"So if this isn't Skyla's doing, then what the hell is going on?"
"I think the world is ending!" Elexi yelled excitedly, the pop and candy clearly going straight to his head.
The ground shook underneath all of them. Several of them fell over, got back up, and had a hard time keeping a vertical base. Only Skyla managed to not topple even once, being so sick to her stomach that her legs adjusted themselves to the turbulence on their own.
It wasn't that long before the shaking stopped, and only then did Skyla manage to fall over, causing Elexi and Kisatrix more alarm than Skyla being sick in the first place did. There could only be one cause for this.
Both of them looked up to the right before the figure had even appeared.
"Ah, Eli, how're you?" The figure said kindly, although in his ominous and dark voice. "I see Skye is taking this new darkness well. Having fun going after Kingdom Hearts?"
"Hullo, King Idiot." Elexi greeted him back, although not quite as nicely. "Allow me to remind you that my name is Elexi. And her name is Skylexia. How did the spatial rift in her lab not kill you?"
"That is a very good question, Eli." He used Elexi's original name on purpose now that he was aware that it annoyed him. "It could be because the rift was started accidentally it seemed. Though since Skye's a little… out of it, I suppose her assistant could tell me if that rift machine was created on purpose as a ploy to escape my kingdom?"
Riku explained a little about Skyla's past quietly to Sora, in order to make this odd scene make a little more sense for everyone. It wasn't long after that when Sora realized where that was.
"We need to check up on Leon's gang later." Sora whispered to all four of his friends, "I'll explain that a little later for you Riku."
Damayon's group was pretty much just playing a backseat to the happenings, it was clear that Ray's argument with Kisatrix was going to be postponed until this new problem was fixed.
Elexi was just busy trying to figure out what to say. What would happen if he told the truth? Well, for one thing both King Idiot and Skyla would kick his ass, but if he lied then King Idiot would kick his ass… option B was definitely safer.
"No, Skyla would never do that to you. She was a… awe crap I suck at lying." He shook his head. Even if he justified the lie it would definitely not sound like Skyla. "Of course she did it on purpose, what else was she supposed to do?"
"All I wanted; now I have grounds for execution."
"I think not."
--
The next thing most of them knew, they were outside the mansion. The entirety of both Sora's and Damayon's group had ended up outside the mansion in Twilight Town.
The mansion itself looked like a black hole in the middle of a starry sky.
Ray looked like he was deep in thought, thinking about how his sister reacted to him wanting to help. Maybe, just maybe, he wasn't meant to help her in the way that he wanted. Maybe he should help with the way she wanted to go about doing this.
"What's on your mind?" Mirra wasn't used to seeing Ray think this hard.
"Are we chasing the wrong goal?"
"I think we might be." Damayon joined in the conversation, pretty much knowing what was on Ray's mind at the moment. He had more or less been thinking the same thing from the start.
"What do we do with them then?" Mirra eyed Sora's group, who were currently trying to find the source of the darkness to try and cut it off before it spawned heartless or something equally as horrible.
"Damay's got what we need to help Kris. We can probably do without those four."
"Ray, you're sure about this right? You don't want to continue trying to help in your own manner, because getting rid of those four has risks." Damayon wasn't as enthusiastic about this plan.
"It can also have rewards. Like, we might get Kris back sometime this year." Mirra pointed out.
"But, Mirra, listen to me here. If we get rid of those four, and we finish Kingdom Hearts and properly close it, who's going to deal with the heartless bound to return? I'm not going that far just for Kris…"
"Did you calculate the odds of us actually defeating them, Damay?"
"No, but… isn't that the point?"
"I wouldn't worry. We can try to be on Kris' side, but it is four against three."
--
There wasn't much going on within the mansion itself.
Skyla had more or less come to about half her senses, which wasn't really enough for what she needed to be effective in battle against her former ruler.
--
"Skye, Skye!"
"What is it, Eli?"
Within the confines of a palace lab, Professor Skye was busy at work perfecting her next thesis, thinking her theorems of space and time weren't going to pass King Iranis' inspection. Her lab assistant, Eli, had different news for her however.
"We got the letter from King Iranis! You have full permission to use anything you can get a hold of to prove that space can be moved!"
Skye looked at her assistant in shock. It wasn't like the King to accept theories that weren't already half researched by third parties beyond the castle's university science labs. This was a bit of a concern, actually.
"Was there any other note with the letter? Did you read it all the way through?" Skye's last four theories of space and time had been rejected for experimentation within the labs. Seeing as she never changed them much between submissions for approval, she couldn't think of why this one was any "safer" for experimenting than the first one she had proposed.
"I read it twice! We're good to go! And, I finished that space rift creator for you."
"You… finished it?" Skye found that even more amazing. The first time she had shown her assistant the plans for the rift creator he had almost passed out in confusion. It concerned her a little, how well could it have been built?
"Yep! All done! You can check it for yourself, there was one part that I thought was a little loose but I couldn't figure out for the life of me if it was supposed to be that way or what."
"I'll take a look, Eli. Just remember the plan."
--
"Wow, Eli. This actually looks almost perfect."
Skye was sitting up in the rift generator, checking the wiring that Eli had done within the machine. He was a good student, but that didn't mean that this was what he actually wanted to do. It wasn't what she really wanted to do either, but if this plan worked she would never have to worry about that again.
"So, what are you going to do when you graduate this year?" She climbed out of the machine, closing it up and checking to make sure it was sturdy.
"I don't plan on graduating." Eli smiled, "If this works I can study to become a florist!"
"You and your flowers… sometimes Eli, I do worry about you. Especially when you talk about flowers while building heavy machinery." She grabbed a screwdriver and tightened the part that Eli couldn't figure out. "Who said this was going to work anyway? It's only a theory."
Eli just smiled at her, with more happiness than he had seen him have in months.
Skye smiled back at him, although in her distraction thinking about Eli and his flower shop she tripped over a cord that was plugged into the spatial rift machine for some reason, sending a short charge into it and turning it on. Apparently Eli's work was a little handier than she had originally thought.
Right at the moment that the rift had opened, King Iranis had burst into the door.
"Professor Skye, that paper is a forgery! What in midnight's name…?" Was the last thing either Eli or Skye heard before the rift transported them elsewhere.
--
These memories were ones that Skyla thought about everyday. Who had plugged that machine in, and why? And why would King Iranis become familiar with the existence of fake papers that quickly? Elexi didn't plug it in, and she was fairly sure King Idiot here did it to set them up.
The memories of rage right before the heartless incident were the only thing keeping her upright. She couldn't see where Kisatrix was, and she had so little sense of space that Elexi and King Idiot kept switching which side of her they were standing on.
"Skyla, what are you doing? You can't use that in here, you can't aim!" Elexi screamed. She could aim alright, but she probably had no idea who she would be aiming at and he couldn't run anywhere.
She felt Kisatrix try and tackle her down to stop her from making a bad decision, but she shook that off too.
"Skyla, this is madness!"
"Hell no. This is revenge."
--
Damayon and his group had now decided to confront Sora's group, after much debate about the pros and cons.
"Hey guys, what's happening?" Sora asked cheerfully. None of the five of them were able to find the source of the darkness. Riku had made the suggestion that the figure from before was the source and that there was very little they could do about it.
Damayon, Mirra, and Ray all looked at each other. They had weighed the pros and cons, but they had never decided how they were going to go about it. Mirra, knowing that the boys would be far to chicken, was the first to speak to Sora after the rest of his group had caught up to him.
"Guys, we need to talk."
"Talk? What, are we just breaking up with them now? I want to fight." Damayon showed sudden enthusiasm for this now, summoning his own keyblade to his hand and standing ready. Sora and Riku, first to notice that it was a keyblade Damayon was holding, had stepped backwards in shock and got a little tangled tripping over Kairi, Donald, and Goofy.
"You have a keyblade?"