This is a giftfic for firehedgehog, as thanks for writing review # 1400 of Uchibi Sasuke. They requested Takato from Digimon Tamers.
It ended up about Yamaki, because.
No idea what the power creep is like in Digimon, but I used to play Yu-gi-oh, so.
"I think I've created a monster," Takato said to himself as he watched Yamaki stare down his opponent. He might be on their side now, but that focus was still a little scary.
"He's not that good," Rika said from where she stood leaning against the wall. Adjusting her glasses, she added, "He just has an actual salary?"
So Yamaki could afford whatever cards he wanted for his deck, instead of hoping he got lucky with the packs of cards like Takato and his friends. Well, Takato anyway: he decided not to ask what Rika's allowance was like.
"Do I want to know how much he's been spending on that card game?" Riley asked, finishing off her bagel.
"Probably not," Ryo said. "The card game's really cashing in right now, and half my deck's not tournament legal."Takato knew that: it was smart of Ryo to bring all his strongest cards into the digital world, ban list or no ban list. "It's been long enough I'd have to start practically from scratch to build a competition deck, and once I got a load of those prices?" He whistled. "It's give Rika her rematch or keep Monodramon in fried chicken, pick one – Sorry Rika. Takato's really lucky his parents own a bread store."
Takato laughed sheepishly. "I guess I am." And that Guilmon didn't mind the day-old bread. Wait a second, wasn't that the same bread Riley had been feeding Mr. Yamaki? "It's kind of a weird coincidence… that you bought bread from us," he explained once he saw Riley's inquiring gaze.
"Not really? You're pretty close to where we work," she reminded him. Then, with a look at Guilmon, "Well, maybe, when we were trying to stop Digimon, we were patronizing a store housing one of the enemy."
"We weren't housing him." Takato's parents wouldn't let him. "He was at the park."
"I give, I give!" Terriermon waved his ears in the air, surrendering. "I prefer the videogames," he added, abandoning his borrowed deck and climbing onto Henry.
"Which ones?" Yamaki asked him, still frowning in concentration. The way his cards slipped out of his hands as he tried to shuffle made that a little less intimidating, but only a little.
"Why, you want to beat me at those too?" Terriermon asked, then looked thoughtful. "How would would you beat somebody at some of them? Beat the game faster than they did?"
Henry chuckled. "Now you're getting ideas."
"Hey, you said I could beat people as long as I didn't beat them up. Although I wouldn't mind having their lunch money." Terriermon smiled at the thought.
"Are they any good?" Dolphin asked, coming over with a drink. "The card game and the videogames."
"Well, I like the videogames," Terriermon said, as though that was obviously the important thing. "Henry does too – he buys them for me. Right, Henry?"
"Well, my dad bought me half of them," Henry said.
"Seeing 'Digimon' everywhere made me nostalgic for when we were working on the project," Henry's dad said.
"They're licensed games," Yamaki said. "We've had teams play them so we could observe if there were any fluctuations, but with what we know now I doubt there would be without a blue card."
"Wow," Takato said. "You went that far?"
"Wild ones – Digimon – showed up with the same designs as those games, so clearly there was some connection. It took us some time to trace the Digimon IP to a small group project almost twenty years ago, even after we found out that the publically acknowledged creator was a pseudonym and royalties were being paid to Dr. McCoy and his family."
"I didn't hand over any of the code from the project – it was the images that got their attention. My son's designs were pretty inspiring – they were really what inspired the whole project."
"Digimon were based on drawings, huh" Takato said thoughtfully, remembering his drawings of Guilmon, how the digivice took them and made them real. If it was the digivice – even the blue card wasn't supposed to do that, just pull data from the digital world.
Oh, maybe it was the digignomes! If they could turn the power of digivolution into a Digimon, they should be able to turn Takato's ideas into a Digimon, right? The card reader contained a computer chip, and scanning that Blue Card would have connected it to the Digital World, so that explained how the gnomes could have gotten to his room to scan the pages of his drawing.
"I made Guilmon with a drawing," he told them.
"You did?" Henry asked, looking fascinated.
"I knew he wasn't an official design," Rika said, "from the research I did on Renamon's possible opponents, but then there was Calumon, so I didn't think much of it. I guess I should have." They might have figured out that Calumon was unique sooner if both him and Guilmon showing up together hadn't been 'proof' there were non-canon Digimon out there in the network. "Wait, Guilmon was created by the digignomes?"
"I think maybe?" Takato said. Wow, Rika had figured it out a lot faster than he had. He guessed he'd been kind of stunned that it was all happening. "I didn't know about the digignomes back then, so I really didn't have a clue what to think when Guilmon's egg appeared in my digivice." Not that he'd really thought much beyond 'Wow, cool!'
Guilmon was still the coolest thing ever, he thought, glancing at his partner, who was still sitting with Alice. Looking away, Takato thought he would give them a little more time.
"With the digignomes, there are three possibly independent cases of life arising in the network," Yamaki said. "Digimon aren't the only digital lifeforms, but with the D-Reaper returned to its original state…"
Riley cleared her throat and Yamaki stopped, looking a little embarrassed.
Right, it was still Yamaki's job that stuff happened like digignomes showing up in a Japanese student's bedroom in the heart of Tokyo and created demon dragon-type Digimon that bioemerged into the real world and could Pyro Blaster holes in stuff and terrify principals.
Ok, maybe it was a little hard to take Yamaki seriously now that he'd started playing the card game. Takato had just meant to suggest that he should take a look at the cards if he wanted to know what digi-modifying could do!
Or maybe he should be glad that Yamaki had taken the suggestion seriously instead of thought that Takato was brushing him off or being rude to someone from a not-so-supersecret-anymore government agency that could still lock Guilmon up and throw away the key.
Yeah, he was glad they had the Yamaki that was willing to sit down and even play card games with Digimon now, instead of the one that wanted to send them all back to the Digital World as data and throw away the keycard.