A few short notes:

The following story has been written for a fellow contributor to the Animated Lust (rated PG!) forums as a present. Shawn's animation love is Mimi from Digimon. In other fanfiction written for him by another forum member who goes by the name Lord Kitsune, Mimi has grown up and Shawn has wooed and wed her. They have gone on to start a family with triplet girls.

Earlier this year Shawn requested fanfiction or fanart for his birthday. After some conversation back and forth, we determined that as I didn't really know much about Digimon, he would accept something from shows I was more familiar with. This is the result.

The following story has a handful of original characters, and crosses a number of different animation shows. Some of the characters could perhaps be accused of being mary sues, but some people will accuse any original character of being a mary sue. So if you don't like original characters, please consider yourself warned.

Shawn is based on the Animated Lust (rated PG!) forum participant known as Shawn and, as such, is copyright to himself, and used with permission.

Kitsune is based on the Animated Lust (rated PG!) forum participant known as Lord Kitsune and, as such, is copyright to himself, and used with permission.

Dayzee, Psychedelic-man, Abby Michaels, Kobe and various secretaries and other minor dramatis personæ are original characters and are copyright to me.

The below shows and characters are used for fanfiction purposes only, I disclaim all ownership:

Digimon and associated characters and concepts including Mimi, Izzy, Tai, Willis, T.K., Matt, Palmon, Tanemon, Togemon, Lillymon, Tentomon, Digimon, Digiworld, Digivice, Digivolution, Digidestined, and anything else known as "Digi-" are © Akiyoshi Hongo - Toei Animation; © Bandai

Mythical Detective Loki Ragnarok and associated characters and concepts including Loki, Fenrir, Mayura, Yamino, Frey, Heimdall, Thor, Neo-Skidbladnir, the pig Gullinbursti, the staff Laevateinn, Ecchan – well, most of these were originally dreamed up by the ancient Scandinavians, but in this case they all are © Sakura Kinoshita

Pokémon and associated characters and concepts including Ash, Dawn, Brock, Pikachu, Croagunk, Staravia, Piplup, Team Rocket, James, Jessie, Meowth, Wobbuffet, Nurse Joy, Paul, Gary Oak, the Johto, Kanto, Hoenn and Sinnoh regions, the Devon Corporation, Pokémon, Pokéball, Pokédex, Pokécenter, and anything else known as "Poké-" are © Pokémon; © Nintendo/Creatures Inc. / GAME FREAK Inc.; © CHUNSOFT

SpongeBob and associated characters and concepts including SpongeBob SquarePants, Patrick Star, and Sandy Cheeks are © Viacom International Inc.

The Beatles: Yellow Submarine and associated characters and concepts, in this case the Yellow Submarine itself, are © Hearst Corp. (King Features Syndicate Div.) and Subafilms Ltd. The Yellow Submarine sequence is loosely inspired by the original movie and Peter Max scenes therein. (The Yellow Submarine really exists; I believe it is in Monaco.)

Yu-gi-oh! and associated characters and concepts including Joey Wheeler, Mai Valentine, Téa Gardner, Yugi Mutou, Seto Kaiba, Mokuba Kaiba, Tristan Taylor, and the game Duel Monsters are © Kazuki Takahashi. (The game Yugioh! which is based on Duel Monsters is registered to Konami Corp. and Upper Deck Entertainment).

Down Alice's Rabbit Hole

Shawn was sitting at his computer doing research – the good news was he had found some really good web pages for information – the bad news was that one of the better pages was in French. And another was in German. Google's "translate the page?" had teased him by rendering them into something that was not exactly gibberish, but was not exactly understandable either; being just clear enough to let him know he really wanted this information and just garbled enough to make it totally useless. The image search was worse – the best images were on a site that looked to be mostly, if he was lucky, in Japanese – Mimi could help him with that.

So now he was trying to run Babblefish, hoping for a better translation. His first inkling that something was wrong was when his translation suddenly, inexplicably, changed languages – instead of English he was getting – what? Italian maybe? Even as he watched, it changed alphabets to Cyrillic.

Suddenly Palmon appeared, followed by Mimi rushing into the room. "Shawn, Palmon says something is causing the Digiworld to go totally haywire!" Mimi cried.

"Yes! It's trying to – " and Palmon stopped, momentarily at a loss for words. "– unravel," she decided. "Like a sweater." Palmon had once seen someone pull out stitches in her knitting in order to fix a mistake she had made in a previous row, and the image had stayed with her. She looked extremely serious, even on the edge of panic. A hole in the fabric of her reality could be a disaster.

The screen of Shawn's computer switched again – to Klingon maybe? – which degenerated into a bunch of incomprehensible ones and zeros. Windowlike squares started to appear floating in the air, filled with quickly scrolling numbers of ASCII and hexadecimal code. These, too, began to degenerate into zeros and ones.

"We'd better get hold of the others." Shawn leaped from his chair and started toward Mimi, but suddenly at his feet a glowing circle opened up, filled with more ones and zeros pouring down its edge like sand from a collapsing dune. The carpet had disappeared and the expanding circle entangled Shawn's legs. As he started to slide into the funnel that moments ago had been solid floor, Mimi lunged...

...and grabbed...

...and caught his wildly flailing hand...

For a moment they hung, balanced, on the edge of a suddenly insane reality, and then the shifting sand of digits disappeared from beneath Mimi's knees and both were tumbling through numbers away from the receding circle of rationality that was their living room.

Palmon cried, "Wait for me!" but it was too late. The last thing Palmon heard was Mimi's despairing shout...

"Take care of the kids!!"