Legal Poo: I don't own digimon. Hell, I wish I did 'cuz I'd get rich but I don't. I'm writing this fic without their permission and neither wind nor rain nor bloodsucking lawyer will get in my way. On the other hand, the new stuff I write into this fic is mine and it'll always be. You can write about it if you ask me first though. I also don't own Shastina or Tao. Just as a minor note, the B of D timeline leaves the show behind on the first episode of the World Tour thing.
Blade of Destiny
Chapter V: Shadowed Destinies
Izzy walked down the sidewalk in some random, part of Kyoto. His new home, after he moved off to this city to study at his University was an apartment building that looked fairly large from its old, but still well maintained exterior, but was positively tiny once you got inside. The apartment was cheap enough for a university student to afford for a reason. All Izzy really had was an old VCR, a TV, a phone, his computer equipment, a bed and your average few tables and chairs. It looked like some forty and jobless man's apartment if not for the fact it had the absolute law and order of Izzy's organization.
As he stood in the rising elevator, momentarily envying Tentomon, whose wings had no doubt already carried him into the apartment to the tiny balcony and maybe through an open window, he glanced at his watch. It was almost six, he'd be just in time for the news and then back to relatively normal life. The only other occupant in the elevator was a smaller boy. He lived on the same floor as Izzy and every time Izzy saw him, he held a puzzle of some sort, this time being a Rubik's cube. His time seemed completely dominated by them, while he was in the elevator anyway.
The elevator pinged as it alighted onto the fourteenth floor where they both got off. Izzy never really said much to him as few really noticed him. They both turned left as they exited the lift. Izzy reached his door and put his key as the child walked past. Izzy entered the door too early to see the kid make a few final turns and deposit the solved Rubik's cube into the pocket of his baggy shorts.
Casey opened the door to the apartment he shared with May. His sister was out as usual, either shopping or dating, something like that. She was rarely home and Casey took care of himself for the most part. Somewhere out there, relatives sent in money once in a while which his sister received for her university tuition and had enough leftover to feed the two of them.
Methodically, he approached a little wooden frame attached to the wall just at the entrance to the tiny kitchen where a picture of his parents hung with your usual few red candles. Chinese in nationality, this setup was what was done when both of them got killed in a car accident. Mechanically, he lit a few of the scented straws and put them in the small urn. Long since past crying or anything, he silently returned to his room, where he spent the majority of his time in the evening.
Opening the door to his room revealed a complete mess. The bed took up nearly half the available. Along with a closet, a huge and stuffed bookshelf and a small desk with his computer, the room could not possibly have fit anything else in it. The bed was messed and unset. It hadn't been set for as long as he moved here with his sister. Every surface without something on it had a puzzle of some sort. The puzzles occupied his mind.
Casey spent a couple minutes fiddling with a Professor Rubik's cube, a 5x5x5 thing that was much tougher to solve. He made a bit of progress before he started up his computer, clicking an icon to get his modem to dialup and put him online. He surfed for a while, all the time with his chess program in the background. At some point, he ceased surfing entirely and switched all his attention to the chess game. He played for a time and was only jolted out of his game by the sound. "You've got mail!"
His computer piped the news as is it were totally and utterly startled that such a preposterous thing as Casey getting mail could have happened within its operational lifetime until Casey himself caused the speakers to conclude the noise by double clicking the mail icon. The file attached did not download nor install but the computer's glow began to cast shadows all over the room. Casey was stunned momentarily out of his nearly permanent silence.
"Huh? How…" A soft music began playing within his mind as the shadows deepened. The tone was both sad and mysterious and in the background, as if someone wanted to speak to him in a voice distorted by wails of darkness. Only to him, the images didn't seem dark. The light brightened and the shadows deepened in response. The wave of the shadows across what was once his room deepened in complexity. Eerie wails called out, over the piano as blue light washed over his field of vision. Now, he could hear the sea, the cacophony of sounds somehow did not collide with each other but broadcast themselves with each other harmoniously. Briefly, he saw a scene of a strange place he had never been to, yet looked perfectly right in his mind. Through the blue tinge of the scene, he could see a palace of running water, stone blocks moving in an endless waltz, patterning themselves to control water flow as tides rose and fell. The scene rippled as if a drop of water had struck the pond's surface. More appeared before the entire sight simply faded away, leaving the lightly built eleven year old back where he had been.
The brief window of the email being trashed automatically appeared. Its work was done. Casey held up an object that had appeared in his hand. The digivice glowed brightly but soon settled down. The surface of the mechanism was done in swirls and oil patterns of blue. He held it to his cheek for a moment. He didn't know what the surface was made of, but it was ice cold.
---
Jophio gingerly held the ice pack to a bruise that had quickly materialized following a hard punch to the head just above the eye. This was, at the moment, the only real one anywhere on his person. He'd been fairly successful for some time with his strategy of avoidance until today, caught off guard out of school. The icy application done, he closed the freezer and opened the fridge below. Quickly grabbing a can of Pepsi, he closed the fridge once again and entered the living room of his apartment, passing his mother who was going through bills and checks and all that sort of crap on the table while the news played on the television.
She glanced up as his son passed. "Jo! What happened?"
"Oh, it's…nothing mom." Jophio said, smiling, opening his drink and tearing off the cap in one smooth, practiced motion.
"Let me see that." She said, reaching for him.
"It's okay." Jophio reassured her, continuing down the hall to his room and evading his parent's proposed examination of his injury.
"Are you sure? Did you get into a fight again or what…"
"No, I just hit something on the way home." He lied, smiling.
"Okay…" His mother said doubtfully as he reached his room and entered.
"Besides." Jophio said to himself quietly. "I just smile at them and they leave me alone afterwards…" He reassured himself that his deception had caused no harm.
He turned his computer on. It was a fairly strong one and with a cable connection, it didn't take long for him to be running and online at which point, he immediately went over to Hotmail. Logging in, he quickly found his inbox filled with several unread messages. A lot of them were junk mail but one with an attachment caught his eye. He quickly opened it and quickly, his screen began glowing.
"Wh-wha?!?!?" His mouth gaped in utter surprise as his room was flooded in a blinding radiance. Soon, he found himself sitting on his chair in a planescape of pure gray. A sad music began playing either to his ear or within his mind. He could not tell which. The tune was simple but seemed to describe a place he'd never been to, yet knew exactly the image of. He stood up, startled and his chair dissipated, leaving him standing in a place where pure white extended as far as the eye could see. For a split second, he saw the image. A city bathed in gray smoke that appeared only briefly in the omnipresent gray. The streets were narrow, a miserable city of sleepy factories… Then, slashes of red tore open the fabric of his universe. Before long, the slashes had spread their taint and he was in a land of pure fire burning away his soul. The sound of distant, crackling flames overwhelmed the quiet music. "Ahh…" He shouted in surprise, falling down backwards. The flame faded from his eyes, sending him back to his room, sitting on the carpeted floor. He lifted his hand, knowing his face was probably unsure of what expression to put on. The digivice in his hand was textured with flaming patterns of fiery reds and yellows, mixing into countless orange tones. After a few moments of admiration, the nine year old's senses came back in and he almost dropped it again. The surface seemed to burn with the heat of fire.
---
Rina charged into her utterly, utterly messed up room and slammed the door. Indeed, it barely did so, brushing against at least two things and losing momentum as a result before actually landing on its frame. The resulting crash was apparently of a level the sixteen year old young woman deemed to be insufficient. This got her even higher on the anger scale if that was possible and she charged directly for her computer.
It was an immensely powerful machine, a super computer by the standards of nearly everyone at her school at least and fortunately so too as she was obviously in no mood to be waiting very long. The crashing course she had led through any amount of imaginable junk in her chamber had probably irritated her some more. Indeed, her room was so full to the brim, despite its fairly large size. Jagged pieces of junk jutted out throughout the room. They literally formed a canopy on which hung drying and long since dried paintings, the odd piece of clothing and whatever else she had thrown and had landed on the crown of one of these unnatural trees and then get abandoned by the law of gravity. Everything from watercolor paintings to scribble sheets to random pieces of poetry could be found here, in what could be called a physical incarnation of Rina's heart.
The machine finished booting quickly and she quickly ran off a few routine things, opening Napster and ICQ were only some of them. Netscape was soon open as well, guiding her through the net. The distinct sound of ICQ beeped as she received a message.
I saw your painting at the exhibit, it was great!
Too bad everyone else just notices everything else on the report card… She answered dryly. She'd just tossed her mid-term report somewhere and she wasn't about to touch the thing again but her mind ran over it again and again and the anger fed off that. Sixties in all four except art, where she nearly hit a hundred, translating to an average in the seventies. Except all her parents would see would be the sixties.
Sooooo unappreciated…
"Why the hell can't they just see what I'm good at and be satisfied?!?" She yelled into the air. Her computer did not respond. Even the ICQ beacon remained silent. Absently, she wandered over to yahoo and logged onto her mail account. She wasn't paying much attention as she went through junk mail, a few chain messages, some fool jokes or others, the occasional real email of value which she noted down, etc. The next email didn't seem any different from the last as she went through them.
Junk mail sucks… She thought tiredly. Her computer responded by loading the next email as she had instructed.
Boooorrrriiinnnnngggg… She thought tiredly. Her computer responded by glowing brightly. Suddenly, Rina was far from bored as she gazed at the brightening screen. What the heck?!?!? Beams of light radiated from her large monitor and within moments, flooded the room, almost threatening to bleach everything in it from the sun-like intensity of the radiance. The rainbow of light flooded the room in waves, eventually blending into a solid, uniform white. The glare lessened but Rina was no longer in her room, but floating over an ornamental pond and stream. Through the bright white haze, she beheld a dreamy scene. The brook bubbled softly beneath the bridge built across the stream with exquisite stonework. The flowering bushes and trees were in full blossom and petals fell in a constant shower of pink and gold. Across the bridge, down a stone path was an oriental pavilion surrounded by the flora of the garden. Two figures were there. The man, cloaked in some dark colors indistinguishable in the glare, reached gently into the pond the pavilion overlooked and picked a lotus from it. As he put it in the woman's long, black hair, she put a flute to her lips and blew a lilting melody to some background music which took Rina some time to realize was the wind moving through the canopy of the trees above. Through the roof of leaves, she could distantly see the form of some high buildings. As she turned back to the pair in the pavilion, her mind slipped into the white glare once more. Every noise from the scene she had just witnessed was quieted. Just before she reappeared in her room, the lilting flute came to melancholy conclusion. When she returned to her senses, a digivice done in green leaf patterns and a smattering pattern pink flowers had been added to the room's mess.
---
A teenager ran down the street, chasing up to a group of a few others walking slowly and leisurely along. The art show exhibited at the school hadn't been long since ending and they were among many heading home after taking a gander at what everyone in the area could do. The displays ranged from things that anyone who tried really hard could do, to stuff that was simply breathtaking in either hidden artistic meaning or plain visual appeal. The annual event was surprisingly popular for what many perceived as the classic boring-as-the-weather-channel art display.
The teen caught up to the rest of his group and quickly fell into pace with them, opening up conversation with the group who had previously been conversing about what was new.
"Well, Wayne. What is it you're going to tell us? Don't tell me the rankings, I can already guess." One of the younger kids replied. He'd been the only silent one throughout the conversation on the art. The scene was ludicrous to see one like him among company who seemed to be the type to get nothing but C's in their report cards and to see every one of them, except him, discussing art.
"Heh, actually Seico…"
"I got second place." The fourteen year old concluded as the rest of the group's attention switched over to them. "As usual. And Victor got first." He continued dryly.
"Oh come on." The speaker was some huge young man in jeans and leather jacket. He seemed much larger than the slim, though athletic Seico but seemed to put a lot of respect on him. "Second place isn't bad. I'd be damn happy just to make into the friggin' show."
"Actually, Seico came in third this year. Some girl knocked Victor out of first! The judges were thinking for so long before actually deciding. They said that girl's piece had that underlying thing that talks to the viewer and all that nonsense."
"It's not nonsense." Seico explained patiently as they continued walking along, talking in a way to sound as far from as if he were trying to flaunt his knowledge as possible. He knew he himself was never in the best of moods with just one person higher up than him. He could only imagine how those even lower than him felt. "That's part of what art does. It creates an image in your head or is an image that you absorb both visual enjoyment as well as a message from. Whatever it was that scored higher than Victor of all people, I didn't see it. If I did, I wouldn't have forgotten." Which was true. He'd have been deceiving himself if he didn't recognize how great Victor, his brother, was. Someone capable of defeating him at anything must have been the biggest damn prodigy in the world.
"Whatever. Anyway, I didn't catch who was the artist of it but if I do, I'll tell you."
"Do that." Seico replied as he turned onto the path leading to his apartment.
"Yo, don't you want to hang with us and maybe grab some time at the arcades or something?"
"Nah." Seico returned. "I've got some stuff to do. I'll be on ICQ in case anyone's up for some online game or other though.
"Okay." Wayne replied as the group started moving again. The rest of the gang echoed 'seeya' and got a hand waved back at them as Seico disappeared into the confines of his apartment building.
The elevator hummed softly as it took him up to the third floor where he lived. In short order, the doors opened into the familiar gray carpets and alabaster walls of the corridor. Turning right brought him quickly to his home where he unlocked the door and entered the neat apartment of his household's four people. Victor wasn't back yet. Who knew where he was. With as much fame as he had, he could be dating anyone or giving a speech or something anywhere.
No one was home yet. His father was working, Victor was somewhere and his uncle Kaine, a man quite close to a useless bum, was probably out spending what little cash he had and perhaps making that same small amount back on the few odd jobs he took. The fridge proved devoid of anything suitable. However, the shelf provided a bag of chips which he opened and conveyed to his room. Running a server, he kept his computer active constantly and it was out of sleep mode within seconds. Soon, Explorer had accessed the website of his school but as expected, it had not been updated with information on the winner of the art exhibition as yet. ICQ likewise failed to produce any messages of import that he bothered to attend and reply to. His email was junk as usual. Though he sympathized with the rest, he couldn't help but think of a lot of others' ideas as pretty petty. One email however, had an attachment and it caught his eye, piquing his interest.
"That's funny. I wasn't expecting such a big attachment right now. Wonder what it is…" Briefly, he considered leaving it alone as email programs were often targets of computer viruses but he then dismissed that idea. He had complete confidence in his skills should that really be a virus. With mind thus set, he opened the email and began downloading the attachment.
As the D/L bar moved quickly down its slot, his screen began to glow brightly, flooding the room in a pulsing radiance. Soon, it dimmed, or rather contrasted, pulsing between a darkness that ate the light in the room to an ambient gray up to a luminosity that threatened his eyesight. As his eyes were overwhelmed by afterimages, a shadowy music began to play within his mind. An orchestra of instruments he could not identify, yet sounded completely normal in nature. As the music sped up to a soft tune, a scene flashed before his eyes.
The sacred rainforest dripped with dew as the fog that inhabited its lower layer shifted in ever changing patterns. It seemed to grow thicker, yet seemed about to clear every time one looked at a different place. Beams of what was presumably sunlight sifted down from above but as the fog shifted, so did the beams of light move like searchlights across the forest floor. The shroud of fog revealed only what was immediately before his eyes. A few creatures that were alien, yet seemed perfectly right and the form of which he could not recall as soon as they faded into the fog. In the distance, village huts rose with a few silent fires of different colors. Stone blocks and stone idles dripped with moisture and moss, depicting unidentifiable figures. Children were dancing to silent music with just as silent a tread around the largest hut whose window was of some sort of translucent material. Lamp shadows appeared within the building, depicting at least two figures. Then, the dancing children-like figures faded from the area, leaving a ghost village save for that central hut. One of the shadow figures within drew a long object and swung. The second figure crumpled after a splash of liquid told of his fate. The music returned to the shadowy beginning melody it had started at as the scene faded into nothingness, returning Seico to his room. His hand now held a digivice created of a solid, gray stone, carved with shallow markings that seemed to writhe wildly when one looked at it from the corner of the eye.
---
The food court at the mall was positively stuffed as high school students left the high school nearby after the conclusion of the art exhibition. Many of them opting to eat out rather than return home early, hanging out with friends and so on. Jason was among those people as he retrieved his food and paid his money at the mall's KFC and returned to his table where a number of his friends were gathered about. Since he had went to get food, several more had joined the table.
"Hey what's up?" He began with a standard conversation opening.
"Not much, you?" Paul replied, sipping at his coke.
"Nuttin' much either except running about the art show there. Did you see the painting at the center of the auditorium? That one was…It was great!"
"Yeah, I saw it, the dragon one. It got first prize too. By Rina I think it was." Gerri put in, taking a bite into her sub.
"Not a bad artist. It looked computer rendered it was so realistic."
"You could almost touch it!" Lucy exclaimed, eating some of her own food.
At that point, a number of decidedly attractive girls walked past the table, probably on their way towards the other end of the food court. The faces passed quickly and to the average observer, the only real indication of attractiveness was Jason and Paul automatically follow with their heads.
"Instinctive ain't it?" Lucy giggled.
"Nah, it was a fly. A terrible coincidence, I assure you." Paul joked.
"Whatever." Gerri said with an eye roll.
"That's Claria." Julia said.
"Isn't she that girl who never goes out with anyone?"
"She was going out with Rob or something."
"Isn't he the guy who got killed last year?
The group fell silent as they all had turned to watch the subject of their discussion. The girl in a jean jacket had finished her purchase and was just leaving, chatting and laughing with her friends. As if nothing was going within her heart…
---
Claria opened the door to her room and instantly plopped onto her bed, tired from a day of activity all over the place. It wasn't difficult to find the MP3 Player that accompanied her constantly and soon, music was playing into her ears by way of headphone and her computer was well into the process of booting up.
Throwing her jacket lazily onto the floor, she ripped off her socks and threw them into a corner as well, among a growing pile of clothes. She was not the neatest person around, especially when everyone in her household was neat as hell, right down to his little brother, a five year old who loved nothing more than putting all his toys in utter, perfect order.
The computer was done booting up so she shut off her player and switched to her Napster jukebox instead, pumping up the surround sound blasters to a totally infernal volume.
"Clarie, turn that DOWN!" The usual shout to turn it down from down the hall in the living room of the apartment where her dad was just turning on the TV to watch the news as usual.
"Yeah, Claria. Turn that down!" Her little sister mimicked mockingly. She ignored both voices with a smile and got her modem connected to her ISP. Soon, her mom would join her father and sister in gloriously useless complaint about the phone-line hold up. Her brother sat in his and her sister's room, ordering toys or whatever, oblivious to all.
Her machine's modem was a bit slow at 36.6 but in due course, she managed it to log into her email account. The amount of email was phenomenal as she had a lot of friends and pen pals and tons of people with reason to send her one. As soon as she clicked the first one and ordered the modem to download the attachment to it, her music ended.
For a moment, she was afraid she'd let in a virus of some sort. Then, her entire room darkened into pure blackness and she knew that no virus could do that. The sound of the television outside, her sister's whining, her mother growling at having to use her cell phone, all of it stopped and froze, plunging Claria into ultimate darkness and utter silence. For a few moments, the only noise was her heartbeat and her own accelerated breath before a quiet music built up in volume. The music was a mix of strings and flutes playing a tune of darkness and evil that put a chill into her being. The occasional woodwind instrument sounded before the quieter instruments disappeared, replaced by the screaming and wailing of souls. Soon, those souls, wisps of glowing white with dark eyes of various colors that sought to attack their counterpart within her body appeared around her, flying hither tither in the total darkness of the netherworld she had been sent to. She began getting the impression she was falling as the souls began an upward movement. Wind whipped at her from below and the screams of the souls trailed like she was moving quickly. She struck a surface at the 'bottom' of the void. The darkness lifted into a scene of devastation. The ground was blasted in many places. Naught was left other than brown grass blowing under the compulsion of an uneven wind and trees bereft of foliage and waving violently in the gale. Two forces stared each other down. She could see neither, yet sensed them both about the clash under the dark, threatening sky. Her hair blew out of control around her as the forces upon the battlefield collided. A great demon of darkness reared its ugly head, composed entirely of starry nighttime sky. As he rose, the clouds above gained a crimson appearance. The other force was a titan in bluish-purple armor. As he stood in all his glory, the clouds above him circled and rotated, forming thunderbolts that tore the ground about him asunder. The two forces collided but as the scene faded, the darkness overcame the scene. She was back in the netherworld's darkness and silence and then, she was once again in her room, listening to music and reading the next email. She looked at the sole reminder of the vision she had just received. A digivice of pure gold and silver. Carved upon it, was a black crest…