*** Author's Note ***

So it wasn't instant, but here is! The new chapter! Sorry it's short, but… I'm short
too so Nya! Okay. So honestly I should probably be in the bed instead of writing a
chapter all night. I kept getting distracted by things on the internet. Between spells of
coughing my brains out. I'm sick but there's only so much medicine you can take and
still show up for work eh? Anyway~ I noticed something about my typing recently…
I am apparently the kind of person that will erase an entire line to fix a spelling error in
the beginning then to click or use the arrows to get to it. It is a waste of time I know. I
just can't stop myself. Gah I just did it again. I'm just going to kill over I think.
Oh yeah! And I have two more fans Woo~ MarLuna and xXulquigirlXx Welcome aboard
I'm flattered when I see on the line graphs that someone has visited my story, my heart
is warmed when someone adds me or my story to their alert list. Even more so when I
become one of their favorites! But when I get a review, I just want to kiss you. Okay…
Maybe kiss the computer screen or something… Yeah… Meet in the middle kind of
thing I guess… Anyway~ So yeah… PLEASE PLEASE REVIEW! It makes me love
you even more! I mean it. And have you noticed recently how many words this story has
now? Try Twenty One Thousand and some change. I'm sure part of it though can be
accredited to my (rather lengthy and probably annoying) author's notes… So I think
I'll end this one here… Before it gets too bad…

~Gebrelle

*** End Note ***

Nina walked back to her house slowly, everything she needed to be doing swimming around in her head. She needed to find out about so many people. Her list was getting longer than she was typically used to. Scott, Nate, Andrew… Who knew where Light was and she and Anne were going to have to start writing names in the DeathNote on a regular basis now.

She grumbled and kicked the ground, sending a small pebble bouncing across the sidewalk where it landed in a drain. She stopped by the hole and looked in on the now damp little rock. Sometimes she felt like that. Like the only time she could ever get anywhere was when someone gave her a boost and she always somehow wound up in a worse place than she started out in. No one was going to kick it out of the drain. She looked up and started walking home, hoping deep inside that the little pebble's dream was to end up in the river and that the drain was a straight shot there. Then all it would have to do is wait on some rain.

When she reached her house, she tried to keep her mind busy by keeping her hands busy. She started out by emptying her father's ashtrays, all 20 or 30 of them then moved on to everything else.

She had finally run out of things to do around five o'clock and flopped down on her bed where Kira climbed up on her stomach and played with a loose string on the hem of her shirt. She laid there and watched him for a while before flipping through a magazine that she had gotten in the mail that day. It was full of Halloween stuff; costumes and party supplies covered all the pages and she wondered what costume Anne was cooking up for her this year. It had been a long time since she had picked her own.

She was still flipping through the magazine when she felt the cat stiffen and she heard a small hiss. She jumped up and saw Light had apparently decided to join her again. She grinned at him, determined to beat him to it, "So where have you been, Mr. Death God?" she asked, only half interested in what a Death God does in his free time.

"The shinigami realm. We may have a problem." He looked at her seriously, without smiling.

She raised an eyebrow, pulling little Kira into her lap and petting him so that he would stop growling at Light, "How so?"

"I went up there to check on things. But I noticed something odd. One was missing. And when I asked Disaster where Ryuk was… he informed me that Ryuk had dropped his DeathNote very close to mine. I really don't like the sound of that. There's no telling what that bastard has planned. He doesn't care about this world; he only cares about keeping himself amused…" Light trailed off, glaring at the wall and Nina was honestly glad that he wasn't looking at her with that look. She didn't know who this 'Ryuk' was or what he did to Light to make him think about him with a look like that on his face but she wasn't sure she wanted to meet him either. One Death God was enough for her…

She looked at her cat and tried to chew on the piece of information that she just heard. Another DeathNote. Close to her. She closed her eyes and could almost feel a head ache forming. Things we forget, we are doomed to repeat. Did the world forget about Kira? If this person wasn't careful, they would start drawing more attention to New York, and she couldn't let that happen, not since they already knew she was in the Eastern Time zone.

She took a deep breath and tried to think more positively. Perhaps this person, if she found them in time, would be the Misa to her Light. Though… Misa had always been a weak link in the chain of things… She wasn't sure she wanted someone like that. But if she could get her hands on their DeathNote, then Anne could have one too… She kicked at a paper wad on the floor, scooting it around while thinking and Kira promptly left her lap, waging a small three way war between the paper and her toes.

Nina took a deep breath and sighed loudly, standing up and making her way to her dad's study, finding a few things to do between here and there, but ultimately she found herself in the study.

She stepped in quietly so she didn't disturb whatever he was doing and she stopped by his shoulder, gracefully sitting on the floor beside him and laying her head on his knee, looking up at his screen. Watching. Learning.

This was something she had always done since she was little. And she raised an eyebrow to see that he was actually working today. Anthony Laverock was what is called a white hat hacker. And as she sat there watching him, she thought about the concept again for the thousandth time.

So a hacker gets tired of hacking or needs a challenge, so they either start or join an internet security group. This group or individual really, is then hired to patch up security holes in servers and business networks, making them hacker proof. Or in some cases they boldly strike out and hack a person's site or server and then contact them saying 'Hey, I hacked your server. Here's how I did it. Here's how I could make it so that no one else can.' It really reminded her of that show some of Anne's friends watched called It Takes a Thief.

Currently her dad was working on an admin interface for a bank. She smiled to herself, sometimes her dad would give her a copy of his source code to let her mess with and she would hack it and give it back, noticing little things that he would miss. Sometimes, her father would get so deep into the complicated parts that he would miss the simple things.

She wasn't white hat material yet, and, if she was honest with herself, she wasn't much better than a script kiddy. She bit her lip for even thinking it and tilted her head so she could read every line of what he was manually typing out. Nina watched as his fingers danced across the keyboard while he coded, only ever pausing the half second before he popped the enter key with a bang for each new line.

And it was a while before she noticed the time, having lost herself in her father's wall of text…