Chapter Three: Errors in the Landscape
If Sora hadn't known any better, she would have said that they'd made a wrong turn at some point in their journey from Odaiba. But she did know better, and they could only be in the digital world.
And there was no sign of Gennai. It figured. It's just like him to tell us the world is going to end and then leave us to figure the rest out on our own, she thought with unusual bitterness.
Gazing around her from where she'd landed in a heap on the hard ground, Sora could see just how much the Digiworld had changed since the last time she'd visited. She found it difficult to reconcile this barren land with the vibrant place of her memories. Before them stood a great wall of stone, a mountain with jagged peaks running east and west as far as she could see. Behind them, the land consisted mainly of rock and sand, a desert. Yet, what was most unsettling was that everything was grey and cold, as if the world had faded somehow, devoid of all its colour. Their little band of travelers was the brightest thing against the bleak landscape.
"Just like the Dark Ocean," she heard Hikari murmur, and Ken nodded his solemn agreement.
Sora didn't know what they were referring to, but she was unaccountably reminded of the cave where she had been trapped by her own dark thoughts, where she would have succumbed to despair, if not for her friends. She shivered.
"You okay?" Yamato asked, blue eyes radiating concern as he offered his hand to help her up.
Sora grasped it, taking comfort in the familiar warmth of his palm against hers, and was relieved to find not everything in this twisted version of digital world was cold.
"I'm fine," she said, releasing Yamato's hand to brush strands of hair from her face. "Is everyone else all right?"
"Yes, if by 'all right' you mean stunned and slightly bruised," Jyou said.
"This place sure has changed," said Daisuke, brushing sand from his soccer jersey.
Iori rolled his eyes. "Understatement of the year."
"Where are we supposed to go?" asked Mimi, struggling to stand in her high-heeled shoes, before pulling them off in frustration. Barefooted, she made her way over to Taichi who was staring speculatively out into the desert.
"I really don't think the desert is the way to go, Taichi," said Yamato dryly.
Taichi made a face at him. "I wasn't going to suggest it," he told the blonde.
Inwardly, Sora cringed. The last thing they needed was a fight. She stepped between the two boys. "Obviously, we'd be crazy to cross the desert, we all know that. But the only other place to go…." Sora looked up at the cliffs. The only way she would feel comfortable crossing those would be if she were nestled safe against Birdramon's leg. She missed her digimon.
"Hey!" Koushiro said excitedly. "Is anyone else's digivice showing digieggs nearby?"
Sora quickly checked hers, and, sure enough, it showed several intersecting dots clustered at one edge of the screen. Pyokomon's sweet face immediately came to mind. "Do you think they could be…?"
"Let's go find out!" Daisuke charged impulsively into the desert. He didn't get very far before Ken grabbed the back of his shirt, halting his progress.
"Uh, Daisuke? They're in the other direction."
"Right, I knew that!" said Daisuke sheepishly.
Koushiro was staring at the mountain range, a calculating look in his eyes. "Any suggestions on how to cross that thing?"
"What if just we walk along the base and look for an opening?" Takeru proposed. "There's bound to be some way to get to the other side."
"I like that idea," Miyako said. "It's less insane than actually trying to climb it."
None of them could disagree with that. Their next problem was whether to head east or west along the wall. Taichi solved the problem by fishing a coin out of his pocket.
"Heads we go east, tails we go west," he said. They all watched as the coin spun in the air. Leave it to Taichi, Sora thought, to let a coin toss determine our fate.
"Tails," Taichi said holding the coin against the back of one hand. "West it is."
And so they walked, always keeping the cliff to their right, looking out for any fissures in the rock that could mean a way through. They didn't get very far before Daisuke, who had taken up the lead, called out: "Hey, you guys! Hurry up! I think there's an opening up here!"
They all hurried to catch up with him. From a little ways off, where Daisuke had first glimpsed it, it really did look like an opening to a tunnel. When they stood looking into it, however, the crevice turned out to lead to nothing more than a shallow cave, curving up from the base of the natural wall.
Sora felt herself slump, and allowed a small sigh to escape her lips. This might take a while. Iori, she noticed, had made his way deeper into the cavern and was examining its back wall very closely. Frowning, she nudged Yamato, gesturing to the younger boy. He caught her gaze, and they exchanged a confused glace.
"Come on you guys," Takeru was saying. "Let's keep going."
"No, wait!" Iori called. "Come look at this! There are pictures of the crests on this wall!"
They crowded back to look, and sure enough, there were crude representations of their crests etched into the stone. Sora picked out her Crest of Love immediately. Wonderingly, she saw that there were also depictions of three crests she had never seen before that could only be the ones Gennai had given Daisuke, Miyako, and Iori.
"What do you suppose it means?" Mimi asked, tracing the symbol of Purity with one finger. (1)
Hikari was staring intently at the drawing of her crest. "Something…" she murmured.
"Uh, could you be a little more specific, Hikari-chan?" Daisuke asked, jokingly. "Hey!" he cried out suddenly in surprise.
Sora gasped: from where it lay on its tag against his chest, Daisuke's crest had begun to glow.
"What…? Is it supposed to do this?" he demanded.
Shouts of astonishment made Sora spin around to where Miyako, Ken, and Iori stood, their crests also shining brightly.
"I don't get it," said Jyou, scratching the back of his head in puzzlement. "This usually only happens if one of us is in trouble."
Miyako held her crest up, looking at it from all different angles. "It's beautiful," she said in awe, and Sora was reminded of the first time she'd seen her crest like that. She wondered if she'd ever see it again.
Ken, who was carefully cradling his Crest of Kindness in the palm of one hand, nodded in mute agreement.
Iori had reached out to run his hand reverently over the stone that showed his symbol of Integrity. He wore a contemplative expression on his face, which was lit by the green light from his crest. "I wonder if- "
And then suddenly, he was gone.
Mimi screamed, and Takeru called out the boy's name, but before they could even guess as to what had happened, Daisuke, Ken, and Miyako disappeared as well.
Taichi had been pacing back and forth along the crest-covered wall for almost ten minutes now and he had yet to figure out what to do.
He didn't like feeling as if things were out of control. As the self-proclaimed leader of the Chosen Children, he figured that it was his responsibility to make sure things like this didn't happen, or if they did, to fix them. It wasn't that Taichi didn't appreciate some adventure in his life, but this was getting to be too much. The four younger kids had disappeared without a trace and they still weren't any closer to finding their digimon.
The others had spread themselves out around him, some of them sitting wearily on the sand, others searching the rest of the walls for any clues as to what to do.
"Too bad whoever made this thing didn't leave any instructions on what to do with it," Yamato said, glaring at the wall as if he could break through it by the sheer force of his aggravation.
Taichi had to agree with him: it was a pretty inconvenient situation. Somewhere, he thought, someone is watching us and laughing.
"I know this sounds strange, but it almost looked as if they were sucked into the wall," Jyou said from where he sat against the side of the cave.
"If that's true, then I really hope they made it through to the other side," said Sora, who was standing next to Yamato. The blonde put a comforting hand on the small of her back and Taichi was surprised that he felt no pain at what he saw. At first, it had been hard to accept the relationship between his two best friends, but Taichi had forced himself to move past it, not wanting to lose their friendship. It was an old hurt now.
"They must have," said Takeru, responding to Sora's comment. "It's the only explanation." He paused. "Unless they got sent back to our world…or a different one."
Taichi let out a grown. "We need to get through this wall!" he cried, slamming his fist against it in frustration.
"We can all agree with that, onii-chan," Hikari said serenely, "but I don't think that turning your fists into mincemeat is going to help." Taichi saw Takeru try to hide a smile with one hand, but before he could say anything in reply, Koushiro spoke up.
"There has to be some reason that our crests are on this wall," he said, almost to himself. "It's like a gate. It must be the way through…."
"What are you talking about, Koushiro?" Taichi asked.
"Well," he said, "the others disappeared when their crests were activated, right? The crests were like the keys to a lock. But the rest of us don't have crests right now, at least not physical ones."
"But we already knew that," Yamato pointed out.
"Let me finish," Koushiro told him. "We don't have physical crests, but remember when we fought Apocalymon? The power of our crests is inside of us."
"I think I get it," Sora said. "If they're inside of us, then we should be able to get past the wall, too. But how?"
"Maybe if we touch the pictures, they'll recognize the virtues inside of us," Hikari suggested.
It was as good of an idea as any of them were likely to come up with, so Taichi stepped forward. "Well," he said, "only one way to find out." He reached toward the image of his crest, pressing his palm flat against it. At first, nothing happened, and he almost fell back in disappointment, but then the stone flared up with some kind of internal fire.
Taichi could feel his hand begin to burn, and the scent of charred flesh filled his nostrils. Yelling out in pain and fear, he tried to pull back, but found he couldn't free his hand from the stone. The symbol of courage was blazing beneath his palm. Behind him Hikari was screaming his name and Yamato had rushed forward to pull him back, but suddenly, almost as soon as it had began, it was over.
He was on the other side of the wall.
Taichi stared blankly at the symbol that had been burnt into his palm, running his fingers over the darkened flesh that was shaped into the eight-pointed star of the Crest of Courage. What just happened?
"Taichi! Taichi!" cried a slightly squeaky voice.
Taichi's head shot up; he would have known that voice anywhere. "Koromon?" He spun around, and got a face full of pink digimon.
"Koromon! It's really you!" Taichi cried happily, prying the little creature off of his face and into his arms.
"Yep! I've been waiting for you!" Koromon said, pressing up against Taichi. "I thought I was never going to see you again. I missed you sooo much!"
Taichi felt tears come to his eyes. "Right back at you, little buddy."
"Taichi-san!" someone called, and Taichi turned around to see Daisuke and the other three missing teens waving at him.
"Look," Daisuke said. "We found our digimon!" He held up a laughing Chibimon.
"How?" Taichi asked, still amazed that it was really Koromon he was holding.
Ken, who had both arms wrapped around Minomon, shook his head. "We don't know how. We were just here, and so were they."
For the first time, Taichi looked around him. There was colour, he realized, and it was much warmer. They were in a field of some sort, and off in the distance he could see the beginnings of a forest. It was so much different here that it was hard to believe that it was the same world, but the mountain stood behind him, solid proof that it was. Perhaps the most miraculous thing of all was cluster of digieggs the sat on a small, grassy knoll near the center of the field.
As he approached it, Taichi could see Miyako and Iori sitting on the hill, their digieggs on their laps. "Ours haven't hatched yet," Iori said, rubbing a hand over the yellow egg he held.
"Where is everyone else?" Miyako asked, gazing up at him.
In his joy at seeing his digimon again, Taichi had completely forgotten about the others. "Oh, no!" He turned towards the wall. "They're still on the other side!"
"Don't worry," Daisuke said. "They'll just do what you did…uh, what did you do, exactly?"
"I'm not really sure," Taichi told him. "I just touched the image of my crest, and I was here." He held up his palm to show them the symbol burned into it. "And I got this."
They stared at it. "Ouch!" said Koromon. "That looks like it hurt, Taichi."
Taichi nodded. "It did."
"Hey, look!" cried Miyako, pointing at the wall.
It had started to glow and there were seven familiar symbols visible on its face. Taichi had to close his eyes for a moment against the glare, and when he opened them the rest of the Chosen Children were standing in front of him.
Daisuke grinned. "We were wondering when you guys would show up."
(1) For those of you who don't know, the Crest of Purity is the Japanese version of the Crest of Sincerity, just like the Crest of Faith is the Crest of Reliability. For the sake of this story, I'll be using the Japanese versions of Mimi and Jyou's crests.