Digiegg 1.2

Wow! An actual chapter! Sorry for the long wait, had to cement out some details further down the line and rewrite this chapter a few times. I might retroactively make this 1.1 if I get far enough and dissolve the current prologue into the story later. Criticism is welcome and appreciated, if you think any characterization is off or the dialogue or paragraphs are weird please tell me.


My world turned upside down within a moment, as everything seemed to dissolve around me.

One click.

One little click.

It was as if I was falling without moving, a phantom wind blowing on my back but nothing, not even a hair, blowing up into my vision.

As suddenly as the world exploded, it began to reconstruct itself as green digits of light flickered and condensed into black points and solid ground caught my legs. I found my bearings and began to think.

It was definitely some kind of jungle, if the weirdly huge trees everywhere said anything at all. Something was off though. I may have never seen a jungle myself, with how far north the Bay was, but I knew enough about bugs and forests to know wherever I was should have been absolutely teeming with insect life. Judging by the fact that I could barely feel any bugs beyond the few I had hidden away in my clothes during school, it was almost as if someone tore all the vegetation out of an area and dropped it on top of me, and me alone.

It got stranger, somehow. Immediately I felt some sort of giant arthropods moving towards my location, maybe not in the quickest of routes, but definitely in a way we'd cross paths. My power gave me a sense of all of the bugs I encountered; these seemed to throw it all into disarray. Limbs much too tiny to pull round, centipedial bodies, humanlike forms with seemingly insect organs, and other head-splitting creations burst into my mind's eye in a flood of information.

Too much information to sift through now. The important part was that most of them changed course enough that we shouldn't cross paths.

I had so much to take in with no warning in very little time. Mrs. Knott's classroom was gone, replaced with all these trees. Only one of the strange creatures still headed my way, but it was moving extraordinarily fast. Without as many of the distractions demanding my immediate focus, I started to get something of a read on what was coming towards me. It was one of the centipede-creatures, almost a giant caterpillar, and it was swinging on strands away from heat like one of those weird Aleph Comics. It's body felt unevenly warm, but I couldn't tell whether it was just a very hot, weird creature or if it was catching fire.

Probably was almost on fire if I had to bet, what with the smoke rising in its direction and some of the signals beginning to disappear, but I was no expert. It could just as easily be some kind of Changer form or monstrous cape. I wouldn't have expected my bug sense to work on either of those possibilities at all, but any advantage was a welcome one when a wildfire is headed your way.

Fuck.

Fire was not something I had any way to fight. Unless my power suddenly decided to make bugs fire-repellant, my plan had always been to hit really hard or run really fast if I ran into a pyrokinetic. A raging forest fire was basically a big old f-u to any chance I had of doing anything, but potentially there could be some sort of shelter.

The bugs on my body scattered, giving me somewhat of a better feel for the area, but what I found only left me more confused. Whereas the mysterious jungle insects were providing me too much information, the sheer scarcity of normal bugs made getting any solid image impossible. Some flies were able to find food, but if they weren't still in my normal range of sight I wouldn't have considered the bright yellow boxes growing off trees may have been edible. The three house spiders in my backpack were useless right now, I only had them out of boredom, and the vast majority of my "swarm", if you were so generous as to call them that, consisted of gnats and mites, who were able to find that the "trees" weren't all trees at all. Some felt harder, while others appeared to have holes in places the bugs tried to instinctually land.

I could use this.

I started to recall all but a few of my bugs, pushing them at the not-trees. They felt like glass to the flies, and were strangely grouped in a tight, interlocked circle. There was no visual difference, but the mites found that one of the trees just barely existed, with an intangible swathe of bark large enough to climb through.

If these trees were flammable, I was screwed, but, thanks to my research on Brockton Bay's Parahuman scene, I was willing to bet they weren't.

Ok, hear me out here. Putting what I had together:

Alien landscapes.

Loose morality.

Monstrous, nonhuman capes.

A pyrokineticist.

Looking at it somewhat cooly, the only local group this powerful, diverse, and unscrupulous enough to try to kidnap random teenagers from schools also happens to have a well documented history of not being killers.

Namely, Faultline's crew.

Granted, I have no idea why I could feel so many strange bugs, but superpowers tended to play fast and loose with what counted as what from my research. Plus, monstrous capes were basically walking blank spots in parahuman research, with how some are seemingly not protected from their own powers and others don't count as living against powers that seem to work or fail on all living things. The signals could be my power trying to comprehend complete non-bugs as familiar creatures, with my brain filling in the gap with weird frankinsects. I definitely got the sense that the worm-thing had humanlike eyeballs even though my power swore it had finger-thick legs.

The rest of it made all too much sense. Faultline may be the leader, but the rest of her group is distinctive. Labyrinth's Shaker abilities creates alien landscapes, always giving them favorable terrain. Her wiki page mentioned she is incredibly strong and diverse, so whisking away basically all of the living things other than a handful of bugs and myself isn't out of the picture. The semisolid thing with the trees actually has a mention on her wiki, there's video of Faultline punching someone through a wall like it wasn't there. It's even possible that the monstrous bugs are actually aliens that just apparated from the terrain, Labyrinth doesn't seem to have a recorded limit anywhere and the advice section on her page basically amounted to "be happy they don't kill". Likewise, Faultline was well known for recruiting monstrous capes, and generally strong ones at that. Newter and Gregor the Snail were basically the founding members after all, and Spitfire could easily have been some bug-person considering she wore a concealing full bodysuit and mask all the time, which brings me into my next point, Spitfire herself. She was basically a nobody in the Bay when suddenly she appeared with the Palanquin Mercenaries, well, spitting fire. If Faultline wanted to start a fire, Spitfire could easily do it, and just thinking about their team synergy made it obvious that they could totally control it too. Importantly though, Spitfire's recruitment proved, to me at least, that Faultline was probably still trying to recruit more capes for her organization.

Being labeled a mercenary wasn't what I pictured my superpowered career looking like, but considering the options in the Bay it certainly wasn't the worst. Forced recruitment without my preparations would be a lot scarier coming from Nazis or drug addicts, and if it was Lung I'd probably just plain get murdered. My other great fear, teen drama, hopefully doesn't exist when Spitfire's probably the only one my age and we don't have to go on those awkward school visits Wards are always doing.

Imagine my surprise, after waiting and thinking over every little thing and coming to grips with the fact that I would be forced to join their team for what might end up being my entire life, when the strange humanish centipede ended up just being a strange humanish centipede, almost on fire.

Green, and as small as a dog, this caterpillar cape was swinging from tree to tree like his life depended on it, which it very well might have with the fire licking at his antenna. His eyes seemed to widen with relief and maybe familiarity as he saw the grove I was in and began swinging my way. I was fairly well covered, so the caterpillar either knew where I was and was coming for me or knew the grove was safe from experience. Either way, his arrival seemed to be a sign I was safe enough for now, and I sat down and recalled the last of the bugs I had outside. The mites were searching for rivers or some sort of fissure that fire wouldn't be able to jump, but whatever effect was trapping me easily extended past my range.

There was no way the creature in front of me should be alive. Mr. Gladly, trying to be cool, once went on about how "capes were bullshit" in September, and it was generally accepted and recited online, but having a weirdly deep sense of the great wrong-ness of the doggerpillar and seeing it still function like I deeply, intrinsically knew that it shouldn't was a new level of bullshit.

It panted like it's phantom lungs were straining, its upper thorax rising and falling as if there was something there; the bulk of the body dedicated to either producing string, firing string, or applying chemicals to the string. Inside, there was no true "void" I could not see, I understood the ins and outs of this thing and that it was simply moving as if it controlled every piece of its body. No muscles pulled the tiny legs, and those legs certainly didn't pull the body, but the creature decided to move and its body moved, piece by piece, in the direction it wanted to go. Getting to see this disconnect up close gave me a slight grasp on it, but I honestly couldn't understand this bug cape's biology- that was, until it spoke to me.

"Par-don, hu-mon," it exhaled in a nervous, masculine voice, rhyming the words as if heavily accented, "Could I stay here for the Mera-mon's attack?"

While clearly exhausted, there was a sense of familiarity I got from this cape's voice that this might not be the first time he clashed with these 'Meraman' capes. The fact that the group had a name attached, a name which was in no way indicative of Faultline, dashed my hopes of the group being nonlethal and controlled. Something deep in my gut told me that this group wasn't one I would want to be forcibly recruited into. Japan may have been basically in tatters, and the language was quite simply dying, but when your city is partially dominated by a half-Japanese Fire Spewing Dragon's gang, the sound of burning practically acts as a battle cry. The only thing even rivalling the amount of mera's on Winslow's heating units was probably the swastikas, but this familiarity clued me in that whatever gang was burning this forest was possibly not recruiting people like me for their parahuman abilities. The problem was that I had nothing to counter a hostile pyrokinetic. I really, really was wishing that it would end up just being Faultline in disguise, but my bad luck stuck me in a burning forest with a monstrous cape I knew nothing about with seemingly no hope for rescue.

Brockton had no jungles like this, and the vegetation and insects, if you could call them that, were much too strange and alien to have gone unnoticed. I was definitely far from home, and I couldn't have been gone long enough for anyone to notice I was gone. Ha! Today was the first day in weeks I tried to go to Winslow for a full day. Between researching capes in the library and getting supplies, there were plenty of ways to distract myself while physically avoiding the Trio, and the school never tried to act on any of the phone calls they left on our voicemail. My dad would go ballistic at school for letting me fall off the grid for so long, but even then I can't think of a reason they would jump to Cape involvement.

I was screwed. Plain and simple, hopefully not literally.

I had maybe a fifth of a pound of bugs, most of which had mildly annoying bites at best, unless one was carrying diseases I didn't know about.

Mystery Bug Cape seemed to be young, at most my age, but either way he (I was fairly certain it was a he) had the bare minimum confidence in his abilities. Given how he was shaking in place, he assumed I would win in a fight despite the fact I had no costume, obvious brute power, or anything really beyond a backpack and unusual lankiness.

Huh. My imagination sparked when I first took in the situation, and now with more information it must have run off again. I never responded to the doggerpillar and I think my spacing out was scaring him. While I couldn't trust it, for the immediate future we would be stuck together so it would be better if he wasn't petrified of me. Scaring people probably wouldn't help me once I became a rogue.

Halfway between a wave and my best "PR-smile" as PHO would put it, I realized I had no idea how to introduce myself to the worm. His nervous chittering started to die down, so he must have realized I meant no harm, but, if I had to give a name, what should I say? He clearly expected me to be a cape regardless of my lack of costume, otherwise he wouldn't be so afraid of an obviously unarmed teenager, so could any more harm come from just giving him my name? Since this wasn't Brockton if some "Mera-man" was able to operate so conspicuously, my first name held basically no meaning while trying to give what might be my eventual cape name would both allow this cape to track me down to Brockton if I got a wiki page and reveal the nature of my powers just a little bit.

"Nice to meet you, I'm Taylor."

His mandibles finally stopped clicking together as he composed himself.

"H-hi Ms. Taylor, my name is W-wormmon. If it isn't rude," the now named Worm-man continued, "how did you get into the Digital World? I thought the gate was closed."

A lot to unpack there, but I wasn't cutting off the conversation again just to think. Worm-man was offering information, I would gladly take it.

"No idea. I clicked a link and then the world exploded."

"Yes, but that hasn't worked in years. There was an attack on the World Code and we lost both our catalysts and our gates to the Human World."

He said human normal enough, but every other time he tried to say man he ended up saying mon.

"What exactly do you mean by 'digital world'? And what's with the human/hu-mon thing?"

His nerves seemed to remember they existed, as his forehead began to glimmer. He really didn't have anything to suggest he could sweat, but the droplets on his brow begged to differ.

"Did the hu-mon's forget us? I suppose it must have been hundreds of years…" he trailed off before continuing, "just like the Human World is home to the Human monsters, hu-mons for short, the Digital World is home to the Digital Monster, Digimon."

"So how did you get between worlds before computers? The internet is barely older than the first parahumans."

"Uh, um, I'm just a small Wormmon, I don't know all the sciency things… no one ever really taught me before..."

Ah. He was on the verge of tears, and had surprising nice eyes. I mean that literally, his sight seemed to have some logic and instinct behind it, and in the future I might be able to try and see what they're reading. Whatever strange place this was clearly had made him paranoid, but he still struck me as childlike. He was speaking clearer now, despite his tears, and his voice was like a less grating version of grade school Greg Veder's voice, definitely male but not quite grown.

"Its okay." I sat down, done with grilling the stressed little thing. Afraid, confused, alone, I understood those things, especially now. I was a little embarrassed for not picking up on it sooner, because I was relatively tall and wearing… not the most inviting of clothes right now with my baggy brown hoodie making my lanky frame wider. "Do you need a friend Wormmon?"

You would have thought I gave the thing a cookie. Releasing his tension like a dam breaking, he climbed onto me and broke down crying. I relaxed myself, despite the fact there was a hostile cape nearing if the fires were any indication. Our cove seemed safe for now though, while the mite I sent out to scout burned it confirmed the fire wasn't able to pass the metal trees. Today was going to be only more stressful from here; this was probably the only calm before the storm I would get. My new little cape friend Wormmon and I sat down and got to know each other better. A bug after my own heart, he produced teabags from somewhere, and I had a water bottle I was supposed to drink for lunch in my backpack. Our plans were foiled when we realized we had no container to boil the water in nor did we want to approach the uncontrolled wildfire, but for the first time in years I think I found a friend.

It felt like my back pocket got a little heavier, but that was a later problem.