Chapter 22:

Wanderlust might be just another response to evil: it is denying fear of the unknown any handhold on one's soul.

The Little Teenaged Geek (not that he would know anything)

Ash and Agumon's chat was just getting good when it started to rain. Fortunately, Agumon still had Tai's mini-umbrella, and was holding it over himself, Tai, and Ash. Tai wasn't looking very well. He was still unconscious, and his face was pale. But he was still breathing, at not too quickly a speed, and, if Sora and Kari came back soon enough, then Tai would be fine for sure.

Ash was just explaining pokéballs to Agumon when the two heard loud footsteps. They looked, and Ash saw what looked like Misty's silhouette, running their way. The girl had flaming red hair---or, more to the point, dripping red hair. If this was Misty, then she had lost her backpack since last they met. And these weren't the clothes Ash remembered Misty wearing when he last saw her. Ash waved to her, and she waved back.

"One of your friends?" Agumon asked.

"Looks like it," Ash answered. "Is there anything dry for her in one of those backpacks? She looks like she's been run over by an aircraft carrier!"

"There are ponchos and blankets in the bags, and we brought them away from the camp in case anyone we'd meet would need them."

"Misty looks like she qualifies," Ash answered, pulling his hood up and standing up to meet Misty.

Misty's face was still shadowed, as the light from the streetlamp came from behind her. She was breathing very heavily and was hunched over, shivering. She stopped at the bench, put her hands on the armrest, and leaned on the bench. She stood there, letting the downpour beat upon her back, getting the overexertion worked out of her system.

"Misty, what on Earth happened to you?" Ash asked. There was no answer; it was as if she couldn't hear him at all, or, if she had heard him, she wasn't listening.

Ash set his hand on her back and ushered her onto the spot where he had been sitting, in the shelter of Tai's umbrella. He sat down next to her, fished a blanket out of one of the backpacks, and covered her with it. He called Cyndaquil out of his pokéball, only to find that it was Quilava instead of Cyndaquil. He had Quilava curl up on her lap to warm her up. After a minute, Ash asked her, "Any better?" She nodded. Ash asked again, "Misty, what happened to you? Where's Togepi, and what happened to your backpack?"

The girl looked up, and this was the first time Ash had gotten a good look at her face. "My name is Rika, not Misty," she said. And the girl wasn't Misty: her build, height, and hair were the same as Misty's, but her voice and face were decidedly different.

Ash scratched the back of his neck. "Sorry, I thought you were someone else." There was an awkward pause.

Rika looked at Agumon and her face took on a surprised expression. "Is that your digimon?" she asked Ash.

"No, he doesn't belong to me."

"Then is this guy in my lap yours?"

"Yeah, but he's not a digimon; he's a pokémon."

"Pokémon?"

"Uh, it's a long story," Agumon admitted. "But what's your story?" he asked.

Rika was afraid to be rude to these strangers who had brought her out of the rain, so she answered, "I…I wasn't expecting to be out this late or this far away from home, but it looks like I am. And I…I think I got hit by lightning."

"Wow. Would you even be alive if you were hit by lightning?" he asked.

"I don't know. But one second, it's just starting to rain, and the next, there's this bright flash, and then I wake up in a park, and there's hardly a cloud in the sky."

"Hmm…weird. Sounds like what happened to me," Ash thought aloud.

"Huh?"

"One second, I was out in the middle of nowhere, and then I saw a bright light, and then I wake up in this city. I've been wandering around for hours, trying to find my friends. I---mistook you for one of them."

Rika wondered what was to become of her. She didn't feel like she had the strength to continue, but she knew that, since she hadn't been who they thought she had, she shouldn't be getting the treatment they were giving her. So she soaked up all the warmth she could for as long as they allowed her to sit there.

Ash noticed that she'd been breathing heavily, and so he gave her a few swallows of water from his canteen.

"Thanks," she said between deep breaths.

"No problem."

Rika kept sitting there, waiting for them to say something to the effect of, "Well, you have someplace to go…you'd better get there," or some other polite way of saying "get out of here; you're not the one we're looking for." But that polite dismissal never came: they let her sit…and sit…and sit. After a while, Rika fell asleep from her exhaustion. Ash asked softly, "Do you think we should wake her up?"

"Not yet," Agumon answered. "She looks like she needs a good rest. But since she's probably being missed, we should wake her up in a little while."

"Okay." So they waited a half an hour and then woke her up. "We were afraid someone was expecting you, so---"

Rika stretched. "How long was I asleep?" she asked.

"About half an hour. How're you feeling?"

"Better than before, thanks. I…guess I'd better be going. My mom and my grandma are probably worried sick."

"I bet they are," Ash answered. He handed her the poncho he'd had draped over his lap to keep his jeans dry. "Your parents would probably want you to wear this."

"Thanks."

"Are you sure it's safe for you to be walking alone? I mean, I've been attacked by weird digimon ever since I got here."

Rika swallowed. It then occurred to her that she had an option that hadn't occurred to her before: if Renamon wasn't dead, she could call Renamon with her digivice. So she pressed a few buttons on her D-Arc and, within minutes, Renamon showed up. But she was different from before: her long, lavender-colored gauntlets had been replaced with a pair of spiked bracelets, and the whirl patterns on her legs were gone.

Rika asked, "Renamon?"

"Rika, you called me?"

"I---I'm kind of lost."

"So am I. I don't recognize anything around here."

"I think home is less than a kilometer from here. I've heard that digimon are everywhere, and some of them are dangerous."

"I understand."

Agumon fished out of a backpack a taller, second poncho. "No need for you to get any wetter," he said to Renamon

"Thanks…" Renamon was unaccustomed to wearing clothing of any sort, but she decided to get used to it, at least for the time being. It was better than a wet pelt.

They hurried off away from the bench just as an ambulance was coming to pick up Tai. Ash stood up and helped the paramedics with a stretcher. "What took you guys?" he asked.

"There was hardly a doctor in the hospital!" Kari answered. "There were children and patients, but almost no doctors. We finally found one and some paramedics."

"Good to know," Ash said.

Kari asked, "Uh---will you be coming with us to the hospital?"

"I might as well. Hopefully, I can find some of my friends on the way there, and it's getting late. It'll be dryer to sleep inside the hospital."

The Ichijoujis were left with a lot of unanswered questions: what was going on? Why were they children again, and what had messed up time so much? They'd asked their neighbors, who were all affected in similar ways: people had randomly been hurled into old age and youth, and even into nonexistence: in one house, the only people Ken and Davis could find were several skeletons. The skeletons were lying in bed, sitting in chairs, and one was clutching the television remote. The horror that had taken them came without warning and while they had been going about their everyday business.

Tina and Youngdramon weren't as melancholy as the rest: Yolei had, of course, forced Tina to stay inside the house, so she never saw the horrors that her parents and Davis had seen. She and Youngdramon got to know each other, and, the more they found out about each other, the more it seemed appropriate for them to be partners: they both were fun-loving pains in the neck whose personalities had turned them into a nightmarish duo capable of mass destruction via pranks.

Finally, the lack of answers was too much for Yolei to bear: she called a family meeting (which Tina was excluded from) and discussed what should be done about the situation.

Ken pointed out, "The datacube must have something to do with what's going on, but we can't use it here. We need to find a working computer."

"There isn't one in town," Davis answered. "We've checked everywhere, and nobody has electricity."

"Then there's only one thing to do," Yolei thought aloud. "We go to another city and hope there's power there."

"Do we go to St. Paul?" Ken asked.

Yolei shrugged. "It's closest."

They called Tina downstairs to explain their decision, and she yelled back from her room, "I'm not dressed yet!"

"What're you doing?"

"Finishing off my Digidestined outfit!"

Yolei groaned. "We have something more important to discuss down here!"

"I'm almost done!"

"How long will it be?"

"Two minutes, maybe."

It was more like ten minutes. She came down the steps wearing a pair of rugged-looking overalls (a pair that seemed to have had some novice stitch-work done on the front pocket), a white, long-sleeved blouse, a tannish-green beret, her green rubber gloves, and her black rain boots. To top it off, she had decorated her cheek with a red butterfly using face paint. "That's your Digidestined outfit?" Davis asked. "Don't you dare ever call me geeky again!"

"Hey, your hat doesn't match Veemon!"

"I told you before: I don't wear a hat!"

"But you're supposed to wear a hat! Your hat always has to match your digimon, doofus!"

"It's Doofus, not Davis!" It took a moment for the reality of what he'd just said to sink in. Half not believing it, he asked, "Veemon, did I really just say that?"

"Sounded like it, yeah."

Tina chuckled. "Whatever you say, Doofus. Anyhow, we figured out that Youngdramon's armor form's color scheme would be whatever her digi-egg's color is. And her digi-egg is yellow, so…" she took her beret off her head, put it in her back pocket, and removed her yellow rain hat from her pocket. "Digi-armor, energize!" she said in demonstration. "And check this out!" She opened up the front pocket of her overalls, and Joey stuck his head out. "I stitched plastic on the inside of the pocket so that the petrolatum wouldn't stain the overalls. This has the perfect place for Joey to sit!"

Davis couldn't help but snicker at how revoltingly cute this was. "Well, while you were playing dress-up, we had something important to tell you."

"What's that?"

"We're taking a little road trip to St. Paul. We're hoping that there won't be a blackout there, so we can figure out what was on the datacube."

"Cool," Tina answered. "How long a road trip?"

"Just one day. We leave tomorrow."

They left the following morning---or, more to the point, what their clocks told them was about eleven hours after they'd had this discussion: the sun still hadn't risen after more than nine days.

They arrived in St. Paul, only to find that the city was almost deserted. They stopped in front of a computer shop in the hopes that they would be open and that they'd have power. The door wasn't locked, but nobody was in the store. There was no power in the shop, either, so they tried a hardware store to see if they could find a natural gas-powered electric generator. They found one, all right, but the store looked like it had been abandoned for years. There was dust on everything, and the hinges to the door were so rusty that they had to use Veemon's Vee Headbutt attack to get into the store. They took the generator back to the computer shop and ran one of the computers to see what was on the datacube.

It was an image of Gennai, saying, "There are creatures from an unknown world on Earth. We do not believe that it is the work of the Dark Ocean; the Dark Ocean planet has been destroyed by what we guess is a natural disaster from their universe. But we do not know where the creatures are from. These creatures are not native to Earth or the Digiworld as far as we know. But the creatures aren't the only problem: time has been completely thrown off course. In fact, time where I now stand recording this message moves so quickly in comparison to the rest of the planet that, by the time you are listening to this, I will be dead. There are other effects, as well: there are shifting fields of time moving around the world like storm fronts, and, speaking of, changes in time mean changes in gravity, and gravity being reversed or neutralized is having drastic effects on the world's climate. The time fields are pulling water out of the Earth's oceans and into the atmosphere, and we project that cloud cover will have increased dramatically by the time you hear this.

"We do not know if you will even be alive to listen to this. Some people here have been hurled into old age by this anomaly, while others have been reduced to childhood. We do not know why or how this is, but we hope that at least some of the Digidestined are left alive to counter this threat. We have left this datacube near the house of Ken and Yolei Ichijouji in the hopes that at least one of the four Digidestined there will find this.

"On that note, we know that the daughter of Yolei and Ken will have the gene that allows her to interact with the digivice. For this reason, we have selected a volunteer digimon and a digi-egg for her, and have constructed this digivice.

"One last thing: we, the humans that have subspace matrices and keep track of the Digiworld, are not all present in this room. We do not know where the others are, but hope that they are alive, and working towards your benefit. This is all we know." That was all that was on the datacube.

Yolei looked at Ken with a gulp. "Creatures? What creatures?"

There was a grinding noise beneath the floor. "Everybody, OUT!" Ken yelled. They dashed through the door and looked behind themselves. There were three metallic birds flying out of the store. They began firing bolts of lightning at them from out of their talons.

GAZRIITOR:

Nickname: E-gull (Denkimo)

Real Name: Ilto-tor-agnei

Caste: Y'tr-Nut'ka

Special Attacks: Jero Dra, Kiro Koutato

Modes: One

The E-gull fires bolts of electricity out its talon, sometimes powerful enough to stun or kill a human being. It can eat, and it flies through the air searching for any kind of edible prey, including humans. It is another of the breed of shock troop that is designed to attack the interiors of buildings, subways, and other places where humans and digimon would think would be safe from enemy attacks. It is not the strongest of its class, but it is no laughing matter.

Yolei held up the digi-egg of love and yelled, "Digi-armor, energize!"

"Hawkmon, armor-digivolve to…Anserimon, the fountain of love!" Anserimon's form was similar to Halsemon's: it had brown feathers and four legs and was covered with white, winged armor, but there was one difference: she had a cannon sticking out her chest.

"Veemon, digivolve to…Exveemon!"

"Wormmon, digivolve to…Stingmon!" Stingmon's form was different: he had a green and black striped tail with a metallic stinger on the end of it. Besides that, there seemed to be no differences.

Tina looked down at Youngdramon. "Ready to give it a spin?"

"Hit me!"

Tina switched hats and triumphantly yelled, "Digi-armor, energize!"

"Youngdramon, armor digivolve to…Gryllotamon, the tunnel of adventure!" Gryllotamon was an insectoid digimon, covered in yellow, metallic armor that almost made her look like a robot. She had a pair of mandibles that seemed to be her weapons of choice.

"Let's see how these new forms handle!" Stingmon shouted. "Lightning Spike!" Purple heat rods extended from his arms. He reflected the e-gull's shot away from himself with the rods.

"Tempest Wing!" Anserimon fired red lasers out her eyes at another of the e-gulls. It dodged under.

"Time to test this form out!" Gryllotamon crowed. "Laser Mandible!" Her fangs glowed green, and she leapt up and smashed one of the e-gulls to bits.

"Rapid Vee Laser!" Exveemon shouted. A deluge of yellow, boomerang-shaped shots fired out of the big "X" on his front side. The second e-gull didn't last long under that fire.

"Time to see what this tail is good for!" Stingmon yelled. He pointed the metal stinger at the final e-gull. "Stinger Missile!" A missile shot out at the e-gull, but the e-gull fired a bolt of lightning at the missile and destroyed it.

"Laser Mandible!" Gryllotamon shouted again and fired a green beam at the e-gull. It went down.

"So much for them," Tina thought aloud.

"Doesn't say much for them," Gryllotamon answered, pointing with her fang at the troop of saberstrikes that were looking at them with hungry eyes…