A tree stood outside of a white, two-story house, its branches pressed against a window and wall on the second floor that faced more than a mile of nearly absolutely nothing. Bits of grass poked out of the dry, dusty land at places, and there were
a few more trees further back, but that was all. It wasn’t an overly beautiful or hospitable place to most, but to the people who lived there, it was fine. The Murkes gladly took the dusty scenery in exchange for the space and freedom to move that life in the cities denied, the cities that were covering nearly everything by this time.
In this tree, a young girl was perched, gazing over the featureless terrain. She looked perfectly normal for a girl her age, in all respects, although “normal” was a role fate and history had never chosen for her. Though you couldn’t tell it by looking, Natalie was not the stereotype of American youth, and she was conscious of that every day. For unlike every other American youth of that time, or actually, any youth of any nationality, she didn’t have a Digimon.
Digimon, also known as Digital Monsters, had first come to the world a little over fifty years ago, when the legendary Digidestined (people chosen to help the first Digimon) had broken the definitive barrier between the two worlds. This hadn’t caused free trade and travel between the two worlds, but somehow it caused humans the world over to suddenly receive digi-eggs, seemingly at random, that later hatched into Digimon partners. Within ten years, only a few lingering people were without Digimon. By the time Natalie had been born, everyone had had them for some time.
The other children at school, of course, seemed to think Natalie was always in open season for their little pranks and games. This was the reason she found herself outside on her tree so often; sitting at that tree and gazing at all of the nothing was one of the few ways she could calm herself down enough to try not to break something, particularly on the bad days.
This was one of those.
“Stupid Marcus,” she muttered, eyes narrowing.
Marcus was one of the worst problems, not really because he knew any better insults than the others, or because he was any bigger, but simply because he was sneakier. Instead of calling her names, for instance, he’d simply do things like take the last bottle of green paint when he knew she needed it (and make it obvious that that’s why he took it), ask her questions and interrupt her when she answered (What’s your name? It doesn’t matter!), cut in front of her and insist that she was trying to cut in front of him when she complained, and other stuff like that. The real big thing wasn’t that he did them, but that she supposedly overreacted to such “minor” things. She also tended to overreact a lot, which made the teacher (who had some kind of notion about turning the other cheek) angry. Natalie had gotten a detention twice because of him, which made her parents angry, too.
Of course, the other kids had a tendency to annoy her, too, and in a lot of cases (like when someone dropped an already-cracked egg on her head from the top of the slide) it was worse. None of those kids really acted individually, though, which made blame kind of harder. Besides, they did it less often, and at least she didn’t get into as much trouble when she overreacted to them.
She sighed as she closed her eyes, and opened them again a moment later. She couldn’t keep thinking about Marcus and the other kids it if she was ever going to calm down.
She’d been trying to calm down for a long time, at least twenty minutes, when her vision blurred all of a sudden. Startled, she sat up a little, making sure she had a very firm grip on her tree limb.
What’s going on?
The orange-tinted sky, the only thing she could really see completely at all through the fading tree-limbs, was turning colors. It was paling, thinning, and getting . . . bluer. Though Natalie had heard that skies tended to be blue in some places, she knew for a fact that the sky should not be turning blue in front of her eyes.
Then, before she knew what was going on, she was pitched forward, toward a ground that seemed a swirl of blue and green.
“Aaggh!! Cold! Cold!”
Natalie fell into the middle of some sort of creek. After splashing around frantically for a few minutes, thoroughly soaking herself, she realized that the water only came to her stomach when she was in a sitting position. She stood up and waded out.
Despite the fact that the day was obviously warm, Natalie shivered and shuddered. That water was freezing, and she was absolutely covered in it! This was why Natalie had never liked getting wet, which is why at age ten she still didn’t know how to swim.
She spent a few minutes trying to warm herself as she gazed around, trying to make sense of things, none of which seemed to have any sense to make in the first place.
She wasn’t in her backyard anymore; that was for certain. The sky was an entirely different shade than it should be; it was blue, with fluffy white clouds floating in it high above her head. There was grass, at least hundreds of blades of the bright-green plants, beneath her. And, last time she checked, there wasn’t a creek running through her backyard, nor was there a forest surrounding it. And, just to top it all off, her house wasn’t there.
A tree, though, was there. It wasn’t really like her own tree, though. It was really thin and graceful, with a thin white covering (was it bark? Natalie thought it looked too thin for that) that was peeling off in places, as opposed to Natalie’s big, twisting, sturdy tree.
Natalie looked at the scene over again. It was really strange . . . but it was also really pretty, too. It was like one of those puzzles her mom always liked to put together.
It’s a tree and some water. Focus!
Natalie had to agree with herself. This was no time to be zoning out. She didn’t know what exactly she had to be doing, but she knew that she couldn’t just sit here. She had to figure out what happened.
So what had happened?
Maybe Natalie had had some sort of epileptic thingamajig, like this one girl at school had once, and she’d hit her head when she’d fallen. If that was true, then this was all a dream, like in The Illusionist of Oz.
Natalie immediately discarded this one without thinking about it--it was too boring.
Maybe . . . maybe she had been caused to go to sleep somehow, and some wacky evil scientist dude was keeping her in a calming dream so that she wouldn’t resist when he did evil experiments! And maybe . . .
A deafening roar abruptly cut off Natalie’s musings.
“Aaahhh!” she shouted in automatic response to the noise, covering her ears and not quite seeing the cause of the noise yet. She sprung to her dampened feet, her shoes making a squelching sound in the grass. High above the treetops, she saw it. Or . . . at least some of it.
A big, huge red dinosaur head that Natalie easily could have fit inside poked out of gigantically broad, red shoulders, with two relatively puny arms coming out. A little of the body was visible, but the rest was buried behind the treetops. It was huge, and it looked both bloodthirsty and angry.
Natalie felt there was really only one thing to do.
“YAAAAH!” Her shriek was louder and higher-pitched than before as she sprinted off into the woods, her arms flailing around her.
“GRAAHH!” shouted the dinosaur in response, chasing her. Natalie could hear trees falling down behind her, and hoped furiously that none of them would fall on her.
Natalie’s legs were getting really irritated by the wet, rough fabric scratching against skin, and her feet were slipping a lot inside her shoes, since they were having trouble getting a good grip in the wet sneakers. The twigs and branches that were slapping her as she passed were something else she would have liked to avoid. Fortunately, the big dinosaur behind her helped her ignore pretty much all of that.
It was definitely gaining, or else Natalie’s imagination was playing tricks on her. She could feel the monster’s huge feet as they hit the ground, its loud breathing (with roars put in every now and then) was getting louder, the crashing trees were falling on either side of her. Natalie could almost feel its stinky breath on the back of her neck.
“Ag-oof!”
Natalie tripped over one of those weird roots that stick up out of the ground and fell, rolling down a sudden downhill slope that popped out. The ground was a whole lot more uncomfortable than the forest; it seemed every piece of underbrush scratched her bare arms and face, and that everything small enough stuck to her. At the very time she decided that it would be better to get up and run, she rolled the edge of the earth and tumbled into a dark place.
“Oww . . .”
She had actually only fallen into a hole, narrow and about as tall as she was. She was curled at the bottom of it, head spinning, head pounding, limbs aching.
Natalie was in pain, and bleeding a little bit in several places, and she was really dizzy from the rolling. She couldn’t quite find her head long enough to even think about getting up until the monster’s giant jaw was directly above her.
“GRAAHH!”
Natalie’s mind was jelly. She saw each of the huge teeth . . . couldn’t stop looking at them. A gigantic tongue, and giant drops of spit falling, and breath that could kill a cow . . .the mouth coming closer, oh no, oh no . . .
And then it stopped.
The dinosaur tried to put its jaw down there again, and failed again. Natalie would have cheered, if she weren’t so terrified. It couldn’t fit its mouth down there!
Natalie’s heart fell into her feet again as the monster leaned down and started to dig the hole wider with its puny forefeet.
The monster wasn’t moving much dirt at a time, but it didn’t matter-Natalie couldn’t get out as long as it was there. As long as it took it to widen the hole enough, Natalie would have to be there. Unless there was some kind of miracle . . .
“GRAAAH!” Another loud roar. This wasn’t the dinosaur’s, though. It came from further away, and it was higher-pitched. “PAH!” the voice shouted, and moments later a huge, blue ball of . . . something . . . hit the dinosaur.
The dinosaur stood up and faced its attacker. “GRAAH!” he shouted, letting loose a gigantic fireball in the direction of the other roars.
It was distracted! Natalie needed no more invitation than that. Quickly, she stood, climbed out of the pit, and ran away as fast as her little legs would take her, never looking back.
Author's Note
I think I started in on this too quickly. But then again, they did for the first episode of Digimon, too. Doesn't really excuse me, but oh, well. There's a story to this coming, believe me. I've got a lot planned.
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