While entertaining; I quickly realised that Luxord ultimately outmatched me. It took mere moments for me to receive more papercuts than a newspaper intern during the festive period, and I had been completely entrapped in a card prison before I could bat an eyelid. Luxord paced around the small room, with a bored expression.
"I had hoped that would have been more difficult. Then again; I suppose I rarely used my time stop against Sora, and that keyblade wielder had a bunch of elements to use against me. No offense kiddo, but you're fairly limited in a battle of elements. Plus I guess only someone with time magic can beat a user of said element." He pondered to himself. As a card, I was rendered totally immobile, save for flopping a tiny bit. Brilliant.
Luxord carried me under his arm, deeper into the steel lair. I prayed that Samus would find another way through, but I knew the luck pool would have run dry by now. I was carted like a trophy into the inner sanctum; where a giant Brain was situated in a large jar. The room was full to the brim with metroids.
Luxord used a time stop, aware that the brain was not exactly friendly.
"See this? This is the kind of evil that your heartless wants across Radiant Garden. Pitiful." Luxord spat, staring down at the brain.
"That's mother Brain; the space pirate leader." He explained; before summoning several massive cards to cut through the flesh like butter. Luxord then released his time stop, allowing the devastation to unfold.
"Heh- done your friend's job for you." He laughed with a smirk. "I really shouldn't ruin anyone's fun, but matters have sadly gotten serious. This isn't a game anymore Jex. Much as Vexen wants his end goal of Kingdom hearts, you have to stop the carnage. That Heartless has to die, some way or other. And you're the only one who can, due to some symbiotic link apparently.
He released me from card form, allowing my beaten body to flop to the floor.
"We'll call it a draw for now. But I do wonder what your element is like at full power…" He mused, before opening a dark corridor and returning to the castle. Luxord has always been like that; strangely neutral to everything, like a chess player moving both sides of the board.
I had tried to return to the room from earlier, but Samus was nowhere to be found. Instead; the large room housed a strange blue box. For crying out loud, I thought to myself. Another pointless encounter from yet another hindrance. It appeared to be an old fashioned telephone box in a United Kingdom style, but blue with police identification. It appeared greatly out of place in this universe; and something was certainly amiss. The doors were both locked tightly, and I felt that punching it was not a viable solution for once.
Instead; I backtracked to the brain room; spotting a secret opening behind the brain using my peripheral vision. The doorway emanated an eerie blue light. I carefully hopped my way over broken glass and slippery grey matter; peering through the doorway. There it was; the other side of the Metroid rift. A man in a brown coat and jeans seemed to be observing it with great detail. He turned, and smiled with the look and manner of a schoolteacher.
He was a strangely quirky looking man, red tie, glasses and yet scruffy looking hair. He eagerly waved me over.
"Ah- excellent excellent! I was hoping you'd bump into me. Well- I say hoped, I already knew you would." The man chirped. I warily approached, nervous of both him and the close proximity of the rift. The man pointed a strange looking tool at the rift, causing a blue light to glow from the tip alongside an odd buzzing noise.
"See; this is a B class special distortion. Deadly to an ecosystem; but not so earth shattering that it's making whole worlds collide." The man explained. "The good news is- its stable. The bad news? Well…you've already seen the effect caused by sucking a dangerous organism into a different dimension." I nodded and stared into the blue rift; metroids pouring in like a swarm of bees.
"So how do I stop it?" I asked more bluntly than I expected to.
"Well; the time space continuum is a funny thing. Most can't just manipulate it like a bowl of cheerio's. But; time isn't just a line of cause to effect. It's actually a big ball of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff. Not easy to break a link with conventional science. But ancient species were forth dimensional- and to them a ball is a very simple object, easy to split in half and stick onto another ball." He kept rambling on, a veritable seminar in theoretical temporal physics. At Least M.I.T education prepared me for this, I suppose.
When he had finally finished, the man fished around in his coat and pulled out a black orb, that looked like all of space bundled into a cubic inch of solid matter.
"Long ago; this item was used to test the sanity and future of folks like me. Some would be intrigued, some would go entirely mad. But that wasn't its intentional purpose. Its power can only be harnessed by you- the Onyx shogun, fate foretold since time itself." The man then thrust the orb directly into my hand; activating the upgrade process.
The orb activated itself on instinct; closing the rift like a zipper.
"Wait. I have several questions." I began; cut off again by the nutty professor.
"Oh I'm sure you do; buuut I can't answer half of them for the sake of the plot, matey." He said with a cocky grin.
"Can you at least tell me your name?" I asked, still trying to process a million new bytes of information.
"Oh, that's easy. I'm the doctor." He grinned wider; walking out of the now empty chamber.
"Wait, doctor who?" I enquired; my words only invoking a slight laugh from the man.
The stranger calmly walked back to his Blue box; opening the door. I stood there, wondering what he would need from such a small compartment, and how he even got it there in the first place. He held the door open, steeping inside slightly.
"Well; you coming or not?" he questioned with a wry smirk. I shrugged and followed him; into a room that far exceeded the capacity of the telephone box. There were consoles; lights, cables and some sort of central tube mechanism.
"I-it's bigger on the inside?" I thought out loud; the man mouthing the exact same words in unison, and laughing again.
"Ahaha; every time." He remarked, skipping over to the panels.
"So! You need to get back to Hollow Bastion! No-wait, after that. Radiant Garden! Yes. But you also need to be taught the proper way to traverse time and space." He rambled, pulling levers and pushing buttons. The central mechanism began to pump, generate a strange grinding, screeching noise.
The man who called himself The doctor turned to face me again. "And who better to teach you about that; than a Time Lord?"