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.

15. Lotus Resolution Part 1

HOLY CRAP, this took forever.

I'm still not sure why it took so infernally long, and I apologize. On the other hand, it was a great opportunity to do some proper action scenes, which I haven't done in a while.

Even so, the end result was still ridiculously long, and since I couldn't cut it down without diminishing the end result to unsuitable degrees, I had to split the chapter in half, and the second half is only mostly done. (It will be finished soon, thankfully.) You wouldn't believe the number of scenes I already had to cut and redo just to make things more managable.

So, again, sorry for the long wait. Me and Schedule Slippage have to get a troping-divorce before I go mad from the shame of it.

Disclaimer: You know the drill. I don't own anything aside from the things I do own. References abound, and the world may tremble at their illogical-ness.

...

Calvin had been doing mad science since before he had been old enough to be aware of the concept of existence, and he had been working with sub-par equipment, haphazard assistants and horrifying circumstances nearly as long as that.

Thus, the news studio he had chosen to prepare for a last-ditch gambit (should it be neccesary), while not very well-off, was the kind of environment he was used to working with. At least, he had been before he had gotten the benefit of his various high rankings and the research and application grants that came with them, but he could still use what he had here. (Even if he spent a lot of time wishing that they had better stuff for him to use.) Even so, he couldn't help but notice that the basement area he and his 'assistants' were working in was distastefully dusty and sparsely used, and he considered the management here wasteful, since he could think of a whole host of things it could be used for.

Mostly, it seem to be a storage place for the things left behind by previous owners, but to the credit of Courtney and her co-workers, they did an admirable job of maintaining all these things and getting them to operate in tandem to power their building's occasionally expensive power demands. (Like most organized group in Traverse Town, they periodically did some work as crime fighters. With the sheer number of anti-crime units in the town and the amiable nature of the place, it must be wondered how there is still crime of any sort there, and it must be pointed out that these groups are usually reactive in nature, and also that a number of people fake crimes and evil-doings to give these crime-fighters something to do. They are usually given a great deal of leeway amongst the authorities for their public charity.)

In this basement, there were, among other things, an impressively large boiler hooked up to a number of pipes in case it was needed again, sandwiched between the kind of power generators popular among people that didn't trust manufactured Blue Eco, powered by all manner of well-known fuels as like energon crystals (exported from a civilization of giant robots that had sadly been supposedly scattered by a civil war eons ago, and more recently decimated by a space-spanning horde of Heartless), solar-charged batteries that collected power from exterior antannae, all those things wired into a pair of massive power circulators squatting right there at the back of the basement, cables and wires and conduits running from them and into the walls, and from there into the building's power grid. He didn't go digging around to find out (fun though that would have been) and he didn't get a chance to investigate the more in-depth nature of their operations, but he didn't have to because Courtney told him everything he needed to know.

In any event, Calvin figured it was good enough for what he had in mind (a plan that required his impromptu assistants to remain oblivious to his intentions or they would strenously object), and he wasted no time getting in done, as he had no idea how long it would take for Kimblee to get there. Without more than a simple statement of, "MINIONS! Let's get moving already!" he set to work at rewiring the boiler and transmuting part of it into a crude device to sky rocket the pressure to a dangerous but controlled level.

"Don't call us minions!" Courtney said, crossing her arms.

"Yes, sir!" A stocky girl named Milda Snadolski said (a blameless girl, in the grand scheme of things), completely ignoring Courtney and running over to the boiler and helping him wire some new components into it. Courtney facepalmed on behalf of the ever-dwindling dignity of her workplace.

"You guys!" Calvin said to the others, making them jump. "Get those emergency generators fueled up, I want them overloaded pronto! You two, get those power circulators fired up at maximum!"

"Wait, what do you mean 'overloaded'?" A mostly humanlike anthropoid frog man and an impressively large furry creature living on his head protested.

"It's a means to help defeat Kimblee!" Calvin said, with complete honesty only slightly diminished by his refusal to spell out what that entailed.

"Oh, okay," The frog man said, his living hair piece wriggling in agreement. Several other of Calvin's new minions stated their agreement, and they got to work as Calvin directed.

"But why?" Courtney asked suspiciously. "They could explode with that kind of stress!"

Calvin didn't explain that this was actually the whole point here. (Or at least a directed explosion, but any way it was crucial that no one be inside the building at the time.) Instead he just said, "You go and fuel up those conduit things that I can't be bothered to identify more accurately until I have the time to take it apart and improve it to such a degree that it will probably violate local bans on weapons of mass destruction."

"I'll have you know, we have practically no restraints on incredibly powerful world-busting technology!" Courtney said proudly. She frowned in reflection. "On second thought, that's not really a happy sentence...hrm, I should give a letter to the Council over that."

"Okay, good, you think about that and help me with the conduits," Calvin said gamely.

Courtney pouted, clearly thinking about the possible ramificaitons of just leaving him to his own devices without her supervision, and winced at the potential for damage. "Oh...fine!"

Calvin went to work on those conduits, his minions (except for Courtney) obeying him not owing to any force of personality on his part but something of his manic energy leaking into out and influencing them with a portion of the same obsessive drive he had; a measure of curiosity regarding what precisely he was up to was also a factor. The actual work didn't take very long; Calvin was surprisingly good at directing minions, and wasn't particular rude or abrasive about it in spite of his usual behavior. He'd slipped into a different frame of mind then he usually had, and instead of treating them as annoyingly talkative tools, he talked to them with an obnoxiously loud enthusiasm quite foriegn to his normal behavior, edging on to manic cheeriness as they made progress, and soon enough, the machines were modified to his intended purpose, the generators were fueled up and overclocked while vital pipelines had been moved elsewhere, all done in such a way that no one had any idea what was going on, not even the technical people.

As they were nearing completion of their task (which took around ten minutes under Calvin's direction of his new minions), Courtney took it upon herself to break out of this strangely nice creative insanity Calvin had inspired in them and said, "You're a mad scientist."

Calvin, strapping his specialized pyrokinetic glove for his current task, paused and sufficiently edged away from whatever extranormal frame of mind he had been in. It wasn't a question, but he still said, "...Yeah. It runs in my family." He laughed, and it was nearly gleeful. "Other families have weird toes or freckles, my family has a propensity for situationally modifying the law of physics and natural philosophy with mechanism and theory!"

(He wasn't exaggerating. Mad science ran deep on both his respective family lines. Deep, and old; older than the Kingdom's current incarnation, perhaps even older than their most distant ancestors from the time of the Imperium of Man and the ascendency of the Ruinous Powers of Chaos. It wasn't something most of his family liked to keep known, with the horrific atrocities the last ruling caste of mad philosopher-kings that had ruled over their still-wounded realms had commited. Mad scientists had a bad reputation these days, and Calvin's little branch of the family tree, which had cast the family's sparks of mad genius into a roaring blaze, didn't have much to do with the others.)

Courtney knew more than her fair share of extra-dimensional history, having traveled with her own group of misfits before she settled down in Traverse Town; the history of the Comic Kingdom, even though it wasn't in the same universal axis as her current home, was known to her. She was alsoquite perceptive and a great deal smarter then most people thought, and that brief pause before that simple response, heavy with hidden meanings, spoke volumes to her. She wondered whether to push the question and decided not to; he was a tempermental little kid. "I don't suppose you're experienced with this?"

Calvin put a hand on the power conduits at the back of the room. "What do you mean? Fighting, struggling against an unknown quantity of foes or just tinkering?"

"Well, all of them, I suppose."

Calvin didn't think about it much, opting to concentrate on the matter at hand, warmth flickering around his hand and beating in the metal underneath. Give it to the metal, he thought. Memetic theory suggested that all things remembered their history, and so to did this metal remember the heat that had shaped it, years ago; draw on that heat, bring it back and the metal could be changed. "I've been fighting all my life," Calvin said unthinkingly. "And tinkering's a good way to stay alive. You'd be surprised about the weapons-" He heisitated, clearly annoyed that was the first thing he had thought of. "Uh, weapons and good things you can make from scrap and junk."

He found the small space of the basement comforting. Hobbes probably wouldn't; the memory of those long-gone days under the pressure of a hundred streets above had nightmarish associations, not when they had been host to the remnants of a dying magicracy determined to exterminate itself in a final gesture of defiance and kill everything it could. There were nightmares under those dark spaces, and only some of them were people.

On the other hand, Calvin had wrought some truly impressive craftworks in those dark days. He was alive because of them, those works of art born under his diligent handwork. When he was in spaces like this, it reminded him of those times when he'd had no formal training, barely any time to test anything he'd made and the ever-looming threats literally crawling out of the walls...and there had still been the joy of creation, the thrill of success and the satisfaction of learning from his mistakes. That was something to remember, and worth the bad times.

Courtney, not privy to his thoughts but certainly aware of his osscilating mood, gave him a look. Calvin observed that it wasn't confused or annoyed, like he was used to. This was a penetrative look, and he suspected that if he so much as gave her an opening to exploit, she would dig and dig and hit something eventually. She wanted to know; it didn't matter what, his brief remark was like dangling a lure in front of a kitten. She just wanted to claw at it now.

Thankfully, she seemed to be aware that now was not the best time and left it at that, watching what he was doing with interest. Calvin resumed his work, guiding his device's heat into the metal, coaxing the distant memory of forge-fires in. There was a spark, a surge of alchemic light, and the metal changed, splintering and reforming at the same time, and became a small sphere with a little valve on the top of it hung between the conduits, connecting to both with a thick cable. Calvin adjusted that valve until he was satisfied with it.

He made a few other adjustments. Courtney watched him do it, helping him when he asked her to, but otherwise simply watching, and waiting, and observing.

He reminded her a little bit of people she had used to know; it softened whatever reaction she might otherwise'd had to him.

Eventually, Calvin finished what he was doing and called out, "Somebody get me the stuff I brought!" The stocky girl from before wheeled a trolley over, loaded with many things, and at the top of the trolly was a radio and some remotes and other things he could fashion into something useful; he turned as she brought it over, and Calvin's eyes briefly went gloriously blank with pure possibility; the thousand-faceted gears of his mind spun with suggestions, and out of the churning chaos came a glowing spark of inspired science, begging for his hands to give it life-

He closed his eyes and let the divine madness wash over him and burn out without incident. He took a deep breath. Focus. Stay focused. Calm, serene, moored by the Obligation to keep these people alive...

The power of Science could do it, he thought with a hint of a genuine optimism that no many people knew he had. Scientific know-how could save everyone. With the right Science-

Well. With the right Science, anything was possible. Anything good. Anything that deserved to be real.

"Okay," He said, cracking his knuckles like the hardened engineer that he was. "Let's get this finished! For Science!"

"Don't crack your knuckles like that, you'll get arthritis when you're old," Courtney scolded.

He rolled his eyes. "Bah, if it comes to that I'll have my hands sawed off and replaced with pnuematic gauntlets that shoot lasers and project force fields and have built-in TV remotes."

"That's quitter's talk!" Courtney said, not batting an eye.

The hastily assembled pile of assorted tech was brought to him and Calvin willfully rose to the final stages of his idea in a mad frenzy that astonished (and in a few cases scared) his audience, and soon assembled a few crude but servicable device; an old-fashioned transmission radio with a few retro-styled personal phones wired into it, the top of the radio taken away and a motherboard inserted into it, covered with a plastic sheet and plugged into a awkward-looking keypad that looked suitable for entering coordinates. It looked unwieldly and unfashionable, but he pronounced his satisfactory, negelcting to mention what it was for.

Courtney gave it a dubious look. "...You're going to explode the building, aren't you?"

"Close," Calvin said with a wicked grin. Courtney considered pressing the matter, but conscience prevailed over her territorial impulses; if it defeated Kimblee (and got her a front-row seat to his defeat and an exclusive), she couldn't see an honest reason to say no.

The moment fell away when the stocky girl came up, holding the strange device Calvin had built in his sleep earlier. "Um, sir?" Milda Snadolski said nervously. "Your, uh, your mad science-y thing? It's going all spinny and lefty-blinky and stuff!"

"Those aren't even words!" Calvin complained. "Lemme see." He took it from her and saw that one of the radar bits (which was difficult to comprehend indeed) was indicating a large source of strange energy approaching. Interestingly, a gauge was blinking incrementally, like a fuel meter that was slowly filling up, if extremely slowly. So slowly that it couldn't be said to really be filled up at all.

"Hrm," Calvin said. "That's...now, that's interesting..."

"What does it mean?" Courtney asked, a bit leery of the tracking device.

"I have no idea!" Calvin said cheerfully. "Experimentation and poking here and there to see what works, that's what science is all about. However, I do have an idea."

"Like?"

"Well, this is just a theory right now, but I'm pretty sure it's right. I have no idea what this machine is exactly, but I am certain that it's absorbing energy. Not from all around, or we'd be having black outs and stuff; I don't know what it is absorbing, but whatever it is, it's concentrated from a distance, based on the rate it's building up. Furthurmore, I bottled some blood I found at the site of Kimblee's attack-"

"Wait, you what?"

"It was for science!" He looked hurt. "And for humanity! But mostly science."

"That's a horrible breach of ethics! Don't you have to ask permission or something?"

Calvin waved the concerns away. "Whatever, the donor was either dead, getting dead or evil, asking permission was ill-advised all around. And hey, I'm a mad scientist. Disregard for professional mores comes with the job. What part of that did I not make clear?"

"Um-"

"Exactly! Oh, and by process of elimination, I figured out where the energy is coming from. There was some crazy energy in the blood sample I got, and my little lovely wonder seems to have 'locked on'. Imprinting or something like that, I don't really want to test it further right now. It's picked up on where the main source of it, and by the extension the blood donor is, and I've eliminated the other candidates from the short list. For one thing, it's not anybody from Foster's, given the direction it's indicating. At least," Calvin said ominously. "Nobody who lives at Foster's."

"I don't understand-"

"It's from that Kimblee guy," Calvin explained impatiently. "My machine locked onto him and I can pinpoint his general direction! Wow, you're slow to catch on. You suck."

"Wait, you could track Kimblee?" Courtney said incredulously.

"Apparently."

"...Why didn't you do that before!" She yelled. "You could have saved who-knows how much money in property damage! You could have just gone after him and not wrecked our stuff!" She paused. "...And I wouldn't have the rights to an exclusive, either. I hate ethical condundrums like this."

"Hey, I didn't know it could do that before, I didn't even know what it was!"

"You made a machine and you didn't even know what it does?"

"You say that like it's a bad thing." Calvin glowered and thought of the most worrying thing he could say. "Oh, and according to this, Kimblee's getting really close. Wow, we finished just in time, too."

"...What?" Courtney squeaked, several people echoing her.

"You heard me. We're inching ever closer towards the final fight! Of this morning. I guess. Or maybe your guy's lives. Won't that be fun to see?"

"I guess," Courtney said, not really approving of his cavalier attitude. "Well, if we're done here, we should head up to meet with the other guys!"

"Okay," Calvin said, as did a few of his minions. He frowned. "Hey, when did you start giving the orders-"

"I'm in charge here, I have seniority, I could go on!"

"The Great Maker preserve us from such indignities," Calvin said dryly. Courtney huffed, but let it go. "Ah, here's hoping everyone up there is doing as good as us."

"Oh my god, I BROKE OFF MY HAND!" A technician who came from the Free League screamed, clutching a curiously bloodless stump; Calvin whirled around in horror. "Oh, wait, wait, never mind. False alarm. It's my prosthetic hand, I forgot to tighten it this morning. Could someone help me put it back on?"

"...Well, they can't suck at it too much," Calvin said. "Or get more distracted than that."

On the upper levels...

"You know what would make the world a happier place?" Zim asked Morte, proving Calvin wrong in a single question. "More show tunes."

"Show tunes?" Morte said.

"Yeah, the really catchy types of songs they play on urban theater. Big choreographed numbers! Exceptionally well-executed synchronized choirs! And lots of flashing lights! And also nice voice overs when they go viral on the Internet."

"I don't..." Morte said. "What?"

"Aha, you seek explaination! To facilitate this, I offer you the six hundred reasons show tunes are awesome, listed in order from most boring to least comprehensible! I wrote them up last Tuesday, for I was very bored. SO VERY BORED INDEED."

"I feel I have made an error in judgement by responding," Morte said quietly to Zuko, who was sitting nearby and examining a gatling laser, his Fire Nation heritage drawing him to advanced weaponry that would utterly decimate the opposition. (And possibly explode.)

"Never give him an opening," Zuko said. "He will exploit it, he will not quite trying to take it as far as he can, and you will regret it forever." He put the gatling laser down, regretting that he had no idea how to operate it.

"Hey, what are you talking about?" Zim asked him, already bored with the show tunes thing.

"That it's a stupid idea to give you an opening to go off on some tangent, whether conversational or something else."

"Good advice! Why, I'm already thinking about setting my jacket on fire again to give myself an appropiately menacing air! And look cool. Everything looks cooler on fire. Ironically enough."

"And you could use that fire as a source and not have to make your own fire," Morte added.

"Ooh, I hadn't thought of that!"

"Don't encourage him!" Zuko snarled.

Morte shrugged, feeling that he was doing a reasonably good job of distracting himself from his creeping dread over the whole 'incoming horde of creeping abominations to be followed by superpowered sociopath' thing. Having a vested interest in not thinking about it until he really had to, he looked around the studio to see if anyone felt the same as him, and was a bit disgruntled that no one else really seemed to share his quiet desperation; the workers at the news studio were the closest, but that didn't mean much; they were quietly resigned, like they dealt with smaller-scale threats like this all the time. Hobbes, currently talking potential strategies with Kim and Sokka, had the jittery movements and snap-shot reflexive jumps of someone feeling stressed, but he as terribly frightened as Morte, merely anxious. Zuko seemed at a strange sort of peace, completely calm if you didn't notice the combative zeal manifesting as a personal heat that made everyone keep their distance from him and sizzle the air against his skin. Zim, of course, was the complete opposite of 'quiet', emitting little sparks with every other movement and completely oblivious to it, half-second fires sparking in his footsteps and ignited by his utter excitement. Perhaps more strangely, luminous light was generated from him without him even noticing, something quite distinct from his fire-themed abilities to date.

It reminded Morte of old times and old friends; it was both a pleasant feeling, and hurt him so deeply that if he still had organs he would have felt like they were twisting around each other. The fact that out of all these completely random people and townsfolk, he was the only one who was completely useless; even the friends of Zim's friend Danny Fenton seemed willing to get some weapons and fight as support.

All Morte could do here was bite things and insult them, usually at the same time. That wasn't a useful talent in the situation at all. Some days, he got tired of being little more than a guide, and he was begining to think that even the new Boss' book, the Hitchhiker's Guide, could do that just as well. He really had no idea why King Garfield had sought him out and convinced him to join this crew...

Morte voiced his concerns and said, "Isn't anyone the least bit worried?"

"No," Zim said.

"Not really," Zuko said.

"We deal with this kind of thing all the time!" Aang said.

"Meh," Danny said.

"I'm scared stupid!" Sokka said cheerfully. "I think. Probably not even paying attention to it."

"We second that motion!" Sam and Tucker added. "Seriously, what are we even doing here?"

"...Moral support?" Morte suggested.

"That's stupid and you know it is," Sam told him. "...Still, we might as well help someone out, what with our abysmal failure as heroes since last night."

"Totally. So...do we have a concrete plan yet?"

"Indeed!" Zim said, looking quite pleased. "We wait for the Heartless to show up and we blow them up. Then we wait for Kimblee to get here and then we hit him until he gives up! It's foolproof."

"Unless he kills us all from a distance," Hobbes remarked sourly. Aang winced; Appa had gone to the rooftop because he didn't like enclosed spaces, and the thought of Appa getting caught in a blast like that hurt.

"Huh?" Cyborg said. "What are you basing that on?"

"I was raised by mad scientists and my adopted brother-slash-best friend is a mad scientist that also likes transmutation alchemy. I've had plenty of experience to see it's combat applications! If this Stone thing amplifies alchemic power as much as Scar told me it does, we're probably going to die within five minutes of this Kimblee guy showing up. Our best hope will probably be that the initial blast kills us all immediately instead of lingering on in painful meaty bits. That is a painful way to die."

"Also, killing from a distance is precisely how Kimblee fights," Scar said from the corner he and Abel had quietly been discussing contingency plans. (They involved lots of stuff blowing up. It is said that the Crossguard has an unhealthy interest in making things explode.) "Provided he doesn't find an alternative means that entertains him more...which is entirely a possibility."

"Yeah," Morte concluded. "This is gonna suck."

Danny face-palmed. "I escaped horrible abominations only to be maybe eaten by a whole horde of them and then blown up by a crazy guy with a explosion fetish. Did I soak up Zuko's bad karma or something?"

"Hey!" Zuko said.

"...Oh, come ON!" Zim snapped. "Would it kill you all to show a bit of optimism! The flood of darkness incarnate didn't kill us or even seriously hurt us, how the hell will a loony with a magic rock made of evil gonna do more than give us a good fight!"

"Technically, that Stone thing is made by souls, not evil," Katara pointed out.

"SEMANTICS!" Zim raved.

At that moment, Calvin opened the door that went to the basement and came out with some harrased looking technicians and also Courtney, the lot of them looking vaugely satisfied but also confused by what they had been doing. "What's all the yelling about?"

"There is a minor bit of skepticism regarding our chances of survival," Abel explained. "And I gotta say, you guys are pretty much screwed. Not me though, 'cause I'm immortal or something. I'll get all blown up but I'll just piece myself back together and be on my way. But yeah, you're totally hosed." Everyone glared at him. "What? I was kidding! I hope."

Calvin glared at the room in general. "Geez, what's with all the negativity? Would it kill you to show a bit of optimism!" Zim gave him a weird look. "...Why are you looking at me like that?"

"Probably 'cause that's exactly what Zim said," Morte said.

"Huh?" Calvin stared at Zim, clearly horrified that they had agreed with each other on...well, anything.

As Zim and Calvin considered the ramifacations of this, Courtney crept over to Hobbes; he seemed like a nice sensible boy. "Um, hey. He had us do a lot of weird stuff to the boilers and power systems. Do you know what he was making this all do? He wouldn't tell us." Hobbes shook his head apologetically. "Aw..."

"It's nothing to worry about," Hobbes assured her, giving Calvin a sidelong look. "He's not going to do something crazy like, I don't know, turn this place into a giant rocket and hit Kimblee with it or something." Even as he said this, he felt bad for lying to her; that sounded exactly like something Calvin would do.

A few minutes passed as they made further arrangements, had Hobbes go and talk to the Mall Crawlers to make sure they were in position and motivated and stuff, talked to the 'Benders and made sure that the battlefield engineering had been concealed properly, and listened to Calvin refuse to explain what exactly he had done. ("It'll be a surprise, you'll see!" He had said. "...But just in case, make absolutely sure that no one is still inside the building when we're fighting, or they'll die horribly. Being on the rooftop will be fine though." Naturally, this die not assure anyone much.)

Inspired by this last point of Calvin's Zim got everyone (that was not in for the Heartless and Kimblee) together and asked, "Is there anyone here who does not wish to join in the fight, or at the very least take the fight elsewhere? I have it on good authority that many Heartless are attacking this district in important areas. Like that one hospital outside the Foster's site, probably." He glanced at Aang, as if seeking approval. Aang nodded, and indicated for him to go on. "So, um..." Zim wasn't much good at sincere speeches, and was having some difficulty with basically asking the timid people of this studio if they wanted to run away without being cruel about it. "Uh, yeah, say something. I haven't got all day. Well, actually, I do, but then I have to go on a space voyage and rescue mission and also there's that whole impending attack here so...uh, I feel have have mislaid the thread of what I was talking about."

"Wow, you are spectacularily bad at speeches," Calvin said. "I am actually impressed. It takes real lack of talent to be that astonishingly bad at something." Zim threw a fireball at him and it went out the window. (By complete coincidence eventually hitting a very distant wall in the distance and blasting a brick that hit Kimblee.) "And your aiming sucks. Amazing!"

There was a brief tense moment, possibly while his audience deleted those embarassing moments from their memories. Then, "NO WAY!" Zero-Forty-Nine the cloned reporter shouted. Zim blinked in surprise.

"This is our news studio!" The frog man with the awesome hair-critter said passionately.

"WE'LL EAT THEIR BRAINS AND MAKE THEM SUFFER FOR ATTACKING OUR STUDIO!" A black goopy symbiote howled ferociously. She paused. "Wait, do Heartless have brains?" Someone told her that they did not. "Crap. Eh, we can still shoot them and stuff. Shoot them with SCIENCE."

"Half of every other news report we do is fraught with danger!" Courtney said stubbornly. "Sneaking into hidden giant robot sales amid the black markets that think it's a good idea to hawk their warse here...fighting through armies of dumb goons to get an interview with mob bosses that are trying to pretend to be tourists...infiltrating big evil armies just for that small chance we might overhear their generals saying something we can expose on the air and break out of our low-scale rutt! Interrupting Crossguard representatives when it's tabletop RPG night!"

"Yeah, that last one is the most frightening," Zero-Forty-Nine agreed.

"We can't let you get killed on our turf!" The alien lady that had answered Kimblee's call from earlier said passionately. "...Not that I'm saying it would be okay for you to get killed off it. Um. You know what I mean!"

Zim blinked. "This was not what I expected."

"Guess everyone in Traverse Town really is capable of fighting," Hobbes agreed.

"We can't just run away from our own news studio like that!" Milda Snadolski cried furiously. "Do you know what we had to do to get it?"

"No," Zim said.

"...Oh, yeah. Well...it was a big deal. Totally."

"Actually, I am majorly okay with running away. Well, not okay with it, but c'mon, I'm a realist," Morte said. The others stared at him. "What? I'm a godsdamned talking head, how the hell do you expect me to positive influence the course of battle?"

"...We could put you in a robot suit?" Courtney suggested.

"Right. And would you just happen to have one of those lying around?"

"Um...no, sorry."

"Oh." For a moment, Morte looked almost disappointed.

Zim considered the matter. While it was refreshing to see so many people willing to fight instead of letting him and his group fight their battles for them (something he had gotten used to during his, Danny and Aang's stint as heroes), there was absolutely no way he could possibly field them on the battle; there were far too many of them (the people that he had brought with him was already a large enough number to be pushing his luck), and it was likely that these news people would get killed in the ensuing battle with that kind of ill-thought out recklessness. Further death was not someone he wanted on him, and espicially not when it was a fight he started. But he couldn't deny them their vengeance, or the right to fight on their own turf either...

He had an idea. "My guide Morte cannot fight on his own, and requires someone to take him to a place of safety! Who will volunteer for this illustrious duty?" Zim declared, pointing at Morte. Courtney blinked.

"Wait, I do?" Morte said, having intended on just running like hell, or staying out of the way.

"Yes, you do!" Zim insisted. "For you are the last living remnant of a vast intersteller culture of scholar-kings dedicated to knowledge and the empirical analysis of a thousand-and-twenty 'verses! All their vast and mighty knowledge is contained within your skull! Should you perish, all that wisdom that was earned over a span of time greater than most time measuring systems have names for will be gone, and the multiverse shall suffer for it!"

Morte stared. "...That's right, I am!" He said quickly, being the kind of guy who knew a decent scam when he saw one. ('Decent' in the sense that it was for a heroic cause.)

"Wow," Abel quietly said to Scar. "I totally would not have noticed he was one of those kind of survivors."

"He's not," Scar said, equally quietly so as not to ruin the scam. "It's a plan to get the news studio employees out of here and reduce potential casualities."

Abel crossed his arms and frowned sternly. "Must you take the romance and wonder out of everything?" Scar sighed.

Several people gasped. "No!" Milda Snadolski cried, utterly horrified. "That's...that's something too horrible to let happen!"

"Not another fallen culture of thinking guys that fell to evil!" Zero-Forty-Nine raved, his arms held up high. "WHY DO THEY ALWAYS SUFFER MOST!"

"They never pay their insurance on time," Morte said. "Too busy contemplating the dharmic meaning of the peach tree and stuff like that. Also, gits get jealous."

Moved by this sentiment, the news guys conferred, while Courtney kept quiet on the obvious truth; the others did not, not because they were stupid or credible, but because such a premise did happen on Traverse Town often enough that dismissing it out of hand would be silly and mean. Eventually they seperated and Courtney said, "Everyone else, uh, everyone else wants to get your friend Morte to safety at the mobile hospital, which should be the safest place in the district at the moment from the heavy faction presence. I'll stay here as a representative and fight on the studio's behalf."

"Excellent," Zim said.

"Shouldn't we get some weapons too?" The tentacled alien lady said, looking longingly at the gatling laser Zuko had discarded.

At this most appropiate moment, Kim and Ron wandered back in from they had been helping the Mall Crawlers prepped with the defenses and ideal places to hold the defense. "Hey guys," She said breezily. "What's happened?"

"The employees here wish to escort Morte to safety at the mobile hospital that set up shop near Foster's," Hobbes said, putting it all as tactfully as possible.

"...Huh," Kim said. "Why?"

"For he is a living remnant of a lost culture and holds all their vast knowledge," Calvin said snidely. "Would you want it to be lost?"

"No way!" Ron said, completely buying the whole thing. "We'll help too!"

"We will?" Kim said. Ron looked at her, his eyes big and his lip trembling. "Okay, okay! Stop looking at me like that!" Ron did so, smirking smugly. Rufus rolled his eyes. "Pretty sure they'll need more weapons than what we have on hand, though."

"I can help give you weapons!" Abel said brightly, reaching into a shadow and pulling out the gigantic cross-shaped...thing he had been lugging around last night. "I figured I'd have to pull 'er out sooner or later for this fight, but now's a good time as ever, yeah?"

Danny carefully moved away. The streamers of darkness still rolling off the bizarre contraption probably had something to do with it. "How exactly did you just do that?"

"And why didn't you bring it to begin with?" Calvin asked.

"Well, I learned my lesson from being lost forever under Foster's, and I certainly didn't think I'd need to bring it with me this time! And I summoned it like that because I have many unusual and interesting talents that I'm not really comfortably with telling you right now." Abel carefully placed it on the ground and a sizable dent appeared underneath the extraordinarily heavy device. Abel did...something, the mechanisms of the device weren't at all clear, and then a drawer slid out of a seemingly smooth part of the left cross-arm, unfolding multiple times until it stopped halfway across the room, revealing a rack filled with weapons; chainswords, beamswords, beam-chainsaw swords, chainsaw-beam swords, regular swords, swords that pretended to be regular because they were bored and apparently sentient, semi-automatic firearms, fully-automatic firearms, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, grenade-propelled rocket-launchers bayonets, power fists, power fists with retractable blades, power fists that projected beamswords and also shotguns, many other weapons of that sort, and also a cross-eyed ferret in a habitarium reading a copy of the legendary book of enlightenment The Kitab al-Alacir. "Take your pick, ladies and gents!"

"Wow," Calvin said. "That's a load of dakka."

"Hah!" Zero-Forty-Nine said. "This will serve our purposes admirably."

Sokka stared in disbelief at Abel. "How-" He shook his head. "You know what? I don't care. I'm not gonna ask how he pulled that thing from wherever. I'm not gonna ask why it's so heavy that it's sinking into the floor and will probably break." Courtney gave Abel a dirty look and he hastily picked his weird contraption up. "I'm not going to ask how you're so strong you can pick it up one-handed. And I'm not going to ask how it's bigger on the inside than the outside, and I'm definitely not going to ask why you're carrying so many weapons, or for that matter, why you have a ferret in there. I'm done. No more stupid questions! No skepticism from me, I hereby renounce my official position as the 'Meat, Sarcasm and Continued Skepticism Guy' and once again became the 'Meat and Sarcasm Guy'. Have fun killing logic with your crazy, but I am done beating my brain out against it." To settle his point, he went to the weapons Abel provided and selected, among other things, a plasma rifle in perfect condition and fully loaded; Sokka hadn't learned of firearms until he'd left his homeworld, but he'd develouped a tremendous enthusiasm for them. (Much to his sister's distaste. She liked the concept of firearms, actually, but she was wary of what would happen of them in Sokka's hands.)

"Glad to know!" Abel said cheerfully while the employees, Courtney and Calvin crowded around, Scar hanging back and clearly disapproving of Abel's excessive panoply. After the newly armed employees were done and started pestering Morte with an array of questions about his 'lost culture' (which he happily made up bizarre answers to), the question of what to do with those employees came up, as neatly summerized by the tentacle girl. "Now what?" She asked cautiously, her many limbs carrying multi-barrelled flamethrowers and repulser beam rifles; she'd picked them on the basis that they would work well to keep the evil things away from her and Morte, and also the others. "Do we just head through the tunnels underground or head up-top?"

"Well," Kim said, glancing at the others. "Staying up top just looks like it's an invitaiton towards being ambushed by Heartless. I say we head underground; at least if we meet Heartless down there, they'll be cornered no matter what way they come at us."

"Okay," the tentacle girl said. With that settled, Kim selected a modified beamsword-laser rifle for herself. (Ron stuck with the Lotus Blade, after Kim convinced him not to go straight for the chainsaw-beam swords. She insisted it would end badly.) She ordinarily was loath to resort to actual weapons, but since lethal force wasn't really avoidable with Heartless (though Aang would probably try anyway), she was willing to make an exception. She immediately started instructing her new escorts on movement strategies and proper formations while Rufus took notes and Ron played games on his communications device.

Aware that it was nearly time to move out, Zim beheld this all and laughed. "I do enjoy it when a plan comes together."

"Try to keep it quiet when you up and admit that you manipulated people," Morte said insistently.

"...Ah, right," Zim said, momentarily startled. Fortunately, none of the employees had heard him. (Well, Courtney did, but she was aware of his 'plan' from the begining.) "I suppose I should have the Keyblade out as well." He raised a hand and frowned in deep concentration, his still newly forged connection to the Keyblade calling to it from wherever it went; light flared around his head, so bright and harsh that space seemed to melt a little bit around it. The light reshaped itself into solid form, and as the puzzling non-Euclidian weirdness melted away, the Keyblade was in Zim's grasp, it's chain wrapped around Zim's arm and slowly coiling and sliding over itself like a living thing.

Zim gave it a weird look. "That's never happened before." He poked the chain. Several loops of chains slid out of the seething mass now covering his entire upper arm and tapped his fingertip, rather like a friendly dog nudging someone. "Huh. Magic is weird."

"...Okay, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say, what the frak!" Sammael said from behind Zim's head, peering at the innocent-looking Keyblade. "It's moving on it's own. THAT IS NOT NORMAL!"

"Oh, come off it!" Razael said dismissively. "It's done us no harm and it's clearly a supernal artifact of holiness, Light and probably shiny things. Why need we be afraid of it?"

"Because it's clinging to Zim's arm like a snake, with chains that were not that freaking long the last time I saw it, look, you can't even see anything between his elbow and shoulder now!"

"It's quite snug!" Zim said. His imaginary friends stared at him.

"What's snug?" Morte said, wandering over.

"This!" Zim waved his arm, the Keyblade's chains writhing happily along it, so extensively wound around Zim that his arm had disappeared from sight.

"...Is it supposed to do that?"

"Eh, guess so." Zim tried to pull the chain off, but it stubbornly held onto him, rattling affectionately. "Hey, it likes me!"

"When they say that you've got a 'clingy weapon', they're supposed to be speaking metaphorically," Morte commented.

"Hey!" Sammael yelled at Zim. "Get back here! I'm not done raving yet!...Dang it, he's not even listening." He hung his head, saddened while everyone tended to their own needs, and got ready to get this battle started. Zim, feeling in a faint way that it was his responsibilty, went over to Morte and his new escorts, intending to lead them down to the tunnels and see them off.

...

And speaking of getting the battle started, the opponent in question had already arrived, but he was in no hurry to begin: at the far end of the plaza from the news studio, Kimblee was thinking his needlessly convoluted and probably messed-up thoughts. At the very least, he had observed that the entire neighborhood and surronding areas had been evacuated with a casual sort of experience, so quickly that they had been gone before he gotten here. He wanted to have the silence speak to him of the life of a city itself, diverted and smashed aside as though struck by a mighty boulder, irrevocably changing it's course. He wanted to get the impression that there had been lives here, being lived, but then he had come and now scattered like so many little drops of water the same as the rest, in the wake of his doings.

He wanted to. But the only thing that kept coming to mind was the idea that he was being a mild annoyance to the city at large. A mild annoyance that had killed many people already and seriously destabilized their sense of security, but still only an annoyance. It rankled him that he hadn't even needed to blast his way here. The only explosions of recent times had been shortly after leaving the Council's strange...'clubhouse'. It was truly odd when a town's public policy was dictated by a group of representatives that chose to spend much of their time in a clubhouse doing little of importance.

This town was very surreal, Kimblee brooded as he walked atop building to building, pacing along rooftops as their walls stretched into the next building like bridges for him to move along. Disturbed and uncomfortable, he focused instead on the Stone's energy, little red flashes of souls fueling his alchemy, seemed like the auras certain mighty warriors something exhibited. He'd never approved of such ostentatious displays, but now he saw the appeal. How could one not show off to the world, and your foes, the extent of your world-shaping might?

He smirked at the thought, feeling better already. His shadow, swollen to such impossible size as though cast by a massive titan, covered the buildings and streets behind him. He left things changed in his wake; streaks of rust in metal. Door silently torn from their hinges. Walls now displaying awful murals of nightmare-worlds and hellscapes created by a thousand claw-marks. Water, whether in fountains or containers or unattended beverages, frozen over with a blackened frost. And, if in passing, the sunlight was turned gray and weak and fighting his influence.

(Kimblee was reasonably certain that most of those things ran counter to the laws of physics, but he was also pretty certain that he wasn't quite up-to-date on scientific knowledge as he should've been. But then the nature of the Heartless was to warp and break things, so almost certainly the same thing applied to their powers.)

There were things in that darkness that now traveled with the Red Lotus Alchemist. Shapeless shadow-things with enough substance to kill but not enough to dare the sunlight unmade all that they could grasp, venting their bottomless fury at this world of light by destroying all of it that they could touch. Kimblee could feel more of them, stranger things that even he shuddered to think of, trailing at the corners of his mind while Ghostfreak spread wariness at them and Kevin roared and lashed out like a rabid dog. The fear and anger only seemed to entice them, but how could it now? Such flashes of feeling were like motes of purest light to the things floundering in the darkness, alone and tormented and maddened. Kimblee thought he understood how they felt.

"So," Kimblee said to himself after stopping at what he felt to be the appropiate place upon a building he had no interest in identifying. "Here we are." He looked down the street, peering at the distant and unimportant looking building kitted out to maintain a news station.

He frowned at it, ready to clap his hands and summon enough alchemically-born power to wipe it (and the rest of the neighborhood) off the face of the planet, and heisitated. They had called him out through means that must have been enormously difficult and expensive to obtain; he had to assume that they were waiting for him and had plans to prevent such a ignominous demise. Scar was with them, so they had to know how he fought with his alchemy, while he didn't know who exactly he was fighting.

He knew (or that he did) that his reluctance to simply wipe them out had nothing to do with the disturbing thoughts drifting from Jarod's unconscious mind, drifting into Kimblee's through their mutal Heartless-forged connection. He closed his eyes, forcing the troubling feelings to just drift away and be replaced with a vauge internal neutrality he was far more used to. The silence felt wrong, only for a moment, but still long enough to leave him feeling unsettled.

He dismissed these thoughts and frowned as he looked across the street, past the buildings and to the innocent-looking news station at an intersection at the far side of the street. So unseeming a building to house such madness; his eye twitched a bit at the thought and shuddering, vowing great vengeance on that odd person that had seen fit to ramble on over the phone. It certainly didn't help that Kimblee thought that he heard, however distant, the noise of Kevin's mocking laughter at his expense. He considered killing them all for that insult, and dismissed it. The important thing...yes, the important thing for him was that he honestly needed his enemy to know that they had been beaten. He needed to leave them lying in the dirt, their broken bodies slowly inching into death, and he needed to be there to explain to them just how wrong they had been, to tell them at length of the foolishness of their beliefs and how his victory here was Fate itself declaring him right with his success. He needed to see the light of despair in their eyes as the life drained out, their pitiful idealism finally fading as they accepted that reality was pain, bile and loss.

Anything else was just vain posturing to make himself feel better.

In the depths of the building he stood upon, in the tunnels just under the street, hidden just past the windows of the evacuated buildings along that street and homing in on him were the Heartless. The horde teemed, silent and hungry, an all-consuming shadow that on it's own would have been a mindless tidal wave that would, in time, drown all the multiverse. His presence gave it a pattern to confirm itself to, a ray of baleful light to cast a direction for their shadow. He gave them intent, gave them a shade of a sense of purpose they had all held before their current state, and in some perverse way he supposed the Heartless were gratefulfor it, if they could even understand such a thing anymore. Perhaps that was why they obeyed him at all.

He reached his mind out to them, allowing the part of themself they had connected themselves with to feel the horde, and he was surprised to see that it were smaller than he had expected. The Heartless horde he had summoned into the world was not quite as huge as he had hoped, and not all of them had gathered here; the rest were scattered throughout the district, defeated and roaming in small pockets or otherwise engaged in fights. Certainly, the ones here was a huge number; they teemed in the hundreds, so many of them gathered unseen with him, but he had expected them to harvest greater numbers from the soldiers they would have fought, the civilians they should have mowed down. They didn't seem to have swelled their ranks at all, but had actually lost a full third of their numbers.

Traverse Town fighters were better than he had given them credit for. Regardless, it was enough. He smiled, a thrill pounding in his head. "Let's begin," He said.

The Heartless seemed to approve.

...

Under the news studio itself, Zim, seeing Kim, Ron, Morte and the escorts off on their way to safety, had found that there was a secret entrance into the underground tunnels in the basement level. More specifically, it was a large vault door that Kim was able to open after some effort while Zim himself (who definitely wasn't maybe a little bit worried about them. Nope. Not at all. Not one little bit), helped shoved the vault door open and had to close his eyes for a moment when the light hit them. He was eventually able to see properly, and gave an interested look to the small chamber beyond with an open tunnel in the floor with a ladder in it. "Is that some manner of maintenance tunnel?"

"Looks like, Boss," Morte agreed. He had been more downcast than usual. His mood had been changing ever since his decision to retreat from the fight owing to his uselessness, and it had gotten so profound that even Zim, who didn't know the skull well, had noticed and been troubled by it.

"Nuh uh," Rufus said, surprising them both. "Go under-top real fast, see?"

"They're just for moving under the surface without hitting traffic," Ron elaborated. "In case you need to get somewhere with the action's going on real quick! I hear they used to be trams underground before any of us showed up here, but if it's true, those people were gone a long time ago. They're useful for important travel, so we kept them on."

"Ah," Zim said. He noticed that the tunnel was lined with so many lights that it was a little painful to look at it. "Brightly lit, I see."

"In case of Heartless attack," Kim said solemnly. "They don't like the light. It doesn't always hurt them, but they stay away from bright light. The weak ones won't even show up in the lit tunnels, and the big ones..." Her mouth quirked in a winning smile. "Well, that's what we're for."

"And us," Zero-Forty-Nine said helpfully.

Morte didn't seem very comforted. "But what if a giant Heartless appears to eat you or something?"

The newsguys winced. "So not going to happen," Kim said; they relaxed, but only a little bit. "Now you guys come on, gotta get moving before the fireworks start."

"Do us a favor and whup 'im before he, I dunno, tries to escape and tries to blow up the guys near Foster's!" Ron said to Zim. "I hate fighting crazy guys."

"Interesting, that's what my enemies say to me!" Zim said.

Ron shook his head. "No, I mean real crazy. Like, criminally insane. Guys that would blow up the world on a dare!"

Zim considered that. "Ah. And...perhaps, taking vengeance on a rival by flooding the entire planet with a giant water balloon? Or mutating a class pet into a kaiju-class destroyer because it'll kill things good but no one will attack it because it's so cute? Or stealing Christmas with a giant Santa robot that goes crazy because of bad programming and environmental factors?"

"Kind of," Ron said after a moment of thought. Kim shook her head, as if wondering how Zim could think of such absurdities. "Those things sound crazy and stupid, don't you think? You know someone like that?"

"...In a manner of speaking, yes," Zim said, neglecting to mention that those were all previous plots of his. Morte snickered knowingly, sufficiently versed in the nature of rational species to know what Zim meant; it lightened Morte's mood, just a little bit. "Good luck and all that."

"We will protect your guide, have no fear!" The newsguys declared, waving their acquired weaponry.

"You do that," Zim said.

Kim lifted her hand to her head and up in a salute. "You can always count on us!" She waved, Ron giving Zim a hopeful thumbs-up, and the two of them walked into the tunnel, the newsguys following behind.

Only Morte was left. He made to float after them and heisitated. "Er," He said. "Uh. Boss?"

"Yes?" Zim said.

Morte looked at him. It was hard to tell emotion on Morte, but he seemed to have no trouble making his intention known at normal times. (At least, Zim thought he did.) And yet, it now seemed that Morte was actively trying to conceal his feelings. He actually seemed upset. This puzzled Zim; Morte had been content to stay out of the action thus far, and he himself was quite vocal about how little he could contribute in a fight. Morte didn't say anything for a moment and finally said, "Hey, uh, go tear those guys up. Make 'em sorry they ruined the first day of your adventure and all that."

"'Ruined'?" Zim repeated, a big grin on his face. "Are you serious? An epic threat? An army of monsters? An elite squad that actually allows me to give commands? I couldn't have asked for a better begining!"

Morte almost grinned (so to speak) at that. He looked like he wanted to say something more, just for a moment...but the moment in question passed. He floated down a bit; it was a lot like watching someone bow their head in frustration. "Wish I could be more help, Boss," Morte said quietly.

It was a unusually solemn statement from Morte. Unnerved, Zim said, "Yes, me as well."

He meant it as a joke, but Morte visibly floated down some more, his usual bobbing a lot more unsteady than usual. "Try not to die," He said, managing a trace of his usual attitude. He thought for a moment and added, "Hey, uh, show him our way works, Boss. That'll show the bastard."

Without another word, Morte floated into the tunnel after the patiently waiting Kim and Ron (and the less patient Rufus and newguys), leaving Zim to close the door behind them. He waited for them to leave before he closed and sealed it, making sure it was secure before he started up the stairs.

He waited for a moment, but he didn't hear any screams that suggested something awful happening, and reluctantly went on his way up the stairs and to the rooftop where everyone else had gone.

"Hrm," he said quietly to himself, briefly thinking that he might have to rethink his impression of Morte. "'Show him our way works'..." It was an attractive notion, not the least because ruthlessness had lost it's appeal to him a long time ago.

Perhaps the Keyblade resonated with such thoughts. Perhaps it was an as-yet untested ability he didn't know about yet. Perhaps it was his emotions bleeding into the ambient magic the Keyblade produced, and perhaps it was a mixture of all these things or none of them, but before he was aware of it happen a stream of brillaint light flashed up from him, swirling around him andf laring out. It was power in the shape of light and energy, flowing from without and focused within, and suffused into localized reality in a burst of radiant colors like a solar flare in miniature, flashing in all variations of the color spectrum before fading.

Zim blinked. He looked at his hands. "...If I knew how to do that in command, destroying the Heartless would likely be much easier." Slightly cheered by the experience (not the least because of the giddy exhiliaration it had instilled in him), he hurried on his way, going to a small but useful elevator lift that swiftly moved him up to the rooftop.

When it arrived and the doors opened, Zim stepped out into the rooftop, which was fairly wide open with a number of hastily arranged chunks of rock from the ground below meant to serve as cover, and most everybody was standing behind them. Abel and Aang were standing directly in front; Aang because he could see anything coming before anyone else, and Abel because he was so ridiculously confident he could survive nearly anything. "What is the situation?" Zim asked as the others took notice of him. "Are we going to have the oppertunity to die yet?"

"Give it a few minutes, and then probably!" Aang said cheerfully, pointing at the street. Zim thought he understood what Aang meant; the streets in front of them swarmed with shadows. Not tangible forms, not yet, but the shadows cast by the buildings around them bent and writhed in slow, hypnotic patterns, spilling in from windows he was sure hadn't been broken. A thin black mist was rising up from it, odd shapes that hurt his eyes just barely visible in it, and Zim thought that it was like looking into a mirror that was impossibly reflecting someplace...else.

Calvin paced nearby, clicking his tongue in tune with the beeping his device was making. "Good news and bad news!" He said loudly. "We won't be waiting much longer, from the readings I'm getting!"

"Readings from what?" Zim looked over. "Oh, it's that...thing you've been mucking about with. Bah, inferior craftsmanship. It's so irregular and scrappy!"

Calvin bristled, a craftsman getting defensive over his craft. "Lay off, I made this thing out of stuff I salvaged! In my sleep!"

"Bah, excuses! So what is it, then?"

Calvin rolled his eyes. He had already explained this to the others, but Zim obviously hadn't been listening then. "It's tracking energy, but I've no idea what kind. But it's the same energy that a sample of Kimblee's blood I bottled contained, and he's gotta be saturated with whatever it is. I'm reading a massive source of it way too close for comfort, so fill in the blanks on your own."

The others waited awkwardly, well aware what this meant. Then, Zim said, "You bottled his blood?"

"Yes."

"Hrm. I must approve your intiative then." The others, who didn't seem too pleased with the idea, frowned at Zim for this. "Give the sample to me. I believe a number of my scanning sub-routines may be operative, and I may be familiar with the energy. I don't want more variables!"

"Maybe it's just the power of the Philosopher's Stone?" Zuko suggested, but with a frown; he didn't know if it worked that way or not, and anyway he knew that energy didn't work that way. (He suspected that the laws of physics varied from universe to universe, and he didn't like it much.)

"Is this really the time?" Danny asked dubiously.

"Probably not," Calvin said, and pulled out a small bottle and started to pass it over...

And then there came an enormous flash of red light, smaller than the one that had preceded the destruction of Fosters, flowing into a number of structures along the street and twisting them until they were deformed into wire-shapes of the words 'HI, PREPARE TO DIE', still glowing with energy and impossible to miss. Zim looked closely, and thought he saw a distant figure on top of a building at the opposite end of the street, waving at them.

It was, of course, Kimblee. And while Zim's group had effectively made a declaration of war against him, Kimblee made the first move of violence and officially started the battle. More red light flashed around Kimbee as a flash of light erupted from Kimblee's position and into the ground (nowhere near them, thankfully, or the escape route the newsguys had taken), blasting an enormous hole into the street and enough dust into the air to dim the light a little bit...

And then, as expected, they appeared: the Heartless, and they rushed in all their monstrously savage ferocity. From out of the hole in the ground and the tunnels they'd been hiding in, from the buildings they'd snuck into, from the myriad shadows they had portaled through. It was so sudden, so drastic a movement, that seemingly an instant later all those Heartless were there, covering the streets and the walls and coming right towards them as the light of the Philosopher's Stone faded for the moment, the distant concern of Kimblee's threat fading in favor of this extremely immediate problem.

Calvin stumbled back, putting the bottle back into his pocket. "Oh feth," he swore, clearly thankful that he still had his fire gauntlet still on, and generating a blast from it that Zim eagerly augmented with his own fire power. The blasts streaked down, at the on-coming Heartless, most missing by far too much, and only a few knocking down a Heartless or two. It made no difference; the Heartless flew, ran, jumped and otherwise rampaged straight towards the news studio, smashing or blasting through everything in their path.

For their part, Zim's group was remarkably unworried. "You know, if I didn't know much about the situation, I'd probably think we were doomed," Hobbes remarked.

"Yeah," Zuko agreed.

"Probably," Zim said.

The Heartless rushed on...and were justifiably surprised to have a portion of the street collapse right under them and drop them into a hole lined with explosives Zim had helped prepare. A wave of explosive force blasted up from there, throwing plenty of Heartless up and tripping more as the Heartless behind them crashed right into the ones that had fallen or gotten blown up. Those on the rooftop chose this moment to start firing into the Heartless, cutting through them by the dozens with their concentrated aim. Even so, the Heartless still recovered and went right back to stampeding at them...

And ran right into another such trap, this one lined with automated gatling lasers that did tear through the Heartless, it's energy-based effect punching big holes in many of them. Undeterred, the Heartless jumped down and tore the guns to bits, several of the Heartless eating the guns and assimilating them into their bodies and advancing once more. It didn't help that the people on the rooftop keep firing at them, with gradually greater effect.

Kimblee frowned. "...I suppose I should have expected something like this. And yet it still makes me angry."

Predictably, the Heartless fell into more traps like that. About, oh, four or more times before even the notoriously instinct-driven Heartless got the hints and started moving along the walls, clearly thinking that they had avoided problems like that. Unfortunately for them, the dust from Kimblee's blast started to clear, and the sun shone through, it's light illuminating the street properly again. At once, dozens of the weakest Heartless fled in abject panic, burst into solar fire or condensed themselves to weaker but light-resistant Shadows to protect themselves. The bigger and more powerful ones endured it, their bodies burning and disintegrating but remaining whole anyway, allowing them to keep on soldiering through. Still feeling confident, the heroes readied their attacks, charging up guns, pulling out devices, and doing that general sort of thing as they begun to hope that they might just have an advantage against even these numbers.

(They would have been more worried if they had seen Kimblee smirking just then, having come up with a truly nasty idea.)

Zuko, hands still alight with flame from bent flames, commented with what proved to be remarkably poor timing, "At least we get to fight in the sunlight."

As if Kimblee had heard him, or been waiting for a moment like that, there was a very faint and distant sound like two hands clapping together; red energy flashed from the building he was standing on and over the ground right in front of the news studio. Nothing happened for a moment, so some of them thought that he had done something subtle and horrible to the ground before that was proven wrong by the ground just behind the Heartless (by now pretty close to the news studio, in spite of the traps and constantly being shot at) breaking and surging up like a tidal wave, the Heartless jumping on and clinging to it on the inside while it was growing up into a ludicrously large dome made of stone and metal and asphault and whatever else went into the streets, curving over the news studio and merging with the ground behind it, shutting them all into total darkness.

They blinked, their eyes trying to adjust to the darkness. Cyborg helpfully turned some shoulder-mounted lights on, and Aang did him one better by making an enormous flame in mid-air. Of considerable concern was the sound of the Heartless moving around in the darkness that was their natural element, coming for them with single-minded determination to feast on the light of their souls. (Their 'hearts', in current parlance.) The sound of their movement built into a nearly-defeaning roar. Calvin glared at Zuko. "You had to say it, didn't you, new guy?" Zuko glared at him, his sunfire-yellow eyes glowing faintly in the darkness.

Calvin had even more of a point in being annoyed: the darkness below (and above, and forward, and a bit to the sides) lit up with hundreds, maybe more, of shining eyes. So many eyes, so many things to see with them, that the interior of the hollow shape casting them into shadow was illuminated by them and making it clear that the 'shadows' present were actually a solid layer of an enormous amount of Heartless packed tightly together in a single enormous horde covering every inch of the thing looming over them. With the light Cyborg and Aang provided, it was clear that there were hundreds of Heartless of every type they had seen so far, mutated outside of those castes' restrictions and newer kinds, and more singular horrors that were awful to behold. It was a swarm beyond any of the hordes afflicting the rest of the town, a single massive force so large that, clinging to the walls like they were, the entire interior of it was hidden under their twisted mass.

And every last one of those Heartless was moving straight at them, to kill them if they were lucky and feast upon them if they weren't. Danny started to hyperventilate, green light flashing erratically from him. Hobbes tried to be helpful and pat his back, only to freak out when his hand went right through Danny and came out coated in ice. "Sorry," Danny said.

There was a long, long horrified look. "Huh," Calvin said, with more amiability than the situation warrented. "That's a lot of Heartless."

And like some sort of prey-signal the Heartless were conditioned to respond to (or perhaps it was the sudden swell of fear they reacted to), the horde did what hordes are supposed to do and broke away from itself, the massive group of Heartless coming apart and surging forward as a mass of individual monsters, those in the back smashing into those and front and shoving onwards while those pushed back leaped bounded back and took off at high-speed, the mass of Heartless coming right for them, and those crawling on the walls simply took hold of each other and whipped themselves out, numbering in so many that they fused into a a massive tentacle-like thing aimed right at them.

"THIS IS AWESOME!" Zim screamed, in the precise opposite attitude to most sane people, as he summoned the Keyblade. At the infusion of the baleful Light shaped into the Materium and impinging on their senses like a slab of lead dropped onto a rubber sheet, the Heartless froze, just for a moment.

It was long enough. "GO FOR IT!" Hobbes shouted (not one of the better battle-cries of history) and a volley of projectiles burst out of seemingly nowhere from ground level, a wall of blasts that smashed into the Heartless' front lines with a mighty burst that briefly illuminated their awful forms just long enough to stun them and knock them aside, tripping the ones behind them and making a shockwave effect as the ones behind them tripped over them, and so on. The big tendril-thing fell apart and Heartless rained down, so Zuko helpfully set them on fire so everyone could see better. Fortunately, none of those Heartless were Red Nocturnes.

"I knew those guys would come in useful," Sokka said proudly as a number of armored figures appeared; two shoved aside cleverly assembled piles of debris that served as camoflauge (and cover), several jumped out through the windows of the news studio ground floor, and another slammed down from atop a nearby building.

The small team, girded in armors forged by their own hands and steeled with zeal where "Darklings that lurk outside time, gnawing on the frayed edges of reality! HEAR US NOW!" Teslaman of the Mall Crawlers said, several crude amplification feeds cutting in and magnifying his voice loudly enough to make Hobbes wince and cover his ears in pain. (Also, it made Teslaman's voice sound really deep. And, for some reason, like he had a breathing problem. It was still really badass.) "WE HAVE WORDS FOR YOU AND YOUR MASTER!"

The Heartless paused; it was a gradual process, given that they were still tripping over each other. Zim, watching and wondering when he would start blowing stuff up, didn't know if they were actually listening to him or were simply reacting to the new group standing their ground and were reevaluating the Mall Crawlers from prey to threat/background/thing. The Mall Crawlers politely waited for the moving wall of Heartless to halt. They eventually did, and the Mall Crawlers continued. "We've the knowing that you, the commander of these monsters, has unleashed a horror upon our town!" Shredcord cried. "The devastation of Foster's! The soul-theft of it's keepers! The murder of those slain to create that vile artifact in your posession!"

"And now," Deadshot said. "You are here, pulling down the wretched Heartless themselves from their abyssal realm and unleashing their horror upon our homeland! Have ye no shame! Have ye no mercy? Have ye cast aside all shred of remorse, all your capacity for deceny fed to the altar of your ambitions! Do you even understand what you have done...and the doom you have unleashed upon yourself! Those monsters destroyed all that was dear to us, and if you hold the evil in your heart for them to obey you, and consider you one of their own...then you ARE OUR FOE! AND WE SHALL SHOW YOU ALL THE MERCY WE WOULD OFFER THEM! NONE!"

("Geez, they're so melodramatic," Calvin said.

"Hush, I'm trying to listen!" Courtney said, taking notes.)

"We are but the vanguard of Traverse Town's wrath, the knights who carry the will of those who died to carry us here so that we might live in their stead!" Behemoth yelled; his own vocal systems gave his voice a grinding snapping quality, like the echoes of a thousand saurian beasts roaring in a primordial choir. "We stand for them! We stand for the memories of the worlds that have gone! We stand for those that live! We stand for those that have not yet lived, so that the worlds that gave us their ancestors will live forever in their legacies and never die! We stand for the promise of continunity, and one knee bent to the sacred earth and our heads raised to the eternal sky, we become vassels to all those who will stand beside us! We stand for all the town and those who dwell in it, and those with us will not fail!"

"Your evil ends here," Adeptus-Indefinitum said calmly, his voice echoing as every single metal surface on the street resonated with his vocal harmonics and amplified everything he said. "You have wounded the world enough; whatever mad ambitions you hold end here. All your plots and desires will be unmade, and in their detritus we shall forge the means of your unmaking. No more death. No more doom. No more suffering. None of that, save for that which falls upon you. Ready yourself, despoiler of today and ravager of souls; your doom is nigh, and it's heralds speak to you."

(On the rooftop, Zim munched on some popcorn. "These guys are pretty good at speeches and stuff."

"Where'd you get the popcorn?" Zuko asked.

Zim paused. "I don't know.")

Tesla Man held up an armored hand. "But we honor the dream of mercy and honorable conduct in true battle! If you surrender now, send away these Heartless, turn in the Philosopher's Stone so that those within it might be freed and freely admit yourself to the authorities, we will deliver you to the constabulary without harming you. What say you?"

The Heartless stared at him with a focus that was unheard among the mecurial darklings, as if directed by an intelligence that was thinking, Is he serious? Eventually, a small composite Heartless that might have once been a Soldier and a Red Nocturne and possibly ruined machinery waddled up; it was a little smaller than Zim, made of writhing semi-solid darkness that slithered out between the pieces of machinery wadded over it's frame and igniting in a strangely cold fire that covered it's body. Tesla Man stared down at it, inviting a response, and the little Heartless complied by digging it's claws into it's chest and ripping apart the front of it's torso, unleashing a massive fireblast that threw Tesla Man into the door of the new studio.

In the time it took for the other Mall Crawlers to see this and looked back at the Heartless with their weapons readied, an even larger fire blast came down from above, a burning tornado of superheated gases and plasma that struck the offending (and surprisingly tough) little Heartless in a mighty explosion that summoned so much primal light that the other Heartless recoiled, opening them up for another wall of projectiles from the Mall Crawlers (who knew an opportunity when they saw one).

When the smoke cleared and the Heartless were still retreating, there was nothing left of the Heartless that had carried out Kimblee's response to Tesla Man's offer. Zim, standing on the rooftop with fire still emanating from his fist, grinning madly. "That counts as a declaration of war, does it not?"

"Yeah," Zuko agreed, the wisps of the internal fire that he had imbued Zim's fireblast with still on his breath. He inhaled deeply, sparks flickering out of the heated air around him. "Still plenty more dark-things to burn."

"Oh, yes." Light flashed around Zim, spiraling around him and cascading away in surprisingly dense shapes that cycled through the radiances of the visible spectrum, though maintaining a surprisingly tendency to green. The surface under his feet warped under the touch of that primal Light, twisting slightly and reshaping itself into a translucent metal that shone softly, as though reflecting the slightest traces of the light of a thousand suns. (And also providing sufficient lumination for those on the roof.) "Hey, I have no idea how I did that. Convienient, though."

Every single Heartless there stopped and looked at Zim. Aang frowned thoughtfully. "They don't like light," He said. "And sunlight weakens them."

"We need to crack that blockade upon and bring on the sun!" Danny realized. "Zim, hold on a second, I think we-"

"Yeah, sure, you have fun doing whatever you're doing, I'm bored!" Zim yelled, roughly shoving through everyone. "Enough talk about strategy and such nonsense!"

Hobbes blinked. "Um. They weren't saying anything about strategy, it was just common sense..."

"Yeah, sure, whatever! Point is, there's too much talk and not enough SMITING! I want some smiting! Is that really too much to ask! Huh?" Zim raised the Keyblade up high, and a mighty flash of light chased the darkness away for just long enough for everyone to look at him. "We are the sword that cuts into the abyss! We paint ourself in it's ichors and suffer no corruption! We do not yield to it's temptations, we do not attend it's whispers! We delve into it's stygian depths and destroy all that assails us, banishing them into oblivion, and with our strength of will, we transform the endless darkness into less than Oblivion! That is who we are! That is what we do! AND THAT IS WHAT MUST BE DONE!"

"I'm sorry, what?" Courtney said. "I kinda stopped listening after you started talking, there's a big horde of evil down there that wants to eat me or something. You said something metaphor-ish and there was yelling? Not much sense? Even the Mall Crawler guys are less overdramatic than you."

Zim wasn't listening. "Open up this to the skies once more and let the sun scourge them if you can. I will throw myself into their midst and do battle with them! Let us see which carves a legend into their nightmares first: the nuclear-fueled celestial sphere that will one day scour all life from this world just by being that damn hot...or ME?"

The Heartless stirred, and in a clicking, snapping rush, they finally went back into the battle and swarmed, a great teeming mass clearly aimed right at Zim. Zim just grinned. "I thought as much!" With primordial light pulsing all around him, he ran and jumped right off the rooftop and fell right towards the Heartless, laughing crazily as he plunged, a mad and brilliant light in the darkness.

Hobbes watched him fall. "Is he...is he actually insane?" He asked Zuko.

Zuko shook his head, a smug little grin on his face. "Some days he is, some days he isn't. Just try and keep up." With that, he jumped off the rooftop too.

Hobbes watched, bemused, and saw Zuko slow his descent his own way, massive flames erupting from his feet and propel him at the enemy, and at the apex of his arc he expelled a massive gout of fire from his mouth to carve a burning path through the Heartless for the Mall Crawlers to eagerly exploit and rush the scattered Heartless. "...I hope craziness isn't infectious." He made sure his hat was tied down lest it be blown away by some stray attack and turned to Calvin. "So how do you wanna do this?"

Calvin, already strapping on his other oversized and somewhat bulky ice-themed device, made a show of concentrating hard. "Well, sniping them from here sounds like fun, but we'd be like a rock on the ocean."

"Maybe we can make some holes in that giant sun-blocker thing our bad guy here summoned up?" Hobbes suggested.

"That's not a bad idea," Aang said. He glanced upward. "Completely smashing that thing sounds like a bad idea right here; we could smash right through the street or hit something! Making some big holes looks managable, though."

"I'm coming with!" Toph said. "No way I'm leaving the Earthbending all up to you."

"Okay," Aang said. Toph threw an arm over his shoulder, clearly unhappy about leaving proper surface even briefly, and a large chunk of the rooftop flipped them upwards with such velocity that they were soon out of sight, and a violent blast of Airbending took them the rest of the way. Distantly, Hobbes saw them impact the ceiling.

"I hope they know something about battlefield engineering," Hobbes said. He looked at Calvin and made a mock salute. "Wish me luck!"

"If you die, I promise I won't do too much surgery on your corpse before I reanimate your corpse for my own purposes," Calvin said. "Maybe a cyborg limb or two at the very most. How do you feel about having your right arm replaced with a chainsaw mounted on a heavy-load grenade launcher?"

"Extremely uncomfortable. Put in a hyperdextrous tendril so I can actually hold stuff and I'll feel okay about it." Hobbes nodded at the other guys and tipped his hat at the ladies, certain they would perform admirably and trusting them to kill as many monsters as they coul, and then he dug his claws into the ground and tore off a large chunk of ground. He hoisted it over his hip, ran, and jumped right over the rooftop like Zim and Zuko, the chunk of rooftop held under him like an oversized surfboard, smashing into the fray of Heartless and plowing through them.

"Hey," Calvin said to Katara. "You control water, right? But you don't create it?"

"Of course not," Katara said, and she couldn't stop glancing at the blue and black device on his arm. "Why?"

Calvin grinned and held up his left arm, a rim of frost on the device and plumes of frigid air drifting in it's wake. "I can help you with that!"

Danny didn't pay much attention to Calvin and Katara's quick and muttered conversation. He exhaled, his breath so cold it almost hurt his throat. He frowned. "Huh," He said, his eyes flickering between blue and green unsteadily. "They're like ghosts. But not like them."

"What is?" Sam said uncertainly.

Danny looked at her for a moment too long to be entirely comfortable. "Them." He gestured at the Heartless horde, even now still advancing. "I don't know what they really are. They're dead. But not dead. Like ghosts, but my powers aren't reacting to them. I don't..." He grunted and pinched the bridge of his nose. "Darn it. I'm overthinking this." He took several steadying breathes, his exhalations expelling more and more plumes of frost and his skin turning slightly transparent with each breath until the blood pumping through his veins were faintly visible and his bones stood partly revealing under his skin. Finally he opened his eyes, and they were startled at the change: once more, his eyes were such a vibrant shade of green that they were like pieces of ghost-fire. He smirked, all heisitation was gone from him, the memory of the dead he'd left behind on Earth subsumed into a white-hot determination, and he said, "Let's see if they take an ectoplasmic blast like ghosts!"

"We'll be right behind you!" Tucker promised. Danny and Sam stared at him. "Except that me and Sam will be here. Right on this rooftop. Where it's slightly safer than duking it out one-to-thirty-bazillion on the ground like you are. And we'll be shooting at them while you do whatever. Probably really far away from this rooftop because you go all over the place in a fight. Also, most of our shooting-buddies are people that probably want to beat us up for taking over their place and they have more guns than we do and we'll be all alone. Did I miss anything?"

"That you'll be completely overrun by the monsters that eat souls or something if me and the others don't push them back?" Danny suggested. "Or that Courtney girl. I'm not sure which one's scarier."

"Me neither," Tucker agreed. ("Hey!" Courtney said.)

Green fire tinged with white flared out from Danny, welling out from his very cellular structure; the ectoplasmic energies of the Ghost Zone, long since imbued into his body. In less than a moment, bathed in it's energies, the transformation from human to ghostly-powered metahuman was done and the fires vanished, revealing him as Danny Phantom; his black and white outfit, tanned skin, white hair, glowing green eyes and a faint glow around him. "Okay," He said, turning translucent and then totally vanishing from sight. "Here I go!"

Moments later, the front line of the Heartless was punched by a tremendous blast of green energy that came out of nowhere. As the survivors scurried around in confusion, a larger beam came down from above and left nothing behind. The ground split under the Heartless misfortunate enough to be close enough and icicles bigger than trucks sliced right through them, and as the other Heartless panicked and fled, more huge icicles tore out of the ground right after them, like they were chasing them. The Heartless weren't fast enough. "Danny seems like he's feeling better," Tucker said off-handedly as more destruction ensued.

"He always gets in a better mood after he starts whaling on things," Sam said. Both of them nodded at her sage wisdom and started firing at the Heartless in wild frenzied bursts, careful not to hit any of their friends or allies.

"You see that a lot in kids that have to deal with their own little wars," Abel remarked to them, scaring them; they'd had no idea he'd been standing right behind them, as insubstantial as mist. "Pardon me, I must go and assist the ground-floor recruits in the fetching armors before the Heartless get to them and you. Nothing like an old soldier to give the new recruits a hand, you know!"

"You're not so old," Sokka remarked.

Abel smiled gently, like an angel in human flesh that was privy to many ancient and mighty secrets. "I'd be willing to bet good money that I was old before your ancestors were dancing with water spirits when they were nice and hitting them with big pointy things when they weren't."

"How'd you know about the dancing!" Sokka demanded.

"Lucky guess. Tally ho!" Abel walked right off the edge of the building in a way that made him look both totally badass and utterly moronic because he tripped at the last minute. He crashed into the ground with a tremendous impact with no harm, the ground pulverized under him; he climbed out of the resulting crater, whistling cheerily and walking away, walking right into a cluster of dark fire thrown by an errant Red Nocturne that burned half his face off. Another person would have been killed, or at the very least fallen in mid-step. Abel did neither. He just kept walking in the same easy military pace, not even pausing in midstride or reacting in any way to having the entire left side of his face burned away; his face regenerated with some rather sickening crunches when his muscles grew back and his jaw realigned, a disturbing wet noise where freshly grown eyelids slid over his eye, and quite a few of those on the rooftop winced in horror when his skin just swelled out in tight packets of bubbling flesh and burst, splattering all over his face and wriggling into place before evening out, leaving him looking perfectly healed. His only concession to suggesting that he was even aware of any of this was lifting a strand of regrown hair out of his eyes.

He walked up to a Mall Crawler and tapped him on the back. "Pardon me," Abel said. The Mall Crawler, Behemoth, turned around, a puzzled expression under his mask. "I think you could use a touch more assistance here on the ground. Also, behind you?"

Behemoth glanced behind and yelped; a massive and bizarre Heartless, a feral spiked thing that ran on all fours and constantly changing form along the way, pounced at him, dozens of tentacle-like viscera bursting from it's belly and snapping with the mouths that formed in their lengths. "That'd be appreciated!" He said, grapping a handful of those awful tendrils with one massive fist, wincing as they starting chewing into his armored hand. He lifted his foot up, avoiding the mouthy tendrils that tried to stab him there, and stomped hard on them before they could retreat. Behemoth looped those tendrils around it's neck, or at least tried to; it's head kept flowing back into it's main body with it's neck swelling back out as a lump of muscle, fading away entirely and then a massive pair of jaws appearing at the front, and so on. Giving up on that, Behemoth simply looped the tendrils around the front half of it's body, pinning it's many pairs of razor-clawed forelegs to it's body, and pulled. Pneumatic muscles in his armors pumped, various guages whined, and steam hissed out of valves, the man-made mechanical power of terrestial science contesting the seething chaos of this malevolent darkness-

There was a tremendous snap, and the Heartless broke in half, ichor spilling out in masses like malformed organs; Behemoth snarled in revulsion, still gripping the tendrils, and spun the pieces overhead like a lasso, flailing it around again and again until the centrifugal force was nearly tearing the Heartless apart on it's own and he finally threw it overhead all the way to the opposite side of the battle. (The two halves, still not quite dead, were nonetheless soon found by a pair of oppertunistic Heartless who greedily tore apart and consumed their crippled kin and swelled up into ever-larger and monstrous forms. And then Zim smashed into them, blew them up with really big blasts of fire, cut them into pieces, burned those pieces, and did a little dance that frightened the other Heartless away.) "I think that you could have done something to help...me..." He trailed off in mid-word, too stunned to finish properly.

"Hrm?" Abel said, glancing up from pulling off the head of a struggling Heartless three times his size, his bare hands burrowed deep into it's false flesh and looking like he had claws. The battlefield around him was littered in black ichor, steaming shadow-stuff and so very many mangled Heartless expiring as Behemoth watched, their bodies torn in so many inventive ways it made him feel a little sick. Several other mangled Heartless were fleeing from Abel in terror. "Oh sorry, give me a moment here, this thing's sinew analogues are so tough! It's like I'm pulling steel wires. Heh, I probably am, it looks like it pulled a lot of stray materials around itself...ah!" With a horrible screeching noise and an awful crack, Abel pulled it's head off, broken silvery strands trailing behind it. Abel shoved the head into the ichor-spewing stump and jumped up, a slow and clumsy slap from the Heartless missing him easily. Still in mid-air, Abel gave it a vicious kick that left a deep imprint of his boot in it's back and sent it flying halfway across the battlefield, right through Danny and into a wall. A bit nonplussed, Danny shrugged and blew it up. "Well, I saw you were having your hands full, so I took care of the rest behind you!"

The horde did seem a lot thinner in his area, Behemoth thought. "Ah...thank you..." Behemoth said uncertainly.

"No trouble," Abel said, still smiling in a way reserved for people called 'bright' and 'sunny'. (Neither were concepts traditionally applied to vampires. Except the really weird ones.) "Oh look, there's a lot of Heartless over there. Pardon me, must go kill things." Abel drew his arms back against the crazy cross thing he was carrying, momentarily looking like a potentially blasphemous parody of the Cruxification. (Which would be a really weird thing for him to do, being a devout Catholic priest and all.) It wasn't anything of the sort; the arms of the cross unfolded with a thousand-fold sounds of mechanical noises; spinning gears and flexing pistons and a clack-chack-chack sound mixed with humming; those arms became a great mass of flexing parts that came back together around Abel's arms as a pair of massive plasma cannon-guns almost bigger than Abel himself, easily as long as he was tall and quite a big thicker, and mounted on them were all manner of cannons and rapid-fire launchers and lasers and similar armaments, so big it would have taken several strong men just to hold them up, but Abel hefted them like they weighed no more than straw. A set of turbine-like generators hummed at the base, energy crackling around it, and Abel cackled like a mad bomber. "Oh man, stuff like this takes me back to my days in the Royal Air Force! 'Who Dares, Wins'! I think that's the right phrase, it was quite a while ago." The guns, all two dozen of them, came to life as the Heartless advanced; flamethrowers spewed streams of fire that melted the metal parts of the Heartless. Grenade launchers spun and shot expertly aimed explosives that hit the centers of Heartless packs, harming no one but the monsters in question. Six different sets of miniguns fired not bullets, but hardened points of holy water that burned the Heartless like acid, loosening their grip in the world and diluting their bodies, weakening enough for the volley of plasma fire that Abel shot out with his gun's main attack forms.

When he was done, the immediate area was clear of Heartless. But there were still many more to go. "Stick with me, young knight, and you and your's will get out of this with life to spare!" Abel boasted, firing more volleys of grenades here and there, and charged into a thick pack of conjoined Heartless in the process of melding into a larger and grotesque tentacled beast, Behemoth following and privately vowing to emulate Abel and the Adeptus Astartes.

The building where the shooters like Courtney, Sam and Tucker stood was in no danger of falling to the Heartless horde, for Appa had apparently declared himself their guardian. The great Sky Bison stood his ground against the darkling forces, roaring mightily as gusts of wind pounded the weakest of them into lumps of goo and trampling those who got close enough to pose a threat. A squadron of Red Nocturnes, their bodies now composed of dark flames burning so impossibly dark that it made the surronding shadows seem bright, hovered nearby, discordant music following in their wake. (They were called Red Nocturnes for a reason.)

Appa ground one of the stone-bodied Heartless to dust under a single foot and took notice of the Nocturnes. His belly still stung with the many wounds inflicted on him last night, and he roared defiantly at the darklings. It was doubtful that they actual understood it, but they seemed to accept the challenge and flew at him, their dark fires combining into a massive blast bigger than Appa himself and throwing itself at him; Appa stood his ground and roared; that blast of fire was snuffed out in a vastly more fierce blast of wind that kept going, tearing up the ground in it's wake. The Heartless tried to flee, but the the wind caught them, smashed them to the ground, tore the fire from them and did worse: their fire was a transitory thing, all hunger without any sense, and this wind was old and so very angry, and this wind had teeth. It ground them up, stole the heat from their cores and spat out goo and smoke.

Calvin, observing all this from above, clicked his tongue. "Pretty cool," He admitted. He stood near the edge of the rooftop, surveying the battlefield. "Bet we can do better, y'know?"

Katara, standing next to him, looked at him expectantly. "Are you going to try that thing we talked about?"

Calvin smirked. "Yeah." He held out his left arm, the water-themed Wonder of super-science glowing with blue light as the sound of etheric machinery echoed from it. Frost crackled around it, and several large masses of water appeared, slipping out of thin air, and coiled around his arm, plumes of frost shooting up around Calvin like steam from super-heated water. They tightened like a wound up spring, flakes of ice cracking on their jellid mass...and then they exploded off his arm in several large frozen chunks, each bigger than a man, and as they hit the ground, they struck several large packs of Heartless that had been uncomfortably close to flanking some of his allies, stabbing deeply enough to the ground to anchor themselves and suffused with such elemental cold that a few nearby Heartless had the metal portions of their innate weaponry turn brittle and frosted.

And then Katara stepped onto the edge of the rooftop, drawing her hand away with an sharp movement like a snake striking; one of the big chunks of ice exploded into a large stream of water that flowed over to Katara and hovered around her like a halo, some of it drawn undernearth her and freezing into an ice slide under her as she went down to the ground, jagged icicles firing from the water and impaling flying Heartless with perfect accuracy.

The ice slide struck into the ground with the odd-sounding noise of the moisture in the air freezing on contact with the shards of super-chilled ice that drilled right up through the ground and absorbed the shock, stabbing into any nearby Heartless. Katara didn't miss a moment's oppertunity; the Heartless swarmed towards this newest threat and she spun out of the way of a pouncing catlike thing, a section of ice under her bubbling into water and carrying her out of the way with a spin, droplets of water rocketing from it at such speeds and pressurized so that they punched right through the horde around her. The wounds healed almost instantly, but it did make them pause, perhaps estimating the danger she posed to them and whether or not it would be worth attacking her.

It was a fatal error, pausing in front of a aggressive Southern Waterbender who remembered the horror that was the end of Earth and that the monsters before her were the same kind that had dragged people down in the streets and eaten them alive and twisted their living spirits. A lash of water was pulled from one of the chunks of ice, cutting the Heartless impaled on it into chunks before Katara whipped it around herself and lashed it out at a large Heartless three times her size with no head but a huge gaping mouth in it's belly; the water whip, speed and pressure turning it into a cutting edge that would shame even molecular blades, struck through it's jaws and sliced it off to topple it's upper half onto a number of smaller Heartless behind it. The water whip kept going through the massed Heartless too near Katara, cleaving bodies and severing limbs and breaking them in a single smooth strike. When it rolled back towards her, seperating into several bubbles that froze into spiky shields around her, the ground was littered with bits and pieces and still moving Heartless bodies, a few disembodying right there, most of them simply retreating as their bodies regenerated at once.

Katara frowned. She wasn't about to be having with any of that nonsense. She extended her arm out, the ice around her rippling in response and thrust it back in and out again; all the ice liquified instantly and rushed down in a mighty wave that arced over Katara's head and smashed into the healing Heartless with such force that their bodies were pulverized, lumps of foul goo that evaporated from the world and still dripping from the wave as Katara pulled it back around her, whipping it around fast enough to cast off all the remnants of the Heartless' tainted innards until the water was pristine again.

Katara changed her stance and took a half-step back, pulling the water back around her again and again, condensing and concentrating it, and she spun it around herself into a twenty-foot-high pillar of churning water around her, controlled with such precision that she was untouched by so much as a stray drop, and large icicles burst from it to impale Heartless at considerable distances.

A small pack of large Heartless approached, the biggest of them was easily the same size as Appa, an enormous thing like a slug covered in chitinous plates and pulling itself along by gelatinous tendrils the size of a man. Katara let them come at her, smashing a considerable part of her water supply out of the swirling funnel and onto a number of low-flying monsters. The big ones took their chance, falsely believing her to be giving them an opening. They were sadly mistaken, the moments they came into range, Katara moved the water she had thrown right back her way, and it struck the slug-like Heartless so hard that it's shell cracked and it stumbled, falling right on it's cohorts. Katara called the water back to her, and just as the Heartless recovered, she pulled all of it under herself and back up again, carrying herself up into the air. She glared down at them, standing atop a furiously raging tornado made of water, and pushed one hand out in a movement strikingly like an Airbending move; a considerable amount of her water supply burst out in a thick blast of bone-freezing mist and washed over the Heartless pack except for the slug-thing, hardening with a loud crunching noise; she called back the mist, and all that was left of them were a few fading globs of fleshy shadows and strikingly realistic ice sculptures that had froze around their bodies...except with those blades pointing inward, still slick with bloodlike ichor. The slug-like thing finally pulled itself up, curling into a ball and rolling at her with surprising speed and force, cracking the ground as it bounced along, little shockwaves tearing up the street in it's wake...

Until it rode over a part of the street that was still wet from Katara's Waterbending moves. She pulled up and froze that water into incredibly dense spikes, and the slug-thing rode right into them and slipped off-course, not actually hurt but losing all it's traction. Katara called forth a massive tendril of water and slapped it right into the flailing slug-thing without stopping it, instead grasping it tight and partially freezing over it for an assured grip and guding it's path upwards. Katara let it go up as high as she could manage, letting it's momentum spell it's own doom as her entire watery construct stretching to it's limits...and then abruptly bending in such a way that the hapless Heartless was smashed into the ground with a sickening crunch.

"Not bad," Calvin commented, watching Katara slaughter the Heartless with much gusto. "Bet I could do better with the right Wonder, though. Speaking of which..." He started fishing through his belt compartments, finding various things and fitting them together.

"Wonder?" Courtney commented. "Isn't that what mad scientists call the stuff they make?"

"Some, yeah," Calvin said. His hands were well-practiced and amazingly fast; he soon had a bulky bracer-like object, brimming with pistons and shallow grooves and vents and more, resembling the basic design of his pyrokinetic glove-thing. It was an appropiate notion; he was strapping it around his arm and that very glove, seeming to hook the glove into it with a few hissing clicks like they were two parts of the same machine. Probably they were. He fiddled with it a bit more, yellow and red energies flickering on the numerous gauges on the thing, plugging a pair of small tubes filled with a strange fiery fluid (actually phlogiston, a fluid form of heat, and it was anyone's guess how that worked) into the appropiate sockets and once they were connected, the device hummed pleasantly for a brief moment. He attached a few other odds and ends, mostly serving to hook the glove into the apparatus now on his arm; a few cables that hooked into concealed ports on the gauntlet, a narrow and sqaut dial and guage that fit over the wrist and covered much of the back of his hand...

Calvin calibrated it, grinding the dial and priming something, and eventually stepped forward, embers crackling around the completed device on his arm. "Okay. BEHOLD THE POWER OF MY SCIENCE!"

Courtney blinked, instinct compelling her to stand well back. "What's he talking abou-"

Calvin twisted the dial further and extended his arm towards the massed Heartless (and aiming away from any of the fighters); a burning shape appeared over his arm, perfectly identical to the device on it but much bigger, growing even larger until it reached optimum mass and fired itself as a spiraling fire-beam at a small group of Heartless with a sound like zakka! and a blast of fire that briefly ignited the entire dome; the Heartless thus struck (the ones that weren't blown to burning chunks of goo, of course) ran around while on fire, so Calvin squeezed his fist in a firm gesture, pulling a thin lever and several prongs sprang out, a golden field shimmering around him for a moment and ramping up the local geomancy's sensitivity to fire; all the fires in the area erupted into extremely brief but destructive infernos, utterly consuming the Heartless he'd struck. "HAH!" Calvin yelled excitedly, firing more lasers. "BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!" Each word punctuated another laser-blast and resulting explosion, and while he wasn't making any massive fire-blasts owing to the concentration required to maintain that effect, they were certainly much bigger than any fire-attacks he'd made before. Additionally, either it was a residual effect of his messing with the geomancy or just the activation of the complete flame-making Wonder, but all the fires created on the battlefield were far more intense then they should naturally be.

This was not entirely a good thing. "Uaagh!" Abel screamed as his overclocked flamethrowers exploded, knocking down the Mall Crawlers that had huddled around him and setting the nearby Heartless (and Sokka, who'd been too close) on fire; Abel went rocketing up and back down with a terrific bang, propelled directly into a pack of oppertunistic Heartless. A few seconds later after they ran away because of him walking right up to the meanest-looking one and pulling it's head off without any apparent effort, Abel dusted himself off and feeling grumpy.

Sokka was not doing much better. "I hate magic I hate magic I HATE MAGIC!" He screamed, dropping and rolling to extinguish the fire on his clothes and getting scared because nothing he did would make it stop. Fortunately, Zuko had the presence of mind to turn his fire-propelled jump (it had been a ordinary fire-shooting kick but Calvin's unwary actions had made it otherwise) into a means of shooting himself in Sokka's direction. He smashed right through a malformed bundle of Shadows (who were surprised but otherwise unharmed when Zuko smashed through them and made a big hole) and flipped in mid-air, kicking off of a Soldier and smashing it's head in, grabbing an Air Soldier by the feet and breathing fire that melted it's wings off so he could grab them and slow his descent just enough to land on Sokka. "Hey!" Sokka said.

"Hang on a minute!" Zuko said, making a quick movement and Firebending the fire right out of existence; it went out as if snuffed by a wind, leaving Sokka's clothes scorched but otherwise unharmed. (In Traverse Town, they made their outfits tough.)

"Okay, I still hate magic but Firebending's all right with me," Sokka amended, mollified. He glanced up. "Uh, Zuko?"

"Yeah?" Zuko said.

"Good thing you showed up just now, apart from the 'me on fire' thing. Which, now that I think about it, is weird that that never happened when you were still a bad guy-"

"Your point?" The Firebender said gruffly.

Sokka pointed. Zuko turned around and saw that they were completely surronded by Heartless, at least half of them fire-controlling Red Nocturnes. "We're kind of surronded. Espicially by ones that eat fire!"

"...Crap," Zuko said as the Red Nocturnes swelled up to three times their original size, now bigger than Zuko and Sokka, and there was a lot of them. "Still, I know one thing for sure."

Sokka grinned as he readied his sword. "What's that?"

"We can take them."

"You're on!"

The Heartless attacked, a small pack of Soldiers that had sprouted mouth-studded tentacles flailing furiously at Sokka; he and Zuko seperated, Sokka ducking as Zuko kicked up a blast of fire at the Soldiers, intense enough to knock them over. The Water Tribe warrior was on them in a flash, sword flashing as it cut through a lashing tentacle with only a slight bit of resistance. Sokka grabbed the loose half of it, grasping just above the ichor-spewing stump, and he lashed it at it's former owner, the stolen whip wrapping around the Soldier's throat so hard it almost decapitated it, and the perpetually hungry mouths on it chewed the rest of the way. Sokka cut it's body in half just in case that wasn't enough to kill it and climbed up the rapidly dissolved mass, jumping up with a fierce yell and impaling his sword right in the head of the nearest Soldier. The other two in the pack rushed at Sokka while the one he had impaled thrashed around, wildly trying to hit something with it's tentacles.

Sokka moved his legs out of the way of one such lash and stomped hard on the next one, stumbling away with a grunt and tearing his sword out, nearly bisecting the Soldier. It fell over it's own tentacles, falling right into one of the charging Soldiers, and Sokka kicked a flailing tentacle into the path of the other one. They all stumbled together, and before they could do more than claw at each other in a desperate gambit to get back up, Sokka was upon them, the meteoric iron of Space Sword slicing through them like they were bags of goo. He wiped some splattered black slime and sweat from his face. "Were they this weak last night?" He muttered to himself. "I remember them being tougher." His hand gripped his sword tighter and he glared at the amassed Heartless with renewed venom; oh yes, he remembered exactly what they had done.

The entire mass of Heartless surronding him and Zuko attacked at once, rushing over on him like a tidal wave. Sokka was a lot quicker than they expected, ducking claw swings and fire blasts with equally great agility. "This takes me back to my childhood, and not in a good way!" He commented as he narrowly ducked a blast of fire, sidestepping under a large spike-beast and stabbing the Red Nocturne that had tried to blast him, kicking it right behind him and making a sizable explosion when it rammed into the spike-beast that Sokka used to dive under some rubble. The nearby Heartless paused, wondering where he had gone, just as Sokka impaled a Soldier from behind, slicing off it's arm and stabbing it into the face of a Red Nocturne and turning it around so that the resultant blast of blind fire burned the Heartless in it's way badly enough so that Sokka was able to dispatch them (and the Nocturne) with minimal effort. "Aside from a lack of diatribes about elemental superiority and vaguely supremecist talk from the enemy. And our own guys, I guess..."

"I said I was sorry about that!" Zuko said, sweeping a Soldier off it's feet with a kick and grabbing it by the wrist in mid-air, throwing it into the face of a much larger Heartless that looked like it was made of lumps of meat and goo around a humanoid skeleton. Stunning it, Zuko climbed onto one of it's overlong arms while it was distracted, the muscular limb bigger than he was and well-able to support his weight, his every contact with it leaving burning marks. It didn't miss him and tried to pull him off, probably to tear him in two, but Zuko was every bit as agile as the fire he Bended and kicked off in time, grabbing one of the large but blunt spines on it's back and hauling himself up, climbing over it's malformed muscles and breathing clouds of fire on it's neck before he wrapped his strong arms around the thinnest part of it's neck; right below it's doglike head and just wide enough for Zuko to lock his arms around it. Fire screamed up around Zuko like the mantle of a war-emperor, biting into the darkness of the Heartless and consuming it, it's body shrinking slightly as Zuko squeezed and twisted it's neck as hard as he could, muscles standing rigid on his arms. The Heartless panicked and stretched it's arms over it's head, trying with all it's might to wrench Zuko off even as it's head started to turn out of place and it's spine wrench nearer and nearer out of place...but it's muscles were just too big to allow it's arms to reach back that far, it's claws dangling within inches of Zuko. Still the Heartless reached, growing closer and closer to Zuko's head, the Firebender seemingly too focused on his task, and the claws came within touching distance of his face...

Zuko turned his head up with a glare, proving that he was not as distracted as he looked, and even as he kept twisting the monster's neck, he breathed a blast of fire that blasted it's claws out of the way. The Heartless recoiled in pain, it's tense muscles relaxing, a fatal mistake; the only thing preventing Zuko from suceeding was the Heartless' own strength, and Zuko hissed in breath, fire streaming alongside his arms as the Heartless' neck finally gave way with a sickening crack, his burning arms melting right through it's neck and slicing it's head away to land on it's foot. Amazingly still functional, the headless Heartless stumbled over it's own head, lurching towards the ground. Zuko jumped off before it fell, gathering the fire from his arms, breathing greater power into it, and shooting it as a dense arrow directly into the center of the beast, burying deep until it exploded, tearing it apart in a mighty conflagration that Zuko slammed right into, a ring of fire expanding at his impact and striking down some sword-armed Heartless that had been drawing near. That wasn't enough to kill them, so Zuko projecting the fire around him in powerful bolts that melted right through them, and that certainly killed them.

Unfortunately, the Red Nocturnes chose this moment to start attacking in earnest, hovering towards him and projecting streams of fire. "I'm starting to remember why nobody likes Firebending anymore!" Zuko said, slapping away embers big enough to be fireballs before he brought his hands together and slammed them into a stream of fire, diverting it past him. He grunted in his dismay; the Red Nocturnes poured on the heat, and were actually pushing him back, the fire at his hands piercing through the gaps in his hold. With a indignant snarl, he wrested control of the stream and tore it loose from the Red Nocturnes, knocking them silly from the disorientation of it. Too angry to think straight, Zuko spun it over his head, sprayed it out at his side, and with a open-palmed thrust of his arm, spewed it right back at the closest of the Red Nocturnes, hitting in dead-on. This didn't matter a great deal, as the Red Nocturne just absorbed it, swelling up and up.

"They EAT FIRE, YOU LUNATIC!" Sokka yelled, while giving a helpless wolf-like Heartless a vicious noogie. "STOP FEEDING THEM!"

"What?" Zuko said as, with a spray of embers, the last of the fire disappeared into the great engorged Red Nocturne, now severely bloated and somewhere around the size of a small car and bleeding fire everywhere. On the other hand, it didn't look like it was going to be attacking any time soon; it bobbled up and down almost like it was drunk, weakly trying to force itself back up. "...Huh." Curious, Zuko pointed his finger and shot out a pencil-thin flaming ray to see what would happen. It sizzled right into the overstuffed Red Nocturne, which flailed around with alarm while the other Red Nocturnes fled, and then it exploded in a massive blast that knocked the other Heartless silly (but not Zuko or Sokka; Zuko diverted it with trivial ease, and Sokka was far too used to fireblasts to be blind-sided by that).

"...Okay, cool," Sokka said, standing up from the piece of rubble he had dove behind when the Nocturne exploded. "They explode when you feed them too much fire."

"Yes...they do..." Zuko agreed thoughtfully. They looked at each other and then grinned at the Red Nocturnes in a way that made the fire-themed Heartless edge away with something almost like alarm.

For those Heartless, the rest of the day was very brief and exceptionally unpleasant.

Elsewhere inside the dome...

"WHEE!" Zim shouted as he slammed into the back of an overlarge Air Soldier that, on closer inspection, prove to be several Air Soldier fused into a trembling monstrosity with too many arms, not enough legs and sixteen pairs of wings. Also, tentacles. (For some reason, the mutating Heartless really had a thing for tentacles.) He hoisted the Keyblade up overhead as it generated an enormous amount of light to burn the Heartless on it's own, and he almost fell over when it suddenly grew larger for no apparent reason, forcing Zim to hold a weapon so large that the hilt alone was as long as he was tall. Grunting with the effort of balancing a weapon so big (but not, curiously, with the effort of holding up such a weapon) he stepped back, the heaving lumps of flesh under his feet tripping him; much quicker on the take than people gave him credit for, Zim stabbed the Keyblade down into the composite Air Soldier's body, the tightly packed shadow-flesh shuddering like thick liquid as the holy weapon bit deep. There was a glimmer of bright light from the weapon, it's increased mass transforming into pure white radiance that the Heartless started to melt around. For a moment, the entire battlefield under Kimblee's reshaped structure was bathed in that light, every single Heartless there falling over in pain for just long enough for the fighters to kill scores of them without interruption...

The light flashed out, exploding in a large blast rippling through the entire chromatic spectrum several times over, instantly disintegrating dozens of the weaker Heartless from the sheer radiance alone and seriously hurting quite a few of the stronger Heartless outright. The rest were still stunned, though many of the least mutated recovered immediately; for some unknown reason, the ones that were closest to their usual shapes were the least harmed, while the more powerful and mutated ones erupted in small pillars of darkness.

Zim did not noticed, because he had the rather more pressing issue of falling to his doom from dozens of feet up. "Perhaps I should have thought this out a bit more," he said, Keyblade in hand and returned to it's original size. "Wait, Firebenders can fly, right? Or at least do that rocket kick thing. I've seen Zuko do it scores of times. Sure it can't be that hard. Also, I should probably stop talking to myself like this in the middle of falling to my death, it can't end well." He grunted, channeling energies to his feet and gasping with the effort of moving and amplifying his innner heat as evenly as possible to the heels of his shoes without burning them or himself...

Fire erupted from his feet, not burning him or setting his clothes on fire again. However, due to both Calvin's ill-timed messing around with the local geomancy and his own inexperience with Firebending, the fire immediately exploded in a rather spectacular fashion and flung him across the battlefield, the ground getting real close real fast-

Something black, thick and disturbingly gooey smacked into him. "What the-?" Zim started to say before he saw that it was a Heartless; he couldn't be sure what sort it was, because it's arms, legs and head were gone, severed as if by a blade (with crisped edges on the wounds) and it was already disintegrating. Zim didn't have long before it collapsed into murky goo and he fell right through...and then another Heartless smacked into him, briefly halting his fall, though this one looked like it's limbs and head had simply been torn off with tremendous strength. He fell through that one, and predictably another one hit him right away, and this one had been blasted almost totally apart. "Ow! Who keeps doing that!" Zim yelled as he fell through it.

Right as soon as he realized that perhaps gratitude should be called for since he was falling a lot less quickly now, he became aware that the black specks hurtling towards him at incredible velocity were all similarily maimed and dying Heartless coming right at him. "...What," Zim said flatly. Three struck him at once, and six hit those, and twelve more hit those, the numbers rapidly piling up, the constant continual contacts crushing confused Zim and they all fell together...for about sixteen seconds. The moment they hit the ground the Heartless burst apart and Zim rolled to his feet without any fuss, the fall cushioned by all the Heartless bodies. "Ow," Zim said, stumbling around a bit, aching all over. "Yes...I truly should have thought that through...and who did all that!"

"Hi," Hobbes said, sitting atop a pile of twitching Heartless. "You're still alive. My plan worked! Cool."

"That was you!" Zim said, outraged.

"Yes," Hobbes confirmed. "They helped too!" He added, pointing at two nearby allies: Cyborg and Scar.

"Hi," Cyborg said, waving at Zim inbetween scything through a large pack of Shadows, both his forearms transformed into glowing chainsaw blades of energy. Scar grunted in acknowledgement, busily finding new and exciting ways to get a Heartless to kill itself through creative applications of breaking limbs in certain ways.

"You're supposed to be on my side!" Zim yelled at Cyborg.

"I am!" Cyborg assured him. "One second, man, these little fleas are a pain in my gyro-gears." He took a half-step back, neatly allowing a Shadow to misaim it's leap at him, and brought one of his blades around in a blow that sliced it in half, both halves punching into other Shadows on the way, stunning them long enough for Cyborg to deliver an overhead swing with such force upon them that the energy of his weapons dispersed explosively, sending out a wave of energy that fried over a dozen Shadows, and those that remained pulled back in fright, their primeval fear of light overwhelming their hunger.

"Wait a minute, energy doesn't work that way!" Hobbes complained. A mighty Heartless shaped like a bear's skeleton crept up on him, it's claws raised up. Hobbes punched it in the face without turning around and popped it's head off. The Heartless stumbled off, looking for it's head. "...Or does it?"

"It does not," Scar said, putting his hands on the ground and transmuting a weapon from the ground; he pulled away a large staff with vicious-looking serrated blades at both edges, whipping it around him and dismembering Heartless with frightening speed and skill.

Cyborg brought his now energy-deficient blades up, now only a oddly shaped assemblege that had been directing the energy for his laser chainsaws, and transformed them back into arms. The Heartless that Hobbes had punched had found it's head and had returned, jaws open wide as it loomed over Cyborg (himself a pretty big guy). Cyborg grabbed it by the jaws, the metal of his hands not even scratched by it's teeth, and with a mighty yell and the grind of hydraulic muscles, he lifted it right over his head, the massive Heartless seeming to float there for a moment, and he pivoted around and swung it right into the Shadow Heartless around him, swinging it around and around, the tiny Shadows smacked flat onto it's back and forced there by gravitational forces, and he kept doing this into the air was clear (and a few random Heartless had been pulverized by their weaponized brethern), and he finally ended the poor beast's torment when he smashed it into the ground with a street-cracking impact, small shockwaves knocking a few people off their feet and quite a few gross noises as the Shadows burst under it. The bestial Heartless seemed to whimper, several nasty chunks of street protruding right through ichor-gushing holes in it's belly. "Open up!" Cyborg joked, firmly grasping it's jaws once more and kneeling as he applied superhuman leverage to it. The Heartless, perhaps sensing what Cyborg had in mind, snapped it's jaws shut with all it's strength, Cyborg's power just barely enough to keep it from chomping his hands and prying them just slightly open.

"Lousy monster that doesn't know when it's beat!" Cyborg snarled, steam hissing from vents in his exoskeletal plating as inner components strained to overheat. Bizarre muscles in the monster's jaws stood rigid with the effort of keeping it's jaws nearly shut, and Cyborg's own mechanisms made a bit of a racket as they whirred and grinded with the effort of augmenting his already impressive strength. But the contest didn't last long; slowly, inexorably, the Heartless' jaws slid open wider...wider...the infernal furnace of it's mysterious internal organs burning with a pestiliential glow becoming all the more apparent...and finally, there was a snapping noise and it's jaws swung open, hanging a little loosely since Cyborg had just broken it's jaw muscles. Grunting with effort, Cyborg slammed a foot into it's lower jaw, freeing one hand that he pulled back and transformed into a large and lethal-looking cannon that he stuck into the creature's throat.

The Heartless' eyes widened, as if it was saying 'eep!'.

Cyborg fired, and the monster's entire body south of it's neck just vaporized in a tremendous blast of sonic energy that shredded it's shadow-flesh to the very last scrap of corrosive goo, tearing it all apart in a cloud of darkness that was also vaporized by the sonic blast, the waves of sound crumpling the ground in a straight line for at least half a mile. (Quite a lot of Heartless were taken out in that attack.) "BOOYAH!" Cyborg shouted jubilantly, his cannon transformed back into a hand as he took his foot off the thing's jaw so that he could pick up both halves and lift the head into the air and tear them apart with little effort. "Heh, all that talk about how I've lost my edge working in the lab all the time are way off!"

Zim, sitting on a pile of squirming Heartless he had beaten off while Cyborg was being awesome, applauded vigorously. "That was AWESOME!" He said. "Do it again! Only with a bigger Heartless! And smash, like, fifty Heartless with each swing! And use two cannons! No, grow four more limbs and turn those into cannons! No! Combine them all into one super-cannon and BLAST DOWN THE WALL!"

"...That does sound like an intriguing idea," Scar said. He didn't look happy that he thought it; it sounded like something Abel would say.

"Eh, not with the stuff on me now," Cyborg said, shrugging.

Zim shrugged and Scar looked vaugely saddened. "Eh, worth a shot." He hopped off the pile of Heartless and blasted them with fire blast after fire blast until they exploded; he was a bit disappointed that his blasts were nowhere as effective as Zuko's own seemed to be. (He had been spying on the more experienced Firebender during the battle. He was creepy like that.)

"WHAT?" Hobbes yelled, having been driven temporarily deaf by the sonic cannon's noise, his incredibly acute sense of hearing working against him this time. "DID YOU GUYS SAY SOMETHING?"

"Whoops," Cyborg said when Zim wrenched the Keyblade out of the ground where he'd left it and snickered. "Sorry about that man. It'll wear off! Probably."

"WHAT WAS THAT?" Hobbes said again. Scar glared at Cyborg on Hobbes' behalf.

"Well, I should say we're doing quite well," Zim said, sounding pleased. "The overall Heartless numbers have been driven down by a considerable percent, none of us are dead or even seriously injured, and the big villain has yet to make an appearance. Maybe he got scared and gave up or commited ritual suicide with a rubber ducky and a piece of toast. THAT WOULD BE GREAT! And possibly a subject of some interest to the morbid crowd, yes?"

"We should be so lucky," Scar said darkly.

"You're a very weird little guy," Cyborg said to Zim. "Ya know that?"

"Yes," Zim said smugly. "Yes I do."

"WHAT WAS THAT?" Hobbes said. "...OH, ASLAN'S MANE, I'VE BEEN TEMPORARILY DEAFENED, HAVEN'T I? THIS SUCKS."

Zim frowned. "I do wish you would stop yelling like that."

"WHAT?" Hobbes looked slightly smug, this time.

"Okay, now you're doing that on purpose!" Zim paused. "Hey, where did Cyborg go?"

"I do not know," Scar said. "However, a number of Heartless approach."

"Okay," Zim said. "Let's kill them!"

"Very well." Scar and Zim went off to make those Heartless' lives very miserable.

He had, in fact, hidden behind a nearby dumpster shoved aside in the fighting so he could pull in some assistance. "Are you getting this?" He said, speaking into a communicator that had unfolded from his forearm, one of the older sound-limited ones. (He'd been meaning to upgrade to a visual telecommunicator for some time, but he'd been busy.) "Damn, I think there's some interference!"

A girl's voice answered him from the other end, amid a lot of thick static. "...Winry Rockbell...Hang on, just gotta..." There was a muffled noise like cannonfire. "...is that you Cyborg...Heartless are...swarming everywhere, been holding off the place since you left...messing with communications..."

"Winry!" Cyborg said, relieved to hear the voice of his sometime partner and landlord. "Thought you would have already blasted half of downtown by now!"

"Give me credit, I'm better than that!" Winry said, speaking in short clipped sentences so the static didn't hamper communication too much. "...Okay...so I shoot like Ed a little bit..."

"Winry, I gotta make this quick!" Cyborg said hurredly. "You remember that broadcast from a little bit ago?"

"Yeah, why?"

"I'm kinda sort in the middle of it. Right there, actually."

"Sorry...gotta be the static but thought...just said that you're right there where the Red Lotus Alchemist is!"

"Nope. I am. Funny, ain't it?"

Cyborg was glad that the static flared up just then; it cut off what sounded like a lot of well-chosen swear words from Winry. "Probably a good thing I didn't catch all that."

"...LOST YOUR MIND!" Winry yelled. "KIMBLEE IS...COMPLETE SOCIOPATH AND...ACTUAL PSYCHOANALYSIS! HE'S GOT A...PHILOSOPHER'S STONE...ANY IDEA WHAT HE CAN DO!"

"Not really!" Cyborg said cheerfully. "But he's a bad guy, doing bad stuff! He killed nearly everyone in Foster's to make that thing, and I hear there's a chance it can be reversed! If there's even the tiniest chance of making that happen, I'm gonna take that guy down myself even if it kills me!"

"Don't...joke about that, even like...gonna get killed one day, I hear the Truth is a total bastard that way..any ideas for what I do?"

"Remember that ship we got done double-time?" Cyborg said.

"The one for the new guy?"

"That's the one! I think we could use a test run for it!"

"...actually serious?"

"Yeah. Work with me on this!"

"...hang on, be there in a bit...gotta clear out the rest of the trash here!" There was a sound of increasingly louder blasts, followed by Winry yelling, "HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT YOU BASTARDS!"

"Hey!" Cyborg said.

"Not you, the Heartless!"

"Oh, I know. Just doesn't seem right, a nice girl like you cussing like that."

"Geez, loosen up a little. I'll be there as soon as I can!" Winry said, and the communicator cut off.

"That went better than I thought," Cyborg said. He frowned. "Hey, wait..." He looked up.

"Hi," Zim said, crouching on the lid of the dumpster and staring directly down at him. Scar was standing at Cyborg's side, as equally silent.

"...How much of that did you hear?" Cyborg asked.

Zim grinned. "Enough to get tremendously excited." Cyborg rolled his good eye. (He seemed fated to be surronded by hyper-excitable little green guys.)

"Your buddy's taking a while to get that wall down," Cyborg noted. "Think he's okay?"

"I am certain of it," Zim said confidently. "Well, I suppose something could be delaying them..."

"Perhaps," Scar said. He looked longingly at the wall for a moment, where Kimblee waited...and returned his attention to the Heartless.

This didn't escape Zim. "I had a thought," Zim remarked. "Perhaps it would be advisable for you to confront Kimblee here and now, before he can spring whatever ambush once the Heartless have worn us down?"

Scar looked at him with an expression that, on someone less jaded and broken down, might have been hope. "You are serious."

"Yes."

Scar said nothing for a moment, clearly struggling with his duty to his fellow refugees and his long-overdue vengeance. "...You may need my aid. I do not have the right to pursue selfish vengeance. Not now."

"Oh, go on and get him!" Zim said impatiently. "Remove his threat now before he pulls some other unexpected trick. That way, no one else will be hurt, and his threat will be removed." Scar still looked doubtful. "At the very least, you could slow him down and see what he wants. If it makes you feel better, you could not kill him right away unless it is unavoidable."

Scar considered it. "Perhaps..." He said heisitantly, clearly trying his hardest not to see this as running away from his duty.

Zim thought it was only appropiate for Scar to fight Kimblee first, if not outright defeat or kill him, and wasn't much concerned on the other technical issues there. "You promised that girl you would bring him down or something similar. At the very least, would it not be the most appropiate thing for you, an Ishbalan," (He hoped he pronounced the word right.) "To be the one that brings proper vengeance for what he has inflicted here?"

Scar glanced at Cyborg, clearly desiring another opinion. "Go for it, man," Cyborg said. "If there's anyone here that knows Kimblee and can stop him, it's you."

"He may well be distracted commanding these Heartless," Zim said. "If you face him now, they may lose cohesion and be easier for us to defeat!"

Scar's eyes widened slightly. Clearly, he had not considered that. His face set into a grim expression of resolution. "...Then I go for everyone else's means, and not my own," He said, and sounded satisfied. A measure of burden seemed to fall from him, and he looked at a nearby wall meaningfully. It would be easy enough to break through.

"Eh, don't bother rationalizing it," Zim said sternly. "Just do what you know to be right, and do it!"

"...As you insist," Scar said.

...

As expected, Zim and his allies were not the only ones caught in the turmoil of Kimblee's plotting, either.

All over the First District (and on those bordering it, as the Heartless swarms forced all available fighters to stem the tide), the Heartless were attacking in larger numbers then they ever had before; for every refugee willing to stand and fight, there were ten Heartless ready to tear them apart and feast on them; having grown stronger than usual due to the unprecented process they used to enter the world again stripping them of the usual forms they took on and mutating them into utterly nightmarish forms, the Heartless were more powerful than ever before. They had abandoned the efficiency of their usual varieties for greater swells of the oblivion-touched power that had corrupted or birthed them, and if that wasn't enough, their mere presence did something to the dimensional barriers already weakened in the town, and permitting more Heartless to slip into the world in the wake of their mutated brethern and share in their newfound strength, augmented even further by the power loaned to them by Kimblee and the Philosopher's Stone...for the power of that alchemical weapon was so great that it's mere presence was enough to make them strong.

Now, all over the district, these empowered Heartless smashed their way through in a bloody-minded rampage. With the scant warning Zim's ill-considered plan had given to the town, hurried teams of guards had emerged just in time to face down the Heartless and...slow them down. That's all that could be done; these Heartless were utterly unprecedented in the town's history, compelled by both their own destructive compulsions and the orders Kimblee had given them, urging them on to their destination: a small and normally unimportant news studio. The people who tried to fight the Heartless knew that they might well being going to their deaths, and went anyway. It was the proper thing to do, and they did have some sense of confidence; they knew the town's layout far better, they had superior weaponry and defenses, and they knew their foes.

It seemed misplaced confidence; the Heartless tore through everything in their path, assimilating inanimate matter into their own bodies to increase their killing potential and flattening buildings that weren't strong enough to withstand their assaults. When they encountered people fit to oppose them, they charged right through them; these teams were too confused and surprised to put up as much a fight as they could have, but they held their ground regardless. Inevitably, they were only barricades holding back the flood that was the Heartless...but they still held them back as long as they could, and managed to survive the experience, and that was admirable enough, and even bought time for reinforcements to arrive there.

Unfortunate, though, that the bulk of the Heartless that hadn't already been slain had simply charged off at their distant objective, leaving only stragglers to be struck down. The flood was coming, aimed straight at that little news studio, and the reinforcements didn't know that this was were the Heartless were headed.

Too much was happening, and too quickly. If there was more time to prepare, it would have been a different story, but the confusion of the events prevented an immediate response from almost anyone in a position to do something large-scale. (And that was quite apart from the extremely brief and scattered reports of something blasting it's way from the Council of Insert Nomenclature's base of operations in the First District, but unfortunately that particular threat had beem very thorough about eliminating bystanders.)

All in all, it was not a good situation for someone totally unprepared or not in a position of power to deal with it, and Stewie Griffin was was both, espicially since he had gone to Foster's to meet up with his erstwhile warden Jarod, only to find the man missing and the devastation of the place terrible enough to make him envious. (He was a supervillain, and not a very moral one either.)

And, just as he hadn't been confused enough and wondering whether this was a good time to finally make his escape (what if Jarod came BACK, though?), that unexpected broadcast had played, telling Stewie all he needed to know about the current situation, as well as suggest that those people he had helped find last night were even more insane than they'd seem if they were willing to fight a madman like this Kimblee fellow. Ah, and there had been the sudden outbreak of a veritable onslaught of Heartless that he had been quite unequipped to deal with. (At least until he had hit one of his various safehouses hidden throughout the town. And to think that so many of his malicious associates considered them to be a paranoid waste of resources.)

So he'd hit the streets himself, wearing a suit of mechanized armor suitable for his dimensions and preferences, not helping in the fight himself but simply keeping himself alive and trying to determine if Jarod was alive or not; Kimblee's last known location had been Foster's, as Jarod's, and Stewie privately hoped that Jarod had died or least been incapaciated. In the meantime, he was focused on finding information and staying alive, two fairly problematic situations given the Heartless swarming everywhere.

"Be off with you!" He snarled, a fairly ludicrous sight in his fairly squat four-foot-tall powered armor suit made in the Raygun Gothic fashion (a fairly retro aesthetic of mad science in the old pulp fiction sci-fi fashion with a brutalistic twist; smooth curved surfaces dominated by bits of artfully exposed machinery) powered armor, equipped with four overlarge double-jointed limbs with morphing capabilities, transforming into firearms, power claws, electric whips, tendrils and whatever else he deemed useful for the moment. They were heavy enough to have him assume a simian stance to compensate, perhaps the reason he was mainly moving by either the jets on his massive boots or point-blank expulsions of his personal force field. With it's brass-colored metal body, the alien-like shape of the armor and the grim face, it would have looked more intimidating if not for the egg-shaped upper body. He punched an in-coming Soldier in the face, not even remotely hurting it but knocking it off the rooftop they were fighting on and plowing through a score of it's fellows, all falling to the ground.

"Well, come on then!" He challenged to a number of other Heartless of varying types, now hunkering at the edge of the rooftop. "I assure you I can destroy you all with ease!" To prove it, his arms morphed into rocket-propelled grenade launchers that fired scores of ballistics into their teeming ranks and the Heartless were pushed back in clouds of fire.

Unfortunately, it also caved the sight of the (fortunately evacuated) building, and Stewie fired his jetboots and flew off before it could tumble around him. "That was far too close! Blast it all, I specifically designed this contraption to fight monstrous hordes like this, why in all reason is it not mowing them down appropiately!" And, though he loathed to even think of it, the monsters he was battling looked wrong. There was far greater individual variance than he was accustomed to seeing in the Heartless, their usual castes degenerating into nightmarish forms. He thought he had even seen some mutating from moment to moment, abandong and adopting shapes like shadows cast by a ever-moving figure, and he shivered, briefly feeling like the child he appeared to be.

A massive burst of flame snapped him out of it from several streets over; a tremendous pyrotechnical roar, arcing high above the buildings as dozens of Heartless were launched up, burning and gone in moments. There was another, so bright it hurt to look at it, and as a massive Heartless that looked to have inhabited a disused truck and rearranged it's form leaped to that street, there was yet another fire blast that struck it in mid-air, and that Heartless fell to earth, burning and quickly disintegrating. It didn't hit the ground; an enormous green laser surged out from that street, vaporizing that Heartless in midair.

"Well now!" Stewie said, pleased and not as well-informed on the local residents as he should have been. "A number of pleasingly puissant personages have taken to the fight? Excellent, I can hide among their number as a simple engineer of tiny stature until I can make a run for it!" Most unfortunately, his airship had been left outside of town, and he was away from the instruments he required to control it remotely as he had the night before. He made a mental note to rectify that as he turned towards the street in question, jets accelerating and finding it in moments.

When he got there, he beheld an unusual sight, and if he had actually been aware of who all of them were he would probably have made smarter choices than he did. The street was running rampant with Heartless; they were coming from the front of the street, they were coming from the back of it, and they were doing the same from all of the alleyways and out of the sky above, melting in the sunlight though they were, so hungry and bloodthirsty that their own impending doom did not concern them a whit. They were even coming from underground, cracking and breaking themselves apart in their frenzy as they shoved themselves through too-small cracks in the ground and reforming in the midst of battle.

And here, on this street that ran so thick with Heartless that he could have ran across their heads and never touched the street itself, there were but five combatants to stem the tide and doing a fine job of it. It was hard to tell, but the ones in charge seemed to be two men in uniforms so tattered from the Heartless' constant barrage of attacks that Stewie couldn't tell what regiment they were, one having torn his sleeves away and his arms swelled into a multitude of miniguns and energy rifles and grenade launchers and more combined into uneven mixtures of every firearm known to mankind across the worlds, each shot taking out scores of the Heartless (not that it mattered much; dozens replaced each fallen monster) and not a single projectile ever missing a Heartless or hitting collateral damage. The other man was a pyrokinetic of enormous power, summoning massive bursts of flame that cut down the darklings with astonishing effectiveness; as Stewie watched, he snapped out his fingers and huge streamers of flame flew through the street ahead of him, neatly avoiding everything except the Heartless and burning their legs away and dropping them face-first in to the fires, killing them instantly. But there were still so many of them..

Scattered throughout the street and totally unharmed by the chaos the first two unleashed were three others: the first of them was a man-thing covered in a shell made of black diamond (or so Stewie assumed) that smashed into his foes with all the ferocity of a monster, tearing off limbs and beating Heartless to death with them before resorting to even more upfront brutality; all their attacks did nothing to him, all their claws and strikes couldn't so much as scratch his armor, all their wall-pulverizing blows couldn't even stun him and all the energy attacks they could muster bounced off; he didn't even slow down and tore into the offending targets, an immovable object when still and a unstoppable force when he started moving.

And then there was an even odder pair; a man wearing a full-body red outfit and striking impossibly fast with his paired katanas, slicing Heartless to pieces, wading right into their teeming masses and attacking, bouncing from monster to monster with a single attack each, slaying dozens in his acrobatics. The other was a woman in green, radiating green energies that she cast with reckless abandon, vaporizing the shadow-fiends and lacking the raw power of the pyrokinetic but overcoming him in recklessness. Unlike the others, who fared well enough on their own, these two were fighting side-by-side, or more accurately, back-to-back, keeping their backs to each other as much as they were able, minimizing their weaknesses and dealing violence to every enemy that they saw...and this way, they saw quite a lot.

Stewie was never one to deny a good idea and thought he saw a brilliant plot right here, ready to be used, and allies of convienience to be discarded to the Heartless if need be. He dove down right into the middle of the fight, intending to insinuate him into this band and manipuate them into helping him just long enough; he came down with his force field activated, the egg-shaped frame of his armor turning it into a drill-like form, and the combination of that and his momentum allowed him to crash right through the chest of one of the stone-bodied hulks lumbering over the pyrokinetic, landing with sufficient force to make a small dent in the ground. Dazed, but unharmed, he pulled himself out of the ground with some effort and staggered up, his on-board Head's-Up Display informing him that the others were looking at him; mildly surprised, and in a few cases looking at him with familiarity. Unfortunately, his (very incomplete) on-board database didn't have any information on them, so he was unable to verify if any familiarity with them was good or bad.

He decided it was unimportant. "Yes, yes, can we hold up with the usual familiarities?" Stewie said, trying to sound as heroic as he could. It wasn't very easy, but he enjoyed such roleplaying. (Jarod loved tabletop roleplaying games and made him play some as a empathy exercise; Stewie thought he was a bad influence because it was starting to work.) "We've monsters to slay and such." He turned around, his limbs morphing into an assortment of grenade-launchers, and fired them directly at the stony hulk he had just drilled through; they punched into it's exposing insides and exploded, tearing it's body apart completely. Unable to maintain itself any longer, the Heartless essence animating it drifted away in plumes of blackness that burned away in the sunlight; dead or simply banished, none of them could say. Stewie thought it was a shame; it would be interesting to use the Heartless to his own purposes, but the secret to it eluded him.

"Well!" Stewie said, now having a great deal of fun being as hammy as he could. "A touch on the dire side, and a trifle close to the cut, but I think my arrival was most fortituious, yes?"

"Uh..." The pyrokinetic in blue said, frowning at him thoughtfully. "Well, I won't say we weren't having a hard time of it. Way too many of these monsters to fight alone, but you're lucky you caught us after we trimmed their ranks down."

"'Trimmed'?" The woman in green repeated. "Was that before or after they almost tore us apart and ate our bones?" She gestured at the destruction outlying the area. The pyrokinetic glared at her. "Hey, just asking." She stopped, staring at Stewie with a look of intent familiarity. Stewie thought he knew her from somewhere, but couldn't place her. (He knew a lot of green people with superpowers.)

The man she addressed grunted, and then looked down at Stewie, who was a bit discomfited to see that grafted pieces of synthetic skin had peeled away from one side of his face in the heat of battle, revealing a nasty mess of scars around what looked like a normal eye but was probably cybernetic with a contact built in. "...Do I know you from somewhere? Your armor looks familiar."

"What? No, of course not!" Stewie was thinking fast though, and he noticed the white gloves and the odd markings on them. "I must say...do I know you? I don't believe we've met."

"Roy Mustang, the Flame Alchemist." The man with the nasty scars - or rather, Roy - stuck a thumb at the others. "Field-Admiral Gibbs, the homunculus Greed and his bodyguards Shego and Deadpool are helping me with the Foster's incident and bringing in the man responsible for it."

"..Ah, I have wound up amongst the authorities," Stewie said, and he was screaming on the inside. It was mostly because of all the people that he, a wanted criminal, could have possibly run into, it had been one of the most powerful people in positions of authority in the entire town. "Then...I suppose you don't need any reinforcements, then..." He carefully began to edge away.

"Are you crazy?" Roy said, snapping his fingers out with a flourish and igniting a flame that rippled through his half of a street in such a way that it disintegrated a score of Heartless, only to be replaced by twice that number. "We need all the manpower we can use! Half my men aren't even in town right now, and the other half that isn't already tied up in dealing with incidents are still en route! Most likely they're already curtailing Heartless encursions besides here!"

"Oh. Stupendous." Calm down now, Stewie told himself. This is indeed a bad situation, but consider the positives! They are far too concerned with battle to pay you much attention, and anyway none of them know who you are-

"Hey! I know you!" Shego yelled, pointing a glowing fist at him. "You're that crazy midget who stiffed me and the Doc when we did a job for you six and a half months ago! You owe me money!"

"Who is he?" Gibbs asked her sharply.

"That midget in the squatty armor, Stewie Griffin. Nearly famous small-time megalomaniac and wannabe supervillain? He had me and the Doc pull off a heist on some off-world company that wouldn't deal him any. 'Thugs-4-Less', I think."

"I'LL HAVE YOU KNOW THAT I AM NO 'WANNABE!" Stewie shouted. "I AM A FAR STEP ABOVE THE REST OF THESE MEGALOMANIACAL CROOKS, SWINDLERS AND SMALL-TIMERS!" Everyone stared at him. Even the Heartless. "Erm...that is what I would say, if I were Stewie Griffin, devilishly handome rogue that he is. But I'm not. Most certainly not!"

"But you're wearing his goofy armor," Shego said. "Sound like him, too."

"Oh? Erm..." Blast, I knew I should have invested in different models! Why must I always be so fiendishly singular in my appearances! "That's...because I am, in fact, his armor come to life! Yes, a stray lightning bolt hit me and I acquired sentience. Yes, that's it."

"I can hear someone moving inside you," Roy said.

"...I keep housecats inside myself. It's the humanitarian thing to do, yes?" They stared at him, clearly not buying a word of it. Drat, I need a distraction! Stewie pointed wildly and said, "Oh, look at that! The Heartless are swarming en masse!"

"Huh?" Roy looked around, justifiably alarmed to see the Heartless rushing at them, packed so tightly together that they were actually merging together, joining up into a larger thing. (It was really disgusting to see, too.) "Oh, damn."

"Eh?" Stewie said, looking around. "There really are more Heartless there? Double drat!"

Fortunately, just then, the top part of the nearby building slid off, as though cut invisibly, and slammed right onto the Heartless mass, crushing it flat and sinking into the street a bit. It wiggled a bit, black tendrils extending out through the cracks, jaws opening every few inches and snapping madly. "Oh, just die already!" A woman's voice yelled, and Stewie looked up just in time to see an amazonian woman jump from the horizontally bisected building, leaping dozens of feet in the air and radiating an intense light before dropping down with such immense speed that an instant later, the weaponized architecture on the ground smashed apart with a mighty flash of light, inducing many to cover their eyes protectively. When they dared to open them again, there was a big dent in the street, pieces of building were lying around everywhere, and standing in the scorched center of it all was the giant Crossguard representative to the Council of Insert Nomenclature, the cleric Angilaka. Stumbling a bit after her feat, she bulldozed through the Heartless in her way and accidentally slipped, nearly running over Roy. As it was, he neatly sidestepped her and glanced down as her considerable bulk smashed into the ground. She grinned sheepishly from the ground and stood up, saying, "Hey. Heard you had some trouble here and thought I'd drop in." She grimaced, rubbing her back. "Didn't think it'd be that literal..."

"Hey, reinforcements," Shego said. "Cool."

"Yeah, sure, pretty awesome and stuff, can we focus on me?" Greed said, having got a particularly large Soldier into a headlock; it was still doing it's best to chew his head off and just hurting itself. "Help? NOW?"

"What are you doing here?" Roy asked Angilaka while Deadpool tended to his boss. "I thought you were working crowd control! I had things here under control here, you know." Angilaka raised an eyebrow at the teeming Heartless. "Okay. Mostly under control. Sort of under control. It was going well...look, it was being contained very gradually."

"Uh huh," Angilaka said. "Geez. What's with guys and posturing?"

"It makes us feel like MEN!" Deadpool shouted. "MANLY MEN. Which is really not easy when we got giant girls like you running around, dwarfing us just by being there and having nice legs bigger than I am and making us feel all small and weak and in desperate need of hooded jackets." She stared at him, nonplussed. "Your hair is shedding everywhere. Seriously, it's annoying. Go get a hairnet!"

"If I kicked him into the stratosphere, would that count as a diplomatic incident?" She asked Roy.

"Probably," Roy said. She scuffed the ground with her boot sadly. Roy incinerated a Heartless about to bite his head off without even looking and asked her, "What are you doing here again? Without the upstaging me parts."

"Oh, yeah. I just got a team together when I saw that kickass broadcast; I'd heard you'd come down here to investigate the Foster's incident so I figured you'd wind up being at the epicenter and would need some help, and here you are! Worked out pretty nice, yeah?"

"Yes," Roy said wearily. "But it's worse than you thought. We found Kimblee, the man behind all this insanity, only some lunatics called him out on TV and he's going right to them!"

"Oh, right. Best to get my team down here then." She tilted her head up. "OY, GUYS! GET DOWN HERE AND START DOING SOME AWESOME!" Everyone stared at her. "What? It sounded good when I brought it up at the last tabletop RPG game-night..."

"Wait, that's your battlecry?" Deadpool said. "Seriously? Weak."

Two figures leaped from behind the buildings and slammed into the greatest concentrations of Heartless, scattering them before moving onto the assault. "Face me! Face the wrath of the Crossguard! Bring yourselves, spawn of corruption and despair, and die die DIE!" Yelled the first of them, a man-sized robot named The Most Equitable and Firmest Merciful Resolution (at least until recently, when he got tired of people complaining about his name, so he'd legally changed it to Pants-Man Audrey in the mistaken belief it made him more personable), his metamorphic nano-colony body's current configuration humanoid enough to comfortably wear the vestments of an human initiate of the Crossguard, including a pair of garishly ostentatious pants that were the bastard crossbreed of cargo pants, parachute pants, bell-bottoms, bib overalls and probably a small circus tent. His arms were spread out, and emerging from his billowing sleeves was a startling array of firearms; the long glass-paneled barrels of plasma rifles, a set of flamethrowers to the sides and in the middle of the plasma rifles were rapid-fire rocket-propelled-grenade launchers. (Gibbs felt vaugely ripped-off.) He fired again and again, bolts of green plasma blowing massive holes in the Heartless before him, clawed limbs and killing blade-arms flying into the air and disintegrating in the sunlight.

The flamethrowers ignited, and twin streams of brick-scorching fire melted right through the Heartless, burning them not just with fire but with the solid core of faith that Audrey held in his mechanical heart, a faith that pulled in the Heartless in it's light and turned his weapons into purifying expressions of righteous vengeance. (Also, he had awesome pants.) With those flames, he herded dozens of Heartless into tight packs, forcing them to gather up lest they be incinerated with fire. This was a bad move for them; his next move was to power up the grenade launchers and fire in volleys, one after another, until the time-delayed missles erupted not in explosions but in holy water that splashed onto the Heartless and melted them (possibly because he believed it would) and he had aimed them with such perfect skill that not a single bit of shrapnel came even close to hurting anyone else. He appeared to smirk somehow, a sudden wind blowing back his coat...and rustling his pants, which produced a series of cheerful clinging noises thanks to all the bells, zippers, dogtags, collectible antannae ornaments and various tacky stuff he'd put on. "Thus perish the enemies of us all." A pigeon, passing through and perhaps mistaking him for a statue, landed on his head and sat there. "Get off my head!" The pigeon refused to move. He sighed, for though he did not need to breath, all members of the rational species find some point in their lives where they just have to sigh, and having a totally badass moment ruined by random pidgeons is one of them. "At least my pants are unharmed." Another pidgeon sat on his boot and pecked inquiringly at his pants, and found several firearms being pointed at it. "DON'T. TOUCH. THE. PANTS." Wisely, the pidgeon flew away.

"Hooray!" Deadpool said. "Reinforcements and stuff. Which means...THEY'RE STEALING OUR THUNDER! DAMN IT! Well, except her." He pointed at the other figure, who waved sheepishly back: a short sweet-looking young woman with a body type that put one in mind of a healthy pear, her face set in a pleasant expression of persistent good-naturedness, and wore a pair of large glasses, the belted-up longcoat and armored clothing that was the uniform of a knight of the Crossguard, her brown hair done up in a high ponytail. About the only thing about her that looked vaugely threatening was a very large mechanism of uncertain purpose she was wearing on her back and extended onto her arms and legs as a potent exoskeletal rig to enhance her strength. Such rigs were a was a popular means of empowering baseline initiates and reserve fighters in recent times, when not used for construction purposes.

The Heartless stared at her. She looked as meek as a anemic kitten that had overdosed on some sort of mood suppressent, and about as threatening. "Um, hi," She said to Roy and the others. "My name's Beth. I was, um, on TV once?" She turned to the Heartless and added, "Stop looking at me like that! I'm a mighty and fearsome member of the Crossguard! I'm totally a knight and everything! I think, our naming system is so screwed up, I think Abel keeps changing it to annoy people."

"I see," Stewie said, unimpressed. That pack on her back looked familiar, though; he thought he had seen something like that in demonstrations of minturized mini-mecha meant for battlefield deployment on home territory...

"I am a knight, I really am!" Beth said fiercely, or at least tried to do so. It just sounded kind of adorable. (Roy had a strange compulsion to pat her on the head and drag her away to attend parties.) The Heartless seemed to agree with the other's unkind assessment, and sprang. Roy moved to blast them away before the girl (whom he didn't recognize, as she had only become involved in the Crossguard recently) could come to harm.

It wound up being totally unneccesary; Beth pressed a button on the straps (which were really a control mechanism) and the pack on her back unfolded and reformed around her in a complicated motion too fast to be registered by the eye; there was a vauge impression of metal parts sliding over her body and joining together, interlocking and rotating outwards until it became a dome that the Heartless ran right into and bounced off of. From the sounds coming from inside, there was still mechanisms working in there. It was more drastic than that, as the dome rolled up into a ball and held still for a moment before transforming further, parts falling inward and other parts rotating, interlocking and generally transforming until the whole thing stood up on a pair of well-stabilized back-bent legs, rising nearly ten feet off the ground, and the sides swung out as some of the top swiveled to the sides, changing into a massive set of shoulders and matching arms (patterned after a ape, it appeared) while the front and back streamlined into a more humanoid shape. A helmet-shaped head, hosting a considerable number of sensory equipment, appeared at the top, and at the 'belly' of the new mini-mecha was Beth, sheltered in a fuselage and connected to the controlling equipment of the mecha and looking triumphant. It slid close and armor clicked into place over it as the hulking blue-and-yellow mini-mecha stood to it's full height of nearly twelve feet, towering over even Angilaka and most of the Heartless there.

"Um, here I go?" Beth said heisitantly, and charged, grabbing a nearby Soldier out of the air as it tried to pounce on Stewie and pulled it apart and dropped the fading pieces, and then raising a massive armored arm to block a cascade of darkness-spawned flame and firing a volley of small missles in retaliation to create a most satisfying blast.

She took a few heavy steps forward; in spite of her armor's bulk, it was a lot faster than it looked, and certainly strong: a single punch from her armor pulverized a barely recognizable Red Nocturne. "Sorry!" She said, not speaking to the Heartless themselves, but to whoever those Heartless had been before. "Sorry!" She crushed another, and another, before firing another volley of missles at the large collections of Heartless scaling the buildings to get an air advantage. One of the hulking stone Heartless smashed into her and tried to pry her armor apart, only to have the surprisingly flexible suit twist around and grab it and bend over backward, applying enormous amounts of force to it's more inflexible body. "Sorry," Beth said once more as the Heartless' body cracked and splintered. "Just pretend this is happening to somebody else..."

There was a ear-splitting noise; the Heartless collapsed, it's body falling apart. Beth dusted the pieces off her armor apologetically. "It's what I always used to do," Beth finished, not seeming to care that the Heartless likely couldn't understand a word she said.. She sighed and resumed the fight with a sad shrug.

As the fighting continued and the faction soldiers (and Stewie) doubled their efforts, Roy took the time to say to Angilaka, "That's your team? Two people plus you?"

Angilaka frowned. "We're short-staffed, okay?"

"Even less than you intended!" Greed remarked. "If I hadn't found you, it would have just been you and Gibbs."

"...Point," Roy admitted. "But why these ones? I know the guy with the pants used to be a combat drone until it got up and demanded recognition as a sentient being and...and...I don't know who the other one is."

Beth started to explain herself in the middle of giving a bunch of chimerically fused Soldiers's a vicious noogie. "Oh, that's just Beth," Angilaka said. "Top-notch research and develoupment girl; that armor she's got is a prototype we've got high hopes for. She used to be one of those kids from that sick reality TV show a few years back; also, she's my sidekick!"

"Yes," Beth confirmed. "Wait, sidekick! I thought I was an understudy...oh well, it can't be as bad as almost dying every day for the viewing public's enjoyment."

"Yep!" Angilaka said. "Now you almost die every day for the greater good! And FOR GREAT JUSTICE." Roy pinched the bridge of his nose, wondering once more why he was doomed to be the only sane man in the world. (Conviently forgetting that he had nearly blasted a kid's head with a powered-up pool ball not too long ago, of course.) Gibbs, being a more proactive man, simply smacked both Angilaka in the back of the head.

"Owie!" Angilaka said. "How the...how'd you even reach me, I'm like twice your size! And what are you doing dope-smacking me? I outrank you!" Gibbs smacked her in the back of the head again, for petty things like ranks, authority and reach limits meant NOTHING to Field-Admiral Leeroy Jethro Gibbs. "Ow! Okay, shutting up."

"Can we please focus?" Roy said. "We still have a great deal of Heartless hanging around and an entire horde to exterminate!"

"And they keep nipping at my pants," Pants-Man Audrey remarked. They stared at him. "I'll have you know, I love my pants! I named myself after them, regularily consecrate secret missions in their honor when my superiors aren't watching, and I defy dress code to keep them at my side at all times, you know. Sadly, I could not marry them because of foolish laws. HOW DARE THEY DENY OUR LOVE? THOSE HEARTLESS WRETCHES!"

Stewie ignored him, scared almost to the brink of sanity by how many of the Heartless there were and something in them reaching past his mind and touching something best left burried, turned and prepared to open fire on what seemed to be likely targets; his arms transformed into all manner of destructive weaponry (and still seemed inferior to Beth's weapons, he seethed), only for the Heartless to abruptly stop in mid-fight.

That was it. They just stopped. There was a very brief moment of them pausing in mid-action (some leaping, some actively fighting, others running or flying and generally doing things, which led to some quietly humorous moments when a lot of them fell flat on their faces), soon turning to a more extended moment of them silently pulling away from the fight, softly lumping up together and staring blankly into the air.

They remained there. Just staring.

A full moment passed. Nothing happened. "That's...odd," Gibbs said, expended clips falling from him in this brief halt.

As one, every single Heartless - Soldiers and Air Soldiers and Shadows and Red Nocturnes and far more powerful Heartless of greater variety and horrid things with hardly any shape and no conceivable name came together - turned their heads (where applicable, anyway, but most of them had faces and in those cases their faces alone turned) into the distance. For a horrible moment, Stewie thought they were looking directly at him, until he realized that the glow of their eyes was set on a point over his shoulder. He turned as much as he could without turning his back on the Heartless and saw nothing more ominous then a building, as ordinary as any other. "What are they looking at?"

Roy's face went blank with horror. "Where is the news studio that broadcast came from?" He asked flatly.

"Huh?" Shego said, surprised at the question in the current situation. "It's on the Maineford Duloc plaza, by Donotgonearthesewer Avenue. Why do-" She stopped. "Oh crap. That's exactly where they're looking, isn't it?"

"Yep," Beth said gloomily, checking it on her database's maps. (Her's were continually updated, and not by insane thinking engines. She was lucky that way.)

"...They're going to go right there right now, aren't they?" Angilaka asked rhetorically.

The Heartless glanced at her, as if to reply to her in some alien way. They shifted, ready to move...

"Look at the bright side," Deadpool said cheerfully. "It's just a huge horde. It's not like we gotta fight something big! That would be awesome! But nooo, we gotta fight a plain old horde. Lame, dude."

The Heartless didn't move, though, in spite of their foe's confusion and weakness. Instead, something altogether stranger happened: perhaps it was whatever had bidden them to focus on the distant news studio, maybe it was the presence of the more seriously warped Heartless, and likely it was something altogether more mysterious, but each and every one of the Heartless present (and there was so many of them) pushed against each other and simply dissolved, their various corpereal forms collapsing in murky semi-solid liquid and flowing together without any pause, cohesing in thick lumps and unsavory chunks, their still half-solid bodies into each other and growing...

Wisely, most present made a tactical retreat. Beth grabbed Pants-Man Audrey flew to a nearby rooftop, jets firing on her armor's back and greaves. Deadpool got Shego and Greed and teleported to the same rooftop. Roy and Gibbs were too badass to have too much concern for something as minor as their physical well-being, and Angilaka was sensible enough to grab them both and take a single powerful leap to the same rooftop the rest had gone to. Only Stewie remained where he was, too terrified to move. And at the same time, utterly entraced by the horror before him, feeling a strange and dissonant fascination at the sight of it.

He felt called to it and heard a distant whispering just below the audible noises of the world, and something pulling at him, pulling something loose...and as the darkness grew around him, Stewie stared at his hands. He wondered, vaugely, why the terror of this thing seemed to have left him, as had all other feelings. He just looked at his hands, girded in metal and encased in protective metal that, nonetheless, didn't seem suitable as an expression of power. Just bits of the world, molded into technological power; good enough for these others, a contemptuous thought that didn't seem his own remarked, but not enough for what he needed. Nothing would be enough; nothing would be enough...

He remembered his world dying, remembered the screaming and the dying and his own survival, and was, in the gray absence of proper feeling inflicted on him now, disturbed to find that he felt nothing about it one way or the other.

And so, as the disembodied Heartless became a single composite entity and the shape of that new creature spilled throughout the streets just below of the rooftops where the others had safely retreated, Stewie didn't move, fight or resist in any way as it rolled right over him. In all the ways that mattered, he had already lost a fight he didn't even know he had been fighting in the first place. There was, for him, enough time to remember Jarod and what that strange man had painstakingly tried to teach him; lessons of Good, Justice, Mercy, Duty, that sort of thing, and as the thought of those things came to him, the Heartless pulled back slightly from him, a brief bubble of hope and survival...

Stewie tried to hold on to it. He truly did. And then, he thought that Jarod's teachings still didn't make sense to him or even matter, and in that thoughts place came a feeling of horrible certainty. "I still don't understand," He muttered, a touch of anger there, and the darkness closed back over him. There, the Heartless came for him. Armor and technological power was no help in his state, in his weakness; there were ways that he was akin to the Heartess, and in those ways they slipped past armor, past flesh, past the boundaries of the mind and soul...

There was, for Stewie, a moment of pain. And then, all that he was and could have been was gone.

On the rooftop, where the heroes (and anti-heroes, and whatever Shego and Deadpool were) were, Stewie's absence didn't go unnoticed. "Where'd the little guy go?" Shego said, looking round. "I didn't see him fly up here or anything."

They all looking down at the seething liquid darkness in the street; the sun beat down, frying it, and it reflexively compressed into a more suitable body capable of properly emulating the purely destructive principles it embodied while it's inherently chaotic nature pulled at the seams, pulling it apart: as it struggled, it lost sufficient cohesion to stay in phase with everything around it (a more common concern for those employing the Heartless as weapons, as their otherworldly natures made interaction with the material realms quite tricky) and slipped right through the ground, leaving a tortured and broken street behind that was testimony to the sheer unnaturalness of it's existence, having doing damage simply by being.

"...Huh," Roy said, grimacing at the sight; the remnants of what little of the street that hadn't been shredded by the thing's mere presence had been distorted at best, and outright melted right through, like a supernaturally potent acid had rained down. "Looks like it's retreated or something. Now, where'd Griffin go-" He stopped, his heart stopping for a moment. On that blackened and twisted street, still standing where it had been taken by the Heartless, was a small familiar suit of powered armor. Stewie's powered armor, and now it was totally unmoving and lifeless.

Just over where Stewie's heart should have been, there was a large and blood-streaked hole, metal still fizzing where it had been violated by the touch of primordial darkness.

Once again, and under his watch - Roy Mustang seethed with fury over this failing, this injustice, regardless of who it'd been done to - someone else had died and been consumed by the Heartless.

Even after all the death he had seen, it had never gotten any easier, or less regrettable. Roy's mind went blank for a moment in a blaze of horror soon subsumed into numbing fury - make the monsters burn, he thought as his eyes narrowed to a painfully tight glare, a vein throbbing on his forehead, make them BURN FOR THIS - but he couldn't help a slightly clinical observation: even from this distance, he should have seen if there had been a body in there, some bits of gore or a more copious spray of blood...

Well, of course there wasn't a body. Most people the Heartless killed and corrupted didn't leave bodies behind. (It made figuring out which deaths the Heartless caused to be extraordinarily difficult; without direct eye witness reports, it was almost impossible. And the bodies that were left behind tended to behave...strangely.)

Gibbs saw the abandoned armor and the bloody evidence of Stewie's demise. "Oh hell," He whispered, the still-protruding guns on his body falling apart at once, disassembling into their component parts and fading into steam and dust at his feet. Conviction fueled his abilities, and there wasn't much that wounded his resolve like seeing a senseless and stupid death like this.

"That poor guy...kid...creepy short person..." Angilaka said miserably, trying to give the moment some dignity and failing pretty hard. "What happened to him back there?"

"Happened to who now?" Deadpool said, having been hopefully scavaging Gibbs' leavings with intent of getting some cool guns out of it. He looked over. "Oh, yeah. That guy's dead." He paused. "...Who was that again?"

"Eh, better than him than me," Shego said indifferently...or at least tried to sound indifferent.

Beth gave her a furious look. "Try to show some respect; somebody just...up and died!"

"Well," Greed said quietly. "Kind of guy he was...can't blame Shego here."

Beth gave him a mixed angry-confused look. (Not that he could tell, since she was wearing armor.) Pants-Man Audrey, posessed of a more efficient perspective then her, checked the databases and reported, "Ah, Stewie Griffin has...er, had, I apologize, a prime listing in the wanted criminal sections of the Bingo Book. A criminal mastermind, would-be conquerer of worlds and super-scientist of some repute in the worlds at large, believed to be instrumental in a disturbingly large number of wide-scale incidents...there's a fairly comprehensive and, unfortunately, fairly reprehensible collection of his known crimes. As well as ones suspected and attributed to him." He paused. "And yet, the last cases of his actions would indicate that he had at least been trying, or been influenced, to improve his behavior." He stared unhappily at the abandoned suit. "...It would appear that his desire to do was insufficient. The Heartless lured him in, as they do with those who share something with them."

"...I see," Roy said, making no assumptions or unwise guesses on what had really transpired here. He grimaced bitter nonetheless, and shook his head. There was work to be done. "We need to eliminate those Heartless and stop Kimblee before more people die. I think-"

Whatever he was about to say went left unfinished, since he stopped in mid-word at the sight of the shadows swelling unnaturally and the poor abused street cracking like something huge was trying to break through. A massive shape the size of a ship's sail sliced through the ground and their building, barely missing them by a few feet and looking like a crude synthesis of a fin and wing with eyes all over it, folding up back underground. Spines and spikes and gnarled tentacles burst up at random spots, clawlike protrusions and small bundles of Heartless-bodies breaking out here and there, an enormous train-sized shape swelling up from underground as if so large it was expanding right out from the tunnels, randomized blasts of corrosive force spilling out from underground and devouring the very air it sliced through, leaving a black and inky residue behind.

"Oh, hell," Gibbs murmured, his arms already morphing back into a fearsome array of big guns at the precise moment that Roy screamed something about shooting that thing down, but it was still irrelevant. There was not time to react to what happened before it had finished.

It is difficult to say whether or not Heartless had a mind; this much, the studies are certain. There is a degree of decision-making involved, but it remained unclear if they were only instinctual creatures compelled by the worst emotional majorities that they sensed where they appeared, utterly corrupted horrors driven solely by destructive compulsions and nothing else, or perhaps even mimicking the sentience they'd once possessed...but twisted as they had been, it was only a tool to them and a difficult one to use at that. However it happened, here, a decision was reached at once before Roy Mustang's crew could attack: there was a moment's briefness, just long enough to suggest that a decision had been made, and the shadow under Stewie's abandoned armor grew again as the cracking street roughly fell back to normally levels (except for several chunks that fell in due to the seismac uprising), the various repulsive extensionssliding back underground, and a staggeringly huge Heartless thing tore out from under it, barely visible for a moment as it swooped down and funneled itself directly into that small suit of power armor, the mechanical assemblege blowing back as the Heartless stuffed themselves into it without any respect for the laws of mass; there just seemed too much of it to work, like a river of horrors flowing into a cup far too small to contain it all.

And then, it was done and the armor stood up on it's own, gauntlets clasped protectively over the hole in it's chest; the lights of whatever power source Stewie had used flickered pitifully and glass cracked, bursts of electricity blasting out just long enough to be engulfed and absorbed by the liquid-like forms streaming out of those broken power-ports, those same forms hardening into a thin protective patina over the armor, shaping into subtly distorted patterns that looked unsettling...off. While Roy and most of those with him were usually quick enough to simply attack before things got worse, this happened so fast that they didn't get the opportunity. As soon as they realized it was happening, it had stopped, and they were still processing it all as the last wisps of Heartless faded away and the armor trotted away unsteadily, gazing up at them with a disturbingly blank awareness: it knew they were up there, but it's concern for them ended there, and was quickly directed into the distance, aimed past the buildings and over the horizon.

Where, Roy knew, the news studio and the people who had sent that idiotic message were waiting to be attacked.

The powered armor suit, moving awkwardly and almost tripping with every other step, retreated several paces and fired a laser blast directly under itself and opened a hole in the ground straight into the underground tunnels that it fell through, vanishing from the sun's weakness-laying light and safe in the darkness, animated by the monstrous essence of hundreds of Heartless.

The ground rumbled a bit in it's passing, and all was still for a time. Cracks in the street got a bit bigger. Some of the dust settled. A mailbox fell over into a pothole (thus causing a chain-letter to be irreversibly lost for all eternity, which no one cared about). Some birds chirped. Shego, mistress of dry statements, said, "...Huh."

Greed was the next to recover. Sort of. "Uh," He said. "Well. Um. What the hell was that?"

"A whole bunch of Heartless melted themselves down or something, commandered a pretty powerful suit of powered armor and ran off on us after killing a random supervillain, and are now probably going straight to that news studio," Deadpool said. "To kill people and things. Along with Kimblee too, I guess."

Greed sighed. "Yes. That. Thank you. That's exactly what we needed to hear. A baldfaced iteration of the stupidly obvious."

"That's what you pay me for!" Deadpool said happily. He paused. "No, wait, scratch that, you pay me for killing people and shooting you in the head when it would impress tourists to do your 'Hey, I'm Practically Invincible' shtick. Also, hunting down that Larfleeze guy that you say is totally infringing on your trademark. But mostly the first things that I have now forgotten what they were because I have the attention span of a goldfish." He stared at his hands for a moment and added, "Man, it would be so awesome to make a trained commando army of ranger hamsters and put them in powered armor suits."

Roy stood completely still for a moment, in such a way that no one could see his face clearly. He didn't move a single muscle, or demonstrate a single display of frustration, anger, fear or any other emotion that would seem appropiate in the circumstances.

Gibbs gave his superior a sidelong look, knowing full-well what was coming, and carefully edged away. Angilaka, Beth and the robot with the awesome pants were unaware of the worrying signs in Roy, as they were already getting ready to pursue the Heartless to the news studio, and perhaps intercept Kimblee. Pants-Man Audrey did glance at Roy, his instruments detecting some unusual data and looked at his leader; Angilaka shook her head sharply. Beth still looked back and said, "Mr. Mustang? What will you do?"

Roy said nothing, not moving one bit. Except for his hand making a fist so tight that someone with sufficient perceptive powers (such as all the Crossguard present due to Angilaka's divinely-granted enlightenment superpowers common to the mightiest of the Crossguard, Audrey's perceptive instruments and Beth's field sensors) could hear his bones grinding against each other.

"Commander-Admiral Mustang?" Beth said, a touch more sternly. "What are you going to-"

"Flame Alchemist," Roy said quietly, the low and crackling tones cutting through Beth's modulated voice. His free hand grasped the silver pocket watch, squeezing it so tightly that several of his knuckles popped. "Not just Commander-Admiral Mustang. Not here. I'm the Flame Alchemist."

He looked at her, his sole remaning organic eye wide and mad and his cybernetic one twitching around furiously in it's socket, and Beth flinched: there was genuine madness in those eyes. Not clinical insanity, certainly, not capriciousness, but a madness to be found in other things. Like convictions, for instance, stoked low like a fire for years, kept cared for in inner furnaces for such a long time to weather eras of torment and loss and constant duty worn so hard that it hurt, always kept burning but rarely allowed to blaze properly. But now the furnace had been thrown open, all restraint cast to the wind in this crisis, and the soul of the Flame Alchemist was revealed for the tempered inferno it was. And it was not Roy Mustang who spoke then, not the Commander-Admiral who had fough tooth and nail to preserve their town, but the human weapon: the Flame Alchemist. "I'm going to do my duty," he said simply, and clapped his hands, transmuting a staircase from rooftop to the street, walking down without so much as a backwards glance. Gibbs silently followed, a metallic sheen flashing on his skin. Angilaka, Audrey and Beth didn't follow but went their own way, just jumping straight down to the street without injury. Greed, Deadpool and Shego exchanged glances and followed without any of the usual wisecracks: it was impossible in the wake of the Flame Alchemist and the sheer will burning in him like a flame, drawing even these irrepresibly self-interested rogues into following him for even a short while.

One after another, they descended into the hole left by the Heartless-posessed armor, leaving the destruction behind them.

And in those tunnels, that posessed armor was moving fast. It was guided unerringly, called by the will of one who in many ways was opposite the Flame Alchemist. Where one amplified disparate elements into impossibly bright light and burning flame, the other introduced instability and brought destruction. The armor was still covered in the blood of it's former bearer, and little drops of blood dropped as it moved, making a nice little trail to follow.

The Heartless inhabiting the armor did not care. There was only the hunt, and the unmaking. Even feeding was insubordinate to that all-consuming urge to kill and break everything of these material realms: not all those the Heartless killed were consumed and into one of them, or even most. Of course, the original bearer of the armor was quite present, in a manner of speaking. He was not one of those who simply died with mercy.

And indeed, the Heartless in the armor were...changing, compelled by forces and events they were not in the habit of noticing or being concerned with. They were changing, combining, fusing, transforming into something far worse than their usual sort, feasting on the residual power of the Philosopher's Stone while they were still flush with the essence of their awful realm of origin. Yes, changing, into something rather bad.

The late Stewie Griffin's armor looked a lot like an egg, and given the grotesque processes going on inside that armor, that resemblence was horrifyingly appropiate.

...

On top of the dome covering the news studio, Aang and Toph's attempts to make some holes in the dome wasn't going well, but they were doing an admirable job of cutting down the Heartless population.

"It always comes down to fighting, doesn't it?" Aang complained, backflipping over a charging Soldier and laying a hand on it's back as he landed, gentle as the wind, and a blast of wind roared like echoing thunder and knocked the Soldier so high into the sky that it passed over the buildings. (Landing into the middle of another fight a few streets over and getting clobbered, of course.) The windburst kept going, bowling over the Heartless amassed on top of the wall, sweeping over the entire downward curve and only the Heartless that had the sense to melt into the shadows in the crevices survived. Aang landed neatly on his feet, his face set in a detached expression; though this violence was regrettable, it was unavoidable and he was unafraid to do what he needed to. (The Heartless' unnatural and sickening resonance was probably a factor in the absence of his usual reluctance to fight aggressively.)

"You're a total wuss," Toph said, wrenching a stone-shaped Heartless to the ground and giving it a vicious noogie that shredded large stony flakes on the ground that she periodically flicked at immense speeds into the heads of the other Heartless with all the effect of explosive bullets. (It only slowed them down a bit, but it probably hurt a lot.) Quickly growing bored with tormenting it, Toph worked her strong legs around it's neck and squeezed with all the considerable force that an Earthbender like her could muster and broke off it's head almost immediately. She struck the head with a sharp hit before it could even start falling and straightened it into a spike that impaled a charging pack of Shadows.

The stone-body began to fall. Toph fell underneath it and hit the dome-top with a mighty stomp that sent small but dense clusters of spikes shooting into the stone body of the now deceased Heartless, the spikes seamlessly merging with the assimilated material of that body and stopping it just over her head. She then struck her hands into the stone remnants up to her elbows and when she pulled her arms back, they were covered in big chunks of rock that she quickly compressed into a thinner but more managable layer of flexible guantlets over her arms. The stone under her spun her around so that she faced the other Heartless and flipped a big chunk of rock from under her, launching her at the Heartless with a joyous shout.

Aang grimaced as he turned to a Soldier with swords grafted to it's arms and stepped aside, lightly touching it's arm as it swung and redirecting the blow into the path of a strangely large Shadow, the two of them falling over and bowling over the other Heartless in their path. "Mm," He said, still not happy with the extremes they had to go to while defeating these things. It wasn't still killing - he knew it as though the Avatar Spirit whispered it to him, and perhaps it did - but he still disliked it. "I wish we knew what these things actually are. Then maybe we could, I don't know, put them to rest or purify them. Something like that!"

"They're soulless things made from pure evil and also dead people," Toph said. She stomped hard on the ground and a large section of the stone under her flipped up under the Heartless, tossed them into the air, and when they crashed back to the ground, the stone smashed back down over them with a gruesome crunch. "Pretty much covers everything."

"That still doesn't say much," Aang said patiently. A bunch of Shadows rose from a patch of darkness made from all the uprooted rocks and such around them, sneaking behind Aang. They prepared to pounce...and without turning around, Aang thrust his palm backwards, shooting a massive jet of a fire that scorched the uprooted bedrock black and blasted the Heartless back. He didn't see the point in killing them as brutally as Toph did, as one benefactor or another had explained to him that the Heartless were effectively immortal. Or more accurately, they had a kind of alien existence where the concept of death didn't apply anymore. "Actually, I've heard that when you, uh, 'kill' these these things, you're really destroying the corporal manifestations they build around themselves when they materialize on our plane of existence."

"...Wow," Toph said. "There was not a single word that that made any sense."

Aang tried again. "They're a little bit like video game avatars that you fight in on-line roleplaying games. Those die all the time, but the player doesn't die too, right?"

"RPGs are for nerds!" Toph said loudly, making a few Heartless flinch; in their past lives, they had been video game designers, and some lingering remnant of professional pride made that comment hurt. "And dorks that spend too much time on the Internet anyway. I don't play video games anyway."

"The Heartless aren't alive to begin with," Aang said, hoping this would work. He grimaced all the same; it sounded a lot like a cheap justification and rang more than a little hollow to him. Just because he was avoiding outright destroying them didn't make him feel any better, espicially since the Heartless he spared could go off and kill someone. He refused to permit them that. "I don't know what they are, but...whatever or whoever they used to be, they're not alive anymore."

"Okay, I can work with that," Toph said. Turning the questions to other matters, she said, "Okay, ready to bring this thing down?"

Aang nodded, and the two of them adopted the spread and rooted form of an Earthbending stance: the ground cracked under their feet, large cracks appearing as it all started to rumble. The part of the wall they were standing on started to rise and the entire dome twisted slightly-

A massive tendril of pure malevolent darkness rushed out through the cracks and punched into Aang and Toph, not knocking or pushing them down but interrupting them enough to stop them Earthbending the massive dome. It recoiled in the sunlight, seperating from whatever it was rooted to in the shades under the dome and bubbled disgustingly before managing to reshape itself into a man-shaped form covered in glassy plates that would protect it for long enough.

Aang had already recovered and broke off a piece of rock with a stomp, and with a kick launched it at the suddenly charging Heartless, stunning it in it's tracks. Grateful for even this small piece of luck, Aang punched a blast of superheated air at the offending Heartless; the monster took it head-on (not that it had much choice) and exploded messily. Aang winced, even knowing that he wasn't doing anything worse than delaying a quasi-immortal abomination for a while. His pity was forestalled by the sight of the Heartless' pieces not evaporating but dragging themselves back together and Heartless took it head on and exploded, the pieces of it's body flowing back together in big nasty clumps. "Weird. That usually works."

More cracks appeared as shadow-form Heartless oozed through, a dozen of Heartless taking form in short order, not a single one of them recognizable as any Heartless variety; these things just looked like rough amalgations of several vauge archetypes of 'big and scary'. Claws, tentacles and gaping jaws with oversized teeth abounded, while the actual body-types were everything from animalistic (both four-legged and simian) horrors to towering brutes shaped roughly like a man but with considerably more creative license. "Crap," Toph said deadpan as the monsters ran at them powerfully enough for her to register their new shapes, moving in a innate silence so total that even the scrapings of their claws were muffled. (How that worked, Aang couldn't say.) Both Aang and Toph moved into Earthbending stances and a huge Heartless twice the size of a man and tentacle-arms opened it's jaws silently, a ball of energy gathering there...

A small object struck it's shoulder, pushing deep into it's jelly-like flesh. The Heartless paused and looked at itself, it's shoulder peeling back to reveal a small dagger that a ninja might use: a kunai. Several rolls of thin paper had been tied to the hilt, and they were smouldering slight, the kanji on them glowing like burning coals.

It blew apart in a controlled explosion, tearing off the Heartless' arm, the shrapnel masterfully aimed to hit the soft parts of all the nearby Heartless, not a single piece hitting Aang, Toph or anything that wasn't a Heartless. The unlucky Heartless that now lacked an tentacle stumbled back, but not in time to avoid several large clump of sand that rained down from the sky like hail (and unusually hard for sand) and smashed into it, swiftly flowing out over that Heartless, reshaping into dozens of grasping hands and wrapping it before resolidifying, forcing the Heartless over backwards. If it had a spine, it might have broken even before the sand somehow hardened and squeezed with such enormous pressure that the Heartless was effectively liquified, spraying everywhere in a blast of mildly corrosive goo and finally staying dead. (Until that particular Heartless remanifasted or something.)

Aang blinked, gratified and mildly repulsed by the inhuman violence. "Wasn't expecting that," Toph remarked. A Shadow appeared next to her, looking just as perplexed. Toph flicked a pebble at it with her toe and popped it like a balloon filled with grease or liquid evil. (More likely the latter.) The sand dispersed and the Heartless shifted, readying themselves for what this new threat...and nothing happened. They glanced around at each other and then at Aang and Toph in a manner that was almost inquiring. Aang shrugged. Toph killed more of them with precision-aimed pebbles.

And then Aang noticed the shadows; the many, many shadows swiftly growing into view. Not the living shadows the Heartless kept turning into, but actual shadows not powered by evil. Aang glanced up, noticing many orange shapes desecending from above, and just as immediately felt a brief chill and ferociously territorial at the approach of something evil, a natural disaster given a name and a face and such impossible malevolence-

And it abruptly faded, as though it was being dampened by something truly good. At the exact same time, roughly two dozen completely identical blond guys dressed in orange came shooting down from the sky and crashed into the Heartless yelling, "SECRET DESCENDING LEAF SNEAK ATTACK OF DOOM! AND ALSO PAIN! LOTS AND LOTS OF PAIN!" The Heartless didn't have even a moment to react when the orange-clothed guys struck like foxes out of tall grass; three drew more kunai and stabbed a blade-armed Soldier through the neck and shoulders as they fell and pulling it to the ground, their impact forcing it through their blades and cutting it apart. Six of them struck a hulking beast-like one, hitting them in the back with kicks of astonishing force that broke it in half. Another six pulled out a bunch of small bombs from their jackets and threw them into the outlying Heartless, blowing plenty to pieces and scattering the others, where they were quickly dispatched by the falling newcomers. A mighty insectile Heartless stomped up as the rest fell, clearly intending to kill them right away. Unexpectedly, the ones that had already hit the ground jumped up, lining up their sandals, and kicking a team of three to meet those still falling and kick them right at the Heartless. Those put their hands close together as they fell, energy gathering between their hands, soon twisting into a burning white sphere (that looked oddly like a weaponized version of Aang's own Air Scooter technique) that spun around and around, the wind bending violently around them. Roaring like animals, they smashed the sphere into the Heartless and it expanded to enormous size with such force that it cracked a nasty dent into the wall and sent large cracks for over six yards around them; the wind blasted away as the sphere kept going, grinding the Heartless with it and soon reducing it to dust, and it kept going, carving a long hole into the ground and smashing right through a good number of other Heartless that hadn't gotten out of the way and kept going on and on until it lost cohesion and dissipated, leaving a trail of destruction in it's wake.

"Woo hoo!" one of the new guys cheered.

"We kick ass!" another cried.

"If I was any more awesome, I would explode into hellfire made of awesomeness and destroy the universe," another one said. He paused, looking disturbed. "Wait, that's a bad thing...isn't it?" Another one of the blond guys near him rolled his eyes and smacked him in the back of the head and he exploded in a plume of smoke, leaving nothing behind. Since none of the others seemed upset or at all surprised by this, Aang decided that either that was supposed to happen or these were savagely malicious murderous monsters who cared nothing for the deaths of their own. And since someone like that seemed really out of place in this town, Aang concluded that this was the former.

"Uh," Toph said. "Ah." She flung her arms up. "What the hell just happened?"

The blond guys all looked at her in surprise. One of them made a complicated motion with his hands, and all but him disappeared in blasts of smoke. "Don't you know?" he boasted. "A hero always shows up in the nick of time!"

Aang nodded in agreement. "Yep, that's the way to do it!"

"Sounds boring," Toph complained. "It's more awesome to smash in whenever you feel like it and make a mess until there ain't a problem anymore!"

"I agree," a raspy voice said from seemingly everywhere, drifting on the wind. Aang again got that brief feeling of some monstrously evil power in his presence (though this one felt different, tasting of blood on the wind and grinding sands), and again, it wasn't for long and felt strangely subdued by someone that was at least on the way to becoming good. Or, perhaps, controlled and contained. The rock under them quavered, breaking apart into massive bursts of sand shaped into very thin spikes that impaled the Heartless and kept going, the wind whistling fiercely along their razor-thin lengths. (Aang thought it would look cool.)

The spikes became sand again and gathered together in a miniature tornado of sand that struck ground behind them, dispersing to reveal a red-haired boy wearing a reddish-brown coat. "Show-off," the blonde boy commented.

The redhead frowned at him. "...This, from the one who did that?" he said, gesturing at the destruction the blonde had caused.

"Yeah, but at least I just went and did my stuff without a lot of lame special effects," the blonde retorted. The redhead rolled his eyes, which Aang noticed were ringed with completely dark markings like a racoon-dog's, or perhaps a panda.

Toph shifted to a more casual stance, perhaps because the Heartless were retreating back into the cracks, probably to regroup. "Okay, and who are you guys?"

"I'm Naruto, and my buddy's name is Gaara," the blonde boy said. Gaara blinked vaugely at them, looking uncertain and like he would have liked to fight a whole horde of Heartless on his own instead of talk to them. Naruto noticed and gave him a nudge in the side, pointedly standing at his side. "Say hi to the new guys.

"...Hello," Gaara said, nodding his head slightly and looking tremendous uncomfortable, though he looked like he appreciated Naruto's company a great deal.

"Hi," Toph said. Aang waved. Gaara looked very slightly relieved...and glanced at a spot just to the left of Toph's head, a trace of alarm on his strangely neutral expression, and his hand flashed down, pulling a slim and well-honed knife from his coat and blurred in movement. A Shadow Heartless fell over Toph's shoulder, the knife impaling it completely through, and Toph gave it a dismissive kick over to Gaara, who removed his knife from the Heartless and killing it in the process. "Nice shot," Toph remarked. Gaara looked faintly pleased, and Aang found himself wondering how Toph had known about the Heartless.

"Hey, what are you carrying a knife for, anyway?" Naruto asked Gaara suddenly. "You got creepy sand powers. You don't need knives!"

"But I like knives."

"Hang on to that thought," Aang said, seeing that liquid darkness was bubbling up from the cracks again, this time in thes hape of huge oily bubbles sliding up like grotesque wombs and the half-visible Heartless inside them their awful progeny. "They're coming back!"

"Okay, no problem!" Naruto assured them, pulling out a small scroll from his pocket and unrolling it; he bit his thumb hard enough to bleed and wiped it across a line on the scroll and slapped his hand on it. There was a puff of smoke, and a massive star-shaped shuriken appeared in his hand, it's blades as long as a man's leg and extending from a metal ring as wide around as his toros.

"We're meeting all kinds of crazy guys today..." Toph muttered. She tilted her head at Gaara, who looked back at her with a cool professional estimation. They regarded each other, a pair of total badasses, and turned their attention to the Heartless.

The bubbles started to steam in the sunlight and the Heartless within wriggled to be out. "We fight," Gaara rasped. "No mercy." The cork in his gourd dissolved into sand, and a flood of it came rushing out, a stream of it shooting at one of the bubbles, hardening in mid-air into a jagged spear that pierced one of the bubbles with a disgusting noise like...well, realistically speaking, there was nothing that noise could be like except a bubble of concentrated evil being torn apart and the spear that did it impaling the Heartless inside and blasting right there and spearing it to the ground while noxious goo went everywhere. And then there was the noise of it burning in the sunlight, but that was more favorable to generalized similies.

The sand flowed out, Gaara's gourd emptying itself; a thick line of sand encircled right around him, a lot of it dispersing into the air, while the rest fanned out towards a patch of hatching bubble-things, unstoppable as a tidal wave. The sand rose up, shaping itself itself into dozens of grasping hands that slid around the bubbles and squeezed-

But it was too late. Moments before Gaara made his move, a little under half of the bubbles broke, and over a dozen unique-looking Heartless tore their way out, bodies covered in a chitinous material that smoked under the sunlight but did not burn away, breaking right through the sand; the strength of the sand was only as much as Gaara's will gave it, and their emergence was enough of a surprise to loosen his hold; the sand broke easily, scattering all over, and one of the larger bubbles burst open, revealing a massive humanoid Heartless nearly twice the size of a large man and aspects of it resembling a monstrous rhino, aside from the clawed tentacles drooping down it's back. Half a dozen goblinoid Heartless around Zim's size clung to it and looking like a demonic mixture of birds and goblins, the precise ratio of features dependant on the specific Heartless; one's entire body bristled with feathers that clicked like knives and had a serrated beak twisting out of the top of it's head, while another was a leather-skinned fiend with a set of fleshy wings and only a few mangy feathers to go with it.

Gaara's sand rolled back to them in heavy waves, forming a crude half-circle in front of them. "Hrm," he said. "The situation would appear to be more complex than we thought."

"They can do stuff like that?" Aang said incredulously.

Naruto spread his arms out in consternation. "I've never seen them pull that kind of thing!"

"Yeah, me neither," Toph quipped. No one noticed; Aang was too busy freaking out, Naruto wasn't paying attention and Gaara didn't know she was blind. She grumbled to herself in annoyance.

One of the goblin-birds (Aang nicknamed them 'Flayfeathers', because it helped to give them a name instead of just letting them remain nameless otherworldly things) took flight, and several of it's knife-like feather detached from it and fired themselves right at Toph, making little shockwaves in the air as they flew on streamers of darkness, so sharp they cut the very air, twirling around each other like they were outlining an invisible spear and aimed right at her, seemingly too fast for any one to react...

And no one had to: the moment the feathers got too near Gaara's the outline of sand that served as his personal space bubble, the partcles of sand dispersed into the air so widely that they couldn't be easily seen flew together into a thick shield and stopped the feathers dead in their tracks. To the untrained observer, it would have looked like a large chunk of impossibly strong sand had appeared from nowhere and encased the feathers in less time than it took to blink, the displaced momentum making more shockwaves enough to make Aang and Naruto, as light-footed as the wind, dance out of the way. Gaara and Toph were too rooted to even notice. A dart of sand formed from what looked like thin air (it was just more of the dispersed sand, actually) and fired at the Flayfeather. The feathers were simply crunched with such force that the metal-hard fragments richocheted back at the Heartless and the dart only narrowly avoided the Flayfeather's head thanks to some quick reactions on the Heartless' part and it retreated back to it's brethern, all of them staring at the mortal fighters with something like wariness.

"Nothing gets past my Sand Shield," Gaara said calmly as the darkness flowed up around it, little tendrils probing warily. A tendril made of sharp-edged sand lashed at it, cutting bits of the shadows off (even Aang thought that was weird) and vile ichor splattered over the ground.

"...I've seen, like, half a hundred things slip past your shield too fast to get stopped by it, and plenty of stuff that can outright break it," Naruto observed.

"Quiet, you," Gaara said, without changing expression at all.

The Heartless charged, the big rhino-like one leading the charge, it's child-sized fists swinging back for a devastating strike. "Here they come!" Aang warned them, fanning his arms out and sending a sheet of wind that only slowed the big one down but blew the rest off their feet, though the Flayfeathers clung to their host with such tenacity that they moored themselves. And the rhino-like one kept coming, it's footfalls shaking the ground and getting closer and closer.

Toph grinned. "Per-fect." She stomped on the ground, so hard it cracked (and without her Earthbending it); the ground rippled out in a straight line at the rhino-thing, passing under it without appreciable effect. Only a few steps away from the sand shield, it's next footfall crashed right through the ground, shards of rock flying around as it's feet sank nearly to it's knees. It placed it's hands firmly on the ground, intending to lever itself out. Toph wasn't having any of that and melded the rock back together, sealing around the Heartless' legs and trapping it. The Flayfeathers flew off in alarm, flocking overhead while the other Heartless, smaller and less powerful than the rhino-like one, warily circled them, waiting for an opening or a moment of weakness.

There wasn't one to be had. The rhino-like one, so big that the sand shield and the humans behind it were well within it's reach, drew an arm back, semi-organic pistons pumping from the elbow and slamming it's arm forward so hard the air blew back around it. When it struck, the shockwaves once again almost unfloored Aang and Naruto had the former not anchored them both down with Earthbending.

When the dust settled, the Heartless' arms quivered, muscles wriggling like snakes. It's huge first was clenched and bleeding, a floating section of sand partially bent around it, dented and crumbling, but holding fast. Black ichor dripped from the broken skin and into the sand as little tendrils extended from the sand and onto the Heartless' arm.

The Heartless tried to pull back, perhaps sensing that this was an enemy that was unwise to charge. Toph heard the sounds their claws scraped on the stone and the soft sussuration of the darkness trailing in their wake and the awful deadened quality of those sounds, and the impact of their hurried steps on the stone rang through that stone and through her feet into her was like a well-detailed map. She rolled back on her heel and struck down, the stone shuddered and six spikes larger than she was burst around the rhino-like Heartless and impaled it in a single move, stabbing through it's shoulders and neck and body, immobilizing it long enough for Gaara to direct his sand at it in a tidal wave of grasping hands and open jaws; it closed around the Heartless in a mighty crash, wrapping around it in a cocoon posessed of a tensile strength greater than most metals. Gaara opened his hand and made a fist, the sand tightening and the Heartless' arm breaking off.

He squeezed his fist, and the sand compressed into a sphere no bigger than a man's head, though this was hardly discernable under the quantities of black goo that spurted out through the crevices in the sandy cocoon. "Nice moves," Toph commented, her experience in Sandbending sufficient to allow her to sense through the sand almost as well as with stable earth. "You hold your ground and use a perfect defense to stop anything that comes your way. You bide your time, wait for the enemy to set themselves up..." she trailed off expectantly.

"And then I crush them," Gaara finished.

Toph nodded sagely. "...You'd fit in right where I come in. Best Sandbender I've ever seen that didn't have goofy tattoos or learn from Badger-Moles."

Aang huffed. "My tattoos are not goofy! They're awesome!"

"What tattooos?" Naruto asked; Aang's current outfit didn't make his tattoos immediately obvious. Realizing this, Aang lifted his pilot's helmet, revealing the intricate markings that made up his arrow-shaped tattoo on his forehead. "Ooh, nice!"

"Thanks," Aang said, pleased to have met something of a kindred spirit here. "Are those markings on your face tattoos too?"

Naruto absently rubbed the whisker-shaped markings on his cheeks. "Nah. They're more of, uh, curse markings."

"Oh, sorry."

"No big deal. I didn't even know what they meant until I was twelve!"

"Lucky bastard," Gaara muttered under his breath. Toph gave him a look, but he didn't elaborate.

Aang eyed the other Heartless, who now attacked him all at once. He paid them hardly any attention, dodging every attack in such a way that they struck other Heartless. "...I have a plan to help our friends under here."

"What is that?" Gaara asked.

"We're gonna break this wall thing," Aang said, tapping a foot on the ground and ducking over an arm-blade that decapitated the Heartless behind him. "And let the sun rain down on them! It should weaken the Heartless enough to make it easy to take them out, right?"

"True. But why haven't you done this already?"

"It's not as easy as it looks!" Aang said, absently snuffing out a Red Nocturne's fireblast with his bare hands, and accidentally trying too hard and doing the same to the Nocturne. "We have to be really careful moving it, or we could bring the whole thing down on everyone!"

"...Ah," Gaara said slowly. "And...that's bad, right?"

Aang stared at him. Gaara sounded like he honestly didn't know. "Um, yeah."

"Remember, excessive collateral damage is bad," Naruto reminded Gaara.

Gaara gave him a fishy look. "This from the man that stole a truckful of dynamite and blew up a building with it on a dare?"

Naruto waved a hand angrily. "Father Nightroad knew darn well what he was getting into when he made that dare!"

"Guys," Toph said. "I like blowing stuff up as much as the next total badass..." She paused. "Okay, I like blowing stuff up as me and that guy with the awesome Sandbending-"

"Hey!" Aang and Naruto complained.

"Airheads," Gaara scoffed.

Toph continued. "But still. Heartless. Big scary monsters. All over the place and keeping us from bringing on the sun. Might wanna think about taking them out, y'know?"

"Okay!" Naruto said agreeingly.

The four of them turned around. The Heartless froze. Toph and Naruto grinned. Gaara frowned menacingly. Aang looked apologetic, which was somehow far worse than all the others put together.

The Heartless would have cowered if they knew how.

...

The underground tunnels that Morte and the people that thought they were protecting him, along with Kim, Ron and Rufus, were fleeing through was a pretty nice looking place, and in ordinary circumstances it would have made a nice place to stroll through. However, it had the downside of having excellent acoustics. Every footstep was magnified until it sounded like a ghostly army dogged their footsteps. Every breath echoing into a rasping dry howl. Add this to the general state of nervousness, and the general effect was to drive Morte's already dour mood into a state of constant panic.

And just to make the constant grinding on their nerves even worse, Ron Stoppable was there and feeling bored. "I spy, with my little eye, something that begins with 'C'!" he said cheerfully.

"'Corridor'," Morte said, clicking his teeth.

"Ooh, nice one! That's, what, fifteen times in a row for you guys?" Ron didn't wait for a response and went right ahead with the next one. "Okay. I spy, with my little eye, something that begins with...'U'!"

"'Underground corridor'," Kim said, sounding rather tired.

"What she say!" Rufus added snappishly, jerking a thumb-claw at her from Ron's shoulder.

"Aw, and that's nineteen for you two! Each!" Many of the employees winced. "I need to try harder. I spy something that begins with 'T'!"

"'Tunnel!" the tentacle-alien lady that had been unfortunate enough to get Kimblee's call said, far more grumpily than usual.

"Okay, sixteen." Ron glanced around. "Okay, I spy with my little eye, something that beings with-"

"Underground corridor, underground tunnel or some other variation of such," a footage editor interrupted.

"Unsanitary Hutt massauge therapists!" Ron exclaimed, and many of them shuddered in horror at that mental image. (Except for a Hutt that happened to be a live-in chef that owed Courtney a few favors; he thought he needed such a therapist right now.) "That's amazing! Okay, I spy-"

"Underground accessway," Kim said.

"You're just know me so good you can figure it out by the equidistance of my eyelashes," Ron said quickly. "Okay, I spy-"

"Tunnel!" Rufus barked.

"And you probably just have some empathic link with me or something. I spy-"

"Subterranean corridor!" An exasperated camerawoman said.

"Ooh, I can't think of anything that would explain you. Back to the game! I spy-"

"Tunnel, corridor, also corridor, and tunnel for the next three times," Morte said.

"Oh my gosh, you're amazing! I didn't even finish thinking it! What are you, psychic?"

"He don't need to be!" The Hutt said. "You've been playing that stupid game since we got down here and there's nothing else down here! What else are you gonna look at!"

"Plenty! There are...uh, little alcove things in the sides. Probably used to be for toll booths or boarding stations. Dunno why."

"You told Zim why; it was probably a tram subway abandoned by whoever tried to occupy the town before us," Kim told him.

"Oh, right. Cool! Maybe the tram gods ate them for lack of appropiate sacrifices." Morte shuddered at that, and so did a few of the less certain employees. "Okay, one more time! I spy-"

"Once more for posterity! TUNNEL," Morte said.

"You sure you're not psychic?" Ron asked him suspiciously.

"As a matter of fact," Morte said. "You're going to be picturing me biting your face off."

"What? No way, I'm not-" Ron paused in astonishment. "Holy cheesy poofs! I'm picturing it right now! You're not just a psychic, you're a future psychic!"

"...Where'd you ever hear that?" Kim asked, her curiosity getting the better of her.

"Something I heard from a bunch of adventurers that stopped here once. Some kind of portal goof-up."

"I think I met those guys too," Morte muttered quietly to himself. "Think the elf smelled the ventral Planes on me...smart girl. Or guy, it was hard to tell. Hope it was a girl, I had fantasies for a bit."

"How do you live with that?" Zero-Forty-Nine begged Kim. "It can't be done! You must tell me how! How have you not gone mad by now!"

"Lot of practice, good ol' fashioned experience and living with a manically-depressed mad scientist for a little brother!" Kim said brightly.

"Also, earplugs!" Rufus added, pointing at two little things in his ears.

"Do you have some more of those?" A small armadillo-man said hopefully. Rufus shook his head. "Crap."

Ron continued, to the disappointment of all concerned. "I spy, with my little eye, something that begins with-"

"Is it 'B'? For, y'know, 'boring'?" Kim remarked. "Because this place is so boring."

"Nah, you're wrong this time. And boring is good! Do you want exciting? Do you want monsters here!" Ron said. "Big ugly scary monsters with big sharp nasty teeth and mean dispositions and claws that snatch and machine guns in their crotches and synchronized watches of DOOM and also a pre-elementary education? Is that what you want? Danger? Impending doom? Because that kind of stuff is not boring! It's all kinds of horrible stuff that ends with me screaming like a girl and losing my pants because the universe hates me! Is that what you want? HUH!"

Everyone stared at him.

"Because that would totally suck," Ron finished. "So...yeah."

"Do you hear a rushing sound?" Morte said suddenly. "Like little jets or something."

"What do you mean?" Kim said. "I don't-"

Something small and moving from the distanct curvature of the furthest reaches of the tunnel appeared, vaugely pointed and made of metal and moving fast. "The hell is that?" Some random person asked.

"I don't know," Kim said, peering at it. The metal object speeded up as it caught sight of them, so much that it smashed right into an alcove and bounced off with a nasty grinding noise, hitting the ground at a bad angle, it's neck twisted at an angle sure to snap the pilot's neck. It's jets were still on and drove it almost into them (close enough that it nearly rammed into Morte, and for him to see the blood on the chestplate), narrowly missing them and smashing into a wall, grinding along it for a good distance until it bounced off again and kept flying, still going.

They watched it go. It showed no reaction to them or even acknowledged they were there, and kept flying. "Huh," Ron said. "That was random. And I didn't even get to bring it into the game..."

"Maybe it was a drone? Flying down here to see if any Heartless came down here?" Kim said. "Dad's been talking to Jim about patenting some for the Peace Marines."

"If it was a drone, why would it be person-shaped? Humanoids aren't that aerodynamic," Morte said reasonably. "And I saw bloodstains on it. And they don't look very old."

This was received with due gravity and analyzed. Eventually, Ron asked, "Any bets on if this is gonna suck?"

"I'll take some of that action!" Kim said, raising a hand.

An older man gasped. "You gamble! For shame, young lady! You're supposed to be a role model!"

They stared at him. Morte gave him an eye-rolling look that amounted to a raised eyebrow. "Is this really the time for that?" Kim asked him awkwardly.

"NOW IS ALWAYS THE TIME TO GUARD ONE'S BEHAVIOR!" The old man yelled.

This peculiar moment was stopped short by a rumbling noise coming from the same way the monster had come; a rough and massive vehicle that looked a lot like a minecart with a set of tank-treads instead of wheels came screaming up, a complicated engine spewing fire from behind it and rocketing it through the tunnel, though it sputtered out when the drivers caught sight of them, the treads clanking to a stop a short distance from them. The cart was an odd sight, some of it like stone sculpted into a new shape by rough and crude hands, while the various components (the treads, engine and a big shield on the front with the logo of the Peace Marines on it - a blue and white checkered background, with a firefly over a stylized gear) looked like transmuted bits metal parts.

It was, in fact, fairly obvious that the whole thing had been transmuted, but it was important who was in the contraption. "...Commander-Admiral Mustang?" Ron said disbelievingly. "And...that weird friend of Edward's whose always talking to himself. Lin? Greed? Greedlin? Make your mind up, this is confusing."

"Hey!" Lin and Greed said in unison.

"Dad?" Kim said to Gibbs. "And..." She scowled at Shego, who didn't seem particularily pleased to see her either. "What are you doing here!"

"Eh," Shego said. "Fighting crazy sociopath that blows stuff up with his hands. You?"

"Same thing here. Well, that was the plan, but I'll probably be fighting him again later anyway. You know how these crazy guys never stop bothering us."

"Yeah, I saw your TV message thing. Smooth."

"Hey, it wasn't my idea to bring Kimblee down there..."

Rufus pointed at Deadpool, squeaking furiously. "YOU!"

The occupants stared at Deadpool. He scowled, possibly. "Sheesh, you shoot one mini-nuke on a dare, and the little rat thing holds it against you forever." Rufus crossed his arms and glared hatefully. Ron leaned over and waved at Beth, the two of them having dated for a short time a while ago. Audrey waved, because he was friendly like that. Mort just grumbled to himself; no one ever went and greeted him.

"Hey, guys, nice to see you and stuff but we're kinda in the middle of somethin'," Angilaka said shortly, looking really uncomfrotable. She was already having a rough time of it, since she was so big she had to sit down and everyone else was sitting on her legs, with amble seating to go around that way. "Hey, wait, you're Gibbs' little girl! One of the ones that sent that crazy message to Kimblee and got him riled up."

Kim blanched. "Yes," Gibbs said evenly, leaning over and frowning at her. "About that. Interesting question. Just why did you decide to send out that incredibly ill-advised televised taunt to an extremely sociopathic and powerful alchemist armed with the most powerful artifact known to his sciences? When, if going by the warnings all of you gave, you were perfectly aware of how dangerous he is. Particularly since you were with Scar, whom Roy assures me knows better than anyone how dangerous this Kimblee man is."

"...Um..." Kim said miserably.

"Ooh, you are so busted!" Shego hissed cheerfully from the cart. Kim gave her a hateful look.

Gibbs rolled his eyes. "No, she's not," He said patiently, frowning at Shego (who felt a sudden and brief utter terror). "Though I'd like to know what made her think that would be a good idea." At the look on Kim's face, he added, "Later, you know. After this situation is resolved." Kim's expression brightened up, and Gibbs smiled a bit. "...You could have tried something a bit more subtle first," He added.

"Didn't you start the fight with him by shooting a giant sniper-rocket at him?" Deadpool asked.

Kim blinked, and Gibbs grimaced. By way of explanation, Roy briefly said, "We already fought him earlier," Roy said shortly. "Right before your message thing. It...didn't go well. The fight, I mean. Stewie Griffin showed up and, well, it didn't end well."

"What do you-" Kim stopped. She recognized the look on his face. She had met Stewie before, and fought him, and now she remembered the blood on the armor. "No."

"Stewie's dead?" Ron said, looking stricken. Rufus shivered. Most of the people present blinked, not knowing who Stewie was.

Morte had only seen the strange madman briefly the night before, and it was still unsettling to know that someone he had known was dead; Stewie had been an arrogant, condescending irritant, but he hadn't deserved that. And then he made the obvious connection as well. "Don't suppose you guys recognized a suit of armor going this way?" Morte said grimly. "Real small, not in the best of shape?"

"Stewie's armor?" Beth said. "Before he...um. You know." She bit her lip and changed the subject. "His armor. Yeah; a whole bunch of Heartless did...something, and then they stuffed themselves into it and ran off. We don't know why."

"Huh," Morte said. "'Cause we, y'know, saw it come right by." Roy started. "Didn't do anything, it just flew by us. Which is weird, being that after the message we got out, Kimblee called us. Said he was bringing his own 'advance army', or something. Guess that means Heartless. And, ah-"

"He blew up your clubhouse-diner thing too, and he killed your orc friend that works there," Kim said, taking care not to look at Roy or Angilaka. "He told us he was going to do something big."

There was a long dangerous pause. "He killed Gorgob," Angilaka said, her voice low and rumbling like the echo of a landslide. "This...bastard went to my house and killed my friend."

"He was my friend too," Roy said quietly. Quiet, like the distant whistling of a hydrogen bomb.

For a moment, Angilaka and Roy processed this, a new and thoroughly unpleasant reality snapping into place for them, a reality that didn't have that old and friendly orc working at their diner, telling them cheerful stories about the reintroduction of his kind into civilized society back home in Middle-Earth and listening to their stories with total interest in everything they said. Never complaining. Never saying a bad word about anyone. Never doing a single thing to earn the reputation his species had. Never doing a single thing to deserve this.

Finally, Roy spat, "I am so damn sick of that egomaniacal sociopath walking into my town and killing my people. We've already lost a mansion's worth of people to that monster. And then that crazy Stewie guy; he was a thuggish maniac, but he didn't deserve that. Not this too."

"No more," Angilaka said solemnly. "We're stopping it here and now." She looked at them sharply. "Where did that suit go?"

"That way," Morte said, forgetting he was just a head. Ron helpfully pointed behind them. "Leads back to...oh, crap, to the news studio."

"I figured." She glanced at Kim, Ron and the people that were escorting Morte and said, "Audrey. Think you can give these guys a hand?"

"I would love to," Audrey said graciously. Kim and Ron nodded at him, pleased to have another person to help out. (And big-scale fights weren't really their expertise; they were more skilled at preventing disasters than averting ones in progress.) "Care to head down to the hospital? I'm sure fine journalists like yourselves would appreciate that. Not to mention fighters to help defend it until this debacle is concluded." They considered that, and shrugged. "Very good! Good luck to you, my superiors!" He paused. "Erm. What are you doing down here?"

"We are escorting this fine survivor of an ancient and wise culture, to preserve his life and the knowledge he holds!" Zero-Forty-Nine proclaimed.

"There is nothing in that sentence that is not technically true," Morte said.

Angilaka nodded at Audrey, wisely ignoring Morte's contribution. (And the other news guy's sad looks that no one had asked who they were until just now.) "Good luck then." Audrey coughed. She rolled her eyes. "Good luck to you and your pants, I mean."

"I should hope so," Audrey said gravely. He hopped out of the cart. "Fellows, to me!" The newsguys, Kim, Ron (and Morte) did so: Audrey's hands held his hands out as they gathered around him, pulled his sleeves all the way up to the shoulder...and his arms suddenly expanded several times until they were bigger than he was, becoming slightly concave and scoop-shaped. Without any fuss, he lightly grabbed them all, carefully adjusting himself until he was certain that they were comfortable and safe, and then he activated his jets and flew down the tunnel, his passengers safe and sound. (But he was also rambling on about how nice his pants were and how everyone ought to get a pair like his, so it was a bit of a mixed deal.)

Gibbs watched them go, looking worried. Roy glanced at him as they started up the cart again, sending it through the tunnel at breakneck speeds and taking them farther from Gibbs' daughter, musing that it would be nice to have a family like he did.

...

Back above ground, not quite involved in the battles as yet, Kimblee was contented with merely observing the results of his actions. It was humbling, in his understanding of the term, to see events unfolding around him as the world responded to what he had done, with a minimum of further effort required from him.

He wasn't watching it, precisely, not being in a position to do so; the powers of the Stone were beyond measure, but they didn't include giving him the power to see through solid objects such as the dome he had raised to shelter the Heartless from the sunlight. (Well, it could have if he modified his eyes the right way, but he didn't know enough about medical alchemy to risk something so frivolous. He might have also adopted the form of an alien with vision powers, but he didn't know any.) But...but he was the link to this world for these Heartless, the means by which they had been able to appear in far greater strength and variety than before, and not merely in the cast-off shells Wuya's sorcerous channels forced them into. He was the key from their extraplanar origin, and he was connected to them, and he was more than aware of how things were going. As a scientist, he believed he was going to find some very interesting data to supply to Wuya's research corps when this was all over. And as an experienced soldier, he estimated that things were going to go badly for the Traverse Town refugees.

He decided to think of it as an experiment: let the refugees fight as many as they wanted, and see how well they did. Eventually, at least one would make a fatal error, a final misstep...and then the Heartless would add another to their ranks. The other refugees would panic, lose their focus, and one by one, they would die.

At least, that was the plan. Experience had taught Kimblee to be a little more adaptable than that, and that was why he was now lazily walking down the street, walking right up to the great curvature of the dome from where it had assimilated the street-top and the nearest buildings into itself, leaving twisted and strange-looking deformations on the street, with a nagging feeling that if he didn't insert himself into the fight at a crucial point soon, things would go badly for him. On the other hand, if he appeared too soon, his forces might be too far stretched and his own plans might not work as he'd hoped. Contingency plans, back-up plots, possible routes for retreat and the most effective means of reprisal ran through Kimblee's head, largely because of Ghostfreak, and he finally grunted with disdain at the pretentiousness of itall. "Self-preservation is overrated," he said aloud.

An idea came to him as he looked at the barrier, the refugees inside totally oblivious to his presence. (Or so he believed.) A wicked, wonderful, exciting idea.

He brought his hands up, the flesh of his palms rolling like there were things underneath. "The dice fall where they will. Coins fall on side or edge regardless of expectation. Slot games ring up in the house's favor and the gambler loses everything. A lucky shot rings out, and the challenger dies without a scream."

His hands came together. There was a faint sound as transmutation circles met another. "Whether chance or destiny or skill saves anyone, Fate makes them real. Who is real, here? Who will survive this? All or none. I don't know. I do not care. I want to see what will happen. Nothing else matters. Not my death. Not my survival. It's all about what happens next."

Kimblee gracefully pulled his hands apart, energies crackling between them. "Show me how real you are," he whispered to the winds. "Show me if anything is real." He passed that energy into the air in front of him, twisting it, pushing it far past the boundaries of safety as his alchemy could, the power of the Stone feeding vast amounts into it and amplifying it past all possibility...

Or at least that's what he would have done if he hadn't noticed a human-sized hole in the dome's base, cracked at the edges in a way he immediately associated with a destructive use of transmutation alchemy, and if he hadn't felt a shift in the otherwise still air that signaled the impending approach of a large person.

Kimblee threw himself to the ground and rolled away just as a open palm smashed into the ground where he had been standing and tore it apart, light flashing wildly around as dust and stone fragments burst up, a ragged crater swelling out of the street. Windows were broken by the destruction energy, streams of water briefly blasted out from ruptured waterlines (and were immediately and automatically rerouted), and a workshop made from a old tank fell apart, it's very seams unmade.

Kimblee stood up, coughing into his hand. His throat burned, and the wetness that passed onto his palm tasted coppery. He pulled the hand from his face, and smiled at the blood even as his body broke in a dozen tiny but dangerous ways. Misfiring nerves that caused him to tastes smells that weren't there, the uncontrollable twitch of a finger, the muscles on the right side of his neck seizing up with such force that they almost tore...

Destruction. Brutal, fast, and angry. He knew this flavor of alchemy well, alien though it was.

A larger form hurtled at him through the still settling dust, and Kimblee half-stumbled over himself getting out of the way of the figure's hands. The flesh-rending grasp of the right missed him, but a vicious jab from the left's elbow rammed into his side hard enough to make his gorge rise, and Kimblee hit the ground and the world went completely out of focus-

Pain. Such awful pain.

From the other, there were no words. Just a quiet and inarticulate snarling breath almost choked by it's impossible rage. Kimblee slapped a hand on the ground as the feetsteps grew too near, and the ground pulled up, doing two things at once; a crude hand pushed him into his feet, and a spinning drill mechanism shot forward at his attack, punched out on a spring-loaded conveyence-

A right hand dissmisively slapped it away, with a flash of light, and the whole thing exploded in chunks of metal and perpetual motion clockwork.

"You've little respect for art," Kimblee said breathlessly. "All blind rage and screaming anger, destroying everything that turns against you and remaking it into nothing. Your reality is defined by the destruction of everything that opposes it. How...admirable!"

The scarred Ishbalan warrior-priest who had cast his name aside long ago glared contemputously at Kimblee. "Your approval shames me and mine," Scar said, his tone no less hateful for how quiet it was. He considered Kimblee, his red eyes narrowed in distaste as he turned his attention to the still standing remnants of Kimblee's 'art'. He placed a hand on it, light flashed into it. It didn't explode, it was only destroyed with such throroughness that was hit the ground was the soft dust of it's chemical components. "'Art'," He repeated. "Your 'art' is nothing but hubris mutilating the world."

"You can call it what you want," Kimblee retorted, fascinated by the magnitude of the loathing in Scar's eyes. He wondered what it was like to feel things so recklessly. "Hubris is only a word. Like 'good'. Or 'evil'. Or even...'hero'."

Scar glared at him, unfazed. He didn't seem to have many words that he cared to address to Kimblee. There was just vengeance and duty, refined into something akin to purity in it's intensity.

Kimblee waited for an acknowledgement. When none came, he decided to give it himself. "It's been a long time, scarred man."

"So it is," Scar said flatly. Kimblee smiled and shrugged. Scar frowned. "And now, here you are. By the grace of Ishvala, you are finally in my grasp."

"Your zealotry wounds me." Kimblee paused. "Well, not quite like when you nailed me to the train with a broken lever through my stomach. You have a certain...knack for irony." Kimblee wanted to go on, but he didn't mention how Scar's brother, whom Kimblee remembered dying under his hands during the Ishbalan Extermination Campaign, had died from a wound to his lower stomach. The irony was compelling, but the last time he had pointed that out was when Scar had tried to do the same thing to him. If Kimblee had not blasted his train-car to safety, Scar would have undoubtedly blown him apart then and there.

A moment passed the two, a brief and tiny mirror of the longer time since they had last seen each other. All times had ended in near death for one of them: the first, Scar's family had died and his own severed arm replaced with his brother's, his life bought by his brother's willingly given life. The second, Kimblee had been nailed to a train. And the this third time would certainly be the last. Compelled by this momentous occasion, Kimblee said, "I've found much more interesting work and employers, while you...well, I've heard what you've gotten up to. Very much embraced the adventurer's mindeset, I hear." Scar frowned at him. "And left your past behind you. I met a lovely young woman today; she helped give me these again." He demonstrated the tattoos on his palms. "I daresay she'd be...upset to learn about their purpose, but that's not my concern, is it? She seemed decidedly naive about your history."

"I have no history!" Scar said sudden fierceness. "I have no country! No ancestry! No homeland! No name. There is nothing to come back to, nothing to give to others. None of us do; not the Elric brothers, not my fellow Ishbalans and Amestrians, not the Xingians and their boy-emperor, not anyone." His brow furrowed, his expression as foreboding as a god of righteous vengeance. "You and the treacherous homunculi, and their 'Father', saw to that."

"What is done cannot be abandoned or forgotten," Kimblee said solemnly. "Lie if it suits you, but I cannot abide the sight of someone lying to themselves for their own...convienience. Have standards really fallen so far that a so-called 'hero' can dare engage in such childish action?"

"I have abandoned nothing!" Scar said firmly. "The dissolution of Amestris and all our worlds at the darkness that you helped invite in is not something that can be taken back! You speak of childishness, and in the same breath you accuse me of casting aside the past like it is something that ought never to be done! I have learned well that the evils of the past must be endured. It is no deception to accept mistakes and to move past them."

"And then...to allow the person that you were to wither and die?" Kimblee said slowly, as if tasting the idea. "To abandon everything that you were?"

"That, at least, you appear to understand."

"And this has nothing to do with you not wanting the people of this town to know about your 'crusade'?" Kimblee said, arching an eyebrow. "Or perhaps they're not comfortable with a serial killer in the priesthood."

Scar crossed his arms. He met Kimblee's gaze levelly, without shame or self-doubt or anything except will shaped harder than iron. "Those who have need to know, know of what I have done," He said calmly. "Those who do not need to know...still only have to ask. I will not lie of who I have been. Can you say the same? Or do you even know?" His gaze turned contemptous. "Is there anything to you but madness and emptiness?"

"I fail to see importance in those words except as linguistic expressions." Kimblee crossed his arms as well. "...Still, I admit that you have made a life for yourself here in a manner I did not expect, even had I reason to think that you would be here. A man of a local, if deliberately deranged, priesthood society? Hero to the fellow outcasts not good enough for the Heartless' claws? And I never thought that your anger difficulties would ever subside."

He considered Scar for a moment, giving this due thought; the scarred man had always been a whirling storm of untempered and inhuman fury, a man filled to the brim with such apocalyptic anger and despair that it had recast him into an avatar of vengeance; unstoppable, implacable, and utterly indiscriminate. No, better yet, anger and irrational thought bound together into a hateful howling thing that was more supernal force than man; that was Scar in essence. And yet, apart from his customary brutal attempts at a final resolution before the enemy even knew what was upon them, this time Scar had taken the time to engage his foe in meaningful debate before resuming battle. (Normally, he did it while battling, but everyone did that in Amestris. It was just one of those things; wars happened, industrial diselpunk came into fashion, and people spouted philosophy at each other while fighting to the death.)

Scar's inhuman temper had inexplicably cooled. Perhaps, Kimblee acknowledged, there had been some changes worth consideration. He was more wary of him than before now; Scar's wrath, brutal and indiscriminate though it was, was so fierce that it didn't make him any less weaker or sloppy due to his discipline and focus. It just made him into a killing machine in the shape of a man. If he'd learned to control it, to direct it-

Scar punched Kimblee in the nose. It made a very satisfying crack. Godammit, my nose! Kevin cried.

...Hold a moment, Ghostfreak said, confused. This body has gotten far more serious and insulting injuries than a broken nose. Why are you complaining about that?

Because a broken nose hurts like a bastard! Kevin said. ...Wait. Since when could I feel pain to my body after Kimblee stole it?

That was a good question, but Kimblee wasn't listening. "Ow," He said faintly, snapping his nose back into place. "OW. That hurt even more than breaking it to begin with." He frowned at Scar. "What was that for?" Scar raised a eyebrow. "...Besides the flagrantly obvious reasons you'd have for hitting me, I mean."

"Because you were just staring blankly into space. It had gotten disturbing."

"Ah. And you couldn't wait for me to finish thinking?"

"I was waiting here for over five minutes."

"...Ah," Kimblee said, feeling a modicum of embarrasment and wondering why Scar hadn't just blown his head open. (Probably because it was unsporting, or because even an avenger like Scar didn't have the heart to kill someone while they were in the middle of an overly long internal monolouge.) "Um. Hrm. What was I talking about when I lost focus?"

"My anger management issues and becoming a local hero, I believe," Scar said. "And in reply to that...serving my community and Ishvala has always been my purpose. To serve one is to honor the other. That is my purpose, my reason for being. That is the identity I carve out with my life, and that is enough for me."

"An admirable sentiment, if not one I find entirely comprehensible," Kimblee commented.

Scar ignored him. "...I love this town," He said, unexpectedly. Kimblee raised an eyebrow in surprise. "Don't look at me like that. I know this town is an absurd place. It is filled to bursting with chaos. It has no rulers save perhaps a commitee that barely keeps a reign on the borderline anarchy it engenders. There is hardly a trace of sanity or temperance among the populace as a whole, and even the most strong willed survivor that washes on it's shores falls into the madness sooner or later.

"And yet...

"And yet I love it all the same. It is not the deserts of my youth. It is not the cities and plains of Amestris. It is not the marshlands of Xing. And yet, my fellow Ishbalans and Amestrians and Xingians and our hundreds of other refugees live and love it as though it were the lands stolen from us. It is the shelter denied to us by the Heartless that slaughtered our people and unmade our worlds. In it's absurdity is room for any being through the endless multiverse, of whatever shape, creed or capability! Have you any idea how few other worlds can claim that? And In it's chaos there is still peace untouched by the horrors that claimed our old lives...the same horrors that you have unleashed upon this world!"

"You speak so readily in defense of a world and a town that outright embraces chaos and dysfunction?" Kimblee said skeptically. "One that hoards madness like a miser's gold? That is plauged by a constant seige of random super-criminals and evil geniuses and mad sorcerors and trashy romance novelists? Not to mention the needlessly gullible townsfolk. This place is insane. And you still love it?"

Scar stared levelly at Kimblee like he would at a particularily rude idiot-child. "Yes," He said firmly after a moment. "I do." There was much that went unspoken in that simple sentence, and all of it was a challenge, a declaration of war. I shall permit you to move no further.

Kimblee said nothing, for a moment. Then, "...Before you die, satisfy my curiosity," Kimblee said. "Tell me your name. Your real name. I have wondered for a long time what it is, and calling you 'Scar' seems...childish. You could consider it a last request?"

Scar gave him a glare that was still rooted in a arcane peace that disturbed Kimblee. "...I need no name. The man that held my name died in Ishbal, under your hand. All of his sins, deeds and good works have faded into the sand. Only this wretch is left...and I need no name but what those who count me among them will give me."

"Noble words," Kimblee said disdainfully. "And if they were to know the full magnitude of what you've done...would they still count you among themselves?"

"Perhaps. If not, that is what Ishvala has cast for me, and I shall abide by it. But the chances of them casting me out are still vastly slimmer than, say..." Scar's mouth made an odd contortion that might have been a smirk. "You learning to tell a joke properly."

Kimblee's eye twitched. "...I am going to enjoy killing you all far more than is healthy for me."

"Interesting," Scar said. "I used to say the same thing about you State Alchemists." With that, he slammed his right hand to the ground and the street burst apart under his him in a straight line at Kimblee.

In response, the street right around Kimblee flashed red and fountained upward into the shape of a pair of massive blast-shields, the Stone's power allowing Kimblee to transmute them into a alloy of dozens of different nigh-indestructable metals from across twenty-two distinct 'verses, these metals layered over each other in a intricate mesh that would have made a sculptor weep at it's beauty. The line of destruction slammed into it, but because Scar had been specifically targeting the materials the street was made of, it had no effect on the shields' different composition. Kimblee put a hand on the shields and half a dozen ugly gun-barrels twisted out of the front, each one nearly the size of a man. Light flashed inside them, and each spewed forth a barrage of gravel fused into chunks individually larger than a man's head, propelled at enormous speeds with incredible accuracy directly at Scar.

Unworried, Scar put his hands on the ground and a large crater appeared as the street pulled up around him, and much to Kimblee's utter astonishment, the material reshaping itself into an extraordinarily thick shield just as the projectiles struck with an awful grinding noise, ripping a few nasty dents in the shield but not coming close to breaking it. (It was a good thing for Kimblee that Aang, Toph, Naruto and Gaara were preoccupied with their own fights or they surely would have noticed.)

Kimblee heard the distinctive sound of alchemy happening and the telltale flash of light from behind that shield, and when the light faded again, the shield was gone (as was even more of the street), transformed into a plain cannon the size of a small car and nearly hollow with the size of it's barrel. Scar stood atop it, and didn't even flinch as it fired a massive barbed spear with odd blobby protrusions on the side. This spear smashed right through the lowest of Kimblee's guns and splintered it, going further into the base of the weapon and solidly anchoring itself, though still not penetrating the shield. "You've learned real alchemy, I see," Kimblee said. "You know how to do more than destroy after all! It's still not enough, and you didn't even dent my shield! And...wait, why are those things on that spear lighting up like that?"

"An interesting point," Scar said calmly. "You Amestrian zealots rant and rave about how singleminded my people are about religious studies, and you never even bothered to ask just what those studies consist of. And thus, you don't know that the training of a warrior-priest also includes a very thorough grounding in the study of the natural world given to us all by God...including, for example, chemistry."

The blobby things swelled up, starting to turn black. Kimblee got a weird feeling of deja vu. "And on that note," Scar continued. "You of all people ought to know well enough how relatively simple it is to reshape basic metallic compounds and chemicals into explosive matter."

The blobs exploded with the force of a truck going fast enough to smash through a brick wall and, the explosive lumps having been shaped in such a way as to propel the spear forward, firing with sufficient force that while the spear still only managed to indent itself a little into the shield, the part of the street that the shield extended out of, being made of lesser stuff, was broken by the force of the impact, and so the shield fell and hit the ground; Kimblee had dodged backwards and out of the way, but only just in time, the edge of his own shield clipping his foot. Grimacing in pain, Kimblee transmuted again, a long thin path in the street parting behind him and a narrow piece of street appearing under him and sliding him through that path and moving away nearly as fast as a moderately powerful car.

Scar was in pursuit almost before Kimblee was even moving, and struck his hands against the first building he passed; a cannon extended from a corner of it and fired a cannonball that almost hit Kimblee, smashing into the ground and missing his legs by a foot, and with the incredible speed Kimblee was moving at, Kimblee tucked his legs in instinctively and paled at the thought of nearly being crippled. Outraged, he transmuted a large section of the ground he passed, twelve cubic feet of it twisting up into incredibly thin sharp pointed lengths that stretched into the air, turned sharply, and went right at Scar while randomly twisting into a staggering amount of absurd angles that should have made it impossible for him to block or break.

Scar died neither. He kept moving and neatly sidestepped the first one as it lanced into the spot he'd been on, lightly put a hand on it and pushed himself into the air, spinning so that three missed him without even nicking his clothes, landed a foot on another and jumped off in time to avoid the next six, spinning and flipping and springing off them as they came, and every single evasive movement planned to keep him moving after Kimblee.

He lightly touched ground just past the ground they had sprouted from, bleeding from a few small cuts he'd been unable to avoid, laying his hands on the pointy thing's base, and four small cannons swelled out from their metal, firing more oversized spear after spear into the street after Kimblee as he was speeded on his way.

Kimblee came to a stop when the crevice he'd made to accomodate his retreat ended standing up as several of the spears going so far over him that he didn't even feel the wind of their passing, though one came so close that it whistled just over his back and pierced the tail of his coat. The rest he didn't even bother to dodge as they came at his head, but simply transmuted a series of thick pillars with grasping hands out of the ground and into the spears, smashing or pulverizing or sending them hopelessly off-course. More gatling guns appeared on their sides and opened fire on Scar, and the nameless warrior-priest didn't even blink. He avoided the volleys of rapid-fire armor-piercing hurt-making projectiles with such speed that he moved like one of the dust devils of the deserts that he'd called home, not even ducking behind cover but moving through the bullet fire, so fast that he was only nicked and scratched, more bloody but puny marks accruing without delaying him in the slightest.

Then, he vanished from sight. Kimblee thought he'd disappeared. One moment, he was there, and the next...gone.

One of the pillars above Kimblee shattered, fragments of stone hitting Kimblee between the ices and slicing his ears and nearly cutting his cheek open, and then Scar appeared in the dust, descending on Kimblee like the wrath of angels (the good old fashioned 'impossible biological mishmash' sort), all weathered dark skin and loose clothing and pure elemental vengeance in man-form-

A great weight hit Kimblee, knocking the wind and self-assurance from him: it was Scar, his knee's hitting Kimblee in the stomach as an iron-hard hand clamped around his face like a vise around something soft and squishly and almost certainly about to explode. The heat from that hand was painful, the sweat on it making Kimblee itch furiously and the stink of blood curiously arousing.

Kimblee hit the ground and the broken earth dug bloody tracks into his back through his clothes, and him not even aware that he had been sent down by the force of Scar landing upon him, the man trembling with loathing of such intensity that Kimblee was staggered by it, tempered though it was by rigorous discipline. "How did-" Kimblee started to say, but the hand clamped down with a faint crunching noise.

Kimblee felt his jaw fracture. Some of his teeth cracked, his words died unsaid in his throat, and his muscles stressed to near-snapping. The pain nearly made him faint with dizziness, and it was exequsite in it's purity. Scar's voice rang out over the fogginess in Kimblee's head, like a lighthouse horn cutting through stormy winds. "I will give you a moment to pray." Calm for all of the fury in every syllable, so curt and precise that it was like the judgement of some celestial diety. Kimblee was disturbed by the way Scar sounded as though he were making an honorable concession.

Kimblee said the only thing that came to mind, not caring about the strange prickling under his skin as though his bones were turning to crystal. "You're deluded," He said acidly, mildly frustrated with Scar's stubborn belief that so surely should have been stamped out long ago. "There is nothing to pray to."

A brief, darkly amused silence. "As last words go," Scar said, like an educated man talking to a deluded zealot. (Kimblee fervently believed it was the other way around.) "Yours are unfortunately ill-timed."

And with that, alchemic energy was siphoned from the breath of the world and flashed around his arm and through his hand - his right hand, the right hand of Destruction - and poured into Kimblee's body, the power of it tearing the ground up in a great circular blast as Kimblee grinned fiendishly-

The light faded, a residual arc of energy flashing along bits of metal.

And Kimblee grinned still, unharmed but his skin inhumanly translucent and distorted. Scar stared at him for an instant, his mouth open in a wordless expression of infuriated disbelief and said, "What."

"Ah," Kimblee said brightly as green Omnitrix energy flashed under his skin. "I see. You were deconstructing human flesh and bone or trying to make my brain explode or something of that nature. But you were targeting a human body! Which is now longer applicable." Green crystals slid out noiselessly through his skin, and the rest of him silently transmuted into the same greenish diamond-like crystal, his body bulging into the larger configurations of a Petrosapien without totally abandoning his human pattern. "Your powers are no longer applicable, provided you don't know precisely what you're deconstructing."

His arm twisted up, and Scar yelled in pain, rolling away with his hand held to his chest. Kimblee got to his feet, but Scar made it first; when the Ishbalan pulled his hand away, it was streaked with blood, a ragged cut in his chest.

Kimblee raised his right arm, now distended past his knee into a blade-like length of green crystal, almost completely smooth except for the wicked edge along one side and liberally splattered with Scar's blood. The right side of Kimblee's face had shrunken slightly, it's mass redistributed into a more elongated configuration, and something similar had happen to most of the entire right side of his body; it was affecting his balance, making him lean slightly to the right. Kimblee still grinned, with some difficulty, since his jaw had partially been changed into a form totally unsuitable for biological muscle structures, and also because the transformed parts of him didn't feel completely under his control. Best to keep this controlled and neat, he thought shortly, wary of whatever influence Kevin might yet have over this body.

Scar stared at him, utterly repelled. "What have you done to yourself?"

Kimblee grinned wider. "Whatever I must to survive."

"Not for much longer," Scar said. A vestige of a reckless melodramatic streak compelled him to add, "Accept your judgement now and die at my hands with no more contention. It would be a kindness for you."

Kimblee scoffed, with difficulty. (His lungs certainly weren't designed for that now, or whatever he had for lungs.) "And how does lying down and letting you kill me qualify as a kindness?"

Scar raised his hand, wet with his own blood. The blood was the same color as his eyes, bitter and angry and exactly as stubbornly faithful as the day Kimblee had slaughtered his family. "Because the alternative is you dying anyway, piece by piece."

"You can't deconstruct my body if you don't know what it's made of! I have hundreds of different bodies to adapt-"

"You are mistaken," Scar said quietly. "If you think that I need alchemy to pull the bones from you while you still scream."

"...Ah," Kimblee said faintly. "Brutality. How provincial."

"Elitist bastard," Scar spat.

"Delusional zealot."

"Empty sociopath, knowing nothing, accomplishing nothing, being nothing."

Kimblee's eyes flashed, as did a quasi-organic light inside his crystalline structures. "Don't you look down on me, Ishbalan scum!"

Scar smirked coldly and he put his hand to the ground. Alchemy happened, and he pulled away a massive meat cleaver half as wide as a man was tall, with an appropiately long and thick hilt to compensate. He tensed, and then with the speed he had nearly made his trademark, was upon Kimblee, who only had time to petulantly say, "How are you even carrying that thing with one hand?" and throw his crystal arm to ward away the oncoming strike. Sparks flew, again and again as Scar furiously swung over and over while green chips overhead, and Kimblee snarled in dismay as the cleaver actually hurt his arm, breaking the supposedly diamond-hard crystal. Remembering that most of him was still made of meat he pulled back, madly slashing with his crystal arm and applying all the bloodthirsty violence he had always employed to bombing to melee combat.

The two old enemies resumed a battle long since delayed by circumstances, and other battles raged beyond them.

Kimblee would have better served his time by just blowing up the dome instead of focusing on his vendetta with Scar, but distracting the Red Lotus Alchemist until the Heartless were dealt with was probably Scar's intention.

Or just killing Kimblee in as horrible a way as possible. That was a distinct possibility.

Inside the dome itself though...

For what seemed like the hundredth time in the past five minutes (and never mind how mind-numblingly fast that would mean they were spawning), a Heartless pulled itself out from the thick shadows cast by the barrier still around them all, it's body almost like a Soldier's before it stood far too tall, body distending to knifelike thinness, bits of stone poking out from it's latticed skin and twisted into nasty sharp pointy things, it's jaws distending completely with drooling threads of sinew sliding from the jagged rims of it's fanged jaws, the unsound of a dead roar rippling in the minds of everyone who beheld it...

Zim, the one fighting it, wasn't particularily bothered by it.

Light flashed and it recoiled, turning around not nearly quick enough to escape the flashing edge of the Keyblade and the red-eyed blur wielding it, slashing through it's leg with a gleam of fire, burning so brightly that it was nearly blue in places, and hurt it badly: light, any light in any form, whether physical or metaphorical, was anathema to the Heartless, and fire was so very much a form of light. There didn't seem to be any real meat or combustibles on this Heartless to burn, but it's frayed epidermis caught fire regardless.

Zim watched it run briefly until he lost patience and pointed the Keyblade at it, a beam of fire lancing at the Heartless' head and tearing it apart in a blast that took out everything from the shoulder's up. "Boom!" Zim said gleefully. "Headshot!" Unfortunately, the Heartless, while certainly decapitated, was still moving and didn't look like it would be stopping any time soon. "I'm on a schedule here! I don't know what it is yet and I haven't calculated what it's for and I have no idea what the overall agenda actually is but it totally counts and you're ruining it! That's very thoughtless of you." The Heartless jumped at the first thing that moved; namely, another Heartless, this one a shapeless blob-thing with too many half-calcified tentacles. "Hey, I was totally going after that one next!" Zim complained as the two tore at each other. "Have you no professional decorum!" He advanced forward, Keyblade in hand...

And a much bigger beam of fire than he could summon came from above, vaporizing the Heartless he had been about to take down himself; heat washed over him, blackening his clothes at the edges (even though they were supposed to be fireproof), but that was less irritating than the chunks of dirt blasted loose with sufficient velocity to punch dents in metal. His magically-boosted reflexes ensured that he was barely grazed by most of those projectiles, but this was poor solace, espicially after he overheard what was unmistakbly Calvin's maniacal laughter. (Whether it was at blasting Heartless Zim clearly wanted to take down himself, or just mad glee at blasting stuff, no one but Calvin could say. It was probably a bit of both.)

Zim turned and stared at the news studio in the distance, illuminated by the enormous fires he and Zuko periodically had relit by setting random stuff on fire. (To be fair, it was the only building in plain sight; the dome had either absorbed or cut off all other buildings around them.) "You kill-stealer!" Zim bellowed, shaking his fist in rage. Distantly, the ground rumbled and Zim, who was used to being around Earthbenders for some time and to subterranean drilling even longer before, didn't pay it much attention, though he did notice the shadows around him deepen. The Keyblade's usual rippling lightshow brightened almost to electrical levels and whatever malign power the Heartless cast over this place faded slightly (and the shadows retreated) as a tugging sensation nagged at Zim. He got the distinct impression that he really ought to be paying attention to...something, as well as feeling a lot like someone was calling him an idiot to his face without bothering with words or even a medium he could comprehend. He glanced accusingly at his Keyblade...and stared. The surface of the seemingly stable metal (not that he knew what kind of metal it was) had formed bizarre grooves and lines all over, twisting in odd patterns to such an extent that the whole weapon looked like a mosaic designed by someone obsessed with spirals. More disturbingly, they were moving, slivers of flowing metal floating off and joining to different parts of the blade like drops of water and seamlessly joining again, bits of multicolored light crackling where the metal was joining together. As Zim watched, the Keyblade shimmered in a spiral pattern from the hilt on up, churning up the metal until it settled down with the patterns gone and the Keyblade looking just like it had before. "...Huh," Zim said.

Another Heartless appeared behind Zim with exceedingly bad timing; he was looking into the Keyblade in such a way that he saw it's reflection well enough. Without thinking about it, he spun and swung; the Keyblade was an arc of silver glowing with arcs of light, smashing into the emaciated creature's midsection and bisecting it with a peculiar grinding noise. Zim glanced at the Keyblade; the side that he favored writhed with edges like the bits of a chainsaw. They faded back into the metal, leaving no sign that they had been there.

Any thoughts on that matter, which might well have led to some serious doubts on the whole thing and perhaps even further delays on his journey until he figured out what he had been cast into, were thankfully put aside as a small part of the rock barrier above them - a part no bigger than a large man's fist - crumbled into sand on the wind from above, and he heard the distant roar of violent air; he'd known Aang long enough to recognize that sound, and he smiled. It wasn't a very nice smile.

It had been long enough since there had been illumination under the dome that Zim hadn't help provide that he flinched when proper sunlight came down even though it wasn't much more than a thin ray of sunlight, but it cut through that grayish unreality like fire through fog, and it was still enough real sunlight that the Heartless recoiled from it. It got worse for them when another hole opened in the ceiling a short distance away. And then another, and another, and another, tracing a vaugely geometric shape that went all the way to the outer slope of the dome and down to the southern part of the wall just above the very ground it had been scooped from, making a very large outline of something that was quite quickly pushed outward by unseen forces. Bent outwards, you could say.

Ah, Zim thought smugly. It had taken them long enough.

Sunlight flooded in for just enough of a short instant for all but the strongest Heartless there to scurry away as one, and then (Zim could have sworn he heard a distant grunt of effort in stereo), at long last, the part of the fight in total darkness was brought to a relieved end as the entire outlined chunk of the dome was forced off with a thunderous push, breaking away with a slightly louder crash. (Hobbes winced miserably, even though he was still somewhat deaf.) That chunk floated up a bit, almost timidly, and then sharply moved up, getting out of the way...

And things got a whole lot brighter.

The Heartless couldn't talk, or scream, or roar, or make vocalizations of any kind, but Zim was certain that they would have as the sunlight flooded into the chamber and washed over the Heartless over them and burning them; in the darkness, they had no need for unneccesary defenses against the light and were totally unguarded against their most potent weakness. Dozens were burned into even less than ashes; the Heartless that had phased into the ground disintegrated in ugly wisps of smog; those that had assimilated available material just collapsed in sickening bursts of goo and various chunks of metal or stone clattering to the ground; all those that remained fled, running for the safety of the scant shadows but didn't make it before the Sam, Tucker and Courtney took them out and only a few getting through, various others making it to safety. That, however, were only the Heartless that had not adapted in some fashion: there were still a full half of the remaining Heartless remained, apparently unharmed but severely disoriented; curiously, these were the ones that seemed the most like the 'species' of Heartless Zim had almost gotten used to fighting.

Above them, the building-sized chunk of transmogrified stone turned overhead, until it's top pointed at the ground; a bit of it broke off, a quartet of small figures upon it and headed straight at the opening so recently opened while the rest of the broken barrier-bit fell against the barrier's side (presumably because they couldn't think of anything else to do with it that wouldn't cause massive collateral damage). The part of it that had broken away came down through the opening, aimed directly at the remaining Heartless, who had unwisely grouped together. This didn't escape them; they glanced at each other with a look that probably translated as 'oh crap!' and scattered, flying and hopping and leaping away right before the surprisingly big chunk of stone crashed into the ground where they'd been, still flattening a good number of the bigger or slower ones that didn't move fast enough.

The top of the stone broke away from the rest in a moderately large slab and slammed into the ground a short distance from Zim, who wasn't surprised to see Aang and Toph sitting on it, though he was surprised to see the two ninjas from last night, Naruto and Gaara, with them; he'd totally forgotten about those two idiots. (Well, he mentally corrected itself, one surprisingly savvy idiot and one amazingly creepy-awesome lesser idiot.) "Excellent work," Zim said to Aang. "...Though it took so very long..."

"We were constantly being attacked, we couldn't crack it fast enough," Aang said. "We might have squashed you guys, you know?" Zim inclined his head reluctantly.

Some of the Heartless feebly tried to squirm out from under the stone, and Hobbes wandered over to give them encouraging kicks. Thus chastened, those Heartless admitted defeat and their bodies vanished into the smoke-stuff defeated Heartless normally became while their true negatively-aspected essences returned to...wherever it was they came from.

There were still Heartless around, though. "Darn it, we missed most of them!" Naruto said, and Aang shrugged apologetically. Toph snorted dismissively. Gaara spotted a Heartless out in the open and proceded to kill it in as unneccesarily gruesome and hideous a manner as possible. (Fortunately, Aang wasn't loooking. Otherwise Gaara might have gotten into trouble.)

"HEY, YOU'RE THAT GUY FROM LAST NIGHT!" Hobbes yelled from next to Zim. He had actually recovered from being deaf some time ago, but then Cyborg had fired his sonic cannon too closely again, deafening Hobbes once more.

"Why are you yelling?" Gaara asked him, glancing up from he was while a gaping mouth made of sand had appeared in his clothing (which apparently were also made of sand) messily gnawed on the still animate head of a helpless Soldier-type Heartlesss.

"WHAT DID YOU SAY?" Hobbes yelled. Gaara and Naruto glanced at each other, clearly deciding that this wasn't worth asking about. "ARE WE GOING TO GET BACK TO BEATING UP HEARTLESS OR WHAT?"

"Ah?" Zim said. "Yes, certainly." He turned around, just in time to see every single remaining Heartless in the area barreling straight for him. "Why are they going for me!"

"You are carrying an artifact that is anathema to them," Abel said apologetically, firing into the Heartless mob; he got off five rounds of six grenades per shot before he got empty clicks from his guns. "Checkered-stripes and pounded nails! Of all the times to run out of ammo!" Abel furiously started adjusting his device into a different, hopefully more efficient configuration.

"Allow me, sir!" Tesla Man said, stepping forward and firing extremely fast, though worryingly unstable, blasts of energy from his gauntlets. Bolts of electricity lanced out from capacitators extending from his shoulders, knocking back a Heartless or two and causing a chain-reaction of tripping Heartless, and he finally took a step back, opening his chest plate, and firing an enormous laser from his power source as he had done to Hobbes earlier. The resultant blast caused a small mushroom-cloud effect, and when the dust died down...there were still Heartless running at them, burned and battered but very much unharmed, though they was fewer of them.

"That's it?" Zim said, looking at Tesla Man skeptically. "You require a power source with a higher output. Have you considered doubling the cycling? It would make your armor far more efficient."

Tesla Man gaped. "...You can do that?"

"Can you lot hurry up and hit them already?" Abel said, his device now transformed into a power armored suit of his own, wrapping around Abel in a bulky design that looked like a mixture of seventy percent ancient armor and thirty percent high future machinery, with an overall aesthetic in bulky and heavy machinery he held up with no trouble at all, with many visible joinings, bulky sub-systems on the exterior. Mechanisms Zim recognized as being meant to regulate muscle power extended from the shoulders and arms, resembling complicated pressurized mechanisms and rotating devices with pistons here and there. There were no external or obvious weapon systems (at the moment, they could easily be internal), though there were several vents and nozzles set all over the suit, as well as a well-protected fuel tank feeding into his back, filled with an unidentified grey goop tinted a bloody red. A short, face-concealing helmet had extended over Abel's head, and it was clear that the whole suit was expressively designed not expressly to protect Abel, but to conceal him. Exactly why that was, Zim didn't know.

"JUNGLE CAT AWAY!" Hobbes yelled for no apparent reason, leaping overhead and smashing into the Heartless with enough force to send shockwaves through the ground and scatter the Heartless, where the shooters on the news building (and Calvin) were able to shoot the dazed Heartless easily. Lasers, plasma volleys and directed fire rained down, tearing through the Heartless with such great efficiency that the Heartless were killed on the spot or mortally wounded, and Gaara easily resolved that problem by crushing them to pieces.

The remaining Heartless, though there were many, tilted their heads up and slunk away, turning into shadow and sliding into the ground. "...Huh," Zim said, looking around nervously.

A wind blew nearby. He waited patiently.

Nothing happened. No darkling or unnatural horror appeared to kill him.

He waited some more.

Still nothing happen, and he got bored with waiting. "HEY, THE HEARTLESS ARE GONE!" He yelled.

"What, really?" Behemoth of the Mall Crawlers said, trundling over and carrying Sokka on his shoulder for some reason.

"They're gone?" Zuko said. "We beat them?"

"Looks like it," Katara said, walking over to them.

Everyone else came over (aside from the people on the roof, who weren't in a position to get down really quick). "We won?" Abel said, sounding suspicious, in contrast to the gleeful and gratified looks of the others. (The ones that prefered not to fight, that is. The ones that liked fighting, like Zim, Toph, Gaara or a few of the Mall Crawlers, looked disappointed.) "That's...anticlimatic."

There was a long pause as they all mentally adjusted to this develoupment, and then the gust exhaling of their collective sigh of relief. "It lacks drama, me thinks, but it could have been worse for us still," Tesla Man said solemnly, even though in the course of his battles the front of his chest plate had been nearly torn off, several capacitators had overloaded and exploded, and his limbs weren't compeltely moving in sync. Hobbes, while still not really aware of what anyone was saying, was perfectly aware of the armored blowhard's condition and he looked guilty; he hoped he hadn't doomed the arrogant but earnest teen by damaging him so badly during their fight at the mall. "We could all well be dead, and yet we are not!"

"Yeah, that's always something to think about!" Aang said, looking a bit brighter. He paused. "Hey, where'd Danny go?"

"Yo," Danny said, materializing by them, and with him came Calvin, Courtney, Sam and Tucker, all clinging to each other while Appa's surprisingly graceful bulk flew over to them. Presumably, Danny had fetched these guys from the news studio since this part of the battle was done. Courtney was shaking and shivering, Sam and Tucker had adapted to being made intangible a long ago, and Calvin...

Well, he looked to be feeling the same as Courtney, though instead of being upset or frightened he was downright gleeful and fascinated. "That was awesome! It's really kinda cool how it feels like every bit of water in your chemical structure freeze and tries to go somewhere else, isn't it?" He said to Courtney.

Courtney shivered. "Saints save me from mad scientists..." She said quietly.

Calvin snorted. "No luck, we're all over the place, I checked. Now, from a strictly subjective point of view, would you say that you felt that you were still on this plane of existence with your body altered in some fashion, or that you were partially shifted into somewhere else?" Courtney groaned.

"Actually," Danny said to him, unaware that it was a bad idea to be feeding a mad scientist experiment fodder. "I got it on good authority that it's a basic reaction that ectoplasmic matter, like what my body's made of in Ghost Mode, has on the material world. Earth-stuff does the same thing in the Ghost Zone."

"'Ghost Zone'?" Calvin said thoughtfully. "Do tell."

"I think not," Zim interrupted. "Partly because I could tell you all that if I felt like it, partly because I just noticed that I have not seen Abel's partner Scar anywhere here at all after I got him to face down Kimblee, but mostly because I do not like the idea of you experimenting on my friend to satiate your curiosity."

"Hey, I don't do stuff like that to people!" Calvin said. A surge of honesty made him add, "Anymore, that is. As such. Not so often, anyway. Um...define 'people'." After a moment, Calvin blinked and added, "Uh. What was that you said about the Scar guy?"

"Yeah," Zuko said. "Last time I saw him he was smashing through Heartless like the rest of us."

"Yes," Zim said. "Because I got him to face Kimblee! What is with you guys and not listening."

"And another thing?" Calvin said, showing off his tracking device once more, now beeping furiously. "My readings say that Kimblee is practically right by us, no doubt waiting to pick up where his evil little shadow-things left off?"

There was a long pause.

"The same Kimblee that Scar really really hates?" Calvin prompted. "The same Scar Zim says has gone off to defeat him? And would just love to make his skull go boom and-"

"Okay, we get it!" Zim said. "Now, let's just turn around and join him and...hey, what's that noise over there?" He pointed, and they looked down the side of the street. By some blessed chance (or perhaps certain otherworldly and helpful entities pushing probability here and there), Kimblee and Scar turned the corner, somehow exchanging blows before moving on, oblivious to their audience, and were gone again. "...Ah, there they are."

"WAS THAT THE KIMBLEE GUY WE'RE SUPPOSED TO STOP?" Hobbes yelled, looking around for confirmation. No one answered, as they realized belatedly that while they had heard much of Kimblee's evil, Kimblee's power and Kimblee's general threat level, Scar had neglected to tell them what he looked like.

Still, Scar was fighting him, and that was good enough for everyone, who had basically defaulted to taking Scar's advice on dealing with Kimblee; at the moment, perhaps realizing that they had escaped, Scar had lured Kimblee back into the street just in front of him, the two alchemists now dueling with swords. Well, Kimblee had a sword (a very nice zweihander with a six foot long blade so wide he had to assume a Tetramand-muscled form just to lift it), Scar had created an equally large (but he was naturally strong enough to carry it with no problems) chainsword, it's overlarge motor roaring slightly louder than Scar's own incoherent bellows of hate. If it hadn't been for Kimblee's sword being made of a synthesized alloy made of six of the most durable substances known to science (and at least two that were not, because Kimblee's evil backers had made them two and a half weeks ago and no decent science would have anything to do with those jerks), Scar's chainsword would have already cut through it.

"Okay, back to setting evil on fire and stuff," Zim said, tiny arcs of miniature lightning arcing off the Keyblade agreeingly; he broke into a run straight at Kimblee...

And didn't get three steps before the ground started shaking ominously, a grinding noise coming from underneath. Zim came to a startled halt, as did the scattered bunch who had been about to follow him. Kimblee took advantage of Scar's brief moment of heisitation to trigger a blast that smashed Scar through into the wall of a successful Altarian fast food franchise and out the other side; Scar's chainsword fell to the ground, motor still grinding away before sputtering out. Kimblee looked down and stepped away carefully, smirking grimly at the crumpled layers of asphault that were quickly giving way to the underground shockwaves that something was making...and paused, looking up a bit and taking notice of Zim and his allies, who were less than thirty feet away from Kimblee. "Ah, there you are," Kimblee said, tipping his hat slightly. He frowned at Zim, and would probably have been offended at the rude Irken gesture Zim made at him had he understood it.

Another shockwave rocked the ground, and the shadows all around them grew to impossible sizes, pooling together in a massive immaterial tide that, for all of it's inability to touch the material things them, did something to everyone as they passed through for only an instant, long enough to leave them shivering and stuttering and hearing faint whispers from...something. Those shadows receded, as though only the display of an approaching horror, leaving in their tracks purplish-blue anti-light shimmering in nausea-inducing patterns...

And then at last, before anyone could make a move to put down Kimblee and end this debacle, something broke through the street with such violence that the material the resultant hole had been filled with vaporized, exploding upwards in a dust-cloud while a small yellowish robotic figure flew up on the head of that cloud, soon dispelling it by virtue of the incredibly powerful jet blasts from it's feet...and those jets were the same anti-light as that of the Heartless' energy displays.

It came crashing down into the ground, just in front of Zim: a small yellow suit of powered armor that looked a bit like an egg (and to Calvin and Hobbes and some of the more scholarly present, like an antiquated powered armor of the lost known as the Squats until the ancient Tyranids ate most of them), it's various power cores and capacitors glowing with negative energy and rusting everywhere, blood still dripping from inside it's broken chest plate.

The little armor stood up carefully, gazing at all of them...and then focused it's stare directly on Zim, irrational and impersonal malevolence clear in that inhuman stare. It took a step forward, braided coils studded with spikes sliding out of a crack in it's armor and around it's upraised arm as a repulsor array on it's palm powered up...

Except that Zim had started running at it since he noticed it staring at him, and smashed the Keyblade into it's side; it was even smaller than Zim was (Stewie having been the size of a toddler, for some reason) and not particularly heavy, and was knocked into the air past the lowest rooftops, spiralling completely out of control when it's repulsor array released a black beam with enough force to send it flying over the rooftops while Zim kept running.

"Well, that was a bit of a letdown," Kimblee started to say, only for Zim, still halfway to Kimblee, to raise a fist glowing with heat and punch out a fireball that was more combusted air than flames and struck Kimblee squarely in the stomach, knocking him several dozen astonished paces. Zim kept running, wildly throwing blasts of fire and screaming like a madman.

"Doesn't that idiot have any grasp of combat tactics?" Calvin yelled, running after him; somewhat awkwardly, with the weight of his magitech devices on his arms, the scanner machine he was holding in one hand and the converted radio in the other.

"WHERE ARE YOU TWO GOING!" Hobbes yelled at them. "RUNNING STRAIGHT AT THE CREEPY GUY RIGHT IS STUPID! AND PROBABLY BUSINESS AS USUAL. OH, WHO AM I KIDDING?" He ran right after them, since it was his job to be the one person on the crew with a reasonable modicum of sanity. (Zuko looked like he might hold that role too, given time.)

The others watched them go, too stunned to do anything. "Are they really crazy enough to just charge like that?" Courtney said incredulously. "At a long-ranged combat specialist?"

"Yes," Aang said at once; he and the rest of Team Avatar were far too used to Zim's antics to be surprised. Toph looked like she downright approved, Katara seemed like she would have preferred to have Kimblee blow himself up somehow, Sokka was torn between exasperation and geeking out over how cool that that, and Zuko... "Wait. Where's Zuko?"

Just then, the animated armor from before smashed through, flying in mid-air and looking around for Zim before seeing him going after Kimblee. Apparently deciding to weed the competition a little bit, started firing repulsor beams at them, beams that Aang and Toph deflected by pulling up a barrier of stone from some of the dome Kimblee had trapped them in earlier. Once the energy had faded, Toph (after getting quick directions from Aang) broke it off and shoved it at the armor, knocking it back for a moment. Then it smashed through it, diving at them and narrowly missing everyone as they dove for cover. Sokka, though, lunged at it, grabbing it by the leg and clinging on to it for dear life with one hand, his free hand scrabbling for a cable on it's back or something he could unplug.

It flew over head, Sokka passing just inches over Katara's outstreched hand, and smashed into the top floor of a nearby house. There were many smashing, blasting, crashing noises (and the top floor of the place basically imploded) and then the armor smashed through the door, hissing vapor everywhere, then Sokka blasted it from behind, firing blast after blast and knocking the light mech overhead. The other gun-carrying fighters took this as a cue, and then a volley of blaster fire from Courtney, Sam and Tucker, aided by larger Ghost Ray blasts from Danny, ice spikes from Katara, sonic blasts from Cyborg and energy blasts from the ranged weapons of the Mall Crawlers all culmatively knocked it back...for a moment.

It started charging up it's repulsors and fired them, one after another, at Aang, who it accurately measured to be the strongest among them. It was a bad move; Aang spun spun into their path instead of moving away, and with his increasingly sophisticated knowledge of the primal art of Energybending, caught the repulsor beams in his bare hands, wincing at the nasty way they felt. It didn't stop him from seamlessly channeling the dark beams as easily as he had learned to do with lightning, redirecting them through his body. He kept moving, catching one of those blasts after another and dancing around in a circular manner to keep the energy circulating inside him, until even the amor, amped up by the Heartless now inhabiting it, wearied itself. No sooner had it done that did Aang released all the stored up energy, channeling it into a massive ball of negative energy that exploded in a mighty laser, tinted a brilliant blue thanks to Aang's pure spiritual power, and struck the armor so hard that it was knocked through six buildings, the last one collapsing on it. Aang winced, at that, espicially it didn't seem to do much good. The Heartless armor just got back up, dented but none the worse for the wear, and started advancing again...except that Appa flew from above and smashed into it, Abel cling to one of his legs, and starting pounding on it in a desperate attempt to keep the damned thing pinned.

Oblivious to this new fight going on in the background, Kimblee had recovered and hit the ground with his hands, transmuting and launching a stern-faced bludgeon from the ground that hit Zim a glancing blow, surprising more than hurting him. By this time, Scar had recovered as well, racing past Zim after helpfully dislodging the bludgeon but keeping his distance for some reason. "Aha, now the players have assembled!" Kimblee said. "With less than steller dramatic timing, I'll admit." Calvin clumsily managed a blast of flame that Kimblee easily blocked by transmuting a barrier from the ground (not one of the fancy ones from earlier, he didn't think it was worth the effort), while Hobbes threw a dislodged brick at the barrier it made a dent in the dense mineral. Kimblee smirked, unimpressed, and saw that Scar was still maintaining his difference, looking above Kimblee and still warily backing away a considerable distance with a few skidding jumps. "Where are you going to-"

Kimblee felt brightness and heat, just before a blast of fire exploded right in his face and chest, rocketing him down the street, past two intersections, over a tourist's booth, off a lamp post, and finally skidding across the ground in a smaller circular plaza and smashing into a abstract sculpture covered with spikes and bladed bits all over called Celebration of All Things Spiky and Stabby. (A nearby sign read 'Please direct all villains to the sculpture.' Traverse Town largely adhered to the 'hurt bad guys until they stop annoying people' school of crime fighting.) He groaned, thinking vaugely that he'd never known that it was possible to block out pain of a certain intensity when it hurt too much. I could have told you that, Kevin said smugly, his 'voice' growing stronger. With a grunt, he used the Stone's power to smother the fires on his clothing before they could spread and do him serious injury.

There was a small noise. Kimblee looked up, still smouldering and smoking, and a hard-faced scarred boy, his flesh glowing slightly reddish like it was feeding on the sun's light, was perched atop the rock. He glared at Kimblee with a hatred that didn't seem human, too elemental and pure to be truly sane. "Are you Solf J. Kimblee, also known as the Red Lotus Alchemist?" the boy asked, his voice cracked (was something wrong with his throat?) and lisping slightly, like the echoes of flames were burning in his guts.

Kimblee blinked. "Yes. I am."

The boy nodded, and in that quick jabbing gesture, Kimblee was reminded strongly - terrifyingly - of that girl Azula. It was the eyes, those inhuman dragon's eyes...and before Kimblee could follow that thought anymore and come to the logical conclusion, Zuko blasted Kimblee in the face with more fire.

"You should have known," Zuko said furiously as Kimblee's flesh reddened and burned and all he could do was scream. "You deserve this. You're a murderer and a monster and it's time you paid what you owe." He held up a hand, still burning with the fire he had cast at Kimblee. "Fire cures all moral debts."

"That's insane," Kimblee said after a moment, totally bewildered.

"Insane?" Zuko repeated, smirking with all the dragonish and fury-touchedmadness of the imperial line of Sozin. "No. That's just how we do things in the Fire Nation." He inhaled, fire whistling from between his lips-

Kimblee changed, as quickly as he could, and the blast of fire hit him a bare moment after his flesh bunched up into something akin to the flame-like stuff of a Pyronite and it still hurt, still burned (and he wondered how that could be, how could a Pyronite, a being made of fire, be burned?) and he grinned at the pain. "Well," He said with a grin as his humanity reasserted itself. "At least I am bored no more!"

"Bored?" Zuko said. "You're pathetic."

Kimblee's expression froze. "Don't," He whispered. "Don't look down on me." He clapped his hands and charged a blast, too fast for retaliation, and Zuko's eyes widened as the ground in front of him broke, a large figure bursting out of the ground at him-

Kimblee released the power, and the world went white.

The light faded and Kimblee found himself standing in the middle of a crater carved deep into the street. Rubble formed a crude ring around him, the buildings that had stood around him utterly destroyed. Dust rose and fell on the air, and liquid darkness pooled around his feet and nearly to his knees, writhing like a living thing.

"You survived that, didn't you?" Kimblee said softly, seeing that there were no splatters of blood or chunks of organic material or broken bodies or anything to signify that he'd hit anyone. As if in response to his frustration, at the edges of his mind he heard the call of the Heartless, a smooth suggestion that they could be so much help: a thousand whispers melded together into a single voice that pulled at his mind and asked again and again, the voice something dark and vitrolic and quite inhuman. A need, almost buried under the hunger and pain and fury and need to destroy and hurt and unmake. A need for a command, for it's broken mind to be directed...

"That was reckless, boy!" Scar scolded Zuko from behind a nearby piece of rubble, the Firebender still hoisted over his shoulder from the scant moments when Scar had burst from the ground and back under it with Zuko in tow (breaking the ground open with alchemy, of course), and now just outside of the impact Kimblee had made. "You could have died just now."

"Is it a bad thing to die doing the proper thing?" Zuko asked, sliding off Scar's shoulder and onto his feet, looking quite unpeturbed by his narrow escape.

"No," Scar acknowledged. "But it is better to live and serve, your enemies broken behind you and the world made better for their absence."

Zuko inclined his head. "The Fire Sages of my country say much the same thing." He peered around the bit of rubble and saw that Kimblee was standing quite peaceably, right there on what was left of the street. "What's he doing?"

"Waiting for his enemies to reveal themselves," Scar said knowingly. "He is arrogant. He will not fire blindly to hit our allies; it would seem...inelegant."

Zuko's face crinkled in disgust; that sounded far too much like a lot of Fire Nation generals he had known. "If we immobilize him now, we can take him down without any more risk of anyone else dying."

Scar nodded, a short and tacit gesture of approval. Ruthlessness in the service of slaying evil was sometimes required, regretfully enough. "If I can transmute something around him, can your flames kill him then?"

Zuko nodded harshly. "Provided no one interrupts us-"

Something pinwheeled through the sky. It went bonk. "Ow!" Kimblee said, rubbing his head and picking his hat off the ground where it had fallen. "What the hells?" The Keyblade gleamed where it hit the ground after bouncing off Kimblee's head, imbedded nearly to it's hilt and the shadows around Kimblee parting around it, as if afraid to even get near it. "Who throws a sword...key...thing as an attack?"

"It was a surprise attack!" Zim declared, now standing directly behind Kimblee, having been carried there by an unusually strong wind. Coldness gusted out from a space quite near him.

Kimblee stared at him. "...You're standing right there where I can see you. In what way is this a surprise attack?"

"Well, you weren't expecting it, were you?" Zim asked.

Kimblee sputtered, trying to respond; while he was distracted, Zim kicked Kimblee in the shin really hard. "OW!"

"Weren't expecting that, either!" Zim said proudly.

Behind the boulder, Scar stared in astonished horror. "What. The. Hells," He said flatly.

Zuko sighed. "I keep forgetting that the rate of a plan succeeding around Zim is inversely proportionate to his proxmity to the area of it's execution." He paused, and added, "Which actually bodes brightly towards us foiling this monster of yours."

"And if Kimblee is simply rampaging?"

"Then we're probably hosed," Zuko said flatly.

In the meantime, Zim was was doing a slightly sub-par job of avoiding Kimblee's reaction to his 'surprise attack'; a volley of spikes bursting out of the ground under his feet. Zim was fast enough not to get hit directly, but he still wasn't fast enough to completely avoid them. "I don't think -ow!- that you're -ow!- approaching this in -Ow! Ow! OW! - the right frame of -wow, that was real close - mind."

"Indeed," Kimblee remarked, green energy seeping from him alongside the red energies as he continuously transmuted. "The right frame of mind to not take a joke so seriously, you might say."

"What? You're still on about that?" Zim said, grabbing the Keyblade out of the ground and sliding it free as easily as if it weighed nothing at all. He turned, and in a single quick movement chopped a spike in half as it grew at him and struck it, sending it flying at Kimblee, who caught it with one hand and transformed it into a stone cannon that fired a single big bullet right at Zim...

Who noticed something over head and stood his ground, grinning like a maniac, because an instant later a blast of green energy came down from above, shaping itself into a shield that bounced the bullet off harmlessly, dissipating after a moment. Kimblee blinked and that's all he had time for, because a moment later a tremendous blast of wind knocked him off his feet and almost flattened him shortly before the section of the ground directly under him burst open and wrapped around his body to immobilize him, dropping him on the spot and holding him still.

More still of the ground crumbled into six square feet of sand that moved up like grasping arms that seized him so tightly his bones cracked, and yet moved aside for a set of blunt-tipped daggers that struck him at several precisely targeted nerve clusters, causing his muscles to violently and painfully seize up. Icicles larger than a man rained down around him so close he could have been skewered, liquifying and flowing together before freezing again to make a cage around him and locking him down even more, while blue-green beams of pure elemental coldness froze around the rock and sand, hardening them to beyond even the steel-hardness they'd already been.

He blinked, fascinated at the appropiately extensive measures. His body refused to respond, partially paralyzed as it was, and the restraints around him made him unable to escape without breaking his body into pieces; he knew that there were many beings with the ability to grow and smash through restraints like this, but he wasn't one of them. He was less fascinated when he still managed to make a small movement and a ferocious volley of blaster shots, set to 'stun', hit him in the face and snapping his head back with sufficient violence to bruise his neck...and more importantly, making the Philosopher's Stone slip out from between his teeth and clattering to the ground at his feet. "Unfortunate, this," Kimblee remarked, startlingly indifferent.

A duo of figures appeared beforehim that he was unable to place; a blond preteen with a pair of devices on his arms resembling bizarre mixtures of pseudo-science and alchemic artistry, and a tall teenaged tiger-boy with tribalistic markings. Both of them struck without warning or preamble, the restraints around Kimblee moving around to accomodate them; the boy slammed a radio-like assemblege into Kimblee's groin with surprising force while the tiger diffidently swing a fist into Kimblee's stomach with all the force of a jackhammer, with a pair of sickening crunches. Kimblee's chin hit the hardened rock over his chest and he coughed wetly, blood dribbling over his mouth. The tiger stepped back with a carefully passive expression, the boy with a savage and vindictive grin. It was hard to say which was more disconcerting.

Zim got up from where they had watched this happen and walked over, giving Kimblee a friendly punch to the face on principle, as did Scar and Zuko. "Hey, did we win?" Zim heard someone yell; he looked over to the street leading into this plaza and saw everyone else finally caught up to them and spread through it, their various members responsible for restraining Kimblee. Aang was the one who had spoken, riding on Appa's head while the Mall Crawlers. Zim shrugged, and everyone came over to have a closer look.

"Hi," Zuko said to the others. He glared at Zim. "We had a good plan to kill that lunatic before you interrupted it."

"That was rude of you," Kimblee scoled Zim weakly. Scar gave him a good solid haymaker in the stomach. (In the exact spot where Hobbes had hit him, actually.) "Gah, with the internal bleeding!" Scar punched him some more. In the exact same spot.

"Isn't that like police brutality?" Calvin asked Scar with a frown, Hobbes also frowning.

Scar paused, blood on his knuckles. "It may be, but I am not a police officer." He resumed pummeling Kimblee.

"Hi," Abel said to them as he walked over, holding the animated armor in his hands. Strangely, it wasn't struggling at all; it looked like the forces animating it had been 'switched off', for a time. "We managed to get this thing worn down...I guess, but then the others here got Kimblee down and this guy just shut down and-"

"Bored now!" Zim complained, interrupting Abel in mid-sentence. He bent over and picked something up. "Hey, look what I found." He held up the Philosopher's Stone.

They stared intently at it, as did Zim. This little red crystal, the materialized form of over a hundred souls torn from their mortal shells, their very minds frayed and shredded from the dislocation, bound into a form reducing them to little more than metaphysical fuel, dying by inches to feed a madman's lust for destruction...

Zim shook it a bit. "Cool! It's like looking into a lava lamp!"

Calvin went to stop him. "Hey, quit it, that's just not right-" Zim shook it some more. "Hey, it does look like a lava lamp! Make the little bubbles move sideways!" Zim did. Both of them giggled madly. "So cool!" Hobbes facepalmed; even if he couldn't hear properly (though his hearing was clearing up) it was pretty obvious what was going on. Zuko scowled harshly. Scar was paying no attention, as he was still trying to beat up Kimblee. (Much to his disappointment, his attempts to blow Kimblee's head apart from the inside-out still had no effect. Then again, he was still targeting human components, and this particular body hadn't been strictly human to begin with, as Kevin could have explained.)

"Hey, check this out!" Zim said. "If you look at them like this, the little bubbles look like...um...they look like...yeah, they totally look like faces...does anyone else hear whispers and people talking and stuff?"

The Keyblade glowed, the chain wrapping around Zim's arm and the Stone.

The world shifted-

Red, everything is red

No up, no down, no shape or form or anything sane, and faces everywhere, twisted and long and mad and screaming, screaming...

the sound hits him like the screws in fingers, burning oil in bone, and hurts like the echoes of everything wrong; hundreds of voices scream in unison, unknowing and confused and shredded, bit by bit by incautious bit

they are melding into each other, arms conjoined to neck and torso growing from misshapen heads and they scream with the pain of it, these soul-shapes that need their bodies back to live, that want so very badly not to die; the pain consumes them, overwhelms them, IS them and all they can do is scream and scream and scream-

wait. Not all of them.

A green figure is moving in this typhoon of souls, a spark of emerald in this red nightmare catlike and quick and efficient, grabbing on limbs and slowly pulling them apart in unshaped masses that aches to look at, hurt and still crying but apart from the screaming and flashing GREEN-

The cat looks right at Zim (and he KNOWS he's there), a bundle of other green bodies clinging to him and Zim thinks he recognizes Bonnie Rockwaller and a host of others and before he can a word, the cat, Razor, turns back and resumes what he's doing.

Zim feels something unexpected, a certain tension in the atmosphere that he can almost touch, that he can almost grasp, like the feeling of a lock in the process of turning, and he suddenly knows that he could push it the rest of the way if only he knew how-

He didn't know what to do. The screaming was going to drive him mad-

Zim dropped the Stone. And Zim stood still, the Keyblade's chain falling away from his arm and the Stone, the latter glinting with the tiniest hint of green in all that baleful red, now very slightly brighter than before; like a beneficient flaw amid the vile redness. (Not that red was always bad.)

"What whispers and stuff?" Calvin said, as if less than seconds had passed. This was probably the case. "Oh, whatever. Hand over the Stone, let me see if I can figure out how to reverse whatever Kimblee did to make it-"

Kimblee suddenly looked straight at the animated armor, which suddenly burst out of Abel's hands, blasting off him in a spray of jet-fire and flying down to Kimblee, raising a hand and blasting Scar with a repulsor beam before he could turn around and flew to Kimblee-

There was a crashing noise and a great deal of dust; Zim fell back, coughing furiously and increasingly bewildered and getting angry because he was bewildered and his bewilderment deciding to bow back because being angry made more sense and so on before the dust cleared and now Kimblee was gone. "Where'd he go?"

A boot lightly kicked him in the back of the head. "Hello," Kimblee said, the robot tightly grabbing him from behind and holding him up so that they hovered in mid-air. They suddenly flipped up side down, so that Kimblee was at face level with Zim (and had to put a hand on his looted hat to keep it falling off.) "Mine," He said, grabbing the Philosopher's Stone out of Zim's hand and flying back out of range, holding the stone between his hands as he clapped and placing a hand on the armor's hands, pumping the Stone's energy directly into the Heartless directly inhabiting it. The metal of the armor twisted, bulged, horribly creaking noises coming from it as the anti-light powering it became almost blindingly bright and they both fell to the ground. Kimblee took several cautious steps back as the armor broke apart, literally coming apart at the seams as something inside it came bursting out-

Darkness erupted around them, a teeming writhing mess of dozens, hundreds of Heartless bound together and finally combined into a single amalgam, and it quickly took shape, or rather it took anti-shape, an apothesis of sanity-breaking predatory intent just barely defined by the demands of physicality. It could not last and it writhed in furious denial of reality's crushing pressure around it, feasting on the essence of the world around it as it manifested physicality and something huge emerged around Kimblee, looming up, up over the buildings, Kimblee standing smugly under it, summoning more of the Philosopher's Stone power to himself and conjuring up a set of large cannons around him that fired massive quantities of dust into the sky, held together by the unusual properties Kimblee had made in them and blocking out the sunlight.

And so, the Heartless manifested in full, an amorphous horror that made Zim suddenly think of half-glimpsed and half-remembered sights glimpsed only in faint memory, of that horrible moment between dying Earth and the relative safety of a random alley in Traverse Town's. For a moment longer it was ephermeral, and then it was a thousand shifting forms made for killing and feeding and enduring, all of them changing and bleeding into the next without pattern or reason. An conspiracy of nightmare forms changing with such speed that it was nearly formlessness, an almost perfect arrangement of tentacles and tooth-rimmed orifices and leathery wings and sharp beaks and scything limbs and chitinous plates and more, so many more, beyond the apparent limits of the 'normal' Heartless, and shrouded in the substance of the blackest night so that the sun only outlined it's horror for a moment and Zim just knew that it was looking right at him with over twenty-six eyes sliding out from places where eyes didn't belong.

"Ooh, a nightmare horror from fearful realms I dare not contemplate!" Calvin said excitedly. Hobbes, his hearing back by now, stared at him in mingled horror and exasperation. "I haven't seen one of those for a while...well, one I didn't summon accidentally-on-purpose, I mean."

The great horror reared back, a massive tooth-studded maw appearing from the murky depths of it's amorphous form. It opened wide, it's jaws elongating into a shape similar to a crocodile's (longer, so much so that if it had a endoskeletal structure under there it should have snapped by the weight of gravity on it's absurd mass) and it's insides boiled, entropic energies crackling and forming into a massive sphere of purple-black power.

The sphere rapidly expanded, bulging slightly outwards as it amassed strength. "They can use energy attacks!" Zim said indignantly. "Why did no one tell me that?"

"...You've seen them use energy attacks," Calvin told him while Zuko looked behind them and saw several individuals approaching.

"Well clearly I wasn't paying attention!" Zim snapped.

They prepared themselves as the energy sphere exploded outwards in a massive beam of black energy with streamers of red spiralling around it...and fortunately no effort was required on their part, because a massive chunk of the very same dome they had been trapped in earlier was thrown into the side of what could be considered it's face at the moment, hitting it just before it fired and knocking it off-course, and the beam fired harmlessly into the sky. (Disintegrating some of the airbourne nanomachines there, decreasing their overall computing power by a few decimels; nothing was lost, but they sent a message to everyone's various messaging accounts politely asking them to bring some scrap to the appropiate industrial recycling facilities to be remade into more nanomachines.)

While the Heartless was still reeling, and disgorging it's beam attack (as cutting off entirely would could potentially dangerous feedback to itself), a tremendous blast of fire - not from Calvin, Zim, Zuko or Aang - flew overhead, singing a few hairs but otherwise doing no harm, and punched into Kimblee's general area with a impressive explosion, flooding the Heartless with the kind of elemental power it was particularily vulnerable to (any lingering resistence it might have retained from Red Nocturnes having been overwhelmed), still not doing much damage at all. The amalgamated Heartless pulled back nonetheless, confused and wary, and revealed Kimblee held safelty within what could be considered a hand.

A few dozen heads extended from the Heartless' heaving mass, fanged jaws opened wide, and lunged at Zim. There was a snapping sound, and a ring of fire rose up just in front of Zim like a shield, the offending heads ramming right into them and burning away into ashes before having a chance to realize what was happening.

Cyborg looked around to see what the commotion was. His jaw dropped. "You gotta be kidding me," he said, sounding downright awed.

"Huh?" Calvin looked around. "...Oh, it's you guys again."

"Didn't I leave you in abject mind-warped misery?" Kimblee said, blinking. "Or something like that?"

"I got better," said Roy Mustang, followed by Field-Admiral Gibbs, the two of them looking as badass as possible. Angilaka and Beth followed behind, waving at everyone (a few of Zim's older allies waving back uncertainly) while Greed, Shego and Deadpool were keeping a safe distance in case exploding started happening. "It's time you-" He stopped, his usual heroic declaration stopped short by the sight of the bizarre Heartless. Even by his odd standards, this was unusual. "...Huh. What the hell am I looking at?"

"No idea," Angilaka said.

"Never seen anything like it," Greed said.

"I did once," Shego said. "Back when the Doc thought it was a good idea to summon things from weird dimensions and get them to do his bidding with a good game of Rock-Paper-Scissors. Not his dumbest move, weirdly enough..."

"Me too!" Deadpool said. "Though I may have been stoned off my gourd; I drank cactus juice on a dare, see?" (In the crowd, Sokka blinked in puzzled commiseration.)

"Not me," Beth said sheepishly. She looked into the crowd and waved at Courtney, who waved back. "What about you guys?"

"I don't know, we were just fighting a weird suit of posessed armor or something and it hatched out of it," Aang said. "...And it only sounds dumb now that I'm saying it, come to think of it."

"I think I saw something like this on my world once," Naruto volunteered. Gaara tilted his head, puzzled. "No, no, wait, that was a ox with octopus tails. Eight of 'em!" On a whim, he pulled out a knife and threw it at the Heartless; it got stuck in it's flesh, or whatever analouge it had, and was sucked in. A moment later, a number of tiny metal trinkets popped out of the same place and were expelled, landing near Naruto. Disturbingly, they looked like Naruto's face, screaming in agony. Carefully, Naruto edged slightly back. (In much the same way that a fox will before going for the throat.)

Just about everyone else said something along the lines of 'I don't know either'. "I don't know either sir," Gibbs said to Roy. "But..." He looked ominously at Kimblee, who had been waiting patiently for them to finish deliberating. (Sure, he'd killed tons of people and commited general acts of rudeness, but there was a thing as being crass, after all.) "I'm certain he knows. You!" Gibbs said to Kimblee, who perked up at the attention. The giant Heartless seemed slightly pleased that something was happening. "What the...what the hell is that thing?"

"Why should I tell you?" Kimblee said, sounding bored. Gibbes glared at him. Without knowing why, Kimblee started to sweat and he managed to say, "I don't actually know."

Gibbs' tone oozed sarcasm. "Really."

"Yes. I just wanted some Heartless to come down here and provide support, and what they did after that isn't something I had any direct control over. I expect this-" and here Kimblee gave a portion of the Heartless' bulk a brief pat. "Is the result of the Heartless' loosened constraints owing to the way I lured them to this plane of existence and their consumption of the residual energies of the Philosopher's Stone. I don't know it what it was doing with the armor, though."

"It killed someone, posessed the armor and used it to...I don't know, incubate itself," Angilaka said. "Just a guess, mind you."

"Ah, it's a Gestalt Heartless!" Zim said brightly.

"...A what?" Kimblee said.

"It is simple, yes? You lot like to give Heartless species...or whatever they are...you like to give them names, and since this one is a combination of many Heartless fused into a single thing, I'm calling it a 'Gestalt'."

"Okay, it's going on the register as that," Beth agreed, and her on-board computer made a system-wide memo to the Scribes on duty back at the Crossguard's base.

Kimblee rolled his eyes. "That's all well and good, but you all are giving a bit of a headache, so...goodbye and such." The Heartless, pleased to at long last fight, extended a series of insectile legs ending in scything claws, it's front transforming into a huge reptilian head. It opened it's jaws, starting to form another energy blast...

Shego took careful aim and fired a concussive blast that launched Kimblee directly into the Heartless, punching him through it's body and causing the Gestalt Heartless to peer down in bewilderment. (Danny felt that she was ripping off his 'green power blast' thing.) "Please shut up," Roy said, at the brink of exasperating, and snapped his fingers, creating a massive blast of fire that would have incinerated the entire neighborhood block if it hadn't been as specially controlled as only he could make it, focusing it into a narrow blast centered solely on Kimblee and his Heartless, flinging them into the sky and several streets over (and vaporizing the ground under them, but by this point that was rather expected). Appa, wary of fire, backed himself into the air and exhaled a blast of wind that punched kimblee another few dozen feet: getting into the idea, Zim and Zuko fired their own blasts of fire that Calvin and Aang amplified, Beth, Sokka, Courtney, Sam, Tucker and Deadpool fired at the airbourne alchemist (and Heartless) with far too much enthusiasm. Gibbs took carefully aim, generated a rocket launcher, and fired just once. Angilaka summoned up some holy power and fired a laser-like blast of light (while Hobbes watched, intrigued), Shego fired another blast with greater power than before. Toph tore a large chunk of the street off and flung it in the hopes of nailing Kimblee while Katara pulled some of the water she had on hand and fashioned it into blunt ice projectiles that she threw with even greater speed. Scar transmuted a giant siege crossbow from the ground and fired a single massive bolt. Cyborg brought both his arms together, combining them into a single large cannon and fired a blast of hyper-accelerated sonic energy (making sure Hobbes wasn't anywhere near him first). The Mall Crawlers fired their own projectile ones (those that were still functional, anyway). Also, Greed made a rude gesture at Kimblee. And Abel...raised his arms, remembered he didn't have any firearms right then, and slumped over in embarrasment.

Not all of these attacks hit, but enough of them did that Kimblee was hurled a good distance away, and at tremendous force. They waited patiently, and sure enough a painful-sounding crash answered them.

"Do you think that killed him?" Zim said to Roy, who he identified as the leader of the new back-up.

"No," Roy said flatly.

"I thought not. Do you think it slowed him down?"

"What do you think?" Roy said dryly.

"I dunno. Let's go see!" Zim said brightly. Roy nodded fiercely. Zim frowned and added, "Also, who are you guys? Rampaging fast food salesman bursting with civic pride?"

Gibbs said, "What."

Angilaka blinked. "Not too clear on the power in structure in town, is he?" she said to Abel.

"With all due respect, m'am," Abel said. "I don't think we're clear on the power structure in town."

"Fair enough."

"We're representatives and high-ranked members of the controlling factions of this town," Beth informed Zim. "Mr. Mustang - the guy with the gloves - and Mr. Gibbs, he's the one with the gun powers, are from the Peace Marines. Me, Angilaka, plus Abel and Mr. Scar, are from the Crossguard."

"Oh," Zim said, still not entirely clear on this since he had no idea who most of these people or their factions were, but decided he didn't really care that much. "Shouldn't we have gone to see if he's dead or not, and if he is not, to finish the job?"

"...I knew I was forgetting something," Roy admitted.

"Well, if it helps, that Scar guy has already run off," Calvin said, pointing at the advancing back of Scar in the distance. "Maybe we should catch up to him before he tries to kill Kimblee and does something drastic like, I don't know, transmuting himself into a bomb and blowing himself up to kill Kimblee? On the other hand, that would be awesomely ironic..." He paused, noticing that everyone was giving him disgusted looks. "Uh, that's what I would be saying if I really thought that. But I don't. Really!"

The now-larger group charged down the street, making sure they were on the right path by checking Calvin's device that served as a handy Kimblee-Tracking-Thing. "Have there been any casualties for you guys?" Roy said as they moved.

"No," Hobbes said, his hearing fully healed up by this point. (Provided he avoided any bad noises like a sonic cannon or something.) "But it's been close. First he made a giant dome that trapped us with the Heartless, not that it hindered us that much-"

"They are surprisingly flammable," Zim said fondly.

"I've noticed," Roy said dryly.

Hobbes continued. "After that, we managed to hold him down and try to fight him, but he keeps pulling out surprises. Like, uh, the Heartless we've seen today: they're a lot stronger than the ones we saw yesterday and...more distinctive, I guess. The ones that look like the 'species' we've heard about seem like they're constantly evolving, and the rest..I don't know, I think they're losing hold of their shapes, if that makes any sense."

"Soap bubbles," Angilaka said. "They're like bubbles being blown into the firmament of...ah, I'd guess you call it local sub-space strata. Like the background 'here-ness' of our slice of the multiverse. Probably making echoes in conjoined realities, I shouldn't wonder. The pressure of reality is pushing in on them, straining 'em and putting the squeeze on. Too much longer..." She clapped her hands. "Pop!"

"I guess that explains the types we've seen so far," Calvin said. "Simple, deadly forms based around basic themes. I was wondering why eldritch horrors forged from sapient hearts looked like they way these do; you'd expect each Heartless to be totally singular." He frowned. "I'd like to know what established those themes, though."

"As would I," Scar said, who had seen them coming and had bowed to the inevitable, waiting patiently for them to catch up. "Be careful! Kimblee is in the area, I'm certain, but he is not in the open."

He pointed as everyone caught up; this was a wide-open area on a bridge set over a small recreational lake that served as an very well maintained swimmin pool and incidentally stood ready as a presentation of Traverse Town's enthusiasm for doing entirely pointless but aesthetically pleasing things (that, scholars were quick to discover, always maximized the local geomantic currents even if the architects didn't know about it). The bridge itself (empty of all previous residents thanks to the hurried fears of getting caught up in a fight) hosted a number of small buildings, mostly card shops, meal vending shacks and the similar, though there were a number of depectively ramshackle-looking buildings (quite sturdy, the architects just liked the look); a fortunately disused warehouse had been totally flattened by Kimblee's arrival into the area, and of course Kimblee was nowhere to be seen.

Everyone warily stepped into the area, outside of where they made preparations to fight. "Be cautious," Scar advised them. "I don't think he demonstrated this power to you in his last encounter, but-"

"He's a shapeshifter now," Roy said. "He gets green energy similar to what the Tennyson kid does and partially transforms. There doesn't seem to be any applicable limit to what he can change into; best course of action is to catch him by surprise, or failing that, distract him so that someone else can catch him by surprise." Scar raised his eyebrows. "I told you, fought him earlier. It didn't go well."

"Shapeshifting and green energy, you say?" Calvin repeated, looking at his device with dawning realization. "...Hang on a minute...no way can that be, but...oh man, I wish I figured this out earlier..."

No one was listening. "I don't think I like the look of that," Abel said, pointing at the sky. "He's made some kind of dust barrier, blocks out the sunlight. Filthy rot. He thought this through."

Zim looked around warily, half-hoping that Kimblee would be lying on the ground where no one had seen him and tremendously dizzy enough for a quick apprehending with no more fuss; he didn't see anything that nice, of course, though he did notice a large hole in the building just in front of the one where Kimblee had crashed. From the lacerated edges and...unusual shape of the hole, he supposed it had been made by that bizarre Heartless Kimblee had made. (He was going to have to ask why no one had told them they could do that. Unless no one had known they could do that.)

"We should spread out," He said after a moment. "If we stay too close together, he could kill us all with one hit."

He heard a clapping sound from behind him. "That's right," Kimblee said, his tone flat and cold. The Gestalt Heartless towered over him, a dozen jaws opened in it's body and each one powering up an attack. "I could."

Roy whirled around, fingers already moving. "Oh sh-"

This time Kimblee and his Heartless moved faster, and fired their respective explosive and beam attacks before their enemies could stop them, or worse, retaliate in greater measure.

There was a extremely loud noise, and a brilliant light, washed out by a greater darkness; the area basically imploded under the onslaught of life energy-fueled alchemic reactions and the power of hundreds of Heartless fired as individual attacks.

Kimblee waited for the dust to finish falling, and the first thing that happened was an agonizingly loud and slow creaking noise; he turned his head and saw the bridge built over the artificial lake gradually topple, the front part of it shattered into ugly chunks. It held for a moment, and Kimblee gave the architects of the town their due for making suspension that could hold itself against the twin threats of the sqaure-cube law and gravity, not to mention it's own mass. Even the bridge was fairly small, it still made a amazingly loud noise when it inevitably shattered and smashed into the lake below, splintering on impact and bits of metal and stone flying up in a small ground-level cloud, and then down.

If anyone survived this day, Kimblee thought, they were going to dispise the clean-up they were going to deal with. Unless they liked that sort of thing, Kevin said, not sound like he really believed it. Kimblee found it annoying but not really surprising that Kevin found this thought more important than the possibility that the enemy was alive or not.

Kimblee looked over what remained of the area; all but a few buildings had been totally shattered, their component parts scattered over an open place covered in collapsed (and cheap) wooden shacks and simple tents previously belonging to the vendors and shopkeepers that had vacated the area. The remaining buildings were either mostly destroyed or only partially wrecked, the hollowed-out image of their ruin pleasing to Kimblee's sense of aesthetics. (There was a totally intact watchtower, though. Peturbed at it and feeling it was mocking him, Kimblee blew it up. Fortunately, no one was inside it, but it was still mean of him.) What remained of the charmingly old-fashioned cobblestone ground was shattered into dangerously jagged shards or simple dust totally unrecognizable for what it had been. Secondary shockwaves from the combined attacks had torn large holes open here and there, and a sign post had fallen into one much as the bridge had. He could see no one, and while he didn't see any bodies or gory remnants, it wasn't impossible that the remains were simply buried under the rubble.

The logical conclusion was that they had been totally obliterated. It was so obviously ridiculous that anyone could have survived those blasts. So very ridiculous, Kimblee thought. So, naturally, he sighed dramatically (unable to repress a grin, though) and said, "Well, come on then. I know you're still there."

The air directly in front of him shimmered strangely. "Hrm?" Kimblee said. The Gestalt Heartless (he resented himself for using that obnoxious alien's name for it, but it had stuck in his mind) leaned forward, several small figures dripping off it's body and reabsorbed into it's main mass. Kimblee peered carefully; he thought the air seemed unusually green-ish.

And then a big blast of green energy exploded at him from mid-air, catching him in the stomach and knocking him off his feet. While he fell, the Gestalt Heartless extruded a large arm with a faint resemblence to humanoid musculature and caught him at Kimblee's mental command (as on it's own, it was unlikely the Heartless would have shown any concern, or even any interest in Kimblee's well-being) and sped away on a pair of enormous wings it grew for this purpose.

The air shimmered some more, and then Zim and his allies faded into view, a good many of them shivering and glistening emerald-colored ectoplasmic energy. Danny was the last to show up, ghostly green energy expanding from him to encompass everyone and flickering out as they rematerialized properly. "It's funny, y'know," He said weakly. "Me and a whole lotta ghosts once phased a freaking METEOR through the planet, and yet that was nowhere near as exhausting as phasing you guys through that attack."

"Maybe it's like the difference between having a lot of help to do something, and then having to do this all by yourself," Hobbes said helpfully. Calvin rubbed some of the frost that Danny's high-level uses of power tended to generate off his arms, trying to pin this moment in his mind for a later time when he could analyze it properly.

"What just happened?" Beth squeaked, shivering and shuddering, small icicles hanging off the larger plates on her powered armor.

"He phased all of us so none of us got hit by those blasts!" Sam Manson said proudly. Danny smiled faintly. "Looks like there's some side effects, but you get used to it."

"When!" Courtney, even more encrusted with frost (to a larger degree than anyone else besides the Mall Crawlers who had been nearly frozen and had gone unconscious; Zim, Zuko and the rest of Team Avatar were totally unaffected, Calvin and Hobbes looked like they had walked through a fog, Scar was only a bit damp, and everyone else had frosting problems to various lesser degrees). "I'm starting to regret inserting myself into the story like this..."

"Yes, that's very unprofessional for a reporter...anchor...whatever your job is," Zim commented. Courtney grumbled furiously under her breath.

Any further conversation was rightfully halted when Zim (as well as the more astute people there, such as Hobbes or the more long-time residents of Traverse Town) detected movement, and saw the Gestalt Heartless taking flight overhead. They got ready to flee and retaliate once it attacked, but it was unneccesary, as it simply dove down at them, dematerializing upon impact with the ground and leaving Kimblee to nearly slam into a building, transmuting a cushioning balcony from it. Once more he transmuted an explosive blast, but much weaker than before so that it only buffeted and dazed them. This was Kimblee's intention, as he was starting to believe that there were outside forces explicitly preventing him from outright killing them all at once; deciding that it might be safer to simply seperate them and eliminate them one by one, he jumped to the ground and transmuted a number of stony fists from it that knocked just about everyone in different directions and scattering them over the area, with a few exceptions: Hobbes split the fist coming at him with a single blow and dived to the Mall Crawlers, grabbing the unconscious teenagers and hurredly dragging them away before they could be blasted; Gaara's sand shield ground up the bludgeon that came at him; Angilaka was too big to be thrown like the others and was merely knocked head over heels; and finally Aang just dodged it, fast like he was made of air, broke it with a kick and sent it flying at Kimblee, who merely transformed the on-coming projectile into a cloud of dust that he summarily transmuted into a number of projectiles he sent back at Aang. Zim, nearly knocked through a wall, managed a small fireball that knocked Kimblee off-balance, and opened him up to further counterattacks by those still standing.

"This is going less well than I envisioned," Zim said to Calvin, who had landed next to him, as Aang, Gaara, Angilaka and Hobbes pressed their brief advantage against Kimblee. (Unsurprisingly, this involved them harrying him until he tried to blow them up without blowing himself up.)

"Would you prefer him still rampaging around town and us not knowing where he is?" Calvin said reasonably.

"No, I think not," Zim said.

"Glad to hear. Think you can get the other guys to distract him? I sort of have a plan."

"Oh? What sort of plan?" Zim asked. Calvin told him. "...Hrm. I suppose it could work."

"Could what work?" Roy yelled, stumbled over to them and transmuting a large barrier out of the ground. It wouldn't last long, but that was still time spent not being killed.

"Can you think of anything that will distract him long enough for me to exploit a potential weakness?" Calvin said.

Roy paused. "I have just an idea."

There was an exploding noise, and Hobbes flew overhead and crashed into a wall, bouncing off with little apparent harm. "Thanks for the love, ladies and gentlebeasts, I'm here till Thursday!" Hobbes said dazedly. "Tip your waitress, they work hard and have pretty hair-decs."

"Just in time, too," Roy said. He leaned over his barrier and yelled, "KIMBLEE! A question, for a moment."

Kimblee, busily trying to blast through Gaara's shield and annoyed that he was having little success (owing to his limited amount of power he could use without potentially getting himself killed) while the red-haired ninja just stood there and waited for that tinest moment of weakness to happen, said, "Yes? Hold on a moment, will you?" He transmuted a cube around Gaara from the ground, severed it at the base (not hurting Gaara) and knocked it away with a contemptuous gesture. "What is it, man?"

"Where's Jarod?" Roy yelled. Zim started at the name. "You abducted him after your fight with us and you don't have him with you, so where is he?"

"Hrm," Kimblee said thoughtfully, ignoring Danny and Shego's attempts to punch through a barrier he had made with their respective energy attacks. "An excellent question. And the answer is...well, I don't have the theoretical knowledge to answer your question properly, but suffice to say that he is alive and whole. Not safe, certainly, but presently alive."

"...Okay," Roy said, not sure that answered anything. He looked around and saw that Calvin was gone, but not attacking Kimblee. Trying to buy more time, he said, "Where is that Heartless of yours! How did you make that thing?"

"I didn't, Kimblee said. Appa roared, lunging at him from behind, and Kimblee dismissisvely blasted him into the side of a building. Appa stumbled out, not much hurt, but still weakened. "It chose this form on it's own. Well, not chose, I'm not certain that Heartless think like that, but they did seem to follow some sort of basic instinct. Perhaps all Heartless become part of a massive core consciousness in their native realm, and appearing here temporarily divorces them from it?"

"I don't suppose you'd tell us about how you know that? Information about the Heartless, where they come from and such?" Zim said. "A true scientist should share knowledge when asked!"

"I wouldn't call myself a scientist, exactly...not like you would, I should say. But, since you ask, my...'associates' have come to the conclusion that of all the elements and materials and substances in all the worlds, the closest terrestial equivalent to the darkness you see here...such as the darkness that the Heartless embody, or that of the Negative Energy Plane...is acid. Vitriolic fluid in general. It makes a great deal of sense if you think about it; it moves and flows, unending and in such great variety! It wears through everything that opposes it, melting all opposition and destroying all that it meets! And what is left of what it attacks...is pure. Strong. The callow exteriors destroyed and made ready for the beginings of perfection."

'Acid?' Zim thought. He frowned, thinking about it.

Patiently ignoring how most of them were either busy just staying conscious from the beating he was dealing out (and in a few cases, hating him so hard they weren't paying attention to a word he was saying), Kimblee continued. "And within the damaged survivors of this glorified refugee camp that you call a town - even though it's quite big enough to be a city, you really out to get your nomenclature straightened out - there exist so very many who have been touched by the darkness in some fashion or another. Survivors of the Heartless' raids on worlds, the last remnants of some civilization or another, or else simply victims of various atrocities. The nature of this darkness is to eat away at the barriers you have constructed, the scars you've made around these inner wounds..and then eat it's way inside you. And then just melt away and away and away..."

He chuckled. "You all are...so sad. This town is pitable. A great mass of chaos and anarchy and little else. Wounded stragglers and mad-things, lumped together and so obsessively determined to survive, and for what purpose? There is none. Inevitably it will all fall apart, be reduced to nothing, and-"

There was the noise of transmutation, of stone being changed and reshaped, and then the blast of a cannon shell being fired right at Kimblee and hitting him dead-on.

The blast was like a slap to the face for most of them, and so very many of those teetering on the edge of collapse woke up. "Oh, godammit, will you just SHUT UP ALREADY?" Calvin yelled, standing behind the overly ornate cannon he had transmuted. He didn't have the hammer from before, and his gauntlets didn't seem to be presently active. But now, around his wrists, were four interlocking bracelet-shaped devices crackling with power, spinning slightly in place and appearing to be more devices he kept in his belt pockets. "You talk and you preach and you never shut up with these stupid talking evil lectures!"

Kimblee, sprawled on the street after bouncing off a few times, got back up, his body deformed and swelled into an armor-plated thing he had transformed into to take the blast. "What-" Another cannon shell fired and hit him in the chest; his armor was thick enough that he wasn't torn into pieces, but the shrapnel cut him up terribly.

"First it was Mr. Lyle and the Rambling All-Knowing Litanity of Ambigiousness," Calvin said. "Now you, with your stupid inability to just fight and get beaten without pausing every six and a half seconds to ramble at us like some...idiot evil guy who can't stop talking. Shut up, I can't make good insults at this time of the morning."

"That's-" Kimblee started to say, and this time Calvin shot a blast of fire at him from his fire device.

"I told you to stop talking!" Calvin yelled over Kimblee's screams. "Mr. Lyle, now you, and I bet that giant armor Heartless we fought was probably thinking dumb evil lectures at us. What is with bad guys and trying to demoralize the good guys with evil speeches anyway? Do they actually think that a few well-chosen lines are going to really change the minds of people crazy enough to charge into evil strongholds for the Greater Good? Don't answer that, I'm sick of you continuing to breath. Also, hold still."

Kimblee noticed that Calvin was now in front of him and holding something, adjusting a few dials or gauges. "What-"

Calvin shoved the device up onto Kimblee's chest and pressed a small button: several large panels opened, several lense-tipped things screwing out and lightly touching Kimblee's flesh. There were a few beeping noises as it powered up, and on the last one the device flashed green, just once, and Kimblee screaming in mingled surprise and pain - another voice screaming in unison, with pain and elation -and a torrent of green energies poured from him, for the briefest of moments an emerald aura that almost totally obscured him from sight before quickly dimming to a translucent banner around Kimblee. Calvin's device continued to exert it's unexpected suctioning effect, the green dimming further into a rather pretty array of green threadlike patterns flowing away from Kimblee and into the device, bright and luminous and beautiful in the staggering complexity of it all; a thousand threads and more, each one the DNA sequences of a different alien race, all coming together as a single flood of energy that the device sucked up and routed into secret neutrality-attuned reservoirs, analyzing each one and compartmentalizing each new source of evolutionary data-

There was a final burst of green; Kimblee's scream wavered to a startled gasp and he slumped over, shivering slightly. The green disappeared into Calvin's device and with an apparent effort Calvin shoved it off Kimblee (and giving him a kick that sent him sprawling on the ground) "Chalk this up as a victory," Calvin said proudly. "A victory...for Science!"

"Yay, Science!" Zim yelled. He got a round of weird looks. "What, no one else was inspired?" Zuko clapped very sarcastically; Hobbes did too, but more earnestly so.

Some of the others got into it. "Science!" Beth said, holding her arms up. Her robot suit hopped a little bit.

"Um...yay, science?" Sokka said uncertainly, cautiously raising a fist.

"For science, yo," Abel said, giving Sokka's fist a light tap with his own fist. Sokka looked at him with a weird expression and carefully backed away. "...Shizzel. Yo."

Scar smacked Abel in the back of the head. "If you ever try to talk 'street' again, I will do something unspeakably horrible to you!"

"Like what?" Abel asked. Scar told him. It was so horrible the idea of it erased itself from their minds. (Except Toph, who thought it sounded pretty awesome. Kimblee, for his part thought it too excessive.) "Geez, you have a problem with overreaction."

"What...did you do...?" Kimblee gasped.

"In technical terms? I have absolutely no idea," Calvin said proudly. "Finding out is part of the scientific endeavor. I think I can wager a guess that my little device here has been tracking you all this time by sucking up the latent bits of energy you had in you; it was doing in such small quantities that it was effectively 'tracking' you and pinpointing your location through the highest concentration of that particular energy source, so all I had to do was amp up the 'suction' and rip the energies right out of you!" Calvin smirked. "I have no idea why I built a device to do that in my sleep, or how it would wind up being so mind-bogglingly useful in this extremely specific situation, but I'm not gonan complain. Since now, you've been brought down to normal, stripped of all your power!...Except for your undoubtedly formidable alchemic knowledge. And the transmutation circles on your hands. And the Philosopher's Stone. And...okay, you're still kind of a badass, but at least you're not changing shape anymore. That is totally a victory. Even though you're not exactly defeated yet. Yeah."

"You actually did something with your primitive devices that didn't nearly blow us up?" Zim said, astonished. "And seriously hampered our foe? You're actually halfway competent?"

"Yep!" Calvin said. He frowne. "Wait, what do you mean 'primitive'? And, uh, competent."

"...Victory?" Kimblee repeated, trying to ignore the frenzied screaming in his head and Kevin's tentative grip over this body fading away. Something in his body's structure snapped back into place, feeling solidly human again. "I think not. You forgot something, you see."

"Yeah, my assistants say that all the time," Calvin remarked.

"In this case," Kimblee continue, ignoring him. "You forgot the Heartless I summoned. And more importantly, you forgot that I very much like having back-up plans."

"How could we forgot? Most of us don't know who you actually are," Zim said reasonably. "And the one guy here who does know you doesn't know you personally." Scar nodded in agreement.

"...Oh, just shut up," Kimblee snapped and his shadow (or more accurately, the Gestalt Heartless that had been hiding in his shadow until a moment such as this) surged up and smashed back down in a large blast of dark energy, throwing them head over heels and tossing every last one of them back; by sheer dumb luck, Hobbes managed to catch a lamppost and hang on for dear life, catching Zim's screaming form with one hand and wincing with the effort of catching Calvin when he came flying by. Zuko had the more dubious fortune of being smacked into a rock (and then Beth, Angilaka and some other heavy things crashed into him), but at least he didn't go flying through windows and over buildings and into alleyways and even into a pothole going underground (in Abel's case).

The Gestalt Heartless, fully formed again, moved away from Kimblee, and still the darkness stormed from Kimblee's shadow, now grown impossibly big, as though it was cast by a giant thing. "WHAT'S GOING ON!" Zim yelled incredulously as the incredibly discomfiting sensation of pure negative energy blew through them at such for that had Hobbes let go, they would have smashed into walls; it was like being caught in smog propelled at tornado-force winds.

"I don't know!" Calvin said. He peered, blinking furiously with the grit getting into his eyes. "Wait, I see something there...he's got something in those shadows!"

Kimblee smiled serenely as something stirred around him; something with the feel of general big-ness. "All cards on the table!" He said jovially. "My life against your's! My powers and that of hundreds of stolen lives against the might you can summon! The will of those I serve, set against your resolve to live! See what I have assembled with my power. See...the Eternal Night."

He closed his eyes, the Gestalt Heartless looking on, and the darkness flooded from around the area and down to him, condensing around him into shapes that looked almost...mechanical. Thus the winds stopped and Hobbes, Zim and Calvin fell painfully to the ground, right on Hobbes. "Ow," Hobbes said.

"What is with this guy and his surprises?" Calvin said. He took notice of Kimblee now. "Uh. Guys?"

"Yeah?" Zim said.

"Remember when I said I totally had Kimblee figured out?"

"Yes?" Abel said from the hole he had crawled out of.

Calvin pointed. Kimblee's shadow had spread out to the size of something...big, bulky and almost humanoid. And something was shaping itself around him, like an unholy engine forcing itself into the world with the power of a thousand madmen's horrors dreaming it into existence. "Well, that? I have no idea what he's doing. But I'd probably describe it with unneccesarily florid language."

"Ah," Zuko said flatly as several spine-like forms extended out of the darkness, wrapping around Kimblee like a harness, melting and solidifying into a secure position. They rose him up, and more of that strangely liquid darkness surged up and crystallized around him like a monstrous cocoon; the darkness spread out, and out, and out, like the shadow cast by a brutish giant...

Or, Zim thought as he recognized the inhumanly angular, artificial contours of that shadow, a giant robot.

Something smashed up from the depths of that darkness, tearing up the ground as it appeared; Zim saw metal gleaming under the living shadows spun everywhere like webs, and two bulky spiked shapes towered up over Kimblee, tentacle-like forms rising up and bigger than some trains Zim had seen...

They rose up, carrying Kimblee up on a chaotic stream that more metal shapes conjealed out of like a crude skeleton. The ground cracked and more metal cut Kimblee from sight momentarily; Zim, too stunned to move, thought that Kimblee had summoned some kind of bizarre shell to protect himself, an armor-body to do his fighting for him...

It rose up - no, Zim realized, it stood up, enormous and vaugely saurian legs materializing as a deadly mechanical form assembled itself from shadow and furious red light. Much of that darkness slid away, revealing the awful shape for what it was: a colossal piloted robot, looming over them, it's body composed of ferociously demonic black metal or liquid-form darkness streaming around it like blood from a gaping wound in the fabric of reality itself, and every of it's mechanical portions was jagged or sharp or otherwise shaped in such a way to indicate that it was designed to kill, to destroy, to end. The bulky shapes Zim had assumed to be shells revealed themselves as enormous shoudlers, and between them was a demonic helmet with a face like a mouthful of fangs (and, oddly, actual fangs behind them) and an expression of such rage and savagery that even Scar thought it looked a bit excessively vindictive. Another set of jaws yawned in it's belly in what presumably this magitech monstrosity's cockpit, with Kimblee suspended in it and the Philosopher's Stone hovering tauntingly over his chest, moored by ropy black filaments.

And, his body half-visible in the teeming blackness but otherwise totally visible, was Jarod, unconscious and tendrils winding into his body at uncomfortable angles. "Hey, I think I know what happened to Jarod," Deadpool said unneccesarily. "...Kimblee cloned him and is using the clones as big girl-bait batteries!"

"Makes sense to me," Zim agreed. Behind him, Calvin facepalmed; considering that he still had a modified radio, an energy-absorbing device and was wearing several clunky wonders of super-science on his arms, it hurt his face a fair bit.

The rest of the thing Kimblee was conjuring up appeared, darkness blasting out of it with such force that a few damaged buildings crumbled, unable to resist the pull of the raw entropy that this thing radiated as it hunched over, still so big that the back-bent knees of it's legs where higher than the rooftops of some of the smaller buildings. It shifted about a few times, as if testing itself for cricks or unexpected problems in it's manufacture and found itself suitable; possibly related to this, a number of weapons slid out from the howling blackness of it's upper torso, all sized for it's gigantic scale: gatling guns, rocket launchers, flamethrows, chainswords, building-sized flamethrowers, explosives-tossing chutes, energy gatling guns and more that Zim missed because he blinked and they were already being switched out for other weapons like it was examining it's options and found them all suitable.

"...Huh," Calvin said with deceptive calm. "That thing looks pretty cool! I cannot wait to break that thing and reverse-engineer it! I could go to the store with giant robot legs and not have to wait in line or get any needless excercise."

Hobbes face-palmed. "Well, shoot, I'm the only sane man in a mental asylum!" He paused, horrified. "Or...since I'm totally unlike them...does that make me the crazy one!"

The Mall Crawlers finally woke up, their armors repowering up and breaking off the icing from Danny's earlier phasing trick. They looked up, stared in horror, and immediately fainted. "Yo," Deadpool said, wandering over from the building he'd smashed through. "Turns out my teleporting gadget's all busted up and I would have been here sooner but WHOA, WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?"

"A giant robot made of evil," Hobbes said.

"...Huh. Two giant robot fights in one day. And me without my robot!"

"You mean my robot!" Greed said from in front of Deadpool, staring up at it with horror and quiet resignation.

Everyone else appeared. Normally, this would have been the moment for them to gather together, but they were too stunned by the sudden machine-titan to do that. (And packing together when the enemy could take you all out in a single shot was just stupid, as had been pointed out previously.)

"...Well, crap," Roy said grumpily. "Is that parts of the Juggernaut in there?"

"There is," Gibbs said. "Wasn't killing it once bad enough?"

"That is SO COOL!" Calvin squealed like a fan boy. Gibbs dope-slapped the back of his head. "Also, it's about to kill us. That's bad."

"...I want one of those," Sokka said, after a moment, rounding the corner with the rest of his group behind. "That would be so awesome."

"So awesome," Aang agreed. He frowned and shivered. "That thing doesn't feel right..."

"Eh, I don't see what the big deal is. It's made of metal, it's gonna break," Toph said, though she didn't sound too confident.

"What's with people and giant robots these days?" Katara said faintly. "...Then again, when we get back, we should tell Teo and his dad to make things like that...it might help even out the problems between benders and everyone else."

"That might mesh pretty well with Aang and mine's idea to make an international city," Zuko stated.

Scar stared sullenly at Kimblee and his giant robot. "...What."

"Oh, come on!" Abel said incredulously. "What stupid trick is that hardcase gonna pull next? Summon another giant monster, one that eats worlds and spits hellscapes? Chain the three most powerful dead souls of the netherhells to himself and channel their powers? Steal Death's scythe to unmake the concept of his capacity to be defeated? Get a restraining order?"

Naruto stared at the robot. "...I thought we had the cornerstone on giant monsters made of evil," He said to Gaara off-handedly.

Gaara crossed his arms. "They're in the public domain, it appears."

Danny and his friends stared in horror. "I thought I was done with giant robots that defy the laws of physics," Courtney said faintly, self-consciously rubbing her right shoulder; in the rigors of battle, her sleeves had torn away to reveal a tattoo resembling a stylized flaming skull wearing nice sunglasses. It was quite unusual for a girl like her to have such a tattoo

Beth smiled at her. "Things like that keep catching up, don't they?" She said quietly. Courtney nodded solemnly.

"Well, this is gonna suck," Angilaka said flatly.

"No big deal," Cyborg said reassuringly, trying to hide how terrified he was...and how much he was looking forward to a good old-fashioned all-out royal battle with a rampaging machine-monster like this. (And hopefully soon his back-up would show up.)

"Gentlemen! And ladies," Kimblee said dramatically. "BEHOLD! This mighty machine-demon, forged from the broken remnants of a war-machine built to make war and Greed's own war-machine, infused with the power of the emmisaries of Oblivion. It walks now, walks to END you-"

"MY ROBOT!" Greed howled.

"...Er, yes, it was made with that robot of your's. Now, where was I...yes, it walks to END you and everything around us. It-"

"ROBOT!" Greed screamed.

"Yes, fine, I got it, you want your robot back, I should hope you had it insured for the highly specific and obscure sorts of damages combining mechas no doubt incur. Please let me finish. Now, it-"

"ROBOT!" Greed shrieked, and fell to the ground, sobbing inconsolably. "My precious badass mech. Gone forever."

"There there, boss-man," Shego said, awkwardly patting Greed on the shoulder. "There'll be other giant robots."

"But this one was special," Greed said through his sobs. "It looked like me and had all my powers, but in robot form! Even my devillishly good looks. ESPICIALLY my devillish good looks! And now he's stolen it and made an evil robot with it! My favorite giant robot has been used to bolster a evil robot; that's just wrong!"

"Erm," Kimblee said awkwardly, starting to wonder when he'd lost control of the situation. (He was a mighty alchemist armed with the Philosopher's Stone and currently piloted a giant robot just percolating with the might of Oblivion. People not paying attention to him did not mesh with the basic premise.) "Ah! You see the situation. Greed's unstoppable armored battle machine, combined with the destructive power of the Juggernaut and bringing forth such bloodshed to fill a GOD to satisfaction!"

He got a full round of alarmed looks. He smiled cheerfully; he was getting attention now. The only thing odd was a faint itch on his lip. A passing tendril wiped it away, and Kimblee was surprised to see that it was a bright red drop, too clear and gel-like to be blood. Ignoring a faint feeling of trepidation, he dismissed it and continued. "When it walks, the sun dies. Where it's fists fall, the world screams in torment. Where it's weapons fire, THE UNCOUNTED MANY DIE! Where it's song is heard, YOUR MEANINGLESS EXISTENCES WILL JOIN IT'S CHORUS AND FALL DEAD! In it's shadow, this world will find the essence of destruction made physical, and the day fall away forever! This is the Eternal Night! This is my final chorus! This will be my finest revery of the Symphony of Destruction! It's name is the Eternal Night, is Umbra Eternis!

"It's purpose...is to THROTTLE THE HEAVENS! AND IT WILL END YOU ALL."

There was a long pause. Kimblee waited expectantly.

"That name sucks," Zim said. "Far too melodramatic."

"I kinda liked it," Hobbes said. "It's catchy."

"I stopped listening a while ago," Calvin admitted. "Did he say anything that could be construed as possible weaknesses?"

"No," Zuko said.

"No great loss, then."

"You need to take lessons in self-narration," Zuko remarked to Kimblee. "You fail at it."

"YOU SUCK!" A chorus of voices sang from the remainder.

"Why do you keep getting the crazy ones?" Abel asked Scar with a remarkable lack of self-awareness.

Scar sighed. "I honestly don't know."

"Well, that's enough pre-battle banter," Kimblee said decisively. "Now FIGHT!"

"That's my line!" Zim said, Keyblade drawn, and showing not a trace of fear. "Not only are you a mass-murdering sociopath with bad taste in jokes...you're a plaguerist!"

Umbra Eternis charged and the Gestalt Heartless proved back-up, weapons unfurling and firing in unison just as the fighters who'd been charging their own attacks fired back.

The resulting explosion wiped out every building (except, fortunately, the news studio because they were too far away from it now) for the next two and a half miles, and the sound could be heard from farther out.

And they still didn't get hit by it. Kimblee was annoyed by that, espicially since the Gestalt Heartless was the one that took most of the damage.

...

In one of the busier parts of the district, the Heartless problem was being dealt with, in spite of Kimblee's intention to basically kill everything. In the area just around Cyborg's shop and place of residence, for instance, all but a single woman remained to fight the Heartless, everyone else there either fled, wrapped up in other fights elsewhere, injured, or worse.

But there were no deaths. That single woman was enough to keep those people alive. (Which was delaying Cyborg's called-for back-up, of course.)

"C'MON IF YOU THINK YOU'RE HARD ENOUGH!" Winry Rockbell screamed from atop a compact bird-like walking mech, twin energy gatling guns over it firing fourteen beams of stone-melting chambered plasma per second. She was a tall and muscular Caucasian woman in her late teens if not old enough to be in college, her long blonde hair tied back in a loose ponytail and a tastelessly colorful bandana tied over her forehead; her taste in gaudy colors was thankfully understated in her choice of clothing, all of which suitable for working with machines; a loosely-fitting and cool set of earth-toned mechanic's overalls (protecting her from wayward shocks or flying bits and it was easy to clean too), the bib hanging down and unstrapped, with a matching set of metal-toed boots (it would not do to have something heavy fall on her feet without protection) and heavy gloves (like the above, but more integral to her work) and a short-sleeved light red shirt hanging off her front in loose folds with a small winged crown on the shoulder (because mechanics was hot work and she liked to let her skin breathe). Perhaps not incidentally, given her slightly vain regard of herself, this outfit also showed off her curves, and strong muscles honed from years of intensive work with machinery stood rigid as she squeezed volleys of shots, one after another with only minimal pauses to keep the guns from overheating to dangerous levels; those guns were ridiculously big, and the triggers were nearly as big as her fists. Keeping them pressed down was starting to make her back hurt, but mere bodily complaints were no match to her fierce desire to see Heartless just die.

One particularily deft Heartless (not dissimilar from the Flayfeathers Aang had faced, actually) had been watching carefully as Winry had fired, and when the gatling barrels stopped rotating, the person-sized guns cooling down as mysterious mechanical processes occured inside, it dove down, claws spread wide as it gracefully swooped down on Winry's unwary back...

She wasn't as unwary as she looked. She turned, a murderous look in her blue eyes and she punched it so hard her fist broke the surface tension of it's body (the engagement ring she wore under her glove adding a painfully sharp edge to her punch); mildly acidic goo splattered everywhere and the Heartless retreated warily, not actually hurt, while Winry hurredly shook the gunk off when she saw it hit the metal under her and start sizzling.

She grabbed the twin multi-purpose control handles extending out of the interface in front of her and squeezed the triggers, and that was all. There was no other input on her part, no further manipulation of mechanical processes, no other interaction that would send commands or otherwise operate the mech, but those controlls were sufficient by themselves. and the mech stepped foward in a deceptively awkward gait, the boxy main body of the mecha bearing the slightly raised cockpit covered by a partly transparent and abstract design that sort of looked like a face on the front. (But only if you looked with your head tilted and eyes squinted.) A set of thick jointless limbs or tendrils extended from the sides of this 'face', their tips capped with a complex arrays of manipulators shaped like the petals of a flower.

One of those tendrils were wrapped protectively around (and safely holding up) several canister-shaped public shelters containing a collectively small group of people that were nonetheless finding it quite crowded, not to mention uncomfortable being jostled around like that. Most of these people were seriously injured in some fashion, a few were hunkered down and whispering hushed apologies to long-dead people, at least one small boy had curled up into a tiny ball and was sobbing inconsolately while black spider-like forms crawled from the edges of the darkness under him whenever he moved only to be squashed underfoot by the terrified others. (The presence of the Heartless did weird stuff, generally speaking.) All of these people were, in one way or another, incapicated and unable to fight effectively, causing the present situation.

"Hang on, you guys!" Winry barked, her voice distorted and tinny through a loudspeaker, and the tendril curled over them while a flamethrower bolted to the side of her mech sprayed liquid fire, pivoted on a revolving joints, the cascade of flame spraying right into the Heartless; a few fell away and on fire, the others retreating to the shadows, dancing and lurking just out of view, waiting for their oppertunity. As soon as they had moved away, though, the cockpit opened while the mech stepped back, stopping just short of Cyborg's shop, and the tendril gingerly deposited the shelters inside the mecha, where they would hopefully be slightly safer.

"Hooray," A satyr rock musician said vaugely. "We're alive?"

"Yes," A hulkish and dragonish humanoid (a Dragonborn, actually) confirmed, wiggling her arms in shellshocked (and not totally enthusiastic) triumph.

"Geez," Winry grumbled. "Dead people show more spirit than you do." (A mummy girl named Aset who had a job doing murals agreed; she was the only one showing real enthusiasm for their neighborly rescuer.) Winry twisted the controls and the machine lurched to the right to take a bolt of fire a few Red Nocturnes spun out of the still-burning fires she'd laid down; the resulting explosion pushed them enough to make the machine lurch, and the unwary passengers wailed, tumbling over the ground. "...Uh, maybe I should have installed some seats."

"Y'think?" A grouchy boggan (a fae being thematically similar to a halfling) yelled. "Why did you just take that blast of fire! It could have melted right through this thing's armor!"

Winry glared at this indictment of her mechanical prowess. "What."

"...Er, it could have seriously hurt us, is what I meant. Your machine-thingy would have been perfectly undamaged. Yeah. It's way too tough and awesome and nigh-indestructable and a paragon of industrial might and for the love of God please stop glaring at me like that!"

Winry softened, mollified. One of the other passengers whimpered into his knees, "We're all gonna die..."

"No," Winry said, and a stack of rocket-propelled granades slid out from a rack on the side of the machine, blasting into the Heartless and exploding; Heartless scattered, limping and missing pieces and in one memorable case a walking torso dribbling it's dismembered head like a basketball for some reason. Unfortunately, few of them seemed destroyed or even mortally wounded. Winry set the primary guns a'blazing again, following the fleeing Heartless and tricking them into falling back and herding tightly together. "I got things I won't have broken. Oh, and you guys too."

"Gee, thanks," The satyr said morosely. He glanced back at the shop Cyborg ran and Winry owned; the facade had been torn away as a weapon not so long ago, more than a few Heartless had crashed through it before being repelled and there were a few other similar indignities commited on it, but it was otherwise in surprisingly good shape; for one thing, it was still standing. "Why are you working so hard to keep that thing standing?"

"Because I have a good investment in it!" Winry said. They stared at her. "What, you've never had a business deal that you didn't want wrecked?" They continued to stare. "Oh, fine! I got something to do after we get rid of the Heartless here, and I have something important there for that particular job."

"Oh, okay then."

"Relax!" Winry said cheerily, now in a better mood because shooting things always cheered her right up. "There's a few things you should know about why we're not going to die."

"Eh?"

"First, I'm really good at killing things with these wonders of science!" Winry twisted the controls and the machine smartly stepped forward, crushing Heartless underfoot; it rose up on it's four backmost legs, it's body structure reconfiguring slightly, and it scraped the wriggling Heartless off it's foot and threw it into a large lumbering Heartless made from spilled blood thickened into rock-hard lumps around blocks of stone and dozens of kitchen knives sticking up all over, knocking it over and sending it tumbling over the smaller Heartless behind it, splintering most of them and dismembering a few and outright killing one or two.

"Two!" Winry said. "I've loaded this thing with enough weapons to seriously upset a small nation!" Just to prove it, about half of them pulled out of hidden hatches, flamethrowers and smaller gatling guns and plasmacasters and razor-disc shooters and chained blades on revolving joints and missle launchers and pincer claws that looked like wrenches for some reason. They struck, the firearms launching just behind the Heartless in blasts of fire, bullets, plasma bursts and explosions that annhilated the Heartless in the center and blasting away the others that weren't lucky enough to run away, only for those ones to be caught by mechanical tendrils that pulled them apart and crushed the pieces or to be struck by wrench-pincers that smashed them to volatile goo.

"Three!" Winry shouted, pulling the machine back. "I'm in a hurry to help a friend of mine, so I'm gonna mow these bastards down so I can go and find him already! And four, I don't actually have a fourth thing to use as an example, so I'm just gonna enforce the first three things until they die already!" The primary gatling guns roared energy-based death, spraying laser-volleys so thick they looked like bursts of white-hot light.

The Heartless charged forward in spite of that and Winry eagerly prepared an attack that would surely blast them all to tiny bits...and then a large explosion in the distance nearly knocked her over, and the seismic rumbles certainly knocked a few of the Heartless over. She, her startled passengers and even the Heartless looked and saw a faint dust cloud on the horizon, shaped a bit like a mushroom, and Winry thought that she saw something really big moving amid flashes of light and fire.

"What was that?" Aset (incidentally, was the 'reanimated ever-living sort of mummy, not a 'bandages and moaning' sort) asked, voicing the question on everyone's mind. "And...why did the Heartless stop fighting?"

Indeed, the Heartless had gone completely still, staring off into the distance. (They had done much the same thing earlier, and in fact had stormed into Winry's neighborhood in the process of going there while trying to kill everything in their path, until Winry had forced them to stay and fight through overwhelming firepower.) Winry frowned, thinking that she had seen a faint burst of darkness far off where those Heartless were staring. The Heartless below started to move, a few of them taking a few steps before standing still again. Winry didn't have any intention of letting them go; she readied the guns again...

And before she could fire, all the Heartless there dematerialized, melting into the shadows and swiftly moving through the darkened streets and straight towards the distant fight. "...Huh," the halfling from before said. "Didn't see that coming."

"Oh my Anubus!" Aset said excitedly. "Winry, you're so awesome your badassery hurts Heartless and it leaked into your machines and it's industrial power freaked them out! Or something."

"Sure, yeah," Winry said, not wanting to spoil Aset's illusions. (And she half-thought that Aset was right.) She tapped her fingers on the controls thoughtfully; things in this area seemed well in hand. "Hey, can any of you guys drive a context sensitive spiral-based weapons platform like this?"

Aset raised her hand. "Ooh! Ooh! I can! I can...uh, I have a part-time job driving construction mechas that use systems like that!" Everyone else (who was capable of doing so) glanced at each other, considered this and then shrugged amiably enough.

Winry bit her lip, weighed their options, and finally decided that this was the best choice to use. "Okay, sounds good. Head down to that hospital they set up near Foster's, that should get you guys taken care of. And fight through the dozens of Heartless that are no doubt waiting to feast on your souls and drag you to a horrible fate no one even wants to think about, while being largely untrained in how to operate this machine." The others gawked at Winry. Winry tried not to look embarrased.

"Okay," said Aset, seeing nothing wrong with that.

"Wait, why can't you do that?" The satyr guy said disbelievingly. "You actually know how to pilot this thing!"

"I have to go help stop the guy who started all this," Winry said simply.

"...Oh. Well. Um. That's a good reason. Yeah."

"Glad to have your approval," Winry said walking through a small opening at the rear of the cockpit and sitting on a seat in the very small chamber (which was actually an escape pod, designed after a long weekend of boredom ultimately resulting in a heated argument about tabletop tennis that had somehow sparked Winry's imagination) beyond, hitting a nearby button and causing an automated process. The escape pod doors closed, and there was a sudden sharp noise that sounded like a pod being rotated very fast and fired out of the machine at incredible speeds. (Smashing through the door of Cyborg's place, incidentally.)

The injured or otherwise non-combat capable people jumped when the robot shook, a result of Aset's overenthusiastic handling of the controls upsetting the mecha's balance and setting into a run out of the neighborhood. "We're so going to die," The boggan said morosely. "Either the Heartless will get us or we'll blow up when this thing trips. Something like that."

"You are so negative today," said the satyr, who ran a hobbyshop right next to the halfling's diner and therefore knew him pretty well. "I remember that just yesterday your little mood swing was in the 'optimistic and happy' part, and now you're going grumpy on me. Did you go Unseelie on me or what?"

"What happened! A big Heartless invasion happened!"

"I don't know that the Heartless actually invade," The satyr said thoughtfully. "Mostly they just show up and wreck stuff and-OW!" He fell forward as the mecha almost tripped (it's stabalizers tending to skip every ten steps, something Winry was trying to fix by applying trace amounts of blue eco-treated imitation Raritanium to the mechanisms) balancing tending to stick, banging his head on the floor and chipped one of his magnificently curly horns. "Ouchies."

"Sorry!" Aset said. "This thing does not have the most intuitive handling! Which is really weird, because the controls are expressively designed to transfer intent into operational commands based on contextual situations. I knew I should have signed up for that class in piloting big mecha, but no, I'll just get job experience, said I..."

Her grumbling spiel cut off at a startling grinding noise. It wasn't a particularily loud noise, or even unfamiliar; everyone who lived here long enough had heard it, usually in the context of airbourne vehicles moving in a hurry. The situation, however, made it very unusual. Thus, even though they were out of the neighborhood and en route to Foster's and therefore not in a position to see the area directly behind the Rockbell-owned and Cyborg-operated mechanics place, they still were aware that the rather large hatch in the ground easily big enough for a moderately large spacecraft to fly through (though not a true spaceship; Cyborg dealed with relatively small-scale operations) and the sound of machinery (at least the rather particular sounds of machinery rotating an underground hanger in a certain way) opening that metal door up.

They didn't need to see it happen, and they certainly heard it. Because Aset had turned the mecha around in sheer paranoid surprise, though, they did see a relatively small spacecraft fly out, a toiroidal phase-field coloring the air behind it a faint electric-blue as it moved on towards where all the blasts and stuff had been coming from. (Unfortunately, there were a few troublemakers around taking advantage of the recent strife to advance their plots, so it's arrival was delayed for a while.)

The people in the mecha watched it go. The moment seem to forbid comment, though there were other reasons to stare at it. Eventually, the satyr grunted and said, "By the Dreaming, that's an weird ship."

"Yep," was the unofficial agreement of everyone there, before they went back to the business of going to Foster's and the hospital to provide some back-up and get some help, and left Winry to do whatever she deemed it neccesary to do.

Later, they'd probably ask her why she had gone to do it in such a strange-looking ship, though.

...

A/N: As if this writing, the second half of this is nearly finished. So for any concerns of ANOTHER nearly year-long wait, have no fear.

In retrospect, though, I may consider dialing things down a bit in the future, or at least try to speed up pacing.