Computer Lab, Thursday morning

[blondecanary.livejournal.com]

Dinah wasn't typing away phrases this time. She was surfing the 'net. And looking for free downloads and music. And trying to think of anything else to show Jak that she hadn't already.

With that Killers song blasting away, too.

[open as a computer lab!]

Comments

[unborn-renegade.livejournal.com]

And that was one head full of big blond hair sticking in through the doorway. And then padding in, as you did, with a grin on his face, giving the computer lab another once-over.

[blondecanary.livejournal.com]

Dinah looked up at the footsteps and grinned. "Hey!" She raised a hand for a high-five. "How's it going? Need anything else typed up before we have fun?"

[unborn-renegade.livejournal.com]

Jak gave her a highfive, in which he tried to focus on Uhhh... Eco? for a moment before dropping his hand. What? It'd been coming up. Like, a lot.

[blondecanary.livejournal.com]

"Oh, sure," Dinah said aloud, putting his hand on her arm and turning to the keyboard. Eco is... um. Energy? She typed that much, and sent back, There's lots of types, you can use them to do stuff? She paused and added, "Okay, Shakespeare I'm not."

Eco is energy, there's lots of types, you can use them to do stuff

[unborn-renegade.livejournal.com]

Jak leaned over (he had a habit of leaning when she was on the computer, it'd seem) and pointed at the you.

And then made a valiant try for the backspace key. He removed 'ff' instead.

[blondecanary.livejournal.com]

Dinah blinked at the backspacing-- and not the leaning, which was... just fine, and sent back, Oh, wait, I'll fix... what do you want it to say?

[unborn-renegade.livejournal.com]

Totally 'I', he said, 'You' is kinda vague.

... What? He wanted people to know he could totally do powers.

[blondecanary.livejournal.com]

Dinah gave a mental giggle, and grinned, then rewrote it to say "I" then asked, "You said you were hot stuff with that." Just a little amused. "Like a Sage? Do you want that part in there, about Sages?"

I can use it to do stuff. Like run really fast, and

What else? And a mental image of that Eco vent, flavored with wistfulness and a little envy at the image.

[unborn-renegade.livejournal.com]

Shoot fireballs, he said, thinking about destroying dens of large swamp rats in Boggy Swamp, all charged up with yellow eco. Just to start with. Hit really hard...

The Sages thing, though. Um. I'm not actually a Sage. Yet. What? All four Sages had told him he had potential.

[weldedtomyspine]

Jaime didn't have anything on his schedule for the day, so after a late breakfast he'd decided to go check his email.

He'd been putting it off because he'd been pretty sure he knew what was in it, and as he sat down and looked at the hundred or so new messages he sighed to realize he was right.

There were the usual couple of dozen different emails from Paco entitled "BEST THING EVER!" which contained links to various YouTube videos, some of which were actually funny. (What? Jaime had to check all of them, just in case Paco had managed to accidentally discover the best thing ever!)

The rest were a message from Brenda to him and Paco about something innocuous that Paco had responded to in his usual manner which had then devolved into an extended exchange with Brenda shooting of witty and cutting remarks aimed at Paco and Paco responding with variations on "Oh yeah? Well... you're mom!" There were occasional asides from one or the other of them trying to recruit Jaime to join their side, but he wasn't touching that argument with a ten foot pole.

Jaime loved his friends, but he really, really wished they'd leave him out of the squabbling. As amusing as it was.

That was all a long winded way of explaining why Jaime was emitting a series of diverse noises such as choking laughs, suppressed groans, and the occasional resounding thump of his forehead striking the desk.

[blondecanary.livejournal.com]

Dinah looked over and laughed. "It can't be that bad!"

[weldedtomyspine]

"It can and it is," Jaime countered with a mostly-amused grimace. "But I'll excuse you for your optimism because you've never met Brenda or Paco."

Brenda had apparently decided to bust out the big guns: You're parents are from Mexico, and you just failed Spanish. Again.

To be fair that was in responses to Paco's It's okay to be a short angry girl, no need to have a complex about it.

[blondecanary.livejournal.com]

Dinah slid her wheely-chair over to Jaime's side, looking over her shoulder at the screen but not reading it when she saw it was an e-mail. "News from home? Dramatic crises? Possible freakouts?"

[weldedtomyspine]

"Just business as usual," Jaime sighed and chuckled at the same time.

"Paco," Jaime pointed at one of his messages, "and Brenda," he pointed at one of hers, "feel that it is vitally important that I watch them bicker." He sounded fond. It was almost like being back home with them.

"Brenda is, of course, winning. She's way too smart for anyone's good."

[blondecanary.livejournal.com]

"Go Brenda," Dinah said, waving an invisible pom-pom, then snickered. "Thank God my sisters don't do that. It's bad enough over the phone. Are these your friends, or family?"

[weldedtomyspine]

"Friends-almost-family." Jaime smiled a bit wistfully. "It's actually kind of nice, honestly. I miss them, you know?" And he hadn't even been gone a month yet.

[blondecanary.livejournal.com]

"Yeah, I do. That's why we've got a webcam." And so she could check that Helena wasn't too bruised, and Barbara could see that Dinah wasn't too bruised. "But I'm glad they're keeping in touch." She grinned at him. "Have you told them much about this place yet?"

[azuldragon.livejournal.com]

After the pool, Azula went in search for the Computer Lab. Her recent computer purchase tucked under her arm.

Azula raised an eyebrow, "What is that noise?"

[blondecanary.livejournal.com]

"'All The Things I've Done,'" Dinah answered her, looking up as she arrived without startling too much. The music would've covered her approach anyway. "I've got soul but I'm/ not a soldier--" She grinned and sat back. "Have a seat. You bought one already?"

[azuldragon.livejournal.com]

Azula approached Dinah and shrugged, "I was curious. But then, I couldn't figure out how to use it. The writing still confuses me."

[blondecanary.livejournal.com]

"Yeah, it would do that. Here, let's plug it in, I may have at least a temporary fix for that," Dinah said, grabbing one of the power cords.

When the computer was hooked up, and on, Dinah said, "Okay, this? Is the touch pad." She moved her finger on it, and the cursor danced on the screen. "It let's you pick things you want to do. This one?" She pointed to the icon for Firefox. "Let's you surf the internet." Click!

Dinah went to Google Translate and said, "Okay, I think you said that your alphabet looks like our Chinese, right?"

[azuldragon.livejournal.com]

"Yes, I think that's the one closest to our system of writing," Azula said nodding. She watched with great interest as the computer lit up and images began appearing.

[blondecanary.livejournal.com]

"The keyboard tells the main computer what you want it to do; the screen just shows it. The main memory part inside is where things are stored," Dinah said, hoping that made sense. "We can set it up so there's a picture of a Chinese keyboard for you to click on, if you want to write something in your own language." She typed in hi, how are you? and then hit the translate button, and the Chinese characters appeared.

[azuldragon.livejournal.com]

"Huh," Azula sat back, "this is very useful. It would certainly help cut down the time I spend staring at the dictionary."

[blondecanary.livejournal.com]

Dinah grinned. "Yeah, I thought that might help. And you can type in the address--" She pointed to the URL in the browser, "--of a page you want to translate, and it'll transform it to all Chinese so you can read anything on the web. It's not perfect, and the grammer might suck. But still." She shrugged, and typed in the address for CNN.Com. "News of the day! If that's what you're interested in."