AN: Longer chapter this time and the plot actually moves ahead. Enjoy!

Chapter 3
What's Going On?

Sora groaned as he forced himself to wake up. Something was licking his face. He opened his eyes to find himself face to face with a bright yellow dog with long black ears. "Huh? Where am I?" he asked out loud. The last thing he remembered was seeing Destiny Islands being swallowed up by darkness. Sora looked around and found that he was sitting on the floor of a crowded restaurant. The restaurant wasn't like anything he had seen in Destiny Islands. Sora looked at the dog. "Am I on a different world?" he asked it. The dog furiously wagged it's tail and licked Sora's face before bounding away. Sora jumped to his feet. "Hey wait!" he called after the dog, "Don't go!"

"Don't worry; Pluto'll come back," said a young male voice on Sora's right. "He's probably gone to get Squall."

"Huh?" Sora turned around to see a young man drinking from a milk bottle. He had brown hair and golden eyes with slitted pupils like a cat's. Underneath his collar-bone was a tattoo of the roman numeral 13 and strapped to his thigh was an ornamented gun. "Who are you?" Sora asked.

The man laughed. "I'm Train Heartnet. Pluto's the dog, and Squall's our leader." He took a drink form the milk bottle. "So, how'd you know you're in a different world?"

Sora scratched the back of his head. "Er... I live on a tropical island." He looked around. "Do you know where the Kingdom Key is?" He blinked. "How do I know my keyblade's called that?"

Train leaned back and grinned. "Why don't you ask Squall that."

"Who?"

"Me," said a voice behind Sora. "I'm Squall Leonhart."

Sora turned around and found himself staring at a young man with silky brown hair and stormy grey eyes. Hanging from several belts was a gunblade with a very complicated looking hilt and a blade made out of a glowing, transparent blue crystal. His most prominent feature was a scar that slashed diagonally from the right side of his forehead and across his nose to end on his left cheek. In his hand was Sora's keyblade.

Before Sora could get a word in, Squall started talking. "Ariadne found you and your keyblade in the streets and brought you here. Since you have a keyblade, the heartless are following you and trying to steal your heart." He stopped talking and held out Sora's keyblade. "Here. You'll need it."

Sora blinked and looked at the keyblade. He reached out his hand to take it. The keyblade disappeared from Squalls hands in a flash of gold only to reappear in Sora's hands. Sora looked from Train to Squall. "Heartless? Why don't you guys start making sense? ! What's going on here?"

Train and Squall shared a look and Squall got out a PHS. He dialed a number and began talking after a moment. "Shalua... I need you over here. And bring Ariadne... heartless, keyblades, the multiverse, Ansem; the usual."

"So," began Aerith. She and Zelda were leading Donald and Goofy through Traverse Town. "You know there are many other worlds that exist besides Disney Castle and Traverse Town right?

"Yeah," said Donald.

Goofy blinked at her. "But they're supposed to be a secret."

"Kind of," said Zelda. "Cracks have always existed between them, but they haven't really been connected until recently."

"What do you mean by that?" Donald asked.

Zelda laughed. "Yuugi has a card named Celtic Guardian who looks almost exactly like my boyfriend."

"And me, Squall, Cecil and Hope all come from worlds that use the exact same currency," Aerith added. "It changed when the heartless came and around the same time, all the worlds were connected."

"The heartless?" Sora asked Shalua. Shalua was the data analyzer Squall had called in. She was an exotic young woman with orange-brown hair pulled up into a high ponytail and glasses. Her left arm was built entirely out of automail and she was missing her left eye.

"They're the creatures that came with the darkness that took over your world." Shalua spoke slowly and with a slight drawl.

"They are those without hearts and are attracted by the darkness in people's hearts." Ariadne explained. She had rippled brown hair and wore a scarf around her neck over over a sensible shirt and jeans.

"There is darkness within every heart," said Squall. "So there is nothing that can keep the heartless away forever."

"Have you heard of someone named Ansem?" Shalua asked.

"Ansem?" said Goofy.

Zelda turned around. "He studied the heartless and recorded all of his findings in a detailed report."

"Let's hope that's all he was doing," Aerith said with a surprising amount of venom.

Donald looked at her. "What do you mean by that?"

Aerith sighed. "Where I come from, there are very few people who just study... supernatural beings. Many of them also ex..." She shook her head. "Never mind; it's not important. What is important is that the report was scattered."

"Scattered?" Donald and Goofy asked.

"The report's pages," said Zelda. "When the world Ansem lived in fell to darkness, the report was scattered everywhere."

"Oh, maybe the king went to find 'em," suggested Goofy.

"Those were our thoughts exactly," said Aerith.

"Wait!" cried Donald. "First we need that 'key'"!

Aerith and Zelda looked at each other before looking at Donald. "Which keyblade?" asked Aerith. "There are a lot of them." She pulled the staff off her back. Green light swirled around it and the staff transformed into a whitish-green keyblade with an organic feel to it. It's keychain was a whitish-yellow flower. She smiled sweetly at them and Zelda laughed in the background. "Mine is Great Gospel."

"So," Sora looked at his keyblade, "This is the Kingdom Key."

"Yeah," drawled Shalua. "It has great sealing powers. Of what, I don't have a clue."

"Huh?" Sora looked at her. "What do you mean by that?"

"Every keyblade has it's own special abilities," Squall explained, "and people who have keyblades can usually tell what those abilities are just by looking at the keyblade. I won't show you my keyblade, because it doesn't work right without it's mate, but Ariadne's is easy to understand." He nodded at Ariadne.

She smiled and held out her hand. A keyblade literally drew itself into existence. It was a very weird keyblade with chess pieces for teeth, a Devil's Pitchfork for the shaft and the hand-guard consisted of Penrose Steps. It's keychain was bishop chess piece. "What do you think this can do and what's its name?" Ariadne asked.

Sora scratched his head. "It's called... Tipping Bishop and it... warps reality?" He looked at Ariadne. "How does it do that?"

"Like this." The flat surface of a table smoothly formed itself into sharp spikes.

Sora's jaw dropped. "Cool!"

"Yep!" Ariadne's eyes glowed as her keyblade disappeared and the table flattened itself out.

"Sora," Squall's voice was hard and Sora looked at him. "The heartless fear keyblades in general and they fear the Kingdom Key most of all. They'll keep coming after you until they succeed in taking your heart."

"But, I didn't ask for this," said Sora.

Train flinched and looked at the table. "Sora, you never ask for destiny to come knocking at your door." He drank from the milk bottle. "It barges in into your life, destroys it and forces you to make a choice." He looked at Sora and his eyes had a hardness to them they hadn't have before. "The choice to live or to die." He leaned back on the chair and considered Sora. "Trust me when I say that dieing is never the right choice no matter how bad living sounds." He threw back his head and finished off the milk bottle.

"As it is, keyblades choose who their masters are," Shalua added. "There has never been a recorded case of the same keyblade being wielded by two people at the same time. For whatever reason, the Kingdom Key chose you to be its wielder and you will have to live with it."

Sora looked at them and sat down on a chair across from Shalua and Ariadne. "How did this happen? I remember being in my room... and..." he leaped to his feet. "What happened to my home? My island? My friends! Riku!" His face fell. "Kairi..."

"If they got lucky, they ended up in different worlds," said Squall. "That's how we all got here. If not, they got swallowed up into darkness along with the rest of your world."

At that moment, a teenager with white hair and a teal bandana around his neck slammed open the door. "Squall!" he yelled, "Heartless!"

Squall looked up at him. "How many Hope?"

"More then usual." Hope gulped. "Should I find Cecil?"

Squall shook his head. "No, me and Sora will deal with them."

Hope nodded and ran out into the night. Squall gave Train a meaningful look before turning to Sora. "Let's go," he said and unhooked his gunblade from his belt and walked out the door. Sora smiled and ran after him into Traverse Town.

Back in the tavern, Ariadne turned to Train. "Why didn't you go with them?"

AN: The hardest part in writing this chapter was finding a non-mad scientist who would only want to conduct experiments based on the data found in the Ansem Report. Way harder then it sounds. Ironically, she's from FFVII where practically all the scientists are mad. I had a lot of fun changing the dialog to fit character's original backgrounds (Aerith's in particular. Mentioning experiments in front of her, eek!) and all the new characters.

Thanks for reading.