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_The Sword sang on the barren heath,

the Sickle in the fruitful field

the Sword he sang a song of death,_

_ but could not make the Sickle yield.

** William Blake,** _ Ideas of Good and Evil

The three hundred and twenty second layer of the Digital World. It was a vast forest, home to an incredible array of Digimon, with its lakes, fields, trees, small valleys, and bright blue skies. One Digimon in particular, even though he didn't call the place his home, was enjoying it's beauty. The layer directly beneath him was a dusty, rocky layer filled with volcanoes, brimstone, and all manner of virus-types.

The lone wandering Digimon was himself a virus-type, but he didn't carry himself like the typical virus-type. His steps were jovial, his head was held high, and there was a wide smile on his face--even though that face, with the exception of two devilish red points of light that indicated where his eyes were. The rest of his body was covered in similar fashion, by an oversized gray robe that hid every part of his body. The two sleeves of the robe were connected in front of his chest, hiding his hands. The Magusmon was perfectly capable of levitating, which was generally what he did, but he liked the feeling of the forest floor on his feet, so he had reverted to that more primitive form of transportation.

He turned around, looked at his reflection in a small pool of water behind him, and sighed softly. A master of the arcane, in his mega form, and yet he had no control at all over his outward appearance. Still, even if he did...it wouldn't really have changed anything, other than what everyone else saw. He could see the two points of light that were his eyes flatten out sadly.

"Ah, Lex..." he said, addressing his reflection. "Nothing ever really changes..." The last time he had been spotted in a place like this, he had been attacked by a vigilante swarm of what looked like floating jellyfish who obviously hadn't been very pleased with his presence. At the time, he had no desire to bring harm to someone that was just trying to protect someone else, so he skirted fighting them by leaving the layer. Basically the story of his life--running when he could, and fighting when he had to, growing continually stronger from the encounters. But there were only so many places that he could run to, and he was starting to run out of places he could safely go to.

He heard something snap behind him--a stick? He ducked back down. Surely someone couldn't have found him already? It had only been a few hours since he got here, no one was that fast. Once he gathered enough mental strength to look over the rock he had been sitting on, he found out that he was right. There was no one following him--instead, there were two felinoid Digimon rolling around in the grass, naked. They hadn't saw him, they were just...busy. His face, still invisible, flushed once he realized what they were doing, but he couldn't bring himself to look away from the act like he wanted to.

The one on top - evidently the male - laughed at something the other one said, then laid down her and pressed his face against hers. Lex licked his lips, imagining himself in the male's position. He didn't know how lucky he was...while he was busy propagating his species in the open forest, Lex could only hide behind the layers of his cloak and watch as a streak of light red appeared beneath the eyes of the female; it probably had something to do with the hand that was moving around between her legs.

Lex watched as the male pushed the female to her limits with his hand. He watched as the female's breaths turned to short gasps and pants, and watched her gather grass into her fur-covered hands when she finally couldn't take it any longer. It must be nice, he thought, to be able to be so open with oneself, to have that kind of freedom. A loud, pronounced cry from the female, who arched her back and cried out what he assumed to be the name of the male, punctuated his thoughts. They hadn't finished yet, though. Only a few moments passed before the male situated himself in between the females legs - who was now blushing harder than ever - and slid into her. They stood still there for another few moments, a soft coo coming from the female directed at her partner, who eventually thrust himself completely into her, eliciting another loud cry, this one falling somewhere between the realm of incredible pain and incredible pleasure. They began moving against each other with a passion that Lex had never even had the opportunity to witness, much less experience, before. To be able to throw yourself completely over to passion and let your emotions take over....it must be a wonderful sensation. Along with sex. Naturally. For the briefest of moments, when the female tilted her head back and closed her eyes, Lex considered throwing caution to the wind and trying to join them. But when the male looked down at her and stopped to give her a brief kiss, a pang of guilt racked him. That would make him no different than what he was always trying to escape. Worse, even.

In lieu of that, he pulled his arm from inside his sleeve, found his own throbbing member, and began to match their rhythm. As the male sped up and begin moving harder and faster, Lex copied the motion, tightening his grip on himself and thrusting downward. He put a little more pressure on himself than he thought he had, making him wince slightly. It only took a few seconds to get back into pace though. Together, the three of them began panting for air--some more than others.

For Lex, simply watching them go at it had taken a bit out of him, so it wasn't long before he hit his peak and shuddered towards an orgasm of his own, releasing his juices onto his hand. The others followed soon afterward, both of them emitting loud moans before collapsing next to each other. The female wrapped herself around the male and they lay there unmoving for quite some time. Lex recovered from the physical activity, watching the two hug happily. Life wasn't fair. It just wasn't fair. The heavily robed Digimon pulled his outermost cloak - a thick grey robe - around himself. The two red points of light, the only visible part of him, slowly dimmed away as they were covered by his eyelids. He would rest here for a while...teleporting all the way up here from the layer below had taken a lot out of him. That piled with the little bit of enjoyment he had just been allowed, and he was tired.

His little sleep was interrupted by a sharp crack as something hard landed on the ground next to him. He opened his eyes with a snap and looked up. There was a set of chattering monkeys above him. They were young...they couldn't have been any larger than 1 gigabyte in size, by Lex's reckoning. And they were curious. Too curious. Worried that they might call for their parents or overseers if he shooed them of, he remained perfectly motionless. They climbed down onto his shoulders and began running his head. He held his breath and held his eyes shut tightly, wishing with every fiber of his being that they would find somewhere else to go, that they would find something more interesting than him to play with.

They didn't. One of them must have shoved their face into his hood, because something only a few inches from his face chattered in fright. Oh, no...no, no, no... The Magusmon sighed and watched them scamper off, no doubt to go tell their elders what they had seen. That would bring them here, inevitably, and as always, they would find him guilty without him even moving, and as always, he would be pushed out of the area, if not off the layer altogether. He sighed again. This was getting very, very old. If he wanted to, he could have leveled the forest and destroyed all of its inhabitants for his peace, barring the presence of a particularly powerful Digimon somewhere. But there was no way he could ever bring himself to such a blatant act of destruction.

He pulled his legs up to his chest and slid his connected arms over them, staring at the ground bleakly. There was nothing he wanted more than just to be left alone. He didn't ask for friendship, he didn't ask for acknowledgement, companions, or anything...he just wanted to be left to himself, and nothing more. But no one seemed to be willing to do that, to grant him the small favor of not acknowledging his existence...

Another, much more pronounced rustling of the leaves reached his ears and ended his thoughts along that line. Well, that was it...his short time here was over. As if that in and of itself wasn't enough, a large rock flew in his direction and lodged itself into the ground nearby. They definitely hadn't come here to talk with him. It was too bad...he liked this layer, too. Maybe the next one would be like it.

"Yeah, right," he told himself. The next one would probably be some kind of giant torture chamber. Or a water world. He hated water worlds. Ah well. Another rock, accompanied by a few screaming Digimon - probably of champion level - flew at him, so he teleported out of the area, towards one of the fields he had walked through earlier to get here. His eyes searched the long, seemingly endless field, which was sparsely populated by the occasional tree. There wasn't a lot out there, but he could make out a small speck of dark green moving around under the canopy of a particularly large tree. It looked like a Digimon...swinging something...a sword...against the base of the tree. He made his way gradually closer to it, teleporting to places out of her view behind the sparsely lain trees. She - it was female, beyond doubt - didn't look like she was much weaker than he was. In all likelihood, she probably could have given him quite a conflict if she wanted to. It dawned on Lex that this might force him into a situation he didn't really want to be in, where he was given the choice of destroying other, lower Digimon or possibly be destroyed himself by another one. On the other hand, maybe his pursuers would be intelligent enough to realize that doing anything remotely resembling an attack in the close proximity of two megas would be a very bad idea.

She was another hybrid...he could tell that the base was Renamon from the shape of her body. In fact, she looked just like one, only bigger, and instead of yellow and white, she was green and black. He couldn't tell what any of her other parent forms were. Definitely at least one virus type in there, though. When he realized that, he ducked his head a little farther behind the tree. Maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all. Even if she wasn't wild, that didn't mean she was going to be friendly. Ah, well. If she was going to kill him, at least he would be put out of his misery. And give him a challenge he hadn't really had since he digivolved from his champion form. He took a slow but steady step to the side of the tree, revealing himself to the Renamon-esque Digimon, doing his best not to look offensive in any way.

"What does this one want?" she growled. Lex twitched. She didn't sound very nice...at least she hadn't tried to kill him immediately! That meant something!

"Nothing!" he said jovially, that being enough to make his spirits soar.

"Yeah..." she sneered. "Like I'm going to believe that."

"Well," he said, his head bobbing up and down. "What do you want?"

"I'm not falling for that approach, either." A scowl formed on the Digimon's muzzle, and Lex was on the verge of reconsidering this encounter when another voice, with far less power behind it, began to call something out from somewhere to the extreme left.

"Jes! Where'd you go?" The Magusmon strained his eyes to see what was making the noise. When he saw what it was, he couldn't help but slide his hands out from inside the opposite sleeves of his robe and clasp them together, revealing the blue-limmed energy fields that were in constant flux around them. A human!, he thought. A real, live, human! Standing right here!

"Don't even think about it." The voice of the other Digimon--whose name he assumed to be Jes--said. He cocked his head and looked at her a few moments before he realized what he had done with his hands. They quickly went back to their concealed space within his robes. If Jes and the human had been able to see his face, they would have seen that he was giving them a sheepish grin in apology.

"At least it's not another wild," the human exhaled in relief. Jes' sword dropped to a resting place on the ground. They both stood there staring at him long enough to make im uncomfortable and say something else.

"What would bring a human to the digital world?"

"Just trying to get back to the real world," the human answered non-chalantly. As if the Real World wasn't special. Or somewhere he would love to go. Or somewhere where he might be more at peace than here. Or somewhere he could live without being attacked every other day.

"That's a pretty big group of people," Lex replied. "Most anyone would do anything for an opportunity to go real-side."

"Well...we're trying to get back there."

"Of course! You've been there already, haven't you..." He looked upwards longingly, at the sliver of the Real World that was visible from this layer. "Then you know how difficult it is to go back. Even if you were somehow able to get up there, you'd need something quite powerful to break the barrier. I don't even know if I--"

"She's standing right behind me."

"I'm not powerful enough, Jamie. You know that."

"Yeah, but you're not far off an evolution."

"True."

Watching their short conversation, Lex gave a small sigh. Wherever Jes went...she had someone to follow her, to help her, to make sure that she didn't fall in more trouble than she could handle. Lex didn't have any of those things...he hoped Jes didn't take them for granted.

"You don't know how lucky you are to have a tamer," he found himself saying, before he could censor it.

"Lucky? I don't think so."

"Oh, no," the human said resignedly. "You're not going to start this argument again, are you?" Lex cocked his head almost as far as it would go. Maybe looking at everything from a ninety-degree angle difference would make Jes' apparent disappointment at having a tamer make more sense to him.

"How not?" he asked. "You get to go to the real world...escape fighting for your life on a daily basis...you have someone to support you, to help you...you have a partner rather than just yourself."

"I already had that!" Jes growled loudly, and he almost stepped back. "Then I got sucked off to the Real World and got landed with this little weed.

"Well, I don't..." Lex sighed. "I'd give up to my last kilobyte of data to be partnered..."

"Really? Care to trade?"

"Jes, when will you realize that I d-"

"Yeah, right, Jamie! Then why did you run yesterday? Or a week back; y-"

"She's always like this..."

" Or maybe I should mention when --"

"I've heard this speech at least a dozen times."

" ARE YOU EVEN LISTENING TO ME?! " Lex looked from partner to Digimon sadly. This wasn't what he had meant at all, he didn't want them to argue on his account. He didn't want anyone to do anything on his account.

"Um...I'm sorry if I..."

"She's just angry that she can't be with Nedrenmon." At that, Jes turned around deliberately, folding her arms and showing her back to everyone.

"Even after I," The human--evidently 'Jamie'-- begin, but was quickly interrupted by Jes.

"CAN IT!"

Lex just stared. He had no idea what any of them were talking about, so he had just let them discuss it in the hopes that they would either resolve whatever issues they were talking about among themselves there, or at least shed a little light on what they were talking about. Jamie laughed lightly at his Digimon before refocusing on Lex.

"Anyway...what are you up to?"

"Nothing, really. What I do every day. Trying not to get killed. Trying not to kill." He looked over his shoulder to see if he was still being followed. If they were still following him, he couldn't see them.

"Oh? Who are you are running from?" Lex twitched.

"I wasn't running. It was a ... tactical retreat. I just didn't want to fight there. Anyway, I don't know what they were. Big. Furry. Monkeys," he concluded.

"Tactical retreat?"

"They were in trees! I couldn't see them!" Lex's tone became defensive. "I would have had to level the forest! Besides, I try--"

"You mean those things over there?" He didn't so much turn around as go from facing one direction to facing another.

"Yes," he said with a resigned sigh. More destruction. Did it ever end? Did this cycle have a point where it stopped? It got awfully old. He waited until he could see the feral look in their eyes more clearly before he finally brought his hands out of his sleeves. Their passive blue glow changed to an active, fiery red, matching perfectly the color of his eyes.

"I wonder what those Digimon are," Jes said.

"Do we have to stay and find out?"

"Wuss."

"Hey!"

"I am perfectly capable of managing myself." His hands whisked through the air, having long since mastered the motions that would create the spells he needed. Slicing through the air, they deftly carved out a line of complicated glyphs that glowed with the same energy and color of his hands.

"Hm. I could never say no to a battle."

Lex waited a few moments before he did anything else. Maybe they'd stop...maybe they'd realize that the only thing that would be gained from this would be their own deaths. Please stop, he mentally pleaded. No one was listening, though...his request fell on empty ears. Maybe this would scare them enough to make them come to their senses and return to their lives.

" Damnation Wall." His hands came into contact with each other and moved sharply downward, completing the spell. A vast wall of dark, flickering flame burst out of the ground. Again...Lex waited. He waited until they all ran right through the wall. Another sigh. They just didn't get it...either that, or they didn't care. In either case, he no longer had any choice in the matter.

" Hell's Artillery." The next few symbols heralded the arrival of a vast column of fiery ash and brimstone which exploded up out of the ground a few feet in front of it's target, originally appearing to miss. But it didn't. It redirected itself and fell directly on top of its intended target, reducing them to bits of random data, which Lex reluctantly absorbed. He could have triplicated the effect, but maybe...just maybe...between being on fire, and losing one of their comrades to this mysterious Digimon, they'd have gathered enough sense to run away. They hadn't.

Distracted by one of their signature rocks flying past his head, one of them leaped into the air in an effort to attack the sword-wielding Digimon at his side.

" Crystalline Strike!" Her sword flew out, sliced the attacker in half, and it's wielder absorbed the data, almost happily.

The one remaining...target...was closing fast. Again, Lex gave it every chance he could before bringing himself to the point where he had to flatten the poor creature.

" Abysmal Barrage!" This single symbol barraged its target in a hail of small fireballs which didn't cease until the target was obscured by a cloud of smoke--which was precisely what the target had become. Lex absorbed the data guiltily, watching the bits and pieces of it flow into his arm.

"Hmph. That was almost too easy." Jes said.

"Easy, maybe..." He was still staring at his arm where the data had entered him. "But it gets old..."

"I prefer 'old'." The spellcasting Digimon was about to ask what she meant by that, but his attention was quickly drawn away by something Jamie took out of his pocket. Intensely interested in what it might be, Lex promptly and silently teleported behind the human.

"You need another forty gigs at least."

"Until what?" Lex asked, shoving his face into the screen of the device.

"AH! Where'd you come from!?"

"Over there," he pointed with his head to where he had been a few seconds before.

"But...you...here." Lex nodded.

"... get away from it. You'll break it."

"Let him have a look. With any luck he'll break it and I can go!"

"Fine, here." Jamie handed him the circular device. He looked at it with awe, examining it from every possible angle. Apparently, it was what linked a Digimon and their human partner together, but sine he didn't have one, obviously, he didn't know much about the subject. After putting it up to the side of his hood and shaking it next to his ear, he gave it back to Jamie, who prompty pocketed the silver miracle.

"Is it broken?"

"No."

"Damn it."

"Would you rather I broke it?" Lex asked, separating his arms again.

"Yes!"

"NO!"

"You have no idea what I would give to be in your position..."

"You're welcome to have it!" Lex gave a small sigh. If he knew...how...he'd take her up on that offer. But, as it were...

---

Oliver had woken up...in a tree. Now, the young man was reasonably sure that he had not fallen asleep in a tree, nor had he been spending a particularly large amount of time around a tree, so he was, quite understandably, disturbed by this little truth about reality. In fact, the last thing he recalled was calmly sitting in front of his computer, gathering data for a science project for biology. Trees had little to do with the matter. That, coupled with the fact that he had no idea where the tree he was in was located, made him quite nervous.

"Hello?" he asked the forest weakly, fully expecting some answer in return. Unfortunately for him, the only answer that he received was from the tree--which said 'get off of me' in it's own unique way: by breaking under his weight, sending him hurdling towards the ground. The ground, however, did not break. The ground broke his fall quite skillfully, though it didn't break anything in the process.

As he brought himself to a sitting position, he felt something pressing against the inside of his pocket. He didn't recall anything being placed in there, either. Assuming that everything in the world was just going to continue not making any sense, he pulled it out of his pocket to have a look. Whatever it was, it looked quite expensive, quite clean, and very...new. Over the next few seconds, it developed another, far more annoying property: it started beeping. And displaying an arrow that continually pointed in the same direction like a compass, even when he turned around in a complete turn. When he did that, he thought he heard some voices. Strangely enough--or not so strangely enough, considering everything else that had happened to him over the past few minutes--the voices were coming from exactly the same direction as the arrow on the thing in his hand. He came to the conclusion that was as good a direction to walk in as any in a strange environment, so he began going that way.

"Hello? Is anybody there?"

When he looked around the next tree, he saw a group of three...people? One of them was dressed in normal clothes...another one, who looked just...scary...was wearing a red cloak and gray robes so expansive that he couldn't see one bit of him, not even his hands, and the other looked like a female...fox?...maybe he had fallen asleep. Because this was making no sense at all.

"Another human." The fox said, in a definitively female voice.

"Another human!?" The robed one said, turning around around and revealing two burning points of light as eyes, the rest of its face swathed in darkness. "Another human!" he exclaimed with a happiness totally unbecoming his appearance. "That's two in one day!"

"So?" The fox said non-chalantly. "There's millions of them in the Real World. And they're all equally as annoying as this one." She gestured at the ... human ... standing next to her. This was too much for him to accept.

"Maybe," the robed one said. "But he appears to care for you, Jes."

"Ha!" she laughed once. "Try telling me that a month ago and I may have believed you!"

Oliver wished he knew what was going on, but no one seemed to be jumping out to give him any explanation of why an otherwise lovely day had to bring with it such nonsense and confusion. The answers to his questions would probably not be too hard for them to answer--especially if he was dreaming. In a dream, the dreamer has all the answers, right? He just has to...make them manifest somehow.

"Who are you? I'm Oliver, by the way."

"I'm Jamie", the 'human' said. "That's Jes."

"As if I care what some human is called..." the fox elucidated, as if she hadn't already made that quite clear.

"I'm Lex!" The mass of robes with eyes answered just as happily as he had greeted Oliver. It was nothing less than amazing how much emotion he revealed just through his eyes. When he was younger and spent a year in Maine, one of his more distant relatives had the rather annoying habit of continually being happy for no reason whatsoever. This...Lex...reminded him of her. "Hi, Oliver! How'd you get here?"

"I hate this armor..." The fox--'Jes', apparently--announced, removing her helmet. Oliver was, not surprisingly, subjected to the view of the head of an incredibly humanoid, upright-standing fox. He had certainly, as his grandmother would say...'fallen through the looking glass'. Lex was watching, too, apparently, because Jes quickly got frustrated by the sets of eyes focused on her.

"Stop staring at me!"

"....." he blanked for a few seconds before answering the robed one's question. "Well, I was working on my science project, and..."

"And you just kind of ended up here?" Jamie graciously ended his sentence for him.

"Yes, that's exactly what happened!" He reached into his pocket, pulling out the palm-pilot-esque thing that he had replaced there at the beginning of the conversation. "I also found this thing..." he showed the item it to Jamie. "What does do? It just keeps kind of...beeping at me."

"Hm, let me see it." Jamie extended his hand, and Oliver quickly obliged by placing the thing in his palm. His expression quickly changed when he looked at the device's screen, then at Lex. Jes looked over Jamie's shoulder, and Oliver followed her eyes when they moved from the screen to Lex.

"What's going on?" Lex asked. When no one immediately answered him, his red eyes visibly squinted in frustration. "WHAT?!?" A few moments passed in complete silence, until Jamie gave the small electronic device to the creature. Whatever he saw pleased him a great deal because his eyes took on an even more gleeful shade of red, and he promptly jumped onto Oliver with a happy squeal.

Maybe he should have taken that psychology class his freshman year. This might have made more sense that way.

---

Lex clung to the human. He had been partnered! With a human! He had never been this happy before in his entire life. The experience of digivolving to a new level for the first time was nothing compared to this!

"What's going on?!" his new tamer asked.

"I'm yours! You're mine!" he exclaimed happily, releasing the dumbstruck human from his grip briefly. It was almost too good to be true...it had to be a dream. But if it was, it was the best dream that he had ever had!

"Wha-what?"

"I'm yours! You're mine!" he repeated ecstatically. "I'm your Digimon! You're my tamer! We're partners! Like them!" he gestured with his head at Jes and Jamie. He must have understood something about the word 'Digimon', because it brought a level of understanding to Oliver's expression that hadn't been there before.

"I've got a digimon!" he finally said.

"I've got a tamer!" He echoed, hugging him again.

"I've got a headache..." Jes said, storming off back towards the forest. Lex felt sorry for her, and it almost--_almost--_ruined the joy of the moment for him.

"Hey...Jes...she's gone." Jamie sighed. "She really doesn't like me." Lex would have liked to have helped them somehow, but he couldn't think of anything that he could do. He didn't know them ell enough to really talk o them. he knowledge that he couldn't do anything to help them be better fiends dropped his level of happiness down a little further. Still...it was much higher than it usually was. He had a tamer!

"Why not, Jamie?" Oliver asked.

"Uh...I'd better go after her..." he answered, edging away from the two of them slowly, then quickly ran after his Digimon. "Jes! Wait up!"

"Why do I get the feeling he's a little weird?"

"They've been here for a while, apparently."

"Ah...that might be it."

"Given enough time, the rigors of he Digital World get to everybody," Lex said, speaking from a vast amount of experience. For a few moments, when he had first met Jes, he had half-wished that she would have killed him.

"I guess you're right." His tamer looked off into the distance. "Was it just me, or did I detect some ... tension between them?"

"You're not the only one."

"... I wonder what they're doing?" Oliver continued staring off into the distance where Jes and Jamie had walked off. Lex, not having many acquaintances, and now with two of them missing beyond his sight, found himself wondering the exact same thing. Fortunately for both him and his tamer, however, Lex had a way of realizing that wish! It would also be a wonderful demonstration to Oliver exactly what he was capable of beyond destruction. He disconnected his arms, revealing his energy-limmed hands to Oliver for the first time.

"Do you want to find out?" he asked mischievously.

"You can do that?"

"Of course I can!" he beamed. "I'm a Magusmon; master of the multitudinous magical arts!" he gave a small giggle, tracing in a symbol that looked vaguely like a giant eye. "I need something shiny, though, if you want to be able to see it too," he added as an aside. Usually, that object was a mirror...but anything would do.

"Will this work?" the human produced from his pocket what looked like a shiny piece of bronze attacked to a ribbon.

"Perfectly! Cosmic Eye!" The symbol spun into life, quickly animating and moving itself into the bronze medal, as well as into his mind's eye. This was something that he hadn't done for quite some time, mostly because he had never really had a use for it. The image rapidly gained clarity, until Lex was able to make out Jamie and Jes hugging on top of a treestump.

"Oh, my..." Lex mentally cut himself off from the image. That wasn't something he needed to see. He had been expecting them to be talking about something interesting! "...if you want me to stop the spell, I will..."

"You probably should. They're headed back this way."

"Huh! Eep!" The Magusmon flared into action, simultaneously ending the evocation with a crack while kicking the small bronze thing under his robes. The last image that it had seen would be burned into it until he cleared it, which he would get around to later. But, at the moment, he jus didn't have time.

"Welcome back!" Lex said.

"...thanks..." Jame answered him weakly. There were another few moments of silence. Lex was going to break it by cheerfully pointing out that combined, Jes and himself were more than capable of breaching the wall, but Oliver interjected before he opened his mouth.

"Soooo.....what now?"

"Now we're in their boat! Getting back to the real world."

"I guess." Oliver shrugged.

"... of course, it's more of a yacht!" Lex said with a wide, yet invisible, grin.

"That...may be a problem."

"What?"

"...Is there supposed to Chaos here?"

"...there shouldn't be Chaos anywhere." Lex flinched, looking down at he small bit of stuff slowly bubbling up from the ground. "But I don't think it feels particularly inclined to obey that."

"Run?" Jes sugested.

"No, no." Lex giggled. "Tactical retreat."

"Tactical retreat it is, then."

"JUST RUN, GODDAMMIT!" Jamie yelled. His tamer quickly obliged. For his own part, Lex levitated in their direction, facing backwards.

"Where exactly are we in the digital world, anyway?"

"That's an odd question," Jamie answered. A second later, he replied. "27.48.27.176, memory dump 31-B." Oliver remained silent.

"You don't even know where you are?" Lex laughed.

"I've never been here before!"

"And I've never been in the real world. But I could read a sign," he giggled, even though something that was perfectly capable of destroying every last bit of his data was only a few feet from doing just that.

"Time for a quicker way out of here, agreed?" Jamie's voice asked.

"By all means!" Lex answered, his level of his cheerfulness completely unbefitting the situation. "In the mean time," he grinned and reached into the depths of his robe for his favorite attack. " Prohibition Papers!" Thousands of slip of red paper with glyphs of countering and halting written on them flew at the chaos and nailed it in place. He was full aware that it wouldn't last very long--but it was cool! And Lex liked it. He scowled defiantly at the chaos, as if that would have some kind of effect on it. He didn't care whether it did or not--he wasn't happy with it.

---

Oliver's mind thought it had suffered enough. But, apparently, life had a completely different definition of 'enough suffering' than he did, because he was rapidly developing a very intense migraine headache. The addition of the running, yelling, and the noise from his Digimon's attacks was doing nothing to help it. And, somehow, he had the distinct impression that there was little to no Advil to be found in the Digital Word. Even if there were, it had probably already fallen victim to the chaos. Maybe the Chaos had gotten a headache, stopped whatever destructive work it had been busy with, and needed a break. And some Advil.

"This should put us some distance away from here." Jamie said, dropping something to the ground which produced a swirling blue...portal?

"...what if it's some distance in the wrong direction?" Oliver asked incredulously.

"It won't work if there's chaos on the other end."

"Ah. That's good." Oliver hoped it was, since Jamie had just walked through the portal. Jes, then Lex, followed closely behind him, apparently without any reservations whatsoever. He waited a few moments to see if it would spit them out or some such thing. Nothing happened. What the hell. Whatever. He closed his eyes tightly and stepped into the portal. He opened his eyes a few moments later - thanks to a sharp prod in the stomach that had apparently come from Lex.

"We went a long way..." Jamie said, looking around. Whatever force had moved them was apparently not without a sense of sympathy--it at least gave them the benefit of similar territory. They were now at the base of a mountain, in another thick forest. Oliver certainly wouldn't have been able to tell that they had gone far...but everyone else seemed to be able to.

"I'll say! We're on an entirely different layer!"

"Yes ... but what layer?" Lex's unending joviality was really starting to get on his nervees. Especially when it was coming from above his head.

"What are you doing up there?" he asked, abandoning completely the question of how he had gotten up there, how he had managed to get up there without Oliver noticing, and how he managed to stay up there. He really needed to sit down with reality and have a discussion.

"I'm getting a view!"

"What layer is this?" Jes repeated her question.

"Three thousand, four hundred and seventy two!" Lex quickly piped out. "I haven't been here for quite a while." Oliver frowned. How many layers were there? Did that mean that they were going to have to go through three thousand, four hundred and seventy two more layers to get back home?

"Can you see a city?"

"I can! That wasn't here last time I was, though."

"A city?" Oliver asked. "Out here?"

"I can't believe he actually did it..." Jes said. Lex disappeared from above his head, and reappeared next to the fox-like Digimon. He could teleport. Great. There went what little he understood of quantum physics.

"Who-did-what?" Lex asked rapidly. When she didn't answer, Jamie began tapping on her armor.

"Huh?"

"Who did what?" Lex asked again, enunciating each word. She flinched a little bit, hen muttered something beneath her breath that Oliver wasn't given the opportunity to hear.

"Ahhh," Jamie came to some kind of revelation, perhaps based on what he himself , hadn't heard. "You mean Nedremon."

"Yeah," she answered. "He always talked about building a city..." Oliver just stared blankly. This whole thing was too complicated for his migraine-ridden brain to handle. Understandably, the young man's brain snapped.

"WHO!?!" he yelled, throwing his arms up into the air. "I GIVE UP!"

"Jes' old mate," Jamie explained. That brought more than a few...interesting...pictures to his mind. Some of those pictures were relatively tame: hugging, kissing, holding hands, et cetera. Picturing Jes doing anything along that line was strange enough. The remainder of the mental pictures he got featured Jes and her as-yet-undescribed mate having sex. That was a much more...abnormal prospect. Yet ...

"Ohhhhh," was all he could ay as those images wormed themselves into his mind.

"Jamie...can we...?"

"Go visit?" Jes nodded.

"How do we know it's not ... dangerous?" Oliver asked, seeing himself as the sole voice of lucidity at the moment.

"It was built to be safe," Jes answered simply. Without another word, she promptly began moving in the direction Lex had been looking earlier; presumably, that was the direction of their destination.

"Is that what you do on a daily basis?" Oliver asked his fellow tamer.

"Yeah, pretty much...somehow I always end up being the one dragged around." Jamie answered.