Asleep at Dawn
Chapter 5: Sleeping In Class
-"I'm Late, I'm Late, I'm LATE!"-
A/N: Indeed I am. VERY late. Here, everyone, have some half-serious apologies! I started thinking about this around Thanksgiving, and now I've even missed Non-denominational Winter Solstice Holiday (NDWSH Day; you might remember that reference from earlier books).
The two girls from the last chapter, Stacy and Alex, were just random OCs with absolutely no significance to this story or any other. They will probably never appear again. Most other characters in this world will be cameos from various animes, though.
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Inside Kairi's heart...
Namine woke up and noticed immediately that something was very wrong. The picture of Kairi on the Station floor was blurred and distorted, which was doubly odd to see happen to stained glass. Namine reached out with her power, reading Kairi's memories to figure out what had happened, and instantly realized the problem.
"Really, Merlin? False memories? Did you forget who I am? You didn't even connect them properly! Or maybe that part's my fault, since I was asleep here when it happened. Anyway..." Namine calmly stretched her arms to wake them up from her nap, knelt down on the floor of the Station, and jabbed her right arm straight into the stained glass with casual ease, creating a ripple effect in the already distorted image. She extracted a glowing string from the unharmed glass; a chain made up of several shining orbs. Most of the memories were bright, clear, and flawless, but the end of the chain was messily tied to another set of dim and misshapen orbs: the false memories of a made-up girl named "Carrie", placed there as an effect of entering Lotus Academy. With such a poor connection and so many missing events in the chain, Kairi probably couldn't even "remember" these. The mess did a good enough job covering up the real memories and keeping them from surfacing, though, resulting in something like amnesia.
Before conducting open-heart surgery to excise the fake memories, Namine pushed her awareness out to what Kairi was doing, just in case. The puffy clouds around the Station vanished, revealing a 360-degree view of Kairi's surroundings. Namine had already made use of this trick several times to maximize the party's situational awareness in combat.
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Lotus Academy: Hall 1-A...
"Carrie" followed the other two girls down the hallway, only to realize she'd been left behind. Evidently, they expected her to already know where her homeroom was. "Um, Stacy? Alex...? What am I supposed to do, just wander around and try to look lost until I find a teacher to ask for directions?!" The hallway was really long, and the numbered rooms all looked alike. This setup seemed familiar somehow in a very unhelpful way, like she'd just had this problem, but she couldn't remember how it should be solved.
"No need for that, Kairi. I'll fix this."
"Carrie" looked all around, trying to figure out where that soft-spoken girl's voice came from. "Who said that?!"
The voice came again, and this time "Carrie" - no, Kairi, that was definitely her real name - realized it was coming from somewhere inside herself. "My name is Namine...but you already know that. Just a moment... Oh, by the way, you should brace yourself or sit down. When your memories return all at once, you might get very disoriented."
Kairi took the weird voice's advice by sitting on the floor, wondering if it was okay to smudge the skirt on this uniform with whatever weird germs were - "WHOOOOA!" Vertigo hit Kairi like a sledgehammer, knocking her flat on her back. The ceiling (constructed of an ugly speckled tile) stared down at her, but Kairi was busy reliving the last twelve years of her life, starting from her earliest memory: of the mayor of a small island community smiling down at little, three-year-old, amnesiac Kairi after she washed up on the beach without a boat.
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Kairi's memories...
On the whole, Kairi's life from that moment onward was a lot of the same few activities - a LOT, and now she was stuck in the equivalent of watching an incredibly boring home movie on endless repeat. She spent every afternoon running around the beach, laughing with Sora and Riku, competing with them (read: getting utterly schooled by them) in races and word games, but waving off all invitations to spar with them in play-fights. Good times. Reliable times. Predictable times. But before now, she never really thought they were boring times. She wasn't sure she could go back to those days anymore...
Weekdays were spent in class. Destiny Island Academy was the only school around, and it was here that Kairi outshone the two boys with her stellar academic performance (although Riku was always close behind in second place). She tutored Tidus, Wakka, and Selphie after school sometimes, since their grades were...well, those three weren't quite the sharpest practice swords in the shed.
Around Kairi's thirteenth birthday was when she developed a crush on Sora. Or maybe it started back when they were six-year-olds sketching each other on the walls of the Secret Place, but 13 was when she really started to notice the shift in her feelings. She didn't act any differently around him, but he was constantly on her mind, making her heart beat a little faster each time she looked his way.
Kairi loved that constant sense of wonder that always surrounded Sora. He acted like every new day was a whole new life and the BEST DAY EVER, and he swept everyone else up in his (admittedly aimless) enthusiasm. However, when he made a promise, especially to Kairi, he would see it through, come Heartless or high water. His untameable spiky hair was one of the few true constants of Kairi's universe, and recent events only cemented this fact in her mind. Whenever he smiled, it was like the warm sun embraced her.
Kairi wondered if Sora felt the same way about her, but her silly teenage anxieties kept her from simply asking him about it. It was easy to see now, but only in hindsight.
Riku's affections were more obvious, but Kairi still saw Riku as "one of two best friends who happen to be boys" - which she still insisted was COMPLETELY different from a boyfriend! She got very tired of explaining the difference to Selphie, but eventually convinced her to stop shipping Kairi and Riku...only for Selphie to start shipping Kairi and Sora, which was a whole other level of embarrassing for Kairi. For his part, Sora remained just as oblivious as before.
Kairi stewed in well-hidden emotional discomfort for another year, which of course culminated in the Heartless invasion and destruction of the Islands when she was 14. Things got blurry after that, as she was reduced to a stray heart huddled within Sora. She was one of many, apparently. Sora's heart was absurdly large - large enough for everyone he'd ever met. Large enough that Kairi never met that boy Namine mentioned to Riku (wait, that wasn't something Kairi had been told; were Namine's memories blending into Kairi's from this brute-force use of her power?), and even Sora himself had no clue what was going on.
Sometimes Kairi could tell what Sora was doing, and she could hear his voice all around her, keeping the Darkness away. (Most of the time, he was just yelling things like "Yah! Come on! You're finished! DEEP FREEZE!" But that was beside the point.) Kairi was confused and barely conscious, but safe and happy. And then Sora sacrificed his heart so that Kairi's little lump of distilled Light could return to where it belonged.
Kairi wasn't sure how she had turned that nondescript little Shadow back into Sora. All she knew was that she knew that Shadow was Sora, and that she wanted to keep him safe from the other, bad Heartless and get him back to the way he used to be. There was no big plan involved when she threw her arms around him in the middle of a Heartless dogpile. But it all worked out!
...And then he ran off after Riku, and Kairi had to go back to the Islands alone for another whole school year. Everyone thought her story about Sora was made-up; they had all slept through the Heartless attack before, and so they didn't realize the world had been destroyed and recreated. At least Sora managed to keep that promise charm safe and return it to her at long last. In fact, it was still in the pouch strapped to her...
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Back in the present...
"Oh no, what happened to my dress!? Is it in the bag that came with the uniform?" Kairi fast-forwarded through the last few weeks of her memory: Kairi got kidnapped again, more than once; Sai'x was a huge jerk; apparently Riku had a girlfriend now; Riku gave Kairi a Keyblade; Kairi helped beat Xemnas; now she was with Lambda and two other ex-residents of Sora's heart in the Training Worlds. Everything was in order. She yelped the rather non-sequitur question about her dress out loud while rifling through the spacious black backpack she wore.
Thank goodness, Kairi's real outfit was indeed in the bag, alongside a few (blank) notebooks, textbooks with tiny print that she didn't bother to read, and jar of sloshing green ooze labeled "FOR SCIENCE FAIR PROJECT". A quick look around the area revealed a clearly-marked set of restrooms, so she ducked into the ladies' room and changed back into her normal clothes, storing the uniform in the backpack.
Namine asked, "All better, Kairi?"
"Yep! Thanks, Namine! I don't know if I could've broken that illusion, or whatever it was, on my own."
"You're welcome! Anyway, we should find the others. Their false memories probably connected properly; my presence messed up the effect somehow, so you just got amnesia, but there was almost a whole fake personality stuck to your heart before I cut it away from your real memories."
"Let's start looking, then..." Kairi left the restroom, but was almost immediately stopped by an absolutely gigantic upperclassman with really short blond hair, who blocked her path with a thick book as tall as Kairi herself, labeled RULES AND REGULATIONS! Spelled with two exclamation points! The upperclassman's gray uniform was crisp and spotless, despite straining to contain the eight-foot-tall mammoth of a boy.
As it turned out, he had no sense of personal space or indoor volume. His pointer finger dug deeper into Kairi's forehead the longer he spoke, forcing her to step backward every few seconds."YOU THERE! Freshman girl! You are SKIPPING CLASS! And just as bad, you're VIOLATING our school's dress code! That skirt is eleven-point-six-two centimeters TOO SHORT, and it is NOT a sailor uniform in the first place! Maybe you thought you could get away with it. But unfortunately for you, rule-flouting SCUM, you're hiding in the hallway patrolled by the head of the Disciplinary Committee: me! IRA GAMAGOORI! As long as I draw breath, NO student shall defy the rules of Lotus Academy and go unpunished! You just earned yourself a DETENTION!"
Kairi tried to explain that she wasn't actually a student here, but her voice was drowned out by the excessive volume of Ira Gamagoori. (On second thought, her explanation would have only made things worse.) He grabbed her by the upper arm with an iron grip and dragged her back towards the Principal's Office. Kairi hoped she could explain her predicament to the principal, whoever that might be.
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A few minutes earlier: Lotus Academy: Hall 1-F...
Another girl, Ion, huffed and puffed as she dashed around a corner. Her short, black hair was matted to her head with sweat. "Did I lose them?"
No: a trio of her pursuers - shadowy, humanoid monsters - popped out of the ground in front of her, with yellow eyes glowing and wicked claws reaching. Ion looked around for an escape route, but she'd managed to flee from the monsters only to run right into a dead end.
In hindsight, Ion wasn't supposed to be poking around in the janitor's closet when it was time for homeroom anyway, but class was so boring! If only this school was more like her favorite animes. Of course, the alternative to attending boring classes turned out to be getting attacked by monsters, as she discovered when these dark creatures jumped out at her from behind the mops.
"If this was an anime, now would be the part of the first episode where the hero appears to save me..."
*CHING!*
"...Or it could be where I suddenly gain a new superpower that I can use to save myself! That's way better!" Ion looked down at the weapon in her hand...no, this was no mere weapon. This was a Keyblade - though she had no idea where that word came from. Speaking of strange words, the name of this particular Keyblade floated into her head:
Forget-Me-Not...
This Keyblade was wider and longer than the ones the others started with, which was good, because she was used to oversized weapons. (The others? Weapons? Oh, that's right... She was starting to remember.)
It was like a scale model of the Station Tower in Twilight Town. It was only one half of the tower, though, so the one bell hanging off that side formed the teeth of the key. The hilt, in a jarringly sudden shift, was a blank, white rectangle surrounding a matching white handle, like the halls of Castle Oblivion, and had three points sticking up in the direction of the blade, like the cards that were necessary for everything in that world. An extremely thin cord, like a puppet string, connected the hilt to a Keychain shaped like a bar of Sea-Salt Ice Cream.
On the whole, the weapon's design basically summarized all the things Xion cared about during the brief time she was with the Organization...except the people with whom she shared those memories. Roxas and Axel were already kept safe and pristine in her heart and memories, anyway.
Xion bashed the Neoshadows apart with her new Keyblade, using her mimicry of Sora's fighting style until she could refine some moves of her own. She remembered everything now - courtesy of the Keyblade's power to unlock anything, even abstract things like her memory. Perhaps the temporary amnesia was just what she needed; forgetting about her other weapons made her reach for the Keyblade's formless potential instead. As for those other weapons, she could tell she still had them, but learning to use the Keyblade was the whole point of her being in the Training Worlds...and she couldn't wait to show it off to the other girls!
While she wandered back towards a more-traveled part of the school, Xion debated with herself about keeping the name "Ion". The fake memories that this world had stuck in Xion's head were still there, and were just as well organized as her own and Sora's, so she knew what Ion was supposed to be like. Ion was an anime otaku whose collection of animes put special emphasis on magical girls and similar superheroes. She was also a bit of a punk, tended to exaggerate everything she did, and had a track record of skipping class to sneak around the school's hallways, which was how she'd gotten lost and attacked by the Heartless. That confidence could be useful for Xion.
However, Xion decided that changing her name now would just make things confusing for everyone. After all, aside from Lambda, everyone certainly had a hard enough time remembering the name "Xion," although of course that wasn't their fault. However, she decided to leave her real outfit in her bag where she found it, so she would fit in better with the locals...although she did change the slogan on her shirt to another joke: "Hello, My Name Is: Of No Importance".
She mused to herself, "Now, if I was Kairi or Lambda, who would I be in this world?" Paging through Ion's memories didn't reveal anyone who looked like Kairi or Lambda, and they would have stood out among Ion's classmates, so they must be in different classrooms. This left Xion with no leads...
...Until she heard an excessively loud shout echoing down the hall: "...You are VIOLATING our school's dress code! That skirt..." As the loudmouth barreled on with his speech, Xion winced in sympathy for whoever he'd caught; as Ion, she remembered going to great lengths to avoid getting caught by Ira Gamagoori. No enforcer in the school was quite as duty-driven or unreasonable as that guy.
"...Wait!" Xion realized, "Other than me, there isn't really anyone who would come to school out of uniform. That's got to be Kairi." Of the group, Xion had figured Kairi would be the worst at subtlety, having no experience trying to blend in on other worlds. Xion and Lambda had at least done some sneaking around while working with and against the Organization, respectively, although their Black Coats tended to stand out more than even Sora's outfit would.
Xion would have to sneak into the principal's office to find Kairi; a daunting feat for any student, and especially for an impostor. "Time for a recon mission!" She clutched Forget-Me-Not and crept down the hallway, following the retreating stomps of the Disciplinary Committee's head honcho. She whispered to herself, "I wish I could turn invisible. Maybe there's a spell for that! Err...Disappear? Transparency? Vanish?" That last one worked. Xion grinned invisibly and mentally rewrote her plan of action. There was no need to maintain a cover identity anymore...
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Principal's Office: Reception...
Kairi was shoved into a big chair in front of the secretary's desk, and was immediately locked into place by shackles that snapped around her wrists. She raised an eyebrow at Ira. "Isn't this a bit excessive for a first-offender truant?"
With maximum hypocrisy, Ira shouted back, "BE QUIET! You will remain in that chair until a faculty member is ready to determine what punishment you should receive, if any!" He then stomped out of the room, banging the door shut on his way out.
The secretary's desk was mostly clear except for a little wicker basket, a few slips of paper, and a portable chalkboard with a message on it: "The person sitting at this desk is an experimental automaton. Please rate its service from 1 to 5 and leave a comment in the basket." Having nothing better to do, Kairi examined the robot secretary...and realized it was Lambda! Instead of the dress she'd arrived in, she was wearing a generic, white button-down blouse and black pencil skirt, but her red eyes and extremely long blond braid were instantly recognizable.
"Whoa, Lambda, is that you?" Kairi asked.
"Interaction with students awaiting disciplinary action is prohibited."
"...Well, drat. How can I jog your memory?"
"That's an easy one," Namine whispered. "Use the Keyblade on her. Or at least use it to get out of these shackles."
Kairi looked around and found a camera in the corner of the room. She whispered back, "I think that would count as 'meddling with the world order', Namine. We shouldn't get the whole school in an uproar by breaking their stuff if we can avoid it."
"Good point. I guess I could use my memory powers on her; digital memory is actually easier to affect."
Suddenly, Xion appeared out of thin air, now dressed in her real outfit with her latest custom slogan. "Hey Kairi, hey Lambda! I just learned something cool: 'Vanish' is a magic spell! And another cool thing..." Xion summoned her Keyblade in a swirl of white and blue trails of Light, twirled it once around her hand, pointed it at Lambda, and fired a Release beam. Lambda shuddered, blinked, and stood up from the desk.
Lambda spoke in her normal voice, with a bit of a sarcastic lilt. "Well, so much for the world order, Xion. Whatever, it's just a Training World anyway." Lambda opened a drawer on the secretary's desk and withdrew her real outfit, then slipped out of the secretary uniform (thankfully, she was still wearing her bodysuit underneath that) and changed clothes. She kept the braid in place, since it was easier to manage than a ponytail.
Kairi, stuck as a captive audience in the chair, winced at her team's utter lack of any social skills. If her hands were free, she would have facepalmed. I hope you weren't like this with Riku.
"Exactly! Aaand CLICK!" Xion tapped Kairi's restraints with the tip of her Keyblade, causing the chair to wobble once and release its captive. "...The other cool thing is that I got a Keyblade!" Xion belatedly announced, thrusting Forget-Me-Not skyward.
Namine pointed out, "...Yeah. We can see that. What triggered it to finally appear, though?"
Xion related the story. "...Afterward, I decided to keep calling myself Xion, but keep the parts I liked from 'Ion'. Hence the...energy. Did I surprise you?"
Lambda nodded firmly. "Excessively so."
Kairi added, "By the way, you said you used a spell called Vanish to sneak in here. Did you change clothes while the spell was in effect? While you were standing right there?"
Xion shamelessly replied, "Yep! Vanish actually lasts a really long time, especially compared to other status-effect spells like your Ignite trick. I slipped in when Ira left. I bet we could use the same trick to get anywhere in this school!"
"Perhaps you could, but would you please humor an old man first? After all, I am the Principal of Lotus Academy."
The three girls stopped moving in shock, then slowly turned around to face the one who had spoken.
The first thing they noticed was that he had blue hair, which looked a bit messy for a school principal. The second thing was that his eyes had a thin spiral pattern running from the very edges of his whites to his pupils. On his back was an old-fashioned, hand-cranked drill with a handle as long as a spear, which was yet another oddity in a school setting. Oh, and he wasn't wearing a shirt, but he had a long, black jacket half-open to show off his chest. He also wore tight leather pants.
Xion decided that overall, the Principal wouldn't be out of place in an over-the-top fighting or giant mecha anime series, but in just about any real-life setting (or even any fantastic world Xion had seen), he was just too cool to exist. In terms of appearance, she figured he would be the protagonist or rival character of said anime, so he was probably a good guy...right?
Lambda noted that he was indeed an old man like he said; his face was crisscrossed with wrinkles, lines, and a few scars, though he wasn't hunched over or weak in any way. His muscles were well-defined, but not bulky, and he carried himself with the air of a seasoned warrior. She tried to scan his threat level, and got back Error: threat level overload! Repairing broken scanners... It shouldn't be possible for any mortal being to be powerful enough to break her sensors! She blurted out, "What are you?!"
Kairi's thoughts were mostly along the lines of Blue hair? Seriously? Ever since being kidnapped by Sai'x, she associated blue hair with villains, but she could sort of tell that the Principal wasn't a villain. He was...something else. However, Kairi first addressed her team. "We're going need to have a serious talk about not being total weirdos in other people's houses, girls!" Then, to the Principal, she added, "Sorry about them, sir. I'm Kairi, and these are..."
The Principal interrupted, "Don't worry, I heard Xion say all your names. Well, my name's Simon. Simon the Digger, if you want to be formal for some reason." He pronounced it see-moan, but he pointed to a nameplate on the door to his office that spelled it as Simon. "I can't help but notice that all of you only arrived here today, and yet you've already broken the spell that altered your memories."
Xion thought, Well, that was ominous. Her grip tightened on her new Keyblade; what if this Simon guy was the "boss monster" of this world?
Simon's spiral eyes didn't miss Xion's half-baked plan. He smirked confidently. "You can't catch me by surprise, Xion. Just who the hell do you think I am? I don't like hitting girls, but you should know...that my drill is the drill that once pierced the heavens! Besides, all I meant about the spell was that you passed the test!"
"What test, Mr., um... Mr. the Digger?" Kairi asked, finally standing up from the punishment chair. Without waiting for a reply, she rounded on Xion. "Seriously, Xion! You can't solve all your problems by beating them up!"
Simon graciously ignored the statements that weren't directed at him. "Just Simon, please. And yeah, the first floor of this school is one big test! If you broke the spell, then you deserve to know the truth about this place, and you graduate to the REAL Lotus Academy! C'mon, I'll take you to the next floor up."
Simon strode over to the center of the room and took the drill off his back, then stabbed it straight up into the ceiling. There was no slot for the drill or anything - he deliberately stabbed through the plaster and wood above him. The girls couldn't see up there, but a green flash burst out from the cracks, and a metal tube with an open front descended around Simon, with enough room for the girls to get in around him. "There! Now we have an elevator! Spiral Power is pretty convenient like that. Everyone in!"
All the girls were left utterly at a loss for words, so they just mutely entered the tube and allowed themselves to be carried upward by a section of the floor that most definitely wasn't designed to move before Simon worked his "Spiral Power" nonsense.
VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV
Lotus Academy: Atrium (Second Floor)...
The second floor of Lotus Academy was definitely higher-tech than the first. The Atrium had the same layout as below (two hallways leading left and right, and an office in front), but with metal walls, sliding blast doors, and a holographic map of this floor instead of a door leading outside. Simon announced, "And here we are! Welcome to the real Lotus Academy! The layout is the same: classrooms on the right, other facilities on the left. The difference is, instead of a gym, an auditorium, or the like, we have a mixed martial arts arena, a mecha hangar, a virtual combat simulator, and other neat destinations. This is where we train kids with all kinds of extraordinary powers to defend peace and defeat evil wherever it lurks! And you three just earned a scholarship!"
"Four," Namine pointed out.
Simon blinked. "Oh, right, you're here, too. I'm afraid I didn't catch your name...?"
"My name is Namine. I'm..."
"Wait, let me guess," Simon interrupted. He pointed at Lambda, "You're a robot girl..."
"Affirmative." Lambda nodded.
Pointing at Xion, the Principal continued, "...You're an artificial human..."
"...Close enough." Xion shrugged.
"...You're a pure maiden who holds the universe together..."
Kairi was impressed. "You can tell just by looking? Have you met other Princesses of Heart?"
Simon pointed a bit lower, "...And you're a personification of part of Kairi's personality."
Namine manifested next to Kairi and nodded. "All correct, more or less. We're all a bit more complicated than that, but you figured us all out immediately. I can see why you're the principal of a school like this."
"Well, of course! It helps that I'm more or less immortal, after using a massive amount of Spiral Power all at once. I was once an aspiring hero like you...well, more like I was dragged into heroism by my role model. Big Bro Kamina was...unique. He'll always be remembered by those that followed him...those who followed me after his heroic sacrifice. Anyway, after saving the universe, my team split up. I went wandering the world, and eventually settled down here and started Lotus Academy with a few other friends I met: magic users, mecha pilots, superheroes. They're nice folks, you'll like them.
"But there are those who wouldn't like the idea of a school for the paranormal. The memory spell on the first floor keeps the second floor a secret. That way, we can run a normal school downstairs, and anyone who notices and breaks the spell probably belongs up here anyway. We get a few who just have really strong wills without any superpowers, but that doesn't mean they're any less suited for the curriculum."
Lambda spoke up. "That sounds awesome, and if I had the choice, I'd probably enroll, but we're actually just looking for a very specific thing before we move on to another world. It's not weird that we come from another world, is it?"
Simon laughed. "No, of course not! Among our students are plenty of aliens, a couple ghosts here and there, some nice monsters, and even a few eldritch horrors from outside time and space...whose reputations were greatly exaggerated, thankfully. Sorry for the misunderstanding that you were students here. What exactly are you looking for? Maybe I can help you find it."
Kairi took up the story. "Something called a Practice Keyhole. You see, we're already doing a training course that's taking us to multiple worlds. On each one, we need to fight a powerful Heartless - they're a kind of monster you can recognize by their round, yellow eyes, and most of them have a certain emblem on them..."
Xion interrupted, "And there's an infestation of them on the first floor; you should look into that!"
"...And if we find the strongest Heartless on this world and beat it, the Practice Keyhole will appear, so we can unlock it with our Keyblades and move on," Namine finished.
Simon scratched his chin. "Heartless, huh? This is the first I've heard of them. They must not have reached any worlds I know yet. Imagine that! The universe is even bigger than I thought! Don't worry, I'll gather some students together and make a lesson out of exterminating these Heartless. After all, they can't be THAT tough if you fought past them to get here."
Xion nodded. "I've fought much tougher ones on other worlds, but yeah, I think the ones downstairs should be easy to handle, especially with a team."
Simon nodded back and turned to the right-hand corridor. "It is worrisome that they can sneak into the school under my nose. I'm sorry, girls, but I'll have to leave you to your own training and give this my full attention."
Lambda felt sorry for the Heartless being given Simon the Digger's full attention. "Don't worry about us, sir. We'll be fine."
Kairi realized, "Um, do we need a hall pass or anything? That Disciplinary Committee guy stopped me in the hall downstairs."
Simon laughed heartily. "Oh, right! That almost slipped my mind. Here, pin these somewhere." He tossed four little pin buttons shaped like lotus flowers at the girls. Lambda caught hers, Xion dodged hers and picked it up off the floor, Kairi blocked it with her arm and caught it as it fell...and Namine's passed right through her. "Those will let people know it's okay for you to be here. Good luck!" Simon waved goodbye, then dashed down the hall so fast he created a shockwave that knocked the girls off their feet - even Namine.
Namine picked her immaterial self up and returned to Kairi. "How did he do that?"
Kairi could only shrug. She pinned both her and Namine's lotus pins to her pink, zipper-y dress.
Lambda groaned and held her head. "He seems to casually warp reality through sheer manliness. I can't even...the world is supposed to make sense, right? RIGHT?!"
"Nope. The world doesn't make sense unless you MAKE it make sense!" Xion punched her open palm. It seemed she had found a role model.
Kairi turned away from the dust cloud Simon left behind, which had yet to settle. "Well, whatever his deal is, we have our own task. Let's find that Heartless."
Xion nodded and led the way to the other hall. "Ten munny says it's in the martial arts arena."
Lambda hung back for a moment. "Give me a second to record the map, and I'll take that bet. Twenty munny on the mecha hangar." With the map committed to memory, she rejoined the others. "The arena is the closest; third door on the left. The first two are the restrooms."
VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV
Lotus Academy: Hall 2-B...
"Wow, that's still quite a walk," Kairi noted, looking down the long, long hall. With the doors so far apart, each room must be huge.
Xion shrugged. "No problem. We could use the exercise. I'm still kind of embarrassed about needing a break after such a short time walking in Midnight Town."
As they walked, Namine spoke up. "Lambda, I've been meaning to ask you about something. Remember how you used to talk differently sometimes? It was something about protocols."
Lambda blinked. "Oh, right. I hardly noticed I'd stopped doing that. When I got my Keyblade, it did something to all my protocols so they can't override my actions anymore. I could use robo-speak when scanning and doing other protocol-related things, but I don't have to anymore."
Kairi pointed out, "Maybe you should do it anyway, so we'll know right away when you're doing robot...things."
Lambda giggled. "You and Sora are a perfect fit, you know that? You're both clueless around technology. But your idea does make good sense. I'll go back to making scan reports in robo-speak for easier understanding. Speaking of which..."
She went on to relate the various threat levels she could report: as she'd explained to Riku a while ago, the scale went from F (dead) to D (disabled) to C (untrained civilian) to B (trained soldier) to A (badass) to S (demigod) to SS (godlike). Right at that moment, Lambda considered herself a high C, Kairi a low A, Xion a high A, and Namine would be a C in most combat situations, but technically an S in terms of sheer power. All of them had the potential to reach a strong S or even SS tier if they kept training.
"...And then there's Simon the Digger, who actually broke the scale. How can he even do that? Even Merlin still fits in SS tier, even after all the crazy things I've seen him do, and that's because he focused so much on gaining secret arcane powers that he doesn't actually stand a chance in any sort of combat! How could an illusion created by Merlin have more power than him?!"
Namine had to point out, "Lambda, you're ranting again."
"...Oh. Sorry, I just...don't do well with illogical worlds. This is like Wonderland all over again. Well, at least we're here! Hooray for distractions!" Lambda yanked open the door...
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A/N: Coming not-very soon: the boss, which is running wild through the school and needs to be chased down. I have a pretty good idea in my head for an original Heartless, so...probably about another month(s).
Known error: up there where Kairi got chewed out by Ira Gamagoori (from Kill la Kill; alongside Simon from Tengan Toppa Gurren Lagann, Ira is one of several anime characters I do not own), I mentioned his rulebook's title is spelled with two exclamation points, but it turns out FFN hates letting two punctuation marks coexist. What a pain! Please mentally double the exclamation points.
I'm not. Giving. Up. I WILL finish this!