I had never been a very hungry child. The woman who had adopted me had awlays said I ate as much as a sparrow (especially comapred to her own children). She never thought that I ate so less because she was a lousy cook. Still, her inability to produce proper food had trained me to live on very little nourishment. As an orphaned, self-re-orphaned runaway, it came in handy. I fed Eveemon with a few crakcers and she soon fell asleep, hidden in my backpack.

I gazed at my nearly transparent reflection in the window and couldn't help but smile. The girl now smiling back at me was anyone but Lilly. Lilly had ceased to exist. That girl I saw was nameless – fateless. And I liked her looks. There was a thin, olive-skinned face with large, dark-brown eyes, and I had seen this face so many times before, but it had changed – now, it was framed by short, messy black hair with red strains in it. I had cut and dyed my hair just a few hours ago in the restroom at the station.

Lilly had ceased to exist.

No chidish, proper clothes of a middle-class Japenese child. I wore a pair of torn hip-hugging jeans and a violet t-shirt with splashes of different colours on it (I had once worn it during an art workshop at school). I looked cool and tough, or so I thought.

A Lilly no more.

I couldn't help but continue to smile with glee. There I was, barely twelve years old, with clothes that covered the fact that I had ever been looked after by petty adoptive parents, sitting in a train with just my digimon partner for company.

I didn't know where I could eat or sleep tomorrow, but I didn't care. All I needed was with me – Eveemon was with me and I was free. "Oh yeah!" I said to myself and sank back into the seat. Never before I had felt so free, so careless, so safe! I wanted to dance, but that would have just caught the attention of the others passengers, and I couldn't risk being remembered. Even though I looked different now, people might still recognise me if they saw Lilly's picture on the news.

I had never been a very hungry child, but now I felt as if I was going to starve. Never before had I been so hungry! Hunger was burning in the pit of my stomach, and I knew Eveemon felt the same way. Two days ago, I had stolen bread from a shop, but that hadn't lasted for very long.

"What are we going to do?" Eveemon asked.

We were sitting by a river, resting in the late afternoon sun of Yokohama. A few students in uniforms and adults in suits walked by and paid us no attention – the half-starved child and it digital companion.

"I don't know." I had never known what I had wanted to do. Being a runaway turned out do be not as glorious as I had imagined. We were hungry, dirty, and my back was aching because I had been sleeping on the hard floor of a restroom the past two weeks. The search for food was our main occupation all day, it was like a holy quest we somtimes couldn't even accomplish, so we went to sleep with an empty belly.

We had seen a few other street kids and beggars of course, but none of them looked too friendly, so we had decided to stay away from them. We had each other, that was enough. I didn't allow myself to think any further than our next meal. The week before, I had stolen pastels from a paper shop and painted a picture onto the pavement near a mall in order to get money from passers-by. That had worked pretty good, but then, a gang of punks had approached me on the third day and I had fled.

All in all, life on the street was difficult, but not very exciting either. It was struggling to exist, but not the kind of adventure I had imagined. I had thought of myself as something like Buddha on his journey, searching for some kind of... eternal truth or the like. Now, I saw myself faced with a bunch of everyday-problems I couldn't even master properly. And I didn't only carry the responsibility for myself, but also for my digimon. I couldn't let myself go, I had to stand through every single day the best I could, trying to find food, a place to wash and a place to rest. For my best friend, who would never let me down either.

I stared up at the sky, gazing at the clouds above me. If I was a bird, if I was a cloud, if I was the blue in the sky...

"I've been thinking about it," Eveemon said carefully.

"What do you mean?"

"What are we going to do? I've been living with you long enough to know that this isn't the way you usually live in your world. Children need to go to school, so they learn and can get a job. That's what Wormmon said, too!"

"I don't want to go to school! I'm clever enough!" That was only partly true. I even missed school – more than my former family at least. I missed math and literature class and science and especially art... Still, there was no way I would ever go back! "Come on, Eveemon, we're together, that's all that counts!"

My digimon went silent again, and I knew it wasn't a good kind of silence. "Why did you run away? I mean, what did you think you was running away to?" she eventually asked.

"Nothing," I answered, though that wasn't really helpful. That was just what had been on my mind. "I just... I wanted to be away from Tai and Kari! I miss Ken and Izzy and Cody, but about the rest... Well, I don't belong to my family, you know that."

"We can find you a new one," my digimon suggested – and she meant it. It was an oblivious, easy solution.

"You can't just go and find a new family. A family is something you're bond to by blood and birth and all..."

"Why don't you search the family you're bond to by blood then?"

I was a twelve-year old prodigy, I had been suffering for years, I had fought evil digimon, I had nearly died one... And still, after all that, I had never seriously thought about my real family. If you could call it a family at all. Truth was, I had been scared – I had been afraid I would just get disappointed and hurt, so I had banished the thought of finding my birth parents from my mind. For my own good.

"I could...," I said slowly, "It would be a possibility. Yes."

"So, let's go!" My little digimon jumped onto its feet, eager to start our new quest.

"I don't know how to do it!"

"Don't you remember anything?"

Eveemon! "I was a baby, genius! I can't possilbly remember anything!"

"Ask Izzy or Ken! They can find out everything – and they would do it for you."

So, why did I start searching for my root? Honest answer: I didn't know what else to do. That was, maybe the safest reason to do it: If I did it out of boredom, I did it because I wanted nothing else but to be occupied, to take my mind off. It didn't matter what I found because I didn't care about it and therefore coudn't be hurt.

Maybe I should randomly mention that I am pathetic. And kind of mentally-disturbed...