Title: Sealing the Beast
Characters: Ranamon, Izumi
Word Count: 1,779/39,160||Chapter Count: 1/22
Genre: Adventure||Rated: PG
Challenge: Diversity Writing, J14, 1000-2000 wpc; Three-Sided Box, 22 chapters, 1760-1780 words per chapter; Love Buckets Write-A-Thon; Easter Egg Basket Advent 2016, bonus #3, pick a fic with 10,000 words to go and write a minimum of 1,000 words per day for at least a week; What-If: What if Izumi got stuck in her Beast form?; Small Multichap Competition
Notes: This takes place sometime between episodes 17 and 18, after the Chosen have their D-Scans back.
Summary: Ranamon isn't going to be shown up by some ridiculous human just pretending to be a Digimon. And she'll take any path she finds necessary in order to make sure that doesn't happen. Nothing quite works out the way she plans. But when did it ever?

"Rawrgh!" Calamaramon slammed one powerful tentacle against one of the columns, satisfied at the quick way it shattered, leaving nothing but a spray of dust and shards behind.

But not satisfied at what made her this angry in the first place. She whirled and cracked another one in half, not caring that some of her fellow warriors – Mercuremon for the most part – kept on watching her with a very amused expression.

She knew, of course. She always knew when someone watched her. So she made certain they knew not to bother her, because right now, the very last thing she wanted was to be bothered.

What I want is to have that little girl's neck in my tentacles!

It wasn't enough that she'd found the Beast Spirit of Wind, not in the slightest. It wasn't even enough that the little human brat actually could be said by some – who clearly needed their eyes checked – that she might even have been pretty.

But just the fact some people could consider it possible, the slimmest, most unlikely chance that there would be some Digimon or even some human out there who thought the Warrior of Wind was prettier than she was?

Not acceptable. Not by any standards, least of all the one that mattered most: her own.

With a flick of a thought – one that sent a surge of pride through her at how far she'd come in mastering her Beast Spirit – Calamaramon shifted back to Ranamon. Her Beast form came in quite handy when she wanted to destroy something, but when it came to thinking, she wanted to think, not focus on how to move.

"I presume thou hast vented thy rage?" Mercuremon asked, that wicked smirk still floating on his lips. She hated the very sight of it.

There wasn't much that Ranamon didn't hate, when it all came down to it, with the exception of herself and those Digimon who properly worshiped her as the divine beauty she was.

"Oh, forget you," Ranamon snapped, stalking back and forth, most of her mental attention already focusing on what to do about that annoying human. She really wanted to do something to her, something that would make her regret ever coming to the Digital World!

So how do I do it? It wasn't the easiest thing to do, in any world, mostly because the girl had all of her friends with her, all the time.

So could she perhaps separate them? It could be done; they weren't chained to each other.

Ew, being chained to her. Ranamon refused to even thin about that.

She slid herself into her favorite pool of water, barely having even noticed leaving Mercuremon behind. Let him stew around or whatever it was he wanted to do. She had far more important tasks to worry about, such as destroying the Warrior of Wind.

She thinks she can be a Digimon. It takes a lot more than what she's got to be one, even if she looks like one and calls herself one. I've been a Digimon since the moment I hatched and she thinks she can wander in here and grab a sparkly item and that makes her one?

Ranamon didn't think so. Not at all. What she wanted to do was bring home as hard as possible that a human wearing a Digimon skin wasn't anything more nor less than a human wearing a Digimon skin.

Maybe if I take her Spirits away from her? It couldn't be that difficult, not if Grottomon managed to do it.

On the other hand, they'd done that before, and the brats still managed to find them again, and had defeated Grottomon in the first place.

Something about Grottomon drifted through her thoughts. She frowned, trying to pin it down. He'd been able to do some interesting things, she recalled. He'd never actually demonstrated what he could do for them, but he'd never had to. Where water was, she could peer out and see, and it didn't matter how much water there was.

Ranamon made up her mind in a heartbeat, sliding out of her pool and damply padding her way down to what had been Grottomon's quarters. No one had gone in there since he'd been defeated, as far as she knew, anyway. What would any of them want with his old junk?

"I better find something I can use," she muttered, peering around at the dust-covered possessions. If whatever he did, whatever symbols he used, whatever strange dust that he had possession of, was something that he'd taken to the Village of Beginnings with him, she was going to choose this place as her new practice ground for tentacle attacks.

She made a good start of it right then, casually dumping everything she could find on the floor and looking for any sign that it could be useful toward her goals. Vases and plates and anything ceramic or porcelain or easily breakable – and some that wasn't – crashed onto the floor. Ranamon tiptoed past it, sneering at the mess she made.

"What an idiot. He should've tried better not to have such breakable stuff around."

Granted, no one had been allowed in here while he'd been alive, but Ranamon didn't care. She was in here now, and she wanted to find something.

A long row of books came to her attention and she tossed them over without even taking a look at them. She didn't know what she wanted, but what could books tell her?

"Reading is for idiots like Mercuremon," she muttered, "why should I waste my time with it?"

She began to turn away, eyes landing on a row of small, delicate ornaments that could possibly be what she was looking for. Then her gaze dropped down farther, to where a loose page drifted aimlessly.

Her first reaction was just to kick it out of the way. Her second was to stop and stare, since she recognized the drawing on the page: a containment sign, much like what he'd used to restrain the Warrior of Light once. She'd heard about that one, since he'd bragged about it before he'd done it.

Now she reached down and scooped up the pages, flipping through them to get them back into order. Most of them seemed to only be used by someone with a connection to the earth, which made them useless to her.

But a few were different. A few caught her attention and she tucked them away carefully.

This just might be what I'm looking for. Ranamon grinned at the thought of what she could do with all of these. It really wouldn't take long at all, and once it was done, then that girl would know better than to try to compare herself to a glorious beauty like Ranamon ever again.

Izumi poked the fire with a long stick, inching a little closer to it. Why couldn't we have stayed there a little longer? She didn't like being cold and Akiba Market had been so very warm.

She knew they couldn't stay there forever; their quest had barely even properly begun she felt sometimes. But just a little longer wouldn't have been so hard, would it? Long enough to get some food and maybe warm jackets for everyone…

Junpei settled down next to her, a concerned look in his eyes that she tried not to notice too hard.

"Your watch is almost over," he told her. "Mine next."

"You should be sleeping, then. We can all use the rest." The others were certainly getting it, Takuya and Kouji each to one side of Tomoki. Tomoki always took the first watch, which was always the shortest one, though no one out and out said that to him.

Junpei just shrugged, picking up a stick of his own to poke at the fire with. "I'm not all that tired."

She wasn't sure if she should believe him or not. Even to her, Junpei could lie when it suited him. It just usually didn't, from what she'd learned.

Still, it wasn't such a bad thing to have a companion at the end of her watch. She'd done it for the others in their own turn as well. How well any of them slept tended to go along with how much fighting they did that day.

The more they traveled, the fewer fights they got into, but the those fights were even harder than before, especially now with those evil Legendary Warriors trailing after them.

Even knowing they'd defeated one of them didn't make matters a whole lot better.

She stifled a yawn, or tried to. Today hadn't been one of the more fight intensive days of any variety, but she couldn't quite seem to keep her eyes open by now anyway. Maybe it's just all catching up to me.

"Izumi-chan?" Junpei leaned closer to her. "You can go on to bed. We've got a long way to go tomorrow."

She couldn't have argued with that even if she'd wanted to. Instead, she pushed herself to sleep and offered him a small smile, one that made his eyes light up.

"I think I'll do that. See you in the morning." She raised one hand to bid him good night and started toward the pile of leaves that would make up her bed for the night.

She hadn't taken three full steps before a far too familiar laugh broke out, and framed in the light of the three moons, she could see a column of water rising up from the river they'd camped beside.

Junpei stood by her side a heartbeat later, while the others surged up out of their leaf-beds in the space of moments, rubbing their eyes, more annoyed about having woken up than anything else.

"You again," Takuya grumbled, glaring at Ranamon as she stared down at them. "Don't you sleep like regular people?"

"Yeah, can't you come back tomorrow when everyone's rested?" Junpei wanted to know.

"No one asked your opinion, thunderhead!" Ranamon snapped, the water column moving her closer to them. "I came here for her!" She pointed dramatically towards Izumi, who sighed.

"Sure you did. Did you want to fight again?" Given the pummeling that she'd given Ranamon once she found her Beast-Spirit, Izumi didn't think that was the case. Still, she'd been wrong before.

Ranamon threw her head back and laughed. Izumi didn't feel any better, and she doubted her friends did either.

"If that's what you think. Come on, evolve, and let's get started!"

Izumi didn't trust this for a single moment. Her earlier clashes against Ranamon taught her one thing: trusting her was a bad idea.

But she had no other options.

To Be Continued

Notes: Ranamon is genuinely fun to write!