Digimon Fan Fiction ❯ Digimon: Data Storm ❯ And then I was swept away ( Chapter 1 )

*Circeus*

Hi there people! Welcome to the new and improved version of Digimon: Data Storm! Better characters! More words! More colors! More blood!

... Okay maybe not that much blood

*Johnny*

You're forgetting about the disclaimer, you dim-witted heap of slum!

*He takes out a megaphone*

Everything Digimon is the property of too many different people to be bothered about listing them here! The Digital node universe, it's specific concept and characters, however, are (c) Jean-Sébastien Girard, go play with your own toys if you don't feel like meeting close with a fire poker!

*Jean-Seb*That was painful. Well anyway, great thanks to all of those who read the original versions. Greater thanks to those who left reviews, and my greatest thanks to Shirubie, radagast and JJriddler. I couldn't do it without you guys!

AUH ZÄN NIMAN NONÄTOCOH - And then I was swept away

Several well-known websites have reported massive server breakdowns in the last few weeks. A code of unknown origin seems to clog data transmission between important servers. Most noticeably, Amazon and the entire Google network have been all but impossible to access for the past twelve hours. Many, if not all, of the most popular free hosting networks also went berserk, deleting large batches of user accounts. Geocities, Lycos, Angelfire and Tripods hostees are desperate, for they are unable to even access their sites to check whether their accounts have been terminated. This new catastrophe is striking the dot-com industries at one of...

A hand reached out and tuned down the sound. It retreated to the mouse and added text to a picture of stylized blooming flowers. Andrea quickly completed the last of her conceptual works to be presented to her boss that afternoon and saved it. At this moment, a yell of annoyance came from the next cubicle. Andrea sighed with a slight smile. Myriam had been grumbling since she'd walked in that morning. Apparently, she was unable to access her email account and it seemed to impact on her productivity considering the litanies of curses she was producing at a quickening pace as the day progressed.

Finally, she pushed herself off the not-so-ergonomic wheelchair and grabbed for a coffee mug abandoned atop the computer's tower. The green frog drawn on it seemed to glower in anger as it was carried to the floor's resting room and rinsed off from an earlier offering to the most ancient tradition of sacrificing acre black drink to forbidden gods in exchange for energy.

Just as she pressed the "espresso" button, a stream of underbreathed curses preceded the thin ungenerous frame of Myriam. The woman plopped herself down on a chair and slammed her own daisy-decorated mug on the table. Andrea closed her eyes, the nagging feeling that the day would end with a headache confirmed. Myriam sighed. Her face was solidly framed with 2 locks of hazelnut hair left free from her short ponytail. She jumped when Andrea greeted her.

"Oh, hello. Hadn't noticed you."

Andrea rolled her eyes.

"I see you have a new hairdo," again she added by herself. Myriam had been trying a new one a day since she'd met her new boyfriend.

"I really like this one. I think I'll keep it for a while."

Andrea could barely keep a sardonic snort. Myriam said that six times a week. She looked at Andrea with a thinkful air, but Andrea didn't notice, her mind slowly drifting away. She got up and approached her. As Myriam spoke, her hand started to reach up.

"I reckon you could use some free locks too. That braid looks too strict on you."

The hand approached her head. When Andrea, several seconds too late, realized Myriam was speaking, it was too late. She tried to back away, but a coke distributor and a snack machine were in her way. The fingers brushed her ear and Andrea's eyes closed. Her hand flashed up to clasp around Myriam's wrist. Her eyes opened back and glared at the other woman. Then she looked down as half a mug of cold coffee finished to spill out on the floor.

"Never..."

"Touch your hair, I know." Myriam shook her hand free and rubbed her wrist. "Sorry. I keep forgetting." With a sigh, Andrea recovered her mug. She was suspecting Myriam of slowly trying to wear her defences down.

While she sponged up the liquid with a few paper towels, Myriam took her place. The device gurgled happily at being solicited and filled half her mug with a murky liquid Andrea recognize as its highly personal take on hot chocolate. Myriam left without a word.

Once her mug had been properly washed up, Andrea came back to the machine and pressed the button for espresso again. Overjoyed with use, the machine answered by cascading blistering hot coffee down into her mug. With a satisfied smile, she turned to leave and saw her supervisor walking in. Mark was frantically waving a report around, obviously trying to dry up the orange juice that had been spilt on it. She grinned.

"Heyah, Andrea! How's it going?" he asked her in is usual joyful tone.

"Very well. I'm almost done with the project, I only have to do some test printing," she answered.

Her feet brushed on the carpeted floor as she walked back to her working space. As she advanced between the wall and the cubicle sections, she noticed the sound. Before she could ponder on the weird digital rustling that made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end, Myriam called for her.

"Andrea!" she said, walking out of her own cubicle. "Something happened when I came back. There was this big flash of light thing from your computer, and now, it's running amok. Sounds like it's formatting its HD."

Andrea cautiously looked inside the walled area, cursing under her breath. Her eyes widened at the technological nightmare displayed on the screen, in place of the expected error message. She would have screamed in frustration weren't it for the fact she had never seen such a bizarre sort of bug. The screen looked like a matrix-style analyzer gone wild, with multicoloured streams of code streaking across it in all directions.

The characters' slight pulse made her nauseous and she looked away for a second. She wanted to close down the screen or at least hide this madness away, but her graphic tablet was in the way. Actually, it floated in the way.

"What the..." the conceptual designer trailed.

She carefully examined what had been a fairly standard Wacom graphic tablet. The stylus was now attached to it with a cord and the previously solid peripheral device now had hinges to fold it in the middle. It seemed a bit smaller too, with nearly an inch wide trimmed away. Most of it's surface now consisted of a grey screen with greenish text barely interrupted by the ingeniously hidden hinges. Several buttons bordered that screen on each side. The device was floating 3 inches over the desk where she'd left it earlier and was encased in a soft glow. At least it didn't give away too much to cliché by slowly rotating.

When she eventually pulled herself to touch it, the physic-violating device floated in her hand, then stopped both glowing and floating. The sudden need to catch the falling peripheral meant that Andrea's coffee mug would again have an unexpected meeting with the floor. She jumped when hot coffee spilt on her leg, but quickly reported her attention to the tablet. Trying some buttons caused the words displayed to change. "No messages", "Encrypt", "Hack" and "Data Storage" went by on what seemed to be some sort of menu.

At this point, the computer's rustling stopped abruptly. It took at least ten seconds for Andrea's ears to retransmit the information to her brains, and she carefully glanced back at the screen. The data had stopped moving, but a white area had formed and apparently floated over the code. It's shape seemed vaguely familiar, then realization dawned on her like in a B-movie.

"No way!" she mumbled.

Her mind fumbled around for a solution. Her world was rapidly crumbling away in insanity. Than she gave away.

"Drats, what do I have to loose?" she asked aloud and pressed the tablet against the screen to check if the shapes were as identical as they seemed.

All lights shut down. Andrea appears to be paralysed, leaning forward as if pressing her "tablet" against an invisible vertical surface. The view rotates around her until it comes to her face, then it zooms into her right eye where a glint is revealed to be herself, still standing in pitch darkness, then she plummets down...

Andrea blinked a first time, then a second, then a third just to be sure. Nope, she quite obviously wasn't at work anymore. She felt terribly dizzy and sick. A crashing noise came from behind her. She twirled and managed to distinguish some kind of tropical wilderness behind the mist in her eyes.

"Okay... No more... coffee for... me," she mumbled before falling to the ground, unconscious.

Was it a second later? A minute? An hour? She didn't know and, at this point, didn't care either. She had nearly recovered consciousness, that she knew. All I need to do is open my eyes and I'll be back in front of my computer. I'll realize that I have slept a couple of seconds, then I'll print these works, show them to Mark, and be off for the weekend! She smiled. A nice smell of fresh waffles was floating in the air and her smile widened, then her eyes shot open so wide she'd have lost contact lenses had she worn any.

"WAFFLES!?" she exclaimed, abruptly sitting up.

"Yes, miss, waffles, would you like some?" a male voice casually answered from the next room.

The room's wall were made of carefully piled stone forming slightly curved angles at the point they touched the ceiling. She looked back at the bed, which had apparently been made of stone. Fortunately, she had actually laid down on a hay mattress and down pillows. Andrea threw away the colourful quilt she'd been covered with and sat at the edge of the bed, her legs dangling over the edge for lack of reaching the floor. The sparse furniture comprised a nightstand, a closet (both also made of stone) and a rocking chair with a pile of additional quilts on it. A window was filtering light through what appeared to be bamboo shades.

Andrea heard a sound she related to a waffle-iron opening with a puff of vapour thrown in for flavour. Jumping down, she wobbled out of the room in a dazed state. The next room seemed to be the kitchen. Someone looking like an African shaman from those old cartoons and wearing one gigantic ethnic masks was conscientiously cutting something with a meter-long boomerang-shaped sword whose blade was dripping red blood. This scene would have filled many's definition of "odd" and finally managed to snap Andrea out of her trance.

She nearly jumped out of her skin and yelled.

The masked figure did a good approximation of the same, even adding it's own personal tweak by throwing the sword up. It stuck straight into the stone ceiling. Both kept yelling for a good minute until they almost simultaneously ran out of air. Andrea struck a pose the best she could.

"Don't get near me! I'm a black belt and I'm getting out of here and back to my office!" she threatened. While the part about being a black belt was true, she had some nagging doubts about the going-back-to-the-office part.

Her interlocutor put his hands to his hips. Wasn't it for the mask, she would have sworn he was looking at her amusedly.

"How?" His tone probably confirmed her supposition.

It took her another ten seconds to fully grasp that she didn't know where she was, who she was facing or how she got there. Her brain was definitely not appreciative of espresso today. She groaned and took yet another ten seconds to look over the figure... and really wondered where she actually was.

Short brown fur covered his body, except for his chest and belly, where it was white. Dirty, but not bloody, bandages wrapped around his overgrown wrists. His feet looked more like animalistic clawed paws, the hand similarly sported short pointed claws. Green hair (she could only assume it was hair) was visible behind the red and yellow feather lining the top of the mask. There were little words able to accurately describe the sole actual piece of clothing he or it was wearing. Andrea's cortex registered it as "turf briefs" and decided not to ponder further on the subject.

She started shaking when her brain finally registered the fact this was certainly not a human being, confirmed by the simple fact this... thing... had a tail. The mist was floating back before her eyes. Before she realized it, she was fainting again and the "thing" rushed to catch her before she crashed on the floor.

It was starting all over again. She just knew it. At least, this time, she knew, or though she knew, a bit of what to expect. The first thing she noticed was the smell of fruits and waffles. Strawberry... He'd been cutting strawberries. Her memory somehow functioned, which she decided, after much deliberations, to consider good news. She moaned and her eyes flickered open. Her face was all wet. Then she pulled the cloth off her forehead and dropped it on the nightstand.

"There, you had me worried for a little while, miss," a rather comforting male voice commented.

Andrea decided against looking away. There it was again. The mask, the same blue, green and red mask she had seen previously. She realized there weren't any visible holes in it, but she wasn't going to let that get to her at this point. The... person was sitting on a chair by the bed she was in. She had apparently been keeping watch over her.

"Where am I?" she croaked. God, how her throat hurt. "How long have I been out of it. And who are you?" Her anger was slowly building up.

"Well, I'll reply in order." Amazingly, the mask didn't seem to alter the tone in any way. "You are in Axolotl Node. First time you've been out cold for half an hour. Second time around, you've been out of it for at least two hours now. Apparently all this screaming took its toll on you. And last, but not least, your servant is known as Sepikmon."

"Axol-what? Sepik-what?" she refrained herself from yelling and downed her tone to "computer annoyance" level. Her throat wanted nothing more than to go on strike.

"Sepikmon" He looked closer at her and stated, "You're not from around here."

"That would be the understatement of the century," Andrea deadpanned. "Sepikman, eh? I must still be out cold and I'm dreaming about superheroes or something." The humanoid tilted its head. Andrea considered it likely was its way of staring. Had she not been in such a state she might have tried to focus more on the being's odd body language.

"You definitely are not from here." He seemed to think a moment. "You are from the Real World!"

Andrea glared back at the creature. Talk about the obvious. Of course she was from the real world. Now, whether she was still in that very relative "real world" was another question altogether. Fortunately, some insistent grumbling kept her from snapping at her interlocutor.

"Oh God, I'm hungry," she muttered, pulling off the quilt.

"I'd have guessed so. I had to eat the first serving of waffles after a while, but those are quite fresh." He grabbed a tray on the nightstand and put it before her. What was his name again? Sepikmon looked at her as she stretched her arms and set to devour the food.

Once she was finished, she tried to walk across the room. This time, aside from a slight uncertainty, her legs seemed receptive to orders from her brain. She reached the window on the right-hand side of the room and pulled the shades up.

"Oh, dear, this is not Canada," she murmured for herself.

Large palm trees cast shadows over luxurious vegetation where she recognized yuccas and various orchids. A flat paved road was going straight ahead up to a Mayan pyramid. Small stone buildings lined the street. An organic mechanic from some demented mind walked pass the house she was in. Built from stone and wood parts, it looked like some vehicle driven by two 4-feet tall frogs with a cornet sprouting from their necks. She blinked, then faltered back to the bed and started sobbing.

A hand came to rest on her shoulder.

"There, there. Things can't be that bad, can they?" the humanoid said in a soothing voice. Her sobbing turned to blubbering. "Okay, maybe they can," he conceded, "but I know someone who might very well be able to help you."

Her cries eventually came to a halt and she looked up hopefully.

"Did you just say what I think you said?" She could have sworn he was smiling.

"If you think I just asked you to dance the rumba with a dandelion up your nose, I doubt it," he teased. " But I did say I might know someone who can aid you."

She sniffed and rubbed her eyes. He extracted a handkerchief from a pouch at his side and offered it to her. Andrea took it, thanking him with her eyes and wiped the tear marks off. She got up again, her legs more solid under her, and felt the sudden urge to kick something as her vision blurred another time. When the haze subsided, she looked defiantly at Sepikmon and spoke up.

"Well, let's get on our way." And with that she walked out of the room.

Sepikmon looked at the door in perplexity and smiled. On the bedside, the device the woman had clung to while he carried her to his home gave a short, bright burst of light and its screen turned black. However Sepikmon didn't notice this as he was already walking after Andrea, rapidly catching up to her. He found her standing in the middle of the street, looking around in a dazed state. He gave a deep, low chuckle.

"Don't worry. If anything, Coatlmon is just as surprised at seeing you," he pointed out. His arms widened as he spoke with a tourist guide's tone that caused the woman to giggle, "Welcome to Teocaltintlan, the city of temples."

Andrea noticed the same road she had seen earlier. Further down, twittering discussions surrounded stands. Rectangular stone buildings decorated with intricate carvings bordered the paved plaza that was apparently the centre of the city. A frog nearly her size jumped past her, startling the young woman. Sepikmon chuckled again.

"You'd better get used to it, Miss. You are going to see a lot of things like that." She cringed at that name.

"My name is Andrea." Sepikmon was surprised at the tone she used. It implied that further offences might not necessarily call off physical answers.

Can Sepikmon's acquaintance help her go back to the real world? Will her narrow mind be able to cope with this dimension? Will she tastes the peppers? Stay tuned for the next chapter: Namiquïlo in coatlahtoani

Johnny's linguistic trivia
The verb in the title actually means "I was carried away by the river". It is composed of the verbal form tocoh, "to be burried", ä from ätl, "water" and the prefixes on-, meaning "away" and n(i)- marking the first person singular subject.

However the English title got the obvious precedent in the translation process. It's much better than the original attempt, though, which ended up meaning "I have upturned myself".