"Ummm... please don't kill me?"

"Huh?" I looked up from the screen and turned around, scowling at being interrupted, though it was probably for my own good at that point. After all, I had been in the same position for the last... three or four hours, moving only my fingers and hands as the characters moved across the screen in front of me at a speed that shouldn't have been possible.

It was the kid who I had picked up off the street because he seemed to have potential. I know that Dad is always yelling at me not to do that, that someday I might end up getting my throat slit by one of my helpers. But, so far so good. And that particular kid was one of the better ones, not that that's saying much... Still, at least he knew how to type, and that was better than most of the kids I brought in.

"Please don't kill me?" he repeated, and this time I actually heard him and understood the words he was saying. I didn't get why he was saying them, but that was the next step, and I've always liked to take things one step at a time.

"Why would I kill you?" I asked, and he started wringing his hands nervously.

"I... ummm..." he said. There was something about that that bothered me, maybe the fact that he was being way too under confident. I mean, yeah, I'm not exactly the most comforting person in the world. Hell, I'm downright scary at times. But, that didn't mean that he needed to walk on eggshells around me. After all, it wasn't one of those times, and I wasn't far enough behind in work that it was starting to get to me. Maybe in a week or two I would be ready to bite his head off for just existing, but not quite yet.

So, at that point, his hesitance was just annoying, though annoying turned to aggravating quite easily. And an aggravated me can every so often be even worse than the monster that comes out once a month and wears my face. So I hoped, for his sake, that he would get to the point sometime in the near future, as opposed to making me wait for and/or guess the problem.

"Would you just grow some balls and spit it out?" I may have said that aggravated me is scary, but annoyed me isn't too much better.

"I..." he said, sounding, and looking, like he was about to faint. I sighed heavily, but that didn't seem to help him summon up the courage to tell me what it was that he "wanted" to tell me. It just made him turn even paler.

And then, before I could start throttling the problem out of him, he turned around and sprinted from the room. He ran surprisingly fast, for an underfed street urchin who probably had so many diseases that it was a miracle to find him standing upright. Of course, I didn't even consider following him. There were plenty more where he came from, and it wasn't worth my time to try and hunt him down. So, I just let him run and watched his figure disappear down the hallway and around the corner.

After that, I went over to the terminal where he had been working. It was off, which was a good thing; I had been trying to teach him to shut off his terminal when he was done for the past month, and it hadn't been catching until then. But then, when I booted it up to transfer his work over to my terminal, I discovered why it was that he was worried about being killed.

He had shut down, but hadn't saved anything, for the entire day.

Needless to say, I screamed.