Disclaimer:I do not own Digimon. Or Heroes of Olympus. But how cool would it be if I did?

Author's Note: Written for the Novel with Prompts Challenge found on the Digimon Fanfiction Challenges forum. The prompt for this chapter is "device".

Don't expect updates to always be this quick! But when I'm on a roll, I'm on a roll, what can I say? I reworded the summary just a tad, because I thought it sounded a little awkward. Hopefully you all agree with my changes. Also, baby digimon are so cute, aren't they? Yes, yes, they are.

Enjoy!

Chapter Two

The inside of Elecmon's home looked more like a preschool than somewhere to have tea. Guilmon had crushed a toy upon walking in with a pathetic "Sorry!" that mostly went ignored. The chair that Elecmon gestured for Takato to sit in was much too small for him, and Guilmon ignored the chairs and decided to just plop down on the floor instead. The table they sat at was much shorter than was comfortable, and Takato had to stretch out his legs to keep his knees from knocking against the underside of the wood.

Any second now, Elecmon was going to plop a coloring book and several crayons in front of him to keep him occupied. He just knew it. His eyes widened with alarm when Elecmon seemed ready to do just that as he pulled a colorful book off of the shelf, but instead of giving it to Takato, he carried it over to a playpen in the corner where two baby digimon were currently wrestling playfully.

"There you go, you two," he said affectionately. "Play nice now and enjoy this book about Patamon and his adventures. I wrote it myself!"

Elecmon puffed his chest out as if that was supposed to mean something, but the two baby digimon were too busy tearing through the book already to give him much of a response. He turned to another whimpering baby digimon that was settled in a nearby crib and rocked him a few times to ease him back to sleep. The fifth baby digimon in the room was given a bottle and a few cooing words before he was left to his own devices.

Finally, he came to a stop in front of Takato and Guilmon as if just remembering that they were there. "What was I doing?" he muttered. "Oh, right! Tea!" He started to bustle around the kitchen while Takato and Guilmon watched.

"Uh… Elecmon?" Takato said. "Shouldn't we be figuring out who I am? Or at least how I got here?"

"Hm?" Elecmon placed a kettle on his child-sized stove before Takato's words seemed to sink in. "Oh! Yes. I have a friend that is coming over for tea who might be able to tell us a thing or two to help you out."

Takato brightened immediately. "Really? Who?"

Guilmon perked up. "I smell digimon!"

A swift knocking on the cottage door cut off Elecmon's response, and the little digimon raced past Takato and Guilmon to the front door. Standing on the other side was a really tall man who appeared to be naked at first glance with orange skin, purple polka dots, and a silver helmet on his head. Takato didn't know whether to blush or stare, so he did both.

But the longer he stared, the more Takato realized that first of all, this guy was taller than any man he had ever seen in his life, and secondly, those weren't human legs at all. From the waist down, the orange man was all animal, muscle and sinew under prickly orange and purple fur. His feet were polished hooves holding up long skinny legs and knobby-knees. As the guest stepped into the house, having to duck to avoid banging his head on the doorframe, his hindquarters just kept going and going and going.

Takato had to blink twice before he realized that an orange and purple horse with a man's torso and head attached to the front had just walked through the door. Though his jaw dropped open, and he was completely shocked, he had the strangest feeling that he shouldn't be. Like this – a half-man, half-horse creature – was completely normal. Either he was totally losing his mind, or he had led a life far more interesting than he could have ever anticipated.

"Takato, Guilmon, I'd like to meet a friend of mine," Elecmon said, leading the horse-man toward them. "This is Centarumon."

"Hi!" Guilmon said brightly.

"Uh… It's nice to meet you?" Takato didn't mean for it to come out as a question. He just found himself suddenly at a loss as to how he was supposed to address a man-horse creature that looked like he could snap him in half if he wasn't in a particularly good mood. The fact that he couldn't even see Centarumon's expression underneath that helmet made him all the more intimidating looking.

"And you," Centarumon said, with a polite nod in his direction. He turned to Elecmon. "I didn't realize you had invited others for tea."

"I didn't," Elecmon huffed, as if it were an inconvenience to him, which considering they were apparently interrupting his tea plans, it probably was. "They just kinda showed up, and… well…" The kettle started to whistle from the kitchen. "Oh! The tea. Takato, why don't you explain it?"

He raced off before Takato agreed, and Takato grimaced as he was left alone with the large digimon – he could only be a digimon looking like that, right? He sure hoped that this guy wasn't someone that passed swift judgments, because Takato was pretty sure that his story sounded about as false as any other. He told it anyway, though, as short and sweet as it was. It was, as far as he knew, his life story, and it took him less than five minutes to say it all. Talk about depressing.

"I see," Centarumon said.

He had lowered himself in front of the child-sized table so that his legs were curled underneath him. The table was even more ill-fitting for him than Takato, and it made his plight with the size seem a lot less important.

"And you remember nothing before you woke up here?" he continued.

Takato closed his eyes and tried to think, tried to force his mind to go where his memories wouldn't allow, but it was like hitting a brick wall. He felt like he had something right on the tip of his tongue, but he couldn't quite get it out. He somehow knew that when it came to words that he forgot, if he stopped trying so hard to remember it, then it would be more likely to come back to him when he least expected it. But who had told him that and where he learned it were just as blank as everything else.

"No, nothing."

He sent Guilmon an apologetic look, knowing how much that information had hurt him before, but Guilmon didn't even seem to hear him. He was in the middle of a staring contest with one of the baby digimon.

"Well, the most likely way for a human to come to the Digital World is if they are a digidestined and have a digivice," Centarumon said.

Takato stared at him, most of those words going over his head in a way that told him that he should probably know what they meant but he no longer did. "I have no idea what any of that means."

"You are in the Digital World." Takato nodded; he remembered Elecmon mentioning that earlier. "You are human." He nodded again; he knew that one on his own, thanks. "You may be a digidestined, which means you may have a digivice."

"That's where you lost me," Takato said.

Elecmon returned with a tea tray that he set down on the table. "Check your pockets," he told him.

As Elecmon poured each of them a cup of tea, Takato instinctive reached down to follow his instructions. He only hesitated for a moment when he felt a flash of panic as he worried about having anything embarrassing on him. Like what? a voice in his head asked sarcastically. A love note from a girlfriend you don't even remember? The voice had a pretty good point, so Takato went ahead and just dumped everything he found onto the table in front of him.

Takato hadn't paid much attention to what he was wearing, but he apparently really liked pockets. He wore a thin blue windbreaker that had pockets on the outside as well as on the inside, a plain white t-shirt with a breast pocket, a pair of brown cargo pants that had pockets on the front, the back, and one more halfway down his pants leg by his right knee, and a pair of blue and white sneakers. Fortunately, most of the pockets were empty, but by the time he was done with his own personal pat-down, he had a nice collection of items sitting in front of him.

Everybody leaned forward to get a good look. Even Guilmon had ended his staring contest to look (and sniff) at his stuff curiously. He had a pack of gum, a deck of cards for a game that Takato didn't recognize, a folded up piece of paper with a heart drawn on the top that did look suspiciously like a love note (and that Takato still blushed at for reasons he couldn't remember), a receipt that had probably been for the gum but was no longer readable, several banknotes and coins that Takato immediately identified as yen though he couldn't explain how he knew that, another piece of paper that had a handwritten list of groceries on it as if Takato had been in the middle of running errands when he had been just picked and dropped here, and…

"A digivice," Centarumon breathed as he picked up the red and white device.

"So it's true then," Elecmon said. "He's one of them, like TK and the rest. We can call them! They'll know what to do."

"Maybe," Centarumon muttered, but Takato couldn't help but notice that he didn't sound too certain of that. "It's a different model than I've ever seen before."

"A newer one?" Elecmon suggested. "Maybe a new group of digidestined has been chosen, like Davis and the others were when a new threat arrived?"

"Perhaps, but you would think that Gennai would inform us of this," Centarumon said.

Takato couldn't tell, but he guessed that he was probably frowning. The two digimon were talking as if he wasn't sitting right there, but he made no move to interrupt. Most of what they were saying was going over his head anyway, and if their talking back and forth brought him some answers, then they could ignore him all day long. Besides, as polite as Centarumon had been since he arrived, Takato still could not shake the feeling that he was not a digimon to be messed with, and he really did not feel like testing his theory.

As they talked, Elecmon finished serving the tea, setting a cup down in front of all of them. Guilmon immediately gulped his down, nearly swallowing the teacup with it, before he cried out, "Ah! It's hot!" and started to stampede around the room. Elecmon shot him a look as if to make sure he wasn't about to trample any of his babies before he went back to mostly ignoring him. Takato watched for a few seconds, amused, before he turned back to his own cup with a sigh. He couldn't even remember if he liked tea. He couldn't remember if he ever had it before and if so, who with.

A simple cup of tea shouldn't make anyone feel so lonely, but all he really wanted was at least one memory that let him know that someone out there was wondering where he was. His eyes slid over to the folded up piece of paper with the pink heart drawn on the front, and his fingers itched to reach out to grab it. But under the gazes of Centarumon and Elecmon, it felt stupid and needy, so Takato resisted. There was something else on the table that suddenly caught his eye, though. He reached out toward the deck of cards and fanned them out before he found what he had unconsciously been looking for.

"It's you," he said quietly.

Elecmon and Centarumon still heard him. "What?"

He turned the card around to show them. "It's you! Centarumon, you're on this card!"

Centarumon tilted his head in curiosity while Elecmon reached across the table to take the card from Takato's hand. He held it up as he gave it a look over before shaking his head.

"I have never seen anything like it," he muttered. "But it is a rather good likeness to you, Centarumon. Maybe you're famous!"

If Takato didn't know any better, he would have thought that Centarumon might have been blushing at the idea. He cleared his throat and turned his attention onto Takato instead of responding to Elecmon's comment.

"What other cards do you have in that deck?" he asked.

Takato spread out the cards more so that everybody could see. Most of them seemed to have creatures on them that Takato assumed were digimon as well, especially from the way that Elecmon and Centarumon were pointing out digimon that they recognized. About a hundred cards existed all together, more than any deck of playing guards that Takato could randomly remember ever existing. He couldn't even remember the last thing he had actually played that needed cards – well, cards other than the ones he was apparently carrying – but he was able to recall that most decks had about 52 cards, not closer to a hundred.

Guilmon sniffed the cards curiously before turning his big gold eyes onto Takato. "Is there one of me, Takatomon? Do I get a card, too?"

"Uh…" Takato said, scanning the cards quickly. Nothing big, red, and adorable really popped out at him. "No, I don't think so. Sorry, boy."

Guilmon's ears flattened with disappointment. "Aww…"

Takato smiled affectionately at the digimon and decided that if they were best friends, his life must be either pretty messed up or pretty darn interesting. He couldn't decide which, but right now, he was just glad not to be alone. He reached out and scratched Guilmon beneath his ear, which earned him something that he assumed was the equivalent of a purr before Guilmon got distracted by one of the baby digimon who were trying to learn to stand on their head.

"Ooh! I can do that too!" he said before he ran off.

Shaking his head in amusement, Takato turned his attention back to the cards. Something was extremely important about these cards. He was having a hard time piecing it all together, but right now, the only thing he had to go off of was his gut, and his gut was sending up red flares right about now. His eyes scanned the card faces before freezing on one card. It didn't seem so special compared to the others, but it didn't have a digimon on the front. Instead, it appeared to be a power-up card of some sort with an image of white wings gracing the front.

Hyper Wings, Takato read off.

A sudden pain behind Takato's eyes nearly toppled him off of his kiddy-chair. Digimon. Digital World. Guilmon. Hyper Wings. He still didn't know what anybody was talking about, but the words gave him a massive brain freeze – like his mind was trying to access information that should've been there but was missing.

Elecmon was at his side in an instant, catching him before he fell from his chair. For being such a small digimon, he had strength like a giant. "Whoa, there. Don't tell me you're about to pass out on me too?"

"No, no," Takato said, waving him off gratefully. "I'm okay…"

Centarumon gave him a look over in concern. "Maybe you're right, Elecmon. We should contact the other digidestined. They'll probably have a better idea of what to do with him in their world than we do in ours."

"Digidestined?" Takato asked. "Who are they?"

"Just sit tight. I'll go see if I can find Tentomon," Elecmon said. "He usually isn't too far away, and he'll be able to get into contact with Izzy. In the meantime, you should probably hold onto this." He pushed the device that they had called his digivice into his hands. "Hopefully you won't need it, but just in case—"

A menacing growling cut him off. Takato turned slowly to look at Guilmon who looked practically vicious. He was crouched, and his face was pulled into a tight snarl. His entire body shook with excitement. Beside him, the two baby digimon in the playpen were also trembling, but they were not looking at Guilmon. They were staring toward the ceiling as if expecting it to fall down on their heads any second now.

"What is it, boy?" Takato called out apprehensively.

"Takatomon," Guilmon growled in a voice that seemed uncharacteristic to the adorable dinosaur that Takato had started to get used to the past few hours, "I smell digimon."

This was the third time that Guilmon had said those words, but for some reason, this time the words made Takato shiver with fear. Something about the way he said it this time meant business; something about the way he said it this time meant danger.

That was when the ceiling exploded.