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.

10. Red Lotus: Exposition and Firebending

Here I am again, probably sooner than you expected. Again. Surprise!

Once more, we have a posted half-chapter. Which was supposed to be the second half of another chapter, but it was getting too long and had some bad pacing, so I cut it in half again and worked on the first half until we got this. I hope I don't keep doing that, or commentary like this will get very complex indeed. I don't think my wrists could take it.

Writing these short chapters is rather fun. And that makes it easier to do it, yes?

On a personal note, I recently saw The Last Airbender? I was following it ever since I saw the first trailer on Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. I was excited then, and I stayed excited throughout. I followed every update on the Airbender Wiki and Youtube, collecting internet pictures with fervor and sqeeing like a girl on every released trailer and news release.

I dismissed all the concerns about M. Night Shyamalan directing it, in spite of his recent issues with direction; I cited Mike and Brian being the executive producers. I honestly got extemely sick of all the naysaying, and even a little depressed. (It at times spawned some brooding about the nature of the human condition and wondering if hatred is so deeply ingrained in the human brain that we just need something to pour the bile on, but I do stuff like that all the time, no big deal.) I was exhiliarated with all the stuff I was seeing, with only a little fear now and then, but that was to be expected.

And then, I finally saw it, by going with my step-brother because my dad didn't want to risk the bad reviews.

And you know what?

I liked it. Seriously.

(Fooled ya, didn't I? You were expecting some sort of outraged rant about how M. Night RUINED AVATAR FOREVER or some other whiny nonsense. Got ya!)

Seriously, I liked it a lot. True, there were a lot of things that could have been done better, were executed strangely or shouldn't have been altered too much (where's Koizilla, man? Though I firmly believed that the Ocean Spirit acted through Aang regardless, given the Dragon Spirit's remarks of 'use the ocean'), but the Blue Spirit scene was plain BADASS. I hope the DVD will have an extended scene thing or deleted scenes, but it was still excellent. Not something I'd spend a whole day building up for an epic watch-a-thon, but it was still good. And let's face it; no live-action can match the brilliance and majesty of the animated series. So let's just pack up on the hating and look forward to Avatar: Legend of Korra? New Avatar series! It'll be cool.

Enough about me ranting. But then, there's a fair bit of Avatar stuff here, so be prepared, yes?

But first, mysterious spookiness. And then some exposition and a game of Spot The Fandom! Ooh! But then Avatar stuff. Only without the Avatar and...aw, you'll see.

Disclaimer: I don't own any copyrighted characters, setting, ideas or properties.

...

A lot of people take it on faith that things are connected.

It's pretty obvious, really. The quantum butterfly proves that a tiny, seemingly irrelevant event can cause a cascading avalanche of unexpected results until a hurricane is born is probably the best known one. And there are less obvious connections within all things: thousands of universes dance alongside each other, unseen and unsuspected and reflecting each other in almost-there ways until they are almost nothing alike but for the people within them.

Some know of the truth of these connections. They know how to pull on them or how to flow into them and make things happen. More often, usually because they haven't a choice, they use them to see.

In the glowing room of light, the lion-man, the machine-being and the hooded one were still watching recent events unfolding through the device between them. They were silent; they knew what Kimblee would do. They knew everything about him, everything he had done; time, for time, was not something they had to experience linearally, so they had felt the shocks of exploding buildings as his alchemy tore the earth apart, seen those marked for death by a monstrous government crushed under the dying ruptures of their own homeland, and the hooded one had at least been there in person; old dried blood appeared on his gauntlets as he watched, thinking of old wars and the sobbing of dying children, and he was again troubled by the miserable incomprehending horror the people of Ishbal felt as they died. It had driven him a little mad back then, and now it gave him a dawning sense of horror at what was to come.

They all knew what Kimblee would do. And even with all their power, they could not act directly. Not now. Not yet.

"So, that's it?" The lion-man said, knowing the same thoughts were running through their heads. They were not limited to such primitive forms of communication like speech or body language, even though they employed them often enough. "We just watch."

"Yes," The machine-being said, and in that one world was both a heartbreaking regret, black and deep and wound across his soul like the patches of rust that spread across him without explanation, and also a rage greater than the nuclear fire of a star, righteous fury hissing out of every seam and vent as white-hot holy fire with a half-mind of it's own, furious and hungry.

"Watch people die."

"...Yes." The machine-being became obscured as flakes of sad-rust and fury-fire streamed around him like a black-white cloud.

"I've never liked rules very much," The hooded one said flatly. "...Damn them. Damn the devil-puppets. They're going to fry for this."

"The rules that prevent our personal touch are not of our own design," The machine-being said wearily. "We mustn't act directly, or those we oppose will retaliate with all the means at their disposal." Rust overcame fire for a moment. "And worlds will die if we give them the slightest leverage."

"We'll still hold them down and send them back to the pit they crawled out of!" The lion-man said fiercely.

"But people will still die. We cannot allow a single mortal to die because of a lapse in judgement on our behalf. You know the terms! If we act, it must be subtle!" Fire blazed through rust, the machine-being's wrath overwhelming his torment. "We cannot afford to wield our strength like a hammer, even though I wish it otherwise! We must be scalpels: quick and precise!"

"Even if there's only so much that we can do that way," The hooded one said. "If the devils and their kin act through agents innocent and knowing alike, mortal champions, the games of the gods, the schemes of the spirits, and the forces of Destiny and Fate, we must also do the same."

"And let's not forget that Traverse Town is in a...delicate state," The machine-being said. "The land around it mustn't be disturbed by powerful forces of our level, whether they be good, neutral or evil, or...that...may awaken. We cannot afford that. Not with those refugees dwelling there."

"Nor can the universe," The hooded one said.

"Imagine if by some dirty miracle the Heartless overcame him," The lion-man agreed. "Assuming that whatever monster came out of that thing's heart wasn't trapped on the other side of the Door to Darkness, if Wuya got her claws on it...well, the new Keyblade Bearer would have to be a fast learner, yeah?"

"He will be. They all are, sooner or later. Good thing too, you remember the mess an inexperienced one can make."

"I can still remember when I accidentally broke through the universes adjacent to my own," The machine-being said wistfully, rust and fire dying down in the face of his memories. "And they were brought together in a federation of peace, brotherhood and interspecies goodwill. Those were the days!"

"Getting off-track again," The hooded one reminded him. "On the other hand...the Keyblade Bearer had got good allies. I always say, 'you can't reach for the top without people pushing you up from below'."

"It is a little weird, though," The lion-man said. "Two of his friends just happen to be the Avatar and the Half-Spirit? Imagine if they teamed up! The collateral damage would be so damn awesome!" The other two gave him looks. "And so very destructive and unwanted and not good. But awesome!"

"You're forgetting Mr. Lyle," The hooded one said mildly. "You know what he's done in dealing with the devils, and more importantly, what he has become. And is evolving into."

"He's done what now?" The machine-being said. They stared at him. "What? I don't know about Mr. Lyle." They told him. "Oh. Hrm, I should have remembered that. Mind like a sieve sometimes."

"You sure your mind isn't a sieve?" The hooded one joked.

The lion-man laughed. The machine-being literally steamed up, fire and rust gone entirely. "I hate you all."

"No you don't, you're almost incapable of the emotion of hatred."

"...Shut up."

"In any event, it's only a matter of time before Mr. Lyle's...alterations take the better of him," The hooded one said. "He won't be human anymore! Or if, say, he dies again. That'll leave a hole in the fabric of reality. Something that we are expected to exploit. That's a useful loophole, that is. We could play a little Chaotic, maybe; they get demons running around all the time, and I'm sick of playing catch-up with the devils. Time we did something crazy."

"A defining element of Chaotic is that we don't follow the rules," The lion-man agreed.

"Particularily Chaotic Good, what with the whole 'heirarchies are inherently unjust' and 'the best way to do good is just for the sake of it' and stuff like that," The hooded man said. He appeared to grow serious. "And now...it's time we immersed ourselves."

The strange machine at their feet appeared to brighten in response. Like a gun eager to be wielded, a tank waiting to be piloted or any tool that wanted nothing more than to be used, to be important, to fulfill the function it was made for. (After all, if they don't do their job, how do they go to Machine Heaven with all the good toasters?)

"Does this mean interfering?" The lion-man said hopefully.

"Obviously," The machine-being said.

"Finally!"

They prepared themselves.

Then the machine-being said, "Wait. Is there any chance we could infiltrate the lair of the fiends themselves?"

"What?" The lion-man said.

"We could take the fight to the devils themselves! None of this half-assed business with hanging around and tugging a few strings to be subtle! Harking back to the good old days of extremely obvious divine intervention! That style of thing."

"...Yes," The hooded one said sarcastically. "Oh, let's go and throw ourselves into the Nine Hells of Baator, the place where our eternal enemies are most powerful! The place that is literally a semi-sentient self-contained set of universes literally made from Lawful Evil. Which is corrosive to us because we are made of Lawful, Neutral and Chaotic Good! It'd be like taking a dive in acid, only except that jumping into corrosive fluid that dissolves you would be downright pleasant compared to what total dissolution in the Nine Hells does to any soul."

"...So, that's a no, I'm guessing?"

"No. Just...no."

"Aw, come on! I had a totally awesome plan! There were trained gerbil-commandos, a transforming alien cargo plane filled with tacky merchandise, the multiverse's second biggest ball of twine and a absolutely freakin' huge wooden alpaca filled with potato salad!"

There was a long, long awkward pause. "...That was pretty random for a Lawful Good guy like you," The lion-man said dubiously.

"Does being Chaotic Good imply that you spend all your time jumping off bridges on dares, screaming at rats with your shirt off and taunting god-killing abominations?"

"Hey, I told you not to bring that up! It'd been a long day and I needed to unwind! And the god-killing abomination stopped crying after a few hours." There was a pause. "My point is, 'Chaotic' does not mean I'm totally off-the-wall, stab-you-in-the-face-with-a-spork stupid-crazy!"

"Therefore, me being Lawful does not mean I have to be one hundred percent predicatable, logical and stuck-up."

"Can we please put this behind us, never speak of it again and just get to work already?" The hooded one said. It felt very awkward for him to be the one bugging other people to do their work for a change. He hoped that the heroes in Traverse Town would prove to be a bit more competent than his own allies.

...

About an hour and a half after Zim's large extended group of allies, friends and acquantices had found the mall and set off for lunch, one of the large and somewhat neurotic buses that patroled through Traverse Town with all the driving grace and obedience to the regulations of driving safety of Kim Possible came charging to a stop in the central plaza of the downtown First District; stopping a few feet of a lamppost before it's doors flew open and Calvin, Toph, Abel Nightroad and Tucker Foley stumbled out, barely hitting the ground before the bus ran off again to harass some other hapless schmuck in need of transport.

Toph and Abel were the only ones to stay on their feet; Abel because he was used to it and Toph because she was too awesome to be bothered by something as banal as crazy driving skills. "Oh come on, it wasn't that bad," Abel told them. "It's not like we crashed or anything."

"We came close," Calvin mumbled into the grated metal sidewalk they were on, too glad of stable ground to want to move. "...Gathering information about this town cannot be remotely worth taking the buses here."

"How did that bus not run anyone over?" Tucker asked. "It was driving like a lunatic! Driving itself like a lunatic. I'm not very comfortable with the idea of being transported inside something that can think."

"You complain too much," Toph said, lightly shifting her position; this was enough for her to Metalbend the catwalk-style sidewalk under them up and push Calvin and Tucker onto their feet and keep them standing before she slammed it back into it's usual place. She even fixed it up a little bit, tightening some bolts, fastening a few loose bits and evening out a few gaps; Toph was cool like that.

"Well," Calvin said, brightening up a bit due to Toph's influence. "You can't say it hasn't been an interesting morning."

"You can only imagine the enthusism in my heart," Tucker said flatly.

In spite of what Calvin had said, they hadn't had that much exciting of a day, at least not after they found the mall earlier and then stopped at a restraunt that Ron had absolutely insisted on, and all of them gleefully took the oppertunity for a little time without life-threatening chaos, recent errors in judgement coming back to bite them in the butt or anything remotely approaching stress. It was a welcome break for everyone except Calvin and Toph and possibly Zim; they liked having interesting stuff happen, but they at the very least liked having a chance to unwind and get a proper meal along with a good deal of somewhat mixed explanations with how the town worked. (Considering that it was Abel who had said so, it had been a bit garbled; Calvin understood that the town was a very informal sort of ordered anarchy guided by a Council of some kind with members chosen from the various factions that divided the various community duties of the town between themselves, but Abel had refused to give a detailed report, claiming that his position in the faction known as the Crossguard made him too biased.)

After the initial wariness between the new guys and the locals (mostly on the former's behalf), everyone hit it off quite well, even alarmingly so. Calvin still thought it was weird. Kim and Katara had hit it off really well as two girls that had to be the sane ones (like Zim had predicted) with Sam Manson and Hobbes finding a genial friendship out of nowhere. Tucker Foley, Danny Fenton and Aang had pulled Zuko and Scar out of their usual moody self-absorbtion, convincing them to referee an eating contest Ron and Sokka on a spur-of-the-moment whim, involving the naco, a tortilla shell filled with chips, meat, nacho cheese and other stuff; a eating contest ensued between Tucker, Sokka and Ron, and it ended in a tie because the contestant's horrendous eating habits had made Zuko and Scar sick. (Katara and Kim gave them a stern reprimand while Aang apologized to the spirits of the naco's meaty contents for his friend's karmically imbalanced diets.)

Even Morte, the one guy nobody remembered, found some common ground in being the guy that explained stuff along with Scar and Aang and they spent some time swapping notes. Calvin and Toph, of all people, had found kindred reverse-gender spirits in each other and hit it off amazingly well; they shared a impatience with stupid people, short tempers and an affinity for big flashy stuff that went 'boom'.

After their lunch, they were forced to admit that there was indeed stuff to be done and they couldn't just goof around all day; Zim's team needed supplies, Teams Avatar and Phantom desperately wanted to know what sort of place they were in and it would have been mean to just leave Team Possible and the two warrior-priests all alone. Then everyone realized that everyone'd had an absolute nightmare of a night, whether they'd lost their world (Zim and Team Phantom), had completely failed to stop horrible monsters from destroying a world and killing nearly everyone on it (everyone on Team Avatar), had been horribly lost in a seemingly endless chain of catacombs for days without food or water (Abel), had been subjected with the possibility that an evil guy was watching their every move (Kim and Ron) or had been forced in a long and twisted series of chaotic adventures (Calvin and Hobbes). Oh, and there was Scar, but he refused to talk about what his night had been like aside from a brief mention of possesed gardon gnomes packing rocket-propelled-grenade launchers.

Consequently, Aang raised the point "Why can't we do stuff and not have fun doing it?" and they decided to split up and do just that. Hobbes, Kim, Sokka and Sam decided to go shopping for the adventuring supplies Zim's team might need and incidentally have fun shopping. Zim wanted to do something involving creating land-roving death machines for transport on his mission, but Zuko had disagreed, insisting that Zim needed at least one good lesson in Firebending basics if he didn't want to blow himself up. Zim had agreed, mostly because he thought it was too cool an idea to pass up: Zuko had been quiet during the meal, at least for him, and he seemed to have something else on his mind. Scar had agreed to take Danny, Aang and Morte sightseeing so they could understand the town they had found themselves in, and perhaps learn something about their new world. Calvin and Toph thought that was boring and resolved to do something fun by themselves; poor Abel had been forced into keeping a rein on them, and Tucker had been similarily co-opted into being his back-up. Neither of them were happy about it, and Calvin and Toph's irrepresible delight in making trouble and keeping things 'interesting' hadn't helped much.

As a consequence, in the past fifteen minutes alone, their various antics had resulted in the outbreak of a riot, a war between two feuding neighborhoods, an entire platoon of pilots with giant robots attacking each other over an incredible misunderstanding instigated by Calvin, at least five public statues defaced in Toph's image (it was pretty good, given that she wasn't entirely sure what she looked like; fortunately, Abel said that because they were public statues, people could do whatever they wanted to them. Nobody did, because permission takes away the thrill), and a short but very horrible incident involving an incredibly sick mad sociologist who had a dozen people locked into a simulation world where he tortured them in every way possible, forced them into unspeakable depravities for his amusement and generally crossed the moral horizon for kicks. (Calvin and Toph had handily solved the problem of his continued existence by wrapping him inside a metal shell and shooting him into a sky at a specific angle that Abel assured them would lead to a nest of vigilantes that took a very dim view of monsters like him) and several other small incidents that nobody in town seemed to care about except as something to watch, but their resident authority figure, Abel, seemed to regard the whole thing with a bemused apathy that was starting to rub off on Tucker.

After the last incident (involving the evil duck that had caused some sort of trouble with Tucker earlier, and it was following them for some reason), they had cooled off a bit as Calvin and Toph started enjoying each other's company more (something Abel found adorable, even though Calvin and Toph hit him very hard when he said so) and independantly decided that they didn't want to rub each other the wrong way through brashness.

This, of course, had engendered a distinct lack of focus in what they were actually doing, and Abel had happily filled the void by taking them on a bus ride to some friends of his that he promised would give good information on how Traverse Town actually worked. He hadn't specified where or why, and everytime they asked he either chided them for being too hasty or changed the subject to a completely random and bizarre topic, like what colors tasted like (and therefore what the hypothetical eighth color of magic tasted like), making it a futile prospect to ask him for information.

This had ultimately resulted in them coming to the outskirts of the inner part of the First District, between the places where pre-refugee buildings dominated and newer buildings had been built up. And finding out how terrifying the bus system was; being passed around by sentient prescient triple-decker buses with all the driving skill of Kim Possible and none of the restraint is less fun than it sounds.

Tucker shuddered, reacting to Calvin's remarks about the 'interesting' bits Calvin mentioned. "Please don't talk about that."

Calvin didn't seem to notice what he had said; something in his weight seemed different, and a quick pat-down had confirmed that one of his pockets had become unexpectantly lightened. "...Hang on. Where's my cool thing?"

"Your what?" Abel said, not looking at him but instead staring at a distant cloud that appeared to be flipping him off. Abel didn't mind; people had treated him like dirt his entire life, he had gotten used to it.

"It''s...a thing. It's mine, this thing. It's cool. A cool thing." Calvin seemed aware that he wasn't making a lot of sense. "I think I made it in my sleep, because it was there when I woke up and it's not the first time I kitbashed unconscious!"

"...'Kitbashed'?" Tucker said uncertainly. He had grown wary of what Calvin meant when he used words from his own private lexicon without much in th way of explainations.

"Jury-rigged. Take apart and put together. Making mad science-y stuff from what you have lying around, you know?" Calvin didn't appear to notice Toph quietly reach into her pocket, grinning like a loony. "Man, I hope I didn't make something stupidly-destructive without thinking about it. Like a electricity degenerator that eats electromagnetic power, or some sort of handheld laboratory for incubating and releasing incredibly annoying patch-and-stitch viruses. The last one of those I made turned everyone in my hometown into mutated freaks for five days before I put them back to normal. And then they tried to kill me. I mean, they'd tried to kill me before, but this time they were serious about it. It was a real milestone for me!"

"You're a weird little kid," Tucker observed.

"You say that like a bad thing," Calvin said while Toph pulled out a small round and rough-looking device, covered in little wires, blinking diodes, a single red button with a glass shield on it and the general appearance of something that had smashed down into a little size. "Seriously. Has anyone seen my cool thing!"

"Is it small, round and make a cool noise when you shake it?" Toph asked.

"Sure, yeah, that'd be all the interior components-" Calvin froze. He slowly turned around. "...How long have you had that?"

"Since it fell out of your belt-pouch on the bus and you never noticed," She said, lightly tossing it back to him. "Keep a better eye on it, will ya? If you don't at least pay attention to your stuff, you're going to be completely blindsided the first time Zim runs off to blow up vending machines or something."

"Sure, whatever."

"Ooh!" Tucker said, eying the Cool Thing. "It's all hi-tech looking and crudely fashioned and mysterious at the same time...so cool. Let me see it!"

"No way!" Calvin said. "No mad scientist looks at another mad scientist's wonders without dismantling them, you know! I don't even know what this thing does!"

"Then let me show you! Just lemme push the button!"

"Push off, you scavenger!"

"Ahem," Abel said before Calvin and Tucker could start arguing. "Pay a little attention to our surrondings, please?"

"Pay attention to what now? Something to do with the guys you said were going to talk to-" Calvin stopped, taking noice of where they actually were; it was a far cry from the crazy opulance of the mall, the weird uniformity of the uptown where Calvin had met Zim or the Victorian-Funk of Foster's.

"Huh," Toph said. "I like it."

"Well, I like it," Abel said. "I lived around here once. Before everyone kicked me out of the neighborhood for attracting their stabby things and firearms."

"...It's a dump," Tucker said, ignoring Abel's latest non sequiter. "Only not, y'know?"

They were standing in the central plaza of a large open market of some kind, what Abel had called the Big Robot Plaza of the First District Downtown; not far from them on a place of honor in the center of the place and surronded by streets was a large and friendly looking house made from bits of a carrier plane and a few trucks, along with a broken-down giant robot behind it for some reason. Unlike the cobblestone and sidewalk look of the rest of the First District, this area looked like it was made entirely from a scrapheap; the streets were sheets of metal bolted down, the sidewalks were modified catwalks, and everything around them from the small buildings crowded together like metal coral reefs to the giant robot in the middle of the plaza like a statue were made from...well, junk. Most of the buildings looked like they had been made by taking apart aircraft, trailers and things of that nature and smashing them together, and that wasn't even included how many of them had simply been built on top of each other, leaning into each other for support. It was surprisingly well-built; apparently, the people that lived here appreciated this kind of look but didn't skimp on doing it good. In keeping with the 'bad neighborhood look', there was a lot of graffiti, but it was surprisingly well-done grafitti, tasteful and skilled in a blocky and artful way.

"...Well, I like it," Calvin said reflectively. "Reminds me of where I grew up! Only without the crushing pressure of dozens of layers of mess above you. Or the legions of the desperate and vicious. Or the teeming masses of filth and garbage. Or the guys trying to kill you for being related to the wrong people, or guys hunting for spare parts for crazy mad science experiments...okay, tihs place isn't anything like my childhood hometown but it does have a nice look."

"You didn't have a normal childhood, did you?" Toph said rhetorically. Calvin snickered, finding the very thought of a childhood where everyone wasn't trying to kill you or do far worse to be amusingly surreal.

"What the heck is this place?" Tucker asked Abel. "It's...like I said, a dump. Why would the people you're taking us to hang around here?"

"Uh...good point," Abel said. He gave the place a honest look. "There's more to this place than it looks. It's a bit complicated, too...a little long, I should say."

"We've got time," Calvin reminded him.

"We do?" Tucker asked.

"Sure, why not?" Toph said.

"Well, okay." Abel tapped his fingers, trying to think of where to begin. "Well...this wasn't always the downtown of the First District. It used to be...well, a dump. A real one. Everyone just dumped their garbage here. Then ol' Jumba Jookiba came back from a trip to one of the worlds of the Precursors and studied in a place called Haven City; he came back with samples of this neat stuff called Eco; it comes in several different colors, and he'd discovered how to use Blue Eco as a safe and cheap fuel, and ways to recreate it by processing organic garbage and...er, waste. Sewer water, you can say. Suffice to say, the garbage got carried away quick (not to mention an overhaul of the sewer systems); now all our dumping is put at special processing plants around the town, but I'm getting off-track. This place ended up as a free-for-all scrapheap where everyone dumped their more metal-themed junk, at least until the Amestrian alchemists showed up and started teaching people transmutation alchemy; then the scrap got carried away, not by bored gadget geniuses but by people who knew enough about alchemy to patch up their houses or make houses with big ruined bits of junk in such a way that they were actually safe to live in and met building codes! Take a lot of mercantile people from around the worlds moving in here to take advantage of Traverse Town's reputation as a center of trade, a few roaming gangs of ruthless thugs, and you had a recipe for disaster."

"I'm guessing this place used to be where all the jerks used to do stuff that's pretty low," Tucker said.

"You got it. And to understand this better, you have to understand that Traverse Town wasn't always the unified place it is today. Not that it is unified today; mostly everyone just does their own thing and the people sort-of nearly in charge organize all of it a bit. But then, things were a lot dicier. We were practically on the verge of war with ourselves, what with the factions not being established-"

"The what?"

"Factions. Sort of like the organizations that keep the town going, the people you're gonna meet can explain it better, but listen. At the time, the rest of our little world here didn't like us very much; thought we were intruders, or aliens come to invade or just didn't belong here, so when it came to the bad guys among us, we were on our own. The best we could do was fight them when they got really out of hand, but otherwise...it was a uphill battle. Not that we didn't give them far more than their share of losses, but since we hadn't quite settled into our current cohesion, no one was focused enough to make our victories meaningful. For a while. You see that giant robot behind that house?"

They looked at it. It was a wreck of a machine, missing it's entire lower half, but it was a terrifying-looking machine; what intact little of it was left was enough to tell them that it had been designed to be strong and resilient, and while most of it's armor was scorched, broken off or worse, there was enough of it left to show that it had once been covered with massive serrated plates of jet-black armor, shaped so that light would shift off it in the form of agonized faces. The very head of the mechanical colossus looked nasty, with it's low-set visual sensors like mean little eyes and the remnants of a massive faceplate shaped like monster's teeth. "Yeah," Toph said. "In a manner of speaking."

"Well," Abel said, missing the joke. "That thing was built by Captain Razorbeard, who was at the time the leader of the villains here through dint of being nastier and tougher than anyone else. Nasty robot guy, last I heard he raids the islands but we give him a tough time. Anyway, he had that giant robot over there built so he could lead his most powerful men into battle against our own and assert his dominance. Called it the Juggernaut Armor, and a nasty thing it was; in it's heyday it could smash through a Guard Armor Heartless with little trouble. In fact, that's why the people back then delayed taking them down; the Heartless were attracted to this place because of all the evil, I guess, and our enemies fought them for us." He grimaced. "Lazy is what I call it, but I wasn't in a position to complain back then. Well, one day, two members in good standing of the faction that would become the Peace Maines said 'Enough is enough', and marched on this place. Singlehandedly, it was just the two of them. And it worked."

"Wow, that must have been so one-sided," Calvin said. "I bet this robot got put here as a memorial to them."

"What? No, they're alive. It was one-sided, as in they kicked Razorbeard's butt backwards and forwards. What you see there is all that's left after they were done trashing his robot and salvaging the good stuff on it."

Calvin stared at it. The robot was in horrible condition; swathes of it had been melted right through by some enormous heat, most clearly the right side of it's head, now only soot-black clumps of blackened machinery. Most of the armor around it's upper left arm had been torn clear off and the machinery scavanged, leaving only a sad skeletal framework, and the lower arm was missing completely. It's other arm had fared a bit better, with scattered bits of it's original armor, albeit scarred with the signs of some incredibly heavy concentrated firepower. It's torso was the worst; the plates of armor had been completely shredded, burned and torn away, like it's entire chest had been blasted right through. (Someone had shoved a trailer into it to make a bar.) "Two guys did all this?"

"That is so incredibly badass," Tucker said. "Who were they?"

"Roy Mustang from Amestris and Jethro Gibbs from...I'm not entirely sure where. I understand that he traveled across a few worlds before settling down here but he doesn't liking talking about it much," Abel said. "Very tough guys, those two, and they really don't like guys like Razorbeard. Just the two of them kicked Razorbeard's pirates out and made the start of us making this town our own. A lot of our success can be attributed to what they did that day. In fact, some people got together and made them and the rest of the Council a place for them to hang out, namely that house over there that they've turned into a clubhouse-slash-meeting-place for them and the Council, and they used the remains of Razorbeard's Juggernaut Armor as the literal backbone of it! A good way of rubbing it in people's faces of how awesome they are, don't you think?"

"Okay, you've lost me," Toph said. "What's the Council?"

"The guys in charge," Abel said. "Remember you guys asked me earlier about how the town is run and I wouldn't tell you everything? Well, I figured the best way to show you...was to bring you to the guys that would know. Namely, their hangout."

"...Wait, this is why you brought us here?" Tucker said. "You wanted us to meet up with the big guns that run this town!"

"Not all of them, they like to get out and do stuff. And I wouldn't say 'run'. Like I said, you don't run Traverse Town, you sort of steer it so no one gets hit."

"My point is, isn't that kind of stupid? Getting a bunch of important people to talk to us new guys about the secrets of the town? Why would they possibly do that!"

"To make you like them and want to join their factions?" Abel suggested. "They're not exactly what you would call people that put on airs. Explaining how this town works to new guys is just good PR. Besides, if we had people coming in by the hundreds or even the dozens, it wouldn't be sensible. But that's not the case. It's perfectly fine for us to this with every person or group of people that shows up, even if it's usually a bit more low-key than going to their hang out place."

Toph's casuall facade cracked a little. "Wait. You don't mean-"

"That it's extremely rare for big groups like you guys to survive?" Abel said. "I'm afraid so. To be frank, I've never heard of such a large number of people surviving a Heartless invasion and surviving at all, let alone with your pieces."

"...Oh," Tucker said quietly. "...Then, even so, there's still plenty of people in this town. If less then ten people from each world even survive long enough to come here..." His face went horribly blank. "Oh man. Oh man. Oh man. What are dealing with in those Heartless?"

"The Heartless have spread very wide," Abel said quietly.

The bleak tension was broken, this time not by Calvin pulling some crazy stunt, but by somebody else doing it for him. There was a screech from the clubhouse, a man yelled "FIRE OUT OF THE HOLE!" and a flaming pool ball crashed through a wall and right over Tucker's head, burning a hole in his hat; Tucker barely had anytime to acknowledge his hat's sad fate before the poolball exploded.

"Damn," Someone said. "Still can't get the friction-to-impact ratio right!"

"That's the least your problems, Roy," Someone said. There was much irritating giggling. Somebody grumbled, and it sounded like they were marching somewhere. There was a flash of blue light, and the broken flashed brightly before it repaired itself; a bit stretched out in places but good enough.

"Hey!" Tucker said angrily, forgetting his reservations in his indignation and charging into the clubhouse, his hat still smoking. "Who did that! You killed my hat!"

"...We should stop him," Toph said after he went. She didn't move.

"Yes," Calvin said. He didn't move either.

They both stayed put. Abel gave them such a disappointed look that Toph could feel it; it was even worse than the one she could feel Aang giving her in situations like these. (It was because Abel was older than Aang and had more experience at it.) "Oh, fine," She said, and charged into the clubhouse after him, dragging Calvin behind her for some reason. Abel shrugged and followed them, letting the door shut behind him. It would have been rude to slam it.

The inside of the place was the second unexpected thing, mostly because the mid-sized room they were in looked a lot like an old-fashioned diner with a light green tile-floor and tasteful tan wallpaper; it had a counter, but it was manned by a green-skinned fanged orc with a nice hat, which rather spoiled the normalcy. And the rest of the place didn't look like a diner at all; there were a few tables, sure, but only a few, all four of them set up near the door with neat little booth-seats, and they all looked a bit beated up from some fight and hastily transmuted back together. The dimly lit diner-room, in fact, had a surplus of unexpected things; there weren't very many people in there, most of them were wearing uniforms and none of them seemed to be doing things figures of authority were supposed to be doing. Three of them were gathered around a TV and playing video games, there was a man was eating his lunch at the table while a imposing woman tried to read The Art of Personalized Gambits by Bruce Wayne while two women were watching their favorite comedy-horror-drama opera Doctor Acula and constantly yelling advice at the characters.

The first unexpected thing was that Tucker was sitting near a table and talking fairly amiably with a dark haired Asian man wearing a dark blue longcoat worn over a strapped-up white vest and black pants with matching boots; Tucker's hat was inexplicably repaired, and he certainly did not have the attitude of someone who had just charged into the private place of the most powerful people in the town.

"Uh," Toph said. It was the only thing she could think of. "Uh...hi?"

A few people looked at her, Calvin and Abel, intruders in their doman. A few of them said, "Hey," and went back to what they were doing. Other than that, there wasn't much of a reaction. One of the two fighters went flying across the room and crashed into the wall, going 'Wheee!'.

"...Wasn't expecting this," Calvin muttered to Toph.

"Psh, like you'd tick off the Council by coming in here," Abel told them. "They like visitors."

"We do?" Said one of the dueling people, a rather wiry teenager with brown hair and a spider-themed look. The woman he was fighting ran over and poked him in the eye. "Not my eye! I'm not supposed to get people in it!"

"What's with you guys?" Tucker asked them, waving them over. "You're freaking out over something, but I don't know what."

"You're the one who was freaking out!" Calvin yelled.

"Geez, calm down," The larger of the two women watching TV said; she was a dark-skinned woman twice as tall and wide as a man while being mainly normal-shaped at the Amazonian side of the build spectrum; she took up her entire sofa by herself, and the poor sofa seemed quite stressed with her considerable weight; in spite of her intimidating size, she looked quite friendly and seemed to have tailored her looks to seem more approachable, tomboyishly short white hair framing her rounded face. She was wearing a priest's uniforms not dissmilar to Abel's, except that her longcoat was green instead of black and was even more awesome. "This is a happy place. We don't like yelling in our happy YES YES YES! CONFESS YOUR LOVE TO DR. ACULA, MAD SCIENTIST LADY!" She screamed this last part at the TV, stomping on the ground and shaking the floor a bit.

"But she won't, that's the episode on next," Said her friend, a strongly built and buxom woman that seemed much older than her apparent early thirties, her long blond hair tied back in twin ponytails and a diamond-shaped seal on her forehead. She had a definite style, and that style was defined by 'awesomeness'; she was wearing a outfit that was all black; a armored utility vest with all manner of pockets on it worn over a net-shirt, baggy pants with bits of armor and pockets here and there, a pair of sandals and armored gloves up to her elbows with spiked armor on it, an espicially large set on her knuckles. Worn a bit lazily around her waist like a belt was a leaf-green cloth with a metal plate on it, marked with a stylized leaf. Her outfit had a lot of crazy stuff on it just to look cool; chain-belts, normal belts wrapped around her arms, a few bandage-wrapping on her upper arms...Calvin felt vaugely inspired by it.

"I know! It's the wait that hurts!"

"...These are your leaders?" Toph said, bemused. They certainly weren't like the leaders from her world. Well, unless you discounted King Bumi; when Aang called him a 'mad genius', he wasn't exaggerating. Well, or Zuko's Uncle Iroh, once in line for the throne of the Fire Lord and known as the legendary general and Dragon of the West; Toph still wasn't sure if the upbeat and hedonistic attitude he had was a front for his ultimate stores of badassery or authentic. And Sokka and Katara's dad Chief Hakoda was nothing like the old stories about the cold and ruthless Water Tribe chiefs; he preferred non-lethal warfare when at least one of his precedessors had made a point of scalping his dead enemies because it was expected of him for some reason. Or Earth King Kuei, who's pet bear Bosco was still the strangest thing Toph could think of and that was ignoring his childlike enthusiasm for everything, or...Toph reconsidered, and decided that these people were pretty much like all the good leaders she'd ever met or heard of.

"We don't lead, we steer," The man at the counter said. "You been in this town long? Then you don't say people rule it."

"I know," Abel said. "I already told them."

"Abel!" The giant woman on the couch with the green coat said, bouncing off and slamming into him with a kiss on his cheek. Given that she was quite a lot bigger than him, he was nearly flattened. "Where've you been! I thought you were deader, or had gone abroad forever or had a case of public flatulence so bad you were never ever going to come back, ever!" She waited and started echoing herself. "Ever! Ever...ever...ever...ever!"

"Ever...ever...ever..." Abel echoed. He blinked. "What, no. I got lost in Foster's after a little freebie work. Really lost. Like, they sent Kim Possible and Ron Stoppable to save me. And got saved a second time by him and his friends," He said, pointing at Calvin. "And then I got into a huge fight with a creepy guy I don't know who knows waaay too much. It was awesome. Except for the bits I still don't understand."

"Wow, really?" The woman asked Calvin, having to get down on knees just to see him better; he was barely taller than her knee.

"You could say that, yeah," Calvin said, utterly confused with what was going on. The woman's size didn't surprise him that much; he'd met plenty of people her size and bigger. "Just...who the heck are all you people?"

"Hrm? What, you don't know? We're the Council, duh! The representatives of the factions of Traverse Town, bound together to protect the interests of this town, it's people and do awesome stuff. We also have an awesome frycook named Odd Thomas. You know he's awesome with a name like that. YOU'RE AWESOME, ODD!"

"Yay!" Odd Thomas said from the diner's kitchens. "I'm appreciated!"

"...Factions? I still don't know what those are," Calvin said. "Or who any of you are."

"Ah, new guy! Wait. Are you a tourist...or a resident?" This was delivered with a edge of concern.

"I'm a resident!" Tucker said. "I think."

"Me too," Toph said. "I guess."

"Eh, I don't know," Calvin said. "I kind of have a mission going on. Nice place though. The King should open up diplomatic relations with this place. Hm, maybe I can get something like that going..."

"Ooh, a foreign diplomat from someone outside this world," The giant woman said. "Haven't had one of those for a while. Had to send him to a mental institution, poor thing...well, I suppose you could say that the factions are like like philosophical clubs or organizations that a ton of people have gravitated toward because they have ideals in common, because they liked the faction and wanted to do some good, or they used to be bad but were rehabilitated and joined out of remorse."

"The factions split the running of the town between them," The guy with Tucker said. "We organize certain things, and while we keep an eye on each other, we don't interfere. We keep things going with a spirit of mutual fellowship and no small amount of neccesary rivalry."

"I get the feeling this is going to be a long talk," Toph said. "Just...who are you all?"

"Me?" The giant woman said. "I'm Angilaka, from the Crossguard."

"Just like me!" Abel said. "You know all the good churches and groups of organized religion around the worlds, the ones that don't care about the divisions between man, woman and others, choosing to do good and kill evil in the face? We're the ones that out-awesome them all!"

"...I don't follow," Calvin said.

"Ah. In-depth information is required. Luckily, the Crossguard are something I'm prepared to be informative about! You see, the Crossguard is a faction formed of soldier-monks, research-priests, scientist-shamans and all that sort of thing! We're organized religion that doesn't care for too much organization, if you follow me."

"...Not really."

"Oh, right. We're a bit hard to explain, I guess. Er...basically, a lot of very spiritual people with a keen interest in their fellow sentients gravitate towards us. Skilled men, women and assorted others. Fighters, scientists, warriors, researchers, soldiers, battle-clerics, martial-artist types...but mostly people that kick ass and are really really good at it. We believe that order is important; it takes an exceptional person not to go mad without some form of self-imposed fetters. But by the same token, we believe that enforced restrictions and needless law choke the soul and stagnate the people and must be destroyed where it is found."

"We've all sort of congealed together into what is called the Crossguard," Angilaka said. "We're a pretty varied group; mostly we keep the new refugees into homes that suit their particular temperments and needs, as well as pursuing the studies of the lost ancient civilization of this world, discovering the secrets of the multiverse to unveil parts of the Truth behind truth that allows us to do all kinds of crazy stuff-"

"Oh! We have something like that in my world," Calvin said. "It's called 'theurgy'. Sort of a metaphysical science-themed school of philosophy."

"Really? Sounds familiar; With us, it's more about self-englightenment and doing stuff by flowing with the will of All...but I shouldn't tell you more unless you're initated. Not that it's a secrecy thing, really, because if I told you secrets you weren't prepared for, they'd make your head explode. Seriously." Angilaka went on, not noticing how freaked out Calvin looked. "And...hey, we actually do a bit of everything, really. We're the official 'odd job' guys. Science...public works...art sponsoring...helping out neighboring worlds or countries with small bands of elite fighters to fend off aggressive invaders. We like to get stuff done."

"There are reasons each of us are born," Abel said. "We justify those reasons with our lives. Don't focus on the whys, hows or could-bes; we do our mightiest to make the worlds we leave better for our being there. And other stuff."

"If by that you mean you embrace the weirdness that follows you around, love messing with people's minds and doing over-the-top flashy stuff because you like the aesthetics, that would be an appropiate statement," The man at the counter said. "...On the other hand, you are the nicest people I know. Annoying enough to make the Devil insane, but nice."

"True," The woman said. "You just hear Mr. Grumpy-Because-I-Need-A-Girlfriend over there? That's Max Eisenhardt. Or is it Erik Lensherr? Or Magnus? He keeps using so many names...anyway, he does stick to Magneto when he wants to be cool, so...yeah."

The man in question sighed in defeat, put down his book and acknowledged Calvin and company, the metal on the table twitching in his direction when he moved, a faint pulse that tasted like electricity, and where his fingers touched the countermetal, there was a small but violent spark. He was a tall and sour-looking Eastern European man in his late thirties (but it was hard to tell), his silver-white hair very distinctive looking and starting to grow out to a length not normally associated with modern masculinity but nowhere near as crazy-long as Abel's. His eyes were fiercely sharp, an electric-blue color not unlike the spark his touch had produced on the metal, and there was a terrible look in those eyes; it was the same look Scar had, stained by some long ago horror that had driven him straight off the edge of darkness and straight back the other side. This man was as sharp as a katana, and far more dangerous; even his clothing looked the part: he wore a long sleeveless red-purple coat over a matching vest, black pants and short boots. "Call me whichever you like," He said evenly. "If you care to know, I am affiliated with the Free League."

"The what?" Tucker said.

"The ones that say 'Governments should be afraid of their people' and make them afraid. The unjust ones anyway." Magneto's lip curled. "Though all governments tend to become unjust, I have noticed."

"Don't like authority much, do you?" Toph said. "Cool, me neither."

"Authority breeds power. Power breeds poor perspective. And that, in turn, breeds horrors." Magneto grimaced, but didn't elaborate on that point. "The Free League are...equalizers, I suppose. I suppose you've heard that we hold no organized system of government in town? That we in the Council, the closest thing to it in town, simply take part in keeping the various organizations we're tied to in a state of competition at the very worst? Educational structures, the explorers, the many adventuring teams, the Shinobi Guild that organizes the ninjas and gives them something to serve, the trader's guild and the other force in town?"

"Yeah," Toph said. "Something to that effect."

"That is the point of the Council. We are people of power and authority, certainly, but we are not the most powerful people in town. We are people that care, however, and we keep the balance of the powers in our town. The Free League does something similar on a larger scale. You might call us 'social engineers', if you like. We maintain peace among the various forces that keep the town supplied and alive, particularily our allies around our world, but you can be certain that we do not rule, control or force anyone to do anything through the lesser means of false government. We only see to it that they are kept intact and do not attempt to control anything. We keep them safe, sane and most importantly do not let them overreach themselves."

"They're also pretty wild guys," Abel remarked. "They believe in benevolent anarchy, that the best form of order is a voluntary one. The best state is governed the least, or something to that effect."

Magneto nodded. "As we say, 'laws control the lesser man. Right conduct controls the greater man.' We try to put this into practice on a personal level."

"Which means arranging incidents to happen," The guy in the blue uniform said dryly. "I'm serious; the guys based in anarchy actually have the bones of a bereaucracy that keeps random monster attacks, alien invasions, mad scientist-related issues and extradimensional annoyances occuring."

"It is nothing like that!"

"To be fair," The woman on the couch said. "They do keep it happening for a reason. They keep the people on their toes and prepared for tons of crazy shit, and all the weird 'incidents' give everyone a wide range of experiences so they don't panic when something bad happens. And nobody usually gets hurt, aside from the perpetuators."

"...That doesn't sound quite right," Tucker said. Magneto frowned. Abel looked like he agreed with Tucker but didn't want to offend anyone with his opinions.

"You're not nearly chaotic enough," Calvin said firmly. "You want to keep things nice? You smash your semblence of order, take the pieces and forge them into something that works better!"

"...Do you now?" Toph asked.

"Worked where I come from."

"Actually, that's exactly what we do," Magneto said. "But in a long-term manner. Though, admittedly, it's hard to see how some of what we do makes a lot of sense. Lin Yao assures me that it works, though frankly I'm not sure how his idea to bio-engineer the Traversian Inappropiate Comedy Thistle (a more annoying cousin of the Traversian Carnivorus Thistle) does much to help that."

"Oh, okay then." Calvin glanced at the blond woman in black. "What about you? Who do you work for?"

The woman in question raised an eyebrow. "Name's Tsunade; I'm with The Justice Maines. And incidentally, I'm also a grandmaster in the Shinobi Guild." She shrugged.

"Which are what?"

"The Shinobi Guild employs and trains ninjas. We send them out on missions, keep the peace when it suits our specific talents and we do our part to help out our allies when we have to."

"They have a ninja guild!" Tucker said. "An actual guild of ninjas! This place is awesome."

"What about that first part? The Justice...something?"

"Justice Maines," Tsunade corrected Calvin. "We're a group dedicated to justice and avenging those that have fallen. We hunt the Heartless and search for a means to bring them peace permanently or better yet, restore them, but we do not yet have the means to do so." Calvin remembered what he heard about Hohenheim's report, but didn't say anything, assuming that this Tsunade already knew about that. "And we also form the closest thing to a legitimate law enforcement division, and even so, that merely amounts to investigating serious crimes and bringing the perpetuators to justice. We're also a bit like internal affairs for the big people in town; if the Free League keeps an eye on the external side of them, we watch how they work internally; we study who's been shipping what, who the big people are working with, what alliances and feuds are going on...and by a weird coincidence, we've also become something like the big guns and armaments people for the fighters. Go figure."

"Huh." Calvin looked at Toph.

She seemed to pick up his intention. "Alright..." She turned to the guy talking with Tucker. "What about you?"

"Huh? Oh, fine..." He stood up and walked over to Calvin and Toph. "I'm Commander-Admiral Roy Mustang, of the Peace Maines. More importantly...I'm the Flame Alchemist."

There was a beat. "...And?" Calvin said.

Roy almost fell flat from his face in exasperation. "Why don't I get any respect around here?" He raged.

"You fixed my hat!" Tucker said. "Even though your experiment with that pool ball wrecked it in the first place, but all you had to do was clap your hands and touch it and it was as good as new. Awesomeness."

"Flame Alchemist?" Toph said.

Roy brighted a bit at this. "Yes! Through intensive study, experience and talent, I'm the only alchemist around with the ability to manipulate flames with enough pin-point control to create controlled explosions or walls of flame that can burn a city block to ashes. I'm basically a human seige weapon."

"Really?" Calvin said. "I can make fire with alchemy too."

"Oh?" Roy was, surprisingly enough, not put out by this. "What sort of methods do you use?" He and Calvin quickly began comparing notes, ranging from the remarkable similarity of their transmutation circles to the specific differences in their styles (Roy Mustang messed around with splitting oxygen into hydrogen to create flammable gasses, while Calvin directly used the heat and the air).

"Nerd," The blonde woman reading her book said. She turned imperiously to Toph and stood up; she was an dangerously beautiful statuesque woman with long blonde hair, serious blue eyes and a uniform similar to Roy's. "I am Commander-Admiral Olivier Armstrong, and I'm more of the Peace Maines than that fire-starting circus freak is."

"Circus freak..." Roy muttered mutinously.

"What was that, you spark-flicking womanizer?" Olivier Armstrong said, drawing an long and deadly sword from it's sheath on her belt. "Speak up or I'll beat the words right out of you!"

"...Uh, maybe later," Roy said, backing away a bit.

"What, again? Coward."

"So...Peace Maines?" Toph said. "That like the Justice Maines?"

"In a way. We were once the same faction, the Sea Maines, but we split after we realized that we were arguing too much instead of doing things. While the Justice Maines help keep order in the town, we have done our part to assist our allies in other parts of the world. Where the Justice Maines have focused inwards, we are concentrated outwards. Do you understand?"

"Yep." Toph raised an eyebrow. "So...reading between the lines, you guys are some kind of military, right? Going around the world, hunting down the jerkasses and beating them down?"

"Good girl; you'd make a smart soldier." Olivier clearly approved of her. "We are certainly the closest thing Traverse Town has to a standing military; we spend much of our time hunting down criminals around the world. We search the mountains and the seas, scour deserts and dead cities, roam the entire world hunting down the traitors to Traverse Town...and sooner or later, we always find them."

"Badass."

"Yes. We are."

"Hey, I feel left out," Complained a pretty and rather curvy woman with long red-blonde hair, large glasses and an outfit that screamed 'mad scientist': she had a long white coat on over a brown vest with all kind of pockets bulging with odd gadgets, gear and what looked like a little pocket watch robot; a pair of heavy duty pants over a pair of big boots. She had been the one playing video games earlier, and seemed to have wandered over after finally noticing that something was happening.

Calvin brightened at the approach of a kindred spirit. "And you are?"

"Agatha Heterodyne," The new girl said. "I'm from the Peerage."

"Huh?"

"The Peerage of Transcendent Study and Wondermakers. We got voted as 'best name than the other factions'. Basically, we're a collection of mad scientists, mad doctors, mad artists, mad social scientists, mad retrophrenologists (though it's just the one guy)...we're only a faction made of the greatest and slightly unhinged thinkers in town!"

"Your faction creates impossible monsters every other week that nearly kills us or gives invading idiots something to kill us all with!" Roy yelled.

"And yet we keep reverse-engineering alien and native technology that keeps us ahead of our enemies and lets us live comfortable lives," Agatha said smugly. "And we do clean up our own messes. Most of the time. When someone doesn't do it for us, anyway."

"Do you have any openings?" Calvin asked.

"Wait, what do you guys actually do?" Tucker asked. "Besides be mad scientists."

Agatha blinked. "...We help the Justice Maines with the educational stuff, of course. It'd be a shame for study to go out because more people don't bother. We also organize a lot of public artwork projects, both to keep us busy and because we like the town to look pretty."

"They get the mad artists and scientists to engineer the statues and stuff?" Toph said. "That explains a lot of the stuff I've 'seen'."

"I have no idea how they even get most of this stuff approved," Olivier said, mildly amused.

"We also look into researching the ancient culture that once inhabited this world," Agatha said. "Kind of like the Crossguard, but we're better at it then them."

"Everyone's better at everything than we are," Abel said miserably. "We multitask so much we have no outstanding specialties..."

"Aw, come on," Angilaka said soothingly, putting a hand on his shoulder and pushing him down a bit. "No one reconciliates disparate feuding religions, classes and species like we do! Wait a minute...WE'RE THE DIPLOMATS!"

"WE ARE!" Abel yelled. "Finally! Something to be genuinely proud of!"

"Even more than the time we busted that slaving ring up north with a laser the size of a truck, giant robots, fifteen surprisingly moody kittens and a tub of glue? Or when me, you and Scar singlehandedly took down a corrupt theocracy that used it's belief structure to wage holy war for the business sense? Or when we settled a six-hundred-year long war of murder, retribution, vegeance and absent-minded pettiness between the shark-tribes and the dolphin-clans of the Hook Sea?"

"...Well, two things to be proud of. We do stuff like that all the time, it's hard to keep track."

"Would it kill you to act like sane people for once!" Roy yelled at them.

"What culture is this that you research?" Calvin asked, ignoring the idiots.

"No one knows!" Agatha said. "This town has been mostly abandoned for centuries, either the natives that are friendly with us don't know anything outside of legends or don't want us to know, and the only clues we have are in the ruins scattered around the world. It's an intriguing mystery." Calvin looked thoughtful; the Comic Kingdom had it's own share of long-gone civilizations, often due to the Kingdom's dark past, most significantly the desperately xenocidal Imperium of Man. Also xenophobic. And terrifyingly zealous. And constantly on the verge of dying forever. Frankly, the peace between the warring factions of the time to the modern day was a little surprising if you knew your history, but Calvin had problems conceiving of humans and Tau being at each other's throats or Orks that were even more violent than they were today.

"And that's everyone," Magneto said. "Any questions?"

"Yes, actually," Calvin said. "Why is it that you claim to represent Traverse Town and yet have a membership exclusively consisting of humans when the town is largely not human?"

There was a very uncomfortable pause. "...Damn," Angilaka said. "I never thought of that before. We need to start writing petitions to stop this speciesism! Row row, fight the powah!"

"What?" Olivier said. "Angilika, we are the Council, we can just admit non-human species in later. Oh, I can't believe I never noticed before...I have become a racist...I HAVE BECOME EVERYTHING I HATE! Except for a coward."

"We must fight the evil authority!" Abel said dramatically. "Down with tyranny! Down with the unfortunate implications of our membership roster! ROW ROW, FIGHT THE POWAH!"

"Abel, you just pointed out that it's our membership!" Agatha said. "It's ours to add on to. And besides, we're just a bunch of allies that banded together to get stuff done, there's not some kind of evil human supremicist group going on."

"That's what they want you to think," Toph said to Angilaka and Abel wickedly.

"Don't encourage them!" Magneto said. "And we are not entirely human in our ranks."

"We're not?" Tsunade said.

"Obviously! I am not human!"

Tucker stared at him. "...Yes you are. I can see you being all human right here."

"I can't," Toph said.

"My point is that I am a mutant!"

"Defined as a human born with the potential for active super powers without any outside stimulus," Agatha reminded him.

"...If anyone ever brings that up again, I shall have no choice but to hit them in the face with a building."

"But-"

"With a building."

"Isn't Angilaka some kind of giant?" Tsunade asked. "Obviously not the really big sort that can lift battleships, but she's clearly much larger than a normal human. I'm sure she came from some sort of northern tribe native to this world..."

"I did what-now in the hey-huh?" Angilaka said. "...Because I was bored, don't you get inappropiate ideas."

"...O-kaaay," Calvin said, increasingly disturbed. He thought Abel had been annoying enough, and the idea of a more level-headed guy like Scar had given him a bit of hope for Abel's group being a bit sane, but from Angilaka's behavior, Scar was the odd one out and Abel's entire group, this Crossguard, was as weird and unfocused as Abel was.

"Well, this was fun and weird," Toph said. "But I bet we have other places to go. Things to see. People to irritate."

"You've already done a good job here," Roy said.

"And we have a ship to pick up later, so...let's go, okay? Talking to you, Abel."

"Oh...okay..." Abel took a bow. "Sadly, I must take my leave, friends."

"I hardly know you!" Tsunade told him. "I don't think any of us do, actually. Except Angilaka, she's with you. And you dated her for a while."

"But I won't get lost this time!" Abel promised, ignoring this. "I still have a task to do. Showing these guys around!"

"Leave me out of your drama!" Tucker said.

"And being annoyed by them," Abel said. "Slowly slipping down the slope of strangeness. My mind going increasingly strange as my sanity dies, driven closer to the end of the mortal coil by their constant belligerance and refusal to acknowledge that they one day must date!"

"We will not!" Toph and Calvin said.

"My only ally in the madness content to watch me suffer!" Abel continued, pointing at Tucker. "And mad I shall go...but it shall not be the first time I fall. And I shall rise again! With lovely gift baskets and such. So...see you later, hope I'm not crazy, bye!" He ran away.

Everyone on the Council stared at Calvin, Toph and Tucker.

"Wonder how long it'll take before he realizes he forgot us," Tucker said.

"GET BACK HERE, YOU DITZ!" Calvin yelled.

Abel did, and was properly embarrased. "Er...yes. Um...where to now?"

"That place those guys took my ship to be fixed, I guess. You guys okay with that?"

"Sure," Toph said.

"I'm just along for the ride," Tucker said.

"TO ALL PURPOSE TECH SUPPORT WE GO!" Abel shouted. "Which is the name of Cyborg's place."

"We don't care," Magneto said.

"STOP BEING DRAMATIC!" Calvin yelled at Abel.

...

On the rooftop of the First District's Central Bazzar Mall...

The unusual architecutral style of Traverse Town lends itself to many things, not the least snide remarks from snobs that the newer parts of the town look like it was made by a ragged bunch of wasteland dwellers from an After The End scenario. (Like the place built on the old scrapheap, for example.) The fact that they often do look slapped-together, patched-up and more than a little scrappy does not help. But it does work; the buildings are surprisingly well designed and very rarely fall apart, and when they do, it's usually become they've become sentient and then suicidal for some reason and choose to end it all without much thought for collateral damage. And the idiosyncratic building style leans towards making it easier for alternative forms of travel; it's a part of Traverse Town building code to always add ladders, all manner of features capable of being used as handholds, big windows and rooftops that can very easily traversed to make it that much easier for, in example, le parkour, or the art of urban building-hopping. Consequently, wherever you go in the districts of Traverse Town, you're probably going to find unused rooftops being used for something that wouldn't happen normally: ziplines being hooked to friend's houses to make it easier for people to get to them, very large and elaborate gardens arranged on large baskets hanging from the side of the buildings in such a way that they are natural sundials (and, for some reason, are specially bred to make wireless Internet signals much stronger; it's not known what the plants get out of it) and sometimes stranger things, like scavenged parts of broken giant robots removed and made into crudge balconies or rooftops.

And sometimes, as in the case of a unoccupied area of the First District mall's rooftop, littered with air conditioners and reminders for adventuerers to clean up the destruction they made, they were used for training people in training people in supernatural martial arts with elements of full body magic.

"Don't focus on the sun," Zuko said, sitting on the ground with his legs crossed and his eyes closed. "Don't think about what you're doing. Let it happen. Relax your chi, let it flow and adapt to the sun's energy and breathe that energy in...Zim, are you listening to me?"

"Hah hah!" Zim said, pointing at Ron, who was mimicking Zuko behind his back. "It's funny because it's suicidal."

Zuko opened his eyes and glared ferociously enough to make Ron meekly sit down. Zim didn't even notice, but that was to be expected. "Would it kill you to stay still for five minutes?"

"Probably," Zim said.

For reasons that were obvious to anyone who knew anything about the emotion-driven aspect of Firebending and the very, very horrible consequences of Zim running around without any idea of what he was doing, Zuko had taken it upon him to take Zim to a isolated part of the mall's rooftop and instruct him in Firebending basics as well as he could; Ron had come along, supposedly to keep an eye on them but more likely because he seemed to be steadily becoming a fanboy. The idea did not please Zuko.

Despite that, Zuko was too stubborn to give up now. He had climbed up mountains with his bare hands. He had coiled lightning within his body and blasted it back. He'd faced the Spirit of the Ocean and not cowered, and he was going to hammer Firebending into his mildly deranged Irken friend's head if he needed a mallet to do it. "Listen, this is important! Most Firebenders are trained just like this after they first start sparking; you have no idea how abnormal it is to be teaching a Firebender that can already make large flame and doesn't know a single bit about controlling it. If you were a novice Firebender, it would be weeks before any sane teacher would let you even near a fire."

"I defy your logic and replace it with toads!" Zim said. "Toads made of doom...I love that word. Doom. Doom doom doom doom!"

"ZIM!" Zuko stood up, embers flickering off his skin.

"What?"

"Try to be serious for five minutes! You need to understand this if you want to grasp heat manipulation and external Firebending! Or do you not want to be able to move fire around?"

"Not really. I can shoot blasts of fire, what more do I need?"

Zuko stared at him for a long, long time, and he had enough time to wonder if the sun spirit Agni, patron spirit of the Fire Nation, had ever blessed someone as...dense as Zim with the gift of Firebending. He had to admit, given the various men he'd had in his crew during his banishment, it would be quite close.

"You might be able to stop burning yourself," Razael's voice said quietly.

Zim hushed him away, not wanting to admit that the figment of his imagination had a good point. "I'm pretty sure I got some practice in on that last night, anyway," Zim said. "Bet I could do it when I need to. So why bother? Teach me to shoot lightning."

"No," Zuko said curtly; Zim had been trying to get Zuko to tell him how to generate lightning, and Zuko had flatly refused for obvious reasons. A normal Firebender lacked the clarity of heart or the raw power to seperate yin from yang and summon lightning without literally exploding. Zim using it was just asking for his untimely death. "Zim, I'll be blunt."

"Are you ever anything else?"

"Cute. You are, without a doubt, the most abnormal Firebender I have ever encountered. Even Aang learned to Firebend the sane way!"

"By supplicating big scary dragons that could have killed you and him if they felt like it?" Zim pointed out.

"Bad example; I was referring to when he learned from Master Jeong-Jeong. Or from what I heard about that from Jeong-Jeong when I met him before the day of Sozin's Comet. He was entirely too good at it; Jeong-Jeong spent all the time training him how to control fire, not create it. Internal Firebending, the generation of fire, without training on controlling it?" Zuko remembered Zhao, his rival in chasing Aang until the damn fool had fulfilled his life's ambition of killing the moon and gotten himself killed for it; Zhao'd had power, but absolutely no control or restraint. He decided to mention Zhao's untimely demise later to Zim as an object lesson. "That's dangerous. I'm surprised you haven't burned yourself!"

"Er...yes...funny that, I certainly haven't caught myself on fire at all...hah hah..."

"Of course you haven't. Zim..." Zuko appeared to be wrestling with something. "If you don't learn how to control your own fire, people will die. You're going to kill someone if you don't think straight!" He considered this. "Kill someone you don't want to kill."

"Oh," Zim said. He frowned a bit. "Well...in that case, it would be a step backwards for me at this point."

"They really know how to take the fun out of training montages," Ron complained to Rufus while Zuko and Zim argued, the little mole-rat sitting near him.

"If I threw you off this building, wouldn't anyone complain?" Zuko asked Ron.

"Probably not."

"That's depressing."

"Eh, I'm used to it. Also, you're way too tense. You need a girlfriend."

"I have a girlfriend!" Zuko said angrily. Zim remembered Zuko talking about a girl named Mai that everyone else generally said was 'gloomy', 'emotionally repressed', and 'a terrifyingly good shot with big sharp stabby things'. "She's...just back home and...I haven't seen her in a really long time...shut up."

Ron and Rufus snickered. Zuko contemplated whether it would be proper behavior to light Ron's tail on fire and decided otherwise. "Alright. Now...obviously, I can't train you the usual way, because it simply doesn't apply in this case; you can already create fire, you've shown me that you can make some very impressive flames, which takes a lot of time off your training. Normally, Firebenders are given considerable effort towards learning how to amplify their inner fire...my sister was the exception to that, mind you; she was making sparks when she was four."

"When'd you do it?" Ron asked abruptly.

Zuko didn't say anything for a moment. "...That's irrelevant." He didn't tell them that he was struggling with fire even when he was eleven, back when his sister was making fire so hot it was blue. Or that he had always found it so much easier to bend existing fire than create it, something shameful in the line of Sozin and damning in his father's eyes. Or that even with his uncle's tutelage, he had struggled with the most basic concepts for years until they'd been pounded into his head. He learned it, though, like he learned everything he ever had in his life: the hard way.

He tried not to think about that. Focusing on himself was not something he needed to do right now, with all the people on Earth he'd fought or saved or met or even been vaugely aware of dead (no, worse than dead, screaming and torn from their bloodied corpses and mutilated into things torn from the blackest night imaginable); with all those dead on his conscience, daring to brood on the absolutely pointless problems of his childhood was childish. "Zim. I'm not quite sure how to go through with this, is what I'm saying. The basics, though, are something you ought to have hammered through your head. Then maybe, and only maybe, you might be able to learn the more advanced techniques."

"Will these 'advanced techniques' involve me learning to shoot lightning?" Zim asked hopefully.

"Agni, I hope not." Zuko said. In some ways, he reflected, this might actually be easier than teaching Aang; that was a bit of an odd point, given that Aang was, after all, the Avatar, the savior of their world. (And, as events had transpired, quite a few other ones.) He had been born with the knack for the other elements, and once he cleared whatever psychological barriers stopped him from bonding with the appropiate element, he was scores beyond any other Bender; a bit humiliating to Zuko, seeing Aang breeze his way through forms that had taken him months to hammer his way through. Zim, on the hand, didn't have the problem of having to edge through an Airbender's thinking; Firebending was rooted in aggression and passion, while Airbending was firmly based in evasive thought and harmonious will; it ran counter to the essentially ferocious nature of Firebending, and instilling a killer instinct in Aang, had been like pulling teeth.

Zim already had entirely too much of that, and Zuko'd always thought that Zim would make a natural Fire Nation citizen; always a degreely insanely loyal towards them for some reason Zuko didn't understand and deeply passionate about anything he cared about. That insight now proved a degree prophetic, now that Zim was apparently a Firebender. Zuko wondered to himself what his uncle Iroh would do at a time like this and could think only of a koan he made up: If a tree falls in the middle of a forest and hits a squirrel destined to destroy the world, does the squirrel have the right to complain, or is it what makes the squirrel turn to the side of darkness? It helped nothing. "Zim," Zuko said, getting an idea nonetheless. "When you Firebend or make flame or whatever you want to call it...what does it feel like?"

Zim frowned in thought, remembering Zuko mentioned something about a 'fire inside' earlier that morning, and Zim had agreed with the idea then. Zim held his hand out and concentrated, fire swelling out from around his hand, like the determination and floods of passionate will that had always driven him right through the impossible had escaped through his body and burned. "It's like a fire within me, just like you said earlier today," Zim said, having difficulty putting into words what was happening regardless of his intellectual comprehension. "Emotion...energy...everything that's ever been the drill that I've spun through limitations and obstacles mixing together and flowing through me and becoming fire."

Zuko nodded approvingly. "At least you understand that much on Firebending." Zim looked at him, so surprised he forgot to keep his flame burning and it disappeared.

"Sounds like hot-bloodedness given physical form," Ron remarked.

"Row row, fight power!" Rufus said, punching at the air

"Don't be such a-" Zuko stopped, whatever harsh thing he was saying dying. He looked at Ron, surprised. "...What makes you say that?" He asked, a little sharply but not without interest.

"Just how it seems to me?" Ron said, looking uncertain now that he was actually being paid attention to.

"Well, you're right on," Zuko said, looking impressed. "You're smarter than you act."

"Uh...I'd have to be?" Ron said, looking both smug and confused. Rufus patted his knee, as if saying that Ron didn't give himself enough credit.

Zuko turned back to Zim. "That's basically the heart of Firebending. Drive and the higher passions - compassion, righteous fury and determination among them - blend together into your inner fire, which according to the Fire Sages may not be a literal spiritual fire but a form of spiritual connection that we feel as fire. Like the dragons, we breath in, taking in energy from outside, mix in with our internal heat and it creates fire outside the body. The same principle applies to external Firebending: not creating fire but manipulating existing flame, reducing and amplifying it as needed."

"I don't really grasp it, but eh, works for me," Zim said. Ron nodded; he was a fan of martial arts and fantasy movies, and this stuff fit right in.

"Good enough. Before you start trying to do something stupid like I know you will, you should have a better grasp of actually controlling fire and minimizing the damage you can make. That is external Firebending, which is likely to be the earliest form of human Firebending, develouped by the Sun Warriors, the original human Firebenders. It may not be as seemingly handy as internal Firebending, which creates fire, but it's not to be underestimated. Bending operates on principles you'll probably think are alien, and you need to destroy mental barriers like them if you want to learn."

"Alien how?"

"Well...take Toph, for instance. Her Metalbending."

"Right. She uses her vibration-sight to reach out to the impurities in the metal and budge the rest of it." Zim looked vaugely wistful. "I wish I could do that. That would be AWESOME! Also very useful in a mundane sense. Doors would get out of my way for me. I'd settle for just Metalbending period, and never mind proper Earthbending. Wait, don't tell Toph, she'll hurt me."

Zuko pretended not to hear anything after the first part of Zim's statement. "Good analysis. All nice and scientifically accurate. She also bends the metal itself, or so I believe."

"Wait, what?"

Rufus blinked. This whole thing was going over his head. He looked up at his human. "Hrk, getting this?"

Ron shook his head. "Nope. Wish the Hitchhiker's Guide had articles on this Bending stuff. Maybe I can get Aang to do something like that, he seems like he'd be into it..."

Zuko continued explaining to Zim. "Look at it like this. Fundamentally speaking, the seperation of the elements are an illusion. Toph can bend metal, not just because she's an extremely powerful Eathbender, but because metal is, in the spiritual sense, refined earth. It's still Earthbending, you see? Once you let go of the illusion of division...your bending follows." Zuko smirked. "You follow?"

"I...I believe so," Zim said, a little shaken by the implications. He couldn't stop the appropiate thoughts from lining up and explaining themselves, one by one: if metal was refined earth, then perhaps the only reason most Earthbenders couldn't budge it was because they hadn't done it the right way, or else move their chi the right way through it or however it was supposed to be done. And...in that case, it would explain how Aang could bend so easily; perhaps the Avatar intuitively understood that the elements were one, and had the raw power to bend their individual manifastions as the spirits embodied them and the nations of his world understood them. Air for freedom, fire for power, earth for strength, water for adaptability...all those were great traits in any person, and the Avatar held them all in equal measure. It...it made sense. It sounded right. But Zim didn't understand how it could be: for instance, why was fire an element? It was a reaction, a function of energy, not a true element...but Aang had said that the original benders had controlled energy. Perhaps the Firebenders were the spiritual inheritors of those Energybenders, manipulating internal energies to create fire, graced by the Sun spirit? And then, there was their secret technique of Lightningbending? Perhaps a truely flexible Firebender could make more subtle means of Lightningbending, such as controlling magnatism or other such techniques...and incidentally, where were these thoughts coming from? They didn't sound like anything Zim would come up with on his own.

Before he could keep going with those thoughts and hit on a eiphiny that would have remade the theories of Elementbending forever and open up Zim's own eyes to the other potential abilities unlocked in him, waiting to be explored, Zuko said, "Now, for a better example..." He breathed in deeply.

The air around him shimmered in a heat flash and Rufus hid behind Ron after Ron hid behind a suitably large air conditioner, both of them alarmed by it. Zuko tilted his head up and exhaled a massive burst of fire roaring out from his nostrils and mouth, arcing over his head in a swirling fire-cloud flickering white at the edges. Zuko raised his arms in a stance more suited to an Airbender's and the fire dissipated, a fearsome waver of heat still above him like a dragon's aura of power. Zuko spun his arms out, gathering force and thrusting it away, and the heat moved with him, and with that heat, so did the air itself; flickers of fire danced in the burning wind as it surged to the ground, ashes streaking across the ground as it burned.

There was an appropiate stunned silence. Ron peeked out and broke it first. "Okay. I'm not a Bending know-stuff-guy, but I'm pretty sure that Firebenders aren't supposed to do that."

"That was Firebending," Zim said. "But...you moved the air? With heat?"

"Dude," Sammael said. "Airbending, but with Firebending. The implications, and applications, are endless."

"Tell me about it!" Razael said. "The possibilities are awesome! And...wait, where are all these intuitive but not quite Zim-ish ideas coming from? I feel like a lock being picked. Alien thoughts and ideas...flowing in. Like a light that's alive...and thinks...and does a bit of thinking for you to give you a head start and let the rest get done..."

Samael's jaw dropped off his head and reattached on it's own. "Something seriously weird is going on in Zimhead Land...moreso than usual, of course..."

"Precisely," Zuko said, pleased that Zim had understood the concept so quickly and fortunately not privy to the objections of Zim's shoulder angels, otherwise he would have been very paranoid. "Creative applications of Bending have a lot bigger impact than even the great research-masters from my world think. I don't even think the great library of Wan Shi Tong has information about stuff like that. Multi-cultural Bending practices haven't been used or develouped except by the Avatars in more than several hundred years after the Nations started becoming more insular. Since about...a thousand years ago, when factual history was destroyed in some kind of horrible world-wide disaster." Zuko shrugged. "Now the closest we get are legends about spirt-touched Benders who could bend two elements and were two nations at the same time." He grimaced. "I'd hate to have that happen to me."

"Some kind of disaster?" Zim asked, intrigued. He'd never heard anything like that. "What was it?"

Zuko shook his head. "No one knows and half the spirits known to us today don't knowl and the others won't tell. Probably some of them weren't even paying attention to whatever it was. Or engineered it. Spirits don't have the same sense of morality we do. The great Nation spirits excluded, of course, but even they're not quite..like us." Zuko thought about it. "What happened then...mass earthquakes in the Earth Kingdom, hurricanes all over the Fire Nation, tidal waves at the poles and island domains, and the Air Nomads ended up caught in of it, this being before they had Air Temples and roamed around like proper nomads. And all tof this happened at the same time, too. The survivors reformed what they could of their cultures, lending itself to my world's international political climate, and one of the worst long-term after-effects was a breakdown in cultural comprehension of the other nations, flanderization of the Bending styles and people generally finding reasons to be bigger jerkasses than usual."

"You're using internet terms for fiction tropes," Ron said, impressed. "Not only are you made of badass, you're one of us!"

"Nerd!" Rufus squeaked, climbing onto Ron's shoulder. Ron gave him an indignant look. "Hnk. Sorry."

"One of us, one of us!" Zim chanted. "Wait, in what way?"

"Er...in the sense that he's into trope classification?"

"It's a hobby," Zuko said. "It's more of Sokka's thing, but Aang thought I should study this sort of thing more to...avoid the unfortunate instance in the not-so-abandoned ruins that I shall not speak of. Apparently, Air Nomad stories about raiding the treasures of the ancients are more applicable to real life than I thought..."

"Is this something about when you saw the dragons?" Zim said. "Because you don't explain much about that in detail."

"Wait, when did you see dragons!" Ron said. "You gotta tell me, dragons are the badass of badass!"

"That would explain a lot, actually," Zim said. "Aang tells me that pre-Fire Lord stories about the Fire Nation say that dragons interbred with humans to birth the original Firebenders, and supposedly feature heavily in Zuko's genealogy."

Ron blinked. "What." He looked at Zuko thoughtfully. "...I hope in your family's case the dragon was a matriarch. Or a shapeshifter. Otherwise...well, the biology is freakingly iffy either way, but it's a little more acceptable when it's the girl that's outrageously big."

"Those stories always have the dragons as shapeshifters," Zim said. "...Not that I pay a lot of attention to when they tell me them...of course..."

"Oh, okay then."

"Will you stop talking about that!" Zuko said, looking tremendously embarrased. "Those are Fire Nation spirit tales you're spreading around! My mom loved those stories, stop making fun of them!"

"She did, eh?" Ron said, scratching his cheek and grinning evilly.

"Indeed," Zim said knowingly. "Hmn...that makes me wonder..."

"Wonder what?" Zuko said.

"Oh, nothing much," Zim said quietly. "...Just that dragon blood is supposed to run in your family, that's all. The question being, how recently does it run?"

"I don't like where you're going with this. Stop going with this."

"But you gotta wonder!" Ron said. "I mean, you seem like you don't tihnk much of your Firebending, but you're really good at it! I'm guessing you were a bit of a slow bloomer, maybe. Like, real natural talent? From the very source?"

"Dragons get kissy?" Rufus said.

"What are you talking about!" Zuko yelled. "And how the hell are you talking?" He asked Rufus. Rufus shrugged, not knowing himself.

"Ah, I think I see now why your mother might have loved stories about dragon-wives," Zim said, grinning like a maniac. "It hit close to home, yes? And she did disappear completely after she was banished, or so you've said. Perhaps she couldn't be found was because they were looking for someone human-shaped?"

Zuko's jaw dropped in slack-jawed horror. "...You can't be serious."

"Hey, look at the bright side!" Ron said cheerfully. "When people call your mom a dragon lady, it wouldn't be a technicality!"

"Also, we think your mom is a dragon," Zim said. "Maybe she was one of the ones that taught you and Aang Firebending! That'd be nice. Though she probably would have said something nice to you. Like, 'hey, son, how's it been?' Something to that effect. Or a gift basket. Do mother's give gift baskets?"

A deep inner struggle appeared to take place in Zuk for a moment. "You have ten seconds to get off this subject before I push you both off the rooftop with great big blasts of fire. And lightning, if I can find a power source around here."

"One joke?" Rufus asked. Zuko growled, rather dragonishly, and they took the hint. (Zuko appeared not to understand the problem of behaving like a dragon when he was trying to make them stop joking that he was part dragon.)

"You're no fun!" Ron whined.

"I'd say you are a killbuzz or whatever they call it, but I'd expect it from a half-dragon," Zim said.

"STOP SAYING THAT!" Zuko said. "Zim! Show me your form! We're training here, not discussing my lineage!"

Grumbling ungrateful things about chainsaw hotdogs (because Zim is not like normal people), Zim did just there, going off a short distance and standing at attention while he tried to remember what a Firebender's stance was supposed to look like and settled on a bad imitation of Zuko's usual long distance form; foot rooted with the legs apart, one arm tucked to the side and the other ready to lash out like a snake, palms facing out. Feeling a little stupid, Zim drew an arm back, the air around his arm shining with energy before bursting into flame and expanding around his arm without doing him harm; he thrust his arm out, fire spinning out in a thick but unfocused stream, it fell apart after less than ten feet and dissipated, leaving a thin trail of smoke and singed rooftop. Compared to the Firebending Zim had seen from Aang and Zuko, it was...lacking.

"Eh," Rufus said, waving his little claws. "So-so."

"Was that supposed to happen?" Ron asked Zuko.

"What was that?" Zuko demanded. "Ugh...your fire is a lot stronger than any normal novice should be, but you have some of the worst self-control I've ever seen. Focus on your breath control! Firebending control comes from the breath! You breath in! The motions of your Firebending form turn that breath into energy and that energy leaves your body as fire! Poor breath-control makes you weaker in a fight and a danger to yourself and those around you!" Wow, Zuko thought. I paraphrase my uncle better than I thought.

"You're not a very nice kung-fu teacher guy," Ron observed.

"No," Zuko agreed.

"That's almost...draconic of you."

'Yes." Zuko blinked. "I TOLD YOU TO STOP THAT!"

"My Firebending doesn't have anything to do with breath!" Zim protested. "I think. And breach control sounds stupid!"

"Breath control ineptitude leads to wild fires," Zuko said. "Do you how many have died in dry seasons because some idiot wouldn't control his breath? How many child Firebenders ended up left without families because they lost control aroud non-Bending parents just once? Just do it. Breath in, mix your fire with the energy of your breath and release it as fire!"

"But-"

"Do it!" Zuko loomed over Zim ominously. His eyes almost seemed to glow with the heat of the fire inside. "Or I'll make you heat up toast and eat the slices you burn."

"I don't know how to do that. That energy-mixing thing."

Zuko blinked. He appeared to rethink the whole thing. "Don't think about it," Ron suggested. "Just let it flow through you and let it go where it needs to!"

While Zuko gave Ron a confused look, Zim decided that the teen with a monkey's tail wasn't a bad advice-guy and, mostly to shut Zuko up and prove he was wrong, Zim inhaled and clumsily let that new fire inside spread out, having absolutely no idea what he was doing. His timing was off. The energies mixed clumsily. The fire that roared out from his palm was smaller than the flames Zuko had made earlier, a twisted mass of heat and not a flowing stream, but it went further than the fire he had released before, whirling away and leaving a less odious trail of smoke.

"Hey, it worked," Ron said while Zim gaped, astonished that Zuko had been right. "Once again, dumb skills in the form of sage wisdom I made up based on my own experiences with my own inconsistant powers of awesome worked! For the first time. Man, that made no sense."

"Told you," Zuko said smugly. "Wasn't expecting Ron's advice to actually work, though. Good work."

"Thanks, Dragon Son!"

"STOP THAT!" Zuko retreated, grumbling under his breath about annoying mutant man-children who didn't know to leave well enough alone and dealt with it by instructing Zim through constructive harrasement. "Your stance needs work. For one thing, that's a mid-range form, the Solar Snake Style. Quick to move, easy to manuver and deadly to those that get too close. You want to tuck your left leg in for a less constricting stance; you're a Firebender, not an Earthbender, and a lack of mobility is a hindrance. Don't flatten your hands, cup them a bit, like you have dragon's claws; you want to guide the fire, give it a channel to flow through, not force it around. Keep your lower body firm, your upper body loose..."

This went on for a bit, Zim constantly adjusting his stance by Zuko's nitpicking on very minute issues with Zim's stances. Zuko went on to show Zim a number of other forms: Crashing Star Suite, a form meant for someone fighting on higher ground and emphasizing short-range bursts of fire; Righteous Spirit Style, a long-range form based in creating fire and amplifying it for shaping into various forms like fire-whips or pinwheels; and because Zim seemed so used to moving stiff, Zuko showed him the basics of the Raging Volcano Style, an Eathbender-derived style based in holding one's ground and bending existing flame, blasting fire to ward attacks away and building up nearby fires until a moment presented itself to direct all that fire in a single massive blast. And, most importantly, the primal style of Firebending, the original form practiced by the Sun Warrior tribe that was now extinct (or so Zuko claimed) and a far cry from the corrupted and brutal styles Zuko's forefathers had instituted, the Dancing Dragon. (Ron had quite some fun mocking this after all the build-up.)

This went on for a good while. It was kind of a fun, in a way, and certainly instructional. (Not only was Zim being taught real Firebending, he was also getting a crash-course in various forms of martial arts, mostly in aspects of Northern Shaolin Style or whatever Earth martial arts Firebending had an eerie similarity to.) Zuko was aware of this secondary benefit and made a point of focusing on it for a short while, since unarmed self-defense is always helpful; he told Zim that because of height, using his legs to keep his enemies at a distance was a good idea, particularily with his superior mobility, and he was certainly strong enough to take a much larger person close up; in fact, his size was probably an advantage against some people. This wasn't the first time his bending-friends had tried to teach him the more practical aspects of the Bending Arts, though it was the first time Zim had paid enough attention to actually get more than a few scattered moves and principles, and he'd already used most of them in his fighting recently.

Eventually, Zim ended up explaining to Zuko that his agility, while always somewhat impressive given the conditioning of Irken Invaders, had gone through a massive upswing owing to a chance contact with a magical artifact after Zuko expressed a considerable amount of disbelief at Zim's ease with the muscle-stretching stresses the fighting forms induced, not to mention his vastly improved acrobatic and dodging skills. To prove this after Zuko complained about how contrived that sounded, Zim produced the Monkey Staff itself, Ron glaring at it mistrustfully. "...So I hit this thing, summoned it's powers and my own magical artifact interacted with it somehow, adding it's powers to my own and giving the agility and speed of...well, a monkey."

"I'd like to express aribtary skepticism, but that's as good an explaination," Zuko said, handling it before giving it back. It felt...odd to him. Not bad, exactly; where his fingers touched it, a slow and ponderous power reached out towards him, as though curious in a totally non-sentient way. Not alive, certainly, but it was powerful, like the chosen weapon of a hero in a spirit tale. It wasn't like something that had been imbued with magic, either; the very wood of the artifact was like something that had been thrust into the world by the very force of it's reality, like the smallest soul of some massive entity that simply existed without begining or end. This thing was of magic, that much Zuko could tell. "I'm not sure you should be carrying this thing around. It's...it doesn't feel safe, exactly."

"The elemental monks that safeguard stuff like this thought it would be fine for me to have it," Zim said reproachfully.

"Hmn." Zuko looked at at for a good long moment. "And you just found it there? No explaination for what it was doing there or why you, who just got a magical Macguffin earlier, ran into it without foreshadowing or any suggestion at all?"

"Pretty much."

"That's suspicious."

"What, you think someone wanted Zim to find it?" Ron asked.

"Possibly," Zuko said. "On the other hand, Zim said that the Heartless were swarming from around that place, and he said he fought a giant Heartless there too. I've...met things like that, things without name or purpose or sense that are attracted to artifacts and magic. Someone could have been using it to lure them there! And Zim just happened to pick it up."

"Mr. Lyle!" Zim said. "That evil guy that surprised us! He could have planted it there! Someone did say that the Heartless I fought had been haunting the place, and all kinds of people have been talking about someone with the Keyblade coming there! Maybe this staff thing was a beacon, and that's how Mr. Lyle found me...or maybe it's both!"

"Hold on, hold on!" Ron said. "I hate and fear the evil that is monkey as much as the next guy-"

"Not me!" Rufus said.

"You are made of sterner stuff than me, little buddy. What I'm getting at is that Mr. Lyle doesn't seem like the kind of guy to carry out crazy-elaborate plans that always end with him winning no matter what, and your idea of this staff being for something like that sounds like it'd fit in those kinds of plans. In case you forgot, you got super-acrobatics powers and Mr. Lyle got beaten up. And that giant Heartless got killed. Bad guys didn't win that one at all. And these Shen Gong Wu magical artifact things are pretty hot on the black markets; nobody around here that has it in for the good guys would use it as a trap when there's so much other stuff they could use it for!"

"'Shen Gong Wu'?" Zuko said. "Huh...I think of heard of stuff like that before. Not on my world, but during my travels, of course..."

"You and everyone else, it seems some days. Half the evil guys that bug us use scavenged Shen Gong Wu to power themselves up, ya know? Usually powering one of their kill-you machines, or as part of their personal weaponry. The Xiaolin Dragons spend a ton of time tracking those jerks down and securing the Shen Gong Wu when they aren't loaning them out to the good guys like us, of course. Good thing Traverse Town sees a lot of 'weird stuff' trading; the more popular Shen Gong Wu trickle down here sometimes."

"You're getting off-subject. What's your point?"

"We-ell, the Xaiolin Dragons obviously didn't know about it, but the Monkey Staff is, and I heisitate to say good things about the evil monkey things against all that is good and pure, a pretty popular Shen Gong Wu. Used to see a lot of it now and then until it disappeared. Last I heard, it was with the Crossguard; they were due to hand it over to the Xiaolin Dragons but then it disappeared. Crossguard said that they had a deal going with forces that they weren't allowed to talk about and no one got a word out of them. The Xiaolin Dragons weren't talking, incidentally."

"...What does that mean?" Zim asked.

"Could be someone planted that thing for Zim to find," Ron said. "Someone that wanted Zim to find it and give him an advantage."

"I don't buy it," Zuko said. "But then I'm recklessly paranoid."

"Also half-dragon," Zim said.

"STOP THAT!" Zuko looked at the Monkey Staff. "How the heck do you use this thing anyway? Can't see how anyone could summon whatever powers it has on accident."

"You do it with WILLPOWER!" Zim shouted. "Proclaiming the name of the Monkey Staff in a resolute voice, summoning it's powers to you!"

"What, you just say 'Monkey Staff'?" Zuko said. The Monkey Staff overflowed with golden light that wrapped around Zuko in contrails and swirls, resembling a sawrm of light that for a moment looked like all that was Monkey; it flared into a brilliant aura that was so awesome it cracked the ground and levitated Zuko into the air; Zuko was too distracted by this to notice the black fur growing all over his body, his hands swelling up and nails extending into claws, thick military-issue Fire Nation sideburns growing over his normally smooth cheeks, his hair growing out into a shoulder-length mess, the long black-furred tail rolling out from his pants or any of the numerous other changes happening to him.

The light faded and Zuko dropped to the ground, a thick coil of light still flowing from the Monkey Staff and up his arm. He blinked. "I feel different," He said, voice a bit different because of the teeth grown to sharp points. "Do I look different?"

Zim and Ron looked at each other; a freak-out was not in the rulebook for this. Zim didn't have the weirdness censor most people had that would be offended at this sort of thing, and Ron was sensitized to craziness like this. Rufus tried not to giggle at the sight of Zuko. "Let me put it this way," Ron said diplomatically. "No one's going to be making jokes about you maybe being part dragon. Now, part monkey, that's another story."

"What?" Zuko said. "Random question. Why am I suddenly incredibly itchy along with an urge to abandon all upper-body clothing along with my shoes. And my feet hurt." Well, his feet had changed, it seemed. "And what's this pain in my back!"

"Well, I could make a joke about the 'monkey on your back', but it seems in poor taste."

"You aren't making any sense."

"Lookit!" Rufus suggested. "Hands?"

"What?" Zuko glanced at his hands. He stared. For what seemed like a full minute, he just stared at the fur covering the back of his hands before he gently touched the furry sideburns on his face. A full examination of himself commenced, ending with him looking at his tail with a look of quite horror.

He didn't rant, rave or scream his revulsion to the heavens. Because Zuko was a young Firebender, and his emotions ran hot and overt. But for some people, there comes a time when their anger becoems so white-hot that it comes back the other side, quiet and calm. "I am a monkey," He said. "I. Am. A. Monkey." He stared at Zim. "Why. Am. I. A. Monkey?"

"I do not know!" Zim said proudly; it's not like he devolved last night, but then he hadn't held it for long. "What about you, Ron? Ron?" Ron had disappeared, along with Rufus. "...Lousy human, using their common sense." Zuko was still staring at him. One of his eyes twitched. Zim sensed burning doom was approaching. "Er...have you considered dropping the Monkey Staff?"

Zuko let it go; as soon as it hit the ground and the sun-bright curlices around him vanished, Zuko's body lit up from within with a dull light that shone in the image of a simian form for a moment before flying apart in a brief shower of motes, and with them went the magic the Monkey Staff had worked on Zuko, the fur, tail and other monkeylike adaptations reversing themselves and leaving Zuko normal again. Zuko looked himself over and sighed in relief. (He also quietly checked to see if there was still a tail. There wasn't.) "Well, that's another traumatic transformation I won't be forgetting in a hurry," He muttered, referring to any number of horrible incidents that had happened during his time traveling the worlds. It had not been pleasant.

"That had to be unpleasant," Ron said, popping up besides Zim.

"Where did you go!" Zim said.

"Exactly where no one would notice me so no one woud shoot fire at me."

"What?"

"Also, I was hanging from the ledge."

"Oh."

Zuko kicked the Monkey Staff back to Zim, making sure that he was in contact with it as briefly as possible. "It is my professional opinion that no one, and I mean no one, is to get themselves anywhere near that thing. Honestly, what's the point of a magic artifiact that turns you into a monkey!"

"One that gives you superhuman agility and speed?" Zim said, flipping up and catching himself on the ground, holding himself up with a one-handed handstand just because he could do it now. "And balance too, apparently. Look at me! Look at me! Are you looking at me, Zuko?"

"...No."

"Aw, come on, don't be such a hardcase!"

"Is that how you mutated?" Zuko asked Ron, ignoring Zim's childishness. "You used the Monkey Staff and you grew a tail?"

"What? No, a Shen Gong Wu's powers are temporary if they change you. No, my case is a bit...different," Ron said, looking awkward. "Long story, not very interesting, full of unpleasantness and mad science and crazy-awesome magic powers that never work the way I want them to."

"...Well okay then," Zuko said, not really understanding but knowing enough to let it go. He resolved to find some brain acid and erase the memory of this incident forever. "We are never going to mention, talk about, think about or remember the last five minutes again for the rest of our lives."

"But it was funny!" Zim complained.

"I mean it."

"But-"

"For the rest of our lives."

"Okay, okay. Geez. Hot head."

"Incredibly lame punster," Ron said.

Zuko looked like he wanted to change the subject quite desperately and found an appropiate topic. "Zim?"

"Yo," Zim said. "Gah, I can't believe I said that! I feel so dirty. Like I spent half an hour listening to pop idols remixing classic rock. Must ask Abel if that is some sort of sin."

Zuko bit his lip. "...This mission of your's is to go into space so you can find your robot, your friend and any survivors of your world, right?"

"Pretty much, yeah." Zim shrugged. "Gir likes people around; I expect he's with Gaz, wherever she is, so I guess he's safe enough for the moment, but I must find him. It is a matter of duty, you understand. And Dib is perhaps the first person I could have ever truly called a friend, even if he was simply my most worthy foe. That alone would be enough to chase him down if he wasn't in...some sort of trouble. When the...unpleasantness happened last night, it affected him. Badly. I simply have to smack some sense into him, yes?"

"If you think that's what you have to do, you should. But how, exactly, do you intend to do that?"

Zim shrugged again. He hadn't thought too much about and he didn't care to; he didn't care too much about forethought. He just did things. "I don't know. Go from planet to planet until I find them? I still have a transponder in my Pak linked to Gir's SIR signal; I tried it earlier to connect to him, but the signal's too weak. It does, however, exist." Zim grinned, a minor triumph still enough to push him that much close towards a premature victory in his eyes. "I bet I could fashion some sort of radar out of it, though, and I do have this magic key thing that does stuff. Probably it finds things."

Zuko didn't look pleased. "That's not good enough. You're talking about going to every planet you see and searching the whole thing until you find three people. Two of them are children and the third is a childlike robot." He pointed up, as if for emphasis. "Every. Single. Planet."

"Probably even in coterminous galaxies and dimensions based on your resonance imprint," Ron said casually.

"Places you go? Places could be, you!" Rufus said, with some difficulty.

"Dib's no younger than Aang was when he fought your evil dad," Zim pointed out, ignoring Ron and Rufus' contributions.

Zuko, for a moment, looked like he wanted to make some sort of big point but decided against it. "...But, doesn't that seem a little inefficient to you?"

"I believe I could wire the transponder to direct me towards the general location of Gir's location. If I can find the materials, I can make better ones to finetune his location. Simple enough. So what are you getting at?"

"...You're not a tracker, Zim. You're a fighter. And more importantly, you're blasting off into space with two complete strangers. Just...why?"

"Eh, they said something about their King making them help me."

"You could just offer to borrow their ship and consider that to be help enough. Then you could have other people help you. People more qualified for the task at hand. People who know how to find things that are extremely hard to find. Perhaps someone that knows how to hunt down the impossible."

Rufus shook his head in disgust. "Subtle, not work!"

"You missed a perfectly good oppertunity for a 'hint hint'," Ron scolded Zuko.

Zim didn't understand what Ron meant. "Well, yeah, but why weasel my way out of good minons like Colin and Handlesack? They're good fighters, if complete idiots; I'd be a fool to waste this oppertunity!"

"Their names are Calvin and Hobbes," Ron said. "And you forgot Morte."

"Who? Never mind, it must not be important if I can't consistently remember it or keep track of whoever."

"Zim, you just told me this is a search and retrive mission," Zuko reminded him. "What does fighting have to do with anything?"

"Heartless," Zim said flatly. To his twisted amusement, Zuko flinched a little. "Apparently they're attracted to me now, what with the Keyblade and stuff. 'They'll never stop hunting you', someone told me. Or something to that effect. Even though I haven't seen any around today. Then again, it is daylight and they are creatures of darkness. So...yeah."

"Okay, good point, but again, what's stopping you from at least recruiting one of your friends to go into space with you? I'm sure one of us would be very happy to go along with you for adventures and rescuing and that stuff. Particularily someone who knows how to find very hard-to-find things?"

"Well, when you put it that way, it does make a bit of sense!" Zim said. "Hah, of course! That might be a good idea, if not for the fact that there are extenuating circumstances. But why would Sokka want to go with me? I annoy him greatly."

"Wait, what? Why Sokka?"

"He's a Water Tribe hunter. Good at finding stuff." Zim considered this and, in the interest of honesty, added, "Mostly. Sometimes. When it's vitally important for him to be capable of doing so."

"No, you idiot, I wasn't being extremely unsubtle about bringing Sokka with you," Zuko said. "I was talking about...uh, someone else. Look at this another way...uh, you need to learn Firebending too, right?"

"Why?"

"...So you can fight more effectively and not blow yourself up?"

"True. And so I can show up Copenhagenn! Hah, he thinks he can go around making ice slides and explosions and exploding spike things and doing mad science with things, I could show him, oh, how I could show him provided I had proper tutelage from a experienced Firebender! Too bad I don't."

"Cal-vin," Rufus corrected Zim.

"Look, another moment where he's just tempting you!" Ron told Zuko. "Take the oppertunity, will you!"

"What?" Zim worked out what Ron meant and laughed at the stupidity of it. "Psh, like Zuko would want to follow me." Zuko looked like he wanted to smack Zim really hard. "Besides, I couldn't take any of my old friends with me. I dunno how big this ship thing is, so I don't know if I could even take them with me, and even then...Danny's a nervous wreck, I'm not about to tear Aang away from his friends for my own mission, Toph would probably get bored too fast, Katara scares me, everyone would go to pieces without Sokka and I don't think it'd be a good idea to take Danny's friends with me. What would be the point? Snide commentary, occasional badassery from normal people and ghost-fighting knowhow? Also, Zuko! Wouldn't want to join me."

"Uh huh," Ron said, clearly not believing it.

"Zim, that's enough," Zuko said, with deceptive calm. "I'll not have anymore talk about this speculative talk when the obvious solution is right in front of us and absolutely damn nothing is going to change my mind about."

"Oh?" Zim said, not clear where this was going.

"I've been thinking about this ever since we ate. You going into space to find your friends, winding up with this 'Keyblade' thing, these two guys going with you and those Heartless things out after you...I was thinking about my friend's situation and how we're in the same boat you are, and I've come to a decision."

"Okay? Because I don't know why you bring this up now. What, are you going to go into space to find your world? Because that seems like a good idea, provided you find a big ship to take Danny and his friends too. It'd be cruel to leave them all alone."

"I'm aware of that, but that's unfeasible right now and anyway it's a moot point," Zuko said. "You see, I'm going with you."

"Oh, okay then." Zim stared out into space and hummed a bit. What Zuko had actually said entered his brain. He stopped. "What."

"Wow, you haven't even started and you already have another party member," Ron said, sounding impressed. "You're going to be picking up new ones all over at this rate!"

"Brigade!" Rufus said cheerfully. "Boom boom, badass it! Hoo-wah!"

"No, no, no no no!" Zim said to Zuko. "And no for good measure in case you're denser than this floor! You hear that!" He yelled at the floor. "You are less dense than he is! SO THERE!"

According to the fierce look on Zuko's face, Zim's refusal did not appear to make a great deal of difference in his decision.

"Uh, Zim, you may want to reconsider this," Ron said. "He's a pyrokinetic with martial arts! He's a freaking badass and he wants to teach you with inventively cruel methods! This is every martial arts geek's dream come true!"

"It is?" Zuko said. "Hrm, that would explain why I was excited to have my uncle teach me when I was a kid..."

"NO!" Zim yelled. "To you coming along, not the geek's dream thing, which it is. But you're not coming with me, Zuko!"

Zuko glared down at Zim, getting an equally harsh one in return. "And why not?" He asked, with surprising calmness, perhaps a leftover from his tranquil fury at being unexpectedly turned into a monkey briefly.

"Because going with me neccisitates that you not go with Aang and the others!" Zim snapped.

"Fine, we can get a really big ship like you suggested and we can all go have adventures in space or whatever. Bring Danny and his friends too, make a team effort out of it." Zuko appeared to be making an ironic joke, but it was hard to tell with him. "Leave this town behind and find our friends and find my world."

"Leave Traverse Town behind?" Ron said sadly. "Aw...but I like you guys. It's nice having you guys around, it's like havin' friends."

Zuko stared at him. "...You barely met us twelve hours ago."

"When people alternatively ostrisize and pity you, you take what you can get," Ron explained.

"That's rough, buddy." Zuko paused, remembering how...comfortable Kim and Ron were together and missed Mai so terribly it was like being punched in the stomach. By a gorilla-goat wearing fullbody armor.

"Focus!" Zim said to Zuko. "Even if I did have the resources to purchase ship big enough to transport all of us comfortably - which I don't, as you pointed out earlier - Danny is in no condition to venture off into space! And I seriously doubt Aang would abandon Danny here and leave him to fend for himself!"

A burst of light cued that Razael had appeared to throw his feelings on the matter in there. "You know, bringing your friend Zuko along would be helpful," He said. "What with the whole 'you not knowing what the hell you're doing with that fire thing' issue."

Sammael appeared in a burst of ink-dark smoke. "And he's a Firebender with an emphasis in stealth skills. He's like a ninja! A ninja with fire powers! Are you aware of how few ninjas with fire powers there are that aren't jumping down the slippery slope to complete insanity! Well, Zuko wants to go with you, so he's probably been touched by the darkness and it made him crazy. Eh, go for it, he might burn down an orphanage or something. Comedy value!"

Zim ignored them, refusing to acknowledge the fact that if two sem-autonomous aspects of himself were saying those things then he obviously felt the same way somewhere. "And you're supposed to be loyal! Just running off with me hardly seems like loyal at all, and how'd you think they'd feel if you went into space with me and possibly die somewhere out there!"

"And how do you think I'd feel if you died out there and I wasn't there to help you!" Zuko yelled back. "You have no idea what to do, you barely survived those things that attacked your world and you don't even know what sort of insanity is out there!"

"It's space! I was an Invader! I've gone from planet to planet my entire life! I do know!"

"No, you don't!" Zuko yelled with surprised ferocity, flames bursting up around his feet for a moment. "You don't get it, do you! The worlds outside our own are not like the planets you've been to! You're not going to go to planets that are alien because they have unfamiliar enviroments and starfish-weird people, you're going to worlds that are fundamentally different from each other and not at the same time! It'll be like hopping from universe to universe, not going around a galaxy!"

"How do you know it would be like that?"

"Because I've been doing that ever since I lost my way from my world! I know what it's like out there! Hell, you might end up in places I've been!" Zuko calmed himself down with an effort. "Look...Zim, I don't know what this ship you're going to use is like, but if it's like the ones I've seen, you're going to be shifting through pararrel probabilities to get to places that fit with the types of universe and worlds we're meant to exist on. It won't be like the planets you used to go to. You'll be as new to this as you are to Firebending."

Zim didn't say anything for a moment. "...Even if that's true," He said with uncharacterisitic quiet. "Even if I'm going into something unprepared and without hope, I'm not changing my mind. I'm going. I will find Gir, Gaz and Dib. I will bring them here and that is that."

Zuko smirked. "I didn't say to abandon your journey. Not even for an instant would I tell you to betray a friend because it sounds smart. Just...think for a second. You're my friend. Maybe I haven't known you as long as I've known the rest of my team, but..." He shrugged. "Firebender. Loyalty. It applies to you too."

"And speaking of that..." Zim said. "If you go with me...what about Aang and the others? They're far more important than I am to you. They're your family." Zim grimaced, looking at the groiund. "I'm just the first Earth idiot you met."

"I already told you. You're my friend," Zuko said flatly. "That's all the reason I need to help you. And...they'll understand. They'll be angry." He snorted. "Oh yeah, they'll be angry. They'll want to drag me back and use me for a ping-pong ball in Bending Contests, but they won't actually disagree; Katara can keep everyone together without me to make things worse...Aang can talk the horrors out of Danny's head and help his friends move through what happened to their world...and besides, it's not like it'll take long." Zuko smirked again. "It's not like we're fighting an evil conspiracy or anything."

"Lyle guy," Rufus said.

"Yeah, he's right," Ron said. "Mr. Lyle may be proof otherwise. Don't let your guard down on that front, Zim."

Zuko frowned. "Yeah. There is that." He heisitated. "And...I do have a bit of an ulterior motive."

"Aha!" Zim said. "Base selfishness! I knew there was something in this I could understand. What is it? Sick of not being in the Fire Nation and missed having people to boss around?"

"No. But...it is about my home." Zuko looked uncomfortable. "Listen...we've been bounced around the worlds so many times...none of us though we had a chance of getting back home. We were resigned to drifting around the worlds forever, fixing problems here and there but never being able to come back. That's why...you know, we helped your friend Dib with that...machine."

Zim shivered. "That thing that let the Heartless in."

Zuko didn't nod. He didn't look at Zim directly, and his yellow eyes had been infused with a deep veil of guilt. "...We helped make that happen. At the very least, it's our fault your world is...gone." He swallowed. "And I can't stand around and let yourself go off into space because your friends are gone and your world is dust because of something I helped make happen! It'd be passive betrayal and damn it, you're a friend, I won't dishonor you like that!"

"Ah. This is a matter of honor, then."

"Yes."

Ron had been watching it with a curious mixture of growing discomfort and a cheerful detachment that was so very much like Abel. "...And Zim's got a ship that can go places. You don't, Zuko. So maybe Zim can help you find a way to get you and your friends back home."

Zim blinked. Zuko gaped. Rufus made a noise that indicated he thought it was overwhelmingly obvious. "Oh well, that makes sense then," Zim said.

"...Damn it, I didn't even think of that!" Zuko said. "Except that I have, and nothing either of you two can say will ever make me claim otherwise. Yeah. I've had that in mind the whole time and it will be like that forever."

"Hmn, you intend to use my resources to pursue your own goals while satisfying your personal honor, which you feel has been bruised owing to your probably incidental involvement in Dib's crazy dimensional-gate machine scheme," Zim said. "Okay. I can work with that."

Zuko seemed to accept that. "So. What do you say? Will you accept me as a teacher and an ally?"

Zim thought it over for a long, desperate moment and slumped in defeat. "I don't like it," He said bitterly. "This wasn't part of my plan, you're being the spanner in the works all over again! And they'll just hate me for it...but it'd be nice to have someone I can actually trust along for the ride." He shook his head guiltily. "I do not know right now. Give me some time to think about it."

Zuko's face went carefully blank. "All right."

"...I don't want to seperate you from your friends just because I need a tracker and someone to show me the ropes of fire-magic stuff." Zim didn't want to admit that Calvin could probably fill that role himself, even though it would a strike against Zuko coming along, mainly because he didn't like Calvin to want to learn from him.

"Those are advantages to having me around. You said it yourself; you want a friend around too."

Zim nodded glumly. "That I do." He reached down, picked up the Monkey Staff and put it in his Pak, probably to give himself something to do. "So!" He said with false cheerfulness. "How do you Lightningbend?"

"I'm not going to show you that," Zuko said flatly.

"Come on! I'll let you in on the team right now if you do."

"You're trying to get me to bribe you now?"

"...Maybe?"

"The answer is still no."

"Curse you!"

"You need to build on your Bending style," Zuko told Zim. "But that's something that takes practice and dedication, not instruction. I think that it would probably be better for you to get a firmer grasp on this two things: manipulating existing fire and fighting another Firebender."

"Ah, like using aggressive moves defensively or dispelling flames with your own body heat?" Ron said.

Zuko stared at him. "How'd you guess that!"

"Movies," Rufus said. He punched out in a surprisingly good imitation of Sozin-Style Firebending. "Waaaugh!"

"Supernatural martial arts are a big industry," Ron said confidingly. "I love 'em! Espicially when they do stuff that verges on cartoony...of course, I know a lot of people that actually can do stuff like that, but I dare not spoil the wonder of the film."

"I see," Zuko said, clearly not. He coughed. "Uh...yeah. Bascially, that's what I meant. First, I'm going to need to see if you can Firebend defensively and how to best improve your points in it."

"Okay," Zim said. It sounded like it could be fun.

He was immediately proven wrong. "DON'T DODGE!" Zuko roared, flames roaring out of superheated air all over his body like a superpower aura and a single punch sent a good deal of it rocketing straight at Zim, willing it not to burn or hurt.

"NOT FUN!" Zim yelled; in his panic he forgot all about what Zuko had painstakingly taught him about Firebending forms and clumsily fired off a bolt of flame with a thrusting palm a few seconds too slow; the fires connected and exploded violently. Zuko was only buffeted by the wind of it, and blinded by smoke. Zim got it worse.

The smoke faded. Zim was gone. "Where he go?" Rufus asked.

"I'm okay," Zim said, hanging from the nearby edge of the roof, having been nearly blown off the roof from the explosion. Dazed from the explosion, he lost his grip and dropped. Fortunately, it was not a straight fall to the ground because the First District Central Mall had more rooftops than a le parkour-friendly city has balconies (even though it had it's share of those; some shopkeepers like a healthy breeze) owing to the weird construction. Consequently, there was a crashing noise almost immediately, a slightly slick squishing noise, and an annoyed cat screetching it's displeasure. "...Still okay."

Zuko, Ron and Rufus looked over the edge of the rooftop; below them was a part of the mall open to the sky, a large balcony for some healthy wind and sunshine. (And optional shutters for rain.) Zim had landed in a safe landing spot, though it wasn't very hygenic.

"I can't believe he landed in a garbage can," Zuko said. "What are the odds of a solitary garbage can being in the exact place he was going to fall?"

Ron looked at Zuko with something like pity. "You're not very genre savvy, are you?"

Below them, the garbage can tipped over. "Ow," Zim said, covered with filthy garbage.

...

In the First District, a healthy distance away from the mall, probably...

"...And that is why it is pointless to invent noble reasons for murdering people beyond the simple desire to do so, how you will soon die along while your soul will simply merge with the energy-mass of this planet and also a few reasons why I would quite like to kill the universe," Kimblee said. "A life so twisted and bleak ought not to live. As you should well know."

The small child he had been talking to for the last five minutes stared at him, mouth open. "But...but-but..." He whimpered, tears drippling down his face. "No...that's wrong. It's not right, it's not right!"

"And why do you say that?" Kimblee said in a reasonable tone. "I have told you why I do what I do. I have explained my outlook on life and the conclusions I have reached during my years of service to various figures of authority, as well as numberous examples citing specific events throughout history that complement these conclusions. If you have something sensible to prove me wrong, I will be only too happy to hear it."

"Nuh-nuh-no," The child whispered. "It's wrong, it's all wrong!"

"Indeed," Kimblee said. "Everything is wrong. I realized that when I was your age, boy. When I crawled out from under the mutilated remains of my family's bodies stacked up in a pile so nice and neat un a burning caravan with the flames still burning bright and the whip-marks on my back stinging in the desert wind, the bandits running away in the distance. I looked up into the sky, blood dripping down my back and unable to stop crying while the carrion-beetles dove into my open wounds and laid their eggs there, and when I beheld that blissfully empty streak of blue and saw no God looking back at me. It came to me, forces bubbling under the surface and swelling together until a single spark set them off and blasted understanding into my mind." Kimble was, of course, lying. Nothing of the sort had happened to him, but people tended to react favorably to those stories.

The child stared at him, trembling on the sidewalk and afraid.

After his meeting with Deidara, translating Crowley's notes (and deciding that he was going to be very angry later about the content of the coding) and taking a brief tour of a nearby art gallery Deidara vouched for (it was a compeitor for his own gallery, naturally, but Deidara was too fine an artist to let a little thing like business interfere); it had the loveliest collection of bazooka-bagpipes, the signature weapons of the now extinguished Glauswigian Division of the Folk Music Army from the planet of Hat-Planet Two-And-Three-Thirds. (The planet was in very bad shape. Their music was very enviromentally damaging.) He had spent quite some time admiring their collection of death-masks from a number of famous warlords and city-state patriacians and wannabe empresses from around their little world; a few of them popped up every year or so, amassing great stores of lost technology by defeating their rivals and taking their's before marching on the rest of the continent; which unfortunately for the would-be conquerers were still rather better armed. Sometimes they made it all the way to Traverse Town and generally died quite horribly. (No one bothered to regulate those wonders of a lost people; if they tried to, they reasoned, it would only increase the demand and increasingly more horrific consequences. If they left them, prospective conquerers killed themselves fighting over the things.)

And then there had been the new exibit of a recent archeological find in a distant island; very large photographs and high-detail video feeds of a largely intact captial city in ruin that had done fairly good as apocalypse collateral damage goes. There had even been a few artifacts that had been sent to that gallery as a favor; a few damaged but quite operational weapons shaped somethin like revolvers as large as a man's forearm, a barrel-like front made of delicately carved and slightly transparent crystal, a cylindrical 'battery' inserted behind it on the stock; a display case full of shards of ancient serving bowls; an entire cabinet holding the smashed remnants of a boat-shaped vehicle that, judging from the shattered wings at the sides and the propulsion bulbs at the back, was a flying vehicle. More interesting to Kimblee had been the attendent notices claiming that these pieces had been uncovered and sent back by the Fullmetal Alchemist, Edward Elric, at his most recent discovery in the distant Ho'Kami islands in the South Hook sea. That was very interesting to Kimblee; Edward Elric had come a long way since Kimblee left him bleeding in the ground with a bar through his shoulder. He always though the boy wouldn't be very happy in a military program anyway.

Sadly, his mission had called and Kimblee went on his way, doing his best to either ignore or harass Kevin as the situation called for it. Ghostfreak was a bit of a puzzle to Kimblee; he wasn't quite sure what the nebulous sentience haunting Kevin actually was; but he was certain it didn't have his best interests at heart. If it had one. It was a bit slow actually getting to Foster's, though; after the last one kicked him out and ran away, all the other buses refused to come anywhere near him. (A few of them, unknown to Kimblee, had actually detoured for entire neighborhoods just to keep themselves from coming within two miles of Kimblee; this played havoc with the passenger's schedules, but it did them the favor of not getting anywhere close to Kimblee.) He'd considering hitching, but there weren't enough people on the roads to make it sensible and besides, you met very strange people that way. So he was taking the long road and walking; this gave him time to think about his plan, too. It was coming along nicely, even if the actual execution of it was still a bit unclear. Kimblee liked having room to be flexible, anyway.

And, of course, he took the time now and then to give foolish people a bit of his wisdom. He liked connecting with people, even if it didn't go over very well most of the time.

"There is no meaning to anything," Kimblee said, like a teacher to a smart but untutored student. "There is no grand scheme, no all-knowing entity judging the wicked and avenging the weak, no real reason for anyone to take up gun or sword and strike down another man. Life, you see, is war. A constant battle fought between the strong and those who wish to be strong, like waves smashing together and breaking into dozens of little dying droplets that stay alive just a little bet longer than those already smashed. Some are too weak to even fight back and are struck down. And that is war. Others survive dispite all the odds and keep fighting until all sense is lost. And that too, is war. And others fight with such ferocity and lack of forethought that they lay waste to everything. Their own people are slaughtered by their efforts, and the battleground becomes a wasteland home only to corpses and carrion-birds poisoned by the meat. And that is also war." Kimblee smiled wanly. "Life, you see, is a blank canvas. There is nothing there and only a fool claims otherwise. Blood, sweat and tears are our paints. And all we can do is either endure our service until we are relieved of duty, or else impose a pattern on it and make that pattern real, for however long it lasts."

"That's horrible!" The child cried. "It's horrible! You're horrible! Everything's horrible!"

"Espicially trashy vampire movies," Kimblee said.

"No, you-" The child blinked. "Wait, what?"

"Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt your approaching mental breakdown, I simply hate films like that. Even clumsily executed live action adaptation of animated series are much better."

"...I'm gonna go far away and forget this ever happened," The child said, edging away from Kimblee.

"See you later!" Kimblee said cheerfully. There was an odd twitch, and his jaws, throat and tongue worked without his consent or inclination. "In your dreams."

Kimblee stared. Do you even intend to be creepy, Kevin asked as the small child ran away sobbing in horror. Or does it just wind up happening independantly of whatever thought processes are going on in this head of yours?

"Technically, it's your head," Kimblee said, wondering just what had happened just now. He certainly hadn't said that last part, even if it had been his voice. "And I'm sure I don't know what you mean."

Ghostfreak radiated smugness. And I gave you a bit of a help. Wouldn't want this child to forget our talk, would we?

"That was you?" Kimblee was not given towards strong emotional displays, but he was quite annoyed at having his body usurped, however briefly. "Please do not do that without my say-so."

Kevin ignored this point. Also, what's with you? First that girl in the tattoo place and then this random kid on the street? You can't go five minutes without giving someone a brain-breaking speech about how evil you are and how meaningless everything was. That kid just asked you what time it was!

"And I thought it appropiate to point out that everyone's time is running out!" Kimblee blinked. He became aware that he was drawing a small crowd, what with attempting to psychologically destroy a child and talking to himself in the middle of a street. "...All of you heard my entire conversation with myself, didn't you."

"Yes," A elderly squid-woman said.

"Did you escape from a sanitarium?" A small person-shaed bush asked Kimblee.

"...I suppose that's a matter of debate. I was only having an inner monolouge, anyway. A very expressive one."

"Oh, okay then," The squid-woman said. The crowd started to drift away before they remembered that Kimblee had tried to psychologically break a small child for no reason. They immediately reconvened, intending to beat Kimblee to a pulp, only to find that he had disappeared.

They would have been better served looking at a higher elevation; in the few moments it took for them to want to made Kimblee hurt very badly, he had fled up a ladder onto the roofs, with no one the wiser, and now he looked down at them from the base of a wireless beacon. "Such sad fools we are," He quietly said to himself. "Pretending sanity and rationality, but bruise one of those precious invisible rules we impose on ourselves and we abandon it all. We don't even question that we do it."

Now you're giving yourself a cruel lecture, Kevin said. You're gonna make me ill, man.

Kimblee ignored them. The people down there looked like ants. A dense cluster of insects, clicking and crying their petty little complaints. It was just noise to him. Ugly. The Symphony of Destruction could sooth the pain of it away. They chittered with self-righteous anger disconcerting on such primitive things: the intruder to their hive had vanished, and they had nothing to vent their hate on. Perhaps they would let their irrational insistence on their invisible rules slip just enough to satisfy their lust for violence on one another.

Kimblee had been in this position many times. A lone figure overlooking the targets below him, insignificant until fate gave them their right to live through the fact of their survival. Sometime he had soldiers and warriors and monsters to back him up, but it was meaningless; even now, with the voices in his head to bicker and plead, cajole and encourage, he always stood alone. There was no company. There was no brotherhood. There was just him, and that was enough.

He felt then like he did now; the world seeming to crawl to a stop. The streets and buildings and all extraneous features of his surrondings fading out, leaving the Targets to stand out like fires on ice through an infrared visor. His own heart speeding up as he began his work and started his Symphony of Destruction. For a moment, then, there was a blissful freedom, a complete cessation of self. He was not a man, plauged with doubts and memories and a burdensome sense of awareness; nor was he human, so dreadfully like all the other gut-bags, screaming and sauntering and beating themselves to death for vauge stupid reasons that were like so much tiresome noise to him. No; in those few moments, he was a weapon, all his existence directed towards the fullfillment of his superior's will; he was the bombardier and the bombardier's scope, sniper rifle and bullet. And in that null void, when the explosions rocked him to his choir and his ears were filled with the rising perfection of his Symphony, he found his reason to live.

Kimblee considered embracing the bombardier's scope and starting his work right here and now; smash the little nothing people out of existence. Stain the earth with their blood and hate and desperation. It could be the start of something wonderful.

His hands were already coming together, restructuring matrices about to touch when he saw that the crowd had remained together and coerced the weeping child out of a garbage can it had sought refuge in; the squid-woman was dusting the child off like a fussy grandmother while the bush-thing and the other varied people said things that Kimblee heard as a gentle sussuration; Kimblee did not hear the words or care to understand them if he had (Does any weapon care for the protestations of a Target?), but he understood what was going on.

He tilted his head, a bit puzzled. His normal expression of faint amusement spread into a geuine but twisted smile. Laughing quietly, he stuck his hands in his pockets and walked away.

Such fun this town was! The thought rang in his head like sweet little bells, chiming out copper tones that soothed the ache behind his eyes.

Why do you leave them? Ghostfreak asked imperiously. I could feel your killing intent; why repress such fine talent? What posessed you to flee the battle?

"I choose not to begin the battle here," Kimblee said, (no battle, not a proper battle without suitable combatants to die under his hand) lightly running down a rope-and-plank bridge someone had made between two rooftops and silently congradulating whoever had been kind enough to put in rope-handrails too. Kimblee disliked it when people commited building code violations.

You let them live, Ghostfreak said. He sounded affronted. Why?

"Why not?" Kimblee walked across the head of a giant robot that had been converted into a house and onto a pipe that went into it's 'ear'; he deftly made use of several handholds and crawled up the wall, soon on the rooftop of a building made from two ships transmuted into a rather odd looking building. Perhaps the pipe was for power supply service. "I expected them to fight alongside each other and vent their anger at not having me to attack. Instead, they turned their attention to the child and comforted it."

...And?

"And nothing." Kimblee slid down a chute built into the outside of a wall and touched down on a good sidewalk. He had no idea what the chute was for. Perhaps it was just for fun. "Their sole motivation was the child, not petty rule-breaking. I enjoy it when I find real people among the social maggots. It will be interesting to see if they can survive me the next time we meet?"

That means you're going to kill them, Kevin said vaugely, like it was only a point of vauge concern to him.

"I shall certainly give it my best. If they survive, then good for them. If not, they were not meant to live." Kimblee smiled. He imagined every person in the crowd lying in graves of honor, or what was left of them, with neat little photographs to commorate their struggles. It was a beautiful sight.

Kimblee never forgot the face of anybody he worked with. He made a note to revisit those people later. He would give their lives meaning, if fate decreed that they were not meant to live.

"'With a little crystal ball I see a naughty wizard scry," Kimblee sang. "'Mists and dust, fog and clouds, I see the little children cry. Their world cracks, and away they fly. Oh, watch the little angels rise up high...'"

Your rhymes stink, Kevin complained.

"Oh, hush." Kimblee started walking in Foster's general direction; he soon decided that was inefficient and decided to purchase a map.

About twenty minutes later, after a good deal of trouble getting people to give him directions to a place of map purchasing, a regrettable incident with a fruit-pie sorcerer and a angry argument with a blond midget wearing a dogsuit, he found a newstand; Kimblee considered it to be a poor one, since the perveyor of it's papers, postcards and other stuff was a transparent haze of green with a mouth and sixteen hands, but he didn't feel like being picky.

The haze (which was called Magic Mouth, after the spell that had created him; once it had been a normal spell, but it had been cast by a Crossguard research-priestess in an attempt to decipher a neophyte's extremely bad handwriting; when a Crossguard priest does anything it usually leads to weirdness, but owing to a chunk of psychically reactive psitanium that was being used as a paperweight and some funky resonance, the spell had acquired sentience. Normally, this would have been bad news for the poor spell, giving it life only for the duration of it's time effect, but the research-priestess had quickly discovered a way to affix the spell's existence into the fabric of reality so it wouldn't fade away into oblivion. Sometimes Magic Mouth and her played video games on the weekends; Bash Fighters Vs. Immortal Conflict was a favorite) stared at Kimblee. "Hey. Whatcha need?"

"...How can you see me if you don't have eyes?"

"With my spirit of youthful enthusiasm, that's how, and don't question the logic. Here to point out the nonsenseoleum or is it something else?"

Kimblee had conditioned himself to ignore the strange and pointless. Admittedly, it was hard. "Ah. I need to find my way to Foster's Home. Do you have a map that would serve that purpose?"

"Sure thing, boss." One of Magic Mouth's hands pulled out a folded-up map from a small vertical rack. "A reasonably detailed map of the First District, for a reasonably extravagent price."

Kimblee raised an eyebrow. "You certainly don't bother with white lies for the sake of business."

"Truth in advertising, kid. It's gonna be big. I can feel it! Not that I know what this 'feeling' thing you flesh-guys get so hung up about is, what with the lack of nerve endings, but you know, idioms. They're weird."

"And the prices?"

"Tourist season! Summer started not so long ago, we gotta milk them while we can! Of course, that doesn't apply to the new guys, but you are clearly a tourist, not a refugee."

"How do you know that?"

"Because your spirit's not broken," Magic Mouth said simply.

"Of course it's not." Kimblee paid for the map, started to leave, and paused. It would be imprudent to not use a potential source of information. "You run a newstand. I suppose you hear your share of rumors from customers?"

"Well, I don't run this thing per se, more like I sort-of rent it from Mr. Bloo, but yeah, I hear things. Like about the Monty Burns Casino! The whole thing was completely destroyed last night!"

"What?"

"Apparently, some idiot was flying a ship without any skill and crashed right into the Casino. Apparently it hit something big and...well, boom. Big boom. Whole Casino just exploded; the roof was shattered into pieces, the walls collapsed, one-armed bandits were disarmed, jukeboxes fired like popcorn kennels, the noise broke some windows and scared a few cats, but lucky no one was hurt."

"I'm sorry about that," Kimblee said sincerely. He wished he'd been there; it would have been such a lovely noise.

"...About the explosion or people not getting hurt?"

Kimblee frowned. "Is this a distinction or a difference?"

"Uh, never mind..." Magic Mouth floated up and down; a shrug. "Heard there was some kind of messiness at Foster's; heard some people heading down to Damage Control complaining about some new guy running amok. Heh, good thing for him that Mr. Herrimen's softer than he acts."

"...Is that so?" Kimblee asked. "Because I heard that there was another incident involving a recent refugee as well."

"You tourists, you get savvier all the time. Dunno too much about that, though one of the Foster's regulars that came my way said something about a ballroom getting totally wrecked in a fight. Thought it was the same guy that messed with them. Guy's not making a good impression, though I have to admire his chutzpah."

"What does that mean? That word you said."

"I don't know, and I'm a sentient spell designed to translate langauges, but it sounds cool."

"I'll take your word on that. Now tell me; have you ever heard of a man called Jarod?"

Magic Mouth burst out laughing, falling to the ground and chortling helplessly. Kimblee politely waited for him to finish. "Oh man, I don't get that question done seriously. I mean, really! A tourist, coming up and asking about Jarod? That's like someone going up to a New Yorker and asking about the sewer gators!"

"What's New York?"

"I don't know, but tourists mention it in mean jokes a lot."

"So this Jarod is an urban legend?"

The point that Magic Mouth got across, with a lot of hyperbole, friendly jabs and a fair degree of bemusement, was yes. Kimblee was not overly surprised or displeased to hear this; you expected complications in missions like this. According to Magic Mouth, the rumors were varied; some said Jarod was a mystical force of justice incarnate. Others said that he was the extension of a vast force beyond all understanding, brought into existence to right some unspeakable injustice. And, in an side, "I know this Stewie kid that insists that he's just a really smart and freakishly obsessive guy that lives in the Underdistrict and spends his time working odd-jobs when he isn't hunting down evil-doers to visit karmic justice on them, but hey, some people just can't tell a good tall tale."

Regardless, Kimblee waited patiently. He was good at getting people to talk. He just looked at people and created a sort of vacuum that people hurried to fill up with words to stop them from thinking about Kimblee looking at them.

"...But you hear things," Magic Mouth said, after getting suitably unnerved. And Kimblee listened attentively. Weird things, it seemed, happened in the Underdistrict, and there was so much for it to happen in. Warlords that exterminated entire native tribes and went into hiding from their enraged allies wound up arrested by the Justice Maines, begging for prison time because it was safer than being out in the open where something could find them.

Crime bosses from other worlds that hid too well for interplanetary police to find them were written about in the newspapers after being buried alive in the ashes of their blood money.

Mass murderers in hiding that came screaming to the Peace Maines to be arrested because someone was stalking them, calling them on the phone with the voices of people they killed, plastering every inch of their house with their pictures and getting little letters that stuff like 'You will never forget them' and 'justice is coming for you' and 'your nemesis comes'.

And there were more stories. Magic Mouth told them with a mixture of morbid fascination and quiet fear. He didn't believe in what they were talking about, and at the same time, he was afraid of it.

"Disturbing," Kimblee lied when Magic Mouth was done. He liked this man's style. If this newsvendor's rumors were true, this 'Jarod' was a man of convictions. Kimblee admired that.

"Not the sort of guy you want hanging around," Magic Mouth said. "Tell you the truth...I don't know if he's real or not, but I hear there's something in the Underdistrict calling itself the Pretender."

"Really? Why would it do that?"

"Got me on that, boss. My guess is that it's responsible for all the Jarod stories; scary thing. And the stories about the Pretender are even weirder. A few people think it's this insane vigilante named Rorschach come back from death after ripping the soul from a demon and taking it's body from it; doesn't work, because I know Rorschach and he denies it. Some people think it's an alien life-form that can take on any form and any mind; it can be anything it chooses to be, so it can know how any mind works and figure out how to break them, so anyone could be the Pretender. Even me. Even you." Magic Mouth stared at Kimblee. "Are you the Pretender? Tell me now!"

"No."

"Aww. Anyway, I know a few Transformers that reckon it's a reformed Decepticon that turns into a human shape that pulls this stuff, on account of that's what Decepticons that disguise themselves as humans call themselves."

"Fascinating," Kimblee said. He was taking everything Magic Mouth said dubiously, but he knew better than to discount it out of hand. This was Traverse Town, after all, where members of dozens of vastly different species and cultures existed in amiable apathy, evil mad scientists attacked every month, pirates attacked the coast border with giant sea monster-ships and all kinds of absurd oddities occured every three and a half hours just to make things interesting. A perfectly mundane explanation would have been stranger. "And how would I encounter this 'Pretender'?"

Magic Mouth stared. "You heard me, right? You heard me tell you about it? And you still want to meet it?"

"Yes."

"...Damn. You're crazy. I don't know if it comes up here, but I expect that it doesn't have much of a sense of jurisdictions. I suppose if you hang around someplace where something really bad went down, you might catch it. If the Pretender's real."

Myths, Kimblee reflected, were all the same. They grew in the retelling, like coral reefs acculumating from years of shed exoskeletons. What starts as the acts of a vigilante become distorted as each tale teller adds his own spin to things. The next tale teller takes those additions as part of the story and adds to them, and it goes on and on until the vigilante has become a god of the avenging dark, a terrible thing of justice and rage that burns the souls of the unjust. Kimblee, reading inbetween the lines of the rumors, suspected that 'the Pretender' was some sort of psuedonym Jarod had adopted for whatever reason, or perhaps a name he had picked up somewhere. He didn't put much stock in exaggerations. "I suspect that he might be. I have very convincing information."

"You do?" Magic Mouth sounded intrigued.

"Yes," Kimblee said, not explaining that it was because he had been asked to capture the man behind the myth and drag him back to the people that had tortured and coerced him into engineering staggeringly inventive plans, military strategies and weapons that had led to the deaths of hundreds of people. He considered that pretty reliable information. "So. If something...regrettable happened, he, or it, would show up to attack the perpetutor."

"Could be, but the Pretender would have to get in line. There's a lot of evil-fighters in town, you know? Half the factions are centered around fighting the people that show up to make things miserable, you know, and the other half just love getting their hands a bit dirty. And that's nothing to say about all the regular vigilantes, hero teams, heroic mad scientists, warrior-heroes and all the other kinds we have. The Pretender sounds like it goes after small guys that the factions don't notice most of the time. It'd have to be really big to get it mad. And even then, you'd have everyone screaming for your blood."

"But all one would have to do is make sure that no one knows you did it," Kimblee pointed out reasonably. "And then, this Pretender, or Jarod, would appear to bring his justice, if someone was to cause a big enough disaster to the town. Kill many people in a horrific or eye-catching way. A real horrorshow, you might say. Perhaps even blow up an important building, like the Deceased Memorial in the Upper District or...well, someplace else that's important." A thought struck him. "And if multiple incidents were to occur throughout even a single district...they would be spread thin. It could be a simple matter to isolate this Prenteder, if you knew the how of it."

"Uh...well, yeah, I should say so, him and anyone else who hears about it!"

"That's very interesting to know," Kimblee said. He tipped his hat to Magic Mouth. "Thank for your time. Have a good day. I recommend you treasure it, because you never know when a good day might become a very bad one indeed."

He left. Magic Mouth seemed puzzled. "I wonder what he meant by that?"

Half a street later, Kimblee was having his own share of questions. "Mr. Lyle seemed to think that this new body would enable me to find this Jarod," Kimblee said. "I wonder why he told me that?"

This body is host to an infusion of the energized DNA of the Omnitrix, Ghostfreak said. Kevin lacks the control to manipulate it, espicially after Dr. Hojo's experiments drove his body mad, but it is currently contained, with both your morphological resonance 'imprint' keeping it that way and, I suspect, my own influence. I have already shown you that I can...relax. you might say, my strangehold on the Omnitrix energy to create short transformations on you. I suspect doing it for long periods of time would be disastrous and carry a risk of imbalancing our present stability. but...

"Your point?"

I can give you the powers and forms of the aliens of the Omnitrix for short periods of time, obviously. There are scores of skillful trackers in the Omnitrix; Vulpimancers, Loboans, Xenomorphs, Yautja, Wookiees and more, and those are only those who can do so with heightened senses, natural instincts or programmed know-how! Such banal abilities, to be sure. There are other species with more...sophisticated potential. True power that do not rely on scent or tracks or residual heat or innate skill.

"You speak of psionic abilities."

Precisely! And as it would happen, my own kind, the Ectonurite people, posess such power. And quite potent they are. I would be willing to, you might say lend them to you.

"Interesting. But at what price?"

...Consider the cost to be a favor to be paid later on. Allowing me to control this body of ours, for my own purposes.

"Very well," Kimblee said, having no intention of allowing that to ever happen. Ghostfreak was a valuable tool, but he didn't like having him in his head. "I shall allow you to control this body at a later point, and those are the terms of our deal."

I dislike your specific wording, but a bargain struck is a bargain I intend to have you hold.

No one mind me, Kevin said peevishly. It's just MY body you're treating like the new car everyone wants to drive, but never mind me, it's not like I have anything important to say.

"It's true, you don't," Kimblee said.

Shall I change you? Ghostfreak asked, a bit too eagerly. We can find this Jarod much quicker!

"...No, actually. Consider this transformation idea part of my plan but not the crux of it. I have something else in mind."

Oh?

"Simple. I need to draw this Jarod out, and I need to make trouble in Traverse Town for Wuya's various purposes. Mostly likely making people miserable, and some idea that is. But I always pay my debts, and Wuya did give me a perpetual source of employment." Kimblee smiled. "I intend to do both at once. It'll be a marvellous concert..."

What kind of crazy sociopath says 'marvellous' with a straight face? Kevin asked abruptly.

"...Shut up, Kevin. I don't feel like listening to an idiot child who can't even hold onto his body."

At least I didn't buy stock in the studio that made the 'Kill Your Family' show.

"I like that show, even if it bombed."

If that is your plan, Ghostfreak said. Why did you fetch that diagram...formula...transmutation thing or whatever it was from Deidara?

"Firepower," Kimblee said simply. "I intend to make this act a full-production. I shall begin it at Foster's and expand it from there. Would it not be wonderful if this entire town could become part of my art? The music and fire spreading on every corner between the Seige Mountains and the Scyllian Sea. I've never done anything like that before. I've anhillated cities, but not a place of people of this magnitude."

Might I see what your actual plan is? Ghostfreak asked hopefully.

"No no no, dear Ghostfreak. It would be a shame to spoil the surprise. Suffice to say, I shall need to find the skillful and the strong-hearted to make the msot of this. But I suspect that good...ingredients, you might say...will not be hard to find in the vicinty of Foster's."

You know, I've noticed you kind of go all over the place with metaphors, Kevin said. Concerts, symphonies, ingredients...find a theme and stick with it. You jerk.

"No one was asking you," Kimblee said. He pulled out his map and inspected it closely. "Hrm, I believe I have an appropiate route traced out. Gentlemen! Now, we move!"

"Who are you talking to?" Someone asked from behind him.

Kimblee turned around; the speaker was a little girl. "...No one," He said.

"You're weird." The little girl frowned a bit. "Do you know what time it is?"

Kevin flinched. Ghostfreak was amused. "Ah, time," Kimblee said. "You speak of time. I shall tell you about time..."

And so another entirely pointless and sadistic speech about life being meaningless and a lot of justification for being a sociopathic nutball ensued, It was having a very adverse effect on Kevin's day. And on a whole string of traumatized people Kimblee had run into, for that matter.

It was only going to get worse from there, amazingly enough.

...

A/N: And that's another chapter down, and in record time once more! Ladies, gentlemen and asexuals, we have something of a consistent schedule! (Even though it's still basically 'it gets down when I finishing typing the damn thing'.) These shorter chapters make it work, but I'm not sure I like them too much, but it does help the pacing; the original second half of this chapter, which I'll begin work on soon, had a serious problem with pacing: I had Kimblee doing the Evil Thing He Will Be Doing right away, and it felt rushed. No build up, no drama, no suspense, nothing. And there was a LOT of exposition for one chapter; I felt it would be too much.

A few notes of interest.

Calvin, Toph and Tucker getting the town faction talk from important Faction members was originally just them on a giant mechanical submarine-shark-tank and talking to Roy Mustang along. (It was originally a One Piece-themed Gibbs from NCIS with a fanmade Devil Fruit power, but I like Roy. He's awesome.) The problem was, it was just...talking. Too much exposition to sink it, and it wasn't very interesting as scenes went. I thought that having them go to a fairly low-key place and get the faction members themselves to explain themselves would work a bit better, not to mention show what a few of their members are actually like. Note that I've experimented with OCs again here; namely Angilaka, who came about because I could not honestly think of any cool-crazy warrior-nuns or fighting-priestesses and I wanted to have a healthy number of girls then. (I want to avoid the Smurfette Principle.) I've taken a note out of Vathara's book; in her fanfic Embers, she advises that you create OCs by taking another character as their core and build around it. (Sort like homunculi and Philosopher Stones from Fullmetal.) In this case, Angilaka is basically a more boisterous Abby from NCIS. Only a lot taller.

The factions themselves are a more interesting idea I've had for a bit; it's a shame I hadn't thought of them before Chapter 8, otherwise I could have made things a bit more sensible, but oh well. It's not like I've contradictied myself, or I hope not; Continuity Snarl is my great enemy. The Dr. Insano to my Linkara, if you will. In some ways, the factions corrospond to 3d Edition Dungeons and Dragons Alignments on the Good and Neutral ends! Guess which ones. On an unrelated note, several of the Factions are based on Trope concepts; the Crossguard, for instance, are my version of a Saintly Church with shades of Church Militants with all the Crazy-Awesome, Cloudcuckoolander and Bunny Ears Layer dialed turned up to eleven. The factions themselves were inspired by the way Sigil, the City of Doors in Planescape works, but it's less vicious rivalry between the factions here.

Zuko and Zim's training lesson will have big ramifacations later. Is Zim a true Firebender? Well, he's close enough for it to work, right? However, as has been pointed out, he shouldn't be able to Firebend and certain intergral parts of it were foriegn. So is he imiating Firebending, blundering into it on accident or simply doing pyrokinesis with martial arts that happens to meld with Firebending? Time will tell. Several of the ideas here were inspired by Vathera's Embers (the details of which have entered into my personal canon), along with a few of my own theories and stuff. And Zuko humiliation. I don't think anyone ever expected to see Zuko-Monkey. On a more serious note, some of you may be wondering if I'm going to have Zuko join or not. The first thing to say is that one, I've already made up my mind on that one but I want to hear feedback on the idea. The second point is that I'm taking a slightly different approach to the party formation that the game did. No member swapping here, people! Because that...would be just stupid. Seriously.

You might be wondering what's with those mysterious three guys that from this chapter and Chapter 7. You might be thinking that they're up to something, and you'd be right, but it's good. And you might wonder just what they are. In which case...I'm spoiling nothing for you.

Zim will be going to see other worlds. But first, he's going to have to deal with a crazy-ass alchemist first. That'll be fun! Well, not really, but at least he got a bit of downtime before it.

Kimblee's Evil Plan is very bad. Really very bad indeed. And appropiate, given a certain scene from Chapter 7, AKA the Chapter of Evil-Doing! Guess which one! Also, Kimblee likes his Hannibal Lectures. Tropers will know what the appropiate heroic response is to this. Also, I find Kimblee's character as a Affably Evil sociopath to be a interesting character study; I tried to portray him as a completely sick but charming monster, and I found the 'bombardier's sight' and 'they look like bugs from up here' to be an appropiate metaphor.

With all that in mind, be posting again soon! Next chapter promises to see what Hobbes' and Morte's groups are up to and, probably, what Kimblee's actually doing.