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.

5. Lost' Is Such A Strong Word

This chapter's a little later then I envisioned, mostly due to laziness on my part, but also because I originally planned it to be a lot bigger. Unfortunately, much of the latter half got compressed or something; it was seriously messed up, forcing me to split it into two chapters. The good part about that, though, is that I already have much of the next chapter written.

Sorry, no poem for you.

Disclaimer: I own no property properly owned by Disney, Square-Enix, Jhonen Vasquez, Bill Watterson, Thirtieth Century Fox, Christy Hui, D.C., Cartoon Network, Sunao Yoshida, Masashi Kishimoto, Joss Whedon or anyone I forgot to mention.

-------

Gaara of the Desert, who'd earned such delightful nicknames as the Demon of the Hidden Sand, the Monster of Sunagakure-That-Was, the Sand Reaper, Host of the One-Tailed Shukaku and The Beast With No Eyebrows through the natural progression of the instability inherent to his personality due to his chronic insomnia, stared stonily at the air.

He growled to himself as he tried to tune out the ceaseless screaming of the Shukaku, trying uselessly to ignore it's endless pleas for him to kill everyone on board in a spree of murder. He glanced out a window, his lips frowning slightly as he stared at the gleaming silver disc in the sky. I hate full moons, he thought moodily.

I likes me a full moon! The Shukaku declared loudly. Gets my blood pumping, know what I mean, boy?

Why do you think I hate it? Gaara thought back. I have to listen to your bitching.

Screw you, dumbass! Kill someone, will ya? I'm going stir-crazy here!

Gaara told the Shukaku to copulate with itself. The demon quieted for a moment, giving hifm some space to think.

Due to the suprising series of events regarding the sudden appearance of the Keybearer, he had found himself aboard Jarod's private airship, the Sun Eagle; it was a expertly designed craft, designed by Jarod personally and built by some of the finest technicians in town. It was Jarod's home away from home, which meant that it was the only home the few people who knew he actually existed were aware of, as no one knew just where he lived. It was about the size of the average blimp, normally invisible to the human eye but colored bright friendly primary colors when it was visible. It's bulky exterior looked a bit steampunk, with small pistons everywhere and oversized antigravity engines among other little details.

A few moments of thought later, Gaara, currently sitting in a seat in a small hallway lined with chairs, poised between a kind of recreation room and the pilot's chamber, was staring at Jarod, trying to get his attention in his own unique manner. Either that, or he was finding the space between Jarod's neck and shoulder unaccountably interesting.

Anyone who knew Gaara for any appreciable amount of time got used fairly quickly to his personality quirks, creepy as they were; being an insomniac who until fairly recently primarily defined his interactions with people in terms of indiscriminate murder and general hatred, people generally feared Gaara, even when they weren't aware of his dark past. It was fairly common knowledge that he labeled 'subduing an opponent' as 'breaking all the bones in their body three times', based on the logic that an enemy that couldn't move was an enemy that couldn't harm anyone. He also often forgot to only think his replies to the Shukaku's running commentary, causing many to believe that Gaara was schizophrenic, though technically that wasn't far from the truth. Even those who were aware of Gaara's lamentable condition as what he called a 'spirtualist medium' or host were easily unnerved by the sight of him angrily voicing irate replies such as 'I want to purge your intestines out through your throat', neglecting to add the stipulation that his comment had been made independent of whatever conversation had been going on around him. Third, he was just plain creepy, in his own inimitable 'holy shit, he's scary!' way.

He also had mastered the fine art of turning a stare into it's own form of communication, a fact not lost upon Jarod. Being a person given to nearly obsessive-compulsive levels of organization, he'd quantified the majority of Gaara's various facial expressions from Number 1(perfectly relaxed stare): I have nothing in particular to communicate, to Number 352(slight furrowing of the brows and bit of a frown): You are causing me undue stress and I advise you to desist, and that old standby, Number 9001(stone-cold glare, narrowed eyes and tight scowl): I am going to kill you. The stony neutral look Jarod was currently receiving by proxy was Number 2213(almost completely neutral): I desire your attention, but the situation is not so drastic that I am willing to disrupt your thoughts.

Stepping out of his seat, Jarod quietly sat next to Gaara. "Something on your mind?" Jarod asked pleasantly.

Gaara didn't say anything, but that was likely because he gathering his thoughts: Gaara only spoke when he knew precisely what he wanted to say, often because he hated looking stupid. "Something," Gaara finally said.

Jarod waited. Gaara just stared back at him, blinking once or twice. It was a tribute to Gaara's mastery of fear that he could make even a blink look intimidating; it reminded Jarod of a guilliotine blade coming down on an immobile lump of meat.

"And?" Jarod said, breaking the tension in the air.

Gaara paused another few moments, collecting his thoughts like grains of sand in the air. "Was it really a wise decision to send the Keybearer and the King's emisaries to Fosters' with..." Gaara paused, as if still trying to digest this one fact in his mind. "Spike and Bloo?"

"It seemed to be the best idea at the moment," Jarod replied calmly. "Bloo knows the way and Spike's one of the best fighters we have in town."

"I wasn't talking about their fighting abilities. I was talking about the fact that Spike is a pretentious bastard and Bloo couldn't find his mind over his ego if he had a map. In short, they're both idiots." Gaara said acidly.

Jarod sighed. "Look, I know it seemed like a bad idea, but it seemed faster to do it this way. We send them off to Foster's, I take their Gummi Ship to Cyborg's for a repair job and drop you guys off at home."

Gaara closed his eyes momentarily. He opened them a moment later, his odd blue-green eyes boring into Jarod's brown ones. "I understand your tactical decision. I don't understand why you sent them, when you could have sent someone more competent. The Xiaolin Warriors, for instance. Hell, even me or Naruto would have been a better choice."

"Alright, a natural twenty!" Naruto cried from the airlock-style door to their rear.

"Naruto," Clay said slowly. "For the last time, we're playing poker."

"...Still taking all your guy's money," the ninja replied smugly.

Raimundo let out a string of Spanish that probably translated to something vulgar. "He doesn't even know what game we're playing and he's still cleaning us out! Buenos Dios, what's wrong with us!?"

"I blame you wasting time on your pelvis bound," Omi said, making sounds that suggested he was shuffling cards.

"Pardner, I don't know where to start correctin' ya," Clay said amiably.

"Yeah," Kimiko agreed. "Rai doesn't slack off half as much as he used to. Mostly."

"Thanks for the sterling recommandation," Raimundo said sourly.

"An old habit," Omi said, probably laying out the cards. "Is an old habit. Shall we...how do you say...play for keeps?"

Gaara thought that everyone in the other room was staring at Omi slack-jawed. "I knew it!" Naruto yelled, probably jumping to his feet and pointing at Omi. "You can get idioms right!"

"Yes; I have, as some of our friends say, furious skills!"

"Aaand he slips right back," Kimiko said drily.

"And we already covered that one too," Raimundo said. "Back in New York when we recovered the Serpent's Tail."

Gaara turned his head from the door to Jarod.

Jarod shrugged uncertainly. "I know it looks bad...but we've only been seperated for about thirty minutes. How much trouble could they get into by now?"

------

Spike, Bloo, Calvin, Hobbes, Zim and Morte stared sullenly, their backs facing a huge smoking hole in the wall behind them. To their left was a dead end, to their right was a sharp turn

Morte dared to glance back. "Is that...thing following us, Boss?"

Zim looked back, twitching slightly. "I see it nowhere! That...horrible demon! We must have lost it!"

"Yeah," Bloo said. "We blew up a building to get away!"

"Always a good thing in my book!" Spike said.

"Guuuys!" Bloo whined. "Less talking, more running before it catches up!""

Hobbes shuddered. "Don't have to tell me twice!" He hopped away from the hole, turning to the right, the others following him.

"Hi! My name is Fred Fredburger! I can! I can! I can spell my name real good! Yes!"

He came to a stop, the others crashing together behind him. The odd sight right in front of them was a short furry green...thing. It's body was wide and stout, with no clear division of it's shoulder or hips, and it's limbs were fairly short, ending in stubby fingers with hooflike nails and feet that looked like an anthropoid elephant's. A pair of small horns graced the top of it's head, above where it's eyes shined out with all the intelligence of a pet rock. the short horn-nubs poking out of it's head were coupled by a short tail that ended in a triangle of sorts, extending out from the vicinity of it's rear. Finally, an elephantine trunk hung out above his mouth to just below it's bottom lip.

"F-R-E-D...F-R-E...D! B...U-R...G-E...R! Fred Fredburger! Yes! My mom, my mom says that I'm reeall smart and if I don't have any more accidents, I can move out of the yard! Yes."

There was a long pause.

"I like nachos and frozen yogurt! Yes."

"Sweet, jumping chili bean!" Zim yelled. "He found us! Again!"

"What will it take to rid us of you!?" Bloo screamed at Fred Fredburger. "What!? For the love of God, TELL ME!"

Fred Fredburger stared at him. "I have toe fungus!"

"Sir," Calvin said to Hobbes. "I should like to hire you for a monster extermination job."

"Oh no," Hobbes said back. "This one is free. I insist."

Bloo slapped his face. "I hate my life. This much."

Spike lightly kicked him. "Hey, remember it's all your fault, dumbass. You're the one that tried to sell the District to him."

"Hey! I remember you! I remember you! Yes!" Fred Fredburger walked out over Bloo, pressing a finger into the imaginary friend. "One time, this one I was playing a game with dots, and blinking things and fruit! I like fruit! Yes. And there was a, there was a ball thingie chasing you around when you looked like this, yes! And then it ran away, 'cause you were all white and stuff! Yes! And then it touched you and you went poof! And then you went back into your box thingie! Yes!" Fred Fredburger kept poking Bloo as he spoke, increasingly poking him harder, which, judging by Bloo's increasingly deeper scowl, were incredibly irritating.

"Hey-! Quit-! Stop tha-! Seriously man, that's-! Okay, if you don't-! STOP THAT!" Bloo screamed, his patience frayed.

"Yep. Definitely Gir flashbacks," Zim said to himself, thinking that the main difference between his robot sidekick and this idiot was that this...whatever it was, it was merely mind-bogglingly stupid. Gir was mind-bogglingly stupid and insane.

Fred suddenly ceased, staring at nothing in particular with blissful stupidity. "Okay, blobby thing!"

"Don't call me that."

"Okay, Mr. Blue Thing! Hey, what's that?" He asked, wandering over to Spike. "Are those your pants? Are those? Are those? Are those your pants?"

"No, they're the Greased-Up Deaf Guy's pants. I'm just holding them for him," Spike said sarcastically.

"Okay!" Fred Fredburger said. "They're very nice pants! Yes. And very greasy slimy, yes." Fred suddenly opened his mouth and closed it over Spike's leg, managing to gulp it down to his knee.

Spike's face, normally set in an expression that seemed to suggest that he really didn't give a damn, turned to one that was somewhere between shock and fury. "What the bloody hell?! Get off me, you brain-dead...brain-dead.." Spike looked at Zim. "Help a man out here?"

"Vaguely elephantine stink-thing?" Zim suggested.

"Hell no, that sucks." Spike furiously shook his leg, trying to use sheer motion to dislodge the dim-witted Underworld-That-Was inhabitant.

"Ooh!" Fred Fredburger mumbled through his mouthful of leather-clad leg as he flew off the leg, crashing into the wall with no more awareness of the impact then the average rock. "That did not taste good! Yes!" He started hopping up and down excitedly, noticing Calvin's weapon. "A hammer thingy! Hey, Mr. Blob! When! When! When do we get hammer thingies?"

"Shut up! You're too stupid to get one!"

"Damn, this thing's stupid," Morte observed as Fred Fredburger went back to Bloo, begining to pester him for a hammer. "And I was in a plane of pure stupid once. Source of all cheap useless mass-produced crap, you know."

"Even duller than a broken tack of the Ordinary Tool people of Stuffia-2," Zim said sagely.

"You just made that up, didn't you?" Spike said.

"Yes. Yes I did. And you'll never prove it!"

"You just said it."

"Did I? Did I really?"

"Yes, you did!"

"That's what they all say. And then you're strapped into a rocket ship headed into the path of a supernova with only a crossword puzzle in Spanish and a scale-model of the Massive to decorate with pleasing shapes to pass the time before your flesh-searing oblivion! By way of exploded sun! Which hurts. Oh, the pain of the hurting."

Spike stared at him; he had some experience in the matter of judging someone's madness, given that his vampiric sire and longtime love had been tortured to insanity shortly before being turned, but Zim was in a class all his own, blending irrationality and unpredicatibility into a potent stew of sheer chaotic behavior.

Bloo's scowl intensified, but he showed no other sign of his volcanic state of anger. He calmly glided...scooted...however he moved around to Calvin. Bloo held his arm out, Calvin handing the hammer over wordlessly. Grasping the hammer firmly, Bloo came back to Fred. "So, you want a hammer thing, do you?" Bloo said sweetly to Fred Fredburger.

"Yes! Yes! Yes! I do!" Fred Fredburger yelped, jumping up and down.

"Okaaay then...HAVE THIS!" Bloo swung the hammer full-force into the moronic creauture's face, knocking it high into the sky, the being dwindling into a tiny speck that abruptly vanished in a twinkling flash with a loud ting.

Bloo slumped over and sighed, throwing the hammer back at Calvin, unintentionally bopping him in the eye. "That takes care of that."

"I would like some nachos and frozen yogurt!" Fred Fredburger said from behind him.

"Whaat?!" Spike said. He furiously glanced at the sky and at Fred Fredburger, looking at one then the other so fast he should have gotten whiplash. "But...you were up there...but you...here...there...AUUUGH!"

Hobbes sympathetically patted him on the shoulder, being the only one tall enough to do so. He had to reach up a bit, but it was the thought that counted. "Relax, you get used to the insanity eventually."

"You guys!" Zim shouted, deciding that referring to them as minions or expendable pawns would have been bad for his public relations. "In my role as Supreme Leader Guy, I have decreed, that starting right now...we run like hell and never look back!"

Everyone who was capable rose a hand. "Aye!"

They paused for a moment. "'Supreme Leader Guy'?" Spike questioned. "I've heard better made-up titles at a banana republics run by insane cannibals."

"Quiet, you!" Zim snapped right before everyone started running.

And Fred Fredburger found himself in the dust, all by himself.

"My head is a hammer thingie!" He said, pounding his forehead into a nearby wall for a few minutes, causing a sizable dent and accidentally causing his brain to suddenly develop a through and comprehensive grasp of basic algebra for no apparent reason. "Ouch! Yes."

-------

Near Cyborg's shop...

"Uh...ugh...UGH!" Naruto yelled, tugging at the door. He gave up, letting go and slumping back, turning to the Xiaolin Dragons and Gaara. "It's no good, he must've locked up for the night."

Dojo slapped his face, loosening his coils around Clay's hat. "Naruto, for the last time, that's a push door!"

Naruto crossed his arms. "Sometimes pulling is pushing."

Omi crossed his arms and considered it. "Perhaps, for the sake of argument, let us agree that that may be true. However, in a far more accurate and correct view, it is not. You are being most foolish."

"Yeah?" Naruto shot back. "Well...well...you all talk with an accent!"

Raimundo smacked him upside the head. "They should've X-rayed your head when you were at the hospital!"

Naruto threw a punch that Raimundo easily weaved away from. "They did! And for your information, they found nothing!" He paused for a moment. "I didn't mean it like that!"

"Sure ya din't," Clay said.

Gaara looked at Naruto. "You're an embarrasment to shinobi everywhere."

"...You don't have any eyebrows!" Naruto shot back.

"Ooh," Gaara said cooly. "I haven't heard that one before."

"Will you idiots knock it off!?" Kimiko snarled.

Gaara glared at her. "Excuse me?"

Kill her! Peel her skin off, drain her fluids and wear her meat as a musclesuit! Teach 'er to tell you what to do! Heh heh...musclesuit. I'm so freaking funny it hurts! The Shukaku paused. Then howabouts we go moshing? I like moshing! Rap rules!

Gaara's eye twitched. If you were manifast, he told the Shukaku. I would make you scream and bleed in interesting ways.

Damn it, boy! You ain't got no flair for violence. 'Scream and bleed in interesting ways'. Where's the threat? Where's the rage? Where's the glamour? WHERE'S THE DAMN SANDWICH? WE HAVEN'T EATEN IN HOURS! I'M HUNGRY! I WANT SPICY FOOD!

Gaara told the Shukaku to copulate with himself again.

You're not nice!

Clay waved his hand around Gaara's blank eyes. "Hey? Hey, you in there?"

"Am I the only one who thinks it's really creepy when he zones out?" Kimiko said.

"That is just weird," Raimundo said. "I think he's drooling a little." He looked closer, his lip curling in distaste. "Yup, we got drooling."

Naruto glared at Raimundo and angrily kicked him in the shin.

"Ow! What was that for?"

Naruto smirked. "What? I didn't do anything." He silently rejoiced at the blow struck for all demon-possessed hosts everywhere, not that there were many.

"Friends!" Omi declared. "We must be courteous to our allies. Mocking his nature as a host is most uncouth-"

"'Host'?" Naruto repeated angrily. "'Host'?! What the hell is that supposed to mean? Don't callGaara that! There's more to him then just being the container of the One-Tailed Shukaku!"

Omi flinched, realizing he'd violated the first rule of speaking to Naruto: never mention the word 'host'. "I-I apologize."

Raimundo glanced guiltily at Gaara, who was still somewhere conversing with the Shukaku. "Uh, yeah, me too."

Naruto scowled at Raimundo. "Yeah...that was real convincing."

Raimundo glared at him. "Dude, I'm serious! I-"

Naruto grunted. He turned around, scuffing dust up. "Whatever."

Raimundo looked moodily at the ninja's back, wondering whether he should drop the subject or kick him in the back. He decided to ignore it, as that seemed the better option and he didn't want to fight Naruto when he was in a bad mood. Bad things happened when Naruto got really angry.

Naruto fumed to himself. Most of the time, the mostly unknown fact that he was the container of the Nine-Tailed Demon Fox didn't bother him that much. Sure, it was distressing to find out you were holding up a demon inside, and terrible to find out that the reason you had been hated and despised by almost everyone you knew was because you bore the monster that'd almost killed your village home the day you were born, but the thing that really annoyed him was when people considered people like him and Gaara to be extensions of the demons they carried inside them. The mindset that they were the same as the demons inside was the very thing that'd made his and Gaara's childhoods so miserable, but he couldn't hate people for that. But he despised the term host. It implied that they were nothing more then receptacles for the Tailed Beasts and less persons then tools.

Gaara, on the other hand, was unaware of anything going on around him. The Shukaku, on the other hand, was. Oy! The mouth-breathers are staring again!

Why are you calling them mouth-breathers? Gaara asked. You breath through your mouth too.

Grrr...damn it, boy! You're always picking apart everything I say and throwing it back at me! You are one damn sarcastic son of a bitch!

Don't insult my mother, Gaara 'said' calmly. Or I'll listen to love songs.

You fight dirty!

Gaara stirred, finally noticing everyone staring at him. "What?" he asked sternly.

"Nothing!" Dojo squeaked, crawling under Clay's hat to shiver in fright.

Clay found himself in the unenviable position of having Gaara glare at him. He shuffled nervously, smiling awkwardly at the sand-ninja. Gaara's expression remained as it was; a stern stare that could make a glass-eyed statue want to blink.

It went on for a few more minutes; Gaara staring at Clay, the Earth Dragon refusing to back down or show aggression.

Gaara finally looked away, walking away from the others and staring out at the moon. The ground under his feet crumbled as he walked over it, crumbling into curling tendrils of sand.

Jarod came out of the shadows from the alley they'd arrived at, tending to who-knew-what, and noticed Gaara's mood. "Something the matter?"

Gaara stared up at the moon, scowling faintly. He looked away and at Jarod; as he half-turned to face him, the sand at his feet stirred, forming clawlike protrusions; they reached out at the warm meat around them before Gaara clenched his fist and they crumbled away.

Gaara spoke, his voice slightly hoarse with effort, and with an inhuman timbre to it. "On nights of the full moon...it's blood...boils."

Jarod found his attention drawn to the eyeliner-like marks around his eyes. They were wavering slightly, the black creeping out onto his face before being drawn back in.

Kimiko raised an eyebrow. "What?"

Naruto walked beside her. "What he means," he said quietly. "Is that the demon in him is awake right now. And it wants out."

Kimiko stared wide-eyed at Gaara's trembling, tightly clenched fist. A tiny trickle of blood was coming from inbetween his fingers.

"You alright there, partner?" Clay asked concernedly.

Gaara didn't answer for a minute, staring down at the ground, his eyes shut tight.

Naruto, alone of all the people there, really knew what was happening to Gaara. Only he, a fellow container, could know what he was going through. The Shukaku was active, and it was wrestling Gaara for dominance, fighting to emerge and kill. Gaara was fighting it with all his strength. Only Naruto knew how hard Gaara was fighting, and how fast he was slipping. Fighting against his inner demon was always going to be a losing battle; it would always be Gaara's will and determination to prevent the Shukaku from possessing his body and living his murderous fantasies on the world. And only Naruto knew that Gaara had been losing that battle the day the demon was placed inside his body before his mother had even given birth to him.

Gaara finally raised his head, his eyes opened normally; his eyemarks had stopped shifting around and he wasn't trembling anymore. The Shukaku, if only for this night, had been denied.

Omi, Clay, Raimundo and Clay looked at one another awkwardly. They couldn't think of anything to say.

Gaara gave Naruto a glance. Naruto looked at him, his pronounced canines biting his lower lip. Gaara shook his head wearily and brushed his hair aside, throwing the red kanji-scar on his forehead.

For Gaara, it was symbolic. The day he'd been born, he'd killed his mother. He'd been born with his hands stained with blood, the Shukaku already seeking to emerge again, eating away at his psyche as he slept, reducing him to a life of instability, terror and insomnia. He had been, and always would be, a bloodlusting monster, spurred on by the endless screaming of the demon in his heart.

And yet he still had the kanji for love scarred on his forehead.

Jarod picked up on Gaara's act. "Are you sure you're alright?"

"I am," Gaara replied, his voice devoid of inflection or tone. "For now."

Jarod felt a momentary surge of pity for Gaara's condition and remorse for his inability to do anything about it.

Any further discussion on the matter what interrupted when the door swung open, held open by Nigel. He looked at the collected people evenly, raising an eyebrow under his sunglasses. "All right," he said slowly. "What's going on here?"

"Hey, uno!" Raimundo greeted.

"Hello," Nigel replied, unsure whether Raimundo was referring to his last name or simply using the Spanish word for one. "Raimundo, Clay, Omi, Kimiko," he paused as Dojo lifted Clay's hat up, looking out fearfully. "Dojo." Dojo waved his hand, forgetting he was holding the hat up and dropping it on him. Nigel grimaced slightly as he spoke to the ninjas. "Naruto, Gaara." The tone in which he spoke those two's names was different from the others; Naruto's name was spoken with an obvious edge of irritation and he referred to Gaara with a slight degree of apprehension. If that bothered either of the ninja, it didn't show.

Nigel paused, looking at the last one there. "Jarod. What is this about, then?"

"We got a job for Cyborg," Jarod replied. "He still here?"

Nigel nodded. "He's around the back, going through the inventory. Is this important?"

Jarod raised an eyebrow. "Aren't all jobs important?"

Nigel rolled his eyes, not that anyone could see. He stepped back into the shop, waving at the others and indicating them to follow him. They complied, walking into the shop and following Nigel to the various chairs in the middle of the room. "Wait here, I'll go fetch him." Naruto happily flopped into a bean-bag chair, kicking his legs out gleefully. Gaara chose to remain where he was, standing by the counter silently. Clay quietly leaned back into another chair, Dojo crawling out from under his hat and coiling onto the table between the chairs. Kimiko and Raimundo sat back on the sofa, sitting side by side. Omi, unsure where to sit, took a small cushion from a chair and dropped it on the ground, sitting on it cross-legged, folding his arms together, his interlocked hands disappearing under his sleeves. Jarod sat back on a reclining chair, watching everyone in the room off-handedly.

Seeing that they were seated, Nigel nodded. He disappeared through a door behind the counter.

Dojo peered around nervously, tapping a claw on his chin nervously. "Uh, where's the Gummi Ship?"

Naruto grinned at him. "Ah, I got it handled!"

Dojo blinked. "Uh, what?"

The ninja raised an eyebrow rougishly. "Hey, some of us can be in more than one place at once."

"Hey, what's that supposed to-" he stopped, his eyes growing wide. "Oooh. I get it!"

"Hah!" Omi boasted. "I got it before you did!"

"Oh really?" Raimundo said drily.

"Indeed!"

"If you don't mind my asking, then what's he doing?" Jarod asked Omi knowingly.

Omi kept smiling. "I cannot tell you; it is a secret!"

"Or maybe you don't know."

Omi's smile became strained. "Eh...heh heh...what would make you say that?"

Jarod smiled inscrutably.

Omi twitched. "All right, so I do not know what he is doing!"

Raimundo snorted. "It's obvious! He's using Shadow Clones!"

Omi laughed nervously. "Ah, heh heh, I already knew that! I was just seeing if you did!"

Raimundo smirked and was about to say something when Kimiko sharply elbowed him. He looked at her sharply and she smiled innocently.

Naruto grinned. He looked at Clay, who was regarding the scene calmly. "Ease up," the cowboy advised his friends.

Jarod looked at Gaara, who'd refused to join in so far. The sand ninja looked at the others coldly. "You are all idiots."

Naruto scowled. "Be nice, Gaara!"

Gaara scowled. "No."

Cyborg came in the room from the same door Nigel'd went into in time to hear that comment. "Heeey, you getting sarcastic on us?"

Gaara crossed his arms. "Look at me, I have a sense of humor. La de-freaking-da."

Naruto and Jarod looked at each other; Jarod raised an eyebrow while Naruto merely grinned widely. They both looked at Cyborg to gauge his reaction: the cyborg smiled, not minding the cruel sarcasm.

Cyborg greeted everyone in the room, getting greetings in return. As he finished, Nigel came up from behind him, sidestepping him easily. "I'm clocking out," he informed Cyborg. "It's late." The way he said that suggested that he disapproved of the lateness of the hour. Without another word, he walked out through the open door, closing it behind him.

Cyborg watched him leave, then turned to Jarod. "So! Heard ya got a job for me."

"Yeah."

Cyborg raised an eyebrow. "Seriously? At this hour?"

Jarod shrugged. "You have been keeping this place open for a long while."

"Only until the Elrics finish up whatever they're up to," Cyborg said defensively. "So tell me something, I gotta know: why?"

Jarod looked at him firmly. "It's for the Keybearer."

Cyborg raised his only remaining natural eyebrow. "You mean that Zim guy?"

Jarod nodded, not surprised that Cyborg had already met him. "Yeah. He connected with the King's guys; they're planning to go up into space tommorow. Problem is, their ship's totalled."

Cyborg considered that for a moment. "I got it. They gotta go to the worlds, but for that they need a Gummi Ship. So you need the skills of the greatest mechanic in all Traverse Town, am I right?"

Jarod nodded. "Yeah. But he's out of town, so I had to go to you." He smiled to show he was joking.

"Yeah, yeah, I getcha. So, what kind of job are we talking about? If the blocks were just trashed, it's easy to reconnect and replace them. If the computer was damaged, that's something more serious."

Jarod shook his head. "I don't know; haven't read anything on Gummi maintenance and repair yet. I wouldn't be able to tell."

Cyborg sighed. "Fine, bring it in."

Naruto jumped up. "Right on it!" He ran to the door, slipping on the floor and flying right into it, swing it open. He fell to his feet, unperterbed by his fall. He clapped his hands around his mouth and shouted, "HEY, GET YOUR BUTTS OVER HERE!"

Omi raised an eyebrow. "That was your brilliant plan! I could easily do much better than that! Even Ra-"

Raimundo shook a fist warningly. "There's a typhoon with your name on it, pal."

Omi smiled nervously. He paused, frowning slightly. His head leaned over as he listened to something intently, finally standing up. "What is that sound?"

"Sounds like footsteps," Clay observed.

"A lot of footsteps," Kimiko stated.

They all stood up and looked outside. Marching in from the alley they'd landed in(and incidentally where Zim had arrived at)was at least fifteen clones of Naruto, each helping to carry the remains of Calvin and Hobbes' Gummi Ship, holding it over their heads, running over to the shop while arguing amongst themselves.

Cyborg stared unbelievingly as the Shadow Clones set the Gummi Ship down, waving energetically at everyone. His attention was not focused on the clones, now wrestling each other happily, but at the ship before him.

Calling it a ship, Cyborg thought, was an insult to all properly maintained transportation everywhere. The Gummi blocks of the rocketship-styled craft had been horribly burnt, only a few traces of the orignal orange-yellow coloration showing up under the soot. The front was heavily crumpled, throwing the cockpit slightly out of alignment with the rest of it, the underside throughly pressed up to the engines, one of which had been lost. One of the wings had harshly twisted away, looking like the ship was trying to wave at him and the other wing was compressed into the side of it; the fact that the ship was still in one piece after what it had been through spoke of the sheer resilience of the Gummi block.

"Well?" Jarod said after a long pause. "What do you think?"

Cyborg didn't say anything. He slowly walked to the Gummi Ship, moving stiffly and almost robotically, his attention completely focused on the craft. He looked over it, running a hand across it in some places, making the soot chip and fall off, revealing the Gummi beneath. He lifted it up, grimacing at the damage underneath and carefully putting it back down. He continued in that vein for a while, grumbling unhappily as he surveyed the extent of the damage, analyzed the worst of it and generally made himself angry. He carefully climbed over the top of it, lifting up the cockpit, coughing loudly as the smoke flared up and hit him in the face, making the metal on his head rather sooty. Wiping the soot off his face, he rooted aroung in the surprisingly roomy cockpit a bit, looking around. A few minutes later, he came back out, a dark look on his face, holding a large dufflebag in his right hand. He climbed to the top of the Gummi, shut the cockpit behind him and jumped in front of the shop, walking back in.

"So," Naruto said. "How bad is it?"

Cyborg stared at the wall for a minute. "It's not as bad as it looks," he finally said. "Most of the damage is strictly aesthetic. The wings are busted, it's gonna need new engines and the body blocks are gonna need to be replaced, but that's easy. None of that's too bad." He sighed unhappily. "The real problem's the cockpit. Computer's completely busted, trashed and every other synonym for 'ruined' that you can think of. Without that, there's no way it'll work."

"Can you do anything?" Gaara asked.

Cyborg snorted. "Don't insult me, man; 'course I can do it! Thing is, it'll take all night! With all the replacing, programming and general repairs I'll have to do, this thing won't be ready until..." He did some quick calculations. "Twelve o' clock tommorow morning. And that's going if I do an all-nighter."

Jarod grimaced. "So what do you say?"

Cyborg thought about it. "Well...I did tell Zim I'd try to help him out, and he needs to get on his way as soon as possible...stand out the way, y'all. I'm hauling that thing in!"

Everybody quickly stood to the side of the rear wall as Cyborg jumped behind the counter, hitting a sequence of buttons. The entire wall facing the street lifted up, disappearing into the upper story and exposing the shop to the steet. The floor beneath the feet rumbled as the shop slowly rose up a few feet, the floor iteself changing; the hidden platform disguised as the ground under the chairs sank into the ground, leaving a circular hole behind. It came back up a moment later, two long grooves set into it, the chairs absent. The ground leading from the platform to the street sank, forming track-grooves in it. At the perimeter of the shop, a pair of lifting forks emerged from the hidden part of the building that now lay exposed. The forks extended to under the Gummi Ship, rising to the shop's ground leve and lifting it into the air. The forks retracted, sliding along the grooves and fitting neatly into the platform's tracks, setting the Gummi Ship directly on the platform. With a loud hissing noise, the platform sank back underneath.

Cyborg hit a few more buttons; the shop sank back to it's usual level and the wall slid back down, a few securing locks sliding into place at unseen edges. He jumped back over the counter, walking up to the hole in the center of the room. "Well, better get to work then." He glanced up at Jarod, throwing him the dufflebag. "Get this to those guys. Don't think they'd want to lose whatever's in here."

Jarod easily caught it. "No problem. Good luck."

Cyborg grinned. "I don't need luck. I got skill."

"Sometimes luck is skill," Naruto commented.

Cyborg rolled his eyes. "Maybe for people who need it." Laughing loudly, he jumped down the hole, a platform sliding back over it a moment later.

They left, walking back into the alley. Naruto paused, noticing that his clones were still fighting each other, not noticing anything that was going on around them. He made a gesture that looked like a weird attempt at a cat's-cradle, causing the clones to disappear in loud puffs of smoke, leaving nothing behind. Naruto quickly followed the others, coming to a stop as they stopped in front of the very dead end Zim had awakened in.

Jarod hit a few buttons on a wristwatch. A blindingly bright light broke through the clouds, illuminating them against the alley; the various litter around the alley was spun away by a powerful force generated by the light, clearing their immediate standing point.

Gaara looked up as closely as he dared. There was a large light high in the clouds, looking like a burning eye if you ignored the dim outline of the airship behind it.

Jarod hit another button and they flew into the air, rising high and higer, levitated by the same force that had thrown the litter about until they disappeared into the light. It disappeared after they did so, no evidence of their passing left behind.

Except for the fact that Dojo had been left behind. "THIS ISN'T FUNNY!" He screamed, shaking his hands out at the sky.

The light lit up again, taking Dojo up into the airship too.

Needless to say, Jarod was extremely embarrased.

-------

"We're lost," Spike said flatly, giving Bloo a sneer as the imaginary friend anxiously dug around in a bush growing through a tall old-fashioned iron fence. "Again."

Bloo took a moment to look back and glance at him in a confused manner. "What makes you say that?"

Spike inhaled deeply and counted to three, exhaling on three. Given that he was technically dead and his atrophied lungs had ceased to absorb oxygen properly about a hundred and ten years or so, it was rather pointless, but undead monster or not, there were some habits that stuck with people. Counting to a predetermined number and exhaling was one of them.

"Do you even know where this house is!?" Zim snarled.

"'House'?" Bloo asked, clearly surprised. "Oh, the house. It's right over there," He pointed directly to their left, past the fence. "I was looking for my paddleball collection." He jumped into the bush.

Spike's eyebrow twitched. Bloo hopped out of the bush, supporting about fifteen or so paddleballs in his arms. He spoke to the inanimate objects, cooing softly and reassuringly."It's okay, Daddy's here, no, ssh, ssh, it's alright. Did you miss Daddy? Daddy missed you." Behind him, Calvin unslung his hammer and ran at him, though Hobbes caught him before he was able to get very far.

Spike's left eyebrow started pulsing convulsively, threatening to shift his entire face into his demonic features, images of brutally mangling Bloo and giving the most agonizing five point two seconds of his life, the last four point six he would actually be alive to experience.

"Urge to destroy blob-thing...rising..." Zim mumbled, alternatively urged on and advised to let it go by his consciences while a misplaced banana spirit floated around his head, completely confused.

"Let me at 'im! Let me at 'im!" Calvin roared, struggling to escape from Hobbes' iron grip on his arms.

"No. You'll pulverize him." Hobbes said, tightening his grip.

"That's the whole point!"

"'An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind'," Hobbes grumbled, lifting the boy in the air so his rapidly pedaling foot couldn't give him any ground.

"Enough!" Zim snapped. "We can beat Bloo up later, but now is the time for...now is the time for...not beating up Bloo!"

Calvin stopped struggling, deciding to settle for giving Bloo one of his patented scowls of promised doom. Seeing his charge had given up his current object of wrath, Hobbes dropped him with a small thud.

They turned towards a massive pair of wrought iron gates at least ten feet tall, arcing at the top and formed from an intricate maze bars, the word Fosters was formed near the top of it, arcing along the top in a nice floral pattern, the upper line in the first F curving along and forming the T's crossline.

They looked past the gate, down the sidewalk nearly overgrown with tall grass, and down to the mansion that overshadowed everything around it.

Zim imagined there was some kind of main building there, but it was hard to discern underneath all the baywindows, balconies and towers; a good way to describe it was as if someone had taken several large buildings and smashed them together. It gave off a generally luxurious and comfortable feel, looking like the archetypical big house. It had a strong Victorian aspect to it's construction with a bit of a psychedelic touch to it all, from the yellow-brown-red coloration to the odd construction. The roof slates were brown, sloping downwards and framing the primary yellow nicely. There was a prominent tower, rounded with several windows around it and a flag pole placed on the top; the banner was dark red, with a blue stylized F on it, identical to the first letter on the logo on the gate. There was a puzzling strangeness about it that gnawed at Zim's brain, but the more he tried to pursue it, the more the thought scurried away. Eventually he gave up, though it chittered at him still.

"Why are all these vermin related metaphors going through my mind?" he muttered. "I hate vermin."

The totality of the evil part of his psyche popped up on his left shoulder in a puff of smog. "Maybe you need a life? I recommend going on a killing spree, looting everything and pausing occasionally to remind everyone of the futility of their actions to date and how it was all for nothing and sooner or later, everything crumbles to dust-"

He stopped when Zim's considerably larger finger pressed into his face. "Shut up," Zim advised, flicking him away into a wall, whereupon he vanished in a puff of darkness. Zim couldn't be sure, but he thought he heard a faint whoo hoo! from the deeper receses of his sub-consciousness.

"Interesting design," Hobbes conjectured, apparently coming to the same conclusion as Zim pushed the gates open, hopped in the gap and left the gates to swing inward. "And you live here?"

Spike grimaced as he jumped ahead, catching the heavy gates before they could crash into anyone. "I've lived here the past two years," Bloo stated, ignoring Spike's predicament.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Spike grunted, glaring at Bloo as Calvin, Hobbes, Zim and Morte took the opportunity to sidestep the gate. Hobbes stepped back, holding the gate open with one hand, allowing Spike to walk in before the tiger closed it behind him. Noting that everyone was walking towards the house, he stepped onto the path and let go of the gate, allowing it to slam shut.

Ahead of them, having already depositing the paddleballs in another safehole, Bloo frowned, wondering where Mac had gotten to. He generally was with Bloo or at home in Foster's at this time of night, unless other business got in the way. He mentally recollected everything he'd done lately, and concluded that he hadn't done anything to get Mac arrested by any of the various groups around that served as local militias in at least two weeks. And he was pretty sure that Mac wasn't in the mood to skip town.

Hey, I saw Mac on that freak's airship right before Captain Bighead shoved me off! How's he going to get here? Stewie's secret evil base is miles out of town.

Bloo considered the problem and shuffled ahead a few steps. Hobbes frowned, hearing a distant sound that sounded familiar. He looked around for whatever might have made the noise, and stopped when he looked at Bloo's growing shadow, mental gears turning against each other. He looked up, his face becoming dismayed.

Spike, his vampirically enhanced senses detecting the same noise, was also looking around. Hobbes shook him by the shoulder and Spike turned around to glare at him and say something scathing, but Hobbes raised a hand to between their faces, extending a finger directly upwards. Spike frowned, looking up.

When he looked back at Hobbes, they shared a look that spoke volumes. Simultaneously, they grabbed Calvin and Zim, tugging them back, ignoring their yelling.

"Hey, what's with you guys?" Bloo asked, raising an eyebrow. "Not like it's anything I have to worry about."

The irony of his statement, being that he spoke this the exact moment before a red-tan blur plummeted from the skies above and broke it's fall by landing on him wasn't lost upon the observers. When the dust cleared, Mac dazedly sat atop Bloo, who was pasted to the ground by the impact.

"Ow." Bloo said monotonously, reforming slowly.

"Thanks, Bloo." Mac said.

"Anytime, Mac."

"He shove you out, too?"

"Uh huh. Wanna do an elaborate revenge prank?"

"Yep."

"Okay then." Bloo paused. "Wanna get off me?"

Mac rolled off his imaginary friend, landing on the ground with a slight thud. Bloo grunted, getting off the ground and shaking the feeling back into his body.

Zim raised an eyeridge, looking from Mac and Bloo to the cloudy night sky, seeing nothing in the sky and not aware of what they were talking about. "This town is insane."

"Tell me about it," Mac agreed, sticking his hands in his jacket-pockets. He gave Zim a friendly look. "My name's Mac."

"I am Zim." The Irken said, returning the human's friendly look with a analytical stare. Mac found the sheer intensity of the alien's stare unnerving; it gave him the impression that Zim was looking into his mind, going through his every little thought and not finding any of it very interesting. Mac looked at the others, noticing the way they were staring up at the house, and came to the obvious conclusion. "Let me guess; Bloo's supposed to bring you over to the home?"

"Emphasis on 'supposed to'," Zim said, glaring at Bloo. The imaginary friend huffed and turned away.

"Hey," Mac said cordially, turning towards the new guys, slightly recoiled at the sight of Morte and giving Spike a friendly wave; Spike returned the gesture with a perfunctionary wave of the fingers. Mac looked back and frowned. Zim had disappeared. "Hold on, where's Zim?"

"Right here," Said a voice from directly behind Mac and Bloo; the two recoiled and fell fowards onto the ground, turning over on their backs to see Zim crossing his arms and grinning maliciously at them.

Bloo clutched the area of his body where his heart would have been, pointing weakly at Zim. "What is wrong with you?!"

Zim tilted his head slightly to the side, his disturbing grin growing even wider. "Do you want that alphabetically or in order of importance?"

Mac stood up, warily watching Zim closely. "Why did you do that?"

Zim raised an eyeridge. "Why would I need a reason?"

Mac's face underwent several interesting turns of expression until he slumped slightly over, his downcast face and sigh suggesting surrender in the face of Zim's singular personality.

Morte edged closer to Spike. "All of a sudden, our chances ain't looking too good. Am I right?"

Spike pressed the skin around his temples slowly, relieving tension. "The Powers That Be must be crazy, sending a guy like that to save the worlds."

Hobbes shrugged. "'Much madness is divinest sense.'"

Spike looked at Hobbes in surprise. "Emily Dickenson. Good poet, nice use of rhyme structure."

Zim stopped where he was, watching his miniature counterparts popped out of thin air. "What is it this time?" he said; from everyone else's point of view, he was now talking to the air directly above his shoulders.

"We've got a dilemna on our hands," his good incarnation said seriously.

Zim considered the last few minutes. Not noticing anything particularily good or evil about anything he'd done, he looked around to see if anything important happening. He saw nothing of the sort, so he looked back down at his consciences. "Eh, what dilemna?"

Everyone else stopped, watching Zim loudly talk to people only he could hear.

"Not the moral kind," his evil incarnation said hurredly. "It's more of a...hmm, you could call it a personal problem."

"Why would you have a personal problem?"

"What are you-" Bloo started to say when Zim whirled around on him, glaring ferociously.

"Do you mind, blob thing!? I'm trying to have a conversation with things of metaphysical import! Now be quiet before I do things to you, such that thou couldst not comprehend! Thou sounds neat when you use it in a serious context!" He turned back to his consciences. "Now where was I? Ah yes, the problem. What is it?"

"I can think of a few he's got," Spike muttered. Mac nodded uneasily.

"It's a identity problem-" The good one started saying before he was interrupted.

Zim's inner jerk flew up and pointed at his inner altruist accusingly. "He was calling me names!"

The small angel stared at him disbelievingly. "I did not, you moron!"

The devil bounced up and down, pointing angrily. "See? See? See?"

"No-I-ARRRGH! I wasn't making fun of you! I was pointing out that we need names! I was just throwing out some suggestions and Senor Overreaction over there took it as a personal thing!"

"You suggested I take the name Agbar The Eternally Repetitive!"

"Oh, don't start throwing things like that around! Who called me Sir Can't-Take-A-Hint? Let me think, hmm, yeah, oh, it's you! Anyway, like I was saying...um, let's see...where was I...oh yeah! So I want a name, and you know what Mister Envy's like; since I want a name, he wants one too."

"Damn straight."

The angel looked at the demon. "Appropriate choice of words," he said dryly, turning his attention back to Zim. "So, how about it?"

Zim tapped his chin, thinking quickly. "Awright, how is this?" he pointed at his altruistic conscience. "You can be Razael," he pointed at his sociopathic incarnation. "And you can be Samael. How's that?"

Samael shrugged. "Eh, so 'kay." He scooted closer to Zim. "Hey, as long as we're talking, I'd like to mention that I'm tired of listening to Angel-Boy's lies."

Razael eyes widened and his jaw dropped to his feet, staring in shock. Then his mouth reasserted itself, and his eyes both narrowed and turned a darker shade of red, the light shining from his skull becoming more intense and flickering around violently. He manifasted his guitar, pointing it at Samael angrily; for some reason, the blades on the lower half looked more like motorized chainsaws than the usual protruding sickles. "Oh, you ego-bloated son of a sin, you are going DOWN!" The guitarsaw suddenly powered up, the air around it glowing white and crackling with electricity. Screaming with fury, he leapt at the demonic conscience, swinging the weapon back.

Samael's eyes bulged and he flitted away just in time to avoid the first swing, hurredly flying around Zim's head with Razael in pursuit, the two's cyclical orbit around Zim's head looking like a bizaare halo. "Unholy son of a buttmonkey! He's gone CRAAZY!"

"Arglebargle margle fargle!" Razael roared from behind Samael, spraying froth from his mouth and swinging the modified guitar wildly; Samael screamed like a little girl, flying away just before he could be eviserated, flying around Zim's head, the angel in hot pursuit.

Zim watched Razael chase Samael around, amused at the prospect of wanton violence, though he did have one concern. "Heeey, I thought that you were my shoulder angel! This seems overtly homicidal for a shoulder angel."

Razael paused for a moment. "Yeeah...but I embody all in you that is good. Righteous fury probably falls under that category, right?"

"Oh, okay then."

"HELLO!?" Samael screamed. "In case you haven't noticed, HE'S TRYING TO KILL ME!"

"Oh, right." Zim looked at Razael. "Proceed."

Razael grinned in pure psychotic glee. Samael paled at the sight of the angel readying his guitar and bursting into manic laughter. "Guess what time it is? Thass right! It's CHOP-CHOP TIME! AHAHAHAHAHAHAH!"

"Ah, crapshack." Samael said sourly, flying away just as Razael starting flying at him.

Spike raised an eyebrow. "Changed me mind. Hmm...make nice poem, looks like. How to start, though...let me think a bit...Upon a night considerably dark/it was that in my heart's silence I observed something new/a being sent by the Powers as a Spark/of hope sorely needed, bearing a Key of Destiny./ Only thing was, the bugger was crazier then a sack of rabid Lioonne./I knew not what Destiny saw in him, but I decided to go with it/ I had little else to do./He was considerally smaller then me/not that bright either, juding by his taste in hats/ though he had a nice jacket. I'd like on of those with a longer bottom./His eyes constantly gleamed, not unlike certain wild cats/ and his attitude could be called abhorrent/ by some blokes; won't mention you here, but you know who you are./ His head was as shiny as an orange/and his sword arm didn't suck either-oh, hell! What was I thinking?! 'Orange'? What am I, buggered out of my mind? Nothing rhymes with orange! Now that damn thing's going to be running through my mind all day!"

Calvin grinned at Spike. "You remind me...of a British Ziggy."

Spike stared at him. "Who?"

Calvin smacked his head. "Arrgh, insults are pointless when no one knows who you're talking about."

Hobbes wasn't paying attention to Calvin, instead thinking serious thoughts. Hmm, Hobbes thought. We've been going around like a bunch of aimless tourists without a clue despite being in the midst of longtime refugees. He looked at Mac, who was clearly intelligent and resourceful. It's recon time. "Hey, Mac!"

"Yeah?" Mac said, smiling pleasantly at the tiger. Hobbes seemed saner than either of his companions, and he was the only one there that hadn't threatened Bloo with violence, suggesting that he was more reasonable then the alien or human.

Hobbes thought for a moment, deciding that he needed to know about the house. "What can you tell me about this place?"

Mac nodded. "When our world fell, the house somehow ended up here too, taking us with it. Since most of the people living there...didn't make it, we've converted it into a place for people to stay until there's more houses for them to go to."

"Go on..."

Hobbes listened, fascinated by Mac's account. Calvin had an extremely short attention span to when something bored him or just on general principle, but Hobbes had the reverse problem; it was fairly difficult for him to tune out things, and unlike Calvin, he enjoyed learning things even when the subject disinterested him. And the house had a fascinating history. According to Mac, the house was considerably old; how old he didn't know, but he was fairly certain it was the family home of the Fosters, the current matriarch of which had converted it into a foster home for a species of creature unique to Mac's home world, a sentient being with a interesting name.

"'Imaginary friends'?" Hobbes repeated. "I'm sorry, we are talking about the substitue companions that bored children make up, aye?"

"Sort of," Mac said; as a student in Figmentology, he was somewhat of an expert on the subject. "They're a sort of being from my world that are literally born from people's imaginations."

The human continued. As with the more metaphysical variety of imaginary friend, eventually the child would outgrow the friend, no longer needing them; however, whereas the being that Mac called the fictional imaginary friend faded into the subconscious, becoming little more than a memory, the true imaginary friend would have to leave, making it through life on their own through necessity. That changed when the oldest living Foster, Madame Foster, converted her family home into a foster home for imaginary friends that had nowhere else to go, whereupon they would eventually be adopted by another child.

Something about this was troubling Hobbes. "So...the children of this world simply abandoned their companions once they had no need of them?"

Mac sighed. The tiger didn't know it, but he was echoing sentiments that Mac himself had said before. "I know what it sounds like-"

Hobbes narrowed his eyes. "It sounds cruel."

"I know it sounds bad, and believe me, I know what it feels like," Bloo said, taking an interest in helping out Mac. He glided over to besides his creator, coming to a stop. "But you don't really know the full story."

Hobbes raised an eyestripe. He was sensing a philosphical moment.

"See, imaginary friends," Bloo paused, thinking about how best to articulate his feelings. "We need a purpose. We're made for a purpose: protecting somebody, helping them out, giving them a shoulder to cry on or just being a friend. And when we don't have a purpose anymore...when we don't have anyone to depend or need us...when we don't have a reason to exist anymore...it's worse then being dead. Even worse then being nothing at all. Because you're not necessary anymore; you're useless, and you feel dead inside. You feel...that your existence is pointless. You're forgotten. And that's worse than death for imaginary friends."

"Exactly!" Mac said, proud that Bloo was able to phrase it so intelligently. He felt proud of Bloo. Bloo wasn't the same person he'd been before the Heartless came. Back then, he'd been wild, selfish, and unapologetically egomanical, uncaring about whoever got hurt in the pursuit of his plans. He'd been a obnoxious self-centered jerk, unwilling to do anything that he found boring or just didn't feel like doing.

There were those who said that Bloo hadn't changed at all since his days at Fosters; that he was still as immature as ever, and unconvinced at Mac's patient attempts to inform them of his friend's true nature. Because through all the insane adventure at Foster's, during all their younger years of being bullied by Mac's malevolent older brother, even during the doom of everything they'd ever known, Bloo had stood by Mac's side as a true friend, a companion who would never had truly deserted him. Okay, there was that one time when they were being chased by insane alien friends, but that was a fluke; Bloo's behavior had since proven that. Throughout his entire life, Bloo had been Mac's best friend, always standing by him, providing him with someone to fall back on or catch should he fall. And few people knew of Bloo's true purpose of being a security blanket; a shield to block the perils of the world away, and keep their little world of themselvesintact, regardless of slings and arrows however outrageous.

It had been difficult for them when Bloo had been forced to leave by order of Mac's mom, and then all their insane adventures at Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends, but the greatest hardship of all had been when the darkness came. Three long months of terrible hardship and pain. It seemed that when every day left, it took another friend with it and no one knew how or why. People kept disappearing day after day, the onset of paranoia creeping into the heart of every being. And worse then that was when the darkness broke into the world, attacked their world with all the terrible power the Heartless posessed. They had taken his mother away and his brother had fled like the coward he was after they came to the town, leaving his already broken family utterly shattered.

But Bloo had stayed by his side. He'd saved him from drowning in misery and his own regret and had saved him from himself.

Raising himself from his thoughts, Mac noticed to his surprise that Zim, Calvin and Morte were standing by Hobbes, now paying attention to his discusssion; even Spike, feigning indifference, was listening, if one was to judge by the way he leaned against the tree in Mac's direction.

The human blinked, regained his confidence, and starting talking again.

Madame Foster was, as far as Mac knew, one of those few humans from his world that really cared about the plight of imaginary friends, and turned her house into a foster home for imaginary friends, likely around thirty years ago.

Then, about two years ago, the Heartless came.

The devastation to Mac's world had been terrible; they had washed over his home in a vast storm, murdering everyone in their path and leaving more demons of the dark in their wake. A few weeks later, most of their friends and family dead, the entire species of imaginary friends nearly extinct, when they'd drifted through the darkness and finally emerged in Traverse Town. There, they'd rebuilt another house in the image of the one left behind in their own world, partially to have a place to live but also, in a way, to honor the memory of the friends who'd died defending it and whose sacrfices had, in the end, been for nothing.

Sometime after they realized the extent of the refugees diversity, the inhabitants of Foster's decided that the house should be converted to a new cause; with the amount of imaginary friends having dwindled from over several thousand friends in the house alone to barely fifty, they decided to use the house as a home for new refugees until they either decided to move out or remain there. For the protection and convience of the friends, not to mention Madame Foster's own enthusiam, they upgraded the house with the incredibly advanced technology that the various refugee's offered, making it one of the most advanced and well-protected building in town.

"And that's pretty much everything about the house," Mac concluded.

Hobbes looked at him sadly; Mac had stated all of that almost factually, like a robot. As if most of that didn't meant nothing to him despite the pain reflected in his eyes. Yet he had done so without betraying the true feeling inside.

Mac glanced up back towards the house. "Well, better go tell Frankie about you guys and get you a room."

"One step ahead of you guys!" Bloo bounded in front of them, loudly yelling, "Hey! Weee're HOME!" as he hopped onto the wide porch.

"Right, right. Get this over with," Spike said gruffly. He knocked on the door loudly a few times, looking slightly bored.

The massive oaken doubledoors swung open, revealing an attractive human girl in her early twenties, about Spike's height and a generally friendly demeanor. She was roughly about Spike's height, had green eyes and red hair pulled up in a short ponytail at the crown of her head, the rest of it arranged in a straight and nearly geometric style, flatly laid out at the sides of her head with small purple hairclips. As far as clothing went, he noted a few superficial similarities between her wear and the vampire's, suggesting that they traveled in similar sub-cultures; she wore a green jacket, of a similar style to Spike's own jacket, except for the bottom being around her waist. the way it was a more traditional size; it had seams around the shoulder joint, from the elbow line to the folded back cuffs. There was a large hood lumped around her neck, a seam running along it's neckline through the middle up to the rim. She wore the jacket over a midriff-baring white shirt with a high collar; it had a logo of a sort on it, bearing the image of a purple ogrelike silllouhte to the right, a blue thumblike shadow in the center and a tall red shadow that was almost all legs to the left. She wore purple shorts ending in reinforced knees while two light purple flaps, one attached to the front of the two overlapping belts around her waist and the other to the back of the belts, covered most of the shorts. Her shoes were ankle-high white versions of the boots Spike wore, looking considerably well-worn.

She smirked at Spike and lounged against the door. "Well, well, well. Look who's come crawling back."

Spike blinked. "What? The hell are you talking about, Red?"

"Last Tuesday ring a bell?" She said, almost sing-song.

"Oh, give me a f-"

"What?" She raised an eyebrow.

Spike hissed something under his breath. "Give me a friggin' break. Is that okay? Is that better, huh?!"

"Better than what you were going to say, Captain Peroxide."

"Oh, sure! Make fun 'a me hair! That's classy!"

"Oh, that's funny! The guy who writes epic poetry about-"

"Leave my work outta this, woman!" Spike snarled.

Unimpressed, the woman said, "Oh, Mr. Rockabilly has a sensitive side."

Spike broiled in his fury for a brief moment, glaring at her. "You wanna talk about who's ain't got the punk rock spirit, we can go there, you glorified janitor!"

"You wanna go there, we can go there!"

"Bring it on, Red!"

"Fine, we can, jacka-" the girl paused again. "Jerk!"

"Aw!" Bloo whined. "I wanted to hear Frankie swear."

"SHUT THE HELL UP, BLOO!" Spike and Frankie yelled.

"Didn't mean at me," the blob muttered sullenly.

"Where were we?"

"Sniping at each other."

"Ah, right. Same old, same old. 'Sides, what you have against me?"

Frankie snorted. "You throw wild parties that cause disasters worse than almost anything Bloo's come up with!"

"Thought you liked wild parties," Spike said snidely.

"Yeah, but every single time you throw one, you get so drunk you do something insanely stupid!"

"Like what?!"

"Last Tuesday alone commandeered the house's migration and defense systems, turned it into a giant robot and wrecked the Western District."

"That only happened twice!"

"What about the time you convinced Grandma to start taking potshots with the primary cannon?"

"They rebuilt that district! Eventually!"

"Lookit that," Razael said nonchalantly as the two continued to argue, munching on Samael's shoe casually. "Dinner and a show."

Samael finished the final stitch on his knee; the limb stopped oozing dark ichor as he took a break from stitching his limbs back together and glared at the two humans. His body was mostly assembled, all his limbs and body parts in their proper places except for the leg slung over his shoulder and there was a great deal of stitching under his clothing. He stood up and giggled malevolently. "Discord, resentment, anger! Soon they'll take the fighting to the physical arena!"

Razael sneered at Samael. "You are a horrible monster."

Samael glared at Razael. "Gimme back my shoe."

Razael held up his guitar, pointing it's wider end at Samael; the guitar sprouted massive jagged clawlike blades, and Razael simply looked at him with heavy-lidded eyes and a lazy smile filled with confidence and the will to undo Samael's stitching. "I returned your limbs. Count your blessings and shut up." Samael growled, taking the conscience's advice; that angel had a particular fondness for 'sectioning', as he put it. Giving his shoe a forlorn look, he resumed his stitching, turning his attention to his other leg, unslinging it from around his shoulder. It would have been a repulsive sight if it wasn't for the fact that it wasn't oozing blood like a normal limb, but simply oozing liquid darkness from it's torn edges, the inky blackness fading away at the edges.

Zim gave a look towards his hallucinatory companions. "You're a violent little angel, aren't you?"

Razael shrugged. "Eh. You work with what you've got, and with me, that includes a surprising proclivity for random homicidal tendencies."

"TENDENCIES!?" Samael yelled. "You hacked me to bits with a chainsaw and threw a needle and spool at me!"

Razael looked at him faux-innocently. "Well, how else were you going to piece yourself back together? Get it? 'Piece' yourself back together? Hah, I made a funny!"

Zim slapped his forehead. "I'm starting to think you're both idiots."

Samael completed another loop, snapping the thread off with his teeth. "Well, then that'd really be more your fault then."

"Hello?" Bloo said, trying to get Frankie's attention. She ignored him, her argument with Spike dying down into a more pleasant conversation about the next party to be thrown in roughly three days, as per Madame Foster's plotting. Bloo gave up, waving them inside. "C'mon; she's outta here." He walked inside, everyone following him in except for Spike and Franke; the one consession they made was Frankie stepping back so Spike could come in and close the door.

Zim looked around the entrance room with interest. The most prominent sight in the room was a large staircase at the back of the room, leading to a wide platform with two higher staircase at either side, leading up to the higher levels. The floor was decorated with small white tiles so obsessively cleaned he could see his reflection in them, though with a notable shine to it. There was a large red carpet rolling out from the doors to the staircase, going up the other stair; it also split away at the ground level, leading to the other doors around the room. There was an old-fashioned elevator door located at the left wall, and there was an abundant supply of classical looking antique furniture around the room, sharply contrasting with the slightly psychedelic appearance of the design. Strangely enough, the numerous doors around the room were absurdly tall and wide, as if designed for things of decidedly inhuman porportions.

Strangest of all were all the creatures moving around everywhere. Some had to be imaginary friends, as their biology was simply impossible to have formed through the course of evolution; Zim had seen many things in his tenure as an Invader, giving him the opportunity to proclaim that there were very few things nature considered impossible with the sort of authoritive tone that comes from first-hand experience. Walking around here were things that made him want to reconsider that claim.

Calvin, on the other hand, was more blunt in his assessment. "Look at the people! And the...things."

"The 'things'," Bloo said with a touch of annoyance. "Are also people."

Zim also noticed a few species that he vaugely recognized from his days as an Invader, and a few that seemed peripherally similar to humans for the most part, and a small number that radically pushed the envelope for the proper definition of alien. What seeemed oddest of all was the way they regarded each other peaceably for the most part, which struck Zim as an interesting development.

"Interesting," Zim said by way of commentary on it.

"'Interesting'," Bloo repeated. "That's it? You come all this way, go through all that, have to be brought here by me of all people, and all you have to say about the glorious anarchy that is Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends is that it's INTERESTING!?"

Zim blinked, staring mutely at Bloo as he processed his outburst and considered his reaction. "Yes," he decided. "That's it."

Bloo's jaw dropped to where his feet would have been if he'd had them. Given that he appeared to be a absorbant blob, it was debatable whether or not he actually had a jaw. "That's IT!?"

"Yes," Zim said with a trace of irritation. "That's it. If I had anything else to say, I would have said it already." And I don't feel like letting people into the recesses of my mind, blue thing.

Bloo raised an eyebrow. The overly matter-of-fact manner the alien spoke in was begining to creep him out. "You're weird."

Zim narrowed his eyes.

Bloo looked away from Zim, not understanding the danger he was putting himself into. "Coco said you were like that earlier. Before her and Minimoose went out on the town."

The name of the imaginary friend bounced through Zim's mind, meaning nothing in particular until it associated itself with his other sidekick. "That...bird-airplane-plant thing? And...Minimoose?!" One of Zim's red eyes narrowed to a knife-thin slit, the other open to a painful extent, his mouth suddenly spitting forth a guitar-strumming quick burst of alien langauge directed at no one; "Nur sadanet burakos, chlorbag varblernelk!"

"Was that Tamaranean?" Mac wondered.

"No," Hobbes replied. "Sounded more like Kroeese. By some astonishing coincidence, they sound almost exactly the same."

Morte twitched, glaring up at Hobbes. "Hey, how would you know?"

Hobbes shrugged. "Foreign languages is one of my many talents, including hairdressing."

Calvin rolled his eyes. "Sure, the guy with a talent for hairdressing takes his baths in the washing cycle."

Hobbes glared at him, coughing something that sounded suspiciously like 'noodle incident'.

Calvin whirled around, pointing a finger at Hobbes dramatically. "You can't prove I did that!"

Bloo raised an eyebrow. "Oookay." Not having any more interest in what was going on around him, Bloo pulled out a paddleball and began attempting to hit the little red ball. Unsurprisingly, he completely failed to do so, provoking eyerolling and gleeful snickers from around the room.

Bloo lost his temper, swinging the paddleball around wildly; this caused the surprisingly elastic ball-on-a-string to swing around Mac and Bloo, the string winding around them, stringing them back-to-back and fall to the ground when the ball hit Mac on the head, causing him to lose balance. On the bright side, his fall was cushioned by Bloo. Unfortunately, despite the fact that Bloo was completely immobilized by the double impact of having Mac squashing him to the ground and being tightly held down by a thick string, his mouth was not similarily constricted.

"Auuuugh, why does this always happen to me!" Bloo screamed.

Mac's eye twitched. "You know what a better question is? Why is it everytime you do something stupid, I somehow get strung along with it!"

Bloo winced. "Eech. Mac. Bad pun!"

"You know what I mean!" Mac snapped.

"Here's an idea," Bloo said to the people around them. "Why don't you stop staring and help me!"

Hobbes looked around. Spike and Frankie were pretty much oblivious to everything else, still caught up in their private moment, now somehow centering on how much heavy metal sucked and he didn't see anyone move. He glowered as he realized what that meant. "Oh, don't everybody just jump up at once," he said sarcastically. Not expecting a response to his comment, he kneeled down and extended the claws of his raised right hand.

Huh?" Bloo said. "Is that that Hobbes guy? What's he doing? What's he up to? Oh no, he's going to shave us!"

The entire room stopped. They all stared at Bloo. "What?" Hobbes finally said.

"He's going to try to get us out of the string-net by shaving us! NO!"

"Bloo," Mac grunted. "He's not trying to shave us. And why would you care? You don't even have hair."

"Well, whose fault is that?! And the real issue here isn't me, it's you! If we went outside in public with...you...bald...I don't even wanna think about it! Mac, have you any idea how'd goofy you'd look without hair!?"

Mac rolled his eyes. "I'm sure that's something I spend hours everyday thinking about."

"See, see? If we go out like that, we'll be humiliated beyond compare! I'll never be able to show my face again! The public would condemn and taunt us everywhere we go, torment us at everything we do! I can't take that kind of rejection!"

Mac sighed. "If they didn't hate you after that fiasco with the giant bulldozer and the Lawn Gnome Empire, I'm pretty sure they'd be able to get over me being bald in public."

"Mac, you're not looking at the big picture; this is serious! This is our image we're talking about, man!"

"What image?"

Hobbes rolled his eyes. "As brilliant as this conversation is, do you think you could stop moving for five seconds! This is delicate work."

"I can't help it!" Bloo whined. "I get all twitchy when I can't move!"

"Then stop being 'all twitchy'. Or someone else could do it." Hobbes stood up, and shouted at the rest of the room. "Hey! Who here wants to get REAL close to Bloo with a sharp instrument while he's completely helpless?"

Nearly every other person in the room drew forth some kind of deadly edged weapon.

Bloo paled as he realized what was going on. "YOU! I pick you! Just hurry up and HELP ME!"

Hobbes paused for a brief moment, judging where to aim the cut, and slashed his arm out in a quick chop through the side of the string prison, letting Mac and Bloo fell to the floor with a loud thump. "Ow," Mac complained, rubbing his sore arm. "I'm going to feel that in the morning."

Bloo grunted. "Yeah yeah yeah, bring on the guilt!" He turned around at Hobbes, pausing. "Wait a minute, where'd the guy with the Keyblade go?"

Calvin and Hobbes looked around wildly. "Now where'd he get off to?" Calvin wondered.

-------

Zim was presently wandering through the house aimlessly, thinking deep brooding thoughts about Minimoose in a relationship with another creature. Was that sensible? Was Coco a good match for Minimoose? Was there, frankly speaking, any actual sense to it? Could a robot even have a relationship with an imaginary friend? And why was it bothering him so much? He hadn't taken as much interest in Minimoose's activities as he had with Gir, perhaps because Minimoose was more autonomous than the defective SIR unit. Then again, Minimoose was a fairly inscrutable being; Zim didn't really know what went through his head.

He resolved to take a better look into the robot's thought processes. Something else was troubling him too; what if Minimoose decided to remain here with Coco? Zim twitched at the thought. He couldn't blame the robot for wanting to remain with new companions that understood him, and perhaps staying around Zim might remind the robot of what he'd lost...but then again, he wasn't sure that Minimoose really missed anything, or took much of an interest in anything that went around him. He'd created Minimoose, but what he thought was a mystery to him.

Zim frowned, realizing that in the course of his thoughts, he'd wandered further into the house then he'd intended to. He wasn't sure how far, but he didn't recognize anything from when he came in. He was presently in a long hallway, a few people milling around. The most prominent feature was a large decorative doubledoor next to him, mostly white and engraved with floral patterns, a large floral H set above the door.

Zim stared at it for a minute. That door reminded him of an executive office; the engravings, while as random-looking as anything else there, seemed entirely superficial and lacked any real creativity to it. They were almost sterile and plain. There was an undeniable utilitarian aspect to it that he didn't like, either.

Grunting to himself, Zim walked off, deciding to find his bearings, the problem with Minimoose nagging at his mind.

He wandered around aimlessly for a while, not trying to find anything in particular, just find something that looked familiar. A few people tried to strike up a conversation with him, but he ignored them all, not in the mood to chatter with completely unknown people.

He stopped again in another of the house's seemingly endless supply of hallways. He felt something familiar. He knew he did; he just couldn't place it.

He heard a loud rush noise and a storm of running footsteps. Recognizing something faintly familiar, he whirled around just in time to see a red-yellow blur at the head of a windstorm; just above the rush of air, he could hear a voice yelling, "Little buddy!"

It hit him, propelling the two of them across the room, the wind spiralling across the hallway and throwing the various statues down to the ground; paintings tore free of their frames as the canvases flew into the air, spinning into the walls while suits of armor fell apart as they smashed into the ground.

Zim was aware of an exuberantly happy figure hugging him excitedly and babbling happily. He pushed the figure away and landed on the ground, opened his mouth to yell and his jaw dropped.

"Aang?!"

"Hi!" Aang said cheerfully, grinning happily at the surprised Irken.

Standing in front of him was a human male about fourteen, apparantly Tibetian. His face was generally round and slightly pointed downwards at the chin, a sunny grin lighting up his face, his round gray-brown eyes shining happily. He wore a brown helmet that resembled an old-fashioned pilot's helmet, complete with fold-down goggles built into the front, large brown-yellow ear flaps that fastened below his chin, and was adorned with a thick blue line originating at the back of the helmet and culminating in a large arrow-point directly above the goggles, matching the tattoos he wore. He wore a yellow short-sleeved shirt with a high collar under a orange jacket with some rather prominent shoulder flaps and a folded over collar, the jacket's front fastened with a number of straps instead of the usual zipper. The jacket sleeves were long and billowy, ending in loose sleeves. His belt was fairly thick, fastened with a large circular silver buckle with three blue spirals arranged in the pattern of the points of an upside-down triangle engraved in it, a large squarish staff strapped to the back of the belt. His dark brown pants looked like cargo pants with zippers around the knees, pockets closed with zippers and loose cuffs pooling around his footwear, which happened to be strap-on black hiking boots.

Zim gave him a look. "When did you get here?"

"Well...after everything disappeared...me and Appa wound up here. I ran into Katara, Sokka and Toph a while back; some nice monks pointed us this waye and we've decided to stay here for now." He paused. "I ran into Danny a little bit ago and decided to go looking around for anything interesting."

Zim nodded, gratified that his old group of a sort was alive and well, staring at Aang for a moment. "...What is that thing on your head!?"

Aang looked surprised. "What? My helmet?"

"That's a helmet? I thought it was a brain parasite! Some...horrible brain-meat devouring creature disguised as that absurd thing of a hat!"

Aang couldn't tell if Zim was joking or being completely serious. "Hey, I think it looks cool."

Zim smacked his head and looked around, frowning slightly. "You wouldn't have any idea where we are, would you?"

Aang grinned sunnily. "Nope!"

Zim sighed moodily. "But of course."

As the Irken sulked, Aang lookd at him and thought something was odd. Zim and Gir were inseparable, or to put it another way, Gir would follow Zim anywhere and Zim wouldn't do anything about it. It was extremely odd for Gir to be apart from Zim at a time like this. And Dib was usually around Zim when he didn't have anything else to do, often finding some way to rope the easily bored Irken into his various schemes. And with the horror that had just happened, Aang thought that the three of them would be together. "Wait a minute...where's Gir? Or Dib?"

Zim sighed. "I don't know, okay?"

Aang frowned, realizing that something was terribly wrong. He didn't say anything for a moment.

Zim considered Aang's happy dispostion despite what had happened. He supposed that it had to do with the majority of Aang's friends being alive and well. He recalled a few of Aang's stories of...wherever he was originally from. "Where's Appa?"

Aang gestured outwards. "They have stables for the imaginary friends that are too big to fit in here. I'm going to sleep there tonight so Appa doesn't panic or wake up thinking it's like his lost days." Aang momentarily scowled, thinking of the traumatizing period when Appa had been separated from him back in their original world.

Zim nodded. "That's good, I suppose. And where'd your group get off to?"

Aang looked slightly nervous. "Up in one of the rooms. I left when Katara wasn't looking; I just had to see all the stuff here!"

Without warning, Aang started talking about the various things he'd learned about Traverse Town since he got here; being a natural tourist, Aang was always fascinated by new cultures, towns and places everywhere. It didn't surprise Zim that despite the world disappearing after being attacked by monsters, Aang was as eager to sightsee as ever.

Aang talked a great deal about things like how Traverse Town was divided into a number of districts, seperated by large wall that connected to two larger circular walls; one at the border of town to guard against the threats of outside and one that surrounded a memorial at the center of town with the names of all the worlds and people who were lost. The districts were named based on their prominent features(such as the Beach District, which was basically a large beach or the First District, the very one they were in, so named for it's relatively high population). The town had a fairly small population, given the low survival rates when a world was taken by the darkness, and even then, not all the survivors wound up in Traverse Town; various explorers had reported several other worlds similar to Traverse Town, suggesting that it wasn't entirely unique and that the Heartless were even farther spread then they realized. Humans were the most common species there, but only in a sixty-forty percentage, making it an extremely diverse population.

"Plus!" Aang announced, pulling a light blue copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide from a pocket. "I got this from a shop a little while ago!"

"Me too," Zim said. "Only mine came in a plastic Easter egg laid by what might happen if a palm tree and a bird-slash-airplane had a lovechild."

Aang laughed loudly. "I just love this town!"

"Eh?" Aang's comment caught Zim off-guard.

"I mean, look at it!" Aang put the Guide back in his pocket and gave the room around them a dramatic flourish as he pointed around, accidentally causing a breeze to quickly whip around the hallway. "It's a pretty big place, but there's not that many people, and they've all have horrible things happen to them, but they're so..relaxed about it. Even though they have every reason to be, they're not really upset, or sad all the time. They're just..." Aang took a deep breath to give him some time to articulate his thought. "Most of the people I've met in my adventures would have just kneeled over and let their misery eat them alive, but the people here, they don't let it kill them like that. They don't let the despair keep them back."

Zim considered what Aang said. "Yes," he said softly. "Despair can kill a person."

Aang nodded solemnly. "It might not be as obvious as those...black monster things...but it's just as bad in it's own way. It comes up out of nowhere, and it never leaves you alone. Even if you find a new life, a better life, it bites at you, pulling at you. It'll just keeping digging in and in, clawing into your heart and ripping apart everything it touches, until there's nothing left. It leaves empty inside, more dead than alive. It makes you feel guilty that you're still alive, like it's a betrayal of the people who died instead of you. But the people here...they don't let it get to them. They've found another way instead of misery. They keep the pain away, and they stay alive. They don't let the darkness eat them alive from the inside."

Zim shrugged. "Eh, I suppose."

Aang looked around. "What have you been up to? I mean, you're always doing something...a whole new world that knows nothing about you? That sounds like the perfect opportunity to do your stuff!"

Zim snorted. "I have more important things to do then my usual schemes."

Aang smirked knowingly. "Would this have anything to do with Gir and Dib?"

Zim smacked his forehead; Aang knew him too well. "And Gaz, too. I think. They're lost somewhere out in the worlds, and I'm going to go find them."

Aang looked up into the ceiling. "You're going to the worlds?!" He looked at Zim incredulously. "Why do you always get to do the fun stuff!?"

Zim grunted. "Eh. I have the distinct displeasure of having a few tagalongs."

"You made some new friends?" Aang said with a smile.

"Uh, no, I mean-"

"Where are they?!" Aang asked excitedly, hovering around Zim. "I wanna meet them!"

Zim looked embarrased. "Eh...I...sort of...lost them."

"Then let's go find them!" Aang yelled, grabbing Zim by the arm and dragging him by the arm.

-------

"I don't get it," Morte complained as they wandered through a series of dank and dark catacombs. "How hard could it be to find a short green guy with a giant key thing?"

"The fact that we've yet to find him speaks for itself," Hobbes stated. He sniffed the air for a moment, coughing slightly and glaring at Calvin. "You mind toning that thing down?"

Calvin, his right hand encased in his Pyro Glove and suspending a small fireball above it, glared back at him. "Tone this! Maintaining a floating flame to give off light without burning anything is not as easy as it looks!"

"Yeah, sure." Hobbes sniffed again, trying to ignore the ozone in his nostrils. They'd been looking everywhere for Zim, and going in these catacombs was only the latest in their efforts to find him again. He sniffed again. "Ugh...it's like there's two fires in here."

Calvin rolled his eyes.

Morte clicked his teeth. "Wait a tick, do you see that?"

Hobbes looked up. Down the narrow stone hall was a small flickering red-yellow light. "Hey! There really are two fires! What's someone else doing down here?" He took another sniff. "Aha! That's our guy! And somebody who smells of buffalo."

"Bison!" Someone yelled down the hallway.

"Is there really a difference?" Calvin thought.

The three of them rushed down the stone hallway, stopping in front of the two down the passage; it was indeed Zim, as well as an unknown Tibetian-looking guy, holding a small flame in his open hand.

Hobbes looked ready to snap. "Do you have any idea how long we've been looking for you?!"

Zim thought for a moment. "Yes, and I don't care."

Hobbes growled. "Urgh..." he paused. "Who's your friend?"

The flame in Aang's hand disappeared as he rushed over and excitedly shooke Hobbes' considerably larger hand with both of his own, pumping them up and down happily. "I'm Aang! Nice to meet you!"

"I'm Hobbes and you're welcome?" Hobbes said, unsure how to react. He wondered if hands could get motion sickness.

Aang smiled sunny and let go. He grasped Calvin's hand next; to the mage's surprise, Aang's hand dove right through the fire, completely unharmed by it as he happily shook his gloved hand, repeating his greeting.

"I'm Calvin," he said warily. He firmly believed that no human could possibly be this friendly and Aang was disrupting his view of the universe.

Aang let go of his hand and rushed over to Morte. He stopped, having no idea how to shake his hand when he didn't have any. He settled for grinning at him. "I'm-"

"Heard ya the first time, kid. Name's Morte Rictusgrin, hoya doing."

"Fine!" Aang said cheerfully.

"If you say so," Morte said doubtfully. He eyeballed Zim. "Friend of yours?"

"Yes," Zim said.

"Is everyone from your world a freak!?"

Zim glared at Morte and soundly kicked him into the ground.

"Don't do that!" Aang scolded, picking Morte off the ground and dusting him off, setting him back into the air.

Calvin was still staring at his hand. "How the...what the..." he looked away from his glove and stared at Aang. "How'd you do that?"

"Do what?"

"Touch the fire without being burned!"

"Oh. I'm a Firebender."

"A what-bender?"

"Something like a elemental manipular that focuses his skills with martial arts," Zim explained.

"Ah." Calvin said. He looked at Zim. "Why'd you run off like that?"

Zim crossed his arms and glared at him. "I don't need to justify myself to you!"

Calvin walked up to Zim, raising himself as high as he could. "What'd you say to me?!"

Aang stood between them. "Guys, guys! Don't fight!"

Calvin snorted. "Yeah, yeah...got any bright ideas about getting us back up?"

Aang thought about, "Give me a minute here." He assumed a stand, standing where he was.

"What's he doing?" Hobbes wondered.

"Earthbending," Zim said shortly.

Hobbes stared at him. "I thought you said he was a Firebender."

"He is. Earthbending, Firebending, Waterbending, Airbending...he does it all. He's like the Swiss Army knife of elemental martial arts." Zim paused. "He also makes July Ann's fries."

"That's julian fries."

Zim rolled his eyes. "I say tomato, you say tomato."

Hobbes raised an eyestripe. "Don't you mean 'I say tomato, you say to-mah-to'?"

"Who'd be stupid enough to say it like that?!" Zim demanded.

Aang looked up; he had been utilizing his skills in Earthbending to sense the vibrations around them so he could sense where the most people were, therefore where they could go up. "Got it!! He waved his arms back, air currents flowing around them visibly for a moment before Zim jumped in the air and crashed into him.

"DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT!" Zim yelled, rolling off the last Airbender.

Aang sighed sadly. "Fine...guess we walk." He rolled to his feet, walking in an apparantly random direction.

Morte stared at Aang. "Where you going?"

"I have no idea!" Aang said cheerfully. "But it's a way out."

-------

Spike frowned, looking over Frankie's shoulder. "Hold on a minute..."

"What is it?" Frankie asked.

Spike walked away from her, looking around the room. "Where'd the newbies go? They were here just a second ago!"

Frankie blinked. "Newbies? You mean those guys that were with you?"

"Yeah, them. Crap, this ain't good, it isn't. They don't know anything about this place!" Spike started to run off when Frankie yelled.

"Wait a minute! If they're new, that means they're looking for rooms! Start up at the upper floors!"

"Gotcha!" Spike yelled back, rushing up the stairs and sniffing for their scents. I don't get paid enough for this, he thought.

-------

Foster's had a lot of hallways. It had been noted previously by the inhabitants of the original house that there were a lot of hallways, frequently in a tired and exasperated tone.

It had been suggested by some that the original house had been an imaginary friend. Some of those same people suggested that the original house had survived somehow and intergrated itself into the substance of the current one.

Whether or not that was true, it would go a long way towards explaining why there were so many revolving walls, trapdoors and general disregard of normal archetecture.

One of those trapdoors blew off it's hinges, a powerful gale whistling off the hole, Calvin, Hobbes, Zim and Aang blown out in short order. They landed on the ground painfully, the wind around them quickly dying down.

"See? I told you I could get us out of there," Aang said.

Hobbes shook the dust out of his fur. "Yeah, but did you have to do it like that!? I'm going to be windblown for a week!"

Aang shrugged. "Whoops?"

There was a loud flash behind them; they turned around to see Calvin behind the restored trapdoor, holding his hammer in the air.

Aang looked at Calvin's work with interest. "What was that?"

"Alchemy."

"Oh."

Calvin looked at Aang sideways. "What about that bending stuff? Mind explaining?"

As Aang proceeded to do just that, Hobbes rolled his eyes. "So now what do we do? Finding a room seems like a good idea."

Zim nodded. "A surprisingly good idea."

Hobbes' fur bristled. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Zim smiled innocently. "Nothing."

"And that's how I can bend all four elements!" Aang finished.

"Okay," Calvin said. "But this Avatar thing...if you're the incarnation of the planet, how are you still alive?"

Aang shrugged nervously. "I don't really understand it myself."

Calvin shrugged. He pointed a finger at Aang's tattoos. "So those tattoos mark you as an Airbending master?"

"Uh huh."

Calvin waved his hands in a beckoning gesture. "Okay, show me! Prove you're a master!"

Aang raised an eyebrow. "The tattoos aren't good enough?"

Calvin snorted. "Take it from a real master: skill is proof enough."

Aang grinned. "All right..." He moved his hands back, holding them close together. Calvin braced himself for what was surely going to be a masterful display of aerokinesis: Aang held his hands in front of him, a small top of tightly condensed wind spinning around between his hands.

Calvin stared at it. "That's it?"

"AANG!" a girl's voice shouted across the hallwayroom. The top spun out of existence as Aang jumped in shock. He slowly looked at the end of the hall and smiled nervously as he saw an attractive brown-skinned girl Aang's age and a little less than a head taller than the young Air Nomad, came walking their way, clearly relieved to see him, a slightly exhausted look in her bright blue eyes. Her considerable mass of dark brown hair was carefully styled in a thick braid going past the middle of her back, a pair of large loops around the sides of her face. She was wearing a blue sleeveless jacket, fastened at one side, with matching arm-cloths over her forearms. A white-lined hood hung loosely over her back, flipping slight with each pants were dark blue, the same basic style as Aangs except it didn't have any knee-zippers, a few compartments were clipped to the belt, and the cuffs came down to her mid-calf. Her shoes made no noise against the carpet, black simple shoes with small straps.

For some reason, at the sight of the girl, Aang looked incredibly nervous. "Heh...heh...hi, Katara..."

Katara stomped over to him and crossed her arms, glaring at him. "Aang," she said coldly.

Aang gulped loudly. He smiled nervously, the smile faltering when her expression refused to change.

"We have a problem," she said menacingly.

Aang looked around for help; the hallway had suddenly become deserted. He heard footsteps from behind him. He turned around, seeing a long orange tailed with black stripes from around the corner, swiftly whipping out of sight.

He turned back to Katara and laughed nervously.

-------

About ten minutes later...

Calvin, Hobbes, Morte and Zim stopped, pausing at the foot of a four-way intersection.. They looked around, each of them looking off in a different direction.

"Let's go this way!" they all said, stepping in a different direction before stopping abruptly, looking back at each other.

"I said it first!" Each declared, walking back to each other in a four-way square.

"I'm the leader," Zim said, "And I get to say where we go!"

"I got the most experience adventuring," Morte said. "And this is just another weird dungeon!"

Calvin snorted derisively. "Oh, shut up! We've heard enough of you! I've done way more with pan-dimensional pathways than you guys!" He said, not bothering to mention that Hobbes had an equal wealth of experience in that matter, even if he didn't quite understand the super-science behind them like Calvin did.

"Yeah? You ever go to a place of pure chaos just 'cause you were whistling an old tune by an old door?"

"You ever miscalculate a waypoint trajectory and make half a city block wind up inside Mathematician Hell?"

"You ever actually go to Hell? One of 'em, anyway?"

"You wanna go back?"

"You're both idiots!" Zim yelled.

"Says the guy with a beret!"

"I like my hat," Zim growled.

Calvin gestured at Zim's hat. "Good for you, 'cause the Fashion Police called; they need their Most Wanted back!"

"This according to the one with shoulder flaps?" Zim shot back.

"At least I have a coherent clothing style!"

"You call that style?" Morte sniped.

"At least we have clothes!" Zim and Calvin said, turning on Morte in both senses of the term.

"And a whole lotta good it's done for you! Way it looks, you guys oughta be drowning in hangers on and wait, I forgot; you're both so short you'd drown in a sea of gnomes!"

Zim and Calvin balked, looking at each other.

"Did he just call us short?" Zim said.

"Yeah," Calvin said.

"You know what that means?" the Irken said, summoning the Keyblade.

"Yep," the inventor replied, shouldering his hammer. "And he must burn."

"Look at you guys!" Hobbes yelled, gesturing at them with his hands palm-up. "We started off arguing about going off in different directions, which everyone knows is a adventuring negative, and now you're just fighting each other! Stop being idiots and make a decent effort to actually work together!"

"I'll be an idiot if I want to!" Zim said mulishly.

"Me too!" Calvin yelled.

"Good call," Morte said.

The two short people of the group paused. "Wait," the older of the two said. "That didn't sound right."

"Yeah, gotta go with you there."

A moment passed.

"Let's get 'em!" Calvin roared, the hammer's alchemic runes aglow.

"I second that emotion!" Zim said, the flames around the Kingdom Key obscuring the metal of the weapon from view. "With a vengeance."

Hobbes was a very patient person. Years of being Calvin's best friend, sole confidant and psuedo-brother had impressed in him a high tolerance for self-indulgent selfishness, short tempers, and an abundance of insanity. His employment as a knight had further increased his tolerance for chaos and drop-of-the-hat violence, leading to his growing skill as a peacemaker. However, the stress of his King having disappeared out of the blue, having to go into the depths of the Greater Universe with only his loudmouth of a charge and a babbling stranger had stressed him out a great deal, and that stress had only been compounded in the multiples by their chaotic adventure in Traverse Town, the discovery of the Keybearer, his attitude problem and unwillingness to cooperate with what Hobbes suspected was a vastly important scheme. His patience, normally strong enough to withstand even some of the mightiest blows from the world's...worldness, had been ground from an adamantine wall to a suction cup holding back his fearsome temper, normally held in check by his patience and cultivatedly laid-back attitude. With the declaration of intent to trash a hallway in the process of assaulting another member of their group, that single string finally snapped.

From Zim's point of view, being hit by 250 pounds of feline muscle and carried through the air along with the human technomancer was a bit like being hit by a steam locomotive operated by an escapee from Pratchett's Home for the Criminally Stupid incarcerated for his frequent urges to demolish things with large vehicles.

Hitting the ground and being smashed into the human like an pair of cymbals hurt too.

When the ringing in his head faded, Zim discerned Hobbes standing over them, his arms crossed and his face stern.

"What was that for?" Calvin whined, rubbing his head.

"Why?" Hobbes asked rhetorically, his voice rising. "Why? Why? I was trying to knock some sense into you two, that's what!"

Zim's antennae twitched, half-rising. "Eh?"

"You two are behaving like children. And not the good kind, either; you're acting like the kind of kids that inspired The Omen!"

As Calvin got up, Morte cautiously said, "Uh, Hobbes?"

"Not now, Morte," Hobbes said shortly, not in the mood for Morte's antics. To Calvin, he said, "Are we calm now?", his voice more even now that he'd expressed some of his anger, his patience starting to mortar up the bricks again.

"Yeah, yeah." Calvin replied, putting his hammer away.

"Hey, Cal-" Morte started saying again, before Calvin cut it off.

"Stow it. I don't need to hear from you."

Morte clapped his jaws shut.

Hobbes nodded in approval. He was wound tight enough as it was, and he didn't need Morte making him even more tense. He looked away from Calvin, intent on telling Zim off, noticing an absence that made that a difficult prospect. "Where'd Zim go?"

Calvin looked to the spot the Irken had landed after Hobbes had banged their heads together. "I don't know. He was there last time I looked."

"Don't look at me, I was focused on you!"

"Not that I blame you. What about you, bonehead? Why didn't you say anything?!"

Largely because he lacked any other means to do so, Morte's primary means of communicating frustration and anger was with his voice and vocabulary. And he had a great deal to work off. "What do you think I was trying to tell you, you piking berks?! He ran off during your little 'Look at you, you're a dumbass' speech down that hallway! Probably already got into a fight with someone he shouldn't have, knowing him!"

"What do you mean, 'knowing him'? You just met the guy," Hobbes pointed out.

"I know his type. Short guy, massive shoulder chip, attitude problem as big as he has to look to get past his height? Tch, I know his type all right. He's probably running around like an idiot, opening every door he sees until he finds an empty one."

"Why do you say that like it's a bad thing?" Calvin wondered.

Morte rolled his eyes. "Look at it this way, kid; you're a refugee. You're a long way from home, which doesn't even exist anymore. Everything you know is gone and shattered to Limbo and beyond. You live in a big house with a bunch of other refugees; the tension level's gotta be up to there. And some guy with an attitude problem slams your door open, acts like you're not even there?" Morte clicked his teeth. "That's practically a recipe for disaster."

As if on cue, they heard a loud array of voices yell "Get back here!". They turned the way Zim had suggested just in time to see Zim running their way, looking panicked; he jumped onto the wall, bounding behind the larger mass frame of Calvin and Hobbes, hiding himself from view just as a large crowd ran up to them.

"Hey," said a massive gray-furred friend with a pickle-shaped nose and mean little eyes. "You see a real little guy go this way? He ran into my room and when I told him off, he kicked me in the shin!"

"He said something to me, I don't know what it was, but it sounded insulting!" Someone else said.

"He told me my pants were ugly!" proclaimed a purple-clad female ninja with extremely long blonde hair.

"He set my curtains on fire!" complained a small pink squirrel.

"He tore down my wallpaper and replaced it with the carpet!" yelled a barbarian-hero.

Hobbes felt his eyes sliding back down to Zim despite his best efforts not to do so. We're off to a great start, aren't we? Out loud, he said, "Yeah! I saw he go that way!" and he pointed to the left.

The angry mob exclaimed it's thanks and ran that way, vocalising it's intent on pummeling that 'green twerp' once they found him.

Hobbes turned to Zim. "What was that about?"

"Eh...you wouldn't understand."

"Oh? And why not?"

"That's classified," Zim declared, getting to his feet, his composure regenerating now that the evil mob of doom was out of his field of view.

"Oh, really? Is that why that mob was trying to lynch you for rampaging into their rooms, making rude comments and acting obnoxiously?"

Zim's eyes darted suspiciously. "There's a very good reason I did that."

Hobbes raised an eyestripe. "And that is...?"

Zim didn't say anything, but seemed inordinately fascinated by his feet.

"Do that again!" Calvin said. "That was fun!"

Hobbes, Morte and Zim gave him a look. Zim's look scared Hobbes, as he appeared to be considering it.

"What?" Calvin said, not understanding their expressions.

-------

"Now I know we just went this way," Hobbes said, looking forlornly at a X-shaped conjunction in the seemingly endless array of hallways.

Calvin looked away from a holographic display emanating from his watchlike device. "Spectroanalysis detects our heatwave pattern, so that's a ten-four."

Hobbes rolled his eyes. "Yeah. And you 'accidentally' burned a big hole in the floor."

"A guy's gotta keep his way somehow."

"How?" Morte said blithely. "Trail of underwear?"

"In a place like this? They'd just disappear." Calvin said. Hobbes was having his suspicions about someone secretly monitoring their movement and moving the walls around to make things more difficult, but he didn't say anything.

"What about you, Boss?" the skull said to Zim, who was secretly enjoying the sobriquet. "Any bright ideas?"

"An analytical observation of the local area suggests a complete absence of our bearings, and simple conjugation declares a continuation of the same."

"Which means...what?"

"We're lost," Zim simplified.

"Now see?" Morte said. "You brain-trusts can talk common."

"Yeah," Calvin said, "But where's the fun in that?"

Zim gave them a look. "Do you ever stop bickering?"

"Nope," Calvin said, his face growing a satisfied grin at the sight of Hobbes' face, suggesting that he'd just cut off a reply.

Zim gave him a evil-looking smile. "Likely because the amount of energy required to turn on your brain-to-mouth valve is greater then you possess"

"Hey-" Calvin started to say before Hobbes cut him off.

"Y'know, he's got a point."

"What?"

"Yeah," Morte added. "I've been thinking that all day."

"Perhaps it's some sort of familial condition," Zim suggested.

"Nah," Hobbes said. "I was raised with him and I can tell you that neither Mom or Dad ever showed a trace of it. Might be all the sugar he eats like it was a medical necessity. And caffeine. I've known long-distance overnight truckers who take in less caffeine then he does!"

"The horror!"

"And you do not want to see him after he gets a fresh supply of his cereal. Yeesh."

"Well," Morte said. "That explains the hyperactivity."

"Sure!" Calvin yelled. "Everyone savage the Calvin!"

"Is that an invitation?" Hobbes asked, a feral grin on his face.

Calvin scowled. "No. It was sarcasm!"

"Ooh, now there's a calm response," Morte said sarcastically.

"And how many people at home would like to take that invitation?" Zim asked, one corner of his mouth open and revealed his jigsaw-teeth.

"Most of the people in my departments, anyone within fifty miles of the testing range, almost everyone I ever knew in school, my PR agent, that one guy whose name I can never remember, probably about sixty percent of the population, and those animals from that one farm Hobbes hates." Calvin answered honestly.

Zim and Morte looked surprised, both due to Calvin's answer and the manner in which Hobbes was grumbling about some farm back home, using unkind words.

"Gee, you must be real popular back home," Morte said sarcastically.

"What?" Calvin said. "All great geniuses deal with their detractors."

"True, true," Zim said. "In your case, however, that would require genius."

"Hey!"

Hobbes wasn't paying attention to them. His grievences against U.S. Acres voiced, he'd settled for moodily staring at the wall until Zim and Calvin finished their argument.

His plan was interrupted by an incredibly loud blast of air and sound that roared from his left.

"OW!" Hobbes yelled, falling to his knees. He looked up dazedly, seeing Zim standing next to him with a large foghorn in his hand. "What did you do that for?"

"Mostly to get your attention. And boredom, can't forget the boredom."

Hobbes glared at him. "Tell me something, and be honest here: is there something wrong with you?"

Zim looked innocently at Hobbes. "What would make you say that?"

Hobbes groaned, shaking his head in his hands. "Just...ugh. I'm going to have a migrane." He lowered his hands from his eyes, noticing that everyone had gone. "Hey!"

He whirled around to his feet; behind him, his small group was ascending a staircase, apparently oblivious of his absence. He ran off after them, sprining into the air, springboarding off the handrail and turning in the air, landing in front of them on all fours. "What are you guys doing?"

"Going up the stairs, duh," Morte said.

Hobbes struggled to keep his eyebrow from twitching. "And...why aren't you just looking down here? We haven't checked all the rooms yet."

Calvin scratched his chin lazily. "Well...all the rooms seem to be occupied...we haven't had much luck on this floor...plus Zim decided."

"What?" Hobbes directed his stare to the Irken.

Zim shrugged. "I don't like this floor. The carpetry offends me."

Hobbes groaned. He suspected that he was going to do a lot of that in the near future.

"Hey!" The quarter turned towards the intersection; it was occupied by the small mob Zim's attitude had garnered, and it seemed they'd added some members to their number during Zim's room hunt. "LET'S GET 'EM!"

Zim, Calvin, Hobbes and Morte looked at each other.

"Run!" Calvin, Hobbes and Morte yelled.

"Bacterial disinfectant!" Zim yelled.

The mob and his happenstance group paused. "What?"

Zim's eyes darted back and forth. "I happen to be concerned about the dangers of disease. The microscopic menace plagues us ALL!"

Contemplating that for a moment, the mob charged again.

Needing no further motivation to move, Zim's group ran off.

-------

Some time later...

"Well, that worked well," Morte said dryly.

"Make silence now," Zim said moodily as he walked out of a room with a large mark over his eye.

"No, no, no," Morte said, feigning innocence. "I mean, sure, it's a good plan. Running in and out of every room you see in a town full of people that I bet are just waiting to blow up, insulting them when they yell at you and let's not forget the attitude problem; yep, that's a great plan! Can't possibly see what's wrong with that one, nuh uh!"

"Finally," Hobbes said. "Someone sees the truth."

Calvin sighed. "It was fun while it lasted."

Zim crossed his arms. "I don't see what was wrong with my plan."

"You break and enter, aggravate probably very angry people and in the process incite a mob that's probably still on a manhunt for you," Hobbes said pointedly. "And you need us to give you a reason?"

"The plan is foolproof," Zim said stubbornly. "They are merely small bumps in the road of the road of pain and misery that is life."

"For that to count, it'd have to be a plan. This is more of a 'I-Hope-This-Works' kind of deal."

Zim glared at him. "And you have a better idea?"

"Actually, I do," Calvin said.

The other three turned to him.

"You do?" Zim asked, a little surprised.

"You do?" Hobbes said, his expression more suited to someone who'd just been informed that their body was a walking time bomb.

"You do?" Morte said. In his experience, the boy was an oddball who just shot his mouth off, and occasionally some highly destructive spells. Aside from that, he hadn't seem him do much in the planning department.

"Yep," Calvin said to all three. "I went to the liberty of procuring us a map!"

"You found a map?" Hobbes said. "That's...actually intelligent."

Zim was more suspicious. He didn't trust this town's maps, suspecting them to be a common product of an insidious beast of pure malevolent thought energy that infected the minds of the town's business models, forever cursing all who dwelled within the town to wander about it's endless alleys forevermore. "Where'd you get that map?"

"Hey!" Frankie yelled from somewhere ahead of the corridor they were in. "Who broke the Foster's Display Map?!"

The other three looked away from the direction of her voice to Calvin, who hastily hid the rather tattered map behind his back. "From an area completely unrelated to that event," he lied.

"Uh huh," Hobbes said suspiciously. "And the Noodle Incident had nothing to do with you."

"I told you never to bring that up! Stop using it against me already!"

Hobbes let his retort die in his lungs when he noticed Zim skulking about, looking around suspiciously. "What are you doing?"

"Searching," Zim said shortly.

"Ah, 'searching'. For what?"

"Evil."

"Evil," Hobbes repeated.

"Yes. Evil."

"I'm probably going to regret this...but why are you searching for evil?"

"Because he found a map. That is far too convenient for my liking."

"How is that bad?" Calvin wondered, waving the map around.

"Because something is bound to happen to prevent our room discovery. That map is some sort of evil trap. Just like the last one I found."

Hobbes was about to ask when Zim found a map when Calvin felt he had to ask the obvious question. "Who honestly cares enough about what we're doing to stop us?!"

"I don't know," Zim snapped. "Possessed garden gnomes. Middle management-based lawyer demons. Sentient clusters of pure stink. That kid from Skool who always makes fun of my version of a Scottish accent."

A long pause followed his statement. "Don't you think that maybe you're being a little bit paranoid?" Calvin asked sarcastically.

"Perhaps," Zim said. "But a little paranoia never derailed a hovertrain."

The other three stared at him.

"Ah," Morte said. "The ever present rambling of the barmy. How I haven't missed it."

Zim glared at him. "Mock me now, animate skull thing, but wait! Just you wait until the carnivorus tumbleweeds are chewing on your collective heads! Then you'll be sorry! Oh, how you'll be sorry!"

Morte stared at Zim. "Eh...how likely is that going to happen?"

"In this town? Probably in the next five minutes," Calvin said.

"Nah," Hobbes said dismissively. "I say fifteen. Gotta give 'em time to prepare."

"I wager fifteen on five!"

"Me too, but vice-versa."

Zim turned around. The rooms here looked too small to be of use, but he remained optimistic about their eventual goal. "Let's try the next hallway."

"Get them before they're gone!" A voice behind him yelled.

"No," Zim said, a little confused. "The rooms in this hall are not suitable."

"Uh, Zim?" Calvin said, tugging on the Irken's sleeve.

Zim turned around, ready to berate Calvin for uninvited physical contact when he saw the mob, standing just around the corner, glaring menacingly at him. And several cells of the mob were holding large cages containing what appeared to be bundles of thistle with large fang-filled mouths, narrowed gleams of red light staring at them malevolently.

Morte's jaw dropped, and Hobbes reluctantly handed Calvin three fivers. "You have got to be kidding me."

"Hah!" Calvin proclaimed, ignoring Morte's outburst. "I finally won something!"

"Hmph," Hobbes said. "Are you forgetting that the only games you ever win against me are games of chance?"

"A-hem," the large imaginary friend said. "Angry mob here; you could follow standard regulations and pay some attention to us before fleeing in a panicked fashion."

Zim waved a hand at his colleages. "So sorry; proceed."

"Thank you. In accordance with the Vigilante Justice Article of The Traverser Town Amnesty Agreement in the town's official founding, we, the mob, present you with our grievances in the form of this bunch of highly aggressive Traversian Carnivorous Thistle."

"Uh huh," Zim said slowly. He stared back at the mob. "Is that it?"

"Pretty much, yeah."

"Okay then. Please don't proceed."

"Sorry. We're real pissed at you."

"Eh, I'm used to it." Zim said indifferently. "Go on, go on."

"Good." The mob opened the various cages; the tumbleweeds, pleased to be free, leaped out while snarling ferociously and foaming at the mouth.

One jumped further ahead of the rest, snapping Calvin's ill-acquired map out of his hands and gulping it down. Before Calvin could do anything stupid, Hobbes smacked into him, hoisting him on one shoulder and running away, Zim and Morte in close chase, the Irken supported by his spider-legs.

"My map!" Calvin yelped.

Hobbes gave him a look. "Forget about it!"

"Do you know what I had to do to get it?!"

"The same kind of thing you do whenever you get even slightly bored?"

"I'm not saying yes!"

"Quick!" Zim said, dashing in front of them, opening a strangely cubist looking door. "In here!" He ducked in, the others following after a brief pause. Zim slammed the door shut, the others pinning themselves against it in a last-ditch attempt at saving themselves from an angry mob. They waited tensely, bracing themselves against the door as they heard the bouncing-scratching sounds of the tumbleweeds, followed by the stomping sounds of the mob.

The sounds passed with no incident. After a brief moment of stressful tenseness, they relaxed and looked up at the room they ducked into.

It was, to speak bluntly, an architectural impossibility. It appeared to be another hallway, this one completely gray and white, consisting entirely of staircases going in every possible dimension, and from Calvin's art studies, he felt certain that a few went in some dimensions that weren't geometrically possible. Stairs going up, down, sideways, facing upside down, to either side, spiraling around the walls, intersecting with others, and branching into the vaulting hallways high above them, themselves obeying equally absurd laws. It looked like something out of a surrealistic painting.

"You know," Hobbes said dryly. "I should probably say something about how impossible that is...but I don't know whether it's sadder that something like this even exists or that I'm not surprised it does."

-------

Even later...

"We're lost," Morte said.

"What a big surprise," Calvin said sarcastically. "That's absolutely brilliant! I mean, it's a testament to observational genius! I don't know how anyone would have noticed if it wasn't for the fact that we've been lost for the past fifteen minutes!"

"Don't gotta be snippy with me," Morte said, offended.

"I can be whatever I want to be," Calvin snapped. "It's one of the bonuses of playing puppet master with the laws of physics."

"And an apparent side-effect is a constantly running mouth," Zim grumbled.

"No," Hobbes said. "That's more of a personality inclination."

"You know what? It's not just Morte. All of you guys suck. Like mosquitoes."

"You mean mosquitoes in general, or those mutant ones you made on accident?"

"You're never going to let that go, are you?" Calvin asked sourly.

"Come on, you know me. You're practically a wealth of blackmail material."

"Some friend you are."

"Hey, look at it this way; would anyone but a true friend have stuck besides you this long?"

"Would a true friend file up blackmail material?"

"You do that too."

"Fascinating as this completely pointless conversation is," Zim said. "I must interrupt it to inform you that I see an open room over there!"

"What?!"

"Follow me!" Zim commanded, rushing off towards the open door. The others followed him excitedly as he slid to a stop in front of a spacey looking room, the door clinging to the wall.

"Finally! Our search is over," Zim proclaimed, triumphantly walking into what he thought was the border between greater house and room and turned out to be a highly convincing solid space.

The sight of Zim suddenly crashing into seemingly empty space, one leg stuck out behind him as a result of his odd gait while the 'room' crumpled around him, the highly convincing painting falling onto him and revealing only a wall. He fell down, the painting covering him like a shroud.

"Oh, come on!" Calvin yelled, throwing his hands up in the air. "This is getting ridiculous!"

"'Getting'?" Hobbes mocked. "We're way past that border."

"Man," Morte said sympathetically. "I haven't seen a place this nuts since Rubikon. That place was like a cuckoo clock. I mean a cuckoo cuckoo clock!"

The canvas pile started to twitch violently.

"Hey, Boss!" Morte said, floating down to Zim's level. "You, uh, feelin' alright there?"

"I HATE THIS HOUSE!" Zim screamed, ripping out of the canvas like a Xenomorph Chestburster out of it's hapless host. "It's INSANE! Everywhere there's nothing but the depths of madness cowering at every turn, and that stupid MOB won't stop chasing me! What I said was a long time ago, GET OVER IT! And this!" He gestured at the remains at the canvas. "What is this!? Who in their right mind would paint over a solid wall to create the illusion of an empty room?!"

-------

In Traverse Town's Guild of Pranks, Mischief and Amusing Annoyances...

A Smergle sneezed. As it turned out, he'd recently used Sketch to copy a Whirlwind attack, and destroyed most of the hall. Everyone thought it was funny.

------

After about five minutes of yelling, shredding and stomping, he finally quieted down, panting with his back hunched over.

"Feeling better now?" Morte asked cautiously. Assuming Zim was still in a mood to lacerate anything that invoked his considered ire, he wanted to be close enough to be a voice of sympathy but far enough to flee at top speed should Zim be inclined to commit acts of great destruction.

"Yes." The reply was delivered in a toneless voice, suggesting Zim's temper tantrum had run itself out.

"You sure?"

"Uh huh."

"Not about to go around comitting acts of great chaos and destruction on, I dunno, me, for example?"

"No."

"O-kay then!" Morte said brightly.

Zim took a deep breath. And he looked around.

"You!" he suddenly shouted, whirling around the spot and pointing at Hobbes.

"Me?" the martially artistic anthropomorph asked, taken aback.

"Yes, you! How can you be so calm in the face of such maddening...madness?! It's ludicrous!"

Hobbes looked at Calvin. "I've developed a bit of an immunity to insanity over my life. Doesn't bother me that much any more."

Calvin scowled. "I don't like the way you were looking at me. Why were you looking at me like that?"

"No reason."

"No reason," Zim said, happy to have a distraction from their impending screaming fit. "Or some reason?"

"No. It's nothing."

"So much nothing that it is, in fact, something?"

Morte wished he had eyelids so he could blink. "Wait, what?"

Zim jabbed a finger at Morte's forehead. "Aha! You're in on it, too!"

"In on what?"

"You're in on the conspiracy to deny Zim his sleep by forcing him to wander around this house forever, alerting the hall monitors of his every move to drive him mad!"

"Bit late for that," Calvin muttered under his breath.

Morte's jaw dropped slack to the left. "I'm a what-what in the who-hey on the what now?"

"In on it. The Zim-going-crazy conspiracy. Right now,"

Morte looked at Zim for a long moment. "Don't take this the wrong way, Boss...but you're in desperate need of an appointment with the men in white coats."

"This is news to you?" Calvin muttered. Unfortunately, Zim heard him and expressed his displeasure by swiftly swinging his fist sideways, the back of his arm catching the side of Calvin's head and knocking him to the floor.

"Ow!" Calvin squealed as he went flying and smacked into the ground. He groaned loudly, furiously looking up and planning to issue some sort of retaliation when he noticed the nimbus of fire playing around Zim's clenched fist. Getting the message, Calvin gulped and backed away.

Zim nodded approvingly as the fire faded away; he let his arms drop into a crossed position as he gave Calvin a sardonic look. "Now what have we learned?"

"Don't insult someone when you're in hitting range of that person?" Hobbes suggested.

"Don't piss off a cutter who earned the name?" Morte offered.

"Make sure to save your insults for when your target can't hurt you?" Calvin said.

Zim pointed at Calvin. "Bingo. Now, let's get moving. There's no point in wasting valuable rest time remaining lost in these cavernous catacombs of...of...hallway things."

"Ooh," Calvin muttered under his breath. "Great grammar. You should teach English at a university."

Zim's head snapped to him, a sharp frown plastered on his face.

"What?" Calvin said with a false note of innocence. "I didn't say anything. Look at me, look at me; I didn't say anything. You must be hearing things." A moment passed, what with the awkward silence and all. "You gonna get moving or what?"

Zim rolled his eyes, electing to let it go; like he said before, they didn't have time for this. The thought of vengeance for future infractions cheered him up a bit, and his brain started busily constructing appropriate scenarios immediately.

He paused at a fork in the halls, unsure whether to go down the stairway in front of them or turn to the other hallway in front of them. He leaned a hand against the wall as he made up his mind, elicting a small squeaking noise as the others gathered around him. Zim raised an eyeridge, not liking the way his hand was recessing into the wall slightly.

There was a loud clicking noise from directly underneath them.

"Naart," Hobbes said.

A square outlined in the floor beneath them suddenly swung open, dropping them into a tunnel.

"Was that another trapdoor!?" Morte yelled as the four of them tumbled around wildly, all rendered blind by the absence of light anywhere.

"What was your first clue, the tunnel?!" Hobbes yelled back.

"I hate this house!" Calvin yelled.

"I fail to see how destroying several planets on accident earned me this fate!" Zim screamed.

They fell (or rose; in the dark of the tunnel and amid all the bouncing around, gravitational orientation was a nebulous constant) through the darkness, wildly bouncing around a winding dark pathway that seemed to obey no rhyme or reason, distractedly hitting each other as they collided with the walls and bounced off again, their various cries and yells cut off and echoing as they bounced around, giving the impression that they were bounding around the mind of a madman.

It went on for a long time. It was hard to tell how long; given their personal point of view on the whole thing and the subjective nature of time, it felt like hours but was probably only ten minutes, if even that.

The darkness suddenly brightened in a flash of light, though they only had a moment to notice this before they crashed into the ground, landing in a heap of tangled limbs.

Zim distangled himself away from the dogpile, rubbed his head and sat up, taking in the sights. They were lying in a fair-sized dimly lit room, a few electric wall-mounted lamps lighting the room, though not well. Aside from the wall they'd just flipped in from, there appeared to be only one way out: a door leading into a down-staircase, it's entrance shrouded in the dark. There were a few scattered tables around the room and some small cabinets built into the walls, making it look rather utilitarian in nature. He stood up, grimacing as Morte pushed himself out from under the dogpile, bobbing around Zim with a note rather remnisciant of a mother hen. Hobbes brushed off the person on him, sending Calvin flying across the room, smacking into a wall and falling back down, his shoulder flap snagging on the hook of a wall-mounted lamp. Hobbes took note of this, shaking his his head wearily as he delicately stood up.

Zim looked around the room warily. "Perfect," he grumbled to himself, now how are we supposed to get out?" The room had no apparent exits or entrances, the trapdoor they'd descended in from closing up behind them.

He heard a creaking nose. Zim flipped around, Hobbes doing the same while Calvin and Morte at least faced the appropriate direction as part of the wall at the other end of the room slowly fell back into the wall, sliding away from sight. A few moments later, a young human stumbled out of the resultant gap in the wall, yelping loudly.

He hurredly scurried to his feet, giving the others a clear view of him: he was a fair-skinned male that was probably about seventeen. He looked to be about five six and on the slighter side of the male build spectrum. His hair was a little darker then Calvin's, but not as spikey, though no less messy. His face was rounded, with a small spattering of freckles, slightly fuzzy large ears and light brown eyes. He was wearing a large black jacket with loose wrist length sleeves and a high collar. He wore a sleeveless red vest over it, it's neckline a hole for the collar of the jacket to come through. It had darker red seamlines going around the armholes, shoulder areas and chestline, and ended just above the bottom of the jacket, his belt concealed from sight. On the back of the vest was a large logo consisting of the letters TP in a circle outlined in purple, rendered in a stylized shape with the P a bit lower than the T. His charcoal gray pants were baggy, the cuffs spilling over the tops of his shoes and looking well-worn; the pants were covered with number of overlapping dark red material that looked like armor plates; they started somewhere around the belt, judging from the way they came from under the jacket and down to about mid-thigh, another larger piece covering most of the lower half of his legs. He had a small pouch strapped to his right leg, the flap pushed open by the small head of a curious naked mole rat; it was strangely unwrinkled and smooth-skinned for a mole rat, in Zim's opinion. Curiously, a long tail covered with fur the same color as the boy's hair protruded from within the back of his jacket, drooping down to a light coil around his feet. His strapped-together shoes, their tops lost under the loose legcuffs, were white with gray soles.

He blinked, seeing the others stare at him like he was about to sprout tentacles and devour their heads. "Uh, hey?" he said nervously, raising his hand and waggling his fingers in greeting.

"Ron?" said a girl's voice from behind him. "Who are you talking to?" A girl stepped in from the gap, walking to behind the boy. her skin tone a little lighter then the boy's, looking to be roughly around the same age as the male and about five four. She had long red hair going down to around the small of her back, the long bangs mostly combed over to one side framing her intelligent green eyes and an attractive rounded face. She wore a zipped up black jacket with a high collar, elbow length dark purple sleeves with darker cuffs, a wedgelike pattern marking off the black from the purple on her shoulders. Her jacket had purple seamlines in roughtly the same areas where the boy's vest had red ones. Her jacket had the same logo the boy's did on the back, except outlined in red. Her pants were almost identical to the boy's, except for the pants being olive green and the overlapping parts being black. The cuffs of her pants covered most of a pair of black designer combat boots; they were in the town's style, meaning that they were tied with three straps across the leg, all but one of the straps obsured by the pants. Covering her arms from the middle of the forearms on down was a pair of long black combat gloves with reinforced knuckles.

She warily regarded Zim and his company, noting Zim and Hobbes' defensive readiness. She wasn't sure why, but the tiger and alien seemed somehow dangerous in a vague but indisputable way. She placating waved her hands at them. "Whoah, amp down, guys."

"Kim? Ron?" A third voice said from behind them, followed by several loud crashing sounds and a lot of screaming by the same voice. Kim and Ron jumped, whirling around and yelling, "Father Nightroad!" They disappeared back into the gap, dragging one of the singularily oddest figures any of Zim's group had seen yet.

The man Kim and Ron helped to his feet was another human male, this one with very light skin, appearing to be in his late twenties at most. He was also unusually tall, standing at about six feet five inches. He had a pleasant-looking thin face, framed by the chin-length winglike bangs of his almost girlishly long gray-white hair, the rest of it combed back into a flowing shoulderblade-length ponytail, tied with a small dark piece of cloth. He wore a large black knee-length bulky jacket styled after a cassock with a tall collar bracing his neck, the interior, sleeve cuffs and seams on it a ivory white. Under his jacket, he wore a loose short-sleeved white shirt with no collar, and looped over his muscular neck was a peculiar heavily stylized and nearly skeletal golden cross on a chain-necklace, resting over his heart; the cross's central conjunction had a fanning shape around it like a metal spiderweb with extensions at the edges, some bladelike, some blunt. His pants were completely black and mostly plain, with a series of looping belts on the thighs and the cuffs of his pants were tucked into a pair of simple ankle-high black boots.

Adding to his already strange figure was the fact that he wore what appeared to be a large cross high on his back; it appeared to be slightly wider than his shoulders and about four feet tall as his shoulders. It was tightly bundled in what, judging for the text and elaborate illustrations, were Bible pages completely concealing the object underneath from view. An absurd amount of belts criss-crossed over the pages, clasps keeping them together and placed with no discernable pattern; many looped under his jacket and into his shirt, a few going through his jacket, the clasps placed strategically on his front to counter the obvious weight of the mummified-looking article of faith, even though it didn't look like the weight bothered him at all.

Father Nightroad looked at Zim and Hobbes tensely, his gaze retreating to Calvin and Morte for a moment; Noncombatants, he thought. The alien and the tiger, on the other, most certainly weren't. "Wait!" He said, waving his hands around anxiously. "Calm down, we're not enemies!"

Zim twitched an eyeridge. "You're not with the mob?"

Ron blinked. "Mob? What mob? We don't have anything to do with any mob."

"Aha!" Zim yelled, pointing a finger at him. "That's exactly what a mobber...mob...person would say! Admission by sterotype confirmation!"

Kim blinked. "Then...he is with the mob?"

"AHA!" Zim yelled again, this time pointing a finger at her. "You admit it! I smell guilt! Such horrible guilt it is?"

Kim, Ron and Father Nightroad stared nervously at the clearly insane alien, slowly backing away, freezing when the wall slid back into place, cutting off their escape.

"...Ah," Father Nightroad said unhappily. "Oh no."

Zim pointed a finger at them, yelling maniacally. "Come on! You'll never take me alive for your twisted vengeance-cy vengeance of...pain! I'll take you all on!"

"Er...yeah," Morte said uneasily. He wasn't sure about the priest, but he knew adventurers when he saw them, and if the boy and girl weren't adventurers, he didn't know what was. "You do that. I'll just stay out of your way." He floated off to the side, chattering his teeth.

Zim faltered, realizing that no one else was saying anything. "Back me up, will you?" He said, nudging Hobbes with an elbow. He got no response. "Eh? Hobbes?" He looked at the tiger, noticing that the tiger was sitting in a relaxed quadrupedal fashion, staring at Kim with something like rapt fascination. "Eh? Hello? What are you doing?" He waved his hand in front of Hobbes' face, the tiger's gaze remaining steady. "Oh, come on! Don't leave me to fight them on my own!"

Calvin smacked his face. "Oh, for the love of the One Man Band! They aren't with that mob, they're just a bunch of lost idiots!"

"Idiots?" Kim snapped, bristling.

"Yeah, that's not very nice," Father Nightroad said indignantly.

"I don't even know you and you're already insulting me!" Ron said. The naked mole rat pointed at Calvin and chattered something angrily.

Calvin groaned. "I hate public relations..."

Zim paused. "Wait. You're not after my precious gut-meats!?"

"Uh, no," Kim said shortly.

"Then what are you after?" Zim said suspiciously.

The priest twitched. "A WAY OUT" He suddenly screamed, clutching his head for a moment.

Morte stared at him for a moment. "...Does this town snap your crank or is it just 'cause you're all Primers?"

Father Nightroad paused. "Wait, what?"

"Never mind. Berk."

Father Nightroad frowned. "That's not nice."

Morte gaped at him. "Wait, you understood what I said?"

"What do you expect? I'm British!"

Seeing that Zim had been set at ease somewhat, Ron walked over to the tiger, peering at him thoughtfully. "Is something wrong with him?"

"Perhaps his brain has finally succumbed to the rampant insanity that dwells with everywhere?" Zim hypothesized.

"No," Calvin snapped, irritated that no one was paying attention to him. "He's just enamoured again!"

Kim blinked, flushing slightly. "He's what?"

"'Enamoured," Calvin said, emphasizing the syllables. "'Verb. To be charmed, captivated, unduly fascinated in a romantic sense.'"

Ron twitched. "Urk."

Zim looked at him sharply. "What was that about Irk!?"

"He's just snapping a crank," Morte said dismissively. "Nothing to do with...whatever you're talkin' about."

Calvin stared at Morte. "Will you stop saying that? What, were you a mechanic in another life?"

"Pike it, twerp!"

Calvin narrowed his eyes. "Pike this, bonehead!" He closed his forefinger and thumb in a small circle, holding it off to his mouth and loudly breathing into it. A short burst of flame jumped away from him, blasting into Morte and sending him flying.

Kim, Ron and Father Nightroad stared unbelivingly as Calvin let his hand drop, grinning malevolently. Okay, Father Nightroad said to himself. So he is a combatant.

Hobbes finally looked away from Kim, his eyes narrowing at Calvin. "Huh? You exercising your firebug again?"

"Shut up!" Calvin snapped. "Stop sightseeing and help me!"

"Do it yourself," Hobbes said lightly, ignoring Calvin's yell of frustration. He glanced at Ron, suddenly freezing. His tail started thrashing around rapidly as his eye twitched, watching the way Ron's tail was gently swaying from side to side...from side to side...from side to side. His teeth bared tensely, his claws boring into the floor.

Ron paled. "Why are you staring at me like that?"

Calvin eyes widened. "Listen, you! If you want to keep it, stop moving your tail!" He paused. "Wait, why do you have a tail?"

Ron grabbed his monkeylike tail defensively. "Long involved story!"

At the stop in movement, Hobbes relaxed, scooting back, his fur fluffing out. Zim thought he looked tremendously embarrased. Looking for something to take everyone's mind off his brief lack of control, Hobbes walked over to Calvin, a grin forming on his face. "What's the matter? Hanging around not your style?"

"That's funny, real funny. It'll be even funnier when I rearrange your face!"

"Flattery may get you somewhere, but threats will only get you humiliation. And a good fist to the face."

"Why...you...when I get down from here, you are taking a one-way trip down the evolutionary ladder, you hear me! You see how well you flirt after you're a paramecium, you hear me? A paramecium!"

"I think I like you like this. You look like a door knocker." Hobbes pulled on Calvin's shoe, easily pulling him away from the wall and letting go, letting Calvin's free weight swing him back onto the wall. "Ding dong."

"Hey, knock it off!"

Hobbes did it again. "Ding dong!"

"Quit it!"

"Ding dong."

"I said quit it!"

"Ding...dong!"

"QUIT IT!"

"Ding! Dong!"

"AARRRRGGGH!"

"DING-A-LING DONG!"

The mole rat chittered something nervously, probably something to do with Calvin and Hobbes' sanity.

"That's...kind of scary," Kim commented.

"Just smile and nod," Ron said in an aside, his tail pointing at them along with his index fingers. "Don't be too obvious."

Zim slapped his face. "Oh, Gir. Oh, poor, poor Gir. Your rescuers are naught but complete idiots!"

"Hey!" Morte whined. "What about me?!"

"...Right," Zim said slowly. "You're not a complete idiot. You're a perverted idiot." Zim walked away, fuming at the unfairness of being alone in a strange world with only three idiotsfor aid.

Morte shrugged in his own way. "Eh. I can live with that."

Father Nightroad spoke up. "Erm, maybe we should check the map again. There must be another entrance to the higher levels that won't require us wandering around the catacombs for hours."

"A map?" Zim, his spiderlegs extending and clinging to the ceiling, dropped down between them, hovering around their heads and scaring them. "A map, you say?"

Ron jumped in surprise, falling to the ground. "Y-y-yeah!"

"Is it cursed?" Zim said sharply. His spiderlegs detached from the ceiling and he flipped in midair, landing on the ground softly. He narrowed his eyes, advancing on Ron, who nervously scooted back as far as he could, the Irken still coming.

Uh...I don't think so..." Ron said nervously, hitting the wall and looking up in fear as Zim stopped in front of him, looking down at him sternly.

"Is it possessed by malevolent spirits that feed off of mortal confusion and frustration?" Zim demanded, his eye twitching slightly.

Calvin and Hobbes stopped yelling, staring at Zim.

Calvin looked at Hobbes. "Is it just me, or is the life of the King in the hands of a guy who's flipped his lid?"

Ron stared to say no to Zim's question, then paused. That explanation made a lot of sense to Ron. He put his hand to his chin, frowning slightly. "Don't think so."

Zim stood up, crossing his arms. "Is it part of some extradimensional conspiracy to trap us all within the bowels of this house forevermore, sent down to us by unnamable horrors the like of which man was not meant to know before his morning coffee?!"

Father Nightroad blinked. "That is both the longest run-on sentence and the most overly floral words I've heard all day!"

Kim stared at the strange priest for a moment. "...That's not what got my attention."

"I...don't know," Ron said slowly. "It'd explain a lot."

Zim grabbed Ron's collar and roughly pulled him to his feet. "Let us take a look at it." Ron and Zim hurried back to Kim and Father Nightroad, who stared at the two of them.

"K.P.!" Ron said. "I have it on good info that this map could be-"

"We heard him," Kim said, giving Zim an uneasy look.

He was staring off into the distance, his eyeridge and antannae twitching ever so slightly. He suddenly shook his hands in the air and yelled, "STOP TELLING ME TO DO THINGS!"

"So, who are you guys?" She asked, trying to be nice.

Zim didn't see any real reason to not tell her. "I am Zim," he gestured behind him to Calvin and Hobbes, who had watching them curiously. "Calvin and Hobbes are those idiots. Perverted idiot otherwise known as Morte Rictusgrin, cowering in the corner like a cowering coward that turns cowering into a postmodern artform."

"Postmodernish doesn't deserve to be called art!" Calvin yelled. "Taking a failed masonry project and calling it art does not work!"

Morte snorted. "Feh! I don't have to take this! I'm a highly-skilled guide to the multiverse, I don't need insulting from a berk with a Napolean complex!"

"Then go somewhere where I don't have to listen to you," Zim replied.

"Well, fair's fair in the introduction game!" Father Nightroad said brightly. "I am Father Abel Nightroad and these are Kim Possible, Ron Stoppable and Rufus of Team Possible."

"Right, Fath-"

"Oh, come on!" The priest said loudly. "Call me Abel!"

"...Right, Abel." Zim said, momentarily wondering who Rufus was before he realized Abel must've been refering to the naked mole rat currently sitting on the arm of Abel's back-worn cross and watching them with concern. "Let us examine that map, then!" He frowned at the way everyone was staring at him again. "Don't make gesticulate! I mean it!"

Abel and Kim looked at each other, then at the way Ron was taking Zim completely seriously, then just decided to go with it. "Alright, then," Abel said. "There's a table over here." He pulled out a map from the depths of his jacket, unfolding it several times until it concealed his entire upper body and a bit of his lower half as they came to a medium-sized round table, laying it flat against the table as the other three assembled themselves around it and Rufus hopped onto the table.

"Okay!" Zim said, cracking his knuckles. "Does anyone here have expertise in paranormal matters?"

A long silence followed his words.

"Sorry, don't really do the whole mysticism thing," Kim said apologetically.

"I do have some training in exorcisms, basic demonology and the like," Abel said. "But not anything like curses or the like. Ron, don't you have some kind of magical power?"

"Yeah," Ron said, his tail curling around his leg self-consciously. "But the Mystical Monkey Power isn't really that reliable. Sometimes I just, y'know, know stuff I shouldn't, but I'm not really getting anything right now." he paused thoughtfully. "Doesn't usually happen unless it's a bad sitch, most of the time." He looked into space dreamily, thinking of one such exception to this rule; that one time he'd suddenly become aware that the town had become infested by werefleas. That had been unpleasant for everyone.

Rufus chattered away in a series of squeaks and sounds that approximated human speech; Abel just looked at him curiously, Kim looked as if she was struggling to catch every other 'word', Ron simply nodded, apparently understanding it all, while Zim's language translation module didn't understand it a word, causing him to miss the brunt of what he said. "What'd he say?"

Hobbes took a moment to answer him. "He just said that he's no good there, either."

Ron blinked. "Wait, you understand Rufus?"

Hobbes shrugged. "Sure; I'm an animal, he's an animal. It's not that complicated."

All the other people looked at Zim.

"Alright, alright!" Zim snapped. "I'll admit to having picked up a few things here and there, but I only know enough real magic to set you all on fire." There was a long, very awkward pause. "Okay, that came out wrong. My point! Is that I don't know about this sort of thing. However," his eyes slowly glided to Calvin. "I do know someone who does...I hope."

Calvin looked at them uneasily. "Okay...I don't like the way you're looking at me."

"You!" Zim said commandingly to Hobbes. "Get the loudmouth over here."

Hobbes snorted huffily. "Try that with a little more respect."

Zim glared at him. "Orders are orders."

Hobbes crossed his arms. "My orders were to stand by you. Not slavishly obey your every random whim."

Zim stared menacingly at Hobbes, the tiger returning the gesture for every iota of dislike.

Ron propped his elbow on the table, holding his head up with his hand. "You could cut the tension in this room with a knife. Not one of those good daggers; I'm talking plastic little butterknives that snap if you sit on them."

"Yuh huh!" Rufus agreed.

Zim crossed his arms. "Fine. Please bring Calvin over here," he said slowly, the sheer venom in his voice contrasting the filial politeness of the statement.

Hobbes smirked cattily. No one could smirk cattily like Hobbes could. "All you had to do was ask." He plucked Calvin off the hook, tucking him under one arm and sauntered over to the table, ignoring Calvin's indignant demands as to whether he was luggage, cut off when the tiger roughly dropped him in front of the table.

"Ow!" Calvin yelped, standing up. He was about to say something when he noticed the various people around the table looking at him strangely. Well, he thought nervously, that ain't good. I'm in a strange place, I'm completely out of my element, I'm faced with people who, from what I've already experienced, probably want to kick my ass or at least make me eat my shoes. This is like being back in high school!

"Which is a weird thing to say, seeing as how I've never actually been to high school," he muttered to himself.

"You aren't missing anything," Ron muttered, having sharper.

"Never went to high school," Abel said musingly. "I was, huh, could say home-schooled? Yeah, that's not really a lie..."

"Guys," Kim said patiently. "We're getting off-track again."

"Sorry!" Ron and Abel both said. Rufus rolled his eyes.

Weird, Hobbes thought. If I didn't know any better, I'd say this town was full of people like, well, us.

"Okay..." Calvin said slowly. "So what do you people want?" As Kim began to speak, he held up a hand. "And just to get things straight, if it's a human sacrifice so you can harvest my organs to make yourselves more powerful in the name of some unknowable tentacled horror, I'd like to point out that I've got more then enough ordinance on my person to reduce this entire house to a smoking ruin in the next five and a half seconds."

Kim blinked. "Uh, no."

"Oh, okay then!" Calvin crossed his arms behind his head, raising an eyebrow at her challengingly. "So, what is it?"

Abel cleared his throat. "Well, we've a map, but we've also a theory that it's cursed, and you're the only one here with any actual experience with this sort of thing, so..."

"You want me to check it for you, that it?" Calvin finished. Abel, Ron and Kim nodded. Calvin shrugged. "Fine. I'll see what I can do. And maybe get us into a friggin' room," he added in an undertone.

He again underestimated Ron's hearing ability. "Oh, we could help you guys there!" Ron said. "Y'know, assuming we can get out."

Calvin started, a little surprised Ron had heard him. "Alright, let's see what we got here." He walked closer to the table, scowling when it became clear that he was too short to see over it well enough. Grumbling to himself, he dragged a chair over to the table and hopped onto it, to see better.

"Okay," he said after a careful moment of observation. "According to this map, we're presently somewhere in a sub-catacombs level of the house. Judging by the lack of readily accessible exits and entrances except for that one I presume you guys came through," he pointed to a descending staircase within a stone-rimmed open door at the other end of the room. "I'd say this is a panic room or safehouse of some sort, designed to give the inhabitants a place to recuperate before fleeing into...the sewer system? That's weird. Anyway, I think there might be a stone in this room that triggers a revolving up-ladder in one of the walls-"

"I don't think that's what they meant by checking it out," Hobbes interrupted.

Calvin's reading trailed off. "Oh," he finally said, his cheeks going a bit red. He looked at the map a bit more keenly, not looking for escape routes this time, but searching for any tell-tale signs of it being cursed. After a long minute of him not seeing any signs of seemingly innocent rows of evil numbers, a lack of sulphuric smells from the paper, the first letters of a row of paragraph spelling out the name of a demon, evil mage or random corporation or even suspicious alignments of paper thread, he realized he had only one recourse.

He flexed the fingers of the Pyro Glove, activating it. Those members of the now substantially larger group who hadn't seen him in action watched him curiously and, seeing Hobbes' worried face, anxiously.

"Wh-what's that for?" Ron asked, noticing the red-orange glow emanaing from the palm. Rufus, not liking the look on the human's face, dove into Ron's make-shift pocket.

"The penultimate test," Calvin said with an evil grin.

"Pen..?" Hobbes wondered before his eyes went wide. "No! You better not be doing what I think you're-!"

"Too late!" Calvin cried, stepping back as far as he could. He snapped his gloved fingers; a thin line of red-orange alchemical energy flickered away from his fingers and onto the map, igniting into a small burst of fire that reduced the map to ashes almost immediately, fading away just as quickly.

"Huh." Calvin looked at the ashes disinterestedly. "No wailing spirits, no discorporation of negative energy, no spiraling trail of dark magics...looks it wasn't cursed after all." He laughed loudly, enjoying the horrified looks on everyone's faces.

"Did...did...did you just set our map on fire!?" Abel demanded.

"Yeah, so?"

"And you call that a penultimate test?" Ron asked shrilly.

Calvin shrugged. "Yeah. Destruction of a cursed object always results in the release of whatever magics were used to make it cursed. That was the best I could do with the tools on hand, anyway; for the ultimate test, I'd have needed a priest."

"But I am a priest!" Abel yelled.

"Oh," Calvin said. He shrugged. "My bad."

"Your bad? Your bad?" Kim yelled. "And setting a map on fire to see if it's safe to use it doesn't seem really counterproductive to you?!"

"Nope!" Calvin said cheerfully. "Besides, I can fix this."

"Fix it? How? It's a big pile of ashes!"

Calvin raised a finger. "And therein lies the reconstructability!"

"That's not a word, you know," Zim said with a grin.

"Shut up! I'm a genius, I don't need to pay attention to grammar!" Calvin pulled out his hammer, readying it over his head. "All-ll-ll-riiighty, then! Behold the power of the Silver Bullet Alchemist! No wait, the Vermillion Alchemist! Hold it, the Gadgeteer Alchemist! Can I get back to you on this?" He turned the hammer in his hands, displaying it's transmutive striking edge and swung it directly onto the center of the table.

Unfortunately, he mistimed his swing, the force of his blow splitting the table in half. Zim was halfway across the room before he was aware of his reaction, Hobbes had jumped six feet straight up into the air, hanging onto the roof, and Ron's panicked arm-flailing had accidentily knocked both Abel and Kim down, to the girls discontent, knocking off the priest's glasses but not ruffling his composure, and giving Rufus good reason to stay in the makeshift pocket he'd retreated to ever since Calvin pulled out his glove.

His fur slowly flattening again, Hobbes clung to the roof tightly. "Smooth move, monkey boy," he hissed.

"Hey!" Ron said from the floor.

"Don't call him that!" Kim said indignantly.

Abel looked up at Hobbes. "That's really cruel! I have half a mind to come up there and hurt you until you are sad!"

"...I wasn't talking about Ron," Hobbes said lamely.

"Oh, okay then," Ron said amiably, standing back up. He almost toppled backwards, but Kim caught him before he could and pushed him up. Noticing Abel's glasses, he picked them up and gave them to the priest, who quickly affixed them back on his face.

Calvin awkwardly stood up on one of the table halves. "Well, that could have gone better."

"You think?" Kim said sarcastically.

Calvin glared at her. "I'll take my dues, but insult me and you're an art project."

Kim said nothing, but crossed her arms and turned away.

"Yeah, that's what I thought." Calvin said arrogantly. Kim had to forcibly remind herself of her rule of only using her considerable skills on the evil and villainous.

Abel sighed. "Well, now what do we do? We don't have a map or guide of any sort-"

"Ahem!" Morte said loudly. They looked at him. "Oh, right. Forgot I don't like you guys."

Ron looked up and frowned. "Hold it. What happened to Hobbes?"

Calvin jerked his head up. "No one better be sneaking up on me!" he said loudly as his shadow suddenly started growing larger.

He really didn't like the way everyone high-tailed it away.

And then Hobbes dropped directly on Calvin, shattering the table even more thoroughly.

The dust cleared around revealing Hobbes pinning Calvin to the ground by virtue of larger muscle mass. "Get off me!" Calvin mumbled from underneath the mass of tiger.

"Sorry, can't hear ya." Hobbes grinned evilly. "Cat got your tongue?" Laughing loudly, Hobbes rolled away, leaving Calvin free to sit up.

"Why you do you do that!?" Calvin demanded, wiping dust and splinters off his clothes.

"You had it coming!"

"Did not!"

"Did too!"

"Did not!"

"Did not!"

"Did too-ooh, you little!" Calvin jumped up and tried to throttle Hobbes, who simply held a hand against his head and kept him at arm's distance.

"Show's how smart you are, calling someone bigger then you little!" Hobbes laughed as Calvin's legs motored away pointlessly at the ground.

Calvin shoved his hand away. "Well, you're stupid!"

"Well, you're stupid-er!"

"Stupider isn't a word, moron!"

"You see how dumb you are? I have to invent words to explain how your idiocy surpasses all known forms of unintelligence. Like omnidiocy. Hah! That's good one. Or maybe ultimadumb. No, wait, that's stupid. Like you!"

"Well...well..." Calvin stumbled over himself, struggling to think of a comeback. "I know you are, but what am I?"

"An idiot!"

"I know you are, but what am I?"

"Two steps up the evoluntionary ladder from a diseased baboon, rolling around in the stench of it's departed brethren!"

"I know you are but what am I?"

"A retro phrenologist!"

"Psst!" Ron whispered to Kim. "K.P.! You following all this?"

"I'm...not sure I want to," she said slowly.

"This is fascinating," Abel said, scratching their replies down on a notepad. "Wait 'till I bring these to the next Illuminus Diem Seminar! Hee hee, the Psychology Department won't get itself untied for weeks!" He grinned evilly. "Oh, how I hate the Psychology Department! Always making fun of my rock and roll playlist! I'll show them, oh, I'll show them!"

Morte gave him a curious look. "Disregardin' the stupidity of using those two for research, how can you bend over like that with that thing on your back?"

Abel paused in his writings and stood back up, considering the question without exposing secrets he really didn't want anyone to know. He happened to notice Kim and that gave him an idea. "...My name is Abel. As in, able to do anything? Even walk around with this all day!"

Kim crossed her arms, looking amused. "You borrowed my motto for that, didn't you?"

Abel's eyes darted back and forth. "Well...I can do things you can't!"

"Like what?"

"Ummm..." Abel could quite easily mention a few things that only he alone could do, but he really didn't want to tell anyone here about them. "Could you get into a heavily guarded papal conference without a pass?"

"Give me five minutes to scrounge a disguise and we'll see!" she replied confidently.

Abel slumped over on the ground miserably. "You guys do everything better then me! You make more money, you have your own mottos, you have a fully functioning team not built on politica! You have brothers that aren't insane and evil! You have an actual relationship that isn't built on happenstance resemblances to your true love, you have a cute mascot, you have actual UNIFORMS!" Abel continued ranting about Team Possible's various advantages over him, making Kim and Ron glance at each other uneasily before he finally fell to his knees and screamed at the sky, "Oh, Lord, why have you FORSAKEN ME SO?!" He then curled into a fetal ball, whimpering and twitching.

Zim looked at him uneasily. "Is he...feeling well?"

"Yeah," Ron said, nudging Abel with his foot. "He does something like this every few weeks. Good thing he got it out of the way; worried he was going to do something really crazy like tying ten boxes of puppies to himself and running around the town's outer wall, yodeling limericks in Russian for ten hours straight...again."

Kim patted Abel's shoulder; from the looks of it, the hysterical priest wasn't aware of her in the least. "He should get over this in a bit. Doesn't usually take him long to get out of it when he gets all histronic like this."

"We should have brought doughnuts," Ron said, noticing Abel twitch less stressfully at the mention of doughnuts. "He likes doughnuts."

"We did bring doughnuts," Kim said. "You ate them on the way here."

"Kiiiim! No pointing fingers!"

"Is everyone in this town insane?" Samael wondered as he popped into view. Zim flicked him away, noticing that Calvin and Hobbes were still fighting.

"You're an nerd! Hobbes yelled.

"I know you are, but what am I?" Calvin shot back.

"You're an idiot!"

"I know you are but what am I?"

"I know you are, but what am I?" Hobbes mimicked.

They both started yelling at the same time. "I know you are but what am I? I know you are but what am I? I know you are but what am I? I know you are, but what am I? I KNOW YOU ARE, BUT WHAT AM I?!"

"I know you are but what am I infinity!" Calvin yelled.

"You can't call infinity, that's cheating!" Hobbes protested.

"Tough luck, fair's fair in war! And you called it last time!"

"You're mangling metaphors and that's a lie! You always call infinity!"

"You always pounce me! That's cheating too!"

"What, jealous I'm using my natural talents?"

"At least I have natural talents that don't relate to dissertation on ethics!"

"Yeah? You're short!"

"Why, you-!" Calvin angrily lept at Hobbes, who quickly stuck his foot out, kicking Calvin in the chest and launched him into the air; he took advantage of his air time and spun around in the air, landing on Hobbes head and knocking him to the ground, where they both immediately began to wrestle furiously, rolling around on the ground with no appreciation of the stares they were getting.

"Is this...normal? For them?" Kim asked Zim.

Zim rolled his eyes. "I just met them! How the hell would I know?"

Ron watched the angry duo anxiously. "Uh, K.P.? Zim? Abel?" He looked down, noticing Abel was still being histronic and gave up on that end. "Am I the only one that thinks it'd be a really good to get away from...from...that?" he gestured towards the whirling mass of orange-black-red that was Calvin and Hobbes.

"Muscle head!" Calvin said.

"Dead head!" Hobbes said right back.

"You're stupid!"

"You're ugly and smell bad!"

"You ever smell yourself!? That could kill a yak at thirty paces!"

"You look like a baboon!"

"Monobrow!"

"BIG HEAD!"

"Sure, make fun of my head! I'll see how much fun you make of me when you're a RUG!"

"I'd like to see you try!"

"Oh, I bet you would!"

"No argument here," Kim said to Ron's question, struggling to move Abel somehow so he wouldn't be injured. Unfortunately, while she was preoccupied with Abel, Ron was distracted with ensuring that she didn't do it by herself, causing him to not notice Zim's warnings. Calvin and Hobbes' wild fight literally ran Ron over as the two tumbled over him, contining on their course with the hapless boy in tow. They continued their fight, wildly flailing out at each other while tumbling across the room, not aware of Ron's accidentally being hit by most of their hits and being dragged around. After a moment Rufus came flying out of the dust cloud and hit the ground with a sharp thud, squeaking in confusion.

Needless to say, Ron wasn't particularily pleased with being tumbled around the floor and constantly hit by an angry kid and a irate tiger. "K.P., HELP! SIDEKICK IN TROUBLE HERE! RUFUS! SAVE YOURSELF! YOU TWO, STOP BEING CRAZY! ZIM! HEEEEELP!"

Kim looked up, and upon realizing where Ron was, her eyes dilated. "RON!" she yelled, immediately chasing after the dust cloud enshrouded moving mass that was keeping Ron captive.

Zim was hanging off a lamp, staring at the girl chasing the dust cloud "That's...not normal." Morte suggested from a safe distance.

"And you're the height of normalcy?" Zim asked, clinging tighter. He'd already been in that situation once and he had no desire to go back.

Abel said nothing, only sobbing to himself. His disjointed ramblings were becoming slightly more sane, though.

True to form, Kim ran flat-out and dove directly into the rolling ball of antagonism that was Calvin and Hobbes, sending the tussling two into the air for a moment; the airborne dogpile rolled into the ground. Hobbes came flying out of it, rolled around in midair and landing on his feet perfectly. The dust cleared, revealing Kim with Ron crouched into a ball behind her, his face hidden by his hands. Calvin was somehow hanging on to her head, maniacally chewing on her hair, unaware of what he was doing.

Ron opened his fingers slightly, noticing he wasn't being hit anymore. He stood up, about to express his gratitude when he saw what Calvin was doing.

Kim had noticed it too. It gradually dawned upon Calvin exactly where he was, his chewing slowing down. He stopped, looking around with his face reddening. He glared at Kim, Ron and Rufus. "Tell anyone about this, and I mean anyone, and I will inflict such pain upon you that your plebian minds could not comprehend." He hopped off to the floor, walking a short distance before whirling around and making a gun-gesture with his hands. "Fire! That's the main thing. Fire. Lots of fire!"

"Hmm?" Abel said, gradually emerging from his histerics. "Did you say something?"

Kim looked at the priest disbelievingly as Ron fussily smoothed out her split ends. "You can't tell me you didn't notice all that."

Abel blinked cluelessly. "Notice what? I was a bit occupied bemoaning my miserable lot in life. Oh, cruel Fate, why must I be your whipping boy? What did I do to deserve thi-oh, that." Abel looked strangely evasive for a minute. "Never mind then." He looked at Kim's increasingly depressed look. "I'm sorry, what was I talking about? It involved bacon, didn't it? I'm sorry, that was insensitive, wasn't it? Wait, does Ron keep kosher? I can never tell."

Kim liked Abel; it was impossible not to. Disliking Abel would be like nailing a kitten to a wall. But sometimes, she wanted to hit him on the head. "Never mind..."

Calvin suddenly charged from across the room, launching himself at Hobbes, starting the fight anew as they rolled around, ignoring the panicked yells from Ron as his badly tuned danger senses detected the return of the beatings. Not wanting to get pummeled again, Ron jumped into Kim's arms, yelping in terror as Rufus scrambled onto Kim's other shoulder.

Abel coughed. At least it's not as strange as the last meeting of the Order of the Illuminus Diem, he thought to himself.

Clearing his throat, Abel attempted to stop the relentlessly furious friends. "Um...excuse me...could you...wait, now...that's...I mean..."

"Nice to have you back, but I don't think they're listening, Abel," Kim said. "And Ron? Don't take this the wrong way, but you're kind of heavy-"

"Don't drop me!" Ron wailed. "For the love of all that's good and cheesy, DON'T DROP ME! Being in that thing was like being hit by a truck!" The girl turned her head to look at Rufus; they both sighed at the same time.

Abel stood there for a good five minutes, waiting for the storm to blow itself over. Then he decided to resolve things on his own.

Calvin, in the middle of his 'fight', bit into Hobbes shoulder, pulling his fist back. He was about to launch it when an enormously strong hand bit into his arm, another grabbing Hobbes' arm, pulling them both completely off the ground and apart from each other, boy and tiger fell apart on the floor with a hard thud. Abel stood inbetween them, looking pointedly down at the two. "Please stop fighting. There is a time and a place for fighting, but never one for senseless in-fighting."

Calvin and Hobbes gave each other an echoing shrug and got up. "Alright then."

Abel looked over at Kim and Ron, who was already warily watching the unpredicable Calvin and Hobbes. "You can put him down now."

Abel smiled happily, pleased at resolving the situation so well. "Well then, that's better!" Abel adjusted his glasses and righted the cross on his back; Zim gave him a side look, inwardly thinking that the rather odd-looking human had to have some impressive strength, given that the strange object on his back was by all appearances insanely heavy, particularly if the cross was as realistic as possible. Given it's unwieldy shape and the way he was carrying it, it had to be incredibly awkward, if not outright painful, but the priest seemed to have no trouble carrying it around.

"Is that not heavy?" Zim asked him.

Abel followed his gaze and smiled. "Oh yes. All burdens are heavy."

Zim raised an eyeridge. "Eh, why is it so heavy?"

"Because it's filled with God's mercy." Abel smiled mysteriously, knowing something Zim didn't.

The priest paused. "Do you hear someone yelling?"

Hobbes looked up. "Yeah, sounds familiar and coming from..." He paused and made a few quick calculations, recalling how and where everyone in the room had moved around. "Same way we came in!"

Abel frowned. "How did you come in?"

Calvin started to say something to the effect that they'd accidentally activated a trapdoor shortly before Abel's group came in when the same trapdoor he was about to mention flipped open; moments later, a snarling mass clad in a duster smacked into the ground with a sharp thud, the trapdoor shutting closed with a small click.

There was a long moment as everyone watched the lump get up, the duster it was wearing shoved up by the freefall to the point that it's face and identity were concealed.

Finally Morte spoke. "Y'know, this is just my opinion here, but it's rainin' freaks today!"

"Hey, Morte?" Hobbes said. "You remember that blessed period when you weren't talking? Let's revise that. Let's give us all a hint of what true Paradise might be; a glorious place of freedom and beauty, devoid of offensive and idiotic chatter."

"But that's the best kind!" The skull objected. "Wait, you're doing that highbrow thing again, aren't you? Quit doing that. It's scarin' the crap out of me. Big, mean tattooed warriors-"

"Knight," Hobbes interjected sternly.

"Knight, right. Big, mean tattooed knights shouldn't go around spilling the dark about arts and craps like blue-bloods with so much jink you could drown in it. It just ain't right."

Hobbes growled menacingly. "First off, these are not tattoos, they're...they're...it's too complicated to get into right now, so just accept they're not tattoos! And second, I'm the the big mean tatooed-with-non-tattoos knight here, and I'm the one who gets to evalutate what I'm supposed to do and not supposed to do, so if you don't stow it, I'm putting my foot-claws up your ass!"

"I don't have an-"

"Shut up!" Almost everyone in the room yelled.

Except for the mysterious new guy who still had the duster crammed over it's head. "The hells goin' on?" It wondered aloud.

Zim recognized that voice. "Oh, mighty Irk. You!"

The figure turned to him. "Hold on a sec'..." It tugged it's duster back to it's proper place, revealing it as none other then Spike.

"Spike?" Abel, Kim and Ron said aloud. "What are you doing here?" Abel asked, speaking for all of them.

Spike snorted at Abel. "None of your damn business, Nightroad." He adjusted himself, getting out some kinks in his back. "Ow! I hate this bloody domicile! Damn trick floors hurt like a rabid monkey on something illegal!"

Abel smiled. "And you still retain your unique take on the English language."

Spike scowled at him. "You better not be insultin' me as a writer. That's just asking for a Boxer Rebellion-scale ass kicking."

Abel's smile didn't change. "I'm sure that it is."

Spike looked away huffily, glancing at Zim's group for a moment. He noticed that they had evidently ran off from Bloo, which was probably a good thing; Bloo knew this place like he knew the back of his fingers. He muttered something to himself that sounded suspiciously like 'all present and accounted for', then looked at everyone with his usual game expression.

"...Hey," Ron finally said, getting Spike's attention. The vampire looked up, recognizing Ron. Zim realized that while Abel and Spike had been speaking, Kim and Ron had been watching Spike with familiarity tinged with wariness, suggesting that they knew each other, but didn't like each other much.

"Bloody hell," Spike finally said. He looked from Team Possible to Abel for a moment, then burst out laughing. "You've got to be kidding! Don't tell me; you're the gits they got to pull Nightroad out of whatever rathole he disappeared into?"

"What's that supposed to mean?" Kim asked defensively.

Spike smirked at her. "What the hell do you think it means? I'm insulting your abilities, I be casting asperations on your capacity to do anything right, I'm insulting you for being in the business a lot less than me, take your pick. I got more."

Kim fumed silently for a moment, finally snapping, "Yeah, you were in the business for a long time. On the wrong side!"

Spike laughed harshly. "Dragon Girl, when you don't have a soul, the wrong side is what comes naturally, if you get my meaning."

Kim glared at him some more. "Yeah, and your life really set you up for being one of the most sadistic and vicious serial killers in your world's history."

Spike smirked, ignoring the looks he was getting from Calvin, Hobbes and Morte. Zim was looking at him uneasily, reevaluting his thoughts on him. "Look at it this way, Princess; take a blood what don't fit in too well with his times and circumstances, lay all the insults and mockery and genial hate you can think of on him for being different, see what a thing like removing his soul does to him. Only needed to lose my conscience to become a monster." Spike spread his arms out, smirking even wider. "And thus does personal evolution, and one hell of a love moment, lead me to the bloodsucker I am today!" He pauised. "Had to get my soul back in the meantime, but hey, as I said before, 'I might be love's bitch, but at least I'm man enough to admit it'. Hey, I just quoted meself. Ain't that a kick in the nadgers."

Ron looked at Spike in confusion. "Okay; pretty sure that first part was a dig at me, and I had no idea what else you were going on about."

Spike snorted. "Try taking a few courses in British Dialects. Do you a world of good, dumbass."

"Hey!"

"Oh, right. Monkeyboy."

"That's worse!" Ron yelled, grasping his tail self-consciously.

"Spike!" Kim said dangerously. "Knock it off!"

Spike gave her the one-fingered salute and grinned maliciously. "Bite me. Better yet, howsabout I bite you?"

Ron's eyes bulged. "What."

Calvin raised an eyebrow, looking aside as he heard Hobbes growling ferally. "Down, boy," he muttered to the increasingly incensed tiger. Hobbes swatted the boy away, knocking him on the ground.

Morte 'grinned'. "Thank the Powers, I just found my spiritual other!"

Zim's eye twitched. He was never particularly fond of crudity, physical or vocal, and Spike was already near the top of his 'People I Want To Maim' list. He was strongly considering the idea of teaching Spike some manners by beating them into him.

Abel didn't react like the others; he still stared at Spike with a dreamy half-smile, apparently viewing the world through a misty cloud of serenity. "Spike," he said pleasantly. "If you don't stop heckling everyone, I'm going to have to break you in half."

Zim looked sharply at Abel. The priest was still smiling in that odd manner, yet he had every indication of being perfectly serious. Despite the superfluousness of the threat, Zim thought that Abel might well be perfectly capable of doing such a thing. This was confirmed by the sudden nervous looks Kim and Ron threw Abel. Hobbes blinked, the comment throwing him off balance momentarily, while Calvin watched Abel with interest, wondering if he would follow through on his threat.

Even Spike was thrown off-center. He swiftly recovered, though. "True what they say, then; you paladins really are all a bunch of homicidal maniacs bearing crosses."

Abel's smile didn't change. "A warrior priest I am, but a madman I am not."

"Speak for yourself," Spike grunted. "Priest that thinks all good religions are branches of Christianity can't be sane."

Abel frowned. Surprisingly, Zim came to his defense. "A priest with exceedingly libertarian spiritual views seems saner than a man who freely admits to being chained by the winds of eros." The Irken said, almost quietly.

Spike and most of the others in the room stared at him. "By Browning," Spike said. "That was almost poetic. Screwed it up by mixing similes, gotta say."

"It was?" Ron said.

Calvin slapped his face. "You plebian!"

"Eros?" Hobbes said helpfully. "As in the third kind of love referenced by C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity, better known as romantic love?"

"Oh!" Ron said. His brow furrowed. "Wait, what?"

Hobbes gave Kim a sideways look. "Why do you like this guy again?"

Spike covered Kim's mouth before she could reply. "Bloody hell, don't get her started! We'll never hear the damned end of it!"

Calvin frowned. "You're overusing certain words. A real artist would use the thesaurus of his mind to supply appropriate words instead of using so-called 'sentence enhancers' to fill the work end of his speech." Calvin paused. "Damn it. That is how you say it, right?"

Hobbes slapped his forehead. "Oh, Totem-Spheres! Good work, you Billy Idol wannabe! You taught him how to swear! That's...that's...that's fantastic."

The vampiric poet-gone-punk smirked. "Always ready to spread the philia around, aye?"

Abel shrugged. "I'm really more of a agape man, myself. Part of the job, really." Abel paused, starting to get weepy again. "And also because everyone thinks I'm too much of a freak to be around for more then five minutes of meeting me!"

As Kim and Ron went to comfort Abel before he could spiral into another bizarre period of histrionics. Spike laughed. "Any wonder why?"

"Not helping!" Ron said.

Spike snapped his fingers suddenly. "They say hunger can drive a man mad. That reminds me." He reached into his jacket and pulled out a small pouch filled with a thick dark liquid, tossing it at Abel off-handedly. It bounced off Abel's head, landing in his open hands with a slight slooshing noise. The surprised priest looked down at it and recognized what it was almost immediately; before Kim, Ron or anyone else for that matter could get too good a look at it, he stood up and backed away a little and reached between one of the bandages of his cross, pulling out a blue bendy straw. He flipped it into the air, catching it between his teeth and flicking his head to the side, flexing the straw out and partially bending it. He maneuvered the straw around in his mouth until it pointed outwards and quickly inserted the straw into the nozzle of the pouch, hurredly drinking the contents lustily, unaware of the looks he was getting, his manners forgotten; he was dribbling a little of the liquid on himself, though it didn't seem to manner. Where the liquid fell, whether on bare skin or clothing, it melted away, absorbed into either fabric or flesh.

Calvin blinked. "Well. That's one of the freakiest things I've seen all day, and believe you me, that's saying something." Zim ignored him, cocking his head and raising an antennae as the priest drank.

Morte clicked his teeth. "Ain't this a sight."

Hobbes sniffed the air, frowning slightly. There was a familiar scent in the air, but he couldn't quite place it. The tiger looked at Kim and Ron, hoping for a clue; they seemed unnerved, but not surprised by whatever it was the priest was drinking, so Hobbes thought that whatever was going on, it wasn't anything suspicious. Strange, maybe.

Kim looked at Abel uneasily, as Hobbes noticed. "Uh, Abel? You're, uh, getting some of it, uh..."

Ron raised one shoulder. "Don't think it's really a big with Abel, K.P."

Calvin stared at Ron, abruptly yelling at him. "Now they're intentionally dropping words from sentences for uniqueness! This is George Orwell's nightmare come to life! Words are losing all meaning! Civilization will crumble with no means of proper communication! A twisted form of doublespeak is becoming the norm! When will the atrocities against the English language end, dammit!?"

Ron stared at Calvin. "...I think you've been reading too much English Literature!"

Calvin pointed a finger at Ron dramatically. "You can never read too much literature, freak-monkey!"

"WHAT?!"

"No...not like that."

Spike grinned, watching the passing drama but focusing on what he thought was the real issue. "Getting messy, Nightroad. Not very becoming of a warrior priest."

Abel paused in his noisy drinking. "Hmm?" He abruptly realized what he'd been doing and had the dignity to look tremendously embarrased. Flushing red, Abel backed away into a nearby wall and huddled into himself, apparently working on the theory that if he shrank down hard enough, he'd disappear from sight and escape the burning loathsome stares. Satisfied with his apparent lack of presence, he resumed drinking.

Spike considered Abel to be taken care of, and he decided that he only had two jobs left: getting Zim to a room and annoying Team Possible until they couldn't take anymore. The second one wasn't a job per se, more of a duty he took upon himself. "Soo," Spike drawled out. "Not doing that well, are we? Knew I shouldn't 'ave left you lot on your own, but get late catching up with a girl, and look what happens. Typical."

"Use that tone with me again and I'll put my foot up your ass." Zim said warningly, putting weight at the toe on his foot. "It's not my fault we couldn't find a room."

"Maybe," Spike said, leaning back on the gargoyle. "But if you'd gotten me, maybe you'd have managed to avoid running into this sorry lot."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Kim snapped.

"Nothing; just they couldn've hit better company than a semi-schizophrenic priest with serious denial problems, a jumped-up cheerleader that plays at the hero game and her pet monkeyman who stays alive via sheer dumb luck, emphasis on the dumb."

"Hey!" Ron said. "First off, major minus points for calling K.P. that! And I'm not a monkey. I just kinda look like one. Three, Abel's not in denial; he's in Traverse Town. Also? It's dumb skill. Dumb skill. I cannot emphasize this enough, people!"

"Psh," Spike said. "That's the best you can do? I've had better retorts from the prats at high society." He looked down at Zim. "What's the matter? Going to let your whole rampant insanity go out the window and allow the Dragon Girl and her Monkeyboy steal the scene?"

"Shut up, you crude-talking malcontent," Zim snapped. "Or I will..." Zim paused, trying to articulate how best to threaten him. "Hurt you. Yes, huuuuuuuurt you!" Zim suddenly stuck his arm straight out, his knees slightly bent. A large flash of white light radiating other colors appeared around his right hand, illuminating the room and momentarily banishing the shadows, the remaining ones looking even darker by comparision. A pulse of bluish light moved through the light, flattening it out and streamlining it as it became more defined, the form of the Keyblade appearing in his hand, the light fading away to reveal the Kingdom Key in all it's glory, a few traces of light flickering around it. He stood back up, shouldering the Keyblade and letting the mystical weapon speak for him.

Kim and Ron, their argument against Spike forgotten, gaped openly at the sight of the Keyblade. Kim was the first to snap out of it, Ron still just staring at it with obvious admiration. Abel looked at it from the corner, his mouth agape and dribbling red liquid.

"Didn't bother telling them anything, eh?" Spike said. He rolled his eyes. "Feh, might as well get you filled in as well. You're hopeless, you are." He walked past Zim, ignoring the evil glare the diminutive Irken was giving him. Spike hooked his arms into Kim and Ron's, dragging them across the room as he walked over to Abel, who hurriedly drank the rest of whatever was in his pouch and stowed his empty packet away in a pocket, standing up and dusting himself off.

Spike dropped Kim and Ron on the ground unceremoniously. Rufus chittered up at him angrily as the two teenaged adventurers stood up. Spike glared at the mole rat, baring his teeth and waving him away. Scowling fiercely, Rufus scampered off.

Ron eyeballed Spike. "Okay, we missed something, what's going on here?"

"Right," Spike said. "Gonna explain it nice and neat for you lot. Zim's the Keybearer, he's out to get some people from his world back, the tiger and kid back there are top agents from the Comic Kingdom and sent by King Garfield, the skull's just kind of there, they ran 'round town like idiots, They ran into each other and whaled on a Guard Armor. You want more in-depth? Talk to Naruto or Gaara. Or you can get me a beer, I ain't picky."

There was a long pause.

"That was a thorough explanation!" Abel commented. "Granted, I still don't know half of what you're going on about."

"Zim's the Keybearer?" Kim said, cocking an eyebrow. "As in the master of the Keyblade Jarod told us to keep an eye out for a few days ago?"

Ron glanced back at Zim. "That's...kind of cool." he looked back at Spike. "What's this about Naruto and Gaara? What do they have to do with this?" Ron knew both the ninjas as friends, and he wasn't sure how they fit in.

Spike rolled his eyes. "The Keybearer ran into your's truly earlier; he wasn't a mood to cooperate and I was bored and Naruto showed up after. Put it together, yeah? Little sucker's tougher then he looks, too; moves like a soldier and fights like a lunatic with a chainsaw. The Comic Kingdom lot were picked up by Numbahs Three and Four; got into a fight scene with some Heartless, then the Sand Reaper showed up." Spike chuckled. "That'll take the bit out of anybody."

Kim frowned at Spike. "Don't talk about people like that," she said angrily. "It's not Gaara's fault he's messed up."

"Yeah, but it is his fault he's a homicidal candidate for the Ratchett Center." Spike quipped, enjoying the indignant look that came over the other's faces.

Ron scowled. "Do you have to try to be such a jerk, or does it just come naturally?"

Spike grinned malevolently. "Learned from the best, I did."

"Wait!" Abel said, remembering a few key points of their conversation he didn't understand. "I'm confused. What are you all going on about?"

"Right, you've been out for the last few days," Spike said. "Few days ago, Jarod said to keep an eye out for a new refugee that'd have a big weapon shaped like a key, and King Garfield of the Comic Kingdom would send two of his best down here."

"Which would be Zim, Calvin and Hobbes, in that order," Ron concluded helpfully.

Kim looked back at the people behind them thoughtfully. "I'm still not sure how everything fits together...you know how Jarod likes to keep things to himself and all."

"They seem nice," Abel said, gesturing at them. "A little odd, certainly, and definitely at odds with each other...but they mean well, and they're seem the sort to do well."

Kim and Ron nodded, sharing his sentiments.

"Speaking of him, here's the plan from the big boss man," Spike said. "Don't be overt in anything. Nothing that might make 'em feel...pressured or anythin'. Nothing that might make 'em feel obliged to burn the town to the ground."

Ron looked worried. "No one told me that was a possibility. Is that a possibility? 'Cause you gotta tell me if that's a possibility!"

Abel thought about it. "Spike probably made that last part up. Again."

Kim grinned maliciously. "Like that one time he said he once got a chip stuck in his head that made him harmless?"

"Or what about the one time he mentioned that he got incinerated when he saved all mankind on his world, but he got turned into a ghost-type thing after?" Ron added.

Abel grinned. "Oh, wait! I got one, I got one! What about when he claimed that he was in a physical relationship with a mechanical replica of a girl he was obsessed with?"

"Hey!" Spike snapped. "All that was actually true! And sex with robots is more common than people think."

Kim, Ron and Abel stared at him.

"Okay," Kim finally said. "That? That last part there? That was just...that was just sick and wrong."

"I don't even want to know how you figured that one out," Ron said flatly.

"Personal experience," Spike replied. "I was obsessed with the girl-"

"I said I didn't want to know!"

Oddly, enough, Abel seemed to be the least bothered. "Huh," he finally said. "You think you know a guy, and you find out he's a pervert."

Spike rolled his eyes. "We done here?"

"I can't think of anything else to say." Abel said. "Not that I said much..." he added sadly.

"I got nothin'." Ron said.

"That's for sure," Spike muttered.

Kim gave Spike a sharp look. "Yeah, think that's everything."

"Right," Spike said. He walked away from the others, aware that Kim and Ron were still giving his retreating back repulsed looks.

Hobbes looked up from his, Morte, Calvin and Rufus' highly profitable poker game. He looked up from the increasingly wealthy mole rat, raising an eyebrow. "Hey, your pet humans are back."

Rufus looked up, chattering happily. He scooped up his earnings and scampered back to Ron, leaving Morte to complain, "Hey! Where you getting off too?! That...that...pink hairless whatever it cleaned me out!"

"That's your problem," Ron said flippantly as Rufus jumped back into his pocket. "Hey, your cheese budget is restocked for the next month, little buddy!"

Rufus poked his head back out, starting to drool at the prospect of all the prime on-demand cheese he could buy.

Kim and Ron kept walked, stopping by Zim. Ahead of them, Spike jumped on the wall, landing out on a stout gargoyle, he had already jumped back onto the gargoyle thing, assuming his previous pose, an arm hanging loosely over the side.

Calvin sat up, mumbled unhappily about how much he now owed one mole rat's debt collectors. Behind him, Abel wandered against the wall, sad that no one seemed to be very interested in him. "Okay...I'll...uh...just stand over here, then. No one mind me, I'm just a starving lost priest."

Zim raptly stared at the wall, observing an angry conversation about meatcakes between Razael and Samael. Ron once again got a weird feeling, but passed it off as gas. Seeing that Zim was a little out of it, he roughly shook him by the shoulder. Zim snapped out of it, falling backwards and accidentally flinging the Keyblade into the air. He sat up, blinking a few times before the Keyblade came back down, bopping him on the hand and bouncing off on the floor. He dazedly stood up, walking around like he'd been hit with a book the size of a small country.

Kim came over to him, gently shaking him by the shoulders. He started to fall backwards when she steadied him, holding up three fingers. "Zim! Zim! How many fingers am I holding up?"

Zim's antannae twitched as his eyes focused. "Look!" He said with a confused giggle, blowing at her fingers. "Fishies!"

Razael hovered around Kim's head anxiously. "Ah, that's not good! The last thing he needs is more concussions!"

Samael glared at Ron. "That's it. When he gets out of this, he's going have to kill that guy with the tail. Nice little pig-smellie barbeque!"

Razael smacked his forehead. "Oh, for Irk's sake! Murder does not solve all your problems!"

"So you admit that it can solve some problems?"

"...I loathe you. Greatly." Razael punctated his comment by manifasted his guitar, extending the blades and decapitating the anti-conscience in one quick move, the head hitting the ground with a wet thump.

Samael's headless body, the edges of his stump of a neck like wavering smog, cautiously felt around the space where it's head should've been. On the ground, Samael's head rolled to atop the stump on it's bottom, taking note of the darkness spilling around it's bottom. "Oh yeah, end an argument by cutting my head off. Yeah, that's real mature!"

Razael extended his leg, a steel-toed Kodiac grip workboot manifesting. "And this is going to be even less mature."

Samael's eyes widened as Razael flew down at him, the angel's boot-clad leg winding back. "Oh...unholy fu-"

THWACK!

"OW!" Samael's head wailed as it flew through the air.

Razael ran around on the ground in a circle, victoriously pumping his arms up and chanting to himself. "And theeee crowds goes WILD! Yeaaah! YEEEEAH!"

Unaware of any of that, Calvin came running from behind Kim, roughly pushing the girl out of the way. She rolled in the air, landing on her feet in time to see him yell, "Snap out of it, you idiot!" and soundly punch Zim in the face.

Something in her mind told her that it would be a very smart thing to get out of the way as soon as possible. She hurredly ran off, stopping by Abel, watching the scene intently.

Zim rocked back two steps and a half, his 'dazed and confused' look replaced by something very like shock. His eyes focused and his slack mouth formed into an angry snarl, and then he grabbed the Keyblade off the ground, swinging it directly into Calvin's stomach, launching him off the ground.

He hit the ground hard, bouncing off once and landing on his back. He rolled to his feet, gloved fist already glowing with flames. He ran at Zim just as the Irken started running too; they drew close to each other and Zim swung the Keyblade back as Calvin drew back his flaming fist.

Abel started to move and stop them, as did the teenage adventurers there. Altogther, they would probably have been able to do so, but they were beat to the punch by what they saw as an orange-green blur; Hobbes jumped onto the Keyblade; his weight throwing Zim to the ground, the Irken's feet flying into the air as he dropped on his back. Hobbes flipped into a handstand, balancing on the Keyblade with one hand, a foot flying out and slapping through Calvin's legs, knocking him away and sending him spinning around the floor and into a wall. Not in the mood to play peacekeeper, Hobbes grabbed them both by their collars and lifted both of them up into the air. He swung them around in a circle, building up their momentum and smacked them into each other. The Keyblade dropping from Zim's hands and disappearing in a flash when it hit the ground and they both lolled, slightly dazed by the impact until Hobbes roughly shook them.

"Enough of that," he growled, holding them side by side directly in front of them. "Either you two declare a temporary truce or I declare open warfare on every part of your bodies that's capable of feeling pain."

Calvin growled something affirmative, but Zim just scowled at Hobbes and said, "Fabricatim diem, pvnc!"

Hobbes narrowed his eyes and dropped Calvin roughly on the ground. Ignoring the thump of impact, he glared at Zim fully, the Irken returning the gesture. They stared at each other for a moment before Hobbes dropped him on the ground; the Irken snorted, turning aside with a twitch of his antennae.

Ron raised an eyebrow at Zim, amazed at his sheer bravado; this, clearly, was a person who would never back down to anything. He was also impressed with Hobbes' sheer speed and agility, but Zim just had a faculty for grabbing someone's attention. He looked at Spike, raising an eyebrow. "You picked a fight with a guy like that?"

Spike folded his arms and growled. "What's it to you?"

"Were you drunk?" Ron said plainly. He reconsidered his words. "I mean, you're drunk a lot, so it's hard to tell-"

"Shut up before I shove that tail up-" Spike started to yell before Ron interrupted him, improbably angry.

"Again with the tail! What is everyone's obsession with my tail!? If it's not Kim flipping it around-" the girl looked embarrased, going slightly red at this. "-Or cat pirates attacking it then stealing my wallet, my glasses and my pants, it's something else! What is with you people!? It's just a tail! Stop obsesssing over it!"

Spike walked over to Ron, an eyebrow arched. "Are you done?"

Ron shrugged. "Yeah, pretty much."

Spike nodded. "Good." Then he kicked Ron in the shin.

"Ow!" Ron hopped on his good leg, clutching his leg in pain. "What was that for?!"

"My foot slipped, Monkeyboy!"

Ron visibly twitched. "I thought you didn't like reusing insults, Will," he said.

Spike glowered at the diminutive form of the name he'd dropped long ago. "I don't. But a good nickname is a good nickname. 'Specially when it grinds your girlfriend's gears like that, Monkeyboy."

"Don't call him that!" Kim said harshly, glaring at Spike with all the fury she was capable of; if looks could induce moleculer excitement, Spike would have burst into flame on the spot.

"Or what?" Spike replied flippantly. He waved his hands at her in a bring it on gesture, grinning malevolently at the prospect of violence. "Come on then!" Kim glared at him and started slowly walking over to him, her eyes narrowed dangerously.

Abel looked worrIedly from her to Spike. He glanced at Ron, who seemed a bit tense, ready to move at any given time. His finger curled, not unlike someone grabbing hold of a sword. His tail was thrashing dangerously, which wasn't a good sign.

Calvin looked on with interest. "This oughta be good." Hobbes rolled his eyes.

Zim watched the two stare each other down; where Kim's face was a simmering image of outrage, Spike was grinning excitedly, constantly shifting weight from side to side, his fingers tapping together almost constantly. Zim raised an eyeridge, remembering a few times in his past where he'd been just this eager to fight someone, though hardly in the same circumstances; for one thing, he wouldn't go after a being's most sensitive spot to entice them into a fight. Maybe while he was fighting, to give him a psychological edge, but not to egg them on.

Spike laughed loudly, shaking a hand pulled into a clawlike position wildly. "Come on, come on, come on! Bring it on, Dragon Girl! Come on, defend your Monkeyboy! You only gotta take on one of the biggest badass vampires there ever was! Come on, damn it, come on! The night's still young, and I am so freaking bored!"

Kim found her composure again, not appearing peturbed by Spike's thirst for battle. She drew her right side back, her posture looking like someone about to charge; Spike tensed with a huge expectent grin, half-expecting her to throw a punch right there. Instead, she looked at him and copied his confident smirk. "Whatever you say, mama's boy."

The look on Spike's face was the same as if she'd swung a baseball bat upside his head. He narrowed his eyes dangerously. "The hell did you just say!?"

Kim smirked at him. "You heard me." She'd heard that Spike had issues with his mother; she didn't know the story entirely(or at all, really), but she knew for a fact that whatever it was, it was a massive sore point for Spike, to the point where he'd attempted to exorcise an epic poem about he'd titled The Wanton Folly of Me Mum. Ordinarily, she wouldn't even come close to picking at such a sensitive area, but Spike had gone where only the dumbest of foes had gone. Spike was, at best, a nominal ally, but given that he had recanted his old ways, not to mention the Amnesty, he wasn't a villain. By her own ethics, she couldn't fight him over words. But she knew how to use words the same as the vampire did; she knew how words could bite and wound.

Oh, yes. Words could hurt.

Spike stared at her, his eyes flickering from blue to yellow as long-seated hurt became churning rage, one of the most traumatic experiences in his life burning in his mind. Kim's smirk started to falter as she noticed the way his fist was trembling and his knuckles seemed to be growing tiny spurs. Her faint worry focused itself as his eyebrows furrowed together so tightly it looked like his face would split in twain. He growled tensely, his face shifting with a sound like leather sliding across wet meat; his eyebrows arched inhumanly over his eyes and bulged out, his ears lengthened, his nose curled up, his eyes turned bright yellow and all his teeth lengthed to sharp needlepoints. Numerous small indentations pressed among his face, particularly around his bulging brow; the impression was that a number of small horns were trying to force their way out from under his skin, but weren't having much success. The back corners of his jaws pushed out, becoming quite recognizable hornlets. The spurs on his knuckles lengthened and judging by distensions at his pants and duster, similar extensions were forming at his knees and elbows as his nails became proper claws.

Kim flinched, but stood her ground. She'd seen this before, but never focused at her. Must've touched a nerve, she thought tensely as Spike snarled animalisticallyat her, baring his fangs at her, forcing Kim to recall that though Spike possessed a soul, he still was a vampire, with the heart of a demon that had killed scores of people almost nightly for a little over two hundred years.

Ron saw all this. He was thinking the same thing Kim was. And he knew what it meant when Spike put what he called his 'game face' on. Quite simply, it meant you were dead. He was already begining to move, the vague outlines of a plan in his mind; keeping Spike down, moving Kim out of the way, something with one of the tables when Abel placed a hand on his shoulder. Not in the mood for pacifism, he started to push the priest aside; Abel responded by tightening his grip to vise-like porportions, giving Ron the impression that if he tried a little harder, Abel could have ripped his arm out of his socket. Ron's snapped his head at Abel and he thought someone must have installed refrigration coils in his spine when he wasn't looking as he saw the look on Abel's face.

Abel ordinarily was a goofy priest; a little klutzy, seemingly determined to cause all sorts of accidental havoc everywhere. And then, he showed the face Ron saw now, a face that eclipsed all definitions of serious face. Abel was looking down at him coldly, his brow slightly furrowed, his eyes narrowed and his mouth set in a thin line. This was a face very people saw twice; this was the face Abel wore when he killed monsters, sometimes with weapons of his own design, sometimes with his bare hands. This was the face Abel wore when he assumed the age-old duty of judge, jury and executioner to those who he had seen to have gone too far. This was the face Abel wore when he strode into places claimed by evil, invoked ancient rites of cleansing and forced evil spirits into the world and killed them on the spot.

This was, in short, the face that Abel wore when he was carrying his duty as the most dangerous warrior priest in town. It could also be described as a 'holy son of a sundae, he's SCARY!' face.

Faced with that expression, Ron's resolve melted and he backed down, his body almost moving by itself, the idea that Spike was going to be serious hurt working it's way into his mind.

Spike lost all restraint and dashed off at Kim, his lengthened arms brought to bear. He leapt into the air, one arm swinging into the air, his mouth opened wide in a wordless howl of rage and pain and confusion that was going to be ameliored by directing all the previously mentioned at Kim. She hopped back a half-step, alarms ringing in her head. Went too far, Possible! She thought distractedly, readying herself to fend off Spike until he could be calmed down. He had his tantrums, but they always wore off shortly. The real difficulty was making sure that by time it was over, everyone still had all their limbs. She'd never seen him progress his demonic transformation this far before and she seriously doubted that that was a good thing.

She was about to act, begining to swing a leg into Spike's mid-section as he raised a fist that could dent reinforced steel when he looked human when the ground around them turned as pitch-black as a starless sky at midnight at the new moon. A bulge of blackness pushed up at Spike, rising off the ground and slamming into Spike in a large amorphous bulge, knocking him off-center and swallowing him, pulsing disturbingly as the lump in it slowly came to the bottom. The shadowy bulge twisted, writhing around and shifting almost organically, the vampire within moving around. Several bulges pushed out as Spike frantically slammed his fists into it, struggling to free himself. The shadowy mass contracted, the lump in it's center rising up and the image of Spike's face appearing near the top of it. It shifted around somemore, langourously shifitng aside and revealing Spike's head, the shadows lingering over the sides of his head and the top of his hair almostly hungrily, pulsating as if they were possessed of their own life. The shadowy mass throbbed a few times, emanating a spiraling mist of darkness that imprinted on the walls, moving around crazily before slowing into bizarre patterns on the ceiling and the walls. The shadowy mass moved again, pushing Spike up and onto his feet, and gradually, more of Spike became visible; patches of clothing, sections of arms and leg, the darkness still clutching at him.

Kim took an involuntary step backwards. The ground she trod on, while recognizable under her feet as the stone floor of the room, was overlaid with the slightly spongy mass of animate shadows now partially curled around Spike and keeping him prisoner. That alone was a bad sign; she had seen Spike punch through a wall, tear through reinforced steel and snap a man's arm, making whatever this was unbelievably strong. As she moved, she disrupted the constantly moving darkness under her; she felt it move under her boots, making an eerie sussuration at her soles and causing some of it to shift onto her shoes and the cuffs of her pants, the black-purple-blue mist of the darkness painting eerie markings on her pants that vanished after a moment.

Spike's eyes rolled; he was completely unable to move his head at all. Though the thing holding him captive wasn't hurting him, it was exerting enough pressure to keep him from moving a muscle, impairing his ability to see what was going on. "The hell is this?" Spike grunted as his face shifted back to human, his violent impulses forgotten.

"Me," Abel said simply.

A long moment passed.

"What the fook?" Zim said, summing up everything that could be said.

"What?" Spike said. "Oh, don't tell me, you're playing hero again! Damn it, Nightroad, stay the hell out of this!"

Kim, unlike Spike, was in a postion to see the area around them; to her credit, she didn't panic, but she couldn't repress a shudder that had nothing to do with the temperature. The ground around them had become covered in pitch black shadows, highlighted by purple and blue here and there, churning with eerie life. It fanned out at the edges of the 'pool', spiraling into lazily shifting amorphous shapes. The exception to this was at one point of the mass; a single thick plane of shadow, stretching past the others despite the light that should have obstructed it. At the end of it was Abel's shadow, the bottom portion of his shadow-cross forming the long shadow that terminated at the shadows holding them hostage. Eerily, the shadows directly around him seemed to have thickened, swirling around him with a life that was somehow different from whatever it was that the Heartless were composed of.

"A-Abel?" Kim asked, her feet shuffling back slightly. "What are you doing?"

She tried not to flinch as she saw the sudden but very real glare of red light in his eyes, turning the glass of his eyes into crimson stoplights momentarily, his hard expression never changing. "What I must."

"Yeah, it's freakin' creepy!" Spike yelled. "What kind of a priest does this?!"

"A very unique one."

Spike stared at him for a long time. "Right, we get that a lot here. How about we build up on that and you let me go? Most jailers don't let go of their prisoners, be right abnormal of you."

"You will remain where you are as long as you let the rage in your heart goad you." "Abel said dispassionately.

"I'll let it go soon as I beat some sense into her! Break a few bones, maybe introduce her to a few walls; it's all good!" Spike broke off to snarled at Kim, almost growling ferally.

"No, it's not. Whatever issues or grievences you have with Kim-"

"It's nothing personal," Spike said flippantly. "Just enjoy a good brawl, I do. But no one brings up the issue of me departed mum in me presence!"

"You know, I think your accent gets thicker when you're emotional," Morte commented.

Abel continued on like neither Spike or Morte had spoken. "-It doesn't matter. This is stupid; fighting each other like this is following the same path of those who's inner darkness brought our worlds to ruin. Do you really want that, Spike? Do you want to be just like them?!"

Spike looked at Abel, his brow wrinkling. "You've any idea how corny that sounds?"

Abel didn't bother replying. He simply stared back at him. Spike thought that compared to him, the inexplicable stone heads of Easter Island were downright jittery.

Spike tried to stare back, but couldn't hold Abel's gaze; he looked away, pressing his lips together tightly, reluctantly considering Abel's words. Maybe Nightroad's got a point...crap, he's doing that thing he does, isn't he?! Damn priest! Isn't there a contradiction in that statement? Arrgh, I'm getting side-tracked! Damn test tube baby, he's right, this ain't the place for brawling. That's what the Stadium world's for! He let his body go limp, assuming Abel would be able to tell the difference. Regardless, I have other ways to settle buisiness like this.

Kim, for her part, was more receptive to Abel's words. He's right, you know, she thought solemnly. You shouldn't have reacted like that. You should know better then to just go at someone's sensitive points like that. You went and did the exact thing he would have done; hit him where it hurts the most. You goaded him into doing that! I can't blame him for reacting like that. Abel's right, as usual; you should have found some other way. As if on cue, Ron walked up; he quietly braved the eerie pool of shadows, proving as he walked through it that it wasn't the semi-liquid substance Zim had percieved back on his island before everything went black, but was more mistlike in nature, juding from the way it parted and flowed around his foot steps. Disturbed as Ron looked, Abel was certain that Ron was thinking about the Heartless' essential nature as creatures of darkness and destruction, and admitted that this didn't look good for him. Abel also didn't care.

Biting down on his fear, Ron trudged through the animate dark and placed a hand on Kim' shoulder, hoping to provide a means of comforting contact.

"How sweet," Spike said dully.

Abel looked at Spike coldly. "Either resolve this issue in some other way, or I will have to take more extreme measures."

Spike rolled his eyes. "Ease off, Nightroad. I'm good, we're good, we're all bloody good."

Abel stared at him for a long time. "Fine," Abel said calmly. "I'm going to let you go now, and I trust you'll be able to behave yourself."

The shadows melted away from Spike's immobile body, falling away like a fast-moving liquid and disappearing among the shadow-mass on the floor; as they did, the large mass rapidly shrunk, falling into the shadow of the cross Abel carried on his back, the shadow itself shrinking back to it's normal size, leaving no physical indication that anything eerie had happened.

That was cool," Calvin muttered to Hobbes, who nodded agreeably. He hadn't smelled the strange smell that accompined the Heartless, but he wasn't sure that it was magic. "Indisputably eerie, but cool."

Ron looked back at him and grinned. "That's Abel for you."

Zim regarded Abel with an odd half-grin. Isn't this interesting? he thought. So very...interesting.

And yet one more sod gets pulled into the weirdness that is Father Abel Nightroad, Spike thought with a smirk, guessing what Zim was thinking; he had to admit, Zim was quick to adapt. He heard a sound from behind. He turned around to see Kim with her hand extended in the traditonal symbol of goodwill and benevolent greeting.

"Well? Still...allies?" Kim asked.

Spike sighed, slapping her hand without any of the force he could have. She let her hand drop, her face suggesting she accepted the gesture as acceptance. Spike couldn't resist one more jibe, and made a pistol gesture at Kim. "Forget it, Princess," he said flippantly, smiling in a way Kim didn't like. Spike gave her a jovial wave, walking off and squatting in a chair, plucking a cigarette out of a pocket and lighting it.

Abel sighed. Getting Spike involved in almost any situation wasn't always the brightest idea, given Spike's like for verbally assaulting nearly everyone he met on a constant basis, needling them until they couldn't take anymore, sheerly out of amusement or to see what made them tick. Kim was a favorite target of his, as even her considerable self-restraint didn't seem to apply in issues of self-esteem or when people she liked were insulted or demeaned in any way, and Spike knew all of the ways to get at her through them. Abel had heard that when the two had first met, Spike had nicknamed Kim Little Red after her passing resemblance to a few red-haired women he'd known over his long life. After seeing the defensive way she reacted to Spike calling Ron Monkeyboy in regard to his more simian characteristics, as well as because of his very slowly receding monkey phobia, he'd started referring to her as Dragon Girl, delighting in the apt title everytime he gave her cause to come closer to the brink of snapping.

"That is a vile habit," Zim commented, looking with dislike at the vampire's lit tabacco product.

Spike looked at Zim, the left corner of his mouth turning up satirically. "What's the matter? Feeling a little sore over the beating I handed you earlier and can't think of anything else 'bout me to attack?"

Zim gave Spike a sidelong glance, the corner of his mouth turning up dangerously as he summoned the Keyblade again. "If I remember correctly, you were the one with his legs kicking the air in the trashcan."

Spike's face threatened to warp into it's monstrous visage again, but he held it back, both to avoid getting tackled by everyone else in the room and for politeness's sake. "I went easy on you. Talk to me again when you want a real fight, midget."

Zim scowled fiercely and tightened his fists, his anger making them ignite with him being aware of it. He frowned and crossed his arms, noticing the heat. "Why is it warmer in here? Does this mansion of irrefutable madness have faulty air-conditioning?" He didn't notice his flaming hands lighting his sleeves on fire.

Being a generally charitable person, Abel couldn't exactly let this go unnoticed. "Uh..."

Spike beat him to the punch. "Hey, Lord of the Flame! Your jacket's on fire."

"Eh?" Zim looked down, raising his arms as he observed that they were burning. The flames on his hands went out as he lost interest in Spike; the fires on his sleeves continued to burn unabated, however. He stood there for a moment, staring at himself blankly. "AAAHHHHH!" He screamed, waving his arms frantically as he turned his head towards the others. He looked back at himself and screamed again, proceeding to run around the room and scream some more.

"Ah!" Abel said, as he chased after the panicking Irken, followed by his accidental friends. "Hold still! I think I have something here!" He started reaching in-betweeen the tight pages that covered his cross and pulling out random items, including a small Tazer, a tracking collar, a comprehensive map of the First District's sewer system, a few spark plugs, a pack of razor sharp exploding playing cards with a Famous People of Traverse Town theme, a small vaccum cleaner, a coupon for three free meals and a song at a kareoke bar called Caritas, and a copy of Alphonse Elric's Exorcising Your Inner Rage Through Intense Kitten Snuggling; for some reason, Spike found it imperative to catch each item as Abel threw them, making embarrasing comments about them.

Unnoticed by everyone(except possibly for Zim, but he was a bit occupied with the whole 'being on fire' buisiness)the two consciences finally resolved their problems.

"Right," Razael said. "You stop insulting the validity of my arguments, and I stop chopping you to tiny bits."

Samael nodded. "Right, but only 'till tomorrow. Then all bets are off."

Razael shrugged. "Fine by me."

"Okay, good." Samael frowned. "I'm getting that 'I-missed-something' feeling again." Razael raised an eyeridge and looked behind Sammael. He grabbed the uncomprehending anti-conscience's arm and pulled him straight up into the air several feet. "Hey, the hell? Look, I don't know 'bout you, but I don't really swing that way-" Samael started to say before Razael shook his fist threateningly.

"Shut up! You know I know you know I hate your metaphorical guts! Look down there!"

Samael glanced down, noticed Zim running pass where they'd been floating. "Oh. He's on fire. Again. Wait; if you hate me so much, why the save?"

Razael had a very strong urge to take a holy book and smash it into Samael's face until he could come up with something besides I don't need a reason to help people. "Because I'm the shoulder angel, you half-wit composition of metaphysical ethical essense!"

"Good alliteration."

"Thank you. Now do something!"

"Why me?!"

"Because," Razael said impatiently as they floated down to where they'd been hovering. "If he dies on third-degree burns, we both fade into the obscurity of oblivion, or join with his mind after returning to our former state of being or what it is that happens to whatever the heck we're becoming."

Samael's jaw dropped down to his feet; Razael did him a favor and set it back into place with a sound that sounded strangely like blagoonga. "Twenty burping crapshacks, I don't wanna die! Come back, you!" he shouted as he flew after Zim, forgotting that Zim's panic would make it a pointless venture, not to mention Samael's inability to affect the physical world.

"Woo!" Razael said. "That's got them distracted. Now maybe I'll have some peace to myself, heh heh." He took a large soda out of nowhere, sucking away at it contentedly until Kim and Ron ran right through him, his hallucinatory body not impeding their bodies in the least. The experience of them running right through him and passsing through their stomachs shocked him enough to make him drop his soda, his jaw hanging slightly ajar. He floated in exactly the same position for a few more moments, an extremely disturbed look on his face. "Well, that was one of the freakiest things I've ever seen. Who eats hot dogs with marshmallows and how can a man eat that much fast food and still be alive?! It's times like this I'm glad most of my entrances into the outside world are mostly limited to moral quandaries and stuff like that."

Ignorant of the fact that there was a possibly imaginary being of impure evil squatting on his head and saying cruel things about his hygiene, not to mention question his paternity, Ron yelled out at Zim, "Slow down a litt-" Ron tripped, throwing Samael through a wall as he slammed into Zim's back and bouncing off the floor. They quickly jumped off the floor, taking a moment to consider the fact that both their shirts were now on fire and quickly spreading to both their entire outfits. They both started screaming in terror, flailing their arms around in an eerily similar fashion as they ran around in blind panic.

"Ron!" Kim yelled.

"You take care of your boyfriend!" Hobbes called out, gesturing to Ron. Calvin glanced up from his spot on the floor, where he was attempting to deal with the other fires Ron and Zim were spreading. "I'll get Keyboy!"

Kim nodded gratefully, switching targets and chasing after her panicking partner. Though he had the benefit of mysterious magical powers, trained with her almost daily and a few significant other factors, it didn't change the fact that she was indisputably stronger and faster then him, a point proven as she jumped into the air and tackled him in the back, immediately slapping the fires out, trying to put aside Ron's yelps of pain mixed in with the pleas for help.

She soon stopped, the fires put out and his jacket-vest combo showing no traces of the fire that had plauged it. "You all right?"

"Yeah," he said, getting up. "Only thing hurt was my pride, but that gets stomped on a daily basis."

"Hold still!" Hobbes roared; Kim and Ron looked up to see Zim running their way, leaping over Ron, followed closely by the irate tiger; as the two passed, a few stray sparks landed on Ron's shirt, lighting it anew.

Ron grimaced. "The timing on that just really tanks." Then he started running again.

"Ron!" She yelled, chasing after him. "Hold still! Do you want to be warm for the rest of your life?!"

"My head hears sense, but my feet don't care!"

"I don't believe this!" Abel said, rummuging through his surprisingly roomy jacket. "I brought a flashlight, a bag of fries, a spare pair of glasses, even a scraping of pigment from Da Vinchi's The Last Supper! Why didn't I think to bring a fire extinguisher!?"

"Technically, you did," Spike said, waving around Abel's personal Bible around. It was a small feat on Spike's part, considering the tome was the size of your averge Ye Olde Grimore What Doubles As A Method Of Execution. "But it's of the metaphysical variety."

"You're not being funny! And treat that nicely!"

"Guess you can take the Crusnik out of the pulpit, but you can't take the pulpit out of the Crusnik." Spike said, faking a wise tone.

Calvin looked up curiously. "What's a Crusnik?"

"Nothing you need to know about!" Abel yelled, attaining a curious resemblence to a small girl. He paused. "Wait, how are you holding that without burning yourself?"

"I found gloves." Spike heard a small sizzling noise; he looked down, realizing that his gloves were frying to crisps, effected by his vampiric aura. His hands immediately started smoking and he dropped the book; as luck would have it, it dropped directly on foot. "DAMN IT!"

"ARRGH!" Zim yelled, grabbing everything he could lift and trying to douse the fires. He tried a tabletop cloth; it lit on fire. "No!" He beat himself against the walls; it left some sparks that lit a nearby chair on fire. "No!" He rolled around on the floor, but only spread around the fires. "No!" He wrapped himself in some heavy curtains, which not surprisingly, lit on fire. "Oh, come on! Is everything in this room combustible!?"

Morte backed away into a small corner of the room the furtherest away from the chaos, Rufus riding on his head, the mole rat having panicked earlier and retreated to the skull's cranium to evalulate the situation. "So...eh...this kind of thing happen a lot, Redless?"

Rufus nodded.

"Riiight. So, how's about sticking here and let the raving lunatics do their own thing?"

Rufus considered the question, crossing his small arms and observing the scene. Abel had given up looking for a extingusher and was simply looking for something to put the fires out, Spike was pointing and laughing at everyone, Calvin was jumping from fire to fire, putting them out as he went, occasionally pointing and laughing, and Hobbes had joined Kim in trying to catch Ron, who was proving to be surprisingly fleet of foot. He scampered off the skull's head, seeking to help out.

Morte snorted. "Suit yourself."

"Hey, you!" Hobbes yelled at Calvin, trying and failing to hit Zim with a pounce.

"Huh?"

"Stop messing about with the little fires and take care of those two!" the tiger shouted.

"Oh, right!" Calvin said, raising his gloved hand as Zim stumbled around on the floor, trailing burning drapes behind him and babbling inchoherently.

Kim had taken advantage of the very slight drag in Ron's step as he switched direction, slide-kicking into him and interlocking his legs with her own, pinning him to the ground as she sat up and beat the fires out, trying to ignore Ron's yelps. Kim raised her hand to slap out the fire again when the fire jumped up, abandoned Ron's shirt and rose into the air in a thick, almost greasy flamecloud. The fire on Zim and the drapes flew into the air too, leaving him sooty but unharmed. Behind them, Calvin stood with his glove open, the mystical design glowing the same red-orange as the fires racing towards him. The flames melded together into one large stream in midair, flowing into Calvin's open hand and forming into a large chaotic ball of fire. He kept it there for a minute, all the stray fires in the room flowing into the fireball; he slowly focused his attention on it, the flameball growing smaller and less chaotic, shrinking from the diameter of a bowling ball to the size of a softball. After a short tense moment of pyrokinetic demonstration, he squeezed his fist shut, the fireball spurting out between his fingers before sputtering out into dark smoke. Calvin opened his hand again, revealing that it's interior was thickly covered in a dense wreath of smoke. Raising it near his mouth, not bothered by the heat, he blew it off in a flourish.

Abel examined the room and sighed contently, deciding that the whole thing had been resolved with a minimum of chaos. He looked back down, realizing that everyone knew about the absurd state of his jacket. Blushing slightly, he begun hurredly stowing everything away again. Spike pushed Abel's Bible towards him without actually touching it; Abel easily scooped it off the ground without looking up, solemnly placing at back in his jacket.

"Look at the bright side," Spike said, catching Abel's slightly gloomy look. "Least it didn't get as insane as it usually does."

Ron, lying on his stomach, issued his view of the feat he'd just barely seen. "That was cool!"

"Yeah," Kim agreed. She looked back down, the fact that she was pinning Ron down by the legs with her own registering itself properly into her mind now that the threat of imminent burning was gone.

Ron had noticed it too. "Uhhh..."

They became aware that the heat of the fire had disappeared and been replaced with a different but not entirely unwelcome sort.

"This is awkward," Kim stated.

"Yeeah," Ron said slowly. "Awkward. Yeah, that's the word I was thinking of."

They both stayed where they were until Morte floated on by. Morte being Morte, he couldn't resist the oppertunity in front of him. "Aha, now they're getting into it!"

He didn't get the reaction he was hoping for; instead of the both of them panicking and scooting away from each other as if they had the plauge(or opposing ideologies), they simply fixed Morte with identical dirty looks and said, "Shut up."

"Hmm. Now they're finishing each other's sentences. Must be one of those mind-meld type things. Eh, if you're into that kind of thing-"

"Check previous sentence, please and thank you," Kim said moodily, disentangling herself from Ron, helping him up once she was on her feet.

"Freedom!" Zim yelled, finally tearing himself free of the drapes where he'd previously escaped everyone else's attention. "Zim is free! Zim is free! The flames of madness shall not consume me yet! AHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAH!" He started running around again, remembering his previous predicament and unaware that he wasn't on fire. He ran right into a wall and jumped back up again, resuming his fit of victorious laughter.

"Um," Kim said slowly as Zim ran by her, wailing to himself about the flames of the all-cosuming chaos envoluping all and devouring all within their tenebrous grasp, occasionally shouting something about the Canadian government owing him one for some reason. "You...do realize that you're not on fire anymore, right?"

Zim looked down at himself and screeched to a stop, his jaw hanging open. His eyes quickly darted from side to side. "I knew that! Yes, I was...practicing my dramatic skills for...eh...the Tantalus troupe!" He said quickly, recalling a poster he'd seen in town. "The rumor that I wasn't aware of the flames being not-there has absolutely no validity to it! Like those rumors of there being no spacecraft at Roswell."

"The Roswell thing's just an urban legend," Kim stated skeptically.

"Pssh!" Zim said. "Six months ago, on my world, me and a friend with a freakishly large head conclusively proved that aliens had been at Roswell!"

"And?" Ron encouraged him.

Zim looked sheepish. "...I found out there was a reason I turned up in an intergalactic Alchoholics anynamous with a dent in my space-vehicle with a bad case of short-term amnesia."

There was a long awkward moment. The kind of long awkward moment in which there's probably a lot going on in the background with everyone else, but due to the focus not being on them, goes unnoticed.

Ron finally spoke. "You were the alien at Roswell. You."

Zim scratched the back of his head off-handedly. "Weee-eee-llll, not the Roswell from your world, and there wasn't any alien autopsies, just a permanently angry Furon with a dependency complex I forgot on the way back...but yes." There was another long awkward moment. "There are many dangers to being drunk at the wheel. Learning that I'd been to Earth some time ago and forgetting about it taught me a few of them. Including never accept gifts from strange aliens." he scowled. "Damn flowers gave me a rash that didn't go away for six months! Have you any idea how painful detoxifaction is! It's how do you like having your skin tissue nearly scraped off painful, that's what! What was I talking about again? I don't care, I'm too busy yelling!"

Ron was still stuck on one detail. "But if you were at Roswell...that was, what, sixty years ago? And you look younger than me!"

Well, not everyone looks their age, Abel thought wryly.

Zim snorted. "Just because I'm-" Zim visibly contorted, as if he was having a seizure as he tried to say whatever it was he was trying to say was causing him to have a brainstorm. "...not-tall like you people! Doesn't mean that I'm young. In Irken years, I'm roughly about your age, perhaps, but in Earth years...I'm old enough to have..." he paused. What's an impressive example, WHAT'S AN IMPRESIVE EXAMPLE!? Aid me, brain-meats! I command you! Why am I being imperious in my own head? "Caused the Chicago fire!"

"Riiight," Spike said drily, interrupting the spell of interested surprise. "And I like Barry Manilow."

Zim smiled vacantly. "Zim's wrath has been averted by the end of the accidental burning. Do not invoke his wrath again." He paused, looking at Kim and Ron. They were looking at him like he'd walked by them from the direction of an asylum, carrying a fantasy trilogy's worth of blades while drenched in blood and bearing a sign that read Caution: I Will Stab You. On the other hand, he was used to it by now. "And stop staring at Zim like that. It disturbs him...me...Zim...that is...guy, he that is...me...I think that...oh, you know who I'm talking about!"

"Why are you talking in the third person?" Calvin wondered.

"Because it is Zim's particular idiom," Zim said calmly. "To do as he is warranted."

"Really?" Ron asked. "I thought you just liked doing whatever random thing jumped into your head."

Zim rolled his eyes. "Semantics is another word that Zim lives by."

"And they call me crazy," Calvin muttered.

"You got 'em there," Morte commented.

Everyone in the room backed as far away as possible from Morte. "What's this about?" the skull wondered; Hobbes and Rufus pointed directly behind Morte. Morte turned around, his jaw dropping when he saw a stern-loooking Zim standing directly behind him.

"Hello," Zim said simply, his red eyes flashing dangerously.

Morte laughed uneasily and hovered down to the ground. "Eh, heh heh...you do know that crack back there was just some friendly ribbing, right, Boss? Right!?" Morte looked desperately around for help, his desperation growing greater as he observed everyone whistling and making a point not to look directly at him.

Zim leaned over, scowling darkly. "When I want an opinion, I'll ask for it."

"D-duly noted, Boss," Morte said timidly.

"Good," Zim said menacingly. He turned away, facing everyone else as best he could. "Alright then! Enough standing around here; we need to find a way out of this room. Clearly, coming to this house to escape the madness was a bad idea!"

"You came here to get away from insanity?" Kim and Ron said simultaneously with similar expressions of incredulity.

Their heads turned to each other, Kim moving marginally faster then Ron. "Jinx, you owe me a soda!" She declared.

"ARRRGH!" Ron yelled. "One of these days...I swear, one of these days, K.P., I'm going to call it first!"

"And people call us weird," Calvin muttered to Hobbes under his breath.

Hobbes raised an eyebrow. "I pounce people at high-velocity, you throw around superscience like a high-quality bludgeon and you're calling other people weird?"

"Oh, fine! No one else is weirder then us! Happy?"

"No. I'll be happy the day you grow some common sense."

"You wish! Wait, that came out wrong!"

Abel shrugged. "This is funny and all, but we should really focus on finding a way to get out of here and go home."

Calvin paused in the middle of what he believed to be a brilliant comeback. "'Homes?' Wait a minute. If none of you live in this place, what are you guys doing crawling around here?"

Abel looked horribly embarrased as his eyes darted back and forth supiciously. "Er...that's...um...I...er..."

"Oh, he got lost in the catacombs under Foster's a few days ago!" Ron said cheerfully. "And me and Kim got hired to go rescue him earlier today, so...that's why."

"Ooh," Abel said sadly. "I really should know how to navigate cavernous places by now. I used to know Rome like it was my backyard!"

Hobbes came up from behind him, patting his shoulder awkwardly. "Well, I remember this one time me and Calvin got lost in our own closet."

Abel looked curiously at him. "A...closet?"

Hobbes shrugged. "Due to the magical energy distilled by Calvin's little expiriments, it got turned into a portal to another dimension that consisted of several worlds inhabited by sentient digital programs, but...you know."

"See? You don't have anything to be upset about," Kim said encourgingly; behind her, she sensed Ron's slightly flustered look. She had the distinct feeling he'd been about to mention the time he'd burrowed the Changing Chopsticks from the Xiaolin Dragons and accidentally shrunk himself to the size of a grain of rice and got himself trapped in his room for six hours while being harrased by dust mites.

"So," Abel said to Zim, now in a mood to be helpful. Then again, it was that mood that caused him to get stuck under Fosters for three days. "What you're saying is, you three haven't found a room?"

"Yes," Calvin, Hobbes and Zim said blandly. Morte started to say something before he got a roomful of dirty looks.

"Hmm. It would seem you wound up here at a particularily bad time; tonight's the last night for the Town Assembly Meet. All the important figures in town are staying in the house for a week-long meeting on government things."

Zim rolled his eyes. "Typical," he muttered. Then he realized something. "And 'government things' is the technical term?"

Abel scratched his head in embarrasmenty. "Well, I did get my start as a priest in a world where the Vatican was a major world power, but politics...me not so good with the politics!" Abel got the vauge feeling that hundreds of years worth of ancestors were now screaming at him somewhere in Aristocrat Heaven for being so unsophisticated in his speech patterns.

"How nice for you." Spike snarked. "So tell me something; does the priesthood make you crazy?"

"No!" Abel said hotly. "Some of us just start out that way!" He realized the flaw in his sentence. "That's not what I meant and you know it!"

Spike snickered loudly. He flicked his stub of a cigarette on the ground, watching Abel panic and stomp it out and throw it away. Abel stomped over to Spike and started lecturing him on proper enviromental responsibility and being concerned for everyone else and just because Spike didn't use his lungs didn't mean that everyone else around him couldn't afford to and why Spike liked rock and roll but made a point to stay away from Abel's church group and things in that vein. Spike, as per his idiom, zoned out, his eyes glazing over as he fantasized about a troupe of beer bottles doing ballet and getting into a street fight, after which Spike drank the survivors.

"Is everyone always like this?" Zim asked Ron.

"Nah, not really." Ron said flippantly. "Spike just kind of brings out the angry moralist in you."

"Small wonder," Kim grumbled.

"Like how my brother here can construct a slinky that works in mid-air, but he couldn't be bothered to do five minutes worth of mathematics if it killed him?" Hobbes said, gesturing at Calvin.

There were a few long moments as Kim, Ron, Zim, Rufus and Abel put it together. Spike looked up and figured out what was going on, quickly joining the ranks of the five that were piecing one more oddity together.

They looked from Calvin to Hobbes several times.

"You guys are brothers?!" Zim finally said.

"Well, yeah," Hobbes said, grinning deviously. "Is that odd?"

"Is that..." Zim closed his eyes, his fingers digging into his forehead while his antannae beat flexed in a manner that reminded Abel strongly of the stress-relieving actions autistics took that were collectively called 'stimming'.

"Uh..." Kim stammered, not wanting to say what she felt would be extremely rude.

"Eh..." Ron muttered, his mind flashing to thoughts of interspecies relations and what he thought of people who disapproved of them; given Traverse Town's diversity, the number of humans and human-derived species were only slightly greater than those that weren't, strictly speaking, human, so nonhuman and human marriages were fair common, if disapproved of in certain quarters, making them the Traverse Town equivilant of interracial marriages.

Abel cleared his throat nervously. "You...er...don't look like brothers," he said quietly.

"I'm sorry?" Calvin said acidly. "What was that?"

Spike, on the other hand, didn't truck with temporary mouth paralysis, politeness, a mind so open you could park a jumbo jet in there or good sense. "Look at you two!" he yelled, standing up and gesturing at them with his palms down, ignoring the glares he was getting.

Calvin and Hobbes looked at Spike and then at each other. They jerked away in mock shock, pointing at each other dramatically.

"I don't believe this!" Calvin said sarcastically. "You don't look anything like me!"

"Me too!" Hobbe said with an identical degree of sarcasm. "I can't believe I didn't notice all these years! Now I knew why we always got those stares! This...I can't believe this, it's absolutely mind-blowing! I think we're going to need to talk to people about this!"

"Oh no! This is much too big for that! I just realized my big brother slash best friend is a tiger! I'm...I'm going to have to have my head examined! Maybe get a good CAT-scan! Get it, a CAT-scan!"

"Wait!" Hobbes said, scooting around and looking in Calvin's ear. "Yup, your brains a big pile of gears that got stuck!"

"Let me see!" Calvin said as he crawled up Hobbes' side, peering into his ear. "Yeah, we should have guessed it."

"What?" Hobbes said, gasping loudly. "What is it? Tell me now; I can't take the suspence!"

"It's bad," Calvin said gravely. "There's a big screen behind your ears. We'll have to clean it out."

"What, again! Oh, tragedy! Oh, horror! Oh, for the love of Krazy Kat and the King-Sponsored Eighteen Man Comedy Brigade!"

"All right," Spike snapped. "We get the point! Enough of the theatrics already!"

Calvin dropped from Hobbes' shoulder, landing back on the ground with a thump. "Long as you get the point."

"They say that humor is the most entertaining way to extrapolate the truth," Hobbes mused. "And they also say that sarcasm is the cruelest form of humor." he ruffled Calvin's head. "Perfect for you!"

Calvin scowled. "Shut it, tuna breath."

"So this kind of family arrangement is common back on your guy's home?" Kim asked, curious as ever. "I mean, you see it everywhere in Traverse Town. Lots of orphaned kids from different species...good natured people who want to be parents or lost their kids in the Heartless attacks..."

Calvin shrugged. "Yeah, pretty much. In the Comic Kingdom, you get a lot of species and humans are slightly rarer than the other kinds. You see a lot of interspecial families." He raised an eyebrow at the fascinated look on Abel's face. "We're good and wacky that way."

"That's cool!" Ron declared; Calvin and Hobbes uneasily turned around, not sure what to expect.

"Uh...what is?" Calvin asked, looking at the mole rat for help. Rufus shrugged at them, rolling his eyes at his pet boy.

"You two!" Ron yelled, gesturing at the two. "You guys, brothers? It's like you two are living signs of interspecies marriage! You guys are like signposts for supporting two people in love, but different species! Man, I can see it now...all those jerks milling around, protesting a human-nonhuman union, all their ugly signs with their stupid slogans on there...but then people like you guys show up, living testaments to love ignoring shape and form, and shut them up! Ah...it's beautiful, really."

Calvin and Hobbes shared a glance, looking at each other a little nervously. Hobbes twitched his whiskers, smiling unsteadily. "Uh...Ron, is it?" Hobbes finally said, a reluctant look on his face.

"Yeah?" Ron asked, a happy smile on his face, his eyes closed and his arms behind his head.

"I'm adopted."

"Huh?" Ron said, uncrossing his arms and letting them drop to his side.

"We're not biological brothers," Calvin explained, spreading his arms out. "My mom and dad were human, but they adopted Hobbes when I was about six months old and he was two."

There was a long pause.

"Oh." Ron finally said. "Okay then. I'll just stand in the corner over there and feel stupid, okay? Okay." He shuffled off, his tail drooping shamefully.

"Get back here," Kim said, grabbing his arm as he walked past; she grabbed him a little too hard, making him trip and fall on his back, his arm still held.

"Okay, fine, me not going anywhere," Ron said from the floor. His brow furrowed and he sat up, frowning. "Does anyone hear anything? Kind of a-"

"Rumbling!" Rufus finished.

"Rumblin'?" Spike said, jumping to his feet. "I hear it too. Lot of heartbeats, too." Spike frowned. "Either a good lot got pissed or the caffienes been thrown around a bit much."

Hobbes' ears twitched, the fur over his mouth shifting as he frowned. His ears suddenly flattened back over his head, his healing eyes going wide behind his sunglasses as he focused on the rightmost wall. Seeing where he was looking, Zim narrowed his eyes and flipped to the back of the room, his spider-legs extending in the air and giving him several feet in height. Pointing the Keyblade at the wall, Zim mustered all his powers of leadership and shouted, "BACK OF THE ROOM, NOW!"

In a whirlwind of movement, the people in the room followed his order, most of them without thinking about it, clustering around him.

The wall exploded.