A world without Digimon.
It was a concept that Alison just couldn't comprehend. It would be like trying to imagine a world without trees or without birds or without stars. You take things like that for granted, especially when you've known and seen them all your life and they've simply become part of the status quo. They seem like just one of a thousand details that simply lend itself to making up an entire picture, and it was only when you removed a single detail - just _one_ - you realised it wasn't just a tiny, inconsequential feature. It was pillar, one of many, that was holding up the foundation, like Atlas the Titan holding up the sky so it wouldn't come crashing down onto the Earth.
Alison knew this now, because a world without Digimon was the kind of world she was now living in.
Well, almost.
---
### DIGIMON: ACCESS POINT
---
Alison ducked her head down to stare down at her feet, her long side-fringe untucking itself away and unfurling itself into a curtain in front of her eyes as a familiar group of boys passed her. She couldn't see them, but she could tell they were smirking at her. One boy even shouted some stupid remark at her, but she dared not reply and merely waited until they passed before she dared to lift her hair again.
She was sat outside the headmaster's office just next to the reception, a place she had found herself in so often that one of the receptionists had remarked that she should have her own special chair. It was probably meant as a light-hearted joke, but Alison had been in such a bad mood she had scowled at the woman, and the receptionist hadn't tried to speak much with her since. On the chair beside her, curled up in a ball like a cat, with its oversized head resting on the pointed tip of its tail, was a small creature that vaguely resemble a koala - or rather, a cartoony rendition of a koala - with the added addition of tiny horns, wings, a devilish tail and rather malicious claws. It was like something out of a child's drawings. At first glance, someone might have thought it no more than a soft toy, but on close inspection, one would see that it was breathing, its body rising and falling just a fraction with each inhale... exhale... inhale... exhale...
Alison jumped out of her skin as one of the doors behind the reception desk opened, but relaxed when she saw it was only a bespectacled receptionist returning with some sheets. The woman gave Alison a thin smile as she passed her before sitting herself down behind her desk. Alison lowered her head and returned to staring at her shoes, examining every scuff or speck of dirt. She'd lost one of the laces for her left shoe long ago, and ever since it had been so loose on her foot she had to always walk slowly in fear that it would fall off. A few minutes passed. Every so often, the little koala would jump slightly out of its, slumber lift its head a fraction before immediately dropping it back down and falling back to sleep. More time passed. The receptionist got up and went into one of the back rooms again. Alison started to focus on the faint ticking of the clock in the background. Another person exited one of the back rooms, causing Alison to tense up yet again, but they quickly left, scurrying down the corridors in some frantic errand.
Finally, Alison's patience whittled down to nothing and her nerves wrought and raw, she decided she could take it no longer. Hastily, she scooped up the koala in her arms, placed the creature in her bag which she had left resting by her feet, hoisted the bag of her shoulder and ran out of the reception room, charging down the corridor as quickly as she could and praying to God that no one saw her. She didn't even stop running after she had gotten outside the building.
It was break time. Everyone was out in the playground. Pale gold rays of sunlight poured down from between the little cracks in the cloudy veil overhead, and Alison had to hold up a hand over her eyes to shield herself from the brightness as she stared at her various schoolmates, from the small first-years to the very adult teenagers in their final years of school. The sight was a little difficult for Alison to take, not because of the children themselves, but because they were all... missing something.
Inside Alison's bag, the little koala-creature must have awoken because there was the sound of rustling paper, the bag started to move slightly and a small voice came out.
"Alison," it said, a voice obviously female in tone. "What's happening?"
"Shhhh!" Alison hissed quickly down at the bag before darting nervous glances around at the many face in the playground. When she was sure she had no one's attention, she darted sharply to the left, quickening her step as she made her way to the edges of the playground.
"Alison?" the voice spoke up again.
Irritably, Alison yanked the zip of her bag and closed it, meaning any more attempts for the creature to get her attention were now mostly muffled and concealed. She hurried down a large sloping hill where the terrain got slightly grassy and difficult to navigate. Finally though, Alison reached the car park, with the school gates in her sight. Behind her, she thought she heard someone call out her name, and she broke into a run, charging out the gates as quickly as she could not daring to look back.
---
Once, every child had had a Digimon.
At the age of ten, every child was sent an email from an address which was no more than bunch of jumbled characters and letters. When clicking on this email, always marked with the word 'TIME' in the subject bar, a powerful glow would radiate from the computer screen and a solid form would begin to materialise. When the light had cleared, you find that you had been given a gift. An egg.
A digi-egg, to be more precise, and this egg would hatch into a Digimon. They all started off small and relatively simplistic in form. When Alison's egg had hatched, her newly-born partner, at the time called Conomon, had been no more than a brown, jelly-like blob with a long tail and three small horns on it's head. Conomon had been very cute, very small, very gentle, not much of a talker, but nonetheless, she was friendly and she seemed devoted to Alison from the moment she first opened her large eyes and looked up at the girl. Alison's older brother Josh, had already received his Digimon only two years prior, now a hulking half-reptile half-soldier creature called Commandramon, and was able to help his sister and talk her through the process, helping her to raise Conomon to the slightly larger Kokomon and then her current form, Phascomon. Alison loved Phascomon, finding the little koala-like Digimon adorable. It helped, of course, that she was relatively easy to take care of, being small and very portable, sleeping most of the time so she didn't need to be watched, obedient and friendly, must the opposite of what Commandramon had been like.
Alison _loved_ Phascomon. But not everyone did.
Phascomon was, for one, a virus-type, considered the most hostile and least easy to control. They were more animal-like, feral. People had constantly told Alison that even if Phascomon seemed docile now, once she first obtained Champion level, she start becoming more difficult - much like an actual teenager, Alison's mother once commented - and they told Alison to be careful. People were even more suspicious because of Phascomon's typing as a demonic Digimon. They thought she'd cause problems. Even more people thought that Phascomon was a sign that Alison herself was a problem. She'd gotten several lectures about how Phascomon was a 'sign' that she should change her ways and work to bettering herself before it was too late. These warnings became a self-fulfilling prophecy, and as time went by, Alison had become more distant from people, from those she had considered friends, now only keeping company with Phascomon, her brother and Commandramon. They were the only friends she needs, not the fakers who only pretended to help while secretly judging her.
She hated them. She hated them all. That hate only worsened on that day when all the Digimon disappeared. It was a day like any other, her, her brother, Phascomon and Commandramon all deciding to go bowling with a couple of Josh's friends. They had been having fun, laughing. Alison had been in good spirits that day. However, just as they had finished the first game and were about to start up a second, the light came. It rushed in, obscuring their vision and blinding them. They were without sight for what felt like ten minutes, and when the light finally cleared, all the Digimon were gone.
All of them, that was, except for Phascomon.
---
"Where to?" the bus driver asked as Alison fumbled with the coins in her bag. Thankfully, Phascomon decided not to cry out at this point, but simply kept silent until Alison had placed the coins down in front of the driver. She said the name of a street near her home before making her way to the back of the bus.
The bus was mostly empty aside from a elderly man sitting near the front a woman on her phone, speaking very loudly. Alison sat on one of the backseats.
"Alison? Where are we going?" Phascomon's frightened voice came from inside the bag.
"Home," Alison said simply, placing the bag on her lap.
"What about your school?" Phascomon's head peaked out slightly. "You'll get into trouble."
"I don't care," Alison answered. She took out her mobile phone and started texting Josh, telling him she wouldn't be coming home with him tonight. She knew he wouldn't question any lame excuse, and simply wrote that she had been deemed to sick and sent home. He wouldn't care. Josh hadn't really cared about much since Commandramon's disappearance.
"Your mum is going to be super mad at you," Phascomon warned.
"I don't care," Alison mumbled again, sinking further into her seat and letting out a loud sigh.
"We should go back to your school," Phascomon continued. "If we hurry, we can get back before the headmaster calls you in."
"I'm not going back," Alison said. "I'm never going back to that stupid school."
"You have to go back sometime."
"No."
"Yes."
"_No_, Phascomon," Alison hissed sternly. The elderly man on the front seats glance back at her awkwardly, and Alison averted her gaze. "Just be quiet, okay? Everything's going to be fine."
Phascomon stared up at her for a moment longer before retreating back into the dark depths of her bag, albeit reluctantly. Sighing to herself, Alison continued flicking through her phone. She decided to check her texts. None. Josh hadn't replied yet. Her emails? She checked. Nothing of note, just more of those spam.
She'd started receiving them only three days after the Digimon had vanished. They were all from the same address and all of them were marked 'no subject'. Alison had dismissed them as spam. When she had receive several of the same email - quite persistent for just some spam messages - Phascomon had suggested she open at least one of them, Alison had actually be quite tempted. However, there was still a chance it could end up infecting her computer with some sort of virus and, as she'd bluntly put it to Phascomon, "Ain't nobody got time for that."
However, as she scanned her emails, seeing the most recent message from EBE (what kind of name was that anyway?) she noted that something was... different about this one. At first, she wasn't sure what it was until she noted the subject bar. Where on the previous emails from EBE there was no subject, this one did.
It was marked 'TIME'. The same as the email she had clicked when she had first received Phascomon.
Seeing this made Alison's eyes widen slightly. She hesitated for moment, finger pausing over the email. Could phones catch viruses, she wondered? Well, now she was so curious, and already pretty down, she couldn't care less. _I regret nothing,_ she thought to herself daringly before clicking on the email.
There was a momentary pause as the page seemed to be loading. Then suddenly, the world around Alison started to feel like it was moving... very slowly. When she looked around, she noticed something was strange. She was still on the bus, but there were no other passengers. Had they gotten off when she wasn't looking? What was even weirder, though, was why was it so dark outside? It was only 2:00pm last time she checked, but now, when she looked out the window, it was pitch black.
"What the hell...?" Alison muttered to herself. Suddenly, Alison felt a burning feeling on her palm and quickly dropped her phone. It landed on the floor of the bus but surprisingly didn't break. Instead, it was glowing.
"Alison, are you okay?" Phascomon's concerned voice came out of the bag and she jumped out and onto Alison's shoulder.
Alison nursed her hand close to her chest. "Argh... that _hurt," she hissed. She looked down at the phone, which was now cloud with a radiant gold light. Alison stared at it for a long moment before the light cleared away to reveal that phone had changed shape. A shape that Alison recognised.
"Is this...?" She leaned down and picked up her now changed phone. "No, it can't be."
She'd seen pictures of this kind of device all over the web, usually in articles about the first appearances Digimon, and they were often mentioned in school. Digital devices, or digivices, were special machines given in the past to children that had communicated with the Digital World and provided them with a direct link to their Digimon and was used to be of help when performing digivolutions. No one knew how they worked, where they came, not even Aegiomon, the messenger Digimon of the Olympos XIII, had known. These days, since every kid had a Digimon partner, a more widespread method had been developed for 'tamers', as people who owned a Digimon were called, to monitor their Digimon: a phone app which was mandatory to be installed into your phone after you had received a Digimon. It served the exact same purpose as a Digivice. But now...
Now, Alison was holding the _real thing_.
_This is a dream, right?_ she thought to herself. _Yeah... this must be a dream. I'm so full of stress that I fell asleep on the bus and this is just some crazy dream._
Just as those thoughts left her head, the screen on her 'digivice', previously all black like that of a computer in sleep mode, lit up. First it was merely blank screen, but slowly, words appeared across it, slowly, letter by letter, as if someone were typing them out as Alison watched.
It said: "THIS IS NOT A DREAM, ALISON."
Alison stared blankly at the screen. "... whah?" She gaped down at the little device in her hand. "What the...?"
The screen turned blank again, only for new writing to slowly appear, just as before.
"I HOPE YOU KNOW HOW TO DRIVE."
"Huh?" Alison said, at first lost.
Phascomon, however, was quicker on the uptake. "Alison! The driver's seat!" she exclaimed, raising her voice for the first time Alison had ever heard.
"Crap!" Alison charged over to the front of the bus. There was no one in the driver's compartment. She grabbed for the door, which luckily wasn't locked, and swung it open. The bus seemed to be getting faster now, and with the darkness in front of her, Alison could barely see where she was going.
"Alison! You don't have a license!" Phascomon protested as her tamer plonked herself down in the driver's seat and grabbed for the wheel with such force, she probably could yanked it right off.
"Somehow, Phascomon, I don't think that matters right now!" Alison shouted back. The moment she looked back towards the front of the bus, the world around her was no longer dark, but suddenly getting brighter, and brighter, until a powerful burst of light flowed in from the windows and filled the bus, blinding Alison. She screamed at the top of her lungs before her mind could no longer take the strain and she felt herself black out.