![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
butter-fly lyrics are appropriate titles for every post this account ever has and ever will make
This is an open post for people whoopsing themselves into the Digital World and going on adventures with some iteration of Erika and Wormmon while they're there.
Circumstance deets to mix and match as you desire:
-> Version of Erika. There are two options here; the one I'm most interested in playing at the moment of posting this is the one I talked about in this plurk, wherein the events of CSHM specifically don't happen but everything else in Erika's life does; around the time CSHM would have happened, she dies and wakes up in the Digital World, then meets Wormmon and goes about enjoying her new life.
The second option is the actual end of canon, where Erika is Hudiemon (who I've decided can partition into Erika and Wormmon because nyeh), with all the various things that that comes along with. I'm less interested in this overall because she's a distinctly different character, and since she has her shit so much together there's less to explore on my end, but if a more straightforward mentor-student dynamic is what you're after - or if you want something with preexisting CR dealing with Erika just being a Digimon now and that's how it is - it could be fun.
There are actually three options, I lied, the third is a wildcard for shit like...jamjar to Digital World. Jamjar Erika getting absorbed into Hudiemon? Eater Erika???? There are lots of possibilities. Life is god damn weird sometimes.
-> Where your character comes from. Digimon indulges in multiverses, so they can come straight from their own.....or they can come from a CS AU (so basically modern life but EDEN exists)......or some mashup of the two, or from a jamjar, or literally whatever. As you might have guessed, going to the Digital World tends to involve weird shit happening with computers. Sometimes that weird shit is as inexplicable as "a portal literally manifested on my computer" and sometimes it's weird VR hijinks that leave you in a coma and sometimes it's weird dire science mishaps and ETCETERA
-> Specific geographical locations. If you're familiar with Digimon you know the kind of stuff you can do. If you're not familiar with Digimon: places in the Digital World tend to look like fantasy wildernesses with weird inorganic bits baked into the scenery, or structures of human origin that built themselves and have never been inhabited by humans and thus are kind of Weird. Here are some examples and also some more examples. Digimon live both in the wild, where they can be very monstrous and dangerous, and in villages, which can be extremely rustic or actually fairly developed.
By default I'm assuming Erika and Wormmon are hanging out in a jungle-y area like this but if you have a better idea I am all ears.
-> Digimon friend. Sleuthverse doesn't do the like, chosen child partners assigned by fate to save the world thing, but there is kind of this sense that Digimon and humans click well together and some inexorable whim of the universe nudges friends together and it's very poetic and shit. If you think it'd be cool or there's something to explore there, and if you don't mind juggling two characters, go for it. Here's an index of smol Digimans because the wikis are hahahahahahahahaha
-> The presence of some greater threat. If you want some drama mixed in with your wilderness survival SoL between Getting Here and Going Home, there is always vampires, which historically cause most of the dramatic horseshit the Digital World goes through. Or demon lords, or weird eldritch shit. Maybe Eaters? If you want something to fight but you don't know what, I can rec something. If you just need something to run from, any big toothy Digimon can do that without being evil, they do hunt each other and eat people and shit sometimes.
-> DESTINY?! If your character would really just not fucking deal well with being punted into isekai bullshit, in Sleuthverse they'd be likely to attract the attention of Mirei, who is like, the Igor/Velvet Room Attendant of the Digimon games multiverse, and whose purpose is to 1) show up and go hmmmm how fascinating and talk cryptically about fate whenever weird nonsense happens, 2) offer hospitality and important powers and things to the people who have to deal with the weird nonsense. Have her dispense advice, give directions, let them stay a night in the DigiLab, etc. She's accompanied by her partners Angewomon and LadyDevimon, who sometimes take the form of a white cat and a black cat.
-> Literally any specific character dynamic or scene things you really want to make happen. Ways characters meet, drama, cute shit, whatever
for claire
...Well, you get what you get in life! Sometimes that's a jungle full of much bigger, and stronger, and less clumsy, and more irate bugs! You have to look on the bright side. Like...like strange creatures that appear out of nowhere, and who are very nice to you, even though sometimes they ask you to do dangerous things, because the dangerous things usually turn out well for both of you. Like the existence of Mountaintop Village, which is nice and cool despite the jungle humidity due to the altitude, and where most of the Digimon are young and friendly and only want to play, and where you can meet other Digimon to do things like trade fruit for tools...
...Cockatrimon still drives a hard bargain. He definitely remembers that time Wormmon knocked a shelf over, hmm. It's important to keep track of all your legs in his shop.
Mountaintop Village is nice, but if you're just another Digimon who's too old to be taken care of with the babies and too unskilled to run a shop or build things, it's a depressing place to sit around all day. Part of the day is just fine, though. Check out the overlook, rest your feet, catch up on the local gossip...
...Speaking of, is something going on around here? Everyone's acting a little energetic.]
for skarme
Of course, that means it stops looking like a police station the instant you step inside. Aesthetically, it's still got that government-contracted look in its walls and floors and everything, with desks and cabinets and all that, but police stations don't generally have a big spiral staircase smack dab in the middle of their floor plan, plunging down through floor after basement floor. Also, the papers scattered busily across tables usually aren't printouts of recipes. (they do sound p appetizing though)
Police stations are generally occupied, not abandoned save for faint voices carrying on somewhere far below. If there's multiple, they're similar in tone; distinctly feminine, either way. Conversational stops and starts break up the sound.
One one hand: people. On the other hand: the further down you go, the weirder the place starts to look, less "police station" and more "ominous fantasy cave". Big blobby slime molds with (admittedly pretty) glowing circuit-board patterns are devouring desks at a glacial pace. The scattered papers have coalesced into paper-mache stalactites. Veins of coppery ore show behind faded, peeling walls.
Is the chance worth the spookiness?]
no subject
[In Rise's mind, it was hardly worth weighing up before pushing open the door. Outside, sticky with heat, studded with out-of-place detritus and buzzing with red-and-black bug monsters she's sick of hiding from? Bad. (If only she'd known she'd be doing the exact opposite of sitting in front of a VR terminal for a few hours, she could have worn sneakers to today's shoot. Oh well.) Inside? Quite possibly not that. She'd be a fool not to take it.
There had been silence at first, other than the click and clatter of her heels on the tile floor. By itself, she couldn't be too unhappy about that. She'd had a hunch it would be deserted at best; discovering that she was right was almost comforting. ...but still kind of eerie too, no lie. A buddy or five would sure be nice to have round about now. Even Kanji or Yosuke.
But then, there had been... not silence, from somewhere far below. So quiet that she mistook it for a wistful memory of her friends' bickering at first, but once she listened a little closer, the tone and cadence were way off anyway. People? Shadows? Unusually eloquent bugs? More of Yu's weird ladyfriends, who he'd always assured her weren't Like That? The voices were kind of high pitched.
Predictably, there was only one way to find out. Or so she'd thought, about five floors ago. Now her voice is starting to get hoarse, the flickering LEDs embedded in the walls are getting on her nerves, and her still mud-spattered heels were not made for endless staircases any more than they were for unexpected rainforest.]
Helloooooo... Geez.
[Once again, she peers down over the staircase railing. At least she's near the bottom... unless she's just imagining the cave floor she can see beneath her, but the voices do seem clearer than they did up top. More distinctly Japanese, too. With a bit of luck, soon she'll be able to make out individual words.]
I'm guessing no clues on this floor either, huh? Himiko?
[The tall, floating feminine figure behind her shakes its head. Rise shakes hers too. This is still the most bizarre part of this jungle jaunt so far, and she intends to demand as many answers from whoever's down here as they're capable of spilling - but at the same time, she's glad she doesn't have to navigate this strange land completely alone.]
Okay then, moment of truth. Let's go.
[Ducking its neck to avoid catching its antenna on the nearby BRAISED SPICY TOFU MOCHI stalactite, Rise's battle-mode Persona descends through the stale air. And steadily, cautiously, Rise follows it down the final flight of stairs.]
no subject
Erika's arms hurt.
She doesn't really have anyone but herself to blame for the misunderstanding; of course "you can find pure digicopper in this underground location" means that it has to be dug out of the ground. Never mind that things in this world don't necessarily work the way they would back home, and everything up to this point has neatly defied her expectations. This would be the one - the metal not occurring as a junk heap of statuettes, or growing off the cave walls like some kind of bulbous vine fruit, but just...sitting there, in the rock, like a completely normal vein of ore.
The time to turn back, make the trek to one of the nearby villages, and ask for help is past. Erika's pride insisted they keep searching, and then they found a relatively convenient protrusion of the stuff, and then in her frustration she may have said some things she regrets to Wormmon - who watches from a distance now, antennae drooping, too small to be of much help.
...Not that Erika really thinks she'll get anywhere with this. She is not a very strong person, and a chair leg is not a very appropriate tool for the job. But pride got her here, and pride demands that she keep chipping and smacking away at the protruding wing of ore until something happens. Either the ore will give out, or the chair leg will, or her hands will. Pressing herself to this extent is still a fresh privilege that she hates to turn down.
Wormmon can forgive that, even if being snapped at has made her kind of twitchy and useless-feeling. Watching Erika swing and swing and work at infintesimal cracks...is awkward. She could offer to loop some silk around and pull, but it's awkward, and she doesn't want to get in the wall.
Clink - clink - clink.]
...Um. I'll go look for tools.
[No response. She scuttles away anyways, glad for the excuse of something to do.
The sound fades out the further she gets from Erika, and combing through each room in the hall puts one of Erika's earlier questions at the front of her mind. Why doesn't anyone live down here? It's dry, it's cool, it's too small for large predators to get into. This would make a nice den for something that prefers the dark - maybe the paper everywhere would make lighting hard to manage without starting a fire, unless you had something besides fire at your disposal, or enough skill to extend whatever principle is powering the odd ceiling light here and there. Maybe Erika would consider moving here? She could hack something into place...
Lockers creak open, and closed. Nothing. Paper mountains pushed aside - nothing. It doesn't have to be a pickaxe. Just something a little sturdier, with weight at the end? Like - Wormmon squeaks in surprise and leaps atop a desk as something with a long handle goes clattering to the ground. No, that's just a broom...
She sighs, and sprawls across the dusty surface, fatigued. There's a recessed light in this room, but it's long burnt out. This would make a good nest for a Dokugumon, or something. If it ever saw the sun, she'd web it up herself and settle in.]
for jade
There's good business in gathering up the second kind, and sometimes even the first kind, if someone's looking for something in particular. There's a little hut in the north part of the junkyard where a pair of daring entrepreneurs live, and it's there that Hajime might come around to a conversation something like this:
"-but, you know, it's still pretty weird."
"It's still not a book! He only buys books. He ONLY buys books."
"Worth a try!"
"Worth a- no it's not."
"Yes it is!"
"You wanna drag it all the way up there? Let's just give it to, you know, her. It looks like her. That's - that's - I don't wanna get mixed up in this. It's weird."
"Yeah, and he likes weird stuff!"
"You can't sell something that talks!"
"Yeah we can!"
"You can't!"
"Look, just gotta-"
"-what, no, don't wake it up!"
"Hey. Hey. 'Scuse me."
Poke poke poke.
"Can we sell you to Wizarmon?"
And that's about how Hajime's day is going.]
no subject
...Nothing from Hope's Peak.]
Did... did the shutdown not work...?
[He mumbles it to himself before finally opening his eyes. That's when the prodding starts, dragging him to something of a more aware state. Of course, opening his eyes doesn't exactly help, because as mind-meltingly absurd as the final stage of the Neo-World Program had been, this...]
Gyaaaaaaaaaah!!!
[He lets out a yell of shocked surprise, sitting bolt-upright and trying to scramble backward.]
W-What the hell?!
no subject
It hastily whips its marker out, scrawls worried eyebrows onto its face, then hurls the door open and slams it behind itself. Blue skies and dusty-brown junkyard appear through the gap, then vanish.
The baku just carries on with a let's-all-calm-down-now gesture. "No no, definitely not. It's a bit shady, but nobody could ever call it hell. Wizarmon's house is a nice place!"
Surely, nicer than this shack. The bed feels like it's mostly stuffed with rocks.]
[Less than a mile away, Erika picks her way between mounds of garbage, following a trail that wasn't here the last time she came and won't be here the next. Wormmon bounds ahead of her, antennae perking and swiveling. Between the two of them, they can carry just enough fruit to make up a modest gift for two Digimon; an appropriate price for the privilege of rummaging through their recent finds.
Hacking is a very physical endeavor in this world. Data is matter, and matter is data; code changes when you rearrange things with your hands. It's engineering and chemistry and physics sprawled across a foundation of familiar logic. It requires a lot of relearning, and also a lot of walking, dragging things, lifting things into place. Knowing a solution and not having the physical capacity to execute it isn't a new frustration, but it's an aggravated one.
Months of exertions have started to force adaptation, but only just. She's a little stronger. A little better-suited to long treks. Better outfitted than she was at first, with real shoes and sturdier clothes hacked painstakingly into existence. Still ultimately reliant on her wits and on Wormmon (who isn't that much of a bruiser herself). And on connections, clumsily but carefully built. There are Digimon who don't know what she is and take great exception to that, she's found. Allies are valuable. So are blithe acquaintances, like the salvagers, that see her as a curiosity but not a threat, and don't care who or what is making day-long trips to their home as long as they get rare foodstuffs out of it.
It would be a crushingly lonely afterlife, if not for Wormmon, who is exuberant and clumsy and anxious and frighteningly devoted to Erika for reasons she thinks she knows but only partially understands.
The little bug stops and twitches wordlessly, in what Erika has learned is a gesture of surprise.
"What's wrong?"
"Someone's running around...I think."
She hums, and peers as far down the trail as she can, and keeps walking; Wormmon jolts again and bounces faster, to catch up.]
no subject
[It sure isn't a comfortable bed at all, and Hajime surges upward, throwing both legs over the side to stand. He has to fight a rush of vertigo at standing up so quickly, but it doesn't stop him from almost blindly moving forward toward where he remembers seeing a door, just for a flash of a second.]
This is...?!
[Barring the Bakumon stopping him, Hajime shoves the door open, blinking in the sunlight. It's certainly different from the island he'd spent the last month on, nor does it seem to be that strange, obviously digital game stage that Monokuma/Junko had forced them into. He stops, gapes, tries to find something, anything that looks like something or someone who's familiar. Even those Future Foundation guys would be welcome right about now.]
no subject
The sun is bright and the sky is orange in that way it gets on a clear evening, achingly picture-perfect. And the rolling hills of garbage are cartoonish in their scope, a notion of a junkyard from a child's imagination.
Omekamon is gone from sight; there are faint sounds, breeze and a banner over the house flapping and steady creaks from something metal swaying in the wind and far-off cicada trills in the key of summer.
Bakumon patiently tugs on Hajime's pant leg.
"Are you really running off? Don't you need water? I thought things like you needed water to go running around."
Omekamon running in a roughly away-direction from the salvagers' shack, whimpering and with eyebrows, is the first sign that something's wrong.
It's a potent one, if confusing. Wormmon looks at Erika. Erika looks at Wormmon. By unspoken agreement, they up their pace, and divert their path, aiming for the crest of a nearby hill to have a look at the shack before approaching.
Climbing is rough going - Erika's turned her ankle once here before, slipping on a loose tire. Wormmon reaches the top first, and puts two feet to her brow to peer down.]