Disclaimer: I don't own Digimon or Pullman's stuff. The other stuff is mine.
neoKOS-MOS: Sorry for the long wait.Why do I always have to apologize in the beginning? Well, my computer still hates me, and muse is running around between three different things at the moment. Flashes of inspiration here, flashes of inspiration there. Mostly there. But, anyway, this is a short one. Basically Davis's version of spreading the word. Fun in parts though. Hope you like it.
Shaping Up
Davis was dreaming. Fuzzy blue mist was everywhere. Something was yelling in the distance and he was being jabbed in the arm. He kept turning around to see what it was, but nothing was there. After a moment, he realized what the yelling was.
"Wake up, Davis."
Brown eyes opened. Demiveemon noticed and stopped poking him in the arm. Red numbers glowed next to his bed. Still half in the dream, the boy raised his arm and shut off the alarm clock. The yelling noise stopped. He closed his eyes and fell back asleep again. The little blue cynodont instantly started punching him in the back. Davis moaned, rolling over to try to crush his partner.
"Get up, Davis." Ken called from the door. "We're gonna be late."
The door closed again, and the gogglehead slowly pulled himself out of bed. He rubbed his eyes and looked at the alarm clock.
"Three hours." He muttered. Only three hours of sleep last night.
Grabbing some clothes, he went to shower and then ate breakfast. Ken was watching him across the kitchen table.
"Are you all right?"
Eyes closed, Davis spooned cereal into his mouth. "So tired."
"You guys have to find a better way to get together."
"There isn't one." He squinted his eyes open to look for his drink. "It's the stupid world time difference."
"But isn't that going away now?" He heard Demiveemon ask from where he was sitting with Wormmon on the table.
Davis paused for a moment. Oh yeah.
You didn't forget, did you, Davis? Roxelle asked.
He sighed. Well, I did have some pretty crazy dreams last night.
"What do you mean?" Ken asked the cynodont.
"There's a cycle coming up when all the world times will be the same." The cinnamon haired boy responded.
"What? How do you know?"
The boy shrugged, too tired to explain it all now. "Did Jun come home last night?"
"Uh, yeah." Ken hesitated over the change in subject. "I don't know when, but her shoes are by the door."
Davis opened his eyes again to look at the door. Yep. Two old blue gym shoes next to his mom's gray ones. He looked down at his breakfast. Sighing, he picked up the bowl and dumped what was left in the sink.
"Let's go. We're gonna be late."
Sitting in Chemistry, Davis tried not to fall asleep. The teacher was droning on about benzene rings. Only he could give an entire period's lecture about benzene rings. Minutes inched by. The clock stopped, and yet, somehow, the teacher still continued talking. Davis laid his head down on his notebook. Across the aisle, TK's seat stood empty. Where was this kid?
He crashes my date. Shows up with his weird girlfriend who takes us through some nutty world to a room where you can spy on anyone you want. Then she and her team recruit us to kill something that's unkillable.
I thought you were excited about going. Roxelle cut in, shifting herself where she lounged next to him in the aisle.
I am. It was just so weird. Surreal almost.
Their rhetorical conversation was cut off by a knock on the door. The teacher stopped mid-sentence and went to open it. TK stepped inside and handed him a note before going to take his seat. Davis stared at him as the blonde boy sat in his empty desk. All he got was a smile and a shrug.
It's fourth period. What's he doing getting here now?
Roxelle just shook her head, a mental question mark.
The clock stopped again as he waited for the class to end. Davis took to drawing the stupid benzene rings all over the margins of his notebook so the teacher would stop glaring at him for looking so bored. Dozens of little hexagons covered the page when the bell finally rang, their chemical formula forever engraved in his memory.
He shoved his stuff in his bookbag and looked up to see if TK had waited for him. Instead, the other boy was asleep on his desk. Davis smacked him and he woke up.
"Class is over."
TK sucked in a breath and got up, grabbing his own bookbag. The two boys left the room with the teacher's glare behind them.
"What's wrong with you?" Davis asked. "You come in late and sleep in class. Do you want to endanger your grade?"
TK waved him off. "I was tired. It takes a long time to get out of the Core. It's not like we could cut through to the transition world and take the train. We had to walk. And the digital world's time frame is slowing down."
"So how long were you there?"
"About a week."
Davis nodded and looked around the hall.
"Did you tell Ken about MIRROR this morning?" The other boy asked.
The brunette frowned. "Yeah, right. I barely slept three hours last night. I was feeling primed and ready to tell him the whole story when I woke up."
"You have to do it soon." TK said, stopping off at his locker.
Davis leaned against the wall. "I think you should tell him. Tell everyone. After school."
The blonde boy paused in dropping his History book into the locker. "Why can't you do it?"
"What? Why can't you do it?"
TK sighed and shoved a binder into his bookbag. His eyes flicked over to Davis. "They're gonna wonder why I know so much. I don't exactly want them to know I'm with Nora yet."
"So don't tell them."
"That's easier said than done, Davis."
"It's not that hard. "He replied. "You just twist the truth around a little. That's what I always do when I'm going to meet Rika."
"Yeah." TK whispered. He blinked. "Wait. What?"
Davis stopped. His heart jumped.
"You're dating Rika?"
The gogglehead felt himself blush and ran a hand through his hair. "Um, Yeah. You didn't know?"
The other boy blinked at him again, and then broke out into a grin. "Oh, I get it now. That's why you guys are together so often."
"Shut up, TK." He pushed the locker door closed. "You keep my secret, I'll keep yours."
"So. We'll both tell everyone after school?"
Davis nodded.
"Great. I'll e-mail Sora, Tai, Matt, and Izzy when I'm in the computer lab next period. You tell everyone else to meet there after school."
The brunette nodded again and the two boys went off to their separate classes.
Yolei was so annoying. It was like she'd memorized the entire book. She knew the answer to every darn question. Davis could hear her mumbling them to herself behind him.
"Golgi Apparatus." She whispered, answering yet another question for seemingly no other reason than to flaunt her grade in everyone else's face.
"Shut up, Yolei." He hissed through clenched teeth.
She poked him in the back with a finger. He glanced over his shoulder at her and caught her grinning at him. He snapped back to face forward and slumped down in his seat. Only a few moments of peace passes before she poked him in the back again. He would have ignored her, except for the crinkle of paper. The boy reached back to take the note from her and spread it flat on his book.
'What crawled up your butt and died?'
He frowned down at the sentence, Grabbing his pen, he tapped it on the paper a few times, considering a few vulgar things he could write back. Making his decision, the boy grinned and started to scrawl out one of them until Roxelle nipped his leg.
"Ow." He grunted and crossed out what he had written.
Tell her about after school.
So, instead he wrote, 'Are you doing anything after school?' He handed it back to the plum haired girl.
After a second she passed it up to him again. 'Are you hitting on your best friend's girlfriend?'
"Stupid." He whispered back to her, annoyed by the quiet giggle he heard behind him.
The boy drew a line through her words and write beneath them. 'TK is calling a meeting in the computer lab when school's out.' He gave it to her over his shoulder.
"Why didn't you just say that?" The girl whispered to him.
"Are you coming or not?"
"Of course. I've been wondering what TK's been doing with all the time he spends in the digital world."
Davis grinned. "You'll be surprised."
"Davis?"
The gogglehead jumped as the teacher called his name.
"Can you answer the question?"
He blinked. "Um..."
"Mitochondrial DNA." Yolei whispered to him from behind.
And this time he was glad she knew everything. "Mitochondrial DNA." He announced to the class.
The teacher looked a little confused and disappointed that he'd known the answer. "Uh, right." She turned back to the board to continue with the lesson.
It took a while for everyone to show up at the computer lab after the final bell rang. Strangely, the older kids were already there, sans Izzy, when Davis walked in the door. Tai was on one of the computers, with Matt peering over his shoulder at the screen. Sora was standing by the window, looking outside.
"Am I the first one here?" He asked.
"Nope." Kari replied, and he glanced over to see her drawing red flowers on the dry-erase board mounted on the wall.
The boy sighed and dumped his bookbag on the floor next to the door, going over to see what Sora was looking at. As he stepped up next to her, he realized that she was smiling.
"What is it?" He asked.
The older girl pointed a finger toward the parking lot. "Izzy's got a flat tire."
The brunette peeked out and saw the genius changing the tire of his black jeep. For a geek, he had no problem with a manual task like that. Davis himself didn't even know how to change a tire.
"How'd it go flat. Did he drive on it here?"
Sora shook her head. "No. He ran over a nail in the lot when he was parking. Made me carry in his laptop so he could change it." She motioned to thin black computer lying next to Matt's guitar case.
The girl frowned and turned away from the window and walked over to the door to peek out.
"Is anyone coming?" Kari asked, looking up from the flower covered whiteboard.
Sora backed up and let Yolei and Ken file inside. They both waved at Davis.
Matt moved over and sat in one of the computer chairs, leaning back and running a hand through his blonde hair. "So everybody's here but the one who called the meeting in the first place."
"Wait for Izzy." Kari said, throwing her red marker into a bin of about thirty other colors.
"What's this whole thing about, Davis?" Yolei asked, surveying the expression of the gogglehead, from his position by the window. "Ken said you knew something you weren't telling him."
"Well, uh, I don't really know all that much. I only know what I found out last night. It's just that, uh..."
"Wait for Izzy." Kari demanded.
Davis held up his hands. "Okay. Sorry." He glanced out the window again, but the older boy had left the parking lot and was nowhere to be seen.
"Sorry I'm late."
Izzy walked in the room, rubbing his hands together to get the tire dirt off of them. TK followed him in, grinning around the room.
"Okay. Let's get started." The blonde boy said and went over to the table along the wall. He shoved some books aside and sat up on it, glancing at Davis. "We've got help coming, too."
Confused, the brunette walked over to stand next to his friend. "Who?"
"You'll see. Anyway," he turned to the rest of his confused audience. "You all know I've been spending a lot of time in the digital world lately. I've told some of you that I've been exploring some new changes." He looked around. "Well, that's only partially true."
Izzy smiled crossed his arms over his chest. No one else moved. They all just stared.
"Um," the silence seemed to faze TK. He shook his head and began. "Well, a few months ago, Patamon and I were contacted by a team of kids from another world, much like Davis found the Tamers."
"You found a rip and didn't tell us?" Kari asked, sounding hurt.
TK blinked. "No. I said they contacted me. And they didn't come through a permanent rip like Takato and the others did. They knew their digivices could cut between the worlds, and they have for a while. They're a part of a balancing organization called MIRROR, which serves to protect the universe from the forces of evil."
"The universe?" Yolei asked. "What does that mean?"
The blonde boy nudged Davis, prompting him to take the question.
"Um," the gogglehead blinked. "Well, I said I only found out last night, but from what they told us, our world and the digital world aren't the only ones out there."
"Duh." Tai rolled his eyes. "There's the Tamers' world as well."
"Yeah," Davis responded, "but there's a lot more than just that." He pulled out his digivice and showed them the world number he'd displayed on the screen. "It says 683. So that accounts for at least that many worlds, though I'm guessing there's a bunch more above the number."
"Right." Izzy cut in. "There's multiple worlds in the same basic universe. They're all right next to each other, but fundamentally separated. There's no traveling between them."
Everyone turned to stare at him. He suddenly looked embarrassed and sat down in one of the chairs. "Sorry. It's basic M-theory stuff."
Everyone blinked.
Kari sighed. "It's what he's writing his Bachelor's thesis paper on."
"Oh." Yolei looked confused. "Well, if you could tell us what's going on in the universe, why didn't you?"
Izzy gave her a dry look. "Do you really want to go there with me? This is incredibly complicated stuff. Even you wouldn't follow it."
"Anyway," TK demanded, trying to turn the conversation back into his story. "I've been working with the MIRROR team for a while now, and they've been teaching me a lot of stuff about the structure of the universe. In essence, there are thousands of worlds like ours, and then there's the digital world, which permeates all the worlds and serves as a connection between them."
Davis watched Izzy. The college boy looked really excited at the moment. "So that's why we can travel between them?"
Both younger boys nodded at the same time. Davis took his turn talking. "And now, it turns out, there's some supreme evil being trying to take over the entire digital world, not just the part assigned to one of our little worlds. So, if he succeeds, he gets the whole universe to rule."
"And that's not a good thing." TK said.
"No kidding." Tai responded.
Footsteps echoed outside in the hall, and Davis looked up to see Randy step into the room. He grinned at everyone. "Hi. I'm Randy. TK called me in to help him out with the whole explanation. I'm the crossworld ambassador for MIRROR team 37."
Everyone stared again. He launched into the recruitment speech.
neoKOS-MOS: Sucky ending, I know. Seems right though. Now I'm taking a few days off to tend to my other inspiration. Though, I am excited for the next chapter. We get to meet the fourth member of MIRROR! And I think you'll all be surprised. Plesantly, I hope. Still hoping to get some suggestions on how to split everyone up into four teams. E-mail me if you think of anything. Thanks!
Dark Qiviut: Thanks again for all the suggestions. I have so much to think over for the future of this story. Need names for my bad guys. Need an ending. Need mini-plots to fill up the holes. Glad you like the conversation in the end. It was kinda funny. I personally liked Renamon playing with Suzie.
miracles-3: I loved that you updated Collide. Do it again, when you get the time, of course. And I'm glad that I write a good enough story that you'd actually want to read it word for word. Yay! No skimming! dancing
ApricotKisses: Glad you're so happy about this. What is it that gets you so much? I have to say, I was inspired by reading your fics, and that's what brought about the Henry and Rika friendship stuff. Write some more. I'll give you a list of brainstorm topics later. And, if you want my book when I finish it, I'll give you a signed first addition. Just gotta finish it…
Please review on your way out. Thanks again…