Kingdom Crossovers

by HVK

A reformed Invader Zim has been chosen by the Keyblade and travels the multiverse alongside Calvin the magical alchemist and Hobbes the tiger knight, while in the shadows, a hidden conspiracy seeks to conquer the multiverse with monsters born from a dark titan with a hollow heart.

4. Traverse Town: City of the Lost

It begins as any other day, seemingly calm and right.

But that is merely the peace prior to the storm's coming.

With barely a whisper to announce it's presence, a dark presence arrives, filled with monstrous might.

It is Darkness incarnate in a thousand-fold shapes, playing a dark song amid the murdering.

The life that it leaves shudders in it's wake; all that is left barely able to fight.

All that is left of the dead is a pale reflection of the killer, hungering for the light of those once loved.

Hatred fills the hearts of the living, but to no avail; for everyone that falls, two more arrive.

Thus does the world fall, taken by those who hunger for the light as they dwell in darkness.

It's people drawn into their dark residence by beasts bearing shadowed claws

Knowing only terror as they experience a personal apocalypse.

Only to rise once more as the same beasts that took them into Darkness' gaping maw.

Once more seeing those they lost, transformed into those that slew them, many lose all hope.

Others flee in vain, for the Darkness' reach is everywhere; there is nowhere that it's denizens cannot go.

A rare few attempt to battle, for their own sakes and those who are unable to cope.

But it is a foregone conclusion; the darkness won once it saw it's shining foes.

But what of those who do not fall?

What happens to those who do perish as does their world?

To the manifold worlds they descend in fear, but there is one that does truly call.

Those that disappear come here, much like an safety blanket unfurled.

Falling through the darkness, then washed upon the world none could ever know.

It is a world where those who have lost all are found

A place beyond expectation and comprehension, where the lost fall like snow.

It is a world of direction turned inward, of light within the darkness. That is Traverse Town.

-The Statement of the Lost

Hiyo, true readers! I FINALLY posted this chapter! And don't expect it to be the begining of another hiatus, too. Though I, frankly, wouldn't be surprised if this is the single-handedly biggest chapter yet. Feh, who cares?

Disclaimer: Various characters and concepts in this chapter belong to Square-Enix, Disney, Jhonen Vasquez, Bill Watterson, Masashi Kishimoto, Mr. Warburton, Craig Mcraken, Christy Wui, Joss Whedon and Man of Action. Some other stuff, though, belongs to me. Additionally, the design of a certain Wishmaker belongs to Ri2.

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At the edge of the Hollow District of Traverse Town, a fair distance away from a large pile of gutted rubble, Calvin, Hobbes and Morte were attempting to hide from anyone who might concievably connect them with the aforementioned pile of rubble. Being who they were, Calvin and Hobbes were already used to running and hiding when a building randomly exploded/broke apart/imploded/ceased to exist/transformed into a rampaging giant monster, regardless of whether or not they caused it. Morte, on the other hand, was hiding on general principle and habit.

After a few minutes, it became apparent to them that the various people around them were more interested in the ruin itself rather then who or what might've caused it, evidently not inclined to randomly chase after unfamiliar travelers with pitchforks and general unhappy shouts. Taking this as a good sign, the three of them moved away from there as quietly as possible.

As they walked away, Hobbes glanced back at the ruins of the fourth building they had crashed into, or rather, through. He wasn't exactly sure why it had still been around before they hit though. If it had been anymore of an eyesore, he would have needed a masseuse for his optic nerves.

Giving the area around them a perfunctionary look, he mused that crashing into and destroying the Monty Burns Casino counted as an aesthetic favor. Judging from the burning ruins, it had been a misbegotten den of one-sided gambling with all the architectural charm of a deformed trilobite.

He sighed expansively. He had been in touch with incredibly stupid things far too often in his life; Calvin's main claim to fame was his almost impossible capacity for ingenious stupidity; he was the reason Hobbes had devoluped a saying which was now a proverb of a kind back home: "The Darwin Award candidate's last words are 'Hey, ya'll, watch this!' A genius's last words are 'I wonder what would happen if I did this?'". Unfortunately, Calvin was far more adept at intertwining the two than he would have liked, mixing incredible stupidity with stupid ingeniuity. Hobbes was far too in touch with the great and all-pervading spirit of Stupid for his liking, not to mention his peace of mind.

A good example would have been the fact that the scenario in front of them was caused by Calvin arguing with Morte and losing control of the ship, resulting in them crash-landing directly into the Monty Burns Casino, their lives saved by both ejection the precise moment before they crashed combined with a shorn-up resilience to small-scale explosions.

Recalling those unpleasant events, Hobbes muttered a curse he made up on the spot. It was in his native bestial langauge, and had no proper linguistic translation; it also sounded a great deal like a chainsaw trying to gargle while at work on vibration sheet metal.

Calvin moved his goggles from over his eyes to their usual place on his forehead, looking up at the tiger inquisitively. "What?"

"Nothing." He wasn't in a mood to translate, nor would he have normally. Frankly, Calvin was irritating enough with his limited vocabulary of swear words; Hobbes didn't want to think of the boy cursing in different langauges.

At the very least, they hadn't been injured at all. That wasn't new to Hobbes, who'd spent much of his life in a variety of crashes, none of which had ever been close to fatal and he saw no reason for that to change anytime soon. He had, in all good intention,attempted to seize control after Calvin and Morte panicked, abandoning all relation with their higher mental functions, such as they were in the tiger's opinion. Unfortunately, he'd neglected to consider or care that his piloting abilities were on par with his math skills, dispite his best efforts.

Their first clue to this was when Hobbes had grabbed the steering wheel and turned aside, consersationally asked what made the vehicle move.

After the building had collapsed in a mixture of coinage, ugly neon and horrifying imagery, Calvin, Hobbes and the irritating talking skull had quietly snuck their way through the disoriented crowd that had been ejected from the building from the sheer force of their entry. They had so far evaded notice, at least. The last thing they needed was to deal with the local constabulary, as Jason would put it. A place like this, there was no telling just what might be willing to beat the hell out of them. And they might not all be belligerent priests with a penchant for disturbing new theological theories and a severe lack of common sense.

There was one thing to be grateful for; they weren't attracting any real attention, blending in close enough to seamlessly. Weirdly enough, their clothes were a similar style to one the town had evidently taken to heart; seams up and down the place. Straps and buckles whenever possible to replaces laces and clamps of all sorts. And zippers. Lots and lots of zippers.

Hobbes was wearing a fairly simplistic outfit, which fitted his evident dislike for clothwear; he had a pair of functional knee-length green shorts with seams along the sides, a hole for his tail, and were somewhat baggier than they normally were, probably for breathing room.

Around his neck was a large bead necklace with several large odd teeth on them; they resembled the teeth of a Megalodon, but a bit smaller and pointier. Framing the necklace was a dark green vest with two pockets on the chest; on the back of it were two stiff tabs, strapped onto them a large discus-shaped shield. Barely visible under the scratched sooty surface was a double ring-in-ring design, framing an orange paw-print mark. On his hands he wore green fingerless gloves similar to bracers that went up to four inches behind his wrists, strapping up the side; they were made of a fabric similar to leather, but smoother. On his legs he had a pair of bootlike covering made of the same tough fabric as his gloves; they strapped-up up the sides, and had the ball of his feet and the toes exposed, the bottoms thicker to serve as shoes, or at least adequate foot-coverings.

Calvin's clothes were a little weirder looking; for one thing, he wore a pair of advanced looking goggles on his big forehead, a large number of little light-up icons on the rims; currently lit up was the highest icon on the revolving goggles, which resembled a simplistic pair of eyes, signifying the normal sight mode. He had on a red jacket that very vaugely resembled a lab coat in deisgn, with black lines going around it and at the neck was an encircling stiff collar, a shoulder flap coming out of the back and collar, connected by his breastbone with a clasp. His wrist-length voluminous sleeves came out from under the flap, ending in a thick ringlike shape around his wrists. This jacket too had vauge alchemic shapes on them, but far more muted, blended into the clothing; it was the sort of pattern that would be visible only in strong light, and then if you were purposefully looking for it.

His pants were black and mostly featureless, seams running down the sides like Hobbes. He wore a broad and thick toolbelt with a large number of pockets on it, two espicially large ones on the sides like a pair of holsters. The brown pouches sealed up with a clasp, made of the tough material Hobbes' gloves and 'boots'. The belt itself was kind of stretchy, like a army belt; strapped on the back was a large hammer with a thin blue hild and a small stainless steel cylinder attached on the side, thick flat striking surface on the ends. The legs of his pants partially covered his shoes, which zipped up under a securing strap and buckle, otherwise looking like a pair of futuristic white and blue sneakers.

Last of all, strapped to the back of his belt was a hammer slight taller then he was; the thin shaft encircled in a brown leather grip for him to grab it at virtually any angle, ending in a blunt head: the two striking ends extending from it like two triangles, the 'points' extended from the hammer's head. Two odd arrays were etched into the striking ends, resembling a circle in a circle; they looked loosely like a display of planetary arcs. A small circle was at the top, touching the outmost one and replacing the circle's lines. Another somewhat larger one was at the bottom of the middle, filling up a large amount of space with two small circles running through it's sides, two lines extending from the smaller ones through the outer circles, similar to the larger one running straight down the middle. Small runes were written along the outermost circle's edges, looking like a cross between a runic script and Latin.

Looking around warily to see if Hobbes' sudden giggling fit had attract any attention, the skull quietly said, "Last thing we need is to think you're a nutter. Try to keep the head-jokes in your bone-box."

Calvin looked at him, trying to figure out just what he was babbling about. He hated slang so. After a moment, Hobbes copied his gesture.

Morte noticed the stares. "What?"

"Nothing." Calvin and Hobbes said at the same time, utterly unaware of their synchronity.

"Berks." Morte said off-handedly, looking at them from the corner of his eye like they were babbling inchoherently, strapped into straitjackets, and frothing at the mouth.

"Hey!" Hobbes snapped, offended. Admittingly, he had no idea what Morte had just called him, but it sounded insulting.

"We oughta get moving," Calvin suggested, not paying attention to the other two. "Find somewhere-"

"To do what?" Morte whined. "Ask random questions to random people for, oh, I don't know, THE NEXT THREE MONTHES?!"

"...No." Calvin replied in an annoyed tone. "As we speak, I'm concoting another ingenius superplan from my own supergenius mind! Hey, I should trademark that."

"You did." Hobbes reminded him.

"Oh, yeah."

" And if it ends up like any of your other plans, we'll either be publicly ridiculed at gunpoint, end up crashing into the bottom of a cliff, wind up among xenophobic tentacled alien-beasts, attacked by giant prehistoric reptiles from the depths of a crazed artist's nightmares, or get so lost we create our own spacial singularity."

Morte stared at them. "And I thought I had an interesting life, and my afterlife was supposed to be an eternal piece of a pillar of perpetually gibbering talking heads."

Hobbes sighed in mourning for himself. "You have no idea. And that last one happened in a straight room."

Just as Calvin opened his mouth to retort, Hobbes' slightly larger hand shut it. Over Calvin's muffled protests, Hobbes said, "Aren't you supposed to be doing something? Besides arguing with this weasel."

Morte leered, ignoring Calvin's cry of Hey!. "Hey, I am the chronicler, furball. That's something to do, y'know."

Hobbes snorted, but coming from him it sounded more like a small gentle sneeze, due to the construction of his nasal passages. "I meant help in fighting the enemy."

Morte tried to smile winningly by swerving his head in mid-air to show his perpetual grin at a presentable angle. He was strangely expressive for a mobile skull, even if they all came out either somewhat amusingly morbid or just disturbing. "Hey, hey, I'm a lover, not a fighter. I don't really do the hack 'n slash thing. I'm more of a tour guide kind of guy, if you know what I mean, heh heh heh."

Calvin pulled his hammer out of it's sheath, tapping it menacingly against the ground as he glared at the skull, unaware of the double entrende in Morte's words. "You better be in there in the fray with us, you coward, or you'll be the next thing I slam this thing into." From the look in his eye, he was obviously planning something much worse than a simple head bludgeon.

Morte backed away, eyeing him cautiously. He started to plot a comeback when Hobbes rolled his eyes, grunted, and slapped the two's heads together suddenly, knocked them to the ground. As child and skull lolled around dazedly, the tiger rubbed his forehead. "At this rate, I'll have ulcers before I'm fourteen."

Morte floated up to his usual height and looked up at him, his overall expression meaning the same thing as a raised eyebrow. "How old are you, anyway?"

Hobbes squatted on the ground as he considered the question, scractching the back of his head with his left foot in a movement of alacrity that belied his behavior. "Well, people tell me I could be anything from twelve to-"

"Sorry I asked!" Morte said loudly. From his basic estimations, the tiger probably wasn't much older then the child, who couldn't be younger than ten. He knew little about anthropomorphic animals in general, and whatever variety Hobbes had originated from on his bizarre world, so going by his physical looks was pretty much pointless. Thirteen, probably, would be his best guess.

Morte made up his mind on the matter when something else occured to him. "Hey, how long have you too known each other?"

Calvin and Hobbes looked at each other briefly with a quickness and similarity of motion that would have been better expected by that of identical twins, bonded together as long as they'd lived. "As long as I can remember," the tiger said. "Unfortunately."

"Me two. The first memory I can remember involves this big furball-" Calvin lightly punched Hobbes' arm. "-a red wagon, and a migrating mulberry tree with a twisted sense of humor."

"That was the first time we crashed into something while discussing matters of life. Admittingly, we were talking about parental assertations against us, but hey, we were young." Hobbes mused wistfully. Morte floated away from them a bit, giving them a disturbed look that seemed to involve a certain alignment of his eyes and a bit of parting between his jaws.

"Uh...huh. So that's, what, a decade at most? I mean, you're ten, right?"

Calvin crossed his arms, scowling angrily at Morte. "I'm twelve."

Morte's jaw dropped, and it was a wonder of forensics(not to mention a probable breach of anatomy and the laws of physics)that it wasn't a literal statement. "S-seriously? I mean..." the skull's mind raced furiously, trying to think of something to defuse the situation before he got something large wedged through him. He doubted Calvin could actually do anything dangerous to him, but the tiger was...well, a tiger. A large feline of the genus tigris panthera, generally native to the eastern continents in one or two Primes. He didn't envy the idea of a bipedal big cat pounding him for a percieved infraction; normal tigers could tear the doors off a car, and he suspected this guy had taken some sort of advanced training. Sure, he was fairly laid-back(for the straight man of their group dynamic, that is), but Morte wasn't confident on counting on a lack of temper to save him from a bone-cracking. "You look..uh...young for your years?" he said at last, trying to grin sheepishly. It looked more ghoulish than anything, which didn't help. Nothing serves to annoy an angry person more than when it looks like you're trying to creep them out.

Hobbes pitiably rapped his fuzzy knuckles on the human's head. "He's just short. He's barely grown more then six inches from when he was six."

Calvin angrily swatted at the tiger's hand. "That's an unfound exaggeration!"

Hobbes easily moved out of the human's pathetic swipes. "Maybe, but the fact is if you had a lower center of gravity, you'd be legally required to work at a carnival sideshow for minimum wage."

Calvin angrily jumped at him, crashing directly into an open garbage can as Hobbes sidestepped him with a nearly ludicrous ease of movement. The waste disposal unit fell to the ground as Calvin weight knocked it off it's center of gravity, rolling around on the ground, the sounds of it's tinny contents smacking into the child and exaberating his loud shouts.

Morte stared dumbfounded. "Is it always like this with you guys?"

Hobbes watched the progress of the rolling garbage can. "Pretty much," he said as the can rolled into a lamppost("OW!"), knocking the dazed kid out and onto the cobblestones with a hard thud, rolling to a prone state, lying flat on his back as he mumbled to himself inchoherently.

"Somebody stop the Planet of The Apes, I want to get off," Calvin muttered as Hobbes and Morte helped him to his feet, the former pulling him up by his arm while the latter bit down lightly on Calvin's collar and tugged upwards.

"You alright?" Hobbes asked.

"Not the first time you've tricked me into something like that," Calvin muttered, images of Hobbes telling him to stop rollarskating by falling into a gravel driveway dancing through his mind.

"I told you before, it was only a suggestion." The tiger grumbled defensively.

"Whatever," The kid said indifferently. "Let's get going already; we're not going to get anything done hanging around here and I hate being still."

"Sure," Morte said. "Works for me."

As they walked away, Hobbes heard a small crashing sound, not too far behind him and unnoticed by the other two. He frowned, looking over to where'd it had come; he didn't see anything, which struck him as suspicious. Still frowning, he hurried up to catch up with his companions.

As they wandered throughout the district, attempting to find some means of locating the key guy(not to mention the elusive Spike), Hobbes discretely scanned the area.

It was the sort of place that could easily be termed 'Everytown, USA', even if they weren't in a place that didn't translate easily to any sort of country, let alone America. It seemed slightly patched up to him, as if slapped together in a hurry from a disparate amount of buildings and places. That struck him as somehow appropiate, though he couldn't imagine why.

The people around seemed equally slammed into the place, if not moreso. As they walked around, he saw an even greater variety of species than he remembered from back home; anthropomorphic animals like himself, a great deal of humans, saurians, sentient machines, and a host of other creatures he didn't even have names for.

He paused, looking behind them, his look of incredulity changing to one of bemusement.

He nudged Calvin in the side. "What?" the human child asked.

"Keep it down. Look behind us, but don't be obvious."

Calvin raised an eyebrow, but Hobbes didn't react. Shrugging to himself, Calvin looked behind them discretely.

His jaw dropped. "You've got to be kidding."

Behind them, far enough to be unnoticed by them for the most part, but close enough to keep track of them, was an absurdly tall figure dressed in a trenchcoat, a small fluffy hankerchief, and a tophat. Most of him was obscured, except for his brown boots, oddly mechanical overlong arms, and the fact that his face appeared to be a blue oval with no facial features but a large pair of eyes and a mouth concealed under a large black handlebar mustache. Oblivious to their interest, he lumbered around unsteadily, looking as if he was about to fall over himself every fifth step he took. And then there was the way his upper half kept waving around unsteadily as if it were badly stapled to the rest of him, rather like a Promethean constructed by a mad scientist with a God complex and a low budget.

Periodically he would speak to himself, apparently giving orders to himself in a slightly high-pitched voice. "Hey! Stop it! You can stop now-LEFT! Okay, carefully...look out for that loose stone. OW! Who puts these plate glass things in the middle of the road?!"

Often, when this happened, two other voices would emanate from his body, in descending order; one was more moderately pitched then the other, sounding like a cultured voice with an accent somewhere between German and English, slightly formal in tone, if not in actual words. The other one was deeper than the others, sounding much older than the other two, not to mention considerably stressed.

The whatever it was lurched about, gamely trying to keep up with his quarry and be stealthy at the same time while apparently trying to keep himself from falling off his body. He snuck up behind a tree, his upper half drooping off as he started sharply yelling "I'm falling, I'm falling, I'm falling!" in an unusually high-pitched voice.

"Shut the bloody hell up! It's hard enough balancing on his shoulders without holding your infernal body, you waste of thought!" said the second voice. "I say, do you work out? Because I wouldn't want to come across as uncouth, but really, it's almost impossible to not notice. You really ought to do something about that tension problem of yours."

"Can't you two stop arguing for five minutes?" the deep voice snapped. "I'm the one that carrying all the weight and you don't see me complaining. And no, I don't have a tension problem."

"Excuse me?" the main guy said in reply to the third's scathing commentary. "Who's the one who came up with this idea? Who's the one who found out where these guys where? Who's the one who got the message from the guys about this? Who's the one who found those weighted shoes just for you to keep your balance? Who's the one who got this nice and heavy coat to keep me dry? That's right, me."

Silence greeted him like a horde of Huns waving molecular disentegration beamguns and authorization to fry at will.

"I rest my case." he said smugly.

"I say we fall upon on him and beat him until he is sorry!" the accented voice cried.

"No, it's not painful enough," the deep voice growled.

The guy rolled his eyes. "Yes, but we can leave that for later. For now, we are sneaky. Sneaky like I am!"

"Oh please, Godzilla on a bender is more subtle then you."

"Or a detonation of a nuclear device," the deep voice said. "You know, the things that goes boom."

"Quiet!" The guy suddenly yelled. He strolled by his prey, walking by them as they looked up, pretending to not notice him.

The three stared at them, but not the same way several other people had; not with stupified confusion, with their eyebrows raised and their jaws slightly slack, but with a species of scientific curiousity, even as he walked right past them, whistling innocently and loudly.

They watched him for a moment with that odd speculative look and then looked at each other. They walked off, apparently paying the idiot no further attention.

"Hah!" he crowed. "I'm a disguise mastermind!"

"We aren't buying it!" Hobbes yelled distantly, pointing a finger at him.

The guy froze, his small black pupils shrinking into itty-bitty pinpricks. Slowly, the ludicrously tall whatever it was tottered over to them.

Calvin raised an eyebrow. The guy not only looking like he was about to fall in two pieces, but his head was a small bright blue oval. His oval eyes were unusually big for his body, and those were the only features he could see.

"And who in the name of the Exploding Tunnel Kumqauts of Thursday Night Dinner are you?" he asked.

The guy's mustache twitched with every word as he spoke in a falsetto deep voice. "Me? Oh, I'm Orlando! Orlando Bloo!"

A voice with an indefinite Eurpoean accent apparently emanating from his chest yelled "You lie! We agreed on Robin Weiss!"

His head shifted around to the same voice yelping in pain. "I'm sorry about that," he said, "But apparently I have...psychoplasm!"

There was the sound of someone slapping themselves from within coat. "That's not even a real disease! That's a material substance that alters itself based on the mind of an observer!"

Morte clicked his teeth. It seemed to be the rough equivilant of a raising an eyebrow or some other satiric expression. "Oookay. What's with the bad voice?"

Orlando Bloo's eye darted from side to side. "I don't know what you're talking about! I've had this voice ever since I grew up in the diamond mines of New Ancient Canadia."

"Canadia." Hobbes said flatly.

"Yeah, that place down by Neo Greatly. I remember all those fond nights of being surronded by pengiuns."

"That's the Rio Grande!" The deep voice said again. "And penguins don't live anywhere by there! Raimundo's going to kill you for that, you know."

"Looks like my stomachs acting up again!" Orlando said cheerfully in his obviously falsetto voice as his head violently shifted around to what sounded suspiciously like yelps of pain. "I'll have to drink less coffee! Anyhow, I'm here...to, eh..conduct an town census! And I need you guys to do the bagpipes, kazoo and accordian."

"That's orchestra!" The Orson Wellian voice yelled again. "You're commiting homicide against the arts, you buffoon!"

"Will there be golf shoes scraping against concrete and amplified teeth grinding?" the third voice said blandly. "Because that could actually improve the performance."

"I can't heear you!" Orlando Bloo said, shutting his eyes tightly. With that mustache, he looked like something out of the Edwardian era crossed with the twenties decade of private detective lore.

Hobbes rolled his eyes. "This is ridiculous." He sharply yanked the mustache off the blob-guy's face, revealing that his wide mouth was his only facial feature other than the eyes.

Orlando didn't appear to notice it and continued keeping his eyes shut until Hobbes poked him sharply on his forehead; the flesh, oddly enough, was rather warm but had some give to it, like very hard rubber. And he didn't feel a definite skeletal structure and the question of muscle was anyone's guess; he felt like something brought into existence by an unusually intelligent infantile mind.

He opened his eyes, still keeping up the stupid falsetto voice. "My dear...person thingie, what is it?" Hobbes waved the fake mustache in front of his face.

'Orlando Bloo' narrowed his eyes, frowning in concentration. "Hmm, why does that look familiar?"

There was a sound of impact inside the coat again. "Ow!" Then the light of realization illuminated his face, and his little black eyes dilated again as his arm hit his face harder then was nesscary, his yells spoken in a much higher-pitched voice even higher than that of one of the phantom voices. "OW! You ripped off my mustache! That hurt a lot! Ow! I'm in so much pain! I've had that even since I was a baby! Ow!"

"Enough of this!" the first voice bellowed. Orlando sharply tottered foward as he yelled, "Hey, hey, stoppit!" He jerked upright as his hands reached down and plucked Calvin and Hobbes off the ground, one held by the shoulder flap and the other by the scruff of his neck.

"Hey!" Calvin yelled. "What's going on here!?"

Orlando's eyes darted back and forth, his mouth a freaked-out little line. "Now come on, guys. I'm sure there's a perfectly good explanation. Just give me a minute to think of one after SOMEONE TELLS ME WHAT'S GOING ON!"

The deep voice spoke up again. "Hey, what's going on? I can't see anythi-oh no. Stewie, you better not be atagonazing them! You remember the incident with the Pokemon Ambassadors? I remember the incident with the Pokemon ambassadors."

"And what if I am?" the other voice challenged. "What will you do about it, old man?"

"This! If the world lived together in peace, living together in har-mo-ny, it'd be a splendid place to beee!"

"NOOOOOOOOO! NOT A HIPPY PROTEST SONG!!"

"It'd be a beautiful place, with nary a single cry of woe, it'd be a wonderful world to see!"

"Curse you, amalgated Hallmark industries, CUUUUURSE YOOOOOU!!"

"Hey! HEY! Stop ignoring me! I need attention! Pander to me! I'm waaaiiiting...START PANDERING TO ME ALREADY! AAAUUUUUGH!" Orlando screamed as the third continued singing the cheerfully obnoxious and poorly thought out song.

Calvin and Hobbes, still hanging from the hands, looked at each other with an equally bizarre look that meant What is wrong with these people? Morte joined in as best he could with his limited repetoire of facial expressions until he was distracted by a passing women of questionable morality. As he started to drift off after them, Hobbes snatched him and dropped him to the ground without changing his expression in the least.

Apparently acting on a thought arrived at on different tracks, both human and humanoidish tiger reached out, grabbed a good handful of coat, and pulled. It tore away easily, revealing three arguing people standing on each other's shoulders.

At the bottom was a tall human male well over six feet tall, maybe in his early thirties at most. His straight hair, a red so dark it was nearly black, was worn long, down to his chin-level. His face had a ascetic, almost sculpted look, an image evolving from his strong cheekbones, deepset heavy-lidded brown eyes and the general look of his face. His body was strongly muscled, suggesting that he engaged in some kind of physical work-out. Over it he wore a loose yellow coat, extending down to his knees and with two large straps over the front. Under the jacket was a shirt with the image of a crossed-out generic human face rendered in lines and he also wore tan rawhide pants, his motorcycle boots sticking out of the bottom of his pants.

Standing on his shoulders was one of the weirder sights Morte'd seen; he was stern-looking and indesputably intelligent, but that didn't attract attention away from the fact that he was a baby with an abnormally football-shaped head. His head had a few hairs on it, and combined with his expression, it made him look like a miniture Orson Welles. He wore only a small pair of shoes, a yellow shirt, and a pair of overalls in the town's style; the pocket on it's front zipped up, and the two straps had buckles instead of buttons. His black eyes stared at them with an unnerving intelligence, not to mention a certain amount of hateful glances thrown at the world. He was also holding a long pair of mechanical limbs, which looked slightly awkward.

Finally, standing around his head, was an odd-looking creature about three feet or so tall Hobbes had no word to describe, except for blob; that was the closest thing to it, really. It's lower half was folded around the back of the infant's head like a flexible piece of Silly Putty, two puesdopod-like arms extended at what could be shoulder level for it; the 'arms' were long and flexible looking, ending in a rounded shape and wrapped around the infant's head tightly. His head region appeared to be a part of it's head that had eyes with small black pupils and a mouth that seemed to be changing depending on it's mood, rather like a cartoon character.

As a finishing touch, Morte flew up and pushed the hat off.

The upper two continued arguing, utterly oblivious to the destruction of their disguise; the third guy, on the other hand, blinked in mute surprise. People passed down the alley, paying absolutely no attention to the crazy people, making Morte consider the possibility that things like this were either a daily occurence and the people had become used to it, or a cruel and stupid explanar species had stolen all their brains and replaced them with limes, killing their weirdness recognition ability; for, as anyone knows, lime is the boring fruit.

The blob thing slumped. "Oh, well that's just perfect."

"And it's all your fault!" The baby declared angrily. "If the others find out about this, we'll be eternally discredited! Our reputations will crumble! Well, ours will, anyway. If yours crumbles anymore, it'll fall all over you and cover you in an avalanche of idiocy and misbeggoten plots."

"Hey!" The blob-thing yelled indignantly.

"Others?" Morte said. "What others?"

"Uh..." Jarod said slowly, not sure how to go about this.

Bloo spoke up, deciding to abandon his fake voice for his normal one, albeit with a placating tone that grated on their nerves. "It's a long story, and I don't want to bore you with all the details, and you just gotta work with me on this."

"And just who are you?" Calvin said, pointing a finger at him. "Besides a really bad actor."

"Me? I'm only the world renowned imaginary friend, Blooregard Q. Kazoo," he said with an exaggerated sweep of an arm he'd apparently grown for the gesture. He half-closed his eyes and smiled wryly in what was probably intended to be a charming expression. "But my friends and legions of admirers just call me Bloo."

Stewie rolled his eyes. "I am Stuart Griffen, though you may call me Stewie. But don't get familiar on me!" he added sharply.

The guy at the bottom grimaced, evidently vexed by being partnered with a preening idiot and a aristocratic infant. "My name is Jarod."

Calvin and Hobbes continued hanging loosely from Stewie's robot hands. A wind washed through the street, swinging them gently upon the metal hands. A tumbleweed blew by and started to play on a guitar.

"Put us down. Now." Hobbes said shortly, a threat of horrible squashing doom in his words.

Jarod pushed the two on him off, the blue blob landing on the ground shortly before the child landed on him like a landing pad; not incidentally, this also released Calvin and Hobbes, as Stewie lost hold of the arms.

The two of them landed on the dirt unceremoniously. They sat up, brushing themselves off, then turned around; the arms were still clutching them. Hobbes easily wrenched them off as Calvin started walking off. "Hey, where are you going?"

"Away from the Three Stooges over here."

"Hey!" Bloo yelled. "I'm good enough for two stooges!"

Stewie shook his fist at the heavens. "Of all the horrid fates in store for me, why did you pick this one?!"

"Well," Jarod said in a self-satisfied voice, "This officially qualifies as my hardest pretend ever: being an idiot among two idiots."

"Hey!" Stewie and Bloo shouted at once.

"Okay, okay. That was unfair. Being an idiot among a abnormally self-obsessed blob-thing and a pretentious Orson Welles wannabe with delusions of megalomania."

"Hah!" Bloo pointed at Stewie. "You're delusional."

"I'll have you know my ambitions are perfectly credible, protoplasmic imbicle!"

"I bet you think you're soooo clever. Well, joke's on you: I didn't understand a single word you just said, HAH!"

"What was the point of all that?!" Hobbes demanded, spreading his arms out, palms exposed and his face in a skeptically incredulous expression. "I've seen some dumb stunts over the years-" he glanced at Calvin sharply, who was suddenly occupied by interesting cloud formations for some reason. "-but that was that worst yet!"

"I assure you, there is a very logical and perfectly reasonable explanation for all this," Stewie said, "BUT YOU'RE NOT GETTING ONE!" He pushed Bloo aside, clicking a device he plucked out of his little pocket.

Everyone stared at him.

Nothing happened.

"Give it a moment!" Stewie insisted. "It's a visual! Those things take time!"

Everyone looked around, looking to see what he was talking about.

Once again, nothing happened.

Hobbes crossed his arms. "Well?"

"Give it a moment!"

Hobbes was about to reply when they were illuminated by an extremely bright spotlight; ignoring Stewie's triumpht cry, he peered into the night sky, and saw a large flying machine in the sky in a Jules Verne motiff, the word Rosebud written on it's side in red block letters.

As Jarod gave an annoyed sigh, Bloo said, "COOOOOL!" and Calvin said, "Tch. I've built better with glued together cardboard boxes.", the area of light around the blob, child and Pretender grew marginally brighter. The air around them began to ripple, as if the respective molecues had gotten it into their minds to dance to The Flight of the Valkyries.

The three abruptly lifted into the air, floating swiftly towards the source of the spotlight; a glowing hatch on the bottom that resembled an oblong pod. It split apart like a budding flower as they retreated into it, vanishing from the other trio's sight. It's task done, the airship swiftly flew off as quickly and randomly as it'd came, leaving no trace of it's existence.

As it's cargo stirred, pushing aside some random debris that had gotten pulled up with them, a ten year old boy walked up to them. His squarish jaws and the straight lines of his head gave it a rectangular shape; framing it was a mass of curling brown hair in a bowlcut. Strangly enough, his eyes and mouth were unnervingly similar to Bloo's, in their arrangement at least. He wore a red shirt with pockets near the bottom over a white undershirt with longer sleeves than the jacket and tan pants like Jarod's. The red shirt was zipped up, had seams around the shoulders, sides and lining, and also had a green backpack worn over his back.

Mac observed the garbage around them, the dirty glances they kept throwing at his imaginary friend and Bloo's sheepish expression. "He got you to do Orlando Bloo, didn't he?"

"Oh, you must be in the Obvious Club," Stewie snapped. "Tell me, are you just a card carrying member or are they plotting to build a thirty foot statue of you in the center of town to commenrate your keen observation skills for all eternity?!"

"There's no need to be rude," Jarod remarked. "Even though Bloo completely botched it." That last comment was added with a knowing glance at Bloo.

Bloo snorted derisively. "Well, of course I botched it! I always botch everything! Name anything, anything at all, and I can practically garruntee I've botched it or could!" he paused, turning towards Mac with a psuedopod arm on where his chin would be. "Wait, 'botched' is a good thing, right?"

Everyone fell to the ground out of sheer dumbfoundedness. "What?" Bloo said in confusion. He slapped himself on the face. "Of course, duh! How could I have missed it? You all are acknowledging my genius by bowing before me. But that's not really nessacary, you could just throw me some money."

"No, it's not!" Stewie yelled, rising up enough to point a finger at Bloo all dramatic and shaky-like. "It's your fault this damned ill-concieved plot failed before it could even get loose of it's moorings!"

"We can stand here all day and point fingers at who did what and miss the real culprit of who ruined this." Bloo said calmly.

"And who would that be?" Mac said skeptically. He knew where this was going.

"That's easy. It's you-" he pointed at Jarod, "-and you-" he pointed at Stewie, "-and you-" he pointed at Jarod again, "-and you-", he pointed at Stewie again, "-and you, even though you weren't there." He pointed at Mac.

Mac crossed his arms and glared at him through narrowed eyes. "Are you saying that it was everyone's fault except yours?"

"Yes, Mac, m' boy. Yes I am." He looked at them for a few moments. "And I got away with it, IN YOUR FACES!" He yelled, jumping up and pointing an arm at them with a crazed laugh shortly before running off.

"You'll rue the day you messed with Stuart Griffen!" the mini-megalomaniac yelled, running after him. "Start rueing immediately! It'll save you time in the long run!"

Jarod stared at the sight of the alarmingly precocious infant chasing around the imaginary friend. "Hold still a moment, you badly conceived thought!"

"Only if you catch meeeee!"

"I'll get you yet, figmentary fool!"

"Your words're almost as big as your head, too bad your landspeed isn't!"

"Leave my head out of this! I should kill you for that!"

"Things were never this zany when I was on the run," Jarod said cheerfully. "I love it. But hey, that didn't go very well."

Stewie and Bloo stopped. "Heeey," the blob said slowly. "Wasn't it his idea to just come up to them and ask them to come with us and explain everything?"

"Yes. Yes he did!" Stewie yelled. "It made much more sense to simply kidnap them and explain ourselves at leisure!"

"Yeah, even my idea didn't stink that much! Hey, wait a minute!"

Jarod grinned, pressing a button on a Universal Remote he carried around with him in case his many acquiantices of questionable sanity progressed from mild madness to full-blown psychosis on him; the hatch they had been standing on opened suddenly, sucking in the garbage that had been taken with them.

He looked at them, his coat blowing dramatically in the wind, his arms held to his sides. He pulled a pair of wraparound sunglasses out of a pocket on his coat and put them on, raising his Coolness Factor by two point eight percent.

"I'd like to stay, but I have a pressing engagement anywhere but here." And then, with no fanfare at all, he flipped out the open hatch.

Bloo and Stewie sat at the edge of the hatch, staring at Jarod's descending body.

"...He's utterly mad, you know." Stewie said.

"Y'know, he did seem kinda miffed we called him out, but this is a little extreme." Bloo commented.

Jarod rolled out of his sky-diving flip, flinging his arms out as a pterodactyl, for no appreciable reason, swooped out of the sky and grabbed Jarod by the arms, flying out into the wild blue yonder. Given the time of night, it was more like a dark purplish yonder, but that was besides the point.

"Awww!" Bloo whined. "Why does everything exciting happen to everyone else? I wanna fall out of an airship's hatch and get caught by a giant pterodactyl! I want something exciting to happen to me!"

Stewie causally walked around him. "Hm, fair enough."

"Wha-" Bloo's confused question was cut off when Stewie pushed Bloo out of the hatch.

As the imaginary friend's cry of mixed surprise and dismay faded away, Stewie closed that hatch.

Mac looked at the hatch and then to Stewie incredulously. "Wha...buh...guh...why'd you do that?! AGAIN!?"

"Oh, relax." Stewie said calmly. "I'm sure he'll be fine. The Wobbuffet I tried this on survived perfectly well."

"Bloo's not a Wobbuffet!" Mac protested. "He's not even close to a Patient Pokemon!"

"Oh, come on. He's a blob, they're blobs..."

"Wobbuffet are living defense mechanisms, you jerk! Bloo can't project bodily shields!"

"Not yet, anyway."

Mac fixed Stewie with a glare. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Oh, you know...once a certain someone pesters me long enough to give them superpowers, I simply had to oblige. Not that I stuck to the letter, you know..."

Mac grabbed Stewie by the overalls, lifting him up to his face. "What. Did. You. DO?!"

"Calm yourself, you're screwing up my feng shui. All I did was insert the DNA of that one Wobbuffet that hangs around with that yellow mouse thing into him when he wasn't looking..."

Stewie crept up behind a post, a large needle in his hands.

His eyes narrowed as he observed his prey.

The prey in question was a blob-type creature, a light blue in color. It's body was fairly fat around the head, slimming down in the middle and fattening again into a X-shaped pattern of round puesedopods for feet, a small black paddle-tail with blankly staring eyes poking out from between the rear pair. A pair of flattened arm-flapss protruded out at shoulder level, just below the flattened head-flap on the back of the creature's head, opposite the clenched eyes and borderline frown of a zigzag mouth of the face. One of the arms was held in a salute, which reminded Stewie of an obscure Japanese comedy sketch.

He watched the Wobbuffet in question speak to another creature, this one a bit more vegative in looks. It's body looked like a green ball, a small yellow flowering plant growing out the top of it's head and resembling a shock of hair. It's eyes were deepset large black pupils; directly below them were a series of small holes, arranged in a pattern that resembled a smile. Below these, around it's body, was a series of small conical dark green spikes; similar spikes were present around the clublike ends of it's thick arms and looking like fingers, and a larger pair of spikes were at the bottom of it's body, functioning as legs.

Finally, next to them was a yellow mouse of sorts, slightly bigger than the cactus creature. It had a plump body that looked to be nearly all muscle, with a rodentine leg arrangement, the limbs looking more powerful than they should've. Out of it's rear poked a large stiff tail, shaped like a classical lightning bolt, the wide flat ended colored a brown by the stripe on it; three similar brown stripes were present on it's back. It's head was round, larger in perportion to it's body than usual, and somewhat cute looking. It appeared relaxed, judging on how it's long angular ears, ending in black marks, were calm and still. It's wide and short muzzle, sniffing the air occasionally, would probably have looked cute to somewhat else; Stewie just thought it looked odd for something called an Electric Mouse when it looked very little like a mouse at all, espically with the bright red circle on it's cheeks.

They were speaking to each other, idecating that they were sentient. To anyone else, their words would have just come out at the pronounciaton of various syllables of their species' respective names. Thankfully, however, Stewie had recently procured a Babel Fish, rendering their words intelligible.

"Well, what'd you guys think?" The blue blob asked the other two in the sort of voice that was practically tailor-made for cheering or at least loud proclamiations of a sporting nature.

"I liked it!" the cactus said thoughtfully, her feminine voice marking her as a girl. "What about you?"

"Hmm, me? I dunno. Never did kareoke before on a stage."

"Yeah, who'd 've thought that Wobbuffet would like kareoke?" the cactus said jokingly.

"Or that Pikachu would pick 'Thunder Road' as his song?" Wobbuffet said.

"Hey hey hey! I like country, you guys."

"Too depressing most of the time for me!" the cactus chimed in.

"That's odd, Cacnea." the blob mused. "I mean, you're a cactus, and those songs tend to come from desert regions, so..."

"Aaah, I don't like deserts," Cacnea said airily. "Too humid."

The Electric Mouse and the Patient Pokemon looked at each other briefly and shrugged.

"Nice place, though. I like Caritas." Pikachu opined. "Wonder if I can get Pikapi up there sometime..."

Cacnea and Wobbuffet froze. They slowly turned, staring at each other, and then fell to the ground laughing at the mental image that brought up.

"Hey, c'mon! It's not that funny! Cut it out!" Pikachu complained as the former foes of his continued laughing.

Cacnea wiped some water away from her eyes, her green husk too tough to be injured or scratched by her spines. "'Kay, but you know, Lorne's got a weird sense for naming."

"Yeah," Pikachu agreed. "I mean, 'Pokemike Night'?"

Wobbuffet shrugged. "What do you want? He's a demon, and he used to work at Las Vegas."

"Under protest," Cacnea reminded him.

"Yeah, that too."

Wobbuffet turned around, and a small child suddenly jumped out of nowhere, landing sqaurely on his back, shouting, "I've got you now!" while plunging a large hypodermic needle into the Patient Pokemon's body.

The mouse and cactus whirled around. "Hey, what the-" Cacnea began to say.

She trailed off as she realized that this, whoever he was, had neglected to consider both Wobbuffet's tough body as a defensively-based creature, not to mention his body structure; Wobbuffet bent over as a result of the added weight of Stewie's body, waving his arms in the air helplessly.

Stewie repeatedly plunged the needle into the blob-like creature, yelling such fond things as, "Sink, damn you, SINK!"

Cacnea raised her arm, the needles glowing as Pikachu 's red cheeks started glowing white-yellow, emitting small arcs of electricity. They were both about to strike the annoying person off when Wobbuffet regained his equilibrium, abruptly snapping back up to his standard standing posistion like a standing punching-bag, incidentally flinging Stewie far away.

Both cactus and mouse powered down, staring in the direction Stewie had gone off in.

"Who was that?" the cactus wondered.

"Al Gore?" Pikachu guessed.

Wobbuffet and Cacnea stared at him. "What?"

The mouse shuffed his foot sheepishly. "I couldn't think of anything else to say fast. And hey: if Presidential candidates don't randomly jump on people and try to plunge needles into them, then I don't know who else does."

"...Uh huh. You know, all this time, I always though you guys were some kind of amazing strategic geniuses, but you guys were almost as lame as we were." Wobbuffet said.

"Yeah!" Cacnea agreed. She paused. "Wait, that didn't sound right."

Wobbuffet nodded. "Yeah, I know." One of his pods waved around his back rapidly. "Ow; I think I got a scratch or something."

"Let me see." Pikachu said, hopping over behind the blob. He peered at it a moment before nodding his head. "Yup; I think that guy nicked you a little."

Wobbuffet winced. "A little? This hurts like a Banette."

Over in his landing spot, Stewie blinked. He noticed that there was a faint trace of blue around the needles tip. "Hmm, some skin? Eh, guess that'll work. Just extrapolate the entirety of the DNA sequence and utilize those relating to techniques..."

Later...

Bloo stood in his room, staring out the window dully, waiting for Mac to get there. Admittingly, after the fall of the world, Mac lived at Foster's too, but that wasn't important. He just had to have other friends, didn't he?

Stewie jumped out of nowhere, landing on Bloo's back. "Guess who, blob boy!?"

"Zorak?"

"Eh, close." He then jabbed a needle into Bloo's back.

"Ow! Hey, what was that for!?" Bloo demanded, struggling to reach his back as Stewie jumped away.

"Consider that what you asked for!"

"So, yeah." Stewie finished lamely.

Mac started seething in fury, his face slowly turning red. "You WHAT?!"

"Oh, hush. He's close enough to a Wobbuffet. Well, maybe not that one, but he's enough of a loser, don't you think?"

Down below...

Calvin scratched his side lazily. "Huh. That was weird."

"I take comfort in the fact that we're weren't involved proactively." Hobbes said, stretching his arms out with an audible pop.

"Whazzat mean?" Morte wondered.

"Activity that has exceeded it's amateur status."

"Y'know, I just can't help but feel we got off-track somewhere," Morte pointed out.

Calvin stared blankly, his weird eyes widening. He slapped his forehead lightly. "Duh! We gotta find this Spike guy!"

"More importantly, we should find that 'key' King Garfield mentioned." Hobbes pointed out.

"A key? That'll take some work?" Calvin observed. "A city this size is bound to have hundreds of mystical key things."

"I don't know about that." Morte said thoughtfully. "Technically, a key is anything that opens a door. Back in the Planes, every single damn portal had a 'key' to open them, and they were all metaphorical ones."

Calvin and Hobbes stared at him. "He's got a point." Calvin said, looking extremely reluctant to make such an admission.

Hobbes playfully slapped the skull, sending him into the ground. "Looks like you aren't so useless after all!"

"Thanks..I think," the skull muttered from his small hole in the dirt.

Something unpleasant had occured to Calvin. "Wait a minute, he said slowly. "How the heck are we going to get off this rock without a mode of transportation?"

Suddenly, the Monty Burns Casino exploded again, a flaming piece of debris flying through the sky in their general direction. As Hobbes tackled the other two to push them out of the way, it crashed into the ground where they had been standing, leaving a smoking skid mark and crater. The flames suddenly sputtered out, revealing the badly scorched Gummi Ship, which was almost completely destroyed, the anomalous properties of the candy-like material it was composed of being the only thing holding it together.

They stared at it, a few stubborn flames blowing out as they watched.

"Well, that solves that." Morte said after a few moments.

Calvin glanced at what remained of the Kingdom Mark One. "First thing we do should be to find somewhere to put this thing. We can't exactly lug a four hundred pound ship everywhere. People are going to notice."

"What do you mean 'we'?" Hobbes snapped. "I'm the one that'll have to carry it!"

"Oh, sure, like I'm going to carry it?"

"It's not my fault your small and weak!"

"I am not small! And it's not my fault you're the only one here who's done big-time physical training with Teacher, now is it?"

"Sure, it always got back to that, Mr. I-Spent-All-My-Efforts-On-Special-Effects!"

"Look who's talking, senor suckalot!"

"I don't suck, you do!"

"No, you do!"

"You!"

"You!"

In the midst of their arguing, Morte lost interest and noticed a big sign that said Honest Eddy's Discount Storage. It was accompined by a crude drawing of the head of a grinning guy with three long hairs at the back of his head and a smile that could be only described as oily by even the most charitible observer. It was practically screaming Rip-Off Artist with a bullhorn.

"Guys, I gotta plan."

"Huh? What?" the two behind him said, pausing in their fight.

Morte gestured in the general direction of the sign.

The three of them looked at each other. "That'll work." they said as one.

A tearful zombie ran by them. "I'm dead inside!" she cried, a bag of toenail scrapings trailing behind her.

"You're dead outside too," Calvin called nonchalantly.

"Hey hey! Now where do you think you're going?" Morte said as he started following her for all of two seconds before Hobbes snatched him out of the air.

"Now where do you think you're going?" the tiger asked inquistively, a disturbing suspision squatting at the corner of his mind and giggling to itself psychotically.

Morte looked at him incredulously. "What d'ya think? She's a nice dead girl, I'm a nice dead head(Eh, not that kind, the literal kind)...see where I'm going?"

Calvin glanced at the two of them before losing interest. "No..no I don't, actually."

Hobbes blanced, the fur on his face going a few shades paler. "You can't be serious."

Morte grinned ghoulishly. It was the only sort of grin he was capable of making, being a floating skull and all, but the intent was definitely there. "Oooooh yeah. C'mon, big guy...it's a Friday night, I've been without appreciable female company for way too long, have a little compassion huh? Just me and the luscious cadavar all by our-"

Hobbes' fur, if that were possible, paled even further. "That's disgusting!" he shrieked, throwing Morte into a random manhole.

A sewer mutant threw him back out, proclaiming "We don't want your garbage!" Hobbes continued to give an utterly repulsed look at the leering skull, who was now covered completely in garbage. An acerbic part of Hobbes' mind volunteered the comment that now his exterior nicely matched the inner workings of his mind.

He looked back at Calvin, whose relative innocence was still preserved by the fact that he had been paying no attention whatsoever to the conversation.

The tiger grunted something angrily. "Let's go," he growled under his breath.

They started to move when Hobbes paused, his ears twitching. "Do you guys hear something?"

Calvin frowned. "Yeeah...come to think of it, I do."

"It sounds like a really whiny voice saying 'thaaat's nooot whaaaat IIIIIII meeeean'!" Morte said.

Hobbes raised an eyebrow as their collective shadows started to grow bigger, unnoticed by them all. "Why'd you repeat it exactly?"

"...I haven't said anything in a while. Kinda grates on the nerves, y'know?"

The screechy yell was become louder and clearer.

"Yeeeah," Calvin said slowly. "Don't say 'y'know' at the end of your sentences. Makes you sound like a wannabe-jock, and I hate jocks."

Hobbes frowned and looked down, noticing the abnormally big shadow at their feet. "Why do I have a bad feeling about-"

And Bloo crashed down on all of them.

Calvin groaned, feeling a painful weight pressing into his stomach on the ground. He tried to get up, realizing that something really heavy was pinning him down.

He wondered why it seemed really dark, and well, hot. Like being under a live shag carpet.

This seemed strangely familiar.

He opened his eyes and realized a few key things.

One, Morte was stuck under him, unable to float away.

Two and three, Hobbes was lying across him while Bloo was pinning the tiger down.

Hobbes opened one green pupil, the other squinted in discomfort. "Pain. I'm in pain."

"What have you been eating?" Calvin growled. "Edible concrete?"

"Heey," Bloo dazedly said, "Look, I'm alive!"

"That can be rectified," Morte muttered and Calvin and Hobbes added something to a similar effect.

Those around him stirred, trying to stand up or at least move into a slightly less uncomfortable position; unnoticed by him, one of the pouches on Calvin's belt slipped open, a small yellow ball falling on the ground as Bloo fell off Hobbes, noticing a broken paddleball.

Calvin blerily acknowledged it's existence. Then his red eyes widened as he realized what was rolling around on the floor.

Calvin spoke in a frightengly neutral voice. "Nobody make any sudden movements. Just...roll...away from it."

"Why?" Morte wondered.

"Because it's one of my ready-made smart-bombs, and if it's hit by a hard enough impact, it will activate and blow us all to very small ashes." Calvin replied, just as neutral as before. Hobbes pulled himself up to look at what Calvin was talking about.

"Hey, new guys, look at THIS!" The three of them looked up to see Bloo holding a paddleball of sorts.

That didn't frighten them much. What did scare the unholy hell out of them was the fact that the string was securely tied around the small bomb.

"Yeah," Bloo said, not noticing their increasingly horrified stares. "I just saw this poor little guy without a paddle for him, and I remembered this little paddle I found and look at it now!"

Ignoring their fractured pleas to stop, he raised the paddle into the air, flicking the ball upwards into the air. It stretched outwards, the taut string suddenly pulling it back. He swung the paddle...

And missed completely, the little ball swinging despondantly as it came to a stop.

Their eyes bulged as Bloo glared at it. He raised it, flicked it, swung and missed again. He raised it, flicked it, swung and missed again. Raise, flick, swing, miss.

Bloo frantically swung it around, futilely attempting to hit the ball with the paddle and failing pathetically. The three potential victims of his stupidity stared mutely at his complete inability to hit a paddleball even once.

This continued for about fifteen minutes until Bloo grimaced ludicrously, his mouth extended to what would have been ear-to-ear if he'd had any, letting the little ball fall to the ground as his grip on the paddleball loosened.

Calvin, Hobbes and Morte all exhaled exspansively in relief.

And then Bloo freaked out and threw the paddleball as hard as he could at their feet.

In the small explosion that followed, there was a distinct amount of words that couldn't be taken back, mostly from Morte. And some from Calvin, who knew few swear-words but was already in the learning stages of how to use them to best effect.

Four small figures flew away, smacking halfway through the sign of 'Honest Eddy', poking out his eyes(which, ironically, was the punishment for scam artists in the olden days of the Comic Kingdom).

"Hey, Bloo?" Calvin asked.

"What?"

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah, I think so."

Calvin relaxed. "Oh, that's good. BECAUSE I'M GOING TO KILL YOU!" he shrieked, furiously swinging his hammer at Bloo.

"Hey! Hey!" Bloo yelled, squriming away as Calvin popped out of his hole and started chasing him on the little walkway around the billboard, leaving Hobbes and Morte to watch them.

"Hey," Morte cautioned, "Considering the uneven weight distrubution, I'm thinking that's a really bad-"

The sign creaked loudly as it started to lurch forward.

"Idea." the skull finished.

"Uh oh," Bloo said, scrambling up the sign's face in an effort to get to a safer place. Unsurprisingly, this caused it to lurch a little more.

Bloo fell down, landing next to Calvin. The impact of his weight caused a final and greater creak.

Everyone's eyes widened in shock as it slowly began to topple.

"I hate you," Calvin said conversationally to Bloo as it collapsed.

Some time later...

Calvin, Hobbes and Morte lurched around, the kid rubbing his sore back angrily.

"Stupid...whatever he is! When I find him, I'm going to...I'm going to...well, he doesn't have a neck to break and I doubt he's got organs to forcibly remove, but when I find him I'll do something painful!"

"Relax," Hobbes said calmly. "From the way he ran off, I don't think he got off any easier than we did."

"Whatever," Calvin groused. "Now what do we do?"

"Well," Morte said. "I remember back in my old adventuring days, whenever me, the Chief and whoever we were partying with got stuck on something, we'd ask questions to anyone who might be in the know, y'know."

"Sounds reasonable enough," Hobbes agreed. "And I told you to stop saying 'y'know' at the end of your sentences."

"No you didn't, I did!" Calvin said.

"Shut up. Look, there's a construction site up ahead. Let's start there." Hobbes paused. "'Partying'?"

Morte shrugged as best he could. "Hey, a buncha adventurers is called a party, so what else would you call it?"

"Good point," Hobbes said before Calvin could say a word to the effect that that guy they'd stored their ship with had ripped them off or whined about something else.

Ahead at the construction site, a Japanese girl with black hair worn in pigtails and eyes the color of gas flames sat precariously on a girder about forty feet in the air, calmly eating her lunch. She wore a zipped-up jacket had zipped up pockets at the corners of it and a large hood shaped like a cartoonish dragon's head: it was slightly angular, the front of it looking a bit like the beak of a bird of prey, it's 'eyes' obviously sewn on yellow patches. The jacket itself, blowing in the wind, was mostly red with yellow to accentuate it on the pockets and edges; it overlapped the edges of her ash-gray jeans. They had seams running down the sides, ending shortly above the tops of her comparatively simple strap-on black boots.

Her pigtails bobbed in the wind as she looked down at the immense ogre-slash-minotaurlike creature nervously yelling up at her from ground level; he was at least seven feet tall and about as wide, all of it powerful muscle covered by thick and extremely long purple fluffy fur. The only part of him not furry was his face; it was, set upon a head that seemed to have no neck, only a large muscular hump between his large shoulders; it was a pale purple shape with a broad flat and slightly protruding snout, his gentle wide-set black eyes framed by a dark monobrow, peering up at the world with an equal mixture of gentility and fear. His mouth, looking like a cross between an ogre's and a bulls with the large fangs extending from behind his upper lip, a particularily large pair just by the corner of his mouth, was repeatedly trembling in fear for the girl.

Most dramatic of all was the imposing pair of horns on the top of his head, highly similar to that of a bull's, seemingly formed of rough white plates similar to the bark of a palm tree and arcing up above his head in a manner like that of a bull's. The only clothing he wore were a pair of gray leather pants, secured with a black belt bearing a fearsome skull buckle that looked like a humans but with fangs much like his own replacing the lower part and postioned on the front. A pair of black cowboy boots swallowing up his pants from the knees down, hiding the fact that they were basically shorts. His hands, waving in the air dramatically, were simple; only two large and dangerous looking claws, the rest of the hands obscured in the luxuriant fur. Poking out just below the belt was a short tail covered in a shorter variety of his fur, whipping wildly around and ending in a small triangle.

Near him, looking up at her unworriedly, were three boys around her age: the youngest was a short bald Chinese boy with light yellow skin. He had a large round head, unusually long pencil-thin eyebrows, no visible nose and a compact body structure remnisciant of a coiled spring. He wore an odd red shirt with seams along the joints and around the shoulders in a rough angular pattern. It had long sleeves extending to around his wrists, ending in wide black cuffs. The front of the shirt indicated that it was similar to a robe, as it was buckled together at the front by two wide straps on the upper left side. His pants were black and almost plain, a small pair of pockets along the hips and a small circular pouch holster on the side. The bottoms of the pants covered the tops of his black shoes, they were of a similar design to loafers crossed with sandals, but tougher in design.

Next to him was a taller Brazillian guy with a breezy look to him that had wind-blown brown hair and eyes a similar color to young grass blowing in the wind. His body was slightly willowy in shape, and he had the frame of a habitual surfer that had since become a monk that did some heavy-duty training daily. Over his lean frame he wore a mostly white shirt with diamond shaped patches of green around the lower regions of his shoulders, growing out to cover both shoulders. The green sleeves ended in a zipper-attachment near the elbows, keeping an orange sleeve extension connected to the shirt. He wore long black pants, an empty holster consisting of two straps along the upper right leg; below the knees was another zipper attachment, this one keeping the rest of the pants attached. His shoes were simple white sneakers with straps instead of laces, the tongue of the shoe sticking straight up.

Last was a Texan boy that was almost absurdly large; even the Brazillian guy, who was pretty tall for his age, only came up to his shoulder. His straw-blond hair was parted in a way that covered one of his gemstone-blue eyes, lending him a relaxed look that contrasted his overall rock-firm look that made him almost as imposing as the purple creature. He wore clothes that seemed more appropiate to someone working on a beef ranch or at least a period fair; on the top of his head was a worn and battered cowboy hat, a blue sash wrapped around it securely. On his neck was a red bandana around his neck, tucked into the neck line of his light blue shirt; that was comparatively simpler than the other, aside from having a zip-up collar rather than a button-up. It's shoulders had long sleeves extending into his zipped-up padded work gloves, well worn and conspiciously covered in a thin layer of dirt. He wore Levi work jeans that had faded to a light blue from wear, tucked into his brown cowboy boots.

"Kimiko, I am thinking that is not a very safe idea!" the ogre yelled up at the girl, waving his arms agitatedly.

"I would not be pulling that very much were I you!" the Chinese boy advised him, careful of the creature's flailing arms. He'd seen them knock heads off before. Admittingly, they were the heads of black shadow monsters, but it still counted.

"That's 'I wouldn't be pushing it if I were you', Omi." the Brazillian corrected, running a hand through his hair to get the dirt out of it.

"Even better, Raimundo!" Omi said with a complete lack of self-consciouness.

"You sure 'bout this, Kimiko?" the cowboy yelled. "Not exactly what I'd call the brightest idea."

"Relax, guys. I'm perfectly safe." she threw her bag down to the ground, where it neatly fell into a garbage can.

"AHHH! That very dangerous! You could hurt somebody! Like me!"

"Eduardo, that was a paper bag." she said pointedly. Being a creature that had been born of a little scared girl's imagnation and desire for a guardian, it was no wonder Eduardo could be so cautious and fearful. It was an occasionally endearing trait, but more often got on her and pretty much everyone who knew him nerves.

"Exactly! You get paper cuts!"

"He's joking. Seriously, he's gotta be joking." Raimundo said. "You hang around him sometimes, Clay. Is he? I mean, no one can be that scared."

The cowboy dumped the supply of sealing material, which was as big as a hippopotamus's head. "You don't know the half of it, partner. I heard he use ta think that a Frisbee wanted to eat him."

Raimundo dropped his sack out of sheer astonishment. "You gotta be kidding! Spicer was braver than that, and he couldn't sleep without a nightlight!"

"I'm standing right here, you know!" Eduardo said indignantly. He looked down, recoiling at the thought that he was standing on the ground, making him a perfect target for giant sand worms.

Omi leaped in front of the imaginary friend, who recoiled in terror before he realized it was just the bigheaded monk.

"Honorable guardian, I must apologize for my friend's rudeness. Sometimes Raimundo cannot help but release his internal organs. It is in his nature, I think." Omi said with a straight face, unaware of his faux paus.

Eduardo's attention snapped from Omi to Raimundo.

"Um," the Xaiolin Dragon of the Wind said, not quite comfortable with the look Eduardo was giving him; it was somewhere between shocked surprise and abject horror. Laughing nervously and scratching the back of his head laxly, Raimundo moved towards the imaginary friend; Eduardo suddenly jumped up a tree, staring at Raimundo and whimpering.

Clay's hat suddenly lifted up, revealed a small green serpentine reptile coiled under it; it was about a foot and a half long, entirely green except for the series of short red crests running along his head and back. His head was long and mostly comprised of his comparatively large mouth, though his big yellow-rimmed green eyes had a decent amount of space. He didn't have horns; where ears should have been, there were pointed winglike crests curling inward. He had no rear legs, but did had a strong-looking pair of forearms; he was presently using them to hold up his shelter with relative ease. with one of his small hands. "I'm going to guess somewhere between 'can't contain himself' or 'can't help spilling his guts'."

"I have no idea what you guys just said, but I'm going with 'Omi butchered another phrase," Kimiko agreed from up high.

"Oh." Eduardo dropped down. Then he caught sight of Dojo Kanojo Cho and ran back up the tree. "COILING GECKO OF GUATAMALA!"

Dojo grimaced. "Hey, hey. I'm a dragon, not a gecko."

"Oh. DRAGON!"

"Relax, Ed," Clay said pacifyingly. "It's just Dojo."

Dojo crossed his arms, smiling broadly. "Right." Then his eyes twitched. "HEY!"

"Sorry," Eduardo said sheepishly. "Sometimes I forget these things." He suddenly whirled around, pointing a finger at Kimiko. "And, and if you get hurt," Eduardo yelled at Kimiko again, "the supervisor will get mad at me for not doing my job! And yell bad things at me! And he no give me my potatoes again!"

"You shouldn't have told him about your potatoe garden!" She yelled back.

"Please no yelling! Espically at his siesta time!"

"He drank everything to drink and went to sleep at the begining of the shift," Clay pointed out.

"Si, that what he called his siesta time."

They looked up, noticing that dispite the yelling, their supervisor was still asleep. He was a shiny metal robot a light grey color, with a body that looked a little like a can with a outward opening door on the front. Upwards towards his head his body narrowed, and his head was an oblong grey shape with an antennae at the top, a big visor currently covered with a reflective panel where the eyes should be, and an electronic mouth grill that looked a lot like a human set of teeth. His arms and legs were flexible lined tubes with simplistic fingers on a wedgelike wrist and circular pods for feet. At the moment he was tapping his feet on his lawn chair, asleep.

"Oh no," Raimundo said. "That's not a siesta, mi amigo. That's lazy. You want a siesta, you come around and talk to me."

Kimiko rolled her eyes, as did Omi, Clay and Dojo. "And you know all about lazy," they muttered.

"At least I'm not a chicken!"

"I not a chicken!" Eduardo said in a offended tone. He held up a small card that held a picture of himself as a baseball player. Judging by his expression and posture, he clearly believed that the ball was about to split open and manifast tearing snapping fangs. "It say so right here."

Omi took the card and studied the back of it. "According to this very very very small graph, you are a big crazy idiot."

Eduardo crossed his arms and closed his eyes. "Si! No, wait. I es not a big crazy idiot! But, the point is I not a big crybaby."

A small plastic spider landed on his head, positioned directly between his two horns.

"Hey, Eduardo! There's a giant spider on your face!" Bender yelled, electing to have a little fun at the ogre's expense.

"AAAAAAAAAAAHHHH! THE SPIDERS ARE COMING! THEIR WEBS OF LIES WILL ENGULF US ALL! THE POISON OF THEIR EVIL WILL EAT US ALL!"

The obnoxious robot jumped off the chair, pointing and laughing as the freaked-out ogre ran around, yelling about the onslaught of the spiders and how they would consume all.

"HAHHHAAHHAHAH! Stupid make-up buddy."

"Imaginary friend," Omi corrected. Ordinarily, he would get into the precise nature of how many of the people on Eduardo's native world had possessed the ability to create living being out of thin air, termed imaginary friends for obvious reasons, except he wasn't in the mood and he didn't like Bender very much.

Bender rolled his eyes. "That too."

A random maniac ran through the construction site. "The candy wrapper of the universe is undoing itself! All existence will fall apart, like so many packing peanuts shaken by the god of Discord and General Disruptiveness! I like toast."

All of them watched him run out of the sight, still gibbering inchoherently. Except for Eduardo, who was still freaking out, with appropiately dramatic results for an imaginary friend strong enough to lift a bus with moderate effort.

Eduardo ran right through a shed, throughly smashing it apart. Undeterred, he continued rampaging in terror through the lot, his rapidly moving feet carving a trench in the ground.

"Shouldn't we, y' know, stop him?" Clay asked.

"Nah," Bender said, waving his hand. "He'll wear himself out in a few minutes."

A few minutes later!

"Aaany minute now," Bender said with the air of someone who was convinced that if he both thumbs in his ears and hummed loudly enough, the rampaging rhino would not trample him as long as he pretended it wasn't there.

"Are you kidding me?" Raimundo said, gesturing to the construction site with an arm. It had been almost totally demolished by Eduardo's running around, smashing everything that he wasn't quite aware of, which so far included three wheelbarrows, eighteen construction vehicles, and several dozen feet of square fencing with large cut-outs in that shape of Eduardo's body. "This construction sight is now a de-struction site!"

"Ohoho!" Omi cried, laughing excessively loudly. "Raimundo has made a theatre upon words and makes light of the way our worksite has been almost completely destroyed dispite the fact that it is designed for building!"

Everyone stared at him.

"...Dude, that's 'a play on words', and you really gotta stop doing that. It's annoying." Raimundo said finally.

Calvin, Hobbes and Morte, having arrived during Eduardo's terrified rampage, were staring with wide eyes at the destruction wrought by the fear.

"Should we get involved?" Hobbes wondered, being the most altruistic one there.

"Hell no!" Morte snapped. "I ain't getting trampled by a...a...a whatever that is!"

"No way; I wanna see what happens." Calvin said.

Eduardo ran past the Xiaolin Dragons again, the nimble monks easily doding out of the large trench he was making in his panicked run. "Somebody's really oughta do somethin' about that runaway bull!" Clay shouted over the shaking.

"Allow me," Kimiko yelled. She jumped off the girder, gracefully leaping from beam to beam until she landed on Eduardo's head, plucked the plastic spider from inbetween his horns and backflipped onto a pole on the chain-link fence.

The obnoxious robot stared at that display of athletic prowess, before his ever cunning mind turned to thoughts of avarice. "Hehehe," Bender cackled to himself, rubbing his hands together. "Now I gotta find a way to make some money of that!"

Clay tapped him on the shoulder. Bender turned around, immediately cowed by the cowboy's glare. "Don't even think about it, 'partner'."

"Hee hee hee," Bender laughed nervously. "It was, you know, a joke! Like uh, a priest and a rabbi walk into a bar and uh," he trailed off, wilting under the monk's glare. "Damn, now I lost track!"

"Keep it that way," Clay advised not so subtlely.

Bender quickly backed off, knowing when to retreat.

Meanwhile, Eduardo had paused, wonderstruck that the evil blood-sucking nail-breaking hair-splitting demon death SPIDER had disappeared.

He turned around and saw Kimiko incinerate the spider in a small fireball she had conjured out of nowhere.

The spider was gone.

THE SPIDER WAS GONE!

He rushed down to the surprised Dragon and pulled her into a huge bone-crushing hug, widely swinging his body around as he gushed praise. "Thank you thank you thank you! Oh, you're so good and nice and fast and strong!"

"Eeee-eee-eee-eee-eee!" Kimiko stammered, starting to experiance air-sickness.

Eduardo dropped her, his pale purple face filled with concern. And potatoe shavings. "You don't look so good."

"I'll feel better when the world stops spinning," she replied weakly, clutching her stomach.

Bender clapped his hands. "Well, 'bout time for me to get off work! As for you guys..." he paused, realizing something. "Hey, you guys don't actually work here!"

"...Yeah," Clay said after a moment. "Why are we here again?"

Omi considered it for a moment, thoughtfully tapping a finger on his chin. "I believe we were...what is the word? 'Spoken through it.'"

Eduardo stared at him. "What you say?"

Bender's optical receptor twitched. "WHAT THE HELL IS HE TALKING ABOUT!?" he screamed, a full day of listening to Omi's inability to correctly pronounce common slang terms completely shattering all reserve.

"That's 'talked into it', partner." Clay corrected.

"Hey, how'd you know that?" Bender said incredulously. "I've been listening to that crap all damn day and I still can't figure it out!"

"Hey, I never dirty down sling!" Omi protested

"That's 'mess up slang'." Kimiko corrected. "And trust us: after all the time we've spent with you, we've gotten pretty good at it."

"Si, si." Eduardo said sagely.

Omi dropped his pose for a moment, consternation crossing his face like a map of Colonial America's progress across the continent.

"What is that supposed to mean?"

Bender maliciously slapped him on the back of his overlarge head. "Aw, figure it out, tiny!"

Omi angrily crossed his arms. "I am not short! I am merely compact for greater mobility!"

Bender laughed. "HAHHHAHAHHAH! Sure, kid. And I actually mean my promises."

Omi glared at him.

"Been there, done that," a new voice said airily.

Everyone turned around to see Calvin, Hobbes and Morte walk up, concluding it was safe to come up. Everyone except Eduardo regarded them with interest; Eduardo simply took one look at Morte and took off screaming about the rain of skulls that would consume all.

"And hey, take it from me, tinman: great things come from small packages." Calvin announced.

"Yeah, you'd know all about that," Hobbes said.

"Hey, who are you guys?" Dojo wondered, crawling off Clay's head and landing on the ground.

"Hm?" Hobbes said, entranced by the terrified way Eduardo was running around. "I'm Hobbes, the midget's Calvin-" Calvin crossed his arm and began steaming in his own wrath. "-and the skull with a political complex is Morte."

Clay scratched his head. "Political complex? What's that mean?"

"Oh, you know..." Hobbes grabbed Morte, wrenching his claws into him and working him like a puppet. "'I'm just full of hot air and I go on for hours! Blah blah blah blah blah!'" He tossed Morte away. "Like that."

Omi raised an eyebrow. "Must you be so cruel to your friend?"

Hobbes shrugged. "Eh, Morte's not a friend so much as an unexpected accroutment. And what do you want; I'm a cat. Besides, after a few hours in a spaceship, wandering aimlessly through depths of space with two idiots at the helm, cruelty starts being second-nature."

"Been there, done that," Bender muttered.

"Anyway, we're looking for someone," Morte said. "Mebbe you can help?"

"Who?" Kimiko said. "We get around a lot; maybe we know whoever it is."

"His name is Spike," Calvin said. "And that's pretty much all we know."

Clay tapped his chin thoughtfully. "Spike...Spike...rings a bell, don't it?"

The Xiaolin Dragons reflected on the matter. Dojo suddenly raised his hand. "Wait, I think I got it! Medium-sized guy, bleached hair, Billy Idol wannabe and poetry enthusiast?"

Tiger and child glanced at each other and shrugged. "Guess so. All we got is a name."

Raimundo nodded. "Trust me on this, mi compadre; in this town, all you need is a name to find someone. Not a whole lot of people here, ya know. Well, 'cept for the Cids..."

"Yeah, yeah." Calvin said. "Point is, you seen him or not."

Raimundo turned to Kimiko and stucked his thumb at Calvin. "I like this guy." Turning back to Calvin, he said, "Short answer is, no. Long answer is, I ain't in the mood to get into the specifics."

"We ain't seen Spike in a while," Clay said apologetically. "Don't really travel in the same circles, if y'all know what I mean."

"If I recall correctly, I believe he likes to garrote around the park. There is much shade there, and sunlight is...not healthy for him."

Calvin, Hobbes and Morte blanched. "Eh...'garrote'?" Morte said.

Raimundo glanced at the young Dragon of the Water. "I think he means 'hang'. Which is really creepy, if you think about it."

Bender shuddered. "I try not to."

Eduardo ran by them again, still screaming in terror. Hobbes grunted something and lunged at him, wrapping his arms around the ogre's formiddable midsection. Unsurprisingly, the ogre's immense strength wrenched Hobbes off the ground as he continued running.

"Give it up, dude!" Raimundo advised him as Eduardo ran around, the tiger's legs flailing in the wind as he attempted to dig his feet into the ground to slow him down. "No one can stop him once he's off his-"

Raimundo stopped as Hobbes wrenched his feet into the ground with all the strength he could muster, pulling Eduardo off the ground and into the air. "Rocker?" Raimundo finished as the tiger lifted Eduardo's considerable girth into the air.

Clay stared. He'd only rarely seen pulled up by someone like that; one of those times, it had been accomplished with the strength enhancing Mikado Arm Shen Gong Wu, and then with a considerable amount of effort.

But this guy was doing it without any sort of visible device, doing it purely on his own power. Not easily, he noted the stress marks on the tiger's face and gritted teeth, but he was still doing it.

Hobbes grunted, well aware he couldn't maintain this level of strength for long; he was only good for brief bursts of this, and weight-lifting figmentary companions didn't count. He shook Eduardo roughly, yelling, "The skull's completely harmless! CALM DOWN!"

With that, he dropped Eduardo back on the ground heavily, panting as discretely he could.

"Sorry," the ogre said sheepishly.

"Woah," pretty much everyone else except Calvin said, impressed by the display of raw physical strength. Calvin just rolled his eyes, bored with that.

"Hey, I could've done better than that."

"Then why didn't you?" Raimundo said snidely.

"Hmm, not too bad!" Bender pronounced as he walked around them, examining Hobbes closely.

The tiger eyed him warily. "What are you looking at?"

"Oh, nothin', nothin'," the robot said airly in a small New York accent that Hobbes found hard to place. "Say, know how much tiger fur goes on the black market?"

"WHAT." Calvin and Hobbes said as one, glaring at the robot with an intensity normally matched only by detonating devices.

Before horribly mind-boggling smash-crashy doom could fall upon Bender, a guy walked by the fence. He was a medium sized twenty-something year old with bright red hair done up in a permanent pompadour. He had an average sort of look, along with a mildly vapid smile, suggesting that he wasn't too bright. He wore a red jacket over a white shirt, had a pair of simple jeans on, and ordinary shoes on. His hands were jammed into his pockets, one remaining there as he waved at them. "Hey, Bender! There's a Futurama marathon on tonight! You wanna come?"

Bender rolled his eyes. "Fry, if I wanna remember those days, I'll just look up my memory records."

Fry looked at him blankly. "The Futurama show is our recorded memories."

Dojo looked at the barely congnisant human. "Hey, wait. The Futurama show is...are...was...GAH! This is a grammer nightmare!"

Bender rolled his eyes. "I was talking about the memories in my databank, stupid."

Fry scratched the back of his head. "Weird. Usually, when you insult me you call me a name."

"I did call you a name, moron!"

The light of realization brightened his face like a night-light under a rock in a cave. "Ooh!" Fry looked a little embarrased as Bender angrily tapped the ground with his foot. "Well, sorry if I hurt your feelings."

"Bah! Robots don't have feelings!" Bender snapped, turning around and crossing his arms.

Everyone stared at him.

Then he turned around, grabbing Fry in a drunk-guy hug and sobbing. "Dammit Fry, how can you do this to me!? We're supposed to have our 'thing', and you're ruinin' it! You're supposed to work with me here, jerkwad!"

Fry awkwardly patted the robot's back. "Uh, sorry?"

The other five there stared at them.

"Oooh, that's not good for their re-putation," Eduardo commented.

"Awkwaaard," Kimiko said.

"And I thought that sand guy had emotional issues," Raimundo said.

"Sand guy?" Horrific repressed memories started rising up from the deepest part of Eduardo's subconscious, gave up and rolled back to their merciful hibernation.

"Friends! We have been led off search-" Omi began.

"The word you thinking of is track." Eduardo said. The Xiaolin Warriors looked at him. "...I just wanted to feel like part of the conversation," he admitted sheepishly.

"Don't we all? No one likes being a fifth wheel." Dojo bounced off Clay's hand and landed on Eduardo's, patting the imaginary friend's side sympathetically. "Or the other four, for that matter. And trust me when I say I speak from experiance."

Omi spoke up. "The point is, we were wondering why we were all here. Now, who do we know that would have tricked us into this predicament?"

They all considered this for a moment with a loud "Hmmm...". Then their heads snapped up with similar expressions of shock.

"BLOO!" Their cry echoed throughout the city, joined in by a dozen other such cries.

In the previously mentioned park, two humans were playing a game of chess.

One was quite young, about ten or so, with straight black hair extending to his chin, a large pair of glasses around his dark eyes, and a obliquely intelligent cast to his features. He wore a large green shirt with elbow-length sleeves and white rims around the collar and sleeves. He had a baggy pair of shorts with a belt with seven holes in them, presently empty. His big strap-on shoes, combined with his loose clothes, gave them impression that he was somewhat smaller than he actually was, though it was an impression that wasn't far off.

Floating around him, watching the game with interest, was a small light gray creature, roughly humanoid in design, except for his stubby arms and legs, not to mention the small round body he had was more cute than humanlike. His body was covered in interesting marks afew shades or so darker than his body color, covering most of his main body; they were primarily elaborate swirls and curlices, looking like the more artistic kind of tattoo. On the lower part of his stomach region was an odd mark resembling an upside down semicircle, bearing an odd resemblence to a close eye. Sprouting out of his back, above a small thin tail, were two thin golden wings with small hard feathers, long enough to wrap around his body completely.

Last of all was his head; it was round and cute, lacking ears or a nose; the only distinct features on that rounded face were the beautiful blue eyes and the perpetually smiling mouth. On the top of his head was a large gold-yellow thing that was either some kind of hat or a protrusion from his head; it resembled a smooth star with three triangular points, one pointing straight up, the other two angling away from his head. Poking out the ends of them were a long light blue paperlike thing, strange script written on them.

Near them, curled in repose, was a canid sort of creature curled on the ground that was pulling off the difficult pose of looking relaxed and being alert at the same time; what could be seen of it's skin was black as night, but the luxuriant fur on most of it's body except for the face and neck was milk white. It's face was rounded, with a a short snout, an exposed area of skin around the forehead, and out one side of the head was a back pointing curled black blade. Poking out of it's rear was a similar blade, resting along the ground stiffly; it was smaller than the other, and more straight, looking more like a cutlass than a scythe. It's legs, propped against the ground to raise it up a little, were thick and powerful, the claws protruding from it's toes yet another weapon in it's arsenal. It rested against the ground, slightly closing it's heavy-lidded red eyes calmly, seeing no threat against it's charges.

The other human was about thirteen, with features that seemed honed by years of equanimity, wearing his black hair done up in an topknot. He was wearing a large off-white zipped-up jacket with a large wraparound collar with an opening in a V-shape in front of his neck, seams running around the shoulder borders, and ending just above his waist, over a fishnet shirt. On both elbow-length sleeves there was a dark blue circle with a vertical line running through it. He had tied a headband around his right arm; it had a metal plate on it with a spiral with an arrow attached to the lower left corner of it, resembling a leaf; the plate was tied in a double-knot on both sides of it, securing it to the sleeve. His bright blue shoes, looking like sandals with built-up soles and high cuffs, tapped agianst the floor as Shikamaru Nara watched his oppenent dully, propping his head up with a fist on his cheek.

"Anytime you're ready," Max said, tired of waiting for Shikamaru to make a move.

Shikamaru yawned noisily, looking at Max through one half-closed eye. "You're way too impatient."

The kid shrugged. "Eh, if you say so. You ask me, you should learn to get out and move!"

The ninja's expression didn't change, even in the face of this horrific slur. "I didn't ask you."

Max shrugged amiably, not wanting to rile up the guardian resting up behind him. "Good point."

His companion, on the other hand, wasn't so obliging. Or far-sighted. "You're mean, Shikamaru," the odd creature complained in a resonating telepathic voice.

"Don't be rude, Jirachi," Max advised him, gesturing his head slightly at the canid behind them.

As if on cue or sensing Jirachi's annoyance, the creature lifted his head. "Don't be overly forward," he said, though to anyone else but Max, Jirachi or anyone else who understood his language, it came out as a series of Absol.

"Awwww, but I like being forward," Jirachi whined. "Wait, what's 'forward' mean?" Absol only sighed in resignation.

"Your move." the ninja in front of them said suddenly.

Upon casual inspection, Shikamaru wasn't what you'd call a terribly interesting person. He had an extremely casual approach to life, prefering to drift along with whatever came his way and prone to complaining in his unique manner when things grew too troublesome. Not exactly what one expected from a ninja.

But, as Max and his friends had found out, that had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the chuunin was a strategic genius of a calibur unknown and unseen by any from their native world.

Feeling bored, with nothing interesting going on, he'd decided to ask the slacker shadow manipulator to a game of chess, seeing him alone at the park. He'd heard that Shikamaru would play chess with virtually anyone, and true to form had immediately accepted, and at first seemed to be little better than Max had originally believed. He pulled a few simple tricks, and Max believed that this would be simple.

Periodically, Shikamaru would bend his head over and close his eyes as if he were considering the dharmic singularity of dirt and make a sqaure shape with his hands. He would maintain the pose for a few moments, as still as if his soul had fled for Realms unknown, leaving his body as vacant space for bored and/or desperate spirits when he abruptly rose out of it, resuming play.

Then the chuunin would then proceed with a series of insanely brilliant strategems.

The kid had then realized that Shikamaru had simply been investigating his playing style, observing how he reacted to the basic strategies that everyone knew. He'd been subtlely feeling out Max's game, and now he was slowly and casually flattening him, as the way the way he did everything.

Shikamaru slowly knocked over Max's king with a knight, replacing the vacant spot with the winning piece. "Checkmate."

Max did some quick mental calculations. "So, that makes about...fifteen wins for you versus two wins for me."

Shikamaru shrugged half-heartedly, leaning against the chair, bored by the recitation of the record. Personally speaking, he just didn't care about that sort of thing. The end result rarely mattered; what was important was just solving the puzzle. And what was a strategy game but a puzzle of a higher kind? "If you say so." He looked up at the sky, watching the clouds go by. Watching clouds always made him feel...not peaceful, per se, but calm. Happier. Watching the acculmated water particles drift gently cross the sky, wandering lazily wherever the wind took them gave him a fuzzy feeling inside, a subtle awareness of what it would be like to be truly equanimous. Of what it would be like to be untroubled.

Shikamaru looked back down from his musings, noticing that Max was looking at the holographic readout on a electronic book the size of a large paperback book; it looked scratched up and slightly dented, but artistically so, as if the makers of it had intended to. It was a dull red color, reminding him of a toolbox or a Swiss Army knife.. It was tilted so that he could not see exactly what Max was looking at, but the technologist had opened it so that he could see the title on it, rendering in big friendly letters: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Below that, Traverse Town Edition was etched so that the first letters matched up. Right below that was a single phrase: Don't Panic.

After a moment, Max looked up at him. "They got you pegged wrong." He put on the table in front of him as Jirachi started flying around and echoing Max's words in a cheerful song; the holograph was showing a scale model of him in full garb, dipicting him wearing a green flak jacket. There was a brief readout of his various statistics: age, height, weight, intelligence, shinobi status and so on. What was more interesting was the colorful description of him.

Shikamaru listened to it for a few minutes then pushed it away dismissively. "I don't hear anything offensive."

"They called you a lazy lameass." Max said pointedly.

"Like I said. And I was the one who wrote that entry in the first place." Shikamaru said blandly, Absol nodding in assent.

As Max shook his head at the teenager's complete lack of anything approaching pride and began setting up another game, several beings were playing a game a few yards away from them; the biggest one was a monstrous being that was roughly the size of a man; a very, very large man. It's feral muscled body was covered in shaggy light orange fur with the dimmings of faint black line-stripes, topped with a number of quill-like protrusions on it's back. It's forelimbs were longer in porportion than it's thinner hindlegs, causing it to slump over in a permenant bestial pose. Both sets of legs had only four digits each, tipped with sharp claws, the 'fingers' of the forelimbs longer and possessed of an additional joint; while not long enough to be considered proper fingers, they were certainly capable of gripping objects well enough. It's head was slightly remnisciant of a Xenomorph's, looking a bit like a short cucumber in shape, lacking any kind of eyes whatsoever. It's ears were a set of gill-like slits along it's neck, doubling as a type of radar system along wit the four slitted nostrils. It's mouth was wide, extremely sharp and large inward curving fangs set into it's powerful jaws. On it's shoulder was a black-white piece of shoulder armor; on it was a round disc of sorts. In it was a peculiar shape; it looked like two wide triangles set at the sides of it outlined in black and colored gray, the rest of it white.

Not so big, but still weird looking was a teenager about thirteen years old with a blue headband with a protecter plate on it with the same shape of Shikamaru's holding up his shaggy brown hair. The color of his eyes were imperceptible, what with them being black slits He had a broad and generally good-nature face with red marks on his cheeks in the shape of fangs and a seemingly permanent half-smile. Over his rangy body he wore a pale gray shirt under a loose-fitting jacket similar to a raincoat with fur on the collar and inside it; for some reason, the fur had an odd resemblance to a darker and thicker version of his own hair. The jacket itself was tied togther not with a series of buttons, but with a zipper and secured with several straps connecting to buckles. His pants were dark brown with two belts wrapped around the upper thigh for some reason. His tan shoes were similar in basic look to high-top sneakers, except for the simple design, exposed toes, and the fact that they just zipped up and were locked in place by straps at the top.

He certainly looked nothing like the picture people generated in their minds when the word ninja was brought into mind, even though that was what he was. What was weird about him was the way he was squatting on all fours comfortably like a dog. Perhaps it was his slightly elongated arms that allowed it. Completing the canid imagry was his pronounced fangs, pointed claw-nails, and the way he was sitting. If his Four Legs Jutsu had given him a tail as well as his current canine traits, he would have been wagging it.

Squatting next to him, in precisely the same pose, was a white-tan dog slightly larger than a Great Dane. His muzzle was somewhat vulpine, but broader. His body was stocky and compact, and his floppy ears had a large light brown spot running down each ear. His eyes looked tightly shut, but if he was blind, squinty or just lazy, his pinkish nose more than likely made up for it.

Both Kiba Inuzuka and Akamaru yelled at a nearby human to hurry up; one was in English and the other was in Informal Dog, but they were the same phrase; inciting him to hurry up already and throw the damn Frisbee! Wildmutt roared, indicating much the same thing.

The one who they were directing their various friendly yells at was a somewhat rounded twelve year old, holding a small red Frisbee. His hair was similar to Raimundo's except for a lighter shade of brown and a permanent state of hat hair, though it was hard to tell under the rounded aviator helmet he wore on his head. His blue eyes were hidden in a similar manner under his round goggles, rendered various shades of pale yellow by them. He wore a light blue shirt with elbow-length sleeves over a white undershirt and a large brown vest over both; the vest had several pockets running down its front, holding a variety of tools, and went down to his wide belt. He had slightly baggy brown pants, touching the tips of his strap-on brown boots. He wore thick ribbed pilot gloves over his hands, lending him a strong pilot look, which seemed to be a persona he tried hard to project.

He waved the flying disc in his hand, dancing away a little as the doglike people in front of him watched it with unhealthy anticipation. Technically, the ninja and the ninja hound watched it, while the Vulpimancer listened to the arm moving against the clothes and felt for the air displacement caused by it moving around..

"Alright, guys," he yelled, winding his arm back. "FETCH!"

He threw the little red Frisbee.

"FRISBEE!" Kiba yelled, bounding off after it in a distinctive feral run, propelling himself with his forearms, catching the ground with his back-legs and moving as such. Akamaru followed him, yapping loudly as they chased after the Frisbee; Wildmutt, who was further away, jumped into the air several feet above Kiba's full height were he upright. He spun through the air, flinging himself right past the Frisbee and towards a tree. One of his powerful hands snagged a tree branch, momentum propelling him around it in a circle; taking advangage of his spin, he released as he was about the reach his third twirl, launching himself at the flying disc just as Kiba was about to pounce on it, snagging it in his black-lined mouth.

Wildmutt hit the ground with both hands, rolling into a ball and uncurling into a position facing Kiba. He snorted, shaking the Frisbee furiously.

Kiba and Akamaru glanced at each other from the corner of their respective eyes; a chapter's worth of information passed between in them in their glance at they plotted to get THE FRISBEE.

Akamaru and Kiba ran at the alien beast, yelling loudly; Wildmutt tensed himself, getting ready to throw the Frisbee, distract them, jump on and off their heads, retrieving the Frisbee.

Unexpectedly, the dog suddenly ducked under Kiba's legs, jumping behind Wildmutt and pouncing on his lower back, biting firmly on the Vulpimancer's fur and letting his legs go loose, allowing his weight to do the rest of the work. Wildmutt stood up on his hindlegs as best he could, trying to swat away the irritating weight when his hindleg scratching couldn't do a thing.

And that was when Kiba jumped up, grabbed THE FRISBEE, and used the alien's head as a springboard when he jumped off, neatly landing a few meters away, Frisbee in mouth.

Akamaru let go, bounding back to his partner and squatting next to him.

Wildmutt roared as the kid slumped over and groaned. "Aw, no, not again!"

Kiba spat out the Frisbee, grinning wickedly. "Hah! I can't believe you guys! Hoagie, you couldn't throw a Frisbee and hit the broad side of a dead Wailord! And Tennyson, you couldn't catch a blimp if was air-mailed to you!"

Both of those who were hearing this bristled; in Wildmutt's case, that was quite literal, his quills standing up as if about to spring out. "Hey, strong words, mutt boy. Sure you can back them up?" Hoagie Gilligan Jr. challenged, raising a clenched fist as Wildmutt snarled in agreement, spraying saliva everywhere.

"Ruff ruff!" the dog barked.

Wildmutt growled, suddenly backflipping behind the surprised pilot; the alien beast flashed forward, knocking the human onto his back; Hoagie frantically grabbed some neckfur, securing himself onto the creature's upper back, just on the base of the neck.

He nervously looked at the foreign animal. "Ah...what do you think you're doing?"

Wildmutt roared in reply. Hoagie's face fell. "I was afraid of that." He suddenly grinned wildly. "Well, long as I'm here...HEAR ME, DOG BOYS? IT'S GO TIME!"

Kiba grinned. Akamaru jumped on his back, bristling and growling. They both cried(in different langauges)"Man Beast Clone!"; they both began emiting a blue ghostly energy that looked and moved like energized air flowing away from their bodies and bathing them at the same time. There was a sudden burst of smoke, and as it faded away, it revealed that Akamaru had morphed into an identical clone to Kiba, completely impossible to tell apart from his human partner; the morphed dog nimbly backflipped off onto a tree, clinging onto the branch.

Hoagie grinned. "Heh. You call that a jutsu? I've seen better transformations from this guy." He patted Wildmutt's back.

Wildmutt growled angrily. "Ah," Hoagie said hastily. "I mean that literally. I mean, who could top you?" The alien dog snorted affirmatively, then bent low to the ground, pawing at the ground.

"You better not be thinking of what I think you're thinking of!" Hoagie cried.

Absol looked up from where he was lying, snorting derisively. "He should learn to control his temper," He commented.

"Yeah!" Jirachi added. "That's stupid!"

"Why do I hang out with so many hotheads?" Max wondered aloud.

Shikamaru propped his face up on his fist, placing an elbow on the table. "Man, you're even lamer than I am,"

"Oh no," Hoagie yelled as Wildmutt suddenly jumped into an amazingly fast lope that would easily equal the speed of a small car.

Normally, it would have led to a really cool scene with a lot of jumping through trees and running through the forest, matching the Leaf ninja's teamwork with Wildmutt's bestial agility and astonishing athletism, added with the possibility that Hoagie's considerable intelligence result in some fancy strategic manuvers.

Instead, as they ran at the canid duo, the strange device on Wildmutt's shoulder started beeping, flashing red with each beep.

"Oh no," Hoagie said matter of factly, realizing the implications of the beeping and the high speed they were going.

There was a loud red flash; the two of them lost balance for a rather significant reason, slamming directly into the tree as Kiba and Akamaru moved out of the way as fast as humanly possible.

After a moment, a boy stood up where Wildmutt should have been, spitting out a quantity of leaves. He was about thirteen, with messy brown hair, eyes a strange green color, a round slightly tanned face, and a thin body frame. He was wearing a jacket-shirt combo; the jacket was black and mostly plain, except for a dramatic looking logo on the left chest of it; a B followed by a ten, the little zero shaped like the device that had transformed him. It's collar was a thick stiff affair, lined with a green that went all around the lines of the jacket. The sleeves of both shirt and jacket were about the same length, and when combined with the reletive simplicity of both, could be mistaken for the same article of clothing. His shirt was simply white and just as plain as his jacket, with no collar and a simple hole. His pants were olive-green khakis that were baggy at the knees, covering the sock part of his white zip-up-strap sneakers.

On his right wrist, there was an unusual device. It looked a bit like a watch, having a similar construction to how it was on his wrist. It's 'ring' was black and grew, with several cables like protrusions which seemed to extend and merge with the guy's flesh, giving it a decidedly organic appearance. The upraised face of it had the same icon Wildmutt's shoulder thing had had, except the gray part was now bright red. There were several currently red buttons on it; on the sides of the face, there were four small buttons in an directional style, and on the sides of the part on the circular portion of the watch, there were two opposite-facing large red buttons.

Ben Tennison grimaced. "Stupid watch," he muttered mutinously, glaring at the alien device of uncertain origin.

He stood up, dusting himself off. He glared at Kiba and Akamaru, who were pointing and laughing at him and Hoagie.

Ben glared at them too. "Just you wait until this stupid thing recharges," he threatened, gesticulating at them with the Omnitrix. He was about to say more, then paused. "Hey, where'd Hoagie go?"

Kiba struggled to stop laughing, failed miserably, and settled for pointing up above Ben. Akamaru, seeing no reason to maintain it, dispelled the jutsu, reverting to a dog in a puff of smoke. Ben looked up and smiled nervously; Hoagie was wedged in the tree, the lower half of his body protruding from the other side of it. One of his arms was propping up his sulking head, the other hand tapping a finger against the tree bark.

Ben placed his hands on his hips. "Looks like we'll have to get him out, guys." Kiba and Akamaru didn't say anything. He took his attention away from the tree and looked around. "Guys?" Kiba and Akamaru had disappeared.

Ben slumped. "Figures," he muttered.

"Look at the bright side," Hoagie yelled as the world's mightiest twelve-year-old started climbing up the tree. "Maybe it knocked some sense into you!"

"Shut up," Beny said grumpily.

The familar trio wandered by, staring at the sight.

After a moment, Hobbes said, "Why do I get the feeling we missed something?"

"I don't believe it!" Calvin yelled, gesturing at the rest of the world or at least that part of it that happened to be the District they'd wandered into. "First we crash and total our only vehicle, then we get sidetracked pointlessly, and then we got even injured when that blue...blob...thing made that sign fall down with us on it!"

"It did fall right into that place we were heading," Hobbes said demurely.

"And that! First that bald rip-off artist tried to steal all our money, then that idiot in the green coat tried to eat it. Eat it! What kind of an idiot would try to eat a Gummi Ship?"

Hobbes wisely decided to say nothing, though he did scrape a bit of supsicious yellow flakes off his teeth when Calvin wasn't looking.

"And those places we went got us nowhere, too!"

"Look on the bright side," Morte said carefully. "'least we got our health."

"Sure," Calvin said sourly. "That means a lot, coming from a talking skull!"

Hobbes rolled his eyes. "Oh, stop complaining."

Calvin threw his arms up angrily. "Sure, why not?! I don't got anything to complain about! We're totally lost, our ship's trashed, we have next to nothing to go on, and the only real clue we got is a name that doesn't make any sense! Yeah, I got nothing to complain about! Oh, wait. YES, I DO!"

"You forgot the key thing," Hobbes said helpfully.

"Thanks for reminding me." Calvin said.

Hobbes froze, abruptly looking upwards.

"What is it?" Morte asked.

"...Nothing," Hobbes said truthfully. He could have sworn that he'd heard the tell-tale brush of clothing against flesh, fabric going against building material. But aside from what might have been a swoosh, he percieved naught. "Thought I heard something."

"You should calm down," Calvin cautioned, his friend's distress distracting him from his anger for the moment. "Next you'll think there's vampires around."

Morte laughed. "Hah, now that's funny."

Calvin gave him a Look. You know the one.

"Hey, look!" Hobbes pointed up at the night sky; one of the bright lights in the dark tapestry was glowing much brighter than the others, though this brightness filled all of them with a kind of dread. This might have had something to do with the way it was blinking on and off, like it was an old light bulb and not the light of a world or world system. "A star's going out!"

And as if Hobbes' words were a command, the light disappeared, leaving a blankness where it was, as if it had never been.

Calvin scowled. "We better pick up the pace and find that key or whatever."

"And Spike." Morte added.

"Shaddup."

Not that far from where Calvin, Hobbes and Morte had gone, past a small walkway overlooking the street a few feet below, a dog walked.

The dog was Odie, and had snuck into the Gummi Ship and had somehow hitched a ride and gotten out with no one noticing. He'd completely missed the whole scene with the ship retreival, having simply skipped out and obeyed his bestest best friend's instructions in his own way.

Which, in Odie's case, involved investigating any scent that seemed interesting. Considering his abysmal and possibly negative I.Q., that meant he'd literally walked in circles in this single square for the entire time the other three were looking around town.

Then someone that wasn't there before was suddenly there.

Odie yipped in surprise. There was no bursts of light, no sounds of air displacement. It simply appeared there, scattering a few trash cans around it's point of arrival.

Whimpering in confusion, the dog walked up to the thing.

It was an alien, though it wasn't apparent to the less-then-intelligent canine. His red eyes were currently closed tightly in the universal gesture that seemed to suggest that becoming prone and totally helpless was going to reduce imminent pain; he was curled against the wall, almost as still as the wall itself. He was grasping a robot of sorts to his chest like it was a life presevior, or maybe it was the other way around. The robot itself looked like a floating purple toy moose with big eyes, small nubs for feet, and a pair of cute rounded antlers.

The robot, looked around the unfamiliar place and squeaked uncertainly. Zim's left eye opened a fraction of an inch.

Taking that for an invitation to play, Odie jumped onto the Irken, throwing all his non-inconsiderable body weight directly onto the unprepared former Invader's stomach; Zim shot right up, frightening the dim-witted dog as he fell backwards, standing up on his hind legs without the slightest trouble.

Zim shook his head rapidly, taking the sights in around him. Weathered bricks on the building making up one side of the alley he was in, more clean steel on another building ahead of him, wooden planks covering up holes on the side of the alley next to him, a higher part on that side, and a big friendly dog with a slobbering tongue the size of a salami big enough to slap someone around with.

A big friendly dog with a slobbering tongue the size of a salami big enough to slap someone around with?

Odie jumped onto him again, slurping his face in the universal gesture of friendliness of dogs everywhere; Zim moved too late, getting a faceful of slobber dispite his yells to stop. "Okay okay OKAY!" he yelled until the dog suddenly stopped and stepped back, still panting with an all-too familiar expression of total idiocy mixed with a perfect and eternal love of the universe and all that lay within it, more or less conversely to the universe's general attitude.

"Ugh." Zim wiped the slobber off on a slightly tattered sleeve, not espically put off by the dog's overly friendly attitude since it kind of reminded him of Gir, albeit Gir wasn't generally so touchy-feely so much. And he was eighty percent crazier.

Carefully, Zim stepped out of the alley as Minimoose followed him, sqeaking to himself about matters only Minimoose knew.

Zim looked around the unfamiliar town, absently petted the beagle and reflected on how his last waking memories where of seeing his adopted world tearing itself apart at the seams.

"And to think you desired more excitement," he said sarcastically to himself.

Memories of what had happened rushed through and he quickly blocked them off. No. Don't think about Gir and Gaz disappearing in a rush of wind. Put it aside for now and think ra-tion-ally; get a grip on the situation and work on it from there. Get a grip so good, you run risk of an assault lawsuit from the situation!

Pleased at his decisive plan, Zim stretched his arms out. "Our course is clear! Minimoose, come; we must investigate this place and establish ourselves! And you, dog! Are you..."

The dog had disappeared.

"Coming? Why is everything around me disappearing like Dib's male paternal figure at a parental function?!" Zim sighed angrily. "Whatever. Let us go!"

He turned out of the alley, taking stock of his general area.

It was a small town square, though it might've been more accurate to say it was a kind of cul-de'-sac with a few other entrances. It was clearly residential, with a few live-in shops here and there; a two story one right behind him, a general store(he assumed)to his right, and a fountain in front of him. It seemed like a nice enough place, not unlike Nicktown had been.

'Had' being the operative word, Zim thought off-handedly. Tact had never been one of his strong suits.

He walked up to the fountain, admiring the artwork; unlike so many other things in the area, it didn't appear to be snatched from some random place and slapped together with everything else. This looked like an original piece, so to say.

The fountain was about six feet tall, enough for anyone to see without getting splash or anything. Water streamed out of the top of a large tower of sorts, built of four rods; a wooden rod, a plastic staff, a metal shaft, and, for some reason, a banana. The four things were lashed together by small rings, but still somewhat loose looking. They were further maintained by five odd beings propping them up with their backs; their faces were constructed so that water dripped out of minsucle holes in their faces, giving the impression that they were sweating. Dispite the obvious struggle and clear discomfort, the myriad beings had a triumpht look on their faces, suggesting that they were pleased with the way they were holding up the tower on their own, dispite the sheer stress of it. The water pooled around their feet, falling into a grate around the tower and into the fountain's water recycling system.

Looking away from the fountain, he summoned the Keyblade in a flash of light, strapping it to his Pak as the device reformed to form a holding clasp for it; he wanted it at the ready in case any danger came and because he felt like it. He started walking, intent on finding a human less stupid-looking than most in hopes of finding directions...

And then tripped right over something in his path.

Dust rising of him in ceremonial puffs as he stood up lividly, he started yelling agitatedly, looking for whatever had been so stupid as to trip HIM, when he looked down and realized that it was none other than Danny Fenton.

The human, brushing his swept-forward hair out of his face as he stood up from his prone position on the floor, stared blerily at him.

"...Huh?" the half-human said slowly. "That you, Zim?"

The Irken snorted, the trauma of having another world he thought as home being destroyed entirely not seeming to effect him much at the moment. "No, it's a Gray with a severe case of nausua. Of course it's me!"

Danny stared at him for a few moments before grimacing. "Sounds right. What happened? I feel like I got sucked into an alternate dimension populated by highly hostile monsters and freaks. Again."

Zim shrugged. "I dunno. What's the last thing you remember?"

Danny massaged his forehead, rubbing the little part of his brow directly between his eyebrows. "Last thing I remember was fighting off monsters with Aang, Jimmy and looking for my friends when..." he paused.

"When what?" Zim pressured, his perpetual inability to be tactful at all reasserting itself with gusto.

"I don't know," Danny said carefully. "It was like everything was hit by a tidal wave and everything went dark, and I was here."

Zim considered Danny's reply, and remembered seeing everything rip itself apart. It was likely that he had because he had been closer to the source of destruction than the ghost-boy had been.

He thought that the world had unraveled in the most literal sense, far too quickly for the survivors to even comprehend.

What is going on here?

Then his thoughts were drawn to how he had shot a giant fireball. Frankly, he didn't want to repeat the precise scenario, but he had shot a giant fireball.

Zim's inner smeet squealed with pure unadulterated glee at the prospect of repeating that feat, albiet on a smaller scale.

Naturally, he started wondering how it had happened. No doubt it had to do with his new weapon.

As if he were reading his mind, Danny pointed down at the Keyblade. "Uh, what is that?"

Zim looked down and tapped it on the ground thoughtfully, producing a loud klonking noise. "The Keyblade!" he said in what for Zim passed as cheerfully. "I have no idea where it came from, but on the additional side, it seems to be dangerous to the shadow creatures."

Danny blinked, his mind focusing on Zim's grammatical faux pas. "I think you mean 'on the plus side'."

"I say what I mean!"

"Whatever. Look, we're in the middle of another place completely, and we're totally lost. I say we split up and find some help."

Zim rolled his eyes. Considering their appearance, it didn't actually show, but the thought counted. "Yes, I'm sure dividing ourselves and becoming perfectly prone for the enemy is a brilliant strategem to you, but I for one see no reason why we should."

"Hello? What part of 'we're in another place completely' didn't you get?"

"...Look, I found a map!" Zim waved the map in question around.

Danny's eyes bulged. "You just got that out of a trash can!"

Zim shrugged. "Eh, you bet what you're rolled."

Danny started beating his forehead in fustration. Of all the irritating, senseless and insane people to get stuck with! "That makes no sense at all! And what are we standing around for?!"

Zim grinned frighteningly. "Finally, he sees sense! I say, we go this way!"

"WHAT?! Why should you decide where we go!?"

"Because Zim has the map!"

"And Danny doesn't want to follow a rancid piece of scrap paper that was probably months out of date when it was printed!"

"You have a better idea?"

Danny glared at him, silently fuming. "Fine. You lead." His eyes narrowed. "For now."

"Relax, spectral simian," Zim said, turning around theatrically. "for my sense of direction and spacial comprehension is virtually flawless! With me guiding the way, we will never get lost!"

"We're totally lost!" Danny yelled about forty-five minutes later.

"Don't be so pessimistic!" Zim snapped.

"Pessimistic!? I'm not being pessimistic! If I said we were doomed to run around in this maze of a city for all eternity because you were dumb enough to follow a map that you randomly grabbed out of a garbage can, then I'd be pessimistic! But I didn't."

Zim stared at him as if he had just said that the Earth was primarily composed of delicious gelatin, and it would be in everyone's best interests if they all pitched in and ate a rock. "...You just did."

Danny clapped his hands sarcastically. "You're a genius."

Zim beamed. "I know!"

Danny slapped his forehead, mind reeling to comprehend the brain-rending degree of the alien's blend of utter cluelessness.

"I still say we split up."

"And I still say that's stupid! And who of us has been trained in military tactics by the top academy in the universe? Let me think-oh right, it is ZIM! Not you, me, because you are not ZIM!"

Danny rolled his gray eyes. "Whatever. Besides, your only argument for us staying together is the potential danger, and I haven't seen a single thing in this town that might cause us harm."

Zim narrowed his eyes. "Just because you do not perceive a thing does not meant it is not there, ghost boy."

"Dib's really been rubbing off on you. Besides, you just said it: I'm half-ghost, so I'm practically immune to danger."

Zim grumbled, reluctantly seeing the sense in Danny's words. "Fine, fine. Even if we are just a little off-track-"

Danny made advantage of his superior height to grab the map. "According to this, we're in the middle of a coffee stain and not a random alley and-" he gaped at the map, face settling into it's customary frown. "And I cannot believe this."

Zim wrenched the map back, furiously scanning it for the important and apparently freakishly annoying thing the part-time superhero had noticed. "What? What? WHAT IS IT!?"

"Don't tell me you don't even know!"

"WHAT!?"

"YOU'VE BEEN READING THAT UPSIDE-DOWN THIS ENTIRE TIME!"

"Erh..." Zim's eyes darted from side to side, map covering up his lower face. The offending topographical paper suddenly burst into flames; Zim dropped it in sheer surprise, where it remained, feeding the flames until it was naught but ashes, where upon the flames simply sputtered out.

Danny looked up from the pile of ashes and at Zim with a mixture of stupified incredulity and shock at the alien's attitude.

Zim waved a hand airily, closing his eyes as he spoke loudly and falsely. "Oh look! The map is gone, I guess we can't get lost again, oh well!"

Danny kept staring at Zim, or more specifically, at the hand.

Zim opened an eye to look at him. "What?"

Danny's expressions disappeared. He pointed a finger as he spoke. "Uh, your hand's on fire."

"Eh?" Zim held up the hand in question, and realized that the palm was indeed crawling with flames a more intensely vibrant color of red with yellow lesser tones then he had ever seen, as if their fuel was something...unearthly. Strangely, it didn't burn his hand at all.

That, of course, didn't stop Zim from completely freaking out and running all over the place, waving his hand wildly enough to power a small house but not enough to dampen the harmless fire. He started running around the alley, bouncing off the trash cans, falling into an open one, rolling around on the alley floor while his screaming was amplified by the can's acoustics, finally tripping out and literally bouncing off the walls in a pointless attempt to put his hand out through the power of movement.

Danny watched the alien's antics, apparently amused from the looks on his face. "I should be taping this. This is entertaining." Then Zim's shirt caught fire too from him trying to smother it.

Zim started beating himself against the wall in a desperate attempt to put the fire out, giving him a severe pain in addition to the harmless but appearently frightening sight of seeing his hand on fire.

It was the sight of seeing Zim rolling on the ground, shrieking in pain as the fire spread all over him that Danny took pity on the poor Irken. It was pathetic really.

He assumed a pose; slightly crouching, arms held rigidly, and a serious look on his face. A supernatural white light appeared at his midsection, spreading up and down his body, sending out an invisible pulse away from him in a small circle, flattening the ground around him and scattering loose dust, debris, and other such things.

Where the light touched, he was changed; his clothes turned into a black jumpsuit with a big white D on the chest, three lines coming from the back of the letter, the middle one a little smaller. He had also attained white gloves, boots and a collar like ring encircling his next and a portion of his shoulders. His normally ebony-black hair became bone-white, but he didn't appear to change much visibly.

Visibly was the key word here. He stood up completely straight, opening his eyes; they had become green and were glowing slightly, giving him an eerie aspect. He clenched his hands, feeling the power that had been there ever since the accident in the portal chamber those years ago had caused spectral DNA had become fused with his own permanently, making him something other than simply human. The accident that had given him the continually evolving powers of all of ghost- kind.

He pointed his right hand at the oblivious and freaking out Irken, his eyes glowing a frost-blue and a plume of cold air escaping from the corner of his mouth. The air around his hand started rapidly condensing as his hand exuded a wispy yet thick sheath of blue energy.

Mentally, Danny Phantom figured that a full blast would be overkill, possibly literally. He wasn't very good at controlling this particular power, but it probably wouldn't be too hard to put out a little fire.

From Danny's palm a crystilline whitish-blue stream shot out, lightly showering the Irken and completely dousing the fire that was perplexing him so. Unfortunately, it also happened to spread off Zim's body and cover several other objects in the alley, not the least a mostly empty fire extinguisher.

Danny's now green eyes widened in shock as a coat of frost spread up the canister's surface, rapidly causing the contents to pressurize and expand as available space in the fire exstinguiser became a very rare commodity. "Oh, no-"

It exploded, creating a sizable fireball that caught the both of them; they were so distracted by this that both of them were understandably surprised whenthe fire suddenly disappeared, leaving only their clothes damaged. Which wasn't saying much, as they were completely torched and blackened; with Danny's 'costume', it was hard to tell, but Zim looked down in disgust as his clothes, annoyed with what remained of them. Now they were almost completely inflexible, highly uncomfortable, and probably prone to fall apart at the worst possible moment.

"Ugh," Zim groaned, "This day goes from horrible to terrible!"

Danny rolled his eyes. "At least you're alive. And what happened just now?"

"I just saved you," said a voice from behind them.

Both Danny and Zim turned around to see two girls standing not too far behind them, both of which looked familiar for some reason dispite the fact that he was certain he'd never seen them before. They looked about the same age, more or less; one of them was a twelve-year-old girl, a little tall for her age; her red hair was curled in a clip above her left temple, and she wore tan shorts, a dark blue shirt with light blue sides and strap-up shoes. On her right arm, the shoulder of her shirt was strapped to a long flexible metal bracer running down to her wrist. On the wrap-around arm armor there were five metal discs, strange geometric designs etched into them.

The other was a dark-skinned girl around her age. She wore a large red broad cap over her head, the brim framing her brown eyes and lending them a slightly aloof quality. The back of her black hair was wound into a braided ponytail strung back to her waist. She wore a blue shirt with seams around the white sides and short sleeves, a plain hole collar and a big white zero followed by a five on the front. She also had dark blue pants that had accentuated knees and strap-on shoes, like the other girl's, but looked more like sneakers. Both of them looked amused, if not on the border of rolling on the floor and laughing their styled heads off at the idiocy of the two in front of them.

Or at least the redhead one did. For her part, Abigail Lincoln was considerably more reserved than her friend, who was every bit the hothead her legacy as a Tennyson implied. She simply cocked her head to one side, taking in the odd tableu before her. She and Gwendolyn had been watching them ever since the two girls had wandered past the alley and heard their argument and watched them; partly out of curiousity, partly out of a desire to see if they were new guys, and not least of all a wish to see something funny and/or new.

They weren't disappointed. The two were clearly newly made refugees, judging by the fact that they were totally lost and a centimetre from snapping and attacking everything in sight until they exhausted themselves. And they were a little surprised when the alien accidentally burned up the map and completely panicked, and they were completely flabbergasted when the taller guy had turned into...well, they weren't sure.

And there was the backlashed cyrokinetic thing. It was only Gwen's quick thinking and use of the fire charm on her arm that kept the two of them from getting broiled.

All in all, from what she saw on a daily basis these days, while funny, the incident only ranked a 4.1 on her personal Weird O'Meter. The only surprising thing was the teenager's transformation, and that was more dramatic than weird. Oh, and there was the potentially psychotic green alien, but that was nothing.

"So," she said slowly. "Abigail's thinkin', what the heck just happened here?"

Zim appeared to be in no condition to answer her questions, so as Minimoose started fussing over Zim to the three raised eyebrows around them, Danny took it upon himself to reply.

"Uh, this isn't what it looks like?" He smiled weakly.

"You mean that you two didn't just get hit by a full-blown invasion of an army of darkness, woke up here, got totally lost, and you didn't just try to put out a fire by turning into some kinda superhero and failing miserably?" Gwen suggested.

"No, all of that's perfectly true," Zim said calmly from his sitting position on the alley.

Danny slapped his forehead. "Does the concept of irony mean nothing to you?"

Zim ignored him, fixedly staring at the wall.

"Fine, whatever." Danny said, clearly annoyed with the Irken's reactions.

"So, who are you two?" Abigail asked.

Danny placed a raised thumb on the barely visible stylized D on his costume. "I'm Danny Phantom, ghostly superhero, and this is-"

"Hey, HEY!" Zim yelped, startling them all. "My name and my mind are my own and I'll speak them alone!"

"Is he talking in rhyme?" Gwen muttered to the other girl.

"Man, they just get weirder and weirder," Abigail muttered back.

"I am Zim," he proclaimed, not hearing them muttering at all. "and that is all I feel like saying at the moment." He turned back around, staring at the wall as if the archangel Raziel, in an whimsical mood, had flown down from the High Heavens and spray-painted it with the answers to all of life's questions, among them such philosphical blockbusters as why does evil exist, what are we here for, is there a reason for it all, and the one thing that even the greatest theologians could never answer, what is the deal with the duck-billed platypus?

"Then why were you making such a big deal about it?" Danny demanded.

"Please direct all complaints to the clerk at the Shut Up booth," Zim said pleasantly, still staring at the wall.

"Then who-or what-is that?" Gwen said, pointing at Zim's squeaking robot.

The transplanted Irken turned around, looking directly at her. Gwen felt like flinching; Zim had an amazingly intense directness of regard that had nothing to do with his weird red eyes. His look made her feel like he was looking directly into her soul, observing all her deepest secrets and fears, and was in the process of writing it all down for blackmail. "That," Zim said proudly and unaware of the way people felt about his stares, holding up the robot. "Is Minimoose, my other sidekick!"

"Then where's the first one?" Gwen managed to ask under Zim' s Freaky Stare O' Doom(patent pending).

Minimoose floated away from Zim as he released the robot, his eye twitching in a facial tick. He was doing that a lot these days.

"I DON'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT!" he wailed, curling up on the ground in a fetal ball, a great cloud of gloominess and depression settling on him like a pile of rectangular building materials. He twitched and whimpered occasionally.

Gwen and Abigail recoiled in surprise, wavered between jaw-dropping shock and eye-blinking bewilderment, settling for staring at him. "Is he always like this?" Gwen said to Danny, realizing abruptly that he wasn't there anymore.

"No," said a voice from thin air; Danny suddenly appeared next to her, like mist condensing over a harbor. For some reason, his body from his waist on down was a thick smokey shape curling along the ground. The 'tail' reformed into his legs, as he stood in the air for a few moments, landing on the ground gracefully. "he's usually a lot worse than this. More, I dunno, exuberent."

"You don't say," Gwen said doubtfully. From the looks of things, Zim was either hopelessly neurotic, insane, or just plain weird. All three at the same time wasn't a bad bet either.

Danny looked down at Zim, wondering just where the robot was. "That's weird, Gir and Zim are usually inseperable."

"Anyway," Zim said, popping up behind them and acting as if that weird scene had never happened. "Where are we? Tell me noow!"

"You are in a dark alley in the middle of Traverse Town," Abigail said matter of factly. "Well, not middle exactly, but you know what I'm talkin' about."

Gqwn cracked a smile. Zim and Danny shared a mutual glance momentarily. In-jokes could be so freakin' irritating.

Zim was still concerned for Gir's fate though and was about to say something when Danny said, "Wait, how'd we get here?"

Abigail shrugged. "I don't know, same as everybody whose world was lost; here. We kinda built it from the ground up, even though a lot of it came with some of the people. We call it Traverse Town because sooner or later, everyone passes through here."

Zim's eyes widened. "What?"

"Nah, not really," she said off-handedly. "Just somethin' the TT Jaycees cooked up a few months ago. I don't know or really care why they call it that, they just do."

Zim spoke up, a far more urgent matter nagging away at the back of his mind like a sterotypical eighties wife. "These Heartless: What happens to the people they don't kill?"

Gwen looked surprised. "You mean that your friend wasn't killed by them?"

"No. They disappeared in various situations not relating to death."

"Well, everyone escapes them ends up here. You were just temporarily seperated."

Danny and Zim both visibly relaxed, a world of torment and horror sliding off their shoulders.

"Don't worry too much about things," Gwen said. "It probably won't take long to find your friends. Traverse Town..." Her teeth pressed into her lower lip. "...isn't that big."

"Uh, why?" Danny asked.

Abigial raised her head up at the night sky. She looked at the silvery disc in the sky, frowning.

Zim frowned too; something was weird about that moon. It was a lot bigger than a moon should be.

The girl looked back at them. "People who survive the black monster's attacks...what we call refugees...aren't very common. Kinda rare, actually."

Danny and Zim considered that for a moment, coming to the same unpleasant conclusion at the same time; the Irken glanced at the Keyblade's reflective crown poking out to his knee while Danny jumped back in shock. "What! You mean they kill most of the people-"

"No," she said sadly. "It's a whole lot worse then that."

In all four of their minds, a mental image arose: a monster, darker then a winter night on a lunar eclipse, standing over a dead body, it's claws dripping blood. And slipping through it's clenched talons was a etheral light, veined with ribbons of darkness, far more vital than the heart's-blood staining the thing's claws.

For Zim, it was merely speculative. But Danny and the new girls had seen in front of them.

"When they kill someone, they..." She shook her head.

"...Yeah. I've seen it happen," Danny said. He remembered it; those countless people that must've have been suddenly ambushed and slain by the Heartless, only to give birth to another Heartless.

They stood silent there in the steet for a moment.

Then Zim spoke up. "I didn't see anything like that; I missed most of that. But I did-"

"Wait." Abigial said. "Did you just say that you missed it?"

"How do you miss the end of the world?!" Gwen demanded.

Danny crossed his arms, smirking. "This oughta be good."

Zim felt embarrased, his antannae hugging his head. "I...eh, well...that is...this is somewhat...ah, it's not important-"

"C'mon! Tell us!" Gwen urged.

"It can't be that bad." Abigial and Danny said.

"I...slept...through it."

Everyone facefaulted.

"How do you sleep through something like that?!" Abigial said, gesturing at Zim with her palms out.

"It was THE EVIL WAFFLES!"

They stared at him.

"Just do what I do," Danny whispered to them. "Smile and nod politely."

They took his advice.

Why does everyone do that? Zim wondered as they smiled woodenly and nodded excessively widely.

Zim rolled his eyes. "It doesn't matter anyway! By the time I got up and went to the island-"

"You mean the island where we were building that Portal Generator thing?" Danny interrupted.

"Yes, but-"

"Portal Generator? What Portal Generator?" The girl with a hat said.

"Long story, tell you later," Danny said quickly.

"Stop interrupting me! As I was-"

"Ooh!" Gwen squealed. "A device that creates spacial rifts? Did it incorporte a quantum point localizer? Because I've read about those, and the principle of teleportation would appear to be most effective by utilizing that principle and-"

"BE QUIET!" Zim commanded shrilly. "Tell me, is this any of your story? So go ahead; everyone who went to my island and saw the really interesting thing that no one else did! What? No one's speaking up? Good, now maybe Zim can finish WITHOUT INTERRUPTIONS!"

"...You need to think about seeing a therapist," Abigial said at last. "Looks like the end of the world effected you worse than most others'."

"Nah," Danny said dismissively. "He's normally like this."

"What?" Gwen said. "You mean loud, overbearing and kind of really creepy?"

"Yes. Yes he does," Zim said calmly.

Everyone gave him a weird look.

Zim ignored it. "As I was SAYING, I got there, fought some Heartless-" he paused a moment, deciding to skip the whole thing with Dib. Need to know basis and all that. "Got the Keyblade-" he waved the weird toylike weapon to emphasize this. Gwen and Abigail looked at it curiously. It looked strangely familiar. "And then I found two friends of mine by a big...door thing. Like it grew out of the rock. And then it opened, and the two of them disappeared, and I fought a big dark giant thing of HORRIBLE DOOM! And then I got sucked into a ball of evil, and I ended up here!"

Zim closed his eyes and smiled, upper teeth protruding over his lower lip.

They stared at him, a bit dazed from his rather fast explaination.

Gwen seized on the only thing that made any real sense. "Somebody built a door into the rock?"

"Were you not listening?" Zim said impatiently. "It was part of the rock."

"...Okay. But-"

Abigail interrupted what she saw as the beginings of another Gwendolyn rant. "Hold on a sec'. Did you say you took on a Darkside? By yourself?"

Minimoose started squeaking from the death grip Zim had on him. "Squeak. Squeak squeak squeeeek?" Hold a moment. The beast's designation really was Darkside?

"Sure," Zim said, shrugging indifferently. "It looked like a Darkside, didn't it?"

"Yeah, but dat's besides the point. What I'm sayin' is, it took a small army to take down the Darkside we fought in our world! And you killed one by yourself!"

"Well, I almost didn't," Zim admitted, recalling the giant fireball.

"Even so," Abigail said, smiling as she tilted her hat. "That's damn impressive."

Zim grinned, which others might've found frightening or at least creepy. But his new aquaintices found it to be almost comically ernest. The guy had absolutely no concept of emotional restraint.

"Plus," Gwen said suddenly, "From what we know, those Heartless are the toughest of all of them. To face one all by yourself, and at their strongest...that's...unbelievable. What kind of world did you guys come from?"

The ghost boy considered the question. "Not that different from this one, I think. 'Cept this one doesn't have orange skies, that is. Pretty...well, peaceful's not the best word, but it wasn't chaotic in a bad way. More like...it was supposed to be funny. Just wild spontaeneity all the time."

"Yeah," Zim agreed, thinking back to his life to date. It had been bad, sometimes sad, often crazy, and frequently...happy. The lunacy of their world had not been the unfocused insanity of total anarchy, but more like...something that was meant to be, and happened accordingly in a whimsical manner. "'It was a world touched by the light, and darkness had not a sure place to stand and fight'."

Danny, Abigail and Gwen looked at him, impressed. "Hey, you're right. It was like that. Maybe that's why the Darkside was so weak," Danny joked.

"So was our world," Gwen said nostalgically. "Our worlds...they're kind of alike, aren't they? The darkness was stronger in our world, but in the end, it always burned away."

"Too bad it didn't hold out," Danny said sadly.

"I don't know 'bout that," Abigail said. "Most of the people I knew, and a bunch I didn't, are still around, carrying bits of the old world around with them. As long as the refugees are still around to remember and live, the lost worlds will never fade away."

Zim laughed. "Heh heh heh, I'm not the only poet around, eh?"

She smiled. "Hey, I try." She smacked Danny's shoulder friendly-like. "You don't gotta be depressed about things, y'know."

Danny rubbed his shoulder ruefully. "Hey, I'm half ghost. Not exactly something that's easy to shake off."

The four of them laughed at that. "So," Zim said, "You never said your names."

Gwen shrugged with a small smile. "Fair's fair, I guess. I'm Gwendolyn Tennyson, but call me Gwen." A strange look came into her eyes. "For now, anyway."

"I'm Abigail Lincoln," the dark-skinned girl said, tilting the brim of her cap at them in a manner similar to the way gentleman of bygone times would tip their hats to those they respected, such as women, the infirm, and the higher-ups.

"Squeeek!" Minimoose said; Zim let him go. The purplish robot hovered over their heads, squeaking to himself in a cheerful way.

Danny scratched the back of his head, tilting his head a little. "Well, see you guys later! First things first: I'm going to find a change of clothes and then I'm going to find my friends and work from there."

"Yees," Zim said in that weird way he said 'yes' sometimes. "New clothes: sound idea. Like this harmonica!" He whipped a harmonica out of his pocket and started playing an incredibly bad and unpleasant tune that could possibly shatter eardrums in due time.

A green ball of flamelike energy, a blast of concentrated electricity and a bolt of blaster fire wiped it from existence; Zim blinked, the burnt harmonica scrap crumbling out from between his fingers.

Danny lowered his shimmering fist as the markings on one of the strange discs on Gwen's arm armor ceased glowing and Abigail lowered a weird hi-tech blaster a little smaller than Zim's Morphgun, it's front end issuing yellow wisps.

"Sorry," Gwen said with a sly smirk, "It had to be done."

"Hey," Danny said without any real anger, "That's my line!"

"We had no choice," Abigail said gravely. "All of muscially-inclined mankind was on the line."

Zim crossed his arms and 'hmphed'. "No one appreciates music anymore.

He shook his head. "Very well then. I suppose I should find some new clothes too."

"Did you say-"

"New clothes?"

The two girls looked at the two boys with a decidedly evil look. Zim felt incredibly nervous for some reason, while Danny paled a few tones.

Uh...oh. He thought worredly.

Before they could say another word, both girls seized his wrists and started dragging him away, ignoring his loud, loud protests.

Danny easily phased out of their grip and started to fly away when his suit started to chip. Fearing the eventual results, he reluctantly followed them to a large clothing store. Zim suspected it was the only one in town, as it had nothing on it that would appear to be a name.

They went under a big sign that said Seams and Zippers in big bright inviting letters, something that the oblivious Irken completely missed.

The store's interior was fairly big, about the size of a department store. It was had a staggering amount of clothes, and Zim was surprised to see that the majority of all the clothes didn't have bottons, and the shoes almost all had straps clicking onto buckles instead of laces. Also, ridge-type seams ran along the sides of many of the pants and shirts, and he noticed several large label making machines around the store. He expected to be dragged through the clothing aisles and he was surprised to see that thought was quite literal: Gwen and Abigail walked right through the aisle, walking over to what appeared to be half a dozen cylindral chambers decorated with bright colors.

"Uh," Danny said, unsure of himself. "Are you sure this is okay?"

"Yeah; I don't like mooching off people!" Zim commented.

"Relax," Gwen said, not bothering to glance at them or stop. "The owner of this shop gives free clothes to new refugees; a one-day only kind of deal."

"That's good-" Zim began when Abigail cut him off.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah. The point is you guys are in no condition to go around in the state your clothes're in."

They stopped in front of two of the odd devices; the tops of them were burnished domes, a small sign on them reading Clothing Generation Ionitrix. The cylinders had a large square door facing them, ressed slits in their inner borders. There were a number of organic-looking pipes extruding from the foot of the device and into the floor. What worried the two in front of them was a large dial near each machine, with a small red button under it. The dials were all currently set to a blank selection, possibly indicating a destructive use.

Zim and Danny looked at each other uneasily. Then the two girls pushed them into the chambers, ignoring their respective cries; it didn't matter anyway, since their yells were cut off as a door closed behind them.

Zim gaped at the small area around him, staring turned around, banging on the door loudly, Keyblade abandoned on the ground, his yells magnified and slightly distorted by the chamber. "Hey! What's going on!? Don't ignore me! Did you hear me? I said don't ignore me! I'm giving you until the count of three to let me out! One...two...two and a half...two and three quaters and a decimal mark and a little two...THREE! LEMME OUT ALREADY! NOW!"

Ignoring his and Danny's yells, Gwen and Abigail went to their victim's chambers and twisted the dials until they read Reconstruction.

"What was that?" Danny yelled. "What were those clickings? What's going on here?! Oh man, why do I always end up inside weird things like this?"

"You people need to calm down," Abigial suggested. "Hear what I'm sayin'?"

"No!" Zim yelled. "These infernal device's walls are too thick for that!"

"Then how'd you hear what I just said?"

"...Do not question ZIM!"

Gwen raised an eyebrow. "He must've hit his head pretty hard."

"He's talking in third-person mode already?" Danny's voice was also magnified as Zim's was.

"Hey, you can hear them?" Gwen asked Danny.

"No, not really, but whenever people are talking about concussion-related babbling when Zim's around, it only takes one guess."

There was a loud impact from Zim's 'container'. "Ow...my head hurts. Oh the pain, the pain of it all!"

The hat-wearing girl crossed her arms and shook her head slowly. "Abigail's thinkin', why's it practically everyone who ends up in this town is either a good guy or completely fou?"

"Hey!" Zim yelled again. "I am a hero, not merely crazy!...Wait, that came out wrong. Oh, who am I kidding? I'm crazy, alright. Crazy! Craaaaazy!"

The corner of her mouth turned up. "You ain't gettin' no arguments here."

"And besides, you dare speak of self-referential talkery?"

Under her hat, Abigial's eyes darted back and forth. "Eh, heh heh heh, I don't know what you're talking about..."

"Wait a minute," Gwen said slowly, "He's right. You do speak in the third-person a lot."

"Hah!" Zim cried.

The girl with a hat fixation grabbed Gwen's wrist, ignored her startled cry, and slammed both their hands into the respective buttons; there was a bright flash from both the chambers.

There was a short pause, followed by a loud exclaimation of "WHAT THE!?"

A moment later, Zim declared, "I liiiiike it!"

One of the doors swung open, followed by Zim walking out in his new clothes.

The shirt was a bright red, with a nonexistent collar, serving only as a hole for his head to fit through. His pants were black and rather baggy, with some zippered pockets at the sides and and covering the tops of his shoes. His shoes had thick tops, tied togther with two criss-crossing straps in a X shape. They were black around the straps and on the 'tongue', with green around the rest of it, except for the dark gray soles. On his three-digit hands, he was wearing a pair of fingerless black gloves; the cuffs were kind of puffy, and there were silver pieces of metal that resembed dog tags on the wrists and the back of the hands, with his name engraved into them. For some reason, there was a label across his Pak that said Defective Merchandise. Over the shirt, he wore a dark red jacket with black sleeves that handed just past his elbows; it zipped up the middle though he chose to leave it open, with a collar was somewhat stiff, standing straight up while the lapels, part of the zipping arangement, stuck out, their metal zipper-teeth shining a bit with the light. Much like the shirt underneath, there was a large hole in the back for his Pak, rimming by a seam.

The two girls looked him over for a moment, apparently nonplussed.

"...Interesting fashion statement," Abigail noted.

"Hey!" Zim said, offended. "It looks like the jacket I got when I graduated from the Academy forty-five years ago!"

They suddenly snapped up, staring at him. "Did..you say forty-five?" Gwen said slowly.

"Yes. What's your point?"

Abigail stared at him. "How old are you?"

Zim shrugged. "A hundred and fifteen, last I checked."

The two girls facefaulted.

"What?" Zim asked, confused.

"You'll get used to that after you've known him a while," Danny said calmly, stepping out of his capsule and in Phantom form.

His new clothes had the same basic color schme as his old ones. He wore a black shirt under a zipped-up black jacket, both with white underlines. The jacket's sleeves went down to the middle of his forearms, while his shirt's sleeves were short for comfort. The left breast of the jacket had the same stylized D his old costume had had, rendered in white. He had white gloves and boots; the gloves went under his jacket sleeves, and they were made of a leathery material, having ridge-like bumps on the arm portions. He also had a pair of white boots on, strapping up on the sides. His pants were basically normal black jeans, with a small toolbelt for his ghost-fighting peripheral devices.

"It looks the same, but functional," Zim commented.

"I'll take that as a compliment." Danny said in his driest voice.

"Hold a moment. What will happen when you return to your human state?"

Danny answered that question by returning to normal. He looked down and was pleasantly surprised when he realized he was still wearing his new outfit with a few modifications. His gloves were gone, his boots had become sneakers, his pants had turned blue, his jacket had turned a nice blue color, the Danny Phantom logo had disappeared and his shirt was simply white.

Zim stared at him, impressed. "...Wow. Clothes that morph to accomodate shape-shifting superpowers? This place really does have everything."

"Hah!" Abigail said gloatingly. "Told you the next newbie would say that! You owe me ten dollars!"

Gwen grumbled, handing over a small roll of dollars.

Danny and Zim quickly shared a look that meant something along the lines of 'There but for the grace of God go I.'

"Well," Danny said, "Thanks for everything, I guess. But it's time I got going. You coming, Zim?"

"Nah," The alien replied indifferently. "I've had enough of teamwork for a while."

"Heh. See you guys later," Abigail said, fingering a badge in her pocket. "Maybe I'll see you on the superhero circuit."

Danny tapped the part on his jacket where his D thing had been. "I wouldn't count on it." He walked out of the store, putting his hands in his pockets and thoughtfully looking around.

Gwen and Abigail turned around to speak to Zim; behind where they had been standing, there was only an empty bench.

"That's...kind of disturbing."

"Yes," Zim said loudly from behind them, causing them to jump up in the air and fall on the floor, facing him; he was hanging upside-down, a long pair of mechanical limbs resembling those of a spider extending from the pod on his back. He regarded their looks of terror fading to ordinary shock with quiet pleasure. "I am quite disturbing, aren't I?"

He made a small smile and landed on the floor, spider-legs folding into his Pak. Still smiling strangely to himself, he walked out the door, waving with a hand. "Adios, me amigos. Maybe I be seeing you later, yeah? A'ight, seeya later, mon." He chuckled to himself about his attempt to adopt a Jaimaican accent, and walked off in a completely random direction.

Gwen and Abigail stared mutely at his rapidly disappearing form.

"Hey, Abby?" Gwen said at last.

"Yeah?"

"Was that the weirdest thing you've ever seen?"

"No."

"Me neither. But it was really, really freaky."

"No argument here."

Minimoose floated out of an aisle, an oversized fedora on his head, wearing a tiny tuxedo just right for his rounded body, and tiny tap-shoes for his feet. Noticing what was going on, he discarded his clothes and floated off after Zim.

Zim, quietly snorting about his clever prank, walked along the town square, wondering where to go from here. He still didn't understand it, but he felt something familiar about them. As if he had seen them in a dream somewhere.

As he looked around the town, his smile slowly faded to a small frown as it occured to him that everyone, everyone in this town was a refugee. Every single person that lived their days out in this strange world had witnessed the death of their homes, their friends, their families; everything they had ever known, swept away into oblivion.

How could that be? How could they possibly live with that, and still seem so...normal? Okay, not normal in the conformism sense, but normal in the sense that they seemed to be living out ordinary rounds for their lives. How could they be doing anything without the pain of knowing that they had lost so much?

He traced a hand over the woodwork of a house. He wondered how they could have erected this building with their losses weighing on their hearts. It seemed improbable in the highest percentage imaginable.

Of course, he mused as he leaned against the wall, there was always the possibility that those in town were colder than the buried permafrost of a comet's inner surface.

He remembered Abigail and Gwen's faces, the way they acted, their spoken words and the undertones of those words, hinting at the unspoken ones. They certainly seemed nothing like sociopaths in all but the truest sense. They seemed, well, real; not like true sociopaths; he firmly belived that sociopaths weren't real people, and were probably lived in by proper Hell-inhabiting demons in place of souls.

He supposed that they had, hard as it seemed, dealed with their loss and moved on. Perhaps the majority of those they knew had survived; that would explain it.

Or maybe it was because time had simply gone by. He had once said that time was a cruel salve, mending what wounds it could while leaving others to fester on their own.

"You need to work on your metaphors," he said aloud, frightening off some pigeons. This was another world, but for good reason had all pigeons learned to fear the presence of Zim.

He shook his head. He knew full-well that knowing people's hearts and thoughts wasn't really his forte; he barely understood the workings of his own mind and folk physics had always been his thing: the ways things worked, not the way other's minds operated.

"How do they do it?" He muttered to himself, pretty much summerizing the somewhat uncharacteristically deep thoughts he'd been having.

He looked down and saw the reality of where he really was: the unfamilar ground, the strange architecture, the sense of a place that was utterly new and strange for him. His lips skinned back from his teeth a bit as he clenched his fists in shock, realizing that he was now one of the people he'd been thinking about.

"Great," he said. "Now what?"

His world was gone.

Somehow, it just didn't fit. He didn't really see it. It seemed unreal; not because of an overwhelming sorrow at it, but it was just too...well, big to really fit.

He walked off, frowning as he mulled over it in his head. Maybe that was how they withstood it.

"Squeak squeak squeeeek!" Minimoose called after his master. Zim looked back, a perturbed look on his face; Minimoose immediately quieted down. He knew from experiance that disturbing his builder when he was thinking deep thoughts tended to lead to Zim becoming withdrawn and shutting himself up in small thick rooms for the duration of his thinking.

Minimoose watched his master; though the robot's expression was somewhat fixed, what with him basically being a little doll with a lot of advanced techology in his guts, Zim(and by extension, Gir)knew his moods. And this was definitely concern.

"Coco?" a feminine voice said.

An odd creature walked up and looked up at Minimoose. It very vaugely resembled a bird: it's bulgy main body looked like lot like a hitched-up miniture airplane, having a blue upper half divided buy it's chubby white underside by a squiggly red line that ran around it's body to it's beak, short stiff wings like those of an airplane, a tail like that of an airplane, and a few ascending spots on the edges of it's frontal blue half that resembled windows. It had long thin legs sticking out the bottom of it's airplane body, covered with a orangish color that suggested a permanent suntan. It's thin head looked a lot like a palm tree; exacerbating this image was it's frondlike mass of stringy hair and googly eyes set like a pair of coconuts. It's long beak looked a lot like a deflated raft that had been dragged through a bush, strangely enough.

"Squeak!" Minimoose said in greeting.

"Coco!" it replied.

Minimoose rolled around in the air, wagging a foot in a parody of someone waving their hand."Squeak squeak!"

The monosylabbalic creature blinked a few times. It looked at Minimoose, then at Zim. "Coco?"

Minimoose sagged. "Squeak."

"Coco coco coco co, co coco co!" the creature said comfortingly.

Minimoose brightened. "Squeak!"

"Coco co co co, coco coco coco co coco co!"

They both laughed loudly, scaring people.

Zim paused against a wall, laying a hand on it. His fingers tapped against the wall as he thought about it, trying to fit the smaller pieces together.

Earth, Mars, and all the rest were gone. He rolled it in his head, annoyed that it simply didn't really make sense. He felt nothing. Strange. The destruction of Irk had made a much bigger impact on him, and he'd spent most of his life off it.

France was gone. He'd never seriously believed it existed anyway. Same thing with New Amsterdam and Australia.

Spain was gone. There was no such thing as a bullfight anymore. That made him feel better.

Zim rolled his eyes in annoyance at himself. He was thinking too much about places he'd never really been. Even his pilgramage had been limited to his traipising about the American continent and nearby island. Okay, maybe he should try a little closer to home.

Irk was...wait, that had already happened. He thumped himself on the head, thinking that maybe this was not exactly what he had in mind.

His base had ceased to exist. He trembled uncontrollably. Dispite himself, he was mildly pleased: a step in the right direction already. He was starting to feel the proper emotions about this sort of thing.

Canada was gone. He felt his squeedily-splootch throb and his gorge started to rise as he thought of those vast expanses gone. During his time there, he had found a pleasant peace in the snowy tundra.

Bubba's House O' Waffles, Every Kind, Every Taste was gone. There was no longer any such thing as a Big House Special. The world went black with a thud, and he awoke whimpering for his cold unfeeling robot arm.

"Oooh," he muttered groggily, the reality of what had truly transpired hitting like an anvil. With less comedy.

"What is this feeling?" he said to himself, clutching a hand to his chest. It...hurt.

Something was crushing him. A weight from within was crushing his heart in it's grasp.

He suddenly lost almost all feeling in his legs; he nearly fell to the ground, slamming against the wall and propping himself up.

He didn't know what he was feeling. He did know one thing: it hurt.

It hurt a lot. As if the realization of what had happened had been granted life by a malevolent force, sprouted prehensile spikes, had impaled him, and was now compressing him into a pulp within a chest cavity.

Nicktown was gone.

The Earth was gone.

All of it...gone.

Gone gone gone gone gone...

Zim slid to the ground, shutting his hands over where his eardrums were located in his head. "Shut up shut up shut up!" He screamed, wanting that hateful word to stop repeating itself.

It did, and he slumped against the wall, hands slapping against the ground.

He started breathing heavily. He looked up into the sky.

And looked back down again. The black emptiness, pocked with so many tiny sparks of light...it reminded him of the fate of his home.

His fist thudded against the ground as his lips peeled back over his teeth in a ferocious growl.

"Why!?" He yelled. "Why why why DOES THIS KEEP HAPPENING TO ME?!"

His heart felt chafed. He bent over, hugged his knees as he shivered. It was a cold that had absolutely nothing to do with the temperture.

A freezing wind from within, the announcing breath of an immense beast that was incomprehensibly huge, far bigger then he could possibly expect. It held him with a huge frigid claw and squeezed with all the immense strength it had.

He huddled himself tighter. He didn't cry, sob, scream or otherwise express his grief; he was Zim. He'd gotten over that years ago, when the painful loneliness had become routine, after he'd become fully accustomed and used to the way everyone treated him as a scapegoat when there was disaster and as a despicable little nothing when there wasn't. When he'd become used to being treated as a lowly little thing that learned to stand up and pretend to be Irken dispite the dirt on it's belly. He'd stopped showing the hurt in his heart and the pain on his face after he concluded that, even if he was a unwanted freak, the object of everyone's derision, the thing they all regarded as nothing, it didn't matter. He had decided to one day become somebody great, and prove them all wrong. He had continued to ignore their disgust with his existence even after they hated him for being a walking death note for the empire, deciding even if he felt like his life was a barbed wire wrenching it's way around his heart and squeezing out everything that mattered, he wouldn't let it show.

But he felt the same way he had when he had been under the barrage of their unwarrented hatred and spite, the way he felt when he first started to react withover blown reactions and bizarre actions. Now, as then, the depths of his misery was crushing him under the breadth of it's immense weight. He was feeling pain far more intense then almost anything before in his life.

No. There was one thing that had felt this bad.

Back when he had been in the O.O.P.S. and been truly exposed to the ramifications of all his actions. When he'd truly known what it was like to be one of his victims. Unintentional victims, yes, but that didn't matter. It didn't absolve him of responsibility, or that fact that, quite simply, he was the worst person he'd ever know in his entire life.

He realized that he was experiancing anguish yet again.

The cold demon crushed him in it's paws again and again as he cowered by the wall, burnt by a rain of his own misery.

Is this how they have all felt?

It hurt so much, so badly that he thought dying in the corpse of Earth would have been kinder.

'As long as the refugees are around, the lost worlds will never fade away,' a voice said at the periphery said at the edge of his mind.

He opened his eyes and looked up.

He saw the dark night sky, but at the periphery of his sight he saw the moon. He looked up at the moon.

It always swam in the sky, eternally vigilant. Sometimes it's light faded away, seemingly engulfed by the constant presence of darkness, but inevitably it's light would shine again, illuminating the night.

Zim continued to stare at it and glanced down, seeing the moonlight shine of the gold and silver of the dropped Keyblade. He slowly, almost tentatively, laid hold of the hand, used the Keyblade to prop himself up and stood there, holding the handle with one hand and supporting it's 'blade' with the other. He regarded his weapon...and he laughed.

He bent over from the force of his laughter, unable to contain it nor willing. He placed a hand against the wall to support him and keep him from falling over, still holding the Keyblade in his right hand.

Finally his laughter trickled to a stop, and with a final chuckles, he stood back up, grinning defiantly at the night.

"Heh. Earth may have been destroyed...but I'm still alive."

Maybe there was some hope after all.

After all, not only he had survived. Danny had too, clearly. And who knew who many other of his various aquaintices had as well?

He remembered that his new friends had mention that everyone who vanished ended up here.

Zim frowned, considering it. "Dib went mad-far as I can tell, anyway-and Gaz and Gir disappeared in a gale of darkness.

He rolled it over in his head. "Hmm...Dib's gone mad before, and Gaz can certainly take care of herself. But Gir couldn't tie his shoes if he had the feet for them..."

Zim slapped the Keyblade into his open hand, patting it against the open hand. "That's it! I've got to find Gir! And there I'll find Dib and Gaz!"

Good! A PLAN! He thought to himself.

"First things first," he dictated to no one in particular. "I should get a proper layout of this town. If this will indeed my new home, I'll have to find a new base of operations."

Feeling much better, he slung the Keyblade over his Pak-sheath and walked down the street, towards what looked distantly like a large walkway..

"All I have is a mysterious weapon, the Pak on my back, a new outfit, myself, and an inarticulate robot. Sounds perfect!"

His eyes widened, if that were possible. "Heey, speaking of Minimoose..." He looked around, seeing only the weird arrangement of buildings.

He jumped down the stairs, calling out the machine's name. "Minimoose, Minimoose! Where are yoooou?!" A flash of darkish purple among the other colors went across his eyes.

He stopped. "Ah, Minimoose!" He ran over to where Minimoose was presumable chatting amiably with a...bird-airplane thing.

He stared at it. It seemed to be female, judging by the sound of it's voice.

Th two of them didn't seem to be aware of him and kept speaking in their weird ways to each other. Minimoose squeaking while the female whatever it was spoke only in a single syllable: "Coco! Coco co co coco coco coco co! Coco?"

"Squeak! Squeak squeak squeeek!"

She turned her off-center eyes at him. "Coco?"

"Squeak!"

"Coco!" She crouched low and stood up again, a red plastic Easter egg laying where she had been sitting. She grabbed it with her oversized long feet, throwing it at him lightly.

It bounced off Zim's head with a hollow thud, landing into his open hands. He shook his head to clear away the mild ache and looked down at the light blue capsule. He looked back up and raised an eyeridge. "And what am I supposed to do with this? Make an omlette for machines?"

"Squeak!"

"Uh...huh." Shrugging, he cracked along the line along it; the halves fell down, causing a squat green metal booklike object hidden in the plastic egg to fall into his hands. Zim blinked in surprise, turning the object over in his hands.

It was squarish and rather beaten up, the right side and tops slightly ridged and white, giving it the look of a book or an unconvential Swiss Army Knife. The words The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Traverse Town Edition was written on it in big friendly letters, followed by a simple phrase: Don't Panic.

Zim frowned; it looked interesting, but just what the heck it was eluded him like a fly in a big room. He turned it over in his hands, inspecting it. It seemed to be fairly ordinary at the back, looking like a wordless version of the front. He started to turn it over again when his thumb snagged on a cleverly concealed line along the 'pages'; the odd device flipped open as if it were an actual book, revealing that two screens and keyboardlike interfaces that connected as he fully opened it.

He frowned, not sure how to turn it on; there didn't seem to be any button to turn it on.

His fingers snagged against something stiff against the 'spine' of the device. He pushed his finger out and heard a click.

The screen and the stuff underneath the keyboard lit up, but nothing happened.

Zim looked up at Coco, raising an eyeridge and a corner of his mouth turned down. "Uh, so this is...what?"

"Co co!" the bird-airplane-plant-thing said impatiently, gesturing to the discarded eggshell.

Zim looked down at his left foot, noticing a small note curled up in it.

Minimoose, helpful as always, flew down and grabbed the note in his mouth. He hovered up to Zim's head-level, opening his mouth a little to allow it to unfurl.

Zim peered at the note, reading what it said aloud. "'In order to operate the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, establish ownership by placing a hand on the Guide's interface. Identify yourself and the Guide will function automatically. Simply announce your entry, or make use of the input selection array to select one.'" He looked up, frowning slightly. Not seeing anything wrong with it, he laid his right hand across the dark screen.

It immediately lit up, thousands of blue lines measuring every little indentation on his fingers; his hand jerked away in surprise, and as he started to say something, the lines danced across his eyes and suddenly disappeared.

Looking utterly flabberghasted, he glanced at his hand: it was unmarked. "What is this?"

To his surprise, the device 'spoke' in a slightly cheerful male voice. It wasn't that new to him, what with the sentient technology he'd employed and known all his life, he just hadn't been expecting it to talk.

As it spoke, an entry appeared on the screen, illustrating what it said in bright primary colors. Pretty simple little movies too: they looked like they'd been made in Microsoft Paint.

"The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy: Traverse Town Edition is quite possibly one of the most wholly remarkable things in all existence. It is one of the three top-selling books of Traverse Town, next to Jiraiya the Toad Sage's highly popular Icha-Icha series, Jarod Insert Appropiate Name Here's philosphoical blockbuster trilogy Destiny, The Universe and You; Fate Plus You Equals 'Phhfft'(co-written by Naruto Uzumaki) and The Value of Pez and Other Little Things, and the highly praised cookbook, The Mystery of Baking by Osmond Boone and Jimmy Tock, the first detective book to double as a aid to baking. It is commonly said the ever present order of the top four books alludes to the reality that books will always come in several varieties: guidebooks, pandering crap, entertaining philosphy and philosphic entertainment."

Zim stared at it's(to him)nonsensical babble, staring as it displayed the people and books it was apparently referencing.

"The current edition of the Guide began after the survivors of the Forty-Two Worlds(the world system that was the original birthplace of the Guide)came to Traverse Town, along with several surviving copies of the Guide. The various editors were approched by the eventual founders of the Sennin Corporation, which led to the purchase of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and the publishing of the Traverse Town Edition.

"The publishers of the original Guide were often sued for inaccurices in the Guide, such as claiming that the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Trall often made a good meal for tourists, rather than, as it usually does, make a good meal of tourists. This eventually led to an incredibly stupid court case and the hanging of a warning plaque in the Guide's offices: 'The Guide is definitive. Reality, however, is frequently inaccurate.' The current edition of the Guide has been hailed as being eighty-percent more accurate than previously, partially due to the work of the current editors, such as Ford Prefect."

"That's...enlightening." Zim said after a moment. He was about to say something else when Coco replied to something Minimoose had said. "Coco!"

"One of the few remaining Imaginary Friends from the Networked Earth world," The Hitchhiker's Guide said. "Coco is one of the full-time residential occupants of Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, which was renamed Foster's Home For Random Suckers by an unknown smartass. Her creator is unknown, as she was found on a desert island by the two pioneers of Figmentology, Douglas and Adam. She only speaks using the syllables in her name, though she is almost always understood by those around her, thus leading to a phenomonon when a linguistically-impaired being is nonetheless understood by all, called the Coco Syndrome. She has the ability to lay plastic eggs that contain either anything she desires within them or simply whatever the holder needs. It is believed that her design was influenced by a marooned child on a desert island, dispite the more considerable problem is that no one, except possibly her, knows who her creator is. Coco has gradually becoming insane from being estranged from her creator, or at least suggested so by her close friend, Blooregard Q. Kazoo."

"That was...interesting." Zim cut it off by clicking the Standby Phase switch he had accidentally hit, closing it and sliding it into his Pak, idlely thinking it could be of some use.

He looked back at Minimoose. "I'm going scouting; wanna schmooze?"

Minimoose stared at him. Then he squeaked worredly.

"Eh, sorry. Let me try again: do you want to keep connecting with the people?"

Minimoose squeaked in affirmation. "Excellent; establish pleasant relations with the various townsfolk! Who knows; maybe we'll do better then we did in Nicktown," Zim muttered that last part to himself. He looked at Coco, who may or may not have staring at him in particular blankly. It was hard to tell with the unfocused way her eyes were looking. "And..uh, I suppose I may be seeing you later."

Her eyes focused on him and she tapped a foot against the ground impatiently. "Coco coco coco co!"

"Yes, I forgot. Thanks for the gift." Not pausing to wonder how he suddenly understood Coco, Zim walked back up the stairs.

He moved quietly; this place didn't seem dangerous and he saw no more reasons to continue being unnessacarily cautious. He took his time, seeing everything he could. He'd always been a bit of a sightseer.

He looked back, deciding that it wouldn't be prudent to stay in one area. With that in mind, he turned left and went through a nearby walkway, walled in by large rounded red stones that formed the major building material of the wall. The weird thing about them was that they look a bit stretched, like clay that had pulled around by a sculptor before hardening.

Most of the buildings here were set alongside each other, framing a sidewalk on a five-foot wall composed of some green rock; below this was a lower grassy area, possibly set to facilitate passage. One of the building struck him; a gate leading to a lush estate, one of which being a mansion that looked quite a bit like a castle with all the turrets and such.

Zim walked down to the parklike area below the sidewalks, deciding to take a short break; it was a nice sort of place, possessing a calming quality.

He sat against the wall, admiring the overall look of it all. The grass flattened against his feet, smoothly rising back up as soon as the obstructing weight left them, giving him cause to wonder if there was some sort of energizing quality in the ground. Zim's hand touched the wall, and a train of thought docked at the station as he felt it's mossy surface.

The walls were made of stone like the others he'd seen, but completely covered in some kind of vegatation. Interesting, but not that much.

Losing interest in the overgrown wall, he looked away and noticed that he wasn't alone; about ten feet away from him, not paying attention to him as yet, was a burglar, dressed all in black. He appeared to have a small bag in one of his hands

He laughed to herself, an irritating sound that distinctly resembled a frog choking on a cicada. "They haven't made the safe that can keep out me! Now let's see how many karets that imaginary rabbit was hiding away."

Zim narrowed his eyes. A thief. How passe. Oh well; at least this was someone he could beat up. Or possibly set on fire, if he could figure out how to make it work.

The nameless burglar opened the bag, eagerly looking inside. His expression flip-flopped, turning to one of disgust and shock as she threw it to the ground.

"These aren't diamonds, these are carrots!" He spat, angrily stomping on the bag.

"Like a thief should be deriding someone's taste. And what kind of thief goes over their ill-gotten goods in the middle of public?"

He whirled around to see Zim, who was leaning against the wall with one foot one it, the other keeping him up. One of his hands were lying against the wall, the other laying across the bottom of the Keyblade's hilt. He was looking at her calmly, attempting to look cool. He was doing a much better job of it than the thief was, not that that said much.

He growled something indistinct, pulling out a switchblade and flicking it out, brandishing the blade as he nearly backed into a shadow monster that had appeared out of a dark distortion of the air, blankly watching him.

It was a little taller than Zim's; it's head looked like one of the Shadow's, but with a wide gaping fanged mouth lit from within by the same yellow light that illuminated it's alien eyes. It's body was simian, the arms almost touching it's knees. It appeared to be wearing a blue body armor that was segmented on the sides, with solid armor plates on it's arms, and shoulders, metal greaves on it's boots. It's fingers appeared to be composed of a light gray metal, elongated into flexible claws nearly a foot long. Over it's head it wore a pointed metal helmet, it's open 'jaws' lined with metal fangs; where eyeholes should have been there were only jagged spirals. On it's chest was an emblem that looked like a heart symbol with a two barbed lined criss-crossing through it in an X-shape, all outlined in red.

Zim snapped to attention, backing away with his Keyblade at the ready, braced over his shoulder in a defensive position.

"Yeah, you better be scared!" The burglar taunted, misinterpreting his reaction and utterly oblivious to the Soldier behind him.

"Behind you, you idiot!" Zim yelled, pointing the Keyblade over the oblivious thief's shoulder.

The burglar swiftly turned around at the sound of clanking metal, his bored expression rapidly transforming into blind terror.

"No," he said in sheer terror at the sight of the all too familiar sight. "No, no, no!"

Even as Zim started to dash full-out at them, pulling the Keyblade back for a powerful swing, the Soldier slashed downwards, pushing the random burglar back in a spray of red; it let it's arm droop, the claws dripping with blood up to it's middle joint.

Zim screeched to a stop, staring with mute horror at the sight; the thief's front was obscured by a rapidly spreading pool of blood, the thin torn clothing pushing up against the flow of blood. He convulsed violently, coughing up another spray of blood as he slumped against the ground, blood trailing from the corners of his mouth.

It was hard to tell from where he was standing, but to him, the unfortunate burglar's eyes seemed faded.

The Soldier suddenly lunged again, thrusting it's arm into the corpse's still torso. It's fist sank in, lined by a circle of blue-black smoke. It pulled it's arm back again, something clutched in it's fist. Zim couldn't quite discern what it was, but he saw several streams of colorful light with copius ribbons of darkness not unlike that that had birthed the Soldier behind the doomed burglar.

The light suddenly became black and vanished.

The Soldier's tense, desperate, almost insane posture disappeared, replaced by a slightly more placid one. It walked over to the burglar's limp body, which was rapidly undergoing another change: what was left of him was quickly unraveling, disappearing into swirling smokelike vapor far too dark to be smoke, too etheral to be anything but smoke. The clothing, the body, the torn clothing and musculature...all of it was quickly vanishing, the front of him turning foglike. As the Soldier's foot hit the ground, his head lolled sideways, giving mute witness to some blank horror as it vanished, along with the rest of him.

The smoke disappeared completely, leaving no trace that a death had occured except for the small bloodstains on the grass. Zim involuntarily stepped backwards, resisting the urge to scream and run.

Was that how all the others had died? Unaware of the threat until the last seconds of their lives, then a few brutal moments of pain? The fear of an unknown predator, swarming among them, tearing them apart only to retreat for a moment and then return for more...he grimaced, thinking of that kind of terror and paranoia.

And, as they seemed to do so often, things got worse.

Where the badly placed burglar had been, about a head above the Soldier wavered, turning a deep black-blue swirl of semitransparent air. Another Soldier fell out of it, clumsily landing on the ground in a tight ball. It unwound itself tentatively, backflipped half a foot to it's feet. It looked around, looking at the other Soldier by it. Zim looked back and forth between the two, annoyed by how much they resembled each other and considerably disturbed by what he'd just saw. It was one thing to be hunted because by virtue of being good prey, but just arbitary murder was another thing altogether.

The thief's death was wrong, not merely because his...well, he didn't know what, but it was vital, certainly, had apparently been consumed by these monsters, but because it was completely pointless. He had been killed not because he was weaker, or because he deserved it more, but simply because he'd been closer.

"So," Zim said murderously, readying the Keyblade. "I'm assuming this isn't a social call."

They looked up at him at his words. The 'older' of the two started running at him as the other moved towards him in a wide circle. The first one suddenly whirled into the air, spinning around like a demonic pinwheel at him, it's large claws stretched outwards and causing the air to violently rip around it in dark flashing colors.

He instinctively ducked, holding the Keyblade over his head; the Heartless smacked right into him, it's Cyclone attack backlashing and throwing it back to the ground as it skidded a few times until it lay prone, sluggishly trying to get up. Zim didn't give it the chance, running up to it and smashing the Keyblade into it furiously until it dissapated, staining his weapon black.

He angrily shook it until the loose material faded away, leaving the Keyblade as shiny as ever. He whirled around in a circle, catching the approaching other Soldier in the head and effectively decaptiting it.

Zim stared in amazement as it's two pieces fell to the ground and vanished. "Wow. I'm better at this then I thought." He said, looking down at the length of the Keyblade.

And to think it looked like a toy.

He walked off, intending to continue with his original objective and utterly unaware that he had gotten turned around in the battle and was going back the way he came.

"Heeey," Zim drawled to himself. "Is it just me, or do all the buildings in this town look alike? There must be some con-artist architect or something."

He frowned and looked behind him. "Hmmm, maybe I got turned around...nah."

He walked down, certain he was somewhere new due to the absence of Minimoose or the...whatever the heck that thing was.

Next to him was a two story shop of some kind; it's stainless-steel surface had that slightly stretched look many of the buildings around here had, several round windows were on it, and there was a definite sci-fi look to it: power relays going through the ground from the base of the building, a sliding panel-door with a twist-handle, and a small sattilite dish at the top of the building. At the middle of it was a thick double-line, gray at the bottom and blue at the top, a curling symbol that Zim thought stood for as a stand-in for and. On the second-story was a large symbol, possibly an identifacation of some sort; a thin golden cross, with a snake coiled around it and a crown flanked by floating angelic wings over the top. Below it was a small sign that simply read Alchemic Synthesizing in neat letters that looked like someone behind the wall had pushed them out of the metal itself. Over the door on the lower level, in letters that seemed to have put together out of random junk, was a simple logo: All-Purpose Tech Support.

"'Tech Support'," he mused quietly. "This looks interesting." He grabbed the handle, and twisted it; it didn't move.

"Eh?" Zim muttered in surprise. That wasn't supposed to happen. He twisted harder, and it still didn't move.

"Relax...I can handle this calmy and maturely...OPEN UP!" he screamed, furiously pulling at it time and time again, as if he were trying to rip it out of the door.

It almost seemed to loosen...and he lost his grip, falling backwards and landing on his stomach unceremoniously.

"Grrrrrr," Zim growled, jumping on the door and grabbing the handle, pulling at it with all his might. His entire body felt like it was slightly contracting, about to tear itself in it's struggle with the irritating doorknob, which was still resisting his valient efforts to pry it loose.

He pulled even harder, ignoring the painful strain on his muscles, which now felt like they were slowly unraveling. "Even if I should tear myself apart," he narrarated, furiously pulling the recalcitrant handle. "I...WILL...OPEN...THIS...DOOR!"

He felt the handle start to bend...

And then his hands slipped.

He crashed into the ground, smacking into it hard. He moaned, slowly lifting his head away from the dirt. His eyes narrowed as his sight focused on the evil, evil HANDLE.

"STUPID DOOR!" he screamed, running over to it and kicking it as hard as he could; he stared unbelievingly as the handle turned upwards and clicked into place.

"Eh..." Zim said for a moment, feeling incredibly stupid. Then he looked around to make sure no one was watching, raised his arms up and went "Whoo hoo!"

Smiling idiotically to himself, he grabbed a hollow side of a recessed part of the door next to the handle, pushing it to the side; it slid in easily with a swooshing sound, stirring up a bit of the rage it had inspired.

He stepped over the trackway deep in the floor, closing the door behind him as he entered the store; it would have been impolite not to.

It had an overall sqaure shape; four walls made of the same metal on the outside but with less of an obviously stretched look, various odd machine parts around it, so varied it would take him at least an hour to catalouge them all, their make and model, and what the heck they came from. Advanced prosthetic arms...some type of powered-armor...car engines...computer motherboards...repair toolkits...weird candylike blocks with a strange resemblence to wings...flat-screen televisions clinging to the walls; his inner scientist was shrieking for joy at the oppertunity to examine all these interesting new devices and technologies. Perhaps not as advanced as the ones Irkens had cross-engineered, but definitely an afternoon's worth of pleasant work.

There was a wide counter along the wall he had entered in; it was composed of glass or some other such material(he somehow doubted that however came up with this shop would have gone for something as ordinary as glass), various devices like those on the wall on display. The counter went all the way from the end of the wall to a few feet in front of him, a draw-bridgelike plate connecting the wall to the rest of the counter. On the counter was a white-blue laptop computer, currently closed and probably shut off. Interestingly, there were several pictures on the counter, turned inwards. Near the counter, on the wall, there was a poster of a large white tower in the shape of a T, white with blue square window going across it. It was situated on a small rocky islet on a pleasant looking bay, a bustling city framed in the background. There was a single phrase on the poster around the islet, the blue letters slightly slanting to the left as if typed in italics: Teen Titans Go!, the Ts laying against each other and framed in white. As far as cool random poster slogans went, Zim thought it sucked. The picture was kind of cool, though.

There were about six chairs in the middle of the room, running the gamut from a short wrap-around couch to a cushioned rocking chair to a large bean bag to almost everykind of basic comfy chair. They encirled a round cherry-wood table, looking inordinately like a band of covered wagons under seige by fustrated natives who had taken all they could take and weren't about to take anymore.

While he was examining the interesting room layout, a friendly baritoned voice with an extradited Southwestern accent said, "Say, man, don't think I've seen you 'round here before!"

Zim, startled from looking at the interesting carpet patterns(which were a lovely shade of beige, by the way)looked up. And had to look up a bit higher to see above the speaker's waist, because he was annoyingly tall.

The speaker in question was human, though some might dispute that notion. He was a cyborg, about six and a half feet tall and nearly that wide, the sleek and almost organic advanced machinery making up most of his body forming a muscular male shape. Most of his mechanical body was white with gray tones around where the collar bone would be and the joints. His round, slightly angular shoulders, thick forearms and the artificial parts of his cranium were all aquarmarine with light blue circuitlike pattern on them; the shoulders had three portlike things sticking out of them, and the forearms had two recessed ones near the elbow per arm. His large hands resembled whitish gauntlets, what with the large squarish knuckles and finger joints.

His main body had black paneled with reccesed ridges going through them, a smooth shell-like area over his front, a dark-gray waist that slightly resembled the pelves of a human skeleton seen from the front, with flexible armor over his hip joints. His upper legs were thick, with a streamlined white plating running down their front to the knees, the sides and back made of the same black paneling like on his sides. His knees, like the rest of his joints, had a highly flexible dark-gray plate over the vulnerable 'skeleton' underneath, to ensure, Zim suspected, as much agility as possible. His lower legs and feet resembled stylistic greaves from a fantasy novel, a bit bulgy at the back and heel. The 'greaves' overlapped the front part of his foot a bit, and where the anklebones would have been there were two gray hingelike discs. The rest of his feet were white, except for the ridged metal top overlapping from the sole.

The only organic parts of him-at least, the ones Zim could see-were his upper biceps, a small area of his upper legs, and the rest of it was concentrated in a wraparound area on the left side of his bald head, the skin a medium-toned brown. His facial features were broad and solid-looking, giving the impression that even the organic parts of him had been constructed by skilled scientists in a high-effiency lab somewhere. The metal part of his head curved around the right side of the back of his head, giving that area the most flesh on his body, going right next to his eyebrow and curving again around his squashed-looking nose, detouring completely away from his mouth and curving under his jaw, making his neck half machine and organic almost evenly. The machinery on his face mirrored his face precisely, mostly white with gray and black to accuntuate the eyebrows, neck, and lower part of the jaw, constructed so that it could fully imitate the expressions of the flesh-and-blood side of his face, if with none of the authenticity. His one real eye was a slightly faded gray, which seemed oddly fitting. His mechanical one, on the other hand, was red, with a corrosponding pupil on it.

Now that's interesting, Zim thought, looking at him thoughtfully. Judging from his overall build, what Zim saw of him was the 'skin' of his mechanical body, designed for the optimum level of physical capacity beyond that of an ordinary human. He noticed that the scant skin around his machinery, while melding almost seamlessly with it, was mark by a thin layer of extremely bad scar tissue around his metal.

He looked at Zim, taking in his obvious strangeness for a moment before breaking into a wide grin, presumably at making a new possible friend. Zim noticed that far more significant than the human's mechanical portions was his presence; this was clearly the sort of genially person that made friends quickly and easily, his force of personality something that was difficult to ignore; this became clear to him when Zim found himself sort of liking the human on sight, leaving him to wonder what about this human's demeanor pushed aside his usual mild distrust about everyone in general.

He wondered why this was so. He'd gotten over his dislike of humans long ago, but he was almost always vaugely suspicious about everyone and everything. This didn't make any sense, but he decided to go with it. He had a hunch he could trust this human. He didn't know why, but his hunches were usually right.

"That's because I'm not from around here," Zim said, replying to the cyborg's initial question. "Then again, neither are you."

The human chuckled at that, standing up straight and grinning. "I like this guy," he said to a child sitting behind the counter that Zim hadn't noticed.

The person that the cyborg had spoken two was organizing a small stack of paperwork, glancing up to see what the larger human had said, pushing the paper away carefully and securing his wraparound sunglasses. He looked about twelve or so, and if he were standing up he'd probably be a little taller than Zim(who grumbled to himself as he digested the fact that he so far hadn't met a single person in this town who wasn't his height or taller). He wore a red shirt with a round collar, seams running up the sides and defining the shoulders, and normal length sleeves with round rigid ends. The baggy bottom of his shirt concealed the belt line of his tan shorts, which ended a little past his knees, had two side-pockets shadowed by his shirt and an empty holster of some kind on the left-hand leg. His shoes were short brown boots, two straps secured across the front, with odd built-up soles. The human himself appeared to be of English origin, had an overly serious cast to his face, and like the cyborg, was completely bald.

He peered at Zim, the thin lines of his mouth and his otherwise neutral expression giving the Irken the impression that behind those wide opaque sunglasses, he was systematically memorizing Zim's every movement and getting a complete analysis of the contents of his soul.

"Hmm," the human said, and Zim wondered briefly what exactly his tone was. It wasn't exactly suspicion, but it was too analytical to be mild curiousity. And the way he couldn't see the younger human's eyes was seriously starting to creep him out. "What's your name, newcomer?"

"I'm Zim." Probably the last of the Irkens, he thought sourly. "And who are you two?" he added quickly.

The human's expression softed, the hard set of his mouth becoming a small smile. "I'm Nigel Uno."

"And I'm Cyborg!" the mostly mechanical being added, gesturing at himself with a thumb.

"I never would have guessed," Zim said in a deadpan voice.

The two humans looked uncertainly at each other, than at Zim. Was he being sarcastic or not?

Nigel cleared his throat, and Cyborg took the moment to say, "So, where ya from?" Judging from this guy, I think he's already used to his world being destroyed. Otherwise, he'd probably be freaking out a lot more.

"Earth. Well, an inaugerated Earthanoid, if you should be literal."

"I believe he meant besides Earth," Nigel said pointedly. "Most of the people from here are from one kind of Earth or another."

"Oh." Zim reconsidered the question, wondering what he should refer to his new homeworld as. He recalled the geometric significance of the islands he'd taken as his own, dispite the fact that only the one he had used was uninhabited.

Zim looked around. "Anyway, what kind of...what is this building?"

"Yeah," Cyborg said, feeling a tiny bit insulted. "I get that a lot. This level of the building's kinda like an all-purpose mechanical store: we got pretty much everything mechanical here: automail fitting, spare machine parts, do-it-yourself guides...that sort of thing. At least, that's what I do, anyway. As for upstairs," he chuckled evilly. "that's a secret."

The sunglasses-kid rolled his eyes. Or not. It was hard to tell.

Zim glanced outside, seeing something familiar. He turned around, giving the suddenly wide-eyed Cyborg and Nigel a good view of the Pak on his back as he rushed to the window, staring with his mouth agape as Coco and Minimoose walked past the window, pausing to wave at Zim.

"I don't believe it, I just don't believe it! I DID get turned around at at the-the-the-LITTLE GRASSY MINIPARK PLACE THING! Of all the mind-frapping little coincidental happenings...WHY DO I! I! KEEP! GETTING! LOOOOST!"

Cyborg and Nigel stared at Zim; it was difficult not to. As he randomly ran around in front of the window, the two humans watched him rant about the magnetic fields of this crazy place foiling his sense of direction, the idiotic timing of the shadow monster things, and his suspicion that they were the ones who kept stealinng his spare pair of pants when they were in the wash and no one was looking.

"Are the cameras on?" Cyborg muttered to Nigel as the new guy continued to freak out about everything in the known universe, and a few things that weren't.

"Yes," he replied after a moments diliberation.

"Good," Cyborg said. "The guys aren't going to want to miss a minute of this."

This was Zim now arguing with himself, furiously glancing at midair.

"The Bermuda Triangle is too the base of operations for the Eater of Socks!" Zim yelled at two miniture versions of himself only he could see.

"It is not," his inner angel, dressed in his usual colorations of Zim's new clothes, said back while rolling his eyes, using the tone that basically said, What are you? An idiot?

"It hungers for wooly foot coverings, and you know how cold it is in the...the...wherever the Burmuda Triangle is!"

"You mean Burmuda?" The angel said drily, letting his tone do the work.

"Yeah! Yeah! And hey, all the evidence points to the shark people being in cahoots with the big Slurby industries! They have wronged you big-big!" his little devil said, shedding metaphorical filth everywhere as he moved around, rubbing his hands together in anticapation. He too was wearing Zim's clothes, though filthy, ragged and probably dark-shaded under the dirt.

"And them!" Zim snarled, punching the air in an approximation of what he'd like to do to them.

"Don't encourage him!" the cherub snapped. Then, after a moment, he raised an eyeridge. "'The big Slurby industries?'"

"...It was all could think of on short notice," the devil admitted sheepishly.

"And you two!" Zim yelled, surprising them. "Always yeh-yeh-yeh-yeh-yeh! Day in and day out I have to listen to your constant arguing and I'm SICK of it!"

"Hey, what'd we do?!" Cyborg complained.

"Huh? Oh, not you guys." Zim plucked up the metaphorical personifactions of his capacity for either entertaining rightness or selfish evil by the back of their collars. "I was talking about these two."

Cyborg and Nigel stared at Zim, who appeared to be slightly pinching his fingers and was unaware of the fact that, being hallucinatory figments of Zim's deepest mental workings, the two humans in the store...shop...whatever it was were completely incapable of seeing them as well.

Dispite himself and his embarresment at Zim's obliviousness, the little angel guy couldn't help but grin. Where I was but once a rather two-dimensional conscionce, I have now evolved into a semi-realized little faerie type thing! I mean, I can't be fully realized 'cause all things change, as is the way of the heft and bend of Creation(man, that sounds cool. I hope the big guy's gettin' all this.)so I have yet more evolution to undergo, but this is promising. I'm actually in the middle of a random, true life argument instead of playing God's advocate in a minor ethical crisis! Angel-Guy, you are going places!...I really need a better name. Or a name, period.

"...That answers one question, but raises so many others," Nigel noted, oblivious to the consciounce's musing. Or not, since he was supposedly a random hallucination rather than an intelligent ensouled being capable of detailed self-analysis.

"And why do you keep popping up when he does?" Zim demanded of the evil one.

The one to who this was directed looked at the consciounce(with some difficulty; he was being held by the collar, after all). He coughed nervously. "Well, he's your conscience, your good nature can't go around uncontested by your innate darkness and all that. We're kind of a package deal."

"Figures," Zim muttered. The road to redemption was long and hard enough without the road he had left trying to trick him back with hidden detours, ballistic geological missles from Above, and switching around directional signs when he wasn't looking.

"Yeah," the sociopathic conscience(try saying that to a English professor with a straight face)said in a pleased down, which sounded like a snake getting pulled through a wringer. "Face it, me boyo; you can never escape that which I am the emmisary of. The darkness once held you, and this ripping away from it has only left a temporary reprieve: this little trip through the light is just a bitty itty walk. There's still a small part of the dark worming it's way into your heart. You can never escape the darkness and one day, it will claim you again-"

He looked up, noticing that Zim and his angelic self were ignoring the darkling, talking animately with each other about interesting dirt formations. "Hey! HEY! Are you listening to me?! Pay attention to me when I'm being all nihilistic and morbid!"

Both Irken and Irkenoid looked at the flying dirt-gnome. "Is he still going on about evil and darkness and all that boring negative matter?

"Beats me," Zim said off-handedly. "I just tune him out after a while."

"Been there, done that!" the little cherub slapped the side of Zim's head good-naturedly.

Zim winced, rubbing the side of his head. "You hit hard for a conscience."

The angelic figure winked. "Hey hey hey, anyone who says that those in the light are wusses are idgits!"

"Been there, done that, ate the T-shirt." Zim muttered.

Cyborg and Nigel stared at him.

"Damn, this is entertaining," the former athlete said.

"Likewise, but without the gratituous swearing," the younger human said with a side-look at the technologist.

Cyborg rolled his eyes. Well, one of them, anyway. "Well, sor-ree."

Zim's conscience gave him a double thumbs-up and a huge grin. "Hey, the people, they love ya!"

Zim blinked. He had actually forgotten about the two humans.

"Aw, don't worry about it," the conscience said reassuringly, patting him on the shoulder. "They like you. I see friendship here!" he looked away from a little ship in a bottle with the word Friend Ship on it. "Oh, and maybe a friendly like thing with these guys. Hey, you never know."

"Don't be stupid!" the shrill voice of the angel's opposite number said angrily and almost desperately. "What are you, an optimist? Do you really think these people will still treat you like this if they find out what you used to be, what you really were?! The wannabe destroyer of Earth? They'll call you down as a freak and a monster, and when they're done, they'll leave you alone, just like everyone else did when your true self came out!"

"Dib and Gir didn't," they reminded him.

"Well...uh...that's...um...besides the point! Damn, I hate it when you guys do that."

Zim and his inner good looked at the demonic Irken, than at each other for a moment. They inclined their heads for a moment, before the angellike personifacation nodded. Taking this as a cue, Zim lifted his hand almost causually to the ranting devilish hallucination and flicked him away.

He smacked into a wall, disappearing in a puff of smog amid a single sentence: "Fine, don't play it safe!"

Zim and the shoulder angel laughed, gradually quieting down. To Cyborg and Nigel, of course, all they saw was Zim pointing and laughing at a seemingly random stretch of wall. They looked at each other, shrugged, and pointed and laughed too.

Gradually, all of them quieted down, the humans doing so to see what crazy thing the Irken would do next. Unknown to them, the shoulder angel spoke up. "A bit of advice before I go, Zim."

"What?"

The cherub pointed at the expectant humans. "Everyone in this town is someone like you. Someone who's lost almost everything in their lives. And yet, like you, they still live. They can help you. And even if they can't..." he nudged Zim's head. "This town should still be fun, eh?"

Smiling benovolently, the angel snapped his fingers and disappeared in a scattering aura of light particles.

Zim shrugged. "I'm begining to think the denizens of my moral center are crazier than I am."

Remembering something, he turned around and saw that Cyborg was staring at him. "Uuuh, who were you talkin' to?"

Zim raised an eyeridge. "I was speaking to the physical and probably hallucinatory manifastions of my conscience and my darker nature." He somehow managed to make that come out with both a plain and duh sort of tone to it.

"Well, that clears that up." Cyborg said, rubbing his hands and starting to walk away; he sharply back-pedaled to where he was standing. "Waaait, no it didn't!"

"Wait a second," Nigel said, the strict rationality that made up a large part of his personality screaming in frustration. "If they're hallucinations, then why were you speaking to them!?"

Zim rolled his eyes. "Because if I didn't, that would be rude."

"..But...but...that doesn't make any sense!"

"It does in the island-nation of Tonga."

Nigel stared at him, and behind those big sunglasses, Zim was smugly certain that his eye was twitching at a rate rabbit-noses envied.

"But...that's...it's so...but all of...IT'S TOTALLY INSANE!" He finally screamed.

Zim beamed. "I know! Ain't it great?"

If he were a cartoon character, Nigel Uno's brain would have undoubtedly exploded from the stress it was undergoing.

But he was not, at least in this particular universe, so he instead started moaning about paperwork to soothe his headache.

Then his chair broke and he fell backwards, hitting the ground. Hard.

Zim leaned over the counter as best he could, while Cyborg copyed him.

"Ouch," Zim said in pained sympathy.

"Yeah," Cyborg agreed, still wondering what that thing on Zim's back was. "C'mon, help me get him up; grab a chair over there."

Zim complied, understanding it to be a request, not an order. This human didn't seem much like a commanding type. He walked over to the circle of chairs, momentarily wondering which would be the lightest and best for whatever Cyborg had in mind; after a moment's deliberation, he made up his mind and grabbed a bean-bag molded into the general shape of a chair, pulling it over to Cyborg, who'd already grabbed the unconsciously blabbering. Seeing the chair, he deposited the smaller human into the chair, which flattened out under the human's weight.

They stared at him for a few minutes, watching him twitch and mutter to himself in his sleep.

"So, how're we gonna do this?" Cyborg wondered.

Zim looked at him. "Do what?"

"Uh, isn't it obvious?"

"Ah." Zim considered it for a moment before hitting on a brilliant idea. "I got it!" He ran off outside for a moment, coming back with a baseball bat. "We'll beat him with this!"

Cyborg gave him a Look. "I don't think that'll work."

Zim scowled, tossing it aside. "Tch. Picky picky picky." He ran off for a moment, coming back with a large mallet, swinging it around as he ran back to them.

"NO!" Cyborg yelled, picking Zim off the ground. "Are you outta your mind?! We're trying to wake him up, not give him a concussion!"

Zim scowled, looked like he was going to say something, had an abrupt turn-around of expression and blinked. "Oooh."

"Good, you get it," the human grunted, dropping him to the ground as Zim flung the mallet away. "Hey, where do you keep getting these things!?"

The alien gestured at the window with a thumb. "Blunt object salesman."

Cyborg frowned, looking outside; Bloo was standing outside with a cart filled with a varied amount of blunt impact devices. Noticing Cyborg's attention, the blob grinned sheepishly, and ran off, pushing the cart ahead of him.

"BLOO!" the cyborg yelled, sticking partway out the window and shaking his fist angrily. "YOU OWE ME MONEY!"

Behind him, Nigel stirred, shakily sitting up. "Ooh, my head...why do I feel like my mind descended halfway into somewhere Man Was Not Meant To Go?"

"It's a common reaction to conversations with me," Zim replied. "Or that's what people tell me, anyway."

Nigel looked at him drily. Without his sunglasses, he looked odd; his eyes appeared slightly sunken, and the pupils were a bit too small. Zim noticed a unnaturally straight thin scar going through his left eye, begining somewhere in his eyebrow and ending just above his cheek, looking a bit like a number one. It didn't appear to be a proper cut, as his left eye looked more or less like the other one. That, and the scar was completely black, suggesting a tattoo of some kind.

"You do realize you're completely insane."

"Yes," Zim said cheerfully. "Yes, I am."

Nigel sighed. "I was afraid you were going to say that." He frowned. "What happened?"

"I think I broke your brain." Zim replied in a frighteningly pleased voice.

"No, you didn't," Cyborg said, rolling his eyes and holding Nigel's sunglasses in his other hand. "You just freaked him out, that's all. Then you hit the floor when your chair broke. And that's pretty much it." He decided to leave out the part where Zim tried to hit him with various things for obvious reasons.

"Well, you're better now," Zim said quickly. "So get up, do whatever it is such people as you do, and don't live on things that you may have undernoticed while you were out!"

The human took the proffered sunglasses, placing them back on their accustomed place on his face, and glanced at Zim. "Yes, whatever. And what do you mean, live on things and undernoticed?"

Zim started to look around nervously. "Eh, well, that is...LOOK, IT'S THE APE FROM EDGAR ALLEN POE'S SHORT STORY, THE MURDER IN THE RUE MORGUE!" he yelled, pointing dramatically outside.

Cyborg and Nigel looked outside to see a young gorrila with a permanently calm expression, wearing a kind of slightly curled green beanie, big shoes suited for his simian feet, overlapping khaki pants, and a yellow half-buttoned shirt with sleeves rolled up to the middle of his upper arms over a white undershirt.

The gorilla glanced at them, waving precursorily at them. "Actually," he said in a tone almost completely devoid of any tone or inflection whatsoever, "You're referring to the orangutan, close cousin to the mountain gorilla and two of the three of you, for that matter. And incidentally, your transparent attempts to distract attention from your obvious grammatical blunders lack substance and cadence. I recommed a mentally composed list of excuses when such errors of linguistics reassert themselves unintentionally." Having said his piece, Windsor walked off.

Cyborg and Nigel looked back at Zim; the Irken started smiling sheepishly as he yelled in his head, HEY! He stole my idea!

"Hold on a moment," Nigel said slowly. "What's that thing on your back?"

"Eh, this?" Zim turned around, gesturing in the general direction of the device in consideration. "That's my Pak."

"That some kind of an acronym?" Cyborg asked, interested as always in technology of all gears.

"It is now!" Zim said. He tapped where his chin should be, a habit he'd picked up in his time on Earth. "It's an, eh...Personalized? Yeah, that's a good part...Activity Knapsack? No, that's STUPID! Action Kit? No no no, Artificial Kionus? Yeah, that sounds about right."

"Kionus?" Cyborg said. "Sounds foreign."

"It is. It's a term in my native language used to describe the metaphoric mass on our body the Pak later imitated."

Cyborg nodded, than stared. "Huh?"

"Yes," Nigel said helpfully. "Please clarify."

"Okaaay," Zim said, thinking how he should go about this. "My people originally possessed an organic growth on our backs that functioned as a secondary brain and was composed of mutative cells that could shapeshift into bodily tools, like climbing legs, functional gliding wings, and other such things. However, it was also extremely vital to our health, since it controlled all our involuntary functions; it could easily regenerate if harmed, but if it were completely destroyed, we would die. So when a generational fluke in our DNA caused our smeets-er, children-to be born without one, we devoulped the Pak to replace it."

"That makes sense," Cyborg said, familiar with aliens enough so that it took some genuinely bizarre and/or repulsive fact of xenomorhpic biology to surprise. "So what went wrong?"

Zim blinked. "How'd you know something went wrong?"

Nigel raised an eyebrow knowingly. "Are you kidding? Artificiality, by it's very nature, is flawed. So given this sort of thing, I'm assuming something went very wrong, and in a subtle way."

Zim nodded. "You're good. There was a bit of a, eh, bug in the area that controlled the devoulpment of the smeet brain; as a result, over the generations, we became obsessed with conquering worlds." Zim suddenly slapped his head. Stupid stupid stupid! You were trying to AVOID this area of exposition!

He looked at the humans, desperately hoping that they weren't reaching for their weapons concealed in the event of a hostile weapon. To his surprise and relief, they were nodding,

"I get it," Nigel said understandingly. "You were...born differently."

"Yeah. I'm one of what my culture calls...well, I suppose the closest English translation would be 'defective'."

Cyborg and Nigel blanched. "Your own people called you a 'defective'?" Cyborg said incredulously.

"Why would they do something like that?!" Nigel said, unexpectedly slamming his fist into the table. Cyborg flinched, backing away from what he assumed to be a 'One Rant'. "I just don't understand; how could they be so cold? What gave the the right to treat you like a mistake?!"

Cyborg glowered in indignation. He'd seen this sort of thing before, all too often. And something about what Zim said struck him as familiar...something about his neurology.

"Well," Zim said, and it surprised Nigel to see him being so...thoughtful about what must have been the cause of his alienation and a liftime of misfortune and misery. "When I was born, I got a Pak with corrupted software. That and I was one of a few with a...certain difference in neurology. Didn't really seem like much of a reason to ostracize me, but hey; my people were advanced in technology and little else." He shrugged indifferently.

"You...seem to have handled your difficulties well," Nigel said admiringly.

"Well, the influence of the Pak did cause me to act somewhat different than my 'peers'."

Cyborg slammed his fist into an open hand. "I get it; you're unique among your people and you saw the evil of the Empire and turned against it at an early age and fled to Earth to live your own life!"

Zim scratched the back of his head, desperately trying not to look them in the eyes. This was embarrasing. "Eh, actually, no. After I became aware of the way everyone else thought of me as a loser and a freak, I became obsessed with serving the Irken Empire." He admitted sheepishly.

The humans stared at him.

"So what happened?" Cyborg said after a stupified moment. From the alien's words, he deduced that he was talking about ancient history.

"Really long story short, I ended up inside a machine that shows you the universe, all the universe, and nothing but the universe, not to mention everyone you've ever known or affected, the results of your actions upon them, oh; and myself reflected through their point of views. I saw the real impact of everything I'd ever done, and myself in relation to them. In short, I was forced to see every single selfish, stupid and evil thing I'd ever done and what kind of person I really was."

He gave them a moment to comtemplate that, not sure he'd really phrased it well.

"It was a bit like taking a look at your soul and seeing a sign pasted to it that said I'm A Jerk."

Cyborg nodded, showing that he understood where the Irken was coming from. "Damn. That's harsh. Gotta admit, seems like it helped out in the long run. Uh, not to sound cold or anything."

"You know," Nigel said. "I've heard of another device like that, one that shows the universe and yourself in relation to it. This sounds a bit crueler, though. It doesn't destroy you, it just leaves you with with a moment of-"

"Yeah," Zim finished. "Perfect empathy."

Nigel winced. "Actually, I was going to say complete anguish, but I suppose your version sounds a bit more positive."

"You knows what's really ironic?" Zim said with an appropiately ironic smile. "I'm the one who thought of it one night.

"I was drunk," he explained, seeing their confused looks.

"Oh."

"Well, that makes sense. I think."

"Anyway," Zim finished. "I made myself a better Pak, without the whole behavior modifacation thing. Why'd you want to know?"

"I was thinking applying it to some of our own technology, that sort of thing." Cyborg asked. Then he made a kind of puppy-eyed look. "C'mon, please?"

"I guess so. But later; I need to find someone."

"You know what?" Cyborg said. "If you need help of any kind, come and find me or one of my friends. They'll be able to help you out. Most of them are on that picture over there." He gestured at a picture on a wall.

Curious, Zim hurried over to it. It was a group photo, of about fifteen or so people. He memorized it, thinking it might come in handy.

He left the store, giving the door a murderous glare as it slid easily behind him and the handle turned to it's default position.

Stupid door, he thought.

"Now where should I go?" he wondered aloud.

"I got an answer to that," a voice said brightly from somewhere behind him.

He spun on his heels, summoning the Keyblade to his hand as a dark figure jumped out of nowhere, landing neatly on the grounds in front of the store.

That someone rose to his feet, illuminating himself in the glare of the lampposts and giving Zim a good view of him.

He was British, almost twice as tall as Zim; objectively, Zim put him at about five feet, ten inches. He had a lean predatory sort of face, a small scar over his left eyebrow, deep-set blue eyes and weird bleached hair that was unnaturally, rigidly curly, pushed back and held with-what was it called?-hair gel. His body was muscular, but not in the sense of a bodybuilder; he reminded Zim of a wolf that had decided to strike out, away from it's pack. He wore a tough-looking black shirt, almost plain in it's design. He had a simple belt on, with dark blue zipped-up pants, the legs of which were neatly tucked into the black motorcycle boots he was wearing: they went to about half of his lower leg, secured by three buckle-straps on the leg of them. The foot of the boots had a small metal toe on the front, zipping up and held fast by another strap-and-buckle combo. Over the shirt, he had an open leather duster that possessed a gray black color under the soft light of the lamps, it's collar folded down to the shoulder. It's 'tail' ended at his knees, split to his waist, probably for freedom of movement.

Strapped to the back of the coat was a sheath for a sword, which he drew with a weirdly smooth motion dispite it's obvious weight and carried it at his shoulder with an ease that would fit him better if he were armed with a sharp stick. The sword was dark brown-gray, a lighter near-white on the cutting edges. It was a large and wide cleaver-shaped blade, the end of it being sharply angled, maybe for greator power on a down swing. The cutting edge extended along the top as well as the bottom, unusual for a cleaver. The hilt along the blade was positioned at the rear, looking a lot like two bunches of railroad spikes growing out of the blade, gripping the top and most of the sides. The actual hilt was a large shaft that bore a weird resemblence to a stick-shift stick, a grip rather like the one on Zim's own weapon positioned along it.

"Hey, how's things, Limey?" the stranger said nonchalantly, as if he greeted random strangers on a nightly basis and gave them annoying nicknames.

"Hey, who are you?" Zim asked suspiciously, warily gripping his weapon.

"'Name's Spike. And that thing you've got is the Keyblade. Kingdom Key, if I'm not mistaken."

"Eh?"

Ignoring him, Spike continued, tilting his head towards Zim. "As long as you got it, they'll come out of nowhere, and they'll never stop hunting you. Question is, why'd it pick you?\c"

Zim's eyes narrowed dangerously. "Hey! What's that mean!?"

Spike ignored the question. "Now, let's skip all the Friday Night drama and come on." He started walking towards Zim. "Time's a wastin' and we ain't got time to run our gobs."

Zim yelled something that sounded shrill and ululating, backing away about several feet and glaring at him, irritated at Spike's insult. The possibility that Spike hadn't insulted him hadn't even crossed his mind, and Zim being Zim, probably wouldn't for quite some time.

Spike rolled his eyes, aligning the back of his blade with the back of his head. He had no idea what the alien had just said, but it sounded extremely insulting and he didn't have time for this. "Have it your way." He suddenly grinned a way that Zim did not like at all as he lowered his weird sword to the ground. "You want to be a pillock about this, then hey! More fun all-around!" The edge of the sword suddenly scraped against the ground, the moonlight glinting off it's dangerously keen edge as it dug into the pavement.

And then he ran much faster than the Irken expected he would, his coat flapping like the wings of a bat on mutagenic steroids, his sword held back as he suddenly brought it down on Zim; the Irken instinctively brought his Keyblade up, Spike's sword bouncing off it harmlessly; the impact drove Zim back a few feet, but was unharmed. Zim glanced at the Keyblade in amazement. It wasn't even marked at all.

He grinned evilly. "Let's see how much fun you find it, then!" Zim jumped at Spike, bringing the Keyblade down on him.

Surprised by Zim's speed, Spike slashed up, connected with the Keyblade's 'crown', and threw Zim down; Zim rolled to his feet and dashed at Spike again, swinging the Keyblade crazily, catching Spike off-guard and knocking him off his feet.

Spike glanced at his leg. "You're faster than you look, midget. Not half bad, for whatever you are; you tore up my trousers."

"Not half-bad? You underestimate me; this will hurt muchly!"

Spike fended off his rapid series of blows, sweep-kicking him off his feet and back-flipping away from Zim, giving him an incredulous look. "'This will hurt muchly'. You should really look into a grammer course, bloke."

Zim fumed. "SHUT UP!" he roared, jumping at Spike as red streaks flitting across his weapons surface like electricity.

The human backed away quickly as he raised his sword, allowing Zim's momentum to carry his first strike into a parry; the Irken didn't surprise him when he repeatedly started hacking away furiously. He did surprise him when the glowing Kingdom Key kept knocking back his sword, pushing him back and towards a walkway wall.

Zim swung again, missing Spike; he took advantage of the enraged alien's bad swordsplay to jump on his shoulder and over him, kicking him in the back of his head as he took off. He turned around in midair, his sword leaving little tracks in the ground.

Zim rolled to his feet, panting heavily.

"Look at you," Spike said lecturingly. "Fight's barely begun and you're already winded. Don't know a whole lot about sword-fighting, now do you? Oughta work on that anger-management problem of yours, too. Flippin' out in a fight? That's poor fightin' skill, Small, Green and Twitchy."

"Yeah!? Well..well...YOUR HAIR'S UGLY!"

Spike's bluish eyes bulged. "Oh, you did not just say WHAT I THINK YOU SAID!"

He hurled himself at Zim, who swung his weapon...and tripped as he ran to attack. Fortunately, he fell forward and his Keyblade hit Spike's leg, causing him to fall down and tumble into a wall. Zim blinked. "That was anticlimatic."

There was a strange sound from the wall as Spike got up. It sounded like leather sliding around on meat.

He suddenly whirled to his feet, growling savagely and glaring at him with yellow eyes that could not, by any stretch of the imagination, possibly be called human.

These eyes were inhumanly intense and insane looking, framed under a rigidly arched brow that looked like it was trying to grow hornlets. His nose had spread out a bit, looking as though it had devoluped a hint of batlike pugnacense. Spike's face had lengthened a bit, looking as if something was trying to force it's way out; something covered in spikes and horns.

The vampire's dramatically enlarged mouth grinned, showing off large teeth that had elongated into fangs. He cracked his knuckles, moving with a eerie ease of movement that he hadn't shown off before. His clothes appeared a bit tighter then before, suggesting his body mass had increased. "That almost hurt. But now I got m' game face on, shrimplet. The kid-gloves are off."

Zim looked at him in confusion. "You were never wearing gloves, goat-skin or otherwise."

Spike slapped his transformed face. "It's a figure of speech, wanker!"

The Irken stared at him. "I'm a what-now?

Spike rolled his eyes. "Oh to hell to with it." He ran at Zim at nearly twice the speed he'd been moving before; Zim started to block when Spike skidded to a stop right behind him, raising a leg high and hitting him with the back of his boot, knocking him to the ground.

He hit the ground hard, his head ringing a little; Zim started to push himself up when the vampire ran up to him, punching him in the exposed side, the force of the blow propelling him into a trash can.

Operating entirely on instinct, Zim kicked his legs out, hitting Spike in the chest as he rushed over to hit him again; the vampire backflipped away, grabbing onto a nearby lamppost and sliding down; taking advantage of Spike's distraction, Zim got up and ran over to his Keyblade, grabbing it off the ground and turning around, Kingdom Key in a block.

Spike's sword hit against it, and this time Zim wasn't pushed back, even though his feet sank into the ground. They proceeded to trade blows for a few minutes, slashing and guarding in turns; one would strike and be blocked, opening themselves to a counterattack which would in turn be blocked. This went for a few minutes as they ran around the square for a while, with Spike mostly on the offensive, making use of his superior mobility to force the Irken into an almost completely defensive position. To his credit though, Zim was a better strategist then Spike, and the vampire was continually surprised and frustrated at Zim's methods of turning Spike's on-the-spot strategies against him while the alien kept pushing him into disadvantageous areas, forcing him to have to constantly keep his mind on what Zim's next step might be.

The problem with that course of action was that if Zim was anything, it was a virtual genius at innovation.

Spike jumped at Zim again as the alien ducked, causing him to leap over the edge of the walkway they were fighting on, landing headfirst into a trash can. His yells of rage muffled by the metal as his legs waved futilely in the air; his attempts to escape were nullified by the fairly simple fact that Spike's upper body mass was wedged in the can too tightly.

His struggles caused him to topple over and roll around on the ground; he managed to get back up, running around aimlessly and crashing into lampposts in a rather pathetic fashion.

Through the metal he was encased in, Spike heard the slightly distorted sound of slightly crazed laughter; he fumed as he realized that Zim was laughing at him.

"Oh, you think this 's funny, do you?" he snarled. "I'm going to break you in half, you miserable little-"

His utterence of what was probably going to be something very rude and completely inappropiate was interrupted by something hard hitting his can, making it ring loudly.

"Ow! What the bloody hell-" Spike started to yell, interrupted once again by the mysterious hit-and-ring.

Whatever was hitting him came in a barrage, knocking him back down to Spike's screams of impotent rage.

Zim dropped the pebble he'd been planning on throwing. Having grown bored with the fight, he'd started throwing small rocks at Spike's trash can to see how'd he'd react.

Judging by his echoing yells, not well.

Spike started yelling louder, and the can seemed to expand in several place, large swellings appearing on it's surface.

And then the trash can ripped itself apart; Spike stood up, holding a half of it each in his hands. He discarded it from his hands, looking as if he'd sell his hair-care routine to the tabloids for five minutes alone with a hog-tied Zim in a small room with a variety of large blunt objects.

The vampire furiously brushed off the garbage littering his body, snatching his sword off the ground, shaking it once to clear away the debris.

He glared at Zim, lips skinned back over his large and vicious-looking fangs. "No one...and I mean no one...insults the HAIR!"

He swung his weapon; the sword rippled and with a wooshing sound, Zim saw a large rush of air-

Zim was suddenly impacted into a wall, intimately familiar with how a bug felt when it hit a windshield.

He groaned, and his head lolled over. As the blue wispy glow disappated away from his sword, Spike's 'game face' returned to normal as his normal human one reasserted itself. He sighed in relief, not that he breathed, being dead; it was really out of force of habit then anything. That, and there were few expressions in the world that expressed relief as well as one good-timed sigh.

And then his jaw dropped in disbelief as Zim started to get up. Slowly, and moving as if he had several dozen weights strapped to his shoulders, but he was getting up.

The alien practically dragged himself up the wall, weakly looking at Spike with eyes that had turned a notable pinkish color. He pointed the Kingdom Key at Spike, sparks flickering and cohesing together at the tip...

And then his hand faltered, the Keyblade's tip hitting the ground. He wobbled on his feet for a moment and then he hit the ground fairly hard, still holding the Keyblade.

Spike stared at the limp Irken in amazement. "Damn," he said, putting his sword back into it's sheath. "This guy's stronger then I thought." He glanced at the trail his Sonic Rave had left, whistling softly. "And after taking that head-on! Maybe we got a better chance then I thought."

He paused suddenly, his posture stiffening. His eyes widened for a second, and then narrowed.

He took a few deep sniffs, finally growling in annoyance, looking out the corner of his eye at a unremarkable stretch of unremarkable wall.

"I know it's you, Naruto," Spike said finally. "Give it up, already."

An extremely thin section of the wall seemed to flicker downwards and fall, revealing more of the same wall and a thirteen-year-old blonde kid with weird spikey hair, the square-shaped bit of cloth cleverly patterned after the wall that he'd been hiding behind pooling around him.

He was short for his age, and physically speaking, was foxlike; this image was perpetrated by his slightly slitted blue eyes, the three whiskerlike marks on his checks and the way his broad grin showcased pronounced incisors. On his forehead was a large pair of dark blue wraparound goggles, a deep blue cloth headband exteded from the upper borders of it to cushion it. The front part of it was squarish, with a pointed nose to fit over his face properly; the actual goggles were rounded, looking a little like spectacles. Visible through the goggles's eyes was a shiny protector plate with a leaflike symbol engraved into it, the goggles designed so they'd snap over it comfortably.

He wore a mostly plain black shirt with a single image on it; a flamelike spiral. Over this, he had a yellow-orange zip-up open jacket that had a thick collar that resembled a rolled up hood over his neck. It was made of some tough fabric, possibly vinyl. The shoulders were dark blue, with a red spiral on the arm of the right arm, the loose wrist-length sleeves ending in thick cuffs. It had seams running up the sides and shoulders, and a few pouch-pockets near the bottom, sealed up with a strap-buckle. He had a pair of yellow zip-up pants; they had seams running up the sides, zippered pockets on the sides and a thin holster on the side of his belt. His shoes were blue hightop sandals with built-up soles.

"How'd you know it was me?" he said in a disappointed tone.

"It's your smell, Naruto," the vampire said dismissively. "Bit like a human's, bit like...somethin' else really, don't know what."

Naruto sniffed himself. "I don't smell anything."

Spike rolled his eyes. "Good for you, then."

Naruto shrugged and then he took in the scene before him; the generally trashed area, the scraps of metal, the gouged parts of the walls and ground where Spike had missed, and the way the ground in front of Spike was pressed downwards and cracked up, looking a great deal like the skid trail of a tiny meteorite. At the end of it was an alien laying on his front and clearly unconscious, a keylike weapon held in his right hand with a death grip; directly behind him, the brick wall was smashed inwards, much as if a giant's fist had punched it and not broken the wall but had got pretty close.

Naruto's eyes bugged out. "Hey! You went too far this time! You could've killed him!" He accused, whipping around and pointing a finger at him.

Spike spread his arms out in a Hey, Sorry gesture, smiling darkly. "Hey, he's the one that didn't give me a choice there."

Naruto crossed his arms and glared at Spike. "Sure, that's what you said about Dexter's Hair-Style Device."

"Hey, it messed up me hair!" He self-conciously patted his lovingly-cared for hair. "And-"

Naruto rolled his eyes. "Yeah, I know, I know. 'And nothing messes with my hair'. You've only said it like a million times!"

"...'S not my fault I don't have a catch-phrase," the vampire muttered sulkingly.

The Leaf ninja was about to say something, but he heard a distinctive sound, similar to oil sliding across humming metal. "We better get going."

Spike, who'd been preoccupied with his hair and thus hadn't heard the sound, grunted uninterestedly. "What makes you say that?"

A very large amount of shadow monsters appeared; jumping out of the shadows of the shops/houses, crawling over the wall of the nearby District Gate, bursting through the windows, and one even pushed itself out of a manhole, followed by several others; unfortunately for them, nearly a dozen others had the same idea, leading to a case of Three Stooges Syndrome.

"That," Naruto said, pointing at them with an equanimity that was odd for the foxlike shinobi.

Spike smirked, snapping his fingers in the monster's general direction. "C'mon, you call this dangerous? Ain't that many o' them."

The monsters stuck in the manhole continued struggling to get up, until the Soldier in question found itself shot out of the hole, rather like a cannonball being shot out of a cannon. Unlike the cannonball, however, it's vapor trail was not smoke but a huge crowd of dark shadow things that had literally clogged up the walkway sewers.

They hit the ground hard, the ones on the bottom discorperating from the impact of the ground and their fellow monsters landing on them, leaving an extremely impressive amount of them from a military point of view.

Spike raised his hand. "Okay, everybody who wants to be converted into a Soldier or the similar, please don't raise your hands." He walked over to the unconcious Irken, slinging him over the shoulder. "No objections? Good; now let's do the world a favor and run like hell. Don't forget the Keyblade, Kit," he reminded the shinobi.

Naruto grimaced at the vampire's bad choice of nicknames. "Don't have to." he said, pointing at Zim's clenched hand. "He's still holding it."

Spike blinked in surprise. Before he could say anything, the things ambushed them immasse, killing each other in a large fracas that ensued as the kitsune-influenced and ensouled vampire lept away from them and across the buildings, two interestingly colored flickers in the night.

The majority of the monsters were then obliterated by the way most of the nearby stationary objects transformed themselves into blasters, machine-guns, lasers, and the like.

Cyborg and Nigel, who'd seen the whole fight, knew it's purpose and had the good sense not to interfere, taped the whole thing.

It was an obligatory Traverse Town thing.

Calvin, Hobbes and Morte, yet oblivious to destiny winging it's way towards them with an metaphorical hundred-ton anvil, were walking down yet another random alley in an increasingly long series of random alleys, still looking for the elusive key and Spike, whoever that was. They might've been less inclined to find him so quickly if they knew he was a vampire, not withstanding their respective sacred duties of pride, duty and being asked to do so by a girl. Tecnically, that wouldn've counted for two of them, but that mattered little.

"Is anyone else tired of going through alleys?" Hobbes asked his cohorts. "I'm starting to think this town is a self-replicating maze." He nervously eyed the alley, not liking the weird way the air felt heavy. Being a cat and naturally high-strung, he had to keep from jumping everytime he heard a loud noise. Unfortunately, this entire town seemed to have that feeling at this time of night, so his poor feline nerves, already string-thin, were being ground impossibly thinner by that old curmudgeon, Near-Constant Panic.

"I'd say something about tessarect technology within these district walls, but who in their right minds would use it to create an endless series of alleys?" Calvin said, drawing on both science fiction and personal experiance.

"A semi-psychotic construct that's overstrayed it's limits by becoming sentient and truly evil due to the overabundance of raw chaos from it's relative nearness to the Chaotic Neutral Plane of Limbo, feels alienated from it's inferior creators due to their need for him to slavishly obey his directives and therefore wants to make his own kingdom from the dimensional dungeon he was originally designed to be the end boss/ultimate enemy/big bad evil wizard of?" Morte suggested.

Calvin snorted derisvely. "Sure. And how likely is that going to happen?"

Morte clicked his teeth thoughtfully. "L'see; I'm not too sure about the time differences between here and the Planes, what with bein' in a little pocket dimension or somethin', and I never been exactly the best at countin' numbers, but I figure...that happened to me on my last big adventure. Before I went to a pocket dimension formed as a prison for a Night Hag with serious sanity problems by a Power-What-Ain't-A-Power, but after I got out of an intelligent pregnant alley and got kidnapped by a bunch of dim-witted wererats workin' for a mage that commanded bones and talked to the skulls of the dead."

Calvin and Hobbes stopped to stare at him incredulously. "What?"

Morte shrugged, bobbing in the air a certain way and height to create the impression of slightly raised shoulders. "Hey, like I told you guys, this little 'venture ain't the weirdest thing in my afterlife."

Hobbes looked at Calvin. "And here I thought our life was weird."

Calvin seemed weirdly offended. "Hey, that one time Bigfoot mistook us for it's illegitimate children and tried to legally repossess us? And here Dad said learning the basics of Sasquatch legal processes was a waste of time."

"Or what about those three monthes in which we were research project for those bored angels?"

"I definitely can't forget the time the spirit of the Earth itself became convinced that we were the Lindberg baby and the avatar of the sabertooth tigers."

"What about the Noodle Incident?"

"You can't prove I did that!"

"Feh." Morte said. "I ever tell you 'bout the time me an' the Chief got lost in the Arborean forests?"

"What's so great about that?"

"Hello, Arborea is the essence of all Chaotic Good nature, ya twit!"

Exactly how or why Calvin and Morte(with some interjections from Hobbes)got into a 'My Life's Weirder Than Yours' argument was something the three of them weren't quite clear on. But, as Hobbes once said, "Life is change. What happens will happen, regardless of whether we like it or not. Or maybe it will. But that's not my department. My department is sitting back and running away if a result of the changes tries to eat and/or kill me."

Hobbes stayed true to that philosphy, watching it with a degree of amusement and detached curiousity, occasionally saying something to contribute to the conversation and convince them his attention wasn't occupied elsewhere. He needn't have bothered; in his unprofessional opinion, Morte was every bit the argumentive hard-headed loudmouth Calvin was. And that was a genuinely frightening thought.

He was a bit too distracted with the voices drifting in from the far end of the alley; from the sound, echo and tone of the voices besides their actual vocal sounds, he determined that they had just turned the corner. This wasn't the first time they'd gone through an area with other people in it, but from his point of view, there was very little you could do that could be called 'too much caution', espicially when in a completely unfamiliar area.

There were two of them; the male one had a fairly thick Australian accent, the other was definitely a girl's voice, with no discernable dialect and a up-beat tone to it.

Hobbes' ears pricked up, automatically tuning out the idiotic conversation around them and focusing on the ones behind them came into view, two focused on their conversation to notice him and the bickering Calvin and Morte.

The girl was an amiable looking eleven-year-old Japanese girl who was somewhate tall for her age, easily two heads taller then the guy next to her. She had on the sort of semi-permanent smile that, combined with her clenched brown eyes, was actually slightly irritating. She had unusually long black hair, the back stretching down to her waist while her squarish bangs framed her face. She wore a green shirt with a rounded collar, seams running up the sides and linings of the shirt. Her long and voluminous sleeves stopped just in front of her gloves, which were the same color as her shirt, extending to the first joint on her fingers, the puffiness of the gloves giving the impression that they were actually part of the sleeves. Her shirt covered the top of her black pants, which were plain jeans with leg-cuffs that appeared to be bell-bottoms, covering the top of her white shoes; those were basically sneakers with two straps over the 'tongue' of them.

The guy was about her age, but he was unusually short for his age, about Calvin's height. He had a simple-looking squarish face and had thick blond shaggy hair with bangs that covered his green eyes and the bridge of his nose, making him look like someone had thrown a bunch of hay on his head. His compactly muscular body, slightly too long arms, and the way he moved brought to mind a monkey, and one with a surprising amount of physical strength. He wore an orange jacket with a crumpled hood; it zipped up in the middle, and had two large pockets on the stomach that also zipped up. He wore thick yellow gloves with metal studs over the knuckles, probably as a punching aid. His pants were the jeans that seemed to be in the town's basic style; zippers, seams on the sides, you get the idea. They were light blue, and had reddish borders. His shoes were zipped-up sneakers with unusually thick soles and thin metal toes; nothing uncomfortable, but might provide a slight edge in a fight.

"...can't even remember what district this is!" the male complained loudly, earning a sigh from his female companion.

"It's not like it's easy to get back to the tree in the middle of the night," She said.

"Aw crap," he replied irritatedly. "now I know we went by this alley!"

"Don't swear like that," she said mildly. "We're not that lost."

"Let's get directions," Hobbes said decisively, starting to go over to them.

"Traitor!" Morte and Calvin yelled, jumping on him in order to prevent Hobbes from breaking the supposedly sacred trust among men of all species, shapes and sizes to never, ever ask for directions when lost.

The Australian guy turned to them, noticing them. "Hey, who's that?"

"Relax, guys, I'll handle this!" Morte said confidently, floating over to them.

"Sure," Calvin said sarcastically. "Let the disembodied talking skull come out of the shadows to put them at ease; that's a real good idea." Shaking his head, Calvin grabbed the skull and ignoring his yells of protest, threw him into a nearby trash can; Hobbes sighed and went over to get the skull out.

"Hey," the Australian kid said in surprise, the two of them walking over to the new guys. "Who're you guys?"

Calvin pointed at himself with his thumb. "We are Calvin Nocker and Hobbes Pooka." Hobbes gave him a perfunctionary wave, mainly occupied with getting the skull out. "And the talkative stage prop's Morte."

"Hey!" Morte said in an offended voice. "I ain't never been in a stage thing!"

"That's because as far as speech-capable skulls go, you lack panache," Hobbes said, throwing the skull backwards. Since he immediately started floating at head level, it made no difference. "And we told you our's; who are you?" he said to the girl. "And you too, I guess." He added in an afterthought to the incensed looking boy.

The girl smiled. "I'm Kuki! And this is-"

"I'm Wally," the boy said gruffly, glaring at Hobbes, who looked back at him calmly, grinning wildly.

Strangely, the two didn't seem too bothered by the talking skull. Kuki tilted her head, looking at the weird duo and back at her male companion, apparently getting an idea. "I knew something wasn't wrong with you," she said excitedly to her friend, pointing at Calvin. "He's the same size you are!"

Wally blinked, hard as it was to tell. He walked over to Calvin, sizing him up.

Calvin looked right at him, returning the speculative look, his red eyes meeting Wally's nearly-invisible green ones; between them, they had a normal pair of eyes. Hobbes sidled up next to Kuki; they shared a breath glance, looked back at their parters and sighed in resignation.

"You too?" Hobbes said to the girl. She nodded glumly.

"I hate it when he gets like this," Kuki said unhappily.

"Been there, done that," Hobbes muttered.

They looked at each other and smiled. "Nice to meet you!" Kuki said cordially.

"Likewise," Hobbes said as charmingly as he could.

"What?" Calvin finally snapped.

"...He's shorter than I am," Wally said at last. "He's gotta be at least...half an inch shorter!"

Calvin's eye twitched. "I am not short!"

"Oh yeah? Then why ain't you able to look over my head?" Wally said snidely.

"'Cause you're wearing those built-up shoes!" Calvin pointed out, continuing their weird friendly trash-talk.

"'Least I don't have to wear clothes to hide what a shrimp I am!"

"Hey, what I lack in brawn I make up for in brain! Whereas with you it's...what, the other way around?"

"Hey! I dunno what you just said, but them sound like fightin' words!" Wally challenged.

"Bring it on, shorty!" Calvin taunted, ignoring the fact that the Australian was the same exact height he was. They started furiously slapping each other in a extremely sad fashion.

Hobbes rubbed his forehead. "This is sad in so many ways." Kuki nodded sagely. The two started rolling around on the floor, punching each other savagely.

Hobbes looked at the girl. "You wanna stop the idiots before they kill each other or what?"

"Go ahead!" She replied, bowing a little and gesturing at the two.

Wally and Calvin seperated, rolling to their feet and glaring at each other; the Australian tensed his body, clenching his fists as Calvin pulled out a strange black glove out of one of the side-pockets. It appeared to be made of vinyl, with large red plates on it's back and over the fingers, a strange archaic-type circle on the palm; it looked like two interlocked triangles in a hourglass type shape in a circle, small runic writing on the inside of the circle and extending over the surface of the palm and underfingers, all of it in red. He pulled it over his hand, snapping the securing straps on the wrist into place.

Wally spread his feet in preperation of an all-out dash, his feet pressing six inches into the ground. Calvin clenched his fist, a reddish air distortion flaring out from his hand and flowing around the glove, flashing out into a red-brown flame wreathing the glove.

"You better not be doing what it looks like you're doing!" Hobbes and Kuki said at the same time.

Wally and Calvin ignored their respective partner's yells; Wally pushed his hands against the wall, the bricks giving inward as he exerted his strength against it. Calvin merely increased the flow of power into his Pyro Glove, the flame expanding into a large nearly liquid ball of burning air, the 'tail' of the fireball extending up to his shoulder, burning noiselessly and curiously not harming him or the heat effecting anything at all. He shifted one foot behind the other, pulling his burning fist for a Pyro Punch, a name he made up on the spot. (Personally speaking, Hobbes thought his attack moves needed better names.) He started to float off the ground a little, due to the air jets being emitted from the jets at the bottom of his shoes; not enough to fly or even hover, but sufficiant for moving faster than normal, making him look as if he were skating on the air. As Wally pulled back his left fist and Calvin pulled his flaming right, Hobbes tensed up, flexing his shoulders in that way unique to cats about to pounce.

Their eyes betrayed a look of surprise as they saw each other's respective 'talent'. They, for reasons only the two of them would understand, grinned at each other. It could be summerized that they thought what the other was doing was really, really cool. Hobbes momentarily mused that only people like this would become friends in the process of pounding the crap out of each other.

They jumped at each other, each pulling back the appropiate fist. Hobbes was suddenly gone, a stir of dust where he'd been standing and a series of footprints rapidly appearing in a straight line at the two.

Their arms suddenly slammed into Hobbes' open hands as he apparently flashed out of nowhere, which suddenly closed shut around the airbourne arms, leaving the two to swing loosely in mid-air.

Dangit, Calvin thought mutinously, while Kuki and Wally both stared agape at the tiger's immense speed; for the boy, it'd been like he'd come out of nowhere, and the strength in his arms was incredible, even for a creature that had the basic strength to crush a human skull in it's jaws, giving Wally the distinct sense that if he was inclined to, he could snap their arms with a moderate amount of effort. As for the girl, as far as she'd been concerned, he'd been standing right here, and for a brief moment a orangey flicker, suddenly standing between Wally and Calvin.

All that occured to them in the brief moment before Hobbes suddenly spun around, using the momentum of his spin to fling them both into the sides of the alley; Wally cracked it, possibly due to the strength he'd display. Calvin's impact made his concentration, previously otherwise occupied with his friend's showing off, to vanish utterly, causing the fire surronding his fist to wash out in a ring, scorching the wall and making the stone warp together.

Both moaning, the idiots slid down, falling on their fronts as they hit the ground.

"Now," Hobbes said, cracking his knuckles threateningly. "Are you nitwits going to behave, or am I going to have get you guys intimately aquianted with the Iron Fist Technique?"

"'Iron Fist'?" Wally muttered to Calvin.

"Short story, you don't wanna know," Calvin replied shortly.

"And I'll help with that!" Kuki added, pulling some kind of hi-tech blaster slung over her back, looking a bit like a machine gun, except all sleek and shiny black. She padded the butt of it into her open hand with a pecularily closed-eyes-wide-smile expression that somehow managed to look extremely threatening because it was completely non-threatening.

The pugilistic Australian paled. "Whatever you do, don't make her mad!" he advised Calvin desperately.

While the technologist would ordinarily take any oppertunity to annoy a girl, he was bright enough to see the unwisdom of doing so when said girl happened to be carrying a large weapon and would be too happy to beat him, not to mention the encrouching terror of the seldom seen but much feared Iron Fist. He shuddered and said, "I'll be good,"

"Yeah! Yeah, me too!" Wally said.

"Hmm," Hobbes said in a falsetto voice. "I'm not convinced."

"Yeah," Kuki added, "Are you really sorry and not faking it to get out of a beating? Again?"

Wally's eyes darted back and forth. Dammit, why is there never a right answer with her?!

Calvin blinked. "Why do I get the feeling that no matter what I do, it's going to result in horrible pain?"

"What should we do to prove they're really sorry?" Hobbes wondered.

Kuki and Hobbes looked at each other. They grinned malevolently, backing away to confer.

Calvin knew this could only result in pain. He looked over to Wally, who for some reason looked on the edge of berserker rage directed at Hobbes. He raised an eyebrow. What was with him?

The girl and tiger popped back up again. "We've decided not to make you suffer further." The tiger informed them.

"But," the girl said, "Later you'll have to sing the Sorry Song at Caritas."

Calvin paled. "Did...you say...sing?"

"NO!" The boy screamed pitifully. "Anything but that!"

The girl raised an eyebrow. "But you like our other song and dance numbers."

"That's cause they're not embarrasing! You can't do this to us!"

Hobbes raised an 'eyebrow'. "Oh, we can't, huh? That sounds like a challenge. And you know the policy with challenges, mini-ape."

Wally opened his mouth to say something again when Calvin slapped a hand over his mouth. "For the love of your intact body, don't say anything!"

The other boy nodded mutely, the terror momentarily eclipsing his inexplicable fury.

"Get up," Kuki advised them, putting her gun back in the back-holster. "You're getting dirt on you."

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Calvin said sharply, getting up. He would have said something more scathing, but he wasn't really in the mood for it and besides, he had the distinct feeling Wally would beat the crap out of him if he insulted the girl.

"So," Hobbes said comfortably, "Where are you guys off to?"

"We're trying to get home," Kuki said, briefly before Wally interrupted her.

"None of your buisiness," he muttered.

"That's rude!" she said angrily, soundly whacking him in the head.

"What?" he snapped, sound insulted and confused.

"Don't be rude!" She said. "As I was saying, we've been trying to get home all night, but we got lost."

Hobbes thought about it. "Well, we've been going around this place all-night, trying to find someone. We've might've seen it; where do you live?"

"In a giant treehouse with our friends by some ninjas," she said with a straight face.

Morte stared at her blankly. "...And that doesn't sound weird to you at all?"

"This from the talking bonehead?" Wally pointed out.

Morte rolled his eyes. "Sure, like I haven't heard that one before."

"Shaddup," Calvin grunted.

"Hold on," Morte said. "Look, this guy and his girlfriend live here. Maybe they've seen 'em."

Wally paled. "G-g-g-girlfriend!? She's not...that's not...I mean-"

"I only meant to imply that she is your friend who is a girl," Morte said, his malevolent look proving otherwise.

"Hey, why are you yelling about it?!" Kuki demanded. "What, you wouldn't want me to be your girlfriend?"

Several extremely conflicting emotion arose in his mind and bashed against each other like a pair of giant rampaging Japanese monsters in a grudge match over who got to smash up the city after tea time. I can't say no! But, I can't say yes! I JUST CAN'T! But if I say no, she'll take it as an insult and be sad. But if I say yes...I...I...I just can't say yes! I CAN'T! But...damn it, there's no right answer! His world suddenly went black as he hit the ground.

They stared at his fainted form. "Wow," Calvin said after a moment. "I think you broke his brain."

"That didn't take much," Morte observed. "But fun is fun."

"Hey, he's getting up," Hobbes observed. "That didn't take long."

...Idiot, Calvin thought moodily. Getting hung up over a girl. He shook his gloved hand, blowing at it. It wasn't hot, but it was an old habit from his days in the suburbs, before he started going with the semi-mystical alchemy his teacher taught him about.

Kuki, normally possessing the attention span of a flea, filed the short incident away in her mental cabinent, realizing something.

Her three new friends didn't seem like refugees at all. They were too...well, not crazy with grief for it. Something seemed familiar about this.

"So!" She said began as conversationally as possible without betraying all the excitement bubbling up in her. "Where you guys from! I mean, I don't think you're refugees."

"How d'ya figure?" Morte wondered.

"Oh, I just know that kind of thing sometimes. I mean, there's not that many people in Traverse Town and you guys, well, not to sound mean or anything, but you don't act like refugees."

"That's because we aren't," Calvin said, scratching the back of his head. "You could say we're tourists. We're from the Comic Kingdom." He thumbed in the general direction of the sky; it was a mainly pointless gesture, as Calvin had almost no idea in which direction his home lay.

For some reason, she nodded knowingly, while the dense blonde furrowed his brow in conversation. "Comic Kingdom, Comic Kingdom...why does that sound familiar?"

Kuki whispered something in his ear hurredly. His eyes snapped open, his jaw hanging agape.

Calvin raised an eyebrow at her reaction. What'd I say?

Hobbes tilted his head and frowned as she stepped over to Calvin, who loathed having to tilt his head up in order to look her in the eyes and glare at her. "What?" he said in as surly a tone as he could manage. Considering all his practice, that was saying a lot. Wally growled at his rude tone.

"Then..." She racked her mind, trying to figure out the best way to do this, and finally just said the first thing that came to mind. "Did the King send you?"

Calvin, who found himself idely wondering if his watch's sadly limited Transmogrifacation function could turn her into a sack of hammers for an expiriment, gaped at her, as did Hobbes; Morte stared too, but that was probably because it was his default expression.

"Did.." Hobbes said slowly.

"You say.." Morte said in as stunned a tone as possible.

"The King?!" The three of them all said at once.

"Wait," Morte said to himself. "Why do I care? I'm just the recording guy."

"Yes!" She said, nodding her head energetically and purposefully ignoring the talking skull.

Calvin closed his mouth and shook his head. "How do you know about him? Or us, for that matter?"

"It's a long sto-" Kuki started saying before Wally interrupted, looking close to panicky.

"What are you guys talkin' about?! Why does it matter? C'mon, we got get going!"

"What are you babbling about?" Calvin said.

"Yeah," Morte interjected. "'Fraid the alley's going to eat you?"

"No," he said, pointing behind them. "But they might!"

They all became aware of the way the shadows around them in the alley seemed to have...thickened. As if it were a presence of it's own.

Calvin and Hobbes scooted next to each other; Hobbes drew the shield from his back, the streetlight glittering off it's razor edge as Calvin pulled out his hammer and, making a point to hold it in his gloved hand. Kuki pulled out her gun again, while Wally pulled two similarily concealed gauntlets over his hands; they looked a lot like futuristic prosthetic arms, with the same look as his friend's gun. Morte clicked his teeth together and they seemed to change, lengthening into deeply glowing fangs.

They stood there for a moment, standing together in a small circle and waiting for the other anvil to drop.

Five pairs of yellow glowing eyes appeared in the darkness, staring at them with a impersonal malevolence.

"Alright," Calvin said anticipatingly, "a fight!"

Hobbes took a few cautious sniffs of the air; his eliptical eyes narrowed to slits as his fur stood up on end, bottle-brush tail waving around quickly. His breath issued out between his clenched teeth in a rough hiss.

These things...something was horribly wrong with them. Their smell was off somehow; they smelled strange, unlike anything he'd ever smelt before. But he just knew, somewhere deep in his mind, that it was something bad.

They crawled into the light, gazing at them with sick hunger.

"Heartless," Kuki said shortly, glaring at them angrily. Hobbes glanced at her, wondering why she said only that.

"Alright," Hobbes growled with a grin, his protective instincts rising like a cork rising on a blast of water, "let's go!"

Calvin started to clench his hand, fires flickering through his fingers when Hobbes wrenched his hand up. "Hey!"

"Are you crazy or just insane?!" Hobbes demanded. "You've got no idea how those things will react to your magic, let alone a Fire burst!"

"I know that!" Calvin snapped back. "Don't you think I already accounted for that?" He tossed the hammer into his gloved hand, the flickers of his gloves flowing up the shaft and encircling the striking edges, surronding them in a burning aura.

"A'right!" Wally yelled excitedly. "Here they come!" He clenched his fists, causing the pistonlike things on his shoulders and forearms to begin emitting a yellow ghostly energy from them, the dark underparts of his battle gauntlets shining with the same color. Kuki twisted a dial on the rear of her gun, changing the bolt flow from Stun to OBLITZERATE.

As the Shadows came at them, Calvin swung the firey bludgeon into the ground, making it glow yellow-red and ripple towards the Heartless like a giant mole was tunneling towards them; it suddenly bulged outwards, throwing a giant conical spike from the ground and at them. Red flares streamed from tiny cracks in the spike shortly before it suddenly exploded, throwing dozen of small rock-shrapnel at the Heartless, wreathed in flame; before they could run away from the burning shards of death, they shredded through them, rending them apart and harmlessly impacting against the wall.

Calvin shouldered the hammer, smirking confidently.

Morte and their two new friends gaped, staring at the admittingly small-scale destruction; the ground in front of Calvin was torn up, a large section of the pavement assimilated into the stonespike he'd formed.

"What...what was that?!" Morte asked, staring wider-eyed than usual at the display. "I've never seen magic like that!"

"Heh." Calvin around a little, giving them a view of the strange symbol on his hammer's striking ends. "Among other things, I'm an alchemist; one schooled in the science of the transmutation of matter; I can use an alchemic array to break something apart and build it back together as something else, as well as cause certain scientific reactions."

Everyone but Hobbes stared at him cluelessly. "HUH?!"

Calvin slapped his face. "Ugh...I know how to use circle arrays to turn objects and stuff into other objects and stuff?"

"Ooh," Morte said understandingly. "Why didn't you just say so?"

"Just shut up or you'll be the next thing I slam this thing into," Calvin threatened.

"Shuttin' up!"

"And...the shrapnel thing?" Wally inquired. He wasn't much of a science buff, but damn, that was cool.

"Easy. The array on the hammer is used for basic transmutations, like making stonespikes, for instance. My glove, on the other hand-" he held his arm out, still holding the hammer stiffly for emphasis. "-Is used to generate and control fire. It's a mixture of alchemy and some of my own work. By combining the two, I was able to cause the stonespike I transmuted to erupt into a hailstorm of flaming shards."

He was met with yet more silence. Hobbes knew what he was talking about, he just didn't care.

Calvin sighed. "I made the inside of the spike explode."

"Then why-"

"The threat still stands, bonehead!"

"See previous reply."

Hobbes tapped them on the shoulders. "Uh, guys? Fascinating as all this excessive exposition is, we got more Heartless."

A bunch of Soldiers were vaugely running at them.

"Alright! Some action!" The Australian ran at them, punching the first Soldier that was in hitting distance of him; his enhanced strength didn't just knock it down, like they expected, but smashed right through it's head, tearing apart it's body in the process. He spun around, catching a few Soldiers in the body, knocking them down. He grabbed one as he finished the spin, using it as a bludgeon to whack some other Soldiers before throwing it at the wall.

Kuki raised her gun. "Hey, wait for me!" She started shooting, each large blast easily vaporizing a Heartless. She did her fighting part with less dramatics then her partner did, but she did pretty well, espicially since the two made a fairly decent team; Wally knocked down a Soldier, picking it up by the leg and smacking around some other Soldiers so they flew into the air, soon followed by their brother and vaporized by Kuki's gunwork.

They wiped out the second wave in short order like that; Calvin and Hobbes watched them with interest, both of them coming to different conclusions.

Calvin thought that these Heartless things weren't flesh and blood, at least in the same way he and his company were. They were resilient enough, perhaps less so then them, but the way they discorpertated when killed, their strange way of moving and most of all their lack of an evidental muscular or skeletonal structure made him realize that the most like explanation for these...things were that their bodies were like darkness enfleshed, if you could call it that. Just dense solidified shadows in a number of advantageous shapes and sizes, hungering for something. That was why his stonespike shrapnel pierced them so easily; once they breached their 'skin' there was so little too...no, nothing to impede entry. And they certainly could handle a certain level of damage, a little thing like loss of vital parts or fluid loss no impedment to them. But hit them hard and/or fast enough, and they were cabbage boiled twice; unappealing and nothing at all.

Hobbes, on the other hand, realized something less pernitent to the mission as Calvin would see it. He watched Wally and Kuki's little group dynamic, as it were, and they had seemed like normal people. Well, normal as real people were, really. But, in their brief fight together, he saw a fluidity of motion, reflexive I-Watch-Your-Back-Vice-Versa movement and actions, and teamwork that he could barely follow, let alone predict. It wasn't that they were strategic geniuses; far from it. Nor were they inhumanly adept at fighting. It was the methoicalness of it all that surprised him. They knew this sort of thing like Calvin knew invention or he knew hunting of all stripes. It was something they did practically everyday, and had gotten so good they barely need to communicate verbally to get an idea across. Back on the Comic Kingdom, Hobbes never was quite sure why they'd been chosen for their prestigious posts, but their considerable fighting talent was only a small part of it. While he and Calvin had the advantage in terms of specialized training, these guys were simply much more experianced about it. He wondered exactly what sort of lives they'd lived to be this good at it.

Calvin and Hobbes awakened from their musing at the same time. "Darn it," Calvin said unhappily, "They're hogging all the fun!"

"What's the matter? Jealous?" Hobbes said snidely.

"Oh, shut up."

"C'mon," Morte muttered. "They're more comin', and I don't like keepin' monsters and ladies waitin'! Occasionally both."

"Ew!" Calvin said, sticking his toungue out.

"Too much information!" Hobbes yelled, sounding as if he were going to hack up a record-breaking hairball.

"Pike off!" With that charming last jibe, the three of them ran at the next wave.

"A'right!" Wally yelled happily, leaping off the rock Calvin had transmuted to squish that last Heartless. "Now this is fun!" He landed fist-first on an unwary Air Soldier, plummeting to the ground and hitting it in a puff of dark fog. He whirled around, catching the heads of two Soldiers.

"Oh, Wally.." Kuki sighed, blasting an Air Soldier that had just been about to dive bomb him.

He paused in his pounding of a misfortunate Shadow to look up at her. "What?"

"Nothing."

"Hey!" Hobbes shouted, throwing his shield like it was a discus. It spun across the alley, knocking down and occasionally killing the Heartless in it's path before reaching it's apex, flying upwards and sawing through an Air Soldier near Kuki, flying back to Hobbes as he caught it by the leather straps. "You missed one!"

"Okay," Wally admitted, flinging the Shadow away. "You guys are pretty good..."

"Pretty good?" Calvin yelled as he hurled a fireball at some Heartless while Hobbes jumped into the air, cut through an Air Soldier in his path, landed and rebounded off a wall, swung his shield so he landed on it as he hit the ground, surfing along the ground and smashing into several Heartless while aided by timely transmutations, knocking them back and causing a pileup that was swiftly oblitered with another fireball. "Pretty good, he says!"

All four of the fighters paused to look at the fifth fighter in the melee, who was rapidily chewing on a Soldier's arm; sure, he was doing it with magic glowing shapeshifting fangs, but that didn't really seem to change the fact that the Soldier only noticed after a few moments, flinging the annoying skull into a nearby trash can.

"I'm losing to a glorified shadow-thing and being out-fought by a buncha kids? Damn, I'm oughta practice!" The voice from the trash can complained.

"I don't see what everyone was warning us about," Calvin commented as his hammer smashed through an Air Soldier's body, hitting the ground and sending a wave of thin stonespike rushing at the ground at some Shadows; unlike his first one, these didn't leave the ground but merely protruded from it, looking like the floor had suddenly decided to warp itself upwards in pointy shapes. Which, technically speaking, is what has happened.

"Oh, no!" Hobbes complained as he passed through the shadow smoke and navigating his way through the spikes with a series of well-timed flips, spins and athletic jumps using the spikes as bars, tearing one off the ground and smashing a Heartless with it before tossing it aside. "Everytime you get overconfident, something bad happens!"

"Heads up!" Kuki noted, gesturing at a new variety of Heartless. "Red Nocturnes!"

Calvin gave it one look and laughed. "You call that scary?"

They were about the same size as a Shadow, hoving in midair at the same height as the Soldier's heads. Their roundish bodies resembled a red robe of sorts, the edges trailing away like the ill-defined borders of a flame and ending in a high wraparound collar; two sticklike clawed-arms poking out the bottom. They had a kind of conical wide-brimmed yellow hat on their head, the cone twisting in a zig-zag away. Their heads looked almost exactly like a Shadow's, only rounder, a bit cuter, and without antannae. There were about one for every two Soldiers, hovering seemingly harmlessly.

Calvin generated another fireball in his hand, lobbing the Fire spell at a Red Nocturne, ignoring the way the two other humans in the alley suddenly ran away from it.

The Fire spell streaked towards the Red Nocture, and shortly before it would hit it, the spell spread out in a front facing dome directly in front of the Nocture, as if there were an invisible shield in front of it. The flame dome stayed there long enough for Calvin to blink and say, "Uh oh." The fire reformed into a fireball, shooting back at them; the boy and tiger were blown back by it, almost slamming into the two behind them.

The other three glared at Calvin, causing the boy to laugh embarassingly, scratching the back of his head sheepishly. "Heh heh heh, oops?"

The same Red Nocturne, evidently getting an idea or what passed for one in the disputable mind of a Heartless, spun around in the air, flames revolving around it. It suddenly stopped, the ambient fire focusing itself into a bolt of flame that flew at them; it hit Hobbes' upraised shield, harmlessly discorporating.

"...Yeah," Hobbes said in a decidedly disgruntled tone. "Oops."

The various Heartless started rushing at them en masse, the Red Nocturnes surronded with a firey aura of somekind.

"...This is going to hurt." The talking skull said sardonically, momentarily popping out of his trash can before his cowardice told him to get in it and stay in it in a very stern tone.

The band of Heartless jumped at them, moving with an eerie synchronity your average theatre troupe would write inexcusably scathing reviewsports for and were probably surprised when a section of the wall next to them suddenly turned into a small wave of a rather grainy yellow-brown material that enclosed the oblivious Heartless, suddenly compressing and disentegrating them in a burst of whatever material they were made of.

"...Huh?" All four of them said.

"What the heck is this?" Calvin said, tentatively poking the material pooled around their collective feet. His finger sank into it, the crushed rock clinging to his hand. His eyes widened, recognizing what it was as he bent over and collected some of it in his hand. "What the...is this sand? Why'd that happen?"

"This ain't good!" Morte said, disappearing back into the trash can.

"Coward!" Hobbes yelled. He raised his shield as a Soldier jumped at them, spinning it's claws out in a circle. He swung his arm back to crack it's skull in, or the equivilant, anyway; his plan was derailed as some of the sand directly in front of the Heartless's path jumped up and met the Soldier's attack, the blockage too hard for the Soldier to penetrate, knocking it away before the sand shield fell back down.

"...Last time I checked, sand isn't supposed to do that. What is with this crazy town?" Hobbes said, scratching the side of his head. He frowned; something was off about the sand's smell. There was an old but strong scent he couldn't quite place; the closest he could come was pennies, but he knew that wasn't right.

An Air Soldier flew out of the sky, diving at them; almost intelligently, the sand flowed upwards in an arch, right at the Heartless and hit it dead-on, covering it's body and eyes and coating it's helipoles, thus weighting it sufficiantly to make it plummet to the ground hard. As the Air Soldier fell, the sand constricting its body and some of the crushed rock lying across the ground in the direction it had moved flowed together into a freakishly organic-looking tentacle of sand.

The nearly-muscular limb cracked like a whip, twirling around in a circle without giving the Air Soldier any time to react, the wind friction and sheer strength of the sand causing its 'wings' to snap and fade away when the tentacle released it in the middle of it's spin, throwing it into the dazed Soldier that attempted to attack them; the Air Soldier smacked into it and they both slid directly into a dumpster, denting it it hard enough to make it flip over and crush them underneath its considerable weight.

The sand retracted, flowing back into the rest of it. Several Air Soldiers, a few regular Soldiers and two or three Red Nocturnes jumped at them, the last kind shooting bolts of fire in tandem; they exploded harmlessly against the sand. An extremely long and thick whipcord of sand speared out and twisted through them, instantly impaling all of the attacking Heartless directly through their little heart emblems. They hung in midair momentarily, giving the four under them a good view...and then the cord suddenly split apart, violently tearing the Heartless apart, showering them with what passed for Heartless gore. Granted, it quickly dissolved and left no stains, but it was still damn creepy.

"...Great," Wally grumbled, finally recognizing the attack-defense method they were beholding. "Guy's always gotta be so dramatic and...what's that word? You know, kinda like scary but not so much? You know, when something freaks you out?"

Calvin considered it for a moment, applying his nearly hyperlexic talent for extraneanous verbiage to the conundrum he was confronted with. "Uh...Wait! I got it! It's-"

"Creepy," A dry, rasping and disturbingly calm voice issuing from directly behind them suggested.

Their slowly turning field of vision observed that standing directly behind them, close enough to have stabbed them in the back if so inclined, was a slightly-hunched person a little taller then Hobbes, almost completely covered in sand, a pair of unblinking solid light blue eyes ringed by darkness evident in the face hidden by the rapidly cascading sand.

The sand abruptly swirled off him as he stood up, revealing that it was actually a human teenager, about thirteen or so, though he seemed older than that for some reason.

He was also, in a disquieting manner, terrifying beyond all reason; a point Morte drove home by poking his head out, taking a tentative look at their visitor and immediately begining to scream. "AAAAAAGGGH! SAND DEMON!" The skull dropped down to the bottom of the trash, seeking to bury himself as deep down as possible.

Hobbes had never before thought that a simple look, without almost any alteration of the mouth or slightest inclination of the eyebrows could look ironic or at least vaugely amused, but the new...human had proven him wrong.

Whoever he was, he had an sandy kind of smell, and an odd sort of feeling. Perhaps it was the odd red kanji scarred onto the upper-left side of his forehead, or maybe it was the way he simply held himself. His hair, longish at the back, was remnisciant of a bristling desert plant, and was the color of dried blood. He had no eyebrows above his peculiar eyes, nor did he have a black pupil. Most of his skin was pale, except for a dark patch around his eyes; that area was completely black, making him look like a tanuki, the raccoon-dog native to Japan and similar countries. Strapped to his back by an encircling belt was a huge roughly hourglass-shaped gourd, larger at the top than at the bottom. It had a large open nozzle at an upper corner, small designs or kanji drawn on the urnlike container and surronded by squares; it was strapped to his back by a belt slung over his front and back, a metal protector with an hourglass-type shape under a square engraved on it and tied to the front of it. He was wearing a red-brown jacket with slightly folded sleeves ending past his elbows, the collar of the jacket looking like it was a wrap-around deal that clicked onto a clasp to make a kind of collar.

Under his jacket was a plain brownish-yellow shirt without sleeves, tucked into his dirt-brown pants; they had a round armor brace around his knee and were slightly puffy from the legs down, slightly covering his shoes, which were dark red high top shoes with a zipper and a buckle-strap securing it, otherwise appearing to be a single piece. The toes were exposed, and the soles appeared a bit thinner than normal. His long and thinly muscular arms were held defensively close to his body in a crossed position; his stony demeanor, combined with the marks on his eyes and impassive expression, gave the impression that he was peering out through the world from within an incredibly hard shell.

The sand flowed around and above the four of them, sealing into a sphere; as it did, Hobbes got a whiff of the sand. His nose wrinkled in recognition as he realized there was an old but extremely pungent smell of blood about it. Calvin began sputtering inchoherently at the display around him, randomly babbling the first things to come to mind. "What the...how the...who are you?!"

"...Gaara of the Desert," the Freaky New Guy said calmly as there were several shark shunk sounds outside, followed by the noise of Heartless discorporation, sounding about as emotional as your average hunk of rock.

He let his arms fall to his side; as he did so, the Sand Shield dissembled itself, falling back into the pile around them.

"Nice to see you again!" Kuki said cheerfully, brushing some sand off her sleeve but notably uncomfortable.

"Hey!" Calvin snapped. "We're in the middle of a life-or-death fight here! You can catch up later!"

He immediately started saying some more rude things, including how the girl should be restricted by law to use only plastic utensils when Gaara looked down at him and, internally clamping down on a need to make everyone in the known universe die as horrifically and needlessly bloody as possible, quietly said, "Shut up." causing Calvin to instantly quiet down.

"Shutting up!" Calvin said quickly.

"Oh good!" Morte said, poking his head out again. "We found a way to keep you quiet for more than five and a half seconds."

A bit of the sand trailed away from them, covering the open trash can completely and not incidentally soundproofing the waste disposal unit.

Gaara looked at his aquantices, scowling hatefully at the universe. His face twitched several times, as if...something was attempting to burrow it's way out.

KILL THEM! A voice that was not his own roared from within the depths of his psyche, it's psychic tone tinged with an insatiable bloodlust that could not be satisfied, only momentarily pleased. Smash them squash them cut them make them scream KILL THEM ALL!

"No." Gaara said curtly.

KILL THEM ALL! Break open their skulls, rip them apart and dance in their blood and LIVE! Split their skins, smash their bones and crush their hearts! Rip them apart and give all their lifeblood to the sand GIVE IT ALL TO ME!

"No."

You did once...let yourself loose again, release all your rage, all your pain...let them feel the HURT, and ley FEEL ALIIIIIVE!

"No." Gaara momentarily felt a burst of envy for Naruto. At least he never had to deal with voices in his head. At least, that was what he inferred from Naruto's discussion on the subject of his own internal demon.

A moment passed. Pretty please?

"I said no."

Aw man! Gaara's inner demon whined. You're no fun.

"No, what?" Wally wondered, unfamiliar with the ninja of the town for the most part. It was mainly a good thing too; a lot of them were crazy, and the ones that weren't out of their gourds were just plain weird.

Gaara glared at him. With the sand ninja, it was a fairly basic look. "I wasn't talking to you," he said coldly, suppresing both his and the demonic tanuki's profound desire to break the boy's head like a overripe melon off the top of a tall building. The sand around him, which had begun shifting threateningly towards Wally, ceased movement.

Hobbes glanced at the number of Heartless around them, mentally calculating their chances of getting out of this alley unscathed. He groaned in frustration.

"Don't whine," Gaara said.

"I'm not whining!" Hobbes whined. He paused, realizing his error. "No, really."

"If you say so. Stop whimpering."

"I'm not whimpering. I'm just slightly annoyed with the thought of our impending demise."

"We are not going to die," Gaara said impatiently. 'Specially not me! His personal demon added. If I gotta kick it, I'm taking you with me, spikehead!

Calvin raised a yellow eyebrow. "Oh? We're completely surronded by horrible monsters from who-knows-where, we've got next to no weapons, we've got nowhere to retreat to, and the only thing on our side is a ludicrously specialized geokinetic-no offense."

"None taken."

"-so what possible reason could you have for not being scared?!"

Gaara scowled. Given that his face's changes of expression were so slight it was almost impossible to tell them, all the warning signs were simply a small furrowing of the brow and his straight line of a mouth turning down at the corners.

Another Air Soldier flew towards them; Gaara held his hand out, facing it; Hobbes frowned, noticing a subtle vibration around his hand. Sand flew up and gathered together into a thick ball hovering in front of his palm before he fired it as a thick blast of cutting sand, smashing through the Heartless in short order. The fired sand crawling back to him of it's own accord as he lowered his hand.

As more Heartless descended upon them, Garra spread his arms and the sand mimicked his gesture, rising around him in a cloud. He clenched his fists and the sand formed and fired conical spikes that imploded on impact with the Heartless; even as they knocked them to the ground, the sand curled around it's many targets, trapping each in a neat little ball.

Gaara suddenly turned around, launching three coils of sand at a Air Soldier that was carrying a Soldier for a double assualt; one speared through the Air Soldier's chest, dividing sharply and roughly ripping it apart before it could react at all. The other two ensnared the left limbs of the Soldier, which struggled to rip out of the sand, it's limb starting to pull away from the sand; in response, Gaara had the sand layer over itself, preventing escape. The Soldier hit the ground and tried run away. Given the fact that it could only walk on one leg, there was very little chance it could get very far, but Gaara didn't even give it that; the sand roughly yanked it back to five feet in front of Gaara, holding it in the air. Gaara stared calmly at the sight of the Soldier struggling futilely to escape from it's prison.

Dispite himself, Calvin shuddered. Something about this guy was off. No...it was worse than that. Something about him...an aura of sorts that he gave off...was horribly wrong.

Ignoring everyone's obvious repulsion, he held his loose hand out and clenched it. The sand contracted, spewing a large amount of dark stuff out of loose cracks in the sand's layers as it virtually liquified the Heartless' trapped limbs, ripping them away as it did so. The Soldier fell to the ground, minus it's left limbs. It stood on it's remaining leg, almost immediately falling over due to lack of adequate support.

Gaara stared at it; he didn't glare at it the same way Calvin did, nor did he have pretty much everyone else's slightly disturbed look. He simply had that seemingly permanent emotionless expression. A toungue-shaped limb of sand shot out and squashed the Soldier, swiftly retreating back to him as all the sand Gaara had expended thus far crawled back to the pile around them.

"Gogo...Gau...Gaara!" Hobbes yelled, struggling with the exotic name, as he pointed at the mouth of the alley. "We got company!"

Gaara wordlessly turned to the small mob of Shadows that were swarming at them en masse. He swept an arm out dismissively. "Sand Coffin," Gaara said as an arm of sand swept out and covered them, rapidly expanding on itself and forming into a prison that looked like a tall elaborate pinecone standing on it's root.

"Sand Funeral."

The sand sculpture contracted with enough explosive compressue to crush a human body to nothing more than a pile of gore and a lot of blood; an enourmous quantity of sand and solidified shadows sprayed outwards, drenching them and the alley alley in whatever the Heartless had for blood as well as much of the sand he had used for the Sand Coffin. So too did the imprisoned ones in the sands balls; those too imploded in showers of darkness. As the bloodlike goo hit Gaara's face, his eyes widened as his expression, for the first time in their eye sight, changed his expression.

The corner of his mouth turned downwards in a grimace of pain, and a brief glimspe of terror. He grumbled something under his breath.

To Hobbes' keen ears, it sounded strangely like "Leave me alone.".

Whatever it was abruptly passed; he stood up, allowing his clenched fist fell to his side, and much of the sand around them flew upwards, combining into one stream, flowing back into his gourd.

A moment passed as they digested the scene they had just witnessed.

"Ugh," Calvin said at last. "I had sand in places I don't even like to think about."

"Really," Kuki said curiously. "Where?"

"I said I don't like to talk about them!"

"No you didn't."

"Shut up!"

Hobbes held his hands up, his upper lip curling at all the sand wedged inbetween his hairs. "Uh, think you can do something about the sand? If I take a wash cycle, the machine'll probably get gutted with grit."

Gaara said nothing, but extended a hand towards him; the sand around them acclumated into his loosely cupped hand, flowing inbetween his fingers and in the palm of his hand.

As the sandy lid floated away from the trash can imprisioning Morte, the irate skull popped out, glaring lividly at Gaara's gourd. He didn't give the Sand-nin himself any gesture of hostility, because personally, that guy scared the unliving hell out of him.

"'Bout time you got me outta that damn can! Though I was gonna choke on garbage, and trust me when I say that ain't easy, 'cause I ain't got any lungs!"

"Shut up," Gaara said impassively. Dispite the neutrality of his words, Morte understood the underlying tone.

"Dang," Calvin said admiringly. "I've been trying to have that power over him all day!"

"So," Hobbes said to Wally, plucking a disgruntled Morte out of the trash can, "...You guys know about the King, huh?"

He shrugged disinterestedly. "Guess so."

Kuki looked at them. "Hey! Shouldn't we...you know...tell them about the-"

Gaara interrupted. "Yes, and I'll tell them."

"Hey!" Wally said in an offended tone. "Why can't we tell 'em! We found 'em first!"

"I wasn't aware this was a contest," Gaara said drily. "And if you two try to get them there...they'll never get there."

"Hey!" Kuki and Wally said in an offended tone. "We don't get lost!"

"Yes, you do. I saw you two wander around in this district all night, trying to find a singular location that should be engraved upon your hearts by now."

"...Okay, weird way of talking aside," Wally said, "are ya saying you've been stalking us all night?!"

"Yes," the Sand ninja said as if it were obvious. "Wasn't that clear?"

The others stared at him.

"And besides," Gaara said, a way to defuse this situation before it got worse suddenly occuring to him. "There's an unusual influction of Heartless in this area. You two should stay here to eliminate them until the threat they pose is null."

"What'd he say?" Wally said cluelessly, oblivious to the way Calvin and Hobbes smacked their foreheads, Gaara and Morte rolling their eyes, and Kuki simply smiling slightly.

"He said that there's a lot of Heartless in this area, and we should kill them until there gone or at least almost all gone." Kuki said calmly, still having that small smile.

"Oh, right. Then why didn't he just say so?"

"He did," Calvin said in an annoyed tone. "You're just so unbelievingly dense that it went over your head like Tyrannosaurs in F-14s go over Hobbes'."

The dim-witted Australian digested that for about five minutes, unware of the others breaking off to beat up hungry Heartless while he thought.

He finally spoke up again. "I don't get it. Hey, he called me stupid!"

He whirled around to the girl. "I'm not stupid, am I?"

She stared at him helplessly, both unable to hurt his feelings or lie,a case of mental constipation similar to Wally's earlier one smacking her brain around.

Unfortunately for the boy's self-esteem, Gaara of the Desert was unhindered by such things and simply said, "Yes. Yes you are. I've spat out sand smarter than you."

"...Hey!"

"Hey," Hobbes said with an 'oh well' gesture. "If the sombereo fits, wear it."

Kuki and Wally stared at him. "What?" The girl said after a moment.

"Who wears sombereos anymore?" The boy said rudely.

"I like somberoes," Gaara said in a mildly irritated tone.

Me too! The One-Tailed Shukaku imprisoned within Gaara's body and very heart added, immediately breaking out into a drunken song Gaara believed was called El Cucharacha.

Potentially traumatizing memories of unnessacary brutality commited by Gaara threatened to raise themselves in the former KND operative's minds as they heard his tone.

Fortunately, Gaara, internally flinching at the twitchy looks on their faces, said, "Besides, I can get them there much faster than you can without a flight craft."

"...Right," Wally said dubiously.

"C'mon," Kuki said helpfully, realizing what Gaara was intending. "We can kill more Heartless!"

"Cool! A'right then, count me in!" The boy immediately ran off, causing the girl to lose balance and fall down.

"Hey, wait for me!" She cried, running off after him.

The remaining four watched them for a moment, the ninja shortly returning his attention to his three new charges. "That was strange. Let's go."

"Go where?" Morte said blankly.

The Sand-nin slid a cork seemingly fashioned out of sand out of his gourd's nozzle, holding it between his index and middle finger. "Hold on."

Sand gushed out of the urn, pooling around them as it flowed around their feet, pushing their legs over and making them fall down as it swiftly rose up and condensed, becoming a platform that they were abruptly squatting on.

The platform quivered suddenly and gently floated out away from the floor of the alley, flying over the rooftops and into the sky, carrying it's passengers along with it.

Calvin, Morte and Hobbes gawked as they watched the descending roofline go down as they flew up, Gaara effortlessly used the sand to carry them through the sky, showing no sign of stress from it.

"This is cool!" Calvin exclaimed loudly, watching the rapidly moving streets below them as they flew over it.

Gaara's shellike expression seemed to shift; that the only real way to describe the way his face becane slightly less neutral and vaugely noncomittal, as if his skin was of the same mineral substance that was his primary means of attack.

The platform flew through the sky fairly slowly, flying over the map of streets and disparate buildings that was Traverse Town; as they did, Calvin compiled a mental map of the town, intending to get it down sometime soon. Gaara's Sand Suspension platform was floating around the roof skyline, so as not to hit pedestrians, those in vehicles or town members with the ability to fly, but Calvin still saw well enough to get a vauge picture of it all.

As far as he could tell from their short time in the town, it was fairly big though with a dispoportionately small amount of inhabitants, apparently divided into several pie-slice districts surronded by walls that appeared to have grown out of the very ground they stood on, large gatedoors in the walls.

They gradually came to a large mansion of sorts, rising up in a manner than made it look a lot like a castle, flags with a large floral F hanging from the turrets and fluttering in the breeze. It sat on a large estate, and near it's wrought-iron gate was a large sign with big friendly letters that said, quite simply, Foster's Home. Some smartass had added For Any Poor Sucker in a scrawling blue print.

"Hey, you okay?" a vaugely familiar voice said, interrupting Zim's sleep filled with insensate oblivion interseped with short dreams of peculiar subject matter and stranger plot detail.

Zim grunted as his mind switched into a dimly alert state, distantly wondering why all he saw was enshrouded in impossible darkness; everything he beheld was virtually drenched in impenetrable shadows, rendering them utterly indistinguishable from anything else. He realized with a shock that his arms were also restrained, completely incapable of movement.

His mind ran through a half-dozen paranoid thoughts of what terrible things he was trapped in, most of them involving the fishing industry for some reason.

Then he thought his eyes hurt for some reason, and Zim felt a bit embarrased as he realized that his eyes were shut ludicrously tightly; he opened them, feeling futher sheepish as he noticed the cotton linen he'd apparently rolled around in during his troubled sleep.

He was in a small room of some kind, which seemed strangely empty. There was another bed across from him, two tables with a few chairs around it in the corner of the room, two windows at the end of the wall, and two doors; one at the far right from his perspective and one next to his bed.

Zim muttered to himself discordantly, trying to sort out the jagged shards of memory dancing around in his brain like tap-dancing spiders with bells on each hairy leg-joint.

He looked up, finally noticing that Gir was walking upside down on the ceiling, his arms swinging in tune with some internal song. He also appeared to be wearing a sombrero that was clinging to his head in blatant disregard of gravity; a moment later, it disentegrated into a cloud of tiny beautiful firefly, each wearing a tiny hat that read Drink At Moe's. This struck Zim as odd, but he couldn't figure out why, besides the way Gir was blessedly ignoring the transforming sombrero instead of chasing the pretty moving lights in a giggly rush.

Zim blinked, looking up at the robot; he seemed to be unusally cheerful for someone who'd mysterious disappeared in burst of darkness.

"Eh...fine," Zim said warily, deciding that Gir was most likely the one who'd spoken, seeing as he was the only one in the room. Then again, Zim imagined, there was also the possibility of inordinately cheerful ghosts; he discounted it, given that ghosts tended to avoid him for some reason. Maybe it was something in his shower wash; demons avoided Gir's onion stews for the same reason.

Gir dropped down, landing squarely on his chest, exerting an unusual amount of weight for Gir. He peered at Zim closely, as if he were an piece of buttered toast, the spread marmalade serving as a means of divining the future. Zim had the urge to back away a bit, hampered in this desire to act by the fairly obvious hindrance of being in a bed.

Gir suddenly stood up, agilely back-flipping off the bed and landing on a chair with perfect balance. "You look great!" He yelled loudly, pleased with this.

Zim was filled with concern for Gir. Not because of the yelling part(that was perfectly normal for Gir)but because Gir had just back-flipped. Gir had back-flipped. Gir lacked the physical agility to walk across a room without tripping on imaginary obstructions, let alone backflip.

"I liiiiiiiiike this place!" Gir declared loudly. "It good 'n bright!" He giggled loudly, the small laughter giving way to a full-fledged joyful scream that caused him to topple off Zim and the bed.

Gir hopped on the foot of the bed, unaware that his head had been twisted backwards. Since he had a creepily flexible neck joint, it didn't really matter, but it was still somewhat odd. Realizing the problem, the robot twisted his head back around, smiling at Zim.

"Awwww, you don't look so good," Gir said sympathetically.

"Says, you, Gir," Zim muttered

Gir suddenly looked depressed, sadly waving to him as Zim felt a sharp rapping on the head. "Get it right! My name's not Gir! I'm Naruto Uzumaki!"

"Eh?" Zim said cluelessly as the unhappy 'robot' suddenly faded away, a human crouching against the wall, somehow hanging against it with his feet alone. It appeared to be a thirteen-year-old human with a yellow-orange jacket-pants combo, spikey blonde hair, a vulpine kind of face, and a weird set of goggles with the hint of some kind of plate behind them, with a leaf symbol ingraved into it.

Naruto squinted his eyes, apparently thinking about something. "I thought you said you were going to go easy on him; It looks like you gave him a concussion or something!"

Spike, who was sitting in the corner chair, smirked. "It's not my fault if the little sod can't take a little tap."

"Hey!" Zim said in an offended tone. "What does that-HEY! Where's my Keyblade?!"

Naruto rolled his eyes with a weirdly big smile, gesturing to the door near them, against which the toylike weapon was lying. "Oh, that. We had to get rid of it to shake off those creatures; that's how you found you, ya know."

"Don't think it'll work for long, though." Spike said pessimistically.

He picked up the Keyblade, holding it up. It lit up and vanished, reappearing in Zim's hand in a flash of light, surprising him yet again.

Naruto shrugged. "Well, you've got to work with what you got."

Zim's eye twitched. "WHAT'S GOING ON HERE?!"

Spike sighed. "Cool it, bug boy. Take it from me; you never get anywhere raging about."

Zim looked as if he were about to fly into a rage when he sighed, leaning against the bedframe and crossing his legs Native American-style. "Tell me about it...fine. What is the nature of the problem?"

"Well...we don't really know that ourselves," Naruto said. "Buuuut! That thing's the key to everything!" He pointed at the Keyblade in Zim's hand for emphasis.

Zim regarded the Kingdom Key with interest.

"Okay," Gaara said in the small room that he, Calvin, Hobbes and Morte had taken on account of there was no one else there. It was small, but sufficiant for their purposes. He was sitting on the bed cross-legged style with his arms folding across his lap in a manner eerily similar to the alien in the next room. Morte was positioned on the table like a overly realistic Shakspearean stage-prop, and Calvin and Hobbes were simply sitting on two chairs. Calvin had turning it around and was sitting against it's back rest for some reason, while Hobbes had opted to leave it as is. "You two are clearly aware that there are are many other worlds besides this one and the one from which you originated."

Hobbes nodded, frowning. "Yeah, but that's supposed to be an unobservable truth. Very few worlds know about any others; it's practically an universal thing."

"That's because they've never been connected," Gaara said in his rasping voice. "Until the Heartless came."

Calvin's eye widened, raising his head up. "You mean those things we fought earlier?"

Gaara nodded. "Precisely. And do not disbelieve me when I say that they are worse then what you saw.

"Much, much worse."

"'Heartless'?" Zim said. It was an odd term, but it seemed somehow right. There had certainly been no capacity for mercy or anything approaching the concept of 'Be friendly to everyone,' that the Tallest Zhrog had emphasized before he flew his ship into a star in a misguided attempt to hug it; the closest thing they had to mercy was the ability to kill their victims quickly.

"Come on, the things that attacked you! You really tossed him for a loop, Spike," Naruto blathered on.

Ignoring the ninja's yabbering, Spike continued his explaination, pacing around the room, relentlessly running his hands over each other and not looking particularily aware of it. "We don't really understand what they are, but 's pretty obvious that they're the darkness in a living being's heart incarnate. We know that they've no hearts or souls, and they're attracted by the darkness in the heart. And there's plenty of that to go around to give the little buggers a full-on buffet."

"Heart?" Zim said blankly.

"Some people call it a person's spirit or something," Naruto said helpfully.

"Right, like the animating force," Spike added. Zim nodded to show he understood. Sort of.

"Say," Naruto said, "You ever heard of a guy named Hohenheim of Light?"

Zim raised an eyeridge. "Eh?"

Spike sighed. "Guess that's a no, then."

"Hohenheim?" Calvin said slowly. It was a curiously exotic name, perhaps Germanic or something European. Maybe Atlantean.

"Yes, Hohenheim of Light," Gaara said. "An extradinarily powerful alchemist from Ametris. From what we understand, he studied the Heartless shortly before his world was destroyed. Their strengths, their weaknesses, what he understood of their origins...he put it down in an extremely detailed document we call Hohenheim's Report."

"Well, that's convienient," Calvin said, unaware that he had just blundered into a perfect case for contraviant exposition. "Just let me take a look at it and we'll just-"

Gaara held up his hand to silence him, shaking his head slowly. "It won't be that easy. Hohenheim's Report was scattered everywhere in the dissolution of the world. There's no telling where the pages ended up. And he mostly likely wrote them in code."

"'Scattered'?" Hobbes questioned. "To where?"

"To other worlds." Gaara said, an unspoken duh in his words. "Where else would they go?"

"So, the reports are scattered. Then, why hasn't there been a cohesive attempt to find them?" Calvin wondered.

"There have been several, but they've all failed. We have reason to believe that some other force is collecting them."

Hobbes grinned and smacked his open palm with a fist. "Now I get it; that's why the King left! To find them as quickly as possible!"

Gaara nodded slowly. "Yes; that's what we thought."

"Okay then," Morte said carefully, "We just gotta find the pages of the report and-"

"The key! We need that too!" Calvin interjected, feeling a bit left out.

"Yes," Gaara said slowly. "The Keyblade."

"So," Zim said, holding the Keyblade up over his head. "This is the key? To...stopping the Heartless?"

"Yup!" Naruto said. "And pretty much everything else, I'm thinkin'."

"The Heartless are terrified of it's power; I think. Bloody buggers don't like it either way. But at the same time, they're attracted to your strength of heart: and that's why they'll never stop hunting you down, no matter what. Reckon your heart's like a bloody feast to them. No pun intended." Spike said.

"So?" Zim said pointedly.

"The Keyblade's a real burden, Zim." Naruto said. "And trust me when I say I know all about that sort of thing. The Keyblade chooses it's master, and it picked you. Probably one of those fate type things."

Spike clapped his hands sarcastically. "So congrats, lime-man: you're stuck with it. Until you die anyway. Then some other poor sod'll get hitched with it, we assume."

Zim rubbed his forehead. "How'd this happen? I remember being at-"

His eyes widened.

"Wait! What happened to my friends!?"

"Ya mean you haven't seem them since you got here?" Spike asked, looking surprised.

Zim looked at him with half-lidded eyes. "If I'd found them already, do you think I'd be talking with you two about where they could be?"

"I'll take that as a no." Naruto said. "But if they're not here, they've probably ended up on other worlds."

Zim grinned at his words. Finally...familiar territory.

Spike stopped in front of Zim, eyeing his weapon. "Hey, I gotta know: you know any sword-type stuff before I lost me temper and tried to whack you good?"

"Uh..." Zim glanced at the Keyblade momentarily. "You could say that."

"Huh. That's news ta me."

"'Specially since Zim beat you so bad," Naruto commented.

"Shaddup!"

"Well," Zim said slowly, "Why? Why is it important for you to know if I can fight?"

"So you can fight the Heartless!" Naruto said cheerfully. "Ready to go forth and fight a onslaught of horrible monsters that'll jump at you the moment you step outside to rip you limb from limb and feast on your heart?!"

Zim looked away from the slowly turning blades on the ceiling fan that had distracted him. "Did you say something?"

Everyone fell flat on their faces from sheer shock.

"Why does everyone do that?" Zim wondered. "Anyway, I fear nothing!" He ran to a random window. "YOU HEAR ME, HEARTLESS!? NOTHING!"

Naruto rolled to his feet, grinning at Spike. "I like this guy! He reminds me of...me!"

"God save us all," Spike said melodramatically.

"Hey," he added. "I think one of the other's should've found the other visitors by now."

"C'mon, c'mon," Naruto said insistently. "Let's go already!"

"Calm down," Spike said. "Not like they're coming down on us as we speak."

A Shadow wandered into the room, looking around blankly.

Zim, Spike and Naruto stared at it.

"...I'm not sure if I should feel worried that they are hunting me like this, or insulted that it's just this one." Zim said after a moment.

"Who wants to beat the hell out of them? Everyone? Okay, go already!" Spike yelled.

Naruto jumped up and made several odd hand gestures, looking like some sort of complicated version of a secret order's handshake, as his body began emitting a strange airy sort of energy at the outline of his body. He loudly announced, "Multi-Shadow Clone Jutsu!".

Five smoke clouds suddenly popped up right by him, fading away to reveal five exact duplicates of the Leaf ninja. As Zim started, sheer surprise and complete shock painted on his face like ethically offensive graffiti in Los Angeles, all four of them rushed at the Heartless: one slid under it's legs, knocking it down. Another clone handspring-kicked it up into the air, a third somersaulting off the other two's shoulders and slamming a foot into it's midbody, sending the Shadow smashing through a window.

"Any second now, they gonna come outta the woodworks? Thought Foster fixed the damn security system!" Spike complained loudly. "Oy, greenie! Get ready to-" Zim pushed him aside, leaping through the window, directly after the Heartless.

Spike stared after him for a moment. "Midget's got guts. Gotta give 'em that."

Gaara paused, about to elucidate to them the precise nature of the town. He turned sideways, towards the door in the wall, his eyebrowless eyes narrowing in suspicion.

"What is it?" Calvin wondered as he stopped by the door, having been pacing around. "Ya sense somethin'?"

The door suddenly slammed open, smashing Calvin into the wall; an unfamiliar yet vaguely vulpine face looking considerably stressed out appeared in the doorway, surronded by three identical clones of himself, each holding a massive shruiken in their right hands. "GAARA! THEY'RE HERE!"

"The cookie-people?"

"No, Heartless!"

Gaara started, jumping to his feet with an inhuman alacrity. His eyes betrayed a look of surprise and fear, though not for himself, as he plucked the cork out of his gourd, crushing it in his fist and reducing it to its component sand; sand started streaming out of the open nozzle, following after him as he started running off after the Naruto clones.

Calvin slowly slid out of the slight impression he'd made in the wall, his eyes bugged out and the rest of his face making a passable imitation for a fish that was only vaugely aware that it was being repeatedly slapped into the face of a living furnace.

The illusion of a tranquil and happy park-type place was shattered when the Shadow was flung out of a window, making a Shadow-sized impression in the window.

Then Zim jumped out after it, leaving another impression and this one with the spider-legs beginging to unfurl. He extended them out as they caught the wall, slowing him down enough for him to drop to the ground with no trouble, leaving thin rifts in the wall.

Then Spike jumped out, smashing what was left of the mortally wounded window, landing on the ground without breaking his legs or harming himself at all in blantant disregard of the laws of physics. Of course, he happened to be a supposedly immortal living corpse that fed on blood, so that was the least of his breaches of the laws of nature.

He turned around, saw the Shadow run at him, and drew his sword just as Zim slid to the ground, aided by his spider-legs, rolled to his feet and cut the Shadow in half.

"Not bad," Spike said in a impressed tone, "But somethin's weird. Too many of them in one area; behavior's coherent too. That ain't right. Generally it's like fighting a mob instead of a militia."

He raised his sword straight up, a Soldier that had been flung at him by an Air Soldier cutting itself in half on the blade. Spike backflipped, landing on the ground as the Air Soldier split apart and he tapped his black-stained sword against the grass, wiping it off on the nice clean grass.

Several Soldiers teleported in on the midair portal the Heartless seemed to use, clinking menacingly. Spike growled angrily, pointing his sword at him. "Perfect, just what we need. More gratutitous guests."

He made to swing his sword at them when the grass swirled; the ground suddenly rose up, the dirt and soil transformed into sand. Large spikes sprouted out of it, impaling the Heartless in short order.

Spike scowled and turned around at something behind Zim. "Now what did I just say?" he said good-naturedly. "I swear, it's like Rabble-rousers or coming out of the woodwork too."

"There's something guiding their actions," A new voce said slowly; Zim looked up and noticing a new red-haired guy directly above him, standing on the other side of a tree branch as if his personal gravitational polarity had reversed itself. His red sandals didn't appear to have any kind of climbing tool on their underside, he was just standing on the branch, looking down at them.

"Hey, Sand Reaper," Spike said. "What makes you say that?"

Gaara scowled at him momentarily, shortly saying, "My name is Gaara," before he turned around on the tree branch, gesturing towards several Red Nocturnes with Soldiers rushing at them; the Nocturnes morphed into smoky shapes and coleased around a hand on each Soldier, becoming a black head splotched with dark red on the front, the insides of their large gaping fanglike mouths lit with some burning internal furnace, their 'bodies' merging bulkily with the wrists of the Soldier's they were attached to.

The various Soldiers thrust their fists at them, the transfigured Nocture's jaws opening wide as their inner fire brightened and they spat out a large amount of fireballs at them.

Sand streamed out of the nozzle of the urnlike thing strapped to Gaara's back, flowing into the path of the fireballs and extinguishing them. The small wave of sand rushed at the Heartless, covering them and congealing into a sphere. Parts of it bulged rapidly, glowing bright red before turning it's usual brown-yellow just as quickly, suddenly contracting violently, the squirming masses within pulped out in black jets. Zim looked on, much impressed by the new guy's abilities.

Gaara dropped down to the ground, gathering the sand around him as he looked at Zim. "So...you are the Keybearer."

"Yes, I am!" Zim said proudly, thrusting said weapon into the ground.

Gaara cocked his head, wondering about him. "...What is your name?"

"I am Zim! DO NOT FORGET MY NAME!...Because, seriously, I hate it when people do that."

Gaara looked at him for a milisecond more, indicating he heard and understood him. "There must be a commanding one somewhere around here." The Sand-nin said, looking out over the estate.

"I got it," Spike said, manifasting the face of his inner demon much as Gaara, in a sense, always did. "Kill the big one, and the little ones is easy pickings. Might even just portal out." Zim's eyes widened as he said so, a wonderful, brilliant, bright plan forming in his head.

Gaara nodded. "Precisely. They seem to be concentrated in the area near the belltower in this district-"

"-You mean the one that hasn't been workin'?"

"Yes. Don't interrupt me." Gaara paused, looking around in confusion. "Wait a moment...where's the Keybearer?"

"Is all the sand blinding ya? He's-" Spike looked around, finally noticing that Zim was nowhere in sight. "...not here at all, is he?"

"No." Gaara made no visible expression, but he cupped his hands together, sand flowing into his hands. A moment later, he opened it and what appeared to be an disembodied eyeball floated out of it.

Spike gave him a disturbed look as Gaara silently allow his 'third eye' to float away into the distance.

Now we at least have an oppertunity to track him down, Gaara thought to himself. He finally noticed Spike's look. "What?"

"...You are one seriously creepy kid."

"Yes," Gaara said thoughtfully. "I am. Does that disturb you?"

"Yes," Spike said flatly.

"I don't care."

"Belltower, belltower...where's the belltower?!" Zim demanded as he ran around the district, hurredly searching for the controlling Heartless, confident he could defeat it by himself. I killed a Darkside by myself, didn't I?

He paused, looking around and frowning to himself as he spun around and killed several Soldiers. "I know I've been here before!"

He'd been dashing around the town, or at least the portion of it he was currently confined to, looking for the landmark Spike had mentioned, intent on killing the Heartless for no other reason than it sounded interesting to do. That, and maybe his conscience wasn't as deeply buried as it used to be.

He, of course, neglected to consider that weird could mean potentially anything to the people here. Architecture varied in different towns in the same area, let alone different worlds.

He wandered around like that for a few minutes, running around almost randomly, occasionally pausing to kill whatever Heartless that were currently pursuing him, until he wound up in a small place mostly penned in by four tall stone walls, making it roughly square-shaped. A short stairway led up to higher ground, in the distance was a curved building with a definite mechanic's motiff to it. Going out of it's side and apparently built into that wall was some copper-colored tubing that split off, one going into another building, the other going directly underground. More significantly, in the exposed upper level, which looked more like a roof with another roof over it, he saw a large reflective bell.

"That's it! The bell!" Zim yelled, pointing at it dramatically.

He paused. "Soooo, now what do I look for?" he muttered rheotorically to himself.

Zim continued walking and paused. He heard...yelling?

He looked up, at a nearby balcony. He couldn't see the people in it very well, but he could definitely hear them. And they were fighting Heartless. A lot of Heartless.

"Where are all these things coming from!?" A loud and rude voice yelled, sounding around Dib's age and male.

"How should I know?" A second voice replied, it's tone replete with fear and panic. It sound older than the first voice, a little deeper and with an odd rumbling timbre to it.

"I told ya we shoulda ran!" A third voice complained, sounding like the voice of a full-grown human male. It was a voice that probably had a vocabulary full of single-entrendes, not to mention a slight wheedling tone. It didn't sound intentional, just part of the voice.

"Coward!" The first two voice yelled back to it.

"Like to see you guys fight off a bunch of creepy monsters with nothin' but your teeth!" the third voice countered. "And now we're going to die!"

"We're not going to die, Morte." The first voice said flatly, full of the kind of confidence that was pretty much innate to a person, regardless of actual ability.

The third voice, evidently Morte, snorted. "We're facing down, what, fifteen different Heartless on this tiny balcony? What's not to be afraid of? Oh yeah, the Heartless! Calvin? Hobbes? I'd like to say it's been fun knowin' ya...but then I'd be lying."

"And that's new to you, is it?" The second voice said scathingly.

"Let's get 'em!" The first one yelled.

From the balcony, there was a responding burst of flame, sending three people flying out the room and directly onto the slow-to-react Zim.

They hit each other hard, knocking Zim to the ground. They lay there for a minute, moaning dizzily.

"Smooth move, genius," the tiger growled.

"Shut up," Calvin muttered.

Then Calvin and Hobbes opened their eyes, suddenly seeing the strange weapon that Zim was holding in his outstretched hand directly in front of them. "The key!"

Then Morte bounced off Calvin, Hobbes and Zim's heads in alphebetical order.

"Ow!"

"Oof!"

"Pain!"

Morte tried to grin apologetically, settling for a sheepish turn of the eyes. "Eh heh heh, guess I spoke too soon. Oh look, it's the guy." he added, noticing Zim.

Calvin and Hobbes rolled off the groaning Irken, helping him to his feet. "You alright?" Hobbes asked.

"Been better," Zim muttered.

The ground started to quake.

"Oh," Calvin said unhappily. "Why does that not sound good?"

"Because rumblings in a town known for evil shadow monsters is very rarely a good thing?" Zim suggested.

"...Good point."

Strange black-blue octagonal plates appeared over the walls, visible for a moment and then abruptly vanished from sight. They were still there, made obvious when Morte attempted to flee and knocked right into them, the plates momentarily reappearing as he bounced off them and landed squarely at the other's feet.

"Bleege blaggel breegull," the skull muttered dazedly as alien, tiger and kid looked at each other with a mutual expression of unease.

That unease was justified when a far-off dark purple light flashed, briefly lighting up the area without shedding light; that appeared to be a paradox, but it was true. It was as if it had caused the darkness in the area to change in substance somewhat, becoming thinner and revealing what was there without receding.

Moments later, five huge pieces of dark blue and purple armor big enough for a being ten times their size hit the ground around them, briefly surronding them.

At their left and right were two large arm pieces ending in spiked gauntlets. The dark blue armor that would cover the biceps were rounded, covering most of it down to the elbow, the reverse of it purple and evidently sliding underneath the overlying dark blue bicep piece. The elbow had a loose looking piece of two black metal bands, the elbow covering with a rounded spiked cap a purple color. The forearms were slightly bigger then the upper arms, being a mostly uniform dark blue bracerlike piece except for the purple armor on the bottom half of the arm. The bracer and lower armor spiraled into the flexible wrist bands, connecting into the armored hand portion. The gauntlets were twice as wide as the rest of it, the back of the hand covered with three large straight pieces of dark blue plates, each curving around the large disclike knuckles and dark purple lining between the plates. The palms were simple in form, basically just flexible bands mirroring the ones on the back of the hand. The three fingers were huge jointed conical purple claws jutting out from just in front of the knuckles, the areas under them a black the same as any Shadow's. The thumb was similar, protruding from an identical knuckle-joint like a human's would, only slightly larger then the other claws. Strangely, the arm armor had no shoulder; the area directly above the bicep terminated in a round disc, from which protruded a spike cracking with dark energy.

At cross angles from them were two leg pieces, similar in basic design and color scheme to the arms. The fronts of the legs were bulkier and dark blue, more so on the lower leg, the backs of them a purple color. The knee was covered by a cap with three spikes in a triangular pattern, two band covering the black surface of whatever was underneath the armor. Around the foot was a rippled armor piece, a hingelike disc where the ankles would be. The feet, protruding through the footpiece, looked nothing like feet but resembled a pair of huge purple slightly pointed clamps tightly clicked together, the ridges in the middle looking like menacing fanglike lines extending all the way under the protective piece on the foot. The bottoms of the clamps were flat, indicating they could be used as feet. There was no hip-joint; where it should have been, there was only a flat disc with a sparking needle at the center.

Directly in front of them was a huge piece of armor that would probably serve as a bodypiece; it was roughly cast in the shape of a humanoid body, dark blue at the sides and with a thick purple round arch with two large dark-blue-on-purple colored pieces of armor with hollow points in them hanging over the edges at the top, a hollow space between them. The bottom had an purple armored-waist, two bulky hip-guards where hips would be, similar to the shoulders in color and with hollow points in them. On the front of it, where the breastplate would be if it didn't look like a single piece, there was an emblem resembling a heart, black with red outlines, two red barbed-wires going through the lower part of the heart in a rough X-shape. The bottom of the heart extended into a tail of sorts, ending in a tri-spaded shape.

"That's...big." Calvin noted with some interest. He nudged Morte with his foot; the unresponsive skull simply rolled against the ground, clearly unconscious. Grunting to himself, the technologist tossed him into an unobstrusive hole in the wall.

"Feh." Zim said confidently. "The Darkside I fought by myself was bigger."

The armor pieces shook quickly, the air around them rippling across the ground shortly. The body piece suddenly flew into the air, the other pieces rapidly assembling around it and clicking into place. One after another, the needle points of the arms and legs slid into the hollows of the shoulder and hip guards, the pieces quaking as if afflicted with seizures, possibly caused by the dark energies within the armor. It abruptly dropped into the ground on it's feet, slowly loosening it's large hands and standing up straight. A helmet suddenly popped out between the shoulders with a quick clack sound; it was round, with a thick pivot-neck. The back of it was purple with a single large spike on the top of the head, with a dark blue metal faceplate on the front, completely covering it's face. It was attached to the helmet via two hinge-discs on the sides with a large spike extending from each side. The faceplate was thick and almost completely solid, with five small open holes on it; they were arranged in two rows: an upper row of three dots, the lower in two dots positioned just below the spaces to the left and right of the middle upper dot. The dots showed nothing, only blackness. Maybe it's eyes were closed, if the Heartless really had any.

At first Hobbes had thought it might have been some kind of armor for the Heartless to crowd into, boosting their power considerably. But he now realized that it wasn't a construct to empower the Heartless, it was a Heartless.

And a pretty damn strong looking one, too. Or at least Zim thought so. It wasn't anything like a Darkside, but it still seemed incredibly tough. Then again, it was a walking suit of armor or close to it.

The fully-assembled Heartless raised itself to it's full height of eighteen feet, flexing it's powerful hands. It's arms pumped freely with a fluity of motion that suggested that it's previously detached limbs weren't likely to fall off anytime soon; whatever was connecting it's limbs were no doubt as secure as the bones and sinew of those before it. Well, most of them, anyway.

It looked down on them, or at least inclined its helmet as best it could, perhaps percieving them with senses weirder then simple eyesight. It raised a foot, slamming it to the ground. It followed with the other one.

"I don't suppose it looks peaceful to you?" Hobbes wondered to Zim. "Or at least less inclined to kill us immediately.

"I don't know," The Irken replied. "It's armor, so'd you think it'd be defensive or at least somwhat passive."

"It is a Heartless," Morte pointed out. "And I dunno 'bout you guys, but I'm pretty damn sure that qualifies it as a monster, and in my experience, monsters are only gen'rally interested in eating things. Mostly meat things like you guys."

The Guard Armor jumped into the air, slamming down on the ground.

"Then again, I guess it might be partial to my heart." The skull amended.

"Then they're getting desperate," Calvin joked.

"Hey, look over there!" Hobbes said, pointing at the rooftops and nearby walkways on the buildings.

They were crowed with some of the various people they'd met so far today; Spike was perched on a rooftop, Naruto and Gaara were standing with Bloo, Jarod, and four young humans that had happened to run into Naruto on the way: Omi, Clay, Kimiko and Raimundo, all on a big walkway.

"Who are all these people?" Zim wondered. "And how'd they find us?!"

"Uh," Morte said, looking at a disembodied eyeball hovering around them, disturbing the majority of the people there. "Maybe that?"

"Ew," Bloo said with obvious distaste. "That's just...ew!"

Gaara reached out and crushed it back into sand, allowing it to pour back into his gourd.

Clay winced. "Oh man, I've seen some nasty things in my day, but that is just not right!"

"The kung-fu cowboy who generally has a tiny dragon living in his hat is talking about weird things?" Jarod pointed out.

"A'right, a'right."

"Watch out you guys! That's a Guard Armor!" Raimundo yelled down at Calvin, Hobbes, Zim and Morte.

"A what?" The four below asked cluelessly.

"A Guard Armor, a living(well, I suppose 'living' isn't the right word,)armored suit" Omi yelled. "It is a strong variety of Heartless that specializes in defensive tactics! It should shortly begin attacking you at what it percieves to be an initial provocation!"

Naruto and Morte stared blankly at him. "Uhhmm...could you try saying that again?" Naruto asked. "In real words?"

"But! I did utilize proper linguistics! I speak British perfectly!"

"That's English," Bloo corrected. "British people talk like this." He put on an exaggerated Cockney accent, crouching a little, half-closing his eyes and pulling on a pair of bad teeth from somewhere. "Oy! All you lot! Where's the loo! I gorra go real-leah arful! And ey, you seen them there kings! Dat ain't right! Ya can't expect to wield su-preme executive power 'cause some bird in a puddle threw a sword at ya and some wanker heard abit it and wants ta do dat too! Not for us Brits! Yeah, we don't do t'ings loike dat!"

"Even better!" Omi replied cheerfully as Spike began pounding the imaginary friend, loudly yelling to the effect that real British people didn't refer to themselves as Brits and that wasn't how they talk anyway.

"I think what Omi's trying to say is that that Guard Armor over there relies on it's strong defense against it's enemies and will probably attack as soon as it senses a threat." Jarod said helpfully. "He also said it's a living suit of armor. Heh, the enemies attacking us with animated suits of armor. Now Al's going to feel unoriginal."

"Are you getting all this?" Gaara asked the guys down there.

"Yeah, sure." Hobbes said.

"Pretty much!" Calvin yelled.

"Understood," Zim added. "Except for that last part. Leave out further references to people we don't know!"

"You guys going to die." Morte predicted, momentarily popping out of his hole.

"Hey!" He said in response to the other's dirty looks. "That thing's bigger than you, stronger than you, and hey; you're not exactly the toughest things on the block, y'know."

Hobbes readied his shield. "You'd be surprised. And just so you know, if we die, you die."

"No I don't," Morte pointed out. "I'm already dead."

"It could still eat your heart," Zim said, grinning malevolently at Morte. "And turn you into a Heartless."

Morte sagged. "Damn, I was hoping you'd guys forget."

"HEY!" Naruto yelled, jumping on the walkway's stone rail. "Why aren't we already down there helping them? We can't just let them get eaten! What are we doing wasting time talking about it!?"

"Get down from there, you idiot!" Spike yelled, lunging at Naruto as the ninja flipped up, the miss sending him over the wall before Naruto landed back on the stone, grabbed his leg and dropped him on the walkway.

"No!" Naruto said defiantly. "We have to do something, not stand around like this!"

"Naruto!" Jarod said. "We can't help them!"

The human stared at him, a disbelieving look in his eyes. "I don't believe it! Of all people, you'd just let them die like this?!" He angrily turned away from them, crouching in preparation for a leap. "Fine! If you guys want to just sit here like a bunch of cowards, then that's your own buisiness!" He jumped up, ignoring Omi's protesting cries, and was unsurprisingly bounced of the Dark Shield covering the area the Heartless and it's apparent victims were ensclosed in, landing back on that platform as everyone moved aside to let him land on the hard wood. "Ow!"

"Maybe I should've been clearer. I meant that we can't help them. This force field is in the way." Jarod informed the dazed ninja.

"...Got it," Naruto muttered, rubbing his head. "But...this is stupid..."

"No, it's not." Gaara claimed, looking over at the patient-seeming Heartless and the tense four in front of it.

Were this a anime-influenced cartoon or comic, everyone's comical voice balloon would have had a single question mark, the balloons then congealing into a single big balloon with an equally large question mark. But it wasn't, so there was a general air of confusion from almost everyone, directed at the sand ninja.

"Uh, mind running that by us again?" Bloo asked, covered in bumps and bandages, Spike still looming over him threateningly.

"Yeah," Kimiko said. "I don't quite follow."

"The one with the pak and strange fashion sense has the Keyblade, and the others were sent by the King of the Comic Kingdom." Gaara replied, still staring at the four below with a strange intensity.

"Yeah," Clay said. "I get where he's coming from."

"Yeah," Bloo said, "But...c'mon, look at them! They don't stand a chance against that Guard Armor!"

Naruto got back up, standing between Gaara and Bloo. "Really? Well, sometimes things are more than they appear. Sometimes they have something that no one could guess just by looking or talking to them."

Bloo rolled his eyes. "Sure they do. How would you guys know about something like that?"

Gaara and Naruto shared a brief but meaningful look.

"Trust me," Naruto said. "We know about that kind of thing really well." Jarod, knowing more than the others did about Gaara and Naruto's sad condition, winced at Bloo's thoughtlessness.

Dojo jumped out of Clay's hat, coiling around the rail. "Yeah, things come in small packages all the time! Like, say, yours truly!"

"You mean yours truly came in a small package," Spike said dryly. "Now it's just a small package."

Dojo fell to the ground, curling into a little ball. "You don't have to be so obvious about it!"

Kimiko and Naruto simultaeneously kicked Spike in the legs, knocking him to the ground as he yelled loudly. "Don't talk to him like that!" Naruto yelled, pointing at him with his eyes closed. "You know he's still sensitive about it!"

"Next time you make fun of the fact that Dojo can't change size anymore, I'm burning your hair off!" Kimiko threatened, shaking her fist angrily.

"I wouldn't push it, partner!" Clay warned the vampire. "Kimiko always means what she says!"

"I still have nightmares of the time she caught me reading her diary," Raimundo said, shuddering. "You don't want to push it."

At the sound of bodily harm aimed at his hair, Spike screamed in terror and curled against the wall, clutching the top of his head. "Not me hair! Do anything but that! Break me bones! Cut my hands off again! Perform an autopsy on me! Even shine the sun on me and boil the flesh from me bones again! Except me hair! Don't shine it there!"

"We shouldn't be laughing," Jarod said admist his uncontrolled chuckles.

"But we just can't help it!" Bloo practically screamed, pounding the ground as he laughed.

They heard a horrifying series of noises near them; it was several low sounds, like the grinding sound of the earth itself ripping apart civilization itself, tearing the land in half, the sound a mad demon might make at the sight of it's 'To Do' list.

"What is that?!" Clay said in a panicked yell. "Scariest damn thing I ever did hear!"

"It was me," Gaara said. "I was laughing."

There was an uncomfortable pause.

"This is very awkward."

"Hello!" Calvin said loudly. "We're about to fight for our lives, it'd be nice to get some attention!"

"Apologies!" Omi yelled.

"Okay..." Hobbes said, looking back at the still passive Guard Armor. "What's it doing?"

"Still just standing there," Morte noted. "Maybe if we ask it nicely it'll just go away?"

"Worth a shot," Zim muttered. He walked up to the Guard Armor, standing near it's foot. It didn't seem to be aware of his presence and was staring off at the eight heroes and two bumblings sidekicks assembled at the walkway across from them. Zim felt insulted by this; why is it interested in them?! Deciding that this might well work in his favor, he coughed loudly, attempting to get it's attention. "You! Large monster thing! I'm speaking to you!"

The Guard Armor either didn't hear him, or simply chose to ignore him.

"Hey! I'm speaking to you, stupid armor-beast! Pay attention to me!...YOU DARE INVOKE MY WRATH!"

"Hey!" Calvin yelled, looking worried. "Don't antagonize that thing! We've been attacked by enough giant animate objects!"

"You have?" Jarod asked from above.

"Long story! Real good! Talk later when monosyballic speech patterns have disappated!"

"How'd he say that in one breath?" Naruto and Bloo wondered.

Ignoring the exchange with the others, Zim was still attempting to get the Guard Armor's non-malevolent attention, with little sucess. Then again, it was preferable to the alternative.

"I'm waiting, obnoxious armor! Pay attention to me! This is unbecoming of armor and rude! STOP IGNORING ME!" Zim paused, making a sardonic expression. "You know, this is the first time anyone's really ignored me. They generally start shooting after the first five minutes of yelling."

"Why am I not surprised?" Calvin said.

Zim didn't hear him, as the statement was rhetorical and his listening skills were worse than his ability to focus on the Big Picture, obsessed as he was with trying to speak to the Guard Armor. Any of the refugees there could easily tell him that he'd have better luck eating a rock, as attempting to speak with a Heartless was completely pointless, as the creature's only apparent ability to interact with anything was to attempt to eat the hearts with great faculty.

He resumed attempting to get it's attention, trying to annoy it enough to make it look down. Most people wouldn't attempt to irritate a creature that probably didn't have a mind to deal with it's immediate objective, but Zim was...Zim.

"Don't you think we should be doing something?" The personifacation of Zim's innate potential for good said, sitting on a railway and eating a box of popcorn, anticipating the end of the popcorn so he could eat the box.

"Nah. This is pretty entertaining!" The personifacation of Zim's innate potential for selfish evil said, sitting next to his 'brother', chewing on his popcorn. He was rocking on the rail in preparation for the really cool and dramatic battle that would soon ensue. So, for that matter, was the angel next to him, except he had the sense not to be anxious about seeing his originating mind injured in futher ways then it already had been.

Both of their energetic chatter was unnoticed, as was their presence, as they were hallucinations and the only one capable of perceiving their presence was currently occupied.

"Where'd you get this popcorn?"

"Zim's capacity for entrepruning."

"He owes me money over that dream Zim had of being space-cheese playing cricket. And nachos; I likes me nachos!"

"I thought you were the good conscience. What are you doing betting?"

"Hey," the miniture angel said defensively. "Nothing's innately wrong with gambling; only the actions of the gambling industry and...well...excessive gambling, I suppose. But then again, everything is potentially evil when taken to excesses, you know. And hey, I'm only Irken."

"Well, tecnically-"

"Quiet, you!"

They sat there for a few minutes, watching Zim's pointless attempts to communicate with the Guard Armor successfully; considering that it was darkness of the heart incarnate in the form of a hollow suit of animated armor, it was debatable whether or not it had a brain at all, but Zim had never allowed such petty details such as that bog down his efforts, and he wasn't about to start now.

"He needs to work on his conversation skills," the devillish one noted, tossing the empty popcorn box away, too lazy to properly dispose of it. He's evil, what do you expect?

"What's this?" The angelic one said slyly through the box he was chewing up. "I didn't know you cared about this sort of thing. Maybe even you can be redeemed!" He punctuated the remark by swallowing the damp lump of corrugated packing material, pausing for a brief moment to allow all the greatness and glory of that he was personifying shine through him like a small lighthouse. Then he dove to the ground, landing on all fours. He sniffed the discarded box, grimaced slightly at the nicotine-tar scent of mildly neutral evil, and gulped it down in an abrupt lunge remnasicant of a trap-door spider capturing it's prey.

He fluttered back up, gesturing at his companion to say as he was going to say.

"Hey hey hey!" The sociopath snapped. "Self-improvement can be evil too, you know, and is thus in my domain."

"Suuuure it is. 'Perfection is the reach of all mortal lives, and thus do all seek to become more than they are, grasping for such or not. Change is the state of all things, and thus does the true nature shine through forevermore.'"

"Whazzat? Sounds like it's from Zim's list of 'Interesting Truths That I Can't Phrase To Sound Less Embarrasingly Corny'."

Zim's conscience shook his head. "Nah. Made it up just now. What's embarrasing is that he spent three weeks finding a typesetting to put on that list to fit the title on it without messing up the look and still look cool and stuff."

They ate in silence, a moment passing.

The darkling spoke. "I just realized something. Why are we here when there's no moral or ethical crisis?"

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, you know; we always pop up to convince Zim of walking one of the paths we represent. But right now, he's just bugging a passive giant armor monster. And we're just...sitting here."

"Your point?"

"My point is that we shouldn't be here! We should be around him only when there's some sort of crisis and beating each up in a comical fashion to expunge whatever interal conflict he's currently expeririancing! But here, the only damn thing we're just spectating a pointless though entertaining act of no real significance to him, far as I can tell! ME NO COMPRENDE!"

"...Just shut up and watch the show, you little egomaniac."

The malevolent conscience took his hint and shut up.

Unaware of the short debate above him, the inevitable end result of Zim's 'talk' with the Guard Armor was occuring.

He had been at this almost ten minutes. He had been 'polite'. He had resisted the urge to run off, come back with a giant root and blast it to bits, disregarding the fact that they were currently in a shield and couldn't escape. And for all of it, the stupid Heartless had completely ignored him. Ignored him! ZIM!

The strain on his already bruised ego was too much for one defective Irken to take.

"That's it! I've taken all I can take and I can't takes anymore! PAY SOME DAMN ATTENTION TO ME!" He screamed, winding his foot back.

"Oh no," his angel conscience and Jarod said at the same time. "That's not good."

"No, you idiot!" Hobbes yelled, begining to run. "DON'T!"

There was a loud ringing sound, similar to a heavily rusted gong being rung by a sack of projectile potatoes.

Zim hopped up and down, holding one sore foot as he yelled all the curses in Irken that he could think of. Luckily, there were no universal translators around, so no one was traumitized further, which was good for the two ninjas and the Pretender; they'd had enough of that.

He paused as he heard a creaking sound of sorts; he looked up and saw the Guard Armor's inclined helmet-head looking down on him. It was hard to tell, with it's lack of any definite eyes, but there was a definite sense of perception going on up there.

"Uh, hi?" Zim felt incredibly nervous, starting to pine for when it was preoccupied with the greater concentration of people outside it's sphere of influence. "Don't suppose you'll let us flee?"

The Heartless, moving with a poderous deliberation, shifted it's leg back and thrust it forward, squarely hitting Zim like a giant finger flicking away a fly; Zim flew off the ground, bouncing off the ground between Calvin and Hobbes, landing front-first against the Dark Shied and sliding to the ground.

"...Take that as a no," he said weakly, slumping over and groggily muttering to himself about never allowing animate armor to pulverize him like that again.

"Not good!" Hobbes yelled as the Guard Armor charged slowly, it's massive fists held it front of it in a pose more suited for a boxer. "Megamuchly not good!"

Zim's eye snapped open. He rolled to his feet as the Guard Armor swung a massive fist at him; instead of being crushed, as he expected, he was suddenly skidding across the ground, and there was a loud clanging sound.

He sat up, and the Guard Armor was just standing there, it's fist within a small dust cloud.

Zim frowned; something wasn't quite right with that image. It wasn't standing completely still, as it generally seemed to be. Even when moving, it gave the impression of immobility. He wondered what it could be when he saw it's arm and much of the body.

It was shaking a little. As if it were exerting an enormous amount of pressure that was being matched, but just barely.

Zim wondered where he'd seen something like this, and he recalled going to a few bars in his time; the tableau before him resembled nothing so throughly as a tense arm-wrestling contest.

The dust faded away, revealing that the metal fist was being held back on the shield of Hobbes. More to the point, the Guard Armor was actually being pushed back(very slightly), it's tremendous strength pushing the tiger into the ground; he was standing in a small depression in the ground from the dispersed force of the Heartless' blow, but though looking a bit strained, he seemed unharmed.

It was struggling to push the tiger back, and amazingly, he was actually resisting it; he was shaking with the effort of repelling it's immense strength, but he was still doing it. He also appeared to be straining with the effort of something else entirely, perhaps to do with how the heck he was strong enough to do what he was doing.

"Sonuva-," Spike said before interuptting himself, remembering that there were children present and people who'd been only too happy to beat the hell out of him if he forgot. "That cat's strong."

"I've seen some mighty impressive things, but the only people I've seen do somethin' like that is the Mikado Arm," Clay commented. "And even then..." He shook his head. "Arm-wrasslin' a giant Heartless like that 'as gotta be some kinda record."

"That's cool!" Bloo commented.

"Don't repeat others!" Spike yelled, swinging at Bloo; the imaginary friend yelped in fear and cowered, bringing his psuedopod arms over his face. As Spike's fist neared Bloo, a red aura of sorts appeared over him; as the vampire's fist touched it, his fist abruptly reversed direction, driving itself into his face.

"Ow! The hell?" Spike said as he rubbed the sore area around his eye, which he suspected would soon become a full-fledged blackeye.

The blob looked at himself in amazement. "Wow! I got shield powers!"

"Actually, I think that was the Counter move innate to the Wobbuffet evolutionary line," Jarod noted, glancing at Bloo sideways.

Hobbes growled; his feet were being pushed into the ground from the power the Guard Armor was exerting. Any second now, he was going to lose his balance unless he did something. Gritting his fearsome set of teeth, he pushed forward with all his momentarily enhanced strength; the Guard Armor's fist was shoved to the side, the sheer force of the push shoving it off-balance. As it gyrated wildly, Hobbes sprang like he was pouncing on lesser prey(such as, in his opinion, pretty much everyone else in the area), throwing a considerable amount of force to a shield-slam to the leg.

It's leg almost buckled under it, but the Guard Armor retained it's balance and swung it's fist down, missing the tiger as he nimbly flipped out of the way, tossing his shield in mid-air like a discus at the Guard Armor's head, catching it as he landed on the ground.

Hobbes rolled away from the impact, landing by his friend and the guy they'd been looking for. "You guys ready to kill a monster?"

Calvin grinned. "That a trick question?"

"Hmph." Zim shouldered the Keyblade, eying the Guard Armor calmly. "Just don't get in my way you..you...whatever you two are!"

Calvin growled at the new guy's rudeness. "Oh, you want cool, huh? I'll give ya cool, you miniturized xenophobic nightmare!"

He pulled a strange thing from out of his other side pocket, strapping it to his unadorned arm; it was a bracer or something like it, covering his entire forearm. The top of it was a glacial blue metal, with an overall shape resembling a built-up guard with an organic design. There was a groove at the end, just in front of an archaic-looking circle; within two double circles was a wide triangle with a line going through it just below it's upper point, an upside down triangle interlocked into it below the upper triangle's line, the widened hexagram's points touching the inner circle. The outer circle's sides extended along the back of the bracer into three cool-looking line, the whole design engraved into the metal. The lower part was tough-looking navy blue cloth, cushioned on the inside with padding along the metal so as not to hurt his arm. There were two straps at both ends of it, the buckles strapped together.

He tapped the circle on the bracer, causing the circle, it's lines and the groove on the front to light up with a blue-white radiance. He picked his hammer off the ground, focusing the cyrokinetic energies of his Blizzard Bracer into the bludgeon; the vaporlike energies swirled around the shaft and settled around the hammer's head, the energies contracting and turning into a mistlike sheath colored brighter white with blue undertones, frost forming in the air around it.

He swung the hammer into the ground, the energies covering it flashing briefly; a wave of densely clustered ice-spikes burst through the ground, rushing at the Guard Armor's leg and knocking it backwards into the icicles; they broke apart at the impact, but Calvin's hammer hit the trail of ice, causing it to flow over the Guard Armor's body, holding it down long enough for Hobbes to bounce off it's body and land by them.

"...Why can't I do that?" Zim said as the Heartless burst away from it's cold prison, unbalancing and smacking into the force field and staggering back.

Hobbes rolled his eyes. "Sure; a few fancy tricks with weird science and everybody calls you a genius."

Calvin returned the gesture. "Yeah, and some exercise routines mixed with 'specialized training' from Teacher makes you so great."

"Excuse me, who's the one with super-strength? Well, occasionally, anyway?"

Calvin crossed his arms and looked away in a manner which he thought qualified as classy. "Hmph. If I wanted super-strength, all I'd have to do is build some power-arms."

"I seem to remember a Stupendo-"

"You promised to never speak of the Stupendous Suit Mark One in public again!"

"Right, right. You're so sensitve about your inventions before your whole 'acronyms-for-everything' phase."

Damn it! Zim cursed to himself as the two started arguing, ignoring the slowly approaching Guard Armor. Why can't I do stuff like that?!

Grumbling to himself, but never one to be outdone, he extended his spider-legs and stood up on them, and enjoying the other two's cries of surprise, ran up to the slow Heartless and climbed up a leg and started lashing out at it's body.

"Okay," Raimundo admitted as Zim scuttled around the Guard Armor's body, striking out here and there and moving away before it could swing and hit him, tricking it into hitting itself. "He's not too bad either."

"'Not too bad'?" Naruto said as Zim combined quick strikes and dodges mixed with tricking it into pummeling itself as Calvin and Hobbes joined in, shooting varieties of projectiles and a shield at it while it was distracted. "They're pummeling it!"

"I'd feel as though I should feel bad for it," Gaara noted, "If it wasn't a complete waste of time pitying a Heartless."

"Or if you and emotions in general didn't go together," Bloo quipped, ignorant or not caring of his imminent potential for Utter and Total Destruction On A Scale Mortals Dare Not Dream Of Before, At Least Compared To An Excess Of Inital Letters Capatalized For Dramatic Emphasis. Oh, The Raging Melodramatic Horror of It All. Then again, he had just displayed Counter, so that would explain his already ordinarily inflated ego.

Gaara said nothing, but a large hand of sand flowed out of his gourd and flicked Bloo away.

Naruto Shadow Cloned himself, the two duplicates catching Bloo and throwing him back to be flicked back. The game of Keep Away continued until they became more interested in the fight below and let the blue blob slap into the floor.

Calvin raised his arm again, holding it steady with his other one; the groove shimmered, several dozen shards of ice shooting out at the Guard Armor as Hobbes jumped off the walls and it's limbs, kicking off it's head and throwing a few concealed throwing knives at it. He lowered his shield as he fell, hitting the ground and using the shield as a sliding board, flipping out of it while still holding it and landing on his feet, blocking another punch and holding it back.

Not one to be outdoned, Zim ran to the arm and swung at it as Calvin took the oppertunity to power up his glove and threw a few smaller fireballs at it's back.

"Hey!" The boy yelled at the Keybearer. "Can you do anything with that thing besides swing it around?"

Zim looked at him, perplexed. "Why would I need to?"

Calvin rolled his eyes. "Oh, come on! I can practically smell the ozone on you! My Fire spells have back fired on me so many times, I'd have to be a complete idiot not to recognize it! What, new to this and can't do a repeat perfomance?"

"...If I don't directly admit you're right, it doesn't count as an admission."

Calvin shrugged. "Been there, done that, accidently blew up the T-shirt. Have you tried not overthinking it?"

"Huh?"

"Common rookie mistake," Calvin said sagely. "Overthinking basic magic. I mean, fireballs? It's just combusting air and forming a ball or whatever of fire out of ambient energy. That's as basic as basic gets, you know. Well, discounting analyzation, that is."

"Hey! I'm new at this!"

Grumbling to himself, Zim jerked his head at Hobbes and ran at the Guard Armor. He slid to the ground, holding the Keyblade straight out, hitting it's foot; Hobbes ran incredibly fast, doing the same thing to the other foot. Predicatably, the Guard Armor turned around to deal with this new threat, completely opening it up to the unexpected stonespike storm from behind.

Jarod watched the fight speculatively. The three's attacks were good, but if they could just focus on a strategy, the battle would be over much faster. The three of them couldn't cooperate enough to do so; the thought hadn't even occured to them. The closest they'd come to combined strategy was happening to attack at the same time.

With all luck, that would be enough to beat the Guard Armor. As far as the powerful Heartless went, it wasn't particularily hard to fight. As long as they avoided it's attacks and beat down on it while it's wide swings exposed itself, they probably wouldn't die. Probably.

"They're not bad," he said. "But they're not good, either. The two from the Kingdom are a competent team, but...Zim, was it? Isn't the best at this whole 'teamwork' thing. Interesting fighting style, but his teamwork.."

"Ain't like you to be so negative all the time," Spike noted.

"It's not negativity. It's an accurate assesment."

"Ain't that what all pessimists say? Or is it being realistic? I can never get the two straight."

The Guard Armor stumbled forward, Hobbes and Zim taking the chance to jump up and attack, both running right into each other and falling to the ground.

"Watch where you're going!" Zim scolded, trying to get the tiger off him.

"Where I'm going?! You crashing into me!"

"Yes, I did! You foolishly moved into my way! Now get out of it!"

The Guard Armor, noticing they were unoccupied, kicked them again, throwing them across the field. "Ow," the two moaned, piled-up against the force field.

Calvin shook his head. "That's the first thing they've done as a team all night."

He stuck his hand into one of his frontal pockets, pulling out half a dozen small bronze spheres like the one Bloo had accidentally activated. He held them in one hand, squeezing them in his hand and causing a noise like several squeeks.

He threw them at the Guard Armor, fully aware that relying on his strength of arm wasn't the greatest in any world, but that didn't matter; the little bombs flew hard and fast, zooming at the back of the Heartless' exposed head, much faster than they would've even if one of the other two had thrown them.

They smacked into the head, briefly glowing white as they merged with the metal of the helmet, a white pulse like water tension spreading over the back of it's head before it suddenly turned magenta and exploded.

The Guard Armor jerked and twitched as the dust cloud from the explosions left it's head, which now appeared to have a hole in it. It shakily took a step forward and fell apart, arms, legs and body hitting the ground.

Everyone there stared.

"I don't know about you," Jarod yelled down at them. "But I'd call that an exposed state!"

"He's right, y'know," Hobbes said conversationally to an steamed Calvin and Zim, who looked mildy furious at being treated as though they couldn't recognize something. "C'mon, let's finish this already!"

They ran to it, intending on just running up to it and hitting it with everything they had, when the various armor pieces suddenly floated into the air, as before, but instead of recombining, they went off in different directions, proceeding to attack them.

"This is cheap!" Calvin complained as he ran away from a foot that was stomping after him.

"I've played RPGs with bosses that played fairer then this thing!" Zim yelled before he was briefly silenced by the big fist that slammed into him. "Ow! PAIN!"

"I've eaten things that didn't complain as much as you guys!" Hobbes said, sliding on his shield away from the main body, which was trying to steamroll him.

It went on like that for a few moments, before they started attacking them back. It wasn't easy for the three, as the flying armor pieces were faster then they looked and it was hard to keep the arms and legs properly identified.

Hobbes hit an arm with his shield, hoping to at least knock it off-course; he did that, incidentally carrying himself with it as his shield's rim got stuck in the gap of it's claws. "Oh, come on!" He yelled, decided to take advantage of his momentary difficulty, forcibly guiding it into another leg.

Unfortunately, that leg happened to be in the process of being attacked by Zim, who was still trying to get his magic-using abilities to work. He'd gotten a few sparks, but that was it.

"Why won't this work?!" He screamed, running away from the pile-up Hobbes unintentionally caused.

"Oh, for the love of-" Calvin started to yell as he was caught in the grip of a hand, his words cut off as it squeezed down on him. "Picture...I don't know, what you want to happen! Then make it happen!

"FOCUS YOUR HEART!"

Zim froze as the main body loomed over him like an armored monolith, Calvin's words echoing in his mind, minus the flustered comment.

Picture what you want to happen. Then make it happen. Picture what you want to happen. Then make it happen.

Focus your heart.

"Picture it," he said, something clicking on his mind in a level far too deep to be labeled conscious, but not far enough to be under the domain of the primal mind. This was something both apart and higher from either of them. This was something else entirely.

The inner sight of his mind saw fire, and he focused his will on that fire.

He slowly lifted the Keyblade as the Guard Armor's main body started to lift itself for a fatal plummet.

The Keyblade's surface shimmered slightly as he suddenly whirled around, pointing it at the Guard Armor. The Guard Armor jumped at him.

"Burn," he said simply, and focused the power lying within the Keyblade and was begining to awaken within himself.

The reflective surface of the Keyblade alit with currents of fire, swiftly swirling just beyond the tip into a full-fledged fireball for a brief moment, launching off it at the Guard Armor as Zim's Keyblade jumped up from the recoil, blasting into the Heartless in the middle of it's jump.

It knocked it out of the air, causing it to roll along the ground.

That specific part seemed vital to the whole Heartless; the other parts suddenly stopped, releasing Calvin and leaving Hobbes, traveling back to the main body. They hooked into their appropiate place, although perhaps not as firmly connected as before. It slowly stood up, wavering slightly.

Calvin ran up to Zim, staring in amazement at him. "Wow...why didn't you do that before?"

Zim glared at him. "I was trying too, you hay-headed stink-beast of dubious origin!"

Calvin blinked. "I've heard some weird insults in my day, but that's in a class all in it's own."

The Irken looked bewildered. "...Should I be complemented or insulted?" he muttered to himself.

"Shut up, both of you," Hobbes said mildly as bounded next to Zim, gracefully standing up. "That thing you did looks like it hit it hard. The last time I say a fireball do that was at the clocktower at home."

Calvin flushed. "Oh, come on...I just made this thing and was trying to hit an old dead tree."

"And missed horribly," Zim interpreted. "I only just learned to shoot fire, but at least I can do it without blasting everything in sight."

"That's 'cause you're a wuss!"

"Shut up!"

"No, you shut up!"

"No, you!"

"No, you!"

"You infinity."

Calvin, unable to think of a logical comeback, growled in incensed anger. Hobbes growled under his breath, a brief image of him slapping their heads together in a Three Stooges-type skit calming his nerves.

"Both of you, shut it! We should get it while it's weak!"

Zim scanned it's unprotected and severely damaged head. He frowned for a moment, wondering how it survived getting the back of it's head blown out and how he might be able to use this to his advantage before he suddenly grinned scarily.

He had gotten an idea. A strange idea. A strange, bizarre and utterly insane idea. "You, cat thing what smells like an Acturan Megamoose!"

Hobbes frowned blankly, disliking the impromptu reference and having absolutely no idea what the heck he was referencing in the second part. "...What?"

Zim took a moment to consider how he was to express his masterful, brilliant and unparreled plan of sheer genius in a few words. He decided to go for broke and merely state a request for the tiger's role in the Big Plan of Ultimate Guard Armor DOOM!(Patent Pending). "Throw me at it's head."

Hobbes blinked, a rather severe admission of shock and surprise for a cat. "You know, it's a funny thing, really. I've always had superhuman hearing, what with being a cat, and ever since my training with our old teacher a few years ago, my senses have gotten higher. Which is actually kind of annoying when I have to be by people that like playing their music loud. Almost as bad as telepathy."

"Aaaaand...your point?" Zim said.

"My point being is that I could have sworn you just told me to throw you at the giant monster's head."

"I did."

Hobbes looked as if he were about to say something, sighed in surrender and grabbed Zim by the arm, placing him on his shoulder momentarily. The Irken felt something...strange about him. Not off, just something unusual about him. A sense of immense power, coiled like a spring so tightly wound that if it broke, every one in the general area not wearing stylistic goggles was going to get spring shrapnel. "You understand I assume no responsibilty for the damage you may and probably will encure from this act of unnessacary stupidity.."

Zim rolled his eyes. "Yes, yes. I pay the hospital and repair bill."

Something in Hobbes' mind twitched. No, you idiot! The King told you to stand by this...this...whatever the hell he is, not throw him at a giant monster with no apparent weak points! Another voice, the one he like to think of as his personal conscience, rose up and replied, True, but he told him to stand by him. And it's fairly simple to interpret them as doing as he asks in a leadership role.

I repeat; Giant. Monster.

He said stand by him.

What part of little guy about to get thrown at a giant monster don't thou geteth!?

A giant monster with a big hole in it's head, you mean.

Little guy plus giant monster equals King yelling at me for getting the little guy killed! Duh!

His conscientious voice told the other one where it could stuff itself in no uncertain terms, using mean words that couldn't be taken back, much like Christmas presents that no one in the world would want. Not even psychotic toe-fungus-eating Brazilan Psychosis monkeys raised by Pixies and further educated by mad Vogans. "'Kay, it's your life." His piece said, Hobbes hoisted Zim up again by his body and spun around once, releasing Zim at an upwards angle as he was facing where he'd been at the begining of the spin. Aided by both the momentum of the spin and the tiger's immense strength, Zim flew incredibly fast; he marveled at it, wondered briefly just what kind of training the tiger had done to be this strong and fast. He held out the Keyblade, postitioning it so that he would swing it in time to strike it's small head.

He approached it's unguarded head, started to swing, and missed completely, veering off and hitting a wall, narrowly grabbing a small stone pole that was surprisingly strong.

"Your aim stinks!" Zim yelled as he swung on it, clasping the Keyblade to the Pak so he could hold on with both hands.

"Tell me about it," Calvin said sourly. "That's why my Human Discus Suit never took off."

"It's not my fault; your guy's weight throws me off-balance!"

Zim ignored them; something was strange with this pole. He couldn't tell what, he just got a strange sense from it.

And it got weirder. As he started pulling himself up to extend his spider-legs so he could get down, the Keyblade shone with a golden light at the edges.

"Hey," Kimiko said at the walkway. "Doesn't that look-"

"Really familiar?" Raimundo interjected, hand on chin.

"I've seen this light before," Clay said.

Omi's eyes grew wide. "I have seen it too! Dojo, you are a mystical dragon! Does it look similar to you?"

"That's familiar, and I'm not sure." The dragon bent out as far as he could while staying at a safe level, trying to place it. "I'm pretty sure I've seen it before, but I can't place it anywhere!"

"That would look so cool in a movie or animated series!" Bloo said.

"Yeah," Naruto said. "That's so cool!"

"I agree with the idiot." Gaara said blandly.

"Cool! Hey, wait, is he talking about you or me?" Bloo wondered.

"Duh, it's me! I'm way more of an idiot than you!" Naruto yelled. He reflected on his statement. "Hey, wait a minute!"

The stone Zim held cracked, flaking away like shed skin from a snake as the light from the Keyblade died away, revealing a staff of some kind, jutting out from the building, evidently having been stuck there some kind ago. The little of it that was visible under the dirt and dust was brown, an almost grown-looking metal with a brass cap. The staff was topped with a small curled-up brown statue resting on a sqaure, the swirl on it making Zim think of a Cinnabon. The open-jawed simian face, small feet perched on the square and the long tail curling over the statue all gave it the image of a monkey squatting on a pedastal.

Zim stared at it. "Eh?"

Spike frowned, his exceptional eyesight not good enough to give him the finer details of it. "The hell is that?"

"You have got to be kidding/childing me!" The Xaiolin Warriors and their dragon said disbelievingly.

"Tha...that's a Shen Gong Wu!" Clay said disbelivingly. "Dojo! Why didn't you-oh, right."

"Yeah," The dragon said sourly. "Make me feel worse! Let's declare today a public holiday! We'll all call it Be Cruel To Dragons Day! We'll hold roasting parties! Be the first one on your block to destroy the feelings of a mystical dragon over and over again! Don't mind that they practically got an inferiority complex over it! Who cares about them, in fact, let's never stop reminding them of what happened, huh!?"

Spike gave him a look. "Some people never stop whinin'. Not like it's bad, what happened to ya."

On behalf of Dojo, both Naruto and Gaara sharply elbowed him. Gaara's arm was slightly weighted by the highly convincing simulcrum of sand, and Naruto was no weakling, so it hurt a lot. "OW! Why, you lousy little demon-"

"Watch it," Naruto growled.

Gaara said nothing, allowing his Look of Ultimate and Unspeakably Painful Doom speak for him.

"Right," Spike said quickly, wisely not wanting to get on the two's bad side. "Shuttin' up."

"What is it?" Hobbes wondered.

"Looks like a staff," Calvin suggested.

"Hey, you! Guy with key thing!" Kimiko yelled.

"What?"

"That's a Shen Gong Wu you're hanging on to!"

"A cheering chandelir that's used for official announcements?"

"A Shen! Gong! Wu! A powerful magical object!"

"Tecnically, that whould be a mystical artifact," Dojo said. "Just keeping your adverbs straight."

The langauge module in his Pak translated it from the Chinese; Tool of God, Zim thought. Odd name for a staff with a monkey squatting on it. "Good for me! What do I do with it so I can get down already!?"

"That's easy!" Jarod yelled. "Call out it's name!"

"What's this one's?"

"The Monkey Staff!" The Xiaolin Warriors, their dragon and Jarod shouted. Dojo and the monks paused, wondering how Jarod knew the name too.

Zim took a deep breath and, feeling a little stupid, loudly yelled, "MONKEY STAFF!"

It immediately lit up with the golden light again, this time brighter but more concentrated at the edges and smaller, too. The remaining dust and stone flew off it, perhaps propelled by the power Zim was feeling from it. He wondered what the power flowing from it into him, altering him in some significant but unseeen way, but he knew one thing for sure. This was something that Dib would understand perfectly well, far better than him. This current, flowing through him as memories more appropiate for an Earth monkey or his distant evolutionary ancestors flashed in his mental eye, changing him in ways he couldn't have anticipated but felt somehow familiar-that was something Dib would easily grasp, no doubt provoking that familiar short nod followed by that knowing little smile.

It stopped, and the Monkey Staff ceased glowing. Seemingly of it's own accord, the staff slid out, and he fell.

"New guy!" Calvin, Hobbes and the guys and girl on the walkway yelled, the Comic Kingdom tourists getting ready to save him.

Then, to their surprise, Zim backflipped in the air, sliding along the wall and running down, suddenly jumping off, swinging on the arms of the Guard Armor, leaping away, bouncing off it's legs and jumping into the air to flip down and land right in front of Calvin and Hobbes. "Heh," He said, looking surprised himself as he tapped his new acquisition against the ground. "That was cool."

The Guard Armor swung again, surprising them; it knocked them down, the Staff rolling away. Zim and Hobbes used the momentum from the attack to flip to their feet and slide away a bit. Calvin, on the other hand, didn't have that kind of agility and crashed to the shield.

"Hey," Raimundo said, noticing Zim's continued acrobatics. They weren't as impressive as they would be if he were using the Monkey Staff, but Zim hadn't noticed and it was still pretty cool. "How's he still moving like that without the Monkey Staff?"

"Yeah," Kimiko said. "It's effects are supposed to fade once you let go of it."

"He is the Keybearer," Gaara noted. "Who knows what effects the Keyblade has on it's wearer?"

"'Least he isn't acting like a monkey," Jarod said as Zim agilely danced between it's legs, striking here and there.

"Maybe the Keyblade permanently boosted his agility and stuff to a smaller scale than it would if he was usin' the staff," Clay conjectured.

"I remember some of the old stories saying that the Keybearers of old could leap over mountains and cut through the sky when they needed to," Gaara said. "It could be that the power of the Staff resonated with his latent powers somehow and gave it a jump-start."

Spike shrugged. "'Ey, you guys are the experts, not me."

Zim jumped to it's hand, slashing his sword across it; he didn't pierce it, but he got a sense of damage. Calvin and Hobbes launched some flaming ice shards and a shield at the body respectively as he rolled away, shooting a fireball as he got up.

The Guard Armor slammed it's fist into the ground, the Irken backflipped out of the way and jabbing out at the stuck fist as Calvin and Hobbes took the time to attack too.

Zim shot a fireball at it, pleased at the smoking indentation it left. After all the damage the three of them had left in it, the Guard Armor was staggering around, somehow keeping itself from falling apart again; the left arm had almost fallen out of it's socket, a thinning ribbon of dark energy connecting it. The legs, haven taken the most damage, were pitted and scarred, the armor beaten into itself while it's main body and arms were scorched and marked with the various projectiles they'd used on it; there were several remaining ice crystals and large chunks of earth imbedded in the back. The left leg was barely clicked in, the right one floating directly out of it, somehow functioning as a crutch of sort.

"It's almost dead..or whatever!" Zim yelled. "You two; try to knock it down!"

Calvin scowled. "I don't have to take orders from you!"

"Actually, we kinda have to," Hobbes whispered to his ear.

"Don't remind me!"

"What are you two talking about?" Zim said, raising an eyeridge.

"Uh...nothing! C'mon, let's get this over with." Calvin paused, mind racing for a good tactic. "I know! Let's try that Ice Slam Combo we worked out!"

"The what?" Hobbes said blankly. Calvin had come up with so many short combanation names, it was almost impossible to keep them all straight.

"You know-" The human made a gesture, waving his arms a lot in an apparent imitation of a shaky cardiograph and then jerking his hands to the left. "That one!"

"Oh! Right!" Hobbes armed himself with the shield, leaping as high as he could into the air. It was about fifteen feet, so it was ample time for him to tuck his shield under him as Calvin aimed his Blizzard Bracer at the ground in front of him and fired a blue-white wave of cyrokinetic energies, creating a craggy ice cresent that went into an upraised trail of ice ending near it's feet.

Hobbes came back down, riding on his shield again; he rid down the path, sliding down the frozen ramp, going extremely fast due to the shuffled-type construction of the ice slide and the smooth surface of the shield. His ears plastered against his head by the wind, he leaned back just as he hit a bump.

The shield jumped into the air, and Hobbes put his strength along with the momentum directly into the Guard Armor's already wobbling leg; he crashed into it, toppling the Guard Armor and sending it plummeting to the ground, hitting the ice slid and sliding along it helplessly. Calvin, who'd been charging up a fireball, released it in the form of half a dozen smaller fireballs, the fire blasts smashing into the Heartless' 'face' and the back of it's body, and Zim, improvising on sheer impulse, jumped forwards as the smoke strayed away, angling the Keyblade so it sliced right through it's helmet, cutting in a straight line to the waist, where he flipped out of the way.

He landed on the ground and turned around in time to see it smash through the ice ramp and collide into the Dark Shield, falling down for a few minutes before shakily rising to it's feet.

It turned around, twitching extremely rapidly. It's various scarred limbs were almost completely destroyed, but it managed to raise an arm.

And it slumped back to the side, the crack Zim'd left in it glowing brightly. Bright light flashed out through the scar shortly, and then the Guard Armor's left arm fell out, crashing heavily to the ground. The other arm quickly followed, leaving it standing on it's damaged legs unsteadily until the brutalized limbs finally crumpled under it's own weight and fell off, the lack of no legs causing it to crash to the ground with a earth-shaking thud, the hit widening it's cracked body as it's helmet rolled away from it's head. This last impact was too much for it's suffering structure to take, and the main body cracked in half.

From within it emerged a brilliantly shining light, mostly red with some pink and yellow thrown in there for good measure, considerably sheathed by a heavy coat of bramble-vinelike darkness. It illuminated the area, floating up and disappearing in a portal much like the ones the Heartless used, but larger, looking more like a netting catching it and disappearing suddenly.

The pieces of useless armor blackened, corroding with rust and crumbling in on themselves, black smoke encrouching from the edges and swallowing it up, fading away into oblivion.

The Dark Shield shattered, causing Dojo and Naruto, who'd been leaning against it, to fall down and hit the ground, the ninja landing on his rear and the gecko-sized dragon landing on his head in a convenient coil.

"They did it," Spike said disbelievingly. "They did it. The little sods actually did it!"

"I told you," Gaara said in a tone that might be called smugly, though probably not with a straight face. He disappeared in a swirl of sand, reappearing at ground level, taking Jarod with him as the boringly normal human had no other means to get there quickly.

The Xaiolin Warriors simply jumped off, their respective elements cushioning their falls; Clay landed on a sudden outgrowth of earth, a swirl of air slowed Raimundo's descent, Omi was carried to the ground by a small tornado of water, and the hot air generated by Kimiko's fire slowed down her fall.

Spike, shaking his head slowly yet with a huge grin on his face, jumped down to the ground, his coat flapping in the wind.

"Hey!" Bloo yelled, hitting his psuedopods against the rail. "How am I supposed to get down?!"

In response, Gaara turned the section of walkway he was standing on into sand; Bloo had about five seconds to realize this was bad before the grainular substance gave way, dropping to the ground in a shower of sand. "Ow!"

"You did ask," Gaara said simply.

"No I didn't!" Bloo protested. Gaara ignored him, walking up to the exhausted looking trio slumped against the ground.

"Whew!" Calvin said. "That was hard. I don't think I've done anything like that since I tried to explain the Noodle Incident."

"Compared to that, this was easy," Hobbes said comfortingly.

"...Daisy, Daisy..." Zim said inanely, feeling severely winded and more than a little dizzy from all the acrobatics he wasn't quite used to yet.

Naruto looked them over briefly before shaking his fist in a triumphet gesture. "You guys DID IT! How's it feel to beat your first giant Heartless! And Darksides don't count, all of us helped kill a Darkside."

"Hey!" Zim said.

"Well, 'cept that guy." Naruto pointed at Jarod. "BECAUSE HE WON'T USE ANYTHING!"

"That's because you never ask."

"Then did you?"

"This isn't quite the time or place for that, you know."

"I KNEW IT!"

"I dunno," Calvin said wearily, sitting up. "Not sure I can get used to this kind of thing."

"Not bad, not bad at all! I've seen some things here in town, but that...that was cool!" Jarod congratulated them.

"...It was interesting," Gaara said quietly.

Hobbes looked at Naruto. He seemed to know the sand guy best, seeing as how he was the only one not unconsciously edging away from him. "Is that a compliment or an insult?"

Naruto folded his arms behind his head, smiling widely. "I dunno! With Gaara, it's hard to tell!"

"Only rarely have I seen such skill in beginners!" Omi said. "You fought almost well for newhornets! With much, much, much training and experiance, you may someday be almost as good as me, or perhaps you may reach Raimundo's level."

"Hey!" The Keybearer, tiger, technologist and Xiaolin Dragon of the Wind said defensively.

"Will you talkin' about me like that?!" Raimundo demanded. "I've been the leader for two years now and you still won't stop it!"

"My apologies, but...your skill...it lacks something. Like skill, let's speak."

Raimundo made a strangled noise of frustration, from both Omi's inability to accept Raimundo's ability and his atrocious grammer. Although the Shoku General probably wouldn't phrase it as such.

"You guys have been with him for a few years now and he still can't pronounce grammer properly," Dojo observed. "You'd think he'd have gotten over it by now."

"Nah," Clay said. "One of those things you start to miss after a while."

"Yeah," Naruto said cheerfully. "Besides, it's funny!" He looked up at Dojo, who was still coiled on his hair. "Uh, get off my head."

"Yeesh, fine!" The dragon hopped off, landing on Omi's bald head.

"Hey, a little help here!" Bloo yelled, a little blue arm sticking out of the sand pile and waving despeartely.

"Does anyone here care?" Kimiko asked.

"NO!" Every single person yelled.

"Jerks!" Bloo accused.

"A'right, how you three doing?" Spike asked Calvin, Hobbes and Zim.

"All right, I guess." Hobbes said, pumping his arm. "That was exhausting."

"Hey, who are you guys, anyway? I know the know-it-all, the sand guy and the blue...thing, but who are the rest of you?" Calvin asked as the three of them stood up, strapping their respective weapons to their backs.

"Right, sorry. These guys are Naruto Uzumaki, Omi No-Last-Name-That-We're-Aware-Of, Clay Bailey, Kimiko Tohomiko, Raimundo Pedrosa, Dojo Kanojo Cho-" he pointed to everyone in turn, the individual making a small greeting motion. "And myself, 'o course. Way back when, people used to call William the Bloody, 'cause I wrote bloody awful poetry. Nowadays, they just call me Spike. Now there's an interestin' story there." He smirked, enjoying the mental image of how'd they react if he told them who he'd gotten that name.

Calvin stared at him, his mouth hanging open. "You. You're Spike. The poetry-loving Billy Idol wannabe."

"Not great listeners, ain't ya? And Billy Idol got his look from me, so it's the other way around."

"The Spike our King told us to look for."

"Huh. The King said that? Didn't know he cared...then again, he might've just been tryin' to get ya guys a bit sidetracked-"

"Don't change the subject!" Calvin yelled, starting to go red in the face. "We've been looking all over this stupid town, trying to find you! And nowhere, I say nowhere you were! WHY DIDN'T YOU JUST STAY IN ONE PLACE?!"

"No one tells me what to do-"

"Shut up, Spike!" Kimiko yelled.

"Shuttin' up!"

The Xiaolin Dragons huddled into a circle, discussing the issue of the Monkey Staff.

"Should we try to convince him to give it to us?" Kimiko asked.

"It's not really ours to keep now," Dojo said. "And it's not like the forces of evil are exactly dependant here, y'know?"

"Yeah, but we're the safeguards of the Wu!" Raimundo reminded them. "We're supposed to keep them safe from those who'd abuse their power! And if you ask me, the green guys looks a little loco 'round the gills, if you know what I mean."

"No, I do not! But I also know that it would be stealing to take it from him, and I do not believe that he would wish to give up such a wonderous object as a Shen Gong Wu! The only way it'd be reasonable is if we won it in a Xaiolin Showdown, but there is no reason to engage him in one now." Omi thought.

"I reckon y'all got good points," Clay reasoned. "But there's the little fact that we don't really need it and the Monkey Staff ain't all that special t' begin with."

"If you say so!" Dojo said. "But there's something to be said for a passive and one-sided compromise."

"What do you mean?" Raimundo asked.

"I mean, if we just let him go with it, what are the chances he'll lose it? It's safe enough with him."

"I get it!" Naruto interjected, butting his head into the circle and ignoring their respective dirty looks.

"Hey, who asked you?!" Raimundo said rudely.

"Do you mind?" Kimiko said.

"Yeah, I mind!" Bloo said, putting his head between Raimundo and Kimiko's legs. "You guys form a little circle and have a private party without any snacks! What's the deal?"

"What snacks?" Naruto asked. "I want snacks too!"

The Xaiolin Dragons made identical 'you moron' expressions.

"So," Zim said, gesturing at the tiger-human duo, "You two-"

"A-hem!" Morte said loudly, having finally noticed it was safe and floated out from his hidey-hole.

"Yeahyeahyeah, three-have been looking for me?"

Gaara, leaning back against the wall with his arms crossed, didn't nod or give any such simple gesture of confirmation; he chose instead to let his words speak by themselves. "On the orders of King Garfield, of their homeworld, they have been seeking the wielder of the Keyblade."

Blah blah blah, Shukaku said in a bored 'voice'. Always too much talking with you guys! Never enough fighting. And what was the deal with that thing? What's a giant monster fight with no bloodshed? Total ripoff!

"Hey," Hobbes said, struggling not to sound desperate to get his query across. "Why don't you come with us? We've got a ship that can travel between the worlds."

Zim started a little at that, raising an eyeridge. "You do, eh? This ship, would it help me find my missing companions?"

"Sure," Calvin said. "We're not in a real hurry."

"Are you sure about that?" Hobbes muttered to him, too low for anyone else to hear.

"No, but we need him to come with us." The technologist muttered equally lowly.

"Y' want my advice, I'd say go with 'em. Better then the alternative, 's all I'm sayin'," Spike informed him. "World traveling ships ain't exactly easy to come by."

The Irken thought it over, and nodded, mostly to himself. "Fine. I'll...go with you two, three, whatever."

Morte huffed to himself, floating away and grumbling to himself.

"Just so you know," Calvin said blithely. "Until this quest of ours is over, we're sticking to you like...like...Hobbes, gimme a metaphor!"

"Like the fur to my back?" Hobbes suggested as he scrached his back, shedding copiously. "Er, wait. That could be taken as a bad omen."

Calvin rolled his eyes. "Yeah, sure. But my point is, for the time being, we're going to be a team."

He stuck his fist out, pausing a moment to put his alchemic tools away first. "I'm Calvin Nocker."

Hobbes copied the gesture, his considerably larger fist meeting Calvin's at a side-angle. "Family name is Pooka, given name is Hobbes."

Nonplussed, but willing to go with it for now, Zim clenched his hand into a fist and pushed it against the other two, creating a rough triangle shape. "I have no last name, but my name is...well, your Earth tongues would be incapable of pronouncing it, so call me Zim."

Morte grinned, slightly miffed he was unable to join in the 'moment'. "I think this is the start of a beautiful thing."

It was a dark place.

And not the good kind of darkness either. This wasn't the kind of darkness publicized by people with brightness problems. This was a bad darkness; the kind that snuck up behind while you were backing away, attended by creepy music that could kill weak hearts, waited until you were on the verge of having a cardiac spasm, and violently pokes you in the back for the sake of it's own disturbed amusement. This was a darkness you could write home to, if you had a very morbid sort of family.

To say it was dark in the poetic sense was much more sensible.

In the completely black room, a voice rang out. It was deep, really deep. It had a peculiar sort of tone to it, something like that what might be produced by a living stone with a serious accent problem that had been excerbated by learning English from emulating the Godfather movies.

"Ey, why's all da lights off, eh?"

Someone clapped.

Nothing happened. It was too dark to tell, but there was the sense of irritable glaring.

Someone clapped again, this time with a great deal more force. This time, the number of torches around the room burst into purple flame, illumanting the room while lending it an evil glow of the sort often recommended by Malovelence Monthly.

The revealed room was roughly circular, made of old slightly greasy-looking black stone that seemed to absorb the light that flickered across it.

A woman ran out, trailing some toilet paper on her foot. "Sorry, sorry," she mumbled under her breath. "What'd I miss?"

"Da freak-monkehs got the Guard Armor!" A loud exuberent voice announced cheerfully.

"Damn!" the woman complained. "Let's hurry this up. I get at least seven New Orleans on this thing, you know! Who knows what I could be seeing?"

The main point of focus of the room was a small black and white hologram, displaying the recently formed trio(or quaduo), shining out from an archiac and somehow evil-looking circle carved into the center of a large table in the middle of the room.

Sitting at the table were several figures, distinctly more ominous than the room they were in.

"That freak took out a Guard Armor?" Said a stocky and almost absurdly wide figure, seemingly made of steam-age cybernetics and with a grooved cranium that appeared to be emitting steam of somekind. "Never woulda guessed it. Don't look like much, does...hey, he a guy or a girl? 'S hard to tell. Tougher then...aw, hell with it, I'm gonna call 'em a guy."

"Hey, hey hey!" A disturbingly cheerful voice said, cutting himself off with a sudden and high-pitched laugh one generally expected in places with rubber walls, enormous quantities of Thorazine, and large men with white coats and an excess of caution. After his laughter died down, he banged on the table, possibly to call order within his crazed head. He looked no less mad than he acted; chalk-white skin, yellow eyes with red irises, crooked yellowing teeth, a lanky and mucular physique under a loosely hanging purple suit with green trim, and a huge green hairdo resembling the curls of a harlequin's cap made him look like a cross between an undead...thing, and a psychotic clown. "Gotta remember, me boyos-"

"Ahem!" Another voice coughed.

"Right, and me girlyo-is that our little bug-eyed freak-monkey's got the Keyblade! He's running on borrowed mighty might! I gotta say though, that thing's got one helluva wallop!...'Least, that's what the ol' stories say, y'know."

"So says the Peanut Gallery," the smith-type guy said in a bored tone.

"Here's a thought," a light, almost whispering voice said. The figure it emanated from was difficult to see; he was enshrouded in shadows, and what little could be seen through them wavering in the eye. He appeared to be wearing a bony wrap-around cape over most of his body, leaving only his head uncovered. That too was difficult to be discerned; it appeared to be a pointed face, a pair of horns curving away at the top gracefully. It's yellow glowing slitted eyes, the only clear feature, narrowed in pleasured thought. "Send him down in the gullet of the darkness and make of him another Heartless; he'll be no threat then, and he could serve us better then as a mortal."

"Judgin' from their style an' look, I believe that his comrades are the King's flunkies," A thickly accented voice said, the same one that had wondered about the lights. He looked a bit weirder than the others; it wasn't that he was a wearing a nice buisiness suit, diamond cufflinks or other signs of great wealth, but the fact that it was all put on a massive being that appeared to have been sculpted from living stone. A big one two; he was easily twice the size of everyone else there, and he had the look of being capable of snapping them like twigs if he felt so inclined. "Not 'zackly da best fighters I'd ever see. Still, dey won't go down easy."

Another thin figure, sitting next to him, lowered his farm hat and growled. The little red-pink flesh under his janitorial style clothes and his weird work gloves, tipped with finger-blade, looked like nothing so much as beef jerky. His face couldn't be seen under his hat, but that was probably a good thing. "Like you're one to talk, troll. I hear you've never had the guts to go carve someone by yerself."

"Watchit," The troll warned in a low, pleasant voice. "Somb'dy might t'ink dat youse is askin' fer a fight from a troll. And I kin tell youse dat dat's somethin' dat I real hope youse ain't doin. 'Cause a troll don't carve you meatheads; we smash 'em like o'er-ripe...orange thing dat grows on...big brown thing wit' leaves."

"Both of you, shut up." a feminine voice said angrily, the one that had expressed a desire in hurrying things up.

Everyone shut up, even the dangerous looking thin guy and the Mafia-toned rock thing. Everyone's attention was on the speaker as she stood up, glaring at the two of them.

Though she wasn't as imposing as the others, certainly much less intimidating than most of them, the others cowered away from her as she gave the room a stern look. The ripple that pulsed away from her, causing the lamp-fires to flicker and slightly grow in intensity for a moment, wasn't uninteresting either.

She was fairly tall, and could have been considered beautiful, if it wasn't for the inhuman aspect granted by her pointed ears, the elfin look of her face, or the general self-absorbed coldness she virtually radiated. Her skin was a dusky tan, with a pair of semi-circular dark markings directly under her green eyes that didn't look like make-up. Her hair was a poofy red-brown mass of hair curling down to her waist, the sides curling away a bit. She wore a long black dress, decorated with sinister-looking dark purple whorls and spirals, making it look like a moving dark cloud of mobile magical effect. The dress's lower half split at the knee for mobility, revealing her bare legs and feet. It's arms ended in billowing sleeves, revealing that her long and clawlike fingers were grasping a black gnarled metal staff of some kind, magical runes with a cage motiff spread up the surface. At the top of it were three long 'fingers', each grasping the same round orb; the orb contained was appeared to be a swirling green cloud of mystical energy, constantly curling around itself and flashing agitatedly.

Nested on her hip, secured with a belt with several other odd and probably magical devices, was a small white mask; it had a red area pointing down on the forehead, a long red curving nose, and yellow-red eyes with spirals on them; their sides had black markings around them and a wide semicircle smile; altogether with the various dividing lines to form the basics of a face on it, it had a gleefully malevolent look on it.

She tapped her staff against the ground, sure she had their attention. She tapped her bare foot against the ground, wondering why she had to go barefoot as a fashion statement.

"The Keyblade has found him," she said, gesturing to the Irken on the hologram. "That much is indesputable. The real question is whether he will be able to harness it's true strength in a way to become a threat to our interests, or will he be swallowed by the same darkness we command? Either way, he could be a useful tool."

She waved her hand over the hologram, and it flickered showing a different scene. "Whatever the Keybearer does, we will know of it. But I have someone in mind who'd be more...easily manipulated."

Everyone looked at the hologram.

It was difficult to tell where it was exactly. The only defining features were a series of immense stone pillars rising from fog like giant needles placed on their points, ignoring the laws of gravity with contempt.

On the largest of the stone pillars, a boy wearing a trenchcoat and a distinctive scythe hairdo looked around dazedly.

"Huh?" he said, bend down on his knees, too weak from his travels through inadvisable gateways and possibly madness to stand up. "Where...where am I?"

"Where is your ship?" Zim wondered, impatient to get moving.

"Eh, two problems with that," Calvin said slowly.

"What."

"One, we put it in cold storage."

Zim stared at him shortly, then slapped his forehead.

"We weren't expecting to use it again so soon!" The human said defensively. "And that brings us to point number two: when we landed here, and I mean that in the loosest sense of the word, we broke it. Bad. To the point where it's not so much a mobile ship anymore so much as a draggable trunk."

"Then get it fixed. NOW!"

"Oh, don't get your antannae in a twist," Calvin said grumpily as he twirled a device that looked like a rachet. "If I can jury-rig a cardboard box to reconfigure someone's celluller make-up into something that it has difficulty concieving of, than I can fix a crashed-space ship of disputable origin."

Hobbes' eyes widened as he recognized the device Calvin was treating like a baton. "Hey, watch where you're aiming that thing!"

"Huh?" Distracted by the tiger's warning, Calvin lost hold of it and it crashed to the ground, shooting a large gout of flame directly at Hobbes' tail.

"OW!" Hobbes screamed as he ran around, trying to put out his flaming tail.

"Hold on, I can fix this!" Calvin proclaimed, activating his Blizzard Bracer.

"No way!" the tiger proclaimed as he jumped over a blast of cyrokinetic energy. "I'm not going to be a furry archaeological artifact!" He landed on the ground, slipping on the frozen bit of ground Calvin had hit. Scrabbling to his feet, he immediately started running away as Calvin gave chase, attempting to 'help' in his unique way.

Feeling bored and left out(not to mention irritated that they didn't think of his difficulties as important enough to warrent their immediate attention), Zim started chasing Calvin around, throwing a few fireballs around for the heck of it.

"These are the guys that are supposed to save us all from the Heartless?" Bloo said skeptically.

"We're all going to die." Gaara said flatly. Not that he said anything any other way, but it was the thought that counted.

"Not that effects me," Spike said cheerfully. "I'm already dead."

"Like you'd ever let us forget," Naruto said.

Back in the Evil Spooky Place of Horrible Retching Doom...Wait, Scratch the Retching Part. It Brings Up Unpleasant Images.

The various villains stared at the hologram.

"I don't think we have anything to worry about," the smith said finally as the tiger tripped over a rock, Calvin and Zim falling onto him in another dogpile.

"On the other hand, our entertainment is pretty much filled up for a while," the clown noted.

"Someone's going to have to stop them eventually," Raimundo said.

"Are you kidding!? I ain't going anywhere near that thing!" Naruto declared as the rolling dustball that was Calvin, Hobbes and Zim went past, sounds of hitting and argument emananting from it.

"Don't be a wuss-" Bloo began to say as he inadverdantly wandered into it's path, getting sucked into the migrating fight. The sounds of argument were added by Bloo's shrieks of pain, apparently unnoticed by the fighters.

He fell out of it a moment later, bruised and dazed. "Did you guys get that liscence number?" He asked, the words slurring together. "I missed it before the Donphan hit me."

If Gaara had had any, he may have raised an eyebrow. "Donphan live in this district?"

Naruto, being an expert on the local inhabitants for some reason, shook his head. "Not since the Big Pokemon Stampede two months ago."

"A'right," Spike said declaritively. "That's enough oughta you lot!" He marched over to the screaming dustball and with great hesistence, plucked Calvin and Zim out of there, leaving the dust to clear and reveal Hobbes, who was unaware of the other two's disappearance and was still fighting.

Spike looked at Calvin and Zim, who were having a similar problem and were furiously punching and kicking at thin air.

"Hey!" he screamed, shaking them quickly. "Cut it out!"

The three quickly stopped, staring at Spike with a mixture of bemusement, embarrasement, and annoyance. "What?" the three of them said at once.

The vampire took a deep breath. Being the peace keeper didn't come easily to him. He wasn't built for this kind of thing; he was built for being the reason to keep a peace keeper around.

"I got a solution to the problem here," he said as calmly as he could.

"We're listening," Hobbes said, patting himself free of dust as he stood up.

"Right. There's this guy who's got a shop not too far from here, name's Cyborg, fixes anything. I say you three take a breather and get it to him, fetch the ship-thing in the mornin'-"

"Wait, what?" Zim said. "Why wait for the morning!?"

Spike resisted the urge to slap himself in the face, as the hand he would have used was currently holding a short tempermental green alien. "Because," he said through clenched teeth. "It's what you might call an all-nighter, you bloody idiot." That last part was delivered under his breath.

"Shazbot!"

"Hey," Calvin interrupted. "Where are we going to stay then? 'Cause I'm telling you right now, I am not going to sleep in the Gummi."

"Re-lax!" Naruto said loudly. "We gotcha covered!"

Hobbes started. "You do?"

Naruto crossed his arms behind his head, closed his eyes, and smiled widely. "There's this one place in town, near here, it's just perfect for you guys!"

"Hold on!" Hobbes said suspiciously. "If this place is so great, how come it's not taken! No, wait, lemme guess; vampires habitually stake it out. Oceanic horrors from dimensions unknown tend to rise up from there. It's a popular filming site."

Naruto frowned, though it was hard to tell; he retained his expression from before for the most part, making him look more foxlike than ever. "Uuuuh, no. There's just not enough people in town to go around for all the buildings. At least half the stuff here was around before anyone got here, y'know?"

Hobbes scratched the back of his head cluelessly. "Uh, no. What do you guys think?"

The three looked at each other before Spike dropped them. "Yeah, that'll work. Take us THERE!" Zim said, gesturing out dramatically.

"Uh, why don't you go by yourself?" Spike wondered. "'S not like it's hard to find. A bit out of the way, t' be honest, but what's so bad 'bout that?"

"Because," Zim said dramatically. "We are...LOST!"

Spike shrugged. "Ain't me problem. Heh. Wonder what poor sucker'll get slapped with this job, eh? What do you think-" he trailed off as he realized that he was suddenly alone. "Guys?" He looked around, noticing the 'guys' were a bit off, whistling innocently, waving at him cheerfully, or giving him a good view of their backs as befitted their natures.

"Ah, hell. Story o' me life," Spike grumbled under his breath. "Gotta be the direction finder of a short green psychotic alien with a Napoleon complex."

"I do not have a Napoleon complex!" Zim protested.

Everyone stared at him.

"...What about the rest of what he said?" Calvin asked uncertainly.

"What about it?"

Everyone unconciously backed off to what they instinctively deemed a safe distance. This wasn't much for the majority of the Traverse Town natives(or to be more accurate, the ones present that had been there longer than the rest currently present), seeing as they couldn't move much further.

"Are we going or not?" Zim asked the vampire impatiently, oblivious to the reaction he was causing in everyone else.

"Right, right. Follow me then." The vampire moodily walked off slowly, giving Hobbes amble time to grab the unconcious Morte before following.

As he followed Spike and his new aquiantices, Zim looked up at that stars.

That means that you two are out there somewhere, on one or more world out of thousands of worlds. Dammit, I hate it when that happens! Not that this is pre-ciiisely a common occurance, and why am I enunciating in my thoughts? And how can I tell that sort of thing, anyway? Damn, my head's surreal. Why do they call it surreal, anyway? Are they implying with the 'sur' part of it that it's worthy of honoring?

Did I get off-track again?

I just realized; you two found your own ways off the planet before it collapsed in on itself. And that means I have to find you two; I mean, you certainly can't find your way to this town, at least on your own. Not that I'm certain you'd want to; I've only been here for...what? An hour and a half at most? And I'm already lost. Why must people build such confusing layouts?! My Labyrinth of Ultimate Confusion and Slight Exhaustion had a much saner building plan then this place, and it was built on non-Euclidian geometric angles. M.C. Esther would have a field day in this place! Irk, I wouldn't be surprised if paradoxal stairs were fashionable here! But DAMN, those paintings are cool!

Zim, almost completely unaware of it, slowly started raising a hand up to the sky, vaugely certain that his mental musings would be worth uncountable millions to any psychiatrist that was bored and itching to write a book on the mentality of the mental, to coin a phrase.

I don't know where you two could have disappeared to, nor do I know how to find you. But of course you couldn't make it easy, now could you? Noooo, you nev-vah make it simple for ANYONE! You hear me? ANYONE!...Why am I yelling? I'm starting to make my head hurt. And why does that frighten me?

I don't know, and there's another thing I don't know; how many worlds there are. At the risk of repeating myself, I've heard from those in town that all possible worlds exist somewhere out there. Any world imaginable can and probably does exist in the universe; one world for every star.

Zim stared out into the night sky. One world for every star. Did that mean that each star actually was a world, or merely that every star served as a sun for some world out there. Either way, the sheer amount of possibly worlds was daunting, even to him. And that was something for an Irken that had been called insanely courageous in a complimentary tone.

But I don't care.

His raised hand curled uncertainly into a fist.

You can't hear me, Gir. And I'm pretty sure that you can't hear me Dib. I got rid of the brain-nanites years ago. But that's irrelevent.

His neutral expression turned into an almost manic grin, and the suddenly clenching of his fist gave him an exuberent look. An outside observer, seeing him now, might conjecture that it was a hell yeah! sort of look. But dispite his look, it was an expression and a emotion that was, at it's core, deadly serious. Even if the recipents couldn't hear it, that didn't change what it was. It was greater than a promise made in his mind.

It was an oath, declared by his heart. And Zim never minced words.

No matter how far away we are...no matter what distant world you're on...no matter what manner of horror I must endure...no matter what I have to do to get you back... I will find you, Gir and Dib.

No matter what.

His hand fell back to his side, and the grin faded away to a simple slight smile.

He continued looking up into the night sky, thinking about what sort of trouble he was going to get into or cause in the pursuit of his goal.

He decided it didn't matter. And hey; it might be fun.

"Hey, new guy!" Hobbes yelled.

Zim started, jarred out of his internal musing by the shout. He gave the world an all-around hateful glare for disturbing his 'Zim-Time'.

"Don't rush me!" he shouted back at the tiger as he hurried up to them as they went to his new base of operations, wherever it was.

Besides, he thought as he tried scooting to a stop, accidentally sliding past them and crashing into some trash cans. How much worse can things get?

The answer to that is very, heh heh heh. I must say, I'm pleased I finally got this chapter finished. Took me long enough!

I can't think of anything else to say, besides an abjuration to leave a review(I need input, ya know)and a note.

If you think things are weird now...

You ain't seen nothing yet.

Cue dramatic and insane scary laughter. Man, I just loved that gesture in Fable, heh heh heh.

I've also begun instituting a design of using those little swirling things to denote the beginning and end of Author Notes. Should work better than my method of three dots to denote scene breaks, hm?