The fox that cried vampire- chapter 6
A re-write by outlaw torn
This is a re-write of Chibi Renamon's "the fox who cried vampire" the idea and basic plotline is his, everything else though has been Re-done by me.
Authors note; this contains vampirism, crossbreeding, and violence. Plus I use all Japanese names and attacks.
Black sun
School sucked. Takato Matsuda knew that, but he wondered if everyone else did.
Around 28 kids were stuffed into his classroom. The light glared through the windows, getting into his eyes. Pissing him off. He shifted around in his seat; his briefs had crept up his ass again. And he couldn't fix that until the period ended. He didn't want to go groping himself right in the middle of class in front of everyone, no. That would come later. Much later.
Beads of sweat trickled down his forehead. He reached up and pulled his goggles into his hair, freeing his hairline. He wiped the sweat from his face with equally sweaty fingers. Damn, he thought. How did it get so hot in here?
The teacher paced through the grid work of desks, stealing looks at the other kids papers to see if they were working. Takato watched him owlishly. Ms. Asagi was pretty nice compared to the ex-military spook they had down the hall, that guy was bats, no two ways about it. But Asagi was always a bitch when it came to lectures. She'd have him stand in the hall for the period if he was late. Funny, he hadn't seen her do that to anyone else. Takato had decided on the second day there that she simply did not like boys. Not that she was especially mean to the boys; she just seemed to gravitate towards him when he wasn't doing what he was supposed to.
"Takato!" Ms. Asagi's voice sounded angry.
Takato looked up from his paper, pencil still locked into his from when the period began. "Yes Ms. Asagi?" he said, looking up into what ten years ago might have been a pretty face.
Her eyes bore down on him from behind her auburn hair. "Have you even been working all this time?"
"Yes Ms. Asagi" Takato said robotically. He rubbed the pencil together in his sweaty fingers.
"You haven't been drawing again, have you?" she said, lifting up his paper.
"No Ms. Asagi" Takato said, his eyes not shifting the slightest even as the paper was lifted up, revealing what he'd been working on for the last thirty minutes. It was a new digimon, a giant dinosaur with blades attached to its arms and a mane of hair trailing down its shoulders. That's what he'd intended, but he still drew two dimensionally, the big dinosaur was scrawled across two full pages of his sketchbook. It was supposed to be red, which he'd take care of when he got home with his markers, assuming he could ever get it out of here in one piece.
"What is this?" Asagi said.
"That must have gotten stuck under my paper when I started" Takato said, doing his best innocent impression.
"Yes, I see... another creature..." she sort of trailed off staring at it.
"What is this? Hair?" Asagi said at once, using her grilling tone.
Takato readied his voice to sound polite. "Yes Ms. Asagi, he'd look weird without hair." A few kids in the room started to snicker just because he was being scolded.
Asagi glanced back at him, raising her hand to brush it out of her eyes. She dropped the paper back to the desk, letting it fall like a leaf from a tree. "Get started Matsuda" she said, and she stalked away leaving Takato to breathe a sigh of relief. She could have given him detention right there, but she didn't. Takato concluded that she had probably wanted to go home and not have to deal with him. Its not like he would have done work during detention anyway. The air settled down as she made her way back to her desk. Takato could hear one of the girls in the far side of the room whispering.
He watched her sit down at her desk and wondered what Guilmon was doing.
Across the school building Jianliang Lee rustled under his clothes. He had the front of his orange vest wide open. Soon, he would have to wriggle out of it and drop it into his bag. He didn't welcome the idea of that, the room was almost sweltering, but he didn't like being without his vest, he felt naked without it. The dark gray T-shirt he was wearing underneath was already damp with sweat. It made him feel even worse, because if he took his vest off now, it would feel like he was not only naked, but wet as well.
"Another wonderful day at Osamu elementary" he thought, rolling his eyes. There were other things he could be doing, but being able to say that you went to school everyday went farther than you think in an argument, especially with his sisters. Shaochung, his sister, had been a little bitch lately about Terriermon, keeping him in her room, making Jianliang come get him when there was trouble.
Terriermon. Jianliang thought about him constantly, at the moment he wondered where he was. The little rabbit had been on his shoulders on the way to school, when they had gotten there he had retreated to Jianliangs book bag. Funny. He wasn't there now. Sometime between when he had put his bag down to fix his shoelaces, to the time when he had picked it up again he had wandered out. Most likely slipping right through the crowded hallway, hidden in plain sight by how small he was.
He had probably slipped down to the cafeteria for a snack, or into the girl's locker room to go through some of the girl's panties. The school was pretty much his playground during the day. The funniest thing was that no one had ever caught site of him. No one had ever mentioned a foot tall green and white horned floppy eared rabbit running around.
He cracked a smile thinking about some of the girls in the class. What would happen if they knew a digimon was going through their unmentionables right now.
His eyes scanned the room. The teacher was a brown haired man in late forties, wearing a dress shirt all buttoned up in spite of the temperature, just another person to roll your eyes at. The teacher knew that Jianliang knew that he didn't have clue as to what he was doing, but the teacher still came in everyday with the same attitude. Which was holding up well considering the heat. Jianliang hadn't even bothered to remember his name.
The social studies book and paper loomed in front of him. He had already finished half of it, and was waiting until the clock caught up with him to blow over the rest. No hard working on my part, not for this place. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs under his desk. It would still be a while before he could leave, and Terriermon was somewhere, he'd have to find him before he could actually leave the building and find Takato, although Takato would probably come looking for him if he didn't find him first. Takato was funny, the kid had is very own real digimon, and yet he still didn't know how to play the card game. Well, he could play, "could" being emphasized. He still lost to his friends, from what he told Jianliang anyway. He wanted Jianliang to meet him after school in the park and show him some "tricks" that he knew.
Jianliang uncrossed his legs and started working his vest off, as the day grew hotter.
Ruki rubbed her arms. The school had their air-conditioner cranked up all day. That was a perk of going to a private school, but the damn thing was actually making it cold in there! She hadn't been able to get comfortable since she got there. She didn't like the cold; it made her want to shrink down into a ball, so no one could see her.
She sat with her legs uncrossed. She knew that was one of the reasons why the other girls made fun of her behind her back, that she sat down like a guy, or walked like one, or ran like one... so what if she didn't button her legs up when she sat down, at least she didn't have them spread all the time like all the other girls did. She would bring that up when they made smart-ass comments about her, if she ever caught them.
The teacher was a tall man with brown hair and huge coke-bottle glasses. He had been on a lecture the whole day about stuff like the ozone layer and the rain forest. She wondered when he would shut up.
She hunched over her desk, she tucked her chin onto her palm for support and flicked open her pencil case with her free hand. She had chosen the case because it had a mirror inside the lid for some reason; Ruki used it to see behind her in class. You couldn't just look behind you while the teacher was right in the middle of talking, as tempting as that was when he was especially boring. Ruki knew none of the other girls had the brainpower to think of something like that, and that was why Ruki was the best.
Ruki tilted the oblong mirror left to right, giving her a view of the back of the room. A crowd of the other kid's parents stood behind the last row of desks. A few of the kids in the back made little waves to their mothers or fathers and quickly went back to looking forward. It was that project! "Damn" she thought. The first day I give a rat's ass about being here and I start losing my memory. But she knew why she had forgotten. It was because of her nightmares, while her digimon had been gone; the nightmares never afforded her a decent nights rest.
A woman in a long brown coat and wearing an expensive looking floral scarf waved in Ruki's view from the mirror. Her mother. She had come to her school.
An annoying beeping started and the other kids looking up from the front of the class. Ruki kept her sight on the mirror. Her mother reached down into her coat and pulled out a cell phone. She tapped a button and the beeping stopped. She turned and walked quietly into the hall, taking her call. Leaving Ruki's class. Leaving her.
Ruki sighed and closed the lid to the pencil case. She didn't expect her to come. Why would she? Ruki wondered why she even bothered. Her modeling job kept her out all nights of the week. Grandmother made dinner because mother never learned how to cook; apparently she had missed some "woman lessons" growing up. It didn't really bother Ruki, while mother was away she would use her time to go over her cards or to look for random digimon with Renamon, not that there many of them around lately.
Her thoughts wandered to Renamon. She had been the only worthwhile project in the last few months; she wondered why she couldn't make her evolve. She had seen everyone else's digimon do it, even Renamon herself, but the question was how...
Lee's digimon had evolved to protect itself against Renamon when he had gotten in the way of her attack. And Takato's had done the same thing, evolved to fight. Why couldn't Renamon do that? When Renamon had evolved it was to destroy that spider digimon they ran into a month ago, its name was Dokugumon, it had Renamon and still Renamon got stronger, and won. "But why?" She wondered. Was this all some kind of joke that god had played on her? Given her just what she wished for and then made it foul somehow, made it reverse.
Her mother had gone; Ruki could hear her travel down the hallway until she couldn't be heard anymore. The day was still ahead of her, and there was still after school to look forward to, at least. She sits up straight in her chair, and rubs her throat, the warmth of the inside of her hand comforting to her cold skin. She doesn't notice a few tiny flakes of dried red falling away from her hand as she lets it drop back to the desk.
The sun seemed to breath in through the windows to smite her. Renamon lay in the shadow of Ruki's dresser, curled into a fetal position because that was the only thing she could do. There wasn't much shadow to be had at noontime, when the sun was high in the sky. She had made herself go dark so she couldn't be seen, but it was hard to keep concentration with the light clawing at her nerves.
"How did I get like this?" she asks herself. "Was it that man? Or is it something else..." her thoughts roll around her head like ice cubes floating in a glass. "What happened? Did I die? Am I dead? I think I'm dead... I'm dead..." her brain murmurs at her. "But I'm still alive, how can I be dead? There just must be something wrong with me, something I did, am I sick?" she lies silently on the floor, thinking strange thoughts.
She wishes for Ruki to be back home, and also for the light to go away. But neither of these things happens. Everything just drones on, her reality keeps going. Her stomach is quiet. And yet that bothers her, because if its quiet now then, what does that mean?
She wonders about the feeling in her chest, not that it is gone she can think. What was it? Did I do something wrong? Why did it go away? When did it go away? Why was it even there? She feels herself finally calm and fall away after many minutes on the floor. She does not stir from her spot on the floor as a heavy truck carrying gasoline rumbles down the road out side the yard.
She still lies on the floor, in the corner under Ruki's dresser, her arms and legs tucked into her chest. She lies in a state between sleep and thought, between thought and realization. Not asleep, but not awake. Her eyes are closed halfway, half-lidded even though she is not awake. She does not dream or know that she is asleep. Her eyes are like glass marbles set into a statue of pelt and flesh. They see nothing, not even the sun.
The room and the house lay in almost total silence, then, after an eternity, someone starts to clack on a keyboard.
Seiko Makino turned on the computer silently. She sat down in the armless computer chair and switched on the monitor, the static electricity crackling amid the dust and debris that had been left on the screen.
She was mother to Rumiko Makino, Ruki's mother. She had lived with her daughter since her granddaughter was born, she knew that Rumiko wasn't exactly mother material, but she had given her blessing to her granddaughter's birth regardless of the union she came from. She to be there, Ruki needed a positive role model, and that wasn't her mother, or her father, wherever he was.
She was proud of her life, at how long she had stayed healthy while all her other friends from childhood were either dead from diseases like cancer, or on their way to a nursing home. She had read somewhere that learning something like a new language could reduce the possibility of Alzheimer's later in life. So, instead of learning a new language, she learned how to use a computer. She dipped into her own retirement fund to get it, but it was worth it, now at least, she had something to do in-between cooking and handling the laundry while Rumiko was at work or while Ruki was at school.
She had taken quite nicely to her emerald green Compaq Presario, and it had taken nicely to her. Now if only she could get some electronic cleaner for the screen...
She laid her right hand over the mouse in a claw-like way and worked open the window key with her other, the start menu popped up from the taskbar like a soldier at attention. She roved the mouse cursor over to it and clicked open a few of her favorite programs. Windows Media player, a text file for Internet addresses, and of course, Internet Explorer.
The Internet program came up and she slid on a cheap pair of headphones over her hair tie as Windows Media player starts playing an Internet radio station, a classic radio station.
Her home page on Internet Explorer was a news web page. Her eyes wandered uninterested over the articles about "Strange monster" sightings. It was funny how each of the articles was almost cookie cutter, bland and boring, as if someone had taken a scissor and cut out the good parts...
She scanned the mouse over a few underlined hyperlinks, the mouse cursor turning into an index-finger pointing hand over each one of them. She had clicked on the mouse only to discover that she'd hit the wrong one! A white lined template full of sharp lined ancient looking characters spilled onto the screen.
"The Kitsune" the article was called. The Kitsune, a mythical fox spirit who would only come to those who summoned her, and would stay with the one who summoned her forever if that person was strong enough. Seiko liked the legend since she was a little girl. When she learned how to read her mother often scolded for reading "such trash", because mythology books were the only kind except romance novels that populated her bedroom.
Seiko's favorite part of the legend was that you had to summon the Kitsune willingly; you couldn't if you weren't trying or didn't want to. Her other favorite part was that whoever summoned her would usually wind up in bed with the Kitsune, because of the spirit's fixation on the physical world and its delights. Thus she would often read pulp magazines written by amateur writers about the Kitsune, more often than not the person who summoned the Kitsune would wind up getting lucky.
She smiled as she scrolled down the page, revealing an old looking hand drawn picture of what a Kitsune would look like. It resembled a fox standing on its hind legs, its auburn fur gray in black and white. Several points on the fox's body like the arms and legs were modified to resemble parts of a Human. Seiko copy and pasted the address of the site into her text document, for later, or when her granddaughter got friendly with the computer.
She shifted in her armless chair as Media player spilled jazz music into her ears. There was something strange in the house, since the night before. Not something that gave her chills, or made her feel afraid, just something that wasn't there before. She felt weird because she was good on strange feelings, and what bothered her was why she hadn't felt it before last night.
Seiko sighed and closed the window to the mythology sight and opened her text document to look for something to do.
The school bell rang, and around three hundred children poured out the front door. Ruki took a side exit out into the west side of her school. The path to the street was lonely, apparently no one had brought their bikes that day, because there was no one other than her using the side entrance to the back of the school to the bike racks. She re-fastened her hair-band and started walking; the cold from the school's hall almost seemed to follow her out...
"Fucking yeah! Run!" someone yelled. Jianliang Lee and Takato Matsuda ran along in a sea of screaming kids, trying not to trip over each other as what seemed hundreds of kids poured out the front of the school.
Someone bumped into Jianliang and almost knocked Takato over, as they had to keep up with the torrent of people. Jianliang took Takato's arm by the wrist and pulled him aside as soon as he saw the first opening, yanking him out of the seething mass of kids. "You okay?" Jianliang said. "Yeah I'm fine" Takato said bleary eyed, Jianliang had literally swept him of his feet when he pulled him by his wrist.
"You've been drawing too much, your legs are starting turn to jelly" Jianliang said, un-shouldering his bag. "Yeah, sure" Takato said half-heartedly.
"You okay in their buddy?" Jianliang said, unzipping his bag and peering into it. "I think I'm crushed" a high-pitched voice said quivering from inside the bag. Terriermon poked his head out from inside the bag, his huge floppy ears still tucked inside the confined space of the bag. "What did you run into anyway? A brick wall?" Terriermon said. "No, just a fat kid" Jianliang replied. "Oh" Terriermon said, pulling his ears out of the bag.
They walked along the sidewalk from the school, heading toward the park. Terriermon ducking his head back inside the bag whenever they passed someone.
"You should get a bag to carry Guilmon around in Takato" Terriermon said smirking.
"I've been practicing walking around with him, he's getting better..."
"Yeah right! A big red lizard doesn't attract any attention Takato?"
"No not really, all the people on the street think he's a Cosplayer" Takato smiling.
They turned the corner, taking them farther away from the school, Terriermon and Takato babbling back and fourth to each other. Jianliang just stared forward, ignoring the cheerful scenery of the mid-summer day. Kindergarten kids walked along sidewalks holding their mothers hands. Smiling. Happy. Cotton-brained...
Terriermon sunk into the bag so that only his head was showing, "Hey Takato, ever seen a girls underwear?"
Takato turned his head. "Uh no"
"Check it out!" The rabbit stood up in the bag holding up a pair of white cotton panties that had been hidden in his hands while in the bag.
"Woah!"
"Hehe yeah Takato! Get a good look, this is probably the last time you'll see something like this!"
Jianliang turned his head to the scene that lay to his left. "Terriermon! I told you stop bringing those home!"
"Aww c'mon Jen! If I get two more I'll have a collection of all the girls in class 2-D!" ("Jen" was Terriermon's nickname for Jianliang, even though all of Jianliangs friends just called him Jianliang)
"Put them away will you please?" Jianliang said tiredly rubbing his eyes.
Terriermon grinned through his furry muzzle and tucked the girl's underwear back into the lip of the bag, Takato giving Terriermon an un-easy look.
"How long have you been doing that Terriermon?" Takato asked.
Jianliang spoke up first before Terriermon could open his mouth. "Since I've known him... My mom was the first to start noticing that her underwear was missing"
Takato shot a glance forward in thought, and then started to grin himself. "Wow Jianliang, I thought Guilmon was bad!" he said almost laughing.
Jianliang just turned his attention to what was in front of him. Everyday things didn't worry him much, but... lately... he had been getting in bad moods, bad moods that made him feel like he was useless. That he wasn't worth anything. He supposed that what he was going through was normal. But then there was how everything had been going. Everything had been happy; too good to be true... something bad was going to happen, something bad was going to jump up from all the happiness and drag everything down with it. He knew it. He could feel it.
Ruki walked home silent. The people were starting to get to her. Everyone running around like the day was going to be his or her last, all anxious to get to the park or one of the malls that dotted the area. Some of the older kids on the street recognized her, and whispered to their friends about the "Digimon Queen"; her title, one she'd had since winning the tournament.
She had left her school a while ago, and the cold had seeped out of her gray uniform, replaced by the dry heat of the day. She had started down one of the larger streets in the city; she took the main streets like she had been taught to do by her grandmother when she used to take her out for ice cream when she was little. No point in giving any creep a fair chance. The street was lined with bookstores and independent businesses. Typical for where she lived.
She stepped casually through the spare crowds of men in business suits and mothers with children that populated the street during the day. Once it got dark there would be all manners of punk kids running around, and couples getting off work looking for some "leisure time" in the park.
She stared at the ground in thought.
Evolving... I don't get it... the red lizard could do it... even that gimpy little rabbit... and then Renamon...
Renamon had evolved only once. Ruki wondered if she would ever again.
Is it something I'm doing wrong? ...Or is it something I don't have... am I missing something?
A chill ran up her spine. She stopped mid-stride, eyes widening. Cold crept into the back of her uniform, running icy fingers over her back and ass, penetrating the skin and sinking deep into her insides. Her shoulders trembled. And her back arched in an attempt to get away from the thing behind her.
In her mind a dark hand loomed over her, fingers poised as claws, ready to grasp and crush, cold icing over wounds and freezing blood.
She turned stumbling, her bag falling form its perch on her shoulder and hanging off her arm.
Nothing. The sun streamed bright rays over the sidewalk, a man in a gray suit walked around her, looking at her like she was crazy.
Her eyes were wide and her knees wanted to buckle. Her took the strap of her bag in her hand and held it to her chest, to try and calm her frantically beating heart.
She turned back around and started to walk quickly towards her house.
Author's note; if you want to contact me I'm at cj812@aol.com, for Chibi Renamon Renamon@SoftHome.net
A re-write by outlaw torn
This is a re-write of Chibi Renamon's "the fox who cried vampire" the idea and basic plotline is his, everything else though has been Re-done by me.
Authors note; this contains vampirism, crossbreeding, and violence. Plus I use all Japanese names and attacks.
Black sun
School sucked. Takato Matsuda knew that, but he wondered if everyone else did.
Around 28 kids were stuffed into his classroom. The light glared through the windows, getting into his eyes. Pissing him off. He shifted around in his seat; his briefs had crept up his ass again. And he couldn't fix that until the period ended. He didn't want to go groping himself right in the middle of class in front of everyone, no. That would come later. Much later.
Beads of sweat trickled down his forehead. He reached up and pulled his goggles into his hair, freeing his hairline. He wiped the sweat from his face with equally sweaty fingers. Damn, he thought. How did it get so hot in here?
The teacher paced through the grid work of desks, stealing looks at the other kids papers to see if they were working. Takato watched him owlishly. Ms. Asagi was pretty nice compared to the ex-military spook they had down the hall, that guy was bats, no two ways about it. But Asagi was always a bitch when it came to lectures. She'd have him stand in the hall for the period if he was late. Funny, he hadn't seen her do that to anyone else. Takato had decided on the second day there that she simply did not like boys. Not that she was especially mean to the boys; she just seemed to gravitate towards him when he wasn't doing what he was supposed to.
"Takato!" Ms. Asagi's voice sounded angry.
Takato looked up from his paper, pencil still locked into his from when the period began. "Yes Ms. Asagi?" he said, looking up into what ten years ago might have been a pretty face.
Her eyes bore down on him from behind her auburn hair. "Have you even been working all this time?"
"Yes Ms. Asagi" Takato said robotically. He rubbed the pencil together in his sweaty fingers.
"You haven't been drawing again, have you?" she said, lifting up his paper.
"No Ms. Asagi" Takato said, his eyes not shifting the slightest even as the paper was lifted up, revealing what he'd been working on for the last thirty minutes. It was a new digimon, a giant dinosaur with blades attached to its arms and a mane of hair trailing down its shoulders. That's what he'd intended, but he still drew two dimensionally, the big dinosaur was scrawled across two full pages of his sketchbook. It was supposed to be red, which he'd take care of when he got home with his markers, assuming he could ever get it out of here in one piece.
"What is this?" Asagi said.
"That must have gotten stuck under my paper when I started" Takato said, doing his best innocent impression.
"Yes, I see... another creature..." she sort of trailed off staring at it.
"What is this? Hair?" Asagi said at once, using her grilling tone.
Takato readied his voice to sound polite. "Yes Ms. Asagi, he'd look weird without hair." A few kids in the room started to snicker just because he was being scolded.
Asagi glanced back at him, raising her hand to brush it out of her eyes. She dropped the paper back to the desk, letting it fall like a leaf from a tree. "Get started Matsuda" she said, and she stalked away leaving Takato to breathe a sigh of relief. She could have given him detention right there, but she didn't. Takato concluded that she had probably wanted to go home and not have to deal with him. Its not like he would have done work during detention anyway. The air settled down as she made her way back to her desk. Takato could hear one of the girls in the far side of the room whispering.
He watched her sit down at her desk and wondered what Guilmon was doing.
Across the school building Jianliang Lee rustled under his clothes. He had the front of his orange vest wide open. Soon, he would have to wriggle out of it and drop it into his bag. He didn't welcome the idea of that, the room was almost sweltering, but he didn't like being without his vest, he felt naked without it. The dark gray T-shirt he was wearing underneath was already damp with sweat. It made him feel even worse, because if he took his vest off now, it would feel like he was not only naked, but wet as well.
"Another wonderful day at Osamu elementary" he thought, rolling his eyes. There were other things he could be doing, but being able to say that you went to school everyday went farther than you think in an argument, especially with his sisters. Shaochung, his sister, had been a little bitch lately about Terriermon, keeping him in her room, making Jianliang come get him when there was trouble.
Terriermon. Jianliang thought about him constantly, at the moment he wondered where he was. The little rabbit had been on his shoulders on the way to school, when they had gotten there he had retreated to Jianliangs book bag. Funny. He wasn't there now. Sometime between when he had put his bag down to fix his shoelaces, to the time when he had picked it up again he had wandered out. Most likely slipping right through the crowded hallway, hidden in plain sight by how small he was.
He had probably slipped down to the cafeteria for a snack, or into the girl's locker room to go through some of the girl's panties. The school was pretty much his playground during the day. The funniest thing was that no one had ever caught site of him. No one had ever mentioned a foot tall green and white horned floppy eared rabbit running around.
He cracked a smile thinking about some of the girls in the class. What would happen if they knew a digimon was going through their unmentionables right now.
His eyes scanned the room. The teacher was a brown haired man in late forties, wearing a dress shirt all buttoned up in spite of the temperature, just another person to roll your eyes at. The teacher knew that Jianliang knew that he didn't have clue as to what he was doing, but the teacher still came in everyday with the same attitude. Which was holding up well considering the heat. Jianliang hadn't even bothered to remember his name.
The social studies book and paper loomed in front of him. He had already finished half of it, and was waiting until the clock caught up with him to blow over the rest. No hard working on my part, not for this place. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs under his desk. It would still be a while before he could leave, and Terriermon was somewhere, he'd have to find him before he could actually leave the building and find Takato, although Takato would probably come looking for him if he didn't find him first. Takato was funny, the kid had is very own real digimon, and yet he still didn't know how to play the card game. Well, he could play, "could" being emphasized. He still lost to his friends, from what he told Jianliang anyway. He wanted Jianliang to meet him after school in the park and show him some "tricks" that he knew.
Jianliang uncrossed his legs and started working his vest off, as the day grew hotter.
Ruki rubbed her arms. The school had their air-conditioner cranked up all day. That was a perk of going to a private school, but the damn thing was actually making it cold in there! She hadn't been able to get comfortable since she got there. She didn't like the cold; it made her want to shrink down into a ball, so no one could see her.
She sat with her legs uncrossed. She knew that was one of the reasons why the other girls made fun of her behind her back, that she sat down like a guy, or walked like one, or ran like one... so what if she didn't button her legs up when she sat down, at least she didn't have them spread all the time like all the other girls did. She would bring that up when they made smart-ass comments about her, if she ever caught them.
The teacher was a tall man with brown hair and huge coke-bottle glasses. He had been on a lecture the whole day about stuff like the ozone layer and the rain forest. She wondered when he would shut up.
She hunched over her desk, she tucked her chin onto her palm for support and flicked open her pencil case with her free hand. She had chosen the case because it had a mirror inside the lid for some reason; Ruki used it to see behind her in class. You couldn't just look behind you while the teacher was right in the middle of talking, as tempting as that was when he was especially boring. Ruki knew none of the other girls had the brainpower to think of something like that, and that was why Ruki was the best.
Ruki tilted the oblong mirror left to right, giving her a view of the back of the room. A crowd of the other kid's parents stood behind the last row of desks. A few of the kids in the back made little waves to their mothers or fathers and quickly went back to looking forward. It was that project! "Damn" she thought. The first day I give a rat's ass about being here and I start losing my memory. But she knew why she had forgotten. It was because of her nightmares, while her digimon had been gone; the nightmares never afforded her a decent nights rest.
A woman in a long brown coat and wearing an expensive looking floral scarf waved in Ruki's view from the mirror. Her mother. She had come to her school.
An annoying beeping started and the other kids looking up from the front of the class. Ruki kept her sight on the mirror. Her mother reached down into her coat and pulled out a cell phone. She tapped a button and the beeping stopped. She turned and walked quietly into the hall, taking her call. Leaving Ruki's class. Leaving her.
Ruki sighed and closed the lid to the pencil case. She didn't expect her to come. Why would she? Ruki wondered why she even bothered. Her modeling job kept her out all nights of the week. Grandmother made dinner because mother never learned how to cook; apparently she had missed some "woman lessons" growing up. It didn't really bother Ruki, while mother was away she would use her time to go over her cards or to look for random digimon with Renamon, not that there many of them around lately.
Her thoughts wandered to Renamon. She had been the only worthwhile project in the last few months; she wondered why she couldn't make her evolve. She had seen everyone else's digimon do it, even Renamon herself, but the question was how...
Lee's digimon had evolved to protect itself against Renamon when he had gotten in the way of her attack. And Takato's had done the same thing, evolved to fight. Why couldn't Renamon do that? When Renamon had evolved it was to destroy that spider digimon they ran into a month ago, its name was Dokugumon, it had Renamon and still Renamon got stronger, and won. "But why?" She wondered. Was this all some kind of joke that god had played on her? Given her just what she wished for and then made it foul somehow, made it reverse.
Her mother had gone; Ruki could hear her travel down the hallway until she couldn't be heard anymore. The day was still ahead of her, and there was still after school to look forward to, at least. She sits up straight in her chair, and rubs her throat, the warmth of the inside of her hand comforting to her cold skin. She doesn't notice a few tiny flakes of dried red falling away from her hand as she lets it drop back to the desk.
The sun seemed to breath in through the windows to smite her. Renamon lay in the shadow of Ruki's dresser, curled into a fetal position because that was the only thing she could do. There wasn't much shadow to be had at noontime, when the sun was high in the sky. She had made herself go dark so she couldn't be seen, but it was hard to keep concentration with the light clawing at her nerves.
"How did I get like this?" she asks herself. "Was it that man? Or is it something else..." her thoughts roll around her head like ice cubes floating in a glass. "What happened? Did I die? Am I dead? I think I'm dead... I'm dead..." her brain murmurs at her. "But I'm still alive, how can I be dead? There just must be something wrong with me, something I did, am I sick?" she lies silently on the floor, thinking strange thoughts.
She wishes for Ruki to be back home, and also for the light to go away. But neither of these things happens. Everything just drones on, her reality keeps going. Her stomach is quiet. And yet that bothers her, because if its quiet now then, what does that mean?
She wonders about the feeling in her chest, not that it is gone she can think. What was it? Did I do something wrong? Why did it go away? When did it go away? Why was it even there? She feels herself finally calm and fall away after many minutes on the floor. She does not stir from her spot on the floor as a heavy truck carrying gasoline rumbles down the road out side the yard.
She still lies on the floor, in the corner under Ruki's dresser, her arms and legs tucked into her chest. She lies in a state between sleep and thought, between thought and realization. Not asleep, but not awake. Her eyes are closed halfway, half-lidded even though she is not awake. She does not dream or know that she is asleep. Her eyes are like glass marbles set into a statue of pelt and flesh. They see nothing, not even the sun.
The room and the house lay in almost total silence, then, after an eternity, someone starts to clack on a keyboard.
Seiko Makino turned on the computer silently. She sat down in the armless computer chair and switched on the monitor, the static electricity crackling amid the dust and debris that had been left on the screen.
She was mother to Rumiko Makino, Ruki's mother. She had lived with her daughter since her granddaughter was born, she knew that Rumiko wasn't exactly mother material, but she had given her blessing to her granddaughter's birth regardless of the union she came from. She to be there, Ruki needed a positive role model, and that wasn't her mother, or her father, wherever he was.
She was proud of her life, at how long she had stayed healthy while all her other friends from childhood were either dead from diseases like cancer, or on their way to a nursing home. She had read somewhere that learning something like a new language could reduce the possibility of Alzheimer's later in life. So, instead of learning a new language, she learned how to use a computer. She dipped into her own retirement fund to get it, but it was worth it, now at least, she had something to do in-between cooking and handling the laundry while Rumiko was at work or while Ruki was at school.
She had taken quite nicely to her emerald green Compaq Presario, and it had taken nicely to her. Now if only she could get some electronic cleaner for the screen...
She laid her right hand over the mouse in a claw-like way and worked open the window key with her other, the start menu popped up from the taskbar like a soldier at attention. She roved the mouse cursor over to it and clicked open a few of her favorite programs. Windows Media player, a text file for Internet addresses, and of course, Internet Explorer.
The Internet program came up and she slid on a cheap pair of headphones over her hair tie as Windows Media player starts playing an Internet radio station, a classic radio station.
Her home page on Internet Explorer was a news web page. Her eyes wandered uninterested over the articles about "Strange monster" sightings. It was funny how each of the articles was almost cookie cutter, bland and boring, as if someone had taken a scissor and cut out the good parts...
She scanned the mouse over a few underlined hyperlinks, the mouse cursor turning into an index-finger pointing hand over each one of them. She had clicked on the mouse only to discover that she'd hit the wrong one! A white lined template full of sharp lined ancient looking characters spilled onto the screen.
"The Kitsune" the article was called. The Kitsune, a mythical fox spirit who would only come to those who summoned her, and would stay with the one who summoned her forever if that person was strong enough. Seiko liked the legend since she was a little girl. When she learned how to read her mother often scolded for reading "such trash", because mythology books were the only kind except romance novels that populated her bedroom.
Seiko's favorite part of the legend was that you had to summon the Kitsune willingly; you couldn't if you weren't trying or didn't want to. Her other favorite part was that whoever summoned her would usually wind up in bed with the Kitsune, because of the spirit's fixation on the physical world and its delights. Thus she would often read pulp magazines written by amateur writers about the Kitsune, more often than not the person who summoned the Kitsune would wind up getting lucky.
She smiled as she scrolled down the page, revealing an old looking hand drawn picture of what a Kitsune would look like. It resembled a fox standing on its hind legs, its auburn fur gray in black and white. Several points on the fox's body like the arms and legs were modified to resemble parts of a Human. Seiko copy and pasted the address of the site into her text document, for later, or when her granddaughter got friendly with the computer.
She shifted in her armless chair as Media player spilled jazz music into her ears. There was something strange in the house, since the night before. Not something that gave her chills, or made her feel afraid, just something that wasn't there before. She felt weird because she was good on strange feelings, and what bothered her was why she hadn't felt it before last night.
Seiko sighed and closed the window to the mythology sight and opened her text document to look for something to do.
The school bell rang, and around three hundred children poured out the front door. Ruki took a side exit out into the west side of her school. The path to the street was lonely, apparently no one had brought their bikes that day, because there was no one other than her using the side entrance to the back of the school to the bike racks. She re-fastened her hair-band and started walking; the cold from the school's hall almost seemed to follow her out...
"Fucking yeah! Run!" someone yelled. Jianliang Lee and Takato Matsuda ran along in a sea of screaming kids, trying not to trip over each other as what seemed hundreds of kids poured out the front of the school.
Someone bumped into Jianliang and almost knocked Takato over, as they had to keep up with the torrent of people. Jianliang took Takato's arm by the wrist and pulled him aside as soon as he saw the first opening, yanking him out of the seething mass of kids. "You okay?" Jianliang said. "Yeah I'm fine" Takato said bleary eyed, Jianliang had literally swept him of his feet when he pulled him by his wrist.
"You've been drawing too much, your legs are starting turn to jelly" Jianliang said, un-shouldering his bag. "Yeah, sure" Takato said half-heartedly.
"You okay in their buddy?" Jianliang said, unzipping his bag and peering into it. "I think I'm crushed" a high-pitched voice said quivering from inside the bag. Terriermon poked his head out from inside the bag, his huge floppy ears still tucked inside the confined space of the bag. "What did you run into anyway? A brick wall?" Terriermon said. "No, just a fat kid" Jianliang replied. "Oh" Terriermon said, pulling his ears out of the bag.
They walked along the sidewalk from the school, heading toward the park. Terriermon ducking his head back inside the bag whenever they passed someone.
"You should get a bag to carry Guilmon around in Takato" Terriermon said smirking.
"I've been practicing walking around with him, he's getting better..."
"Yeah right! A big red lizard doesn't attract any attention Takato?"
"No not really, all the people on the street think he's a Cosplayer" Takato smiling.
They turned the corner, taking them farther away from the school, Terriermon and Takato babbling back and fourth to each other. Jianliang just stared forward, ignoring the cheerful scenery of the mid-summer day. Kindergarten kids walked along sidewalks holding their mothers hands. Smiling. Happy. Cotton-brained...
Terriermon sunk into the bag so that only his head was showing, "Hey Takato, ever seen a girls underwear?"
Takato turned his head. "Uh no"
"Check it out!" The rabbit stood up in the bag holding up a pair of white cotton panties that had been hidden in his hands while in the bag.
"Woah!"
"Hehe yeah Takato! Get a good look, this is probably the last time you'll see something like this!"
Jianliang turned his head to the scene that lay to his left. "Terriermon! I told you stop bringing those home!"
"Aww c'mon Jen! If I get two more I'll have a collection of all the girls in class 2-D!" ("Jen" was Terriermon's nickname for Jianliang, even though all of Jianliangs friends just called him Jianliang)
"Put them away will you please?" Jianliang said tiredly rubbing his eyes.
Terriermon grinned through his furry muzzle and tucked the girl's underwear back into the lip of the bag, Takato giving Terriermon an un-easy look.
"How long have you been doing that Terriermon?" Takato asked.
Jianliang spoke up first before Terriermon could open his mouth. "Since I've known him... My mom was the first to start noticing that her underwear was missing"
Takato shot a glance forward in thought, and then started to grin himself. "Wow Jianliang, I thought Guilmon was bad!" he said almost laughing.
Jianliang just turned his attention to what was in front of him. Everyday things didn't worry him much, but... lately... he had been getting in bad moods, bad moods that made him feel like he was useless. That he wasn't worth anything. He supposed that what he was going through was normal. But then there was how everything had been going. Everything had been happy; too good to be true... something bad was going to happen, something bad was going to jump up from all the happiness and drag everything down with it. He knew it. He could feel it.
Ruki walked home silent. The people were starting to get to her. Everyone running around like the day was going to be his or her last, all anxious to get to the park or one of the malls that dotted the area. Some of the older kids on the street recognized her, and whispered to their friends about the "Digimon Queen"; her title, one she'd had since winning the tournament.
She had left her school a while ago, and the cold had seeped out of her gray uniform, replaced by the dry heat of the day. She had started down one of the larger streets in the city; she took the main streets like she had been taught to do by her grandmother when she used to take her out for ice cream when she was little. No point in giving any creep a fair chance. The street was lined with bookstores and independent businesses. Typical for where she lived.
She stepped casually through the spare crowds of men in business suits and mothers with children that populated the street during the day. Once it got dark there would be all manners of punk kids running around, and couples getting off work looking for some "leisure time" in the park.
She stared at the ground in thought.
Evolving... I don't get it... the red lizard could do it... even that gimpy little rabbit... and then Renamon...
Renamon had evolved only once. Ruki wondered if she would ever again.
Is it something I'm doing wrong? ...Or is it something I don't have... am I missing something?
A chill ran up her spine. She stopped mid-stride, eyes widening. Cold crept into the back of her uniform, running icy fingers over her back and ass, penetrating the skin and sinking deep into her insides. Her shoulders trembled. And her back arched in an attempt to get away from the thing behind her.
In her mind a dark hand loomed over her, fingers poised as claws, ready to grasp and crush, cold icing over wounds and freezing blood.
She turned stumbling, her bag falling form its perch on her shoulder and hanging off her arm.
Nothing. The sun streamed bright rays over the sidewalk, a man in a gray suit walked around her, looking at her like she was crazy.
Her eyes were wide and her knees wanted to buckle. Her took the strap of her bag in her hand and held it to her chest, to try and calm her frantically beating heart.
She turned back around and started to walk quickly towards her house.
Author's note; if you want to contact me I'm at cj812@aol.com, for Chibi Renamon Renamon@SoftHome.net