The fic was delayed because I needed to write a chapter of Ryo fighting and learning about Digimon and the importance of partners to bridge the gap between the beginning of the fic I'd posted and the later content I'd already written, but then I realized that this would just delay the other kids mattering to the plot again.
This is now officially AU of the games rather than an exploration of what might have happened: a lot of the point of Ryo is that he's cheating in a sense, otherwise one kid wouldn't be winning against something the group that beat Apocalymon couldn't handle (the question is WHY he's exempt from getting captured/turned to stone the way everyone else does).
Since in this story I wanted to explore the ensemble, what effects being with an experienced group instead of being on his own would have on Ryo and his ability to handle losing the partner Digimon lottery, Ryo got captured just like everyone else.
Machinedramon – Millenniummon, now - was never enough of a fool to experiment with his mind control technology on himself, but he'd made his victims give him very thorough reports and he'd worked out some accurate effectiveness tests over the centuries as he worked on improving and upgrading his technology. Since his first attempt at conquering the entire Digital World, beta testing was usually left to some Digimon with more ambition than sense, one willing to trust technology like this found just lying around in some ancient ruin.
Or built into the ground under Primary Village.
Grinding so slowly, his Black Gears had replaced the entirety of File Island, under the surface. A signal to activate them, and every Digimon that died and was reborn would have been taken under his control the moment it hatched. The enemies that dared oppose his forces would die and become his reinforcements.
Not a plan he'd ended up using, but after his revival and merge with the Kimeramon, he'd already sent a minion to plant another seed. Gennai had summoned the Digidestined to protect the newly-built File City, and they'd stayed there to protect it. Leaving them all conveniently anchored to one place for the capturing.
Then Gennai managed to teleport Agumon out of his grasp and summoned this child.
The one he held in his grasp of one clawed hand, with the tip of another claw pressed against his vulnerable stomach. Not that there was any part of a human that wasn't ridiculously easy for a mega to destroy. Even a rookie.
The Digidestined had Digimon trying to kill them for months and they'd survived. Their chosen protectors were driven to do their best, of course, but these were such fragile creatures. The fact that no Digimon had gotten lucky was proof of the power that resided in these creatures.
He stabbed the claw forward.
He didn't.
The claw had shuddered when he willed himself to strike, but away, not towards. Lifting it away, he saw that the purple 'shirt' was undamaged, much less the skin. In the instant he'd tried to kill this creature, a primal rejection had arisen within him. As though killing this thing was the most stupid thing he could ever possibly do, and his mind and body refused to go through with such idiocy.
The absolute refusal felt like his own will, his own contempt that he was surrounded by fools who would contemplate something so patently idiotic directed at himself.
Harming this 'boy' could simply not be tolerated, the way disobeying one of his orders should be unthinkable and if someone thought of it, they merited immediate annihilation.
Kill it, he thought, and willed himself to strike.
No.
What was he thinking?
Was it him thinking, some buried part of himself, or this creature's power compelling him? Had Gennai summoned this particular human to the Digital World because it had the power to control him?
He thought of ordering one of his minions to kill the human if he couldn't do it himself and no.
So this was the urge that drove a mere Tokomon to fling itself into his hand, trying to tug at the Child of Hope and free him from the grasp of Millenniummon. He'd assumed the Tokomon had practically captured himself out of 'friendship' or one of those similar impulses, so easy to take advantage of, but if this was affecting him?
Turning towards the work table with the stack of nine, he put the boy in one of the test subject cages. There, he thought, locking the door, and had he detected some extra satisfaction in the action of making sure the boy was safely contained? Unable to escape, unable to get killed trying to escape, although a Digidestined's power must be some protection.
Of course, that protection was finite, he thought, grabbing the Wargreymon's human and removing it from its cage.
Nothing too deep, of course. He needed these test subjects, and he'd researched just how fragile humans were in their own world. The digital world was made of human data, for those with the genius to decode it.
Ignoring the Child of Light's cries of "Tai!" and various other distractions, he tapped, quite carefully, at the boy's upper arm, after managing to get enough of a grip on him that his struggles wouldn't end up with him pushing himself against the claw and being wounded more deeply.
There. No problem drawing blood on a different human.
"Agumon," he said, to get its attention as he turned towards another sample table. Every step he took shook the room just slightly, despite the shock absorbers built into the floor. It wasn't good for the equipment, but there was simply no helping it. He could use less cumbersome forms when he wasn't ruler of the Digital World, but now he had scheming underlings to worry about, who would take one look at an ultimate or a more reasonably sized mega and think 'weak' instead of realizing what that meant about his control of digivolution. Yes, it weeded out the disloyal and the too dumb to live, but their suicides wasted his valuable time.
"Yes, master?" came the rookie's voice, eager to please.
"Cut the boy's other arm, just enough to draw blood," he said, and put the boy down in one of the Digimon sample enclosures.
"Yes, master!" Agumon said, happy to be given an order.
This body still had enough of Machinedramon's systems for him to time how long it took the Agumon to carry out his order.
It took a moment to pull the boy off the Agumon. His hands were attempting to pry off the dark ring, even after it wounded him.
"Gabumon. A cut of equivalent depth, an inch lower," he said.
"Yes, master."
This cut was made measurably faster, even though in both cases the Child of Courage was trying to dodge until he got in a position where he could get his hands on the dark ring. He seemed to have some practice anticipating others' movements.
Millenniummon could have suppressed the Agumon's mind even further, to keep its subconscious from having any ability to affect its actions, but he preferred for his test subjects to have enough ability to think that they could understand at least somewhat-complicated orders and answer questions. Still, the fact there was some hesitation proved that the Agumon was still able to recognize that this was his partner, and the ring could still enable it to wound the boy despite that subconscious reluctance and the influence of the bond.
If he was foolish enough to create a mind control device that would work on himself, perhaps then he would be able to injure the human 'Ryo Akiyama.' Normally that wasn't worth the risk, but when his mind was already being influenced?
He looked at the boy in the sample cage while he replaced the Child of Courage in his own cage. Suddenly, it felt entirely wrong that the boy was all the way over there. His shoulder felt light. It felt wrong. There was a weight that was supposed to be there. No, a weight he wanted there: he knew how he felt when someone dared deny him something he wanted.
He'd put the boy there to make it impossible for Ryo's partner to approach him without Millenniummon seeing it and destroying it. Then he'd built that (blasted) device and identified the signature patterns each set of Digidestined and partner Digimon shared. He kept the energy signatures of his slaves and all the other data he'd accumulated over the centuries in his database: easy enough to compile the data and write a program to scan for what he needed.
Perhaps he should have realized that the boy's signature would be a match for his own when he didn't step on the thing immediately. He'd learned of Gennai's prophecy of Myotismon's defeat. It was very possible that there was another prophecy, one of his own downfall, and this boy summoned to the Digital World was likely an integral part of it.
Myotismon hadn't killed Gatomon the instant he met her, but he hadn't known the Digimon was anything beyond a more competent than usual minion. Then, of course, Digimon came back to life while humans didn't: until the Child of Light was eliminated, he hadn't wished to lose a means of identifying her. If Gatomon went to Primary Village, the human might have escaped him and found her there.
Hmm. He would have to perform intelligence and other tests on the captured partner Digimon, see how they compared to un-Chosen equivalents…
What, was he thinking that his bond to this Ryo was the reason he was so exceptional now? Was it trying to manipulate him into thinking he needed the human?
His shoulder felt empty. He didn't like it. The boy was still sedated, he found himself thinking. Harmless.
As though he was ever enough of a fool to think one of the Chosen Children was harmless! They wouldn't have been brought here if they were as weak as they appeared to be, was it not obvious?! Humans might be fleeting and pathetic in their own world, but it was their kind that created the Network that spawned the Digital World, and the Digidestined were chosen out of billions of other humans as its protectors. It could have seemed mere coincidence that these eight had seen a pair of Digimon that came from the Digital World while the previous Digidestined were fighting the Machine Emperor. It was not.
He wondered when Ryo first saw a Digimon, or when a Digimon first saw him. Had Homeostasis been looking through that Digimon's eyes, registering the energy patterns of the humans for future use?
He was able to leave the boy on a workstation or in a sample cage while he left the lab to make personal appearances and lead the number of attacks necessary to keep the megas under his control (even the spirals wouldn't control megas) constantly reminded that they couldn't challenge him before he knew. Was the bond stronger now that he was aware of it? Or was it that there was something frustrating about not being able to hold the creature?
Yes, that was it. There was something deeply offensive about something daring to separate him and his partner. His chest tightened, targeting systems contemplating the sample cage door. Standing between him and Ryo… he felt familiar battle rage trying to rise inside him, and ruthlessly choked it down.
What would happen if he gave in?
He'd have to secure the boy to his shoulder, he thought as he opened the cage door. Or perhaps carry him in a spare hand – he did have six, even if two of them were only solid when he willed it. To have Ryo fall unconscious to his death was unacceptable.
He was aware of the power the Chosen Children offered their Digimon, but he was Millenniummon. He had made himself a god, far surpassing the Sovereign. Not as powerful as originally planned, not yet anyway, but powerful enough to destroy Homeostasis' control over the Digital world's balance and disrupt time to his specifications. He didn't need this creature's power (even if he'd prefer to take it for himself, he wasn't enough of a fool to turn down power), so why did he feel as though he would be deprived of something irreplaceable if the child's head was smashed on the chrome digizoid floor (custom built labs with enough room for a body this size to move around were precious commodities and should be built to last: he remembered the first time he'd gone back to one of his hidden labs after a few centuries. He'd learned his lesson from that).
Yes, he'd have to hold the boy until he came to.
This really didn't feel like outside control, he thought, looking down at the creature sleeping in his palm. It felt so integral.
It could have been programmed into him before the moment of his first hatching.
He can feel his gaze narrowing. Before, he wished to explore, to pillage, to destroy every part of the digital world and the human world as well. The urge to know, to find, to take seemed less important now.
Or perhaps it was reorienting itself around this creature in his lower right hand.
The thick hide on Millenniummon's palm barely counted as armor compared to Machinedramon's chrome digizoid plating, but he still couldn't tell if he was only imagining that he could feel the boy move, just slightly, with each breath.
Was this all it was, this entire time? Was this what he'd wanted, what he'd been perfectly happy to destroy every inch of the Digital world to get his hands on?
Mine, he thought. Not 'my partner,' that would be… he'd never had a partner before, at least one he hadn't already made ten plans to eliminate, but mine.
He'd never found anything that felt this precious.
And he would let anyone take it from him, even himself, over his dead body.
He would just come back to life again, after all. He had been coming back to life for thousands of years (and now he had something to come back to-what was he thinking?!)
He remembered how his rookie form used to feel about a good pile of gems and chrome digizoid when he was young, before even the Digital World's most precious materials became boring, pointless except for what he could do with them. He wasn't a dramon type in this body. That would have left him vulnerable to Wargreymon's dramon destroyers, the attack that killed him as Machinedramon despite all the work he'd put into programming a digivolution covered in chrome digizoid (at first he'd implanted armor into his mega form, but that was additional work). He still remembered the joy of finding something beautiful, curling around it and having it for his own… until he realized that no, no matter how shiny or deeply colored it was, it wasn't all that wonderful. Wasn't what he wanted, and he had to kick it into a pile with the others or bury it until he could bear to look at it again, could see a jewel instead of a bitter disappointment.
He didn't think that would happen this time. There wasn't a rush of glee to wear off and leave him empty when he saw how empty the 'treasure' truly was. He didn't think Ryo was precious, Ryo simply was precious, held a certain value the way chrome digizoid did, for the power and protection it held, regardless of what anyone thought. Including Millenniummon himself.
Power. His power, a priceless find… the fact it was so easy was suspicious. Who left a treasure so poorly guarded? After most of the digital world was destroyed there weren't a great many Digimon who had already achieved Ultimate that didn't belong to him, but a Digidestined without his partner to guard him should have had a better escort than that.
Gennai might as well have just handed these humans and their protectors over to Millenniummon. Then he summoned another boy, with no partner (yet), and when Millenniummon's technology detected that something else had been brought from the human world and went to retrieve it a mere Agumon, unable to digivolve to Greymon, had thought he could protect anyone from a god?
Not without Homeostasis' intervention or the Chosen's power, he couldn't.
The other humans were still pathetic, he thought, looking over the cages. The smaller two were crying, one of them despite being reassured by her 'brother,' Agumon's partner – she was the one destiny used to take out Myotismon, he remembered, and the one that channeled Homeostasis' power to kill his last incarnation. The other was the one the Togomon was desperate to save. The Child of Hope. Machinedramon's… Millenniummon's surveillance systems survived his death. He built them to be sure they always did, so he knew this boy's protector killed Piedmon despite being only an Ultimate.
And there, a moment after his eyes met hers, went one of the girls, the Child of Sincerity. Or Purity. The Crest of Reliability might be the true crest of Sincerity. The Order of Azulongmon's inability to keep their files straight over centuries of constant attacks aside, he knew she was doing it purely to annoy him at this point. A pathetic weapon, but it wasn't as though he'd been foolish enough to leave them any other means of attack. That he knew about.
They certainly didn't seem to understand their true power, although leaving their crests with the artificial human would have reduced their limited ability to access those powers.
Such power these creatures held, and surely his own could be no less powerful. He would have to find Ryo's Crest, Tag and Digivice… what was he thinking, making this Chosen Child more powerful when it was brought here to fight him.
Hmm.
If that power was his, the way a dramon's possessiveness whispered that the boy was his… He would make some further observations of the others while Ryo was still sedated.
Put the Child of Love in an enclosure with the Palmon, and she approached carefully, speaking to it cautiously, before finally getting in range of those vines to try to remove the Dark Ring. Put her in the Biyomon's pen, and she ran to it, babbling. Perhaps she was embolded by the Palmon failing to respond to her in any way instead of attacking her, he forced himself to recognize. Detachment was important for experimentation, to gain proper understanding, as much as some part of him wanted to imagine Ryo running to him if someone dared to steal him away.
Yes: much harder to pry her loose from the Biyomon than the Palmon. He presumed she was attempting to hold onto the Palmon, although it was hard to be certain it wasn't merely a token effort necessary to placate the Palmon's human when human arms were so weak, but she clung far more desperately to the Biyomon.
He would have to study their behavior in order to determine what was related to each crest and what was programming shared by all Chosen Children. If the Chosen Children were programmed the way the partner Digimon are. "If the compulsion programming is installed into your partners, then the data transfer involved in Digivolution would spread it to you… the Order of Azulongmon was created to research how to call down the Gods and compel them to aid the Digital World, and they've always studied what they've managed to capture of my technology." So many technologies they thought they'd reinvented, made safe for their use, only to miss his backdoors. He allowed them to think that their secrets were safe, and their last survivor didn't seem to have thought about the fact that the Dark Masters were able to find and pillage their most vital sanctuary. "The power to compel the gods… I'll have to capture Gennai, and use the device I had Piedmon install into him to download his memories."
Their responses couldn't hold his attention, those rats he chased across his territory back when he pretended to be content with only a quarter of the Digital World, and none of the human world. At least he got Myotismon's reports in exchange for the loan of his gate.
Youth. Such fools most Digimon were, especially evil Digimon since they were very prone to doing stupid things, and when you'd enraged that many, the slightest slip or sign of weakness could be fatal. They assumed they'd terrified their minions too much to dare turn on them, but it took experience to pluck the line between hopelessness and desperation. Even rats could be dangerous, when cornered.
Then they died and retained only vague impressions of their previous life, had to learn all those lessons they needed to be effective conquerors all over again.
Millenniummon had always remembered everything.
He remembered being a mere in-training, wandering the digital world, blundering into the territories of savage Digimon, until eventually even his luck run out and he was sent back to Primary Village. He remembered training and studying how to defeat Digimon after Digimon, because there was always another getting in his way and if he had to go through them then so be it. Sometimes guile and cleverness could work, once he'd reached Champion level, pretending to be another Digimon with his own territory… and it was so much easier when he made it no longer a pretense, and had other Digimon to scout for him.
But they wanted him to resolve their disputes, and protect them, and how dare they repay him for freeing them so they could go about their worthless lives by wasting his time when there was something he needed to find?!
Millennia, and Digimon were still endlessly pathetic.
Eleven. His human was a mere eleven years old, from the data on him he managed to obtain from the network underlying the Digital World. Had it really been that short a time in the human world? Good, the time dilation paid off. The human world started out far ahead of them in technology, but now?
Such fragile creatures. He'd taken the digital world, he could take theirs easily, but the thought seemed only an idle one now. There was no excitement in it, no real drive to acquire it and take whatever could be found there, even if it was of course still inevitable. He would get around to it, he thought, and his eyes were drawn to Ryo's sleeping face. He had to deal with the problem of his Chosen Child first.
The name, even if names were not the same as digivolutions, meant 'Distant.' Millenniummon did not approve. Autumn mountain at least had some dignity to it, and autumn was the season when everything was dying and humans reaped the harvest, from the intelligence he'd gathered on their world.
One of the Gigadramon drones flew in to replenish the food and water in the cages. The Digimon ate the amount provided – he wanted them kept just weak enough to make it difficult for them to attain a higher digivolution if the Chosen Children somehow get their digivices back, not enough to give them clouded minds and make them even less intelligent. "Bring one of the rookie-sized water canisters," he ordered.
Ryo groaned. He felt groggy, but even without his eyes open yet it was pretty obvious he wasn't lying in his bed, or even a bed. Something hard? It startled him more awake when it shifted under him, and raised him up at an angle.
"Drink," ordered a deep voice with an odd tone, one that made it kind of sound like he was whispering even though he definitely wasn't.
Millenniummon.
A large water bottle held carefully between the tips of two claws was pressed against his chest as Ryo was raised up at an angle. He was held in another clawed hand, with one finger wrapped around his stomach to keep him from sliding. He wasn't as high up as Millenniummon's shoulder, but it was a long way down from there, so it was definitely still way too much of a risk to try to wiggle loose and drop down to the floor. It was metal, the hardest metal in the digital world according to Izzy. He'd definitely break something trying to escape that way.
He took the bottle almost automatically when he was nudged with it again. "I don't feel thirsty."
"That would be the knockout gas. Drink."
"Knockout gas?" Ryo asked, still not drinking. What happened?
Millenniummon had been looking at one of the screens, searching for Ryo's partner in order to kill him, and then he'd seen something that shocked him. "What?!" he'd demanded, and looked over at the stack of cages where Ryo was kept with the Digidestined, human-sized lab rat cages, and practically run over (moved faster than Ryo had seen him move, anyway – enough to make everything in the lab shake when he'd complained about that) to jab a button on the outside of Ryo's cage. The next thing Ryo knew he was waking up in Millenniummon's hand.
"That priest somehow found my partner, and brought him to this world." Two heads examined him, one with huge red eyes and the other some kind of energy projection. Sitting on the physical shoulder meant sitting inside the energy projection part, which was weird and tinted everything a pale orange. "Drink. I've used that gas before on the Digidestined to sedate them for transport." First he'd scattered them to different locations so that even if one group escaped, they wouldn't have enough firepower to overwhelm the guards, before he'd had them brought here to take readings. "It didn't appear to do any damage other than slightly dehydrating them. Take a few swallows before symptoms can set in."
"Your partner?" Weren't partners something only the good guys had? Most Digimon didn't have one, and Ryo still didn't.
A child summoned to the digital world in its hour of need: that was what a Digidestined was. It couldn't be a coincidence that he was the one who came, out of all the kids out there hanging out in chatrooms on New Year's Eve.
"I should have realized. I don't find just anyone's company tolerable. I don't find anyone's company tolerable." The energy projection looked upwards, and Ryo could swear that it was rolling the indentations that passed for eyes even as the physical eyes watched him closely.
Realization hit hard enough some water went down the wrong pipe and Ryo found himself coughing it up, body heaving in Millenniummon's grasp.
The evil Digimon put him down on the lab table the Digimon enclosures were on. "Are you alright."
The way he'd said that, not asked but said, was… strange. It should have been an order, a demand that Ryo hand over data on himself, but was there actually, maybe, the barest hint of concern in there? That Millenniummon had some investment in what Ryo's response was, instead of only wanting the data on the result of whatever he'd done to Ryo?
Ryo pulled himself up onto one knee. "Just shocked… You're talking about me, right? It thought you were talking to me to try to figure me out. So you could figure out how exactly I was supposed to be able to take you down!"
"So you realized that was my intention… I should have expected that you would. Why then were you so willing to speak to me?"
"Because if I kept you distracted it slowed you down. There wasn't anything else I could do to keep you from experimenting on them, or ordering attacks on Digimon villages to turn them into brainwashed slaves, or trying to find and kill my partner." He wasn't able to make Millenniummon stop working all that often, the evil overlord was too good at multitasking, but making him turn away from the screen displaying data to look at Ryo instead at least made him take longer to read that particular report, right? Even if he had two sets of eyes.
"Hmm." Millenniummon smiled, sounding pleased. "I've had pathetic Digimon try to babble at me, usually because they're panicking. I should have threatened to have your fingers removed for wasting my time with useless prattle. It should have occurred to me that you were attempting a distraction, but I don't care about the babble of pathetic Digimon enough to consider it an effective distraction."
Ryo looked to the right, to see the other Digimon still just sitting there in their pens. The Digidestined got airtight cages with knockout gas installed, apparently. The Digimon could breathe fire and transform into giant monsters – alright, less giant than Millenniummon – but it was the Digidestined that were locked up securely? Those pens didn't have roofs, and three of the Digidestined's partners had wings!
He'd asked Millenniummon before, "Why do you have everything set up like we're the dangerous ones? You may not be able to stick those dark rings on us, but if I tried to punch your palm I'd just mess up my hand."
Digidestined were supposed to be vessels of incredible power. Power they could give to their partner Digimon, but Millenniummon had implied that wasn't all they did with it, even with no idea of their true power.
"What are you going to do?" he asked, staring at them with something tight in his stomach. It was so wrong so see them like that. Just sitting there like stuffed animals put back on the shelf until Millenniummon was willing to play with them again. And what he was feeling couldn't be anything compared to what it did to Izzy, Mimi and the others to see them like this. He hadn't known Agumon very long before he got Agumon captured, but he knew the little dinosaur loved Tai, and talking to the other captives at night, the other kids loved their partners back. "You're going to want my power, so you can get even stronger and no one else can help them."
"Oh? That's what you're concerned about, not what I might do to you?" Millenniummon seemed darkly amused.
"I know enough about digivolution to I know I'm useless to you dead," or broken the wrong way. "But Agumon…"
"Why are you concerned about him?" Millenniummon said, as though Agumon was utterly worthless.
"I came here to help him, and he tried to protect me when you came."
"Uselessly."
"He still…" This huge, towering, terrifying creature that beat Agumon before even when Agumon had his partner to give him real strength, not just the tiny fraction of it Ryo could manage to provide him with. "I froze," like a coward, like an idiot, "and he didn't run."
"He should have left you there, to get someone else to rescue his partner… but I suppose if you couldn't help him defeat me, then no other human, Digidestined or not, would possibly stand a chance against me. If you are my partner, you must be superior to the average human." Those two sets of eyes examined him. "Why didn't you run?"
"I don't know!" Ryo said, punching the metal table he knelt on. "I got Agumon captured, and now everyone's suffering! I just stood there when I saw you! They gave me a description of what you looked like, I recognized you, but I didn't even have the sense to be terrified! I saw you coming closer and I just stood there! It didn't even occur to me to move, even when Agumon tried to grab me to get me away I actually didn't let him move me! What was I thinking, trying to stand in your way or fight you like that when we didn't have a chance!"
"You didn't want to run away."
"Of course I didn't, that town was behind me, but you'd gone through the Digidestined to get there before and you left it intact. What did I think was going to happen when you got to where I was? I should have known I couldn't slow you down." Even if Millenniummon had left, taking Ryo with him, instead of killing or enslaving those Digimon. He'd still gotten Agumon captured, and he had no way of knowing if Millenniummon had just ordered an army to take care of it for him later, before Gennai could someone anyone else.
"You didn't think you were in danger. The town, and Agumon, but not you."
"I wanted Agumon to run away," Ryo remembered, "but…" His eyes widened. "Was that because we're partners? Was that why I just stood there and let you capture Agumon and do this to him?"
"So this bond was influencing you as well… But you were able to try to fight me, even though I have difficulty bringing myself to harm you."
"And what do you call kidnapping me?" Ryo wondered. "Don't answer that," he said, groaning.
"If I am your partner, then you belong at my side. You are in far more danger in the human world, with nothing but fragile humans to protect you, than in my possession."
"I'm safe here? What about them?" he demanded, pointing at the other kids in the cages.
"Only one of them has been injured."
"Is that supposed to make me happy?"
"You realize that they should have been killed long ago?"
"No, they shouldn't have! We're just kids! They shouldn't have to see that!" He pointed at the Digimon, and shuddered.
"…You find the idea of Chosen Children being separated from their partners distressing?" Millenniummon asked thoughtfully, but definitely not thinking what Ryo wanted him to be thinking. Whatever got his attention, whatever kind of data he was trying to get, had nothing to do with the fact that the others were hurting. "That's what bothers you , not that I have the humans caged and will kill them when their usefulness as samples no longer outweighs the potential danger of allowing them to live?"
"Those are their friends, and you're…" Ryo shuddered. "You really don't get it, do you," he said, tired horror in his voice. "You really don't understand what's so wrong about doing this to people."
"I do: I simply don't care," Millenniummon corrected him. "But it seems you do. I could explain to you why there's no reason for you to care about what is done with these pathetic little insects, but the idea that a Chosen Child needs to be with their partner, that they should be more concerned about their partner's best interests than their own safety, freedom and goals… Why would I want to change your mind about that?" the digital monster asked, and smirked.