"Skyla! Skyla open the door!"

Elexi was having a mini-fit, banging on Skyla's door as hard as he could. He and Kisatrix hadn't seen Skyla since she returned, and the only reason they even knew she was back was because she slammed her door upon returning.

"SKYLA! If you're injured I need to help you!"

"Leave me alone Elexi!" Skyla yelled back from inside her room. It was the first either of them had heard from her. As concerned as he was for her well being, at least he knew she was alive.

--

"Now what do you propose, oh mighty Mirra?" Damayon wasn't exactly happy with the situation. He was a little banged up from the fight, as was Ray. Mirra was being pretty commanding over them both, being the only one without significant injuries.

"I think that for the time being we need to set up base near the World That Never Was, and deal with the heartless problem. Based on my research, Damayon, if you focus on killing the heartless it will help Kris' group. Plus if Sora's little group makes it there we can slow them down from tampering with the completion of Kingdom Hearts." Mirra herself was flipping through a book of notes she had made while spending time in the library in Twilight Town. "We do have to be careful though, as I'm not sure any of the three of them wants to trust us on their side..."

"Well then we can't exactly set up base in the actual world, even if not near the castle." Ray put in, knowing that Mirra was thinking about setting up in the town below the castle.

"Then where do you propose? What world is closest to that world? One that has heartless, not like Twilight Town or Atlantica."

"That's a very good question..."

--

Sora, Riku and Kairi finally stopped into Midnight's Light, only to have their fears confirmed.

"Sora, I'm glad you're here!" Leon was standing in the middle of one the main plazas, fighting what looked like a giant spider heartless. They were all over the place, and everyone else in Leon's group was fighting them off.

Kairi was quickly dragged off by Aerith, who was claiming that she needed her help. Not exactly worried about Kairi so long as she was with someone, Sora and Riku took out their keyblades and started fighting them off.

There must have been hundreds, thousands of these heartless even. They didn't pose much of a problem individually, with the power of the keyblades they easily fell and dispersed. The sheer number of them was posing the difficulty however.

The spider shapes didn't last that long, but as soon as their type was gone new and more dangerous types of heartless started appearing. Bomb types, Shadows and Neoshadows, every type of already existent heartless plus some new ones Sora and Riku had never seen before. There was no doubt in either of their minds that the King Idiot figure from before was behind all the new types.

Kairi was helping Aerith. Aerith herself wasn't much of a fighter, but was definitely an excellent healer. After giving Kairi a quick five minute tutorial on how to heal people with the Cure spell, they were both running around taking care of the injuries that everyone was taking from the onslaught of heartless.

Sora and Riku were grateful for the healing. As great in battle as they were that didn't stop the heartless from sneaking up behind them while they weren't paying attention.

It was a long, uphill battle, but the heartless numbers appeared to be finally dwindling.

--

"Thanks, guys." Leon got Sora's group a tray of drinks inside the residence that his group had taken up in this world. Sora and Riku especially were thankful for the drinks, taking out heartless wasn't easy.

"We're so glad you showed up when you did!" Yuffie exclaimed her own happiness. Everyone knew that without Riku and Sora around that it would have taken three times as long to settle the heartless population down here. "I can't believe the nerve of that King..."

"You forget, Yuffie," Leon cut her off before she went ranting and getting herself hurt, "without that idiot of king, the heartless population wouldn't have been held off like that. Although I'd love to know why he just stopped holding them back..."

"He's dead." Sora cut Leon off now, but the news that the king of this world was dead set off an alarm for everyone else in the room.

"He's dead you say?" Merlin wasn't exactly convinced. Neither were any of the rest of them for that matter. The king of this world was an asshole, but Sora hadn't been around enough to kill him.

"Yea, he came and attacked us with his darkness... we found him dead after the fight." Sora elaborated.

"You mean you weren't the one to kill him?"

"No, one of our nobody enemies did. She and her friend appeared to have a connection to him..."

Merlin had a hard time believing this. He conjured a book, clearly from the library of this world, and opened it up.

"Anyone to have a connection to the King that would pit them against him in such a fashion would have to work within the castle. Do you know their names?"

"Elexi... and Skylexia..." Sora scratched his head. He remembered their original names being spoken, but what was said seemed to elude him, causing Riku to shake his head in disapproval at his friend.

"They would have been Eli and Skye, Merlin." Riku corrected Sora, knowing that their nobody names would get Merlin nowhere in finding out who they were. He himself was a little curious; Skyla didn't appear to like talking about her past in the least, so maybe Merlin could shed some light on her secrets.

"Ah, here we are." He handed the book to Leon, "This is probably of more interest to you."

Leon simply shook his head at Merlin. Knowing him he had some up with some magical plan that he just absolutely had to run off and work on.

"Professor Skye, has a Masters degree in Physics, two Bachelors in Psychology and Radical Philosophy. She was creating theories for her Doctorate in Spatial Differences. It would seem that unbeknownst to her the King was submitting her research to other research facilities in order to produce heartless."

Sora looked to be in a slight state of shock. Riku however wasn't surprised; he had more or less pieced together all that on his own, even when Skyla wouldn't talk about it. He wondered if she had found this out somehow on her own.

"How does she know Elexi?" Sora asked eagerly, all this was news to him.

"I'm getting to that, calm down." Leon shook his head again as he flipped a couple pages. Most of Skye's file outlined her thesis work for both her Master's and her Doctorate's degrees.

"Ah, here we go. She taught three classes of advanced theoretical Physics. It wasn't really actual Physics... it was more a primer course for what students could research at the castle's university with all the details of what had already been found and what steps needed to be taken to continue the research. Eli was one of her students, whom she chose as her lab assistant for her doctorate experiments.

"Eli wasn't interested in scientific research however, which was part of the reason she chose him. She didn't want anyone who could sit there and nitpick her ideas, but more someone who knew just enough to at least tell her she was going in the wrong direction. Eli's parents were the ones who wanted him to go into the Sciences; he wanted to study to be a florist."

"No duh." Sora, Riku and Kairi all ended up saying together. If Eli didn't want to be a florist then he was a very unlucky nobody.

"Skye saw this and let him help her for previously mentioned reasons, and because by helping her he could graduate with a Master's degree with very minimal work on his part."

"That's so sweet!" Kairi exclaimed, and Riku could see where Elexi's supposed 'dark past' came from. Skyla wouldn't go into detail, but he could see from that that he had plenty of problems with his parents.

"So this nobody, Skylexia was her name?" Tifa asked, clearly curious now.

"Yes, Skyla I think she prefers. She killed the king of this world, from what I gathered there was a conspiracy?" Riku looked at Leon, who was flipping through pages again, looking for the answer.

"Possibly. Of course they wouldn't keep direct records, but there's a consistency problem here. He was definitely tampering with her research, although not significantly enough that she'd be completely aware..." Leon shut the book, "There's not much else to it."

Riku was now mumbling unintelligibly to himself. There was something wrong with that story. Skyla said she wasn't happy with who she was, although it seemed that besides the conspiracy that she may not have been completely aware of that there wasn't much wrong with her life.

"She wasn't happy with who she was... but then what on earth does she want to be?"