Haruka had already booked a room a few nights before, so all she had to do was tell the manager, a short chubby guy called Kisho Tanaka, their names. So, she pulled Lan none-too-gently over to where the pudgy man was carefully revising a contract.
His head snapped up as soon as they appeared into sightline and the manager flipped the contract into a desk. Kisho nodded and lifted up a large plastic-bound book which lay on a side shelf and flipped through it, pausing at a page that was filled as it was with other names. He traced his finger down the page, at last stopping at Haruka's small, neat signature, and Lan's larger, messier one.
"Hikari Haruka and Netto? Room 841. Here are the keys," Kisho informed them, opening the drawer of his desk and giving Lan a silver chain where a small room key dangled. "Left side, third floor."
Haruka thanked him and proceeded to steer Lan toward the stairs, whose eyes popped as he complained, "Mom, can't we take the elevator?"
Haruka sighed and rolled her eyes, grinning all the while, but she replied with the suspected and non-desired answer: "No, Lan, we're going to climb the stairs and you know it."
The two of them made their way up to the third floor landing on a metallic spiral staircase, and as Lan gazed up at the swirling steps that twisted up ahead of, he was reminded strangely of the spiral staircase in Hogwarts. It seemed to go on for miles and miles, and he wondered just how many students were enrolled at the dojo. Or, as it seemed to be, half hotel half dormitories; more like it was made for guests than ninjas-in-training.
"Well, here we are," Haruka informed him after Lan had slid the room key into the lock, puffing a little as she put her hand on the doorknob and pulled it open. When the swinging of the door had faded into nothingness it revealed a simple-looking two-room suite, but it was here that the hotel-isms faded and it began to look more like overnight quarters. They were looking into what appeared to be a main room, with a sofa, a desk in the corner, and a plasma screen TV built into the wall that was hidden from view by a bull's-eye targetboard. (Well, it is 200X, you know.)
Haruka walked boldly forth, past the sofa and desk and examined the plasma screen TV. She looked purposefully at Lan, who was coming in, as if to say, "Maybe I should take your TV away." Lan blushed and detoured around his mother to the bedroom part of the suite, pulling the room key off its chain and pushing it into the lock with a satisfying click. The door opened and Lan hooked the key back onto its chain before stowing it away in his pocket.
They both walked into the room, which really did look like a dormitory. Three beds had been crammed together, two of them vertical and a little distance apart third one lay sideways across the other two at the far side of the wall. In addition, there was a small bunk bed in a corner and hanging from the ceiling was a hammock.
Lan claimed the hammock right away, jumping into the ragged white fabric suspended from the ceiling so that it swung precariously from his weight. He grabbed the wires that supported it at grinned down at his mother to see her roll her eyes and mutter something unintelligible and claim one of the vertical beds as her own.
Lan watched the ember-orange rays from the dying sunset. It was a glorious sight, puffy periwinkle-coloured clouds streaked past the sun as it cast its rays right into Lan's face, darkening his skin to a healthy orange. Even though there was no wind or anything, his spiky brown hair rippled slightly. Picture it: a guy looking out the window from his hammock, his faced bathed with the colours of the dying sunset, his hair flickering in the nonexistent wind, a strangely serious and totally unorthodox expression on his face.
Then it was over. Lan reached into his pocket and pulled out his sky-blue personal terminal, or PET for short.
Okay. Before I go into detail with the actual plotline and everything, there's something you curious fanfic-readers should know. A fanfic is short for fan fiction, which is what you're reading right now, by the way.
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It's the year 20XX. They have these cool new things called NetNavis. A NetNavi is basically a virtual, talking human built with artificial intelligence that resides in a personal terminal, or PET. Using their NetNavis, people can do what they call "NetBattling," where they pitch one Navi against the other using "BattleChips." They even have official NetBattlers and tournaments. So then there's our guy, Lan Hikari, whose parents, it seems, don't know that him and his friends go NetBattling bad guys every other week, probably according to the traditional rules of cartoons and anime. So that's about it in this futuristic world of sorts. ;)
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Lan pressed a black button on top of the PET so that his NetNavi, Mega Man, came into view, arms crossed and a grin on his face. "So, Lan, eternal king of craziness, what's it like?" he asked deviously.
"The dojo?" Lan asked with an equally evil grin of his own. "It's all right… Maybe it'll get even better tomorrow, after the tour and stuff. I can tell you then, but now I want to e-mail my friends."
"Can do, little buddy, can do." The screen switched out and Lan punched out his friend Dex's e-mail and impatiently waited for him to pick up.
"Hey, Lan." Two faces appeared onscreen, Lan's best friends Dex and Maylu, their arms crossed, grins resplendent, in a way that was annoyingly akin to the way Mega Man had been a few seconds before.
"So, Lan what's it like?" Dex asked, grinning in that mockingly annoying way as his not-so-white teeth glistened in the sunlight. "You having a good time in the country while you leave your best friends in boring old DenTech City with no one to NetBattle?"
Lan threw back his head at the ceiling and groaned loud enough so that his moaning filled the PET's speakers. "I've just got here, for crying out loud, and you're already being sarcastic to me for no absolute reason."
Dex only grinned evilly and crazily, while Maylu nudged him sharply with her elbow. They seemed to be arguing furiously for a minute, with Lan waiting impatiently from the other side of the PET, and then Maylu turned back to the front. Lan admired the way her short fuchsia-coloured hair flicked over her shoulders (wink, wink).
"What Dex means," she began, sarcastically rolling her brown eyes, "is what is the dojo like?"
"It's all right I guess," Lan said, then ruefully glanced out the window. "The pool looks good for swimming, though," he joked. "As fate would have it, I'm sleeping in a hammock tonight. Where are the other two?"
"Yai and Tory?" Dex glanced behind him and the screen shifted to show a pink-red mansion as the chubby, mohawked boy shifted his PET from side to side. There resided Yai Ayano, annoying nine-year old supergenius. "Tory's at Yai's place. Look, you can see them at the window."
For a few seconds, there were walking sounds from where the other two were making their way over to the front of Yai's house. Lan waited until he could see two pale silhouettes in the window. Dex activated the zoom-in camera then, and the figures came into focus so that he could see Yai and their friend Tory Froid. They were looking down, their faces bathed in red light; they must have been in a darkroom of some sort.
"I never knew Tory liked science that much," Lan commented, shifting slightly on the hammock.
Suddenly they both grew very uncomfortable, Dex kicking the ground with his blue sneakers and Maylu biting her lower lip nervously. "See, the thing is…" Maylu began, running a hand through the magenta hair around her ear, where a large pink pin was clipped.
"It's not about the science, see…" Dex continued, glancing nervously up and down from his PET screen and back up again.
"We think they like each other," said Maylu, plucking up her courage. She fiddled with the pin in her hair. "At least, the day after you left they were…doing something. We were just hanging out, you know, going to the Coliseum, you know, get some NetBattling in..."
"And they seemed to be getting closer and closer together while they walked, like they had a crush on each other or something," Dex finished, glancing back down yet again so that his pointed brown mohawk bobbed in the glimmer of the DenTech sunlight.
"You mean like you and Maylu?" Lan said teasingly. Dex turned an unusually deep red and glared back at him.
"But you like her, too!" he protested.
Lan's own face turned a shade equal to the colour of an overripe tomato.
"Yes, I know you both like me," Maylu laughed, grinning as she nudged Dex in the ribs again. "I never knew I was that famous, though."
They both glared at her.
Back in the dojo's dormitory, Lan heard the door swing open and footsteps approaching from behind him. "Sorry, gotta go, guys; someone's coming," he said, quickly shutting off the PET and whipping around, all the while hiding the personal terminal behind his back.
A boy about Lan's own age had come in, stretching his arms and yawning. Judging by his obsidian-black hair and sapphire-blue, eyes he was one of the ninja-in-training, hitting the sack after a hard day's work.
The other boy heard the creaking of the hammock's support wires as Lan whirled around and both boys looked at each other, one from up and one from down, so that Lan's own brown eyes clashed with the boy's deep blue ones.
"You're one of the guests, right?" the boy said with a small smile, walking over to the bunk bed and beginning his ascent on the ladder. "Kisho told me."
"The manager, right?" Lan stuttered, then caught himself just in time and went on. "Do you have guests often, or are me and my mom the first ones?" He pointed the sleeping form of his mother, who shifted slightly.
"Not really," the boy said, coming to the top of the ladder and perching on the side of the bed, so that his legs dangled over the edge.
"I'm Satou Hiroshi, by the way," the boy said, tucking into his bed; he had already had his ninja-print pyjamas on when he had come into the dormitory. They were black and literally emblazoned with at least ten bright white coats-of-arms in the Japanese kanji.
"Hikari Netto," Lan replied, stuffing his PET into his back pocket. He got undressed and both boys fell asleep.
