By animeninjaNIPPON

"Jun! What are you doing here?" I demanded.

"I'm here to cheer you on," she replied.

Well, at least it was her. She was the only member of my family that I didn't hate with a passion, as far as I could figure. But still…

With or without her company, we still needed to find Patch Village. All we had to go by were some clues from the Seminoa warriors, but those didn't seem to help. And to make matters worse, Chocolove was in charge of information. Fortunately, Manta knew what to do.

"On this Internet Digital Manjien," he told us, showing us his portable computer, "thousands of new pieces of information are uploaded every day!"

"Apple roads?" I had no idea what he was talking about.

"AAAUGH! I was just going to say that!" Chocolove whined.

Damn! First, he makes me smile in secret with his asinine wisecracks, then his irritating humor rubs off on me.

"Let's not ask," Manta sighed. He proceeded to explain how the Digital Manjien worked. In the meantime, I was on edge about everyone being there around me ( Jun in particular), acting as though I couldn't take care of things myself. Yoh didn't mind when Anna was around, or so he said, but he didn't understand because he didn't have siblings.

"Really?" Yoh asked when I told him that.

"Ren," HoroHoro spoke up, "having someone around who's concerned about you close by is a good thing."

"You don't like the idea of everyone seeing you as 'being worried over,' right?" Anna added. "You're completely transparent."

"That's just dumb!" I shot back. What did she –

"BANANA!"

Who else but Chocolove would interrupt a serious discussion with a stupid joke? "What's wrong?" he continued. "Don't hold back, come on and laugh!"

I had no intention of doing such a thing. "You did surprise me, but…this is not a conversation that requires jokes that aren't even funny!" I didn't like where the previous topic was headed anyway, but it was the principle of the thing. "Your overly-simple puns…How can you even SAY them! You annoying little – "

"Be quiet for a moment!" Manta interrupted harshly.

"Stay out of my way!" I continued speaking to Chocolove. "No matter how much I think about your jokes, they aren't funny!" Nevertheless, they got to me. I have no idea why. "It'd be wise for you to think twice about them before saying anything!"

No matter what I said, I just couldn't discourage him. "If this slips off again, Ren-kun will die!"

"LIKE I SAID!" Manta restated.

Fat load of good his concentration did…he didn't find anything. "So your thousands of apple roads were useless, too. No matches were found."

"It's UPLOADS," Manta corrected.

Whatever, I thought – it didn't work. Screw those meaningless computer phrases. We were once again stuck on our search for Patch Village, and there I was surrounded by people who claimed to be concerned about me – and then there was Chocolove, who didn't look as if he was bothered by anything.

End of part four

Once again, I credit Oversoul and SKU for the Choco jokes. I don't have the original Japanese translation of the second joke, so I left it as the fansub scripts had it…oh well, I thought it was kinda funny as is.

animeninjaNIPPON