I'm actually rather pleased with this chapter- it just kept going and going and going. And it was a lot of fun to write. Enjoy!

"It's why there was next to no physical evidence about Roxas." Pence told them. He showed them on the computer what he was talking about. "Sure, he went to school with us. He had a home. He must've had about a bajillion pictures with him in it. But no one could ever find any of those things, because they only ever existed in the Fake Twilight Town. We all remember him, but we shouldn't, because we technically never met him in the first place."

"Take a look at this." Pence brought up another data pack. Hayner and Olette immediately recognized it, from the day that the pictures went missing.

"We all thought that there was some great big magic trick involved in stealing the word 'photo,' in making it so that no one could say that word. But there wasn't. It was a bit of system sabotage, someone got into the program and deleted the word 'photo' from the encyclopedia set that all the fake people in the fake town use and need to feed them their vocabulary. That's all it was."

"Remember right before he disappeared? He asked us 'I fell off the station building yesterday, didn't I?"

Pence activated a video feed. They stared at themselves, plus Roxas, all in their summer clothes. The morning's greeting's passed back and fourth, and eventually Roxas, looking confused, asked the question. They remembered their responses, 'no way,' 'you wouldn't be here if you did,' etc, etc, and the exact same words came from the lips of the recordings.

"Just one of the many weird things he asked us before he was gone." Hayner mumbled.

"It wasn't unwarranted." Pence said, and he rewound the recording. It sped past the morning, the previous night, and into the previous afternoon. Pence started the recording.

The four of them were atop the station building, laughing and chatting happily. They were pleased with how the day had gone, and were cheerfully making plans for tomorrow. Ice cream was passed around. Roxas stood. Slipped. Teetered. And fell.

All three people watching the computer screen stood silent as their friend plummeted to certain death. But halfway down, the picture cut out, fading into static. Various computer pop-up notices whizzed by, and the next scene was Roxas, asleep in his bed at home.

"He fell." Pence stated. "but the program wouldn't let him die, so it intervened. Rearranged everyone to make it like it had never happened."

Neither of the other two said anything for a while. Pence respected their right to be royally freaked out by all of this.

"So…" Olette stopped, and went back to staring at her shoes. Moments passed before she could suck up the courage to ask "What does all this mean?"

"It means…" Pence had to bolster his own courage to say it. "It means that we can call off the search. Roxas isn't missing. He just never existed in the first place."

"DON'T SAY THAT!" Hayner shouted.

"Hayner…" Pence tried to calm him down. "Roxas was just a computer program."

"HE IS NOT!"

"He isn't real…"

"THAT'S A LIE!" Hayner had tears streaming down his face, oddly out of place with the look of absolute rage that was also there.

"He was the lie. He was just some twisted experiment."

"It's…not…true…" Hayner was on his knees, gripping the edge of the computer table with his trembling fingers. He stared hopelessly up at the data displayed before him. Pence, still in the chair, placed one hand on Hayner's shoulder. On the other side of him, Olette was also crying.

Hayner turned away from the many computer monitors, and buried his face against his knuckles. "The person who made this was playing with our lives. He's the one to blame." Pence told him.

"Where did he go?" Hayner whispered.

"I don't know. But I can look."

"Do it."

Olette took charge of Hayner, making him sit down on a metal box, and sitting about a foot away, knowing, from years of experience, that Hayner wasn't one to cuddle when he was upset. She waited until he was ready to talk, or until he looked ready to listen, whatever came first.

Pence tried his best to stay strong for his friends. Try as he might, he couldn't figure out a reason for why all of a sudden the two worlds seemed to be merging. But the important thing would be to find the one who did this. He tirelessly searched, while behind him, Hayner regained his composure, and once again began insisting that Roxas had to have been real.

"What about our memories?"

"Just data from the other world."

"What about that picture?"

"A creation. Like that bag that I made."

"What about…" He stopped, eyes wide in amazement. He stripped off his backpack and threw it down, unmindful of the school books in side. He dropped to his knees and tore it open pulling out a familiar plain manila envelope.

"What about this picture?" Hayner asked. Pence swirled the chair around to look at them. He had forgotten about the police report.

"Why do we remember what's supposed to be fake, and don't remember what's probably real?"

"The data doesn't go back that far." Pence informed them. "The police report is dated three months before even the very earliest files were created."

Hayner looked ready to collapse again. "Another dead end." He moaned.

"No. It's not. It's probably the best clue we've had so far." Pence pointed out. "If this file predated any of this scientist guy's interference, then it's almost certainly authentic. He might have not even known it existed."

"Then why didn't anyone remember it?" Olette asked. "Who else could have erased everyone's memories like that?"

"Good point. I guess that was probably him."

"Was there any recording's of him at all?" Hayner asked.

"I don't think so."

"Check anyways."

"If you insist."

Pence stared up a search for related video recordings and data files. He went back to searching for the creator of this system. The other two stood around, feeling weird about leaving all of the work to someone else. They were a team, they shared things like chores and responsibility. Olette pulled some candy bars from her own bag and handing them around.

"Hey, guys? I've been thinking." She said, staring at her un-wrapped chocolate but not biting. "What's the point of all this?"

"What? Finding Roxas isn't a good enough reason for you?" Hayner was being a bit snippy.

"No, not that. I really want to get to the bottom of this, too. But what was the point of all of this? I mean, creating a virtual reality and making an almost perfect copy of the town is pretty impressive and all, but what's the point? It's not helping anyone, it's not like it was supposed to make money or anything. Why put all the time and effort into building such a useless, complicated system?"

"Hmm." Hayner couldn't think of a reason. "I guess we'll just have to ask him when we find him."

"I'm not sure we'll have too much luck. No one's been on this system for a real long time. This is the first time it's been used since we were here with Sora, and before that it hadn't been used for several months. Whoever made this is long gone." Pence informed them.

"But where did they go?" Hayner wanted to know. "From the looks of all of this, he left kinda like Roxas and Sora. No trace, no sign, no clue.

"Hmm." Pence started a new search. "There isn't any sort of vehicle registered, or any sort of cosmic telephone or something."

"I doubt he would have bothered to put that in his computer." Olette said. "How many people put notices on their laptops on what they drive, what their license numbers are, or where they're parked?"

"True. Why don't you two look around and see if you can find where he parked his spaceship?"

"What makes you think it would be here?" Hayner asked. "If the dude is gone, he probably left in his wagon."

"Jus look around. See if there is any place he could have kept it."

"Okay."

With something they could finally do, Hayner and Olette started looking around again. There was precious little they hadn't already explored, but they gave all the hallways and broom closets a good look over anyways. With out them to distract him, Pence did his best not to disappoint. He finally got the user data on screen, and the computer was registered as belonging to someone named 'Diz,' which was a strange name, but then again, he did come from another world. No references were made to any sort of transportation, but a highly encrypted personal log was found. It required no less than seven different passwords, and Pence didn't trust his hacking skills on such an unfamiliar piece of technology. He went back to pouring over the data collected on the town, as he had gotten the idea of using all of this to figure out how to find the ghost train. This, and other data, was set aside for when the other two got back.

Hayner and Olette stuck close as they moved to some of the creepier places of the secret basement. They skirted around those freakish flower-coffin-bed things, the ones that Sora had pointed out as being snares that kept you in an enchanted sleep. There really wasn't much around. As much as they would like to find a teleportation chamber or a second flying car, they couldn't identify many of the machines, and so could not truly say what they did and did not find.

"It's not like any one of us would be able to use it, anyway. Pence is good with computers, but he doesn't know their high-tech stuff. And he can't drive. I'm the only one of us that has ever driven, and there's no way I'd be able to drive a flying saucer."

"We'll think of something." Olette said softly, staring at a wall.

"Hey, what's eatin' you? You seem kinda out of it."

"Just thinking."

"About him?"

"Who else?"

Hayner seated himself on some steps. "I want to know where he is. Is he okay? What really happened to him?"

"But don't you see?" Olette cried, suddenly releasing all that she had been keeping inside. "He has no reason to care about us! He could be free as a bird somewhere, and he'll never have a reason to come back here! We were never really friends! We were never really anything to him, we're just some random strangers who have a bunch of fake memories of stuff that never happened!"

"Whoa, whoa there." Deciding that it was time to head back, he put an arm around her and walked her down the halls. "Right now, I think we're just trying to figure out exactly what was going on here. Roxas was involved. Roxas'll probably want to know all of this, too. And we may not have actually met him, but our program thingies got along real well with his program thingy, we'll probably all get along real well. You'll see. It'll be like having a new friend that's just like an old friend."

Olette didn't look like she was buying this.

"Good. You're back." Pence looked excited. "Come see this." He pulled up another video file. "This one's dated about a week before the fake Twilight Town got up and running. It's authentic, as far as I can tell, and it played a part in some plan of the programmer's that involved Roxas." He hit the button to play.

It was raining. The entire town was inside, probably huddled in front of warm drinks and wrapped in quilts. It was the sort of night that whistled outside the windows and made people appreciate thick socks.

In the sand-lot, Roxas knelt in the mud. The tail of his black cloak splayed around his feet, and his arms hung limply by his side. His hood was down, and water streaked down his face, though even this downpour could not pull down the golden spikes of hair. He said nothing, just stared up at the sky as water attacked him from above.

"You know, most people are smart enough to get in out of the rain." Sloppy footfalls came from the steps.

Hayner stared as himself walked in from the direction of the Usual Place. He didn't remember any of this.

"Wassa matta? Too busy being goth that you forgot that no one likes an attention whore?" The boy with the umbrella asked. The chin of the kneeling blond dropped, and he eyed this intruder.

"I like the rain." He said.

"Good backdrop for an angsty crying fit?" Hayner joked.

"He can't follow me here. And he wouldn't be able to set any more fires."

That shut him up. A few more steps around gave him a good look at this stranger's face.

"Hey." Hayner said. "Do I know you from somewhere? Have we met before?" he was puzzled. Why was this guy so familiar?

"Once. Or twice. I've lost track of how many times we've met. But always, always I am punished for it, and always, they have her steal your memories so that you do not endanger our cause.

Hayner was visibly surprised. "Huh? What?" He struggled to make sense of what had been said.

Roxas didn't give him that chance. "So tell me, Hayner, how have you been? I haven't had time to skateboard since the last time I was here, but I would still like to know if you have been practicing that twirling stunt I showed you."

"Hey!" Hayner protested. "You didn't show me the Tornado Slide!"

"Really?" Roxas smiled. "And who did? Or do you believe that you invented that on your own?"

"I…you…"Hayner was getting a dangerous gleam in his eye. He didn't like it when people deliberately confused him, or when they would be smug in the knowledge that they knew something that he didn't.

"You know, it's funny." Roxas said. "I could almost say that she's doing this deliberately. She's capable of erasing everything, of truly voiding my time here. But the last few time's I've disobeyed, she's left pieces behind. Not my face, not my voice, not my name, but my actions are remembered…like I've left fingerprints on your lives." He stood. "I can't think of a reason she would do such a thing. It's really quite the lovely gift. I know she daren't defy the Superior's orders directly, but it's nice to know that she is capable of doing something to spite him. It's nice to know that she may someday be willing to help me." He stopped for a minute, giving Hayner that familiar 'hey, guess what' look that sent the other boy into a fit of déjà vu. "And I guess that it's also nice to know that Xemnas is capable of overlooking things, of screwing up. If he was as perfect as he pretends, he would be awful hard for me to kill."

Hayner's eyes grew wide. "Kill? You're planning to kill someone?" He took a step back.

"Not planning, per se." Roxas said, looking a little sad. "But I have a feeling that I'll have to. Especially with the way things are now. You, of all people, should understand. What with everything with your step-dad and all."

"What?" Hayner was again surprised, and then his eyes narrowed. "How do you know about that?"

"You told me."

"I only told my friends."

"Yes. Pence, Olette,…and me."

"No. Not you. You're just some guy."

"A guy who was trusted enough to be there when you told them what was going on."

Hayner snorted. "Yeah. So, like, I sat you down in my backyard, some nobody, and told you all about something that it had taken weeks just to suck up the guts to tell my best friends about."

Roxas pulled his hood up, and the cut of it hid his face very well. "It wasn't in your backyard. It was in the tunnel apex."

Hayner looked a little miffed that this guy had passed that particular test. "And I don't remember you being there… why?"

"You won't believe it." Roxas murmered. "You never do when I tell you about what that witch can do to people's memories. You always just snort and make references to alien brain-snatchers."

Hayner didn't have much more surprise left in him. How had this guy known that that was what he was thinking?

"How much did she leave in, I wonder?" Roxas asked the sky. "Do you remember going out to buy hotdogs with money that none of you three produced? Do you remember why you bought four instead of three? Do you remember what we did afterwards?"

"We scared him." Hayner said. "We scared him so that that bastard would never hit my little brother again."

"No, I scared him. I scared him right in front of all of you. Do you remember what it was like, seeing what I could do? Do you remember laughing about it after wards?"

Hayner now looked confused as he tried to bring up memories that were in complete. "What is going on?" he eventually demanded. "Who are you?"

"I wish I could tell you." The hooded Roxas said. "And really, I could. But that would just make them even more angry, and I don't want that. Besides," he started to walk away. "they'll just make you forget again. So why bother?"

"Because it wasn't enough!" Hayner grabbed the back of the cloak. "That bastard forgot just as soon as it was over, and I think he need's another dose!"

Roxas turned to him. "Unfortunately, Hayner, the effect would probably still be the same."

"Don't go Roxas!" Hayner implored. "Don't-"

"You-, you said-!" one gloved hand flew to his mouth, or at least where his mouth would be behind the collar of the hood. "This is bad. I need to go."

Black whisps, barely distinguishable from the deep night in the dim light of the street lamps, circled around him. The rain seemed to bend above his head, like a glass dome surrounded him to turn it aside. Hayner drew back, or perhaps he was pushed by this weather-bending force.

"I am sorry." Roxas said as he was further obscured. "Or at least I would be, if I had a heart."

"Roxas!" Hayner cried "Roxas!" He tried to reach him through the black ripples but they dispersed, and the boy was gone from inside them.

"Roxas." Hayner said quietly. "That was his name. Ro- aaaaagh." Hayner's hand's flew to his head, and he staggered as he moaned in pain.

"It's-it's because-ergh-he's a…" he fell to the ground, sinking into the mud. "Nohbumble…" he mumbled a little before he faded completely.

Silence reigned.

"Umm…yeah, uh, that's kinda important in some way, I'm sure of it." Pence stammered. "I found some other stuff, too."

"What the hell was that?" Hayner shouted.

"That appeared to be you, and Roxas, talking, and, well, I'm assuming that epileptic fit you had there at the end would be that memory witch he was talking about messing with your noggin." Pence told him.

Hayner was having trouble forming coherent sentences.

"What else did you find?" Olette asked.

"Well, I got the idea to try and use this spy program to figure out how the heck to get the ghost train here. But I didn't find anything useful. Then I pulled out the video file of when Kairi appeared out of nowhere, but unless we figure out how to summon pools of darkness around ourselves, then that option is a dead end, too, especially since Kairi herself didn't know how she got here, and Sora never made any indication that he was familiar with that sort of thing either."

"So we're back where we started." Olette said.

"Kinda, yeah." He knew that everyone was disappointed, just like him. "But look at the bright side. We found out a whole lot of stuff. And I'm sure there's more in here. I just need to find it."

"And what will that take?" Hayner asked.

"Umm…well judging by the sheer amount of data, and my inexperience in navigating the system, though I am getting better, I'd say…" he thought for a bit. "About a month or three. And that's if I'm working full-time."

Hayner groaned. How he hated all these dead ends!

"We do have options, however." Pence said. "any files I'm not searching through manually, we can start a search program in, that should be able to pull out anything that meets certain criteria. And we don't have to be here for that to work. We can start a broad search, and let it run while we're in school or something. That should speed things up, especially since the hard drive is so full, it doesn't have enough memory to do anything with any real amount of speed, so this stuff will take a long time."

"Well…I guess that sounds okay. But wait, how are we supposed to be getting here all the time? I though people were going to be watching us." Olette saw some flaws in that particular plan.

"Yeah." Said Hayner. "and we're not even supposed to be here. We'll eventually get caught. And then we'll never get back here."

"Uh, lemme think. We could tell other people." Pence suggested. "You know, be all upfront about it. Then they'll have to help us, and they, well, I guess they'd probably try and get in our way, wouldn't they?"

"Yeah. People aren't going to react well when they find out about all of this spying and stuff." Hayner pointed out.

"I can up the processing speed by shutting down unnecessary functions." Said Pence. "That should help us get as much done as possible before someone stops us. But…"

"But?"

"The function that is using the most memory and bandwidth is the running of the 'fake Twilight Town.'"

"So? Shutting it down would be like turning off a video game, right?" Hayner asked. "It should all be there when we get back."

"Yes, that's true. But the program startup sequence is under a password. If I turn it off, I won't be able to turn it back on without help. Plus the program is going to want to automatically update itself if we do ever turn it back on, which is going to tie up the computer for a long time."

"So?" said Olette. "We'll just keep it off. It's not like anyone really needs a fake town anyway."

"Okay." Pence turned back to the computer. "Just give me a few moments."

Pence had the simulation turned off in five minutes flat, and then started off some searches for any thing that contained certain keywords, like 'Roxas,' 'Diz,' 'black cloak.' 'Sora,' etc, ect. He was rising from his seat when a notice popped up, a signal that one of his search criteria had found its first mark.

"Hmm." He sat back down and started typing again.

"Aw, just leave it. We need to be getting back, we don't have time for this."

A small gasp from Pence brought Hayner and Olette over to see what the computer had found.

The live video feed was playing, showing a scene from somewhere in the train station. A very, very old man was standing on the platform, glaring at everything. Behind him, the doors to a train slid shut.

A train.

The ghost train.

The ghost train was here, and it had brought them a passenger.

Guess. Just Guess who it is.