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| - He'd long thought phone booths like this were a thing of the past. To see one here, though, he wasn't too surprised. Anything could happen. Although, he couldn't understand why anyone would put a phone booth in the middle of a salt flat. Dust coated the glass panels making up its rectangular sides. The lettering which had been in Japanese was barely recognizable now, much less legible. The frame had long since been bleached white by the sun, and it seemed the first relief in a lifetime when his shadow fell across the front. "Curiouser and curiouser." John said as he examined it more closely, recalling the line from Alice in Wonderland. He wished as he often had in his old life that he'd learned to read Japanese. It had become an almost forgotten thought, the language didn't have any use to him here. "Curiouser is not a word." the Ranamon said, her voice reaching him over the slight breeze stinging his face. "Maybe you're sentimental about things from your world, but it's just a box. We should keep going." "Yeah, just a minute." John murmured. He found the handle and slid the door open as smoothly as he could with the rust that had built up in its joints. Paint flaked from the jarring he had to do to get it open, and he stepped inside. The wind ceased nipping at his ears, and he picked up the receiver to give them something else to complain about. He heard nothing but a permanent busy signal. With a sigh, he hung it back up politely. He checked the coin return, which had sometimes yielded quarters when he was a kid, but this one was empty. On the narrow counter, there was a small, rectangular, plastic mirror. Picking it up, he pondered how it had gotten into the phone booth before the booth had entered the Digital World before pocketing it in his gray jacket. "Come on, let's go!" the Ranamon said irately. The sun wasn't mood-improving for the water spirit, and John complied, closing the door behind him. The fairy Digimon looked roughly humanoid, although her arms ended in what what was just as likely to be gloves or armor as part of her digital flesh, and her head was covered by a finned helmet that was a similar enigma. She stood at least a foot shorter than the adolescent eighteen-year-old, with blue-tinged skin under a darker blue garment, which again could have been part of the Digimon herself. Both her armor and her body were adorned with deep crimson garnets which matched her violet-red eyes. "It's hard to be in a hurry when you don't know where you're going. What's the rush?" John asked, eyeing her from under his matted brown hair. "I just want to get out of the sun." She said, scowling and staring at the ground to shade her eyes. John chuckled to himself. "I couldn't stop you from coming with me before. Now you complain?" Trudging alongside him, she grumbled, "Not even a human would be brash enough to cross the salt flats. How wrong was I . . ." Having already wandered the Digital World a week before meeting Ranamon, and learning this place was called the Digital World, John was just fine with hiking. He still wasn't entirely sure how he'd ended up there, but as long as he was, the prospect of an adventure excited him. What little he knew awoke old fantasies in him, weekend cartoons of monsters and heroes he'd forgotten. John had lost sight of the excitement the times he'd gotten into real trouble, but his curiosity kept him moving. There were so many questions. How he got here, why these things spoke English, and many others. Not the least of which was how to eventually get home, but he wanted to explore this world first. Although, as he thought more about his current situation, he could have been better dressed for adventure when he was brought in. His gray light jacket over a t-shirt and jeans, with tennis shoes that had nearly turned tan from kicking up dust on the flats. He fervently wished he had a pair of goggles or something to shield his eyes, but the closest thing to that were a pair of sunglasses he'd lost to a cheeky Rookie-level Digimon a few days ago. He suddenly realized as tired as he was, Ranamon was having far more trouble. Her name was Latin for frog, with so little water she had to be hurting. Considering what he was about to do for a minute, he went ahead with the plan and lifted her up. She shrieked in protest at first, but allowed him to lift her up over his shoulders until she sat behind his head, sitting on his shoulders. After a moment of quiet indignance of having been handled in such a manner, she lowered her head upside down in front of his face and glared at him, confused. "What do you think you're doing?" "Relax." he said, brushing off her agitation. "This way you don't have to walk, and I get a hat." She rolled her eyes, and retracted back up out of his vision to fold her arms on his head and rest on them. John walked on for a while, each step shaking their awkward new combined form, before Ranamon said apathetically, "If you're trying to be noble to make up for stupidity, you don't have to." "Yes I do." John said, grinning. "Besides, you're even lighter than you look." "Thank you." She replied, accepting the compliment to her weight lethargically. After that, they were both too tired to do anything but press on.
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