Night came and went, and by noon the next day everyone had gathered back at the soccer field. Almost everyone, that is. Once again, Team Tai was running as fast as they could up the street.
"I can't... believe you did... that!" Matt panted as they reached everyone else.
Gomamon stopped to catch his breath before repling, "I didn't do anything!"
"That's the problem. You were awake for four hours, and you didn't wake any of us up!" the blonde complained.
"Ken said he didn't want me to do that after what happened yesterday. And why'd ya make me wear this dumb thing?" Gomamon asked, pulling at his hoodie, which was the standard-issue disguise for all of the Digimon... except Gatomon, Biyomon, Wormmon, and Armadillomon. "It's just stupid!"
"You're stupid!"
By now the other teams were staring at them. While the argument continued, the team leaders were trying to decide what challenge should come after the drawing contest.
"Obstacle course?" Yolei suggested.
"I love it!" Tai agreed waaay too enthusiastically. "I'll call it the Obsta-kill course! Pun-fection!"
She and Sora groaned at the puns. "Now I wish I'd kept my mouth shut..."
"We could each have an hour to set up traps and stuff," Sora said, trying to ignore her boyfriend being an idiot in the background.
Yolei thought about this for awhile. "It could be a lot of work for one person. How about the losers from each team help their leader set stuff up?"
Tai agreed, and the decision was made. After Yolei left to break up Matt and Gomamon's argument, and Tai left to go do "Tai things", Sora turned to Izzy.
"You get all of that?" she asked.
"I'm throwing this challenge so the obstacle course will be nearly impossible for anyone who doesn't know where the traps are," he stated. Sora nodded. The other teams wouldn't know what hit them.
"Let's just start already," Tai complained, "I need to BLOW YOUR MINDS with my awe-pun abilities and destroy my baby sister's love life!"
"What love life?" Kari asked, confused.
Yolei spoke up. "Y'know, you, TK, dat-"
"WE'RE NOT DATING!" the totally-not-a-couple protested, turning matching shades of red.
"If you want people to believe you, you should probably stop doing that," Joe advised.
Cody finally announced the challenge. "You guys have an hour to draw-"
"Whoever you looove the mostest!" Yolei interrupted.
"No prob-pen! This'll make my map look like it was drawn by a dog!" boasted Tai.
No one commented. Yolei was scared that he might actually be telling the truth, and outdraw everyone there. Half of her team didn't have opposable thumbs, after all.
"I won't let that happen!" she yelled, slapping Tai. Tai hastily threw a punch that was easily blocked by his opponent. "You can't stop me! I'm too awe-pun to be stopped!"
Meanwhile, everybody else had started drawing. Matt looked up from his barely started picture to watch the brawl. After a few minutes of watching Tai get wailed on by a teenaged girl, he asked Sora a question.
"Did it look this ridiculous when we fought?"
"Yes," she answered, not even looking at the fight. She was too busy trying to figure out how to draw Biyomon to care about whatever mess Tai got himself into. Her train of thought was interrupted by two really bright lights.
"Wormmon, digivolve to... Stingmon!"
"Patamon, digivolve to... Angemon! The one with the thumbs!"
"That's not how you usually announce it," TK pointed out, shielding his eyes from the glare.
Angemon picked up a colored pencil just to see if he could hold it right. He could. "Yeah, but usually I digivolve to help fight darkness. This time I did it for hands!"
Somehow Yolei and Tai hadn't noticed the transformation sequences. Probably because now Tai was winning. After another ten minutes of the struggle Cody stepped in to break it up.
"Knock it off you two! Yolei, this is worse than you with Davis. You only have forty-five minutes left, so I suggest you get started."
Tai immediately ran over to a pile of crayons and grabbed all of them. He started wildly scribbling on a nearby piece of yellow construction paper. His masterpiece was pun-derway.
Izzy was at a loss for how he could guarantee losing for his team, yet not do bad enough that they lost. The obvious way was to do a terrible job, and he didn't know anyone as terrible as Tai when it came to art. He figured he could just copy whatever Tai scrawled down, fix it up a little bit, and color it like Tentomon. That would make sure that he was better than Tai, and that none of his teammates could do any worse. It was a win-win!
He tried to see what Tai was 'drawing', but the pun-crazed maniac had covered himself with a tarp.
"Tai, why are you under a tarp?" Izzy asked. "Where did you even get a tarp?"
"Believe me, you don't wanna know," Ken cut in.
"NOBODY CAN SEE MY MASTERPIECE PUN-TIL IT'S PUN-PLETED!"
Okay, so Tai had gone crazier. He'd have to scrap that plan. Maybe he could just use his left hand and half-ass it. He couldn't even draw a decent circle left-handed, so that should work out. He started his picture.
Agumon walked up to the tarp. "Tai, can I please borrow a brown crayon?"
"NO! Steal someone else's crayon!"
He left and asked around for the brown crayon he needed to color in Tai's hair. No one had one. The closest thing he could find was half a black crayon, and since his partner was acting really weird today, it would have to do.
Kari put the finishing touches on her picture of Gatomon. There was still half an hour left, so she decided to see what TK was doing. He had just finished drawing Patamon, and was starting on his brother.
"Who are you drawing?" she asked.
"Well, first I drew Patamon, but I've got time left so I figured I should draw my brother too. Even if he has been really, really annoying lately," he replied.
Kari was confused. "We can draw more than one person?" She didn't remember that being in the rules.
"The challenge was to draw whoever you love the most. My whoever just happens to be Patamon and Matt."
This changed everything for Kari. Now she wouldn't have to offend anyone! She flipped over her picture of Gatomon and started to sketch out a much smaller one. She'd have to work fast to fit everybody in.
"Marching Fishes!" Gomamon shouted, flinging fish at Joe's back. For some reason his partner looked mad at him.
"What was that for?"
He shrugged. "I need to draw Arthur, and you were the closest target." They were as far away from each other as possible. It didn't look like Joe was falling for it.
"Um, old time's sake?" Gomamon tried. "Now if you'll excuse me, I need to finish this."
He changed a few lines on his picture and added Arthur, one of the blue marching fishes. Perfect. Now he just had to wait twenty minutes...
"Marching Fishes!" Annoying Joe was always a good way to kill time.
Armadillomon was sitting near Cody, surrounded by broken drawing implements. "Ah just can't do this... Cody, can ah just quit?"
"But if you quit, you're out of the contest," Cody reminded him, utterly surprised that his partner was throwing in the towel. Then again, he'd been trying to pick up crayons, markers, and colored pencils with his mouth for forty-five minutes straight without success.
"Well, that's all right by me. Ah missed you, y'know."
Cody looked perplexed. "It was only one night..."
"An' ah only ate half the stuff in the larder, but ah still hadta watch that terrible movie!" Armadillomon shuddered at the memory. He'd passed out before the first half hour was up.
"I'll tell the others, then..."
"...and then she hit me in the chest! Who does that?" complained Davis. He'd spent the entire contest complaining to Ken about Yolei. Some of the highlights were how she hates puns, physically abuses him, and won't let him take food from her store for free. Ken was sick of listening to him. Drawing Wormmon was so much harder when someone was shouting in his ear.
"You do know you only have ten minutes left to finish your picture, right?" Ken asked, hoping that Davis was already done. He hadn't seen him draw anything, though.
"Wait... picture?" Ken facepalmed. Davis was stunned into silence for about ten seconds. "I NEED TO DRAW SOMEONE, FAST!"
He plopped down next to his Jogress partner and took some of his colored pencils. Then he began his last-second drawing of Kari. He wished that he had more time to work. After all, you can't rush perfection, and that's just what Kari is. Two minutes later, he realized he could just draw Veemon. He flipped over his picture and started drawing his partner.
"Time's up!" Cody announced. Everyone stopped drawing and Tai threw his tarp into the air dramatically, Ken jumping away from where it landed. He struck a pose and said in a voice he thought sounded heroic, "My masterpiece is pun-plete! Gaze u-pun the awe-inspiring beauty that puts every other work of art on the face of the pun-pet to shame!" His so-called masterpiece was the worst thing Cody had ever seen, but he didn't want to crush Tai's dreams.
"It's, uh, something."
Tai was unimpressed by that response. "I know it's something, but what kind of something? I want your 100% honest o-pun-ion on just how awe-pun it is."
He took a deep breath. "Well, it's so bad that I can't even think of a word for how bad it is. Who is that supposed to be? It doesn't look like anything, much less anyone."
"It's pretty obvious who it is, right guys?" he asked in an attempt to defend his work. Nobody had any idea, except for Izzy.
"You started to draw Agumon then switched to Kari, changed your mind and tried to change it to Davis, changed your mind again and started to draw... something. Then you panicked and scribbled random colors over it?" he guessed.
"He almost got it! After Davis I tried drawing the Trix rabbit," Tai proclaimed.
Cody still didn't see it. "So, the oval thing near the bottom is Agumon's tail, and the sombrero is Davis's hair? That doesn't explain why you colored in half of the face red, or gave it purple arms. Or why those two blue things are there."
"Those are the goggles, and the arms are purple 'cause I couldn't find a pink crayon. And the face is red 'cause, well," he broke off and looked at Kari meaningfully. She huffed and looked away.
"You lose, and your team probably will too," Cody said.
"What?" Tai's team protested, glaring at him.
"The other teams would have to screw up really bad and you guys would have had to do amazing jobs for Team Tai to even have a chance."
Cody looked at the rest of Team Tai's pictures to see if they were still in the running for second. Although Ken's picture of Wormmon and Gomamon's picture of himself attacking Joe with marching fishes were both really good, they had no chance. Stingmon's picture of Ken was okay, Davis's picture of Veemon was rushed, and Matt's picture of Sora (his attempt to kiss up to her; he received a pat on the head for his troubles) wasn't good enough to make a difference. Gabumon and Agumon's pictures of their partners were both pretty bad, mostly due to the fact that neither of them had thumbs.
"Sorry guys, but you still lost. One of the other teams would need something worse than what Tai drew, and I don't think that's possible," Cody informed them, still wondering how something as horrible as Tai's picture could even exist in nature.
He then looked at Team Sora's pictures. Sora's picture was of Biyomon. Just Biyomon. "Did it really take you an hour to draw that?"
"I had to get the shading right!" she protested. After looking a bit closer, Cody saw that it was almost perfect. It looked like she'd used at least twenty-seven shades of pink to color her partner's feathers.
Biyomon's picture of Sora, however, wasn't nearly as good. But considering she couldn't really use a pencil that well with her talons, it was remarkable that it was recognisable as her partner. Gatomon... well, she drew what she loves most. Salmon. "I'm sorry Kari, but that fish means more to me than our bond."
"I know," Kari sighed. Cody ignored the interruption and voiced his opinion.
"Gatomon... that's actually pretty good. And it looks a lot easier to draw than Kari."
Tentomon's picture of Izzy and Gabumon's picture of Matt were both decent, but Joe's picture was of a young woman that Cody didn't recognize. "Who is that, Joe?"
"My girlfriend," he muttered, watching as everyone else stood open-mouthed in shock.
"Joe has a girlfriend?" most of the Digimon, Tai, Davis, Ken, Yolei, and Kari asked in unison. The others just smirked and nodded.
"Her name is Megumi Sato," Joe told them, "and we've been dating for a year and a half..."
Tai stormed off, but since he'd already been judged nobody really cared. "I can't believe Joe got a girlfriend before me... and before Matt... what's next, Izzy and Mimi secretly dating behind everyone's backs?!" he screeched as he left.
"Not gonna happen," Izzy murmured. Nobody knew who he was talking to, but just him talking reminded Cody that he still had yet to see the computer geek's artwork.
"Artwork."
It was almost close to being as horrendous as Tai's... monstrosity, but at least Cody could tell what Izzy had drawn. "Did you do this left-handed or something?" he asked, noting Tentomon's square-shaped head and the laptop's uneven coloring job.
"Um..." Izzy needed some kind of cover, fast! "Um... uh..."
"No, he's just really, really bad with traditional art," Sora cut in. "You should see his digital gallery sometime." Normally, she wouldn't have bothered to cover for him, but these were dire circumstances. Nobody could know that he was trying to lose on purpose! Fortunately, Cody didn't see through the bluff.
"All right, you guys are guaranteed second place at least. Now let's see how Yolei's team... did..." Cody stopped short when he saw Kari's gigantic picture. "How many pieces did you tape together?"
Kari counted off on her fingers. "Um... I think this was four sheets of paper..."
He looked at the giant crowd of people she drew. "Who didn't you draw?"
"TK." This response caused Yolei to rip the picture out of Kari's hands and start scanning it for the other half of the couple. She saw everybody who was at the park, Kari's parents, and a ton of other people who it didn't make sense for them to be included.
"Is that Mr. Fujiyama standing next to TK's mom?" she asked in disbelief. "Tell me you did not draw your boyfriend's-"
"WE'RE JUST FRIENDS!" TK and Kari protested, blushing furiously.
Kari took the picture back from Yolei and started pointing people out. "Here's the school nurse, the guy who runs the fish market, a Numemon, that girl who sits behind me in math class..." The list went on and on. "Basically, everyone I know except for TK."
"Why didn't you draw him?!" Yolei's face was turning purple. Why were they so in denial?
"You'd take it as proof that we're dating, which we're not."
Once Yolei calmed down (only to spaz out again when she realized that TK hadn't drawn Kari), Cody moved on to TK's picture. He drew Patamon sitting on top of his brother's head. "I look way too happy in that picture, I hate sitting on Matt! His hair gel is really pointy," Patamon criticized.
"How was I supposed to know that?" his partner asked.
"You could've just, oh, I don't know, touched his head."
"Why would I touch his head?"
"He touches your head all the time!" Apparently Patamon didn't quite understand what a noogie was.
Cody looked at Yolei's drawing as the two continued bickering. "I drew Poromon!" she announced. It was a really good picture, but he couldn't help but feel that she was being lazy. Still, it was better than Kari's giant crowd; although it had taken her a lot of effort, the figures were only just recognizable as the people they represented. Hawkmon's picture, for somemon who didn't have opposable thumbs, was actually pretty good. He got brownie points for Yolei being so hard to draw.
Now Cody only had one picture left to see, since his partner had quit. "All right, Patamon, where's your... picture..."
It was frighteningly accurate, right down to the ever-present smile. "You drew me as an eight-year-old?" TK asked, the bickering having ended. Patamon nodded, beaming. "How'd you get it so... perfect?"
"The magic of thumbs!" his partner exclaimed. "Tai might use them for evil, but that doesn't mean I should! And, well, I don't get to be Angemon as much anymore, so I kinda remembered that hat better."
"But you digivolve to form Shakkoumon..." Cody pointed out.
"It's not the same!" Patamon complained. "Not that I don't like it, but I really miss having thumbs."
"Well, since Armadillomon has decided to drop out," Cody began, pausing so everyone had time to react to the news and for dramatic effect, "I declare that Team... Yolei wins!"
Davis raised his hand, ignoring the fact that they weren't in school. "So did we get second?" he wondered when Cody noticed and called on him.
"What do you think?"
The goggle boy hung his head and sighed. "Oh well," he said about five seconds later, perking up. "We'll just make a pun-back! Yeah, a real pun-from-behind victory!"
"Davis, please stop talking now," Ken pleaded, pulling his friend aside. "Who else is out?"
"Do I really have to answer that? You all know about Tai's... thing... and Izzy drew a computer better than his own partner. It was still pretty bad, but... sorry, you're done."
Izzy shrugged, but some-pun else didn't take elimination so well. "NO!" Tai screamed, suddenly running back. "I WAS PUN-DENIABLY THE BEST! How did this happen? HOW?"
Everyone looked at him, shook their heads, and left. "Whatever, I don't need you... tomorrow, we have an obsta-kill course to build! And you'll see... you'll ALL SEE!"
Author's Note: For the record, I blame Kia, my horribly-pen-named sister for this taking so long to update. Even though I'm the one who procrastinated so much... but she started it! It's been two months since she updated Offscreen Adventures. Tai's terrible art skills are going to become the cover of this fic. Part of my procrastination was drawing his... whatever it was on Paint.
Kia: Hey, guys, I really need a new pen name... anyways, she's one to talk about procrastination, how long has it been since she's updated any of her stuff or done anything new? But I digress. So, next chapter is mine again. Just when I thought I wouldn't have to type the word "pun" for awhile... but yeah, they're really doing an obstacle course, and since Izzy's doing a lot of the traps, well... let's just say it's gonna live up to Tai's name for it. Somewhat. I can't really kill anyone off, since this is a humor fic and all. Injuries on the other hand...
Thanks for reviewing, and let us know what y'all think!