"Is this the place you were talking about?" Maki Himekawa asked, peering through the thick trees at the nearby castle.
Myotismon nodded. "Yes. I was wondering if you might find it familiar."
"...I'm pretty sure that's Homeostasis' place," Tapirmon noted. "Yeah, that- that's definitely Homeostasis' place."
"Let's hope we don't run into them," Maki decided. "I'm not particularly interested in being possessed again."
"Possessed?" Agumon tilted his head to the side. "Should I be concerned?"
"N-not really. It hasn't happened since I got here, and we're just trying to leave." She wasn't even fully convincing herself. "Look, we'll just go in, find a way to open the doors to the Analog World, and then we can go see the others. Maybe Haruka's actually learned to organize things by now..."
"Do you really believe that?" Tapirmon asked, skeptical.
"No."
The castle, as it turned out, didn't seem to have any sort of being inside of it at all. Now, anyone familiar with horror stories would probably see where this was going and try coming back another time, or at least not going in through the front door of a spooky abandoned castle.
Maki, however, had not encountered a proper horror story in well over a thousand years. So she can be forgiven for not realizing this.
The place was completely deserted. Actually, it seemed that it had been attacked at some point, if the broken glass and fallen bookshelves in the lab area were to be believed. Probably the biggest warning sign, if any of them were to think about it too much.
There was still a set of key-cards in one of the drawers. Maki thought she remembered the combination to get to the Analog World. Organizing by Attribute and Level wasn't exactly a difficult combination. Whether the Rookie Vaccine card would be Agumon or Gomamon was really the only part that might be confusing.
And then they found some discarded notes that clarified the whole thing. So she didn't even need to remember it, but... she still felt proud, somewhat, that she could clearly recall that far back. Even if that had been one of the most memorable years of her life, up there with turning File City into something worthy of the name and that time she got lost in Speedy Jurassic Land. Which were technically the same year, but whatever. Time was weird.
Still, she never gave much thought to the fact that the place was abandoned. There were plenty of places like that in the Digital World, and it wasn't like Homeostasis needed a place to experiment with the creation of DigiDestined anymore. She ignored the girl with the Biyomon. She didn't count.
For a moment, the Crest of Reliability seemed... well, okay, she'd say it was pouting, but that was ridiculous. It was a Crest. An inanimate object. She should have had Myotismon carry it with the rest of the Tags.
It was a shame they hadn't found those things until after the Crest of Light had vanished. They turned out to be pretty useful.
Still, they had the key-cards, they knew what they had to do to reach the world they wanted to visit, that was all that mattered. If they wanted to go back to the Digital World, they could just find a place where they could use the cards and figure out the combination to get back. Or maybe just power one open with her Digivice, that might work...
Still, those were thoughts for later. If later ever came.
It didn't.
In hindsight, she should probably have wondered why the lab area showed signs of attack. As well as who would have the guts to attack the laboratory of a force of nature. Or the power to do so successfully.
So it wasn't like there weren't warning signs. But she was confident that she could handle anything that the world threw at her. Aside from possibly Myotismon, it was safe to say that she and her partners knew more about the Digital World than anyone alive.
And it wasn't like anything really stood out there, or tried to attack, or anything. It was just her, Agumon, Tapirmon, and Myotismon in a spooky, abandoned castle.
And yet, it wasn't until Puppetmon and Piedmon stepped out of the shadows that she remembered the plots of all those horror stories.
"Well, well, what do we have here? A little DigiDestined? I'd thought you would all be gone from our world by now."
"That's not a bad thing, right? It gives us someone to play with before we go take the fight to her friends!"
"I like the way you think, Puppetmon." Okay, she could probably handle this... AncientGreymon would be enough to take them both out, right?
If she could bring herself to try, anyway.
Yet, no matter how tightly she gripped her Digivice... it refused to glow. Agumon and Tapirmon were still Agumon and Tapirmon. "Wh-what are you doing here?"
"Now, that's a funny thing to ask," Piedmon commented, making a great show of inspecting one of his knives. "Now, I'm sure we all know that firewalls have to go out of date eventually. Or the Viruses they're trying to keep out just get a bit more... crafty. That seal wasn't going to last forever, of course, we just... sped up the process, a bit.So... there hadn't been a point to it, after all?
"And what do you think I've been doing in that time?" Bluff him. She had to bluff him, or else there was no way she was making it out of this mess in one piece.
"Oh, I don't know. Running around the Digital World, doing DigiDestined things. Certainly not things that could be broken with, say... an inability access the outside world?" He gestured at Puppetmon, who vanished back into the shadows. That was never a good thing.
"O-of course not!" He couldn't break the doors. Nothing could break the doors.
"I didn't think so. Which is why I'll be taking action to clear up a few loose ends." He threw a sheet at Tapirmon, which began to shrink. "A word to the wise, Himekawa. Next time... leave the talking to Nishijima."
Nishijima. Daigo. The others. They probably couldn't help.
But there was a girl with a Digivice and a Biyomon, wasn't there? Maybe- maybe she could help.
Either way, the others needed to know that the Dark Masters were back. And, more than that... things needed to be ready for whatever poor kids would be dragged into this mess next.
She removed the Crest of Reliability from around her neck. It wouldn't do anyone any good as part of a keychain in Piedmon's possession.
"You shouldn't feel too bad, you know. We've only been back for the past five years, and most of that was healing what we broke trying to break out. You won this world whole millennia. Shame that it wasn't enough." Her Digivice. She needed to warn the others. Maybe- maybe they could do something. They always had been a lot better at everything than she was, after all.
She could only send out one message in the time she had. She sent it to every other Digivice in existence, just to be sure it got to the right people.
Help us! -Maki
Piedmon stopped to examine the start of his new collection. An Agumon, a Tapirmon, and a human girl, all in carefully-crafted detail. "You know, I really should destroy these..." A lash of lightning landed near his feet. Ah, yes. The Myotismon. "I take it you disagree?"
The vampire flinched under his gaze. Good. The upstart Ultimate knew his place, after all. Still, this could be useful.
After all, there was nothing he loved more than the sound of false hopes as he squashed them. "Well, then, let's strike a deal. This castle is yours, as is everything within it. You must simply promise one thing."
"Which would be...?" He sounded wary. Nice to know that their fearsome reputations hadn't diminished any in the time they'd been gone.
"Well, Puppetmon's probably breaking every possible connection to the outside that he can, so it's not like you can leave, unless someone else is at the door. And I don't really care how many end up in here, honestly..." Good place to grab new toys for Puppetmon. Maybe Machinedramon, if one of his people wandered in there. Outside of that, what was the point? "So. You keep the Crest here. Don't open those doors back there, though..." He snatched one of the cards from the deck. "It's doubtful that you can make it to the Analog World to warn Nishijima an the others, anyway. Stay here, don't do anything to help the DigiDestined... and you have my word that these three will not be harmed."
He wouldn't do it anyway. They needed someone to practice their villainous monologues on, for when they defeated the Sovereigns and took over the Digital World, and keychains couldn't complain about cliches.
But Myotismon didn't need to know that.
"And the worth of your word would be...?"
"More than if I were to find a filled Tag somewhere out there in the Digital World! Or if Nishijima and his friends were to show up, or if you were to vanish from this little pocket of the Digital World... You do understand, right?"
"Yes." Ah, that was quick. Normally, it took him a lot longer to break someone's will. But there this Digimon was, accepting his new rule without a second thought. Now he remembered why he loved working with Viruses. No offense to MetalSeadramon, of course. "I understand completely."
It took a while for Piedmon and his fellow Dark Masters to regain enough sanity to realize that the vampire might not have been completely genuine. But he seemed to be keeping to the deal, so they let it be, if only so Puppetmon had easy access to potential new playmates.
And fighting the Sovereigns at the time, they were generally a bit too busy to go check up on him, anyway. And they were sure that he wouldn't betray them, as long as they still had Himekawa.
It seemed they had underestimated just how much he was willing to risk.
