Despite what I would have expected, we weren't kicked out of the library. We did make quite a bit of noise with our crash landing, but the librarian was a bit busy pacing back and forth near the entrance. Whatever was happening over at the football field must have been a big deal. That left Gazimon and Roxie and I all by ourselves.
"So what happened?" I asked Roxie as she sat across from me, her eyes still locked onto a now sleeping gray fuzzball I was assuming was Gazimon. She'd fallen asleep almost as soon as I'd called out her name, but I was pretty sure it was her. Mostly because she wasn't in the laptop or the digital home. It was still strange seeing her out here, laying down on a wooden table instead of behind a screen.
But as strange as it was, I still needed to know what was going on with the game.
"Roxie!" I harshly whispered, getting her attention. "I know this is a lot to take in, but I need you to focus here."
"Okay okay… going into the computer really?" I narrowed my eyes and she put her hands up, telling me to hold. "I know, I know. Like you said, it's a lot. So after your big presentation… whose voice was that anyway?"
"Her's," I pointed over at the sleeping bunny ball. "Now focus!"
"Well after the video, the whole crowd went crazy. A lot of yelling and pushing. I just barely made it out of there." She took a deep breath before continuing. "All of the parents looked like they were about to start a riot. I think I saw Francis's dad rushing Coach K when they forced everyone to leave."
"Good," I leaned back and let myself bask in the moment. "There is no way Coach K is getting out of this."
"Oh, did we do it?" I sat forward again and snapped my head at 'Gazimon'. Looked like she was finally awake. She yawned and stretched her ears out like they were arms. "That's great. If we went through all that for nothing, I was going to be pissed."
She opened her eyes back up and glanced over at Roxie. The two girls stared at each other silently for a couple of seconds before Gazimon finally pointed one of her ears at Roxie.
"Ripped jeans, hair in pigtails, and way too much makeup… you must be that Roxie girl Gabi told me about."
…Gazimon why? I silently turned towards the fuzzball in question who just sneered at me. Well, it was better than whatever torrent of anger I was getting from the other side of the table.
"It's nice to know I have such nice friends," oh no. That voice was way too nice and sweet for my liking. I forced my head up and gulped in the face of Roxie's piercing eyes. "Friends who tell other people how much makeup I wear."
"Roxie, I swear I can explain."
"In his defense, he did also describe you as a loyal friend and the kind of person who you could trust to have your back, but I just wanted to have a little fun." She started sniggering as she brought one of her ears close to cover her mouth, only to freeze in place as soon as she saw it.
"Gabi…" she softly said before slowly turning to me. "I need a mirror and I need it right now."
In the end we needed to use my laptop's camera as a mirror. Gazimon took one look at her new form and screamed. This time, we really were kicked out of the library.
"And that's why you should call me Pagumon while in this form," I grumbled as I was forced to rest on Gabi's lap. If I had any other option, I would have been anywhere else. But with my current lack of legs and lack of practice moving as a Pagumon, I had few other options.
"So if your entire body changed from Pagumon to Gazimon once, does that mean you can do it again?" Roxie asked as she tried to keep her balance while standing on the low wall we were on.
"More importantly, will you change again into something bigger?" Gabi added as I felt his legs dangle off the side of the wall. He settled down just as a nice breeze blew in and I closed my eyes. After getting chased out of the library and needing to pretend to be a plush toy, Roxie had led us to a place where we could keep our conversation going.
So she had led us to the far end of the beach, where the wall separating the sand and the shops came to a stop and no one hung out. In front of us was the ocean, and to our back was an abandoned hotel that had been set for demolition for as long as either of the two humans could remember. And to our sides, there was absolutely no one.
According to Gabi, anyone who would have been here was probably at the game instead, and after what happened tonight, everyone had probably just gone home.
"Well…" I finally answered after a long pause, "it's possible. No one in my tribe has evolved past Gazimon right now, but according to legends there were a few who made it to the next stages."
"So what did they turn into, some sort of giant cat bunny?" Roxie smirked as I rolled my eyes.
"According to the story, there were three options. A giant ape, a giant black wolf and a lion who stood on two legs and fought with a sword." As I spoke of each one, memories flashed in my head of old times sitting around a fire as older Gazimon told us stories about these digimon of old. Of their courage and their might, and how we should all drive to be as strong as them. I wonder what those digimon would think of me now. Lost, disconnected from the rest of my group, yet still pressing on. Would they be proud?
"I don't think any of those would end well for us." Gabi frowned as he looked out over the water, the sun finally starting to set behind us. "Maybe for the best if you don't go past Gazimon until we figure out how to put you into the digital home again."
I glanced around at the scale of everything around us and compared it to the size of the average champion. I bit back a gulp as I realized how hard it would be to hide me if I became a Leomon or Gaurumon.
"Hey, I think I see Cascade City turning on it's lights," Roxie pointed out over the water. I followed the angle of her finger as my eyes tried to pierce through the gloom.
It took me a couple of seconds, but then I saw them. Out in the distance, right at the horizon, there were lights. At first only a small handful, but as the sun dropped, more and more appeared, until the whole horizon was filled with lights.
"What is all this?" I breathed in as Gabi pulled me into his arms, got off the wall, and held me up to get a better look.
"That would be Cascade City, on the other side of the bay," my expression softened. I couldn't see his face, but I could read the hope and sadness in his voice. "Cascade bay has one big city all on the way on the east side, and the further you go west, the smaller the towns get. Dryden is the smallest one, and the one furthest away."
"Every kid who isn't set up to inherit a business from their parents has the same dream," Roxie added as she jumped down next to us, "to one day get on that train from Dryden to Cascade City and never look back. It doesn't matter what you do once you get there, as long as you're free of this place."
"The second I finish high school, I'm making the trip," Gabi declared as he finally set me down. I was finally able to see his face. I could see the determination burning in his eyes. "Only two more years till then."
The three of us all stood there for a little while longer, taking in the sea breeze and the sparkling city lights in the distance.
The next two weeks went by pretty quietly for us. Coach K was heading to jail under a whole bunch of charges relating to child abuse, and my name was in the clear. No one else got caught up in the scandal so Principal Verdren's strategy of ducking his head and staying willfully ignorant must have worked. In a fair world, he would have been in jail too, but I'd take my wins where I could find them.
As for the police investigation on the hacker, the case was pretty much dead. I got called in and my official story was that someone had emailed me about the video I had managed to save from my phone's totally still working sd card. As far as the police cared, I hadn't done anything except confirm the presence of the abuse to the real hacker. The whole thing felt a bit too easy, and it was pretty easy to figure out why.
One of the players who'd been in the video, the first one getting beat into the ground, in fact, had been the son of the Dryden police chief. While the official word that he hadn't allowed this to cloud his judgment, everyone with eyes could tell he wasn't trying too hard to find the person who had uncovered his son's abuse.
Sometimes having the football team full of the sons of the town's most rich and powerful had its upsides. As a strictly middle-class person, I couldn't help but enjoy the undercurrent of tension between the rich families whose kid's had been handing out the beatings, and the ones who'd been getting them.
The sole exception was Francis, who hadn't talked to me since that day in the storage building. I wasn't trying too hard to wonder what might be the cause of it. Hopefully, it wasn't anything too serious, I was kind of missing my other friend.
Speaking of friends, Roxie and I had also spent the two weeks looking into the laptop, and the digital rebel. Having Roxie on the outside handling the laptop while I explored the PC and the powers of the rebel drive really helped speed things up. I'd even learned the technical term for what we were doing. The programs that allowed for Gazimon and I's travel between the laptop and material worlds were called the Protein to Data converter and the Date to Protein converter.
Roxie had made jokes about how doing it too often would lead to me getting too swole and attracting attention, while I had discovered more uses of the digital rebel in its wrist-bound form. I had rolled my eyes only to immediately find something called a field guide.
Whoever had created this rebel drive, they'd known about digimon. It had entries for all five of the digimon types I'd encountered so far. Habits, general demeanor, attacks, and other data like that. I'd even found out something about Gazimon I made a mental note to ask her about later.
But for now, I got to relax to the pleasant sounds of Coach K's arrest, courtesy of a freshly leaked video hitting the internet. The handful of police officers in the crowd had managed to control the crowd well enough to drag him to a police car.
"You're all as guilty as I am!" He shouted at the top of his lungs. "None of you cared where my results were coming from, you were just happy to have champions!"
"Wow, I was wondering what he looked like," Gazimon giggled as she watched the video from the digital home. Once she managed to get back in the laptop, it had taken her a few seconds to 'digivolve' from Pagumon to Gazimon "honestly though he'd be fatter."
"He's in remarkably good shape for someone his age," I pointed out as the police tried to push his salt and pepper head into the police cruiser.
"You think what I did was bad?" He popped his head out one last time, screaming at the top of his lungs. "There are people out there who have done things a thousand times worse. I've done nothing! Nothing!"
The cops finally managed to get him into the cop car as his last words echoed in my head.
"You know, he kind of has a point," I grumbled as I leaned forward.
"What are you talking about Gabi?" Gazimon shrieked. "This guy ordered people to beat you up. He didn't do 'nothing'."
"But there are worse people out there," I fired back, "people who order deaths instead of beatings, who take way more from people with way less…"
We both paused as our eyes met. I felt as though Gazimon was slowly analyzing me.
"Just what do you have in mind?" She demanded.
"We pulled this off once, who says we can't do it again?"
"Sounds dangerous… maybe think about it a little before we settle on anything. We had enough trouble with Kotemon," she pointed out as something flashed in my memory.
"Oh that reminds me," her ears perked up as a worried look crossed her face, "I was looking up some information about Gazimons… so what's this about having some sort of paralyzing breath?"
"Well I… I…" I leaned forward and smirked as Gazimon looked down at her claws. She was clicking them together, the blush clear through the fur on her face. "I sort of… can't do it." I was about to interrupt when she exploded. "Listen, Paralyze Breath is a tricky attack to learn. If you do it wrong, you breath it in and then you just paralyze yourself and it's so easy to do it wrong. You hesitate even a little bit and boom, back down your throat it goes. I've tried it before, and all I got was… Why are laughing!"
"Sorry, sorry. Hey, don't worry about it. If you couldn't do it, you couldn't do it." I attempted to comfort the cat rabbit, earning a glare for my trouble.
"I'm going to start practicing it again," she turned away from the camera to avoid looking me in the eyes. "Just you wait. Next time we need it, I'll be ready."
I smirked at her, confident she'd pull it off.
"And just like that, another candidate enters the fray." A voice said as he looked down at a blue board with a couple dozen pieces scattered about.
"I still don't appreciate your shotgun method," another voice added.
"Shotgun? I don't know what you're talking about. Every single one of these kids was vetted by me. Nothin random about it." The first voice smugly claimed.
"You call that 'vetting'? You walked up to children and waited to see if they gave you a good vibe or not," the other voice groaned.
"I have my process. And it's been proven to work before. I have a saved digital world to show for it," the first voice pointed out as five more pieces appeared on the board. They were colored red, blue, yellow, green, and black, with each of them having some sort of small symbol attached at the top. "I just hope these kids are able to hold out until we figure out who the sixth is. Any news on the codes?"
The board cleared away until only the five colored pieces remained. The five moved across the board until they were all lined up on one side.
"We have good news on that front. Only three of the codes have been found, and of them, only one is even close to getting a sword," seven pieces appeared on the side of the board opposite the other five. The outermost four were clear, but the inner three were black shards of crystal, glowing with purple light. The one in the dead center had a small crystal floating in front of it. "At the rate we're going, it will be at least a few years until all seven of them are gathered."
"Let's hope so, or otherwise both worlds are going to be in big trouble," the first voice grumbled before stepping away from the board. The brown robed man reached the window overlooking Cascade City and watched the world below. "Come on sixth child, we need your help."