A.N.: It might be a while before I get to the third part of this intermission. I'm shopping around for a new computer after having countless display driver crashes and two blue screens. :/ But since this part is finished to a point that I'm happy with it, I'm uploading it now. _DTC
*cue Title Theme*
INTERMISSION 2B! THE PRESENT DANGER OF FUTURE KNOWLEDGE!
WCDONALDS RESTAURANT_ _ _| SOMEWHERE IN THE UNITED STATES_ _ _| ONE MONTH AFTER "CASCADE" INCIDENT_ _ _|
"Hey babe!" A guy with slicked back hair and sharp, red sunglasses slid up to the soda bar next to a girl with a pony tail. "If I could rearrange the alphabet, I'd put "U" and "I" next to each other!" he grinned and wriggled his eyebrows.
"Get lost." The girl got up to leave.
"Look at that." Sally Sparrow said as she sipped on her soda. "Some lousy jerk trying to hit on a girl who probably already has a boyfriend."
"Or just isn't interested." Taiki Kudo mused as he munched on a fry.
"Seriously though." The girl sighed. "That's the dumbest pick up line in the book. No girl would fall for that."
"Well." The boy began. "It'd actually be impressive if he could pull it off..." He trailed off.
"Hm?" Sally raised an eyebrow. "Taiki. Please. Nobody would be impressed with that."
He didn't reply.
"Hellooo?" She snapped her fingers in-front of his nose, bringing the boy's attention back to her. "Earth to Taiki!"
"Huh?" he blinked. "What?"
"You spaced out there for a moment." She sighed. "Sheesh. Maybe we should get you home before that second heart of yours leaves your brain off in orbit?"
"Yeah." He shook his head, as if to clear some foggy thought away. "That sounds like a good idea."
SEVERAL DAYS LATER_ _ _| JAPAN_ _ _| KUDO RESIDENCE_ _ _|
Sally yawned as she knocked on the door to Taiki's house. A few moments later, Lopmon in her human form, Kaiyumi, answered. "Sparrow." She smiled slightly. "What brings you by?"
"Hey, Lop." she stepped inside with another yawn.
"Tired?" The younger girl asked.
"Yes." Sally sighed as she sat down. "Jet lagged. Ironic, really."
"Why didn't you call Taiki?" Kaiyumi asked. "You know how well he's gotten with that teleporting of his."
"That's why I came, actually." Sally replied.
"Really?" Kaiyumi looked up. "Why?"
"You know that cheesy pick-up line about rearranging the alphabet? Some guy at the diner we were at the other day said it to some girl and she turned him down." The remark came offhandedly with a bit of hair twisting. Sally grimaced. She needed to trim her bangs or something. "I think Taiki might have accidentally done it."
"I don't think I've heard that one, actually." the other girl blinked.
"Eh?" She looked over at the girl. "Really?"
"Yeah." Kaiyumi blinked again. "What is it exactly?"
"If I could rearrange the alphabet, I'd put U and I next to each-other." Sally quoted the man from the other night. "Cheesey, isn't it?"
"But U and I are next to each-other in the English alphabet." Kaiyumi said flatly. "The books I've had to study to apply for the local schools say as much."
"Exactly my point." Sally said in an equally flat tone. "They aren't supposed to be."
"Well, they are according to the school I'm going to go to." The younger girl picked up a book from a nearby table.
Sally took the book and scanned the pages over quickly. "Yup. Just what I thought." she looked down. "So where's Taiki?"
"Sleeping in his room. Where else?" the human Lopmon rolled her eyes, though she frowned. "It's starting to bug me, really."
"KUDO TAIKI."
The boy practically shot into the ceiling at the sudden intrusion into his room. "GAH!"
He hit the floor and groaned as Sally stormed over to him and held out the book for him to see. "You rearranged the alphabet!"
"Huh?" Taiki grabbed the book away and read it. "No I didn't!"
"Read it." She said firmly. "Out Loud."
"Fine fine..." he said with a yawn. "A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, U..." He blinked. "I...?"
"See?" Sally was frowning. "What did I say?"
"I didn't do this!" Taiki stood up as he looked the book over. "How could I?"
"The other night." She growled. "You spaced out for a few moments after that guy said his cheesy pick up line."
"I did?" Taiki frowned. "I don't remember it."
"You did." she scowled. "Really, Taiki...You're not doing so well if you're forgetting things."
He sighed. "I guess I did it without thinking then...?"
"Taiki." Sally sighed. "What are we going to do with you?"
"Uh..." Taiki blinked again as he looked the book over. "I don't really know what happened here."
"In any case, it's wrong." She tapped the page listing the English alphabet. "Fix it."
"I'm not sure how..." He stared at the book for a few moments. Then, there was a flash of red and white electricity on the paper he was holding, making him jump a little "Okay, I think I fixed it?"
She took the book back from him and scanned it over. "Good. I comes after H, and U comes after T. Just like it should be."
"I really didn't mean to do it though." Taiki frowned. "Now I'm getting worried about how many other subtle things I've changed without noticing."
"It's only been a month." Sally sighed as she threw the book down onto the bed. "I'm sure we can fix whatever else you've accidentally changed. But I don't get how this is even possible."
"Of everything I've been able to do after absorbing the code crown, you find me changing the alphabet impossible?" Taiki raised an eyebrow.
"Your very soul and Hephaestus' merged together, Taiki." She began to list items. "You now have two hearts, you can teleport to anywhere on either world instantly- even to places outside Echidna's range of teleporting- and take anything with you when you do it. You managed two whole planets back during the fight, remember?" she stopped to gauge his reaction, then continued. "You've somehow managed to erase your identity from every single video captured from the fight against Bagura, and made the World Wide Media forget that you even had a role in the fight at all, even though you had your face broadcast all over the world as well as SOMEHOW managing to keep Nene, Kiriha, Kotone, and Yuu's identities out of the spotlight as well, even though Nene and Kiriha are supporting the entire Digital World along side Typheus and Echidna."
He looked to the side at this. "They were just getting ridiculous, hounding at us like that."
"And." She concluded with a slight smirk. "You've somehow faked a birth certificate for Lopmon so she can pretend to be your little sister all because she wanted to come to Earth just to study."
"Well-" he tried to protest.
"You're not a master forger, Taiki." She poked a finger into his chest. "You did that just by wishing it to happen." she narrowed her eyes slightly. "How the Code Crown is letting you just warp reality to your every whim, I don't know, but it's taking it's toll on you." she sighed. "Just look at you."
He blinked, slowly hearing the demand, but not quite hearing the question. "Huh?"
"Your hair's a mess, Lopmon says you've done nothing but sleep and eat since she got here, and you've spaced out a bunch of times during our last few dates." she put her hands on her hips. "The two hearts, Taiki. Two. Hearts. That's definitely not normal. It's like your body's trying to compensate for something that's trying to kill it."
"Survival of the fittest maybe?" he offered.
"Just plain survival is more like it." She huffed.
From the hallway outside the room, Kaiyumi listened into the conversation with concern. Taiki had Two hearts? Since when? Was it something to do with the Code Crown? Why hadn't he told anyone about that?
"Look- Kotone and Cetus took care of all the Dark Energy in the Code Crown, but there was an absurd amount of power still stuck in it when you absorbed the whole thing!" Sally continued. "Akari told me-"
"I thought she said she wouldn't say anything!" Taiki protested.
"AKARI TOLD ME," Sally Stressed the repeated part again, "that you absorbed all of the energy inside it- You were dying Taiki! Dying! And then you REGENERATED."
"Huh?"
"Have you even watched the Doctor Who episodes I told you to?" Sally questioned.
"No...I've been busy lately-"
"Sleeping off all that energy!" She cut him off mid sentence again. "Just like every Doctor's needed to do with every regeneration. Except for you it's gone on for so long because you've still got too much energy inside you!" She paused a moment to catch her breath. "Now come on. Teleport us to old Island Zone."
"What?"
"I said take us to the island, Kudo. You're going to discharge all of that energy before it kills you again."
"Alright, alright...Just...Let me get dressed first?"
"Now. Taiki."
Then, there was the sound of warping electricity, and the house went quiet.
Lopmon blinked. Had she really just heard all of that?
When the duo warped out of teleport, they found themselves not over the island that was normally associated with Island Zone, but in the middle of a city somewhere- specifically, in the middle of a road- at the dead of night.
"What the-?" Sally narrowed her eyes. "Taiki, this isn't-"
"I didn't do it." Taiki protested. "We should've dropped out over the ocean, not in the middle of town."
Sally was about to protest about the "over the ocean" part when another version of her and Taiki ran across the street- the only difference being that the other her had black hair compared to her lime green and the other Taiki had orange hair compared to his usually brown color- directly past them without even noticing their duplicates.
"Okay." Taiki said after realization dawned upon him. "I see what's going on here."
"So your teleport got hijacked by the storms?" Sally asked as they ran after the other-them.
"I've probably been using the same void to direct movement." Taiki shrugged slightly. "That's the best I can figure out right now."
"What's the ETA?" Other-Taiki asked the Other-Sparrow.
"Realization in Five minutes!" Other-Sparrow said after checking a message on what looked like an odd brick of a text-messaging device. "HQ thinks it's just an abandoned portal, given the heads up we got on this, so we should be good to go with the usual fanfare in case something does cross over, Dee."
"Just Peachy!" Other-Taiki replied with a fanged grin.
"So we're in a branch of our world." Taiki mused. "Looks like we traded places, somewhat."
"So are we properly in their world, or are we just observing?" Sally asked.
"Probably a bit of both." Taiki answered. "We're here properly, just invisible thanks to the storms."
Abruptly, the other-them turned a corner and dove into an abandoned storage facility.
"Ready!" Other-Sparrow held the brick-text-er up much like Taiki would a Xros Loader.
"Ready whenever you are...!" Other-Taiki rolled his neck as an eerie look filled his eyes.
"I wonder what's going on." Sally frowned. "It looks like they're waiting for someone."
"Gateway in Five!" Other-Sparrow counted down.
"Looks like we're about to find out." Taiki's eyes narrowed a little.
"Four!" Other-Sparrow continued. "Three! Two!"
On where the One mark would be, the far wall of the building seemed to ripple like a stone had been dropped into a puddle.
There was another ripple, larger...
And then the whole wall seemed to explode into a shower of particles as a massive shadow stepped out of the now-opened portal.
"That..." Other-Taiki took a step back cautiously. "That doesn't look like an abandoned portal to me, Sparrow!"
"Damn it!" Other-Sparrow quickly spun the brick around so that one end, with an odd looking vent on it, was pointed straight at the wall. "ANALYZE!"
The Vent shot out a small beam of light that hit the massive shadow that had yet to fully cross over between worlds.
When the light bounced back, the device beeped with stats of the creature: "Name: DarkTyranomon. Type: Virus. Power range: Mega."
"What!?" Other-Taiki did a double take at the device. "DarkTyranomon are usually in the Ultimate Power range, not Mega!"
"Me'll just have to make due then!" Other-Sparrow shifted her grip on the brick so that the vent was pointing at Other-Taiki. "CLOAK DISENGAGE!"
A beam of red light shot out, hitting Other-Taiki, and causing the appearance of a human boy to shatter away as his body immediately shifted into something familiar to all parties involved.
"UNCLOAKED! DORULUMON!" The Drill-Wolf howled to the air.
"Go Get 'im, Dee!" Other-Sparrow ordered, a smile wide on her face.
"With PLEASURE!" And so the Other-Taiki, actually a Dorulumon, leaped towards the DarkTyranomon as his coloring began to fully appear on his still shadowy body. "DRILL BREAKER!"
The Drill on the wolf's head launched out, spearing the DarkTyranomon in the eye. It roared in pain as it then let loose a breath of fire at the opponent before him. "TYRANNY FLAME!"
The Wolf quickly spun into his "DRILL BLADE!" attack, whisking the green flames away from him via his tail's drill.
"I guess it's time we leveled the playing field a bit...!" Other-Sparrow pulled what looked to be a USB Flash Drive out of her pocket, and then slammed it into a port next to the vent on the top of the device. "FLASH ARMOR! BALLISTIC CANNON!"
The hinged door on the front of the Digivice flipped open, letting loose a blast of bright blue light that bathed the still spinning Dorulumon with power and energy.
When the flames stopped from the DarkTyranomon, the Dorulumon stopped spinning as he readied the two cylindrical cannons branching out of his shoulders...
"Hey!" Sally gasped. "Aren't those Ballistamon's arms!"
"BALLISTIC CANNON!" The other-Taiki/Dorulumon roared as the cannons launched three matching blasts of drill shaped energy at the DarkTyranomon.
KTHWAM!
The DarkTyranomon roared, and stumbled backwards through the portal, transforming back into shadow and then vanishing entirely as the light from the event-horizon began to dissolve away.
And then Taiki and Sally found themselves standing on air right above one of the vast oceans of the Digital World.
SPLOOSH!
"No more teleporting!" Sally grumbled as they swam to the nearest island. "I've had it up to here with mis-aligned teleports!"
"I don't even have my goggles on." Taiki lamented. "Maybe that's it. I can't focus right without my goggles."
"Please." She scoffed. "This isn't like Sket Dance."
"I dunno." he chuckled a bit. "I could see us living inside an Anime."
"With all the shout outs to copyrighted works like Doctor Who?" She rolled her eyes. "And then there was the Gurren Lagann thing Cutemon's got going on..." then she stopped the moment she saw what was before them. "Isn't this Island Zone?"
"It is." Taiki watched as Xros Four- and just Xros Four- dueled against the mad Neptunemon on a block of ice while another version of Taiki stood nearby, Xros Loader raised high- It was red. "Looks like another branch we landed in."
"Just great." Sally sighed.
Xros Four jumped away as Neptunemon's spear dove straight through it's owner's chest.
"Ouch." Taiki grimaced from shore. "That had to hurt."
"How'd you get rid of him in our world?" Sally asked. "Didn't we do the same thing?"
"I don't remember." Taiki shrugged. "Probably. Who knows though."
This time, they stayed within the same universe as they warped around by some unseen hand's design- sticking to key events that were majorly different from how they happened for our Xros Heart.
Sure, somethings were the same, such as Xros Five's rescue of Nene, but the way they went about doing them were completely different.
"I was born a Sparrowmon here?" Sally had raised an eyebrow at that particular revelation.
"Apparently so." Taiki didn't really appreciate the way the other him was going about some things- such as how he handled the Jungle Zone situation. Nene had been captured, but not the rest of them- Kiriha had even dived in through the portal after her!
Then Taiki himself had been kidnapped by the Knight... And had lost his Xros Loader twice over the span of two days.
Twice.
Over two days.
Other changes? Akari was apparently born in the Human world this time around, there was no Lopmon with them, and Zenjirou didn't get a Xros Loader in Shinobi Zone. (Nene had interrupted the discovery, although the TV had not been broken at that point so it was dubious as to whether or not there was a Xros Loader even in there in this time line.)
Then came Omega Shoutmon- evolving on Earth instead of DeltAntylamon!
But when the other Taiki and other Shoutmon left for the Digital World again, Taiki and Sally were left behind.
So they wandered.
"This earth's history is very different from ours." Taiki mused as he read a newspaper over a man's shoulder. "Lots of major changes over the previous twenty years..." He scowled. "That number comes up a lot, doesn't it?"
"It does." Sally murmured as she watched a nearby flat-screen TV in a store display. "Look at this, 'brand new' it says. We don't have TV's this thin back home."
Taiki frowned. "It's almost like time back home stopped."
"Maybe it did." Sally turned to face him. "Remember what Wisemon told us back when we first met him?"
"That our parents made our Earth?" Taiki blinked. "Yeah, what about it?"
"I didn't think much about it at the time, we were too preoccupied!" Sally turned to face him. "But think about it for a moment. Our Earth was manufactured! Made! Created!" she looked at him, fear forming in her eyes. "What if our earth is just a fake?"
Taiki opened his mouth to protest... then closed it as he thought over it. "Damn it, I wish Hephaestus didn't get fused into me." he muttered. "He'd know what to say."
"You've got his memories, right?"
"Yeah..."
"So what do they say? How would he react?"
"..."
The world around them was dimmed away by a massive explosion of red and white electricity, forcing Sally to look away to shield her eyes as Taiki's mind seemed to break from the question.
"TAIKI!" she shouted at him over the noise of the energy radiating out of him. "WH-Are you Okay!?"
The boy had fallen to his knees, eyes shut, his hands covered his ears. "...They're not real..." he whispered, but somehow it managed to over power the noise of the energy flowing out of him- zapping, and sparking every which way.
Sally just stared, wide eyed, as more energy began to flow out of him. 'I wanted all of that out of him, but not like this!' she thought sorrowfully as the boy before her grit his teeth in pain.
"I can feel this world!" he whispered, but still loud enough to over power the massive rain of energy pumping out of him. "I felt it before in the other one too... All the lives...all the memories, the history, the politics..." his eyes snapped open, revealing a flickering code of letters and numbers. "I can see all of time for our world." he repeated, stressing the syllables. "Our. World."
Sally's eyes widened as the world around them dissolved away into static- and then was overwhelmed by the energy Taiki was releasing. She staggered back a foot as a pressure wave pulsed off of him. "Taiki!" she called out. "Stop it! Calm down!"
"Nobody over nineteen is real." Taiki continued, ranting and raving partially to himself, partially to her. "It just came into existence, it was just there...centuries of history just...imported from a doomed world..."
Sally's eyes watered slightly. 'I shouldn't have said it. I shouldn't have said it!'
"It's wrong. It's wrong it's wrong it's WRONG." He clenched his eyes and hunched over, crying out as the revelation threatened to break his feeble mind. "WHAT DID THEY DO!?"
If a whisper was a shout, then a scream was reality trembling at it's core- and considering that at the moment they were standing inside the void of time and space itself, that was an impressive feat to accomplish.
Sally was suddenly glad, all of a sudden, that they weren't on Earth or the Digital World.
But even so. She felt horror for accidentally invoking this on the boy. "Taiki!" She called out, daring to take a few steps towards him. "TaikI! Please!"
There felt like there was a reversing gravitational pull coming from him, trying to keep her away. No She had to stop this.
Sally Sparrow was not going to let a singe friend slip through her fingers. Not ever.
One foot in front of the other. One. Foot. In. Front. Of. The. Other!
After a certain point, she got close enough to touch him... So she did.
She fell to her knees...
And wrapped her arms tightly around him.
SOME TIME LATER_ _ _|
It had been two hours. From her seat in the dining room, Kaiyumi frowned as she looked over at the hallway leading to the bedrooms. "Two hours..." She pursed her lips a bit. Surely it didn't take a whole hour to drain some energy? Kotone did it within a matter of minutes... Unless there was less energy that Kotone absorbed?
Kaiyumi scowled. "Something's wrong..." She stood up, and turned to go down the hallway. "Something's not right. They should've been back by now."
She walked pass the many doors towards the one leading to Taiki's room and reached for the handle.
It was then that a burst of static warped electricity could be heard through the door,
"Finally!" She pushed the door open and stormed inside, not expecting what she was about to see. "You guys have been gone for two ho-" She stopped, jaw wide open mid sentence. "ur..." she blinked. "sz?" she did a double take. "Whaaa...?"
Taiki was curled up into a ball, and Sally was hugging him and... "Why are your clothes all burnt up?"
"Energy overload." Sally said quietly, not barely above a whisper and...it sounded dry. Like she'd been shouting for a while. "Lop?"
"Y-yeah?"
"Call Shoutmon."
SEVERAL HOURS LATER_ _ _|
"So, to summarize, you're telling me..." Shoutmon said with an incredulous look at the two of them. "That you saw two universes similar to ours, but different, and both of them had histories that continued well into the past beyond this earth?" he paused for a moment to swallow, then continue. "And because you realized it, Taiki...what?...Lost control of his powers?"
Sally nodded, though Taiki didn't say a word. "That's about the gist of it."
"So..." Shoutmon pursed his lips a little bit. "Why call me? Couldn't Echidna or Typheus do something about it?"
"No." Taiki spoke up, his voice sounding like it had been drowned out by something. "This has to remain closed to us for now."
"There's too much energy inside him, so much so that having all of it in him is killing him." Sally explained. "He got rid of a bit of it inside the void, but if he kept releasing it like that, it wouldn't have done any good."
"I'm sealing the Code Crown's programming up into six locks." Taiki continued. "Six locks with one key."
"You don't mean the necklace?" Shoutmon scowled. "That's not going to work, considering that it exploded while reviving me."
"It exploded right in front of me," Taiki clarified, "I don't know what that would have done to speed the process along, but it only makes sense to use the same key to lock it all up again."
"Like one of those self-creating paradox things Tairru was telling me about the other day." Shoutmon asked.
"Yeah." Taiki looked down at his hands. "Something like that."
TWO MONTHS LATER_ _ _|
"You're not going to tell us what the locks are, though, are you?" Akari asked with a sour expression as she looked at a necklace she herself had been given around that time- with the Delta Glyph shape.
"No." Taiki shook his head. "It's better this way that none of us know unless we absolutely need this energy back. I had Wizardmon erase my memory of which ones were the locks."
"But you've still done teleporting." Nene pointed out, even as she fingered the Sigma Necklace around her neck. "You've done that a lot, in fact."
"That's because I didn't get rid of the powers, just kept myself from subconsciously using them when they're not needed." Taiki smirked, just a little. "If the time ever comes, I'll have Shoutmon use his key to unlock everything I've sealed away."
"Okay, so that explains why you gave everyone those necklaces." Kotone spoke up. "But I think we got a bit off track. How exactly does this affect the Human World compared to others. And why did you wait this long to tell any of us this?"
"Unlike every other instance of earth..." Taiki explained. "...Every human over nineteen at this point was simply imported from other earths- copies of the originals. They're alive, with their own thoughts, yes. But they're not in control of their actions. They're acting according to the paramaters they-" at this he pointed at the parents who had saved the world before. "-had put into that machine. It's only the people who were born after the world itself was 'booted' into existence, or those that came into this world from an outside source that have any hopes of changing it."
"DarkKnightmon's one of those external influences, by the way." Shoutmon smirked, just a bit. "All of us from the Digital World too."
"So basically..." Tyson Sparrow, Sally's father, said after a moment of silence. "...We made a world of robots?"
"Wait." Akari raised her hand. "Okay, I get all of this other worlds stuff now. But this doesn't explain the fact that the Digital World is populated by humans and Digimon, said to have come from an expedition about twenty-" She stopped, eyes widening. "Wait. Never mind. I figured it out."
"Care to enlighten us?" Kotone asked, even as Taiki and Sally shared knowing smiles.
"It's simple really." Shoutmon spoke up before Akari could.
TO BE CONCLUDED.
Next time!
"So what's the deal here?"
"He was a brave soul."
"Humans led an expedition here, right?"
"It's more like they..."
"Next time!"
"Intermission 2C: Future Hero, Past Heroics."