"Another day off?" Roman asked, lazily resting on one of the couches in the Grey Area wearing a light blue (he calls it cobalt) and grey shorts.

For whatever reason today, he couldn't be bothered to wear so much as flip flop, so other members were greeted by the sight of feet whiter than the rest of Roman's complexion. "I call 'em cracker feet," he joked to Xion before she could ask.

"Well…" she started. "I WAS going to ask why you weren't wearing any shoes. Your feet aren't disgusting… really. It's just that everyone else is wearing shoes or boots or something."

"Newsflash: You and Roxas are the only two I've seen today so far," Roman said, sitting upright.

As he said that, Axel walked in yawning. He clutched a plush toy in the shape of a plume of fire and was wearing red vertical striped pajamas supported by slippers reminiscent of his chakrams. "Case in point in regards to clothing," Roman said, pointing to Axel who promptly went back to sleep on one of the couches on the opposite side of the room. "By the way, where is Roxas, anyways?" he added.

"I don't know," Xion said, seating herself on the couch on the opposite side of the table. "Maybe he's gone to Twilight Town for something."

"From what I know about him, that makes sense. Me? I'm just gonna stay here for today. Maybe hit the simulator, but… hm. My options around here are pretty limited now that I think about it."

"This is very important, Roxas," Saix said as the two went through the halls of the Castle.

"Why is that?" Roxas asked.

"We are conducting reconnaissance within our own castle."

Roxas stopped. [In the castle itself?] he thought. [Did someone break in?]

"In case you are wondering," Saix said, "This is for Lord Xemnas to check on progress of a project that has been going on since the fifteenth's arrival."

They went into the lower levels of the castle, levels where Roxas had never been to. He was continually amazed by how large the castle was and how relatively little of it was actually in usual use. There were only fifteen of them, after all. Not like families going up to nineteen as Roxas had seen on more than one occasion on TV. Even so, they didn't need huge castles: just a large house. After what seemed like half an eternity, the two reached the end of a large downwards spiral ramp to a doorway. "This is it, according to Lord Xemnas," Saix announced calmly as usual.

At this point, the hallways were scarcely lit, so Roxas had a bit of a hard time finding the door even with the neon blue lights illuminating on the floor and walls. The twin doors slid open to reveal what looked like a dark, deep chasm with a spiraling ramp going down and starting to the right. Only a short, waist-high (to Saix) wall stood between walkers and certain death. Roxas gulped and followed Saix on the long way down. Another eternity later, and Roxas noticed something on the guardwall. Someone had etched something in. He recognized the language as Japanese, as some worlds put it, and he struggled to translate it. "An…dro…gynous… freak," he read aloud.

The message was directed with an arrow to what looked like Vexen, but he couldn't tell, exactly. The lips were too big, and the face, frankly, scared him. Saix stood in front of a door in the wall a little further down, on a flat part. Roxas guessed that this was where the pathway ended, as the wall turned to a guardrail. "This may be it," Saix said.

The door unexpectedly divided open, prompting Saix to summon his signature Claymore and causing Roxas to jump back a bit. Seeing nothing, Saix dispelled the claymore and walked in with little reserve. "H-Hey! Wait!" Roxas called as he ran in after him.

Instead of anything resembling a laboratory, the two were met with a long hallway lined with doors. They had security keypads, as if though something was put behind here to be restrained to be concealed from public view. Roxas decided to take a look through the bars of one of the doors out of curiosity with Saix standing behind him. The first cell he checked was empty. No bed in the wall, no sink, nothing. Like they expected those inside to just sit there, die and rot. Not that it seemed to have happened, though. There was no stench of decomposition.

Walking to another cell further up, Roxas peered in. Nothing again. He wondered why these cells would be empty and devoid of practically anything. To him, it was like the cells were not initially planned to be included and were last-minute additions to the castle. Saix continued on forward to the door, which was more regal-looking than the one they went through to get into the well-lit hallway. "There," he said.

Walking up to the front of the door, it opened up and he stepped through with Roxas behind him. The two were greeted by the sight of a large laboratory with machines lining the walls and a large screen display on the opposite side of the room. Sections of the floor were glass revealing transparent piping with liquids going to and from a large metal cylinder that was as tall as the room itself, built into the floor and ceiling. Instead of being white or light grey, the metals here were dark greys. A control panel of sorts stood some feet away from the large metal cylinder, and in front of that was a yellow and black striped section on the floor, where he presumed the operator of whatever stood. In many machines, there seemed to be test tubes built into the machines themselves. Roxas didn't want to try to take any out for fear that he might break one.

The two separated and looked throughout the laboratory, examining the machines and Saix drawing a composite sketch of the area's general layout. Roxas merely looked at the machines, running his hand over a few, careful not to touch anything. He came to a machine directly to the left of the laboratory's entrance from the perspective of someone walking in. There were three knobs below a large white, glowing bar. The knobs had rings of red, green and blue. Walking to this machine, Roxas tilted his head curiously and moved the red knob by pure accident. The bar was no longer white. Roxas readjusted the knob, making it turn back to white. "What would Roman do?" he asked aloud.

He figured that he would play with the knobs a bit before leaving them back at white. He always was a hands-on person. By the time Roxas finished his thought, he found his own hands on the knobs. [Ah, what the hell,] he thought as he began to fiddle with the knobs.

The glowing bar turned all sorts of colors as Roxas adjusting the knobs to varying degrees, just to see what would happen. All this happened without Saix noticing, as he had walked over to the control console. He noticed a piece of paper stuck under a metal panel, pulled it out and unfolded it. He recognized the handwriting as Vexen's. There were words next to unintelligible scribbling, as if to translate something. Saix soon noticed that one of the scribblings seemed to be identical to one of the symbols on the touch screen. Following a trail on the paper, Saix touched one graphic, then the next. The third one prompted a loud clunk that startled Roxas as he reached for another knob and he pressed the glowing bar, which was now a brilliant gold.

The metal cylinder rose into the ceiling to reveal a glass one. Inside, it seemed that there was a long haired being curled up into a ball and floating in clear liquid. Roxas once visualized tubes for something like this, but there were no such tubes to speak of. The being bore gorgeous snow-white hair, and its eyes were closed, like it was sleeping. "A being soon to be born by sleep…" Saix said. "So this is what he is working on."

"Vexen?" Roxas asked, walking over to the glass.

"Yes, exactly."

Roxas looked up at the being. A girl. "That is supposed to be me?" Saix asked.

Roxas looked at him curiously. "I do not see it," Saix added.

"Wait, what?" Roxas asked.

The next event caught their attention: the girl's hair started to turn faintly yellow. This was gradual, but fairly fast. Saix squinted to get a better look and Roxas's jaw went slack. [Oh… no,] he thought. [I must messed it up. Me.]

"Intriguing," was all Saix said in response and touched a graphic to resummon the metal.

He started on his way out as Roxas followed. He was stopped, however, by a machine similar to the last with the same three knobs. The bar above this one was glowing a soft, feminine magenta. Roxas considered something… then hit himself on the head with the Keyblade for even considering such a thing. "Stupid…" he said as he walked out the door.

Through the long hallway and out the other door to the large chasm. "Now we know that it's there…" Saix said, waving his hand to summon a dark corridor.

"You mean we can't use these to get to places we've never seen in person?" Roxas asked. "So how do we get to new worlds?"

"When you get a high enough standing within the Organization, you will know," Saix said. "You may even be part of the process."

"Just what the hell are these things supposed to be made of, anyways?" Roman said as he threw a Limit Recharge against the wall.

Apparently, he had got bored in the absence of Roxas and Axel had left some time ago, so he figured that he would try to find out if said item could bounce. After several throws at the floor, wall and windows, it soon became apparent that it would not do such a thing like a rubber ball. "They're not glass, or else this thing would have shattered long ago."

"No, but with you, it's more likely to put a dent in the wall," Xion said, looking up from a manga she was reading.

Without warning, Roman knocked it out of her hands by throwing the Limit Recharge at it. "It's bad enough that I read yuri, shoujo-ai and the like out here, but you with that sort of material? Absolutely not," Roman said, kicking it out of Xion's reach from her couch.

"But I like shoune—" she started, but Roman cut her off by smacking her over the head with a hand chop.

"NO," he said.

As fate would have it, a black and yellow streak came by and swiped the manga right off the floor and retreated out of the Grey Area as quickly as it came. Roman and Xion both had faces of amazement not only at the speed and what was taken, but whom they associated that colored streak with. "M-My shoune—" Xion started.

"DON'T say it," Roman said, cutting her off again. "Hell, you got good reason to. Here comes Roxas."

"What was that that passed me?" Roxas asked.

"Larxene, more likely than not," Roman replied. "She made off with one of Xion's manga. She made a good choice, since there's one less thing I have to deal with in here."

"Do you make your existence off of insulting my body and interests?" Xion asked.

"Nah, just your body and the manga you usually read," Roman replied quite frankly.

With that, Xion punched the boy in the face. "Anyway," Roxas started, "Does anyone know about the lower levels of the castle?"

"There's more to this big-ass castle?" Roman asked from the floor.

"Apparently so. Saix told me to not tell anyone else, but I figure you guys can keep a secret, right?"

Both black-haired Nobodies nodded. "Okay, here goes. Earlier today, Saix and I found this secret laboratory deep under where we usually go around here. It looks like Vexen is making something, like a person. And… I think I messed it up."

"Oh, dude. You killed it?" Roman asked.

"No!" Roxas replied quickly. "I… just…"

He mumbled out the rest of his sentence. Xion would have needed to ask for clarification, but Roman was close enough to use his own sense to complete the sentence. "So you're a closet egomaniac?" he said before being kicked.

Day 9. After pouring the Compound into the test tube and bringing completion to 90%, something caught the left side of Vexen's vision. [Wasn't that light white?] he thought.

Walking over to the console, he noticed that the glowing bar that was above three knobs was glowing golden yellow. [Surely, this may be an indication that-]

And then everything held still in time for a moment. A siren started to go off in Vexen's head as he stared at the bar of light. [Is it… a button?]

He turned to face an imaginary camera with a look of sheer horror. He ran back to the control panel, accidently hitting the graphic for the trap door and nearly falling in. Closing the door, he frantically searched for the graphic to unveil the being within the containment unit, failing to realize that he had opened the first door to the hallway directly outside the laboratory in the process. Finally, he found the desired graphic and slammed his fist down on it.

The subject's hair was no longer white, but golden blonde. It had not changed lengths, but its color certainly had changed. "Wha-Wha-Wha-What kind of scandalous mockery is thiiiiiiiiiiiiiis!" Vexen shouted, gripping the sides of his head in terror and disbelief.

"What day is it today?"Gintoki asked Rinoa.

She turned away from rubbing Sadaharu's belly to reply, "It's Day Three. But if you want to know the day, day, it's Wednesday."

"So the newest JUMP won't be for two more days…"

"You really are fixated on JUMP, aren't you?" Kagura asked, looking up from one of her few functioning game UMDs, which was an imported game which she presumed to be English. "Aren't you getting too old for that?"

"Yeah, I realize that. I always keep saying that some issue will be my last…" Gintoki replied. "But I always keep coming back for more."

"It's like an Italian mafia or something," Rinoa said. "By the way, why in the world did you bring your scooter today?"

All three freelancers took a look at Gintoki's signature blue motorscooter, which was resting against the guardrail next to Kagura. "I figured that you two are enough to guard this door, so I'm going to see how long it'll take for me to get up there," he said.

He put on his helmet with a sticker reading "Gin" on in and took the scooter from the guardrail. Setting it where the ramp began, he revved the motor on it. "Besides, we always sit here for a long-ass time, so I probably won't be missed all that much."

"This is a very bad idea…" Rinoa said, moving Sadaharu behind her.

"Not really. He can just find me and put a portal in my way, anyway," Gintoki said.

At that moment, the door opened. The three freelancers walked in front of it, wondering how it had opened. "Well, damn," Gintoki said.

"Now's our chance! Let's see what he's cooking!" Kagura said as she began to tiptoe in.

Rinoa, however, pulled her back by the back of Kagura's shirt. "Wait! Maybe he opened it by accident. Let's just look from here so we have something to work with," she said.

The three of them looked in through the door. Instead of a laboratory, they saw a long hallway lined with security doors. "It's like an insane asylum…" Kagura said.

"Yeah… wait," Gintoki said. "What if… what if he's the warden of this place?"

Rinoa gave him a questioning look. "What makes you say that?"

"Well, it's like Kagura said. Maybe he's just looking for people to keep the crazies from escaping. And I can guess," he pointed to the door on the opposite side of the hallway, "That that's his office over there."

"Really…" both girls said in unison.

Sadaharu added an "Auf!" which echoed against the walls. The faint sound of groaning came from further down the hall. "It's a looney!" Kagura whispered.

Then, muffled shouting. This made Rinoa shiver and hold her arms to steady herself. "So this is what he wanted us to guard… this haunting place…"

"So what's with the pit of death back here?" Gintoki asked, looking at the chasm behind them.

"B-Body disposal?" Rinoa asked weakly.

[Author's Notes]

- Oh lawds, a blonde experiment? Note the magenta bar o' light as well. I think I've pretty much given it away, but she's on the cusp of completion, so I may as well. Besides, for those of you who haven't read the notes back at the Cast List, this is OC x teen!Eve, not Roxas x teen!Eve. Roxas just plays a big role here.

- Xion: "But I like shounen-ai…" "M-My shounen-ai…" I think it's quite obvious to myself that I'm more of Xion's foil specifically rather than the general foil for all of the Organization.

- Yes, my feet are more Caucasian than the rest of me. And I'm Filipino!