Wow. This whole part took me so long to write. I actually started this fic almost a year ago, so I even had to go back and partially re-write the bits with Luna (My Little Pony), now that she's finally shown up again.
This part has a lot of random little cameos. I've been trying to stick to characters from video games with mainly antrho casts. You can play spot the reference if you like. I don't think it's a proper crossover, since it's just like "so-and-so gets mentioned for one paragraph! And now they're gone." If anyone knows a game that I should bring in some characters from drop me a line! (It's a recommendation for me, 'cause I love these kinds of games!) There are a couple of exceptions. (Luna and Chris are from shows, of course. I really wanted to have Canard from Mighty Ducks TAS, because you just know he's got a room in the temporal anomaly wing. Maybe I'll put him in later, but the other two were kinda plot-important and he wasn't.) I also have a couple OCs running around to make things interesting.
This is so long I have to split it into two parts! Part two of the In-between will be up in a week or two, probably.
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Something was buzzing in Klonoa's ear, a whisper on the edge of his waking mind in the moment before he opened his eyes each day. Every time he woke to a new world, and a new quest waiting for him, he could hear something in the void between dreams and waking calling to him.
It was familiar and yet he couldn't seem to figure out why. Klonoa would sometimes stay perfectly still even after waking, eyes squeezed firmly closed, and tried to will himself back to that in-between place so he could pick up enough of that whisper to make it form actual words. It didn't help. Nothing seemed to bring him closer to making any sense of it.
At least, nothing helped until one adventure, when he got into a little trouble fighting a particularly huge monster.
He didn't have trouble defeating the giant itself, that was a standard adventurer thing. But the shockwave as the giant finally fell shook the entire temple down to its foundations, knocking Klonoa clean off of his feet.
He lay where he fell for a moment, exhausted and aching all over from the scattered hits he had taken during the fight. As he watched, the twisted bulk of what had once been a rain-bringing dragon, and had lately been a furious giant that blotted out the very sun, dissolved into soft mist. In only a moment it was as if a fog had been lifted from the whole world.
Another call answered, another world saved. Klonoa left out a laugh at the satisfied exhaustion of a job well done, and started to get back to his feet.
There was a low, distant rumble all around him. He had thought was just a ringing in his ears at first, but it was growing louder and louder. All at once he realized that it was the sound of stonework coming undone. The temple was collapsing around him, shaken by that final battle. The stone ceiling was breaking apart above him even as Klonoa scrambled to escape.
He never felt the impact, never an instant of fatal pain to accompany the crushing blow. All he knew was darkness, silence, as if his world had come to an abrupt stop.
Klonoa found himself floating in a void, empty and alone. It took several seconds for him to even feel, in his disorientation, that he was laying face-down on something cool and spongy. His face was pressed into it so that he couldn't draw breath.
Klonoa rolled over, took a deep breath, and slowly let it out again. Whatever had happened, he still seemed to be all in one piece. Even the small wounds and the places that had ached after his most recent adventure weren't troubling him any more.
With a little effort, Klonoa braced his hands in the spongy mass under him and pushed himself upright. The ground didn't seem quite solid under him, but it was somehow able to support his weight. It was like resting on a cloud.
There was a stillness, a vast feeling of open space all around him. Klonoa felt his way along as his eyes adjusted. Even the faintest scrap of light was enough for his completely dilated cat's eyes, but there was nothing to see. He soon found the edge where his little fragment of world dropped away into a nothingness so deep he couldn't make out anything below, and followed it in a rough circle.
Halfway around exploring the boundaries of his cloudy platform, Klonoa finally saw the source of the faint light. Something was shining in the distance, like the thinnest sickle of the waning moon.
The light was enough for Klonoa to make out several more little islands scattered about the one he had woken on. It was even enough for him so scramble from one to the next, avoiding the seemingly bottomless void in between. Whenever he had to flap his ears to get a little extra distance, the wind he kicked up whipped through the steep valleys and sent an eerie howl back to echo around him. Klonoa was in no hurry to explore the dark spaces below.
With no other obvious landmarks, Klonoa moved towards the light. As he got closer the thin sliver of light started to seem like a physical thing, hanging much closer to the ground than any moon ought to. Just beneath the shining slice of moon he could make out a small bundle. Each was connected to the other by a thin beam of an almost glittering darkness that hurt his eyes when he stopped and tried to make it out clearly.
The shape finally resolved into a creature curled up in the dark. A little pony the color of darkness in darkness like the void of a new moon, with only a single mark on her flank that glowed like a perfect reflection of the moon shining close overhead. She was resting with her forelegs tucked neatly under her, her head and neck up in a pose of elegant alertness. In the dark it took Klonoa a moment to realize that she had small wings folded against her back, and a horn the spiraled gracefully from her forehead.
She watched Klonoa approach in silence. It wasn't until he paused on her platform, that she chose to speak.
"Why dost thou approach us?" she asked. Her voice didn't match the fragile, childish look about her. The sheer power of it blew Klonoa's ears back and unsettled his fur. She sounded old, centuries old, like an ailing goddess. Klonoa had met a few of those.
"I think I'm lost," Klonoa tried to explain. "Can you tell me where this is?"
"Thou hast been here many times," she told him. "In the In-between."
Had he? It didn't seem familiar at all, and even with a lack of recognizable landmarks he should remember the sheer strangeness of this place.
"We do not forget. But you little transient things cannot seem to remember." There was a touch of bitterness, of wistfulness, in her voice now. She wasn't angry, but... Klonoa felt a little wary just the same. No matter what form they took, scorned goddesses tended to smite.
Her form itself was odd enough. She was smaller even than Klonoa, but gave off the impression of size. Maybe it was just the moon-like thing hovering over both of them. Klonoa couldn't seem to see it properly when he was this close, though its light still let him make out what little there was to see. He was fairly sure he wasn't imagining the oddness of her eyes. Clear eyes that had looked down on a whole world like the cold sky at twilight.
"Where should I go from here?" Klonoa asked. The same little island-platforms dotted the void on all sides, all looking more or less the same.
"Thou art not returning?" When startled, she seemed more like a child than a goddess. Before Klonoa could ask her how he could return she had composed herself, and had another answer for him. "We shall endure your company for the moment, for the light road shall open soon."
Almost as soon as she had said the words, a glimmer of light in the distance caught his eye. At first just a single star on the horizon, it grew larger and brighter with each second until it was no longer a single point of light but a ribbon curling towards them from far away. Klonoa let out a cry of surprise to see that light widening and flattening until it became a winding road through the void. The edge dipped down to touch their platform, then kept going, unravelling on and on out into the darkness.
Klonoa hopped onto the strange road of light, testing to see if it would hold under his weight.
"Let's go!" Klonoa was back in his element. He had a path now, and that was all he needed to start a new adventure.
"No." Klonoa looked back in surprise, to find the little pony hadn't stirred at all. "We are still waiting."
It seemed like a very strange place to be waiting, but if someone wanted to find her, they would only need to follow the moon. Klonoa gave her a nod of agreement and set off on his own road.
The road was letting off a low, warm light that helped him see more of the floating platforms in all directions, but it still didn't throw enough light into the void below for Klonoa to even guess at where the bottom might be. He would just have to keep from falling.
As the glow opened up the world for Klonoa's keen eyes, he began to see he wasn't as alone as he had thought. An aircraft went roaring by, following the light road from above and kicking up a wave of pressure that threw Klonoa flat against the road for a minute before it passed.
While he was picking himself up, Klonoa found the aircraft wasn't the only thing overhead. Something he took for a red, two-headed beast coasted down onto the road just ahead of him, and hit the ground running. Klonoa had just enough time to see that it was actually a bird-like mech with a young dog and cat at the controls. An instant later something whipped by just behind him, and Klonoa turned quickly enough to get a glimpse of wings and a scaly purple tail before it was gone, disappearing in a ripple of darkness that hung in the not-air of the void. A dragon?
It was getting crowded out here. Klonoa clambered back to his feet and started running again.
By now he could see where the light road originated, and where it was leading him. There was a structure rising out of the void ahead of him, stretching down into the darkness and up past the sky, father than Klonoa could possibly see. It was a rounded tower, but one so massive that as he reached it the grey stone seemed more like a wall stretching out to both sides.
The light road led right up to a wide balcony, a landing platform of sorts. In the tower, above the balcony, there were several arches that led to wide, flat areas. The aircraft that had flown over him on the road was now resting in one of them.
Finally he could see where the light road was coming from. A lantern, or at least it looked like an old-fashioned lantern, held by a gaunt, silver-furred badger in pale grey robes. Many loops of tattered, rough-edged bandages wrapped around the badger's eyes to hide them.
The light poured out of that lantern like trickling water until it hit the stone floor of the balcony. From there it flattened and spread, stretching off of the balcony and away to form the road Klonoa had been running on. It made about as much sense as any other dream, he supposed.
The badger's face turned blindly towards him as he stepped gingerly from the pooling light to worn stone. The ground here felt more solid than the cloud platforms, at least.
"Klonoa! What are you doing so deep in the In-between?"
"I think I'm lost. Wait, how do you know my name?" How had the badger even recognized him? Could he see through his bandages?
"You've been here many times before, though you rarely come this far in. Ah, but you won't remember, I'm sure!" The badger gave him a wry smile. "For travelers like yourself, this is a place between worlds and times where they are needed. You can't die in a 'dream,' but when you're knocked out of a world you're visiting this is where you land. You won't remember this place when you leave."
Klonoa couldn't have said if he had heard this before, but he certainly got the feeling the badger had given the same explanation many, many times to many travelers.
There were others besides the badger already scattered around on the platform. Some were heading inside, having arrived ahead of Klonoa, while others looked as if they were waiting for something. There were two ladies nearby, a svelte purple cat talking to a brightly-furred fox wearing a police badge as a 'dog-tag' around her throat. The fox looked irritated, glaring out into the void even as her ears swivelled to listen to her companion. To the other side was an extremely strange looking boy, sitting with his legs swinging out over the edge of the balcony. He had a messy auburn mane, but no fur anywhere on his body.
"Is everyone here dream travelers?" Klonoa hadn't crossed paths with anyone like himself in a long time. So there were other people here who would understand what it felt like, spending so much of his life in worlds that seemed so real, yet disappeared each time he woke?
"Not everyone. Many come here in their dreams, even ones who aren't meant to be travelers." The badger nodded to indicate the strange furless boy as he said this. "If I remember, you never stay here long before jumping back into a dream," he added.
"I don't know how to get back!" Klonoa protested.
"Now that is strange. You should have had the option to continue when you first arrived here." Klonoa got the feeling he was being scrutinized, though he still couldn't see the badger's eyes. "You'll want to step out of the road for a moment."
When Klonoa did take a step away, something whipped by him so fast that it tossed up his ears in its wake. A blur of blue and black. No, it was two blurs, moving so close together that they had seemed like one entity as they whipped past.
Two hedgehogs, Klonoa realized once they screeched to a stop on the balcony. One was shock-blue with spiked quills that stood out down his back. The other was black with his spikes turning up like wicked claws highlighted in red. The black hedgehog had his arms crossed angrily under the tuft of white fur in the middle of his chest, while the blue one laughed uproariously at him.
"You're too slow!" the blue hedgehog teased.
If that was what passed for 'slow' around here...
As Klonoa watched, the furless boy deserted his post and practically threw himself at the blue hedgehog to hug him, without the slightest care for his spiked quills. The blue hedgehog didn't seem to be caught off guard by this, catching the boy mid-hug with a joyful greeting.
And that wasn't the only reunion. Moments later a third hedgehog arrived, not speeding along the light road, but flying through the void, surrounded by a blue-green aura that disappeared when his feet touched the smooth stone of the platform. He looked rather different from the other two, and not just because of his pale, silvery color. His halo of gravity-defying quills were so wide and soft that next to the other two he didn't even look like he could prick someone.
The third hedgehog only seemed to notice one person on the balcony, as if the rest of them weren't even there. The purple cat, who had stepped away from her conversation to meet him.
"You're... I..." Words seemed to fail him, except for a single whisper, "I'm so sorry."
She cut right through his hesitation by putting her arm around him and pulling him to rest against her shoulder with the air of an older sister comforting her brother. "What am I going to do with you?"
"Is this always-" Klonoa looked around at the grey badger, a tiny part of his heart already hoping that this was a place of reunions, somewhere he might possibly meet even a few of the countless precious friends he'd had to leave behind in the course of his travels. He found the badger staring hard out into the void, his expression set as frigid and solid as a statue. He might have been a stone sentinel standing there. "What is it?"
"They won't remember."
"How can they not remember? I always remember my dreams! You don't just forget something that important!"
The shadow of an indulgent smile only irritated Klonoa's temper further. "No one can remember this place. If you stay here long enough you just might remember it when you return. But when you wake..."
"But why would it have to be-"
The badger interrupted Klonoa, his voice strong over the sound of tearful reunions. "There's someone you'll want to see. In the medical bay, three flights up, temporal anomaly wing." A second's pause, and then, "She's waiting for you, Shadow."
Apparently this message was aimed at the black hedgehog. He had a frown of deep distrust that never left his face, but he did turn his back on the others and stalked inside. Even when he wasn't running so fast as to be a blur, he was gone in the blink of an eye.
"Why would you tell him to go meet someone he won't remember?"
The badger didn't answer. Before Klonoa could question him further another hedgehog popped out from where she had been hiding in his shadow. This one was perfect black from head to toe, with incredibly long quills that hung down like graceful corkscrews.
"Why didn't you let me show him where it is?" she cried in a pouty child's voice. "I love seeing Shadow happy."
"I'd like you to show Klonoa around instead, Mary."
"Oh?" Mary peeked over at Klonoa and smiled brightly. She crossed behind the badger, and in the instant Klonoa couldn't see her she had transformed from a hedgehog into a cabbit. She was still jet-black, but curly quills had been replaced with impossibly soft-looking fur. Her long ears were tied together at the top of her head so that they hung down together down her back in a ponytail, which was almost stranger than her sudden change in species. That actually looked kind of painful.
Klonoa stepped back in surprise, only to have the cabbit girl catch him by the arm before he could stumble too close to the edge.
"What just... Who are you?"
"Don't mind Mary. She's made up of wishful thinking, so she tends to change a lot."
Klonoa could swear that badger was laughing at him.
"Come on! I'll show you all around and you'll meet lots of nice people and we can probably find someone to figure out why you're stuck, if you still want to go home," Mary chirped. She dragged Klonoa inside with her, in spite of his half-formed protests.
There was an unornamented tunnel leading from the balcony into the tower itself. Klonoa stumbled along, unable to retrieve his arm. Her fur was changing color, so gradually he couldn't be sure his eyes weren't playing tricks on him, but before he knew it black fur had changed to pale blue patterned with fine darker stripes. It was unnerving to watch.
"How did we all get here?" Klonoa asked, trying to make sense of the place. Even dreams made their own sort of sense, usually. "Are we all dreaming? What about that little pony out there?"
"You mean Luna?" Suddenly when Mary turned her eyes on him they weren't just bright, but like twin luminous moons. How could he have not noticed that before? "She's waiting for her sister to call her home again. She never comes to the tower." Mary smiled sadly to herself as she talked. "You know, she told me where she was from no one wanted her night. But she waxes and wanes like a real moon, and lets us know time passes even here. It's so much more beautiful here since she came."
That sounded so sad... Klonoa couldn't completely believe he wasn't here for a reason as a dream traveler. Even if this was a place for happy reunions, there was something melancholy about the place that nagged at him.
As that thought occurred to him, Klonoa felt something ripple through him. It was a voice on the edge of hearing, a thought on the edge of consciousness. He almost didn't have time to be aware of it before it was gone.
"Did you hear that?" Klonoa asked, though 'hear' wasn't quite right, he didn't know what else to call it.
"Oh yes. The canteen is right through here. Sometimes it gets a little noisy!"
And with that they rounded a corner into a huge mess hall. The ceiling arched up away from them, the better to amplify the cacophony of voices that filled the space. There was no single coherent theme to the place. Tables of varying sizes and shapes were scattered through the room, with chairs to accommodate almost any species. There were clusters of long couches, and even dips in the floor with seats carved out of the sides. A bar ran along almost the full length of one wall, raising and lowering to serve customers of different heights. The main portion of it jutted out nearly to the middle of the room in a long, narrow horseshoe, before returning to the wall again.
The canteen, while not nearly filled to capacity, held an amazingly diverse number of people. Many of them looked as if they couldn't possibly live in the same reality, let alone the same world. For a moment Klonoa could only stare around himself in awe.
At the bar was a species Klonoa had never seen before, though this man wasn't as strange as the furless boy had been. He had short tawny fur and oversized pointed ears that stood out from his head. As Klonoa watched he paid for his drink with a handful of bolts and turned back to his companions at the bar, a blue-feathered falcon and a muscular young fox, both in matching jackets. A little father along was a whip-like racoon, idly twirling a hooked cane in one hand. When the falcon gave him a sharp warning to 'watch where you put that thing,' the racoon gave him a charmingly insincere smile in return.
There were other strange match-ups scattered throughout the room. At one low table a dreadlocked echidna was arm-wrestling a manically-grinning bandicoot. A nearby table had a young fox with two tails, an impeccably neat turtle in a bow tie, and frog wearing the same uniform as the fox and falcon at the bar all pouring over a mess of blueprints. Klonoa could hear snatches of their conversation, though none of it made any sense. Something about 'chaos energy,' and 'plasma engine,' and 'ectoplasmic residue.'
"Oh no, I told them to stop messing with the gravitational polarity fields!" Mary cried, apparently noticing the three at the same time Klonoa did. "Their technologies aren't mutually compatible at all!"
That made even less sense. When he turned to tell her that, he was taken aback to find she'd turned into a lizard in the interim. She was covered in shining golden scales now, with a paler, creamy belly. That threw Klonoa for a loop once again.
"When did you... ?" he asked, dumbfounded.
"Oh, these?" Mary adjusted a pair of glasses that Klonoa was sure she hadn't been wearing a second ago. "Don't you think they make me look smarter?" she laughed. The huge wire-rimmed lenses didn't serve to hide her eyes, but only made them look larger and highlighted how they were a glowing orange now to compliment her new scales. Not that randomly appearing accessories made much of a difference when she kept changing species.
"You wait here for just a minute while I talk to them. Oh, boys!"
Klonoa found himself released. Instead of waiting, he slipped off through the odd crowd, listening to the different conversations and just trying to take in the oddness of the world where he found himself. It wasn't that he hadn't been in many strange places, maybe even stranger places than this, but this was different. He couldn't shake the feeling that there was something he was supposed to do here, and yet he couldn't find it. Figuring out where he was supposed to start was usually the easy part.
As he passed a table where a diminutive parrot perched in a strange clockwork cage and an oversized alligator woman were drinking tea, he picked up a few snatches of conversation.
"... And all that just to learn you can't even trust your own protégée. Even with immortality nothing is set in this world."
"Mm," the alligator grunted. "Tha's why I raise all mah own children. Put jus' the right voodoo in 'em zombies and they'll never leave yah 'lone. Now gimmie that cup, and I'll read the leaves."
Even that snatch of conversation was strangely sad, not for the alligator now detailing the apparent horrors found in her companion's tea leaves while he protested at the sheer unscientific nature of her practice, but the thought of being abandoned and alone.
Klonoa felt it again, like a ripple over his mind. He wasn't imagining it. Someone was calling for him, and the voice was familiar. It almost felt like...
Pausing to collect himself, Klonoa pictured in his head the reunions he had witnessed. He could see the happiness that had made those hedgehogs and their friends ignore everyone else around them. They had acted as if they had never expected to truly see these precious people again. And then he echoed the badger's words in his mind. 'They won't remember.'
A pang of sadness accompanied that thought, and inside it was the voice that Klonoa was looking for. It was a sound of sorrow, and it was calling to him.
Where was it coming from? It seemed to be echoing down from somewhere above. Klonoa had to keep searching around in his mind and dragging out painful thoughts just to 'hear' it, trying to orient himself towards the source. Every dream that he had seen go wrong, every world in distress, every friend left behind, Klonoa focused on a montage of unforgettably painful things, and he had never realized his adventurous life held so many painful things, just to keep hearing the echoing that wasn't truly a sound.
There were stairs to the side of the bar, and he followed them upward, past the open hangers holding airships of all different shapes. One, two, then three floors up he followed the feeling. There he found a maze of narrow hallways, all sterile white and scrubbed clean, with endless doorways and signs in a nonsensical language pointing him this way and that.
And there he was close enough to finally recognize the voice. It had been clearer when its whisper had called him into another dream, into Lunatea, but faint as it was he knew this voice. This was the King of Sorrow.
Realization made the voice suddenly clear, as if he had finally found the frequency to pick out the words. The King of Sorrow was calling to him, sobbing out his name into the silence over and over, and finally Klonoa knew how to listen.
He practically flew down the hallway towards the source, ears flapping behind him as he ran. It was no puzzle to find where the voice was coming from, just a few sharp corners and into a doorway like any other, and there...
There was the child-king of Lunatea's Kingdom of Sorrow, just as Klonoa remembered him. He was curled in a miserable ball in the far corner of the room, face hidden in his knees as he shook with silent sobs. His huge ears wrapped around his body as if to hide him, but there was no way Klonoa could have failed to recognize him.
Klonoa didn't hesitate to approach the weeping child. Crouching beside him, Klonoa lifted one protective ear out of the way so he could lay a steading hand on a narrow shoulder that shook with silent sobs.
The King of Sorrow lifted his head, his eyes completely red from crying. His voice was almost too hoarse to hear even in the silence, but he let out a strained whisper, "Klo'oa?"
The soundless voice at the back of Klonoa's mind evaporated into nothing as he embraced Sorrow's fragile form, letting a tear-soaked face press into his shoulder and smoothing back huge ears. The thin body in his arms no longer shook with sobs, but with deep gasps of breath that sounded only a shade away from weeping.
There was no doubt in Klonoa's mind: This was the reason he had been called to this in-between world.
