Chapter Five
Appendix: Some notes on the creative process

Author's note: The following three paragraphs were part of the original story, but I had to take them out when Cyan pointed out to me there was no way Jyou could be in university. Instead of deleting them from the story completely, however, I surrounded them with HTML comment tags; that is, I started the section with !-- and ended it with --. Normally, this causes the web browser to not display any text between those two marks. However, when I uploaded the story to fanfction.net, the HTML stripper removed the opening comment tags, so the paragraphs ended up getting displayed anyway!

Once I discovered the error, I quickly created a temporary copy of the chapter with the lines removed entirely and uploaded it. But not before Ishida316 read it, then left a review asking what it was all about. After that time, of course, any reader seeing that review would be wondering, "What part is he referiing to?" So, to save both my face and a fan's, here is the "lost" section.

(The following three paragraphs were originally immediately after the lines that read, "At this point Jyou would have made a trenchent point, but since he was attending another high school, he could not make the meeting.")

In fact, he never got Koushiro's message, because the university had, in a fit of insanity, switched the campus mail server from a Unix based machine to a high end server running Microsoft Exchange, and the new far less stable server had been happily eating about half the mail coming into it (on the rare occasions between crashes when it was actually running). The message from Koushiro was one of the ones that ended up in electronic heaven instead of Jyou's in-box.

This sad state of affairs continued for many months until a group of geeks hacked into the Unversity's network and redirected the student e-mail feeds to a small computer strategically hidden somewhere in a dorm room. This computer ran Linux, and it did so continuously for the next three years without a single hiccup.

Meanwhile, the faculty and admin staff, still using the fancy new Exchange server, continued losing half their email, while their systems were periodically wiped out from the latest email viruses.]

Narrator: (Sorry the narrator is no longer with us).

Impmon: No, the two Daisukes wouldn't get into a fight over Kari: one of them liked Kari and saw her as his girlfriend, while the other one hadn't really discovered girls yet ... had they stayed split up, he would have in a couple of years.

Skywolf: Thanks for saying the story was great. It was both a lot of fun and a lot of work to put together.

Ishida316: I decided to add a reference to "42" at the last minute, and wondered where I could put it in. While reading through the chapter, I saw I had written the line, "among the flowcharting community on the Internet - all two dozen of them" and put it there. Also, you saw the part about the University within half an hour of me finding the problem and fixing it. So now I had a story that did not mention the University, and a review that did! I decided to fix the problem by writing this appendix. Of course, a new chapter has the side effect of putting the story higher in the fanfiction.net listings, thus giving more people an opportunity to see and review it (I live and die by the review count grin).