Chapter 33: Determinations
"You mean that we're going to have to use the boys room?" Misty asked, her mouth wide open.
Tina insisted, "I'm not making this up! Look! See for yourself!" The door to the women's room was barred shut---with Youngdramon's duct tape. That was suspicious: what if this was a prank? This was just the kind of thing at Tina and Youngdramon would do as a prank. Misty frowned. "When I hear it from Yolei, I'll believe it."
Tina's mouth fell open. Since when was she an unreliable source? Tina was still bewildered as she sat down on the Couch of Wisdom, where---as usual---Davis was sitting, eating tortilla chips, and watching television. Tina asked Davis, "If I told you the women's room had a time field in it, would you believe me?"
Not taking his eyes off the television set, Davis nodded. "It fits in with my theory that sheer femininity can cause rifts in the fabric of space-time."
He was asking for it, and he got it: Tina gave his goggles a pull and let them snap back onto his forehead for that remark. "Seriously, there is one! I don't know how it got in, or how long it'll stay, but I know we can't use the women's room because what seems to be five minutes in there is more like half an hour out here!"
Still nursing his forehead (and his eyes still not leaving the screen), Davis spat, "So no difference from before, huh?"
Tina rolled her eyes. "Look, I didn't come here so you could mock me and my gender to death!"
"Then don't be so sarcastic, yourself. If you're sarcastic, then you're asking for other people to have the same attitude about you."
"Whoa…am I that much of a pain in the neck?"
"Yep."
"…Seriously, am I?"
"Nope."
Tina sighed. "I began this conversation in the first place because Misty refused to believe me when I told her that there was a time field in the women's room. Why didn't she believe me?"
"Because you cried wolf one too many times."
"Huh?"
"There's an old proverb about this shepherd kid. As a prank, he yelled 'There's a wolf eating my flock!' to the rest of his village. There wasn't a wolf, of course; he'd lied through his teeth just to get them in panic mode. He thought that prank was fun, so he did it again and again. He cried 'wolf!' so much that the village didn't believe him, even when there actually was a wolf eating all his sheep."
"So…you think my flock's going to get eaten?"
"There's the wolf, right now!" Davis answered as Misty walked into the room.
"…How can you tell when people are walking into the room when you don't turn your head and look at them?" Tina asked.
"I heard her."
"Oh…well, that explains it."
Misty didn't make eye contact with Tina because she was ashamed: she hadn't believed Tina, even when it was the truth. However, there was a far more insidious problem at hand: what alternative was there for the girls than to use the men's bathroom? Yes, this was a problem. First of all, the nasty remarks scratched into the stall walls had to be painted over, before they met softer eyes.
Later that day, Ash walked into the men's room, and he could hear the chatter of several girls inside. He heard so many that he wondered if he shouldn't keep away, but then again, all he had to do was wash his hands from the kitchen work he'd been doing: he'd be in and out of there in less than a minute. So he walked in, heading straight for the sinks. The second he walked in the door, the conversation in the room fell to a dead silence.
Ash was stunned at the sudden, eerie silence. "Don't do that!!" he yelled. "That creeps me out when you suddenly stop talking like that!"
Mimi let out a little yelp of surprise right before she remembered that the bathroom was now serving both genders.
"I am never going to get used to having a boy in here!" Sora sputtered.
"What is the bathroom to you? The Holy of Holies for the girl's mind, or something?"
"Well, what do you do when you come in here?"
Ash gave her a look that said, "You know the answer to that question."
"You don't talk with the other boys at all?"
"No more than usual. Maybe even a little less than usual. What do you talk about in your bathroom?" Silence answered Ash's question. "…Oh, I get it. Is this about me?"
After a pause, Sora answered, "No...It's not that..."
Ash rolled his eyes and made a mental note to wash his hands in the kitchen. "Oh, never mind! Just let me wash my hands and get out of here so you can get back to talking about me!" Ash could feel their eyes burning a hole in the back of his jacket. He knew they were waiting for him to get out of the room. Man, he thought to himself, I am going to need to stop getting my hands dirty! Now I know why everyone is always wearing gloves around here! "Since when was it such a terrible thing to have a boy around while you talk?" he asked.
Silence was his answer.
"Okay...I'm out of here...you can talk again." Just to see what would happen, Ash stood just out of sight, beside the bathroom door. The conversation slowly started up again, but he couldn't tell what it was about. Ash shook his head and thought to himself, I can't wait until this time field leaves!
******
Tracy, Tai, Kari, and T.K. were on seek patrol. They'd wished that they could take along Cody and Yolei for the excursion in case a DNA digivolve was necessary, but both of them were getting sleep and recovering from the digivolutions they'd gone through on the fishing trip. Kari and T.K. were along because both their digi-eggs had become golden eggs, and golden-armored digimon tended to have about ultimate-level power.
Rain was steadily falling out of the gray sky. The pavement was slippery with water, and the noise of the rain made it difficult to hear. Both T.K. and Kari were carrying their digimon inside their raincoats to keep them dry. "Don't fall asleep, Patamon," T.K. warned. "If there's an attack, then we'll want you not to be tired, so that you'll have a clear head to fight."
Gatomon cut in, "Actually, I'd better be the first to armor-digivolve. As Quadrigamon, I'll have better speed in case we need a fast getaway."
"You don't know the definition of the word 'speed' until you see Metatronmon!" T.K. shot back. "He doesn't even need to move to get from point A to point B; he can teleport!"
"Wow…that's fast, all right."
"Just like a kadabra!" Tracy added.
"A what?" Tai asked.
"I'll show you," Tracy answered, whipping out a sketchpad and pencil. In less than two minutes, he had a sketch of a kadabra for them.
"Whoa. How'd you get so good a drawing?"
"Not drawing, sketching. And it took four years of practice and experience."
"I guess hard work pays off!" Tai said.
Kari snapped, "You might want to try it, sometime."
"Oh, shut up! You don't even know what work is! You try dealing with foreign digimon executives who want rights to have a quota of humans that they can eat!"
After a few more minutes, they found a curtain of luftwaffles draped across a skyscraper's side. "Okay…not good," Kari thought aloud. "If I were on seek patrol on a sunny day, I sure wouldn't want those things ruining my fun!"
Tai nodded. "If you can call it fun---but how can we destroy something that big?"
"I have an idea," Gatomon answered. "We just blow up all the top ones! The rest will have nothing holding them up, so they'll all fall down!"
"Right, good idea. But how do we destroy all of them? Does any of our digimon have an attack that can take them out?"
"Metatronmon does!" T.K. declared. He held up the golden egg of hope. It looked kind of like an astrolabe; it was made of three circles that were put together to make a sphere. In the middle of the sphere, there was a set of empty armor that looked vaguely angelic. "Golden armor, energize!" he shouted.
"Patamon, golden-armor digivolve to…Metatronmon, the angel of hope!"
Metatronmon was an angel, covered in golden armor, and surrounded by golden wheels. He had a sword at his side that he drew immediately. The wheels surrounding him came together to form a single wheel, which gave him better mobility for his sword. He flew up and sped along the top of the skyscraper's luftwaffle-covered side. "Archangel Sword!" he shouted, letting his sword slice apart the luftwaffles as he went. The curtain went crashing to the ground, and a pile of broken-to-pieces luftwaffles blocked the street.
Tracy finished a sketch of the luftwaffles just as the curtain fell. "Cleaver's going to need to add this to his files."
Metatronmon landed. "So…now what?"
"If you go back to Patamon now and rest up, you'll get back your energy more quickly."
"Good idea." The golden egg of hope flew into T.K.'s hands and he put it in his pocket. He hurriedly scooped Patamon up into his poncho before Patamon became too wet.
"So…now what?" Patamon repeated.
"One place where we haven't looked for people yet in is inside the buildings," T.K. pointed out.
Tai sighed. "That's because it'd take too long to search them all."
Kari cut in, "But where else would you go if you were trying to hide from man-eating monsters and trying to get shelter from weather that's generally as bad as this---if not worse?"
"Good point," Tai nodded. "But what can we do?"
Agumon thought aloud, " (1) If the mountain won't come to Mohammad…maybe we could get the people to come to us instead!"
"How would we do that?"
"Well, the people have to leave to find food and water every now and again, so if we could leave a note by the doors of these buildings that the people won't miss, then we might be able to get them to come to us."
"But how would they survive? If they would get attacked on the way to the nuke plant, who'd protect them?"
T.K. said, "Hold on…what if we put a something on the paper, like, 'if you want to try to get to the nuke plant, then write check-mark on the box, and when we come back and look at the paper, we'll know to bring you back'?"
"It's worth a shot. We'll have to get the idea to Yolei when we get back. But in the meanwhile, what do we do?"
Tracy cut in, "There aren't that many places to get food and water left, thanks to the fact that we've taken almost everything for the refugees. We should try to go to a convenience store, and see if we can find anyone there."
"It's worth a try," Kari agreed.
They made their way to the convenience store that had once belonged to Yolei's family. Her parents had sold it and had been living in Hawaii for their retirement before they died. The six of them stepped inside. Patamon and Gatomon stretched as they began standing on their own feet instead of being carried. "So…what's the plan, do we just wait for people to come?"
Tai shook his head. "For all we know, there might be people living here, already, hiding from those menace machines out there. If I were them, I'd keep out of sight---especially if there was someone coming in."
"Patamon, you smell anybody?" T.K. asked.
"There were humans here a minute ago, even if they aren't here, now."
"Any digimon?"
"Don't think so, no."
"Well…where would you hide if you were a human being, and didn't want some man-eater to find you…?" Kari wondered.
T.K. walked to the back door. He wished that Yolei had been there; she would have a better idea of the layout of the store than he did. He knocked lightly on the door. "Hello? Anybody in there?" he asked. There was no answer. He slowly opened the door and shone a flashlight inside. "Hello?" He aimed the light this way and that, scaring rats and cockroaches to find new hiding places. Eww, he thought to himself, this place is run-down! Time getting messed up sure took its toll on this place… His light shone on the tip of a shoe that protruded from behind a box. Now, why would a shoe be in the back of a store that doesn't sell shoes---unless somebody was wearing that shoe? T.K. yelled in the direction of the shoe, "I can see you're there. I didn't come to hurt anyone, I just came to ask if---"
A woman jumped up from behind the box with a pistol in her hands. "Hands up! Don't make me shoot you!"
T.K. recognized that this woman was Yolei's mother. His mouth dropped open. "You're…you…!" T.K. shone the flashlight on his face, hoping she'd recognize him.
"T.K.?!" she stammered.
"Mrs. Inoue, I'm as surprised to see you as you are to see me!"
"What'd you find, T.K.?" Patamon asked.
Mrs. Inoue looked at Patamon, and a yelp of alarm shot out of her mouth. She fired the gun in his direction, but missed by about three centimeters. Patamon jumped into the air, readying his Boom Bubble attack.
"Patamon, stop!" T.K. yelled. "Mrs. Inoue, you have nothing to be afraid of Patamon for!"
"That's another one of those…those things, isn't it?"
"He has been my friend for about thirty-four years!"
"You haven't been alive for thirty-four years, T.K.!"
"Yes, I have…and, from what I can remember, you're supposed to have died five years ago!"
"You're scaring me, T.K.! And you don't want to scare a woman with a gun in her hands!"
"Listen, calm down, Mrs. Inoue. Your memory was erased."
"My memory?!"
"Listen, I can explain all of this---well, some of it. I know where Yolei is."
"Where is she? I want to see my baby!"
"She's at the Ukitachi Nuclear Plant, west of here. I've been living there for the past four months with her and a whole bunch of other people. Now…what's the last thing you remember before all this started? What was the date?"
"It was…December, 1997…there was supposed to be a huge snow storm coming, and---we were selling out…and then I woke up and the weather hasn't changed from this rain for a week! There haven't been any shipments coming in, but we've had people come and rob the store. But not for money, for food and water. And there have been a couple attacks from these metal robot-thingies…one of them attacked my husband yesterday, and he was hurt…and he's not getting any better."
"All this is because time has been completely messed up. We don't know how or why, or what these metal robots are. We call them menace machines, but we don't know where they come from or why."
"You seem to know a lot about Patamon, there," Mrs. Inoue mused, waving her gun in his direction and making him stop peeking around the corner or the door.
"He's not one of them. Digimon have been walking the Earth since 2001, even though you can't remember it. And those menace machines aren't digimon. Digimon disappear when they die; menace machines turn into scrap metal."
"Did you say…2001? What're you talking about?"
"Last I remember it, it was the year 2028. Then, someone destroyed the Digiworld, and…ohhhh!" T.K. slapped his forehead. "I keep forgetting you don't know what I'm talking about!" T.K. paused to consider what he should say next. "Listen, we don't know why, but these menace machines won't come within half a kilometer of the nuke plant. That's why everybody's staying there. If you can come with us, then you'll be safe there, and we can get a doctor to look at Mr. Inoue's wounds."
She stood there a moment, considering the offer. "How long would it take to get there?"
"A few hours' walk."
"What about the menace machines? What'll we do if they show up?"
"We digivolve."
"What?"
"You'll see. Let's just say that Patamon doesn't stay the way he looks now forever."
She thought some more… "How will we move my husband?"
"On Greymon's back."
"Greymon?"
"There are more creatures like Patamon that are on our side, Mrs. Inoue. Most of them are made of flesh-and-blood, not metal, like those machines. One of them that's here is a huge dinosaur that we can ride back."
"All of us?"
"I don't see why not."
Mrs. Inoue put her gun back in her pocket. "…Then let's get moving." She added to herself, I must be nuts! But it's worth the gamble if it means my husband can see a doctor.
******
"Sir, our project is nearing its completion. But there are a number of drawbacks. We require another element in order to finish."
"What do you recommend to obtain it?"
"I believe capturing one like the previous may do the trick…if we examine the digivice, we may at least get an idea how to generate a lens of our own. Ideally, we would be able to steal or copy a lens of our own, but that may not be possible."
"Do what you judge to be more likely to succeed. But make sure your judgment is sound; I will not have this project delayed, and I do not wish to report a failed project of this magnitude. I obtained the prototype template myself, so make certain you make good use of him. And what of the escapee?"
"We…are close to a solution."
(1) The complete phrase is "If the mountain won't come to Mohammad, Mohammad will come to the mountain." Basically, it's a hackneyed saying that, put in context, doesn't really have much to do with Islam.
AUTHOR'S NOTES:
I always wanted to make Tina snap Davis with those goggles! And about Davis's comment about sheer femininity causing rifts in space-time? That is not my sentiment; it isn't really his, either. He only said that to tick Tina off, and we both know he never would've said that if Kari had been in the room.
One other thing: that was one of my favorite lines in Operation: Salvage Earth: "Listen, I can explain all of this---well, some of it."