Disclaimer: These suckers are copyrighted to Disney and Squeenix. Author's Note: Enjoy the frames below? It's very cute, and illuminating on the kind of wackiness you otherwise find in Kingdom Sorts, including a subtle hint of why it's called that. (Spoilers for next chapter, folks. Le spoilers are tres replete.)
Mistah Furious--An Article of Damnation, Written by A. Wiseman
A Disclaimer Requested by the Publisher: I must preface this with an assurance that the persons, institutions and suspicious laboratories within are the properties of Square-Enix publishers and Buena Vista, as well as Panawave. Both Buena Vista and Square-Enix do not endorse this release, nor does it profit the person that arranged this material to release it. Panawave declined comment, and further attempted to kidnap a seal of authenticity in order to prevent global warming from killing us all.
This sensitive documentation is protected under the law of the United States as parody, but anyone reading this in Midgar, you are forewarned. Violation of copyright laws of any sort are prosecuted, capital punishment or a 5,000,000 Gil fine are in place.
Name Changed to Protect the Innocent, et. al. "The Contentious Reports--1. 'Mr. Furious--How Xehanort's assistant Braig went from being a chemist to being a soulless murdering machine, to overall just being a morose, world-hating bastard", Random University House Press, copied dead to rights, At Some Point
It did not happen overnight. These things rarely do. Yes man status was granted and upheld, taking him smoothly across continents and various atmospheric O2 ratios, mongering fear and death and smothering nations in the grip of one onyx hand.
It was too easy, really, even if depth perception wasn't. It didn't require much thought, and while it didn't pay, everything was arranged by spoils, and power. Unlimited free power, courtesy of conquest express and exanimate hordes.
It was too easy, and then those meddling kids, and their god-modding squeaker made it less easy. Terrible enough that he was upbraided for being undead, he supposed, though he didn't really let that factor in at first.
It used to piss him off that he spent most of his days with a walking, raging head case, back when he was alive, because his project head lacked a clear understanding of group dynamics.
Dilan. The alembics they totaled had to finally get worked into the insurance packet, costing him part of a pay docket and detracting from the total salary forever afterward. He wouldn't trade the sheer joy of finally culling enough attitude to deliver a kick to Dilan's coccyx and slam his head into the beakers though, not for the world.
It became a constant, one humorously thrown together at his expense by Even:
Braig's Constant N(number of alembics broken inversely proportionate to the actual amount of exposure to , but directly proportionate to History represented by the value aitch, which is a sum derived from the number of days working together characterized by D, multiplied by the Amount of professional disdain magnified by the intensity of personal dislike, represented by the sum of professional disdain multiplied by college classes shared to the tenth power.)
The dueling remained as a force of habit, inseparable to the men they once were. Over time, it grew to incorporate the additional subordinates, who, if incapable of registering emotion in quite the same way as a human, could certainly interact like one.
Braig and Dilan became second and third body in Xehanort's organization post-mortem, respectively, which led them to seemingly off-panel loggerheads more often than not, and probably led to a certain lack of cohesion that was exploited horribly by a relative newcomer. They are these days known by the names Xigbar and Xaldin.
The relative newcomer who used their power plays and the idiotic heroics of those big damn heroes working for the good of all killed a great many of the members of the organization indirectly, and was known by them, at least before they were gargling out his accursed name alongside damnations, was Axel. Axel, who might have once been called Lea and had an irritating habit of wanting people to call him God and Boomshakala, was enough to set a man's teeth on edge if nothing else, he thought.
Otherwise, the unease, had it not been for the fact that he could not feel, would have quite worked its way in by now, like a canker, to harsh Braig's mellow.
It was, however, only after he was left with the big damn hero, confident of his skill, decidedly a ghost of a bit cheerful that his hated nemesis was somewhere on the far plane, prancing through the existential lilacs, that he started to reevaluate this.
Big damn heroes bloody damn win, damn it. There was nothing he could do to preserve himself.
He faded, as so many of the group had, into seeming nonexistence, into particle disarray and void. Unfortunately, the atheistic nothingness of void was propped on the back of a spiritual dimension of narrative, and thus 'void' was too strong a word, 'nothing' too forceful a declaration, for what actually happened.
He felt heavy, something that he couldn't remember being in his life, although he realized it as a dull, leaden weight of the body afterward. Sea spray hit him in the face as he sat up, clogging his nostrils.
It was a fairly rude awaking, on the whole. And roundly, in every way that would measure a sentient being with the capacity of empathy, he was.
And he was terribly sympathetic toward himself. Astoundingly sympathetic. His sympathies lay with his use as a pawn, with his vendetta, still unresolved, with the boot-to-the-ass nature of being an assistant, unrewarded as a genius in his own right, for delving into things he didn't understand, for joining Panawave during his college years, an act that handed him a future in a laboratory with a fellow member, a future at the end of which was a snot-nosed kid with a large door key.
Bloody Xehanort. He went from draping things in white to draping them in darkness. It should have been obvious that he hadn't gotten a second opinion after that crack psych-eval at a hospital following the incident, in which he was labeled HTD with a hint of TARFU and diagnosed as an SEP. (Terms which, would later learn, his doctors had made up entirely to indicate how little they wanted to deal with the problem. A nurse later bitten in the eyeball by Xehanort added the acronym TARDIS, one of her own.
The closest meaning of which that could be arrived at by fearful hospital authorities was, 'that asshole really does insane shit'.)
The incident that left him bereft of an eye was even forgiven, if bitterly, in the pursuit of money and weapons research. It featured a botched bleaching of the skin in pursuit of saving the environment, and a half-arsed attempt to clean the acid off with a letter opener. This had given him the advantage of looking through a microscope uninhibited by a fluttering second eye, but largely did nothing to aid his career, especially when the professors kept pulling faces and running off.
Of course, time passed on that beach, introspection lasting only for so long before his clothes dried in the sun and he felt rather alone and miserable. So, the universe fucked his plans of a bleak, desolate future as a castaway and gave him an answer to that.
Lo and behold, all were alive and emotional and he found them to be every ounce as irritating as he once believed they might be. Nothing friendly about the whole cast of them popping out of the waves like bloody Flipper, in his opinion; no.
He just wanted to make his mum proud, and then all that shit had to pour down on him like concrete. Like his whole future in science was some kind of dunnikin diver expedition into the sewage-laden bowels of servile hell.
Of course, Xehanort, who you might know well as XEMNAS, wanted to rebuild it all…
A word from our whistle blower:
Good day to you. I am sure you are as hale and hearty as you should be, and if not, I wish you well. This is a timely publication, as it illumes much of the hidden, seamy past of the current campaigner and his offices of spite and malice unseen by the public and nugatory of the public image he bandies around with such wanton abandon, painting you a fresco of harmonious grace.
But surely, you say, these are calumnies. They are not! Unfortunately, in my many forays into these unreleased documents, my attempts to apprise them from the grip of the unknown and bring attention to their subversion of the heinous distortion known as Kingdom Sorts: the Autobiographical Saga of Xemnas the Nobody, Esquire, have been primarily futile. The information will sadly be suppressed until a future wherein which I am at liberty to release them in full.
Therefore, with a heavy heart, I have included, for you worthy readers, a further exciting revelation from the reports.
Sincerely,
A Wiseman, a man who follows the campaign efforts of Ansem the Wise
An excerpt from the Contentious Report labeled, 'The Authorized Corporate Insert with the Voice of Dracula'
He's not mentioned very much, because he can be summarized as follows:
I am Dis, destroyer of worlds.
Why? Simple: he knuckled down on six people and made their lives a living hell, and they sought an alternative, and to one-up him, and, since they were handpicked to make him look better (thereby proving them to be slovenly cowards with a reputation as assistants that could only ever take them so far) they failed spectacularly. Numerous worlds went into nonexistence as a price. He is, however, much revered, sainted probably, by the corporation that sanctifies his actions and probably bears a portion of his name.
He was sipping from a cruet filled with sugar and injected with a little tea and watching a computer monitor for much of the time after that, owning up to his failure just to deliver some damnation to a megalomaniacal fellow out of touch with reality. He died, and has not made a reappearance.
He was fond of crickets, if that does his memory any good. Then again, most people are in some way.