Warning: this section contains minor Daisuke-bashing. Why, do you ask? 'Cos it's fun! ^^;;
"Marco!"
"..."
"Marco!"
"..."
"I said 'Marco', dammit!!"
Iori looked up from the fossil. "Don't curse, Daisuke," he reprimanded, then went back to staring at the skeleton intently. He'd been examining it for the past ten minutes, and nothing the others said could pry him away from it.
Laughing, Takeru swam away from the irate Motomiya, heading toward Hikari. "Hey, beautiful," he greeted her, grinning.
Hikari laughed. "Flattery? Like that worked for Daisuke," she teased, batting her eyes so he'd know she was kidding. Then she quickly became serious. "I'm a little worried about Iori. He's been staring at that fossil for a long time, now."
Takeru shrugged helplessly, the awkward movement submersing him momenterally. "I know, but what can we do? We can't force him away from it if he doesn't want to go, you know that."
"Yeah," Miyako jumped in, nodding in agreement. "But it's still kind of strange. Hey, Iori!" she yelled. "Get away from that rock for a while and come play Marco-Polo!"
Ken shot an amused glance at Daisuke, who was swimming away, out of hearing range. The goggle-boy was obviously enraged, but it hadn't yet occured to him to go ahead and open his eyes. "Maybe we should play by the rules and say 'Polo'," he suggested.
The four DigiDestined exchanged grins. "Nahh!" they chorused after a second, looking back over at Daisuke. The boy was appearing smaller and smaller as he got further and further away, but they could still hear it when he began yelling again:
"Marco! Aw, c'mon guys, answer me! Marco! Where are you guys?? Mar-- hey, waitasec!"
It had just occured to Daisuke that he could open his eyes. He began swimming back, glaring.
"That wasn't funny, guys!" he yelled at the four DigiDestined. They were giggling too hard to answer.
"S-sorry, Dai-kun, but we couldn't resist," Ken apologised, grinning from ear to ear. Still, the ex-Kaiser didn't want his boyfriend mad at him, so he stifled his laughter.
Daisuke glared a moment longer, then suddenly grinned. "Yeah, okay. Hey, anyone wanna play what the heck is that??" the boy finished loudly, eyes widening.
The others turned to look, their mirthfulness quickly fading. Near Iori, some fifteen feet up in the air, a jagged white area of absolute nothingness had opened.
A split second later, four kids dropped out of it.
Miyako was quickly on shore, running over to the four kids. "They're alive," she informed the rest a moment later. "Not happy, and definately not conscious, but alive."
The other five -- including Iori, who was obviously of the opinion that kids falling from nowhere was a higher priority than a fossil, even one with terrible ripping claws -- clustered around. The kids were gradually reviving.
Only one was a girl. She had shoulder-length, mousey brown hair, and was wearing a green blouse and a pair of blue jeans.
One of the boys was tall -- probably as tall as Jyou. He had longish, slightly curly brown hair, and was wearing khaki pants and a grey t-shirt.
Another of the boys had short black hair, and was wearing black jeans and a dark blue t-shirt.
The fourth kid...
"Hey! Whoa! What's his malfunction??" Daisuke exclaimed. The kid's dark blue pants and black t-shirt was an incredible offset to his pale skin and almost-white blonde hair.
Hikari just rolled her eyes. "So says the boy with the maroon hair," she quipped. Daisuke just shrugged, throwing her an embarassed grin.
The girl groaned and rolled over, her eyes fluttering open. "Ughhh... wha... where am I?" she asked groggily, blinking in confusion at the half-dozen DigiDestined.
Miyako grinned. "You're in the DigiWorld!" she exclaimed, adding, "Oops, sorry," when the girl winced at the volume.
"The DigiWorld? Man, I couldn't've heard that right; I've got a major headache..." the girl trailed off, staring at the Digimon. She blinked. "Ooo-kay..."
"Hey, kid, what's your name?" Takeru asked gently, cocking his head to one side.
The girl struggled into a sitting position. "Kid??" she repeated, obviously confused. "My name's Margo Green; I'm a research scientist. And I'm twenty-nine years old, so I don't know who you're calling 'kid'," she finished, slightly contemptuous.
Daisuke laughed. "Yeah, right. Look, Margo, I don't know how hard you hit your head, but you are not a day over sixteen."
Ken shrugged helplessly. "He's right. Wherever you came from, you sure aren't the same as you were... in more ways than one, apparently."
Margo looked angry, then bemused -- then slightly paniced as she looked down at herself. "Gahh!" she yelped, leaping to her feet, completely ignoring her headache. "I am sixteen! What the-- huh?" She interrupted herself, then broke off in amazement.
She'd noticed the other three kids.
Margo gaped at the three kids. Two of them were definately familiar, and she was pretty sure she knew who the third was. She could feel the color drain from her face.
"Hey, what's wrong?"
Margo ignored the kid; she began shaking her head, trying to clear it. A pain shot through her head and she winced, gritting her teeth. Shaking her head when she had a headache wasn't the smoothest move; she stopped.
"Margo? Hey, can you hear me?"
Margo snapped out of it. "Huh??" she asked, blinking. It wasn't the most brilliant responce, but it was her most prominent thought at the moment.
The brown-haired girl looked concerned, but it was the blonde boy who replied, "You zoned out for a minute, there. You okay?"
"Do you know these people?" a small, brown-haired boy asked in a soft voice.
Margo laughed a little, weirded out. "Yeah. I mean, I think so. They were a bit, um, older the last time I saw them, but they're still kind of recognisable. I think it's them, anyway." She was obviously unsure of her convictions.
The maroon-haired boy sat down suddenly, grinning. "Hey, we might as well do the introductions before they wake up; it might get outta control. The name's Motomiya Daisuke. The others are Kamiya Hikari, Takaishi Takeru, Inoue Miyako, Hida Iori, and Ichijouji Ken."
Margo blinked. "You're... Japanese, then?" she queried. When the six kids nodded, she smiled and responded, "Well, you know I'm Margo Green; I think I know who the other three are. The one with brown hair is Bill Smithback, and..." she trailed off, thinking. "Well, the black-haired kid is D'Agosta, and I think I heard Pendergast call him Vincent a few times." She shrugged a little, smiling shyly. "The last kid's Pendergast; I have no clue what his first name is. He never really introduced himself."
"Well, Margo, that's because I never felt any need to," a calm, genteel Southern voice interjected. "And it's 'Ryan', by the way."
Margo blushed a little as she and the six kids turned to look at the speaker. "Sorry, Pendergast -- Ryan, I mean -- I didn't know you'd woken up. These are--"
"I know their names; I've been conscious for a while." Pendergast smiled. "Sometimes it works out better when nobody knows that you're listening in. When I figured that we weren't in any danger, I decided it would be safe to, ah, introduce myself. It appears," he added thoughtfully, looking around -- his gaze lingering a moment on Margo, and the unconscious Smithback and D'Agosta -- "that something very strange has happened."
Margo couldn't help but laugh. "No, really? I hadn't noticed. It's perfectly normal that we're now teenagers."
"We're what now?" someone groaned. Smithback was sitting up, rubbing his head and wincing. "Geez, did anyone get the number of that truck? I feel like-- hey, why'm I a tenor allava sudden?"
"We're teenagers, genious," D'Agosta growled, pulling himself into a sitting position. "The question is, why?"
"More importantly," Margo jumped into the questioning, "where?"
"Uh, guys?" Smithback shrilled, pointing. "I think that maybe the most importent question is what the hell is that??"
All nine turned to look. "Oh, we think that's a fossil of a long-extinct Digimon," Hikari informed the four newcomers. "Actually, we're not entirely sure it is a Digimon, but what else could it be?"
Margo, her eyes wide and all the color drained from her face, looked over at Pendergast. The albino was staring intently at the fossil.
"I believe I can tell you what it is," he relied slowly. "That is the reliquiae" -- and at the word 'reliquiae', a shiver ran up the other three just-turned-adolescents' spines -- "of a creature called Mbwun."