A Lost Factor

Chapter 16-Connective Reflections

Jasmine spent the rest of the day getting supplies, like the glowing spraypaint, and food, stuff that wouldn't go bad and didn't need heating. She wasn't able to get very much in general, since she would have to carry it back to the tower herself, and she didn't have that much extra money anyway.

Along the way back home, she did paint the trees to mark a clear and safe path avoiding the dark area, where she saw Jenni yesterday. Was it really yesterday? Everything kept seeming to last forever, even though logically it added up to nothing done. She'd seen Lunamon die, saved Alimon, remet the unaware Alysha and sneaky Brandy, visited the apartment, met the Hidimonish Jenni, and today ran into the disruptive Wedge. But how did any of this help get her closer to saving them?

She took the groceries to the tower, stuck them in the closet, and for the rest of the night, just sat at the tower, thinking, trying to see a solution. She had to find a solution. Alysha was in no position to be brought back into this mess. Brandy would probably try to make Jasmine join them before helping Jasmine with her plans, whatever they were. Jenni...she didn't want to think about how unnatural Jenni was. Brian and Pirelli were lost, but at least safe, and lucky also, getting to go to cool dimensions. At least Wedge was against Realemon, but going about it all wrong. How could any of them do anything if they were all divided? But maybe he was right, that since she wasn't digidestined, she couldn't do anything to help, or at least directly. She was as useful in fighting as Brian's sisters. Maybe worse, since they knew Taekwondo. She just had to find a way to make herself useful, if she wanted to get anywhere. It was impossible to become digidestined, and she couldn't fight like the girls could anyway, especially with her dresses. But there's other ways to cause things to happen in life.

The next day, she actually got up early, although she didn't really get up at all; she hadn't really slept, once again. Making a mental note to try to get sleep that night, she left the tower, and first went downtown, then taking the bus down Nee Way to CSUA, the college her and her friends had gone to.

Once there, despite all the annoyances going on in the outside world, this was another place that still felt like home. All the pretty trees and flowers, it was open yet close together at the same time. All the buildings had interesting appearances and architecture, and memories associated with them and happier times.

The first thing she did besides wandering around was go to Maple Hall, the building with all the academic info and financial offices were, to see what her actual status at the college was. She was glad to see that she had passed her classes that first quarter, which had ended the day before Michelle's party, which lead up to that horrible battle with Realemon and started all this. After that point, she simply hadn't registered for classes, and it was too late for her to register for next quarter anyway. Not that it'd be a good idea, since she had things to do.

Next, she headed to Lavender Hall, which by far was one of her favorite buildings at the college, mostly due to its interesting design. Many glass windows made it all shimmery, but the windows were parallelograms, not rectangles. The windows often reflected a sort of green light onto the ground when hit by the sun just right. And almost as if reflecting the name, along the sides of the building were lavender plants, giving off their unique smell.

She quickly went to the computer lab inside the building, and logged on. First she checked her mail, but found mostly junk mail, but there were some letters from home and the DigiReal Station. She deleted the junk mail, but didn't open the good mail right away. She checked several news sites, seeing what was going on. Major confusion on more places being where they don't belong, or didn't exist. Extremely unusual population growth. Random digimon attacks. Frequent digimon/human battles in Japan. Looking at the pictures, she saw that it was her friends from there. The troubling thing was, it was both her Japanese friends from her own dimension, like Takato and Rika, and her friends from Jenni's dimension, like Tai and Davis. The article was very vague, but the pictures almost seemed to imply that the two dimensional groups were fighting each other.