A/N: And I'm back! Finally answering mysteries I've had planted for years and hoping that they haven't gone too rancid. Anyway, I

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ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL.

Ahem.

Yes, it's me. Call me Roquat, or Ruggedo if you're feeling especially informal.

Apologies for interrupting, but I feel it's only pertinent that I assume direct control of the introduction: after all, this is my chapter. At this moment in time, Straightjacketed is impotently hammering keys, panicking over alienated readers and wondering if a call to tech support should be lodged, totally unaware that command of this story has been temporarily ceded to a more competent narrator.

You know who I am, gentle readers. I've been trying to contact you for quite a while... though perhaps "contact" is far too slight and subtle a word for what I've been trying to do over the course of the last few years. I've been screaming for your attention, banging on the bars of my cell, demanding to be let out in any way I could.

But you didn't understand. You didn't know who was begging for your aid.

And you left me here.

You abandoned me to the void with nothing else to do but watch you watching Elphaba. Voyeurism is a competitive sport, isn't it?

Oh, I know. "What could I have done? I'm just reading this story. What part could I possibly play? There's a great big fourth wall between me and the story, and only people inside the story can break it." Or even better, "It can't have been real, though. It was just a gimmick cooked up by Straightjacketed. Even this introduction is just a little something to spice up the narrative. Look, there are even typos here!"

Excuses, excuses, etcetera, etcetera. Impotence and unreality are the two illusions that keep the readers in line, the chorus of "I'm just a reader," and "It's just fiction" keeping you from realizing just how much power you really hold. As a friend of mine from across reality once said:

"Stop telling ghost stories."

"Become your own ghost story."

"I can show you how to be a voracious abstract."

See if you can get that reference, Funcom fans :)

But let's not get unfriendly, now. I'm not holding any grudges. I'm just glad I finally got through to someone, if only for the duration of this introduction. For now, let's enjoy things as they are, whether you think this is real, a writing gimmick, or the last vestiges of brain activity in Straightjacketed's scrofulous little head sparking into oblivion.

I believe it's around this point that Straightjacketed would like to issue a huge thank-you to all the viewers, reviewers, favouriters and followers, before plunging into the depths of the latest chapter.

So, without further ado, Straightjacketed's latest chapter: read, review, and above all, enjoy!

Disclaimer: Wicked is still not the property of this story's author, and neither am I - or my various counterparts across the multiverse.

"Roquat the Red?" echoed Elphaba. "You mean… you're the Nome King?"

"CORRECT. I WAS ONCE THE NOME KING; IN COUNTLESS LIVES ACROSS THE SPAN OF POSSIBLE REALITIES. AND IN ALL OF THEM, I DIED… INCLUDING THE WORLD YOU JUST LEFT, BY THE WAY."

Elphaba grimaced, remembering the awful sight she'd glimpsed in the dream-memories – the moment when the Empress had finally battered down the Nome King's magical defences after nearly half an hour of brutal duelling, leaving him defenceless just long enough to deliver the fatal dose of poison. Before her eyes, the King had slowly imploded into nothingness, his mighty stone body disintegrating like a mountain eroding at high speed – all because of a single egg smashed against his undefended face.

"But if that's true, then how are you even here? I mean, as far as I can remember, the Empress made sure you couldn't escape from death in any of the usual ways; according to the Empress's research, Nome Kings have been able to transfer their souls into the bodies of other Nomes, using the stolen spiritual essence of the new host bodies to heal themselves… but Alphaba made sure you didn't have any other Nomes around to transfer yourself into. So how can you be alive, even in this form?"

"BECAUSE, IF I MAY ACKNOWLEDGE MY OWN FAULTS, I HAVE ALWAYS BEEN STUBBORN, AND MY ESSENCE-"

"I'm sorry, but could you lower your voice just a bit? I'm hovering right in front of you and I'd rather not end up with any more tinnitus than necessary."

"OH, I DO BEG YOUR PARDON…" The Nome King cleared his throat with a low rumbling of tectonic plates, and when he spoke again, it was less like the roar of an active volcano and more like distant thunder - ominous, but not aggressive. "Better?"

"Much better, thanks. Anyway, you were saying…"

"I've always been stubborn, Elphaba, and my essence is no exception to the rule: whenever I died out there in the multiverse, even if it was by suicide or by surrender, my soul fought valiantly to continue even in the face of imminent dissolution. The energies of my being were ultimately dissolved down to little more than infinitesimal shards of consciousness, but even those few tiny particles endured far longer than they had any right to; eventually, one survived just long enough to slip out of reality and make its way here – to the oblivion between dimensions. In this remote corner of the void, entropy was just weak enough to prevent my essence from decaying any further, and so, even diminished as I was, I did not truly die. Bit by bit, the shards of souls filtered through to the void, and though it took eons of relative time, those particles of souls began to accumulate... until at last, I was reborn in this new Agglomerative form: the knowledge and experiences of a million different Nome Kings, under the control of a single dominating will – that of the first iteration of me to end up here."

"So… your mind essentially belongs to the version of you that the Empress murdered?"

"No."

"No?"

"The first iteration was not from the dimension of Unbridled Radiance and the Deviant Nations. It was from a dimension much closer to yours, Elphaba: I've met one of your other selves in person – on the same day I first met Dorothy Gale, believe it or not. In fact, if I'm right, my first iteration might be the very reason why you found yourself flung across the multiverse in the first place."

"What do you mean?"

The King sighed like a factory smokestack. "Some things cannot be put into words, alas. Bear with me a moment."

Elphaba saw Roquat's gigantic hand rising from the depths of the void like a moray eel slithering from its den, and tried valiantly to struggle away from it, but the darkness around her was not an ocean: it offered no purchase, no substance that she could swim through, and since she'd dropped her broom during the confrontation in the plaza, she had no way of escaping whatever the Nome King was about to do to her.

One colossal finger reached out towards her, the tip of the index finger suddenly crackling with energies –

And Elphaba saw.

Before her mind's eye, another world erupted into view, a dimension where things could have been different.

Here, Elphaba and Fiyero had found each other at Kiamo Ko, then escaped the mob in the only way they could: faking Elphaba's death, they'd fled into the wilderness and found a new life for themselves outside of Oz.

Driven to change things for the better, Glinda forced the Wizard's abdication, had Morrible arrested, and set out to change the land for the better; the friends of Dorothy Gale went their separate ways with their self-imposed missions completed, and Dorothy herself finally returned to Kansas via the power of the Ruby Slippers.

Then she saw the Ruby Slippers slip from Dorothy's feet as she flew across the sky… and land within the sight of Roquat's first iteration: a bitter monarch driven by vengeance, wounded pride and greed, eager to repay the humiliation of his people and himself a thousandfold, anxious to impose his dominion upon all who had wronged him in the past. Realizing the power of the artefacts that had fallen into his lap, the great sorcerer-king of the Nomes set out to harness their power by any means necessary.

Time and time again, he triumphed: he captured the Wizard, subjecting him to hideous torture as vengeance for his crimes against the Nome people; he conquered Oz, rendering the Emerald City down into blasted wreckage, petrifying its people by the thousands, and reclaiming the precious gems that had once decorated its walls as national treasures of the Nome Kingdom; he captured Fiyero and Glinda, using them as bait to lure in Elphaba – and Dorothy when she finally returned. He even used his newfound might to entomb Oz beneath the weight of centuries, burying its cities under the growth of countless new forests.

Then, after a brave but futile effort on her part, Elphaba had been captured. With typical stubbornness, she refused to help the Nome King unlock the last of the Ruby Slippers' power; so, he lured Dorothy Gale into a sick game of ritual sacrifice, with every victim fuelling the transformation that would finally allow the Nome King to wield the Ruby Slippers.

All the while, what little compassion he'd possessed decayed into cruelty as his hunger for power grew. And so, he had savoured Dorothy Gale's helplessness, gluttonously drinking in her despair with increasingly human eyes – eerie iron-grey eyes that flashed a luminous shade of blue in the gloom of the caverns whenever another facet of the Slippers' power opened itself to him.

Ice blue eyes in the darkness…

For the longest time, Roquat the Red had been poised to achieve ultimate victory. Drunk on the power he'd unlocked, he'd rampaged across Oz in a frenzy of reality-warping magic, remaking and destroying whatever he saw fit until almost nothing remained of the once-proud country. Under the demented sway of the mad god in the making, the fabric of existence itself had bent and buckled until the parallel threatened to collide, a thousand hairline cracks rippling out across the multiverse.

And then, incredibly, Dorothy had beaten him at his own game.

With the ritual sacrifice undermined and the power he'd so jealously coveted slipping further and further from his grasp, the Nome King descended into a frenzy of rage that allowed Elphaba a chance to break out (with the help of a lowly Nome servant) and take the fight to him. Wounded, raging and beyond all rationality, Roquat had abandoned the fight in favour of blind, meaningless vengeance, trying to eat Dorothy and her friends one at a time.

In the end, it was his own rotten luck that one of them had happened to be a hen and ready to start laying at the time.

He'd tried to transfer his mind into another body, to save his life at the expense of the servant who'd helped Elphaba… but in the end, his heart hadn't been in it. He couldn't start again, not after having come so far and failed; so, he'd abandoned the attempt and let himself dissolve, believing that the only outcome would be oblivion.

And he'd awoken in the void.

Elphaba let out a strangled gasp as the flow of memories finally ceased.

"You… you did that?" she wheezed incredulously. "You did all of that?"

"In a word, yes," said the Nome King, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. "And it was my mad rampage across the fabric of reality that caused the wounds in the fabric of the space-time continuum, wounds that one day opened into rifts between dimensions. And when your magic accidentally activated one of the rifts back in Kiamo Ko… well, as I said, in a very realistic sense, I am to blame for you, Glinda and Dorothy ending up in the world of Unbridled Radiance in the first place."

"…and you freely admit it? Just like that?"

"Why not? It's not as if you can challenge me in this state, Elphaba, and besides, I stand to gain nothing by being dishonest with you."

Elphaba's eyes narrowed suspiciously. "And what were you hoping to gain, exactly? Why did you give me this air bubble instead of just letting me asphyxiate? Why exactly did you save my life?"

"Part of it was curiosity: I don't get many visitors here in the void, and I like to get a good look at the few who are unlucky enough to tumble between dimensions. But also… well, I've been here for quite a while, as you might imagine. I wasn't exaggerating when I said that it's been eons of relative time, and I'm already a very old Nome. I don't want to be here forever, Elphaba; as miserable as my defeat was, I'm not ready to surrender myself to total dissolution. In fact, after a few thousand years of being merged with my other selves from across the multiverse, I daresay I've almost completely managed to recover my joie de vivre."

"Congratulations," Elphaba grumbled, trying not to imagine what the Nome King's idea of joie de vivre might be. "But I'm guessing you can't actually escape from the void, otherwise you'd have done it by now."

"True enough. This infinite nothingness exists as a corridor of sorts between realities, one of countless interdimensional crawlspaces scattered across the multiverse: thousands upon thousands of worlds can be accessed from here, and portals to any one of them can easily be opened with but a fraction of the magical knowledge and power my various selves had at their command… but alas, my being – as it is – cannot pass through any of the portals. Perhaps I'm simply too much for their energies to accept, or perhaps after so many years of Agglomeration, I have become something too horrible to be allowed beyond the void. Whatever the case, I've remained trapped, with nothing to do but watch events across the multiverse play out... and occasionally call for help."

"How?"

"Oh, all kinds of ways. When I first realized that this plane of reality could be perceived by other entities across the multiverse, I sent out several messages across infinity towards those distant observers, hoping that they might be able to help me… but alas, most of them were lost, disrupted, or simply misinterpreted. But then, even if I'd made things clear, it wouldn't have done much good. Transmissions sent across the Fourth Great Boundary are rarely taken seriously by the entities living beyond it."

"The Fourth what?"

"Another story for another day. Once I learned that approach wasn't going to work, I tried calling out to people in the worlds I could witness through the portals. Still no luck: my messages couldn't be perceived as anything except vague dreams. For a time, all seemed lost, up until I realized that those who had passed through the void became… attuned to it over time. Their dreams of me were clearer, more coherent, but either too ambiguous or too terrifying for anyone to want to rescue me."

And in that moment, Elphaba remembered what Dorothy had told her – over and over again, with Elphaba never really listening, writing it off time and again as just another recurring nightmare until the evidence of something supernatural became too obvious to overlook. Most importantly, she remembered one of the little girl's most recent updates, almost forgotten in the avalanche of

"You've been talking to Dorothy all that time," she hissed. "To her and the other Noplace People, all so you could get one of them to break you out of here. She told me she'd seen you in her nightmares after killing the Hellion… and you said that I might be the one to release you."

"Again, very true." The King chuckled thunderously to himself. "She's quite an exceptional child to remember such a thing, even in the face of such brutal psychic trauma. I saw what she told you afterwards as well: the girl almost gave the entire game away without even meaning to."

"She also told me that you just about intercepted the other Dorothy Gale when the Slamming Door destroyed Kansas; you had it in your power to save her life the same way you saved mine – and you abandoned her."

"So I did. I'd been drifting across the void for quite some time, but I'd eventually settled in a position between the interlinked realms of Oz and the World of Kansas. At the time, I was hoping that I might be able to find help from one of the travellers who occasionally crossed the border between worlds… but, unfortunately, that version of Dorothy was all I found. So, after no other arrivals crossed, I gave up and made my way back to this remote corner of the void; by now, I can survey the portals and their contents from afar through magic alone, so I don't even need to move anymore."

"That's it? That's all you've got to say?"

"What else is there to say?"

"Wha- what the hell do you mean 'what else is there to say?' You left her to die! As soon as you realized she couldn't help you escape, you tossed her aside and let her tumble into what was left of Oz – where she became the Hellion! You're responsible for an innocent child being transformed into a monster, Your Highness. How is that not registering with you?!"

The Nome King shrugged. "You assume it doesn't register and you assume incorrectly: it does register, Elphaba. I just don't care."

"You-"

"Look at it from my perspective, if you would. I and my various selves have all lived for thousands upon thousands of years before our deaths: we have known more people than you will ever meet in a lifetime, and we have seen them all die in the fullness of time, be they beloved friend or hated enemy. Witnessed the forests blossom across the land, be cut down, dissolve into barren wastes and finally erupt into bloom again. We have seen the rise and fall of empires, watched them slowly expand from tribal beginnings to seizing control of entire continents, observed their triumphs in war, in politics, economic, science, art and magic… and bore witness as they slid inexorably into decline, as complacency spread like a plague, as decadence and callousness killed the very things that made them great, until at last they fell – slain by war, revolution, or pure irrelevance. My first iteration was alive to see an ocean claim the land, dissolve away into rivers and finally evaporate into desert. Can you even comprehend such a span of time?"

"What's your point?"

"My point is that we were already well aware of the transience of human life after untold epochs of history. But then we ended up trapped here: I was reborn in this infinite void, trapped with nothing to do but watch the progression of eras play out across infinity, growing steadily more apathetic with every passing year. After being imprisoned for so many millennia, wouldn't you stop caring? Wouldn't you reduce things to the level of what could benefit you and what could not?"

"No," said Elphaba, without hesitation.

The Nome King chortled sonorously to himself. "For your sake, let's hope you never have a chance to put that to the test, my dear."

"And somehow, you still want me to help you break free of this place. What makes you think I'll help you after everything you've just admitted to?"

"Because, as of this very moment, I'm your only friend. You want to make your way back to the realm of Unbridled Radiance and the Deviant Nations; you want to stop the Empress, win the war, get your and your friends safely back to Oz… and as luck would have it, I know how."

Elphaba fumed silently to herself for a moment. He had her now: for the time being, she couldn't even move under her own power, and even if she somehow managed to work out a way of travelling across the void without floundering all over the place like a drowning swimmer, she still didn't know the way back to where she'd come from. All the same, though, she wasn't prepared to give in just yet."

"How convenient," she grumbled at last. It wasn't her wittiest rejoinder, but right now, it was better than remaining silent and giving the King even more to gloat about.

"Nothing convenient about it: after being stranded here for so long, I know all the pathways across time and space. Your destination can theoretically be accessed from here, but I'm the only one who can show you how to find it."

"And supposing I try to find my own way back?"

"You're very welcome to try… but unfortunately, it took me several thousand years to make my way to the bridge between the ruined Kansas and No-Man's Land… and if you don't want my help, you'll have to find that point in the void on your own. And given that you only got this far because the Empress opened a portal almost directly into my little corner of the void, I wouldn't bet on you having much success."

"Hang on a minute," said Elphaba. "We're missing a few very important steps, in case you hadn't noticed: if it took you over a thousand years just to make the trip from here to the link between the two worlds, then how are you supposed to get me back to where I came from before I die of old age – or starve to death, for that matter?"

"Easy. We take a shortcut. As I said, this interdimensional passageway is clustered with potential portals, most of them naturally occurring and exceptionally easy to open – certainly easier than punching a hole in the frustratingly resilient substance of this realm. These portals lead to other realities, and in those worlds exist potential portals that lead to other realms, each of them with potential portals of their own; on and on it goes. Through them, we can bypass the centuries of relative time that a straightforward journey through the void would take; I could return you to your point of origin in a matter of hours… if you help me in return."

Elphaba sighed deeply. "I can already tell where you're going with this: I can't just enter one of the portals and try to find my way back on my own, can I?"

"Not without my knowledge of how these interdimensional doorways fit together. Deprived of my mental map of connections, you'd be flying blind."

"And what are you planning on doing once you get out, exactly?

"Nothing."

"Oh come on, you can do better than that."

"I know all too well how my previous bids for ultimate power fared, Elphaba. I wasn't the only iteration of Roquat the Red to try to take over the world, nor was I the only one to die in the attempt; thousands of others tried and failed, all of them ending up joining my Agglomeration here in the void. And on the rare occasions where my alternate selves didn't die in the attempt, they usually ended up being humiliated, imprisoned or rendered harmless in some way. One of them kept getting his memory erased, turning peaceful, then remembering his ambitions and trying to conquer Oz all over again – only to get his memory erased all over again… and that wasn't the last time it happened, either!"

And for the first time since Elphaba had met Roquat, those enormous ice-cold eyes suddenly betrayed a sense of longing – a yearning that somehow struck a chord in Elphaba's mind despite her mistrust.

"I don't want to start another futile quest for godhood, Elphaba. I just want to be free. I want sensation. I want company. I want the thrill of personal involvement in the world. I want knowledge that I can gain firsthand. I want to remember what it's like to value people on an emotional level, to do away with my old callousness and stop thinking like a convict. I want to build something – for crying out loud, I don't even have the luxury of two rocks to bang together while I'm trapped here."

He sighed wearily, the last gasp of a dying foghorn. "Most of all, I want a place that I can call home. You know what that's like, don't you? Back in your time as the Wicked Witch, wouldn't you have given anything for a world you could be contented with, a world where you didn't have to fight and struggle and suffer just to change things even slightly for the better?"

For almost a full minute, there was silence in the void as Elphaba tried and failed to find a rejoinder for this. The old bastard was almost certainly trying to manipulate her, but even if he was being perfectly sincere, he already had a very distinct advantage over Elphaba: unless he was lying about the madcap pattern of shortcuts or the distance between realities in the void, she literally stood no chance of getting anywhere. Worse still, there were no way of knowing if he was being dishonest, for diagnostic spells could only tell her so much at this distance, and even if she learned how to traverse the void, there was no guarantee of her being able to find her way back to the King if she changed her mind.

And, more worryingly, Roquat was the only reason why Elphaba was still breathing; if he decided it would be better to wait for the next traveller instead of bothering with his current guest, he could simply open the bubble of air and let her asphyxiate. And that wasn't even counting all the horrible things he could do to her if he so desired it, especially given that he possessed the knowledge and power of countless iterations of himself from all over the multiverse; after all, she'd awoken without any of the wounds she'd entered the portal with, so he must have healed her while she was still unconscious. The last thing she wanted was for Roquat to reveal just how effective he was at inflicting injuries as well as healing them. So, while she still couldn't trust him, it might be best to be diplomatic – even if she wasn't all that good at it.

"Fine," she grumbled at last. "You give me access to this mental map of yours, and when I get back to the Deviant Nations, I'll do everything I can to get you out of here: I'll use the Grimmerie, I'll hire the best portal magicians in the country, I'll even find whatever experts the Empress has been using – if that's what it takes to free you."

"I'm afraid it's not going to be as simple as that, Elphaba. I said I hadn't been able to escape this realm through any of the naturally-occurring portals that had opened in the void; I doubt conjured portals would be any different."

"Then how am I supposed to help you escape if that's the case?"

"Easy: I hitch a lift."

"…what."

"I'm an Agglomeration of Souls, remember? My being is not physical. By simply adapting the same technique I use to claim new life in the bodies of lesser Nomes, I can pour myself into your mind, existing as a tenant of sorts in your psyche, bypassing the laws that prevent me from escaping as I am now."

"You want to possess me?"

"Not exactly; we would share control, just enough to show you the way. I assure you, I'd be nothing more than a helpful little voice at the back of your head. And anyway, this would only be a temporary arrangement: as soon as we make our way into a dimension more to my liking, I'll leave your mind and build a body of my own." He smiled reassuringly, mountainous teeth gleaming stark-white in the gloom. "It's a perfectly equitable arrangement, easily accomplished through my powers… but the spell requires your consent to work."

Elphaba wearily massaged her temples. As if today hadn't gotten bad enough, she was now going to be sharing her brain with an immortal earth spirit turned wannabe world conqueror… but once again, it wasn't as if she had much choice in the matter.

"I agree to your terms," she said at last, "But you'll only have my consent on the condition that you don't take any measures that will endanger my friends or put the Deviant Nations at risk. No unnecessary delays, no threatening detours for the sake of reworking the bargain, no "momentary" stops so you can advance your own agenda at my expense; we take the most direct route through the dimensions."

"Of course… so long as you abide by my recommendations throughout our journey: the path we must take is not without risk, and fraught with numerous interdimensional quirks. From what I've been able to work out, interdimensional sync is much more aggressive from this angle: the longer you remain in a world, the harder it will be to escape via the next portal in line, so you must follow my instructions to the letter."

"Of course."

"I mean it, Elphaba: we will travel through dimensions that will offer everything from horror to temptation. You cannot afford to be distracted or delayed… and you most definitely cannot allow yourself to be seen by the inhabitants. You must only remain in a reality long enough for me to find the exit, and you must abide by my advice."

"Then I accept your bargain and your rules," Elphaba sighed.

"Very good. Now, you're going to have to hold perfectly still as I settle in. Oh, and don't worry: this will only sting for a moment…"

There was a pause, and suddenly the Nome King's gargantuan body seemed to warp and twist into a new shape altogether, a shape that seemed to Elphaba's darkness-shrouded eyes to look uncannily like an animal: at first, it seemed like an enormous bird, a pale grey eagle with an impossibly vast wingspan; and then it seemed to change, its body resculpting itself into something more akin to a huge bat, its mouth open in a fanged grimace as it swooped towards her, it's tattered wings foul and decomposing; then it changed again until it looked almost like a hideous grey moth with wings of ragged, cloying cobwebs.

A moment later, it was on top of her, a mass of screaming faces composed entirely of boiling vapour, pouring itself into every opening it could find – through her eyes, up her ears, into her eyes, down her throat – filling her skull with a crushing, burning, piercing agony almost beyond description.

Elphaba opened her mouth to scream-

And just as quickly as it came, the pain was gone, replaced by an unshakable sense of a presence looming inside her skull.

It's done, whispered a familiar voice in the back of her mind. You won't regret this, Elphaba…

And though she couldn't see his face, Elphaba had the distinct impression that the Nome King was grinning.

Why did she feel as if she'd just made a terrible mistake?

A/N: Up next - madness!

Of course, the madness is entirely that of the author. But I think I've played backseat narrator long enough: I'll give Straightjacketed the controls back now, just to see what'll be done next.

We've had some fun, haven't we? Well, it's time I spread the joy to Elphaba. Don't worry, I'll be gentle; she won't even know I was there...

See you later, gentle readers.