vi. i'll give them shelter like you've done for me
Taiga reacts first. He stumbles out of his chair and to the hangar door. He vibrates in place, hopping from foot to foot. Rina meets him there, smiling like a child.
"Come on, Taiga!" she laughs, like she's so much calmer than he is. "We're just meeting a friend. Don't get nervous."
He glowers at her. "We taught you that."
Rina puts her nose in the air as light floods through the hangar door. "And the student has become the master!"
Taiga snorts, instantly feeling better. At least, he feels better long enough to get down the ramp and around the ship to the throne. Mirei is standing there, watching him with those cautious eyes. She barely blinks. His heart comically skips a beat. Get it together, idiot, he thinks as the others come around. They're all staring at him, Niko nudging him in the back to talk first. Traitor.
Still, he had started this. "You're, you're the one on the terminal."
She nods.
All of them breathe sighs of relief and seem to slump. "We finally made it," Akiho whines.
"Um … I'm sorry?"
Rina nudges Taiga this time. He can feel the bruise on his back. "We, I got a message every now and again from someone. They spoke to me about a girl every now and again, and about how he couldn't get back to her. He said that she could change the fate of everything."
Her eyes water, and she wipes at them, hard. "I … I see…"
"The last message I received." Taiga forces his voice to calm down. She knew who he was talking about, and that meant all of it was true. "He sent me a weird attachment. When I clicked it, a signal began emitting from my digivice, even though we were underground. And the radar's been pinging ever since. Do you, can you,-" His tongue feels swollen. His heart hurts.
"Humans," he manages. "Are all stuck underground now. The digimon that have worked with us can barely stay around for long, and we can't stay when we go to them. Can you help us? That message, your dad said you could. I don't know what happened to him, but he called someone to help you so, I want to believe he's out there. If you can help us, I'll help you look for him."
Yuuya groans quietly but Taiga is unmoved. They cannot expect her to do this for free. There's no one who'd do something like that.
"All right." She holds out her ghostly hand as if to shake. Then she looks at herself and laughs.
Despite everything, or maybe because of the long journey, Taiga laughs too until it hurts.
Mirei remembers a little better now. She remembers her father's big, warm hands, clasped in prayer. The digital world wasn't religious in the way humans were, but since it had started merging, more things were supposed to follow. She didn't quite understand, but, she trusted her father, and she trusted the person in the computer he was talking with.
Norn was very nice. At least to her then younger mind. If she'd known what the two of them had been planning, maybe she would have felt differently. But right then, she'd only been happy to help however she could, especially with her plushie in hand.
Her plushie who was now Meicoomon, all that was left of her Digimon partners.
"When the worlds had started to meld, dad and I fell into one of the random portals." She tells the motley group of children. Their digivices glowed with recognition, and they were older than expected. One isn't a full blooded human. That was so interesting! There weren't robots when she was awake before.
"We were lucky and ended up in the castle. Bar the overpowered monsters who live in it, most digimon were peaceful or at least left us alone. We weren't hungry, nor thirsty. It made it easier to run, until we grew tired. Eventually, at the back of the castle, we met a strange girl."
Mirei regards them all before continuing. "She called herself Norn, the last piece of Yggdrasil."
A soft gasp echoes from the digivice in Rina's hand. The humans share a look.
"Yggdrasil," Mirei continues, ignoring her sleeping body and sitting on the steps. "Became aware of humans long before they fell into their world. Unfortunately, there was very little their arms could see alone. So, they sent a branch, Mikihara Norn, to study the humans and digimon that had met, to create those chosen ones and see if the world was worth saving. She decided it was, though other branches of Yggdrasil decided it wasn't. I think."
Her voice is quiet. She feels that one named Taiga watching her.
"I wasn't there. This is just what she told me and my dad." She has to be clear about these things. she remembers now. Otherwise they'll think she's actually a thousand years old, instead of dreaming for that long.
"By the time the world was saved, it was already too late for the barriers. They'd been eroding for so long, the connection just stayed, made permanent."
it's easy now, looking back, to see what her father had been doing. His intentions had always been to love and protect her. His wish was-
"My father sent you to me," Mirei says, looking at her hands. "Because he's the one who turned the two worlds the way they are now, and the key is with me to undo it and correct the error." She looks at them all. "I know what to do, but in order to do that, we need to get this place back to the digital world's remains."