ATUHOR'S NOSE: Eyyy, we live!

For the sake of readers who can't see color (for both vision-impairment and FFN-doesn't-have-text-colors reasons) we did try our best to make the dialogue easy enough to follow even without those cues.

Also let's assume that at some point offscreen Tempest asked Marco's pronouns and Marco was like "uh, him? the boy ones? because I am definitely a normal ordinary boy -" and Tempest was like "I am ethically obligated to act as though I take this claim at face value. Even though it is very blatantly questionable (void)". And Marco was like "why did you say 'void' after that second sentence" and Tempest was like "what second sentence, I only said one sentence".

...either that's a really good bit and we should be annoyed we only just now came up with it, or... the opposite of that... and we can't tell which.

I grumbled in annoyance as the Gummi ship's autopilot drove toward Mewni. I did not have to do that the way I did it. Of course I didn't. There were so many other things I could've done instead of impulsively giving a kid a Keyblade that hadn't even asked for it.

Nothing to be done about it after the fact, though... I thought about it, and I was pretty sure the only option was to teach Marco myself. At least a little bit, the important parts not already covered by martial arts training. The Keyblade parts, in particular.

... Probably should have been a bit more forthcoming with Marco about the Keyblade's existence. Dunno why that didn't occur to me earlier.

Didn't think this through, eh Tempe?

"And you can shut right the hell up! You're not even real, so you have no say in the matter!"

You... do see the problem with that statement, right?

"Still not real!"

... I wasn't having the best time. This pretty much continued until the ship reached Mewni.

"I'm gonna stop talking to you now, you know that?"

Oh, obviously. But I won't stop talking to you~

I groaned with deep annoyance. "Just... at least let me handle this in peace?"

No promises.

Finding Marco didn't take long. I'd landed just outside Echo Creek and I quickly made my way to the taco stand.

"All right," Marco said. "What's going on?"

I took a deep breath. "Hold out your hand," I said, holding mine out in front of me to demonstrate.

Marco held out a hand as directed. "I don't really get what's..."

I summoned my Keyblade.

"... No, that doesn't explain anything."

I shook my head. "Of course not. That would've been totally cool and dramatic, though."

Nice priorities.

Hush, damn you!

"Tempe? You listening?"

I shook my head. "Uh, trying to. Do you know... how Keyblades are summoned? Like, generally?"

Marco frowned. "It kinda sounds like you're implying — " And then Marco frowned harder and I could see his wrist tense briefly and there was a Keyblade in his hand. "... What?"

"At this point," I said, "I'd like to say a sentence starting with the phrase 'in my defense'. ... I'd really, really like to say such a sentence."

"Wait, why?" Marco responded.

I blinked. "Uh..." Oh yeah. Nobody ever told Marco about this. "The Heartless can sense Keyblades. So they kinda... go after 'em."

"So I'm monster bait now?! Why!?"

"... It really really seemed like a good idea to give you a Keyblade," I said. "The monster bait thing, I'd just forgotten about."

"So you're impulsive, join the club," Star said. I was definitely completely aware of her presence and did not leap any number of feet into the air.

"Star?! How long have you been here?" I exclaimed.

"Like, the entire time?" she said. "Do you just never turn around?"

"Apparently not? I don't actually pay attention to that!"

"So," Star said, "Marco's got a cool key sword now. You can just hand those out, then?"

"Uh, in principle," I said, "but..." I trailed off, noticing Star was giving me puppy-dog eyes. "Star, you can have a Keyblade when Marco decides it's a good idea. I'm impulsive, but I'm not that impulsive."

"Bah! I revoke your membership to the impulsive club!" Star declared.

"So," Marco said before Star could distract me any further, "what are you planning to do?"

"Well, uh," I stammered, "I think, the only realistic option here is for me to... train you in Keyblading, at least the important stuff that's not already covered by your martial arts."

"All right, what kind of stuff do I need to learn?" Marco asked.

"That's... the part I'm stuck on," I admitted. "I, uh, never actually got any kind of formal training, so..."

Gosh oh golly gee, you ever wonder why you're supposed to be a Master before you do a Bequeathing?

And you can just buzz right off.

"Oh. Great." Marco looked, well, not pleased.

"Yeah. Well, improvising. I was thinking, for starters, your martial arts classes probably cover a lot of basic bare-fisted fighting -"

"And how do you know about my martial arts classes?" Marco asked.

"That's not important right now. What's important is SURPRISE SWORDING LESSON!" And with that I leapt across the table and swung my Keyblade at Marco.

... Don't look at me like that. I took a nice big telegraphed wind-up to make sure Marco had time to react and block. Which was exactly what happened.

We flynned through the food court for a few minutes, me pushing Marco back the whole way.

"What are you doing?!" Star exclaimed.

"Teaching Marco how to use a weapon!" I told her. "Stop retreating and hit me, Marco!"

I was literally asking for it, yet somehow I was surprised when Marco responded to this with a one-two combo, first bashing my wrist, then knocking Voice of the Well out of my hand, sending it clattering across the food court.

"Ow," I muttered, rubbing my wrist. "Well. I guess you're already pretty polished at swording, then."

"And you're apparently not," Marco said, Keyblade warily pointed at me. "Aren't you an official Keyblade person?"

"Yeah, but I'm a white mage," I said, summoning my blade back to my hand and holding it in the off-hand reverse grip I favored when focused on casting. "Wherever possible, I avoid actually needing to swing the big chunk of metal at people. Speaking of item number two on the list! Magic!"

"Uhhhhhhh" Marco uhhh'd

"Okay, hang on!" Star interrupted. "I have got, like, at least three questions here."

"I have absolutely no idea what the relation may or may not be between your kind of magic and this kind of magic," I said.

"... Okay yeah that covers all of them."

"Good." I turned back to Marco. "Now, in principle, magic doesn't actually have anything to do with Keyblades at all. I learned magic just fine when I thought I didn't have a Keyblade. So it might be simplest to dismiss our Keyblades for now," I said, doing that, "and learn magic pretending we don't have them."

"Okay..." Marco said. "... How exactly does this make up for impulsively giving me a Keyblade, then?"

"Well, y'know, if Heartless are gonna be after you all the time, it's best to be have every defensive ability possible, right?" I said, not quite certain of my logic.

"... Um, speaking of that, they sure don't appear to be after me now," Marco said, looking around.

I blinked. "... Huh. Weird. Come to think of it, they didn't go after me when I was in Traverse Town not knowing I had one..." I pulled out my phone and dashed off a quick text to Luke. "I dunno, but I bet my brother does. He's always had himself more together than me. Anyway! Magic. I learned my magic from a ninja and a wizard."

"A ninja wizard?" Marco asked incredulously.

"No, two different people, one's a ninja, one's a wizard." I paused. "The wizard might also be a time-traveler, now that I think of it..."

"Waitwaitwait, are you talking about Merlyn?" Marco said.

"You know about Merlin?"

"He's... a major mythological figure? T.H. White wrote some books about him and King Arthur?"

"Oh, that makes more sense than what I was thinking. Anyway magic," I hastily continued before Marco could ask just what I had been thinking. "The way I learned magic was... kinda ridiculous. We're not gonna do it like that." I paused for a moment to put together some kinda coherent path from not knowing any magic at all to... at least being able to practice magic on one's own.

"What we are gonna do," I continued, "is... uh, this: step one, hold out your hand."

Marco held out a hand. "Uh, what exactly is the purpose of this...?"

"... Okay full disclosure, I've never taught magic before."

"Gosh, I couldn't tell," Star said.

I rolled my eyes. "My point is that I'm kinda improvising here, so bear with me if I'm a bit directionless. Anyway." I turned back to Marco. "First thing, you need to find magic. I am absolutely going to be doing this the cheatsy shortcut way. Which is probably totally fine and will have no downsides."

"That's not at all reassuring," Marco said.

"I'm sure the main benefit of doing it the slow and proper way is to weed out people who would go off the rails when given power," I said. "So nothing to worry about."

And you're quite sure Marco isn't one of those, of course. You're definitely not immediately thinking of that one bit where Marco instantly got possessed just by turning a page.

I gritted my teeth in annoyance, and that was just about as much as I thought I could respond to that without someone noticing. "Anyhow, cheatsy shortcut — " I gathered energy in the tips of my fingers, then reached out and grabbed the magic in Marco's hand, pulling it just about two inches out of the flesh.

"Yeesh," Marco yeeshed. "That is an absolutely skin-crawling feeling."

"Is it?" I asked, releasing the magic, which sprung back into Marco like a rubber band. "I never tested it on myself." A brief pause to let the gears click in my head, and then I quickly tested it on myself, pulling some magic out of my arm.

"Yeesh," I yeeshed, "that is unsettling. Well, we only need to do it once anyway, you should be able to feel your magic now. And a lot less creepily."

"I can do that, yeah," Marco said. "It's... kinda surreal. In retrospect it was always there, but somehow I didn't notice it before...?"

"Ooh! Hey!" Star interjected. "I have an idea! You should do that to me so I can compare your magic to my magic and see if they're the same thing!"

Oh yeah, we are so on task right now.

Shut up shut up shut up shut up "Yeah, sure Star, we could try that..." I desperately cast about for a reason not to, because it didn't seem like either answer would be a good thing to get into Star Butterfly's head, at least not without thinking about it a lot more... "After I finish teaching Marco, all right?"

Star huffed and folded her arms. "Fiiiiine. You better teach fast, though!"

"Unlikely, to be honest," I said bluntly. "Anyway, Marco. What you wanna do here is actually fairly simple. You can feel your magic now, right? So now that you can do that, you want to gather up a bunch of it, compress it into a little orb, and throw it at your target." I summoned Voice of the Well and held it in front of me in a blocking position. "Who will, of course, be me, because I don't make a habit of carrying around target dummies in my back pocket."

Though if you're gonna keep being like this, maybe you should start.

That's... not a bad point, for someone who doesn't exist.

... stubborn brat. Watch yourself, by the way.

I suddenly remembered that there was an outside world to pay attention to just in time to spot and block an orb of water magic, which exploded in a splash.

I blinked drippingly. "Well, you seem to have gotten that down pretty well." I thought back on my magic classes with Yuffie and Merlin. "Step two, learn how to cast specific types of magic, instead of just whichever one your... magical core or whatever, happens to be aligned to."

"I'm inherently aligned to water?" Marco asked, sounding skeptical.

I shrugged. "It's not exactly an inherent trait. It can change with context and self-perception and stuff. I was aligned with earth when I first learned magic cause, like I said before, I think of myself as white mage, a person-who-casts-Stone."

"Huh." Marco thought about that a moment. "What kind of mage is a person-who-casts-Water?"

I shrugged. "Never heard of one, actually. Honestly, these classes are kinda fake in the first place. You could make up your own, call it the Nacho Mage."

Marco looked intrigued. "Marco Diaz, universe's first Nacho Mage..."

"Though to be fair, I imagine there's lots of people aligned to water," I said. "Just that I haven't heard a specific word for it yet."

"Hydromancer?" Star offered.

"Specific Final Fantasy word for it," I clarified. "... also I think you might be mixing Greek and Latin roots there, which someone somewhere probably objects to..." Seeing as I wasn't that person, I just shrugged it off. "Anyway. Other elements of magic. To my recollection, there's... fire, ice, thunder...earth, air, water... light, darkness... magnet, gravity, time... healing... whatever element Ruin is, I think it's nothing? I think that's all of the basic elements. There's complicated combo stuff too," I said, waving a hand dismissively, "but this'll get you by."

"Isn't ice just... frozen water?" Marco wondered.

"Physically, yeah, but ice magic might be more accurately termed something like 'chill' magic," I mused, "cause the defining trait is the coldness, not the solid dihydrogen monoxide. ... This'll make a lot more sense when you know how to cast them," I added, noting that the two teens' eyes appeared to be glazing over.

I quickly went over an explanation of how to cast other spells by filtering magic through the elemental concepts of earth, wind, and healing. "You can kinda see a pattern here, but it's still a really good idea to have an experienced mage on hand when you're trying a new element... to put out fires if nothing else."

"Speaking from experience?" Star asked.

"Maybe!" I said cheerfully. "Hmm, what else should I do...?"

"Um, no offense, Tempe," Marco said, "but none of this has addressed the actual problem here, which is that you turned me into monster bait!"

"R- right," I stammered, "which is why I'm making sure you're able to fight the Heartless..."

"Have you considered just undoing the thing so I wouldn't be monster bait at all?"

I froze, faltering. "Uh... I don't... think I can take the Keyblade back... plus I don't know how I'd do that if I could..." I was (briefly) saved from my floundering by my phone chiming with a text message, which I checked immediately.

Heartless generally consider large populated areas too risky to enter, so they won't chase Keyblade bearers there. Why do you ask?

No real reason, just remembered a thing and was curious.

"Luke says to stay in large populated areas, the Heartless don't like to go there," I told Marco, immediately realizing that —

"That's really not a solution!" Marco exclaimed.

"I know, I know," I said, running a hand through my hair nervously. "It's the best I've got, though... um, maybe handing off your Keyblade to someone else if you want to leave town?"

"And that definitely won't give them another copy of the thing, the same way it did when you let me borrow yours?" Marco said skeptically.

"Ack, right, that would be problematic..." I wracked my brain for some kind of alternate solution. "I had intended for you to get your own Keyblade when I did that. I intended it very hard, actually. Maybe that makes a difference..." I suddenly recalled how Kairi got her Keyblade — and for that matter how I had gotten mine. "... too much of a long shot to risk, I suppose. Unless you want lots of people to have Keyblades — "

"I really, really don't," Marco said.

"Yeah, I'm starting to think that's just me," I muttered. "Um..." I ran my hand through my hair again. "I dunno. I'm... I'm running out of ideas here. I..." Without thinking about it, I opened up a Corridor and —

"... did she just... vanish in a cloud of smoke?" Marco said, sounding confused as hell.

"I think she did, yeah."

hey remember when i took the whole "this is actually tempest's journal" thing seriously and left stuff out because i thought tempest wouldn't want to write that

haha what a wacky idea lol