Back in 2006, when I was 14 years old, I joined a forum called "Digimon Universe RPG". Around this time, there were several "RPG" forum websites. Digimon Universe was one such group. This is a group project story involving multiple people leaving their novel-like posts on a forum to create a drive a story. Describing what this is to someone who's never participated in anything like it isn't easy, but imagine that you're writing a novel with a group of friends, but each one of you is only in control of specific characters. There is a head leader of the novel who drives the story by controlling all other non-main characters, the villains, and even a couple of main characters of his own. He's pretty much in charge of the main plot. Each post describes the actions and feelings of a character, and each post reads like an excerpt from a novel. If your character speaks to or interacts with another forum member's character, that forum member will write a response post describing how his character responds to yours.
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Example:
Poster 1: Bob was unsure of what to say regarding the pizza that sat in front of him. It had anchovies on it, and he had never had anchovies before. He spoke up "I appreciate you buying me dinner, but could you perhaps send this pizza back and order another one? I want one without anchovies."
Poster 2: Sam frowned. "Have you even had anchovies before?" Sam asked.
Poster 1: Bob folded his arms behind his head and leaned back. "I haven't, but everyone I know besides you hate them, so I probably will too." Bob said.
Poster 2: Sam chuckled a little and looked off to the side. "Just because everyone else in our friends group hates anchovies doesn't mean you will. You ought to at least try it before you knock it." Sam said before taking a slice of the Anchovie covered pizza and taking a bite out of it.
Poster 1: Bob sighed. He knew Sam was right. So he reluctantly picked a piece of pizza up and put it in his mouth. His eyes lit up. "This is delicious!" He said, his words distorted because his mouth was full of pizza when he said it.
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The original Digimon Universe series was just like this. I controlled two human characters named Evander Glovion and Jessica, who for some reason, I never gave a last name to. I also controlled their Digimon partners; Evander's Ladybugmon, Terriermon, and Agumon, and Jessica's Leormon, PawnChessmon, and Gabumon. There was another poster who went by "Mario" who controlled his own characters and their partner Digimon, but he also drove the story along by controlling the villains and other important characters. There were two other forum members as well, who also had human characters and their partner Digimon.
At around 30 episodes in, Mario decided to quit the novel-like project. But being so invested in it, I decided to write up the rest of the series on my own in a Word document. I saved these episodes in an e-mail on my Yahoo address and 15 years later, compiled them into Google Doc documents and exported them as PDFs. Below are the PDFs, divided up into 4 volumes.
You'll notice that a small handful of the episodes are missing, and also the writing styles of the different forum members differ wildly. That's unfortunate, but we were just kids playing around. It's not like we were hard at work trying to produce a professional looking novel. Nevertheless, I hope you'll still enjoy the story anyway. I'm currently working on a sequel to this that will explore the lore of the planets the non-human Digidestined are from in much more depth. So stay on the lookout for that.
And Mario, and the girl who portrayed Zai, if you find this, contact me. I'd like to talk to you again after you lost touch. Maybe we can become Facebook friends, and maybe I can actually learn what you look like. After all, this was back when people didn't even use their real names on Facebook. You weren't Bob Smith, for example, you were Bobatron_3000 or something like that. :-)
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