-chapter 37-
That wasn't the only time we ever slept with Zari, though after that Phoebe made it clear that she was only just a friend to us. Apparently a friend with benefits. Some nights we would spend together, but other nights we forced her to stay on the coach so we could have some nights alone. It was terribly awkward, as every other girl we had a threesome with was usually gone the next day, but Zari was stuck on the train with us, and had nowhere to go. To make things even more awkard, when we wouldn't let her stay with us, sometimes she would try to get in with Henry and Claire. Though to their credit they had more resistance than Phoebe did, but the first time she tried she mentioned us, which required a very awkward explanation the next morning. During which I kept quiet and laughed on the inside while Phoebe tried to explain it on her own.
Anyway, our time on the train was comming to an end, because we were about to get dragged into another adventure. To everyone's surprise, about a week after the demon incident. The bubblemen somehow managed to find us again after we had to make several stops to look for a place where we could get some more fuel for the train, and if that wasn't enough, the nexus had its own ideas.
"Oh great, first those giant spiders and now the bubble boys are back." I said as I saw one of their jeeps outside the window.
In the last world we were in, while the crew were filling up with coal. Henry, Claire, and Zari got trapped in the nearby coal mine, by giant spiders. We had our pokemon with us, so they weren't that hard to fight, though they did terrify our friends, and Phoebe.
"Never mention those spiders again." Phoebe replied with a cringe. "Too close to the funhouse."
The bubblemen were firing at us, as the train sped up to try to escape. Then something unpredictable happened, a portal opened up right infront of the train, on the mainline!
It was impossible to stop in time so the entire train went through. The portal led us to another railway, just far enough away from a terminal station to allow the train to stop in time.
It was weird, unlike how the nexus had been working up to this point, the station didn't seem to be abandoned at all. There were no people around, but it was very clean in fact, almost too clean.
"Where the hell are we? " I asked.
Even the bubblemen pursuing us seemed to be confused at the moment. Thankfully they couldn't get their jeeps on the station platforms so they were stuck behind us for now. This gave us plenty of time to escape with our friends and the crew. Obviously we had to leave Jack at the station, but the bubblemen weren't interested in him anyway. Outside the station, there wasn't much of anything really, just an endless grass covered field, occasionally dotted with flowers. You'd think for such a big station there would be more out here, but that just wasn't the case. This was bad, as it meant there was nowhere to hide. Worse still, the portal we came out of vanished shortly after we looked back at it, as suddenly as it had appeared. It seemed that we as well as our pursuers had been cut off from the nexus entirely.
Thankfully it wasn't flat land forever, we finally reached some hills at a point where Phoebe collapsed from exhaustion.
"What is this place?" Henry asked.
"I know as much as you do." I replied.
"Who's chasing us?" Zari asked.
"The spacemen." I replied. "We ran into them a few worlds back, they've been tailing us ever since, I don't know why."
"It's Volkheim and the bubblemen." Henry corrected. "The guy's a nut, I'm not even sure I want to know why he's chasing us."
"So what are we going to do now?" Claire asked.
"Well at some point we have to get our vehicles off the train." I replied. "Phoebe's exhausted right now so we should wait until she's able to teleport us again."
"I don't . . . want to . . . think . . . about that . . . right now Cj. Oww my head. " Phoebe replied between breaths.
"Just take it easy baby girl." I said as I helped her to stand.
"The portal is gone. How the bloody hell we supposed to get back to the nexus now?" The engineer asked.
"I don't know." I replied. "Maybe it will open again? Maybe it's on a timer?"
From where we were, we could see that there were 5 other tracks that went through the station, of some kind of alien monorail design. They went straight through, unlike the line we came in on which was of the more conventional design that terminated at the station. They seemed to go on forever, much like the nexus itself.
We had lost the bubblemen for now, they returned to their jeeps and their one blazerish suv and began to fan out and explore, thankfully none seemed to be heading our way.
We were on those hills for hours. Until it seemed that the bubblemen were way out of site, so we took advantage of this oppourtunity and made a run for our vehicles. It took awhile as the crew had to relight Jack's fire, but by sunset they were off the train, so we picked a direction and started traveling. When we were all tired we stopped. It had been awhile since we had seen a natural night sky, but the strangeness was far from over. The next morning the crew was missing, and there was no sign of them anywhere. Phoebe searched around and couldn't them, and after about an hour of searching, we decided to continue forward to see if we could find a town. With the general thinking that the crew had gone back to Jack and the rest of the train. And so we traveled with Henry and Claire in the camaro, and Phoebe and Zari seemingly attempting to drive me absolutely insane in the bus. It was actually kind of funny. Watching them argue back and forth over trivial things. Sometimes Zari would push things just a bit too far. Then Phoebe would get defensive, and say something extremely awkward to attempt to make Zari jealous or use her powers to basically cheat and say something to Zari's extreme embarassment. I just thought it was amusing they thought I could be swayed either way when clearly my heart was with Phoebe. I think she new that, but as mischeivous as she can be sometimes, it was just too much fun for her to keep egging Zari on.
By noon, we found a strange little town composed of small dome shaped houses and a few "towers".
The residents were mostly child-sized alien looking creatures of many different unknown species. We didn't know it yet, but we slipped into a rendition of the digital world. It was just a bit hard to tell at first because the digimon we had found weren't exactly the ones I was used to seeing on tv, Phoebe wasn't familiar with them enough to know and our friends didn't even know what digimon were in the first place.
The digimon worlds are kind of an intermediate world, they're kind of unstable due to their nature, and they're normally pretty closely connected to atleast one other world.
Anyway, it wasn't long before we were surrounded by the little things. We were the tallest things in the village so we couldn't really help but draw attention. We spent a few quiet minutes just sizing each other up, before Phoebe finally said "Don't mind us we're just traveling through." Which caused the crowd to whisper among themselves.
"There's so many different ones." I said.
"Mhm, and what are they? " Henry asked.
"I don't know." I replied.
"Hello, I'm karatsuki numemon. I'm the mayor of this town." A large snail like creature said in a gurgly voice. Reality was not kind to this poor thing. You know how gamefreak kind of made their pokemon depictions more simplified and child friendly? Well let's just say that whoever made the digimon anime did this guy a huge favor. Of course some things weren't meant to be said so I kept that to myself.
"Did that snail just talk? "Claire asked while pretty much everyone ignored.
"Oh this is a digital world?" I asked.
"Yes that is correct." The talking snail replied. "Why do you ask it has always been that way?"
"We've been traveling all day." Phoebe quickly explained.
"Well, as long as you're not planning on destroying our village feel free to stop for a rest." The snail replied as it returned to whatever it was doing prior to our arrival. "Come on everybody, back to work, we got to get the harvest in before sunset."
"We're not going to attack." Phoebe insisted as the crowd started to disperse.
"What do you mean this is a digital world?" Henry asked.
"It's um, complicated. It's a world that exist in the digital space of another world. The world wide web, all the files and data and everything, is like this place's quantum physics. " I replied. "And it's inhabitants are digimon, which are sort of like pokemon, but there are usually no humans, and they don't neccesarily have to comply with what we would consider to be the laws of physics."
"So how do we get out of here and back to the Nexus?" Henry asked.
"I don't know, I don't even understand how we got here." I replied.
"Me neither. " Phoebe agreed.
"Why do you want to get back so badly?" Claire asked.
"Don't you guys want to get back to your children? "Henry asked.
"Yes, but, I mean really what are we supposed to do?" Phoebe asked in return.
"We should figure out what happened to the crew." Zari said.
"I told you they probably went back to the train." I replied.
"Some of these things are kind of cute." Claire noted.
"Yeah." Phoebe agreed.
We spent the next hour or so trying to figure out what to do. It was never easy to deal with situations like this.
"I don't even know where to begin Pheebles, I guess we need to find a way out." I said. "We need to find a portal, just like we used to before we found the nexus."
"We need to find a way back to the nexus." Phoebe replied. "That was the best chance we had at getting home and now it's gone."
"We could head back to the train, atleast to make sure the crew is allright." Henry interjected.
"I agree." Zari said.
"I guess I agree too." Claire added, making it three to two.
"Ok why don't you all go and check? If you hurry you should be back by sunset."
"Do you remember the way? " Phoebe asked.
"Yeah it's just a little bit off in that direction." Henry said as he point to the direction we came to town from.
"Yep that's right." Phoebe agreed.
"Just don't get stuck to the walls by giant spiders again." I replied.
"Cj I told you not to bring that up!" Phoebe protested.
"I don't think there are any spiders out here." Claire said.
"Yeah but, this world can offer much worse, I'll tell ya that much. "I replied as Henry and Zari headed towards the camaro.
"You comming or not? " Henry called.
"Yeah, I 'm comming just wait up." Claire said as she turned around and headed after them.
"Well, now we're alone baby girl." I said after they got in the camaro and started to head for the horizon.
"Mhmmmm." Phoebe agreed.
"So what should we do? " I asked.
"I don't know." She replied. "We need to find a way out of here."
"Yeah, but I don't even know where to begin to look." I said. "Let's just take it easy for a bit."
"Well, I am kind of hungry, maybe they have some decent food?" She asked.
"Maybe, I don't know, let's find out." I replied as I took her hand and led her through the village.
"Wait Cj where are we going?" She asked.
"I don't know, let's find out." I said as I proceeded down what amounted to the village's main street. Unfortunately it was such a small village, there didn't seem to be a restaurant. Instead it appeared that the residents relied on some form of agriculture. They seemed to be farming some kind of plant that looked a lot like cabbage but came in many different colors. There were many of them carrying these things around and stashing them inside a building, where there was basically just a huge pile of them.
"I guess these cabbage things are all they have for food." I said to my beloved.
"Well then I guess they'll have to do." Phoebe replied.
"Excuse me can we have some of those cabbages? " She asked what appeared to be a blue kuriboh looking creature.
"Don't take too much." It replied with a childlike voice." We need some to pay for protection."
"From what?" I asked.
"From the dark ones." It replied as another identical creature came up from behind, carrying about a half dozen cabbage things.
"What's going on here?" It grumpily asked as it bumped into the other.
"You can't have any, we need all the ones we can get, they aren't growing as good as last year. We'll be lucky to even be able to pay for protection." It continued to say as it navigated itself into the storage building.
"They just want a few." The other defended.
"You know what will happen if we can't pay? They'll destroy the whole village." The grumpy one argued back.
"What if we offered to protect you from them, for less?" Phoebe replied.
"Pheebles they're just cabbages." I argued.
"And this village's freedom." She argued back.
"That and we'd be fighting digimon with pokemon." I said. "I
don't know how that will work."
"Same way it always has." Phoebe insisted.
"I don't think you know what you're getting into." The grumpy creature interjected. "But if you want to make a deal like that, you need to talk to the mayor, we're just workmen."
"So where is he then?" Phoebe asked.
"He probably went to his office, now we have to get back to work, we can't just stay here talking to you all day." The grumpy one said as it took its companion by the hand and headed down the road, probably to get more cabbages.
"So I take it we're off to go talk to the giant snail thing again?" I asked.
"Yep." Phoebe matter-of-factly replied.
"Over cabbages?" I asked.
"Yep." She replied just as before. "And maybe if we help we'll find a way out."
"Yes for helping one village that doesn't even seem to have a general store." I sarcastically replied.
"It's a start." She insisted.
"-sighs-, I don't even like cabbages." I replied.
Then a few moments of awkward silence ensued as she just cutely looked up at me.
"Ehh, but what the hell, I'm bored, let's see where this goes." I said a few moments later, after realizing we litterally had nothing better to do.
"Allright then let's find where Mr. Snail's office is." She said.
So we headed down the "street" a little ways. The office wasn't really that hard to find, it was a really small town, and we just guessed it would be in the tallest building, and that's just where it happened to be.
"Mr. Snail, we have a proposition for you." Phoebe said as we entered the mayor's office, where he appeared to be playing chess with a small, unknown humanoid dog-like digimon, it was like a doggymon, but smaller.
"I thought I told you my name was karatsuki numemon." The hideous mayor replied, as his companion just looked back and stared at us.
"We need food." Phoebe said.
"Well you're going to have get your own. We're not doing as good this year as last. We barely have enough to pay for protection."
"I know we heard. "Phoebe replied. "But we can fix that so you won't have to pay."
"Are you even a digimon?" The snail asked in confusion.
"Um, no, but." Phoebe tried to explain only to be interupted.
"Then what can you possibly do about our situation? " The snail asked in disbelief.
"And you, you look like a human." The snail continued.
"Humans don't come here very often, but from what I've heard they're quite weak."
"Now get out!" The snail declared. "You're interupting my game!"
Seeing that the mayor turned out to be kind of a pompous idiot, we left his office.
"Well now what are we going to do, I'm still hungry." Phoebe said.
"We're going to have to do this ourselves Pheebles." I said as we headed back to our bus. " but that means we're going to have to wait for whoever they're paying protection to to show up."
"I guess so." She agreed. "I hope they aren't too strong."
"Looking around this town, I 'd say they're probably just some peons. I'd doubt they'd be more than champion level." I said.
"What's that mean?" Phoebe asked.
"It's like their second stage basically." I said. "It's like rookie, champion, ultimate, and then mega and most of this place's residents are either rookies or lower."
"What's lower?" She asked.
"What amounts to babies and children." I said. "Things that are basically harmless."
"Digimon can have babies?" Phoebe asked.
"Not really, the babies are basically just recycled data." I replied.
"Oh." She said in return.
Eventually we made it back to the bus, where we played the waiting game.
-Meanwhile-
Henry, Claire, and Zari made it back to the train station, where they found that Jack, and the rest of the train were missing. They were just about to leave when another train approached. Another sentient train, a trailmon of the angler type.
"All aboard, mind the gap." It announced as it arrived at the station and the doors on it's carriages opened up.
"Um, there's nobody here." Henry replied, not at all phased at the train's sentience, and instead wondering why the sentient train would even stop at such an empty station.
"You're here." The trailmon quickly defended.
"We don't have any tickets." Zari said.
"None are required to ride on the trans-digital railway." Said the locomotive. "Service is complimentary."
"Where are you going?" Claire asked.
"I don't know, I've never been down this line before." The locomotive replied.
"Can you wait? We have some friends we need to go get."
"Sorry, no can do, gotta get these coaches to the next station." The train digimon said as it started to pull away.
"You don't even know where it is!" Claire argued.
"I kind of want to go, I want to see where it leads." Zari said to the others. "Wherever the next station is it has to be bigger than that village."
"It could just be out in the middle of nowhere like this one is though can't it? "Henry asked.
"Yeah and what about Cj and Phoebe? We shouldn't leave them behind." Claire said.
Just then the trailmon blew it's horn and continued to pull away.
"Sorry don't have time to wait for your decision, gotta go!"
The trailmon accelerated out of the station and eventually dissapeared over the horizon, leaving just as swiftly as it had arrived.
"There goes our chance at getting out of here." Zari said.
"Oh come on, there will be more trains." Henry replied.
And with that they returned to their car and began to head back to the village.
Meanwhile, the bubblemen were scattered all over the place. Some had found their way into a forest, while others had made it to a little desert.
A digital world has some strange geology that is pretty much just patchwork most of the time, the laws of physics and geology often just don't apply. In addition there was no weather at all aside from clear, and no real landmarks, as the place is pretty much always changing and growing. Just like the computer networks in the world it is linked to. Similiar to the universal dumping ground, a lot of the structures and objects end up here at random, but one major difference is that atleast in the universal dumping ground, the world itself is quite stable, in fact aside from it being in the exact center of all existence and things from all over existence randomly teleporting in, it's quite a mundane little planet. Whereas a digital world can change on a completely random basis, plateaus can turn into mountains in a manner of minutes, entire cities could exist one month and be in ruins the next. Furthermore, all the things that end up in the digital world are generally only from one world and aren't really from that world they're just stabilized conglomerations of random data. Needless to say, we weren't going to be finding any convienient hovercars here.
Anyway, Phoebe and I were on the lookout for whoever the town was paying for protection. None of the resident digimon would tell us who to look for, reading their minds didn't work either, as they were digital beings, and while most of them appeared organic on the outside, on the inside they were mostly data, data which, for whatever reason, did not give off thought waves that Phoebe could read. So we asked another question, when were they going to make their payment? Most of the villagers we talked to simply replied that it would be whenever the thing they were paying arrived, while others just ignored us or claimed it was none of our business. By then we realized it was going to be a long day.
Eventually Henry and the others returned later that afternoon, at that time Phoebe and I got bored from watching the "main street" for a few hours, so we were just snuggling and playing around in our bus. Our clocks were way off after traveling through so many worlds, so we were half asleep when Henry and the others parked beside us and knocked on the door.
"You in there? Are you busy?" We heard him yell as he repeatedly banged on the door.
We were both woken up almost instantly, but it took us awhile to respond.
"We're comming, give us a minute." Phoebe groaned as we clambered out of bed.
After getting our clothes on we answered the door.
"What did you find?" I asked.
"The train is gone." Henry replied while Zari and Claire stood behind him.
"Ok." I said, with just a bit of worry.
"Did the bubblemen destroy it or . . . "
"It just wasn't at the station anymore it's gone." Henry replied.
"But we found another train. " Zari said. "Another one that could talk, it said it gave rides for free, but it wouldn't give us the time to come find you."
"Ok, that's interesting." I said.
"But, we got another mission." I replied.
"What? It doesn't look like you two were doing anything." Henry asked.
"This town here, is apparently paying food to something for protection." I said. "They got these multi-colored cabbage things they're using for food."
"I know it seems silly, but if we beat this thing, maybe we could get some food." Phoebe added.
"As well as some more information about what is going on here." I said. "The crew is gone, the train is gone, we're not getting out of here anytime soon I think."
"Who are they paying? " Henry asked.
"Presumably a fairly strong digimon, but we can't get any information out of them whatsoever, so we just kind of have to wait for them to show up." I replied.
"How long is that going to take?" Henry asked.
"We don't know, they won't say." Phoebe replied.
"So we're just going to sit around and wait for whoever we're looking for to show up, so we can act as vigilantes?" Zari asked.
"Well, we don't really have much else to work with." I replied.
"There's a train that could take us somewhere better." Claire said.
"Not until we free this place from whatever is scaring them." Phoebe insisted.
"And what will that do?" Henry asked.
"It will assist in pegging us as the good guys and get us more information about this place." I replied. "We have the time, might as well save them, besides, what are we going to do? Abandon our vehicles? And seriously after we get this done, couldn't we just follow the tracks?"
"You're right, I never thought about that." Claire replied.
"The train is more comfortable." Zari insisted.
"Yeah, but it can't leave the tracks." Phoebe replied.
"Let's just get this sorted out first, it shouldn't take long. " I said.
"And the the next thing you know we're still here tomorrow waiting for this thing, and neither of you even know what we're looking for." Henry argued.
"As far as we know this is the only village here." I replied, though I knew there was a damn good chance it wasn't.
"Just relax ok, the nexus is gone, none of us even know if we'll ever get back to it. Let's just take it easy, atleast we didn't get separated. " I replied.
"That's right Cj." Phoebe agreed, seemingly impressed.
"I guess we're going to have to find somewhere to spend the night then." Henry said.
"We coud build a shelter there's plenty of trees around." I said.
"Can't you just use your powers to make them let us have a hotel room for free?" Henry asked Phoebe.
"My powers don't work on them." Phoebe replied.
"Otherwise we'd know exactly what we were looking for." I added.
"Right." Phoebe agreed. "We don't even know if there is a hotel."
"Well I'm going to check." Henry said. "Who's comming with me?"
"Can I stay with you tonight?" Zari asked.
"No Zari we've been over this already." Phoebe replied.
"Ok then I guess I'm going." Zari said to Henry as Claire turned around and followed them without saying anything.
"Not sure what they think they're gonna accomplish." I said once they were out of earshot. "Even if there is a hotel, we don't have any money ."
"Henry thinks they can work that out later." Phoebe replied. " I don't how they plan to do that, but that's what he thinks, anyway, weee're alonnne againnn Cj." She happily said as she gently threw her arms around my neck.
"Awwe my sweet little psychic nympho milf, what am I going to do with you?" I asked.
"we can go back to snuggling for awhile." She sweetly said.
"Yeah I guess we can." I replied.
- approximately 10 minutes later-
While Henry and the others were exploring the village. The enemy of the day finally arrived. Riding in an extravagant wooden cart being pulled by two blackgreymon, a powerful-looking warrior-type digimon.
"What do you mean you don't have any rooms available?" Henry asked. "The sign out front says vacancy."
"You have no money, we have no rooms." A kotemon replied from the safety of the area behind the front desk.
The ground started to shake from the approaching darkgreymons just a few moments later. The blue t-rex like digimon weren't as big as aggron, but they were still pretty big. Big enough to be a challenge, considering aggron was too weak to fight at the moment. As they presumably weren't there to just pull the carriage around. The carriage stopped outside of the mayor's office, while most of the townsfolk took cover inside buildings and other places they could squeeze themselves into. The warrior digimon got out and headed inside the office, it was so tall it had to crouch just to get through the door. While Henry and Zari peeked out of the inn to see what was going on, all they saw was the two blackgreymon standing as still as possible, and not much else.
"That's got to be them." Zari said. "Whoever was in that carriage is who we are looking for."
"Yeah, but what do we do now?" Henry asked.
"We need to tell Cj and Phoebe, they're the only ones that can handle this." Claire said.
"I disagree, I could handle them easilly if they didn't take my equipment." Zari replied.
"Whatever, we don't have time to argue about this, let's go."
"You're going to find them?" The kotemon asked as it cowered in fear behind the front desk.
"You can't possibly win, you're not even digimon." It continued, but they ignored it and snuck out of the hotel and down the street, back over to our bus, right when we were just about to fall asleep again.
"Wahp, Wahp, Wahp." The doors rattled as Henry banged on them.
After a series of annoyed moaning we got up to answer the door.
"What?" I asked.
"We found the person you're looking for." Henry said.
"What's he look like? "I asked.
"I don't know, but considering he has a chariot pulled by dinosaurs, I'm pretty sure he's the one." Henry replied.
"Ok then, Pheebles get our pokemon, let's go investigate."
"Ok." Phoebe replied.
"Can I have my equipment back? " Zari asked.
"Pheebles." I turned around to get my wife's attention.
"What?" She asked in return as she gathered up our pokemon.
"Can she have her equipment back?" I asked.
"Um let me see." She said as she finished gathering up our things and made her way back to the front of the bus.
"Yeah, I don't think she'll run away." She said as she handed Zari her teleportation watch thingy and bubble gun.
"Allright then, let's go see what we're up against." I said as Phoebe and I left the bus and headed back into town with the others.
-meanwhile, in Mayor K. Numemon's office.-
"What do you mean you might not have enough digifood this year?" Asked an iritated warrior digimon.
"Well, we're just not doing as good as we were last year, not as many are growing." The fearful mayor tried to explain.
"I have an army to feed, pay us what you owe or we'll eat your citizens instead." The warrior replied.
"Well, um about that, some humans have arrived in town." The mayor said. "They mentioned something about trying to stop you, perhaps you could eat them instead?"
"Humans? There hasn't been humans here since . . . " The mayor made the mistake of interupting him.
"Since the world was reformated, yes, I know, but it's true, they were in here earlier." The mayor said, thinking he was off the hook.
"DON'T INTERUPT ME FOOL, OR I'M HAVING ESCARGOT TONIGHT!." The annoyed digimon replied as he easilly pinned the defenseless snail of a mayor to the wall.
"I will take these humans, then, maybe, we'll reduce what you owe." Duskmon said.
"Thankyou." The mayor nervously replied.
"Shut up you worthless pile of slime, I got humans to catch." The warrior replied as he dropped the defenseless mayor to the ground and stormed out of his office, out of the building and onto the street below and that was when our groups collided.
"That's him." I said.
"HUMANS!" The digimon angrilly replied as it untied it's blackgreymon from the carriage.
"Get them." It commanded.
Both blackgreymon charged at us, Phoebe teleported us out of sight, while Zari used her watch to teleport somewhere else.
"Do you know what kind of digimon it is? "She asked. "That thing was creepy looking."
"I think it's a duskmon, which is strange, but that's what it looks like to me." I said.
"You two just keep hiding we'll deal with this." I said to Henry and Claire, who were both a little outmatched.
"Humans, where did you go?" Duskmon replied. "Such strange humans, you look nothing like you did in the old scriptures. I always thought you'd be much shorter. And well, not be able to dissapear like that. What are you invisible now? There was nothing in the books about that."
Zari was hiding behind a building across the street.
"No matter, we shall find you."
"Bubba go! Attack the giant charizard things with hydro pump!" I yelled as I release him from the roof of a nearby building. I knew they weren't charizards, but I also knew Bubba would have no idea what a greymon was. Anyway, he hit one of the two greymon headon, then withdrew into his shell to safeguard against a retaliatory fireball attack, which did a lot more damage to the building than to him. Unfortunately Bubba's attack didn't seem to be as effective as I was hoping it would be, but he did withstand the attack, so that was good.
"What on earth is that?" Duskmon asked as he spotted Bubba on the now damaged roof.
So I returned Bubba, thinking he would have trouble dodging all the fireballs, and sent out Magnum.
Electricity seemed to be a bit more effective.
"Now what is that?" Duskmon asked in even more bewilderment.
"Kill it, and the turtle thing to, maybe they have more data we could use." Duskmon said.
"And you! You can't sneak up on me fool, I see everything." He said to Bulby who believed he was sneaking up on him.
"Venus?" Bulby asked.
"What are you?" Duskmon asked. "Answer and I'll let you live."
"Venusaur." Bulby replied.
"And what is that?" Duskmon asked.
"Venusaurrr venussaur." Bulby replied.
"Yes but what in all of data, is a venusaur?" Duskmon asked.
"Venusaur." Bulby replied.
"I'm going to kill you now, you're annoying me." Duskmon replied as he readied his blades to strike, before he could even move though, he was suddenly bodyslammed by nidoqueen who had lept off the roof of a nearby building.
"Venusaurrrrr!" Bulby laughed.
"Niiiiido." Nidoqueen commented as it tried to keep duskmon pinned to the ground.
"What the?" Duskmon asked. "Get off of me you big blue buffoon. Do you have any idea who I am?"
"All we know is that you're charging this town for protection." Phoebe said as she teleported in from places unknown. "That's not nice."
"That may be, but considering I am king of these parts, you just got yourself into a whole lot of trouble." Duskmon replied as it teleported to freedom.
"Queen?" Nidoqueen said in confusion.
At that point Phoebe teleported away just in time to avoid Duskmon's blades, and then they both engaged in a confusing teleportation battle. Which seems to be what happens whenever two teleporting things fight eachother, but they weren't the only ones that could teleport.
Zari was with me trying to stop the Greymons, both of which had done more damage to the town than to us. The bubblegun was not very effective, it slowed them down a bit, but they could break out of the goo really easilly. The thunder attacks seemed to hurt them the most, but Magnum was running out of juice. I was trying to slow them down enough so I could get far enough ahead of them to let Blossom out and use sleep powder. Eventually I let Hellblade out so he could act as a distraction. Their fire-based projectile attack couldn't hurt him, and he was fast enough to dodge any of their attempts to hit him with their horns, tails, and claws. I returned him once I had Blossom out and ready to go with Sleep powder. They breathed it in, but they kept going, Zari teleported us to safety while the powder worked its magic, a minute later, both dinosaur digimon were unconcious.
Meanwhile Phoebe and Duskmon were still teleporting around in mid air, with the odd shadowball flying off in random directions. While Bulby and Nidoqueen were idly watching in confusion. Bulby decided to start charging up a solarbeam, waiting for the two to slow down.
"Should I join them?" Zari asked.
"Nah, she needs absolute focus." I replied.
Eventually Phoebe started to slow down, which led Duskmon to believe he had won.
"Tired?" Duskmon asked. "I'll tell you what, tell me what the hell you are, join my army, and I'll let you live. Refuse and you die right here."
Bulby opened fire with solarbeam before Phoebe could even reply, he hit duskmon right on that big eye on his chest with solar beam, propeling him several feet away. He crashed to the ground. Despite the amount of blood and ocular fluid that poured out of the eye, he acted like it was only a minor injury.
"Magnum, use magnet bomb now! " I said to magnum who was getting a bit tired as well.
Phoebe teleported over to us. Wrapped her arms around me and pretty much collapsed, while the explosions from the magnet bomb attack went on in the background. I didn't see what kind of damage they did, but duskmon was still breathing afterwards.
"These things are strong." She weakly said.
"We can handle it though baby." I replied.
"Zari why don't you go check on Henry and Claire?" I asked.
"Egh, fine." Zari replied, teleporting away soon after.
"You ok baby girl?" I asked.
"Just tired." She softly replied.
"Ok." I said, feeling a bit relieved.
"Allright then, you want to fight me? Great, I'll be back tomorrow with an army." Duskmon said as he managed to stand."Tomorrow, I will destroy this town, not one building will be left standing, not one digimon left unconsumed."
"You've done it now, you've doomed us all." A furball of a digimon said from across the street.
"Duskmon Sir, please you must reconsider." The mayor begged, annoyingly standing in just the right position to block another solar beam from Bulby.
"Allright fine, deliver the humans to me by tomorrow and your village will be spared." Duskmon said. "But you still have to pay for protection in full."
And with that he teleported away, while Zari joined us on the roof with Henry and Claire. We had no idea where he teleported to, and none of our pokemon were able to follow him. He had escaped for now, crippled but alive.
"You heard what he said, surrender!" Another resident digimon called out.
"Why, it's obvious we can beat him, else he wouldn't have run away." I replied. "I'm not going to be eaten by some eyeball covered freak."
"You idiots, don't you see you ruined everything?" Mayor K. Numemon replied. "If you really want to help just surrender, please. We already know we can't beat you."
"No we haven't ruined everything." Phoebe said. " Tomorrow we'll defeat his army, just wait, you'll see."
"What do we do with the dinosaurs?" Asked Henry.
"I don't know." I replied. "But I have an idea."
"Ok we got two unconscious greymon here." I declared before the town. "If we finished them off a few of you can absorb their data and get stronger.
"Why don't your own digimon do that?" One of them asked.
"Because they aren't digimon, they could kill them, but they wouldn't get as much from it." I replied. "We need one or two volunteers to take these thing's data.
"Or we could just use the greymon." Phoebe replied.
"Pheebles you said your powers didn't work on them." I replied.
"They don't, but, maybe they'll be willing to help?" She asked.
"Baby girl, sometimes you're right, but this isn't one of those times." I replied.
"Look, let's put it this way. You aren't going to win, so if we lose tomorrow, you're dead. You have a chance to get some data, grow a little stronger, and fight back. Are any of you going to volunteer or not?" I said to the townspeople, begining to doubt that any of them were willing to help.
"Ok then, I guess we're doing this ourselves." I said after an extended period of silence as a crowd began to gather.
"Wait." A palmon said from the crowd. "I'll go."
"Are you nuts? We should run away while we still can." Said another member of the crowd.
"No, duskmon needs to be stopped, he's enslaved us, maybe he even enslaved others. We have to stop this or die trying." The palmon replied.
"Allright then, anyone else?" I asked.
"You sure about this Cj?" Phoebe asked.
"We need all the help we can get don't we?"
The palmon wrapped one of the greymon up in it's vines, and started to drain it's energy while it was unconcious. After about 5 minutes of this it painlessly expired and it's body was converted into a stream of data, which palmon then absorbed.
"No one else wants to join so go and take the other one." I said after watching the spectacle.
"Ok." The palmon replied as it entangled the other greymon.
"It's still so small." Phoebe replied. "It probably couldn't even get passed Cubey, even with the type disadvantage."
"Really Pheebles? I'm hoping this will be enough data for it to digivolve." I replied as the second greymon began to be converted into data.
"This has to be one of the strangest things I've ever seen." Henry said.
"Yeah, you'd think it just turn into a pile of blood and organs." Claire replied.
"No you'd think they'd just consume it." Zari said. "Nothin turns into a pile of blood and organs when it dies."
"Well after they start eating it it does." Claire argued.
"So what's the plan for tomorrow?" Henry asked.
"The plan is for you two to hang out at the train station, and focus on training your pokemon." I said. "We'll handle the fighting."
"Are you serious?" Henry asked.
"We don't know how big this army is going to be and we don't have a huge supply of weapons." I said. I had tried shooting one of the greymons earlier, but they were so big standard guns were practically useless.
"What Cj means is it's best if you just stay back and train so you can get stronger." Phoebe added. "Right now your pokemon are still too weak."
"Right, we get it." Henry said.
"What about me?" Zari asked.
"You're staying in the hotel tonight, but you can stay." Phoebe replied. "Now please Cj, can we get some sleep?"
"Just a second." I replied. "Palmon why don't you just stay at the hotel with Zari?"
"Or Zari could stay with me, I live here ya know?" Palmon replied.
"Ok, that works." I said. "Everyone else, hopefully by noon tomorrow this town will be free."
"You want me to stay in a strange house with a complete stranger?" Zari asked.
"What are you worried about? You got your stuff back." I replied.
"Fine, see you tomorrow then." She crossly replied.
"Allright Pheebles, let's go." I said to my beloved.
-a few minutes later-
Phoebe and I gathered up our pokemon and returned to the bus for some much needed rest.
"This is a disaster." I said as I laid next to my beloved. Many digimon were fleeing the village, only a few of them stayed. It seemed like we may very well end up liberating a ghost town.
"We'll figure it out, just relax." Phoebe said.
"And after all that data, palmon still didn't digivolve." I said.
"Maybe it didn't want to until it needed to." Phoebe said. "Can they do that?"
"I don't know." I replied.
"Cj I need to sleep . I'll talk to you again in a few hours." Phoebe said before she kissed me and closed her eyes. "Then we can figure out how to deal with this."
"Ok goodnight baby girl." I softly replied.
I fell asleep myself just a bit later. I had Hellblade guarding the outside, in case any of the towns people got any ideas. Cap'n' Magnum was tired, I was going to need to find a way to get him charged up again. All this over what appeared to be cabbages. I didn't even like cabbages.