Leon Alexander, 19—the same age as Eiji—is an American student at Tokyo’s University of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
“Leo, it’s been forever!”
“Yeah! It’s good to see you again.” Leon spoke fluent Japanese, which was a help.
“We last saw each other in elementary school, right?”
“Yep. I went back to America as soon as we went to middle school,” Leon said with an easy smile.
“Ah, that’s right. Your dad was a professor at Tokyo Electrical, right?”
“You’ve got a good memory!”
“And you really grew up! I remember being the bigger one when we were kids.” Leon wasn’t just taller, either.
He was bigger all around. Eiji figured he must be hitting the gym or playing some kind of sports.
“Look we could stand and chat forever, but let’s find a spot to sit,” Leon said. Eiji got a pass from the front desk, stepped through the gate, and made his way to the café inside the DDL.
The café security was lighter relative to the rest of the DDL, and was far and away less tightly controlled than the D4 division. He bought a drink and sat down at the table.
“So Leo—er, Leon, sorry.”
“Nah, Leo’s fine. You’re the only one who ever called me that, believe it or not,” Leo said with a laugh.
Eiji tried to cast his mind back, but his memories prior to elementary school were an indistinct haze of shapes and colors.
He watched as Leon took something out, as if to kickstart the conversation: a keychain-style Digimon Dock.
It was several generations old and sported a monochrome LCD screen.
“Oh my gosh, that’s a dock! I thought it was a gaming handheld!” Eiji squealed.
Leon had raised Digimon with this very dock some seven or eight years ago.
“I didn’t know anything about the Digital World then, either. I was singularly focused on raising Digimon,” Leon said wistfully.
Looking carefully at the back of the device, Eiji noticed it was made by Abadin Electronics.
It still worked, but there weren’t any Digimon in it.
“Wow, this takes me back... So many memories just bubbled up,” Eiji said, opening an opportunity for the pair to retrace their childhoods.
At the time Leon was completely absorbed by raising Digimon on a handheld game that “wasn’t sold on the market,” then he got into a different middle school than Eiji, and they slowly drifted apart.
Shortly after, Leon heard from his parents that they were returning to America. It all happened suddenly, and had to do with his father’s job. The offer itself was fantastic, but...
“If I’d known, I wouldn’t have bothered with those entrance exams,” Leon said with a measure of exhaustion.
“Yeah, I bet...”
Leon felt lonely at the time, but friendships at that stage of life change on a whim; even changing classes was enough to break them, never mind changing schools.
Even now, Eiji hadn’t bothered to keep in touch with his high school friends. So it goes.
Sometimes, though, life provides chance reunions like this.
Leon held out his arm, revealing a smartwatch-like Digimon Linker.
A hololized Digimon appeared, sparks shooting off its body.
Eiji was sure he’d be shocked by the fairy-esque creature if he got too close, despite knowing it was nothing more than a video.
“This is Pulsemon,” Leon said.
“Yeah! This is the one you were raising all those years ago,” Eiji said excitedly.
The creature hadn’t changed one bit.
Eiji hololized Loogamon from his own Digimon Linker, which was permitted within DDL.
The two rookie Digimon looked at each other in silence from across the table.
They hadn’t exactly had a prolonged battle with one another while on the X nation’s server, and yet the air was tense.
Loogamon narrowed its eyes and kept them fixed on the jauntily bobbing Pulsemon across the table.
(Be cool. You’re both hololized; nothing’s going to happen...)
Eiji and Leon turned their attention away from their Digimon and continued catching one another up on their lives.
Though they never consciously labeled one another best friends, had you asked them at the time they would likely have said the other’s name in response.
Eiji still held Leon in high regard, his memories of that time perfectly crystallized in his mind. Leon felt the same...probably.
Not that it mattered; they were far too young to go around trapping themselves in some imagined nostalgic past conjured out of distant memories.
“I’m impressed,” Eiji said, turning the conversation toward more serious matters.
“It didn’t take you long to find my contact info.”
Leon—or Judge, the famous hacker—was the one who sent a message offering to meet up in the first place.
“You moved, didn’t you? Your old house is gone.”
Leon was right, he’d moved out of his family home. He hadn’t been back since and wasn’t about to go out of his way to see it, but he’d heard it was due to be torn down and replaced by an apartment building.
That seemed to be the way of things these days.
“Oh, yeah... I’m, uh, living on my own these days.”
“Same.” Leon lived in an apartment building in the Denrin District.
A one-room apartment three tatami mats in size.
“You, too?”
“I’m a hacker, so...”
Eiji briefly wondered why Leon hadn’t sent him a message on GriMM, but there were a ton of dummy accounts on the Channel SoC server that must have made his harder to locate.
“Yeah, but you’re not just a hacker. You’re in Japan, and a student at Tokyo Electrical no less.”
Eiji mentioned that he sometimes came to DDL for work when Leon texted, and so they’d agreed to meet up.
“Studying here has been my goal ever since we moved.”
Indeed, this was the best place for anyone looking to learn more about Digimon or the Digital World.
It was one of the toughest Japanese universities to get into, and only a handful of those who were accepted actually got to work with Professor Ryusenji.
“Which brings me to the second surprising thing: you’re one of Professor Ryusenji’s students.
I’ve been working with him as well,” Eiji said, proudly emphasizing the last part.
Leon recounted his history with the eccentric professor.
“He said, ‘you look like you’d do a fine job raising it with love and care, so I’m giving this dock to you!’ and handed it to me,” Leon said, recalling how he’d come to be in possession of his first dock.
“So Professor Ryusenji gave you that keychain dock...huh.”
The world had never felt smaller, or more dense with meaningful connections.
Eiji couldn’t help but be awed by the story of how Leon came to be a hacker contracted by DDL.
He’d even accompanied Professor Ryusenji on overseas trips to various meetings and academic conferences.
“You’re basically his apprentice, then?” Eiji asked.
“More like his personal assistant. He still operates all this independently; when would he possibly have time to purchase tickets or reserve a hotel room?”
“Oof, that doesn’t sound like your strong suit.”
“Right?”
“I met the professor a lot more recently. I can still count the number of times we’ve met, I’ll put it that way.”
“I had no idea. It must’ve been weird to get a job offer from him, seeing as you’re a code cracker. Like some wires got crossed on the network.”
“Yeah, for sure. What a small world!” Eiji took a sip from his drink.
“I see your dock is also Abadin’s latest,” Leon glanced at Eiji’s arm as he picked up his paper cup.
“Yeah, it’s pretty sweet! I see you’ve got the same one in a different color.”
“Yep.”
“The professor gave it to me for a job. The Digimon, too. Oh, and keep this between us, yeah? It’s some sort of testing and Digimon-raising job.”
“Eiji, these Digimon Linkers are more important than you realize,” Leon said, visibly stiffening.
“Oh yeah?”
“They’re highly-classified Abadin Electronics devices. I thought I was the only one aside from the police who had one. I’ve gotta say, I’m a little ticked to find out that’s not the case,” he said a bit too sharply to be joking.
Eiji sat in silence for a moment.
“A Digital World researcher personally reaching out to a code cracker for a job isn’t the weird part. It’s rarer than hiring a hacker, but not unheard of,” Leon continued.
“Yeah, like, ‘go get me this rare Digimon,’ right? I think it was a ModokiBetamon that I caught for him,” Eiji interjected.
“Heh, he does like his Betamon. But my point is that he should’ve asked me, his actual pupil, to do this job instead a code cracker.”
Eiji sat in stunned silence.
Was Leon...jealous?
Eiji put himself in Leon’s shoes. He definitely had a longer relationship with the professor, who personally introduced him to the world of Digimion.
Leon was a true believer; a passionate fan of Professor Ryusenji’s work. Not that Eiji wasn’t.
“Yeah, and if we’d actually fought back there? We would’ve won!” Pulsemon added.
“What’d you say, you static shock?!” Eiji was still processing the rather blunt words being hurled at him.
He flinched at the booming voice next to him.
“It’s obvious, pup. I can go all the way to Mega, and you—Loogamon, right?—have your hands full maintaining Champion level. Which is adorable, by the way.”
“You little...” The two Digimon carried on at length about which would win if they fought, which was now it’s own battle.
“That’s enough, Loogamon. We get it, you used to run an entire district, but you’re still no match for a Mega Digimon,” Eiji hissed.
“So none of this bothers you?!” Loogamon growled, its fur standing on end. Eiji tried to connect the dots in his head.
If Leon and Pulsemon could get all the way to Kazuchimon, that must put them near the top of the pack in terms of hackers. If Eiji were A-tier, they were S-tier, if not double-S.
“Same goes for you, Pulsemon. Can it,” Leon said.
“I can’t help it, Loogamon keeps antagonizing me!” Pulsemon whined, smugly acting as though it had done nothing wrong.
“I don’t care. Eiji and I were friends. I was weak, but he stood up for me.” Leon was a wisp of a child, and often silent in class, which curiously made him stand out more. Eiji, however, was always right there beside him.
“So, what? Is he one of these ‘friends’ you humans always talk about? I don’t know where to start with all that. At least come up with a hierarchy! Can you make sense of it, Loogamon?” Pulsemon asked with maximum condescension.
“No. What else could possibly matter, aside from who is stronger? I suppose their biological sex holds some amount of significance.”
“It does seem to help them make more of each other,” Pulsemon said, laying bare Digimon’s thoughts on humanity.
“I always thought your ‘weakness,’ as you put it, was just you doing your own thing,” Eiji finally said, leaving the Digimon to their banter.
“Yeah.”
“I’ve never seen you cry or anything.” This whole “weak” think didn’t square with the Leon Eiji knew.
“Yeah, I guess not,” Leon said, nodding.
“I think you’re the only person, other than my dad, who actually understood me. That’s why I took to you.”
“Oh?”
“Pulsemon, it’s not about who’s stronger or weaker. What matters is that the strong protect the weak.”
“Yeah! Listen to him, Loogamon!”
“You know I’ve looked down on you this whole time, haven’t you?”
“You have?”
“AHHH WHAT IS THAT IT’S SO CUTE!!!”
A shriek of delight startled them both.
Hatsune from the reception desk had drifted over to the table, and brought a friend who couldn’t contain her excitement.
“Everything okay, Hatsu?”
“Hello, Eiji. And hello, Leon. Do you two know each other? Or did Professor Ryusenji introduce you?”
“Oh, Leon and I—”
“We went to elementary school together,” Leon said, both finishing the thought and cutting Eiji off.
“Oh wow, so you went to school in America, Eiji?” The surprise in her voice was palpable.
“No, Leon went to school here in Japan.”
“Ahhh, so that’s why you’re fluent in Japanese, eh Leon?” The pieces were sliding into place for her.
Hatsune’s friend, meanwhile, was utterly transfixed by Pulsemon and Loogamon.
She was a recent DDL hire who knew Hatsune through school, though they hadn’t been in the same class.
Her semi-long hair was done up in very intricate braids, and it was clear she had never seen a hololized Digimon before.
“Well hello there, pretty lady!” Pulseman chirped, unbothered by the attention.
“Like what you see?” Loogamon said, not necessarily displeased by the attention.
“Stop it Loogamon, don’t harass her,” Eiji snapped.
“Eh? What’s gotten into you, Eiji?”
“Hi there! Are you interested in Digimon?”
Eiji asked, hastily making nice with Loogamon.
“Oh, I mean, I don’t know...”
“This is Eiji Nagasumi, a...contractor who is friendly with Professor Ryusenji. And you might already know Leon? He’s a hacker who works for us.”
Hatsune cut in to keep things from going too far off the rails and introduce her colleague to Leon and Eiji.
“Wow, a hacker!”
DDL’s hackers were known to be among the best.
“They’re both just 19 years old, too. Younger than us, not that we needed a reminder,” Hatsune went on, trying to cut things short.
“Oh my gosh, sooo young and handsome!”
“Okay, let’s not harass anyone!”
Hatsune desperately tried to peel her friend away, who was now obviously looking over in Leon’s direction any chance she got.
The Digimon had clearly been just an excuse to come over and chat.
“Such grievous harm is the direct result of the cyberattack perpetuated by criminal code crackers, and we are likely to attack with fury the likes of which has never been seen before.”
A large monitor hung from the café ceiling, and the news was playing the dictator of the X nation’s response to the cyberattack. Everyone turned to watch.
“Ugh, another code cracker attack,” Hatsune’s friend said with disgust.
Even as a DDL employee, she didn’t have much reason to think about the Digital World, or the truth behind Digimon Crimes. Sure, she’d seen a Digimon or two now, but she wasn’t necessarily any better informed than someone off the street—and didn’t have to be.The attack on the server, the dictator’s fight to keep the SoC from taking the nation’s state secret Machinedramon, the interruption from the hacker who goes by Judge? All D4 classified, naturally.
