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.

7. Red Lotus: Blooming

Well, it's been a good long time since I updated. And yes, you may consider me properly abashed. If any of you knew where I lived, you could feel free to take a baseball club upside my head. But you don't. So you can't.

Lucky me!

We're taking a short break from the main trio in this chapter and focusing on the villians. I'm not sure if I'm going to make a habit of this or not, but I guess we'll see, yeah? You might see some familiar characters here and there, and you're probably not going to like what's happened to them, either...

This chapter took forever. Seriously. I've been working on it in one form or another since the last update, but the key term is 'one form or another'. This chapter has gone through at least four different versions, all of them massively different. It just didn't want to behave.

Thanks to Night-Owl08, Plutos, Echo the Etheral Swordmaster, Balverine, The Plot Master, Lt. Commander Richie and Ri2. Your reviews are what keep me all warm and fuzzy inside.

Anyway, enough babble! Well, enough babble not directly related to the story, anyways. Also, remember that what might be seemingly random isn't.

Disclaimer: I make no claim to any copyrighted properties. Characters appearing in this chapter belong to Nickolodean, whoever owns Xiaolin Showdown, Marvel, Hiromu Arakawa, and a bunch of others. There is someone I do own, though.

---

Dib sat alone in the dark, and it seemed only fitting.

The barely glimpsed countours of the room around fhim felt wrong to him, not because they almost all came to harshly beveled edges, not because the vauge suggestion of opulence was alien to Dib and not even because some strange part of him, something that stirred within him and felt like all the hurt he'd buried within him all his life, knew that there was something terribly wrong about everything around him, like it was something built from the foundations of all that was wrong with the universe.

All else was secondary to the simple fact that it was not his room, and that was his fault that this was so.

He hugged himself tightly as the thought reverbeted in his skull like a ball richocheting in a far too small space. He kept his eyes shut tight until they ached, but it did nothing to keep back the memories of what he had allowed to happen-

-goggles crunching against the floor, lenses cracked and splattered thick with blood, his father screaming for them to run, run far away, even as an utterly black creature like the apothesis of all the things he had always insisted had never existed buries it's grotesque jaws into his throat and TEARS-

Dib shivered so violently his ragged nails scratched him, but the thin sob that escaped his throat had nothing to do with physical pain. He tried to force his mind to stop thinking about the blood that, indirectly or not, was on his hands, tried to will himself to think of nothing, tried to think of something, anything but the memories of the death he had unleashed-

-screams echoing all around him, from the blackened house behind him to the streets, the buildings burning and crawling with things he had never imagined in all his curious explorations into the supernatural, like shadows given life and monstrous form, mutilated bodies lining the streets and staining the asphault red with blood as those who dare to fight are torn apart piece by piece in front of him, and those who run are in turn chased down by packs of the merciless abominations-

A light sweat broke out on his brow as he struggled not to cry. For years, he'd kept his emotions under control, forced himself to bury all of the hurt and pain he dealt with on an almost daily basis until all but the most determined sadists gave up on trying to hurt him, simply because it was too much work on making him cry, and even most of them had the sense to back off once Zim had become a friend instead of an enemy. It had been so long since he'd felt bad enough to cry, it was almost an alien reaction to him. Pain? Most certainly. Unhappiness? Sometimes. Frustration? Almost contstantly. Sadness? So very frequently.

But feeling bad enough to cry wasn't usual for him, not anymore, but these were far from normal cicumstances. In fact, normalcy itself was dead now, wasn't it?

As dead as Earth and the human race.

His hands clenched tightly, so tight they hurt as he thought that in one fatal mistake, he had finally done what Zim had attempted to do for years until the truth had stared him in the face and ripped the malevolent innocence from him: the complete obliteration of the planet and almost every single living thing on it. He wasn't altogether sure how he knew this now, but he knew all the same.

A small malicious part of him, the part that kept him from falling into meek submission to all the torment the idiots around him had put him through, said that maybe it wasn't such a bad thing in some ways, that his tormentors had finally gotten what they'd had coming to them after years of osctracizing and tormenting him, had all the pain they'd directed onto him pushed back on them, that they had screamed and bled and died-

Dib squashed the cruel thought before it could become anymore pervasive. It was a perversely comforting thought, too comforting, and made him feel ill to think about it.

He shook his head to himself, mumbling distractedly under his breath and not sure what he was even saying, only understanding the tone: it was low and wavering, almost desperate. "Come on, come on, come on," He said after a few unintelligble moments. "Don't think like that, don't think about it at all. Just..."

His mind went blank for a moment. Just what? He wondered, the grief and guilt undermined for a moment by a vauge sense that he should do something instead of sitting on a bed feeling sorry for himself. He couldn't help it; as far back as he could remember, he'd always resolved things by handling them himself, even when doing such was, in hindsight, an incredibly stupid idea.

For the briefest of moments, between the grief and his drive to act. Dib found himself smiling, amused by memories of when that had led to certain consequences that were almost invaribly painful or at the very least embarrasing. Then he frowned, a cold feeling creeping in his stomach and he threw himself back on the bed, miserably thinking that none of his old mistakes, slip-ups or errors in judgements had ever come close to the nightmare he'd unleashed.

For a moment, he remained motionless on the bedspread, staring blankly at the ceiling. It had seemed so much simpler last night, before the full impact of what he had done to his family, to the people he knew, to the entire world had finally crashed upon him like a payload of rectangular building materials in the middle of the night, waking him from fitful dreams too hazy to recall, and the fleeting impressions of terror and guilt made him feel a vestige of relief under the greyness choking his mind that he couldn't remember them any clearer.

His vaugely indignated demeanor during his wanderings in that wasteland where Wuya found him now seemed so childish.

Dib's hand paused over his forehead. Wuya, the name echoed in his head, like the call of a blind thing in some deep cave under the face of the world. It was exotic, clearly of Asian origin, and Dib's nearly encylocepdic knowledge of trivial things gave him a meaning to the name: a raven or crow, the bird most accustomed to places of mystical import the world over, or in more prosaic knowledge, a merciless scavenger that was sometimes known as a gorecrow because of it's long-time habit of falling down on the wreckage of battles, pecking the eyes from the dead and taking whatever they could from the fallen.

The metaphorical implications of the latter fact weren't lost on Dib, and he disliked the implications. Is that all I am to you? He grimly thought. Something useful you plucked from a dying carcass?

The thought receded from his mind as the roiling misery and guilt came to him again, and the dark thoughts of Wuya's intentions were replaced with sickening memories of all the people he had seen die screaming, the thoughts of those who'd been torn to pieces in their sleep and the gut-twisting knowledge that it was all his fault.

The need to do something, anything at all, pulled at him, and he let his hand slump to the side, unaware of the way the darkness of the room shifted like a misplaced blanket at his movement, how for the briefest of moments black mist followed the shape of his hand before fading away. He thought of Wuya's offer, thought briefly of the costs he was sure would come with whatever power she offered, and decided that whatever the price was would be worth it, if only so he could make amends.

Whatever it takes, he told himself with all the resolve he could muster in his traumatized state, the core of his being wearing through the tired grayness choking his soul. I'll set this right.

-------

Some evil plans were intricate and deep. Convoluted masterpieces that boggled the mind first with their complexity, and stunned those who survived the plan's execution. The twisted designs of twisted minds that glared into the universe and roared, challenging logic and sanity to fight back.

Other plans were less...logical, but still no less complicated, often to a stupid extreme. Plans like spending several lifetimes mastering magic in order to arrange things to make your enemies suffer tended to fall into this category. They worked, but not very often. Probably because of the explaination of the Speed Force: 'It's so stupid, it has to work!'.

And still other plans were just plain stupid. Plans that might succeed if it wasn't for minor details like casuality and the laws of physics. Plans that would have been better if implemented by a living broomstick with, say, the common sense of the average chicken.

Wuya preferred a simpler approach in her evil plans, particular ones when the point of them was simply to cause havoc and chaos, and hopefully loss of life. Sometimes, though, as a demon had once told her, 'The complexity is involved not in the implementation of your evil plan, but in the set-up. It's a bit like stage comedy done by people that think too much, you know?" Wuya hadn't, actually, but thought she did now.

Traverse Town was getting a little too...content. The usual boil of chaos about to burst into outright lunacy had come to a merely weird simmer lately, and partially out of a respect for her long-range schemes and mostly out of a fondness for watching things go 'boom', both literally and figuratively, Wuya had a plan to raise some good old-fashioned bloodshed. And, hopefully, some dischord.

Her actual plan to get the person to do those things were, she admitted, rather convoluted. But she wasn't the type of person to take actions back, even if they would save her skin. Unlike some other people she knew.

"Okay, I'm the first to admit that I could have handled that better," Mr. Lyle said as he and Wuya, the Heylin witch carrying her staff as always, walked down a long high corridor deep within the confines of her fortress, him walking a jerky and extremely uneasy few steps behind her. "'And I probably should have sent a proxy, but I still accomplished my mission, didn't I?"

Wuya raised a weirdly angled eyebrow at him. "In a manner of speaking, I suppose so, but that was still a damnably foolish method you took. You're lucky they didn't kill you on general principle."

"I'm the first one to have noticed. And that reminds me; how did that Irken psychopath get the Keyblade, anyway? I thought it was supposed to be wielded by the purehearted or the baseline heroic or something like that, not a soldier that barely has a handle on sanity. If anything, in his little group, I'd expect the ghost-boy or the Avatar to get it. Even that blond kid that Cain wouldn't frag would do better, whatever his name is. Blonde hair, about this tall, looks a lot like a Nightroad for some reason, has a tail and that whole monkey power thing going..." Mr. Lyle gestured vaugely. "You know who I'm talking about."

"Certainly. It's...it's..." Wuya frowned in thought. "Terry? Will? No, it's a bit shorter than that, I think. Some sort of a hard 'o' sound."

"Yeah, like...Jon? Kon? Don? No, I'm sure it's higher on the alphabet."

"I want to say Don Stompable for some reason. I'm sure it's a pun of some sort."

"Yeah, that I can remember. Supposed to sound like 'unstoppable'. Which is weird, because he's really passive from what I've read. Mellow, even. When I said stuff, he didn't want to stab me silent. I think. Now, the Zim guy, he would have if I'd given him an opening before they cornered me."

"So would have most of the others," Wuya remarked. "Save perhaps for the tiger. Odd; I've heard that his people value personal honor quite highly. One would think that referring to his cultural division would incur some sort of bestial wrath. On the other hand, his childish companion would have hurt you quite badly, but not to the extent of actually killing you."

Mr. Lyle gave her an intent look, making a obvious attempt to keep his eyes off the ground and walls. "You think he's soft?"

"Something like that. I've heard he's instated a ban on testing anything on living lifeforms. I suspect it has something to do with their time in the Under."

"Well, he got mad when I said that he didn't care about much of anything at all."

Wuya gave him a look. "Yes, I've been wondering about that. You had all that information about them available and you chose to hurt him with that? Why didn't you say something about how his King no doubt chose him for his position because of his talent for destruction, or that he was living a lie, or even what his father did to the tiger-boy's birth family?"

Mr. Lyle gave a twitchy half-shrug. "Honestly, by that point, I couldn't think of anything really interesting. I was running out of ideas. Besides, kids are boring when it comes to traumatizing. You have to be protractive to scar their souls." His voice took on a bitter, knowing quality. "I should know."

The hardness in his voice suggested that he didn't want to discuss the matter further, and Wuya chose to end the conversation there. She found his obvious discomfort in the corridor to be far more interesting; his breathing was becoming erratic, he kept closing his eyes every few steps as if to block out the walls around them-or perhaps vile memories-and Wuya saw that his quick, harsh footsteps were obviously playing out an urge to move, to run as fast as he could. Psychically, she felt the echoes of screams from old memories playing out in his head, the voice of a little boy screaming in a metal box with only the whispers of moving cockroaches the size of kittens and his own rising terror to answer him.

It had been like this, going through these corridors on their way to the main biological laboratory. Mr. Lyle, it was clear, did not like enclosed spaces. All the better for her; Wuya could have just used a dark portal to take them to their destination, but it was just too much fun to watch him squirm.

They kept moving through a series of largely identical corridors all grouped together like tunnels in a warren, moving seemingly at random, the steady light from the glassy orbs hung at regular intervals over the ceiling lending a greenish-yellow glow to the Gothic arches above them and the elaborately shaped walls shaped into abstract depictions of demonic figures, worlds burning to ash and Wuya victorious over her foes, all shining with a baleful gleam that suggested that this was a place of such unspeakable evil that it's inherent malevolence had sunk into the very walls, or that the janitors had an unhealthy obsession with polishing every surface reachable with a good coat of varnish and a rag. Wuya had very definite opinions about evil architecture.

The corridors she was moving through had a purpose, aside from just looking evil-ish. They were, in a sense, a prison and a place to keep the ones that survived the experiments.

Large cells were built into the walls, each just large enough to hold it's particular occupant, blocked off from the corridor not by bars but by translucent curtains of shimmering green-black energy, fragile-looking force fields that were far more deadly then they looked. The cells themselves were almost completely bare but for scant toileting facilties, threadbare sheets for bedding and the remnants of whatever food and water they'd been given, if any. In this particular corridor, not all the cells were occupied, but those that were had small name plates just above them, either with the cellmate's names or the specific project they were a part of. The latter were more common; Wuya found a certain cruel pleasure in refusing to acknowledge her prisoners as anything other than her personal property, and it made it easier for underlings to identify them. Nonetheless, some were unique enough to warrant a more specific identification, or else were one of several victim in a specific project.

For a time, they stopped thinking overmuch about their immediate concerns and focused on the interestingly mutilated and suffering prisoners here. She didn't have to look at Mr. Lyle to sense his unhealthy interest at some of the prisoners they passed by; she felt the almost sensual sense of fascination he found in their broken bodies and minds, almost as strong as his obvious claustrophobia. He grew more excited-though not overly so; he rarely did things to extremes-as they saw more; the patchwork products of animals she had magically bred together to create ghoulish warriors, repulsive to look at and so unnaturally aware of their ugliness that they had to be restrained to keep from gouging their eyes out so they didn't have to look at themselves; obviously insane children with much too wide eyes, wrapped nearly head to foot in thick bandages to cover the diseased woodlike husks their flesh had congealed into, each of them bearing a grotesquely swollen limb bigger than their entire bodies, toes or fingers little more than jointed talons; things like anthropomorphic animals but twisted and distorted, their fur or scales turned ashen gray and throbbing from within, nowhere as refined or, well, human as the numerous species of sentient man-beast hybrids around the worlds were but infinitely more savage than even the most rabid human-hater was, their impossible physiologies wracked with a pain they would be all too eager to turn on others.

Mr. Lyle's phobic reaction to the subterranean space they were in gradually abated as he became interested in the experiments around them, espically as they came into a part of the corridor that housed experiments Wuya was inclined to think of as her guests, albeit with a sardonic touch. Their enclosures were larger than normal, partly as a nod that they were exceptional individuals even if they had either refused to join her or weren't suitable to, but also because many of them were subject to more specialized experiments and needed unique enclousures to keep them safely caged. Some of them had offended her in the past, tried to attack her or had done some wrong to her that required her to retaliate in an appropiate fashion. Others had been captured by her scouts for their superior physical prowess, unique talents, and still others simply because they'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

A teenage boy that had long ago gone from large and strong to an emaciated wreck whimpered in a corner of his cell, huddled in a fetal curl, his leathery prisoner's tunic and pants torn at uneven angles, not seeming to care that his blond hair was matted with dirt and filth Wuya didn't care to look closer at. The blackened and ragged welts criss-crossing his body, following the extent of his central nervous system and veins to form a twisted map around him shifted slightly, swelling and contracting as though alive. "I can't feel it," He half-whispered to himself or perhaps the cell. "I can't feel the Other, the Other's gone, gone, gone..." He violently twitched, his sides jerking as though something inside him was fighting to get out. He settled onto his back, shivering and sobbing as something pitch black seeped from the corners of his eyes instead of tears, dissolving into acrid muck on his cheeks. His cell's nameplate, Brock, Edward Jr., was faded and uncared for, much like what was left of the teenager himself.

In an adjacent enclosure was a young demonic mutant teenager, his lithe body covered in nearly black dark blue fur marred with burning yellow tattoos patterned after angelic symbols. He clung to the back of his cell with his adhesive elongated two-toed feet, back braced against the wall and utterly calm to all apperances, the same yellow fire of his tattoos streaming from between his lips, closed eyelids and nostrils. His two-fingered hands were clasped together in prayer, and only a tail as long as he was tall gave any pretense of stress, twitching erratically in the air, the triangular spade it ended in flexing peaceably. His apparent serenity was all the more suprising, given the machinery in the cell he was being tortured with: a massive inhibitor collar around his neck, numerous cables wired directly into his spinal cord feeding into a small bank of diagnostic equipment, four drip-lines injected into his neck, the base of his tail and both wrists, all wired into a small tanker built into the wall, filled with a black liquid shimmering with purple. Freak, Wuya thought disdainfully at the mutant boy whose nameplate bore the name Wagner, Kurt Darkholme.

A massive red-brown humanoid with the dense armorlike skin of an armadillo, the powerful forearms and claws of a bear, the spiked tail of a stegosaurus, the head and general appearance of a rhino stared cooly into space, eyes glowing blue-tinged white. "No, no," He muttered to himself in at least half a dozen dead langauges. "The people belong to the land, not the other way around..." A complicated machine that was almost all chemical-filled vials feeding into a vat of bizarre fluids wired into a number of living brains, suspended in shielded jars near the top, and was in turn connected to the creature's skull by means of a large cable. A light on the machine blinked, and the humanoid's eyes stopped glowing, revealing a pair of mechanical lenses. It's mouth cracked open, mismatched teeth gleaming wetly, and it giggled to itself. "Dark, dark, dark," It sang to itself, it's multi-linguistics gone and replaced with quavering English. "We all go alone into the dark..." It's nameplate simply read Collective Unconsciousness/Psychic Amplification. In all honesty, Wuya had no idea who or what it had once been, and she didn't really care either.

A massive wolf the size of a station wagon, it's fur a dark gray darkening to near-brown along it's head and back and nearly white on it's underside and hindquaters, sat quietly in it's cell, utterly relaxed despite the way it's back was scraping against the low roof. With an intensity alien to any animal, it stared at her with cold yellow eyes shining with an intelligence beyond that of any human. They were old eyes, the mind behind them more ancient than some worlds, speaking of a lifetime that inspired tales as much as it had been shaped by them, and one that was almost older than language itself. It bore no obvious marks of ill usage, but it's cell floor was stained with the maroon of dried blood, so thickly that a hundred creatures might have bled to death on it's floor, and the complete absence of toiletries or bedding suggested that this was less an experiment's home than a more traditional prisioner's cell. At the sight of her, the wolf bared his impressively large teeth, the air around him twisting like something alive and angry. He glared at her with a single-minded malevolence that promised her doom, a curious mixture of the rage that an alpha wolf whose pack had been taken from him and the mad grief of a father whose wife and children had been stolen away.

Almost completely filling up one cell was a sentient mechanical lifeform, remarkably uninterested in Wuya's presence, focused on it's own internal issues. When this sentient robot had been captured, it had been humanoid in form, but now it was a continually transforming mass of alien machinery, constantly shifting in and out on itself, forming amazingly advanced variations of machinery for a moment or two before falling back into the chaos that it had become while never quite remaining a shapeless mess. Large sections of itself shaped itself into armor-covered wheels or thrusters more appropiate to a flying machine, the suggestions of arms or legs forming at odd and unusual angels, broad fingers or massive feet starting to piece themselves together until they fell back apart and fell back into it's main body mass, which itself was constantly trying to reform into a likeness of the broad, squat mechanoid it had once been. The scientists were still unclear if it was doing this mockery of the elastic adaptations it's species was known for on purpose, or if it was an automatic reaction while it sank steadily deeper into it's own thoughts even as they hacked off the less aware bits of it for reverse-engineering. Perhaps it was the latter, because the three parts of it that never changed completely were it's coloration-a bright yellow with beelike stripes of black-, a pair of eyelike lenses blazing with the bright blue of it's very life-spark drifting in the mess that was it's body, and a very clearly defined symbol on it's body that resembled a mildly neutral robotic face made of geometric shapes: the symbol of the Autobots. The nameplate on it's cell read Bumblebee, which was the rather odd (in Wuya's opinion) name of the machine.

There were more of them. More prisoners that had once been enemies or merely unlucky. Wuya was determined to keep her organization as quiet as long as she could, but nevertheless, word still reached people. Sometimes, those people were the right sort, and offered her their surfaces in exchange for whatever rewards they believed she might have. Other times, they were the wrong sort, and tried to stop her. The ones that didn't end up horribly bloody messes usually ended up down here.

They paused by a cell being emptied by three of the demons known as Founders that Wuya employed, each of them short, stocky and resembling goblins, their skin chitinous and nearly black, apish arms ending in large clawed three-fingered hands and mouths dominated by sharp-toothed and disarmingly friendly smiles, dressed in the plain jumpsuits that were the uniforms of Wuya's multi-purpose minions: black leather one-pieces with glowing seamlines, matching streamlined gloves and steel-toed boots and a detachable face-hood with built goggles and respirator masks. One of the Founders was standing by the cell, hand placed firmly on an adjacent control panel to keep the force field deactivated while the other two hauled a large corpse out of the room that was only barely recognizable as human; every inch of it was withered and deeply wrinkled, folds of calcified skin hanging loose on quite visible bones. It was quite a large body, even withered as it was, but it's prisoner's clothes hung loosely, made for a body that had been much bigger than this emaciated husk. It's face looked vaugely recognizable, square-jawed with tufts of wispy white hair falling out the top, but Wuya couldn't quite place it, and the nameplate above the cell had already been removed, providing no help there.

"Good mornin', miss," One of the Founders said to her, nodding deferentially to her, hood flopping over it's back. It straightened up, claws securely around the corpse's ankles.

"Evening..eh..." Wuya thought for a moment, trying to remember the names of these particular Founders. Considering that she had over three hundred under her employ, she decided not to make the effort and mentally nicknamed the one who had just spoken Screwtape, the other corpse-carrier Balthazar and the one at the control panel Bob, the first two being fiends she had fond memories of and the third just being a random thought. She resolved to add nametags to the uniforms starting next week. "And what exactly is this thing?" She gestured at the corpse.

'Bob' saluted her with his free hand. "Right now, it's destined for the Sewing-Life Alchemist's examination table, and hopefully, tomorrow's lunch, but it used ta be...eh, can't remember the name." He shuddered. "I hate that guy. The Sewing-Life Alchemist, not this guy, mind." Wuya wrinkled her nose in distaste, echoing Bob's sentiment; she disliked the Sewing-Life Alchemist for various reasons, and given that the question of Dib would require his particular expertise, she didn't like being reminded that she was going to have to deal with him soon enough.

"W.R. Monger," 'Balthazar' said, grunting a bit as he hooked his hands tighter under the corpse's shoulders. "That crazy general that tried to infiltrate us and got caught, right?"

Wuya recognized him now that she had his name, even thought this twisted husk was barely recognizable as having been human once. Mr. Lyle gave W.R. Monger's body the once-over of an experienced killer: he only needed one glance to see everything. "And what killed this? I've seen burnt hotdogs that looked better than this."

Balthazar gave as best a shrug he could. "Hard to tell. Looks like a number of factors, like the trace symbiotes in his bloodstream eating him alive, that petrifying disease Miss Azula tried out on him last week, and some other stuff, but it looks like it was that infusion of Crusnik nanites from Mr. Nightroad's bloodstream."

"Tore him apart from the inside out, drained him dry and worse," Screwtape commented. "Just like all the other ones, though he held out longer than anyone else, I'll give him that much. Looks he started to change shape at least a little at the end; his skin and muscle were starting to merge, turn into something like organic minerals." Wuya thought he had a point; W.R. Monger's body did display several characteristics that any of the Nightroad family displayed when their power was active; his skin was stonelike, perhaps a precursor of a potential elemental association, small spines that might have been wings sprouted from his shoulderblades, his nails were unnaturally long and thick, the beginings of claws, and not least of all, what few teeth left in his mouth were serrated fangs.

"Ah," Wuya said, a bit regretfully. "He came so close. Closer than anyone. But at least Tucker will find something interesting in his remains, no doubt. Perhaps another step on recreating the Crusniks."

"And lunch?" Bob asked hopefully.

"We'll see," Wuya said amiably, not a yes or no. The three demons whined, but didn't press the issue, hauling the corpse out of the cell and moving it down the corridor several paces before turning right, taking a different path from Wuya's.

"I like it here," Mr. Lyle commented as they went on their way. "There's always something happening."

Wuya and Mr. Lyle went on their way, and down here, closer to the laboratory, there were more of the 'special' prisoners, some in better shape than others, some far worse but most manifastly broken in some manner or another, unlike the old wolf or the demonic mutant. Wuya found herself wondering just what kept their minds intact even after she had them tortured on a regular basis, psychics invading their minds and twisting their recollections until every memory they had felt wrong and painful, after her scientists had used them for whatever projects and experiments they were suitable for, food delivered to them infrequently and without any semblence of a pattern to throw off their grasp of time, not to mention whatever she deemed a good idea to do to them. The psychology of the hero was always an enigma to her, and while many of her prisoners were far from that lofty title, so many held the potential to be heroes. She had led many experiments and examinations to determine exactly what constituted a heroic mindset, ostenibly to use it against any enemies that might come her way, but really out of simple curiousity. Her limited success in this inquiry wasn't discouraging, just mildly annoying; the fact that many her subjects had been reduced to psychological trainwrecks was more than a little gratifying, compared to the bravado they so often displayed before they crashed and burn, occasionally literally.

Heroes. She hated them. It was part of her job description, or at least it would have been if she'd had one. Ever since Grandmaster Dashi had tricked her into that stupid box so long ago, she had been foiled at every turn by idiots with delusions of bravado, and even now, the thought of that small band of elementally-empowered children was enough to set her teeth to grinding. They would pay in due time, oh, how they would pay, and they might never suffer enough to satisfy her taste for vengeance, even with their world less than dust. Nevertheless, simple curiousity had demanded to know why they did what they did, and Wuya found it frustrating that she still wasn't much closer to having an easy answer.

Wuya smiled. Curiosity and interest had led to Mr. Lyle's disastrous assignment of the night before-what idiot confronts an unknown quantity directly?-and in some respects he had failed, but in many others, he had done well. He had examined the new Keybearer's capability, tested the cat-king's minions and might have began to put doubts in the heads of the refugees, or at least in three that were ideally placed to influence the more dangerous elements of the town, which was a start. And he'd let them all know of things better left buried, which was both entertaining and a potential rift in the tentative partnership that King Garfield seemed intent on forming. She knew that it was probably a good idea to punish Mr. Lyle for his mistakes, but she wore inclined to leniency than most in her station, and of course, she didn't want to offend his master. She had power, but the ones that pulled his strings might well blow her out like a candle in a hurricane. And that was the best possible death they might bestow upon her; she knew that their kind delighted in the painful subjugation of others, and knew oh so many ways of how to break the mind, body and soul of others, all without laying so much as a polished claw on her.

No. They could wait until she could do the same to them.

But all the same, Mr. Lyle hadn't failed at the true purpose of his mission, which was basically a follow-up on their examination of Zim during his battle with the Guard Armor. It had worked; the Keybearer's powers were develouping disturbingly quickly, but by the same token, they were much too...wild. Chaotic, even. He had too little control, and that was something valuable to keep in mind. To Wuya, Mr Lyle hadn't failed so much as he had been foiled, which was an important distinction. And of course, since he had been foiled while on a mission on her direction, that implicitly meant that she had been bested, and she very well couldn't let anyone get away with that.

Hence a plan concoted over a morning's breakfast that, while basically simple in excecution, would require a bit of leg-work to get moving. Still, the results were bound to be good.

As they walked from corridor to corridor, taking a cruel pleasure in the prisoner's pain, Wuya realized that her path wasn't quite as random as it seemed. She was being pulled, unconsciously following the psychic bond she shared with her apprentice, who was clearly close by. Delighted with the prospect, she followed it instead of merely being led by it; there wasn't any real practical purpose for it, but Wuya liked the prospect of company other than Mr. Lyle, who embodied the old woman's saying, 'if he looks too good to be perfect, he probably isn't'. Without consulting Mr. Lyle, Wuya took several left and rights through the winding corridors, eventually backtracking a few times as she followed her bond. The detour didn't matter, as the corridors all ended up in the same place, and Mr. Lyle seemed to be under the impression that Wuya was moving more or less linearly.

Wuya soon found her apprentice in a wing of the prison-warrens reserved for the most dangerous of the experiments: she was standing in front of an occupied cell, a late teenager that was much like Wuya herself, quite beautiful in a distinctly dangerous way and pale-skinned. The girl wore her long black hair in a loose style down over her shoulders to mid-way down her back, her sun-yellow eyes narrowed in some cruel thought.

Her clothes were well-tailored, and excessively decorated: an elaborately designed dark red vest, the chin-high collar folded over, her high-collared black shirt embellished with red flame designs, form-fitting black pants with an elaborate series of ribbed red pieces on the outer sides of her hips and downwards, becoming increasing complex and joining with the cuffs of a pair of light knee-high boots, criss-crossed with straps, the toes capped with spiked steel. Heavy-duty combat gloves clothed her forearms, colored fire-red with darker accents on the seamlines and borders, several of the glove's fingers fashionably cut away, short retracted blades built to slide over the steel-covered knuckles and presently hooked behind the wrist. Her short sleeves exposed a tracery of glowing blue geometric runes covering her toned arms and, if similar lettering at what could be seen of her neck was any example, most of the rest of her body. She held herself with an almost unnatural sense of confidence, the unerring ease of a predator in it's natural element, posessed with all the beauty of a contained blaze; under control to all apperances, but quite capable of incinerating anything that failed to excercise caution.

"Good morning, Azula," Wuya said genially.

Azula gave her a brief look that, to anyone else, probably would have been dismissive. Wuya knew it to signify acknowledgement. "Hello, Wuya," Azula said calmly, as though she'd been expecting her. She probably had, through the psychic bond Wuya had forged between them with powerful magic that connected them as master and student. Azula glanced at Mr. Lyle with obvious distaste. While she was nowhere near as powerful as Wuya was, Wuya had still given her more power than she'd ever had even as a Firebending prodigy, and she was no doubt picking off the same vaugely repulsive vibes off Mr. Lyle that Wuya was, perhaps even the vauge sense of inhumanity that accompined him. "And...you."

Mr. Lyle, for his part, only grinned salaciously at her. He didn't seem at all put off by her dismissive attitude; if anything, it piked his interest. Wuya grimaced, and withdrew her psychic awareness from him as quickly as possible: being telepathically close to Mr. Lyle could be like pliunging your hand into mildly acidic sewage.

Acting to prevent Mr. Lyle from doing or saying anything exceptionally stupid that would resort in his horrible doom before she deemed it ready to happen, Wuya stepped directly in front of him. "Ignore the idiot, he fouled up last night and I fear it's affected his judgement-"

"Hey!" Mr. Lyle snapped from behind her.

Wuya ignored him. "-I was hoping you could accompany us on a mission of some importance. I've been around him for far too long. I miss intelligent conversation."

"It's only been fifteen minutes!" Mr. Lyle said, indignant. "Twenty-five, maximum!"

"With you," Azula said with a smirk. "Time expands to a horrible crawl." She turned her attention back to Wuya. "Certainly, but I've got to finish up the latest attempt at one of the projects you've assigned me."

"Oh? Which project, exactly?"

Azula gestured towards the cell. "Alucard," She said simply, and that was all that was needed to be said.

The cell was one of the more sophisticated ones Wuya had at her disposal, virtually every inch of it etched with glowing arrays of increasing complexity until it resembled a fold-out from an obscure grimore, all of them seals designed to restrain beings of immense power. At the center of the cell, juxtaposed between the most powerful of the binding seals was a gaunt and cruelly handsome man with ink-black hair falling below his elbows in a tangled mess, wrapped up in a bizarre black leather outfit resembling a full-body straightjacket, his arms forced behind him with the cloth riveted shut. No less than fifteen massive noon-forged golden chain imbued and glowing with the very essence of the sun itself were bound to shackles riveted into his outfit, wrapping around his legs, arms and lower body and holding fast dispite the fact that they phased out of visibility just inches short of the wall, as though they were shackled into another dimension entirely. The flickers of a force field far stronger than the usual ones she employed appeared with every movement the man in the cell made, seldom though they might have been. And Wuya knew perfectly well of the other defenses specially made for this particularily prisoner, defenses that she kept private so that no one might let this thing loose, whether through intent or accident.

Her primarily laboratory, once housed on Azula's old world, had already seen one breakout before she moved all her prisoners here. If this thing got loose, her entire world would be at risk, if not all the other ones currently under her control until the Heartless ate them.

There was a lot of blood in that cell, too, slowly moving back to the man and flowing into his flesh like water to a sponge. Splatters of red decorated the walls in random spots not unlike a rorschach inkblot, thick and rimmed with glimmers of black. Wuya could feel heat radiating from the cell, the ghosts of recent fires. And there was a certain energy to the air, suggestive of a lot of action having taken place, as though they were witness to a down moment between scenes of enormous violence and cruelty. Of course, when Azula was involved, that was more of a given rather than a possibility.

"Ah. That.Wuya gave the man in the cell a sideways glance. "I...see. Still as uncooperative as always, I assume."

The younger woman sighed. "You've no idea. No matter what I do, whenever he reacts to me, it's usually just the round of insane laughter." She paused. "Which is an improvement from always ignoring us. I don't know if I'm finally breaking through to him, the more creative measures I've been using or if he's just screwing with our heads. Again."

"Well, it could be a start," Wuya muttered. "If we want to muck around with his blood to make vampire soldiers like Millenium did, we have to find some way of breaking him," Wuya admitted, as much as she thought that it was an futile effort trying to make the creature within the cell cooperate, willingly or not.

"Ah, did I miss something?" Mr. Lyle asked abruptly. "What's going on here?" He frowned, looking at the cell's occupant, clearly unaware of who it was. Wuya studied the incredulous look on his face, and thought that he might well be picking up some disturbing enemations. "And what is that thing? Some kind of...vampire?" His frown deepened, and Wuya glanced at him as she felt a dim shift within his morphological field, something begining to emerge from the depths of his maimed soul, something that better suited Mr. Lyle rather than the vestige of humanity he was still troubled with. His face twisted, contorting in bizarre ways, cheekbones crunching up into bizarre protrusions as his eyes swimmed with blackness that swallowed his pupils and whites both, turning them black as oil, shining red where the light struck them. "Reads like a vampire," Mr. Lyle muttered to himself, his voice changed. It was deeper, raspier, with an odd reverb like there were several of him speaking at once. "But not like one I've ever seen. Darker than anything I've seen outside of Hell, but it's not outright evil." He took a cautious step closer to the cell; not out of any actual fear that it could hurt him, but of a simple reluctance to get closer to it. Mr. Lyle obviously didn't know much about it, but Wuya thought he might be seeing enough to seriously unnerve him.

He looked the man in the cell over, his fiendish eyes glimmering with awareness as he did. After a moment, he suddenly hissed, like a sexually-obsessed man spotting an impossibly alluring woman. (Or man. Both applied to Mr. Lyle.) His jaw fell slightly open, uttering a wordless noise of mingled surprise and perverse excitement. For another moment, he held the pose, then he spoke, haltingly and stuttering slightly, as though whatever he had just seen had unhinged him just a little. "You. You're him. You're that. Alucard. You're Alucard. The nightmare that broke Milleniun." He stepped back, eyes wide, and his face and eyes returned to a semblence of humanity with several sickening noises. He spoke again, in a quiet, almost awed whisper. "The Bird of Hermes is your name, eating your wings to keep you tame." Mr. Lyle chuckled, a little disbelivingly. "And you're ours. We have Alucard."

The man in the cell, silently regarding Mr. Lyle's odd babbling as Wuya and Azula stared at him warningly, looked at Mr. Lyle in obvious surprise. "Have me?" He repeated. "You believe...that you own me? That you have broken me as you have broken so many others?" He stared up at them in blank amusement, and suddenly began to laugh. "Heh. Heh heh heh...ha! Ha ha hah! Ha ha hyah hyah ha HYAH!" The laugh surprised them all, stealing their attention and coming from the man in the cell, seemingly disinterested in the events just beyond him until now, dusky, as wild as the voice of a sentient predator would be, and not in the least bit human.

He, Alucard, moved his head very slightly up, and a pair of monster's eyes opened beneath his mass of black hair. They were red, or orange, glowing a color that was just between the two colors, his pupils slit like a cat's. He grinned in clear amusement at them, thin lips sliding over white teeth as pointed as railroad spikes.

"What are you smiling at?" Wuya said, feeling a bit unnerved.

"You," He said in a near-whisper, grinning even wider. "You all dare to dream of controlling me? Your hubris is an astounding thing, witch!" He chuckled darkly. "Perhaps it is true that one with an immovable place to stand on can turn the world on itself, but you should heed your predecessors in this mad endeavor of control and dominance..." He gave Wuya a consperatorial look, cocking an eyebrow. "When you hold the world above you like a crown, there is only one way for it to fall. On you. And then, it's a short move straight down!" He abruptly broke off laughing again, long and loud, the sound echoing through the hall.

It was a bit more personal to her. It was almost a promise, this insane laughter of his. He was making a statement: I am not broken. I shall never be broken. I will survive this as I have survived all else. I shall escape, and then I shall find you. And then not all your stolen power, not your allies and not the darkness barely under your control will save you.

He stopped as suddenly as he had started, leaving an eerie silence where his laughter had just been. "No matter where I go," He said thoughtfully to himself. "No matter now long I have lived, they always come back. Fools and madmen obsessed with controlling everything around them, who had the audacity to be suprised when they find the death they so richly deserve."

"Now he graces us with his attention," Azula complained, giving the vampire a sour look. "After completely ignoring me all morning. That's very rude of you."

Alucard smirked faintly. "It is a king's perogative to give his attention to whatever he wishes."

"It's still rude," Mr. Lyle remarked. Alucard only grinned at him, teeth bared like a clenched beartrap. Mr. Lyle took a step back after a moment, unnerved.

He then turned his attention to Azula, a horror that had been subjected to things nearly as nightmarish as he was, and Azula the one who did most of them to him.

It was reasonable, and correct, to assume that he might be annoyed at her, in spite of his demeanor. He was annoyed indeed, very deeply annoyed. It was an annoyance not quite on par with the legendary grievance that the spirit Agrajag bore the man who had kept killing him in every single one of his many, many lifetimes, all apparently but complete coincidence, but Alucard was still unhappy with being tortured and other stuff. Like most strong-willed people in his position, he chose to vent that frustration.

Someone else might have screamed obscenties at her until they were hoarse, or howl all their bile-black hate at her until they weren't able to speak a single word. The more stoic of personalities might take to glaring hatefully at her, and still others might turn away from her sheer force of personality. And the utterly enraged-or those with nothing to lose-might throw themselves at her in an attempt to break through the shields and get to her, even if it only meant their deaths by immolation.

But then, those were human things to do. The products of a sentient mind that might be sprained, or even broken, but still essentially sane. While he looked human for the most part, Wuya knew from haunting personal experience that Alucard was posessed of a mind that was not merely twisted but in fact totally bent.

He grinned impossibly wide, horribly sharp teeth exposed and eyes wide like a madman's and glowing painfully bright. Wuya's awareness of the extrasensory pricked; Alucard was doing something, mustering powers that even as weakened as they were by the seals around him, weren't completely nullified. Mr. Lyle seemed aware, judging by his sudden edginess, and Azula was all too aware; she took a step back, her eyes narrowed in suspicion.

Alucard struck. Not physically, he was immobile as ever, but one second Wuya felt that awful sense of gathering power, like a tsunami pulling itself up before a hapless beachfront, and then she felt it hit, and Azula staggered back, eyes blank, and Wuya felt the same things she did, through the semi-psychic bond between them-

Alucard's voice in her head, echoing from every corner, every memory, everywhere, like something alive. Laughing at her, mocking her, taunting her in a thousand words that weren't words at all, that insane laughter sounding like every harsh condemnation Azula has ever imagined from behind everyone else's eyes, like the horribly pitying way Zuko looked at her after that Water Tribe girl saved him from the brink of death, like the way her father only cared about her as a tool he never entirely trusted, like the disgusted look Uncle gave her everytime she saw him after the war...

That monster's laughter rang all the harder as he moves through all the carefully constructed barriers in her mind, not even smashing through them but flowing around them, ignoring them, and it's like having entire pack of massive ferocious wolves cornering her, snapping at her, like having a thousand poisonous centipedes crawling all over her naked skin, biting and stinging and poisoning her from the inside-out, and the deeper he goes, the more he knows, every dark thought, every forgotten hurt, and every screaming instant of burning envy and crushing fear comes rushing to her as he observes them all, until in a searing flood of horror, he finds the very kernel of her mind and LAUGHS-

And then, as soon as it happened, she felt Alucard's mind abruptly falling away from Azula's, and not by his choice;. Alucard rocked back in his cell as much as he was capable of, looking mildly surprised. Azula's face was lightly coated in sweat, her eyes were wide, and her hands were shaking both from the tremendous psychological shock Alucard had put her through, but also because she had just expelled Alucard from her mind, a feat equivilant with pushing a lever clenched in your teeth while sitting on greased tiles. In spite of her obvious exhaustion, she was grinning, her teeth bared much like Alucard had been, a look that quite simply said I won.

Wuya was impressed at Azula's force of will in actually forcing Alucard to do something he didn't want to do, but Mr. Lyle said nothing. He only looked mildly thoughtful. Interested. And he was smiling, ever so slightly.

For a moment, Alucard and Azula stared each other down, the vampire looking vaugely amused, Azula rooted where she was and unwilling to budge. Then Alucard laughed some more. "You," He said softly to Azula. "Are so cold."

Azula's eyes went wide, first with shock and then with rage. She thrust her arm out, blue fire billowing out once more from two outstretched fingers and passing through the force field. Mr. Lyle took a half-step back, stopping and staring in obvious excitement as the blue fire homed in on a grinning Alucard, the force fields within the cell glowing painfully bright, protecting the circles, chains and other defenses completely while according the vampire within the cell no such protection.

Alucard didn't so much as twitch as the blue fire engulfed him.

Azula stepped back as Alucard burned, the smell of burning cloth and roasting flesh hot in their nostrils while the man inside failed into react in all but the most involuntary ways, his head forced back by his incinerating muscles, jaw hanging open, inhumanly pointed teeth blackened and falling out as his gums burned away. His skin baked and chipped as it was consumed by the flames, and his jaw fell open, muscles disintegrating under the heat. His entire body seized up as he went up like a torch, hair blazing like a warped halo. The only noise he made was the creak of burnt leather straining against itself, the hiss of internal gases burning and the chains that bound him clinking as his body's contortions twisted him into an unnaturally twisted posture.

The fire snuffed out, leaving the cell untouched and an unrecognizable husk, half bent back, hair burnt to ashes and the skin a baked red-brown. Yet, it still radiated amusement, the few teeth it had left seemed bared in a grin, inhuman and mocking. The three of them processed it in equal silence: Wuya because she knew what was going to happen, what was happening, while Mr. Lyle looked on with prurient fascination; not at the burning dead man, but at Azula, and Wuya would have blasted his head off on the spot if it wasn't for the wrath that would evoke from his masters. The girl paid both of them no attention, focused exclusively on the man, her lips twitching irritably.

"Laugh that one off," She spat, turning around from Alucard's burning body.

Mr. Lyle frowned at a whispering sussuration, like the movement of many small forms, and in the cell, shadows were moving. Not like the distinct forms of intangible Shadow Heartless, but vaporous shapes, glowing red and bubbling a deeper red at the core, swarming from around the cell and over Alucard's body, flowing over it and merging with the burnt husk.

"If you insist," Alucard's voice whispered.

The red in the shadows deepened, clearly growing thicker and changing Alucard's body in some subtle but definite way. It was straightening, moving back into the subservient posture his bindings had forced him into. There were several audible cracks and pops as bones were forced back into their proper settings, and more shadows formed from the top of his head, down over his shoulders, becoming finer and thinner until they were no longer shadows at all, but quite clearly Alucard's black hair.

Bit by bit, the shadows covering Alucard turned a disturbing violent color, until he seemed to be drenched in blood, and it suddenly faded away-or, more likely, directly absorbed into his body-revealing Alucard to be completely regenerated, looking as though he'd never been burned at all. He smirked up at them, eyes glowing, and chuckled cruelly, sounding like rats running over greasy bones.

There was a long moment; Azula glaring at Alucard angrily, Wuya impassive and Mr. Lyle still quietly thoughtful, looking interested.

"That was fun," Alucard finally said, grinning like a shark. "Shall we try again? Think of something nastier to fuel your fire. The flames might be hotter, and the healing take much longer."

Azula stared at him before turning away with a revolted grunt. "...You disgust me."

"Actully, I find him charming. And pretty good looking, too. I'd take him in a heartbeat," Mr. Lyle said brightly. Wuya, Azula, and even Alucard stared at him. "What?"

Wuya slowly took a step back, followed by another and then another. "Er...ah...I'm going to leave now," She said slowly. "Before you say something else to make me violently ill."

"Don't forget me," Azula said quickly. "I'm done here." The two women quickly left, moving at a brisk walk that took as quickly from Alucard's general vicinity while not actually running and thus embarrasing themselves in front of the prisoners, while Mr. Lyle followed after them at a steady pace.

Alucard watched Mr. Lyle's progress as best he could from his position, and shuddered. "Not even were I drunk," He muttered, looking distinctly disturbed. And it took a lot to disturb him. Generally, it took bizarre dreams involving vistations from gun spirits, random celebrity cameos and utterly deranged events that made him feel like a character in a demented (and not altogether consistent) manga.

Being hit on by a man who seemed on the verge of a claustrophobic panic attack yet still having the presence of mind to flirt with not only Azula but Alucard himself was more psychologically dibilitating.

-------

After an interminable length of time going through the corridor warrens, a veritable maze of rights, lefts and more than a few elevator lifts, they gradually found themselves moving into a more open area. Rather than the corridors that the prisoners were kept in, they were now in a much larger box-shaped chamber, the glow-orbs brighter than in the corridors and the stones of the floor slowly worn and set at smooth angles to accomodate wheels. Large tunnels feeding into the corridors and various elevator lifts opened into the sides of the wall, each big enough to let an elephant or large truck through with ease, and the greater size of the room certainly had a positive effect on Mr. Lyle: he was still annoying and unpleasant, but whether it was his claustrophobia easing off or him actually learning the errors of his ways or he was being more subtle about it. Wuya would have bet good money that it was the latter possibility; she didn't know enough about his life to understand more about him than she absolutely had to, but it was evident that he abhored enclosed spaces with an almost psychotic intensity.

Wuya's staff, the various accroutments on Azula's clothes and their respective footwear clicked on an elaborately designed metal disc set into the middle of the room, easily as big as any of the tunnel entrances if not bigger, made mainly of brass with cold iron overlaid in a variety of mystical patterns. Among the circles-within-circles, almost non-Euclidian gemetrical angles and other occult symbology Wuya liked, at the very center of the disc(which was actually an elevator lift) was the crossed-out heart that the Heartless overlaid the shadow of a raven with it's wings spread out, the symbol that Wuya took as her own and, by extension, her entire organization.

In a short time, they stood in front of the only actual door in the room, a large circular one built like a mixture of an airlock and a vault; completely round and made of a gleaming metal that looked and felt like moonlight made solid, a single black disc set into it's surface at arm's-level and surronded by a mystical diagram inscribed in exquisitely drawn calligraphy, the ink seeming to shift like the currents of the deepest ocean depths.

Mr. Lyle gave it a mistrustful look, his eyes betraying a hint of fiendish red. "Magic," He muttered to himself. "I hate magic." He glanced around suspiciously. "I feel like there's something in here that wants to eat me."

"Most assuredly not," Wuya said loftily. "The demon bound to this chamber know better than to do something so crass. At most it would take a bite out you. Just for the taste, you understand. We haven't had cause to feed ir for quite some time."

Mr. Lyle grimaced. Behind him, the air rippled momentarily, some anamolous form almost visible behind him. It cast a shadow not unlike an ape's, adorned with spikes and sharp protrusions and dripping something thick off it's fur. Mr. Lyle jerked as a thick, wet noise came from directly behind him, and he turned around just as the air stilled, the shadow on the ground disappearing. "Can we just get going already?! The corridors were bad enough without there being some kind of evil spirit in here?"

"Eurymanthus, actually," Azula remarked. "'Blood ape', if you want to go so far as to use common vernacular."

"And if you're in such a hurry, open the door yourself," Wuya said, trying not to grin evilly and failing.

Mr. Lyle, too unnerved by the unseen presence, didn't notice, and also failed to notice a silent back-and-forth between Azula and Wuya: At once, Azula raised an eyebrow, glancing at the door and Mr. Lyle and back again. Wuya smirked and held a finger to her lips, shaking her head slowly. Azula raised an eyebrow in thought, and grinned back at her.

So, ignorant of what they were probably up to, Mr. Lyle walked to the door and examined it for a moment before he cautiously held his thumbless hand up to the door, his palm crackling with red-black telekinetic energy that snaked out just in front of the door and suddenly spread out, as though covering a curved surface before winking out like a candle in a highwind. Mr. Lyle blinked, nonplussed, and laid a hand just in front of the door, his hand meeting a unyielding resistance just in front of it, translucent blue-purple force forming out of the air around his hand. "A force field. How...cliche." He pressed on it, his splayed fingers making a thumbless indentation for a moment before he removed his hand, the force field disappearing from sight.

A ripple flashed out from the disc and spread over the door, it's metal suddenly as liquid and fluid as a storm-tossed sea, and a slightly curved and knife-thin protrusion formed out of it so fast that it had already sliced through a good portion of Mr. Lyle's hair before he was even aware that it was there; with a yelp, he ducked just as the blade dissolved into liquid metal again, absorbed by the door, and several blunt spikes surged out from the lower section of the door and struck his shoulder and stomach, knocking him off his feet just as the force field appeared again, but not the half-there shell Mr. Lyle had seen but a darkly radiant mass, so thick that the door vanished behind it, and abruptly flashed out, striking Mr. Lyle with all the force of a speeding car hitting a brick wall, flinging him halfway across the hall. The stone floor flickered with the same energy of the force field, and swelled up into a vaugely hand-shaped mass in time for Mr. Lyle to crash right into it's palm and immediately slam him down into the ground, the fingers arranging themselves in such a way that he was completely unable to move even as they seamlessly joined with the floor, the hand slowly pressing down and crushing him.

Wuya and Azula laughed at him as several strangled gasps were squeezed from him. "Oh, it appears that I forgot that you're not authorized to access the labs on your own," Wuya said. "Even though we're with you. It appears that the door-wards aren't intelligent enough to tell the difference."

"Or maybe it took offense to the little trick with the red light," Azula said, almost grinning.

"Okay...point taken..." Mr. Lyle wheezed, his face turning red as the stone hand steadily crushed him. "A...little help...?"

Wuya snapped her fingers, clawlike nails scraping against each other, and the stone hand obligingly melted away from Lyle, joining with the floor and becoming inanimate stone again as the blunt spikes on the door melted away, the liquid metal turning still.

"That was fun!" Azula said cheerfully. "Make him do it again!"

"Let's not, okay?" Lyle grumbled as he got to his feet and stumbled back over to them.

"Consider that a warning. It would be...ill-advised to go wandering where you are not wanted, or to attempt to interfere in my more delicate machinations. I do believe that your masters would understand if something unfortunate happened to you within my demenses because you didn't heed your limits."

"I wouldn't bet on it," Mr. Lyle muttered. "Devils aren't known for being understanding about anything." Azula rolled her eyes and lightly struck across the back of his head. "Ow! What was that for?!"

Azula shrugged. "I felt like it."

Trying not to laugh, Wuya stepped forward and placed a hand on the black disc, her palm burning a green and black that quickly spread through it in grainular veins and lines, glowing from and quickly acquiring the partial translunce of a translucent gemstone lit from behind. The diagram around it turned red for a moment until it polarized into a calming shade of blue-green, pulsing gently until it flared out, a single large ripple rushing through the door's metal. Wuya sensed rather than saw Mr. Lyle flinching behind her, even though this change was nowhere as chaotic as the door had been.

The force field pulsed into view again, as powerful and wild as it had been only moments before, turning almost rock-still before it irised open, forming a large hole the exact diameter of the door behind it, and almost immediately, the door itself came to life again, the metal flowing like liquid once more and creating three large openings, each big enough to permit the three of them comfortable entrance. Without a word, Wuya and Azula walked through it with an almost unconscious ease, and a few moments after something unspeakably horribly failed to happen to them, Mr. Lyle followed after them. Given Wuya's puckish and slightly twisted sense of humor, it might have occured to him that she could have set up something bad to happen to him anyway, but he didn't, and in this case his belief was validated.

The three of them came into a massive sprawling rectangular room, far bigger than the chamber they'd just left and furnished with a more futuristic touch than Wuya usually liked; strange machinery that formed part of the walls as they carried on their function, smooth forms and odd protrusions giving them a throughly organic look, and quite a few of them quite clearly had disembodied brains floating in small tanks much like the ones of the animalistic experiment from the corridor, wires and cables connecting them to the machines they served. Several airlock-style doors less obviously magical than the vault-like door they had just passed through were set into the walls at oddly spaced intervals, while several elevator lifts were set at equally unpredicatable places at the lab.

Even more randomly arranged were the various enclosures in the lab, placed in no clear order, more technologically reliant than the prisoner's cells where most of the experiments the enclousures housed spent their time, none of them the same size, ranging from the same dimensions as the cells in the corridor beyond to the size of large rooms(all depending on the experiment or project in question), all of them the same box-shaped constructs of magically-forged alloys that could resist the exertions of a full-grown Tetramand, the metal almost completely translucent for easy viewing except along the corners and edges, small arrays of control equipment monitoring their degree of transparency, size and other factors more specific to each enclosure.

Less dramatic were the various tables set around the room, lined with alchemical equipment and tools of the magically-knowledgable scientist's trade; some of them were simple desks, used for work upon strange minerals or other substances Wuya's scouts and explorers had procured, others were carefully shielded areas to test magical weapons, and still more were surgical in nature, shackles and heavy-duty straps part of the padded chairs. Many of them were being used at the moment, the prisoners that were being operated on generally anesthetized so the screaming would distract the scientists. The laboratory itself was bustling with activity and action, much of it moving along the pathways inaverdently formed by the larger enclousures many enclosures; scientists that Wuya had hired or who had come as part of the allies she'd found, along with their assistants and superiors, doing various arcane things that seemed less like work and more like looking like they were busy to Wuya.

Mr. Lyle and Wuya both looked around for a moment before Mr. Lyle frowned at Wuya. "He's not here."

Wuya looked around some more, scanning the faces around her, looking for a certain mess of green hair and a purple suit before she admitted that Mr. Lyle was right. "Should we really be surprised?" She muttered irritably. "He isn't posessed of what you might call conventional sanity..."

Mr. Lyle grunted. "Then we'll just have to take a look around, then."

"What? Why? We could just wait here for him. If he shows up while we're gone, we could miss him and throw my timetable completely out of whack!"

Mr. Lyle glanced at her. "I do have my own report to make, you know. And my superiors have expressed an interest in the experiments you might be doing." He gave her a pointed look. "Do you really want to give them an outright 'no'?"

"Oh, fine," Wuya said, rolling her eyes. "If you insist. But only until we find him!"

"Yeah, yeah, get the clown and get out, got it."

Azula grimaced as Mr. Lyle walked off to look at a number of scientists busily stitching together a war-ghoul. "Ugh, I hate being out of the loop. What are we here for?"

Wuya glanced at her apprentice. "Receiving a package, in a manner of speaking. Do keep an eye out for the Head of Enforcement Division and Field Operations, will you? Or whatever we've decided to call him this week." Wuya psychically sent an image into Azula's mind: a pale-skinned thin face with unkempt green hair, a ghoulishly deformed yellow-toothed grin, and too-bright eyes glimmering with insanity. "We're looking for him."

Azula blinked, and sharply looked off in a completely different direction, clearly spotting something neither of her companions had. She started to say something, but Mr. Lyle called to them. "Hey, what's this thing?"

They caught up with him, now standing in front of an exceptionally secure enclosure housing an amorphous black mass the size of a small truck, constantly morphing and shifting in slightly disquieting way and never staying the same for more than a few seconds. Tentacles laced with dozens of tiny sharp teeth thickened into an insectile leg before being reabsorbed into the main body mass while a single massive mouth filled with bristling teeth the size of daggers snapped at the air, a thick pink tongue lashing out and spraying green saliva while countless smiliar jaws formed and disappearing all over it's body at once, jagged white streaks trailing all over it's body, two large patches located above it's largest mouth like a pair of eyes.

It shrieked in agony, strangled voices howling from it's many mouthes, most of them smothered and echoing within it's mass as those mouths disappeared, it's body shredding and dissolving under the sonic waves being projected at it from sound cannons placed at the perimeter of it's enclosure. It screamed all the louder as a small adjustment by an attending scientist intensified the sonic waves, it's body wavering like a heat wave as it tore apart so quickly, and regenerated equally fast, that the human eye was almost unable to comprehend it. Yet, Wuya noticed, it's screams of pain were not entirely physical. It thrashed and slammed around in much the same way that a violent mourner might smash furniture and dent walls in a rage of grief, and even louder than the pain in it's many voices was a clear note that, if it were human, she might be inclined to think of as loneliness and loss.

Wuya didn't need to listen to know it's pain, both emotional and physical, the former far louder and greater than the latter; as a result of the immense power at her disposal, she could feel the agony racking it's mind, slowly but surely driving it insane. It wasn't quite telepathy, which was a talent she had stolen and refined some time ago from a paraplegic telepath shortly before she killed him, but a related ability much like an advanced form of empathy; as if she were a receiver dish and every living mind and soul around her were broadcasting, she was awash in the glimmer of their near-thoughts at the front of their minds, the echoing murmur of dim memories, the emotions that were a result of sensory input, and most of all, their pain.

She felt the agony and distress of everything around her, the mental howling of even the most stoic prisoner, how they scrabbled for ever-receding glimmers of sanity even as they slipped deeper into madness and worse. She felt her scientists and their assistants, whether their minds and hearts whimpered at every nasty thing they did or they enjoyed every tear-soaked moment of their vicitm's pain or simply didn't care at all. The misery seeped into and through her, like a river of tears awash with brittle memories, flowing into the stone and metal of the very building around him until the stones could sing of the pain that fed the mysterious mechanisms of her fortress, giving it strength and flowing through it like blood through veins.

It was glorious. Wuya thought that maybe a businessman, watching an investment growing and growing in giddy anticipation of the day he finally cashed it in would understand how she felt. And one day she would; everything was for that promised day, when everything that had gone wrong in her life would finally be set right.

For a moment longer, Wuya reveled in the pain she was responsible for inducing, until murmuring words, not a part of suffering minds, made it clear that she had become overly proccupied. Willing her awareness of the river of pain to diminish to a mere trickle, she returned to part of the attendent's answer to Mr. Lyle's question. " ...No ones knows, actually, but they're commonly called symbiotes, largely due to it's method of surviving by attaching itself to another life-form for a time before draining it. By it's own people's standards, this one is insane, because it attempts to permanently attach itself to a given host, bonding with it on an emotional and mental level, as well on the merely physical.

"Seperating it from it's original host seems to have caused both of them severe mental damage, but it has helped us observe the results of what happens when you seperate a bonded symbiote from it's host through non-lethal methods. We've managed to cultivate enough samples from it to create smaller, weaker versions with no individuality. We're hoping to create biological weapons to enhance our foot soldiers, but so far we've only created non-sentient savage creatures that only live for a month before draining their host dry in their death throes, but they ought to be enormously effective in an initial strike."

Wuya zoned out as the scientist started droning on and on, not even bothering to follow Mr. Lyle on his attempt to pretend to understand half of what the scientist was saying. After the scientist started earnestly talking about all the new suits spontaneously develouping emotional attachments to a single bionic-kitten named Growltiger that had somehow wandered in one day and never left, Wuya and Azula slipped away, Mr. Lyle making some excuse or another and following after them.

They barely went six steps before he wandered off, intrigued in a massive vaugely anthropoid creature with the head of a snarling wolf, mangy greyish fur, burning green pictographs on it that looked somehow wrong, and was in the process of having an array of blades, guns and powered armor grafted onto it's flesh, all made of silver; a horrible smell escaped it's enclosure as it's skin erupted in boils, burning at the contact, and it howled loud enough to shatter glass before the sound dampeners went on, silencing it's cries as the scientists went to work. Wuya humored him; she would rather have left him behind(or in a very small box), but his presence was required to satisfy his masters that the retaliation that their customs demanded would be promised.

In about five minutes, he got bored and immediately went over to something else, quickly losing interest again, quickly producing a vicious cycle that showed no signs of stopping any time soon. Wuya tolerated it because she wasn't ready to step on any diabolic toes just yet, but she wasn't sure why Azula hadn't tried to intimidate him into stopping. Most likely, she was genuinely interested in the things he was investigating.

As time wore on, Mr. Lyle gravitated towards so many different projects that Wuya couldn't discern the common ground any of them held, and worse, there was an element When Wuya realized that Mr. Lyle had wasted the better part of an hour in the lab, her patience abruptly snapped.

"Will you focus, already?!" She yelled at Mr. Lyle as they caught up with him moving from one experiment to another. "We don't have time for this!" She paused. "Well, actually, we do have time for this but I don't feel like using it."

"Calm down, calm down," Mr. Lyle said soothingly. "That's probably true, and I hate wasting time as much as you do..."

"You do?" Azula said disbelievingly. "I thought you worked for bereaucratic fiends."

"Not all careers are perfectly matched," Mr. Lyle replied.

"Also, what are we doing here at all. Surely not an inspection." Azula scowled unhappily. "Not another loop. I thought I made my position about them perfectly clear before. What is going on here?"

Mr. Lyle and Wuya glanced at each other. "Well," Wuya said, an oppertunity to enlighten the ignorant deflating her temper a little. "You realize that the new Keybearer appeared last night, correct?"

"Yes, some eccentric Irken frycook. It's been all over the news networks. So what?"

"So," Mr. Lyle said. "As it turns out, two of King Garfield's fighters found him and joined up with him. Do the names Calvin and Hobbes sound familiar?"

"Ah...no. Not really." Azula raised an eyebrow. "How did they know to find him in the first place?"

Mr. Lyle was, if anything, even more eager to educate the unknowing than Wuya was. "They're a pair of troublemakers from the Comic Kingdom, a beastman tiger with some supernatural martial arts and a surprisingly powerful kid that knows magic-based alchemy. From what I've dug up, they're both in high positions that are basically there to keep them out of the way: paper tigers, if you will. Heh, I made a pun. As for how they found the Keybearer..." Mr. Lyle scowled unhappily. "Our informants don't know, but I'm willing to bet some good money that King Garfield is behind it. He's cagier than he lets on, and I've heard rumors of another group trying to oppose us that just may be more than they appear."

Azula snorted. "You're joking, right? A fat lazy cat somehow knows what we're planning, knows where the Keybearer ended up before we did and planned all this?"

"Yes," Wuya said cooly. "A fat lazy cat that also spearheaded a rebellion that destroyed a legion of severely mutated humans, took his monarchy almost completely by accident and singlehandedly turned the warzone of his old kingdom into the foremost intersteller empire in the galaxy."

"Ugh." Azula rubbed her temples, vaugely stressed. "Fine, I'm not taking an animal seriously. Whatever. You still haven't explained what we're doing here."

"I was getting to that," Mr. Lyle said, a bit impatiently. He told a quick retelling of his experiences the night before; how he had made his way into Foster's Home and tracked Zim and his three sidekicks down to a ballroom, along with three residents of Traverse Town and survivors of various Heartless attacks on their original worlds: Abel Nightroad, Kim Possible and Ron Stoppable.

Azula grinned at the names. "'Kim Possible'? I haven't heard that name in quite some time. Not since she and some of our other 'guests' escaped from the old laboratory." She smiled pleasantly. "She was my favorite prisoner. So full of spirit. And I never got to burn it out of her." She sighed dramatically. "And I tried so hard."

After that slightly disturbing aside, Mr. Lyle continued, and all of them kept laughing as he recounted the various ways he had brought out their pasts just for the fun of it; technically, he had only been there to evaluate and study them, but he had been curious to see how they would react. Mr. Lyle smiled nostalgically as he spoke about their individual reactions, and the sick feelings each of them had to have just thinking about what the others thought of them now. Zim's less than noble history, Calvin's apparent indifference, Hobbes' status as a pariah among his own kind, Kim barely escaping from a place not unlike this one, Ron's inability to save his family from the monster that was Cain Nightroad, and Abel once being every bit as vicious, savage and monstrous as his brother was.

Mr. Lyle went through the remainder of his experience in a bit of a rush; how he'd hidden in the shadows while they fought the weak artificial Heartless he'd summoned, the surprising capability Calvin and Hobbes had displayed and Zim's rapidly increasing power. When he got to the point where he'd lost his temper and attacked them, he tried to spin his humiliating defeat as a heroic stand against overwhelming odds (dispite the fact that, by his own admission, he considered them all to be losers) and had only been truly beaten when more heroes kept showing up out of the blue.

When he was done, Wuya said, "While you did do an amazingly half-assed job of his objective, Mr. Lyle-"

"Hey!"

"-You were still working on my orders. Doing my work. Those...heroes fought him, attacked him, and I'm certain that deranged Irken might have killed him. And an attack on my minion, incompetent or not, is an attack upon me. Such insufferable arrogance can never go unpunished." She paused. "There's also the small manner of that town getting entirely too mellow for my tastes."

"Doesn't it normally exist in a state of weirdness approaching anarchy?" Azula remarked.

"Yes, but it's not real anarchy. And that bores me."

Azula shrugged, apparently thinking about the implications. "So what's the plan?"

Wuya told her. It wasn't overly complicated, at least the stages of it that she told her. It basically involved the usual method in these matters: send a man in, suited to do the job. Have him go to the place and do what the plan required, and leave once the mess had been made. Except that this time, the man for the job wouldn't actually leave; Wuya wanted another man in town, perhaps someone that could rouse the criminal element in the area and make things a little more unstable.

"So that's it," Wuya concluded. "Not too complicated, I hope?"

"No. It's a good plan. Short, simple-"

"I wouldn't say simple," Mr. Lyle said quietly. "Not with all that we're going through to actually get it going."

Azula gave him a sharp look before she resumed talking. "Anyway, it seems good enough. I like retaliation."

"Me too," Mr. Lyle admitted. "I don't like plans like this one-"

"You know all this running around for the Head of Enforcement and Field Operations isn't really part of the plan," Wuya snapped. "It's...for making the plan happen. Getting the underlying structure of the plan together. The pre-plan....plan." She paused a few moments, thinking how stupid that last part sounded.

Azula blinked. Wuya hadn't told her about the...pre-plan plan."It's still stupid," Mr. Lyle grumbled. "Still, there are certain protocols in mind. Certains regulations that have to be complied with. Retaliation works here. Even if most of the people it's going to affect aren't going to have any idea why they're being punished."

A high-pitched giggle sounded behind him, and they turned around to see a figure walking towards them, clapping sarcastically with every step; the clownlike man from Wuya's inner circle the night before, and the very man they had been expecting. As soon as they caught sight of him, he started laughing even harder, a distinct wicked edge to his glee. "Heh, heh, heh! Rules. Heh, heh! Regulations! Hah! Hah!" With the corners of his mouth twisted into a permanantly inhuman grin, it was impossible for him not to be smiling, but he seemed to be grinning even wider than normal, his eyes dancing with evil humor. "Protocols!" He broke off into another giggling fit before he stopped abruptly, straightening up and fixing them with a snide look. "That's so stupid, it's funny. People like you..." He paused. "Yeah...yeah! People like you," He pointed at Mr. Lyle. "Never get it right. You have all these insane rules like a noose around your neck, and you jump off the chair without even thinking about it. You don't do these things because you have to or because these fussy little words and ideas tell you to, you do them because you want to! Because you just gotta!"

Everyone stared at him evenly as he continued to rant, pausing every few minutes to remember what he was talking about, and breaking off into sporadic laughing fits, apparently so amused by what he was talking about that he couldn't help but laugh himself until he almost choked. The scientist-types all around them were giving the man an extremely wide berth, though Wuya's company didn't mind at all.

You got used to such things when you spent enough time around the Joker.

Evenly, trying to hold her temper, Wuya said, "You said you'd be waiting by the door."

The Joker shrugged his thin, sinewy shoulders. "I say a lot of things. One time, I told our guy Deidara that I wouldn't blow up this art museuem if he gave five bucks, but I did it anyway. He was pissed." He snickered.

"Oh, I know that guy!" Mr. Lyle said brightly. "Long blond hair, scope over one eye, looks like a girl, has mouths in his hands and molds explosive clay sculptures with them? He's a real blast, pun not intended, once you get past the avant-garde thing he has going on."

"And the mouths in his hands, don't get me started!" Joker added. "He licks your hand when you shake! Even for a guy like me, that's weird. First time he tried it on me, I had an electric joy buzzer on. It took him weeks to get his hair back to normal. What's with bishounen and their hair, huh?"

Mr. Lyle shrugged; he didn't know either. "I don't think the hands are so bad," He said suggestively.

Azula looked from clown to...whatever Mr. Lyle was, disturbed by their apparent familiarity. "Do you two...know each other?"

"We've worked together in the past," Mr. Lyle replied. "Occasionally giving him odd jobs..."

"Destabilizing worlds that go and get boring," Joker added."Heh. It's hysterical what a few pounds of plastique, some unstable foundations and a little gossip can do to turn a single city on itself."

"I met him when I was in college," Mr. Lyle added. "He helped make me the man I am!"

The Joker sidestepped over to Azula and leaned in close. "I know some alchemists, and believe me, it's true what they say about superior ingredients. I had some great raw materials to work with. Mr. Lyle here was one of the great undiscovered serial killers of his world. Pity he had to go all schemer on me, but..." He shrugged.

Mr. Lyle tried to look modest. "Well, I don't like to brag...but I do it anyway. It's one of my many innate talents. Including, to a lesser extent, accesorizing and interior decorating."

Wuya shuddered at the idea of them having a prior association. "Where have you been?!" She demanded, before she paused and groaned. "Don't tell me; you were hiding out of sight and following us ever since we came in, didn't you?"

"Yes," The Joker said plainly.

"Obviously," Mr. Lyle added.

"I saw him earlier. I would have said something, but I was interrupted," Azula said huffily.

Wuya gaped at her. "And you didn't say anything!?"

"I tried. Then I got distracted and stopped paying attention." Azula shrugged. "An old trick I had to learn to deal with my uncle."

Wuya groaned. "I'm surronded by idiots and ingrates..."

Mr. Lyle and the Joker snickered as Azula turned red. "Hey!"

"No, no, those two are the idiots. You're the ingrate."

"Oh, okay then." There was a short pause. "Hey!"

Wuya ignored her, and turned to the Joker. "Do you have it? The...thing you were told to bring?"

The Joker gave her a blank look. "Huh?"

"You know," Wuya said, speaking as subtlely as possible, not because she was afraid of eavesdroppers, but also because she wasn't altogether sure what to call the thing she was talking about. (She was also keen on playing things close to the chest, after the failures with some of her other pawns, whether they were either incompetent, heroic, or treacherous.) "The....thing. You know," Her voice dropped. "The object of my pre-plan plan? The most important part of it all?"

The Joker looked blankly at her. So did Azula.

"You know, the 'human weapon' of Amestris we have? The one you were supposed to fetch on your way here?"

"You're batting zero, boss-lady," The Joker said, shrugging more or less indifferently. Mr. Lyle snickered and she glared at him; he knew perfectly well what she meant and wasn't saying anything on purpose.

Wuya slapped her forehead. "The Red Lotus!" She snapped. "Did you bring the Red Lotus or not!?"

The scientists and such flinched at her harsh tone of voice and immediately made a reasonable impression of the sheer busyness normally found around a dead cow lying on an anthill. "Oh, that," The Joker said, reaching into his coat and pulling out a small syringe filled with a thick red liquid similar to blood but with a red glow, a red lotus stylized on it. "Got him right here!"

Azula stared at it, as did a number of scientists that were openly drooling at the sight of it. (And possibly Azula and Wuya..) "'Him'? What's that supposed to mean?" She frowned peering closer at it. "It looks almost...alive."

The Joker shrugged. "For a given value of life, yeah, you could say that."

Azula gave Wuya a questioning look. Wuya looked away, whistling innocently and peering intently on a small spot on the ceiling. It happened to be occupied by a large automation that resembled a spider made out of blades oozing poison, but that was besides the point. She stole a peek at the stuff in the syringe, her eyes glowing as she shifted her perceptions up a few levels just to make sure that it was the real thing, and not something the Joker had brought as part of some stupid (and lethal) prank.

Everything became defined in lines of energy, turning deep black rimmed with blue, living things defined by shifting auras around them, changing into a shocking variety of colors, none of which having a set meaning. Those auras defined the person radiating them, the colors comprising them being metaphorical representations of the conditions of their hearts and minds, and if Wuya had felt like it, she could have read everything worth knowing about most people around her; not her group, their mental defenses were too strong, and not the experiments either, their pain served as a kind of mental shield, but certainly the assorted scientist-types. They were open books to her.

Most of the auras around her burned; some were candles, others were pale flickers and still other were bonfires, or infernos. These fires were representations, like the colors, metaphors conjured by mind's perceptions of things less physical than the world around her but even more real. These fires represented willpower, determination, and more than anyone there, the auras of Mr. Lyle, Azula and the Joker blazed. Mr. Lyle's aura was strangely ordered, chainlike shapes moving through it, and the vauge shape of something twisted, reptillian and inhuman just around him, and Azula's looked like nothing less than an approximation of fire distilled to it's barest essense and roiling around her, defining her form and making it appear as though she was fire incarnate, but it was a cold fire, like her heart had burnt to ash years ago. The Joker's aura was strange, as was obvious: it was chaotic, twisting, like a living thing twisting through an endless series of iron rings pulling it in every possible direction. And within it was another aura, greenish, far older and more powerful than any human's ever could, like the aura of one of the old gods, and even more chaotic than the Joker's...though it seemed marginally saner, for what that was worth. An emu on acid was saner than the Joker was.

And, in spite of the lack of a proper body, there was an aura around the red stuff in the syringe the Joker held as well, as though it was alive. The aura was a faint red, and roiled in rippling random patterns, like a glass of water shaken by the steps of an approaching behemoth. Other color were present, beneath the red, but muted and dim, too faint to properly make out, or perhaps the right word was dormant. There was a mind there, it's thoughts and feelings as faint as the soul-colors in it's aura, and Wuya knew it to be a sleeping mind, awaiting a proper veseel before it could awaken, and return to life once more. What little she could gleam of that sleeping mind was limited to vauge impressions, but most of all it felt cold; not in the same sense as Azula was, but on a less comprehensible scale. It was suggestive of a mind that seemed to regard everything else as things, a heart with all the warmth of dust and easily as twisted as the Joker.

Wuya scaled her perceptions down to normal, the auras fading away and revealing the world as she normally saw it. Azula, she was sure, was curious about what exactly the red stuff the Joker had was.

The sudden appearance, though, of two swirling portals of darkness that quickly faded away to reveal two Founders with their hoods down, one of them with an absurd number of facial piercings while the other was wearing clown make-up for some reason and both of them looking very purposeful, derailed any questioning.

"'Ello, Miss Wuya, Miss Azula, Misters Lyle and Joker," The one with all the piercings chirped in a Liverpool accent, saluting. The other followed his example. "Eh, am I interrupting something?"

Wuya stared at them for a moment. "...Yes. Yes you are. What do you want? And can it wait?" She paused, and stared some more at the one with the make-up. "And why are you wearing clown make-up?!"

"Don't tell me you're trying to cosplay me," The Joker said grouchily, putting the syringe back into his suit-jacket. "The last outbreak of that was not pretty..."

"What?" The Founder with the make-up whined. "It makes me look pretty!"

"Does not," The other grumbled. "'Sides, you're a guy. I think. If you are, you can't be pretty, more or else by definition. If you are female, you're doin' a spectacularily bad job of it, mate."

"Says who? I'll be pretty if I want to! Where is it written that a man can't be pretty, huh?!"

Wuya groaned. "These demons get loopier by the day..." She frowned at Azula. "What have you been telling them?! I told to stop giving them ideas after the incident with the paint-guns, the magnets from Planet Belgium and the man-eating toilet!"

Mr. Lyle blinked while the Joker snickered. "When did you guys have a man-eating toilet?!"

"What, it was funny!" Azula retorted. "We made a killing from the tapes we sold to comedy networks! Though, admittedly, not the reputable ones."

"Are there really any reputable TV networks now?" The Joker wondered.

"Not really," Mr. Lyle said knowingly. "All the good showss are getting cancelled or lame spin-offs. The only thing that makes good money now are easily marketable cheap archetypal knock-offs. Sickening, isn't it?. Even from a devil's point of view, that's just plain wrong. I should know, I was the secretary to the devil who thought of it for a week. You should have seen his promotion; for sheer speed, he made the record books."

Wuya rubbed her forehead. "I think we're starting to get entirely too comfortable with each other..." Ignoring the debate now emerging between Mr. Lyle, Joker and Azula, she turned her attention to the two Founders, who were arguing about how the meaning of life related to the recent drop in intersteller peanut butter trade, the up-swing in metahuman evolution and whether or not cheese tasted yellow. "Shut up. you two! Now what is it that you want...er...what's your name?" She pointed at the one with all the piercings.

He saluted. "Metalface, m'am! At least, that's my name until I do something else particularily noteworthy, or get bored with it."

She took a moment to observe all the piercings he had. Three small chain-links in each eyebrow, a small key hooked into the top of each one. Four studs lining either side of the bridge of his piglike nose. Six earrings on each ear, all hooked into each other and coiling around his dense earlobe, culminating in a thick stud at the point at his ears. A massive nosering, gilded in brass lettering. The small horns over his eyes had been filed to points and tipped with metal caps.

The Founders, Wuya thought, were not typical demons, if there even was such a thing. The original ones she'd coerced into her service some years ago had been bound to a twenty mile expanse of wilderness for several thousand years, perhaps even a millenia, and their years of imprisonment seemed to have caused to change somewhat from the things they had once been. One aspect of the informal culture that had sprung up among the ones in her service seemed to be fluid identites bound in every aspect of their personal apperance, due to their ability to reshape their bodies to a limited extent.

Regardless, Wuya waved her hand in an impatient 'go on' gesture.

Metalface took the hint and nodded hurredly. "We just received the reports from some of our, eh, 'worlds of interest'. That's the word, right? You were supposed to get them earlier this week, as usual, but there were...extenuating circumstances, you see?"

"Oh?" Wuya said, an eyebrow arched. "Like what?"

The Founder paused, consulting a mental list. "Er...renegade factions allied against your interests, surprisingly stubborn locals, the Heartless popping up where we ain't expecting them, and general incomptence." His eyes darted back and forth suspiciously. "A lot of general incompetence."

Wuya toyed with the idea of using a spacial-relocation spell to modify the corrospondence of Metalface's body so that his internal organs would occupy the same space as a vat of acid she kept in a room somewhere for supplying gameshows, killing him in an excrutiatingly slow and horrible manner, chain his newly released soul to a hungry ghost and set it loose upon a random world and film the resulting carnage for retail purposes. Luckily for the demon, she chose not to vent her frustration in such a manner: it wouldn't be good for morale, and besides, she'd already done that three times this week. "Be more specific," She said curly. "And try to supply some good news, will you?"

"Ah. Oh-kaay..." Metalface paused for a moment, thinking. "Well...our agents in Oddworld are making some headway with the Glukkons. After they transplanted some new lungs into her, they've been much more inclined to ally with us. Give us money, hire off some Big Bro Sligs to us, stuff like that."

Azula, deciding to pay attention to the report, said, "Who do we have on Oddworld?"

"My hyena muscle," The Joker said. "Shenzi, Banzai and....Ed."

"What? Those idiots? The hyenas you recruited from that one world of anthropomorphic animals that mirror various cultures from around the worlds?" Azula said disdainfully. "How in the world did they pull this off? They can barely grasp the concept of walking straight!" Azula paused. "Alright, Shenzi's fairly intelligent, being a girl, but her boys would get lost in a straight corridor."

"They're more resourceful than they look. Where do you think the man-eating toilet came from?"

"But there's...a small problem," Metalface said heisitantly. "You know the fight the native Mudokons and the recently renewed Gabbits have been putting up?"

"Yes?" Wuya said tensely, sure she wasn't going to like this.

"It's gotten worse. A few weeks ago, six entire Glukkon industrial factories were wiped off the face of Oddworld. There was nothing left, nothing at all. Just twisted scrap and..." He paused, and in that pause, Wuya read a lot about things that put even demons off their lunch. "The bodies. The Mudokon Scrubs and other prisoners escaped before whatever it was hit, but every single Slig, Glukkon executive and everything else was dead. Very dead." He gulped, looking a little shaken. "Really very dead. They were torn apart. Bits were everywhere. And what was even remotely recognizable was blown apart, fried and, looking at what was left, battered after they were dead. Blood was everywhere; even the explosions that took out the factories couldn't get the blood out. And a Mudokon Scrub we caught swears that it was a monster that set them free and killed all the guys in charge. He was terrified of it; made it sound like a white-haired demon with perfectly black eyes, dead-pale skin, big claws and bigger horns." Metalface paused. "And they said he had a orange otter-weasel thing on his shoulder that never shut up."

Wuya's eyes went wide. Mr. Lyle frowned while Azula started. "Why does that sound familiar?"

"Was there any Dark Eco contamination?" Wuya demanded.

"A-a little bit, yes! Not too much, it was mostly dissipated, but it was still Dark Eco. That's not a Precursor world, you know, there shouldn't have been Eco there at all. I gave the science-type report to the Sewing-Life Alchemist, like I'm supposed to, and he said the same thing." Metalface frowned. "At least, I think that's what he told me. You know the way he talks, m'am; hard to understand half of what he says. The guy talks like his head got twisted around a few dozen times."

"That's because it did," Mr. Lyle remarked off-handedly.

Wuya rubbed her temples. "Ugh. A factory gets attacked by a monster with a talking orange rat-"

"Otter-weasel," Azula corrected, feeling a vauge sense of familiarity with the word. It sounded like something from her homeworld.

"Whatever. A factory gets attacked by a monster with a talking orange otter-weasel that leaves the working slaves alone, utterly savages everything else and leaves only unrecognizable pulp behind, and when it's done doing whatever it did, there's traces of Dark Eco. Do you know what this means?"

"Yes!" The Joker said triumphantly. He paused. "Wait a minute. Uh...no."

"I do," Azula said grimly. "It looks like the eco-freak is finally rearing his ugly head."

"That's what I thought," Wuya said. "And here I was hoping that he had died in the chaos of the break-out from the old laboratory...even if Baron Praxis wouldn't shut up about for weeks..." She glanced at her companions. "Joker! Make a note of it. Send someone to Oddworld to help the Glukkons and hopefully curry some favor. Or even recapture the eco-freak. I doubt the hyenas are going to be much good there..."

The Joker grinned slightly more than usual. "You got it."

Wuya glanced at Metalface again. The Founder hurredly resumed talking. "Our agents infiltrating the Super Smash Brothers Stadium have reported that they're going to start a new tournament shortly. Popular rumor is that it's going to take the form of several week-long tournaments, with escalating cash prizes and artifacts of magical power. One of your Inner Circle already has a particular interest in that world, but he requested that I pass the information on to you for some reason."

"Very well," Wuya said. "What else?"

"Our intersteller patrols are reported a weird fluctuation fairly close to Traverse Town. They're not sure what it is (but then again, they're Heartless, they don't really know anything but killing things), but examinations of the energy readings suggest that it's some kind of reverse wormhole; some new and really weird world is starting to move onto the interworld dimensional matrice. From the background magic readings, a very powerful one."

Wuya raised an eyebrow. "Indeed? I'll bear that in mind." She glanced at Azula, already planning a small field trip for her apprentice in the near future.

"Oh, one of the late reports only gave me a codename, so I hope you know who it is. Something like, uh, the Angel of Destruction. Or Angel of Death. Angel of Light, maybe. Some kind of angel. Which is weird, 'cause he's working for you, thus making evil more or less by default and therefore no angel at all-"

Wuya coughed pointedly. Metalface got back on track. "Anyway, whoever he is, he said that he's almost co-opted Thugs-4-Less, but he needs a bit more time. Oh yeah, he somehow got wind of something Mr. Lyle did, and he says that if you ever screw with his brother like that again, he's gonna, ah, what was it..." Metalface than cheerfully recited a list of incredibly horrible and violent things, including, not in any particular order, pulling Mr. Lyle's head off and using it as a lawn ornament, carving every word imaginable in the Japanese language on his entire body in very small calligraphy with a rusty knife, feeding the left side of his body to a land pirahna, breaking every single bone in his body at least twenty-two times with the help of a spiked sledgehammer, imprisoning his consciousness within his rotting corpse so he could feel the experience of decaying, and a lot of other nasty things. As the list went on, Mr. Lyle's face turned more ashen, the Joker listened admiringly, and Azula took notes, intending to do several of those things to people that looked at her funny. When he was done, Metalface said, "Oh, yeah, who's his brother? He didn't say."

"That's not important," Wuya said rather stifly, trying not to laugh at the way Mr. Lyle looked like he was about to have a heart attack, stroke and terror-induced spontaneous combustion all at once. "Is that all?"

"What? Oh, no, sorry. Anyway, we got reports that the agents working on the Discworld are doing fairly well, even if they haven't found many receptive to their suggestions. That's the worst of it, m'am." Metalface proceeded to go on a long and boring report of various worlds either under Wuya's control or getting there, talking far too much on mundane factors and embarrasing remarks on the sheer stupidity of many of Wuya's people involved in the lateness of their reports.

Wuya didn't pay much attention to this part; she had bereaucratic people to take care of inconsequential things like that. When he was finally, mercifully done, Wuya waved her hand in the universal gesture of dismissal. "Oh, good, I'd thought you'd never shut up. Go and get those reports filed in the records, will you? But before you do that, go tell the Sewing-Life Alchemist to be expecting me in a short while; I have business with him. Do tell him to throw his other little experiments on the back burner; I have something very important for him to see to personally." She paused. "And please, this time, make sure not to make him think that I mean that literally. The last incident of that was not pleasant."

"I don't know about that," Azula said. "The smell was nice. It's surprisingly hard to get the smell of burnt flesh and pineapples just right."

The two Founders stared at her for a long moment. "...I'm going to be having nightmares about the things you say, m'am," The Founder with the make-up finally said. "Bad ones." That said, the two demons stood at attention, saluting. Dark portals flowed out of the ground below them, swept over than and disappeared, taking the demons with them.

Wuya shook her head and look back at her entourage. "Well, that was annoying. Anyway, to use an all-too appropiate alchemical metaphor: the circle and runes have been drawn, the elements have been brought together, and all that is needed is the proper flow of power." She gave the Joker a meaningful look. "I trust you have provided an appropiate vessel for the Red Lotus? Like you said you would?"

The Joker, idlely flipping a two-faced coin across his bony knuckles with inhuman dexterity, shrugged absently. "Nope."

Wuya stared at him.

For several long moments, the Joker continued to play with the half-dollar, the burned side of the coin contrasting the brighter half. Wuya gripped her staff tightly as magical energy flowed from it into her, filling her with raw power that immediately made itself known. Unnatural forms flickered in and out of existence around her, her rising rage taking itself out on the fabric of reality itself, which nowadays was more like a threadbare patchwork hand-me-down rather than the thick tapestry it was normally depicted as. Azula and Mr. Lyle gave each other significant looks and took several steps away from the Joker. "And why," Wuya hissed. "Do you not have an appropiate vessel available?"

"Because it's not appropiate, it's insanely convienient and a potentially permanent solution to the problem to begin with. "Besides," With his free hand, the Joker pointed at Mr. Lyle. "It was his idea to begin with."

Wuya slowly turned to Mr. Lyle, her anger turning on a new target. "And you didn't think it prudent to tell me about this before...why?" Malevolence dripped from every word, and was matched by unbridled fury by the green fire flickering around her eyes.

Mr. Lyle started to sweat. "Ah...I thought it'd be funny to tell you at the last minute?" He said weakly, grinning hopefully.

She sharply stepped over, just in front of Mr. Lyle and swung the lower end of her heavy metal staff directly between his legs and into his crotch.

The resultant scream was notably higher-pitched than a man's normally was.

Wuya neatly stepped out of the way as he fell over, the power she borrowed from her staff flowing back into it wile the unreality swirling around her neatly fading back into normality. "Well, what do you know?" She said brightly over Mr. Lyle's whimpers. "That wasfunny!"

The Joker crossed his arms and made a disgusted noise. "You call that comedy? Where's the depth? Where's the disatisfaction with the status quo? Where's the revelation of the chaos inherent in the apparent logic? Hell, I'd settle for cleverly timed punchlines starting with the comedy 'k's!"

Ignoring him, Wuya rolled her staff into the crook of her arm and brought her hands together expectantly. "So, the vessel. Whe and where is it?"

Mr. Lyle moaned before he managed to get back on his feet. Most men wouldn't recover that fast from being whacked in the Place That Shall Not Be Thwacked, but Mr. Lyle was more durable than seemed normal, or even decent. "I got Kevin Levin."

Azula gave Wuya a look. "What, exactly do you mean by vessel?"

Wuya glanced at Azula. "It's a bit complicated, but take 'vessel' very literally and you'll get the right idea." She frowned. The name sounded vaguely familiar, but she couldn't quite place it. "It rings a bell, but I can't place the note."

"And your metaphors are too obscure, too," The Joker complained, evidently still displeased with Wuya's sense of humor. "What, am I going to have to set you up with appointments at the Society for the Educuation of the Pun-Reliant? Oh, and he's obviously talking about the absorbing boy."

"Isn't SEPT what you call a bunch of werewolf packs that gather in one general area for mutual support and companionship?" Azula wondered.

"Oh," Wuya said. "That Kevin Levin." She frowned, thinking about the consequences of the boy's powers combined with the substance the Joker had brought. After a moment, she grinned wickedly. "That's...brilliant." She patted Mr. Lyle on the head. "I may have misjudged you, Hell's pawn."

"That'd probably mean more if you hadn't just violated the most taboo law of interaction known to mankind in general and men in particular," Mr. Lyle grumbled. "Hey, did you just call me a Hellspawn?"

"No, I said 'Hell's pawn'. Pawn. It's more accurate."

"True," Mr. Lyle conceded. "I auditioned to be one once, you know. A Hellspawn. Didn't pan out; something about me lacking certain appropiate character traits. And the last one went AWOL and the Senior Partners are still steamed about it."

Wuya rolled her eyes, not overly interested in the sordid details of Mr. Lyle's homelife. "Whatever. Where is he? I don't suppose you stuck him in a cage or something right around the corner? Something that won't require us to, ah, walk through another small, cramped, subterranean corridor?"

Mr. Lyle violently shuddered. "No, nothing that contrived," Azula said, surprisingly enough, cocking an eyebrow at Mr. Lyle in a way that indicated that she had every intention of exploiting his clear claustrophobia to psychologically torture him in some hideous fashion in the near future. "Assuming he hasn't been moved, he'll still be in solitary confinement. Shoved him in there to see if the complete absence of anything to talk to might make him at least bend a little, but..." She shrugged with an irritated little jerk of her wrists, conveying her clear unhappiness with his rude inability to break.

Mr. Lyle raised an eyebrow. "Wait, why did you take an interest in this kid in the first place? He doesn't have the right sort of...personality for torturing. He's like a rock."

Azula returned his eyebrow-raise and added a crooked nod for emphasis. "I could ask you the same thing. What gives you the idea of using him for...whatever it is we're using him for...when you've only been here for a few weeks and you've only just gotten to know the prisoners?"

"I take an interest in profitable situations," Mr. Lyle said, smiling an off-kilter smile. "And that includes what I shall call, for lack of a more dignified word, 'personnel'." Azula gave him a curious look tempered with interest.

"Enough already," Wuya said before they could start doing something stupid like debating on whether it was more artistic to torture someone to death with finely honed instruments utilitzed according to neatly arranged graphs of acceptable violence measured against pain thresholds, or using a blow torch, acid-laced stencils to gouge pictographs of nightmarish horrors that would make the Marquis de Sade retch into their flesh and bone and see how far you could get until the victim went and died out on you like a wuss. "If you know the way to Devin-"

"Kevin," The Joker corrected.

"-Then lead on. Wait, has he been moved?" Mr. Lyle shook his head. "Okay then."

Azula thumbed backwards over her shoulder. "I think there's an elevator lift that way. If the layout hasn't changed on us this week, it'll take us halfway there. Then it's just a short walk to his cell."

"Do we have to walk? Couldn't we use the Dark Corridors?" Mr. Lyle asked uncomfortably. "That elevator's going to get a little cramped with all of us in there."

Wuya rolled her eyes. "Oh, swallow your cowardice, Mr. Lyle. A little exercise can't kill you."

"It does if you overdo it and you have cardiac arrest," The Joker remarked. Mr. Lyle gave him a look that he might've learned in whatever trade school fiends attended before they were certified as tormentors of the damned, corruptors of the living and network television executives. "What? You know it's funny."

------

It was a short trip to the elevator lift Azula had mentioned; fortunately, it hadn't been moved lately, though there had been a large and unusually articulate squid blocking the way and complaining about everything around them, including things that it had no logical reason for being capable of knowing. A technician had blamed it on excess magical backlash, and Azula's Firebending had seen to it that the squid ceased to block the way in about six point two seconds, with a net result being that the squid was quickly reduced to an ashen feast for the Founders (and her more craven employees) and three unlucky technicians had been horrifically burned. Business as usual whenever Azula was involved, in other words.

As the calculatedly ponderous machinery operating the lift went to work and took them up. (And down. And sideways. The solitary confinement cells were located in a well-guarded massive chamber the size and shape of a silo, all as a security measure. Besides, even Wuya wasn't totally sure of the precise dimensions of her fortress, even though it never impeded getting around. In that way, it was a bit like an evil Fosters.), Wuya told Azula about a man from an alchemical country called Amestris. A man who even fiends admired.

His name was Solf J. Kimblee. But he was better known, in history books, mass murdering records and the blood-soaked memories of his world itself (until it was devoured by the Heartless) as the Red Lotus Alchemist.

Azula knew very little about Amestris, the secret plot that was responsible for it's very existence or the State Alchemist Program that recruited talented alchemists into the military, but Wuya didn't to tell her much, only informing her of the essentials. It was enough to tell her that Amestris was a country that quite intentonally had a history splattered with blood wherever you looked; from the savage skirmish at it's very begining, conflict had driven Amestris since it's inception, and the pinnacle of the country's many wars prior to it's destruction not so long ago was a civil war waged between Amestris itself and an ethnic people living in the east of Amestris whose dark complexion, red eyes and generally white hair made them stand out against the primarily white and blonde Amestrians. More important was that they were almost universally followers of a religion called Ishbalinism (which seemed to be a mixture of the various Judeo-Christian faiths, a subject of interest to numerous theological scholors researching the fact that many, many, many of the various world's religions were nearly identical). That civil war had been started when a shapeshifting artificial human being-a homunculus- that was Envy incarnate shot an Ishbalan child while disguised as an Amestrian officer, who, ironically, was against being there on Ishbalan land in the first place. The Ishbalans, already fed up with the Amestrian forces occupying their land, erupted into furious retaliation that soon became a full-out war.

The resulting war lasted more than seven years. For all their experience and efficiency, the Amestrian military was stymied by the brutal stocism of the Ishbalans; one reluctant soldier, years later, had remarked that the merciless desert climate that had bred the Ishbalans had consequently instilled in them a incredible resilience of spirit that went hand-in-hand with their religion's strict code of conduct and honor. Of course, this was all going according to plan; the point was to shed blood on another part of the map, and it was immaterial whether or not the blood in question belonged to Amestrians or Ishbalans.

In time, though, the toll it took on the country necessitated a quicker resolution; trade with the eastern and soutern nations were suffering, soldiers were dying off by the cartload or being sent home with an indecent lack of limbs, and it didn't help that a single Ishbalan warrior priest was as good a fighter as an entire unit of soldiers. The ruler of Amestris, Fuhrer King Bradley (King being his first name), who was himself a homunculus properly named Wrath for fairly obvious reasons, sent in the State Alchemists to solve the problem of the Ishbalans by simply killing every single Ishbalite down to the last man, woman and child, even down to the military officers who happened to be Ishbalan. It was an all-out genocide campaign that was strikingly similar to various other incidents like it around the worlds in the last few decades. Azula herself thought it sounded a bit like the Air Nomad extermination, except much more protracted, not to mention recent.

To put it bluntly, the overall effect was like dropping a brick on a watermelon: pieces were everywhere and the mess was incredible. There was a good reason, after all, that the war was officially refered to as the Ishbal Extermination Campaign. The State Alchemists were selected based on their skills, and the ones chosen to go in based on their combat abilities were almost armies in their own right, and it didn't help that most Ishbalans were opposed to Amestrian-style alchemy on theological grounds.

Solf J. Kimblee was one of those alchemists, and was a living example of the saying 'every government needs it's butchers as well as it's shepherds'. A destructive man with no real understanding of other people as, well, people, he'd joined the State Alchemists for the purpose of going into battle and conducting what he called his 'symphony of destruction': as an alchemist, he was skilled in manipulating transmutations to creat explosions, most frequently reshaping the metallic compounds in a human body to turn that person's entire biological structure in a big explosives, turning the hapless victim into a human bomb, or else compressing the air and blasting it outward. Given Fuhrer Bradley's view on the proper role of soldiers in general, it was likely that Kimblee's apathetic opinion of his fellow man would have been an asset; armies spent a lot of money trying to instill their recruits with the same approach to war simply as a job to be done with a sense of self-satisfaction and professionalism that Kimblee already had as a consequence of faulty genetics and a stunted soul.

In other words, he was basically the ideal agent of mass destruction. All you really had to do was point him in a general direction, stand a good ways back, and marvel at the mess that ensued.

"Do you know what a Philosopher's Stone is?" Wuya had asked Azula after she was done explaining Kimblee to her.

"No, not really," Azula had replied, not really interested. She didn't understand what the point of the exposition was, and so she ignored it.

"It is the ultimate goal of the Amestrian alchemist, and pretty much any other alchemist, for that matter. You see, alchemy operates mainly on the Principle of Equivalent Exchange: for something to be gained, something of equal value must be lost. The Philosopher's Stone is an indescribably potent alchemical amplifier. An alchemist with it in his posession would no longer be bound by those restrictions, you see. They would become almost incomprehensibly powerful."

"Sounds a bit like the Sorcerer's Stone," Mr. Lyle had commented. "Makes gold from lead, extends your lifespan."

"Cosmically speaking, they're the same artifact. Sort of. Now, here's something hundreds have died trying to find out: what few ever learned, and what even fewer put into action, is that the Stone is made from the most powerful materials there are. Do you know what that is?"

"Soulsteel?" Mr. Lyle had volunteered.

"What? No."

"Refined shards from Sozin's Comet?" Azula said.

Wuya had blinked. "...No, that's not strictly applicable to non-Firebenders."

"Aw."

"Unique metals from all the Outer Planes that, when smelted into an ore, gives you a vision into the true metaphysical nature of the multiverse and the cosmology that it represents, granting you an awareness of Reality itself, allowing you to manipulate in cosmically small but personally immense ways?" The Joker had asked. Everyone had stared at him. "What? I'm not allowed to be all astrally-minded? Supervillians can't have an open mind to the nature of reality, that's what you're saying?"

"Yes," Wuya had replied flatly. "At least when you're doing it. That was incredibly disturbing. Don't ever do that again." To Mr. Lyle and Azula, she had said, "The material in question is greater than all those things. I speak of nothing less than the very lives of sentient beings."

There had been a long silence. No one really reacted. "You know," Wuya had prompted. "Transmuting living human beings, killing them and condensing their life energies and almost certainly their souls into a high-energy substance? That sort of thing?" She had grunted. "I'm not getting through to any of you, am I?"

There had been a longer pause, almost loud with the amount of pondering going on. "So I was close," Mr. Lyle had remarked, looking pleased with himself.

"What?"

"I guessed soulsteel. It's an extremely powerful magical material created by imbuing souls into cold iron. The souls have a tendency to appear in the reflections on the metal and scream a lot. It's very popular among the undead, fiendish and people who buy into the whole Goth thing."

Yet another long pause. "I know that," Wuya had snapped. "Is the import of the power of the Philosopher's Stone and what it means to construct them on a mass scale meaningless to you all?"

"Pretty much," Mr. Lyle had said with a shrug.

"I have no interest in alchemy, so no," Azula had said.

"I wasn't really listening," The Joker had remarked. "What were we talking about again?A medical problem the great thinker Socrates had once?"

And there was much face palming, at least on Wuya's behalf.

Somewhat disappointed by her fellow's lack of interest in something as powerful as the Stone (and the delightfully evil and heartless means of creating one), she had continued with her story. Shortly after the State Alchemists were set loose in Ishbal, all the Ishbalan officers that had been in the military had been decomissioned and arrested, and shortly afterwards killed when their lives had been consumed in the creation of a Philosopher's Stone. It was an experiment, as well as a means in ending the war as bloodily as possible; Ishbalans were, as a product of their enviroment, culture and faith, tough of body and spirit, so there were those who wished to know if the 'ingredients' in a particular Stone made for a more powerful one if those people had stronger spirits than the average person.

It did.

The Stone had then been delivered into the hands of Kimblee, an act on the same level as giving an amoral pyromaniac a flamethrower than never ran out of fuel and setting him loose in a neighboorhood made entirely of tar and wood, and he then proceeded to make a nightmarish legend of himself. His already formiddable powers amplified a hundred-fold by the Stone, he was no longer bound by the rules of equivilency, and, for that matter, to the more basic laws most people understood instinctively, like 'do not blow up that city because the architecture is shoddy' or 'do not blow up your soldiers just because they weren't smart enough to move out of your way in time'.

To this day, even in Traverse Town, traumatized and soldiers told stories of how he had held out his hands, Stone clenched between his teeth, and entire cities had erupted into smoke and rubble, the ensuing blasts anhillating friend and foe alike with no regard for who died as long as the body count soared higher. Sometimes those stories were of a more personal; the handful of surviving Ishbalans that spoke of how Kimblee had turned their friends, families and countrymen into bombs, blowing apart in gory red showers that were still explosive and blew everything they came into contact with, whether buildings, the ground or horrified family members. Soldiers would talk of how he would pick off surviving Ishbalites with timed aerial detonations that would shred them like paper in a grain thresher, or how he would sometimes talk to his fellow alchemists between battles, expressing bewilderment at their trauma and despair at killing thousands of innocent people. And he fought, Kimblee would laugh so terribly and joyously, roaring like a maniac as explosions tore the ground apart, leaving rubble-strewn scars in the landscape where villages and cities had stood.

"I like him already," Azula had remarked, looking dubious even as she said it. "But what I don't understand is you bothering with all this exposition." She had paused. "Also, why the 'Red Lotus', anyway? Sounds too...girly for a serial killer."

"He didn't pick it," The Joker had said. "Fuhrer Bradly (or Wrath) chose a code-name for each alchemist when they were given their license. Kimblee's shtick was blowing people up, tearing them apart in bloody gouts. Like the petals of a lotus opening. Sort of like how some warrior cultures call gladiator fights the 'Flower Wars'."

As their elevator came to a stop and they exited into another corridor, even smaller and sparse than the ones they had traveled through to get to the laboratory (much to Mr. Lyle's obvious discomfort), Wuya elaborated. "I'm trying to give dear Azula an idea of what exactly we're planning with Kimblee. I prefer people to know what they're getting into." She had paused, thinking of her intentions for Dib. "Well, generally on a case-by-case basis. Besides, I like exposition. Who doesn't?"

"I don't," Azula had said indifferently. "What does the stuff in the syringe have to do with this guy anyway? Something he invented? Turns people into bombs? Becauses if your little story is any indication, there are easier ways of doing that."

"No," Wuya had said, deciding that her taste for the dramatic was lost on her. "That is Kimblee."

There had been yet another long pause. "Do you want to run that by me again?" Azula had said after a moment.

"No, I hate repeating myself. You remember what I told you about how the Philosopher's Stone is created with the lives of humans?" Azula had nodded, understanding dawning on her face as they had walked down the corridor. "Do you know the ways a homunculus is born?" Azula had shook her head. "Well, I don't know too much about it myself, but a homunculus is effectively made by creating a being around the Stone, turning it into the homunculus' heart. Most often, a core archetype is infused within the Stone, usually an emotion or attitude of some sort, and a personaliy develoups alongs those lines. Then, there's what the original homunculus calls a human-based homunculus; by injecting a liquid-form Stone into the bloodstream of a human, it is possible that the human will absorb the stone and become a homunculus."

Azula had given the Joker-or rather, what he was carrying under his coat-a startled look. "You mean that thing was a Stone?! With Kimblee's consciousness the directing soul or something like that?"

"Again, no. But quite close, really; a few months ago, I recruited a talented scientist into our ranks. Professor Hojo. He had a theory, you see, after he learned about homunculi; if it was possible to transmute lives into the Philosopher's Stone, than it might be possible for the essence of a sentient being to be condensed into a similar state without killing them. Evidently, he got the idea from his world's practice of harnessing the planet's energy into crystal orbs. He proposed it as a form of immortality: transform them into these dormant liquid states, where they would simply exist, unchanging and asleep, until such time that a suitable living body could be located to house them. With one small snag; the veseels often reject the foriegn substance, tearing their bodies apart even as the soul attempts to take control. Even the ones that survive generally burn out, unable to resist the strain."

From the glint in her eyes, Wuya knew that Azula truly understood what the talk of a 'vessel' had been about and what they intended to do. "Ah," Azula had said, smiling sinisterly.

That had been the end of Azula's short education in the matter, and from there, it had been a short trip to the secluded cell they kept Kevin Eleven in.

As soon as the airlock-style door opened, it was clear that the room was small, but not uncomfortably so, if only so that all the diagnostic equipment, humming generators, arcane machinery and force field generators that lined the walls could fit. It was lit with a unpleasant light timed to go on and off at unpredictable intervals to throw off any sense of time, and that sickly yellow light illuminated an enclosure at the back of the room, that on the other, was uncomfortably small. It was not unlike the ones in the lab they had just spent so much time around, but in addition to being small, was also much more of an obvious cage; it was an ugly thing, thick slabs of heavy blackened metal alchemically melded together, dozens of tubes and pipes going into the machines around the room. It was built so that it was actually part of the room itself, rising from the floor and meeting the ceiling, and was almost completely obscured by the machinery around it. There was no door, of course, only another force field over a gap in the front.

The lift, locked into place so they could step into the room from the vast chamber the lift had navigated to get them there, detached as soon as they had entered the room and the door closed behind them as a security measure. As soon as the pressurized hiss of the closing door died down, and something stirred beyond that force field. In the dim light, it was hard to make out, and considering what could be seen, that was probably a good thing. There was a general sense of great size, that it was far too large to fit comfortably into it's cell, the green energy crackling around it, bright and almost alive, shining off chains-soaked with the blood of kyton chaindevils and given a portion of their life-wrapped painfully tight around it, moving around in a clinking mass to accomodate their prisoner's mass. That same green energy was continually crackling around it, dimly illuminating it as it changed, it's body continually in flux; spines and spikes grew from massive shoulders, turning it's outline demonic and twisted as erratic patches of living fire appeared on it, brightening the cell and giving them a better look at it than was probably advisable.

Wuya snapped her fingers and the glow-orb over the door brightened enough to illuminate the entire room. The creature in the cell hissed, mismatched hands instinctively lurching towards it's face, the chains looping around them and pulling them back down while it's mutant face turned aside, eyes shut so tight it must have hurt almost as badly as the sudden flare of light. Wuya examined the thing, her lip curled in distaste; thing was the best word for what this mutant creature was, at least in her opinion. It was just plain ugly, even by her own rather loose standards. Monstrous, even; if it wasn't for it's uncontrolled shapeshifting, it would look much like a patchwork nightmare put together by grafting the pieces of dozens of aliens into a single roughly humanoid shape. It was in distinctly bad shape as well; badly healed welts, burns and scars crossed it's bizarre body like a badly drawn roadmap, the trauma that had inflicted them beyond the constant regeneration his state of flux granted. Dried foam flecked his changing muzzle, and the absurdly human hair falling to his shoulders was a tangled mess, bloody crusts pockmarking it and nearly calcified by the grease in it. His body flesh, no matter what it's coloration or shape, had an unhealthy pallor to it, and Wuya briefly wondered how many months it had been since she last allowed him to feel natural sunlight. His left arm was in particularily bad shape, blatantly broken in no less than four places, the chains wrapped tightly around it like a cast.

That wasn't even taking into consideration the machinery almost literally grafted into his body; thick tubes drilled into his flesh and supplying precious nutrients while tiny mechanical insects equipped with vicious mandibles literally ate into flesh that continually regenerated itself, harvesting the ever-changing supply of alien DNA samples he made available to them. A small mass of machinery was placed over where his heart presumably was, topped by a large crystal glowing with the same green energy he produced like a living generator. At least a dozen simliar crystals, artificial rather than the alien-based ones he sometimes manifasted, were driven into his body very near his pressure points, glowing bright green. Almost all of this, by this point, was largely unnessicary, but Wuya liked hurting people.

The monster adjusted to the light fairly quickly, probably because of it's constant state of shifting, and it raised itself up to glare at her. Dull gray flesh, hardening into armor while small prickles sprouted everywhere, heaved in a labored breath. It's eyes narrowed at the sight of her, even as one became a bulging and utterly dark Furon eye and the other became a Taxxon's stalk-eye. A huge orange furred-arm, bulking up as diamondlike shards spread through it in large spurs, pulled him further, small tentacles budding on his body and stabbing into the ground just enough to pull him without upsetting the chains. A mouth like something from a oceanic killing machine from prehistoric times bared massive sharklike teeth and growled sullenly.

This beast was battered and abused. He'd been damaged goods long before he'd ever become the thing he now was. Logically, he should have given up a long time ago, if not outright descended into inhuman savagery and madness years ago. Yet here he was, as defiant as he was when she'd first claimed him. Wuya felt momentarily annoyed; he was no hero, the furthest thing from it, but there was a certain intractability that was as bad as the Xiaolin Dragons.

"Good morning, Keven Levin," Azula cooed with false kindness, moving her hand so that more of what must have felt like violently bright light flashed into his eyes; it flinched. "Still as deformed as always, I see. Won't even put on a pretty face for a pretty lady?"

Another growl, rumbling strangely as the mouth it came from compacted, swelled and sprouted finned spikes. Something interesting happening in his throat. "You ain't no lady," Kevin finally said in an exhaused voice, every word a titanic struggle against the forces twisting his body out of control. As if to compensate, one of his eyes slid up his head, a spiked ridge flowing out over it.

Azula scowled, and for a moment, looked as though she was going to burn him. It wouldn't have been the first time. "Do you really think your opinion means anything here?" She spread her arms out, gesturing at the dank surrondings.

Kevin chuckled darkly before stopping, hissing in pain as his body twisted, shrunk in itself and swelled out again, new razor-edged scales sliding out over the incredibly musclular yellow-green flesh of a Lowardian. "Looks like it matters to you."

"Don't argue with the prisoners," The Joker said snidely before Azula got angrier. "It gives them ideas. Makes them feel like people."

"That's rich," Kevin said, hissing louder, trickles of saliva leeking between his teeth and dripping over dried crusts on his jaw. "Coming from a freak that dresses like a clown." He broke out into a choking fit, his throat convulsing and thickening, the vocal cords twisting into some chaotic amalagation that made speech impossible.

"Says the freak that likes pretending he's human even with a face that would make his mother scream," The Joker said back, punctuating Kevin's physical pain with an emotional slight. "Oh, that's right, she already does that, right? Before she died, squealing like a pig when she got eaten?"

Kevin growled angrily and thrust his head aside, his expression momentarily recognizable, twisted though the face was, as a wounded little boy's. His hair swished in his face, and Wuya found herself wondering yet again why his hair never changed like the rest of him did. Nearly shoulder-length, straight and black, it was beautiful even with the blood, filth and grease layered into it, and she supposed that perhaps some part of Kevin's psyche kept it from changing, instinctively clung to this last remaining vestige of humanity. It was very likely; except for his hair, there was no vestige of the boy that this monstrosity had once been. Not his eyes, not his general shape, not even his voice.

Just the hair.

Mr. Lyle snapped his forefinger and remaining thumb, producing a small cold black spark. "Hey, kid. Remember me?" Kevin stared at him and snarled, something massive and clawed that might have been a leg or muscular tentacle bunching under him. It wasn't very much. "Oh, good. I was worried I might've broke your head a little on my last visit a few days ago." Kevin made another wordless sound of rage, and Wuya glanced at the numerous breaks in Kevin's left arm. Even without the mechanical bugs eating at them, they were festering. In a way, it was lucky for Kevin that the process lying in wait for him would heal his injuries.

Mr. Lyle bent down a bit so that he was eye level with Kevin, or at least at the median where Kevin's eyes kept drifting around. "Well, still haven't considered my little offer? Sure you don't want to leave this little cage, do whatever we need for fun and profit?" He smiled wide. "You could get out of here. Forever. Away from the machines and out of the dark." He smirked maliciously. "Not to mention away from this thing you've become. This abomination. And trust me when I say that I know what I'm talking about when it comes to things of nightmares. And you, kid, are just plain nasty."

Kevin glowered at him. Wuya thought it strange that he didn't growl or froth at the mouth or suddenly almost dissolve in biological chaos of sharpness and bestial wrath. He'd done those things before, but never this sullen stare.

"And these experiments on you have been Hell. Nothing personal about it, you know. Bad luck for you, I guess. Or maybe I should say karma; you weren't exactly a sterling example of humanity, even when you could look the part. Killing people to get money, electrocuting everyone that pushed you around and going on vengeful rampages?" Keven simply stared at him, a dull twitch in what Wuya chose to think of as his lower jaw for lack of a better anatomical reference. "Mind you, I'm not saying anything negative. We all do what we have to survive." Mr. Lyle glanced at his thumbless hand for a moment. "Some just have to do worse, to survive even worse." He peered at Kevin, to gauge his reaction. Seeing that he wasn't really getting much, he went forward. "But that still didn't give that Tennyson kid an excuse to turn you into..." He gestured vaugely at Kevin, who now looked mildly surprised at Mr. Lyle's information. "This."

Kevin finally spoke again, struggling through his physical limitations. "My fault," He grumbled, glaring at Mr. Lyle "How the hell do...you...know?"

Wuya raised an eyebrow. What does he think he's doing? She wondered.

Mr. Lyle smirked maddeningly. "You know the saying 'Hell knows, Heaven suspects'?" He paused for a reaction. He didn't get one. "It's not just a saying." He shifted position, carefully watching Kevin. "Anyway, back to my main point here. You help us willingly, you can join us instead of rotting-possibly literally-in this hellhole. We could help you, remove that energy in you and let you go back to being human. Or a resonable fascimille, anyway." Mr. Lyle extended his thumbless hand, as if to shake. "What do you say? Want to cause a little havoc for your freedom? And humanity?" He paused, glancing at the Joker significantly. "Or we could always go to Plan B. Which would be very unpleasant for you."

There was a long pause as Kevin considered Mr. Lyle's offer, thinking on it's various ramifications and options. Then he narrowed his eyes and raised the shifting mass of his right arm. The hand, now a furry paw with stubby fingers tipped with thick claws, turned, back of the paw towards Mr. Lyle, and extended the middle digit up.

Mr. Lyle shrugged and stood back up. "Fine. Be that way. But be sure to remember; I gave you a choice. Whatever happens to you from here is your own fault." He paused. "Oh, yeah. I lied. Plan B was what we hand in mind anyway." He shrugged apologetically. "Nothing personal."

Wuya rolled her eyes and glanced over at her apprentice. "Azula? Care to do the honors?" She said aloud. Kevin's mismatched eyes narrowed, his lips peeling over teeth sharpening to needle points.

Azula smiled cruelly. It was an expression she was very good at; iron maidens looked downright innocent compared to her. "If you insist." She glanced at the Joker, making a 'gimme' gesture with her hand; he pulled out the syringe again and, with another dramatic flourish, handed it over to Azula.

She smiled again at Kevin. It was not a nice smile, but that went without saying. It was crooked, more than a little insane, and promised nasty things to the universe in general and Kevin in specific. "Do you have any idea what this is?" She brandished the syringe for Kevin's inspection. He stared at it, not saying anything. "Well, I suppose I could go on a long-winded story that didn't go anywhere, like some people-" Wuya grimaced. Some people just didn't appreciate backstory. "-But I believe in showing, not telling."

Kevin glowered at Azula, clearly not liking what she was saying. It was hard for Wuya to get the gist of what he was thinking; his bizarre face was almost never structured like a human's, making his expressions difficult to understand, and the incredible energies concentrated in his body made a sort of background noise in the back of his mind that rendered telepathy equally taxing. Even so, the raw waves of emotion twisting around him were unmistakable, and easy enough for her to sense; a considerable surge of fear intertwined with hate and a curious measure of sullen resignation. He was used to treatment like this, Wuya had realized long ago, and for a moment, the weariness wore against his mental defenses just enough for the energies around him to subside, and she-

A young teenage girl, a year younger than him, with a a pretty face framed by red hair pulled back over green eyes shining with pink-purple energy, and something has changed in the way he thinks of her; not an enemy anymore, not an obstacle in his stupid obsession but one of a few people that have never hurt him outside of self-defense, people resent him not because of the half-human freak he is but because of the horrible things he's done. A small distinction, but words can't describe what it means to him, and it tears him up inside, thinking of her and what could have been when her brown-haired cousin made his offer.

"You can come with us," he had said, and he could have, but he was too STUPID, too angry at the world and everything in it for treating him like an animal for so long that he became one long before he turned his powers on the boy's alien watch and turned himself into a more obvious monster. The weight of it tears at him, rips his mind apart the more he thinks about it, but it gives him a strange comfort: he had a chance, an oppertunity to be somewhere else than he got himself to, and he could have joined them, but he had no one to blame but himself for his stupid decisions this time.

-got a brief flash into Kevin's mind, and she raised an eyebrow at the disjointed thoughts therein. It was slightly disappointing, actually; he didn't seem nearly as broken as so many others under her control, and he could have been an excellent agent for her. She'd made the offer more than once, before Mr. Lyle had ever come along, and had gotten the same reaction, in varying degrees of vehemency that had grown less violent and more stoic as time had gone by. Ironic, actually; he hadn't ever had a choice in serving her, whether it was her scientists mutilating his freakish body in search of whatever secrets it might yield and what she had in mind right now.

Wuya wasn't aware of it, but Kevin was actually closer to the edge then she was aware of; the torture he'd endured under her scientist's cruel minstrations was bad enough. Slowly losing control of his own body was worse, something contributing to his mental troubles for a long time even before the experiments inflicted upon him had tore the energies within him completely out of control, turning his body into a chaotic parade of nearly every species in over a couple dozen worlds from one galaxy alone, but the worst of all was the loneliness. Kevin had hated being ostracized when he was younger, and being confined in a tiny space, unable to significantly move around was slowly driving him insane with cabin fever.

And then, when all other sounds went silent in his cell, without footsteps outside his door or the mocking of evil people or even his own screams to drown it out, was thevoice. It's voice. Something cold and rasping, like the voice of a demon pulling itself from Hell on the back of the screaming masses. It had been there, in one form or another, since he'd tried to absorb the energies of the Omnitrix and succedded all too well. Impulses and ideas darker than any he'd ever had before, not just killing people to get what he needed or wanted, but killing them just because he wanted to, because it made him feel better to lessen his misery by inflicting it upon them with the monstrous strength his newly-inhuman body afforded him. Hunting down Ben Tennyson and tearing him apart limb from limb for making it possible for him to taste the power of the alien watch on his right hand and turn him into a monster was one of those ideas.

In time, his desires became different, more chaotic and gradually less sane, and they evolved, or maybe it was better to say that they didn't just influence him. After he had been trapped in the Null Void with that alien monster Vilgax, they had stopped being vauge feelings and became voices, evil words, suggestions and taunts coming from every dark shadow and unknown corner when he wasn't fighting for his life and escaping things that snapped and bit and wanted him dead for just being there. The voice had grown stronger, more alive, and he soon realized that it wasn't some part of him amplified by the alien powers, given strength and purpose by the alien forces in him like he'd once believed. It was one of those alien forces, something evil and obsessive, that only thought of dominance and control and felt like something dead.

The name of that dead dread thing was Ghostfreak, or so Ben Tennyson had named it. It was evil in a way that Kevin had never really understood, and as he had come to realize that it was Ghostfreak who had compelled him to use his twisted power as viciously as he wanted to, control and use everyone around him with fear and violence, not Kevin himself, or at least not as completely as he'd thought. To that thing, Kevin wasn't anything more than a puppet, a pawn for it to use in it's stupid obsession with controlling everything around it. He hated it, loathed it more than anything else in his life, more than he'd hated Ben. It was so much worse than anything that came before.

He could hear Ghostfreak right now, the feeling of utter coldness unrelated to anything around him that heralded the rise of it's consciousness within him. You sicken me, boy, Ghostfreak whispered, and even though there was nothing there, he still felt spindly fingers like long jointed claws touch his cheek, so cold it made his skin crawl and sent small spurs shooting around his face. You lie in this chamber like a dead thing when you could join them and be free.

Kevin didn't bother to answer him. He rarely did these days. To him, it was all a fight, always had been. He'd been fighting, it seemed, since he was old enough to look into his stepfather's eyes and see the disgust there; fighting his personal war first for the approval of a mother who didn't love him enough to protect him, the imagined respect of a long-dead father, than simply to survive on the streets of New York. Later, he'd had someone to fight, pinned Ben Tennyson and his family as something to direct all his embittered agression against. Now he fought everything; fought his own treacherous body for control. Fought whoever experimented on him that day for the sake of denying them his screams. Fought Ghostfreak and Azula and everyone else for the sake of his sanity, however tenuous it was. His reality was war, and he was set against a universe bent on making him suffer.

It was a losing battle. He knew that. One day, he was goingto lose. He would die, probably. It could be worse; they could finally break him and use him however Ghostfreak or Wuya or whoever wanted. He didn't even want to think about giving in, following orders and fighting for his tormentors just to escape. But he was equally certain that it wouldn't be this day, and he didn't want to give them the satisfaction of giving up in any way, not without a fight.

So, ignoring the words in the back of his head that itched like carnivorous worms in his skull, he chose to fight.

Wuya made a strange gesture, like she was weaving a cat's-crade with one hand, and the force field in front of Kevin faded out. Even with the chains holding him so tight it hurt, he managed to move into a squatting position, bracing himself for any defiance he could muster, no matter how pointless. As his entire body uncontrollably shifted into an even broader shape, a black insectile exoskeleton growing over a predatory Yautjua's broad muscles, the chains tightened around him, almost making him cry out in pain. Azula silently stepped into the little cell, an intolerable smugness in every motion. She didn't know what was going to happen, Kevin was sure of it, but it didn't mollify his rising panic at the horrible glee in her eyes. As she came closer and closer, his every instinct screamed at him to attack her, kill her if he could, just strike out with all the impossible strength he could find in his mutant body; perhaps sensing this, the chains tightened even further around him, winding around him like boa constrictors.

It hurt. Everything hurt, from the labored inflation of his lungs to the burning of his flesh as it constantly rearranged itself without warning, consistency or relief. And the memories of what he could've had hurt worse, Ghostfreak's cruel scorn making him mad enough to kill something, and the anger hurt; he was sick of always being mad and feeling like he was burning into ash from the inside-out. It wasn't fair, none of it was fair, and he was so tired of being so wound up from fear and anger and stress that he felt like a single tap would drive him insane-

A small feminine hand lightly touched on a shoulder that was trying to grow back-jutting spikes and blades at once. Something snapped in him (not her, never her, don't ever let her touch you) andKevin roared and twisted, foamy saliva streaming from knife-long killer's teeth as his mouth opened impossibly wide, turning his head and lunging, wanting so bad to make someone pay for making him more of a monster and Azula was so close and he moved to bite, to kill and crush and hurt-

Cold metal choked him, a loose loop of animate chain winding over his neck and squeezing until a small pitiful noise escaped his throat, a scream bled of air and noise until it was just a puny gasp. Kevin's head rolled back, all thoughts of desperate vengeance forgotten. He gasped for breath, flinching as Azula unworredly stroked the roiling flesh of his cheek with a finger. "I'd hate to see you at the doctor's," She whispered, and Kevin recoiled at how close she was to him, and the smell of burnt flesh and ozone she carried around her, coming through whatever floral perfume she was wearing. "You're so very picky about who touches you."

He was so distracted by her, so revolted by her touch and afraid that at any moment it was going to turn into more blinding pain that he didn't see her other hand hold up the sinister syringe, thumb pushing lightly against the plunger. Then there was a small pinprick on his neck, followed by a peculiar stinging in his neck. "You tell me if this hurts or not," Azula said primly, and slowly pressed down on the plunger of the syringe now stuck in his neck, injecting the contents of the syringe directly into Kevin's bloodstream.

For a moment, Kevin blinked, nonplussed and wondering what the slight pinprick in his neck was. Then, as the red fluid instantly diffused and spread across his entire circulation system, the Omnitrix energy reacted to it just as his natural powers reflexively absorbed it.

For an instant, nothing changed. And then everything changed, and he was falling, he remained in the same place, but he felt like he was still falling, falling into an abyss and it was so cold, so bitter and dark and empty-

Everything went white with pain, just like the first time he'd lost control of his own body, and another voice latched it's claws into his fractured sanity.

And this one was worse than Ghostfreak.

------

Mr. Lyle and Azula took a step back as Kevin reared back and screamed, his body warping and bending in a bizarre flurry, a biological chaos even more out of control than before.

"Guess it did hurt," Azula murmured as Kevin writhed and shrieked, his flesh thrusting out in foot-thick tentacles studded with barbs before bursting into flame, one side of his face contorting and compressing into a human face, high-cheeked and narrow. The syringe popped out, muscular contractions forcing it, and landed unceremonious on the floor, a drop of red clinging to the needle's tip. "Is this supposed to happen?"

Wuya smirked in satisfaction. "Yes." She said simply as the green energy around Kevin coiled around him, turning him a radiant green mottled with the dark red of the soul-stuff, or whatever you might call it. She had seen this before, watched this process at least four times, but never with someone with Kevin's unique body, and watched with interest at the bizarre changes occuring to him, watching the weird things his hands were turning into, apparently undecided between being burning magma-hands or techno-organic paws with the features of a dozen species visible on either, frantically reaching for his face, the human side of it looking mildly surprised as opposed to Kevin's bewildered agony.

"NO!" Kevin howled, vocal cords reasserting themselves, his jaw reconfigured itself in a series of sickening crunches, turning into something more human, the absurd array of fangs already becoming smaller and receding behind his lips. "Not again not again not again, NOT AGAIN! My body, not your's, it's mine, all mine stop trying to CHANGE IT!" His neck abruptly started heaving from the left to the right, becoming smaller, and at the same time, she could see the transforming energies around him sinking into his body. The machines in and on him started detaching, responding to preprogrammed signals, the crystals dropping off while the tubes retracted. The mechanical bugs retreated en masse, melding with the cell walls and vanishing on contact.

Mr. Lyle cocked his head, interested, as Kevin's broken arm completely and flawlessly turned into the circuit-streaked black liquid-flesh of a Galvanic Mechomorph, broken bones and damaged muscle transforming into living nanotechnology, than glowing dimly as it turned into a human arm, pale and slender, looking absurdly small on Kevin's immense body. At the same time, patches of similar humanity were appearing all over his body, increasing in frequency as Kevin's distress got worse. He was fighting a war within himself, that was obvious, and he was losing it very quickly.

His entire body began shrinking, becoming more human with an escalating series of crunches and noises. His remaining alien bits were already becoming smaller, random mutations happening more slowly and less dramatically. As immense spines burst from his back only to slide back in, his hair changed, develouping a blue tint, falling more wildly over a face that was rapidly becoming entirely human. Kevin screamed again, louder this time, and recoiled as though someone had struck him, his remaining alien eye wide in absolute horror as razor teeth flattened and reset themselves into jaws contorting into a more human shape, his muzzle seperating into a mouth and nose.

His legs twisted, growing smaller and more human, his back-bent ankles crunching as they became more humanlike, clawed toes shrinking into proper toes. With another loud crunch, his entire upper body twisted, turning into sinewy muscles and all traces of inhumanity vanishing in flickers of emerald energy before red overwhelmed the green, flashing over his energy body for an instant. Wuya saw the outline of a body in the red, humanlike except for a weirdly distorted head reforming as she watched, and a loud roar, a monster's voice that suddenly changed just like everything else, becoming the croaking rasp of a young teenager, perhaps the true voice of Kevin Levin, yelling something inchoherent and hard to make out except for the clear and surprising defiance tinged with absolute horror-

The red flashed again and Kevin's body slumped over, hair falling over his face and the chains loose around him, only just tight enough to keep him from falling over himself. His body was completely still, though clearly breathing, and clearly an adult's, wearing only the ragged pants that had been the only clothing that could survive the constant transformations of Kevin's mutant body. He looked fairly tall, even kneeling, and slender. Like a knife, Wuya thought, or some other lethal weapon. His blue-black hair, even longer than it had been, hung down over his shoulder blades, and moved slightly as red-tinted green sparks flickered around the man's body.

The Joker bent down and snapped his fingers in front of the man's face. "Hey, wake up! Wake up, will you? Which one are you, huh, which one are you?" Wuya found his phrasing odd, but didn't comment.

Slowly, very slowly, the man looked up. His face was angular, with a thin chin and slanted yellow-brown eyes. What emotion showed on his face was completely mild; mild confusion, mild interest at his surrondings, and mild distaste at his condition. "Hey," He said softly, recognizing the clown in front of him. "Long time, no see."

"What's your name, huh? Know your name?"

The man laughed, a single hard noise almost like a snap. "Kimblee. Solf J. Kimblee." He paused, and when he next spoke, he did so slowly, as if savoring the words. "The Red Lotus Alchemist."

Wuya started to move forward, sure that it was a success, but the Joker held up his hand, a finger held up in the universal sign for 'hold on'. "What's the 'J' stand for?"

Kimblee tilted his head back. "Nothing. It doesn't really mean anything at all. Bit like life, really." He glanced at himself, properly registering his location for the first time. "Is there a good reason for me to be in chains?"

The Joker stood up, and clapped a few times. "Yup, that's our man. Your theory was right on the money, Mr. Lyle; the kid's absorbing powers worked like a charm."

Wuya rolled her eyes. She heard the chains clinking, and saw that Kimblee was focusing on her, his eyes slightly narrowed like he was peering down a bombardier's scope. Except that analogy wasn't completely right; Kimblee was the scope, the bombardier and bombardier's weapon in one, a perfect weapon.

"Do we have to do this every time?" Kimblee asked. "Every time, it's the same thing. Twenty Questions, but even more pointless. So sick of having to swap bodies every time one burns out on me." He paused. "What happened last time, anyway. One moment, I was doing the job. Yeah, the job. Than I was dying body-death again, and then...nothing." He paused. "There was screaming. Yeah. So much screaming, men and boys and girl and women and babies, a backdrop against the explosions of an entire world going up in flames...it was so beautiful. So beautiful..." Kimblee began to whisper, a solitary tear leaking from the corner of his eye. He frowned, and cocked his head. "Who's talking? Stop yelling, geez, you're loud! And the other guy, stop whispering, I can't hear you..." He paused again. "On the other hand, go back to whispering. You sound remarkably unpleasant. Hey, don't take that tone with me, kid, I don't care, it's my damn body now, I'll do whatever I want with it."

Azula raised an eyebrow. Wuya looked sharply towards the Joker and Mr. Lyle: the former was paying a great deal of attention to a stain on the ceiling while the latter tried to look innocent, a feat at which he failed extravagently. "What's the matter with him?" Azula whispered to Wuya. "Should he be this...unhinged?"

The Joker shrugged. "You tell me. You're the magic-lady, not me. I lack the requisite equipment." He snickered at his own bad joke. "Could just be that the Kevin kid's still running around in his own head, now that Kimblee's in charge. It's happened once or twice in some of the old bodies we installed him in, but not ones as together as Kevin Elevin."

Azula considered Kimblee's mumbling and muttering to people who quite clearly weren't there. "I wouldn't call that kid 'together', in the mental sense."

The Joker shook his head. "You should have seen some of the others. Compared to them, the Levin kid was downright sane. Distasefully so."

Wuya cleared her throat. "Kimblee." The alchemist in question looked up at her. "I have another job for you. Feel up for it?"

Kimblee frowned faintly with a nod. "Certainly. But I do feel like I got hit in the head by a lemon wedge wrapped around a brick, for some reason." He glared at the Joker. "I told you I didn't want to drink the Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster on an empty stomach, but nooo, you had to have hard money riding on it." He paused, looking at the chains around him. "Wait, did I die? Is this some kind of stupid New Age-y ironic Hell? Oh, crap, don't tell me the Ishbalans were actually right! Damn it, my agent at the Interworld Evil Management Agency told me atheism had it's risks in a universe obviously replete with supernatural forces."

"...No," Wuya said after a short pause. "You're still alive. Technically. I meant, how do you feel about the job, regardless of what it entails?"

Kimblee chuckled softly. "Is that so?" He smiled crookedly. "You can count me in."

Azula cocked an eyebrow. "Don't you want the details beforehand?"

Kimblee shrugged indifferently. "Nah, not really. As long as I get to make my war-music, it's all good." He paused. "And maybe getting out of these chains. That would be good too. I think I'm losing circulation to my shoulders. Which is very painful. The prickles are a little soothing, surprisingly enough."

"Isn't it though?" The Joker said. Mr. Lyle glanced at him disapprovingly.

Wuya gestured, and the chains slipped off Kimblee, still clinking longingly for the feel of weak living flesh. He slowly got up to his feet, joints popped and creaking. "This body's been through hell," He muttered, slicking his hair back and grimacing at all the grease, filth and...things in there. "Feels...inhuman somehow." Green energy sparked around his fingers as his nails grew, thickening into black claws. "Ooh, that's new." He looked somewhat different than Wuya remembered; he was taller than he was supposed to be, and a little broader, particularily at the shoulders. His face wasn't as lean and narrow, too, and his skin looked too light, though his eyes were the right amber shade. It was, she supposed, a consequence of merging his essence with Kevin Levin's unique body.

As she had realized when Mr. Lyle had told her of his choice in a vessel, Kevin's absorbing powers would have reacted to the soul-stuff Kimblee had been condensed into by simply, well, absorbing it. As a consequence, there had been none of the tedious rejection messiness that usually resulted with such things, though it appeared that the soul-stuff had reacted with the Omnitrix energies in a way Wuya hadn't foreseen, imposing Kimblee's shape on Kevin's body as usual but not completely, for some reason. Instead, it appeared that this form was a mixture of Kimblee and, most likely, what Kevin might look like at Kimblee's age.

"Mr. Lyle was right. This was a lot of work just to get a field agent," Azula said quietly, looking Kimbley up and down with clear physical interest. "And what if Kevin Eleven burns out too, like those other bodies you mentioned?"

"Maybe," Wuya replied, thinking that Kimblee was rather pleasant to look at. "But always go for the best, I say. Unless you're low on cash. Besides, Kevin's more or less useless to me now; I've already collected all the DNA I need from him. And if my projections are accurate, his body has already perfectly adapted to Kimblee's body, with his innate powers as well as the energies within him."

Kimblee examined himself, evidently displeased with a body that hadn't been cleaned in...a very long time, actually. Even filthy as his body was, Azula and, disturbingly, Mr. Lyle, were still quite interested in it. He looked at his palms, disappointed. "I'm going to need some paints. And some more appropiate clothing." He tugged at his now-loose pants. "These work for prisoners, but are completely unsuitable for someone of my stature. And I need to get cleaned up. I don't like being unclean." Abruptly, his skin started shedding in large, thick flakes weighed down with the dirt, filth and other stuff Kevin's imprisonment had acclumated. Kimbley blinked as green sparks flickered around him, his skin shedding in large patches and revealing new, pinkish skin beneath. "...Maybe just a quick shower, then." He muttered, scratching absently at a particularily large fold of shedding skin on his cheek.

"Yeah, you do that," Wuya said before glancing at Mr. Lyle and Azula. "You two. Get Kimblee prepared. Give him the details of his mission and..." She paused heisitantly. "Transport." Kimblee gave her an openly pleading look. "Oh, and a change of clothes." Kimblee grinned in a way that would have been happy on someone who wasn't so emotionally dead. She looked at the Joker. "Don't you have something else to do?" The Joker shrugged. "Then go back to whatever it is that you do. And no details; I was sick for hours the last time you said anything."

"Okie-dokie," The Joker said cheerfully as he left the room. "Back to proving that you can nail Jell-O to a tree! Oh, that reminds me, your work force is down fifteen percent. I warned 'em not to get in the firing range, but nooo, they just had to get involved, huh? 'Course, it was probably a bad idea to put the tree in the Founder barracks, but that's their problem, isn't it?" He continued rambling to himself as a dark portal opened up around him and disappeared, taking the Joker with it.

"Yeah, he is insane, isn't he?" Kimblee said amicably. "But he's still fun."

"He says the same thing about you," Mr. Lyle replied playfully.

Wuya opened a dark portal for them, the six-foot high egg-shaped vortex of darkness expanding from her shadow. "This will take you to the appropiate place." Nodding understandingly, Mr. Lyle, Kimblee and Azula walked into it. As they did so, Azula moved slightly too close to Kimblee, saying, "You doin' anything tomorrow, war flower?"

Kimblee gave her a mildly confused look. "...How old are you, exactly?"

Azula grinned evilly. "How do you wanna find out?" Kimblee blinked, looking mildly frightened. Mr. Lyle snickered as he took hold of Kimblee's arm, the alchemist glowering at the uninvited physical contact and yelping in dismay as Mr. Lyle pulled him into the dark portal, Azula grinning evilly as she followed.

Wuya chuckled to herself, and wished she could have watched the mess that would undoubtedly ensue, but she still had business to take care of. "I really should get more people to handle the little things," She mused to herself. She blinked. "Why am I talking to myself?"

She devoted at least five minutes to the question before she decided that it wasn't worth thinking about and went on her way, opening another dark portal, this time directly around her person, and vanished in a flurry of shadow and blackness.

She reappeared in another part of the same laboratory complex, but not in the brightly lit and expansive spaces she had spent far too much time entertaining Mr. Lyle's erratic interests in; her eyes took a moment to adjust to the much dimmer quality of light, the ever-present glow-orbs she liked for lighting much darker than usual.

Wuya tapped her staff against the ground, and the glow-orbs brightened to a more comfortable level, at least for her; loud raspy screeches and howls echoed around here almost immediately, rising for a brief moment above the background sounds: the gloop of blood-tinted liquid running through a complex maze of glasswork machinery in the machinery, electrical humming just below the slightly louder buzz of computers and other machines doing their work, the dripping of bodily fluids dropping into specially arranged collection trays and more.

The sounds of things that were actually alive were louder. A near-constant chorus of whimpers and screams, the savage roars of massive things slamming and crashing into another, the wet crunches of lifeless bodies busily being torn apart and eaten by those still barely alive, futile sounds of flesh hitting force fields and coming right back again and again, mismatched footsteps ecohing in tune with heavy distorted breath. Sometimes, there were words, but more often, they were only whispers, both mad and inchoherent:"It's so dark here, so wet and sharp, how it burns the bright and warm, burns it so bad..."

Wuya took several steps forward, moving around a decsicated and almost mummified corpse that no one had bothered to move, and thought that it was probably unsanitary. The area around her was small compared to many of the places around her domain, a large hallway connecting to several smaller rooms, danker, darker and dirtier than normal, looking like a mixture of a large and very unkempt apartment suite and a mad scientist's laboratory, and for good reason.

She grimaced as she passed an enclosure much like the ones throughout the laboratories. Two sallow things that had probably once been human savagely tore at each other, clawlike nails raking into their flesh while they bit and snapped, hideously distended and yellowing sharp teeth biting deep. They hissed and cowered from the light, rolling back into their little cell, their skin steaming and boiling like melting wax at the light, thin lines of uttermost darkness on them like infection marks. Their eyes glowed bright yellow, and for a moment, Wuya considered that their stunted stances, various sharp protruding bones and natural weaponry reminded her of Soldier Heartless.

She tried not to look at some of the other things she saw. She had done many great and terrible things over her life. She'd enjoyed most of them. But there were...things down here, things that could make even her stomach churn if she thought about them too much. Worse than in the laboratory complex she had gone through, worse than the seemingly endless series of corridors and barricaded half-mad prisoners. Down here, there were no prisoners, not really; just what was left of them, and more often than not, the only word fit for them was monster.

And not all of them were in the cages they belonged in.

"Tucker!" She called out, fighting to be heard over the noise all around her. "Are you in here?" She hoped so; he didn't like leaving his private domain for various reasons, but he did have occasional moments when he ventured out over some pretext or another.

She glanced around, hoping that a Founder might spontaenously appear and point her in the right direction. Many of them worked as small scale technicians and laboratory assistants, and some of them actually liked the somewhat nastier things they could do under her scientist's direction. But then again, the Founders were somewhat adverse to spending any time around in this particular lab, and rarely came in here except when they had to. There was the odd demon who chose to be a lab assistant down here, but they were very much in the minority.

No one answered her. Either absent, or simply too busy. Both possibilities annoyed her.

She considered summoning up her abilities to see auras again, but decided that one, it'd probably easier in the long run to simply follow the freshest trail of grotesque sins against nature, and two, much less traumatizing, given what she would be privy to when looking at the deep resonances the auras embodied.

The idea worked; after searching fruitlessly through at least four room, all of them in varying degrees of messiness and just storage for the horrible experiments withiin, she found herself passing a large enclousure filled with furless werewolves with the perpetually grinning heads of deformed humans ferociously brawling with equally ugly things best described as eight-foot high ambulant tumors that bubbled and sloshed as they moved and a smaller one inhabited only by a insectile nightmare with a thin powerful body and a long stinger-tipped tail, reading a large book of haiku and chirping cheerfully at Wuya when she went by. Not far from the unusually culture-conscious alien, Wuya saw an adjacent door with light streaming out from under it.

She quietly opened the perfectly mundane door and walked into a small room, lit slightly brighter than normal, at least in this laboratory. It was much more innocent looking than several of the rooms she'd passed through; there was just a large cage holding two severely damaged children with warped and elementally twisted bodies barklike and overgrown with plants or metallic and churning into the likeness of living machinery, hanging from the ceiling just above her, four enclosures of varying size contained a red ooze-thing about the size of a shoebox and the same shape, somehow screaming extremely loudly dispite the lack of a mouth, vocal cords and other important organic bits, much to the displeasure of everyone else.

Next was a humanoid elk with three necks, coyote heads on the outer two and a smaller, headless human-sized neck inbetween. Across the room in the other two enclosures was a mobile mass of hair, like several dozen wigs somehow stitched to another, stumbling over each other in a frenzied search for something, flashes of wickedly pointed fangs glinting in the light.

Most disturbing was an apparently empty enclosure, aside from the Founder she'd named Bob earlier hanging in mid-air, screaming in agony as huge gashes and cuts ripped themselves into it's flesh, at least one arm, several toes, one ear and other bits missing from it and rolling around on the floor. As Bob screamed and periodically paused to comment on the lack of artistic detail in it's torture, insane giggling echoed from every corner of the cell, going louder as more blood splattered against the enclosure's floor. And walls. And ceiling. Bob, apparently, had a lot of blood to go around, though obviously not as much as he'd had before he'd been caught by whatever it was that lived in the enclosure.

Wuya was relieved. The things in here were much less disturbing than some of the other specimens and experiments scattered through this particular private lab.

At the back of the room, furthest from her, was an autopsy table with a decidedly strange set-up; various collection drawers were set up around it in odd places and already housing a number of withered things almost unrecognizable as organs, four magnifying glasses large enough to mistaken for mirrors had been hooked to it by unstable-looking extensions that seemed to be dozens of thick hinges connected by thin metal rods as long as a child's finger, all of them set up at bizarre angles that, given the way one would have to bend to reach them, would have made even a master contortionist grimace. Strangely, there were no surgical tools at hand; no scalpels, scissors or anything at all, as though the one in charge here was either woefully incompetent or simply didn't need them.

The proper answer was the latter; the scientist conducting the autopsy was hunched over the table, at least seven feet tall and dressed completely in a full-body protective suit not unlike the uniform her Founders and other low-tier workers wore, except this was probably white under all the badly cleaned blood and other stains and a lot of grayish ribbed padding spread over it, with small pockets holding various odds and ends strapped to them. The...man, or whatever you might call him, was much thinner than he should have been, his heavy work-suit hanging in folds and clothen lumps on a body that was only vestigally humanoid, various large lumps squirming just under the surface amid a constant chitinous clicking. He was continually adjusting his weight as he worked, probably because one of his legs was much thicker and shorter than the other, a uniquely-shaped boot protected a bent-back ankle, while the other one looked human-shaped if slightly bent to the left, with an bulky boot with a supporting brace built into it.

The shape of the body, barely visible under that work-suit, was just wrong, and Wuya repressed an instinctual shudder as she stepped silently closer to him. It's whole body, at least what could be guessed under it's fortunately thick work-suit, was animalistic, and oddly distorted, as though something had tried to blow it apart from the inside-out some time ago. And there was something about it's back that was sickening; sharply hunched upwards, slowly rising and falling like it was breathing, the faint markings of thin abdominal muscles clearly in the wrong place, insectile shapes squriming over them before disappearing elsewhere, thin shapes that looked horribly like shoulders twitching and flexing as the scientist worked, ignoring the chewing sounds from under it's work-suit.

It's body, compared to it's height, seemed weak-looking, but the arms were thick enough around the shoulders, equipped with not one joint per arm but five; one just after the shoulders, another at the usual place that split into two pairs of forearms so thin that the sleeves covered them like thick blankets, two more on each arm shaped like pivots so that the forearms could twist around a full three-hundred-and-sixty degrees, and a final similar pivot-joint halfway across the upper forearm. All four of it's hands were dispoportianately thicker, equipped with nine-fingered hands too brutish too be called fingers, stubby and yet articulate, blessed with four pivot-joints, and they were all busily at work on W.R. Monger's body, now roughly hoisted up on the autopsy table. They were moving, working, twisting with all their impossible dexterity, not needing any scapels as small but unmistakable knife-blades slid out of special slits in the gloves, slicing through the dead general's calcified flesh and steadily opening up a large cavity for the scientist to explore.

Bad as the suggestion of it's body was, the voice was worse. Wuya knew her monsters, knew her demons and hell-things, and vaugely thought that if you were a thing of nightmares, you should at least have the dignity to have a voice that sounded like it belonged to a monster. Something deep, harsh and gutteral seemed right. Or maybe almost charming, if you ignored the coldness in every word. Alucard's voice was good, she admitted.

This thing didn't have a voice like that. It's voice was a rasping whisper, falling every so often to a heaving wheeze, and it was often hard to make out, as though it had been severely damaged. Wuya had heard of a villian from the ancient days with a wheeze like that, but at least his voice had been intimidatingly synthesized. This man, monster, whatever he was, sounded like his vocal cords have been torn out and beaten, stomped on, stuffed inside stress relief punching bags, used for target practice by blunt arrows and than bequeathed to medical science before medical science they didn't like the look of them and had reinstalled them back in the unfortunate creature's throat.

"Yes, yes," He said fixedly to the numerous recorders set up around him, no doubt to help catch his whispering voice. "Here's something unusual: the inner chest cavity is severely traumitized; the walls have been affected by the same elemental effect throughout the body, fusing partially with the ribs and breastbone. Several spurs, composed of the same sillicate-based material much of it was transforming into, have torn inward, quite rapidly from the abrasions and other internal wounds. I believe I'm seeing the remnants of very bad internal bleeding, which no doubt contributed to Mr. Monger's death, the poor man. Strangely enough, the heart appears to be almost totally unaffected, aside from some minor changes that may have eventually been for reasons of biological efficiency; a more extensive vein network that. hold it, I'm snipping it-" He leaned in, right arm moving in, and sure enough, a hurried series of snipping began. "Done. The veins were thicker and harder than I expected, but not entirely rocklike. They were simply hardier, perhaps as a consequence of the general superhuman adapations present in the body." He reached in. There was a small and unimportant wet noise. "The heart is slightly withered, but still in good shape." The creature diposited a fist-sized organ, the more messy and organic sort of heart, on a collection drawer just under him.

Shou Tucker, the Sewing-Life Alchemist, busy at work, Wuya thought sourly. Or at least, she added, what was left of him.

"Tucker," She said quietly, trying to curb her impatience. She wasn't normally this short with her minions-barring some sort of catastrophic incident, anyway-but frankly, she just didn't like Shou Tucker. It might have been the man's attitude, his grotesque appearance or simple gut instinct, but there was something about him that was frankly irritating.

He jerked and whirled around towards her. Wuya grimaced; his weirdly contorted front was worse than the view from behind, possibly because it looked even more wrong. The head, for instance; the top of it was thinner, coming to a point, with a small breathing mask at the top, while large eye-lenses were located near the bottom, like his head had been literally twisted around. "Miss Wuya," Tucker wheezed, "I-I wasn't expecting you-"

"Yes, you were," She said flatly. "I sent you a Founder with instructions to the effect that you should expect a visit from me."

Tucker frowned. Possibly. "I believe I would remember something like that-"

"The same Founder, I note, currently being eviscerated by one of your experiments."

"...Ah," Tucker said after a moment. "He was trying to tell me something, after he dropped this body off, but he got too close to the wild Zephyr we captured from the world of the North Wind. A savage wind-spirit, you know? And...er....I'm afraid the Zephyr was feeling bored."

Wuya shrugged. "Oh well, no harm done." The background screaming peaked a little louder before it suddenly dropped, eclipsed by a peculiar sucking noise, like air being drained out of someone's lungs "Well, no harm to anyone important. But that doesn't matter right now. I have something important that you need to get to work on immediately. An experiment, involving a new acquisition of mine."

Tucker paused for a moment, his scientific curiosity roused. "...What kind of experiment?"

"Ah, a little pet project of mind, you could say. An improvement of several techniques I used with Azula, along with more technological variations. It's a bit magical, a bit science-y...and that's right in your department."

She couldn't see anything of Tucker's expression, but his manner certainly seemed startled enough. "Me? But why? You have more experienced people than me, whole teams that know more about techno-science that I do! I'm an alchemist, not a doctor-"

She waved a hand, cutting off his protestations. "Enough. I know you, Tucker, and what you're capable of. You're good enough to warrent your own laboratory, and I know that you've got a reputation for biological alchemy for good reason. I need you to apply these skills in a very important project." She paused. "And do keep it quiet. Just our secret until we get results, you understand."

Tucker nodded, after a moment. Or at least, his head slowly bobbed up and down in a affirmative manner. With his body construction, convential body langauge was amiss at best. "Well, if you think my expertise is ideal for the job at hand, I'll...do what I can." He paused unhappily. "Not, I suppose, that I have much of a choice."

"No," Wuya said cheerfully. "You don't. I suppose you checked those X-rays, medical read-outs, aura examination and other scans I took recently?"

"Yes, of course! The boy you brought in, the one everyone's talking about?" Wuya nodded, though she wondered how Tucker knew about that when he rarely left his laboratory suite. That everyone knew was obvious; she'd made her intentions for him more or less clear to her inner council the night before, when she'd shown them Dib, and no doubt several of them or their minions had talked. "I did notice a few irrgularities."

"Oh? Like what?"

"Well, the boy's basic physical structure is...different from a baseline human. It's hard to put it in plain words. Nothing that would stand out to the layman's eyes, but it's still very strange. I'm still trying to determine the extent of the differences, but it's already clear that he's much more physically durable than any ordinary human being should be. Much stronger but lighter bones, a more efficient nervous system...things like that. The durability would certainly explain why he's still alive after wandering around in the Wastelands in our current location."

"Or maybe he's just more resourceful than he appears," Wuya mused. Tucker had made an interesting point, though. She had sensed altogether different about the boy when she'd met him, but she'd put it down at the time to the fact that his gears were clearly a little stripped at the time.

"And it is fainly familiar," Tucker continued, pausing for a thick wheeze. "I'm actually reminded of a Nightroad's base physiology. Nothing on their level, but-"

"Like the Nightroad's, you say?" Wuya interrupted keenly. "Well now...that's very interesting." She thought for a minute, deciding she was going to have to recalibrate her original plans for Dib, though thankfully not by much. "I've an idea. I want you to pull our files on Operation: Rebirth and the Dark Warrior Program and see if you can use anything from them. I have an idea with using elements from them. While you're at it, see if we can use what we've discovered from Crusnik nanoites. If his body is more durable than normal, he might be more receptive to him than, say, that." She gestured at W. R. Monger's body for emphasis. "Understood."

Shou Tucker nodded, looking uneasy. Or at least as uneasy as he could look fully covered, anyway. "Yes, Miss."

"And don't forget that a powerful connection to darkness will come into play, if my own experiments go well. I want you to test what sort of end result this might have."

"Of...of course."

Wuya frowned faintly at Tucker's slight heisitant attitude. "What's the matter with you?"

Tucker paused for a moment, and said, almost helplessly, "But Wuya...he's so...young."

There was something strange in the manner Tucker said it, and at the forefront of his mind, Wuya sensed the face of a young girl, round-faced with big friendly eyes, brown hair tied into two immense braids, a face beloved by Tucker. A moment later, with a sharp twisting pang, it was replaced by the face of a bizarre creature like a dog but slightly larger, snowy fur tinged with longer strands of brown along the back, a rounded snout surronded with hair so much like the girl's, it's eyes the same as the girl's and twisted in bewildered pain.

Wuya leaned in towards Tucker, raising a skeptical eyebrow. "But Tucker," She said coolly. "That's never stopped you before." Tucker flinched and wheezed again, thick and deeply, and he abruptly bent over, choking and coughing. Wuya stood over him, arms crossed, impatiently waiting for him to finish.

The choking attack continued for over a minute, growing in violence as Tucker fell to the floor, whimpering inbetween his increasingly wet coughs, a hint of red spreading from under his face-hood. He stopped hacking and slowly got back to his feet, shaking weakly. Wuya rolled her eyes and turned around. "Don't allow your limitations to detain you," She called back, paraphrasing a tyrant from a world that she admired.

------

Kimblee, even in a culture posessed of the most grotesque form of moral relativity as possible, would have been considered criminally insane. He resented the idea; in his experience, everyone else was insane, with their hypocritical delusions eating at them and having the gall to bawl about it when they were challenged. He'd been through a lot, and quite apart from his own innate coolness, wasn't an easy person to disturb, upset or emotionally affect at all.

Mr. Lyle's constant subtle come-ons and Azula's slightly clumsy if forward style of attempted seduction were doing all three, and he was starting to feel an emotion that he was sure he had never felt before, and it was starting to bother Kimblee that he couldn't put a name to it.

"...So this one vampire, I forget his name, was completely convinced that he was theoretically invincible, dispite being caged," Azula said from Kimblee's right, smiling fondly. "By then, I'm sick of him bawling over his girlfriend and little vampire family being eaten by Heartless, so I start finding ways on making him dead. I do a little, heh, 'hand's-on' research, and it turns out that dismemberment and burning do the trick. And not exactly in that order."

"Yeah, I've heard of those vampires," Mr. Lyle said from Kimblee's other side. It wasn't a pair you wanted to even know about, let alone be in their care. "They get all...sparkly in the daylight. Sometime about how their vampiric transformation crystallizes their skin. I've met some real nasty vampires in my line of work. Like the Baal. Or the Brujah; they're like supernatural vicious bikers on steroids. Or the Tzimisce. Talk about nasty. Even fairies are worse than sparkly bloodsuckers."

"Depends on the fairy," Azula said knowledgebly, flickering her head so that her hair lightly flipped over Kimblee's jaw. He flinched; he hated uninvited contact almost as much as he hated fangirls. "On the one hand, you got wish-granting nitwits that aren't good for much besides draining and feeding to the demons. On the other hand, you get things like the Unseelie, or the Fair Folk; fairies that eat the dreams of mankind and leave soulless husks when they're done. Or just kill people for the hell of it. They're always fun to have around."

Kimblee wished he could have pushed them away or move to a more comfortable distance, but they were insistent on being at either side of him. He wished even more that he could just blow them up, but he was aware of the reprecussions of doing so; it would cause needless structural damage to the nice fortress of doom he'd found himself in. And it might upset Wuya; Kimblee wasn't eager to test her.

The three of them were walking through a massive room easily the size of the entire laboratory Azula and Mr. Lyle had been in not so long ago. It was, basically, the essence of a hanger bay distilled within a aeriel-themed laboratory; small Gummi Ships, double-seater Zoomers and flying cars flew through the air over them, weaving through a complex maze of walkways, tiered floors overhead, and elevator lifts. Kimblee could just barely see the myriad figures up high on the walkways, moving along the many levels in the place, so high up it was mildly dizzying. He wasn't even sure if the top of the place was a ceiling at all or the floor of a level reserved for espicially large aerial war machines, but suspected that it was the latter.

Large structures were placed at regular intervals throughout the place, squarish and designed with airlock-style doors at the easy and west sides along with a larger opening atop roofs that reached the first few levels around them, and the rather obvious nature of them as workshops for ground-based war machines had led to the nickname 'Iron Sheds', according to Azula. Between them, the hastily erected workshops around various downed aircraft that had no doubt been shot down in random dogfights and the occasional mighty death machine rolling out from the Iron Sheds, they had a fair bit of trouble moving around: things kept getting in their way.

Kimblee, even though he was largely disinterested in the actual point of what Wuya wanted him to do was, knew quite a lot about warfare. It was what he believed he had been born, and to a certain extent, remade to do. All the heavy metalwork around, the continual clamor of construction, the flares of energy weapons being tested and the strong smell of whatever they were using to fuel their machines were all musical notes to him, the preliminary drumbeats before the song began in earnest.

These people, it was obvious, were gearing up for war. One on a scale Kimblee almost couldn't imagine.

He smiled at the thought of it, and blinked, realizing that his...'entourage', he supposed, were talking. Rather loudly.

"A bit ostentatious, don't you think?" Mr. Lyle complained, gesturing at a large shell-shaped tank with a large plasma cannon built into it, a focusing lens fixted to the front and surronded by the muzzles, nozzles and barrels of many smaller energy-based firearms, each pointing to a different angle for tactial reasons. Massive treads propelled it surprisingly quickly for such a large machine, set against an almost fluid black substance that was in turn supported and turned by large steel spheres fit snugly into the lower sides of the tank, grooves cut into them so that they locked into each other like gears.

"Have you ever been on a battlefield?" Azula asked him coolly, eyeing the tank with an almost fond look. "Does it matter what it looks like as long as it works? We based that model on the Fire Nation design from before the war."

"Are you serious? Your world doesn't even have access to technology of this scale."

"True, but even so, it's still a superior design to most tanks around, even without the improvements we've made." Azula looked almost patriotic as she added, "If you really want your war machine to run smoothly, get gears made in the Fire Nation."

Kimblee made a slight dismissive noise. "I'd still put my money on Amestris-issue. My country was born for the sake of war. We're very good at it, with all the practice we've got." He gave Azula a look. "And have you been on a battlefield? As just another soldier, little more than a statistic set loose to either whittle the enemy away or die hard enough so that enemy is too weak to put a meaningful resistence from the next wave?" Azula looked at him sourly. Kimblee smirked. "That's what I thought."

Kimblee felt strange, much stranger than the last time Wuya had set him loose, but it was a good kind of strange. Azula and Mr. Lyle had provided him with a more appropiate change of clothing, though he had a strong suspicion they had watched him change through a conviently located peephole, and with good reason: he'd heard them arguing over which of them got viewing rights. He was wearing an outfit much like his old military uniform, though colored all in dull unobstrusive black: a long coat that fastened like a jacket, with darker ribbed padding along the lower part of the coat and forearms, with metal-edged shoulderpads; a short-sleeved high-collared jacket with a pocket across the lower front like a sweater; slim leather pants with deep cargo-pockets going down his outer thighs and knee-high boots with steel-capped toes and spiked soles.

Kimblee liked it; it was sort of a 'punk-meets-military' look. He'd cleaned himself up as best he could with only a fifteen minute shower, which the inexplicable shedding had helped a lot with and had slicked his hair back and tied most of the slightly ridiculous length of hair in a manly ponytail. At least his hair was completely clean; Kimbley disliked being dirty. He'd had quite enough of that in Ishbal; he really had no idea how those red-eyed fanatical savages had survived in that sun-scarred wasteland or fought so hard to take it back even after they'd been reduced to scattered pockets of life around his country.

His look, he felt, would have complete if he'd had his old State Alchemist pocket watch; he'd had fond memories of the old thing. He'd cheated the psychological examination to get it, which was the only real trouble he'd had with the certification, given the extent of his alchemical skill. But it'd been stripped from him, like his freedom, when he blew up a few petty commanding officers rather than give up his piece of ultimate power, (and because he felt like it) along with his rank and title.

He'd had his share of bodies since he'd volunteered for the experiment to become theoretically immortal, at Hojo's invitation. It had hurt, but pain didn't particularily bother Kimblee. Boredom did, and he was apprehensive at the darkness between suitable vessels, and he hoped that this body would last him. It felt stronger than any other vessel he'd used, stronger than his old body, and the incredible energy flowing through it was focused so much by the soul-fluid flowing through his new body's veins that the wildness this body seemed to have no was no longer a factor; he'd probably have to wing it in actual combat, but Kimblee believed that he could control it without much effort.

The voices in his head, on the other hand, were both new and unpleasant-

The boy screamed and railed and shouted hate without words, rage without sense, a promise to turn Kimblee's life even blacker with pain than his own was, he knew what Kimblee wanted to do and he didn't like, oh, how he HATED it, and the other voice, the one that tasted like death less sweet than the music Kimblee spun and felt like every nightmare from a childhood he barely remembered except in fevered dreams, whispered strange promises, suggested strange plans and pointless ideas that he summarily ignored. Ignoring was the order of the day; he ignored the child's voice that thought it was a monster even with it's essential fear laid bare, and he ignored the dead demon voice, refusing to remark that it's stupid desires of control were so, so pointless and empty, just like everything and everyone else in the whole general mish-mash of being except for his death music-

-but Kimblee made a point of not visibly reacting to them anymore.

Azula and Mr. Lyle, on the other hand, were worse than the voices in his head. The voices he could ignore, but his entourage wasn't so easily dealt with; they'd been continually flirting and hitting on him, and Kimblee had too little experience in dealing with romance to dissaude them. He couldn't just pretend they weren't there, and since redecorating the walls with chunky bits of them wasn't an option, he was reduced to being snide. Not that it seemed to do much good; Mr. Lyle and Azula's attraction to him outweighed any anger his insults and remarks might rouse in them, and that just seemed wrong to the poor Red Lotus Alchemist.

They continued on their way to...somewhere. Kimblee wasn't entirely sure just what they were doing in a hangar bay to begin with: couldn't they just open a portal to wherever it was they wanted him to go? And for that matter, he was mildly annoyed that they still hadn't told him what he was supposed to do. Concerned with the matter, though not overmuch since he was uncomfortable with taking emotions to extremes, Kimblee said aloud, "Where, exactly, am I going?"

"Traverse Town," Mr. Lyle told him. "Ever heard of it?"

"No." Strictly speaking, that was a lie; Kimblee'd had business with people from the town before, even though he'd never been in it properly. He'd heard a little about their town from those people, about the borderline state of chaos it existed in and the strange species-crossing cameradie between it's inhabitants. He also knew more about it's history than it's current inhabitants did, and why it and so much of the world it was built upon had been empty. He knew why those sensitive to psychic currents were so uncomfortable in the scarred wilderness outside town, knew about the evil so great that even now it still echoed in the stones and winds of the landscape, bringing nightmares and horrifying thoughts to those who could sense it.

But the townsfolk, he thought, didn't. It was so funny, he couldn't help but smile.

Before Mr. Lyle could say anything, Azula said, "Thumbless here screwed up, and we want you to pull off that messiness you do so well."

Mr. Lyle scowled and hastily told Kimblee about the specifics of what he was needed to do, skating over whatever personal responsibility he had in the matter. When he was done, Kimblee nodded sagely, ignoring the way Kevin screamed and raged at his helplessness in the back of his mind, a prisoner in his own body. "Ah. Chaos. Destruction. I love it. And how, exactly, am I supposed to be getting there?"

Mr. Lyle answered this time. "Dark portals are a bit iffy right now, and you're still not totally adapted to them, not being connected to the dark like we are..." He paused, as if considering his statement. "Well, you're not literally drawing your power from the dark undercurrent of all reality, so it's not quite safe for you to use their little 'gifts'. A ship would be too noticable since we're dropping you right in the district, we haven't figured out how to hotwire the Stargate on that planet, so the only viable option is the teleporter we stole from the Richards guy before he could patent it."

"What teleporter?" Azula said suspiciously as they came to a clearing amid the mess. "We don't have a teleporter in the hanger bay."

"Then what do you call that?" Mr. Lyle asked, pointing to a large machine not far from them. It was slightly larger than a small room on it's own, being a raised square platform covered in a slightly translucent material Kimblee recognized as what you got when you smelted Gummi and coated ceramic with the resultant substance. It was bordered on all four sides by tall machines shaped vaugely like ornate tuning forks, tubing and cords connecting into the base of the machine. A clear shield covered the platform in a large dome, and more machinery formed a perimeter of sorts around it; Kimblee wasn't much of an expert on computers and machinery in general, but these looked like the controls of the...whatever it was. Founders, sharped fanged dwarfish figures and various other humanoids were busily standing at attention, watching them anxiously and giving Kimblee, who was very experienced when it came to frightened underlings, the impression that they had just finished doing something important.

Kimblee inspected a nearby plaque attached to one of the computer-things. "This thing says 'Multiphastic Universal Relay Harmonic Generator'.'"

There was a long pause. "Well," Mr. Lyle replied, in the patiently plodding tone of someone trying very hard not to start a fight. "We appreciate that the...uh..." He paused in thought, and shrugged. "The Manifold Personage Yoyo Relient K Hula Hoop Jingler doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, so I call it a teleporter. It's a big machine, it moves things around, it's a teleporter, okay?"

"You're confusing actuality with semantics," Azula remarked. "And you got the name wrong. It's called the Multiple-Personality Ululating Rapper Hurting Guillotine."

"No it's not," Kimblee said, always happy to make fireworks of any sort, whether the kind that blew people to bits or the kind that could lead to people getting blown to bits. "It said Mandy's Principle of Utilizing Residual Horror Portafuge." He paused in thought. "And it looks like what we'll get if someone ever does bring disco back."

Azula stared at the machine speculatively. "No, no, that makes no sense. Both things you said, I mean."

"I do," Mr. Lyle said suddenly. "Look, there's a disco ball on it. Or something that looks like one." Sure enough, there was a multifacted crystal hooked into the top of the dome, level with the tops of the tuning fork machines, that bore an unfortunate resemblence to a disco ball.

"You're all wrong!" Said a computerized and overly chipper male voice echoing from the computers. "My names MURPHY G., not...those other things you said."

There was a significant pause.

"Did you hear anything?" Azula said.

"No," Mr. Lyle said quickly.

"No," Kimblee added, shaking his head firmly.

"Nope!" MURPHY G. chirped. "Wait, do you mean me talking?"

Azula ignored him. "Good," She said. "Neither did I. And," She added, a distinct threatening note in her voice. "We will continue to hear absolutely nothing from artificially synthesized voices that sound like they used to be in public broadcasting. Am I clear?"

Kimblee and Mr. Lyle answered in the affirmative. "Hey!" MURPHY G. whined. "I was too talking!"

"And if we should hear those voices again while we are, in point of fact, not hearing them," Mr. Lyle added decisively. "I will go to the teleporter's main computer banks and reprogram them with several pounds of plastique. And machine-eating bug-robots."

"...That's a little extreme..." MURPHY G. whimpered while Kimblee and Azula agreed very enthusiastically with Mr. Lyle's idea.

And what's with you people? Ghostfreak asked Kimblee, an entirely metaphoric eyebrow raised. Always ignoring voices that are quitely clearly there and want to be paid attention! That can be very hurtful, you know.

Shut it, all of you, Kimblee thought back.

I hate you all, Kevin thought mutinously from a tiny, lonely corner in his own head. It wasn't something he actually, more like a raw wave of mingled despair and rage that translated into those four simple words. Kimblee and Ghostfreak both ignored him, resulting in another, slightly more vehement blast of hate.

"Well, whatever you want to call it, this is what we're going to use," Mr. Lyle told Kimblee. "It's been programmed to drop you in the general area for your mission. Somewhere a bit out of the way, but close enough."

"What about when I'm done?" Kimblee asked. "But however will I get back? You want me to hijack a ship?"

Mr. Lyle actually looked thoughtful for a minute. "No," He finally said. "If you decide to head back here, make contact with one of our agents in town. They're mostly in the Underdistrict, but some of them live topside. We've got a man from one of the organizations allied with us, the Akatsuki, in the First District. Name's Deidara. Blond, runs an art gallery, has a thing for artful demolition. Just like you!" Mr. Lyle told Kimblee his address and paused, grinning saliciously. "And, between you and me, he looks like a girl. A very beautiful girl..." Mr. Lyle waggled his eyebrows suggestively in a way Kimblee just knew was going to give him nightmares. He turned aside to Azula for assistance and immediately decided that none would be forthcoming from that demonically smiling girl and a look in her eyes that was as disturbing as anything Mr. Lyle said.

Wait a minute, Kevin said abruptly, now speaking actual words instead of emotional bursts. He said 'if', not 'when'. I don't like the way that sounds.

Of course not, child, Ghostfreak said snidely. You no longer have the drive for power that once drove you. Pity. I had such hopes for you...

Bite me, Kevin snarled.

...That is an anatomical impossiblity, Ghostfreak observed after a moment. As our body is no longer under either of our control. Also, even if I were in a position to masticate you, I am not certain that my teeth would break the skin.

If you were a position to WHAT?

Masticate, Said Ghostfreak patiently. Masticate. As in chewing?

Oh, Kevin said, mollified. Okay then.

Kimblee repeated Kevin's observation, though without the mutant boy's opinions and the other stupid bits. "Oh, c'mon, isn't it obvious?" Mr. Lyle teased. "We're giving you a larger-scale assignment after you're done with the main job: stirring up the criminal element in the town, blowing stuff up for fun and whatever pleases you. I imagine it'll be like a vacation for you."

"That it will," Kimblee said, smiling wanly.

"Good, good." Mr. Lyle threw an arm around Kimblee's shoulder. Kimblee looked at it like it was a half-tame python. "Now, I have a small favor to ask, okay? You agree, and I'll see to it that certain...parties that might want you in their clutches for reasons you'd find unpleasant might be otherwise inclined."

Kimblee raised an eyebrow. "What did you have in mind?"

"I'd like you to find a certain man," Mr. Lyle pulled out a picture and gave it to Kimblee; it was a black and white photo displaying a small room with nice furniture. Prominent in it was a man glowering at the camera. "His name is Jarod, and he, along with his rather unique skills, belong to an organization I used to work with. They're very interested in reclaiming him, for a variety of reasons I'm sure are of no interest to someone like you. He's a master at hiding, and there's no telling what sort of skills he's got, or what he would do with them. He's sort of a sociopath with a conscience."

"That's a contradiction," Azula remarked.

"Still accurate." Mr. Lyle scowled, but not at her, as if in memory of this Jarod man. "But I believe that with certain...qualities of your current body, tracking him down from the ballroom where the fight took place last night will be someone of your talents, Kimblee, taking him down should be no problem. Er, without actually killing him, I mean. Bring him to me, and I could make life very easy, and interesting, for you. What do you say?"

Kimblee pocketed the picture. "We have a deal," He said softly and shrugged Mr. Lyle's arm off and walked over to the machine, jumping onto the MURPHY G.'s raised platform, his boots clicking oddly on it. "What are you waiting for?" He snapped at the nearby technicians.

They flinched. "It's all automatic, sir," One of them said. 'Just wait for it to memorize your DNA!"

The disco ball, or whatever it was, shimmered brightly, and Kimblee was suddenly bathed in a warm orange-hued light originating from the ball. His skin tingled at the contact, and he heard computers busily working around him, and the light abruptly vanished, just as more machinery started cycling to life, various lights on the four large tuning fork-shaped machines glowing brighter, a distinct crackle of electricity in the air.

"INITILIZING PHASE-SPACE ENTRY AND LOADING COORDINATES," Said the voice of MURPHY G., now cold and robotic, devoid of any humanity. Kimblee envied it, and wondered for a moment just what it meant. The disco ball hummed, the computers made the distinct sounds of machines at intense work, and Kimblee's perception of things around took an abrupt skew; for a moment, it was like looking through water, and then things outside the MURPHY G.'s perimeter stretched, colors bleeding into each other and gradually blurring out of focus. Kimblee frowned momentarily, correctly believing that the space within the machine was warping, affecting his sight.

The various protrusions and forked tops of the 'tuning forks' around him shimmered, a more intense form of the warping he percieved occuring directly around them. Kimblee's awareness of the energy around him, worn blade-sharp by his experience as an alchemist, buzzed dangerously at the sight. Everything around him took on a sudden bright glow, the edges of colors he'd never even imagined creeping in at the periphery of his vision, and he saw half-glimpsed shapes all around him, moving just out of sight, and he felt himself unraveling, making him feel like he was being deconstructed in an instant, spun out into everything, into the nearly-infinite reaches of all the worlds and feeling the beginings of a strong pull-

There was a sudden harsh tug, and then he was gone.

The bright light faded, and Azula and Mr. Lyle blinked, their eyes itching from the flash. Chromatic wisps fizzled out over the machine, the floor of the machine still glowing, and there was no Kimblee in sight. "Was that supposed to happen?" Mr. Lyle said to no one in particular.

"I hope not," Azula growled. "I almost went blind." She glared at the technicians, none of whom were bothered by the flash, and they all cowered in abject fear. "You. One of you, tell me right now what just happened! Did Kimblee make it through or not?!"

The technicians immediately ran to the monitors, frantically poring the data read-outs. "No worries," One of them cried out. "He made it through. Complete success!"

There was a distinct undercurrent of immense relief. Not out of concern for Kimblee's well-being, certainly; none of the technicians wanted to take the blame if anything had gone wrong. "Congratulations," Azula said coolly. "None of you have to die horribly." They all sighed in relief. "But that doesn't mean I can't."

Screaming ensued. And a little carnage, focused on the ones that hadn't really done anything, happened to be awaiting punishment detail, or just looked ugly. Mr. Lyle joined in; he was feeling bored.

If Azula and Mr. Lyle hadn't decided to do that, they probably would have been made aware that there wasa slight irregularity with the read-out regarding energy imbalances within the subject's body, but that was really their fault.

------

Elsewhere...

"Aw, horseshit!"

"How uncouth of you," Remarked a roughly humanoid fiigure, a mechanical life-form about seven feet tall and nearly four feet wide, his entire body an exoskeleton of green-hued metal plates laid over an intricate system of small wheels, multifaceted gears and other delicate looking machinery. Most of his body was covered by a plain red outfit that looked like a mixture of a toga and a monk's robes but suited for heavy-duty action, and what could be seen of his body was a mixture between what a citizen of Amestris would have called automail and a suit of powered-armor out of a steampunk comic. His arms were massve gauntlets nearly as wide as his entire body, his feet were enormous steel boots fitted with spikes on the toes and mysterious diodes and piping on the sides, and his face was a surprisingly expressive mess of protrusions, moving plates and other things in the rough shape of a noseless human face, finlike shapes for ears and a pair of large eye-lenses, glowing with a brilliant blue-white light. His overall apperance was fearsome, but it contrasted with his obviously kind demeanor, and it certainly didn't dissaude several small kittens sleeping around his feet. "Remember, my friend, self-control is the essence of sentience. Well, one aspect of the essence of sentience anyway. There are so many. Like common compassion. The ability to look above and seek the face of God. And a decent sense of humor. People always underrate the sense of humor..." He trailed off for a moment, then blinked. "What was I talking about again?"

"I dunno," Said a much smaller and more humanoid creature: he was cloaked in a heavy white trenchcoat that wouldn't have been out of place in Traverse Town, obviously patterned after an Amestrian uniform. The man's head was covered by a detachable hood, casting his face into deepest shadow, with only a pair of glowing rectangular shapes were eyes might be, and the suggestion of bangs. He appeared to be of average height and built, a bit broad across the shoulders, but not obviously so. Golden armor, intricately desigened and enlaid with holy symbols, covered a good deal of him; large rounded epaulets over the shoulders, overlapping plates on the outer arms and connecting to a broad pair of clawed gauntlets with spiked knuckles. More armor went down his back, built into his very clothing and over his completely covered body, a massive pair of wings formed of six tendrils of light folded close to his body. His pants were almost completely clothing, heavy-duty work pants with clipped pockets everywhere, covered from the knees down by large fighting boots made of the same golden metal as the creature's armor. "When you start babbling, I stop paying attention."

"Guys," Growled a massive leonine humanoid, the man who had exclaimed just a moment ago. "Focus? We've got some serious evil going on! Don't tell me we're just going to watch and let it happen, like always!" He was nearly eight feet tall, every inch of his bristling with powerful muscle and covered with thick black fur and wearing a black uniform trenchcoat and uniform startlingly like what Abel Nightroad wore when on the job, except this lion-man didn't wear any kind of shirt, just an open vest under his coat. His dishplate-sized hands were clothed in thick fighting gloves equipped with metal-studded knuckles, the glove's fingers cut away to make room for his massive claws. He didn't wear any kind of shoes, but they probably didn't make any that would fit his large bent-back ankled paws. His head was a lion's, the fur on his short snout lighter than on the uniform black of the rest of him, but still somehow human. The ears poking through his wild mane were pierced with at least six earrings, and as a final accessory was a gothic cross on a chain worn around his neck, just like Abel's. His annoyed demeanor aside, he seemed like the sort of man who could flirt with a woman just by looking at her from across the room.

"I am aware of the situation," The machine-man said coolly. "And your assesement is indeed correct: evil is afoot."

"You sure about that?" The hooded one wondered. "Because I've always seen it as more of a clawlike shape, myself. A stinger maybe."

There was a long moment. Both his friends stared at him. "...What?" The lion said after a moment.

"You know, a stinger! It stings you, injects it's foul corruption into you and you die. It works!" The hooded one paused in thought. "No, no, wait, claw is definitely better. Think about it!" He curled his fingers into one hand, raking at the air and hissing. "'Beware the Claw of Darkness'! Rawr, growl and other mildly intimidating noises!"

Lion and machine exchanged looks. "I'm not sure where to begin correcting you," The machine-man finally confessed.

The lion-man tapped on the hooded man's head a few times. "Dude, you have got a few gears loose. Was it the stress of dying or have you always been this loopy?"

The hooded man blinked. Or the lights in his hood dimmed momentarily. "So...you don't think evil is a claw? Because evil being a foot makes no sense. Except in the sense that evil carries you to terrible places that shouldn't even exist. Like a foot that supports and takes you places."

Two loud smacks, one of them metallic: the other two had just facepalmed.

The three odd beings were sitting in a small room, possibly on a ship of some sort, judging from the steady rocking of the place. It was weird, in a vauge but certain sense: the walls weren't made of metal or wood, but some sort of glassy, pleasantly glowing material, like light made solid. Strange shapes flowed in them, serpentine and beautiful, changing colors as they swam, shifting across the visible prismatic spectrum and throwing colors all over the room (but not obstrusively so) interacting with each other in a beautiful lightshow. There was no apparent door, but there was a large magic-looking glyph floating just in front of one wall, and there was a large window on one wall, made of something like translucent crystal, showing what appeared to be wine-dark water, glowing gently against the window. Half-glimpsed creatures swam in and out of sight, peacefully and quick.

The floor was slightly thicker than the rest of the room, less vibrant and more apparently solid, probably to avoid a sense of vertigo. The three beings were positioned in a rough circle in front of a device that wasn't espicially comprehensible to mere three-dimensional beings, but various components of it were mechanical, crystalline, the same light-stuff as the walls, glowing lines of pure magical force, and plant life, all forming a table-shaped thing raising off the ground a few feet, an immensely complex magical array projecting from the top.

This wasn't the tricky, mind-bending bit. The tricky, mind-bending bit was the fact that the multi-dimensional image radiating over it was showing Kimblee's departure, Wuya's talk with Shou Tucker, several displays of life in Traverse Town, and at least a dozen other things all at the same time. They weren't overlapping or hovering around each other or switching around in order of importance, they were all the same image at once. Looking at it for about five minutes would be enough to drive an ordinary mortal to bewildered gibbering in about five minutes, but the beings watching didn't seem to have any trouble.

"Ah, forget it," The lion-man growled. "Look, you know what's happening. What's going to happen!"

"Yes," The machine-man said, sounding sad. "I know."

The hooded one seemed to grimace, a deep and knowing anger leaking through his goofy demeanor. "Monsters," He spat. "Kimblee should have died years ago at the hands of Scar. I thought Pride ate him. I can't stand him still being alive. Not after what he did in Ishbal." He glared moodily at the projection, mind awash with bad memories. "That's Murphy's Law for you. Real people die and leave their friends and families alone, and the bastards keep going on...and on...and on."

"Not always," The machine-man said. "But far too often." He glanced at the hooded man, who knew what he was talking about only too well.

"So what's the plan?" The lion-man asked, crossing his well-muscled arms. "Don't tell me...we're going to just sit here and let it happen? Let the bastards kill people, let more people die, just like we always do, like we have to."

"Yes," The machine-man said quietly. "And you know why."

The lion-man snarled in frustration and stomped on the floor. "Yeah, but I don't like it!"

"You know what's at stake. The Balance-"

"Screw the Balance sideways with a poleaxe!" The lion-man almost literally roared, white-fire flaring around him.

The hooded man raised an eyebrow. Maybe. "That's not hygenic, sanitary or possible."

"I don't care,' Snapped the lion-man. "I say we go down to the Prime, rip Kimblee out of that poor kid's body and throw him to the demons like he deserve! Forget the damn Balance!"

The machine-man sighed. He didn't need to, being a mechanical lifeform, but sometimes you just have to sigh, regardless of your metabolic structure. "I understand how you feel-"

The lion-man made a disbelieving noise.

"But, regardless, we must not interfere. Not until we absolutely have to." The machine-man's voice grew darker. "Don't you dare forget that the Balance isn't in place for our benefit. That stalemate is the only thing preventing the fiends from turning on the Prime plane! Do you really want to risk the entire structure of reality, and more importantly, all those lives for your own satisfaction!?"

The lion-man heisitated. "...Damn. I hate when you bring out logic."

"Sometimes," The hooded man said quietly. "The logic of the right thing is more cold and hard than it is warm and fuzzy."

The machine-man nodded glumly. "Too true, my friend. Though I wish it otherwise, their fates are largely in the hands of the mortals themselves."

"It still sucks," The lion-man complained. "The devils broke the Balance already when they sent their emmisary to Wuya's stupid organization. Why can't we return the favor?"

"Because he isn't in violation of the Balance," The hooded man said patiently. "Not yet, anyway. Until he unveils what he really is and frays the fabric of mundanity, all we can do is respond in kind."

"Working by indirection," The machine-man recalled. "Speaking in dreams and visions. Acting in ways subtle and quiet."

"I don't do subtle and quiet," The lion-man quipped, seeming to calm down.

He leaned against the nearest wall in thought. For a moment, they watched the projection. "Respond in kind," He muttered. "Heh. Maybe that's it."

The hooded man glanced up. "You have an idea?"

"Sure. Look, the devils sent Mr. Lyle to Wuya, yeah?" The other two nodded. "So maybe us on the opposite end ought to return the favor?"

"You think we should advise the Keybearer?" The hooded man said skeptically. "We'd have to be careful about it."

"Maybe so," The machine-man said. "But it could work. Yes, we shall have to think of this. But," It added. "Not yet. We have a meeting to attend shortly enough."

"Oh joy," The lion-man said sarcastically.

The three of them sat down around the projection, watching intently. It was all they could do, and it gnawed at them, but they knew that soon enough, an oppertunity to do something more proactive would likely present itself.

As they reviewed the events in Traverse Town that had occured at the same time as Wuya's own business, a saying came to the hooded one's mind, amid his own wondering how so many significant destinties could have interlaced in that single town.

'The sole irony of evil is that it inspires men to do good'.

---

Well, that's another long-awaited chapter finally posted. It had a bit of a weak ending, but hey, set-up is usually like that, right? Raises lots of questions.

Questions like: what, exactly, is Kimblee going to do? What is Wuya planning for Dib? Is Dib going off the deep end, at least moreso than usual? Who were those three weird guys at the end? And what was Zim and co. doing while all this was going on?

Some of the questions will be answered next time. Others...are a bit more long-ranged.