Episode 1.07: Twilight Galaxy

The next morning, Joshua was roughly shaken awake. Slowly, Joshua's eyes adjusted to the light and started to focus on the figure standing over him. "Emily?" Joshua mumbled groggily as he picked himself up off of the floor. "Why are you wearing my glasses?"

"They're mine. Your pair is on my dresser." When Joshua did not move, Emily resumed jostling him. "Come on, get up!"

"You wear glasses?" asked Joshua even as he fumblingly retrieved his own pair from atop the dresser in front of which he had spent the night.

Joshua had made enough progress in getting up for Emily to let go of him and make her way over to the window. "I usually wear contacts," she said impatiently. "Will you get up?" With that, Emily threw open the blinds and bathed her bedroom's soft pink walls with the perfect quality of sunlight that only summer can produce.

Instead of being invigorated by the signs of a perfect summer day, Joshua shielded his eyes and whined, "Geez! Fine! I'm getting up, I'm getting up. What time is it anyways?"

"About nine o'clock," said Floramon as she entered the room. The Digimon was carrying a plate piled high with toast and grabbed the topmost piece and took a bite from it after she had strutted into the room. Penguinmon and Kudamon followed in Floramon's wake with far less swagger in their respective steps.

"I had to wait for my parents to go to work before waking you up to try and sneak you out," Emily explained to Joshua with a shrug when he started to say something about having three Digimon walking around her house.

"Especially because Emily's not supposed to have boys over!" Floramon crowed, stretching the penultimate word out and making it a musical taunt even with her mouth full of bread and jelly.

"Shut up!" Emily hissed at the Digimon. "She's still here!"

At that point, Lynn walked into Emily's room, brushing her long, silky brown hair with a hairbrush. "Why is it bad that Lynn's here?" Joshua asked earnestly.

"Did I do something wrong?" Lynn asked. Despite having had less sleep than Joshua, Lynn looked well-rested and completely put together. Her hair reached perfection with just a few more swipes of the brush in her hand. Even though both of them were wearing the same outfits they had worn the night before, Lynn's tidy image was a stark contrast to Joshua's severe bedhead and visibly wrinkled clothes.

Joshua was about to stutter out an assurance to Lynn that he was sure that she didn't do anything wrong, but he was interrupted by the harsh voice of a different young woman yelling, "Emily! You better not have my frickin' car keys!"

Emily gave everyone else in her bedroom a view of her grimace. "She's gonna be here in a minute," Emily said as she walked over to her closet and opened it, "so you need to hide."

"She's right," Joshua agreed with a nod, "we can't risk someone finding out about the Digimon."

"Not them, you," Emily sighed as she shoved Joshua forcefully into the darkness and closed the slatted doors after him.

Inside of the closet was a pile of shoes, boots mostly, that did very little to cushion Joshua when he toppled over onto them, yelping as he fell. From inside of the closet, Joshua heard a pair of feet stomping down the wood floor of the hallway to Emily's bedroom and then the same voice from earlier growling, "How many times have I told you not to touch my car?"

"Good morning to you too, sis," Emily drawled back. "I needed it to pick up my friend, and now I need it to take her home."

"Um, hi, Brie," Lynn interjected nervously and gave an awkward little wave.

Emily's sister ignored Lynn. Instead, Brie eyes dropped to the Digimon who were all lying motionless on the floor. "Stuffed animals and sleepovers," Brie said, her voice dripping with disdain. "Let me guess, you girls were up late taking magazine quizzes and doing each other's nails?"

The bedroom was silent until Lynn whispered, "Not exactly."

Joshua wanted to get a better look at what was going on, so he planted his hand on a mound of dirty clothes and propped himself up on one arm. Peeking through the narrow crack between the nearly closed doors of the closet, Joshua could see Brie Rayburn standing in the doorway to Emily's room and looking incredibly cross. The older girl looked to be two or three inches taller than her sister, and the strands of hair which had escaped the periwinkle towel on top of her head were the same color as Emily's. Joshua only hardly noticed Brie's hair as, besides her towel, Brie was dressed in only a pair of high-waisted jean shorts which ended under her pierced belly button and a crimson bra. Seeing Brie like this made Joshua want to forgive her for how she was speaking to Emily. It almost made him want to tumble out of the closet and introduce himself, but before he could get carried away, Joshua felt his heart stop.

As he had been preoccupied in studying Brie's sun-kissed curves, Joshua's hand had idly rolled the laundry beneath his palm. When he realized that his hand was not resting on familiar jeans or t-shirts but on a pair of underwear, Joshua forgot about Brie long enough to jerk his hand away from the pile of dirty clothes as if it contained a poisonous animal. The sudden loss of support made Joshua topple backwards into Emily's collection of cowboy boots, and the whole thing was capped off by a mercifully brief grunt of "Oof!"

All three girls' eyes darted to the closet, with Emily's and Lynn's widening in alarm and Brie's narrowing in suspicion. "What was that?" Brie asked and she took a step into Emily's room.

Emily hastened to block Brie's way and pulled out a ring of car keys from the back pocket of her jeans and jingled them as she wondered aloud, "What do you need your car for anyways? I thought you stayed out of summer school this year."

The distraction was a success and Brie lunged for her sibling's outstretched hand. "I don't have to tell you anything. It's my car, runt."

"Or maybe you just want to hit the beach for a few hours and get hit on," Emily said acidly as she spun the keys lazily on her index finger. "Is that why you need the car?"

The two sisters glared at each other until Brie shot a quick glance at Lynn. Finally, Brie jabbed her finger at Emily and snarled, "Fine! Take your friend home, but if you ain't back in an hour, you're dead." Brie then stalked out of the room, pausing only to savagely kick Penguinmon and shout, "And pick up your frickin' toys!"

Once Brie had slammed Emily's bedroom door closed behind her, the Digimon all quit pretending to be stuffed animals. Floramon and Kudamon helped Penguinmon to his feet while Emily and Lynn retrieved Joshua. The first thing that Joshua said to them was, "I should go introduced myself to her," and he started to drift towards the door, a dreamy, vacant look in his eyes.

Emily's resulting grip on Joshua's arm was unyielding. "Oh no, you don't, lover boy," she said, "we've gotta get you home."

"Besides, Joshua," huffed Lynn, "you don't want to get mixed up with a girl like her."

The teenagers and the Digimon worked their way out of the house wordlessly in order to avoid Brie. It was only when all of them were piled back into the small black car in the same seating arrangement from the previous night that Joshua asked, "So, how does everyone feel about last night's fight?"

Floramon puffed out her chest and bragged over the roar of Emily starting the engine, "He wasn't so tough!"

From the front of the car, Lynn countered, "That was only our first experience with all of this, but I think we were lucky that Sagit-whatever-mon wasn't as smart as he was strong."

Both Kudamon and Penguinmon nodded along as Lynn spoke, with Penguinmon mumbling, "The whole situation got very frightening very quickly."

Since she was the only one left who hadn't spoken her piece, Emily's passengers all looked to her as she careened down the road. Finally, after screeching to a stop a few inches past a stop sign, Emily said, "Look, I'm not saying this to be all sentimental or anything, but only because I reckon that the only way our little Digimon can keep beating big ones like last night is with numbers and by working together." Emily turned to look at the other passengers, and continued, "We better shape up if we want to succeed. I think the best way for us to keep winning is to expand our team.

The car started moving again with a lurch and Joshua fought to keep the excitement out of his voice as he started to ask, "You mean-"

With a sigh, Emily said, "Yeah, I mean we should probably try reaching out to those two jerks from the skate park."

"Well, that's great because I actually know-" began Joshua again, only for Lynn to cut him off.

"Oh, you don't mean the short one with the knife, do you, Emily? I don't want to deal with that one if we can help it," Lynn said with a sniff of her aquiline nose.

"Me neither, he was a real prick," Emily agreed and mulled things over. After she sped through a yellow light, Emily snapped her fingers. "I've got it! We'll talk to the jerk with the dinosaur and Joshua can talk to the other one!"

Joshua opened his mouth to argue, but before he could get out a single word, Lynn turned backwards in her seat and blessed him with a warm smile as she said, "Thanks, Joshua, you're a lifesaver!"

Not long after that, Emily jerked her sister's car to a stop in front of Joshua's house. "Hey, I've been meaning to ask you," Emily said as Joshua worked to unbuckle Penguinmon's seatbelt, "you live pretty close to us, but I don't think I've ever seen you around Southwest. Are you homeschooled, or something?"

"Uh, no," replied Joshua, "I actually go to South."

Emily whistled and Lynn said, "Isn't that kind of far away?" Her voice dropped to a whisper, "Like, in the ghetto?"

"It's not too bad after you get used to it. My best friend goes there and I only knew, like, one person at Southwest."

"Well, now you know two more," Lynn said, and Joshua could only smile dumbly at her.

After they had said their good-byes, Joshua and Penguinmon started towards the garage. Unbeknownst to any of the teenagers or Digimon, a small twin-rotor drone with a thick midnight black chassis sat glittering in the gutter of the house across the street. The drone was equipped with a powerful camera which had captured in perfect clarity both the car's license plate of the car and the digits which Joshua was now entering into the keypad in order to open up the garage door. All of this footage, and more was being handled, compressed, and streamed to the ninth floor of a nondescript office building in downtown Minneapolis to be reviewed.

Ken was smiling as he watched the footage on his computer for the third time. He ran a hand through his short brown hair and said to the man next to him, "Incredible, isn't it, Eddy? Daytime footage of an Unknown and its human accomplice." He was dressed in an immaculate slate gray suit and a black tie that was fitted to his tall, powerful frame and although there was a chair behind him, his excitement kept the man in his early thirties standing.

Eddy was a shorter, rounder man whose dangerously thin black hair was matted with sweat despite the building's air conditioning. "Yes, very impressive, Ken," Eddy said sarcastically. "Millions of dollars siphoned from across a dozen programs and you've captured a picture of some bird. Maybe I should call up the Raptor Center."

"Don't be cute, Eddy," Ken said, his eyes still fixed on the now-stagnant feed. "You and I both know that all of that money was being wasted. Subsidizing training for law enforcement by foreign experts? Improving intelligence sharing efforts by different agencies? Community outreach, Eddy? Those were all shortsighted fixes by armchair generals obsessed with fighting the last war." Ken reached for his computer's wireless mouse and pulled up a still image of the blue bird-like creature being helped out of the car and zoomed in on its docile features. "This," Ken said, jabbing the screen with his index finger, "is the future of combat."

"Again, Ken, I have to ask, just to play devil's advocate: a bird?"

"Not just a bird. A dinosaur, a centaur, a bat with knives…"

"An electric mouse who says 'Pika pika'?" Eddy offered with an irreverent smile.

Ken's brown eyes flashed dangerously. "Laugh all you want, Eddy, but each of these Unknowns seems to be able to materialize out of thin air and disrupt all but the most sophisticated electronics."

"To say nothing of their more violent capabilities," Eddy added, already anticipating Ken's train of thought.

"Exactly. If we could get that stupid-looking bird to appear inside of the Kremlin or an Iranian nuclear facility that would be damaging enough, but picture the problems we could solve if we used one of the big ones."

"Especially since they basically destroy any camera without puzzle-mapping capabilities and dissolve when they're killed," Eddy contributed. "The Russians, or whoever you'd like, would have no idea what hit them."

Ken remained silent. He and Eddy had run through variations of this same conversation many times. Instead of adding anything further, Ken came around from behind his desk and exited the office through a door which bore a nameplate reading "Kenneth Roberts, Director of Operations". Eddy was left to scramble after Ken, a job not made any easier by the taller man's long, confident strides. The two of them passed by a farm of open-ceilinged cubicles, only two of which were currently in use.

Ken stopped at the first workstation and rapped on the thin wall to get the attention of its occupant. "Jacquelyn," he said authoritatively, "any activity on the grid?"

The hard-eyed woman looked up from her monitor and loudly cracked a sunflower seed between her teeth before answering, "Maybe a small brownout from the heat, but nothing that looks Unknown-related." After scooping up another handful of seeds from the bag resting on her messy desk, Jacquelyn added, "Given the size of whatever came through last night I think we should have some peace and quiet for a bit."

"Keep up the good work and keep me posted," said Ken automatically before he moved to the other occupied cubicle.

In contrast with Jacquelyn's clutter, the desk in the second cubicle was painfully neat, Spartan even, with only two perfectly aligned stacks of reports joining a single stapler, a single pen, and a framed photo of the family of the man who worked there. That one personal memento was lined up so carefully with the rest of the items on the desk that one could be forgiven for assuming that everything had come prepackaged. Their owner was as devoid of frivolities as his workspace. He was a broad-shouldered man of Hmong descent whose face was hewn roughly with scars and the weathering of age. Unlike Jacquelyn, he did not need to be alerted to Ken's presence and his chair was already facing Ken and Eddy when they appeared. "Sir."

Ken lazily returned the older man's salute and said, "Joe, I've got a job for you. Are you caught up with the footage from last night's incident?"

"No sir, but I'm nearly done with it."

"It can wait for now. I need you to run the plates of the car those Unknowns and their accomplices were in last night. There's more footage from this morning if you need better lighting or angles." After a moment's thought Ken added, "Also get me any information you can on the houses it stopped at. I want to find out everything I can about these kids. Leave no stone unturned."

With a glimmer of hope hidden so deeply underneath his gruff voice that he could always have denied it, Joe asked, "Should we have someone tailing them?"

"This is the twenty-first century, Joe, not the Great Depression," Ken replied with a barking laugh. "The best way you can use your thirty years of experience is running these searches, not playing cops and robbers. Send me everything you can find, no matter how inconsequential it may seem." With that, Ken and Eddy left the Joe slightly deflated in his cubicle and stepped into the elevator at the end of the hallway.

While Ken plugged his thin white keycard into the elevator and pushed the button labeled "B3", Eddy wiped his sweat-dampened brow and said, "Forgive me if this is a stupid question, Ken, but why haven't we just grabbed these kids and gotten whatever information we need without going through all this cloak and dagger nonsense?"

The elevator descended with a steady hum as Ken appraised Eddy.

"It doesn't have to be us, I mean," stammered Eddy, "just throw your weight around and have some of the local cops take these kids in, interrogate them, and then use them to bring in their monsters. Why do we need to be monitoring them when we can just take what we want and be done with it?"

"Because it's not just the Unknowns that we want, is it, Eddy?" Ken said quietly. "We want to know how to use them and how to control them so we can transform them from natural disasters into something we can control." The elevator's bell chimed and the its doors opened into a long hallway bordered exclusively by thick concrete. "For better or worse, those teenagers are our pilot program. Proofs of concept."

Even though the air filling the underground level was cooler than the upper levels of their building, Eddy's nervous perspiration would not cease. Still, he remained quiet and contemplative as he and Ken walked down the narrow passage, at least until they reached the heavy metal door at the end of the hallway and a new argument occurred to him. "Why does it have to be us? Why can't one of the other sections handle this?" Eddy asked. He winced at the tone of his voice. No matter how honest his question it still sounded like a child's whining.

"Because those idiots in California and out east have no idea what they're dealing with," Ken Roberts said darkly. "They've blown their budgets on patching up security and preventing emergences altogether instead of trying to understand the Unknowns, to harness them. None of them has ever even seen one of these creatures! They think of them in the same abstract way they picture computer viruses or the stock market." Ken placed one hand solemnly on the heavy metal door. "They lack vision, Eddy. That's why they will keep doing it wrong and that's why it's up to us. Our section of the department is going to be the one to solve the riddle of what these things are and how to best use them."

The two men stood motionless for a couple of seconds before Eddy muttered ruefully, "So, the plan remains unchanged then?"

"That's right. We get another Unknown and we bring it down here to see what makes it tick."

Eddy chewed the inside of his lip and shuffled his feet. "And we've, uh, learned from the mistakes we made last time?"

Ken stared at Eddy coldly. Both men still vividly recalled the chaos that had ensued a scant two months ago when they had successfully apprehended an Unknown and tried to study and dissect it.

It had seemed more intriguing than dangerous when the report had come in of a bright red- and blue-furred rodent who had been capable of electrocuting perceived threats through some strange application of static electricity. The Unknown had been tracked before its emergence and had been successfully apprehended at the cost of only a few tranquilizer darts, a few damaged pieces of equipment, and some small burns among Ken's team. Ken had been notified as soon as the Unknown was incapacitated and in transit to their department's facility. He had been pleased when he had received the news, unaware of what was to come.

The trouble had started as soon as the Unknown had been encountered, with radios and other electronics behaving erratically. These had not seemed to be major issues at first, but as soon as the Unknown had been brought into the department's building, the computers populating nine stories of office space had begun to crash all at once, smoking and then bursting into flames. Over a million dollars in equipment and a countless amount of information had been lost. That alone had been bad enough, but it had also not been the end of the day's excitement.

Even as the whole building had been thrown into chaos, the two agents who had captured the Unknown had still been determined to fulfill their objectives to the letter. So, the duo had brought their prize to the sterile room that had been set aside for it, and had handed the Unknown over to a trio of scientists decked out in mint green scrubs and white surgical masks. The Unknown had been carefully laid out on a stainless-steel table and had been examined while the whole room waited for Ken to arrive. As soon as Director Ken Roberts was present and dressed in his own set of scrubs, the dissection had begun.

On the levels above them, scenes of sheer pandemonium had played out as workers had attempted to find some way to stop the ongoing loss of their careers' work and managers had run around trying to lend a hand even as they had assessed just how horrible their losses were. For those assembled in the insulated laboratory, however, the atmosphere had been one of perfect calm. The two agents flanked the room's single entrance while Ken and the scientists huddled around the operating table. No sooner had the first incision been made into the furry Unknown's stomach that it had begun to die, spewing white particles instead of blood as its unconscious body had been wracked with a series of violent shudders caused by its biological systems shutting down one after another. Though the befuddled scientists had tried their best to stem the strange flow of material from the wound, the Unknown had continued to dissolve until there had been nothing left. Less than an hour after the Unknown had been captured, it was dead and the only thing Ken had to show for all of his section's efforts had been a horrifying amount of ruined infrastructure. It had been back to square one, it seemed.

The official explanation which had been carefully crafted for delivery to the department's head in Washington was that the cause of the damage had been a cyberattack originating from a hostile foreign country. The memo had claimed that evidence suggested North Korean involvement, but that it was impossible to determine exactly which country had been behind the attack and thus retaliation, public or private, were not advisable options. Federal money for repairs and retrofitting had come flooding into Ken's section, but unlike the rest of the department's sections spread across the country, which had doubled down on their security-minded strategy in response to the disaster in Minneapolis, Ken had opted to use the money to prepare for a second attempt at capturing and understanding an Unknown.

Those efforts had yielded both repairs to existing detection systems and new innovations like the sophisticated drone and monitoring technologies which Ken now had in his employ. Furthermore, the rooms which housed the new computing infrastructure and the entire passage, from the building's back entrance to the laboratory in front of which Ken and Eddy were currently standing had been reinforced with every kind of dampening material that could be squeezed into the walls. These renovations had required a large degree amount of siphoning funds away from other federal programs, but Ken knew that it would all be worth it in the end.

With a swipe of his keycard and a few practiced strokes of the keypad, Ken opened the heavy metal door and reveled in the sharp hissing of air as the pressure between the area inside and outside of the laboratory equalized. Before they could step inside of the room, however, Ken and Eddy heard the chime of the elevator and turned around to see Jacquelyn emerge from it, panting heavily. Neither man approached her, so Jacquelyn had to jog down the concrete hallway towards them, the slap of her flats echoing off of the walls with each step. "Director," she gasped, "we've got another emergence."

"Are you sure?" Ken asked eagerly.

Initially, Jacquelyn could only manage a nod as she continued to struggle with catching her breath. "Yes," she finally forced out, "much smaller than the one last night, but it's definitely an Unknown."

Eddy looked slightly nauseous, but the Ken's eyes glittered with excitement. "We can examine the latest updates to the lab later," Ken told Eddy as he closed the passageway into the room, "this could be our chance at finally getting another specimen to study."

With that, Ken, Eddy, and Jacquelyn headed back down the hallway to the elevator and away from the heavy steel door marked only by black paint which formed four letters: D.o.R.U.