Author's Note: This chapter is the reason I posted this story with an M rating. It's not anything particularly graphic, but I think it definitely pushes beyond what I would be comfortable publishing as a T rating.
Also, to the guest leaving the reviews (Arika Koski): Thank you so much for taking the time to do that, but since you are a guest account there's not a way to directly answer your questions for things that could be considered spoilers for other readers. If you had an account I could PM you answers.
Naminé exited the Dark Corridor with Way to the Dawn in a ready stance, only to relax when she saw she was alone in what remained of the Black Forest. She knew it was a long shot that she'd be appearing right in the middle of something, but it paid to be cautious. Multiple worlds had all started reporting sightings of a mysterious figure running around, and while there was never a fully detailed report the details that were common across multiple worlds warranted attention. Some worlds were reporting the figure as wearing an Organization cloak, and that was immediately cause for concern. The only people who would know where to get those were either connected to the Organization, or the figure that had attacked Radiant Garden alongside the Foretellers. Since most of the old Organization were now allies—or in cases like Demyx, Elrena, and Lauriam had their locations currently known and weren't traveling outside of their worlds—this painted the figure as likely dangerous. They never had tracked down Braig or Luxord's Somebody, and with Braig's long history of working for Xehanort and the general mystery surrounding Luxord's past either could prove problematic to a world.
However, some of the rumors coming from worlds reported a figure wielding a giant key, and that pointed to a vastly different level of threat. It was a simple matter to verify that none of their Keyblade Wielders had been galavanting around in an Organization cloak, which meant the figure could only be a Foreteller, another Keyblade Wielder that had somehow appeared after sitting out the last Keyblade War, or Sora somehow returned to the worlds but unable to directly meet up with his friends for whatever reason. Since the last two options were far less likely, it sounded like they had a chance to get a jump on one of their newest enemies.
Of course, just having information of where the figure had been wasn't too helpful. They were still working on getting some sort of unified timeframe across all the worlds, and even if they had something like that it didn't help that their information was coming from rumors so it was impossible to tell exactly when the figure had been in each world. The only way to truly figure this out would be to hit as many points as possible. Since their last encounter with the foretellers proved a one-on-one fight was a terrible idea, though, each person knew they were just doing scouting and would have to call for help as soon as they realized a fight was coming. With time of the essence, that meant a Gummi Ship would be too slow, so only those who had mastered Dark Corridors were active on this mission. As soon as any one of them made contact, all of them would be able to jump in to either subdue the figure or in the worst case get their friend out of the fight before things went too badly.
Since Naminé was the only one who didn't have a lot of experience traveling to different worlds, she let everyone else pick which world they would investigate first and ended up getting the Principauté de Rose. At first she thought she was in a similar position to everyone else, but on arrival at Adam's castle she was directed towards a remote village where the one sighting had been reported. Once she arrived there, she found that while Adam had only been aware of one sighting, the village had often seen a figure in a black cloak retreating into the parts of the forest that remained in the grips of darkness. They had never bothered pursuing, because while most of the forest was now much safer than it had been in decades, that just meant the truly dangerous beasts were more concentrated in a single area so it was best to avoid it at all costs.
Naminé could only sigh but not hold that against the villagers. After spending a decade having to fight for a living within the confines of a cursed forest, they were probably all too happy to avoid further conflicts. And the remaining pockets of darkness that permeated the forest would only be more intense—even a light as powerful as that of a Princess of Heart could never completely eliminate darkness, and any loose Heartless and other beings manipulated by darkness would have only gotten stronger as they had less area to work with. So of course her mysterious target would just go into that area without a care in the world, and now she had to follow.
There wasn't any clear danger as soon as she stepped out of the portal and into the woods, but Naminé always kept herself ready to fight at a moment's notice. She was going through unfamiliar territory against an opponent who could likely defeat her with very little effort if she was caught unaware, so she made sure to keep all of her senses primed for anything out of the ordinary. She'd much rather jump at a squirrel running through the brush than not take notice of someone approaching her, or even miss anything suspicious happening around here.
A woman's scream suddenly cut through the surrounding forest before instantly disappearing, not even echoing among the trees. Naminé immediately started heading towards it, Way to the Dawn held in a ready stance. If all of the locals knew to avoid this area, the screamer was most likely an outsider—or someone used to the typical dangers of the forest that had suddenly run into something much worse. Even if this wasn't related to the cloaked figure, she couldn't just sit back and do nothing while someone was in danger. However, despite her hurry, Naminé did make sure to keep her eyes and ears on her surroundings. Even if time was of the essence for the person she was trying to save, she couldn't help them if she ran into an enemy that she had to fight—or even just tripped on a tree root.
It was nearly impossible to tell how far sound carried within the strange forest, but after around a minute of walking Naminé still hadn't seen anything out of the ordinary and was beginning to wonder if she was still heading in the right direction. Her path eventually took her to a small clearing—or at least, it would have been a clearing if it hadn't been overtaken by a massive tangle of thorny vines broken up with various different types of wildflowers. It looked like it would be a pain to navigate through for no real benefit, so she may as well turn around and head back—
Naminé was turned around with her foot in the air when she paused. Where had that thought come from? Even if walking through the bramble was clearly not high on her priority list, why had she started heading backwards instead of just going around? Her instincts were telling her not to go into the clearing, but just forgetting about everything and heading back seemed like such an overreaction that she couldn't help but wonder why she wanted to go that far. A closer gaze at the clearing only made her want to leave more, which she took as a sign there was something more here that she was missing. Luckily, she had invented the perfect spell for this instance.
A small spark of magic and a whispered "Libra" later, and Naminé almost regretted creating the spell. It was great to show all the magical effects currently active on the target—but it turned out the air around the clearing was permeated with different magical effects. All the information jumbled together in a blur of colors that made it impossible to fully tell everything that was going on, although one small thing she saw reminded her of the look of Ienzo's illusion magic. Figuring that was potentially responsible for manipulating her instincts, she decided to see how the clearing looked when she couldn't be hit with negative magical statuses. Instead of using her own custom spell, she decided to copy the spell Riku had used to counter her own cases of mixed statuses.
As soon as the combination of Shell and Esuna surrounded her, the clearing in front of her shifted with a slight popping sound as the illusion dissipated. While the wildflowers remained, the thorny brambles and the feeling she shouldn't enter the clearing disappeared. More urgently, the things that suddenly appeared drove Naminé to action—as she now saw a small cottage in the middle of the clearing, and once again heard the woman whose screams had now reached a higher pitch before petering off into a wailing moan. That couldn't mean anything good, so Naminé immediately rushed to the cottage and threw the door open.
She had been prepared to potentially walk in on a woman being tortured. She hadn't been prepared for what she saw. From a purely detached standpoint, she had known she'd eventually have to face Elrena and Lauriam again, and it would not be the most pleasant of circumstances. In her more hopeful moments, she hoped she'd at least be able to attain the level of peace that Xion and Isa managed to stumble into. At the worst, she thought she'd deal with hostility and a flood of traumatic memories. She quickly found something worse than her worst case scenario.
Seeing the two of them again without expecting it did bring some very unpleasant memories, which might have been worse if they immediately noticed her. That was delayed by a few seconds though, as Lauriam had his back to her while Elrena was facing her but her head was currently thrown back and her eyes probably weren't able to see anything at the moment anyway...for reasons Naminé wished she couldn't piece together. Even in her worst case scenario of meeting the two people she had the worst memories of, it hadn't involved them both being naked, with Elrena currently suspended in the air with each limb wrapped in a vine. To say nothing of the fifth vine that was currently plunged inside of her and had most likely caused the screams...of pleasure instead of pain.
Naminé had long ago resolved to never use her powers over memory on herself in case she ended up putting herself into a coma like she had done with Sora and the Riku Replica—especially since she was the only one who could fix that level of damage to memories and she couldn't do that if she wiped herself out. However, this time she was strongly considering just doing it anyway. She wasn't sure if anything other than her powers could get this image out of her head. The best she could do was try to mentally escape to a happy place as she slowly backed out trying not to draw the attention of the two adults. Unfortunately, her attempt to remember her latest dancing lesson with Riku to erase the sight before her wasn't fully successful. Instead, it seemed to mix with the current situation, and she saw herself in Larxene's place with tendrils of darkness replacing the vines—and the pleasant tingling running through her at THAT thought was something she would have rather learned about herself in literally any other situation.
She thought she had suppressed the groan she wanted to let out at that particular thought, but she must not have succeeded as Lauriam turned towards her and after his eyes widened for a second in surprise he quickly threw out his hands and a pair of dark corridors appeared in front of him and Elrena. Since the corridors covered from the floor to each person's neck, Naminé could tell it was more an attempt at preserving modesty than an attempt at escape.
"Naminé, I'm sorry you had to walk in on this. There must be a reason you're here, and if you'll give us a chance to get dressed we can talk then." Naminé was thankful the former ruler of Castle Oblivion was at least trying to be civil considering the circumstances, but since the conversation wasn't going to lead her any closer to her original goal she decided to just put as much distance between her and this whole scenario as possible.
"That's fine, it's not really—" Naminé had to swallow the rest of her words as her attempt at a quick exit almost resulted in her walking directly into Elrena's knives as the older woman stood blocking her path. "Oh no, you don't get to just kill the mood and then go on your merry way. You better have a really good explanation for cock-blocking me, or I'll try to salvage some enjoyment out of this another way."
That threat, and the painful reminder of some of the times Larxene had decided to 'punish' her at Castle Oblivion, caused Naminé to freeze up. She wasn't sure how long it would have taken her to move if Lauriam hadn't cut in. "Can we please try NOT traumatizing Naminé any further? Yes, this is far from the ideal scenario but we don't have to immediately jump to inflicting pain on people we'd much rather keep as allies."
Despite the fact that her eyes were fixed on Elrena, Naminé was a bit surprised to hear her answer from behind her. "Oh please, do you really think it will come to that? She just waltzed in here getting past all of our defenses with a Keyblade in hand. If she really wanted to, she could dispel that clone pretty quickly. After all, I believe you've repeatedly shown that they really can't take that much punishment…"
Naminé involuntarily shivered at the images that sentence placed in her head, which just seemed to amuse both the original Elrena and her clone. "See, she's not completely out of it. She'll be able to bounce back just fine. Well, depending on the explanation. If she came here trying to kill us, she'll see what I'm like when I'm not playing around."
Lauriam sighed. "Fine. Let's just go get dressed and then we can talk about this like civilized people." Elrena must not have had any more arguments, since Naminé noticed her clone put her knives down with a sigh—although she didn't move from blocking the door. Taking that as a sign she was at least free to let her guard down for a bit, she decided to at least try to get a little bit of control of the situation.
"So, do you mind if I sit down somewhere?" It wasn't much, but it was better than being frozen staring down a set of knives. Elrena's clone just rolled her eyes. "Does it look like I give a fuck?" It was far from the friendliest response, but it was enough of an affirmation that Naminé felt comfortable enough to walk to one of the wooden chairs around the table and sit down. There was a nearby couch as well, but considering what she had walked in on, Naminé thought it was better to trust a less comfortable piece of furniture. Of course, it didn't matter how comfortable the furniture was if you had to deal with a supposedly-reformed psychopath watching you like a hawk.
Sitting quietly under the stare of Elrena's clone was bringing back some unpleasant memories, but Naminé decided she would try to do something different than before. "So, I get that you have to watch me, but if I promise not to leave until your original gets back, would you at least go get dressed?"
"What, so you can just slip away while I'm out of the room? I'm not exactly in a position where I can just trust you. As for you seeing me naked, I'll repeat my earlier question—does it look like I give a fuck?"
Naminé gave a small smirk that she was at least able to get something out of this. "Oh, maybe I was misunderstanding how your clone technique works. I thought you were sharing the same mind, but since your original seemed embarrassed to be seen by me and you don't I guess you're a completely different person who just has to serve at the original's whim and often dies for her."
Naminé wasn't sure what reaction she was going for from the clone, but laughter wasn't one of them. "Are you really trying to turn me against myself? You know, if you had shown any of this spark back at Castle Oblivion, things probably would have gone a lot differently and you would have been a player instead of a pawn." She took a deep breath before returning her eyes to Naminé, although they had a much lighter quality than her previous glare. "But I guess you are wrong, since I'm not really an individual. Sure, my original doesn't instantly know everything I do right now, but I have an exact copy of her mind from the time of my creation and she gets my memories back as soon as I fade away. As for the other thing, there's quite the difference between someone seeing me naked and someone seeing me while I'm pinned to the wall on orgasm number six."
Naminé flinched back at the flippant way Elrena's clone was bringing that up, leading to the older woman snickering. "You know, I was going to say that I'm not an exhibitionist because I don't like putting on a show for people, but if everyone is going to react like you are I might have to give it a try. You just make it so easy to tease you! Maybe we'll start with the eighty percent of the time I'm the one with Lauriam pinned to the wall and go from there…"
Naminé was saved from reacting when Lauriam burst into the room wearing a white shirt and dark pink pants. "How about we don't?" Elrena's clone had the audacity to wink at him before she disappeared in a fizzle of electricity, causing the pink haired man to sigh. "Sorry for that whole situation. Would you like something to drink? Normally I'd offer tea, but I can understand with our history and my powers if you don't trust anything plant-based around me."
Naminé was going to point out that she wouldn't have trusted anything Marluxia gave her, but since Lauriam was at least making an effort to be nice she could do the same. "Just water is fine. But speaking of powers, would you mind answering a question for me? I know you and Elrena probably have more questions for me that will have to wait until she gets here, but I was hoping to ask you about all the spells around this cottage."
Lauriam sent her an uncertain smile. "Sure, I can explain once I get the water. It will take Elrena a little longer to get dressed anyway, since you do not want to wear a black cloak without anything underneath it and the outfit she was wearing was not exactly designed for practicality."
Naminé resisted the urge to shiver—apparently it wasn't only Elrena that was able to put images she'd rather not see in her head. However, Lauriam didn't seem to notice as he had already left the room, only to return a minute later with a glass of water. Naminé wanted to trust him, but she supposed he wouldn't know if she cast a quick Libra right before he entered the room just to make sure there was nothing magical going on. When the glass of water came back without anything noticeable, she took a small sip before asking her question.
"Okay, so when I walked into this clearing, I noticed a ton of magical spells floating around, and I couldn't even identify all of them in the haze. One of them was an illusion hiding this cottage, and one of them was blocking sound, but how did you even manage to maintain all of those spells? Each one of them seemed pretty powerful, and I'm not sure how anyone could maintain a handful of those for more than a few seconds without passing out."
Lauriam smirked. "Oh, you're right. If I tried casting all of those spells they wouldn't last long at all. However, you're forgetting my particular elemental affinity. Sure, flowers may not seem as immediately threatening as lightning, but you'd be surprised at the different defense mechanisms some plants develop. All it takes is quite a bit of patience and the ability to travel worlds and you'll be able to find plants with pollen that can do everything from disorienting people to nullifying magic. All I then need to do is use a fraction of my power to trigger these plants to spread their pollen and I get whatever effect I could want, without having to worry about draining my reserves since I'm not actually the one maintaining the spell."
Naminé shivered. "Okay, if you could always pull something like that off, how was Sora ever able to defeat you?"
Lauriam just chuckled. "Well, for the simple matter that this setup takes some prepwork, and on both occasions Sora fought me I happened to be in areas that weren't exactly suitable for growing a garden. Back in Castle Oblivion Axel made sure to torch the room I was using as a greenhouse before he made his moves against me, and I couldn't exactly grow an entirely new garden out of the stone floor without expending an inordinate amount of power. Then in the Keyblade Graveyard I was in another wasteland, and since Xehanort wanted me to lose as part of his grand plan he didn't let me try my hand at terraforming before the fight. In both cases I was forced to rely on myself instead of existing plants."
Naminé gulped. "So, you're most dangerous in an area you were able to prepare ahead of time, and I walked into the middle of your house. I'm not going to get immediately killed if I step on the wrong blade of grass out there, am I?"
Lauriam's eyes widened. "What? Of course not! I'm trying not to fall down the wrong path again, so there's nothing so...immediately and indiscriminately fatal. This garden is mainly focused on stealth, and even the more directly threatening measures are designed more to incapacitate than kill. Of course, that's just because anybody who could get through the combination of spells that block sound, hide the cottage from view, provide a powerful suggestive influence to go away, and a few other related effects would obviously be someone we'd want to question in person. There are no automatic attacking plants, and the ones that are more dangerous focus on binding people in place or releasing a powerful sleeping agent. That's about all that you have to worry about—well, I guess there's also the parasitic plants currently in my body, but they aren't threatening."
"Wait, did you say parasitic plants? Are those even a thing? I thought the whole point of plants was they were able to provide their own food, and parasite implies needing something else to survive. And why would you even choose to let one grow in you?"
Lauriam smiled. "I told you, I went to many worlds finding unique plants, and I found three variations of parasitic plants. Two of them are far too dangerous to let them loose in my own body or anywhere near people I care about—there's the Sinning Tree which will trap the victim in illusions of their worst fears while it drains their life force, and the Immortal Mimic which will actually prolong your life nearly indefinitely—if you don't mind being completely unable to move and being a convenient practice dummy for just about anything that wants to torture something that can never escape and can only die under specific conditions. Neither of which are things I want in myself, or really see much use for since I almost died or worse collecting the scant few seeds I have."
He paused for a second before continuing. "No, the parasitic plant I'm referring to is known as Heart's Grapevine. It's a simple little thing that can monitor the condition of its host organism and if something is wrong, it sets off a distress signal that can be felt by other sprouts of the same plant. So, if multiple people consume the sprouts from the same plant, it serves as a way to immediately know if the others are in severe danger. And the best part is it only has a lifespan of a month before it dies and can then easily be digested by a human, so there's no long-term consequence. It might not be the prettiest solution, but it was the best way for Zinnia, Elrena, and I to be able to jump in and help each other if anything ever happens to us."
Naminé shuddered. "We could have just gotten you some Gummiphones. Seems like a cleaner solution than trusting some plant not to set roots in a direction you aren't expecting."
Lauriam shrugged. "In most cases you would be right. But trusting plants is easy when you can control them, and while most people would be well within their rights to never trust me, Elrena and Zinnia are exceptions to the rule. I'm rather protective of family, after all."
Before their conversation could continue, Larxene sauntered in the room wearing an Organization cloak and playing with her knives. "Luckily for us, that also happens to be one of my few redeeming qualities, and I'm less likely to balk at getting my hands dirty. So, why don't you explain exactly how and why you strolled past all of our defenses with a Keyblade in hand?"
Maybe it had been her relatively simple chat with Elrena's clone, or Lauriam's attempt at keeping things friendly, but Naminé was able to face down Elrena's glare without freezing up. "Okay, but I'll try to keep it simplified because there's quite a bit of context you need. We've started hearing about a figure running around the worlds, with most reports identifying a black cloak…"
Naminé continued her story, covering their fight at Radiant Garden where they barely withstood the ancient Keyblade Masters to further impress the urgency of why everyone was out scouring the worlds. "And when I got here, I found there were multiple sightings around this forest, so I went to investigate. I thought I was on the right track when I heard a scream, but I'm guessing that was just you."
Elrena had mostly been quiet through the explanation, but at this she turned her glare at her husband. "I thought you said you had all the privacy settings up!"
Lauriam blushed and averted his gaze. "I...may have forgotten them at first. In fairness, you were quite distracting…" Naminé took a deep breath to steel herself before she had to spend any more time listening to a recount of the more amorous adventures of her previous captors.
"Anyway, I followed the direction it came from until I came to the clearing, which I clearly felt the need to avoid without a reason why. That caused me to investigate further. I used a spell that lets me identify active magic, saw the cacophony of spells in the area, used another spell to dispel any effects on me, and that's when I came here. Now, I realize the tips we got from this world were probably just people seeing you, but I still think it will be best to keep looking around if you wouldn't mind me leaving."
Elrena rolled her eyes. "Fine, but if anybody else comes knocking unexpectedly I'll know exactly who to blame for telling them where we are. Now go on and leave so we can get back to—"
Elrena cut off as she and Lauriam both doubled over and clutched at their chests for a second. Lauriam immediately barked out, "Go to Zinnia! I'll be a few seconds behind!" as he formed a Dark Corridor and started running out of the room, presumably to grab his own cloak to safely travel. Elrena, who was already prepared, leapt into the corridor without pausing for a second. It only took Naminé a second to blink before she put all the pieces together, and then she was running through the corridor as well. She may not have personally known Zinnia, but she wasn't about to let another child molded by the Organization suffer while she could help it.
