Lost Change - Snippets

Fine Dining And Recreation

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Author's Note - Rambling.

Hello again!  I have been working on story ideas for a sequel to Lost Change, and... it hasn't really been going as well as I would like so far.  To try and help me stay motivated (and to take breaks from ideas that I ended up getting stuck on) I went back and fleshed out a few ideas I had come up with when I originally started on Lost Change, but which for various reasons I ended up leaving out of the final story.  For the most part these are probably going to be closer to rough drafts than polished chapters, since most of my focus is still on the new story, but since I wrote them out anyways I figured it wouldn't hurt to share.

This scene is actually an example of two ideas I had - Nate trolling Minna by interrupting her work, and the lunch date.  They were too short to do much with on their own, but together they formed a fairly decent chapter.  This would have taken place somewhere between chapters 84 and 85, during the time skip - after Minna had moved in to her new place, but still well before the three month deadline that covered the final arc of the story.  It would have been awkward to do a time skip just to do these two scenes, then do another time skip immediately after, and I couldn't think of anywhere else to put the ideas (and while some of Ivy's comments are amusing, I feel like even as clueless as Nate is when it comes to social interactions, even he would have started to suspect Ivy had some feelings for him after he sat down and thought about them), so in the end the idea got left out.

But it was still a fun idea, and I had fun writing out some more of the playful interactions between Nate and Minna - so, enjoy!

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I watched from the wall perch as Minna tapped away at her keyboard. I knew by now that she much preferred using her handheld tablet over the computer, and only used the desk computer for when she couldn't record a report by audio.

Which probably meant she was putting pictures of me in the report. Yay.

Tap, tap, tap...

It was still early morning - I had danced for the sun, and then we had eaten, but instead of starting out on a training patrol or going to the gym, Minna had gone upstairs and started typing away. Probably on something Trenil had asked for. Or maybe even Elder Naishi - I knew from some conversations that she would occasionally ask for an update on how Minna and I were doing, and Minna always took those reports seriously.

Either way, it was boring. Minna's new house was nice and all, but I had been looking forward to a chance to spread my wings some more.

Tap tap. Tap. Taptap. Tap... tap...

Minna wasn't that great of a typist. I had no idea how the Kymari language worked, or how many letters were on their keyboard, or how their letters were arranged, or even if their language had letters. But even if every keystroke was an entire word, Minna was still slower at typing than I had been. Than most other people I had known.

I vaguely remembered Ivy mentioning that the other handlers liked to use laptops. Alec, maybe, or the other one... um... the handler of that gold dragonet I had talked to once, the first one to have a handler. What was his name... Taureen, maybe? That their dragonets would laze around in warm sand and zone out to the rhythmic sound of fingers dancing on keyboards. Maybe even fall asleep to it.

Tap... taptaptap. Tap. ... ... ...tap.

Minna wasn't that great of a typist.

Tap.

I finally sat up with a loud sigh. Her shoulders shifted ever-so-slightly, in a way I had come to understand meant she had devoted some attention to me, but her gaze was still focused on the thin screen in front of her.