Boy am I stupid. I accidentally deleted all my fanfiction off my computer . So yeah…if you're also reading Two Story Town, I swear I'm going to continue it; I have tons more written and even more planned, but it all died on me, as did the last 3 chapters of this one. I hate being computer illiterate.

I'm going to reply to reviewers up here instead of at the end, because I'm so grateful to be getting reviews at last that I can't wait till the end of the chapter to acknowledge everyone. So here goes.

Mirowood: Yeah, if you read the first chapter's disclaimer, it does list "Finding Nemo" as an inspiration for this story…as to your plot comment, I use Mark Twain's foreword to Huck Finn as my reply: "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." No offense.

Sangfroid: Cool pseudonym! Thanks for your much-appreciated compliments…I was having a rough day (finals etc.), checked my email, and…suddenly everything was okay. And I love Maglor too. (spoiler: he features in the sequel to this…yes, I am planning a sequel…but it won't be up for a while.)

Yael3000: Hannon le, mellon-nin. If I were to go a whole summer without my closet boy, I would miss him too. You'll have to come over and say "hey" to him every once in a while…but I'm afraid he isn't much of a conversationalist, and if you feel like dancing, he flat-out refuses to lead. He kind of just stands there. BTW, once you type Alexia's story, can I read it?

Dalamar Nightson: Wow…since reading ESGAME I have something to live up to and I'm not sure if I can, but I'll do my best. This is the cough drop chapter, and I swear I thought of it before reading your story, so I am not ripping you off or anything. It just looks that way…

Okay, that's everybody. Disclaimer: Nothing is mine except the cardboard elf in my closet and the crazy half-elf princeling in my head who keeps yammering about indoor plumbing and could I please update his story because he's getting really bored…and even he isn't really mine but his author never gave him much of a personality, just a really complex pedigree…and I oughta know because I did his family tree for the sheer geeky heck of it…

Anyway. I've babbled too long.

The Recovering Evil Madmen Support Group, Chapter Three: Everything Blows Up in Maedhros's Face

"My name is Lucemon." The angel enjoyed being the center of attention, the dark-haired boy could tell. He also was not truly an angel, the boy would bet. To be sure, he looked like one, but he was not divine. He was no different than the creature asleep in the boy's lap, computer data with a soul. The suffix of his name betrayed this identity.

"Hullo, Lucemon," everyone intoned.

"I don't know how long it's been since my last great work of evil," the blond angel/data monster began earnestly. "Not that long. But I wasn't really evil. I was mad. Just because I had utopia all planned out and was ready to make everybody's lives better, they locked me up in the center of the world without even room to stretch my wings, the jerks! I was trying to save them! I almost did, once. I broke free, but I was stopped. Stopped—and killed. By humans. Why should they care what I was doing? It wasn't their world I was planning out…until they started making me mad, so I set my sights on that too." Lucemon pouted, the purple tattoo on his cheek standing vividly out. "They had to go and interfere when everything was working out so well!"

"Wait." Anyone who knew the dark-haired boy well would have instantly identified that single word as a portent of trouble to come. He always interrupted thusly when something bothered him, and he never did botherment halfway. If he had a problem, it was serious. He stood, clutching to his chest the green monster, who recognized the pending cloudburst suggested by the interjection. "You claim to have done no wrong…yet you sought to dominate the world?" Every word was deliberate, intense. His sensitivity had been ignited. Lucemon, look out, thought the little green monster. You have no idea what you're dealing with.

"For its own good!" snapped the angel, voice slithering in his anger in response to the boy's inquiry. "I would rule, and everyone would be happy, because I would make them be happy to serve me! Everyone happy: that means utopia!"

"Utopia is impossible!" retorted the boy. "All you sought was to brainwash others so you could increase your power, your control!" The hot blood throbbed through him, the temper he'd inherited from him older brother, one of many unintentional curses handed down from an unhealthy relationship. The other curses were a feeling of inferiority…and a worldview that only the very lonely can acquire.

"You know nothing of me!" Lucemon no longer seemed innocent; neither did the boy. Staring at his opponent with quickly-sparked hatred, the angel's light blue glance fell on the creature in the boy's arms. "That…" Lucemon gasped. "That's a…"

"He's my partner," replied the boy fiercely. "My partner and my best friend. My reborn salvation. Do not think I cannot understand you, your ambitions. You are not the only one who has ever thought to brainwash others for your own betterment. The name my parents gave me on Earth is Ken, Ken Ichijouji, but for several dark months your homeworld knew me as the Digimon Emperor." His shoulders heaved, but no tears fell from his burning stormcloud eyes; he had shed too many over this pain already and had told himself he would be rid of it. "The forces of darkness used me, Lucemon. They fed on my insecurities, my fears, my darkest desires, and created a monster where there had once been a human boy." He turned to the dark-robed man, who had been watching the quarrel with a calculating yet interested look in his unsettling golden glance. "You said you all had paid for your sins with your lives, or some such thing. Well, a life was paid for my mistakes, my weakness. It was not mine. I have wished it was. It was my partner's, and with his sacrifice I broke free of evil's dark hold on me, from the Dark Spore implanted in my neck by a cruel fluke of destiny. But I cannot blame the Spore for all my darkness. It merely enhanced what was already there, what had made me, even as a young boy, want my brother to die!"

There. He'd said it. He didn't know why; he never spoke of it expect in nightmares. But there it was, in the open, for these fallen men to pounce upon and rip apart. How well Ken understood their suffering! How he wanted to help them, for them to help him! That was why he'd come, to prove to himself he truly wasn't alone in his struggle to rinse himself clean. But instead of open-armed forgiveness, he'd found the seemingly unrepentant Lucemon rubbing salt in his wounds by sheer obliviousness. See me for what I am, bickering elves, reticent man with the strangest eyes I've ever seen, innocently caustic angel. See me for the jealous, guilty…

"Did he?" inquired the black-robed man lightly.

"Did he what?" asked Ken, though he knew what the man had meant.

"Did he die?" The man folded his hands inside his robes and looked straight at Ken, saw him through golden eyes with pupils shaped like hourglasses.

Ken swallowed. "I did not murder him," he replied, "but yes." Sam, Sam, you left me alone, forced to fill the hole you left in everyone's lives. I cannot hate you, Sam, not any more, but why did you have to leave?

"Then we are similar, Ken Ichijouji. You are not as alone as your face proclaims you fear to be. I too have suffered, unknowingly to him, at the hands of a brother. And, in an illusion, I killed him." The golden-skinned, white-haired, frail young man's voice was impassive, but mirrorlike shadows lurked behind the hourglasses in his eyes. "I killed my twin brother."

Lucemon interjected. "Twins! I hate twins! After I ate the world to prepare for utopia, two of the humans trying to stop me were twins. I killed one. Or I thought I did. Anyway, it made the other go insane, and he and his friends killed me. The idiots."

"I had…have…twin brothers," said Maedhros softly, but no one was listening. Lucemon had found someone new to pick on, and Maedhros's father was in shock over something the angel had said.

"You ate the world?"

"So what's your problem, twin? Aside from the obvious, of course. If that's a skin disease, keep it away from me!" Lucemon ignored the dark-haired elf and had turned his criticism to the black-robed man.

"Speak not of that," the man in question ordered harshly, but without raising his voice. "Are you blind as well as doltish? You provide yourself with enough vulnerabilities in your own personal appearance to make slinging insults a suicidal gesture. As for myself, this is the price…one of the prices…I paid for power. That is all. We all have paid our prices. We all have failed. We all, I should think, came here to learn from those failures. I will not concern you with my history, angelic demon; your simple mind would no doubt disintegrate from befuddlement mere minutes into it, and what a tragic loss that would be." Ken smiled despite himself. The sarcasm was barbed, to be sure, but also placed with the expert marksmanship of one used to slinging such a lethal weapon.

"Know only," the man continued, "that I, Raistlin Majere, fell from a great height, but not to the ruin of all. And, knowing that perhaps my descent led to the salvation of the world, I cannot regret it." He broke off, bothered once more by his persistent cough.

Sympathy welled up within Ken. He could tell that here, too, was someone who had been alone most of his life, both by his own doing and by the choices of others. Only, unlike Ken, he had not been simply overlooked, something inside him told the boy. He had been consciously rejected. And he had no Digimon partner to clear the demons away from his head and heart. Reaching into his pocket, Ken drew a small, paper-wrapped object out; he was strangely fortunate to have the things on his person, just getting over a cold himself.

He offered the small object to Raistlin. "Here. It'll help with the cough."

The black-clad man repelled his offering. "Trouble yourself not with me."

"It's no trouble." Ken was insistent. "You stood up for me."

"I did no such thing," replied Raistlin, but he accepted the gift. "What do you do with it?"

"You suck on it," replied Ken. Raistlin followed these instructions.

Maedhros walked into the cluster of people, a harried look on his face. "Right, well, we've met some more people. Ken…"

"Hullo, Ken," Maedhros's father and Lucemon said dully and cynically. Raistlin shot the angel a dark look, but the corners of his mouth twisted in a hint of a smile.

"..and Raistlin," finished the red-haired elf.

"Hullo, Raistlin." The golden-skinned man glared. The angel shut up, but only for a second. He's just like a child, realized Ken. A little, demented, self-absorbed child. But if he's not sorry, why is he here?

"Honestly, you people interrupt way too much. Anyway, back to me. I wasn't alone all the time, like all of you seem to have been. I had Cherubimon helping me at first; then I had the Royal Knights. Until I killed them, which made me feel kinda bad. They had been trying. They just weren't good enough. Speaking of which, they're going to be late. I told them to come and see me during this meeting. They should be getting here right about…"

For the second time that day, the door exploded off its hinges.

"…now," finished Lucemon as the smoke cleared and everyone glared at him, then stared in shock at the two newcomers, monsters who had to bend nearly double in order to even enter the room, large though it was. Without knowing he did it, Ken activated the digivolution of his partner, and once more he was defended by the giant green insectoid. The newcomers eyed his partner suspiciously.

"Step away from the Lord Lucemon," ordered the creature covered in full-body, hot pink armor.

"Or what?" challenged Ken's partner, instinctively not liking the new duo. Ken ran a frantic hand through his navy-blue hair.

"Now, Stingmon, don't attack anybody, I'm fine…"

"Too late!" cried the other. "The slight has been done! We must fight for our honor and the safety of the Lord Lucemon!"

"No!" complained Maedhros loudly, but just like so many other times in his long, unfortunate, cursed existence, it was too late. The monsters were already fighting, though their movements were sorely hindered by the cramped quarters. Raistlin watched with great interest. After about five minutes of observing, Maedhros's father, letting out a long-suffering sigh, walked over to the door to fix it again. While looking for a hinge, he dropped his hammer on his foot.

"Scum of Morgoth!" he swore loudly.

Unfortunately, Lucemon's rather brawny white protector thought the insult, unfamiliar though it was, was nonetheless directed at him. "What was that?" he cried, his shrill voice rising and making both elves wince. Maedhros, seeing that unless he did something fast his father would become the next target of the easily offended Royal Knights, jumped between the Knights and the black-haired elf.

"Hey! I just remembered!" he cried desperately, grasping for something, anything to say before he lost his tenuous hold on his meeting and/or sanity. "We haven't finished introductions yet! Please, let's all sit down and do that! After everyone is introduced, you can feel free to continue your…ah…discussion." Ken's heart went out to the obviously frazzled elf; he too had come to this meeting with expectations completely different from the reality. This is not the first time his carefully wrought plans have brought nothing but heartache. I have failed in the past, but I have succeeded as well. Has he ever had anything go right for him?

Eyeing Maedhros dubiously, the Knights nonetheless ceased their assault at a nod from their Lord. Everyone sat back down, and the scene returned to more or less normality, except for the room's disarray and still-battered-down door. Raistlin settled on the floor next to Ken, rubbing his metallic-hued throat thoughtfully and in amazement. "My cough is gone," he said wonderingly. "Normally only my tea can dispel it. What magic…"

"No magic," Ken replied sincerely. "That was a Halls' Fruit Breezers. A cough drop."

"Incredible," whispered the golden-eyed man. Then both were silenced as Maedhros's father, amid the chaotic setting, began to speak.

a/n: Poor Ken. He should always have "poor" before his name. Anyway, I talked too much before the chapter so I'll make this disclaimer/explanation thingie brief. Lucemon is OOC…he's supposed to be far more sinister but for some reason I have this portrait of him as an "evil kender"-type and can't shake it. Also, some more clarification regarding him and Ken: while they are both from Digimon, they are from different seasons, which take place in different "digital worlds." So they both are actually never in the same world. But neither of them have any way of knowing that, so they both assume the other has been to the same "digital world." And the Royal Knights would have finished Stingmon off in no time, had they encountered each other in the actual show…but I needed them to buy time for Raist's cough drop to take effect. (Do they even have Halls' Fruit Breezers in Tokyo, Ken's hometown?)

Well, that wasn't very brief. I also successfully discounted everything I said in the past chapter, more or less. Now I have guilt over being so picky while watching the EE RotK. Oh well. If perchance missed anything, let me know and I'll add it to my already copious collection of Things Fetchie Screwed Up. Thanks.

See you in Chapter Four, coming soon from a nuthouse near you!