--- Proper Introductions ---
Davis rushed to look over his homework before he had to leave, hoping that nothing would be too hard to get done in the free time he had left. Today the Digidestined were going to get to meet the new Pokemon Champion. Well, most of them, Joe had spoken with her the day before when she got started working with DSS.
"So, you're meeting more people from that other world right?" Jun asked curiously, and sighed. "If I wasn't grounded for flying around town I'd ask to come along."
"Well 'BlueBiyomon' maybe you should have thought about that before you did it," Davey said, and he sounded as annoyed as Davis was about what she had done out of the blue. Tai had been upset with him because of how letting her have the pendent had turned out.
"It was fine," she grumbled. "Nobody seemed to notice."
"Sure they didn't," he said darkly. Tai had told him that the TV station was faking a report about the pair of them to cover things up. Then he sighed as he realized just how much homework he had piled up now. "I wish I could make a better impression," he complained, half meaning that he didn't want that mistake as the first thing the Champion heard about him. "It's that Jane girl, the dragon from the League matches, and she managed to win that really hard trial they do even though it was only her first League."
"The orange one with the tail that was on fire?" his sister asked suspiciously. "Alright then, I won't ruin your first impression," she teased him. "She was cute after all."
"What, no it isn't like that," Davis said embarrassed about the implication. "She's just a strong fighter. You saw how well she did in that match against the giant gator monster. She managed to use that purple fire and her claws to take that water spitting lizard down." It had been amazing to see how strong someone could get, and being able to meet that powerful pokemon was something he was excited about.
"Oh? Sounds like you might want to be a Flamedramon to show off your own flames?" Jun asked him, not letting up on the joke. "You both have that in common."
Now Davis wished he had learned Acid Armor so he could just melt onto the floor. The worst part was that the Champion's human form was cute, and he could also see that her dragon form was in the kind of shape he wanted to be in himself. However, he was trying to avoid the problem that he'd gotten himself into with Kari, so he was trying to think that kind of thing out instead of just going with whatever popped into his head.
---
"Come'on, Boss, it's a Champ. Ya have ta bring me along to meet her!" Sneasel argued strongly as they prepared to leave for the Digidestined base. T.K. honestly felt a bit bad for the pokemon, who clearly wanted more to do even if he couldn't really find anything. "At least let me tag along to meet her? Ya don't have to bring me to that world you're spending all your time fighting in."
"He's trying to trick you," Patamon said a bit unnecessarily. The way the pokemon quickly lost his sorrowful look told that well enough. "Again."
"Hmph, I still want to meet her, see what kind of trainer it takes to make it that far," the Dark pokemon responded being called out.
"Looks like the dragon kind to me," T.K. noted. "Big orange, tail on fire. She even fought this other blue and white dragon that looked kind of like an airplane."
Sneasel looked at him with considerable confusion. "Do you mean a Charizard? Because they aren't actually Dragons," the pokemon criticized, and then blinked as he clearly thought through the rest. "Wait, that other one sounds like a Latios, those are Legendary pokemon. You've actually seen her pokemon go up against a Legendary?"
"No, we saw her go up against one," Patamon corrected. "Turned into a Charizard and then got in a one on one fight herself."
"I take it back, I'm Ice typed and not going anywhere near that strong a Fire typed trainer," Sneasel quickly said and hopped away from the doorway a good distance, and T.K. decided to try something.
"Oh, but you're right. This is probably the safest time we're going to have to take you to the digimon world," the Digidestined of Hope said with a wide smile. "After all, she should know how to keep you safe a lot better than I do."
---
Tai looked over the Digidestined base, and then took a deep breath to try to stop worrying about every small thing he spotted that wasn't quite perfect. Like the out of place captured production line, or the makeshift sign for Joe's pool, or the fact that they didn't have anything to wear that looked better than their school uniforms and normal outfits, at least nothing that was also sturdy enough to handle a trip to the digimon world.
"Calm down, Tai," Agumon quietly said to him. "We'll do great."
"You know, this place actually looks like it belongs to a serious group now," Sora said thoughtfully. "It still doesn't seem quite real that it's ours."
It took a moment for Tai to realize that was true, because by this point he had been working on leading the group for long enough that going to school was starting to feel like the odd part of his day. In fact School was actually something he had become increasingly worried about exposing them, since he knew that he had already accidentally turned in one of his Digidestined reports instead of the actual homework. Explaining that as a group game he was playing with friends probably wouldn't hold up if monsters started attacking the human world again, and he was going to have to get everyone on the same page with that excuse if they started having the same problem.
"Yeah, it is kind of odd to go into a high tech base like this, and that's before you remember that it is ours," Matt agreed. "This is the kind of place we saw that younger Gennai working in."
"Hopefully we can protect it better," Izzy commented. "Although I'm not planning on making any digimon here." Despite saying that Tai had found an entire page worth of notes that touched on how to do that in Izzy's report. He had asked for a new report focused on just that to know what the genius was able to actually do with what they had.
"Guys, she's going to be here soon," Joe dryly noted, and that ended the conversation so they once more simply waited for the Champion to arrive.
Just a moment later a bright flash appeared in the area Izzy had set aside for teleporting in and out of the base. This revealed a familiar looking girl, and a guy they didn't recognize. Jane Felsic was a bit shorter than he had expected in person, and it took seeing her in the flesh for Tai to realize he had spent the past couple of days waiting for a 12 year old. The other guy looked about Shawn's age, which still felt a bit young, but by this point Tai had no room to complain about that.
"Whoa, nice place," the Champion said as she looked them all over. "Champion Jane Felsic, and this is Investigator Ladder." She motioned to the other arrival.
"Call me Jack. You guys already know my old rival, Shawn, so it would be awkward to hear 'Investigator' all the time," the newly introduced Investigator greeted them. "Not to mention I still don't like how fast they promoted me," Jack then mumbled.
Tai looked at the guy critically, remembering Matt's short-lived attempt at 'rivalry' with him and trying to place who was who between this guy and Shawn. "Good to meet you, Taichi Yagami," he introduced himself. "This is Agumon." The digimon nodded and the other digidestined took over their own introductions. Mimi was the only one missing, apparently her new friends had somehow roped her into traveling even further away to reach a place with another fashion show thing before she came back home.
"Wow, maybe we should introduce our teams too?" Jane suggested to Jack, and then let out her own collection of monsters. There was a large stone lizard covered in circuit patterns, a darker colored version of Cody's grandfather's pokemon form, a lion like monster with a single long ponytail of red and yellow fur, a large red and black bird, and finally a massive red dog with black stripes. "These are Stonescale, Marowak, Pyroar, Talonflame, and Arcanine."
"Yeah, might as well get that out of the way," the guy agreed, although his group was even stranger. There was a carved pumpkin, like from Halloween, a green dragon thing with pale purple markings that floated through the floor for a moment before setting down on it, and there was a Monochromon right there alongside them. The most normal looking one was another plant snake like Serperior. "This is Strangle, Slasher's sister," Jack introduced the snake, although Tai could quite place who 'Slasher' was. "Vibration, he's a Flygon." That was for the dragon, which looked a bit nervous. "Smile, my Gourgeist." The pumpkin monster, which admittedly was smiling. "And Crusher, who you guys probably recognize, but the whole story is kind of complicated."
"I used to be a Gazimon once upon a time," the digimon rumbled jokingly. "Then I got resurrected into someone else's body. Admittedly they weren't using it anymore. Kinda like Tyra's arm, but for all of me."
"His team has a bit of a 'used to be dead' theme," Jane joked. "While I'm a Fire typed trainer." She punctuated that statement by turning into her dragon form.
Jack sighed at this display. "Alright, might as well," the Investigator said before taking a wooden mask out of a pouch on his belt. It looked odd, and Tai could see that he wasn't the only one that was getting an ominous feeling from the bird shaped mask. So he was half expecting it when the thing turned the guy into a giant owl monster. "I'm a Decidueye too, but my team is really, really complicated." His snake monster hissed something at him. "I barely want to talk about it at all, Strangle, I'm not making it clear that you're our only teammate that might not have died before," the owl said to her, and got another angrier hiss back. "I've seen how crazy we've gone so far, so I'm just waiting to see how you had a past life."
"Uh," Tai said as one of their new help actually started getting into a minor argument with his monster.
"Going better than I expected the first meeting," Jane complained with a huff of purple flames. "I think we can skip any other really serious stuff for now."
"You were awesome in the League," Davis said with only a hint of a rush, clearly the member of the team most willing to jump in to talk. "I made sure to watch all of your matches." Tai managed to avoid sighing at the younger leader possibly having a crush on a dragon now. T.K. was less composed and put his hand over his face, and there were a couple of giggles from the girls.
"Oh, thank you," the Champion replied sounding a bit embarrassed. "I'd like to be happy that they're going to actually release the Elite Four Challenge this time around, but I kind of ended up not doing as well as I could have there." She huffed again. "Didn't really get to fight myself." Her team of monsters sighed loudly at this statement, and Tai was suddenly worried that his own problems were a lot more common than he hoped in the pokemon world.
---
"So, are you a pokemon that turns into a human, or a human that turns into a pokemon?" a Sandshrew asked her, and Jane had to wonder if all of them had as weird of a past as she did.
"That's, actually really complicated," she admitted with a frown. "I was a human originally, but then I ended up turned into a pokemon."
"Huh, I didn't think that would end up being a common thing," the Ground type noted, and Jane wished that she had not just given the smaller pokemon the wrong impression. Then she thought about how he could be right about that, and worried that she might not have actually done so, and that was somehow even worse. "How do you deal with having to clean up without using water as much? I've been having some trouble and mom says that Fire types have to worry about that too."
That was at least a topic she could help someone else who ended up a pokemon with. "It can be really annoying, although given what you are you'll probably find the most common method a lot easier to pull off. Sand baths, use the grit to scrape everything off your scales. It still was a bit unpleasant for me before I got my wings, but better than water," she said. "I've heard that Ground types typically use Sandstorms like humans use showers."
"Huh, we'd need to reinforce the apartment a lot to do that, but maybe it would work," Cody replied with a happy nod. Then the smaller pokemon looked a little nervous. "Uh, how do you handle. How do you handle not actually being a human around them?"
That was a hard question, but an important one. "Mostly by pretending I still am one when I'm around them," she admitted quietly. "That's pretty easy for me, because I actually thought like a pokemon despite being a human for a long time. Most people assume that I still think of myself as human too, like mom and my brother Jim." She paused for a moment. "Okay, Jim hasn't actually been human since the change because of his new job as an actor, but I can tell he still thinks more human like."
"I think I get that. Davis spends a lot of time as a Flamedramon now, but he's still fairly human, and Yolei can only really handle digimon forms that are a lot like humans," the Digidestined replied, and Jane wondered how 'form' was plural for them. "But, it is weird. Things have changed for me, but when I turn into a human again they don't change back, and for a lot of those things I'm not really trying too hard to go back to doing. So far at least nobody seems to have really noticed."
"Yeah, I kind of had that issue," Jane admitted. "Although in my case it was doing things like a pokemon when I wasn't one. We actually had a few problems with that, but, well we didn't know I was thinking like a pokemon so we just tried to adapt. Well, actually we tried a lot of things to keep me from getting myself lit on fire, which probably would have been bad." She paused to consider how 'probably' was possibly accurate all things considered. "For a lot of it everyone just thought it was being quirky. Grant can probably tell you some things about that too, he had entire medical issues that were dismissed as him 'being quirky'."
"I, didn't consider it like that," Cody said thoughtfully. "There are quite a few things my mom does that I do too that make more sense now, but those aren't really what I was thinking about." He looked down at his claws. "I wonder if the stuff I meant might just be things I know I can think about now."
"Yeah, my entire training style is like that. My brother never understood why I liked doing that personally, and that made a lot more sense after we found out that I thought like a Char," she agreed.
---
Yolei had watched the older Digidestined all start questioning the digimon that had shown up about various things nervously. That didn't fully distract her from the dragon girl talking with Cody, and she really wished that she had not drifted close enough to overhear the two of them talking about not being human. Some of the odd things Cody had done as long as she'd known him did make more sense now, but it was awkward to think about them actually being signs that he wasn't really human in the first place.
It also made her wonder if she had changed since being switched with Hawkmon, and just had not noticed. The only thing that came to her mind was a consideration of where she could fly if she wanted to, but that didn't really seem all that big of a change.
"It is generally hard to tell what is 'normal'," a voice suddenly said from behind her, and she quickly turned to find the bird monster. "Ah, sorry. Ghost types have problems with being a bit tricky. I try and avoid that, but, well it's hard to resist the temptation."
Yolei simply glared at Jack for a moment, before considering her question for the dragon girl. "My family is having a lot of problems with this monster thing. How we're changing into them, and Hawkmon being one all the time," she tried to explain, and checked to make sure her brother wasn't too close. "Things aren't going the best between me and him. Our middle sister even turned herself into a digimon for an afternoon to try and help and I just don't know if that is what I need to do to connect with him."
Jack simply looked at her for a moment. "Well, I can try and tell you what I've gone through getting back in my starter's good graces," he said cautiously. "I kind of wish we had a translator for our pokemon around so Strangle could help too. She'd at least be able to give the other perspective on that topic." Said snake monster hissed at him, and Yolei could sort of understand how not knowing exactly what she was saying could make that tougher. "Okay, yeah I could translate for you, but that isn't quite the same."
"That might work actually," Yolei told them, happy to just possibly have some help. "So, does turning into a pokemon too help?"
"No," Jack said and it was quite clear that Strangle said the same thing, and if anything the snake emphasized that statement more. "I don't particularly like being a monster, and Strangle outright hates that I keep ending up in situations where I'm one. You shouldn't assume that being the same creature means you can understand each other better, even if it is the only way you can actually understand your partner's words."
"Yeah, it does not help you connect with someone very well," Jane added, apparently having heard their conversation. "If anything it made my attempts to deal with a rock headed Charmeleon worse, and it did not help that he barely acknowledged that me being like this was his fault in the first place." The dragon girl smirked evilly, and Cody looked a little uneasy. "He's dealing with me saddling him with some humanity now as a bit of payback. A trainer card and an appointment to get himself a starter of his own."
Jack and Strangle both looked a bit intimidated by that, so apparently it was a fairly harsh thing. The snake monster then asked a question, which got a growled response from the Champion. "Yeah, but it still is a bit of a thing to just throw someone into," Jack said, following the suddenly incomprehensible conversation.
"So, two of our siblings spending a while as a digimon probably isn't going to help much?" Yolei asked to remind them that she was there. Her mom had for some reason decided that Momoe needed to be stuck as a digimon while she was grounded at home to punish her for running around town as one, and Mantarou apparently felt his Hagurumon form was somehow better suited to running the family's new storage world.
"'Our'?" Jane questioned, making the Digidestined realize that these two might not really understand the whole situation.
"Ah, well it turned out that Hawkmon was kind of a clone of me, sorta, so that means he's a brother too," Yolei quickly explained, embarrassed about missing the main problem.
"Huh, that's a whole different problem," Jack replied, and Strangle looked like she wanted out of the conversation. "I don't have any siblings, so that's something I can't really help with." The snake hissed out a statement that Yolei did not need translated, she had met Strangle's brother after all. Possibly brothers if both of them counted.
"Hmm, did Hawkmon have any siblings before?" Jane asked thoughtfully. "Because I've met a lot of people who assume having a brother around all the time is a lot different than it actually is."
"Oh," Yolei said dumbly as the concept hit her. "No, he didn't have any before." She had not even considered what it would be like to not have siblings and then suddenly be buried in a full sized family. "I didn't even think about that," she said sadly, and decided on what to do next. "I'll try and explain that to him, what it is like. Well, at least explain that we aren't actually treating him all that differently." Especially since everyone in the family seemed to be having problems with everything going on.
---
Tai was glad the introduction had gone well, and hoped that the planned attack on another of the Emperor's R&D sites later would be a good demonstration of what they were up against in practice. For now he needed to go over the strategic situation with the Champion and the Investigator, hopefully with help from Izzy but it was possible that the boy genius would need to help Davis with getting everyone ready for the fight.
"So, we've seen the basic reports that got passed along, and we've spoken with Shawn about his perspective, but what I want to hear is your actual problems," Jack said tiredly as the bird took the odd mask off and turned human again as it was put it away.
"Mostly trying to figure out what you don't want us to smash for you, because it sounds like there is a lot of stuff I can handle," Jane added as she also returned to humanity.
"Myotismon is the real threat," Tai started off as he motioned for them to follow him to his new desk. "From what DSS has said about this 'Absol' monster's abilities I'm fairly sure that Upload is actually trying to distract everyone more than anything until they can just take him out all at once." He grabbed his own report on everything from the bottom of the smallest pile, where he hoped that none of the others had thought to look so far. "The Digimon Emperor is either a minion of Myotismon, or of another of his minions. Which would be bad enough, but from that I for one think that just defeating the Emperor isn't a good plan right now."
"How strong is this 'Myotismon'? Because Shawn's holding back an 'Ultimate' form on you guys," Jane said as she took the papers. "Is that strong enough?"
"It took about eight Ultimates to take him down the first time, and two Megas and a prophecy the second," he told her bluntly, although he wondered what exactly Serperior became as an Ultimate. He was fairly sure that it wasn't Gazimon they were talking about.
The two of them looked up at him, and then after a moment seemed to realize he was serious as they paled. "Wait, wait, that's what we're up against here? How many Ultimates do we have?" the Champion asked in a rush.
"If Shawn has that option, right now? One," Tai sighed. "We might be able to track down some digimon that are already at that level, but that doesn't solve the real issue." Luckily Izzy was on his way over, so he could get some help with this whole mess. "So what we really need is to find a way to get ourselves back to that level, or even better to get our Megas back."
"Which is where things get tricky," Izzy said as he arrived. "From our current analysis we have found three possible options available to Myotismon using the Emperor's efforts, with hints of others we have not yet identified. The first, and most obvious in retrospect, is that the Spires were disrupting the barriers between the digimon world and human world. That likely would have allowed the spirit of Myotismon to get back in a way that would allow resurrection." Tai quickly looked for the second drafts of those reports from Izzy.
"Upload's lockdown of travel hasn't actually impacted us much, which didn't make any sense," Tai explained. "Unless we weren't the ones they were trying to stop. They frankly haven't been paying very much attention to us at all, so we should have expected that it was something to counter the Emperor." He managed to find the two reports for threats they hadn't gotten to yet, but the one about at issue was apparently somewhere else on his desk.
"Okay, there is an entire list of problems with something that damages the barriers between worlds," Jack said with a huff. "With the biggest one being that it could damage or destroy a lot of other worlds in an extreme case, and I really hope that I'm going too far with that one."
"Yeah, I have some suspicions on that one, but I'll need more information before I can pin down how exactly Upload is locking it down," Izzy replied to that statement as Tai finally found the last one to give the group. "The second option is that Myotismon is planning on recharging or improving himself by using the Control Spires to gather lots of energy from the digimon world. They are already doing that passively, and it would explain why he'd want to keep things quiet while that was setup."
"Let me guess, they can ramp that up at any time and we need to not spook them," Jane complained as she took the files and set his overall report back on the desk.
"Pretty much, even if he isn't able to use that to power up it is still a risk for the world until we can disable them all," Tai confirmed, probably even more upset with that issue. They couldn't risk just going straight for the Emperor himself with that looming over their heads, or it might take out all the still enslaved digimon along with most of the captured parts of the digimon world. "The last option is the obvious one, if the Emperor conquers the digimon world for him then he doesn't have any threats around when he goes back there."
"This isn't a one or the other situation is it? It is all three at once," the Investigator asked with a sigh. "Right, so what can we do to get the kind of power that deals with that?"
"In the short term? Not a lot. We have some information on where we can get one replacement for a Crest, and if we can keep things stable long enough I can make more, but that still only gets us to Ultimate," the Digidestined of Knowledge explained. "To hit Mega we'd probably need Tai and Matt to somehow take back the power we gave up to help repair the digimon world. Either that or find another way of going past what the Crest boost can give us."
---
Jane was a bit intimidated with how together everyone she was dealing with now was, with professional reports, a fully functional base, and even a rough chain of command that let them setup this attack while she was getting informed of the larger picture. Admittedly it wasn't as intimidating as the fact that every last one of the humans on the mission had turned into monsters, herself included, but it did make her feel better about how much work she would need to put into getting this group up to forming their own League equivalent. Jack had stayed behind there to get some of those things settled with the older part of the team.
The kind of cute looking fire lizard that was leading them had ordered the bug girl with lots of problems to scout the place quickly to make sure that more forces had not been brought to the base. Which left her with the black cat, the two winged horses, the two lizard men, the human faced cat-bird, the bird monster, and the two drill bugs. "You guys using this temporary powerup is still odd," she commented as she rechecked the way her equipment sat on her Charizard form. Wings made a massive change to where you could actually put stuff so it didn't mess with your movement.
"That's just how Digidestined work," Davis said calmly, although he continued to look around for any possible threats. "Well, not the part where we turn from human to digimon, that's mostly because of Upload and DSS, but just having our partners power up is normal."
"Turning into monsters is definitely not normal," Jane said strongly, mostly so that she could get it out of the way. "I know I can do it too, but that just means I have that DSS issue in common with all of you."
"It wasn't really DSS's fault," Cody noted as Yolei appeared over the ridge that they were hidden behind.
"Wasn't their fault when my dad decided to mouth off to an angry Ghost either, but I was at their place when that happened," she said quickly to finish that conversation before the fight began.
"It looks better than we heard," the bug monster told the group with a tone that made clear that Yolei did not trust that assessment. "I think they might have sent out the group they were working on already."
"That's fine," Davis told her. "The Emperor shouldn't have had time to move out the big computers and stuff yet, and if there aren't as many enemies we might be able to capture some more."
"Sounds good to me," Jane told them. "What exactly are we up against? My team is trained for battle right now, so we might not be well suited to dealing with these mind control collars." She looked over at Takeru. "Also I want to try and let your Sneasel at least see a normal battle for you guys. It should help give him an idea on what you're fighting, and why you don't want him there yet."
"Looks like it is just a small number of slaves, and a lot more of those robot things that he seems to have started making," Yolei informed them. "The new small camera drones that aren't even as strong as a Rookie, along with some assembly machines that are actually moving around. It's like he's trying to copy Upload."
"Then we should really make sure to take the computer," Cody said firmly. "That way we can find out how much he can copy."
That seemed to be enough for the group to move on the site, which was a mess of quickly and cheaply made prefabricated parts as far as Jane could tell. Stuff like what her brother was now using as sets for his film career, old outdated things that were simple to make but not as good as modern equivalents. The machines were fairly nice, better than she'd seen outside of Salient City's more high tech areas, but still looked a bit too primitive overall. Which made the whole thing feel off, because from what the reports had said this kind of thing was really advanced or otherworldly stuff to the Digidestined.
The actual fight started quickly, although the tricky part was clear. There were a mix of low level monsters, and League level ones, all controlled by the strange black rings and trio of large obelisks. Jane had her team out, but more to keep a lookout for any other threats and guard the Dark/Ice typed pokemon. "Heh, didn't realize my boss was turning into a mon too," Sneasel said to her with false bravado.
"I think you have a long way to go to be even up to his level," Pyroar said critically. "He is more hesitant than his Starter, and clearly less practiced in that form than the other humans, but still a strong fighter." The cat pokemon shot Jane a dark look, clearly still upset about how she turned into a pokemon.
"Hmph, I can handle myself," Sneasel sneered at them, but at least was smart enough to not charge in to try and help.
"I'm less happy with things," her overly lazy Talonflame complained. "This looks like a lot more work, and I was sure that you learning to fly yourself around meant I'd have less of that."
"Self replication equipment is within tolerances for Stonescale production," her digital pokemon intoned with a noticeable amount of unease. Given that just getting Stonescale to talk was rare that was something to pay attention to. "Line setup is currently operating using unknown mineral result, but similar construction purpose." It focused on one of the Control Spires. "Tower is of same mineral, operating on more advanced settings. Conversion between the two implementations likely available."
"Well, that was terrifying," Marowak joked unsuccessfully. "This place reminds you of where you're from then?"
"Correct, unknown mineral constructs appear to serve same function Stonescales served," it actually replied. "Constructs likely lack mental capacities without controller, as we did."
That was a horrible concept for Jane to consider. That one of the sides in this fight was made of creatures like her teammate, and that they were just killing them to fight the enemy. "Should we try and find a way to stop destroying them?" she asked, more questioning what they could do than if they should do anything.
"No," Stonescale replied with atypical strength. "If have strong enough mind can be reasoned with, if not then will not have enough to act without control. Until control removed too dangerous to others to leave alive."
The response clearly didn't sit well with any of her team, and T.K.'s Sneasel was simply staring at it with horror. However, it was the most animated she had ever seen the monster, and if it felt that strongly about this then she had to at least consider the option seriously.
---
The fight had not really been much of one, and taking out the three Spires had been enough to resolve things entirely. Izzy had been a bit upset to have to capture even more gear, but had quickly changed his mind when he actually got a look at what they had found. Then he had been adamant that they made it look like they destroyed everything even though they were taking it.
"I really hope I didn't turn in my report for us to my teacher this morning," Cody muttered uneasily as the Digidestined all broke up to head for their homes. "Mom's been having extra training sessions, so it's been easy to mix things up."
"If you did then say it is from a game we're playing after school," Tai dully told the pokemon. "Is that stuff really safe, Izzy?"
"Safer than the production line was at first," the Digidestined of Knowledge complained. "We have it secured and actually spotted the tracking devices this time, including a couple new ones. From what we've seen it looks like they would have expected us to take it to our world instead of this other digital one, so they aren't even able to transmit properly." He sighed and then began to work on getting everyone home.
"Boss, I want in on real training," Sneasel said to T.K. seriously as they made their way to the teleporter. "I don't want to just sit around doing nothin while you're out there in danger. It just ain't right for you to fight more than your pokemon." This declaration got a strong and embarrassing cheer from Jane's entire team of pokemon.
"Alright," the Digidestined of Hope responded with exasperation, and a cautious look over at the Flameheart Champion as they vanished while she tried to argue against the point with her pokemon.
"If I knew how to get Momoe out of being stuck as a digimon I'd have done it already," Hawkmon complained to his sister as they moved forward to leave next. "Or even better a good reason for why Mantarou doesn't need to be a collection of gears to run a warehouse."
"Yeah, I know," Yolei agreed. "I mean, I don't even understand why mom thinks that will work. Being a digimon isn't even something Momoe seems uncomfortable with, and at this point it's almost normal for us." The pair then also left, clearly still in the middle of the conversation.
"So, I'll check and see if I still have it," Cody said to Tai after the room cleared out.
"Alright," the Digidestined of Courage tiredly replied just before the Sandshrew left as well. "So, what do you think?"
"You guys need more help, but I'm not sure where to start," Jane replied, her pokemon returned to their balls. "Other than trying to get in contact with the local government to see if I can get you some real funding for this, or at least make it easier for you to set something up to support yourselves." She sighed at his uneasy look. "I'll want you there with me, and I'm bringing along some people from my world with actual experience with that sort of thing. Worst case if everything goes badly we'll just have to conquer the city for you guys."
"That's not really that funny," Tai informed her.
"No? Why would it be funny?" she asked, completely serious. "It's the worst case scenario, where you guys need to protect yourselves from the local government the hard way. I seriously doubt it would be that bad, but well, prepare for the worst and all."
With that Tai realized that he needed to spend quite a bit of time getting her familiar with his world before any such meeting.
