Chapter 30: Ciudad de los Muertos
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Disclaimer: I don't own Digimon.
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A dark-skinned man walked along the edge of a vast cliff, overseeing a large city. With him was a boy of about twelve, with olive skin and curly hair, wearing a green, buttoned-up shirt over a white shirt and a pair of blue-jeans. The man decided to tell the boy a story as they walked along the edge. "Once, there was a man that fell in love with a woman from a different country. The two conversed by letter over a period of about a year and they wanted to get married, but they couldn't decide on which of their two countries to move to afterwards. Then the woman received a job offer here, and her fiancé agreed that it was a good compromise. So, after they were married at a ceremony in the man's home country, they moved here, buying a nice little house." The man smiled.
"Uh, why are you telling me this?" the boy asked, his voice starting to crack with the onset of puberty.
"What? Are you saying that you never heard the story of how your parents first met?" the man inquired.
The boy's eyes widened. "Wait, you mean that my parents lived here?" he asked, looking over the city.
"Yes, specifically the area of Federal Heights," the man responded, smiling before adjusting his glasses before pointing. "It is right over there, along I-25 and I-76."
The boy nodded. "What about you? Were you from here?"
The man shook his bald head. "No, I'm from Cleveland. You, however, are."
The boy's eyes widened. "What? You mean… How come my grandparents never told me about this?"
"It was because of how traumatic your last days were here," the man explained, frowning before pulling out a digivice. "I know you don't want this, but…"
The boy was angry. "Are you kidding me? Of course not! It's because of that stupid thing that my grandparents are dead!"
"No, it's because of the Anti-Digimon League that they are dead, not because of your partner," the man objected. "Art, I'm giving this back to you so that we can save them, your parents and everyone you love."
"Mr. Rinaldi, you can't be serious!" The boy exclaimed.
"Yes, I am," Alexander Rinaldi responded. "What do you know about Time Travel or Alternate Realities?"
"Both are impossible," Art guessed.
Mr. Rinaldi smiled. "On the contrary, both are indeed possible. Once there were numerous realities, but now, due to the various Unifications, there are only two left: this reality and the source realitie. And as for time travel, I have a way to travel through time."
###
Shibumi and Yamaki were in the conference room shortly after the Unification occurred, conversing with spokespersons from Echelon, Saxum and various other intelligence groups.
"So far, we have no explanation for why more than 7,000 Tamers were taken to the digital world, nor do we have an explanation for the events that led to that," Yamaki told the group of representatives on the screens.
"What about making our way into the Digital World?" Rob McCoy asked from one of the screens.
"Unfortunately, it seems we aren't detecting any gateways to or from the Digital World," a black woman from Saxum responded. Her thick, curly hair was held back by a purple headband and she was wearing a dark grey suit.
"Nor are there any digimon bioemerging," the representative from China added.
"We realize that, and we're trying to figure out a way to set up the ark again, but there's still the problem of the barriers being impenetrable," Shibumi responded. "Along with the obvious being the sheer numbers of Tamers, many of whom are children."
Rob McCoy nodded before speaking. "My granddaughter is there again, though this time she's in the flesh. At least she has a partner to protect her now."
Yamaki decided to add something to his speech. "There is someone who may know something. He goes by a number of names: Carmine Reed and Keith Jackson for instance, but the codename that Echelon uses for him is Mr. Immortal."
McCoy gasped. The rest of the group didn't know who Mr. Immortal possibly was. "Him… But he's supposed to be on sabbatical. How do you know about him anyway?"
"He came here to work under a false identity," Yamaki replied sternly. "Of course, he makes up a new identity every twenty years or so, if the information I have on him is correct."
"That's true. It's due to how he can't die," Rob McCoy explained. "Because of that, he made an agreement with one of the founding fathers to have that legal ability so that he wouldn't have any mobs going after him because of his immortality."
"Yes, but I take it he didn't know that this agreement doesn't extend to other countries," Yamaki responded. "He is wanted for coming to work here under false pretenses."
"And he was about to turn himself in before being attacked by one of our Tamers," Shibumi told Yamaki.
The blond man was shocked by that one. "That… is a surprise."
"I'm sorry I didn't tell you earlier. You called this meeting almost immediately after the Unification occurred," Mizuno informed his partner.
Mitsuo Yamaki hadn't expected that. Still, this man needed to be found. "There is also someone else that we need to find, someone known as the Watchmaker, who apparently knows how to travel through time. The first place to look for them is…" The blond brought up a map of the Caribbean and pointed to a small island to the east of Puerto Rico. "… Here, the small island of Santa Corona."
The group of representatives all nodded. "That's technically in international waters," Rob McCoy told the group. "Maybe this should be a joint operation between Saxum and Echelon."
"I agree," the dark-skinned Saxum representative stated. "In the meantime, we'll need to monitor the Digital World. Some Saxum workers have detected unusual digivice signals."
"That's surprising," Shibumi said, his face showing slight shock.
"It is. There are a number of signals belonging to one type of digivice as well as one belonging to a different type," the black woman explained. "Two of the signals belong to people with the last name Symanski. The other type of digivice belongs to someone whose name is obscured. However, he seems to be traveling with someone named Fernando Urrutía."
"Antonio's nephew. He's partnered with a Patamon," McCoy deduced.
The black woman smiled mischievously. "Yes, and nearby are a number of other Tamers including some Japanese citizens."
###
Jeri found herself in the middle of arctic tundra. She had no idea how she got here, just that she was in class one minute, wondering where Tadashi had gone, and here the next. It all felt so cold, and she needed to get out of here. So, she shouted out. "Hello, anybody out there?"
After a minute without a response, she grabbed her digivice and glanced at its radar mode, detecting five other signals nearby. So, she walked toward them. She fingered the signals, getting details on them. The first was Ai and Makoto, meaning that the two six-year-olds were trapped in the Digital World alongside her. So, she ran until she found them following a black boy and a blond boy. The black boy had a Kotemon following close behind him while the blond boy was carrying a pink fluff, Piximon.
It turned out that neither the black guy nor the blond guy could speak Japanese and all Ai and Mako were doing was annoying them.
"Hi, my name is Jeri," she greeted them in her best possible English.
"Yo, the name's Matthias. So, what's a pretty Asian girl doing out here without her partner, eh?" the black boy asked with as sly a smile as he could muster.
Jeri didn't want to talk about Leomon yet. "Hi, what is your name?" she asked the blond guy.
"Uh," the blond guy started to say before speaking halted, heavily accented English. "My name is Gustavo."
"Huh?" Jeri asked, confused.
"Yeah, I know. Blondie here doesn't speak much other than Spanish even though he don't look Mexican. Talk about false advertising, man!" Matt complained.
"Yeah? I can understand this guy just fine when he speaks Spanish," Impmon informed him.
"What? You can?" the black boy inquired. "That's crazy talk, dude."
"You wanna bet?" the imp asked, creating a small ball of fire with his finger.
"Impmon, no!" Ai exclaimed in Japanese.
"Yeah, you better be good, Impmon!" Makoto told, aiming the finger toward the ground.
"Aw, you're no fun!" Impmon complained. Jeri simply giggled a little bit.
"Man, talk about only hearing half the conversation," Matthias remarked before turning to Piximon. "So, you think you can make one of those orb thingies and take us somewhere else? I'm freezing my butt off here!"
"If you want, I can take you anywhere you'd like," the pink ball of fluff responded.
Jeri decided to take matters into her own hands. "We should try to find out if there are any other Tamers around here first. They might need our help."
"Sounds like a good idea to me," Matt said, grinning at the Asian girl. "So, where you from? Japan?"
Jeri nodded. "Yeah, I'm from Shinjuku."
"Shinjuku! I was there just before coming to the digital world. Didn't go hanging around much, though," the black guy complained. "Man, that was a bummer. Saw a guy get his arm blown off, too."
The brunette girl looked at him in shock. "Wh… what?"
"Yeah, this fat blond Asian kid did it to him, too."
"Tadashi? No…" Jeri was appalled. It couldn't have been him. There's no way Tadashi would have done that.
"Other Tamers are near," Gus told the group. "Fernando Urrutía and another."
"Fernando Urrutía and someone else, huh?" Matt asked.
"And… And… Alice McCoy."
"Alice?" Jeri inquired. "I heard about her. Her partner sacrificed his life so that Takato and the others could reach the Mega level."
"Come on, man! Let's get going!" Matt exclaimed.
Piximon then created an orb and transported them to the location of Fernando Urrutía.
###
After the wave hit, Tadashi's team needed to find shelter as night fell over the Digital World, something they didn't notice happen earlier. The group really needed to go after Abby's brother, but they realized that they might as well be too late since they are a few hundred kilometers from the location of his digivice and none of their digimon could travel fast enough. "Scanning with my digivice shows me that there's a whole bunch of buildings just over that hill," Gunter reported.
Tadashi decided to follow along with it, deciding he wasn't exactly fit as leader. There were so many conflicting emotions running through the blond's head that he had a hard time keeping track of them all. He had to struggle just to keep himself from lunging at Ed. Still, he tried his best to keep himself in check, breathing in and out while dealing with the guilt that his good half felt as well as the rage that his dark side felt.
And then there was the despair that both halves of his mind felt, despair that he couldn't find Takato and the others before the rest of their childhoods passed them by.
Ayaka was the one to notice the emotional changes in her blond friend. She wandered over to him as they traveled. "Are you alright, Tadashi?" she inquired.
"I'm fine, Ayaka!" he snapped before covering his mouth as he watched her flinch. "Sorry. I guess I'm kind of stressed."
The girl smiled at him. "I know, right? We have all these memories that seem like they came out of nowhere and now we have to deal with them." She paused for a few seconds as they made their way over the hill of sand. "Your other half… wasn't very happy in the days before whatever happened to us, was he?"
Tadashi shook his head. "He was angry. I guess he was kind of ticked at all the adult Tamers in the world and so he took it out on them."
Ayaka looked at her friend in concern. "Wait, what do you mean?"
"Remember how I left class really fast?" the blond asked. "That was because I… found out a certain person was in the area. I… I did something really bad."
The blonde girl stared at him. "What… What did you do?"
"The part of me that… lived in the real world all that time, he… he tried to kill somebody. Instead, he almost killed somebody else that was with that other guy, in front of several other people including Shibumi." It was really painful for Tadashi to get it all out. The blond glanced over at Coronamon, whose other self was deleted by a combination assault from Asuramon, AeroVeedramon and Vermillimon on the roof of the Hypnos building. The poor digimon had no idea what Tadashi forced him to do.
Ayaka wasn't going to ask him who his other self tried to kill. Still, she felt she needed to do something. "Tadashi, is there anything you want me to do for you?"
The blond nodded. "Yeah, lead the team until I get this… dark side or whatever out of the way. Don't tell anybody else about what happened, especially…" He couldn't say the last part, the name of the friend his other self betrayed because he was so consumed by rage.
"Here we are!" Gunter shouted. Tadashi and Ayaka realized they were a ways behind the rest of the team. That was probably why they couldn't hear them.
"Wow, what a view!" Coronamon exclaimed. Even in the twilight hours, the city in front of them was magnificent. Right in front of them were numerous suburbs and beyond that were various unlit skyscrapers, jutting upward into the heavens.
"Wait, weren't we here before?" Ed asked the rest of the group.
"Yeah, you're right. This is that empty city you said was in your videogame!" Miki realized.
"I didn't say it was in my game. I just said that it reminded me of a city in my game," the pudgy black-haired boy corrected her.
"So, what's your stupid game about, anyway?" the dark-haired girl inquired as the team went downhill.
Ed explained everything away. "Well, it's about a guy who goes to this colony in outer space to get away from it all. What he doesn't know is that one of his roommates in the colony is actually an alien. Oh, and there are space Nazis and cyborgs."
Miki rolled her eyes. "Space Nazis and cyborgs, huh? Are there any princesses?"
Ed paused for a second. "Uh, no, there aren't. At least I don't think so." He reached into the laptop bag and pulled out his drawing notebook and went through it, flipping through the pages. "Nope, nothing." Then some pages fell out and the black-haired boy had to stop to grab them. "Oh, crap!"
Abby immediately went and helped him out, which made him slightly awkward. He was starting to get over the kiss that she gave him, but he still wasn't completely ready to confront the girl about it. Plus, there was the fact that he didn't want anybody to see his precious drawings at the moment, especially the ones that fell onto the ground.
The brunette girl picked them up and glanced at them. "A squirrel digimon, huh?" she asked.
"Uh, yeah!" he exclaimed, a little embarrassed and red in the face. "Ardillamon. I designed him one time after we ran into the Digimon Queen. Hehehe."
The girl noticed his slight embarrassment. "Hey, you've let me look over your drawings before…"
"I guess." The black-haired American rubbed the back of his neck.
"Hey, guys, we just got a little more to go!" Gunter exclaimed. Then the group hit the concrete streets on the edge of the city. "Wow, this place is huge!"
Ayaka nodded. "Well, I guess we can find shelter," she suggested. "Anything here that we should know about, like why the city from our digital world is here all the sudden?"
Gunter took the digivice and scanned the area. He did a double take when he saw what the digivice was picking up. "Uh, guys, there are other Tamers here!"
Everyone looked at him like he was nuts.
"That's impossible. The only Tamers in Abby's world are Abby and her friends," Miki objected.
"What if… I don't know, the worlds combined or something?" the brunette girl that Miki mentioned suggested.
"That's so weird. Is that even possible?" Coronamon asked, scratching his mane.
"Yeah, how could that even happen?" Keramon inquired, shaking all over.
Ed thought about it for a second as the team continued to walk down the desolate street, walking past the deserting buildings. "What if the Dimension Key has something to do with it?" he inquired of the group. "As in, if you turn the Dimension Key somehow, you'll combine two worlds together."
The team glanced at the black-haired boy. "That's nuts, but… You might be right," Tadashi said, almost begrudgingly due to his dark side. "But what is the Dimension Key, exactly."
"Imperator Symanski clavis dimensionalis est," Gunter said, repeating the mysterious Latin text that Ed found that one time. "In other words, Abby's brother's the Dimension Key."
"Then how do you turn it?" Ed asked the group.
The brown-haired girl didn't like the implications. "What if… what if to turn it, my brother has to… die or something?" she inquired, shivering every second.
"I hope not! Hey, did anybody see Samuel anywhere?" Gunter exclaimed.
Ayaka looked around. "Wait, you mean he disappeared without us knowing? How did that… Oh no, he had to have merged with his other self or something like that when the whole merging of worlds happened."
"Merging with our other selves, huh?" Gunter asked, scratching his chin. "That explains the weird memories."
"So, what about Taizou and Yuji? Does that mean that that happened to them too?" Miki asked the others.
Tadashi decided to check his digivice for their location. "That's funny, I can't find them."
The others looked at the blond in dread. "You've got to be joking," Coronamon said.
"What could have happened to them?" Salamon inquired.
"They couldn't have died, could they?" Syakomon asked with a shiver.
"No, they're not dead," Ayaka reassured the others. She felt a bit nervous having to boost the spirits of the team like this. "We'll find them at the Emperor's castle. Maybe the Emperor just destroyed their digivices when he left as soon as he found out his power was getting to be less and less."
Tadashi hoped that was the case. Of course, if it were, wouldn't their digivices that weren't destroyed before the merging of worlds have replaced their old ones as soon as the worlds merged together.
The whole concept of the Multiverse collapsing in on itself gave the blond boy a headache. It just didn't make any sense. Why would Abby's brother of all people be the key to unifying the worlds? What made him that way? There just weren't enough answers.
"So, if there are Tamers in the Digital World, wouldn't that mean that they work for the Digimon Queen?" Ed asked the others. "I mean, she's the only one with Tamers around here, right?"
The others realized that Ed might have been right. They were going to have to be cautious. Ayaka decided to check her digivice to see how many Tamers were in the Digital World. When she checked, she got an abnormally high number. "That can't be right. She couldn't have taken that many Tamers," she said, getting the stares of the other.
"How many?" Salamon inquired of her partner from next to her left leg.
"7,361."
"That's about how many Tamers there are in our world!" Gunter exclaimed, throwing his hands in the air.
"Then that would mean that they aren't all working for the Queen," Ed deduced.
"What about Takato and his team?" Tadashi inquired; concerned for the ones they couldn't save on time.
"They're here in this world," Ayaka replied after the others, "but they're on a totally different continent."
"Well, that's just great!" Miki exclaimed sarcastically in annoyance, folding her arms.
"What about Marie Cauvin, the Digimon Queen?" Ed inquired.
"She's here and on the planet," the blonde girl responded, worried. "She's actually on a different continent too."
"Drats, just who we need to deal with, right?" Miki said with words dripping in sarcasm.
"What about the Tamers nearby?" Tadashi asked.
"They're headed this way," Ayaka responded after going through a few screens on her digivice's map program. They were close.
Suddenly, a voice was heard through the air. "Grand Cross!" The group of Tamers knew that it meant that a digimon was attacking them. They all dodged an explosion and had to shield their eyes from the debris that resulted. The group looked over to the source of the attack, an angel in the form of a boy with short blond hair that was floating in mid-air ready for another attack.
Gunter immediately checked his digivice. "Lucemon, Rookie Level, Vaccine Attribute," he read off of the device.
"Rookie? That wasn't the attack of a Rookie!" Miki objected, the look on her face one of absolute horror as she sat in the middle of the road.
"He's a stronger-than-average Rookie," Abby told the group. "On Digimon Frontier, it took ten Megas to defeat a single Lucemon."
"Well, we'll have to do something about that, then!" Tadashi exclaimed, fury running across his face, making him forget about his dark side for just a second.
"Yeah, there's no way this freak's getting away with this!" Coronamon shouted, ready to strike.
"Stop the battle!" the group heard a smooth voice from beyond the angel. They spotted a skinny, fair-skinned American boy with his brown hair so short it looked practically shaved off. The group didn't know who he could have possibly been. "They're Japanese. All of Roger Volkmann's allies are either American or Canadian, or in the rarest cases, British or Australian," the teen explained to his team. Next to him was a version of Elecmon with purple and yellow fur, Vi-Elecmon.
"So, who are you?" Ayaka asked the American.
The skinny boy responded with a smile. "The name's Kyle Dibenko and I run the Denver team of Tamers. Sorry for the attack, we thought you worked for Roger Volkmann."
"Who the heck's Roger Volkmann?" Tadashi inquired, glaring at the newcomer.
After a brief pause, Kyle replied with a serious expression. "He claimed to be the most powerful Tamer in the Americas, up there with Antonio Urrutía and Mr. Immortal. He also worked for Mr. Immortal to take down an enemy here in the Digital World shortly after becoming a Tamer, which helped him to reach Mega. Ultimately, Antonio Urrutía defeated the enemy in question, but Roger still takes credit for it. His ego is massive but somehow he got a bunch of Tamers from all over Echelon's jurisdiction to join him."
"That guy!" Gunter exclaimed upon realizing who Roger was. "Oh man, I met him once. He wouldn't take no for an answer when he asked me to go to the Digital World with him and his team to fight something there. And then the Digimon Queen got me. Hehehe." The large German was a bit embarrassed about that one.
"Yeah, he's kind of nuts," Kyle told him. "Well, welcome to the city. We've been here for about a half an hour ever since that weird wave came and hit us and we almost thought you were Roger's people. Sorry for the misunderstanding."
"How many of you are there?" Ayaka inquired, curious about the group.
"You want to come?" the brown-haired teen asked the group, particularly Ayaka who he was smiling at. "I can show you where we set up camp."
The blonde chuckled a bit. "That would be great!"
###
"This whole thing that we call the Unification caught us all by surprise. Still, we found each other quickly and banded together just in case." The group listened to Kyle's explanation as they walked in and saw the group of about ten or so Tamers that the teen had found and contacted in the city, all lying around the indoor basketball courts that they were in. The brown-haired boy was in between two other, taller boys: one with black hair and brown eyes and the other with red hair and blue eyes. Both boys were really heavy and both had equally pale skin, though the black-haired one had rosy cheeks to go with it. Also, they had facial features that indicated that they were brothers.
"I guess I'm lucky that my buddies, the McCloskey brothers, and I were hanging out and we somehow got stuck in the same place. The rest of my friends weren't so lucky. But we found a few others that could help us." The brown-haired boy explained. "Once we found ourselves here, we made our way into this building and set up camp. I guess it's some sort of school or something, but it doesn't look like it's been lived in for a while."
"No kidding," Ayaka replied.
"So, anyway, you are welcome to stay," Kyle told the group, giving them a warm smile.
"We have to go find my brother," Abby told him. "I'm worried he might be in danger and at the center of our worlds combining."
"Our worlds?" Kyle's red-headed friend asked, his voice cracking like crazy. "Wait, what?"
"Yeah, that's right. My digital world and your digital world fused together," Abby replied. "We don't know how, exactly, but it had something to do with my brother."
###
The team spent the night there, seeing as they were all groggy and that David Symanski's digivice wasn't going anywhere. As it was, they were hundreds of miles away from its location, so they weren't able to get there in any reasonable time. Plus, they still needed to track down Yuji and Taizou.
The whole group took turns watching out for any enemy Tamers that may show up. Eventually, Ed was woken up to perform his watch with Steven, Kyle Dibenko's red-headed friend.
When Ed was summoned, Abby's eyes opened slightly as she saw him walk out of the room they were sleeping in to head up to the roof. She slowly forced herself to sit up before glancing over to the others in the room. As far as she could tell, they weren't sleeping well, especially since they were all forced out of their world. The brunette thought about her parents and how they must have missed her. She also thought about how she would have ended up in this world even if she hadn't gone willingly with the Tamers.
She heard some faint mumbling and looked over at Tadashi, who looked like he was having a nightmare. She had no idea what was going through the boy's head earlier, or why he had seemingly given authority to Ayaka. Maybe something happened in the other world.
She forced herself up, being careful not to wake her partner, who was sleeping soundly at her feet. The girl then walked out the door and headed over to the stairwell leading to the roof. She was going to apologize to Ed no matter what it took.
When she opened the door, she could hear Ed and Steven talking, or at least the red-head. Steven was surprisingly boisterous and emotional. "So, anyway, we had to go up against this Ultimate Level that had just emerged, a Parrotmon. Well, anyway, it attacked us so we beat the crap out of it so that it got deleted. Then flipping Joey Krenzel came out of nowhere and chewed us out for taking out a digimon on his territory! And I'm like: 'Sorry, dude, I was just in the area. Won't happen again!' Still, he filed a complaint against me at Echelon."
"Wow, what a jerk," Ed responded, shaking his head.
"Oh, yeah, you should have seen this time he tried to trick Kyle into a Dark Digivolution," Steven's Ryudamon responded. "It didn't end good for him when Kyle digivolved his partner into his normal Ultimate form instead."
Abby gave a slight smile before finally shutting the door. The two Tamers heard this, though, and looked over, getting up just in case. "Oh, it's you!" Ed exclaimed.
"Wait, that's the nerdy chick on your team, right?" Steven asked loudly, eliciting an elbow from Ed. "Hey!"
The brunette just chuckled before walking over to Ed. "Hey, can we talk in private?"
Ed nodded. "Yeah, sure, there's an empty classroom just below us."
Abby nodded and Ed walked down the stairs with her and Prokyomon, who was just content to follow from a distance and keep an eye on them through the window on the door as they talked inside the classroom.
Abby just sat on one of the desks before speaking. "Ed, I… I have to tell you I am really sorry about the kiss the other day."
Ed smiled slightly. "Apology accepted. It… It just complicated things."
The brunette's eyes widened. "What do you mean?"
The black-haired boy shrugged. "I don't know. I guess… I had a bit of a crush on you before that whole incident but having it reciprocated. I guess I'm just really confused."
Abby nodded. "Me too. I don't really know what to do about it, especially since my parents don't want me dating until I'm old enough to get married."
Ed's face went from somber to shocked. "Are you serious? My dad's the same way. Same with Tadashi's parents."
"Wow, I didn't expect that," the brunette replied, giggling a bit.
"Yeah, funny how we all are. So, what do you want to do about this?"
Abby thought about it for a second. "Well, since our parents don't want us getting together, I guess we should agree to be just friends for now."
Ed nodded. "Yeah, and we probably shouldn't be alone together from now on, either, so we don't end up getting involved."
The brunette smiled. "Well, I'm glad that was taken care of."
"Me too," Ed said, looking around the room before glancing at the wall. "Oh… crap, what is that?" He got up and walked over to the wall. "You've got to be kidding me."
Before walking into the room, Ed had turned on the light, but he didn't look closely at the words on the board. Now he did.
Duo fratres sunt.
Unus maritus reginae erit.
Alter finis reginae erit.
"Uh, I think we should get the others," Abby said nervously, her face filled with concern.
"Yeah, and tell them Alexander Rinaldi left another message," Ed told her, his fists clenching.
###
Art yelled out, hating what had happened. "Dang it, dang it, dang it, dang it, dang it!" he cursed, kicking a rock, one of only a few on the vast tundra. "Unification! Why'd it have to be just before a stinkin' Unification!"
The brown-haired kid in front of him just shrugged, the Patamon on his head chuckled, while the blonde girl with them, Alice, just rolled her eyes. Nearby, a Sparrowmon flew up above, watching out for any enemies.
"Do you know what caused this?" she asked.
"Yeah, some idiot turned the Dimension Key. Stupid Unification! It's what separated me from my parents in the first place."
"That had to have been freaky," the brown-haired kid replied.
His partner, a Patamon, just fluttered up above him. "Wow, he's not in a good mood."
"Yeah, no kidding. I had no idea he would be like this when I met him a few minutes ago," the kid replied. And Patamon thought about it.
###
The small digimon formerly known as Daemon relaxed on his partner's head in the real world as they walked along a street in his neighborhood. The brown-haired kid had just gotten some ice cream from an ice-cream truck and was heading back to his house with the yellow digimon, Patamon. Really, things were going well for the former ruler of Oppidus Septentrionale. He had a fairly relaxing life and since his ally had left him in an area with very few bioemergences, he didn't really have to do any fighting either.
"Hey, is that a digimon?" The yellow rodent's reverie was interrupted by that phrase and he looked over at the speaker, a thirteen-year-old with olive skin and curly black hair. The boy had a full face and a slightly pointed nose. Patamon had to guess that the boy in front of him was either of Mediterranean or Latin American descent, though he wouldn't be able to guess where except by asking.
"Uh, yeah, he's my partner, Patamon," Patamon's Tamer replied enthusiastically. He was only about ten years old, so his voice was soft like one would expect for someone of that age.
The dark-skinned boy smiled. "That's cool. You fight many powerful digimon here?"
The Tamer shook his head. "Nope, we definitely don't. All the bioemergences are in bigger cities like San Francisco or Los Angeles."
The dark-skinned boy grimaced. "Now that has to suck. I think it was that way for me and my partner for the first little bit." He chuckled.
"You got a partner?" the brown-haired kid asked.
Patamon was surprised too. "What kind of digimon is he?" he inquired.
"Ardillamon!" the dark-skinned boy called out. Suddenly, a small squirrel ran out of the bushes, climbed his partner's back and up onto his shoulder. The tan-colored rodent smiled at Patamon and his partner.
"Oh, and by the way, my name's Fernando," Patamon's partner greeted the other Tamer, who shook his hand in response.
"Mine's Arturo but everybody calls me Art," the olive-skinned boy replied with a grin.
###
"What is the Dimension Key?" Alice asked, fed up with the dark-skinned boy kicking everything around.
"Some dude named David Symanski. For some reason, unlike anybody else, when he meets his alternate self, instead of just fusing with him, it fuses the two realities he was from together too." The dark-skinned boy shrugged at Alice's confused look. "I know. It doesn't make much sense to me, either."
"I wonder if anybody I know is here," Fernando told his partner.
"Let's find out," Patamon told him in between glances at Art as his tamer pulled his digivice out and performed a search for his brother Ezekiel.
Alice did the same.
I doubt anybody I know's here, Art mused, still moderately grumpy as he pulled out his D-Plus and opened it, using it as a small tablet. He wondered why whoever designed the digivice didn't just go all out and make it into a smart-phone. He pressed the button for the radar app and then pressed a button toward the top of the touch-screen that that said "Radar Search".
He hesitated a bit, trying to remember the maiden name of the woman that he was about to search for. "Katarina Xanthopoulos."
"Location found: WWW continent, 5,467 kilometers away," the device said, showing a dot where the woman's digivice was. It looked like it was inside a building of some sort. There was also a digivice signal right next to hers. The boy touched the signal. "Petros Xanthopoulos."
"That doesn't make any sense," the boy mumbled, wondering if the digivice was malfunctioning. "She didn't have any family named Petros."
"Who didn't?" Fernando asked, looking at the digivice and seeing the initial look-up. "Ooh, you looked up a girl, huh? She your girlfriend?"
Art pushed the boy's head away. "No, that's disgusting! She's just a relative."
"Oh, you have a cousin in the Digital World or something?" Fernando inquired.
The olive-skinned boy knew better than to hesitate, knowing about Fernando's deduction abilities. "Yeah, I remember meeting her years ago."
"Oh, okay, cool. So, you're Greek, huh?" Fernando inquired and Art nodded, wondering how he could have deduced that so quickly. The curly-haired boy had no idea how he was going to survive being with the kid.
"Guys, somebody's coming," Alice told the group, pointing. The two boys looked and saw a sphere of light heading straight for them. The sphere stopped after a few seconds and a variety of kids appeared with their partners.
A brunette girl took the lead, her oriental features a striking contrast. "Hi, I'm Jeri. You must be Alice."
Art raised an eyebrow as Jeri and Alice conversed. A Sparrowmon flew down to check things out. "Yes, that's me," Alice responded with a smile. "And these are Art and Fernando."
Art raised his hand weakly in a wave while Fernando smiled widely. "Cool, it's somebody from Japan!"
The brown-skinned boy glared at Fernando. He couldn't stand kids.
After a sharing of stories about how they got there, during which Art revealed what he knew to the girls about the Dimension Key, the girls decided to bring up the subject of where to go. "Maybe we should try to find other Tamers and find a way out of here," Jeri suggested.
"Hey, there could be a reason for us to be here." Art looked over to the source of the voice to see a black kid with a wide grin. "Maybe we have to kick evil digimon butt!" The Greek kid glared. He was already starting to not like him.
"But there are way too many Tamers here for us to be the Digidestined or something," Alice objected. "I agree with Jeri, but there has to be a final destination."
"Oh, okay, I get it," the black kid said. He looked like he was quietly cursing himself for something.
"Maybe we can visit Art's cousin," Fernando suggested.
"She's five thousand kilometers away, kid," the dark-skinned boy objected.
"Five-thousand kilometers should be well in my range," Piximon told him.
"Oh, so pink creampuff has something to do, huh?" Art rolled his eyes.
"You're not being very nice," Alice told him, giving him a glare.
The olive-skinned boy raised an eyebrow. "Uh, in case you haven't noticed, lady, we're kind of stuck in the digital world. I have a reason to be grouchy."
"Uh, dude, that doesn't mean you should take it out on everybody else," the black kid told him. Art just shrugged.
###
"There are two brothers. One becomes a queens husband, the other her end. Cryptic," Gunter commented, translating the text from before. "Al must be telling us something. I wonder who these two brothers are."
"Me and Kurita," Tadashi deduced, telling the group. He was really uncomfortable. "The Watchmaker gave me this vision one time where I worked for her and she called me her favorite."
"But Kurita's in the Dark Ocean, right?" Ayaka inquired. She remembered the surprise Tadashi felt when he found that out from Kuzuhamon.
Tadashi shrugged. "Maybe Kuzuhamon lied again."
Ayaka thought about that. "Whatever's going on, we need to find Abby's brother. Miki, can you check and see if Taizou and Yuji showed up again?" The blonde felt really awkward giving orders instead of Tadashi, especially since the blond was there with them.
The dark-haired girl performed a search. "Oh, yeah, found them," she exclaimed. "Bushy brows and Fabio are at the Emperor's castle along with some other people, including Abby's team."
Abby looked up at that one. "That's… That's great. You think they're no longer under the Emperor's control."
"Maybe. There's a couple other signals too. Looks like some brother and sister duo came by along with another team or something." The siblings looked like they had some weird last name that the dark-haired girl wasn't going to attempt to pronounce.
"Okay, Miki, contact Taizou," Ayaka told her.
###
A/N: There, I revealed Art, showed what happened to Daemon (kind of. You'll get a more detailed explanation later), and showed what Rinaldi looks like. Though, the next chapter will complicate that one a bit. Heh.
Right now, the story's going to be about two teams, Jeri's team and Ayaka's team. Oh, and the others fit in there too. I guess it's going to be Three Lines, Some Waiting for a bit, though I'd prefer to keep it at Two Lines, No Waiting. The next chapter, which is already written, should be out in a couple of days. It'll reveal how Taizou, Yuji and the others got rescued as well as what's happening with Antonio and Katarina.
Don't worry, the majority of the characters introduced in this chapter as well as the next one won't be doing much, so you don't have to remember them. I guess. Maybe. Well, they'll just be minor characters who don't take the focus out of the hands of the others. Oh, and Kyle and his team had a brief cameo in Chapter 15, if anybody's wondering.