Never send a college student to do a high schooler's job. They tend to resent the lost time, let alone the loss of mobile phone reception. Maiming and twisting of the "original," as in it's not original, idea of a new Keyblade Master, and she's stuck way back when Xehanort came to Radiant Garden.

I don't own Kingdom Hearts, and you'll all want to kill me for this piece of shit rag.

ßßß

It had become a lot easier to understand what was transpiring around me so long as I made myself believe I was dreaming.

"Get—the fuck—off!" I barked, wheeling around and slamming one yellow Croc-shoed foot into the face of a twitching, hollow-eyed Shadow Heartless.

I had no idea if they were real Heartless or not—well, considering this was a dream, a very lucid one, none of this was real so who really cared—but they were annoying as fuck and kept jumping at me.

A massive golden thing—I couldn't call it a sword, it was too ungainly and inefficient to be called that—kept materializing in my hand no matter how many times I threw it away and turned to punch one of the Shadows between their bulbous glowing eyes.

I had a fucking Economics test to study for, and I'd fallen asleep over my books. Why couldn't I wake up? Usually, once I realized something was a dream, I could will myself awake with ease. Not so, now, and though this place definitely had ethereal qualities it wasn't quite dreamlike enough.

Hence the fear that twittered on the edges of my thought. While I had twitchy Shadow-things to concentrate on I could ignore it well enough and bite out the odd curse every now and then, try not to bite my tongue in the process, but it was a snaking, binding fear that got no time when I was about to be swarmed by dark things.

One of them fucking bit me.

I yelped, and turned on my heel, slinging the miserable wretch sky-high. Okay, that was not cool. I knew what pain felt like in dreams and I knew it intimately—that hurt like it was real.

Not used to the weight of a sword, I hefted the big golden thing over my head and brought it down like some kind of beating stick. They popped out of existence, vanishing like a cloud of smoke upon a hit.

I growled when I felt the rake of claws at my ankles. They weren't tall, and I was resilient enough, but it was so goddamn fucking annoying.

"You leave me alone!" I roared, my voice fanning out in the darkness with a commanding snap, but it didn't echo back at me: Was this place really that big?

Not allowing thought to impede me, I jerked away and stumbled over their fat little bodies, heading up the stairs. I was afraid of heights and clamored nervously, eyes focused on the center of the steps. I couldn't look out at the black oblivion around me, I felt the sway of vertigo and a mortal fear of falling.

I eventually struggled my way up to a platform, and quite immediately it brought Kingdom Hearts' opening to mind, though the pattern below me was of a white-haired, tanned person wearing a white coat and a purple bow at his throat. The circles had strange motifs in them.

"Xehanort?" I muttered, hefting the sword-bashing-thing over my shoulder. The Shadows skittered away. I didn't much like the golden kill-stick, I was far more given to ranged weapons like guns lethal at 200 yards. "This just keeps getting weirder and weirder..."

Now I knew why Sora carried that dumb Keyblade on his shoulder all the time: You couldn't just lug it around like a normal sword, it was heavy, and I sensed shoulder problems in the near future.

"End of the line," I mumbled, licking my lips, absently cracking the knuckle of my left-hand index. I wrote with my left hand, but I wielded the stupid gold thing in my right: It was the same with baseball, I had to do it right-handed.

"The Keyblade bearer has come..."

I jumped, and stared at a cloaked figure standing at the opposite edge of the big, round platform. What was it with cloaks and idiots who think they can just pop in and out arbitrarily?

"Who the feck're you?" I demanded shortly, for a moment feeling the urge to quail before steeling myself. Now wasn't a good time to be afraid, and this was a dream. "Look, I don't really care, so don't answer that, but where the hell am I?"

"The Station of Transpontine."

"Uh...come again?" Somehow that really didn't sound familiar from the games, not that she even knew what those idiotic platforms were named, anyway.

Just as long as she didn't fight a Darkside or a Twilight Thorn, this remained okay.

Oh, wait: What did she have to worry about? This was a dream, a dream...

The cloaked dude was gone.

"That's...probably not good," I mumbled, glancing around. The sword was trembling like it had a Rumble Pack stuck in it, and I winced: It didn't feel good on my shoulder, so I let it drop, tip end clanging hollowly against the ground.