- The Calm -
Akira followed his grandfather to work reluctantly. Without his band he didn't really have an excuse not to help the old man with something, and after hearing that Yutaka's mom had been arrested he really didn't expect the band to be able to fix its problems.
"So, how is your monster investigation work going?" he asked a bit nervously. He had not talked with Matt about anything recently other than Yutaka's disappearance, and all he'd heard since was that the drummer was 'going to be okay'. He didn't want to know why that wasn't 'is okay'. Telling his gramps about any of Matt's real situation would have definitely been betraying the kid, and given they had an army of monsters that had seemed like a very bad idea.
"Well, we're still adapting to a big change that came out of nowhere, but it does look like things are getting better," his grandfather replied with a smirk. They soon arrived at the office, and Akira prepared for another day of mostly looking at fairly nice monster drawings.
Instead the doorway opened to Matt's secret base, and there was a tiny dinosaur sitting on a desk with the receptionist's nametag set on it. "Yes, I know I shouldn't be like this, Kazuo," the dinosaur complained. "We're still working out if it is worth hiding anything given this place is where they end up after getting into fights."
"Gramps, why does your office lead to Matt's secret base?" Akira managed to ask as he found himself unable to look away from the small impossible creature in front of him.
"Taichi Yagami took us over," his grandfather joked. "Well, more he's given us something to actually do, I don't think he's officially in charge yet."
"Tai's my age," he grumbled with a bit of worry as some of his grandfather's coworkers arrived, along with Matt's friends. Kichiro Ono was a nice guy who could draw really well, but Akira didn't really want to see how that tied into real monsters. Ryuuji Kubo was talking with Tai, and it was quite possibly true that his grandfather's boss was working for the other kid now from how things looked. Matt wasn't there yet, but the redhead Matt liked was looking at the dinosaur with regret, and that made the bass player worry about just what was happening.
"Why do you think you're here?" the dinosaur asked with a bit of a huff as she struggled to get a small necklace on. Then she suddenly turned into the monster team receptionist. "Apparently kids work out alright for monster stuff."
"He's been worried about Yutaka," his grandfather noted quietly, and Akira was suddenly very worried about his friend. "And since he already knew about this place I figured the kid could use another friend right now."
"He's here?" Akira asked quickly. "That was some monster thing?" He realized with a bit of horror that the drummer had mentioned something like that with the past life stuff.
"I can take him there," the 'Digidestined' girl said. "We brought his drum set here to give him something to do," she added a bit sadly. She then led him up the nearby stairwell again, and he was slightly relieved to hear somewhat familiar drumming a short way off. "I'm actually surprised how good he sounds," the girl confusingly added as they got closer.
Then Akira realized exactly what she meant as he spotted a bright red werewolf playing the drums while Takashi worked on setting up a keyboard. "I have heard too many stories from my grandfather about this sort of thing being fake for this," he said aloud to attract their attention and try and hide his own nervous reaction. "Are you planning on going on stage like that?"
Yutaka, and the wolf monster had to be him, stopped playing to glare at him, and the crazy look the wolf's eye color held was a bit intimidating. "Very funny," the canine grumbled in a changed but still recognizable voice. "Like that would work."
"Seriously, he got called in to look at a concert where the drummer was just wearing a really nice costume once," he admitted easily, still amused by that event. "I honestly think we could pull it off."
"That's honestly half of how we're keeping this whole mess quiet right now," the girl complained.
"You can not be serious," Tai said even as he looked over the pile of documents Ryuuji had handed him to punctuate the man's insane statement.
"Champion Jane set off a bit of madness, boss," the adult in his office said with a bit of amusement. "The government was already uneasy with her first reports, and this past life incident has proven that your group is able to get ours working better. If it makes you feel any better I'm fairly sure she's also got them second guessing the ages we gave for all of you."
"They put me in charge of your group," the Digidestined of Courage repeated. He did not feel very courageous as he looked at the official papers naming him as the new head of the MRT, and the files below apparently made to transfer all of the Digidestined to be part of that group. "They actually just want me take over you guys."
"Would you be upset if I said that makes me feel better? I've been struggling to deal with the management stuff," Ryuuji, who should have been the adult in charge here, admitted. "I'm doing alright now with a small team, but back when I first ended up in charge I got overwhelmed and basically lost half our remaining staff myself."
Tai stared at the man for a moment, then the paperwork in his hands, and then he glanced over at the other piles of paperwork on his desk. "Right, okay. In that case I have a big job for you to work out," he said as he set down the forms to take charge and found one of the reports he had on hand. "We're going to need to keep track of pokemon energy readings and any people with connections to pokemon somehow. That means working in the human world, and the human world expects adults to be doing things like this." He handed the first report that Izzy and Matt had made together on the way that energy was absorbed by things to his new subordinate. "So you're in charge of tracking and investigating those. I'll see if we can get anyone to help you out, but I need the rest of your team doing their actual jobs right now."
The Digidestined leader was quite happy to see Ryuuji slowly blink at the sudden shift in tone. "Okay, I can see why you would need Kurou and Ono, and I guess we probably do want Aiko to stick with being just a secretary," the man noted. "But I don't know what you want Kazuo doing."
"From what you and your team have told me he's been mostly looking over old reports," Tai started. "I want him to go over what we've made so far, along with anything DSS sends over, so we can get a fresh set of eyes on things. Izzy's already going to be working with him today on monitoring our raids so he has some idea what combat looks like for us to get started."
"So you've already given most of my team stuff to do?" Ryuuji said thoughtfully. "Did this change in leadership actually alter anything?"
"Now I have stuff for you to do too," Tai complained.
Kazuo had waited just long enough to make sure his grandson had settled in before continuing to the Digidestined's current operations center. The place was makeshift, but just having a setup to manage a war in another world at all was more than the MRT had ever managed, and it had been key to getting help to Aiko in time.
"If I'd known you were bringing Akira I would have had Matt handle this while I took to the field for once," Izzy said to him from the main console. "Although I think Tai might have still wanted me here just in case Kurou ran into any issues with the first scan of our world."
"I think that those kids probably need a bit of time without Matt to go over things," Kazuo noted as he looked for a place to sit down for this. The alien office building actually had plenty of chairs, and he might have even heard something about a strange machine that made them, but it also had the common office problem of the chairs constantly migrating away from where you needed them. "How exactly are we doing this?" he asked to buy time to grab one from the empty looking office next to them.
"We got a better monitoring rig along with that other stuff so we can watch them from their tracker eyepieces," Izzy explained holding up a small thin screen that had a small set of attachment points that probably let you put straps or something onto the device. "I've hopefully figured out how to stop these things from breaking all the time, and if that works out I'd like to send the team out with them all the time."
"Can I see that?" the oldest of the MRT asked and finished getting the nearest chair into place next to the small bank of monitors. The young tech casually handed the device over, and with a single false start Kazuo managed to hold it in a place where he could see through it clearly. "How do you control it?"
"I made them for digimon to use," the Digidestined explained. "That helps with holding them next to their eyes too, but the main thing is that digimon are still mostly computer programs. That means it is really easy for them to interface with digital electronics if they're made right." The young man looked a bit embarrassed. "I'm not sure I've really explained that to the others yet. I've mostly given them out after the team has already transformed into digimon."
"You might want to think about a way for us to use them without that part," Kazuo said humorously as he attempted to get the thing to do something. "They're a little less obvious than a monster walking around."
"I've got a couple of things that might work with that," Izzy replied thoughtfully. "For now though we will be able to see the battle straight from the eyes of the team." The tech then made three of the screens show a video feed.
The eldest member of the MRT could only recognize one of the resulting creatures that appeared on the screen from the old reports he had gone over regularly. That was the two story tall werewolf monster next to the only human still present in the group. The other monsters had been briefly introduced as the forms the various younger kids turned into, although in some cases it had apparently become unclear which was a monster that turned into a kid and which was a kid that turned into a monster. Personally Kazuo didn't think it really mattered, which left it basically just down to which monsters stayed monsters, and he was more worried about how the MRT secretary might have just joined that particular group.
"It looks like we've got the best signal from Yolei, Patamon, and Kari," Izzy noted as the images revealed the group approaching an alien crystal coated landscape. "The plan is to hit a battle in progress. We need to take out the Emperor's Control Spire constructs, they work for the Emperor's bosses more than the Emperor, and to gather more Artificial Crests." On the screens a true warzone appeared, with a mass of black smooth monsters clashing against a swarm of red crystal creations. "The red ones are Hackware. Huh, looks like they aren't holding back very much at all."
Kazuo wasn't sure how you could tell anything about the conflict going on. The smallest shards of red were everywhere, and seemed to mostly exist to be hit by ranged attacks. It was hard to tell what anything was in the mess, and the view shifted rapidly as the Digidestined moved to attack themselves. "I think we might need a more stable view," he noted dryly, although he was a bit worried about just how many explosions were going on.
"Yeah, I forgot that the pokemon thing has kind of made fights a lot more mobile," the Digidestined sighed.
Ken glared at the losses he was taking, internally happy to see those minions of his masters destroyed so he could replace them with his own machines. "We might need to use some more firepower next time," Arukenimon unfortunately noted. "Can those drones you designed handle smaller operations while I work on those?" she asked in a tone that actually managed to sound like a flustered woman asking an expert for help. That act was a clear indication she had no idea how aware of reality he was, or how much control she had lost.
"I don't suppose it would be safe to modify our resource output somehow?" he asked as if it was just a game, but with a sarcastic bent that was appropriately arrogant while also likely pissing her off.
"Unfortunately we can't risk these Hackers reproducing that effect given their strength," she replied with a tone that clearly held barely restrained anger. "I'm just glad you've found a way to do that with their method instead," she lied along with an order to STOP THIS CONVERSATION.
"We should have production of the new machines soon," Wormmon cut in. "We have captured more than enough of the fabrication systems from the Hackers during this last assault, all we need to do now is convert them into constructors for the cores."
Ken smiled widely at that statement. "Ah, in that case we might want to look into multiple core units," he said and began to develop out loud, deliberately looking distracted so Arukenimon lost interest.
It took longer than he liked, and might have given her too much valuable information on their construction, but she did eventually leave without giving any additional orders.
Mimi sighed as she finished another long session of trying to get Grimer to control his poisons better. They had locked the doors to the seventh floor so there was little chance of unmodified humans approaching, and Joe had joined them just in case with a pile of treatments that would hopefully work in the worst case. "I think that's enough for today, Grimer," she burbled to her pokemon, who made a disappointed noise but nodded for her to return him to his pokeball.
"Mimi, I really hate to say this, but you adopted a kid," Joe said with unease instead of the sarcasm she had expected her friend to use with that statement. The Floatzel looked worried and guilty. "I spoke with Delta 2 and Tyra a bit more about what happened with you, and Alpha 45 is mad at me for having you use the pendant right then and there. You probably would have been another Bellossom, or at worst a Vileplume, if I would have just had you wait a couple of days."
His second point didn't sound like the same conversation as the first, but Mimi was fairly sure she knew what he meant. "Pokemon aren't quite like that, Joe. Grimer would probably still be calling me 'mama' even if I turned into one of those instead," she explained tiredly. Her Muk body didn't work at all like a normal creature. She was mostly animated by her energy in this form, with very little of her actual composition mattering to how she felt, so working hard could tire her out much more quickly than a flesh and blood creature. "He probably even would be doing it if I never turned into a pokemon. So don't think that has anything to do with how I have to explain a kid to my parents." They both cringed at how she put that.
"I'm still sorry about making you into a Muk instead of one of those," Joe grumbled.
Mimi had to laugh at that. "You know, it s funny how now we're saying how much better it would be if I ended up with the same skin as Palmon," she said with amusement. "I still remember when I got upset just from the idea of ending up like that before. I can't imagine how I would have reacted to being told I would end up a Muk."
"Yeah, I'm pretty sure if you told me that I'd end up being a fighting monster," Joe started wistfully, and then his expression shifted to annoyance. "Actually, I'd probably be upset it hadn't happened already. Gomamon didn't exactly have much more combat ability than I did back then, and evolving never really felt like a sure thing until we got back home." The Water type groaned aloud. "So I'd probably have spent even more time as a monster."
"Are you really spending that much time as a pokemon?" she asked him a bit nervously. "I've been doing it for Grimer, but that's mostly because it is a lot easier to explain while I'm the same kind of monster as him."
"Yeah, turning back is still hard," he admitted quietly. "I just. I still freak out about what I do while I'm like this. The more serious the thing I do the more it messes with me, and the less I want to go through that again." The otter monster looked at her with some worry. "I'm supposed to be this species, I can't imagine what it is like for you."
Mimi had to blink at that confession. She considered her own reaction to turning back, and it had mostly been annoyance at losing her train of thought. Compared to him she had not had as much time to spend as a pokemon, but the worst she had felt about the form had been back when she first saw it as an illusion. "Honestly it isn't even as dirty as I thought it would be," she noted uneasily. Joe seemed really shaken up by this topic. "I have looked into how to clean up after Grimer and Muk, and my friend Amy got me started on how to make sure all the poison around me is part of me. When I change all of that changes with me." She cringed once again at the thought of that gunk becoming a part of her human form, but so far there had been no hints of it after she changed back.
"Maybe I'm just hoping someone else has my problem then," he grumbled and glared at his own tails.
"Yolei definitely has that same issue," Mimi had to note to try and improve her friend's mood. "She is just trying to tough it out. I'm actually worried about her." She looked at the patterns in her surface for a moment. "I'm not too happy with what I'm hearing about her family."
"I'm not too sure if it is really as bad as we hear," Joe countered in a slightly better mood. "Yolei and Hawkmon like to complain almost as much as I do."
"I still can't believe that Chizuru didn't at least try!" Yolei complained as she slashed through another couple of black stone enemies.
"I had even thought about going through with being human again," her brother agreed as the two of them spent more effort on complaints about their home life instead of focus on their current enemies. "I wasn't going to, but I would think about it if dad actually tried being a digimon."
"It was her idea in the first place," the Flybeemon grumbled as she kicked a Crab into the mass of Hackware in a way that looked like she was attacking it instead of getting it off the front line. "I went through an entire afternoon as a giant bug for that, and all I got was jokes from Mantarou about how he liked how my metal was polished."
"I think he might have been serious actually," Halsemon complained. "I think he's trying to get pokemon stuff through DSS." The large bird monster smashed a pair of Hackware versions of himself hard enough to knock them back into Crabs, quickly followed by the Ghostly form of Wizardmon to collect the dropped Artificial Crests.
"Of course he-" she continued to complain, only to be cut off.
"Light Slash!" Kari called out clearly before sweeping a set of black claws trailing a glowing wave of white across the Emperor's line. The delay between the shout and the attack was a welcome one for all sides, as it let them all at least try to prepare for the entire area in front of the BlackGatomon to disintegrate from the attack, removing an entire formation of Control Spire constructs from existence.
"Hey watch it!" Yolei complained from only a short distance away from the strike. "I thought you were still having trouble with that one!"
"I am, that's why I made sure to be far enough away," Kari noted with a grimace. "Probably should have still been a bit further away."
"Hey!"
Tai answered his desk's phone a bit nervously. "Mr. Yagami, we have a Fumiko Hida here to discuss something with you," Aiko said professionally after he responded. "She seems to be another pokemon."
"Send her up," the new official leader of the MRT sighed. "Have you had time to try any of the other ways of being human yet?" he asked in response to the slight alterations in her voice that were the result of her smaller pokemon form.
"Not yet, boss," the secretary replied with a bit of humor. "The DSS Troubleshooter Lead said she wants to go over the stuff more first." She then hung up on him.
He simply shook his head and then spent a bit of time to clean up his desk. He needed more file cabinets at some point, and while they did have a machine to make those it took time to move them around. Tai also spent a good minute looking to see if there were any reports he had on what Cody's mother was working on, and at least by the time she arrived he had not found any.
"Mr. Yagami," one of the Digidestined's parents said from the doorway, as if he was just another adult. Tai looked at the Sandslash a bit tiredly. "I'm afraid I have a rather difficult question for you." She had a bunch of documents with her, and tellingly he could see one of those was the pamphlet they had given out about the digimon transformation pendants.
"Alright, what's the problem?" he asked and moved a few more papers out of the way so she could more easily hand him her documents. Tai was really glad that the chair designs in this place were from the pokemon world, it made having usable ones on hand for monster visitors easier.
"We now need to worry about people in our own world becoming monsters," Ms. Hida replied seriously and passed a large map marked by hand. "I could feel the battle with the past life group. Onyx and Rhyhorn are both part Ground type and can cause earthquakes."
"Oh," he said a bit faintly as he realized that the markings were directly at the site of that short lived fight. "What do you need to stop that?"
"More Ground types living in our world," she answered sadly. "Either recruits from one of the pokemon worlds, or volunteers to change into them from our own. I'd prefer both so we have some with existing experience in managing earthquakes and others who are from this world."
The Sandslash then passed over a number of documents she had clearly made herself on the topic, and others with an odd script he didn't recognize. "I'm honestly not sure which of those will be easier," he said after looking them over for a few minutes. The papers mostly covered how a Ground type would go about dealing with an earthquake prone area, and even that he could only tell because he was used to picking out important parts of Izzy's still hard to read reports. "Do you know of any groups of Ground types in those worlds that would help?"
"Not enough to handle the problem entirely, but I think I can get a few from my Grandfather's world to train others from ours," she admitted. "I'm just not sure where to recruit anyone from our own world, or the other pokemon world."
Tai quietly considered that as he looked over the papers another time, and then sighed. "I'll see if I can get Champion Felsic to meet with you about this. Maybe her world has run into this before," he allowed.
Kichiro Ono found the encyclopedia in front of him the most horrifying thing he had ever seen. Admittedly a large part of that was the very serious note from someone named "Shawn Reading" that he should not bring his drawings to the world it was from out of concern that someone would somehow create his own monsters for real. This book had actual photographs of a wide variety of creatures, and while in many ways it was like one of his fake nature guidebook themed works, the reality on display was another matter entirely.
Compared to the idea of an entire world where those fantastical books were made with complete sincerity the smattering of various images and reports on digimon were comforting to him. Some of them even showed off creatures he had heard about before from his work, the ones that Ryuuji had seen were there in some sort of data display screenshot.
"Wow actually working on our job for once, Ono?" Kurou asked as he walked by the new public relations office carrying a stack of printouts. "Or are you making a special 'real monsters!' book?"
"Our new boss asked me to start planning ways of dealing with monsters being real getting blown as a secret, and how to slowly tell everyone that they are real in the long run," he replied unable to keep his horror out of his tone. "I made the mistake of trying to see if the pokemon world had anything to help." He lifted the open encyclopedia out for the tech to look at.
"It can't be- Is that an actual slime?" Kurou asked with some disbelief at one of the two on the page.
"Grimer and Muk, apparently one of the Digidestined is the second and she has one of the first following her," he confirmed a bit hysterically. "They have plants, rocks, robots, and their own special digital monsters too." They had everything he had considered and more, including some of the less safe abilities he had thought up.
"Aiko is one of those rocks now," the tech noted uneasily. "She ranted at me today about how her scales are made out of stone, and it makes taking a bath horrible. The skull-pangolin said they actually had a sand bath here for monsters that didn't like water that much. I actually think Polite Snake might have been a vine that decided to try and mimic a snake."
"I've been told that if I bring my books to the pokemon world then some god might find them and decide to make some of my monsters," Ono confessed in a rush. "What if some of those follow the kids here?" Too many of his books had a light horror theme for that to happen.
"Then you will have your own monsters," Kurou said and started to clearly look for a way out of this conversation. "At least we'd know how they work, right?"
"I really hope not. Some of those things should not actually work," he faintly replied at that terrible possibility as the tech all but fled.
Akira kind of wished that Matt wasn't busy with a giant monster fight, because the rest of them were actually having a decent time practicing. Yutaka seemed to be rather good at adapting to his new shape, although there were a couple of false starts and Sora did admit they had to do something to make the drum set stronger before she had left.
"So, you're staying here now?" he asked Takashi during a break.
"He was staying with me before," the actual werewolf of the band grumbled. "They actually kicked him out at least a month ago now."
"Your mom was nuts, and all things considered I'm glad I left when I did," the keyboard player confirmed a bit ominously. "I'd probably have ended up one of the other two rock wolves he's mentioned, and those apparently don't have hands," Takashi then said directly to him.
"They aren't 'other two', just different formes of Lycanroc," Yutaka grumbled. "Ugh. This really sucks. Being a pokemon again makes it hard to not remember who I was before."
That seemed to shock Takashi out of his mood. "You can remember everything?" the other human present asked with some surprise.
"Yeah. Old me died of old age, my trainer had grandkids by then," Yutaka confirmed quietly, and Akira knew they needed to change the subject now.
"So do we keep working until Matt is done with fighting, or is there other stuff you two have been helping them with?" he asked, possibly a bit too quickly.
"Well, I have a lot of furniture to move around later," Takashi grumbled, but both of his fellow band members looked happy with this alternate topic. "They're still setting this place up, and I think that the next big project is more stuff for the medical area."
"They're still not sure where to get more medical help, but I heard the Charizard Champion, which is really weird actually, say that we might be getting a Nurse Joy," Yutaka added.
"'A Nurse Joy'? Is that a title or something?" Akira has to ask at the strange way the werewolf said that.
The red furred wolf monster visibly paused at the question. "Nobody asks that," the canine said a bit uneasily. "Or why all of them look exactly the same. It's just one of those things you don't question."
"Are there any comfortable topics about the pokemon world?" Takashi grumbled in response to that reply.
"That's it," Alice confirmed. "One Crest of Love, with makers markings that match Gennai's group." The stone tablet between two pillars at one edge of a large ruin didn't look like it, but they had more than enough sensors available to check more deeply.
"Huh," HackBiyomon had to say about where they had found the thing. "I think I can actually see where we ended up from here." She pointed over at a nearby mountain. "That looks a lot like the place Izzy used to teleport us right to Etemon's pyramid."
"There does seem to be the remains of a basic site relocation event there," the Architect confirmed as he carefully inspected the stone form of the Crest. "I do not think we will get much use out of this device. Emotional empowerment is tricky, and best left to specialists that have a background in that topic."
"It is still good bait," Bob noted from the edge of the group where he was observing the conquest of the region. "We might need more pieces of that before this is all over."
