Chapter 11

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
Ellen Parr

Figuring out what to do was not so easy for the Digidestined. Savannah and Zach took a bus home, leaving Tithonia to catch one bound in the opposite direction. Zach and Savannah crept into their respective houses through bedroom windows that had been left unlocked. Upon entering his room, Zach went to his computer and tried to open a digiport. It, too flashed the dreaded message: CONNECTION TERMINATED.

He sat back on his bed and held his head in his hands. He was cut off from the Digital World and Spikemon, and had spent a terrible night at a desk that had put a crick in his neck. At least it was Sunday and he didn't have to go to school.

Zach took a shower, checked to make sure his mother was asleep, then turned on his computer and logged onto his chat program. Savannah was on. "Any luck?" he asked.

"No," she replied. "Says connection terminated still. What are we going to DO?"

"Maybe the network's down," typed Zach, a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. "Can we send them a message with our digivices?"

"I've looked," said Savannah. "All the communication menus are disabled in the real world."

There was a pause, and Zach stared at the chat program for a long moment. "I'm getting off, bye," he typed, and logged off. All he wanted to do was go to bed and sleep.

And sleep he did, past lunch. He awoke at 1:30 and sat up, feeling groggy. He got up and went in the kitchen. His mother was reading a book with the television on, and she got up when she saw him. "Hi Zach," she said. "Have fun?"

"Not really," said Zach, pulling out milk and a box of cereal. "The network went down, and this game Savannah and I were playing stopped working."

"That's too bad," said his mother. "How late did you stay up? You look exhausted."

"All night, mostly," said Zach, glad that he had practiced his story in advance.

He at his cereal, looked at his homework, and decided to get on the internet. As he surfed, he doodled on a notepad: images of Spikemon and other digimon he had seen. "I don't even have a baseball bat anymore," he thought dully. "Hope that lizard is enjoying him."

* * *

"Right! Left! Right! Hit him again! Again! Again! You aren't tired, are you?"

Chamelemon crouched on the ground, gasping for breath. He clutched Base's handle in both hands, and in front of him hung the long-deserted cocoon of some insect digimon. It made an excellent punching bag.

"You don't need rest!" said Base. "It's an enemy! Attack it!"

Chamelemon resumed beating the cocoon with the baseball bat. "Harder!" Base yelled. "Those swings would hardly make it to first base, let alone over the back fence!"

Chamelemon stopped to rest again, his skin turning from orange to brown and back.

"Do you really think that's air you're breathing?" said Base.

"Shut up," panted Chamelemon. "This is stupid."

"You don't have any attacks because you never attacked," said Base. "You don't use it, you lose it."

Chamelemon looked at him. "You are annoying."

"Shoulda thought of that before you swiped me," sneered the bat. "Now we're stuck, my friend, and stuck together."

"I have better things to do than this," said Chamelemon. He stood up and walked off, carrying the bat.

"Hey!" said Base. "I wasn't don't training you!"

"Tough," said Chamelemon. "I'm going to do something useful, like earn my attacks."

They were a mile north of Chipset, and were walking north, toward the Binary Plateau. Base kept trying to irritate his companion into fighting, but Chamelemon had a long fuse. In reality, Chamelemon kept having mysterious pains in his body, and he lost energy too quickly. It frightened him. He had never before been tired without having fought or worked for long periods.

If only he had grabbed that digivice while he had had the chance. He had been so close, then looked up and saw that girl's snake, who had frozen him. The memory humiliated him. Before his attacks had gone away, he had possessed high defenses. Now even a mild thing like a paralysis attack affected him. It also upset him that the Digidestined had attacked him. Hadn't they seen he was trying to help them?

Chamelemon coiled his tail around Base's handle and carried the bat in a neat curl. It was easier to ignore the bat's prattle that way.

Chamelemon plodded along the edge of a small wood, toward the Binary Plateau. If he didn't tire out, he'd reach it in three days.

* * *

Tithonia got off the bus at her apartment complex and climbed the steps to 118. She stood for a moment in the chill morning air, wishing her digivice would let her talk to Mulemon, but it did not respond to her button mashing. After a few minutes she pulled out her key and went inside.

Her mother was standing at their tiny kitchen counter with a cup of coffee, and her black hair stood on end. "Thony!" she exclaimed as her daughter entered. "What were you doing out there?"

"I had to make a sudden exit," said Tithonia, holding up her digivice. She went to her mother, put her arms around her and cried.

"Did something happen to your little donkey?" asked her mother, stroking her hair.

"I had to leave her," sniffed Tithonia. "We got attacked, and these other kids made a portal, and we went through, and Mulemon didn't come!"

Her mother murmured soothing words, and gradually Tithonia calmed. She sat down on a stool, and her mother fed her a bowl of homemade granola at the sink. Tithonia felt better after her meal. She kept no secrets from her mother, for they were all the family they had. She had introduced Mulemon to her mother when she discovered she was Digidestined, and explained about the Digital World. Her mother seemed to understand everything.

Tithonia took a quick shower in their miniscule bathroom, then did her homework while her mother darned a shirt with a hole in it. Tithonia had not had time to do her homework before she went to the Digital World, and was thankful that she had returned early.

Then she took a nap, having given her mother instructions to wake her if her digivice made a sound.

It seemed Sunday would never end. Tithonia and her mother could not afford a television, and instead visited the library. Her mother was reading aloud a book called The Trumpet of the Swan, which was how they spent the evening. By bedtime the digivice still had not made a sound, so Tithonia went to bed soothed.

The next day at school she looked for Zach and Savannah, but did not see them until lunch. They were dressed in black, as usual, and Zach had a staring, disinterested look. Savannah asked Tithonia if she could reach the Digital World, and when Tithonia said no, Savannah lost interest. Tithonia hung around, hoping the older kids would want to talk about digimon, but she was a year younger than them, and thus totally beneath their notice. It was discouraging.

The days came and went, and still the Digital World was unavailable. Tithonia even tried the computers at CompUSA, where she worked after school. These refused to open as well. She began to wonder if the Digital World had been erased.

November wore itself out and December drew on. It did not snow in Hilldale, but the mountains in the distance received a dusting of white. Ski resorts opened, and many locals went skiing on the weekends.

Still the Digidestined were blocked from the Digital World. Savannah wondered if it had been a fantastic dream, and Zach sank back into his old depression. On top of it all, Christmas was approaching, and Zach would have to visit his father out of state, which was not something he enjoyed. The one bright thought in his life was that maybe his dad's computer would let him back into the Digital World.

* * *

Spikemon, Mulemon and Hissmon reached Digiforum after a day of travel by train. The three ran past the town, up the hill, and into the meadow where their partners had first appeared. There they stopped and stared, aghast.

The meadow had been burned black. Trees had been uprooted and thrown into the open, and broken branches littered the ground. In the middle of the devastation they found a small metal fork with a snapped wire at one end. The node had been severed.

"They can't come back," said Spikemon in a small voice. He picked up the broken node in his claws. "I'll never see Zach again."

"But there are other nodes, right?" said Mulemon desperately. "They can get in some other way, right?"

Hissmon slithered up and looked at the node in Spikemon's paws, tongue flickering. "Whoever did this was a very powerful digimon," he said. His eyes narrowed. "And a very stupid one."

"Yeah," said Spikemon, "because now they've made me mad."

"Not only that," said Hissmon, "but those nodes are what stabilize the Digital World. If they are all destroyed, the Digital World will wither." He hissed through his fangs. "I'm going to poison someone."

"Spread out," said Spikemon. "Let's find out who did this."

The three separated and circled the burned meadow, sniffing and searching. They met back in the center to compare notes. "It's burned, so it's a fire-type," said Mulemon. "Like Meramon."

"A firetype wouldn't break trees like this," said Spikemon. "Look how cleanly that one is cut. It must have been an android type."

"You can't have both at once," said Hissmon. "A fire attack might burn up a section of a meadow, but not the whole place. Only a true fire-type could do that."

"Okay," said Mulemon, swishing her tail. "So there must have been two digimon."

Hissmon and Spikemon stared at her. "What?"

"There must have been two," repeated Mulemon. "A robot and a fire. A robot-type would know how to tear out a node, right?"

"Sparkling logic," said Hissmon.

"But two!" said Spikemon. "If there's two, they wouldn't stop at one node. They'd take out a bunch!"

"Then we'd better beat them to the next one," said Hissmon. "And we ought to tell Digiforum to repair their node at once."

Digiforum was still sullen over the Loricamon incident, and were outraged to hear about their node. Redhatmon, a penguin, was dispatched to investigate the damage, as the three rookies set off in search of a working node.