Chapter 7: A Day in the Life
"You sure you guys don't want to sleep over?" Max asked. "We could fit you guys in the living area."
"Nah, it's getting late," Jen responded. "Veemon's had a pretty long day…"
Veemon rubbed his eyes in apparent agreement. "I need… bed… gah."
Alexis smiled down at Penguinmon. "I guess we should get some rest too, huh?"
Penguinmon flapped her wings positively.
"Seeya Jen!" Jared waved goodbye to Jen and Veemon as he, his partner, Max, and Alexis took off in the opposite direction.
"That was fun, eh Veemon?" Jen asked her Digimon excitedly.
Veemon was barely awake in the night air. A clock on a nearby building read 22:15. "Yeah… you can say that again…"
The two remained silent for the rest of the walk home until Jen came to her apartment doorstep. The door was unlocked. Her mom must have been home. The two stepped in, and Veemon tried to keep quiet.
Jen walked into her living room and slumped into the couch. Her parents must have been in bed already, and she quickly fell asleep on the couch with Veemon on the floor next to it.
- - -
"You know, Max," Alexis attempted conversation back in their room with her brother, "I kinda miss my Digimon game."
"What's wrong with Penguinmon?" Max wondered, gathering his pajamas for bed. "She's pretty cool."
Penguinmon giggled. "Yay!"
"It's not that anything's wrong with her…" Alexis examined her D-Cell. "It's just that we have more responsibility when we have real Digimon."
"You were complaining for a while about not getting a real Digimon," Candlemon noted. "Do you regret that already, you goofball?"
Alexis shrugged and smiled. "I guess not. Penguinmon will be fun to have around!"
Penguinmon flapped her wings in joy. "Penguinmon digivolve to… MegaPenguindramon!"
"Hehe, right on!"
Max took his clothes into the bathroom while Alexis quickly changed into some light blue pajamas and laid down on the bottom bunk of the bed. Penguinmon leaped onto it as well.
"Penguinmon, you're too hyper for Alexis right now," Candlemon joked, hovering up to Max's top bunk. "She needs to sleep!"
"Don't worry, Penguinmon," Alexis whispered, "Candlemon's just a party pooper. We'll have our own fun tonight!"
Penguinmon squawked in overexcitement yet again.
"But you gotta be quiet!" she shushed her.
Max walked into the room with red pajamas on and climbed up to the top bunk. "G'night, sis…"
"Good night, Max!" Alexis and Penguinmon giggled, but Max paid no attention to them.
- - -
Max yawned and sat up in his bed. Candlemon wasn't in front of him, strangely, and neither Alexis nor Penguinmon were on the bottom bunk. The alarm clock on his computer desk said 7:25.
"She beat me to waking up again?"
Max hobbled out of his bed, half awake, and walked out to the kitchen. He noticed his mother, a fair, brunette woman with medium-length hair and a fuchsia tinted apron, cooking eggs over the stove. His sister, and surprisingly, the two Digimon, were sitting at the table.
"WHA?! Candlemon! What'd I tell you about keeping this a secret?"
Mrs. Miyotama laughed. "It's okay, Max. I've been informed about the Digimon thing."
"But… Commander Yamas--"
His mom interrupted, "You go ahead and take care of your little school project. As long as it gets your grades up."
Alexis winked.
Max smiled and lied, "Whew, for a moment I thought you weren't going to let me keep my paper maché monster at home!" He sat down next to his sister at the table and whispered, "I didn't think you'd have the guts to use our little excuse. I was prepared for the worst."
"You can count on me," Alexis whispered back with a corny thumbs up. Mrs. Miyotama flopped a few eggs sunny-side up onto two plates and placed them in front of Max and Alexis.
- - -
Jen woke up to the sound of a door slamming. She jerked herself upward and looked around, noticing a nearby clock that read 11:34. Almost noon!
"Crap," Jen sighed. "Late for school." Looking down over the side of the couch, she noticed Veemon wasn't there. She noticed her bedroom door closed and was prompted to go in there and look for him.
Jen stepped in her room and saw Veemon sleeping soundly on her bed. She smiled and walked over to the bed and shook him awake. "Hey, who said you could sleep up here?"
Veemon awoke, "J.. Jen? You should be at school, shouldn't you?"
"Don't worry about that. Why'd you sleep in here?"
"I didn't want your parents to see me…" Veemon rubbed his eyes and got off the bed.
"Wow, I really didn't know you were that thoughtful," Jen chuckled. "Well, I guess school can go a day without me. It's just Friday, after all, and my parents won't know. They're at work by now."
"Friday must mean a fun day, huh?"
"Haha. I have a feeling it won't be all fun today."
- - -
"So you're not coming to school?" Max asked Jen over the phone at lunch time. The cafeteria was filled with kids chattering, and Max was at a table where that was no exception. "That's what you get for oversleeping."
"It's no big deal. I haven't had a sick day in a few weeks," she chuckled. "I can still meet you outside at the park afterwards if you want."
"That's a good plan. Any word on Uyeda yet?" The loud noise of the high school kids in the lunch room made it hard to hear his friend.
"No… I'm definitely worried. You think some evil Digimon snatched him or something?"
"Ha, I doubt that. Why Uyeda of all people? He was new to the city this year, he's the last person they'd come after."
Jen's voice laughed. "You're right. Well, I'll see you after school, Veemon's playing DDR in the living room."
"Sounds like regular Veemon to me. Alright, later." He smiled and hung up, turning back to the kids at his table to chat.
- - -
"You done out there, buddy?" Jen walked out of her bedroom and saw Veemon, almost exhausted, finishing up on a Dance Dance Revolution song.
"Yeah… this is… hard, Jen!" Veemon panted. "Can we go… do something else?"
"We can go up to the park later and see Max and the others. They'll have just gotten out of class, so they probably won't have their Digimon. But you'll still have fun, right?"
Veemon nodded, almost as if he didn't care, and looked back at the PS2 as they walked out the front door. "Are all video games like that…?"
"No, a lot of them require you to just sit down and press buttons."
"That's boring, Jen."
Boredom ceased when Jen's D-Cell began to ring. Reluctantly, as she exited her apartment, she answered. "Hello?… Oh, hey Commander."
- - -
Commander Yamasaki sat at his office desk with a microphone headset on his head. "Greetings, Jen."
"Why are you calling me right now? If I weren't home from school I'd be in big trouble."
"Your friend Max called me and told me around twelve."
"Oh."
"Which is very convenient for me. I need you to come down to my office. Don't worry, it's relatively close to your house. Care for an address?"
"Okay. Lemme get a pen."
- - -
Jen wrote down a few notes on a small sheet of paper. "Okay, thanks, Commander. See you in a bit." She hung up.
""What does he need, Jen?" Veemon wondered.
"He needs us to go to his office… which, strangely, isn't at the police station. He says it's close to the McDonald's we were at yesterday."
"That's cool." Veemon seemed very nonchalant as the pair walked down the apartment steps.
"You like the Real World much?"
"It's pretty interesting, actually. And fun! You and Max and the others are great friends."
"Well, good then… 'cause I've changed my mind about you over the past day."
"You don't hate me anymore?"
"I will admit, you're kind of a burden…" Jen paused, "but I could get used to having someone as energetic as you around my house."
The two were silent for the rest of the walk. Reasons why they didn't communicate on long strides like this were unknown to either of them. It easily could have just been that their physical language was more prominent than their verbal. Like a real Digimon's human partner should be.
Arriving at the office building, Jen had a rather hypnotized look on her face. "What's up?" Veemon asked. "Are we gonna go in?"
Jen looked down at her piece of paper and back up at the building a couple of times. "Yeah, it's just…" she paused and gazed at the small structure, "this building was never here before. It's always been a blank lot here with a bunch of dead grass."
"I've seen this building before," Veemon confirmed, "I'm sure it's always been here, Jen."
"But I've lived in Osaka my whole life. I guess maybe it's easy to forget small things in this huge city. Wanna go in?"
"Well, duh. The Commander dude obviously wants us." The pair nodded to each other and walked through the building's front doors. The secretary room was empty as could be, so they traveled down the very bland looking hallway with plain white walls, checking each room along the way. Commander Yamasaki wasn't in any of them.
Jen and Veemon had made it to the end of the hallway, and there was no sign of anybody in the building. Just a big red button on a wall. "Where could he be?" Jen asked, not expecting any reasonable answer. "And why is there a button here?"
Veemon walked to the end of the hall and stared at the floor. A large metal slate in the shape of a square lay where he was looking. "I think he might be in the floor, Jen."
Jen approached the plate and kicked it with the heel of her shoe. "That's called a basement, if there's anything under here. And how the hell do I open it?" She kicked it again. This time, the door collapsed inward and Jen fell through unexpectedly. She screamed the whole way down the dark chute.
Veemon stared down the hole in a daze for a moment. He was slightly intrigued by the fact that there were, as far as he knew, random holes in the ground in the Real World, even in the emptiest and blandest of hallways in abandoned office buildings. Veemon shook himself out of his daydream and, rather stupidly, leaped into the hole himself head first. "I'll save you, Jen!"
