I spent a couple of minutes carefully watching the glowing blue figure floating over the water. The longer I watched, the clearer it got. It was a small blue figure with no legs and a large hat made of blue flames.
In fact, the whole thing seemed to be made of blue flames. I took a single step onto the sand and the figure spun around to watch me. It had two big empty eyes and a stitched mouth in the biggest smile I'd ever seen. When the figure didn't rush up and attack me, I took a few careful steps forward.
Outside of that first spin, the blue figure did not react until I was just a couple feet away. I stopped there and got back onto two feet. The blue figure finally moved, tilting its head at me as though I was something worth study.
"Hey there…" I was the one who spoke first, "so… are you a digimon?" I finally asked after what felt like an eternity. Instead of answering my question, the blue figure started to slowly float over to me. I took a deep breath and let myself relax. If the figure was going to attack me, it would have done so by now.
It floated in place right in front of me for a couple of seconds before tilting its head down to look me in the eye. After a few more seconds, the figure opened its mouth, the stitches over its mouth stretching wide.
"Ghost…mon," I gulped as I saw the barest bits of the empty void inside the now identified digimon's mouth. Even knowing they were just a digimon didn't help calm me down.
Come on think, what did I know about ghostmon? I could have sworn I'd heard the name before. Maybe in some of the stories number four told me? What had she said?
"Hi there, anything I can help you with?" Maybe an answer would help jog my memory. I could barely see the information in my head, but it was buried under a layer of fog.
"Grave… Yard." That was it. Ghostmon and other digimon like them liked to hang out in parts of the digital world patterned after graveyards. I suppose now that they were here in the material world, they were going to do the same. Which… might be a bit of a problem for me.
Maybe I could solve the problem. I'd already found a small local graveyard on my first night out.
"Listen, I can take you to a graveyard, but you have to stay out of sight, alright?" I carefully explained. "My peaceful life requires the humans of this world not knowing what I am. If word of what we are breaks out, we might be in trouble."
I fought back a gulp as ghostmon took a few seconds to think over my offer. Or at least that was what I thought they were doing. Maybe they were reconsidering their decision to attack me for daring to set limits on them.
"Deal," my shoulders relaxed as I turned back to the mainland. "Okay, follow me and try to make sure you're not noticed."
Ghostmon nodded and started following as we left the beach behind and started making our way through the town. I felt a weird cold spot over my right shoulder and braced myself for a long walk.
"The graveyards at the very edge of town, as far inland as you can get before hitting the hills and mountains," I explained as I kept watch over the big road which split the town in half. If there was any part of town which stayed active at this time of night, it was this one.
Last thing I wanted was to end up joining Ghostmon by getting run over by a truck running through town on its way to Cascade City. I had to wait until I couldn't spot any incoming headlights from my perch on top of the tallest building next to the road.
"Okay I think we can cross," I jumped down once the coast was clear. I had to make a careful series of quick leaps to get to the ground. The second my paws hit the ground, I dashed forward as fast as I could. I took one last leap to make it to the other side of the road, my chest heaving as I huffed in air.
Ghostmon simply floated across the street high enough to pass over a passing truck. I had to fight back envy as he floated back down to my level.
"Show off," I scoffed as my envy won. For a split second, I was worried I'd done something wrong. But instead of getting angry, Ghostmon's stitched mouth stretched into a slight smile as a ghostly giggle came out of them.
Well at least they had a sense of humor.
"Yeah laugh it up, we still need to keep moving. And stick closer to the ground, we're going past a bunch of residential zones now. If anyone's going to be awake to spot you, it's going to be in this next part." Ghostmon frowned at the words 'residential zone', and I remembered that was a purely human concept.
"I'll explain more later, for now all you need to know is that it's where all the humans live and sleep." From the look on their face, they still didn't really get it. It was fine, I could work with what I had.
Either way Ghostmon closed their eyes as their glow started to die down. Their hat shrunk as the fire died down and once I was sure we wouldn't be spotted from a mile away, we made our move.
It took a lot longer to make our way through the residential area compared to the part of town south of the main road. Part of it was how we needed to avoid every lit porch light and any other sign someone was up and about. But the main part was just how little I'd been in this part of town.
Gabi lived just on the edge of this part of town, only a couple of minutes from the main road. And most of my nights out started with me crossing over to the more interesting side. And tonight I didn't have time to find out if an alleyway was a shortcut or dead end, or if I could use that one big tree as a bridge over a river. Not with the blue lantern floating after me.
I'd need to spend the next few nights going through the area. I liked knowing my way around the place I lived, and being so uncertain so close to home was not a pleasant feeling. And it wasn't like I could explore Dryden during the day.
"Here we are," I announced as we emerged from one last row of hedges to the last road before the graveyard. Ghostmon's arms dropped before they floated forward with their eyes wide. I smirked in satisfaction as their lower jaw shifted, as though it would have dropped without the stitching.
When I'd said the graveyard was built in the small space between Dryden and the hills further inland, I hadn't been exactly correct. It was more accurate to say the town ended and then the graveyard started, before it kept going into the hills. Maybe it had fit in correctly years ago, but in the time since I'd been expanded?
Either way, Ghostmon seemed to love it.
"Figured you would like it," I interrupted them just as it looked like they were about to float forward, "it's perfect right? All of the hills, trees and mist gives it that spooky vibe, and more importantly, it blocks people from seeing you."
"Amazing…" the childish voice whispered before letting out another giggle as Ghostmon rushed forward. They started dancing around the graves as their mouth stitches stretched so much I thought they might break.
"Well, glad you're having fun, but I need to get back home and…" I turned around to start the long journey home when Ghostmon appeared right in front of me.
"Play?" They asked with big empty eyes which somehow managed to look cute. On one hand, I needed to get home if I wanted to get some good sleep. On the other hand, I was getting the feeling that Ghostmon was a particularly young digimon. I felt kind of bad abandoning them so soon after meeting them.
"Okay, I can't play with you tonight…" I quickly kept going as before Ghostmon could look too disappointed, "but I can come play with you tomorrow. I just need to handle a few things first… maybe you can help with a few of those."
If Ghostmon was as new to the material world as I figured I was going to need to teach the young Digimon the ropes. And if in exchange I got help mapping out the town from someone who could float, well that was just an even trade.
"Yay", even trade or not, Ghostmon seemed to be okay with it. I shrugged my shoulders, trying to get the ghostly whisper out of my ear. I was going to have to get used to that, wasn't I?
"Okay so making stuff from data is pretty complicated. You can't just snap your finger and create something. It takes time, and effort," Gazimon pointed towards the program on the screen, "fortunately for you, you have a program doing all the hard work for you. But even with that on your side, don't get too bummed out if you can't finish it in a week."
I held my head as I took in a deep breath. Gazimon had a point. Creating physical objects from data worked a lot like coding. No scratch that, it was coding. At least it was if the stories Gazimon told me of her village's many crafters were true.
The only reason why I even had a chance of figuring it out in a week was a program called the 'Data Fabrication Program' I'd found on the laptop. And even then It was proving tougher than expected.
It wasn't like I had a graphical interface to work with. Instead I had to input the commands and instructions into the program, wait until it finished processing it. Once that was done, I had to have Gazimon go and check the new item to see how it held up.
My first attempt had resulted in a mess of fabric which vaguely looked like a shirt which was someone every single color in the rainbow. After a full day of practice, I had something which looked like a real shirt. It was two sizes too small for me, and it was still every color of the rainbow, but it could at least be worn.
In theory at least. Gazimon had refused to wear it the second she saw the colors. I couldn't blame her, I wouldn't have either. And not just because it hurt to look at it for too long.
But now I'd come across a new hurdle to overcome, learning hex codes. Because it wasn't enough to just tell the program what color you wanted by typing in 'red' or 'blue'. No, you had to type in '#990F02' or '#104A8E' and then you would get one shade of color. So hope and pray it's the exact right shade you want because you wouldn't find out otherwise until the whole process was done.
"If only there was a way to do this faster," I moaned in despair. This was starting to remind me of the time my relatives had dragged me out to the hardware store so Laura could go around picking colors for her room…
"Well there's not a faster way, you just have to keep trying until…" I cut her off as my hands reached for the keyboard. She broke off and instead watched me as I put my brain to work. The longest part of the process by far was waiting for the object to finish processing, so the best bet was to cut down on that time.
A few minutes later, I hit the finish button and sat back.
"Now behold my genius," I smirked as Gazimon raised an eyebrow at me before making the slow walk over to the program. As far as she knew, she had no reason to hurry. It would be nowhere near done by the time she arrived, no matter how fast she was.
So imagine her surprise when she walked into the program and found it already finished. She picked up the pace and raced to the program, before finally finding a scrap of multicolored cloth. She held it up and gave me a look which screamed a single word.
'Explain.'
"Well you see, I figured I could figure out the color a lot faster by just making this." The 'this' in question was a small multi colored piece of fabric the size of an open wallet. It was split into three sections, one black, one purple, one silver.
In other words, it was the perfect way to quickly see how these particular shades went with each other. In this case, not too well, the purple was a bit too bright and the 'silver' was a bit too close to gray for my liking.
But it had only taken a minute or two to figure out, instead of the nearly ten minutes it had taken before.
"Huh," Gazimon held the fabric in her paw while scratching at it with her other claw, "you just might get this down in a week after all."