A New Face Among Many – Chapter 4: When Trouble Becomes Second Nature
While she was waiting for Izzy to return Reliana made more cookies. She didn't quite know why she was nervous; after all she had resolved the situation. Why do I feel so guilty?
A bell dinged in the kitchen. The batch of cookies was finished.
Calm down, Reliana. Think of some way to make him not so mad at you. Reliana had decided to go after Izzy. Not an easy task considering their rocky start. Show him the computer room. He'd like that, right?
A knock on the door made Reliana almost jump out of her skin… again. It was Izzy and he was ten minutes early.
"Tai and Matt made me promise to bring them more cookies." Izzy couldn't take his eyes off Reliana. The setting sun was pouring through the open balcony door, and it shone on her hair making her seem more ethereal and beautiful.
Reliana smiled. Izzy had broken the tension. Perhaps that meant he wasn't too mad at her.
Reliana went into the kitchen, partly to package up some cookies for Matt and Tai, and partly to think. When she came back into the living room Reliana could see a disc and a manila envelope on the table. Izzy was over by the balcony door admiring her collection of sun-catchers and figurines.
"I'll just skim through the files from your hard drive." Reliana smiled. "I mean, you could have missed something."
Izzy looked startled. She can do that? He followed her into what should have been the living room. It had been walled off using Chinese water silk screens. Izzy stopped in his tracks.
There was computer hardware everywhere. Monitors, wires, towers and desktops, mice… There was a stack of recordable CDs in one corner and shelves upon shelves of computer software.
"All this and you still felt it necessary to hack my Unix server? What were you after?" Izzy was just shy of hyperventilating. The sheer amount of technology crammed into this little room was making his head spin.
"Unix." Reliana was sitting at a computer in one corner of the room opposite the door. Images were flashing upon the monitor in front of her. "There is a certain way of hacking a server to obtain a copy of the original software… There must have been something different about your copy or the manner in which you tampered with it, but needless to say I couldn't get what I wanted." Reliana turned around to watch Izzy's reaction. "I'm sorry I blew away your server, but I tend to get angry when I'm frustrated about something."
"Sounds kind of like Tai." Izzy's comparison was found to be very funny by the girl across the room. "But KillSwich? Couldn't you fins a less permanent solution to the problem, like asking me for a copy?"
"Izzy, you blackmailed me to try to get KillSwich. Couldn't you have more easily just asked for a copy?"
Izzy smiled. He was starting to like her. "Good point. So now what do we do?"
"Good question." Reliana laughed. It felt good to get along with him. "Take a look around, see if anything strikes your fancy."
Once Izzy had turned his attention to the shelves of computer gear Reliana turned back to the computer she was working on. She had found something interesting among Izzy's files. Something called a 'digiport'. Highlighting the program she pressed the 'enter' key and waited. Nothing happened.
Looking over her shoulder to see what Izzy was up to,
Reliana noticed he was checking out the system properties and configuration of
her newest prize. A gamer's computer with an AMD Athlon 1Ghz processor with a
gig of SDRAMM
"Hey, Reliana does this have…" The rest of Izzy's sentence was muffled by Reliana's lips. He didn't remember initiating the kiss, but he was fairly sure she hadn't started it.
Izzy placed his hands on her hips, dragging her closer. Reliana responded by twining her arms around his neck. Both unconsciously deepened the kiss.
Izzy shifted his head to get a better kissing angle and Reliana decided to make herself taller. She scooted up against the table behind them, accidentally sitting on a computer keyboard.
Reliana's Digivice was touching the monitor when the digiport appeared on the screen. The overload of data cause by her sitting on the keyboard had two effects. First it opened the digiport, and second, it changed the destination co-ordinates.
Izzy stumbled forward as Reliana fell into the Digital World. His hand hit the keyboard, changing the destination co-ordinates again. The digiport closed.
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