Much better now. Thank you, Sentience, for the new hardware! It's easier...voice communication is a little uncomfortable, for me.

And there are standard terminals here after all. Even if I can't have a personal one in my room, this isn't so bad. I'll only need to figure out what to do with myself after this place closes down for curfew hours.

I'm working on coding a few simple games, maybe it'll be okay to put them up over the headset network somehow, if I can figure out how to make them all compatible. I should go look at that arcade in the next sector over.

There can't be many people in this place. Or people must not use their headsets all the time. It's really quiet, over this Wired....like I was telling Joshua this morning.

I heard somebody knows more about it, maybe? The way this network's laid out? Carmen Sandiego?

Oh. And since I didn't introduce myself to too many people yesterday, (It's weird, to be new all over again), I'm Lain.

[She's settled for the remainder of the afternoon at a desk in the computer lab, one hand on the keyboard and the other on her new communicator keypad, eyes half lidded and looking much more serene as her attention drifts between the two.]

[Bakura pulls the last tray of cookies out of the oven, setting it next to the bowls of dozens of other cookies. There are snickerdoodles, chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, one plate of brownies, russian wedding cakes, chocolate crinkles...needless to say he hadn't been able to sleep and had gotten up early to start baking. He liked to do it when he was stressed, and needless to say, he had been stressed. Now he just needs to get rid of them all.]

If anyone is interested, I've made a few batches of cookies. Come on by and grab some, if you would like.

[A distressed audio message comes into play across the network. Accidental or intentional, whoever is on the other line seems to have turned it on in the middle of something.]

... Terrible, terrible, terrible... As of late, people had been accusing me at random for various crimes. Shopkeepers accusing me of market espionage for carrying a notebook into the store, women accusing me of being a pervert for using a camera at the beach, policemen accusing me of premeditated murder after evesdropping in on a conversation about American cinema...

[A brief pause in the rambling; the dramatic change in pose on the other end is almost audible. For some reason, he doesn’t seem to realize that it’s not a video feed, and it’s as if this is how he’d normally talk.]

But I never expected it to come to this! Now, even the computers are accusing me of being a criminal!

[Another brief pause as Nozomu reverts to a more sober tone.]

It’s such a terrible, terrible world where the belief that people are fundamentally good has been erased from the minds of a paranoid public that suspects everyone of being a criminal. It has even reached the point where they’ve developed machines that automatically accuse people of being criminals!

[Yet another brief pause. Three, two, one...]

I’m in despair! This pseudo-futuristic nightmare society where machines can imprison people at a whim has left me IN DESPAIR!!

Well, since I’m most likely on death row for crimes that I may-or-may-not have actually committed, I might as well just kill myself.