Okay, I know this kind of late, since 02 ended like a billion years ago and Digimon really kind of sucks currently, but just keep in mind I wrote this in July of last year. I've just now gotten an acount here so I wanted to put it up for the hell of it. Reviews are welcome, though, a word to the wise, if you just flame me or something don't expect me to just ignore you like some people. If you flame me, I'll probably email you to ask why you didn't like the fic, we'll get to talking, and soon we'll be best of friends. Sooooo, if you really hate me or something, just don't say anything at all and you might escape alive ^_^.
Also, what's Toei and Bandai's is Toei and Bandai's, so don't let anyone tell ya it's not.
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For those of you who haven't seen 02 or weren't paying attention: The World Tour was a series of episodes in which the digidestined went all over the world and met up with other kids like themselves to get rid of digimon that had escaped into the real world. It was long and tedious to watch, so I began to speculate what might have happened had they gone to different countries than the ones on the show. The following is what I came up with.
~*-*-*~
World Tour Revisited
By Elsha Rhosyn
Koushiro looked up from the open computer on his lap. This couldn't be happening, it just wasn't logical. How could digital gateways be opening up all over the world? There they were though, in black and white. Control spires, hundreds of them, in all corners of the globe...
***
"All right guys, this is how it's gonna work. I'm going to open digiports and transport you to the places where the spires are most concentrated. Your jobs are to destroy the spires and get the digimon that have been released back to the Digital World. You all got that?" Koushiro sat back in his chair, pleased to have been able to dumb down his explanation so that the rest would understand.
"Got it. Where are we going anyway?" asked Yamato through clenched teeth. He was still angry about the whole ruining-his-concert-without-his-permission thing. I mean, think of the groupie action he was missing out on. And those evil digimon at the concert had even managed to make the tent collapse without killing Jun. He was out for blood.
"I actually don't know. I have a program set up that will determine where you are needed most and transport you there instantly. It's completely up to the computer."
"Well then, let's get going!" Daisuke yelled. Koushiro had to make a running dive to stop him from jumping on the monitor.
"Wait until I open the program, you ignoramus!" Koushiro cried, resisting the urge to strangle the last living breath out of him. Not that anyone would have minded especially.
Regaining his composure, Koushiro began typing furiously. Program, man, think about the program.
"We'll go in groups: Yamato, Takeru, and Iori first, then Hikari, Ken, and Taichi. Sora, you, Jyou, and Daisuke will meet up with Mimi in New York first and then we'll transport you to your location. Miyako will stay with me here in the computer lab. I will be in need of a sla-... assistant while every else is gone. Go and fetch the digivices, hardware wench!"
"It shall be done, Lord Koushiro!" gasped a frazzled looking Miyako. She kowtowed out of the room and returned moments later with digivices in hand.
"Now, remove yourself from my sight. Shall I need you again, I will summon you. That is all."
"Yes Lord Koushiro."
Miyako left hurriedly .
"All right now, here we go. Yamato, Takeru, Iori, please step to the Pineapple."
Yamato narrowed his eyes at the laptop. "Let's go kick some control spire ass."
"Prodigious. Here we go now..." Koushiro hit the shift key.
***
"Where are we?" Takeru rubbed his head and blinked.
Yamato shrugged. "I can't tell. There don't seem to be people in stereotypical costumes anywhere."
Iori glanced out across the sparsely wooded cliffs of the area they appeared to have landed on. A man stood staring out at the ocean about 50 paces away. Takeru saw him too.
"Why don't we go ask that guy?" he suggested.
"I don't know. What if he's a serial murderer or something. He probably just stands on the beach all day just waiting for people to come up and ask him things so he can kill them," said Iori.
"Interesting theory, freak. Let's just go ask him," snorted Takeru, already starting off down the beach. What a weird little kid.
They jogged up to where the man stood. He was sturdily built and gave off a semi-grandfatherly smell of whiskey and pipe tobacco.
Takeru tapped him on the shoulder. "Excuse me sir, but... uh, where exactly are we?"
"Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch."
"Oh really now. That's very interesting." Yamato grabbed Takeru and Ioris shoulders. "Back away slowly, smile, and nod," Yamato hissed. "You hear me? Smile and nod."
***
"Hikari, Ken, Taichi, it's your turn now. Stand in front of the screen please." Once again, Koushiro hit shift.
***
Hikari was the first to regain consciousness. She caught her breath when she saw her surroundings. They were standing in a vast plain covered in mounds of sand, sand so white it looked like snow. The sun was beginning to set and cast orange, crimson, and violet rays over the dunes. A tiny white lizard skittered across the sand next to her feet. "Wow. This place is beautiful. Do you know where we are Taichi?"
"No, but I think Ken does." Taichi gestured to Ken, who sat a little ways off, rocking back and forth and clutching his knees to his chest.
"What's wrong Ken?" Hikari asked in her soothing, kindergarten teacher voice. She took a few cautious steps in his direction. "Do you know where we are? If you do, you should tell us."
"White Sands," Ken mumbled and buried his head back in his knees.
"Duh Ken, we know the sand is white," said Taichi. "What we want to know is where we are."
"No, you don't understand. We're at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. This is the place where they invented and tested the atomic bomb. The A-bomb for Christ sake! If we aren't killed by the radiation seeping out of the ground right now, we'll die of dehydration. We're miles from any town. Even if we did make it to a town, how would we get back to Odaiba? None of the hillbillies out here will have a computer. There's no way out, no way out..." Ken trailed off and began to rock faster.
"Okay, calm down Ken, we can figure this out." Taichi had always been the leader. He could think of something they could do, couldn't he? He sure hoped so. "New Mexico is in America right? All we have to do is e-mail Mimi and she can drive here to pick us up."
"We're not in Japan anymore, you idiot Goggle Boy. We're thousands of miles from New York. Even if that would work, Mimi is most likely in a different country by now anyway. Sora and the rest were on their way to pick her up, remember?" Ken was standing up now, but the doomed look in the back of his eyes had been replaced by one of anger.
Hikari, who had stayed out of the conversation till this point, painfully remembered that she hadn't had anything to eat since breakfast. "Well, no matter about that, but what are we going to do for food?"
Ken crouched down. He stayed motionless for a moment, then let his hand dart to the ground. He opened it to reveal a tiny, white lizard. "You better get used to these."
***
"Alright. Sora, I'm going to send you through next to go get Mimi. No need to flood the network with all of you going through to New York at once. Then when you get her all you have to do is stand in front of her computer and I'll bring you back. Just step right up over here." Koushiro smiled as Sora took her place in front of the monitor. Before anything could be said, he hit the delete key. Sora disappeared.
"Okay. Now with Sora out of the way, I'll transport you and Daisuke to New York where you will meet up with Mimi. Then all you'll need to do is stand in front of her computer and I'll send you out into the world. Got it?"
"Yeah, got it," said Jyou. "Nice job with that whole 'Flooding the Network' thing. You really had her fooled."
"Thank you. I pride myself on my acting skills. It was actually Taichi's idea to 'eliminate' her though. I was quite obliged to do it of course, but when I asked why he'd finally come around he just mumbled something about cookies. See you guys later." Koushiro reached out and tapped the shift key.
***
Jyou stood up and glanced at the pink walls. "This looks like Mimi's room, but where's Mimi?"
"She's in bed. Hee hee, look, she has curlers in her hair."
Daisuke giggled and pointed to a sleeping Mimi.
"Who cares. Just wake her up," said Jyou.
"I have a better idea. I'll just send her out the same way Koushiro sent Sora here. Then she'll wake up in another country!' Daisuke ran to Mimi's computer and studied the keyboard. "Which key was it now? Oh, here it is.'
"No, stop, I beg of you." Jyou called half-heartedly, but it was too late. Daisuke reached out and punched in the delete key with his index finger. However, due to a lack of any foresight whatsoever, he hadn't realized Mimi would actually have had be in *front* of the computer. Thus, he managed to delete himself instead.
"What's happening? Jyou, where the hell did you come from? And why are you yelling in the middle of the night while all the normal people of the world are trying to sleep?" Mimi sat up and stared at Jyou.
Jyou tried his best to explain the situation, carefully leaving out the bit about Sora and Daisuke's fates. Mimi, who was now mostly awake, grimaced.
"So you mean Koushiro wants us to go and fight digimon, in the middle of the night? What if those nasty numemon things come back? My hair could get ruined beyond the point of help. I certainly won't have time to pack, and I don't want to fight. I still have nightmares about being in the digital world the last time." Mimi was rapidly pulling curlers out of her hair, chewing on them, and spitting them out onto the floor.
"Me too, that whole digimon thing was pretty awful. Hey, screw saving the world. They'll manage without us." Jyou stood up. "Wanna go get some coffee?"
"Sure. Let me go change. I know a good place that should still be open."
***
"Damnit. I can't get any of my e-mails through to Koushiro."
Yamato slammed the D-Terminal shut and tossed it to Takeru. "You try for a while."
"What would we tell him if we did get through to him? 'Help us Koushiro, we're stranded but we don't know where we are.'? Or how about we just tell him we're in the same country as a crazy old man? That'll help a lot." Iori kicked at the sand.
Yamato glared at him. "Hey, we kind of know where we are. The name of this place might be what that guy said."
"Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch," Takeru recalled absent-mindedly.
"Yeah, that one... wait, how did you remember that?" Yamato glanced inquiringly (and a little frightened) at his younger brother.
"Uh, I just have a good memory... and stuff."
And stuff. That was what Takeru always said if someone was suprised or caught off guard by something he'd done. What could he say, it had worked before.
"Okay, whatever. We'll just tell Koushiro we're in... that place. Even if he doesn't know where that is, it wouldn't suprise me if he had tracking chips implanted in our bodies somewhere. All we have to do is keep trying to contact him," said Yamato.
Takeru looked at the screen of the Terminal. Another alert had popped up, again telling him his e-mail had been rejected. He threw the D-Terminal to the sand. "I give up. None of the messages will go through. It says the receiving server is too busy to accept any new e-mail. We might have to stay here the night. Let's just go to sleep and try again in the morning."
The other two agreed and were soon lying asleep on the sand. Takeru remained awake though, staring into the evening sky and wondering where Hikari and the others had ended up...
***
Hikari bit off the head of a lizard and spit out its skull. The little things actually weren't that bad if you were really hungry. "Any luck with the D-Terminal Ken"
"Not yet, and stop asking! Do you think solar recharge panels are easy to make out of sand, twigs, and a paper clip?" Ken glared maliciously at Taichi. "Maybe if someone hadn't forgotten to replace the batteries in the first place we could have been home by now."
"Hey, I was going change them. I was gonna go to the store after Yama's concert and get some new ones. Considering the circumstances, it's not my fault." Taichi was standing up now, and about ready to smack Ken upside the head.
"Okay, both of you, shut up. Ken, keep working on that solar panel thingy. Taichi, get over here and eat the rest of your lizard. I spent hours catching them just so you would have something to eat." Hikari had a tone in her voice that no one questioned.
Taichi finished his lizard and looked at its bones. "Do you need any of these Ken?"
"Those might actually be useful. Maybe you're not as big of an imbecile as I had thought. Break off the smallest rib and give it to me."
Taichi carefully separated one bone from the rest. He handed it to Ken, who in turn jammed it into a hole in the Terminal.
"Its done. Now all I have to do is set it to pick up the radiation from the ground and it should work." Ken squinted at his configuration and played the paper clip into place. The machine gave a resounding beep and started up.
"Ken, e-mail Koushiro and tell him where we are. I want to get out of here tonight." Hikari got chills just looking out into the darkness that had surrounded them. Why was it so much darker here than in Odaiba?
Ken stared intently at the little screen. "It says the receiving server is too busy to accept any new e-mails. We can't get anything sent to him until it clears up," he said, the bleak look reentering his eyes.
"Well, we can't give up. We'll take turns staying up and e-mailing him. We're bound to get through at some point." Taichi had to keep his hope up if he was going to be the leader. For some reason though, he was beginning to suspect he was not really the one in charge here.
"I'll take the first shift," said Hikari. She didn't want to sleep in this place. It bothered her to think about what might come out at night here, and what that thing might like to eat.
Later in the night, amidst all the monotonous e-mailing, Hikari began to think about Takeru. Where had he been sent? She hoped it was somewhere nicer than here. Another rejected e-mail rebounded back to her. What on Earth was Koushiro doing?
***
"Where is that girl? I sent her to Krispy Kreme over an hour ago and she still isn't back yet. I've even started that blasted D-Terminal automatically mailing her every 30 seconds when she didn't arrive back at the computer lab on time. She is going to greatly regret her lateness when I get through with her."
Koushiro sometimes regretted having Miyako as his personal slave. She wasn't as efficient as he would have liked her to be. This meant he had to go out of his way and find new ways to punish her when the insolence got out of hand. Still, he did have his own slave, which was more than some of the others could say about themselves. He would have liked to see Yamato try to get the Jun girl to clean all the computers in the lab with a single slice of rye. She might worship him, but, sadly, Jun was still in control of her own free will. Miyako was in the palm of his hand.
The D-Terminal on the edge of the desk beeped and sent another message to Miyako's. Oh well, if she didn't come back within the next hour he could just hack into her social security records and declare her dead...
***
When the police arrived at the overpass they found her. A passing motorist had seen her and called in. She was standing in the middle of the roadway, clutching a box of doughnuts that appeared to be no more than a few days old. When the police tried to speak to her she clutched them more tightly to her chest and backed away. "No, stay away. I have to get the doughnuts to Lord Koushiro. You can't have them. If I don't get their soon, he'll make me clean the monitors again. I don't have any bread left, none at all I tell you!"
"That's fine honey. Just come with us and we'll take you to see 'Lord Koushiro'. You can even bring the doughnuts with you." He peered at the box. "Hey, Krispy Kreme. Score!" The policeman motioned for his partner to move behind her. "We have bread you can use, too. Bread for doughnuts, how does that sound, hun? Just come with me and- NOW!" The other policeman tackled Miyako from behind.
Miyako seemed unfazed from the attack. She settled into the back of the squad car and began to stroke the doughnut box. "Did you know that Lord Koushiro was president of the computer club 6 years in a row?"
The End
Also, what's Toei and Bandai's is Toei and Bandai's, so don't let anyone tell ya it's not.
For those of you who haven't seen 02 or weren't paying attention: The World Tour was a series of episodes in which the digidestined went all over the world and met up with other kids like themselves to get rid of digimon that had escaped into the real world. It was long and tedious to watch, so I began to speculate what might have happened had they gone to different countries than the ones on the show. The following is what I came up with.
Koushiro looked up from the open computer on his lap. This couldn't be happening, it just wasn't logical. How could digital gateways be opening up all over the world? There they were though, in black and white. Control spires, hundreds of them, in all corners of the globe...
"All right guys, this is how it's gonna work. I'm going to open digiports and transport you to the places where the spires are most concentrated. Your jobs are to destroy the spires and get the digimon that have been released back to the Digital World. You all got that?" Koushiro sat back in his chair, pleased to have been able to dumb down his explanation so that the rest would understand.
"Got it. Where are we going anyway?" asked Yamato through clenched teeth. He was still angry about the whole ruining-his-concert-without-his-permission thing. I mean, think of the groupie action he was missing out on. And those evil digimon at the concert had even managed to make the tent collapse without killing Jun. He was out for blood.
"I actually don't know. I have a program set up that will determine where you are needed most and transport you there instantly. It's completely up to the computer."
"Well then, let's get going!" Daisuke yelled. Koushiro had to make a running dive to stop him from jumping on the monitor.
"Wait until I open the program, you ignoramus!" Koushiro cried, resisting the urge to strangle the last living breath out of him. Not that anyone would have minded especially.
Regaining his composure, Koushiro began typing furiously. Program, man, think about the program.
"We'll go in groups: Yamato, Takeru, and Iori first, then Hikari, Ken, and Taichi. Sora, you, Jyou, and Daisuke will meet up with Mimi in New York first and then we'll transport you to your location. Miyako will stay with me here in the computer lab. I will be in need of a sla-... assistant while every else is gone. Go and fetch the digivices, hardware wench!"
"It shall be done, Lord Koushiro!" gasped a frazzled looking Miyako. She kowtowed out of the room and returned moments later with digivices in hand.
"Now, remove yourself from my sight. Shall I need you again, I will summon you. That is all."
"Yes Lord Koushiro."
Miyako left hurriedly .
"All right now, here we go. Yamato, Takeru, Iori, please step to the Pineapple."
Yamato narrowed his eyes at the laptop. "Let's go kick some control spire ass."
"Prodigious. Here we go now..." Koushiro hit the shift key.
"Where are we?" Takeru rubbed his head and blinked.
Yamato shrugged. "I can't tell. There don't seem to be people in stereotypical costumes anywhere."
Iori glanced out across the sparsely wooded cliffs of the area they appeared to have landed on. A man stood staring out at the ocean about 50 paces away. Takeru saw him too.
"Why don't we go ask that guy?" he suggested.
"I don't know. What if he's a serial murderer or something. He probably just stands on the beach all day just waiting for people to come up and ask him things so he can kill them," said Iori.
"Interesting theory, freak. Let's just go ask him," snorted Takeru, already starting off down the beach. What a weird little kid.
They jogged up to where the man stood. He was sturdily built and gave off a semi-grandfatherly smell of whiskey and pipe tobacco.
Takeru tapped him on the shoulder. "Excuse me sir, but... uh, where exactly are we?"
"Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch."
"Oh really now. That's very interesting." Yamato grabbed Takeru and Ioris shoulders. "Back away slowly, smile, and nod," Yamato hissed. "You hear me? Smile and nod."
"Hikari, Ken, Taichi, it's your turn now. Stand in front of the screen please." Once again, Koushiro hit shift.
Hikari was the first to regain consciousness. She caught her breath when she saw her surroundings. They were standing in a vast plain covered in mounds of sand, sand so white it looked like snow. The sun was beginning to set and cast orange, crimson, and violet rays over the dunes. A tiny white lizard skittered across the sand next to her feet. "Wow. This place is beautiful. Do you know where we are Taichi?"
"No, but I think Ken does." Taichi gestured to Ken, who sat a little ways off, rocking back and forth and clutching his knees to his chest.
"What's wrong Ken?" Hikari asked in her soothing, kindergarten teacher voice. She took a few cautious steps in his direction. "Do you know where we are? If you do, you should tell us."
"White Sands," Ken mumbled and buried his head back in his knees.
"Duh Ken, we know the sand is white," said Taichi. "What we want to know is where we are."
"No, you don't understand. We're at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. This is the place where they invented and tested the atomic bomb. The A-bomb for Christ sake! If we aren't killed by the radiation seeping out of the ground right now, we'll die of dehydration. We're miles from any town. Even if we did make it to a town, how would we get back to Odaiba? None of the hillbillies out here will have a computer. There's no way out, no way out..." Ken trailed off and began to rock faster.
"Okay, calm down Ken, we can figure this out." Taichi had always been the leader. He could think of something they could do, couldn't he? He sure hoped so. "New Mexico is in America right? All we have to do is e-mail Mimi and she can drive here to pick us up."
"We're not in Japan anymore, you idiot Goggle Boy. We're thousands of miles from New York. Even if that would work, Mimi is most likely in a different country by now anyway. Sora and the rest were on their way to pick her up, remember?" Ken was standing up now, but the doomed look in the back of his eyes had been replaced by one of anger.
Hikari, who had stayed out of the conversation till this point, painfully remembered that she hadn't had anything to eat since breakfast. "Well, no matter about that, but what are we going to do for food?"
Ken crouched down. He stayed motionless for a moment, then let his hand dart to the ground. He opened it to reveal a tiny, white lizard. "You better get used to these."
"Alright. Sora, I'm going to send you through next to go get Mimi. No need to flood the network with all of you going through to New York at once. Then when you get her all you have to do is stand in front of her computer and I'll bring you back. Just step right up over here." Koushiro smiled as Sora took her place in front of the monitor. Before anything could be said, he hit the delete key. Sora disappeared.
"Okay. Now with Sora out of the way, I'll transport you and Daisuke to New York where you will meet up with Mimi. Then all you'll need to do is stand in front of her computer and I'll send you out into the world. Got it?"
"Yeah, got it," said Jyou. "Nice job with that whole 'Flooding the Network' thing. You really had her fooled."
"Thank you. I pride myself on my acting skills. It was actually Taichi's idea to 'eliminate' her though. I was quite obliged to do it of course, but when I asked why he'd finally come around he just mumbled something about cookies. See you guys later." Koushiro reached out and tapped the shift key.
Jyou stood up and glanced at the pink walls. "This looks like Mimi's room, but where's Mimi?"
"She's in bed. Hee hee, look, she has curlers in her hair."
Daisuke giggled and pointed to a sleeping Mimi.
"Who cares. Just wake her up," said Jyou.
"I have a better idea. I'll just send her out the same way Koushiro sent Sora here. Then she'll wake up in another country!' Daisuke ran to Mimi's computer and studied the keyboard. "Which key was it now? Oh, here it is.'
"No, stop, I beg of you." Jyou called half-heartedly, but it was too late. Daisuke reached out and punched in the delete key with his index finger. However, due to a lack of any foresight whatsoever, he hadn't realized Mimi would actually have had be in *front* of the computer. Thus, he managed to delete himself instead.
"What's happening? Jyou, where the hell did you come from? And why are you yelling in the middle of the night while all the normal people of the world are trying to sleep?" Mimi sat up and stared at Jyou.
Jyou tried his best to explain the situation, carefully leaving out the bit about Sora and Daisuke's fates. Mimi, who was now mostly awake, grimaced.
"So you mean Koushiro wants us to go and fight digimon, in the middle of the night? What if those nasty numemon things come back? My hair could get ruined beyond the point of help. I certainly won't have time to pack, and I don't want to fight. I still have nightmares about being in the digital world the last time." Mimi was rapidly pulling curlers out of her hair, chewing on them, and spitting them out onto the floor.
"Me too, that whole digimon thing was pretty awful. Hey, screw saving the world. They'll manage without us." Jyou stood up. "Wanna go get some coffee?"
"Sure. Let me go change. I know a good place that should still be open."
"Damnit. I can't get any of my e-mails through to Koushiro."
Yamato slammed the D-Terminal shut and tossed it to Takeru. "You try for a while."
"What would we tell him if we did get through to him? 'Help us Koushiro, we're stranded but we don't know where we are.'? Or how about we just tell him we're in the same country as a crazy old man? That'll help a lot." Iori kicked at the sand.
Yamato glared at him. "Hey, we kind of know where we are. The name of this place might be what that guy said."
"Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch," Takeru recalled absent-mindedly.
"Yeah, that one... wait, how did you remember that?" Yamato glanced inquiringly (and a little frightened) at his younger brother.
"Uh, I just have a good memory... and stuff."
And stuff. That was what Takeru always said if someone was suprised or caught off guard by something he'd done. What could he say, it had worked before.
"Okay, whatever. We'll just tell Koushiro we're in... that place. Even if he doesn't know where that is, it wouldn't suprise me if he had tracking chips implanted in our bodies somewhere. All we have to do is keep trying to contact him," said Yamato.
Takeru looked at the screen of the Terminal. Another alert had popped up, again telling him his e-mail had been rejected. He threw the D-Terminal to the sand. "I give up. None of the messages will go through. It says the receiving server is too busy to accept any new e-mail. We might have to stay here the night. Let's just go to sleep and try again in the morning."
The other two agreed and were soon lying asleep on the sand. Takeru remained awake though, staring into the evening sky and wondering where Hikari and the others had ended up...
Hikari bit off the head of a lizard and spit out its skull. The little things actually weren't that bad if you were really hungry. "Any luck with the D-Terminal Ken"
"Not yet, and stop asking! Do you think solar recharge panels are easy to make out of sand, twigs, and a paper clip?" Ken glared maliciously at Taichi. "Maybe if someone hadn't forgotten to replace the batteries in the first place we could have been home by now."
"Hey, I was going change them. I was gonna go to the store after Yama's concert and get some new ones. Considering the circumstances, it's not my fault." Taichi was standing up now, and about ready to smack Ken upside the head.
"Okay, both of you, shut up. Ken, keep working on that solar panel thingy. Taichi, get over here and eat the rest of your lizard. I spent hours catching them just so you would have something to eat." Hikari had a tone in her voice that no one questioned.
Taichi finished his lizard and looked at its bones. "Do you need any of these Ken?"
"Those might actually be useful. Maybe you're not as big of an imbecile as I had thought. Break off the smallest rib and give it to me."
Taichi carefully separated one bone from the rest. He handed it to Ken, who in turn jammed it into a hole in the Terminal.
"Its done. Now all I have to do is set it to pick up the radiation from the ground and it should work." Ken squinted at his configuration and played the paper clip into place. The machine gave a resounding beep and started up.
"Ken, e-mail Koushiro and tell him where we are. I want to get out of here tonight." Hikari got chills just looking out into the darkness that had surrounded them. Why was it so much darker here than in Odaiba?
Ken stared intently at the little screen. "It says the receiving server is too busy to accept any new e-mails. We can't get anything sent to him until it clears up," he said, the bleak look reentering his eyes.
"Well, we can't give up. We'll take turns staying up and e-mailing him. We're bound to get through at some point." Taichi had to keep his hope up if he was going to be the leader. For some reason though, he was beginning to suspect he was not really the one in charge here.
"I'll take the first shift," said Hikari. She didn't want to sleep in this place. It bothered her to think about what might come out at night here, and what that thing might like to eat.
Later in the night, amidst all the monotonous e-mailing, Hikari began to think about Takeru. Where had he been sent? She hoped it was somewhere nicer than here. Another rejected e-mail rebounded back to her. What on Earth was Koushiro doing?
"Where is that girl? I sent her to Krispy Kreme over an hour ago and she still isn't back yet. I've even started that blasted D-Terminal automatically mailing her every 30 seconds when she didn't arrive back at the computer lab on time. She is going to greatly regret her lateness when I get through with her."
Koushiro sometimes regretted having Miyako as his personal slave. She wasn't as efficient as he would have liked her to be. This meant he had to go out of his way and find new ways to punish her when the insolence got out of hand. Still, he did have his own slave, which was more than some of the others could say about themselves. He would have liked to see Yamato try to get the Jun girl to clean all the computers in the lab with a single slice of rye. She might worship him, but, sadly, Jun was still in control of her own free will. Miyako was in the palm of his hand.
The D-Terminal on the edge of the desk beeped and sent another message to Miyako's. Oh well, if she didn't come back within the next hour he could just hack into her social security records and declare her dead...
When the police arrived at the overpass they found her. A passing motorist had seen her and called in. She was standing in the middle of the roadway, clutching a box of doughnuts that appeared to be no more than a few days old. When the police tried to speak to her she clutched them more tightly to her chest and backed away. "No, stay away. I have to get the doughnuts to Lord Koushiro. You can't have them. If I don't get their soon, he'll make me clean the monitors again. I don't have any bread left, none at all I tell you!"
"That's fine honey. Just come with us and we'll take you to see 'Lord Koushiro'. You can even bring the doughnuts with you." He peered at the box. "Hey, Krispy Kreme. Score!" The policeman motioned for his partner to move behind her. "We have bread you can use, too. Bread for doughnuts, how does that sound, hun? Just come with me and- NOW!" The other policeman tackled Miyako from behind.
Miyako seemed unfazed from the attack. She settled into the back of the squad car and began to stroke the doughnut box. "Did you know that Lord Koushiro was president of the computer club 6 years in a row?"