A single lightbulb cast a beam down into what otherwise was a pitch black room. No attention was, or could have been for that matter, paid to the endless bookshelves in the back and foreground that made up the library of the grand palace of Toad Town. Instead, all that existed in the fake world lied within a small circle of light that dripped off one of the study tables and also lit up the chair that was tucked neatly under the surface. Troy sat in it with his arms draped out weakly over the table, staring at the dusty book in front of him with tired eyes.
He flipped it open, quickly hiding the XIII on the binding.
"...I thought I had all the answers in front of me. I couldn't be any more dead wrong." he lazily tossed the pages from right to left. "...well, I guess this is about as in-depth as you need to get if you want to just wipe out the Heartless and Vast en masse, but it's not much of a philosophical read."
Troy sulked forward, slamming his elbows down onto the table and folding his hands above his head. He stared at the text in front of him, it becoming more and more incoherent the more he strained his eyes to read it.
"...it's not so much that I realize that this isn't the whole story," Troy groaned. "but that I have no way of getting everything else I know out to the right people... even if I DID happen to completely trust someone to the level of trying to explain all this crap to them, there's no telling what Ederick would do if he didn't agree... and what degree of control he could probably exert over me... what am I going to do, I just can't keep all these experiences to me forev..."
Troy paused.
"...what am I SAYING, that's EXACTLY what I have to do; I have to sort this entire situation out before I can even start to think about breaking out of it. That's what's going to happen - I AM going to keep this to myself. Every last detail."
Troy slammed the book shut, turning it over and starting from the back cover. He flipped backwards through the pages, licking his lips as he finally came to the one he wanted. "...perfect."
A page was barren, with nothing besides III. VAST written at the top in bold type. The remaining 52 pages behind it were blank. Troy's hand snaked over, seizing a pencil that lied beside the book, and lead began stabbing at the empty pages with murderous intent.
My name is Troy Kiemen, and this is a story I'd like to refer to simply as 'NSX'. NSX is something mysterious and misunderstood, and I think I have the means to finish what Organization XIII started - not just figuring out what the Vast is; it turns out that was the easy part. Organization XIII didn't just mean to make encyclopedia entries on the Heartless, Nobodies and Vast, they wanted to figure out each one's placement in the world and how they interacted with each other to make up everything we know. As someone who's caught up in the middle of all three I think I'm entitled to talk here. I'm not going to go into details about NSX itself because it's still something not perfectly clear to me.
I was like any other Koopa at the time, fed up with the limitations of tribal living and was therefore more than happy to work on the construction of Last Chance Ramparts, a city-state formed and ruled by the less-than-forgiving Bowser. I did my bare minimum of time to became a Lance Corporal and served as a standing member of the Koopa Troop... well, where I was forced to, anyways... and was on my way to a steady paycheck, a bachelor bungalow and all the pork rinds and Koopa Cola I could ever want, even if others thought jack of me and my ambitions or lack thereof. Well anyways, it turns out that I was part of a brigade that was scheduled to be on a patrol of Dark Land to the waypoint closest to the nearby Mushroom Kingdom, but instead I figured I'd sneak out and join the guys on leave and enter the Dark Land Kart tourney. Besides being a terrible career decision, I ended up getting hunted down by the Koopa elite themselves and got thrown in prison. Not just any little brig no, but actual PRISON. When Bowser himself escorted me to his own private lair, I figured I would be leaving with a few fewer limbs.
Nope, turns out I was comitting high treason by supposedly escaping to the Mushroom Kingdom to alert them of the coming INVASION that he was sending said Koopa brigades out on. Here's where things get fuzzy, obviously - the entire compound had been covertly infested with a Heartless-Vast symbiote that had infected Bowser directly and caused him to go outright insane, as well as become even more megalomanic than usual which is NEVER a good combination. I was thrown back in the deepest, darkest cell of the fort to rot while he met up with his cronies to carry out his slaughter. Exactly what implications any of that terminology would have on me, well, I wouldn't know that for a while, but eventually it would get very, very ugly.
While I was down in that cell, I got a giant gash on my hand from some refuse glass. While I hadn't anticipated or even realized it at the time, I had managed to infect myself with pure Vast in the process. Even if I DID realize anything funky going on however any rumination over it got interrupted by this big bird-man thing suddenly blowing up the fort and whisking me away into the catacombs leading out of the castle. Only after a while did him or I realize that he didn't even know his own name. Eventually we... or he, the details are kind of fuzzy... decided on the name Sirius.
He claimed that he'd saved me from the wreckage because I carried an innate power, something that'd managed to protect me from going crazy like many of the other troops had when this crap fell from orbit and snuck in to our daily lives. He guided me to a lower level of the tunnels where I'd find my power and eventual worst nightmare all in one - the Chronicle keyblade. Effortlessly shattering the protective coating of the weapon with my sheer CONFUSION over what was happening that night, I took the keyblade for my own. We carried on to the Toad Town sewers and successfully intercepted Bowser's forces at the gates of the city, where the Heartless was finally beginning to take its true form. With the power of the keyblade they were simply cut down where they stood and it was just me face to face with Bowser - who again, against all odds, got beaten into a pulp by my Chronicle.
The Chronicle is an anolomy - as I'd figure out later, whoever controls the Chronicle gains short-range control over local space-time. With it I've teleported, slowed time to a crawl, and generally gained pretty rad artificial reflexes and resistance to damage entirely. As I'd learn eventually though, I'd only just tapped into a fraction of its power, and it was capable of much more destructive purpose - and that it was my task to keep it out of the hands of anyone that could put it to evil use.
This foray into the Mushroom Kingdom brought some unexpected surprises - one, that people were randomly plunking down into the territory of the Kingdom from other worlds at a startling rate, two, that their heir to the throne Princess Toadstool was strangely cool with all this, and three, for the most part all our visitors were trying to kill me, with some notable exceptions. Selphie the daisy-dressed schoolgirl, as well as the polar-opposite Mario brothers, were both allied with the princess with the promise that the Kingdom would do whatever was in its power to help them find their way home. The good news, they just happened to stumble across the two people that had the best idea what the hell was going on here, me and Sirius. The bad news, Sirius was a master of subject-dodging and expressed no interest in aiding them but instead made every attempt to let the Mushroom Kingdom know that the Vast was this evil entity that needed to be contained via the discovery of new keyblades. For the most part, the opportunity to release that notion on a now-paranoid population in the midst of an unexplained alien invasion was beneficial to Sirius's cause.
There was one other late arrival that threw a wrench into things, though. Well, technically two. On one of the keyblade/Keyper scouting missions that ran concurrent with the one that brought us Selphie, I got attacked by, and immediately saved by, two people from what would be later known as the Covenant - Siegfried, or Nightmare as he calls himself, and Auron. Auron effectively filled the gap in dependability that Sirius was beginning to leave in his disregard for the social state of affairs in the Mushroom Kingdom following all this crap. Working behind the scenes, Auron had already been secretly guiding people in the other nations to keyblades of their own, most notably Bowser himself. In addition, Auron presented me with texts created by the ancient Organization XIII, an occult group that had once tried to dissect the relationships between the Heartless, Nobodies and Vast to interpret and distribute amongst the population. Information on the latter was sparse for suspicious reasons, but the major point of interest here was that by the physiological descriptions provided... this entire world was made up of highly-evolved Nobodies. However, I wouldn't understand the whole importance of this until much later.
As the Keyper operation began to grow increasingly autonomous Sirius felt his authority threatened. Eventually Princess Toadstool and the rest of the Mushroom Kingdom governing body had him arrested on the spot under the assumption that Sirius was withholding information regarding the Heartless and Vast to preserve his seat of power. Toadstool, or Peach as she calls herself, was able to easily suppress Sirius using Vast controlled by a keyblade of her own, where he remained unrepentant. Mobilization of the Keypers remained relatively on schedule, indirectly guided by Auron and managed by governing bodies of the Mushroom and Koopa Kingdoms, and the Sarasaland Emirates.
Of course, being on schedule implies that I had no input into the matter entirely, which was the case. You see, while I was TRYING to act as a hastily-promoted emissary of the Koopa Troop in the Mushroom Kingdom's Keyper force, a shady group of people was popping up at every possible opportunity to either try to beat the Chronicle off me or goad me out into the open with attacks on Koopa infrastructure, most prominently an attack on the Koopahari sludge extraction facilities. With great help from Auron, some from my friends, and virtually none from Sirius, I managed to beat them off at every turn - the chaotic, egotistic Dr. Wily, the sly, suave yet still dominantly dim-witted Valentina, the scheming mastermind Heihachi, the slightly less than legible Fawful, and the nightmarish tag-team of Pokey and Giygas.
The latter presents a bit of concern. It turns out that this Giygas under the control of Pokey is what Auron referred to as a 'primal Nobody', a being that retains none of the sentience the rest of us did, but also presented a huge danger in the fact that the vibes it gave off could cause any Nobody's mind to turn to putty and return it to its natural symbiotic hunting patterns. This is something that nearly happened to me... and it was not pretty by any means of the word. With each victory we got closer and closer to eliminating all speed bumps in the Keyper organization plot, and we could turn our industrious minds to fully comprehending the food chain of symbiotes outlined by Organization XIII's work - and possibly figuring out where the Vast lied in it all. When Auron finally cornered me and informed me exactly what the long-effects of my earlier Vast contamination had in store for me, however, events quickly took a turn for the worse.
It turns out that the Vast I sucked in were gradually warping my Nobody complexion and drastically altering my own thought patterns. The more I thought about it, pun intended, the more it made sense - over an incredibly short time I'd developed a concrete grasp on the Chronicle's powers with virtually no training, and my personality had taken a complete 180 from when I was still working at Last Chance Ramparts. My logic and computational skills had shot through the roof, my overall strength had multiplied, and I was taking every possible leadership role within the Keyper construct and fighting with an unstoppable fervor when a couple months ago I couldn't be bothered to take the garbage out of my military dorm or manage to do more than 5 pushups in one go. I'd attributed this to freak luck in my path of mutation, but Auron made it clear that he hadn't witnessed anything like this before in Vast contamination cases, whereas all that he'd seen was a stagnation of the thought process in the afflicted Nobody followed by a lethal relapse in mental activity that lead to an instant, completely irreversible coma. Auron suggested that the Vast be removed just in case, and he already had a plan set up to do so.
It was blatantly obvious. The Vast was exhibiting parasitic behavior in me, so the general idea was to offer a more pure Nobody to it in the hopes that it would jump ship for a comfier home. This pure Nobody would be Giygas. This whole operation, inconveniently enough, would rely on a precision strike into the headquarters of these people. With some help with the expedition forces of the Koopa Troop, we were able to locate their grotto, which was a cave that had traditionally been off-limits to the Koopa tribes due to the belief that the legendary beast Magmagore made its nest there. What we found instead behind the steel doors though, was instead a high-tech bunker that had been implanted before the very evolution of the Koopa race - a supply depot for Sirius's ilk. Fighting our way deep into the fortifications, we managed to beat all of the bandits yet again, but I would have never been prepared for what lied between me and Giygas at the very end.
For starters, the final member of the posse, Illidan Stormrage, had been relaying my whereabouts to the rest of the gang via a psychic link from Sirius under the promise that the Chronicle would eventually be returned to him. However, Illidan was ready to jump ship and use all the information he'd gathered to seize the Chronicle for himself. Using Giygas to force another repression into my primal Nobody form, I pushed forward and tried to implant the Vast into Giygas as the Chronicle inexplicably multiplied in power. As I readied the deathblow however, another plot twist ended up crippling me.
A weakened fragment of Ederick Argentai, the true form brought about through the unification of my symbiotic forms had been lying dormant in me, managed to burst out and take control of me. As he would abruptly explain, he as my Complete was so completely unwilling to die in the event that split him into his symbiotic forms that his Nobody managed to retain slivers of the other two even through countless ages of environmental degredation and evolution on part of the Nobody. The current iteration of that Nobody was me. As he began to explain in detail what exactly the passages in the tomes of Organization XIII meant, and the implications that had for him and I, his reasons for restraining himself in the past and suddenly bursting out into the open here became clear.
The Heartless, Nobodies and Vast all have physical forms, but it turns out those physical forms merely exist to explain their relations in a disturbingly convenient manner: the Heartless represent the carnal desires and senses of the body, and Nobodies show the mental processes and logical mannerisms, whereas the Vast is the physical entity solely responsible for the creation of hearts... what exactly the possession of a heart entails is beyond me, but it's worth noting that the Organization in its plans had completely put unification with their respective Heartless on the back burner while they pursued their heart. This is probably what lead to their haphazard encounter with the Vast... regardless, it lead to the Heartless, Nobodies and Vast duking it out.
This flew in the face of everything that Organization XIII had said earlier about each of them seeking to align with their original accompanying symbiote and return to Completeness, but as Ederick explained we were in a space that was rife with all three and they were all in perpetual conflict as they kept flying into their sister symbiotes that DIDN'T correspond to their factory number so to speak, and they all ended up annihiliating each other in a battle of self-preservence to this day.
The Nobody's potential to retain their past being, along with possessing at least some sense of rational thought allows it to combat the Heartless by accessing the keyblades.
The Heartless, mindless in their pursuit of hearts to gain, gains no negative effect from latching onto a Vast and continually siphoning energy out of it.
This is the opposite of what happens when a Nobody comes into contact with a Vast. The Vast, biologically engineered to administer new hearts to those that lack it, inject a blank one and end up completely overwriting everything that Nobody can recall of its earlier life, turning it into a mindless vegetable.
It turns out that when I'd infected myself with that Vast in the dungeon of the Ramparts, Ederick had been jarred awake and since then had been involved in a battle for survival with the Vast. Fully awake and able to harness the Vast for his own purposes, he eventually managed to overpower the mutations that had occured to the Nobody since his slumber (in other words, me) and return himself to temporary, incomplete consciousness. Realizing that the loss of the Vast would mean the loss of the buzzer keeping him awake, so to speak, he kicked out the jams and fired up the true power of the Chronicle to defeat the threat to it - Giygas.
Ederick explained his rising spirit - the keyblade I had was actually the lost keyblade of an incredibly powerful Keyper by the name of Ameile, who he had strong relations with. This is what empowered him to actually push the time-shifting powers of the Chronicle to levels beyond any of us had actually witnessed. As he utterly annihilated Giygas, he left me with the cryptic instructions for me to head to the stars and seek out this Ameile, reminding me that while he was weakened he could still make my life a living hell.
Considering that Auron had already offered an invitation to the Covenant, a job that would likely involve lots of travel on the intergalactic interstate anyways, I didn't have much of a choice but to comply. Although I'd managed to get answers to a lot of questions that I had regarding the nature of the Heartless, Nobodies and Vast, I'd received ten times as many questions in response.
Here's where we lie now. With the defense of this world solidifying and gaining total resistance to the swarming, small scale attacks made by both the Heartless and Vast, we've begun to turn our attention to gaining greater understanding of the external forces acting on the world, and how to subvert and bend them to our own will. We've managed to create an incredible bond between the kingdoms that had mere months ago were either in the beginning stages of development or trying to antagonize one another.
This is only the beginning of things to come, though. We would never be free from these invasions until we found our place in the universe and unraveled the mystery of NSX - Ederick, as well as Sirius according to witness accounts of his ramblings, made mention of the 'lost galaxy' that we all lived in. Sirius on the other hand made reference near the end of our contact as something that all of us were part of... that it was nothing but reality... and it was something that he had to preserve the sanctity of. In addition, he was the only one to actually comprehend that Ederick was a part of me... or that I was a part of Ederick. He had the nerve to suddenly turn his entire intent to terminate me around, saying that the preservation of Ederick and his ultimate search for Ameile had some kind of bearing for the future of NSX. Sirius was one of the people determined to set that course of fate straight - he was one of what he referred to as the Nepenthes.
NSX is a place. It might very well be where we all reside right now. Who knows? I sure as hell don't, that's what I'm riding off into the wild blue yonder with Auron with to find out.
Have we really figured out the holy symbiote trinity? Something about Organization XIII not getting it for an indeterminate period of time and no one actually finishing what they started afterwards let alone ATTEMPTING to for all I know makes me a little uneasy... what would cause the Heartless and Vast to suddenly rain down on us like candy when there's no actual instance of anything remotely related happening in recorded history?
What kinds of new and amazing pains are Selphie, Mario and Luigi going to soak up in their attempts to get home? Is Peach really the diplomatic superhero she insists she is? I wonder if she or the others will actually manage to get off this rock...
Where the hell IS Auron taking me, anyways? I hope Nightmare doesn't feel like assassinating me again...
Have we really seen the last of Sirius? What is all this Soulscreen business that he's dropping on my shoulders? Gimme a break here, I already have galactic symbiote defense to tend to here... to that extent, it's pretty much a given that these Nepenthes are going to be hunting me down sooner or later, and on that note... what role do Ederick and Ameile play in all of this? In all of NSX, I mean? Why is everyone so interested in their heritage, besides Ameile's keyblade being able to crash the space-time continuum at its full power for all I know?
These are all things I'll learn in due time... some results redeeming, and others crippling. Either way... this tale was only beginning to unravel, and what lied ahead would be a grueling test for all of us, including myself. That desire I so boldly shouted out to no one in particular, that I wanted to 'evolve'... that resolve would be pushed to its absolute limits.
If the Vast and Ederick convinced me that I was turning into a different person altogether... that would be the understatement of a lifetime.