Kingdom Crossovers

by HVK

A reformed Invader Zim has been chosen by the Keyblade and travels the multiverse with his crew! In the latest update, Zim's crew deals with the mummy soldiers of an opposing crew, while Jak of Sandover investigates in his own destructive way. And beneath the sea, there lurks forbidden secrets... not the least, the continued existence of Kamina Jiha!

11. Red Lotus: Forging The Stone

Well, it's been due for a bit, but actual stuff happening!

Yeah, not just pacing. Real honest horroshow stuff goin' on.

And I MEAN horrorshow. 'Cause, that Kimblee, he's an ass.

Also, we get to see what Morte and Hobbes' groups have been up to! A bit of Traverse Town building and weirdness too! Also, this is a bit longer than recent chapters, sorry. It didn't feel right to split it up, y'know? Seriously.

Disclaimer: I don't own anything that isn't mine.

...

If there was one thing Kimblee was able to state without a hint of being called incorrect, it was that the attitude Traverse Town gradually installed in it's inhabitants was a deeply frustrating one for outsiders. Espicially the maps.

It was not obvious at first glance. But complications abounded. There seemed to be some sort of conspiracy afoot to make them as useless as possible; even the latest printing were always a few years out of date, the layout were nearly as twisted and multidimensional as some of the slightly more impossible architecture (and never mind how that was possible with a two-dimensional piece of paper), what he had first thought would have been a straight route had failed to take into account the weird shorthand the map used in the form of alternative layout with little notes advising not to take it literally and in fact had led Kimblee through five neighborhoods, and the last one had been on fire for no apparent reason. People had been roasting marshmallows and complained about a volunteer fire brigade. Even the references and informative notes had little to do with subject matter and everything to do with random tangents on whatever interested the mapmaker, and even those tended to lead into nonsensical arguments with itself. (Kimblee did not know that this wasn't the intention of the mapmaker, but of the thinking engines that actually copied them out; afflicted by the quirks of artificial intelligence that Traversian machines are so prone to, they decided that it wasn't interesting enough and spiced it up a bit; some had argued on the way to do that and another had misinterpreted the argument as suggestion and printed the whole thing down. People found the whole thing hilarious. Needless to say, Traverse Town is an easy-going place aside from the chaos.)

I think I hate this town a lot, Ghostfreak said, contempt rolling off him like grease off a melted pot of butter the third time they wandered into a building hoping it would supply a vantage point only to discover that some idiot had put a gravitational polarity engine in it and reversed the gravity. (To make it fly in the event of the apocalypse, of course.) Kimblee himself was uncomfortable with the prospect of jumping over open doors and wondering what would happen if he fell out a window.

(The Hitchhiker's Guide has this to say about flying buildings in Traverse Town; they have become common. Really common. Incredibly, face-slapping, kick-you-in-the-groin-with-a-stuffed-alligator common. Admittedly, that is not a very common occurance in itself, but it is in Traverse Town, where retribution is more creative. According to the people in the know, the 'flying building thing', as it is popularily and uncreatively known, is a recent fad; Traverse Town clothing fashions are pretty much set in the whole 'belts and zippers, straps and buckles, longcoats and layers of clothing, chainbelts and personalized outfits' fashion with a few minor crazes, so fads are pretty much aligned at more unusual things. In this case, modifying your buildings. Before the flying building thing, it was filling them with machines that could transform the building into giant fighting robots; this made moving around a breeze, but vehicle sales went down, and people literally refused to leave the home. Before that, a serious misunderstanding of the 'fur is murder' idea had led people to cover the outsides of their buildings with a specially designed formula that altered their exterior, eventually growing thick, silky and luxurious fur. And after hearing of a fantastic tale from another world about a man that converted his house to fly with a lot of balloons, a steering system and para-sails, many people decided that they liked the idea of flying houses and did it their own way. Some liked balloons and sails, other modded their's into inhabitable rockets, a few guys put graviational polarity engines that inverted their home's gravity so it could propel itself, and at least one young lady made her house the central nervous system of a flying tree monster with fire breath; she had spent too much time at the planet of Melchior-7 and it gave her ideas.)

"I am begining to wonder if perhaps my familiarity with Traverse Town should have been more extensive before I accepted this mission," Kimblee said. "Oh well. When I blow up this district they can rebuild it in a more sensible way."

"Why are you talking about blowing up the district?" Asked a large mushrooms-man, a low-set face under a broad cap and a body made of gnarled branches and lumps of fungoid matter.

"Because I was sent here by the leader of a neferious organization intend on galactic domination and destruction to wreak great destruction," Kimblee said honestly, knowing perfectly well that he wouldn't buy it.

The mushroom-man snickered; it sounded like mud bubbling. "Like you'd do it." He walked off into an open manhole. "Ow! WHY DO I ALWAYS DO THAT! AUUGH, THERE'S ALLIGATORS DOWN HERE!...And they want someone to referee their Skid-Ball tournament and maybe have some tea after. I'm in!" Reptillian bellows of jubilance ensued. They talked with Cajun accents.

"...I choose to be the better man and pretend that didn't happen," Kimblee said, and walked away.

Hey, I forget, Kevin said after they had gone a fair distance, narrowly avoiding a folk dancing contest made more interesting by doing it on giant spinning plates on ten-foot-tall poles; politely turning down an eager young perky goth Crossguard medic-priestess that wanted to try out her handcranked acupuncturist twelve-barrel precision minigun on a volunteer; and having to listen to people complain about the buses going on strike and roaming around the neighborhood with picket signs that went Your End Is Nigh, Probably! Repent, Maybe! Your Doom Is At Hand, I Guess! and other such sentiments.

"Forget what?"

Why we're going to Foster's.

Ghostfreak said, To commit all manner of as-yet unstated horrors to get people's attention, you silly bastard.

Hey! My parents were married! I think.

It's a figure of speech meant to communicate one's low opinion of the other.

Oh...and what does THAT mean!

"Never you mind."

Asshat. Kevin glowered internally and then said, Well, are we there yet?

Kimblee would have to be a psionic, several steps outside consesual reality or have really good eyesight to stare at Kevin, but a nearby mailbox sufficed until it became unnerved, sprouted rocket jets and flew away singing like a barbershop quartet. "...We are in the middle of a six-way intersection crowded with shops all seeming to cater to a single kind of soft drink in massive cups sizes, slushies or tooth-healing varieties. Foster's Home is a mansion bordered by a cul de sac and posessing a considerable amount of private property because it pleased the Council to let it do so. Do you think we're there?"

Couldnt say, Kevin said, and Kimblee did not misunderstand the wave of childish spite spiking from him. I'm not in control of my own eyes anymore. At least the set is consistent, so who am I to complain? Oh, right! BECAUSE MY BODY IS POSESSED!

You complain, Ghostfreak said. At least he's making proper use of it. You wasted time being tortured when you could have done something with it. Like join the winning game and twist it to your advantage.

Sounds boring. I hate politics. Also: are we there yet?

Kimblee groaned as he crossed the street. "Please don't tell me you're going to do that tired old sequence."

Can if I want to, Kevin said. I have no control of my body, I can't fight you in any way, and you're probably going to play some stupid game with my body as a playing piece. Consider this a completely ineffectual mutiny! So! ARE WE THERE YET?

"You can't do that forever."

Watch me.

Kevin was honest to his word; Kimblee kept walking. He ignored passerbys when they said things to him. When people on giant robot legs played hopscotch and kicked the loser in the dignity (they had very good aim), Kimblee avoided them. When roving reporters were searching for someone interesting to heckle, Kimblee treated them like they were made of very annoying fog. He scaled houses and shops, moved from rooftop to rooftop, traversed with all the inventive means the townspeople had already been kind enough to install for him, and kept moving in what he hoped was the vauge direction of Foster's Home, and still Kevin kept saying it.

Kimblee began to dread it. It was worse than listening to someone grinding stone on concrete. Even Ghostfreak became polite when he asked Kevin to stop after the first twenty minutes of a continious stream of Are we there yet?

Those four words. Over and over and over and over and over and OVER AND OVER AGAIN. Kimblee feared that he might go mad; those words seemed burned into his brain, a noxious hissing behind his eyes like some nerve gas that did worse than kill you. Time kept passing and Kimblee didn't even notice, like he didn't notice the buildings gradually thinning out into residences, the structure becoming less creative and more practical from residents learning their lesson from too much collateral damage. Kimblee could focus on nothing else but Kevin's insistent, spiteful, hateful, malicious voice, echoing in his ears. It was worse than acid dripped into his ears; at least that would cease and the pain didn't psychologically scar you.

Kimblee thought it had been bad before. He thought it had been annoying in Ishbal, listening to the bleating of cowards who hadn't realized what their duty entailed and cried so about the dead whose blood was on their fingers; one random officer had always bothered him for some reason, the man had been so...alien. Maes Hughes, that was his name. Odd man, always flashing his pictures of his girlfriend to any man or woman that came within a fifteen mile radius, had a thing for throwing knives and a problem with the 'erasing families' thing. Then there had been all the countless Targets he had removed that whined about their rights to live. Kimblee had a little list of people that annoyed him, and until now, he hadn't imagined that anything could be worse than Targets complaining about fate not giving them their existence to them, but Kevin quickly made his way up that list.

Are we there yet? Kevin asked what felt like hours later.

No, Ghostfreak said, his voice as tired and ragged as any refugee's.

Are we there yet?

"No," Kimblee said. His hands itched and he wondered if you could alchemically blast someone out of your brain. It seemed as possible as flying into the air with martial arts, but you needed hope.

Are we there yet?

"No," Ghostfreak and Kimblee said.

Are we there yet?

"No," They said again. Kimblee nearly tripped over a torn bit of a cloth cat's-ear; all that was left of Katnappe after her Heartless' defeat and unregarded by the unscrupulous scavengers.

Are we there yet?

No! Ghostfreak said.

Are we there yet?

"No-" Kimblee started to say. He ran into a sign and fell over. He looked up, intending to blast it into oblivion and saw that it said Foster's Home on it. Some idiot had added For Any Poor Sucker.

Are we there yet? Kevin said viciously.

"Actually, yes," Kimblee said.

Ghostfreak gasped. Are we there yet? Kevin said. Sometimes when you're in a groove, it's hard to stop.

"Yes."

Are we there yet?

He told you yes! Ghostfreak said.

Are we there yet?

"I already said yes, you idiot child," Kimblee said. "Must I start thinking about Crowley's code in graphic detail?" He wondered why he hadn't already done that to shut Kevin up and pinned it down to being distracted.

Oh, I know, I just wanted to see how far I could go with it, Kevin said. Now I'm bored.

"You have my deepest condolences." Kimblee regarded the iron gate of Foster's and pushed it open with some effort. He was surprisd they hadn't locked it; they were going to regret that.

He would have smiled at the thought of begining his plan after some initial surveying of the area and making up his mind on the exact implementation, but frankly, his brain felt a little broken.

Sometimes, karma works in some very odd ways indeed.

...

Inside the mall, Hobbes crushed a projectile made from a lot of compressed trash in his hand, frowning slightly.

He glared at the a five-man team of people that had decided to oppose him, Katara, Sokka and Sam, standing guard in front of him and looming over them in their massive (but scrappy) suits of powered armor clicking in place, steam whistling through vents all over their bodies, twin canisters of glowing yellow fluid on their backs and hooked up to large energy-casting cannons on their forearms while their multi-sectioned jetboots hummed gently, air intakes readying for take-off. Kim, Katara, Sam and Sokka just in front of him, glaring as well. Kim looked slightly eager for the fight, Katara a bit more wary and Sokka almost detached. Sam alone looked worried; she could handle herself in a fight, but she had already claimed a spot as 'the weak one', given her lack of outstanding physical abilities or powers.

The engraved, elegant pillars at either side of the ranks of their powered-armored equipped foes provided an entryway into a wide floor space that was a bit like a mixture of a bazzar and a flea market, only even more chaotic because of all the weird stuff being sold and the weirder salespeople; large tents, stalls and similar things were placed in a haphazard manner, mostly organized on who got a spot first with short walls to divide them, though there were a few more traditional stores built into the mall and occupied on a rent basis. Their next shopping destination was there, and standing between them and their mission (and fun) were these idiots in powered armor.

"Okay!" Hobbes said. "We already beat up the last bunch of you loonies in lousy powered armor to stop us shopping because none of you recognize any of us despite Kim being a local girl!" He gestured below, referring to the floor under them. "After we defeated him in three consecutive games of capture-motion boxing, two rounds of air hocky and five games of Mosh Mosh Dance-Off! What more to we have to do to get into this big shopping area!"

"Fight us!" The opposing team challenged. "We, the proud fighters of the Mall Crawler Enforcers, Traverse Town Chapter One, will not allow unskilled or incompetent idiots to gain access to the great treasures, equipment and cool stuff of our beloved salesguys!" Their suits powered up, their various weapons charging, one set of energy shields turning on, a energy-katana extending itself, a pair of arm-swords unsheathing and a massive electric-sledgehammer being slung out.

"Oh, this is just excessive!" Sokka yelled furiously, waving his sword at them.

"Excessive!" Roared their leader apparent, a rather scrawny human in a heavily modified suit of powered armor with an mighty strength-enhancing exoskeleton covered by plates of beaten metal like tortoiseshell, conduit lines glowing and little vents sparking bursts of energy as he powered up, all the little arcs of yellow energy making a ever-shifting tapestry around him. His helmet was fashioned like a knight's, with a cyclopean visor over his eyes and glowing much as all the other stores of power on his armor was, presumably to fuel integral parts of it. Protected by a shell-like form on his back was what looked like a pair of scuba tanks modified into fuel tanks, filled to the brim with a not-quite-energy-or-liquid mass that glowed a pale golden yellow; Hobbes vaugely recognized as it a form of essence-matter called Yellow Eco. "THIS! IS! TRAVERSE TOWN!"

Another one raised his arm-blades. "Gentlemen and ladies! Prepare yourselves! For the breaking of those who would dominate great Purchasing! Know that the enemies of bargains will FALL! By our hands, they will be BROKEN!"

"Why do people always quote historical organizations out of context?" Hobbes wondered as the armored fighters flew at them and his own guys prepared to fight the heavily armed (if not very well maintained) people 'guarding' the mall's best wares from them, so they could finish their shopping and goof off. (The girl's statement had been a warped variation of a common sentiment from the dark days of the ancient Imperium of Man, and Hobbes wondered how these idiots knew about it.)

Their leader (who had a nameplate on his armor that read Tesla Man, probably chosen because of all the power glows and ranged energy weapons) made a hand signal; everyone in his group scattered, jetboots and back-thrusters roaring to life as they ran with surprising speed for their ponderous armors; they took off and flew straight at them, their various weapons powering up.

Katara sighed. "Here we go again..."

"Hah!" Said a fish-girl in a broader suit of powered armor that went out of it's way to have elongated serrated surfaces said, energy whiped streaming behind her in a spiral from cylindral emitters on her armor's oversized forearms. A nameplate on the curved breastplate of her armor read Shredcord. "Our brothers and sisters in arms regulating the lower levels are vastly inferior to our might! You've never fought people like us!"

"Eh, we've fought jerks in super-armor before," Sokka said dismissively. "You're nothing special. Matter of fact, your armor looks really...slapped together. Like you just went to a scrapyard, retrofitted all the big heavy stuff you could find, made weapons out of stuff you slapped together, added some mechanisms to move it for you, took some power sources and soldered it shut."

"Our armaments are sufficient for our task, and our will far supercedes them!" Tesla Man said proudly. A handmade cannon that was a mass of cables, wire and an oversized barrel spun to life, Yellow Eco loading into it before firing mechanisms launched it as an explosive blast right at Sokka, a low-rate concussive blast hitting him dead-on. "Do not mock them!"

Sokka skidded across the ground and bounced, landing on his feet and brandishing his meteorite-forged blade Space Sword (names were not his strong suit) in one hand, his trusted secondary weapon Boomerang Junior in the other. "Do you have to ask why no one gives you better stuff?" He asked. "And who talks like that!"

"We know of mighty warriors and space-knights from the ancient and noble Imperium of Man!" Tesla Man proclaimed. "In their honor, we emulate their mode of speech! Or at least what the novels we've read said they talked like."

Hobbes gaped. "...You're purposefully emulating the Imperium of Man. The specist xenophobic and cult-driven ancient precursor to the Comic Kingdom."

"The what?" Said Shredcord.

Hobbes sighed. "...We're also called the Brighthammer Federation when we want to look more respectable."

"Ah," Tesla Man said. "That makes more sense. You should call yourselves that more often."

"'Comic Kingdom'?" Sam asked.

"Our King has a weird sense of humor," Hobbes said.

"Ahem, I believe we were busy?" Tesla Man said.

Hobbes grimaced, though he had honestly been expecting someone like these idiots: this wasn't the first group of holier-than-thou armor-wearing teenaged warrior-knights the four of them had to fight to gain access to superior shopping spaces, though they were certainly a few steps beyond the previous guys they had to fight.

These idiot's presence had been unexpected; there had been no indication of anything like that; the mall's layout was weird, but it didn't exactly suggest that teenagers in armor with elitist notions of shopping rights were hanging around to beat up unfamiliar people. (And by that, they meant beating up anything they didn't personally know; apparently they'd only started doing this a few days ago, while Kim hadn't been to this mall in about a week. It was a case of very bad timing all around.) The inside of the mall had four levels in it; one of the stadium-style lower part, two levels spaced out through the upper pueblo part, and a final level that was just under the roof and open in part to the sky. (With retractable transparent shields in those parts in case it rained.) The layout was...eccentric. The ground level had absolutely nothing to do with shopping, instead hosting a large food court with a wide variety of food sellers (the very one where they had eaten, of course), a movie theatre, a indoor pool-themed amusment center and a huge arcade, and a number of other things of that general nature. The upper levels didn't have much organization either, with the most famous stores renting out specific spaces or areas in the mall while smaller or newer places had to compete for space, sometimes with quite public duels. (Non-lethal, of course, and they always got someone to referee on pain of breaking the ground with your face.)

They'd wanted to go around through the mall and buy their stuff, taking their time and not hurrying around. That had been the plan, anyway, and had been somewhat jolted by the teens in powered armor that guarded, respectively, the elevator-lift to Floor Two, had patrolled Floor Three and this latest bunch that had teamed together to stand guard at the Big Bazaar, the place with the most unusual, specific and adventurer-heavy equipment; lower levels had provided them with stores where they had purchased, among other thing, a few codexes on interworld travel (Calvin and Hobbes were fairly new to it, after all), a good supply of dried food they could ration out when they couldn't buy any or hunt prey or otherwise procure something to eat, gadgetry for Calvin to make nice weapons out of, a number of other outfits for them to change into for certain extreme environments or just needed a change of clothes (Sokka had insisted on buying an outfit similar to what Spike had been wearing and using a weird machine to alter it to Zim's height and build, not to mention altering the color to something like the Irken Invader uniform; he reasoned that 'any good adventurer needs an awesome outfit, you know?') and a number of other things, though the bulk of their shopping needs were in the Big Bazaar.

They'd also bought a fair bit for themselves; Sokka decided that since they had come all this way it'd be a shame not to buy themselves some cool stuff. Sokka had already bought a few video-discs of a few series that looked cool to him (among them, the hit anime series of drills and giant robots Heavenly Crimson Spiraling Stone, the often dark and tearjerking but still outreageously awesome All Steel Chemist: Nakama and the much beloved pirate anime Romance Dawn); Katara wasn't much for shopping, but she did find herself a few interesting books to read, and for her part, so did Sam; Sokka bought her a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide, when she found a very good read rather quickly, but more significantly she bought some gifts for the rest of their team. Sokka also saw fit to buy a few gifts for his new friends Kim and Hobbes, as he, his sister and Sam were getting along very nicely with the 'new guys', and Sam now had her own copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide, and Hobbes had been gifted with a totally awesome flat-crowned wide-brimmed that had been fitted for his head. Hobbes dearly hoped not to lose it, because he thought it looked really cool.

Oh well, Hobbes said, resigning himself to another fight. Just another obstacle.

He braced himself as Tesla Man came flying at him, a twelve-foot tall mass of metal and machinery; armored gauntlets open wide and small lenses in his palms glowing, vast stores of the weird power source he had recalibrating itself before releasing as sprays of little beam-discs; Hobbes didn't jump back, retreat or get out of the way but instead dodged into the attack, avoiding the little blasts of energy with dozens of small quick movements, hops, duckings and feats of acrobatics, easily dodging them with only a few singed hairs as casualties. Tesla Man was so surprised by this he almost stepped back; in that brief moment of heisitation, Hobbes lunged forward, snarling like his distant feral ancestors as he slammed a open palm into Tesla Man's chest and his other hand, crackling with a stream of cutting power, chopped at a forearm cannon; the force of his palm strike smashing up a powerful gust, cracking the floor around them and knocking Tesla Man across the floor and into the pillar, cracking it a bit.

Tesla Man got up with a syntheziser-distorted groan, a sizeable dent in his chestplate. "...Hrm," He said, standing up and keeping steady dispite his obvious dizziness. His armor made a few noises so people knew that computer stuff was happening. "Interal systems are uncompromised...left arm cannon inoperational..." He shook himself, metal sliding and grating agaisnt each other.

Hobbes winced. "I hate shoddy armors! Can't you be a little considerate for people with proper sensory capabilities and muffle your armor a bit!"

"My apologies," Tesla Man said as the others battled. "You are...more capable than a tourist, and have none of the hollow spirit of a refugee. An interesting fellow; I was wrong to brand you a heretic to the cause of shopping!"

"Does that mean you'll stop fighting us?"

"No. We stand as the bulwark against the endless storm of the rude, the self-important and the window-shoppers, using our physical might to weed out the inglorious and selfish from those who understand the intent of supply and demand, and who share the ideals of us Mall Crawlers! Until you are proven, we shall not let you pass...AND YOU WILL NOT!" He gestured disdainfully at the large cracks in the ground where his metal armor had bounced off. "This is nothing. The contest...is...not yet...OVER!"

"Well, someone took good advantage of 'Hamming It Up' speech classes," Hobbes said glibly.

"I take pride in my dramatic skills! Now, suffer the wrath of my DUAL-WIELDED PUNISHMENT CANNONS!" He raised his arms.

Hobbes brought his right hand up; supported from a dense network of severed cables, wires and conduits was Tesla Man's left arm cannon. "I can cut with my bare hands. I imagine it's a bit hard to dual-wield when you just have the one weapon!"

Tesla Man appeared to take this into consideration. "Indeed. In that case, taste the power of my OMEGA CHEST BLASTER!" He gripped the inner sides of his pectoral-shaped torsoplates and pulled, sliding them out to reveal a whirring machine-mass over his chest and underlying machinery, a glowing disc visbile in it's depths. The energy grew so bright it was almost blinding, and abruptly fired a ridiculously huge laser-type blast bigger than Tesla Man (and he had a pretty big suit of armor).

Hobbes' eyes widened. "What." The laser came roaring at him, the floor shattering in huge pieces of stone work and virtually disintegrating in the massive power blast, and he was too stunned to move in time; it hit him with a thunderous noise, an explosion and a blinding burst of light. When it faded, Hobbes was at the other end of the chamber and half-imbedded in the wall, having narrowly missed falling into the gap of the elevator-lift. "...Ow." He fell out of the wall and landed safely on the floor, right on his face. "Again. Ow."

Tesla Man laughed. "Is that the power you can muster, knave!" Hobbes threw the severed arm cannon, which he had improbably held on to dispite being thrown over twenty feet by being hit in the face with a big laser-caused explosion and smashing into a stone wall hard enough to effective displace some of it; it hit Tesla Man in the head hard enough to damage his neck-movement regulating servos and knock him over. "Ow! What the wicker basket! How can anybody throw that well or that hard!" He got back up as Hobbes wearily did the same. "That's it, now you will hurt! Like a thing that hurts really badly!" He fired up his repulsor-pack and jetboots again, flying at Hobbes for a ramming charge. Hobbes only straightened the spacial-physics defying dufflebag he was storing all their stuff and purchases in; it'd be a shame to get anything broken.

In the meantime, Sam was being faced down by two armored Mall Crawlers. "I don't know," Said a girl in a nearly human-sized suit of armor, her nameplate reading Deadshot, probably because she specialized in long-range weaponry if all the arm cannons, palm-blasters, disc-shooters and the debris-launcher on her shoulder were any suggestion. To compensate for this crippling overspecialization, her guantlets had serrated edges and massive claws for fingers. "Ought we to fight this one? She seems a bit...non-superhuman and such. Would it be honorable?"

"What?" Sam said crossly. "Just because I can't throw water around or take a giant laser to the face, I'm not as good as the others?"

"You surmise the idea well, m'lady," Deadshot's friend, a guy in a fifteen-foot-tall suit of armor patterned after a prehistoric reptilian monster with only a pair of shoulder cannons for ranged combat; it was geared almost entirely for melee, with crackling power-fists armed with massive retractable knuckle-blades, long sidearm-blades made from flattened girders riveted together, huge jet-fired boots with retracted sickle-claws and a dinosaurian helmet and faceplate built over his actual helmet, designed to bite with devastating force. This guy's nameplate read Behemoth. "I apologize for the twhacking to come, but we simply must."

Not pausing to complain about why two powered armor nutjobs had ganged up on her instead of the more capable others, Sam said, "But why! Why attack us? Your friends downstairs wouldn't tell us anything, but you guys are clearly in charge! You even said so!"

"...True," Behemoth acknowledged.

"So why? What's the point in attacking people that shop at your malls and stores?"

"It's just this mall," Deadshot clarified. "This place is important."

"Huh?"

"This mall is the first stop for all the traders that come from the rest of our world and from the stars! Well, not the stars, they'd burn. Unless they wre Pyronites...my point is that many unique and treasured wares are sold here! That means that many rapscallions appear here to take them unlawfully!"

"Lawfully taking them usually requires a visually appealing duel in the public," Behemoth said.

"Our founders, the original Mall Crawlers from an ancient galaxy-spanning civilization of money mechanics, merchants, and makers of marvelous merchandise, discovered that this mall secretly hosted a vile group of criiminals from other worlds that were secretly controlling the most successful businesses for their own base desires, perverting the intention of any place of salesship; to provide a consumer with valuable products!"

A fair distance away, Sokka was having a similar conversation with Shredcord; the difference was that since he could clearly fight, Shredcord was happy to do battle-bantar in the process. "So you guys drove them out!" He asked, expertly flicking his sword out to deflect her energy whips, sparks flying from the ground where her whips tore up the ground in neat little lines. One might wonder why his sword could even compete with her whips, which were burning through the ground with ease. The answer was simple: Space Sword was just that damn cool.

"Correct!" Shredcord said, the small cannons on her shoulders powering up and spinning, firing a volley of concussive blasts; Sokka spun his sword around, deflecting a few of them back for some reason before ducking and then slamming his sword into the ground, digging out a chunk of stone from the ground and hurling it at a cannon as the volley ended, badly denting it. "Back then...our chapter was only a scattered bunch of teenagers who cared about this mall! We had nothing! We did poorly in schools, our families were long gone, our species were extinct but for us-"

"Wait, extinct? You're not human?" Sokka yelped; Shredcord's energy whips had coiled around his sword. Extending a modified telekinetic field over themselves, they reeled back, taking his sword with them and dragging it right to Shredcord's open hand.

"Certainly not. I am, in fact, an amphibious coelacanth girl; my people were known as the Edge-Treaders, owing to our homelands near islands. Many fish cultures, you see, think of land as 'Unsea', or a part of the world that is not the familiar and welcome water-based life." To prove it, her helmet unlocked, with a hissing of air forcing it's way into an unsealed vessel. Her faceplate flipped open, and Sokka blincked. Her big black eyes, low-sloped and finned forehead, and her broad mouth made her look kind of cute, in a weirdly ugly sort of way.

"...Huh," Sokka said.

Her faceplate flipped down and sealed shut. "Anyway, the mall was liberated when an advance scout from the Mall Crawlers discovered one of those rogues harrasing a tardy merchant after hours! They began a holy war to scour away the pestilence and restore peace to the mall! And among the natives here that they recruited so they could serve the town better...was us!"

"Cool," Sokka said. He readied his boomerang, made a few calculations regarding trajectory and allowing for her reflexes, and threw; the small sharpened pieces of metal spun through the air, sliced through the dented shoulder cannon, looped around and cut through the other shoulder cannon and kept going, hitting a vital cable on her arm. Power failure ensued, to her surpirse, and when her arm dropped down lifelessly, her muscular power unable to so much as budge it without her suit's strength amplification, Sokka dashed forward and caught Space Sword in one hand, and the returning Boomerang Junior in the other.

Continuing in this general thread of 'talking things out while still trying to beat the crap out of each other' was Katara, Kim and the last of the armored fighters, a fellow named Adeptus-Indefintus, who'd gone to the efforts of actually introducing himself to the two girls before formally engaging them in combat. He'd also explained to them that he was an artificial intelligence that operated by plugging itself into sophistacated electro-mechanic devices like his hulking powered armor, which was the most austure and plain of the armors in spite of being the largest; it was basically just a combat-oriented mechanism with a pair of arm-mounted energy swords that could transform into plasma cannons, a pair of massive arms bigger than she was, equally large jetboots armed with katana-blades mounted on the legs and a cyclopean helmet that doubled as a laser-blaster. "We struggled mightily against our foes, and with the assistance of the true Mall Crawlers, we proved victorious!" Adeptus-Infinitus said, keeping a good distance between himself and Katara while he repeated palm-striked at her, the repulsor-blasters in his hands firing volleys of concussive blasts at the two girls.

"That still doesn't explain all this!" Katara said, warding away the blasts with a fist-sized sphere of water she had Waterbent from the air; it was rare that she could make much with that technique, but she still wielded that tiny amount with devatstating efficiency; the energy blasts scattered the water only for Katara to pull it back together in enough time to block the next one while Kim simply dodged them with inerringly perfect agility, again and again until Adeptus-Indefinitus' paused a brief moment to evaluate his strategy; it was a few seconds too long, even for his machine intellect, and Katara spun her water out into a incredibly thin whip, launching it at Adeptus-Indefinitum's side at the same time a twist of her hand set a coldness into it that froze the strike side of the water whip into a layer of jagged ice. Her aim was near-perfect; it hit at a precise angle on a weak spot in his side that Katara had noticed he kept guarded and struck deep, not doing any injury but surprising him as her water whip splashed all over his side, some of it going through his armor. (It didn't short anything out; his electronic systems were more robust than to succumb to that.)

That changed when Katara drew her arms back and out again with incredible speed; the water that had seeped into the armor and outside it collected into a small ball inside his armor, expanding into an incredibly sharp thin icicle. Adeptus-Indefinitum shouted in surprise as a tiny spear of ice inside pierced right through his side and into a delicate servo-motor in his shoulder, normally protected by his armor but certainly not from the inside. There was a horrible mechanical screech, metal grinding against itself as ice sliced through it, unfroze, refroze in dozens of small sharp spikes only to liquify again and repeat until worn mechanisms shuddered and finally gave up, and Adeptus-Indefinitum's arm hung lifelessly at his side.

He glanced in surprise, a moment of distraction that was ill-advised; Kim ran straight at him, hopping off his knee and swung a well-muscled leg directly into his wounded shoulder with such force that the entirely mechanical appendage broke off; Kim caught it in mid-air and swung it like a club at his head before she even touched the ground. Adeptus-Indefinitum stumbled back and Kim pressed the attack, straightening her improvised weapon like a club and brutally striking out with it, focusing on the wound on his side to draw his attention and hit him in his other joints when he tried to protect it with a powerful swipe of his other arm. "We were the foot soliders of that great fight," Adeptus-Indefinitum said. "Our alien friends equipped us with mighty powered armors that amplified our abilities to vast levels, and we were only semi-competent fighters simply because our world's toughness demands it! The armaments they graced us with made all of us into war machines! Even I, who already AM a war machine in my unattached state."

"Are...are you sure you're okay?" Katara asked carefully. "Your arm's off!"

"Hmn? Oh, a mere flesh wound. Truly. This body is merely a shell for me to control! I have already insisted that you do not hold back; it will ruin the point of this exercise!"

"Right, but I'm still not all that comfortable with this," Kim said, hitting him in the leg with the robot arm and vaulting up with it, flying up twice his height and slamming his arm right down on his head, flipping in the air so that she could spin the arm around and hit the back of his legs, nearly knocking him off his feet. He would have kicked at her, except that he and everyone else on his side were avoiding lethal force and his leg-swords certainly were lethal. (One might claim that Tesla Man's giant laster to Hobbes' face defied this, but Traverse Town had a higher standard for toughness that, fortunately, the Comic Kingdom/Brighthammer Federation was even stricter on. One might also consider Kim's brutal treatment of Adeptus-Indefinitum to be a case of anti-robot prejudice, but this was not the case; his 'body' was one of several suits he could be plugged into and no damage to it would actually hurt him. He had explained this to them so they wouldn't be obliged to hold back. Kim, for her part, had no problem with robots.) "I heard all about it! They had to retrofit the mall to defend itself for times like that. So what does this have to do with you guys?"

"Our alien allies left, and in time, without a cause to motivate us, a goal to compell us, a reason to STRIVE, we were lost! Saddened and gloomy, we took to trying to enact ways to prevent a criminal group from doing that again! We saw the corruption being scoured away from our town, and we were powerless to help! Powerless to defend outselves! We are WEAK, mi' lady! We are MEANINGLESS! Without strength, without purpose, without CONVICTION, you cannot protect anything you hold dear, not even YOURSELF! We endured, nonetheless. We survived! We did what little pointless trifles we could! And then...we remembered what the Mall Crawlers had done for us, in the name of our eclectic socieity, fragile and small though it is! They came with technology and girded themselves with it, took up arms they crafted themselves, and fought evil!" Adeptus-Indefinitum paused. If his faceplate could express itself, it would have looked almost...rapturous. "We...were...inspired."

All around the chamber, along the two balconies bordering the elevator lift and the walkways that connected them, the fighting slowed down as the armored fighters explained themselves. For Hobbes and Tesla Man, though, it only intensified. "We had NOTHING before we remembered what we had been a PART of for so little time!" Tesla Man roared, his gauntlets crackling as he powered up secondary muscle-amplifiation modulators and punched, the energy shaping itself into the air and setting it on fire, twisting the burning wind into a drill-like shape and spinning wildly as more energy ignited Tesla Man like a thunderstorm, his power source consumed so rapidly that it couldn't be properly harnessed and was instead expelled through vents in his back with such force that he was propelled forward. "DRILL! ARM! PAWNCH!"

"Eek!" Hobbes said as he side-stepped out of the way of the 'Drill Arm Punch'; not nearly far enough, it turned out. The drill kept spinning, the floor cracking around them in bursts and blasts. The energy-drill expanded without cease, soon collapsing into a ominous mass as the floor around them completely shattered from the sheer force Tesla Coil was using, and then the energy-mass exploded again in a controlled blast right at Hobbes. "NOT AGAAAIN!" He yelled as he went flying across the room, his fur singed and his clothes starting to get a bit sooty but otherwise unharmed (not being of normal construction); not one to let this fight end here and now, he tied his new hat down under his chin by the drawstrings and aimed himself at one of the thin decorate poles at the edge of the elevator-lift, his claws tearing off chunks of rock as he turned his momentum to his advantage and spun around the pole, picking his moment and letting go after building enough speed to launch himself like a rocket at Tesla Man.

"Excellent form!" Tesla Man said.

"I'M BACK! HURRICANE! CHAIN! SMASH!" Hobbes yelled, spinning in mid-air and building up speed, turning it into a flip mere feet from Tesla Man and hitting him right in the dented chestplate with a singularily brutal mid-air roundhouse kick that hit with such force that it cut the air, sending a number of razor-shaped gusts of wind that sliced the ground in another spiral-shape; chunks of the floor went flying, blown off by the razor-winds and the entire floor for twelve feet rippled like water struck with a brick. Hobbes, bouncing back, flipped over a chunk of airbourne stone and kicked it at Tesla Man in such a way that it launched himself at another piece of stone. He kicked that at Tesla Man too, propelling himself against at a cluster of pieces that had almost hit the floor and sent them flying with a palm strike, a spinning kick and a final double-handed punch.

Hobbes landed neatly on all fours on a chunk of the floor that had been knocked up in their battle rages, tilting a little bit from his weight; he timed it so that he landed exactly as all the pieces of stone he fired slammed around Tesla Man. Not into him, that would have been a bit excessive; the first one landed right to his side, slamming his arm down. The next did the same to his other side, and the next two rocks trapped him from the back and front, effectively pinning him before the final rocks slammed onto the top, trapping him there and leaving him unable to move enough to use his armors strength.

Hobbes almost fell down, and he still breathed heavy. "Had enough?" He asked, trembling a bit from over-exertion and straightening his hat with a hand.. "Stop fighting now and let us go?"

"...Never," Tesla Man said calmly. "You don't understand! I don't CARE HOW STACKED THE ODDS ARE AGAINST ME! None of us gave up when we fought the criminals that took over our mall! None of us gave up no matter how hard it was to find meaning after the joy of being soldiers in the cause of mercantile protection! And NONE of us gave up when we decided to protect this mall again in honor of the Mall Crawlers and took their name, and no one would give us weapons or armaments because we didn't have anyone's backing! For four days we have guarded this mall agaisnt people who would use it! For four days we have weeded out untrustworthy tourists who would destroy our economy by engaging them in battle, proving their valor and virtue through the cleansing purity of combat! FOR FOUR DAYS, WE HAVE ACTUALLY ORGANIZED THE MALL A LITTLE BIT! WE HAVE NOT FALTERED, WE HAVE NOT FALLEN, WE HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN AND WE WILL NOT FAIL!"

Hobbes blinked. "...You've only been doing this for four days?"

"Yes. What's your point?"

"...Well, if you go around attacking people you don't know because they've come to shop, how is anyone supposed to get any shopping done?"

"We don't keep people away, we clear away the weak and craven-hearted who don't understand our town! The ones who flee at our perceived strangless are NOT worthy of our town! The ones who do not fight us because they see it as beneath them to listen to our reasons are NOT worthy to enjoy the fruits of shopping! The ones who fight like devils are NOT permitted within this mall once we discover them! And those who are proven to be like the ones who would despoil our shopping will FALL! FALL! FALL AND BE BANISHED FROM THIS MALL FOREVERMORE!"

"Huh. So what happens to everyone else? Or those who can't fight because they have crippling disabilities or are just kids with their families?"

"Hmn? Oh, sorry, I wasn't clear enough. Those who pass our tests, by fighting with valor and whateer skill they have may go with our blessings. Those who we KNOW to be of our town, whether they reside in it or not, may be harrased by others ARE UNDER OUR PROTECTION! And those who CANNOT fight physically are fought in the manners of combat subtle! DEBATING!"

"Oh, okay...this still seems like a bit much for shopping."

"We take our mall very seriously." Tesla Man paused. "Care to surrender?"

"Uh...you're the one pinned there."

"An interesting point, my friend. But, my rebuttal! Did you, at any point in our fight, ever see me activing my weapons manually? Would you believe that our systems are activated through a neural INTERFACE!" Hobbes' ears pricked; he heard a grinding sounds, metal sliding over metal as mechanisms spun around, energy crackling and devices humming loudly, and a bright light illuminated the stone cell from within. "Prison! Erasing! AURA!" A single white-hot laser pierced the stone and burned a small hole in the ceiling above. Another stabbed through, followed by another and another, more appeared by the instant, the stone prison vibrating as more lasers cut through it. A small stone, cut away from a larger piece, tumbled down. It was swiftly followed by another as more lasers appeared, the light of all the lasers starting to hurt Hobbes' eyes, and the lasers abruptly faded away, though a threateningly bright light remained. His finely tuned senses detecting something very bad going on, Hobbes flipped back, clinging to a pillar and hauling himself behind it as a small but powerful explosion tore the stones apart in a flash of light; he narrowly missed the sharpnel flying everywhere, cutting gouges in the pillar he was hiding behind and a blinding wave of dust.

"Huh?" Kim said, noticing it. "Whoah, get out of the way!" She flipped behind Adeptus-Indefinitum and tried to pull him back.

"Hrm?" Adeptus-Indefinitum said. "What is-" Katara Waterbent a freezing spray onto his optical sensors and followed Kim's example, running behind him. Moments later, the dust hit, missing the girls, but their 'shield' wasn't so lucky; the dust and grit didn't do well with his somewhat sensitive mechanisms and he soon found considerable difficulty moving.

"Eh?" Shredcord said, as the dust cloud hit her, blinding her own optical sensors. "Gah! I'm blinded! Wait, let me just remove my helmet-"

Sokka sliced through the power conduits going from the tankers of yellow liquid-energy-stuff on the back of her suit. "You know, it seems a little stupid to be carrying your fuel on your back. Without any armor at all." He pushed her over.

"Bollocks," Shredcord said, not strong enough to move her suit with her own strength; her weapons, vents and auxillary systems blinked weakly and died in moments. "Wonderful thing I can breathe air or I'd be dying now."

Sokka's eyes bugged out. "Damn it! I gotta remember that the next time I fight a fish-guy; I can't go around killing people!"

"Eh, no harm done," Shredcord said amiably. "Um. Help?"

"Oh, sure, weird girl that beat me up for no real reasonWHAT DO YOU THINK I'M GOING TO DO!"

"Unchivalrous dog!"

"YOU ATTACKED ME WITH LASER WHIPS AND TRIED TO STEAL SPACE SWORD! DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW HARD IT WAS TO FIND IT AFTER I DROPPED IT OFF AN AIRSHIP AND BROKE MY ARM!"

"Hrm, Shredcord has fallen," Adeptus-Indefinitum said, having witnessed that after breaking the ice off his face with some difficulty. "I mustn't give up now, not with her at stake! I will not fail to avenge her defeat-"

"Sorry, that's a negative," Kim said as Katara drew a little more water out of the air and pressurized as much as she could, lashing out once again, cutting through one of Adeptus-Indefinitum's own power conduits; the power demands on his body caused a unpleasant feedback loop, and he was forced to conserve the little power left to him by deactivating all but the most rudimentary of his motor systems, auxillary cognitive functions and AI-to-body interface processes.

"Bugger," Adeptus-Indefinitum said. "Oh, my apologies my ladies! No need for crude language."

"I've heard worse," Kim said.

"I am defeated then." The A.I. did not sound very upset. "I congratulate you on your victory, ladies! And I thank you for being kind enough to do so in a way that merely disables me rather than completely destroying this body and forcing me to be relocated to another one."

Katara smiled faintly. "Well, I wouldn't want to actually cripple you or anything..."

"Let's go find Sam!" Kim said. "She's not a fighter; I don't know if she can last long against these-"

"Geez, calm down," Sam said, walking up to them, Behemoth behind her, his armor utterly destroyed by an insane amount of firepower. For some reason, she was somehow wearing Deadshot's armor only without the helmet, and from the looks of the two Mall Crawler's condition, had done so quite well. "Thanks for endorsing me."

"...Oh," Kim said, abashed. "Um...why are you wearing that girl's armor?"

"This thing? I convinced them that it was unfair for a non-fighter like me to have to go against TWO of them, and they weren't confident in beating me in a debate about the foundations of 'Dark Is Not Evil' trends, so I got Deadshot to let me borrow her armor so I could fight the Behemoth guy on equal terms. Short story, I won. Hard."

"May I have my armor back now?" Deadshot asked imperiously behind Sam; she was a reptillain elf-like alien known as a Kineceleren, with a thin green-eyed face, light blue skin, a body shape something like a velociraptor (raising the queston of how Sam had bit on her suit, but perhaps it adapted to the body shape of whoever wore it), a long thick black-striped tail and dagger-like claws; she was wearing a gray tanktop and matching shorts, neccesary clothing for the hot work of wearing powered armor all day. Sam shrugged and deactivated the armor (Deadshot had given her a crash-course in the neurally-operated armor's operation to make the fight as fair as possible; it would up being entirely too fair in Sam's favor) and the front of the armor slid open in rotating layeres of metal, the shoulders revolving away, the legs splitting open and the helmet sliding away from her head and a lot of stuff in this vein until the armor fell off. Sam stepped away, clearly disliking the armor, while Deadshot walked over to put it back on.

Tesla Man observed all this, pausing in the middle of a fistfight with Hobbes. "Hmn, you are indeed not the craven tourists or clueless fools we mistook you for! You have the strength of mighty convictions, and the will to adapt to unusual circumstances!"

"Do you always have this much trouble with tourists?" Hobbes asked, backing away and hoping the fight was done.

"Often enough. We respect the strong, you see; we know from our friends in the Crossguard that the multiverse seems to be patterend that in the end, it is those with the strongest convictions that win where it truly counts!"

"Really? Huh...and convictions aren't neccesarily good. Guess that explains why the Time of The Warped Immateriam was such a long, nasty period of time," Hobbes mused.

Tesla Man nodded. "Indeed! That is how we have determined that the quickest way to evaluate a man or woman's worthiness to come here is through the cleansing of combat. It doesn't matter if we win or lose, it is our enemy's actions and methods that matter! Brutality and fairness aside, those are not indicators of what we look for; we have learned to examine a foe's character through physical telegraphy and in-combat body language!"

"I know guys that can do that! Mostly Orks, like the guy in my theurgist-knight training bootcamp. They like that sort of thing. Hard to believe they used to be even more rough in the past...so have you made a decision about us, or do I have to punch you so hard it breaks physics?" Hobbes exaggerated, of course. He wasn't that good, but it paid to sound awesome.

Tesla Man lowered his head respectfully at Hobbes. "Men and women of the Mall Crawlers, listen to me!" His teammates looked at him attentively. "I have made my conclusion about the strength of these fighters! What have you to say?"

"They are adaptable and intelligent!" Deadshot said.

"The Goth girl posseses the strength of will to master our Self-Forged Armaments with capability, if not skill!" Behemoth said.

"They have the strength of character to carry on conversation while in the midst of intense combat!" Shredcord said.

"They hold great power...and it is tempered with greatness! Compassion and consideration even unto their foes!" Adeptus-Indefinitum said.

"THEY ARE WORTHY!" They shouted at Tesla Man.

"MY FELLOWS HAVE SPOKEN THEIR HEARTS! WITH ONE VOICE, WE HAVE COME TOGETHER! WITH ONE HEART, WE OBEY THE MANDATES OF THOSE WHO INSPIRED US! WITH ONE UNERRING FOCUS, WE FIND THE TRUTH! AND WE HAVE ABSOLUTELY CERTAINLY THAT YOU FIVE ARE WORTHY TO BENEFIT FROM THE FRUITS OF OUR TOWN'S LABORS! GO FORTH, SHOP TO YOUR HEART'S CONTENT, AND BE BLESSED IN THE NAME OF THE MALL CRAWLERS!"

"...Yay?" Sokka said uncertainly.

Since they seemed to be allowed to go and finish their errand, Hobbes, Katara, Kim, Sokka and Sam walked back to each other in front of the pillars. They glanced back; the Mall Crawlers, having rejoined each other, were looking expectantly at them. "I can't believe we had to go through all that just to do a bit of shopping," Katara said.

"Just be happy it's not in the holiday season," Kim said evenly. "Martial arts duels with chained swords taller than I am are the accepted means of settling disputes over the hot new fad around then. And we should be lucky that these guys are new! Imagine how much of a menace they could be when they get good at this!"

Hobbes gaped. "Wait. You think they were inept!"

"Sort of. For the town's standards, a bit, yeah. Probably why they were the foot soldiers. They had some decent skill, but it needs polish." Noticing the incredulous looks from the 'toursts', she laughed. "You gotta be tough to make it in Traverse Town! There's something about the place that makes badasses out of everyone, and I mean everyone. Probably because of all the random weirdness. And the guys that hate us. And the supervillain idiots. And the smart supervillains. And would-be conquerers. And...you know what, I'm going stop now before I turn this into an overly long gag."

"Too late," Sam said.

Hobbes sighed. "...It's not like you guys thought they were tough, right?"

"More like persistent," Sokka said thoughtfully. "Their gear stunk and they aren't the fighters we are, but they were crazy-determined. They just wouldn't stay down! It's like a whole team of Zukos, but without the bad hair." (On the rooftop, Zuko instantly felt that he needed to get back at Sokka for something.)

"We've fought much bigger threats, but I guess they put up a good fight," Katara said. "And if we wanted to hurt them bad...there's not much they could have down about it."

"We can hear every word you say," Tesla Man said flatly. "Every single disparaging comment is perfectly audible to us."

"...And?"

"Bah, have it your way! Men!" Deadshot and Shredcord coughed. "Men and women! Let us move onward! TO THE SCRAPYARD FOR REPAIRS!"

"Yay," The others said, unenthusiastically.

"Buck up! Show some spirit!"

"Your dialect is slipping," Hobbes told him.

"Silence!"

Hobbes shook his head and finally went into the Big Bazaar with his team, ready to finally buy the essential equipment for adventuring.

...

Kimblee was in a better mood now; checking out Foster's and determining the best course for his plan had taken less time than he'd thought.

It was a fairly large property by Traverse Town standards; the main house and a few additions that included a dining hall, stables for sentient animals and a few other things, but apart from that it was smaller than Kimblee had expected. The entire property was fenced all the way around, a neat little dividing line in a near-perfect rectangle shape, cutting neat lines in the ground sharp enough to alter the flows of power just a little...and he could pattern the transmutation circle around it.

No one had paid much attention to him. He was just one man, a tourist, low-key and not interested in small talk or having anything to sell. He had been ignored.

He smiled. No ignoring him for much longer.

He had left, of course, after scoping out the house a fair bit and determining that the idea place to put the inner transmutation circle - the reception one, as it were, and the larger the output circle - was atop the highest point of the rooftop. When the time came, he would be within that circle, safe and unharmed. He had been hoping that he could have made the inner circle within the ballroom (the symmetry would have been pleasing, one scene of destruction engineering a much larger one) but it would have been impractical in this case, given that the ballroom wasn't near the center of the house. Unfortunate, that.

He whistled cheerfully as he dragged a janitor that had stumbled onto what he was doing. Kimblee lacked strength, but he was faster than he looked, and a point-blank explosion threw the errant janitor into a wall hard enough to knock him unconcscious. And to think that he had been thinking of capturing more people; it had been annoying charming people into coming into isolated buildings and old houses, transmuting little rooms to hide them in so they could play their parts. On the other hand, most of the places he'd picked for their particular positions relative to Foster's on the map he'd acquired, confusing as it was, had been inhabited. Not by much; three of them had been either shared with roommmates, a married couple and an old woman and the last had been a small family. That had been a pain; charming his way into their home, incapacitating them and dragging them into their basement. That one child had screamed like the dickens and his mother had rushed in with a chainsword and...well, if Ghostfreak hadn't given him the armored skin of a Arburian Pelarota, he might have lost bits of himself there. Still, while he had been tying them up, he'd entertained them with stories of his job in Ishbal. He didn't understand why they cursed and swore and hated him for it. Sometimes people were so...inexplicable.

Luckily, this building, a stout and boxlike affair, was a news station that was currently in disuse owing to the operators having moved to a peaceful island home to a easy-going culture of sentient penguins with a thing for surfing. It still had to be regularily maintained for whoever wanted it next and thus the hard-working representative of the Guild of Maintanence Technicians had found himself as an unwitting resource for Kimblee to exploit.

Kimblee didn't need to transmute a hole in the floor, where the exact center of the house and dump him into it before tying him up with bonds of stone molded from the floor, but he didn't want screaming to get in the way. This was a delicate operation.

The janitor woke up before Kimblee had gotten out, however, and immediately made a fuss. "Wha' the hell's goin' on..." He blinked, realizing that he was in a pit with rings of stone wrapped around him. Kimblee was looking down on him in more ways then one, smiling oddly. "Ah crap damnit."

"Poor choice of words," Kimblee said. "Everyone should be a professional, Mr. Janitor."

"I'm a professional maintenence technician!" The maintenence technician, whose name was Dusty (he liked to assure people that it was not an ironic name), snapped. "And what do you think you're doing! You're not supposed to be here!"

"What if I was scoping the place out to see if I wanted it for my own?" Kimblee asked.

"That'd be different then, but you were making a big hole in the ground." He frowned, looking around him. "This hole, as a matter of fact. And you didn't even explain yourself!"

"You didn't give me much of a chance."

"Yeah well...you were being suspicious and stuff, I thought you were planting bombs!"

Kimblee laughed softly. "Funny you should say that." He clapped his hands and touching the ground; the ladder he'd made from the stone broke apart, a tiny explosion cracking the stone enough to shatter them. No one could have heard it.

Dusty frowned. "...What are you doing?"

"Only my duty to the world that is to come," Kimblee said softly. "I want to see how this will all turn out you know...the war that's going to come. The flood of the deepest darkness. The worlds of the Light drowning and burning to the last as every awful blackest thing arises from the depths of the multiverse's worst nightmares..."

Dusty blinked. "What?"

Kimblee ignored him. "They will come, heroes and soft villains alike to oppose us but they will fail, our foot soldiers will tear the light from their husks and make it one of theirs and they will grow like the most wonderful army ever, stamped with our crest after we tamed the wild ones and gave the newborns a shape to take, and they will never stop swarming in our name..."

"Did you take something?" Dusty asked. "Because this sort of thing can't be healthy."

...The Lower Planes themselves will be opened, and all the demons and devils and those other fun fiends will be free to kill each other and enslave the weak and teach the willing of the perfection of freedom from the lies of moral strictures and everything will burn burn burn burn. So many screams and so much crying...it will be so beautiful."

Dusty stared at Kimblee. "If you aren't on something," He said evenly after a moment. "You should probably get on something. You need medication bad."

Kimblee shrugged. "I'd rather not pollute myself like that." He smiled at the circle Dusty was in, that perfect little circle. A eye in the earth, fit for the flow of the earth's essence to flow into, pool over and spill back out.

He loved it when things came together like this.

"So, what now?" Dusty asked sarcastically. "Hold me in this pit until the Council of Insert Nomenclature throws money at you? Because they don't have money. They work with the town, not the other way around. And the Guild would sooner march down here and feed you to the shark-cats then waste it on you...wait, you're not even listening to me."

Kimblee was looking at a piece of paper he'd pulled from his pocket. "Yes, I'm sure the weather is lovely in the autumn but the seagulls are a bother."

"Great." Dusty grimaced. "I get the psycho that can't even pay attention to what he's doing."

"You know, I may be a combat specialist," Kimblee said. "But I'm not amatuer at medical alchemy. I have to know a fair bit to alter the makeup of a human body, you know. It's not easy; biological bodies are much more intricate and difficult than inanimate objects or natural phenomenon. So many little ways to fail, so much interconnected physical systems you have to sift through without damaging if you want to get your goal just right...and that's without isolating specific chemicals and elements within the human body like I do."

"Oh joy, a rant. At least you're none complaining about how your Daddy never loved you."

"Hmn? Oh, I had a good homelife. A bit out of focus, and I imagine my mother was a bit disappointed in me for not looking Amestrian enough, but enough of that." He looked at the paper a bit more. "Hmn...eight is what Crowley recommended, but I worked out how to alter the diagram enough to keep it balanced without destablizing the condensation process...from eight to five. The circles...doing this eight times would have been difficult. Figuring out how to translate the map into dimensions that make sense wasted enough time, I don't need to have to pull everyone I saw into this mess."

"What." Dusty stared. "You mean you're doing this to other people!"

"With great enthusiasm."

"You son of a...a...lady of questionable decorum!"

Kimblee raised an eyebrow.

"My ma raised me to be good to women," Dusty said. "No man ought to said rude things about a lady, you know."

"Ah, respect is something that no one seems to care about anymore," Kimblee said sadly.

"Too right. I mean, I love cats. Used to raise kittens until they made me charge rent because they felt bad about freeloading. And all my friends thought it was unmanly, said I should raise dogs. Why is that, huh? Why are cats unmanly, and why should it have anything to do with me being a good guy?"

"Useless stereotypes. People simply must apply them to everything, espicially when it makes no sense."

"You got a point there. Cats, at their worst, are savage little sociopaths that kill because they're born for it, not because they're hungry. A cat's nature's most efficient killing machine; claws to catch and slash, teeth to sever and tear. They're not feminine anymore than dogs are masculine; they just are and it's stupid to distinct them on that."

"I agree with you completely."

Dusty blinked. "Why am I being friendly with you? You knocked me unconscious, threw me in this hole, tied me up somehow and already did it to other people."

Kimblee shrugged. "Stockholm Syndrome works very fast these days."

"Psh, you say so." Dusty frowned. He felt...weird. A little dizzy, somewhat sluggish and it hurt to move. And he felt pale. "I don't feel right."

"Oh, that's because I alchemically fused the sulfer in your body and the iron in your blood with the carbon elements present in your physical structure into a gunpower substance that even now are absorbing oxygen through your blood with your every breath for about, oh, ten minutes. It was a bit difficult, but fortunately you eat the right foods so it wasn't hard."

"Oh, that'd explain it." Dusty froze. "Wait. What."

"I doubt you'd like a further explanation. Good bye." Kimblee clapped his hands together and put his hands on the ground. "...I can't have you making noise. If people come to rescue you, it'll be a nice big mess when the time comes, but I can't risk you being moved. The circle must be made or I'll be very annoyed indeed."

"What!"

"That particular mixture inside is very volatile. It'll make a nice big...mess. And plenty of destruction. When it all happens, I'll try not to be distracted by the sound of it."

"I don't understand."

"Oh, you will, don't worry. And I'm not telling you anymore. It'll be a surprise."

There was a flash of blue light from Kimblee's hands, and the hole over Dusty's head sealed itself, cutting off anything else he had to say.

Kimblee tapped a hand on the resealed floor; it wasn't going to interrupt the circle, as long as the circle itself stayed intact. It produced a hollow sound, and he could hear Dusty's faint but noticable yells. "Good enough," He said, and stood up.

Time to move on, I think, Ghostfreak said; shortly since his promise of help (which Kimblee didn't entirely trust; the Ectonurite was being entirely too helpful for the leader of a terrifying hive mind), he'd adopted a slightly paternal approach to things, even if Kimblee hadn't explained anything about it yet.

"That would be the fifth one," Kimblee said. "And that's it. Now I simply need to get back to my spot, and wait. I will activate the circle at the appropiate time."

"Hello?" Dusty yelled. "The hell did you do that for!"

Not that I'm interested in whatever you're doing, Kevin said. But I got a point I need to make. What I know about alchemy is about the same that my old enemy Ben knows about anything outside of the Sumo Slammers series, but don't you need an actual CIRCLE for transmutation circles? You're just doing weird stuff to people that live in houses on your map.

"Oh, there will be a circle," Kimblee said. "If the dust clouds don't make one just long enough to activate the transmutation, the collateral damage certainly will."

"Let me out of here!" Dusty yelled. "I don't afraid of anything but enclosed spaces! Which doesn't make sense, given my occupation as a maintenence technician. Or grammatical sense. 'Don't afraid of anything'...what was I thinking!"

What dust clouds? Ghostfreak and Keven both asked, ignoring Dusty.

Kimblee smirked and started to speak. "You can enclose me in the earth, but you can't silence my song of protest! In the form of yodeling!" Dusty interrupted. "Yoh-de leh, yoh-de leh, yoh-de lah hee HOO! Yoh-de leh, yoh-de leh, yoh-de lah hee HOO!"

Kimblee stamped on the ground. "Be quiet or I'll come in there and talk nihilism at you!"

"That doesn't sound very threatening."

"Neither does the combination of a pressure cooker and a steam gauge assembly, but tell that to the Railway Rifle! Although it's fairly inaccurate, I will admit...shut up...anyway, my plan. That I am most certainly NOT telling to you, Mr. Maintenence Technician."

"Then who are you telling it to?"

"The voices in my head."

"Oh, okay then." In Traverse Town, this was considered an acceptable excuse for talking to yourself in public.

"Bye," Kimblee told him. He didn't feel like getting a resource in his business. (Granted, he was realistically beyond the point where he was capable of complaining about that, but it was the principle of the thing.)

Dusty muttered and sat down on the floor, not feeling terribly put out. "Eh, whatever." He started doodling in the dust, to his contentment.

Unaware of this, Kimblee left the building and stepped out onto a street that, even nearing noon, was fairly uncrowded except by a few lazy drivers (a few of which had flying cars) and some other people. Where were we before that obnoxious man interrupted you? Ghostfreak asked.

"I was asked about the dust clouds."

Ah.

"And I already told you, I'm not spoiling the surprise."

Curses!

Kimblee glanced around the abandoned studio. "...I suppose there's plenty of raw material around here I could repurpose for insurance purposes." He smiled and got back to work.

...

Morte was, by nature, a suspicious person. He didn't want to be; he tried, day after day and moment after moment, to be better than that. In the depths of his sarcastic, jaded and traumatized heart, he cared about people and wanted to see theme do good because they wanted to, not because some nebulous authority told them to or they believed it was the only way to escape the horrors their own psychological and karmic baggage would hoist on them after death.

In this respect, his present company of Aang, Danny and even Scar satisfied his wishes for genuinely good people. Admittedly, he was surprised by how fast Aang and Danny had acclimated to the essential weirdness of Traverse Town. He suspected that the boys were suppressing the horrors they'd seen just to function; Danny certainly was, if his slightly distant act was any indication.

Aang, in spite of being a self-confessed genocide survivor-by-accident, was...more nebulous. "Hi!" He said cheerfully while they were stopped at a convienience store, addressing a horrible vaugely humanoid twice the size of a man with barklike skin, the stature of an ape, a mouthful of fangs to complement the huge tusks and horns growing like fearsome branches and a head that looked flipped upside-down. It was also pushing a sales stall on wheels.

"Hey," Danny said, not batting an eye.

Appa, happily eating his fill from a feeding trough put in place for vegetarian animal companions like him and filled to the brim with straw from an adjoining dispenser, glanced up at the stranger, took his measure of it and concluded that it was no threat to him, Aang or their companions and lowed a response. Momo, perched on a horn and eating an apple that'd come from a refrigerated dispensor, paid no attention at all.

The plant-beast rumble-burped-coughed a reply in a language incomprehensible to them. (Even Morte, who'd spent a fair share of time in a sub-dimension occupied by plants, four planets of sentient trees, a plane of goodness where the forest primeval lived and loved it's inhabitants and a lot of other places of that sort, only understood a little bit of what it said.) Fortunately, the rather intricate and gaudily colored tunic-and-robe it was wearing had a small translator badge pinned to it's concave chest; it beeped and said, "And hello to you too!"

Morte, not knowing much about Traverse Town, had been all too pleased to run around a bit with Aang, Danny and Scar; they seemed the least annoying of the group (though he was coming to reconsider that for Aang), none of them had shown any interest in making trouble that'd give Morte problems and since Danny and Aang seemed interested in their new environment and Scar was willing to exposit when asked, it had been a good oppertunity for him. Morte had, like he usually was in matters of this sort, been proven right. They had left the mall and explored the First District, not hurrying, rushing around or generally being too hasty. This suited their temperments; Danny still acted like he wasn't all there most of the time, Scar seemed to dislike impulsiveness and Aang...well, Morte had been around Aang for a very short time but he'd seen how excitable he could be in the right conditions, but theat that earlier enthusiasm had cooled down into an inquistitive attitude; he seemed to be taking this as a guided tour. Morte concluded that Aang was sufficiently in tune with the element of air that he had become like it, changing here and there to sudden extremes without warning.

The thought disturbed him. The idea that the incarnation of a planet in human form, with all the power and weaknesses that implied, being prone to sudden extreme mood swings was not a pleasant one. And given the negative attitudes that the elements of water, earth and fire might have on him, those extremes could be very bad indeed. (Morte, clearly, did not know Aang very well.)

The others were just as worrying in their own ways. Morte had seen people like Danny before, splintering-glass people trying not to scream at the horror in their heads, and it was not a pretty sight. It was a good thing he had good people around him, because when people broke, you never knew if you could get the pieces put back together right. Appa and Momo ignored Morte completely, and he returned the favor (aside from some musing about how dangerous a ten-ton manatee-bison hybrid with the power of aerokinesis could actually be). Scar, on the other hand...well, he was incredibly terrifying in a quiet way. He reminded Morte a little of the old Chief when he'd been in his moments of quietly hating the universe because of it's injustice.

Thinking about the Chief hurt these days. It made the loneliness hurt worse. Almost as bad as how much that Jarod guy reminded him of the Chief, but he preferred not to think about that.

Scar looked like someone who honestly believed that for him and his kind, the entire world he was born had been his enemy. People like that were often accurate and rarely disappointed in their expectations. In spite of that, he was a pretty cool guy; among the Crossguard, his seriousness apparently made him the odd man out, or so Morte guessed from what Scar had said about his fellows in his faction. Aang, who seemed to make up his mind pretty quick about people when he had enough first-hand experience with them, clearly liked him dispite Scar's tactiturn and grouchy demeanor, probably because Scar had paid for Momo and Appa's food and refused to let them even consider indebting themeselves to salesmen (in Traverse Town, it was the done thing for new people to pay for stuff with favors or bartering, depending on what would be more valuable), while Danny was a little more distant, but then he seemed to be a few phases out of conjunction with reality as it was.

Scar, in spite of Morte's misgivings, was a pretty good tour guide. So far, he'd taken the prospective new residents towards, among other things, a mechanic-engineer that specialized in small personal vehicles that could fly, drive fast or operate underwater; a musuem of the town that collected and preserved artifacts of the factions, which was a good oppertunity for Scar to enlighten his group about the factions and his role in the Crossguard as a hunter of fugitives from justice when he wasn't working with Abel on missions; a statue dedicated to the man who had helped design most of Traverse Town's law system and their form of 'Lazy Justice' (if they're okay people, aren't doing anything heinous, don't ask for help and aren't monsters that need to be put down, let them solve their own problems) and was the unofficial leader of the 'sixth faction', the group collectively known as the Orphans because they weren't part of any faction at all, Bruce Wayne, more popularily known as the fearsome vigilante called the Batman; the world's largest ball of razor floss (once used as the favored means of execution in a distant country on their world by cat-people with a sick sense of humor); and a truly magnificent library with books, reference volumes, holy texts, biographies, spotter's guides, knowledge databases and other forms of information collected from dozens of worlds, all in honor of a great man named Charles Xavier that Scar, and other people, evidentally held in high esteem. Their most recent stop was this convienience store, which had apparently been where a number of high-profile adventurers liked to shop. No one tried to rob it ever, in the basis that anyone stupid enough to rob a place that is frequented by professional adventurers is too stupid to deserve to live anymore. Scar had gone in, reducing the total amount of evil intent around the neighborhood by sixty percent with his presence alone, all to fetch them refreshments out of hospitality. (Except Morte, who hadn't wanted anything.)

The whole time, Scar seemed to have a goal in mind. Wherever he was leading them, he was in no hurry, instead herding them towards whatever seemed interesting or informative. While his precise definition of this was a bit strange, it had gone over quite well with Danny and Aang. Even Morte had relaxed a little and was enjoying the day before something bad happened to ruin it like it always did. And the three of them were learning a lot; about the way the town worked, the amiably anarchic nature of the town, the bare-bones political structure, the near-constant attacks by exiled megalomaniacs, madmen who commited horrible crimes and would-be conquerers from across the world, the differences between the districts, the many strange and interesting native anthropomorphic animals and naturalized alien races that shared the world with them, the remnants of a bygone culture dead a thousand years ago but with such frighteningly advanced technology designed for warfare and national infrastructure that even today scavenged artifacts were commonly used and reverse-engineered all over the world...

Scar had taken them to many places; noble places that showed the hard-won peace the town had made with the world's other inhabitants, like the gallerys of art that proudly displayed souviners bought from the other nations of the world that Traverse Town honored by guarding them from dispoilers, like Rain Maker, the suit of powered armor once owned by the guerrila warrior Asosaki of the Ajaba hyena-people in the Sunland desert until he had been crippled killing the mass-murdering lion warlord Black Tooth. On the more sombre side, Scar had shown them the Necropolis, a building made entire from ink-black metal polished until it shone like a beacon in the sunlight, a small complex extending underground with names carved into every available surface of the walls with a short biography and dates of birth and death when they could be confirmed, and so very many pictures of people, lost friends and sundered family members on little alters surronded by dozens of little candles lit, little flames against the darkness. Sometimes, instead of alters, there were coffins and biers, still memorized with the pictures of the dead; according to Scar, the Necropolis was a memorial and buriel place for the few that didn't die under the Heartless' claws or dark sorcery, but either as victims or in the line of duty: repulsing the few truly serious assaults on Traverse Town, the most recent being a full-fledged alien attack by the warlike Lowardians that had left more than a third of the town ruined and almost the entirety of the former Factory District in ruins, dozens of people dead. There weren't many bodies left to honor, usually, even when the dead didn't come back as shadow-monsters corrupted and insane.

Morte thought it was...nice.

The plant-beast moved on, and Scar soon emerged from the convienience store, bearing drinks for everyone. "Oy, room service, we're over here," Morte said.

Scar gave him the kind of look that can kill with overexposure. "Okay, bad joke, sorry," Morte said.

Scar inclined his head slightly in acknowledgement and gave everyone their big fountain drinks. "You shouldn't be going to this much trouble over us," Danny said.

"That is a view you are free to express," Scar said. "Nevertheless. I must insist on it."

"This some kind of hospitality thing?" Morte asked. "You're from some kind of desert place? Hospality's the done thing in places like that, am I right?"

"True. Hospatality is an honored tradition of Ishbal, and only a madman would dare to impugn it. However, I am acting in a manner more consistent with something known as 'common human decency'."

"And that translates to giving us stuff for no reason how?"

"Because I feel like it is how."

"Skull-guy, stop being such a complainer!" Aang chided him. "We're having a nice day, don't go and make our tour guide mad by casting asperations on his goodwill."

"You're just siding with him because you're both tattooed monks," Danny said.

Aang and Scar looked at each other, glancing at each other's rather obvious (and cool) markings. "Am not," Aang decided.

Danny shrugged. "Mm, yeah, that." He took a long drink. When he had to stop to take a breath, his exhalation was clouded with frost. He frowned. "...There are ghosts around here."

"Yes," Scar said, not looking very surprised that Danny had seen so. "If you do not bother them or violate their laws, they will leave you alone. The problem is, they are very touchy, so I would advise you to be wary. Few of them care to be dangerous but they tend to make thing very irritating for everyone concerned."

Danny blinked and stared into space, perhaps looking for bursts of coldness or brief shimmers in the air or metal rattling so hard and fast it sounded like someone crying or any of the other ways ghost changed the world. Aang asked, "...I have had a weird feeling ever since I came to this place last night. Not a bad feeling, just this weird sort of...unfocused wonkiness, and not mind, it's coming from...somewhere else. It's kind of like when you're really tired after you just woke up." Noticing Scar's surprised look, he added, "I'm the incarnation of my planet's spirit, and the bridge between our plane of existence and their's. One foot in this world, another foot in their's; I can sense spirits when they're close, I know things about them. It's part of what I am."

"...I would reccomend you speak to my fellows in the Dimensional Sciences if you find the time," Scar said. "They know of this sort of thing. Communing with spirits, sharing their strengths, making peace with them...they're always trying to find ways to pacify the spirits of our land and determine why they act the way they do."

"What's weird about the way they act?" Morte asked shrewdly.

Scar thought about it; to buy some time, he dispensed more hay for Appa and gave Momo another apple in an absent sort of way. "Strange," he finally said. "Confused, from what I hear. Most are half-mad, though not unkind, but they all follow an alien logic that is very difficult to comprehend, let alone reason with. They are part of the chaos that makes the town unique. More often then not they contribute to it, setting into motion events to punish people who transgress on obscure metaphysical laws or posesses the unwary for their own means, though that is comparatively rare. Sometimes greater spirits appear, but not often. They do not seem to concern themselves too much with us, provided that we do not desecrate the remains of this town's original civilization. The problem is, we have not ascertained what they define as 'desecration'. They certainly do not care if we renovate, move into or use what the original culture left behind."

Aang frowned. "Spirits normally act like that. They're not like us exactly; their sense of morality isn't anything we would emphasize with. I get the feeling there's something else about them you're not telling me."

"...You are more perceptive than you let on," Scar said, after a brief pause.

Morte didn't like where this sounded like it was going.

"The spirits of this town...are largely quiet to us. For a long time, they were utterly silent; until the first shamans, spirit-speakers and dimensional-technicians appeared here, they normally only awoke to viciously punish those who angered them." Scar paused. "I have seen many horrible things in my life. What the spirits do to those than enrage them is a difficult one to top." He shook his head. "You recall that one exihibit in the museum I showed you? The one that detailed the town's period of lawlessness and rule by strength alone?" They nodded, though Morte privately noted that it was still pretty lawless. "The spirits were at their very worst then; the shaman-priests have theorized that the emotions of anger, despair and hatred, combined with the violence and brutality of Razorbeard and Panda Bubba and the other thugs inflamed their darker natures and influenced them into despising us."

Aang nodded. "Spirits are sensitive to currents in human behavior. I remember, after the big war back home, I spent a long time back in this big city called Ba Sing Se pacifying the spirits; the war back home turned the city into a dytopian nightmare, and the spirits of Ba Sing Se didn't like that at all. Everyone was constantly watched...they could be taken away by the secret Dai Li agents at anytime, just disappear into the earth and maybe not be seen again. And if they were...it wasn't them anymore. Mindbending." He shook his head. "The spirits of the city, dwellers of the hearth, guardian spirits of families and the very spirits of the Earth King's rule itself at the behest of an ancient Avatar...when the Dai Li didn't pacify them or take them down when they turned into monsters from all the spiritual contimanation, they did...things. Bad things." He shivered. "You really don't want to know..."

"No," Scar said. "I believe I don't. And I might have an idea of what you mean. We had a similar situation here. Am I correct in believing that over time, the spirit's desposition improved?" Aang nodded earnestly. "It was the same here. After Roy Mustang and Gibbs rooted out the corruption in what is now the First District Downtown, they rallied the other decent people living here and together we defeated the other thugs that controlled our lives, exiled them, forced them into hiding or scared them into scattering across the world or even leaving the planet. Without their toxic influence, the spirit's calmed down. There were no more incidents of flayed bodies lying in the streets after whistling the wrong song over the wrong canal, no giant robots awakening and running amok, no more apartment complexes disappearing and reappearing inside a volcano somewhere. Now...they tend to do annoying things, such as instigate small incidents for their own reasons, but they do not seem to intend any casualities." Scar grimaced at that. "And even then, those are the awakened ones. The ones that still stir, dreaming their long memories of whatever was past, tend to effect things on a rather broader scale."

"'Dreaming'?" Danny said.

"You mean some of your spirits are...asleep? In a coma? Hurt?" Aang said.

"In a manner, all three. While many spirits of places have woken up overtime, often confused and angry at everything for no reason we understand, and other spirits have been born of our presence and actions, the vast number of spirits that should normally exist, such as an embodiment of the town, have yet to reveal themselves. My brothers and sisters in the Crossguard who know of such things tell me that those spirits sleep; the few they have found evidence of have their essence scattered in the very metal of our homeland. There is evidence that the ancient civilization that once inhabited this world and gave us the vast numbers of technology we and our native allies use were kind to some of the spirits, and...less kind to others."

"This the same one you told us about in the museum?" Morte asked. "Not that we got much out of it. Not a whole lot of information, there."

Scar shook his head. "No, I suppose not. I think that we will need another stop." He looked at the area around them, as if comparing them to an internal map. "Hmn...I didn't think we would look at that thing just yet, but this is as good a time as any..."

"To do what?"

"To see one of the fragments we have of our past." Scar looked up at the sky. He was probably thinking about some crazy philosophical weirdness like how thousands of years ago aliens once roamed Traverse Town just like they did, wielding technology so stupidly advanced that it took insane geniuses to reverse engineer the simple bits, but now no one knew what those people really did, what they looked or acted like, what they even were or why they had utterly vanished from the face of the planet. (As a matter of fact, this was exactly what he was thinking about.) "...Would you like to see it? It may answer a few questions about the shape of our world."

Morte wondered what he meant by that. Glancing at Danny (who looked largely indifferent) and Aang (who looked enthusastic), he said, "Awright, show us this thing you're talking about."

Scar nodded and looked back. "...Will your Sky Bison carry us again? It will take a shorter time to ride with him."

"Also be much more terrifying," Morte said. Appa had carried them around since they left the mall, but it hadn't been any easier for Morte; he just wasn't used to the wind.

Appa, seeming to conclude the inevitable, rumbled something benign. "He can do it," Aang said. He glanced at Scar. "You know, I think he likes you."

Appa lumbered over and licked Scar's head, tousling his hair. "...I have no idea why," Scar said, absently scratching a side of Appa's face.

"Maybe you just radiate 'monk' and the bison-thing likes it," Morte said. "Or, you know, the whole giving him food repeatedly thing."

"He's a Sky Bison," Scar and Aang corrected Morte; Scar had learned the proper term already, seeming to be one of those nitpicky people when it came to names.

Morte muttered about people that never stopped picking nits but he didn't stress the point. Danny helped him up into Appa's litter, and after securing their drinks and snacks safely, Appa took off into the air again, knocking a few hapless bystanders over. One swore revenge agaisnt the heavens for the indignity.

They followed Scar's directions, and it was a fairly short and uneventful flight, suggesting that he had been vaugely circling around this thing he wanted to show them for a while; the only thing of interest was a number of Flying Pokemon like the graceful Pidgeot or dangerous Starraptor that flew up to see what this newcomer to the air was. In less then ten minutes, Appa's horns and the sides of the litter had become the new perches for a flock of various flying creatures; Aang didn't mind, but the way they stared at Danny made him think that they were plotting against him. (They weren't.)

Scar knew the district well; without getting lost or anything, they eventually flew into a large plaza of some kind; a number of small specialized shops offering services such as firearm-equipped weapon maintenance and a mechanical prosthetics engineering shop, as well as a few homes in the shapes of their owner's heads. No one asked why, because in the middle of the square was a highly elaborate sculpture that held a massive piece of ancient wall with an unusual mural on it.

Aang shivered a bit for some reason, looking slightly uneasy as he brought Appa into the square proper and landed him in front of the odd thing, Appa coming to a gentle stop on the ground in front of the spiral-shaped sculpture that wall fragment had been affixed to, keeping it displayed proudly to the world, some transparent material on the front of the fragment to protect it from damage. "...It's a giant rock?"

"Uh, that's nice," Danny said a bit warily. "Very nice, good rock and stuff." He looked at it. "...Why would you guys put up a giant rock?"

"Maybe because all the other rivals from across the worlds stole all the other giant rocks!" Morte said sarcastically. "The scoundrels!"

"It is a key to the past of this world," Scar said, hopping off Appa's litter to the ground below; Danny and Aang followed his example after leaving their drinks behind, Aang grabbing Morte on the way down. Morte was grateful for the help. The three of them followed Scar as he led them to the steps of the sculpture and wall fragment, impressed and disturbed by it, Aang more than any of them; he looked slightly dazed.

To begin with, the sculpture itself had been carved out of a single piece of rock fused with the ground, shaped like a reverse waterfall made of jagged loops and whorls, growing more rough and strange right around the necks of a pair of ferocious dragon's-heads at the top of the sculpture gripping the top of the wall fragment in their teeth, every inch of the sculpture polished bright and gleaming. In fact, once you noticed the dragon's-heads, the whole sculpture looked increasingly like a pair of dragons: a large fold of the stone that at first just looked like craggy shapes suddenly looked like folded wings, the parts of the sculpture holding the wall fragment in place looked like tightly gripping claws, folds and crags in the lower part of the sculpture looked like two massive bodies with their tails forming the steps. The strange roughness appeared intentional, as though both dragons had been injured but were supporting one another: the overall effect was of two dragons holding up the fragment, their bodies close together in friendship and holding each other up.

The dragon-sculpture was strange, but beautiful. The wall fragment, though...it was cracked and faded, in spite of the obvious attempts at restoration made by the artist, but it was pretty obviously a sectioned view of the world, and was very realistically done to, down to the cartographic undersea valleys, the large ridges of mountains on the land, flat expanses of land that were alternatives plains and deserts. Because of this, Aang, Danny and Morte could easily see that the planet shown on the wall had two medium-sized continents on opposite sides of the world, both of them slightly broken; they were ragged and cracked, dozens of inland seas and huge rivers running through them, and they saw that there were dozens of islands across the world, archepelagoes of very diverse sizes, ranging from scattered clumps of fingernail-sized islands (which appeared no bigger than a deserted island realistically) and large chains of tropical islands, about four nearly as large as Austrialia. There were even islands in the continential inland seas; the overall effect was that someone broke the planet and had put the pieces back in a hurry but had just said 'screw it' to getting them right and had just done what worked.

That alone would have been pretty weird, but then there was the...thing. Engraved in the face of the upper continent was a massive malformed thing, every inch of it ragged and shaped so that whoever had etched this into the wall had been shaking when he did it. They saw spikes like organic spear blades, each one made of a thousand tiny scales that proved to be distorted faces on closer inspection, looping together and branching out and extending in a nightmarish fractal design. Huge tendrils were intertwined into the ground like massive roots, looping in and out of the continent itself, spikes growing out at random angles, and those tendrils seemed made of thousands of tiny shapes and forms, wounds so deeply together they had become part of each other, and a lot of them still had limbs and faces. And last, by some twisted work of genius, the artist had not given any indication of the form under those spines, but only a suggestion of shapeless horror, a warped thing that was nearly humanoid and bestial at once, and then again neither; it was surreal and defiant, a grossly beautiful horror that was too complex to grasp properly. Aang, who had a good eye for detail, thought that the many, many slits and gaps were supposed to be eyes. He hoped they were eyes, because he didn't want to think about what else they could be. And somehow, the thing seemed to be burning, every one of it's spines surronded with a slightly blurred shimmer engraved on the mural through unknown means. Perhaps they had been done with powered crystals or some stranger method, but they glowed harshly bright in the sunlight.

Aang stared at it, utterly horrified. He didn't say anything, he just stared at it like it was the most horrible thing ever made.

Danny was the first to speak at the...wrongness of the thing on the mural. "Okay. What the hell is this!"

Scar tapped a nearby sign. Aang went over to it and read, "'Wall fragment found in the deserted Kageko island of the Ho'Kami Island chain by the famed researcher Edward Elric in what is believed to be the remains of an ancient library. This was the only intact piece of artwork recovered and is believed to depict a legend passed down by native cultures acorss the world, commonly known as The Coming of The Uncreator; this tells of the arrival of an evil god from beyond the stars that destroyed nearly all life on the planet before it joined with the earth in eternal rest. Other cultures alternatively refer to it as The Great Fire, The Dark Zeal and That Which Devours Time. Research on this legend is ongoing.' I...don't get it." He looked back at the giant rock and shuddered; he couldn't stand to look at it for more than a moment.

"No one does, I bet," Morte said. "That's what crazy architecture like this is for. Confusing people."

"As the exibits regarding the ancient artifacts may have led you to conclude, the ancient past of our world is a complete mystery," Scar said, ignoring the stupid comments. "There are no surviving civilizations from a period of history going back roughly twenty thousand years ago. If the natives are the remaining descendants of whoever they were, they either don't know what happened to the original inhabitants or they refuse to speak of it. We dont know who these people were, what they looked like and we espicially do not know what happened to them. It is clear that they were a very advanced culture though; their construction material is unknown to us but it is still largely intact on much of the world, proving that it has withstood the wear and tear of the ages. It somehow stores and amplifies solar power, creating clean energy we use in conjunction with Blue Eco to power our town, and we've found remaining bit of their technology that we've only just scratched the surface of. Much of our town's infrastructure was made by reverse-engineering what we've found." The quirk of his mouth might have been an ironic smirk. "And this is the greatest fruit of our research. A direct link to whatever these people believed in. An appaling thing...but it is strange, isn't it? It is virtually untouchable by modern tools, acid or paint cannot mar it, it's surface weathers all nature can attack it with and endure unscarred."

"So you guys brought this thing back to figure out why they went to the trouble of keeping it preserved in that ruined library you found it in?" Aang asked. Scar nodded. "Huh! No wonder you think it's important. Could be some kind of thing they built a legend around."

"Or maybe it's some kind of evil thing from a local religion," Danny guessed.

"I believe it is a allegorical depiction of an ancient disaster that seriously damaged this world," Scar said.

"Or maybe it's exactly what it looks like and those civilizations were wiped out by a incomprehensibly powerful eldritch abomination that reshaped the world and either left, was defeated after it was done killing people or was sealed away in to the planet itself, and this was some poor sap's describing just what happened after the fact." Morte said. "Seen it a million times."

Everyone looked at him for a moment, considered it, and passed it off. Except for one. "I hope not," Aang said, but he looked like he half-believed Morte.

"It'd never happen," Danny said, dismissively.

"What made you guess that?" Scar asked Morte.

Morte appeared to grimace. It was a good question how he did it. "I'll end up right, I just know I'll be. And I'll tell you all 'told you so' and you'll shut up and take your lumps."

"Doubtful," Scar said cooly. "Now, I've brought you here for another reason. Aside from the...artistic license..."

"By which you mean the ungodly abomination on it," Danny said. He looked at Aang, who was starting to look a little sick. "Hey. You okay?"

Aang nodded. "Uh, yeah, yeah, fine, just fine." He shuddered. "Yeah, nothing's wrong here..."

"Yes, that. Aside from it, this is a perfect cartographic representation of this world. This is the world you have come to. Aside from the monster-thing."

"Unless it's still here," Morte interrupted.

"No it's not. As you can see, our world is an island-themed one, and we are right here," Scar said, pointing to a spot off the coast of the southern continent, right between a mountain range girding the area like crossed arms and a inland sea that resembled a reverse peninsula; instead of a spot of land extending into the sea, it was a stretch of sea bordered by pincer-like sections of land. "Because we have mountains on one side and a narrow expanse of sea on the other, we have the advantage in any homeland attack situation." He then pointed to the rest of the continent. "The rest of this is occupied by a large number of native cultures consisting of varying species of anthropomorphic animals that exist in a federation called the Fire-Born; it originates with a legend not dissimilar to the one about the thing on the wall fragment, concerning how their ancestors died in fire and they have been reborn as who they are now."

"That doesn't make much sense," Danny said.

"Translation issues are always hard to get through."

"...If there's something I've learned, it's that where there's a relatively small group of people, there's people trying to kill them," Aang said. "Is there anyone like that on this world?"

"Unfortunately. There's a fair number of foes to test us; the ever-present criminals and outcasts that arrange, lead and cause innumerable incidents on a nearly weekly basis, the not-infrequent Heartless raid, various native cultures that attack our traders, roaming explorers or even the town directly for bragging rights, religious reasons or because they require our resources...but they are the most dangerous." Scar pointed to the northern continent. "The Automechanic Empire. A group of machine-based lifeforms that we believe to have survived the time of our precedessors, though we're not certain if they actually recall that time; none of the ones we've made peace with have told us anything, though the ones we know may simply not know anything of use. They have largely feuded with the other native cultures for their own reasons, according to our allies, but they particularily resent our presence; they regard it as an insult to their makers, the original inhabitants of Traverse Town. As I understand it, they were intensely loyal to their makers, and now serve the memory of them."

"That's a bit better than the usual evil machines that conquer to take out inferior organic life," Morte said. "They have a 'you're not my real Daddy' complex. Least they're more honest about it than most kids."

Aang hit the ground heavily, accidentally Earthbending a sizable dent in the ground. Scar and Morte looked around but Danny was already there, helping his friend back up. "Hey man! I knew something was wrong!"

"Not me," Aang muttered. "That thing, the giant rock, it's wrong, it's all wrong..."

"The hell's he saying?" Morte asked.

Appa lowed, nudging Scar and Morte aside as he made a beeline directly for Aang; he nuzzled him, clearly worried. "We need to go somewhere else," Danny said firmly. "Something's wrong with Aang."

"Already told you, it's the rock," Aang said.

"Yeah, yeah, the killer rock and stuff, hear that's a real problem in these parts..."

"Actually, they are," Scar said. "And a mountain that ate people before we blew it up."

"Not helping!"

"Hrm." Scar helped support Aang as Appa laid down so they coud get Aang in the litter more easily. Morte was able to join them with some effort and they left quickly; as soon as they were out of the way, Aang started recovering immediately, as confused as everyone else was, but after Danny made him drink some of his fountain drink on the ground that 'sugar makes everything better', he improvd immensely.

"What the heck was that?" Morte asked him. "You have a problem with fainting spells?"

"No, but I've seen a few. Never well-performed." This earned a round of stupified looks. "Right, bad joke, sorry."

"Are you all right?" Scar asked Aang. He sounded concerned. It was hard to tell; he had the same basic vauge scowl he always did.

"Yeah, fine." Aang shuddered again. "Something wasn't right with that giant rock."

"In what way?"

"Hey, don't be so pushy," Danny said, annoyed. "Something weird just happened and he almost fainted, you don't have to-"

"Really, I'm fine!" Aang seemed genuinely irritated. "Danny, seriously. You know me! If I can channel the spirits of all the Avatars before me and the vast potential of those to come, I can handle...whatever just happened." Danny didn't look convinced. "Really."

"...If you say so." Danny leaned back against the litter. He glanced at Scar, the tattooed warrior-monk looking at Aang with a strange detached interest. He looked thoughtful, but again, with his expression it was hard to tell. "Hey. I don't think anyone's told us. What's the name of this world? It's not going to be named after this town or something stupid like that, is it? Because that would be incredibly parochial."

"...No." Scar looked at him; Danny was a little unnerved. Scar had a alarmingly forthright look that was only a few degrees away from being a stone-cold glare. It was...sharp. Sharp like a katana, some hard metal beaten and broken and put back together over and over again until it had become something deadly and focused, a thing that would never bend until it was shattered completely.

"Do you mean 'no', you're not going to tell us, 'no' that's not it or 'no', screw us you dont give a crap?" Morte asked.

"...This world has a name, and not one that we have the town have guessed at." Scar tapped a finger on the litter-floor. "We have not been so presumptious to take that right away from the true inhabitants of this world."

"Huh?" Danny said.

"I think he means the natives," Aang said. "Whoever they are."

Scar inclined his head agreeably. "They gave this world a name long before any of us came here. Long before Ishbal was settled by my most ancient ancestors, I am certain. Perhaps before you became...whatever you are." This last bit was directed at Morte.

"Hey!"

Scar ignored him. "This world does have a name. One derived from the non-stop warfare and harsh conditions engendered by it's standing magical field. And that name is Crucible."

Aang rolled the word around in his mind for a bit. "That sounds nice," He offered. Danny frowned vaugely, not looking very pleased.

"Sounds fine to me," Morte said.

"Your inclinations flatter me," Scar said, and it was probably sarcasm. "Now...I believe there's an interesting museum near the inner part of the district that offers an amazing cross-section of artifacts from across the world you may find interesting." He raised an eyebrow laconically. "Ones that will not induce strange spiritual illnesses."

"Hah hah," Aang said sourly.

...

"...So if hadn't been for the donkey exploding, I never would have spent that year in college," Captain Razor said to Bloo, finishing a long-winded anecdote. "And that's how I got my degrees in engineering, computer science and other stuff."

They were still on the grounds of Foster's; it was a nice day, and it wasn't like they had anything better to do. Bloo, tied to a tree so he couldn't run away, groaned. "Okay, geez, fine, I get it, you can't get anywhere in life by using people to your own ends! Is that the moral already!"

"Huh?" Razor blinked. "No, I was just telling stories about my young adulthood before I joined the Enforcers. Jeez, you gotta lighten up, Bloo."

"Says the guy who tied him to a tree," Mac remarked, without any vitrol; Mac was teaching Eduardo how to play a children's trading card game while Wilt talked to Minimoose and Coco to puzzle out their sudden relationship (and figure out why Minimoose was hanging around them at all) and the guards Acting-Lieutenant Stature, Second-Lieutinent Freya, Warrent Officer Andre and a pair of lower-ranked guards Razor liked just hung around, taking it easy and being generally relaxed. Razor chuckled, taking Mac's remark with good humor. After Mr. Herrimen had sent him to catch Bloo without any instructions on what to do after, he had fallen back on Madame Foster's default means of dealing with troublemakers that did things beyond a certain extreme level (generally defined as trying to attack someone for no reason when it wasn't awesome, trying to awaken demonic spirits to ravage the world of Men or publically trolling), and in this case he had chosen to annoy Bloo until he gave up and cut a deal to behave for a while. It wasn't the most productive plan, but it was fun. Until Mr. Herrimen sent orders to do something, he needed something to occupy himself.

(Most people would point out that the leader of the private security team of a high-profile team would have better things to do with his time than harrass a mischief-maker. The proper point is that the people in this town had a more relaxed outlook on 'proper business protocol'.)

"We can do this all day, Bloo," Razor said.

"He might," Andre said. "Dis iz da Keptain sp'heaking, he like messin' vith hyu head!"

"Perhaps you could attend to repairing the defense systems?" Freya said loftily. "Certainly it would be a better use of your time than annoying this reprobate!"

"Hey!" Bloo said. "Who are you calling a reprobate? Why are you calling me a reprobate? What's a reprobate! Mac, help me out here!"

"Maybe we can get our own oliphant-bodyguard later," Mac said, not really listening. "Now, Eduardo, you can't summon more than one monster in one turn except if you use special cards."

"But the people in the show, they are always summoning lots of monsters in one turn!" Eduardo said.

"Sorry, but the show's not very good at depicting this game. I'm not honestly sure if they even know the rules of the game! I mean, they usually win duels through blind luck, contriviance and the writers blatantly pulling cards out of nowhere JUST when it helps them the most. Not to mention resorting to card games for absolutely EVERYTHING. Why would a bad guy that wants to kill everything need cards for that, anyway?"

Minimoose squeaked something. "'I like the abridged Internet show better'," Wilt translated.

"Oh yeah," Said a random guard, a teenaged girl named Nidah said; she was wearing her uniform as conservatively as she could, and had the dark skin, red eyes and white hair characterisitic of an Ishbalan. More particularily, she had a terrible scar going across the lower side of her jaw, like it had been nearly removed by high-impact sharpnel. "Never liked the real show, to be honest; the abridged series is way funnier! Espicially when they get cameos from guys like the Cartoon Guy, infamous Internet reviewer of animated series and films!"

"I like that guy's show," Wilt said. "He's kind of snarky, but he's still nice about it, except when they REALLY need him to say mean stuff about it! Even if a lot of stuff he says doesn't make sense or he likes to go on about continuity to put stuff into context."

"He's actually Ron Stoppable," Stature remarked, grinning widely. The others stared at her. "It's true! He hides his tail and wears a pretty hat, glasses and a wig for the reviews, but you can tell it's him! Just listen when he starts going off on a rant about something or starts rambling, and you can tell."

"Hey, does this mean that the Film Lady, the amusingly abrasive and scathing reviewer of popular movies of all sorts, is his girlfriend?" Bloo asked. "I mean, I don't know them personally, but I've seen them a few times. She looks a lot like the Film Lady!"

"Huh," Razor said. "If she did up her hair in braids, put on a nice hat, got really big glasses and dressed like a punk...yeah, looks like!"

"Maybe would 'splain vy she go and start dating him in de skits dey do sometimez for charity schtuff," Andre said. He stared into space. "...I mizz her..."

"Miss who?" Wilt asked.

"...My true luff. The von dearest to my heart, the voman I szhall luff forever! I shtill haff de scar from her darling hands, de voman who ist more dangerous than a bag full of knives! VON PINN!" He started to sob theatrically and pulled out a terrifying huge bloodstained knife. "Look at dis darlink utensil of stabbiness! Admire it's sheen, it's deadly efficiency, it's wonderful curves and sharp lines! Designed for the purpose of killing and serrated so that the pain tears, though it is built not to kill but protect! So like Von Pinn! Hy named it in her honor, but it iz no replacement for HER!" He started to cry until he was distracted by the clouds over the mansion. "Hee hee, lookit zat! Dat von lookz like a taco! And zat von looks like a muffin! Un zat von looks like a bear! Hy luff bears! Und zat von looks like a bear-shark! Even better! And zat von looks like a man in white 'cept for his hat climbing up the house wall! Wait, zat's not a cloud."

The others had tuned out his babble, so they missed this last crucial point. This is a good reason to never entirely ignore the guy who spits in word salads.

"So I heard you guys met some new refugees last night," Another low-ranking guard said to Bloo; he was a small squat humanoid bat-person named Hertz,. his uniform modified for the leathery membranes stretching from his wing-fingers to his body, a pair of goggles for his light-sensitive eyes and a hat shaped so that his elongated ears wouldn't knock it off. Unlike many others in town, this grey-furred fellow wasn't a refugee, but had been born to a clan of the great mountain-dwelling bat people of the mountain range outside Traverse Town; he had once met a traveling salesman from Traverse Town who had been called in to fix some TVs from Traverse Town that had neglected to include repair instructions. (They otherwise had little problems with machinery, being a bit adept with them and powering them with geothermal energy from heatvents under the mountains.) Impressed by him, he had returned to Traverse Town to see what all the fuss was about and had many adventures, most recently a stint as a navigator on an airship and now a guard at Foster's, though he was primarily on the mechanic's crew and was expected to help repair the security system. "Think they have good life stories to sell to someone? Cartoons and movies have gotten a bit stale lately!"

"...If they do, the usual exaggerations and 'creative changes' are going to be less impressive than the real stuff," Bloo said. He had a thought; suppose those guys hadn't been told that it was the usual thing for newcomers to approach one of the entertainment guys that ran the studios in town and sell their life stories to them for a good amount of money if they were good enough. It was a good deal; the new guys could get around for a few months with that money while they figured out their niche, and the entertainment business got more fodder to spin into shows for the ever-hungry production mills, comic books, movies and novels. It was extremely rare for someone to be refused; everyone had a unusual story to tell. "The refugee I know is freaking nuts, and anybody that would actually be friends with would have to be almost as bad." In spite of that, Bloo had a plan for his next big scheme; get Zim and the other newbies to sell him their stories! He could picture it now; cartoons and tie-in comic books! Movies! Endorsement deals from the big fast-food places!

"Hey, you're dozing off," Razor said, poking him with a stick. "Pay attention, I have more pointless stories to bore you into submission!"

"Seriously, dere iz a guy up dere," Andre said. "...How de hell iz he climbin' like dat?"

Wilt's eye swiveled around and blinked. "...Huh, there is someone up there!"

"Don't humor Andre, Mr. Wilt," Stature said. "It'll only encourage him. The last time we listening to his crazy ramblings, we had to fight off an alien invasion in another dimension where sombreros are the symbol of kingship and the dominant lifeform were British cuckoo bird-people!"

"Dat was jest one time!" Andre said hotly. "Don't hyu mock me, leetle gurl!"

Stature narrowed her eyes and suddenly grew to the size of a small giant, reaching a daunting twelve and a half feet of height and a considerable increase in muscle mass (which, for some reason, tended for an increase along the arms, shoulders, legs and espicially the hips. It was just one of those things). "Who are you calling a 'little girl'!" She said, stomping on the ground and making a small crater, the impact knocking Andre (and everyone else) off their feet.

"My cards!" Eduardo wailed, scrambling in vain to pick them all up, but the game had already been ruined.

"Oh no! I'm sorry, Eduardo!" Stature said. She glared at Andre. "This is all YOUR FAULT!"

Most people would have been cautious when dealing with an angry woman so large that they were at face-level with her knee. Andre, being a Jagermonster (a supersoldier created by the Heterodyne family), was not one of those people. "Hyu, not-so-leetle-gurl!" He yelled, completely forgetting about the guy climbing, excited by the prospect of a good fight; Stature was a one-woman tank when she was in the mood. "But how is you messing up da cardz my fault, eh?"

Stature frowned. "I don't need to be taught logic by you!" She drew back, tensing for some tremendous act of enormous physical power that would probably involve Andre doing a remarkable imitation of a football or some other projectile.

Fortunately, there were clearer heads around. "Come on, calm down!" Mac said, running between the excitable Andre and the extra-extra-sizd Stature. "Can't you ever resolve arguments without trying to punt each other into the stratosphere or going crazy with a missle launcher?"

"Dere iz anudder vay?" Andre asked, puzzled.

Stature had a temper, but she was always eager to see reason. Inclining her head, she shrank down to her usual height and body shape, almost losing her footing; her center of gravity got a little wonky when she changed size quickly. Once she had her footing back, she knelt down to help Eduardo gather up his cards.

Minimoose peered up while Eduardo forlornly gathered up his cards. His eyes shifted to a setting similar to binoculars; he wasn't a very emotional robot by design, and he was generally focused on whatever goal he had at hand, but even he found himself unnerved by what he was looking at. He squeaked at Coco, inviting her to look at something. She squawked for clarification, and he squeaked an explanation of his capability of being used as a scope, adding exactly how that was done. Coco stared at him and then strutted behind him, looking awkward at staring into the screen that had appeared on his backside. It had certain connitions. These feeling passed when she clearly saw what Minimoose was looking at, the screen showing the world through his eyes.

"COCO! Coco cococo coco co!"

"What are you getting worked up about?" Razor asked, now flicking small things at Bloo and being surprised when a red shield repelled them; he knew Pokemon, and he knew what a Counter technique looked like when he saw one. Coco gestured frantically.

"What's she want?" Hertz asked.

"...She wants someone to look at something through Minimooose's...posterior."

"What's this about?" Nidah asked, walking over. "...Why does Coco's friend have a screen on?" She looked into it, a little disturbed by what she was doing. "...Huh, there actually is a guy climbing the building!"

"Andre was right?" Freya said, sounding like this constituted a serious warp in the nature of reality. "This is not normal!"

"Hy know, Hy'm scared too!" Andre said.

"What's he doing?" Hertz asked.

"Hard to tell," Razor said, having squeezed around Nidah. "Guy really likes white and...something's wrong with his arms and EW! THAT IS NOT RIGHT! ARMS SHOULD NOT LOOK LIKE THAT!"

"Urgh, it's like some kind of twisted half-Arachnachimp mutant!" Nidah said. "...Not that there's anything wrong with that..." (In Traverse Town, you learned to keep negative remarks to yourself. Sooner or later you were going to offend someone, no matter how obscure or absurd the remark was.) "What's he doing up there anyway? Taking the scenic route?"

"Could be," Wilt said, a bit ashamed that it wasn't that helpful. In honesty, it was perfectly normal for the more athletic of townsfolk to scale buildings through handholds, convienient balconies and piping, and various tricks of architecture specifically designed to encourage this because it reduced street traffic and besides, it made walking awesome.

There was nothing abnormal about this per se. Even the freakish mutations. (And again, in this town they have a different standard for 'freakish', most due to individuals forcing themselves to do so after a 'freak' taking their opinions the wrong way.) And yet there was something that didn't seem quite right about the way this man was doing it. He was moving slow, purposefully and with a cheerful implacability. He didn't slow down for obstacles, he just clambered around them, treating everything between him and his goal like an inconvienient fog.

"Huh," Razor said, focusing on this because it was his duty as a guard to see if a visitor was a potential threat. "Looks like he's trying to head towards the highest rooftop point...wait, he just got here. And it looks like he got suprised by some people already there."

"Should we go have a look?" Freya asked, flexing her well-toned legs. "I could have two others and myself up there in moments."

"Could just be a random tourist, we don't want to jump the gun or anything," Razor said. "I think...wait, his arms are doing something...they just turned human. Looks like we got us a shapeshifter, boys and girls!"

"And now he's clapping his hands," Nidah said, wondering briefly why the sight of this looking at a man high above sent a cold shiver up her spine, half-forgotten memories from her childhood, vauge shadows of the long-gone holy land of Ishbal dancing just behind her thoughts and crying Run! Run! "Hey, he just grabbed Mr. Loikitz from the kitchen duty roster-"

An explosion intterupted her from the rooftop high above them, a bright flash of light and force that didn't make a loud noise so much that it made a wall of sound that was felt rather than heard; bits of roof flew overhead and hit the ground like shrapnel, a iron-fence broke against a tree and a number of people screamed as they fell from the air.

For a lot of people, there's a brief moment between the shock and the instinct to act; that pause is fatal so very often. Razor was more skilled then that. "STATURE! FREYA!" He yelled, the affability sliding away. "CATCH THEM!"

Freya didn't hesitate for even a second to judge the situation. She saw, she decided and she acted all at once, a lifetime of fighting life-or-death battles honing her battle reflexes to an edge that was proverbially sharp. She crouched low, her powerful leg muscles tensing under her uniform and her thin furred tail curving upwards to avoid impact. For a moment, she was there, grim and focused; the next, she had suddenly gone, and behind her was a small round imprint in the ground from the force of a singularily powerful push, and it had been strong enough to tear the grass from the ground like a shower.

Above in the air above her, already nearly halfway to a painful death on the ground, was a elf-like person named Seralat, of the people known as the Eldar, an ancient and powerful race known for their incredible powers; the species as a whole made it's stronghold in the Comic Kingdom where they had warred with, among other things, the civilization that was the ancestor of the Comic Kingdom and known as the Imperium of Man, but during the cessation of war if not total peace that had followed the restoration of the vast intersteller subdimension known as the Immaterium or the Warp, they had spread beyond their galaxy and even into other universes; this man came from such stock and was as far removed from his psychically-inclined ancestors as Hobbes was to a true Siberian tiger; he had chosen not to study the powers of his people but instead focused on building a mercantile empire to help found an interdimensional federation of worlds. He was begining to suspect that not bothering to even master some basic telekinesis had been a bad move.

This was no longer a problem as he abruptly vanished from mid-air; a instant later, Freya smashed onto the side of the wall of Fosters, her impact making a circular dent in the sturdy walls that would otherwise have warped steel if not for her carefulness. In her arms was Seralat. "I apologize for the discomfort," She told him as she slided down the wall, digging the clawed toes extending from her specially-made boots to slow their descent.

"What is going on here?" Seralat asked politely; he came to Traverse Town often enough. While nearly getting killed wasn't a novel experience for him, this manner of him escaping it certainly was.

"That is a good question. Hold a moment." She jumped again, nearly breaking the wall she bounced off, and intercepted another falling person in midair; a small autonomous mechanical robotic lifeform half her size. This one was a resident of the house, a female Transformer classified as a Minicon named Dingbot for various unflattering reasons concerning her sanity and penchant towards ill-advised experiments; one such experiment with portal apertures had unexpected thrust her into Traverse Town, and unable to find a way back to the planet she had been at, she decided to make the best of it. This may not have been the best idea. "No need to worry. I have you as well."

"Then what about you!" Dingbot cried, waving her arms and desperately wishing that she had trans-scanned something flight-capable when she had the chance. "Who gets you!"

"ME!" Stature yelled, her voice distorting to a roar as she abruptly swelled up to the size of a more literal giant, expanding to the point where she was easily able to catch the last falling civiliian. a foriegner of some sort named Lu-Tze who had been working as a non-descript cleaning man that did sweeping; in fact, he had been sweeping the rooftop before the explosion. Improbably, he was falling through the air without any trace of concern, smiling gently with his arms and legs crossed. He landed quite neatly onto Stature's helpful palm in a sitting position, doing it so easily he practically floated onto it. (It was a definite possibility. You never knew with little smiling men.) He watched with a detached interest as Stature gently grabbed Freya out of midair and put Freya, her passengerss and Lu-Tze on the ground. She glared at the man standing on top of the room and staring down at them; Stature considered if it would be a good idea to flick him so hard that he flew into the sky and came back down on something quite hard, but she decided against it; she might damage the house if she tried to finish this like that. Instead, she shrank down to her usual size, giving herself a slightly dizzy feeling as a significant amount of space she had just been occupying was now absent of Stature-territory.

"Hot slag on a positron engine!" Dingbot said.

"Not a good idea, making a engine that do that," Lu-Tze said.

"Shuddit, you...you...who the heck are you?"

"I think he's the new sweeping guy," Bloo said while Mac snuck behind the tree he was tied to to free him; something bad was about to happen and he didn't want his friend caught up in it when it wasn't his fault. Presumably.

"Right," Razor said, not really listening. "You guys, get out of here." He gave Mac a ironic look and slashed through the rope with curiously metallic claws, grabbing Bloo before he could hit the ground and setting him upright. "Stature, your powers aren't very collateral damage-preventive. Go and get an evacuation ready in case this turns ugly!"

"Got it, sir," Stature said, running off immediately and the lesser guards following her.. She didn't have to ask how to tell when she should get people moving out. She was a guard in Foster's Security; she would know.

"Andre? You're with me."

"Goot to hear it, boss-kitty!" Andre said, stretching his claws and snarling enthusiastically.

"Freya? Get us up there!"

"Of course," She said, grabbing Andre and Razor by their sides while they hooked their arms around her neck. She crouched down again, the two men looking uncomfortable with being pushed off-kilter, and then she was gone again in another spray of wind-shredded grass.

"What going on!" Eduardo cried out, completely horrified by all this and trying to stuff his precious cards in his pockets. "Who that up there? Why this fight happening!"

"All the really very bad shit is going down, I can tell you that!" Dingbot cried. "You guys run!" She transformed, her body coming apart, individual parts swiveling and rotating and locking into place and forming new parts until she had become a miniture motorized scooter. With jet engines on.

"Excuse me," Seralat said as he hopped aboard her. "Don't you fools forget to flee!" Dingbot's engines roared to flaming life and she literally rocketed away. The Foster's bunch couged from all the smoke.

"...We should be up there," Wilt said after a moment, staring at the roof. "We shouldn't leave them alone."

Coco squawked. "They might be hardened professionals," Mac said to her. "But we can't just sit here!"

"We can run," Eduardo said, though he did not look terribly enthusiastic. Eduardo was a coward; afraid of nearly everything and easy to turn fearful at the smallest signs of trouble. But he was still an imaginary friend, created from the heart of a young child and born of a purpose. And at his own heart, there was something where fear was not a factor, but a white-hot fury that roared to life at indignity, suffering and people in danger. He was a protector, a guardian. He wasn't supposed to run away.

"But what can we do!" Bloo asked desperately. It didn't sound like he was making an argument to flee. "And, wait, what are you doing?" This was addressed to Lu-Tze, who was amiably strolling through their group.

Lu-Tze moved very slightly. In the physics of the world, it was barely a twitch. For certain rules that went much deeper into more significant realms, it was the equvilant of a megaton punch. Wilt, Mac, Coco and Minimoose dropped, unconscious (or inactive) and made vauge noises of dazed people.

Bloo and Eduardo gaped. "...ARE YOU CRAZY?" Bloo said.

Lu-Tze smiled and nodded.

"It a ret...rhetetty...rhinoadon...question that you not need to answer!" Eduardo said. "WHAT YOU DO TO OUR FRIENDS!"

Lu-Tze pointed to the top of the roof. He made a gesture that suggested that while their friends were ordinarily competent and useful people to have around, this was a situation where they were better off out of it.

Bloo extended and waved psuedopod arms in frustration. "Whatever! Deal with you later, ya smarmy little sweepy guy...Eduardo, think you can carry everyone?"

"Si!" Eduardo said, gently scooping everyone up over his arms. Wilt danged a little because of his extreme height, but Eduardo had everyone secured.

"Uh...get them out of here! Like hide them somewhere where the collateral damage won't hit them." Eduardo ran off, careful not to jog anyone, and Bloo started to hurry after him and heisitated. He had a brief moment of thought, mostly relating to self-preservation instinct and more noble impulses and finally rushed back at the house the same way Stature had gone.

Lu-Tze smiled again. He looked up at the sky for a moment, seeming to be staring at something no one else could see. Something a bit higher in the grand scheme of the cosmic scheme. "Good enough," He said, half to himself, and he left.

Going back a little bit, around the time where Lu-Tze had done whatever he did to the Foster's friends and Minimoose, Kimblee (who else?) had been feeling a bit of satisfaction with the way things were going. He raised an eyebrow at the giant girl's brief appearance; they had all sorts in this town. Like the talking catman. Or the kangaroo-rat...thing that jumped as high as dragons flew.

He was making his way towards the alchemic circles hidden at the very top of the mansion, positioned right through the center of the house, when he became aware of movement. He turned and was surprised to see that same kangaroo-rat person he had just been thinking about appear high over his head, distangling a inhuman greenskinned thing from her; while still rising in the air from the power of her jump, she transfered her grip on him to his wrist and spun around with a mighty swirl of wind and a loud blast precipated that same green thing hurtling at him, as straight and fast as a spear, howling absurdities in a bizarre vaugely Germanic accent while it flew straight towards him, a roaring purplish aura shaped like a fierce dragon rippling around him.

Kimblee had time to blink at the absurdity of it. He did not have time to dodge before Andre slammed into him like the spear Freya had used him as and suffered the novel experience of being hit by over a hundred and fifty pounds of human mutated by mad science and an insane inability to die.

After Kimblee got back up and reassured himself that his stomach was still inside him despite the pressing feeling it wasn't, he glanced up to see Andre the Jagermonster grinning at him while Freya smash-landed behind him with a dignity that must have been very hard to carry with that sort of move. "Guten morgen," Andre said; it was hard to make out with his lips rolled back over his sharklike array of improbably pointed daggerlike teeth, his every breath whistling across their serrated inner edges and sounding like the whispering voices of a thousand furies were talking behind his every word.

"Please explain why you just kiled Mr. Loikitz, and nearly killed three others," Freya asked politely. "Perhaps we may be inclined to be merciful if you had a good reason."

"Because they were in the way," Kimblee said. "Because the sun flashed at the wrong moment and they suddenly annoyed me. Perhaps their existence was intolerable to me. Perhaps I simply wished to. I don't need a reason."

"That is not acceptable." Freya's eyes narrowed. It was a sight, barely glimpsed behind the eye-slots of a Dragon Knight's helmet, that had been a prime signal of sudden death for many an unwary evil dragon. "You miserable little buckstick of a man."

"I've heard worse," Kimblee said. He glanced around. "Wasn't there another one with you?"

He felt a heavy impact behind him followed by a larger furred - and curiously heavy - attacker that pulled Kimblee's hands behind his back with one hand and grabbed him in a headlock with another. "Freya threw me upwards after she opened with Andre," Razor hissed into his ear. "Sneak attack."

"Hyu lose," Andre said cheerfully. "Can Hy take a bit of him as a trophy? Mebbe a finger? A ear? Just a tooth! Hy put it onna necklace, trade it for stuff from Orks."

"...No," Razor said blandly. "I don't think so."

"I always find such compelling people," Kimblee said dryly. "And always ones that think I'm beaten so easily."

"You're restrained and unarmed," Freya pointed out.

Kimblee chuckled. "True. But then..." He tapped his palms together, which was easy enough the way Razor had them. "'Unarmed' is such a relative term these days, is it not?" With one of his hands, he was just barely able to tap Razor on the wrist; it was a moment of fleeting nearness, but it was all he needed to let the blue sparks fly.

"Huh?" Razor said. His arm seized, the skin of his forearm swelling up into rounded tumor-like growths the size of melons, spreading down his hand and as his fingers thickened, his grip loosening enough for Kimblee to tear himself away. "WHAT THE FU-"

The swelling cut him off in mid-curse, unexpectedly exploding. Razor went flying into a nearby elevator wall, blackened by smoke and collapsing after hitting the wall.

Andre and Freya stared at Kimblee. "What?" He said. "I'll tell you what I told the officers about the orphanage; it was a clear case of self-defense!"

Razor stumbled back up. "Ow. Explosions make pain happen." He glanced down; much of his uniform had been burned away, mostly on his right side. "Hey, you torched my outfit! You suck."

Kimblee blinked. "...You're still alive? I transmuted the flesh of your arm into explosives!"

"Yeah, well, it's not like I had a lot of flesh there to begin with." What Kimblee had thought had been skin had peeled away when it hadn't been burned completely and destroyed, not skin at but a cunningly designed imitation of it; now revealed was a complex and well-crafted series of flawless prosthetics that replaced much of the left side of Razor's body: his arm, his sides, some of his face...Razor grinned, the burnt fur on the right side of his face cracking as more fake skin stretched too much and sloughed off him, revealing an articulated complex for a good part of his lower jaw and muzzle. Perhaps amused by Kimblee's surprise, he waved the arm Kimblee had tried to transmute, and alll that was left of it was a damaged but very much intact prosthetic arm, bolstered by mechanical muscles that were amazingly still functional, sensory relays to replicate sensation and a complicated array of mechanisms to perfectly simulate arm functions and generally behave like the limb it replaced. There were a few improvements, not the least a set of metal claws forming the ends of his fingers and ordinarily buffered by the fake flesh and fur he'd been wearing. "Not everyone gets away from the Heartless with all their bits. I barely survived! Still, this nice kid named Victor Stone - he's called Cyborg now - fixed me up good. Everything works like the real thing and I designed imitation flesh to cover it up! Doesn't really work for guys who spring for exoskeletal designs like my buddy Cyborg..." He shrugged.

"Ah," Kimblee said. "No wonder. I introduced an unstable reaction into your arm, but since I was trying to transmute organic matter, it only affected your superficial coverings." He raised his hands, showing off his palms. "I shall have to recalculate."

"Hyu're an alkemisty guy!" Andre said in surprise.

"What?"

"He said that you're an alchemist," Freya said.

"Ah. I hate excessively thick accents." Kimblee glanced up at the sky; owing to all the Airbending going on earlier (not that Kimblee knew about that), it had gotten pretty cloudy. At least enough for his purposes. "Well, if you insist on interfering, I'll have to make you disappear as well." He shrugged. "I've got time."

"Time!" Razor said, realizing that someone more serious was going on than the usual random fighting. Of course, random villains or misguided extremists starting outrageous plans with excessive violence was normal around here, but they were more serious on general principles. "You have some kind of scheme going on!"

"You're trying to guess what I'm doing. How cute. He thinks he's people."

"Oh, that does it!" Razor pulled his pantsleg up, mercifully while dispite the explosion and tore the fake skin off his leg, revealing a metal leg. He dug his claws into an unusual disc on the side of his knee, inserting his claws into the notches on the edges and twisting hard; the front of his leg parted slightly and a hidden blade slid out, nearly going from his knee to his shin.

Kimblee frowned as Andre, Razor and Freya rushed at him. "...I really hate fistfights," He grumbled, in spite of Ghostfreak channeling the energy of the Omnitrix into his body to give him a Tetramand's strength, associated with his body swelling up into a grotesque mass of red-brown muscle, another pair of eyes splitting his forehead and his arms growing wider than he was and long enough to scrape his knuckles and his elbows on the ground as a second withered pair grew under his arms. He wondered what the point of those was. He fell into the battle regardless, hurredly listening to Ghostfreak's whispered instructions, the wisdom learned from a thousand dead foes; Kimblee needed it, as he was horrible at personal combat.

...

"A madman blew a number of people off the roof of the house and Captain Clawson believes he has something worse in mind?" Mr. Herrimen said, neatly summmerizing everything Stature had to say about the matter at hand.

"Yes!" Stature said. "He wants an evacuation readied!"

She, in an attempt to find someone of higher authority to get people's attention and correctly concluding that Mr. Herrimen was the logical choice, had cornered him in his office where he had been giving Bonnie, Zaphod and Tarquin Tisenhausen Tickgrass (who were seated rather than caged) a long and boring lecture about the proper way to express your issues with someone, such as a legitamate duel of some sort. Spike had been there too, mostly because he enjoyed torture when it wasn't him being tormented. (Sometimes he did when it was him, though. Spike had a warped mind.) Owing to the loud explosion that Stature had explained had already killed someone, it was not a time to be skeptical.

"...Do we really need to make a total emergency evacuation?" Mr. Herrimen asked. It was a two-pronged question.

"Sir, I know the problems that causes, and the stupidity in panicking over every incident that happens, but this guy killed Mr. Loikitz and blew a tourst, a sweeper and a resident off the roof with that explosion! I don't know how or why, but come on, from the looks of it he didn't even have a valid reason for doing it!"

"Ah, but what about the cost of it? You know what a emergency evacuation does to this house!"

"Yes. I do." Stature reminded herself to stay calm; Mr. Herrimen considered emotionality to be a disgraceful weakness and non-conducive towards keeping anyone alive. "And regarding your question...you know that things have been escalating lately. All the incidents from last night all around the town and not to do with the newcomers we've met...the criminals getting more gutsy and violent...someone hacking into our security system and leaving us completely defenseless! Last night, someone seems to have come here just to harrass some new guys and-" She froze. "Oh no."

"What's 'oh no'?" Spike asked laconically. "Suppose that you've made one of those unlikely little connections that screws everything."

"Sir. Our security system is down. We are helpless." Stature dwindled a little bit, her fear shrinking her before she got control of it. "However it got brought down, that could be a pre-emptery action on whoever's doing this! And I just realized, we can't activate the automated evacuation system with the securty down!"

Mr. Herrimen's fist tightened. "...Start an evacuation, then. With all due haste! What of Master Blooregard and the others? Captain Clawson was dealing with him!"

"He set him loose and told them to run; you know what Bloo's like, though. He's probably still in the thick of it somehow."

"...What a troublesome creature." Mr. Herrimen shook his head, but it seemed a compliment. "Master William?"

"Me?" Spike said.

"I have a deal for you in light of this. Find Miss Frances and escort her out of here and anyone else you find on the way! Make your way outside and then help stop this madman, whatever's he doing; you and the other three should be able to detain him at the very least. Be sure to capture him; I want a talk with this man! Consider this your community service to the house; I will consider your debt paid!"

"No problems here," Spike said, grabbing his sword from the side of his table and sheathing it in an improbable fashion again. "Save the girl, kill the freak. Not getting those mixed up, promise." They stared at him, aghast. "That was a joke. Mostly."

"No!" Stature said. "Mr. Herrimen said capture him! No killing unless you absolutely have to put him down like a rabid dog."

"Yeah, yeah, heard the first time." Spike started to leave.

"Wait!" Bonnie said, following after Spike. "I want in on some of that community service action! I'm paying my debt off too! Except not for the fighting thing."

"Me too!" Tarquin Tisenhausen Tickgrass said loyally.

"Eh, so long as I don't die," Zaphod said amiably, the two men following Bonnie.

"Wait, I didn't authorize that!" Mr. Herrimen protested. They ignored him and left. He sighed. "Acting-Lieutenant Lang, join up with Master William and help him; a woman in uniform and rank of good standing will do much for his authority. And try to keep those ruffians in line. If they can help, all to the good and I'll gladly accept their terms. But I don't want anyone panicking, you understand?"

"Certainly," Stature said. She saluted smartly and left.

"What about us?" Nidah asked.

"Go spread out and help in the evacuation; find as many guards as you can to comb through the house and get people out. It is fortunate that we already have so many residents either out in the town today or centralized in the ground level due to that bit of amusement they found earlier. But we cannot afford to have anyone missed! See to it!"

"Understood!" Mogo said. "What about you? The usual overseering bit?"

"Indeed. I shall remain here until the last and direct the process over the intercom. Alert me through it when it is appropiate for me to leave myself."

"...Sir," Nidah said, incling her head slightly. "Let's go," She said to Mogo, and the two left.

Mr. Herrimen watched them go and closed the door behind them; it was rude to leave the door open. Without making a sound, he hopped back to his chair. He did not tremble; he was too used to things like this to be so easily frightened. In the days when he had been new to Traverse Town, he had. Oh, how he had; for months, he had been a bruised bundle of nerves. It had taken years for him to acclimate properly, and he suspected that he would always be half-expecting the chaos to never be even close to fatal like it had been before the Heartless.

He sat down and paused, looking at the keybeard under his desk. He disliked the contraption and the monitor designed to flip out from the desk's top; he believed in manpower and self-adminstered filing, not in letting machines do proper work. (Usual machines, of course, he wasn't an robot-hater.) He was not all at used to the machine, having only accepted this after the Madame had pressured him into modernizing just a little bit.

Therefore, he was more than a little bewildered to see that the glass-shielded button that started the Emergency Evacuation system was lighting up now and again, that way it did when the house detected an obvious threat and reading the Emergency evacuation system. It was wrong somehow -the lighting was inconsistent and faint, like a dying person's heartrate monitor - but Mr. Herrimen distinctly remembered that it hadn't been on at all. It normally had a faint glow to it, possibly because of all the chaos around, but Mr. Herrimen was reasonably sure that it wasn't supposed to be lit up at all with the security systems out.

Deciding not to risk anything bad happening, he resolved to only risk the Emergency Evacuation button if things got...worse than usual. He glanced back at the large portrait behind him, showing the Madame herself. It was comforting; whenever he turned his chair to leave his desk or when he entered the room, she was the first thing he saw. At the moment, he felt terribly glad that she was abroad on behalf of the Council's business. (She dealt with them more often then he did; Mr. Herrimen disliked the atmopshere of what he considered recklessness and a lack of attention span among them. Commander-Admiral Armstrong and Mister Eisenhardt or whatever his name was were the exceptions to their anarchic outlooks.)

Composing himself, he hit a different button that activated the intercom, and spoke into a pleasantly archaic microphone feeding into the intercom.

"Friends, residents, tourists and newcomers, this is not a joke, a lie or a exercise of any sort..."

...

"...So please listen closely! This is President Herrimen of the Household speaking, and I have been informed that there is currenly a battle going on between a number of our guards and a invading madman that attempted to kill one of our own residents without provocation! As your President, I am hearby ordering each and every one of you to evacuate immediately. Kindly do not interfere in the fight, but leave the house at once! Leave your posessions behind and assist anyone you encounter in evacuating! The Household shall care for you, but only if you are alive for it!"

Mr. Herrimen continued in this general vein; a plainly worded speech urging escape and mutual aid. The ubiquitous speakers placed in every room of the house carried his mesage, and there was no one who didn't hear it. (Mr. Herrimen had tried to have cameras installed as well so he could actually SEE the people he was speaking to. Madame Foster had put her foot down because 'it's too creepy' and gave him a number of downer books set in dystopian settings to discourage this sort of thought; he hadn't brought it up since.)

Of course, some didn't believe it. No matter where you go, whether the gas giants at the outer edge of solar systems or worlds of floating plate-continents traveling in layers bourne on aetheric winds or asteroid-lands where sentient scraps of silicon evolved from constant exposure to cosmic storms, there will always be an idiot who refuses to listen to anything because they're too stubborn to do anything else, so blindly rebellious they might take a Do Not Swim In Case of Crocodiles as a personal affront to their freedom, or just an average idiot.

For these people, who would sit through an Apocalypse and complain that no one warned them about it when the angels made fun of them for being stupid afterwards, there was still hope; namely, the guards, which after the Spike messiness earlier had returned to theirs ususal routine of hanging around in large bunches and annoying people who had excessively big offense files. This made it a fairly simple matter for Spike to alert them to the matter at hand and get them to work evacuating the stubborn idiots who hadn't got the message.

Normally, Bonnie Rockwaller and her bunch of idiots were among that unhappy number; she was surprisingly charismatic in spite of her personality being roughly the same as a badger with chronic toothache, and had garnered a bit of influence among people and that made things a bit difficult when she didn't want people to do something, usually for her own petty reasons. It was a bit odd to see it work in his favor, actually.

"Get moving!" She yelled at a small group of her usual sychopants after explaining the situation to them in extremely clipped tones. It got them moving.

"Let's see, we're not far from the foyer," Spike said. "You lot, meaning Rockwaller and her minions-"

"Hey!" Zaphod said. "I'm not a minion! I'm just the guy that does stuff."

"Right, what you said, rush off to the dining hall and see if anyone's there. Kitchen staff is usually still there anyway, and meet with me in the foyer room!"

"Whatever you say," Bonnie said, and hurried away.

"Wait for us!" Nidah yelled at her, Mogo and her chasing after the itinerants. Spike didn't envy them their job of keeping those three out of trouble, but at least they could use their rabblerousing skills for something beneficient for one.

Speaking of rabblerousers, Spike heard a familiar voice, insulting people. "Slam-dancing orangutang pirates with slighshots and small dogs to do their evil bidding, that's how low on the lameness meter you jerks are!"

"SHUT UP, BLOO!" A crowd roared.

Spike blinked. ...Seriously? He thought to himself. What was Bloo doing making trouble now of all times? Curious dispite himself, he quickly made his way to where he heard the voice coming from and soon discovered Bloo swiftly running away from a very large mob of residents, tourists and a few low-ranked guardsman, all of them absolutely furious.

He had no choice but to stare as they left for the very clear direction of the foyer, and a direct exit from the house. He also noticed that it took over a minute of high speed infuriated running for the mob to thin out a little. "...That's a lotta blighters he got there. Takes a bit of steam off the rest of us." For a moment he wondered if Bloo was actually trying to get people outside, and grinned; jerks often had hearts of gold, slightly tarnished though it often was. He was living proof. "Heh. Not bad."

"RUN, YOU IDIOT!" Frankie yelled, falling behind the rest of the group because she had been pushing the remains of what Spike remembered to be a huge clanking monster of a wheeled machine that was a combination vaccum cleaner, mop machine, air freshener, odor neutralizer, disinfectant factory and all kinds of other things that made it into the worlds perfect cleaning machine, if perhaps the least elegant one ever. "Oh, hey Spike."

"Mornin'," Spike said. "What's up with that?" He gestured at the direction Bloo had gone.

"He told me that there's a lunatic on the roof killing people, or trying to. Got it into his head to get people out of here by ticking them off bad enough to follow him outside. As if Mr. Herrimen's message wasn't enough...still, there's plenty of idiots who thought it was a waste of time with all the incidents we normally get slammed with. Never mind that they don't know about the security problems..."

"And the, uh, thing?" He pointed at the busted machine Frankie had.

"His idea. He rigged it to blow up somehow and caused a hell of a mess. Right in the middle of a crowded hallway. Mess went everywhere! And this was after a few other stunts he pulled; I heard some people ranting about mutant pirahnas with lasers on their heads backing up the toilets again, but to be fair that might not be related to Bloo. At least he managed to get all those people after him." She nudged the busted machine. "I figured that if I pretended that I was mad about it for real, more people would chase him down on my behalf. Wait, I am mad he did that!"

"You can belt him later. Wanna got take a quick turn and rustle up the rest of the layabouts?"

"Sure." The two of them ran off, leaving the useless machine behind.

Spike liked to drop in from time to time. Frankie worked as the head of maintence on the household; as a consequence, they were fairly used to this sort of thing. In a short amount of time, thanks to the fair amount of chaos that had enticed people out of their rooms to see what was going on (and most people not leaving the ground floor until a good deal after breakfast), they got a good-sized number of people heading towards the exit. (Bloo seemed to have egged on most of the people in the area, which was quite good.)

On the way, they passed the room where all the devices, computers and machinery pertaining to the house's security was kept. Frankie paused. "Say, you don't think...?"

"That we jump in there, fix the machines and evacuate everyone?" Spike said flatly. "Don't think it'd go. I'm no mechanist, and you're...well, there's a reason we got guys like Razor to handle this style of thing or outsource. And incidentally...that sort of thing takes a while to do. The system's fried, or whatever the techie word for a computer coma is."

Frankie frowned. "Just a thought." The door to the room opened and a amiable generically Asian face appeared. "Oh, hello...uh, what's your name...Lu-Tze."

Lu-Tze smiled, nodded and left, giving no indication what he had been doing there for the last few minutes ever since he manipulated Bloo into chasing more people out.

"...Isn't he a sweeper?" Spike asked. "The hell was he doing in there for?"

Frankie opened the door. The bewildering array of machinery within was, dispite all expectation, on-line. Or perhaps, to use a medical term more proper for Spike's 'coma' analogy, on life support.

She closed the door. "...By any chance, do you know if we hired him to do basic computer maintence or anything like that?"

"Shouldn't you know?" Spike asked. "You're the one that hires people!"

"Well, I didn't do it! As far as I know, he just showed up a week ago!" Frankie frowned. "And I'm not sure if Mr. Herrimen even knows he exists, Madame Foster likes hiring everyone she talks to (which leads to much irritation for everyone like when she hired that wrestler to be the house therapist), but if it was here she would have given him something more weird to do, like surprise everyone with a chansaw and hockey mask before bed to keep them on their toes."

"So, what, he just showed up one day?"

Frankie nodded. "Pretty much."

"...For some reason, that hits me as a weirdness out there even for this down," Spike grumbled.

...

I am begining to think that you lack experience at fistfighting, Ghostfreak said coldly the third time Andre head-butted Kimblee hard enough to break his nose.

"At least I make an effort!" Kimblee said as he flailed at the Jagermonster; Andre, a much more experienced combatant, slid under his oversized Tetranmand's arm and rammed his elbow into Kimblee's gut. Even with the alien muscles half-melded with his own, it hurt bad.

I give you Tetramand strength. I channel Petrosapien crystal skin, Vulpimancer muscles and the flame powers of a Pyronite, and still you falter! A pity Kevin won't help, he is good at this sort of thing when he isn't being beaten about by a stronger foe that wants to show it's strength...

Shut up, Kevin grumbled.

"Who iz hyu talkin' to?" Andre asked as he threw a punch at Kimblee; Kimblee could hear Ghostfreak whispering intstructions and ducked, dust and bits of wood settling on his head as Andre's punch went into the wall of a small elevator lift.

"The voices in my head."

"Ah, Hy see, that iz how it iz bein'. Get your face off my boot."

"But I haven't got my face in your-"

Andre kicked him in the face, and Kimblee slammed into the fence. "Hyu do now," Andre said, grinning madly as Kimblee hit the floor.

Kimblee got back up and grunted. This was proving tougher than he thought. Guards weren't supposed to be tough, but then these were the strongest of them...he frowned as his body twisted out of the mangled configuation Ghostfreak had induced to enable him to fight. His human shape reasserted itself, and Kimblee wondered why he couldn't maintain any xenobiological alterations for more than a few minutes, and that was for minor ones; extrem transformations, such as producing the musculature structure of a brutish alien beast, could barely be maintained for a hundred and sixty seconds before his own body rebelled at it and rejected the transformation. Kevin seemed to find this amusing, for some reason. Kimblee wondered if he had a hand in it, somehow. The boy was an uncounted variable.

He took a moment to recount the situation. Razor, the most dangerous in the group due to his superior on-the-fly strategies and fighting ability: blasted off the roof by a lucky explosion and already climbing back up. Freya, whose leaping abilities and dragon-themed techniques made her extremely threatening to his plan, jumping to all the outer rooms to get the people in there out. Andre, who was basically insane and a berseker, was right in front of him. It annoyed Kimblee that Andre gave him trouble; he was smarter than Andre, he should have run circles around him. He'd been told about Jagermonsters in some lecture or another throughout his travels in the aftermath of Amestris' destruction, that they were made by a truly deranged mad scientist family's secret formula that turned those who drank into either dead men, mad men or the 'hunter monsters' that were the Jagerkin. Stronger than machines, so tough hanging would only give them a gentle swing and as insane as the Orks that now held alliegience to the distant Comic Kingdom (which was a lot more terrifying than it's mildly goofy name let on, perhaps why they sometimes called themselves the Brighthammer Federation owing to the fact that they were technically a federation united under the rulership of a king, making it a bit of an empire too); Kimblee hadn't cared and that was costing him.

Kimblee clapped his hands together. Collateral damage could not be permitted.

Freya found Razor climbing up the side of the wall with his bare claws. "May I lend a hand?" She asked, standing atop a nearby balcony.

"Shouldn't you be getting the people out?" He asked. The battle had not been kind to him; more of his mechanical parts had been exposed by Kimblee's pinpoint explosions, and the only thing keeping him from being dead a dozen times over was Kimblee keeping them curiously muted.

"I do move quite fast, you know. The stubborn and ill-timed have been set straight, or kicked off the balconies." She grabbed his mechanical hand, not brooking any argument. "Hold yourself ready, sir."

She pulled him up onto the balcony. An unready jump could tear him to shreds. "Kay, I can live with that..." Another explosion rocked the house, and a few of the tiles that covered the house's slanting rooftops fell over their heads. "Freya, something's not right!"

"Besides the madman that came out of nowhere?" She said dryly.

"Well, yeah! Haven't you noticed that he hasn't left the summit point at all? He holds his ground, he pushes us away, but he refuses to make bigger explosions that could kill us except when we're in different spots!"

"You suppose he's more than a usual maniac, then?"

"It just doesn't make any sense! Why would he just show up to kill us all and hold himself back? We've seen him make big explosions easily, so why is he holding back? A chip in his brain that won't let him? Some bigger plan that needs the house relatively undamaged? A healthy respect for architecture?"

"And he seems to rely on his alchemy too much for a person with those shapeshifting powers of his," Freya remarked. "Even if he has difficulty controlling them or even fighting with fisticuffs. Odd...they're not dissimilar to young Benjamin Tennyson's transformations, if much more coarse in form."

"If by that you mean rampant body horror, sure. I don't get this. Idiot keeps going crazy in the weirdest places." He frowned, and grinned, his mechanical side sliding back to help the gesture. "Freya, back to the rooftop!"

She nodded, grabbed him, and jumped.

In the meantime, Andre had scored a lucky hit; a good slice through Kimblee's shoulder. It seemed to hurt much more. "Damn you!" Kimblee hissed, grabbing his arm.

Kevin was laughing at him. Like an wounded animal, cackling and echoing in the skull that wasn't his, like so many other people that dared to question his skills and his worth. Kimblee couldn't kill Kevin, couldn't wipe him away, couldn't make his existence disappear, couldn't make the laughing stop and the giggling stop and the sounds of mocking hateful noise stop, Kevin couldn't die and it was making Kimblee crazy and thinking in italics more than usual and he just wanted to wrap his hands around the stupid boy's neck and squeeze until the ugly noisemaking stopped-

"Heh, not so tough now, huh?" Andre said, licking his claws free of blood. "You not half-bad with the fighting even if you a newbie, but you shtink at it with someun like me."

Kimblee couldn't take it anymore. Couldn't take the meaningless nothing people's noisemaking anymore."Shut it."

"Vay I see it, you'z a new guy. Some tourist dat t'ink's he tough enough to take on de town, so he start vith the big 'un: Fuster's Home! Vell, ain't working so vell for ya, eh?"

"Don't you dare to comprehend the way I see things, you beast!" Kimblee screamed and grabbed his arm. "Damn, what did you do to my arm!"

"Wuss," Andre said unsympathetically. "Pipe down and lissen to da master. You listen to dis advice, which iz advice dat Hy am giving hyu gratis free for nothink. And yez, I know dat's redundant, don't say it. Hyu new guy. Don't go overboard on your first day. Don't blow up dis house iffen hyu ain't even going to do it right!"

"I told you to be quiet and stop guessing at my motivations, you freak! What has science down to make you!"

Andre ignored him. "Chill out and go home, I'm going to say. Mebbe we let this go, okay? Prob'bly not going to happen, but you get away, you train up some. Mebbe practice on some warlords or cult leaders or runavay mad science-guys in the mountains, get some practice in and do de town a favor. Have some fun! Den you come back, set it up with the Freedom League for a nice appointment for a good mess and make it memorable. You get it out of you system, nobody else gots to die, and you stop wasting our time. Okay? Because you no good."

Kimblee's eyes flashed. "Dont...you dare...look down...ON ME!" He clapped his hands together, not listening to the insane laughter in his head (Kevin was so happy and crazy and he felt too real and Kimblee actually felt scared) and let the energy shock through his arms and traumatize the air, introducing currents of alchemical force, change and alteration and dynamism spiralling out from his palms and-

No. The big structure in the very middle of the summit rooftop like a crown was right there, the explosion could utterly destroy it-

Kimblee dropped his hands and almost got his leg snapped from a heavy kick; Andre was even stronger than he looked. But he couldn't risk making explosions, not right here and now. The circle had to stay intact, he couldn't risk it now and he couldn't let himself be compelled to breaking for a pitiful beastman and a whole lot of other things that lended themselves nicely to Kimblee's train of thought until Andre grabbed his wrist, pulled his arm out and bit him.

Once, Kimblee had fought a rogue State Alchemist who fought by transmuting metal into intricate machinery: the Gearspring Alchemist, from his attentive detail to his art. During the fight, a beartrap had snapped closed around his arm. This hurt worse.

Kimblee went down screaming, blood streaming out in thick spurts over his nice coat and Andre's green twisted face; Andre twisted hard to the right, and if Ghostfreak hadn't swelled his skin into Arburian Pelarota armorplates he would have lost his arm. Andre let go and backed away with a wince - he'd nearly cracked his teeth there - his face bloody and grinning as he kicked Kimblee in the side and knocked him off the ground. "Hyu're weak," Andre said, leering. "But taste fonny. Like...a thing dat pipple ain'ts s'posed ta taste like. Explain!"

""No," Kimblee said, deceptively calm as he tried to stem the bloodflow on his arm with pressure. Strange; the blood didn't seem to be flowing as fast as he thought. Or perhaps he had become a fast healer.

Razor slammed into Kimblee from behind, hopped off Razor's head with his not-metal foot and landed on top of the rooftop structure. "'Scuze me!"

"Oy, boss, what's de rush!" Andre complained. "Almost lost me hat!"

"Sorry."

"Damn, you're back," Kimblee said, standing up. He almost clapped his hands, but remembered where Razor was. At this angle...a blast would ruin everything. And he was so close to fruition. Just a few more minutes. Just a little more time...and they would all disappear.

"Yeah, real sorry about that." Razor's sarcasm was a brittle and mean thing.

Freya appeared next to Razor. "I hope not to impugn on your time, you nasty little man," She said to Kimblee. "But we are attracting a crowd." Sure enough, there was a truly enormous crowd around Foster's; from Kimblee's vantage point, he coud see the insect-swarm of so very many of the Foster's residents just outside the house. Watching them, too fascinated to move. A few were actively leaving, but most had succumbed to that Traverse Town instinct for entertainment and were too distracted by the fight with the invader to their home to follow.

Freya added, "And it would be such a shame to disappoint an audience," but Kimblee wasn't listening. He was calculating. Thinking. He needed a few more minutes. He had to stall them until then, but that wouldn't be difficult; just try not to get killed or let that structure on the roof get destroyed and it would all work out. But those people down below...

They couldn't run, that would spoil everything! No running, no fleeing, no escape, no one gets out alive, that sort of thing. But...Kimblee considered fast. If they kept watching...if he kept it interesting...they wouldn't want to leave. They would be too fascinated by their own self-indulgent obsession with amuesment to be sensible until it would be too late. They were not going to leave if he made it good.

He smiled. This was going to work out.

Down on the ground below, Spike and Frankie ran out on the front yard with a large crowd of evacuees, along with Bonnie and a ton of people she and her gang had gotten out through dramatic speeches, and stood back a ways to see what was going on. "Think we got everybody?" Spike asked.

Frankie looked around; she knew everybody. Spike didn't know how she had the patience or psychology to know so many people and care about them, but she did it. "...Yeah, looks like! We got guards chasing the rest out, it'll only be a few minutes before we're in the clear!"

"Don't curse us..." Spike said ominously.

"Hey!" Bonnie said. "Wait for us! I don't-" She stopped. "Ooh. What's going on up there?"

"Looks like a stand-off," Tarquin Tisenhausen Tickgrass said. He looked extremely uncomfortable in the sunlight, even with his protective gear on. Spike had less troubles with it, through that was perhaps less of comfort level and because Spike was really weird even for a vampire.

"Sounds cool," Zaphod said. "Picture it! The plucky guards standing against the psycho intruder. Noble nine-to-fivers and the crazy-ass bomber with an attitude problem. Guys with uniforms and guy...who can't decide if he's going for a Nazi vibe or what. I'm going for the film rights and you can't stop me. Try and see, yeah?"

"You can see what he's wearing from down here?" Frankie asked.

"Yep. Nanoscopic binocular lenses. Had them installed last week."

"What's going on?" Nidah and Mogo said.

"Shouldn't you guys evacute other guys?" Frankie said.

"The boss is having us keep an eye on the idiots," Mogo said.

"Oh."

"Stand-off up top with the big guards, not counting Stature, and whoever's picking a fight now. Zaphod says he has binoculars for lenses or something now."

"Yep," Zaphod confirmed. "Huh; he's doing something weird with his hands. He's got funny little circles on them, can't make them out-" A bright flash of light whitewashed the world, and then they could clearly see a cloud of smoke over the top of the mansion. It cleared away fast, showing that no one had been harmed and the explosion had been directed in midair for some reason, but they could easily make out that the smoke spelled out I Am Not At All Suspicious and a little arrow pointing at Kimblee. In no time, much of the crowd started talking about this and arguing whether it was a bit of honesty, an ironic confession of being a villain or a weird joke.

"Where'd the explosion come from!" Bonnie yelled.

"Guy made it with his bare hands. Nice."

Nidah stared blankly. For a moment, she looked like all the nice happy things that make people human had been torn out of here and left with the rest to make her quietly insane. "...Did you just say that they're fighting a man with wierd circles on his hands who made the air explode?"

"Yeah."

"...No. No, that's ridiculous. It couldn't be. That's just not..." Nidah shook her head. "...It can't be. There's just no way. Mogo?"

"Yo," Her bat friend said.

"Take me up! The guys up there could use some back-up, and I am absolutely not harboring suspicions about a mass-murderer from my world improbably showing up here."

"Okay." He fluttered up, grabbed her shoulders with his flexible feet and somewhat awkwardly lifted her into the air. He flew off, though weighed down somewhat by Nidah.

"Maybe we should run for it," Frankie said as another explosion rang over head, this one spelling out And Now For Something Completely Different! prompting a few people to exclaim 'Hey, I love that show!'.

"Nah," Spike said. "Your boss got me to get you out here and help out beating that guy up there. Couldn't run if I liked; bit more than my personal safety's at stake, yeah? Said I'd do it, didn't I?"

Frankie rolled her eyes. "Oh, fine, just try not to get killed, you lunatic." She lightly punched him on the shoulder.

"Only done it twice and I ain't aiming for a third." Spike jumped with supernatural strength and speed, jumping several dozen feet clear onto the wall of the house, the spikes on his boots and the metal claws on his gauntlets giving him improvised handholds. Mogo and Nidah still were much higher than him. "Oy, why don't I get a flying escort!" He raged.

Back on the rooftop, Kimblee was trying to avoid getting gored by Freya, who had made a rudimentary spear from a bit of railing. "You're a good little soldier, aren't you?" He asked.

"Please stop talking, your voice annoys me," She said.

Kimblee kept needling her. His temper of a few moments ago faded; he was happy at the oppertunity to talk again. "I expect you have done your duty in many wars." A sharp point came within inches of his neck and scored a good hit on his jaw. "Yes," He said after he clicked his jaw back into place. "You certainly have the reflexes that only honest battle experience can offer. Tell me...are you one of the honest few that took satisfaction in it?"

"Hy am!" Andre said.

"Andre, stop talking to the looney, you'll just encourage him," Razor said.

"Why do you call me abnormal when he agrees with me?" Kimblee asked, a little hurt. "He's the same as me."

"Am not," Andre said. "I haff a nicer hat."

"Well, Andre may be a cheerfully psychotic monster with a weird thing for incredibly terrifying women, but he's our monster!" Razor said. "You? Not so much."

"Aw, thanks!"

"At least he understands me, then," Kimblee said, much to Andre's indignation. ""Incidentally, do you have the time?"

"It's a little past noon, why?" Razor asked. "And why are you making small talk in the middle of a fight? Banter, yes, that's an accepted tradition and I would kill you right now if you tried to break it, but asking the time? That's stupid."

"Ah, thank you. I was a bit worried that I was losing track of things. Happily, things are progressing according to plan!"

"Plan!" Razor said. "What plan! I knew you were up to something! Well, beyond trying to kill people, I mean."

Kimblee smiled. "Oh, is that so? How nice. Just keep waiting...the show is nearly ready." He paused, turned, and smiled. "And yet more players have arrived."

He stood still and took the hit as Spike slammed his feet into his chest in a dynamic entry; it almost smashed his ribs. "You're a bit strange," Spike commented. "And it's me saying it, doesn't come up much."

"Of course," Kimblee said. "You are entitled to your opinion. The question is...can you fight for your convictions?"

"I fight for the hell of it!" Spike said, drawing his impressively large single-edged sword. "Conviction comes into it when I please!"

"Impressive words," Kimblee said, Omnitrix energy cracking around him. "Now die by them."

Spike frowned under his facemask at the green static. "What the hells are you doing?" Not one to take chances when it's not that fun, he focused and cut the air so hard it split, the vacuum exploding out into a cut-shaped blast that carried the cutting edge of the slash; Kimblee got in it's way and destroyed it with a blast of his own before it could damage the central building.

"Please don't do that," Kimblee said curtly, his hands smoking. "We cannot afford excessive collateral damage!"

When you say 'we', do you mean you and the other fighters in a mock-friendly way or are you talking about us? Kevin asked. Kimblee didn't bother answering.

Razor was thinking hard. Kimblee was avoiding damage to that part of the house and was even putting himself in danger to stop it...he had mentioned some sort of plan...he was acting like someone who hadn't even begun to fight and he was generally not acting like a random lunatic...Razor put it all together. "GUARDS! SPIKE! THIS FREAK HAS A CRAZY PLAN GOING AND I BET IT INVOLVES THE CENTRAL PART OF THE ROOFTOP!"

"You're intelligent," Kimblee said snidely. "How will you wow me next? Conclude that the sun rises in the morning? Explain that grass grows? Discover that shooting yourself in the head is not conducive towards living?"

"You're a jackass." Razor grinned, his bifurcated face nearly as frightening as Kimblee's inhumanly calm expression. "But I can use that. Hey, Andre! Spike, I got a job for you guys! SMASH UP THE SUMMIT LIFT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROOFTOP!"

Kimblee froze. "What."

"Hyu gotz it!" Andre said, running ahead and smashing right through a wall, coming out through another wall without losing any speed.

"NO!" Kimblee screamed. "NOT NOW! WHY ARE YOU DESTROYING YOUR OWN HOME?"

"We can always rebuild," Freya said.

"You won't have that problem," Spike said.

Kimblee's eyes narrowed. "No." He clapped his hands as the Omnitrix energies within him surged, Kineceleran DNA superimposing over his own and turning his skin a faded blue and black-striped, his face narrowing and his knees reversing direction.

He ran, and the powers of his alien form amplified that small bit of kinetic movement a thousand-fold; he became a blue-black blur and slammed into Spike, his hands slamming onto the blade before the force of his impact threw Spike over the rooftop and right through the holes Andre had made, slamming into Andre himself and the two skidding across the rooftop and hitting the rails lining the roof. "Ow!" They both said. Kimblee cursed his impetousness; they had almost stopped inside the elevator itself.

"Ow, dat hurt," Andre said, extracating himself from Spike. "...Er, hyu swod s'posed to be turning bleck like dat?"

"Eh?" Spike said. The metal of his sword had turned a deep cold iron-black and was hissing slightly. "I really hate alchemy," He said before the sword exploded, and he and Andre went flying off the rooftop. Scraps of bent and twisted metal was left behind, a few sad remnants of a weapon.

"You'll pay for that!" Razor roared, his mechanical claws telescoping into two-foot-long blades, larger ones sliding over his knuckles and a air compression cannon unfolding from his forearm. "No one lays a hand on the men and women under my command! NO ONE!"

"Then why send them to fight?" Kimblee asked reasonably. "You command them to fight. In fights, they will get hurt. It's fairly standard logic."

"Arrgh! You...just...shut up!"

"A stunning counterargument."

"STOP STEALING ALL THE GOOD LINES!" Spike yelled as he and Andre came flying from the direction they had fallen (only coming back instead of falling) and they both slammed into Kimblee. This time, Kimblee got a good amount of boot in the face and shoulder.

"Damn it, where did you come from this time?" Kimblee asked after he got back up.

"We gave them a head's up you sick genocidal person of questional parentage!" Nidah yelled as she and Mogo came flying up from where Spike and Andre had come from this time. "I kicked them right back as they were falling! Tricky, but I've done worse!"

"I'd say you're about due for a promotion," Razor said. "What took you so long to get here?"

"Lifting a teenage girl with her mass is not easy," Mogo said as he let Nidah down and fluttered down. "Humans are much heavier than they think."

Nidah seemed to ignore the remark, which really lent itself to a 'did you say I'm fat' moment. She glared at Kimblee. "You damned dog of Amestris. You're alive. What the hell are you doing been all alive and breathing and people-shaped!"

"The natural order of things," Kimblee said. "Who are you...ah." He smiled slightly. "I know you."

"You should," Nidah said. She did not tremble with rage. She did not scream with hate fit to burn the world. She did not curse Kimblee with all the foul names her people had seen fit to devise. She did not need to do any of those things: the look she fixed Kimblee was worse than anything she could have done or said. "And I know you."

"What is this?" Freya asked. "You know this man? Is he from your world?"

Nidah laughed hollowly. "Oh yeah. You could say that. You could, you can, it's so sick I could cry but you could say I know him." She looked like she did want to cry, with rage and misery alike. She smiled twistedly. "Did you tell the guys your name, you sick freak? Or did you lose that sense of courtesy?"

"Who iz he again?" Andre said. "Hy'm losing track of t'ings here!"

"Ah, since the situation calls for it," Kimblee said. He just needed a few more minutes more. He could humor this girl. "Permit me to introduce myself at last!" He swept his hat and bowed. "My name is Solf J. Kimblee. But I expect that this girl knows me as the Red Lotus Alchemist."

"And the Mad Bomber of Amestris," Nidah said.

"A State Alchemist? Like Edward Elric?" Freya said. "One of those people from that military dictatorship from your country Amestris?"

"We are from the same country," Nidah said. "...He is not my countryman."

"Is this about the Ishbal Civil War?" Kimblee asked. "Because you brought that upon yourself. It was a single child. Just one little girl that got herself shot. Why make such a fuss?"

"Ishbalan Civil War?" Razor said, confused. Recent history from their world was not something the Ishbalans or Amestrians among them cared to discuss, espicially with each other. "What's that?"

"It was a nasty war from Nidah's homeland of Ishbal and the country they were a part of, Amestris," Spike said. "Little girl was murdered by a Amestrian officer, and the Ishbalan people were pissed enough with the military intervention in their holy land, so they basically went crazy with rebelling. Went on for a few years until the Fuhrer got bored and sent in the military to execute everyone in a full-scale genocide campaign." Everyone stared at him. "What? I talk to Fullmetal all the time, he don't want this sort of thing to be forgotten. Stuff like that, can't be ignored or forgotten, you know? I been alive a long time, I remember stuff like that. Things that sicken even monsters, I've seen. Ishbal sounds like one of them."

"A nice little summery," Nidah said quietly. "I was there, you know."

"And so was I," Kimblee said fondly. "I got quite a reputation. Everyone knows me as the alchemist who killed more Ishbalans than any other one involved." He paused and smiled, remembering a few other pernitent details. "As was many other Amestrians living here that you hold in such high esteem. Roy Mustang...Alex Louis Armstrong, brother of Olivier Armstrong...Riza Hawkeye..." He continued. Razor blinked in horror at the list. "A shame; you hold these people in such high esteem without knowing what they did."

"Alex Louis Armstrong? That charming buffoon from the Justice Maines?" Freya asked. "Big, noble, is outrageously dramatic about everything and treats everybody like they were his closest family? Enjoys smashing things to transmute them into effies of himself for missles?"

"Wait. Roy Mustang? That guy from the Peace Maines? You can't seriously expect me to believe he was in a genocide campaign," Mogo said.

"Ask him yourself," Kimblee said. "Ask him about Ishbal and see if his eyes don't cloud with horror. See if perhaps he doesn't choke with the guilt of the dead he hoists on his shoulders like a damned martyr. Would you like to know of all the women and children he burned alive on his country's orders? The city blocks that burst into flame with the snap of a finger? The buildings that he made into crematoriums? Or I could tell you the story of how I once found Armstrong in the midst of making a wall to cordorn off Ishbalan runaways as they fled the firing squads. How they panicked to find a towering wall cutting off their escape! How the children cried before the gunshots silenced them. One of the men tried to shield a woman with his own body, you know, quite noble. And Armstrong made it there and listened to them die. I saw him punch a hole in the wall so a young woman and an old woman could escape. He said something about fleeing to them. Quite unprofessional of him; lucky for him I blew their heads off before they could get away or he could have been tried for treason."

"...Hyu got problems," Andre said. Coming from a Jagermonster, this was a very bad sign.

"In fact," Kimblee continued. "I expect that's what caused his mental breakdown. He had to be sent home, you know that? I heard that one day, he found the body of a child his alchemy killed and he just broke down there like a machine that snapped a gear or two. Bawled something about 'how can we be fighting this brutal war' or murdering civilians or some other nonsense. They had to drag him back to Central. I think it made him a little crazy; it would certainly explain his outlandish style."

"No," Nidah said. "He's always been that way. Told me so."

"...And you associate with a man that murdered your people?" Kimblee asked.

Nidah frowned. "I don't need to answer to a animal like you. They call you State Alchemists 'Dogs of the military', yeah? For people like the Flame Alchemist or the Strongarm Alchemist, they were dragged on those chains. Choked with them. I cannot forgive them for what they've done, not with my country a bitter memory...but I will not take revenge either. The people of Ishbal dare not disgrace Ishvala with more bloodshed! Whereas you...are a rabid animal. The leash is for your handler's protection as much as your control!"

"...Interesting remarks," Kimblee said. "That is the standard belief of the Ishvalan religious order. Enduring your hatred for vast indignities done to you. A pity your fellow Ishbalan warrior-monk does not share the same beliefs. Do you call him Scar as well?"

Nidah's eyes narrowed. "Watch your mouth with what you say about God-Hand Scar," She hissed. "You filth. You are undeserving of even speaking his alias, given in place of the name he had forsaken!"

"'God-Hand Scar'!" Kimblee said, laughing. "What manner of stupidity is this? Is that the name you have given him? The name the remnants of Ishbal have given their great hope, to the beast that slaughtered the despoilers of Ishbal?"

"Enough talk," Nidah said. She unsheathed her punch lasdaggers again. "I do not do this in the name of revenge...but I am putting you down like a rabid dog."

"How appropiate," Kimblee said. He glanced up at the sun's position, and grinned so broadly his face should've split. "But I'm afraid your revenge will have to wait!"

"I told you, it's not revenge, it's simple pragmatism and...wait, what do you mean?"

"The show," Kimblee said. "Is about to start."

"What's doing what-now?" Stature said as she popped out of seemingly nowhere. (In reality, she had shrunk to such a tiny size that she develouped porportional strength similar to a flea, but on a capacity relative to her usual size. This gave her the ability to jump to the top of the house in under a few minutes; she'd only just arrived, of course, after herding enough people out of the house.)

"...What, more of you!" Kimblee said. "Oh, never mind, I can work with this..." He clapped his hands and laid his hands on the ground; everybody who knew what he could do, espicially Nidah, recoiled, but all Kimblee did was use another ability of his transmutation circles to shove the ground under him upwards and launch him into the air at such an angle that he landed neatly atop the little building in the middle of the rooftop.

He clapped again, and once more laid his hands down, touching the roof of the building he was on, the highest point of all Foster's. A blue pulse flashed over it, the building under it and the entire rooftop around him.

The surface cracked. A slightly larger layer that he had transmuted earlier to protect something else crumbled, and revealed at the feet of his unwitting witnesses was a large eight-point restructuring matrix; a circle with a octagon drawn within it, small circles where " the two shapes met. The circle had been carved deep into the ground, at least three feet deep, and it looked like the material he had 'moved' out of the way with alchemy had been transmuted into the protective layer above them and reinforced with building materials from all around; no wonder the rooftop had looked a bit shoddier. It was still quite impressive for alchemy, which revolved around the concept of the conservation of mass.

"A transmutation circle!" Freya said. "Razor was right! You did have a plan!"

"Obviously," Kimblee said.

Andre glanced around. "Hy only see circle-shtuff on the ground by uz. Whyfor hyu protect that place hyu standing on so much? Hy don't see anything on it."

"I needed a dramatic place to make it happen," Kimblee said honestly.

This was so stupid, the sheer stupidness hit all of the fighters except Spike and Andre hard enough to make them fault on their faces. "True, gotta look important," Spike agreed.

"If hyu gotz to do sometink, HYU DOES IT VITH A PASSHION!" Andre roared. "...Even if it iz beink evil and schtuff."

"Why do only the morons ever agree with me?" Kimblee wondered.

Because the multiverse is really unsubtle and pointing something out to you? Kevin said.

Because you speak on such a high level that only the truly stupid are able to comprehend it because their stupidity goes so deep into negative-intellect that it comes out the other side as semi-genius? Ghostfreak suggested.

...No, I'm going to bet on my guess.

"Anyway, go see what's going on below," Kimblee said, clapping his hands again and directing it at the people below him, grateful that they were packed together; he touched the ground and bits of the floor seperated and spun around them, wrapping them in little cocoons of stone and tile and whatever building material the house was made of and hardening. Kimblee transmuted again, this time turning the floor underneath each of them into little flippers that tossed them off the rooftop in a tight cluster. The transmutation circle was left intact.

Kimblee wasn't surprised when a few of the better jumpers or fliers - guards and experienced residents alike - intercepted the trapped fighters and ferried them to the ground. "They'll make good starts," He promised himself.

On the ground, Frankie had ran over to the first of the people-cocoons when she saw them falling, along with Bloo, his hate-club disbanding when they realized what was going on a while ago; Eduardo, who had returned after getting their friends somewhere safe, had broke it open and owing to the inverse statistics of someone close rather than some stranger in a time of drama, it was Spike. "Sonuvablitsnack!" He yelled as soon as his head was freed.

"Spike!" Frankie warned.

"What?" He looked at Eduardo meaningfully. "I didn't swear! Technically."

"Is true," Eduardo said helpfully, and broke the rest of the cocoon off.

"People keep doing that to me," Spike remarked, and shook himself off, checking his outfit for tears; even a little sunlight would burn holes in him. "Awright, the others alive?"

A good distance away, they could hear Razor scream, "KIMBLEE! I'M GONNA HIT YOU IN THE FACE WITH A LASER!"

"It's a fair bet," Bloo said.

"Where's Mac and the others?" Frankie asked.

"They're okay," Bloo said. "Uh, they are okay, right, Eduardo?"

Eduardo nodded fervently. "Si! I put them in a nice alley right by Mr. Cyborg's shop! No one bother them there! Me hope."

"Not that encouraging," Spike said. "Better than I thought-" He froze. "...What's that?" He sniffed the air, his facemask shifting against his wrinkled nose. "Wuzzat smell? Like somethin chemical...getting worse." He looked around. "It's coming from...everywhere."

...

In the buildings bordering Foster's that Kimblee had broke into, alchemically mutilated people and trapped them in, bad things were happening.

In the family household at the top of his 'circle' outside Foster's property, a homemade bomb made from carbonated beverages and a lot of bottle caps was foaming over and rattling against the sides of the gas-fired generator the father of the household had kitbashed together just in case, and this generator was hooked up to every single appliance in the house Kimblee had found, and was sparking dangerously. This was not going to do well with the gas leaking out, or the family themselves, lying on their sides and comforting one another even as their insides twisted and fused and mutated into something else.

In a modest little home made from several trailers mashed with a gunship bridge that no one had quite been certain about, a husband and wife of a happy sixteen month's marriage were tied together in their bathroom, wired to a assortment of explosives that Kimblee had created from the weapons they had collected as a hobby; they went all over the house, and they were a little miffed that their house was probably going and explode soon. Oh, and kill them too. Still, they didn't mind too much; they'd had a good run of it, even after surviving the destruction of their worlds and having to deal with the stigma of interspecies marriages from some people, what with him being a halfling and her being a half-giant. At the moment, it was enough for the both of them to take strength from the other and go out together.

In a often-contested duplex, amid a whole assortment of chemicals easily transmuted into powerful explosives, a pair of older teenagers that had finished their schooling were tied together under a false floor Kimblee had transmuted, but he had made it from a unusual material he'd used various chemicals he found as a base; another homemade chemical he'd found was airbourne and highly acidic to this type of building material: as a result, the floor was giving through in patches and bursts, much to the surprise of the mutual friend that had come looking for them when they hadn't answered their phone in spite of the super-special awesome news about an update on a up-coming movie they were all into. He was understandably surprised to see that his friends were tied to a shallow pit in their own living room, their body's distorted, bloated and in some places the skin had worn so thing that he could see muscles and organs that had melted into a yellowish gel. He heisitated a few seconds, and rushed to save them. It would wind up being a bad idea, but the correct action must be undertaken regardless of the consequences.

In a small apartment building, an old woman had been tied up inside her own bedroom, surronded by all manner of ticking oil drums she had kept as a reminder of her old days as an oil baron back when she had roamed the desert lands of Crucible, an idea that had lately struck her as exqusitely stupid because nobody here used fossil fuels and more importantly oil was very flammable, and it hadn't taken that insane intruder very long to convert them into what looked very much like time bombs; he'd put a few here, in the basement and in her lookout room for some reason, muttering something about 'equally distubuted explosions' and 'it must work but it must also look correct'. She was trying her hardest to get loose, but that bastard had changed her own bed into a excrutiatingly tight cage that kept her from moving. She couldn't slip out. With the gag in her mouth, she couldn't scream. She did have time to think, and she considered that much of her life had been senseless, starting with her stubborn specisism and human superiority attitudes, driving away everyone who didn't share the same opinons she did. She had convinced herself that she alone was right, and the entire world was completely mad. Only now, she was forced to conclude that she had wasted her life and she had become an embittered wretch, but in spite of that it had still been...a happy one. Her body seemed to be expanding into a shapeless horror that was moving inside, but she was sufficiently distracted by this revelation to make this body horror seem minor.

Finally, in the abandoned news place, Dusty the maintence technician had been trying to sit up for the past few minutes but was finding it hard; his muscles were hardening and fusing with his bones, softening now and almost liquid. He could feel his skin rippling; he remembered movies when the unlucky guy who's just there to show how nasty the monster is gets an egg put inside him and is torn apart when it's born. He knew how that guy felt now. The ground above him was cracking - microscopic explosions taking it apart bit by bit - and it was begining to bother him that he couldn't feel it settle on him even while he saw it. He hadn't felt much for a few minutes now; probably his nerve endings had been melted by whatever monstrous thing was happening to him.

In spite of it, he laughed. The sound was tiny, foriegn and weak in the gloom, but he laughed regardless. He smiled honestly, blood trailing down his lips and making tiny blasts when they hit the air. It was tearing up his face pretty badly, not that he minded very much. "Heh," He said. He had thought about what Kimblee had said earlier, and he'd figured a few things out. "...At least I get to go out with a bang."

He grinned, closed his eyes and let all his troubles pass. He had reached the point were conjecture, hopes and fears were pointless and did not bother himself with them.

A moment later, his body, as well as that of all the other people Kimblee had transmuted in the buildings, absorbed enough oxygen to fuel their body's alchemical transformation into a potent combustive gel and they all exploded horribly in massive chain-blasts that on their own would have been powerful enough to shatter bedrock, but this also set off all the secondary explosives Kimblee had prepared in the buildings as well.

Kimblee knew explosions. He knew them like the Flame Alchemist knew the splitting of air to create precious flammable hydrogen gasses or the Iron-Blood Alchemist knew how to draw on the metal in his blood to augment the metal in a simple building and transform it into a mass of weapons. So it was no accident that every rigged drum of oil, every homemade canister of explosive chemicals, every jury-rigged on-the-spot thing that made a big mess that he'd put around the buildings with expert precision had been set up in just such a way that when the buildings erupted in noise and a showering rain of rubble, those very explosions cracked the ground in just such a way that they arced to the next building.

All it took was a few moments. That was all. Less then fifteen seconds for sixteen people to die so their bodies could fuel a massive explosion, at least half a dozen more people to be crushed or severely injured in the ensuing rain of debris or the explosions themselves. Fifteen seconds for the ground to be so badly torn up to make a perfect circle with each building as a 'point' on it seen from overhead, and for the tremors to collapse underground tunnels and basements, killing twenty people that were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. (Some of them were evil and trying to smuggle other evil people for their own reasons, though, so it balanced out a bit.) It took even less than all of that for the entire neighborhood to screech to a sudden horrified halt. These people had seen destruction before. They had seen their homes torn asunder and their families massacred. They'd seen their worlds vanish into nothingness, and they'd seen countless random attacks and monsters attack them generally for no apparent reason or even on purpose by their town leaders, but those times, nobody ever died or even generally got really hurt.

The common people of Traverse Town had not seen death since an entire distract had been anhillated in a vicious war not so long ago, and the horror of it simply made so many of them just...watch.

But in those few moments, things got worse for everyone inside Foster's. Much worse.

"Yes..." Kimblee whispered as he saw the smoke and dust and thick airbourne debris rise above them, so thick and dark and perfect.

"What the hell!" Spike yelled as the crowd at the base of Foster's broke into a chaos that was worse than usual. Panic. Screaming. Running for the exits and people fighting to get there first and trying to kill each other while the guards tried to stop them or even got in on the fighting themselves, their duties forgotten in their terror. Blood was raining on the ground, not only from that of the sacrifices from the buildings Kimblee had rigged to blow.

"Yes..." The echoes of the explosions roared through Kimblee, rocking him to his core; the five so loud to make lesser men deaf, vast existences here only for an instant, but so much greater than any single life, needing only moments to change the world. They had roared and now the screams followed, and Kimblee wanted to scream at the absolute beauty of it, the glorious perfection of the symphony of screams and devastation. His symphony. The Symphony of Destruction.

Inside the house, Mr. Herrimen had fallen on the floor, the explosions strong enough to knock his office astray, and he was currently trying to extracite himself from a large amount of filing cabinets. He was trying to move, to reach, to hit that damned button regardless of what might happen, the consequences could not be worse with explosions going on-

"YES!" Kimblee screamed, his veneer of humanity and affability and sanity tearing away, and left exposed to the world was the monster he knew himself to be. Spittle flew from his mouth. His lips were stretched in a huge horribly jubilant grin. His hands clutched tight around his chest, like he was afraid of his heart tearing away on wings of joy and he wanted to catch it just in case. "YES! WHAT A GLORIOUS NOISE! INSECTS PERISH! MAYFLIES VANISH! BEASTS OF MEAT LACKING SENSE OR REASON DISAPPEAR, AND THE MUSIC BURNS THROUGH! IT! IS! GLORIOUS!"

The people below him spoke. He did not listen to the noises of insects. They meant nothing, they were nothing. But he did have a appreciation for drama.

"BEHOLD, PEOPLE OF FOSTER'S! YOUR LIVES HAVE MEANING!" He screamed, ignoring Kevin and Ghostfreak's babbling; the first furious and a little underwhelmed, the latter exultant at the devastation and that which was left to come. "SETTLE DOWN AND EMBRACE YOUR CALLING! KNOW THE SOLE THING THAT YOUR LIVES COULD EVER HAVE MEANING IN! ENDURE IT AND JOIN TO MY CONVICTIONS!"

He slammed his hands down on the ground. Light streamed forth around him, in sparks and flashes and then flooding out from the circle in the rooftop around him, building up as the people below recoiled, feeling pulled and hurt and starting to scream so lovely even as the light then began to flow at the much greater circle created by the destruction of the explosions, pooling in the rubble of the buildings and swelling up like a chorus.

This was not the same blue light as normal alchemy. Normal alchemy was almost always yellow or blue; sometimes specialized forces of nature made it a different coloration, but this was not the green of bio-alchemy or the orange of heat modification or even the purple of the vastly experienced metal workers: this was a vibrant and brilliant and utterly exciting red.

Red, like the color of the Stone. Red, like the life's blood of humans. Red, like the eyes of the people of Ishbal that died under his hands. Red, the shade so close to touching the Truth...

Red bolts of alchemic energy thundered, roiling mass that fired straight up into the heavens, piercing the clouds and filtering the sun's light through a haze of crimson that turned the neighborhood the color of war. Distorted and warped, it was still the energy of the very world itself, harnessed with the laws of alchemy and directed by the alterations in the landscape Kimblee's explosions had made, it couldn't help but flow through the patterns of the circle now. It was a vast stroke of misfortune for Foster's that the fence - or rather, the pattern it made in the ground - was easy enough for Kimblee to adapt his circle around, and that same red light flowed through it, turning the fence into a glowing wall of light, the metal bars breaking and bending and tearing apart under the raw force Kimblee was modulating.

It was something that was seen all over the town. Atop the mall in the First District, Zim and Zuko's training exercise in Firebending styles halted completely when they saw the explosions, and now the red flashing into the sky. Hobbes' group heard the explosions, and a nearby TV on a salebooth was displaying the whole thing through a distant camera that could zoom on. (But not well enough to show Kimblee.) Calvin's group was right outside the neighborhood due to their proximy to Cyborg's place, and Cyborg himself saw the whole thing on a TV; they couldn't do a thing to stop it, none of them understanding just what was going on, not even Calvin, for this concerned alchemy he rightfully never breached. Morte, Aang, Scar and Danny, flying on Appa far away, saw it from too far away, and they were all enlightened at this not being normal when they say how Scar froze and stared in utter horror and recognition.

The First District was the first to become aware of this monstrosity.

Finally, Lu-Tze watched it happen from a rooftop right outside there, much like Calvin's group. He watched with a calm, slightly weary look. He did not inerfere, nor could he. There are those with great power who can interfere with the working of history. And then there are those who can, at best, nudge it a bit. Lu-Tze was not lucky enough to be among the former. He observed. It was his duty.

The red dancing under Kimblee's hand looked like a baleful aurora before it exploded out to the limits of the outer circle in a gigantic killing pulse.

The screaming was brief. That did not mean it wasn't loud enough to pierce the heavens.

It bore down on Spike, Frankie, Eduardo and Bloo, and Bloo flashed another shade of red: the aura-glow of a Counter technique.

...

Mr. Herrimen had only just gotten free of the cabinets and screamed when the world turned red, with indignation at the foul wrenching feeling, with rage at this latest violation of his household, with a sudden paralyzing fear for everyone's else's safety but that last was very slightly eclipsed by the mind-shattered pain.

Hooks in the core of him and wrenching pulling and tearing, he feels himself dying, feels the life tearing away from him and screams, screams again and again, every single awful memory and every moment of regret and remorse and horror coming back and tearing in and out again and again and again-

Blood dribbled down the corner of his mouth as he collapsed again, his office, his chamber tainted the red of dying innocents and pestilential churning like a damned wind, cracking the walls and rotting the brass and rotting wood, the names of people that cared blackening and fading in the rust on the plaques-

It can't end like this. The thought welled up through the screaming that seemed louder in his head, his own screams a fraction of it. For a moment, he was surprised to realize that he was capable of thinking rationally at all.

Then the pain surrendered to the white-hot rage simmering inside him for years, centered squarely at the sheer injustice of it all, of so many creators and friends dead and corrupted, at his house and those under his protection inflicted by too many indignities; he had seen too much, done too much. It could not be in vain-no, he refused to let it be in vain.

His eyes narrowed in spite of the blood streaming through the cuts that have opened on his head as his body tore itself apart on the inside, his very soul slowly peeling away from the awful force tearing at him. "I..." He rasps. "I...I..." The single syllable repeats itself. He wasn't not sure what he was trying to say.

His gloved hands, starting to turn damp and red, grabbed the edge of his desk.

"I...have come too far..."

He gripped as hard as he could with his muscles tearing themselves apart, his bones cracking and his body failing ever faster.

"I have not gone so far from home..."

His shoulder felt like it's going to break as it pulls all of his not-inconsiderable bodyweight up, over the desk. His front collapsed all over the keyboard, and he started to slip.

"...To give up now."

Mr. Herrimen's hand fell down hard on the keyboard and hit the big red EVACUATION button.

He was dimly aware of lights blaring, of hidden machinery in the walls coming to life and stranger things happening as the house itself rumbled, like a sleeping giant finally opening it's eyes. More pointly, the pain was fading. Everything was fading. He couldn't feel anything at all, not even that soul-stealing pain.

He hit the ground hard, flat on his back and his arms outstretched.

Mr. Herrimen sighed to himself. "Not good enough," He scolds himself even now. No matter what, everyone had to survive. His own life was of little consequence.

He is not alone. He can hear the sweeping of a cloak, a hint of black in the red, but he cannot look to see.

I EXPECT IT IS GOOD ENOUGH, a voice like two slabs of lead slamming together remarks. I SHALL BE SEEING YOU LATER.

Mr. Herrimen didn't appear to notice; his attention was centered exclusively on the portrait of Madame Foster, even as his eyes shut.

...

Frankie heard screaming after the world flashed red. It hadn't lasted very long.

Some of it had been her own. She hadn't imagined that she could make a shriek like that.

She was having trouble moving. Thinking. Doing anything. It was hard to focus, with the red still firing into the sky, turning the smoke and dust falling down into bloody-colored demonshapes.

People were on the ground and they weren't moving or breathing or doing anything so Frankie knew they weren't dead. So many people. So many women and men and kids of all shapes and sizes. So many friends. So many people dying dead or dying on the ground, whispering and sobbing and gone half-crazy and talking to people that died a long time ago...

She could hear her own mom and dad's voices, distorted and fading echoes of the dead. Hah. It was silly; they died when their city on Earth exploded in dust and dirt and darkness.

It was hard to hear the things that were there, unless (Maybe? Could be? Or if?) this was the illusion and she was waking up. She smiled loosely. The nightmare was over. Nobody died and imaginary friends weren't almost extinct and the people that had created them could do it again and her Earth wasn't just one of many.

Frankie heard Spike yelling. His voice sounded raw and ragged, like something had been torn out of him clawing and screaming. That wasn't good; Spike needed somebody. She needed to...needed to...she didn't know. Hard to think. Hard to remember what she was supposed to do.

She saw Razor crawl along the ground even while the world turned to screaming. Saw Freya claw at the ground screaming and yelling as the red tore something out of her. Saw Andre actually climb halfway up the mansion to get at Kimblee before he collapsed. Saw Stature grow three times her size before she collapsed, and Frankie didn't know if she was alive or dead.

The huge crowd had become the biggest pile-up of bodies Frankie had seen since the war with the Heartless on Earth, when the bodies that didn't fade into the darkness had been burnt in big holes in the ground so the monsters didn't posess them and make them kill people. So many of them. They died screaming and yelling as the red pulse ripped the life (or something else?) right out of them, flopping right over each other. It was like watching dominos fall.

Some people were still moving. They were crying and begging and whispering hate and sounding like they wished they were dead, but it was good enough.

She heard Bloo yell. She remembered the flash of red that had come from him (a Counter technique? Like what Wobbuffets used?) that had smashed into the red pulse and...bounced it away a little. Maybe that was why he wasn't dead or halfway there like the others, and maybe why Spike and Eduardo were still moving.

She was moving. Oh, right, Spike and Eduardo were trying to get her and Bloo out of there. She kept trying to tell them to leave her there, she didn't matter, to get the others out before Kimblee finished the job, but she couldn't make the words work.

Hell of a time for the Evacuation system to not work, She thought sourly before the ground rumbled. For a moment, she panicked: He's gonna make it worse, he's going to kill us all-

Then rationality prevailed. She remembered what that noise signaled. She grinned. "...Screw you..." She rasped, thinking of the invader that had made all this horror happened.

Spike stumbled after the thing causing the rumblings made him trip. "Damn it," He gasped. "What's wrong with me! Can't move like I'm s'posed to...don't feel normal...what did that bastard do to me!"

"Sorry, Scary Vampire Guy, but no arguing!" Eduardo said, scopping Spike, Frankie and Bloo off the ground and running. Curiously, he didn't hurt at all. He had seen the screaming. He didn't understand what had happened, he just needed to get them out of there, then he could save everyone else.

"Damn it, put me down," Spike said weakly. "Like hell I'm just going to sit this out like a punk..."

"We couldn't do it," Bloo said faintly, squished between Spike and Frankie but not seeming to notice. He wasn't paying attention to anything, really. "...I couldn't save anybody."

"Please focus, Azul!" Eduardo pleaded. "Don't go all crazy in the head!"

"Not making any promises," Bloo said, briefly lucid.

"Chill out Bloo," Frankie said faintly. "We're almost in the clear."

"Wilt not here, so I have say this: sorry, what make you say that?" Eduardo asked.

The rumbling under their feet reached a peak; deep under the surface, strange things had been happened. The stone catacombs running under Foster's (not actually part of the building but accidentally broken into during it's establishment) had been shaking, strange technology that was as much magical as it was scientific activating. It wasn't complete; with the security system mostly down (this specific function having been restored by Lu-Tze) not everyone could be saved like this system was meant to. But it was still good enough.

All around the house, floorboards were tearing up under the feet of the people standing on them. Bits of wall tore out and wrapped around unmoving guards and the people they had been trying to evacuate. Doors broke off their hinges and went around people. Outside, huge slabs of the walls tore right out of the house and slammed over dead or near-dead people, bits of the catacombs walls tearing right through the ground

As they did this, the bits of house flying around people changed, seamlesly transforming into another state of matter entirely. Wood, stone, metal and other stuff bulged out and stremlined themselves into seamless masses of silvery stuff that was too unyielding to be a liquid and too malleable to be truly solid, gently but speedily wrapping around people and sealing themselves up into compact spheres.

"What the hell!" Spike said as stone from the catacombs tore around around them and did this very thing, silvery stuff spinning out through the dirt, bits of stone still melting into something else and flowing right around them, moving right under their feet and closing itself before reforming into a ball-shape big enough to accomodate Eduardo and everyone.

"That's the Evacuation system," Frankie said quietly. "The house tears bits of itself off, reverts it to this protomatter stuff and then it seeks out anyone alive on the property classified as a resident or 'friend' and gets them out. Wrecks the place something bad."

"Hooray!" Eduardo said as the protomatter-ball shielding them stiffened on the outside, presenting a mighty defense while keeping the inside soft for the comfort of the passengers.

In spite of the intense concentration it took for Kimblee to mold the primal forces around him, he still noticed all of this. "That was...unexpected," He said, bits of vibrant red stuff floating in the middle of the circle, red flashes of energy meeting there as people had died and growing it bigger. It was taking form, one not dissmilar to the substance Kimblee's soul and personality had been personified in until recently.

That was it? Kevin said, unimpressed.

Ghostfreak raised the mental equivilant of an eyebrow as the spheres scooping out all the survivors from the ground abruptly spun around, generating incredible gyroscopic force, and without further ado fired themselves like bullets right over the Foster's property lines, going the alchemic energy flashes without harm and landing elsewhere with big crashes. You seem remarkably composed about this. Your victory here has been stolen!

"Hardly," Kimblee said, not paying much attention to the metal spheres now smashing right through the walls of the house from the inside, carrying away the unlucky few who hadn't made it out in time, not that it would have helped them much. "They were of little consequence...come on now...just a little bit more...condense, damn you, condense!"

The red bursts of alchemic energy flowing through the explosion-made circle outside the Foster's property and the smaller circle on the rooftop died away. The red stuff floating in the air in front of , and finally fused together, the bright red glow dimming a little as a new shape appeared; an uncet red crystal, still glowing slightly with crimson light. Kimblee stared, his mouth open in glee. He did not generally indulge in powerful emotions. But this was different. He held his hand up and let it fall into his hands, right on the outline of his transmutation circles, and gingerly picked it up between thumb and forefinger, staring at the jagged thumb-sized crystal.

The hell is that thing? Kevin asked.

Kimblee grinned so widely his face might've cracked. He imagined that his fingers might tremble under the power of the unassuming little object. "The great dream of Amestrian alchemy, ever since the original homunculus illumatinted our ancestors with real knowledge and real power. The power to create is also the power to destroy. You must break before you can build and those who know how to make know how to unmake."

...What?

"It has many names, this little lovely made from living souls..." Kimblee said, twirling it in his fingers excitedly. "The Sage's Stone. The Red Tincture, the Crimson Elixter, the Fifth Element, the Heaven Stone, the Elixer of Immortality. But they are only titles. No name is as recognizable to the learned as it's original name, this most powerful artifact forged from human lives and will, the most powerful ingredients of all...

"The Philosopher's Stone."

Kimblee waited for a stunned internal silence.

The what? Kevin said.

I expected something a bit more...grand, Ghostfreak said.

"Idiots. A thing need not be obvious to be impressive," Kevin said. "Just look at my handiwork!" He spread a hand at the ground; bodies littered the ground still, the spheres not bothering to take the dead.

That IS a lot of deaders, Kevin said. I've seen more. Made more but...you know. It's somethin'. I guess.

Not as many as I expected, Ghostfreak remarked. Kimblee frowned, but he had a point. There were a lot less dead bodies than he'd hoped for.

Well, not quite dead. He peered into the stone, looking deep past it's red glow. Past the reflection of it's own light on it's many facets, into the very core of it. He saw faces, screaming without sound, bound together and mashed all up. The faces, as a matter of fact, of the people lying dead below him.

Their souls, really.

"Not bad for my first time making a Stone," Kimblee remarked. It could have gone better; the raw flow of energy with such a large-scale transmutation had been agonizing to maintain and direct; he hadn't properly transmuted as many people as he would have liked, only seriously draining or half-killing a good deal of them. But enough had been used to make ideal fuel for his purposes.

Ah well. He looked at the stone, satisfied. The first one he'd wielded had been forged from the souls of Ishbalan officers discharged from the military; Ishbalan convictions made for powerful stones. The second had been made from the researchers that had worked on it except for the man in charge of the project, Dr. Marcoh; those men had violated the very principles they had vowed to uphold through the course of their experiments, all for 'the good of the country'. Finally, this stone, created from people who had survived the Heartless invasions and all the dangers of this world; what sort of wonders could he work with the power they could give?

He grinned, biting down on the Stone and touching his hand to the ground. It flashed red instead of the usual alchemic blue, and the entire front of the house angled out into a broad slide, facade and roof ledges and balconies and windows and walls surging together and flattening at an angle. "Let's make some explosions, he said, sliding down and clapping his hand, still holding the Stone in his teeth.

He slid down to the ground and neatly landed in a waiting piles of bodies. "Just like old times!" He said, laughing to himself and pulling himself out. There were so many hands waiting for him. He clapped his hands, glancing around for ideal explosive material.

He found none. But he did see the shadows moving. Kimblee remembered that bloodshed and death wore holes in the multiverse; it made the tears easier, making it simpler for the things beyond the light to chew their way in the worlds of light.

Yellow eyes blinked, wary of the sunlight, and seemed to peer at Kimblee in subservience. He laughed at this intriguing develoupment.

Strange; the bodies of those guards that had attacked him weren't anywhere around. A pity, it would have been delicious ironic. He shrugged, walked over to the dead bodies he had landed on, and put a hand on an outstretched hand. "Farewell," Kimblee said. "It was a pleasure to work with you." He then turned back to the house, held out his hands, and released a surge of alchemic energy vastly amplified by the power of the Philosopher's Stone.

The air crackled red, the Stone's power bleeding into it and draining the life of a soul or two within it, and with a blast that made Kimblee just roar, released.

The explosion, in professional terms, was really damn awesome.

...

"So think we should check whatever happened to Foster's?" Ron asked Zim and Zuko, the lot of them still on the rooftop of the mall.

"That red flash of light didn't look good," Zuko said darkly. "The explosions alone deserve our attention!"

"Get 'splosions alla time!" Rufus said dismissively. He hesitated. "...Mebbe not like 'dat..."

"It's probably an evil mad bomber doing some sort of unspeakable evil that deserved our burning retributon!" Zim said.

"I-" Zuko started to say.

The explosion that utterly anhillated Foster's Home, most of the property and a small chunk of the area behind it nearly blinded them; they shut their eyes instinctively and were almost deafened by the near-solid wall of noise that hit them like a car hits a stupified armadillo on a highway. It was so loud, it almost didn't register as sound, just a terrifyingly hard smashing of the hearing organs.

Zim, Zuko, Ron and Rufus dared to open their eyes.

They stared. Shock overcame emotion momentarily.

Finally, Ron carefully spoke. "Um. I may be a bit presumptious in saying this since we're pretty far away from the place...even though we got a pretty good eye-view from up here...but did Foster's just get wiped off the map by a crazy-big explosion?"

A set of alien binoculars unfolded from Zim's Pak and around his eyes. "...Yes," Zim said after a moment, uncharacteristically quiet. "Yes it did." The binoculars unfolded.

"...Oh." Ron was equally quiet and still. Like a sword about to be unsheathed to skewer someone.

"We're find the others," Zuko said, with a terrible note of finality. "Now."

There was no arguing.

...

A/N: Well, this is a bit of a WHAM Episode, is it? Someone tell me, I can't tell.

Kimblee just killed off most of Foster's, and then he blew it up. After killing a bunch of other people. But nobody we know. Probably. Don't go giving the guy ideas, mind.

But on to other matters!

The Mall Crawlers are loosely based on the Brotherhood of Steel from Fallout 3. Very loosely. Also much more provincial. They were written in to give Team Hobbes something interesting to do other than some vauge description of shopping going on, and also a vauge idea of the sort of stuff that happens to Traverse Town: even the crazy dorks are, at the very least, Elite Mooks. It was also a ton of fun to write.

Alas, poor Dusty, nobody actually knew you. For the purposes of this story, I'm playing a bit loose with Kimblee's alchemy, but I figure that if Miss Arakawa did it in Fullmetal Alchemist (she stated in the first volume she wanted to go for a B-Movie feel), it fits the genre if I do it, right? Also, Kimblee a total sociopath. I hope I got that across; I did a bit of research into the typically solipsistic thought patterns of fictional sociopaths for this sort of thing.

So what's the deal with that spooky rock that makes Avatars collapse? I bet the more Genre Savvy will figure it out quickly enough. Also, I realized earlier that I was forgetting Morte, so aside from turning the characters doing the same thing into a Running Gag, I'm doing my part to make Morte a more integral part of the team, and certainly more of one than Jimmy was. Looking back on it, if I had thought the complexities out more when I was starting this, I wouldn't have included a 'chronicler' character at all, espicially since that version of it makes no sense for this story, but I decided to make the best of it and retcon Morte into a Mr. Exposition, just like he was in Planescape: Torment.

Of the four main guard leaders, I think I like Razor and Stature the most, though Andre is plain fun to write. (I actually patterned a bit of his dialogue after a Warhammer 40k Ork. Jagermonsters are basically Genre Savvy Orks with Nice Hats, really.) Also, the fight scenes may give a few potential clues to how this Red Lotus arc will play out. Any guesses? Anyone? Also, I adapted aspects of Freya's abilities from Final Fantasy IX for her fights, after Shonen-ing It Up a bit. (My little term for taking stuff and making them ridiculously awesome. My main inspiration was the One Piece anime.)

I'm taking steps to making Bloo more like his original personality in Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends, but his troublemaking version is just so much inciteful fun!

Discworld fans will probably recognize Lu-Tze and Death's brief cameo in this chapter. Think hard about the implications of them being there!

Also, yes, most of Foster's is now dead. (Or had their souls transmuted into a Philosopher's Stone; unless that thing gets broken, it's the same thing.) Note that this means, of course, that not everyone is dead. Just very close to it. Among the survivors...well, you'll see next chapter, yeah?

Also also, Kimblee blew up Foster's. He's kind of an jerk that way.

Have a moment of silence for Nidah, Dusty, Mogo and the unnamed minor OCs that got ka-boomed. Okay, silence moment over!

Belive it or not, I originally had an extra scene with Bonnie, Zaphod and Tarquin Tiesenhausen Tickgrass, evacuating people from the dining hall with big dramatic Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann speeches. It was pretty damn awesome; in a similar vein, a deleted idea for Zim's Firebending montage with Zuko involved Zuko giving Zim a Kamina-esque peptalk. Complete with the phrase 'believe in me who believes in you!'. It was as intentionally ridiculous as it sounds.

Aaand...that's all I have to say.

Next chapter: people start a-looking, and Jarod gets pissed. This will be inadvisable. Also: stuff happening!

Don't worry; only a few more chapters to go until World Hopping Time, hoo-wah! Zim's crew will start getting bigger around then. Look forward to it!

...I really like the games Chrono Trigger and Dante's Inferno. Been eating up a lot of time, playing them.