Digimon Christmas Carol
By Charles Dickens, Digimon characters put in by Cyrox.
Disclaimer: I don't own Digimon or a Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
Cast: (please don't complain about the choices, these are the best ones I could think of. And yes, I'm aware of how people are related in this.)
Scrooge: Matt
Bob Crachet: Takato
Mrs. Crachet: Jeri
Scrooge's Nephew Fred: TK
Scrooge's Nephew's Wife: Kari
Tiny Tim: Tommy
Other Crachet Kids: Susy, Ai, Mako
Jacob Marley: Tai
Fezziwig: Ken
Fezziwig's Wife: Yolei
Fan: Zoe
Belle: Sora
Ghost of Christmas Past: Mimi
Ghost of Christmas Present: Takuya
Ghost of Christmas Future: Koji
Collectors: Joe and Henry
Boy: Cody
The other characters will be played by the other Digidestined and Tamers and other characters who have appeared in Digimon.
Cyrox: Now that we have the parts down, on with the show. Oh yeah, don't flame me if you don't like whose playing what part.
A Christmas Carol.
Tai was dead to begin with. There was no doubt about it. Tai was as dead as a doornail.
Matt knew that he was dead. Matt and Tai were partners. Matt was his only executor and friend.
Matt never painted out Tai's name. There it stood above the warehouse door: Matt and Tai. Sometimes people new to the business called him Matt, and sometimes Tai, but he answered to both names.
But Matt was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone. Secret, self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. His heart was cold and it never thawed, not even at Christmas.
Nobody ever stopped to greet Matt, but what did Matt care. It was the thing he liked.
Now our story started on Christmas eve, Matt sat busily in his counting house. It was cold weather with a bit of fog. It was three o'clock, but it was dark already.
The door of Matt's Counting House was open so he could keep his eye on his clerk, who sat in a small cell copying some letters. Matt had a very small fire, but the Clerk's fire was smaller that it looked like one coal. But he couldn't replenish it because Matt kept the coal box in his room, and when the clerk came to get some, Matt wouldn't allow him. So the clerk put on his white comforter and tried to warm himself with the candle.
"Merry Christmas Uncle! God save you!" Cried a cheerful voice, it was Matt's nephew.
"Bah!" Matt said. "Humbug!"
"Christmas a humbug uncle? I'm sure you don't mean that?"
"I do! Merry Christmas, what right do you have to be merry? You're poor enough."
"Come then, what right do you have to be so dismal? You're rich enough."
Matt had no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, so he replied "Bah! Humbug!"
"Don't be cross Uncle."
"What else can I be when I live in such a world of fools? Merry Christmas, out upon Merry Christmas! What's Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in 'em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could have my way, every idiot who says Merry Christmas should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart!"
"Uncle!" Pleaded the nephew.
"Nephew, keep Christmas in your own way and let me keep it in mine."
"Keep it? But you don't keep it."
"Leave me alone then. Much good may it do you! Much good has it ever done you!"
"There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not made any profits and Christmas is one of them. But I'm sure that Christmas is a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time when men and women can express themselves freely, and think of those who are below them as if they really were their own. And therefore Uncle, even though I have never made any money off of it, I believe that it has done me good."
The clerk in the tank applauded at the words.
"Let me hear another sound from you." Matt said. "And you'll keep Christmas by losing your job. You're quite a powerful speaker sir." He added, turning to his nephew. "I wonder why you don't go into Parliament."
"Don't be angry Uncle. Come dine with us tomorrow."
Matt said that he would see him. He went the whole length of the expression, and said that he would see him in that extremity first.
"But why?" Cried Matt's nephew. "Why?"
"Why did you get married?"
"Because I fell in love."
"Because you fell in love! Good afternoon!"
"Nay Uncle, but you never came to see me before this happened. Why don't you give us a reason for not coming now?"
"Good afternoon!"
"I don't want anything from you and I didn't ask anything from you; why can't we be friends?"
"Good afternoon!"
"I'm sorry, with all of my heart, to find you so resolute. We have never had any quarrel, to which I have been a party, But I have made the trail in homage to Christmas, and I'll keep my Christmas humour to the last. So a Merry Christmas uncle!"
"Good afternoon!"
"And a Happy New Year!"
"Good afternoon!"
His nephew left the room without saying an angry word. He stopped by the door and wished a Merry Christmas to the clerk, who replied with a Merry Christmas of his own.
"Great." Said Matt. "Now my clerk, who gets fifteen shillings a week, and a wife and a family, is talking about a Merry Christmas. I'll retire to Bedlam."
When Scrooge's nephew left, two other people named Joe and Henry entered. They entered Scrooge's office and bowed to him with their books and papers in their hands.
"Matt Ishida and Tai Kamiya I believe." Joe said. "May I have the pleasure of addressing Mr. Ishida or Mr. Kamiya?"
"Tai Kamiya has been dead for seven years on this very night." Matt said.
"Then you must be Mr. Matt Ishida." Henry said as he presented his credentials.
"At his festive season of the year, Mr. Ishida." Joe said as he took out a pen. "It is more than usually desirable that we should make some slightly provision for the poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time."
"Are there no prisons?" Matt asked.
"Plenty of prisons." Joe replied.
"And are the union workhouses still in operation?"
"They are still, but I wish they were not."
"The treadmill and the poor law are in full vigor then?"
"Both very busy sir."
"Oh! I was afraid that something had occurred to stop them." Matt said. "I'm very glad to hear it."
"But those things scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude." Henry said. "And a few of us are trying to raise a fund to by the poor some meat and drink and means of warmth. We choose this time because it is a time when people are generous. What should I put you down for?"
"Nothing!" Matt replied.
"You wish to be anonymous?" Joe asked.
"I wish to be left alone!" Matt said. "I don't act merry at Christmas and I can't afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned, they cost enough and those who are badly off must go there!"
"Many can't go there and many would rather die."
"If they would rather die, they had better do it and decrease the surplus population! And it's none of my business. It's enough for a man to understand his own business and not interfere with other people's. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon Gentlemen."
Seeing that it would be useless to pursue their point, Joe and Henry left him.
Meanwhile the fog and darkness thickened so that people could barley see anything. During that time, a boy named Cody stood by his door singing a Christmas carol. But opened the door and answered so fiercely that Cody ran from there. And at the length of the hour when it was time to close the counting house arrived. With an ill wind, Matt dismounted from his stool and tacitly admitted the fact to the expectant clerk at the tank, who instantly snuffed his candle out and put on his hat.
"You'll want all day tomorrow, I suppose?" Matt said.
"If quite convenient sir." The clerk said.
"It's not convenient, and it's not fair. If I was to stop half-a-crown for it, you'd think yourself ill-used, I'll be bound. And yet you don't think me ill-used when I pay a day's wages for no work."
"But Mr. Ishida, it's only once a year."
"A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every twenty-fifth of December! But I suppose you must have the whole dy. Be here early next morning."
The clerk promised he would and Matt walked out with a growl. The office was closed with a twinkling, and the clerk went down a slide on Cornhill.
After eating his dinner and reading all of the newspapers, Matt went home to bed. He lived in the chambers which had once belonged to his deceased partner. They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard. It was old and dreary enough for nobody lived in it but Matt, the other rooms being all let out as offices.
Now the only thing different about the knocker was that it was large. And Matt hadn't even thought about Tai that afternoon. But Matt saw the knocker, in the process of change, as Tai's face. It looked exactly like him, even down to his large hair.
As Matt looked at it again and it returned to the shape of a knocker. Now Matt was startled at that. But he put his hand upon the key, turned it, walked in, and lit his candle. Then he locked the door and walked across the hall. He walked slowly up the stairs.
Now Darkness is cheap and Mat liked it. But before he shut the door to his room, he walked through his room to see that all was right. Seeing that nothing was out of the ordinary, he closed his door and double locked himself in. Thus secured against surprise, he took off his cravat, put on his nightgown, slippers, and nightcap, and sat down before the fire to eat his gruel, and thinking about the face of Tai.
"Humbug." He said at the thought of it. Then he heard a clanking noise below him, as if some person were dragging a heavy chain down in the cellar. The cellar door flew open and the noise grew louder on the floors below, then coming up the stairs, then coming straight towards his door.
"Humbug!" Matt shouted. "I won't believe it."
Then something entered his room right before his eyes. Matt knew who it was, it was Tai's ghost. It was Tai, down to the very last detail. But there was a chain around his middle. It was like on long tail with cashboxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel.
"How now!" Matt said. "What do you want with me?"
"Much." The ghost said. Matt knew that it had the voice of Tai.
"Who are you?"
"Ask me who I was."
"Who were you then?"
"In life I was your partner, Tai Kamiya." Matt didn't believe the ghost for a second.
"You don't believe in me." Observed the ghost.
"I don't!" Matt replied.
"Why do you doubt?"
"Because a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are. You see this toothpick?" Matt said.
"I do." Replied the ghost.
"You are not looking at it."
"But I see it."
"Well I have but to swallow this, and be for the rest of my days persecuted by a legion of goblins, all of my own creation. Humbug, I tell you, humbug!"
At this the spirit raised a frightful cry, and shook its chain with such a dismal and appalling noise, that Matt held on tight to his chair, to save himself from falling in a swoon. Matt fell upon his knees and clasped his hands before his face.
"Mercy!" Matt said. "Dreadful apparition, why do you trouble me?"
"Man of worldly mind!" Replied the ghost. "Do you believe in me or not?"
"I do! But why do spirits walk the Earth and why do they come to me?"
"It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow men and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on Earth and turned to happiness."
Again the spirit cried and shook his heavy chains.
"You are fettered." Matt said, trembling. "Tell me why?"
"I wear the chain I forged in life." The ghost said. "I made it link by link and yard by yard. I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?"
Matt trembled more and more.
"Or would you know the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself?" The ghost said. "It was full as heavy and as long as this seven Christmas eves ago. You have laboured on it since. It is a ponderous chain!"
Matt glanced at the floor, in the expectation of finding himself surrounded by some fifty or sixty fathoms of iron cable: but he could see nothing.
"Tai." Matt said. "Tai Kamiya, tell me more. Speak comfort to me Tai."
"I have none to give." Tai said. "It comes from other regions Matt Ishida, and is conveyed by other ministers, to other kinds of men. Nor can I tell you what I would, a very little more is all permitted to me. I cannot rest, I cannot stay, I cannot linger anywhere. My spirit never walked beyond our countinghouse, in life my spirit never roved beyond the narrow limits of our money-changing hole, and weary journeys lie before me."
"You must have been very slow about it Tai."
"Slow!"
"Seven years dead, and traveling all the time."
"The whole time. No rest, no peace. Incessant torture of remorse."
"You travel fast?"
"On the wings of the wind."
"You might have got over a great quantity of ground in seven years."
The ghost, on hearing this, set up another cry and clanked its chain so hideously in the dead silence of the night, that the ward would have been justified in indicating it for a nuisance.
"Oh captive, bound, and double-ironed." Cried the ghost. "Not to know, that ages of incessant labour by immortal creatures. For this Earth must pass into eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is all developed. Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness. Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunity misused. Yet such was I! Oh such was I!"
"But you were always a good man of business Tai." Matt said.
"Business!" Cried the ghost, wringing his hands again. "Mankind was my business! The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealing of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!"
It held up its chain at arm's length, as if that were the cause of all its unavailing grief, and flung it heavily upon the ground again.
"At this time of the rolling year." The specter said. "I suffer most. Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed star which led the wise men to a poor abode. Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me! Hear me! My time is nearly gone."
"I will. But don't be hard upon me! Don't be flowery Tai! Pray!"
"How is it that I appear before you in a shape that you can see, I may not tell. I have sat invisible beside you many and many a day. That is no light part of my penance. I am here tonight to warn you, that you have a chance and hope of escaping my fate."
"You were always a good friend to me, thank you."
"You will be haunted by three spirits."
"Is that the chance and hope you mentioned Tai?" Matt demanded.
"It is." The ghost said.
"I-I think I'd rather not."
"Without their visits, you cannot hope to shun the path I've tried. Expect the first tomorrow when the bell toles one."
"Couldn't I take them all on at once and get it over with?"
"Expect the second on the next night at the same hour. The third upon the next night when the last stroke of twelve has ceased to vibrate. Look to see me no more; and look that, for your own sake, you remember what has passed between us!"
When it had said these words, the ghost walked towards the window and it floated out upon the bleak, dark night. Matt closed the window and examined it. The window was double-locked and none of the bolts had been removed. He thought about the conversation with the ghost, and went straight to bed and fell asleep upon the instant.