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An Ending and an Explanation

So. Been a while. If anyone was actually expecting me to finish this, it's safe to say it isn't going to happen.

A lot has happened to me as a writer since I began this. It was kind of a bridge between two different times I was active in writing communities, and while I was active in the second one I wrote vastly more and got vastly better at it. Looking back at this, it isn't really something I can stand behind, or slip back into to continue forward with anything like happiness with my own work. I'm still a fan of a lot of the ideas I had here, and I still point to the last chapter especially as one of the best things I've ever written ever, but my execution of those ideas leaves a lot to be desired.

I'd say I'm still happy with around 60% of the ideas and 30% of the execution, to put it into perspective. That's not enough to attempt to fix and improve and salvage.

That's not to say this is dead, though. I mean, this is dead. This is absolutely dead and will never be posted in again, in fact it is unlikely that I will ever post on this account again, I don't even particularly like this site, but some of the better ideas behind this are things that I am retooling and shaping into something entirely different. While this particular story would have been kind of on the border between fanfiction and original fiction, the new one will be entirely original, just with a few pretty obvious influences.

It won't be the same story, either. This one is dead, and some of the cooler ideas I had are dying with it because the new one is an entirely different beast with some pretty different influences, that just keeps a couple of the same characters and themes at its heart. While this one would have been a love song to Adventure 01, the new one, in the bits it borrows from anything at all, will be much more reminiscent of 02. It just has some pieces of the same soul at its heart.

So let's talk about what this story would have been.

The most important thing to note is that the characters in this story-Alex, Terry, Mitsuko (already dead), Sam (actually a girl, as would have been revealed later on), Natalie, and John (never got far enough to introduce him)-are the second batch of kids. This wasn't a full-on original story, it was an AU with a divergence point that happened long before the actual story started. Adventure 01 happened up to a point, probably near the very end of the series, before something different happened and the original batch of canon kids lost. All of them are dead except for Izzy; he's still around, except he's not particularly whole or human these days, a ruined missing-limbed thing glued to the wall of an insect hive, his consciousness extending through the hundreds of drones, letting him command them and see through their eyes, and the hive's mind influencing his in turn.

The divergence point would have had something to do with Izzy discovering the true nature of the world, and keeping it from the others. More on that later.

After the first batch of kids failed, the world summoned a second batch of kids, thinking that they would succeed where the others failed. This time, rather than snatching them from summer camp, it took them from the hospital, grabbing kids that were sick or dying. Alex committed suicide as detailed in the first chapter, Terry was a formerly very athletic kid who was now in the late stages of terminal cancer, Mitsuko was in a car crash, Sam was in a wheelchair in the real world but was not actually sick or dying, Natalie was murdered as sort-of-detailed in the last chapter, and John... well, he also would have been a character in the story.

The problem was, the world didn't exactly reset after the first batch of kids died. In Adventure 01, the kids got stronger over time, and so did the enemies they fought. The enemies are still there, and still that strong, and these characters would have been as useless starting out as the original kids were. It would have been a much more cutthroat world, with a much lower chance of victory. In fact, they weren't going to win. They were going to die. But not before Alex figured out the same thing that Izzy did.

More on that later.

After that, the world would have tried again. New batch of kids, the evil is even more powerful than last time, they try, they die even quicker. Cycle repeats. I planned to play around here for a while, introducing batches of kids with different themes, even breaking linear time for a while and pulling some in from the far future-I mean, there's no need for the transition to be instantaneous, right? The kids could have been copied and storied for centuries before being decanted into the digital world. We could actually be in the year 3000, there could be no going back for anyone, who the hell knows.

Anyway.

Everyone would lose, faster and faster. It would eventually devolve to the point where impossibly powerful demons were telefragging these kids-literal babies in some cases because the mechanism pulling these kids in was Not Very Intelligent and would just try random variations on the theme from time to time-as soon as they appeared. However, behind all of this, there would have been a more subtle narrative being woven. Alex, as it turns out, wasn't all that dead.

The Digital World, in this, was going to be something I explored a lot more than any of the shows ever did. Let's face it, it was basically just a fantasy world that they put some window dressing on and arbitrarily called digital because it was the 90s and computers were cool. I wanted to explore what a digital world would have actually meant. In this case, nothing in this world was actually real. None of the beings were actually real. It formed itself around their expectations. It was an interface. Digimon partners existed so that the kids had a way to impose their will on the world in a way that they could wrap their heads around. They knew the world was supposed to be a certain way, and so it was; they couldn't do magical things, they were aware of their own limitations, but they had these magical beings as partners that could. Those beings were just extensions of themselves, and this was a notion I was going to play with extensively, and tweak with each new group of kids; those accustomed to violence would find themselves committing it, and not require a partner, for example.

Another part of this was that none of the other beings, the hostile beings they encountered, were real either. At least, they didn't have an independent existence. The only true minds at play in this entire story were the kids and the world itself. All of the fighting and all of the villains were a metaphor for the real struggle of the optimism of childhood against the depression and hatred and sickness of everything else. In real-world terms, this entire story was an ailing artificial intelligence giving itself booster shots of hope in the form of the minds of children.

Given this, given that nothing was real and the kids themselves were data in an artificial mind, they were only dying because they expected to. Alex worked it out, and was able to think himself back from death. While all the other batches of kids were going on their own shorter and shorter quests, he was in the background trying to understand the world and find a way to bring his friends back, too. Eventually it would be just him, walking through a demon-filled hellscape, trying to find the data remnants of the other kids and think them back to life.

It worked. Sort of. Not really. It worked badly. He could bring them back to life but not as separate things in their own bodies, only as new voices in his own mind, bleeding into his own personality, increasing his power of will, and thusly his power to affect the world, but fucking him up and corrupting him the more and more fallen kids he brought into himself.

Meanwhile, the last group of kids didn't actually die. The odds were virtually impossible, but somehow rather than dying they adapted, and became very very very good at killing things, and not particularly human, though the lead kid of the last batch had more humanity than the others and was keeping the rest together. It began to look like they might be able to succeed where literally everyone else failed, even though Alex had given up on that ever happening, and was proceeding with his own fucked up method of saving the world.

And that's where I'll leave it, I think. You don't get to know much about Natalie. You don't get know anything about John. You don't get to know the ending. I like those concepts and will be lifting most of them for use in the next thing, which I don't have a clue when I'm going to find time to write, or how I'm going to distribute it once I do.

I still get e-mails through this, so if there is anyone actually reading this, you can work out how to get in touch with me. This means you, Tyler.

Later, all.

~12/02/17