Adventures of the Spore Kids

Episode 2: Hiroshi's Art Class

Author's Notes: This is the second in the series, and covers Hiroshi (boy with dark brown hair who said he wanted to be an artist and got a Nyokimon for a partner in "Million Points of Light"). Spiderman and X-Men are copyright Marvel Comics. Enjoy!

Date: 1/18/2004

Time: 6:30pm

Place: Hiroshi's room

Hiroshi ran one of his hands through his dark brown hair, in some ways still trying to make sense of the first few weeks of 2004...

He looked around his room, at the many posters of comicbook heroes he had displayed on the walls. He loved comic books, particularly Spiderman and X-Men, and the dream he had spoken that New Year's Eve was to draw comic books. He had hoped one day to be hired to draw up for a notable comic book series, which was why before becoming involved with Digimon he had regularly practiced drawing in a notebook. However, it never seemed to him like it was up to par with the professional drawings in the comic books...

Lately, he had been drawing himself and his new partner Nyokimon a lot, mostly because Hiroshi felt like he was living in a comic book! He figured the whole deal with Ken and that cruel Digimon manipulating Oikawa could have been pulled straight out of the whimsically implausible world of the comic book, and Nyokimon... well, he thought it was really weird that he got a "talking seed" for a Digimon partner. Don't get me wrong, he loved his new partner, but it didn't really seem to measure up to the "cooler" Digimon he saw the older kids have, and often Hiroshi just sat scratching his head in puzzlement...

He got up off the bed he had been sitting on and walked across the room to the crown jewel of his comic book-themed collection: a poster of the main characters in the X-Men comic books signed by some of the artists who drew the characters. Hiroshi had to pay lots of money to get that poster, and to him it showed an aim of his dream: to one day have his own autograph grace a poster like that. But just as Hiroshi knew that those wonderful characters were just drawings on paper, so at times did his dream feel as artificial and unreachable; that was much of the reason Hiroshi had wanted the Spore in the first place...

He sighed. He wasn't sure he could ever be a good an artist as they were...

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"Hiroshi, hurry up or you'll be late!" he heard his mom call. Startled, Hiroshi rushed to grab his coat and beckoned Nyokimon to follow. Last night, the first meeting with the other Digidestined as well as the other kids had taken place, and Hiroshi had made a start in friendship with some of those, most notably Noriko. He was willing to help deflect the curiosity of the other kids about her, as he considered it understandable but very insensitive. He also liked Noriko's "teaching session" during that meeting and plainly said so to her.

However, Hiroshi also wanted some help for his own dream. He hadn't found the "mentor" to link up with during that meeting, and he suspected Noriko was the focus that night. Still, he could hope that maybe those things would happen today...

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7:00 pm, the meeting place

Hiroshi said goodbye to his mom and picked up Nyokimon as he got out of the car and entered the building where they had met yesterday.

He was greeted with a sight that made him smirk: a banner hung above his head with the words "Art Day" crudely painted on it. Hiroshi walked into the main room, wondering if the banner was a good omen or a bad one...

He immediately saw several other of the newer boys and girls, along with their Digimon partners, surrounding a large table covered with paper. On it, he saw various colors and types of paint and some paintbrushes. The paints and paintbrushes were being used in various ways for drawing; it was quickly obvious that this was some kind of painting area.

As Hiroshi approached the table, he also noticed that some of the baby Digimon were allowed to bounce around the table leaving paint "trails" of where they bounced. This looked very fun to the baby Digimon, and Hiroshi felt his partner bouncing up and down in his arms, wanting to do that too.

"I don't know about that..." Hiroshi warily stated, wondering if the older kids would get mad that the Digimon were leaving paint marks all over the table and some on the floor as well.

"Oh, come on, please? I promise I won't make a mess!" Nyokimon pleaded.

Hiroshi smirked as he considered the proposition. Finally, he consented, warning his partner to come when called and that a washdown would be needed afterwards. Nyokimon agreed, then bounced off, quickly getting onto the table and joining in a game of chase after bouncing in a small puddle of orange paint left by another kid so as to leave tracks.

Hiroshi, meanwhile, looked around, trying to find an older kid to ask about whether the Digimon should be allowed to bounce around and make "tracks". While he looked, he noticed Takashi, a younger boy with brown hair he had befriended the previous night. Takashi was sitting at the corner of the table, concentrating very hard on a drawing.

Hiroshi rushed over and peaked over at what Takashi was doing. Hiroshi tapped Takashi on the shoulder, but all Takashi did was say hi and looked back down on his work.

Annoyed, Hiroshi pressed his question at Takashi: "Are you sure the Digimon should be allowed to run around like that?" he asked.

Takashi looked up just long enough to see what Hiroshi was pointing to. "Hmm, I don't know. I guess it's okay, I haven't heard anyone complain about it, and my partner Poyomon is over there playing with the others. Hey, it let's me work in peace without having Poyomon be bored, so I don't see a problem." With that said, he returned to his work.

"Yeah, but I still think someone should've asked Ken or something before they started doing that." Hiroshi countered. Then, suddenly curious, he asked Takashi "What exactly are you doing?"

"Fingerpainting. Hadn't ya noticed?" Takashi said, holding up his hands, covered in various colors of paint.

Hiroshi stepped back an almost imperceptibly short distance. "Fingerpainting?! But that's for babies!" he said in obvious disgust.

"Is not!" Takashi fired back with a scowl before returning to working on the picture.

"Hey guys, cool it down! Everyone has their own way of being artistic." came another voice from the side. Hiroshi and Takashi turned and looked up at Tai Kamiya (or as they called him, "the cool kid with the big hair") as he looked over the situation, Agumon standing beside Tai as well.

"Fingerpainting can be fun. When I was his age, I still did it sometimes." Tai added.

"I'll say fingerpainting is fun!" Agumon added, holding up his "hands", partly covered with paint, as evidence of this.

Hiroshi chuckled a bit, but his face turned red at having been corrected by "big man" Tai. Hiroshi quickly decided to change the subject, stating his worries about the baby Digimon playing around with the paint.

"Eh, let them have fun. We can always clean up afterwards." Tai stated, and with that Hiroshi's objections had been firmly shot down.

Bummed, Hiroshi randomly looked around the room while trying to think of what to say next. When Tai noticed this and asked about it, Hiroshi said he was wondering where Noriko was because he hadn't seen her yet.

"Oh, I think she's down by the computer display. But you should wash up your partner before you two head over there." Tai answered. Hiroshi thanked him, then ran off to grab Nyokimon for a quick washup in the bathroom...

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After a fair bit of struggling with Nyokimon in cleaning the partner up (mostly because the Digimon kept complaining about water getting in its mouth or scrubbing too hard with the soap), Hiroshi dried Nyokimon off as quickly as possible and rushed over to the computer area Tai had mentioned. Sure enough, Noriko was there, staring transfixed at the computer screen placed between Izzy and Ken and linked to a laptop nearby, which Hiroshi presumed to belong to one of them.

He tried to talk to Noriko, but was shushed by another girl nearby, who told him that Izzy and Ken were about to present something and that he needed to be quiet. Suddenly interested, Hiroshi and Nyokimon turned their attention toward the computer screen.

Various pictures, some of them very abstract looking, flashed in a slide show manner on the monitor as Izzy explained: "As much I like computers to do work, computers have been used to create various artwork and some very abstract images such as the ones you see here. And then there is also computer programming, which is more of an art than a science."

"What do you mean?" a boy near Hiroshi asked.

"Well, the science is that you have to use certain programming elements, commands and such, in a programming language and that you understand how the commands work and interact. The art is how you use the commands to make a working program, how you put the elements together."

Izzy went over to the laptop and manipulated the cursor seen on the monitor screen as he continued talking: "And sometimes the results can be either very good or very bad. But how well something is programmed doesn't change what the game is or what is in it." After saying this, Izzy used the laptop's touchpad to open a program represented by the shortcut icon on the monitor screen. The screen went blank for a few seconds, then a picture that looked like someone hunting animals appeared on the screen.

The picture must have been recognizable to some of the kids because Hiroshi immediately heard surprised whispers and quiet chatter in those around him.

Izzy smiled quietly. "You may or may not recognize this game, but Ken created this game completely from scratch to win an important national programming contest. Afterwards he sent a couple copies of the game out to shareware download sites, which means you may know someone who plays or played the game."

Hiroshi, as well as most of the other kids, turned their attentions to Ken, who had stayed in the background. He emerged, sighing and with a smirk on his face. He explained: "It was a very high-quality program, but the time and effort put into it was misused. I thought making a hunting game was innocent enough at the time, but now I know it was influenced by Myotismon and the Spore, playing with my perceptions and paving the way for worse... If it wasn't for the fact that it still makes money for me and my family, I would've destroyed all copies of this game long ago and disassociated from being its creator. It lead me to worse, and the only good it does now is it brings money in."

Hiroshi was both sobered and shocked at what Ken had just said. "Did he say what I think he just said?" he quickly asked Noriko.

Noriko looked back, responding with a somber nod of the head. This confirmed Hiroshi's thought: that Ken had been ready to destroy a masterpiece of his own work because it related to his agony under the Spore. Stunned, Hiroshi slowly walked away from the crowd, wondering how important it really was to be an artist...

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Dejected and confused, Hiroshi wandered for a few minutes, trying to make sense of his dream and whether it would be worth trying. So caught up in the worry, he barely noticed the photograph collage he went by until he saw Keiko looking at those same photographs.

Snapped out of his thinking and curious, he backtracked to where Keiko was standing. He said hello to her and asked what was so interesting.

"Kari said that photography is an art as much, if not more so, than painting or drawing with pencil." Keiko explained, eyes narrowed in apparent analysis of the pictures and what made them good or bad. "And I want to figure out what a good picture is like."

Hiroshi quickly started looking them over too. Most of them showed various scenes of what he presumed to be family moments, with pictures of Kari and Tai with their parents. However, Hiroshi noticed that at a fair number of pictures had the Gatomon and Agumon in them, some "personal" shots of one or the other, some with the rest of the family, some of the two Digimon together (including one of them hugging) and some as partnership shots (Kari and Gatomon together, Tai and Agumon together).

He was immediately struck by the emotions displayed by some of those pictures, and he got an impulse to try to duplicate it in a drawing. Hiroshi reached down and in front of him, a reflex which normally allowed him to grab his drawing notebook back at his desk. When all he got was air, though, he realized he had acted on reflex, berated himself for not bringing the notebook, and blushing a faint pink slowly walked away from Keiko, hoping she wouldn't notice...

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"Rats! I've struck out!" Hiroshi thought. He didn't think anything beneficial would happen to him tonight. Aimless and confused, he slumped in a chair in a corner. Nyokimon saw the gloominess and tried to cheer him up by bouncing up and down in his lap and making loops around the chair. He smiled at the effort but said it wasn't going to help much. "I want connections, not comfort." he said as he patted Nyokimon for the effort in trying.

Bored, his eyes wandered about, trying to find something that was worth his attention. He flipped around until he noticed Matt had his guitar with him. Hiroshi sat up quickly, nearly dumping Nyokimon on the floor; was Matt going to play again? He walked over as casually as he could, considering his sudden interest in what was going on.

Much to his disappointment, however, he found that Matt was not readying to play again but instead was talking to another one of the older Digidestined, an orange-haired girl whose name he couldn't remember at the moment.

Hiroshi quickly asked the boy next to him what the name of the older girl was. "That's Sora." the response was. "I think she's Matt girlfriend or something considering how they're talking."

"Girlfriend?!?" Hiroshi asked himself as he looked back up at Matt and Sora. Sure enough, they were laughing over something that Hiroshi couldn't hear about. As he watched, he noticed several disappointed kids walk away from where Matt and Sora.

Suddenly, Matt seemed to notice Hiroshi. The laughing stopped and the next few moments were more serious; judging from Matt's pointing they seemed to be talking about him. He craned to hear what they were whispering between them, but with no luck.

After about 20 seconds of whispering, Sora pointed to Hiroshi. "Me?" he mouthed, pointing to himself. Sora nodded and beckoned him over.

Immediately the nearby girls broke out in giggles. One of the older ones said "Wow! She must think you're hot or something!"

Hiroshi rolled his eyes, then gave the girls a mean glare as he started walking over, carrying Nyokimon, to where Matt and Sora were. "Hmph! What are they thinking?" Hiroshi said to himself, shaking his head.

As he approached, Sora instead directed him away from Matt and toward a table Hiroshi had largely ignored before. Perplexed, he followed Sora all the way back to her table, which was covered with various flower arrangements.

Hiroshi stared blankly at the flowers until he remembered that he had read last night that one of the older kids worked in a flower shop, which he guessed was Sora, hence the flower arrangements. But he still didn't understand why here, of all places, he had been led to. He look back up at Sora with an answer-seeking expression.

"You like the arrangements?" Sora said with a smile. "You know, it takes lots of practice to arrange them in an attractive pattern. I should know, I help in my mom's flower shop. Flower arrangement is an art, too."

Hiroshi mechanically nodded. This wasn't the answer he had been expecting; he wanted Sora to get to the point.

"Well, you're probably wondering why I called you over here. It turns out I am the right person to help with your Digimon."

Hiroshi looked at her skeptically, then looking back and forth between his Nyokimon and Sora's Biyomon, the look changed to disbelief. Sora laughed and said, "I know, Digimon are weird that way, but trust me this is where you want to be for advice."

Hiroshi looked down at his Nyokimon, trying to picture the Digimon turning into a big pink bird. Instantly the phrase "You're living in a comic book" passed through his mind, making him smirk.

Sora reassured him with "That's all right, we can talk more about it later. Right now though, I want to see your drawing skills."

Hiroshi snapped to attention, now slightly unnerved by the mention of drawing. "My... my drawing skills?" he repeated.

"Sure."

"Uh, well, what do you want me to draw?" Hiroshi asked, restraining his talking in an attempt to prevent looking like he had a panic attack.

"Try Biyomon. You can use a piece of paper from the drawing table."

"Uh, OK." Hiroshi replied without much confidence. As he walked over to the table, he thought over the possible consequences of failure as well as wondering if art was even worth the effort considering how easily it could be destroyed...

He picked up the piece of paper and grabbed a pencil laying nearby. Sitting down in a chair, he used the table as a backboard while he set to work. He carefully labored, his face showing his concentration and his like or dislike of what he drew. Erasing repeatedly and feeling hopelessly inadequate for the job, he finished the picture and handed it to Sora. "I don't know how good it is though..." he said dejectedly.

Sora looked the drawing, looking surprisingly pleased. Much to Hiroshi's relief, Sora looked back down at him with a smile. "This is actually pretty good. Do you practice a lot?" she said.

Hiroshi gave a shrug and said "Just now and then. I doodle in a scrap book that I have in my room."

"Well I actually think this is pretty good. You just need some practice, and some confidence too." Sora concluded.

Hiroshi looked up at Sora's face as she thought about what to do next. He began to think again: "Hmm... is she telling the truth, or just trying to make me feel good? But art is art, no doubt about that, and art can be hated even by its creator if it is something that people do not consider good or something that they like... Art is a good thing, but it is not everything. Perhaps I should keep that in mind as I work at becoming a comic book artist..."

He saw Sora nod and she said, "You know what? I'll mention you to my mom. You can help with drawing the displays on the weekends. I don't know if we can pay you, but I'll help with your drawing skills. Do you like that offer?"

Hiroshi's face lit up. Maybe he had found his mentor after all! He eagerly nodded, and asked to borrow her cell phone to tell his mom about the news. Sora consented, and as Hiroshi punched in the numbers he thought that maybe his dream wasn't a bad idea after all, provided he had the right perspective.

His voice was animated and chatterly as he told the good news to his mom, something that was a good sign not just to Sora, but to Hiroshi's mom and Hiroshi himself. The artist had a break at last...

The End