Nabiki sat behind the computer, watching as the text in front of
her scrolled at the touch of her finger. She laughed slightly as
she read someone else's take on what Auntie Saotome could do with
her katana.

"Oh god...", she rubbed her eyes with one hand, still smiling. "Now
while that might solve a few problems, its just so not Auntie
Saotome that it's just... not her" Wondering at the people who
could write that sort of crap, she stopped pushing down on the
keyboard as the window stopped scrolling.

As she finished reading the e-mail currently open she scrolled the
top window down and looked at the next header. Her finger sprang
away from the mouse button as her eyes lit once more upon the word.

"Spam?" she muttered, looking at the tag sitting before her in the
header of the next mail. "Just what the hell _is_ spam?"

*************************************
Insert Standard Copyright Disclaimer.
< The characters used in this work of Fiction are not owned by
  me.

 Ranma 1/2 and all associated characters, trademarks and
 situations are owned by Rumiko Takahashi, Shogakukan, Kitty, Fuji
 and Viz - Used here without permission. >

*************************************

[Nabiki from Ranma 1/2]: Nature of the Beast.

*************************************

Tapping her index finger on the side of her chin, Nabiki silently
read the contents of the mail. As with the others this spam message
had absolutely nothing in common with anything else on the mailing
list, including the other spam. In fact, it appeared to be an
announcement about something on a web site somewhere.

Well, that was different, last time she saw an announcement about a
web page, it had been under the tag [announcement]. Why was this
one under the heading spam? Was it different? Was it better? Worse?

Her interest piqued, Nabiki quickly flicked the mouse pointer
across to the left of her mailer and switched to her trash folder.
Quickly scrolling down and scanning each of the headers, she opened
the previous announcement.

She read the small message contained within and then switched back
to her inbox.

Her eyebrow twitched slightly as she read the first message again.
The click that sent the current message to wait with the rest of
it's spammy brethren for deletion was a little more forceful than
necessary. They were the same! Identical, except that the address
of the web site was different.

Wondering exactly why she was worrying about a silly tag, Nabiki
opened the next message and began reading. Ahhhh... a Sailor Moon /
Ranma crossover... one of her favourites.

"I wonder if I become Sailor Earth this time round..."

~~~

The call from downstairs caught her just as she was finishing up.
Kasumi had just finished preparing a brilliant meal, as always.

Switching back to her trash folder, Nabiki was about to delete the
lot when the spam tag showed itself again. Why was it so damn hard
to find out what this thing was? She'd only been on the list for
three days and most of the other tags were easily identifiable.
There was even a section in the FAQ about it, but no solid
definition of what exactly spam was.

Already one person had been banned because they'd posted some
advertisement about those crappy "tell everyone about it and you'll
get something back" sites. Now that really was pointless, they'd
even labelled it "Good Spam". Nabiki thanked the gods for
moderators, they made life so much easier, just the thought of
having several hundred of those types of messages delivered to your
mailbox every day was enough to make her shudder.

Selecting all of the messages in her trash folder, she hit the
delete key on the keypad, and then followed it with an enter.
Watching as the trashed messages, spam or otherwise, disappeared
from her hard drive, she sighed softly to herself, remembering the
final story from the list. Briefly she entertained the idea of
replying to it, but dismissed this urge when she remembered that
the last time she'd told someone that "she knew by personal
experience" she'd been laughed at. Well, if they insisted on
putting someone in bed with Ranma, they could at least call it the
way it was.

Switching off the monitor on her computer she stood up, left the
room and went downstairs to eat.

~~~

Drumming her fingers on the desk as the modem dialled, Nabiki
wondered what she'd see in today's pile of messages. The mating
call of the modem completed and she quickly opened her mailer.
Watching the status bar as the messages downloaded, she thought
about what she'd learned.

Trust Ranma to have heard of spam. Of course, she smirked to
herself, if you picked anything that was edible, chances were that
the Saotomes had heard of it.

Spam was something to do with ham eh? Nabiki scrolled down the list
and picked another message with the tricky tag again. Briefly
looking over the contents -- a status report on this person's
stories -- she really couldn't see anything at all to do with ham,
or any other type of food for that matter...

Wait! Maybe it was symbolic of something else... How to find out?
Ahhh... the web, of course. This new computer really was coming in
handy. Opening a browser window, Nabiki quickly changed to a search
engine and quickly typed "spam" into it.

~~~

Talk about a can of worms.

Sorting through all the crap that had come from that search had
taken her the better part of half an hour. At least she had finally
found out, exactly, what spam was.

Spam really was ham, a spicy, salty, packaged ham made in America
since 1937. She smiled to herself, Ranma had been right, that was a
pretty rare thing in itself. Spam also appeared to describe junk
mail on the net. Well at least that solved that problem, why
couldn't I see it before? Nabiki smiled to herself as she looked
over the page that was open in front of her, still reading up on
spam. The junk mail term had been coined after a series of non
serious commercials made by some series over in the UK. She looked
at the title of the show.

Monty Python? Now what was that?

*************************************

[Authors Rant]

Sorry, I really couldn't stop myself... :) I just got it into my
head to write a spamfic and well a fic about spam certainly fits...
:)

Why pick Nabiki? Well she seems to be the most likely of the Ranma
1/2 characters to own and actually use a computer to the point where
she'd join a mailing list... Ranma might use it, but it'd only be
to look up the latest martial arts material... :)

Why not just let her figure out what spam was without the elaborate
set-up? Are you kidding? Then I'd have nothing to write about. ;)

Anyway, hope you all got at least a little laugh out of some of the
stuff in here...

Later,
     Mike.

--

Visit my website : www.upnaway.com/~ricketts

I write, it's not a job, it's just something I enjoy.

.-----------------------..------------------------.
|  .-==-. <\-/> .-==-.  || In time, even those who|
| /_.-=-.\|^ ^|/.-=-._\ || appeared to lead fell  |
|  /_.--.\(o_o)/.--._\  || to the side, corrupted |
|   /_.--\/   \/--._\   || by their own power.    |
|     \/ {/.-.\} \/     ||                        |
|       /"(   )"\,--.   || You have risen in their|
|     __\ /'-'\ /__     || place, how long will   |
|   ///---'   '---\\\   || you walk undefiled?    |
`-----------------------'`------------------------'
If the above picture looks wrong, it's just you...