Now it begins, now it starts

Trenn let a small smile flicker over his features as the running total on his account ticked up a few hundred zenny, then pursed his lips a bit when it stopped. "And that's that." He said, leaning back in the chair. "I'll have to keep an eye out for those immunities in the future..." Trenn scratched his chin, then looked across the table. "I don't usually bust in Netfrica-- not my kind of network, I guess, so I'm not too familiar with the viruses here."

Trenn let out a light laugh, then tapped a few more buttons on the PET. "Say.. speaking of oddities, would you like to see an odd character I've had hanging around in my PET for quite some time?"

"Odd character? Besides your Navi? What do you mean?"

Guy looked genuinely interested, if a little confused, whereas his sister Rachel, who had already busied herself re-organizing her BattleChips, looked genuinely annoyed, if a little interested.

"Yeah, I'd like to see," said Guy, leaning over to look into Trenn's PET as before.

A grin drove itself into Trenn's features, and he tapped a few keys. A small, holographic button popped up just in front of Guy, flickering ever-so-slightly; it wasn't quite at the PET's max projection range, but it was close enough to not be absolutely perfect...

"Well, you do the honors, then." Trenn chuckled, setting the PET on the table.

"The honors?" Said Guy, frozen with his hand an inch from Trenn's PET. "You want me to push this button or something?" His finger hovered over the largest button on the PET. "I've never used any PET except Aunty Jean's..."

Even Rachel looked up from the battle, seemingly convinced that the action didn't require her total attention. "He means the hologram right in front of you," she said, irritated at her brother's oblivious nature.

Guy blushed slightly as he stuck his finger awkwardly through the holographic button.

There was a loud beep as Guy attempted to stick his hand through the hologram, instead meeting-- resistance? The button almost seemed solid to the touch, and depressed when Guy applied pressure, then disappeared entirely.

Unseen from the angle it sat at, the PET cued up a status bar that quickly filled, loading... something. The PET beeped again as it finished, And this time a different hologram popped up near Guy and Rachel-- a navi.

Draped in a long cloak, with brown, messy hair and a boyish face, he hovered silently in the air between Trenn and the pair, his eyes closed. The navi seemed almost serene like this, his feet hanging idly out the bottom of the hoodless cloak.

"Guy, Rachel-- I'd like you to meet Wiz." Trenn said, hiding the grin on his face with a hand.

As if on cue, Wiz's eyes shot open, revealing a set of green peepers that immediately latched their gaze onto Guy- then Rachel- then in pretty much every direction as the navi spun in midair; whether for the fun of it or to get his bearings, it was hard to tell.

A broad, innocent grin plastered itself onto Wiz's face, and the navi shot off like a bullet, flying all around the Netcafe, laughing his head off with a childlike glee. Under tables, over the heads of patrons, through counters he flew, winking out of existence whenever he got too far from the PET, like a ghost, only to pop back up again somewhere else.

Wiz made a couple of passes around Guy and Rachel as well, twirling around their heads faster than the eye could track, and then disappeared.

There was a quiet moment, a lull where there was no sound in the netcafe-- and no Wiz.

Then, slowly, the navi rose out of the center of the table, beaming at the two operators. "Hello!" He answered with a youthful voice. "My name's Wiz! Nice to meet you!" The navi waved at Guy and Rachel in turn, a broad, sweeping gesture, like he was trying his hardest to make sure they saw-- and then sped off again, through the air.

Rachel lowered her glasses to peer intently at Wiz. She leaned forward across the table, trying to glean some kind of information from the featureless Navi. "Wiz, eh? You have a standby Navi?"

That was what Rachel wanted to say. She got through the word you before the floating Navi interrupted her. She made a noise of surprise that turned into a frustrated snarl as she cringed in her seat, as if Wiz was an insect that she couldn't pin down, or something magnetic that she couldn't let near her chips.

"What in the...?" Rachel's head literally spun as she whirled in her seat, trying to get a better look at what was going on.

Guy, on the other hand, was dumbfounded from start to finish, first at the idea that a second Navi could exist within a PET, then at the ensuing airshow. He, like his sister, glanced around when Wiz took his aerial laps, but with less fervor.

"What just happened?" He stuttered.

Trenn let off a little chuckle as he watched Wiz fly around the shop aimlessly, making little noises of glee as he went.

"Wiz." Trenn nodded with a smile. "I've got enough memory in my PET that I can have the both of them, Soundman and Wiz, in there at once-- but it doesn't have nearly the processing capacity for them to both be jacked in, and Wiz's battle routines are being reworked at the moment anyway." The operator shrugged, but didn't let the grin drop from his face. "He's actually the third navi I made... and, if you'll believe it, Soundman helped."

Wiz chose that moment to return from bugging the rest of the patrons, and plopped down on Trenn's shoulder, almost like some kind of parrot. Seemed he was done flying around for now...

"What's it like, creating a Navi?" asked Guy, staring in wonder at Wiz. "You write all that code, just words on a screen, and then suddenly... it turns into something alive." He folded his hands on the table, looking from Wiz to Trenn as he spoke. "And I wonder how Navis feel about how they were created."

In the midst of the sounds of Battle, Guy found himself transfixed by Wiz' manifestation. It was clear that he hadn't often seen holographic representations of Navis in the real world, and the sight was a special kind of food for thought.

"It's a mystical, indescribable experience. It is as if you take a piece of your soul and-" Trenn started chuckling a bit. "No, I'm kidding." There was a slight pause as Trenn stopped his snickering, then continued. "Writing a navi is a different experience depending on who does it and why, I think. I get all kinds of freelance work..."

"There's been a couple of times corporations want a basic framework, for instance. Sorta bland, subservient personality, something they can mass-produce and hand over to all their employees. So I code up an appearance, some basic abilities, and a boring personality that doesn't grow too much, but is very dependable." Trenn scratched his chin, looking over at Wiz.

The small navi had one of his ear-covers lifted up and a finger stuck inside, and seemed to be digging around for earwax in his ear. He looked down at Trenn, who was eyeing him with a curious look, and awkwardly dropped his hands to his sides. Trenn turned his head back towards Guy.

"Then you get the more custom, personalized jobs," Trenn continued, "real expensive deals, especially if I throw in a program that allows them to pretty easily make their own appearance for the navi. For these I do them one of two ways, depending on what the customer wants."

"The first way I do things is to give them a basic personality along the lines of what the customer wants, but I also include routines that will let the navi's personality grow just as much as a human's would, if not more because of their increased cognitive capacity. Trenn explained. "The second way is a bit more time-consuming and expensive; I work closely with the customer to make the navi to their exact specifications personality-wise, giving them the option of whether or not they want the navi to really grow personality-wise. There will always be some measure of growth, sure, but you can make it so they stay relatively the same."

Trenn paused, as if considering, then continued. "Humans are inherently afraid of change, you see. In a world where things are otherwise chaotic, changing from day to day, we seek a 'rock', so to speak, or things that will stay the same for as long as we desire them to. This is the main reason I offer the option for the navi to stay similar at all. Sometimes people will hang onto navis that do not change longer than they would ones that grow in complexity by the day. It's like building a powerful PC for someone who mainly wants it for word processors. There's no point."

"But somehow, I get the feeling you weren't asking about my work, Guy." Trenn chortled, nodding towards Wiz. "When I created Soundman, I had no 'pre-set' personality, no real goals for who or what he could or would be. So what I did is I looked inside."

"I looked inside myself and asked that empty space in my head... 'Who are you?', 'What drives you?', 'What are you like?', and other questions like that. I looked inside myself, gazing down on these lines of code just sitting there, lifeless and unfinished, and asked myself who it was I was creating." Trenn paused for a long moment, smiling. "Soundman answered back."

"With Wiz-" Trenn looked up toward his shoulder; the little navi was gone, instead kicked back and relaxing on one of the lower-hanging light fixtures in the cafe, "-Soundman asked himself those very same questions. Who was this he was making? What life was it that he would breathe into what were otherwise words on a page?"

"I'm not sure what answer exactly he got, but whatever it was... Wiz was the result." Trenn reached behind him and scratched an itch on the small of his back, then leaned back in his chair again.

Guy's eyes lit up at Trenn's mock introduction, and he looked embarrassed after the first few seconds, when the the mysticism around Navi creation was broken. Still, he sat transfixed, like an attentive child in elementary school, absorbing Trenn's speech about creating life from lines of code, clearly fascinated, though exactly how much of it he actually stood was unclear. What was clear to him was that Trenn was someone cool, someone powerful and knowledgeable that he felt like he wanted to associate with, if he was good enough. It was as if Trenn was a level of Navi expert above him, above Rachel, above even Aunty Jean. He could create a Navi!

Guy jumped in surprise as Rachel snatched a chip from between his loosening fingers and rammed it into the PET, the more practical-minded girl having apparently lost interest in Trenn's speech in favor of giving her full attention to the battles at hand. "Don't mind her," said Guy sheepishly. "She can be a little rude."

But with all this talk about Navis, Guy couldn't help but bring it back to his own Navis. "You know," said Guy, trying to lower his voice so that Rachel wouldn't be tempted to interject, "We don't know anything about our own Navis. Yeah, they're obviously original jobs, and we assume our uncle made them, but what they were made for, and who for... or how they ended up the way they are... we don't know anything." He frowned nervously, as if he wasn't sure if the information he'd just shared was something taboo.

He looked back at Rachel, who was still industriously attacking the buttons on the PET and cycling chips through its multiple slots. Nothing could be sure about Titania and Oberon. It seemed to him like they were two Navis, created separately, fused together by some bizzare accident, formerly a pair of formidable warriors, not the ghostly, shifting form that could be seen now.

"What could you learn from looking at a Navi?" He asked, looking at Trenn with an expression that wasn't quite awe. "I mean, if I let you probe at their code for a while..."

At least an hour and a half of busting and conversation later...

"That will complicate matters..." Trenn started, switching the line back to private. His screen winked out of existence next to Soundman as he spoke to Rachael and Guy, sitting across the table. "Okay, so what we've got sitting over there is a Mystery Data. Rachael, you might know what they are, but I'm betting that you don't, Guy."

"Mystery Data are basically treasure chests, if you've played any of those old RPGs. Pop one open, you find things inside. What they really are is an amalgamation of various types of junk data. Bugfrags, old cache files, deleted navi pieces... if it gets left on the net in some way or another, chances are it's in there somewhere." Trenn frowned, looking down at the screen. "Some are also virus beacons, or traps, but those are only the green ones..."

"So we should keep the fight away from it in case it's valuable."

Guy leaned over to peek at Rachel's screen, to confirm for himself the presence of this "mystery data" business. For a moment, he was fascinated by how fragile it was, a drifting structure of congealed data, randomness somehow forming into a simple, concrete form.

The spell was broken when he saw the enemies. They were something exotic, the likes of which he'd never seen before, and both he and his sister came to the mutual agreement that they weren't something to be trifled with. "Those things have been destroying other viruses," he muttered. "That's why it's been so quiet."

"Not that you need me to tell you, but those things are a non-trivial threat," announced Rachel, her push-to-talk key held firmly down. "Test the water a little before diving for the throat, Oberon."

"Yeah, I can say I've never seen anything like these before... And those black dots, like hockey pucks--" Trenn thought for a moment. "They might try to pull something like those Airhockey viruses do, with the pucks that bounce around. We should probably let them make the first move for now, then lay into them once we know how they're going to attack us."

"Roger that, Trenn." Came Soundman's reply from the PET.

Trenn looked up toward Rachael and Guy for their response.

"Christ, those things are deadly. Looks like I was right about them bouncing, though." Trenn remarked. "Alright Soundman, now we're-" he began, only to be cut off by a Hyperactive Wiz zipping by and tapping a bunch of chip sends at random. "-pretty much hosed." He finished, head turning to shoot a look at Wiz-- who was acting rather smug near the far edge of the table.

"Wiz just flew across the controls, Soundman. You're going to have to try to keep yourself alive until I can refresh your chip cache and send you some chips in an order resembling strategy." Trenn said, glancing back towards Wiz again. "And why are you looking so smug-" he nearly asked, before Soundman butted in.

"Trenn, did you take a look at the chips he sent?" Soundman asked over the line.

"N...not really." Trenn relented, pulling up the 'recently sent' list. "Why, what did he... send..." He trailed off in mid sentence, face going blank at first, then slowly twisting into a grin. "This... could work!"

"Depending on how I use these it could, yes." Soundman says. "At either rate, a performer is expected to be showy sometimes, right Trenn?"

Trenn grinned. "Alright then, Soundman. I'll leave it up to you, you decide when to attack."

Trenn thought he heard an affirmative grunt from the other end of the line.

Guy imagined that his and Rachel's hair was blown back, and their faces illuminated orange, by the carnage on the screen, even though this was clearly not possible.

Titania and Oberon, of course, had no problem with routinely collecting rewards while their operators watched, dumbfounded.

"What?" Said Rachel, a little indignantly, to something that Oberon was saying, but then she fell silent, and killed her mic as she picked up her chip folder and turned to Trenn.

"Hey," she said, "If you need one, you can take one of our Subchips. Soundman's hit points are low."

Trenn nodded, grabbing one of the EnergyPacks. "Mm. I can pay you back for it later if you'd like, but for now I'll offer you my thanks." he said, slotting the Subchip in. "Here, Soundman. Take this."

"Ahh, thanks, Trenn." Came in through the PET's speakers. Trenn chuckled, then replayed the footage of Soundman crashing into the virus. He was so glad he had remembered to hit 'record'...

Rachel went through a few calculations with a determined look on her face. "With that," she said, "I have enough for upgrades. Guy, operate for me, please."

For someone who's only ever operated Navis that she has to micromanage completely, said Titania in a tone that expressed annoyance, She seems to forget that virus busting requires just as much focus as the Netbattles she claims to be an expert in.

Guy looked to the door, then looked sheepishly up at Trenn.

"Need help there, Guy?" Trenn chuckled, pulling his seat over towards the other side of the table. Wiz trodded along on the glass tabletop as well, taking up a position between the two operators where he could look at both PET screens.

"I wonder what's at that mountain, anyway... I've never seen anything like that on the networks before, I'll say that much." Trenn remarked, brushing a lock of hair out of his face. "I guess we'll find out when we get there, though."

"Y-yes," said Guy nervously, his fingers skimming apprehensively over the 24 chips at his disposal-- Rachel had taken some with her when she left, for some reason. "I've only operated Titania and Oberon once... I know how to do it, but..."

What came after the "But" was not spoken but acted. Guy started methodically taking out chips and examining them, trying to discern their usage from the pictures.

Trenn glanced over at the chips Guy was examining, as well as the ones laying scattered on the table. "It looks like she took the weaker ones, as well as the duplicates." Trenn noted. He tapped one of the chips Guy was holding. "This is an Areagrab. Some navis use them to move at super-speeds, but the more common usage for them is to simply teleport, bypassing the space in-between."

He looked over towards another chip, and picked it up. "A pulsar? Man, I've been meaning to get my hands on one of these. Lucky bastard." He chuckled, then set the chip back down.

There came a beeping from Trenn's PET, prompting him to pick it up and inspect it. "Aha! He accepted." Trenn said, pulling out a pair of unformatted chips from his pocket...