Episode 1.06: Sick Muse

Once again, Penguinmon was sitting on his couch watching television while Joshua found himself unable to peel his eyes away from his blue and white phone-turned-Digivice. Instead of doing anything to discover more about how the strange machine worked, like he had been doing before encountering Rabbitmon, Joshua had been reduced to waiting in vain for his Digivice to give notice of another Digimon appearing. That would mean that he and the other tamers and their partners could meet up again and take on a new threat from the Digital World, and more exciting than the prospect of leading Penguinmon into battle was the thought that he would see Lynn and Emily again.

Thinking about the two girls made Joshua's face flush, and he was grateful that Penguinmon didn't notice or care about Joshua's silent embarrassment.

This was the first time that Joshua had gotten phone numbers from girls his age who were not related to him, and the fact that he had somehow managed to get the numbers from two different girls made the achievement all the more unbelievable. Joshua had been interested in plenty of girls before this, but his crushes had always been limited to merely admiring his crushes from afar. He thought that he could never have approached a girl as stunning as Lynn or as charismatic as Emily in a thousand years, and yet, somehow, he had both of their numbers in his phone. Joshua wanted to laugh, but felt too nauseous to do so. Here he was, a bonafide Digimon tamer who had faced down two sinister Digimon (he mentally discounted the pink-furred Rabbitmon) and stood up to two other tamers and their Digimon partners, but he still could not work up the courage to pick up his phone and text either girl.

How pathetic was that?

So, Joshua sat on the couch next to Penguinmon and chewed the inside of his lip as he alternated between looking at his phone and pretending to ignore it in the hope that either Lynn or Emily would reach out to him first and save him the trouble of figuring out how to start a conversation with either of them.

That only happened long after Joshua had all but given up. The text message came a bit after midnight, and interrupted Joshua's halfhearted attempt at a civics lesson that aimed to explain House of Cards to a befuddled Penguinmon. Joshua's Digivice began to vibrate in his hand and he instantly cut short his lecture on the three branches of the American government. Joshua's brown eyes frantically scoured his phone's screen. The lethargy brought on by the late hour and the daylong Netflix binge was replaced by excitement as Joshua read the words "Digimon Detected!" over and over again. Just as he was about to say something to Penguinmon, Joshua's eyes widened even further when his phone buzzed with another notification.

This time it was a text message from Emily. It read, "New Digimon on 35W. I'm picking Lynn up. Want a lift?"

Joshua sent back an affirmative response at once along with his address, which he had to retype twice due to his trembling fingers. Once the message was typo-free and delivered, Joshua let out the breath he had been holding and turned to Penguinmon with a wide smile. "We've got a new Digimon to take on, Penguinmon!"

"But I don't want to go back in your backpack."

"Don't worry," Joshua said absentmindedly as he started rooting through the clothes in his closet, "we won't be taking my bike. Emily said that she'll drive us to this one." Joshua turned back to Penguinmon holding up two patterned shirts in front of him. "Which one do you think looks better, the plaid or the stripes?"

Instead of answering Joshua's question, Penguinmon griped, "Why do you keep insisting that we go looking for trouble? I would rather keep watching this show. Let the others handle it."

"I don't go looking for trouble," Joshua insisted as he decided that the plaid pattern of blue and black squares on the shirt in his left hand went best with his black t-shirt, "it just seems to happen." As he headed to the bathroom Joshua called back, "Besides, you did pretty well when you were dealing with BlackAgumon and Dracmon!"

"I'm only alive because Floramon was there!"

Joshua popped his head through the door as he squeezed some toothpaste onto a mechanical toothbrush and, with a smug grin, asked, "You mean the same Floramon who'll be with us tonight?" Instead of waiting for a response, Joshua ducked back into the bathroom to make himself presentable and left Penguinmon was left by himself to stew silently.

When Joshua emerged into the basement's hallway again, Penguinmon noticed that Joshua's dirty blonde mane had been meticulously flattened as best he could, although some hairs were already rising up in revolt. Penguinmon wisely said nothing in response to Joshua's unspoken question about his appearance.

The two of them moved upstairs to the ground floor's living room, and it was there that Joshua and Penguinmon waited. Neither of them spoke for fear of waking Joshua's mother, but Joshua paced back and forth between the back of the couch and the window. His eyes constantly scanned the dark streets outside, but it wasn't after many false alarms that a pair of headlights slowed to a stop outside of the house and then clumsily turned into the house's driveway with a roar of unnecessary acceleration.

Joshua's face lit up and he turned to Penguinmon to quickly whisper "How do I look?" Before the Digimon could answer his question, Joshua tried to flatten his hair down again.

The quiet of the house was violently marred by the ringing of the front doorbell. Forgetting his hair, Joshua hurried to the door and flung it open with only a single worried glance in the direction of his mother's bedroom.

But how could Joshua worry about anything when he saw Lynn standing in his doorway wearing a jean jacket over a yellow camisole? In an instant, the greeting that Joshua had prepared and even practiced a few times in the mirror was caught in his suddenly dry throat.

"Um, hello," Lynn said, seemingly unaware of the effect that she was having on Joshua, "are you ready to go?"

"Oh, right," Joshua forced out. "Yeah, I'm ready. It's just- You look-"

Thankfully, Joshua was saved from making a pathetic attempt at a compliment by a sleepy but annoyed voice yelling, "Who's at the door, Joshua? It's one in the morning!"

Joshua's face blanched with mortification and he summoned an apologetic smile to give Lynn before hollering back to his mother, "I'm going to hang out with Joules!"

There was a pause during which Joshua was not sure if his lie would work, and then the groggy voice replied, "Okay, have fun and be safe!"

Once he was sure that the shouted conversation was over, Joshua turned off the living room's light and stepped over the threshold to join Lynn outside. Once Penguinmon had followed, Joshua closed the door and they all walked to the boxy little four-door car idling in the driveway. "Sorry you had to listen to that," Joshua offered weakly as he lingered outside of the car.

Lynn accepted his apology with a wordless smile before climbing into the front passenger seat. Joshua opened the back door to find Floramon and Kudamon looking up at him.

"Okay, move over," Floramon said to Kudamon, who silently made space for Penguinmon and Joshua to join them in the backseat. Penguinmon needed a boost from Joshua to get into the small black car, and Joshua followed him and closed the door behind him. "So, what now?" Joshua asked the girls in the front seat after he had fastened his and Penguinmon's seatbelts.

"Now," Emily answered with a grin, "we go find ourselves a Digimon." Without warning, she threw the car into reverse and backed out of the driveway with a jerking turn which had her passengers holding onto the car or each other for security. With another shift of the stick, a sharp turn of the wheel, and a roar of the engine, the six of them were off.

It was not long before they were on the highway and Emily, no longer constrained by stop signs or traffic lights, pushed the pedal nearly to the floor to urge the aged car to go faster and faster down the empty highway. During the drive, the three Digimon and the three humans had two parallel conversations. Penguinmon and Floramon primarily shared stories of strange human behavior and Netflix recommendations while Kudamon listened intently. Meanwhile, the girls subjected Joshua to the type of friendly interrogation endured by any recruit to an existing friend group. Joshua was overwhelmed by the attention and attempted to answer Emily and Lynn's questions honestly without embarrassing himself. It was not the easiest task.

As the group continued north along Interstate 35W, Joshua felt more and more like the seating arrangement was a blessing in disguise. Even as small as Kudamon was, having four passengers in the back of an already cramped car was not ideal, with Penguinmon almost sitting on Joshua's thigh. But there were some benefits, chief among which was that Joshua did not have to make eye contact with either Lynn or Emily. He was sitting right behind the first girl and every time that the car's driver started to turn her head to look at Joshua, or even at Lynn, five voices rose up as one and demanded that Emily keep her eyes on the road. As a result, while his stomach was still alive with the flutter of butterflies, Joshua was able to keep his voice tolerably between a choked-up silence and idiotic babbling.

The car gave a sudden jerk of deceleration as Emily quit trying to squash the gas pedal under her sandal and instead started subjecting the brake pedal to the same treatment.

"What happened?" Joshua asked. "Did we finally hit something?"

"No," Emily replied tersely. "Show him your phone, Lynn."

The other girl turned around as well as she could in her seat and fixed Joshua with her blue eyes and smiled softly at him before saying, "We've been tracking this Digimon, but now, well, you can see it yourself."

Joshua extracted himself from Penguinmon's panicked embrace and leaned forward to take Lynn's phone from her slender hands. On the screen of the yellow-trimmed Digivice was the increasingly familiar sight of a green radar on a black background overlain by a grid, with a bright green dot blinking inside one of the boxes created by the network of horizontal and vertical lines. This time, the flashing circle seemed to be rapidly heading towards the arrows which Joshua assumed represented the six humans and Digimon on the center of the screen, forcing the screen to refresh with the squares of the grid growing larger each time. Joshua watched this phenomenon occur twice and then spoke carefully, "Emily, I think you better pull over before this thing passes us."

"You go it," the young woman said and jerked the wheel to the right, causing her fiery mane of red hair to fly in the other direction and her passengers, save for Kudamon, to cry out in surprise. The car came to a rough stop on the shoulder of the highway, rocking once before settling. Unlike everyone else in the car, Emily seemed completely unfazed by her reckless driving and calmly unbuckled her seatbelt before turning around in her seat to address the others. "Okay, y'all get out and set up a perimeter," she ordered. "We're not letting it though, understood?"

Joshua felt a sudden urge to fire off a salute, but he suppressed it and got out of the car with the other passengers instead. They prepared for the Digimon's arrival according to Emily's directions. Emily and Floramon planted themselves in the center of the empty highway. When the Digimon appeared, it would be up to Floramon to subdue it. To that end, she had already partially extended her vines in anticipation of ensnaring the approaching foe.

With some difficulty, Joshua and Penguinmon had climbed over the threshold to the other side of the highway. They were assigned to spook the unknown creature with a few attacks into the other half of the highway if it was charging down the south-bound lane. Finally, Lynn and Kudamon were stationed on the shoulder by Emily's parked car, the former to keep an eye out for the tell-tale lights of an incoming vehicle from the south and the latter, like the other teenagers, to monitor the approaching Digimon on her phone.

The three teams had barely gotten in position when they all heard a noise like bare feet slapping on pavement along with the rattle of metal armor coming from the north. The approaching Digimon galloping down the half of the highway where Joshua and Penguinmon were standing, and Joshua idly thought to himself that the new Digimon could be said to be roughly obeying the basic rules of traffic. It was even using the bypass lane.

As was the plan, Penguinmon let loose with a few weak icy projectiles at the nearing figure. The frozen missiles hit the towering creature, only to shatter uselessly against its armor. While it did not leap over to the girls' side of I-35 as anticipated, the Digimon did come to a halt.

The Digimon which stopped in front of Joshua and Penguinmon stood on four powerful black legs with a torso jutting out from above the two foremost ones. From its head to its thighs the centaur-like creature was decked out in an array of armor that, when combined with the shadows thrown by the streetlights, obscured the blue-and-white scaled skin of its upper body. The Digimon's helm was a solid, glittering black broken only by the slots for the wearer's eyes and a jagged, silver spike rising from the top of the intimidating creature's head. Even with the horn and the blood-red armor protecting its chest, the eyes of Joshua and Penguinmon were inevitably drawn to the Digimon's armored gloves which were emblazoned with a fiery pattern.

The Digimon towering over Joshua and Penguinmon spoke with a booming voice which echoed across the empty highway, "Ha! I knew there was something afoot whom Digimon I was seeking, but to find only three low-class peasants instead of the feared Orochimon or even the ferocious Deltamon, ha! It seems like a joke!" The Digimon spread his gauntleted hands wide in invitation and thundered merrily, "If you wish to fight me, then very well! I admire your courage, whelp, but expect no mercy from the likes of Sagittarimon!"

Penguinmon looked completely terrified and even when Sagittarimon started to gallop towards him, Penguinmon remained frozen in fear. "A little help here?" Joshua hollered.

In a flash, a whip-like vine flew across the highway just inches above the ground as Floramon cried, "Stamen Rope!" It shot through the posts of the metal railing bisecting the highway and then seized one of Sagittarimon's front legs as he was in the middle of a bounding leap. Floramon's vine went taut and the armored beast toppled over to land mere feet in front of Penguinmon. The larger Digimon caught himself with his armored hands before he hit the ground so that the metal scraping on road in a horrible shriek.

Emily leapt over the railing in one fluid motion, sliding across the metal on the seat of her jeans. Lynn, by contrast, decided against risking her clothes and carefully stepped through a gap in the barrier. Kudamon was perched on the shoulder of Lynn's jean jacket and glaring silently at where Sagittarimon was slowly rising to his feet. Floramon, satisfied with having hog-tied Sagittarimon to the metal divider, detached her vine from her hand and wore a toothy grin as she followed Emily.

"So," Sagittarimon said. His voice was still obnoxiously loud, but now it was also tainted with anger. "You would stoop so low as to have your wenches fight for you? A shameful display of cowardice!" The clanking Digimon pulled on Floramon's vine insistently, causing the divider to which it was affixed to groan in protest.

"Uh, wenches?" Emily asked sharply.

Sagittarimon laughed condescendingly as he rose up from his kneeling position to his full impressive height. His attention was still focused on the petrified Penguinmon as Sagittarimon remarked, "I admit that I am surprised that so weak a champion managed to attract not one, but four trollops in addition to your servant." He chortled humorlessly before continuing, "Although I suppose of all the strange details of this strange realm, a pauper being mistaken for a prince is just another." With a single swipe of his gauntlet's claws, Sagittarimon severed the vine constraining his muscular leg and reared back in preparation for stomping on Penguinmon.

Before the attack could land, five voices yelled out variations of, "Penguinmon, run!" Penguinmon let out a fearful honk and waddling away as fast as his orange feet could carry him while Sagittarimon's powerful feet thundered down on the section of the road where Penguinmon had been standing mere moments before.

Instead of chasing after Penguinmon, Sagittarimon reached behind his back and retrieved a bow that was the same shade of crimson as his gauntlets. With his free hand, he pulled out a wicked-looking arrow from the quiver haphazardly secured to his side and notched his bow. Sagittarimon emitted an exaggerated sigh as he took aim at Penguinmon's plump body, "There is no honor in shooting an opponent in the back, even a cowardly knave such as yourself." He pulled back the bowstring. "Still, it must be done. Judgement Arrow!"

In the instant before Sagittarimon loosed his arrow, Kudamon launched her own attack. With a shout of "Bullet Whirlwind!" louder than any utterance the rodent-like Digimon had ever made before, Kudamon launched herself from the Lynn's shoulder and corkscrewed through the air so that her sleek white body with its array of purple markings becoming a blur. Kudamon struck the Sagittarimon's hand and threw off the surprised Digimon's aim so that the arrow into which he had poured his energy flew wildly off-course. When it struck the wall which had been erected to spare nearby houses from a view of the highway across the street from them, the arrow detonated with a tremendous explosion.

The arrow was not the only thing that exploded. All of Sagittarimon's composure evaporated as he roared not out of pain, but rather from sheer indignation, "You empty-headed trollop! This is a matter of men, not the domain of wretched sows!" Sagittarimon reared back on his hind legs and, after a throaty scream of "Meteor Gallop!", began bucking and stomping wildly on the ground. The Digimon's impressive tantrum threw up chunks of road with each thundering impact of his feet and all Penguinmon and Kudamon could do was attempt to dodge the rain of rubble. Kudamon was the more successful of the two, with Penguinmon squawking every time a piece of asphalt struck him.

"Wow, it's like if Paul was turned into a Digimon," Joshua offered. Neither of the girls laughed, Emily because her mind was racing trying to think of a strategy and Lynn because she was still shocked by Kudamon launching herself into the fight.

Emily's eyes narrowed in concentration until she barked out with a sharp twang, "Joshua! Look this guy up on your Digivice, see if there's any information that can help us!"

"Yes, ma'am!" Joshua said eagerly.

"Floramon," Emily said to the Digimon standing by her side, "get those two out of there before they get hurt!"

With a nod of acknowledgement, Floramon thrust out her flowering hands. "You got it, chief!" Floramon said. Then, with a cry of "Stamen Rope!", two more vines shot out from the scaled Digimon's hands towards Penguinmon and Kudamon. With slightly more care than she had used grabbing Sagittarimon's leg, Floramon seized both Penguinmon and Kudamon and retracted her vines to pull them out from under the hail of falling roadway caused by Sagittarimon's bucking feet.

"Thank you," Penguinmon offered once Floramon had released him.

"What do you have for me, Joshua?" demanded Emily.

Joshua was furiously scrolling through the information his Digivice had come up with. "Let's see," he mumbled. "Champion-level, vaccine attribute, virus busters family-"

"Anything we can actually use?" Emily asked exasperatedly as Sagittarimon stopped his rampage and glared at the three Digimon clustered together.

Joshua's eyes devoured the information streaming past his eyes and he started to read fragments aloud unconsciously, "Nicknamed 'the judgement of hope', incredible proud, possible mutation of Centarumon-" Then the teen's muddy brown eyes shot up from his phone's screen and he exclaimed, "I think I found something!"

Just as the words left Joshua's lips, Sagittarimon announced, "Judgement Arrow!"

"Look out!" Lynn screamed and she roughly grabbed Joshua's arm and pulled him to the ground just before Sagittarimon fired another red-tipped arrow at the assembled teenagers and Digimon. The projectile soared through the air, leaving a star-streaked trail behind it, until struck the highway in front of the highway median. Another explosion bloomed, sending up huge chunks of the road and creating a ragged crater in the middle of the black asphalt.

Luckily for Sagittarimon's targets, they had all managed to move quickly enough to avoid the worst of the explosion. All of the humans and Digimon were still coated in a veil of dust and each had picked up a few scrapes and bruises from their desperate efforts to avoid Sagittarimon's attack. Looking up from her skinned hands, Emily growled, "What do you have, Joshua?"

Joshua picked himself up from the ground and wiped his glasses clean. Quickly realizing that he was not going to get them spotless, Joshua replaced his glasses on the bridge of his nose and started talking, "So, this guy is much stronger than your average Champion-level Digimon-"

"No kidding," Floramon grumbled.

Ignoring her interjection, Joshua continued, "But he doesn't actually seem to be that sturdy. That's why he wears the armor. If we can stall for long enough and get in one good hit that should be enough to destabilize him."

"So, our plan is to just stay alive and land one good hit?" asked Lynn, skepticism creeping into her voice.

"I've got no problem with it," Floramon commented with a toothy grin. "What'd'ya say, Emily?

Emily returned the smile, her green eyes sparkling. "Go for it, take him out of commission, guys."

"You heard the woman! Let's go!" Floramon said to her fellow Digimon before leading the charge. Penguinmon and Kudamon followed after Floramon, albeit with much less visible enthusiasm.

Sagittarimon saw the trio of Digimon coming towards him and immediately started reaching for another arrow from the quiver at his side.

"Oh no, you don't," Floramon grunted. "Stamen Rope!" Another thick cord of vegetation sprung from one of her hands and entangled Sagittarimon's free hand with a snap, halting his attempt to restock his weapon with a fresh arrow. "Go," Floramon ordered as she struggled to restrain the much larger Digimon.

Floramon's allies did not have to hear the command twice. Both Penguinmon and Kudamon sped past her, the former already launching his own attack. "Ice Prism!" he let out and followed up with a series of three-dimensional cubes of ice. Each of them broke against Sagittarimon's red chest plate without having any effect.

"Try aiming for the legs," Kudamon suggested as she overtook Penguinmon through combination of her paws and powerful undulating tail.

Sagittarimon's gaze narrowed behind the slits of his helmet. "Pathetic," he spat as he started to return his bow to his back. "Even together, you three whelps amount to little more than a nuisance." After stowing his weapon, Sagittarimon raised his clawed gauntlet to slice through the latest of Floramon's vines.

Before he could bring down his hand and free himself, Kudamon cried, "Blinding Ray!", and a beam of harsh white light shot out from the glowing purple glyphs on Kudamon's back to strike Sagittarimon's face.

Sagittarimon bellowed in pain, and he began to stumble around and grab helplessly at his eyes. The larger Digimon wasn't able to defend himself when Penguinmon attacked Sagittarimon's unprotected legs, with every burst of ice Penguinmon fired cutting into the black scales. In a blind panic, Sagittarimon started to run. He stampeded past Penguinmon and Kudamon and threatened to take Floramon along with him.

As soon as the tug on her vine started to pull her off of her feet, Floramon began to retract it. Soon enough, she had shortened the distance between her and Sagittarimon enough that Floramon was in the air instead of being dragged along the now-uneven highway when Sagittarimon broke into a full gallop. With a final effort, Floramon closed the gap enough that she landed on the careening Digimon's back, the two Digimon still connected by the leafy vine wrapped around Sagittarimon's hand.

"Yeehaw!" Emily cheered. "You've got him now!"

After finding her footing on the back of her unwilling mount, Floramon leapt off of Sagittarimon and used her vine to swing past the charging Digimon's front before rising back up to land on roughly the same section of Sagittarimon's back which she had just left. This forced Sagittarimon's entangled arm to his chest even as his other limb reached behind his back to try and frantically grab at his unwanted rider. As she dodged Sagittarimon's snatching hand, Floramon grimaced and seized the rest of her vine in both of her flowered hands and slipped it over Sagittarimon's head by standing on her root-like toes. Then, Floramon pulled the vine tight.

Sagittarimon immediately began to gasp and sputter. As unpleasant as it was, Floramon did not stop choking the larger Digimon. First Sagittarimon slowed to a trot and then he halted altogether as his free hand grasped more and more feebly at the makeshift noose around his neck. Then all of his struggling ceased and the bulky Digimon toppled over onto his side as Floramon hopped off of his back.

"Wow," Joshua said queasily as he and the others slowly crept closer to Floramon and to Sagittarimon's fallen form.

"Is he dead?" asked Lynn quietly.

"No, just unconscious," Emily said grimly. "See? He's still breathing, and not disintegrating like the others. We need to finish him off."

Penguinmon and Kudamon reached Sagittarimon's exposed underside, but both of them hesitated. "I really don't like this," murmured Penguinmon, "he's not even awake."

"Exactly!" said Joshua with forced bravado. "Emily's right! Now's our best chance at stopping him!"

With a heavy sigh, Penguinmon started to gather indigo energy in his orange beak. Next to him, Kudamon began to concentrate on her own attack, causing the arcane purple patterns on her back to glow brightly. Then, with simultaneous cries of "Ice Prim!" and "Blinding Ray!", both of the reluctant Digimon launched their attacks. The beam of light which Kudamon emitted from her narrow back met with Penguinmon's frosty pyramid and passed through the shape so that it split up into a rainbow of colors which pierced the target's stomach. Penguinmon's attack followed suit, digging deep into Sagittarimon's flesh before shattering. The wounds which the two smaller Digimon inflicted proved fatal and a flurry of white particles began to bleed out of the hole in Sagittarimon's stomach as he started to dissolve. Floramon joined the other Digimon and, along with Kudamon, seemed to enter a trance-like state as she began absorbing the particles which had once made up Sagittarimon. After some confusion, Penguinmon tried to mimic them, closing his red eyes and relaxing as some of the white flecks diverted their course and began to flow into him as well.

"What are they doing?" Joshua asked the girls.

Emily paused wiping her scratched and bloody hands off on the legs of her jeans to answer, "Apparently whenever a Digimon dies it reverts back into data which can then be absorbed by the Digimon that beat it."

"That's supposed to be how they get stronger," added Lynn helpfully.

Joshua smacked his forehead with the palm of his hand. "Of course," he groaned, "just like in Tamers!"

Emily and Lynn exchanged curious glances before their attention returned to the Penguinmon, Floramon, and Kudamon. Sagittarimon's body was gone and the other Digimon looked content, even a little dreamy. "So what now?" asked Joshua.

"What time is it?" Emily said to Lynn.

"Almost three in the morning."

Emily chewed her lip. "Shoot, I've got to get home. You okay to spend the night?"

Lynn thought for a moment. "Yeah, that should be okay. I don't have to work tomorrow."

A silence hung over the group before Emily said, "Joshua?"

"What?"

"Do you want me to drive you home? Or are you okay with spending the night at my house?"

"Uh," Joshua said dumbly. He imagined his mother's negative reaction to him sleeping over with two girls, especially without asking for her permission first, but it was accompanied by other, more optimistic scenarios. His optimism won out and Joshua managed to stammer out as casually as he could manage, "Yeah, I'd be down for that."

If anyone else noticed his nerves, they didn't remark on them. Emily just flashed another winning smile at him and started walking back to her car. "Come on," she said, "let's get going."

The six of them, human and Digimon alike, dragged themselves across the ruined highway. All of them were eager to get some sleep and all of them were unaware of the drone flying overhead and recording them.