ATUHOR'S NOSE: I'm never gonna talk about my writing pace again. It's just gonna curse me. The cuuuuuurse. Oooo.
"... So, wait, how are we supposed to follow your brother, Tempest?" Sora asked.
"Wait, you still don't know how to use the Lanes Between? Oh dear." I pondered this a moment. "I guess... I should text him."
Hey fun fact: Turns out Sora and Kairi can't use the Lanes Between yet.
...
...
"Um. I was expecting a faster response. Well. While we wait, we should probably check out the damage."
We returned to the gardens, and... it was bad. Bad enough the physical destruction - the entire area was basically destroyed - but worse was definitely the rents in space-time itself.
Most of it was localized where the Assault Armor had fallen, but there were longer tears reaching out like arms. I jump to that simile because, weirdly, some of them were wrapped around the remaining large chunks of land, seemingly holding them in place.
One of them was reaching out to the entrance. I approached it curiously. What's on the other side? Is there an "other side", or does it just annihilate anything it touches?
"Tempest?" Sora spoke up, snapping me out of my thoughts. "You sure you want to touch that?"
I looked down, confused. My right hand was reaching out, somehow without my knowledge. I shook it and shoved it in my pocket. "Definitely not. This looks..."
"Hey, what's over there?" Kairi said suddenly.
Across the ruins, near the other exit, a swirling vortex of black and white spirals had opened. Little beams of red and green laser light shot out in various directions, apparently scanning the area.
After scanning a larger chunk of land that happened to be near one of the void tears, the portal closed and reopened over there, and... a robot rolled out.
The robot rolled over to the tear and started poking at it with several mechanical arms.
"Is it... gathering something?" Sora said.
"Gathering what?" I responded. "It's a void." And yet, that was unmistakably what the robot was doing.
After a few minutes of furiously gathering... essence of nothing? ... the robot paused. A storage tank on its back that I hadn't noticed retracted into its body, and a new tank replaced it.
"Do we just... let it be?" Sora asked.
"I kinda want to follow it back to its home," Kairi said.
I pondered this. "I can think of a number of ways that can go bad... Would we even fit through its portal?"
"Good point," Sora said. "Hmm... Oh! Maybe Tron can help us!"
"Ooh, that might work." I quickly began formulating a plan.
XXXXXXXXXX
"Okay, it's a bit more beat up than I was intending," I admitted, "but I'm pretty sure it's all structural damage."
"I just hope it can still interface with the Radiant Garden computers," Kairi said.
"Hey, how were we planning to connect this thing, anyway? I haven't seen a USB port or cable since my world got eaten; I'm guessing there's no standardization between worlds that shouldn't be in contact to begin with."
"I was thinking we'd just have the computer scan and upload the entire robot. It worked on me, Donald, and Goofy, so I figure..."
"I mean, maybe. But don't we want the data stored on the robot, specifically? Uploading the whole thing might be dangerous."
Sora paused. "Hmmm... Well, I can't think of a better idea."
"Neither can I," I admitted. "I mean, neither of you saw any kind of access port on the thing, right? Maybe it's supposed to work wirelessly. ... Oh, that's gonna be a pain to handle."
"Not with Tron's help!" Sora declared. And that was the end of that discussion.
After a quick walk to Cid's computer lab, the robot was scanned and uploaded. Another quick scan and we were inside Space Paranoids.
"Sora!" Tron appeared and hugged Sora spontaneously. "It's good to see you again! And to finally meet your friends!"
Wait, does Tron know about hugs? ... What am I saying, obviously he does, he's hugging Sora right now.
"And you must be Kairi," Tron said, turning to Kairi. (He was clearly guessing based on the fact that Kairi was obviously much closer to Sora's age than I was. I mean, he was right, but still.)
"Yep!" Kairi said, nodding. "It's nice to meet you, Tron."
Tron turned to me. "And... I don't believe Sora has mentioned you."
"Yeah, I'm new, so he wouldn't have had time. My name's Tempest."
"Good to meet you, Tempest." Tron paused. "Tempest... Ah, yes! I believe Cid has spoken of you."
"Cid talks to you? ... About me?" I wasn't sure which part of that surprised me more.
"Yes, I believe he was considering taking you on as an apprentice of sorts, but then you were abducted by the Organization."
"Oh, I am never going to stop hearing about that..." I muttered.
"Tempest, you escaped today," Sora reminded me.
"Yesterday, actually. Luke took me to Twilight Town first, then I stopped by Yen Sid's tower, and then I was frickin exhausted so I took a nap that accidentally turned into a full night's sleep..."
"It's true," Kairi said. "She was at the tower yesterday."
"Ooh, that's why you didn't ask me to introduce her. And why you fought so well together."
"I mean, we didn't train together or anything. I just slept. Kairi might have trained while I was there, but that shouldn't do anything..."
"With Keyblade wielders, that's actually surprisingly effective. I think there might be some sort of psychic connection thingy going on."
"And neither of us noticed?"
Sora shrugged. "It sounds weird, but there's definitely a difference. I once spent an hour and a half Magnet-ing those little flying swarmy Heartless on top of Pride Rock, and Donald, Goofy, and Simba all got way better at fighting by my side, even though none of them were contributing and Goofy wasn't even there."
I blinked. I had assumed that level grinding was a video game abstraction of proper training, but apparently not. Also, apparently canon.
Tron looked back and forth between us. "Every time I think I understand Users, something odd like this happens."
"Hey, don't feel too bad," I reassured Tron. "I am a User, and I'll never understand us either."
This sparked a bit a collective giggle fit, after which Tron apparently decided it was time to get down to business. (Defeating the Huns was on a different world's agenda, though. Ba dum tish.)
"So, you wanted us to analyze that damaged robot you uploaded, correct? Thankfully, the physical damage didn't affect its hard drive -" ("HA! Told you!") "- though its using an unfamiliar format, and its processors are quite mangled, which is making it difficult to decompile the data -" ("Oh. Oops.") "- on top of which, it was evidently programmed to wipe its data if it met unexpected circumstances. But you disabled it before it could finish the process, so we should be able to recover the data with time."
I frowned. "So, for the moment, we have nothing?"
"We kinda captured the robot on a whim," Kairi pointed out.
"But my curiosity is completely unsatisfied!"
"Well, not necessarily," Tron spoke up. "While we haven't yet analysed the data stored on the robot, we did have information on the substance in its storage tanks."
"Oh, right, those things." I had already forgotten about those, actually.
"It's a thick fluid, invisible to organic eyes, with a high concentration of magical energy." Tron waved one hand and a projection of the two storage tanks appeared, with the iridescent liquid now clearly visible.
"This matches descriptions in some very old archived files - a substance called 'flux'. Mostly scientific reports, but there are other contemporary accounts, newspapers and the like. Apparently, they used to make ethers out of this stuff back in the day, before a more effective plant-derived recipe was created.
"Its use was abandoned some time back due to some catastrophic magical experiments that made it very unpopular. Apparently, the most common method of generating it could 'rend the worlds to their very core', or at least that's what people were saying."
"Hmm." I thought about this. "So, magical petroleum. I guess that's just inherently useful, if you can get it. But how did the robot know to come to this place, at this time?"
Sora shrugged. "I imagine that'll be answered when Tron analyzes all the robot's data. In the meantime, shouldn't your brother have messaged you back by now?"
I glanced at my phone. No Signal.
"Um. It seems I can't receive messages in here." How did that not occur to me?
Sora and Kairi facepalmed. (Tron, not familiar with the gesture, looked at them in bewilderment.) "Out," Kairi said, pointing back to the entrance.
A quick jump through the scanner and I was back in meatspace, where my phone immediately buzzed with approximately 11 messages. "Well, shit."
"Probably should have occurred to me to mention that you couldn't connect inside Space Paranoids," Luke said. "But it hadn't occurred to me that you'd find a reason to go in there. This confirms some things, though..."
"Ah yes. Nice and cryptic."
Luke shrugged. "My reticence is magically enforced. I'll pester the one responsible til he gives me some clearance, but that can't happen until we actually, y'know, go there. Let's fast-track that a bit. Cid, can you put me on the line with Tron?"
"Yeah, hold yer horses." Cid tapped some keys, then pulled a microphone out of a drawer and tossed it to Luke. "He'll be on the line in... now."
"Tron? This is Luke, Tempest's brother and an ally of Sora. Sorry I couldn't jump in to meet you in person, but we're kind of in a hurry. Can you send a copy of the robot's raw data to the I/O Tower, and send out Sora and Kairi?"
"Acknowledged, Luke. The data is ready to be downloaded, and Sora and Kairi are on their way."
While the computer reassembled them, Luke handed Cid something that looked like a modified USB drive, and Cid plugged it in and tapped more buttons. (I had been reasonably computer-savvy back home, but every part of every system here was completely unfamiliar. Was this how the stereotypical "computer-illiterate grandmother" felt all the time?)
"You two need to communicate better," Sora said.
"Well, obviously," I said.
"Since you two somehow still haven't been taught about the Lanes Between, I guess we're taking Sora's Gummi Ship... That can fit four, right?"
"Yeah, I upgraded the seating ages ago. And you'll have to drive, right?"
"I think having me give you directions while you drive would end up incredibly annoying, so yes."
So with that we all headed to the hangar and had a nice, mostly-uneventful flight. There were Gummi Heartless, but Sora's ship outgunned them handily. And then we arrived.
"Luke, I can't help but observe that we seem to be looking at less a world and more... a collection of broken fragmenty bits."
"Yeah. I know why we set up here initially, but he refuses to move somewhere more coherent, and I'm not sure why. Drama, maybe."
Unable to land, we ended up beaming down to coordinates Luke gave us, into a maze of twisty little passages, all only slightly different. Luke led us down a path he had presumably memorized, and...
"DiZ?" I exclaimed in shock.
"Indeed."
"I... was almost entirely sure that you had died in that explosion."
"I'll admit, that was my intent... Let us say that Ansem the Wise got his wish, and DiZ learned that he has more work to do.
"To begin with... When I said that the explosion of the Kingdom Hearts Encoder could cause anything to happen, I must admit that I had severely underestimated just what constitutes 'anything'."
I blinked. "Back up, just seven seconds. Are you saying that's how the Organization is back?"
"Indeed. But they are a lesser issue." Oh, hell. "Certainly Xehanort will wish to exploit them. He'll likely succeed at that, But Sora destroyed them once, and he can certainly do it again. No, I'm concerned about something else.
"Tell me, Tempest." DiZ gestured at the scattered ruins around us. "What do you see?"
Most of what I saw was destroyed beyond recognition. And/or was something I wouldn't have recognized to begin with, I suppose. But I could see some twisted pieces of metal that made just enough sense that I could imagine untwisting them, into... "Some kind of science lab?"
"Indeed. A certain material was studied here, one whose name has not been spoken since bef-"
"Flux," I interrupted. "It's flux, isn't it? Tron told us."
"... indeed. I am surprised to learn that my old systems had access to this information, as it predates even them."
"Well, did you have any 'digitally archive all these old documents' projects? Perhaps ones that you let someone else oversee? Because that would answer that."
"I did, in fact. Perhaps it was a mistake not to return to Radiant Garden..."
"Well, never mind that for the moment. Is this about the 'rend the worlds to their very core' bit?"
"Yes. I shall show you to the archives, for you will need the documents stored there. And I will explain the phenomenon they referred to as 'Points of Shadow'."
... I can't think of anything to say in this end note, other than the obligatory reminder that reviews are good.
I'm excited for TWEWY Final Remix. There, that's a thing. Is it a relevant thing? The world may never know.