- Base Building -
"So, this is the place huh?" Tai asked looking over the rather plain and unnaturally basic looking office building that had clearly been partially modified to house a lot of people trying to live there. All of the Digidestined were present to look it over, with the exception of Mimi and Palmon who were both still on their trip to the pokemon world. Cody, Davis, and surprisingly enough Joe were all currently various kinds of monsters which was slightly odd to the leader of the group.
"One of the refugee digital worlds that DSS was setting up for the digimon," Izzy confirmed with a sigh. "They're giving it to us and helping us set it up somewhere safe in our world. Do you think the TV station is really a good place for that?"
"My dad is usually there when anything would happen to it, and with how badly he wants something to do to help he might end up basically guarding it while he's at work," Matt replied with a sigh of his own. "I don't suppose we could bring my band in on this?" he asked at least half jokingly. "They want to know why I said I might have issues making practice, and maybe having somewhere in this place to do that would help make up for this whole mess."
"If we're making suggestions, can I ask for a pool?" Joe asked in a tone that the group usually heard from Gomamon, who looked simply tired instead of worried about his brother's joke. The younger kids along with Sora all seemed used to this, and also with the oldest Digidestined's current otter like form, so Tai was fairly sure this had become typical. He had no idea what to do with a monster version of Joe being typical. "If this is my life now I at least want somewhere to relax when I'm not learning about how to deal with alien diseases we now just might catch," he added at the looks that his question earned him, the strange yellow part of his body inflating a bit.
"Do you mean digimon diseases, or pokemon diseases?" Davis asked, scratching the back of his head with the metal claws of his Flamedramon form. Tai was honestly a bit impressed with that question, as at this point both of those were represented by Digidestined he felt should be human. Which was Joe and Davis actually, as he was not counting Cody among the 'should be' group, as the kid apparently wasn't human to start with.
Although Joe looked incredibly disappointed by that question. "Well, now I have to do both," the otter like Digidestined complained more typically as his yellow body part entirely deflated.
"Anyway, this place should work fine," Izzy said to get the discussion back on track. "It will take me a bit to get everything I need up and running, and even longer for everything I want on top of that, but we should have our own base of operations by the end of the week."
"That should help with things going forward. It will be a lot easier to be taken seriously with our own place," Tai informed the group. "Unfortunately we need to work on the next issue, the war in the digital world," he added tiredly. "Our first priority, before anything else now, is to find out if either side is working for or with Myotismon."
"Gazimon is our best bet there," Gatomon said bluntly. "He's been working on the Dark Network longer than I've been alive, if there is anyone left who would know what Myotismon's devices look like it is him."
"If it is particularly closely connected to Myotismon I might be able to sense it," Wizardmon added, earning himself an unhappy glare from both of Tai's sisters. "I still need training to use all of my... new powers, but I had focused a lot on his nature to try and tell you about this problem in the first place." The fact that the revived digimon was still a ghost, just a sort of living one, was something that all of them were trying to avoid thinking about.
"We have found a target to take them to," Tai agreed with his digimon sister. "One of the Emperor's smaller factories. It isn't one where he's working on those artificial digimon right now, but it also isn't one of his new ones. That means the place shouldn't be too heavily defended." He looked specifically at Davis, and hoped that the younger boy was up for this kind of fight. "We want to clear out the Emperor's forces, including the Control Spire, and then while we're evacuating any of the digimon he enslaved Gazimon and A-0 will go over the base. Then when we're done with that we destroy the place."
Yolei looked a little intimidated by his speech, while Cody and the older Digidestined simply took the idea seriously. "Are we going to see if we can use anything he has there?" Davis asked with a thoughtful look on his muzzle. "If we can make use of the stuff Upload is making, maybe there is some of the Emperor's that can be useful too."
That was a good point, but Tai didn't know the answer, so he turned to Izzy. "You would need to hold the place longer for me to go over what they have, and I'd need to go myself," the team's tech expert said seriously. "I don't know what exactly the Emperor has there, probably just Control Spire and Dark Ring production. I don't know what we could do with those, but the Dark Rings are being used to avoid the negative effects of the Spires." The young genius started to mumble, but that was enough information for Tai.
"It's up to you Davis, if you can handle the extra time then go ahead," he told the young leader.
Who made him proud by taking a moment to think, and then asking. "What do you guys think, can we handle holding the Emperor off for a while?"
"I'm going to end up a digimon the whole time, aren't I?" Yolei asked, and Tai had to keep his expression neutral about how she seemed to think that was the situation so quickly. "Fine, if I'm going to be a bug anyway might as well make it a full day."
"We might have some things our mom wants us to try out as Digmon," Cody said while looking at his brother, and it was still odd to see someone who looked so much like their partner that it was easy to forget which was which. "Making walls and other ways of altering the terrain. Having somewhere to defend for a while would give us a chance." Everyone got fairly quiet at that casual declaration of earthmoving, as if it was just something to do to pass the time. It had become fairly common to hear from the inhabitants of the pokemon world, and that only made one of their group saying it more unnerving.
"I think we're fine with staying a bit longer for that," T.K. agreed then turned to look at the Flamedramon. "Good idea Davis."
"Well well well," a dark voice rumbled soon after they had managed to reach the site of the base. The large dark structures were surrounded by enslaved digimon, raw materials taken from the digital world, and partially completed Control Spires. At the far edge of the clearing was a massive black scaled harsh looking Tyranomon. She had a more complex Dark Ring around her neck, and behind her following closely was a good sized force of the Emperor's new artificial digimon. "Looks like we do have some attackers." She chuckled darkly. "I'll give you Digidestined a choice, leave now and focus on the damn crystals, and I won't have to destroy you all."
"Yeah right, sure, we'll just roll over and let you enslave the digimon world," Yolei shot back from the air above the battlefield. She then dived down to help the others with the enslaved digimon by slashing through their Dark Rings.
"Careful," the group's white furred Nefertimon cautioned the group. "I recognize her, and she wasn't a slacker when it came to fighting."
The black coated mirror of the sphinx digimon shot a glance at the newly arrived enemies. "So we need to take out that Dark Ring?" Kari asked in a way that was almost an order.
That turned out to be easier said than done, as between moving the enslaved digimon out of the way, destroying the black featureless digimon, and keeping away from the overwhelmingly powerful slashes and fireballs of the Dark Tyranomon they could barely focus on the oversized device.
The Flamedramon and Pegasusmon were all focused on removing the easier to hit Dark Rings of the factory workers. Davis and Davey were intercepting any stray attacks that got close to the freed ones, and moving them to a sheltered location behind one of the buildings. T.K. and his digimon brother were taking advantage of the wide area of their attacks to hit multiple rings at once in order to clear that threat faster.
The Hida brothers started their action by dropping the ground out from under a large part of the artificial digimon. From there they began to shatter them as fast as they could, dropping more in as the pit emptied. This worked for the most part, as the simpleminded creatures clearly found something attacking them directly to be the best threat to take on themselves.
That left the girls of the team, Hawk, and the snake twins to try and deal with Dark Tyranomon. The Grass types were focused on attempting to entangle the dinosaur digimon, but she was proving a bit more capable than usual at breaking free of their strong vines. The Kamiya girls were mostly just trying to make the enemy digimon move in a way that would leave the Dark Ring open for attack. Yolei was darting in and out of melee range with Dark Tyranomon, making what were so far ineffective slashes at the device.
Halsemon had been both helping to two Nefertimon try and pin down their foe, and trying to get a shot at the Ring when his sister wasn't in the way, but after his third pass he huffed with annoyance. "I'm going to try taking down the Spire, maybe that will be enough," he informed the group and made his way to the last of what had been a small collection of fully assembled towers. They had managed to destroy most of them before these enemies had arrived, but it had seemed like too many artificial enemies to risk it after Dark Tyranomon's demand.
He then proceeded to blast the base of the tower with beams of energy, which in the short term had the effect of making things harder for Davis' group as they now had a collection of entirely freed digimon all breaking for cover without any organization. Dark Tyranomon, however, if anything just looked annoyed at the destruction. "Try the Ring," T.K. shouted a bit unhappily. "Maybe hers can work without a Spire."
Yolei was motivated enough by that plan's failure to risk a quick strike on the ring using her stinger directly. This cracked the hardened band, but didn't destroy it outright. "Damn, there are tough ones now?" she complained, then darted out of the way of a claw that interrupted her second attempt. Her third was a success, and she smugly flew away to a short distance to see the effect.
"Hmph, you're all just breaking all of my stuff now," Dark Tyranomon complained, although she had been more and more focused on Gatomon's armor form. "But that's not enough to put me out of the fight."
"So, you're actually just working for the bad guys again," the team's white Nefertimon said with disappointment.
"And you are Gatomon," the digital dinosaur replied with a serious tone that had been missing from her previous statements. "Tell me then, where is my brother?" she raged. "Why should I listen to his killers?" their enemy roared.
"Myotismon killed him!" Gatomon shot back. While this explained the situation a bit better to the older Digidestined, it only served to further confuse the new team and their pokemon world allies.
"Ah, so you finally did betray Myotismon," Dark Tyranomon rumbled, suddenly sounding thoughtful, but at the same time the mighty digimon swept her tail to try and hit Serperior and Yolei in a wide movement. "I should have known you'd lead him to death," she said, then vanished in a black flash that somewhat resembled the Upload method of retreat. This left the battlefield silent for a moment, as the team's two Digmon had just finished taking out the Emperor's artificial digimon before the leader of the enemies vanished.
The white Nefertimon's eyes were left wide and horrified, and her sister quickly moved closer to check on the digimon. "Gato?" Kari asked quietly.
"We should make sure the place is safe," the other sphinx digimon said in a bit of a daze. "Just in case she comes back with reinforcements."
"Boss man! What the hell was that?" Dark Tyranomon roared as she suddenly found herself back at base.
"The Digidestined had taken out all of the constructs and cleared the slaves," the Digimon Emperor replied with calm reassurance that just made her more angry. "They would have been able to focus on you with all of their forces."
"I know how strong I am, Emperor," she spat at him. "I'd have a good chance against an Ultimate if you needed one beat." Her eyes drifted to the doorway to the 'advisors' chambers. "They didn't have enough strength to take me down."
"But they did have enough to possibly injure you," Wormmon cut in with a bland tone she recognized as angry. "And we can not afford to lose you, even for just a couple of days."
"The facility they were attacking was far less valuable than you are," the Emperor confirmed, and it was the closest he had gotten to saying he cared yet. Dark Tyranomon was actually a little impressed, as that was a good effort for a leader of the dark forces. "I will need to further refine this recovery program quite a bit to ensure your value is not lost in future battles. Scans of the Hacker's method are proving insufficient."
"Next time, warn me that you will be pulling me out before sending me to a place," she complained, but simply in a huff instead of another roar.
"That is the other reason I recovered you," the Emperor said grandly, but with that slightly distant look that reminded her of her brother before a fight. "I need more examples of the Hacker's devices, and the constructs you used this time were adequate for deployment. We have another force ready to go and a target near our new force's construction site that should be simple enough to reach today."
Dark Tyranomon shook her head with a grim smile. "Boss man, if you had a different place you want me to attack more, you just needed to tell me," she rumbled.
"We probably could have stripped the place and found a use for all of the stuff we got at some point," Gazimon said to Izzy as the two of them worked on the recovered main computer of the factory inside the Digidestined's new base. It was decided that extracting the key components instead of checking things while at the location was safer with the threat of new enemies showing up with their more vulnerable research members on the ground.
"Yeah, but I'm not sure we have time to check all of it to make sure that's safe," the Digidestined of Knowledge noted. "How's the check for any hint of Myotismon going?"
"Well, now that I know he's still an option I can say that it is his work, although we did meet a former minion of his too so that might throw it off," the rabbit monster replied with a grim chuckle. "Still, I think enough of the towers look like his personal work that we can confirm that the Emperor is just another of his pawns." The digimon frowned and huffed. "Although, it does look like someone higher up the totem pole might be in the game now. They sent some of the construction information for those artificial digimon, and it is barely anything like the stuff the Emperor is using."
"They are definitely an active project, while the Emperor's gear so far has been clearly made for him by someone else," A-0 added as it looked over the single complete assembly line they decided to recover. "Lots of available options, but he's only set up to use a subset of them, while these new monsters are purpose made, but not fine tuned for their current goal."
"They were made from something else that was better," Gazimon corrected the Porygon-2. "I can see signs of how these construct digimon were supposed to be created, and it was a handcrafted sort of thing. I've had to try and do this kind of thing quite a bit, mostly when someone who was really good at getting some impressive thing done fast got themselves killed, and we needed to keep making new ones to keep the boss happy." He chuckled. "Actually, that was kind of what we did for all of the stuff Datamon made himself. Surprisingly enough for a guy who loved having machines to do things he was too much of a hands on mon to just automate the useful stuff." This anecdote led to a more in depth discussion of what their construct enemies' original form might have been based on the digimon's experience and the available construction equipment.
This was what Tai and Yolei found when the leader of the Digidestined finished listening to the younger kid's explanation of the battle's events. "So, is there a reason you're still a digimon?" he asked the Flybeemon to get that conversation out of the way before dealing with the technological mess ahead of them.
"I don't want to have to change back and forth if they are tracking this stuff somehow," the younger Digidestined complained. "They were teleporting after all, and the worst part of changing is right after you turn back and realize all the odd stuff you did." She shrugged. "I might as well avoid freaking out about spending most of the afternoon as a bug until we know we're done with fighting."
"You know, you new kids might not have to deal with some of the survival problems we had before, but I have to admit we never had to consider what species we wanted to be," Tai admitted shaking his head. "Not to mention we always had the hope that things would get back to normal if we just managed to finally defeat enough bad guys."
Yolei scratched her head nervously at that, producing a sharp screeching sound from her metal claws on her armored head. "My older brother actually asked me about changing into a digimon," she quietly said. "Our dad is getting another of these DSS digital worlds for us to use as a warehouse, and Mantarou ended up in charge of it. He's not sure if being a digimon would help with that or not, and I don't know what to tell him."
"I don't really see how being a digimon would help with that," the Digidestined of Courage said dubiously. "I mean, we already got super strength from this mess when we're human. There isn't really anything else that you can do like that for moving stuff around."
"I know, but I think he's using it as an excuse to try this out," Yolei said pointing at herself. "So I'm trying to get a good enough handle to just tell him about being like this instead. Although given how my other brother doesn't want to be human again ever, and I'm the only one of us new kids who doesn't like being a monster better I'm not sure it will work." She looked away from him thoughtfully as they finally reached earshot of the trio of tech heads. "Maybe Davey would be able to help."
Tai turned back to the captured equipment and let her think about that on her own, having realized that his attempt to distract himself from whatever bad news his tech guy was going to give him had somehow resulted in a conversation he wanted to deal with even less. "Hey Izzy, how's it going?" he asked hopefully.
"We've confirmed that Myotismon is somehow behind the Digimon Emperor," the boy genius dryly replied.
"The good news is that I have some things I might be able to do for the new kids now that you've got this stuff," Gazimon added thoughtfully. "For one thing I think I can re-create the control systems so they can hijack his Dark Rings."
"I don't think we want to enslave the digimon ourselves," Yolei harshly countered.
"I can set it to just release their minds by default, basically make it disable that part of them whenever you get close," the rabbit monster clarified, and then looked darkly at the machines. "Also, I think there is one digimon we know of now that you would like to make get rid of her own Ring. I should be able to add a control so you can try and take that Dark Tyranomon over if we see her again."
Gatomon was still sitting awake when Wizardmon quietly floated past well after dark. Admittedly he was also awake, but he was dealing with the fact that his new nature seemed to like the dark of the night much more than daylight, and so he had to work to not end up nocturnal. "Shouldn't you be getting some sleep?" he asked in a slightly joking tone, and expecting to hear the same question thrown back at him by his old friend.
"Should we have tried to get the others on our side against Myotismon?" she asked instead, far too quietly as she curled in on herself.
"The digimon you found for him?" the Ghost typed former digimon asked, remembering that she had faced the rather dangerous sister of one of those digimon today.
Gatomon nodded. "Dark Tyranomon thought I'd turned her brother against Myotismon, and that's why he died," she said in the same quiet tone. "And now I can't help but wonder if we should have tried that. Those digimon were only in this world because of me, and..." She trailed off looking at him brokenly.
"And none of us that died here were able to reincarnate normally for digimon," Wizardmon admitted reluctantly. "Gatomon, I hate to say it, but you didn't exactly pick the nicest digimon."
"I picked you," she countered. "I picked that Dark Tyranomon, and whenever he wasn't under Myotismon's control he was a lot nicer than his sister."
"Gatomon, I followed you," the mage monster said sharply. "I, I might have done things to protect Kari and the other Digidestined, but I did them because that would help you. We both know that my motives were some of the better ones of that group."
"I thought of some of them as cannon fodder," Gatomon said more to herself than him. "Extra bodies to get in the way while the bigger ones actually fought our enemies." She finally looked at him. "And, you haven't mentioned trying to bring any of them back. Like we did with you."
"I still need more lessons on being a Ghost, Gatomon," Wizardmon said with a depressed tone of his own. "But the big problem there is we would need to find them, if there was even enough of them left to find. It took years for me to get to the point where I was annoying people every few weeks, and that was because I was motivated by Myotismon's stronger spirit."
They were quiet for a time, deep in thought about what could have been.
"I just wish we'd had more time back then," the cat monster said as she finally uncurled. "I keep thinking of how we could have done it differently, and there just wasn't any time for me to track any of them down." She shook her head. "But that doesn't help me sleep any."
"I'm afraid that I am specifically forbidden from trying to hypnotize you to sleep until I'm better trained," the new Ghost sighed.
"We actually tried that before, didn't we?" Gatomon asked fondly.
"It made your nightmares worse," Wizardmon grumbled and made to float off. "Come on, let's both try the normal way again."
"Maybe try the pokeballs?" his friend suggested as she joined him. "I haven't tried one yet, but Agumon says they work pretty well. At least, he said his isn't as cramped as the bed Tai got him."
