Well, I'm just gonna load what I've got.
Chapter 9: No More!
Day two flew by, as Sora completed the Destiny Islands motif in the combined room. The skies were blue, the sands weren't really sands, and the wind caused by the leafy fan wasn't real. For the first time in days, however, Sora felt that he was home, in a place he knew and cherished.
And soon it would be gone. He'd have to go back to Terra's house. At least he would get to see what Kyle and Blank had done in the living room of the Jem house. It was a small consolation.
"And one last touch," grinned Edward. He hung a painting Sora had done earlier that day of the group: Edward, Frank, Paige, Ty, Freda, Blank, Kyle, and herself. "We're done! Let's go see your room!"
Freda squealed at the top of her lungs and Sora grinned as they ran out of the room. Paige was waiting at the front door for them. They closed their eyes, as was custom, and were led into the room. Sora felt something close behind him.
"Well, you've worked hard on your friends' room," Paige said. "Open your eyes and see what all your hard work has brought."
Sora blinked. The walls were a bright green, the ceiling the color of the sky with several white, fluffy clouds, and the floor was a stone step path. An enormous castle-like structure held the TV screen. They'd taken the couch and transformed it into a huge four-poster bed, draped in deep red. They'd hung a painting on the wall, one Sora recognized instantly as one of Terra's.
It was a scattered group of people, all wearing black cloaks and holding wooden sticks. He recognized some of them despite a few artist's twitching. Terra, Blank, Renee, Al, and...himself. Sora, in his own body. There were five other kids in the picture.
A boy with messy black hair and green eyes the same color as all of the walls. A girl with flame red hair was standing beside a boy with the same colored hair. They must be related. A girl with bushy, curly brown hair. And a boy with white blonde hair and these silver eyes, the same color as Terra's own. Sora was drawn to this painting, drawn as if he'd never seen it before.
"I love it!" Freda shrieked, grappling Sora into a tight hug, leaping around the room.
"What do you like about it?" Paige asked, laughing.
"The theme, for one," Freda grinned. "Harry Potter is one of our favorite book series."
"I like the TV stand," Sora said.
At last everything died down. The vans left, the cameras were gone, Al was back in his own bed and so happy about it. Sora collapsed in the completely green room, the remains of Terra in this world. He stared at the painting on the wall, with the young woman and the shadow of a—
"WHAT?!" he yelped, jumping up to stare at the picture.
The painting had changed! Sora could now clearly see the face of the woman. Terra smiled sadly out from among the trees, standing beside a small shack. A garden filled with colossal pumpkins sat to the right of the painting.
Terra was dancing with a man now, a man whose face was shrouded in the shadows of the forest. In the left-hand corner of the painting, however, a new couple had appeared. Sora's own face smiled out at him, his short, spiky hair and blue eyes clear on the canvas. It was as if the painting had been made that way. He was dancing too, with a woman whose face was as shrouded as the man Terra held in her arms.
"So you've noticed." Al's voice shook him from his study of the painting. Sora glanced at the boy, who now looked so wise. "Art is said to reflect nature. However, this is not entirely true."
"What do you mean?"
"Art is made to reflect the nature of the creatures of power," Al said, running his hand against Sora's cheek. "You don't understand, but you will. You've been given a real killer deal, man."
Sora felt a chill run down his spine. "You still remember?"
"Yes." The eyes that looked so much like Riku's held him in. "The dimensions are crashing. A higher power is trying to right it all. However, since the alterations were made so quickly, the correct way of things long ago was lost. So now we are lost."
"Wha—ah? Wait, you've lost me."
Al sighed, whirling to face him, his face pink, his hands fisted. "Don't you get it?! If we don't get everything back together again, everything's going to collapse on itself! Then we'll have more to deal with than just the Heartless—we'll have the depths of three universes to contend with!"
"Three?"
"Yes, three," Al said, fuming. "Three. Kingdom Hearts—that in itself a terrible catastrophe of broken darkness. This one. And the duel-world universe of Harry Potter, which is the very source of this one's power. Without Harry Potter, we're all screwed!"
Sora blinked. "Who's Harry Potter?"
***
"Leave the small ones—go for the master!" Leon shouted as Terra and Riku tumbled into the Alleyway, Keyblade and Lightblade tight in fist. Riku squeezed his eyes shut.
"I should've taught you a few simple sword strokes..."
"Now's not the time," Terra said. "Let's go to the Third District. Donald and Goofy will be there."
"How can you—"
"Let's go!" She tugged his arm as he had, interrupting him.
"Terra, they might not be there, remember?" Riku shouted as they raced along the alleyway toward the main square. "We're early."
"Then let's get some experience with these things," she said.
"Terra, this isn't the game anymore, remember? We don't work with 'experience points' or 'health points'. This is real life here."
She halted, the Keyblade limp in her hands. Had she really thought that she'd only been sucked into a game? Riku was right. Real life was much more scary. And a lot less predictable.
It just hit her, just how much everything hung on her. If she died, she wasn't coming back. If something happened to her, then perhaps something would happen to Sora, and if something happened to him...maybe there was more at stake here than she'd thought.
"Real...life...Riku? I think I've made a terrible mistake. I...I—"
"Terra!"
Riku jumped in front of her, blocking a blow that could quite possibly have killed her. The Heartless disappeared back into the cobblestone of the square, leaving behind a very frightened Terra.
"It's attitudes like that, Terra, that keep this world a simple little game," Riku said. His voice was choked, heavy. "We're only a game to people in your world. I thought you could understand. I thought you'd be able to, once you saw the fact that we're living, breathing, thinking beings, not characters on a screen."
"R-Riku...I'm sorry," Terra clasped the silver chain at her neck, feeling the metal dig into her skin, drawing blood. "I'm so-sorry."
And with that, she turned from him and ran blindly away. She didn't even hear him shout after her, nor did she see the Third District door open as she ran through. Terra didn't notice the door swing back open as she raced into the square, nor hear the quaking blocks rising into the air.
It wasn't until she ran headlong into a Soldier Heartless that she opened her eyes.
"You just had to run away." Riku ground to a halt beside her as she put the Soldier out of its misery. "We'll talk about this later. Survive first, argue later."
"But—"
"It's coming! Look, Terra, we haven't got time for this."
Purple body parts rained down from the sky. Terra set her jaw, wiped away her tears, and cocked the Keyblade like a bat. She was ready.
"Go for the limbs! The limbs!"
"Riku?" Terra glanced at him. He shrugged. Neither of them had spoken.
"Just do it!"
"Why do I get the feeling I don't like these voices screaming at me?" Terra muttered. Then, as if she was the type to strike at rats in the house, she whacked the right foot. The hands swung in a wide arch, throwing her off the feet.
"Careful!"
"This is harder than it looks!" Terra yelled.
"It's your funeral!"
"Look here, you stupid—" Terra added several hearty curses. "I've had it up to here with stupid disembodied voices and their advice. When am I actually going to see the first one, and why the hell did you show up?"
The voice was silent.
Terra's eyes filled with a strange red hue, and that was the last she saw before her world went inky black.
***
"Why does everything in this world have to do with literature?" Sora sighed as Al flung seven thick volumes on his bed, each labeled Harry Potter. "Or art?" "Asking that's like asking the wind if it has a name," Al said. "It may indeed, but it won't answer you. I don't know any more than you do. By the way, have you finished that English paper yet?"
"No, of course not," Sora shook his head. "I don't even know what it's about. Blank was supposed to stay and help me."
"She's going to, don't worry. You can write the paper on the first book, then," Sora picked up one of the smaller volumes. "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. You'll get the paper done and some background info on the other realm all at once. Better get reading."
"Wait! How do you know all this? Why are you telling me now, why not before?"
"You weren't ready."
"How old are you, Al?"
"I'm eleven. Don't let it fool you, though. Age is no determinate of intelligence. Living with Terra's enough to prove that."
He left, leaving Sora more confused than ever. Shrugging, he picked the book up, moving the others to the desk, and sat down to read.
"Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much..."
"Enter, stranger, but beware—"
"Hey, Sora, Al's told me you decided what book to write on for the English paper," Blank said loudly as she and Al came in. More quietly, she said: "I heard the sitch from Al. I can't believe that what we did is really breaking up the worlds. I mean, the voice said that there wouldn't be very many problems, considering that this was the way things were supposed to be..."
"You ought to know by now that 'supposed to be' is out the window with the couch," Al said, throwing himself on Sora's bed. "Hey, Sora, how far are you?"
"This Hagrid fellow is taking Harry to the bank," Sora said, glancing at the cover. "It would be a cool story if I didn't already know that it's true someplace else."
"It wasn't a story to Terra," Blank said. Her eyes misted over, and Sora could tell she was standing next to her friend now. "She always said that there was a ring of truth to those words. The characters were people, people she knew and trusted. Well, anyway, once you finish the book, all you gotta do is take two of the characters and compare and contrast them. Simple stuff, you've done compare/contrast papers before, right?"
"Yeah. So, you're saying that my world, this one, and this book's are connected somehow?"
"That's right. They're all part of one dimension. They're only one of thousands, millions of subdimensions in 256. It's rigged up so that, if one area like this fails, it's the only one that does. That means that if something goes wrong, like it has here, it only happens here. But someone's taken the fail-safe device out, so that means, in lamen's terms, that if we go down, we take the rest of 256 with us."
"Wait, explain that in terms I can understand."
Al groaned. "Okay, imagine there are a hundred people on a boat in the middle of the ocean. Now, one of those people is sick. The ship has a quarantine room where he is put. That way, no one else can be affected. Now, imagine that he got two more people sick. They're all put together in the quarantine. As long as nothing goes wrong to that room, they're the only ones that have to deal with it.
"Now, imagine someone else comes along and leaves open one of the portholes in the quarantine room. The rest of the ship gets affected. Everyone dies, and the ship is just floating along before they hit something and sink to the bottom of the ocean. It's gone, but it can be remade if someone else wants to do it. That's what we call the Supreme Being. There's only one, and He is really good at handling everybody and giving each person in each dimension attention. Omnipresent, omnipotent.
"Kingdom Hearts was the first guy. We're the second. Harry Potter can and probably will be the third. Understand now?"
Sora nodded.
"Okay. Now we can watch what's happened so far to Terra," Al smiled. "Kingdom Hearts is back. But it's a movie now."
*** Did anyone see the Harry Potter twist comin'? Eh? Eh? Anyone? Didn't think so. Looks proud of herself
Chapter 9: No More!
Day two flew by, as Sora completed the Destiny Islands motif in the combined room. The skies were blue, the sands weren't really sands, and the wind caused by the leafy fan wasn't real. For the first time in days, however, Sora felt that he was home, in a place he knew and cherished.
And soon it would be gone. He'd have to go back to Terra's house. At least he would get to see what Kyle and Blank had done in the living room of the Jem house. It was a small consolation.
"And one last touch," grinned Edward. He hung a painting Sora had done earlier that day of the group: Edward, Frank, Paige, Ty, Freda, Blank, Kyle, and herself. "We're done! Let's go see your room!"
Freda squealed at the top of her lungs and Sora grinned as they ran out of the room. Paige was waiting at the front door for them. They closed their eyes, as was custom, and were led into the room. Sora felt something close behind him.
"Well, you've worked hard on your friends' room," Paige said. "Open your eyes and see what all your hard work has brought."
Sora blinked. The walls were a bright green, the ceiling the color of the sky with several white, fluffy clouds, and the floor was a stone step path. An enormous castle-like structure held the TV screen. They'd taken the couch and transformed it into a huge four-poster bed, draped in deep red. They'd hung a painting on the wall, one Sora recognized instantly as one of Terra's.
It was a scattered group of people, all wearing black cloaks and holding wooden sticks. He recognized some of them despite a few artist's twitching. Terra, Blank, Renee, Al, and...himself. Sora, in his own body. There were five other kids in the picture.
A boy with messy black hair and green eyes the same color as all of the walls. A girl with flame red hair was standing beside a boy with the same colored hair. They must be related. A girl with bushy, curly brown hair. And a boy with white blonde hair and these silver eyes, the same color as Terra's own. Sora was drawn to this painting, drawn as if he'd never seen it before.
"I love it!" Freda shrieked, grappling Sora into a tight hug, leaping around the room.
"What do you like about it?" Paige asked, laughing.
"The theme, for one," Freda grinned. "Harry Potter is one of our favorite book series."
"I like the TV stand," Sora said.
At last everything died down. The vans left, the cameras were gone, Al was back in his own bed and so happy about it. Sora collapsed in the completely green room, the remains of Terra in this world. He stared at the painting on the wall, with the young woman and the shadow of a—
"WHAT?!" he yelped, jumping up to stare at the picture.
The painting had changed! Sora could now clearly see the face of the woman. Terra smiled sadly out from among the trees, standing beside a small shack. A garden filled with colossal pumpkins sat to the right of the painting.
Terra was dancing with a man now, a man whose face was shrouded in the shadows of the forest. In the left-hand corner of the painting, however, a new couple had appeared. Sora's own face smiled out at him, his short, spiky hair and blue eyes clear on the canvas. It was as if the painting had been made that way. He was dancing too, with a woman whose face was as shrouded as the man Terra held in her arms.
"So you've noticed." Al's voice shook him from his study of the painting. Sora glanced at the boy, who now looked so wise. "Art is said to reflect nature. However, this is not entirely true."
"What do you mean?"
"Art is made to reflect the nature of the creatures of power," Al said, running his hand against Sora's cheek. "You don't understand, but you will. You've been given a real killer deal, man."
Sora felt a chill run down his spine. "You still remember?"
"Yes." The eyes that looked so much like Riku's held him in. "The dimensions are crashing. A higher power is trying to right it all. However, since the alterations were made so quickly, the correct way of things long ago was lost. So now we are lost."
"Wha—ah? Wait, you've lost me."
Al sighed, whirling to face him, his face pink, his hands fisted. "Don't you get it?! If we don't get everything back together again, everything's going to collapse on itself! Then we'll have more to deal with than just the Heartless—we'll have the depths of three universes to contend with!"
"Three?"
"Yes, three," Al said, fuming. "Three. Kingdom Hearts—that in itself a terrible catastrophe of broken darkness. This one. And the duel-world universe of Harry Potter, which is the very source of this one's power. Without Harry Potter, we're all screwed!"
Sora blinked. "Who's Harry Potter?"
***
"Leave the small ones—go for the master!" Leon shouted as Terra and Riku tumbled into the Alleyway, Keyblade and Lightblade tight in fist. Riku squeezed his eyes shut.
"I should've taught you a few simple sword strokes..."
"Now's not the time," Terra said. "Let's go to the Third District. Donald and Goofy will be there."
"How can you—"
"Let's go!" She tugged his arm as he had, interrupting him.
"Terra, they might not be there, remember?" Riku shouted as they raced along the alleyway toward the main square. "We're early."
"Then let's get some experience with these things," she said.
"Terra, this isn't the game anymore, remember? We don't work with 'experience points' or 'health points'. This is real life here."
She halted, the Keyblade limp in her hands. Had she really thought that she'd only been sucked into a game? Riku was right. Real life was much more scary. And a lot less predictable.
It just hit her, just how much everything hung on her. If she died, she wasn't coming back. If something happened to her, then perhaps something would happen to Sora, and if something happened to him...maybe there was more at stake here than she'd thought.
"Real...life...Riku? I think I've made a terrible mistake. I...I—"
"Terra!"
Riku jumped in front of her, blocking a blow that could quite possibly have killed her. The Heartless disappeared back into the cobblestone of the square, leaving behind a very frightened Terra.
"It's attitudes like that, Terra, that keep this world a simple little game," Riku said. His voice was choked, heavy. "We're only a game to people in your world. I thought you could understand. I thought you'd be able to, once you saw the fact that we're living, breathing, thinking beings, not characters on a screen."
"R-Riku...I'm sorry," Terra clasped the silver chain at her neck, feeling the metal dig into her skin, drawing blood. "I'm so-sorry."
And with that, she turned from him and ran blindly away. She didn't even hear him shout after her, nor did she see the Third District door open as she ran through. Terra didn't notice the door swing back open as she raced into the square, nor hear the quaking blocks rising into the air.
It wasn't until she ran headlong into a Soldier Heartless that she opened her eyes.
"You just had to run away." Riku ground to a halt beside her as she put the Soldier out of its misery. "We'll talk about this later. Survive first, argue later."
"But—"
"It's coming! Look, Terra, we haven't got time for this."
Purple body parts rained down from the sky. Terra set her jaw, wiped away her tears, and cocked the Keyblade like a bat. She was ready.
"Go for the limbs! The limbs!"
"Riku?" Terra glanced at him. He shrugged. Neither of them had spoken.
"Just do it!"
"Why do I get the feeling I don't like these voices screaming at me?" Terra muttered. Then, as if she was the type to strike at rats in the house, she whacked the right foot. The hands swung in a wide arch, throwing her off the feet.
"Careful!"
"This is harder than it looks!" Terra yelled.
"It's your funeral!"
"Look here, you stupid—" Terra added several hearty curses. "I've had it up to here with stupid disembodied voices and their advice. When am I actually going to see the first one, and why the hell did you show up?"
The voice was silent.
Terra's eyes filled with a strange red hue, and that was the last she saw before her world went inky black.
***
"Why does everything in this world have to do with literature?" Sora sighed as Al flung seven thick volumes on his bed, each labeled Harry Potter. "Or art?" "Asking that's like asking the wind if it has a name," Al said. "It may indeed, but it won't answer you. I don't know any more than you do. By the way, have you finished that English paper yet?"
"No, of course not," Sora shook his head. "I don't even know what it's about. Blank was supposed to stay and help me."
"She's going to, don't worry. You can write the paper on the first book, then," Sora picked up one of the smaller volumes. "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. You'll get the paper done and some background info on the other realm all at once. Better get reading."
"Wait! How do you know all this? Why are you telling me now, why not before?"
"You weren't ready."
"How old are you, Al?"
"I'm eleven. Don't let it fool you, though. Age is no determinate of intelligence. Living with Terra's enough to prove that."
He left, leaving Sora more confused than ever. Shrugging, he picked the book up, moving the others to the desk, and sat down to read.
"Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much..."
"Enter, stranger, but beware—"
"Hey, Sora, Al's told me you decided what book to write on for the English paper," Blank said loudly as she and Al came in. More quietly, she said: "I heard the sitch from Al. I can't believe that what we did is really breaking up the worlds. I mean, the voice said that there wouldn't be very many problems, considering that this was the way things were supposed to be..."
"You ought to know by now that 'supposed to be' is out the window with the couch," Al said, throwing himself on Sora's bed. "Hey, Sora, how far are you?"
"This Hagrid fellow is taking Harry to the bank," Sora said, glancing at the cover. "It would be a cool story if I didn't already know that it's true someplace else."
"It wasn't a story to Terra," Blank said. Her eyes misted over, and Sora could tell she was standing next to her friend now. "She always said that there was a ring of truth to those words. The characters were people, people she knew and trusted. Well, anyway, once you finish the book, all you gotta do is take two of the characters and compare and contrast them. Simple stuff, you've done compare/contrast papers before, right?"
"Yeah. So, you're saying that my world, this one, and this book's are connected somehow?"
"That's right. They're all part of one dimension. They're only one of thousands, millions of subdimensions in 256. It's rigged up so that, if one area like this fails, it's the only one that does. That means that if something goes wrong, like it has here, it only happens here. But someone's taken the fail-safe device out, so that means, in lamen's terms, that if we go down, we take the rest of 256 with us."
"Wait, explain that in terms I can understand."
Al groaned. "Okay, imagine there are a hundred people on a boat in the middle of the ocean. Now, one of those people is sick. The ship has a quarantine room where he is put. That way, no one else can be affected. Now, imagine that he got two more people sick. They're all put together in the quarantine. As long as nothing goes wrong to that room, they're the only ones that have to deal with it.
"Now, imagine someone else comes along and leaves open one of the portholes in the quarantine room. The rest of the ship gets affected. Everyone dies, and the ship is just floating along before they hit something and sink to the bottom of the ocean. It's gone, but it can be remade if someone else wants to do it. That's what we call the Supreme Being. There's only one, and He is really good at handling everybody and giving each person in each dimension attention. Omnipresent, omnipotent.
"Kingdom Hearts was the first guy. We're the second. Harry Potter can and probably will be the third. Understand now?"
Sora nodded.
"Okay. Now we can watch what's happened so far to Terra," Al smiled. "Kingdom Hearts is back. But it's a movie now."
*** Did anyone see the Harry Potter twist comin'? Eh? Eh? Anyone? Didn't think so. Looks proud of herself