- Shape Shifting Trials -

Tai looked over the assembled Digidestined with a bit of trepidation at what the main event for this meeting would bring. So far they were still only picking at the edges of their two foes to try and find somewhere they could cause some real damage, while also trying to figure out just how much damage they really could afford to cause to one side or the other.

"So we can hit the armies pretty hard actually," Davis, currently a Flamedramon, explained. "Upload retreats quickly when we hit hard enough, although they don't really have anything to take out so that isn't really hurting them much. The Emperor is easier since we can still take on his artificial digimon alright for now and his stuff is a lot more obvious."

"He's definitely working on making it so those forces can handle us," Izzy added as the field team's leader finished his clearly practiced summary. "We have identified a number of sites where it seems that improved versions are being developed that I think we should try to take out." The boy genius sighed and looked over at the captured production line still sitting in their base unused. "Which is better than what we can do about Upload. I'm getting closer to finding where they've got the Digi-Egg of Friendship, but other than that all of their stuff is highly redundant. They don't have any notable bases that they can't just move operations out of easily. The only good news is that it doesn't look like they are breaking their own firepower limitations anytime soon."

"Alright, I hate to say this, because it's a really odd thing for us to actually do, but can you guys write me up some reports on all of that?" Tai had to ask. "I've got news that the pokemon world is finally sending over a Champion to help, and I want something official looking to show them about what we're doing. I've already got a desk full of paperwork for you to put them on and everything," he complained to his team.

"Yeah, I think I can clean up my notes," Davis replied to the shock of the rest of the team. "I wanted to make sure I did it right," the armor digimon clarified at that reaction. "It has been helping with school too."

Izzy looked a lot more nervous about that request, which was exactly the opposite of what Tai had expected. "I can help them out with that," Joe cut in, while Gomamon was struggling to move around the good sized box they had brought from their internship. "Is our work next?"

"I hope so, I want to get this over with," the seal digimon grumbled as he opened the box to look inside. "You know what, I'm not waiting. Here they are, amulets to turn humans into digimon and digimon into humans." Gomamon then glared at Joe. "We had to test them ourselves."

Tai sighed about the whole idea. It honestly was the news he least wanted to deal with, but nobody had stopped the work on that project, and Davis' mom really did want Veemon to be a human most of the time. He still didn't like the fact that Kari had been asking him about if it was ready, and now would be able to get one. "Alright, but I want to see what they do first," he said, earning a bit of a glare from the pair.


Matt looked at the pair in front of them uneasily. It was someone who looked like Joe, and someone who looked like Gomamon, but the two of them were currently in exactly the wrong shape. He quite honestly did not want to see either of their faces with the expression typically found on their partner, and actually having to see a Gomamon as serious as Joe while someone identical to Joe was halfway goofing off somehow was worse than he expected. "Can he turn into the otter again instead?" he mumbled with a bit of a sigh. "That would be a bit less distracting."

Gabumon nodded next to him while the rest of the group went over and distributed the new objects, a different grey colored version of the pendant that the Digidestined of Reliability had taken to wearing. Veemon, or really Davey now, had already put one on and Matt wasn't sure how long it would be before the digimon was going to school.

"Are, are you going to try Matt?" his partner asked a bit uneasily, and Matt looked over at Gabumon to see the digimon nervously picking at his arm.

"Not if I don't have to," he replied quietly. It was the best he can say now, because there was a very real chance that they might need everyone fighting in order to take on entire armies like what they were up against. "Is something wrong?" he asked at his partner shifting a bit from that mediocre response.

"It's silly," Gabumon said with a sigh. "I just. If you did then you'd be a Gabumon too, right?"

"Yeah, I would." Matt was vaguely interested in knowing what it would be like, but nowhere near enough to actually want the answer. The thought of what it would be like to have fur was interesting, but he definitely didn't want to learn the reasons for T.K.'s complaints about keeping it clean firsthand.

"I'm just," Gabumon started before giving another sigh. "I don't want you to, because then you could take off your pelt and you'd know what I look like under mine."

Matt started to reassure his friend, and then what Gabumon meant caught up with him. Along with a realization that suddenly made him worry about something far different than what Gabumon was worried about. "You're wearing a pelt," he said dumbly, and Gabumon nodded with a bit of confusion. "You, you look different without the pelt." Matt was more than worried now, and from how his partner reacted it clearly showed on his face.

"Matt? Is something wrong with that?" the digimon asked louder than they had been talking, but a quick look revealed that it seemed that Tai heard enough to drag the rest of the group away so they could talk in peace.

"Gabu, I was thinking I would look like you," he tried to explain, suddenly unsure of himself. "Not, not whatever you look like without that, like you. I, don't know how to take looking like something other than what you do now." Matt couldn't keep himself from cringing at how he said that about his friend.

Gabumon didn't look at him unhappily though. "Well, maybe that just proves we are copies of each other then," the digimon said as he rubbed a hand along his pelt. "Because I don't want to look like that either."


Yolei frowned at the small grey pendant around her neck. She still wasn't quite sure why she had decided to take it. It was easy to see why Davis and Davey had them, Kari was easy enough to understand, and Patamon seemed just generally upset as he took one for reasons that still were probably better than her own.

The best reason she could think of was that Hawkmon hadn't taken one, didn't even get close to the box to look at them, and that actually hurt a bit. Davey and Armadillomon were both easily acting like brothers to their partners, but her own didn't seem to want that. Kari and T.K. had siblings before, and knew their partners for long time before learning that they were relatives. So, if Hawkmon didn't want to be human then maybe she should try to be a digimon more.

It still didn't sit well with her as a good reason, and in the digimon world she was barely being human already, but everyone else was getting along so well. They also were all at least considering the items.

"I'm not sure I'm actually going to use this," Davis commented, and given he was still a digimon when he said it that was fairly obvious. "I want to have it sure, but... Wait, what would happen if I tried it right now?"

"Do not do that," Joe sharply said, which was somehow more impactful while he was shaped like Gomamon. "We do not know what would happen, and I fairly obviously couldn't test that one for us."

It only took a moment to use her pendant to become a Hawkmon again. Yolei could see her brother react with clear shock, and honestly she was rather surprised herself. "I think he might want to put it down then," she said unhappily at how easily it had been to set it off, and Davis' hit the floor immediately after she finished speaking. "This feels, a bit better than last time," she noted as she tried to pin down why that was. "I can't tell if it isn't as bad because I know I can just turn back, or because I've been using armor evolutions so much." Both were fairly good options for why she didn't yet have the same discomfort.

"Being able to turn back when you want does sound better," Hawkmon said quietly, and Yolei thought that the way he looked at her was a step in the right direction at least.


Looking at the rather notable pile of paperwork he had only been partly joking about Tai decided that the reports he asked for the day before weren't working too well as a distraction from Kari spending the afternoon as a digimon again. She had told him that she wanted to figure out what was different when she was a BlackGatomon, but so far he had just seen three cats terrorizing the house instead of just two. Although that was helping to get Miko safely using her new powers.

"Watch out guys, we don't want to tire Wizardmon out," he called out as said formerly normal cat cut through the leg of a wooden chair. Tai had to flinch at the clattering sound of the chair falling, and he also made sure to keep his paperwork steady as it hit the table on the way down.

"It is good practice," Wizardmon quickly said as the former digimon moved to use his own magic powers to repair the chair. Again, for the third time just today. Miko even meowed apologetically about it.

Tai just shook his head and tried to go back to looking over the reports. Davis had actually surprised him with how well it covered things so that he could actually understand what the younger Digidestined meant, even if he was still having some issues with details or apparently with getting information on what his teammates had done. He realized that probably meant that he was going to need to have all of them making these things going forward to get the full picture of what was happening, and a quick look back at the mess his home was currently in was more than enough to include the digimon partners in that requirement. With what he had now, and with the page of advice from Matt's dad to compare to them, Tai was fairly sure he had a good handle on what to give the team for requirements.

Which is where Izzy's report came in, and Tai did not know what to think about the fact that Davis had done such a better job at actually making a comprehensible report. Tai had actually needed to refer back to the field leader's report in order to puzzle out just what topic the Digidestined of Knowledge had tried to cover. If there were teachers for digital world physics Izzy probably would have gotten an A+ for it, but since it was supposed to be for Tai to read it kind of was a C or maybe a D in practice. Worst of all was that the thing had been split into sections, but they all talked about things in other sections until it was such a complicated mess that Tai had actually rewritten it three different ways to get at bits of information he actually was looking for. He did not even know where to start with fixing that issue, but he was going to try handing back his own pages of notes with a long written complaint to stand as a record of how bad this was.

On a bright side, Matt's father had also given him a few other documents on possible monster sightings across the country and the world in addition to the advice on report writing. Most didn't appear to be real, but a number matched what Izzy had told him about other Digidestined. It honestly made him feel a bit better about if they were caught out in the open, as there were apparently lots of cases of people with costumes or props out there causing scenes. The worrying part was the copy of a government order to downplay any confirmed monster sightings, or at least make them seem to be fake. Shawn and Serperior apparently were a specific headache for that, as it specifically noted that a report should be made that a foreigner had been allowed to take his pet snake around by accident.

Compared to Izzy's, Joe's submission was perfectly fine to read, and even a bit better than Davis had managed. Which didn't help with the fact that Joe's report was a series of topics that Tai found uncomfortable at best, and worse tied directly into the thing he was trying to stop thinking about by reading these reports. There were summaries of the overall results of transforming Joe and Gomamon into humans and digimon and pokemon, along with the detailed data on what specifically had happened with each of those, and another report on the revised results from what they found out from the younger kids spending a week switched around. It gave a clear picture of how they could and couldn't safely change everyone's species, but it also meant that he had to deal with that being an option they were now regularly employing.

"Are you okay Tai?" Kari suddenly asked him, and he realized that he was just propping his head up while blankly looking at the paperwork. A quick look around revealed that everyone looked somewhat worried about him.

"Right, okay. You know what, I'm going to try this out," Tai said shaking his head. "Maybe being an Agumon will make things make more sense somehow."


Jun Motomiya was a friend, especially now that life had gotten a lot stranger, but that didn't mean Momoe wasn't uneasy about the other girl half dragging her to an obscure area of the closest large park for reasons she didn't really explain beforehand. She was mostly going along with that because it was a good distraction from what was happening at home.

In her opinion the Inoue family was currently going a bit crazier than the others, and she was aware that the two other options were both adding a new brother out of nowhere and turning into monsters all the time. Her father seemed split between wanting to know everything about the other worlds to get an advantage for their store, and wanting to not deal with the fact that there were problems going on too. Her mom was mostly just ignoring that anything had changed, and always stumbled when Yolei or Hawk had to talk about it. Chizuru and Mantarou were both working on the problems from different directions, with her older sister's attempts at making Hawk feel like family getting minimal success, and her older brother now stuck with trying to deal with an entire warehouse that fit inside a computer in the storeroom. All on top of her younger siblings actually fighting a war. Which left her just going to school and trying to figure out what she could do.

"Alright," Jun said as they reached a clearing that was hard to spot from outside of it, and then positioned the two of them so they could clearly view of all the paths leading there. "I managed to get my brothers and mom to agree to let me borrow this." She held up a small grey gemstone on a nice looking necklace, just like one that Momoe had seen just a little bit ago.

"Wait, why are you borrowing one of those?" she asked her friend now even more nervous than ever. "I thought they were for our brothers to change back and forth." She was actually worried that in her case the wrong brother would be using it to go between human and monster.

"Well it should work for anyone," Jun said way too cheerfully. "I want to know what digimon I'd be, see if I really am the same kind of lizard as my brothers. Like we were talking about before, how I'd be a lizard and you'd probably be a bird?"

"The other kids with siblings don't have the same kinds of monsters," Momoe cautioned her friend as Jun put the pendent on. "Is your mom really fine with you doing this?" she had to ask, because she still couldn't really see her friend's mother actually letting Davis transform as much as he apparently was, let alone Jun.

Jun actually looked nervous herself about that question. "Mom wants me to try before she does," the other girl admitted quietly. "She wants to see Davey's world, but doesn't think the Digidestined would agree unless she can protect herself."

That answer made a lot more sense, but was also a lot scarier than what she had been thinking before. "Yolei and Hawk don't talk about it much, do you know how bad things really are there?" she asked as her friend adjusted the necklace.

"It's bad," Jun replied with a cringe. "Davis talks about it some, but I don't think I really want to get into it right now." The other girl looked at her sadly. "I want to just have a bit of fun."

"Alright-" Momoe started, and then a terrible thought hit her. "Wait, you aren't thinking of having me try it too, are you?"

"Of course!" her friend replied with a slightly sinister smile. "Come on, it will be fun."

After a moment spent contemplating if she could get out of it Momoe sighed. "Alright, let's see what we end up." If anything it would be something that would help her understand Hawk and Yolei a bit better.

Jun's body then was covered with a glow, and shrank quite a bit while also changing shape quite a bit. The end result was mostly familiar, being like the pink bird monster that they had met, only blue with pink markings instead of the other way around. Admittedly that pink bird had been one of the older Digidestined that got swapped with their siblings. "BlueBiyomon?" the new digimon asked, which only confused Momoe as she had not remembered what that other monster had been called. "Why does my digimon species have to say that it's blue?"

"You ended up a bird," she said finding that this result was somehow more amusing than anything, or at least that the only feeling getting through was amusement. "I thought you said that was supposed to be me?" The angry look that earned her was still unnerving as it was mostly beak, and she was barely used to her little brother looking like that.

"Hmph, I don't mind being a bird," Jun said, although the girl then started carefully inspecting her new shape. "It is a little strange. Not really what I was expecting."

"That weird?" she asked as the idea that she was actually going to be experiencing it herself began to set in. Her friend wasn't human right now, and she'd agreed to try that too.

"It's, normal. Too normal," her currently digimon friend said carefully. "Like it came with everything to actually be one." Jun shook her head clearly unhappy with how she had said that. "Um, I kind of just know how it works already," the bird attempted to clarify, and demonstrated by flapping into the air slightly. "I think I can see why my brothers have gotten used to this so quickly."

The transformed girl spent a moment hovering around the area, clearly trying out flight, and then changed back to normal. "My turn now?" Momoe asked as her friend started taking off the pendant.

"Yep, I want to see if you end up a lizard instead too," Jun said happily, although with a bit of unease in her stance.

Momoe carefully took the item, and then the two of them spent a couple of minutes going over how it actually worked. Apparently Davis and Davey had been a lot more excited to talk about that with their family than Yolei or Hawk had been. Jun had heard the instructions secondhand, and was fairly sure that there were some details that had been missed, but since they had already seen that the instructions worked for going back and forth Momoe agreed that she could probably trust them.

The grey item hung from her neck ominously as she prepared herself. With a sigh she did as instructed to trigger it, and felt her body shrink and shift. Momoe had to blink as she realized what Jun had meant about it feeling too normal. She could clearly feel her new tail, and her entire shape had changed so much that she had been sure that she would feel weird. Jun silently watched as she actually inspected what she had become, apparently trying to figure something out. She had actually ended up a lizard, one with dark yellow scales, an odd pattern of orange ones on her stomach, and a single horn in the center of her head. Most of her body was hidden though, by a large brown feathered pelt that covered her almost entirely. That had white feathers around her head, and the top half of a beak covering her own muzzle. The strangest part of that was she knew that it was the pelt of an Aquilamon, and that she was a WingGabumon.

"You look like Matt's twin brother, only with a Hawkmon coat," Jun said with a bit of jealousy, but mostly confusion.

"It's from Aquilamon," Momoe replied a bit unhappy about how the other girl had gotten it wrong, despite how she knew that even her knowledge of that wasn't normal. "What I'd evolve into if I could," she said before she fully thought out what that statement actually meant. "Uh."

"No, I get it," Jun replied. "I didn't know what I'd turn into, but I did know that I could." The still human girl was still looking at her thoughtfully. "So what do you look like under those feathers?"

That produced an immediate reaction from her. "No way!" she found herself saying as she hugged the pelt closer to her body, horrified at the idea of her reptile form being exposed in a strange new way. Then she blinked at her own reaction. "Okay," she said slowly. "That's something I care about now." Momoe was surprised at just how much she cared about it, as she couldn't shake the horror enough to even consider showing her friend what she looked like under it.

"Alright, I won't pry," Jun accepted. "Actually that's probably a good thing to know if we talk to Matt's brother, or he turns into a digimon." The girl had a look like she wanted to try and pet Momoe, and that was just as awkward. "So, do you want to try and figure things out more, or can I try again?"

While she did want to try things out a bit more, her friend hadn't spent very long before letting her change. So she took the pendant off and handed it over to the other girl.

This did not result in her becoming a human again, and that left the two of them staring at the small necklace that apparently did not need to be worn to keep you a digimon.

"So, does this mean we can both turn into digimon with just one of these?" Jun asked with only a little bit of fear.

"I really hope it doesn't mean I'm stuck," Momoe complained, even as her friend actually used the item again. Which meant there were now no humans in their small clearing. "You couldn't have waited for me to try and turn back first?" she asked the BlueBiyomon.


Davey looked over the schoolwork with unease. "Are you sure I can do this?" he asked his mom. He had actually been spending a lot of his free time trying to work on the schoolwork that she had gotten around for him.

"I'm sure you can do it," she replied kindly, although their mother still looked sad about whatever she was reading. "It looks like we might need to wait a while though. We would need to say where you came from, and a lot of paperwork to go with that." She sighed sadly. "And we don't know who we can even talk to about that yet."

"Tai said he's looking into it," Davis noted while going over his own homework. He was human while doing it, although he had taken to studying as a Flamedramon, and even reading ahead in a couple of classes in that form. "But he did say that Agumon was mostly doing some home school stuff so far."

"Oh, that actually sounds like a good place to start," his mother agreed.

"So, are you really going to try being a digimon too?" Davey asked her cautiously as he checked the math for one of his answers again.

"When your sister gets back I'll see about it," she replied a bit more nervously. "It isn't that I don't trust what the two of you are saying about it, but I want to hear what it's like from her first."

"Yeah, that makes sense, mom," Davey said with a bit of disappointment. "I'm not even sure what you're going to do with being a digimon."

"I'm going to learn more about my sons," she replied kindly. "And try and help them save their other world if I can." She looked both of them in the eye and then sighed. "I want to see it, the digimon world."

The two brothers, currently both human, did not take that well. "Wait, mom it isn't safe there!" Davis said first, homework forgotten entirely.

"Yeah, there a lots of evil monsters that have taken everything over, and they can even tell when we go there," Davey added with a horrified look at the idea of her being in danger.

"I know," she countered strongly. "That is really why I want to try and be a monster, to see if that will help keep me safe there." She then looked embarrassed. "I spoke with Ms. Hida about it actually, and while she has an odd perspective on humanity, we agree that being able to help if you need it is important."

Davis and Davey looked at each other with considerable worry about that idea, as Cody's family wasn't actually human that often anymore.


Momoe could sort of see why the Hida family had stopped being a human family. She wasn't actually any stronger than before, but that said more about how much her strength had been increased by the pokemon world than that her digimon form was weak. The big thing was that she still felt normal, and being normal as a monster around another monster made the experience a lot easier to deal with.

Admittedly trying to figure out how to clean up the ruts they had made in the park was a major downside. "Maybe we should have waited to try our attacks?" Jun asked as the BlueBiyomon inspected the burned patch they had made on a nearby tree.

"I think maybe we should have," she somewhat sarcastically agreed, and then glared at the dirt getting into her pelt from trying to patch the larger burn spot in the grass. "Also we might want to get out of here before anyone spots this."

Her avian friend nodded uncertainly. "Think we should head home now?" Jun asked with a glance to the sky to judge how late it had gotten.

"Probably," Momoe agreed with a huff. "Do you want to change back first?" she asked, then after her friend did not respond for too long asked again. "Jun, do you want to turn back first?"

"Can, can we try and go home like this?" the BlueBiyomon asked flapping down to stand next to her. "To see what it is like for the normal digimon to be in this world?"

"They had humans around to help them do that," Momoe complained, well aware that it might result in her having to help Jun home as a monster anyway.

"It doesn't sound too hard to me," Jun argued.

"You can fly," the WingGabumon noted. "It is a lot easier to hide from humans in the sky than trying to walk around like this."

"You could pretend to be a little kid in a costume," her friend suggested unhelpfully.

"Yeah, a little kid with a tail," she said moving the exposed reptilian part of her body into her friend's view. The fact that was easy to do was still rather strange.

"Okay, well, is it okay if I don't turn back?" Jun asked a little predictably at that point. "I kind of don't want to be human we I get home, to show what I ended up without changing again."

Momoe considered that idea. Transforming at home was almost out of the question, but going home like this would possibly help her directly connect with Hawk. In fact that would probably be the only way she could easily talk to her younger brother while they were both digimon. "Alright, I'll try staying like this, but I want to keep the pendant until we get me home," she allowed. "That way I can get human quick if I need to."


Hawkmon heard tapping on the balcony door, and since he was the only one home he went over to try and figure out who or what was there. The answer turned out to be a pair of digimon he had never seen before. One looked like a Gabumon wearing another Hawkmon's feathers, while the other was a blue version of Biyomon that had clearly lifted the other digimon to the ledge.

"Alright, who are you two and how did you get here?" he asked tiredly as he opened the glass door to let them inside before someone spotted them.

"Jun convinced me to stay like this on the way home," the Gabumon like digimon said with a voice that was fairly familiar.

"It worked didn't it, Momoe?" the bird asked, and Hawkmon realized that she had one of the new grey pendants. Which meant that the lizard monster was one of Yolei's sisters.

"Why are you both running around town as digimon?" he asked, utterly exasperated even though the situation had just begun.

"Because I want to be a digimon when I get home," the bird monster said sounding half proud of that statement.

Hawkmon didn't think that was a good reason, and Momoe seemed to shift nervously at the look he gave the pair of them. "Really?"

"Yeah," the other bird strongly said, leaning closer. "It means I get a chance to see what the world looks like to you." Jun then looked over at Yolei's sister. "I think I will head home now, you okay, Momoe?"

"I think I'll be fine," the reptile digimon replied with a nod, and then did not stop the blue bird from leaving before turning her back. So Hawkmon had to just fume as one digimon just left into the open again without restoring her.

"Yolei took her pendant with her. Mantarou convinced her to let him try it," he informed the remaining digimon darkly. "You will need to wait to change back now. I hope you weren't planning on being human anytime soon."

"I thought I wouldn't have the courage to change again after I got home," Momoe responded while giving him a serious look. "And I wanted to spend some time as a digimon with my little brother." She then looked a little nervous. "I kind of wish I'd tried to change again when I got home instead though. This city really isn't the place to be monsters in."

Now Hawkmon felt a bit bad about how he said that. "I can't imagine trying," he said trying to sound kinder.

"Should have convinced her," she agreed. "So, I ended up a WingGabumon. Any idea why I'd have an Aquilamon pelt instead of a wolf monster one?"

"Aquilamon," he said thoughtfully. "It feels familiar but I don't know what one is." He looked her over again. "Perhaps, it might be what we both would evolve into? That seems rather strange if true."

"I think I will at least," the WingGabumon agreed looking a bit relieved. "What's that like?" She actually sounded rather interested, and that worried Hawkmon.

"Momoe," he said instead of answering, and then stopped unsure of how to even start discussing whatever was happening.

"Just because we aren't doing a good job of showing it doesn't mean we don't think you're family," she said quietly before he could figure it out. She chuckled at her own statement. "Actually, it might just show how we are. Please, just let me try?"

He sighed, because this was apparently just the latest in a series of bad ideas that she had came up with today. "Okay, I'll try and explain what I know about evolution, but Yolei could probably explain it better to you."