Hikari's Journal
I'm no good at these things. I never know how to start them.
Basically, Jyou says we should all write down our thoughts and memories of what happened, as well as what's happened up until we wrote this journal, as part of adjusting and recovering from it. She says to write it down like we're talking to someone.
Her and I guess her colleagues now, they all say that having us all write it down in our own words, at our own pace, means they can look at each view in writing before they speak to us about it. If they hear all our stories like that, written and from memory, they can start identifying main areas to work with.
We have to cover three things. First, what we remember happening and how we saw things then. Second, how we remember the weeks since we escaped plus how we see things now, and third, any questions we ourselves want to have answered.
I guess I'd better go from the start then.
First, The Master, whoever he was... Well, apparently he started by experimenting on Catherine, a French Digidestined. What he did to her alone shows just how crazy he was. He transformed her, a really pretty girl, into just a little tabby cat. I really don't want to talk about her here though, but I have to later. It's more relevant then. No less upsetting for me but I have to do this.
He had kidnapped Daisuke's sister Jun. We had tried to rescue her, but we were caught. We being all the younger Digidestined. The rest followed to try rescue us, and that failed too.
He first turned us all into statues. Then he began brainwashing us, and making changes to our appearances. According to a disc we found, and that Koushiro partially cracked, altering our bodies meant our minds became confused as to our own self image. He shifted us through a whole host of changes it seems, and I don't remember many of them. Few of us do, since they were apparently for minutes at a time at most, to disrupt our minds the most. The end shape he aimed for was a catgirl, though.
According to his own notes and what he himself said, catgirls were harmless and happy, as well as cute. The notes also added that their shape helped keep the mind in turmoil somewhat, a near-human appearance that felt wrong to the original personality and kept it suppressed with added help from the properties of his pocket dimension.
He managed to create one near-perfect example of brainwashing first, in Sora. Then, with weakened minds in the various statues, he and his new assistant tried to get the rest of us to be just as servile. Only some of us worked though, though Sora thinks he was being impatient. He had been working in the basement of the pocket-demension mansion he created, and had sent up catgrirls as they worked, and ordered Sora to keep them away from the basement. He started the gallery after a few failures, and each new addition to the gallery was an addition to the fake history for each catgirl. Because he didn't wait to have them all at once he had to keep rewriting, and we think Sora's conditioning held out better because she was brainwashed once. Every other catgirl had new bits and pieces added by force.
Those of us who worked, he made into Catgirl maids, and turned our physical ages back to around fourteen-fifteen. Chronologically, the youngest of us, Iori, had actually been eighteen. He also turned all the boys female, since apparently that change could have helped boost the boys confusion as well as keep his idea for our fake life working.
Inside his sped-up dimension, we didn't age, and didn't notice much we weren't supposed to. For years of his experimenting, really bare minutes in the real world each time, but days and months from his outlook, we were his loyal little servants in mind. We all loved our master.
We know the truth now, of course, and our opinions have changed.
The brainwashing meant we never paid much attention to what was happening. We stared in the faces of old friends daily and never knew they were more than just statues.
But in terms of what I remember, it's pretty bare. I remember being scared for Jun, because I like her. I remember a vague time of feeling really weird, I guess that might have been the shifting transformations. And then I just remember being a happy little catgirl. I remember that at one point one of my Catgirl sisters vanished, and I never even noticed at the time. It sounds strange but one morning I just suddenly remembered a new fake past.
In terms of that fake past, it's just false patchy memories. Of my "sisters" and I homeless somewhere... I guess it's kind of like a dream you remember. It made sense then, but when you wake you start to wonder why the elephant was purple and more importantly, why was it driving the spaceship? I remember begging for coins in what I think was Victorian London, huddling with my sisters in the middle of some warzone...
It's pretty obvious he tried to pick memories of poverty, loss, and hardship to make our catgirl minds stronger, by having them appreciate the lives they had. But if he made a note about that, Koushiro hasn't cracked the file yet.
Then I remember being an arrogant statue called Light. I was certain I was the very best in the world. Then I remember my original personality coming back, and a time of disjointed memories and haze.
Well, that's not really what it was. The catgirl parts and such were really just added to our own personalities. It was only as they stopped suppressing the original memories, did the more catgirl aspects get shunted aside, but I should cover that later. It's really confusing though, and I guess that fits.
See, it seems that the strange Digivices he used were, well, really confusing. Sora tried to explain from her memories as his right-hand Cat, but even she admits they were random. The beams had a side effect of disrupting other transformations if you were caught too close to one not actually hitting you. It was what caused the memory issues where our false personae lost control and the originals had to work with a sudden surge of random memories.
When I was accidentally reverted, and Sora accidentally ended up a statue, we reverted Miyako, and then Daisuke fetched clothes. However, Takeko had told Sora she was worried about Dai, and Sora had went to speak to her. So when Takeko saw Daisuke running and no Sora in sight, she went to The Master.
Apparently, when she contacted him he was furious. She ran to follow Dai, wanting to keep track of her sister and keep her out of more trouble. However, she went and wound up getting accidentally blasted, mentally reverting back into Takeru a little. The other three maids had saw Takeko running after Dai, and they had all thought there was something wrong, hence them also showing up. But The Master was already back, and he used some sort of trigger phrases to make the other three freeze in place when he arrived.
He tried to turn us all back into statues. But after he had us at his mercy, Taichi somehow broke out of the trigger. My former big brother, now, I guess my big sister, had been frightened to see family in trouble. Taichi, the main personalty, remembers going from the confusion of what she guessed was that shifting transformation period, straight to one thing, seeing me in trouble. And then Taichi's main personalty just remembers waking up with the rest of us after his bubble dimension burst, and then suddenly wondering why she was a girl. She doesn't remember anything about attacking The Master, being turned to stone with me, or our attempt to run from the collapsing gallery room.
All the statues reverted, and for a good reason.
I want to try explain the "rules" of why that happened. There are three basic ways to petrify someone in the Digital World: Remove code to freeze the victim, alter it, or add it. A Cockatorimon removes it and stored it in himself. However, kill it or, if you do it within a few weeks, disrupt him by knocking him out violently (sleep or a less gentle state of ko doesn't do it) and all the stolen code in his buffers go back.
Only that, or something that forces a recovery of the code, does the trick. I don't understand it well myself but basically, after a while, the Cockatorimon holds the code more securely and you have to kill it or restore from a backup. And that generally means some elements of amnesia for the statue, in normal cases
Altering however can be temporary or permanent-ish right away. It's flexible, but quite tricky. Only really strong Digimon can alter code, like Piedmon, and they can if they want make the code added expire and delete itself. Adding it is similar, since the added code can be a temporary file, so to speak. The removal of referencing the file meant that the effects went away.
That's what The Master did. So when the "temp file" being reference was gone, it all fell apart. It seems his pocket dimension referenced a lot of temp files as well. We had reached the Digimon, all of them disoriented. I should point out thought the petrification had little effect on our minds. It was him messing around with them that did that.
We recovered a strong box that held a lot of encrypted hard drives. Some were labelled as Catherine's mine copied, but others were just given a code. Each one had at least two backups, and four of the discs were just the backups for Catherine, or his notes. Others, we think, might be other plans he had, or if we're lucky, backups of us. But so far Koushiro, Ken, and Miyako have been cracking his notes drive, since he encrypted every file.
Nya, that brings us to now, I guess.
Since we escaped, we've been adjusting. The world itself has barely changed. After the defeat of BelialVamdemon nearly seven years ago, there's been more public knowledge of Digimon, and an increase in Digidestined numbers worldwide, so the shocks at what happened to us were maybe handled a little better, though our families did freak out a little bit in most cases.
All of us have moved into Jyou's student aparment. Most of us who had commitments like school and university have had to take a break from them at the very least, and we've been warned to try and prepare for the risk this might be the rest of our lives. None of us have gave up hope though, at least, none that I saw.
I remember a lot of doubts. I still have them.
After all, all the boys are now girls, and very much so in some cases. Iori for example, is a human and four years younger, and just her luck to be the first one to get a monthly woman's problem. Resulting blood tests, and it seems that Iori, Jyou, Koushiro, and Ken are both healthy human females in every way except for being born male. Taichi is the same, since she wound up petrified and turned human.
Me and Miyako are only aged down, as was Sora since she turned human to become a statue, but the four remaining catgirls are a little troublesome. They haven't displayed the problem Iori had, and none of those of us who were catgirls ever remember it. But if our ageing was stunted or stopped, maybe body clocks and cycles were too. All of us are now younger, and we seem to be ageing normally again.
Jun was unaffected by any physical change. It seemed whatever had been done to make her into a fountain left no lasting damage. She's been x-rayed, scanned, poked and prodded to make sure there's not some sort of tubing to help spray water stuck inside her somewhere, just in case.
Those are the physical changes, and those, we're dealing with well. Sure, it's frustrating being a little shorter, and the former boys are still quite embarrassed about some things. But the mental changes are tricker, and at the same time, helping out with the physical changes in some cases.
See, when our main minds resurfaced, the new persona (or personae) we each had added on went to one side, dormant. However, with altered bodies, those personae that had lived in those bodies have begun merging back in with our older minds. It's just smaller things in most cases. We act a little like our altered selves. All the catgirls say "Nya" sometimes, and even the former catgirls say it. I keep trying to end sentences with it while I'm writing, for instance. I'm sure I've already wrote it and missed doing it.
This isn't a bad thing according to the psychiatric students and teachers from Jyou's university that have become our physicians during this. Since they're technically the people I'm talking to though I guess this is going to... I should probably have deleted that but maybe it's something for you guys to use.
The merger signs aren't huge, but they're still significant shifts to our prior personalities. Those of us who had been maids seem to be more servile. The former statues who had been there a while sometimes seem to freeze in place like posing, and at night they're supposed to sometimes move back into their poses they'd held. I'm supposed to have done it, but only the once and for a few seconds. Perhaps because I'd only had a statue-persona for a few days, so the catgirl and my real me were stronger.
Jun says any time she drinks water she has an urge to spray it out of her mouth, and apparently on more than one occasion she's suddenly went back into her pose while drinking and actually done it. It seems to be just water, though, so she's drinking more fruit juice.
In terms of memories, well, it's patchy. Some of our early childhood memories are unclear, the fake memories of poverty seemed to be pretty strong. We know they're fake and we sometimes remember the real pasts, but we've all been forgetting things from our early years our families say we should remember. Even some events in the Digital World seem to have been forgotten for some of us: Sora's forgotten what happened in Datamon's pyramid, but Taichi remembers it.
Some of us have reacted to the changes differently. I've only really had the little changes. Jyou, Miyako, Koushiro and Ken have all been helping research and investigate what has and what is happening. Some of the former guys changed names. Daisuke is Dia, rather than Dai. She says it's because she's not really Dai or Daisuke any more. Takeru has become Takara by name for a similar reason, and Yamato's kept her catgirl name of Yatsumi. Taichi just shortened her name to Tai, the nickname our mother had for, well, him when she was younger.
As you can guess we've all had some trauma out of this. Luckily the stress and strain is easier to deal with than some of the other mental issues we face, but it's worth noting we have nightmares and dreams. We haven't required medication for any mental issues yet, and hopefully we won't. The catgirls have altered physiologies somewhat, and they're still testing to figure out what the differences between them and humans really are.
I guess before I go into our relationships I ought to cover Catherine. It's kind of hard to even write it. As I said, she got turned into a full cat, one of The Master's sick little experiments. The trouble is, I think he said it himself. A cat brain is smaller, so it's like fitting a DVD onto a CD or something. Things are compressed, or just left off. She's also technically still a kitten though, and still developing.
She basically has a human mind, stuffed into a cat's brain with a cat's personality stuffed on. He kept a saved record, he said, and we do have it, but we have no ideas just now how to turn her back human and then we have to get that backup into her head. As it is, she's got cat instincts and is showing some recognition of people. She seemed to like Tai and Takara, for instance, and when you shout for Catherine, she comes to you.
We found her shortly after we escaped, after we helped the French track her down. It's a miracle she wasn't killed: When we found her some human memory seemed to make her want to play with a rottweiler. She'd already had some close shaves from the look of it, bite marks and scratches from getting into fights or attacked. A vet gave her the physical all-clear though.
I barely knew her, and I feel so sorry for her, so upset that she's suffering this, and at the same time so guilty I'm glad it wasn't me or someone I knew well. We've had to take her from people who did know her. She's probably not aware of who she is at all even if she responds to her name. She's just a cat with odd patchy memories of being human.
And even if we can save her human body and get her mind back in, she'll be waking up in Japan, months or years after she'd been captured. Even if the backup memory goes on flawlessly, she'll have effectively not existed for a long time.
But she seems happy enough as a cat. I know it's no life for her, but at least she doesn't seem totally horrified by her existence.
The last thing about recent events is relationships. All the Digidestined from Japan had been close before but now, it's a sisterly bond most of us share. Dia for instance is a little freaked out that Daisuke once had a crush on me, because to Dia, I'm her sister.
At first some of the former boys were a little worried. Now they're girls, what if they start to like boys? But over time they've dismissed the worry a little. Besides, apart from Jyou's colleagues and the French Digidestined we've not had much contact with other people at all who weren't family. Yatsumi though has admitted one of Jyou's former classmates was cute, but I've got be honest, I have no idea who that person is or what gender they are.
I have to write now that I had begun to write talking to whoever it is Yatsumi calls cute. I was apologising for not knowing who they are. This might seem odd to people who aren't the psychiatrists reading it, but I'd been told to explain when I started doing things like that, explain what I did, and explain why I was explaining. If anything though all these checks and things we're warned about are more likely to break my brain than catgirl-me and statue-me merging more with the real me.
The last thing before I ask my questions, is our families. Like I said, they were freaked out a little, but they're supportive. They're upset, but they're there for us when we need them.
Well, now I just have to ask questions. Maybe someday I get answers, nya?
First, who was The Master? And what made him so convinced we were some kind of huge threat to world safety? Everything we know about him shows the guy was nuts, but why?
How come he attacked us first? He caught Catherine snooping around, he had said. And true, we are the most experienced Digidestined and have all got our Digimon to evolve pretty high up the levels. But he knew to kidnap Jun. He must have tailored his plan to put us first.
How did he get Jun in the first place? How did he learn she existed?
Where did supplies come from in the Pocket Dimension? Was it part of his code for it to make them?
Lastly, will we ever get a chance at being normal again? All of us?
I guess I should end here now, but I want to say one last thing. That last question. Whatever the answer is. We're going to face that together.
We were like family before. And now we are all sisters. As a group, we can and we will overcome this.
-Hikari.