Prologue, "a" – Dive into the Heartless
Once upon a time there was a small world. It was nothing special; it was around 90 water with a few unnotable islands in the water. All-in-all, it was a rather dull place, though enjoyable for a vacation, or if you enjoy spending your teatime looking at a vast ocean.
But for some reason, there was one king from another world who, in a fit of scientific insensibility, decided to send off one girl from his own world to this dreary world.
Now, this world was, as I have said before, utterly insignificant and nothing special. There is no reason to go there, except for the pleasure of leaving. But, insensibly (since people do tend to be insensible sometimes), this world had a thriving economy and a large population, all packed into ten percent of the world's surface. And at that, ten percent wasn't much, as the world was small to begin with.
Anyway, the king sent a girl to this world which we are talking about, this boring world of water. This girl, too, was utterly dull and lethargic, which is a perfect reason to send her there, as then all the boring things in the entire universe would be on one small hunk of rock and water, and on maps we could merely put a small arrow pointing to this world, labelled Keep Out, and all the universe's problems would be solved.
Now, as you probably know, there is a set amount of dullness in the universe, and whenever anything or anyone stops being dull, something else entirely unrelated elsewhere in the universe becomes dull, keeping this amount of dullness the same at any given moment.
When the king sent this girl to the dull, dull world we are speaking of, he knew that she was the last dull thing in the universe, and thusly the whole dullness of the universe would be in one small speck. So nobody expected what actually happened: by some freak coincidence, this girl was entirely fascinated by water. As we have noted earlier, the world was 90 water. So when she arrived on this world, she was utterly engrossed, and utterly stopped being dull.
Similarly to how an atom bomb works, the power of dullness is strange. Dullness attracts dullness, but when something in the middle of a big ball of dullness stops being dull, it sets off a chain reaction of anti-dullness. In this way, the mere happening of a leaf falling to the east instead of to the west has been responsible for completely destroying the perfectly planned-out segregation of dullness, spreading the dullness out around the universe once more.
And so, when this girl was sent to this dull world, she completely un-dulled the whole place the immediate moment she arrived, sending all the dullness all around the universe.
At that same, very exact moment, Alexander Graham Bell, a man living on Earth, invented a contraption which is now known as the "telephone", and is responsible for thousands of people around the whole of Earth being bored to tears by their talkative aunts who can't bear not to tell them that the dog needs to have its spleen transplanted.
But that's another story entirely.
In our story, the girl had just destroyed the dullness-work of hundreds of thousands of scientists and dullologists (those who study dullology, the study of dullness) and mapologists (those who study maps – not make maps, that would be cartology, but they study maps that other people made) in one moment.
And then two little boys walked up to her.
Mind you, these three children were no more than four or five at the moment, so the two boys were entirely unaware of the phenomenon that was the transferrence of all the dullness in that world to somewhere else. (In fact, much of that dullness had been near-permanently fused into telephones, another likely cause of people's ears being talked off by their great-uncle Ed.)
These children, being no more than four or five, were highly imaginative, and immediately named the girl "Kairi" despite the fact she'd never had a name to begin with (at least, not one pronounceable by thirteen-twentieths of the universe). The two boys' names for themselves were "Riku" and "Sora".
And the three children, along with three other children which have no significance whatsoever to the plot of our story and therefore should not be mentioned at all, lived on their island, dullless except for the occasional dullology scientist who crash-landed on the world (and immediately repaired his or her ship and went away again).
As the three (or six, depending on how you look at it) children grew up, they also grew many abrasive personality traits. For example, Riku became unbearably sensible to the point of insensibility (but luckily, was sensible enough not to show his sensibility). Sora, of course, developed in the opposite direction on the evolutionary scale, becoming more like an ape in his thought-processes.
Kairi, being a girl, and going through puberty as all girls must do at one point or another in their life, became obsessed with boys and magazines. However, where most girls stop getting more and more obsessed and generally stay at one point until they graduate high school and find out there is much, much more to life than who's on the cover of Seventeen, Kairi's obsession-growth-rate crescendoed, if anything else. Soon she got to the point where the tiniest acorn could occupy her attention for hours at a time, and something outlandish like shadow creatures coming out of the ground, kidnapping her, and accidentally getting her heart put in her friend's body would not occupy her attention for more than a split-second. In fact, this event did happen, and it did not occupy her attention for more than a millisecond.
This story is not about Kairi getting kidnapped by the creatures deemed the "Heartless" and getting her heart put in her friend Sora's body, only for him to turn into a Heartless as well before safely delivering her heart back to her body (much unlike the post office tends to do).
This story is instead about what happened afterward.
Or rather, what happened after what happened afterward. If you have not read a story entitled The Crazies and the Loonies and the... Other Crazies, I would advise you do so, as it is the story of what happened afterward, and this is the story of what happened after it.
To be exact, this is a story taking place eleven months, two weeks and three days after The Crazies and the Loonies and the... Other Crazies. But who's counting?
It was eleven months, two weeks and three days after Riku had last seen Sora. He marked yesterday – the nineteenth of Theptar, known on Earth as October – off the large calendar on the wall. He sighed as he looked at the illustration for the month of Theptar: a large, approximately ten-inches-by-ten-inches, watercolor portrait of himself and Sora fighting the Heartless.
Of course, this illustration was not at all correct. Before he and Sora had become friends again, Sora was fighting the Heartless while Riku was busy going off being possessed by Ansem, who, in turn, created the Heartless which Sora killed, which resulted in neither a growth or decline in the population of Heartless, which was rather unpleasant, as a decline in the population would have saved hundreds of lives (not to mention worlds), while an increase would have allowed the Heartless to destroy the universe before teatime on the nineteenth of Theptar, which would have meant there would be noone to note that there were too many Heartless for anybody's good. And after he and Sora had become friends again, the Heartless had become strangely docile (and, more strangely, began to respond to his, Sora's and Kairi's commands).
Ding, dong, the bell said. Teatime! Of course, it was anybody's guess why Riku had decided to install a bell which said "teatime", much less one which said every possible time of the day (from "teatime" to "breakfast time" to "time to pay the taxes", but oddly omitting "one o'clock", "two o'clock", and those of a similar nature) at the exact time that the event had exactly zero chance to occur.
In this particular case, the bell was ringing teatime at three o'clock, thirteen minutes, and seven seconds in the morning, a time of the day at which nobody should be up, and the clocks should not be talking, much less telling you to have your tea before the sun decides to come up and allow you to see whether you are pouring your scalding tea into the cup or into your own pants (assuming, of course, that you are one of the people who wear pants while sleeping, eating, or whatever other activity you happen to be doing at three-thirteen and seven seconds in the morning).
Riku, of course, was wearing pants that morning, partly because he had developed partial insomnia and had already woken up and dressed, and partly because he had gone to bed with pants on to begin with. He was also wearing a shirt and socks and underwear but no shoes, for anyone who's wondering.
And now you're probably wondering why this is so important. Well, I'm here to say it isn't.
Well, it really isn't important in the scheme of things, because this is a fanfic, so unless for some reason you have developed a syndrome in which you die unless you read fanfics, the fact that Riku was wearing pants really isn't all that important.
Anyway, let me try desperately to claw at the steering wheel of my train of thought, which has jumped off the tracks and is now careening toward a field of wheat, hay and other carbohydrate-based plants, soon to engulf me and certain people's would-be loaves of bread, horse food, and other things you might buy at the supermarket before being caught at a register manned by a teenager who cannot for the life of him figure out how to scan the prices, and so for every item he must call to some other employee to help, in flames. (Read the previous sentence again to make sense of it. You may have to remove the words from "you might buy..." to "...some other employee to help".)
Ding, dong, the bell said, time to pay the taxes! Of course, since this was the nineteenth of Theptar, and not the first, it was utterly wrong to think that it would be time to pay the taxes, which is exactly why the bell said it was time to pay the taxes. And of course, as Riku was only sixteen, and for that matter he was staying in Leon's house, there were no taxes that he actually paid.
Riku was suddenly distracted by a bang! sound, clearly audible through the thin walls. The sound was similar to what one might hear, for instance, if their next-door neighbors were newlyweds, or just lustfully unaware of the racket they were making.
Leon and Cloud were certainly not newlyweds (in fact, they hadn't even thought about marriage – something about it looking odd if there wasn't a bride at a wedding, and it being even odder if Cloud put on a white dress, to which Cloud would always respond, "Who says I'd be wearing the dress?", much to Riku's and Leon's amusement) but they certainly acted like it. Sometimes Riku would be kept up for hours on end by their incessant banging (and moaning, and screaming).
"Keep it down in there, will ya!" Riku heard the neighbor, a man called Cid, yell. "Some of us don't want to hear the sound of you two fing each other's brains out!"
"You've obviously never been young!" Riku could hear Leon yell back, his voice hoarse and throaty.
"Well you've obviously never been old!" screamed Cid.
Riku rolled his eyes. "Leave it to Cid to point out the obvious..." he muttered, before yelling out, "No duh, Cid!"
"Shaddup, ya little varmint!" Cid yelled back.
"You shut up!" Leon retorted.
"Leon," Riku could faintly hear Cloud say through the paper-thin walls, "stop arguing with Cid. He isn't gonna shut up."
Leon sighed. "I guess you're right..." – and here his voice got slower and more romantic – "Now, where were we?"
"Oh, f this!" Cid shouted aggravatedly.
"Exactly what I'm planning on doing," Leon replied quietly with a certain type of innuendo that everybody noticed, but nobody wished to respond to. There was a very long, very quiet silence that lasted a few minutes until eventually, Leon and Cloud decided to go back to "sleeping" and Cid decided to go back to not-yelling (and Riku decided to just go back to doing nothing in particular, as he often did in the mornings lately).
Riku turned back to his calendar, again focusing his eyes on the illustration for the month of Theptar. A tear crept near-unnoticed down his left cheek as he gazed at Sora. If it wasn't so cheesy, he probably would have been thinking something along the lines of, "Oh, Sora... why did you have to go crazy and try to kill the author and then have a big chair fall on you? Oh, Sora... oh, Sora... wait... what's that dark thing on the floor... AAAAAAA!"
Well, he actually did say that last part that consisted only of the letter "a" and the punctuation mark "!". Or rather, he screamed it. Because as he gazed at Sora, he noticed a shadow dancing around the floor, and then two, and then three, and four and five and six and seven, one by one until he counted three hundred sixty-two. And then these three hundred sixty-two shadows each popped out of the ground, one by one, until they were three hundred sixty-two Shadow Heartless. And then these three hundred sixty-two Shadow Heartless took one step, then another, and then a third. And meanwhile, Riku was screaming his head off.
"LEON!" Cid screamed. "FIRST YOU HAVE TO F CLOUD, NOW YOU'RE RAPING RIKU! WHAT IS THIS WORLD COMING TO?"
Riku could see that screaming wasn't gonna help, so he ran for the door. Unfortunately, he had no weapon, so by the time he'd opened the door and run out, there were thirty-seven Shadows hanging on to his arms, legs, shoulders, head, and various other body parts. Due to this specific invasion of privacy, Riku could only think of one thing to do: run for help. Unfortunately, he ended up running to the wrong help.
"Ugh, I did not need to see that!" he exclaimed as he walked in on Leon and Cloud – you know, since this is rated PG-13, I don't think I'll specify what they were doing.
Cloud turned and, had he been looking, Riku might have seen a bit of something he didn't particularly want to see still clinging to Cloud's left cheek. Of course, Riku was not looking, for obvious reasons. "Riku, why are you here– whaa!" Cloud exclaimed, seeing the Shadows clinging to him. He stood up quickly, redressed (as did Leon), and grabbed his Buster sword, running straight at the Heartless. Leon followed suit, swinging his Gunblade.
The two quickly stripped Riku of his Heartless bling, and before long they had all three escaped Leon's apartment to the Gummi Ship. "We can probably follow them to their source," Riku panted as they jumped into the Gummi Ship. "It worked last time."
"Yea," Leon and Cloud both echoed, simultaneously shooting Riku a death glare for interrupting them from their 'fun'.