ATUHOR'S NOSE: As you can see, I'm not quite dead yet! There were multiple reasons for this delay, but I think my primary mistake was splitting up a transitiony bit into two chapters. Even though that felt like a really good note to end a chapter on.

If this had taken my usual two-ish weeks, I'd be making a comment about E3 right now. But now it feels too late.

This chapter was betaread by Nightress5. Acknowledge their awesomeness!

I glared at the books, annoyed. Then I glared at the striking dummies. I switched back and forth a few times before giving up. "Oh, whatever," I griped, slamming a book shut. "This is basically what I was trying to do anyway. I just... hyperfocused on the effects I wanted and forgot that reality is messier than that." I started to put away the striking dummies, grumbling indistinct recriminations towards my past self.

"Having trouble, Tempest?" Aqua asked as she entered the room.

"One could make such an assertion," I said, unnecessarily cryptic. "But it's nothing I can't handle... so far, at least."

"You're not planning to do anything reckless, right?"

"Planning? Oh, no, nothing of that sort." Aqua didn't seem particularly pacified by this pointedly precise platitude. "No, I already did the reckless thing." Now she looked even less reassured.

"Elaborate," she growled in possibly the most intimidating tone I had ever heard in my entire life. Or maybe it just seemed that way because she also had her Keyblade pointed directly between my eyes.

"Whoa! Hello there. Overkill much. Um." Carefully, without making any sudden movements, I placed two fingers on the Keyblade's teeth and gently nudged it to the side, so it was pointed away from my face. "I'm, uh, not entirely sure what you thought just then, but I feel fairly confident in guessing that I did a different and less dangerous thing."

Aqua still looked skeptical. "Look," I said, "you see the books, right?" I didn't know if she'd recognize them off-hand, but the titles weren't subtle. "Does anything obvious spring to mind?"

"... So you were also worried about the darkness in your heart."

"Well, I... hang on, 'also'? When did you think of this?"

"The moment we met. You reminded me of Terra. Reckless, impulsive," Aqua paused, "... trusting, and naive..."

"You... got all that from one conversation?"

"Well, I might have imagined part of it -"

"I mean, you're right on the mark, so even if you imagined it... I don't think you did, though." I pondered this. "I really ought to stop being surprised when people who are much older and wiser than me are so dang insightful."

"'Much older and wiser'? I've got four years on you, tops."

"Okay, slightly older and much wiser. Still."

Aqua let out that exasperated-amused noise halfway between a sigh and a chuckle. You know the one. She took another glance at the books, as if to confirm that they were the same ones she had looked at one minute ago. "You really are trying to avoid being consumed by darkness, huh?"

"I do have a general preference not to be consumed by things, yes."

"And you're not looking for an easy path to power?"

"If there was a path to power that was easy and worth it, everyone would be taking it, not just No Heart."

"No Heart?" Of course she didn't immediately know who that was. I was trying to figure out how to clarify when the penny (1-munny piece?) dropped. "Oh, you mean-"

"Don't!" I interrupted. Very loudly. Maybe too loudly, judging by Aqua's flinch. "... Sorry. But after remembering that he could track people by putting his initial on them, I've gotten super paranoid about saying any word containing it."

"... Such as the names of everyone in the Organization?"

"Yeah! It makes talking about them really annoying, like we're up against a whole team of Voldemorts." I shuddered at that thought.

"I don't know what a Voldemort is..." Oh, jeez, I thought, am I going to have to go into ridiculous detail about Harry Potter now? (*) I was trying to figure out where to start when she continued speaking. "...but you seemed awfully demoralized to think of the Organization as a whole team of them. And it struck me that... well, where did you originally learn that our enemy could track that letter?"

(*Yes, I know - in retrospect, it clearly would have been quite sufficient to say 'Voldemort was a fictional evil dude who everyone was scared of saying his name'. I was sleep-deprived. Moving on...)

"Um? Well..." She seemed to have skipped a few steps, but I went with it. "You know about the video game thing. This happened in the most recent release... One of the 'norts, I forget which one, was info-dumping about how the whole thing had been a trap for Sora, and the crossed straps on their new outfits were how they'd tracked them the whole time. 'As your flesh bears the sigil, so shall your name be known as that of a recusant'.

"... Hey, wait a second. Why'd he tell Sora any of that? If that particular vessel needed to be independently told something the group already knew for some reason, that could have happened afterward. Or else, if the plan failed, he'd have leaked one of their primary spying tools to the enemy for no benefit."

"No benefit?" she asked, raising an eyebrow. "It freaked you out pretty good."

"Aqua, that can't have been intentional! Knowing things might be his superpower, but there's absolutely no way he knew that a video game was delivering his monologue to a remote observer."

"Oh, of course, there's no way he knew that. But look at what he did know. He knew that if Sora escaped, they would absolutely tell us everything. And he did plan for that possibility in other ways, so the idea that he overlooked this consequence..."

"... So, what, you think he sacrificed a powerful observational tool to inconvenience and demoralize us slightly?"

Aqua shrugged. "I know you weren't serious, but I wouldn't put it past him, under the right circumstances. Still, I had something else in mind. You know that he can't have made 'two crossed lines are trackable by the forces of darkness' into a fundamental property of the universe, right?"

"Aqua, I just learned that everything I thought I knew about physics was made up by the soul of the multiverse as misdirection so it could present the reality of other worlds as fiction without risking us figuring out that magic was a thing. I'm kinda restarting science from the beginning, here."

"... That's fair," Aqua said, shrugging again. "Well, you can get primary school physics books from... maybe not Yen Sid's library, actually. You might have to wait until we have time to go back to Traverse town and borrow them from Merlin. Until then, the simple version. Modifying fundamental rules of physics requires the creation of a closed space - such as your worlds, actually. Overriding the true laws of physics with the strict math-based version you learned would never work outside a closed space."

(It was fascinating watching Aqua teach. She just needed a pointer and a blackboard to complete the archetypal professor image.)

"Now, the Recusant's Sigil obviously never worked that way. There are a number of ways he could have pulled this off, like giving a tracking spell a transmissible element and overcharging it - but the main thing they'd all have in common is that he'd have to put in one huge burst of magical energy at the very beginning, and when that was used up, the whole spell would fall apart all at once."

"So, what, he'd have to recharge it every so often, right?"

"In practice, no. As the spell spread throughout space - and time, because of course time travel would get involved," she added with a look of utter disgust on her face, "it would become more and more inefficient to recharge. He could do it anyway, especially early on, but eventually it would grow beyond his power to maintain."

I tilted my head in thought. "So... that would imply..." I knew where she was going with this, but I didn't want to say it.

Aqua just watched me, expectantly. She knew I knew and she wasn't gonna let me off the hook.

"... when the spell ran out of energy, it'd be done, pretty much for good. I mean, he could repeat it, but he'd be starting from square one, and..." I left unspoken a hunch that his... magical capacity or whatever, might not be what it once was. Voicing something like that without solid evidence seemed like a good way to ensure that at a critical moment he'd be all 'FYI I am not left handed' and pull a bunch of additional magic out of his rear end. "... Well, suffice to say he's not going to, is he?"

"Most likely not."

"In which case... all he'd have left is the idea of the Recusant's Sigil. Sacrificing that for a cheap bluff would be basically free. ... So the sigil doesn't work anymore and he can't track a damn thing, and I'm a dumbass." I buried my face in my hands and let out an anguished groan. "I completely played myself, didn't I?"

Aqua patted my shoulder. "Don't feel too bad. It happens when you're dealing with Xehanort's schemes."

"That's.. definitely true. Yes, you're right again," I said, picking myself up and continuing to put away what was still scattered about. "No more whining about how foolish I feel. Gotta focus on the now and the future and all that stuff."

Aqua blinked. "That was... a quick turnaround."

"Well, I wasn't that aggrieved about it. Nothing really happened because of my mistake, it was just kind of annoying for a while. Plus, on the bright side - the annoyance is over. I can just say things again without having to be vigilant all the time over how they're spelled."

Aqua gave me a skeptical look. "... You're being relentlessly positive on purpose."

"Well, yeah. I mean, I know a sunny attitude isn't a get-out-of-darkness-free card - just look at Sora, right? - but my natural inclination would be to wallow in self-loathing and berate myself for falling for that obvious bluff like a big dumb idiot, and that would definitely go badly."

"Ah. That's why you're worried."

"One of the reasons, yeah. Anyway, you came here to train, right? I mean, you didn't say why, but this is a training room, so it's the most obvious guess..."

"Actually, I came here to speak to you."

"Oh! Well, uh, you've been doing that, but if there's any particular topic you still need to address, I'm listening."

She paused for a moment as I finished putting away the training equipment. "The thing is... I'm not ready to take apprentices yet. Even considering that I have to recover from being stuck in the Realm of Darkness, I just don't have enough experience yet."

"Y'know," I interjected, "I don't know why the Keyblade tradition doesn't have this, but back home, systems like this didn't promote people straight from 'apprentice' to 'master'. There was an in-between step where they were independent but not ready to take apprentices, called 'journeyman'. And I mean, I'm aware that there's a vague understanding that new Keyblade Masters need to... master around for a bit before they can train apprentices, but this was a formal part of the system."

"Hmm. Interesting. What were the qualifications for graduating from journeyman to master?"

"Well, I was never part of such a system myself, so I'm working with osmosis here - for all I know, I might have said something incorrect already. But I vaguely recall that there would usually be a guild involved, and a journeyman would need to produce a masterwork that the guild would evaluate... not entirely sure how that correlates to what is effectively magical knight-errantry, but Sora and Riku's Mark of Mastery exam seems to be approximately equivalent.

"Oh, but I totally interrupted you. You were saying?"

"Right. Well, I'm not ready to take apprentices yet. But when I am, you'll be the first to know."

I nodded. "All right then." A pause. "If you ask me, you'll definitely make a good teacher."

"Well, I've wanted to teach for most of my life. Even before I apprenticed with Master Eraqus, I always figured I'd teach something when I grew up. If I'm passing on the Keyblade, though, I'll have to choose my students much more carefully than I had imagined when I was twelve."

"Yeah, this kind of power could... well, already is doing a lot of damage in the wrong hands. Then again, Xehanort apparently seemed perfectly reasonable right up until the day he interfered in your Mark of Mastery exam..."

Just then, somewhat inconveniently, my phone chimed. "Hm..?" A quick glance at the text notification. "Oh, it's Luke. ...We're about to head out?" He had included a reason, of course, but the preview cut it off.

"I thought we were only taking a short break."

"I also thought that," I said, reading the remainder of the message. "It seems Organization members have been spotted on all three target worlds, so we gotta head out and hit them before they start messing things up. So the rest of the meeting is postponed."

XXXXXXXXXX

I blinked.

We were on a Gummi Ship. 'We' here being me, Luke, Sora, and Mickey.

"Hold up. I think..." we skipped too much with that scene break, I didn't say, because this fic has a fourth wall. "... I zoned out a bit. A lot. The entire planning process. What are we doing, again?"

"Well," Mickey said, "we've split up into three teams, to go after all three targets at once."

"Must be nice," I mused, "actually having enough people, for once. Usually darkness way outnumbers light. It's even built into the χ-blade scenario that we're outnumbered nearly two to one."

"Still," Sora said, "with the original Organization back for no reason, Xehanort has a bunch of extra allies. We're not out of the woods yet."

"Sure, but I figure most of them will merge with their originals as readily as Axel and Lea did," Luke said. "Though with whatever the deal is with Saïx and Xigbar now, they might be more complicated."

"I wonder if..." I shook my head suddenly. "And I've brought us off track again. What is our group doing, right now, specifically?"

"We're going to Shibuya," Luke said. "Plan is to meet up with Joshua if possible, or anyone else we know. They'll help us find where our Organization member is hiding."

"Wait a sec - we're all alive, will we even be able to see into the UG?"

"We're not expecting that to be -" Mickey started saying, but was interrupted.

"What do you mean 'we're all alive'?!" Sora interrupted.

I blinked, perplexed. "Are... some of us not alive?"

Luke poked himself in the shoulder. "No, I don't think that's the issue," he said, grinning. "I think someone just forgot to explain to Sora the finer details of the Reapers' Game. But as His Majesty was about to explain, we don't expect to need to see into the UG. If you recall the ending of that game, everyone's alive again now."

"Yeah, but - Sora, you met them in the dream realm, right? And they were in the Reapers' Game again. Which might also have been the first time...? The point being, I have no idea what the timeline actually looks like."

Mickey shook his head. "This time, we don't need to rely on your memory. I contacted Joshua before we left... I told you I was going to do that, Tempest. Don'tcha remember?"

"Mm... like I said earlier, I lost some time there, so maybe that's why I don't."

"Hmm." Mickey tilted his head in thought. "Does it happen to you often, losing time like that?"

I thought about it for a moment. "Not frequently, I don't think. This would be the first time since I left my world... I didn't keep close track of how often it happened back home, because it never seemed to interrupt anything important. But it couldn't have been more than an hour or so every few weeks." A thought suddenly occurred to me. "Hey, you don't think that -?"

"I think," Mickey said, "you ought to keep an eye on yourself, and tell someone if you get worried about what you see. It might be nothing, but after your little experiment in London -"

"Hey, wait, how do you know about that?"

Luke raised a guilty hand. "We've been keeping in touch since the beginning, and... I thought, since I don't know anything about that, someone else should know. Just in case."

I sighed. "Okay. A perfectly sensible precaution. I'm not actually mad, but in the future, please ask beforehand."

Sora looked back and forth between the three of us in confusion. "Uh, did I miss something?"

I groaned quietly. "I'd have preferred not to talk about this," I muttered. But then I shook my head. "I guess I should have thought about that before I did it. So, you know how Points of Shadow only go off when light and darkness clash nearby. After setting off my second Point, I had a 'clever' idea - if our enemies are all dark, what if I stopped being light? And as it happens, the Fifth City has some... interesting rituals. So I decided to do something super reckless..."