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.

8. Red Lotus: Picking Up The Pieces

Sorry this thing's so late, people; I've had all kinds of problems. Including consistent Jabberwock attacks, but I deserved it. I'll spare you the sordid details, but suffice to say that it was a mixture of me having difficulty nailing this one down and other stuff that I said I'd spare you.

What do we have for this chapter? Seeing what our heroes and assorted fellows were doing while Wuya and such were doing evil stuff. And what Kimblee does when he gets to Traverse Town. It ain't pretty.

Also, I've recently seen the anime Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. AND. IT. WAS. AWESOME. There are no other words. That's all I can say without going on and on and on and on and on about it.

Disclaimer: I don't own anything that isn't mine.

...

It was a source of pride to the residents of Traverse Town that their home was situated on a perfect position to be greeted by the morning sun; the sunlight backlit against the mountain range north of town, building up until it eventually spilt over in a virtual flood of solar radiance, turning the inland sea the Beach District had been built around into a shimmering expanse of glassy beauty. It was, in fact, better than an alarm clock; due to the unusually powerful and strangely aspected magical field extending some several dozen miles around the town, light was slowed down considerably. When morning came, the rising sun seemed to take a while to show, and when it did it came like a flood, crashing all over town and flashing through every available window like molten gold, only without the wealth or massive loss of life than an actual flood of molten gold would encur. Metaphors are not as reliable as most people assume.

In most narratives of this sort, such an opening is usually followed by remarks to the effect that 'the town usually got up early' or 'the people woke up with the sun' or something to that effect. As a matter of fact, this wasn't neccesarily true; while many people did do just that, they were generally people who worked in the factory-dojos housed in the Underdistrict, a massive winding underground complex of tunnels underneath the town like the roots of a tree, an accurate simile the Underdistrict supported the town's manufacture industry; everything they couldn't make at home, they just traded for, and that wasn't a very large area. As a result of the town's varied population, seemingly bizarre technologies and ingenious inventions were commonplace. But in terms of waking-upness, not everyone did. The town tended towards a slightly lazy feel, which a lot of tourists felt jarred with the town's proud image of a wildly adventure-prone always on the verge of tipping over into the less malevolent sort of total chaos but never quite doing it owing to some impressive police work on behalf of the dominating factions that didn't so much control the town as guide it and keep the shrapnel from hitting anyone.

Of course, it helped if your window actually faced the sun. Obviously, it couldn't stab you in the eyes and wake you up if it wan't direct. And it was for that reason that Hobbes alone was still in the room they had borrowed last night and was deeply asleep, his mind throwing up mental sequences that weren't dreams, that is random figments of his imagination, but fragmented memories from his early childhood.

They weren't happy ones.

Dust.

Dirt.

That's all he knows these days, all he can remember. It's a shame, worse, it's an humiliation; he used to pride himself on his memory. He used to be able to remember things when he was a kitten-cub with eyes shut closed. know what fresh snow felt like on his fur, what it was like to eat food that was warm and steaming and not cold and desperately preserved by the few of those here who still care that he's alive and aren't so desperate to save themselves they hoard food like rodents in winter.

Pride is important to him. Grandfather tells him it's a part of being a cat; for a cat, he says, pride is part of your honor, and your honor is the bedrock of your higher soul. Without honor, he says, you're little more than a beast, a monster. Always left unsaid is the assumption that the lack of honor explains humans, but if they catch you talking bad about humans, bad things happen to you, your friends, your family and anyone around you that isn't already dead.

Grandfather has warned him about that. Once Grandfather disappeared for weeks and came back with half of his face wrong, burned and scarred and missing and eye and his whiskers gone, but he's still proud of it. "Mikiyok," his grandfather calls him, nicknaming him after the word for 'small' of their people; it's his personal joke about his grandson's small size, his name for him and his way of keeping their dying langauge alive. "I did not let them hear my pain and I offered them no satisfaction. They think me broken, that I have suffered too much to hurt anymore." Knowing that his own grandfather refused to admit weakness to an enemy is something to be very proud of.

But now he's forgotten many things. He can't remember enough of his homeland to keep him truly sane. He can't remember what it was like to live in a place that wasn't a hell of impossibly high metal deathtraps where it's too easy to lose your footing and fall to your death and screaming and dirt that cuts your feet if your fur isn't long enough and the humans, those demons with evil flat faces and nightmarish things working behind their faces when they do what they do, and oh Spirits, it's so wrong when they come to work. It's not because they're killing his people one by one. It's not because they violated his people's language-their sacred tongue!-and use words they have no right to and call him and everyone else 'angutiriyok' because they think it's funny to call them 'stubborn' in their own langauge. It's not because they're slowly killing him and his grandfather, and although it's very close, it's not because they're erasing everything he is, taking the language and culture and history and stories of his people and tearing them apart, deconstructing them and leaving nothing behind for them to claim.

It's because they laugh. They smile. He knows something is terribly wrong the first time he sees them smile when they do their terrible work, the first time they slice the back of his neck open and put a machine to stop him fighting inside, when they drag off the bodies of the dead to strip them of their valuables and have their skin taken away to make pretty clothes, and he knows in his heart that it's wrong for anyone to smile like ordinary men at work when they do such terrible things.

Sometimes, when the pain is too much to bear and he sleeps through the night, he prays to the spirits and God and whoever might listen to wake him up, to make the nightmare stop. It was a year before he realized that it wasn't a nightmare, but he still prays. The semblence of hope is still something for him to cling to, like a drowning man to driftwood, and he must hang on to something or drown. He will not die like the others have, exhausted to death or shot in the head for impertinence or simply out of human boredom. He will endure. He will survive.

A child's hope, a child's logic (I will not die because I am me), but it is still something to drive him onwards. His grandfather is there, and he approves of his only surviving family's fierce drive to live. He does not say that he is troubled by his grandson's growing rage, but instead counsels him to tend to his anger and release it when he must do so or perish. His grandson heeds it.

And today, on that vast field of twisted and dusty metal they made to keep his people contained for some mad reason, that man comes again. He is not old, but he is younger than he looks, years younger, barely older than a boy himself, blonde hair darkening to brown and heavy glasses fogging eyes turning blank with shock and numbness, and a nose that looks like it has been broken before, and strange heavy bangles on his wrists, four of them, two on each arm, overlapping each other and covered with strange symbols.

This man is not like the others. He comes sometimes, and every time he returns he looks older than before, like something is slowly ripping the life out of him. The young tiger has little sympathy for humans, but he has some to spare for this man; he looks like he is quietly going mad. He never smiles over the carnage; he just looks away and shivers sometimes, but mostly he just watches, like piece of himself rot with every atrocity he sees, and oh, there are so many for him to see. It's not the kind of insanity he's used to from the ones that just start screaming and don't stop until the humans shoot them dead and carry the bodies away. It's like there's a light behind his eyes and it's burning his soul away.

The little tiger-boy wonders what set that light to burning.

He comes to them, sends the guards away so no one can see them fraternizing and risk death, and Grandfather speaks to him, speaks with the tightly controlled rage that he will always employ with humans and he says strange things in the human's stranger languages. The man talks back, quiet and desperate.

They do not talk for long. Grandfather's anger abruptly stops soon after the man reluctantly says something, his eyes shadowed and ashamed. Grandfather asks him something, quietly, so quiet the young tiger can barely hear him. The young tiger is frustrated, he can't understand a word they're saying, and in his annoyance, he notices that the man smells very faintly of blood, and that blood reminds of someone. Two someones.

He later hears that for humans and cats alike, smell is a potent jogger of memory. He can't remember their names, but he faintly remembers what his parents smelled like, and he suddenly knows enough, too much and-

Hobbes' eyes came open, one hand still clutching his blanket so tightly his claws made holdes in it. He stayed the perfect stillness of a rock, his eyes staring and blank.

He breathed. Slowly, heavily, the blanket lying on him shifting slightly like a big soft heavy thing stuffed with cotton and stuff. Which stood to reason. Because that's exactly what it was.

Hobbes blinked heavily, trying to get the horrible, horrible images out of his head. Shivering like a bunch of metal shavings caught between two sloppily arranged magnets.

He tried to focus on the here and now. The softness of the pillow. The warmth of the sunlight. The cozy looseness of his vest, hiding his back from sight, should anyone dare to look at his marked back. Okay. That made him feel a little better; softness, sunlight and the absence of shame had been unheard of in that evil place of his early childhood...

Aw crap. Now he was thinking about it again.

Sighing to himself, Hobbes sat up, sloughing the blanket off and putting a hand on his face. He was trying so hard not to think of that place of nightmares, that atrocity zone, that even now drew the memories of his surviving people like metal to magnets if only because of the horrible things that happened there and deserved to be remembered and acknowledged by people for as long as there were people to do it. Even in his memories, it was a black hole made of human evil and despair instead of gravity, drawing any light into itself and consuming it forever, and given what black holes actually were, all devouring things made when a star collapsed under it's own weight and became something strange and alien, it was an apt comparision if you know your history.

Again, Hobbes shivered and pulled his vest tight around his body.

Few people had gotten out of that nightmare alive, and no one had escaped unscarred. Espicially him. The thought of his grandfather alone, of how long it had been since he'd actually spoken with him, been able to look at him and not be ashamed of what he had become...

Trying his hardest not to cry, Hobbes stepped off his bed, noticing that he was alone in the room; Calvin and Zim were nowhere to be seen, and all their stuff, little that it was, had vanished. A thought occured to him, and he remembered that he'd forgotten Morte, who also wasn't there. He was completely alone.

Hobbes blinked. "Where'd everybody go?"

He drew upon his experience with this sort of thing. "Okay," He said to no one in particular. "Obviously, we offended the guardian soul of the house by running around and smashing stuff. It was Zim who did that, but spirits are known for being indiscriminate. Or maybe it was some sort of elritch abomination that followed us from space and sucked them into an evil dimension of torture, mind...violation, and general unpleasantess."

He continued to rant. "And if it's anything like that thing that time in one of the old Imperium holdouts, we'll have offended a bunch of holier-than-thou sociopaths completely by accident, thus requiring us to bring in the Sixtieth Foe-Tossing Ork Brigade, with their giant robots and really really big chainsaw-swords and a general lack of mercy regarding everyone who's a foe, resembles the foe, happens to have grown up with the foe or looks ugly. Hah, we showed them traitor Space Marines though. Serves them right for trying to take us back to the days of the ancient Imperium. It's been over a few thousand years, get over it." He glanced at the table. "Is that a note?"

It was, and held done with what appeared to be a small wiggling rock with crudely painted eyes. Hobbes picked up the rock, only to have a mouth open on it and it's painted eyes look at him. "Yo," Said the rock.

"Hello," Hobbes said, having too much experience with weirdness to be bothered by a living pet rock. "What are you doing?"

"I am a messenger from the Anti-Zim Residence-Defending Home-Defense Colition," The rock said gravely. "I was sent to warn you all that there would be trouble."

"Is there now."

"Yes. That happens, when you break into people's rooms and set their stuff on fire. Seriously, what was that about?"

"Oh, he was just having a bad day," Hobbes said, not bothering to point out just how mind-breakingly awful it was.

"Hmph. And then the blond smart-aleck decided to use me as a paperweight for that note there. And here we are?"

"Uh huh. And you didn't try to wake me up because...?"

The rock looked uncomfortable. Hobbes had trouble believing that he was actually thinking that. Uncomfortable looking rocks weren't an easy concept to get across even a weirdness-inured mind like his. "Er, I thought it would be funnier to have you wake up, pick me up and panick over me?"

"Well, that kind of fell through, didn't it?"

"Tell me about it. Most people that I pull that scam on, they're all 'Help! Help! A talking rock with painted eyes that move, I must be going crazy, send in the Mindwrenches,' that kind of thing. Then I, using the Yen Buddhist style of arguement, convince them that their earthly attachment to money is causing them enough stress to make them hallucinate. They're so freaked out, they actually do it! Mostly works on tourists."

"Yeah, I've pulled ones like that before. What's a Mindwrench?"

"Psychologists, psychiatrists...mind doctors. Wrenches are what we call doctors, on account of referring them to mechanical-types."

"...That doesn't make much sense." Hobbes glanced and picked up the note.

"What's it say? My employers didn't say."

Not altogether sure why he should read it to the rock, Hobbes started reading. "Hey, You. Woke up earlier and found Zim doing stuff outside. Left you to sleep in while I try to control him a bit, or failing that, not be bored. We're going to look for his friends afterwards, so you'll probably find us with them. I made sure to rub the letter all over my body so you can find me easier. Good slaps and badgers up the nose, Calvin. P.S. I left you some food on the counter." Hobbes directed his attention to a small plate of bacon, sasauge, ham and other assorted breakfast meats on the table. "Aw, he does care!"

"...Your friend rubbed that note all over his body?" The rock said, disturbed. "That's creepy."

"To each their own," Hobbes said amiably, not caring enough to point out that Calvin had done that to make his smell as strong as he could and make scent tracking easier. He'd also left out the parts where Calvin had mentioned that Zim had apparently decided to practice his fire-powers on everything in sight and a few other incriminating details; the rock had been sent as a warning by some new enemies, so he saw reason in avoiding the telling.

Hobbes put the note into a pocket, doing a quick search of the room to make sure nothing was left behind and didn't find anything, and prepared to leave. "Hey!" The rock complained. "What about me?"

Hobbes considered it. On the one hand, he could just leave the rock behind. With any luck, such trouble that might track them to the room would be pinned on the rock. But that didn't seem right to him; the rock was a bystander, really. But on the other hand, the rock had shown up to threaten them, sort of. If Hobbes let people here think they could threaten him with impunity...well, if they were ever going to come back, as he suspected they would, it would simply not do. He'd learned the hard way not to let people push him and his family around. So...he had to do something decisive but not dishonorable. It was a quandary.

(The Hitchhiker's Guide defines a quandary as such: quandary. Noun. From the Latin 'Quando', while not being clear about it being the latin of ancient Rome or the country of Sto Lat on the Discworld. It goes on to refer to it as a state of difficulty or perplexity; a predicament. There has been some legal bickering over the fact that the definition was almost entirely cribbed from the Heterodyne Dictionary of Nifty Concepts, and it can be concluded that the editors of the Guide are very lazy, rabid fanboys of peculiar things, mildly insane, or any combination thereof.)

Hobbes made up his mind. "You're a tough little rock, right?"

"Yeah, but I don't see what that's got to do with-" Hobbes opened the window. "Aw crap," The rock said when Hobbes picked him up and lightly threw him out the window.

Hobbes watched him skid out the window and bounce off the slanting roof, which he noted would make for a series of good footholds if he wanted to use them for that. "Ow!" He said as the rock bounced over an old tile. "Ooh!" The rock smacked into a ventiliation pipe. "Ouchie!" Hit a statue over the gutter that complained loudly about the ill-treatment. "Wow, that looks like it hurt." It skidded down the gutter, into a pipe, hit a woodchuck at the bottom that used super-chucking powers to throw it back up the pipe and over the gutter, hit a passing bird known as a Spearow, was mercilessly savaged by the Spearow's flock, and hit the ground with such an impact that it made a small crater.

Then the mighty woodchuck ran over and mightily chucked it into the air, commanding his mighty chucking powers to rip a hole in the fabric of the universe to cast the rock into an alternate dimension. An instant later, the rock returned, now having transformed into a small craggy stone creature. "At last!" The rock cried. "Freedom of movement! The ability to walk under my own power! No longer shall I rely upon a friendly hand to cast me on my way, or the power of persuasion and charisma! Now, I can sing! I can dance!" Just to prove it, he did a very nice dance that was so good, Hobbes would never be able to accurate remember what it was, ever again. It was just that awesome. But it had a bit of the river-dance and whatever dance Russians are supposed to do, so you know it was good, espicially for one without any choreography at all. "TO THE UPPER DISTRICT AND THE FULFILLMENT OF MY SECRET DREAM TO BE THE DARLING OF THEATRE AFFICIANADOES EVERYWHERE! MY THANKS, MIGHTY TIGER-MAN! I SHUN MY OLD LIFE OF SHAMEFUL ODDJOBS AND VAUGELY WORDED THREATS THAT COULDN'T POSSBLY BE CONSIDERED THREATS UNTIL YOU LOOKED BACK AND REALIZED HOW OBVIOUS IT WAS BUT ONLY IN HINDSIGHT! I, WINSTON WILHELM WICKTICK, DECLARE A DEBT THAT I SHALL UNDOUBTEDLY REPAY TO YOU IN A CONTRIVED MATTER AT A LATER DATE! FARE THEE WELL!" The rock ran off, still ranting and scaring a few random bystanders. They'd just been there to watch a talking rock get pulverized, they didn't deserve all that crazy nonsense. The mighty woodchuck scratched his head and made a mental note to stop throwing people into the Zone of Contrived Evolution That Doesn't Really Follow Evolution But A Heavily Narrowed Perception of It. (Some people have lobbied to give that zone a shorter name, but all alternatives have been shut down as not being awesome enough.)

"...Huh," Hobbes said. "That was unexpected. But on the other hand, he's happy, so...eh, I have no idea where I was going with this." He turned his attention and ate it in a hurry; he was very hungry.

After he left the room and responsibly deposed of the food's plate in a manner not important enough to go into detail about, Hobbes amiably walked down the hall, feeling a little better about things. His life to date, the probably weird and harmful things that were going to happen to him, and the horrible things he'd half-remembered in his sleep. Bad, yes, he decided, but all in all, things could be worse.

He hadn't gone very far before he noticed that the door to a nearby closet was being hit time and time again by an interior force, punctuated with slightly muffled complaining. "-Dag a rag-sag flip a dingaling! Why!" Pow! "Won't!' Fow! "You!" Zow! "OPEN!" Cow! Wait, that's not a sound effect. Hmn, just pretend it was a suitable sound effect and everything will be nice and not intrusive at all.

Hobbes believed in narrative casuality. He knew when it was at work and when running into an ally out of nowhere was not a coincidence but fate making things easy on you. Shrugging a bit, he opened the door. Unsurprisingly, Morte came right out, and had, with uncannily horrible timing, started charging at the door right as Hobbes had opened it and consequently slammed right into the wall, denting it a bit. "Ow," Morte whimpered. "Oh, it's you. Bit of help?"

"So that's where you've been since last night!" Hobbes said. He'd awoken earlier in the middle of the night, plauged by horrific nightmares (well, more so than usual) and had briefly noticed Morte's absence at the time before he'd gone back to sleep, assuming Morte was off being stupid somewhere. "What were you doing in there?"

"Being stuck. Like I am now. Hint?"

Hobbes picked him out of the wall. "So. What were you doing there?"

Morte shook himself free. "Eh, nothing important, nothing at all! A bit of this, a bit of that, maybe I got in a spot of trouble but nothing important, yeah?"

He seemed oddly defensive. "Were you spying on women?" Hobbes asked. It seemed in character for Morte.

"Yes! I mean, no! Well, okay, yeah, a little bit, but it was a happy side-effect of what I was actually doing."

"Which was...?"

"Tracking down those punks that our new boss ticked off, figure out what they might be planning and get a counterattack planned before the boss even has to know."

Hobbes was impressed and suspicious. That didn't sound like Morte at all. Then again, he had to admit that he didn't really know Morte at all. "That would be constructive. But how does spying on the fairer sex translate into that?"

"Hey there were girls there, right? I was watching them plot without their knowledge. That counts as spying. Well, that and some other stuff." He laughed. "I had to do something on the way there, yeah?"

"And all this has something to do with you being in the closest, I assume?"

"Well, maybe I found them lying outside in a backed-up septic tank 'cause of a trapdoor and followed them to the showers-"

"You watched them in the showers!" Hobbes said indignantly. "There were girls my age in there! Is that even legal!"

"Hey, hey! What do you take me for, a deviant? I didn't watch the underagers in the wash, thank you! Or the men, I ain't like that." Hobbes raised a eyestripe. "...But the older girls...well, I'm a guy, what do you want?"

"Some self-control?"

"How about a bit of essential masculinity?"

"You're a skull! You don't have any...er, meaty bits, how can you discuss masculinity when you're not bothered by testorone and other such hormones?"

"It's all state of mind, kitty-boy."

"And the closet?" Hobbes pressed, ignoring the 'kitty-boy' remark.

"...I'll admit it, I'm not very subtle. I got caught by the girls and they took it personal." Morte shrugged, as if to say that it was all right with him, that stuff happened and women had their rights to do what they wished, a notion that still seemed vaugely misogynic as it should've gone without saying. "Still, I found out a few things, so it was worth it."

"About the girls, or...?"

"The evil plot against us! Although, it's not so much a plot against us as a lot of general ill-will and some muttering, but there are some things they're planning."

"Oh. Like what?"

"I don't know, I got caught before they went that far. Also, thanks for the assist. I tried to come out of the closet on my own, but I just couldn't do it. I needed the help of another man to do it." Morte waited. He loved set-ups.

"Okay," Hobbes said. "As long as you can say so."

Morte wondered if Hobbes had fallen for the bait or dismissed it and meant that sentence honestly. Hobbes grinned, and Morte decided that the joke had been turned on him.

"You are a worthy opponent," Morte said.

"I've learned well," Hobbes said. "Though to be fair, my usual verbal sparring partner generally gets both of us to degenerate into a name-calling lunacy."

"Ah, you mean that kid you hang around. So, you want we should find him or...?"

"He'll be with Zim," Hobbes said. "So...let's go do something else, okay?"

"...What?" Morte stared at him. "I'd think you'd be all for hunting them down and stopping them from doing something stupid."

"You remember last night?" Hobbes said flatly. "In the course of looking for Zim, we, in the process of wandering over this 'district', wandered into two gangfights, offended three elritch abominations, accidentally attacked a giant suit of powered armor that was alive, blew ourselves up, got really lost, blew ourselves up again, got so lost we fell into a parrarel dimension of living clothing armed with spears that tried to kill us, and a whole bunch of other crazy stuff before we wandered into that construction site or met that sand-ninja Gaara and those kids."

"Yep, we certainly got into a lot of messiness before anything particular important actually happened. Or before we met anyone interesting."

"My point is that I was there for all of that, and nothing I did stopped any of it!"

"Like when you crashed into a casino and totally demolished it," Morte reminded him. "I'll bet you anything that place was owned by a criminal outfit. And then there was Bloo blowing us up that third time, but that happened out of the blue, heh, and no one could have done anything about it."

"You're not helping. My point, again, is that when we did meet Zim, we immediately had to fight a giant monster. On our way to Fosters', idiot tour guides notwithstanding, we wandered into a giant obstacle course, a little green thing started following us and I don't even want to think about that...incident with the nuns in a station wagon loaded with weapons of mass destruction. That transformed. Both weapons and station wagon which was named Ironhide. And when we did get to Foster's, we got stuck because of a yo-yo, and then Zim wandered off. And when we finally caught him, we spent forever wandering around like idiots before he got mad and started punishing people for being there when it was inconvienient for him. Thus ensued a mob rush. And after we finally escaped them, a weird guy showed up out of nowhere, taunted us and our new friends with knowledge he couldn't possibly have without connections and then sicced Heartless on us. Do you see where I'm going with this?"

"You're all very danger-prone?"

"Yes, but that's not my point. I mean, we were there the whole time! Nothing we said or did made the slightest difference in stopping the chaos! So, it's pretty much inevitable that Zim and Calvin will get in trouble. Painful trouble. If we do our own thing for a while, we'll avoid getting the fallout for stuff that's not our fault!"

"Ooh, that's sneaky! I like. But isn't that kid your friend? Brother? Some weird thing like that."

Hobbes shrugged. "If I had to stop every thing he brought on himself from hurting him, I'd be a nervous wreck. He can handle himself, and if not, I'll undoubtedly wander over by then and bail him out. That's the way it always works."

"...That sounds kind of cold."

"I'm aware of that, but...I don't know if theres some sort of spirit pushing things around, if it's my fate to watch out for him like that or if it's just that chaos theory he's always ranting about breaking apart systems of narrative complexity and resorting to the same situation resolution over and over again, but it just happens that way." Hobbes shrugged. "So. What do you want to do?"

"Wanna find food and outdo each other in weird experiences?"

"Okay. Wait, you eat? How do you intend to do that?"

"By chewing it up and swallowing, obviously."

"But...how? Where does it go?"

Morte shrugged. "I've been around a while, and trust me when I say that some questions, it's better not to ask. Some answers aren't worth it, you know? All I know is, I can eat even if I don't need to, I can taste it and it goes...somewhere."

"I suppose it's the same question as how it is you talk without a tongue...which you need to taste things, I might add...and on the subject, how do you float?"

"Dunno. Guess I gotta move somehow, right?"

Hobbes wisely decided to drop it. It seemed entirely pointless. "Okay, I think we can find somewhere to eat downstairs; I smelled stuff like that last night. You should know, I once fought a psychopathic atavistic sharkman with only a knife in my jaws and both arms broken."

"Tch, that's not a weird experience, that's badass. How about this? I once met a devil who'd

been doomed to an eternity of doing charity work because a sneaky angel tricked him into signed a contract to make him do it!"

"Ooh, that is pretty weird. I've met a few angels. All I can say is that the wings-and-haloed-human thing is way off. They look more like eldritch abominations! But pretty. Weird, isn't it?"

"You know what eldritch abominations look like?"

Hobbes laughed sourly. "Oh, do I. Let me tell you about the Noodle Incident..."

...

The Noodle Incident was something Calvin was one of three things Calvin was absolutely certain he was never, ever going to live down. The other two, respectively, was his inability to do anything with complicated machinery without something insanely destructive eventually occuring and his issues with being scrutinized by people he didn't know but apparently had reason to consider him completely insane. (Granted, he was a happily self-confessed mad scientist, but it was so annoying when people wouldn't get their definitions of madness straight. It wasn't like the light of genius had burned his humanity out and left him a science-crazed sociopath. Yet.)

This was the reason why he sincerely wished he had something to put between himself and the small band of Zim's friends that had cornered him and Zim not far off from the now burned, torched and generally fire-blasted-to-death area that Zim claimed to have spent all night training in. Something like a good suit of powered armor, or a loyal kaiju monster; he'd even settle for Hobbes, even though he'd just be likely to completely ignore him and cozy up with the three girls there. And their vauge distrust annoyed him; alright, Aang seemed to like him (though Calvin got the impression that was just because he existed and hadn't done anything to destroy it yet) and his girlfriend Katara seemed to be waiting to make up her mind, and Danny...well, he was an odd one. He kept drifting in and out of current events, like he'd been hit hard in the head with a hammer and was still reeling.

"So," Said Sokka, a vaugely Inuit wiry teenager with tanned-brown skin and longish brown hair worn in a high ponytail (or wolftail); he quitely clearly liked blue, wearing a water-blue hooded jacket with white seams and accents over a blue-sleeved black shirt with abstract water designs on it, dark blue pants with metal kneepads and reinforced areas from the knees down. On his hands were long dark blue fighting gloves with black worked in, complemented by a pair of short black boots. He was also armed, a large metal boomerang clipped to his belt, not to mention a longsword sheathed on his back. "You're Zim's new sidekick, huh?"

"Sidekick?" Calvin said in utter horror. He stared at Zim, the alien grinning at him like a jerkass. "You actually said I was your sidekick!"

"You're going on an adventure with me because you were told to, and doing so for a reason that benefits only me with no obvious gain for you," Zim said. "Thus, sidekick!"

Calvin came up with a few words and said them under his breath, causing a few new spirits to be born in order to embody the concepts he'd just created.. "This is a new low for me...even worse than what happened after that experiment with Blue Eco and the mutagenic alteration foruma I suspended in a free-form life-inducing matrix, while during the full moon during the winter solstice on land consecrated to St. Snodgrass, patron saint of improbable and horrifying occurences. I still think there are mutant beavers out there, ravaging the land with their armies of biker-scarecrows." He reflected on it. "Okay, maybe not that bad, I mean, no one's on fire and no hideous mutations have erupted from common sea life and I don't have an angry mob out to make marry their scariest daughter, so...yeah."

Sokka snorted. "What, that's it?" He said, unimpressed. "You should see some of the crap Zim's gotten up to. You remember that time you tried to send us back home in a spaceship?"

"Look, it'd been a good sci-fi expo, I was feeling good about myself with hiding in plain sight as an alien, we thought we could get into space and beyond, they found homes for all the giant kittens and Zuko didn't have to go to federal prison for tax evasion!" Zim screamed. "We decided to drop it, okay!"

There was much shuddering. "Psst!" Aang whispered loudly to Calvin. "Don't let Zim drive, ever!"

"That whole idea was stupid, anyway," Muttered Zuko, a grouchy looking Japanese-looking teenager with long unkempt dark hair, fire-yellow eyes and a hideous burn scar covering nearly half of the left side of his face, twisting his left eye half-shut and pulling part of his mouth into a permanent grimace. In Calvin's opinion, put together with his outfit (a sleeveless dark red long coat with intricate designs all over it, a black shirt with dark blue on the front, red-and-brown combat gloves, black cargo pants with red belts, pockets and reinforcment padding on them and a pair of combat boots), he looked like the coolest person he had ever met. Calvin suspected that Zuko was royalty; he'd met nobility in his time, and Zuko seemed to fit perfectly into the sub-type of 'Royals Who Actually Do Something'; plus, he had a weird little noisy badge on his coat that looked like a crown made of fire and went 'foom!' when you poked it. "We're from another dimension, not just a different planet."

"I always thought we were from a seperate continuinity of reality-substrate," said Katara; even if they hadn't already said so, Calvin would have pinned Sokka as her brother. The two of them looked too much alike, and her hopeful optimism constrasted with his continued skepticism with all the ping-pong physics of family social dynamics. Then again, you could say that about all of Aang's friends, Calvin had noticed, even though he'd barely known them for five minutes. "That's what that smart kid used to tell us. Johnny Neuron?"

"Jimmy Neutron," Zim corrected. "And why did you bother listening to him! My theories are far more likely to work than his ever were. And I wasn't trying to go into space, really, I wanted to get us so lost we'd break through the heavens themselves and by virtue of your sympathetic connection to your home world, what with Aang being a kung-fu action messiah, there would be an instability in that moment of transit and toss you back home!"

"Yeah, but what would you have done?" Zuko said while Aang started muttering a little song that sounded a lot like 'Kung-Fu Action Jesus' under his breath. "We'd have a reverse situation! You, stuck on our world!"

"Ah, I see your point," Zim said. "Wait. You don't want me on your world?"

"What, no, of course not, I-" Zuko stopped. He sighed. "I should have worded that more carefully, shouldn't I?"

"Oh yeah," Aang said.

"Uh huh," Katara said dryly.

"You're really bad at explaining yourself," Sokka observed.

"You kinda suck at it," Danny said, in a rare moment of focus. His friend Tucker shrugged, as if in support of Zuko's cluelessness. Danny's girlfriend Sam, on the other hand, gave him a look that suggested she was used to this nonsense.

"Seriously," Said the last of Aang's friends, a girl Calvin's age named Toph. (Much to his annoyance, she was still taller than him despite being the smallest in her group. He hated being short.) She looked Chinese, with long black hair pulled back in a thick pony tail and bangs falling freely around green eyes glassy and blind, though she certainly didn't act blind. (Calvin had already theorized that she wasn't blind, but incapable of perceiving anything less awesome than she was.) Her clothes were practical and hard-wearing; a high-collared green vest with a large zipper down the front, a short-sleeved tan shirt, thick green fingerless gloves with metal studs at the knuckles. Her knee-long pants were a paler green, with clip-closed compartments on the lower ends, and probably to protect her legs in a fight, the front and sides of her pants were reinforced, tougher overlying areas colored a darker green and elaborately patterned. She wasn't wearing any shoes, just a set of strange metal rings looped around her ankles. "You need to get a speech writer or something, Sparky." After a moment, she added, "Not that he's the only one," and directed a shameless grin at Calvin that made him feel unaccountably flustered, panicky and like his insides had gone twisty.

Zim, for his part, didn't appear offended. "Why?" He asked Zuko. "Do ye fear the unaccountable destruction and havoc I would undoubtedly wreck on your world, cultural norms and foodstuffs? Because I would, y'know. Also, I would import Canada." He paused. "Is that what you're afraid of?

"Yes," Zuko said. "Wait, no, no! Eergh, this is pathetic, I can't put it right..."

"That's what she said!" Sokka said, snickering like an idiot. Everyone looked at him. "What?"

"Do me a favor and shut up," Zuko said. "Zim. Uh. I, er. That's." He sighed. "I wouldn't want you trapped on our world. You wouldn't like it."

"Would too!" Zim said.

"You'd like being trapped on a world not your own?"

"Sure, why not."

"You're just saying that to be contrary, aren't you."

"Make me!"

Zuko grumbled. "Why are all my friends idiots?"

"At least you have friends now," Katara said loftily. "That's a step up from a few years ago."

"...Why are all the good points at my expense?"

"You make it too easy!" Calvin said. Everyone looked at him. "What? I don't even know him and I've already noticed that he goes out of his way to get the universe to sucker punch him!"

Zuko and Zim frowned, the latter on behalf of his friend, but neither of them bothered to contest the point. Zuko had hinted that he'd had an incredibly bad night, starting with being seperated from his friends during the attack of the Heartless on Zim's Earth, followed by him appearing in a completely different part of Traverse Town from everyone else, and he'd mentioned something about a staggeringly huge gang war he'd accidentally triggered through a series of ridiculously convulouted and improbable events that had ultimately climaxed in part of Traverse Town briefly warping into another dimension where up was down, left was right, Tuesday didn't exist and cats talked in a weird but freakishly adorable pidgen. Fortunately, he hadn't earned any noterierty, because apparently that sort of thing happened all the time here. Zuko claimed to have escaped sleeping on the streets thanks to the timely intervention of a pair of ninja named Naruto and Gaara, who'd met Zuko after they found him trailing after Zim's whereabouts, probably because he didn't have anything else to do. They'd forced him to crash on their couch for the night before sending him off to Foster's, where he'd reunited with his friends before returning to hunting down Zim. (Apparently, the fact that he was obsessively tracking down his friends was a bit of an in-joke among his friends that Calvin totally missed.) To summerize, he was in the beginings of a bad mood and the explosion would burn the very bedrock of a mountain.

Tucker cleared his throat, probably to change the subject. He was a dark-skinned nerdy teen with a pair of thin glasses, wearing a neat brimless red cap that had a few random badges sewn into it; a red vest with an incredible amount of pockets that he'd stuffed to overflowing with all kinds of absurd devies, gadgets and machines; a pair of brown cargo pants with even more pockets and machines in them; and a pair of short boots. Boots were fairly popular, apparently. "So, uh, you guys had a pretty crazy time last night, huh?"

"Crazy?" Calvin repeated. "Crazy, crazy? You wanna talk crazy, ooh, don't you bet I can! You know how we got here? When that brother-best friend who is bonded to me in some weird and recursive familial loop crashed our spaceship into a casino and collapsed the whole thing! We got here by smashing a building! And then it just got worse!"

"Not for me," Zim said. "I just woke up in an alley. Being watched by a dog with a tongue like a salami." He paused. "On the other hand, my departure from Earth..."

"Can we not talk about that?" Danny said, looking uncomfortable. "I really don't wanna think about that stuff yet..."

There was a thick, awkward beat. "Well," Sokka said. "All of us showed up in this town, seperated from each other and you know what? Each and every one on us got into some kind of crazy trouble! I ended up in a scrapyard run by a giant transforming robot named Ratchet and smaller transforming robot buddy Rhinox, while they were fighting off an invasion by a rival gang of scrapyard mangers who were all well-spoken rats, hyenas and other disliked animal-people who resented Ratchet's good press! I jumped up just as soon as they were gearing up for all-out war, but thanks to my intervention, timely assistence and a few quiet sneaky bits on the side, I resolved it all for my new buddies Ratchet and Rhinox with the power of dance." They looked at him. "We had a dance-off. You've never seen break-dancing until you've seen a twenty-foot robot transform parts of himself for the moves."

"That's nothing!" Toph bragged. "I showed up in the middle of another gang war, between two big bad outfits, the Si Xiong Triad and the Axe-Slinging Genociders! These guys were badass! I mean, on one side, you got a bunch of classy gangsters with a ton of hi-tech gadgets and kung-fu powers that should at least be called Realitybending! And the other guys were...well, a bunch of raving maniacs with axes. Really big axes. Like bigger than Sokka's completely unjustified ego."

"Hey!" Sokka said. Zuko snickered.

"Or Zuko's issues. All of 'em put together, not when they're lining up to get noticed."

"Hey!" Zuko said. Sokka snickered.

"I think at least one of these axes was made from a car door and a lamppose, actually. But enough of that, it was freakin' awesome! One guy got kicked so hard he flipped into another dimension and came out as a girl! And this one axe-guy kept swinging his axe so hard his cut went on for a few yards and cut a building!"

"Wait, how could you tell?" Calvin asked her. "You're blind."

"I am? And I thought my eyes had been closed for too long," Toph said sarcastically. "I'm an Earthbender. I can feel things and stuff through vibrations in the ground. I can find detail just fine."

"What, really? Cool."

Toph blinked. She looked nonplussed. "What? You actually believe me? And you're interested?" Calvin nodded, remembered she couldn't tell, probably, and told her that he was. "Huh. That's a first." She looked faintly embarrased, which was definitely a first, judging by the other's looks of shock. "Uh...like I was saying, I solved the whole thing with a very localized earthquake. Earthquakes make everything better."

"There was no earthquake!" Zim accused. "I would have noticed! Probably."

"Okay, geez, so maybe it was a bit of artistic licsence and I just tore the ground out from under them and dropped them into some kind of underground place beneath this city! Earthquake sounded cooler."

"I wound up in a mad scientist convention," Tucker volunteered. "And it was awesome! They mistook me for one of their own, and with all the Fenton tech I salvaged in an attempt to fight off those shadow-monsters, which almost worked by the way, I single-handedly sped up the technology curve of all paranormal studies at least five years ahead of time! They made me some cool stuff too, and gave me these snazzy clothes. They said it was like a club card but more awesome."

"I wound up in, uh, don't laugh, a vampirism rehab clinic," Said Sam; she was a pleasant looking girl with short dark hair, light skin and was wearing a dark purple minidress with criss-crossing shoulder straps over a sleeveless black shirt, the lower sides of the minidress split over a pair of black pants with an absurd number of belts built into them like an outer layer around her pants, and a pair of knee-high boots. She was wearing a lot of belts for some reason, even around a pair of black-and-white stripped gloves with a single large opening for her fingers. "Something about getting them off the blood-thirst thing and replacing it with obsessing over something more socially acceptable. And they were all wearing black ribbons. Well, apparently girls that look like me are to deprived male and lesbian vampires what fast food is to savage grease junkies on a diet-"

"Hey!" Sokka, Toph, Tucker and Zim all said, mortally offended at the 'savage grease junkies' remark.

"Fortunately, I got out of that problem with only three rubberbands, a statue of St. Boniface the patron saint of small spikey things and carnivorous plants, a semi-automatic portal generator and what I learned from a two-week enrollment in the annual She-Fu martial arts retreat," Sam said. "The carnage was horrible, but luckily, no one was really hurt. Or went on a feeding frenzy. I was feeling ticked, so I gave them all a good long talk about why it was wrong to feed off the blood of other living creatures without permission or to become shamelessly addicted to it and making it into something they think is sexy, not to mention the whole mess of wrongs with turning themselvse into something glamourous. I mean, they're animated corpses that suck people's blood. They're, at the absolute best, tragic figures who are going spend all of eternity hating themselves unless they come into a balance between who they were and what they now are, and at worst...well, it's a toss-up between being ravening demons that slaughter people for kicks or the ones that...sparkle. Euch."

"Didn't we go to a world with those kind of vampires once?" Aang asked. Zuko shuddered.

"Still, we completely threw their world into a brief chaos from which every single living human ended up becoming the better kind of mad scientist, a superpowered hunter bonded with an angelic spirit of pure awesomeness or came back from the dead with archetypal ghosts piggy-backing with them," Sokka said. "So it's all good! Espicially after the really crazy ones in Rome tried to eat us. Fortunately, they were flammable." Zuko, still unhappy with that memory, grinned viciously.

"I thought you went from your world to Zim's," Calvin said to Aang. "At least, that's what I heard."

"Say what?" Aang looked at Zim. "Hey, are you going around telling people our backstory for no readily apparent reason? Again?"

"It was for context!" Zim said. "Probably."

Katara sighed. "Zim, the last time you did that, you had half the world convinced that we were extradimensional things that looked human because you left out important details."

"I only suggested that you were from a higher plane of existence and were so mighty that to be called 'gods' would be an insult to your magnificence, that you could all make the world cease to exist in a moment's pause if you pleased," Zim said innocently. "Besides. This time, I told it to some people that helped me a bit and I told them the important parts of Aang's journey. Not how it ended, though. Or who any of you were. Or about Zuko."

Zuko groaned. "You got more people thinking I'm a bad guy, don't you?"

"No. They don't even know who you are."

"...Oh." Zuko said. "I...guess that's better. Sort of."

"And I made sure to tell them about the Air Nomad and Fire Nation...issue," Zim said delicately. "So they'll probably be exta-nice to you. Give you money and stuff. Maybe you'll get a giant robot of doom! I want one. But they'll probably hate you when they find out you're Fire Nation," Zim told Zuko. "Oh, yes, they'll instantly think of you as one of an entire countryful of genocidal monk-killing maniacs with bad hair! Who like burning stuff."

"Zim!" Aang and Zuko said. "You didn't have to tell them that stuff!" Aang continued.

"You didn't even bother to give an unbiased report about my people!" Zuko nearly screamed. "That my great-grandfather intentionally spread propanganda about the Air Nomads before he rallied the army to doing...that? That my people were resentful towards the Air Nomads because we lived on islands and were constantly terrified of hurricane season when they ruled the wind and weren't bound by loyalty like we were! That excuses nothing, but you should at least give people historical context!"

"It's not historical for me," Aang said, still looking extremely uncomfortable. Zim was quite interested; he'd never heard much of that before. He only really knew that the Fire Nation had some sort of loyalty to their leaders related to their spiritual link to fire; to break loyalty was to extinguish your spirit's fire and die. Aang had never spoken much of the Air Nomad genocide, for obvious reasons. "Just...ugh, the people you told are going to have the wrong idea all over! My best friend before the war was Kuzon and he was from the Fire Nation! Zuko's part of my family! Both spiritually and by Air Nomad terms of connection, of course. Just...just who did you tell? Please don't tell me you told a bunch of crazy people again!"

"Oh, don't worry, it was just four people! And their pet talking mole rat that doesn't look anything like an actual mole rat. Let's see, there was these two teenage crime fighting secret-agent types, a guy and girl with unusually appropiate names, and the guy had a monkey tail! Also, hideously tramuatic lives. And then there was Abel, who apparently I have met before but didn't know it. He's a secret-agent priest that seems good at killing things, really good at killing things! And freaky shadow-based powers, like the Heartless but less ominous and more awesome. And I'm pretty sure he's some kind of weird vampire. Did I mention the giant cross chained to his back and he's prettier than all you over there are put together?"

"Hey!" Sam, Katara, Toph and Aang said. The girls stared at Aang. "What?" He said defensively. "Where is it written that a man cannot be pretty!"

Katara sighed. "Aang, you're not pretty." She gave him a hug from behind. "You're adorable, okay?"

"Awww!" He whined. "I wanna be good looking! Is that too much to ask? Really, I'm a person of mass destruction, can't the spirits gift me with something that doesn't revolve around killing people or hurting them!"

"Also, a fourth guy that's really weird and is supposed to be an urban legend," Zim finished.

"Who was also following me and my buddy while he had a obnoxious imaginary blue blob and a talking evil mad scientist baby on his shoulders. Wearing a trenchcoat," Calvin said.

Sokka and Zuko groaned. "I don't believe it," Zuko said. "Did you go and look for the least stable people you could find?"

"It's going to be Area 51 again, I just know it," Sokka said despairingly. "Interrogations! Uncomfortable examinations! Constant threats of vivisection! Prison food! Which wasn't that bad, really."

Toph shrugged. "Ahh, you guys are overreacting." She went over to Calvin. "As for going from our world to Zim's, it wasn't exactly a linear process, lemme tell ya. One day we were just looking for Zuko's mom, we found some crazy ruins in this dingy little island no one has ever heard of, which was weird enough since even the Spirits Aang talked to didn't know anything about it; there weren't even local spirits of the place to personify it! So we find this giant ring thing and Sokka and Zuko somehow turn it on, and boom! We're sucked into some kind of crazy interdimensional rift and we wind up in another world. I think it was called 'Alagaesia' or something. We, ah, really made a mess there. We had no idea what was going on, what had happened to us, if it was just a crazy spirit-dream or real, and then we ended up in the middle of a huge fight between a big evil empire and some other guys.

"And then we did our thing and beat everyone up because we had no idea what was going on, and Aang got kidnapped by crazy elves who wanted to study him and it got mesy when they tried to be all flat-earth atheists on him when he's the freaking incarnation of our planet and then Zuko tried to take over the rebellion in the place because he didn't think they were doing a good job and he got into a huge problem with this kid with a dragon and...well, they weren't used to Bending people who didn't get tired fast. Not that they could Bend right, or figure out how we were Bending and stop us. It was only a few days, though, before whatever catapulted us there snapped and launched us to a different world. That one was called Middle-Earth, and we ended up in some place populated by short guys called hobbits. It was pretty sweet."

"Yeah," Aang said dreamily. "But then a evil wizard showed up and did an evil industrial Revolution on it, so we decided to go beat up the big bad guy that was causing all the trouble. I think he was some kind of evil spirit, or something, everyone called him Sauron." He frowned. "We...we saw some awful things on our way." He brightened. "But everytime we met a band of Orcs, we talked some sense into them, somehow got them loyal to Zuko and convinced them to become civilized warriors of justice and other nice things!"

"We've never been in any world very long until Earth," Toph said. "It was at least...a year? Maybe more. Time's gotten weird for us since we left home."

"Yeah..." Katara said wistfully.

"At least you have a home to go back to," Danny said quietly. Tucker and Sam flinched.

The others winced. Except Zim. "Oh yeah, good point," He said. "You other guys are tactless."

Zuko gaped. "Did ZIM just call us tactless? Oh, this is a new low."

"Indeed," Zim said. "I mean, that's just embarrasing. I did nothing to even compare to that! All I did was run around like an idiot and get in a fight with a vampire, get told a lot of stuff I still don't really understand, get into a huge fight with a shadow-monster that looked like a living suit of armor for no readily apparent reason, charge all over the town following the vampire from earlier and an obnoxious imaginary friend, get even more lost trying to find a single room in this asylum they dare to call a home, pick fights and destroy property out of frustration, get chased everywhere by an angry mob I utterly brought upon myself, get taunted a lot by an evil intruder we don't know but knew impossibly private and damaging things about all of us, fight a huge fight against a massive number of weak but sort-of-skilled Heartless, have some more boring not-going-anywhere talk, practice Firebending or whatever it is I can suddenly do all night and commit more property damage in the process, most while being partnered with a moody mechanist with magic powers, a lazy tiger-man with kung-fu powers of Facebending and a talking skull with no other apparent use than to annoy everyone."

"...Huh," Danny said. "All I did last night was get lost, find my friends and try not to go crazy from almost everyone I've ever known and cared about dying and being turned into monsters. And being horrifically traumatized, can't forget that."

Zim looked at him. It was hard to tell, from the apathetic lok on Danny's face, but he thought that the realization of what had actually happened was starting to get to Danny worse and worse; Sam and Tucker seemed better off, Sam moreso, but both of them seemed to be treating the loss of their world as something too big to fit. He did notice that everytime the subject was brought up, Aang and Zuko looked sick and the rest of Team Avatar wasn't doing much better. Zim had no idea why; it wasnt like their world had been destroyed or anything. He supposed people they'd known had died too, but they hadn't said anything about it yet, so he dismissed it until further notice.

Aang hung his head. "'M sorry, Zim. Danny. Sam. Tucker." His balance shifted, like an anvil had dropped on his back, and he hit the ground in a unsteady jerk. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry..." His friends crowded around him, like a loosely questing organism will contract around itself in times of trouble, and Zuko bit his lip and looked away from the survivors of Earth, like the sight hurt him.

"For what?" Tucker said heisitantly.

Aang's faltering nerve failed him and he dropped his gaze fell to the ground, ashamed. Zuko managed to look at them and said, "For letting this happen." He again looked away, unable to watch them react, the reminders of his and his friend's utter failure. "You guys...you're like, no, you are part of our group and we couldn't stop any of this..."

Zim remembered that nothing like this had happened to any of them; they had tried to return to their world for so long now, but they hadn't truly lost it. They had been to many worlds since then, foughts scores of battles, befriended dozens of people, but according to them they had never remained in a single world as long as they had in Earth, and no one had come into their group as closely as Zim and Danny had. They had failed sometimes, and terrible things had come of that failure, but never anything as drastic as the obliteration of an entire world. And each of them had their own ways of interpreting this horror; Sokka and Katara, from the familial Water Tribe, had lost their mother and dozens of their people and were undoubtedly thinking of how many family members their friends had lost. (Zim had noticed that Danny hadn't spoken of his sister or parents at all.) Toph, ignored and dismissed nearly all her life, was probably feeling like she had abandoned her Earth-friends. Zuko, who'd once lost everything in an untimely act of goodwill, likely saw it as a failure unsurpassed by anything he had done, a betrayal of trust. And Aang, who was the lone survivor of an act of genocide that left him the last Air Nomad in the world...Zim just knew he was thinking about that horrible act of mass murder and was applying it to Earth.

Zim felt guilty for making them feel bad. Samael popped up by his head. "Dude. Everyone's getting bummed out. Do something to distract the angst!"

"Uh...give them a minute," Zim whispered to him. "They'll get over it! I hope."

Samael pointed at them again. Zim blanched; Aang looked on the verge of tears and Danny, whatever mental defenses he'd constructed to hold off the horror just behind him, looked like he was about to collapse into a miserable little pile of grief, his friends even closer to the edge. "Ah. I see. Okay, we can-"

"Hey!" Calvin said, poking Zim hard in the back of the head. Zim stared at him. "I'm bored now and you smell like wet ugly. Let's you and me fight!"

"What?" Zim said. "I'd love to beat your smelly, ugly, self-satisfied, smelly, arrogant, overconfident, smelly, oversized and smelly face in, but is this quite the time?"

"You said smelly four times."

"You are quite smelly. Four times smellier than anything else I could say."

"That doesn't even make any sense!"

"Neither does your face! Which is smelly."

Calvin felt he was losing control of the argument. "Well...your hat is stupid!"

Zim gaped at him. Katara and Tucker gasped. Sokka and Toph immediately starting making bets how how bad the beatdown would be. "What," Zim said flatly.

"Yeah, yeah!" Calvin said, remembering that Zim had been a little defensive about his hat last night. "What's with that thing, anyway? It's like it can't decide whether it's a beret or a cap. What's it made for, looking stupid?"

Zim's eye twitched. He took his hat off his head and put it away in his Pak. "You have said the unkind words," He said in a quiet voice. "Now I must make your brains go squish."

Calvin braced himself for the inevitable, but he was still surprised when Zim lunged at him like an arrow, screaming a fearsome battle cry of 'Spoon!' and hit him once with a solid kick to the gut, a punch to the chest, grabbed Calvin by the arm and spun him around before kicking him in the back and sent him skidding along the ground before he hit a tree.

Everyone winced. Zim got a few angry looks. Calvin twitched a little. Zim winced. "Ah. I, er, may have overreacted..."

Calvin groaned and sat up; above him, the tree trembled a bit and in accordance with the laws of humor, several large clumps of leaves fell on Calvin's head. "Ow," He said, getting up and dusting himself off. "I'll say."

"Look, see, he's fine!" Zim said hurredly. "And...not hurt at all dispite being kicked in the stomach and hurled into a tree. What, are you made of iron!"

"Could be," Calvin said, stretching his arms. "But are you made of marshmellows? 'Cause you're soft! And you probably get all crispy and nice in a fire, but it's hard to roast you on a stick and when you try forks you never get the gunk off." Calvin frowned. "Okay, I lost hold of what I was talking about there, but you get the idea."

"Was that a threat?" Sam wondered.

Zim shook his head. "No, he's just an idiot."

"Hey!" Calvin said. "That's it, verbal assaults that were tired and boring before you came around to muck around in them, like a toddler in a swamp? C'mon, I thought you were better than that! But you're not! You suck!"

Zim bristled. Zuko put a hand on his shoulder. "Calm down. I don't like the idea of you beating up a kid."

"Shows what you know!" Calvin yelled at Zuko. "I could beat you up with two hands behind my back, my legs belted up and a ironing board strapped to my head! And your hair's stupid. It does nothing to make your face look better."

"I've gotten over my reluctance," Zuko said. "Beat his face in!" He self-consciously patted his hair. "...I'm getting hair comments from a guy with anime hair..."

"Sporkmonsters of sylvian footwear!" Zim yelled for no apparent reason, rushing at Calvin, his shoes spontaenously bursting into sparks and flames igniting around his arms.

Danny watched him go. He sidled to Aang and said, a little uncomfortable from Aang's confession of unwarrented guilt and said, "So, I don't really know what you guys do and all...but he's doing that same thing you and Zuko do with fire now. Is that normal where you come from?"

Aang frowned in thought. Sokka slowly shook his head. "Nooo, no, I really don't think so. I mean, he can't be Firebending."

"He's doing it right now," Sam pointed out; Zim and Calvin were now trading ranged attacks, Zim furiously punching blasts of fire at Calvin, ragged and weaker than anything Zuko or Aang ever did, but as Team Avatar noticed, far stronger than anything even the most talented novice Firebender could bend without external fire. Calvin, on the other hand, had retrieved his hammer from his dufflebag and transmuted into a hefty staff, redistrubuting it's mass across the whole thing for a painful-looking bludgeon; he was actually dispelling the flames, waves of force rippling along the staff before it blew the fireblasts apart and kept going enough to hit Zim more often then not; they were pretty big, and Zim wasn't accustomed to his newfound agility to dodge them easily.

Toph felt the heat washing over them, felt Calvin and Zim's furious footwork on the grass-laden earth while blasts of fire and and that very grass flattened under the blasts of air-pushing force and wither under the fire. "Sure looks like it," She said.

"Stop making blind jokes," Sokka scolded her. "No, what we mean is he can't be a Firebender! He's not from the Fire Nation, he doesn't have that element thing going for him, he's not even from our world!"

"Maybe his contact with you guys has forged a link to your world that let's him Firebend?" Tucker suggested. They looked at him. "Hey, I've heard stupider ideas in crossover fanfiction that justifies stuff like this."

"Bending comes from the spirits," Aang said unexpectedly. "In part, it has to do with how the spirits influence my world, and Bending capability...it's complicated, but a lot of it has to do with how the philosophy of your nation is channeled. I think that's part of why most Firebenders these days aren't as strong as people like Zuko and me; they've forgotten what fire actually is and don't channel it right. Life, energy, will, not destruction and hate."

Zuko nodded and frowned. "But...it's weird. Whatever he's doing, it's like Firebending. Watch him."

"Shouldn't we help that kid?" Katara asked nervously. "He could get hurt!"

They heard another loud blast of force that cut a slash in the ground, frayed grass falling everywhere and Zim lying at the end of it. "Three five six and space, here's more telekinesis in your face!" Calvin yelled, hitting Zim sqaurely in the side, the blast of force sending him flying right into a tree; the same one Calvin had hit. Leaves fell on Zim's head.

"...I think he'll be okay," Toph said dryly. She raised an eyebrow, enjoying the fight. "Ooh, that was a nasty hit! Go lower, knock him off his feet, Firebenders hate that!"

"TOPH!" Zim yelled furiously. "YOU ARE NOT HELPING!"

"Thanks for the advice!" Calvin said. There was a thump, followed by Zim yelling some more in frustration.

Still too surprised by the sudden fight, everyone forgot the horrors of last night at least for a while, fear and remorse and guilt buried under simple bemusement at Zim Firebending in a fight with a kid Aang's age who was throwing blasts of telekinetic force that were a little similar to Airbending but lacking the basic principles even Zim's odd fire-powers bore to true Firebending. They watched them fight, Aang, Katara, Toph and Zuko taking notes on their styles while Danny, Sokka, Tucker and Toph (pausing in the studying) made bets on who was going to win, and Sam wondered why she was alwyas surronded by idiots.

She also wondered why, aside from a few curious bystanders that Sokka and Tucker soon managed to trick into buying 'admission for the show', no one had turned up to investigate the noise.

...

Inside Foster's, it was pandemonium.

The word may be a bit misleading. In the epic work of fiction where the word was first coined, it was simply the lair of all the fallen angels as they transformed into demons, and functioned somewhat as a literally hellish bereaucracy. (It is widely believed that this piece of fiction has basis in fact. This is partially correct.) In current events, the word has come to mean a place of complete and total ravenous chaos, perhaps because when one considers what a place inhabited only by backbiting, self-centered and delusional personifications of corruption would actually be like, a constant state of ferociously insane violence punctuated by moments of horrifically worse violence springs easily to mind.

Whenever Spike was involved, such scenes were certainly to happen.

"Is that all you've got!" He bellowed, hopping off the head of an unconscious Primeape (a creature looking something like a round and very hairy thing with a pig's nose and oversized boxing-glove fists) and ramming boot-first into the chest of a small guard with big geeky glasses and the steampunk-styled snap-up purple vest over a black jumpsuit that was the uniform of the Foster's Security force. The geeky but tough guard stumbled back a bit, gasping in pain when Spike, hands on the ground and pushing him up, locked his feet around the guard's neck, levered himself and threw the poor guard halfway across the hallway into a suit of armor, hitting it hard enough to send it falling over right on the poor guard.

Spike stood up, breathing heavily and grinning like a monster under his protective clothing. He was in a serious spot of trouble, yes, but he was having such fun. Ordinarily, he would have been a little wary of the sunlight streaming through the windows, but that was ameliorated by his outfit, which was something he wore in the daylight hours; all-black and made of a material like leather and rubber, covering him head to foot in a bizarre arrangement of layers over a coverall jumpsuit, buckled at various points to keep the numerous parts of the outfit together, a matching pair of metal-capped boots and gloves, and a knee-long black coat that would probably have looked incredibly cool in a gaslamp romance sort of way if it wasn't buckled closed in defiance of all the laws of badass longcoats. Owing to the denseness of the outfit, he was completely shielded from the sunlight, espicially his head; he wore an attached hood-mask equipped with a pair of narrowed goggles over his eyes.

He cocked his head curiously, like a cat noticing a mouse proving to be a small wolverine as the guard, Kain Fuery, got up to his feet with surprising speed, given that he had just had an entire suit of armor fall on him after he'd been thrown into it. "You're a tough kid, Fuery," He said, taking a moment to look at the nametag on his vest. "You ought to sign up with a more lucrative outfit than these jokers." Spike thumbed at a number of other guards lying around the hallway, mostly humans with a few other inhuman sentients known collectively as Pokemon, all of them wearing the uniform, if altered for their body shapes.

Fuery brushed himself off and held his arms up. "I don't do this for money." He said simply as glowing circuit lines appeared on his sleeves before the nanotechnology imbedded in the fabric reacted to his elevated heart rate and body activity, replicating and unfolding into a set of overlarge mechanical arms over Fuery's own, equipped with special motion-sensing machines folding over his major muscle systems and connecting to muscle-power amplifying transistors, huge mechanical fists flexing as his own fingers, somewhere in the lower arm region of the arms, pressed and pulled on a motion-transference rig. Spike cocked his head, wondering where he could get gear like that before he whirled around on another guard that had been sneaking up on him and grabbed him by the wrist before throwing him across the hall at Fuery.

"No! My doctor said I'm not supposed to be weaponized before twelve in the morning!" The guard wailed. Fuery, perhaps realized the stupidity of grabbing a person out of the air with giant machine-arms designed to make things hurt very badly, lowered his arms and moved into his way, cushioning the projectile man's impact. "Ow! What are you trying to do, break me like the fine china your mother always puts right where you just have to run into it!" The man complained, falling off and lying on the ground. "Also, what do people in China call the fine china?"

"The nice plates?" Spike suggested; he'd spent some time in China during the Boxer rebellion and it now occured to him that perhaps he should have indulged in a little research instead of brutally slaughtering everything in sight for his insane girlfriend's approval like he'd actually done. "What do they call 'em where you're from? Fuery? Wait, where are you from?"

"Amestris," Fuery said. "I think they call the 'fine China' the 'fine Xingese'. It's also...uh...fairly crude slang for Xingese women." He paused. "Wait, why are we talking about this? I'm supposed to be fighting you."

"Not doing it very well, are you?" Spike said. Fuery frowned and grabbed a table and threw it at Spike with such force that when Spike narrowly sidestepped it, it shattered across the wall and sent splinters flying like small daggers. Spike didn't bother dodging them, just let them stab into his shoulder without even ripping his outfit.

Spike cleared them out just in time to see Fuery rush to him; there was a complicated series of motions involving a horribly painful crushing impact in his chest, ending with Spike being smashed through the wall, Fuery's exoskeletal hand spread over his body and holding him painfully tight. "Okay...maybe you're doing a bit better," He admitted, wincing. Being squeezed by a machine-fist while splinters as big as knives and about as sharp were pressing into your shoulder and your head was pinned between a metal pipe and plaster fragments wasn't fun, even with his clothes providing a measure of armor.

"That's enough from you," Fuery said when Spike started kicking and thrashing in a fairly pointless attempt to get loose. "I don't really feel like hurting anybody today-" A lucky kick hit him in the shoulder, knocking him off-balance enough for his glasses to slip. "Hey, my glasses!"

Between his oversized armature, his position, and his hands in the sensitive grips so he could operate his exoskeleton, Fuery couldn't manuver himself effectively enough to fix his wayward glasses, and his awkward attempt to fix this gave Spike just enough leverage to kick the machine-arms in the elbow; it was hard, with the way he was being held, but it was enough to dislodge himself, and a simple matter to flip himself over Fuery's back and kick him into the hole he'd made. "Now stay there for a tick, right?" Spike said, pushing Fuery into the wall more thoroughly; the amplified strength of his arms meant nothing if he couldn't actually move the bulky machines in such a cramped space.

"Hey, get back here!" Fuery yelled, realizing he could hear Spike walk away. "You're not supposed to be...aw, it's going to be trouble for me, I just know it...Commander-Admiral Mustang's never going to stop laughing at me..."

"Probably," Spike said, running through an open door and leaving Fuery and his fellow guards behind. Almost at once, a roaring four-armed humanoid Machamp named Tetro threw himself at Spike with a Megaton Punch technique, fists glowing with power and hitting Spike dead-on, the vampire roaring with pain as the inhumanly strong blow nearly smashed him through the wall again, the force of it spintering one side of the hallway and knocking a few doors off their hinges. (They weren't weak or anything, Tetro was just a very tough Pokemon.) He clumsily shoved it away, getting back onto his feet and narrowly ducking another mighty punch, avoiding a third incoming punch by grabbing the offending arm and pulling the startled Machamp into the air, spun around and threw him back the way he'd came with a strength that easily matched Tetro's own.

Spike swallowed the blood in his mouth. "Why do guards and their like always get tougher as you go along?" He wondered.

"Probably because an increasingly dangerous threat encourages a greater response," Tetro said weakly. (Unlike many people, Spike had bothered to learn Pokespeak. He was surprisingly intellectual under his veneer of brutish punkdom.)

"It was a rhetorical question, you git." Spike turned and went on his way, well aware that the noise had attracted more of the guards now heading after him.

"Let's see, here...I'm in the east wing, ground level, administration set..." He muttered to himself a few hallways later, hopping off the head of a an incoming female guard and tapping her shoulder with a secret technique he'd learned in Tibet at tank-point, messing up the flow of her energy and knocking her unconcious instantly. Spike could be quite gentlemanly when he felt like it. Unfortunately for her, he didn't much feel like it and, taking advantage of the fact that she was as stiff and immobile as a statue, grabbed her and proceded to use her as a bludgeon in a short fight against three of her friends, which unfortunately all happened to be large trollish brutes made of solid rock. (Not actual trolls though, those were from another world that hadn't fallen to the Heartless yet.)

"One day, I will find you," She said afterwards, her friends all lying on the ground and blocking the hallway back, effectively cutting off pursuit from there. "I will find you and friggin' castrate you. If only because of this damn headache I got now!"

"So long as I'm forewarned," Spike said amiably, dropping her on the ground and going on his way, ignoring her amazingly invective curses and wondering distantly if women had actually invented the concept of cussing; this one certainly sounded like she had a dab hand in most of them. "All right. That's...several dozen guards down, at least half of what Herrimen's got in stock, so I'm nearly in the clear. Probably." He shrugged and went on his way.

A few hallways later (and at least fourteen badly concussed guards), he stopped in the middle of a hectic fight with a twelve-foot-tall robot and six halflings (humanlike people about half his size and twice as tough) as Bonnie Rockwaller, Zaphod Beeblebrox and the anonymous vampire (the ringleaders of the Zim-hating mob from last night he assumed), charged in from down the hall, viciously fighting yet more guards, whose uniforms were much less ostentatious than the ones Spike was dealing with, signifying they were of a lower rank. Their sudden intrusion was as much to the halfings and the robot as they were to Spike, and that was probably why they didn't react in time to stop Zaphod from seizing his oppertunity to ram a nearby chair into the robot's knee-joint and give it a hard enough shove to push it onto the unwisely charging guards; predicatably, the robot hit them all, unfortunately pinning it under it's weight and unable to get itself up after Zaphod locked up it's other joints with a series of small things he found around the hallway and stuffed in during the course of half a minute; a painting, a bust of Madame Foster, a rather inexplicable pinata, two of the halflings...

"Oh great, it's you," Spike said sourly, glaring at her while she was decking a female guard in the stomach with a oversized weapon best described as a combination of a staff and a rather nasty mace with the spikes sawed off. "Of all the inconvinient nuisances...what'd you do this time, eh?"

"I could say the same thing!" She said, flipping onto another guard's head and hopping off, her mace-staff flailing around in a intricate pattern that happened to involving smashing into the heads and sides of three other guards, knocking them to the ground, into the walls, and at least one through the ceiling. "You've got a lotta nerve showing your face in here after that stunt you pulled last night."

"Technically, he's not showing his face," The nameless vampire said. "He's wearing a mask...hood...facial protecting...thing. Whatever you call it."

Bonnie groaned and facepalmed. "I really hate literal-mindedness. And you guys."

"But I love stealing stuff from random guys and selling it," Zaphod said. Bonnie and the nameless vampire stared at him. "What?"

"So what's going here?" Spike asked Zaphod. "What's gotten your little party rolling?"

"Oh, nothing much, a minor disagreement with Mr. Herrimen over the treatment of newcomers that cause a lot of trouble and things got out of hand." Zaphod shrugged. "You?"

"Got blamed for another rumble I was actually late to. Herrimen wanted me to work off my debt and I wasn't bloody going to take that."

"That explains the guards chasing after you," Bonnie noted. She looked down Spike's path and winced. "Kind of a lot of them."

"The rabbit takes discipline entirely too seriously." Spike frowned under his mask...hood...thing. "Wait a tick. Where's the rest of your headbangers? Thought there were more of you running around."

Bonnie snorted. "Yeah, you noticed? After you dropped us down a trapdoor, the rest of us got sick of the whole thing and went to get Damage Control insurance cashed in." She smirked. "Not us."

"Actually, I don't really care, but this sounded like fun," Zaphod remarked.

"And owing to legal complications, I'm technically her man-servant," The nameless vampire said. He shrugged. "And that's why you never try to prevent Van Helsing hate crimes by hiding around doors with large frying pans." Bonnie rubbed her head and scowled. Catching her look, the vampire said, "I said I was sorry!"

"Whatever you say...uh...you...guy who you are...that's...look, what's your name again?"

The vampire froze. "I'd rather not say."

"Go on, what's the harm?" Zaphod said. "It's not like you've got something hideously stupid for a name."

"My name...it's..." The vampire shuddered, swallowed and slumped a little. "My name is Tarquin Tiesenhausen Tickgrass."

There was a significant pause. No one laughed, perhaps in pity of such a damnably bad name. "Oh, you poor unfortunate soul," Bonnie said. "Kind of sucks that you actually deserve your name."

"...Hey!"

"Well, you are a jerkass," Spike remarked. He learned around and noticed than another round of guards was coming. "Well, it's been right fun wasting time with you, but I expect you have a beating coming 'round." He jumped over Tarquin Tisenhausen Tickgrass' head and left through an adjacent hallway.

"Dammit!" Bonnie screamed as four elite guards, who weren't wearing vests but long coats of pure concentrated awesomeness, glared at them with such ferocity that Tarquin Tisenhausen Tickgrass fainted. Wait, that's not very manly. He blacked out. "How could this get any worse?"

"Excuse me, but I'm not really sure you should talk like that," A quiet voice said behind her. She turned around to see Kain Fuery standing behind them, surronded by a surly-looking Machamp and an angry woman touching her forehead tenderly. He kneeled down and turned the robot over, freeing the halflings and incidently dislodging the stuff Zaphod had stuffed into it's joints. "I didn't know you guys were in trouble too." He shrugged. "Sorry about this." He and his companions rushed, and much pain was inflicted upon the tattered remnants of the Zim-hating mob.

Spike, on the other hand, was only peripherally aware of it, being busy down the next hallway looking at the doors, in a bit of a hurry but not quite frantic. "Cleaning stuff storage closest twenty-three-A through twenty-three-F...Auditorium four, featuring documentaries for what not to do if you don't want your head handed to you...shoe depository...secret public entrance to that alternate dimension Madame Foster installed last week...ah, confiscated goods and retired documents!"

He came to a stop before a door. It was not a happy door. It was big, solid, and artfully painted to look like bricks with chains on, for some reason, and a big sign on the front that read Absolutely No Admittance Ever Granted Now, Tomorrow, Yesterday Or At Any Point Prior To The Heat-Death of The Universe, Except For Special Permission from House President. This Means You, Bloo. Spike kicked the door in, taking a moment to consider that if Mr. Herrimen had been truly serious about keeping people out, he could have put a sign that said something like Do Not Obey This Sign. It was logically impossible, absurd and could tie your brain in a knot, and anyone who saw it would be too confused to wonder what was behind the door. Obviously, Mr. Herrimen didn't care that much about it.

He entered a long and somewhat cluttered room, the wall lamps dimly lit, possibly for effect. It looked a lot like a room for storing unwanted things; there were old metal boxes with rusted locks, a lot of disassembled machinery lying around in open boxes, and the walls were lined with old filing cabinets that, Spike supposed, were all full of the names, files and offenses of long-dead imaginary friends; in the gaps between the cabinets were huge clockwork shelf devices, containing no less than four shelf compartments each, hand-cranked machines designed as part of the walls and floor, probably to save space. They were certainly big enough, with each compartment filled with smaller sliding drawers folding into each other in a sort of geometric puzzle. You had to have a mind like Mr. Herrimen's to design something like this, Spike thought. Orderly and neat while being mindbendingly complicated at the same time.

Hoping that whatever Mr. Herrimen had taken lately would still be in the open, he searched through the nearest ones as quickly as he dared without being incautious; he knew he had little time. In short order (in fact, at the right-hand rotator at the front of the room), he saw a familiar sword hilt lying just under a ragged blue child's blanket. Roughly pushing the blanket away, he grabbed the hilt and swung it out, freeing it from the collection of daggers, short swords, gunblades, big freaking swords, punching claws, arm cannons, axes and other assorted weapons that Mr. Herrimen had confiscated from brawls over the last few years. Spike almost admired him for the sheer volume of it all. And because he never wasted an oppertunity, he grabbed a few throwing daggers and tucked them into his sleeves, gingerly placed ten finger-claws on his gloves, took at least six daggers and knives of varying sizes and put them into sneaky hidden compartments in his clothes, all before he sheated his sword into the collection of rough straps on his coat's back. He didn't intend to use any of them right now, he just liked sharp things.

Quickly grabbing a few other cool looking stuff from the other rotators and stuffing them in his pockets, just because he could, Spike left the room and strode into the hallway, unsurprised to see a large crowd of guards and officers waiting for him, led by none other than Mr. Herrimen himself and the commanding officer of the Private Foster's Security Team, Captain Jake 'Razor' Clawson, accompinied by Acting-Lieutenant Cassie 'Stature' Lang (an unusually tall teenage girl with long blonde hair and black goggles), Second Lieutenant Freya Crescent (a pretty humanoid rabbit-rat Burmecian with a slightly pointed snout, elongated ears and a long spear) and Warrent Officer Andre (a green-skin-and-hair humanlike Jagermonster, with monstrously overgrown fangs and a snazzy dress fez), all of them wearing the longcoat uniforms of the elite, with a few variations on the higher ranked Stature and Razor.

(The Hitchhiker's Guide had detailed articles on all four of them, even though they were, for the most part, the unseen people that keep things moving, that help the overall plot of the world going without affecting it in a obvious way. Captain Razor, for instance, was once a tech-savvy police officer in a world of humanoid cats, working alongside his partner Chance 'T-Bone' Furlong in the Air Force Squadron of the Enforcers, the local law enforcment division of their world, the pilot and gunner of a fighter plane who had a repuatation as being really good at causing headaches for their superior officer Commander Ulysses Feral, mainly for their problems with accidentally blowing stuff up, taking insane chances with their own lives and generally being annoying, hitting a peak when they accidentally destroyed their own command headquarters and were sentenced to lifelong community service in a military junkyard.

(This didn't quite work as expected when they realized that a lot of the stuff there was perfectly usable; Razor scavenged what he could and built a high-tech fighter jet so he and his partner could get back to doing what they loved; fighting crime, putting supercriminals in their place and working on giving Commander Feral a premature anyeurism. They took on the codnames Razor and T-Bone, referred to themselves as the Swat Kats, and went back to work, until their archnemisis Dark Kat begun experimenting in pan-dimensional portals to recruit alternate-but-still-evil versions of himself, only to accidentally pull in Killer Croc, a horrifically-monstrous human from a world of noble superheroes and foul supervillians; he was doomed to gruadually mutate into a reptilian form similar to a crocodile's, growing superhumanly powerful even as his condition worsened, becoming a cannibalistic horror that was more man than monster descending into madness and savagery.

Fascinated by the massive reptilian monstrosity, Dark Kat recruited him as a henchman, and Killer Croc complied, mainly because he had no idea how else to get home; in short order, the other villains the Swat Kats faced 'disappeared', their savaged bodies cropping up in pieces here and there, parts of them eaten. And it got worse when Dark Kat begun recruiting more villains from that other strange world; Scarecrow. Bane. Mr. Freeze. Deathstroke. These new villains were too much for the Enforcers and even the Swat Kats to fight effectively, culminating in the appearance of a scarred and sadistic nihilist clown called the Joker; his first act was to arrange the deaths of every single Enforcer, starting with the televised murder of Commander Feral's niece by way of Killer Croc and his...appetite, followed by all-out war as the otherworldly villains switched to following the Joker, stating that 'where we're from, when supervillains want to scare each other, we tell Joker stories'. In the end, Commander Feral died trying to stop the Joker from opening a very specific pandimensional portal, unleashing the horror of the Heartless upon that world before he and his fellow supervillains merrily went back home, the Heartless sparing their world for a while longer. Razor was the only survivor of his world, and he continued doing what he'd done even when his partner died trying to take down the Heartless threat; saving the world, one idiot monster at a time.

(Cassie, on the other hand, didn't have such an illustrious past; she was a human girl from a world of marvels, of superheroes and villains who were defined by the horrible state of their world; racism against superhumans ran rampant and bad things tended to happen to everybody with the wrong set of genetic code. She grew up idolizing her father Scott Lang, a scientist who designed a serum after studying mutants with the power to shrink or grow to incredible sizes, devising a formula that would endow a human with the ability to shrink to the size of an insect or grow to enormous sizes; he tested it on himself, whereupon it was a complete success and moonlighted as the superhero Ant-Man, much to his daughter's awe. Both of them were unaware that second-hand exposure to him during the process of his transformation into a metahuman had given her similar abilities, though they took longer to manifast. She never discovered her powers until after she came to Traverse Town, in the wake of her world being one of the first to be attacked by coordinated armies of Heartless and stranger things.

(Her father was one of the superheroes, few at the time, who responded, alongside the embittered mutant Magneto, his friend the telepathic Charles Xavier, the legendary Captain America, Magneto's reality-warping daughter the Scarlet Witch, the monstrous and heroic incredible Hulk, and Miss Marvel the energy-controlling super-soldier, forming a team of heroes to avenge the thousands of people already dead. They fought back against the Heartless and the evil men and women that had brought them: villians like the angry and arrogant sorceror-technologist Doctor Doom, Thanos the lover of Death herself, the Darwinian mutant-supremicist Apocalypse and the Red Skull, a man so evil that he decided that being a Nazi was lame and switched to anarchy. Story cut short, the Heartless overrode their boundaries and devoured the world of the marvels, and those that survived the devastation were scattered far and wide across the worlds, and Cassie's dad was among the dead; the lucky few that wound up in Traverse Town had formed the bulk of the protective arm of the adventurering community, and Cassie for one upheld the ideals that her father believed in, and put them to good use once her mass-shifting powers develouped. Being a guard was just a job; she and her friend Peter Parker, the spectacular Spider-Man and one of the few teenage heroes to fight the Heartless, were two of the founding members of the local youth hero group, the Teen Titans.

(Freya Cresent was originally from a world known as Gaia, where she had been a renowned Dragon Knight, a warrior who emulated the ways of the dragons, from the rainy land of Burmecia. Her lover Iron-Tail Fratley had disappeared during a journey into foriegn lands, and not being the sort of woman to take her boyfriend's apparent skills into considering, she set off to find him and beat some sense into him if he was alive, and if he wasn't, she'd find his body and scare his spirit into coming back for terror of what she would do if she died and found him there. While visiting a hunting festival in the technologically marvel-city of Lindblum, she reunited with an old friend: Zidane Tribal, a chivalrous perverted thief who'd kidnapped the princess of Alexandria to sneak her into Lindblum under the name Dagger so she could meet her 'uncle', the king of Lindblum, Cid, and had picked up her stalwart knight Adelbert Steiner and a young but powerful Black Mage named Vivi Orinter. After the festival, and Dagger's running off with Steiner to parts unknown, Freya decided to join up with Zidane. This was quickly followed by them journeying to her native Burmecia as it was being ravaged by Black Mages under the command of Alexandria's Queen; Black Mages, much to Vivi's horror, were artificial creatures born to be weapons, and they were very good at it. When they tried to stop Beatrix, the ruthlessly loyal head of the powerful knights, they were soundly beaten before being mocked by Kuja, the queen's adrogynous and very nearly unclothed arms dealer.

(They next tried to take refuge and help the surviving Burmecians escape to their neighbor city of Cleyra, a massive city-tree where their pacifistic cousins had left to years ago. Freya's attempt to take part in a ceremony to revatilize Cleyra's protective sandstorm ended disastrously, with their mystical harp breaking and the sandstorm vanishing forever. This was shortly followed by Queen Brahne unleashing wave after wave of Black Mages upon Cleyra, killing hundreds, before she commanded her own daughter's stolen spirit-ally Odin to utterly destroy the entire city of Cleyra; Freya barely escaped with her life, as did her friends and several dozen Cleyans and Burmecians. With little left to lose, she vowed to stop Brahne, particularily after she learned that Iron-Tail Fratley was alive, but had lost his memories and had no clue who she was. She and her team found many things across the continents of their world; that the Black Mages were innocent and naive constructs that develouped empathy and intelligence in time and had retreated to a little town far to the north where no one could hurt them or force them to kill, that Vivi was doomed to one day 'Stop' like them and die; that Kuja had arranged Brahne's war to fuel some hideous plan...

(Brahne died, and they soon found out, after a series of harrowing adventures and trials, that he and Zidane were both creatures from another world called Terra, a dry and dying world; they were both artificial creatures called Genomes, created to bring death to Gaia and harvest the souls to restore the people of Terra and give the empty shells of the Genomes life. Kuja learned that Zidane was to be his replacement, that he himself was going to die soon, and had a cosmic temper tantrum culminating in a mission to kill everything else out of spite. Somehow, this involved a trip for Freya and her friends into a trippy realm of memories and other stuff, a huge fight with Kuja, him intentionally allowing them to hammer him to a pulp so he could go into a super-mode and unleashed massive devastation before making them all travel back in time so he could destroy the original begining of the universe: somehow, a monstrous entity of death called Necron showed up and they had to fight him to stop everything dying. It worked, they went back home, and Zidane stayed behind to save Kuja, though he showed up at a play a while later after there was happiness all around: Vivi made more Black Mages so his people wouldn't die out owing to their killing the Iifa Tree that produced the soul-stuff that manufactured them, the sort-of-last Summoner Eiko Carol was adopted by CiD Fabool and his wife Hildegard, Freya started dating with Fratley, their bizarre friend Quina Qu became a famous chef after his/her/it's quest to become one, Steiner and Beatrix became lovers and the reformed assassin Amarant went into bodyguard work. But a few years after Zidane and Dagger got married, the Heartless showed up, they did their thing, and everyone died; Zidane. Dagger. Steiner. Amarant. Quina. Fratley. Everyone but Freya, Eiko and Vivi had died, the poor Black Mage's children and the rest of his race included, but they were still alive, so that's life for you.

(Andre, unlike the others, didn't have that much of an epic story. He had been a decorated soldier in the service of the Heterodynes, an notorious family of deranged mad scientists in a world full of mad scientists, or Sparks as they were called. He earned the right to partake of the Jagerdraught, a potion made partially of the stuff of the River Dyne, the unusual river from which the sentient and homicidal home of the Heterodynes drew the immense power it required. Most people who drank the Draught died if they were lucky. Some went insane. Others mutated in interestingly horrible ways. And a lucky few became monstrous super-soldiers, somewhat like the stories of the man who became a creature of pure evil, except these monsters replaced 'evil' with 'undiluted deranged awesomness': Jagermonsters. The top of the Heterodyne's family's personal army, the monsters that struck fear into the heart of other monsters, and for some reason had a cult of personality centering around cool hats.

(The Heterodynes were insane, even by Spark standards, and were extremely gifted inventors. This, in a spark, was not a good combination. This all changed when the next generation of Heterodynes arose; Bill and Barry Heterodyne, brothers who channeled their family's madness into good-natured heroics, journeying around their native Eastern Europa, righting wrongs, fighting monsters, stopping mad plots and saving girls with the help of their patchwork flesh golem constructs Punch and Judy, as well as their dignified but ill-fated friend Klaus Wulfenbach, leaving the Jagers to protect their hometown of Mechanicsburg from harm. For a while, it all went well; the world became a little bit safer, the Jagers got to be a bit more socially acceptable and cheese wasn't very expensive. And then bad stuff happened, possibly involving Bill's mysterious wife Lucrezia after Klaus disappered; an entity called the Other attacked Castle Heterodyne, irrevocably damaging it and driving it insane-er. Their son Klaus, named in honor of their missing friend, was found crushed, and Lucrezia missing with her lab in shambles. Bill and Barry both went a little crazier and set off to hunt down the Other, who was infecting random people with slaver wasps that transformed them into shambling zombielike revenants.

(In time, the revenants were largely gone, though the slaver wasp hives remained. The Heterodynes disappeared, and the Other was presumed defeated, what with the lack of horrible shambling hordes and all. And with them, there was a powerful vaccum ready to be filled by bloodthirsty Sparks, bloodthirsty nobles, bloodythirsty Spark nobles and foriegners. and then Klaus Wulfenbach showed up, his infant son in tow, and he immediately set off on fixing the problem by taking advantage of the fact that he was a Baron, rallied what troops, fighters and machines he could make and created an empire of sorts based exclusively on telling everyone to quit acting like idiots and obliterating everyone that said 'no'. He employed the Jagers, since they were out of work at the moment and super-soldiers are always handy, on the provision that they have a few wild ones out and about to search for the Heterodynes and satisfy their loyalty to House Heterodyne. So, things were pretty good then; Baron Wulfenbach was an benevolent overlord, operating on the principle of 'Don't make me come down there', and otherwise ignoring people, provided they didn't mess around with artifacts of the Other.

(Andre was one of the Jagers that signed up with Wulfenbach, and settled down happily as one of those faceless mooks that does his job and has fun with it, busying himself with constantly hitting on the sadistically homicidal but motherly construct Von Pinn and keeping his fellow Jagermonster Gorb from being too stupid. Aside from meeting Agatha Heterodyne, the long-lost heir to the now-heroic house of Heterodyne, he hadn't done much important. Surprisingly accurate rumor had it that his world was just fine, he'd somehow got involved in an ill-advised experiment with ancient ruins, a banana peel and a overactive thinking engine, getting him stuck in Traverse Town until he could get back home and rejoin his brothers; as a Jaegermonster, he was going mad from the agony of seperation from the pack. On the other hand, he'd come to think of the Foster's Security Team as his new pack, so there's that.)

Mr. Herrimen looked at Spike, his mustache twitching. "The game, as they say, is up, Master William."

Spike took a good long look at the assembled people around them. A lot of them were passingly familiar, in the sense that they had smacked his boots, fists and various improvised weapons with themselves. Most of them had the bruises and vaugely dizzy expressions to show it. Tetro the Machamp shook two fists at him, while a robot and six halflings opted for menacing glares. A whole two-score of human guards of varying genders (the women far, far less hurt than the men) made a number of threatening gestures at him. A good number of Pokemon were less reserved, growling and snarling and hurling vitrolic insults at him. A low background murmur saying mostly unkind things and promises of dispoportionate retribution would have made most people very nervous.

Spike spread his arms wide, as if to say Is this all? "Well, now this is a proper change of pace. Hate fighting one-on-one, I do. If you're going to send your little security team, you ought to send the whole thing, yeah? A proper one-on-all beatdown, that style of thing."

"Things aren't as one-sided as they look!" Kain Fuery said indignantly, near the back.

Spike blinked at him. He had certainly not been expected to see him there. "Oh, you've gotta be putting me on. I put you half through a wall! After you did the same to me, but not half as well."

Fuery frowned. One of the numerous women covering him like an honor guard (or a fanclub), one Warrent Officer Risa Koizumi, stood up and angrily said, "Yeah? And he still managed to get out on his own and follow you, help all the guys you knocked around, pull them together and meet up with the rest of us!"

Spike gave Fuery a dubious look. Fuery shrugged, looking slightly embarrased. Mr. Herrimen coughed. Startled, Spike looked at him again. "If I may, Master William?" Spike shrugged, indicating that he wasn't bothered one way or the other. "You've wasted quite a lot of time here. I am offering a chance to return to your assigned duties and repay your debt to the house, as you were supposed to before this ill-timed attempt to escape. And apologize to the fine men and women-" A few people that weren't human, animal or mineral but still capable of taking offense coughed. "Ahem. And others, that you assaulted."

"'Assaulted'?" Spike said. "They were trying to capture me, you remember. I think a little fighting back is warrented under the circumstances, yeah?"

Razor tapped Mr. Herrimen on the shoulder with a claw before the rabbit could say anything. "Mr. Herrimen?"

"Yes, Captain Clawson?" Mr. Herrimen said.

"There's a thing, sir," Said Razor. He was a tall, lean anthropomorphic cat with short tan fur, and signifying his rank was his outfit, which wasn't dissimilar to Spike's, aside from being primarily green with yellow undertones and a long purple coat. And a nice pair of black goggles. They were almost as nice as a good hat. "Much as I hate to admit it, Mr. Pratt-"

"Spike," Spike said empathetically.

"Yeah, that too, he has a point. Technically, anybody who can be said to be fighting back against an opposing force that moved first can't be considered to be commiting a crime."

Mr. Herrimen frowned. "What? Are you quite sure?"

"I do get a special corrospondence from the Judgemasters whenever they have an official law amendment made," Razor said, somewhat reproachfully. "Helps to have contacts in their ranks."

Mr. Herrimen groaned. "Then I suppose it would be unlawful for me to punish him for that, exactly. Whoever thought that a law like that would be a good idea?"

"If memory serves," Acting-Constable Stature said, "Field-Admiral Gibbs proposed it six months ago. I thought the same thing as you, sir, and checked the minutes for that hearing. His rationale was that street fights are so common that it'd be a waste of time trying to get someone arrested for roughing someone else up, espicially the courts, and that criminals were actually using it as a defense against vigilantes that took them in. I believe the whole idea is part of the town law's idea to leave people alone unless it gets really out of control or is actually dangerous to other people than the ones involved. Let them bother themselves and leave the courts out of it."

"I still don't think that's very sensible, and I told them so!" Mr. Herrimen glared at Spike. "So, what will it be, Master William? Please tell me you'll do the intelligent thing and kindly surrender yourself and return to your appointed duties. And return all the items I confiscated from you. They'll be returned to you after you absolve your debt to the house, which is much greater now with the damage you've caused." His bushy eyebrows furrowed, wondering just why one man required so much manpower to recover.

"That's unlawful indebted servitude," Spike said flatly. "For one, it's a thing to make a body serve his debt to you and this place by doing some chores, fix the damage he did and maybe take some of the pressure off the ones that do work here, and then it's another to force him to do it when he didn't even do what you're condemning him for!"

"Oy, not this again," Tetro the Machamp groaned. "Mr. Herrimen found you in that ballroom with the place wrecked, right after you dropped a damn chandilier to the floor!"

"Hy alvays t'ought dat dose t'ings is trubble," Andre said in a thick, Germanesque accent. "Hyu get big chandy...chandolor...chandi'liar...big hanging fancy t'ing, summun's gun knock it down for de laffs, yeah? Hy do it all de time!"

"That explains the mess left in your wake," Freya said. "And why you've been fired from sixteen cleaning companies on this continent alone."

"Oy, there were extenutatating circum'tanses!" Andre replied. He spoke like spelling was something optional. "Hy got certain instinks, hyu know? I see guys runnink, Hy gots drop de big hanging fancy t'ing!"

"Perhaps," Freya acknowledged. "But it's the principle of the thing. It's practically common manners to drop it on the opposition, not to make a mess."

"I already told the rabbit the first time, there was a big fight!" Spike said. "All right, I'll admit I dropped the chandilier for kicks and laughs, but most of the damage had nothing to do with me. The cut-up bits, I'll own up to."

Mr. Herrimen sighed. "Master William. Will you kindly give up on this cockanamie story about some fiend that ambushed a number of new refugees and three perfectly respectable public-good fighters? I have seen the place, and I have no evidence of a massive Heartless attack!"

Quite a few people shuddered at the thought of so many Heartless in the building, even if most of them didn't believe it. The very thought was going to give them nightmares; more than a few of them still remembered nearly invisible killers entering their homes and houses, turning their homes into gore-splattered slaughterhouses even before they let loose the flood of the dark. "Besides, no Heartless can enter the house anyway," Freya said. "The security sensors would lit up like infrared in a firestorm."

"Actually, the security system is down," Razor said glumly. Kain Fuery, being the man assigned to repair it until Spike's escape attempt had required all availiable hands to capture him, nodded. "We're still working on who did it and bringing it back up."

Mr. Herrimen cleared his throat loudly, neating cutting the near-panic at this statement in the bud. "Be as that may, we have little to fear from those monsters. We have quite enough of our own strength to defend ourselves even without the aid of pointlessly complicated machinery. Oh, and Master William?"

"What?" Spike said, already long tired of this pointless stand-off.

Mr. Herrimen reached into his vest and pulled out what looked like a small round device made of tightly wound brass parts. He lightly tossed it at Spike. "Catch."

Spike caught it purely from reflex. "Eh? What's this thing-" He felt the device start clicking and moving. "Oh hell." With a loud flurry of clicks and snaps and other mechanical noises, the little device suddenly unfolded, exploding into a number of large, long spider-leg shaped waldoes that snapped into position around him in a flurry of movement that ended with them tightly wrapped around him in a small round cage, perfectly locked into each other and immobilizing him completely. "I refuse to believe that actually worked."

"Well, seeing is believing," Stature said cheerfully.

"No it's not. Seeing is the moment when believing no longer actually operates. You can't believe in what you know to be true."

"Don't be so literal-minded." Stature said while Andre kicked the side of Spike's cage for laughs. "Not bad work, Mr. Herrimen."

"Well," Mr. Herrimen said with quiet pride. "Overly complicated machinery does have it's moments. Shall we, gentlemen? Also, you may be interested to see that you're not our only difficulty."

"Eh?" Spike said.

Mr. Herrimen gestured as two guards came round, dragging three cages behind them on wheels attached to the cages for the lazy warden on the go. "Hey" Bonnie said sourly as she was dragged over to them by another guard. Zaphod and Tarquin Tisenhausen Tickgrass, locked in two other cage-traps, said their hellos.

"Ah, they caught you lot too, eh? Not surprised, me."

"You know, the odds of a whole team against a few guys like us aren't nearly as one-sided as they are in TV," Zaphod said. "Or in my case, personal experience. I should sue whatever planned my life out. That's false advertising!"

"But it was completely one-sided," Tarquin Tisenhausen Tickgrass said, puzzled.

"Yeah," Stature remarked. "We totally whupped you guys. Score for the guards!"

"But it's supposed to be the other way, though!" Bonnie protested. "A few people against a dozen guards always ends up badly for the guards!"

"Unless it doesn't, for the sake of humor," Said Mr. Herrimen, who knew more about the nature of reality than he let on. He paused. "I say, did one of of you call back-up?"

"Nuh-huh, sir," Andre said, puzzled. "Evervun's right here!"

"Then who is this?" Mr. Herrimen said as a young teenage tiger-boy came around the corner with an animate skull following him, both of them wearing comically oversized sombreros fitted for their heads.

Hobbes came to a stop. He stared at the hallway filled to the brim with very tough guards of all shapes, sizes and varying weaponry, few of them in a semblence of a good mood and clearly raring for someone weaker to beat up. In cages were four people that had been getting on his nerves, and only one of them was technically an ally, and Hobbes only thought so because King Garfield had said so.

There was a long awkward silence.

"I swear, it's not what it looks like!" Stature said hurredly, instantly concluding from the tiger-boy's bemusement, awesome clothes, good looks and general aura of quiet suffering at the hands of the universe that he was a Good Guy.

"You mean you don't have over a few dozen highly skilled guards crammed into a single hallway with a young girl, an idiot, an idiot vampire and another idiot vampire in wheeled cages looking beat up while you lounge around like jerks?" Morte said.

"Which idiot vampire am I?" Spike wondered.

"Okay, it's exactly what it looks like," Stature admitted.

"Hin our defense, it vos all warrented!" Andre said defensively. "Most uf us vere after Spike, since he's so very really toff, and all uf us started chasink him ven we noticed vot was goink on, and den dose other idiots made trubble and ve had to ketch dem too and-" He paused. "Gott's leetle feesh in trousers, vy am Hy tellink you this!"

"...I'm not sure," Hobbes said slowly. "I'm having trouble understanding anything you say."

Andre glared. "Hyu sayink dere's sometink fonny about de vay I talk?" He said suspiciously. "Hy talk just fine in spite uf speaking clear German when everyvun else is saying the Eenglish or votever language dey're sayink! I dun talk fonny, you all talk fonny! De whole stinkink vorld talk fonny! Und you eet too many cheeseburgers!"

"...Is there someone else we can talk to?" Morte asked.

"No. Now go avay or Hy'll taunt you a second time."

"But you didn't taunt us," Hobbes pointed out. "You just ranted a bit."

"...Den go avay or Hy'll taunt you the first time. Better yet, go avay and get a nicer hat!"

Hobbes tapped his sombrero. "But I like my hat...I just bought in a vending machine in the hall. I didn't know they made machines that could dispense stuff like this."

Mr. Herrimen got over his shock. "I say, who are you!"

"Us?" Hobbes said. He glanced at Morte. "We're...uh..."

"Hobos," Morte said.

"Ninjas," Hobbes said. They glanced at each other. "Hobo-ninjas. Very well-dressed hobo-ninjas. Our friends call us Not-At-All-Well-To-Do-Well-Dressed Ninjas."

"And we're on our way to...the North Pole?" Morte said.

Mr. Herrimen tilted his head. "You're very lost. This is the southern continent."

"Is it? Er, of course, of course. We'll be on our way?" Morte said to Hobbes pointedly. Hobbes didn't answer, as Spike had squirmed around and gotten a good look at him.

"You!" He shouted. "YOU! Of all the damned lucky coincidences! You get me out of this mess! I did you a favor, you're going to leave me here, eh? You call that honorable? 'Cause I don't!"

"What is he babbling about?" Mr. Herrimen asked Hobbes. "Do you know each other?"

Hobbes didn't say anything. He was thinking. So Morted spoke up. "Can't say I do, never seen him in my life, wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him if I had arms to throw him with, we'll be going now. Right? Right?"

Hobbes still said nothing. On the one hand, he could do the practical thing and run away very quickly. It would cause little trouble, and he could grab Calvin and Zim, get them out and find someplace else to annoy people. On the other hand, that would be leaving Spike behind. And that...that was wrong. He had helped them, in his own way, annoying and reluctant though it had been. And the King had said to go to him, and the King understood people.

Hobbes shifted position. When you put things like that, there was only really one choice. A scale only slid one way in his point of view. "Of course," He said dreamily. "Yeah. That's what we'll do."

"Good, let's go and stop bothering the nice people!" Morte said.

"Okay. Let's not forget our luggage though." Hobbes sprang. There was a inhumanly fast and jarring series of movements that left crumpled footprints in the walls and ceilings, a brief yank that resulted in Spike's cage disappearing from Mr. Herrimen's easy reach, and another bunch of jumps and bounds across the walls made with such force that they left more imprints on the surfaces of propulsion. In the space of less then two minutes, Hobbes was back in his original position, down to his exact stance, only he was now holding Spike's cage by a handy bar. "There, I got it. No problems."

"What-what?" Mr. Herrimen yelped in mingled horror and amazement at the impossible thing he had just seen; a person moving so fast the only evidence of his movement were the impacts on the walls and Spike's altered location. Razor made a signal, and the other guards moved into position behind Freya, Stature and Andre. "Now hold just a moment, that man is wanted for crimes against this house! What do you think you're doing!"

Hobbes heisitated, but only for a moment. "What I must," He said.

"What's that supposed to mean!" Bonnie said from her cage, finally squirming enough to see Hobbes.

"You owe us too!" Zaphod said.

"Actually, I'm fine with this," Tarquin Tisenhausen Tickgrass said. "Being all pinned up by pretty girls like this makes me feel warm and fuzzy." Several people moved away from him.

"Uh, no," Hobbes said. "You guys tried to hurt me last night. I spent all night running away just because I was associated with another guy! And I think you guys are jerks."

"It's a fair cop," Zaphod admitted.

"...Ah, fine, I get where this is going, let's get the idiot chase started and the ass-kicking fight filled with awesome-sauce started then," Morte said. Everyone looked at him. "I've been around a while, I know how this sort of thing goes."

"Actually, I thought you'd be opposed to a rescue at all on grounds of inconvience," Hobbes admitted.

"Tch. I'm a studied jerkass, not a bastard."

"Ah," Hobbes said. "Bye now!" He said to Mr. Herrimen and the guards, hopping on top of Spike's cage in an awkward squat, digging his claws into the nearest wall and pushing them off with all his strength, sending them screaming down the hall with a tortured noise that suggested the wheels of the cage were going much faster that they were ever intended to, that carpet was being shredded and the force of their speed was knocking statues, armor and other decorative stuff all over the place.

The guards stared as Morte glared at Hobbes, still floating in the hallway by himself. The mechanical shrieking stopped abruptly, replaced by a meek squeaking while Hobbes wheeled his way back to Morte and picked him up. "Stuff like this is going to happen a lot, isn't it?" Morte asked.

"Probably," Hobbes said sheepishly.

"Hmph." They went back through tearing down the hall faster than was strictly neccesary.

"Well," Freya said after a moment. "That was unexpected."

"Even in this town," Stature agreed.

"Shouldn't you be chasing after them?" Mr. Herrimen asked.

The four elite guards blinked, embarrased. "Oh, right," Razor said. "Sorry, sir."

"And why was it you four that beat us up?" Zaphod wondered. "I mean, you guys are big-time elite guards. Spike fights you guys, well, it's anyone's guess who'd win but you could have at least got him cornered, yeah? Why'd you waste your time on small-fry like us?"

"Er, for de braggin' rights?" Andre said uncertainly. "Dispite you three bein' not dat toff?"

"Who are you calling small fry?" Bonnie said indignantly. "Do I look small!"

"He meant in terms of your capacity for violence and disruption, not your body shape," Tarquin Tisenhausen Tickgrass, the vampire with a name so unforunate and goofy it deserved to be repeated at every oppertunity, said.

"Are you calling me fat?" Tarquin Tisenhausen Tickgrass groaned and banged his head against his cage.

"That does it," Mr. Herrimen said. "Master William has been running amok for over an hour now, Miss Frances refuses to curtail him, he's diverted all personal from attending to other crises that might have arisen, someone appeared out of nowhere and absconded with Master William while all of you stand about bickering, and I hardly need to bring up that business with our latest batch of newcomers and the plants in the aviary. Nothing could make anything worse, and that is an absolution that will never be contradicted ever."

"Sir, you don't keep plants in an aviary," Freya pointed out. "That's a arborium. Aviaries are for birds."

"It was, until this morning."

"Ah."

"Let's just catch those guys, okay?" Razor said. "They're probably halfway across the house by now!" In fact, they had actually paused at a malfunctioning vending machine because they were all hungry, but he had no way of knowing that.

"To needlessly overcrowded battle where the laws of the conservation of ninjutsu need not apply!" The less important background guards cheered.

...

"Well, that was an absurdly epic and dramatic fight with little basis in rationale," Zuko said after Calvin and Zim had stopped fighting.

"Yep," Danny said. "Espicially after they both got fighting staves from that tree-reshaping thing Calvin did, lit their ends on fire and spun off fireballs at each other while flipping around a series of earthen pillars Toph got them to fight upon. I can't even remember what we were doing or thinking before all of it happened."

"And it must remain that way forever," Calvin said. "And if it doesn't, I shall shoot you in the face with a bazooka. Have a meatpie." Danny did, and pronounced it delicious.

Calvin's gambit to get everyone's mind off the horrible demises of almost all their friends and almost certainly that of Tucker, Sam and Danny's families had worked. Zim had eventually caught on, and they both endeavored to make the fight as dramatic and awesome as possible, just to get their attention. It had worked extremely well, and in fact a crowd had appeared around them before anything particularily exciting had happened; Sokka had managed to make a lot of money from admissions sales, and when people had pointed out that anybody could just see them fight without paying anyone, Sokka had threatened to sic Toph on them, a threat that would have cowed even a rampaging oliphaunt.

And for some reason, a number of imaginary friends had seen fit to set up a bunch of stalls offering delicious food right by the fight, presumably to cater to the early-morning snackers. None of them understood how the stalls had gotten there, when they had been built so fast or even why someone would go to that kind of effort for such little potential profit, but it was a convienient means for them to get some kind of semblence of a breakfast. (Well, Calvin had stopped by the Foster's dining hall earlier to catch some breakfast and get some to Hobbes, but they were probably closed now and he saw no reason to point this out to anyone, because he wasn't feeling in much of a jerk mood. Yet.)

"Get your meatpies! Hot happy-making meatpies!" Cried Wilt the imaginary friend, from behind one stall, wearing a billboard sign around his neck that said something to the effect that this stall had meatpies, they were good, cheap, and in rather smaller print claimed that they probably weren't stolen from the kitchen and you might not be punished for being accomplices in theft and it was probably best not to ask when, hypothetically, they had been stolen and where they'd been kept until now. Either way, the pies were still good. "Uh, Bloo?" Wilt said to the small blue imaginary friend behind the stall, selling the pies and making change. "Is this, I don't know, on the level? It seems kind of fishy to me."

"That's just Eduardo's barbequed fish you're smelling," Bloo said dismissively. "You've read your sign, you know it's all good!"

"That's the thing. I was created to teach how to play basketball and good sportsmanship," Wilt said. "I know all about lousy contracts, legal loopholes untrustworthy schemers use to exploit people and stuff like that! And, Bloo, this doesn't seem right to me..."

"Ah, you worry too much. The food is fresh, sort of, people are getting what they want and I'm getting money. What more good anyone want?"

"Proper compensation for being your slave labor?" Mac said sourly. Bloo had forced him to wear an apron for no apparent reason while he sold 'advice' to people at his particular stall. Bloo thought that people wanted that sort of thing early in the morning, and most of it tended towards the nature of 'buy more stuff from Bloo'; it was Bloo's idea. He thought consumerism drove the spirals of economic happiness.

"Silly, silly Mac," Boo said kindly. "Slaves don't get paid! That's part of the definition! They do what they're told and they deal with it! They don't need money, just the satisfaction of a job well done! Like trained chimps."

"Coco co co coco co!" Coco squawked. Minimoose, the latest addition to their group, squeaked.

"Whattaya mean, 'trained chimps like to go crazy and eat their trainer's faces off'?" Bloo said, confused.

"I'm sorry, but Bloo's not good with subtlety," Wilt said to Minimoose.

"What's that suppoed to - hi, how can I help you?" Bloo said as new customers approached.

"Oh good, it's you," Zim said with a complete lack of enthusiasm, followed by Aang, Katara and Tucker. "I was so looking forward to seeing you again. SO I CAN SHOOT YOU IN THE FACE WITH A WAVE MOTION GUN!"

"Already tried that on the one ballroom back in the house?" Bloo said slyly.

"Say what?" Katara said. "What's he talking about, Zim?"

"Nothing!" Zim said quickly. "He lies, with the chicanery and falsehoods and subterfuges and proposals for spin-off series that promise to be good but almost always suck."

"What?" Wilt said.

"Huh?"

"I heard that someone ran amok in a ballroom, crashed a chandilier and totally trashed the place," Bloo said cheerfully. "And since there's a bunch of guys around that want to beat you up because you broke into their places and lit their stuff on fire, doesn't take a genius to guess that it was you making trouble."

Aang, Katara and Tucker stared at Zim. "You have issues," Tucker said after a moment.

"Can't we go anywhere without you inducing a lynch mob?" Katara asked Zim angrily.

"Well, there was that one time in the mystical paradise of Shangri-la," Aang said. "Wait, no, that doesn't count, not after all those reanimated corpses and that thing with the cyborg-llamas. I wonder what the llamas were doing there?"

"This mob," Zim asked Bloo. "They're not around here, by any chance, are they?"

"Nope. Most of them either went over to Damage Control to get their insurance cashed in, commit insurance fraud or move to another continent. Something about Spike dumping them into a trapdoor that led into a septic tank, I don't know. I know Zaphod, Bonnie and Tarquin Tisenhausen Tickgrass wanted to beat you up, but eh, they're not that bright, you know?"

Katara giggled. "I'm sorry, but what was that name again?"

"Tarquin Tisenhausen Tickgrass?"

Katara and Aang both laughed and Tucker snickered like an idiot. Zim tilted his head. "Who?"

"Idiot vampire, hangs around Bonnie Rockwaller, smells a little bit like a dead fish. Because he baths in dead fish to ward away the clowns that live under his bed."

"...Is that so."

"Yeah, the clowns are filing for joint custody of the house-"

Minimoose shoved Bloo aside and squeaked in joy. "Minimoose!" Zim said as Minimoose tackled his chest in the closest thing the robot could come to a hug. "What are you doing here?"

"Ow," Bloo said.

Minimoose squeaked. "You had a delightful adventure with your new...girlfriend, involving many interesting furry animals, the majestic moose and the answering of the question of the maximum air-speed velocity of an unladen African swallow carrying a coconut? And fishing?" Zim said.

Minimoose squeaked. "And then you followed Coco and reunited with her small band of imaginary friends and human boy Mac, had further harrowing adventures that you now suspect to be related to the troubles I caused?" Zim listened and Minimoose squeaked. "And what makes you think that I may have accidentally awakened an ancient spirit of chaos and spite because the extent of how lost I got in my own travels generated a time-space flux that disturbed the higher planes? Oh, it told you so. And then it went into outer space to get away from me and my being-lostness? Okay, so how'd all this get here?" Minimoose squeaked. "Really. With a hyperspace cube that looks like a ball?" Minimoose squeaked. "They did it without wrecking the fabric of the universe dispite invoking the power of ancient creatures never meant to be awakened before the stars are right?" Minimoose squeaked. "Hmn. And you wish to remain here for the interim to collect more information?" Minimoose squeaked. "Oh, very well, if you must."

"This really hurts," Bloo complained. A force field flashed under him and blasted him into the air, and he fell back into the ground. "...That hurt more..."

Ignoring him, they bought some meatpies from Minimoose (and after checking them with Irken instruments to make sure Zim could eat them) and left. "So, you had an eventful night, huh?" Tucker said dryly to Zim.

"You've no idea," Zim said, twitching a little. He was never going to look at mansions the same way again. Of course, he'd used to view them as extravagent sources of firewood, but this was probably a healthier view.

"Hey, over here!" They heard Calvin yell from around another stall, where he, Zuko, Danny, Sam and Sokka waiting and eating the food they'd gotten.

"So, that was a pretty good fight you guys did," Aang said to Zim. "Like that bit when yor friend shot you with a cannon he made from the ground but it backfired and almost ran him over."

"And I used the fire from the explosion to hit him around like a lash smacking a pig," Zim said dreamily. "Until I lost control and it backfired on me."

"You try too hard to control the fire," Aang advised. "Don't try to force it to do want you want. You sort of want to guide it, make yourself a channel for it. Aw, it's kind of hard to put into words..."

"But would Firebending technique apply to what I'm doing?" Zim asked. "I'm not sure if I qualify as a Firebender."

"Let me clarify our decision," Zuko said. "Do you shoot fire?"

"Yes."

"Do you control fire?"

"A little bit."

"Do you feel like..." Zuko patted his chest awkwardly, trying to put some difficult concept into words. "I guess, like a fire, but inside of you. Like your spirit's on fire, but it's a good thing, like the marrow in your bones burns like the sun, and when you're in the heat of the moment, every single part of you is roaring to do what you have to?"

"...Yes," Zim said after some careful consideration. He wondered for a moment about the incredible heat he'd felt periodically from inside him, like an internal furnace had set up shop when he wasn't looking. Right now, it was barely noticable, a comforting pulse echoing his heartbeat, but when he had been fighting, when he had drawn on his own body heat and amplified it into bursts of fire he shaped with wild abandon, it was like he was a tiny part of the sun, gloriously alive and unstoppable.

Is this how Zuko and Aang feel all the time? He wondered. Zim had always wondered how Zuko could be so withdrawn one moment and be such a explosive bundle of enthusiastic drive the next, but this certainly explained a bit.

"Then you're a Firebender," Zuko said flatly. "Or close enough. I noticed a few interesting things during your fight."

"Like what?" Calvin asked.

"You bend like we do," Aang said. "You make fire by amplifying your own internal heat and transform it into energy within yourself. It's not quite like we do-" Aang exhalted, breathing out a brief stream of fire into the air above them, giving a few people a start. "I didn't see any particular emphasis on breathing, and all Firebending that me and Zuko know about involving breath control. I think it has something to do with it mixing with your own internal heat, kind of like what I think you're doing."

"Is it?" Zim said. Calvin looked very interested. "Hrm...I wasn't really thinking about how I was doing it, but that sounds right, I think."

"Also, your style isn't unlike the Dancing Dragon," Katara said. "Except it's a lot more...how do I say this nicely...unpolished?"

"Hey, I'm only doing what I've seen Zuko and Aang do in fights," Zim said irritably. "And I know little about the actual spiritual physics behind their moves or whatever this magic nonsense operates on." Katara stared to correct him. "Yes, I know, magic isn't bending, icebergs are not for sleeping, I've heard it before, big deal! So how does all that explain him?" He gestured at Calvin. "He's no Firebender."

They looked at Calvin, who looked uncomfortable with the scrunity, rather like a little kid who traveled to a lot of different schools and expected to be beat up by the cool kids on principle. "That's...a good question," Aang said.

"He definitely doesn't fight like anyone I've seen," Toph remarked, fully aware of the mental slapping her 'seen' comment invoked. "He really likes moving in a fight, a bit like an Airbender, but that...that whatever he was doing with blasts and stuff wasn't anything like Airbending."

"Looked like it though," Sokka observed. "Except whenever he did it, it looked like he was...moving with something. Like when you guys mess around with magic water or fire."

"Or they could ask me instead of talking like I'm not here..." Calvin muttered grouchily.

Toph had better ears than he expected. "Then explain," She asked him.

"...What?"

"Explain. How'd you do that stuff you did?"

He hadn't expected that either. "Oh. Uh..." He didn't often get the chance to explain how he could do his special skills, or a captive audience. (Though he sometimes did get a literal captive audience. He was a mad scientist, after all.) "Well...I don't really know how Bending operates, and since that's what you and I suppose Zim are most familiar with, you'd probably get in best in those terms, but..." He shrugged. "What I was doing was pretty basic theurgical skills. I was just transfering kinetic energy and the power of my muscles into bursts of telekinetic force." He shrugged. "Not that hard, once you get the hang of it, though I've never gotten the hang of precise, sustained telekinetic manipulation."

"Theurgy?" Danny asked. "What's that?"

Calvin frowned. "I guess...'holy magic' might be close enough, but it's more of a branch of theologically-aligned philosophy from my country's history that's hung on for ages. It's pretty complicated, goes on with things like the universe is probably alive in and of itself owing to the function of the spiritual growth of living worlds (that is, worlds that have life upon them, not neccesarily sentient worlds even though they exist), how the whole of the universe is a massive flow of concensus belief originating from the background level of reality cohesion from the Will that holds the universe together...wait, I'm losing you, aren't I?" Sokka and the others nodded, though Aang and Sam looked quite interested and were following it well enough. "Okay. Basically picture a relaxed priesthood that's been hanging around forever, isn't very pretentious and has been doing it's part to keep the nations of my world-system from killing each other since forever while silently guiding spiritual develoupment of cultures and people. Like the nicer kind of secret society."

"We might know a thing or two about that," Zuko said dryly.

"Cool. Now, one thing they've passed on here and there is the study of psychotheistic skills, mind-and-body disciplines and fields of magical study collectively known as theurgy or, if you want to get formal, the 'Divine Art of Harmonious Drive' . It's one of my main fields of research; for one thing, it has a lot of practical applications, such the physical disciplines as allowing you to selectively bend the more boring laws of physics as long as what you're doing is interesting enough. Like superpowers you get from training in martial arts all the time." Calvin shrugged again. "What I did was a fairly basic technique that involved diverting forces and stuff and shaping it into blasts. It's the basis of a martial art called the Royal Guard Form."

The Benders in the group looked at Calvin with interest while the others worked it out. "Cool," Toph said. "You're a Realitybender."

"I am?" Calvin said.

"You are?" Zim said, alarmed. Why did this boy keep outclassing him at everything! "Oh come on, you didn't do anything like that all the times I saw you fight last night!"

"Did too! All fields of natural philosophy have a starting point, and mine was theurgy!" He paused. "Of course, you could say that about just about everyone with metanormal skills where I come home. Theurgy isn't exactly secret. I mean, the old regime of the Comic Kingdom was a sadistic madhouse run by mad scientists and bloodthirsty warlords that liked destruction too much to stop adding worlds to the ol' empire even when it wasn't about collecting resources, and the technical title was Theurgist. Still is, actually. My dad was one back then-"

"Oh come on, you just said it was a secret society! How can a secret society's secrets be out in the open!"

"You mean like how only a dedicated martial artist knows how to turn his entire body into a lethal weapon but any idiot can karate chop and not hurt themselves if they're lucky?" Calvin said. "They liked spreading knowledge and the basics of, uh, Realitybending like you said, so people wouldn't be killed in crossfires, rampaging monsters and target practice by bored military-types!" He paused. "Also, the guy who taught me and Hobbes? Big member."

"Wow," Sokka said. "Your homeworld sounds like a real shithole. No offense." He glanced at Zuko. "He makes the Fire Nation sound almost humane."

"Not post-war Fire Nation," Zuko said darkly.

"Yeah, sure, that too."

"Oh, it was an awful place to live," Calvin said. "It didn't even start to stop until King Garfield and his rebels beat the snot out of the psychos in charge, took power and tore down the old structure one festering, atrocity-striken, genociding piece of evil at a time." He paused. "And that was when I was six. I picked up skills like that as a matter of neccisity. In those days, you knew how to protect yourself or you died." He heisitated. "If you were lucky."

"...Ah," Zim said slowly while the others gave Calvin surprised looks. Except Zuko and Toph, the two of them just looked incredibly impressed. "I suppose that's why your friend...brother...person-thing that you don't hate is so tough?"

Calvin flinched, like Zim had punched him. Zim briefly wondered if he'd said something wrong. "...Don't ask Hobbes about that stuff."

"Huh?"

"Just...don't. There's three things you never do in the Comic Kingdom. You don't try to pick a fight with a Void-Knight, you don't make fun of the way Orks talk, but you never, ever bring up the tail-end of the Evil Era around a cat that was there during the Scrubbing Business, espicially if they're tribal. You just...you just don't." He shivered.

Zim had seen haunted people; he looked one in the mirror all the time. Calvin, for a moment, looked every bit as tortured by private demons as Zim himself did when he thought about the logical ramifications of gleefully commiting genocide as the Irkens did, or like Danny was looking recently whenever someone mentioned their parents or family; like someone who had a hole opened up in them by something too monstrous and unkind to accept and stay sane, and something had crawled inside and made a neat little home. Something with fangs and claws and little slimy tendrils. He suddenly looked a lot older than twelve or thirteen or whatever he really was.

Under other circumstances, questions would have been posed. Understanding would have been found, possibly. But that only happened in a few other alternate universes (and at least one where everyone had reversed genders for some reason), and in this one, a loud blast, punctuated by yelling, panicked screams and a little inhuman roaring totally killed the moment.

There's a certain innate incapability for humans, Zim had noticed, to never avoid stating the blindingly obvious. Whenever anything like this happens, if you have a human around you can always count on them to point out what everybody knows, possibly as some sort of mental punctuation. Perhaps they had to remark on it to get it across to their brains. Thus, he was completely unsuprised when Tucker, Sokka, Toph and Danny all said, with outstandingly perfect unison, "What's that?"

Calvin glanced around, casually sidestepping a falling cart as it was knocked down in the crowd's rush to see what was going on. "I'd know that wussy scream anywhere." Sure enough, the roar came again and Zim recognized the hoarse timber.

"Is that...Hobbes?" Zim said, peering at a distant figure wildly fleeing in the distance. "What's he doing?"

"Running away," Toph said. "Wow. That guy's terrified."

"...I saw him tear off a Heartless' arm and beat it to death with it before he shoved the claws into a flame-spewing abomination's face last night," Zim said. "Cowardice is not something I associate with such a warrior."

"Hobbes has always been a bit jumpy," Calvin informed him. "Wonder what he's gotten into."

"Ooh, ooh, I'll see, I'll see!" Aang volunteered, practically hopping off the ground with one hand in the air. Since no one objected, he took that as a overwhelming affirmative (air, being the element of freedom, was not known for it's restraint) and dumped the stuff he'd been carrying into Danny's arms before he called a massive gust of wind, shaping it into a compact ball no larger than his head that he manuvered himself onto in a squat; it just nearly touched the ground before spinning like a top and sending him roaring across the grass, knocking a few people over on accident.

"Wow," Calvin said as Aang zoomed into the distance. "That was cool!" He tapped his fingers in thought. "Hrm, maybe if I created some sort of suction device to imitate that thing and compressed the air with some kind of central ammunition tank, maybe powered by a steam engine...yeah, air bullets of mass destruction!"

"Why is it everyone you bring over is a mad scientist, a person of mass destruction or both?" Sokka asked Zim.

"They resonate with me," Zim said dreamily. "Except this guy, I just wanna punch him in the face." He did.

"Ow!" Calvin complained. "What was that for!"

"I gave you ample warning! In the form of an observation."

A dustcloud made it clear that Aang was coming back, and Hobbes appeared to be coming with him. "Hey!" Calvin yelled as they neared. "What's going-"

"RUN AWAY!" Hobbes and Aang screamed as they rolled right through the, flattening all the stands misfortunate to be in their way. For reasons of contriviance, they were both on sperical things; Aang's construct of air, Hobbes on a small round cage with someone in it.

"On," Calvin finished.

Danny stood there in the wreckage of one such stand. "...They made me drop my breakfast." He didn't say it like it was a particular issue, but wanted to have it known. "I'm having a bad week." Sam and Tucker patted his shoulders. Their hands passed right through him, with a suggestion of transparency. "Sorry." (He felt bad that he was so bad at being heroic he couldn't let his friends comfort him properly for being the failure he was. He wasn't, really, but he felt like one over the whole 'letting Earth get destroyed and almost everyone he had ever loved or even known die' thing.)

"From what?" Sokka said.

"Those guys?" Toph suggested, pointing at a sizeable number of people in snazzy uniforms heading their way and looking incredibly annoyed. Also very tough.

Zim stared at them as they charged, a general tension going on around. The stomping of several dozen pairs of feet reverbeted through his legs like the preliminary rumbles of an earthquake, sending worrying messages to his internal organs, generally along the lines of warning them about an imminent injury. "...Oh, come on, I didn't even do anything this time! I think. Why is there an army coming here!"

"It's not an army, more of a squadron," Zuko corrected him. "Looks like private security. Aside from the uniforms, they don't seem very well organized to me."

"But shouldn't we run-" Katara started to say.

"MR. HERRIMEN'S CAUGHT ON!" Bloo screamed, making nearly all of them jump out of their shoes. (Except Toph, who was both unbothered or wearing shoes.) The little blue blob frantically ran from stall to stall, emptying the cash registers and shoveling the contents into his arms, which were malleable enough to make a handy carrying tray. "RUN FOR IT! RUN LIKE YOU'RE BEING CHASED BY WEREWOLVES WITH FRICKING LASTER BEAMS! OR BEES FROM THE DARKEST DEPTHS OF PLACES WHERE NO ONE IN THEIR RIGHT MIND GOES BECAUSE EVERYTHING TRIES TO KILL YOU THERE EXCEPT MAYBE YOUR PILLOW! Or, I dunno, some twisted combination of the two. You know what I mean."

"Esta es una cosa terrible que suceda!" (This is a terrible thing to happen!) Eduardo screamed. "Why Azul's money making los regímenes de always be ending in the wacky hijinks that hurt?" Zuko twitched at the name 'Azul'.

"Law of narrative casuality, no doubt, sorry, but you're the casualty, bye!" Bloo said, shoving a few empty cash registers into Eduardo and Wilt's grasp. (In Wilt's case, he had to make a lucky throw.) "Giddy-up!" He said, jumping onto Mac's back, biting the back of his apron and kicking him.

"Ow!" Mac ran away with Bloo, leaving Wilt behind to awkwardly follow after them.

A panic immediately broke out among the customers who hadn't already fled. "Okay, I really think we should-"

"Pardon me," Said a humanoid rabbit in a nice vest and tophat.

"Go," Sokka finished sullenly. "I can't help but notice we're surronded by armed guys. And girls. And guys and girls who aren't armed but could probably kill us all without needing any."

"Yet again," Katara noted warily.

"Ah, have you lot seen a young tiger-fellow riding a cage containing a surly man indebted to this household?" Mr. Herrimen asked her, not sounding particularily interested in fighting. "He was accompinied by a vocal skull with quite the coarse attitude. I'm afraid he absconded with Master William for reasons I'm not quite clear on. I'm reasonably sure he came this way."

"And he wrecked a whole lot of stuff in the hallway!" Yelled Captain Razor. "And he didn't do it with any style at all, that really bothers me!" Mr. Herrimen looked at him. "And, uh, that's really very terrible. Because...no one appreciates how hard it is to set up old-fashioned bric-a-brac in a studiously whimsical manner. Yeah."

"T'ough to be fair, he didn' blow a hole in de house, dat vas my fault," Said Andre. "Und Hy luffed every moment again, und Hy'll do again und again und again ontil Hy'm bored! Den Hy'll hug de kitties, because Hy luff kitties. Und kultural eksibitions. But Hy HETE tradink kard games!"

"...I'm sorry, what?" Zuko said. "I didn't understand half of the things you said and the other half were only extremely confusing."

"Could we kindly hurry this up?" Freya asked impatiently. "He could be very far away from now! Did you see him or not?"

"Um...no?" Zim said hopefully.

Mr. Herrimen stared at him. "...I apologize, but I don't quite believe you," He said.

"Aw, damnit!" Sokka screamed. "Why is it we can't go anywhere without someone inciting some kind of crazy mob that wants to kill us all, cannibalize us, subsume our spirits into an artifact of mass destruction and make us listen to bad home videos! It's like all that Internet backlash since Zim's stint as an internet movie critic and that other alien who reviews games almost lead to World War Three! AGAIN!"

"...I'm sorry, what?" Stature said.

"Nothing, nothing!" Katara said hurredly. "He just, uh, has a condition! Sometimes he says loud and inflammatory things for no reason and at random!"

"...Random."

"Yeah!"

"Even though what he said was a complete sentence and fit perfectly into context. Aside from that last part."

"...Yes?"

"Alas, but for that horrible miscreant," Zim said, getting an idea. "I've an thought. We shall accompany you to apprehend that fiend and retrieve your captive, following a circumfluos route unescorted by any other of your minons and ensuring that you will eventually relocate them again. Eventually."

"...No," Mr. Herrimen said.

"That was a stupid idea, Zim," Zuko told him.

"Better than anything you had to say," Zim said. Mr. Herrimen's ears twitched.

"Pardon me," He said. "But...did you say his name was Zim?"

"Yes."

"Then...some of you are...and that tiger-boy was..." Mr. Herrimen sighed. "I have made a misfortunate error in judgement."

"Sir?" Captain Razor said.

"Call off the search. I believe...I have some difficulties to address."

"HEY, HOBBES!" Calvin yelled. "THEY'RE NOT GOING TO BEAT YOU UP! GET BACK OVER HERE!"

"AANG, YOU CAN STOP RUNNING!" Katara called after him. "WE GOT OTHER THINGS TO DEAL WITH!"

"Oh, come on," Freya said. "They can't possibly-"

A tremendous blast of wind interrupted her; Aang and Hobbes, their various burdens with them, landed on the ground in front of everyone. A number of guards sheepishly followed them, looking variously beat-up but much less than Spike had left them; a good majority of them even seemed grudgingly impressed with Hobbes and Aang. "Hey," Aang said.

"I may start panicking now," Hobbes said. "And I don't know when I'll stop."

"No need for that," Mr. Herrimen said. "And I apologize for hunting after you because of what I believe to be a truly noble act on behalf of Master William."

"...Oh."

"Hooray," Spike said wearily. "Sense. You've found it."

"None too soon," A guard remarked. "Having a cage occupied by a psychotic vampire thrown at you like a bowling ball and knocking everyone down is even less fun than it sounds."

"Though that bit when he bounced it off us, ricoheted off the walls, kicked it off again, hit more of us, ricocheted back and kicked it one more time and somehow set it on fire was really really cool," Stature said. A number of other guards, mostly girls, agreed, and Hobbes basked in the admiration.

"Where were you guys?" Toph asked. "Went back to the stables with Appa?"

"Nah, we went to that place where Zim went all pyro...er, that place where an unidentified pyromaniac went crazy on your lawn, sir," Aang said to Mr. Herrimen.

"Say what?" Mr. Herrimen shifted a bit. "...Well, it wouldn't be the first time, I suppose. Fortunately, I have insurance relating to malicious vandalism, misguided vandalism, vandalism which serves to beautify the neighborhood and vandalism that is an act of rudeness on behalf of God or gods, so that should cover any of that."

"Can someone let me out now?" Spike said.

"Okay," Toph said, stomping over to his cage, grabbing two bars and bracing herself before she tore the whole thing into two halves, slamming them together and Metalbending them into a small, contorted ball between her hands, all in under a minute.

Spike stared at her. Hobbes and most of the bystanders there gaped. Calvin was staring at her with a mixture of intense wonder and awe. Morte scoffed. "Eh, I've seen better."

"I haven't!" Toph said cheerfully, Earthbending a rock out of the ground and at Morte. Zim found his scream of surprise very cathartic after all his annoying remarks.

"Can we take her with us?" Calvin said unthinkingly. Hobbes grinned knowingly at him. "Uh...I mean...it'd be good to have someone that can shut him up like that? Why are you looking at me like that? Stop looking at me like that."

"Ow," Spike said, standing up and stretching with audible pops. "That was one of the less pleasant things I've experienced. Now I know how a hamster feels in them ball things. Tch, no wonder the little rodents are so bad-tempered..."

"Does no one care about my pain?" Morte said under the rock; Toph had been nice enough to render the ground under him absobant enough to muffle the blow. And his voice.

"No," Zim and Calvin said.

"I hate you all."

"What did I do?" Hobbes complained.

"Ahem," Mr. Herrimen said, feeling the waterfall of freewheeling comments, remarks and brief arguments was possessing everyone. "I would like to discuss something when you, Master Calvin, Master Hobbes and Master-" He made a strange noise that sounded like a cricket, a guitar riff and a burst of machine gun fire all at once.

Zim gaped at Mr. Herrimen pronouncing his name in perfect Irken. "How do you know what my name really sounds like?"

"I am quite skilled in many forms of decorum," Mr. Herrimen said. "Well, sirs, I would greatly like to speak to you about the matters of last night." His eye narrowed. "Both of them."

"What? Oh, right, the huge fight and the rampage with fire and wanton destruction and tacos," Zim said. "Wait, there were no tacos! My memories LIE!"

"Why is he yelling?"

"He's, uh, a little touched in the head?" Aang said gently.

"Nah, the gears are turning but most of 'em have slipped," Tucker said. "What, it's true!"

"Ah. Well, it would appear that Master William's story that he told to me when I discovered him in the ruins of the ballroom last night was not the fabrication I assumed it to be. So...there really was a fight there? I'd greatly appreciate it if you would explain it to me."

"Okay," Zim said.

"Wait, you are?" Calvin asked him. "I thought you'd want to fight your way out."

"Me too, but that's life for you."

"That doesn't even make sense."

"That's because I try harder."

"If you would come to my office?" Mr. Herrimen said. "I would prefer to discuss things in there."

"Okay," Zim said.

"You do that, I'll just toddle off-"

"You're coming too!" Razor said, tripping him. "He is coming too, right?" Mr. Herrimen nodded. "Whoo hoo!"

"Then let's not waste anymore time," Mr. Herrimen said. He turned around, only to find Zuko standing right in front of him. This was not a pleasant sight; being menaced by a scowling boy radiating elemental heat while a face that appeared to have been savaged by a blowtorh was quite close rarely is.

"He's not going anywhere without me," Zuko said. Mr. Herrimen couldn't help but notice the small flame that rolled out of his mouth.

"A-ah, very well," Mr. Herrimen said, trying not to react. "Friends of yours?" He asked Zim.

"From Earth," Zim said. Danny flinched again. Mr. Herrimen's expression softened and he made a gesture that might have meant 'if you must'. Getting the hint, the others gathered around them as Mr. Herrimen issued orders to them about returning to their posts and stuff, soon leaving Zim, his friends, Calvin and Hobbes, Spike and Mr. Herrimen alone.

"Also, find Master Blooregard and his tagalongs," Mr. Herrimen told Razor. "This is a deplorable mess."

"What makes you think it was-"

"It's always Master Blooregard."

Razor left with Andre, Stature and Freya, and Zim's group and assorted followers went after Mr. Herrimen as he led them back into the house; Zim was uncomfortably familiar with the problems that arose after they'd come into the foyer last night, and with uncanny repetition, they went along the same exact route he had taken to that hallway where he had ran into Aang last night, something both Air Nomad and Irken took note of, and this time they actually went through the big official door Zim had seen and disapproved of.

Past it was a large but tastefully decorated office, most of it occupied by things no doubt required to keep things organized; rotating filing cabinets, storage closets, a bookshelf full of what Zim assumed to be handwritten journals regarding Foster's affairs (Spike pointed this out to Zim; apparently he was in here a lot) and other bereaucratic things. In place of pride was a large portrait of a matronly woman with a strong resemblence to Frankie Foster, just behind a large heavy desk made of solid mahogany, positioned so that the portrait was the first thing anyone would see entering the office, or that anyone sitting in the desk would see getting up, based on it's position to the wall. There was also, Zim noticed, a large board covered with plaques commerating various people that had done services to the house, along with a heavy number of memorials.

Mr. Herrimen indicated the five seats in front of him. "If you would please seat yourselves..." He paused, awkwardly. "I apologize for the lack of seating, but there are quite a lot of you."

Zim took a seat, as did Calvin, while Hobbes offered his seat to Sam, while Danny sat on the floor by her. Aang and Katara managed to awkwardly share a seat (though Aang's smaller size made it doable), and Zuko got to the last seat before Sokka, Toph happily squriming into his side while Sokka fumed and sat on the floor alongside Tucker and quietly plotted revenge. Spike, being a badass, chose to stay standing and looking awesome. "We-ell," Zim drawled. "I suppose I could start when I got to this place of utter insanity, I mean mansion of abnormal geometric patterns..."

Mr. Herrimen didn't look offended, and only listened carefully as Zim, with some interjections from Morte, Calvin and Hobbes, told the story. They probably had to, what with the rampant exaggerations, lack of detail and occasional lies put in to make Zim sound better and make everything more awesome, but that's to be expected.

...

"You know, I feel I don't get enough respect," Abel Nightroad complained; he'd foregone his uniform and the creepy cross thing on his back, opting for a black shirt, a long sleeveless coat with the Union Jack on it and black cargo pants, sitting in the backseat of a large car sitting outside a large warehouse with the symbol of a stylized dragon biting it's own tail on it. Cars, as a rule, weren't all that common in this part of Traverse Town, but this one was special; it was basically a powerful engine attached to two canisters of extremely efficient Blue Eco, four wheels and large seats with a supportive and stylish exoskeletion built around it and painted blue. "Neither of us!"

"What makes you say that?" Asked Ron Stoppable; as the driver's boyfriend, he claimed shotgun a long time ago, and he had happily cashed it in, Rufus playing in the backseat with a unusually small panda no bigger than a small housecat, named Xiao-Mei. Ron himself had foregone his mission outfit, opting for his favorite short-sleeved ret net-shirt over a long-sleeved black shirt and brown cargo pants with that Traverse Town touch of awesome but impractical design ethic.

"We're sitting here in your girlfriend's car while she and my partner help out Mr. Yao," Abel said. He threw his hands up into the air. "They just left us behind like deadweight!"

"Well, bascially we are," Ron said, not very bothered with the concept. "There's some kind of horrible thing going on there, a twisted mockery of science that should never have been."

"Jumba Jookiba did apologize in advance."

"My point being is that your partner is a highly trained warrior-monk with super-alchemy powers of awesomeness while Kim..." Ron paused, grinning like a person of being in the rare position of dating someone they hero-worshipped. "Aw, words can't pin down all the awesome she is. Let's just say she's the anthropomorphic personification of awesome and leave it at that. Not even close to good enough, but hey, it's a start!"

"True," Abel acknowledged. "But we're pretty good too!"

"We are?"

"You're the destined hero of an ancient order of mystical monks and blessed with stupidly-context sensitive powers that function by doing whatever you feel like doing," Abel said flatly. "While I am an indestructable death machine. That eats other death machines."

"My powers aren't too reliable," Ron said. "I don't know if I've got problems...you know, facing up to what I can do or just Fate being a jerk and holding back the awesome, and you...uh, nothing personal but you're freaking terrifying when you actually do something useful."

Abel sighed. "It sucks being a load of useless until things get so bad that you have to run wild." Ron nodded glumly.

Rufus and Xiao-Mei looked at the humans (if Abel counted) and made a short remark on it. Xaio Meng stated that humans were lucky to get their attention, lower life forms that they were. Rufus acknowledged this, but pointed out that strange beings though they were, they were rather nice to have around. Xaio-Mei reluctantly conceded the point.

They passed a short while talking about nonsense things that didn't matter, like how Ron was doing in school before summer had led out (badly, like Abel had done when he was a kid), how Kim's adoptive parents Field-Admiral Jethro Gibbs and Izumi Curtis-Gibbs were doing after that unfortunate incident with the platypus-goblin (they were on the mend, if only Gibbs could stop that persistent problem of his leg randomly turning into a bazooka every six hours), if Kim's younger and unhinged brother Jim had stopped hallucinating about his dead brother Tim yet (the answer was no), and the possibility of Ron getting into Abel's faction, the heroic inter-religious order of the Crossguard, as a member of the Judaistic sector, the Seekers of The Truth (Abel quite frankly thought that Ron had it in him to join today and pass the training and psychological examination in a week, but this wasn't encouraging; while the Crossguard heavily encouraged a relaxed mind and an open-minded approach, the fact remained that their membership primarily consisted of reformed mad scientists and half-mad social misfits that channeled their issues in the service of their fellow sentients but not often very well.) No doubt interesting stuff was going on in that warehouse, with transforming horrors and transmutation reshaping the world into things that cut and bled and acrobatic feats to put a gecko-spider-thing to shame, but for Ron and Abel, it took a turn in words.

"Hey. Abel. Is there anyone I remind you of?"

Ah, Abel thought in the privacy of his mind though lately that space had become crowded with strange impulses and dark mutterings. That old game. He shifted in his seat and thought hard, clicking together fingernails with a sound like steel snapping. For reasons of politeness he chose not to say My brother Cain before he went crazy, even though it was true, and he didn't say himself, because Ron had never been an antisocial sociopath that would've liked to watch the world burn, so Abel said, "Ion...Ion Fortuna."

"That grouchy vampire royalty kid?" Dispite his complaining tone, Ron had no problems with the comparision; he listens to Abel's stories of his dead friends like he listens to everyone else, piecing together bits of everyone's past lives from those forgotten people. He knows enough about Ion Fortuna to know the face to the name, a too-pretty face of a boy who'd been born a vampire with girlishly long blonde hair so light it was nearly white, eyes the red of dying soldiers and a royal brat attitude you could shove a barn over with. Abel's stories of him had put even a voice to it, and Ron could almost hear a Russian-accented voice, growling You're not so bad for a Terran. "Why do I have to be a racist vampire-ambassador? You said Kim's like that girl you used to know, Esther."

"We can't all be asskicking warrior-queen nuns with shotgun powers," Abel said. It was a happy tone, light and easy; talking about all the people he'd known, all the friends he'd buried, more often than not soaked in their blood, invigorated him instead of weighing him down. For a moment, there is solemness; Esther Blanchett, brave and fierce girl she was, went out like royalty out of legend, like a flame against the darkness: her light was snuffed out, but she burned the hand that did the deed and Cain said he was sorry after; even his damaged and ruined heart had room for pity.

Sometimes they ran and died. Sometimes they laughed in the face of the dark and died. It's always beautiful when they fought and died. Everyone died, everyone but them, and that was because the ones who can remember ran away and they can't forget the ones that didn't. They remembered until the tears came like knife-cuts in bare skin, until their thoughts ran ragged and sharp like the most remorseful confessions of guilt and sorrow and oh God, they can never stop crying.

Abel's thought, disjointed and strange though they were, was sidetracked by the background noise from the warehouse going silent. "The BGM stopped," Ron said. "That's either really good or really bad."

"Wanna go check it out?" Abel asked.

Ron shifted uncomfortably. "They said to stay in the car, it would only take a little bit."

"Aw, why let them take all the awesome moments?" Abel said. "I say we go."

"Ah, okay. You guys wanna come?" This was directed to Rufus and Xiao-Mei; Rufus considered this and shook his head. Xiao-Mei growled, and when Abel tried to get her to change her mind by poking her in the belly, she bit his finger off, causing a small amount of fuss involving Abel getting it out of her mouth and putting it back on the joint so it could heal. "Fine, suit yourselves, and Abel! Leave the panda midget alone!"

"She started it!" Abel said childishly, his finger still bloody but reconnected, all the sinews and relevanted muscles reformed. Regeneration is one of the more useful superpowers.

"C'mon!" Ron said, opening the warehouse door, leaving Abel to hurry speedily after him. They found themselves in a small entry room that looked like an ordinary office, a sizable hole in the wall revealing a wide staircase alongside a built-in rolling track, probably for very large boxes to be slided down.

And there was also Lin Yao, a tall Asian teenager Ron's age with narrow eyes and his hair pulled back, wearwearing a snazzy long black coat over a snapped-up yellow vest, white pants and lightweight boots. Ron walked over to the chair he was dozing in with his feet on a desk and poked him in the shoulder. "Hey, Lin! Wake up!"

"Eh? Eh? Wuzzat?" Lin blinked. "Oh, it's you guys. Are they done fighting yet?"

"...I don't know," Abel confessed. "They should have been done by now."

Lin gestured at the starway going down. "If you want to give it a shot, you're welcome to it, yes? I'm not fighting that thing."

"Aren't you some kind of indestructable evolved human?"

"Psh, I'm far from indestructable. And while I'm a deft hand in a fight...have you seen Jumba's latest monstrosity? I'm not touching that! Which is why I called you guys in to handle it. Lucky I got Miss Possible and Scar with her, since you were all together for some reason, eh?"

"...Yes, so lucky," Ron said, a little down that Lin seemed to be completely ignoring the contributions Abel and him could give. They mostly amounted to either distraction or horrifying slaughter, but they were still contributions. "Why didn't you just get your ninja bodyguards to do it?"

"Hmn? Oh...well, they wouldn't want to touch it either. Besides, they're...how do I say...out on totally legal business elsewhere..."

...

Meanwhile, in the Underdistrict...

Gangs of criminals ran wild, screaming in fear and dismay from the giant robot smashing through their places of illicit businesses and shooting at anything that moved, which is a common reaction when a black market zone is attacked by a giant robot that resembled an utterly black demonic figure with prominent fangs and weird red circuit lines all over the place.

"Dude, I can't believe we're actually getting paid for this!" shouted Deadpool in the cockpit, a hideously scarred man wearing a fullbody uniform similar to the outfit Spike had, only red and black, along with a pair of katanas sheathed on his back. "Heh. Someone said 'cockpit'."

"Shut up now," Said Shego, a mint green-skinned woman wearing a similar outfit but colored green and black, the hood unzipped. She was piloting the giant robot, her hands gripping the steering rods in her little pilot's pod as green plasma-like energy streamed down her arms in spiralling waves, powering the robot itself and thus doing away with any other power sources that would have otherwise taken up valuable space they happily filled with more and more weaponry. "Don't you have any concept of mission ettiquette? Banter is for the enemies, not the partner."

"Tried ettiquette once, didn't like it. Stuck in my teeth and tried to eat me in my sleep." He spotted a number of smaller mechs headed their way. "Head's up, enemies at two o'clock unless it's Daylights Savings Time! AND THEY LOOK LIKE HOW WET STUPID SMELLS! EAT HOT PLASMA WHAT COMES FROM HOT MUTAGENIC WOMAN!" His hand slapped down on a big red button with a big smiley face on it. At once, all the giant robot's ranged weaponry fired. Even the one that just fired disproved theories of science. (It was a very advanced robot.) "I AM BEAMSPAM MCMUPPET MAN! FIRING LASERS! ALL THE TIME! LOOKS LIKE A PUPPET! BORN FROM A MOP!"

"You're an idiot," Shego grumbled.

"And you have major Les Yay issues," Deadpool said cheerfully. "Say, I got an idea. We should do a buddy-cop show!"

"You already do," Shego said. "You sold the idea to a studio after you kept teaming with that lunatic Rorschach."

"No no no no, hear me out! Think about it! The song is perfect! 'Shego and Deadpoo-ool! A girl and a foo-ool! Sheee's pretty much just a pretty face! Heee's a mental case! Da na na na! Da na na na! Copyrighted Deadpool! Steal and I'll suu-uuue! I! Think the song should end right here!'" It did.

"...That's the Rorschach and Deadpool theme song with words changed," Shego said.

"Picky picky. You're almost as snarky as the narrator, but with better lines."

"What?"

Deadpool pointed. "Hey, look! The Si Xiong Triad are getting in on the action!" Shego observed that another giant robot their size was coming their way, resembling a demonic panda bristling with manner of horrific weaponry. "Yup. Pandas are evil."

"You!" Yelled Panda Bubba, the pilot of the panda-mech and the undisputed leader of the Si Xiong Triad. "Servants of that double-minded freak, Lin Yao! Which one sent you, eh? Was it Lin Yao or that thing, Greed the Avaricious!"

"Like we'd need an excuse to come down her and kick a talentless idiot like you around?" Shego said.

"It definitely wasn't Lin Yao!" Deadpool said loudly. "Yeah, he's most definitely not a power-hungry for the right reasons guy that's getting all his criminal rivals eliminated so he can take complete control of it and tear it apart from the inside! And he's definitely not aiming for you specifically because you're the worst criminal he knows! And because you make fun of his accent. Even though you're both Chinese or a fantasy counterpart culture of Imperial China. Yeah."

"I have had enough humiliation!" Panda Bubba yelled. "First, my attempts to take out a rival are derailed by a little blind girl! Then you motley minions appear to destroy my base of operations! THIS WILL NOT BE IGNORED! FACE THE WRATH OF THE URSUS MAXIMUS MK. 4!"

"Pity," Shego said. "I'm already doing that."

"I've had enough! Prepare to battle!"

"Fine with me!" Shego grinnned, her eyes burning green as her mutagenic power flared in a brilliant green flash. "Show me what ya got."

He did.

...

"They're probably not doing anything untoward," Lin Yao said innocent.

"I'll bet," Abel said. He twitched.

"You okay?" Ron asked, concerned.

"Eh, I'm fine, I'm fine!" Abel's eyes flickered red, and in the space of moments it took to speak, half his teeth sharpened to razor-sharp point. A paperclip flew onto his head and stuck there, followed by twenty-dozen other paperclips, a number of highly amusing tacky mugs, three clipboards and all their magnets, a computer tower and two large desks, all plowing through the webs.

Ron and Lin wisely threw themselves to cover before it all hit. Ron timidly got up after the noise died down. "I realize this is a stupid question, but are you okay?"

"Fine an' dandy," Abel said, muffled under all the metal stuck to him like magnets on a fridge; being sandwiched between two desks didn't help. He concentrated and all the metal fell off him with a loud and annoying din; under the metal, his eyes were blue, his teeth were normal and he didn't look remotely inhuman. Aside from the prettiness.

"Oy!" A loud, vaugely accented voice yelled. "Is that you two buffoons being up there? Get down here, we are having a serious problem!"

It came from the spooky underground entrance. "This is going to be gross, isn't it?" Ron said unhappily.

Abel nodded. "I'm a bishounen, the universe is supposed to treat me like a delicate flower. Not someone in a show about jobs that someone's gotta do."

"Like Icky Jobs, I love that show. And I thought you hated being a prettyboy."

Abel shrugged. "I'm like a guy in an unconventional training montage; I wax on and off."

"Well, have fun with that-" Lin Yao said.

Abel and Ron grabbed him. "You're coming too!" They both said, dragging him down the stairs.

The three of them went down the creepy staircase of probable doom which led to a small elevator lift that they took down into a wide space that looked like it had been converted from one of the buildings of the Underdistrict.

It was a fairly standard lab devoted to making a mockery of all that was science and throwing it into the bound of utter lunacy. It had it all; huge vats of bubbling organic material, great transparent capsules, humming machines lining every corner of the wall like engines stripped bare and serving uncertain purpose, banks of computers monitoring the experiments, crackling electrical instruments, and a large soda dispenser. The only incongruity was a poster of an affronted kitten hovering above a tree branch with a ray gun and hand, with the caption of the poster making it's feelings clear: Screw Narrative Convention and Get A Damn Jetpack.

Sadly, most of it had been wrecked by the hideous monster now rampaging around the lab, presumably having previously been in the bio-tank in the middle of the lab, now in pieces. The creature was not pleasant to look at; at least fifteen feet tall, it was not even vaugely humanoid, with it's upright body a mottled gray flesh with plates of blackened armor twisted into faces, their mouths howling and screeching with every breath, webs oozing out of their mouths while the massive pincers at the end of thick tendrils for arms clicked out morse code for some hideous demand. The thing scuttled around on six armored crab-legs, slightly bent forward from the weight of the rows of long and smooth tentacles on it's back. Behind it was a huge gruesome pile of...something, like some monstrous form had burst open from the inside.

"Okay, I'm going to throw up now!" Ron said to no one in particular.

"Could you dely that shortly?" Lin Yao asked after they dropped him. "Cleaning this place is going to be enough of a mess as it is."

"Aw, let's just watch and pick our moment!" Abel told Ron. "Our moment...to be big damn heroes!"

Unaware of their sidekicks showing up, the three active fighters continued their battle against the twisted mockery of science.

"You've improved, Dr. Jookiba, you've stopped making giant monsters with three legs!" Kim shouted; in concession to the lack of official business, she was wearing a light red sleeveless shirt that showed off her toned stomach, a pair of conservative shorts and busily laced up shoes. (Apparently, knowing how to ties laces was a rare skill in Traverse Town.) The monster roared at her, all five mouths, and using it's multistereo roar as a sound effect, swiped a claw at her; she bent back nearly doubed, the massive pincer passing inches over her. Before it's momentum could carry it back and let it strike again, Kim backflipped over a table laden with all sorts of chemicals and fizzling tubes and gave it a good solid kick; owing to her abnormal strength, it went flying across the room and slammed into it's underside and the true beaked face between it's legs and surronded by over a dozen mismatched eyes, the chemicals smashing together and not exploding as expected; that would have been preferable, given the sizzling noise, the awful burning smell and the creature shrieks of agony. "Than again, tripods are easy to knock over."

"Miss Possible!" Jumba Jookiba shouted, a massive gas-fired mechanical monstrosity like a chainsaw and a broadsword in one called a chainsword in his hands, hanging back while he adjusted the massive clamp fixed to one side to ensure a better carving angle. Jumba himself was a hulking and slightly rounded alien that Ron had never bothered to wonder the species of, mostly covered in light purple fur under his labcoat and striped pants, his short snout of a face offset by two pairs of eyes; two large ones in the usual place, with a smaller pair behind them, possibly for improved peripheral vision. He might have even put them there himself. "Stop with the kicking of mine lab equipment! This is not being easy to replace!"

"That's because I bought it for you!" Ling yelled at him. For a moment, his voice changed, becoming a darker rasp; his narrowed eyes opened wider, his pupils slit like a cats and a dusky purple. "Tch, mad scientists."

A flash of blue light indicated that the third and final fighter was doing something, followed by part of the floor coiling around one of the creature's legs and staying there. A short distance away was Abel's partner, a man who refused to give his name but was called Scar for obvious reasons. He was a large and intimidating dark-skinned man with the silver-white hair and red eyes of an Amestrian Ishbalan, every aspect of him carefully maintained and groomed, down to the shaven sides and back of his hair; his face was gruesomely mutiliated, a massive X-shaped scar criss-crossing through his brow and meeting on the bridge of his nose and cutting to under his cheek bones, the scar tissue blistered and badly healed, possibly the reason his face was set in a grim scowl; it was partially paralyzed. He was wearing similar clothes to Abel, although he had chosen a dark green trenchcoat with a massive cross on the back, a white sleeveless shirt and heavy-duty hiking boots.

"It won't hold for long," Scar said, his voice rough and harsh. Alchemic sparks still flickered around his fingers, and he raised his right hand; while both hands were calloused and worn from years of hard labor and life in both slumbs and deep deserts, his right hand didn't look right. It was just a little too small to fit on his strong frame, the fingers too delicate; it was the hand of a scholar, not a warrior-monk who spent as much time training for battle as he did meditating.

"She just burned it's face bad," Jumba pointed out. "And you got it's leg. It's not going to-"

The creature roared and wrenched it's leg out, shattering it's restraint and shooting globby bits of webbing from it's various orifices and missing absolutely everything that would have been a conceivable advantage in its fight, perhaps explaining why the room above was covering in it's webs; the creature's aim was that bad. "Ah," Jumba said as the creature tore a chunk of concrete out of the ground and threw it at him. He didn't move, he just swatted the chunk aside with his chainsword, denting the poor thing a bit. "Hmph, stupid unimaginative beast-thing. I knew nanoites were a bad idea, but no, lousy university students are wanting to make biological computer database! You want biological computer database, you get ugly monster that eat people! I have whole seminar about it. Was very tragic, no one listened."

"Hey, my brother Jim was there," Kim said. "He talked about it at dinner that night."

"He don't count. You brother is crazy. Touched in head. Got gears messed up. Lights are on, but space is for rent. He sees dead twin and talk to him, need I go on?" Kim glared at him, and the monster cowered from the force of it even though it wasn't the recipent. "Shutting up now!"

"The next time you do something stupid like this, I'm feeding you to the monster as bait," She promised him. "And why is this thing attacking us anyway? Is it just berserk or...no. It's not intelligent, is it?"

Scar froze, a look of deep horror on his face. "Is as simple as that?" He turned to the monster, which paused to asess the threat. "Could you please stop trying to kill us? Why do you attack?"

The creature appeared to consider this. It twitched, rumbling with some sort of internal seizure and all it's mouths opened wide, clicking and snapping and crying and said, "I'm different I'm different I'm different I'm different I'm different I'm different I'm different I'm different I'm different I'm different I'm different I'm different-"

Scar bowed his head, and for a moment he trembled in the grip of some apocalyptic hate. "I truly despise mad scientists," He said hollowly.

"Classist," Jumba said. "Let's...let's just be putting this thing out of it's misery, yes?"

"I think we should go in now," Ron said. "We've already seen enough to establish that the fight is not going well. And...well, I'm scared of Kim fighting that...thing. It's got tentacles. Everyone knows what happens when pretty girls get attacked by tentacle monsters! I mean, Lin, you're Japanese, aren't you!"

"Ron, what are you doing here?" Kim asked. "I told you it wouldn't take long. Aw, never mind..."

"What happens with girls and tentacle monsters?" Scar asked curiously. Everyone stared at him.

"Actually, I'm not Japanese," 'Ling' started to say before he twitched; his eye turned brown again before he closed it again for his affable look. "But I'm something like that," He said in his usual voice. "Though if there is a counterpart culture to your world from my native empire of Xing, it's ancient China, but I digress. Your dear friend has nothing to fear from this horrible tentacle monster."

"Oh?"

"Sure. You have more to fear from it than she does. In fact, we all do, which is why we requested you guys and got Scar and Abel as a backup!"

"Huh?" Abel and Ron said.

"It is being female," Jumba called out. "And straight! And very very...ah, 'frustrated'. If you are knowing what I am meaning."

"I don't," Scar said. "Not that anyone seems to be bothered enough to enlighten me."

Abel and Ron both paled at the implications and ran for cover. "Not again!" They both screamed.

Lin watched them go. "Whatever happened to being big damn heroes?"

"It's not worth tentacle violation!" Abel yelled at him.

Lin shrugged. He twitched. "Eh, it's not that bad," He said in his other voice. He twitched again. "Quite you," He told himself sternly. "Make me!" "I'll cut off your Shego time." "I'll be good." "And quiet?" "Screw you." "Ah, well, you may dream of it, but it's a physical impossibility." "Oh, shut up." "Make me."

"I'm different I'm different I'm different I'm different-"

Scar grunted. "What does violation have to do with tentacles? Whatever. I'm already sick of this." He flexed his right arm, his sleeve slipping enough to reveal a black-inked and incredibly awesome and elaborate tattoo that a skilled alchemist could recognize as a restructuring matrix, a transmutation array or whatever you want to call it, and slapped his mismatched hand on the ground, blue alchemic light flashing from the ground as the power of the earth itself was funneled by the power of his tattoo and the ground shattered, tearing itself apart all the way to the ground at the monster's feet, completely shattering deep enough for it's legs to slip into like fabled quicksand all the way to it's knees but not deep enough for it's claws to reach the ground and tilting it's face at the ceiling, leaving it defenseless.

Kim shrugged. "Well, I was expecting a more climatic way of holiding the monster down, but I'll take what I get."

Scar looked at her. "And fighting this thing for over fifteen minutes wasn't enough for you? Just looking at this thing sickens me."

"I'm different I'm different I'm different I'm different.." The monster groaned from all it's many mouths, sounding a lot like a draining grease-trap with a living slime caught in it.

Kim shuddered. "Ew. Alright, let's just finish this." She and Scar went to make it suffer while Jumba hung back, revving up his chainsword.

Abel and Ron carefully went back to Ling, who had finished his internal dialouge. "You know, I don't care about tentacle horrors anymore," Ron said. "We came here to be big damn heroes, and I say we go and do it!"

Abel frowned. "You really want to risk it?"

"Abel, dude. Do you want to cower here like an idiot or do you want to be something awesome!"

"I'm fine with cowering."

"Normally, so am I, but come on! We came here, knowing nothing about the horror within. We arrived at the peak of the action. We're fulfilling all the criteria, except for doing anything remotely interesting! And that's terrible."

Able started to come around. "Yeah...yeah! Does this mean...big damn heroes?"

"Big damn heroes," Ron confirmed. "Let us give fear the extended middle digit of defiance, drop the crouching moron and be the hidden badasses we all know ourselves to be!"

"Okay!" Abel said, fired up by Ron's surprisingly good speaking powers. "Let's do some good-"

There was a large thump and a hideous groan. Lin tapped Abel on the shoulder. "You're a a bit late for that."

Abel and Ron turned around to see that the Horrible Thing That Should Not Have Been But Unfortunately Was lay on it side, beaten, unconscious and oozing a yellowish pus from swollen wounds all over it's body. One leg was missing, it's claw had been hammered into one of it's mouths, and Kim appeared to have torn off a number of it's tentacles to make a truly epic flail with the help of a bubbling vat of acidic chemicals. Scar and Kim were watching the creature suspiciously, while Jumba was hanging back with an air of patient inevitability. The poor thing was still weaking muttering to itself, and it could, it might have cried. "What," Abel said flatly.

"Just when we were all revved up to do something heroic," Ron said sadly.

"I would be feeling bad for them if it was not being so very really funny," Jumba said. "So I shall laugh!" He did.

"Shut up," Scar said seriously, catching the thunderous look Kim was aiming at Jumba. "Jookiba. Can this thing be cured? Or is there nothing we can do for it?"

"Eh? No...no. It is basically being an ambulant fungus that serves as an organic supercomputer...it is not being truly sentient, but it is being close enough to know madness, yes? I am not thinking that therapy would help."

"A supercomputer."

"A.I. is, how you are saying, a crapshot. Actually," Jumba added reflectively. "I am remembering the nanoites that make it's mind were being overloaded with the soundtracks of new popular movies appropiate for that hip-hopping music. I am thinking, hearing those tracks playing over and over again drove it's mind into suicidal impulses and it erased own behavior limiters to escape. And...yes, the nanoites were on the cusp of evolving! It almost became sentient, but didn't actually make it. Thus, we have this thing."

"It commited intellectual suicide out of annoyance?" Kim said, bemused. "I always knew hip-hop was evil."

"Me too," Scar said. He held his right arm back, flexing his fingers. "Stand back. This will be very messy."

"Ack, don't, I could be reusing the organic components!" Jumba complained. "The nanoites are a loss, though. Try to keep the damages internal!"

"...Jumba." Scar held his right arm up. "With this arm, I deconstruct. I destroy. And destruction is rarely precise or carefully aligned, and I don't know if I care to make the effort for the sake of your idiot experimentations."

"They are not idiot experiments, they are being mad genius!"

"A distinction without a difference."

"Ooh, ooh, I can do this!" Abel said brightly, running over to the fitfully moving monster. "I can be useful, really!"

"Ah, I'm not sure that's such a good idea-" Kim started to say.

"Humor him," Scar said tiredly. "Otherwise he'll be annoying us all day about this."

"You're quite right I will!" Abel said brightly. He cracked his knuckles, grinning like a maniac, some of his teeth sharper than was logical. "Crusnik 02," He said in a rather different voice. It was deeper and harsher, like the noise of something ancient and monstrous rising from the dirt and a past alien and terrible. "Power regulation, deactivate ten percent." Deep inside, on a level sub-atomic where molecues were giants in their own universe, something changed. Things that were dormant, awaiting the right stimulus. They received it and a tiny percentage of them came to life, and then Abel Nightroad, who was biologically human except for various physiological improvements, was not strictly human.

The changes were subtle, and only someone who knew what to look for would have seen them. His hair changed in texture a little, like something mettalic, his teeth sharpened to predatory points and it was a good things his eyes were closed, given how they turned a bloody red.

Gently, he laid a hand on one of the monster's legs, trying to keep his nails from lengthening into black claws, to ignore the persistent itching of his shoulderblades wanting to lengthen and free themselves from their old shape. He had practice; after dozens of lifetimes being...what he was, it was almost easy to let the dark lightning flow through him, to let his less admirable side flower in him and be bent by him before it could compell him. It was hard; emotions ran hot and deadly when he let one of his other aspects free, espicially this one, and controlling them was like harnessing lightning, strapping a saddal to the fury of the heavens itself and aiming it the way he wanted. But he could do it. His control was slipping lately, but he could do it.

With all the deceptive ease a man took in breathing, unaware of the many complicated biological processes going on, Abel let the lightning flow through him, let it become another force entire, and feeling the pulse of the tiny metal bodies scattered through this creature's body like little brains - calling to him - he let that call reach both ways, and the song they sang in the realm of shimmers and wavelengths flickered. Their minds, already strange to begin with, had gone mad. There was some sort of crude overmind there, the beginings of true consciousness, and it was close enough to be aware that it wasn't something that should have ever existed. It was enough of a scrap of rude consciousness to wish for death, and to react with blind brutishness.

"Bloody hell," He said in a voice not quite his own. "Hip-hop does a nasty number."

His power flashed out, invisible to normal eyes, and because of the mass of metal in the creature's body, it strained against it's bonds while Abel spun a wave of binding forces, gently scrubbing the little nanoites free of the troublesome and botched programming. Not another death, but dormancy, lulling them into a sleep so deep it was nearly death, and without them to animate its strange organs, the monstrosity they had animated could not remain a living thing, and moments after it's various heartlike organs stopped beating, it's short and bewildered life came to an gentle and painless end.

For some reason, this caused a number of interior pus-filled bladders to violently expunge their organs and flood various internal chambers, making a noise like 'spl-urrch'. "It even dies with a gross noise," Kim complains.

"There, problem solved," Abel said, pulling back from the misshapen thing's body, letting go of the brief surge of power that had let him shut down a monster's body from the inside out (but too much of it drove you mad, mad and crazy and smiley-insane like Cain), and the things inside him went back to sleep, quietly remaking his body by the instant. The changes reverted, so subtlely that no one noticed, and if not for his regenerative powers and a few other odd traits, Abel might have been nothing more than a low-level metahuman. "And I did it without blowing it up into meaty bits." Scar grunted, indicating a general lack of interest in how the job was done provided it was done at all.

"Is it over?" Lin said from behind a big box.

"You could have helped," Ron said. He was sitting right next to Lin.

"What part of 'I'm not going to touch it' did you not hear?"

"Everyone else attacked it! Or whatever Abel did."

"Except you, the guy hiding right with me."

"Hey, you don't have to get snippy, I'm older than you!"

"And between us, who's got a seat on the Council of Insert Nomenclature? Oh, yeah, it's me!"

"Meh, get a guy a position on the political circle that practically rules the town and he acts like he's royalty..."

"I am royalty! I'm the son of an emporer! A prince!" Lin paused. "Then again, given the image most princes have, it's probably better that most people don't know that."

"Well, now that that's done, we can go and do some more good," Kim said, dusting herself off and shuddering at the oozing thing behind her. "Uh, right?" She directed this at Jumba, who was paying no attention at all. He was trundling over to it's remaining pincer arm and holding his chainsaw up. "Uh, what are you doing?"

"Collecting the spart parts," Jumba said, trying to rev up his chainsword without much success. "What, you think I just am throwing away dead mockeries of science? Nightmarish wonders like this aren't exactly cheap to manufacture! Recycling is economical, yes? Cut off the good bits, melt them down into organic slush, sell some to cloning industry for profit and use the rest to start making more experiments for little 626. He and loud little girl like the brothers and sisters."

Abel gave him a disturbed look. Scar frowned at him. "I feel that I should object to creating sentient life for reasons best defined as 'why not'," Scar said.

"Yes, probably," Jumba said absently. "And some will be going to fast food industry. A little processing, a lot of mincing and time in deep fryer, you never notice!"

Kim looked sick. "You mean stuff like that goes into fast food! Ron, we are never eating at a fast food place again. Who knows what horrible side-effects it'll cause?"

"Make people transform into giant monsters and kidnap random bystanders?" Abel suggested.

"Hey, that only happened to me twice!" Kim said. "And the first time was probably an accident." Everyone stared at her. "And the second time I didn't actually scare Ron when I grabbed him and climbed up a building for some reason."

"That was kind of fun," Ron said cheerfully. "It was like being manhandled by an elevator!"

"Wow," Lin said. "You guys have issues."

"Don't you share head-space with the anthropomorphic personification of the sin of greed?"

"Hey, only the personification of an eldritch abomination's greed!" Lin said. "For family and friends, I have to point out. Because he's being very loud about that point." He twitched. "Damn straight!" He said in that other voice.

"Right," Kim said dubiously. "Let's just go before something else unfortunate happens-"

Jumba's chainsword roared. A meaty tearing swiftly ensued. "Aha! Is now carving time!" Jumba yelled.

"Ew," Kim said in distaste. "Too late." She ran up the stairs as fast as she could, Ron making a hasty retreat behind her.

"Be sure to salvage the nanoites!" Abel called to Jumba. "I will be checking on that, and I mean it! I'm a man of my word."

He left. Jumba looked at Scar. "...Should I be quivering in instinctive terror like all my childhood terrors just promised to stalk me?"

"Yes," Scar said flatly. He left Lin and Jumba, the latter confused and frightened, the former merely amused and also carrying on a conversation with the entity he happened to be the host of.

...

"...And that's what happened," Zim finished. "Absolute unvarnished truth, top to bottom, no problems."

"I...see," Mr. Herrimen said, a bit baffled. "Ah, I don't recall any invading space fleets, armies of demonic ninja or an epic musical number with a chorus consisting exclusively of cherubim. I'm sure I would have noticed."

"You can tell because cherubim don't look like babies with wings on," Aang said. "To start with, they're pretty big and have a lot of eyes. In all the wrong places."

Mr. Herrimen ignored this and gave Zim a very hard look. Zim, being to body langauge what a rock is to reverse psychology, didn't take the hint. "'Unvarnished truth'?" Mr. Herrimen said, resorting to less finely chiseled words to get his point across.

"Even unvarnished surfaces require a little waxing to get some of the scratches and stuff out," Zim said. To his credit, he did so with a straight face.

"...Could I listen to someone else for a bit?" Mr. Herrimen asked.

"Hey," Spike said, raising his hand.

"Someone I haven't already listened to excessively and know to be an trickster?"

"Ooh, ooh, me!" Aang said. "Pick me!"

"You weren't even there!"

"Wasn't I?"

"No!"

"Oh, okay then."

"I'll do it," Hobbes volunteered.

"Me too!" Morte said. Calvin and Zim gave the skull a dubious look; Morte hadn't been present, precisely, during the big battle with Mr. Lyle or at least the interesting and action-y bits. They didn't raise an issue though, obviously wanting to get this nonsense over with. So Morte and Hobbes quickly but carefully relayed the events of last night as it pertained to Foster's, starting with their haphazard arrival there guided by Spike and Bloo and their quick seperation from their guides owing to boredom and Zim's short attention span. (Both of them went out of their way not to mention any detail of the apparent conspiracy that had been waiting to help them last night. They didn't know if Mr. Herrimen was a part of it, just a powerful authority or something else entirely; they made it sound like they'd ran into Bloo and Spike as a result of a fight Zim'd had with a giant Heartless, which was already apparently common knowledge, according to what they'd overheard during their jaunt around the house before the guard's attempt to capture Spike had required everyone shunted out of the relevant areas except for them, who had simply gone unnoticed by being very good at it.)

They were better at it than Zim, who was obviously prone to making stuff up to spice up the telling, exaggerating genuine occurances for his own amusement or downplaying things he felt had little relevance (like Mr. Lyle being some sort of omniscient dirty secret guy). Hobbes and Morte tag-teamed the story, relaying the absolute bare bones of what had happened while phrasing it in a way that would convey a little more information to Zim's friends, who Hobbes suspected would want to know more. Mr. Herrimen was more polite with them, only interrupting a few times to have them clarify a point or two, or ask them if something they said related to a previous point. Hobbes thought they'd hit a rough spot when they inevitably came to the problem of Zim's brief rampage, but Mr. Herrimen didn't seem to care to read too much into it. As he primly said, "I wouldn't give too much credibility to Miss Rockwaller and her malcontents. They enjoy causing trouble like this, and if there was some sort of ruckus, I would think you all could sort it out without involving higher authorities. Outside of the house, of course."

Morte was more perceptive than he let on, and suspected that Mr. Herrimen was deliberately overlooking Zim's transgressions for some reason that he wasn't making clear. And Mr. Herrimen didn't seem the type to do anything like that. Morte knew people like that; people who were generally more concerned with the letter of the law than the spirit and were sticklers for doing things by the book even if the book was big, inwieldly and no one read it. He managed to breach the subject in the form of subtext under when he got to the bit with the quickly assembled mob of the offended parties, their roommates and their friends, all with the use of a clever analogy to a brick, a dismantled pool table and all the myraid ways butterflies annoyed people with bad applications of nonlinear mathematics.

Mr. Herrimen appeared not to notice, or at least he wanted it to look like he hadn't. "My dear protectorate has taken a bit of a hurting lately," He said, clearly refering to Foster's. "We're often at the epicenter of whatever mad scheme unsavory sorts concoct - I could tell you such stories of the things I've found in abandoned rooms - without the tendency for the warring bands that live outside town and sometimes find their way here in spite of their own misgivings, which always leads to a fair bit of devastation. And just last night, a thief stole my personal cache of carrots! Owing to a mix-up involving the fact that 'carrot' sounds identical to a term for a diamond's value, of course, and that cosmic in-joke wasn't funny the first time it happened to me. I had to go to prison. Again. Though they were returned to me some time later. I hope that thief got what was coming to her!"

"Carrots?" Zim said. "Thief? She was teenaged, had a cat theme?"

"Why, yes! You apprehended her?"

"In a manner of speaking. I prevented her from absconding with them, but then a Heartless came out of nowhere, killed her and consumed her heart, no doubt throwing her soul into some monstrous dimension of weaponized angst where her soul was subjected to tortures foul and unnamable, her psyche torn apart and rearranged in ways it was never meant to be, the darkness in her heart let out roaring and screaming until it consumed her." He reflected. "That would explain why another Heartless showed up so quickly! You'd think transforming people into Heartless would be a gradual process. Of course, I lack information."

Everyone was staring at Zim, horrified. "...Where do you come up with this stuff?" Zuko asked.

"TV, duh."

"Ah," Mr. Herrimen said hoarsely. "Well...ah...good Lord, that's..."

"You did want what was coming to her," Calvin said. He got a full rounded of revolted looks. "What? I've seen worse!" No one dared ask just what he'd seen that could be worse.

"And I've been through worse," Morte said. The silence was louder than a scream. Pleased that the interruptions had stopped, he continued on, passing by most of the rather pointless intervals of running from the mob, wandering fruitlessly through occupied hallways and being really very lost. "Then we hit a trapdoor, fell a long way into the catacombs of this place and met, ah, what's ther names, Kim Possible, Ron Stoppable and Father Abel Nightroad. Funny guy, that last one. Didn't act much like a priest. Not very serious at all."

"He's fairly typical for one of ours," Spike said unexpectedly. Alone of the others, he hadn't been espicially bothered by Zim's remark or any of the following ones. This begged the question of what he had seen. "Got a whole faction full of priests like him. Mad scientists and rejects from mental wards, the lot of 'em. Nice guys, for the most part, but not very interested in being sterotypical 'corrupt church' or stern humorless berks. They hate people thinking of them like that."

"Ah, so that actually happened?" Mr. Herrimen said. "Hmn. I'd heard that they'd been seen around here recently, but I'd put it down to simple gossip. If they really are involved-"

"Which they are," Zim said.

"-Then I am inclined to give you more credit. They are not...easily suggested, if you follow me. I hold high respect for the three of them: Miss Possible's father, Field-Admiral Gibbs, is one fo the highest ranking officials in what passes for true authority here, and she is very clearly following in her footsteps. Master Stoppable...well. He's a bit off in his thinking, but he is a socially responsible and kindhearted young man. As for Father Nightroad, he's a good man, certainly. Though I'm reasonably sure he's an undiagnozed schizophrenic, but of the harmlessly off-beat sort. If I didn't know better, I'd assume him to be Master Stoppable's father!"

"Abel's a priest," Zim said.

"Father Nightroad's group sees chastity as a personal choice and regards procreation as a joy and something to be embraced," Mr. Herrimen said primly. "I don't see the point in such interest in the provision of future generations myself, but I suppose, being incapable of performing such, I am not suited to have an opinion."

"You can't have kids?" Katara said, stunned. The Water Tribe put a heavy emphasis on family, Zim remembered; it was like Air Nomad freedom, Earth Kingdom tradition or Fire Nation loyalty. To break ties like that was, often, to die. Spiritual gifts had their drawbacks.

Mr. Herrimen continued. "By any chance, was Father Nightroad's companion there? A large, unfriendly fellow with red eyes, white hair and an unseemly scar on his face. People tell him he should get facial reconstruction, but he's not keen on the idea..."

"And why should people have to get their faces under the knife just to look pretty?" Zuko said harshly.

Mr. Herrimen stared at Zuko's horrific burn for a few instants too long. Zuko's glare tightened. "That's besides the point," Hobbes said. "We never heard anything about this guy. Even when Abel volunteered help today - not that we've heard anything from them - he didn't mention anyone like that."

"Maybe he forgot?" Spike suggested. "Abel's not the most alert bundle of nerves around. Half his brain's like a rickety clockwork soldier with half the springs gone rusty and most of the gears are mostly slipped." He didn't say what the other half was.

"As Master, er, Hobbes was it? As he said, that is besides the point." Mr. Herrimen put his fingers together in a particular steepled way. "Then what happened?"

"Er? Then I showed up," Spike said. "Had a bit of a talk with the Possibles and Nightroad, told them the situation and my deal with the new lot-"

"Some deal," Calvin complained. "Also. 'Possibles'? I don't like either of them very much, but c'mon, they're not related."

"They're practically married, ain't they? And I can tell you that when it does roll, she's not taking his name. Bloke's practically a doormat when it comes to her." This would have probably caused no end of angry feelings, mainly from Aang, Zuko and Hobbes, who had a tendency to become somewhat passive when it came to the girls they liked, except that Spike sounded wistful about it. Spike kept going. "Anyway, we had a bit of a conflict, but Nightroad sorted it out quick enough..."

Not going into detail about the...dark powers Abel had displayed to do that, Spike skipped to the part where the mob had smashed a wall open to get at them, forcing them to beat a hasty retreat. Spike paused to give Mr. Herrimen a surprisingly comprehensive roster of names of the people who had been involved, naming at least seven people who had been high in the informal and brief hierarchy of that mob, with that Bonnie girl at the top and Zaphod at an informal between position. Dispite the fact that he apparently had little reason to be there.

"I see," Mr. Herrimen said. "Thank you for the details. Please carry on."

And, as it turned out, there wasn't that much left to go into detail about; Spike managed to turn the small level of chaos Calvin had spread in the form of hastily created traps to slow the mob down into the mob causing destruction in their haste for dispoportiante retribution (though to be fair, you have to go really far to go overboard on avenging yourself upon a guy that broke into your place, trashed your stuff, yelled at you and left, not neccasarily in that order), and then filling Calvin, Hobbes and Zim in with the mystery of what had happened to the mob: he'd tricked them into followed him all the way to a trapdoor that he'd dropped them down into. Apparently, it led somewhere horrible. Spike wasn't sure, but he hoped it was a dimension of unending noise or a one-way pocket dimension or a septic tank.

"That does somewhat corroborate with what Miss Rockwaller and her allies told me of last night," Mr. Herrimen said slowly. "Though the details are certainly different. I don't recall them saying they caused that much destruction. Rather, they blamed it all on Master Calvin and insidious devices he constructed to do them harm."

Calvin squirmed. "Hah, yeah...good thing you believe us, not them, right? Right?"

Mr. Herrimen gave him a long, steady look. "I'm still weighing the evidence," He said evenly. "Master William?"

Spike shrugged. "After that? Made my way back to where I'd left everyone else. Huge fight going on, like I told you. I joined it, and they know more than I do."

"Okay," Calvin said earnestly, eager to deflect suspicion by actually being honest for a change. This would probably be worse than lies. "So me and everyone else went into the ballroom to wait out the trouble and get our new, uh..."

"Friends?" Aang said to Zim hopefully. Zim shrugged.

"Allies?" Hobbes suggested.

"Eh, Hobbes' work. For some reason, those two teens really rub me the wrong way. I just can't stand smart-aleck, sanctimonius, self-centered people who think they're the best at everyone when most of their success has to do with that one guy that always tags along and does something to make everything work out!"

Hobbes whistled innocently. "Yeah," Morte said. "Imagine that. So, like he was saying..."

Morte explained to Mr. Herrimen, and now the entirety of Team Avatar and Team Phantom, that they hadn't gone long in the ballroom before a mysterious and stylish stranger had appeared: a charming man missing a thumb and named Mr. Lyle. Morte explained, fairly briefly, that Mr. Lyle had tried to act courteous before he began to reveal bizarre and damaging things; horrific incidents in their pasts, parts of their personalities that weren't right to speak of, unhappy things they'd done...Morte, gracefully, spared the details while getting his point across. Zim's companions at once gave Zim concerned looks, mostly mingled with anger that someone had come out of nowhere to bring up that to hurt their friend. (Zuko just looked angry. He was good at it.) Hobbes looked exceptionally downcast, looking listlessly at the ground as Morte told Mr. Herrimen.

Mr. Herrimen seemed quite interested in all of this. "You're certain that this man was absolutely correct? None of his information was flawed in any way?"

"Yes," Calvin said. "Everything he said was right on, and it seems that in some cases he shouldn't have been able to know by any logical means. He...he knew stuff about my friend. Personal tribe stuff." Calvin frowned. "And...does the name 'Cain Nightroad' mean anything to you?"

Mr. Herrimen didn't flinched. But his demeanor cracked a bit. "Ah...ah yes. I should say so." He looked uncomfortable. "This...this Mr. Lyle spoke of such things?"

"Well, yeah," Hobbes said. "He went into...unneccesary detail. He said he was Abel's brother?"

"That he is. Not that many believe him to be anything other than a clever cipher." Mr. Herrimen sighed. "I'd rather not speak of such things. Not here. If you do wish to learn more, I'd advise to abandon it. There is a thing as propriety, and if you are indeed acquainted with Master Ronald, I wouldn't delve into such things out of curiousity. It is not something...something to be interested in. My Lord, no."

"Alright, alright," Calvin said uneasily. "I just wanted to make sure that Lyle was being honest."

"Ron and Abel said he was right," Zim said, a little disapprovingly.

"Abel's half-insane and Ron should just put the words 'wipe your feet on the Ron'," Calvin said harshly, irritated that Zim was so quick to defend people he barely knew while being overtly hostile to the guys that wanted to help him. And Calvin wasn't sure he really felt like it anymore. "I wouldn't go with anything they said further than I could throw them. And I'm not much bigger than that metaphor made sense."

"You know, you're kind of a jerk," Toph observed. Calvin grimaced, but did not overreact and yell like he normally would.

"Anyway," Hobbes said, leering at Calvin and making a few words in hand language that aptly summerized his feelings about Calvin's odd behavior towards Toph thus far. "We yelled at Mr. Lyle, he made fun of us, and then he did this weird thing when he threw this card and used it to summon Heartless. A lot of Heartless."

"So many Heartless, it was like jumping into a tank full of lobsters at the aquarium because Sokka bet I wouldn't," Zim said dreamily. "Except these lobsters didn't have rubber bands on their claws. And were generally a lot bigger than me. And sometimes flew or blew fire at me. And combined periodically. And came from the darkness, were born from the corrupted remnants of dead people, or both, I'm still not clear about that. And they never sang Christmas songs like mop-puppets do. And they weren't seafood."

Sokka sulked. "That was twenty dollars I didn't see again..."

"So we fought," Calvin chimed in. "Big time fight. It was all epic and stuff, like frit-choo and ba-boom and me contramanding the laws of mass-to-energy conservation because I'm just that cool! But the destruction we wreaked was worth it because we were fighting soul-eating monsters that also eat hearts even though they haven't burrowed into chests in my experience so far. And uh, they did all the damage. So yeah." He and Hobbes then proceeded to tell Mr. Herrimen everything they did there, from Calvin's ice-slides and rains of icicles while Hobbes had gone on a savage mass-brawl and Zim had done feats of great acrobatics, stabbity-action and fire. Lots and lots of fire. Though, as Calvin pointed out, not very well.

"Wow," Aang said, impressed. "You got to have all the fun last night! I just got everyone trying to keep me from running off."

Zuko sighed, as though being pushed to a decision he'd been thinking about for a while, and looked hard at Zim. "You need proper instruction."

Before Zim could ask him to elaborate, Spike said, "Then I came around when the fighting hit a peak, I think. I show up, we beat the beasties back hard and good, and this Lyle bloke shows up again. Starts talking smart, doing the same mind-twisting bit with the unfortunate bit of information he shared. I do my part to stop him doing that and we manage to get him into a corner after some work."

Hobbes grunted. "And then he goes and slips out. Some kind of portal thingie like the Heartless do, I don't know. We left after that, and that's pretty much it. Kim, Ron and Father Nightroad went their seperate ways, and we finally found a room for the night, and that's that."

"Ah, I see," Mr. Herrimen said. "Thank you for volunteering with a minimum of exaggeration, Master Hobbes."

"Wait, you forgot Jarod," Zim said. "He showed up with a gun made of pure awesomeness and in a ship that went invisibile and pierced the barriers of reality! Or something to go through walls. And he knew Mr. Lyle from somewhere, sandworms and stuff."

Mr. Herrimen chuckled. "Oh, come now, Master Zim! I know you'd like to joculate at a time like this, but seriousness should be called for in fact-giving. I can hardly take you seriously when you say that an urban legend appeared to fight with you and take down a wrong-doer."

"...Yes," Morte said. "Stop kidding around, let's be serious."

"But..." Zim heisitated. He hated hypocrasy. On the other hand...Jarod was considered an urban legend. The Guide had said so. "Bah, there was a guy named Jarod that we met earlier and he was there, and I am prepared to argue this with an increasingly deranged set of insane troll logic until nothing makes sense anymore! Espicially linguistics."

"No," Calvin said, with unexpected insight. "Because Jarod is an urban legend. So stop kidding around, okay?"

"Never!" Zim said. "And there is nothing to stop me from-"

"Zim, look at the wall," Zuko said, Firebending a small flame in his hands and making a weird shadow puppet at the wall.

"Oh, shadow puppets!" Zim said, immediately forgetting about the Jarod thing. "Go on, do Deformed Rabbit, it's my favorite!" Zuko did. "Ee hee hee! Sad grotesquery used for comedy. Classic!" Zuko smirked, considering it a job well done and dissipated his flame. "Aw, it's gone. And now I haven't the slightest idea what I was talking about before."

"Yes, we are all absolutely despondant, I'm sure," Mr. Herrimen said dryly. "And that is all the information you can volunteer?"

"Yep," Morte said. "That's what happened, and that's all we know. The guy said something about working for a place called Wolfram and Hart. From what I know, it's a law firm that gives lawyers a bad name. Keeps real monsters off the streets and in power, gets the real innocents a hard time." Morte didn't have a face to give a look of absolute disgust, but he could radiate it pretty well. "The stuff that makes guy like me want to keep out too much law so you don't get stuff like that happening."

"That's why you should avoid too much law or chaos," Aang said wisely.

Zuko nodded. "Too much law, you have people that use it like a club to beat people they don't like into submission or twist it so it does what they want. Too much lawlessness, though, and you have warlords and barbarians running rampant, doing what they want to whoever they want."

"Was that a shot at the Water Tribe?" Katara wondered. Sokka shrugged; all the nations of their world had sordid histories, or at least ones that hadn't been rewritten for the winner's favor.

"It's even worse than that," Spike said. Everyone looked at him, surprised. "I've dealt with them before. Back before I was set to wanderin' the worlds, I hooked up with a group called Angel Investigations. Team Angel, they called themselves, on account of the self-righteous brooding pouf that ran the thing. Me old grandsire, see, after he went good-crazy and turned his heel face-up. Know what I mean? Thing was, there was a real mess for them. A goddess with low opinions o' mankind showed up and brainwashed the damn world into happy-shiny idiots that did everything she said, loved every word and went obidient at the sight of her. S'pose it counted as peace of a kind, but I still don't like the idea."

"That's not peace," Aang said, disgusted. "That's slavery. It's not peace unless people chose it and work for it."

"True," Spike acknowledged. "Not a bad mind on ya, kid. Anyway, they killed her, right? More like they broke the thing and events eventuated, but still, they killed her. They stopped world peace. Angel and his folk didn't think of it like that, or at least tried not to, but the Wolfram and Hart lot did. See, before she came? That goddess pulled a huge gambit on the way there, involving wiping out Wolfram and Hart's Los Angeles offices. So they got Angel and them to take over the offices, saying that maybe they could twist it from the inside. That's the evil lawyers talking. Now their thoughts, the lawyers I mean, was that they'd corrupt some of the greatest heroes in the world by making them do what they had to keep the clients coming." He smirked. "Like hell they did. That came to bit them in the ass damn hard, but, anyway, I joined Angel after but I know my share of Wolfram and Hart's dirty business. These Lyle fellow seems like he'd fit right in there. Extortion...murder sprees...protection for baby-eating monsters from hunters...real estate dealing for demons...providing black voodoo magicians with the messy bits they need...contracts for the worst sorts of deals...they did it all." Spike gave them a hard look. "I wouldn't rush into looking for him without a gameplan. Someone with Wolfram and Hart? Them's dangerous. Like rushing into hell with a sword and guts."

"Sometimes that's all you got!" Zim countered, Zuko, Sokka, Danny and Calvin all looking like they agreed perfectly. "And if you do, do you dare back down for fear of superior forces? Give up and abandon your honor simply because you're afraid of dying? If it gives the forces of evil even the smallest of pricks, you must rush to evil's lair with all the weaponry you have, even if it's nothing more than your own resolve! You remind them exactly who they are dealing with and how much it will cost to risk battling others like you!"

"Even if you go out, you do it in a blaze of glory!" Zuko said fiercely. "And if you burn in the attempt? Let yourself burn and destroy everything that touches you and make them remember just who they were fighting in you."

"Go heroic resolve!" Calvin said.

Spike smiled, the first time Zim had seen him doing so. It was surprisingly warm. "Yeah! Just what Angel and the others said, to that effect!"

Mr. Herrimen's mustache tweaked in a smile. "You're either recklessly rash or an admirable party. Perhaps, both, yes?" He sat back and tapped his fingers. "I will give this matter some thought, but in the meantime, you are free to leave. I'm not quite certain I believe your story, but I think it's worth considering."

"What, too outrageous?" Toph said.

"Actually, it's not quite outrageous enough to be a true Traverse Town incident," Mr. Herrimen said apologetically. "Now, if you'd constructed a war machine the size of a castle that fired bursts of exploding magma fueled by weaponized willpower at a fleet of mechanical dragons fueled by the souls of unwise real estate develoupers commanded by this Mr. Lyle, then I'd have good reason to believe you, if only because that sort of thing is a regular occurance. But...what happened to you sounds so...well, rushed together, I'm sorry to say."

"What?" Hobbes said.

"Oh, come on!" Morte said indignantly. "Half the stuff the Boss said was ten times crazier than that!"

"Yes!" Zim said. "In my version, I used the weaponized power of CHEESE to set the UNIVERSE on fire, willed the universe back to normal before I took all the fire and smacked Mr. Lyle with it!"

Mr. Herrimen gave him an annoyed look. "The problem with plausible lies, Master Zim, is that there's a very fine line between business as usual in our fair town and outrageousness. Someone like that has only happened once."

"...Wait, what?" Danny said incredulously.

"This place is freaking badass!" Toph said. "I'm gonna like it here."

Mr. Herrimen tilted an ear. "Well, I should hope so, but-" His phone rang. "Pardon me a moment." He took off the ringer by the wrong side, accidentally dragged the whole thing off the table, put the wrong parts on his mouth and ear and had a frustrating few moments trying to put it the right way. Obviously embarrased, he got it right just in time to start talking. "Hello. Ah, Miss Frances. Erm, no, I didn't have any trouble with the phone of communication! Hah, no, that only happened four times, that's hardly a negative indication in my culture, thank you!" Aang and Toph looked a bit concerned at that. Four, to their cultures, was not a pleasant omen. "Er, no, we don't need to go to the voice-horn. I miss when we used them exclusively. Wait, come again? Miss Possible, Father Nightroad and Master Stoppable are asking for a Master Zim, a Master Hobbes and someone else they can't quite recall? Hmn. That is interesting. Tell them I shall be there shortly, Miss Frances. I have a few questions for them. Wait, come again? They left? Where did they-"

A knock came at the door. Then another one came from someone else. The first knocker, evidentally feeling challenged, rapped out the familiar 'barber-surgeon' knock. The second one knocked out an elaborate series of taps, taps and palm-slaps that could have been scored by a poorly funded orchestra. A pair of rather louder knocks cut it off, followed by two male voices complaining, "Ow! Head damage!"

Aang and Danny shot important looks at Zim; he shrugged in deference to the workings of fate. Mr. Herrimen sighed. "Hold a moment. This will not take long."

He left the room. They shortly overheard a brief but loud barrage of questions coming from who Zim recognized as being Ron and Abel, cut off by Mr. Herrimen. "I'm sorry to be brief, but did you meet a trio named Zim, Calvin and Hobbes last night?"

"Yeah," Kim said. She sounded worried. "They're not in troube, are they?"

"That remains to be seen, but...did you battle a mysterious, sinister and well-informed man named Mr. Lyle last night? Who summoned a great deal of Heartless?"

"Yes."

"Did you fight off these Heartless?"

"Yes!"

"They did way more damage to your ballroom than we did!" Abel chimed in.

"Did you attempt to bring him into custody only to have him vanish in the way of the Heartless?"

"Yeah!" Ron said. "That's not fair. I hate when bad guys escape the clutches of the protaganist's in some contrived and overly convienient way. What do you call a deus ex machina when it's a bad guy thing?"

"A diabolus ex machina?" Sokka suggested loudly.

"Yeah, that sounds right," Tucker said.

"Thanks!" Ron said. "Wait, who said that?"

"Please hold on," Mr. Herrimen said. "Hrm, wait, that's all the relevant information. Wait. Did you engage in hostilities with an angry mob that wished to battle Master Zim over personal grievances?

"Oh yeah," Kim said.

"Uh huh," Abel said.

"I really, really wish they hadn't," Ron said.

"...Oh," Mr. Herrimen said. "Then I suppose that lends some credence to what Master Zim's lot has told me."

"YAY!" Calvin said.

"...Except for the fact that you both independently made reference to the Heartless doing more damage to Foster's property than you did. That suggests you rehearsed a story!"

"DANG IT!" Calvin yelled.

"Yes...well...Jarod showed up and did stuff, don't pin it all on them!" Ron said quickly. "...Not that he did anything damaging..."

"Oh, for pity's sake," Mr. Herrimen said. "If you did rehearse a story, you could do a more plausible one than that! Miss Possible. The only reason I'm willing to consider this, besides certain evidence and what Miss Rockwaller's band of malcontent have told me, is that I know you to be a plainly honest young woman. If you stand by this story firmly, I will have to consider it."

"Oh," Kim said. "That's...good, then?"

"One should hope so."

"Can we go now?" Zim called.

Mr. Herrimen sighed from the other side of the door. "Yes, fine, I've heard all I care to."

Moments later, the door slammed open: Zim, Calvin, Danny and Aang came screaming out. "FREEDOM FROM OBLIGATION!" They yelled, going right past Kim, Ron, Abel and a fourth guy they didn't know with a tiny panda on his shoulder. Abel and Ron ran after them, joining in the pointless screaming. Hobbes, followed by Zuko, Katara, Tucker, Sokka, Sam, Toph, Morte and Spike, sauntered out. "Hey," He said to Kim.

"Hi," She said cautiously. "Friends of your's?"

Hobbes glanced at the guys behind him. "I think so," He said. "Friends of Zim's, at least."

"Hi," Zuko said warily.

"Hi!" Kim said to him, smiling. Zuko made a show of looking at the ceiling awkwardly and trying to hide his scar. Kim pretended not to notice it. "Um, hi, who are you guys?"

They introduced themselves, except for Zuko, who was last to speak, and the grim looking guy with Kim. Zim and his brief band came back before either of them could say anything. "Who the heck are you?" Zim said to the fourth guy.

"Hey, don't be mean!" Abel said indignantly. He hooked an arm around the other man's shoulder, minding the ferocious little panda. "This man's my main man, my head comrade, the guy whose stern and serious persona contrasts my goofy dumbass ways! He's...er, well, he doesn't like his name being thrown around, so we just call him Scar!"

"I...see," Zuko said, noticing the man's large X-shaped scar. It looked like it had been gouged into his face.

"Because he has a great big scar on his face and he has reconstruction matrix tattoos on his arms," Abel added unneccesarily. "Tattoos are like scars, right?"

"Abel, you're touching me," Scar said. "Why are you touching me?"

"...To reinforce our heterosexual life partner charm?" Abel said hopefully. Scar lightly hit him on the back of the head. "Ow! You're nearly as touchy as Lilith. Oh, she liked smacking things around, I can tell you..." Abel appeared to reconsider that. "Don't take that the wrong way."

"...So," Zuko said to Scar, one facially mutilated survivor to another.

"So," Scar said.

They looked at each other, exchanging looks that basically dared each other to beat each other in terms of scar awesomeness.

"War wound," Scar said gruffly.

"Agni kai injury," Zuko said. "...A fire duel."

Scar nodded. Zuko nodded back. They stared at each other, offered small but significant body langauge speech and retreated. Abel, though, grabbed Scar by the arm. "No you don't! Team Dad stuff is too deadpan! I wanna see some awesomeness!"

"What?" Scar said.

"You two, Sparky!" Toph said, jumping onto Zuko's back and kicking him forward. "You don't get to avoid people this time! I'm gonna make you socialize if it kills you!"

"Get off me!" Zuko said indignantly. "That hurts!"

"That what you tell Mai?"

"How'd you know that...I mean, don't say stuff like that!"

"Come on, I'm sure it won't kill you to make friends," Danny told Scar and Zuko. A smile ambled to his face and squatted there. "We have ways of making you nice."

Scar grimaced slightly more than usual. "I'm not going to like today, am I?"

"No," Zuko said flatly.

On the other end of the communication spectrum, Aang and Katara were introducing themselves to Ron and Kim. "So you helped our friend out last night?" Aang said. "Thanks for that." He grinned. "You know what that means?"

"What?" Ron asked.

"A friend of Zim's is a friend of mine!"

"Awesome! Wait, he considers me a friend? You sure?"

"Has he tried to set you on fire, launch you into outer space or transform you into something monstrous?"

"No."

"There you go!"

"So...your boyfriend's not quite what I expected when Zim told me about you guys," Kim told Katara, looking at Aang. "I pictured someone a little more, I don't know, like him." She gestured at Zuko.

"We get that sometimes," Katara said dryly. "What'd Zim tell you?"

Kim fidgeted. "Not much. Um...he told me about what happened to...his people...and that you guys beat someone really evil and stopped a horrible war. Aside from that, I don't know anything about you."

Katara shrugged and smiled. "Well...it'd be nice to be around sane people for a change. Would you mind showing us around?"

"Sure thing! And not to burst your bubble, but my boyfriend's not exactly sensible or anything..."

"DUDE! THAT'S AWESOME!" Ron screamed as Aang showed off his rotating marble trick to Ron.

"I know!" Aang said excitedly.

"Hey, what are you guys doing?" Tucker and Sokka asked, walking over to them.

Katara winced as the four socialized. "This will not end well."

"You're always running interference too?" Kim asked.

"Oh yeah. You wouldn't believe the stuff these guys get up to."

"Oh?" Kim said challengingly. "You should see what happens when Ron gets up to fixing stuff and weird stuff happens! Or when his ninja friends Naruto and Gaara show up! Or when he does anything on missions!"

"What're you girls talking about?" Sam asked, wondering over and a bit lonely.

"Figuring out whose circle of friends is dumber," Kim said. "You want in?"

"You guys are so going down." The three girls quickly put that challenge to the test, bonding over the stupidity of their boyfriends and male friends. And brothers.

Zim blinked at all the friendships being formed. "Wow. That was fast. I certainly didn't expect anyone to hit it off that fast. Aang, obviously, but no anyone else."

"Aw, I think it's nice," Hobbes said. "Your friends are already getting a little more comfortable with their new home! Making new friends and entrenching your circle of bonds."

"I have emotional bonds?"

"Yes, now shut up and go with it."

"You guys don't seem very put out," Calvin said to Morte and Spike.

"Eh," Morte said. "I'm a floating animate skull. I'm used to being ignored. Or screamed at. Or attacked by paranoids. Or obsessed over by guys that think I represent new horizons to existence or some other nonsense."

"And I'm wearing a faceless protective suit for no apparent reason," Spike said. "Would you go up to a guy like that?"

"That's a protective suit?" Zim said. "I want one!"

"...Oh. Well, this was donated by Abel's bunch, but they sell 'em at Burning Subject Matter down at the mall-"

"Yes, yes, this is very nice and all," Mr. Herrimen interrupted. "But you all kindly clear off? I have work to do!"

Zim blinked. "Oh, yeah. Hey, who wants to get out of here!"

"ME!" Calvin, Spike, Morte, Hobbes, Ron and Abel yelled.

"Then we leave!"

"FREEDOM!" Came the resounding scream, the pull of it's bonds of friendship pulling the others into it when they were too reserved or annoyed or depressed to otherwise be interested, and they all ran off in the general direction of the exit.

Except for Spike, who Mr. Herrimen had caught. "Don't be so hasty, Master William!" Mr. Herrimen said. "You still claim to have crashed the chandilier for no good reason..."

"For drama, it was."

"Oh...well, I'm still quite annoyed with you regarding that!"

"Eh, normally I'd be annoyed but I'll take my lumps when I ought to."

"Very good."

Mr. Herrimen pulled Spike back into his office, no doubt for some horrible and overly long lecture about responsibility, care for his property, and why it was a bad idea to smash six-hundred pound pointed things for dramatic purposes. "Hey, why didn't you call out Zim for doing the stuff he pulled?" Spike said, mostly to distract Mr. Herrimen.

Mr. Herrimen paused. "...Master William. Do you think me a cruel man?"

"What?"

"Do you think me a man, well, imaginary friend, to be unbendably stern towards a soul suffering and unfettered?"

"I'm guessing no."

"You wound me. Master William, think of it. That young boy...alien...whatever he is, he experienced something terrible and unnatural. He undoubtedly saw dear ones be torn apart and turned into foul monsters. His world broken down and consumed by darkness itself. And he went through that darkness to come here."

"...You're being soft?"

Mr. Herrimen looked sternly at Spike. "Those of us that are lucky enough to survive the people we cared about never forget it. And when come here...we are seldom in a state to act rationally. We all do things unreasonable. Is it not cruel to treat them the same as people who have learned to bear the loss of their world, their countries, their people and very way of life?"

Spike didn't say anything. Then, "What about that burned-up bit on the grounds I heard of? He's a pyrokinetic, you know. And he'd looks like he wanted to practice?"

"What? Oh...bah, I'll not contravene myself...Master Zim is not in his right mind now, and I shall not hold that over him. You though, and Miss Rockwaller and her fellows," Mr. Herrimen seemed to smirk. "Well. You cannot lay claim to such excuses, can you?"

"Of course," Spike said tiredly.

If Mr. Herrimen had been the cackling sort, he would have laughed in a truly manic manner as he dragged Spike into his office. It would have been full of harsh giggles, cackles sharp as cactus needles and roaring into an animal howl near the end. Mr. Herrimen did not approve of excess, though, and settled for a small snort of amusement.

"At last!" Zim said loudly as they left Foster's front entrance. "We're finally free of this pit of madness! Even though I could have left at any point earlier. Yeah."

"What are you, an idiot?" Morte said. "You're so enthusiastic about everything. It's creepy."

"Hot-blood is what powers the gears of history!" Zuko said. Everyone looked at him. "What?"

"It is!" Aang said.

Sokka rolled his eyes. "Yeah, I'm begining to see how Zim fits as a Firebender..."

"Ah, being shamelessly oozing with passion about everything," Ron said knowingly. He paused. "Wait, I thought Firebenders were bad guys."

Team Avatar flinched virtually as one. Except Toph, she just snickered. "Ah," Katara said. "Uh. The thing about that...is..."

"The Fire Nation was force-fed propaganda for the entirety of the war and before," Zuko said bluntly. "We had no idea what the rest of the world was like. They told us the Earth Kingdom was a close-minded dictatorship, the Water Tribes were brutal cannibals and the Air Nomads were self-centered sociopaths that either didn't bother to tell us about one of the worst hurricanes in history to hit the Fire Nation, which I may point out is a chain of archepelagoes, or even made that hurricane. Fire Lord Sozin, Azulon and my...er, Ozai told the whole Fire Nation a lie that we were conquering the world for it's own good, and we believed them." He make a sharp noise between a tch! of disapproval and a growl. "And I have my reasons to think that either Sozin stopped the Western Air Temple Nomads from getting word to him about that very hurricane, or worse, spirits did it to instigate the Air Nomad massacre."

There was a long, horrified silence. "Well, I feel like a jerk," Ron said.

"You're not the only one," Aang said bitterly. "That happened before I after fell into the water and froze myself into a block of ice like a complete idiot. And what your great-grandfather did...I wasn't there to help my people."

"...Wow," Abel said. "The fact that you're still psychologically stable after barely escaping something like that either means that you have reserves of inner strength that go over nine thousand...or you have serious issues that you ought to get looked at." He nudged Scar, who'd been carefully watching Aang with a subdued look of shared horrors. "See, look at this guy. Nazis with transmutating circles of doom genocided his people, or came too close. He had a really bad freak-out afterwards." He paused. "Wait, was that insensitive?"

"Yes," Scar said, annoyed. "And genocide is not a verb."

"I can make it one! I have the technology! In my guts and stuff."

Aang looked at Scar with renewed surprise. "Uh...wow. I...I'm sorry, I didn't mean to bring it back up-"

"It is no trouble of your's," Scar said gruffly. "Do not think yourself responsible for things that you had no control over. There is little point in agonizing over what could be or what might have been. There is only what was and what can be, and those alone are worth consideration."

"I think you're right," Aang said. "Thank you."

"This guy's smart!" Zim said to Abel. "A pity it hasn't rubbed off on you."

"Yeah, all my friends make me look like an idiot!" Abel said cheerfully. "Or they would if I had more."

"I'm starting to get the feeling everyone here is messed up in the head," Calvin said to Hobbes. "Either they survived genocide, barely avoided it or were involved in it somehow."

"We're not!" Tucker said.

"Yes we are," Danny said sadly. "Remember last night?"

"...Well, damn it. Now I'm depressed."

"Well, there's a cure for that," Abel said. "All we have to do is go around long enough and-" A part of the ground uncurled, revealing itself to be a mattress-shaped monster with big teeth and centipede legs. It roared and tackled Abel headlong, snapping like a overpowered bear trip. "OHFORTHELOVEOFSUGAR, WHY DOES THE GRASS BITE ME!"

"And now I'm not!" Tucker said. "Nothing like comedic sociopathy to take the edge of lingering grief and supernatural invasion."

"Just as planned," Abel said casually, pushing the monster off. "I figured you guys would be feeling bad, so I set that up ahead of time to surprise and amuse you."

"You owe me," The monster, rolling back into place on the ground.

"I gotta say," Kim said. "When I brought the guys here, I wasn't expecting this many of you. We're definitely not going to fit into my car!"

"That a fact?" Toph said. "Where'd you plan on taking us, huh? And what are we going to do there?"

Everyone stopped in mid-step. "Wait a minute!" Sokka said. "I know we like to make things up as we go along, but come on, we're going somewhere and we don't even know what we're doing!"

"Worked for me last night," Zim said.

"And how'd that go for you?" Sam asked him. Zim conceded her point.

"Well," Hobbes said heisitantly, earning a full round of expectant looks. "Well...uh, we, meaning Zim, Calvin and me-"

"And me," Morte said.

"Yeah, him, need to get properly equipped for our adventure. And by that I mean spamming the spending thing to be on the safe side." He looked at Kim. "And since she volunteered to help outfit us last night..."

"That's pretty much it," Kim agreed.

"Well, we don't all need to go to do that," Toph said sensibly. "We could just head up there, split up and meet up together later, right?"

A short deliberation ensued. "That sounds doable," Zim said, summing up the the majority feelings. "We can get more breakfast there, because meat pies do not simply do for morning feasts, and then we can...uh...split into several groups to leave town, locate hidden robots fueled by fighting spirit and commandeer them to conquer whatever great villain tyrannizes the other people of this world? Only to unleash a greater threat later that we still smash through!"

"How about sightseeing?" Aang said.

"And I could check in with that Cyborg guy to see how our ship is doing," Calvin said.

"I call dibs on shopping!" Sokka said.

"Or we can do that," Zim said. "But that still doesn't answer how we're going to get there in a single car."

"Ooh! I know!" Aang said. He caught Sokka and Zuko's attention. All three boys grinned deviously. "To the Sky Bison!" They cried out and ran off.

Ron watched them go. "What's a Sky Bison?"

"Oh, you'll find out," Toph said, smirking. "But at a distance, mind."

Abel picked up a stick and started poking Scar in the head with it. "What are you doing?" Scar said, speaking like a bear that was contenting itself with allowing a wolf to annoy it and edge closer to suicide.

"Poking you with a stick," Abel said. "For he is a stick, and a stick is he, and it is his people's way to greet others with poking!"

Scar slapped the stick away, breaking it in half. "Oops," He said flatly.

Abel gasped. "NOOO! MR. STICK! How could you! My dearest friend, you killed Mr. Stick! YOU'RE HISTORY'S GREATEST MONSTER! Well, you and whoever that it would be a good idea to start shamelessly churning out movies based on timeless classics for money."

"Er," Scar said, feeling a little guilty about it. "Mr. Stick had a brother." He pointed at the stick's other half. "Named...Mr. Stick. Pronounced with a lower inflection."

"Oh good, a happy ending," Abel said happily. His air abruptly flopped over his face. "Hey, the wind's really picking up!"

Grass tore out of the ground as gusts of wind hammered the dirt, flattening and churning soil into streams of soil fanning around them, the air winind around itself into a nearly solid cushion that softened an oncoming massive beast larger than a tank; white-furred, it's brown markings recalling Aang's Airbender tattoos, it's six-legged body holding equal elements of bison and manatee with a powerful beaverlike tail pounding the air into a spiral around it and throwing another mighty gust that nearly knocked them all head's-over-heels when it hit the ground.

A stunned silence from everyone who had never seen a Sky Bison before commenced. Ron broke it first. "OhmiGod, OhmiGod THAT IS THE COOLEST THING EVER SINCE GIANT DRILL ROBOTS!"

"Wow," Kim said numbly. "That's...that's just...wow."

"Incredible," Scar said, his usual expression of stoic disinterest utterly shattered and replaced with something almost childlike in it's wonderment. "Is that some kind of chimera? No, it's...it feels of the spirits. Like the wind given a shape and face."

"Oh, come on!" Abel said. "Is everything with you guys ridiculously awesome or what?"

The beast himself, Appa, the last of the Sky Bisons and fellow fragment of the lost Air Nomads alongside Aang rumbled his disapproval of these many strange people. Aang patted his head reassuringly, whispering introductions to him while behind Aang, Sokka looked smug and Zuko did his best to help Aang. Appa growled, looking at them mistrustfully until his gaze stopped on Ron, grinning up at him, the small creature on his shoulder staring at Appa with a gleam of mutual brotherhood of protected ditzy owners, and then on Scar, the little panda on his shoulder gaping up at what looked like a godlike being from her perspective. Appa reconsidered his position and bowed his head respectfully to them.

"Is this what you have in mind?" Hobbes said, awed. "This guy's gonna transport us?"

"Oh yeah, this is gonna be one for the books!" Calvin said excitedly. "Did you see the way it landed, with the air and the spirals and blasting and it was awesome!"

"But how are we supposed to ride it? I don't know how to ride giant air-monsters! Only giant sea-monsters! They didn't cover this in theurge-warrior boot camp!"

"I'll make something we can ride in!" Calvin promised.

Aang gracefully jumped down from Appa's head, landing in way much like Appa himself had, though he lacked Appa's restraint and accidentally knocked Abel over. (Abel didn't mind, he was too overcome by the awesome that was Appa.) "Everyone, Appa, my Sky Bison, the original Airbenders and the ones who taught the precursors of the Air Nomads the sacreds art of becoming like the wind. Appa, everyone." He clapped his hands. "Okay, that's settled." A chittering interrupted him; a small creature resembling a large lemur with Appa's fur coloring and patterns jumped off from Zuko's shower and glided down on extended wings like a bats extending from it's arms and swooped onto Aang's shoulder. "Also, Momo. My other sidekick! Besides Sokka."

"Spiritsdamnit, I'M NOT A SIDEKICK!" Sokka screamed. Zuko laughed at him.

"OhmiGod, it's a horrible incarnation of all that's monkey to kill us all!" Ron screamed.

"What." Aang stared at him. "Momo's not a monkey, he's a lemur. They were trained to retrieve Air Monk staves."

"Same difference!" Ron threw himself behind Kim, trusting himself to his much more dangerous girlfriend to save his skinny butt and grabbed his knees and trembled as childhood phobias rung his neck. "A monkey is not a nightmare spider. A monkey is not a big scary clawn in transvestite wear. A monkey is not a librarian ape that's really touchy. A monkey will not bite me and throw me in the basement...OR WILL IT?"

"Uh...wow," Sam said to Kim. "Is he gonna be okay?"

"Probably," Kim said. Momo squeaked and she flinched as he flew overheard, intrigued by this strangely acting human, and landed right on his head. "Ron, wait, don't-"

"WAAUUGH!" Ron screamed in utter horror, his voice cracking windows and disturbing ancient spirits; one moment, he was there on the ground, and the next, he was tearing off around them and trailing blue auras born of terror, moving so fast he was tearing up the ground behind him and making the grass spontaneously combust, the wind spiralling behind him at speed's approaching Appa's gusts of wind. "Getdditoffame, gedditoffame gedditoffame-"

Toph lightly kicked the grond. A large wall of compact soil rose out of the ground and Ron ran right into it with such force that he effectively displaced enough of the soil to make a neat cookie-cutter image of himself. Momo, of course, flew over the whole thing and avoided that.

"Thank you," Hobbes told her. He rubbed an ear gratefully. "He was giving me such a headache!"

"Eh, it was nothing," Toph bragged, cracking her knuckles.

"You're awesome," Calvin said faintly. Toph faked a cough, looking embarrased. It was not a familiar emotion. "So!" He said to Aang loudly. "How are we gonna ride on this guy? Bareback riding?"

Aang faltered. "Uh...oops, I hadn't that far ahead. I used to have a litter for people to ride in, but I lost it a while ago." He gave Zim a look.

"That eldritch abomination was not my fault!" Zim said. "Besides, how was anyone supposed to know it ate everything starting with the letter L?"

"Never mind that, what are the specifications?" Calvin asked. "The size, precise measurement, what it's made of, does it have stirrups?" Surprised, Aang gave Calvin a brief description of what it was supposed to look like before Calvin ran off to the largest nearby tree and scratched something into the back with a small knife he had in a belt-pocket. (It was a transmutation array, actually, but Aang wasn't to know that, nor that it was impressive that Calvin was going to transmute a complex system like a tree.) There was a flash of blue light, a moment of morphologica inexactitude before a good part of the tree detached from the rest and hit the ground in the shape of a large litter such as Aang had descriped. Only it had cupholders now. And was expertly designed to resonate with the air to stimulate air conditioning. "This good enough?"

"...Yeah, I think it'll do," Sokka said faintly. "What the hell'd you just do? What was the flashy! The breaking bits and then not being broken!"

"Was that Energybending?" Aang wondered. "It...felt like it."

"No," Scar told him. "That is alchemy."

"Alchemy?" Danny said while Sokka, Zuko and Kim moved the litter onto Appa's back, Ron trying to help them and quivering in terror; while recovered from his panic attack, Momo had decided to make Ron's head his new resting place and simply wouldn't go away. Rufus seemed fine with it though.

"A field of science from my world, dealing with the understanding of the structure of matter and the use of manipulating the energies of the world to break it down and reconstruct it as something else." Scar grimaced. "The people of Amestris - the country that attacked my people, the people of Ishbal - used a blasphemous form of it that was utter disregard for the nature of existing structure. The alchemy of far eastern Xing, on the other hand, was more harmonious. Amestrian alchemy uses the movement of tectonic plates to fuel transmutations. Xingian rendanjutsu on the other hand, uses what they called the dragon's pulse, or the very energy of the world. They don't tear apart and bring twisted things together from the remains, they...bend it, I suppose you."

"Nice play of words," Toph told him. "That sounds a bit like Energybending, actually. If you bent the energy of the world around you, instead of your own or someone else's." Aang took out a notebook and jotted down a reminder to put that notion into practice later, right between Get Sokka and Zuko to do the ancient Air Nomad ceremony of blood-sharing so we're officially blood brothers instead of ones in spirit and Earthbend mountain range so that it spells out love for Katara to the universe.

"That so?" Calvin said, walking over to him. "I've heard of Amestris before; the guy who taught me alchemy and other stuff talked about it and his family there all the time. I don't think he was actually from there, but he mentioned stuff about it." He frowned. "Rendanjutsu? That's what he called the alchemy he taught me, anyway, and the basics of Amestrian alchemy?"

"There are other people from my world out there?" Scar wondered. "Hmn, I wonder-" He froze. "Wait. You don't mean...you use mixtures of Xingian and Amestrian alchemy!"

"Yep. Why?"

Scar's face froze. "Does this...does this look familiar to you?" He held his arms and let his sleeves fall; both arms were covered in elaborate and stylized tattoos from below the shoulder to the wrist. The right arm, a little smaller than it ought to be and somehow wrong for him, was marked with black ink; on his upper arm was a large symbol resembling a stylized conjoined snake with a halo and flanked by what could have been dragon's-wings or just cool looking curves. On his lower arm was three lines, the middle one thicker, and thin loops intertwined with them like two-dimensional spirals, the words terran and aer in those lines. On his wrist for three narrow arrowhead points, a curving line around the rest of his wrist, and a similar design was around his snake-dragon-pattern thing, and there was a vauge semblence of flowing in the overall design, what with the arrrow-shaped points down the front of the whole tattoo. His left arm was similar, only in white ink, and the design was flipped; ther arrowpoints were around his upper arm and the abstract dragon-thing was on his forearm. The words on that design were ignis and aqua.

Aang whistled, impressed, and tried to show off his own intricate Airbender tattoos as nonchalantly as possible. Then he actually paid attention to them when Calvin pointed them out. "Wow!" Calvin said. "These are...yeah, this looks like a replication and refinement of the 'dragon's pulse' concept of rendanjutsu." He pointed at the conjoined snake thing. "That is the male-and-female-as-one form, or a conception of a perfect being." He looked at the wings. "Those resemble reptillian scales...the dragon's pulse?" He pointed at the arrows. "Those guide the flow of power and represent the outward nature of it. Then those loops there, which, I would guess, represent the cyclical nature of alchemy; replicating the nature of existence itself, which is that things die and feed other living beings, making innumberable tiny things without which the greater whole could not exist. Alchemy reproduces that cycle in miniature...hmn..."

"And these," Aang said, pointing at the words on Scar's arms. "Earth. Air. Fire. Water. In most worlds, they represent the classical elements thought to make up all forms of matter. Earth for substance...air for freedom...fire for life...water for changeability. And the four elements of Bending in my world, the cornerstones of the Four Nation's philosophies." He put a hand to his chin. "I wonder if there's some kind of connection in my world."

"There are legends that the man who discovered Rendanjutsu knew of other worlds," Scar said heisitantly. He did not look at all comfortable.

"That might explain it," Calvin said. "My teacher never said anything about anyone like that. Hmn...and your left tatoos...the order is reversed to represent the inward flow of power. Wow...I've never thought of stuff like this, but the overall principles behind it, they're like the alchemy I use!"

"You use the same style my brother created?" Scar asked.

"Apparently. Wait, your brother?"

"In Ishbal..." Scar's expression tightened. "My brother was a scholar and a teacher. He believed alchemy could be used to improve the lives of our people, and knowing of our ancient disgust with Amestrian alchemy, because of the blasphemous way it distorts the world, he had to go to many lengths to import Xingian books of rendanjutsu from the far east. He studied both disciplines, applied his fields of natural philosophy to both and created a revolutionary field of alchemy." Scar brandished his arms again. "These reconstruction matrixes are the product of his research, and the pillar of Ishbalan alchemy!"

"Cool," Aang said.

"Your brother sounds like a real genius," Calvin said. "I created my own branch of splinter alchemy like that, but I never made an entire new field. Do you suppose I could speak to him?"

"He's dead," Scar said.

Everyone paused in their prepping of Appa and stared at Calvin, who abruptly felt like a heel. "Uh...I'm sorry?"

Scar shook his head. "He died years ago in the Ishbalan Extermination Campaign," He said bitterly. "Long before the Heartless came." He paused. "But if you are interested in his work...well, I have published his research into alchemy so that his work would endure long after him. I am not the only one in Traverse Town with markings like these."

"Oh," Aang said, one genocide survivor to another. "Erm..."

"Your tattoos are interesting," Scar said to him, killing the awkwardness. "What do they represent?"

Scar, Aang and Calvin quickly began discussing the origins of Air Nomad tattoos of Airbending mastery, representing the nature of their element, their respect of the Sky Bisons who taught their forefathers, how the truly poweful master's most complex tattoos were actually encoded 'how to' lessons in skin and ink...Zim and Abel watched them talk with smirks on their faces.

"Heh, I thought the boy would make everyone hate him," Zim told Abel.

"And I had no idea Scar would open up to anyone for so little reason," Abel said. "You've got some unusual friends, to let the Alchemist Slayer of Amestris talk to people about his brother's work."

"The what slayer?"

"Nothing you need to hear about! And if I tell you, I swear Scar will kick me off a cliff. Or shoot me in the face with a bazooka. I hate when people take advantage of my immortality."

Zim considered that immortality. "Are you a vampire?"

"Yes. No! I mean no! Of course not, how could you be...so...you saw me drinking the blood last night."

"Yep."

Abel shrugged. "Okay, fine, I'm a vampire. The technical term is Crusnik, but that's unimportant."

Zim looked up at the sun. "And yet you don't burn. Everyone knows vampires burn in sunlight. Except for..." He froze. "No. No. Are you wearing oinments so you dont sparkle!"

"Oh good God no!" Abel said, horrified at the very notion. "Urgh, never! I'm just not that kind of vampire that burns in sunlight. Well, not when I'm just a guy like this, you know? I have to be an active vampire."

"I haven't the slighest idea what that means."

Abel looked ashamed. "I'd rather keep it that way," He said quietly, and looked old.

"So how old are you?" Zim asked, master of the rude and impolite question.

Abel looked like he was going to say something that wasn't a technical lie, but Kim shouted, "Alright everyone, we're going to figure out who's going where, okay!"

"Ooh, that's our cue," Abel said rushing over to where everyone was already arguing about who had to ride on Appa and go in the car.

After Aang managed to get some order, mostly by shooting huge gouts of fire because fire is too awesome to ignore, they confered for a minute. "Okay, here's the way I think it should go," Danny said. "We have four Traverse Town natives here, meaning we can split up into four groups and do stuff with guides around."

"And therefore, Zim's group can get the stuff he needs for this journey he's going on while the rest of us can figure out what sort of town we're actually in," Zuko said. He paused. "Also, we're going to need to talk to you about that." Zim pretended to be interested in a passing cloud. Actually he was quite interested in it. It was so poofy...and an interesting shade of white tinged with blue...and it looked like a big pancake. He loved pancakes. And making twisted mockeries of science. But he just hated Peruvian llama-slayers. He didn't know why, he just did."

"So that means we need a group to go shopping," Katara said. "A group to go sightseeing, a group to check on this ship Hobbes tells me you have in arrears, and the last group to take Zim somewhere and hammer some Firebending basics into his head."

"Yes!" Zim said. "Wait, what?"

"We saw you fight earlier," Aang said. "And...well, I'm not sure how to saw this nicely..."

"You suck horribly at it," Zuko said, more blunt than Aang ever would be. "You suck worse than a centipede-leech with an eating disorder. You have all the Firebending restraint of...Zhao with none of the actual skill."

"Hey!" Zim said angrily.

"Even Zuko when we first met and he was an angry jerk with a ponytail was better at it than you," Sokka said.

"Hey! I worked hard! Lousy Water Tribe little..."

"Shut up! Spoiled Fire Nation military suck-up!"

"Uneducated Water Tribe barbarian!"

"Mama's boy!"

"Daddy's boy!"

"Hah, my dad could beat up your dad!"

"You lie! Wait, do you mean my biological father or my uncle who I think as a father?"

"Uh...you know, I'm gonna give this up right now. Though as he is right now, my dad would totally whup Ozai. The Phoenix King of Guys Who Don't Win!"

"That was a bad name-call then and it's a bad name-call now," Toph remarked.

"Uh, right," Kim said. "Okay, let's figure out who's going with who..."

"Does it have to be four?" Calvin said uneasily. "Four is not a nice number. We could tempt the fates and get this whole district destroyed by something, because the fates are mean-spirited and quick to take bad timing."

"Don't be superstitious," Katara said dismissively. It was, perhaps, bad for someone who was not only blessed by the spirits with awesome hydokinetic powers but also had met a lot of them to not be a little superstitious, but hey, hindsight.

Arguing quickly ensued. Zim complained about his friends being too brutally honest. (Though he would prefer it to a gentle lie.) Abel privately made notes about these new people, quietly thinking about things ancient and forgotten by civilized men, wondering if perhaps they were finally unfolded and hoping against hope that they were. Scar, instead of skulking off in the dark, had been pulled into the argument too quickly for him to realize how gut-smackingly weird that was. Appa, Rufus, Momo and Xiao-Mei all gathered together and started bonding, pondering ways to make Ron stop freaking out whenever Momo looked at him. (Kim's car would have joined in, except the least spirit of it's archetypal function had yet to properly awaken. A few minutes in Aang's presence would probably rectify that.) Even Danny, the one most badly affected by the loss of his world, was feeling better. Not very much, but Tucker and Sam were relieved at it. (Neither of them were quite as badly off, since the loss of Earth was just too big for them to feel and they were choosing to deal with it by pretending it hadn't happened. It was probably going to bite them in the butt later on.)

They paused, of course, when Bloo, Wilt, Mac, Eduardo, Coco and Minimoose ran by, being chased by Captain Razor, Freya, Andre and Stature. Seeing a bunch of fictional creatures being pursued by a cat-person, a rat-kangaroo-thing jumping to the roof and back, a hunter-monster person and a girl that had grown to nearly fifty feet for some reason will do that. Minimoose squeaked a hurred promise to meet up with them later and they went on their chase.

"...Huh," Zuko said. "Was that your other sidekick being chased by those four guard leaders from earlier? Along with whatever those things were?"

"Yes."

"Life's not going to be normal again for a very long time, is it."

"I expect not."

Zuko sighed. "I was afraid of that." Kim patted him on the shoulder. And then everyone went back to arguing about what they were supposed to do.

...

The uncertainty of spacial trans-coordination.

Feeling like his stomach, heart and assorted organs were occupying spaces not consistent with his own.

The merest sight of all the other possible universes and quantum-point fluxations, coexisting and being a single point of being.

Zolf J. Kimblee was in negative-space transist for so short a time it could hardly have been said to have happened at all, but it was still enough time for him to decide that he hated it forever and that one day he was going to find the asshole that thought it was a good idea and blow him up so hard the universe was going to look around and wonder where that explosion had come from.

In the potential For an instant, seeing himself in all the other ways he could have been; being devoured by Pride (but then helping Edward Elric kick his hypocritical ass), getting his chest blown open by Scar, being forced to marry the homunculus Greed or some corrupt officer named Archer or Roy Mustang...

Kimblee shuddered at the information crackling in his synapses, bursts of insight acquired from himself being oriented in phase-space while the universe tried to sort out which Kimblee he was and where he was supposed to be. Those last ones were the worst; for some reason people expected him to be a depraved deviant and that really offended him. He was an asexual sociopath and proud of it.

Okay, what the hell was that? Kevin demanded in his head. Not so much in words, of course. Why did I see me in the future being...a total freak of nature! With a kid I beat like a dog? I was a thrill-seeking criminal, an occasional psycho for hire and a mutant in all the ways that count but I wasn't THAT bad! Right?

"How should I know, I barely know you," Kimblee muttered.

Bah, he complains too much, Ghostfreak scoffed. That one universe where I was a quiet hero of the Omnitrix? Someone knows little of my character! And that's terrible.

"Please shut up," Kimblee told his occupants. Mercifully, they did. Groaning, he sat up and did a quick examination of his surrondings, realizing that he was some kind of alley.

He stumbled out of discarded newspapers and out into the sunlight, smoothing out his rumbled clothing and realized that he probably should have specified white. He liked white. Oh well, too late for it now-

A man walked by. He was completely unimportant to Kimblee; for the Red Lotus Alchemist, his face was a blank. His body was a triangle. His arms and legs were blurs, only meant to telegraph movement and get this nonperson about and into his universe. But on his head...was a HAT. Wide-brimmed. A flat, slightly creased top. A black bandana wrapped around the top.

Well, Kimblee thought smugly. That is convieient.

"Excuse me, sir," He said in his most courteous voice. The man turned. "Might I have a word with you in that alley over there?"

"That alley, right over there?"

"Yes."

"The one that, due to a archetectural mish-mash of errors, happened to be completely blocked from sight from nearly any angle unless you're inside it?"

"Yes."

"With you, a strange man wearing clothing with a vaugely Nazi-esque feel and a smile that doesn't reach your eyes. Which themselves are the eyes of a man who is not nearly the man behind the bomber's scope, but the scope itself, and one that loves it's work."

"You have it in one." Kimblee liked honesty.

"Hmn. Well, all the evidence is screaming that I should run away like a maniac, but I see no reason why not."

"Very good sir." Kimblee led him into the alley.

He came out five minutes later whistling cheerfully and wearing a totally awesome white hat. He held in his hand a bloody knife that he lightly tossed into a nearby garbage can, grateful he left no fingerprints and annoyed that he'd actually forgotten to get his transmutation circles reapplied, thus depriving him of his art. A trip to a tattoo parlor would solve that right up. "Well, that was unusual."

That man whose hat he'd taken came out of the alley behind him, straightening himself and rather bloodied. "Who would expect muggers to be waiting in alleys like that?"

"You're not very clever, are you," Kimblee muttered.

"Nope. Incidentally, can I have my hat back now? Only you took it off the ground when those muggers knocked it off and you did quite inventive things to them with that knife." He paused. "...I shan't forget that in a hurry."

"I wouldn't bet on it," Kimblee said honestly. By the Shadow, this fellow is annoying, Ghostfreak said. Kimblee, you seem a cooperative sort. Relax your body.

My body, Kevin snarled.

Not now, child.

Kimblee did. His arm jerked, pulsing just under the surface, and unexpectedly swelled to twice it's size, his clothing growing with it and merging with it as flesh and bone transformed into solidified solar flame thickening to magma in solid plates like an exoskeleton: the arm of a Pyronite. "Huh."

"That's interesting," The very unfortunate and exceedingly Genre Blind man said.

"I suppose it is," Kimblee said. "Please come back into the alley with me? I haven't said my piece."

"Is it about my hat?"

"You could say that."

The man followed him into the alley, and as soon as Kimblee was sure that no one could see, he seized the man's neck with his Pyronite arm, pulling his off the ground and burning half his jaw off at first touch.

The man almost screamed, betrayed and horrified even though it was stupidly obvious Kimblee was evil. Kimblee squeezed, his altered body's instincts sufficient to focus the heat to the man's throat. The heat soared until his arm blazed, a contained inferno, hot enough to melt through steel, let along cook the man's throat and vocal cords almost instataenously, killing any semblence of a scream. Skin and flesh burned through, and a strangled wheeze died in Kimblee's burning grip, whistling out holes in what only resembled a throat now.

"The strong survive," Kimblee told him as he twitched and jerked. "The weak perish. That is the shape of the world. Both your's and mine." He gave a gentle shove with his Pyronite's wrist, releasing a stream of fire that lanced through the man's head, cooking his brain from the inside out; when it was done, the man was dead, his face was a crispsed mockery of a human's countenence, lips burnt away and revealing his teeth bared in a desperate grin. Some sort of liquid was pouring down his cheeks, and Kimblee supposed that had been his eyes. Tufts of burnt ashes touched the ground; hair burned and gone.

Kimblee's arm returned to normal, clothing reappeared and fitting comfortably again. He kneeled close to the man's face and jokingly poked him in the forehead, his finger sinking in a bit. "Ah, now your face becomes clear to me. Have no fear. I shall remember it well." He heard a noise, quickly hushed, and turned around. Behind him were two small children, no older then five and younger than six. Kimblee wasn't good with kids. They were staring with eyes wide and strangely blank, as though their minds were breaking trying to comprehend what they had seen.

Kimblee looked from the children to the corpse. "Ah," He said, standing up. "I assure you, this isn't what it looks like."

"Grandpa?" The older child, a girl said. Her voice was quiet, hoarse, and in the grips of some unfamiliar emotion, twisted.

"Hrm? I'm not your..." Realization dawned on Kimblee. "Ah, you mean him." He gestured at the corpse. "Hmn. This is awkward, isn't it." He shrugged. Cleaning up the witnesses was an unavoidable chore. "A little more assistance, er, Ghostfreak?"

Certainly, Ghostfreak purred while the ragged bundle of tortured memories and distraught sentience that was Kevin Levin howled.

Kimblee's hands twisted and grew, green light shimmering as flesh gave way for sillicon structure, pale skin and blood twisting into glass-hued crystal: his hands were that of a Petrosapien's. Kimblee raised his hands out, a single finger pointing out, more unfamiliar instincts emerging. Unusual processes occured in those transfigured hands, and from each finger a single large shard of diamond-hard crystal swelled out and fired. The children jerked as green crystals suddenly appeared into their foreheads, blood welling up around them, and fell over. They didn't move again.

Hoping there wasn't anyone else he'd have to kill to eliminate witnesses, Kimblee quickly dragged them out of sight, put them next to their dead grandfather, one child for each other. It seemed respectful. As an afterthought, he grabbed a nearby newspaper and dipped a discarded glovefinger into their blood and scribbed a note: I did not kill these children. Signed, The Guy Who Did. (Please give credit where credit is due, hapless interloper.) He needed to use the dead children's remaining blood supply in their cooling bodies to get fresh ink for the note, but the quantity of sharp things made it easy.

Well done! Ghostfreak said approvingly. Expertly done. None of that savage brutality I see these days. Almost gentlemanly!

You are a sick monster, Kevin said sullenly. And this is ME telling you that. I once tried to blow up a train to get at the money in another one. On the other hand...what the hell was that guy thinking! You're obviously a sicko! And what were little kids like that loitering around for him or whatever and not being directly with him!

Kimblee ignored them and climbed up a suspiciously convieient ladder and climbed up to the adjoining rooftop, whereupon he located an elevator to the building inside; a kind of supermarket that made it easy to wash off the blood in a bathroom without anyone noticing. That messiness down, he went on his merry way to start off his plans. And he had plans, but he wanted to get some people he knew in town first.

This was going to be fun.

After Kimblee left the alley, the souls of the two children and their grandfather got up and examined their dead bodies with some interest, but not too much; dead shades tend to be a bit touchy about their mortal shells, no matter how badly tended they have been.

"Well, I feel a bit of an idiot," The grandfather said. Illusions are the first thing to go in death, aside from your life. It's a prerequisite.

"Duh, grandpa," The younger girl said, her horror fading away mainly because she was dead and nothing makes things better like realizing that, barring certain theological implications, they can't possibly get any worse by default. "Don't you watch cartoons and stuff."

"I did, once. That's what led me to my recent and apparently short career as the Animation Snob! And I didn't even have an elaborate and pointless fued with any other comedic critics either...the Cartoon Guy looked promising, even though he's the lesser of his team with the Film Lady."

YOU HEAR INTERESTING REMARKS IN THIS JOB, a strange voice said behind them.

They jumped. It was not a normal voice. It sounded like leaden slabs falling into place, sliding into their minds without bothering to go through what, given a lack of proper terms for the anatomy of the soul's form, one must call their ears.

They turned around, saw their fate waiting for them and relaxed. It was not as frightening as they'd expected. "I expected you to be taller," The grandfather said.

HEIGHT IS VERY SUBJECTIVE.

"You're not as scary like pictures say," The younger girl piped up.

I REALLY TAKE OFFENSE TO POPULAR PERCEPTION, I DO. The voice had a wounded edge. I DO THIS FOR EVERYONE.

"I thought you'd be, I dunno, meaner." The other girl said.

I AM NOT THE ENEMY OF LIFE, NOR ANY MORTAL'S, Said Death, the Grim Reaper, the Harvester of Mankind, the Ultimate Reality, the Kindness After Suffering, and, to one small community for a while, Bill Door. BUT I ACKNOWLEDGE THAT OTHER ASPECTS OF MYSELF DO NOT SHARE MY VIEWS.

"Aspects?" The old man said uncertainly.

NEVER YOU MIND. UNLESS YOU KNOW OF THE NATURE OF REALITY ITSELF, THE ULTIMATELY ARCHETYPAL FUNCTION OF THE BASELINES FORMS OF THE FORCES THAT RUN EXISTENCE AND THE CURRENT AND TROUBLESOME STATE OF THINGS?

"Um. No."

WELL THEN. ON THE HORSE NOW.

"What horse?" The grandpa asked as the girls squealed with joy. A huge, milk-white and alarmingly real horse nudged him from behind. "Oh. Nice horse."

'NICE HORSE'? Death said reproachfully. HE IS THE STEED THAT CARRIES ME ACROSS THE WORLDS, UNBOTHERED BY THINGS FLIMSY AS SPACIAL-CONSTRAINSTS. HE WAS ONCE CALLED SHADOWFAX OF THE MEARAS. IT IS WITH HIM THAT THOSE THAT WEAR MY DUTY RIDE. IT IS HE THAT I RIDE AGAINST THE END OF ALL THINGS WITH MY FELLOWS WAR, PESTILIENCE, FAMINE AND CHAOS.

"That's very nice and all. What's his name then?"

ERM. Death was aware that he had probably made too much lead-up. BINKY.

"I like it," The younger girl said encorougingly as her grandfather laughed uncontrollably.

IT APPEARS TO ME THAT IF YOU HAD A MORE APPROPIATE GRASP OF NARRATIVE CASUALITY, YOU WOULD NOT BE DEAD YET, Death told him. He wasn't angry, but he was mildly annoyed. Most people needed a lot longer to be informal with him around. He worried he was losing his touch.

The grandfather and his grandchildren got on his horse, riding pillon behind Death as he too got on. "I hope that wretched follow takes good care of my hat," He said. "I like that hat."

"Grandpa, you're dead. And he killed us. Don't you think that's a bit more important?"

"Hmph! You only die once, but a hat's a hat!"

THAT FELLOW KIMBLEE IS GOING TO GIVE ME MORE WORK TO DO, Death remarked. I AM SURE OF IT.

"Oh yeah?" The younger girl said. "How sure?" Death told her in precise percentages. "Oh. That's pretty sure." Her head exploded from the effort of comprehending it and reformed moments later. "That tickled!"