Lan's POV

A few seconds before the last bytes that made up my older brother and Net Navi disappeared into oblivion, I jacked Mega Man out with an evil grin to Chaud. (Fanficcer pauses its narration thoughtfully to watch the shock and happiness spread over the readers' faces.)

"Genius!" I cried triumphantly, flashing out my PET cord in a single movement. "You, Chaud Blaze, local terror of DenTech City, thought you had actually beat me! But nobody beats the great Lan Hikari!" I crowed victoriously.

Chaud stared at me through his curtain of white-dyed hair, his dark eyes pulsing through his bangs. For a short while we stared at each other, -brown boring into the midnight-blue. "I still won the NetBattle. It isn't over yet, Lan." Chaud jerked his own cord from the traffic light and stalked off, his red vest fading until it disappeared into the sudden darkness.

As soon as the evil one had gone, I tossed my PET from one hand to the other, waiting impatiently for my Navi.. I knew Mega Man wasn't gone forever; I'd saved him from deletion at the eleventh hour.

He appeared next to me a few seconds later, his arms crossed, eyes shining green through the contacts, and the all-too-familiar Mega Man-ish expression on his face. He looked a little shaky and nervous - but this was Mega, after all. Despite everything, he was in his game (of sarcasm). "Just because you saved me from being deleted doesn't mean that you have total and complete power over me, you know."

I cocked my head to the side, being deliberately cheeky. My brown hair flopped and must have given me an uber-annoying look. But as for actual words, I said nothing, only grinned evilly.

Rolling his eyes with disgust and supreme, incredible annoyance, Mega Man turned away and thought hard, his hand under his chin. "Chaud knew," he began, frowning as he puzzled the problem, "so that must mean he was spying on us. I can't think of anyone else who would have known about my transition and e-mailed him about it."

"Well, maybe we should try hiding you. You know, with a firewall," I declared, moving my hands (TCF: pathetically!) to illustrate my point as I went up on my toes.

Mega rolled his eyes again, but he was grinning. "You know, Lan, for one thing it's called a shield, not a firewall. It doesn't even work in the Real World."

"Oh." I dropped back down to my regular height, but the combined weight of my orange roller skates overbalanced and I toppled onto the sidewalk, my head painfully whacking the pavement. Mega Man burst out laughing.

Ever get the feeling that your best friend is only fair-weather?

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"Okay, so what do we do next?" I asked. It was the next day, and I was getting ready for school. I had a walkie-talkie clipped onto my headband and was using it to converse with Mega Man. I was sprinting back and forth from one end of the room to the other - supposedly this was called "getting ready for school."

Mega was pacing impatiently outside my house; the night before, I had sent him off to sleep with Dex again and the new day had begun, glorious and triumphant, with my clock radio going off at approximately 6: 32 in the morning. That had been almost an hour earlier than usual. The reason (and here I quote the humanized NetNavi Mega Man.EXE, also known as Jack Miller): "7:30 is just too late to go to school."

"Listen, Lan. Dex is lending me some old clothes of his that I can use to disguise myself. I'll go to school with you," Mega told me now from his postion on my driveway.

"What? You actually want to go to school?"

"Hey," Mega Man replied, easygoing, and I could just imagine him shrugging dismissively as he did. "I always wondered what humans do when they go to school every morning."

I stood dumbfounded, my mouth open, my eyes wide.