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Chapter 7 - Shaggai Storm

~~~

"Madelyn, it's time we had a chat. You know, as a team." Brad said.

"Okay, about what?" She knew exactly what he was going to say. Skyler at least had woken up. Strangely, once they'd emerged from the Cellar, and found Tsumemon crying over its partner, Brad had pulled her aside.

"What's going on?"

"What do you mean?" She asked, blinking a few times, playing coy. It had worked earlier in their time together as the Chosen Kids.

"Everyone saw how that renamon had grabbed Skyler and Mia's digivices out of your bag," he pointed his finger at her like it was a loaded gun.

"Brad…" Leomon said, his back against a wall that they had blown a hole through.

Oh yep, they were going to ask her about this. Tears started to well up in her eyes. Brad already started to frown, his face blushing as he second-guessed himself. It took a second before he regained his composure.

"Stop that!" He said. "God, if you weren't a girl…" he said.

She would have smirked, but held the tears. Crying wasn't even a lie, either. She was stressed, and she was worried about what Mia would get up to without her there.

"I'm sorry!" she said, "I'll tell everyone, I just … I just need a moment."

"Yeah! Be nice to Madelyn!" Patamon said, getting puffy at Brad's aggressive stance toward his chosen child partner.

Brad tapped his foot for a few seconds, letting her catch herself for a bit, but clearly indicating that he was done with her entire attitude.

"Let's go now," he said, not buying her show. The two of them walked back out into the ruined throne room where they'd had their initial confrontations. Luckily for her, she didn't have to lie.

Because Madelyn never lied.

"So, Madelyn, care to explain to us why your backpack had Mia and Skyler's digivices?" Brad said loudly and artificially, drawing the team's attention.

God, he just was not going to let it go, was he?

"I uh, well I uh—" She stuttered. This was the reason why she didn't lie.

"Go on," He prodded her.

"Patamon and I, well—" Patamon looked at her with betrayal " —we saw that Skyler and Mia were starting to do a lot of bad things." She grew more confident as she settled in. "I'm used to being the one that's responsible, and was worried about what Skyler and Mia were going to do, and I wanted to make sure their digivices couldn't be used for evil."

Being the only girl in the group again, they either looked away from her or blushed as her tears started to flow again.

She hated this.

It wasn't a lie.

"I'm glad she did," Skyler said, looking down at the digivice in his hand.

~~~

"What is that?" I asked. Having a sexy voice seemed to naturally smooth over my verbal confidence problems, but the image in front of us broke through that.

"No one really knows," Meicrackmon said. Her composure didn't break, her wicked, needle-like flicked about.

"That's not true!" Mia said.

"Sleep well?" I asked, as the girl was let down to stand on her own feet.

"With Meicrackmon! Always!" She confidently asserted with a thumbs-up.

"Can I ask a question?" Mia asked, staring at the massive black storm in front of us, a pillar of black with lines of purple highlighting it, connecting to the giant orb that floated off into the sky.

"Madelyn, I'm so mad at her, I feel like this storm any time I see her or think about her. She's always so mean!"

Her older sister was still weighing on her mind. It was difficult because she was eight years old. They were smart, but just smart enough to be stupid. If a kid could take "don't try, reality will throw bullshit at you to stop you from succeeding" from fucking 90s-era cartoon network, despite that clearly not being the intent of the showrunners… What do you tell an eight year old?

Meicrackmon just gave me an eye as I stood, staring at the storm, soaking in the wind whipping past us. Right. This was the break episode. You know the one where one of the characters split up due to some contrived argument. Like Mimi (the girl with the texas-brimmed hat and the palmon partner) arguing with Koushiro (the nerd archetype-character in Adventure) so she could learn about nerds.

"Do you want to forgive her?" I asked.

"Not really," Mia said.

I was pretty confident the translation was unless she stopped being mean.

"Most adults won't say this," I began. "But sometimes, things happen when you're a kid. Older people being mean is like handing a kid a rock necklace, why does Madelyn hand you a rock necklace?"

"Because she's older and says she knows better than Meicrackmon and I do!"

"Yeah, and each time she says that, that's like handing you a rock necklace, and telling you to wear it around your neck. How often does she say that?"

"Pff. Every day!"

"Yeah, and if you did what she said every time, that's a lot of rock necklaces isn't it?"

I sat down on a tall rock, beckoning Meicrackmon to come… closer to me. God, I was probably blushing as she approached. I felt like I was fourteen again, even as the womanly digimon deferred to me as I answered Mia's question.

"Yeah, I guess it is a lot."

"Now, if you tried wearing each and every one, what happens?"

Mia got a little smile on her face. "I wouldn't be able to move, there's so many rock necklaces." She laughed at the mental image.

"What happens when you find out that she just was trying to throw away her own rock necklaces?"

Mia was quick to respond. "I get mad! I don't want your rock necklace! Who gave her SO MANY rock necklaces?" she shouted at the sky. Then she stopped, thought for a moment. "Why is she giving them to me? I don't want them! I want to throw them back at her!" She was hopping up, picking up a small pebble and threw it into the wind.

"Do you know why she's giving them all to me?!?" She asked, not me, but Meicrackmon.

"No, but I won't let her keep giving them to you," Meicrackmon said.

"If I get rid of them, I'm still mad at her," Mia harrumphed.

"That's okay," I told her. "You're a good person aren't you?"

"I… think so!" Mia said. "We're good people, aren't we?" She asked, turning to her digimon.

"Of course we are," Meicrackmon coo'd "you're a chosen child, and I'm you're partner!"

Mia was beaming now, but still not entirely sure.

"No, you're evil now!" I teased.

Mia rolled her eyes. "Well, I don't care if we're evil! Evil isn't so bad!"

"That's the spirit Mia," Meicrackmon said.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

"Because to be GOOD, I have to be able to forgive her for giving me those rocks! I want to throw them back at her! That's evil isn't it?"

I chuckled, not sure how seriously I should take it, but instead decided to wax on a little bit. "Nothing really matters, Mia. Just who your friends and family are, whether you can depend on them and whether they can depend on you. And how you treat them. If you want to forgive them when they give you a rock necklace—"

"I have enough rock necklaces to fill a dump truck! I can't move if I wear them! She's always so mean every time. And she never lets you win or even says sorry."

There were tears in her eyes. I had dealt with the terrible twos. Dealing with a younger sister trying to figure out her older sister? Less experience there. It really didn't matter anyway.

"Well, does it matter if I destroy the world?" I ask.

Meicrackmon smiled at Mia, giving her a hug. Mia was confused. Like it took a minute of thinking to fully register the idea of joining the eviiiiiil side.

"But if you destroy it, everything will go back to the way it was in the past!"

"Hmmm?"

Mia fished around in her pockets, as Meicrackmon decided to start using her claws as a hairbrush on the eight year old.

"This!" she said, holding out a pocket watch.

"There's a big one! Clockmon's in control of it! He stops things like that from happening!"

"Oh that? We broke that clock when Meicoomon released the Megadramon…" Even if clockmon's powers worked the way she thought, which they most certainly didn't… "And besides, see that black pillar sticking out of the giant storm?"

I said, pointing her gaze there.

"That's an elevator isn't it? It's fixed in place because it takes us to the human world? You had to go through it to land here in the digital world, right?"

Mia nodded vigorously.

"Well, we're pretty sure," Meicrackmon added. "That's the earth up above us, or the barrier between the worlds. Seems like time in this evolution is at an end," she said, shrinking back down to Meicoomon, her child form. It didn't take long before I faded back to my more comfortable neutral color scheme.

I hadn't even realized I could stay in a mood like that for that long.

"But then this storm started after we all came to this world!" Mia said. "It was put here by bad guys trying to keep digimon out!"

She was quite confident. "Hmmm", I hummed out loud, rather than questioning her more deeply. Kids did poorly the more pressure you put on them to give an answer. Their explanations sucked and reasoning usually didn't work. Tempered not by poor reasoning necessarily, but by lack of experience. Impulsiveness that forced them into new and interesting situations.

Eh, her explanation was good enough for me. Standing up, and brushing aside the small part of my voice suggesting I had done something that would imprint on the girl's psyche for the rest of her life, short as it would be if I really did follow through with my character sheet…

Actually, I glanced back down.

"Do me a favor this time, and actually stay here." I said.

"Aye cap'n" Meikitmon said, giving me an exaggerated salute, before being grabbed and held in a perma-hug by Mia.

That transition from adult woman voice to scratchy child voice is weird, I mused to myself. And it was weird. At least the renamon evolutions (which I technically was an evil incarnation of), had silky smooth voices. We didn't get high-pitched again until we were one of the baby forms.

I shuddered at the thought of being stuck as an orb or the fat four-legged gerbil-looking thing that preceded my child evolution.

Up close, it was more of the same as from a distance, with both more and less visible details. I saw a smaller slice, but could glimpse deeper inside, which contained a huge swirling vortex of bits of blobs of data and lightning. Occasionally a spark of light would fall into the storm and get dismantled.

More interestingly, despite how fight-brained many digimon were supposed to be, nothing was around trying to fight in or around it. In fact, the entire region in front of us was a huge, empty desert.

One with a raging storm.

"This is the way back?" I said into the silent void. It was like a video game as a kid where sometimes a forcefield was just a transparent picture that the would toggle off with barely any fancy animations. Each layer, the storm got darker, but I could make out the slightest hint of purple at the center.

Up above in the sky, beyond the raging clouds, was a giant green sphere, with that common computer-board style aesthetic. What looked like random pillars stuck out of it. Beyond that was the sky.

"It's so quiet, isn't it?" Mia said, getting the shivers.

"It is," I said. Something about having a giant roiling storm full of crackles of lightning like a hyper-dense digital hurricane that was also incredibly silent was very unsettling.

"Hey! What are you doing! Don't go in there!"

What awaited me if I sat down long enough to contemplate everything that happened in such a short time?

"She's glowing purple…"

Right, enough existential horrors to lock me into a perpetual loop, so of course I aimed to do the dumbest thing possible. Keyblade materialized in my hand as I ran to approach the storm.

Drawing nearer to the black void, it was a flat wall of black, the bits of lightning almost sitting on as if they were from a mid-90s videogame. The wind entirely silent, resisted my approach, my gloves and hair and fur all whipping about violently in the wind.

Voices drowned out, I looked back around. I could see Mia and Meikitmon standing only a hundred yards or so away. They weren't looking directly at me. A flash of light that blinded the eyes but illuminated nothing burned itself into my eyes, causing me to step back.

"-namon!" Mia had been shouting.

Pretending not to hear, I stepped back inside. My fur stood on end. I didn't mind this body. Not really. I didn't hate my human body, either, but I had to admit, this one was stronger, and probably going to live a lot more lifetimes than my human one could possibly experience.

If I was stuck here? If I never actually returned home?

As if there were layers to this void, I stepped deeper in, and the world beyond turned a dark shade of grey. The wind picked up a few paces, threatening to pick me up off the ground, whipping my hair around like a kite. When I said it was long, like a Zoroark's, I wasn't lying.

Kyle was young, and going to a decently-ranked public school and did pretty well, if only struggling a bit in chapter books. My husband was a decent father, but he'd be remarried in a couple years. I wasn't the kind of woman who needed to be told that their husband— anyway, without dwelling on it too much, Kyle needed me.

And if this was my ticket home, I would take it.

I stepped deeper in, Small orbs of light, or packets of data swirling around in the vortex hit me. I hit a pair away with my claws, ripping into them. Their data flowed into my digivice, like the megadramon and the fantomon from before were absorbed.

Things were not exactly… corporeal-feeling, but something drew me deeper in. Curiosity? Mischievousness? Taking advantage of the fact that I would just respawn, a few moments earlier? Who knows. Going deeper into the storm wasn't the only way forward, but it was the most interesting way!

~~~

Beep! Beep! Beep!

"Tsk." Mitsuo complained with a grunt at his pager going off, his face forming back into that all-too-permanent frown. It was one A.M. for Yamaki Mitsuo, and he'd been resting well. The deployment of Shaggai had gone relatively well, all things considered. Unfortunately, it wasn't to be.

There were hints on the wire, from other countries, from sister organizations such as the CIA. Movement had been slow, but with the success of Shaggai, Hypnos had gained notice from the americans. The CIA had reached out to collaborate and work on tracking developments in the digital universe,

He looked at his pager, silencing it.

Unlike those CIA who operated to root out threats to their countries from other humans, Hypnos had been created specifically to strengthen the weakening barriers between the digital and real world.

Realization!? Shaggai was fully operational! It had successfully reinforced the barriers between Japan and the digital world for weeks at this point. He flicked his lighter open and closed and pulled out his cellphone. Flipping it open, he dialed the number on the tenkey. They had celebrated quite well once the program had reached full stability.

"Reilly, patch me in—what's happening?"

Still, despite the new developments, he was incredibly proud of the work they had done. Bought their country more time to prepare and keep the invaders out. Prepare countermeasures. A few weeks of some kids who'd befriended digimon helping to keep the worst out as Shaggai monitored how strong the digimon were and worked to subvert them.

"We're not sure! Something is punching through the encryption barrier!"

He clenched his fist.

What?!/?

"I'll be right there!" he said, hastily throwing his laptop, cellphone, pager in a bag, and tossing on a pair of khakis and an appropriate jacket.

Traveling down the stairs, he put his sunglasses on as he stepped out into the brightly-illuminated streets.

They'd implemented the strongest levels of encryption possible.

It was billed as quantum-hacking proof by the engineers.

Even worse, they'd been stable and had managed to repel incredibly strong digimon on the other side.

That wasn't even everything that weighed on Mitsuo's mind, either. It would be a few months, but copies of Shaggai across the various continents in the world in order to keep humanity safe from the threats that resided in the digital world were going to be deployed, and without a good showing, the world governments and their people might lose faith in his organization's promises.

They needed Shaggai to be able to maintain that barrier, to prevent realization

"It's not a very strong signature!"

"So it had found some kind of loophole around the barrier." he said into his earpiece, not waiting for a response. "Where is it realizing?"

~~~

Mia sighed and laid down on the ground.

Why are people dumb? She thought to herself. She wasn't referring to Nullrenamon/Kaylee, necessarily. Regardless, she wasn't exactly happy about the situation.

Sleeping in your digimon's arms was great! But she was still tired.

"Do you think she'll live?" Meikitmon asked.

"I dunno," Mia shrugged. A large blast of patterned grey ripped into the sky, towards the floating orb that stood in the center.

The storm rippled.

"Ah!" Meikitmon shouted, cracks in the ground began to appear, a purple-ish and pink light shined through the cracks.

Mia grabbed Meikitmon and ran away, hopping over cracks, narrowly escaping the growing sinkhole.

"Guess she made her own way out huh?" Meikitmon said when they finally reached stable ground.

"She left us here…" Mia said, tears starting to form in her eyes.

"Come on."

"Wha—?!?" Meikitmon squeaked out.

"Ready to get out of here and go do some evil?"

"Yay!" Mia shouted, running to hug the renamon figure standing in the elevatorway, Her key-shaped blade lit up in her hands.

~~~