Interlude - Gatomon
Everything ended with smiles and tears, handshakes and promises. Or maybe everything started to end with those precious few moments at the lakeside.
The tramcar grew steadily smaller as it headed towards the eclipsed sun, eventually disappearing with a flash of light. Most of the digimon that were watching it could barely see the actual departure of the tramcar due to the glare of the eclipse, but those that could smiled and waved at it for all that they were worth.
When the eclipse passed and the afternoon sky returned to its usual shade of blue, the smiles faded. In their place came tears and sobs, as the digital world's residents finally gave in to their feelings about those eight blessed children leaving them behind.
Palmon and biyomon collapsed into a weeping heap, while patamon cried into his wings. Agumon and gabumon stood as still as statues, staring off into the distance. Tentomon wasn't crying – probably because he lacked the ability to do so in the first place. Gomamon had slipped quietly into the lake near them, and had vanished into its depths without a word.
It was only a matter of seconds before the eclipse passed, taking with it the group of humans who had meant so much to them.
Gatomon sat by the lakeside, staring at the water as though she expected the Digidestined to suddenly surface and tell them all that it was a joke, and that there was no need for farewells, since they would always be there for them.
The sun was long gone and so were the others before she finally got up and walked away.
xxx
At first, she managed to find things to keep herself occupied with. There was lots of rebuilding being carried out in the wake of the Dark Masters' deaths, and so Gatomon found herself being kept busy with the reconstruction of File Island.
Soon, it became apparent that the Dark Masters had made quite the royal mess of things during their time. Entire towns were missing altogether, and their occupants were usually found in isolated places that were almost unthinkably far away. And that was if they were found to begin with – the body count rose with each passing day, as did the missing persons count.
For her part, Gatomon tried to keep up an optimistic front as she worked alongside the others who were trying to fix all that was broken. But as the days went by and she realised the sheer magnitude of destruction unleashed by the Dark Masters, she began to wonder if rebuilding was feasible to begin with.
By the time that the decaying corpse of Shogungekomon was found at the bottom of a chasm, Gatomon had just about had enough of the Dark Masters' horrific legacy. As soon as the Nursery Village was rebuilt, she packed her meagre belongings, and issued a few polite goodbyes to those who would understand them.
Echoes of a long-silenced harmonica resounded in the stillness of the forest.
xxx
Before the Digidestined, there had been another. Before Hikari, he had been there for her, as a friend and confidant.
They had been friends, and had crossed over to Earth together. It was their first time on a strange world, and they had quite naturally been shaken to the core as they stepped through the doors that would take them there. But they had had each other, and that was enough.
Or so it seemed, at the time.
Earth had proven to be as unpredictable as a numemon's moods, in every sense of the word. They had been separated during the journey across space and time, and had been forced to make their way about the strange new world without any assistance. By some twist of fate, the two of them had managed to end up in the same general area.
So for a while, the future seemed certain.
Then came the day when they found the eighth Digidestined child.
Myotismon had ordered that the child be killed, and the task was assigned to Gatomon, given that it had been she who had found the girl to begin with. Her long-time friend had managed to find her by then, and had even offered to do it for her, that her conscience would be spared the burden of murder. She had refused the offer.
But when the time came to carry out the dirty deed, she found herself hesitating. The child had not asked to be chosen, nor had she done anything to deserve death. She was innocent, and it was only thanks to the demands of a bloodthirsty tyrant that she stood on the brink of dying.
That night, Gatomon had sheathed her claws, and her friend had nodded with understanding from where he stood in the shadows. He had been watching her, as he had promised to all those moonlit nights ago.
It was a promise that he kept right up until the morning when Myotismon struck him down out of cold blood, on the roof of that human building. He had died under a sky which was heart-wrenchingly similar to that of the Digital World, but which was alien, nonetheless. She had held his hand through those tearful pleas for him to hold on, those reassurances that everything would be alright, that they would find a way to save him.
All it took was ten seconds. Ten seconds, and he was gone, his essence scattering like dust in the wind.
Gatomon had promised to wait for him, and so she did. With Hikari's departure from the Digital World, she had nothing else to do. Nothing else to do that mattered, really. Lonely weeks passed with nights spent by the lakeside where the Digidestined had left their world, and mornings spent with Elecmon at the Nursery Village, waiting.
Hikari had promised to return someday, just as she had promised Wizardmon that she would wait for him. And so she found herself doing just that – waiting for the two people that she owed her life to.
The tricky thing about a digimon dying was the fact that they weren't entirely alive to begin with. Really, you could shoot one in the head, and it would then appear to die in a rather convincing manner, which included a nicely dramatic disintegration. But given enough time, an egg would somehow reappear at the Nursery Village, and said digimon would be born again within the next few days.
Even the digimon themselves didn't fully understand how it all worked. And when you made the question trickier by involving a massive trip across space and time, things became even less certain. A digimon rarely ever died for good, but it had happened quite a few times in the past, and rather frequently during the Dark Masters' reign.
As the tender of the Nursery Village, Elecmon was by far the leading authority on digimon eggs and rebirths. However, he himself admitted that he couldn't predict when a dead digimon's egg would appear, or when an egg would hatch. The limit of his abilities seemed to be guessing which eggs would hatch into which digimon, and even that seemed to go wrong sometimes. And that is why Gatomon continued to visit the Nursery Village every morning, hoping for news of Wizardmon's rebirth even though he had told her to give it up.
Hope was all she had left to hold on to, after all.
xxx
The first sign that things were going wrong were the earthquakes. While the Digital World's residents were no stranger to tremors, the increasing frequency of earthquakes was something that everyone seemed to notice and become concerned with.
Some digimon wondered if the earthquakes were a sign that the deaths of the Dark Masters and Apocallymon had doomed their world to a premature ending. Few bothered trying to persuade them to think otherwise.
When even Gennai and Centarumon had no answers, you knew that something bad was on the horizon. It was a mathematical certainty.
After some time, it was observed that large groups of stone blocks seemed to be emerging out of the ground in the wake of the earthquakes. Further observation and some mapping attempts revealed that the stone clusters were apparently the epicentres of the earthquakes, and so Centarumon was asked if his subterranean labyrinth was somehow unearthing itself.
When he admitted that he honestly hadn't seen the stones before the surviving digimon started moving away from the clusters.
Gatomon tried her best to ignore the strange happenings, and continued her daily treks between the lakeside and the Nursery Village. She turned a blind eye to the massive stone archways that had risen out of the ground, and the mysterious disappearances of some digimon that she met on her daily treks.
And then came the day when she walked into the Nursery Village, and Elecmon was nowhere to be found. The hundreds of digimon eggs lay exposed and vulnerable in their cradles, oblivious to the absence of their keeper. There were no signs of a struggle, and the Village's customary silence, which Gatomon usually found soothing, had an eerie, suffocating feel to it.
Without a second thought, she had fled from the Village as fast as her paws could carry her.
xxx
Days passed. The earthquakes ceased, and things settled down, at least for that particular stretch of time.
Since Elecmon's disappearance, Gatomon had decided to keep an eye on the stone archways that had been unearthed by the earthquakes. At first, she merely watched the archways from a distance, not daring to get closer to them – some digimon had done so, and had promptly vanished. Over time, she started throwing pebbles through them, and as expected, the pebbles vanished – just like the digimon had.
One day, she decided to walk right up to one of the archways.
It didn't make her vanish, even when she stepped right up into its shadow. However, the pebble that she threw through its opening did. As she was about to turn about and leave, though, she noticed something lying next to the archway itself. It was close to the stone, but not within the archway, so she risked poking it with a stick. When nothing happened, she decided to get closer, and to very quickly pick it up.
She was more than just a little disappointed to see that it was just a rusty old dynamo – it probably had been buried underground, and had gotten turned out as the archway emerged. Just as she was about to throw it aside, though, the light caught on the little mechanical device, and stilled her claws. She held it up for a closer look, and very nearly had a heart attack when she saw the inscriptions on the dynamo.
Based on the inscriptions, the dynamo had been made by none other than the original inhabitants of the Digital World.
One cautiously rushed trip to Gennai's home later found the dynamo being the center of attention, with the wizened old man giving it a thorough examination. When he first saw the inscriptions on the dynamo, Gatomon saw his face take on an expression she hadn't seen on it before. And when he asked her to call for Centarumon, she practically had to shake herself out of her little reverie before she could comply.
For the first time since she had known him, Gennai seemed afraid.
xxx
"So the Domains have reopened," whispered the gnarled old digimon known as Jijimon. "I wonder why that is."
Gatomon could not help but stare at him as he discussed the Digital World's newest problem with Gennai and Centarumon. Everyone knew who Jijimon supposedly was, but then again, most considered him to be nothing more than a mythical character. Who would have thought that one of the two digimon supposedly capable of reversing death itself actually existed?
Gennai sighed, and rubbed his temples wearily. "Whatever it is, you can be sure it isn't good news. You were there when they went underground, Jijimon – what can you tell us about them?"
"Nothing much, really," Jijimon said, leaning back on the overstuffed chair he had been occupying since they had entered his home. "I was briefly imprisoned by one of the Blood Knights in Giga Domain, but other than that, I stayed away from them."
"As most sane people would," rumbled Centarumon, as his eye shifted slid laterally behind his visor. "Dark and filled with feral digimon and traps... no one in their right mind would go into the domains voluntarily."
For the third time that day, Gatomon felt shivers running down her spine. Much as Jijimon was considered to be a myth, so were the Blood Knights – sadistic beings who were said to have terrorised the Digital World using armies of feral digimon. And even Jijimon, the revered arrester of death, was afraid of these 'Domains' which had only recently reappeared. Likewise for Gennai and Centarumon, who were usually reliable even in the tightest of situations.
She cleared her throat, drawing their attention. "Pardon me, but... if Jijimon himself doesn't know who caused these Domains to resurface, who would?"
"A very good question," nodded the elderly digimon, as he rocked to and fro in his seat. "I think you may have met him before, but I am unsure if he has been alive for the last few centuries."
"Who?" Gatomon asked, her eyes widening as she wondered just who this supposed being was.
Jijimon leaned back in his seat, and let out a long sigh. "He who dwells in the inverted pyramid. That is one of the digimon who was created to manipulate the Domains. And of his kind, he was the last surviving one."
Silence fell over the hut's other three occupants as they digested what Jijimon had just said. If what the ancient digimon had said was true, then the Domains had unearthed themselves.
After all, Datamon was said to have been irreversibly killed for over a year by then.
xxx
Gatomon climbed over a sand dune, and there it was. It looked just as it had been all those years ago, seemingly untouched. She had only been to the pyramid once, back when she was under Myotismon's employ, and had never forgotten the monolithic construct's appearance.
The inverted pyramid loomed up ahead, looking for the world as if it was holding up the sky with its massive, age-worn bulk. Numerous doorways and staircases were visible on all four of its sides, leading to places unknown, improbable, or both. Its peak seemed to be buried in the sand of the Mobius desert, and the entire weight of the pyramid seemed to rest on just that tapering prism of stone.
Not that pyramid was a static structure, though – its sides were constantly shifting before her very eyes, with entranceways moving across the sloping faces and stairways spontaneously taking shape or disassembling themselves.
She circled the towering structure once, and saw that sand had piled over the entrances to the pyramid that were still at ground-level. When she got closer to the pyramid, though, she saw that one of the entrances seemed to be less obscured by the sand compared to the others. Just about then, a stray breeze blew past, and she pulled up her travelling cloak to keep the sand out of her eyes.
"Damn it!" she cursed, as her mind factored in the breeze with the pyramid's current appearance. "They could've gotten in through all of the entrances, and the wind would've blown sand over them!"
Cautiously making her way over to the nearest entrance, she got her tail out from within her cloak, and started brushing sand away from it. It didn't take long to reveal the entrance in its entirety, and the passageway beyond it merely served to confirm her suspicions about whether someone had been in the pyramid since Datamon's death a year back.
Right next to the entrance, the passageway's stone floor was covered in sand, and there were two distinct sets of footprints passing along it. One seemed human, and the other seemed to belong to some sort of creature with four tiny legs.
Despite her instincts practically screaming at her to get out of there before anything else happened, Gatomon steeled her nerves and stepped into the dim passageway. She gripped a stick of chalk tightly in her left paw, hoping that she wouldn't get lost within the pyramid's maze-like interior; the chalk was her only means of marking her path.
As she went deeper into the bowels of the pyramid, she noticed that the walls had apparently changed from smooth bricks to polished metal somewhere along the way. The floor was also devoid of any sand, and innumerable wires as well as pipes were attached to the ceiling. She took this to be a sign of her getting closer to the control room at the bottom of the pyramid, and continued to make her little chalk marks on the walls – a task made much more difficult by the current material the walls were made of.
After what felt like hours of walking along the corridors, descending or ascending staircases, and walking on gantry-bridges over massive, factory-like chambers, she finally arrived at the central control room. The blast doors were sealed, but they were transparent in the middle, allowing her a view of the room's interior.
She glanced about the room quickly, pressing her face and paws to the clear pane on the blast doors. No one seemed to be in the control room, and the computers seemed to be operating on default settings as they usually did. If only she could remember whether the table in the middle of the room was supposed to be glowing like that...
A faint rumbling noise made her jump a little, and she whirled about, getting into a fighting stance. She didn't see anyone, but there were strange noises coming from somewhere down the corridor. Two seconds was all it took for her to jump up to the ceiling and cling to some pipes there, and another three made sure that she was concealed behind an alcove by the time the strange noises revealed themselves to be footsteps. And there was more than one person coming down the corridor, by the sounds of them.
Eventually, voices made their way up to the alcove where Gatomon was hiding, just as the blast doors slide open with a smooth hissing sound.
A raspy voice was the first that she could make out. "I take it that Phase One is complete?"
"Naturally," replied another, more mechanical voice. "We'll just need to set up the infrastructure, and then we'll be good to go."
"I thought that the infrastructure was already in place?" said a third person – or was it a digimon? – sounding female and rather exasperated. "Soft Domain was supposed to have been ready months ago!"
That sentence alone was sufficient to make Gatomon tense up a little, even as the group of strangers entered the control room and the blast doors slid shut behind them. She sat in the alcove for a while, trying to listen for any other bits of information that she could take back to Jijimon, Gennai, and Centarumon, but to no avail – the blast doors seemed to be quite soundproof.
Finally, she decided to sneak down from the alcove, and to get out of the pyramid as fast as she could. She made it down to the ground without making a sound, and was halfway down the corridor before she heard the blast doors opening.
"You!" screeched the being with the mechanical voice from earlier on. "Stop right there!"
Not bothering to turn around and see just who the voice belonged to, Gatomon fled down the corridor as if the hounds of hell themselves were homing in on her trail. As she ran past one of the machine-filled chambers she had passed earlier on, though, a mirror-plated wall offered her a glimpse of her pursuers, just as she was about to exit the chamber.
What she saw made her run even faster, although seconds ago she wouldn't have thought it to be possible.
A red-coloured digimon – with eight legs and a torso sticking out of its bulbous body, it was surely a digimon of some sort – was reflected by the wall, along with a hulking, bandage-swathed creature that was lagging behind it.
Gatomon ran, and when she finally made it back to the entrance, she very nearly ended up taking a flying leap. With a panicked hiss, she sank her claws into the ground, kicking up sand all around her and just barely managing to find purchase between the smoothened bricks.
She gawked at the sight before her for a moment – hardly surprising, given that the entrance she had used to enter the pyramid earlier was now several stories above-ground.
"She can't be far!" the feminine voice from earlier shouted triumphantly from somewhere in the corridors. "I can smell her!"
The owner of the raspy voice from the corridor outside the control room practically ended up booming out its next words. "Come quietly, and we might just decide to keep you alive!"
Gatomon decided to wait for them, to see just who she was up against. She doubted that she would survive a jump from the now-elevated entrance, so perhaps a fighting chance was all she'd get.
A shadow appeared in the passageway as the two digimon came closer. Curiously, they stopped for a moment, and the shadows seemed to liquefy for a bit, as though the two were dancing about.
Seconds later, what appeared to be a human woman in a red dress stepped around the corner followed by a man in a long, blue-coloured coat. As with Centarumon, the clue to their digimon identity lay within their eyes – the woman had three eyes in each eye socket, and the man had a single, glowing eye, the other being obscured by a bandage.
When Gatomon saw the nasty-looking rifle in the man's hands, she reflexively took a step backward, and felt her tail touching the edge of the passageway.
"Gatomon, I believe?" the woman purred, sounding amused. "Clever of you to track us here, it was. But I don't think that you're in this alone, are you now?"
Her towering, one-eyed companion levelled his rifle at Gatomon's shivering form. "Indeed. Reveal the identities of your accomplices, and you might walk away from this encounter."
Gatomon swallowed hard, and quickly took a look over her shoulder at the shifting desert sands, far beneath where she stood. It was a long way to fall...
The red-dressed woman laughed shrilly. "She's thinking of jumping! She's actually considering it! Dear, I think she's allowed all that nonsense about cats always landing on their feet to get to her head!"
"Don't even think of it," snapped the man, narrowing his eye at her. "Step away from the entrance, now."
For a moment, Gatomon actually felt as if she might comply with their demands. But then, a gust of wind blew into the passageway, rustling her travelling cloak and making her aware of a cold weight resting on her chest.
Hikari's whistle.
That thought was enough to get her thinking straight again. With a hiss, she gave the two digimon a defiant glare, and jumped out of the passageway. A few gunshots whizzed through the air where she had been standing just seconds ago, and the female digimon's enraged screech was just about deafening.
She fell, and for that one moment in time, she remembered what it was like to have wings again.
xxx
She had played dead at the pyramid, lying prone and letting sand blow over her still form until her two pursuers had given her up for dead. Of course, her body had been groaning a symphony at her for taking that fall from the raised entrance, but she had forced herself to remain silent, and had survived thanks to that. From there, it had been a question of making a quick trip back to Jijimon's hut. Things were escalating beyond her comprehension, let alone ability to handle.
The little plastic lump that was Hikari's whistle helped her through it all, somehow, even as she lay there in the sand with it digging into her chest.
When Jijimon had heard her account of what had happened at the pyramid, he had turned and sank back into his usual seat, looking every bit as ancient as he was said to be.
"Did you see who Arukenimon and Mummymon were talking to?" he had asked her.
Arukenimon and Mummymon. At least she knew who she was dealing with, now. "No, but it sounded mechanical. Male, most probably."
The elder digimon had let out a soft harrumph at that, before saying, "In that case, the world has just become an inifinitely more dangerous place."
When pressed for further details, Jijimon had remained silent, and for some reason, Gatomon didn't feel as if she really wanted to know the answers, either.
xxx
One month. That was all the time it took for the Digital World to fall under the rule of yet another group of malevolent digimon. And Gatomon saw it all happen.
Arukenimon and Mummymon – the two digimon she had seen at the pyramid - had just been two of the numerous digimon which had set out to round-up almost all the surviving digimon on File Island. Those who had survived the reign of Devimon, Myotismon, and the Dark Masters soon found themselves being apprehended by various digimon, and were promptly brought to the newly-unearthed Soft Domain. It seemed that all digimon who entered that particular Domain didn't ever leave it, save for their captors.
In that one month, File Island was overrun by creatures once thought to have been long extinct or exiled, from swarms of spider-like dokugumon to the beast of a lone ranger known as Minotarumon. There were even digimon that no one could identify save for perhaps Jijimon, such as digimon who resembled a pack of flying cards, numemon-like creatures which were an unnatural shade of blue, and even a robed figure reeking of sulphur, who lurked in the forests.
When supposedly dead digimon such as Warumonzaemon, Cherrymon, and Ladydevimon reappeared, the few digimon who had evaded capture realised just how grim their situation had become.
Gatomon herself had managed to stay free by holding up with Jijimon and a few others in his hut. Thankfully, the shabby-looking hut had somehow managed to expand itself to accommodate its new inhabitants, and the little garden surrounding it was more than enough to keep them comfortably nourished.
It was from Jijimon's hut that they witnessed the end of freedom in the Digital World. Jijimon had among his possessions a television set, of all things, which lacked an antenna or even a power supply, but which could nonetheless bring them live footage from all over the Digital World.
They saw the Nursery Village, left as nothing more than a mass of ashes and ruined buildings by the time a gang of Flarerizamon were done with it. The castle belonging to the late Shogungekomon was ransacked and its occupants forced to flee into hiding by Marinedevimon and his flunkies. Countless digimon were thoroughly brainwashed by the squid-like Vademon, before being escorted into the seemingly bottomless darkness of Soft Domain.
Soft Domain was also connected to Jijimon's television set, somehow. And that was why the digimon living in his hut refused to tune the set to the frequencies which they knew would bring them footage from within the Domain.
According to what Jijimon knew of the Domains, they were dungeons built by the original inhabitants of the Digital World. There were perhaps thirty of them scattered all about the planet, on the three continents, and no two of them were alike.
A Domain's interior was akin to a nightmarish maze, with tunnels whose configuration constantly changed. Ferocious digimon lurked in the dark tunnels, eyes blinded by thousands of years spent underground, digimon which few had ever seen before. Parts of the massive underground complexes were submerged by pools of toxic-looking fluid, which were surrounded by piles of skeletons that seemed to be missing several bones. Occasionally, the Domains' tunnels were lit-up by bright flashes of light that seemed to come from walls of pulsating electricity that advanced along certain corridors, along with massive blocks of stone that could somehow move about on their own.
Jijimon had quietly told them that the Domains were still very tame compared to another, even more hellish feat of engineering by the planet's first occupants. According to him, that construct had been a prototype of sorts for the Domains, but when asked about it, all he would say was one sentence.
Do not enter the Bug Maze.
Curiously, they never once caught even a glimpse of the various digimon that had been forced into the Domain by those that were now patrolling the Island. It was almost as if they had disappeared into thin air after entering Soft Domain.
At least, they hoped that the unfortunate digimon had disappeared – it was certainly the more merciful alternative compared to some of the other possibilities.
xxx
"Gatomon, I am begging you – don't go," Jijimon said, thumping his claw-footed cane on the hut's wooden floor. "It may be a trap!"
"All the more incentive for you to get the readings right, then!" she all but snarled, causing the older digimon to take a step back. "You were the one who mentioned it in the first place!"
Jijimon shook his head, and turned around to regard his bookshelf. "I was just trying to give you some semblance of hope, Gatomon. You know that."
She stared at his back for a moment, and made her choice. Clutching Hikari's whistle in her paw and saying a silent prayer to whoever may have been listening, she headed out of the hut.
Five seconds later, Jijimon shut his hut's door, and slowly walked to his chair, feeling ten thousand years older. Gatomon had been the last of the refugees that had found their way to his hut, and there she was, gone. Somewhere in the corner of his mind, he felt the faint ripples from yet another portal opening to the Digital World.
He hoped that the portal was from Earth, and that Gatomon would be safe.
xxx
The air around her was filled with the stench rotting eggs, and the ground that she was lying on seemed to be of the same consistency as wet cement. Several disintegrating infermon lay twitching about nearby, and the robed digimon who supposedly smelled of sulphur was watching her bound form through a pair of ruby-like eyes. While she had managed to kill the infermon with relative ease, the unknown digimon had proceeded to immobilise her with a cloud of pungent, paralytic gas.
"Gatomon, it seems," the gold-robed creature said, its voice sounding like echoes in a canyon. "Well met."
She growled at it, refusing to show any signs of weakness. "Eat dirt, you fiend. Let me loose, and I'll show you just how sharp my claws are."
"I highly doubt it, given that you can barely move your tail now," laughed the digimon as it walked right up to her. Almost immediately, she was engulfed in a cloud of sulphurous fumes. "You and your human friends don't stand a chance at stopping the rise of the new order. Soon, you shall be imprisoned in Soft Domain, and we shall put an end to your human friends."
Fear blossomed inside her gut like a burst of liquid nitrogen. "What are you talking about?"
Her captor smiled, its eyes glinting in the near-darkness. "I believe you will be debriefed once they have entombed you in the Domain. In fact, there they come."
Entombed. When she heard that word, Gatomon's eyes went wide as she realised what her captors had in mind for her. She tried to move her limbs, but to no avail – the mysterious digimon's attack seemed to have left her completely numb from the neck down.
There was a bright flash of light, and three figures materialised just a stone's throw away from where she and the golden-robed digimon were. Two of them seemed to be engulfed in blue-coloured flames, while the third was a spherical thing that hovered about in the air, with a long, trident-like object held in one of its hands.
"The captive is ready for transport?" asked one of the figures, as it stepped up to them. "We don't want any surprises with this one."
"What kind of incompetent do you think I am?" snapped the red-eyed digimon as it gestured towards her still form. "I make no mistakes, Skullmeramon. You'd do well to keep that in mind."
Gatomon felt her stomach tying itself into knots. As far as she could recall, Skullmeramon had been one of Myotismon's henchmen who had been killed back on Earth. And there he was, standing right next to her, still in his black leather trench-coat and metal mask, with fire flickering out from gaps in his attire.
"Whatever," said the second figure with the blue flames with a shrug – Gatomon could've sworn that it bore a striking resemblance to her old friend Meramon. "Let's just get her into one of the tanks, and move on to the next one."
With that, he stepped right up to her and picked her up as if she was no heavier than a feather. Skullmeramon gestured to the floating digimon that was accompanying them, and it bobbed closer, a baring several rotting fangs in her direction. It was with some disgust that Gatomon recognised it as a tekkamon, a cyborg-like creature capable of teleportation. She had heard that some still existed, but hadn't exactly been hoping to meet one – their reputation of having an appetite for decaying meat far preceded them.
Just as they were about to teleport out, the robed digimon that had captured her offered them a parting statement.
"Do tell her what's in store for the Digidestined, will you? I suppose she could do with something to think about for the rest of eternity."
It wasn't even two seconds after those words reached her ears before they vanished from the area.
xxx
Jijimon had warned them about the dangers lurking within a Domain, and now she was seeing for herself just how deadly a Domain could be.
Skullmeramon, Bluemeramon – apparently, that was his name – and the tekkamon carried her through what felt like kilometres of dark and damp tunnels, only stopping or turning about when they reached a part of the area that was completely submerged. Occasionally, they also turned back when they ran into what appeared to be living walls of electricity or large stone blocks that moved of their own accord.
Eventually, the two Meramon-like digimon started arguing.
"Damn it, are you taking us in circles again?" grated Skullmeramon, as he squinted down a tunnel that looked vaguely familiar. "I'm not exactly excited about wandering about in this stinking place, you know!"
"I'm sure that this is the right path!" snapped Bluemeramon. "It's not my fault that the elec-spores keep moving about to block the way to the center!"
They would probably have started fighting right there and then had the tekkamon not intervened. "Why don't we access the Circuit Board, then? Take us faster to the center of the Domain than wandering about in the darkness."
After some consideration, the two flaming digimon grudgingly came to some sort of agreement. Bluemeramon and the tekkamon started searching along the tunnel for something, while Skullmeramon kept watch over Gatomon.
Not that she could have escaped – her body was still about as mobile as a pile of wet rags. Whatever the ruby-eyed digimon had used on her earlier was clearly some potent stuff.
"Where are you taking me, Skullmeramon?" she asked the muscle-bound digimon after some time. "And what's going on here?"
He remained silent for a while, before finally answering her questions. "You're going to His Majesty's newest dungeon, right in the middle of Soft Domain. Sixteen kilometres underground, so no one's about to rescue you, hah!"
She couldn't help but feel a little nervous upon hearing that. "Why are you doing this?"
"We are at the dawn of a new era," he said simply, as he picked her up by the neck like a newborn kitten and held her up to look her in the eyes. "Pity you threw your lot in with those meddling brats – you could've been a valuable ally."
"What are you going to do to them?" she hissed, narrowing her eyes at him.
For all her intended ferocity, he started laughing in her face. "Well, well, well. Kitty's got claws, eh? Let's just say that the rest of the human world believes in putting insane people in institutions where they'll be little better than prisoners, and that our agents will soon give them a lifelong pass to those same institutions.
"Come to think of it, the portal we opened for our agents to access Earth must have been what your friend Jijimon sensed - how fortunate for us."
It took her several seconds to realise just what he was implying, and by then, the two other digimon had returned to them.
"Found an entrance to the Circuit Board," said the tekkamon, as it pointed down the tunnel with its trident. "Shall we?"
"Of course," nodded Skullmeramon. "How long more do we have before she starts moving again?"
"Knowing Pharaohmon and his gas?" Bluemeramon shrugged. "Maybe it'll wear off in a few days, if she's lucky. Weeks, if she pissed him off while she was moving."
"What?!" Gatomon's enraged screech fell on deaf ears as the trio started on the move again.
The four of them moved into a new tunnel that had materialised on the wall just ahead of them, whose floor glowed with what looked like luminous wires. As they walked along the tunnel, the tekkamon did something to the wires, and it started to seal shut behind them. After what felt like hours of walking – past several doors and branching tunnels – they finally arrived at a door that looked just like the others.
"Here we are," the tekkamon declared, as the door slid open with a hiss.
"About damn time," grumbled Skullmeramon. "I swear, all those millennia spent underground must've softened you guys in the head."
He walked through the doorway with Gatomon tucked under his arm like an errant child, and what she saw next caused her to let out an involuntary gasp of shock.
The chamber they were walking into was huge, larger than the eyes could see. It was so large that she could only see one of its walls, and that was the one behind her. Directly in front of them was a massive assembly of pipes, cables, and metal rails that obscured the three other sides of the chamber from her view.
Every few seconds, several large, transparent cubes would slide past on the metal rails, and she just about had a heart attack when she saw that each of them contained digimon. The larger ones held maybe one or two digimon, whereas the smaller ones held single occupants.
She didn't know which was worse – the fact that they had all been imprisoned, or the fact that they were all seemingly alive in their transparent prisons.
"You... monsters!" she cried, as she saw for herself just what had happened to all the digimon that had vanished in the last year or so.
"Shut it, kitty!" said Bluemeramon, as he pressed several buttons on a keypad mounted near the metal rails. "You'll be getting inside one of those tanks soon enough, so save your breath."
Gatomon lost all control at that point. She started screaming like a possessed being, though being paralysed from the neck down made her efforts more noisy than useful. Skullmeramon cuffed her across the head, making her see stars, while Bluemeramon pressed more buttons on the keypad. Their tekkamon escort seemed to have disappeared, but several more could be seen hovering about near the chamber's ceiling.
"Ah, there we are!" Bluemeramon sang, as an empty cube pulled up on the rails right in front of them along with two other identically-sized ones. "Just the right size for you and you'll have neighbours... for now."
With a hiss, the top of the cube opened up, vanishing into thin air. Skullmeramon unceremoniously reached up to dump her into the tank, and Bluemeramon used his keypad to seal it shut again once she was at the bottom of the cube. In the blink of an eye, the cube was closed, sealing her inside its glassy walls.
A speaker mounted somewhere in the tank crackled to life, and Bluemeramon's voice came out of it. "Welcome to your new home for eternity, Gatomon! We do hope you'll enjoy your stay, since well... you'll be here forever. Maybe you'll get to know your neighbours, or maybe you won't!"
Skullmeramon spoke up through the speaker. "See, the administration knows just how boring the same scenery can get after a few thousand years. So all the tanks are set to move about continuously, and you'll get to meet everyone else in here eventually."
"Not that it'll do you much good," Bluemeramon added cheerfully. "These beauties are completely soundproof, and if you decide to act up, Pharaohmon was kind enough to rig all of them with some of his little gaseous cocktails."
"Farewell, Gatomon," her former colleague said, before shutting off the speaker with a hiss of static.
The tank started moving with a jerk, and was soon whizzing smoothly along the rails. Left, right, up, or down... it moved about in seemingly random directions, and Gatomon saw perhaps a hundred familiar faces passing by as her prison made its way about.
As the cube rounded a particularly sharp turning, she was jostled about for a bit, and heard something clattering on the tank's floor. She struggled to move her head to see just what it was, and eventually managed to catch sight of the object that had made the noise.
It was Hikari's whistle.
Skullmeramon's words echoed in her mind, and she realised that she probably wouldn't ever see Hikari again. A single tear rolled down her cheek as her emotions finally managed to overwhelm her, and soon enough, her fur was dampened with her own tears as she was rolled about by the tank's movements.
Seemingly on cue, the chamber's lights all went off, leaving her in darkness.