Where You Belong

Is The Internet A Place?

Lexi sat onto the plush chair with a deep sigh. Her chemistry class was definitely the most boring and uneventful class of them all. There wasn't any sort of hands-on way to learn the stuff, and on more than one occasion she'd fallen asleep in the middle of class. Luckily, Law was there to ask her questions whenever she'd started to doze. Keeping him in check the whole time made it easier to stay awake. She was half afraid he'd stand up and take over another lecture anyway.

"Ah, just one more class to go..." She muttered, sinking into the cushion further. Law sat in the chair opposite, as usual, and cocked his head.

"When does it start?" She opened her eyes to look at the pirate.

"4:30. So we've got," She checked her phone for the time, "three hours to kill."

"Enough time to explain what this 'internet' is?" He asked hopefully, curiosity getting the better of him. Despite being able to understand most things he saw, there was still a vast amount that was unseen that he didn't know.

She stared for a moment, debating if she wanted to get into that whole discussion at that moment. Closing her eyes and taking a deep breath, she leaned down and produced her laptop from her bag.

"Alright, though it might be pretty confusing. Just saying." He nodded, switching seats to one beside her so he could see what she was doing. She flipped open the top, and tapped her fingers on buttons with letters on it.

"First of all, this is the keyboard. You can type words to search through it." She typed something into a box and the picture changed. He narrowed his eyes, already slightly confused by what was happening.

"What did you just do?" She sighed.

"Wow, this is gonna be harder than I thought." Lexi pointed to the picture. "This is the screen. It shows what you're doing. Obviously. Anyways, I typed in the password and it unlocked."

"Like a padlock?" He observed the new picture, a box full of small kittens.

"Yeah, except it's virtual." He raised an eyebrow at the unfamiliar term, but she shook her head. "I'll get to that later. We'll just say it exists but you can't touch it. If you don't type in the correct password it won't unlock." Hesitantly, he nodded.

"Now this is the home screen. From here you can do everything. See these little pictures with words underneath them?" She pointed to the 'Safari' icon, and he nodded. "These are called icons. They represent a program, which all have different functions. This one in particular gets you to the internet." She clicked it, and the screen changed to a white page with a bunch of words.

"The internet is a place?" He questioned, resting his head on his hand. Law watched with deep concentration, not wanting to miss a single detail of her explanation.

"Not exactly. That's really hard to explain, but let's just say that the internet is inside this program."

"I see." Satisfied he was following up to this point, she clicked on the search box. He, however, had another question.

"What is that square you keep pressing?" She glanced down where he was pointing.

"That's the mousepad. It clicks on stuff. Clicking means you are choosing it to interact with. It's like pressing a button." He nodded again.

"Now, if you click on this bar right here, you can type words in and find anything you could ever want." He looked at her pointedly.

"Anything?" She smirked.

"Yup. Anything." He turned back to the screen, staring at the box thoughtfully.

"Show me." She figured he'd say something like that, and flexed her fingers over the keys.