Daichi: And now to get into the exciting parts! Kind of. There's still a bit to go.

Verity: We don't own anything.

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Ib's Crest couldn't seem to decide what it looked like.

That was the first thing she noticed when she stepped into the sunlight. Even in this form, the color of the tablet slowly shifted and warped, from red to purple to blue, and back again, never lingering on one shade for longer than it took to blink.

The engraving was slightly more static, but that wasn't saying much. It kept the same basic shape of a stylized rose, and there were always at least three petals, but sometimes there were five, and there was a spiral in the middle that seemed to keep reversing direction whenever it felt like.

Maybe, later, she'd ask Lalamon and Gazimon what they saw- see if it was a problem with her or the Crest. But, for now, she thought taking a look at her surroundings was more important.

They were, of course, still in the desert. Ib was beginning to suspect that the entirety of Server simply looked like that, and that she was going to die there unless she could find her friends. Admittedly, the second part wasn't exactly new, but it was something she generally tried to avoid thinking about.

All in all, it looked very different from the sun shape that had made up Tai's Crest. And she hadn't had the chance to see Joe's but she assumed it, too, had been relatively unique.

"So where do we go now?" Gazimon asked, breaking her out of her musings in a way she could never reveal to anyone.

"We could just pick a direction and go," She suggested, turning to face the horizon. She couldn't be sure which way she was facing, sunset still wouldn't be for a while, but the exact direction mattered less to her, at the moment, than the fact that she had one. "Does this way look good?"

"It looks the same as every other way," Lalamon replied. "But I don't see any bad Digimon!"

That was some of the best news Ib had heard all day. Which was its own kind of alarming, if she thought about it long enough.

She decided she'd really rather not think about it. "Then I guess that's where we're going. Let's go."

And so they went.

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Piximon didn't think much of the DigiDestined.

He'd been taking a nice, leisurely flight over the desert, memorizing cable locations in case he decided he wanted to give Etemon a bad day sometime, when he found them. They were facing against a Kuwagamon, which in itself was not a problem. Fighting ornery Digimon was, to his understanding, just something the DigiDestined were supposed to do.

Aside from the fact that they weren't really fighting back. In fact, none of the children seemed battle-ready at all, the smallest of them curling his body around the Tokomon as if he were afraid someone would run by and snatch him away.

He made a vow to train them, until they actually were ready to save the Digital World, and that he would do, while asking as few questions as possible.

Though he did run into an immediate problem with the small one. "Are you planning on letting him walk for himself at any point?" He asked, as the little boy cleaned with a Tokomon on his head.

The boy shook his head, gently catching the little Digimon as he fell off. "If I don't let him go, that means nothing's going to happen to him."

...Piximon wasn't sure he was qualified to deal with this. But then, when he'd had to separate one of them from the rest of the group more for his own safety than to help him with his confidence issues, maybe he should have realized that from the very start.

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There was sand filling Ib's shoes. Given that she was in a desert, that part was almost to be expected. Less understandable was the occasional feeling of thorns biting into her hand, which had no visible source, aside from maybe the memories of shoving two halves of a snapped stem into her pocket, along with a handful of petals, and one flower that could only technically be still called a flower.

Discomfort from walking for too long wasn't something Ib felt often. But given what she'd been doing, she was mostly just surprised this hadn't happened sooner.

"We've been taking a lot more breaks than normal," Lalamon observed. Of course they were. No reason to push herself when there was no longer anyone to try and keep up with. And being mostly alone didn't help.

"Walking's easier than this, most of the time." She sat down, running fine grains of sand through her fingers. It wasn't like she could get any more covered in it. "Now it's just hills and sand. And we don't really get that, in my world. Not the part of it I'm from, anyway." She leaned over towards the two Digimon. "Hey, what do you think of my Crest?"

Lalamon hovered over her shoulder. "I think it's a very nice shade of red."

"Red?" Gazimon glanced up, confusion easily visible on his face. "Doesn't she mean blue?"

Well, that brought up at least as many questions as it answered. She wasn't even going to get into the engraving, clearly that was just going to make things even more confusing.

"...You know what? I think I can handle a bit more walking." She pushed herself up, careful not to accidentally drop any supplies. She'd hate for what little food she had to become as full of sand as the rest of the place. "At least we already know where we've been." The steady trail of shoeprints was really helpful for that.

Ib gave her Crest one last look. The currently-very-purple object glittered tauntingly at her. Annoyed with it, she shoved it back under her shirt for the moment.

She'd deal with it later.

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It was late at night. Tai was still gone.

T.K. was actually beginning to worry now. He'd been upset about SkullGreymon, and Tai was the reason Ib was missing, but… Why did everyone keep leaving?

Tokomon stirred, blinking up at him. "T.K.? Is something the matter?"

"Tai's not back yet." Was he supposed to be upset about that? Even after everything had been messed up, he still didn't want to lose anyone else. "What if something happened?"

"We could go look for him," His partner suggested. "But… that could be dangerous." And Tokomon couldn't protect him while he was still Tokomon, was the part that was left unsaid.

T.K. sighed. "Matt wouldn't want me to go, either." Somehow, his brother was handling things worse than Joe was, and Ib was Joe's best friend. Maybe Matt and Tai just liked fighting. It was dumb, but it made as much sense as anything else.

There was movement on the other side of the room. T.K. took that as a sign to lie down and pretend to be asleep.

Matt and Izzy were talking about something. He couldn't hear what it was, but the two of them ended up leaving the room. Which wasn't actually good for soothing his worries at all.

"They'll come back," Tokomon told him, without prompting. T.K. didn't know how he could sound so sure about that. "I know they will!"

Except neither Ib or Tai had come back yet, and now more people were disappearing.

But… maybe they would come back.

His partner had, after all.

T.K. fell asleep keeping that thought in his head, above all others. And somehow, it wasn't a surprise at all when he woke up and it was Patamon that he was holding.

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Verity: Pyramid next?

Daichi: Pyramid next! And then the stuff that's been changed for reasons other than necessity… Well, okay, I guess some of it was technically necessary to keep things from being awkward later but… Other things.