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.

14. Red Lotus: It Gets Worse

I did say I had the next chapter nearly done, didn't I? This one's an action-filled chapter, people, because I was itching to do an awesome fight scene. Also, the escalation hits a peak! I'd feel bad for everybody at this point.

I have also decided that one of my current goals is to make this story awesome enough to warrent an entry on TV Tropes. This will be difficult; I've come to conclude that my real talents lie in characterization, over-the-top wackiness and dialouge, not epic-scope. (I have a ton of random story ideas, for example, usually based on intriguing crossover ideas, but I rarely put them into practice simply because I can't usually think of a decent plot to pin on it. My earlier attempts used to be kind of weak, so I tend to do one-shots when I bother to write any of them down.)

Also, I've gotten the idea of putting in worlds that don't corrospond to any in the games, either thematically or plot-wise, to help the plot out. (If I did things the same way as the game, it would both be derivative and short. Probably.) Any thoughts on that?

Disclaimer: I don't own anything I don't own. (I'd list things I've referenced, reused, repurposed or whatnot, but that would be impractical.)

...

Ducking through allies is, in Traverse Town, considered a traditional and acceptable means of going about your business. Thus, Kimblee was largely able to escape suspicion, but even though he wasn't being accousted, his mood wasn't feeling so great.

For starters, it was starting to become apparent that the body he was currently using was not as reliable as he had hoped. The healed wound in his neck still twinged with pain as a reminder of that fact. And for another...

He gave closer consideration to Jarod, black-veined and injured and twitching in nightmares Ghostfreak had implanted on purpose; not carried over his shoulder anymore, but scrunched into a mixture of a wheelbarrow and a restraining harness Kimblee had transmuted from a staircase no one had been using. (It was more efficient than carrying him around; Kimblee had all sort of aches and pains now.)

Kimblee shuddered. What he had seen in Jarod's mind was...wrong. Something about the way the man thought was pushing all sorts of absurd feelings in Kimblee's mind, fleeting ideas that he'd never before considered and were, frankly, painful to think about.

He kept thinking about all his 'jobs'. All the people he'd killed. He'd never thought much of them in this context before; not as tools to use, instruments to work his music with, but as people. It was torturous to think about them; he kept wondering how they had felt as they died, their last dying scream scraping their throats raw and bloody...

He'd never cared or even conceived of such concerns before he had started to see the world the way Jarod did. Kimblee shuddered again.

You're not going to win, Kevin said quietly; he hadn't spoken in a long time. Ghostfreak was keeping him buried, shoving him back into the deepest reaches of the consciousness to prevent him from wresting control once more; at best, Kimblee was only feeling a trickle of emotional input from him, Kevin's vaugest reactions to what Ghostfreak permitted him to experience.

Kimblee ignored him. Kevin's attempt to kill the three of them had...unsettled him.

Still, on the other side of his mood, he had captured Jarod. The object of Mr. Lyle's request. Yes, he was a bit banged up, but that shouldn't affect whatever Mr. Lyle had in store for him.

You assume, of course, that Mr. Lyle doesn't harbor some sort of 'affection' for him, Ghostfreak observed. Kimblee twitched; the thought was...all too likely. If Jarod had been in a state to be made aware of this sentiment, he would have thrown up. (Mr. Lyle had that effect on people.)

For that reason (Jarod on his shoulder, not thoughts of Mr. Lyle's deviance), Kimblee stuck to the shadows. Moving in alleys and sneaking over rooftops (which wasn't easy with a wheeled contraption with a person inside it, even if you had alchemy to make bridges from rooftop to rooftop). It wouldn't do to attract attention, and walking through even this town with a severely injured man around you would get some attention. No. That simply would not do.

Kimblee, quietly sliding down a bridge from a walkway into an alleyway between a defunct trading card store and a thaumaturgical bookshop whose owner was off on vacation, ventured a jaunty whistle when he heard something odd; screaming and yelling, and...explosions?

"Hmm?" He said, thinking briefly that people had seen him after all and were about to attack, and transmuted a peephole in a wall to look into the street, only to see...a ninja in a red-and-black outfit fighting a green-skinned woman throwing blasts of emerald-bright fire at him, the ground, trees, trashcans, stationary cars, some overhead birds, and just about anything that moved. (She was missing a lot, too. Perhaps on purpose.)

"...I might say that you do not see that every day, but clearly that is not a consideration in this town," Kimblee said. Heat flashed over him and he ducked just before fire roared like a dragon and smashed through the wall, flooding the alley way with baleful green; he stood shakily back up in a alleyway that was now scorched black and looked through the rather larger hole. Deciding to do the smart thing, he grabbed Jarod's cart-thing and quietly walked away, hoping to get out of there before he got killed or something.

In the street, continued shennigans were happening. "DEATH TO CURTAINS!" The woman cried, blasting a random house and destroying the curtains.

A man poked his head. "Oy, what the hell!" He complained. "You can't just destroy those curtains! They've been just like curtains to me!"

"Tough!" She tilted her head. "Death to curtain lovers?"

The man paled. "Ah. Sorry, I must be going now. Like...um...FAR AWAY!" He retreated, and a few moments later, blasted straight through the roof of his house on a rocket-chair.

"Well, that makes no damn sense at all!" The ninja said cheerfully. "And neither does me carrying this!" He held up a pair of rubber ducks with pulleys in the middle, joined by a length of chain. "And now, a traditional Ysmirchian war screech. Yor-blibl-bla-TOOK-bah!"

"That wasn't a victory screech," Someone complained. "That wasn't a victory screech at all! You have to use your diaphram more. Also, that sounded like something some idiot just made by smashing his face into the keyboard!"

"How'd you know! Wait. I mean, how dare you wear those shirt with those shoes while having that skin color and living under that astrological sign without ever listening to rockabilly polka rap while dancing under a full-moon naked and eating crispy crackers and dancing a merry Irish jig and bribing a troop of miniature giant space hamsters to lead a complicated song and dance routine with some very lovely chereography, espicially from Uncle Steakcharmer?"

The somone stared at him and said the only sane thing you could possibly say under the circumstances: "What?"

The clearly insane ninja gave him a look. Possibly, he was wearing a mask, it made it hard to tell. "...Say 'roota-tonga-splitta-cloaca' five times fast. Please the Irony Gods!"

"What? No!"

"You will please the Irony Gods either with your chanting or your dancing!" The ninja said; he pulled out a pair of guns and fired at the ground by the someone's feet; the someone very quickly ran away. "Aw man, you're supposed to dodge 'em! Tch, some people have no respect for the classics, y'know?"

Kimblee, passing by an open alleyway, watched more chaos happen, to the net effect of everyone in the street or attendent buildings except for the two troublemakers emerging from their homes or business places to see what the hell was going on. Kimblee, in spite of his earlier decision to just get away, stayed there and watched it happen. Should we really be remaining here? Ghostfreak asked. We could well be killed! Or found out.

"I want to leave..." Kimblee said slowly. "But these two...the stupidity is entrancing. Quite annoying, really."

"If I don't get fifty free meal coupons to Mama Biscotti's All You Can Eat Fried Foods right this instant, I'll kill you all!" Deadpool announced, to a horrified streets. "Because I've got...a thermal detonator!"

Some people ran. A few paused, willing to fight. Shego alone pointed at the thing Deadpool was holding and said, "That's a can of tomato soup."

"I know," Deadpool said. "Wanted to see if I could sucker anyone into it. Damn, I love Mama Biscotti's! And reruns from the All Cartoon All-Star channel! And the laughter of things that have no business existing in the first place. But I hate short shorts."

"Why?"

"Lady, some people ain't got not business showing off their inner thighs, know what I mean? Not you, you've got some nice leg-meat." A blast of green fire hit him in the face, not appearing to bother him at all. "Oh yeah, you know what I mean! And riiight now you're wondering how I know what your inner thighs look like. Two words! Hidden cameras. On trained weasels." Another blast hit him in the chest, knocking him down. "Wait, that's five words," He said, getting back up. "And you've got no idea where the weasels can hide. Heh. By the way, your diary has a lousy lock. You can blow it off with grenades so easy!" A final blast of fire, hotter and angrier, hit him squarely between the legs. "Eek! My crotch! MY MORALLY AMBIGUIOUS CROTCH!" He fell over, in pain. Then he shot a firecracker into the sky. Where he'd been hiding it, no one knew. "And yet I still have the strength to spite the ozone layer. Take that, you whiny layer of atmosphere!"

Shego let her hands drop, still ablaze with green flame. Or plasma, or electromagnetic energy or whatever the hell her powers were. "Idiot." She noticed that a few men (and women) were looking at her, their heads tilted. "What?"

"He's right," One loose-lipped fool remarked. "You do have nice legs. Bit thick in the thighs, but some people like tha-" A blast of green fire took out the wall behind him, the room behind that and rather frightened a small bear that had been passing through on a leave of tourism. The fool in question did not blink or otherwise react overtly. "Point taken. Must go now!" He ran away, not in any real hurry but a generally telegraphed desire to not be there at that moment.

"ANYONE ELSE WANT TO SAY ANYTHING!" Shego yelled.

"Yes," someone else said. "That outfit you're wearing emphasizes your chest just a tad more than it ought to. Dispite it being a multi-layered bodysuit with an overcoat on." A bolt of energy, focused into a thin green laser, burned through this critic's incredibly ugly hat. "Hey, I like that hat. It wards away the spirits of poor civic planning because of it's bombastity. Is that a word?" Another laser landed inches away from an ear. "Sorry, must run now!"

More people ran away too, getting the hint; a woman of mass destruction in a lousy mood is not conducive to getting people to stay in the area. Deadpool got up, having recovered by this point. "You wussies! And mouthbreathers! And guys named Jeppi."

"Hey!" Said a guy named Jeppi.

"How dare you ran away from bolts of green...something, no one knows, but it burns and it illuminates and stuff so we call it fire! I'LL MAKE YOU ALL PAY FOR NOT GIVING THE COUPONS!" He tossed the can of tomato soup in the air and unsheathed his katanas in a single economical movement. He swung them in a series of practiced and highly skilled katas, the air whispering along the slashing blades as the can of soup fell. The last of his poses ended with his katanas over his head, pommel to pommel like he wanted to make them into some kind of impractical but really cool dual-blade weapon. The can fell closer; Deadpool spun the katanas so fast some people flinched from the glare of the sun reflected of the blades dozens in times in seconds, making a sharp whistling noise and appearing as a circle of gleaming metal; Deadpool's improbable fencing prowess was so great that his katana's couldn't even be seen in mid-swing. The poor unfortunate can landed right into that spinning arc of blades; mere instants later, three perfectly equal sections of metal hit the ground at his feet, and a large splash of tomato soup fanned out from Deadpool in a perfect circle, splashing a bunch of people. (Shego would have been hit to but she generated a burst of green fire that vaporized the soup before she could be hit.)

"Hey, what the hell?" Someone complained. "Eew, it's cold."

Deadpool struck a cool pose; one blade arced behind his shoulder, another held peripendular to the ground, both completely spotless and unmarked. He sheathed them and pointed at the complainer. "Ooh, you think it's bad now? Just wait until the nanobots active."

There was a pause. "What nanobots?" Someone asked.

That phrase was, actually, a cue to the aforementioned nanoites clustered in the tomato soup; it was not meant to be eaten but spilled on people as a prank. They activated, and the soup turned solid in the shapes of big fists and hammers and other implements of beating. "Those ones!" Deadpool said proudly. The soup-fists immediately set to punching however they were on. Much screaming and panicking and fleeing of unfortunate bystanders commenced.

One big hurried rush later (punctuated by many a scream of pain or condemnation of Deadpool) and the street was abruptly deserted. Except for Shego, Deadpool and still unseen, Kimblee.

"Well, that was interesting," Kimblee said to himself. "...This town really is full of maniacs and lunatics. I'm sure Wuya won't mind if I blow one or two districts off the planet; it'll lower the total insanity of the multiverse as a whole, I hope-"

I'd permit you to indulge your whimsies at another time, Ghostfreak interrupted. But I can't help but feel concerned that they are abruptly ceasing their childish hostilities.

Kimblee blinked. Deadpool and Shego had indeed done just that and were now staring right at where he was hiding. "...Ah," Kimblee said, reaching for the Philosopher's Stone and putting a careful hand on the handlebar of his meatbag-roller (AKA, the thing he was carrying Jarod in) while slowly walking away and going for a passage away from here...

A bolt of green fire struck Kimblee dead in the back, knocking him clear off his feet and into a nearby collection of trashcans. Sucks to be you! Kevin taunted, in spite of the agonizing pain and horrific burn setting on his transformed back.

The meatback-carrier fell over, but Jarod's unconscious body stopped shortly before hitting the ground; Deadpool had teleported to catch him, on the ground that if this guy had kidnapped him, then clearly it was a good idea to take him away. "Yoink!" Deadpool said.

"Hey," Kimblee said lazily, sitting up and ignoring the agony of his burned muscles and shoulder. "I already kidnapped him. Find your own victim."

"Hmn..." Deadpool appeared to think it over but decided that thinking was too much effort. "Nah, I'm good. Chaotic Neutral tending towards Good-ish, whatever."

"...I see." Kimblee grabbed the Stone and put his other hand on the ground; red flashed around his hand and the alleyway rippled, arcs of red flashing everywhere as the walls and ground cracked, incredibly thin and sharp spikes transmuted from them and stabbing Deadpool right in the base of the spine, his actual spine, through the neck and a large one right in his stomach.

"Huh. That's incredibly painful," Deadpool said, amid all the blood gushing everywhere. His arm flopped, and Jarod fell off onto the ground. Kimblee smirked; the ground under Jaroid flashed red and flipped him up into the air with such force that he crashed right into Kimblee.

This was not much of a hindrance, as the Red Lotus Alchemist was able to get back up moments later. Kimblee clenched the Stone in his teeth so he had a hand free to put on a nearby wall; before he could transmute a hole to escape through, a boot blazing with green narrowly missed his head owing to some slight bad timing and put a sizable hole in the wall.

Shego swung again at Kimblee, grinning like a sadist, and this time her clawed gloves caught the right side of his face and produced a loud scream before he sent a large fist-shaped projectile out of the ground and into her side, smashing her into a wall. She recovered fast, bouncing off the wall ninja-like and fired a blast of green fire that vaporized the spikes pinning Deadpool's arms. "Your timing sucks!" Deadpool complained as he got the feeling back in his arms and unsheathed a katana and swung; the spikes were sliced apart, and he wrenched the pieces still in him without seeming aware of the pain.

"Ingrate," Shego remarked.

"So," Kimblee said simply, trying to balance Jarod's weight and remain standing with all his injuries. "I have been found it, it seems. What gave me away?"

"Like we're about to tell you," Shego said. "I used to be a villianess, I know all about not blurting out the plan to the enemy just because it's tradition."

"'Used to'?" Deadpool said. "Some would argue. And by 'some', I mean 'everyone that knows you'. Oh, and explodey-dude? All we had to do was-"

"Shut up!" Shego said. "He doesn't need to know about Mustang being in with Mr. Yao on this...oh, damn it."

"Mustang?" Kimblee said. "Roy Mustang? The Flame Alchemist? You must be joking. What would he be doing working with ruffians like yourselves...hrm. 'Mr. Yao'? I don't suppose you mean that Xingian prince that worked with Hohenheim and the Elric brothers and their other allies against the homunculi?"

Shego paused. "...Wait, what?"

Kimblee frowned. "You mean you don't know?"

"I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Hardly unexpected, given what a colossal failure that was," Kimblee said, with a shrug. "Partially my fault, I suppose." He paused, noticing that the vicious holes in Deadpool's sides were already sealed up, leaving some nasty bruises sure to fade away in minutes. "...A regenerator, are you? Hrm, I suppose that could be a problem."

"Ya think so?" Shego said with a grin. "It's gonna be a problem. No possibilities about it! Now, uh, how would the boss want it down...?" She waved a clawed hand at him. "Hand over the Philosopher's Stone and your hostage and you'll only be slightly maimed."

Kimblee frowned. "Don't you mean 'or'?"

"Whazzat?"

"That's a not at all appealing surrender deal. You're supposed to lay down terms that make a foe see the alternatives and decide that surrendering is the more attractive option. The promise of being maimed isn't appealing to anyone. Except perhaps a masochist. Which I can assure you that I'm not."

"We-elll," Deadpool said sing-song. "Maa-ybee normally that's how they do it, but, heh, see, we're not exactly the usual guys to do this, y'know? We're not too good at surrender, anyway. Giving it or accepting it, I mean. She's gonna wanna break a few bones or burn you some more, she's weird like that. Really likes a good knock-down, smack-up brawl with the kicking and the hitting and the explosions. (But who doesn't?) And who knows what I'm gonna do! Maybe I'll cut off your arms and leg and replace them with cheap plastic Hogswatch trees! Maybe I'll make you wear a hubcap for a piercing, or nail the world's ugliest hat to your ears! Or, I dunno, just shoot you a lot. Ventilate your bits, know what I'm saying? Nah, me neither, give it a miss."

Kimblee, staring off into the sky, looked back when he realized that Deadpool had stopped talking. "I'm sorry, I stopped listening after the first bit of rambling, can I have that without all the stupid?"

"But then Deadpool won't be able to say anything," Shego said dryly.

"You guys suck," Deadpool complained.

"Well...I'm not exactly sure what's going anymore," Kimblee said. "So...go away please. I'm busy."

"No," Shego said flatly. She drew back slightly, the air around her shimmering green and blasting forward as a beam so bright it was nearly white at the core. Kimblee shrugged, incidentally dropping Jarod while transmuting a great big stone wall in front of him to block the blast. He clapped his hands together, drew upon the Philosopher's Stone, and summoned a blast that completely shattered the alleyway in front of him, cracked the alleyway behind him, smashed the street ahead of him and obliterated the buildings in front of that.

Metal, red and melting from the force of the blast, fell around him. He sneezed a bit, the dust that had once been structures of brickwork being bad for his sinuses. Red static crackled around him, sounding like the echoes of distant screams.

Shego and Deadpool were gone, of course. There were no mangled bodies to be seen, but that was hardly a surprise. Kimblee knew all the traditions of battle.

Kimblee heard a blade unsheath, the rustle of cloth, and sighed, grabbing a nearby pipe and transmuting it into a short sword, swinging it over his head just in time to parry the sword-blow Deadpool delivered from overhead while whooping like a crane. (Presumably because it amused him)

Sharp strong metal met inferior but compact metal with a shower of hot sparks. "Hoo-cha hoobie hoo!" Deadpool yelled enthusiastically, flipping overhead and kicking Kimblee hard in the back of the head; Kimblee grunted in surprise and pain, seeing black spots, and was in no position to block a slash that cut a neat wound on his chest.

"Damn it!" Kimblee snapped, stubbornly standing ground and clutching a hand over the wound, Philisopher's Stone perilously close. "Have you ANY idea how hard it is to get blood out of clothing this color? You went and dirtied my outfit. This is unforgivable."

"Eh, I get that all the time," Deadpool said carelessly. "You'd be surprised at the things that rile people up. Square-dancing in the nude at their parties...stealing a vampire prince's priceless paintings and artwork, selling them for fish and then dumping the fish in that prince's casket...ordering a sub-orbital strike on a guy's outhouse during football half-time...shaving a guy's pet dragon and giving him a mohawk and a bad attitude...copying your naked deformed butt on all the milk cartons so that everyone who wants a decent breakfast gets to think about THAT all morning long..."

"I did not need to hear that," Kimblee said flatly as he parried another swing, again and again as Deadpool swung into a frenzy. "The things you say will haunt me forever."

"Then my job is done! Aside from, y'know, killing you." Sparks flew, again and again, vibrations ringing down Kimblee's own sword, the metal starting to crack. Kimblee concentrated, and it repaired itself in a flash of red. A moment's pause, slamming it against a ladder, and he reformed it into a much larger sword with a three-foot long blade.

Deadpool pressed the attack, and Kimblee parried again and again, finding it harder with his new sword's increased weight. "How did you survive that blast just now, incidentally?" Kimblee asked.

"Teleporting belt doo-dad." Deadpool aimed, and stabbed right at Kimblee's neck. Kimblee parried it, but not without Deadpool's superior strength throwing his sword off-angle. Deadpool took his moment, and stabbed Kimblee in the shoulder.

"Ah," Kimblee said; before his blood splattered across the ground, he concentrated and used the Philosopher's Stone again, bypassing the need for transmutation arrays or prudence; the ground underneath Deadpool tore apart, rose up, around him, and reformed in the shape of a simplistic cannon larger than a man. Internal machinery roared, and it fired Deadpool straight up in a blast of fire and smoke and a cry of "Look Ma, no wings! Wait, do I even have a mother?"

The ranting red figure arced over a rooftop, flapping his arms like wings, and from the sounds of it, crashing painfully. "That's one interruption down," Kimblee said, wondering where the other one had gone. He waited for a few tense moments for a green-clad woman to reappear and do something horrible with burning pain and such.

This failed to happen.

Kimblee chuckled and dropped the sword, no longer needing it. "That was easier than expected. I'd best get out of here before someone comes-" He turned around to take off with Jarod and stopped. Perhaps because it would be hard to take Jarod and leave when Jarod had, in fact, disappeared.

Kimblee stared at the alleyway where Jarod had fallen, now absent of anyone but Kimblee. "...Damn it," he muttered. Kimblee didn't deal much with anger; strong emotions weren't really his thing, he needed to have a bit of thinking for it. Sometimes he could think exceedingly fast.

Up on the rooftop overhead, Shego ran across a surprisingly strong clothesline, but she would have done it as equally well if it had been frayed and made of thin wire; she'd picked up a few tricks from her time in the local Shinobi Guild. Halfway across, she bounced with the motion of the clothesline and sprung across to the next rooftop and over a elevator lift that hid her from the sight of a potential pursuer. "And they ask me, why do I torture myself with Deadpool? Why do I subject myself to his stupidity? 'Cause he makes a damn good distraction, that's why."

Jarod, slung over her shoulder (he was a pretty big guy, but Shego was far stronger than she looked), groaned. "Ugh...why the self-narration...?"

"Oh good, you're not dead," Shego told him. "Starting to think you looked it. Hang on a sec', got to hand you off to proper rescuin' types, it's not really my thing-"

The ground in front of her sank slightly, flashing red. Shego backstepped and jumped over some overlarge air conditioning units that doubled as cover before the explosion split the building in half and made a big hole in the foundations that tipped what was left of the building, causing the whole thing to start falling apart under her feet.

"Shit shit shit!" Shego yelled, footsteps flashing green with pin-point bursts to blast her across the tilting rooftop, now slanting dangerously; it had gone nearly vertical now, and sinking underground. She jumped over an escape pod someone had installed, landed on it's side as the whole building went completely vertical and jumped away, green fire pouring from her feet with enough force to rocket her away to a nearby building and atop a flat roof shaped like a massive disc.

Green-hued energy swirled around her free hand as she clenched it into a fist; clumsy though it was with one hand, she still could project a blast with deadly accuracy, and she fired off one that could have blasted through steel, punched into concrete, heated Thunderbolt Iron and give secondary adamantium a nasty burn.

But Kimblee was just plain better at this then she was, and a alchemist also had a ton of tricks up his sleeve. Rising on a pillar of transmuted brickwall swiftly growing into the air with red static flashing all around, he avoided the blast by simply transmuting his pillar into a hard turn to the left, then going straight up again before he stopped, glaring down at Shego with his arms crossed. "You," He said with that gentle silkiness of the truly psychotic. "Are a nuisance."

"I'm so hurt," Shego said deadpan. "If you're gonna waste everybody's breathing space, could you do me the favor and try for better comments? Hmm?"

"Wha' she said," Jarod slurred, managing the strength for this minor comment.

Kimblee glared at her some more. "...Give him to me and I won't force the morgue people to scrape you off the walls." When Shego simpy responded by powered up, a shimmering green aura pulsing out of her and turning more fierce by the moment, he sighed and added, "You don't even know why I have captured him. For all you know, he could be a mass-murdering sociopath with a penchant for eating kittens and laughing at children in a hospice."

"True," Shego acknowledged. "But then I could just blast his face off later. Not that you haven't already done some that way, but...well, between the guy I know nothing about-that being him-and the guy who's running around with souls harvested from a place I actually like and keeps blowing stuff up for giggles-that's you-I'm gonna go with the guy that's not you." She paused. "Damn. I've been around Deadpool too damn long, I'm doing that rambling eighty-bazillion words a minute thing he does and damn if it's actually kind of fun! But you get my point. Also, why do I keep saying 'damn'? Damn damn damn, for the hellcrap of damn it all, I can't stop saying 'damn', damn it."

Kimblee's eyebrow raised a fraction. "You know of my work today? How...never mind. I will ask you once more. Give him to me." He paused. "And you're right. You do sound like your companion. Not a point in your favor; the man's an utter lunatic."

"Yeah, but I like it anyway!" Deadpool yelled, teleporting from above.

Kimblee stared. "...I hate this town and everything in it," He said, right before Deadpool kicked Kimblee in the head and knocked him off his perch and start falling.

Deadpool sliced the transmuted pillar Kimblee had made in several piece as he passed them, and kicked the largest one at Kimblee.

"Yeah, that's what my girlfriend said when she found me in the car," Deadpool replied, slicing through the pillar as he fell down; it toppled over and Kimblee fell. "Well, sorta my girlfriend; she was a girl and I knew her and she knew me because I kept sneaking into her place and drinking her beer when she wasn't home and leaving Blocko cities in the shape of my foot on her doorstep and leaving thirty messages on her answering machine with just one word each and hiding in her car to say 'Surprise' in a creepy voice!...Don't judge me."

"How did you say all of that before now!" Kimblee demanded while falling, slapping a hand against the large chunk flying at him, enlargening it and shoving it's pointed ends into the buildings between his fall; he clambered onto it, panting with the effort.

"Talking's a free action, don'tcha know."

"...What does that even mean!"

"Go check a trope entry, ya neophyte!" Deadpool teleported away in mid-fall.

Kimblee sighed, drawing on more of the Stone's power to pull the sides of the buildings into the bridge to push him up. "Why am I always unluckily surronded by idiots and madmen?" Kimblee wondered, sitting up and aching everywhere.

You do realize that YOU'RE a 'madman', given your own cheerful acceptance of being a freak by society's standards? Kevin said smugly. So...I think it's a matter of attracting appropiate company.

"Oh, shut up."

"Having a bad day, are we?" Kimblee looked up; Shego had spoken, and was standing on the rooftop directly behind him, overlooking Kimblee. Deadpool was beside her, and Jarod was being propped up by the both of them, now sufficiently advanced beyond grogginess to hatefully glare at Kimblee. She chuckled darkly. "It's about to get a lot worse." Deadpool tapped his belt again, and the three of them vanished.

Kimblee frowned. "What's that supposed to mean?" He tilted his head, noticing the sunlight glint off something metal on a rooftop in the distance. Something big, with a odd shape he associated with scopes. "...Oh shit." He slammed a hand on the transmuted bridge, and the facades, walls, internal support and more broke and surged up around him into the shape of a massive craggy shield, far thicker and stronger than any of the materials he transmuted into it, bolstering it by changing the chemical composition of it by making it into a mixture of Raritanium and osmosium; two extremely valuable and strong minerals prized for their strength.

He had excellent timing; no sooner had he done that then there was a distant roar, a glass-shattering shot of immense mechanical force, then the whine of something like a flying missle (only shaped like a drill and fueled with explosive materials no one dared to inquire about) and then it slammed right into the shield Kimblee had made with a truly awesome explosion; the shield held, bending back a bit, but the two buildings it was still attached to, the buildings behind them, the buildings across the street, the buildings behind those ones and a sizable part of the street vanished in a roar of rubble and fire, debris fountaining up before crashing back down in a slightly quieter roar. The shield, without anything to hold it up, fell down into the smoke ruin, Kimblee clinging to life underneath it.

On the rooftop where the good guys had assembled for this task (and where Shego and Deadpool had brought a still groggy Jarod), Gibbs tilted his head, still looking through his oversized scope. (If circumstances had permitted, Shego might have made a comment about overcompensation and Freudian psychology and such but Gibbs didn't listen to those sorts of thing. And she might have given Deadpool something to think about...) "I really hate dealing with alchemists," He said after a moment, his massive sniper cannon generating another explosive oversized bullet. From where, no one could say. It just...showed up, perhaps by the same inexplicable processes that allowed Gibbs to produce massive amounts of heavy firearms from his body without apparently violating the laws of conservation of mass. "They're so...difficult to predict. It's like hitting a fly with a toothpick."

"I've seen you hit a fly with a toothpick," Roy said. "You made a little crossbow thing with your finger, but you still did it. On a dare, no less."

"A Bloatfly. As in a fly the size of a housecat that spits acidic globs at you."

"True, a real fly would have been a challenge, but it still counts, I think."

"Think you got the smug little bastard?" Shego said.

Gibbs shook his head. "Hardly. I might have got him with the explosion...but in situations on this? Never bet your life on it."

Greed made an annoyed clicking noise. "Figures. Any ideas?"

"One comes to mind," Roy said smoothly. He raised his gloved hand. "Lay down suppressing fire and cut off the enemy's retreat."

His thumb came flush against his forefinger. Little sparks jumped as the specially designed pyrotex cloth rubbed against itself. He snapped his fingers, the noise overwhelmed by the larger noise of the moisture in the air splitting into hydrogen gas.

Alchemical energy flashed from Roy's hand, energy harnessed and released, the sparks around Roy's hands magnified and amplified to incredible levels...

And then, with a light that forced them to shut their eyes or be blinded by it, the entire street burst into flame.

There was a great noise, the kind that hits you like something solid. So loud, you can barely tell what it sounds like, it's just noise. Mixed in it was the fire's crackling of anything flammable being consumed, and parts of the street being pulled apart by heat and the ferocity of the fire. The heat was even more intense, just under the roar of the flames, and they could smell bricks cracking, loose dirt baking into glass...and even that was nothing compared to the way the street trembled, as if begining to give way.

"Hmn," Roy said, blue light flashing around his hand; the sea of fire engulfing the street buckled, streamed up, and was gone, leaving a burned street and clouds of smoke behind it. "We're going to need to send someone down here immediately and get all this fixed. I'd hate to let all the residents complain."

When Greed could stand to open his eyes, he saw a street in ruins. Every available surface of the street (except for the buildings) charred black. Half-shaped and ugly glass streaking here and there; melted metal where streetlamps and wayposts had been; and making him want to sneeze, the stink of ash, and smoke. Shego wrinkled her nose, taking a few steps away from Roy. "...When they call you State Alchemists 'human weapons', they aren't kidding."

"Don't remind me," Roy said, sounding bitter and old.

"Psst!" Deadpool said in a stage whisper to Shego that everyone could hear. "Don't remind the old soldier about the whole 'attack dog used by a dictatorship controlled by a person-shaped abomination'! You'll be next." Roy didn't give him the dignify of even reacting to that.

"Think that got him?" Greed said, after making sure that Jarod was in his robot and more or less okay.

"Probably not," Roy said, with what was startling pessimism under the circumstances. "Gibbs? Wait for movement and fire at whatever moves. And use smaller caliber bullets; this street's taken enough of a beating. We don't want to drop the roof on the Underdistrict."

"And on the off-chance that someone stayed after all this?" Greed said.

Gibbs and Roy stared at him like he was an idiot. "..After Deadpool started ranting and railing outside their homes?" Gibbs said.

"And all those explosions going on outside?" Roy said. "They'd have to be brain-dead to sit still without investigating! And even so, I didn't touch the buildings." This was true; even though they were streaked with ash and lightly burned by the heat, they hadn't actually been damaged in any way. Greed grunted his acknowledgement.

Gibbs djusted the sniper cannon; two sections slid away, and two outer halves of a Dakka-Dakka bullet fell away onto the ground, leaving only a smaller part of the bullet inside. Still explosive and armor-piercing, but less destructively so.

Down on the street below, the rubble of the broken buildings destroyed by the power of a Dakka-Dakka bullet, shifted, and a door appeared in a flash of red. It open, revealed a hastily transmuted tunnel, it's walls made of rubble packed together into solid surfaces, and Kimblee stepped out of it, breathing hard and slick with sweat. "That does it," he said. "A precise strike, is it? I offer a precise strike of my own." He judged the distance and considered. He saw the little robot, and the man sitting in it. (Kimblee had extremely good eyesight.) He clapped his hands, drawing on more of the Stone's power, draining away at the lives of the people in it. (In the hospital, two of those who'd had their souls drained died, without any fuss or acknowledgement.)

Deadpool put a hand over his eyes. "Hmn?" He said. "What's that ominous red glow in the distance?"

Roy paled. "Shit." He grabbed Gibbs and Shego and shoved them onto Deadpool, toppling into the robot Jarod was still in. "Go go go, teleport us out here RIGHT NOW!"

Greed waved at them. "You guys go on. I think I'll handle this one for a bit."

"'Kay," Deadpool said,, and they disappeared and reappeared on the other side of the street in flashes of light, leaving Greed by himself.

Greed chuckled. "...Huh, he really did it. Half-thought he'd take me anyway. Oh well, them's the breaks in using reformed mercenaries and thieves for your personel." The red light of transmutation flashed again, and the street tore apart shattering in a explosive blast and a sound like the roar of the titans cast down by gods. "...Bring it on," Greed said with a grin, not sounding particularly worried as the explosion smashed into the building he was standing on like a truck hitting an eggshell.

Roy and the others, watching safely from the other end of the street that was mostly unharmed by the battle fury, winced. "...He can take it," Shego said confidently.

"I hope so," Gibbs said. He knew of Greed's capabilities, but still...that was a lot to get hit by.

"Greed's tougher than that," Roy said; Shego and Deadpool nodded. "Even being hit by a blast like that won't kill him. A homunculus like Greed will only be slowed down."

"A what?"

"Long story! Not really important right now."

Kimblee went over to the building he had targeted (aside from wiping out most of the street) and considered whether or not to dig through the rubble, or just transmute it into something easier to go through. He sighed; he'd seen the flash of light. More teleportation. He considered what to do, and the rubble shifted. Blood was flowing out from underneath it.

Kimblee raised an eyebrow, and caught sight of something moving under the ruins. A flash of something gruesome; a flayed hand, flashing red like the Stone, muscles and tendons and veins over the bones and skin appearing in patches and spots...and fingerbones that looked like a monster's claws.

And, just for a moment, the shine of metallic black, contrasted by the symbol of an dragon biting it's own tail around a six-pointed star, right on the back of the hand.

Kimblee's breath caught in his throat as he instantly recognized the symbol of the Ouroboros. His mind froze at the sheer absurdity of it. No, he thought stupidly. This is becoming absolutely absurd-

The rubble flew, and a jet-black form smashed into Kimblee, the two rolling across the ground, bouncing once, twice; powerful hands pounding him again and again, sharp claws gouging him open, black armor-shell splattered with blood now, every time he hit it, felt like striking metal-

They hit the ground again. Kimblee tasting blood and the thing punched him in the shoulder so hard he dislocated it and crunched the bones. The pain struck him mute for a moment, and then he screamed, angry and infuriated, staring into the face of the homunculus that was and was not Lin Yao; the former human's entire body transformed into a carbon-based organic armor that was as flexible as skin, red marks and lines set on tracks on his upper body.

A shell-shaped head, the armor setting it in that form for maximum protection, looked down at him. A face that was a crude mimicry of humanity, a pair of narrow red eyes and a lipless mouth with overlarge fangs bared.

"Greed the Avaricious," Kimblee said blandly. "We've never met. My apologies."

"I'm not sorry," Greed said. "You're kinda an asshole, you know? But if you wanna know me properly..."

He threw Kimblee across the street, right into a mailbox reduced to slag. (It was still quite hot, and patches of Kimblee's skin peeled away on it.) Greed followed, unhurried and anxious to break bones and do some properly brutal good. "I am Greed the Avaricious!" The homunculus proclaimed. "Sharing body-space with Prince Lin Yao, the twelth son of the Emperor of Xing! I, created over two hundred years ago to serve my Father! I, who turned against him and his stupid plans to use the country of Amestris as human resources! I, who was captured by him, killed, and reduced to my very core to be returned to my Father's soul! I, who was reborn when Lin Yao accepted me into his soul!"

He kept coming. Like a machine. He kept taking step after step, claws twisting with bloodthirsty hate.

"I, who turned against my Father a second and final time; unlike you, who allied WITH HIM! And me, I would have stood with the humans on that Promised Day that never came, because the likes of you tore the gates of the worlds open and let the Heartless IN! Because of the monsters like YOU, I lost my world! I lost my precious subordinates! I lost the kingdoms that would have been mine! Those yet to be born and claimed as mine! An entire world that belonged to ME! Those precious to me were STOLEN BECAUSE OF YOU!"

Greed now stood over Kimblee. The Red Lotus Alchemist tried to move, to think; he grabbed the Stone-

Greed grabbed him by the throat. Claws bit in, and squeezed.

"And here we are again," Greed hissed, eyes narrowing a fraction. "I found this world. I have other things that are precious to me. A whole world that is MINE. No one will take it from me. Not you. Not the Heartless. Not the embittered machines that think. Not whatever insane masters you serve now. Not whatever gods twist the fates of all things. Because I am GREED INCARNATE. And all this world...is MINE."

You know, I like this guy, Kevin remarked off-handedly. He's a pretty cool guy. A bit dramatic and really beating around the bush with his actual motivations, but cool.

Kimblee laughed weakly, blood dribbling from the corner of his mouth. "Edward Elric was right...spouting self-righteous nonsense like that, when what you really want is so obvious. You really are...an 'evolved human', are you not?"

He squeezed the Philisopher's Stone and gently laid a hand against Greed's chest. A pity he wasn't sure what it was made of, but that mattered little. Greed's hand relaxed a fraction in surprise. Kimblee grinned, and the red light shined. The air shook with the explosion that followed; parts of the street cracked and even caved in, and a nearby building collapsed, a human-shaped figure blasted right into it.

Moments later, Greed just smashed through the rubble, completely unharmed. "It's a good thing I can heal or I'd be dead now," He said, and paused. "Actually, I think I did die when the building collapsed on me, but details."

"Who are you talking to? Never mind, I don't care that much," Kimblee said, standing behind him and letting loose with another blast right at Greed's back.

To his credit, Greed turned around just as the explosion came rushing at him and, instead of making some sort of doomed gesture of fleeing, he stood his ground, holding his arms up defensively. It didn't do him much good, as his brief flight arrested by the rooftop of a nearby building and a subsequent tour of all three of it's floors via smashing through them proved, but it was sort of heroic. And, as he smashed right through the door of that building, charging at Kimblee without a scratch, he was still not so much as scratched.

"Oh, come on!" Kimblee said, exasperated, as he transmuted a giant stone fist out of the ground and sent it flying at Greed with such force that the air around it bent. "Being caught in one explosion kills you once, but several point-blank blasts only slow you down?"

"I'm the 'Ultimate Shield', of course I'm gonna take it without a beat!" Greed bragged (and not mentioned that he'd been unarmored when the explosion had hit him the first time), charging head-long into the fisticuff missle in a shoulder-rush, the unstoppable force of the alchemically created missle against the immovable object that was Greed. (Technically, as Greed was moving, he didn't count as 'immovable', unless you considered the immovable object as a perfect defense and the unstoppable force as a perfect offense, in which cases it was totally a good analogy.)

Homunculus and missle collided in a blast; stone fragments flew everywhere, and dust billowed up like a bomb's wake. Greed, of course, came running right through the dust; in one hand, he was holding a huge piece of a fist-shaped stone, the biggest piece he could have grabbed when he smashed through it and left the rest to fly wherever. "Think fast!" He said, and threw the stone bit (which happened to be a curled middle finger, but it was probably a coincidence) at Kimblee with all the force he could muster.

In normal circumstances, it would have probably squished him like a rather overripe grape. (He was just an ordinary human physically, after all; he wasn't even in very good shape, what with being a tad lazy normally and using a body that had been subjected to horrific experiments and tortured and starved for who-knew-how-long.) Fortunately for Kimblee but unfortunately for the total quality of the gene pool, he was carrying a powerful alchemical artifact that only required a moment's concentration to use, and a massive stone wall rose out of the ground in front of him, pulling from the street around it and sprouting spikes all over; the stone smashed into it without any real effect.

Kimblee smirked. "Is that it?" He said.

"Not even close," Greed promised, and kept going. Kimblee smiled cruelly, and red light flashed around him.

Up above on the rooftops, Roy and his team were getting frustrated at being unable to get a decent bead on Kimblee, as the two of them kept moving around so much. without being in a position to hit Greed on accident. "Gibbs!" Roy said, starting to lose patience. "Do you think you can risk a shot?"

Gibbs peered over a bit of rubble on the creaking rooftop they'd paused on; it was important to stay off of Kimblee's vision, lest he blow them away on a whim. The skin around his right eye rippled, and a thin scope slid over his eye. "No," He said, a touch of irritation in his voice. "I might hit Kimblee...but at this distance, the blast might hit too. And even if we have decent cover, there's no promising that it would hold up."

"Y'know, a thought comes to mind," Shego said. "You could...I don't know...try not using big guns. Just a little sniper rifle and put a bullet in his brain. Just saying."

Gibbs, Roy and Deadpool stared at her. "...What?" Roy said, as if it were an unspeakable idea.

"Have you no romance in your soul, woman?" Deadpool said indignantly. "Great big explodey guns are a MAN'S SOUL! The romance of a man is the roar of the gatling laser, the cry of the rocket launcher, the scream of the flamethrower! No man, deep in his soul, can deny the boy inside and his love for all mechanical things that make other things go boom, and to DENY it is to DENY your MANLINESS! Is that what you want, us to deny our manliness! What beast, nay, monster, no, eldritch abomination, no! What manner of TAX ACCOUNTANT are you to deny a man's romance!"

"...Actually, making big guns is mostly what my Devil Fruit lets me do," Gibbs explained.

"...Why!" Shego demanded.

"It's called the Dakka-Dakka Fruit. "An overwhelming concentration of heavy fire is essentially the point of the damn thing.."

"Sniper-type is hardly a heavy firearm."

"It is when it's firing a missle the size of your head," Gibbs said.

A loud blast interrupted their conversation, and Greed's loud yell. They watched him sail across the street, slamming into yet another building; he didn't cave this one in, he just smashed right through it and into another one, amid much cursing and yelling. "I am so glad we evacuated everyone or we'd have one of the worst casualty reports in recent history," Roy said grimly.

"What about when the Lowardians attacked?" Shego said. She would know, having been one of the pivotal figures in stopping that very attack. (It had actually inspired her and her former boss Dr. Drakken to go and make a clean slate. Well, acceptably grubby, anyway.)

"...An entire district was demolished," Roy said, eventually. "I'd rather avoid planning for another scenario like that."

"Wait, when did that happen?" Deadpool said. Below, there was another explosion. This didn't hit Greed this time, and he resumed trying to wail on Kimblee onto to have the rogue alchemist transform his limbs into more freakish amalgations of lethal alien species and proceed to fight back with a tenacity and enthusiasm that made up for his relative lack of combat skill.

Roy blinked. "Are you serious? How can you not know? An entire district was WIPED OUT! The Factory District was completely annihilated! It took us nearly a year to rebuild our major manufactories, and we're still trying to make up for it every time some chief or federal lord or priest-king comes from somewhere on the planet telling us we're falling back on a deal we cut with them because we aren't giving them whatever we promised to because the factory that made them are gone and the people that privatized it are dead! The Beach District was built from the ruins of the Factory District because an inland sea filled up what was left because of all the collateral damage and we used what we could scavenge from the ruins to build new homes and buildings and put them on a mobile sea construct! To say nothing of all the sea monsters the Lowardians made by mutating sea life, or the pirates they supplied and cut deals with to weaken us and are still running around making trouble for my men. How could you seriously not know!"

Deadpool was unfazed. "Oh, all that. I was out of town at the time."

"...You were out of town."

"Yeah. I was on the Discworld doing stuff. Earning brownie points with Death by bringing him cat shelters (by which I mean transporting entire cat shelters to his domain, not killing them!); destabilizing Ephebe and Pseudopolis by screwing with their understanding of democracy for giggles; giving the more militant Omnians a few Holy Hand Grenades I looted and watching the fireworks; giving the hidden orc communities in far Uberwald gas-powered automatic-crossbows and steam-powered chainsaw-swords because the multiverse needs more Orky orcs; stealing all the beer from Four-Ecks, sending it to the Agatean Empire where I got it blown up and seeing if I could blame it all on the Breccia; feeding some swamp dragons a super-special-awesome mutagen that turned them into kaiju and then sicing them on the Ankh-Morpork aristocracy; some other stuff...oh, and I stole Commander Vimes' hat. For about five minutes. Then he found me."

"Is...is that so?" Shego said, not having the slightest idea what Deadpool was talking about.

"Such horrible things were done to me!" Deadpool said cheerfully. "They will haunt me forever."

Roy rolled his eyes. "So do half the things that damaged brain of your's vomits up..."

"My brain isn't damaged, just in a constant state of flux," Deadpool clarified.

Shego rolled her eyes. "Thanks for the explaination no one wanted or cared about."

"Your hair is silly!"

Gibbs appeared from behind them and dope-slapped them both in the back of the head. "Will you two focus?" He said.

"Gah! The Gibbs-Slap! It is a dope-slap of LEGEND!" Deadpool said, astounded and bewildered and a little bit gassy from all the fried food he ate. "...I may never wash the back of my head again. Now that I have been struck by pure AWESOMENESS. Huh, I'm not sure if I've ever washed the back of my head before, but I guess there's no reason to start now!"

Shego rubbed the back of her head. "Hey, that actually hurt." Gibbs frowned at her. "Uh...not complaining or anything..."

"Not that I have your attention, I'd like to point out something important," Gibbs said.

"Yeah. Where's Lin's robot...head...thing?" Roy asked

"What?" Shego looked around; the robot had gone. "And on that note, what happened to the guy we put in it?"

"And where'd this note come from?" Shego said, ripping a note taped to Deadpool's back.

"Ow! Hey, how the holy hell did that hurt!" Deadpool wondered. "I'm wearing three layers of clothing and a overcoat, I shouldn't feel that at all."

"What's the note say?" Roy asked.

"I.O.U. one robot thing, signed Jarod," Shego read. "P.S.:I'll bring it back to Lin Yao/Greed, promise! P.P.S.: Please don't waste time wondering how I wrote this note, put it on Wade Wilson's back and stole your robot without anyone noticing, it'll only waste time. P.P.P.S.: Why do people put 'P.S.' at the ends of notes? If they want to tell people, they should just put it in the note itself. And I don't think anyone knows that 'P.S.' stands for Post Script anymore." She looked up. "Eh, good points."

"What," Gibbs said flatly. "...Who the hell is Jarod? I've never heard of anyone named that before in my life!"

"And I thought you paid closer attention to rumor," Roy said dryly.

On the street below, under cover of a canopy Kimblee had transmuted from the entire street and pulled over his head (and making it grow some nice thick pillars to support it, of course), Greed and Kimblee were fighting some more.

It is an extremely hard thing to fight an ordinary person in posession of a Philosopher's Stone. Even a very weak one affords alchemic power that breaks the laws of thermodynamics and conservation of mass that alchemy operates by; even an uneducated man or woman could use the weakest shard of a Stone to summon machine guns from sticks, or animate statues to do their bidding. Inevitably, such a weak stone will backfire and rebound, all it's power coming back on the foolish person who dares to transgress on the laws of nature...but until then, they are strong.

A capable alchemist with a Philosopher's Stone, whether a weak Stone or not, is as beyond that level of threat as a tiger is more dangerous than a housecat. An ordinary person works with assumptions and wishes; a true alchemist knows just how their transmutation works, and thus how to best amplify their powers. It's the difference between an untrained civilian with a gun (a credible threat but not particularily skilled with it)...and a professional sniper at the aiming rig of a orbital death ray located three feet from you.

Kimblee was a very capable alchemist. And the Stone he'd created, while flawed, was more powerful than any he'd ever held. Brimming with the souls of those who had survived the flood of darkness that had consumed their worlds, bright enough to attract the attention of the Heartless in the first place. All of them flowing together, a great mass of consciousness and will put into his hands alone, augmenting his power by a level bigger than his initial projections...

With that level of power, it was a simple matter for him to transmute what he needed to fend off Greed while he thought of a better means to combat the homunculus. "You're not so good at hand-to-hand, are you?" Greed asked Kimblee as the two fought claw to claw; Greed with the natural claws that formed in his transformation, Kimblee with a mechanical set that was part of a exoskeletal rig he had transmuted out of the outer layer of a building he had briefly slammed into, alchemically taking a chunk of metal off it and reshaping it into a intricate armored exo-rig of grinding pistons and sliding bits and mechanical muscles to augment his strength (and still light enough to be carried with ease), fitting snugly around his arms and back, plates of armor wrapped over the oversized and brutish arms, operated by means of a crude system of pulleys he'd hooked his fingers into and transmuting bits of it as he needed.

"I've never needed to be," Kimblee said, parrying slash after slash; the metal he'd created to armor himself was unique, a mixture of a kinetic-energy absorbant metal called vibranium and a much-prized substance called Raritanium; with the power of the Philosopher's Stone, he'd easily created this new fusion of wondrous metals out of baser materials, something he would have to suggest Wuya to create herself and mass-produce as armoring for her warships. As a consqequence, the fight was turning against Greed; his strength, while beyond a human's, wasn't enough to break through Kimblee's armor, and he seemed to rely a lot on his armor.

His armor. Now that was the problem, Kimblee mused as he pulled his armored-arms over his face and slamming one into Greed's on-coming claws, giving Greed a split-second opening that the homunculus didn't fail to exploit and rammed a elbow into his stomach.

Kimblee gasped. "Don't suppose...you'll tell me what your armor's...made of?" He asked weakly.

"Would you sit down, shut up, give up the Stone and surrender peacefully?" Greed replied.

"Ah, an excellent point, and one that I suppose translates to 'hell naw' in the vernacular." Kimblee's forearm-armor expanded and extended, creating a very wide blade with a curiously beveled edge. Again, he struck at Greed's eyes; they obviously couldn't be armored, or how could he see?

The blade landed on Greed's face, missing his eyes by a fair bit; Greed wasn't even knocked back, thin cracks shimmered up the armblade, and Greed laughed. "Seriously? You didn't put an edge on that thing. I already told you, I'm the Ultimate Shield. That mail-opener of your's won't even scratch me! Have I said that before, it feels like I have."

"While it would have been a good oppertunity, I'm not trying to cut you. Why do that, when there are things I can do better? For example: if I cannot penetrate your armor, I will simply work around it."

His braced his right arm against Greed's chest, and a small explosion shoved Greed back, sending him rolling head-long across the open street. (And through a mailbox. It was fortunately not a living one.) A bit of ground in his path broke and reformed as a hand and rose up; Greed flew right into it, putting a serious dent in it but not destroying it.

He almost fell off; it crackled with red, and more hands balloned from it's 'palm', wrapped around his body and putting him in an awkward position that made it difficult to move. "Aw hell," Greed muttered, dismayed at this turn of events. He knew what happened when crazy science-themed jerks tied you up like this. (He'd been made by one, after all.) "This is gonna suck, isn't it?"

Kimblee chuckled darkly. "You have no idea!" He took a firm stance, securing himself for when he put a hand on the ground and transmuted it so that it split, a large sheaf of rock from underneath sliding up and slicing through ground, red light flashing around it and carrying Kimblee right toward's Greed, air breaking everywhere as it accelerated.

Greed glowered at the on-coming alchemist riding the mobile stone; judging from the way it was tearing up the ground and getting bigger without actually leaving any mess except for the big gulf behind it, it could be assumed that it was moving by incoporating the mass of the street it was ramming through into itself, looking like a bizarre mix of a breaching iceburg and a shark's fin.

He braced himself for the impact; it looked like it was about to ram right into him. Much to his surprise, instead of hitting him, it stopped just short of that, slowing down a bit before transmuting itself solid with the rest of the street, the sudden deceleration snapping it's top half right off and to the ground, taking Kimblee with it. It flashed red in mid-air, and large thick tendrils spun out to stab into the ground right around Greed, stopping the falling projectile in mid-air. Possibly to prevent it from snapping and falling away, the tendrils thickened, the mass of the thing shifting to them until the end result was the world tallest and most threatening looking gazebo. Kimblee came sliding down one of the tendrils, the one right in front of Greed. The surface of it turned into a board-like structure that went down at incredible speeds without detaching from the tendril proper, something like a very fast escalator effect.

Kimblee slammed right in front of Greed, a black-clad nightmare, armored arms dull with the sunlight filtered by all the dust. "I am an alchemist, and so I know this," Kimblee whispered, grinning maniacally. "Whatever can exist must be created...and whatever can be created, can be destroyed."

He wound his right arm back; it flashed red again, and for a moment Greed caught a glimpse of an absurdly advanced transmutation circle flashing on the back of the hand. Spikes appeared on the knuckles. "Suffer," Kimblee said, mechanical muscles tensing with such tightness that bits of vapor hissed out from the armor, grinding sounds from deep within. "And know what it is like to be as vulnerable as a human, you traitor."

Kimblee grinned. He held his hand up...and paused. The shadow around him seemed to be getting bigger, and it was too wide, too round, to be something related to the Heartless.

Come to think of that, why was there a sudden deficit of sunlight above him?

And then, Lin's robot slammed right onto Kimblee from above with a tremendous crash. More dust pillowed up, and cleared to reveal the robot sitting half-submerged in the ground, Jarod awkwardly sitting in it.

Greed blinked. "...A little help?" He asked.

"Hold on," Jarod grunted, in a clipped voice that was unusual for him; he was so injured, it hurt to talk. He fumbled with the controls, eventually twisting a lever, causing thin blades to appear from the robot's 'mouth' and stab right into the stony hands holding Greed still and break them, allowing him to drop down after the blades retracted.

They both waited for a moment, being sufficiently familiar with the rules of drama to understand how this sort of thing worked. Kimblee failed to tear his way out from underground. Greed straightened up, and looked at Jarod. "...That's my robot," He said at last. "Why do you have my robot?"

"Sort of stole it," Jarod said. "Left note. Only borrowing."

Greed tilted his head. "...Well, if it's just borrowing I'll only have to break your legs. Don't like people taking my stuff, on account of my stuff belonging to me." This did not appear to make a great deal's difference to Jarod, even if it was (probably) only a joke. Greed paused, noticing that the man was still badly injured enough to need to have pulled all sorts of random junk for a makeshift crutches just to keep him upright. "On second thought...yeah, you've suffered enough. We can consider karma pre-emptively kicking your ass for taking my stuff."

"Fine," Jarod said. "Think he's dead?"

"Nope," Greed said.

Jarod pulled at the grips that served as the locomotion controls, and the robot pulled itself out of the ground, with some effort. Underneath where it had been, the hole was empty, with no Kimblee to be seen. There was, however, a small tunnel at the very bottom, it's sides being smooth and bearing the stretched fragmented marks of transmutation.

They stared at it. "...Damn it, why won't he stay still and die!" Greed demanded.

"Villain code of standards."

"AHEM!" Someone said. They looked up and saw Roy Mustang on a nearby building, finally catching up with them. "Could you guys move please?"

They stepped back. A good long way; barely a pause between them getting away before Roy raised his hand, snapped his fingers, and sent a massive blast of fire into the hole Kimblee had escaped down.

Greed and Jarod moved back even further; the ground around the hole had turned red and was starting to fuse into glass. Along the street, burning spouts burst out, dirt fountaining up and blasted around by ten-foot high columns of flame, more and more of them until most of the entire street blasted up in a short but intense blast of fire. (Except around Greed and Jarod. Roy Mustang had exceedingly good aim.)

"...Do you think that killed him?" Jarod asked Greed.

"No," Greed said flatly.

Jarod shrugged, wincing. "Can still interrogate him, then." Greed gave him an odd look.

In a nearby building (originally a training dojo for the renowning martial art of Thousand Wounds Gear Style or, as the dojo's name proclaimed, Chainsaw Karate, thus explaining why it was still standing; when you're teaching people to shred things by touching them, you want the building to be tough), Kimblee, having left behind his admittingly useful exo-rig due to it's weight, hauled himself onto the remnant of a training mat, congratulating himself for his brilliance in sealing up the tunnel behind him, or he would have been fried. "So," He said to himself, breathing heavily and grinning so broadly his face hurt. "What a beautiful day fate has brought me," He said dreamily. "So many old foes that have returned to unmake me. Destroyers from the days past, to arrest my future. Yes. So beautiful." He glanced at himself, at the blood staining his clothes, all the brutal wounds and painful aches going to his very bones. A moment's concentration on the stone, applying what he need about medical alchemy, and they faded somewhat, wounds clothing up and his bones mending themselves just enough.

There was still blood on him, though. He still ached. "Am I..." Kimblee stared at the Stone, as if asking the raging multitude he could just barely glimpse within it. "Am I going to die here?"

I do not mean to sound cowardly, Ghostfreak said quietly. But the odds are severely against us.

Kimblee appeared to smile "Oh?"

Yes. We are being persued by an indestructable man, this human weapon your memories call the Flame Alchemist, and we can only assume that those freaks he brought are still alive.

"I know," Kimblee said. "Yes. It is likely now. I could very well die here. My body crushed and my flesh torn and me burned to dust. Thoughts of me to be ignored and abandoned, nothing more than a distant memory..."

Kimblee paused, staring at the Stone again. "...The people of Ishbalan have made this place their own, and seem to be recovering. The Flame Alchemist fights as fiercely as ever even though he lost everything. Has nothing I have done made a difference? Will I really die here? Is that what fate has in store for me?"

Er, Ghostfreak said. Why would you be harboring thoughts of despair now?

Kimblee stared into space...and then he smiled.

"Despair?" He said softly. "No. Not despair." He laughed, quiet and honestly. "If that is what must be, than die I shall. And I will make my death magnificent. And if I do not...I shall endeavor to see to it that their deaths shall be magnicent!

"No fleeing now. The game has become higher. They have made it more difficult, more memorable, more interesting! How can I dare to call myself the Red Lotus Alchemist and flee now! No." Kimblee stood up. "I shall pit myself against them. Roy Mustang, that shooter, Greed, Deadpool and Shego. I will fight them, I will stand against them, and I will exterminate them and reclaim Jarod for Mr. Lyle. I will finish the mission or I shall die doing it. And even if I die...Foster's has fallen, it's people trapped within the Philosopher's Stone. They will learn to know that there is no safety from the darkness, no reprieve in this war. Perhaps...they will see sense, and when Wuya comes calling, they will choose to take her hand and stand with her. I will not die for nothing. And...the odds are not as stacked against me as it would seem. I do have the advantage in numbers."

Yeah? Assume that Ghostfreak is really on board with you and not pulling some sort of game, Kevin said. And what about me? I'm sure as hell not working with you. So what are you talking about?

Kimblee opened his right hand. The Philosopher's Stone glowed brightly. "Why, I have hundreds to back me up. Their will is my will. Their strength has become mine. What better form of numbers advantage could I need?"

He chuckled and squeezed, red light streaming through his fingers. He clapped his hands, just once, the sound a perfunctionary gesture in the silence. "But," He added, as the darkness took shape in that ruined dojo, strange forms heaving themself from pools of liquid blackness and taking shape. "I feel my friends here deserve a chance to do what they do best."

...Shit, Kevin said, as the resulting alchemic explosion smashed through the side of the dojo and across the street, shredding up the pavement and into the building Roy and his entourage were hiding on; it's entire foundation was vaporized from the front, the rest of it holding by steel cables and concrete framework that simply couldn't handle such a dramatic shift in weight. Snapping, unraveling and breaking started happening immediately.

"Damn it, not again," Gibbs said, now mildly annoyed as the rooftop they were standing on slowly tipped to one side and an ominous screeching noise suggested that the rooftop was suffering internal damages soon to be catastrophic.

"Hey, I saw him throw all kinds of cool stuff at the boss!" Deadpool complained as the ground got closer, and more pressingly, the rooftop cracked in half, the half they were standing on suddenly in the air but now in gravity's grip. Gravity had a pretty standard response to these situations. "What, we only get the same explosions over and over!"

"Looks like," Shego agreed as the rooftop, carrying them with it, fell. Unable to hold it's own weight even for a little bit, it broke apart in several large chunks. Shego flipped off the piece she was standing on as they accelerated, landed on the vertical front of another, jumped off that, bounced off the spinning top of another piece and finally landing on the mostly flat horizontal bit of a larger piece.

Roy rolled his eyes. "Is this really the best he can do?" He complained, spreading his hands wide and revealing rather intricate transmutation circles inscribed on his glove-palms. He brought them together, briefly looking like a man in prayer, and then slammed them on his falling chunk of rooftop; there was a flash of blue light, cleaner and smoother and better than Kimblee's somehow, amd metal cables burst out from around him fanning around him and splitting into hair thin extensions weaving together into a air-tight metal balloon over his head, so light and spread so thin that it weighed hardly anything at all. Without a moment to spare, Roy lifted his hand up and snapped his fingers, producing a single solitary spark that exploded into a flame in the heart of the net, not exploding like his other fires had but simply growing larger and brighter, hanging overhead like a miniature sun. The balloon expanded, hot air filling it and trapped by it's particular shape, and incredibly, it slow down in midair, slowly floating down to the ground.

"Impressive work," Gibbs commented, idlely keeping pace on his bit of rubble as it fell down, not bothering at all to seek escape or some creative means of escape; he was simply endeavoring to stay on the top of it by the time it crashed. Roy smirked arrogantly.

The chunks of rooftop crashed into the street below; or at least Shego and Gibbs' did; Shego turned the momentum of the crash to her advantage by letting herself be thrown off and arcing across the street, catching a lamppost and swinging her way down it to the street in a single fluid movement. Gibbs didn't bother moving once the crashing was inevitable and stoof his ground on the top of it, hitting the ground without being harmed; after the dust from the impact cleared off, he simply walked off it, absently dusting himself. Roy, on the other hand, floated down in a gentle landing and chose to direct the fire animating his now useless ballon and direct it to the dojo the blast had come from, shaping it into a wall of fire around the building, amplifying them into a massive firestorm to cut off Kimblee's retreat and pen him in.

After Roy's bit of flying rubble touched the ground, the flames from the dojo died away, the bits of rubble from blowing it up hit the ground without hitting anyone and Roy deflated the balloon, Jarod and Greed ran up. "There you are," Shego said. "Had him going on the ropes for a bit...at least until he kept blasting you around like a patsy."

Greed shrugged. "At least I'm getting you worried," He said as charmingly as he could while looking like a demonic beast-thing with exposed teeth and weird track marks all over his body and no ears or nose...which was surprisingly a lot of charm.

"Don't push your luck," She said dryly. She frowned. "Where's Deadpool?"

A bit of rubble unearth itself; Deadpool, his clothes a lot more bloodstained than before, crawled out, with many sickening cracks and crunches that resolved themself in short order before he stood up. He still looked broken. "Yo," Deadpool said.

Gibbs stared at him. "...You let yourself be hit by the rubble," He said flatly.

"Yep! I mean, you had the badass 'do not care one bit about impending death' thing, the Flamey guy had that hot balloon bit, so not much creative stuff I could pull, and Shego did the flippy-ninja-jumps-of-LAYFE bit, so I figured, what's awesomer than all that? Easy, not doing anything at all! Showed those rocks what I think of them, me not caring if they crushed. Which they did. It hurt. A lot."

"Your head's on backwards," Roy pointed out tactfully.

"Huh, I thought things looked screwier than normal. When I'm not having hallucinations of dancing hot dogs in tuxedos asking me to dance with them into oblivion is what I mean." Deadpool twisted his head in the right direction and a nasty crack. "Wonder if anyone else has hallucinations like that?"

"More to the point.." Roy gestured towards the dojo and snapped his fingers; fire erupted from inside of it, blasting out throught the windows and around it in a startlingly intense firestorm for a few brief moment. The dojo sagged in on itself slightly, blackened and burned.

"A bit much, don't you think?" Gibbs said.

"I'm the Flame Alchemist," Roy said. "'Overkill' is what I do." He frowned. "And a guy who has a superpower acquired from a magical fruit called the 'Dakka-Dakka Fruit' can say that how?"

"With great ease. Think Kimblee survived?"

"Only one way to be sure," Roy said, and moved towards the dojo, intent on frying anything that moved. He paused, hearing a familiar ringtone from his pocket. "...What."

"Your phone's ringing," Greed said helpfully.

"I know what my ringtone means!" Roy hurredly checked it. "What the...an emergency transmission's coming through? Who the hell authorized that!"

"Some random civillian?" Gibbs guessed. Roy grunted, acknowledging the truth of this. Around them, there was an odd noise, everything metal around them shaking and trembing and rattling as each square inch of metal reacted to having specific vibration signals streamed around them and tuning them into proper receiving and sound-broadcast mediums.

In a nearby alleyway that Kimblee had just barely managed to escape to before the dojo had gone up in flames, the Red Lotus Alchemist stared into the sky; the clouds, no, the area directly above the rooftops was...shimmering, with something like rolling static. Like a translucent screen was appearing overhead, big enough to encompass several neighborhood's views but distant enough to keep things comfortable. "Hmm? What is this?"

They had all looked up, the 'screens' becoming clearer. Far from them, unseen but so frequent that they were perfectly aware of what was going on, a broadcast station had sent a specific sort of signal to certain nodes kept safe through the entire First District that were always awaiting certain types of broadcasts. Those nodes, large and blocky things, were quietly coming to life, recieving their signals, decoding them and translating them into the proper sequences that they sent directly into the mass media hive-mind.

(The Hitchhiker's Guid entry on Traverse Town's entertainment and lifestyle sections mention that the town has an...interesting way of dealing with mass media. True, they do have orbital relays to send signals across the planet and towers set up all over town to facilitate localized networking, but one of the remnants of the lost precursors that built the town happened to be exceptionally useful for this purpose; a large cloud of nanoscopic robotic organisms flying two miles above the town like a diffuse cloud, thinning and thickening as the weather changed but incapable of leaving the area no matter what force was thrown at them. And, incidentally, completely harmless and apparently disinterested in anything around them. Dormant and lifeless for how many millenia, until the first radio waves, wireless signals and network broadcasts of the current era played in town: they had spontaneously awakened and, independent of any obvious stimuli, tapped into and absorbed those signals, modifying them and making them better. Further investigation proved that they were phenomonally capable information routers, and in fact had been absorbing the data from over a thousand different worlds, and were quite capable of sending it. Experimentation and the work of technopaths led to discovered that the nanobot cloud was a proto-hivemind; not much more intelligent then a bright dog, cheerful and extremely focused on serving anyone that could access it's information core or receive it's signals: it was only too happy to serve as the new hub of a interworld Internet that would up forming by accident. Exactly why ancient precursors would have built such things to survive to the modern day but still knew nothing about the mysterious disappearance of those very precursors was a subject of some debate. A few pundits joked that the nanobots DID know, they just wouldn't say.

(Many innovations had been created with the nanobot cloud in mind. Among them was Traverse Town's means of sending out public programming, announcements, official news direct from the Council of Insert Nomenclature, and of course emergency news reports regarding sufficiently wide-scale incidents. It was a simple process to create a form of encrypted communications that the lower layer of the nanobots would swarm over and replicate a holographic screen to show them properly, so massive and defined that even people on the ground could hear them clearly. The sound problem was resolved by turning anything metal in the vicinity into speakers with the use of specialized frequencies. The town now uses them daily; anyone sitting outside from the afternoon to late night could watch shows played in the sky for the enjoyment of all, depending on the district and neighborhood; the First District was currently keeping them relegated to day-showings only due to ratings arguments over WHAT shows to run at night, which is why new refugees rarely learn about this until later on.

Naturally, this has solved many problems - as Traverse Town now became the accidental information hub of many different worlds, making it's continued existence very important to the prosperity and security of those worlds - and created others, but no one cares too much about them.)

Above them (and for that matter, all over the First District), the nodes played their encrypted communications and the thinner layers of the nano cloud drifted closer to condense into screens to play them; they soon become perfectly clear if slightly translucent screens, soon showing the image of a monkey wearing a hard hat and banging on itself with a hammer beside a text box that said Sorry, We Are Having Technical Difficulties! and in the meantime, the accompanying sound was some very annoying easy-listening music.

"...They can afford to muck around with lost technology and use it for entertainment, but they can't make a better load-screen?" Kimblee said, his hands on his ears. He hated easy-listening music.

The sound changed though; the music stopped, and the picture changed, showing a cheerfully lit newsroom (that, from the looks of it, had been banged up a bit and alchemically repaired recently); in the background was a slightly translucent newscreen, and the two newstalkers sitting at a table in front of it were positioned in such a way that they didn't interfere with it. There were three other people seated just behind the table too: a short green alien grinning like a maniac, and sitting next to him was Kim Possible, looking a bit pensieve. On Kim's other side was the glowering image of the infamous Crossguard warrior-monk, Godhand Scar.

"...The odds of this are absolutely absurd," Kimblee whispered, recognizing the Ishbalan man at once. "First the Flame Alchemist...then one of the homunculi...and now the multiverse has delivered Scar into my sights. This is a good day after all! Aside from the absurdly powerful people over there waiting to kill me. But that's exciting too."

Unaware of Kimblee's continued presence, Roy glanced at Gibbs, who was frowning thoughtfully. "What's your kid doing on TV?" Roy asked. "An emergency report like this, too."

"...I don't know," Gibbs said. "I really don't know."

"Hello," Kimblee said, walking over. "I don't suppose you know what's going on, do you?"

"Princess and some other jerks are doing some TV thing," Shego said, while Gibbs, Greed, Jarod and Roy whirled around on Kimblee, aghast at his sheer audacity in just walking up to them.

"Well, yes, I already figured that part. I meant, what are they doing specifically?"

"...I dunno." Shego shrugged. "And aren't we supposed to be killing you or something?

"But I want to watch the commercial!" Kimblee said. "You aren't that cruel, are you? To deny me the joy of TV? I promise I won't blow anything up or do anyone any harm until it's over."

"Technically, we do have to have a ceasefire during TV hours is both parties are mutually invested in the TV show," Roy said, looking like he absolutely hated that law right now. "But it only counts if it's made in good faith on both sides..."

"I said I promised."

"Oh, fine!" Roy said, clearly frustrated. "You just wait your turn or there won't even be ashes left of you."

"I said I promised already!"

Roy grunted. "...You know the consequences of breaking those sorts of laws and agreements, don't you? The ones enforced by the town itself." (No one was quite sure why some of the laws that tended to deal with drama were magically enforced by the spirits of the town itself but none of the ones relating to actually stopping criminals were. Most chalked it up to the local spirits loving narrative convention but not really caring about people dying.)

"No," Kimblee said. "Why, what are the consequences?" Roy told him. "Ah. I shall endeavor not to break them, then. I like having my organs on the insides." (The town-spirits took good-faith agreements extremely seriously, or at least they did when it amused them to do so. They liked to keep antagonists guessing.)

Above them, the report was starting, and the newsgirl spoke first, sounding excited underneath her newsgirl's tone of fake affability. "Hi! I'm your nearest and dearest reporter, news hound, information informant and occasional war corrospondant Courtney!"

"What she said, only less so because I have absolutely no real importance in the grand scheme what with being a vat-grown clone and all, I'm your co-anchor Reporter Male Model 13b Designation Zero-Forty-Nine!" Said the other, a completely average looking brown-haired young man with brown skin and dark eyes, every single aspect of his appearance looking hand-grown for being affable, nice to look at and unthreatening.

There was a brief pause. "...Wait, you discriminate against the vat-grown?" The alien said, glaring at Courtney and looking offended. "I WAS GROWN IN A VAT! HATCHED BY THE COLD UNFEELING ROBOT ARM! ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR ANTI-CLONE BIAS!"

"You discriminate against clones?" Kimblee said. "How uncouth of you."

"...What anti-clone bias?" Greed said, after a moment. "Since when do we have policies on discriminating against clones?"

"We don't," Roy said. "And I'll thank you not to be making snide comments when you're killing people!"

"But I haven't killed anyone-"

"I was talking to Kimblee!"

"Oh."

Courtney addressed this cloning-bias-thing. "Uh...what are you getting at? I've never heard of ANYONE having a problem with you because I employed you off the Internet and had you shipped to this town from your education vault."

Zero-Forty-Nine crossed his arms and sniffed. "I can hold out against the universal anti-clone bias for as long as I please."

Kim coughed. "Can we focus, please?"

Courtney nodded approvingly. "Right! I'm sorry to interrupt your sheduled programmed, whether other news reports, sports games, documentaries or cartoons..." She said, not looking like she really meant a word of it. "But I have the pleasure and responsibility to bring you, the First District, this emergency news report!

"After recieving special information from parties concerned with the incident, this studio has the pleasure of being the first to break the true story of what happened to Foster's Home this very morning! As many of you watchers surely know, Foster's was recently attacked by a person or persons unknown with myseterious processes that left many dead and incapacitated, and the building itself wiped from the face of the planet in an explosion that did severe damage to the street behind it!"

"I haven't even been in this town for a few hours and I've already made a difference!" Kimblee said, pleased.

"I hate you so damn much," Roy said.

"Many other news stations have already reported this, but WE are the only ones who have the true story! We were recently approached by those who have irrevocable proof of the perpetrator of the recent incident at Foster's, and these very informants have stated their intention to stop him and recover a weapon of mass destruction he has created! Please give your attention to the representatives of our informants: one of our very finest town adventurers and local celebrity, Kim Possible!"

Kim smiled graciously at the screen and waved her fingers shyly. "Hi."

"Newcomer to the town and leader of a team of adventurers that helped stop a incident in Foster's only last night, Zim of Irk!"

Zim grinned and flailed furiously at the screen in a over-exburant parody of someone waving, his mouth full of sharp-looking teeth all set at odd angles and fitting together so well they looked a bit like zipperteeth. "HIIIII!" He screamed, accidentally falling off his chair. He scrambled back, looking unperturbed. "Ahem. LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! I'M ON TV!"

Courtney stared at him, an irritated look slipped past her newstalker's expression of amiable indifference. "...Look at him. And our final guest, one of the most infamous members of everyone's favorite group of endearingly off-kilter faith-paladins the Crossguard, Godhand Scar! You might recognize him as the destroyer of the off-world slaving ring that attacked us last year, one of the leaders behind the formation of the Refugee Housing Movement, and publisher of the highly controversial book of alchemy Ishbalan Discoveries Into Alchemy on behalf of it's original publisher, his deceased brother!"

Kimblee blinked. "...That man wrote a book on alchemy? I really must look into that."

"Given that would imply that you'll either survive the next hour or do so without being imprisioned, no, you're not," Gibbs said dryly.

"Must you stomp all over my agenda? That's very rude of you."

"Good morning to you all," Scar said politely, bowing. Kim and Zim frowned at him, clearly wondering why their introduction hadn't been so effusive and glowing.

Courtney's co-anchor spoke up. "According to our informants," Zero-Forty-Nine said. "The diaster earlier today was caused by a man from the former country of Amestris named Solf J. Kimblee, considered to be working on his own but possibly in league with others. He was, by the very detailed information offered by our very own Godhand Scar, a high-profile soldier in the employ of the Amestrian military and certified as a State Alchemist under the alias 'Red Lotus'. And before you laugh at how girly it is, bear in mine that our source states that it's a poetic reference to his specialty in creating explosive reactions with his bare hands capable of blowing people apart in showers of fire and gore and icky bits."

Kimblee frowned. "...Wait. People think my name is girly?" He sniffed. "How low-brow."

"You're named after a flower," Shego pointed out. "People aren't going to pay attention to the implications of your name when they can make fun of you. At least they don't call you something painfully generic like 'the Crimson Alchemist'."

"...They do, actually."

"Oh. Sorry."

Scar spoke up. "The Red Lotus Alchemist, if in a fair government, would have been tried and convicted of war crimes on a vast scale, and as it is, he was a complete monster even by the Amestrian military's loose standards when that monster is set against the enemy. He was among those set against the people of my country, Ishbal, over seven years ago, and almost single-handedly destroyed the city I grew up in and slaughtered everyone there aside from myself, and I hardly escaped unscathed." He gestured to the scar on his face. "He wielded an alchemical artifact known as the Philosopher's Stone that amplified his power considerable, and one constructed through abominable means, as they are forged from tearing souls from their mortal shells and condensing them in a material form."

"Wait." Gibbs turned to Kimblee. "All that stuff Roy told me was real?"

"Yes," Kimblee said.

"And this whole time...during your fights...you've been...?"

"Amplifying my powers by draining the life energies of extracted souls to bypass equivilant exchange? Yes."

"And you destroyed their own home with them?"

"Certainly! I thought it was splendidly ironic. Do you call it irony in these situations? I can never tell."

"You are a complete monster."

"I get that all the time!"

"And your outfit looks ridiculous."

"Now that was uncalled for!" Kimblee actually looked a little hurt.

Scar continued. "He has commited MANY crimes against humanity; he is one of the few State Alchemists that participated in the genocide of my people that did not either turn their backs on the military, atone for their sins or die under my destroyer's hand." At this rather flagrant reference to his time as a revenge-obsessed madman, Courtney gave him a disgusted look for a moment. He appeared not to give a damn what she thought."He escaped my grasp, and allied himself with inhuman monstrosities that sought to use the entire country of Amestris to create a Philosopher's Stone."

Greed grunted. "'Inhuman monstrosities'? Well...technically I can't complain on that score..."

"You're more of an 'evolved human'," Shego said.

"Yeah, you're crazy-awesome," Deadpool said. Greed seemed to feel better about it. Kimblee snickered at how sentimental it all was.

"I have reason to believe that he was also involved in the Heartless attack upon my world on the eve of a solar eclipse," Scar said. "I, along with a handful of Ishbalans, Xingians and Amestrians, barely managed to survive as a result of those plots, with the predictable results. Since then, I have heard of him roving among the worlds, seeking employ with many cruel and malicious organizations, and I suspect he has allied with a particularily more nefarious one known as 'Wolfram and Hart' for his own reasons."

Kimblee frowned. "I'm doing what-now?"

"And might they have an interest in destroying Traverse Town?" Courtney inquired.

Kim shook her head. "According to what we know about a hero that fough them - one William Pratt, AKA 'Spike' - Wolfram and Hart are a subtle group that spreads evil through vaugely legal means, though they would certainly benefit from a destructive madman like the Red Lotus Alchemist."

"Though I did meet a man claiming to be affiliated with them as of last night," Zim remarked. "He assaulted my team for reasons I have yet to discern, expressed improbably personal knowledge of our backgrounds, and left after we beat him up a bit." (Kimblee thought that Mr. Lyle was not going to be happy about being outed like this. Obviously, Azula and Wuya were going be angrier, though.)

Zero-Forty-Nine shrugged. "And what exactly did this Kimblee...DO?"

Zim answered again. "According to the survivors from Foster's, Kimblee attacked the house directly after rigging several building in the surronding neighborhood to explode; he did combat with a number of Foster's private security team until those houses exploded with sufficient force to create a transmutation circle in the ground and used the lay of the land to make it more specific; it is a means of harnessing alchemic reaction, and he used this one to cretae a Philosopher's Stone himself, killing over half the people of Foster's by removing their souls and binding them into a Philosopher's Stone. He then proceeded to use it's power to wipe the evidence away. Or just blow stuff up, I don't know."

"There are some pretty fantastical claims," Courtney said. "Can you back them up?"

Kim stared at the older girl. "...Foster's is in ruins, the survivors are half-dead, the ACTUAL dead are in some sort of arrested coma, a massive explosion destroyed the neighborhood. And speaking of 'fantastical'...we live in a town of adventure where actual flesh-eating demons came out of nowhere to mug a comic convention last week. And the week before that, a huge clan of gargoyles went to the Crossguard's headquarters and refused to leave because 'it was so appropiately Gothic', and they still haven't left after joining the Crossguard. And before THAT, a renegade psychic knight from another timeline tried to kill our leader and take over until he was informed that we don't have a centralized head of government, so he decided to kill everyone anyway until the Xiaolin Dragons literally kicked him out of town. Why in the world are you choosing to be selectively skeptical now?"

Courtney paused. "I REALLY feel like I should argue against, but I just can't."

Kimblee shook his head. "That poor logical soul. She was not meant for a town like this."

Roy nodded solemnly. "Isn't that the truth." He paused. "...Damn it all, STOP DOING THAT!"

"Doing what?"

"Being NICE! STOP MAKING PEOPLE THINK YOU'RE PLEASANT! IT'S FALSE ADVERTISING!"

Zim laughed at Courtney. "Now you're learning!"

"Your approval shames me." Courtney brightened and turned to the camera. "So there you have it, Traverse Town! From our sources to your ears, the latest sociopath to make a name for himself in our blood is Solf J. Kimblee, also called the Red Lotus Alchemist, guilty of countless war crimes in a genocide campaign and certainly guilty of Misue of Supernormal Artifacts of Mass Destruction under the Crossguard-Peerage Charter of Common Sense Guidelines! Already guilty of destroying Foster's and presumably harvesting their souls in some ghoulish manner to fashion ANOTHER artifact of mass destruction in clear violation of the Peace Marine's Ordnance Regulation Guidelines-"

"NO PRESUMABLY!" Zim shouted unexpectedly, so excited he burst into flames. "I was there! HE KILLED THEM ALL! Well, not so much 'killed' as 'ripped their souls and shoved them into an itty-bitty container of DOOM' but that's worse, innit? And ya know what? YOU'RE NEXT! YES, YOU, THE AUDIENCE! THINK KIMBLEE WAS GOING TO JUST DO FOSTER'S! WRONG! MAYBE HE'LL BLOW YOU UP! MAYBE HE'LL HARVEST YOUR SOULS TOO! Maybe he'll just blow the wall in your house and draw funny things on family pictures and make disparaging comments about your media collections because you'll be too busy cowering like cowed things that have been cowed so badly it gives 'cowed' a bad name nad makes the anthropomorphic personification of 'cow' come down to laugh at you. That's how cowed you'll be. Because he blows stuff up."

Kimblee blinked in bewilderment. "Aw horseshit!" Deadpool said, as Courtney, Kim, Zero-Forty-Nine and even Scar stared at Zim too. "Not a blowing-up-stuff guy with a artifact of doom! I hate those guys. They mess up stuff that I want to mess up. Hope like hell he doesn't come around here."

"...Deadpool, you just fought him," Shego said. "Not very well, you know. And you already knew all that."

"And I'm standing right here," Kimblee added.

Deadpool shrugged. "Eh, but I now only know how screwed I really am because the TV told me to. Giant projector screen, whatever. I don't need my opinions! THE MASS MEDIA TELLS ME HOW TO THINK!"

"That's because you're dumber than a sack of hammers," Shego said. "And saying that, I apologize the hammers of the world."

"I want yellow text font," Deadpool complained.

"Is he aware that he's on fire?" Kimblee asked.

On the screen..."Um, you...DO know you're on fire, right?" Courtney said uncertainly.

Zim looked at himself. "Am I?" He said, looking at himself. He shrugged, still on fire. "Ah well. It's not a big fire. AND IT'S DRAMATIC! GLORY IN MY DRAMA, VIEWING PUBLIC! GLORY IN IT! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!"

"Why are you laughing like that?" Zero-Nine-Forty asked.

"It's a hobby," Zim said.

"Ah."

"And finally, we have a message from our, er, 'heroes', to you, Mr. Red Lotus Alchemist! If you're watching," Courtney said triumphantly. "Which I know you are, because the emergency broadcasts work by interrupting all televised signals, so you'll see them on TV if you're inside, and if you're outside, you'll still see them on the giant projector screens in the sky!...Aw, this town is so WEIRD sometimes..."

"Ged to ze point!" Zim said. "...Why am I talking like that...?"

"Oh, yeah! And these guys are going find you and beat you up and stuff," Courtney said hurredly. "And Godhand Scar is out to get you."

Scar just glared at the screen. Approximately a third of the audience fainted in terror. The rest was generally frightened, and half of those would have horrible nights for the next six months.

"That makes my current agenda much easier to organize, then," Kimblee said.

"And, with that happy note, remember everyone!" Kim said suddenly. "Forewarned is forearmed! Be ready to evacuate at a moment's notice! You know the drills, so keep steady, safe and sane!"

"You probably won't die horribly!" Zim said cheerfully. "...I mean, I GUESS. Could be. I dunno. I'm not a, a MIND READER if the mind is DESTINY or REALITY or the NEXT FEW HOURS. Meh. What was I saying? Oh, try not to die. That would suck. And be unproductive or something. Oh, and I'm on a bit of a timetable Kimblee, and I have to leave in a hour or two, so if you announce yourself in a less destructive way so I can trounce you properly, that'd be awesome. Like, uh...right outside this news studio."

"Wait," Courtney said. "WHAT."

"WHAT," Gibbs said.

"Ooh, a challenge!" Kimblee said. "I applaud their valor."

"I don't see you clapping," Deadpool said.

"...It's a metaphor, you buffoon," Kimblee said.

"We're on the Maineford Duloc plaza the corner of Jerry's Bait Street and Donotgonearthesewer Avenue," Kim said. "Big news building. Can't miss it. And just to be safe, we'll put a big flaming sign in the sky for you."

"Huh?" Courtney squeaked.

"Let's see," Zim said. "Closing remarks. Yeah...um...blah blah blah, you're gonna pay for stuff and such, yadda yadda, the vengeance of us willl be painful and doomy and whatnot...so on and so forth. PREPARE FOR PAIN! I dare ya. Come on, come on and get us!" He grinned sinisterly. "Unless you don't think you can TAKE us."

"Can we talk about this for a second!" Courtney said. "There wasn't anything about getting him to come HERE!"

"And also, there's me," Scar said coldly to the audience. "You know me, Kimblee. I am the man you have failed to kill three times now. Once in Ishbal. Once on that train. And again when our world drowned in the darkness you and your foul ilk let in. Such a stain on your record seems...improper. Whatever happened to your sense of pride? Of duty? Can you really forgive the insult my continued existence is to you, or that insult I PERSONALLY gave you when I nailed you to that train with a steel pipe through your stomach?" His mouth twitched. "You COWARD."

Kimblee frowned. "That seems uncalled for." His eyes narrowd. "...If you insist, I will come. I was going to anyway, though."

"Please stop antagonizing him!" Courtney wailed. "Oh no no no no, I don't wanna die...er, I mean...that's all, ladies, gentlemen and other assorted gender-types, now back to your scheduled programming!" The screen faded out, and vanished in a pretty derezzing effect, as the nano-swarm dispersed.

There was a long silence. Deadpool scratched himself. "...That would have been useful information," Shego said. "If you hadn't already figured that your, Mustang. Or been about FIFTEEN MINUTES AGO!"

"Ah, it was relentless fearmongering due to the newscasters being unsuited to this kind of thing and the guests being grumpy, camera-shy or completely crazy!" Deadpool said, obviously enthusiastic about the whole thing. "It was AWESOME."

Roy's eye was twitching. "Uh," Gibbs said. "Sir-"

"WHO THE HELL IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS MESS!" Roy yelled.

"Probably kids that got too deep for their own good," Kimblee said. He paused. "Hrm. Are we going to start killing each other again."

"Yep," Roy said.

"Good to know," Kimblee said. "Before we get to all that, I have a minor request. Give me the man called Jarod over in the robot, and I'll leave."

Shego looked from Jarod, who gave her a frown, and then to Kimblee. "...'Leave', you say?"

"Hey!" Jarod said indignantly.

"What? I didn't say go and do it! Just an option. You know, might wanna think about it."

"No," Greed said sternly. "You can't have him."

Jarod smiled. "...Thank you."

Greed continued. "The reason being, he's in my robot right now. They're a package deal and I'm not giving you my robot. It's a awesome robot."

Jarod blinked. "...Going to pretend I didn't hear that."

"So we'll just kill you now," Deadpool said cheerfully. The ground in front of him rose up and reshaped itself into a three-barreled cannon. It spun fast, and fired it's cannonballs straight at Deadpool; the three black missles moved fast, as such things of course do, but Deadpool didn't seem to see things that way. He stepped out of the way of the first one and unsheathed a blade before making precisely three cuts and then sheathing the blades. Six cannonball halves, in perfect poportion to each other, smashed through the windows of a nearby store with a ear-hurting rumble. "Gonna kill you now," Deadpool repeated.

Kimblee shrugged, his shadow moving. "If you insist."

Roy frowned. "You're up to something, Kimblee. But I can't say I'm terribly interested in it. I'll give you this one last chance to surrender, or there won't be bones left of you."

"You wound me," Kimblee said, unruffled. "You should know that I never turn down a challenge or abandon a mission. We knew each other so well in Ishbal, I'm surprised that you haven't already realized We were comrades in arms; I thought that meant something to you."

"We never knew each other," Roy said flatly. "We were accomplices. Nothing more." His hand closed into a fist. "You're no comrade of mine."

"A shame." Kimblee's shadow moved, growing impossibly large, and then engulfing the entire street around them. "But I have, as they say, other fish to fry."

"Oh shit, his shadows moving around on it's own!" Deadpool observed, unneccesarily. "That's never good. Next thing you know, he'll be making deals with the Devil or turning into a horrible monster that's just the piece of an even bigger monster sealed inside the moon or killing kids on his journey into being the ultimate badass asthmatic or doing creepy voodoo stuff while singing a kickass villain song!"

"Would it be off-hand if I said that I probably know all the people you're referencing?" Kimblee wondered; darkness was pouring off him, spinning into the air like a whirlwind.

"Can't say I really care," Gibbs said, one arm transforming into a massive assemblege of machine guns, semi-automatics, rapid fire pistols and a few plasma rifles. He pointed it at Kimblee and opened fire in a thunderous roar that might've defeaned them all if he didn't tone done the noise. (True, guns didn't work that way, but it was a Devil Fruit power, they were really weird that way.)

Another wall was transmuted from the ground to intercept the attack, and the bullets and energy shots broke it down and blasted through; a large piece of wall hit Kimblee in the head. He didn't appear to even notice, apart from absently wiping the blood leaking from the small cut on his forehead.

Kimblee grinned, glad that he had already set up this little stunt in advance thanks to all the hatred and anger directed at him. Those were emotions that tied to the darkness, and so he could use them.

His eyes had turned a brighter shade of yellow, the whites of his eyes turning an unnatural black at the edges. Around Jarod, the shadows encircled the robot he was riding in, sliding up it's feet, the ragged edges of the darkness leaving tiny scratches as they formed into evil little fingers. "Now," He said, calling to the darkness. "Return to the light, and drown it." He snapped his fingers.

From that shadows, a massive swirling tornado of utter blackness erupted from around Kimblee; the sudden gasps of bewilderment were laced with plumes of frost, the tempature dropping dramatically. The tornado, moving faster than they could think or react, twisted together and contracted and compressed, flowing together around all of them into a single chaotic shape, resembling a rounded pyramid, bulging and twisting like something inside too big to be contained wanted out.

The darkness-pyramid exploded; for an instant, it was a burst of blackness that was not the absence of light but it's true opposite, a pulse of an even darker nature slamming into the buildings and street and twisting them. The blast was silent; it went straight up into the sky, apparently harming no one, for a short awful moment looking like a tear in the world, a ragged bleeding cut in the fabric of reality and such horrible things looking back out and clawing and pulling and coming in...

It was gone. Gibbs stumbled back, his head aching in ways he didn't have the words to describe and feeling violated, a deep and unearthly chill in the very marrow of his bones, bits of frosts clinging to his clothes.

For a moment, he didn't know where he was. For a moment, he had been in a place that was nothingness, a dark void that nonetheless churned with life. He had seen...such things. Such horrible things. The loud voices ringing in the back of his head...desperate hands grabbing at him...crying and pleading and begging and condemning...voices that he'd heard before, as they were dying. Voices that he had allowed to die, that had come off the hard way of the cruel choices he had to make and still had nightmares about on the hard days.

The faces. He had known those faces. He remembered a small hand, clutching at his leg and screaming in the voice of his daughter and his wife had been there too, yelling with the rest of them-

He shut his eyes tight and shuddered so hard it hurt, trying with all his might to ignore what had just happened, and realized several things that were wrong.

Firstly, Kimblee was gone, disappearing along with the darkness. The area around them had been...warped. The surfaces discolored, twisted slightly out of sync with their original patterns. He saw the broken stones torn by claw marks, the asphault cracked with the footstops of monsters, the melted glass with blurry shapes like faces only wrong and he never ever wanted to see what they really looked like, the amorphous shadows rolling across the ground like a gritty wind...

His companions weren't in great shape either. Jarod and the robot he was in had vanished along with Kimblee, and the only one that seemed fit to communicate was Shego, who was still standing and frantically slapping at herself, like she was trying to get some loathsome insect off her, a muted green aura pumping up from her.

"Shego?" Gibbs said, feeling a bit stupid for saying it. It was such a goofy name. (Though, he admitted, he wasn't one to talk on that score.) "...What the hell just happened?"

"What? What?" Shego twitched a bit and narrowed her eyes at him; not angry or annoyed, but like she wasn't sure if he was there or not. "Don't know. Dunno, dunno..." She shivered, the green aura around her getting hotter. It didn't seem to be melting the chunks of ice on her, though. "Things!" She said suddenly. "Crying...screaming...cold there. So cold. So damn cold..."

Gibbs paused. Something else seemed wrong. He hadn't heard Deadpool chatter one bit. He saw the motormouth mercenary in question sitting on the ground and staring into the air; small layers of ice had frozen his clothes together, probably making it hard for him to move.

"Hey, Deadpool, what the hell just happened?" Shego said, raising an eyebrow.

He didn't respond for a moment. "Didn't used to be my name," Deadpool said in nearly a whisper. "But they keep calling me by my first one. They know who I used to be. Know how I got into the betting pool. Weapon X." He twitched, so violently he would have hurt himself if he could have moved much. "They knew me. They was there, everybody. And other people. People I...the ones that I..." He stared at his hands, slowly flexing them. "So many people dead. Just 'cause I met them and had a contract or a deal or was bored. Dead. 'Cause of me. Killed them. I killed them." He stared at nothing. "...They know where I am. They know me."

Uncertain of what to do, Gibbs turned aside and saw Greed awkwardly supporting himself on a nearby piece of rubble, his armor gone and revealing his human shell. "...Thousand's of them," He said faintly, in the voice of Lin Yao. "So many of 'em. Yaos and Changs and Mings and Fongs..." He went on for a bit, reciting the names of...what, Gibbs didn't know, but there were over fifty of them. "...Failed them. I was gonna be the Emperor. Gonna make things right for the clans. Gonna fix Xing." He paused. "...Gone now. They're all dead. Can't save anyone. Nothin' I sacrifice good enough for it." He took a deep gasping breath, and Gibbs understood that this was not Greed talking, but Lin Yao. "Fu...Lan Fan...Mei Chang...I'm sorry, damn it, oh God, I'm sorry, I'm sorry I let you die..." Then, with unexpected fervor, "Ed's right, THE TRUTH IS A SADISTIC BASTARD!"

Greed twitched again; the shape of his face shifted subtly, a different personality taking over. Lin's eyes turned red again, the brilliant cat's eyes of Greed incarnate; he fell over, clutching at his face. "No," He moaned. "No no no no..." He punched the ground hard enough to split his knuckles, but they healed themselves instantly. He didn't seem to notice and just sat up, covering his face and getting blood all over his forehead. "Not what I wanted. Never what I wanted. Not supposed to happen like this, never wanted what Father wanted...just me. Always just me." His face twitched. "Me. ME. Me! Me! ME ME ME ME!" He slowed down, his voice faltering. "Me," He said again. "Me. Always just me. Never got what I really wanted. Never knew what I wanted so bad it made me want the world and everything in it. Father wanted it to? Didn't want power or knowledge, he just wanted..." He shook his head furiously. "That selfish BASTARD! Took them way. Took them away from ME. They were mine! MINE! MINE mine mine mine...mine...mine..." Greed trembled. "...Give them back. Give me back my people." He kneeled over. He might have been weeping.

Shego and Gibbs stared in disbelief. "What the hell!" Shego said. "What did he do!"

Gibb shook his head. "I don't...Sir!"

He saw Roy Mustang at last, sitting cross-legged beside a large piece of rubble and staring blankly at something; his back was to them, so they couldn't tell.

While Shego fussed over Deadpool and Greed, Gibbs circled around Roy and found that his commanding officer was staring at a small beaten and old pocket watch in his hand. Gibbs thought it looked like it had a heraldic lion imposed over a six-pointed alchemic star. "Sir?" Gibbs said carefully.

Roy said nothing. He just stared at his watch, and looked like he was staring further than that. At something a thousand yards away.

Gibbs vaugely remembered hearing that all State Alchemists from Amestris were given a silver pocket watch like that when they were certified. It was their ID, a tangible expression of their status as the most elite alchemists in their country...or, as civilians angrily called them, 'dogs of the military'.

Roy did not rant or weep or scream disjointed apologies like the others. He just stared at his pocket watch.

Gibbs stared down at his commanding officer, and remembered something: one time, when they had been out for drinks, Roy had mentioned that they'd called him the 'Hero of Ishbal', after the Ishbalan Cival War. He'd hated that name. "I was never a hero," Roy had said, quieter than ever before. "I was just a murderer."

The look in Roy's eyes then looked very much the same as they did now. A stare that looked back to a time when following his orders meant murdering thousands of his own countrymen because they were Ishbalan. Skin drawn tight and tired. Dark eyes gone listless with the weight of so many deaths, so many burned corpses, so many people on his conscience. There weren't the eyes of an idealistic young man who had gone to the military and enlisted as a State Alchemist in the hopes of making his country a better place, of protecting it from it's many enemies...the eyes of an idealist who had died in Ishbal, dried up and peeled away as he followed his orders and incinerated the sand-blown buildings of his Ishbalan countrymen on orders, who'd snapped his fingers and heard thousands of men, women and children die screaming as their cities burned. An idealistic young man who had killed so many people there that he couldn't possibly remember them all, even if he kept a tally of the burned bodies he knew of to remind himself of what he was supposed to atone for when the nights were too long and the sacrifices started getting too big.

These were the eyes of a soldier who thought himself a murderer. A soldier whose country had been born in darkness, and consumed by it. A soldier who had thrown his life into taking over that country so he could make it so that another Ishbal Massacre wouldn't ever happen again, only to have that desperate ambition torn away and leaving him with nothing but sour regrets, pointless sacrifices and all the gambles that came to nothing.

Roy closed his eyes, and Gibbs was struck by how old he looked right then, even though Roy was the same age as he was. The lines under his eyes were too deep for a man his eyes, his skin too drawn and pale. "I understand," Roy said quietly, to someone from a old memory. Gibbs couldn't know it of course, but in his mind Roy saw the last of the Ishbalan people bleeding and waiting to die in front of a firing squad; an old man pinned against a wall with nothing but a dying dog in his last moments. When Roy had asked him for any last words, before Roy had incinerated him that old man had just grinned and said I will never forgive you. "I wouldn't accept it. I don't deserve forgiveness."

"Sir?" Gibbs said again.

Roy didn't appear to hear him. "...I'm a soldier. I'm supposed to protect the people of my country. I enlisted to help people. Tell me something: I'm a soldier. So why have I killed my countrymen?" Roy laughed, and it was the emptiest, harshest sound Gibbs ever heard. "Falman. Breda. Havoc. Fuery. Everyone." He paused. A glimmer of emotion came to his haunted face; it was grief, sharp-edged and gleaming with madness in it's depths. "Hawkeye. Hughes." He bowed his head and gently turned his hand over, so that the surprisingly heavy pocket watch slid off and hit the ground; the long chain got caught on Roy's fingers and slipped off after a moment. "...I'm sorry. I couldn't keep my word." Then, "None of it was worth it."

Very slowly, with an air of great deliberation, Roy brought one of his hand close to his face, thumb and forefinger touching and inches from his temple, held as such an angle that the spark would certainly hit his eye, the alchemic reaction leave nothing of him but ashes. For a moment, his eyebrows furrowed, and there was an expression of such impossible rage, such inhuman black hate for what he had lost, a desperate need for revenge like the heat of a sun kept trapped and left to stew for years, hate so intense he needed to blame someone for this insanity, someone he could burn, and he would turn those flames on himself if he had no one else. He braced his fingers, about to snap them-

Gibbs broke out into a run, one of his hands morphing into a large heavy cannon fit for clubbing someone into unconsciousness. (He'd always been worried about this, Commander-Admiral Roy Mustang against the darkness so much with so many horrors to his name; rumor had it there was a bet among some of the psychiatrists when he would kill himself out of guilt or some misguided sense of self-loathing, but Gibbs always KNEW that if he ever did it would be fire, Roy would avenge the Ishbalans dead at his hand by killing himself with the same fires that destroyed THEM-)

Roy heisitated. He frowned, contemplative. A hard look came into his eyes, the grief and shell-shock fading and replaced by a familiar hardness. "I've come too far," Roy said to himself, and lowered his hand.

Gibbs stopped in mid-step, relieved.

Roy stood up. He paused, for a moment, so briefly that nearly no one else would have noticed, and he picked up the old pocket watch he had dropped and clipped it back to his belt. The old reminder of his sins, a symbol of the duty he still lived with. To atone for his part in Ishbal.

He glanced at Gibbs. "...What were you doing?"

"About to hit you in the head to disable you and prevent you from commiting suicide," Gibbs said honestly.

"Huh. Good to know." Roy looked aside, and noticed that Greed and Deadpool had finally gotten up around, though they were less...upbeat than usual. "...Okay. What the HELL DID KIMBLEE DO TO US!"

Gibbs frowned. "That's...a very good question, sir. And then...he kidnapped that Jarod guy and the robot he was in." He frowned. "And right after Kim and those others called him out and dared him to fight." His eye twitched.

"What the hell was she thinking!" Shego demanded. "I knew she was obtuse, but...seriously? Calling out a homicidal sociopath and daring him to kill her? Has she lost her mind?"

"You seem a bit concerned about that," Deadpool said, suddenly recovered by now. "I smell ship teasing."

Gibbs frowned at him. "Weren't you just catatonic?"

"Oh, yeah, but I got bored of that. Other people get bored with insanity, I get bored with angst."

Roy rolled his eyes. "Please, enough. We need to intercept Kimblee and finish this." Of all the horrible timing, he thought. They had been so close... "...Okay. First things first. We need to-"

Roy froze. In the ample shadows produced by the rubble and collapsed buildings, the innnocous shade cast by blockages in the way of the sunlight had...changed. It had grown beyond the confines of the shapes that cast it, thicker and vital and with a life of it's own. And they were moving; thick and sinuous, tearing themselves out of the blackness and reshaping themselves.

Heartless. But moving in the sunlight, burning in the light but healing abnormally fast and utterly unafraid of their bane. They hadn't appeared from portals or gaps in reality, but by tearing their way in. Maybe Kimblee had given them a way in, but this wasn't right, it wasn't usual...

So many of them emerged from the darkness. Soldiers, larger than usual, bristling with all manner of weaponry produced by their bodies. Air Soldiers, much thinner than usual, thin blades protruding all over. Red Nocturnes, drawn here from all the flames and explosions cast around so recently; they looked nothing like the cloaked figures they normally were, but whirling masses of fire and smoke with glowing yellow eyes and jarring noise emanating from them, their emblem a design written in utter blackness at their core. There were other Heartless there, too, ones Roy had not seen in a long time and had dearly wished not to.

Bits of the shadows split away and zipped into innocent-looking things around them; a stretch of the street rippled and abrupty tore itself out of the ground, the rubble and stone binded together by shifting darkness and tearing itself into a vaugely humanoid shape lacking a head; it hit the ground, cracking it, and unfolded, revealing it's full height of nearly sixteen fieet and more than half as wide. A Heartless emblem appeared on it's chest, and just below that, it split into a savage mouth with jagged rocks for teeth, molten saliva melting tracks down it's massive legs and sizzling against the dirt.

A utterly black tear appeared just above that stone giant, and a triangular blade seemingly made of black crystal fell out, a Heartless emblem glowing from within and darkness streaming along it's flat base. That stream erupted into a thin, jointless arm, bulking up into a much larger muscular limb, and a shoulder that grew that suddenly expanded into a proper body in the shape of a reptillian thing that looked wrong in it's dimensions; it's main body was a twisted mass of rib-like protrusions attached to a unfleshed pelvis, it's legs surprisingly thick and resembling those of a multi-jointed insect, ending in blades. It's head, positioned on a long serpentine neck, was just a snoutlike shape with hollow sockets glowing yellow just under the opened jaws. Perversely, it only had the one arm; the other side of it's body was hollowed out and shriveled.

They were far from the only ones to appear. Even more monstrous and twisted Heartless appeared, many of them never before seen in the town limits, and the neighborhood was soon full of them, Heartless clinging to the walls of buildings or crowding around on the rooftops, because there just wasn't room on the streets: abandoned objects or broken bits of architecture proved perfect vessels for more powerful Heartless to materialize with, creating monsters so large they took up all the space.

It was...a horde. A huge undisciplined chaotic rabble of Heartless, all staring directly at the small group right there, murderous intentions radiating from the Heartless. And all of this happened in precisely the same amount of time it took for them to realize it was happening at all.

Greed, Roy, Shego and Deadpool stared at the Heartless horde. The Heartless looked back, and would have snarled with a single voice if they could have spoken.

Roy spoke first. "Okay. I officially hate today."

"This," Shego said solemnly as the Heartless broke and charged right at them. "Is gonna suck."

...

Across town, reactions to the emergency report was varied, though it quickly got a lot worse as other Heartless hordes erupted from the shadows of buildings and the places between doorways, all at the same time.

At the Temple of Bitter Work that the Xiaolin Dragons lived at, in the training dojo where they had been sparring and had happened to see the transmission through the transparent roof, the four warriors and their dragon stared in horror. Raimundo swore in Portuguese. Clay, who had many depths, knew precisely what he had said and told him off for that. A Heartless made of sixteen cars joined together in a crudely human form had then smashed through the dojo, and a mighty battle ensued.

The Mall Crawlers, having already returned to their base of operations for repairs (AKA the local scrap dump and the basement under the Fry Barn) saw it in the sky, and immediately decided to do the proper Space Marine-ish thing; but first they had to deal with all the Heartless they kept running into on the way.

In the Gibbs household, Izumi, Mr. Herrimen and Jim solemnly watched it from their tower of TVs. Izumi bared her teeth in a grimace. "Damn that bastard!" She snarled. "Warping alchemy like that...tch. Like I'd expect any better from a dog of the military..."

Jim frowned. "It's going to get worse from here."

Mr. Herrimen looked at him, appalled. "...I sincerely hope not, Master James."

Jim shook his head. "It always does. Always gets worse before it gets better." He frowned again. "And James is the name of my first dad!"

"Don't be rude," Izumi said, a abnormally huge Soldier Heartless leaping from behind her from the depths of a table's shadow, upsetting the table in the process and throwing volative chemicals everywhere. Without looking, Izumi grabbed it in midair by the wrist, slammed it into the ground, clapped her hands and slammed her palm onto the ground; wire-thing cords stabbed right through the Heartless and pulled it apart as more Heartless appeared. While Mr. Herrimen recoiled in horror, Jim only sighed and pulled a massively oversized gun right at the Heartless, hollowing out their heads and stunning them long enough for Izumi to transmute several massive fist-shaped projectiles and squish the Heartless with them.

In the mobile hospital still parked by Foster's, activity ground to a brief and horrified halt. Medical doctors, nurses, pediatricians, veternarians, xenocians, physiologists, mad doctors (you got far in Traverse Town if you were exceedingly skillful and compellingly weird in some way) and the vast inflow of seriously hurt Foster's residents (now destitute and homeless) all gaping at what they saw throught viewing ports and patched-in monitoring scans (for those working there) or on TVs (for the patients). The patients were absolutely horrified, at the monstrous revelation of why they had been attacked and what had become of their dead friends: their souls torn away and fused into a weapon of mass destruction that had destroyed their home. Many of them broke down or went berserk right then and there. Some just...broke. Mac and Bloo raged. Eduardo cried. Wilt could say nothing. Coco was uncharacteristically silent. Stature's depression shrank her to a third of a human's size, so beaten and tired at her failure. Spike had to be restrained by thirteen orderlies and that took nearly fifteen minutes to do. The Heartless tried to attack the hospital, but fortunately there was a sizable number of Peace Marine soldiers Roy Mustang had sent out in case of this sort of thing and they managed to hold the line against them.

For Magneto, Agatha, Olivier, Angilaki, and all the others on the Council, they had already left their diner when Foster's had been destroyed, in their own attempts to rally their respective factions and figure out just what was going on. The emergency transmission in both sky and conventional entertaiment media was a surprisingly helpful bit; though it was obviously met with surprise and no shortage of rage at the atrocity dealt to their people, it allowed all concerned to halt investigations and get to the gritty work of preparing for active battle. (Needless to say, the Heartless that showed up around them died quite horribly. In Traverse Town, authority equaled the ability to issue no-holds barred beatdowns.)

In the second-rate apartment shared by Naruto and Gaara when they were both in town, their breakfast (always made rather late because Naruto was a bit lazy and slept in, while Gaara was pretty much unfocused on this sort of thing) and TV watching was interrupted by the emergency transmission. When it was over, Naruto's first impulse was to storm right out, hunt down Kimblee and beat him up for both killing people so horribly and interrupting his morning cartoons. (The nerve of Kimblee.) Gaara, posessed of a cooler head, convinced him otherwise, and they both decided to get some guys together to help the people at the studio. This was helped when Tsunade called them both and gave them orders to meet her and the others at one of their many hidden bases. (They were ninjas, of course they didn't have a single, easily attacked base.) Heartless swarmed upon both of them, drawn by the monsters inside both Naruto and Gaara. Their neighbors immediately blamed them for everything, which wasn't an entirely unreasonable reaction when their battle strategy caused their apartment building to have a conspicious hole in it's side.

More Heartless descended upon the town, in hordes and packs, coming from nowhere and savagely attacking whatever they could get their claws on. Kimblee had opened the way for them, and they had come flooding out. It was fortunate that the factions had already been made aware of the disaster going on, or they would have been caught off-guard, and the casualties would have been horrendous. As it was, they were still having just managing to hold the line; it had all happened too fast to muster sufficient numbers to combat them effectively, and for every fighter that managed to take down a dozen Heartless, there were two dozen Heartless swarming out of the shadows to take their place.

Attrition would take it's toll. They couldn't fight forever, and a moment's lack of weakness was all that was needed for a single Heartless to slip through past sword or firearm or skill and someone would die.

The Heartless had been aimed at a certain news studio. Few of them were anywhere near it, but this worked in Kimblee's favor. He intended to cause damage, wreck morale and destroy what little sense of safety these people had left. A quick surgical strike, all those Heartless coming down at one studio at once and then departed after their bloody work was done, was not suitable for this purpose.

The Heartless were coming through. It did not matter how many enemies were set in their way, they were coming. And they were hungry.

...

As yet oblivious their impending doom, at the studio itself, Zim grinned at his dubious friends, apparently oblivious to the fact that Courtney had gone absolutely berserk over the small unplanned detail of daring the homicidal maniac to come down to her studio and try to kill them all; the security detail and her co-workers were trying to hold her back from strangling Zim or something. "Well, I think that went pretty well," Zim said, pleased with himself.

"Well," Hobbes said, counting off on his fingers. "We completely blew whatever cover-up might have been going on to keep people feeling safe, we exposed the true horror of what actually happened and may incite a riot over it, and we also dared the guy who did it all to come down here and kill us."

"So, what, a pretty average day?" Calvin said.

Hobbes nodded. "Pretty much. I really have to admit...this is probably the worst thought out plan I've ever been a part of."

"Hey!" Sokka said. It had been mostly his idea, after all.

"What about when I broke through the barrier to the Dungeon Dimensions to summon a horrible eldritch abomination so I could ride it to school because I didn't feel like taking the bus?" Calvin said, while Sokka and Zuko glanced at each other as if to say that they could still outdo that.

"This is the second worst thought out plan I've ever been a part of," Hobbes amended.

"There'll be trouble about this later on," Zuko said darkly. "I just know it."

"Sheesh, you're so cynical!" Zim said. "Are you going to be like this whole adventure or what? Total buzz-kill!" Minimoose, hovering nearby, squeaked in agreement, though he meant that it would be good that someone with some sense would be coming along.

Aang blinked. "Wait, what? Is Zuko going with you or something?"

Zim paused. "Er..."

Zuko froze. His friends looked at each other, glared at Zuko...and shrugged. "Well, I suppose that's safer than letting Zim run around on his own," Katara said.

"You suck," Toph complained. "You get to run around with the fun friend and do awesome stuff."

"Pick us up if you find our world out there!" Sokka commanded. "Or I'll kick your ass!"

Zuko frowned. "...Huh. I'm not sure whether to be relieved that there's so little fuss about me going off with three complete strangers for very little sane reason...or insulted."

"Does that make us the not-fun friends?" Tucker complained. "You guys suck."

In a small glass-walled soundstation that was used as a calling station when it wasn't in use as a radio-station, the rather large tentacle-alien girl had the unenviable task of answering the recent flood of calls by herself; the news report had unleashed near-panic among a certain kind of people, though the phone calls had a disturbing tendency to suddenly have a lot of screaming before they went silent... "Yes, right, I'm sorry for interrupting Dr. Acula," She said into three phones at once, all three callers with the same problem. "Yes, yes, I know it's your favorite episodes, just rewatch them, the TVs record them automatically, what? Hold on, hello? Sorry, sorry about-what? What? I said, I'M SORRY ABOUT INTERRUPTING YOUR SHOW, M'AM! Sorry for yelling, thank you for calling, goodbye! Hello? Yes, madam, I'm sorry about...no, we're not sensationalizing! Well, Missus Courtney probably is, but...what? No, I'm not being mean about her, I really don't know what her last name is! Thank you, goodbye! Hello? No, we're not interested in buying a triple-deluxe edition of How To Screw The System and Still Look Awesome in The Eyes of The Law: A Guide to Chaotic Neutral Heroics by Wade Wilson! Wait, Mr. Deadpool? What are you doing...is that a fight in the background? Hello, hello? He hung up on me! No, he didn't get cut off, he really HUNG UP ON ME!"

Danny, observing this, said to Sam, "I think we may have made a slight mistake in misunderstanding how this would affect the town." She nodded solemnly.

"Yes? Hello? Yes, this is Station WUPI, I-I'm sorry, can you repeat that? Your name is what now?" She stopped, frozen. "...Sir, if this is some kind of a joke-" There was the greatly muted sound of an explosion from the reciever. "I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry! Yes, I believe you! What? You want me to what? No, I can't! I don't have the authority-" Another explosion through the reciever. "OKAY OKAY OKAY, please STOP!" She hung up all the phones but one and yelled, "MISTER ZIM! MISS POSSIBLE! GODHAND SCAR! PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE COME OVER HERE!"

The three in question hurried over, passing through the opened sliding-glass door into the sound-station and sliding it behind them. This was a bit of a mistake, because with all the phones ringing and echoing off the walls, it was really really loud. "I've never been a mister before, awesome! Also, are you by any chance on a sexual offenders register?" Zim asked curiously as the three of them rounded on her. "I ask only for information."

She didn't appear to hear him (probably because it was so loud), but instead held the phone out in a thick tentacle. "PLEASE TAKE IT!" She screamed, in the grip of hysterics secreting some sort of gooey substances from pores in the same way that another girl might start crying uncontrollably. "He'll kill more people, just please, pick up or he'll do it AGAIN-"

"Okay okay!" Zim said, taking the phone; by a surely unimportant significance, he was the closest one. "Hello?"

"Hello," A smooth voice said. "I am-"

"What!" Zim yelled.

"Excuse me!"

"Speak up! I can't hear you over all the phones and the ringing and my foot itching and, wait, wait, is that one girl still trying to kill me over something stupid?"

"I'LL KILL YOU!" Courtney screamed, having somehow found a pneumatically powered supersledge somewhere and was trying to pound Zim's head in with it after shoving the soundstation door open; Scar was forcing her back with his right hand on her face without bothering to look at her, and all she could do was flail around and scream insensibly.

"I-I don't understand!" The somone on the phone yelled. "I can't hear you!"

"Yep, still trying to kill me. WHAT WAS THAT?"

"That's what I-sorry? Sorry? I don't...there's a lot of noise in there, I can't make out a word you're saying!"

"WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR YOU, IT'S REALLY LOUD IN HERE!"

"I'm sorry, what? I CAN'T HEAR YOU OVER THAT YELLING AND RINGING!"

"WHAT?"

"WHAT?"

"SOMEONE PUT THIS THING ON SPEAKERPHONE!" Zim yelled. The harried tentacle-girl did just that. "Hey, hey! Did it go through?"

"I think so, yes!" The someone said, louder and more clearly due to being on speakerphone. Scar froze at the sound of it and almost let Courtney go. (But he remembered himself and disarmed Courtney, lightly tapping her wrist in such a way that she dropped the supersledge on her foot. While she was hopping around in pain, Scar pushed her through the door, shut it, and transmuting it solid with the wall. Naturally, she got started on trying to break the glass.)

"Okay, good, I can hear you now!" Zim shouted. "WHAT ABOUT YOU?"

"YES! I CAN HEAR YOU FINE, THANK YOU!"

Scar stared, recognizing the voice on the speakerphone and reflecting that he had never thought he'd been hearing it in this context. "...You must be joking," He said, glaring at the intercom. (Since this was very close to the tentacle-girl, this had the consequence of her assuming Scar was mad at her and she fell over on her desk and starting wailing in pure misery. Kim went over to make her feel better while giving Scar a dirty look.)

"WHO ARE YOU!" Zim yelled.

"SOLF J. KIMBLEE!" The someone said. Kim stared at the intercom in disbelief.

"WHAT?" Zim said.

"YES, INCREDIBLE, ISN'T IT? GLAD I RESPONDED SO PROMPTLY, ARE YOU? JUST WAIT UNTIL MY WELCOMING HORDE GETS OVER-" Kimblee said.

"NO!" Zim said. "I MEANT WHO IS THAT!"

"...WHAT," Kimblee said, somehow managing to yell flatly.

"SERIOUSLY! WHO ARE YOU?"

"...Solf J. Kimblee. THE MAN WHO DESTROYED FOSTER'S AND YOU JUST CHALLENGED TO A FIGHT? IN YOUR PRESENT LOCATION? NOT A SMART MOVE, BY THE WAY. VALOROUS, BUT NOT SMART!"

"OH, THAT KIMBLEE!" Zim yelled. "I'M GONNA SMASH YOUR FACE INTO OUTER SPACE! Oh," He said, turning to Scar, who was staring at the intercom with such black hate that it didn't seem human. "Yeah, just remembered, this guy's your mortal enemy. You wanna take over this call?"

"No," Scar said. "I truly do not wish to. I do not want to talk to Kimblee."

"I'M SORRY, WHAT WAS THAT?" Kimblee said. "I COULDN'T MAKE ANY OF THAT OUT, IT'S STILL TOO LOUD! WAS THAT SCAR? I THOUGHT I HEARD HIM!"

"YOU'RE RIGHT, IT IS REALLY LOUD IN HERE!" Zim said. "ISN'T IT!"

"YEAH!" Kim said.

"WHY WON'T YOU PEOPLE STOP CALLING!" The tentacle girl cried into the phones, which were still ringing on and off. "I'M TRYING TO HAVE A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN HERE!"

Everyone else had gathered around the soundproofed room. "I wish they hadn't closed the door," Morte said. "Now we can't hear them. Why'd they do that again?"

"DIE! DIE! DIE!" Courtney screamed, having taken a chair and trying to break through the glass with it so she could kill Zim. Or something like that. So far, all she'd done was dent the chair. (It was REALLY tough glass.)

"...Oh," Morte said. "That."

"COME ON SCAR! SPEAK UP! I KNOW YOU'RE THERE!" Kimblee yelled impatiently. "I DON'T EXACTLY HAVE A LOT OF TIME TO WASTE! I HAD TO BLOW UP AN ORC AND SOME OTHER STUFF AT THAT ONE DINER YOUR LEADERS LIKE TO FREQUENT JUST TO GET THAT PHONE-GIRL TO TAKE ME SERIOUSLY, DO I NEED TO BLOW UP A NEIGHBORHOOD JUST TO GET YOU TO TALK TO ME? ANOTHER ONE, I MEAN, YOU SHOULD HAVE SEEN MY LAST BATTLE TODAY! AND IT'S VERY INTENSIVE WORK, ALL THAT; THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE ISN'T EXACTLY AN UNLIMITED WELL OF POWER, YOU KNOW!"

"Should he have really said that?" Kim asked. "Explicitly stating that his power source has it's limits, I mean."

"...OH, DAMN IT!" Kimblee swore.

Scar's eyes narrowed. "What. Did. You. Do."

"OH, NOW YOU WANT TO TALK TO ME," Kimblee said, proving that you can make a yell sound sulky. "HMPH. SINCE YOUR COUNCILMEN AND WOMEN AND WHATEVER ELSE WEREN'T IN ATTENDENCE AT THEIR BASE OR CLUB OR WHATEVER THAT DINER'S SUPPOSED TO BE, I SAW NO REASON NOT TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE SITUATION AND USE THEIR PHONE! AND EXPLOIT THEIR SERVANTS FOR MY OWN ENDS! LIKE BLOWING UP THE ORC. OR THROWING THE FRYCOOK OUT WHEN HE WOULDN'T GIVE ME WAFFLES. I LOVE WAFFLES."

"HEY, ME TOO!" Zim said.

"TRULY? THAT IS A FASCINATING COINCIDENCE! TELL ME, DO YOU TAKE THEM WITH SYRUP OR SOME FORM OF SUGARY FRUIT AND CREAM-"

"KIIIIMBLEEEE!" Scar bellowed, rattling the glass a bit, surprising Zim, spooking Kim and making the tentacle girl pass out from being overwhelmed by awesome. "You bastard!"

"...OW. YOU DIDN'T HAVE TO YELL SO LOUD, SCAR," Kimblee complained. "I ONLY TRASHED THE DINER THAT YOUR COUNCIL USES AS A BASE. WELL, NOT 'TRASHED' SO MUCH, AS IT STILL EXISTS, BUT THE ORC IS DEAD NOW. ON THE GOOD SIDE, YOU'LL ALWAYS HAVE A PIECE OF HIM TO REMEMBER HIM BY. BECAUSE THERE'S SO MUCH OF HIM SPREAD AROUND, THERE WILL AT LEAST ONE OR TWO BONE FRAGMENTS OR ORGANIC MUSH STAINED ON THE CEILING."

There was a long silence, both horrified and bemused.

Kimblee sighed in exasperation. "THAT WAS A JOKE. AS THEY SAY IN THE VERNACULAR, 'ZING'."

Zim blinked. "Oh, I GET it!" He paused. The phones had stopped ringing, mainly because the tentacle-girl had lost her patience and unplugged them, and at least now Zim didn't have to yell anymore, but he had something to think about now. "...That wasn't funny. That wasn't funny at all."

"Oh, whatever. Anyway, Scar. You were about to embark on some sort of self-righteous rant, no doubt-"

"Hey, hey, hey!" Zim said sharply. "I was saying something. It is POLITE to listen to someone when they are speaking, so shut the hell up and listen!"

"Excuse me?" Kimblee said. Scar froze, the insane rage twisting his face fading in favor of a more bemused look.

"You heard me. Now listen, you half-baked toaster strudel with a touch of garlic at the top that everyone knows tastes really nasty! That joke, as you call it-"

"Please shut up, I'm trying to talk with my antiheroic counterpart," Kimblee said.

"-Was simply not funny," Zim said. Kim looked from him to Scar uncertainly; an odd expression was forming on the warrior-monk's face. "For one thing, the execution of it was completely off; you actually explained the details of it!"

"Will you let go of that? It was just a joke!" Kimblee complained.

"And everyone knows that if you have to explain the joke, then it's just not funny!" Zim said. "And secondly...well, it's hard to make a joke about killing someone. Believe me, I know! What with being a reformed bad guy and all. Well, I guess so. Because if I make bad jokes like that, Aang would give me a very stern look and lecture me until I have learned my lesson because I now know that if I tell an evil joke, I'll get bored!"

"Yes, fine," Kimblee said, his patience clearly broken. "WHATEVER! WOULD YOU PLEASE-"

"And to make my point clear, even if you're willing to take humor in a badly executed joke which only derives it's so-called 'humor' from it's brutal cruelty and therefore laugh at something based in death and suffering, you'll have to get passed the fact that it's just a bad joke!"

"Shut UP!" Kimblee said. "I DON'T CARE! JUST SHUT UP!"

"Even if you look past your joke's appalling insensitivity and lack of empathy," Zim said, chasing this line of thought like a kitten with OCD worries at a ball of yarn, seemingly unaware of the fact that Scar was now trembling for some reason, his face contorted in a bizarre expression and his throat making the oddest noises that no one had ever heard from him before. "If you analyze it from a structuralist point of view, it's just not funny! And also-"

"AAUUUUGH!" Kimblee screamed from his end of the phone. "I CAN'T TAKE IT ANYMORE! WHY WON'T YOU SHUT UP!"

"Ah, now you being to understand my line of reasoning but refuse to submit to my mighty LOGIC!" Zim said, pleased.

"WHY WON'T ANY OF YOU MAKE HIM STOP!" Kimblee screamed. From his end, there was the sound of pounding, uncannily like someone banging his head against a wall to shut out the stupid. "HE JUST KEEPS GOING ON AND ON AND HE NEVER SHUTS UP!"

"And furthermore-" Zim started to say, and then there was such a noise, from within that soundstudio.

It was a noise that neither Zim nor Kimblee nor any of the Traverse Town residents had ever heard. It was a hoarse noise, a series of rough bellows booming out in brief bursts, trailing away in strained heaving bits before booming again and again. It was a...happy noise. A amused noise. A nosie expressing a fervent glee that had never before been seen from it's source, a noise that defied all logic, all reason, all past knowledge and wisdom and suggesting that the multiverse held, at it's core, a fundemental insanity for something like this to ever happen.

It was Scar. And he was laughing.

He was standing there, shaking on the spot with the force of his laughter, face screwed up tight and a hand clamped over his mouth and another on his surely aching sides as he tried to control himself. Xiao-Mei the miniature panda popped up from a pocket, staring up at her owner in shock before starting to bark in imitation. (Given Scar's rough voice, it was uncannily accurate.) He shook and trembled, laughter a bit muffled, and then he wiped the tear away, his laughter booming louder and sounding like he hadn't laughed one bit since puberty set it. (Or possibly since birth. He seemed like the sort of man whose reaction to having his parents make goofy sounds at him as a baby was to look indignant.)

There would have been a long silence but for him filling it up with his hoarse laughter.

"Is..." Kim said, shocked and horrified. "Is Scar LAUGHING?"

"What did we DO to him!" The tentacle girl wailed.

"...Cool," Zim said. "Make him do a little dance! Then we can make a Internet video! And a meme. I always wanted one of those."

Outside, the others were peering in. "The hell's going on in there?" Calvin wondered, and said to ABel, "Something's wrong with your creepy partner."

"He looks sick," Aang said, worried. "Wait...no, I think he's...no way."

"Is he...laughing?" Ron said, astonished.

"No way," Rufus said from Ron's pocket. This was much the same opinion of anyone who was even slightly familiar with him.

"I don't get the big deal," Sokka said. "So the guy's laughing. He is laughing, isn't he?"

"He is laughing," Toph said; she was able to feel where he was moving due to the weak vibrations in the wood and from all the metal in the soundroom and the vibrations from the glass. "It's...weird. It's really really weird."

"Dude, what the hell!" Abel said furiously. "I spend over a year and a half partnered with him, and I barely get so much as an occasional smile, but he's stuck in a room with those two for a few minutes and he starts cracking up? WHERE IS THE JUSTICE!"

Courtney's attempts to kill Zim faltered at this astonishing sight. "Holy shit," She said. She clapped her hands to her mouth, horrified at swearing. She made it up to herself when she grabbed a camera and started taking pictures. She was thinking of putting it up in a 'lighter side' segment: perhaps title it "Terrifying Crossguard paladin actually capable of human emotion after all!'

In a similar way, Kimblee was also upset. "...He's laughing. Scar's LAUGHING. SCAR's laughing. SCAR. IS. LAUGHING. WHAT INSANITY HAVE I WROUGHT?" His voice trailed off. "I'm...ah...I'm...going to hang up now. And...kill you all or something. I guess. I don't know, my brain hurts right now. From both the stupid ranting and my world-view being destroyed. I don't know, I come to call to give you a serial killer call to intimidate and infuriate you like all the great criminal genuises do, and I get...THIS." He sighed. "I'm going now."

"But you didn't say what your plan was," Zim complained.

"...Oh, that. I was just going to intimidate you a bit. Mock you. The usual pre-fight banter. Brag about my accomplishments, the dead of Foster's that you could do nothing to save and will soon be brought against you. Say something about my fight with Greed and Commander-Admiral Roy Mustang and Shego and Deadpool and Field-Admiral Gibbs to frighten you and make you think they were dead."

"What are you doing, fighting my archenemy?" Kim complained. "Or evil counterpart. Oh, and my dad."

"Who'd you fight now?" Zim said. There was again from Kimblee's side the lovely sound of head-to-wall-banging.

"...Oh, never mind," Kimblee said tiredly. "I'm...I'm going to hang up now before my brain hurts anymore. Oh. A considerable number of Heartless will be there to eat you all, and if you're not dead yet, I'll be there shortly to kill you all. Espicially you, Zim. That is, Zim's the one that wouldn't shut up, yes?"

"Yep," Zim confirmed.

"Ah, excellent then. And...uh, I suppose I'll kill you too, Scar."

Scar had finally stopped laughing. "What?" He said. "Have you lost your thirst for a perfect kill record?"

"Of course not! But I now realize that this Zim character is FAR more irritating to me than your continued existence. Farewell." The phone hung up.

"Well," Kim said after a moment, the tentacle girl calmed a bit. "That...that could gone better."

"Perhaps," Scar said. "But I doubt it would have been as thrilling." He laid his right hand on the door and alchemically destroyed it, breaking it apart in a flash of blue light. (Zim made a mental note to figure out if Irkens could learn alchemy, that kind of power looked totally awesome.)

Once they were out of the soundroom (and Scar fixed the door with alchemy), Courtney came rushing right at them. Zim flinched in horror, but she was paying no attention to him. "What was that!" She demanded. "You had a long conversation with someone and we couldn't hear it! What was so important the three of you needed to hear it and not me!"

"And WHY WERE YOU LAUGHING!?" Abel asked Scar. "In all the time we've known each other, you've barely smiled! But here you are! LAUGHING! What in the name of St. Boniface HAPPENED IN THERE!"

"Kimblee called us to heckle and jeckle us stuff, but the crows of his evil were thwarted!" Zim said proudly. "THWARTED! Because he made a bad joke about someone he killed. So I picked it out and made him crazy."

"What," Hobbes said flatly.

"...Let me get this straight," Calvin said, after Kim explained the whole thing to everyone. "The crazy serial killer that's been going around ABUSING alchemy called you guys specifically. He makes a stupid joke in the middle of his attempts to mess with Scar, but then Zim starts going off on a tangent until Kimblee freaks out from it and hangs up because he can't handle it anymore."

"Yes," Kim said.

"You drove the serial killer crazier because you wouldn't stop going on about a tangent and dealt him a psychological bow," Calvin said to Zim.

"Yep!" Zim said.

"...I'm not sure if that's the most awesome or the stupidest thing I've ever heard," Calvin said.

"Hooray!" Zim yelled. "I'm INCONCLUSIVE!"

"AND WHY WERE YOU LAUGHING!" Abel cried at Scar.

Scar frowned. "What? Am I not permitted to express amusement?"

"I'VE NEVER SEEN YOU LAUGH OR GIGGLE OR SO MUCH AS SNICKER!" Abel screamed.

"...If you ever gave me reason to laugh, then I would do so," Scar said flatly. "And hearing Kimblee, the harbringer of my family's destruction, one of the destroyers of my country and people, the man who has wrought so much devastation and chaos and death and lived to laugh about it, the man who dreams of slaughtering worlds...hearing him brought down and flustered to tears by a single man going on about the structure of his joke and patiently explaining why it was tasteless and unfunny was simply too much." Abel gaped in disbelief, and grumbled to himself about karma being a cheating bastard.

"Can we focus on something else besides the crazy green alien making the serial killer coming to kill us?" Courtney said. "Like that Heartless horde he mentioned?"

"...Okay, I'll admit that is a little bit concerning," Calvin said, shrugging. "But nothing we can't take care of. Right, boss guy?" Zim didn't answer. "Hey, ZIM!"

"Your hair is silly!" Zim said to Minimoose.

Minimoose squeaked. ("But I don't have any hair!")

"Oh, so you're saying it's my fault?" Zim shook his head. "I thought I programmed you better than that!...Hrm, but perhaps all is not lost. Yes, we shall move on from this! Okay, yeah, we'll do that. I'm glad we had this talk, Minimoose. I'm so proud of you!" Minimoose squeaked, sounding thoroughly confused.

"...Never mind," Calvin said while everyone else stared in confusion or annoyance.

The tentacle girl whimpered. "...We're all going to die, aren't we?" She asked morosely. "There's a million reasons this will never work..."

Hobbes, who had previously seemed somewhat resigned to the upcoming battle, tilted his head at the tentacle girl with a determined look. Appearing to come to a decision, he managed to cross the space between the two of them in a sidle. "Really?" He said smoothly, putting an arm across her shoulder, his furry arm sinking into her squishy flesh. He smiled sweetly, both ears widened in the gesture of a cat completely vulnerable and at ease. "'Cause I can count at least one reason it will work." He pointed at himself with a confident grin.

"Huh?" She said, her face flashing with many different colors, rather like a startled octopus; she looked like she was blushing. She stammered a bit, clearly unused to social encounters of this sort; the concept of people using charm on her was a new one, and Hobbes had quite a lot to spare. The various suckers on her body expanded, her many tentacles quivering nervously.

"Or we'll all die horribly," Zuko said off-handedly.

She squeaked, at last on the verge of a stress-induced faint and she trembled, her large pear-shaped body standing uneasily and the large mass of thick tentacles comprising her lower body starting to fall in on itself. Hobbes gracefully pulled an arm around her back to support her and kept her standing.

"Please, never mind him," He said; she looked at him, drawn by his calmness, and the confidence he had now. "You can believe me when I say that I know problems like the one we have. The proof is written all over me. See these markings on me?" He gestured to himself, helping her to stand up. "These markings are...well, in my tribe, a warrior has markings such as these inscribed into his very spirit, so that when terrible monsters and evil spirits behold him, they see every single great deed that warrior has ever done!" As if to make his point clear, he indicated how they covered his entire body. (And failed to mention that these markings were only fur-deep for him; he didn't have the means or the knowledge of being accepted by his people's spirits or the proper creed-marked, as the process was called.) He pointed at a swooping series of conjoined curves on his neck. "This is from when I, armed with only a battle-chainsaw on a chain, took down a solar serpent that was once a part of the legendary Tyranid Hive Fleet Leviathan! I decapitated it and brought the head as a present to my mom." He pointed at a spiral-shape on his forearm. "This was from when I destroyed a band of undying automations fueled by the sins of the most depraved city in it's planet's history by simple application of the fact that if it exists, you can break it until it can longer move!"

He went on. With each brief account and earnest reassurance, the tentacle-girl's mood shifted, from fear and uncertainty to a more guarded optimism, as well as a certain type of interest in Hobbes himself. Eventually, she said, "A-Are you sure we can survive this?"

Hobbes smiled and put a hand over his head, palm straight like a one-handed praying gesture. "I promise on my word as a knight of the Brighthammer Kingdom that I won't let anyone here die. Espicially you." He noticed something, and with an air of great gravitas, he lifted a small tentacle growing from the mass on her head that had fallen over her eyes and slicked it back; it stuck with a slight popping sound. "There you go; I bet that one always sticks out."

She flashed colors again. "Oh...my, um...thank you." She smiled widely, awkwardly. Disconcertingly, her teeth were a serrated mass like a shark's teeth (but not very sharp); Hobbes, having his own standards, found them cute.7

Sokka blinked. "...Am I the only that thinks it's really weird that the tiger-guy is flirting with a tentacle monster?" Calvin shrugged, completely used to this behavior.

"He's only, what, fifteen years old, right?" Courtney said. "Is this legal?"

The tentacle girl giggled. "Oh," She said faintly. "I'm hardly seven hundred years old, that's barely anything, isn't it?"

There were a few puzzled stares. Hobbes snickered. "Aw, you barely look even that, miss!" She giggled again, more heatedly this time.

Zim looked at Calvin. "Hobbes...doesn't have a conventional view on what defines feminine beauty," Calvin explained. "Some of the girls he's dated...well, he raises a lot of serious questions about cross-phylum standards relationships in the annals of taxonomic regulations."

"You mean cross-species, right?" Zim said.

"I said cross-phylum," Calvin said flatly. There was a moment, and then Zuko, Ron, Kim and Toph shuddered. Zim looked politely puzzled, Minimoose indifferent, and others largely oblivious to the sub-text.

"Shouldn't we be talking about what to do about the crazy serial killer coming to kill us?" Courtney said desperately, having nearly been sucked into the madness.

"Oh, yeah," Zim said. He looked aside; Hobbes was still flirting with the tentacle girl; she had literally swelled up from the attention, having sprouting a number of new tentacles and at least a foot and a half of height, enough to tower over Hobbes, which seemed to impress him a lot. "...Hey, that is pretty impressive...focus! Okay. Eh, it's not like he's going to be of any tactical help. Okay, I have a brilliant plan! First, does anyone know where we can find a wooden alpaca we can stuff full of potato salad? Wait, where would I find potato salad at this hour...I don't suppose you newsies have a salad bar, do you?"

"Never mind him," Calvin said. "I have a better idea. It involves lasers and guns and rockets and weaponizing. Also, we'll need to borrow the building."

"As something to hold him off in?" Zero-Nine-Forty said.

"Yes," Calvin said. "From a certain point of view. In a COMPLETELY UNRELATED note: where is your guy's basement or celler, if any, and do you have any boilers or personal power sources that I absolutely will not weaponize?"

"Check the elevator and head to the sub-basement!" A techie said.

"Hey!" Courtney said.

"I wanna see what the little guy does!"

"Hmn, letting crazy mad scientist do stuff is good," Sokka mused. "But it would help if we had an army. Right, security team we no doubt beat into loyalty throught the power of friendship through defeat? Right?" The security in question was suddenly gone, though the door hadn't been open a minute ago. "...Oh, you guys suck."

"But they left their weapons!" Calvin said, pointing at the abandoned gatling lasers, missle launchers, plasma rifles and pistols, powerfists and all manner of awesome weaponry. "Now that is some flash dakka."

"That's not even a word! Never mind...any suggestions, people? Abel? Ron-guy?"

"Awww!" Abel, Rufus and Ron said, watching Hobbes and the tentacle-girl be all cutesy and stuff. (And mildly disturbing.) "Young love!" Abel said. "Or at least young flirtation." He took pictures to put in his scrapbook of adorable-ness, with a camera he'd been carrying around just in case.

"Ooh!" Aang said, clinging to Katara and pulling her over. "Take a couple's picture!"

"Aang," Katara said. "What-"

"Smile!" Abel said. She did, because everyone obeys an idiot with a camera. They posed cutely, and then Abel took the picture.

"...Right," Sokka said. "Never mind him or them. Does anyone competent have ideas?"

"Well, I don't know about you guys..." Toph said, sensing something outside. "But take a look outside, would ya, I think there's something interesting there."

"What?" Sokka looked outside via a nearby window. He stared. "Uh...Katara? Sam? Kim? Hobbes? Come here a minute."

The four in question (along with a giggling cute monster girl) came over. They looked outside. "...Huh," Hobbes said.

Down on the ground, a band of strange teens in scrappy but effective armor waved up at them. "Good greetings, mighty warriors of the Southern Water Tribe, the Brighthammer Kingdom, Earth and our humble town itself!" Yelled Tesla Man. "We saw your noble challenge to the fiend Kimblee on TV, and we, the Mall Crawlers, wish to add our strength to yours to combat this foul menace!"

"...Okay!" Sokka yelled. "But how did you get here so fast! And fix your armor!"

"Our suits can fly! And I know basic reconstruction alchemy!"

Whiplash saluted them. "We bring terrible news! We have seen that there are many scores ofHeartless heading directly here, rampaging through everything in their path. There are many skillful fighters in town, but mobilizing them will take time, and I do not think you will have many reinforcements to rely on! We ask that you accept our aid!"

"...Okay!" Sokka pulled back. "Guys, good news, bad news time. The good news, we have reinforcements. The bad news is, they're idiots. But that's okay, they're tough idiots. Not too many of them, but they should be able to at least hold the line against whatever hits us."

"And there's plenty of weapons to arm themselves with," Zim noted. "Perfect!" He paused. "'Mall Crawlers'?"

"Long story. Actually, not so much long as random and really weird, but never mind that, this has dragged on long enough."

"Okay!" Zim said, turning to everyone. "Let us bring it together, people and humans and animals and humans and me and other humans and miscellaneous life forms!"

"You said humans twice," Morte said. Minimoose squeaked in agreement.

"That's because there's a LOT of humans here. Now, I undoubtedly drove Kimblee into a brief fugue of madness and depression and bi-polar disorder and manic-depressiveness with an emphasis on petting kitties to feel better and the ice-creaming binging of DOOM, giving us some time to prepare for the assault. Our usual shennanigans and stupidness have wasted most of that, probably, but we still have some time left to get ready and do...stuff. Big stuff. With explosions. Because otherwise it's not worth doing! Explosions are awesome."

Calvin raised his hand. "A question. Do you ever shut up and do anything productive, or what?"

"Silence! So. TO IT, LET'S GET! First! Sokka and Zuko! You're good with people, Sokka is encouraging and Zuko scares them into obedience, get those new recruits down there up here and armed."

"They're already wearing suits of powered armor," Hobbes said. "With incredibly powerful armaments. Well, at least their leader has powerful stuff."

Zim stared blankly. "What's your point? Get them even more armed! Aang, Toph! You guys can analyze our surrondings and see how it can best be turned against this Kimblee."

"Okay," Aang said.

Toph shrugged. "Not fun like shooting guns, but okay."

Zim turned to Calvin and Hobbes and Morte. "And you guys! Eh, do whatever, you're pretty much useless anyway at this point."

"Hey!" Hobbes said. The tentacle-girl patted him sympathically on the back; she was quite a bit stronger than she knew and accidently pushed him off-balance, and he fell back onto her lower tentacle-mass, not at all displeased when her thick limbs wrapped around him instinctively. She was greatly embarrased when they had to get three other people to help extricate him.

"Eh," Calvin said, too much in a plotting frenzy to care about Zim's opinion. He turned his attention to some boxes of old parts. "And since the newsies aren't being useful...get off your asses and help me get this stuff downstairs or do you want to die horribly?"

Courtney sniffed. "We'll just leave before Kimblee gets here. I'm not about to be your minion!"

Calvin grinned, pulling out some wicked looking instruments. "I didn't say Kimblee would kill you. The world could always use a few more flesh golems and I've been dying to try out some interesting procedures. Or transplanting human brains into automations to be used as war machines! I've seen some stuff around here I could use as operating tables and buzzsaws..." There was a strange flicker in his eyes, a suggestion of something not quite right. "I'm feeling a little...Inspired."

The newsies yelped. "WE'RE GOING, WE'RE GOING!" They grabbed the boxes and ran off, hopefully in the right direction. Courtney looked surprised, and disturbed.

"But you don't know how to make flesh golems!" Hobbes whispered to him.

"Shh!" Calvin said. "They don't know that! Besides, they can help me figure out if my new...something can help us out. It's been acting weird." He held out the device he'd made last night.

"Hey, what's that thing?" Courtney said, taking it away from him while he was distracted and pressing the button.

Calvin stared at her. "No. No. NO. WHAT HAVE YOU DONE! YOU'LL DOOM US ALL-" The device trembled with mechanical activity, and with a surprising lack of fuss, unfolded into a concave mechanical thing with wires hanging out of exposed innards, a pair of handles just big enough for someone's hand to squeeze along with several large triggers on either handle. The front of the device was rounded, with glowing circuit lines centering on a circular lens at the front, and on the back was an upraised control panel; several repurposed alarm clocks with reconfigured LED panels made up most of it, along with a bewildering array of switches, slide, buttons, dials, and in one corner a rounded bulb with a compass needle in the middle, positioned so that it could move in any three-dimensional direction. Zim's eyes watered just looking at that control panel; it was a mess just looking at the complexity of it: there was was a universal port there and a plug-switch here and why did Calvin put a cup holder over there? "...Huh. Or not."

"...What is this thing?" Courtney said.

"I have absolutely no idea," Calvin said, wrenching it out of her hands. "But since it doesn't appear to be killing anyone or horribly mutating or some of the other problems with faulty wonders of super-science, I'll call it a success. And you and your guys get to help me figure out what it is while I juryrig some explosives...er, I mean, do stuff to save us all. Yeah."

"Yeah, you guys do that," Zim said, not really paying attention. If it was mad science, he reasoned, what was the point of not making it to kill things? Not even a single laser or micro-filiament blade to be seen.

"Cool," Calvin said. On a whim, he pulled out the test tube and held it near the machine; it flashed green, the blood in the tube, and a screen that looked a lot like a graph lit up. Calvin grinned. "Well now...isn't that an interesting coincidence..."

...

After his phonecall to Zim, Kimblee had to sit down in the middle of the Council's diner and personal clubhouse, which was pretty much the same as it usually was aside for the giant hole Kimblee had blasted into the front and the bloody mess that had previously been the orc that served there. (All the other personal had fled, not really being equipped to deal with a psychotic bomber.)

Kimblee's head hurt. Both the general headache he got whenever he traveled through the darkness, and from...Zim. Kimblee decided he would hate Zim forever, which was a novel thought; he couldn't recall ever actually hating anything...well, ever.

"I really don't understand how you 'heroes' can stand madmen like that," He said to Jarod, who was still in the robot, the Heartless having dragged him into the darkness with Kimblee. "I really don't."

Jarod didn't respond. He was still crouched on the floor of the robot, muttering to himself about 'Curst is a city of traitors, should have known that the deva was there for a REASON' and 'I've killed so many people just by EXISTING, I can't let this continue anymore' and other such absurdities. "Ah," Kimblee said. "Never mind, you're insane right now."

Being dragged through the darkness, without even the protection this town cast over people when it dragged them from their dying worlds, had unpleasant effects on the unprepared. There were things in the darkness. Foul forms that could not yet tear through to this part of existence, but still craved the light. And there was a part of the spirit that resonated with that fell place, that knew it belonged...

Kimblee had once seen a amusing series of experiments regarding this problem, and knew of the problems of traveling through the darkness firsthand. It was still an on-going study, he believed.

"Well," He said, hopping into the robot's chair. "Since you are in no position to stop me, I'll be taking the helm. Is that the right term?" It took him a few moments to figure out how to pilot the robot, but the whispers of the dark, cold and quiet and so very helpful, told him how to do it: he grabbed the handles and let the knowing of his will become the robot's own.

Very shortly, the robot walked out of the hole Kimblee had made. Kimblee realized he needed a plan of action. So many things had happened so fast. That unexpected fight with Mustang and the others...that transmission that had exposed his plan to everyone in the district...and permitting himself to be frustrated by an immature alien. He'd almost forgotten about the plan.

He'd done, Kimblee supposed, enough. The destruction of Foster's would be a large blow to the town, it would rattle their cages, it would destroy their fragile faith in their new lives. He'd captured Jarod (and just to make sure, Kimblee transmuted a metal cocoon around Jarod, so that even if he recovered he wouldn't be escaping or fighting); he'd done everything he'd been asked. But it still didn't seem like quite enough. One more rampage, Kimblee decided, and then he'd call it quits. Set up a diversion and get Deidara's ship out of town. Fortunately, he had the perfect target to end this mission on, given that it had just been presented to him. (Which was pretty convienient.)

And maybe then he could get the awful noise of that alien's babble out of his head once he was dead...

Occupied with these pleasant thoughts of revenge and destruction and such things, Kimblee and his new robot stomped out of the diner's little area. The neighborhood was full of panicking people running around; not fleeing, precisely, but trying to figure out just what was going on. On the other hand...they looked rather soft, Kimblee thought. Not quite as hard as some of the other's in town looked. Yes, that seemed accurate; no doubt these people had slacked off on their preparations and readiness for battle. The vaunted Council, consisting of some of the most dangerous and certainly among the most powerful people of their respective factions, spent their time in their neighborhood. They hardly needed to fear incidents or troublemakers when a Councilmember could just wander out side, vaporize the problem and get back to watching TV or whatever. Their local hangout even made use of the remains of an incredibly deadly giant robot to show off how powerful they were, and as a status figure to their skill, it wasn't like-

Kimblee paused his train of thought. He looked at it again, at the remains of the renowned Juggernaut Armor. A interesting thought occured to him as he admired it's harsh fierce lines, studied the shameful way it had just been gutted. A weapon of war as finely crafted as this deserved better than such ignomity.

The darkness offered much power. And when you knew how to create the proper mental channels, it was amazing what happened when you let the darkness fill them up...

Kimblee's shadow expanded again, into a vast pool of questing hands all clambering and dripping over each other. As they dragged themselves off the ground and people started screaming, Kimblee smiled, allowing the shadows still around him to seep into the robot formerly belonging to Greed, joining with it's machinery and circuitry and computers and other such techno-babble, the lines of the machine creaking out of synch with each other, liquid darkness roiling around it like a fearsome aura.

It jerked and twitched, and abruptly transformed as it's sub-dimensional compacting sequence was activated; it rose up on a tide of complex machinery fashioned in Greed's likeness, a titan of machine-life seemingly emerging from thin air; Kimblee soon found himself sitting inside a pilot's chamber, much as Shego and Deadpool had done earlier that day. The machine-titan was once more a mighty metal colossus but warped, the essential nature of the darkness that had completely taken over it significantly enlargening it and turning it into something monstrous and brutal. (Surprisingly hard, as it's appearance was clearly influenced on Greed's appearance when his 'Ultimate Shield' was fully formed.)

Kimblee blinked in the sudden darkness. The lights inside turned on, and he saw clearly, and his attention was immediately focused on the wrap-around screen showing everything in front of him, including the giant robot remnants currently swarming with dark energies.

Kimblee'd heard of what this...Juggernaut Armor had done in the hands of Captain Razorbeard. It had been a walking siege engine, a nearly-unstoppable force of deadly techonology wielded by machine-men with no need for restraint, and it was pitable to be reduced to this mockery of a shell now.

He'd also heard that objects had memories, of their own. Some more mystical forms of transmutation alchemy were based on that; they reconstructed objects based on what they used to be, on the knowing of their perfect forms. Surely a mighty weapon as this, Kimblee mused as the dark energies on his own new robot crackled, would remember it's titanic might. And if not...the darkness filled all voids.

A massive burst of utter blackness, like the deepest reaches of space untouched by any starlight or solar activity, erupted around Kimblee, pulling away all heat in it's midst. From it's core emerged long tendril-like forms spinning fiercely like drills, thick and huge and buzzing, and they stabbed right into the Juggernaut Armor's remains, going right to where it's core had once been. The energies of them, of darkness itself, of the Void hungering for all light, of the Cold Ones waiting to feed, flooded into the robot's defunct power conduits, and for a moment, it's eye-lenses glowed once more.

Those tendrils of darkness, their surfaces webbing across it's surface in thick veins and already twisting the machine-titan, wrenched it off the ground and slamming it right into Kimblee's mech; there was a tremendous flash of darkness off-set by a deeper burst of red alchemical light, an odd crunching noise, a stranger sound of transmutation, and then there was stillness.

The darkness faded, and the sunlight gleamed briefly on the metal exoskeleton of a new machine-titan before being swallowed by the darkness radiating from it like unnatural fire. Those people still gaped at the mechanical horror before them, a monstrous fusion of two vastly powerful machines, one that had haunted their nightmares and the other a vauge rumor.

Kimblee, no longer sitting in a pilot's seat but directly connecting into a pulsing mass of shadow-mass flowing around him like something almost liquid and solid at once, laughed. He saw clearly, though he was buried deep within the machine. He saw what it saw. Knew what it knew. Their power was shared, and joined together. He didn't think it was supposed to have a mind of it's own, but there was something there; not quite sentience or even an animal's mind, but there was a seeking instinct. The primal urges to hunt and destroy, kill and feed.

He squeezed his fist. Without him having to concentrate or focus, the great machine-titan did the same. He raised a foot, the darkness providing enough tension and tightness to let him know of the robot's conditions without restraining him, and the robot also raised it's foot and smashed it into the ground with a mighty quake. With but a thought, he could feel it's many weapons, or rather the idea of them, their potential, swimming just under the surface and ready to be used.

The Philosopher's Stone pulsed over his chest, the darkness securing it for him. Kimblee could feel Jarod stirring while buried deep in the darkness, it's cold chill rushing into the many wounds and gaps in his soul, the missing pieces life had torn away and left despair room to move in...Kimblee could feel it, tied to the darkness as he was. The utter torment within Jarod, like a scar that had healed over but so badly that it was so easy to open it up. The impossible guilt eating him inside. Guilt for so many things...some the man didn't even remember anymore.

The darkness and Kimblee's will alone were sufficient to power the machine-titan, but the pain of Jarod's innermost spirit, raw and bleeding (the man was so eager to give of himself to a cosmos that didn't even notice), was as marvelous fuel. The writhing shadows sought him, chained him down and lapped at his light while leaving him physically unharmed, funneling his pain into the heart of the machine-titan itself; new mechanisms spontaneously appeared, sliding through the dark aura around it, and the entire machine grew a little bit, the whole of it absorbing something of Jarod's own darkness and changing accordingly.

Kimblee relaxed his mind and the mass of shadows binding him to it detached, gently belaying him to the ground, the Philosopher's Stone conveyed to his hand. He dropped with a slight stagger - he'd taken a bit of a beating today - and turned around, surveying his handiwork.

The machine-titan was enormous, though curiously it was actually a bit smaller than either Greed's fighting mech or the Juggernaut Armor; whatever extra mass combining both machines had created seemed to had been funneled into making it broader rather than taller, as well as it's armor. It was even more brutal looking than the Juggernaut Armor, a killing machine wider than it was tall, nothing about it linear or smooth when jagged bulk could do. It's head, set at such an extreme angle that the machine looked like a hunchback, resembled a low-swept spiked helmet with a faceplate shaped like monstrous fangs, the suggestion of a vicious set of actual fangs behind it. (Kimblee questioned the logic of this, but then, it had been the Heartless that had channeled themselves into this machine or at least something akin to them, and they had a certain design ethic.)

It's shoulders, and indeed, none of it's limbs were connected to the body but hung slightly off, floating at the appropiate spots like the joints were invisible. Darkness poured out of the machine, expanding into a thick aura that left a bitter frost in the air, and even seemed to be forming much of it's internal structure; it had enormous spiked pauldrons, like articulated domes edged with blades, and it's arms overflowed with the vapor-like shadows steaming out from the insides where they formed the shapes of internal machinery. It's arms were enormous, almost simian in their bulk, but they were jointless and rather like segmented tentacles, ending in massive clawed gauntlets that reached the ground.

The darkness comprising it seemed thickest near it's lower half, where it had to devote so much of itself to make up for the Juggernaut Armor's missing half; it's upper half was almost all machine, with vents of dark smoke streaming out. There were weapon systems everywhere; two massive main fire cannons between the shoulders, rapid-fire guided missle launchers on the back, six plasma blasters on the gauntlets and more, and the heavily plated chest contained the reconstituted wave motion gun from the original Juggernaut Armor where it would have been hooked to the original power core but was now powered exclusively by Kimblee's alchemy. It had no cockpit, no controls at all; it's stomach area was a solid mass of darkness, Jarod buried somewhere there in, and it was here that Kimblee would join with the machine and command it's might; the metal above was formed in such a way that the chest place looked like a demon's skull and upper jaws, and the lower body resembling an open maw to give the impression that Kimblee would be resting in the mouth of a monster.

It's legs were double-jointed and backbent, like a saurian reptile's, with large feet still resembling boots except for the clawed toes; the 'boot' parts were actually simplistic flight-capable intake jets and stabilizers, and there were similar but larger ones on the machine's back. The legs were abnormally thick, possibly to support the machine's weight (in spite of not being connected to it, but that's the power of darkness for you); it was probably that most of Greed's robot had been concentrated here, judging from the thick armor characterisitic of Greed's attempt to create a robot as tough as his own Ultimate Shield by using armor made from an alloy called secondary adamantium. (Needless to say, the characteristics of that armor had been applied to this machine-titan, and strengthened.)

In other words, it was not the giant robot you wanted to show off to your friends. It was the giant robot you showed off to your enemies shortly before you slaughtered them all, pulled their souls into the pain-matrix you used to power it and sucked up their vitality until they were naught but tormented scraps of quintessence. (This wasn't that sort of robot, thankfully, but it sure looked like it.)

Kimblee grinned, and the few remaining people (there are always a few idiots who just will not take the hint and go) stared in horror. Except for the ones that thought it looked cool. "...I like it," Kimblee said. "Oh, I like it a lot! But...it would be unfair to march into battle without a title, a name to be bequeathed unto you! If a mind you truly posesses, then listen! I have you a name."

The machine's eyes seemed to glow.

"I have forged you from a dread weapon of destruction, and the greatest weapon of the sin of greed incarnate! You have been touched by darkness before your creation, and so you have become darkness, solid and incarnate! The light flees from you. The sun cannot pierce your shell. You are...yes, you are a shelter, a guiding point to those Heartless that dwell in the darkness and still fear the light that opposes them!"

Darkness blazed from it's eyes; it was not a natural thing, not possible, but the machine-titan was an abomination in itself.

"Born of darkness, protecting darkness, embodying darkness...you are as a titan. Cast down from your rightful place, broken and humiliated! I have broken your chains, I have restored you to even greater glory! Rise once more, great titan, and destroy. Destroy everything I give unto you, demolish this town that is a triumph of the light! Crush everything you see before, and give their sparks of light to your brethern so that they might know a fraction of peace and silence their hunger, if only for a moment!"

The machine-titan rumbled, it's reformed sound synthesizers coming to life.

"I name you. I name you...Umbra Eternus. The Eternal Night."

The machine-titan opened it's jaws, as if to roar...and paused. It tilted it's head, as if to say 'is that the best you can do?'. It appeared to reconsider for a moment, shrugged, and roared half-heartedly.

Kimblee grimaced. "No one appreciates my pseudo-latin names." He waved his hand dismissively. "Oh well. You will have your fill of destruction soon enough." The newly named Umbra Eternus (not looking altogether happy with it's name) bowed it's head to Kimblee. It stayed there for a moment, it's shadow-mass flaring up until a massive burst of darkness consumed it; when it faded, the machine-titan had disappeared.

Kimblee still felt it's presence, felt it's proto-mind waiting for him, awaiting the call. Kimblee raised an eyebrow...and paused, noticing that the people around him hadn't fled yet. He shrugged and smiled, clapping his hands.

"All right then," He said, his shadow much much bigger than it ought to; it was the shadow of a titan. Or perhaps, a giant robot. "I begin my work anew."

Around him, the darkness surged, and then a brilliant (twisted) red flash of light, and then the screaming started.

...

Elsewhere...

"I don't know about you," The lion-man said to his companions. "But I REALLY hate that Kimblee guy."

They nodded in assent. "Hey, I had to work with him," The hooded one complained.

There was a pause. "Ouch," the lion-man said.

"...Yeah. Uh, giving Calvin the idea of building that...that whatever it is through the medium of his dreams was a nice move," The hooded one added, as if in a hurry to make them forget about what he had just said.

"Yes," said the machine-man. "I know. We can only hope he actually uses it..."

...

A/N: And you thought that giant robot from the Council's clubhouse was just a bit of scenery and backstory, didn't you? Next chapter, this arc concludes! And awesomeness will happen.

One problem I realized with bringing Roy Mustang into this fight was that when he's directly IN a fight, unless he's capacitated or fighting a regenerator, the fight's basically over as soon as he attacks. Seriously; he snaps his fingers, boom, enemy is dust. So I had to pull some stuff to ensure that his Game Breaker Power didn't dominate the fight. Kimblee was able to even that a bit, though.

Kimblee's psychology interests me a lot; he's been said to be a Deconstruction of the actual psychology of real-life sociopaths (as opposed to villanious characters that are just CALLED sociopaths); he's genuinely chilling in the manga, precisely because of this. (In the first anime, he's a fairly standard mad bomber, though still scary because of just how completely psychotic he is.) I had some...interesting moments seeing what makes Kimblee go tick-tick-tick. (Bit of a stealth pun there.)

It was fun writing Kimblee being affable with his enemies during his brief interlude during the news report; he's very Affably Evil. It's part of what makes his manga and Brotherhood characterization so terrifying, actually, because he honestly doesn't seem to understand the difference between shaking your hand and blowing you to smithereens (though he's perfectly aware that other people find this off-putting) and he's likely to do both at the same time if he likes you.

That bit with the darkness and Roy's team after Kimblee...did whatever he did? I figured that direct contact with pure Darkness by non-Evil people has got to have some traumatic effects on people. Some of these guys have got some SERIOUS issues to work through. (Deadpool's from Marvel Comics and Roy basically commited genocide in the course of following orders and incurred some nasty Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder from it, as well as a huge helping of guilt.)

Zim had a surpisingly small bearing in this chapter, given that he's the main character of the story. On the other hand, he got some pretty awesome lines. (It occurs to me that when I'm doing comedic moments, Zim acts like a Heroic Sociopath or Talkative Loon; apparently he drops the Sanity Ball when it's funny enough.) On the other hand, his actions do drive a significant part of the latter part, so it counts, I hope.

Zim's conversation with Kimblee was...a highlight of writing this chapter, I can tell you that much.

Yes, my version of Hobbes will flirt with anyone or anything. And I mean that.

First the Mall Crawlers and then the Juggernaut Armor...a few Chekov's Guns fired in this one, and I didn't even plan them for that! Or DID I? (No. I didn't.)

Creating giant robots and combining them before shunting them off somewhere along with hostages being used as power sources; is there anything the Ruinous Powers of darkness can't do? (Create milk for the Dark Side's cookies, I surmise.)

Hopefully, I'll finish this arc before the year is out. Fingers crossed, everyone!