1) Be Careful For What You Wish
Takato Matsuda and his friend, Hirokazu Shioda were starting off the day as usual, getting in a game of Digimon Battle Cards, before the start of the school day.
"With this Option Card", Takato made his play, "Dark Tyranomon evolves to Metal Tyranomon!"
"You can't use that card there!", Kazu protested, as this move meant he finally lost a game.
"I don't see why not", Takato defended, "show me where it says that in the rules. It was just something that came to me, like an inspiration", he said as he ran the winning card through his Card Fighter EX accessory. His cumulative score was up to 117.3184, though he still had quite a way to go to catch up.
"C'mon! We'll be late for school!" Kazu called out. They had lost track of time, and played longer than they should have. Being late meant missing recess. Takato swept up the lay-out and his cards, but knocked the box where he kept them to the ground. "Not now!" he said as he jumped to the ground to gather up the cards.
"What's this?', he asked himself, as Kazu wasn't willing to wait any longer. "I know I never had any such card". There, on the top of the pile, was a featureless blue card. It was the same size and shape, but sky blue. It was only as he turned the card so the light hit it just right, that the logo appeared.
It was a generic digimon head, thrown back in a roar, superimposed over a bright yellow 'D'. There was nothing else to identify to whom this logo belonged. He did the only thing he could think of: scan it through his Card Fighter accessory. Some text scrolled by, too fast to read, as digits written in hex appeared at the bottom of the screen.
"Did I break it?", he asked himself. He definitely didn't want to lose his score.
"Shit!", he called out as he heard the morning bell in the distance. "Late for school", he didn't need this.
Once again, Takato was asked to wait outside the classroom, once again, there would be no recess.
"Isn't it appropriate that you reflect on your tardiness?", his teacher, Ms. Asagi, asked through the open window.
"I'm really sorry about that", Takato apologized one more time. The rest of the students giggled. "I promise not to let it happen again", to more giggles. This wasn't the first time, and they all knew it wasn't going to be the last.
Takato took out the small notebook he always carried, and sat on the floor to use this time for what really interested him.
"He needs to be red", Takato was saying to himself, "and he needs to be the strongest. His power in battle should be like Augomon, but even better, more like a Champion than a Rookie. His ultimate attack will be..."
"Is that a monster of some sort?"
"What're you saying? It's a digimon, can't you...", Takato suddenly realized who was doing the talking. He sprang to his feet.
"Takato: couldn't you at least pretend to be a little bit sorry for being late?", it was his teacher: Ms. Asagi
"Ehhhhh... Yes, I can do that. I'm sorry... I'm really sorry. Please accept my apology".
The class was giggling once again. They knew Takato all too well.
0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF
"Uhhhhh...,", Takato sighed, as he looked out the window. All his classmates were outside, playing during recess. He, however, had to complete his letter of apology.
Next time, I surely will not... were considered to be inappropriate... in addition, today I did some things that made me late for school...
This wasn't going so well, and he had better things to do, as he pulled out the note pad. Fortunately, Ms. Asagi didn't confiscate it.
Name: Guilmon
Height: Same as me
Main Attacks: Rock 'n' Roll Breaker – he can destroy anything with his claws, Pyrosphere
"His name is Guilmon, a Virus reptile type. Most Viruses are evil, but he'll be one of the few good Viruses. That'll help him stand out...", Takato was telling himself.
"Woof!" The hand puppet his classmate had with her all the time suddenly invaded his line of sight.
"Hell're you doin'!", Takato reprimanded his classmate: Juri Katou.
"I forgot my recorder", she explained as she went over to her desk. "There", she said as she pulled the long, thin case from her desk. She headed out the door.
"Woof!", her hand puppet said as it peeked around the door frame. "If you don't finish that letter, you'll be stuck here forever. Woof!"
"Ehhhh...", he knew she was right. If that damn letter didn't get written now, he'd have to do it after school, and that meant explaining his delay coming home. He'd rather not have to do that.
Juri had brown hair worn in two pony tails. Unlike the other girls in his class, she favoured a sea green jumper worn over a canary yellow blouse. The others preferred more subdued grays and black. Despite being at the "Battle of the Sexes" age, Takato liked Juri, and she seemed to like him. This is why they could goof around like that.
Juri also kept this handmade dog puppet with her. It was her desire to practice ventriloquism, and she had a habit of letting her puppet do a lot of her talking for her.
Hypnos Headquarters
"Sir, we have an abnormal packet developing", one of Chief Yamaki's operators was reporting.
"Another Wild One?", he asked.
"It's hard to say", she explained, "but whatever it is, it's continuing to grow".
Hypnos was a government surveillance facility that monitored on-line activity, the equivalent of Echelon in the USA. Their mission was to monitor the international financial markets, looking for unusual patterns of trading, tracking communications from terrorist organizations, and criminal operations like the Yakuza. Of course, this was a sensitive operation: the public was naturally skeptical of having their e-mails read by third parties, of snooping into on-line shopping habits, and the general compromise to privacy such operations entailed.
Hypnos had an additional mission: keeping an eye on the Digital World. Its current inhabitants, the digimon, had been crossing over into the Material World in fully physical form, starting in the late 1990s. Then there was that rash of "UMA's" – Unidentified Mysterious Animals – a few years ago. That had culminated in a very destructive, and public, battle fought right there in the streets of Tokyo itself. There would be no hiding the existence of the digimon from the public at large, but no one wanted to see anything like that happen again. Hypnos was tasked with the detection of these periodic incursions. If the digimon stayed on their side of the Frontier, they were a low priority.
Mitsou Yamaki was the current chief of Hypnos. He was a smoker, and since smoking was prohibited through out most of the facility, he had a habit his underlings found extremely annoying: the habitual clicking of his Zippo. The operators sat at keyboards that would look to casual viewers like nothing more than random, meaningless, colored squares. Through the visors the operators wore, they would see whatever keyboard layout that was required to complete the task at hand.
The weather suddenly turned foul. Dark clouds filled the sky, a stiff breeze blew in, and most strangely, there was a lot of static electricity crackling off anything grounded.
By the time Takato left school, he noticed the swirling of the clouds, as if they would spawn a fierce tornado at any minute. As he made his way to the dinosaur shaped shelter where he kept his game layout and card collection, he noticed the random crackles of electricity. The clock attached to the shelter malfunctioned. It was like nothing he'd ever seen before.
Even his card box was crackling with the discharges, he saw, as he climbed into the shelter.
"What's this?", he asked himself. His score keeper wasn't there, but something else was. It was white with red trim and a matching lanyard. "Did my card reader somehow mutate into this?", he asked as he picked up the strange device. He clicked one of its keys, but came up with nothing but blank screens.
"No data?", he asked himself. Of what use was this thing?
"Where's that blue card?", he asked. He looked through all the cards, looked inside the shelter, and around the shelter. He was certain he'd put it back in the box, but maybe he hadn't. Maybe it had fallen to the ground and someone else picked it up? It was gone now. He'd wanted to give it a closer look.
He ran home, eager to further investigate: "Hi, there", he called out without slowing down to the customer just now leaving his home, and the bakery his parents ran.
"Hi, Dad", he called out as he entered the residential entrance around the side. "School was especially fun today", he called out as he headed up to his bedroom.
"Takato!", his mother called out.
"What?", his father asked.
"Never mind", she replied. "Wasn't it Takato who said we should have more family conversation just yesterday?"
"That didn't last long", he replied, "ten year old boys have a problem focusing".
"I suppose so... he seemed preoccupied about something", his mother observed.
"Could it be", he asked himself as he examined the strange device, "that blue card changed my score keeper?"
A stroke of lightening distracted him. Finally, it looked like the long delayed rain was coming. He saw a stroke of lightening hit one of the twin towers of the Hypnos building.
"Could that blue card have somehow transformed my card reader into a real digivice? How could these possibly exist for real?", he asked himself. "But then what use is an empty digivice? Maybe..."
Takato wondered what he was going to do with Guilmon. Introduce him as a new character for Battle Cards? He figured he'd wait until Kazu and Kenta were a little bored with the game as they played it, and would be more willing to accept a non-canonical character to spice things up a bit. Besides, Guilmon just might give him the edge he needed to win more games. Now, he had a better idea.
He pulled out his notebook. He tore off the first page and slid it through the card reader slot along the side of the digivice. He slid every page through the slot, even though the digivice didn't react at all. He was beginning to feel a bit foolish about this, but was interrupted by his mother.
"Takato! Take a bath before supper!" she called up from the ground floor of their bakery. He swiped the last page through the digivice, bound the loose pages with a rubber band, and left everything on the desk as he left his room to ready himself for dinner.
Later that evening, Takato checked on the digivice. The screen was no longer blank: it was filled with a white oval covered with red splotches. He recognized it instantly: "A digiegg", he announced to the empty bedroom. There was nothing more to do but wait until it hatched.
It was a clear Saturday morning when Takato awoke. The digiegg still hadn't hatched.
"Finally up, Takato?', his father called from the alley where he was stacking empty crates.
"Mornin', Dad", he called back.
"Good morning to you too".
"Uhhhh... Dad?"
"Yes?"
"When you were a kid, did you have anything like Digimon?"
"I wasn't into that myself", he replied.
"How about a real, live digimon, you think such a thing could exist?"
"What're you talking about?"
"Oh nothing...", Takato said, "don't mind me... sometimes I ask strange questions".
"I see... get dressed and help take care of business".
"Right away".
His father knew all about real, live digimon. It was maybe a bit before Takato's time. He still remembered the devastation he'd seen during live broadcasts. Right there in Tokyo: these "UMAs", as they were called at the time, fought right there in the streets. It was very fortunate, the lack of casualties, though the collateral damage had been extensive. There was mention of a government program to keep the public at large from knowing about these digimon, but after that battle, there would be no hiding digimon.
It wasn't until late afternoon before Takato could get away, to meet up with Kazu and Kenta at the park. So far, there had been no change with the digiegg. Should he tell them? He didn't know if that was such a good idea. Better to wait until he actually had something to show them besides a useless digivice.
"You played even worse than usual", Kazu remarked. "Something bothering you?", he asked. Takato had just gotten beat a lot sooner, even for him.
"Nothing, really".
Kazu didn't believe him, but decided not to press the matter any further. Kazu already knew about his odd obsessions. They'd gotten him in trouble often enough in school.
Sunday morning: no joy.
It wasn't until late afternoon that Takato could check on the digiegg. This time, the image on the screen had changed. The digiegg was in two pieces. It had hatched. What to do next? He didn't know since his digivice didn't come with instructions. He tried various keys until he got something beside images of a broken digiegg. It was a blue circle of hash marks with larger indices at the quarter circles. A red arrow pointed in one constant direction. This had to be a direction finder. He ran a string through the clip-on lanyard so he could wear it around his neck as he followed that arrow the best he could through the streets of Shinjuku.
"I have to see it for myself", he told himself.
He made his way through back alleys, that led to a construction site. He made his way through a narrow tunnel formed by steel plates placed over a trough that allowed heavy equipment to pass over. That left the floor covered in oil. There were rats there as well, making it thoroughly nasty. At the end, he found himself looking down into a circular excavation that was obviously awaiting the pouring of concrete to form a piling for the foundation.
Hypnos Headquarters
A klaxon sounded within the depths of the Hypnos facility: "Anomaly detected within the 'Net", one of the operators of the monitors reported.
"Is it a Wild One?", Chief Yamaki asked, as he flipped the lid of his Zippo lighter: Click, click... click, click... click, click - it was a highly annoying habit to his co-workers and underlings. In the sensitive areas of Hypnos, smoking was forbidden, lest the tars and particulates clog air filters, or contaminate circuit boards. This didn't prevent Mitsuo Yamaki from wanting to light up. That would have to wait until he could retire to his office on the top floor. There, he could smoke as much as he wanted.
"Yes, and it looks like a big one. Unusual amounts of data are gathering. Should I launch a tracer?"
"Forget the tracer; try to predict the materialization".
"Got it: on the edge of downtown, a construction site for a new government office tower. It's materializing now".
Nothing more to do about this, except to log another materialization, to get some idea as to the size and scope of the emigration from the Digital World.
Looking around, Takato discovered a steel staircase that led to the bottom of the pit. This was another lucky break. By the time he'd reached the bottom, the pin point had expanded into a large glowing circle of light. The whole pit filled with white vapour, and a dark figure appeared within it. Takato flattened himself against the wall. As he watched, the dark figure filled in, taking shape, adding detail.
The light and vapour disappeared, leaving a large red "dinosaur" standing where the light had first appeared. Could it be? The "dinosaur" looked around with its yellow eyes, not noticing the motionless Takato. There was a slight scratching sound, and the red head whipped around. Takato followed with his eyes, instantly spotting a rat.
"Pyrosphere!", Guilmon called out as he belched forth a mass of glowing plasma that left a gaping hole in the steel former, the edge still glowing red, where the rat had been.
"Holy shit!", Takato gasped at the disproportionate attack. Instantly the head swung around. Guilmon uttered low growling sounds, his nostrils flared, as he slowly advanced on the terrified ten year old. Images raced through his imagination: his parents' growing concern as Takato missed supper, the increasing worry, the frantic call to the police to report a missing child. The police officer at the door of the bakery with the sad news that Takato's charred bones, burned beyond recognition, had been discovered by workmen at a construction site. His parents weeping and inconsolable at his funeral. How many times had he thought how cool it would be to have a real, live digimon? He was beginning to doubt the wisdom of that desire.
"What have I done?", he asked himself.
He needed to do something, and do it fast: "Don't, Guilmon. Don't you know who I am? I'm Takato; I designed you. Guilmon! Don't!"