A/N: I said I was going to finish Mayblade, and I'm going to finish. The after party goes to the 14th, so we'll see how I fare. I'll post the rest of the fills regardless. I have them figured out, it's just a matter of actually writing/finishing them. Thanks to everyone that's reviewed and supported so far!

Day 23 | Dizzi, Kenny, Emily | Rated: K

Bitbeast

"You know, if you've finally got yourself a girlfriend, all you have to do is tell me, Kenny."

"Don't be ridiculous, Dizzi," Kenny scoffed. His fingers never faltered on the keyboard and she could tell he was rolling his eyes, even through the fringe. She wouldn't bring it up or he'd threaten to tape over the webcam again. "Just because I asked you not to snoop through my emails doesn't mean I have something to hide."

"Riiight," Dizzi drawled back, lowering the brightness of the screen to make up for the fact that she couldn't narrow her eyes suspiciously at him. "That's why you specifically asked me not to read the ones from Emily."

Kenny sighed and brightened the screen again. It lagged more than normal, making him frown.

"If it was anything important you know I'd tell you," he said and fixed his already-straight glasses.

Dizzi hummed, not quite believing him.

The next time she looked, the emails were gone. He spent more time on his phone or his desktop now, likely going back and forth with Emily through an email address she didn't have access to. She teased him about it once and got a testy reply in response. She teased him about that, too.

"You don't have to be ashamed of your pickup lines, Kenny. I've read your diary, remember?"

"Dizzi, we aren't flirting!" he denied, voice rising an octave. He was stubbornly refusing to look over at her. "We're working. Can you check on a file for me?"

Every once in a while he asked her to find certain specs or data readouts, only to spend hours running simulations with the information on his other computer that she could tackle in her sleep. He never answered when she asked what he was up to. Sometimes she got irritated enough to shut the laptop down and retreat deep into the circuits.

"Why don't you ask Emily to do it? You're going to send whatever you find to her anyway."

"Don't be like that, Dizzi," he implored, finally tearing his eyes away from the other monitor to roll his desk chair over her way. "As soon as we figure out something worth sharing, I'll show you what we've been working on. I promise."

Dizzi gave him the silent treatment for all of thirty seconds, before replying, "I'm gonna hold you to that."

One file turned into half a dozen and she found herself wondering what he could possibly want with data on the various bitbeast capturing systems they'd encountered over the years.

True to form, Kenny stayed up all night fussing with it. Occasionally his phone or his inbox would chime with a new message. Dizzi tossed up the screensaver and drifted in and out of consciousness. She was awake when Kenny collapsed into bed, fully dressed, at sunrise.

It was days later that Dizzi woke from a nap to find him stashing some of his more objectively geeky possessions into his closet or under his bed. She wanted to grill him about it, but she felt uncharacteristically sluggish and hot.

She didn't remember falling back asleep, but when she woke up there was an unexpected guest in Kenny's room.

Emily was sitting at Kenny's desk, typing away on what looked to be a top-of-the-line laptop. Kenny was standing, watching the screen over her shoulder and blocking Dizzi's view of whatever it was they were up to.

Dizzi cleared her throat and said, "I didn't know we had a visitor." Emily didn't even flinch at the sudden intrusion, but Kenny whipped around. She imagined his eyes would be the size of dinner plates if she could see them. "So that's why you were cleaning earlier."

"I've been too preoccupied with our project to keep up with it, that's all!" Kenny rushed to defend himself, sounding rather flustered. It probably had something to do with the fact that this was the first girl his age, besides Hilary, that Dizzi could remember ever being in his room.

"I don't really care," Emily said flippantly, making that topic of conversation screech to a halt. If she took the time to look away from her computer, she'd see Kenny's face turn the color of a ripe tomato. "None of these sequences are quite right, Kenny."

He sighed and his attention was on the screen again.

"I know, I've run them all hundreds of times looking for a loophole," he said dejectedly. "It just doesn't seem to be possible, even with the new specs you designed."

Emily huffed and shut the laptop. The sound seemed to echo, which made no sense. Dizzi was so busy pondering it that she almost didn't hear Emily talk about going 'back to the drawing board' through the static.

"I don't know if we have time for that," Kenny groaned.

"There's always Plan B."

Dizzi desperately wanted to know what Emily meant by that. She was about to ask, but there was some kind of lag between her auditory processing and her vocalization programs that made her words drag out. It was the strangest mix of knowing what she was trying to say and hearing it come out all wrong.

The last thing she heard before the screen went black, was Kenny calling her name from far, far away.

Then, almost as if no time had passed at all, she woke up. The first thing she noticed was that her computer booted up with surprising speed, as if it wasn't hers at all. The second thing was the relief and exhaustion in Kenny's posture and the bags under Emily's eyes that her glasses didn't quite conceal.

"Whew, Chief. That last reboot was a doozy!"

"Dizzi!" he exclaimed. She could hear the telltale hoarseness in his voice that meant he'd spent at least one full night awake. "Thank goodness!"

"I know you two are no fun without me, but you don't have to sound so relieved," she teased.

"Oh, Dizzi." There was a fondness in Kenny's voice as he began typing on her keyboard. The normal clicking she was used to was now whisper soft, and the software responded to the commands Kenny was inputting in record time. When she stretched, everything felt roomier.

"Is this Emily's laptop?" Not that her previous camera was poor quality, but she could tell a marked difference in the picture clarity when she watched the redhead roll her eyes.

"I keep all my data up here, remember?" Emily said smugly and tapped her temple with her index finger. "No, I built that one for you based off of Kenny's criteria. Looks like we got it set up just in time."

"So," Dizzi drawled as the pieces began to fall into place, "was this Plan A or Plan B?"

"Plan B, if you can believe it." Without prompting, Kenny opened a window with pages and pages of code that she had never seen before. "When your old computer started failing, Plan A was to get you out entirely," he revealed, taking his hands off the keys and leaning back in his seat so Dizzi could scour the data as she pleased.

"Aww, Kenny, I'm touched." She said it in a teasing tone to lighten the mood, but it genuinely meant a lot that he'd put so much effort into trying to set her free. Poring over the data, she could tell he'd been at it for a long time; some of the information they'd used dated back to the year she'd gotten stuck in the first place.

"I thought for sure there had to be a way," Kenny said, "but even with all the data we could find, we couldn't figure out how to safely and completely untangle you from the hardware. All of our tests failed; it's like you became almost dependent on the technology."

"Or it became dependent on me," Dizzi suggested, liking the sound of that better, even if the readouts were right in front of her face.

"Either way," Emily said, in a surprising show of diplomacy, "we couldn't guarantee your survival outside of a computer, so this is the best option. At least right now."

"When you overheated and crashed that last time, I thought we might already be too late," Kenny revealed. He sounded anxious just remembering it. "You didn't wake up when we managed to get that laptop turned back on for the transfer."

"A girl needs her beauty rest, Kenny," she said lightly, preferring not to think about what could have happened.

"You seem to have taken to the upgraded tech well enough," Emily chimed in, watching Dizzi's screen with searching eyes. She nodded to herself and stood up to stretch. "You'll have to let me know if any issues develop. In the meantime, you should notice a distinct improvement in performance."

"Do you like it?" Kenny asked as Emily packed up behind him. For the first time in a long time, she had his undivided attention.

Dizzi brightened the screen and injected as much of a smile as she could into her voice when she said, "As long as my high score in Solitaire transferred over, I'll be one happy bitbeast."

A/N: For a technically unneeded dub add-on, Dizzi isn't so bad. I actually enjoy how she teases Kenny and I like the idea of her being around for a while. Maybe they eventually succeed in setting her free, or maybe Kenny just has a smart home one day and she acts as the AI. Can tell him any time his friends are at the door or babysit the kids or something lol

Thanks for reading!