Butter-Fly Effect

"Would you... like to come see her with me?" You ask, more to fill in the silence than anything else. "Because I already talked to Rikuto, and you're the only one who didn't know yet, so..."

It takes him a few moments to respond. Eventually, though, he turns to the Centarumon. "Sorry about this. Something's come up." He then stands up, pushes in his chair, and returns his gaze to you. "So, we'll be going, then?"

You guess this is going to be the end of your being outside today. If there's anything important, you can probably manage it some other time.

---

There's nobody outside when you return to the house. That's probably because everyone's upstairs by now.

You note that somebody managed to safely move about half of your stacks of research to the side, but scattered all the others. The sad thing is, this is still a lot better than when you started, so you can't even bring yourself to get upset about it.

There's nobody downstairs, either. Human or Digimon. You suppose you should have expected that. Upstairs is where all the excitement is, after all.

Kazuya is still being oddly silent. Really, things are a bit too quiet right now, so you simply cross the room to the stairs, occasionally checking to make sure he's still following, because he can be far too stealthy when he wants to be.

When you get upstairs, Daigo, Rikuto, and Haruka are all gathered around the mattress that Maki and her partners are lying on. You can't see if any of the three on the mattress are awake or not from here, but Izzy and Tentomon are sitting on the other side of the room, seemingly working on something. You wonder if Haruka has shared any of her findings with him yet.

Kazuya, once he gets to the top of the stairs, sort of just wanders over to the mattress, sits down by the others, and joins in on whatever quiet conversation they're having. You can't really make out any of what they're saying from here, but whatever.

It's not your business.

It never has been, really, aside from the fact that you're the reason Maki was in place to be anywhere near a portal. The others could have blamed you for that, if they'd wanted, but you think they were just excited about having new DigiDestined at all.

You certainly don't believe that they'd ever forget about the one who vanished.

Biyomon seems torn between fluttering over to the older DigiDestined, or going to see Izzy and Tentomon.

Honestly, given when you last saw Maki, you find the second option pretty tempting yourself. Particularly given that she's currently surrounded by her friends, while you barely had the chance to know her, and most of what you do know comes from other people.

You don't normally have second thoughts about this kind of thing, but... you're just a kid that took to tagging along with other DigiDestined one day. And while it's not hard to forget that, most of the time, right now...


[ ] Go over to Maki and the others with Biyomon.

[ ] You feel you sort of have to talk to Maki, but Biyomon can go see Izzy.

[ ] You think Biyomon would be able to handle all these people better than you would. So you're sending her to them, and going to see Izzy.

[ ] Maybe you and Biyomon should stick to the person and Digimon you know well...

"Come on, Biyomon, let's go check in on the others." You know, the thing you'd originally intended on doing. You're not about to let something so small as feeling out of place stop you!

So you step across the floor, ignoring the longing looks your partner keeps shooting to the less-crowded part of the room. She's followed you all throughout Odaiba before, this isn't going to stop her.

"I mean, theoretically, it's possible that we could return the world to normal and the Dark Masters would be caught by the backlash, but I don't think it's all that likely. You don't get to take over the world by being overconfident." Haruka's voice is quieter than you'd think it would be, for discussing a battle plan against a group of Digimon that physically can't be here to overhear it.

"When they're that powerful?" Another feminine voice, probably Maki speaks up. "It's hard to be overconfident. Not when you actually can do all those things."

"But they're still fallible, and that means we have a chance. I mean, not us in particular, but..." Haruka turns around, her eyes lighting up when she sees you. "Sora, it's nice to see you made it up here."

Somehow, you're getting a bad feeling about this. "I mean, I... had to do this eventually, right?" You're all DigiDestined, you should talk to each other, that's just how this stuff works, right?

She doesn't seem entirely convinced, but doesn't say anything else, either.

"It's not like what we're talking about doesn't concern her," Rikuto points out. "Honestly, it's the sort of thing everyone should be in on, but... there's really no good way to fit everyone into the same room for that."

And you should all know that. After all, it's not like you haven't tried. "Not until Maki can manage going outside, at least," Daigo agrees.

"So... it's my fault, then." You can't really see the long-missing DigiDestined from where you're standing, but just her tone of voice is enough to tell you that she's not really happy about it... not that anyone would be.

"Don't say that." You don't know if Daigo means it as an order or not, but given who it is, you're not entirely sure it matters. "I don't think any of us expected the Dark Masters to show up again. It just... wasn't something I could consider, at least."

"Who'd want to?" Kazuya asks. "I don't think people usually like bringing up bad stuff."

"It's not like we didn't have clues," You point out. "We just... kept hoping otherwise. It... probably doesn't help that the one who gave us our main clue was insane." That's the best possible way to describe Datamon, you think. Even now, you still don't really understand what it is he wanted.

All things considered, things are probably better that way.

"You know, we never did get the full story about that..." Kazuya realizes. You shrug.

"I... don't know if there's much to tell. We knew it was a trap, we went in anyway, MegaKabuterimon happened for some reason, Etemon dropped in partway through, I got my Crest, and at some point Machinedramon's name came up." That's all the important events involving the pyramid, right? You don't think you missed anything...

"Okay, but there has to be a story there." And now everyone's looking at you expectantly and you're not entirely sure what to do now, really.


[ ] Try and tell the story.

[ ] Distract to a new subject.
-[ ] Such as?

[ ] Get Izzy over here to talk about it, he was there too!