Digimon Adventure
/ Digimon Adventure Prologue Chapter 1 : Drifting Ashore
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The rulers of darkness
to gain power.
— “Digimon Book of Revelations,” Chapter 8, Verse 5
In a sky so blue that it looked as if it was freshly painted, something white hurtled through, marring its even surface. Twin engine roars could be heard not far behind, and their source was revealed as red beings charged in, following the white object in hot pursuit.
Its pursuers, on the other hand, were shaped like red cylindrical objects. A countless number of them had merged together into a battle formation, and grenades could be seen being fired from their arms.
When that happened, one of the eggs fell from its grasp.
As the barrage faded into the distance, the falling egg dropped down towards a dense, dark forest that extended for miles…
Chapter 1; Drifting Ashore ① That Summer“Are you okay?” Taichi Yagami asked his younger sister Hikari as he stuck a cooling gel sheet on her forehead. The poor girl was shivering under the bedcovers with fever.
“I see,” Taichi complied, but inside he was berating himself. He now knew in hindsight that she had been showing cold symptoms since yesterday, but because he hadn’t recognized them for what they were, he had dragged Hikari out to go shopping with him for things they would bring to camp today (although the shopping list had only consisted of loads of candy).
It must have started yesterday morning, when they were watching television together. At that time, a news broadcast was reporting abnormal weather all around the world. Even though it was midsummer, America was covered in heavy snow, while heavy rain flooded the Middle East. In contradiction to that, the swamps in Southeast Asia dried up completely from drought. The weather forecaster said this was all due to destruction of the environment, but Hikari said,
“Eh?” Taichi, who had been stuffing his cheeks with toast topped with egg and round slices of tomato and ham, gave Hikari a strange look.
“Digi….mon.”
This time, Hikari pulled herself away from the screen to give him a wide-eyed look.
“See what…?” Taichi looked at the TV screen. “I don’t see anything.”
She probably got the fever then, Taichi realized now. If he had checked her forehead that time and had allowed her to rest, her cold might have been easily prevented right from the start. Hikari had been looking forward to this camping trip just as much as he was…
In noisy crowds that stood before the buses lined up for departure, the children assembled into their assigned groups as they chattered endlessly about the anime that they had seen yesterday, the new video game that was released, the plot developments in the latest weekly manga issue, or about the romantic relationship between two popular idols who had had a lot of publicity lately in a weekly picture magazine.
It wasn’t because he was lonely. In fact, many of his classmates would greet him with a friendly “Yo!” or “Hi~!” when they came across him and, naturally, Yamato would respond back with a smile.
The situation was as it should be, for this little boy was not a part of this school, and thus was not acquainted with any of the students there. He was Yamato’s younger brother, Takeru Takaishi. The reason they had different last names was because the two were now living separately because of their parents’ divorce. Takeru was allowed to participate in Yamato’s school camping trip after receiving special permission from Fujiyama-sensei, the man in charge of organizing it.
It all began on the first week of July, right before summer vacation started.
Their father surely must have shared Yamato’s feelings of dread. His troubles had increased because that meant calling up his ex-wife and persuading her to agree. Of course, although he complained out loud that it was a bother, his expression didn’t make it appear that it really was.
“You should come over here yourself to play once in awhile, Yamato,” his mother said a little awkwardly to her first son as she stuffed Takeru’s backpack with snacks until its seams were almost bursting open.
Even Yamato thought that his own, short reply sounded cold.
“Okay, Mama, I’m going now!”
“Takeru, don’t cause too much trouble for your brother, okay?”
But Yamato couldn’t help muttering, “It doesn’t matter if he does. We’re brothers.”
② On The Other Side of the AuroraThroughout the entire bus ride, Mimi Tachikawa was so absorbed in gossiping with her friends Taako and Mi-chan that she never bothered to look at the gradually changing scenery outside her window. Nor was she interested in doing so anyway. If you were to ask her later what landmarks the bus went through to get to their campgrounds in Mikami Canyon [01], she would have told you that she had no idea.
“The group you belong in is listed on the printout I gave you before we left. Your leaders will be wearing arm bands with their names on it, so find them using that and stick with your group. After that, listen to what your leader tells you. That is all.”
“Hey, do you know who Kido is?” Mimi asked Taako, who was sitting next to her. Taako’s handout had “Arihara Group” written on it.
The boy she was indicating was dressed neatly in an open-collared shirt and an Ivy League-styled vest. Besides wearing glasses and the arm band that signified he was a leader, his shoulder was burdened by a square-shaped bag labeled “Emergency Food Supply.” Perhaps he was also feeling the heavy responsibility that came with being a leader because his face looked a little stiff.
Mi-chan was pointing at the front of the bus, where a boy wearing a long-sleeved orange shirt was about to get off. Even Mimi knew who he was. They hardly ever talked together, but he was her classmate, Koushiro Izumi. Mi-chan wanted them to look at what Koushiro was carrying on his back - a wireless laptop.
“Isn’t he so weird for bringing that all the way to camp?” Mi-chan sneered with mocking laughter, but Mimi didn’t laugh. She simply didn’t find any reason to.
“Hey, Sora!”
“What is it?” Sora asked him.
“No idea,” Sora said bluntly. “We’re in different groups, so of course I won’t know.”
When she reached the water supply, Sora turned on the faucets to fill the two buckets. A small brook gurgled nearby, but due to sanitary conditions, their printouts had specifically pointed out (underlined with a thick wavy line and everything) that they were to use the water from the water supply for cooking.
Normally this task would have been left to the boys, while the girls were assigned easier work (such as cutting vegetables, or gossiping as they gathered firewood). However, Sora disliked doing such things. As a person who ordinarily never wore a skirt if she could help it, she consciously denied her position as a girl. Such masculine traits of hers were only further reinforced after she’d joined the all-male soccer club.
After resettling her hat in its rightful place, she squared herself and said, “Now then.”
Not bothering to move his posture, Taichi simply lifted his head to look down in Sora’s direction.
Even when she said, “Kenji was looking for you,”
Deducing that Taichi was slacking off from his duties, Sora knew that anything she said to him when he was like this was futile. So instead, she asked him something that had been bothering her since they had gotten here.
“Yeah… she had a fever.”
“I guess.”
“Yeah…” Taichi trailed off when he noticed that something white was drifting down in front of his eyes.
“Hey, it’s snowing,” Taichi called out to Sora below, but she had already noticed. A gust of wind, causing large snowflakes to whirl wildly behind Taichi, had caught her eye.
“It looks like there’s going to be a blizzard,” Sora shouted up at him. “Let’s hurry back to the others!”
“I don’t believe this.”
“It must be due to the abnormal weather we’ve been having.”
His laptop’s OS flicked on. With an ease that showed he was accustomed to doing this, he double-clicked the icon to his Internet browser and attempted to connect to a major search engine he had bookmarked. He wanted to check the homepage of the latest weather forecast.
“This snowstorm must be interfering with reception.”
Without consciously realizing what he was doing, Koushiro must have glared at the intruders for entering without knocking and stepping all over the floor with their shoes on, because the taller, and obviously older, of the two boys apologized.
“I don’t mind,” Koushiro politely replied, a little flustered.
As the snow continued to fall with no sign of stopping, other children arrived at the shrine to take shelter.
Koushiro’s classmate, Mimi Tachikawa.
And, an acquaintance Koushiro only knew through the required school club they shared, Taichi Yagami.
At that time, none of the children would have ever imagined that the seven people gathered here would soon find themselves involved in a long, long adventure.
The snowstorm gradually stopped.
“Yay!” With a whoop of enjoyment, Takeru jumped down onto the snow and scooped up a handful to form a ball. “Hey, Brother. We can have a snowball fight!”
“Just what the hell is going on here?” Taichi asked. The question wasn’t directed at anyone in particular. Taichi often had a bad habit of saying what he was thinking.
“Hmm,” Mimi said, sounding impressed. “You must be pretty smart, Jou-senpai.”
“Anyway, Jou,” Yamato said. The reason he didn’t add honorifics to Jou’s name was because he thought they were in the same grade. “Has the snowstorm passed?”
His cover-up sounded weak, and he knew it. Seeing Yamato’s eyebrows furl for a split second into an annoyed expression, Jou realized that he had screwed up.
Everyone looked up.
“Is that… an aurora?” Sora asked, her eyes wide with disbelief. “But, being able to see an aurora in Japan is just…”
Thinking that his eyes were playing tricks, Taichi shut and opened them again. The lights were still there. They weren’t flickering any longer, but glowing stronger and stronger. It wasn’t long before Taichi realized that that was because these lights were heading towards them.
Sora and Yamato had also noticed. “They’re balls of light! Are they meteorites?”
“Watch out!”
BANG!
“That was scary,” Mimi said as she stood up. Her face, however, was not as pale as Jou’s, who had been standing next to her. In fact, she appeared to be slightly amused, as if the entire thing had been an accident.
Koushiro was about to dig his hand through one of the holes when, with a “Hyah!”, he quickly drew it back.
“Wh—What is that?!” Taichi asked, his voice raised at a hysteric pitch.
“This is…”
All seven of the things began to beep furiously.
“Is it because of the electromagnetic waves?” Koushiro murmured to himself, but even he knew it was a baseless hypothesis.
At the same time, something impossible happened.
And then…
Seized by a power they could not dispute, the seven children were sucked inside.
③ Mysterious AnimalsThey had waited a long, long time just to meet their partners.
Although no one had taught them, they knew how to speak words. They even knew what their names were, and who they were waiting for. However, what they did not know was, for what purpose.
Confident that their partners would arrive from the skies, they faced the heavens day after day, calling out the names of their respective partners.
Another said, “Yamato!”
One day, the one who was waiting for “Takeru” saw the aurora in the sky.
All of them looked up.
The sky glimmered brightly for an instant, and then they heard screaming from far away.
Immediately accompanying the terrified cries were seven children, who they could see were lumped together in a mass of arms and legs as they plummeted to the ground.
“YAMATO! YAMATO! YAMATO!”
So happy were they that they jumped great leaps of joy as each of them repeatedly called the name of the partner they had been longing for. When a force separated the children still in the air into seven different directions, each of them eyed the spot where they anticipated their partner would land, and hurriedly dispersed.
With a dull thump, Yamato hit land.
He was so certain that he had just been falling from high up there, very close to the stratosphere. Could he have been hallucinating? As his body had spun through the air during the drop, he’d thought he’d seen glimpses of something that looked like an island underneath him …
A quick look around his surroundings confirmed that he was in the woods. For a moment he thought he was somewhere on the campgrounds, but the humidity that clung to his arms made him quickly change his mind. If this was really camp, it should have been much cooler weather…
“Hey, Takeru!” He called out his younger brother’s name. When he didn’t receive a response, he tried again.
Turning in every direction, he repeated the same name over and over. But Takeru’s voice could not be heard anywhere.
“Takeru! Takeru!!”
“Takeru! Where are you, Takeru?!”
That was when he heard a shy voice say, “Yama…to?”
Although he couldn’t see anyone around, a chestnut-colored stuffed doll with a horn on its head dropped to the ground beside him. Yamato wasn’t sure how it was made to do it, but it blinked its eyes, and —
— its mouth moved to the sound of words, as if it were really a living being.
Yamato had no idea what was going on, but he still had enough of his wits about him to know not to fall for a talking plushie.
And that was when, as if to emphasize its existence, the stuffed toy jumped up and down.
Yamato’s mouth dropped open. And stayed open.
Tsunomon spoke. “You’re looking for Takeru, right? I’ll take you to him! I’m sure Tokomon has already found Takeru by now.”
Sora became very still. If seeing the strange pink animal with a blue flower decorated on its head wasn’t enough, it had even spoken words to her.
She considered screaming for help, but it would be terrible if that caused this creature to get excited.
The thing wriggled the many protuberances underneath its head (she couldn’t tell if they were feet or tentacles) to approach Sora, and she immediately took a step back.
Its flower drooping upon hearing those words, the animal said sadly, “Sora… Do you hate me?”
“I’m Pyocomon. I just said that earlier.”
“Pyocomon is Pyocomon,” the thing said simply, “Just like Sora is Sora.”
Biting her lip, Sora then heaved a great sigh.
“All right, fine,” she said resignedly. The affection she could feel from those bright blue eyes had stolen her of her wariness. “In any case… at least one thing I know for sure around here is that you’re called Pyocomon.”
Rubbing a leaf between his fingers, Koushiro murmured another “How mysterious.”
He was in a considerably vast forest. The branches of all the trees in this forest had leaf upon leaf attached to them, and although it wasn’t an impossible task to do, it must have taken a lot of labor to replicate everything and make the forest appear so realistic. Even people with untrained eyes would have agreed with Koushiro that it would have been cheaper economically to just plant real trees in their place.
“So, let me ask you again…” Koushiro said to the elaborately-made creature next to him. It had never left his side ever since it had found him. “You say this place is called File Island?”
“I must say, this theme park is made extraordinarily well.”
“You don’t know?”
Perhaps the opening date for this park was a long way off, Koushiro thought, and the person speaking through this machine (whose accent was clearly from the Kansai region [05] of Japan) was playing dumb.
“Anyway, Koushiro-han. Everyone else is waiting, so let’s hurry back to them.”
“Okay, I got it. Can you take me there?”
The creature looked almost beside itself with happiness as it moved along the ground in a shuffling walk. Koushiro reasoned to himself that it must have wheels hidden underneath.
In all eleven years of his life, Jou could honestly swear that he had never dealt with anything as utterly and unexplainably bizarre as this.
“Wait for me, Jooou!”
Which led him to a single conclusion —— A monster?
So could this mean this was a dream?
“Why are you running away?” shouted the incarnation chasing behind him, its very existence bulldozing over the common sense Jou had so carefully cultivated throughout his eleven years. Jou could only run for his life.
Wait, this isn’t the time to be thinking about that.
His voice was so strained from his exertions that it was almost shameful to hear.
“Takeru!”
“Ah, Brother!”
Within his arms, Takeru was holding a… a piggy bank? No, a katoributa [06]? — some object with a pudgy comical shape. Realizing where Yamato’s gaze was directed at, Takeru replied, “Ah, let me introduce you. This is Tokomon,” and shoved the ornament-thing up at Yamato’s face.
It wasn’t an ornament at all. Just like the Tsunomon that had brought him here, it was a living animal that could speak words.
Smiling with its entire face, Tokomon agreed brightly. “Right!”
“Tokomon said that there are more of his friends around,” Takeru said excitedly, “There’s Koromon, and Tanemon, and Pukamon, and Pyocomon, and who else………. Tsunomon!”
“Oh, I see. It’s nice to meet you!” Takeru greeted it with a small bow. “I’m Takeru Takaishi.”
And Yamato was left standing stock-still, unable to comprehend this situation.
A sheepish smile forming on his lips, Yamato raced after Takeru.
When Taichi landed, he had lost consciousness with his hand tightly clutched around the small device that had appeared from within the aurora. Now that object was blinking furiously as it flashed bright light.
Taichi finally opened his eyes, but it wasn’t because of the light flashing in them that had woken him up. Settled right in front of his face was a pink thing that looked like a rugby ball. Someone had drawn large red eyes on its surface, which inexplicably blinked as they stared down at him. The bottom half of the rugby ball split open to display a large mouth glistening with small, sharp fangs, and it spoke,
—It spoke.
“H—Hya!? Wh—What the heck?!”
And then it tried to leap at Taichi’s face. Reacting more out of sheer surprise than anything, Taichi pushed a hand in front to stop it and rose hurriedly to his feet.
The pink rugby ball introduced itself. “I’m Koromon!”
“Um…”
And then it tried leaping at Taichi again.
Just then, the tall grass nearby rustled and the junior [08] that Taichi knew from their club, Koushiro, poked his head out of the wilderness.
But upon seeing the pink mollusk-like animal moving beneath the other boy’s feet, Taichi went on to exclaim, “Th—There’s another one! What the heck are these weird things?!”
“File… Island?” Taichi had never heard of it before. “Wait, so this is an island?”
“Hmm…”
“Let’s see…”
“I guess with that ocean there, it really does mean this place is an island…”
He got straight to the point. “I saw an ocean, but it may have been a lake.”
“But there’s still Mount Fuji, isn’t there? Look, see that mountain over there?” Taichi said, pointing to the jagged-looking mountain on his left.
Next to him, Motimon piped up in its confident voice, “That’s called Infinity Mountain.” [09]
“That’s right.”
While they were figuring things out, the other children soon gathered around them. Each of them was lead by a Digimon partner made of various shapes.
Yamato and Tsunomon.
And, with a piercing scream that announced his arrival,
Jou appeared.
Stiffening, Jou’s face paled even further as he let out a wail. “…Th—There’s more of them.”
Zooming happily into Jou’s back, it said cheerfully with its rank, fishy breath, “I’m Pukamon! Pleased to meet’cha!”
Looking around, Yamato asked, “Is this all of us? I think I remember one more person who was with us at the shrine.”
“Oh!” Jou’s head snapped up as he cried out in realization. “Mimi-kun! Mimi Tachikawa-kun isn’t here!”
Tanemon was having a hard time answering Mimi’s question.
Mimi did not believe it for a minute.
Mimi had never believed in UFOs. The subject was hardly even brought up as a topic of discussion among her friends and family. But when this strange creature suddenly appeared in front of her and she realized she wasn’t dreaming, how else could she explain it? Surely this leafy being must be an alien that had come from outer space.
“I was always here, waiting for you, Mimi…” Tanemon spoke to Mimi, as if it were appealing to her. It fidgeted with its small limbs (or at least Mimi thought they were) as it looked at her apologetically.
Mimi’s thin eyebrows furrowed as she frowned in thought. Maybe this wasn’t Earth at all? Maybe the water that had shown up in front of the shrine was actually a UFO? Maybe the aliens had beamed her up and flown billions of light-years away and brought her to this planet that looked so much like Earth where she will spend her days for the rest of her life?!
Mimi was actually a very nice, well-behaved girl by nature. It was just that, in some cases, she would respond to the inner logic she had formed within her head with disregard for what was actually said to her during the conversation. It often caused many people - even friends - who were talking with her to become very, very confused and unable to know how to carry on their conversation.
That was exactly what was happening right now.
Tanemon was also not the type to delve too long into logical thinking. When Mimi yelled, it didn’t really understand why but it became increasingly sad and wretched. To express those feelings, it burst into tears.
Mystified at the alien’s sudden wailing outburst, Mimi instantly became silent. Perhaps the aliens from the Tanemon Planet were actually very nice and they simply wanted to be friends with earthlings. Although she was picked by them at random to represent the Earth, treating their offer like this would be very bad form on her part. It would be ridiculous to believe that this little mess-up would cause Earth and the Tanemon Planet to wage war, but Mimi still agreed that it was necessary to form friendly relations first.
Flashing her beautiful trademark smile, which had captured the hearts of many male students, she held out her hand to Tanemon to offer a handshake. In this pose, it wouldn’t have seemed out of place if Mimi’s shoulder bore the insignia with the words “Ambassador of International Peace.”
Tanemon stopped crying, but it was puzzled over how to respond to Mimi’s outstretched hand. Unsurely, it stretched out a leaf from the top of its head and touched Mimi’s hand shyly.
It must be a UFO, Mimi thought.
④ Attack of the Stag Beetle Monster“Kyaaaaaaah!”
“It’s Mimi-kun!” Jou cried out in alarm. But because he did not have the courage to take the initiative, he turned to Taichi and Yamato instead and asked hesitantly, “Wh—What do you think happened to her…?”
“Wait, Taichi!”
Sora and Koushiro chased after him. Yamato had a late start because he urged Takeru to climb onto his back first.
Mimi, with a small Digimon that looked like a plant bulb at her heels, was heading from the children’s left towards their right.
“Wh—What’s that sound?” Sora asked, to which Koushiro immediately answered, “Look up there! There’s something in the skies!”
“I don’t know what’s up there, but we have to save her!” Using the swift legs that he prized, Taichi chased after Mimi. Sora lined up perfectly next to him, keeping pace. Clearly, being the two-top team that the Odaiba’s soccer club boasted of was not just for show. Koushiro did his best to keep up behind them, while the additional weight of his brother on one set of legs dragged Yamato quite a distance behind Koushiro. Jou was even further behind.
Now the children could see Mimi. Perhaps she had heard the others’ voices and turned from under her pursuer’s nose, or maybe she was running randomly through the forest and just happened to come upon them, but whatever the case, she was rushing towards Taichi and the others at full speed and…
“It’s a stag beetle monster!” Koushiro yelped.
“Noooo!” As Mimi ran, she could hear the thick snapping of wood as the enormous stag beetle chopped apart the branches with its pincers as it closed in behind her.
The monster chomped noisily as if it was testing its bite — open and close, open and close — approaching until Mimi could almost feel the sharp edges of it grazing at her back. And then this time the pincers opened widely for its final bite and the monster screamed in triumphant anticipation before Sora ran across from Mimi and tackled her to the ground. They avoided death only by a hair’s breadth: So close were they that the sound of its pincers closing on air rang painfully through Sora’s ear canal, a heavy metallic sound like two large hammers hitting each other.
Both of them had mud and dead leaves stuck on their clothes and hair. Mimi herself couldn’t seem to believe that she was still alive and she dove into Sora’s arms, bursting into frightened tears.
But… “It’s coming here again!” Yamato hollered. Far away and high in the sky, the children could see the stag beetle monster make a wide U-turn and head in their direction again.
“What…” Taichi himself did not have a plan. His desire to beat it before it killed them was strong, but just how to go about doing that, he had absolutely no idea.
“Then what?” Jou shook with fear as his eyes fixed on the stag beetle monster closing on them.
“All right, let’s run!” Frustrated that he could not think of another option, Taichi agreed.
Vrrrmmmm… vrrrmmmm…
Even so, they didn’t know if they could keep running away forever. The moment they ran out of stamina would be the exact moment they became stag beetle food. As much as they wanted to believe that their smaller selves held more stamina than this monster, they couldn’t.
“All right, it’s gone!”
“If only there was a cave around here somewhere…” Yamato whispered. Turning to look down at Tsunomon, he asked, “Do you know of any?”
“Er, it’s not your fault…” It was Yamato who ended up feeling shamed for the trouble.
The children set off once again. Tokomon rode backwards on top of Takeru’s hat so it could keep an eye out behind them. Now it cried, “It’s coming again!” and all of a sudden Taichi, who was in the lead, stopped.
The children saw right away what was blocking him. What lay in their path was not more road, but a precipitous cliff.
“It’s coming!” Tokomon yelled, baring fierce fangs that no one would have expected of from its cute appearance.
As if acting on an invisible signal, the Digimon who had clung to the children all this time started to walk away. They began to retrace their steps back to where they’d come from, dragging themselves, or hopping, or moving on tiny feet.
“We’ll never leave you,” Koromon said, looking back at him. Its face was set with a look of tragic determination.
“We’ll protect all of you, Taichi!”
Saying these words resolutely, Koromon turned a fierce glare at the stag beetle monster. His eyes gleamed with the spirit of the challenged who at last took up the gauntlet.
“Stop! Don’t!”
It was obvious that these small Digimon were no match against this enormous stag beetle monster, yet they challenged it to battle. First, Koromon and the others spouted what looked like bubbles from their mouths. Perhaps these bubbles were extremely acidic, because the monster unexpectedly fell from balance and its pincers dug into the earth. Without a pause, Koromon and the others pressed on with their attack.
The children couldn’t stand watching anymore.
Without even a moan passing its lips when the stag beetle monster slapped it violently into a large tree trunk, Koromon immediately leapt at the enemy again. What gave strength to Koromon was its determined purpose and desire to protect Taichi. Of course, the other Digimon — Tsunomon, Pyocomon, Motimon, Tanemon, Pukamon, and Tokomon — were the same.
But we know with our own bodies how powerless we are. There is a wall of overwhelming odds before us. We can’t climb over it with our physical strength, our offensive ability, or even with our willpower.
Taichi screamed. “KOROMON!”
Sora, “PIYOMON!”
Mimi, “TANEMON!”
And even Jou cried out, “Pu—PUKAMON!”
“What’s that?”
“I—It can’t be…”
“Koromon, evolve! Agumon! Baby Flame!” — A cream-colored Digimon shaped like a small dinosaur spat out a breath of fire.
“Pyocomon, evolve! Piyomon! Magical Fire!” — A pink bird Digimon shot out a spiral of mysterious fire.
“Tanemon, evolve! Palmon! Poison Ivy!” — A green Digimon with a bright red plume on her head stretched out her hands, which became ivy that snared the enemy.
“Pukamon, evolve! Gomamon! Marching Fishes!” — Last of all, a Digimon who looked exactly like a seal cried out, calling a large number of different-colored fish that flew through the air from out of nowhere.
“Wh—What just happened?”
“Koromon’s dead!” Taichi wailed. The other children joined his cries.
“I’m Koromon. Now that I’ve evolved though, I’m called Agumon.”
That was the beginning of their adventures. In this manner — sharing laughter and tears, mutual encouragement, and momentary disputes along the way — the children and their Digimon set off on a long, long journey.
It was the ocean. Taichi peered through the round lens of his mini-telescope as he gazed at the horizon where the marine blue of the sea and the azure blue of the sky melted together. The feel of the waves as they crested felt as lukewarm as a heated swimming pool, and the air smelled salty. Taichi put his mini-telescope not in his shorts like he always did, but in the pocket of his briefs. His shorts, blue T-shirt, and socks were drying on top of a rock along with the green, orange, and white shirts of the other boys.
“Hey, Jou,” he asked. “Don’t you feel hungry?”
But it was not only Taichi who was hungry. Feeling his own empty stomach squirm, Yamato grumbled, “When is it going to get darker anyway?” and glared at Jou as if it was his fault.
“I wonder what time it is now,” Koushiro said forlornly. He had attempted to use his cell phone and laptop to investigate, but neither of them worked. And he’d thought he’d still had a lot of battery life left over…
“She mentioned it was… 35:00 AM, was it?” Taichi said with a wry smile. He’d suddenly remembered the minute they had arrived on the beach, when he had tried using one of the nearby telephone booths to call home. The person who picked up on the other end indicated the time as if it was an incredible joke. Too bad he didn’t find it very funny.
“‘Digimon.’ I remember hearing that word before,” Taichi revealed to Koushiro as he slid his newly dried T-shirt over his head. It felt crinkly and smelled faintly of salt.
“I forget, it was like something that caught my attention briefly as I was passing by. Someone did say it.”
“Let me tell you about my personal hypothesis,” Koushiro said, his back turned towards the others as he modestly put his dried shirt back on. “I think this place is perhaps a theme park that is being developed in absolute secrecy.”
“Its concept may be for us children to enjoy an adventure with these strange Digimon beings who live on this island.”
Taichi confused the
Chapter end
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