Archive of Our Own ^beta

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Submersive Technology and Neuro-link Devices , aka STANDs , are the most successful products in the Speedwagon Engineering catalog of consumer electronics for over 25 years! A deep immersive VR headset that borders on magical, the system unites people around the world in common Spaces without the barrier of language! 

SPACES are their own little communities in the endless sea of data that makes up the STAND Universe - planets of activities from immersive nature retreats to theaters for watching your favorite films and tv shows with your friends! There are also a wealth of games and activities that come with their own rewards - from currency to decorations to clothing, even coupons to use in the real world at a partnered location near you!

Along with these community Spaces, there are also personal V-HOUSES you can decorate and customize all you want with currency you earn in the Spaces! You could go fully private or throw a digital block party with your fellow users!

Another outlet of customization is your own personal AVATAR ; your own digital you! You can buy all the fun and fancy clothes you want with the same earnings from Space Activities, or try your hand at making your own custom look! There are even Spaces dedicated to teaching users how to build their own unique selves in STAND!

UPDATE :
If items in your Spaces of V-Homes unexpectedly clip into the floor or wall and you hear odd noises, please contact an administrator and they will have that fixed as soon as they can! We are looking for the cause of this issue so we can ensure a safe and comfortable life for all of our users! - The Admin Team

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To trust your digimon is to allow them to push forward and Evolve.
To have faith in them, is to allow them to become a part of your Soul.

To put your heart and soul into their hands, and theirs in yours - that is how you both shall reach Heaven
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UPDATE 2:
Please also report text errors you encounter! Thank you - Admin Magician

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Let your bonds be a raging flame against those who would tell you how to live

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UPDATE 3:
Who is putting poetry in the update notes? Please knock it off - Admin Magician.

Chapter Text

“Good evening, Jotaro!” A synthesized voice chimes out of a little alarm clock as he logs in, his avatar getting out of his virtual bed. “Your mother has left a reminder for you! You have summer homework to complete.”
He shuffles up, adjusting the gold circlet in place of his hat and fiddling with his hair as he walks around the very nautically decorated virtual apartment.

“I’m aware.”

“Are you going to start it today?”

“Nope.”

“...Understood! Well, have a good day!”

He goes to the fridge - used only as a to-do list rather than store any food: eating is only a few useless frames and he already had Real Breakfast.

COLUMBO CREW - WEDNESDAY 5PM

KARTING WITH KAK - THURSDAY 7 AM

POLNAREFF’S HOLE (???) - WHENEVER HE CALLS

REMIND MOM TO TAKE OUT THE ROAST (IRL) - DONE

CALL GRANDPA - AT SOME POINT

FROG DISSECTION SPEEDRUN CONTEST - FRIDAY 7:30 AM

SUMMER HOMEWORK - WHEN I’M DEAD

Oh yeah - Kakyoin wanted to grind out that 25th anniversary currency boost with go-karting. Good thing he checked - while audio reminders help actually REMIND him to do things, he also finds their persistence at reminding him annoying. He moves over to the mirror in the corner by the bed and checks how he’s feeling about his avatar choice today.
Long coat - always in fashion. Circlet thing - he knows a hat wouldn’t fly off, but he won it in pvp so he can’t just NOT wear it. Big ol belt and boots - classics. Hm…
He reaches into the closet and pulls out a red scarf, throwing it on and giving it a once over.
Fits the vibe of Karting - why not.

He turns away and heads to the door, pulling up the Space Selection menu and finding the go-kart track he remembers Kakyoin agreeing on - it was the advanced track, which he wasn’t the best at, but his job was basically to bully children today. Maybe he should adjust his avatar height to be his actual height for optimal child kart oppression? Nah - too much effort. With a click and swish, the virtual house dissolves into a little plaza out front of the kart track. Waiting, he checks his messages too.

⭐P1AT1NUM⭐: hey pol how’s the hole thing going
SILV3R-SOURIS: Going, but Kakyoin said not to start anything until he at least gets a round in
⭐P1AT1NUM⭐: did you not wanna spin out a few sixth graders?
⭐P1AT1NUM⭐: or are you still doin that disney darkride thing for cash?
SILV3R-SOURIS: I don’t need the cash and they weren’t a challenge anymore.
⭐P1AT1NUM⭐: oh man
⭐P1AT1NUM⭐: almost as if a rail shooter made for ten year olds was not hard at all
SILV3R-SOURIS: They don’t even put up a fight in the scores, Jotaro!
⭐P1AT1NUM⭐: well im sure daddy buzz lightyear is proud of you

He looks away in time to miss Polnareff going off about toy story lore or whatever to see Kakyoin arrive.
Kakyoin was coincidentally a classmate of his, but he met him first on STAND. Figured out who he was when he mentioned that in real life he suffered a nasty fall down some stairs at the end of the previous year near his highschool and messed up his spine only for Jotaro to post a picture of that exact set of stairs not five minutes later. Even though his doctors say he should stay off stand until his recovery is finished, he refused to. He didn’t change his model to have a wheelchair either - he’ll take the phantom feelings over feeling stuck worse than he already was.
While he wasn’t that vain, he did take pride in the model he made for himself: a slim blur of white and green always whizzing by on a single wheel in each heel of the gaudy white thigh-high boots he made. Jotaro knows for a fact that he doesn’t dress like a roller derby card-girl irl, but artsy types are just going to do things for shock value sometimes.

“Polnareff tryin to get you to call this off early?” He says as he wheels on over, skidding to a stop just short of his classmate.

“Nope. Said you wouldn’t let him drag either of us out before we stomp some kids.”

“Well let him know it’s gonna be fast.” He gives a devious smile that just screams ‘I’ve been grinding out a shortcut privately for a week and I’m about to blow some kids’ minds’.

"Well you’re still gonna have to wait for me to finish.”

“Just don’t get in last.”

“Might do it just to spite you.” He smirks, getting a glare from Kakyoin as the two start to get into the queue.

It did indeed go Fast.
Kakyoin found a skip that did involve blasting through some barrier tires and falling at an angle that didn’t trigger the retrieval mechanic, cutting his laps in half. Meanwhile Jotaro was playing The Normal Way and just swerving into anybody else who tried to copy Kakyoin’s skip, messing up their angles. He came in fifth because he couldn’t just park at that corner and gatekeep it, so a few people followed Kakyoin’s lead. Still, it wasn't as long as it could have been.

“Alright - now for whatever Polnareff found.” Kakyoin said with that smug glow about him he always got when he so thoroughly trounced people. “If it’s fast, we can smoke him too.”

“Don’t you have enough cash yet?” Jotaro replies as he watches his own balance tick up from the winnings.

“Nope - the last piece from the gundam colab is very expensive.”

Oh, right…it was for his massive lawn gnomes.

Kakyoin could see the face he was giving and huffed.

“You have your dolphin mailbox flag and I have the Hyaku Shiki framing my front door - same thing.”
“The dolphin flag is subtle - you walk through a robot’s legs every day..”
“Boys, both of you are horrible decorators,” Polnareff calls out, revealing himself from his spot on a bench. Both teens cringe at their older friend’s choice of outfit for today.

Polnareff, 23 years old to their 16, was basically a child with a gun permit. He was wearing that stupid set of zipper-covered dungarees from that disney series that Jotaro never bothered to care about and Kakyoin thought of as a leech to the Final Fantasy series. His missing arm and leg were the only real way you could have guessed that this guy was a more mercenary style Private Eye and not just a disney adult desperate to cling to youth. Kakyoin was the one who introduced Jotaro to him - said they met at a digital arts Space where Kakyion called his fursona cringe or something and they got into a fist fight - friends ever since.

“Hey Pol,” Jotaro says with a half assed wave, unbothered by the insult to his taste in nautical decor.

“Comment rejected.” Kakyoin points at Polnareff, who rolls his eyes as Kakyoin crosses his arms. “Anyway - what’d you find?”

“Yes, well, me and Hol were looking to take a space to use as an office and we found one of those clip spots the admins keep patching,” he starts as he starts pulling up menus to group the boys up with him for travel. “But this one was different - it was much bigger than getting a chair leg through a floor or something: you could see down into it.”

“And you didn’t report it?”

“Hell no - nobody used that Space anymore anyway: Hol got it shut down for being full of racists.”

“Wait, was that that horse group?” Kakyoin snickered. “The one he got banned from for blasting a Union Dixie remix for an hour when the mods were going on a tirade?”
Jotaro snorts, having not heard that story. He hasn’t met Polnareff’s merc buddy, but he has been described as ‘if you condensed the idea of the wild west into a guy’, so imagining a genuine cowboy blasting union dixie from under his ten-gallon as a bunch of racists yell at him tickled him.

“That very same horse group, yes.” Polnareff finalizes the menu, whisking the boys off to the ghost of a racist horse club. The room is mostly taxidermy pieces, with the biggest piece being a bear that is partially blocking the hole Polnareff described, and shitty looking old furniture. Polnareff kicked the bear aside, showing off the hole in its proper glory - it looked like a whirlpool in the wood that ended in a sparkling blue ball of light at its depth.

“Behold - The Spitoon.” Polnareff says as he waves his hands towards it. “I did not pick the name, Hol did - he called dibs.”

“Makes sense.” Jotaro comments before picking up a chair and hucking it towards the hole. It gets caught in the spiraling wood and seems to twist into a single obelisk before getting sucked completely down. “Neat. Hey, Kakyoin - pass me more stuff to throw in it.”

“Ooh how about this?” Kakyoin picks up a hat rack that came pre-hatted with various ten-gallons. “We can see if we can get the hats on it before it goes down.”

“Hell yeah - everybody get a hat then.”

Kakyoin tosses the hats to everybody in the room before Jotaro puts the stand on the outside of the whirlpool, getting it started. The game of hat ring-toss descended into Polnareff and Kakyoin trying to distract each other by yelling just before the other was going to throw theirs, leading to Jotaro to get his own hat on the center pole before it descends.

“Cheater! Spawn in another hat stand - that was bullshit!” Polnareff shouts.

“How did I cheat when you and Kakyoin were the ones yelling.” Jotaro replies with a shrug as he leans back on one of the old-timey lookin chairs. “I won fair and square.”

“But you set up the hat stand! You had the pattern down!”

“The pattern is just going in a circle, dude.”

“But you had the advantage!”

“Uh, guys?” Polnareff and Jotaro look over from their hat-fueled argument to see Kakyoin looking slightly panicked. “Am I nuts or is the hole bigger?”

“Hm?”      “Eh?”

Jotaro and Polnareff do peer closer, not really able to tell if it did get any bigger…Jotaro, of course, tests it by throwing another chair at it. As suspected, it takes longer for it to go around completely and descend - it did get bigger.

“Huh.” Jotaro mumbles before picking up another chair.

“Wh-DON’T PUT MORE IN!”

“Why not?”

“Cause we don’t know where it goes or if this could break something!?”

“My grandpa’s an admin - it’ll be fine. Hyup!” He hucks the chair in the middle, noticing that the light seems brighter once it swallows that chair….then again…and aga-

“Ohshit!” Kakyoin shrieks as he grabs onto one of the support beams of the room as the whirlpool bulges and balloons out. “JOTAROTEXTYOURGRANDPARIGHTNOW!”

“SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT!” Polnareff scampers up the bar, the bottom of it twisting against the tug of the glitch in the floor.
Jotaro quickly tries to get the chat window open, but his ui starts to spaz and flicker as he feels his legs get swept out under him, pulled in by the poorly textured mass of wood.

“JOTARO!”

He digs his nails into the wood as it pulls him in, his friends helpless in the face of the spiral threatening to swallow him whole. He feels his fingers scrape, even from his bed at home in the real world. He feels his nails split. He feels his hands bleed. Something is wrong - worse than just a glitch and motion sickness. He feels it as he gets ripped from the floor and falls.

And falls.

And falls.

Chapter Text

And lands directly onto a few chairs and a hat stand.

“MOTHERFUCKER!” Jotaro barks on impact, clutching his back and gritting his teeth.
He felt that. He FELT like he just landed on a pile of shitty wooden cowboy furniture. He should NOT have felt that and the fact that he DID and he even felt HIMSELF CLAWING AT THE FLOOR BEFORE THAT, is leaving him, frankly, kinda freaked out. He gets his breath a bit and tries to sit up, but finds that something is on top of him.
If those fuckers threw a chair in after him, he’s going to kick their asses.
He opens his eye a crack to find not a piece of cowboy furniture, but…well, something. It looked like some kind of lizard or a frog, but not any one frog or lizard in particular - just the idea of a froggy lizard with a headsail. He stiffens, but tries to not let the froggy-lizard-thing on top of him feel him move: he’d rather not have something bite his face when he’s pretty sure he can feel pain here.

“Are you dead?”

Oh great - the lizard thing also talks. Delightful. Fuckin peachy.

“...who’s askin?” He grumbles.

“Oh! Oh you’re not dead! Wonderful!” The lizard says before climbing off of him and turning back around to face him. “My name is Betamon. Pukamon said they’d seen odd things shoot out of the sky and Babamon sent me to check if he was telling the truth. I didn’t expect one of those to be another digimon!”

That was a lot of mons in one line.

“Digi-whatsit? Hng…” He sits up, feeling the cruddy wood fall out of indents in his coat. Looking past Betamon, he could spot some other creature - they looked like a little plesiosaur but without back fins and a much smaller body all around.

"Told you I wasn’t fibbing, Betamon!” They peep before they slip along the grass like a penguin to join their friend and bounce right over them to land on Jotaro’s lap; they are thankfully much lighter than the lizard. “Golly - never seen a digimon like you before! Oh! Ohoh! Are you one of the bancho types!?”

“Wh-hold on, slow down. Ugh…” He struggles to stand up, Pukamon slipping off his legs and bouncing across the grass. “What are you talking about and where the hell is this?”

“This is Boot Forrest,” Betamon answers patiently, “We’re really close to our village if you’re hurt.”

“No shit I’m hurt.” He grumbles, making Betamon shrink a little bit in embarrassment.

“Sorry, sorry! We can get someone! Yeah! Pukamon-”      “I’M ON IT!”

They slip through the brush quickly, leaving Betamon and Jotaro together to wait.

“And what’s your name?” Betamon asks him politely as Jotaro tries to stretch a bit to get the pain of falling on wood out.

“Jotaro.”

“Oh, well nice to meet you Jotaromon, even if-”

“It’s just Jotaro.”

“Huh?”

“You added mon at the end. My name’s just Jotaro.”

“Oh. Well, Jotaro,” He can practically see Betamon holding in adding the mon at the end. Did everyone’s name end that way here? “Even if this isn’t the best circumstance, it’s nice to meet you.”

“BETAMON I’M BACK!!!” Pukamon yells in the distance. “I GOT BAOHMON!”

“Wh- Why did you bother Baohmon with this!? Why didn’t you get Gatomon or Morphomon!?” Betamon squawks at the other before they emerge from the bushes. Jotaro’s eyes snap open seeing who the little dinosaur brought along with him. 

It was about as large as Jotaro was in real life, clad in a snuggly fitting grey dress shirt with some dark pants and shoes with its shoulders draped in a black pelt. It had bright purple skin that fades into a darker shade for the hair that seems to sway in an unseen wind. This thing, Baohmon, it looked down on him with three bright yellow eyes. While this alone would be enough to startle most when you were just getting used to the two talking critters who can come to see you bust your whole shit, this one was different. Above its head, like any STAND user, it had a nameplate, though its contents were jumbled and glitching and disappeared when Jotaro tried to look directly at it.

“I tried to get Gatomon, but when I said he fell outta a hole in the air, Babamon said Baohmon HAD to get him!” Pukamon squeaked.

Jotaro sinks back as ‘Baohmon’ gets closer to him, the latter’s eyes trailing down to Jotaro’s bloodied hands. It reaches out and touches his blood - feeling it between his fingers, seemingly perplexed by it..

“Oh no, he’s leaking!” Pukamon cries, but it goes ignored by Baohmon, who crouches down fully and hoists Jotaro out of the pile of wood fragments.
Jotaro, not used to being picked up at all, has no idea what to do about it on top of being injured - so he just limply dangles in the arms of this purple glitched out weirdo as his lizards trail behind him.

The sky is cloudless, the colors of this place are much too saturated, and he just got carried into a village made of legos to be healed by a cat on two legs.
Either he’s in the weirdest coma dream of his life or his hell is weirdly whimsical.

“So, Jotaromon-”      “Just Jotaro”

“Oh, okay! So Just Jotaromon, do you know Baohmon? You looked at him funny when he came to get you?” 

Pukamon has established himself to be, in Jotaro’s mind, an idiot. No matter how many times he tells him his name doesn’t have a mon in it, he keeps adding it.

“No, I don’t know him - he just startled me.” He replies as the cat, Gatomon, apparently, patches up his hands with a large first aid kit.

“Really? Baohmon’s real nice! Babamon said he came from a village far away - maybe it’s your village!?”

“Hmm.”

“You don’t talk a lot, do you?”

“Not when I don’t have to.”

“That’s okay! I like talking!”

“I’ve noticed…”

Gatomon also rolls their eyes before putting a bandage over Pukamon’s mouth.

“Anyways,” She says, oddly with a new jersey accent, “Babamon said that once you were patched up, you were supposed to see her.”

“Okay? She’s…”

“Big tent - middle of t-”

“I can show you where it is!” Pukamon yells.

“What happened to the bandage I put on you!?”

“Ate it! Come on, Just Jotaromon!”

The little dinosaur hops off the table and slides to the flap of cloth acting as the clinic’s door. Jotaro, with a stretch and an understanding look to the annoyed Gatomon, follows after. The village is full of all sorts of those weird creatures, from insects to robots to dinosaurs - it’s a wonder that they’re not eating each other if Pukamon eating the bandage indicates that they do eat. He pulls up his Ui, something the pain and panic of his situation made him forget to try, only to find most of the functions useless - it at least confirms that he is, in fact, still plugged in. He mashes the log out key to no effect. Figures.

“Here we are! Babamon’s tent! I’ll just let you two talk!”

Great. More talking. Joy.

He wishes he wore his hat this time - he feels the need to pull it down to try and block out that cheerful idiot smiling in his dire situation. He enters the tent instead, leaving a different cloth barrier between Pukamon and himself. Inside he finds…a small old lady? She holds a broom about as tall as she is in one clawed hand as her other hand stokes the flames of a fire warming up a pot.

“So you’re the otherworlder, hmm?” He crones. “Bit small…”

“I’m usually taller…” He says on impulse, getting a scrunch of her stitched mouth indicative of an eyebrow raise.

“Hm yes, then this time is for real,” She grumbles mostly to herself. “And you have all your memories?”

“...Yes?”

“Hm…” They sit down on a cushion across from the pot. “Yes, you are the one for the job…”

Jotaro tenses. If he’s dealing with a chosen one narrative, he’s gonna- his thoughts are interrupted by something getting thrown at him from across the pot - something he catches…An arm band.

“What do you know about the letters on that band, sonny?”

He looks down at it, finding the familiar wheel logo of Speedwagon Engineering along with another acronym besides the SPW - BAOH.

“It stands for Speedwagon - it’s the name of the founder of the company that became Speedwagon Engineering,” He tells her. “I don’t know what the second thing stands for, but some admin must’ve dropped this in a h-”

He is now interrupted by her broom against his mouth.

“No. This was not a piece of discarded waste. No, this was the only identifying item found on the first otherworlder we welcomed here.”

“...Baohmon, right?” He says, muffled by broom.

“You catch on quickly. Yes. you see, fifty years ago, in our time anyway, a boy fell from the sky just as you did into the forests around our village. He was led to us by Infermon, one of our most trusted guardians. We did not know what he was, but we welcomed him to stay with us. He had no memories from beyond where he fell, so we gave him the name Baohmon for the letters on that very band. He grew up along generations of digimon, evolving as they did, yes, but slowly.”

“Sorta explains why he’s purple-”

“Don’t interrupt me!” She screeches with another swing of the broom before she clears her throat. “Whatever your world had done made our worlds closer - connected, even. The connection is growing stronger by the day and I can no longer in good conscience keep Baohmon away from it. I want you to look for someone, anyone, who could have known Baohmon before he became our Baohmon…I want you to help him return home.”

“...”

“You can speak now.”

“Right, okay lady - nice story, but how am I even supposed to get out of here to do that?”

“Keep your shoulderpads on, boy, I thought of that.” She scolds. “While these holes are seemingly random to you, I have noticed a pattern. They form in time with the lifecycle of us digimon, particularly our evolutions. As such…”

She bangs her broom and yells.

“PUKAMON! GET IN HERE!”

“Yes ma’am!”

Oh great - he’s back.

“You and Pukamon will be partnered in this goal.”

“What?”      “WHAT!? BABAMON, FOR REAL!?”

“Yes, yes, I knew you two would be happy to hear it. Hoho.”

Jotaro is neutral at best, but he doesn’t wanna get another brook thwack to the face.

“Now, Jotaro, you hold tight to Pukamon.”

Jotaro looks down at the sparkly eyed little plesiosaur and sighs. He reaches down and picks him up like a cat, scooped up by the underarms.

“Alright now. Pukamon, digivolve!”

“Yes Ma’am!”

Jotaro feels them get warm in his hands as a bright light erupts from him. It feels like being in the whirlpool but condensed into his hands.He feels their form shift in his hands before the light is too much to look into. He closes his eyes and the noise fades away…

Then he wakes up in bed. 

His real bed. 

In his real room. 

In his real house.

He sighs and wipes his brow. He knew it - it was just a stupid dream. Mom said he shouldn’t be on STAND so close to bed, maybe he’ll actually listen to her.
He tries to sit up, but finds something once more sat on his chest.
A large clam with a happy little face inside the shell.

“Good morning Just Jotaromon!”

“FUCK!”