I could probably steal one of his nappy bottles somehow. Maybe even get a fish, like he promised. If I ran back to the crib I used to be in, I could be in, get fed, and out before he even knew what happened.

…Ooooooor, I can eat another ball of jelly.

My stomach grumbles again. Yup, the answer is obvious. Jelly for lunch, jelly for dinner. Is this just my lifestyle now?

Then again, since I plan on going out to sea afterwards, I’ll probably be getting a lot of fish henceforth. Good nutrition, assuming pixels have that in them.

…I totally forgot about the pixels. That must have been, like, a visual hallucination, right? Either that or my consciousness has been transferred into the body of a digital monster and all of this is just virtual reality or something.

I dangle my legs over the branch. Nah. This feels way too real to be virtual. Let’s just not think too hard about it, okay?

Okay, jelly time!

I swing myself down the branch and slide down the trunk with newfound energy. Then I crash face-first into the dirt because I’m not a skater boy. It hurts a little, mostly in my massive bulbous eye, but I feel mostly alright. This does however confirm that only the ground around the cribs is playmat-styled and everything around it is normal dirt. Right.

I poke my eye out from behind the trunk of a (real) tree, trying to ascertain where Elecmon is, but I can’t see him anywhere. The cribs are totally unguarded.

Is there a better time than now?

Emerging from the shadow of the tree, I quickly speed up into a sprint, only stopping once I’m in the dark in-betweens of the cribs. I try to keep my attention on max, listening for Elecmon, but I really can’t hear him. No thump-thumps. The coast is clear.

Without bothering to try to penetrate deeper into the group of cribs, I scale the wall of the nearest one, clambering in before anyone or anything has time to notice my presence. I turn my attention to the darkness of the crib, mentally rubbing my hands and licking my chops. There, in the shade, a pair of red eyes stare back at me. But it’s not the jelly thing I ate before. This thing is, well… Hairy? But not like an animal, no, more like a dandelion, or something fluffy like that. It’s yellow, and a leaf sprouts from its back, and the second it sees me it starts pressing itself deeper into the crib.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

I don’t even have time to approach before it starts rapidly losing hair, the soft hairs whirling towards me. If this was a movie, the hairs would probably hurt me or something, but it’s really just distracting, so without any further ado, I force myself closer, a number of my limbs taking a hold of it.

“Kyuu, kyuu-!” it cries, which I really hadn’t expected, but it doesn’t have time to cry much more before I succeed in bonking it on the face enough to make it explode into a swarm of pixels. Ah, yummy. I feel a lot better now, and it tastes less like the other one did and more plant-like. I’ve never been much for greens, but this was nice.

I don’t have much time to hang around though, because, with this, Elecmon is sure to return. Probably.

I climb back into the mouth of the crib, but as soon as I leap I have an idea. Sure, I could run right now, but won’t I need some provisions for my long journey across the seas? There’s no guarantee that there’ll be any fish around, and if there aren’t, I might just as well starve to death out there.

These thoughts run through my head in the split second I spend falling, and as soon as that second ends, I turn to action. I bounce off the ground as soon as I hit it, using the momentum to hop into the nearest crib, where I find a little dandelion-looking thing. But not the flower, no, it just looks like the hairy bulb left after the bloom is finished. Well, it’ll probably still be tasty, so I grab it with three arms and run up the side of the crib just in time to see Elecmon turn around in wide-eyed horror, his hands clutching the sides of the crib I just left.

His face is whipping back and forth, and since I’m right behind him, I’m the first place he looks. His face twists in dismay. “Innomon!” And then, he quickly noticed the trembling thing in my grip. “R-, release Yuramon! If you don’t…!” And like the monster he was, he jerked his clawed hand at me. What choice did I have but to run?

Leaping from the crib, I started running, the energy that the little fluffy thing gave me letting me quickly reach a good speed. And I would have gotten away with it too, if a massive electrically-charged body didn’t smash into me from behind faster than I could even fathom it happening. One second I was just running away with my bounty, and the next I was lying hoggly-woggly on the side, my hands empty. Huh, that’s weird. I was sure I’d been holding that little thing…

A burst of pixels explains what happened.

H-, he would rather destroy it than let me have it? Hey! That’s just cruel, man!

I leap back to my feet. The ground doesn’t sway beneath me, so it seems I’ve at least outran the playmat. A few metres behind me, Elecmon stands on all fours, breathing heavily, his face the very picture of determination. Small sparks of electricity jump between him and the ground.

My whole body hurts but I’m not dead. Not yet, at least. Considering his size compared to me, that’s just a matter of time. I’m really in for it now, huh? Is it too late to communicate through body language?

Just as despair begins to set in and the face-off becomes excruciating, a little shift occurs. Somehow, for some reason, the pixels of the thing I was holding that Elecmon killed are reforming into what appears to be an egg. An egg. The sight of it seems to make Elecmon even more desperate, especially so since it’s right next to me. Hmm. My instincts are telling me that he cares about this egg. Let’s see, how can I use this to my advantage? Oh, I know!

I grab the egg and toss it at Elecmon.