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.

12. Red Lotus: Reactionary Measures

Disclaimer: This is a fanwork; I don't own anything.

...

In that mysterious place of light, the bizarre-looking trio of machine-being, hooded one and lion-man had gone utterly and terribly silent, threads of light that would have looked even weirder to someone with the appropiate mulidimensional sense required to properly perceive them splintering around them.

They stared at the complex device showing them what was going on around the multiverse, each individual event layered over each other in ways that would drive conentional intellects to insanity. Fortunately, these beings had greater minds than that.

"A pity that our efforts saved so few," The machine-being said, his bland words creaking on every syllable and close breaking. Rust spread over him, bits of him falling without him noticing; something still remained where he was falling apart, as though the idea of him was so deeply ingrained into reality that it surpassed the psychmorphic nature of his body.

This earned a solemn nod from the other two. They knew what had befallen those consumed by the Philosopher's Stone. They also knew that the threads, the lives of those same people, remaiend in conjunction with their respective level of reality, indicating that they weren't dead yet.

It would have been kinder if they'd died.

After a moment, the hooded one spoke, his voice tight and controlled. "...It is a good thing that we had Lu-Tze there to help."

"I didn't know he knew about machines," The lion-man said.

"He's been alive for a very long time. All immortals learn to fill up that space with knowledge sooner or later. What's the point of immortality if you don't do something useful with it?"

The lion-man grunted. The hooded one looked politely interested; he had only spiritually 'evolved' into his current state fairly recently, he wasn't very well-versed on the nature of what he had become. "It did end up better than the projections suggested in a sixty-nine percent outcome; Kimblee only ended up with a little over half of the population of Foster's in that monstrous construct-cage of his. The rest are safe...for the time being."

This was not said with a great deal of satisfaction. A single lost soul was a tragedy; these entites did not have the unique capability of most mortals to be unable to conceive of anything beyond a set number of people as being 'people' in a conceptual sense.

They could count the death toll of a million, feel each screaming dying scream, and rage against the darkness for every single one lost.

"...He intends to spread chaos," The machine-being said. The others didn't say anything; they were looking through the myriad possibilties evolving from this specific moment (relative to Kimblee, of course), displaying from the machine at their feet, fractal image-scenarios emerging from quantum time-analysis and presenting them with all the following events that could possibly happen.

Most of them were not espicially pleasant.

That was not the same as saying that they were invaribly bad endings. "...There is still a chance," The lion-man said. "We can still beat that jerkass!"

"Indeed," The machine-being said approvingly. He, having been what he was for far longer than the others, was able to process the multidimensional information far more efficiently than the others, and found the best future, in both a cosmic and personal sense. "Yes...that would work nicely."

The others soon sensed their way towards the future he referred to. Nonverbal communication was cool that way. "Oh yeah!" The hooded one said. "That'd work awesomely. Lot of collateral damage though."

"Would you rather people die?"

"No, I'm just making a point. Anyway...the Keyblade can really do that?"

"Yes!" The machine-being said earnestly. "In fact...I am not altogether certain that there is not anything the Keyblade cannot do, given sufficient skill, knowledge and imagination. And of course...skillful teachers to educate a young Keybearer."

"Zim is learning quick," Remarked the lion-man. "He just got the thing and he already makes fire. Probably won't be long before he starts applying it in more...creative ways and makes little steps to figuring out what he can really do." He paused, and grinned. "The Avatar is going to flip when he realizes the truth about this 'non-native Bender' thing he's been spreading without realizing it."

"Zim's just the first," The hooded one remarked. "He's getting close to becoming a true Firebender, if he earns Agni's acceptance. And the others Zim find could become Benders too, assuming they have the right spiritual inclinations. The spirit's little experiment is starting to expand a bit, isn't it?"

"All for the good," The machine-being said, his sorrow-rust flaking away a bit. "...I must confess, I am a bit worried about those children the Cat-King sent to assist Zim in his journey. Calvin and Hobbes. The descendant of Chaos Cultists on one hand and a pariah from a nearly extinct tribe of animal-people on the other. They are gifted, yes...but untested. You would think he'd send seasoned warriors."

"He did, in his own weird way," The lion-man said. "They're strong. Strong in mind, body and heart, and against the Heartless, that's way better than ordinary skill. People who believe in themselves are lights in the darkness, and they burn it."

"But they do not entirely believe in themselves," The hooded one stated. "They are riddled with doubts. They hide it well, but...despair and regret chokes their Kingdom still, and them with it. The days of the Imperium's atrocities mark their people still, and there is still something to be concerned about. They are both touched by the Warp."

"Oh?"

"Not the current one...as much as time applies in that chaos-place. I mean...Chaos is partially responsible for the very existence of Hobbes' kind, as well as the experiments of Fabius Bile; he has a trace of it's mark, no matter how long seperated by the generations. And Calvin is the descendant of psykers. Psykers in service to Chaos itself. It has been moderated by the times, channeled into other forms of power and reduced to dormancy...but the Heartless knew of these things. They might still be able to...affect it."

"Well, the boy is a Genius," The lion-man said. "...For his sake, and those of everyone around, I pray he holds to his humanity, or at least keeps his growing madness channeled in a positive direction. That boy comes from a long line of the Inspired...and we know what happens to a mad scientist consumed by the light of their own genius, let alone Warp taint that's in the blood making things worse."

"Or it could end up being a good thing," The machine-being said off-handedly. They stared at him. "What? It could be!"

"Good point," The hooded one said, after a moment of reflection.

Their talk seemed inane and distracting from their state purpose of being subtle with manipulating events in such, but they were, in truth, already doing so, even as they talked. Their immersion in reality was not such a simple thing to sever, the echoes of their mighty existence echoing (in countless realities, the very act of them doing this made happen small and seemingly unimportant coincidences that cascaded quick; evil empires were toppled, dictators were crippled, genocide campaigns were halted when intervening armies showed up due to a freak storm, and a sad kitten got a sandwich and made it happy).

Even so, the talk faded as they returned once more to the situation at hand; nudging things in the right direction, manipulating by means sly and surprising, casting a bit of light into even the greatest darkness and generally being mysterious benevolent benefactors. They seemed to fade somewhat, merging into the very fabric of their divine reality.

They had some good to do, after all.

...

In Traverse Town.

Minimoose was, by Zim's design, far less emotional than his 'brother' Gir was. Zim had wanted a robotic sidekick that was capable of focusing on the mission at hand, not one that jumped from one distraction to another. A robot that didn't have a mind nearly as warped and bent as his own. A robot that could actually contribute to the cause instead of making things worse. A robot that was, in short, useful.

He did this admirably. Minimoose was not the unfettered spirit Gir was, was not eternally bounding from one distraction to the other as Gir was. By the same token, he was not as overemotional. He was far from the unfeeling machine of human legend (any sufficiently advanced race learns that cold logic and the slavery of eternal servitude do not go well together), but he was...calm. Fettered to Duty and The Proper Thing. Quietly determined.

Still, he was surprised and a little frightened now. It was for his own reasons, of course; he didn't have a particular interest in going overboard in preserving his own life if it put his Master (an unforseen side-effect of his personality growth, not any action of Zim's; he wouldn't have thought of it during his 'bad' era and it would be repugnant to him now), but he was sufficiently empathetic to be concerned about the fact that the earthshaking explosions and that terrible gale of blood-red light had been from Foster's.

He was very glad he had seen his Master leaving that place.

Amid keeping up with Mac, Coco and Wilt as they desperately ran back to their home, that last remnant of the memory of their lost world, and filtering through their panicked-frightened-babble cries for something he could formulate a response to and be helpful-

Minimoose felt afraid. It wasn't an emotion he was familiar with. Without the fear of death that plauged meat-people and so many mechanoid-forms, Minimoose understood fear as something less tangible. He wasn't afraid of his body being broken beyond repair, but he was afraid of other things; of his master being killed. Of the people he thought of as 'acceptables' being damaged beyond repair. Gir never coming back. Those Heartless monsters had inspired true fear in him, fear of a break-down that could not be restored by system-backups or any degree of repairs. Now, as his emotions were begining to register a new form of interpersonal connections in regards to his new friend, he found another form of fear: he could not stand the thought of Coco coming to harm, physical, emotional or otherwise.

"I'm sorry, Mac, but don't you think this is a little crazy?" Wilt said, somehow outdistanced by Mac.

"Are you crazy?" Mac yelled back at him as he ran around the corner and they followed him. "Explosions! Creepy red light! More explosions! Bloo and Eduardo could be there! People could be getting hurt, who knows what that crazy guy could be doing!"

Minimoose squeaked. Coco squawked, translating. It didn't help much for the random bystanders watching and occasionally getting knocked over. Anyway, Mac didn't hear her. "Minimoose says that if that's the case, it'd probably be a good to hang back and wait until it's safe!"

"Easy for you to say, you don't live there!" Mac snapped. Minimoose squeaked sourly: I do now.

Coco squawked reproachfully. "We don't have time for this!" Mac said. "We gotta...I don't know...do something! We have to! I don't know how we got in that alley or what caused that explosion-"

"It was that guy that showed up!" Wilt said. "He made a small explosion that nearly killed those poor guys and definitely killed somebody!"

"All the more reason to get back there and...and..." Mac grimaced. "Doesn't matter, we just do something! Better than just letting it happen!"

As they neared the property, Minimoose scanned for life-forms. He squeaked, and it was the loudest and most bewildered noise Coco'd ever heard. "Coco coco co!"

"I'm sorry, what?" Wilt said. "I didn't catch-"

They turned the corner and saw Foster's.

"...That."

Or more accurately, they saw what was left of Foster's.

Minimoose, Mac, Coco and Wilt stared.

They went on staring.

There was a certain distance in their staring. Like they saw not just smoking and torn ruins (and there was nothing else to see), but they saw memories, swarming hordes of black monstrosities; people dying and more monsters rising and trailing darkness; a thousand-fold moments of despair and misery and spiralling ever closer into an abyss. Being pulled out of it, only to be broken down again and again and again-

Then, this new home. A new start in Traverse Town. Another Foster's Home, for them and for the people that washed up here on the tides of the blackest night. It was like a lighhouse on a razor-rimmed reef; a beacon of safety and hope in a living nightmare. Amid the chaos and the nonsenscial adventures and the crazy madmen and the semi-deranged factions and all the weirdness Traverse Town had to offer, there was Foster's. (True, it was just as weird as the rest of the town, but at least there, the chaos was their's alone to lay claim to.)

Before them was smoke and ashes rising into the sky. A neighborhood, so familiar to them as their own rooms, blasted and broken, chunks of building smashed through the ground and maimed bodies under them. People were swarming - bloodied and battered and bewildered - pulling bodies out from shattered ruins where buildings had once stood when they weren't running away. The streets - Mac could remember drag-racing with Bloo when they built go-karts for the fifth time for fun months ago - had been shattered. Dust over gore-speckled pieces bigger than trucks, blackened by fire and a huge massive crack rolling around the broken homes and shops and places like a white-hot giant's knife had sliced through the ground. The air was thick with dust, so bad that people kept sneezing and could blame the tears on it getting in their eyes.

Mac moved forward, stumbling and dazed, like someone had just hit him in the head. He said something, a small inchoherent noise without sense, and he went on staring. His hands shook, and his knees went numb.

The fence. The big iron fence with spikes on to look cool. Mr. Herrimen liked fences like that. He said looked good, but it had been blown right out of the ground, bits of metal half imbedded in wall or all twisted up in big rolls like weird metal anchovies. After about halfway on, the fence was just gone.

"No..." Wilt whispered. "Nuh...no way, man. No."

The ground was shattered. Big glassy bits were strewn everwhere, clumps of soil rip up and half-pressed into glass by some massive force. The handpaved road from the fence to the house was gone too, but Minimoose could see some bits of white pavement here and there. At least one big chunk had sliced right through a tree and cut it down. Peculiarly, there were a lot of perfect holes in the ground.

Coco squawked something. It held less meaning than usual; no translations were offered, needed or even reasonable; she had no words to make out, just a strangled noise of bewildered incomprehension.

There were bodies. So very many bodies. Humans, humanoids, beast-people, imaginary friends, aliens, fish-people, talking animals, wilted plants, sentient stone sapients...there were more. So very many more, in big piles with their arms and legs against each other, their faces (or equivilants) staring at something with horrible looks of agony. Blood (or something similar) was dribbing from their noses and their mouths (again, if they had any; Foster's residents were a pretty varied bunch). Many had fallen down, like death had just smashed them over. Others were lying down in large piles in positions that suggested they had run and gotten pretty far before they'd died. So many of them were gripping hands or holding to shoulders or had died with hands on arms, like they'd tried to pull each other out even as they were dying or had tried to shield one another. More than a few of them had fallen down holding each other, and none of the men, women and various others that had wandered into the site could pry them apart. (Realistically, they could, but it was disrespectful and it would probably involve damaging the evidence.) They saw friends lying dead there.

Minimoose didn't squeak at all. In all honesty, this was just as bad as he'd expected. It was strange; he had once help to engineer things like this. It was...uncomfortable looking at it from the other side of things.

(But the scanner...these people were dead? Something was not right.)

The mansion, the house, their home, was a ruin; the entire ground floor and most of the second and third floors had been obliterated in that final explosion, and the resulting shockwaves had shatted the internal structure of the house enough to send the rest of the house smashing down. There was pieces of red rooftops and broken glass amid the wooden supports poking out of the sad broken mess like bones in a decayed corpse, all shattered and smashed and utterly beyond any of their means. The dining hall had been flattened by the shockwaves, and a huge piece of a rooftop had smashed into it to finish the job; the once proud shape of the dining table, a massive piece of wood supposedly carved from the trunk of a legendary tree from the planet of Melchior-7 where the trees were three hundred feet tall and breathed fire, stuck out like a arm raised out in some final defiance. The stables, which lay directly behind Foster's, had been simply wiped away, a wide streak of shattered wood and metal where it was supposed to be, the dead within horribly mangled. Even the very neighborhood behind Foster's hadn't been spared; the massive streak of devastation that had tore the ground and unmade the hedge maze and the gardens and the stone statuary plaza had wiped the fence girding the property out of existence, and the streets and buildings beyond had suffered almost as badly, if only because they hadn't been close enough to the explosion, but that didn't make it any better for those half-dead in the rubble amid that nearly perfect circle of destruction off in the distance.

"...We were just here," Mac said, quaking with his disbelief and refusal to accept this in spite of it's unalterable reality.. "We were just here!"

Minimoose was tempted to point out that a lot of things can happen in a few moments, and decided that it wouldn't be in good taste. For similar reasons, he neglected to remark that at least they had a blast. At the very least, it would be amazingly tactless and an incredibly lame pun.

Wilt shook, like a scarecrow in a high wind. He fell down hard, his maimed eye rattling and sounding like a marble in a bag. "What happened?" He said. "What did that guy do?"

Coco's beak trembled a little, and then she just stared. She didn't blink. She didn't squawk. She didn't hide or cry or do anything at all. She just stared.

"...Bloo came back here," Mac said, almost too quietly to be heard. "He and Eduardo came back here, and Mr. Herrimen and Frankie and Spike and everybody and they were ALL HERE!"

Wilt's working eye swiveled at him. "...No," Wilt said, and with that rarely said word it was like he wanted to deny the truth. "No. Not again." This was not the first time they had returned to home only to find it gone, with everyone dead.

Minimoose squeaked. Coco blinked and squawked. "Yeah...okay," Wilt said in response, still shaking. "We gotta go and find-" Mac ran off. "Mac, whatta ya doing!"

"Gotta find Bloo!" Mac said desperately. "Gotta find Bloo, gotta find Eduardo, gotta find Frankie and Mr. Herrimen and Spike and everybody else and I don't care if that guy's just waiting for us because I am not going to let everyone die on me again!"

"Mac, stop!" Wilt said, running after him, his much longer strides allowing him to catch up easily.

Mac didn't seem to hear him. He just kept running. Straight at the bodies, as a matter of fact.

He turned over the first one he reached; Mr. Bobba that worked in accounting at some multi-world company, except he was dead now. "No." He ran to the next one, not noticing Wilt, Coco and Minimoose after him. It was Bladeleg, a nice girl with mechnical legs with swords built in and she was at the back of a kid Mac's age that he didn't know and it was like she'd died shielding him but it didn't work. "No." Again, he went to another body.

And then another. Trey Roadblazer, a puma-kid a bit older than Mac that liked going into the world to explore. He looked like he'd tried crawling to safety even after his legs stopped working.

And after that, another one. Madame Gachanoa, a weak but genuine psychic lady of the good ol' houndoun voodoo style that taught Mac how to make gumbo.

And again...(Leah Owiks, a small dryad that was somehow in love with a rock statue of a kitten in the gardens; Mr. Olafssonsson, a rather eccentric old dwarf that built up a small fortune making novelty prank boxes) and again (Perry Cox, he was a grumpy but good guy that just showed up one day and said he was going to be the house doctor and no one said otherwise and he didn't have a mark on him but he was still dead; Douglas Ramsey, that mutant teenager with linguistic powers who was always ready to help with a computer problem with a nice smile and his alien friend Warlock was there on his body, melding to it in a last ditch attempt to save them both that failed, and it was still warping in death)...and again.

(Alice Aetherhed, Bob Blunderbus, Ripnick the Shreddy-Guy, Mr. Ouldenshanks and so many many more, too many, this couldn't be happening, it was happening again, no no no no, and here was more people he know-)

He recognized faces. People he knew, people he fought with, people he was friends with, people he just knew because he lived in the same place they did. And they were dead.

"No..." He whispered again. He was aware of a burning wetness on his cheeks and blinked, but that just made the tears come faster.

He'd wanted to help. But something had happened, he had been stopped, and now his friends were dead-

"BLOO!" Mac screamed, another bit of his childhood shriveling away and crying as it died. "EDUARDO! WHERE ARE YOU?"

No one answered.

His legs trembled; Mac fell to the ground on his knees, but he barely felt it. He suddenly had all the strength of a bowl of gelatin, and all the feeling too.

"Bloo..." Mac said again, in a whisper so quiet he himself could barely hear it. "I'm sorry...please be alive...I'm sorry...please-be-alive-I'm-sorry..."

The words were running together, like a mantra that glued his sanity together.

Mac was vaugely aware of people running onto the property; many of them in the longcoats that were favored by faction members of all sorts. He hardly noticed them taking appropiate note of the situation with well-timed curses and disbelieving shouts. He didn't react when one of them shook his shoulder and asked what was going on. Mac just kept mumbling that little almost-prayer under his breath, and he was shortly left alone when Wilt was more accomodating.

Mac was starting to cry again. Some of the factioneers were taking notice of this, but he barely noticed them trying to calm him down or comfort him.

In much the same way, no one paid attention to the man with the dirtied outfit and the nice hat and a mad grin and the glowing red stone still glowing with the power of over half of Foster's residents as he watched the proceedings. In the chaos, none of the panicking people on the streets had seen him leave, and no one paid attention to him now; he was just one man watching a disaster's aftermath.

The darkness of his shadow shifted, even though he was otherwise still. Kimblee grinned at it, and other things stirred in the shadows cast by the rubble and the broken buildings. There were no yellow eyes or solid bodies or silent monsters. Not yet.

Blood and hatred and loss were seeping into the ground, staining the planet with the negative flow, the Lifestream of this world twisted very slightly through it. It was like stamping into the ground lightly enough so that a river could flow; on the whole, it was a very small and nearly insignificant act, but it was enough to let the water through.

Like putting up a lightning rod in a storm, or perhaps like dropping an anvil on a stretched sheet of rubber. Atrocities, murders, mass death and all the other lovely shades of human darkness made things...thinner, or so he understood. Interdimensional physics and the sciences of realm interaction hadn't been his thing. But he knew that what he had done had other reprecussions than anyone knew. The people researching the Heartless in this town didn't know. But Hohenheim had known, had seen the twisted results of people dark enough to do what other men didn't have the courage to do, and now Wuya knew what he did, and by extension, so did her trusted agents.

Human evil made a hole in the mish-mash of magic, order, stability and associated weirdness. Like poking a hole in a bag of water. Except it didn't let things out.

It let the things outside in.

Kimblee looked up at a likely building, considering how to best climb up it so he would have a good eye view: self-styled heroes and avengers would be coming soon, and he needed to be ready.

Find Jarod, he decided, and everything would logically flow after that. He didn't have a plan, per se, except in the loosest sense, but he did enjoy the prospect of making something up on the fly. He was already considering what to do if Ghostfreak's scanning didn't work or went sour. In that case, he had a plan that would, if it didn't work, would certainly afford him some fun and allow him to make a big mess.

Technically, he had already accomplished his mission. He had killed more than half of Foster's and destroyed the building. Their precious little illusion of control and safety had been shattered as surely as the dead lying there on the ground in big beautiful bundles. But it wasn't enough. It wouldn't be enough.

Maybe it would be enough when they found him and killed him. Maybe it would be enough if he found a good place to stand tall and start wiping the First District off the planet. Maybe he could blast the town up in such a way that he could create a massive human transmutation circle and make a truly impressive stone and present it to Wuya as a token of his appreciation for being such a good boss-

Wait. She didn't want the town gone yet. Pity, it had seemed a lovely idea.

Still, it wasn't like this district was needed for that.

Kevin was getting better at reading his thoughts. You're an ambitious bastard, aren't you? He asked, a little disgusted and impressed at the same time. That seemed to be his base reaction to Kimblee's actions here.

Kimblee smiled. "To strive...is to live."

I wonder where those ball things were going, anyway. Kimblee didn't answer him; it wasn't his concern now, even if it meant his death. He had more important concerns.

He attended to them.

...

"I wonder where these things came from?" Tucker asked, tapping of of the three great big metal spheres that had nearly flattened them moments after the big explosion that scared them half to death and really freaked out a lot of people. There was, under them, a bullseye-pattern lined in red circles.

"Looks like a Foster's evacuation casing-sphere to me," Abel said. "They have a emergency evacuation system that makes bits of the house tear off bits of itself that revert to a proverbial state of protomatter that forms into a kinetically-absorbant material; they hunt down everyone in the house who registers as both alive and a friend or resident, captures them, and then blasts out of there to land in several designated landing spots throughout the First District. Hence the bullseye on the ground."

"What made you think it was a good idea to stop on one of those, anyway?" Toph asked.

"I thought they were just for decoration, like all the other crazy stuff we've seen!" Tucker said. "How was I supposed to know that there's actually something in this town that's for exactly what it looks like?"

"Common sense?" Calvin said dryly. It was a cutting insult coming from him, a self-confessed mad scientist.

The lot of them were currently standing in the middle of a small plaza (the precursors of Crucible had really liked plazas in their towns for some reason. Possibly they operated on the Rule of Cool) that was actually located a very short distance from Cyborg's shop, though this was a minor point for them. Their hero instincts were ringing. Something bad had happened. Indications from Abel and the other freaking out people suggested that this was not order as usual. Explosions, yes. (But not deadly ones, normally. Property damage was normal here. Lethal casualties were not.) Big red blasts of light and screaming, espicially not.

Some sort of properly heroic action seemed called for. Probably involving stomping someone, in Calvin's own weird lexicon. (He'd spent quite some time among Orks in his younger years and some things had rubbed off.)

Four big metal spheres had nearly smashed into them while they had paused for a moment to figure out where Foster's was relative to them, having done this on a big bullseye painted on the ground (this had been Tucker's idea; naturally, the others were wasted no time mocking him for it, except Abel, who'd done much worse feats in dumbass-ery.). This was cause for concern, given the word evacuation considering the horrible explosions and spooky red lightshow.

"How are these things supposed to open?" Calvin asked, referring to the metal balls. "I don't see a seam or seal anywhere on these-"

One of the sphere shimmered and did something best compared to a chunk of ice suddenly transforming into water and collapsing, except that in this case it was more like metal turning into a liquid-like state and falling apart as it reformed into chunks of wood and stone and other stuff. (It was not a good metaphor.) A bunch of people fell out, generally dazed, gibbering to themselves or unconscious.

"Oh," Calvin said as the rest of the spheres did the same thing. It was pretty cool to watch, if you didn't have nausea problems. (Fortunately, no one was.)

"That's it, I am so becoming a mechanist or whatever a gadget guy here is called," Tucker decided. "The tech you have here is too freaking cool not to."

"Think there's plenty of stuff to start from-" Calvin froze. He recognized bits of that certain lump of mumbling bodies. "No. No...just no. No freaking way."

The lump in question was starting to seperate and get up. "Anybody you know?" Toph said.

"Not exactly. Know would imply that I would appreciate them."

A blue bundle flopped away from the body-cushion of Spike and Frankie, the larger two not seeming much interesting in moving away from each other. "Aw man, it's...you again..." Bloo muttered, sliding up into an upright position dispite wobbling something fierce. "Just the crazy-ass jerk I wanted to see...hoo boy." He fell over on his face, but bounced right back up.

Tucker blinked. "...What do you have to do with this guy?"

"He and two other idiots were stalking me last night," Calvin said. "I'm not entirely clear why."

"Fate of the worlds...Heartless need go boom...nothin' better to do..." Bloo muttered. "Big heap trouble-stuff...whoops, here I go." He fell over, or started to, but Toph Earthbended several small slabs out of the ground to hold him upright without hurting him. "Oh, hey, thanks."

"Sure thing," Toph said.

Abel blinked at Spike and Frankie. "What the heck happened to you guys! What was with the exploding? And the red lights! And...hey, your position looks a bit suspect. Must take pictures!"

"Try it and I'll rearrange your insides," Spike said weakly.

"Hmn, you're not in much of a position to do much about it."

"Will you be serious for five minutes?" Calvin said.

"Nope!" Abel said cheerfully. "Hey, I been around a long time, of course I've gone a bit 'round the bend, y'know?" He made sounds approximating spooky noises. "It runs in my family."

"...Did you just make thematic sound effects?"

Abel said nothing.

Spike rolled off Frankie, pulling himself out of the sunlight and into the safety of the shade; every movement was like trying to haul his way up a mountain by his fingertips. "...Destiny's playing silly buggers with us if'n it's you we see first thing out of the ball," He said quietly. "What's the odds? Must be at least twenty dozen of us flying around town, and first people we sees is you."

"That is really contrived," Toph agreed.

"Law of narrative convention states that if you are put into a position where probability governs outcomes, the most dramatically or themetically appropiate outcome happens nine times out of the eight," Abel said. "And yes, I'm aware that it doesn't make sense. I hate numbers, really. I suppose that since you and Calvin just met, it was the most dramatic outcome. What's the point of you popping out and running into some other person and gradually meeting us later? It'd make more logical sense, but it'd be so boring. This way's a bit stupid, but it makes things happen quicker, yeah?"

Tucker rubbed his forehead. "Too much British accent!"

"Wot?" Abel and Spike said. Abel added, "'Pologize for da 'ead-hurtin', guv'."

"Now you're just doing it on purpose."

"Yeh, wot's yer point?"

The other people were starting to wake up. "Ow," Frankie said, rubbing her head, and carefully got off Eduardo's back.

"Gracias," Eduardo said weakly. He grunted, not so much standing up as he unfolded in a generally upwards direction, his muscles seeming to have to bunch up and move out of way for others.

"I feel like my soul almost got torn out and my life consumed in a whirlwind of unending pain," A small sharkman in a Foster's security uniform said.

"Totally happened," said a petty officer wearing a slightly nicer uniform.

"Ah, that'd explain it."

"Wait, what!" Toph said.

"...I don't know," Frankie said, sitting forcefully down on the ground. Spike sat down next to her, easily as exhausted as she was. "Damn...I don't feel right."

"You need to get to a hospital," Abel said, switching his demeanor. "All of you, now."

"Nu-uh!" Eduardo said unexpectedly. "Got a job to do!" He fell over. "Owie."

"Yeah, the minotaur-ogre-thing is right!" Said the sharkman guard, jumping to his feet. He immediately fell back down. "But it would appear that it is a futile prospect."

"See?" Abel said. "You lot can barely stand, let alone go...do whatever. I'm bringing you loonies to a hospital!"

Calvin thought fast. "How about we get you over there, and then you tell us what happened on the way?"

"No can do," Spike said. "Got a job to do. Mostly involving finishing this before it spreads."

Toph tilted her head. "Who did this to you now? I'm serious, tell me who and you'll have a serious deficit of bad guys bugging you. Film it, it'll be great for ratings."

"...You're panting just keeping yourself up," Calvin said to Spike. "Leave this to guys who aren't half-dead?"

Spike laughed weakly. "Like I'm going to trust the safety of the house to a kid."

"Hey, don't you dare dare talk down to me-"

"Hey, what's going on over here!"

This came from a loud and authoritive voice, and it's identity became clearer as a truck went down the street. At least, it looked like a truck; it had a cab and a trailer, though the cab was fitted for six seats and the trailer was a big boxy square, but it didn't have wheels, just strange bulbs that were emitting a powerful force that had the net effect of pushing the truck off the ground and propelling it, effectively making it fly a few feet above the ground. The whole thing was painted white with bright blue decals in circuit-like patterns.

The truck turned sideways and came to a stop a short distance from them; the driver's side of the cab-door irised open and a large teenaged boy that was almost all cybernetic systems and prosthetics jumped out, what little left of his flesh a dark brown. (And, notably, his mechanical parts had the same design as the truck's paintjob, or perhaps it was the other way around.)

The cyborg stomped over to them. "Spike! What are you and these other guys doing?"

"Horrible explosion. Other explosions before-hand. Nasty red lights," Spike said. "Do the math."

The cyborg frowned. "Wait." He stared at the bits of building on the ground. "...Oh no. You did an evacuation thing! It got that bad!"

"And then some," Bloo said. "Oh yeah, it got bad."

"Some lunatic blew up those houses," Frankie said. "And made that weird...stuff happen. With all the red light."

"Damn it," The cyborg growled. "We just got done with the last omnicidal maniac that really meant it, we don't need another one so soon!"

"What makes you think it's an omnicidal maniac?" Calvin said.

"Who else would want to blow up Foster's?" The cyborg said. "Even the usual idiots have some class." He paused and looked at them again. "Uh...who are you guys?" He binked. "...And why are you with them, Father Nightroad? I thought you were lost somewhere."

"I was!" Abel said. He gestured at Calvin. "He and some friends of his got me out of a mess and I'm obligated to pay them back by being a nice tour guide and stuff." He hastily introduced them, to varying degrees of interest.

"So who are you?" Calvin asked him.

"Name's Cyborg," He said.

Calvin stared at him; he remembered that this was the guy supposedly fixing their ship. "...You're Cyborg. You."

"Yeah. Got a problem with that?"

"...Your name is Cyborg. You. Who are the most literal cyborg I have ever seen, and I grew up during the tail-end of a horrific war that left an insane number of the participents in need of such prosthetic surgery that they ended up more machine than living body-bits."

"Uh, what are you going with this?" Tucker asked.

"I'm just trying to pick the logic here. You seriously couldn't come up with a more interesting superhero code-name or posthuman identity then Cyborg?"

"Hey, don't tell me it's not creative!" Cyborg said. "I'm a cyborg, it's what people think of when they think about me, I'm not exactly able to pass for normal, so why not go with the self-image that belies my increasingly deteriorating self-worth as a human being and vauge suspcisions that people wouldn't think twice about killing me if I went bad because of the whole 'robots aren't people' bit mixed with the 'big black guys are scary' thing." He paused. "...Did I just say the last part out loud?"

"Yep," Calvin said.

"You need to learn about proper monolouging," Abel said.

"I think I'm half-dead and I still have enough strength to marvel at your bad timing," Spike said. "And I'm already dead to begin with, that's impressive, it is."

"You have problems," Eduardo said.

"Eh, I've heard worse," Frankie said.

"Millennium hand and shrimp!" A delirious survivor said.

"Is this really the time for life-changing expositions about your personal life?" Toph said. "It rarely goes over well."

"At least you're the victim of a trope that gives you a bit of credibility," Tucker said. "When people see me, they're all like 'hah, we can belittle him, he's just a walking inversion of the usual ethnicity sterotypes except in regards to the nerdy black student'! And I'm not really that nerdy. I think."

"I once met a undead cyborg-llama with ninja training and a pirate hat," Abel said, not really paying attention anymore. "It refused to stop calling me Jimmy."

"What?" Cyborg said.

"What?" Calvin said.

A pause. Then..."What are you doing here, anyway?" Spike said. "Thought you were working on a ship or something."

"...Sorry, but I think that saving lives is a bit more important than putting the final touches up the ship," Cyborg said. Calvin took note that Cyborg did not say that the ship was unfinished. Transport technology was one of his specialties and he knew what 'touching up' might mean. "I've been going around the evacuation sites and picking people up so I can drop them off at a hospital." He frowned. "I've heard some things..."

Calvin raised eyebrows, including Toph's. She smacked his hand away. "I thought you had just stumbled onto us! That's slightly less contrived."

"Well...we, meaning me and my landlord Winry, she works at the shop too...we did see the spheres going all over the place before that last explosion, I bet tons of people did, but...I dunno what you mean, I was just making the rounds to do something," Cyborg explained awkwardly. "And, uh...who are you guys?"

"Just some new guys," Calvin said hastily, wanting to get out of there now. Since Cyborg had showed up with his truck, he suspected that they were no longer needed, meaning they could just go and do stuff now. (After interrogating him about their ship and it's readiness; he was excited at the prospect of a new craft to mess with.)

Bloo wasn't so kind. "They're with Zim," He said, knowing full well what that would mean.

Cyborg stared. "...You're kidding."

"Nope!"

"I know!" Calvin said. "It's so contrived!" He turned to the sky and shouted, "I KNOW YOU'RE DOING THIS TO ME! STOP MAKING THINGS HAPPEN WITH SUCH CONTRIVED OVERTONES!"

"Who's he yelling at?" Toph asked.

"...I don't know," Abel said, deciding to tune in.

...

Meanwhile, in realms glorious and mysterious...

"Do you think he's talking to us specifically, or is that just a weird coincidence?" The hooded one asked the machine-being as they watched this very event unfold. Well, it wasn't the only one, as they were capable of observing multiple events while influencing them and simultaenously multitasking in various means. They were cool like that.

"...Who knows?" The machine-being said. "Then again, he is trained in the ways of the theurgists and he is of the Imperium, he could well know of our existence! Or at least a general train of thought that verges on the awareness of our influences upon the Materium Realms and extrapolate that into a vauge idea of our potential existence."

The lion-man tapped his claws. "I hate people that catch on to us. It's hard to be all subtle and shit when the guy's we're helping keep attracting attention to it."

...

"...Well, I guess it's some good luck I ran into you guys then," Cyborg said. "Really weird and kind of suspicious, but good luck." He had a nagging feeling that some sort of cosmic entity was annoyed at him now.

"What, you mean you finished our ship!" Calvin said, his eyes gleaming; contrary to his image as a slightly more-unhinged-than-usual mad scientist (the destructive super-science of Katastrofi, ironically, was something he was very bad at), he just loved ships and vehicles. He started out his career making transport wonders of science from scrap and cardboard and willpower; his abiltiy to actually construct ships, on the other hand, tended to vary, espicially when he was dealing with people that didn't fully comprehend his brand of 'science'.

"Yes and no," Cyborg said innocently.

"...Which means what exactly?" Toph asked, cracking her knuckles and cracking the entire street on accident.

Cyborg's good eye widened in utter inexplicable terror. The fates seemed to converge on Toph, all of nature desperately screaming in Cyborg's head not to taunt the badass preteen girl of eath-breaking DOOM. "She's a friend of Zim's," Abel said helpfully, pushing Cyborg's personal Oh-Shit-meter over nine thousand degrees of Dang That Ain't Good.

Cyborg could only say, "Nothing! Nothing bad, I mean, there might be a bit of trouble controlling the ship or powering it due to the special no fuel engine I put in or the slightly complicated means of firing or all the firing-stuff I put on in the first place, I was in a bit of a rush and I had stuff lying around I was dying to test and it sounded like a good time to do it, he just needs to know how to make it work, that's all, please don't hurt me."

"You're a total wuss, man," Abel said.

"Look who's talking, English, at least I don't cower from rabbits."

"BUNNIES WANT TO BECOME THE DOMINANT LIFE FORM!" Abel shouted. "AND THEY'LL DESTROY US ALL TO MAKE IT HAPPEN! DESTROY US ALL! DESTROY US ALL! DESTROY US ALL! DESTROY US ALL! And incidentally, the gene-pools modulated to the basic genotype designed by the Test Tube Babies project that gave birth to me was drawn from all over the British domains! I have the blood of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Britain, England and all the brothers and sisters under the Union Jack! I am Scottish, Welsh, Irish, English, British and so very many more! Not some vaugely defined stereotype that you can assign assumptions on to. It's like when people assume you talk street jive because of your ethnicity. Or date machines."

"...Well, yeah," Cyborg said. "But saying all that is kind of a mouthful."

"True," Abel admitted. "I permit you to stick with whatever sobriquet pleases you, but stick to one that has a modicum of ominousness to it! Like make me look Scottish. Nobody screws with the Scots. Espicially the Scots. Wait, that doesn't make much sense..."

"You're both idiots," Spike said.

Cyborg and Abel looked at him. Spike was alone and sitting on the ground awkwardly, Frankie helping him stay up. It was a mutual effort; both of them were so weary that neither of them had the strength to stand on their own for long, but together, they kept each other from falling apart. "Hey, what happened to the others?" Abel said.

"Over here!" Calvin said. Abel saw that he, Toph and Tucker were over at the truck with Winry, helping the survivors into the passenger seats on the cab; Toph had Earthbent chunks of the ground into crude gurneys for them, uncomfortable but it got them there without having to exert them, and Calvin helped get Bloo into the truck, in spite of his protests. (Bloo seemed adamant about getting back to the house, though he wasn't very coherent about why.)

Embarrased, they helped up Spike and Frankie and steered them towards the truck. "You were at Foster's, right?" Abel said. "What the hell happened! I heard the explosions and I saw...whatever that red light was about...and then there was another explosion! Explain, guys, EXPLAIN!"

"It doesn't exactly make a lot of sense when you do have it explained," Cyborg stated.

"Complete lunatic showed up not too long ago," Spike said gruffly. "Went around blowing shit up with his bare hands. Killed someone. The big-ups in the Foster's Security took him on and I helped. Then a whole lot of the houses around the property exploded; guess he rigged them to do it. No idea why. Then he started that red business and..." He gripped at his chest. "Haven't hurt that much since I got me soul shoved back in."

"Your what?" Calvin said; this triggered warning bells.

"Long story," Frankie said, employing a tone of voice that implied that he did not want to know.

"Oh, fine, in the truck with you, rambling vampire thing," Calvin said. "So...who wants to go check out what's happened to Foster's?"

"Sounds like fun," Toph said gamely. "Might as well make a good first impression and bring down some jerkass."

"That's what I was gonna do!" Cyborg said. "Well, maybe that and bring you guys your new vehicle."

"We're gonna die, aren't we?" Tucker said.

"It'd be dishonorable not to!" Abel said. "...Go and save people, not die. I don't have a martyr complex. Not any much. As such."

"You used to have a martyr complex?"

"In a sense. And by that, I meant I had a thing about making other people into martyrs. Don't like at me like that, boy, I invented that look." Tucker continued giving Abel a baffled look. "Yes! That's the one!"

"I'm going," Spike said grimly.

"Me too!" Bloo said.

"Me tre!" Eduardo said.

"Gotta go save our guys, right?" Frankie said.

"...No," Calvin said after a moment, speaking to Frankie, Bloo and Spike. "Just, no."

"What?" Spike said. "The hell are you on about!"

"Our friends could be dead!" Bloo said. "I'm not gonna sit here an'-"

"What could you possibly do if it came to a combat situation?" Calvin said coldly. "Stand there and be meat shields? An interesting idea, but it'd be stupid! Think. The bunch of you can barely stand up, let alone throw a punch or whatever."

"...You really expect us to leave the safety of the house and the residents to some guys we barely even know?" Frankie said. Cyborg and Abel coughed loudly; they most certainly knew her! "And you guys, but you're cool."

"Yes," Calvin said. "The alternative is you getting killed."

Spike and Frankie didn't seem very swayed by this argument at all. "Please think!" Abel asked. "He's got a...overly direct way of phrasing it, but he has a point! If worst comes to worst, it'll be combat, and you'd be a liability! And very easy to kill."

"Think your friends would like it if we pulled them out and you were all dead because you were too stubborn to get somewhere safe?" Toph said.

"...Fine," Frankie said sullenly, getting into the truck. "But don't you dare let anybody else die!"

"Wouldn't dream of it," Tucker said. "Not that I'll have much of an impact on things one way or another."

"Okay," Toph said, ignoring him. "I'm taking the wheel!"

"No way!" Cyborg said. "Ain't nobody that drives my babies when I'm around."

"Dang it."

Cyborg and Toph went rode to the driver's seat (no one dared argue with Toph there) and shotgun respectively, while everyone else took up a seat in the passengers; there were three rows of them, as this was a supply truck. (Cyborg had learned to make his team vehicles big. You never knew who might decide to team up with you; extra space paid off.) It took a touch of effort to adjust a seat for Eduardo's size and Cyborg opened the canopy so his horns didn't tear anything up, but they otherwise didn't have many problems.

The truck took off, the large cargo in the trailer behind it rattling a bit dispite being fastened down; it took up almost the entire trailer. "Hey, what's that thing you got back there?" Calvin asked.

"Insurance," Cyborg said grimly.

"...You didn't put a ton of weapons in my ship and decide to bring it with you, did you?"

"What? No. Your ship's back at my place, we'll get it set up after this is over."

"Oh, good." Calvin relaxed a bit. "I was, uh, worried that you would have my ship with you just when you happen to meet us. It would be so contrived! And therefore suspicious."

"Tell me; who thinks of something like that?" Cyborg paused. "Look, I gotta level with you, man. Any idea who designed your old ship's computer and systems? Because that thing is...weird. I've seen stuff like it, but only from the loonies in the Peerage. The guy who made it was a genius, no question, but he had to be completely out of his mind when he programmed it! Or drunk. The code's obviously adapted from basic stuff, but it's been warped into some seriously crazy business, it keeps doing not-right stuff with the tech...the ship'll work, but I wouldn't recommend that you start flying around it in a crowded city. Or a abandoned city. Or anywhere near someplace where it can conceivably go wrong."

"I designed the ship," Calvin said, not mentioned that it had been a joint venture between him, Jason Fox and Marcus; Calvin had designed the ship's technology while Jason did the computer stuff (Calvin helped a bit) and Marcus actually constructed it. (Given their respective talents, it was no surprise that things had gone amuck.)

There was a thick, awkard silence. "...Oh." Cyborg started up the truck (by splitting his forefinger open and ejecting the key into the ignition; the dashboard had an electic assortment of instruments that was a uneven mixture of 1950s knobs, dials and lit gauges; and a more space-faring tech predominatly with the glowing panels that displayed solid holograms that, among other things, made a flat steering wheel in the appropiate place) and looked awkwardly around. "Uh...awkward." It was all very awkward.

The truck lifted up and sped away; fortunately, a hospital was not too far away, according to a continually updated digital map Cyborg had. This was good, because the hospital in question had been equipped with sixteen giant feet that moved it around the district like the world's biggest motherly busybody, the scout-nurses hunting down people injured in fights. (They were, of course, en-route to Foster's, considering the explosions and such.)

Calvin was actually looking forward to some good honest adventuring. Also, he wanted to pilot his new ship, which would probably lead to acceptably entertaining hijinks.

...

Somewhere in the same general area but obviously NOT the same place, but it was the First District en route from the mall, so whatever...

It was a scene familiar to many an experienced Traverse Town resident of the First District when something bad was going down; Kim Possible's lucky blue car bouncing off rooftops, screaming down makeshift ramps and occasionally making life on the road living hell. Most people had the sense to take cover from the terrifying roar of the engine alone, and a few had taken the precaution of hiding in basement shelters just in case her traditional 'parkour driving' took a particularily unorthodox turn.

The screaming alien in her car was a bit of a surprise. As well as how crowded the car was.

"Faster faster faster!" Zim yelled, bouncing a bit when the car ran straight off a roof and landed on another, only to bounce off again. "Does this assemblege of parts not go faster!"

"You want faster, I can do faster!" Kim said, pulling a limit-release gauge on the dashboard from Well-In-Exceeds-Of-Fast to Crazy Taxi.

"ZIM!" Zuko roared as the car accelerated so fast that blue-white fire roared from heretofore hidden turbo emission-engines in the back and the car ran screaming right off the edge of a roof and kept going, a rocket-jump that could have crossed a small canyon. Fortunately, they didn't crash into an apartment tree in front of them because Kim just extended the retractable wings again, and with the force of her momentum and the favorable winds, they nearly flew. Quite quickly, too, and they simply switched gravitational alignment and then drove up the tree, brusing a few laws of physics in the process.

"I cannot believe that worked," Zim said. "Usually I just get someone telling me that they're students or cab-drivers or shamans, not race car drivers."

"I took some classes," Kim said modestly. It was hard to do when you were performing the kind of stunt that tends to infuriate certain types of overly realistic movie critics.

"I cannot believe we're back in this thing," Katara said, covering her eyes so she wouldn't have to see anything alarming, like a building coming at her.

"I think I'm gonna be sick," Sam said, looking a little green.

"Ack, not in the car!" Zim said, who was sandwiched between Sam and Katara. "I could get hit and stuff."

After the explosions and other nastiness had interrupted the training and shopping, Kim and Ron had dialed each other's communicators and the two groups had met up outside. On the roof. (But they'd quickly gotten downstairs owing to a convinient accident with a catapult and the world's biggest ball of yarn. Ron refused to explain why it had been there but hinted that it had been a surprise for a traveling kaijuu-kitten.) The idea was simple; go to Foster's and find out what the hell was going on. They were heroes and stuff; this sort of thing was their job. (And Zim thought that if he stopped an evil maniac, it might help his reputation. He hadn't been helping himself much in that regard. Also, it was probably his fault somehow.)

"At least it's better than getting hit in the face by lasers," Hobbes said, his larger mass making things uncomfortable for Sokka and Zuko. "Not by much!" Kim flipped the car over and hit a building wheel's-first and drove straight up it, gyroscopic stabilizers affixing their personal gravity so they didn't fall off. It wasn't a comfortable sensation. "Urk! Not gonna be sick, not gonna be sick!"

"First you guys show up by smashing a casino and now someone's blowing up Foster's or whatever!" Ron said from the shotgun-seat. "Town's really taking a beating lately!"

"I thought this sort of thing was usual business for you guys!" Sokka yelled.

"That thing with the scary red light isn't," Ron said. "Or explosions that big!"

The car roared over the edge of a rooftop and backflipped in midair. (No one fell out, because Kim had been very adamant about the seatbelts.) The wings deployed again, and they righted themselves and flew over the rooftop at the same time. "Eugh," Sam said. "Who taught you how to drive?"

"A tourist named Speed Racer," Kim said. "Why?"

"Rhetorical question-" The car slammed into a large metal loop that was stuck to the roof and the next three ones for no apparent reason; Kim used it as a track, the wheels automatically attracting themselves to the metal so they didn't fall off. "Why is there even a track thing there!"

"Stop questioning the logic! Your brain won't survive it!" Sokka said; he was in a shorter temper than usual; it was very cramped in the passenger's seats.

"YOU ARE THE GREATEST DRIVER EVER!" Zim yelled to Kim; his enthusasim was surprising, given that he was scrunched up between Katara and Sam. (Hobbes bitterly wanted to swap places with him, but Sokka was having none of it.)

"Wow, thanks!" Kim said; she'd rarely heard something like that before. Even Ron, who tended to treat her failing and flaws as good points in clever disguise, disapproved of her overly aggressive driving style. Flattered and excited, she turned up the speed dial to Patently Ridiculous, causing the wheels to split apart into little flight engines while the turbo roared; this had the result of them blasting off into the air in a short burst before falling down to the street and bouncing off. Also, lots of screaming. Lots of screaming.

"Why even that dial!" Sokka managed, with poor grammer.

"Ron, stop with the fetal position thing," Kim said as they bounced off the street again. "You look silly."

"Ron's not here right now," Ron said from the floor, his voice a bit muffled. "But if you would like to leave a message, it will be forwarded as soon as possible..."

Zuko facepalmed. It would have better to bang his head against a wall, but he made do. After Kim nearly smashed through a building and dialed down on the speed, he was comfortable enough to say, "How are we supposed to find Aang's group? Toph's group is supposed to be in that general area, so no worries, but Aang could be anywhere! You know how he is!"

"I'm sure we'll just meet up with him on the way somehow," Katara said. "...But what exactly are we going to do when we get there?"

"Er, what?" Hobbes said. "...Oh. The 'and then what' point. Is it just me, or do we end up running around and just doing things a lot?"

"We should have some vauge semblence of a plan!" Zuko said. "I'm the first one to want to go help people, and those people at the house helped us. We owe them. And likewise, it's probably half of our respective duties to hunt down people that do stuff like making that explosion happen. But we should have a plan! Even the skeletons of one; that works best, you can build them up as you go. But just running to the scene and hoping it works out?"

"I have a plan," Zim said unexpectedly.

"Care to share with the rest of the class?" Sam said.

"It is the very easiest of plans." Zim grinned like a madman, the wind whipping his antannae so furiously it hurt, but he appeared indifferent. It was no trick that for a moment, his excited exhalation carried embers and smoke. "We burn them. We will fall upon them and make them burn. They shall burn until their works fall to ash, and the smoke clouds their voices. Whatever their plans, whatever their purpose or grudges? They burn all the same. Burn burn burn burn burn." He paused. "Fire is pretty."

A brief horrified silence greeted him. "That's a pretty good plan," Zuko said thoughtfully.

"No it's not," Katara said sternly. "Zim, do you need to go back on the medication?"

Zim grimaced. "No..."

"What was that? I couldn't hear you!"

"I said no!"

"Then start acting like it, little mister!"

"I'M OLDER THAN YOU ARE!"

"Then start acting like that too!"

"Sorry to break up the team dynamics," Kim said to Katara as they pulled to a stop on a rooftop. "But I don't think we'll have to look for your boyfriend much longer."

"Huh?" Katara said.

Ron pointed; up in the sky, to the apparent interest of lots of people on their own rooftops, was a short message written in lines of red-yellow flame, moving with the wind and burning without fuel. They said, Bad stuff going on at Foster's! Meet us right here! -Aang. Beneath that was a slightly smaller arrow pointing at a distant building. Also, a P.S.: Don't come snooping if you're not my friend! It's not polite to be nosy!

"...Aang doesn't have much to do with subtlety," Sokka explained to Kim and Ron.

"Ah," They both said.

The car took off again in another rocket-jumped that became flight.

They crossed rooftops and streets with great ease, the curious, the bored and those desirous of a team-up scattering in utter horror of being near Kim Possible when she was driving: in short order (due to her frickin' insane speed and absurd use of driving stunts better suited to the more outrageous of anime films), and when her car smashed into the rooftop thus indicated by the giant burning arrow in the sky, it startled Appa badly enough to almost make him fall off the roof in surprise.

"Hey, they found us," Danny said as Scar warily moved behind one of Appa's legs.

"It wasn't that hard," Kim said, unlocking the doors. They fell open, and the overcrowded backseats were swiftly emptied of their occupants, Hobbes, Zuko and Sokka spilling out on one side and Zim, Katara and Sam out of the other; a few of them whimpered a bit. Kim's driving was a frightful menace. Zim just giggled madly.

Aang snickered at the sight of it from atop Appa's head. "It's like watching a clown car!"

"I show you clowns!" Sokka said, a bit muffled from Zuko and Hobbes' weight.

"Learn some proper angry grammer," Zuko said, a trifle hypocritically.

"Stop ranting about getting what you think is a proper education. Spoilt Fire Nation prince."

"Water Tribe hick that can't even track a tiger-seal."

"Your dad's a jerk," Sokka said, with great understatement.

Zuko said, "Your grandfather-by-marriage is a misogynic curmudegon."

"How'd you know that?"

"I had to spend a day around him at the camp, remember? And Aang tells me stuff."

"Oh. Think you guys can get off me now?" They did.

The girls and Zim had already gotten up; Sam made a beeline for Danny and locked her arms around him with such ferocity that no one would have dared seperate them for fear of horrible doom. "You. Suck. You suck so bad!" Sam told him. "Do you have any idea what kind of idiocy I've had to deal with!"

"Huh?" Danny said.

"I had to fight lunatic shopping idiots in powered armor! Me! I don't do big fight scenes! Next time, you can go to the freaky place with the curb-stompers who get trouble like you do!"

"...Okay," Danny said, not entirely sure what was going on. He hugged her anyway.

"Hey, Boss," Morte said, floating down from Appa as Zim approached. "Feeling up for a touch 'a fighting? This sort of thing always ends up in fighting."

"Hello," Zim said to Scar, completely ignoring Morte. "I understand that this exploding and red light stuff is unusual even for this town."

Scar nodded curtly. "...I feel that this will not end well for anyone."

"Oh, come on!" Morte yelled. "He's not even on your crew! Pay attention to me, dammit!"

Zim glanced at Morte. "...Who are you?" Morte uttered a strangled scream that suggested he would quite like to strangle someone. Probably Zim.

Aang Airbended a twisting disc larger than the roof that he funneled into a column and slid it into the sky, wiping the burning letters out of the sky. (Disappointing the people who were following it to see what the deal was. But they were nosy and impolite.) "Who wants to ride on Appa?" He asked.

"ME!" Hobbes, Sokka, Katara and Zuko all said. Even for those who were...uncomfortable with the prospect, it was a marked sight better riding a ten-ton flying beast then being in Kim's car when she was driving it.

Kim sulked. "...So this is what it's like to be the unpopular one..."

"Relax, arbitary ostracizion and isolation aren't that bad when you have precisely one person backing you up," Ron said. "I've lived with it practically all my life until things got awesome. You got me, right?" Kim smiled faintly.

"I like your driving," Zim said.

"That's because you're insane!" Sokka said, already in Appa's seat.

"Thank you!"

"I shall accompany you," Scar said. "They are in need of more room now on the litter anyway."

"You don't want to abandon me either?" Kim said, her eyes a-sparkle.

Scar paused. "...Once, Ishvala spoke, and it has been passed down in the holy scriptures and teachings of the warrior-monks as this, rendered in our inexplicably common language: Endure. In enduring, grow strong."

"...And now I'm a living test of character," Kim said. "Joy."

"Deadpan snarking is a mark of wit."

"Guess I can live with that."

"Perhaps we should regroup with those that remain of us?" Zim said.

"You mean Toph's bunch?" Aang said. He smiled and held up hands that burned from within. "I got an idea for that..."

With that settled, they respectively piled into their car and Sky Bison litter, the two groups rejoining and taking off once more.

...

Deep under Traverse Town...

There are places under Traverse Town that run deeper than many know and more suspect. Tunnel-warrens below even the Underdistrict. Places guarded by mysterious sentinels and avoided by the sensible, where the dust of the ancients had not yet been cleared away and yet were still filled with the disintegrated ashes of the aeons-long dead, corridors and subterranean buildings filled with still-functioning thinking engines and self-maintaining machines and living libraries and other wonders that remained undiscovered except by the few who had stumbled onto them and kept their secrets.

There was a particular complex nestled deep under the division between the Beach District and the First District, bolstered with a ancient force field to keep it secure in the shifting earth and preventing flooding from happening. It was not a large complex, but it was big enough for the exploits of the twisted mad genius that had once dwelled there, convinced that the town could be the begining of her vision for turning the world into a ecological wonderland born in fevered dreams from her breakthrough as a mad scientist. A grand vision of six-legged beasts with tendrils and flying vehicle-rhinos, where dragons roared from the abandoned buildings and all the people had been freed from the constraints of species evolution to freely mutate into forms more properly befitting their stature as sentients mighty enough to survive the darkness. Buildings that lived. Machines that loved. (But they had plenty of those already.) A ever-growing and shifting menagerie of wonders fit to take this world for their own and make a stand against the horrors set to consume the multiverse and take back the lost spirits of their dead, one Heartless at a time. In this many-chambered, self-maintained, perfectly protected place, she salvaged ancient technologies with her great genius and applied her gift for the biological sciences to create hybrid-beasts, whether of animals or things that blurred the lines between machine and beast overmuch, and she got far enough before Jarod (in his role as the Pretender) had found her lost lair through a series of third-party contacts she used to supply herself without letting any of them on and questioning those servants of her's that dwelled outside as the vanguard for her eventual takeover. He didn't defeat or kill her, but convinced her of the error of her ways; that mad scientist had since joined the Peerage, ashamed and confused, and now made a living as a vetinerian with a hobby in creating life. (She made custom pets and brought extinct species back from the dead as smaller, cuter versions when they paid for it, or as the real thing when it was a conservationist issue. She hadn't had a single backlash since the incident with mixing up the terrorbird and dodo genomes.)

Jarod had since taken over her complex with her permission, and he had refitted the place for his own ends. This basically amounted to selling off all the old technology the mad biologist had left behind (for reasonable prices and under no less than sixteen pseudonyms over the intergalactic auctions, of course) and using the money to purchase and move in a battery of computers, survillence technology, a very small but operable forge-factory, his own personal armory, and, among many other things, the world's only drink dispensor in the shape of a Pez dispensor. (The man loved his Pez.) Since then, he'd hacked into the cameras scattered throughout the town so he could keep an eye on things. He'd done the same towards the private survillence of just about all the important and dangerous people, and coupled with his enormous list of contacts, information guys, semi-friends and anonymous tipsters he paid regularly, he was a very well-informed man indeed. (He was properly paranoid.) The place had become something like a secret base for him, more so after he modified it even more to connect to various secret tunnels and entrances all over the town to enable him to move in secret; he was honestly uncomfortable with it all, as it reminded him entirely too much of the secret organization he had grown up and been controlled by as a child, but he endured. He had a job to do; taking down the corrupt and evil, one poetic act of justice at a time.

There are those, among the multiverse, who are said to be incarnations of that idea known as the nemesis; an unstoppable force sent by the heavens to punish the wicked and avenge the good. Men and women who could not be defeated or stopped. Could not be held back by any false authority. Who burn with a rage at the inherent injustice of the multiverse, who would tear it apart and force mercy and justice into it if they could, and build a path to a proper state of existence on the suffering and screams of the evil.

When people said that under the goofy affability the Pretender was a very scary man, they meant it.

So. Alone, and away from the people he so desperately needed to have around, he endured regardless, now sitting at a computer monitor sitting on a desk, a keyboard with a touchpad on sticking out of the monitor, bulky enough to hide the essential operating hardware inside. Cables ran out of the back and entered the walls and banks of computer towers hooked into each other, tapping into wireless signals and hitchhiking on other signals that transfered video/audio captures from all over the town. It was collected as data, and countless Web pages and online news entires were scanned by other computers, all of it fed into other computers specifically designed to analyze all this data and create likely scenarios and possibility projections to within seventy-five percent accuracy, all for Jarod to keep ahead of his enemies and figure out their plans or discover on-going probability trends to give estimations on whatever they would result in and make contingency plans for each and every one. (The computers were seperate for security reasons, even though they were bolstered by anti-virus and firewall programs Jarod had programmed himself, light-years ahead of anyone else.)

And that was just for starters.

Jarod was too deep down to have felt the explosions from up-top as more than a momentary collection of rumblings, the first ones barely more than a tremble from the ceiling, while the final one was powerful enough to get his attention. But that paled next to the influx of data run through his computers amd brought to his attentions like a swift kick in the teeth by the teeth.

News programs, broadcasting emergency news after they found out from their own video/audio recorders over the area. Panicked calls by the surviving bystanders. Crossguard and Justice Maines hailing each other over (theoretically) private frequencies and urging their fellows to get the hell over there and do something. Numerous unaffiliated but altruistic heroes and adventurers calling in their friends and people that knew when things were going on.

So very little that was concrete.

Jarod's machines, born and harnessed of his will, found it all. They assembled the disparate bits of information in such a short time, and assembled four prospectives on what had happened, along with theories on what the maniac who had done this wanted, how to find and stop him, and what the heck was going on to begin with. And still more were coming.

Jarod tapped a finger on the keyboard as he finished the last of the reports. He seriously doubted that, as the computer claimed among other things, it was a twisted eldritch abomination tearing it's way into reality, the act of the harbringer of a cult of destruction or a random mad bomber just killing people out of boredom. Not everything was accounted for. He suspected the data was incomplete - the purpose of the previous explosions, so unerring precise, and the blazing red lightflashes that had somehow killed more than half of the Foster's populace before the place was destroyed in a final blast of light and the survivors had escaped, those things were unaccounted for - and until he discerned what that was, he could not act. A plan with incomplete data was one doomed to fail without outstanding luck, and Jarod didn't like the idea of trusting people's lives to chance.

The explosions and the red light were more important somehow. They struck him as being significant. And the sudden ferocity of that final blast...it didn't make much sense. If destruction of Foster's was desired, why not do that to begin with?

Five explosions. Powerful enough to crack the ground and make a neat circle shape around the house; shallow, but recognizable. That was important. The suggestion of an idea teased him, but so did six others. He considered them all, but that first one was a half-formed ghost, eluding him.

Jarod was getting worried.

He made up his mind, coming up with a course of action as he got up. It was dangerous; he still wasn't certain of this new instigator's actions and he still didn't have concrete conclusions, but he had very strong suspicions, and his suspicions had an annoying tendency to be right. Right now, things seemed to require a...hand's on approach.

He set up his computer to continually adapt data analysis as more information was fed into it and to send the results to a receiver/reading device in his watch. (It was a simple device; it only received information from these computers and were acessed via a holographic interface. Jarod had adapted it from a Hitchhiker's guide interface.) With that last bit dealt with, he went to a phone and dialed up a number of someone he was currently dealing with, in the form of convincing them to work for him under the guise of community service for trying to take over the town a few times.

"Who the devil is this?" The peevish voice of Stewie Griffin said. "I'm quite busy, you know! I've half a mind to hunt you down and burn your house down! Then I would remove your eyes and shove them down your pants, so that you may witness me beating the crap out of you! Then I'll use you tongue to paint my boat."

"You don't have a boat," Jarod said.

"I'll get one! Oh, it's you. Whatever do you want? I helped you track down those buffoons from that odd interworld kingdom from some twisted universe or another. Are they even in conjunction with our own?"

"They are now," Jarod said. "The dimensional-sifting is getting worse. And as for what I want...I assume you heard about the damage at Foster's?"

"What about Foster's? Did I miss something?"

"...You could say that. Go get into a smaller vehicle that won't attract much attention and meet me there."

"...Bah, if you insist. Why do I even bother working for you?"

"Because," Jarod said coolly. "If you don't keep to your end of our little bargain or try to kill me to wriggle out of this, I have many means of exposing your crimes against humanity, decency, common sense and sexuality sterotypes to destroy all your plans forever." He held this threat over Stewie's head like a sword, in case Stewie inevitably started acting like a classical megalomaniac again with all the horrors that entailed, and unless his attempt to reform Stewie worked out, it really would be inevitable. He wasn't certain if it would turn out well, though he had met with some success. At least now Stewie freely used his genius for the common good instead of being a selfish monster of a midget. (Jarod was convinced that Stewie wasn't a baby at all but a very small person, or perhaps even a nebulous entity that masquereded as a child. He just did not have the characteristics of an infant.)

"I was speaking rhetorically!"

"Really? Sorry, I don't have the hang of figurative speech. I'd prefer it if people said what they meant." He hung up, no doubt infuriating Stewie, and chuckled as he made his way to an elevator that tunneled into a sub-basement under a house he owned under a false name in the First District; it would be a short walk from there to Foster's.

It paid to be prepared.

...

Stature had broken her way out of the evacuation sphere she and a few others had been caught in, in spite of feeling like her life had nearly been torn from her body, but that had been exhausting for her; it had been hard enough to grow to a size where she could exert enough strength to do it without growing so large she crushed the others or broke herself.

So, lying among bent pieces of metal that was flowing and growing bits of leaves and doing stuff metal really wasn't supposed to do, she had lost a little control and grown to a bit under twenty feet and sat against the side of a small apartment building, her hair peeking over the rooftop and her back pressing into the wall to make a sizable impression in it. Her legs were curled up so she didn't take up the street, and she'd positioned herself such that no one was inconvienced by having a giant girl in the way.

She shivered. She felt...violated. The red light had washed over her and she'd almost died back there. Like so many people did. More than the pain, that hurt; for all her strength, she couldn't save anybody. That had been the evacuation system's doing. All she had done was fight the madman that had done it, and without doing any good for it.

Stature hugged herself. She had failed. That was the truth of it. She had failed.

"Unh..." A small (from her perspective) lump said, somewhere near where the swell of her hip met the pavement. Rustling cloth was answered by metal grinding against metal; she turned very slightly to push Razor up on his shoulders now he was awake, feeling intensely glad that she had been near enough to him for them both to get sucked up into the same evacuation sphere along with a few other guards.

"Razor?" She whispered. "Are you okay?"

"...No, but I'm breathing..." Razor said, his voice cracking.

"...That's good enough," Stature said, trying not to laugh in relief.

A fist-sized lump of water hit the ground. "...What're you cryin' for?" Razor asked her, managing to grin a little, his mismatched eyes dimming. "We're alive. Good enough."

"Yeah..." Stature said, wiping at her eyes. "We can go back and finish this."

"Okay...s'right...maybe get some back-up first," Razor muttered, leaning forward and closing his eyes. His breathing eased into a gentle rhythm.

"...Okay," She said, and folded her arms over her knees. Reinforcments. That was a good idea. Get some people together and kick that Kimblee lunatic's ass and hand him over to the Justice Marines. Get the survivors together. Rebuild Foster's.

Same old, same old. The way it always worked out. Sometimes she wished they could cut out the middlemen and stop people from dying.

She was so tired.

Stature had no idea how much time passed between her dozing off and the sudden wind that blew her hat off and her hair over her face (Five minutes? Fifteen? Half an hour? A full hour? Longer?). She blew her hair back and reached down to pick her truck-sized hat off the ground, and a small weight landed on her head. She blinked, a strand of her hair being tugged, and a small green person swung into view, using that strand like a vine in a jungle-movie.

Zim landed on her nose, a manically grinning alien with a fire in him that roused her. "You're that guy that Mr. Herrimen talked to," Stature said dully. She would haven shaken her head, to clear it, but she didn't want to knock the little guy off.

"Hello," Zim said. "My friends and I have a proposition for you and your organization as a whole."

"Wha?"

"Hi," Another one said, from her shoulder. Stature very delicately looked over, so she didn't upset Zim, and saw a tiger-boy; the tiger waved cheerily and grinned in a way that made her feel a bit warm and fuzzy inside, a bit like the way Peter Parker did when he was being an adorable dork. "I assume you're in the way of looking for big damn heroes. Do we qualify?"

"Hey, look," Razor said dreamily. The other guards were sitting up as well, some more along then others. "Back-up's here already. That was quick."

"Yay," Nidah said faintly. She fell back and her head landed on someone's back. "Owie."

Zim hopped down, caught himself on the lapel of her long coat, and jumped over to a windowsill; his Pak split, spider-leg attachments extending and adhering to the building wall. He scaled it, jerking and twitching and generally being spooky; Stature turned her head to watch him, and saw that waiting on top of the apartment building was a serious-looking bison-creature; it had a litter on it's back, and it was stuffed full of people. "Hello," Said a nice-looking boy riding on his head, with an elaborate arrow-shaped tattoo on his head and a flight helmet under his arm. He put it on, and the bison-thing flapped it's tail; a blast of wind propelled it up, and then down to the ground by the other guards and residents she'd gathered up.

The people on board looked at her. "Huh," A cute-looking Inuit teen said. "Grow 'em big in this town, do you?"

"Too tired...to snark..." Stature said. "Or swat."

"I'll take that as implying that you're a special case."

A multitude of engines roared; a bunch of motorized vehicles came down the street, and at their head was a blue car, driven by a red-headed girl she vaugely knew, and those behind her were ambulances and a number of trucks that were mostly the muscle ambulances of Damage Control; it was their job to show up at nasty incidents and get the injured to safety and first aid, and later to fix the damage. Property restitution was another matter, of course.

"Hey, looks like they got our message," The boy with the flight helmet said.

"Wha' message?" Nidah slurred.

"The one I burned into the sky."

"...get a answer, more questions..."

The car slowed and stopped, as did a blue-and-white truck behind her. "Guess who we found at the Walking Hospital!" Kim said.

"Hoy!" Calvin yelled, sticking his head out of that truck's window.

"Oh good, I was worried you'd done something insane," Hobbes said mildly. "As par the course."

"They're coming out like weevils," Razor observed. "...Yay?"

The Damage Control ambulances came to a stop quite near Stature, and operatives came out with wheeled stretchers and first aid kits and scanners made bulky with guages and LED screens and boxes of kittens for emotional problems...they had lots more of that kind of stuff but Stature didn't really pay attention. They immediately went to fussing over the other survivors and politely asking Stature to shrink herself to a more managable size; Stature noticed that the other ambulances kept going past them, and she hoped that it was because they were going to collect more at the designated Foster's evacuation sights. (This was, in fact, the case.)

Scar left Kim's car and went directly to Nidah, helping her up into a offered stretcher. She was his kinswoman; they were both Ishbalan, last of a race too stubborn to see their world vanish and say that it implied their doom: they had faith in their continued survival, and that faith would simply refuse to let them die. "Hey. Godhand Scar," Nidah said. "Heh. The real heroes are always late."

"Do not demean yourself," Scar said. "You are not some faceless extra meant to show off the villains strength to make the hero look better."

"Really hope so. It'd suck to be a random person thrown in at the last minute." She laid down in the stretcher, sighing deeply. "Master Scar...we are in so much danger."

Scar said nothing, but he quietly gestured for her to go on.

She smiled faintly. "I was there. I saw what he did. He exploded the houses...killed people. Made that red light happen and it killed more people...heard the other explosion too." She laughed. "Figures that we'd get away in the nick of time, you know? Up to his old tricks, that crazy psychopath..."

"Who?" Zim asked her urgently. "Who did it! I need someone to aim the guns at. If I can find any. Did I bring my guns? Must check."

"Spike said it was some nut named Kimblee," Cyborg said, sticking his head out of the truck.

Scar froze. He went completely still, his eyes wide and curiously blank. His expression was a mix between Oh shit and I really should have seen this coming. "...You are certain," He said after a moment.

"Hmn, Spike is a bit of a dumbass," Calvin said.

"No mistake," Nidah said. With unexpected fervor, she reached out and grabbed Scar's collar, bringing him closer. Medics swarmed, with restraints and tranquilizers at the ready, but Scar waved them away. "I saw him. Fought him. Bastard blew me off the roof, same as he nearly blasted my jaw off way back when!" She laughed again, and it had a ragged half-mad edge to it. "I was there and it was just the same as Ishbal, that monster standing up there like a god and handing down death and laughing about it!

"No lie, no exaggeration, no bullshit and please listen, the Red Lotus Alchemist is HERE! He killed us at Foster's and he did some crazy alchemy that didn't touch our bodies but killed us anyway and he blew up some buildings to do it first!"

"We're not going to like the implications of that, are we?" Hobbes said.

Scar didn't turn to look at him. "...You should leave," He said after a moment.

"What!" Zim said.

"You have your ship prepared, right?"

Cyborg frowned. "Well, it'll fly, but-"

"Then go. This is not the correct place for you to get involved! You...you have no idea what Kimblee is capable. What he has done. To me. He will not stop here, and he will destroy you if it amuses him." His voice turned soft. "Flee, and attend to your own works. This business is our's, and it is mine to end him."

"Nope," Zim said. "I got here first, so I have dibs on kicking this guy in the teeth, hah!" He paused, and added generously, "But after I remove his arms for backscratchers, I'll be certain to give you a shot at his head."

Scar stared at him. "This is not a joke. I mean it. Kimblee is not to be trifled with. You are putting yourselves in grave danger simply standing in a place he has happened to walk by."

"I fought a man who tried to abuse the power of the Great Comet to set the world on fire," Aang said grimly. "...We've been in worse danger tons of time. We won't just leave you guys like that because you say so."

"Besides, there's no problem that point-blank anhillation won't solve!" Calvin added optimistically.

Scar seemed undeterred. "Your bravado lends little to your understanding of the situation. You must not put yourselves in harm's way like this-"

"Oh, let them go!" Abel called out. "Everybody gets a free shot at being awesome when they come here! Do you really want to stain their honor by shooing them away because the monster is that mean?"

"...Do not confront Kimblee," Scar said finally. "And I will not permit him to ruin what little hope you have left." He turned to Nidah, who had been patiently watching this argument. "...Nidah. Kimblee will not leave this town. That is my solemn oath."

She looked at him, full of naked hope and grief and a frightening hate directed at a single man with empty eyes and the shapes of death in his palms. "Tell me."

"I swear it on the blood of Ishbal, the blood of our people. I break it never, lest my life take it instead."

"By the grace of Ishvala," She whispered. "Send him to his judgement. No revenge. No human justice. Put that monster down like the rabid dog he is."

"I will." Those two words, coming from Scar, were formed with such raw sincerity, and born of hatred mingling with grief and loss for so long that it had become something red-hot and half-insane, were far more terrifying than any longer statement could have been. It didn't sound like a vow, or a promise. It was a simple statement of fact. This shall be so.

Zim laughed. He had no idea what the hell they were talking about, but it sounded like it involved killing a bad guy in the face and that prospect made him all giggly. "Hey hey," He said, looking down at Cyborg. "The guy that's fixing me a ship. Wanna come and do some good?" Zim somehow made that sound like an invitation to causing the Apocalypse.

Cyborg grinned. "I barely know you and I have no idea what the hell I'm getting into, but why not!"

In quite a short time, they returned to their modes of transport (whether truck, car or Sky Bison) and headed straight to Foster's, followed by a number of ambulances, a few curious bystanders, a hero or four, and just behind them now, something was following them. Something that made the ground shake a little where it walked. Something big.

As it approached, Stature quietly shrank down to a relatively petite six feet (from her perspective; she spent a lot of time much bigger than most people in Traverse Town, because giants didn't really fit. The biggest people had forged a friendly allied town in the mountains) and allowed the medics to assist her into a stretcher.

Damn it, Andre...Freya... She thought as a mechanical behemoth loomed over her, immense and blocky and non-threatening. I'm sorry I couldn't save anyone. Some hero I ended up being.

"You're alive now, aren't you? And your friend? Could have been much worse."

The voice came from her side. She looked and saw Lu-Tze in a orderlie's uniform. Her mouth opened wide, and Lu-Tze put a finger to his mouth. She quieted, and wondered why no one had yet noticed the stranger in their midst. Perhaps they didn't notice him at all, or maybe he had always been there, from their perspective...

Still, she had to admit that maybe Lu-Tze had a point, and smiled just a little.

...

On the outskirts of the more densely populated part of the First District that Foster's was (or had been) the center of, a bus screamed onto the corner of a bus-stop; it is difficult to ascribe emotion or mood to an inanimate object, even a sentient one when it doesn't have a clear means of expressing itself, but this bus found a way, it's wheels spinning at a pace similiar to somone walking very fast because they were extremely nervous.

It slammed it's brakes down, opened it's doors, and by dint of a ejector seat, mobile floor and a acute sense of geometry, shoved a certain man out and onto the sidewalk before it drove out of there so fast that a few immaterial passing spirits were frightened. (Fortunately, they were concept-spirits born from the need for excessive speed, so they were delighted about it and proceeded to 'arrange' things so that the bus could move really fast for a long time.)

The man, one Commander-Admiral Roy Mustang, stood up and dusted himself off, checking his pocket to make sure his ignition gloves were still there (strictly speaking, he didn't actually need the gloves to fight, assuming he was in the appropiate environment, but it made things much more efficient; all combat alchemists figured it out sooner or later), and put his hat back on his head after finding it nearly under a trash can. "Damn panicky buses," He muttered to himself. "...Things must have gotten bad if they're that nervous." Most people didn't take the neurosises that tended to develoup among sophisticated AIs very seriously (after all, it was better than them going crazy and killing everyone); Roy Mustang, on the other hand, did. This was partially because he came from a world without robotics, so he had no pre-deterimined opinions about killer robots anyway.

"Now the buses are going crazier?" A nearby pedestrian complained. "I thought it was bad enough that they were just skirting the place, and now they're dumping people on the streets."

"Easy for you to say," Roy grumbled. "You're not the one who met the street ass-first...that sounded less wrong in my head."

"Sure did," said the pedestrian, a humanoid brass-colored dragon about a head short of ten feet of bruiser-material. He did a double-take. "Ah! Commander-Admiral Mustang! I didn't recognize you! Uh, sir!" He saluted awkwardly. poorly imitating a television-inspired idea of what military people did.

"Calm down, you're not under my command yet," Roy said evenly. "Not much point in adhering to discipline that doesn't even apply to you. And your hand isn't supposed to be jabbing against your horn like that."

"Ah. I was wondering why it was hurting so badly."

Roy knew the value of informants. "I heard there was some sort of large disaster going on around Foster's Home. Know anything about it, er..." Roy racked his memory. He made it a point of pride to remember people's name and the faces to go with them, though given Traverse Town's population and the ease of census taking (at least when people didn't decide to leave town for a bit) didn't make this very hard. "Dolanja Hamslapper."

The half-dragon gasped. "You know my name! The Flame Alchemist knows my name!" He skipped about on the spot.

Roy raised an eyebrow, waiting for Dolanja's little happy dance of joy to stop. "Apparently. So...like I asked...?"

"Oh! Right. Well! I heard from my buddy's foster-uncle's grocer's doctor's sister's husband's grandpa's priest's sifu's bandage salesman's daughter's son's wife's overly long gag instructor that some nut went and blew up Foster's Home and did a freaky flashy light-thing and killed half the people there!"

Roy blinked. He'd been going cross-eyed from the stupidity of that statement. "...You really heard that from all those people in less then ten minutes?"

"We're a very tight-knit circle. And we got telepathy implants in our heads! Doesn't work so well. Radio interference. And the minor problem of going a little insane from overexposure to perverted thoughts. My girlfriend has a thing for tea cozies and this one sock in the worst way..."

Roy tried very hard not to think about that. "You're sure about that stuff about Foster's? No exaggeration?"

"Sure! Well, aside from everything else I heard. You want to know?"

"Uh...ah, thank you," Roy said. He was trying very hard not to freak out. "I'll just...uh, go now."

Dolanja waved at Roy as the Flame Alchemist left; the half-dragon did not question just why Roy, such a high-ranking member in one of the most powerful factions in town, should be rushing over to a potential incident by himself without any clear authorization as to why the incident deserved his attention: that sort of thing was normally reserved for full-scale invasions or wide-spread Heartless attacks.

Foster's true significance was not widely known, or else more people would attack it. Roy hurried; if the building had been attacked...(or Truth forbid, wiped out), the entire First District was at risk.

"Huh," Roy said to himself as he went on his way. He really meant, in the privacy of his head, What the hell is going on here! Foster's was DESTROYED! The people there are DEAD! Shit shit shit!

Foster's very structure was a bulwark against the flood. The things that destroyed their worlds and corrupted their people still lurked in the dark and lonely frontier of this town that was still largely a stranger to them all; most people assumed that the occasional pack of Heartless or roaming Soldier-type were all they had to fear, with the occasional mecha-sized one to liven things up. They were only drops, trickling through the dam. Foster's Home was a central part of the defenses that had been rigged by geniuses and research-priests after they had realized the import of what Hohenheim had left on the subject of the Heartless' ways of breaking into these universes and more of them would becoming, they would drown in a sea of darkness and blood and fire and the unstoppable tide-

Roy had gone a few blocks, thinking things in these general theme before he realized he had already seen, just at the edge of observance, a duo of figures flickering around the rooftops, only appearing for a moment before they were gone again, but long enough for him to see them.

He was being followed. By people that wanted him to know about it.

Roy ducked into an alley and took stock of his options before he climbed up a nearby ladder, shimmied atop a thick windowsill and hauled himself up to the rooftop.

No sooner had he gotten to his feet than he saw the teenaged Xingian boy smiling mysterious at him from atop a air conditioning unit, a green-skinned woman in a matching outfit next to him. "Hello," said Lin Yao. "Took you long enough to notice, Commander-Admiral Mustang."

"For a guy with fire for a theme, you're not too hot on the mark," Shego remarked.

Roy grimaced; insults from a beautiful woman always stung hard for him. "That's pretty far to go for a fire-related pun."

"Eh, I work with what I got."

Roy glanced around the rooftop; no one else was there. He sighed in relief. Lin's other bodyguard was...not pleasant to be around. "What do you want, Yao? I have something important to deal with."

"Oh my, you're being a bit short-tempered," Lin said, grinning like a jerk. "More so than usual. Always a pain to have a nice day interrupted by duty, isn't it? Such is the tribulations of authority."

Roy raised an eyebrow. "...Haven't gotten over being an Emperor-to-be, have you."

Lin grinned again, but this time his teeth looked...wrong. Sharp and pointed, almost like a shark's. "Who says I'm not going to rule?" He said, and his voice had an odd reverb; two voices speaking at once, another one overlapping Lin's.

One of Lin's eyes was turning red.

Roy didn't rise to comment. One got used to such half-transformations after a while, and the ambitions of Lin (or was it Greed?) was simple snarking material for Roy. Most of the time. "Why are you following me?" He said. "You're up to something."

"You could say that, yeah," Shego said.

"I presume you heard about the...incident at Foster's Home, didn't you?" Lin asked, a hint of Greed's voice lapping at the edges fervently. "Five houses destroyed before hand. Some sort of massive light show that sounds quite similar to Amestrian alchemy. And all kinds of people just dropping dead."

Roy didn't say anything. Lin suspects. Greed knows.

Lin continued. "And then...well, as some people might say, 'shit got worse'." He glanced at Roy. "I saw Foster's, you know. It got worse, Mustang. Much worse." Roy continued to say nothing. He'd seen those pictures too. He was in a hurry for a reason. 'Pick up the survivors'. 'Clean up the mess'. 'Take down those responsible'. That was standarding operating procedure in scale-problems like this, and he'd already ordered squads to the population-dense areas just in case the worst happened.

He didn't like silence very much. "Where's your other bodyguard? The stupid one."

Shego snickered. "Funny you should mention that, spark-fingers."

"Yeah," The boy by her said. And this time, it was definitely the voice of Greed. "It's a funny thing, Mustang; we put two and two together. Not hard, with two minds to work with. And I'm sure you know what happened there."

"I do, huh?" Roy said neutrally. He didn't trust Greed all that much. He liked Lin and Greed well enough, but he just wasn't sure where they stood on the alignment grid.

Greed laughed and stood up, sauntering over to Roy. "Come on, don't be so stand-offish, Flame Alchemist. Don't act like we're two of those idiots you have to deal with. We're from the same world; in this situation, that practically makes us...family, doesn't it? Human, homunculus...what's a little species differentation mean considering what we've been through?

"Me and you, Scar and Ed, Armstrong and her brother, Missus Curtis (Or is it Mrs. Gibbs now?) the other guys...we all fought off the Heartless as long as we could. We saved so many of our own people! Enough to make the records for the most survivors. We kept them alive, even after my 'Father' got his psychopathic ass chewed up by the darkness and his shell of a skin spit back out! And more than that: we're conspirators. Ready and willing to do the impossible for the sake of the future."

"The Promised Day never happened," Roy reminded him wearily. "We never really got the chance to take down your Father and the other homunculi." Or avenge our friends, he thought with a pang, remembering a eternally happy man with rectangular glasses and a pocket full of his wife and daughter's pictures. The friend he had failed to save. "I don't know that we can call each other conspirators."

"Intent is pretty much the same thing as going to do it," Shego remarked. Roy frowned, but nodded in consent.

This talk of their failure to save their world from the conspiracy they'd known about and the horrors that caught them completely off-guard was making the hidden marks around his false eye itch, old scars acting up.

"Yao...Greed...whoever the hell I'm talking to. You're leading up to something and I don't think I like where it's going."

Greed grinned. "You're a smart guy, Mustang. See, we both saw that red light. Very familiar, wasn't it? I'm no alchemist-"

"Or me," Lin chimed in.

"Yeah, that, my point is that we both recognized just what that sort of light means. I mean, I'd be a complete idiot not to, y'know? It's pretty unmistakable at the site. Even with all the wreckage.

"But I realized something," Greed said. "Or rather, I did," Lin's voice added, their dual-voices shifting towards his. "It's a bit stupid to go off on a hunch...even such a staggering clear one. So, given that Foster's little evacuation system was working, I figured, hey, let's go find some survivors that know something!

"And, to make a short story even shorter, we did. A few confused guards, some very traumatized residents...but we found someone with a clearer head, with a eye for detail. Someone who knows first-hand what went down and isn't too panicked to confuse details." Lin grinned again. "And then...who else should I find going to the scene of the crime but you! A powerful alchemist, and one of the best ones we have, with Edward and Alphonse out of town."

Roy frowned. "You were following me. I knew it!"

"Hmn, yes." Lin's grin softened into a faint smile. "I knew some things too. Such as that you were sure to come down here yourself instead of sending out a squad in your place. And that once you realized you were being followed, you'd confront the tracker on the grounds that you can just incinerate them if you don't like them. Or that you'd do it speedily enough for me to have to send my signal rather quickly."

"What signal?"

Roy heard a loud clanking sound, just under the noise of propulsor engines.

"The one that I sent five minutes ago," Lin said cheerfully, and then a giant black robot head (roughly the size of a large car) with arms and feet smashed into the rooftop next to them, bouncing across the street and off again, spinning in mid-air and finally landing on their rooftop.

Roy blinked. "...Is that your giant fighting robot?"

"In it's compact mobility form as opposed to the full-sized version, yes," Lin said.

The top part of the robot head irised open, and a red-and-black-suited lunatic that Roy groaned at seeing waved a big greasy bag, much to the displeasure of a surprising passenger. "Hoya boss! I'm only late because I had to pick up some nachos," Deadpool said. "More than some. A lot of nachos. Enough nachos to take of the world! Of course. But then I ate most of them. Also, chimmichongas. TOUCH THEM AND DIE! Also also, jaywalkers. They had to be punished. Protect the fast food salesmen, punish the neutrals and poke the poodles! Or does that go another way, I don't remember. Hey, Roy Mustang. Didn't you have an eyepatch once?"

"That never happened," Roy said.

"Sure it did, people were pissed about it. Also, I brought a guest. Lemme get him out, I'm sure I have a bazooka or ejector seat or toaster in here somewhere-"

"I can get out qute well on my own!" The passenger said angrily, hopping out and proving himself to be Mr. Herrimen; he nearly collapsed, but he held himself up. "I don't even dare to imagine what purpose a toaster would serve in getting a man out of a vehicle..."

"It's worse when you know what it's for," Deadpool said.

"Mr. Herrimen?" Roy said, not too surprised at this turn of events. Lin had alluded to finding someone significant, after all, and who better than Mr. Herrimen (who, incidentally, was a member in good standing of the Council of Insert Nomenclature, and Roy decided to make that more obvious to keep away any other claims of human bias)?

"Hrm, what?" Mr. Herrimen swayed dangerously, remaining standing; he refused to bow to something as improper as injury. "Ah...ah...Commander-Admiral Mustang! How good...to see a familiar face in circumstances as these..."

"You mean Foster's going boom or riding in a robot face with me?" Deadpool asked.

Mr. Herrimen glared at him. "...In all honesty, I cannot say which is worse. And good God, men and women and children have just died! Where is your sense of propriety!"

"Is that something you eat? Sounds fancy."

"I sense my protestations fall on deaf ears."

"And I sense that someone loves his thesaurus too much. Them things get vicious if you give them too much attention."

Mr. Herrimen sighed. He looked like he desperately wanted to sit down. "Hey, you should sit down, old timer," Lin said. "You're in no condition to-"

"Please, Mr. Yao, I...am doing quite fine for the...the time being," Mr. Herrimen said. "Besides...a little thing like escaping an explosion and nearly dying in whatever that red monstrosity was is hardly going to do me in!"

"You should be at a hospital!" Roy said. He glared at Lin.

Lin waved his hands. "Hey, don't pin this on me. I wanted to do that, but he insisted on telling people what happened. And...well, I found out about you, so he decided to get me to arrange things. Good thing it worked out that way." This last bit was delivered in a needless facetious way.

"...Yeah," Roy said. "Good thing." It was no accident that he had volunteered to investigate this disaster, after all. He knew alchemy when he saw it, and he had felt the explosions rock the Council's diner and seen the red light pierce the skies.

"Hrm," Mr. Herrimen murmured. "This is, regardless, a brilliant stroke of fortune. I dearly hope it continues." He glanced at Deadpool. "I am certainly due one..."

"And don't worry about the giant robot suddenly being small," Deadpool said to none of them. "We got some kind of crazy packing/unpacking technology that compartmentalizes bits of the robot, seperates them into components and stuffs them in hyperspace pockets so we can pull them out later. Which is why the giant robot from before is now a walking face-thing. No worries, just go with it."

"...I'd ask who he's talkin to, but the answers never make sense," Shego said, disgruntled. "Panda Bubba at least does good banter, not this idiot's word salad."

"Oh, you fought Panda Bubba again?" Roy said. "Did you capture him?"

"Nope!" Lin said. "Unfortunately, while Shego and Deadpool fought him in a truly epic fight that no one appears to have recorded dispite it's awesomeness, it was interrupted during the chaos after the explosions. People panicked and Panda Bubba fled. His robot head flies. Who knew?"

"Eh, we can deal with him later," Shego said.

Mr. Herrimen twitched an ear irritably. "By all means, keep going on about these issues of your's. Why, my home and house to hundreds is clearly insignificant in the face of your inability to catch a crime lord that makes a point to go out of his way to combat you instead of hiding."

"Whiner!" Deadpool said.

"Mr. Herrimen." Roy spoke in his most authoritive voice; there was no room here for the calm and easy-going researcher, or the mildly military commander. This was the voice of Authority, the voice of the man that aspired to the rank of Fuhrer-President to change the country even if it meant getting sent to a firing squad one day on war crimes. "I'd like to ask you some questions on what the hell just happened at Foster's Home, so that I can hunt down the individuals or singular responsible for it."

Mr. Herrimen narrowed his eyes. "Gladly."

The result exchange of information was very...informative. On both sides.

...

Kimblee could be a patient man, but he was losing interest in it.

He toyed with the Stone, rolling it along his knuckles, watching how the light hit it just right and screaming faces glowed in the uncut facets...

It could be so beautiful.

He flipped it with his thumb and caught it. That's a bit dangerous, Ghostfreak warned. Suppose you dropped it?

"Then I would have lost it, and all this would be for nothing." Kimblee continued to play, rolling the Stone back across his knuckles to his thumb and flipping it to his other hand; it fell across the inner curve of his thumb and across the tattooed mark on his palm. His pink flicked it into the air, and was caught neatly between two fingers.

(Kimblee had once spent some months in confinement with a artificial man made from the parts of vicious criminals but was quite nice in spite of it. He'd taught Kimblee a few sleight-of-hand tricks; Kimblee considered them good practice for staying focused.)

Kimblee did not, in all truth, care if he failed. He didn't care if he lost the Stone. He didn't care if he couldn't capture this Jarod person. He didn't care if the Heartless turned on him, and he espicially didn't care that he could well die here, or be captured by the lawkeepers of this town.

It was enough that he try. If fate saw fit to have him fail here, he was content with that. There were those who railed at life's evey little twist, who screamed and fought like rats in a slick pipeline as they fell and died on the blood of their ruptured throats. Kimblee was one of those who smiled at ultimate misfortune and said Oh well, it was fun!

He'd learned to embrace that way of thinking. He had heard of the notion of fighting fate, of telling destiny to do horrible biological acts to itself, and he had dismissed all those notions. It was just too stressful. Better to go with the flow of the world, to accept what happened whether for good or ill, and to die knowing that you had done it by your own code of conduct. Kimblee did have such a code; it tended to surprise people that knew him well, and this never failed to bother him. Just because the closest thing to sexual feeling he ever felt was when the roar of explosions mingled with falling fire and gore didn't mean he was a complete monster.

(This was a point that could be often disputed.)

He flipped the Stone again (how did they feel, in that whirlwind of souls, that typhoon of lives torn from their living bodies and screaming for their shells?) and caught it between his teeth. It did not chip or crack; it was made of sterner stuff that that.

He was bored. He didn't know what he was supposed to be looking for, but that wasn't the problem; people were slow in coming, slow to realize that this wasn't the usual sort of madness. Men and women were arriving now, some dressed in the official uniforms and others in uniforms belonging to more specialized groups (so few of them, too) and more concerned civiliians, but it did not appear to be an appropiate time to act yet. More people had to show up before he could be certain of his quarry.

He flexed his fingers and paused, interested, as a new troop of vehicles approached: a small car, a white-blue truck and a...well, a ten-ton mantaee bison cross-breed, floating in the air by blasts of wind. Curious. Behind them was a small squad of trucks with a decidedly ambulance bent, and even further in the distance, there was a amazingly loud stomping. The lumbering of a machine-behemoth.

Kimblee raised an eyebrow as it came closer into view. Well. People would certainly be coming now, if only to see what the noise was about.

He still did not know what to do. He didn't know if Ghostfreak offered the powers of mental scanning or if he was expected to go and psychically probe every single individual person, if by some chance this 'Jarod' went in disguise.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out the picture of the man in question; he looked at it for a moment. A pleasant-enough looking man, but hard to notice. Nothing about his face stood out or called attention. (Although, it did bear a striking similar to an ancient figure of myth, legend and nightmare that Kimblee had heard of when he had spent some time in the Outer Planes...but it was mostly nightmare.) But Kimblee was good with faces; he noticed details regardless. In a lifetime of working with a lot of people, he had never forgotten a single face. Not ever. Regardless of the condition it was in at the time.

Kimblee glanced back at the vehicles; the 'leaders', or at least the ones at the head of this procession, had stopped in the middle of the street, with the most wonderful view of his handiwork, from Foster's remants to the soulless shells on the ground to the wreckage lining the street. There was a beat, and then all the doors opened and the people nearly fell out of them and the Sky Bison's cargo (which was people) followed in turn and they all stumbled and stared and just beheld the fruits of Kimblee's work: the ruins of Fosters, cracked like an eggshell. The grounds of Foster's, where even the most conscientious interloper's attempts to sort out the fallen had not made much of a difference. (So much for respect and integrity.) The very neighborhood itself, the northern side wiped away by the same blast that shattered the mansion and that was supposed they missed the massive break in the ground encircling the property, crumbled buildings marking the point of a massive transmutation circle. (Kimblee was mildly interested if anyone could see it for what it was.)

They could taste the ash freed from simple minerals. Smell the smoke that had been uninteresting wood. Perhaps even string out the blood from the hapless pedestrians, crushing under falling debris. They were in the perfect place to witness his glorious work, to feel the slightest trace of his art, the faintest echoes of the joy that only he that stood before the brillant lights and feel the vibrations rock their souls.

Kimblee tilted his head. He couldn't hear anything they were saying; he was up much too high on a nearby building so no one could see him. But he could see them well enough, and people that stood like that and hit the ground like so and just stared like this were not usually appreciate of proper work. He shrugged. Proper coinnisuers were hard to find.

He prepared himself to retreat and wait in a safer location when he noticed that one of the men below, one of the ones that stared at his doing with a stoic silence, was rather familiar. He noticed the dark skin and white hair before he pegged him as an Ishbalan. That alone would have served for fond recollections. But then he saw the long coat, a specialized outfit adapted from the traditional robes of an warrior-priest of Ishvala, and it was a impressive feat of his eyesight that he could discern that X-shaped scar twisting the man's face.

Kimblee grinned. He knew that face, of course. One of his finest works, and an admirable imitator of him besides.

"Well now," He said softly. "This is an intriguing develoupment."

Several of the children down there did not seem quite as affected as expected, though. Notable among these were a teenaged tiger-human creature and a runty boy, both of whom seemed to be regarding the destruction with...curiosity, not rampant sentimentality.

Scar glanced up and Kimblee ducked behind a complicated array of interfacing equipment on the rooftop.

What the hell? Kevin said.

That man saw us, Ghostfreak fretted. I am certain of it.

"So much the better," Kimblee said softly. "My orders are to capture the Ishbalan alchemist-killer named Scar. I never forget an order."

Uh, what are you talking about? Kevin asked. No one told you to do anything like that.

"Of course not anyone you know! My old superiors in Central Amestris. Those were my orders. Capture Scar. Instigate a bloody battle in the nothern coutnry of Drachma. I succeded at one, but not the other. I find this...displeasing."

...How many years ago was this? Ghostfreak asked.

"I did say I never forgot an order."

Your devotion to your superiors is admirable, if somewhat unhealthy.

"When I say I'll do something? I do it." Kimblee stood up and checked. The group down below was moving onto the grounds, obviously intent on doing...something, the scarred man with them. He could see them, moving together in a loose cohesion towards the house, and behind them were their followers, piloting their trucks and vans of medical equipment. Not that it would do those here much good, but Kimblee smiled at the thought of the surprise they would get once they analyzed the bodies. Death comes in many sorts, and the body doesn't even have to stop working for some of them to qualify.

He would have to be careful now, though. He couldn't just barge in there and search faces, not with Scar there with his power of destruction and that peculiar Ishbalan sense of irrational familial piety. But he couldn't very well just sit here like some smug overlord with a throne of skulls getting a depression in it in the shape of an armored rear.

Patience, counseled Ghostfreak. Wait for them to become aware of the full extent of what you have done. They shall discover it. They will grow to be afraid of you who has done this. Fear will color their hearts, and cloud their minds. When you act, they will think of you as a monster, not a mortal shell they can take down. To them...you will not be a man, but an idea. A dark and fearsome idea, and ideas are bulletproof.

Kimblee was not bulletproof. But the idea, allowing them to make psychological warfare without him even doing a thing, was appealing.

"Patience," He whispered to himself. "A good idea."

He resolved to wait.

Not everyone had arrived yet. But when more people came...then he could prune them a bit.

...

Zim was starting to wonder if he had some sort of vaugely defined curse of explody-ness put on him at some point.

He had been born on Irk; it exploded. He had gone to countless worlds; they'd exploded, sometimes because he wanted them to but more often not. He had found a new home on Earth; it exploded. (Well, technically it was more like 'consumed by the unnamable forces of darkness heralded by heart-consuming nightmares born from the darkest depths of sentient life', but that wasn't very catchy.)

He stared at a charred piece of wood he had picked up from the ground after clearing off the rubble from a small and sad pile of bodies. (He couldn't think of anything else to do.) It had been part of a building less than three hours ago. Now it wasn't, because Foster's had exploded.

The others had become notably subdued, he had noticed in the short time they had tried to do something for the place. Danny was doing the worst; he hadn't said anything since they got back to Foster's, and Zim thought he had seen Sam crying when she had snuck away. Tucker just looked...blank. He suspected they were irrationally blaming themselves for the death of all these people, but then they weren't in much of a state to be sensible.

Aang and his friends were more ready to be reactionary; Toph had almost immediately taken to helping other on-the-site workers excavate the dead from the ruins, perhaps because she wanted to do something useful, or else she found it distasteful to leave the dead abandoned and uncared for; soil was gluing itself to her feet, dust and dirt swirling around and condensing on her body like the armor she desperately wanted. After the initial shock of it, Zuko had darkened into a disturbingly quiet state that would have seemed callous indifference if you didn't notice the righteous indignation burning just under surface, turning his breath black and smoking and made his eyes, already burned yellow by his lineage and element, glow like embers. At the other end was Katara; she had busied herself with first sorting out the survivors that had rather foolishly wandered back into the area, but she did not bother to hide the almost inhuman degree of rage akin to Zuko's, but where he was a raging inferno under the surface and begging for an outlet, she was a tsunami, building up before the inevitable undersea quake set off a tidal wave that would anhillate anything in it's path. Her steaming breath left little icicles that dropped, grass froze and broke under her step, and it scared the hell out of anybody who saw her. Sokka was a milder example of this; he had no bending power, so his expressions of emotion did not visibly effect anything, but Zim knew him well enough to be aware that him organizing around a number of leaderless and amiable locals to great effect like he'd been doing was him doing something useful instead of standing around moping. Even the animals felt it; Momo seemed to have disappeared (perhaps too frightened by the circumstances) and Appa was gently herding the survivors on his own accord, and doing a good job of it. Very few people oppose the will of a ten-ton hybrid monster with aerokinetic powers.

And Aang was even scarier than any of that. Zuko burned; Katara froze; Toph hardened. This was because they were Benders; the elements they manipulated were engraved into their very souls, moulding their personalities. Zuko could not help but be passionate and loyal; it was his nature as a Firebender. But Aang was the Avatar; he was both of and apart from the Nations, and he was also an Airbender, the people of the autumn, the ones who had become the air...and air was not an element known for being eternally calm. Distant, perhaps, unfettered certainly, but never safe. Where Aang walked, as he helped herd survivors into hastily made zones where medics and healers could help them, the grass crystallized and incinerated in rapid succession. The eath cracked and reformed in his wake, grass rolling like some great worm moved underground. His breath, when he didn't concentrate on control, was a rolling gust carrying shards of new ice and tiny whirls of flame. And most of all, there was the wind; spiraling around behind him and churning with every movement, so full of life and furious action that it seemed that his anger had seeped into the world itself; Zim half-believed that Aang had woken up the land with his own feelings, and like him, the land was angry.

Zim was a bit wary when he had seen Aang's tatoos briefly burn white from time to time, or his eyes glow with a unearthly light, like all the stars in all possible universes shone forth, burning away humanity in favor of terrifyingly pure rage. (It was, on balance, a very good thing that Air Nomads had rigorously believed in distancing their fetters and letting go of harsh feelings. It did not do for people with the power to call down storms to be subject to violent mood swings, let alone someone with the power of the Avatar.)

Most devastated by this was, of course, the locals. Ron was espicially horrified, and he was so disoriented by the destruction that he kept zoning out of conversations and discussions on what to do that they eventually left him be; Kim was almost as disturbed as him, but she forced herself to keep a level head and focus on the now. Grief could come later. Rufus was...a bit of a mystery. Zim had no idea what the little animal was thinking: he seemed to be adopting a more stoic attitude and doing his best to convince the ones that could understand him to stay on task. (Zim had considered that he didn't understand the situtation, but on reflection, Rufus did not seem that simple. Zim didn't know how sentient the animal - or care - but he was certainly intelligent enough to understand the horror of what had happened.)

He had expected Cyborg to be devastated, after he'd joined their group on a whim, and Zim was right in a roundabout way; certainly he did not have any hysterics or quiet weeping fits. Cyborg's horror and grief was a quiet sort: he'd grown solemn and eerily calm, and after he'd been told of the catatrophic system failure of last night, he wasted no time in concluding that this whole thing had been planned from last night and that this 'Mr. Lyle' character was working with Solf J. Kimblee, perhaps as a schemer that had sent the mad bomber there for...something involving blowing the place up for some reason, they hadn't figured that part out.

Scar and Abel, as the eldest there (biologically, anyway, or at least Scar was) were less affected. Both of them were visibly shaken and saddened, but neither of them were devastated. Abel seemed sickened and, weirdly, annoyed by what this Kimblee had done, as though he had seen things like this too often for it to affect him very much on an emotional level. Scar had been even more withdrawn than usual, conversely. This seemed to hit far too close for him; his homeland had been utterly wiped from the face of his home world in a manner such as this, apparently. Scar seemed strangely reluctant to join in on discussions of what had happened, and Zim suspected that he actually knew what had happened but found the subject too painful to elaborate on.

Zim was finding it notable that as things got more serious, Abel seemed to become a different person. He seemed the eldest of them all. Even older than Aang. When he spoke, Zim heard echoes that lasted longer than the lifetimes of cities and memories that stretched back longer than civilizations could lay claim to. Even Aang, whether you counted his physical age or his chronological age, was still a child next to the...entity that was Abel Nightroad. Catholics, Zim concluded, were very spooky.

Calvin and Hobbes...were not acting normally. They had both delved into figuring out what was going on by examining the ruins and determining how it was done after an initial horror, but they weren't acting at all shellshocked like Zim expected. It wasn't something you normally got from a preteen and teenager, no matter what the species. The overall impression was that they were used to stuff like this, at least enough that while it was a tragedy, it wasn't particularily notable to them. All death was regrettable, but they had seen far worse, or so Zim got the impression. Hobbes even mentioned in an aside to him that he'd 'seen worse in a tour with the Adeptus Astartes', whatever that was.

Zim himself didn't have enough information to make a conclusion, but he never let that stop him before; in spite of that, he wasn't sure what to make of this Kimblee business. He didn't know if this 'mad bomber' actually was a minion of Mr. Lyle or an agent of some larger conspiracy; he apparently had a conspiracy in this town working in his favor (or so he hoped), so it was perfectly likely that there was some kind of evil conspiracy set against him. Mr. Lyle had been a little too well-informed: perhaps he had gotten his information from very powerful sources? (Then again, it was sort of obvious.) On the other hand, blowing up Foster's didn't make a whole lot of sense, even if it was some kind of defensive node. If it was helping to keep the people safe from the monsters that wanted to kill everyone, what was the point of it? What was the reason?

Zim knew that some people didn't need reasons. There didn't have to be a valid purpose in blowing up buildings and murdering hundreds of people in the process. There didn't even have to be an excuse; just the right sort of mood swing, or even a vauge feeling that it seemed like a good idea. Some special sorts of monsters just liked doing murderous feats that were epic in their lack of purpose or rationality; motiveless evil without either a real benefit or rationale.

Zim had found that his past as a loyal follower of an evil empire who jumped howling over the line to 'insane stupidity' was pretty helpful in understanding complete monster psychology.

On the other hand, he didn't really care about this Kimblee's reasons for doing this anyway. Catch the bad guy, kill the bad guy or hit him in the face with a truck on fire; just so as long as some measure of 'right and proper' was dealt, he'd be satisfied. He wasn't particularily interested in the mental state of lunatics and sociopaths anyway, he got enough of that when he remembered things too clearly.

He was trying to explain this last point to Calvin (who seemed insistent on following him around for some reason), without much success. "Look, you misappropiated lump of stupid, mental and moral mutants rarely require a reason to do these things!" Zim said. "A means and a desire to do so are good enough!"

Calvin disagreed. "I know enough about my share of sociopaths to say differently, xeno dumbass! Assuming that this guy is a sociopath." Zim pointed at the piles of the dead (now somewhat neater piles and busy being recognized and tagged by concerned doctors; apparently getting your dead sorted out was a really big deal in Traverse Town) and the broken mess that could be dimly recognized as once being Foster's Home. "...You can blow houses up and kill tons of people without being a moral defective. How many evil empires had gone and genocided random people because they just happened to be there? You expect me to believe that the people who carry stuff like that out are all complete monsters? Sometimes all you need is a guy with a punch-card and a paycheck to take by the end of the week." Calvin seemed to be speaking, not by personal experience, but at least by heavy knowledge of this.

"I acknowledge that," Zim said. "But this man was laughing about what he was doing. Making deranged speeches and such. Hardly the act of a man simply doing what his job entails."

"Well, I give you that, but that's not really the point here. Way I see it, we figure out exactly how he did it and why, we know what he'll do next. Boom! Curbstomping ensues and we do a Good Thing."

"You want to face down a man that can, from what we've heard, make explosions with his bare hands?" Zim spoke quietly, as if mulling it over.

"Well, when you put it that way..."

"That sounds awesome! What better way to test our nerve and resolve than by going all-out against a force that can summon artillery-scale attacks in the blink of an eye!" Zim laughed and clapped Calvin by the back of the head, knocking him over. "You have great fighting spirit, boy! I may have misjudged you."

Calvin got back up and grimaced. "Considering the way you fight and your enthusiasm at fighting a psychopathic mad bomber that doesn't need explosives to do his dirty work, I'm starting to wonder if maybe your kind are distantly descended from the Orks back home." He would know, he'd spent a good part of his childhood among them.

"Eh?" Zim said.

Any clarification was not to be forthcoming, at least at that moment. "Hey," Bloo said from behind him, Eduardo following. "You guys seen my buddy Mac? I've looked all over but I haven't seen him."

"Oh, it's you," Zim said, disinterested.

"Hey, sucks," Calvin said, gesturing at the house.

They paused. They blinked.

Calvin did a double-take. "What are you doing here!" He said.

Zim realized that you were supposed to act like Calvin was when people supposed to be staying at a hospital suddenly showed up again at the scene of the attack. "Aren't you supposed to be recuperating or not bothering me anymore!"

"We snuck up on Cyborg's truck," Eduardo said. "Since me friend Wilt not here; sorry, that okay?"

"Eh, it's not my truck, I don't care," Zim said, and tilted his head. "You are looking for your friend? The boy waiting for you here last night?"

"Si," Eduardo said. He was, Zim noticed, being quiet subdued.

"Ah." Zim glanced at the nearest of bodies. "Hrm. Well...I do not wish to be needlessly pessimistic..."

"But?" Bloo said.

"How do I put this politely...or nicely..." Zim muttered under his breath, trying to find a good way to do that.

Bloo frowned deeply. "Mac's not dead."

"Of course not," Calvin said. "But you-"

"Not. Dead."

"...Can't be dead," Eduardo said, quietly. He wasn't crying; that would have been preferable to the way he seemed to be slowly and sadly breaking. He was making a serious attempt not to look at the bodies and recognize anyone, but it was proving hard.

"If they are alive," Calvin said. "Then they'd be over at the place where everyone else is; the other survivors and the non-apathetic citizens that showed up. Or just wandering around."

"Why would they be wandering around?" Zim asked.

Bloo started to answer and stopped, looking at something behind Zim. His eyes bugged out and he screamed something inarticulate before shoving Zim out of the way and running off at something.

Zim turned around. "BLOO!" Mac screamed, running at Bloo and joyfully tackling him, the two bouncing off the ground a bit.

"Ow, pain!" Bloo squealed. "I don't like pain! It hurts me. Wait, why can I deflect red killing stuff and not you?"

"I don't know but shut up, I thought you were dead, I didn't know where you and Eduardo had gone, I didn't know what that explosion was or that red light or you alive or not and we got here and the house was gone and everyone was dead and I thought you guys were dead!"

"...Geez man, you think I'd let something like this kill me!" Bloo said, He thumped his chest. "I'm the toughest blob in all creation! When the big bad punks talk about the manly badass Blooregard Q. Kazoo, who survives the end of the world, random accidents and species definition lawyers, they're talking about me! I'm not gonna die and leave you alone, you idiot!"

"...Bloo," Mac said, but he didn't get the chance to continue, because shortly afterwards Eduardo gathered both him and Bloo into a big sobbing hug punctuated with anguished declarations of relief. It only got worse when Wilt and Coco came out of apparently nowhere and joined in on the hugging and crying and general emotion.

"Oh, guess pessimism was wrong then," Calvin said, regarding the waterworks along with Zim.

"I'm glad they had a happy ending," Zim said. "Take that, cynicism! Your death will be slow, painful and filled with absurd levels of...IDEALISM!" He laughed maniacally, the sound painfully similar to a rabid animal's howling at the phantom thing killing it from the inside.

Calvin didn't appear to notice. "At least you don't have any random people jumping out to say hi, I don't think I could stomach it."

"Yes, well, I-MINIMOOSE!" Zim yelled as Minimoose squeaked joyfully and rammed into his stomach in a cheerful way. "Ow! My mysterious organs!"

"...I have officially lost all credibility for whatever entity is organizing my life at this point," Calvin said bitterly. He yelled to the skies, "Subtlety is important, y'know, look into it! Cheap and contrived reunions are not worth the cathartic release!"

Aang landed from above in a shower of dirt. "Why are you yelling at me?" He asked, hurt.

"What? No, I wasn't talking to you...never mind, I'm just having a minor nervous breakdown. Career hazard."

"...Oh...did I miss something?" Aang added, looking pointedly at the sobbing Foster's residents.

"Not really," Zim said. Minimoose squeaked.

"Oh. Hi, Minimoose." Aang absently patted the small robot, who bobbed agaisnt his hand like an affectionate housecat. "Um...hey, I was looking for you. Katara found out something that she thought we should all know about." He paused. "Zim, you know all kinds of crazy science stuff. Maybe you can figure it out."

"Hey, I'm a mad scientist!" Calvin said indignantly. "Bet you a dollar I run circles around this guy in the Supernal Sciences."

Aang scratched his head. He didn't look like he was in the mood for posturing. "...If you think you can help, come on."

"Oh, whatever," Calvin said. "Whatever gets us to this Kimblee guy sooner, and therefore sooner to a proppa scrap." Zim was starting to notice that when Calvin was particularily agitated, he had a tendency to talk like an English football hooligan. The boy had unexpected depths. Rather like a dank lagoon.

Because he always liked showing off, Aang assumed a wide rooted stance and cut the ground with a sharp jerk of the elbow; the part of the ground they stood on fused into a single piece of rock and seperated from the soil, and Aang flew it into the air with a mixture of Airbending to make it stable and Earthbending to propel it. And so they didn't fall off, bits of earth slid over their feet like little belts.

"Ack! Again with flying in the air on dislocated earth bits. What a week." Calvin said.

"Interesting design on the ground. Explosions are evil and such but lovely designs they make," Zim observed, holding tightly to Minimoose so he didn't get left behind.

"What the Warp are you-" Calvin took notice of the massive tear encircling the Foster's property, and the exploded buildings on it. He recognized the type of pattern (if not the specific form) almost at once. "...Huh. But that's...no way. There's no way it could be like that." Aang landed before he could finish, which pleased Zim; Calvin had a rare talent for annoying him.

They landed right in the middle of the 'salvage zone', where the survivors were being tended to by the attendent rescuers and medics, and he landed with such a noise and lack of preamble that a good number of people started yelling at them after nearly having heart attacks. "A bit soon for sudden surprising explosive things, right?" Calvin said.

"Whoops," Aang said softly.

The bits of earth holding them fast crumbled, and the rest of their flying rock did the same, sliding them down the resulting pile of soil onto the ground, now covered by a tarp someone had pulled out after Toph and Aang had Earthbent the area into a single floor of solid ground for simplicity's sake. From the medical vans had come a plethora of wheeled gurneys and similar things, including a fold-out gazebo on legs. There were a lot of people around, at least fifty in the immediate area, and that was simply the Foster's residents where were fit enough not to need immediate medical attention. (For the most part, they were simply exhausted beyond reason; some proper stimulants, like coffee or chocolate and a bit of rest and they were capable of speaking without having to make pauses.) The other returning survivors were hanging around on the property, not having anywhere else to go and at a loss of something to do.

On the street through the fence, unpeturbed by the massive break in the earth, was a huge machine-building. It was smaller than Foster's had been, at least enough to fit on the street without knocking over the other buildings, but it was even more bizarre, a hulking titan of machinery, an unknown quanity of metal and pistons and nearly-organic sensory machines grouped like inquisitive faces in random places, all assembled over a huge number of surgery rooms, emergency wards, all manner of medical wings, classrooms, offices, specialized medical branches; the end result was a huge building that moved through the air, suspended by propulsion bulbs, it's suspended weight dispersed and crashing lightly to the ground like massive footfalls. Straw-like tubes had emerged from angular apetures, set up to transport people into it's mysterious depths for proper medical care. Sometimes people went in and out of them; medical professionals, Zim assumed. On one of the infrequent moments when Zim had taken an interest, Abel had explained who some of them were. Zim filed the information away for later; knowing who was in charge of the people that knew how to take people apart and put them back together was a useful knowledge.

The mobile hospital, as the moving machine-building had proved to be, was a subject of some interest to Zim once he had seen it properly on the way over to Foster's. According to what Cyborg had to say (since he lived in the area, he made it his business to know about pernitent things for a superhero), it had been intentionally built as such, opposed to the usual tradition of people tinkering with something over time and culmative effect snowballing. It was actually a collaborative effort between a chapter of the Crossguard and the mad medicine branch of the Peerage; annoyed with the fact that incidents tended to leave unskilled or ill-prepared people seriously hurt or even dead (but if they got there soon enough they usually could be zapped back by the Peerage's somewhat unreliable resurrection science, but they had a tendency to come back...wrong), they took the empty shell of a mobile fortress salvaged from a minor war in the mountain ranges north to town and redesigned it from the ground up, the bare bones of a complex inside, and added the Crossguard's bizarre awesomeness-fueled mastery of bending reality to the Peerage's mad science to create a flying magi-tech hospital that could patrol the town, homing in on disasters and send down medical technicians to tend to the wounded. (And, if they came in time, to zap back the freshly dead; there was a reason that Traverse Town had such a low casualty rate in spite of all the chaos.) The whole ensemble worked fabulously, espicially after they got a number of skillful doctors and researchers to take up residence, particular Dr. Knox (Chief of Medicine) and Dr. John Dorian (Resident Boss Physician; he came up with the title himself).

(Supposedly, the Crossguard's Pope at the time - a agreable and intelligent beast-woman named Lizriah with a touch of mad genius herself - had wanted to expand the project and make hospital-ships to launch into space and terraform dead planets to create landmasses for, among other things, creating automated farming worlds, eco-systems where extinct species could be revived and propagated, self-contained bio-spheres fit to grow heavily specialized natural pharmacies to cure otherwise expensive diseases or physical malfunctions or even create a safe environment to mould new sentient species from potential animals that could be guided to greatness and at the very least prove that bastard-liness wasn't hardwired into sentient DNA. This was, unfortunately, prior to her death in a bitter fight with a mad biologist who integrated the remains of the dead to his body, making himself larger and adding their power to his. His intent had been to kill everyone in Traverse Town, transforming himself into a living city with the powers of a decently popular god. Since her death and the lack of a Pope to authorize such a massive project, the idea had been left on the backburner. At the very least, one such Genesiscraft, as the project was termed, was already being built and funded by Bruce Wayne as a memorial to Lizriah. Exactly what it was going to be used for, since they didn't have the requisite technology yet, but there were rumors of dealings with a disenfranchised but advanced alien race from some small-time universe or another. Zim thought the whole thing sounded a bit idealistic but really cool. He wished he could make a deal with the town and trade with technology like that; he had lost all that kind of stuff with his house.)

Zim watched as a hatch appeared in the morphic outer shell of the mobile hospital and a large platform floated out. "Looks like that one's carrying people," Calvin said, observing that it had few people on-board. "Could be for autopsies. The people here work fast."

"I suspect it is experience, from all the stories I have heard about daily life in this town." Zim looked through the crowd around him - rows of people awaiting transport into the hopsital for care; physicians, pediatrics, xenobiologists, vetinarians and other professionals bringing in supplies and tools when they hadn't decided to simply bring people in for more intensive care; dead bodies lined up in neat respectful lines and such - and looked for a familiar blue outfit and long brown hair. He needn't have bothered; Aang was much better at looking for Katara and ran off with a gust in his wake, tearing up the ground in his path. (It annoyed people.) Zim followed after him, and without anyone else to suggest otherwise, Calvin did the same.

They found Aang anxiously hovering around Katara in the middle of a sterilized tent that had been fired into the ground by the mobile hospital. (It was suprisingly low on the collateral damage.) Zim's stomach lurched unpleasantly when he saw that she was bent over the body of the guard Andre with an air of fascination, the corpse lying on a makeshift autopsy table made from a flat section of ground raised up. The cutting had yet to begin, and water streamed around her and winding around the dead monster's body, now stripped from the waist up, and the water was glowing faintly where it touched skin, whether Katara's or Andre's, though it was almost imperceptible around Andre.

"What's with the glowing?" Calvin asked.

"I asked the same thing," said a synthesized and pleasant voice. It came from a thin and uncomplicated robot with insectile limbs on it's lower side, a pair of small antigravity turbines on it's back and a small face on the front of it's body. It's arms were a capsule-shaped revolving array of instruments and tools, currently hosting a delicate set of long-fingered hands. "I am physician-in-training Stitchup Wrenchworker in service to the people of Traverse Town, formerly Service Drone 100023 of Medical Mechanica, set free by She Who Breaks Your Head." It - or he - made a beep. "I presume you are among those summoned by Miss Katara?"

"Yes?" Calvin said warily. Minimoose squeaked, politely puzzled.

"Ah, good! Perhaps you may bear witness to her most fascinating discovery?"

"Eh?" Zim tilted his head at her. "...Is this an autopsy? Should you not be cutting him up?"

Razael popped up, concerned with the whole 'Andre being someone we saw just a little bit ago and now had ceased to be alive' thing. "...We just saw him a few hours ago. We slept the night here. All this happened in a few hours. Someone's gonna burn."

"I don't think we even spoke to him," Sammael said, appearing as well. "Why do you care about avenging him?"

"He said our hat was nice," Razael insisted. "And he was a pretty cool guy! There will be burning afoot, and the evil responsible for this is gonna burn good. Purge the evil. Purify the foul. Fire works good for that. And if that doesn't work, more fire will. The thing about fire? Eventually, everything burns."

"Yeesh, fine, just don't get me killed too."

"Uh, Zim?" Katara said.

"Eh, what?" Zim said.

"You were zoning out again."

"He keeps doing that," Calvin muttered to Aang. "Why does he keep doing that?"

"Oh, Zim's just a little crazy," Aang said nonchalantly. "You get used to it."

"About what you said..." Katara tilted her head at Zim. "I'm good at slicing people, but I don't do it to see how they died. Ice wouldn't work well; a good sharp edge on ice would tear too well to make a good clean incision. Anyway, I think that's a really bad idea. This guy's...er, well..."

"What's with the glowing?" Calvin repeated.

"You know, I had the very same question!" Stitchup Wrencworker said brightly. "Evidentally, Miss Katara possesses a spiritual-slash-genetically derived psychokinetic talent for manipulating water or anything that could scientifically be categorized or otherwise thought of as being akin to water. She had demonstrated her ability to freeze water to make ice packs for a child with a bad deliurm case, and she had informed me that she has learned a talent common among her people that allows her to synchronize the internal bodily energies of a given individual and manipulate them for better or worse, and thus can promote tissue regeneration, psychological restoration or any number of useful healing capabilities! And she mentioned that, in theory, any such weilder of the elements might learn to do so on her world."

"...Uh, I just said that some Waterbenders know how to heal with water, manipulating the chi of a person by using water as a medium and pulling their energies the right way to heal them,," Katara said awkwardly.

"Ah," Calvin and Zim said, understanding in different ways. Minimoose squeaked again; he was still confused.

"Anyway," Katara said, trying to get back on track. "I've been healing the people around here, and I thought I'd try to see what these...people's chi looks like. It still flows after you're dead for a little while, and since injury and emotional suffering affects it, I thought that if I took a look, I might be able to get an idea of what killed them." This was a valid concern; in spite of the multiple explosions, very few of the dead on the Foster's property looked like they had been killed by an explosion. "So I talked these guys into letting me try it and they didn't really have any reason to say no."

"So what'd you find out?" Zim asked, trying not to notice the various bodies that Katara had presumably checked out before Andre. He could see Freya there too. It wasn't a pleasant thing.

"These people aren't technically dead," Katara said simply.

"What," Calvin said flatly.

"It is true," Stitchup Wrenchworker said. "Here, pay close attention!" He scittered over, the broad ends of his feet clicking on the ground, and grabbed Calvin's wrist before dragging him over to Andre's body on the table and pressing his hand to the side of his throat.

"Hey, what the Warp are you-?" Calvin stopped. "...Is that a pulse?" Stitchup let go and Calvin lightly touched a prominent vein on the side of his neck, a look of mingled curiousity and maniac excitement twisting into a huge grin. He grabbed Andre's wrist and put two fingers under it for a moment before gently putting his arm back to rest. "Heh. He's got a pulse."

"Say what?" Zim rushed over and did the same as Calvin had done, though more carefully and without much experience; generally, when Zim was around dead bodies, they were in too many pieces to make checking for a pulse a good idea. Much to his surprise, there was a pulse beating under his fingers. It was faint, with all the substance of a snowflake drifting into a broken window, but it was there all the same. "...These people are alive."

"There's a reason I said 'technically'," Katara said, her eyes downcast. "...I'm not entirely sure how to explain this to you guys, but these people's energy isn't moving at all. I could say it feels dormant...but that makes no sense. Dead people's chi just fades away as the body falls apart and living people's just keeps flowing; sometimes it's stagnant or muddled or even twisted up when you have something bad, but it moves. These guys, though...I can move it around, I can make their injuries heal up a little, but it's not doing anything on it's own."

Minimoose blinked his little eyes. He squeaked. "Minimoose wants to know if they're in a coma," Zim translated.

Stitchup 'bzz'd a negative. "If so, we could find ways to counteract that. There would be signs in their brain chemistry, reflexive reactions. Our victims here display none of that."

"These people are dead while still being alive," Katara said. "I know that sounds like a cheesy intro to a talk about the undead, but really, that's the best I can come up with." She frowned. "And something's just wrong about the way they feel. When I'm bending their energy, I mean. It's not...it feels incomplete. And it's starting to fade, but it still feels like living chi to me. Like they're falling apart. I think..." She grimaced. "I think something was removed from them. It dropped them, and now it's killing them all the way."

There was a profound silence. Aang bit his lip and put one hand on Andre's forehead and the other on his chest. He closed his eyes and appeared to do nothing

(but that didn't explain what Zim suddenly felt, the massive burst of pressure that wasn't physical, like Aang had become a black hole, the entire world bending around him, concentrating and being refined)

and Andre's body lurched. Calvin jumped back, his hand going for one of his bulkier pockets while he muttered about zombies, but Aang simply stepped back and Andre fell back, the blood on his claws dripping slightly. "I can't do it," Aang said miserably. "I tried to bend him, but...it didn't do anything."

Katara went over to him. "I know," She said, and she stared at the top of his head, unable to meet his eyes. Zim envied her height and ability to avoid seeing that powerless look in Aang.

"That red light..." Calvin said, while he took a test tube out of another pocket and scooped up some of the blood on Andre's claws when no one was looking.

"Huh?"

"The people we talked to said that this Kimblee guy did something and there was a bright flash of red light. When that happened, people started dying." He raised an eyebrow. "Whatever that was."

"If we can figure that out, perhaps it can be reversed?" Zim said.

"Could be!" Calvin said brightly. "I've seen all kinds of screw-ups that could be fixed worse than this! If we know what caused it and how it was done, than yeah, sure we can!"

"You're awfully optimistic," Katara said, smiling faintly. "All morning you've been a grouchy fanboy. Now all of a sudden you think you can bring the dead back to life?"

"Anything is possible with the right capabilities! And besides, part of being a mad scientist is dividing extreme parts of yourself into seperate pseudo-personalities." Calvin frowned. "What do you mean, 'fanboy'? I've been around your friend Toph, what's this about being a fanboy?" Katara snickered. "What are you laughing about!"

Aang poked his head into the tent. "Hey, I found some of the others, but I don't know where Mr. Scar or Father Nightroad went...wait, what are you laughing about?"

"I dunno," Zim said, walking past him. "Let the others find out this stuff, I have some thinking to do."

Aang watched him go. "Is he normally like this?" Calvin asked. "Weird and with wild mood swings?"

"Sometimes," Aang said. "But he's been having a really bad week. His favorite science show with explosions went off the air, his computer went on strike, the grocery store refused to stock his favorite kind of TV dinner and his planet blew up. Or so I assume."

"Ouch." There was a faint buzzing noise. "Hrm?" Calvin reached into his pocket and pulled out the weird thing he'd made last night.

"What's that?" Katara asked curiously.

"I have no idea!" Calvin said cheerfully. "I made it in my sleep last night. I must have been sleepwalking half the night and dumpster diving or something." Ignoring Katara's puzzled look, he fiddled with the machine a bit, focusing his what looked like a LED alarm clock screen modified to be a crude gauge. Above it was a small lenses, glowing weakly with green energy. "...Huh. That wasn't happening before."

His comment may have been directed towards the numerous small instruments that had extruded from the device automatically. A wire hanger, bent and coiled so many times it was a short metal tangle...a tiny sattilite dish from who-knew-where...a large tuning fork...a few other odds and ends, all seeming to have unfolded out of the device somehow. Calvin tapped it, clearly longing to push the button. "What'd I put into this thing? Metatropi? Apocalypski? Really hope it's not a bomb again..."

Inside his pocket, where the tube filled with pilfered blood (stolen because Calvin was a bit of a freak for science; if it was the killer's blood, they might track him with it, and if it was Andre's, Calvin could reverse-engineer super-soldiers from it) lay safely stoppered, that tube's contents flickered the same green as the energy slowly being absorbed by the thing Calvin had invented.

...

Scar stepped onto the rooftop.

He was searching.

Red eyes, set in a perpetual frown (possibly from nerve damage from his massive facial trauma) glowered out at the world.

There was no one else on this rooftop, but he hadn't expected much else. In the event that he had foud Kimblee, though...

His hand clenched, seemingly on it's own. Not his left; his right arm, his destroyer's arm.

It was not the arm he'd been born with, and sometimes he wondered if a trace of will lay within it. Ishvala's or his brother's or perhaps both; he didn't know. Under that hand, dozens had died, torn apart by the same heretical arts of alchemy Amestris had slavishly followed, those soldiers and alchemists obedient to the last to the inhuman abominations that forged their country in blood and warmongering.

Many of them, he regretted killing, mostly the soldiers and guards who'd gotten in his way. (But the Rockbells, doctors and husband and wife and parents of a girl, the lives taken after saving his own wretched life, betrayed and murdered and he would NEVER rest with their memory on his conscience) Others, he felt nothing for: he did not learn of the favor Basque Grande, the Iron-Blood Alchemist, had done for the Living Prophet of Ishvala, Louge Lowe, by coldly shooting a superior officer that simply wanted to murder them all, but Scar only found this out after Grande had died under his hand, and even now, Scar did not think that his soldier's generosity excused his unquestioning slaughter of Ishbal. Some, like the Silver Alchemist, who openly talked about Scar's people like they were sub-human...well, that was a favor to the human race in general. He felt no remorse for him.

Nevertheless; Scar repented of all his deeds, even though he knew himself unworthy of forgiveness. He worked to make himself worthy of Ishvala's consideration, and he enjoyed the prospect of dying in the process. It would be appropiate; the murderer returning to God with his earthly shell stained in blood.

Kimblee would be the one man he could be honestly proud of killing. Twice, he had stood before Kimblee after his brother had saved his life and damned(graced) him with his destroyer's arm. One on a train that left Kimblee nailed to a speeding train but very much alive, again as part of a gambit to remove Winry Rockbell as a hostage. Both times Kimblee had not perished, and that offended Scar's honor as a man of Ishvala.

Kimblee is the last to pay. Mustang has repented. Armstrong went mad with grief. All others on the list are dead. Only Kimblee is left to die in Ishvala's name.

His hand clenched on it's own. This time, Kimblee would not escape him again. His blood would spill on Traverse Town and consecrate the land with the final murderer

One more to go. One last death.

He had seen Kimblee, only for a moment but he had SEEN him. He had waited long enough to make certain for his own eyes that these people were beyond saving (more blood on Kimblee's stunted mockery of a soul and so much to atone for in the face of Ishvala's holy wrath), long enough to ascertain what had happened here (alchemy, without any doubt, he had been briefed on the Promised Day, he KNEW what savagery Kimblee had wrought on their souls) and he had given them that much before begining his hunt.

But Kimblee was not here now. He had disappeared, perhaps into the crowd.

Scar bit back a vile curse, appropiate though it was for the occasion. "So close..." He whispered. He was so close to his final battle of atonement for his failure to save his family and his people and his country and his own honor; the hour of reckoning was at hand. He could taste vengeance, but the subject of it was nowhere in sight.

He would find him, though. Of that, he was absolutely certain. No one would survive him now. No matter where they ran...no matter where they hid...no matter what guardians they had to save them...no matter the weapons they armed themselves with or unholy monsters they allied with...none would survive him now. He would find Kimblee. He would face him.

And end him.

Scar almost smiled. At the very least, his grimace lightened a bit.

A nagging impulse tugged at his thoughts. It did not seem quite fair to let the others, caught in this duty with him, remain unaware of Kimblee's actions, the full import of what he had done here. He had not revealed the truth yet, sparing them the horror of what had happened.

Perhaps...now was not the time to be gentle. He loathed the thought of it, knowing himself the nightmare they were so freshly free from

(the blackest night falling from the sky as the darkness steals away the sky, the stars going out as an ocean of living terror swallows their world; blood is raining down on them and he can hear Amestris SCREAMING as it dies, eaten alive and twisting in the monstrous gut of some vile thing and EVERYONE is dying, the homunculi have gone and May, like a DAUGHTER to him is screaming and falling away from him into the waiting claws below her and fades into other worlds than these-)

He sighed. It was a long-broken echo of the man who he had once been. Uncomprehending of one truth of the teachings. Uninterested in what his brother could discover. Mindful only of obvious glory, not knowing of the holiness in everything. That man closed his eyes.

It was Scar who opened them again, red eyes burning with the awful knowing of the pain that had broken him like a glass statue, shattered beyond recognition until even the dust was breaking, put back together into a twisted mockery of what it had once been. Duty became obsession. Faith guttered in his heart, the words of Ishvala half-hearted excuses for murder and violence (not an Ishbalan anymore, not a man of the desert but a beast, a selfish animal biting at anything that came near). Love twisted and warped into white-hot loss, scraping at his insides until he wanted to break everyone with blond hair and blue eyes to shake them out of their complacency ("Scream, Amestrian scum! SCREAM LIKE MY PEOPLE DID!") and the memory was just poison in his veins, and he soon caught himself wishing none of them have ever lived, to spare him this pain.

Ishvala worked in the strangest ways. Even a beast, an animal, can learn to look up and think clearly. Even a murderer can be shaken by a girl that he wronged (looking him in the eyes, her voice shaking with such hate when she whispers that he murdered her parents in cold blood: "I'll never forgive you. But this-" She binds the wound shut, the lifeblood pouring from an arm impaled on metal remaining where it should be. "Is what my parents would have done.") and be reminded of the true path. Broken and worthless and monstrous though he was, by the grace of Ishvala he had been reforged into something with some small semblence of worth.

Scarred and mutiliated beyond recognition, inside and out. But he knew things now that he could not have known then. Knowledge that might save these people.

He set out back to the tent where the others had gone. The boy, the blond child with red eyes much like an Ishbalan's (but wrong somehow, darker and haunted and they almost glowed sometimes, those monster's eyes), was an alchemist. He would understand what Scar could tell him.

It took little time for him to reach the tent, where he had seen him being led by the sky-rider, the boy that danced through the air and seemed like an old spirit-tale brought to life, hardly fit to be contained in his false pretense of base humanity.

The tent flap fell behind him as he approached; it was largely crowded, the others (save the Keybearer and Abel) present, all listening closely to the nice responsible girl that had tended to the dead. (But they weren't, the Stone was tricky that way.) The boy was out of the way of the lecture, puzzling over some object while the girl looked at Scar (perhaps, a bit repelled by what he was; maybe she could smell that innocent's blood on his hands, or worse things; Kimblee ruined everything he touched and Scar was no different) but paying him little attention when she saw that he was going straight towards Calvin instead.

Calvin looked up. "Hey. You. The guy with the other guys. What's it?"

Scar folded his arms neatly. "I request a moment of your time."

"Hn?"

"You are an alchemist. Yes?"

"Sure, yeah. Why?"

"...I have a theory I wish to discuss with you. I have reason to believe it is...conclusive."

Calvin pocketed the device. "Sure, I got time." Scar left, and the boy followed, leaving the others confused for a moment, but only that; what Katara was telling them left them too shocked to be surprised too much by a random interruption.

"So?" Calvin said, when they found a area where few nosy busibodies would overhear them. "What'd you got?"

Scar explained it to him.

The boy was, to put it mildly, enthusiastic about the revelation.

This worried Scar a bit. Regardless, the two of them made plans for a brief presentation to have it explain to their team.

And then, of course, they'd have to get someone to fetch Zim and Abel...

...

Zim wandered the grounds aimlessly, thinking troubled thoughts, Minimoose floating anxiously behind him. He glanced at a row of the dead - or very close, apparently - and shivered a little.

Dead,, yet not dead. Alive, but not quite. And so soon in the wake of a mysterious encounter with an unknown foe that seemed well-informed. Disaster had followed in his wake as surely as the tides were pulled by the moon.

Zim couldn't shake a guilty feeling that he was, indirectly or not, responsible for this in some way.

He stared aside at the ruins of Foster's, a big broken pile of lumber and metal and dead people who hadn't gotten outside before the red flash struck. It didn't matter, he decided, if he was responsible for this; he had been there, he had spent a night here, and that made this place his, in a small way. That was enough reason for him to take revenge. And if it could, by some insane chance, be fixed...

The idea was insane. But then, so was he.

But, he asked himself, not in any sort of whiny brooding way but in a spirit of honest inquiry. What can I do to make this situtation work?

The answer seemed simple: find whoever was responsible for this horror and hit them until they were no longer capable of voluntary movement, toss them to the authorities and be done with it. (Or blow them into many interesting bits.) As plans went, it lacked a certain finesse, but so did explosions but they got the job done.

He laughed to himself as he passed a tree that had been smashed by a flying couch. "You sound like you're in a good mood," Jarod remarked as he stepped behind it, busily seperating couch from tree.

"I guess," Zim said. He processed information. "ARE YOU FOLLOWING ME!" He screamed, whirling and pointing a accusing finger at Jarod.

"Your finger's on fire," Jarod said politely.

Zim, noticing that his finger was indeed alight, blew on it, but that just made the fire bigger, so he shook his hand until it went out. "Besides the point! What are you doing here? You're stalking me, aren't you! Why do I attract stalkers?"

"You'll just shoot me if I lie, but I doubt you'll believe me if I tell you that this is a coincidence that we're both here," Jarod said, not paying much attention to Zim's rambling. "That leaves us in a bit of a conversational dead-end, doesn't it? On the other hand, once I worked out you were here, I decided to see what you were up to...and I deduced that you would end up around here through careful analysis of what I know about you and the usual probability measurements. And here you are."

"...No one says 'deduced', you sound like a...a guy that says stupid things with a straight face and makes everything look silly." Zim decided that Jarod was very creepy.

"Never paid much attention to fads. I never had the exposure to them as a kid."

Zim rolled his eyes. "Yes, yes, I'm sure you had a horrible childhood-"

Jarod looked at him, sincerely astonished. "How'd you know?"

"My point is, I know you're up to something!"

"I am?"

"Yes! I worked out that you're some kind of secret vigilante that goes about harrassing the sneakier criminals and makes them suffer ironically! You wrap yourself in mystery and power-of-personality-cult to make yourself into a dramatic and scary thing that no one believes is anything more than punishment incarnate! A living nightmare to the evils that escape the attentions of everyone else! The dread of the foes of good and stuff! And no one knows who you really are, allowing you to roam at will undetected, unsuspected and leaving those you associate with free from vicious reprisals!"

"I got the idea from Batman!"

"Whatever! So I want to know what you and everyone else wants from me! You knew I would come to this town! You knew I would have the Keyblade, and you knew what I would be capable of!" He didn't say, And you knew my world would be destroyed.

"...Yes. You're right."

"Good. I knew it would be so. What I want to know is what the frak you and the rest of your inane conspiracy wants from me!"

Jarod wrinkled his forehead. "Conspiracy?" He seemed genuinely confused.

"I think he's talking about those guys that know what's going on with the Keyblade and Heartless and stuff," Abel said, poking his head out from the other side of the tree.

"You too!" Zim screamed. "You're both in on this together, aren't you! It IS a conspiracy!"

"Those are some lovely clouds today," Abel said, staring at the sky. "They're so...um. Looking for a word here. Floofy...no, not it. Phoomfy? Not a word! Doofy? No, that's me...possibly Ron too."

"Poofy?" Jarod suggested.

"POOFY!" Abel screamed joyfully. "That's the word!"

"Will you pay attention to me when I'm ranting at you!" Zim yelled.

"You're doing what-now with the sheep under the sun with a see-saw?" Abel said. "Is it unsanitary? Because if it is I'm pretty sure I'm obligated to smack you with something heavy until you stop being gross."

"He thinks we're in some kind of spooky conspiracy or something," Jarod said.

"Oh. Smacking avoided then!"

"And..." Jarod frowned. "It's...technically true. After a fashion. We are a group of people that want to keep our activities and knowledge secret to avoid the wrong sort of people getting ahold of it and don't generally let it be known that we know each other..."

"I KNEW IT!" Zim shrieked.

"But we're not a bad conspiracy," Abel said.

"Of course you'd say that. Only an idiot claims to be part of an evil conspiracy, whether or not they simply are deluded or try to lure you in."

"But we're not," Abel said. "Really. Hmph, this is the sort of thing people expect from me because I'm Catholic...and British. Also because I have white hair and look pretty. Wait a tick...I'm a walking sterotype collection! Any moment now I'll start wearing body glitter and whining to girls I know! I don't want to wear body glitter! I already sparkle sometimes because I'm a bishonen, that's bad enough as it is!"

"And you kept being weirdly syncophantic last night!" Zim told Jarod. "That does not mesh with an avenger of the downtrodden and unmourned innocents! WHAT ARE YOU UP TO!"

"...And that time I spent with Biff!" Abel continued. "He taught me how to avoid this sort of thing and yet I do it anyway! Have I learned nothing from Judo! My precursors must be laughing at me!"

"...I was trying to be nice," Jarod said. "I might've gone a bit too far in trying not to upset you, since that somehow upset you."

"Damn well it has! Wait."

As Zim considered the flaws in his argument, Abel abruptly said in the middle of his hysterics, "If you want to prove our loyalty for yourself, read our minds or something. That'll prove it."

"What?"

"Isn't the power of Light sometimes associated with psychic powers? Telepathy and stuff."

"But I don't know how to do stuff like that!"

Abel smiled infuritiatingly."Have you tried?"

Zim started to say that of course not, he just wasn't psychic...and then he remembered that just the other day he hadn't been a Firebender either. The implications astonished him.

For a moment, he wasn't sure what to think. "I know you don't have any reason to trust us," Jarod said carefully. "And you certainly shouldn't assume that we're trying to control you, but-"

"What do you want?" Zim said shortly. "That is all. I do not wish to get bogged down in semantics or histories or whatever dirty dealings you were afflicted with to get this far. What do you want from me?"

Abel absently scratched the side of his nose. "We want you to save the worlds," He said. "That's all."

"Oh, okay then." Zim blinked. "What."

"Don't worry about it, I'm sure you'll do fine. You got picked by the Keyblade, it's a magical artifact of divine awesomeness, it must know what it's doing!"

Zim opened his mouth to contest that, vis a vis the whole saving the world without prior notice thing, but then someone walked behind Zim and poked him in the back. "Hey."

"WHY IS EVERYONE SNEAKING UP ON-oh, hello Danny," Zim said.

Danny frowned faintly at Zim. He furrowed his brow in deep concentration. "...The others want you back," He said. "Katara filled us in too. We need to figure out what happened here. Your new friend Calvin thinks he has a good idea what happened."

"He is not my friend," Zim said shortly. "He is a egotistical short-tempered madman I have the displeasure of being saddled with."

"...Whatever you say, man," Danny said, clearly not listening. "Come on. Or whatever, I don't know."

He left, in the general direction of Katara's tent. Jarod frowned. "That boy needs help," He said, in the decisive tones of a professional psychologist.

"Yes," Zim agreed. "And since you seem to raise an interest, I volunteer you for helping him! Because you still won't be clear about what you want."

"I thought I was pretty clear! But okay."

"Hah, I-wait, what?"

"Okay. I'll do it. I'll help your friend."

Zim blinked. "...How? I was kidding."

"I'm a qualified psychologist," Jarod said. "As well as a psychotherapist, psychiatrist, paranormal psychologist, pediatric psychological doctor...and a few other degrees, I may have misplaced them. I'm eminently qualified."

"How did you find the time to learn all that?"

Jarod shrugged. "I'm a very smart person?"

"Bah, whatever. But I shall hold you to this. If you back out of it or mess up Danny, I shall hit you in the face with a universe made of cheese! Or learn to be psychic and make you think you're a little girl named...Miss, uh, Parker. Or make you do a silly dance with fire on you feets."

"...How'd you figure out that name! I know a woman named Miss Parker! Literally, that's her entire name as I know it."

"I dunno. Bye." Zim ran off, leaving Jarod scratching his head in bewilderment. Abel shrugged, and followed.

He found the tent soon (after getting very lost, tripping on a tree and taking the time to incinerate it, fleeing from an outraged adventurer that disapproved of that sort of thing, getting into a fight with that adventurer, becoming friends with that adventurer, and some other stuff happened) and only finally made it back to see everyone (Team Avatar, Scar, Team Phantom and team Possible, as well as Cyborg. Also Calvin, Hobbes and Morte who Zim still didn't really consider his team) standing around in varying degrees of moodiness, disbelief or quiet thoughtfulness. Scar and Calvin had apparently claimed the table in the center as their own, Andre's body cleared from it so they could put down a large piece of paper Calvin was scribbling on while Scar patiently waited for him. "Hello," Zim said, Minimoose squeaking helpfully.

"Hey," Zuko said to him. "Any ideas on what the hell happened here?"

"Nope."

"Good, no preconceptions."

Abel walked in. "Sorry, lateness!"

Minimoose squeaked. What's going on here?

Aang sidled over. "Your new friend-" He pointed to Calvin. "And that cool guy with the tattoos put together a little presentation. They think they figured out what happened here and what we can do about it."

"He's not my...never mind." Zim shrugged. "So. This is good news, yes?"

"Probably not," Sokka said.

Abel rolled his eyes. "Pessimist."

"Realist!"

"I've been around a LONG time, kid, I know what the odds are! And I can't really stomach negative thinking; I've seen otherwise!"

Calvin stopped bustling around, indicating that he was done with stuff. "Okay," Calvin said, as he and Scar finished whatever they were doing. "That looks good enough...okay everyone! Listen up and don't fidget, the first person to complain gets shot into the stratosphere with a super-bazooka. So! Let's get this show on the road, and for starters, recount the facts we KNOW!"

Calvin started doing just that. "Got a flair for the dramatic, does he?" Toph muttered to Hobbes.

"He's a mad scientist, it comes natural," Hobbes said.

"He is?" Sokka said. "Huh, just like the Mechanist."

"I think it runs in his, er, our family. Dad..." A stormy look briefly passed over Hobbes. "He's a mad science-guy too. Does different stuff. Mostly with sympathetic principles in theurgistic alchemy-"

"Ahem?" Calvin said. They shut up. "Okay, now that the loud mouths are quiet-"

"Whiner!" Cyborg shouted.

"-We can move on. Now, from all knowledge, it started when this Kimblee jerk showed up and made bad stuff go down. Starting with explosions."

"Kimblee engaged the others in a fight that was, from all accounts, a delaying tactics," Scar said. "A short time after the fight was begun and the authorities were alerted, a number of properties on the outskirts of the Foster's land exploded with such force that they cracked the ground in a rather distinctive pattern."

"Big circle shape?" Toph said. "Real deep?"

"Yes. How do you...?"

"Earthbender? I see through the earth. I'd have to be...well, you know, feet-blind not to notice it. And it all feels wrong around here now. All twisted up and junk."

"See?" Calvin said. "That feeling...ties into my theory. Now, see, after those explosions...Kimblee did something. When we consulted them after arriving, Spike and the others said that he ranted and shouted and did something that made a bright red light flash on for a few minutes, and during that time...people started dropping dead. They don't know how." Calvin nodded at Katara. "And given your analysis of the bodies, they might be capable of being brought back!"

Tucker raised a hand. "I'm sorry, did you just say something about bringing the dead back to life."

"Yes," Abel said.

"...I've put up with a lot here," Zim said. "I have been attacked by angry mobs, menaced by alley-dwelling monsters of annoyingness, gotten very lost, attacked by monsters and generally annoyed. And now you claim you can reverse the process of death? You have lost all credibility."

"It's not that tough," Calvin said, surprising him. "Sure, normal science might find it bad and iffy...but mad science doesn't work like that, you know? Apparently this 'Resurrection Consortium' they have here worked out a number of methods of bringing people back from the dead in strict limits owing to mechanical problems. They can't do it if they're in a bloody mess, had severe brain trauma or stuff like that. Basically just restarting brain functions and getting the body back to work...but none of that applies, since the ones here are, y'know, basically alive."

"Wait, WHAT?" Abel said. "They're not dead!"

The others stared at him. "You didn't find out?" Katara said. "I told everyone!"

"No! I was around stalking Zim!"

"ADMITED IT!" Zim howled.

"And I already knew they would be like this," Scar remarked.

"What," Sokka said. "And you didn't say anything, because...?"

"Would you have believed me if I said so immediately?"

"...Good point!"

"Yo," Morte said. "Yeah, still a bit mixed up on the details here," Morte said. "The deaders are just barely there? So how'd they get not-killed? It's not like I haven't seen stuff like this before, but, context! Important."

Calvin stared at him. "...Who the heck are you?"

Morte's serious deficient of eyebrows was a pitieous crippling, leaving him little ways to express his annoyance. "I'M THE GUY YOUR QUEEN SENT TO HELP YOU, YOU DUMBASS!" Fortunately, there was shouting.

Calvin laughed nervously. "Sure, okay, whatever you say. Watch that one," He muttered to Cyborg. "Anyway, I've got my theories on how Kimblee killed them without leaving a mark at that point...but then their evacuation system kicked on - no idea how, the thing was busted last time I heard anything - and the survivors got away! And then Kimblee blew up their house and disappeared into the alleys, based on eyewitness reports."

"Not for long, he won't..." Scar said grimly.

"So now, before we catch him and make him feel the hard stabby end of justice and stuff, we need to work out how he did whatever he did," Calvin said. "Don't want him pulling that trick on us. Luckily, he have an expert on our killer right here!" He pointed at Scar. "...Uh, you are an expert, right?"

"That man anhillated my home city and personally murdered every last member of my family, and holds the record for the most number of people killed during the Ishbalan Extermination Campaign. On both sides. Yes. I know Kimblee. Perhaps not personally, but I know how he will behave here."

"...Awkward. So...that red light. That's important. Figuring out what it is and what it's for. Ladies and gentlemen? May I take your attention to this!" He pointed at the paper.

Zim frowned. "...Is that a smiley-face?"

"No, it's a duck," Aang said. "A really weird looking duck."

"Nah," Cyborg said. "Totally a connect-the-dots-puzzle. That opens the gate to Hell. Don't connect the dots, we only just got over the last time!"

"What," Calvin said flatly.

"I think it looks like a mountain range on a map," Katara said. "...Drawn by a drunken platypus-bear with a mental disorder. And possibly some kind of social disease that attacks the eyes."

Toph poked it. "I think it's a piece of processed lumber." People at her. "...I assume you're staring at me, so let me point out that me, being blind! Have no idea what's on this thing. Let me have my fun."

"It's totally a dancing lesson thing, right Zuko?" Sokka teased.

"WILL YOU JUST LET THAT GO!" Zuko yelled. "It's a coincidental name, stop ramming me with it! You don't see me making fun of Wave-Style Island Waterbending!"

"Oh yeah, hula dancing with magic water. Hard to insult me with Waterbending when I don't give a arctic hippo's tooth about Waterbending, isn't it?"

"...It's obviously a face with goggles on," Zuko said, ignoring the point.

"Are you guys even trying?" Calvin said.

"I think it looks stupid!" Hobbes volunteered.

"Hey!"

Minimoose squeaked. "Minimoose thinks it looks like you can't draw," Zim translated.

"HEY!" A loud snort almost blew the paper away; Calvin threw himself on it while Zim observed that Appa had poked his head into the tent flap, Momo clinging to his horn, both of them making noises. "They're making fun of my drawing, aren't they?"

"Yes," Aang confirmed.

"I think it looks like a bullseye!" Abel said.

"This is childish," Scar said. "...And it's clearly a cheat code for a game controller designed after password pads."

"YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE HELPING ME!" Calvin screamed. "AND YOU KNOW WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE!"

"I apologize. Group-think is a powerful force."

"Group-think is doubleplus-ungood," Abel joked, with so much hypocritical humor you could shove it off a mountain and make an entertaining mess before the authorities came to arrest you for violating the rights of a metaphor that had gotten out of hand.

"Then what is it?" Danny said, finally tuning in after not paying any attention at all the whole time.

"A smiley face with goggles on?" Zim said.

"Are you stupid!" Calvin said. "It's a transmutation circle, a restructuring matrix! Look at it!" He got up; the shape on the paper was a crude circle with five marks on it, and a small shape in the middle.

"Totally a similey-face," Zim persisted. "See? The two shapes on the top are the goggles, and the two others by them are the eyes, and the one at the bottom is a chin! And that thing in the middle is a nose. Huh...just realized something. What kind of smiley face lacks an expression! You fail miserably at smiley-faces."

"IT'S NOT A SMILEY-FACE!" Calvin yelled.

"Aww," Some of them whined.

"Ugh, stop being idiots for five seconds and just look at it!" Calvin snapped. They did. "This is the same shape made by the explosions prior to Foster's going boom! The circle carved into the earth...the five points made by the destroyed buildings, the shock and suffering of the people in their staining the earth...this is obviously a large-scale restructuring matrix!"

The response was, shall be said, underwhelming. "...And?" Morte said.

"I'm sorry, I was watching some birds fly outside, did I miss anything important?" Aang asked.

"No, I don't think so," Sam said.

"I saw a bird," Aang said. "...It was pretty."

Calvin looked like he wanted to smash his head into something to blot out the stupid. "Calm down, calm down, all great minds are afflicted by laymen at some point or another..."

Cyborg shrugged. His home and workshop was rented from the Elrics, who dropped in all the time for various reasons, so he'd be a fool not to be at least aware of alchemy (Edward and Alphonse Elrics were total nerds about alchemy), but it wasn't something he trusted very much; it was just so much wacky voodoo-science to him. (A remark that never failed to earn a screaming freak out from Edward.)

"The young boy is correct," Scar said. "I found a vantage point to see more clearly, and the destruction is unmistakably that of a massive restructuring matrix. One I am...familiar with."

"That significant pause bothers me," Zim said. "It bothers me very much."

"But what does all that mean?" Kim asked.

"Don't you see?" Calvin said. "It's alchemy!"

Once more, he failed to impress. "What, that discredited science from the Earth Kingdom?" Zuko said. "Over a dozen Earth Kings died from ingesting mercury because they thought it'd make them immortal, and the later ones tried spirit-grafting before Avatar Roku slapped the stupidity out of them. What kind of an idiot would delve into forbidden sciences for immortality?"

...

Somewhere else...

Ling sneezed.

Gesundheit, said Greed.

...

"...Obviously," Calvin said to everyone in general. "You're mistaking what I'm talking about for the common and low-tech form of alchemy...the one that involves pure chemistry and stuff." He turned to Hobbes beseechingly. "Help me out here!"

Hobbes shrugged. "I don't know about this stuff! And it's fun to watch you squirm."

Calvin turned to Scar. "I don't know anything about Amestrian alchemy, which this clearly is," Scar said flatly. He didn't sound like he approved of it much.

"You draw circles in the ground and it makes weird stuff happen?" Cyborg said. "...Sorry, that's all I got. And how do circles make that happen!"

Zim did some thinking while Calvin inched closer to a freak out. "Alchemy...I remember you mentioned your skill of it from time to time last night? The majority of your practical abilities are rooted in alchemical devices? And it's accompined by flashes of colored light?"

"Right!" Calvn said, relieved at some modicum of sense. And from Zim of all people. "Yes! Someone remembers! I might not even have a reason to go on and on!...But I'm going to anyway, because you guys are jerks." Much groaning ensued. "Suck it up, whiners!

"Now, first things first. Alchemy, the kind I'm talking about, is a science heavily linked to chemistry and the larger study of physics, but in pratice it's really the science of recreating the structure of matter through a variety of means, though Amestrian alchemy involves channeling the energy of tectonic movement by the use of a restructing matrix...it's more complicated than that, but those are the bare essentials that aren't really accurate at all but are close enough to give you laymen a understanding of the concept at work here."

"Uh...yay?" Sam said.

"Be grateful he's not giving you the whole-hog lecture," Cyborg muttered to her. "I had to the last time I said something wrong about alchemy in front of my landlord...I dropped by for some basic property expansion permission and I didn't leave for four hours."

Calvin continued. "According to what I've heard, alchemy as it exists today was most heavily used and develouped by the same world Scar here is from, mainly in a country called Amestris-"

"Wait, you use a skill from a different world?" Aang said. "They weren't part of your worlds, were they?"

"What? No."

"So...how can you use it?"

"Believe or not, Scar and I discussed this a bit. This could be pernitent to the situation at hand, so...Mr. Scar, take them away!"

Scar crossed his arms. "This is just a hypothesis. But I believe, based on careful analysis of legends from the ancient civilization of Xerxes, the original capital of alchemy prior to the it's destruction ages before the formation of Amestris, as well as what we have learned from a wide number of alien worlds where we have also found Xerxian alchemy, that deconstruction alchemy did not originate on my world.

"We believe that it may be part of a much older form of scientific develoupment with potential thaumaturgical roots from somewhere much further in the past than we ever thought; it is certainly vastly older than even the most ancient ruins of Xerxes, based on alien texts and cultures we have encountered. One particular culture, called...well, the Culture, and a world-traveling Doctor whose name I can never quite recall...have informed us that they have found many varieties of 'our' alchemy. Ones vastly different often, and often lacking the hubris and transgressive nature of Amestrian alchemy." Scar seemed downright pleased at this. "We believe that some ancient explorer may have made contact with ancient Xerxes, perhaps in the guise of a Xerxian god or spirit-hero, and spread the seeds of alchemy into their culture. Something similar occured with Amestrian and Xingese alchemy in our own world after Xerxes was destroyed..."

"As for me," Calvin said. "Way back in the back history of my world, I think a thousand and some years ago...it's hard to get a certain date, historical records are insanely hard to find the further you want...well, our universe operates on different laws than others, and owing to some of them, it's touched by a messy realm of chaotic psychomorphic weirdness we call the Immaterium, or if you're talking about it's past hellish incarnation, the Warp. You see, the Warp touched all things, or so it's said. It spans across all things, shunning such meaningless things as 'time' or 'space'. We have it on good authority that we've made brief contact with thousands of worlds for brief moments, but they slipped away from the Warp before the daemons could get their claws on them...or worse, the Chaos Gods." He shuddered. "Sometimes, they stayed.

"One of these worlds carried it's secrets to the Kingdom's precursor, which we call the Imperium of Man. I don't recommend you look into it's practices if you like sleeping without nightmares. They didn't like new stuff, I hear; or old stuff that sounded wrong...or talk that sounded like heresy...or anything from people's noise-bits if they were in a bad mood. Touchy, the Imperium. Anyway, the precursor of Alchemy, or Shapecrafting as they chose to call it before we rediscovered the current term in interworld exploration, somehow caught the interest of the Inqusitors that first found it, and not in the bad way. Seems they really really liked the idea of a form of honest science that gave humanity power without exposing people to the corrosive madness of the Warp or putting precious technology at risk. It spread, pretty slowly due to some effort figuring out how it worked...they develouped it, evolved it, and a good long time later, it became our modern form of alchemy, after we mixed it with our develouping thaumaturgical traditions unrelated to the Ruinous Powers of the Immaterium, and thank the Powers That Be for big favors on that one." Calvin grinned. "And then I learned the original form from the guy that taught me and Hobbes how to be all awesome and stuff. After he went back home - probably one of those other worlds with alchemy, he knew a lot about it, used to joke about being a Sage or something - I melded it with the teachings that survived the chaos of the post-Imperium era. My own unique style, I can safely say."

"Oh, the Comic Kingdom used to be the Imperium..." Abel said absently. "Huh, I keep forgetting what a one-eighty it's made. I remember when it used to be a genocidal xenophobic dogmatic grim hellhole...truth in anything being reformed, y'know? Even the Imperium could ally with the Eldar, Tau and Orks after the Chaos Gods were defeated and the ensuing messiness of the existing circumstances nearly killed all of them...and gradually evolve into the Brighthammer Kingdom of your's. Or is it Comic Kingdom?"

"How do you know about all that! And what do you mean, remember?!"

"I'm older than I look."

"Well, what's that supposed to-oh, never mind, I have more important things to obsess over. Heh, and Dad never thought I'd amount to a Staunen..." Calvin pointed at the circle. "Now, me and Scar did some thinking, and that thing around Foster's is indisputably a transmutation circle; I believe that Kimblee blew up those houses in order to create those marks on the circle, as alchemy is rooted in the concept of the circle, representing the cyclical flow of energy, but conceptual shapes and runes are required to direct it. On the other hand, while I know my alchemy, I've never seen a circle like this. I have no idea what it does."

"So all this was a waste of time?" Sokka complained.

"No," Scar said. "Not at all. Because I know what this circle does." He tapped the paper. "I have seen this...in my brother's research, in the very soil of Amestris, with my own country as one of the markers. This particular version is...unrefined and hastily made, but it's unmistakable."

He could not be mistaken here. He knew that transmutation circle. He had spent the last months of his life as the Alchemist Slayer of Amestris preparing for what would happen when it activated. They all had, knowing what would happen on the Promised Day of that twisted thing under Central and it's sin-born 'children'; his brother had died, knowing what would happen to the country, and (Scar felt a surge of fierce pride) he had prepared for it, designed a flawless countercircle that would have spelled the doom of that plan and of the monsters under Central, if not for the Heartless' arrival and the doom of their world. All their plans had been for nothing, but on the other hand, Amestris had not been consumed in a blaze of pestilential red light for the ambitions of a arrogant abomination, and that was a victory, Phrryic though it might be.

"So it's what now?" Toph said impatiently.

"...I wish I could not tell you," Scar said. "The knowledge of this is not a pleasant matter, and I resent the knowing of it. This aspect of alchhemy is known as the Devil's Work for a reason, and I would not blame you if you struck at me and the people of my world for even being responsible for such a thing ever being discovering or invented."

Toph waved her hand irritably. "Enough grandstanding."

"What is it!" Morte said.

"A human transmutation circle," Calvin and Scar both said. Scar finished, "A work of alchemy...specifically designed to sever the lives and souls of live human beings and condense them into a high-energy substance that serves as a nigh-impossibly powerful form of alchemic amplification; and this substance is known as the Philosopher's Stone."

There was a long, bleak silence.

"What," Aang, Zuko, Hobbes and Kim said in the same flat tone of voice.

"I KNEW ALCHEMY WAS VOODOO!" Cyborg yelled. "And evil. Don't look at me like that. My great-great-granny came from the Carribean, she knew stuff."

"...Huh," Morte said weakly. "That's a new one."

"Why would you know something like that?" Zim asked.

Scar glowered at him; not like he was angry, but that he was considering whether or not to tell them, and it would not be a pleasant matter. "...Know this," He finally said, his voice tired and bitter. "My people, Ishvala's chosen, had NOT been kindly treated by our world. Our land of Ishbal was holy, not because it was hospitable or because we had come from there, but because it was OUR'S. Our defense from a world turned against us. And KNOW that one of the first things done in war is to DEMONIZE your enemy. Deny them their humanity, and ANY atrocity can be justified, and it WILL be.

"In the Ishbalan Civil War, they did NOT kill my people always. Sometimes, when the killing streams of fire and blasphemous living earth only left them barely alive...they were dragged to the holy places that had been turned into abbaitors and slaughterhouses for the doctors and scientists they coerced in their butcher's work. They had work to do, these men of science, and my people made such PERFECT materials for their twisted mockery of science. They discovered many things then, in those places. The first Philosopher's Stone in current history was made there, from those Ishbalans that had served the Amestrian military at the time that the mock-human Fuhrer-President King Bradley had them caged away and shipped to their deaths.

"I KNOW of these things. Do not doubt my words."

There was yet another bleak silence. Scar went silent, horrors going back to the memory of racial mnemonics haunting his eyes.

"...They experimented on your people," Zuko whispered, who for his part seemed to be going quietly insane with impending violence. He would know about that; the Fire Nation was known for doing things to the Benders they had captured. The Airbenders had given a merciful death, some said. The alternative was worse. "That's how you know all this, isn't it? This government, this...Amestris, did this to your people."

Scar looked at him, thoughtfully. Very slowly and deliberately, he nodded his head once. "Was that not what I just told you?" He said dryly.

"No wonder you're so grouchy all the time," Cyborg said, disbeliving and resorting to bad humor in his horror.

"So...that's what happened to these people?" Katara said shakily, clearly horrified by this latest atrocity. None of them had ever heard of something so debased, so monstrously transgressive against a living person. It was one thing to kill a person, another to cripple a culture, and yet another to destroy a civilization...but to mutilate the soul...

The people they had met so shortly ago, whether brief enemies or allies or even friends, were worse then dead. "He...removed their souls and turned them into some kind of weapon?" Aang said, looking a mix of sick and righteously indignant. "He blew up their home...with themselves?"

"What do you think they did with the first Stone?" Scar said sourly. "They gave it to Kimblee. The very one he used when he destroyed my city."

"He's going to do it again," Zuko said.

"No," Danny said suddenly. "No. No way. I don't believe it. That can't be real. It makes no sense. You can't remove a soul and turn it into stuff. That makes no damn sense. I am putting my foot down here. The stupid ends here, and I refuse to acknowledge the stupidness any longer. See you guys, I'm going home!"

He left the tent. An awkward silence occupied them. "When do you suppose he's going to realize the flaw in that plan?" Morte said.

"About now," Toph said, having otherwise been unusually quiet, Disturbingly so.

Danny walked back in, looking sheepish. "...I forgot I don't have anywhere to live."

"Them blue-screens-of-death hit the people today hard," Hobbes muttered to the person closest to him, which happened to be Aang.

"Does anyone else who just nearly got killed by monsters born from the metaphorical darkness in the heart the other night have any arbitary objections?" Calvin said dryly.

"Or for that matter deals with the waking dead?" Sam added. "Or ectoplasmic entities from another dimension...what the heck are the ghosts from the Ghost Zone anyway?"

Tucker tapped his chin. "You know, it's never very clear. Pretty sure that Ember used to be alive, though. I always just figured that the Ghost Zone freaks were mostly sentient bits of ectoplasm that took on iconic form based on powerful archetypes and images from our plane of existence, with the occasional ACTUAL ghost thrown in." They stared at him. "What?

Danny opened his mouth in retort to Calvin. He paused. He thought about the relevant logistics. "...Dang it. I REALLY wish I could respond to that. Damn my increasingly insane life!"

"I'd tell you to be grateful you still have a life...but you're half-ghost or something, so you missed it there," Ron quipped.

"...Did I just get burned by the guy with the monkey's tail who's spent all morning fanboying over Zuko!" Danny said incredulously. "THIS! IS! A! NEW! LOW!"

"WHY IS HE YELLING!" Ron shouted.

"HE'S BASICALLY AN IDIOT!" Zim yelled.

"HEY!" Danny said.

Calvin shook his head at poor Danny and clapped his hands twice. "The world-spirits have pity on you."

Aang raised his hand. "I feel sorta bad for him. Does that count?"

"Look, let's just put this whole argument away for a bit?" Ron said; a part of him felt deeply guilty for stopping an argument instead of continuing it. Arguing was in his heritage. "So the question remains...what does this guy want and how can we use that to find and stop him?" He addressed this clearly at Scar. "Is he...I don't know, going to run around blowing everything to bits and us with it?"

Scar tilted his head thoughtfully. "...That is a distinct possibility."

"Of course it is." Ron threw his hands in the air. "No offense, but this Amestris place was too dumb to live! Their leader was called the Fuhrer. They went to war with everyone around them! They liquidated minorities because they were told to! They commited horrible atrocities in the name of medicine! And they were mostly blonde and blue-eyed! Honestly, were they ripping off Nazi Germany on purpose or is it one of those nail things!"

"Actually, Amestris is closer to your Britan or post-World War 2 Germany than the National Socialists," Scar said. "But I see your point. I make it a point of pride that Ishbalans were never ethnically Amestrians. It was an alliance of convienience. Not that it helped much." Scar shook himself, reminded him to get on track. "...We lack information desperately. Any action we make could work into whatever Kimblee has planned. But we cannot simply wait; we invite the deaths of the entire town in such a manner."

They grew silent. "...You do not exaggerate?" Zim said.

"No. The power of the Stone is...beyond your knowing." Scar twisted a bit. "I do. He holds the power to wipe out a building like Foster's in the blink of an eye...as collateral damage. If his intention is to destroy the town and kill everyone in it, that is in his power."

"He wouldn't get far," Kim said. "It's happened before. People go too far in their attacks on us and try to kill the whole town. All it gets is the best and most powerful of us plus an mob of faction members and skilled civilians who don't want to die. Kimblee would go down!"

"I believe so, after extensive effort," Scar said. "And so many of us would die in the process. And I must stress this on you: he does not care if he lives or dies. The thought of a given action leading to his demise is likely to be considered a acceptable outcome if it helps whatever his plan is." Scar frowned. "And something else concerns me.

"Kimblee destroyed my city because he was ordered to do so. He instigated a bloody seige on the fortress of Mt. Briggs on the word of Central. He has done worse, all on orders. He is not a man to strike out on his own and make the world his toy; he requires a framework to make himself useful to do anything. I highly doubt he simply came here on a whim."

"You believe he was sent here," Zim said.

Scar inclined his head. "Perhaps he is connected to this Mr. Lyle that accousted you. And the dismantling of the Foster's security networks, the root of a major defense network of the First District, is too serious to be something minor. And had it not been done, I doubt Kimblee could have created a Philosopher's Stone as sucessfully as he did."

"Mr. Lyle was an advance scout, or perhaps made an error and Kimblee could have been sent to clean up his mess, then. He certainly didn't seem to have accomplished anything significant while he was here."

"But what sent him?" Cyborg asked. "I mean...I have no idea half of what's going on here, but that sounds pretty important. Some kind of evil conspiracy? A extradimensional law firm from Hell or Evil incorporated? A devil that's doing all this to get some guy to sell his marriage!"

"That last one sounds really stupid," Aang complained. "Wouldn't it be easier if we just caught this guy and asked him?"

"Oh come on," Calvin said. "We'd have to interrogate him and stuff first-"

"That may just work," Scar interrupted. "In the dealings my Amestrian allies has had with him in the past, he has not known to be particularily loyal to his employers, whoever they are. He does as they ask without fault or moral qualm, but he is not concerned with banal things like secrets."

"...Well, that does it then!" Zim said cheerfully. "We simply find him, defeat him and convince him to speak. Simple, yes?"

"...Zim, you mean to tell me that you want to fight a guy that took out a mansion in a single shot," Zuko said. "Along with most of the street behind it. And prior to that he set up five buildings to simultaneously blow up. There's something I don't like about this plan. It involves us not surviving the execution."

"Oh."

"Wouldn't it be a better idea to lead this guy into a trap?" Hobbes suggested. "Maybe find out what he's after and lead him...no, we don't have enough information to know what he's after, if he is after anything."

"Bet he's got a ton of pride going on..." Katara said. "You can always use something like that."

"True," Scar said. "I have heard Kimblee to be a man of incredible pride. I remember I once saved a girl from his hands, and he took my statement on the matter as a personal offense, simply because I was looking down on him."

"...So, he doesn't like you," Sokka said as he and Hobbes stared at Scar thoughtfully. "You're like an enemy of his."

"He once said that I was the Ishbalan he missed. He seemed to resent failing to catch me, even if it was extenutating circumstances...why are you looking at me like that?"

Sokka grinned. "I think we have a way to draw him out."

This did not appear to please Scar. At all. "...I am not going to like this, am I?"

It was quite clearly a rhetorical question. Cyborg cackled ominously. It seemed appropiate. After a moment, Zim and Calvin joined in, and Ron took the time to correct them on their evil laughing techniuqes. Toph got bored and joined in, and Zuko ruluctantly followed after she bullied him into it.

...

Kimblee once more walked down a sidewalk, but in a much better mood then before.

Blowing up Foster's had been a fine start to his mission, he'd decided, but it wasn't enough. Wuya had wanted chaos, had wanted panic; in his mind, Kimblee imagined a thousand voices crying out as once, lips stained with bloodied tears and the ground underneath them burning.

It was just one house. It was not enough.

Kimblee knew of destruction. He knew about people. He knew how the first related to the second, and he knew how to bring them together in ways that make people break like fragile glass.

He also knew that his normal method, making the meaningless disappear in showers of fire and gore, was not always the most effective way in spite of it's fun. His mission to spread chaos could technically be done if he simply blasted everything around him at random, but he didn't like the timing. He wouldn't have the time to make it look pretty just yet.

What was he to do?

It was not a question he addressed to himself. It seemed to come from the half-there shapes capering in the spots and pools of shadows he passed, without words. It was a curious mode of communication. It was...liberating.

He liked plans he made up on the fly. They were fun.

Kimblee snapped his fingers once, spinning the Stone in his fingers, feeling it's incomprehensible power flowing out into him and into the ground under him, the energies of hundreds of souls blazing and screaming and raging and singing their despair; how he longed to hear it!

The ground under him shook free in a shock of red and lifted itself into the air, stone stretching itself far beyond it's limits even before it stopped just high enough for Kimblee to neatly step off onto a handy rooftop. It held together; the Stone's power surpassed such simple things as the laws of physics.

That was the intent, after all. It was the ultimate alchemic amplifier. Gold from lead. Power from dust. Life from death. It was a thinking man's dream; reason conquering the world. And in deference, it was called the Philosopher's Stone.

Kevin had been largely quiet and uncommunicative since Kimblee harvested the resources of Foster's and wiped the house out of sight; he stirred and remarked, That's damn arrogant.

"Arrogance is the inevitable result when a man mistakes his capabilty for worth and overestimates his place in the world," Kimblee said. "You cannot expect men and women who are handed the power to remake the world as they wish to treat it with reserve and humility. Perhaps...the people of Ishbal do have a point on those grounds. I suppose they renounced after they saw what became of those who used it. Madness begets madness, and it is sensible to stay away from such, is it not?"

I thought you hated them, Ghostfreak said.

"Hate is a meaningless trait. Investing yourself so negatively in someone else is a waste of valuable time and effort. There are many more admirable things to find in a person than there are to detest, I think."

Ghostfreak seemed amused. Kimblee felt nothing from Kevin. "Are you still there, little half-breed boy? Or has the culmination of my art pulled back the rose-shades too far?"

...Don't have anything to say to you. Kevin was quick to speak, and quicker to lapse into futher silence.

"You pick an odd moment to express humanist qualities," Kimblee mused, walking towards the roof's edge, where he could see the blackened ruins of Foster's. "You used to crash trains to steal the money on-board, and kill the people on them quite intentionally."

If Kevin had a body, he would have expressed some tangible form of expression, perhaps shuffling about anxiously or refusing to look at him. Kimblee felt emotion roil from the boy without pause or control, a tar-sticky mass of many things, self-loathing layered over regret and bubbling with envy and coated with a blind black hate for everyone and everything that didn't make houses black out when he drew near or touch a pipe only to have his hand come away as something stiff and cold and the hand of a monster's...

Kimblee smiled. "Such an interest childhood, and yet not even done with growing up...whatever will you become if you survive me?"

Kevin, again, said nothing. The hate poured forth, enough to twist and corrupt a child's heart, damaged and torn as it was. There are many things that could twist a soul, and Kimblee smelt the noticable traces of betrayal and rage all mixed up and twisted together.

Such beautiful potential, all twisted up and simmering inside. It was surprising that the abyss-black morass of his heart had actually be pulled a little more towards baseline human behavior by his time under the scientist's ministrations; normally it just made crazy people worse. But it seemed a shame to let such interesting possibilities fade away.

"Tell me something," Kimblee said after a moment. "Do you hate these people?"

Kevin said nothing. Kimblee felt a trace of surprise from the boy.

"I can feel the rage that burns through you like lightning from the skies. Building up, ever since you were a small child." A pause. Good for building up. "Since your false father cast you out as a monster."

There were again no words, but that could be taken wrong, implying that Kevin did not react. He most certainly did; the rush of hate and fury and loss hit Kimblee like a riptide. A sore nerve had been struck.

"You were condemned to die on the streets," Kimblee said quietly. "And yet you did not. That would just be giving him his wish, would it not? He wanted you to die there. You endured, you survived, and every moment felt like another strike to his face.

"And you adapted. You fought. You did terrible things to live, and in time you grew to enjoy them. Your false father was a powerful man, and hurting the system he served was revenge by proxy."

Don't know anything... Kevin whispered.

He was wrong. Ghostfreak had told Kimblee much. "And little by little, you became the monster your father believed you to be. People stopped mattering to you. How could they, when they had cast you out to rot on the streets? When your own mother had loved you enough to let you be born but hadn't loved you enough to protect you? When they slept in their beds every night knowing they were safe, they weren't monsters, they didn't have the entire world for an enemy.

"Such a terrible way to live. It felt so much better when the lightning crackled through your body and burned their faces away so you didn't have to hear the hate and the disgust. So much better when you stopped caring."

Kevin was silent.

"So look down on that town down there," Kimblee asked softly. "Those people down there don't have monsters. They don't worry or care about species issues or inter-human blood mixing. They don't cast their halfbreeds out to die. No one here knows the horror of being a monster like you. Being a freak. So, with that in mind...

"Would you like to see them burn?"

Kimblee felt his heart skip a beat. It was nothing to do with his own physiological or psychological state.

Kevin knew revenge. He knew hate. He knew the satisfaction in draining away your pain by inflicting it on someone else. Burn down a house because you were cast out of your own. Burn down a warehouse because the owner kicked you in the street because homeless people are like animals to so many others. Burn everyone that calls you freak and let the horror of your own existence sift away until night comes and the nightmares come calling, the awful truth of the universe pressing down like a falling anvil.

He also knew that his problems, while his, were fairly minor in the big scheme. Don't care anymore, Kevin said, shuddering and small, and if he'd held his body properly, he would probably have been crying and glowering at the same time.

Kimblee's expression did not change. He still grinned. "You have resolve," He said. "...I admire that.

"Please try to enjoy this even a little, though. I promised you this town will burn...and it will."

Kimblee had his plans ready. The pieces were all in his hand. He simply needed the proper moments to play them.

"But first...we find this Jarod," He said aloud.

May I? Ghostfreak hissed.

"You may." He extended his hands as the green life flowed.

His forearms crunched and twisted slightly off-course, the bones elongating to an extent foriegn to the human skeleton. They became thin, almost like a bird's, and his muscles looked akin to tumors, freakish bulges on those frail looking sticks, and a shuddering jerk drew back his unnecessary flesh, pulling it taught across the bones and melding them (he could see his bones and the veins running inside his body, fusing into a beautifully efficient superstructure), small black spines bursting out of his flesh here and there, a large bunch just in front of his elbows, and then his hands changed; not like water, in flowing shifts, but like a landslide, jerky and shocking in it's suddenness. They grew larger, his flesh taut and translucent against them, and his fingers hardened, skin turning into plates of some chitinous material and forming jointed claws.

Black veins appeared on skin that had gone bone-white in odd patches over his body; these veins ran streaks all over his body, most prominently his arms, but as his spine curved slightly and small spikes grew down his back and twisted his shoulders, he could feel his mouth twisting into a nearly-shut hole and his skull itching like mad; he closed his eyes, his shifting bones whispering like the damned, and when it stopped, he opened his eyes to see that more hair than usual was in view. He waved a hand, now an unrecognizable monster's claw, and determined that one of his eyes had moved up into the curve of his forehead, almost on the side.

He relaxed his posture as the changes finished. There, Ghostfreak said. Lovely.

Kimblee glanced at a nearby child, who took one look at him and ran away screaming. He saw his reflection in a mirror and blinked. His migrating eye did it twice, it had four eyelids. "...I seem to be bothering a lot of children today."

He shrugged. "Ah well, time to move onwards."

Kimblee moved out, in a soldier's practiced step. The target awaited.

...

A/N: Only going to get worse from here, y'know.

Danny's going through a bad Heroic BSOD. I'm being partially influenced by Simon's from Gurren Lagann, and also my own experiences from a few years ago.

Little known fact; as Film Brain stated, Deadpol's power is being 'freaky awesome'. I love Deadpool. He's made of awesome. (Also coolness.)

I'm not good at plotting. Just trying out my skill with this Red Lotus arc.

Zim is not getting along very well with his newer allies, is he? But, really, it's ZIM. This is the guy who still juggles the Sanity Ball even after he's done a Heel Face Turn from Lawful Stupid Evil to Chaotic Good. (I think. What does Zim's Character Alignment seem like in this story?)

When in doubt, I suscribe to the tenant of all escalation-guys: Make. Things. WORSE.

In case you're wondering, the 'nail' thing Ron talked about is a reference to the trope 'In Spite of A Nail', wherein things stay EXACTLY the same in spite of an event to cause it. (Like say, a fantasy world where dragons are real and so is magic, but World War 2 and attending atrocities still occured. Which for some reason seems to be the cornerstone of the trope. Damn those Wacky Nazis for such a stranglehold on the hearts and minds of writers! Incidentally, the bit about Amestris being pararel Nazis is a common theme with fans; Ms. Arakawa, the manga-ka being the series, has stated that it's based on Britian, but one gets the feeling she went everywhere for inspiration. The Ishbalans, by the way, are inspired by the Ainu, the original natives of Japan. It's not a happy story either way.)

Wondering what's up with Calvin and Hobbes? Well, while it wasn't an original part of my mythos for the Comic Kingdom (not that I really had one), Warhammer 40,000 is now firmly the distant past of the place, and with that in mind, develoupments are snowballing.

Cyborg was a bit of a random addition, but since he lived near, it wouldn't make sense for him NOT to investigate, right?

I like Stature. She's awesome. (Also, for the crack shippers out there, she dates Spider-Man's Traverse Town incarnation, who is closely based on his Ultimate version. Also, I watch I'm A Marvel, I'm A DC. Think about the implications of THAT!)

Think I should give King Garfield more screen time than King Mickey had in the first Kingdom Hearts? I already have a team set-up to join with him. And if so, how about King Garfield meeting Zim's team later on, BEFORE the big ending?

Few more chapters to go before this arc is done. Promise!

People who pay good attention may notice that Calvin's been dropping his fair share of terms from the fangame Genius: The Transgression. If you're confused, check out the entry for it on TVTropes. It's awesome, and comes with an elegant and finely crafted link to the game itself. Savvier people will consider just WHY he's dropping terms like that.

Been playing Fallout 3 a lot. Think Zim should pay a trip to the Capital Wasteland?

(Also, for the Avatar fans: who is else looking forward to Legend of Korra?)