"...Can I play with it? We haven't had computers like those in a couple decades, I think..." Duo looked longingly at it, clearly eager to see how it worked.

Naomi raised an eyebrow warily, holding her laptop close.

"Unless you're going to give it a complete hardware overhaul while preserving the information on the hard drive, no," she replied.

"I can do that. I'm sure I can find parts around here that are compatible." Duo shrugged like it was no big deal.

Naomi still looked a little wary.

"You can preserve the whole hard drive?" she asked. "What about the operating system? I doubt you have anything compatible."

"Once I figure out how it works I can copy everything over onto a backup," Duo said with a negligent shrug. "Same with everything on the hard drive. Not like I don't have space for it all."

Naomi blinked.

"It has a capacity of seven hundred gigs," she replied. "You have that much disk space just lying around?"

"That much disk space isn't enough to even begin to think about writing programming for one of these." He patted Deathscythe's side. "That is about pocket change here."

Naomi blinked again, astonished. After a moment, she held out her computer.

"Here," she said. "Play with it all you like. Make sure it still runs when you give it back."

Duo grinned and immediately started going through everything, looking at the coding and absorbing everything. Hey, maybe the really old coding would come in handy at some point. And he even backed everything up, just like he promised her.

Okay. So now that we're not at gunpoint... why are we here? Osanna looked at Naomi again.

I don't know, Naomi signed back. Goddamn book... I swear, as soon as we don't need it, I'm burning it.

Osanna nodded her vigorous agreement before she started to poke around. She was bored, and Duo seemed to be totally absorbed in his work.

Naomi was more interested in what Duo was doing. After a world with next to no technology, she was more than pleased to be in a place where people knew what a computer was.

Duo was muttering to himself as he went over the programming, figuring it all out quickly and getting all the information he could. Now he was convinced they were from a different world.

"Having fun?" Naomi commented, looking over his shoulder. She was half-surprised he wasn't just reading straight-out binary or something.

"I haven't seen coding like this except in old textbooks," Duo said with a grin. "Could come in handy sometime."

Naomi shrugged.

"I barely know what I'm looking at," she said. "I understand really, really basic tags and coding, but not a lot of it."

"Well, trust me. It's different. So, where are you from?" Duo slanted a look at her, starting to take her computer apart now.

"The US," Naomi replied. "Osa and I both." She watched as he started to take apart the computer and winced slightly when she saw all the dust inside. "Well, that would explain why it kept overheating..."

Duo gave her a look and started cleaning it out meticulously, replacing parts as he went. Because really, he could have her computer running way better than it was. And quite possibly be more advanced than any computer available to them, but he wasn't going to give her that tidbit of information.

"I kept it from crashing," Naomi muttered. "It never crashed from overheating, I made sure to cool it down before then."

"It's a good thing you don't have anything more than a laptop," Duo muttered. "There. That should work better." He made sure everything was in place again before putting the bottom back on and setting it down to let it boot up. Which happened in all of five seconds.

Naomi blinked and stared, amazed.

"That had to have taken less than ten seconds," she marveled. "I've never seen it boot up in less than three minutes from off to login. From hibernation, maybe, but not from off."

Duo grinned. "I added some extra memory, freed up some things, and gave it a few little boosts. Should run much more smoothly now. And those new parts won't be effected by dust." Because they'd been made for the colonies and partially for gundam use, and gundams had be more durable than your average computer.

"How much extra memory?" Naomi asked. "I mean, considering the fact that you called seven hundred gigs of space 'pocket change' and all."

"The smallest one I could find around here was a few terabytes." Duo shrugged. "Twelve, I think? Something like that."