I got distracted writing what was intended to be a future chapter (edit from the future: I ended up using 0% of it, lol!), and I was gonna make a big deal about how most of the delay was probably caused by that - and then I realized I got this out after less than a week. Two, if you ignore the Jiminy's Journal interlude.

Nyooooom, apparently.

For those who like musical accompaniment with their fanfic, search Youtube for "FFXIV Torn from the Heavens", and you can listen to the music I was imagining while writing most of this chapter. Well, after a certain point, I was imagining it muffled in the distance, but still.

At the moment, the Gummi Ship was hovering near The World That Never Was, a bit outside what we believed to be Organization XIII's detection range, and waiting for Axel to contact us.

A chime from our communicators. (I still didn't know what these things were actually called.)

"Yen Sid speaking. Axel is about to RTC."

"Sora here." He looked to me. Somehow, despite the plan not being all that complex, I had become the de facto leader of this particular battle. (Or possibly because the plan wasn't all that complex.) I nodded. "We're ready to go," Sora finished.

XXXXXXXXXX

The four of us - Sora, Riku, Kairi, and myself - flew through the World That Never Was, two to a Keyblade Glider. Kairi was piloting her Glider, with Sora riding passenger with his Keyblade in hand. Riku and I were doing the same on my Glider.

I hadn't had time to properly teach all three of them how to summon their Keyblade Glider - of course Sora and Riku had watched while I taught Kairi, so probably they could summon their own, but I had only gone over the finer points and confirmed proficiency with Kairi. Anyway, if all four of us were riding our Keyblades, none of us could wield them, which would have put us at a significant disadvantage. (Drive Forms aside - only Sora could use those, and they'd have left one or more of us unable to fight anyway.) We wouldn't have been totally helpless - judging from my fight with Xaldin, magic worked just fine, which was one reason I picked Kairi and myself to be the pilots - but this arrangement worked better overall.

Alarms had been blaring since the moment we beamed down. Nobodies and Heartless swarmed below, with the handful that could fly swooping around and trying to take us down, but between Sora's and Riku's blades and Kairi's and my magic, none even came close.

Without having to navigate the twisted city below, reaching the Castle That Never Was didn't take much time at all. Once we reached the entrance, the three of us channeled power to Riku -

"Mega Meteor!"

- and the flaming rock wiped out the entire crowd in one spectacular magic burst.

Kairi and I reverted our Keyblade Gliders to their weapon forms, and we dropped to the ground.

"Was that too easy?" I asked. "That felt way too easy."

I feel I should mention at this point that I was a bit incognito - I was wearing my black cloak, hood up, and letting my voice come out rather deeper than I was normally comfortable with, and I'd swapped my Keychain back to the Kingdom Key.

Hopefully, nobody would spot the incorrect coloring on that last until it was too late.

"Well, we're not done," Riku said. "We're pretty much just at the front door. And look, it's the welcoming party."

"And what a welcome we've prepared for you," said Saïx. He, Xigbar, and Vexen descended from the entrance. "So sorry we couldn't make this a proper one-to-one fight. I suppose we'll just have to make up for numbers with sheer enthusiasm."

It briefly occurred to me to wonder why Xaldin wasn't among them, before I noticed something significantly more concerning.

Saïx and Xigbar both had yellow eyes.

I leaned over to Sora and whispered, "Do those eyes mean what I think they mean...?"

"... Bad news, probably."

"We know why you're here," Saïx said. "As I've said once already... we don't take resignations."

"Roxas is gonna stay safe and sound with us until we're done with him, you got it?"

Vexen, whose eyes remained their normal piercing green, said nothing. He seemed annoyed, actually.

In a flash, the three Nobodies charged into battle, and Sora, Kairi, and Riku leaped into action. I, on the other hand, quietly opened a Corridor of Darkness and slipped into the Realm of Darkness.

Axel was just arriving there, as planned.

"So, remind me again why we're playing this shell game, instead of just sending your brother in the front door to begin with?"

"That was plan A," I said in my normal voice, "but he ended up not arriving in time. He has half the known universe to traverse, or something."

"So, when he shows, he'll sneak over here and pretend to have been in battle the whole time?"

"Mm-hmm. Now, where might Roxas be held?"

"Well, there's the prison quarter where Naminé's being held. We're gonna get her out too, so we might as well check there first."

With so many alarms going off in the Realm of Light... you wouldn't think that would make a difference, actually.

"Normally, no," Axel explained, "but Zexion set up the alarms on that side to open a hole, just big enough for Heartless to swarm through and overwhelm whoever set it off."

And that's why we weren't encountering many here, in their home.

Soon enough, we reached our exit point. Axel opened the Corridor of Darkness, and we stepped through.

Sure enough, Naminé was there, drawing something. But no Roxas.

"Uh. I gotta admit, Tempest, I was honestly expecting him to be here."

"I wasn't. That would have been too simple. Hey, Naminé, you wanna escape?"

"Um. Are you offering?"

"Uh-huh."

She considered this. "I don't believe we've met, miss...?"

"Oh, right. Like Axel said, I'm Tempest. A friend of Sora, and Roxas, and... several people, really. Hey, did Sora ever remember to thank you for fixing his memory? I know things got complicated right about that time."

She blinked. "That... isn't something that happened. Is it? I never did that, but I remember..."

"Huh?" I went over the timeline in my head again. "Oh! I guess 'you' weren't necessarily there, even though 'Naminé' was. It definitely happened, though. I'm not sure why you remember anything if you weren't there, but memories in this multiverse are weird anyway."

"... Right. I was the one who destroyed his memories in the first place. Or, the other me was. Somehow I didn't think about it til just now. Why - how am I back? I rejoined with Kairi."

I shrugged. "The deus ex machina machine did it, I guess. Hey, I wonder if this means you can be your own person now? Kairi has all of her parts, since the other Naminé gave 'em back. And I know Sora wants Roxas to be his own person. Ooh, I should have asked him about that during the downtime."

Axel and Naminé exchanged a confused look. "Uh, listen," Axel said, "let's not get caught up on infodumping right now. We still gotta find Roxas. Naminé, do you have a guess?"

"Er... Let's check Vexen's lab. He's not likely being held there, but we might find clues."

The prison quarters didn't have a physical exit - it was apparently assumed that anyone with permission to enter or leave would be using a Corridor of Darkness. Well, they weren't technically wrong...

A short trip later, and we emerged in Vexen's lab. There were computer terminals in various locations, hooked up to various devices, and a row of those people-holding tubes iconic of a mad scientist's lair, most empty, but one filled with a single blank-faced puppet. But the centerpiece of the room was definitely the large medical table. Since it was the piece in the center, and all.

"This is creepy," I said.

"This is where Vexen works on his Replica Program," Naminé said.

"Creepy," I repeated.

"Something about this place," Axel muttered.

There weren't many documents lying around unsecured, and none of them seemed relevant. The computers were all locked, too - but there was one stroke of luck. Vexen had, apparently, configured the lock screens to show notifications, so we could see that there were messages from Zexion's lab, even though we couldn't read them.

I glanced at the puppet - a blank Replica? - and turned to Axel. "Should we sabotage this?"

He drew his chakrams. "Smash it all? I've wanted to wreck this place since the first day I saw it."

"Well, I was thinking we'd steal the puppet." A strange look from Axel. "I dunno, I just have this insistent thought that an extra body might be needed... for... something..." I shook my head. "Whatever. I'll figure it out later. Do either of you know how to operate this th-"

Pop! The tube came loose. I looked over to Naminé, who was pushing buttons on the terminal. "Do forgive me for jumping ahead."

"Hey, we are in a hurry." I carefully lifted the tube out of the fixture. "Oh, it's got a handle and wheels. That's convenient."

"I imagine that's the point," Axel said. "Vexen wouldn't want to lug 500 pounds of person and fluid around in just his arms whenever he needed to move a tube across the room."

"Well, it works out well for me, too. Um... now I need to figure out where I was bringing it to..."

"Oh my gosh, I'm being rescued by a total ditz," Naminé muttered, almost quietly enough for me not to hear. (I didn't exactly feel a need to dispute her at the moment.) "Um, here, I can store the blank Replica in one of my memory pods."

"Aren't those all in Castle Oblivion?"

"I think there's one in Twilight Town still..."

"Okay, but like. How are you getting from here to there, for either value of 'there'?"

"I can open Dark Corridors. The prison quarter is set up to stop them being opened from inside the cells, but that's obviously not a problem now."

"The Dark Realm is filled with Heartless, though. Can you defend yourself?"

"... I can dodge. Plus I don't have a heart, so they won't be too attracted to me."

"Hm." After a moment's consideration, I summoned my Keyblade. "Here, you can borrow this," I said, unclipping Voice of the Well. "Umm... I think Castle Oblivion will be safer. We're going to need to head there soon anyway, and I'd bet the mansion in Twilight Town is the first place the Organization is going to look when they realize you've escaped."

Naminé took my Kingdom Key and nodded. "Um... I know you can call this back any time, but how will you know it's safe?"

"Hmmm, maybe you could... Ugh, one of these days it's gonna occur to me to carry around extra communicators."

"Here, she can take mine," Axel said, handing it over to her. "It's only connected to Yen Sid, but he can relay to Tempest. I still don't know why that is," he said, glaring at me suspiciously, "but it's only mildly inconvenient anyhow."

"Yeah, that works," I said, nodding. "Probably you should - "

"Hey, Yen Sid," Naminé spoke into the communicator, way ahead of me. "Just FYI, Axel handed me his communicator so I could relay to Tempest when it's safe for her to retrieve her Keyblade. Long story. So he'll be out of touch for a bit." She pushed a button on it and it went silent again. "Probably I should keep people in the loop? I agree. Now, you two should keep looking for Roxas," she said, and exited through a Corridor of Darkness.

Axel blinked. "She's... more energetic than I remember her being."

"Well, you pretty much only ever met her when she was your prisoner."

"Eh, true. Anyway, shall we?" He opened another Corridor of Darkness and we traveled to Zexion's lab.

Luckily for us, Zexion was less strict about security than Vexen. He had quite a few relevant files lying around. Axel went through those while I started to try his computer.

Like Vexen's it was locked. Unlike Vexen's, this one had a password hint. "Natural log of negative one, over pi. That sounds familiar, but it's been too long since high school math..."

"Isn't that a rephrasing of Euler's identity? The answer's i, the imaginary unit." I input the single-character password and Zexion's messaging app popped up.

"He always liked having simple passwords and complicated hints. If you failed three times it'd sound an alarm and activate that," he added, gesturing to... what appeared to be a nondescript wall panel. "Okay, you obviously can't see it, but there's a wicked Tesla coil behind that panel. Wipe the computer, in case you were thinking of just lifting it and hacking it at home, and probably shock you real good too. Larxene had fun helping with that one..."

"Do Tesla coils work like that?" It sounded improbable, but I'd never researched them per se.

"I dunno, maybe he had to modify it. I do know that thing works like that."

Scrolling through Zexion's conversation with Vexen, I mostly saw chatter about the Replica Project. Nothing seemed interesting or relevant enough to commit to memory, even when I tabbed to the other conversations with other members.

HIs documents mostly contained writeups on older projects. I opened a few, but they didn't look that relevant either. They were all properly named, though, which made "New Memo" (created one day ago) stick out like a sore thumb.

"PL, UG, star-emoji-crossed-swords-emoji, question mark ex two - er, that's probably 'times two'," I read off. "Send one member to each known target, and select one at random to escort the package."

"The package... is that Roxas? What do those abbreviations mean?"

"You won't be finding out, traitor," Lexaeus spat, emerging from a Corridor of Darkness.

"Wh- how'd you know we were here?"

"Did you think our alarms were for show? Or did you forget that we still have ten loyal members?"

I held out my hand and - oh, shit, Naminé! I couldn't summon my Keyblade and leave her suddenly defenseless!

Lexaeus drew his axe sword. "Since you've kindly relinquished your primary weapon, I will offer you this chance to surrender."

"What do you people even want from me? I'm at least 60% sure I have no particular significance - and having a Keyblade doesn't count anymore."

"Surrender and maybe you'll find out."

"Not happening," Axel interrupted, drawing his chakrams. "She's leaving, and you're not following her."

"Uh, Axel, are you implying -?"

"I can take him, easy."

"But can you stop me so easily? I only need to bypass you, not defeat you."

"Well, you two have fun arguing about that, bye!" I said hastily, slipping into a Corridor of Darkness.

XXXXXXXXXX

I emerged in the Realm of Darkness, near-defenseless and surrounded by Heartless. Which I had known would happen, but I was mad about anyway. Thankfully, they weren't paying attention to me. Yet.

"Well, this whole situation is just super."