AN: Yup, yup. Here I go, making all my readers ten kinds of crazy. What can I say? I simply don't have the attention span for one story at a time. Plus, this is fun. I haven't been anywhere Digimon (or, frankly, anything anime) in something like seven years. Wait. When did the first half of season three come out? Somewhere around then. Well, I was Digimon Adventures 2 and Digimon Tamers girl, at any rate. But I was having some fun surfing YouTube, and what did I lead myself to? My old friend, Digimon! What would you have done? I re-watched the entire Tamers series, and I've gotten through most of the original series now. I also popped in some of season 4 (not my favorite, let me say) and Savers, which seems awesome but the subbing is far too small and similar in color to the background to let me get through too much of it.
I'd been looking for something new. I'm tackling Pushing Daisies now, but straight TV isn't really my thing anyhow. I needed something that translated better a more novel approach. Pun unintended, but not disliked. Anyway, I decided to run with it. I'm all sorts of rusty on my Digimon knowledge, so forgive any and all lapses, if you could. Also, I haven't read any Digimon fanfic due to my impending midterms (I wouldn't have time to write, except I have to do it to keep myself calm), so if this sounds like any other fic, trust me, it is one of those zany interstellar coincidences that are going around. Remember, this is my first foray into this particular set of interest in more ways than one, so play nice. And tell me anything I get wrong, and I'll gladly fix it. Keep in mind my style. I'll be mixing in my love for fantasy with the more scientific aspects of the show. The science will come, yes, but not right away, and that is bound to be riddled with mistakes as well, though I'll do all I can to double check before I go shooting off my large, non-science capable mouth. Finally, this adheres to no permanent rules. In other words, I'll be borrowing from all the seasons – well, not four. And only five if I can my hands on the English dubbing. I'm too confused, otherwise.
Oh, yeah. One last thing. I've only got a basic map of this fic. I know the end and I know the important parts, but undoubtedly there'll be bumps on the way, so do your best to coast them with me.
Disclaimer: Did you hear that song they play during the fight scenes of season one? I have nothing to do with Digimon, because I so would never have let them use that thing. It's so … damn … happy.
Little Penny Cynthia had always known there were monsters. Her daddy had lied to her for years, but she'd known better, really. Every time she was in her room alone, after her father had "checked" for monsters under her bed, she sat up in the dark, the frail hairs of her arms at attention and her tiny shell ears perked up as much as they could to listen for the creeping and slithering of the absolutely-positively unimaginable of baddie beasties. Princesses were always being carried away by slimy trolls and enormous dragons in all the fairytales, weren't they? And her daddy had always called her his little princess.
And there, at last, was the great green monster right in front of her.
The first thing she noticed were the fangs. Each of them was easily the size of her kitten, Puffypaws, and covered in drool like Captain Doggy Do's mouth. But they were curved and twisted and riddled with brown sinkholes like the pictures in the dentist office, and she knew this thing was nothing like her beloved pets.
Then were the muscles. And the large, girl-crushing sized hands. The giant bone club, with its bumpy head that looked like it could easily bump her head. White wild hair, dirty and matted, in need of her mommy's best smelling shampoos. But the worst were his eyes. There simply weren't any there. Just white holes in the front of his head.
His great snout twitched, and he snorted in great breaths. The creature lumbered first one way, then another, the ground trembling with each clumsy step, and the white holes seemed to scan the area, though how Penny knew this she had no idea; there weren't any pupils to indicate the direction of his gaze. She knew this also – this monster was looking for her, and she was feeling desperately un-princess like.
She hunkered down in the bushes where she was hidden, trembling. Never before had the urge to cry been so very enticing, but she couldn't. Instead, she remembered how her daddy had looked when she'd fallen from her bike last week and he'd come to pick her up.
"That's my brave little princess," he'd said. "That's my strong baby girl."
Her chin may have quivered just a little, but she didn't make a peep. She was his brave baby girl. Or something like that. Besides, how could that nasty thing see her with all this fog?
Somehow, miraculously, or like a fountain of bad luck falling just on her, the empty sockets swung to the bushes where she lay and locked themselves there. Yelping in awful triumph, the disgusting thing galloped towards Penny's hiding place, panting eagerly, saliva running down his chin and being whipped through the air to spatter on the ground behind it.
Poor, darling, brave Penny let out one soft, terrified "Oh!"
"BUSHIDOMON!"
Out of the shadows, too fast for Penny's watery eyes to see, leapt a strange beast. It hurtled powerfully into the green monster's side, causing the thing to fly into the wall behind it. The new creature sprinted after it; Jenny caught a glimpse of a thin blue fox – or maybe a dog – with a whip-like tail before it was engulfed in fog.
In its place ran a girl, much older than Penny. She looked about the same age as the college kids in town. She was slim and fairly tall with flowing black hair and light skin that shown in the moonlight that broke through the cloud. When she spoke again, it was with a power that belied her delicate appearance.
"Bushidomon, he's weak to your left," the girl shouted over the sounds of the scuffle that Jenny couldn't see. What she did see was an odd sort of cell phone or game boy in the girl's hand, glowing like an overlarge butterfly. "Use your Message of the Master Claw when he raises the club!"
"Message of the Master Claw!" a menacing voice repeated. There was a flash of light and a resounding whimper that made something in Penny's tummy feel sick. Beautiful green light floated through the cloud from the direction the fox-dog had run off to. A tiny bit of swam past Jenny, alighting on her nose for a moment before chasing its friends up into the sky.
At once the fox-dog – or was it a wolf; not that it looked like one, just felt like it – returned to the girl's side. Penny gaped at the mere size of it. It stood a good foot or two over the girl, in spite of the fact that the girl herself seemed to be courting six feet. Great horns of silver light ribboned across its great back. Its fur was a midnight sky on a moonless night, deepening into black at its paws and lightening to an electric blue at the edge of its tail and around its eyes. Eyes of a dark, fathomless purple … the same color of Doggy Do's collar, only prettier.
With an acrobatic ease, the girl swung herself onto the dog-fox's back. "Great job, Bushidomon."
The great fox-dog answered in a rumbling growl. "Is that all I get? I defeated a Champion with one attack …"
"Yes, yes, you're the greatest Digimon ever to walk solid earth, I know." The girl's laugh didn't match the rest of her. It was loud and brash and faintly comforting to Penny. "How mad do you think Jake'll be that we didn't call him?"
"It was one Digimon in a small field. It would have been pointless to wake up him and Humaomon."
"So he'll be really angry." The dog-fox ruffled its shoulders uncomfortably. The girl sighed before reaching down to pat the creature's head. "Alright, start trotting. With any luck, you'll be Kitinumon by the time we get home."
The large fox-dog loped away silently. A slight breeze teased the leaves of the bushes where Penny hid, and her unsuspecting saviors were gone.
Her small hand scooped up a ragged bunny doll from the dirt beneath her. She smoothed the faded dirty face lovingly, fingers shaking, her thumb rubbing the familiar hole where one of the rabbit's button eyes used to be. "Bugs," she said, holding her beloved toy to her chest, "that was a big, big dog. And it could talk. You don't think this was a dream, do you, Bugs?"
Penny had come outside because of a dream. She had dreamt of being lost in a strange land, wandering around all alone. In the dream, she had been missing someone terribly, but she didn't know who it was. When she'd woken up, she'd felt so sad that even Captain Doggy Do and Puffypaws couldn't lick away her fears. So she had clambered out her window and down the trellis into the bushes where she had left her favorite stuffed animal.
"I don't think it was a dream, Bugs," she continued thoughtfully, her voice beginning to lose some of the squeak that the nasty green monster had inspired. "It's too cold, and that thing smelled way too bad. But the dream didn't feel very dream-like either. I was older and it was all hot and my feet hurt a lot and it all felt really real. I'm not sure what's going on."
She was already starry-eyed thinking of the girl who had saved her. She had been so beautiful. She had looked like a princess.
Penny frowned. The girl couldn't be a princess, though. Princesses didn't save themselves, they let knights and princes do that. So maybe the girl was a knight. A girl knight. A girl knight with a really big dog and pretty, silky hair. That was so much better than being a princess.
"Oh!"
The air just in front of Penny began to shimmer, then glow. Far from being alarmed, Jenny giggled happily from the warm feeling the light gave her. Penny stuffed Bugs into the front of her nightgown so she could reach out and wrap her hands around it.
The light solidified into the same sort of phone or game that the girl had. It fit perfectly into her palm, almost as if it were a part of her, a part that had been missing all her life without her even knowing it.
"It's wonderful, isn't it, Bugs?" she asked in awe.
And from the phone shot a beam of … well, her best guess was solid air. And she really wanted to climb onto it and follow it to wherever it might lead.
First, though, she thought of something.
"This is kinda like a falling star, isn't it?" she mused, turning the thing over, watching it shimmer and sparkled with every sort of color imaginable. "I get a wish." She pressed the thing as close to her heart as she could (or what she thought was her heart, for anatomically speaking, her real heart was a few inches to the left) and wished with all her might. "I want to be just like that girl. I want to be brave and strong and fight for myself, instead of just sittin' in the bushes. I wanna be better than just a princess."
Though she had no reason to believe the thing had heard her at all, she felt as if something had acknowledged her request – acknowledged it, and approved. She couldn't put that feeling into words, as she didn't know any big enough, so she didn't try to express herself to her captive bunny audience. Instead, she gave the air a hefty experimental pull.
Instantly, the end of it wrapped around the hand containing the phone and pulled her upwards at a breakneck pace. She laughed sweetly into the rushing wind, loving her newfound weightlessness and sense of adventure.
Bugs the stuffed rabbit slipped from her nightgown and plopped silently to the ground, the last thing to see little Penelope Cynthia, only eight years old, on the planet Earth for some time to come.
AN: Well, here we go. No beating around the bush – bring on the DigiDestined! What's up with Penny? Who is the girl? For that matter, who's that Digimon? And, by the way, I did not make those names up. And do you know how hard it is to find Chinese and Japanese online dictionaries that give you the English spelling of the word instead of a character? Hope you all enjoy, and if I've made any glaring error (other than making up Digimon, which you will hopefully excuse), tell me and I'll make it all better. Love? Hate? Review!