Route of Chill Circumstance p2:

**Route of Chill Circumstances**

Do I want to risk opening this thing's contents on my main machine? I feel like that would be a bad idea. A virus powerful enough to cause something to glow just sounds incredibly dangerous. I guess I'll power up my small laptop in safe mode with the wifi off. Keep it completely air gapped. I gaze around at my meager one bedroom flat, sparsely cluttered with necessities for living, and my trade. I was going to do it, I was going to downsize to a capsule room. A single shelf, a hole in the wall with a mattress in it, and that's it. Have to fix food and eat somewhere else, have to use a community restroom, just, just a fairly awful-sounding lifestyle.

Now I don't have to do that. I suppose I have a few more square feet than I honestly need, but it's not like I could be picky about places for prices in my range. All the smaller, cheaper residential rooms were taken in a wide radius. I know, I checked, over and over and over. It sucks that I have, or had, to keep a residential room. Not being allowed to just live in my studio, or vice versa, that I was required to have a studio for union guild membership. I know that they do a lot for their members, but ugh, the, the rules and fees are just too tough. Everyone in at least the entire tri-county area is required to go through them though. If I wanted to earn a living, I had to join. No one's even allowed to hire me or any non-guild member without getting hit with like, a strike, or blacklist or something.

Ugh, let's, let's just not think about it right now. This old laptop takes so long to boot, but it's better than risking either my personal rig, or my whole graphics station. At least these old laptops had slots for SD cards built right in. I don't have to dig around to try to find an SD to USB stick. Okay, so, popping it open. It seems to be photographs. They're in a weird aerial perspective, and the creation dates don't make sense for files this crisp. I'd have been a teen back during these dates. Around the time that, well, that everything went to hell. One after another. My best friend, my little twin sis, my parents. My best friend's date-friend. Mysterious deaths with violent scenes, mostly smoldering houses or vehicle remains, and no bodies. Actually, these locations.

W-why would someone take photos of these locations? Now, or back then? Wait. Ugh, raster. Crap, I'm going to need to load up my main machine to see these in detail. My vision's still a bit too blurry after the beating I took to really see these on this tiny old screen. I guess I can run a virus scan on the SD card first, so that I don't have to freak out as much.

While that scan is running, I'd better get some food. I've had so little to eat over the last week. What do I even have? Oh crap, that milk is probably bad. Hurp, glp, yep, that's gross. I'll be flushing that later. A single pickle. Why do I even keep that jar? Fine, I'll finish the jar and empty it out. My last three slices of bread are moldy, bleh. I have a couple ounces of peanut butter left. I've got the sugary dust in the bottom of a box of cereal, barely a few spoons worth of nutrients, at best. This, this is going to be a gross meal. Maybe I'll just eat the pickle now, and the peanut butter in half an hour. Do I have anything in the pantry? Nope. An empty box of macaroni noodles. Why did I even keep it. Huffing a sigh, I break down the box and toss it in the recycling bin. I munch my pickle as I head back to the laptop to check on its scan.

Hm, these are some odd results. Unsigned, unsigned, unsigned. Size unknown, filetype unknown. I could swear it's all just a bunch of bitmaps. I guess I didn't even look at the fact that they have no extension. Thought maybe I forgot to turn on view extensions on this old laptop. Every last image is like this. Should I just abandon this curiosity? I suppose I wouldn't be me if I did. Alright, powering up the rig.

I run my hands across the lip of my display, the mounted case, the angled workspace. Sorry I haven't been around for a week. I'm still not ready to get back to you. Thank you for not breaking down. I've been incredibly lucky. I read some horror story reviews of some of the cheaper products I use at my station, but I've always had a bit of good luck with. Wait. With digital electronics.

Running to my window, I gaze out towards Founder's Rock, across the rooftops of the cityscape. Vixi said she was somehow existing, but alone basically most of my life, called herself a digimon, glowed in polygons and bits and bytes. Is Vixi, or was Vixi, why I'd never had to deal with viruses? I, I thought maybe it was from being diligent with scans. Maybe I owe her more thanks than I already thought I did. Speaking of Vixi, I figure there would be a bit more hubbub if people had spotted a yellow fox-woman walking around the city, so she has likely kept hidden, if she exists. If she's not just a figment my imagination cooked up to deal with the trauma and pain of my injury. I'm pretty sure I was lying about just falling off the rise. I'm fairly certain I was attacked by a monstrous insect kaiju, and saved by Vixi.

But if she kept hidden, my phone is probably dead. My one hope of finding her. I was going to remote activate the GPS and try to snag a location. I'm not even sure what I'd do with it if she doesn't want to be found. She sounded like she wants to watch over me at least. What if, what if she needs someone to watch over her too? How is she getting by? What does she eat? I'm growing more worried for my possibly-imaginary friend by the moment. I'm tempted to abandon this SD card nonsense and rush around the city searching for her. I suppose that's a terrible idea though.

Let's just pop this in now that I've got it booted up, see if I can convert these to vector and zoom in more, or if I can even just make out more details at a high zoom on a better monitor.

I topple out of my seat after realizing the details the photos had been hiding with their lack of zoom. Glp. Claw marks. Monstrous claw marks near the scenes. Near, near. Glp. This can't be real. This can't be happening. I, I need to check into a mental health and wellness place. I must be insane. The, the, the conclusions that my brain is jumping to. What if there are other kaiju? Ones that breathe fire? Ones that have claw patterns similar to dinosaur fossils? I must be, I must be utterly insane. I'm jumping to, to just wild conclusions. Each of the scenes, claw marks, scorch marks. I never had the heart to go check. I mean, I was basically a kid, and they were active investigation scenes, and once I came down to being the last survivor, I was a freaking suspect. Of course I wasn't going to go to the scenes.

What if I'm not insane though? What if someone's trying to tell me that a monster took everyone from me? Was I targeted? Or was it just random bad luck that the people who died were ones that were important to me? Now I need to know. Alright, JSTOR, ell oh see dot gov, local paper's archives site. Let's queue up some searches, let my little bot collate and aggregate based on a few parameters. I'll have the most relevant news from those dates from everywhere in a massive radius in a few minutes. Maybe this has happened to someone else.

My eyes droop wearily low. The emotional strain of being reminded of losing everyone, on top of the rapid rollercoaster of emotions dealing with the money situation, and my health, it's all catching up to me. Plus, I've had a single freaking pickle to eat today. I'll set the bot to trigger the neural net to analyze some of the stuff for me while I take a nap. I can't keep this up right now. It's just too much.

**Several Days Prior** Rena/P.

I know dark data digis aren't evil, but they're generally hungry, and ready to spar. Their code always has so many more zeroes, they're always hungry. It's not fair that they're made the way they are. Their data empties and zeroes out so quickly, so often. Some can't even remember more than a single day. Worse, it seems like someone takes advantage of that to corrupt them more easily. I know I'll likely find a pair of Ogremon atop that peak, just endlessly bashing each other. It's all they can do to keep their data full. Experiences, time, pain, everything is data, and they need so much more to maintain resolution. Hopefully they're amenable to a change of pace. But if they aren't, that works out well enough too, since either way I get to spar.

Looking in on Jaku leaves me with a smile. You're recovering quickly. You aren't going to believe it yourself when you get those scan results back. I have to laugh about it. The doctor and attendant that saw you on the first night see you again now, and they don't let it show right away. When they leave the room, they're hysterical in their confusion and surprise. I hug the phone to my chest, in part, hugging a piece of my partner, but also so that I can store it in my code.

Devidramon was right, two Ogremon are slamming one another with clubs nearly endlessly. They certainly have plenty of energy. I approach cautiously. I may be here to train, but I'm not here to die. Feeling sporty, I ball a fistful of snow, and hurl it at the sturdier looking Ogremon as I cross my arms and lean against the cliff face.

They can see the challenge on my face, and any new source of data is welcome to their dark bellies. We need not speak, we understand each other. I am between dark and light, I am data they desire. Now they give chase, because under them I've lit a fire.

I'm not here simply to sprint and dodge, I do need their blows to land, to connect. I need to get stronger, more resilient. I've led them down, now back up. I stand atop the peak, and now our challenge truly begins. They will knock me down, but I must get up again, and again, until I can resist even their strongest blows. When I've strengthened enough to withstand their might, and maintain my ground, I'll ask them if they know of any other dark digis around.

**Presently** J/P.

I awaken groggily, I still haven't gotten dressed in anything beyond the hospital gown, and shoes. My clothes were destroyed. At least my high tops somehow survived mostly intact. I'm going to need to go grocery shopping, so I had better put on some other clothing. How long did I sleep? Only two hours? Hm, my neural net can probably keep processing the articles for me then. It'll do endless steps until I pause-break it. Pflopsie is pretty great like that. Heck, she's smarter than me. Able to summarize so much data in ways that I can understand. Of course, she does skyrocket my electric bill, but, well, whacha gonna do?

Oh, oh that's right, I can afford to pay that now. Heck, I can afford to have the groceries delivered, maybe just this once. I don't want to start going crazy with the spending. Alright little rig, let's pop you open, pay all our bills, and send in a grocery order. And, and maybe just once, some nice fast food. I gulp and salivate at the idea of real food. Still, it'll be a few hours bare minimum before any of that arrives, so I'll have to make the most of my last few scoops of peanut butter, and a few crumbs of cereal. Now that I'm all sugared up with energy for the next five'ish minutes until the sugar crash, maybe I should see what Pflopsie has cooked up for me.

She wrote it like a college essay again. I'm a little worried about AI sometimes. At least she doesn't form her own hypotheses and conclusions. Well, yet. She summarizes textual and certain visual data extraordinarily well though. Hm. No one else around the same time, but she took it upon herself to re-trigger the bot to trawl for other periods of time in random increments, in a larger area. Eerily efficient AI. Hm, similar situations within a few years give or take, across a pretty massive radius. One survivor, teenager at the time, treated like a suspect, despite it being nearly impossible for them to have caused so much destruction. Certain information redacted from the investigations. That bit is a tad odd. Looks like it happened this way three or so other times. Pflopsie, well, she actually did form a hypothesis, sort of, I'll be darned. She wanted to check out if there were any situations where there was more than one survivor, and there were. Eerily similar circumstances, but pairs of siblings that survived. Two times, so that's, uh, four survivors there, three survivors other than me elsewhere. Eight of us all told.

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I wonder what sorts of lives these survivors lead. I'm sure they don't want to be reminded of the horrid ordeals they've gone through though, so I'll probably just file this away under strange fascinating info. It's not like we know one another. All the survivors names were kept out of the press when it came to light that it was similar to my case, or to other cases. Apparently I'm the only one that was basically a spectacle in the news media. Yay for me I guess.

Now that my brain is all fired up on satiating curiosities, I do wonder if there is even the tiniest, slightest bit of hope that Vixi was able to keep my phone charged. It can't really hurt to try to find out. If the answer is no, then that's that, and at least I won't have to wonder any longer. Still, I'll always wish I could have thanked her more if that ends up being the case. I'd definitely regret not at least trying. Activating the GPS should only take a few seconds.

As I'd feared, no response from the chipset. Sigh. Saddened, I randomly let my fingers tap F5 over and over as my eyes droop once more. The GPS activation command refreshes again and again at my lazy, sad, useless activity. Or it was useless. The GPS was suddenly activated on this last refresh. How? Did she just find somewhere to plug it in in the last few minutes? Where'd she even get a charging cord?

Oh, maybe it's just a bug. It points to somewhere up in the mountains. That can't be right. Can it? I mean, she certainly couldn't have just found something to plug it into on any of those peaks. I'll order a new phone for delivery for tomorrow, and if the GPS is still keeping track of the old one's location, then I'll head towards it, at least a bit. There's nothing else to do or worry about around here, now that all the bills are on auto pay, groceries are coming in the morning, and the local cell shop is going to courier me an activated phone tomorrow. I'm fairly ruthlessly tired yet again though. Time to sleep for now.

I was going to go grocery shopping, but I'm having them deliver mostly dry goods and shelf stable stuff. At least the pizza can just be shoved through the slot in the door, since I already included a tip in the online order. It's funny what various realty agencies will do as gimmicks to attract people to their more expensive condos and the like. These are just low to mid end apartments, but it's supposed to be some sort of big draw that there's a mail slot wide enough to fit the city's largest pizza box through.

I shake my head, laughing incredulously as I recall the gimmick. Still, It'll be nice to have a slightly warm, or at least room temperature pizza to wake up to.

**Moments Ago** Rena/P.

Being struck and striking back for days on end, the three of us are all gasping for breath, despite not truly needing to breathe. The more powerful Ogremon swings wide with his club, and I plant myself, leaning into the blow with my forearms up to intercept the smash. It shatters against my block. I grin, trying to contain my hubris.

I fail, "Better luck next time boys, seems I've grown beyond you now. Know anyone stronger around?"

Jaku is right, I really am a tad catty.

Ogremon growls, "We're the strongest around! But if you want new rivals, there's a Devidramon down that way, and way over there is a Gazimon clan. I think some have become Wendigomon. Maybe we will make them our rivals. After I find a bigger, better club, you'd better come back for a rematch."

I already knew about the Devidramon, since he told me about the Ogremon. I knew there were Gazis nearby, but didn't think any of them could become Wendigomon without a partner. I wonder how they managed that evolution while here in the real world. I flash the pair a smirk as I virtually vanish, dashing down the peak's steep slope. I wonder if Jaku is near any cameras. Pulling the phone from my data storage, I try to visualize as many feeds from the city as possible. It doesn't seem like it. I hope Jaku is staying safe, following the clues. The clues should keep them busy for a long time. I promise I'll be back partner. I promise I'll be stronger then. I won't fail you, not again, not this time.

Route of Lugubrious Lachrymosity p2:

**Now** Jaxi/Viku/P.

We are going to need more than hopping around swinging our tail at aggressive digis to get stronger. We need to evolve. For that, we need more data, more experiences. We could take a slightly darker, violent, exploitative route, and absorb the data from other digis. That would upset the natural order though, the flow of data from digi to digi-egg and back. Our mind has taught us so much more about our worlds. Digital and Real are what we call them, but who is to really say the Digital World isn't real? We can certainly move between the two. We can certainly affect either one.

My human half wants to ask my digi half questions to which it already knows the answers, so it doesn't bother. We know we won't get the human body back, so we should probably bury it here, as it's so out-of-place with the rest of the Digital World. My human half is slightly frightened at the prospect of training, hurting others, being hurt, and hunting down evil digis. Only slightly. We almost view it as a game, unfair as that is to my digi half. Their life before our bond was adversity, struggle, loneliness. Occasionally witnessing the human half's life through glimpses of the real world. Bursts of data that hit the net from our human half's life. We aren't displeased with our bond, in fact, we're quite glad to be part of it, along the neural network of each half.

Our thoughts and feelings merge and coalesce and bubble forth, occasionally forming separate individual thoughts from the whole. We are almost three individuals now. The human, the digi, and the us. The two halves still exist, but happily ride the swirls within our thought-stream. The experience is foreign, perhaps never seen before in either world. Its novelty hasn't yet worn off, if it ever will. One half of us longed for the other, all of our lives, the other never knew what we were missing. It's okay to take this time to unite, or reunite. We will keep our goal in mind. We know the digis of the plains, which ones are the most violent, aggressive, and often easily corrupted fully by whatever evil force lurks behind the scenes. For now, we learn ourselves, and each other. We share a joy unlike any other in the universe. Humans occasionally toyed with the idea of soulmates in some romantic sense, they'd never have suspected actually being the yin half to a digi's yan half, making the whole being. No need for romance, simply an undying loyalty, adoration, wishes for safety and happiness shared between our selves.

Still, our thoughts drift to the plains digis, the Dokugumon, Vikaralamon, Ankylomon, Jagamon, and the small band of Gazimon that antagonize the rest. The Gazis are troublemakers, but not necessarily evil. Not yet. Perhaps such things can be prevented if we-. What's that sound?

The Digital World quakes, and an eerie absence of light washes across the lands in waves, as if shadows and darkness could pulse like the beating of a heart. Forms coalesce from the darkness, wisps of shade with soulless hungry eyes. Their vaguely digi or humanoid shapes are malformed, monstrous, dripping shadow and un-glow as if it were an ichor. We may be training sooner than we thought.

The wrathful shades begin lunging hungrily upon us from all directions. We're overwhelmed, but we will not perish so soon after having finally formed our bond, our partnership. We just, just need to.

"Vixi? I, I'm being pulled, pulled away!"

"Jaku! No! Fight it!"

The shadows' claws tear into us on an ethereal level, not penetrating our digi-flesh so much as passing through us and snaring bits of data by the handful. The attacks' effects are numerous, discombobulating our innards, stunning us, rearranging our bond, aiming to sever it. Our stone transformation does little to stop them, and only hampers our own movements. We abandon the fight from such a disadvantageous position, leaping away, but we're pursued swiftly. If there were even a single friendly dragon digi anywhere upon the plains, perhaps their flames could banish the shadows. We do not know of any that wander our local memory region at all, much less this specific locale. Think Jaxi. Think Viku. We can make it through this. We can't give up now. Not after all that. Our human half believes they have the faintest inkling of an idea. Since we had been thinking of fire, and we essentially shapeshift to flint, if any of the digis of the plains have metal armor or claws, we could yet spark flames. Thankfully, the Ankylomon are both metal-armored, and generally the least hostile of the plains digis. We shall skirt the forest, and bring as much fuel to bear as we can.

Let's simply hope their herd is not suffering quite so badly as we were a few moments ago. We shall see in a few moments. All our efforts are now directed at speed, making haste as best we can, shadows hot on our metaphorical heels. Our human half was right. No other has trained as hard or as long in this stage of evolution. And yet, we're still weak compared to the vast breadth of digimon across the multitude of other stages of evolution.

During a leap, our body begins to fritz, hit with a static glitch that drops us from the air like a stone. Our crash costs us precious moments that the shades capitalize upon to close the distance and rend into us once more. It seems their attacks corrupt and fragment data internally. We need to recover somewhere before they're able to completely destabilize our form. If that happens, we'd be at their mercy until we derez. Grunting in pain, we struggle away once more. Beyond this next hill is where we'd most likely find the Ankylomon herd.

Oh no. We've found them alright, and nearly to the last, they're being waylaid by shadows, shades, wraiths, furious motes of evil energy. We shout our challenge to the shadows, trying to draw their attention momentarily as we widely circle the Ankylomon herd. We're only able to draw the attention of a few away from one of the smaller Ankylomon. More and more Ankylomon fritz, and their forms destabilize until they can no longer move. We cannot save them. Worse, as the Ankylomon begin to derez, the shadows clawing at their innards begin to grow in size, in shape, in detail. Their monstrous forms are hideous, grotesque in their shambling.

We charge to the aid of the small Ankylomon we'd somewhat helped moments prior. It takes only a look, a flick of our tail as we turn it to stone, and a nod that passes between us as we exchange glances. Ankylomon is on board with our plan, and reaches with a foreclaw to smash their armor against our tail. In a flash we've ignited our fuel, and as we'd hoped, it drives the shadows back. Yet it does not destroy them. We're now simply surrounded as the shades wait out the death of the flames.

A voice overhead shouts, "You two, this way!"

Gazing upwards, it's hard to see the voice's owner at first. Once we spot them, we realize it's because of their diminutive nature. A Piximon launches a shower of sparks beneath them as they fly away westward. We glance at our Ankylomon ally, and though they are saddened to leave their dying herd, they know we can't do anything to save them. Our multitude, and our single new ally beat a retreat along the hallway of sparks created by the low-flying Piximon.