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.

17. Breaking The Eternal Night

Well well well, another too-long chapter that took forever! I hope I've learned some pacing from this.

Just the epilogue to go after this before new worlds, don't worry, it's short!

Disclaimer: I continue to own nothing, and listing everything would take far too long and these notes are big enough as-is!

...

Morte liked to tell people that being a disembodied head had it's advantages in order to distract them from the fairly obvious drawbacks (and usually along with an anecdote about something interesting, like that time he accidentally irradiated a temple of Elemental Earth Evil with a liquid lunch, two rubber bands and a spelljammer reactor, and also the four other times he did it on purpose). It was a pretty blatant lie as his lies went (and he'd made a lot over the centuries); it seemed the main point of it was to suggest that the problems of no having any limbs or flesh or a real sense of touch or a host of other things he missed so very badly even though he couldn't remember actually having those things didn't really matter to him. (It was one of his very best lies, too.)

Watching the soldiers - or whatever the faction-types around here called the people that did the fighting professionally as opposed to habitually - rushing around in the aftermath of the Heartless' brief assault on the area after Kimblee had apparently taken up Zim's invitation to a battle, so enthusiastic and professional and eager in their work that it inspired suspicions of drugs in the water, irked Morte espicially badly with his own shortcomings in any ability to influence a battle positively. The battle had been largely concluded by the time they got there, so there hadn't been much need for him to have to influence any battles, and then the Heartless had gone somewhere else in a big hurry (and Morte had seen that sort of thing to know perfectly well that they were likely assimilating into a super-monster, joining Kimblee in the battle as his personal army or some combination of the two), leaving them not much to do but pick up the continued debris, arrange some more back-up and organize it the clean-up process with a remarkably laid-back attitude; after some more people had arrived on-site to help coordinate efforts, focus battlefield tactics in the area and generally make themselves useful, the tension of even the ex-Foster's inhabitants had loosened.

Morte's news that Roy Mustang and a small group of associates being en route to fight Kimblee too had really helped in that regard; Morte didn't know much about the man, but the mere knowledge that he had taken to the battlefield had instantly defused quite a lot of about-to-panic people and, a bit charmingly, led several of them to declare that they might as well just pick up the wreckage as usual, because the fight was so clearly done now that Roy was there; a general sentiment of 'Roy is awesome and everything he does is awesome FOREVER' was most of what he heard, suggesting an attitude towards an authority figure that was more appropiate towards a local superhero or a hometown celebrity. Admittedly, here they tended to be the same thing. Morte had noted that the townies were feeling, for the most part, generally positive that the Kimblee situation would soon be resolved. They were apparently so spoiled by the customary way most villains were defeated in this town that they had difficulty grasping the idea of the threat not being slain in battle or taken into custody. (Or possibly both. That sort of thing happened here sometimes.)

Constantly listening to people going on about how awesome they thought the high-profile leader from the Peace Marines was had gotten a little irritating, compelling Morte to find someway to make himself useful or, failing that, hang around somewhere that he could learn something. His whole theme was being a guide and despository of generalized knowledge, he knew when he should be taking an opportunity to get some. (Traverse Town's strangeness meant it was a bit new to Morte; he'd only seen six or seven cities like this in his lifetime, none of them glorified refugee camps and certainly few with the highly rarified circumstances to ensure good diplomatic relations in such a diverse population, and just overhearing random triva was very interesting, and synched up nicely with many of the theories and suspicions he had about the place, most of them reasonably benign.)

In short, the cowardly shame he had felt earlier was starting to turn into self-directed loathing stemming from everything he heard about the idolized leaders of the town like Roy Mustang and wondering why he, Morte Rictusgrin, with all the wealth of experience and knowledge he had amassed throughout what could be conservatively estimated as a 'really freaking stupid-long time' (even without addressing the time travel and existence loops and the occasional chat with a parrarel version of himself) couldn't apply it to actually doing something useful in a fight.

He could have resolved to do better in the next fight. He could have promised himself to find a way to make himself useful at the soonest opportunity. He could have sworn to himself that he would definitely think upon all his vast experience, filing the possibilities down until he arrived at the absolute best one that would be sure to make the others see him for his worth and value him and go for all that super-awesome good feelings trip and incidentally make his existence actually do some good for a change instead of being a useless little malcontent that screwed up everything he touched.

So, in keeping with the traditions he had unwillingly enforced on himself from his weakness of character and the veritable mountainside of mistakes building around him into the psychic equivilant of a concrete wall, Morte had instead fled the area with all the actually useful people on it and fled into one of the tents with the not-dead victims of the Philosopher's Stone and sulked. Bitterly, replaying all his most memorable failures of conscience and will over and over again until the bitterness overflowed to turn his thoughts into the most sour condemnations imaginable, turning on themselves and swelling larger into a mess of self-loathing and regrets just churning around on a scale that anyone under a thousand years simply could not imagine no matter how emotionally screwed up they were, but still sulking.

Still, Morte knew that he wasn't a complete waste of space thus far. Their quick little story back at the news studio had gotten out a lot of people who had been ill-equipped to handle a fight with a monster like Kimblee and whatever he had brought with him, and had gotten them out with a minimum of fuss to a place of relative safety. (As defined as the distance from the psychopathic alchemist.) Their remaining presence would have caused way too much trouble and potential casualties and Morte winced at the thought of them getting killed over this whole thing. They were here and sort of safe, so at least he could do a bit of crowd control.

He wasn't completely without worth. Morte knew he was being a jerk and just feeling sorry for himself when there were people that could use his help. He also knew that he just wasn't equipped to give them the help they needed, and he had trouble repressing the old suspicion that he deserved to feel bad that he couldn't do anything about it. Making cosmic-scale screw-ups and then waffling around forever trying to do something about it only to fail miserably and feel worse was just his lot in life, or at least he had used to think that before..

Before the Chief had saved him from that nonsense. When the Chief had finished his business and atoned for his own sins the best way he could; by accepting the hideous punishments all the hells could offer for vengeance on the world-murdering sins of his first and successive incarnations upon his own head. Stupid, so righteous it hurt and making Morte wish he could be that noble, that was the Chief all over. And he still remembered that the last things the Chief had done had included relieving Morte of the guilt he suffered for his part in the whole tragedy, absolving him of that role, knowing what Morte had done and still wanting him on their journey, and telling Morte outright that he had always been the Chief's closest of friends...

Morte could do better. He knew he could, and he owed it to the Chief's memory to at least try to be more of a hero, even if it was just wrecking up nasty status quos and shaking things up wherever he went. (As he had been doing, to varying degrees of success, before he had been brought on-board for this thing.) He just didn't know how. Even floating around and talking, he was still not much better than the inanimate mimirs that he sometimes pretended to be; just like them, it seemed he required an outside force to goad him into actually doing anything.

Lost in his thoughts and moodily wondering how the Boss was doing, Morte hardly noticed the tent flapping open and Kim Possible striding in, a bit weary from the long morning but seemingly pleased by her success in keeping the current situation controlled. "So this is where you've been hiding, Mr. Rictusgrin."

Morte turned around, quickly repressing his startlement. "Ah! Warn a guy when you're jumpin' on him like that! I'm trying to sulk here and feel bad about myself, you're putting a damper on that."

She gave a short and mildly sarcastic nod. "I'll keep that in mind the next time I run into another hero with issues like this."

Morte let the 'hero' comment slide, fully aware that he really didn't deserve the label. "And drop the honorifics, kid. I ain't no 'mister'. And where the hell did you learn my last name that I made up?" Kim shrugged. "Eh, whatever. What are you wanting, huh?"

"Just trying to keep people rounded up," Kim said, gracefully navigating her way through the stretchers and makeshift beds to Morte, keeping her voice quiet out of respect for the unfortunates here; of course she knew that they were alive, but they looked dead and it felt like being in a place for the dead to be prepared. The feeling was less creepy than someone who hadn't lived with the constant danger Morte had, or the history of mass death that Kim did; it engendered respect and sorrow, not fear or unease. "You have no idea how hard it is to keep people sitting still and making themselves useful. The faction guys are all right, but the independants like me and Ron can be a total mess in situations like this. Keeping everyone together and not wandering off when the situation hasn't been confirmed finished or not is just common sense." She smiled and shrugged. "It's not so bad, though; it's just like herding cats. Not easy and after a little bit it's impossible, but keep them distracted and interested and you can sort of steer them. Being polite helps."

Morte's jawbone quirked. "I know a bit about that kind of thing myself," He volunteered. "I've run with adventuring parties before. Dealing with the kind of people who go in for that kind of life? Oh hells yeah, it's definitely an education for the kind of people that wind up in this place."

"Really?" Kim said. "You were an adventurer?" She gave him an awkward look, sizing up the cracks and fractures on his skull; Morte had seen that look often enough to know when he was being given a 'is that how he got his flesh flayed off' look. "...Must have been pretty exciting...?" She said lamely.

Morte snorted. "I didn't get like this because of something stupid like grabbing a Sphere of Annihilation in a statue's mouth or something like that. I don't know anything about me before I was...well, this." He gave a bob that succintly indicated all of him - not that there was much - and the statement was a lie; he certainly knew something of the person he had been, if absolutely nothing of his memories or identity or anything besides the occasional guilty twinge when he thought about doing something less than morally upright. He was grateful for his lack of knowledge there; knowing just the generalities was bad enough without knowing just how much of a jerkass he really had been in life. "I'll give you exciting, all right, though. The stories I could tell you, they'd turn your hair white."

"It'd be an interesting style change," Kim commented, twirling a lock of her flame-red hair around her finger and looking at it speculatively, as if picturing it white.

Morte hoped she would leave it at that. Hoped, but didn't think she would. Sure enough, she gave him a brief look, her curiosity piqued by the minor gossip-worthy tidbits he had left for her. Morte rolled his eyes; he knew what she was going to ask next.

Kim was a shy girl, Morte thought, watching her shuffle her feet awkwardly as she worked her way up to the question. "Uh," She said, and that was it. She shifted around some more, lips moving soundlessly as she tried out politer ways of phrasing the obvious question without being so direct as to be rude. "Um...I don't suppose you'd say...ah..."

Best to get it out of the way as soon as he could. Morte flatly asked, "You're gonna ask why I ran like a coward when I used to be an adventurer and ought to know how to fight, aren't you?"

Kim blinked. She coughed. "Uh. I wasn't going to say it as mean as all that."

No, Morte thought. Because you're all sickeningly nice when someone hasn't pissed you right off like that Spike blighter. Keeping the sentiment to himself, he thought for a moment; giving a technically honest answer while not treading anywhere near uncomfortable territory for him was a specialty of sorts. "Not exactly gonna be useful in a fight like that, am I? I was one of the front-liners in my adventuring days, I can tell you, and I can give harder than I look, but going toe-to-toe with a guy who can make things explode with his bare hands isn't up there? Yeah, I'd die quicker than a kobold in a dungeon that ain't kitted out for traps."

"Maybe," Kim said , not looking convinced. "But plenty of the guys that stuck aren't aren't metahumans or have any real powers. All they could get were really big guns, and they still stayed to fight."

"I don't have hands to hold guns," Morte said. "Not really something that would work for me."

"You would if you got plugged into a robot or something." Morte found that idea interesting, actually. "But that's not my point. Lack of large-scale metacombat abilities didn't keep anyone from staying there. Well, anyone with common sense. So what's bothering you?"

If Morte had eyebrows, he would have raised them. "What's with the billion questions?" He snapped. "And why do you care if I went runnin' with my tail between my legs? If I had any. You know what I mean."

Kim shrugged, not looking terribly put off. "You just don't seem like the kind of guy who'd be comfortable staying outside the combat."

"You don't know enough about me to be sure about that." Morte gave her a minute adjustment of his and a eye movement that together approximated a frown. "Hell. Hardly anyone on my team knows anyone on it at all."

Kim nodded. "That's true. And you know something?" She pointed a finger delicately at him. "You're in the perfect position to do something about that?"

"I am?"

"Sure. You're the only one with no existing ties to anyone else. Zuko is an old friend of Zim's, and a battle-buddy besides. Calvin and Hobbes are brothers and best friends. Shoved up into a team like that? If they butt heads, someone will take sides on principle. Since you don't have any pre-existing issues like that with any of them, you're a mediating force among them. You can use that."

"Been thinking a lot about this, have you."

"It just seemed like a reasonable idea," Kim said. "I'm all about helping other people whenever I can. Providing a little strategic advice to a fellow adventurer is the least of it."

"Nice of ya, but I told ya, I'm not an adventurer anymore."

Kim smirked. "Not the way your group's going." Morte had to admit, she had a point. "Besides, you should at least try to be optimistic. Between you and me, and please don't tell any of them I said this, but you guys need someone to think straight. Zim's kind of nuts, Calvin's not a whole lot better, Zuko has a pretty decent head on his shoulders but he's got way too much of a nasty temper to make it stick that much, and Hobbes is the sanest, but he strikes me as the kind of guy that made egg other people on if it looks like fun. Which leaves you."

"...Your analysis of our team's psychological profile fills me with so much hope for the future," Morte said sarcastically.

"I try." Kim frowned. "...Wait, everything I said wasn't that nice, was it? Oh snap, please don't tell any of them I said that, and if you do PLEASE make it sound nicer than what I actually said, I didn't mean it like what I said-"

A knock came. Morte found this odd, since there were in a tent and there wasn't anything for someone to knock on, and he realized that it was just a really big guy stomping on the ground really hard. "Who the hell is that?" Morte said.

Kim's self-conscious spazzing immediately stopped and she brightened up. "Oh, I know this guy!"

The tent flap opened, and in stepped one of the largest men Morte had ever seen that wasn't classified as the more human-interaction friendly scale of giants; the first thing that Morte saw was the white, of a uniform similar to the Peace Marines but applied onto a much larger than normal body as it arrived, seeming impossibly contorted to fit into the tent's opening. There was an indistinct movement, an adjustment of arm and massive rolling shoulders and a flash of dark purple, and an absolutely enormous man in a more ornate than usual variation of the Peace Marine's uniform was standing there, somehow managing to barrel down through the tent in a respectful and discreet fashion, massive boots stomping down on the ground hard enough to propel the rest of the body forward, a partially opened longcoat strained tight over a massive bodybuilder's frame and constantly clinking with the weight of the medals pinned to it, and neatly hanging from one pocket was an old silver pocket watch of Amestrian make and alchemic symbols on it, and Morte found his attention drawn upward as the giant approached with the sort of exuberance normally seen in lit fireworks; the immense broad shoulders graced by uniform officer's stripes with multiple pips on them, and hovering over one was a small and insanely cute moose-like robot. Morte looked higher and higher, to a regal head bald except for a single curly lock of blonde hair, an enormous lantern jaw forming the outline of a classically noble face of heroic proportions (as suited to the man's form) and an enormous curled mustache over his mouth.

The giant came to an abrupt stop right in front of Morte and Kim. "Ah, good fortunes come upon me!" He boomed, saluting her. "Precious heroine of our town, I had found a lost refugee and had wondered where you'd gotten to!" He cast big innocent blue eyes upon Morte. "Hrm? And who might this gentleman be?"

"I ain't no gentleman," Morte said. "Who the hell are you?"

The giant made a booming chuckle. "Good sir, a lack of manners is no reason to disparage presumptions of gentility! Why, behold myself!" He flexed suddenly, fists the size of hams clenched mightily as his enormous biceps wrestled with his coat arms. "I was stripped of all my family honors myself!" He twisted, posing heroically so that his back bugled, hands stretched down from his chest. "My sister earning the inheritance before our world was claimed by the demons of the shadows, and then all cast into darkness and ruin!" He flexed like a muscleman, one hand stretched out towards an imaginary sun as his eyes gleamed with intensity.

"And yet do I permit myself the indulgence of presuming that it is a reason to let my ancestry down! NAY, I SAY!" He spun and pointed at Morte, still flexing with his other arm. The little moose bounced up and down like the arm was a trampoline, giggling monotonously in squeaks. "I shall tell you, gentility is a matter of deportment and good grace, sportsmanship and valor! Of setting upon yourself an obligation to everyone before you, excercising every minute of every day with genteel decorum and elegance paying due to those that have gone before! My good sir..."

He flexed so violently that his dress shirt tore, immense muscles sculpted by dedicated hours of bodily training just too much for his shirt to live with any longer, and his skin gleamed so much it suddenly sparkled pink. "Just who do you THINK I am? But wait, have no fear, I shall tell you precisely who I am!" More flexing. "I am an elegant artist of alchemical technique, always aspiring towards greater knowledge and scientific endeavor FOR THE BENEFIT OF MANKIND! A soldier dedicated to the protection and guardianship of this town and all who pass through or dwell here! A vanguard against the foul villains that seek to ruin our good anarchy! A gentleman and a scholar, whose MIGHTY spirit forged through education and experience dwells within an AWE-INSPIRING body perfected by the ideals of SCIENCE! Whose magnificence-forging alchemical technique has been passed down the Armstrong line for generations! CAPTAIN ALEX LOUIS ARMSTRONG OF THE JUSTICE MARINES, FORMERLY MAJOR OF THE AMESTRIAN MILITARY, THE STRONGARM ALCHEMIST, HERE AT YOUR SERVICE!"

He bowed in a courtly old-fashioned way; body bent at waist level, one foot dipped back and arms spread wide, and it was clear that his hands were encased in lethal steel; he wore a set of massive gauntlets with holes for his fingers and massive spikes on the knuckles, with a transmutation matrix on the back. Morte didn't recognize the specific symbolic equations, but there seemed to be a theme of creation in destruction, earth-themed shapes and general bombastic-ness. More sparkles happened.

"...What the fook?" Morte said; he'd been around a long time to have seen some weird stuff, but seeing something like that still freaked him out.

"Yeah, we all feel that way about him," Kim muttered. "Don't let it on though, he's sensitive."

"Hrm? What was that?" Captain Armstrong said. The robot squeaked. "Ah, yes, my friend tells me that you were warning this person not to voice imprecations on my sanity! Rather pointless, since I now know of said imprecations!"

"...Seriously? That thing just squeaked at you, how the hells do you 'know' what it's saying?" Morte muttered. "I knew a guy like you. Crazy-ass ranger who thought his companion hamster was a miniature giant space hamster. Always yelling random stuff you'd expect from a paladin. Had a sweet tattoo, though. Either that or a permenant fingerpaint thing."

The robot squeaked dolefully. Morte thought he seemed faintly familiar. "By Jove, you're right!" Captain Armstrong said. "He is rather quiet when he voices those comments, isn't he? Keeping himself quiet so that he can voice rude comments without letting anyone know! Or is it something else entirely; perhaps we are dealing with a devious fiend plotting evil schemes upon our town! Shame on you if you are; it's not bad enough that we have so many of those already, but so soon after this atrocity! That's not just evil, that is UTTERLY TACTLESS. So, what are you muttering about down there!" The man loomed over Morte, flexing ominously. "THAT'S VERY SUSPICIOUS!"

Morte hovered away. "Oh, crap-baskets."

"Calm down, Captain Armstrong," Kim said placatingly. "He's not plotting anything, he's just an opinionated jerk."

"Wow, thanks," Morte said sarcastically. "You're the best character witness ever."

"I try." Kim returned to Armstrong, who was slightly mollified by her assurences but kept giving Morte stern looks. "What is it you're doing here, sir? Isn't there morale raising you could do?"

"Ah, but that has already been accomplished beyond my most exuberent hopes!" Armstrong declared. "I need not return to the task, for my manly method of total masculinity have already inspired them beyond limits that even my immense reserves of heroism can hope to exceed! I can hardly imagine how, though, I was not even halfway through my list of specially forumated heroic poses to raise morale and induce great VIGOR in the men and women and unaffiliated genders! They were so invigorated they ran off in a hurry to their tasks! They even insisted many times that they could stomach no more further enthusiasm! I pushed them to their absolute limits! I am SO PROUD OF THEM. Alas, but for the possibility of pushing them beyond those limits, but not all are made of the same sturdy and MANLY materials of those of the Armstrong line!"

"Ah, you mean like your sister, Missus Olivier in the Council?" Kim said brightly.

Armstrong paused. "...Yes. Yes she is. Made of far sturdier materials that mortal men shudder to think of in competition with their own masculinity. Ah, some people simply can't handle a bit of competition." The moose squeaked. "No, I am not avoiding the fact that my sister invariably pounds me to a mere shell of myself whenever we spare." Squeak. "And I am certainly not ignoring everything you're actually saying and attributing my own defensive thoughts to your statements. And I am also not pretending that you agree with everything I say!" Squeak. "And I shall pretend I didn't hear that!" He frowned. "Now what was I talking about again?"

"The reason you're in here, specifically."

"Ah, yes." Armstrong gave the tent a sad and forlorn look. "How...how very tragic this all is." He sniffled once or twice, and Morte thought he was going to sit down and sob out his existential grief like a man. Armstrong managed to contain himself, though. "I...regret that it came to this. I only wish that I had been able to join the manhunt for Kimblee and bring him to justice for his many cruel deeds, but if I can assist reconstruction..." his shoulders rose and fell, a simple slightly sad shrug, as if to say 'that is all right with me'. He then indicated the moose-thing. "I encoutered this jolly fellow during my round of inspecting the volunteers. An unusual case; no one could identify him, though he apparently came in with your group from the news studio event. And Miss Coco vouches for him, it seems. Quite lovely that she found a romance for herself, at last! Truly, everyone can meet someone suited to them and know love in all it's splendor!"

Morte made a gagging noise. Kim frowned. "Wait, he was with us? I don't recognize him..."

Morte did, though. "Hey, wait a tick! That's the little moose-thing that was tagging along with the boss-man ever since we made that run down to Foster's!"

Kim blinked. "Wait, really? He's a friend of Zim's?"

"Hrm?" Armstrong said. "You are familiar with this Minimoose, fellow, then? I was hoping I could locate his comrades; he seemed a bit lost out there, without direction or purpose! Floating about, all by his lonesome..."

"He's some kind of sidekick of the leader-guy on my crew," Morte explained. "You remember the broadcast we sent out earlier?" Armstrong nodded. "Remember the crazy green guy?" Another nod. "That's the guy."

Armstrong's eyes widened. "Ah, I see now! But then why was he with you?"

"I dunno. Guess he felt he was better off sticking with us. If the Boss didn't like that or even noticed he left, he didn't say anything about it. Or told him to go with us when no one was looking."

"Well, that makes a degree of sense then," Armstrong said genially. "And if he is a companion of the man assisting in the battle against that disgrace to all alchemy, than I for one certainly value his presence here." Minimoose squeaked indifferently. "Why yes, thank you, I am quite proud of my hair curl. This distinctive manner of honorably curled hair has been passed down the Armstrong line for generations!"

Morte ignored him. The sanest solution seemed to filter out the more grandiose Captain Armstrong kept saying. "Come to think of it, he was tagging along with the Boss back before we skipped the place for our own good. Didn't do much. Guess we just forgot about him after a while." Minimoose glared at him and squeaked warningly. Morte rolled one eye slightly, rather like he was raising an eyebrow. The two stared at each other. Minimoose was the first to back down, though Morte wasn't sure if he was conceding or had just lost interest. "Suppose he came with us and, again, no one noticed him. Quiet little guy. Wonder what he was doing around here, then?"

"Probably didn't think he could do much," Kim suggested. "No big deal, anyway. But I do wonder what he was doing squeaking at people?"

"I gathered that he was attempting to obtain some information on how normal reconstruction procedure went. He seemed quite fascinated," Captain Armstrong said. "And he is with this 'Boss' of yours? Zim, did you say his name was? Fascinating fellow, I would like to speak with him. I admire the cut of his 'jibe', as they say!"

"No one says that. Never say that again," Morte said flatly.

Armstrong bowed his head, abashed. Minimoose squeaked worryingly. "Have no fear," Captain Armstrong said soothingly. "I am sure he will perform admirably. Such battles as this are commonplace in this town!"

"And the constant explosions we've been hearing? And the two or so big explosions?" Morte cut in.

Armstrong's good cheer faltered somewhat. "...Those are somewhat rarer," He admitted. He looked around the room and sadly added, "As is this level of...casualties."

"Yeah," Kim said quietly, her general upbeat optimism diminished. Both the adventurer and the Justice Marine captain were silent for a moment, both respectful and afraid.

Morte felt like a jerk. "Ah, come on," he said, trying to lighten the mood and not look at the almost-corpses. "I bet you anything that the next big explosion is from my crew and this big group we set ourselves up with! Beating down this Kimblee berk and whatnot. Blowing up Heartless, it's all good."

Captain Armstrong gave him a pentrating look quite at odds with his attitude. "You truly think so?" He asked, interested.

"Sure. I haven't been for these guys for even a full day yet and I've already gotten that they're really into making a big mess of their enemies wherever they go. Which admittedly is just this one district, but it still counts. Trust me: next explosion will be a good thing."

Kim opened her mouth to respond. Minimoose froze up and squeaked frantically, spinning around and looking outside. "Hrm?" Captain Armstrong said. "Your instruments are picking up a great deal of energy?" More squeaking. "Even more than that being discharged over the past twenty minutes?"

Morte had a greater concern. "The hell's that light?" He asked, noticing a distant light filtering through the fabric of the tent and shining so brightly every corner of it was illuminated, the dusty scars and cleaned remnants of Kimblee's actions on these people softened in it's radiance. "Feels...weird."

Kim gasped, very softly, her eyes wide and her body going very still. "Oh, my stars and garters," Armstrong said, hushed as a child at their first fireworks display. Minimoose glanced at him, squeaking and saying 'you wear garters'? Neither of them answered him and he peeped in disgruntlement.

The light flashed brighter, and the noises outside the tent ceased, as what was surely every single person working, patrolling or just hanging around in the vincinity of Foster's ruins stopped just long enough to stare at the light streaming up more than halfway across the First District. The air shifted, the atmosphere changing, and while Morte was no mage (harboring a touch of dislike for it in fact, a common reaction after being looked down on by wizards as a 'brutish fighter, a meat shield that didn't even have meat'), he knew magic when he saw it.

This wasn't magic, at least not arcane workings of the hidden sciences of the multiverse. This was...Morte had absolutely no idea what this was, but he had tasted the shock of positive energy-infused power surging through a place, felt the warmth of Goodness infused into will and sent streaking down from the Upper Planes to heal the suffering and cleanse evil's taint, and seen the workings of true belief-summoned miracles with his own eyes. This was magic, yes, and it felt like divine magic to him.

Morte supposed he should have been paying more attention to the Keyblade's specific magical functions.

Potential and reality crashed into each other and the light turned green, a radiant and glorious collection of shades ranging from purest viridian to respledent emerald to frequencies that were almost blue and some nearly a yellow that looked like soft gold spun into lightning cracking the sky, and then something hit them like a shockwave, a barely visible green ripple ruffling the sides of the tent and giving Kim and Armstrong a bad scare, but Morte felt the movements of something huge stirring somewhere, but could hardly notice that compared to the way the very fabric of the tent was infused with a greenness that was the apothesis of all green, and even then he distinctly felt something like over a hundred people in sudden motion, the green light centering around the still bodies of the soul-stolen victims of the Philosopher's Stone and glowing so brightly they looked like bundles of light, sharply defined and still infinite in their scope, a constrast that hurt his brain thinking about it.

One by one, the glowing lights diffused, bodies glowing a few moments more before they all simultaneously started, as if something vital inside them had moved back in, the place still tinted with a faint shade of green that reminded Morte achingly of the glories of the Olympian Glades of Arborea, his memories instantly bringing up island-sized trees converted into cities and titanic buildings flying across the sky filled to the brim with generational parties and fey spirits of chaos born of goodness just flying around and hanging out with people, and above it all the certain knowledge that you were in a place that was right and good. Right here and now, though, Morte was irresitably bound to realize that the bodies were twitching slightly, fingers curling, eyelids flickering...

Several dozen rasping breathes were exhaled, and fresher quantities of air sucked in. Stretchers and makeshift bunks creaked as suddenly very alive bodies gradually and haltingly moved, sat up or otherwise got up in some manner or another. One by one, right in front of the very astonished Morte, Captain Armstrong, Kim and Minimoose, people whose souls had been stolen by Kimblee and left for dead were getting back up, still shocked into silence and looking around; some staring with frank bewilderment at their surrondings, some still fresh enough from their experience to be bouncing in their beds for the novel glee of feeling again, a few staring blankly in mildly puzzled glee for some reason, and while a few were hardy enough to be sufficiently recovered to be analyzing themselves and checking their bodies for damage, most were incredibly confused and relieved at the same time.

People began to speak, the whispers and surprised statements and incoherent babble coming in starts and bits at first, but then Morte abruptly realized just how insanely crowded it was in the tent when they all started talking at the same time, the din rising to a thick hammer upon the hearing organs (not that he needed any) from all the people yelling and shouting over each other. At least six different sets of lovers and friends caught sight of their counterparts and burst out of their beds and ran sobbing for each other, getting their clothes tangled in their stretchers and dragging them with them, knocking over other stretchers with their occupants still in them and dragging them along, their complaints and furious promises of retribution totally ignored. A few people fell out of their stretchers for other reasons, being a little too enthusiastic about being alive again and stimming their ways right onto the ground.

"They did it," Kim said faintly, although no one heard her but it was still vital for posterity. "They actually did it!"

"My God," Captain Armstrong said. "They're not dead. They're not dead! THEY LIVE AGAIN!" He abruptly burst into inelegant sobbing, so struck by the emotional moment he grabbed Kim in a mighty bear-hug. "I AM SO MOVED!"

"OH GOD THERE GOES MY SPINE," Kim squealed.

"Holy crap, I was right!" Morte said. "An explosion really did fix everything!"

"Vot ze hell are ye talkin' about?" Andre said, sitting up and looking totally unbothered from recently returning to fleshyness after about twenty minutes or so as a disembodied spirit in a realm of pain. "Vait, why am Hy in ze hosh-pital place? Hy feel itchy and want to hit things zat are red."

"Ow," Captain Razor said, clapping his hands over his ears. "Shut up that noise, I just got back from being technically dead, I don't need hearing damage!"

"What they said," Freya said belatedly. She rubbed her forehead. "Oh dear Lord, that was...extremely unpleasant to live through..."

"Whiner!" Andre said. Freya punched him in the face. "Hah! Now dat's vot Hy'm talking about, voman!" She punched him again.

"Oh God, I don't feel good," Bonnie said, looking distinctly ill and clutching her stomach.

"What the hell do you have to complain about?" Morte asked her. "You just got back from being dead."

She shook her head. "I don't know..." She blinked, noticing Kim. She opened her mouth to deliver an invective. A glimmer of the light's good feelings stirred and she closed her mouth, simply not feeling the old bitterness as closely as she once had. She shook her head again, looking deeply confused but strangely happy. Also, less sick. "Huh. I feel weird."

"THIS IS SUCH EXCELLENT NEWS AS I HAVE NOT HEARD SINCE SCAR VOWED TO ABANDON HIS WAYS OF VENGEANCE AND JOINED OUR FOLD!" Captain Armstrong, somehow drowning out the other voices with his sheer volume and emotion, shouted. "MY HEART'S MIGHTY EMOTIONS KNOW NO BOUNDS! COME, WE MUST EXPERIENCE THE YOUTH OF OUR HEARTS, FOR I CALL FOR A GROUP HUG FOR ALL!"

Every single person there was silent. "Er, what?" A grouchy human doctor named Cox said, looking horrified at the notion.

"IT MUST BE HUG TIMES NOW!" Armstrong bellowed, falling upon them and grappling them in the mightiest hug he could muster, tears falling from his face as he scooped up Freya, Andre, Razor and Bonnie (since they were closest) and hugged as mightily as he could hug. The sounds of their bones creaking was alarmingly loud.

"OH GOD, THE PAIN!" Kim said. On the bright side, her spine popped back into place.

"Cyborg parts...grinding on non-cyborg parts!" Razor howled. "WHY, GOD, WHY!"

"WHY ISN'T THIS AGAINST REGULATIONS!" Freya demanded.

Bonnie said nothing, for she was smothering between Armstrong's bulk and everyone else. She managed some loud whimpering, though.

"Bah, hyu call zis a hug?" Andre said, unimpressed. "It'z not a real hug onless dere's at least four hospitilzations and someone's arm goes missing and ve haff to call a blood fued on account of me eating somebody's hair!"

"A HAPPY ENDING! I AM SO HAPPY I HURT!" Armstrong said.

Morte considered that his happiness was hurting other people. The other people had caught onto this, and everyone who was physically capable of doing so jumped out of their beds and ran right out of the tent screaming like maniacs, dragging those unable to move to save them from the hugging horror of an overly emotional Alex Louis Armstrong.

He wisely sneaked away to follow them, only to be met by another blast of sound as the escaping crowd ran smack into the group of people that had been about to enter the tent to see what was going on, and consequently there ensued more excited hugging when people saw that so many people had just been re-ensouled again, and a small party broke out on the spot to celebrate the occasion even though Kimblee was still on the loose.

Morte quite eagerly joined the party, taking care to avoid Ron Stoppable as he showed up to wonder why his girlfriend was yelling for help only to be drawn into Armstrong's doom hug himself, wondering to himself how the hell these people had set up the party so fast (and the police force being the ones to set it up, too) but feeling pretty good about it all the same. He felt so good, in fact, that his self-doubting issues of earlier were all but forgotten.

The almost-dead people had been reensouled, apart from a few unfortunates (not that he cared too much about them, since he didn't actually know them), Kimblee had to be severely weakened for that to happen, and a good victory party was rolling. So, knowing as much about the ways of the multiverse as he did, Morte automatically knew that the battle with Kimblee was far from over.

He just hoped Zim and the others could finish it before the party broke up by the people who were already being boring and insisting they should get back to work on reconstruction and stuff. (Mostly the people who had just been ensouled, sadly enough.)

...

Kimblee was feeling several unpleasant experiences right now. Dust on his nice suit, settling on his skin and making things all messy. Blood in his mouth, and a foriegn taste he didn't like. His body aching all over, and a sense of something being horribly wrong. And worse: against even the war inside his head as bits of his psyche tore at each other like the world's most localized civil war, Kimblee was dimly aware that something had gone horribly wrong.

The screaming in his head was a fairly important sign.

Spots of green still blotted his vision, nearly but not quite as annoying as the persistent grinding aches pounding relentlessly at him like a whole-body toothache, all manner of horrible emotions and half-thoughts flickering across his mind faster than sand sifting through his fingers, swirling together in a gut-wrenching miasma and leaving his head fit to burst. More obnoxious still, he felt a familiar dripping moistening his clothing that had nothing to do with blood, and his free hand moved to a copious quantity of the red fluid that was most certainly not blood.

He raised his hand and stared at it a moment longer. It welled up, drops gathering together as thickly as syrup running together, and fell away with a thick splatter on the metal around him. The Umbral Heartless drank it up, for whatever reason, but they weren't terribly enthusiastic about it. He dropped his hand and stared blankly into the sky, where the spot of air where the Stone had just been floating before it had been unsealed was still tinged with remnants of green light.

Kimblee's mouth formed silent words. He didn't bother articulating them. The stone, he thought. The Stone was gone. All the effort he had put into it, all the hard work in decoding Jack Crowley's notes (and attendent sexuality-related trauma), the clandestine skulking to set up the transmutation circle, the damage he had taken while activing it, and all the pains he had suffered to keep the Stone...all of that was for nothing. Absolutely nothing at all.

And yet that hardly seemed to matter, not with the things screaming behind his eyes. "No," he muttered. "That's...it is fine, I can handle this...they won that little victory, it simply makes my own victory better..." He hissed at the effort of just speaking. It hurt, nearly as much as trying to think in straight lines or breathe or do anything without thinking of that horrible, glorious, searing, beautiful light...

He tried not to think of it, not to think of anything except recapturing Jarod and killing people and getting the hell out of there (not explicitly in that order), but it weighed on him. It was hard to think of anything except that light, or more precisely, the...things he had seen. He glanced at his hands and shuddered, trying to think of anything except the brief hallucinatory sight of blood surging away from red-stained hands, which was an odd mental image because he'd rarely ever touched those he killed personally.

Blood on his hands. So much blood that he could have drowned himself in it a dozen times over. It was an amazingly vivid and persistent mental image.

He just couldn't stop looking at his hands. It was better then thinking about what that light had shown him. He moved uncomfortably, and the dank coolness of the Umbral Heartless rose around him, settling around him and supporting him, and at their touch, Kimblee's mind cleared up a bit, the troubling thoughts growing dimmer and faint. "I...I still don't..." He breathed in, out and repeated, visualizing himself expelling all the nasty self-defeating images. "Never mind that. Remember the directive. Cause chaos and spread destruction. I have done that already. I have succeeded; no matter what happens here, I have won." His lies were plainly transparent, even to himself, but he didn't care very much, it still made him feel a little bit better. And the Heartless' presence, like that of an unpredictable but currently loyal beast even though it would be as happy to eat him as his enemies, was comforting.

He started whistling to himself, recalling a cheerful tune he had sung in prison when he had been bored, and strength gradually poured into his body from the Heartless.

"What the zipwick is he being so cheerful about?" Zim wondered from where he was still sitting on the ground, giving Kimblee a deeply distrustful look.

"No idea," Aang said as he hurried over, bits of rock uprooting themselves as he passed. He grabbed Zim by the arm and helped him up, the Irken's feet too unsteady for him to stand for an unnervingly long moment. "Zim...what was that? What did you do? It was all..." He waved his hands around, trying to articulate it before he gave up and spread his arms wide. "That was amazing."

"Do tell," Zim grunted. "I've no idea what I did. I think...I think I just reversed whatever was keeping the souls in the Philosopher's Stone locked in there." He frowned. "Do you think they went back to their bodies?"

"If what the alchemy guys said is true, they'd be drawn back to their bodies once the Stone was destroyed," Aang assured him. "And they'd know, right?"

"...Good," Zim grunted, swaying on the spot. Aang summoned a wind to steady him, and when it touched his hands it burned. Zim screamed, and clutched his hands under the tattered remnants of his shirt.

Aang's eyes flashed. "What's wrong with your hands?"

"Nothing!" Zim tried to keep them hidden. "Just power backlash or something like that, it's no-"

Aang forced his hands out, grabbing him by the wrist and forcing his arm up. Zim pulled away instantly, but not quickly enough to hide the still warm and faintly smoking marks on his palm and further along his arms. The Airbender stared at him in horror. "...What happened to you up there?" He repeated, eyes wide. "Did you use a dangerous technique that's supposed to be forbidden and it burned you! That kind of thing never works out!"

"I don't know," Zim said honestly. "And it's not that big a deal anyway-"

"You burned yourself!" Aang shouted, attracting the attention of their allies, who'd been so stunned by the unsealing of the Philosopher's Stone they hadn't made a move to finish off Kimblee or do anything other than assisting Winry and Jarod off the ground.

"I can deal with that," Zim said disinterestedly. "The Stone's gone, the souls are back to their bodies (hopefully) and Kimblee's just sort of sitting there. Problem solved! You're just whining about details."

"It's not over," Aang insisted. "It's never that easy! And may I remind you that you burned yourself? You need to have that looked at. And how in the Storm's hammer did you burn yourself anyway?"

"Unimportant!" Zim said, but too late; several other people were now clustering around him, the rest of Team Avatar minus Zuko and Abel among them, and even Zim's ship was flying slightly closer so the rest of his crew could get a better look. And from the look of these other people, they had the same uncomfortable questions Aang did. Zim grimaced, resigning himself to the inevitable.

Roy, while he was growing inexplicably fonder of the schizophrenic little refugee, was more business-oriented then the others. Knowing the important thing was to make sure Kimblee was down for good before tending to anything else, he nodded at Greed, Scar, Gibbs and Angilaka. They glanced at the fallen Umbra Eternis, deceptievly still but the Heartless within it gradually getting more active, and as one they hurried over to it. Shego and Deadpool followed along, after a silent 'follow me' gesture from Greed.

The giant robot didn't get up when they got within striking distance of it, nor did Kimblee do more than stare sullenly at them. As they got within a few paces of it's feet, Roy muttered to his group, "Unless he's totally incapacitated, Kimblee's too dangerous to take any chances with. If he so much as blinks, kill him."

Shego nudged Deadpool. "Dude, the big bosses are giving us total kill permissions. This is the best day ever." She reconsidered after the dirty look Scar gave her and added, "Aside from all the death and destruction and devastation on a totally ludicrous scale and the abominable misuses of science meant for the benefit of mankind. Yeah."

"What she said," Deadpool said. "On that note, Gibbs-man! Gimme a gun! Like a rocket launcher! Or a mini-gun! Or a rocket launcher that shoots miniguns that fire rockets! Or a nail gun! Or a gun that shoots nails! Or a nail that summons guns that shoot nails that summon nail guns."

Gibbs said, "No, no, no, no, no, no, and what?"

"Hey, they're legitimate weapons. I know a guy in the Beach District. No questions asked, no passports required, and a special discount for quests of vengeance, espicially if you promise not to start killing random people and get all indiscriminate. That's a real problem sometimes."

"Who wants to vote to ignore him and focus on the bastard that mutilated my robot?" Greed said.

Everyone but Deadpool said, "Aye!"

Deadpool sulked. "It's a conspiracy, I tells ya."

"Right," Roy said. "So, everyone clear on the 'kill Kimblee if you need to' thing?"

"Understood, sir," Gibbs said, and six sniper rifles combined into a chain gun appeared from his shoulder, the absolute minimum required for his powers to manifest them.

"I call dibs on his suit!" Deadpool said. "Espicially if we shred it with like a million-trillion bullets. Shredded suits are the look in the Upper District this year, and you get two cool points for matching body armor and war wounds."

"I'm cool with it," Shego said, after Greed gave her a look.

"No problems here, man," Angilaka agreed. "Scar, you cool with this?"

"Killing him would accomplish everything we have promised on behalf our duties and that I have personally promised," Scar said after a tense personal moment. "As well as being tremendously satisfying to me personally. And yet..." He grimaced, jaw muscles tensing painfully and his hands slowly clenching and unclenching, longing to be around Kimblee's throat hard enough to give a final twist. "...It would be more appropiate to take him alive." He said slowly and with enormous reluctance, as if every word of that was like pulling meathooks out of his flesh and even more painful.

Roy gave him a sidelong look. "Yeah. It would be." He was silent for a moment, deeply surprised by hearing such a sentiment from Scar of all people, even with the deep sense of disgust evident on Scar's expression. "Well. Let's just see how this goes."

As they approaching Kimblee, preparing to open dialogue one last time with Kimblee, Shego said, "Say, with all us heavy hitters, shouldn't we be getting Abel up here too?"

"No," Scar said bluntly. Angilaka glanced back at the group behind them, where Abel was passively overlooking and quietly interjecting counter-arguments in a intense discussion of some kind with Zim and the rest, and she sighed in relief.

"Why? Things go bad, he can just rip Kimblee's head off. No exaggeration, either."

"Yes," Scar said patiently, as if overriding her sillyness. "But you miss the fact that Abel is very, very stupid." They stared at him. "What? You know he is. Stop staring at me like that. YOU try spending nearly every waking moment when he suddenly becomes severely codependant and confused about his sexuality and insists on being around all day long. Every day. For weeks and weeks on end, doing nothing but blathering on and on and on about the most incomprehensibly stupid things as they pass through his mind, abandoning and forgetting them as they come and no matter if you punch him in the mouth or stick a pillow in his face or blast his head off or shove him off a cliff or throw him into the jaws of a rancor he just will not shut up." Scar shuddered. "You have no idea how annoying he is...pray that you never do."

"...But what does that have to do with not having him face off with us against Kimblee?" Greed said.

Scar blinked. "What? Oh. That. That is because this is a situation that requires finesse, cool heads and not a rampaging zealot who may be just as liable to tear him in two for his sins as bring him in."

"But we brought you. And, for that matter, Deadpool," Angilaka retorted. "Only he's minus the zealotry."

"Got me there," Deadpool said. "And replace the sins bit with 'if it'd be funny or if someone dared me'."

"Oh, just shut up and assume I know what I'm doing," Scar snapped, a vein pulsing in his forehead. "Abel's better off as back-up in the almost certain event this goes horribly wrong."

"Right," Roy said, anxious to finish the whole thing. "Let's all pretend we agree with you. Blah blah blah, Scar's right, whatever, it's done. Okay! Got bad guy dialogue to do." He stepped up near the Umbra Eternis and spoke up. "Kimblee! Listen up, will you?" Just in case, Shego powered up.

Kimblee stared at them, blinking heavily. "...I hear you," He said. He lazily waved a hand, indicating to get on with it.

"Surrender now or we'll beat the living hell out of you until you are incapable of independant movement and probably kill you in the process," Roy said flatly; while his every instinct as a heroic authority figure screamed to make a dramatic speech deconstructing Kimblee's flaws and illustrate how his diseased plan had always doomed to failure, and how the overwhelming strength of Traverse Town's military and citizenry would destroy every threat in their way, and something about how this was Kimblee's very last chance to survive the unspeakably brutal beatdown he was about to encur and he should surrender now to resolve things peacefully and at least survive, but Roy knew perfectly well that doing things like that just gave the enemy time to recover and resume the violence, and besides epic speeches would just encourage Kimblee to come up with one of his own and he really didn't want to hear more of the man's psychotic and admittedly intelligent thoughts. (Granted, his comments during the Ishbal Extermination Campaign had forced Roy to see the atrocities he was commiting for what they were and there would never be any excuses for his orders and eventually dedicating his life to atonement for his war crimes, but he was never going to admit to anyone that the crux of his life's goals had come from the cynical philosophy of a psychopathic he was currently fighting.)

Kimblee raised an eyebrow very slightly. Gibbs raised his sniper chain gun, locking onto Kimblee's head; the slightest movement from him would unleash a barrage of precisely targeted bullets and blow up Kimblee's skull. Shego's hands glowed with green fire, ready to be focused into a laser that could burn a hole through his skull. Deadpool got a sub-machine gun Gibbs reluctantly produced fro him. Greed armored up, and cracked his knuckles. Angilaka picked up Greed, holding him overhead like he was a throwing weapon. Roy held his fingers up, ready to snap them and incinerate Kimblee. "Ah. That sort of situation." Kimblee seemed distracted, probably by the Stone's recent cessation of existence.

Behind Roy, Scar's silence was like a beast, crouching and so tense you could feel it just screaming to unwind and kill it's hated enemy. "What do you say?" Roy said, raising his glove for one more blast. "Make it easy on yourself for once. Besides...I wouldn't want to damage the robot much more. I could use it for military research."

Kimblee stared at him. His brow furrowed. "Excuse me?" he said, going slightly red in the face and fists clenching. A vein in Kimblee's head twitched. Already, the offending (illuminating) thoughts had grown harder to recall clearly, and since he wasn't trying to remember them at all, his mind was gradually refocusing itself into what was, if not crystal-clear clarity, at least suitably translucent straight-forwardness.

He still had his mission: destroy as much as he could, sow chaos and discord, and then get the hell out of there before he got killed. (That last part was more or less unspoken, and Kimblee supposed it wasn't that important.) Right here and now, several of his enemies were at hand; out-gunning him, true, but that wasn't so terrible. If anything, it just made things nicely dramatic.

He debated whether or not he should pretend to surrender; it would put him in an ideal place to strike, but on the other hand they wouldn't be so stupid as to allow him to retain the transmutation circles on his palms or give him any means of blowing stuff up. And they would be certain to make him suffer for their indignities...

And yet, the most galling thing was the thought of his Umbra Eternis being reverse-engineered by them. Fury rising at the notion, he tilted his head and saw that they were losing patience. He had to make a decision now, or they'd kill him on general principle. Perhaps he could manipulate them, say just the right thing to make them hesitate or instill a bit of dissension in their ranks that he could exploit. He looked around, realizing that this group was far too small and the others had to be close by, and saw the ship that had rammed him earlier, floating above a larger group that seemed in the middle of a loud argument (something about burns and dangerous magical artifacts that was probably cursed or something like that) and he thought about blasting them while they were unoccupied; it would make an excellent distraction and make Roy and Scar (and those other two he didn't care about) freeze up just long enough for him to charge off and make for his getaway. While he didn't mind dying, exactly, he didn't see it as the most favorable outcome. Leaving this place, getting to the place where Deidara had told him a getaway ship was waiting for him...that was the most favorable outcome.

But it was so hard to think. Hard enough to move, hard enough to keep the whispering things between his ears from talking over his thoughts because it was begining harder to tell what were his thoughts and what were their insistent suggestions, whispers and thoughts blending together until he didn't even know what he was anymore.

Easier, he thought, to just kill everything in his path, and let the validation of his destiny overwhelm the treacherous speech of the voices in his head.

"We're only asking once!" Greed said bitingly, now sitting on Angilaka's shoulder because she was getting tired of holding him overhead. "Take it or die already!"

Kimblee ignored him, and he struggled to think of a plan. He considered the ship floating a good distance down the street; the very same ship that hadled to his current issues and was reasonably well-armed, and needed to be taken into consideration. Still, it was not an immediate threat or else it would have already fired on him. He took quick stock of those people near there, many of them having proven themselves to be considerably powerful, a few of them on the same level as the faction's heavy hitters, and at the lower end of that scale there was the subject of the apparent argument, that Zim person-

His thoughts froze, and reorganized themselves.

Zim. The same little insane alien who had, as far as Kimblee was concerned, had come completely out of nowhere to delay and disrupt his plans for no real reason. The same person who had proven himself a vastly irritating nuisance with very little potential for amusement, would simply not stop going off on random tangents that distracted Kimblee at hideously dangerous moments, had actually removed Jarod from Kimblee's custody, somehow destroyed the Philosopher's Stone when doing that was impossible without working with the damn things for years, would just not die already, and had even unleashed that-

Kimblee shut his eyes. He would not think of the light Zim had summoned in that last devastating attack. He did not dare to.

Rage and spite swelled from him like poison from the rotting carcass of a toxic horror and the Heartless feasted upon it, regaining some of their strength, and it flooded back to Kimblee, renewing his own strength, and then it finally seemed clear to him. Everything seemed clear: the importance of his mission, the need to break everything around him, and that Scar was a less pressing foe than the alien.

Fight the alien, he thought. Destroy him. Reclaim Jarod. Make this world pay for it's insults. Do the damage, and leave. Or else die in process. Either way, his mission would be done.

His path seemed clear. He smiled at the notion, like a man seeing the perfect and immaculate truth revealed to him in all it's resplendent glory, and the darkness poured loose from the Heartless, invisible and unnoticed. Yet more of it's hollow but all-consuming strength poured into him, one last surge for a final show of his conviction, some from within and more from the Heartless, and the frame of both the Umbra Eternis and Kimblee invisibly surged with that power. Metal was corroded, and flesh weakened by the ultimately destructive influence of the Heartless, and neither cared. Not when there was this last final chance to win.

Kimblee believed, in the end, that there were either orders or intent and that was all that mattered for deciding what to do, regardless of circumstances or personal inclination. He didn't mind what other people did, provided they did it according to their beliefs and pursued with all vigor, but just doing things because you thought you couldn't stomach otherwise was...well, he had no words for it, but the very idea repelled him.

These people did not follow that failing. For whatever their reasons, they believed in this town and in it's survival. Kimblee didn't know if surviving had simply become habit for them, if they had been subsumed into the chaos or they just liked life here, but the lengths they had gone to defending it impressed him. Just giving up now would be a poor repayment of such generosity of spirit.

Kimblee smiled as the renewed power flashed through him, through the machine-titan's mighty frame and stunned Roy, Scar, Greed, Shego, Angilaka and Deadpool for a few treacherously long moments. More than enough time, for what he needed.

If things could have turned out better, Roy and his group would have recovered from the shock of direct exposure to the elemental manifestion of the Heartless' darkness in time to counter the reactivated Umbra Eternis and finish it off before more harm could be done: they were tough enough to survive whatever it could initially dish out. They were strong enough to wear him down, and even kill him given enough time and inclination. And they were certainly determined enough to pull both previous statements off; they had their town to fight for, and an enemy that has something to believe in is far worse than a strictly mercenary one.

But Kimblee simply did not give them any chance to pull that off, and before they could recover from the stunning, he commanded the Umbra Eternis to get up, and it rolled to it's feet right through the building it had fallen in, parts of it clanking laborously but it still had the strength to pull itself up, grabbing handfuls of building and hauling itself back to it's full height, dented and damaged and hurting but still so capable of killing everything in sight. It growled, black fluid dripping from it's jaws like the ichor slick on it's ruptured wounds, and Kimblee drew on some of the residual energy the Heartless had absorbed from the Philosopher's Stone, circulated and refined it with a single clap of his hands. Scar's eyes widened as he fell back, recovering first. His hands landed on the ground, and without seconds to spare as punishing light flared from Kimblee in a shaped explosion, he transmuted the biggest and thickest shield he could around him and his allies. It had just finished curving towards them when the blast struck.

When the debris finished falling, the dust cloud had already thinned through, and they had not suffered so much damage that they had been killed or seriously hurt, but they had been blasted backwards, smashing into building walls and knocked silly by them. Only Greed was still conscious after the fact, and Scar managed a few hateful words and a matching glare at Kimblee before he collapsed. Greed climbed out, taking stock of the situation and hurrying to wake his fellow heavy-hitters up. The Umbra Eternis walked right past him, perceiving that they were no longer factors in the battle, and Kimblee gave them a passing glanc, and Scar a brief look. "...Another time, perhaps," he said regretfully.

It was done in seconds, far too quickly for the others to intervene and do anything about it. Once the massive form of the Umbra Eternis clanked it's way through the cloud of dust made by the blast, every single person still standing froze up, unwilling to believe that even after all the damage it had taken, all the firepower they had thrown at it and the mighty blast Zim had unleashed the stupid mecha and Kimblee just wouldn't die.

Still, most of them were expecting this to happen anyway, and reacted accordingly. "BLAST HIM!" Zim yelled, still under the impression that he was in charge of this mission, and no one cared to point out to him how the chain of command worked in this town (which still really amounted to 'do whatever you feel like unless it's evil or someone asks you to stop'), though if pressed they could just say later that it seemed like the obvious choice. Everyone opened fire as Zim suggested, moving to different parts of the street so they wouldn't all be taken out in the inevitable charge: Gaara and Naruto moved farthest up the street, Naruto producing clones that threw themselves in huge clusters and spun up Rasengans while Gaara flew up on a sandy cloud that Sokka hitched a ride up before he could fly away, Gaara creating gigantic spears of sand that he threw at Kimblee while Sokka fired his gun and tried to hit Kimblee.

Right behind them were the benders, riding on a platform the two Earthbenders had made: Toph ripped up the street under the Umbra Eternis, pulling up the ground to trip it up and pull it under so the earth's teeth could grind him to pulp, Aang casting down hammer-hard blasts of wind to knock it down. There was still plenty of water in the area, and Katara pulled it into a water whip she spun high overhead, letting it fall apart and freezing it into dense chunks of edged ice she launched at Kimblee, intending to skewer him directly.

Behind them, Cyborg stood his ground, a vanguard between the Umbra Eternis and Zim's group, now consisting of himself, Abel and, on a less awesome note, Winry and Jarod, who were hardly in any condition to fight: Winry had no weapons, and Jarod was barely conscious. Cyborg's shoulder-pauldrons opened up, tiny missiles sliding out as his on-board computers calculated trajectories and fired them while he fired sonic beams from the cannons both his hands had transformed into, a dozen other weapon systems transforming from parts of him and attacking all at once. Abel summoned electricity through him and fired it at Kimblee, and most of all Zim picked up the Keyblade, his hands stinging even through the bandages Katara had put on him during the little argument Kimblee had interrupted, drew up enough of it's power to feel his hands ache and transformed it into flames that spread away from him like the wings of an awakening dragon, spreading out over the width of the street, and even feeling as dizzy as he did doing that, he forced it outwards as an unstable artillery strike aimed right at the Umbra Eternis.

And last of all was Zim's ship; though slow to move, and slower to reach it's speed (at least without risk of hurting the others), it was still armored and equipped with powerful weapons designed to be used against ship's of it's own caliber and not ground-level combat. The Umbra Eternis, being a giant robot, was more or less the sort of thing it was suitable to fight, so Calvin and Zuko saw no real problems in firing the biggest salvos of power they could manage. It's cannons powered up and fired sustained green blasts at Kimblee, and even though they noticed the power levels going down sigificantly fast and drastically, they didn't mind too much, not suspecting that perhaps this round wouldn't go so well.

It was a formiddable group. Kimblee felt flattered; either he had carved his fate such that he was destined to fight such admirably powerful opponents, or this town's survivors were a lot stronger than his intel suggested. Or perhaps, he mused, adversity brought out the best in them. He applauded their tenacity either way, and the Umbra Eternis just wanted to fight: as it started to speed up to meet the oncoming attacks, it opened it's crippled jaws wide, clanking desperately for a few moments before they opened wide enough for it's vocal synthesizers to activate and unleash a mad scream, escalating up the audible register and quickly inaudible except as a distortion more correctly recognized spiritually than anything as ordinary as with the senses; the challenging warcry of an infernal monster declaring that it had already begun it's own apocalypse...whether that of itself or it's enemies was of no consequence.

It would either die or it would make others die. Both would silence the pain carved into it's psuedo-mind.

The attacks came, and the Umbra Eternis dodged them as best as they could, no longer as confident in it's armor as it had been, running down the street and aiming itself at Zim. The shots from the ship came first, and if they hit Kimblee might have been taken out or at least seriously hurt, but unfortunately the Umbra Eternis dared to make a leap and narrowly avoided getting hit, the explosion launching it far enough to land on it's feet and skid before it got back to it's feet and started charging, running right into the Rasengan-bearing Naruto clones. They smashed into the Umbra Eternis, releasing their swirling spheres of masterfully concentrated energy like miniture hurricanes. One Rasengan could kill an ordinary man and do enormous collateral damage, and these multiple Rasengans managed to actually knock the Umbra Eternis around and dented the frame of one arm rather drastically, blasting the thing back a few giant paces. A small hit, given the scale, but it was enough to render it absolutely furious and crush the clones in a single move. That was too much time spent standing still, and Gaara's giant spears and Sokka's gunfire came at it. The machine-titan simply took the blasts head-on, but that wasn't the same as saying that the plan was fool-proof and Kimblee still got hit by several shots that burned right through him, and when the Umbra Eternis arrogantly tried to destroy a sand spear with a single punch, the spear exploded harmlessly into sand and reformed as several dozen smaller spears, sharp and jagged lengths, and moved like they were homing in on Kimblee (or, more likely, were being guarded by Gaara), and only by wrapping it's arms around Kimblee and charging through was Kimblee prevented from being skewered or shot anymore, and he still had some tiny spears piercing through his arm and some holes in him from some of Sokka's hits.

It then found itself smashing into a portion of the street Toph had made shallow and crumbly. Remembering what had happened the last time someone had messed with the street under it's feet, it jumped back but still had a foot sinking in. Trying to pull it out, it got hammered hard by Aang's wind-blast, buckling backwards, mechanisms grinding and pushing to the breaking point and for a few pistons in it's shoulder breaking completely. Bits of it's mechanisms fell to the ground, uncannily like strips of it's own muscles torn from the stress of battle. Ice crashed into the damaged shoulder, knocking it sideways and pushing it perilously close to falling into what could well be another pit. Trying to ignore the pain in the shoulder, it was faced with the different problem of a massive rock bigger than the Umbra Eternis itself, torn out of the street by a combined effort from the increasingly desperate Aang and Toph and launched right into it's face. It jolted Kimblee, an awful bruise on his jawline, and he toppled into the weakened street and crashed through it, charging forward against as soon as his mecha's feet could hit the ground and charged through it, tearing through the street at street level, and a large laser cannon appearing from his back pointing backwards like a crude jetpack and blasted hard enough to give him a boost out of the pit and keep on charging.

Gaara flew back, Sokka shooting furiously as Kimblee from their sand cloud, and the sand ninja pulled the sand spears he had previously thrown (including the tiny ones in Kimblee, tearing free along with chunks of Kimblee), gathering all the sand together and forming it into massive grasping hands that he slammed into the Umbra Eternis, holding it back for just long enough for it's momentum to make the robot leave the ground for a few seconds. It surged forward a bit, some of the looser sand working it's way into gaps and seams in the robot's exterior, and held it there long enough for their other attacks to hit it: Zim's fireblast hit it in the chest, closely followed by Abel's lightning and Cyborg's multitude of technological destructiveness, a culmative effect so powerful the Umbra Eternis shuddered, the ground blowing apart around it as it slunk down, pulverized Umbral Heartless gushing from it's mouth and painting it's jaws black. It actually coughed, wheezing and snarling weakly.

"It's working!" Zim screamed. "I knew it, I KNEW IT! KEEP DOING THAT! KEEP HAMMERING IT DOWN, KEEP BLASTING IT WITH EVERYTHING YOU HAVE, BREAK IT DOWN TO ITTY-BITTY PIECES AND BREAK THOSE AND THEN BREAK HIM! ATTACK ATTACK ATTACK!"

"Got it!" Cyborg said, firing more and more mini-missiles and side-mounted lasers and salvos of rockets from his legs. He blinked, glanced at Zim as if horrified that he had been taking orders from him, and shook his head, returning to the fighting.

The Umbra Eternis struggled, wriggling in it's sandy cage even with all the damage done to it and, by proxy, Kimblee. It roared, more feebly than ever but it was still a roar, and perhaps only an echo of the rage building in Kimblee. Gaara was the first to realize that the fight was not quite as one-sided in their favor as they might have hoped: his dark-rimmed eyes widened as he felt the intense pressure being applied to his sand in too short a time for him to harden it properly. "Wait! I can't hold it-"

The Umbra Eternis roared again, jaw-affixing mechanism almost strained to the breaking point from the strain of how wide it's jaws opened, and flexed it's limbs with all the might remaining in it's Heartless-fueled body, tearing right through the sand limbs and slamming it's hands together with such power that it generated a shockwave that knocked a fresh wave of Naruto clones away, dispelling them and smashing the real one into a wall in a way that would have been seriously dangerous if Gaara hadn't cushioned his fall with a mass of sand at the last moment. Gaara pulled the sand away from the Umbra Eternis and funneled it around himself, forming it into spears, and before he could complete them the Umbra Eternis raised the gauntlet on it's more intact side, repulsor disc powering up and firing an intensely hot laser from it, not aimed at Gaara but at the sand he was using as a weapon, the resultant blast catching it and superheating it at once into a useless mass of liquid, raining down to the ground and sizzling horribly, and it was extremely fortunate that anyone under him had gotten out of the way before it fell down, or else it would have seriously hurt them at the very least. Gaara reconsidered a head-on attack and flew up, and the Umbra Eternis charged through again, plainly uninterested in that Gaara was flying away on his sand cloud, grabbing Naruto and flying him and Sokka to safety, circling around Kimblee and flying after him.

The Umbra Eternis stomped right through the mess it had made of Gaara's sand, it's feet pounding and lifting off with the red-hot liquid dripping from it's feet without anything more than a mild tingling sensation. The benders were the next in Kimblee's path and Katara, wanting to eliminate a potential battlefield threat, struck the liquified sand with a lash of water instilled with the deepest cold she could manage and snuffed it out, steam pouring up before she spun the water back and left a twisted bulk of craggy glass. While she was still circling the water whip back, though, the Umbra Eternis charged right past her, picking up some of it's earlier speed. It's left foot came within a few feet of stepping right on her, and when the huge hunk of metal moved right over her and kept going in a series of street-pounding bursts that knocked her off her feet, all she could do in the circumstances was ignore the fact that her heart seemed to have stopped beating for a few moments and throw her water at the mecha's hip and freeze it on impact, hurting restricting it's ability to run. It hopped and skipped a few steps before it realized that it's leg wasn't moving so well before it smashed the ice off, and even then it's leg wasn't moving quite right.

In the meantime, Zim's ship had finally gotten turned around and was again trying to ram Kimblee, but had lost too much power feeding into the propulsion field to turn itself around. "Die DIE DIE!" Calvin yelled, hammering the firing button and growing more incensed as nothing happened aside from a message informing them that there was insufficient power for that; an apparent safeguard in the system was that it refused to direct any power to non-essential systems when doing so would draw from the life support and flight systems. Useful, in normal circumstances, but not here. "Warrgh, STUPID POWER LIMITERS! Why doesn't this ship have any normal ordnance! Why didn't she put any missiles in!"

"Why would she or Cyborg have put missiles in?" Hobbes pointed out. "Why in the world would they have given this thing that much firepower? Frankly, what they did put in for self-defense purposes is a bit much. Probably contravenes a few international peace treaties somewhere, and it's just as well that this place isn't a signatory to any of them."

"Stop being reasonable!" Calvin pounded his head against the dashboard. "Come on, you're a freaking genius. You've been touched by the wellspring of raw inspiration, you can make a working combat-worthy hoverbike from the stuff in the average garage, you can blow stuff up without even trying, you can warp reality with disproved theories and mechanisms, you can make this work for you! Think!"

And as stressed as he was, nothing came to mind. His head just spun with frustrated vengeance fantasies and the overriding need to do something. He pounded his head against the dashboard again, but in frustrated resignation. To his surprise, when he looked up, the power had increased a lot, but not enough to power the weapons. There was enough for acceleration, though. "Well, it worked for that same idiot that got me into this mess," He grumbled, sitting back up and putting his hands on the control throttles. "Full speed ahead!"

"Actually, I think it's more like semi-high speed in atmospheric conditions, but if you say so," Zuko said, pushing the drive-shift style speed control to a higher setting. The engines fired, and they were pulled slightly back from the inertia.

The Umbra Eternis, as was predicatable, was still smashing through everything in it's path right for Zim, though Zim and everyone else reasonably assumed that Kimblee was after Jarod again (which worried Jarod himself quite a lot). "Good thing that cat guy isn't here right now, or I'd be giving him a hearing problem again about now," Cyborg said, his forearm transforming into it's sonic cannon configuration again. He grimaced, knowing that even it's high-power yield wouldn't be enough for this, and sent a mental command that shut down his personal safety protocols, accessing his sonic cannon's maximum power settings, and resulted in his cannon growing larger, all of his arm sliding into it and reforming as additional components for it and making it into something like an seige cannon. Several small pistonlike objects slid out of his arm cannon's sides, and they just so happened to be his cannon's power limiter, preventing his cannon from reaching levels of sonic output that were hazardous to his safety. He didn't care about his safety with lives at stake, and he activated his cannon at all the power he had available, with the result of a massive blast of sonic energy that completely obliterated his arm up to the shoulder in a burst that threw him back until he crashed into a building far behind him while the same blast pulverized the street under it, cracked the walls around it like eggshells, and struck the Umbra Eternis hard enough to seriously damage some of the less safely shielded internal components (not that Kimblee knew too much about those), rattled a few of it's armor plates out of place, and most impressively with it's powerful arms braced over Kimblee for protection, still smashed Kimblee into the back of his own fuselage, several teeth knocked loose and blood streaming from his nose.

The Umbra Eternis skidded briefly, internally recoiling from the damage. It stood still for just long enough to make it clear that it had been genuinely hurt again, and in spite of that it kept moving...but not as fast as it had before. It was still moving, and on the other hand of the optimisim scale it had slowed down. A bit, anyway. Unfortunately, by this point it was upon Zim and Abel, and because those two were protecting Winry and Jarod, it was also upon Winry and Jarod, who had just escaped from the accursed thing and were none too happy about being that close to it again.

Zim was, though. "AT LAST!" He shouted happily, holding up the Keyblade and pulling energy from it and firing it out as a large fireball that nailed the Umbra Eternis in the eye. A pointless notion, because it had been blinded, but Zim was just happy to be fighting something. "WITH MY BARE HANDS I BREAK YOU! C'MERE AND FIGHT ALREADY!"

"Please stop taunting the homicidal maniac in a giant robot made of invincibility," Jarod pleaded weakly.

"Nope! Why would I want to do that?" Zim yelled. As in answer, the Umbra Eternis appeared in front of them, one of it's enormous claws pulled back for a punch. "Nope, still not going to take it back! Because this is going to be totally awesome. YES."

"Freaking lunatic," Winry muttered.

"You say that like it's a bad thing," Zim replied.

"I doubt it would matter one way or the other," Abel said as Winry grabbed Jarod and made as if to run away. He held up a hand to caution her to hold on a moment as he charged up, glowing so bright Zim had to close his eyes and still saw flashes of whiteness, but the smell of burning ozone was much worse. A bolt of lightning blasted out from him, hitting the Umbra Eternis very suddenly in the shoulder, Abel's attack so large and uncontrolled that it was more like a beam and not a bolt (even though lightning didn't come in beams) and threw it backwards nearly as hard as Zim's ship-crash had done earlier. This time, though, Kimblee compensated for it and it spun in mid-air, smashing into the ground and shattering the ground under it into a large hole that it climbed out of, it's shoulder scorched by the heat of Abel's attack and some of the detailing melted. Any lesser metals would have been turned to slag instataneously, which said a lot about the amazing quality of the metals Kimblee had synthesized for this robot. It stood up shakily, bits of electricty still arcing through it's body and incinerating Heartless, shorting out improperly shielded mechanisms and generally playing merry hell with the electronics.

"I thought I made this thing non-conductive," Kimblee said, rubbing at a nasty scar on his shoulder from where he'd been leaning against the fuselage when the lightning had struck and superheated the metal. He stood up, trying to shrug it off, blissfully unaware of the ship flying towards him from behind, trailing by Gaara and his companions and about to visit horrible vengeance upon him.

That is, he wasn't aware of the ship exactly, but he certainly heard the noise it made. Aware that something was coming, he decided to make a try at being sensible and smashed through the building on his left, getting out of the way in time for Zim's ship to fly right past where he'd been. "ZOG IT!" Calvin screamed as the ship kept on flying, it's particular form of movement preventing him from steering it around to hit Kimblee or doing anything other than keep moving forward and tilt up to avoid hitting anything. Abel and Zim watched it go with a touch of disappointment, while Winry shouted at them, "HEY, GET BACK HERE! I'M THE PILOT PERSON HERE!" Jarod feebly indicated his own desire to be on the ship and out of there.

The Umbra Eternis stepped back out, confident of a lessened chance of ship-related doom, and turned just enough for Kimblee to notice a small sand cloud carrying a few people on it decelerating not quickly enough to slow down; it had been following in the ship's wake to sneak up on Kimblee, and that was totally spoiled since they'd been spotted. The Umbra Eternis almost lazily brought it's arm up high and then down, slapping the offending sand cloud; Gaara swept the sand up into a round ball around him, Naruto and Sokka, curling up together in midair and shielding them from being crushed, but they went bouncing along the street from the impact, narrowly missed hitting Katara and smacked right into Aang and Toph, bowling them over and still going.

Roy and the others had gotten up by this point. "Okay," he said, breathing heavily; he wasn't really superhuman aside from having access to advanced science that allowed him to develoup techniques that made him the equal of heavy artillery. "Okay, we got sucker-punched," he said to Greed, Scar, Angilaka, Shego, Gibbs and Deadpool as they ran down the street to catch up with Kimblee and resume their potential assasination resolution.

Of them, Greed was the only one fully recovered, followed by Angilaka due to her resilience. Shego and Gibbs were reasonably okay, given that Shego's metahuman status came with a degree of inhuman endurance, while Gibbs was just plain tough, for no reason relating to his powers. Deadpool was a regenerator, but he evidentally deemed it neccesary according to the laws of comedy to be more of a ditz than usual and act like he had a concussion. Scar...was Scar. He wasn't acting any more or less winded than usual, so Roy assumed he was just faking being okay to keep up the whole 'warrior-priest of Ishbal' mystique.

"Yep, sucker-punched," Greed said, Lin's voice chipping in. "Again. You guys suck!"

"Yeah, what would you do?" Deadpool retorted. "Swing a sword at him?"

"If Gibbs didn't give you any guns, you'd only have swords to use too," Lin said.

"...DAMN IT. I can't think of anything funny to say to that. Something about fish-tacos and 80s power metal? Nah, that doesn't work too well. But then 'Fish Tacos With 80s Power Metal' would make a cool name for a alternative rock band. And you have to do a guitar riff every time you say it. Someone get me a guitar! The muse speaks to me. LUCILLE, WHERE ARE YOU?"

Angilaka facepalmed. A poor decision, as she almost tripped right over Roy. "Hey, watch it!" He snapped. "We're supposed to be attacking Kimblee, not each other! And pay attention to the-"

"GIANT BOWLING BALL OF DOOM!" Gibbs said.

Roy blinked. "Wait, what? No, I meant the giant robot." He noticed the aforementioned giant bowling ball of doom coming right for them. "Oh. That. Yeah, that's a thing that's happening right now."

Scar slammed his hands to the ground, transmuting the street such that a number of large blockades rose above the ground under the bowling ball, breaking up it's momentum, causing it to violently decelerate before a particularly large bumb knocked it into the air. Angilaka rushed ahead and into it's path, her arms spread wide and catching the massive thing, almost being knocked over but just barely managing to stand her ground and deposit it on the ground, breathing heavily and looking serious sheepish. She gave it an experimental tap, and it cracked open to reveal a frantic Naruto and Sokka, and a totally stoic Gaara (but then he always looked like that).

"...Did you just say a non-sequiter instead of me? That's all kinds of weird," Deadpool said to Gibbs, while everyone else was puzzled about the weird circumstances before they got right back to the chase.

Oblivious to the drama behind him, the Umbra Eternis and Kimblee kept charging forward, but didn't go very far before another bolt of lightning hit the Umbra Eternis in the side, making his arm spasm uncontrollably and Kimblee scream as his back was burned, lying as he was against the metal as the lightning struck. "Stop right there, criminal scum!" Zim said while behind him Abel was still radiating electricity, and with his temper well and truly broken the ancient vampiric prist walked up to the Umbra Eternis in a disturbingly patient way, various metal objects - trash can lids, window frames torn loose from their walls, and similar things - orbiting around him and glowing with electrical surges. "If you have any other tricks up your vestments, I would advise you to employ them now!" Zim commanded Abel, keeping a wary eye on Winry and Jarod.

"Very well," Abel said. He kept walking, his shadow twisting unnaturally and expanding off the ground in a cloudy aura that twisted around him a few inches from his skin, completely covering him in a darkness that was somehow different than what the Heartless embodied. Zim, now overtaken by Abel and feeling that Abel was stealing the show, was in a good position to see the back part of Abel's armor shift as his back bulged, bubbles of flesh running down and abruptly expanding into, of all things, two massive wings that looked classically angelic; black and coated with even darker feathers, the wings somewhat larger than Abel and strangely ragged, until it was clear at closer examination that the 'feathers' were made as much of a odd organic metal generated from his body as they were of flesh or the same solidified dark matter swirling around him, formed into muscular tendrils and fleshy layers all wound together, all covered with more of the metallic substance Abel had extruded to make the feathers. His armor adapted to the wings, reshaping itself to cover them as well as possible without limiting Abel's mobility, stretching itself thin in the process.

"I...would have prefered to not have to do this," Abel said to Kimblee, holding his arm out. The armor around his forearm shifted aside, revealing that the clothing on his arm had been burned to tatters by the forces he'd been throwing around. His skin was alarmingly pale, like the skin of a dead thing, and powerfully muscled now, but more disturbingly the flesh rippled and surged, and blood tore free from his bared arm, surging around his hand and reshaping itself into a form that Zim couldn't determine; it was a mess of spirals and curves and hard lines and what looked bizarrely like fractals, and stranger still the blood was hardening into a solid shape that was growing taller than Abel, becoming a distinct form like it was being poured through a mould. And as soon as Zim had noticed this happening, the process was finished, and Abel's blood had shaped itself into a massive, ridiculously ornate scythe: it's business end was a mass of differingly shaped and sized blades that were culmatively a sharp mass nearly as long as Abel was tall, it bulged with disgustingly organic cords and chains, and the haft Abel held it by resembled a spinal cord. It remained the red of the blood it had been made from for a moment, and then the same process that had produced Abel's wings turned it an inky black identical to his freakish feathers, leaving him holding a vicious weapon made of a metal congealed from his own body. Abel held it over his shoulder and the air glinted blue around it's blades, so sharp that passing currents of air were sliced up, the constant air slices producing a blue glow.

Zim and Kimblee both stopped to stare at Abel as he flapped his wings once and took off into the air, flying straight at Kimblee, who only said, "Well. That's new."

"HURRY UP AND HIT HIM ALREADY!" Zim yelled. "Also, you should have done this transformation thing way earlier, that would have been totally awesome." He nodded at Winry and Jarod. "And you two go somewhere else."

"No, we were so going to jump right into the fight," Winry said, managing to hoist Jarod on her shoulder and dragging him with her, wtih some difficulty.

"Please don't say things like that, you're really tempting fate that way," Jarod remarked, voice wheezing with every other syllable.

The Umbra Eternis made as if to charge at the retreating humans. Abel's eyes narrowed under his helmet, and he slammed into the Umbra Eternis' front so hard that it was shoved backwards, too imbalanced to slap him away. Abel took advantage of this, electricity arcing around his wings as he generated another massive blast directly into the mechanisms of the machine-titan, overloading them so much that the servos in the right hips and the mechanical muscles in the left shoulder actually exploded, both parts of it's body going slack while smoke poured out.

And then, it was made clear to the rogue alchemist too late, Jarod and Winry had gone (having retreated into the nearby buildings and out of sight, but he didn't know that). He didn't have time to deal with it; he snapped back, burns appearing on the corrosponding parts of his own body, and even though he couldn't move the giant robot, the Heartless did it for him, moving it by themselves to punch Abel with a blow he flew around, only glancing a hit on him. It still hit hard, cracking his armor open, pulverizing his ribs into splinters and pulping a lungs even before he crashed off a fire escape and onto a rooftop. He roared like a monster, voice grating and oscillating in a odd amount of ranges, and flapped his wings to shed a controlled burst of lightning into the arm that had struck him, striking around the metal and frying the Heartless animating it, putrid lumps of black goo crisp on the metal when the electricty stopped crackling.

The Umbra Eternis recoiled, pulling back and flexing it's arm in apparent pain, it's once constant growls subsiding into a flat clicking that approximated surprisingly pitiable whimpers. Kimblee frowned at Abel, realizing that he was more of a threat than anticipated, and forgotting all about Zim or catching Jarod or complaining at Winry for not telling him she was engaged, he bade the Umbra Eternis at Abel, and the machine-titan reluctantly complied, like a rabid attack dog being commanded to go after a very territorial wolf. Even as it charged (and it wasn't that far in the first place), Abel was already standing back up, his body contorting horribly as it literally ate itself from the inside-out, absorbing the damaged parts and regenerating them in moments in the most horrifying way possible.

Abel flexed about for a moment or two, until he was healed enough to satisfy his ability to do battle, and once he felt himself satisfactory he made a gesture at himself and his armor was magnetically pulled back into working order around him, the dents smoothing themselves out and the metal affixing itself properly to his frame. He said nothing but focused on Kimblee again, his wings flaring out and generating another bolt of lightning. Kimblee saw it coming and the Umbra Eternis summoning a laser cannon from it's shoulder, and opened fire as it took the lightning bolt with a whining grunt. It's laser blast hit the foundations of the building Abel was on, blowing it into halves and surprising Abel, breaking through his guard at least long enough for the Umbra Eternis to rush in and grab him, the claws of it's left gauntlet lashing around him in mid-air and smashing him into a building, dazing him, and then it squeezed. Abel howled, with a sastifying cracking noise, and Kimblee grinned as he he felt the transmitted sensation of blood and bone cracking in his grasp, Abel's tough armor cracking like an eggshell and flesh puping through it. Not one to take risks, Kimblee powered up the repulsor beam and fired it with all he had, and with Abel in his grasp he had no chance of missing. The blast became a painfully bright hotspot in the middle of the neighborhood, and when it faded the claws glowed a faint white as the heat dissipated, and an unmoving heap lay in the machine-titan's grip, still holding a scythe that was, disturbingly, pretty much unharmed.

Not wanting to take any chances, he squeezed again, intending to smash the electrokinetic vampire to pulp...only for his robot's fingers to refuse to move dispite his willing them to, as if the metal had been frozen or was being controlled. Kimblee had little time to consider this, as Abel smashed loose, his incredible strength doing so with little effort, pushing one of those massive fingers out of his path and winded his scythe back, it's bladed edges catching a seam in the machine-titan's claws: because the seam was precisely between the mechanisms of the finger and the tougher armor plating, it was nowhere near as tough as the rest of it, and Abel, simply trying to retrieve his scythe, didn't even realize this when he pulled his scythe up and sliced through those mechanisms, severing that finger. He was fairly pleased, though.

Kimblee grabbed his hand and howled, feeling like his own finger had been cut away. Abel's eerily calm expression gave way to an utterly terrifying grin, his teeth like a locked bear trap, and wound his scythe back, the pole elongating until it was more than twelve feet long, and then he smashed his scythe into the Umbra Eternis' forearm so hard that the nearly indestructible metal was still dented fairly deeply, and left nasty scoring where he had struck it. He pulled his scythe back and he struck again, and again, increasing the power of each successive blow until the air itself was pounded by his strength, shockwaves tearing around the Umbra Eternis and scarring the nearby surfaces. Lightning roared around Abel as his attacks came faster and faster, Kimblee's merely human eyes insufficient to see his speed, and to him Abel had become a blur outlined in both vibrant darkness and perpetual flashes of lightning.

"How can you even be using that?" Kimblee yelled, his arm going weak as his free hand reached out, and the Umbra Eternis swatted Abel aside with the corrosponding arm. "The element of Darkness does not work in direct sunlight!"

Abel chuckled as he let himself get hit, the sound wet and wild and totally unlike anything the normal Abel would have said. "We use different definitions of darkness." Even as he said this, though, he had to flare up his own shadowy aura (presently solely to protect his wings and scythe from being harmed by the sunlight; as a vampire vulnerable to the sunlight in his current state, if they were exposed directly he would be totally defenseless and in great danger, perhaps at risk of explosions) to keep up with the increasingly strong sunlight as the barrier Kimblee had made earlier was being worn away by passing time. He flapped his wings, halting his trajectory, and flew back to the arm that had hit him, the hand spread wide as it charged up another blast.

Zim, patiently waiting for what seemed like a good and opportune moment, readied the Keyblade. He grinned, a warrior fully in his element.

Annoyed with those interruptions, Abel powered up with electricity again and channeled it into his scythe as he swung the blades right into the disc-shaped repulsor casing, releasing a massive surge of electricity and blowing the repulsor apart, several smaller explosions throughout the offending arm that knocked it back, trailing small broken parts behind it. Kimblee snarled, pulling it into a fist and swinging...not at Abel, as the vampiric priest noticed with alarm, but at Zim, who had gotten close for a sneak attack but ruined it by screaming like a lunatic because it sounded cool, now just in range to get crushed. Zim saw the fist coming and readied the Keyblade, totally confident he could parry the blow, possibly because he was totally out of touch with reality or because he was completely right but no one knew it yet.

Fortunately, the giant punch froze in mid-swing, as Abel's powers of magnetism just barely caught it, right before it would have hit Zim (and probably crushed him or at least hurt really very badly) and freezing it in place. Zim swung the Keyblade back, power crackling from it in random flashes of light that transformed everything it touched in interesting and benign ways, and slammed it against the hand so hard that the nearly indestructable metal dented from that single blow, and light erupted from the Keyblade in another flaring blast, knocking the arm away and the Umbral Heartless boiling in their material cage, every movement from the giant robot slower and weaker. "Do something magnet-y to it!," Zim shouted at Abel. "Rip the arm off or something!" Abel looked at him for a moment, awed by the Key's light, and then at the arm to focus on the metal. He couldn't manipulate the metal - and he wasn't sure why - but the metal in everything else in that arm? That was fair game.

He concentrated on the skeletal frame and the muscle-patterned machines wired around it, the mechanisms that allowed it to move and automatically stabilized it and a dozen other minor things that were neccesary for the machine-titan to move it's arm at all, and none of those things were made from the irritatingly strong exoskeleton that made this giant robot so hard to hurt. He concentrated hard, pushing his power to the limits he had in his current state (limits that were imposed by himself, too), compressing and stretching and twisting the metal he had telekinetically taken hold of, and he finally just pulled.

The Umbra Eternis screamed like the damned, it's arm twisting and pulling away. Abel spent too much effort and accidentally propelled himself to an unfortunately far distance, his wings flapping uselessly...and yet he grinned victoriously nonetheless as the robot's arm, a source of much devastation and doom during the battle, tore almost completely away from the Umbra Eternis' shoulder, crippled as the parts connecting it to the shoulder shredded in the grip of Abel's magnetic pull before the arm snapped back, still just barely held together by the machine-titan's outer frame, twisting as much as it could with the restrictions of the exterior armor, and it was only because of that armor that Abel couldn't completely tear it away.

But yet the arm was rendered useless, it's size ensuring that it was little more than a massive source of dead weight and dangled uselessly from the machine-titan, pulling the Umbra Eternis off-stride as it tried to charge at Abel and instead tripped face-first into the ground again. It got up, stance awkward and weaker than ever. Kimblee himself blinked. "Strange," he said. "That was so incredibly painful I don't think my brain can even register it. Oh, wait, never mind, there it goes." His right arm twitched in phantom pain, skin turning into a collection of very interestingly nasty bruises. "Hurm. That is amazingly painful. I may have to do studies about it."

"You see? There's a bright side in this for you as well," Zim said cheerfully while he climbed up a building, vaulting over the top of it and spinning in midair to take advantage of Kimblee's distraction to swing the Keyblade and shoot a blade-shaped beam of fire at him. The Umbra Eternis reflexively stepped aside to take the fireball in it's armored side, and Zim caught sight of the weakened spot Kimblee had managed to patch up earlier. "Hey, I forgot about that bit right there."

"Please forget about it again," Kimblee said, commanding the Umbra Eternis to swing it's remaining arm and smash the building and Zim with it. Zim moved out of the way, bouncing off the wall of the adjacent building as the giant metal fist broke through the rooftop he had just been on, bouncing right back and spring-boarding off a broken piece of rooftop that came his way, but calculated incorrectly and wound up landing on the shin of the giant robot. Kimblee noticed and, remembering what had happened the last time Zim had managed to crawl up and face him directly, panicked. "No no no NO, not again! I will not permit that a second time!" He raised a massive foot and stomped it down as hard as he could over Zim, after stumbling a few times due to the Umbra Eternis' body shape making it a bit awkward.

He missed, and by then Zim was already climbing up past the foot, bringing the Keblade to bear upon the Umbra Eternis with the same fury as before, contrails of light flying away with the reckless abandon of a guy who had no idea what he was doing but was having too much fun to care that his hands were begining to burn anew. "Stop hitting yourself, stop hitting yourself!" Zim said childishly.

"That doesn't make any sense, you are the one attacking me," Kimblee pointed out even through the constant flashes and pain.

"Untrue! You have brought this upon yourself! Hah, see what I did there? That is what is known in the common parlance as a 'burn', or else a 'slam'. I'm saying that correctly, right? If I am doing so I may look foolish and that would be most inauspicious. And now I'm wondering what the hell I just said."

"Damn it all, do you ever shut up!"

"Not in my experience, no, not really."

Kimblee caught sight of Zim after a lucky twist-around, and Zim bounced off one piece of rubble and another, jumping back and striking with the Keyblade and making a localized explosion to blast him away, and then out of it's hand-range and then exploding himself back towards to keep doing that over and over again...

It was going pretty well right until he blasted himself right into it's had through sheer horrible luck. "I sense this was an error in judgement," Zim said, deceptively calm as the claws gripped tightly, pinning him against a cold and hard palm, sharp edges digging into his back. He wriggled nonetheless, and the rest of the fingers closed in, squeezing him so tightly he made a squeaking noise (his lungs being crushed, actually) and kept him immobilized and unable to wriggle free.

Frustration and irritation burned through Kimblee's reserve, much like the crimson life-containing fluids leaking from otherwise undamaged skin, faster and faster, and again he ignored this sign of his increasingly worse condition, or that Kevin's babble was getting louder, or that his body was getting slower to react, and quicker to fight against him. Focusing on what he considered to be the more pernitent problem, he brought Zim up to the fuselage so Kimblee could look him face-to-face again, and made quite sure that the insane alien was totally incapable of moving. "Hello," Kimblee said coldly.

"Hello," Zim said back. "Even though we're acquainted with each other. Yeah." Kimblee brought him slightly closer, putting their faces within a few inches of each other. "Whoa! You dare invade my personal space! It is making me profoundly uncomfortable! Also, you smell funny. Why did you make a giant robot without an air conditioner again? Oh, right, you never told me in the first place. Which is quite rude of you. Inquiring people may want to know!"

Kimblee ignored him, which was the usual response to Zim's cheerful rants. He just stared at Zim for a long moment, brow furrowed in concentration, and with the pain he was in - the culmative pain from the long fate, the strain of using the Philosopher's Stone and commanding the Umbra Eternis, the toxic side-effects of being around the Heartless too long, and now his own body backfiring and rejecting him as displayed by the red fluids similar to the substance he had previously been embodied in - it was an effort to focus at all. "You took something of mine," Kimblee said with unsettlingly pleasantness. "I must confess, I am intrigued. It took me so much time and effort and mental scars to find the means of creating that Stone, and then that was dwarfed by the effort it took to create it. I almost got killed multiple times, was ambushed repeatedly, had to fight atop a building while being attacked by a psychopathic super-soldier allied with a dragon-themed woman with a spear, a cyborg and a sizeshifter, and only barely managed to create that Stone with not even half the amount of lives I wanted. All that time and effort, and I had to put more into keeping your lot from taking it from me, and then, you make all of it completely meaningless by destroying in a moment what it took me nearly an hour to accomplish."

He finished, and a reply seemed expected. "Yes?" Zim said politely.

Kimblee said patiently, "And how do you think that makes me feel?"

Zim thought about it. "Upset?" He hazarded.

"Upset?" Kimblee repeated. "Upset? Hrmph, you disappoint me. I'm impressed that you accomplished so much, in spite of having absolutely nothing to do with me beforehand. You're a bit like a...a giant flea. That came in from space. Very unexpected, you know. I actually feel that a measure of congratulations are in order, so well done, I suppose." He shrugged indifferently. Zim stared at him, bewildered. "What?" Kimblee said, his face undergoing a series of odd contortions. "I doubt it will make a considerable difference in the long run. With my giant robot I'm still vastly superior to you, I have my normal alchemy to rely upon, and the whole attempt to retrieve the Stone from me was quite enjoyable apart from the horrible injuries. You have acquited yourself well, even with absconding with Jarod. Very nicely done."

"Right, I have much pride in myself. Might you consider putting me down and surrendering or something like that?" Zim said. "I'm not much for the cliches like that but Aang would be mad if I didn't at least try, and this fight has gone on quite long enough."

"Hmm..." Kimblee appeared to seriously consider it. "No. No, I don't think I will. It would be terribly anti-climatic. At this point, if I was to even try I believe your allies would execute me on principle. No, I think I'll just crush you now." The claws of the Umbra Eternis began to squeeze, fully about to apply enough force to pulp Zim's body...

And suddenly stopped. Something in Kimblee's face shifted, his attention distracted, and the Umbra Eternis went limp as his face went white with strain. Kimblee said nothing, his skin color was actually changing to a paler color. His face was changing, his various features getting leaner and...younger, and it seemed to Zim that this person did not look at Kimblee at all anymore, as he spoke to Zim. "You're a pretty awesome crazy guy," The cracked and faint voice whispered as he exerted what limited influence he had on the Umbra Eternis to force it to open it's hand. Zim hopped out, stared at his erstwhile foe for a moment and wondered what the hell was going on. He didn't get much chance.

"Finish me!" Not-Kimblee urged him. "Before he takes over again! Believe me, you're not going to get another chance at this, hurry up and kill me!" He didn't wait for Zim to try to do anything but weakly forced the Umbra Eternis' arm over a nearby rooftop, dropping Zim on it.

"Hey!" Zim said. "Now wait a moment, I'm not going to kill you. I don't even know you. Who the hell are you and what are you doing transforming Kimblee?"

"My body. Him posesessing me with evil science. Really bad day. Long story," Not-Kimblee grunted. "Just hurry and...oh, damn it, too late-" His face twitched, the essential emptiness of Kimblee-ness coming back into his face, and his body started turning back into the image of Kimblee as the Red Lotus Alchemist resumed control. He gave Zim a infuriated and desperately, miserably tired grimace before his face twitched one last time and Kimblee was looking out through his eyes again. Zim, even more confused, glanced aside and noticed something approaching from over the rooftops. At least I delayed him for long enough, he thought optimistically.

Kimblee, frustrated to the point of near madness, didn't even bother making any declarations but just raised his arm up high, a railgun materializing on it, and before he could employ it he was doubled over as a massive blast of fire from behind him hit the Umbra Eternis in the back, right into the patch he had made for the hole they had made in his back. The Umbra Eternis whirled around, Kimblee gaping in infuriated disbelief as everyone who'd he smashed over in his charge to corner Zim: Roy Mustang and the team he had assembled (the Flame Alchemist still crackling with alchemical energies and just barely managing to stay standing from the energies he was expending), Angilaka, Shego, Deadpool, Scar, Gaara, Naruto, Sokka, Toph, Aang and Cyborg.

"...I wish I believed in a god or something so I could use it's name in vain," Kimblee said tiredly. He started to pull the Umbra Eternis into an attack, but they commenced their own attack immediately. Gibbs produced a laser gatling gun while Roy created a firey explosion and directed it, and together they opened fire directly at Kimblee, and even though Kimblee still put his giant robot's arm in front of him for protection, it still pushed him back, the Umbrals straining to keep the machine-titan still. Sokka, Shego and Deadpool opened fire as well, the individually potent and culmatively lethal array of blasts blasting out the mechanisms in it's knee, nearly crippling it's leg. Naruto, now equipped with a plasma rifle thanks to Gibbs, created twelve clones of himself, each one carrying a plasma rifle too, and the thirteen of them opened fire with startling precision, hitting a few exposed circuits in the Umbra Eternis' shattered shoulder, blowing up a good number of the Umbral Heartless and causing a backlash that forced Kimblee to stumble the robot back, his arm going wide.

Kimblee jerked back to awareness immediately, trying to move his arm back, but couldn't; Gaara was manipulating the grains of sand his earlier attack had slipped between the outer armor and into the frame underneath, and even though it took so much power that he wasn't able to fight in any other way, he was immobilizing it and leaving Kimblee defenseless. Cyborg held up his remaining arm, transformed it into a sonic cannon (in it's controlled configuration this time) and released a spray of sonic energy directly at Kimblee with enough force to smash him into the back of the fuselage, making him bleed from his ears and knock teeth loose.

Sputtering blood, Kimblee clapped his hands together and released a blast that, while lacking the enormous power the Philosopher's Stone had given him and hit a building instead of his enemies, still made a lot of rubble fall at them. Gaara flinched and directed a thick shield of sand out of the ground, protecting them from being squashed but allowing Kimblee to finally pull his arm back around himself, dozens oversized plasma casters materializing on it and firing at them. Gaara's sand shield still protected them from the first wave, and Aang's command of Firebending was close enough to allow him to push them back and hit Kimblee with the rest, almost knocking him over.

Kimblee, arrogant though he was and determined to accomplish his mission, began to realize something quite horrible. His mind had only began to articulate it as Zim leaped screaming back onto the Umbra Eternis' back that was foolishly turned to him at the time, hammering at it's back, light flashing out and passing through the metal and doing no harm to it, searing the Heartless animating it, and the psychic pressure of that light hit Kimblee like an anvil hits a melon, manifesting as a splitting headache happening so hard his vision went white with pain for a second. The Umbra Eternis stumbled, and Zim seized his chance, hitting it harder and harder, ignoring how the Keyblade was getting hotter in his hands, or more accurately he was using his limited understanding of Firebending to redirect it and create blasts of flame shooting out with each swing. The Umbra Eternis flailed, turning around and shaking itself madly to shake Zim loose and not doing a very good job.

"Hang on, Zim's still there!" Aang yelled before they could start shooting and potentially hurt him. The others considered this, and seeing how Kimblee was moving around and unintentionally putting Zim's out of harm's way, waited until he was unthinkingly putting his front to them again and gleefully opened fire again. Kimblee screamed as they hit him, his armor still virtually immune to everything they could throw at it but doing him no good as his robot started failing under the assault, it's poorly planned-out engineering tearing itself apart under the stress.

"I don't care anymore, will you just die already-" Kimblee started to say, and a full-round of green energy from above hit the Umbra Eternis in the face again, funneling deep into it's mechanisms and causing some of it's insides to melt, fires blazing out of it's suddenly uneven features. Kimblee howled, confused and pained, and looked up to see Zim's ship flying at him from where Zim had seen it coming just a few moments ago, cannons still glowing from it's blasts at Kimblee. Even more ominously, Abel Nightroad was perched atop it, his scythe clenched between his hands as his wings transformed into the flood of darkness flowing from him and melding with the ship, reinforcing it's armor and allowing him to channel energy directly to it's power reserves, causing the ship's visible power conduits to glow with random bursts of dark energies that were still somehow benevolent; unlike the Heartless, this was a darkness that shielded and shaded, and did not corrupt things or break them.

"GUESS WHO'S BACK, DUMBASS?" Calvin screamed over the loudspeakers, cackling maniacally. "Packing an indestructible vampire powering my engines with enough power to fuel up a minor country!"

"That would be us," Hobbes added through the loudspeaker, at a more reasonable volume than his friend.

"So just shut up and die already," Zuko added, as Abel let loose a flare of lightning that he channeled as safely as he could into their power reserves, turning the run-off inward to himself and projecting it into a bolt he threw at the Umbra Eternis' feet, blasting the ground underneath it and knocking it head over heels again. Zim springboarded off a plate of metal and sprang onto it's arm, running over the shoulder as it fell and staying safe as it hit the ground and the moment it stopped moving, he ran off to where he was sure he had seen Jarod and Winry go, a new plan forming. "I am so very sick of you shaking off everything we throw at you!"

"What he said!" Courtney and Beth chimed in. Abel, for his part, didn't have the loudspeaker at his disposal, so he just waved. He wasn't sure if anyone noticed, but it was the thought that counted.

"Well, damn," Kimblee said as their ship powered up it's cannons and flung his giant robot's arm over his face. It didn't do him much good, as the build-up charge of the cannons was so bright it momentarily turned it into a greenish light in the sky (tinted blue, due to Abel's darkness) and released a massive surge of concussive energy that punched the Umbra Eternis several feet through the earth, legs digging through the ground as it was pushed backwards until it fell on it's back, smashing another hole into the street. A successive number of volleys hammered into it, pulverizing the street some more and making a dramatic and concealing dust cloud.

"Not too bad," Calvin said, the ship decelerating with considerably difficulty and floating down to the ground after he noticed Zim calling for them, Jarod and Winry being grabbed by their wrists and pulling behind Zim and looking very confused. As soon as the ship was close enough, the cargo doors opened and Zim bodily tossed Jarod and Winry into it, the Keyblade feeding him the strength he needed for that single feat, finally getting them to the safest place in the battlefield, and in retrospect should have gotten them there in the first place. (Their shouts of pain made it a bit less heroic, but it was still pretty cool.)

A large tower of smoke rose into the air. "Aaand, he's still not dead or whatever," Zim predicted. The Umbra Eternis rose up, stiffly and staggering at the left leg, but still active. "Totally called it."

"Just keep hitting him!" Roy yelled, and everyone opened fire again. Taking this as a cue, Calvin hammered the button again and again (after setting the attack to 'Smite' to be less energy intensive), shooting waves of cannon-fire at Kimblee while Abel summoned bolts of lightning he used to keep Kimblee off-balance. Zim waited for a a large rock that Toph launched at Kimblee to slam him in the back, and then he made his way to Kimblee, bouncing up from wall to robot in half a dozen jumps using his incredible and newfound magically-assisted jumping prowess, aiming it so that he crashed into his back (right on the weak spot they'd made earlier, too) and swung the Keyblade into a likely looking seam between plates, channeling as much power as he could and blasting it into the giant robot.

Kimblee stumbled, screamed and everyone halted for a moment when they saw the small surge of light (small compared to the Umbra Eternis, anyway) that was quickly coming to mean that Zim was there. "He went back to fighting him head-on!" Hobbes said, aboard the ship. "...I don't know if I want to shake his hand or smack him silly."

"Pretty brave of him, though," Winry remarked, she and Jarod going up to the bridge post-haste and a bit annoyed that no one wanted to give up a pilot's seat to her. (Zuko tried, but Calvin objected on dramatic grounds; their first team fight needed their flagship operated by their team and nobody else.) Beth nodded. Jarod snored from a seat, having passed out from sheer exhaustion. Calvin rolled his eyes, pretending he wasn't jealous of Zim's sheer bravado.

"Sir," Gibbs said. "What do we do? We can't give everything we got with him still on that thing."

"Keep shooting, but support him!" Roy said. "Don't aim anywhere near him and try to keep Kimblee off-balance!" Gibbs saluted and did just that, the others following his example.

Kimblee was not handling this trouble well, and just screamed inarticulately, Zim still bouncing from spot to spot on his giant robot's back and hammering it with the Keyblade and using all his might, trying to force that awesome power that had burned his hands to emerge again and strike down Kimblee. He knew it could do him serious harm, maybe even kill him too, and each increasingly more powerful swing that unleashed mere trickles of the Keyblade's unfathomable might, he found himself thinking with savage glee that he honestly didn't care at all.

Zim didn't care if Kimblee killed him as long as he brought down Kimblee in the process. (A flash of light from the Keyblade hit hard enough to knock another servo loose, tilting Kimblee's stance.)

He didn't care if he was caught in the crossfire by his allies in the midst of his berseker play, not as long as he was managing to do Kimblee harm. (Another flash of light, striking so hard the impact sounded like thunder. Kimblee screamed, faltered, and was knocked back by the other's attacks.)

He didn't care if he would fall here and now in this alien street in a universe far from the one he had been born in, if he died before he could ever find Gir or Dib or any of the others. (A surge of light and fire, mixing so deeply into each other it was hard to tell the difference, making an explosion that spun the Umbra Eternis around in mid-step, opening it's front to a direct blast from the ship.)

He didn't care if his mission failed before it ever begun properly, not as long as he struck down the Heartless Kimblee had summoned and rendered Kimblee helpless. (A blow that erupted into a light-based blast, the white flare refracting into a dizzyingly beautiful array of colors blending into the next, forming into solid shapes that bounced off the Umbra Eternis in a variety of angles, hit the walls and bounced right back, hitting the Umbra Eternis all at once at the same time the many many other projectiles did.)

And he certainly didn't care if he got blown up right here. It'd be wrong to be that level of stupidly selfish, because that meant he would be close enough to smite Kimblee, or at least knock him unconscious, and that meant it would be worth it. It would be dying a worthy and honorable death, and Zim had secretly thought for a while that such a fate would be a fine way to die, and make up in a small way for his lifetime of evil and senselessness, by striking down something of pure evil in his dying moments. He prefered to live, of course, and atone for his crimes with the remainder of his life's actions...but slaying a monster like Kimblee was certainly a worthy action, and he desired greatly to acclumate worth. (In the course of his attacks, a small chip had been made in the outer armor. Seizing the opportunity, Zim stabbed the Keyblade in and unleashed another surge of power that struck into the core of the robot, into the web of Heartless that powered the unholy thing. The Umbra Eternis halted, screamed and clutched madly at itself as light streamed out from inside it, burning away at it's insides, and Kimblee howled like a fire had been set off in his guts.) And still Zim kept hitting, refusing to abandon the attack or retreat or do anything that would not ultimately end with Kimblee defeated, and he found himself grinning at the thought of their inevitable victory.

The Umbra Eternis, now greviously wounded, stepped back to avoid the next avalanche of attacks from them, a Firebending-enhanced blast of flame from Roy Mustang almost searing Kimblee if the giant robot hadn't stepped out of the way, and a cascade of cannonfire from the ship hit the Umbra Eternis in the sides and leg. I'm losing, Kimblee thought solemnly, his confidence draining into bemusement, wondering when things had gone so badly, and unhappily realized that his downslide had started ever since he had fought Roy Mustang and his allies earlier. His inability to kill them, even with his shapeshifting powers and the Philosopher's Stone enhancing his alchemy, had only been a precursor to the utter failure fast looming over him.

Another wave of firepower, amped up by Gibbs' full round of explosive missiles, hit the Umbra Eternis in the shoulder and knocked a servo loose, sympathetic feedback tearing the sinews in Kimblee's own shoulder up. More fire hit him, more blasts and plasma and lasers, and a horrible thought struck him. He was going to fail.

Kimblee had to stop to breathe, his vision going blurry as the constant impacts were threatening to knock him unconscious, and he choked on the strange red fluid seeping out from his lungs. He coughed in a series of painful spasms, and some of it landed on his hand. He stared at his hand, at the fluid mixed with dark blood, and he suddenly knew that he wasn't going to stay awake for much longer, and if he hadn't escaped by then, or gone to safer harbors, he was either going to wake up in chains or be dead by then. His breath stopped short at the thought, and a thought became clear, even through the pain of the constant harrying attacks hitting his giant robot and Zim's blasts of light.

He knew, almost without the shadow of a doubt, that he probably wasn't going to survive this.

He had bit off too much, tried to accomplish far more than he could have, and it was now all falling apart around him. He couldn't finish this now as he had intended when he had made the Philosopher's Stone, not with all the forces arrayed against him. He had thought his power would be enough to save him, but the Stone had been taken from him, the energies he needed for his shapeshifting powers had been removed, and his own body was backfiring on him.

Something had gone wrong with the process that had infused him into Kevin, he realized. Or perhaps there was some unknown factor in Kevin's body that had been rejecting him the instant he had been infused, or some other matter that he couldn't possibly know, and perhaps when that blonde boy with the strange device had ripped the Omnitrix's energy away from him it had accelerated whatever degeneration process that had already been in effect, and Kimblee shut down all thought on that matter because it was totally pointless.

Somehow, against all possibility and expectation, dispite all his prepartion and skill, Kimblee just knew that he was going to die here, alone in the streets with only jabbering voices in his head for company, unmourned and uncared for except as an object of hate by Ishbalan refugees, and all his hard work and expertise would have been for nothing. I'm going to die now, and I won't have even done HALF of what I had wanted to do here, Kimblee thought mildly, feeling a little disappointed in himself. It was impressive, he suppose, but he could have one so much more. And it was strange, he realized, that it suddenly mattered to him. Thoughts of his death had never mattered before, and he certainly didn't know why the thought of dying scared him so badly. He felt like he had been at the cusp of some vital understand, and now it was going to be yanked from him and he would fall into oblivion and never know what it was...

He was confused. He was tired. He ached in ways he couldn't really comprehend.

And, like ice melting only to refreeze in a newer and sharper configuration, he decided the only rational solution was to do something big. If he was going to die, it was going to be incredible. "Then let it be so," he whispered.

"Hey, he's talking to himself in a creepy quiet voice again," Zim observed. "That's usually a bad sign in guys like that! Trust me, I'm a professional, I KNOW THIS STUFF." The Umbra Eternis backed up, flinging itself into a wall, and Zim jumped off before he could be crushed, slicing through a large piece of rubble that came flying at him, and his spider-limbs popped out of his Pak and caught him on the wall just in time for him to see the Umbra Eternis staggering away, Kimblee's inappropiate laughter growing gradually louder the whole time, even though he was still under fire by everyone else. This time he didn't even seem to be noticing it. "Guys? Guys! He's gone crazy! Crazier, I mean! Way crazier!" No one responded. Zim grimaced. "Great, they don't even hear me."

Actually, they could. Sort of. "What did he say?" Calvin said aboard his ship. "I thought I heard Zim say something."

"I don't know, I couldn't hear over the sound of Kimblee doing that," Beth said, pointing at the Umbra Eternis now lumbering over to everyone on the ground (still clustered around Roy for maximum formation benefit), darkness shimmering over it's metal body and weapons began to materialize. Unlike the relatively smooth transference of weaponry out of the existence-in-potential they had done previously, darkness bubbled up around the Umbra Eteris in big nasty boils, blue-black matter forming over it's arms and shoulders in huge repulsive bubbles, metal forms moving and bulging underneath. They popped and revealed...well, after this long it was obvious what he was summoning: more weapons.

A lot of weapons. Rocket launchers and missile launchers. Plasma rifles, plasma casters and plasma cannons. Gigantic scaled up miniguns, some with standard ammunition and others that shot lasers. Giant robot-sized grenade launchers, hosting grenades that were individually the size of cars. The same railgun he had summoned before, now clustered with at least four more, welded together in a rotating gatling gun of stupifying power. Upon the shoulders were more weapon clusters of the sort it had employed earlier, except that these had even more weapons on them, more grenade launchers and missiles and even a few mininuke launchers.

There were even more weapons then that, too lost in the cluster of weaponry to be seen properly, and Zim had a brief selfish swell of relief that none of them were aimed at him, replaced by a bigger swell of abject horror that they were aimed at Aang, his friends and everyone around them. He made an incoherent snarl of defiance, Keyblade in hand and fire surging around him, the heat transmuting into light at the edges.

Kimblee stepped forward, about to fire, and was once again caught unprepared by Calvin flying their ship right into him once more, shoving him into the air and hitting him with a follow-up shot while he was still in mid-air, blasting him through several more buildings, and with all the weapons on him, Kimblee was so seriously imbalanced that the Umbra Eternis rolled head over heel a few times, several of it's weapons snapping off their fixtures, and when it got up, it's remaining hand knocked a few off for maximum mobility, clearly willing to sacrifice raw power for enough speed and balance to get pushed over everytime something hit it hard enough. The unneccesary weapons shed, it hauled itself back up.

The ship pivoted around, trying to face Kimblee again and shoot him down. Zim ran from rooftop to rooftop, blasting himself around as neccesary until he was in sight of it and shot a flare up to get their attention. "HEY! Don't leave me behind while you take all the fun of the battle!" The ship turned towards him obliginly, with agonizing slowness, and as soon as Zim thought it was the best possible moment he generated a powerful enough fireblast from his feet that he rocketed off the roof and right into the cargo bay, landing on the walls and bouncing off onto the catwalks. With the doors closing behind him, and Kimblee a bit a stunned by that stunt, Zim rushed to the bridge as fast as he could, knocking Beth over onto Jarod without realizing either of them were in his way and not really caring afterwards. "HI, I'M BACK."

"Oh God, this has been the worst day ever," Jarod said miserably, groaning in pain, and groaning louder when Beth stood up, her power armor grinding against his poor bruised body. Hobbes, who liked to think of himself as a gentleman, picked Jarod off the floor and gingerly put him into a seat as far from Zim or Beth as possible.

Trying to ignore him, Zim said, "And what was that? I had to jump onto my ship? We need to get a grabbing claw or a tractor beam, something to get us back on this thing in a hurry!"

Winry sputtered incoherently, her craft insulted. "You're lucky you got a ship on such short notice anyway! And as a favor!"

"Didn't we get this ship because Zim's some chosen one or something?" Zuko wondered.

"I dunno. I don't think Cyborg even knew about that," Calvin said.

"Chosen what-now?" Courtney said, intrigued.

Calvin cheerfully divulged the fact that Zim was the chosen one of a powerful magical relic supposedly capable of destroying the Heartless for good, in spite of the fact that they might want to keep that detail under wraps for a bit. Zuko, seeing an opportunity when it came to him, hurried out of his seat so Zim could get in it; Zim was actually qualified to pilot, for one thing. Once Zim was firmly back in the seat, he went back to what he did best as a leader: yelling at people for no reason. "What's going on down there! I need a status report!"

"Well, Kimblee's gotten back up and now he's charging towards the other guys," Calvin reported, looking at the screens.

Zim turned the intercom on. "Abel! Are you still there? Go on and fry that lunatic before he kills someone!"

"Calm down, the loudspeaker's on, he already knows!" Calvin said, hammering on the 'Smite' button again and again. "Hurry up and get us closer!" Zim grabbed the control mechanisms and the ship accelerated.

Abel could hear all of that perfectly well and his eyes narrowed as they got closer to Kimblee, partly because he really hated that guy - espicially with his Crusnik power making his mind more unstable and pushing him towards violent solutions, his already erratic mind increasingly focused into a monstrous storm building up towards a fury of apocalyptic proportions - but mostly because the ship's weapons were powering up and the green light made his eyes ache. He wrapped his wings around himself to shield himself as the weapons built up to their optimum charge with the power he had supplied, his aura of lightning fading as he ceased pouring power into their ship, opting instead to pull it back into himself and charge up; under the circumstances this was a stupid idea, but he wasn't thinking clearly or strategically. His rationality, for the moment, was being traded in for raw power.

The gun's light faded, forcing them to pull power from the core to build up a proper charge again, this was easily done - though it worried Calvin a lot - and while they glowed a brighter green again, Abel jumped off of the ship, the force of his flapping wings knocking it slightly off-course, and dove down at Kimblee while roaring with all the force his growing madness could summon, putting the Umbra Eternis' own roars to shame. He flapped his wings again as tendrils of darkness tore loose from Zim's ship and uncoiled back into Abel's body in brief bursts of blood and blackness. He raised his scythe, glowing with a massive surge of electricity measuring in the gigajoules, and released a beam of pure levinic forces through it.

Kimblee heard the crackle of the lightning, and the rumble of nearby things exploding in it's wake, various metal things tearing away from the ground and drawn by the intense electromagnetic current Abel had invested in it. The various lesser metals of the Umbra Eternis' frame buckled, momentarily thrown against each other by that magnetic current, and this time Kimblee had the presence of mind - and desire to avoid getting electrocuted again - the Umbra Eternis forced itself into a diving fall, going right into the big hole it had climbed out of earlier, narrowly avoiding the massive blast of lightning that streaked on overhead, it's intensity forcing Kimblee to shut his eyes, and he heard a distorted crackle. He opened his eyes, blurred white spots in his vision, and the lightning bolt was gone, as Abel had cut off the power to it when he saw that Kimblee had dodged it. He was hovering right above the pit now, wings growing larger and increasingly less like something that could have naturally formed.

The Umbra Eternis scrambled to it's feet as Abel flew in, ozone frying as he powered up again so intensively that every single metal thing within half a mile was tugged towards him: the Umbra Eternis itself, the various metal things on people's clothes, the frames in windows (tearing themselves loose), Zim's ship as it barreled on, and so on. "TO THE ARBITERS OF THE DEAD I SEND YOU!" Abel screamed as he hurtled down at Kimblee with his scythe held high in a killing blow, his voice echoing into registers that human ears weren't designed to hear, and slightly muffled as his mouth was twisting into a shape that wasn't designed to make sounds, or work around a human skull anyway, and the helmet wasn't helping matters. (Fortunately, his jawbones were reworking themselves. His body was pretty easy-going that way.)

"Why do I always attract the zealots?" Kimblee asked rhetorically, the plasma weapons still on the Umbra Eternis powering up and forcing their forces into a culmative effort, producing a massive ball of plasma that grew slightly larger than the fuselage Kimblee was in, wobbling dangerously and fully capable of disrupting itself and killing everything in a half-mile radius, including Kimblee if it misfired. Abel heedlessly flew straight at it, confident he could deflect it, and Kimblee waited until he was less then fifteen feet from him and shedding aimless lightning bolts like molten metal dripping bits of itself before Kimblee issued a mental command that altered the firing weapon's settings slightly, turning the ball of plasma lopsided and hollowing it out before it spilled out and fired, lancing out as an enormous beam that seared the air - glowing with a blue light as the air in it's path was incinerated - and the descending Abel Nightroad didn't even bother to move but flew straight into it, not just confident he would survive but utterly oblivious to everything except slaying his foe. He flew right into it and his personal field of magnetism held it at bay for a moment, his inhuman strength of arms actually forcing it to part around him. As the plasma surged all around him, superheating his metal to an intolerable extent even for him (his armor was built to shield him, not supplement him, a design flaw that he vowed to have fixed), Abel's concentration wavered, and the beam tore through, blasting him with all of it's fury.

Everyone on the ship winced when they saw that. "Relax, I'm sure he'll be fine," Zim said, not really even convincing himself. "Yeah. Look, you can hear him screaming, that means he's alive. And I'm not helping, am I?"

Abel did scream, and it was not hard to imagine why. In a single instant, his armor was melted into a molten mass of dribbling slag while the intense heat fused his skin and flesh into one before flaying it from his body, burning his internal organs from the inside out while his wings turned to ash. It still wasn't enough to kill him (Crusniks like Abel being infuriatingly tough) but it was enough to stop him, and the beam continued to fire, still incinerating and hammering him and generally doing nasty things to him through the power of plasma until it blasted Abel right out of it's trajectory, shooting him somewhere else away over the buildings. While all Zim could see from the camera's view was Abel blasting off somewhere over the line of buildings, Abel found a good deal more painful than it already way: he wound up crashing into the side of a small snack-bus that had been abandoned in the evacuation and bounced off, skidding off the ground until he came to a stop, gravel and broken stone stabbing into his chest. His lungs had regrew at this point and he groaned, a semblence of rationality returning to him as the damage began to heal, and Abel shakily stood up, using his largely intact scythe to slice his way out of his useless armor and emerged a horribly hurt wreck already reverting to his humanlike state while his regenerative powers went into overdrive, burning through his store of power and forcing him into a kind of heroic sleep mode.

And he still found the strength somewhere to stand up, scraggles of white hair crowning his burnt scalp, and lifting one leg over the other with such serious determination that he seemed more of a divine automation that a man, he started to walk back in Kimblee's direction. His will couldn't support his body, not as badly damaged as it was and he fell over, legs reduce to flesh-wrapped bones unable to support him. He fell down belly-first, screaming as more rocks sank deep into him, and with nothing else for it, he grabbed at the ground and clawed his way along it, dragging himself by his fingertips towards where the battle rage, completely unwilling to stop fighting or do a thing that might get anyone else killed, no matter how completely pointless the gesture was. Rocks and debris sliced jagged wounds in his flesh that closed up quickly, the organic noises nearly as sickening as his screams, and he endured it all just as he endured the agonies of extremely fast regeneration, unable to stop himself from instinctively burning through his body's store of assimilated blood and life-forces, already reverted back to as normal as he ever was. He considered his total failure here, bits of metal tugging at him before coming to sad stops, acknowleging that it seemed he hadn't made much a difference for all his preparation and it only redoubled his determination to keep moving. His scythe, held between his loosened teeth, could not sustain itself any longer and fell apart into a shower of blood, quickly reabsorbed into his body to provide a brief burst of some much needed power. It helped his skin grow back, which was a relief.

(And on the bright side, it would be another point in his favor of constant oneupsmanship with Scar. It annoyed him how little Scar care about the competition; some things that man just did not get.)

Back at the fight scene, the Umbra Eternis used it's gauntlet to grab the smoking remnants of it's plasma weapons - now melted, slagged, burned out and otherwise rendered useless after being used to disable Abel and remove him from the battlefield - and tear them off it's shoulders, the giant robot wincing slightly. Kimblee wondered how it could feel pain while he rubbed his own shoulder, and the Umbra Eternis dropped the weapons without any thought. He turned around and smashed his way out of the pit, focusing once more on Roy, his group, and the refugees he couldn't be bothered to remember. It reached it's arm down, a cannon powering up for a blast before they could counter, and even if they deflected or avoided it like they had so much else it would still cause an acceptable degree of collateral damage-

Zim's ship, Zim's team infuriated by how badly Abel had been harmed and most espicially Zim, came back onto the scene by having their ship fire a number of high-power blasts in the Umbra Eternis' wounded back, the ones that missed tearing up the ground around it and throwing off it's balance. Zim's voice over the intercom screamed something inchoherent and absolutely furious beyond any sane measure (and it was probably something like 'don't you dare' or 'you touch them and you will die' or something like that, Kimblee heard that kind of thing a lot) and Kimblee winced, trying to drown out the noise even as Roy and the rest recovered from the shock and opened fire of their own; Scar basically went mad with rage, howling vengeful promises in the ancient language of his people as he slammed his hands to the ground and every piece of loose metal and broken stone and fallen walls glowed blue and were transmuted into a very simple and absolutely massive cannon that only needed to fire once, delivering a payload of a cannonball nearly as big as the Umbra Eternis itself, and in the fallout of the other attacks falling on the giant robot, it bent yet more of it's internal frame into increasingly unrecognizable configurations.

In the ship itself, the crew glared bloody defiance at Kimblee and Zuko shouted "OPEN FIRE!", flames blazing from his throat and giving his voice a crackly effect that Beth, Courtney and Jarod, always happy to indulge in some Traverse Town street theater (as they called the more awesome daily adventures) applauded.

"Zuko," Zim said sullenly. "You're not supposed to be giving orders. I'm in charge."

"...Oh, right, sorry," Zuko said. "Orders?" He grimaced, finding the concept distasteful and clearly realizing that he had joined the group in a presumably subordinate position.

Zim coughed. "Ah, yes. OPEN FIRE!"

Calvin slammed the 'Smite' button and the cannons, already charged to their optimum power levels, fired their green beams at Kimblee and targeted directly at Kimblee himself. The Umbra Eternis put it's hand over him and protecting him from certain incineration, the impact unbalancing it, and while the Umbra Eternis hastily righted itself, Calvin and Zim managed to manuver their ship behind the flailing robot, targeting the badly repaired opening on the giant robot's back and locked on before they fired the cannons again at a higher setting, putting as much power into it as they could afford: the cannons surged with green fire, flashing dangerously, and projected massive beams that converged into a swirling drill-shaped beam directly onto that weak spot, striking so hard the Umbra Eternis was pushed high into the air, higher than all the buildings in the area.

If the Umbra Eternis hadn't been so fortified, it would have ended the fight right there, and quite possibly killed Kimblee. As it happened, the beam pierced the patched-up spot after a moment of hammering against it's poor shielding, flooding into the device's internal mechanisms and causing a tremendous amount of feedback that launched it into the air, green energy incinerating copious amounts of the increasingly smaller Heartless aura as various mechanisms in it failed or broke down or even burst apart inside it, bringing it so very closer to the point of ruin and defeated. Kimblee himself was alarmed to find that the Umbral Heartless had been so depleted that they were nearly gone, leaving him with only a connection of thin tendrils extending to him from knee-high pool under him. Deprived of so much of it's motive force so quickly, the machine-titan's frame creaked ominously.

He wasn't particularily put-out by this. "You are some of the best enemies I have ever met!" He cried happily as he fell down, angling the Umbra Eternis that it landed right on the ship right behind it's assortment of guns where they wouldn't be able to hit him without some serious difficulty. "Scar was actually a little boring compared to you. You have pizazz! Is that still a word? Pizazz? It's an unusual word to begin with." He didn't wait for an answer and started hammering on the ship with his robot's remaining arm, ignoring his variety of potential weapons in favor of good old pummeling, Scar and the rest completely forgotten.

To say that the crew of the ship were upset at this turn of events was an obnoxious understatement. "OH CRAP HE'S ON THE SHIP GET HIM OFF GET HIM OFF!" Hobbes screamed, shaking Zuko in his panic while Beth frantically tried to get the door open so she could get out of the ship and fight him instead of being stuck there. Courtney had joined her, but she probably didn't want to fight him directly. (It wasn't like she had any means of doing that.) Jarod only facepalmed, his exasperation so great that even in his infirmity he was compelled to express it.

"Why are you shaking me, I'm not driving!" Zuko snarled, shoving the frantic tiger away.

"Because you'd listen, and you're sane!" Hobbes screamed, pointing at Zim and Calvin, who were demonstrating what he deemed an inappropiate reaction to this turn of events.

"The psychotic maniac who pilots a giant robot made of evil and can blow stuff up with his bare hands is on my ship, no dout intent on tearing in and killing us all!" Zim said, giddily clapping his hands and pointing out the obvious. "That is incredible! Already we have such a excitingly drastic turn of events! This adventure is gonna be awesome!"

"I can't wait to see what this thing has that can kick him off us!" Calvin said, cheerily hammering on all the buttons he could hit and causing various synchronized tracks to play at the same time, little cleaning robots to slide onto the floor and back, the lighting systems to make interesting flashing designs, the top of the roof to turn transparent and back, three of the monitors to display a cartoons-only channel and a video game score board and a tap-dancing prawn-thing respectively, fire extinguishers to spray Zuko, a disco ball to extend from the roof while the floor went all shiny to match, a giant blow dryer to wipe the foam off Zuko, and the disco ball to retract and the floor revert to normal.

Zuko stared at them, as this was somewhat more alarming than the crazy madman whose continued assualts on their ship's hull was rocking the ship. "...Oh, the Lady Amaterasu shine mercy on us all," He said flatly, wiping a remaining bit of foam off himself. "They're both insane."

"This adventure is gonna suck," Hobbes said miserably.

"We're gonna die!" Courtney screamed from the back of the cabin.

"At least my coffin will be a metal hulk and I shall die surronded by the fruits of natural philosophy," Winry said with a shrug, and she hugged the wall fondly. Jarod stared at her and moved very slightly away.

"If we do, I can promise you that it's gonna be awesome!" Calvin yelled, grinning like a total maniac. "I got a plan, you guys! Take from a guy whose first love in the mad sciences was creating things that fly; Kimblee's giant robot is not built to fly or sustain the stresses of flight! We get him in the air, we can beat him with an minimum of collateral damage!"

"Then fly us into the air with all the speed you can manage!" Zim commanded. "Even though I'm the one with his hands on the steering mechanisms. Yes."

"Okay," Calvin said, twisting the interface and fueling it just a bit more, though it was already overcharged from Abel's earlier efforts. And in the nick of time, too; there was a creaking noise as Kimblee dug his robot's fingers into the outer hull, twisting it around, and Calvin pulled back on his interface after hitting several buttons to reroute power from the weapons to the engines.

On the outside of the ship, the Umbra Eternis was smacked around by the rising pressure applied to it by the increase of power directed into the flight-generation field created by the ship's, and the surge was like a punch to the gut for Kimblee; not surprising, considering that it apparently operated by repelling gravity and applying it's own gravity pull and in effect Kimblee had been lifted up and smashed back down by the gravitational trick. The Umbra Eternis stubbornly clinged on even as the ship's constant forward advancement took an upwards tilt, it's remaining hand holding on to the hull like grim death (which it intended to bring, of course). Kimblee kept an eye on the cannons powering down, momentarily grateful that they couldn't swivel around to shoot him, and his attention was swiftly drawn by the ship's sudden acceleration skywards, rocketing up past even the highest buildings of the area in short order, and moving on up. "What are they up to now?" Kimblee roared, his previous enthusiasm draining away. He could appreciate a lust for battle, but this nonsense was hell on his nerves. The centrigual forces taking it's toll on his battered body didn't help: as the ship was now spinning in place, perhaps trying to dislodge him, it was at the center of powerful forces presently tending to the job of trying to grind his internals into goop, and it might only be a matter of time before that actually happened. (It wasn't like his robot suit protected him from that sort of thing. In this respect, it was more of a huge harness than a protective shell with weapons on it.) "Goddammnit, this was a stupid idea!" Kimblee yelled, his voice trailing faintly, the last sound Roy and the rest of his team heard before Zim's ship ascended into the sky properly, leaving them all behind in a blaze of green light.

The group assembled instinctively as they watched the ship go. "...Dude, what the hell?" Naruto said, summing up what everyone was thinking. (Some in more poetic language, but the basic message was the same.)

"Knowing Zim and the company he's been keeping, probably something insane," Aang said. He tried to decide whether or not to fly after them. He watched the ship, and knowing quite a bit about the physics of aeronautics, relaxed. "Everyone, please stay down. It'll be okay."

"Are you serious?" Gaara asked him, sand drifting around him and half-formed into a flight-capable platform.

"Trust me," Aang insisted. "At this point, we'll probably just screw up whatever they're planning."

"...All right," Gaara said reluctantly, deferring to Aang's wisdom. He bowed his head, and the more rational among them facepalmed, certain this was going to go horribly wrong. It wasn't like they could do anything, though, with their two fliers deciding that things were well-in-hand.

And yet, it seemed that they were absolutely right.

Now farther up than anything had been during the entire duration of the fight, the ship continued to accelerate upwards, almost tearing Kimblee off with the velocity alone and forcing his robot to secure a marginally more secure grip by grasping at seams in the hull to tear them open, with the intention of eventually tearing a hole open, jumping in and killing everyone inside, but he was taking it one step at a time, and that plan was seeming increasingly unlikely. He was considering just cutting his loses and getting the ship to drop himself to the getaway ship Deidara had promised him. So far, he'd managed to wedge the Umbra Eternis' legs up against two of it's field-projection engines to keep it there pretty well. Kimblee tried to say something, both he and the Umbra Eternis scream bloody defiance at them, to express his absolute certainty that they would die now and enlighten them to their significance before applauding their courage in opposing the wills of those that had sent him, as he had so many times in this fight before, but no more.

He had been burned by lightning, pummeled by incredible strength, suffering dozens of small blows inflicted by sympathetic connections with the giant robot he piloted, had suffered so very much damage in a fairly short time, and he couldn't muster the strength to do anything except cough so wetly and painfully that it felt like his throat was eating itself. Something red and gritty spewed from his lips, and a substance that was not mostly blood dripped from his body at various points corrosponding to the chakras. "Damn it," Kimblee whispered, putting a hand to his chest and almost screaming at the flare of pain, his ribs ached, and felt like they had been crushed into gravel. "I need to end this now. I need to make one last big move and finish everything before I make my getaway." He reached his hands out longingly, so close to such a glorious final move that he could taste it, and the taunting nearness of it rankled him. For that ship was made of metal, while he was inside of a giant shell made of metal, and the nightmare-things giving it unholy quasi-life still coursed with the power of stolen lives transformed into the purest of energies. And he, the Red Lotus Alchemist, had pioneered the remaking of metals into custom-made explosives.

The Umbra Eternis and this ship, formerly a threat and now an opportunity, would make an absolutely glorious bomb. All it would take would be a single transmutation, and then his work would be done. The rest of it would happen by itself, and he would be able to escape with his duty finished without him even needing to see it happen. The refugee's illusions would be shattered, their faith in their ability to protect themselves completely demolished, and Wuya's goals would be advanced just a little bit further, and Kimblee would have the satisfaction of having played his part.

The wind roaring in his face hard enough to cut him with grit, the pressures bearing down on him like a hammer upon a nail and the stresses inflicted on his machine by the propulsion-field made getting him close enough to transmute it a dicey proposition. The Heartless surged around him, crackling with red energy, and he could feel the power taken from the Philosopher's Stone surging around them, into him. Just a little closer...just a little closer... The Umbra Eternis leaned in and groaned with the effort, and Kimblee reached, his hands coming closer and closer to the ship's hull. All that metal, all that raw material waiting to become something transcendant and beautiful...

He never did stop to think what it was made of or if he could transmute it, which would have rendered the whole exercise exquisitely useless. It would have been a pretty nice crowning moment for his utter failure, though.

The crackle of the loudspeaker turning on startled him and Kimblee jerked back, losing his concentration and causing the Umbra Eternis' grip to slip, and it almost fell right off; it maintained a lucky grip on the hull, digging it's claws into the metal with barely enough strength to keep it's shoulder-attachments from tearing loose. "Hi, obnoxious and probably smelly jerk we're fighting!" Calvin said cheerfully over the loudspeaker.

"Trust me, he smells quite awful," Zim added.

"Who the devil are you?" Kimblee said, not recognizing that voice from any point during the fight.

"Hi," Calvin said again. "I'm Calvin Cadia, and-"

"I thought your last name was Nocker," Zim said.

"That's a title, not a name. As I was saying, I'll be the guy totally whupping you today, and so are these guys. Say hello, everyone!"

"You already know me," Zim bragged.

"I really don't like you very much!" Hobbes said brightly.

"Meh," Zuko said.

"Hi," Courtney and Beth said, obviously terrified.

"I've got nothing to say to you," Winry said.

"...Hey," Jarod said, a bit chipper despite the circumstances.

"Why are the girls and also Jarod talking?" Calvin wondered. "You're not part of this crew."

Over the sounds of those girls (and Jarod) loudly replying with much fury, Kimblee blinked slowly over his pain and said, "Ah. Hello to you too...however you people are." He coughed wetly again. "I suppose I should be pleased to destroy you, after the courage you have shown, but I'd really like to finish this, this much unprotected air travel is doing horrible things to my organs."

"All part of the plan, buddy!" Calvin said. "Which is working out splendidly and you're not even consciously helping me figure out how to beat you. I mean, what kind of idiot are you that you build a giant robot out of the best materials you can find and you don't even engineer it to withstand high pressures or the other lovely rigors of mech combat? You didn't even shield yourself."

"I am not an engineer!" Kimblee snarled, suddenly in a mood to do something nasty. Since he couldn't smash the ship open with the robot's remaining limbs and he had the presence of mind not to waste his one shot at finishing this on a simple revenge attack, he settled for the Umbra Eternis hurling itself at the ship and knocking it slightly off-course, veering it to the left as it leaned a bit, it's sharp acceleration upwards pushed out of orbit. Calvin swore over the loudspeaker as he corrected this, the efforts of the ship turning back straight up smacking Kimblee around in his own giant robot.

"Where did you learn stuff like that?" Hobbes said, appalled. "Mom and Dad would be ticked if they heard you talking like that!"

"Oh come on, we haven't spoken with them in like six months, it's not like they're going to care!" Calvin said irritably. "And I hang around with physicists and engineers all day; I pick these things up! Though that Morte guy is probably a better resource for cool insults."

"Then he is a terrible influence!" Hobbes snapped.

Zuko stared. "...Is that really important right now!" He demanded. "Is...is this a thing that's happening now? Or have you forgotten that Kimblee-"

"Excuse me, I'm still right there!" Kimblee screamed, kicking the ship as best he could without dislodging himself. "Concentrate on the matter at hand! Me!"

"Right, yes," Zuko said, facepalming. "See, he gets my point and we're the ones trying to kill him or whatever."

Calvin rolled his eyes. "I get it already, it's all about you! Attention spammer." He spun the control rods randomly.

"Not like that!" Kimblee screamed, the ship flying straight up and spinning in wild unpredicatable directions, and since Kimblee wasn't anchored very well, in addition to having his guts pummeled by the forces involved he was smashed from side to side of his own fuselage, brusing himself and getting his limbs punched into his own body and other assorted unpleasantries. "Ow! Ow ow ow, oh I brought this on myself-OW!" This last bit coincided with him smashing into the wall of his fusage with all his body weight on the wrist. "Crap damn it. I think I broke my hand."

"Then let's try again, only the other way!" Zim said with a cackle, doing the same thing with the control rods that Calvin had, only the other direction. More ow-ing from Kimblee ensued, and there was much rejoicing at his wholly-merited suffering.

As the ship happily bounced Kimblee into an increasingly bloodier pulp thanks to his misunderstanding of how giant robots were built and the consequences thereof, Calvin and Zim quite happily took turns swinging the directions of the ship around and flying it around in extremely erratic directions: one moment they were flying rightwards and pounding Kimblee in his own craft while he tried to get a grip on the ship, and the very next moment they were going back down for long enough for the sudden acceleration to bash Kimblee back and then they were going up again, the change so swift they could hear Kimblee's screams mostly muffled by the wind. The changes in direction were complicated by their ship's apparent inability to move in anything except a straight line and gradual curves, forcing them to move against their ship's own pull if they wanted to move direction more quickly, and since that made intolerable stresses, they had to settle for just flying in extremely large loops instead of flitting all over the place. It still had a nasty effect on Kimblee, so it was all good.

(On the streets below, quite a few people throughout all of Traverse Town were watching their progress, but given how fast the ship was moving, they had a hell of a time keeping track of it. Some of them thought about joining in, but almost no one had any idea what was going on. For Roy and his group's part, Aang still remained stubborn that Zim knew what he was doing and the best they could manage was getting Cybord to try hailing Zim's radio, but neither him or Calvin had noticed him calling yet.)

On the outside of the ship - and beaten sillier than ever - Kimblee felt that he needed to make some sort of comment and yelled, "What do you intend to do? Build up speed until I am at most my unstable and make a sharp turn that will wrench me off and leave me to fall to my death?"

"A decent plan," Zim remarked. "But I think not. It leaves too many variables open. I mean, sheesh, that armor could protect you even though it's more likely it would just splatter you, you could make a blast right before you hit the ground that cushions the impact, you could have yet another sneaky back-up plan, you could somehow teleport yourself away...something unpleasant like that."

"Good points," Calvin said. "And my plan is a bit simpler than that, anyway. But splattering you would be pretty cool, yeah."

"I definitely agree," Jarod said.

"Are you quite done criticizing my handiwork?" Kimblee said coldly, blood and other stuff painting his chin and much of his jaw a disquieting shade of crimson. "I have said before, engineering is not my specialty."

"Then why make a giant robot?" Zuko asked as Winry sputtered in fury at Kimblee's casual acknowledgement of spitting all over her chosen career path.

There was a long pause, and a brief increasion of tension over the speakers that suggested they were staring at Zuko in disbelief. "It's a giant robot," Zim said slowly. "Why wouldyou need a reason to get one, even if you have no idea how it ought to be made?"

"...Ah, silly me," Zuko said sarcastically.

Eager to do something to make himself feel a little more useful (or at least that he wasn't among crazy people), Zuko then pointed at a blinking light over a small display that had what looked like a call address and a cartoony version of Cyborg's face next to it. "I think your robot friend is calling. Or has been trying to for a while."

"Huh?" Zim said. "Is that what that screen means? I thought it might have been an address application or something dumb like that. Noticing briefly that the display was a little metal box with an overlarge screen that it had just been barely wired around and a grill-like speaker built into it, Zim considered briefly what Cyborg had found all this stuff to make the ship and pressed the button. "Yes?"

He recoiled immediately; the blast of sound from the other end was hellishly loud (and fortunately Hobbes had expected this and had ducked through the room). "WHAT ARE YOU GUYS DOING!" Cyborg screamed over the line, the old-fashioned speaker giving his voice a slightly tinny quality. Next to the caller identification screen, a small guage that calcalated the volume whined up from 'Super Serene Silence (TM)' to 'Locate An Indoor Voice' without a beat, and it was an appropiate measure. His voice had gotten so loud that Calvin winced even with hearing that had been slightly deadened from too many years getting the business end of explosions and the force of it almost floored. Jarod hit the floor, ears clasped around his head and muttering a perfect recitiation of the Eddas to himself in the original languages of it's writers.

"The obvious thing, of course," Zim said, twisting the knob to a a convinient volume control and dialing the volume to a more appropiate level. Hobbes came back in, whistling innocently and pretending he hadn't just been in unspeakable pain. "Avenging the dead and restoring the injured and bringing in the villain of the day, that sort of thing! Also, why are you yelling?"

"You have that psychopath on your ship and you're flying all over the damn place!" Cyborg howled in mingled bewilderment and fury. "We can't get a lock on you! None of us can fire without hitting you guys too! Your buddy Aang won't fly us up there because he thinks you don't need the help and he's convinced our other flier the same thing! Kimblee could blow you out of the sky at any second! WHY WOULDN'T I BE YELLING?"

"...Huh, when you put it that way we sound psychotic or stupid," Zim said. "And I may be, so no big deal there. Be assured, we have everything under control. There's a nice big plan that will defeat Kimblee once and for all, allowing us to resume the schedule as previously planned. I guess."

"You guess!"

"Well, he hasn't been forthcoming with any details." Zim shrugged, although the gesture was wasted since Cyborg hadn't installed viewer screens in there, a rare lapse in judgement for his engineering skills. "How are we on that, anyway?"

"Give us about a little more distance to minimize property damage and casualties," Calvin said, steering the ship so it was pointing straight up and rocketing ever higher. They heard the bumb where the Umbra Eternias flailed around as a consequence. "And we'll be in the clear!"

"'Property damage and casualties'!" Cyborg repeated. "What are you doing?"

"Something excessive and probably ill-conceived, but if I don't try to pull it off my preparation will be wasted and that would just be totally lame," Calvin said solemnly. "It will work. It'll definitely work. Trust me!"

"This is crazy, man. Swing that lunatic down here and crash him, I can fix whatever he does to your ship but if you stay there he'll kill all of you! Just, I don't know, head down and keep him disoriented! We got a clear zone for you to smash him into, we can set another trap for him and take him down before he even knows what's going on-"

"No," Zim said quietly.

Cyborg kept talking for a bit before he realized what Zim had said. "-There's some open ground over on the sixteenth turn over off the Old Tank Road, some old houses that used to be assault fortresses on wheels that we can weaponize, knock him off and get him down there and we can demolish him right then and...wait, what did you say?"

"I said no!" Zim repeated, louder and grinning this time, plainly excited by the prospect of their nearing victory.

"...I'm sorry, I could have sworn you just heard a good plan that won't get you killed and you just said 'no'."

"Yeah, I expect this because it's what I just said," Zim said, closing his eyes and trusting to his piloting instincts as he laid hands on the controls again, putting the ship into a spin that battered Kimblee some more and kept him from tearing into the hull as he had been sneaking up to do while Cyborg had been calling. "No worries, we have it all under control."

"On the balance of probability, that's probably untrue," Hobbes interjected.

"Shh!" Zuko hissed. "Don't tell people that, they'll think we're weak and incapable of doing things ourselves!"

"But we are incapable of doing this ourselves!" Hobbes retorted.

"Yeah, but they don't know that!" Zuko insisted. Hobbes facepalmed.

"...Damn it, I must be out of my mind," Cyborg said reluctantly. "Okay, we're handing it all to you. Good luck, man, and don't you dare get yourself killed." With a heaviness that sounded like someone who thought that he should be thinking that he was sending someone to his own funeral but believed otherwise in spite of himself, the frequency channel closed off.

The silence in the bridge was broken shortly afterwards by Kimblee and his broken and fading voice. "Touching," he rasped. "Care to divulge this plan to me? Display some manners and tell me how I'm going to die."

Zim started to respond with something to the effect of 'screw you' but with more eloquence and also more screaming, and thought better of responding to Kimblee's challenge, mostly because he actually didn't know the plan. "It's a surprise!" He said brightly. He looked at Calvin inquiringly.

Calvin looked back, having been doing some hurried calculations and putting some long-awaited coordinates into the radio-thing he had been carrying around the entire fight with no opportunity to use it safely. "We're ready," He said simply, and a little abashed; after all this, it seemed funny that it was going to come down to something that would probably end it pretty quickly.

Zuko, holding tightly to the back of Calvin's seat in a desperate attempt to keep his footing in the ship's wild rocking, stomped his feet down hard and grabbed hold of a nearby pole that was probably meant for holding hats and coats to steady himself. "Is there anything we need to do?" He asked, voice surprisingly steady.

Calvin thought about it. He did a few calculations. "Yeah," he said, grinning as he tossed the radio-thing to Zuko. "Hang onto that and hit the button when I tell you to, and only when I tell you to!"

Zuko looked down at the device. It was such a tangled mess of looped wires hooked into themselves, small lights blinking over crude dials and power gauges that it would have been hard for him to find any buttons even if there weren't over six different small switches and buttons of varying size and color. "Um," He said. He thought hard for a moment, trying to phrase the thing properly, and just repeated himself helplessly. "Um."

"Good to hear," Calvin said. "Hold on tight! If that thing busts, we're going to have horrible explosion-related problems." He took hold of the ship's controls and kept a close eye on the power gauges, looking at them wonderingly as they started powering up right in front of him. "And hang on to something, it's gonna get bumpy!"

On the outside of the ship, even being hammering by gravity and various other forces conspiring to pummel him into pulp, Kimblee had enough presence of mind to say, "Tell me something I do not already know!" and braced himself for the horrible sound of the Umbra Eternis' face grinding against the ship's hull as it tried to move closer to the top of the airship and away from both potential places to be fired off, and the heaviest parts of the ship's armor. For a moment, he had an experience of fleeting empathy for the people who had to deal with his armored robot, and then felt disturbed, unable to recall ever feeling empathy before and the experience disturbed him. It made him think that maybe he could have done things different, or done his job with less casualities, and that concept alone was so foriegn, so alien that it actually hurt...

The Umbra Eternis' crawl halted as Kimblee tried to sort his confused thoughts out, and was nearly torn off by an almighty lurch from the ship. They flew into the clouds, forcing him to shut his eyes and shield his face from the heavy mist (and ignore how slippery it made the Umbra Eternis' grip on the metal surface that was the only thing keeping it from slipping off and falling to it's death), everything suddenly bitterly cold and his fingers aching and as Kimblee managed to sort things out and decide that if he even if they did beat him here and knock him off to his death, he could just transmute his giant robot with everything he had left and turn that into a truly spectacular bomb.

The ship lurched again, and he was almost thrown off. He cursed and the Umbra Eternis snarled, and Kimblee was worried by how weak the noise was, a feeble growly noise that sounded more like rusted gears clapping against each other. He had no time to concern himself with it, for the ship lurched again as it put up another burst of speed, rocketing through the thin layer of clouds, far above the quickly fading remnants of the smog-like substance Kimblee had made earlier to protect his Heartless servitors, and flew into sunlight more direct and pure than anything he had encountered since donning his giant robot, and he almost slipped off right there; it was no fault of his own, apart from some brief discomfort from the intense sunlight that forced him to close his eyes, but the Umbral Heartless were not so lucky. While they were currently in a diffused form incapable of acting in most of the ways that were suitable for a Heartless, they remained essentially Heartless (and 'essential' was the right word, being boiled down to a particularily elemental state) and even protected by the armor, they were an intimate part of it.

The sunlight burned them nearly as badly as the Keyblade's light did, and Kimblee struggled not to writhe in discomfort as he felt bits of what felt like his mind scream in pain as the dark energies fueling his ship were burned away, one by one, tiny clawing noises in his construct as bits of the dark essence seperated into a proper Heartless from the shock and was destroyed almost immediately. The armor offered barely any protection; in their current state, the Heartless were a intimate part of it, and even being shaded from direct sunlight didn't make any difference as long as the Umbra Eternis was in direct contact with the sun.

Kimblee urged the Umbra Eternis to turn away and crawl under the ship, where it would be more protected, and the brutalized machine-titan eventually responded, but only slowly, only with an agonizing jerking series of movements as it hauled itself down, a stumbling series of unsteady little motions that would have been enough to make it's position extremely precarious even if it hadn't been on a ship moving at unsafe speeds enough to constant pummel it. Kimblee dared to move it's feet from the footholds, reaching an arm up to grab another handhold, and the ship gave an mighty jolt from underneath him, rocketing to the side with such force that with Kimblee digging his robot's feet back while he held onto the small tear in the hull with all the terrified might his damaged machine-titan could manage, the sheer weight of his robot tore a small section of the hull open, peeling slightly away from the rest of itself and exposing a interior layer. It wasn't opened up, but it was still a nasty blow.

"Hey!" Calvin yelled over the loudspeaker as the damage was reported to him by Zim, who was keeping an eye on that sort of thing. "Stop wrecking my ship!"

"You mean my ship!" Zim said. Calvin ignored him.

"It will be over if you just stop and let me finish you properly," Kimblee said, his words slurred. The last lurch the ship had given had smashed his face into his fuselage owing to a bad angle he had been in at the time, and now his jaw ached so badly Kimblee knew it was dislocated, and several teeth that hadn't been outright broken had been knocked loose. "But then, that wouldn't make it very satisfying if you just gave up."

"Shut up!" Calvin said suddenly, twitching so violently he looked fully prepared to run out of the ship and over to Kimblee and beat him up with his bare hands just to shut him up."

"Uh," Zim started to say.

"NO! I am so sick of him saying those stupid self-righteous speeches. He rambles and he rants and he doesnt even sound like he knows what he's saying half the time!" Calvin broke into full-fledged ranting mode, now screaming into the intercom at Kimblee. Hobbes rolled his eyes. Zim blinked. Zuko looked away, grimacing at what he clearly thought to be a childish fit. Everyone else just stared. "And you know what really pisses me off about this lunatic! THE MISUSE OF APPLIED SCIENCE, THAT'S WHAT! He's one of those backwards-thinking delusional morons that give everything science-y a bad name! Because of lunatics like him, you can't even throw a brick without it hitting half a dozen incompetent morons who go 'ooh, science will doom us all!' and 'technological is the fruit of all evil!' and 'the stuff we have now is cool but we should stop going any farther right now because we're hypocritical lazy jerkasses who are afraid of change and should never have left the Stone Age' and kinds of other stupid-stupid-STUPID things I've heard over and over and over and OVER! That...that idiot isn't even a real scientist, he's just using discoveries as a means to an end, not to see what he can find out or apply them to beneficient ends! And the robot!" He continued to rant.

"Uhh..." Zim said, looking to Hobbes for help. (Samael amused him by floating next to Calvin and going 'blah blah blah' in perfect synchronization with the boy's rambling.)

Hobbes waved a hand. "It's best to just let him get it out of his system," He advised. "Interrupt it halfway through and it gets turned on you, and yikes, I can tell you that's not a good idea." He gestured towards Calvin, who seemed to have reached the point of his rant. "See, he's almost done!"

Calvin's voice suddenly lowered a pitch, as if the frenzied rancor he was building into had collapsed into itself and made a portal that rocketed his speaking patterns a few years into the post-puberty future. "You make a robot when you have no knowledge or business making one, you do devil's work by forging a Philosopher's Stone out of people like they're just resources, you spit on everything alchemists are supposed to stand for, you misuse every single scrap of knowledge and learning real scholars have lucked into from years of study and dedication, you warp everything people like ME have ever stood for, and you act like we're supposed to applaud you for it. You self-satisfied mental defective, I really want to know, are you putting on the most elaborate farce I've ever seen or are you really that much of a complete and unbelievably pathetic IDIOT?"

Kimblee's eyes opened so wide he thought his pupils might shred. Aware of a dull throbbing somewhere in the back of his head and his arms feeling wrong, he slammed his hand against the fuselage. It wasn't to transmute anything, or make any sort of deliberate action. His self-control simply broke and the fuselage was a convienient thing for him to hit. Right then and there, if he had retained enough temperance to blast the ship with all he had, than perhaps things would have turned out differently for him. Perhaps he would have been able to escape, or engineer some sort of massive bomb like he had planned. Perhaps he could have accomplished his mission and been able to gloat about it to torment Traverse Town or Wuya's other enemies at another time.

But he failed then and there, because he didn't do anything smart. He should have ignored Calvin's insults and startlingly intense fury, and simply acted in a manner more suitable to someone of his (self-perceived) high station. He could have done anything and it would probably have been smarter than what he did then, which was to intentionally ignore every other stimuli and factor at work, suck in the biggest breath he could manage and howl, "Don't you dare look down on ME!"

He rammed the Umbra Eternis against the ship, furiously clapping his hands and generating a flow of alchemical energy, red energy flashing ominous around him as he called the surge of Heartless who retained some of it's energy to him, never thinking that with his focus waning the Umbra Eternis' grip on the ship loosened and it's claws were drawn away from the hull, the Heartless too weak to maintain it by themselves. And thanks to all the bumping and lurching and general pummeling he had received in the course of his attempts to stay on or climb on the ship, he was just barely close enough to touch the hull, espicially with part of it torn away like it was. He lunged forward, the Umbra Eternis doing the very same and jumping off the ship, just barely a few feet but still detaching from it in his mad attempt to turn the ship into a giant bomb and make them pay for insulting him...

His hands froze moments before he could do it, their flesh almost totally Kevin's skin tone. Kimblee heard Kevin chuckling malevolently somewhere in the back of his head, pleased over this one final exertion of will. The alchemical energy dissipated into the air, no doubt to cause unusual but ultimately non-lethal events some time later, and Kimblee's reserve crumbled. Over the intercom, Calvin ominously said, "NOW." Kimblee heisitated just a moment, wondering what that was supposed to mean.

And then the ship abruptly turned as best it could, which was still enough to have the side of the ship suddenly rise up and smash into the Umbra Eternis a second time like an oversized and exceedingly oddly shaped baseball bat, solidly knocking the giant robot safely right off the ship and over it, still moving fast as it steadied itself and flew on. "NO!" Kimblee screamed, his composure shattering as the last fleeting grasp of a glorious victory or even a satisfactory mission literally slipped from his grasp. The Umbra Eternis swung it's remaining arm feebly, reaching for the ship. It's claws bounced off the retreated hull, repulsed by the propulsion-field, and than Kimblee began to fall, too far away to do anything. "NO!"

"Gotcha," Calvin said from the ship, as Zim cackled madly, rocking in his chair in total unrestrained glee. Behind them, even Hobbes and Zuko were grinning at Kimblee's falling form, seen through several cameras. Hobbes was planning on getting a recording of it for posterity. Beth took some pictures with an on-board cameras. Courtney was already planning the interview questions. Winry cheered, while Jarod just nodded once in relieved satisfaction. "Zim's grumpy friend! Press the big red button I put 'Boom' on!"

"My name is Zuko," said the aforementioned grumpy friend of Zim, though he was in a progressively better mood and didn't say it with more than his usual level of grouchiness. He found the button without much difficulty, paused a moment to wonder if this really was the correct thing to do, decided to trust Calvin and the device he had been carrying around the entire fight and his unstated plan, and he pressed the button that had been awaiting pressing for such a long time.

There was a faint clicking noise. Several lights that had been previously dimmed turned on, faint buzzing noises coming from the device as a preprogrammed signal was sent on with the coordinates piggybacking on the signal, and then the device dimmed. Zim looked around, lingering for a moment on Kimblee's falling form. "Is that it?"

"Nope," Calvin said, pulling the ship aside and curving it around so they were now going after Kimblee again. "Best to stay away from him if he attacks, but we should stay close enough so we can blast him even if this doesn't work!"

"Okay," Zim said. "I-" He stopped as the ship picked up a heavy noise coming from the news studio they'd left behind a long time ago and that Calvin had done some mysterious things to. "Wait. What was that noise? Sounded like something exploding."

"Yes," Calvin said mysteriously, and he grinned.

"I'm not going to like this, am I?" Courtney said faintly.

...

Back at the plaza where all this had started going absolutely catastrophic (for Kimblee), the ground was rumbling most ominously.

The news studio they had invaded, ransacked and commandeered stood firm for the time being, not quite affected by the processes happening within it, but the ground underneath it tore apart in plumes of flame, flat crumping noises echoing as bits of the street were blasted right off.

Throughout the building, quite a lot of mechanisms that had been intentionally pushed to the very limits of their breaking points were being shoved right over those limits. Machines that Calvin had jury-rigged to overclock, powerful explosives waiting to be activated by the final results, went to work and accomplished their mission in a matter of moments before shutting down and begining to set off their attached explosives. Even more explosives had been secreted all over the building, hidden from sight and the casual inspection that their hurry to be out of their would have entailed, not attached to any timers or sensors but set up to explode at the appropiate moment anyway. Gauges whirled, steamed rocketed from vents moving mechanisms whirred to ear-splittingly loud speeds untill something snapped and they burst apart, tearing up whatever they had been a part of and amping up the process they were in the middle of. Under the building itself, special explosives that Calvin had prepared beforehand erupted in small blasts, thundering through the underground tunnels and blasting more of the street up, totally shattering the foundations of the news studio. Calvin was very good at explosives (having a great deal of practice in their making, after all), and so they didn't damage the news studio at all, merely unmooring it from it's foundations and causing it to lean very slightly from side to side until it settled down into a happy medium.

Under normal circumstances, that was still a bad thing; it leaned precariously thanks to the specific pattern of explosions, now actually leaning in the direction that Kimblee was at and aimed precisely at him, and the first earthquake to come along would probably knock it right over. This wasn't much of a concern, given that most earthquakes that hit the town were artificial in origin and not terribly large to boot, and anyway the earthquakes would never have the opportunity to try it out.

At that very moment, the jury-rigged machines Calvin had made and placed in the basement doing their jobs in admirably short time, the crude explosives Calvin were pushed far beyond their limits and finally reached the limits Calvin had expected for his intentional bout of explosive overclocking, and the boilers in the basement (stuffed to the brim not with water now but so very many packages containing explosive substances that Calvin had created with some creative application of detergent, carbonated liquids, a few other things he had neglected to mention to anyone and whatever he'd found lying around), now heated up to an intolerable degree, and finally exploded in a massive blast that would have surely defeaned anyone who was close enough to hear it. And again, if things had been ordinary, this would have likely caused nothing more than severe structural damage and a lot of insurance claims. But then, Calvin had already weakened the walls on purpose, and consequently, the walls were shattered by the directional blasts, and combined with several dozen other smaller initial explosions all along the basement, each and every one precisely calculated and targeted for maximum effect, the building was not shattered, blown apart or imploded under the stresses or anything boring like that: instead, before the smoke caused by the destruction of the foundations even had a chance to begin clearing up, the news studio was blasted loose from the ground, the multiple explosions launching it right into the sky and right through the dust cloud and flying onwards in much the way that buildings ordinarily don't, it's bottom half blackened and busted up but inexplicably intact dispite all the flames trailing from it.

It arced through the air, seeming to hover before gravity took hold and it began falling again. This was all according to schedule; the second part of Calvin's signal finished relaying it's instructions as the systems recalibrated various other jury-rigged devices inside the building for Kimblee's location in accordance with protocols to maximize impact and damage, and more explosions ripped through it's sides. These ones didn't do much damage, mostly coming from the very bottom of the building, a very peculiar device that Calvin had imbued with a portion of the same semi-mystical energies that fueled his pyromantic gauntlet fueling the flames from these latest explosions and giving them new life, swelling them up to a size greater than the building itself though curiously heatless while still producing enormous force sufficient to send the building rocketing up into the air like the giant missile it was increasingly resembling, bizarre almost-colors warping the air in it's wake as a result from the magical energies Calvin had invested into it.

It flew on, the precise explosions Calvin's coordinates had translated by the machines he had rigged the basement with propelling it at Kimblee's direction and adjusting the sustained explosions (now serving the same purposes as rocket engines: i.e., making a big thing fly in basically straight lines at incredibly unsafe speeds) in incomprehensibly minute alterations to keep it aimed precisely at Kimblee's rapidly descending giant robot. An enormous amount of hidden explosives inside it (some modified machines and other things, most simply made by Calvin on the spot and none of his assistants realizing them for what they were), most of those explosives in the basement but an astonishing amount of them on all levels, the bulding-missile that had previously been a news studio speeded onward, rocketing towards it's destination with grim purpose.

(After the recordings of this incident were distributed, this particular moment got a lot of attention and made a lot of money. Even the somewhat jaded residents of Traverse Town had to admit that weaponizing an entire building by turning it into a missile was a pretty awesome move.)

...

Kimblee was aware of many things, falling down from the sky to what might be his death, the fact that he had no longer had access to the sort of power that would enable him to transmute a giant robot into a bomb that could have rocked Traverse Town down to it's foundations, and almost certainly was the end of his mission one way or the other, and closer to hand he was aware of the wind in his fast hitting him so hard and fast, not the least because of the speeds he was falling at, and his face being cut over and over by the grit on the wind. He had managed to force the Umbra Eternis to turn itself around and present it's back to the wind, protecting him from it, and even that wasn't much better; he kept pictured the impact soon to come shoving a jagged piece of metal into him, and it was a very persistent image.

He was also aware the Umbra Eternis was reacting more slowly to his commands (not that it mattered at this point), and it's responses to him had already become sluggish before getting much worse. Commanding it to do so much as lift an arm was like forcing an unwilling body to wake up far earlier than it was used to, and he needed it to do much more complicated things than just lifting it's arm; under combat conditions, it's lack of responsiveness would be a death threat. And the whispering in his ears had died away to little more than a quiet noise like the wind drifting across broken metal; the Heartless were almost depleted, and his machine-titan had become slower as the Heartless that animated it had died. It was as strong as ever; it's armor as unbendable, it's remaining weaponry dauntingly powerful and it's mechanical muscles vastly superior to many metahumans. But it didn't matter that it's physical body was strong enough to fight when the darklings that made it move had almost been snapped away by the Keyblade's power and then burned away by exposure to sunlight unlessened by cloud cover, to say nothing of the countless mighty blows that had whittled them away one by one. The strength of the Umbra Eternis was as mighty as ever, but it wasn't doing him any good.

And not least of all, he was aware that he was almost certainly not going to survive this battle, or even the next few minutes. It hovered in his mind, nipping at every exposed thought, turning his usual calm and focused mind to darker-than-usual brooding. It didn't bother him, precisely, but what did bother him seemed a bit more disturbing than the sight of the panorama of Traverse Town got closer and closer, the ground that would splatter his body to ruined pulp under the weight of the Umbra Eternis growing rapidly closer.

He was begining to wonder if Wuya had sent him here to die.

It was a curious thought. He wasn't sure he wanted to know the answer. Unlike some of her other more skilled agents, Kimblee didn't know Wuya particularily well; he knew her well enough to be familiar with her easygoing and friendly behavior with her subordinates and allies, and that actually trusting her was a very dangerous move, but he didn't know her personally. (And the idea of being so friendly with his superior by actually knowing her on a personal basis seemed mildly offensive to his sense of decorum.) And so he knew, mostly because of what the majority of her luckier employees said when they knew she would hear of it, that she disliked wasting valuable resources like Kimblee and his alchemical power.

Unless, of course, that she had a purpose for him getting killed out here in the field.

And that didn't make any sense at all, he thought as he stared at the approaching ground and grimly noticed that Zim's ship was keeping pace with his own descent, not close enough to be hit by Kimblee's on-board weapons and far enough to move out of the way immediately if Kimblee tried to transmute a blast. He returned to his thoughts, and decided that even if Wuya was willing to cut him loose for whatever reason - it wasn't like his alchemy was singular, part of the deal of his employment was that he provide all his alchemical research to her, and it would be a trivial matter for her to teach a talented alchemist the secrets of his method and make another Red Lotus Alchemist - getting a useful experiment like Kevin killed too just seemed wasteful and impractical.

Unless, of course, Wuya didn't care if he lived or died. Since she had permitted him to be used as his body for this mission, it seemed logical that she didn't think his death would be a hindrance, or that his survival would be a boon.

Inexplicably, this troubled Kimblee. It suggested that he was being permitted to die here, as part of a greater plan that he didn't have the importance to know fully about. He knew what she was planning to do on a cosmic scale but he didn't know if 'causing chaos in Traverse Town and such' was his actual purpose, or if his rampage was just a red herring to draw them into a territorial frame of mind. That seemed the only result that would occur after such an attack. And how would that help Wuya? If anything, it would make her inevitable and final attack on them more difficult if they put more effort into fighting threats more efficiently. Kimblee thought hard, and a new thought occured to him: perhaps Wuya was planning on tricking them into being allies?

The thought made him smile at the sheer audacity of it. Give them an enemy to fight. Let them defeat that enemy. And then, months or even years down the road, Wuya with her vast army and control over the Heartless would appear and offer them her help against future threats, in exchange for helping her deal with a few threats that weren't politically feasible for her to fight directly...

An interesting scheme, he thought, if that was her plan.

"Unless, of course," Kimblee said hoarsely to himself, because there wasn't anyone else he particularly felt like talking to. "It's less complicated than that and she really just wanted me to kill things to rouse up the refugees. An excellent question."

Yes, Ghostfreak replied, his 'voice' much weaker than before and almost afraid. Kimblee was far less afraid of death than Ghostfreak was. I do not relish the idea of merely being a distraction or a nebulous monster to rally her enemies around and blind them to her threat. However, who am I to denounce such an ingenious plan, not when I was once such a mastermind in my own right and...hold on a minute, do you hear a blasting noise? Like some sort of rocket.

"...I do," Kimblee said, and sharply looked at the approaching ship. It was still following at a safe distance, and slowing down suddenly, and it had launched no rockets or missiles at him. "It's not those idiots, and I'm fairly sure I ran out of missiles some time ago. So what's making that noise?"

Ahem, Kevin said with what Kimblee deemed to be intolerable smugness. Kimblee's neck turned of it's own accord, and his head was forced to look at an incoming object in the direction of the plaza that their fighting had started in. Look that way, idiots.

Kimblee looked, not sure what he was supposed to be looking at, and then he did realize what he was looking at, and all mental operation ceased in stupified astonishment. "...Is that a flying building?" He said flatly.

Yep, Kevin said.

"Coming right at me, no doubt somehow homing in on my location."

Sure thing!

"And many times larger than the Umbra Eternis, which is currently lacking enough power for me to defend myself in any appreciable fashion."

Yeah, that's pretty much the situation.

Kimblee stared miserably at the rocket-building. "...Why would you draw my attention to that?"

I wanted to see if you'd freak out or not.

"You loathsome ruffian," Kimblee said with a surprisingly even tone of voice.

Much like Kimblee and Kevin, Zim's crew had someone to gleefully point out the weaponized building's presence to them as it was coming more or less at them, and that person was Calvin. The one who nesscitated his explanation was Zim, who took a look at the radar (a small screen that, instead of displaying incoming threats or something like that, was the display panel for a small computer that analyzed all information relating to scans of the surronding environment and produced a read-out of all pernitent potential threats. It was probably less efficient but more accurate) and saw that something was inbound, and a check at the cameras confirmed that something was approaching fast. "Gentlemen, I believe Kimblee has somehow acquired even more backup," Zim said grumpily. "It's coming fast."

"Oh, don't worry too much, that's one of mine," Calvin said quickly. "And it's aimed at Kimblee."

"What's aimed at Kimblee?" Beth asked.

"Uh, this thing," Zuko said, pointing. He and everyone else who wasn't piloting the ship peered at the nearest available screen. "Wait. Is that thing a flying building?"

"Yes," Calvin said. Courtney stared, too horrified for words.

Hobbes, who was more keen-eyed, stared for a little too long. "...Is that the news studio we took over?"

"WHAT?" Courtney yelled, tugging at her hair in horror.

"Yes again," Calvin said. "Before we left, me and those guys I roped into it modified the stuff down there so...uh, it's a bit technical, but basically I turned the whole thing into a guided rocket."

"You. Did. WHAT?" Courtney screamed, rounding on Calvin.

Hobbes, looking resigned, pinned her in a bear hug and kept her away from Calvin while Zim said, "You turned a building into a rocket." Zuko gaped at Calvin with his mouth open in infuriated astonishment. Beth gasped. Jarod raised an eyebrow. Winry shrugged. "You mean to tell me that you took the building we were in, went skulking about with a small group of technicians and other employees that worked there, modified the things down there so that it would be a rocket when you wanted it to, and somehow none of the technicians noticed this?"

"Yeah!" Calvin said, nodding smartly. "Even she didn't notice." He nodded at Courtney, who redoubled her efforts at anguished gibberish. "Not that they should have, since I never really explained myself and I doubt any of them had any idea what I was doing. I bet they thought it was just defenses or something. And I totally got away with it under her nose! I am awesome."

"...Why in the hells would you do that!" Zuko yelled, his arms spread wide as if pleading for some vestige of sanity from the heavens. "What could have possibly ever made you think that this would be a good idea?"

"YES!" Courtney snarled, looking as though she would like nothing better than to throttle Calvin for this. "WHY! Dear God, why?"

"I knew we were fighting a powerful guy, so I figured I might as well prepare a backup plan just in case things got really crazy," Calvin said. "I just never had a moment to put it into action, and there was unacceptable collateral damage the few times I could have just blasted him with it. Now, though, we're miles in the sky with no one to hit but Kimblee, and I've made sure it's going to crash-land into a place that's already been trashed beyong recognition!"

"I KILL YOU!" Courtney snarled.

"No you won't," Hobbes said firmly, holding her tighter.

"Where did you aim it?" Zuko said.

Calvin started to answer. Zim cut him off with an impatient hand signal. "Worry about that later!" Zim said. Zuko gave Calvin a look of deep mistrust, but complied with Zim. "This building missile will dispose of Kimblee?"

Calvin nodded. "If he somehow survives this - which I totally expect he will - he'll be in no condition to keep fighting."

"You crazy bastards!" Courtney shouted.

Winry said, "Then we make sure it does that! And hurry up, he's trying to get out of this!" She pointed at a screen that showed Kimblee's giant robot flailing and twisting around like mad.

"What's he doing?" Hobbes asked, trying his best not to let Courtney go prematurely.

"Looks like he's trying to move himself out of the rocket's path," Calvin said. "No worries there; I already made sure that the rocket's trajectory will compensate for any attempts on him to move out of the way. Just in case, though..." He indicated the button labeled 'Annoy' and had the computer lock onto Kimblee again. Courtney wriggled some more in Hobbes' grasp, still shouting desperately to get them to stop before she realized that this was their best chance to win and relented, grumbling mutinously.

The ship pressed forward, accelerating enough to get close enough to see Kimblee clearly, and now he was not only flailing around to move his giant robot out of the way of the flying building that was a little less than halfway after him, but had produced several large gatling lasers from the shoulders of his robot and firing them blindly. The shots went wild, and he plainly didn't care, since he wasn't trying to shoot anything, but was using the recoil to push himself out of the missiles way, and little by little, he was doing it. He was moving slowly, gradually, so that it would be very close indeed, that the rocket would miss him by a hair, if even that...but all the same, it would miss.

Zim ran through the calculations, the mechanical part of himself that was most evident in his path doubling them, and came to the very same conclusion, the intolerable and horrifying thought of Kimblee actually escaping this final gambit that so many lives were depending on, the vengeance of the lives he'd stolen and already expended. Without needing to think about it, Zim felt grim satisfaction at the sight of the computers confirmed that the Umbra Eternis had been locked on again and were ready to open fire. He reached over to Calvin's side, thoughts blazing in his head-

I won't let him get away this time, I won't let this monster escape the judgement he deserves, I won't fail ANOTHER world, I won't I won't I won't...!

-and he slammed his hand on the button labeled 'Annoy', hoping that it would do worse than that. It made a satisfying click.

Zim heard the slight humming noise (ferried through the outboard audio sensors and relayed into the bridge) of the ship's cannons charging up to a small but concentrated blast. The screen with the Umbra Eternis on it now had a green target superpositioned over the Umbra Eternis, which was now drifting slightly to the left and away from the oncoming news studio, and Zim realized the problem with shooting him right then and hurredly grabbed the ship's control rods again and pushed hard to the left. A massive lurch hit the ship as it pushed against itself, throwing Zuko and Hobbes to the ground and right into Winry and Courtney (much to Zuko's discomfort and Hobbes' satisfaction, to say nothing of the girl's issues with this) and drifting slowly but surely to the left before coming to a stop again, in a deadline to Kimblee and at the right angle to knock him back into the rocket-building's arc.

Zim didn't say anything. He didn't make any clever comments or smug declarations of victory or anything like that; it didn't feel right, and Kimblee wouldn't have been able to hear him. But he did smirk knowingly, his hands still clamped on the control rods, and he waited as everyone else leaned forward, voices hushed and expectant, the air thick with the hope they did not dare to vocalize, the whispering prayer they were all thinking: WIll this work? Will he be stopped? Will he finally be defeated? Please, please please PLEASE let this work...!

For his own part, Kimblee felt strangely hollow as he felt himself falling out of the missile's range, even though it was still moving in his general direction. He still had a chance to make things work out for him, he need not die by building impact (and that was a strange thought, he decided even as he wracked his brain trying to think of ways for him to make a building become a missile, so he could use the same idea later) and he might even survive this day...but it just didn't seem as important as it should have. An intrusive and alien thought ('Should I have killed all those people?') kept slipping into his mind, tasting so strongly of Jarod's own consciousness that he kept glancing back to make sure that man wasn't there, and yet the thought also felt like one of Kimblee's own, and he didn't understand it at all, not one bit.

"Damn it, it hurts," Kimblee whispered, feeling desolate and alone as he had never felt before, had never even thought that he was alone. "Why does it hurt? I don't...it doesn't...why? Why?"

You're babbling, Kevin said, his 'voice' getting stronger and more confident, and that was another thing Kimblee didn't understand. You're slipping, man. Gonna fall down and crack. Break and burn, you'll see. Kevin laughed, wild and throaty and freer than anything Kimblee had ever heard.

"Shut up!" Kimblee snarled. "This isn't over, it's not over, you shut up now and wait!"

No way, Kevin said briefly. He seemed to smile. It's all green from here.

Kimblee wondered what in the name of Xerxes that was supposed to mean, and then he saw a flash of green at the corner of his eye. He had just enough time to turn his mecha around and see Zim's ship, still too far for him to take a decent blast at it but close enough for it's cannons to fire up just enough to suddenly release small streams of green-hued energy, directed at the Umbra Eternis with a machine's unerring precision. He turned the Umbra Eternis around as quick as he could and while it saved him, they still hit hard enough to knock Kimblee silly and bang his head against the fuselage walls yet again, made a feedback pulse that took the gatling lasers out of commision, and worst of all, pushed the Umbra Eternis out of it's slightly safer freefall and right back into the path of the incoming building-missile.

Kimblee was still reeling from the attack when his vision cleared amid Kevin's insane laughing and Ghostfreak's horrified shrieks, and for a single awful moment, Kimblee's eyes went wide with perfect comprehension, shutting down a little bit at the horror of the fact that a building was flying across the sky and about to crash right into him. By then the flying building was so close, too close, and he found himself stunned by the sight of it, a broken and damaged building flying less than several dozen feet in front of him. The sunlight shined over the metal in glaring bright spots that hurt his eyes (and hurt the Heartless worse, though the Umbra Eternis remained stubborn and alive) and he put his hand over his face to protect his eyes, and then he could just hear the roaring noise of the flame's propelling it at him, the whistling noise from bits of the torn metal on the sides of it sliding through the air and vibrating with the force of it's journey until bits of them snapped off, the smell of it's extremely odd flames and above all, the sheer crazy impossibility of a flying building aimed at him like a missile.

His mind kept circling back to that last detail. It was exerting a powerful hold on him.

He held his hands out and thought furiously, unsure of what would happen if he just blasted it, the explosions might knock him out of the sky and send him faster to the ground and either his death or more likely incarceration; he already planned to pull out all his guns and shoot them at the ground prior to impact to cushion the blow, and he suspected that the Umbra Eternis just might be tough enough to protect him if he crashed. But then that would make it tricky to transmute the Umbra Eternis into a bomb as planned and probably make it so that he wouldn't do even half the damage he wanted it to do, even if it was powerful enough to create shockwaves that would hit the neighborhoods below him, or even that ship that was still following him...

Kimblee tried to think. He tried to evaluate the circumstances, think of all possible factors (though there weren't that many, not now), narrow it down to his best options and carry the very best of those out, but it hurt to think, and those troubling alien feelings just wouldn't stop bothering him and it wouldn't let him just focus, and his mind went into a freefall much like the actual one he was trapped in, and he remembered when that boy - Calvin, wasn't it? He was sure he had heard one of the other combatants call him that once or twice - had used that energy to suck out the Omnitrix energies. At the time, after the shock had worn off, he had thought it had been an unexpected boon, since it had put Kevin in some distress and quieted him for a while, but now he wished that hadn't happened: if he could still have transformed, Ghostfreak could have lent him his powers again and allowed him to phase out of the giant robot and float to safety and the escape ship, so that he could resume his attack another day.

It was curiously humbling. The biggest threats he had faced today hadn't been his nemesis Scar or his old enemies from Amestris, but the crew of the ship harrassing him right now, a small band of exceedingly loud and unpredictable maniacs that no matter what he did just wouldn't die.

The plan with all the guns appealed to him and Kimblee smirked, dispite the pain. "I am not so easily beaten as that," He whispered, so weak that he couldn't speak any louder. He concentrated, pulling the Heartless to his command again, and he felt a trace of fear at how hard it was, both communing with them and how long it took for them to react. All the same, though, shadows rippled around the Umbra Eternis' body, and more weapons appeared: oversized cylindrical cannons from the shoulders, clamped together and firing from the same fuel sources built into them, an array of guns at the robot's back and all stacked together to point outwards, a set of giant miniguns that fired explosive grenades and more weapons, as many as he could remember putting in it. All those weapons fired kinetic based ordnance, and by firing them at once he hoped to push him out of the way of the missile-building, because falling to his death and turning his suit into a bomb on the way seemed preferable to being hit in the face with a building. He readied himself, forming the mental trigger-

And Kevin suddenly radiated pure aggression, red-hot and so intense in his sudden struggle for his own mind that it threw Kimblee's thoughts and distracted him, and the moment was lost. To make things worse, his enemies noticed his new weapons and took action, firing pinpoint blasts at the points where the weapons had emerged from the giant robot. The impacts rocked Kimblee and the blasts struck home, hitting where they affixed to the Umbra Eternis and blasting right off, spinning into the air and flying away, sucked into the jetstream and away from him. He spun around, the sudden weight loss disorienting him, and there wasn't much he could have done to stop the blast that hit him point-blank and launched him ahead towards the flying building, helpless to stop it. Over Ghostfreak's frantic screams and Kevin's self-satisfied chuckling, Kimblee noticed that the ship flew down towards the loosened weapons (now deactivated and inert) and caught them, it's cargo bay doors opening and letting the weapons fall in with only a little bouncing from the sudden weight. The doors closed, and with a new supply of weapons freshly secured the ship was back on track, still flying after him and accelerating, and Kimblee wondered what they could possibly want the weapons for.

The missile-building was looming, less than forty-five seconds from impact, and the heat from it's friction-burn was boiling the air, burning his skin and hair, and the Heartless were recoiling from it as well but for different reasons. Now somewhat alarmed at it's closeness, Kimblee started to sweat...and realized that the slickness on his body wasn't just sweat. He looked at the red substance coating his clothing and said, even though he should had more important things on his mind, "Alright, I really should have investigated this sooner but what is this substance?"

Looks like that weird crap your boss injected into me but was also you, Kevin said. And just saying that makes me feel stupid. What idiot thought that making your semi-immortal by turning you into a soul-in-a-syringe was a good idea?

"It was Professor Hojo's idea, and really that answers everything right there...wait, why am I telling you?" Kimblee said, annoyed. "And I thought it had been terribly clever. Than again, I may have been a bit drunk at the time." He thought fast. "Damn it, your body must have been rejecting it. Those energies you were infused with, they could have been interacting with it in an unforeseen way; no wonder I was able to assert more control when I wasn't accessing the shapeshifting powers, espicially after they were released from me. And it's a moot issue, given enough time your body may well reject my consciousness or at the very least the serum, leaving my consciousness stuck in your body without a means to remove myself, and...wait, why am I telling this to you? Talking to you has never been anything but a disappointment and distraction, and God damn it the building is thirty-two seconds away from me!"

...Huh, so it is, Kevin agreed. Ghostfreak did the mental equivilant of a facepalm. Behind them, Zim's ship got out of the way in a hurry, zipping under Kimblee and doing it's best to turn around and keep up with them.

Kimblee stared sullenly into the incoming building, now so close he could count the individal cracks on the roof if he wished to. The heat so intense that he could feel his hair smoldering, he ignored it and sighed, trying to think of something cool to say. Nothing came to mind, and all he could say was the most persistent thought in his head. "Today," he said. "Was a complete and total waste of time." His arms aching and still controlled enough by Kevin to refuse to respond, he closed his eyes and the Umbra Eternis acted on it's own, fulfilling it's instinctual drive to protect Kimblee by pulling it's arm over him and curling up tightly.

And, at last, the weaponized news studio that had sent the transmission that had lured Kimblee into this battle did the job of finishing the fight it had begun, as was only appropiate. It had tricked him into sending all his forces at them in an ultimately futile attempt to kill his nemesis Scar and bring up his personal body count a bit higher, forcing him to expend all his resources and pushing him into a battle where he had succeeded in killing no one else but instead making him lose his precious Philosopher's Stone and slowy whittle down the strength of his machine-titan, destroying the Heartless allies he had summoned; all of that had begun with that news studio and the people who had commandeered it, and when it at long crashed headlong into the Umbra Eternis with a massive impact that carried it onward, with such force that even the immovable object that Kimblee had imagined his defenses to amount to were not enough to save itself, it was with a sense of the battle coming full circle.

In general, a perfect defense trumped immense force, but happily this was not the case this day. The Umbra Eternis could do nothing to save itself and was hit by the roof of the news studio so hard that the Umbra Eternis was drilled right through and stuck halfway out, the walls smashing into it at such speeds that it was like being smashed into a slab of pure kinetic force that would have torn a less sturdy machine into shreddings. And for all of the strength it had displayed, the Umbra Eternis no longer held enough of that strength to withstand this attack, not after the long battle had taken it's too, and in that very first impact it's crude animating mind was first battered senseless and then mercifully extinguished when the mechanical components of the thinking engines in it's skull were crushed by the impact. The Umbra Eternis died then, it's mechanical body freezing in place as the Umbral Heartless swarmed around inside it, parts of it still moving in a last sad gasp of imitated mechanical life.

The rooftop effectively imploded and the next layer smashed on through, crashing into the Umbra Eternis and shoving some very heavy machinery and reinforced building materials into it's face. It struck so powerfully that the backlash hit a few misfired circuits in it's circulation systems and a small explosion went off in it's lower body, tearing it's hips off-kilter and twisted the entire lower body around, the armor dented and almost breaking from the stress, and the left leg snapped at the joints, smashing back into the main body by the continual forces hammering it over and over again like a particularily vindictive hammer.

The floor pummeled the Umbra Eternis senseless, and the next two after at did the same, and the floor after that had a great deal of technical equipment among the things Calvin had rigged with explosives, and when the Umbra Eternis hit them, they went off with sufficient force that, combined with the enormous pressures from the building's assault, bent the Umbra Eternis' arm in half and a errant metal edge from it's armor sliced Kimblee nearly from shoulder to hip, and he was literally a few inches from being horribly disembowled. He didn't appreciate his luck, having already blacked out from the pain of the constant backlashes inflicted on the Umbra Eternis as it was drilled through the building, more carefully set explosives combining with the sheer power that a rocket-propelled building tends to posess and the resultant shockwaves shredding it's internal equipment to useless bits.

The building was tearing apart around it, the walls flying away as they did their work in bringing it closer to a final death bit by explosive bit, and as it did the building flew onward with it's doomed foe carried with it, aimed at the location where all this mess had started. Heat and force and pressure combined to grind the Umbra Eternis' vaunted defenses down. Earlier, it might have been able to withstand this, and that was a big 'what if', and it was a pointless question, given that it had been damaged enough that those defenses no longer mattered now. Bits of armor were being shredded off, and while it wasn't much, chunks of wall fired at sub-sonic speeds were shoved into them and through the Umbra Eternis, dozens of such piercings done in moments.

The Umbral Heartless fought as hard and as long as they could, trying their very damned hardest to endure; in their present state, it was all they could do. They were only capable of holding on to the fabric of the world they had been pulled into, pulling tight on the concept of the unstoppable predator Kimblee had unwittingly cast them into, their shattered essences clinging onto this last desperate chance to remain, to take vengeance and feed on everything they could kill to fill up the gaping abyss within themselves. They lasted long enough for some measure of credit to be given them, even with the play of powers that were twisting the Umbra Eternis into a ragged mess and crushing it afterwards, but they still only lasted up to the point where it smashed into the room where the transmission had been filled, for some of the building's primary back-up generators had been located right under that floor, and when the Umbra Eternis hit them they went up in a terrific blast, and the battered Umbra Eternis could only take so much and the Heartless much less, and in that blast they were finally and mercifully wiped away from the world, their essences disengaging and flying back to the terrible and empty realm they had been called from.

The smoke and fire and flying rubble made by the Umbra Eternis being smashed through the news studio were briefly met with the smog-like form the Heartless sometimes became when they died, and then that too faded away in moments. And still the building kept pulverizing the fallen machine-titan, it's flight taking it into a downwards arc. The Umbra Eternis was shoved forward deeper into the building, it's arm hanging on by threads and cables and most of it's armor severely banged up but otherwise intact. It went sideways through a floor, was flipped around when it hit the next, and it's head was twisted almost completely around by the power of it's next impact, Kimblee, now a bruised and bleeding wreck just barely clinging to consciousness, failed to Zim's ship now behind them and following the missile-building as closely as they dared, continuously stantly shooting blasts at all the bits of rubble that fell from the weaponized news studio, vaporizing them and stopping so much as a single piece of it from hitting anyone or causing more collateral damage (apart from the obvious bit caused by weaponizing a news studio in the first place).

And then, it smashed through the last floor (the basement were Calvin had done the most vital of his weaponizing work) and the news studio's furious assault on Kimblee at last ended when he and his giant robot impacted the generators and other power supply things that Calvin had overclocked to both turn the building into a giant missile and operate as that missile's explosive payload: he struck it with all the acclumated energy the Umbra Eternis had been hit with during it's impact with the news studio. Kimblee had a brief moment, before he finally blacked out, of appreciating the irony of a final explosion, greater than any of the others and at the very least an equal of one he could have made himself, being the thing to finally defeat him here.

That explosion was mighty indeed, painting the sky a bizarre and fetching array of weird colors from all the different fuels that had gone into the explosive packages, and the immense shockwave from it vaporized what was left of the building (a few well-placed shot by Zim and his ship's guns finishing any errant pieces) and then the light cleared, leaving a short-lived smokecloud behind, and somewhere near the bottom of the smokecloud a charred and largely intact metal husk blasted away, falling in the same arc the news studio had been pushed into. To the ground it descended, trailing smoke like a comet's tail, and Zim's ship followed it like a extraordinarily persistent predator determined to finish the job.

Zim noticed only then precisely where it was going to crash, and he deemed it seemed appropiate that it would end at the place where all of it had begun. His ship moved after the fallen machine-titan, eager to meet it.

...

Presently and blissfully oblivious to the totally awesome happenings with Kimblee, Morte had found himself winding up doing something he was actually good at but wasn't particularily pleased with, as requested by Armstrong after he deemed Morte to be espicially suited for this task: distracting people by telling them the most interesting anecdotes he could think of so they didn't go off and try to rush into what was probably a delicate situation. "...And, bearing in mind the flaw of gaining power by grafting the parts of Vecna to yourself by first cutting off that part of yourself and grafting Vecna's bits to the stump, that's the third least-borning version of the time I got at least sixteen villains killed by claiming I was the Head of Vecna!" Morte finished.

His captive audience's reactions varied, and the ensuing arguments were even more of an effective deterent towards action that giving them something to do. "Yeah, sounds about right," Captain Razor said, having done his best to get the on-site and non-hospitalized members of the Foster's security doing so productive and now settling in for just hanging around and being very awkward about the whole 'Foster's being totally wrecked' thing. (He and his fellow officers were being admirably stoic after they had seen what was left of Foster's, except for Andre who was pretty blase about the whole thing.

Freya was more skeptical. "Who in the world would be stupid enough to cut off their own head and replace it with what they were told is the former head of a godlike mage who ascended into true godly power?"

"Hy t'ink it sounds good for a laugh or two," Andre said, proving Freya's point. "And I ran vith a few masters who would have done it just for laughs."

"Another rousing tale of evil being smote by it's own foolishness!" Armstrong declared passionately. "What say you, fellow random citizens and refugees!"

"I've heard worse," Mr. Herrimen said, sitting in a wheelchair and being dutifully pushed around by Eduardo the ogre. "But then, and I do apologize, I've certainly heard better."

"I thought it was pretty awesome," Ron Stoppable said. On his shoulder, Rufus shrugged.

"It was a little too farfetched for me," Kim added.

"Meh, it was okay," Danny Fenton said, giving a 'so-so' gesture with his hand. The rest of his crew. As he and his friends Sam and Tucker were sitting atop Appa in the crowd, this gave them a measure of influence due to how impressive they looked and several people revised their opinions to match up with theirs.

"YOU SUCK!" A number of revitalized and former victims of the Philosopher's Stone shouted, still a bit filled with hostility towards people that annoyed them after their ordeal.

Morte grimaced. Sort of. "Ingrates."

As news spread that Morte was done with his anecdote, others became even more vocal about their dislike. "Oh thank God, he finally shut up," Pants-Man Audrey said, clapping in relief. "I don't think I could take more insipid babbling about stories that don't actually go anywhere and don't make even the slightest amount of sense. Are you sure you're not making this stuff up?"

"As sure as I am that it makes no damn sense for us to be hanging around and having a party like this," Morte said. Around him, a full-fledged celebration was unfolding and somehow planned by whoever's idea the party was to also have each act of partying assist in reconstruction in some fashion; there was a bunch of men hauling around the larger chunks of rubble so they could climb up and hang a generic party banner that someone had hastily scribbed 'Hooray, We're Not Dead!', someone had installed a giant disco ball-and-speaker that doubled as both as an automated DJ and a display for coordinating the efforts through the specific patterns of light it displayed. And of course there were those kids that were dancing around an effigy they were burning (for some reason) right in a heat-powered truck equipped with a shovel it used to clear the larger debris out of the way and into a neat pile where Foster's had once been. For some reason an awful lot of the rubble was going around Foster's, and that made Morte a bit suspicious.

"Point," Razor remarked. "But this isn't the real party. This is just work. And a preliminary for the real party. Which will take place following reconstruction of Foster's later today."

Morte couldn't blink, but he managed a long stare at Razor. "...That easy, huh?"

"That easy," Razor confirmed with a sly, knowing grin.

Morte gave him a suspicious look. The anthropoid cat declined to elaborate, so Morte dropped it.

The restless crowd got impatient with the conversation. "SAY SOMETHING COOL!" Someone yelled.

"Hey, a minute ago you were all going on about how lame I am," Morte said, a touch offended.

"That was then, this is now, NOW ENTERTAIN US!" Another someone whined.

Morte rolled his eyes, and in doing so was in the same position as about a dozen other or so people that that noticed a bright spot in a sky that was suddenly a lot less darker than it had been for the past half-hour or so. He peered at it, feeling the phantom-feeling prickles of long-since lost muscles that should have been sliding over his skull in a frown, and saw that it was getting closer. He also knew a good distraction when he knew it. "Hey! Everybody, look over there!"

People looked around, bored and very eager for any kind of distraction from the still depressing scene. Danny looked around. "What are you talking about?" Morte bobed his head up. Danny looked and saw the bright spot, now apparent as a large falling object that was on fire and coming right for them. "Oh, that." Danny blinked slowly as everyone caught sight of it and started panicking. "Guess we should move, huh?"

"Hmm," Armstrong said. "That would certainly be an efficient move."

"KIMBLEE'S BACK!" Ron shouted with surprising accuracy, grabbing Pants-Man Audrey and shaking him frantically. "FEEL FREE TO PANIC AT ANY TIME. DON'T YOU WORRY, I ALREADY GOT A HEADSTART ON THE PANICKING!" Audrey put a oversized hand on his face, muffling him a bit, and he gripped Ron's face and dragged him off to what appeared to be safety, hoping he wasn't earning Kim's displeasure. (The woman was frightful when she was angry.)

The various officers and agents of the factions present - Peace Marines in their longcoats and naval attire; Crossguards in their non-denominational trenchcoats; Peerage representatives in their mini-mechas with walking plant minions; the host of the independants who registered with the Free League for census reasons even though they didn't really count as a faction - immediately got up. The competent ones took positions in readying to protect the hospital and the Foster's grounds from further attack or evacuating the people there. The incompetent ones just freaked out and ran like idiots. The competent ones shook their heads at this disgraceful behavior and silently added their idiot brethern to the list of 'people to protect' and decided to have words with their superiors over this, perhaps reassigning the panickers to a less stressful post. (Like kitten handling, or a hug examination facility.)

In short order, the grounds of Foster's were cleared and it was pretty lucky too, considering that the falling object crashed hard enough to hit the ground with a tremendous blast that tore the nearby trees to splinters, scattering them all over and uprooting a few more. Shockwaves tore up the ground for about a mile, growing less drastic as it went out, so the worst that happened was the Foster's rubble got a little more ruined and a lot of people were knocked around. The downed object kept going after it hit the ground, rolling forward and tearing through the dirt, digging a shallow path behind it and bouncing a few times before it came to a stop, the flames still burning and a few patches of ground on fire that were quickly doused by a few attendents who had the foresight to have brought hydro pump packs and fire hoses. Those same people turned the hoses on the burning object, putting out the fires, and as soon as the steam made from the superheated metal went out, the people who hadn't panicked got a little closer to see what it was.

Morte, being of a mood to show that he wasn't a total coward, was one of them, and he was the first to get a really good look at it. "The hell?" He said. "It's a busted-up robot!"

"Actually, it's a busted-up giant robot," said Agatha Heterodyne, who had finished fighting Heartless elsewhere and had arrived to oversee the reconstruction and humanitarian efforts.

"Eh, it's a distinction without a difference," Morte retorted, and further commentary was derailed by another wind stirring up the ashes on the grounds and making a suitably dramatic scene as another strange thing appeared; Morte turned around, attracted by a fresh outbreak of interested chatter, and saw an odd-looking rattletrap ship flying in from where the robot had come from, coming to a stop a short distance from the downed robot so abruptly that it bounced and crashed onto the ground, thankfully without any damage. It hit the ground at an angle, and the cargo doors were now propped open.

Danny came over, accompanied by Kim and Ron. (Audrey was being helpful, and Kim was taking her chances with being on the front line here. Ron was just along for the ride.) "That has got to be some of the worst piloted I've ever seen," Kim muttered to Ron, a bit tactlessly. (And hypocritically, given her driving habits.)

A loudspeaker buzzed on the ship, which Morte realized was in the perfect position to shield people from the robot if the robot got back up and started hitting people again. "I heard that!" Two familiar voices boomed out.

Kim's jaw dropped. Ron blinked. Morte's jaw literally fell off him. "Little loud guy! New Boss?" Morte said after he flitted back to the ground to retrieve his missing mandible. "You gotta be zoggin' kidding me."

The ship powered down, and after a short wait, the cargo doors were forced all the way open. Morte had a brief image of a orange-furred shape behind them before Zim slid out, waving triumphantly. As luck had it, people had stopped panicking after it became apparent that nothing bad was happening, and lots of people cheered on the basis that they were being waved at. Calvin came next, looking a little dizzy. Zuko put a hand on his shoulder and steered him off the cargo's rampway, and got him over to a tree to help balance him. Hobbes was the last of the crew to walk out, and from the looks of it, he had been holding the doors open. Fortunately, they stayed open this time. Courtney, Beth and Winry came out next, the latter two carrying Jarod with his arms over their shoulders, Beth doing so more easily than Winry due to her powered armor.

"Gentlemen, BEHOLD!" Zim said, waving the Keyblade and producing a chaotic stream of lightbursts that exploded overhead into very unexpected but awesome fireworks that got the remaining attention of everyone and certainly impressed on them that here was a good guy (it was a rare villain that announced himself with fireworks, and certainly not in such a manner); it helped that the fireworks spelled out 'I AM AWESOME' and a small arrow pointing down at Zim and his crew. Zim glanced up, wondering how the hell he'd done that. "And gentlewomen, also behold! And other genders if you have them, we're not picky. Anyway, behold, I TOTALLY BEAT KIMBLEE! Who is right over there, totally defenseless and stuff."

"You mean I beat Kimblee," Calvin pointed out. "Or my cunning plan did, anyway."

"Shush, you're ruining the moment."

The crowd, a large assembly of people who had been hurt badly by Kimblee one way or another for they had lost their home to him even if they hadn't been temporarily killed and utilized by him or a loved one or friend had been, stared at Zim. To a man (or whatever), they gaped at the small and peculiar-looking Irken who bore the scars of a long and brutal fight he had clearly come out only just barely on the winning side, the rest of his crew nearly as beaten up. Courtney, Beth, Winry and Jarod, realizing that they might be lumped in with Zim's crew and not sure if they liked the idea, quietly shuffled aside and assimilated into the crowd to find Jarod proper medical attention and also so Courtney could mourn her news studio. And possibly plot revenge with her other coworkers.

A new mood went through the crowd like a slow-motion ripple, picking up speed only gradually, but by the time it became evident to Zim the ripple had became a wave, and the crowd was all too eager to succumb to that wave, and they abruptly rushed forward, screaming and shouting and totally madly gleeful, too confused on the circumstances to be sure of what to do but reasonably clear on general procedure in this event. Just to be sure, Armstrong reminded them: "THE VILLAIN THAT DID HEINOUS DAMAGE TO OUR TOWN AND OURSELVES HAS BEEN DEFEATED! YOU KNOW WHAT THIS MEANS!"

"CELEBRATION PHASE TWO IS A-GO!" Ron cheered.

Everyone screamed something like 'WHOO!' and immediately began cheering Zim and his crew, people rushing in small groups and gatherings to congratulate them and find out more. Zuko blinked, the praise unsettling him, but he got over it and smirked, waving awkwardly to the people that came over and squealed excitedly, demanding his autograph just in case he wound up being famous and cool and stuff. Hobbes was all too pleased to find out that he was the sudden focus of interest to quite a lot of girls and people who immediately pinned him for a knight in spite of the lack of any significant regalia. Calvin was just as upbeat about a number of people lifting him up on their shoulders, giving him congratulating fist-bumps and back-slaps in a display of needless melodrama that he easily outdid in sheer dramatics just through his voice volume. (Plus, he was wearing mad science gadgets. That always got attention.) Zim had his hand shaken by all manner of people that came right out of nowhere to him, in a big hurry to crowd around him and see just who had beaten the big bad guy this time and be the first to tell their friends that they had met the hero of the day (an important tradition in Traverse Town).

Morte stared, jaw hanging open. "Okay," He said. "What. The. Hells." He shook his head and hovered over through the crowd, pushing quite a lot of people out of his way even though some of them were absolutely huge compared to him, shoving them like they weighed as much as wet bags; not espicially simple, but he was more than strong enough for it, shockingly enough. "Boss!" He called out, finding Zim among a bunch of people who weren't doing much but were just kind of there. "You're still alive! What the hell happened up there?"

Zim started to answer, but Appa trundled through the crowd and people got out of his way in a hurry. Danny slipped off the Sky Bison and tottered over, looking almost too weak to move but too insanely stubborn to lay down. "Little buddy!" He croaked, phasing right through anyone in his way and seizing Zim in a fierce hug. "You're alive!"

"Eurgh!" Zuko yelped as Appa bellowed with happiness, lunging at him and cheerily licking him like a giant dog. "Down, bison! Down, I say! Okay, okay, I'm glad to see you too!"

"Yes, yes, I'm alive, celebrate with feasts in my honor!" Zim wriggled out of Danny's grasp, looking incredibly uncomfortable. "Geez, calm down, you'll give yourself the brainworms or whatever lazy malady humans get."

Danny wavered on his feet (literally, he went a bit transparent for a moment or two) and finally fell onto his backside, still staring at Zim with a pleased sort of exhausation. "You're alive," He whispered, grinning faintly. "You're alive, you're still alive..."

Zim looked uncomfortable. "As are you. Focus on that, will you? You'll feel better, trust me!" Danny looked doubtful about that, but the groaning noise of metal against metal interrupted any further comments from him. Zim whirled around and saw that the broken and beaten shape of the robot was moving around like a mortally wounded beast too hurt to get up. "Oh. He's still not dead. JUST AS PLANNED."

"Oh come on, I should be saying that! It was my plan!" Calvin said irritably.

"'Him'? 'He'?" Morte said. He looked at the beaten robot, looked at the wary glances Zuko and Hobbes kept directing at it, and he put the details together. "Is that the Kimblee guy?"

"Yeah, I already said so!" Zim said.

The people celebrating around them froze. "Did he say 'Kimblee'?" Someone asked.

"Solf J. Kimblee, the guy that started all this?" asked Captain Razor angrily.

"The same guy that murdered all those people back in his own world and didn't learn the lesson?" Someone else said.

"Kimblee...?" The name was becoming a quiet and insistent murmuring as the crowd collectively worked something out. "Kimblee..."

"Kimblee...!"

"Kimblee!"

"KIMBLEE!" Quite a few people screamed in outraged fury, having not really processed that the man himself was sitting right there as indicated by Zim in the heat of their excitement that the battle was over. "Kimblee! Kimblee! Kim-blee!"

"Uh oh, sounds like a riot situation," Calvin said, getting away from his supporters before they could go into full mob-mode or something.

"Wait, what?" Danny said. "I'm sorry I'm getting on in the 'stopping the mob' thing we do at times like this, but what happened back there? How'd he get in a robot? Where did he get a robot? How did it get beaten up? Where are the rest of the guys? And where'd you get a ship!"

"It's a long story-" Zim started to say.

"Kimblee summoned the robot," Zuko said, finally getting away from Appa by distracting him with the very large punch bowl someone had left out. "He made it from other robots. We spent most of this time whittling it down and Calvin turned a building into a guided rocket that defeated it and brought it here for some reason. And a guy called Cyborg made the ship for us for some reason." He nodded, looking satisfied with himself. Appa charged over, knocking people aside in his haste to get over to Zuko and bumped him to the ground, nuzzling the young Fire Lord affectionately. Zim caught sight of Zuko's face, just barely visible out of a small part of the fuzz, and he didn't seem particularily upset about it.

"Okay, so the story is much briefer when Zuko tells it," Zim concluded.

"Oh." Danny looked uncertain again. "So...did we, I don't know, win?" At this the crowd hesitated, the mob mentality freezing as they realized that they might just wind up being in the position of being the big crowd of enemies that got blown up by the revived villain.

"Technically, yes, I can't see most people getting up from what we did to him, but...eh, that's mainly hard to say," Zim said. The Umbra Eternis trembled again, and it's arm slid away from it's front, the fuselage warped and bent but still miraculously intact by some combination of it's incredible toughness and sheer luck, and within it was, of course, Kimblee. The man was still alive, beaten more than halfway to death and very much unconscious. Inexplicably quite a lot of him was covered in the same sort of metal as the Umbra Eternis, a metal that shattered off his body as they watched. Zim didn't get any time to wonder when Kimblee suddenly had matter absorbing powers (perhaps related to the shapeshifting ones from earlier) when the man moved. People flinched and some screamed, but all he did was wriggle his arms a bit, making a few interesting noises, and then made a quite inasupicious 'meep' and promptly fell into proper unconsciousness, this time for real. He fell out of the Umbra Eternis, sliding down the side of it and hitting his head again on the way down in such a way that would have knocked him out if he weren't already unconscious and landed squarely on his back next to it's arm; brusied, bloody, burned, battered and beaten.

Everyone, Zim and his crew and errant passengers and crowd alike, stared at Kimblee. Kimblee twitched a bit, and did nothing else; not dead, against all the rules of common sense and logic and fairness, but still unconscious and very definitely, finally defeated. There was silence, tight with swelling glee and the tension dying until Zuko broke it entirely. "Yeah, he's out."

Zim nudged him. "Fellow adventurer, learn some drama!" More loudly, Zim screamed to the crowd and raised his hands, firing a few jets of flame into the air jubilantly. "WE DID IT! WE WON!"

The crowd looked from Zim's crew to Kimblee and back again. They once again expressed their approval via shouting and cheering before abruptly cutting off, staring intently at Kimblee, the man who had done so much evil to them in so short a time. Furious discussion engaged in the crowd on the whole subject of lynching the bastard right then and there or just throwing him into a sub-space vault with all the other evil jerks, with Andre and most of the surviving imaginary friends (except for Wilt and Eduardo and Mr. Herrimen, of course) pretty heavily on that side, while cooler heads (most prominently Captains Razor and Armstrong) insisted on due process and proper trials and then throwing him into a sub-space vault with all the other evil jerks. The more sensible heads prevailed and the crowd reluctantly stood down. There was some grumbling, but overall the mood of the crowd amounted to 'eh, good enough, now let's get back to PARTYING!'.

The rest of Zim's crew relaxed enormously at not needing to deal with another angry mob, and even more happy that the fight had finally ended all because of their efforts: Calvin punched the air and whooped victoriously, getting dizzy and laying back down in a hurry. Zuko imitated Zim's gesture, making only a single fire that was still better than Zim's. Hobbes clapped gleefully, like a little child getting presents. Morte gaped again, but this time it was from happy shock instead of disbelief. "Holy crap, you actually pulled it off!" He said, and even though he was always grinning, his grin was more genuine now.

"You dare a note of surprise?" Zim said haughtily, but still grinned, and the crowd celebrated, a good number of them splitting off to find food and drink and throw it at people in the proscribed fashion acceptable in these moments. Tired, Zim sat down with the Keyblade in hand, looking faintly unsettled about something. He tilted his head, stood up again, and went over to Kimblee; a thought persisted in his head that this had to be finished, but since Kimblee was clearly out of it, he didn't know why he felt so compelled, like sparks of light were buzzing in the back of his and pressing him onward.

Zim stood and walked to Kimblee, staring at him once he was right next to him. He tilted his head from side to side, watching the Keyblade gently moving around by itself while his hand was gripping it and dragged around by it. It was eerily like watching a dog sniffing around for an elusive scent. Light flickered around it, much as it had during their fight, but instead of the violently bright contrails of randomized color these were mostly a gentler white edged with faint traces of green and blue, and Zim assumed there was a significance to this. As they passed over Kimblee, the colors turned more muted for a moment, and with a faint shifting that reminded him of something probing deeper into something and being colored by the depths, the colors turned a fearful shade of a yellow tinged with indigo. It made for some pretty interesting shading.

As the colors passed over him, Kimblee turned slightly. His eyes flickered, and he looked up at Zim as though from a great distance, eyebrows narrowing at Zim like he he was trying to make him out from a long distance away. Kimblee grunted, his arms moving slightly, and then they dropped, too exhausted to move. Zim poked him with the Keyblade and grinned as he said, "We're not done yet, you and I."

Kimblee opened an eye as much as he could. With the heavy bruised swelling his eyes nearly shut, it was a good effort. "Beh?" He mumbled, dislocated jaw doing a poor feat of communicating properly.

Zim clicked his tongue once, unsure of what to do next or how to proceed. He could feel something, a insistent stirring that he wasn't sure came from the Keyblade. It was coming from Kimblee of all people, and he wasn't sure how to identify the sensation; the best he could think of was a choice between sitting on incredibly complex threads that made up the world and feeling someone bouncing slightly out of place on them, or that he could almost see someone at the periphery of his vision that Kimblee had been violently superimposed over. Neither was strictly accurate, but Zim was familiar with the idea that some things had enormous difficulty being communicated to sentient minds; he was a bit disgruntled at actually experiencing such a thing. He remembered the other in Kimblee who had briefly tried to get Zim to kill him before Kimblee could take over, and the desperate unconcern for his own well-being.

It didn't seem right to kill someone who wanted to die to stop a maniac, even if that someone wanted to be killed. And Zim had already seen enough of people dying to last him a long time.

Kimblee's eyes closed and cracked open again, and it was not Kimblee who looked through them. "Hey," that not-Kimblee voiced croaked, face shifting strangely, that red not-blood fluid positively gushing from him. "You won."

"Yes," Zim said warily. "I did."

As the fluid fell away, Kimblee's body grew a little smaller and paler. His features twisted up and began settling into a different pattern, looking like someone else entirely. Some of the damage reverted in the process, and Not-Kimblee managed a small broken laugh. "...Nice. Can't believe I'm not dead yet."

Zim frowned. "Why do you want to die so badly? And who are you?"

"...'m just a half-human freak who got seriously unlucky," Not-Kimblee said, looking surprised that Zim wanted to know. "And dying would have stopped Kimblee from using my body to do all that stupid crap, so..." He wasn't capable of moving on his own, but he still managed a small shift of his shoulders that was almost a shrug. "Can't believe I didn't die from all that anyway. My powers picked a great time to kick in, didn't they? Probably gonna die from getting hit as bad as I did anyway." That almost-shrug again, and it seemed to say, No great loss.

Zim's jaw tightened. He couldn't say anything for a moment, and he almost said, I'm sorry. Stopping other people from dying had been the point of this whole self-appointed mission. He had seen enough of dying this last week alone to last him the rest of his indefinably lifespan, and he had killed enough before he had been shown how sad and pathetic he really was. Killing people, even in the service of the right and proper thing, was something Zim had become considerably uncomfortable with in normal circumstances, not least because of Aang's example and the usual vauge impulse to outdo his friends somehow. (But outdoing Aang's technical pacifism was probably impossible for most people.) The death of anyone else, was something to be deemed dirty business and regretted, and atoned for.

But Zim was tired of regrets; he had over a hundred years worth of regrets to bully his conscience with, and he had decided a long time ago that he would live this new life free of regrets. That he would do absolutely whatever he had to do to live unburdened no matter what the cost was for him life and limb. He swallowed the miserable apology, and glanced down at the Keyblade, thinking that there had to be another way.

He stared at the Keyblade, barely aware of Zuko and Hobbes asking Morte what the hell was going on and not getting any satisfactory answers. The Keyblade, Zim remembered, the weapon that had been described in extremely frustrating and vauge mystical terms, that was supposedly capable of vast and incomprehensible feats outside of anything he had ever experienced. It had, they had told him, spiritually grafted itself for a reason. There was a purpose for it's raising him to the level of exalted heroes, he had been told, and he didn't see much of a better purpose than preventing one more horrible regret from happening right in front of him.

His grip tightened around it's hilt, the warm of the Keyblade rising to a less-than-gentle heat less intense than the force that had burned his hands earlier. It wasn't so different from the fire that he had recently learned to control, and he grinned at the thought. The Keyblade had imbued him with the ability to Firebend, or something very much like it, and Zuko had told him repeatedly that this was flat-out impossible. The Keyblade had the power to cut down monsters that everyone in this town seemed to treat as nameless horrors from the darkest corners of space, and the ability to undo any lock whether it was a literal lock or not. There was no reason, he thought, that it couldn't do one more impossible thing today, and he slowly raised the Keyblade, with no clear idea of what he intended to do aside from an image of the person whose body Kimblee had somehow stolen lying dead on the ground and the powerful thought of Do not let that become reality. "Zim?" Zuko said warily. "What are you doing?"

"...I have no idea," Zim said, the light flowing into him from where the Keyblade had somehow grafted itself to his very soul. He pointed the Keyblade at Kimblee's body, Not-Kimblee staring up at him with a detached interest, and at the periphery of his vision Zim saw the restless crowd watching him to see what he was doing. The Keyblade buzzed in his hand, and Zim had the impression that he was supposed to give it something to work with, a focused intent or something mystical and stupid like that. Think, he told himself, trying to concentrate in spite of him not having the slighest idea what he was doing, what he was supposed to do or even how to do anything at all. Think! What must I do to fix this? How can I best resolve this? It was happening so suddenly, everything was unexpected and he didn't know what to do, his body ached and his hand still screamed lingering pain from the Keyblade's power-induced burns from earlier, and he didn't know how he was supposed to fix this new thing, if he was just going to seperate Kimblee and his victim or what-

Zim stared blankly into space, and a solution became clear to him. Ah, he thought smugly. Of course.

He still didn't know if the Keyblade was alive or not, but a sensation of approval flowed from a within-that-was-not-within this plan seemed to meet with approval from it's dubious intelligence, and the Keyblade swung down on it's own, flying over to Not-Kimblee and Zim was so surprised by it he almost lost his grip on it, and it was bad enough just clinging on to it and being dragged through the grass, digging his heels into the ground and getting to his feet a short distance from Not-Kimblee, the Keyblade still flashing and buzzing in his hands, now pointing at Not-Kimblee's chest, glowing first faintly and rapidly glowing brighter, a pale blue radiance tinged with greenish-yellow in random spots.

Not-Kimblee stared at the Keyblade's light as it washed over him, his open eye blinking with obviously pained slowness. "Dude," He whispered, mouth dropping in an expression of childlike awe that looked extremely strange on Kimblee's face. (Okay, it didn't look exactly like Kimblee's face anymore but it was still close enough to freak Zim out.) "That feels...nice..."

Zim grunted in response; all his attention was focused on a pulling sensation, subleter perceptions taking precedence and his mind struggling to translate it into sometihng he could handle it this wound up with his looking at Not-Kimblee and for a moment he didn't see a human bordering on death but a-

Well. He didn't know what he thought he saw. His first thought was that part of him was looking at what Kimblee's body was made of on the same cosmic scale of reality that the Keyblade operated on, unimaginable numbers of threads made of the pure quintessence that made up the basic building blocks of reality before being spun into the forms that he as a material being actually experienced, and that there were two competing forms right there cohabiting the same space; one of them was maimed, hurt and bleeding on a level that went beyond the merely physical but otherwise whole (except for a peculiar bur of prickly psychic energy that felt something Danny was probably more suited to deal with), but the other, which he presumed to indicate Kimblee, was a twisted-up bundle of psychotic motion in misleading stillness, large chunks of it left out as if something vital had been left out and only gradually filling in now, and hooks of psychic energy extended from it into the smaller presence to bind them together and impose itself upon it in a dominant fashion.

Zim stared it for a brief moment, fascinated by the sight. He was aware that he was almost certainly not looking at the nature of the two personalities he was dealing with but a dumbed-down version that was suitable for his mind to process, and when he thought about it, the sense of what he was looking at wavered, Kimblee's true body bleeding back into view here and there, and he had to focus on the magical perception filtering through. "Okay," he said, getting a better idea of what he should do. "Okay! Those spots, here and there..." He peered closely at where Kimblee's psychic hooks (or whatever they really were) met Not-Kimblee's essence, and while most of those 'hooks' had dispersed to mingle with the other psychic presence, they were mostly obvious as the cruel mental invasion they were and in a few places had disengaged entirely to leave Kimblee floating freely, no doubt to die without a body of his own when this stolen body finally expired.

Looking at...well, whatever it was he was looking at it, Zim got a rough image of how badly Kimblee's body was hurt, and felt a swell of vindictive pleasure at his suffering. Viewing it seemed to transmit the essential details even though he had no idea what he was looking at, and he tracked a few faint spots that looked the most important to the hooked bits where Kimblee had latched onto Not-Kimblee. Wondering for a moment if there was a way to force all the damage onto Kimblee so that he alone would suffer, Zim allowed the Keyblade to release some of the power it was harnessing and a small surge of light flashed from the glow around him, washing over Not-Kimblee. Zim heard a faint sighing sound, and some of the hooks shrank away, already damaged, and he just knew that something had changed. A sense of sudden sureness radiated into him, transmitted into him, and Zim glanced suspiciously at the Keyblade, for that certainly had come from outside him. Dismissing the problematic implications for the moment, Zim pointed the Keyblade at what seemed to be the best areas to begin, and paused; the Keyblade kept moving a bit on it's own, and it seemed that it knew what it was doing. Before he could follow that through, the Keyblade moved on it's own, pointing at a disturbing mingling of essences where Kimblee's inhumanly still psychic presence was a murky mass choking the turbulent form of Not-Kimblee, and light flashing around it and struck down into that spot, pushig it around and pulling it apart...

Not-Kimblee flinched. He made a faint noise of astonished shock, and Zim saw past the image to see Not-Kimblee writhing in place, spots of unmarked flesh here and there and the flesh of his shoulder bulging out beseeching and then a hand sliding out from there, his body twisting places as if another was emerging from him, and-

Zim grimaced, trying not to look too closely and somewhat aware of the various nosies of disgust from the crowd, and a few expressed notions of interest. (From Calvin in his group for starters, though Morte mentioned that he'd seen grosser things then that and biological fusions had gotten pretty stale.) His mind made up even though he had no idea what was going on, he let go of all resistence he had been holding towards the Keyblade's power. Just make this work, he thought grimly, and felt a surge of what might have been satisfaction from that burning mass of light within him and held in his hand, and threads of light weaved together at the Keyblade's tip, shaping into a form that was first impossible for him to discern before it appeared to look something like a small glowing ball before it released itself as a coherent beam directly into the whole of Kimblee and Not-Kimblee's selves (and even that was just a form his mind could handle, he had no idea what was actually happening) and as it made contact and the whole thing flashed up with three faint cries of surprise (one of them too weak to hear, one screaming in agony and one that sounded like Not-Kimblee relieved at long last), Zim remembered the same things he had felt when he had done something similiar with the Philosopher's Stone, and drew on the same thing that had come naturally then. He didn't fight it or force the unsealing, he let the purifying energies flow into it, much as Zuko had taught him to do when influencing flames; he felt the light pour down into it, flooding as a storm crashing into a water-starved desert, filling every dried crevice and washing away the lingering dark taints of the other consciousnesses there, detaching them, pushing them away...

And then, in a single burst of frenzied movement, he felt the psychic 'hooks' tying Kimblee to his victim seared away, that strange third entity wailing in fury, and Zim kept the power flowing as hard and fast as he could, and and then that entity was carried away on the same surge of power that was pushing Kimblee loose and snared onto Kimblee, binding itself as thoroughly to him as it had to Not-Kimblee. In the work of a few moments, buoyed by the inexpressible joy and excitement that it was to directly channel the Keyblade's holy power through his own will, Zim directed the light into every last lingering bit of Kimblee that remaining in the psychic energy of his host, snipping him away from that host bit by bit until there was nothing holding him there, just a free-floating toxic influence just waiting for physics to catch up and expell him. Zim was less patient, and gave another push that manifested as a final and bright flash of light, the aftershocks of which Zim was briefly aware came with the psychic image he was seeing fading in an instant. There was a brief slurping noise, from the red stuff being drawn back into Kimblee's body, consumed by the process happening to Kimblee's body (distilled into purest potential and reused, a voice whispered to him and he had no idea what meant), another bright flash of light as the red stuff transformed into flesh and blood and bone and also clothing.

The end of it was actually a bit anticlimatic after all that built up: the light abruptly got a lot fainter, as if used as fuel to energize something, and was followed by two brief startled yelps, the faint noise of something hitting the ground after a short impact, and then a mildly disappointing silence.

Zim blinked, a bit miffed that there weren't any more explosions like the last time. The light faded entirely, the Keyblade cooled from burningly hot to it's usual comforting warmthc, and as the filters from around him died down he noticed that there were a lot of really lot chattering and bewildered statements being yelled all over, possibly because instead of one person that had fallen from the wreckage of Umbra Eternis there were two now; Kimblee himself, not altogether different in apperance but somehow even more injured than before (he'd acquired a few mysterious burns, for one thing), but the one lying next to him was another story: a young human male in his early teens, perhaps thirteen or fourteen. It was hard to tell with the stains all over his body, the overlarge clothing and the filthy state of his overgrown hair, not to mention he was one of the single most sick-looking beings Zim had ever seen, and yet he was completely uninjured. It seemed all he needed was a good long bath, perhaps a stay in a spa somewhere, and maybe some group therapy sessions.

"...Huh," Zim said.

"What just happened?" Hobbes said, looking dazed and fascinated and a bit blitzed out from all the lights.

"I have no idea," Calvin said.

"Oh, it was a combined-body takeover mashup splitting thing," Morte said knowledgeably. "...That's pretty fricking stupid."

"How the hells do you know that?" Zuko said irritably.

"Eh, I been places. You pay attention to things long enough, you learn how things work good and proper."

"And yet you can't learn to be useful."

"Bite me, dragon breath." The boy grunted, more strongly than any other sound Kimblee had made in the last few minutes. Zim stared. A lot of other people stared. Morte floated right over to Zim and said, "Hey! Boss! What the hells did you just do!?"

Zim looked from Morte to the boy, then to Kimblee and back to Morte. He looked to Zuko and Hobbes for help, but they just shrugged cluelessly at him. So Zim looked at Morte and opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again and said, "Ah...you go first, what did you see happen?"

Morte did that 360-degree eyeroll that resembled him blinking. "I saw you point that thing at the Kimblee nutter, everything got all glowy and then..." He made a harsh wooshing noise. "Bam, there's two guys."

Courtney wandered over to Zim, eager to take a role as spokeswoman for the crowd. Armstrong came with her, mostly just to make sure no one got out of hand or tried to have a debate-duel without him handing out appropiate weapons for a party. "You! Keyguy that blew up my building! What happened just now, what did you do?"

"That was me!" Calvin yelled. No one listened.

"I think he was possessed or something," Zim said vaugely. "Kimblee was possessing him, I mean." He gestured at the boy, whom he noticed was already stirring, though it didn't look like he was in any shape to move around. Even divorced of the damage that had been directed onto Kimblee, he looked like he had been through absolute hell for quite a long time. With his pale skin and dark hair, he looked more than a little like Dib, and Zim grimaced, wondering bitterly if Dib wasn't going such an experience at that very moment. "I think the Keyblade...unsealed him. Something like that." He shrugged. "Who knew." A few people took pictures of the historic moment, eventually leading many to dub Zim 'Shrug Man, the Glorious Hero of Indifference in The Face of Miraculous Awesomeness'.

Courtney looked nonplussed. Zuko looked at the Keyblade, frowning. "It can do that? That's...refreshingly benign." Photos were taken of Zuko as well, and since none of them bothered to get his name, when the photos went viral people eventually decided to call him Two-Face Bishie-Boy. (The latter because he was so pretty, and the former even though there already was a Two-Face living in town but Harvey Dent wasn't twofaced anymore so he didn't mind surrendering the title.)

Zuko looked at Hobbes, probably to gauge his reaction, and looked startled at the sight of the tiger-boy gaping openly at the Keyblade and looking from it to the Not-Kimblee boy, more openly fascinated than Zim had ever seen him. He settled for staring at the Keyblade, a look of frank wonder that was a bit more suitable for someone who had just had a religious experience. "That's...just fantastic," Hobbes said faintly, mouth loosely opened into a silly grin. He looked at the boy, and he faltered a little. "If that hadn't happened, we might have ended up..." He stopped, looking uncomfortable. He made an awkward gesture that sort of looked like he was miming a snapped neck. More pictures were snapped of Hobbes, and he would be labeled by the people who didn't bother to get his name as 'The Quite Appropiately Titled Sir Not-Killing-Anyone-At-The-Moment-And-Quite-Glad-Of-It'. (And that was how Hobbes wound up winning Traverse Town's annual Most Pointless Publically Acquired Title With A Needless Amount of Hyphens Conquest a week later.)

"Accidentally killing this kid?" Morte said bluntly. He didn't look happy about it either. "...Yeah. Lucky break there." Photos were taken of him, presumably because he was there, and the same people who were absolutely awful at giving them names termed him 'Lord Schmitt A'Refreshingly Macduff of Morporkia-Prime, Cosmopolitan Edition' for reasons that absolutely no one was ever clear on.

"...Yeah," Hobbes said quietly, and smiled gently again, thumbclaw peacefully clicking against a odd ornament on his necklace that Zim hadn't noticed it before; a stone rectangle with a big crack in it, apparently carved from a single piece of rock and not very well at that. Calvin gave him a brief slightly sad smile, as if he were happy for his brother for some reason. (No one took pictures of Calvin except when he happened to be in the frames of the other shots. He was eventually nicknamed the Random Dude In the Background. This wasn't as demeaning as it sounded, because since the people who didn't bother to do research had no idea who he was, they had no choice but to invent the most insanely awesome stories of how he wound up being there at this historic moment, the least interesting being that he was just catching his breath after hitching ride on the ship following his assault on a gang of biker-demons by throwing a puppy at them and making a getaway on an interdimensional spelljammer.)

The crowd was standing right around them now, he noticed as their faint murmuring reached a peak, curious and totally confused, and Zim caught a glimpse of people looking aside as someone pushed their way to the front, and with the way his life had been going he wasn't terribly surprised to see that it was Bloo shoving his way to Zim, Mac and the rest of their friends (including, Zim was pleased to see, Minimoose, and to a totally indifferent degree Mr. Herrimen) coming through. More gently, Kim and Ron followed behind them, taking advantage of the brief gap in the crowd, and an android Zim didn't know but had some truly awesome pants kept pace with them. "Green guy!" Bloo said, waddling frantically over to Zim while his friends trailed behind, looking tired and scared.

Zim looked at him, waited for a moment, and inclined his head. Bloo took that as an invitaiton and said, "Dude, what happened! We saw a green light a few minutes ago and BAM! Most of the guys that kinda-sorta died got back up and were all alive again and none of them knew what had happened! And then a robot crashes into the ground and you're back and you're all like, bang, I'm back, and then that robot went ka-bloosh, and then a guy fell out and you made a big flashy thing, and...and...another guy's there!" He waved his pseudopods wildly, so overexcited he almost toppled over. "What happened, man?"

"Um, yeah," Wilt said timidly. "What, uh, what did happen?" By his side, Eduardo muttered something quickly in Spanish, staring in horrified fascination at Kimblee's comatose body and with some concern at the other boy. Coco squawked...something, and Zim didn't catch what it was.

Mr. Herrimen couldn't speak for a moment but shook a lot, his wheelchair creaking in protest. When he did, his voice was hoarse, raw with emotion. "Please. What. What happened? What has become of...of him." He gestured feebly at Kimblee's unmoving body, hand shaking with repressed fury and more evident satisfaction.

Zim started to speak. He stopped, not entirely sure himself. "And what happened to the rest of the guys?" Kim said fretfully, waving to catch Zim's attention. "Are they on that ship? Is my dad and his boss-" She stopped, looking afraid.

Ron swallowed nervously, and even Rufus on his shoulder shivered, clinging to Ron's neck like he was a giant comfort blanket. "Did Kimblee...uh..." He waved his hands around, more subdued than Zim had yet seen him. "Y'know. Hurt them?"

"And what about the rest of them?" The android with the awesome pants asked. "Our leaders! And Abe and Scarl? And also Beth, I guess."

Danny, hiding behind the rest, peeked out and said to his friend, "Dude. What happened to Aang and the others? Are they...alive?" He swallowed, eyes wide and wet and blinking furiously.

The rest of the crowd swelled around Zim, and a host of miserably demanding questions assailed him: where was so-and-so, what had happened then and there, was there a Heartless portal in the town, had other people shown up to help Kimblee, did he find out why Kimblee did it or if he had allies, did anyone else die, what happened when suddenly almost everyone came back, why hadn't everyone come back...

Zim stepped back, alarmed by the intensity and terrifying need of the people who wanted answers and closure so badly, and it didn't help that he didn't know what had happened to them, and he didn't know what had become of his allies either, and he felt a surge of terror for Aang and the rest...

Appa turned aside, ignoring the crowd (he kept growling at the ones that got too close, ensuring that he kept an acceptable amount of personal space which kept their area nicely clear) and looked up at a moving object in the sky. Hobbes looked aside and made a high growling noise in gratitude. Zuko beamed at the sight, and Morte lazily said, "Hey. They're...uh, they're back!"

Zim looked aside for a bullet-fast Aang to fly from nowhere and slam into him with a joyful hug. "Zim! You mad genius! You did it! YOU DID IT!"

"GUYS!" Calvin yelled. "IT. WAS. MY IDEA!" Predictably, no one listened, and if they did, no one cared. Appa charged over, knocking Aang over and enthusiastically nuzzling him with even greater fervor than he had Zuko, who was also joining in with the frantic relief. Zim, knocked on his back, was therefore looking at the sky and saw that Morte had noticed the odd sight of a sandy cloud descending from the sky, and on it was everyone from the fight that had been unceremoniously tossed aside by Kimblee. It came to a slight crash on the ground, crumbling and dissolving back into normal sand that was swiftly collected by Gaara and sucked back into his gourd, dumping everyone on the sand rudely on the ground; Toph pushed through the people in her way and fervantly hugged the ground, grumbling impreciations at Gaara for seperating her from the precious earth, but if he heard her or got offended, he didn't show it.

There wasn't much respite, for several of the more battle-driven members of the group ran up, weapons ready. "All right, we're ready to finish it!" Naruto roared, dragging Roy and Scar with him for some reason. "Just show us to Kimblee!" Zim pointed at Kimblee, who was still unmoving. He grunted a bit, but that was it. Naruto blinked, very slowly, as the rest of the group gradually settled down while they realized that the battle was already over. "Wait, it's over? What the hell? We were all revved up and everything!"

"It's really over?" Sokka said. He sighed in relief, looking ready to just lie down and go back to sleep for a few hours. "I didn't think that stupid fight would ever stop..."

"I second that," Aang said, and they high-fived.

Their group quickly discussed this (their reactions ranging from the relieved - like Angilaka, Katara, Winry and Cyborg - to the surprised - like Greed, Gibbs, Courtney and Beth - and even the disapointed - like Deadpool and Gaara - and varying emotions inbetween), their shock fading into incredulity. Eventually, Abel, who had been apparently picked up by their friends on their way there and Zim was pleased to see looked totally healed up apart from deep weariness, took stock of the situation and shrugged. "Well, Commander-Admiral Mustang did get a call from one of his guys here saying that the situation was in hand."

"That I did," Roy agreed. "Not that I still have any idea of what happened. I seem to remember you hitting Kimblee with a building?" He gave Zim an inquiring and slightly jealous look, and Zim didn't know if it was because Zim's team had ultimately defeated Kimblee or if was just because they did it so awesomely.

"Stop saying it was him!" Calvin said irritably, walking over to see what all the fuss was about. "I'm the one who rigged that news studio to be a missile just in case we needed something big or if I wanted to make something cool happen-" He stopped, noticing that Courtney was staring at him, her eyelid twitching worryingly, and Beth was taking several steps away from her. The people in the crowd who worked with her (the tentacle girl, the clone news anchor and various others) recognized the warning signs and outright fled for cover. "Um. Why are you staring at me like that?"

"My building," Courtney said, her voice quiet and tight and a little higher-pitched than usual.

Calvin worked with a lot of very smart but slightly unstable people, and knew certain signs pretty well. (He'd have to, given that he was a very smart but slightly unstable person. It was practically a job description.) "Uh oh," He said quietly. Zim and Morte exchanged a glance and sidled away.

"My building!" Courtney yelled, shoving through everyone in her way and stomping over to Calvin, fingers curling like she ached to wrap them around his throat and strangle him.

"Hey, I can explain that!" Calvin said, backing up a little. He thought fast, and came up with nothing. "Uh...um. Crap."

"MY BUILDING!" Courtney howled, grabbing him by the collar before he could do something sensible like run away. "WHY DID YOU BLOW UP MY BUILDING!"

"Technically, it was more of a controlled demolition caused by crashing into a giant invincible robot made of evil-" Calvin started to say.

Courtney pulled him up until the rather short preteen was level with her face. "I don't care about technicalities, you destroyed my building and lost us our studio! What do you think's gonna happen to our jobs, huh? And you didn't even TELL US!"

"I did imply a lot," Calvin said, getting annoyed. "And it worked, didn't it? And I didn't tell you because you probably wouldn't have let me, geez. And you got an exclusive story out of it."

"You blew up my building!" Courtney yelled again, face going a bit white with fury. "You lost us our jobs! What's the point of having a news story if we can't publish it!"

Her fellows from the news studio gasped. "He did what?" They gave Calvin downright murderous looks. Much of the crowd was looking disapproving. (Naruto, Shego and Greed, on the other hand, gave Calvin a big thumbs-up when Courtney wasn't looking. Deadpool pulled up a sign from somewhat that scored five out of ten. Calvin thought the explosion had at least been a seven, maybe an eight.)

"You had us help you sabotage our own workplace and blow it up!" A technician snarled.

"Months of work, lost!" Another wailed.

"No it's not," Calvin said, reaching into his pocket and throwing a flash drive at them. "I put all your work into that thing just in case you needed a back-up like this. You still have all your data and recordings and unaired transcripts and stuff."

"...Oh. But you still cost us our equipment and premises," the technician said bitterly.

"I got yelled at, traumatized and now I lost my job!" The tentacle girl wailed. "Today is a terrible day!" Some of the Foster's people gave her dirty looks, probably feeling that at least she didn't get temporarily killed or something.

"...Okay, maybe I didn't think that through," Calvin said, looking worried. "Hobbes, buddy! Back me up!"

"Um..." Hobbes looked at the mood of the crowd, which was leaning back towards lynching again. "...Can I have a few moments to make up my mind?"

"HOBBES!"

"Okay, okay, geez!" Hobbes went over to him. "Uh...look, how much does it cost to buy and outfit a news studio so you guys can get back to work? I'm pretty sure we might be able to reimburse you."

"Actually, that won't be neccesary," Roy said, Gibbs giving Zim's group a sour look. (Zuko grimaced; he hadn't even done anything. He was immediately swarmed by the rest of Team Avatar, who weren't paying attention and demanded Zuko's presence in a group hug.) "Since collateral damage happened to your workplace in such a way that impinges your ability to work, and it occured on a mission that the Crossguard and the Peace Marines had under their respective jurisdictions, we'll reimburse you and set you up with a new workplace."

"Oh, really!" Courtney dropped Calvin, all thoughts of indignation forgotten. "What kind of a reimbursement are we talking about? 'Cause I had some very nice ideas involving one of those mobile news studios that are also semi-sentient whales that they farm in the Beach District. And can we get more computers? And premises away from epicenters of incident occurances this time? And some automatic editing units that make us look as good as possible and a Integrity Inflicting Editing processor? And one of those vending machines that give free muffins from nowhere?" Roy groaned, and waved over Angilaka to reluctantly take over the job of talking terms with Courtney, from where the giant woman had been explaining to her faction members what had been going on.

The crowd started to disperse, their curiosity apparently satisified, and the ones who wanted to see Kimblee taken into custody remained behind. They didn't have long to wait, as Scar quietly came from behind the others, feet silently bending the grass under him and moving as smoothly as a desert wind. He might have noticed that a great deal many people were now staring directly at him, perhaps justifiably concerned about what he was going to do; the history between him and Kimblee had been shared freely, after all. Team Avatar froze as he approached them, or more accurately as he walked towards Kimblee, his eyes strangely unfocused. Zim watched him coming, considered taking action, and then banished the Keyblade. Scar's footsteps got heavier, as if he was weighing Kimblee's crimes against him and this town and placing them on his shoulders, the memories of the atrocities of the Ishbalan Civil War grinding down on him and the certain knowledge that Kimblee's crimes today were in part the consequence of his failure to slay him pressing him down even further.

Ron squeaked a bit, and Zim saw a few of the people in the Crossguard's uniforms watching Scar anxiously as the Ishbalan warrior-priest walked past Zuko and Team Avatar, seeing as Zuko had effectively appointed himself the one keeping Kimblee in custody until someone more official came along. Scar glanced down at them, his gaze sliding from Zuko's own mutilated face to the harrowed look Zuko gave him, the young Firebender pointedly looking away from Kimblee as if saying that whatever Scar might do to Kimblee wasn't something Zuko would concern himself with. Aang and Katara looked uncomfortable, but didn't say anything, perhaps too horrified by the full extent of Kimblee's evil to press the issue before they saw what Scar's intentions were. The sight of the ruins of Foster's had a harrowing effect on them all, espicially with Kimblee lying beaten in it's wreckage.

Zim quietly walked to where Kimblee was before Scar got there. Scar gave Zim a warning frown, and Zim ignored him in favor of hopping aboard the remaining arm of the Umbra Eternis, looking down at Scar and Kimblee curiously. Scar looked at Kimblee, the fingers on his right hand - his destroyer's hand - flexing with a noise like grinding stones, and then at Zim, giving him a hard and flat look. Zim pointedly looked at Kimblee; he wanted to see what Scar would do next.

Scar reached down and effortlessly plucked Kimblee off the ground, grabbing him by the face with his right hand, and squeezed so hard Zim could hear the bones in his hand tightening. "Killing Kimblee would probably be dramatically appropiate at this venture," He said amiably to Scar, as if Kimblee's survival or death at this point didn't make much difference to him.

"Yes," Scar said, gritting his teeth and a vein popping in his temple, his eyes flickering briefly, and his eyes looked as hard and bright as blood splashing onto stone. Much like the blood that had been spilt today, Zim supposed.

The idea of more people dying today had a peculiar effect on his stomach. And yet, he didn't deny that Scar deserved his vengeance, and that Kimblee was a wretched horror that needed to be put down. (Zim didn't think he really counted as a person anymore, anyway.) Either way, Zim didn't think he had the right to deny Scar his vengeance; the idea made him feel like an interfering busybody. Even so...

The image of Kimblee dead on the floor right here was a potent one. He didn't know if he was supposed to feel happy at the delicious irony of him dying here, where he had done so much evil, or if he was supposed to be repulsed by the idea of trying to put a noble face on more killing; he had seen too much death in his life to be entirely casual or dismissive of it anymore. It troubled him to be even thinking of passing judgement on Scar's enemy and nemesis for him. So he was surprised when Scar, as if with a great effort, looked at him and said, "You made the decision to chase after Kimblee and you were the one who ultimately brought him down."

"What?" Zim said, caught off-guard by this. He honestly thought that Scar would have just exploded Kimblee's head and been done with it. "Really? Oh...yeah, I did! Hah, I'm awesome!"

Scar, who tended to treat humor as an abberation that needed to be patiently outwaited but realized that now was not the time for that, gruffly said, "Your input in what to do for Kimblee in the immediate situation would be...valued." He scowled fiercely, like saying this was physically painful. His eyes flickered briefly towards Kimblee and the hand holding him by the face tightened until the knuckles went white.

"...I dunno," Zim said, startled at having his opinion asked for (espicially given how much right Scar had to kill Kimblee, and considering how sensible it would be). "What would you generally do if he survived?"

"We would have him detained in such a way that he would be unable to use his metapowers, put him to a trial by a court of his peers (by which I mean a randomly chosen jury, not specifcally people from the Peerage), and should he be found guilty, for a crime of this magnitude, he would be exiled to a sub-dimension known as the Vault with the rest of the irredeemable monsters we cast out."

"What, you wouldn't just execute him?" Zim said, honestly curious. Having Kimblee executed for his crimes seemed a fitting way of elminating him for his evils. "That would seem more sensible. And dramatically suitable."

"Most people with the political power to ensure that are...adverse to such final measures," Scar said, sneering derisively. "Those that are not are typically over-ruled. Clearly he didn't approve of a mildly soft-hearted mentality, probably because he was from a culture that had arisen in a desert and apparently develouped a religion with a very strict code of honor-related conduct; a culture like that became tough just to survive, and the kinder ideals often didn't take root very easily. Zim could empathize; the Irken Empire had grown in harsh enviroments, according to their tangled and myth-colored histories.

Zim wasn't much interested in the politics behind it, he just didn't want Kimblee to show up again later, as he inevitably would; the time he had spent as a team with Danny and Aang had taught him that any villain who wasn't definitely dead (as in, you had seen his body yourself and even that was more of a guideline) would always come back to harass you later on. And since he was expecting Mr. Lyle to reappear eventually for whatever inscrutable purpose, he didn't really feel like having two new enemies teaming up to fight him and his new crew.

He stopped for a moment, realizing that he was already coming to think of Calvin, Hobbes, Morte and now Zuko as a crew instead of allies of opportunity.

Scar seemed to require a definite response from Zim, though, so the ex-Invader put aside such curious thoughts for now and, not entirely sure he was suitable to render any judgement or why in the world Scar wanted input from him to begin with, haltingly said, "I suppose you should do what I do in situations like this."

Scar regarded him coolly. "And that is...?"

"Screw regulations and the letter of the law and protocol and all that other boring stuff and do what seems like the correct course of action to yourself," Zim said. "Kill him right here and now to satisfy your vengeance. Give him to the court systems, which with the evidence against him will surely cast him out with the other monsters and also satisfy your vengeance in a more passive way. Or just throw him to that crowd and see if they tear him to pieces. Whatever works."

Zuko raised an eyebrow at this, neither approving or supportive. Hobbes frowned gravely. Morte nodded eagerly. Calvin just looked uncomfortable.

Kimblee shifted slightly; Scar tensed, ready for violent retribution should the rogue alchemist do anything to escape (because quite frankly they'd had enough of his bullshit to last them an entire month's worth of serious incidents) but Kimblee merely turned his head a bit, grunting something too quiet to be understood. Zim heard his tone of voice, a pitifully bewildered and lost sound that was completely out of place for the man, and from a quick glance at Scar, even his enemies would have been startled by it.

Scar looked down at Kimblee for just a moment, but it carried on for a long time; Zim tensed, waiting for Scar to do whatever it is he intended, and in all honesty he expected him to kill Kimblee right then and there. Scar's hand tightly firmly around Kimblee's face, turning slightly so it covered his mouth, and Zim saw a disquieting smug look twist Scar's face into a savage grin, full of pride and restrained violence at having this monster in his grasp after all these years.

Kimblee had exterminated Scar's people, Zim remembered, or at least had a monstrously extensive part in that. He had done it with glee and satisfaction, and apparently regarded the continued existence of the Ishbalan people as a personal failure on his part. He had enjoyed ripping the souls out of a few hundred people to create an artifact that he had been extremely blaise about losing, and had been so casual about it. He'd torn his way through this First District, doing immeasurable damage to everything in sight, toying with the minds of everyone he could for nothing more than the simple sadistic thrill of it, and it was only extradinary coincidence and the strategies of Roy Mustang's group that had stopped him from killing more people on purpose or from getting caught in the crossfire. And he had done all that while wearing the body of someone who was so determined to stop more damage that he had repeatedly tried to get Kimblee and himself killed.

And worse, Kimblee had implied that he had done all that mostly because he could. Because there was no real need for him to have a reason in the first place. Maybe someone had ordered him (and certainly someone had given him the resources to accomplish part of it), but Zim had done this sort of thing himself to know that he would have certainly done it himself for no tangible purpose, if the right mood took him at the wrong moment. He was a monster, a digusting sham of a human being, and deserved even worse than what he had gotten.

And yet, even knowing all that, Zim felt himself feeling less vindicated by Kimblee's torment, and felt that he pitied him instead. Kimblee's twitching reminded him more and more of a rotten bit of nearly-dead roadkill at the side of a road, and not a defeated foe. He was pathetic, and evil as Kimblee was, Zim thought it was the kind of mindlessly unknowing evil that inspired as much pity at hate. Killing him right now would be an act of mercy, pushing him off the playing board and leaving history to think of him as a momentary abberation and then proceed to forget about him altogether, and it occured to Zim that there really was no alternative for Kimblee's life. He would pay for the evil he had inflicted, and it irked Zim that Kimblee wouldn't ever understand why he was being punished.

The same thought ran through Scar, judging by the flickering of his face as his stony glower cracked and bent and finally broke into a split-second look, his eyes lowering away from Kimblee's countenace. His hand squeezed around Kimblee, in the way he always did right before he used the destruction application of his alchemy, and then he made a brief frustrated grunt and dropped the Red Lotus Alchemist to the ground, the man beaten and broken and spared. "He deserves death," Scar said sullenly.

"Yes?" Zim said, tilting his head.

Scar muttered something under his breath, grumbled a few more things almost loudly enough before he grunted in dismay and exhaled long and wearily. "Damn his hide, I've gone soft," Scar whispered. "But I have done things the right way for too long to abandon it now. I will do this by the rules. Whatever his fate is, it will be clean." He sounded pained by the thought of it, and he bent down, roughly grabbing Kimblee's hands and forcing them down before he placed his own hands on the ground beside them. There was a flash, and the ground broke apart and reformed into a set of solid stone handcuffs around Kimblee's wrists, forcing the palms straight out so that he couldn't put his hands together even if he broke his wrists to wriggle out of the handcuffs. As a secondary precaution, Scar put a finger to Kimblee's palms, one after another, and with further flashes of alchemical light destroyed the outer surfaces of his skin. It was barely noticable, and done with such precision that the only apparent effect was some serious reddening of Kimblee's palms, and the tattooed arrays on his palms flaking off and falling away.

Scar stood up, watching Kimblee's last defense leave him, and stared down at the murderer of his family and people for too long to be comfortable. He looked away, clearly struggling with himself, and strode away, leaving Kimblee alive but harmless, ready to meet his fate at the hands of the town's people. Scar stopped a few steps, looking back with clear bloody-minded longing, and forced himself to keep walking away, his hands bunched into fists the whole time.

"Hey," the boy said weakly. "Did everyone forget about me or what?"

Scar looked back. "Hrm? Oh. You." Looking very frustrated, he walked back, pointedly not looking at Kimblee, and picked the boy up before slinging him over his shoulder and walked towards the hospital. The boy seemed oblivious to his less than gentle treatment, staring at his pale hands with great avidity for some reason, and before they walked into the crowd and proceeded to become a new center of attention, Zim saw the boy give him a weak but happy thumbs-up, and the single biggest grin he had seen on anyone all day.

Zim found himself smiling back.

He sat down, deciding to guard Kimblee just in case he woke up and tried to escape, and Morte floated by. He looked awkward for a short moment, the area around them reminding them of all that had happened and his own refusal to join in the fight. But the palpable relief of it finally being over compelled Morte to lighten up and say, "Nice work, Boss."

"...Yes," Zim said after a moment, looking cheerful. "I know." He glanced at his hand, still aching from the Keyblade's burning it, decided it was totally worth it before he noticed a shadow over him. He looked up and saw Roy Mustang, a huge but kind man towering behind him. "Yes?" Zim said warily, not sure he liked their business-like look.

"I'm Field-Admiral Roy Mustang," Roy said unneccesarily, and indicated the man next to him, who Zim noticed had a recorder device in one of his hands. "This is my associate, Captain Alex Louis Armstrong, also known as the Strong Arm Alchemist."

The man bowed deeply. "It is a pleasure to meet you, newcomer to our fair and much-varied city of a thousand surprises and significantly more outrageous reactions!" He boomed in a voice that was just too loud to be suitable for most people. He saluted Zim with a crisp snap. "My MANY thanks for bringing this traitor into custody, so that he might stand trial for his many crimes and, of course, ending the threat before something much worse could happen! And doing it in such a splendidly MANLY fashion as well! I nearly weep at it's magnificence!"

Roy grimaced, edging away from Armstrong a bit. Zim looked with renewed interest at the man. Morte said, "Uh, do you have to yell like that?"

"Of course! I would shame my lineage if I did not!" Armstrong boomed boisterously, striking a pose. "FOR THIS MANNER OF THEATRICAL OVERACTING HAS BEEN PASSED DOWN THE ARMSTRONG LINE FOR GENERATIONS!"

"That makes perfect sense!" Zim declared.

"No it doesn't!" Roy and Morte said.

"OH YES IT DOES!" Zim and Armstrong replied, yelling for no reason. By a stunning coincidence, they struck an identical pose in the midst of their overacting.

Roy put his face in his hands. "Oh dear God," He mumbled. "He just had to be the officer in charge here, didn't he?"

"What do you two want, a job offer?" Morte said. "'Cause I don't think you guys are gonna want to go with us into space and stuff. There'll be, y'know, cosmic rifts and planet-eating insect swarms and really persistent librarians that never stop hounding your for that chump change for an overdue recording."

"I do apologize, but we have not come here to extend or accept job offerings!" Armstrong said, somehow managing to make a loud and hammy yell apologetic while Roy sputtered furiously at Morte's temerity and cheerful waiving of the local hierarchy. "We simply wish to hear the truth of how this dreadful fiasco was ended and Kimblee apprehended, old boy!"

"Oh, it's a debriefing, is it?" Zim said.

"Yes," Roy said. "Where's the rest of your team? They should probably be here for this. It's best to have a varied view." He paused, looked down at Kimblee with undisguised disgust, and added, "General Armstrong, deal with him. I want him secured and ready for transport to the nearest judiciary facility as soon as possible!"

"Ah, yes, that would be the Shirestalker's Courthouse For Rent and Family-Friendly Rodeo Clown School!" Armstrong said knowingly. He tapped his mighty chin with a faint echoing noise as he considered Kimblee and raised a finger into the air. "Aha! I know just the way to keep him in suitable bonds!" He raised his massive arms into the air and plunged them into the ground so hard that he made small craters that had nothing to do with alchemy, though the flash of light from his gauntlets certainly did. Dirt and rocks pillared out of the ground around Kimblee, hardening into artistically smooth surfaces and wrapping around the man in a hollow form that quickly finished being transmuted, proving itself to a big chunk of rock shaped into the likeness of Armstrong's head, with only Kimblee's face and hands extending out of it so that he appeared to be popping out of it's forehead. The exterior of it was somehow made to be translucent, and Zim could see that the inside of the stone wasn't exactly hollow and pressed tightly but not uncomfortably around Kimblee with small bits going into Kimblee's pressure points to paralyze him. (Those needles were somehow so stylized that they looked like tiny cats with the points gripped in their teeth. Now that was dedication to one's artistic skill.)

Eduardo, who was a junior cadet in the Peace Marines after an incident some time ago involving a doomsday button and a sackful of rubber giraffes, was brought over to cart Kimblee away, and the Red Lotus Alchemist never even woke up through out the whole procedure. Zim watched him go, with some interest (and amused himself watching Bloo try to kick Kimblee in the shin before realizing he was encased in solid - though translucent - rock and hurt himself) and then did the job of getting everyone else over there; it was a bit time-consuming. Calvin was with Courtney and discussing potential upgrades she could get to cover the whole 'using your workplace as a guided missile and not telling you' thing; Hobbes had somehow been discovered by the rested-up Mall Crawlers and being begged for stories of heroism and valor that he was almost certainly exaggerating (and puffing himself up to look good for the girls); and Zuko was with the rest of Team Avatar and filling them in on what the ship was like. He got them there, though, and after Roy gave up on trying to keep this semi-private and just between them, their hangers-on came with them to listen in.

Their reactions were pretty funny, espicially when they got to the part where they hit Kimblee with a flying building. (And it was pretty cool to see Courtney at least enjoying that she had a pivotal role in finishing off Kimblee by proxy.)

The first thing to do, obviously, was explaining just what had happened with them and Kimblee after he had grabbed onto their ship and they had flown off with him, featured a short summery of their attempts to beat him up before they had made Courtney and Beth jump ship (which the two girls gladly confirmed, after Roy asked them for posterity's sake) and, since it had happened so fast and it was hard to remember every little detail, quickly got to the part where they had fired a building into his face. Roy had made the obvious decision to ask Calvin just why he had modified the building into a targeted missile in the first place, and Calvin had told him, "Because you never know when you need something really big to hit the bad guy with. You never know when they'll pull up something crazy-big like he did, so aren't you glad I was prepared? Honestly, it's a good thing I made the prepartion, even if it would have been looking stupid if it had been useless. Too bad he never gave me a chance to use it sooner."

(And when he was prompted why he didn't use it sooner, Calvin had said, "Because it would have caused stupid amounts of collateral damage, duh. But the fight already did that anyway. Hrm, maybe I should have done it just in case and warned you guys so we could have finished it right away. I'll remember that the next time something like this happens." It was admitted that he sort of had a point, but the 'next time' bit made Zuko and Hobbes very uneasy.)

With Zim and his crew's element of solo fighting summerized, it was just a matter of running through the rest of the fight so the official records could be sure of what exactly had happened (it wasn't uncommon for such things to be modified into scripts for popular TV shows or new stories, according to Morte, to Zim's surprise) and checked against everyone else's accounts and would later be referenced with the surviving footage the town's cameras had captured, and probably released under the supervision of Courtney's group who still retained the rights to the footage for entertainment purposes. It took longer to get all the fight and it's elements sorted out (and they had to interview the others first to get everything truly sorted out, and Roy had Courtney deal with that part so she could have her story right now, and loaned her a recording device for the occasion). Eventually, after it was made quite clear that all the pernitent information had been delivered, Morte asked who the boy Zim had split from Kimblee had been, apparently curious. Roy informed them that he was apparently called Kevin Levin, though none of them recognized name except for Roy noting that the he'd 'heard that name in a report or something somewhere, but I don't have anything specific.'

Afterwards, things were fairly short. The matter of the possession and it's circumstances were something Roy promised to get to the bottom of after Kimblee's interrogation, scheduled to take place soon afterwards, and Roy was certain that a conviction would follow not long after. He wasn't sure why Kimblee had kidnapped Jarod, though he mentioned that Kimblee had repeatedly mentioned being under orders to do that at the time. That was good, because according to Roy, "That means that he wasn't acting alone and we'll be forewarned the next time they show up, if there is a next time. (But you know there will be.) Bad news, because we have no idea who they are, what they want or what they have against us."

Calvin mentioned Mr. Lyle possibly being involved, and at the two marine's surprise, explained the business with the man last night. Both were quite interested; apparently they'd heard the name in connection with a very nasty law firm associated with demons and devils. At the very least, the timing was decidedly suspicious.

Upon being instructed to locate any organizations he could dig up that had a connection to this Lyle, Armstrong had boomed, "I SHALL NOT REST UNTIL THE MIGHT OF MY BODY AND SOUL PULLS THE KNOWLEDGE OF HIS ILL-DOING INTO THE LIGHT!" For no apparent reason, he flexed, and all of his uniform above the waist exploded from the sheer might of his flexing, revealing his incredibly muscular physique. He flexed and posed some more, all the better to show himself off. "BEHOLD MY MIGHT! DO YOU NOT SEE THE POWER OF THE ARTISTIC BODYBUILDING TECHNIQUE? THE ELEGANCE OF MY FORM! THE POWER OF MY WELL-HONED CONTAINER! A STRONG INTELLECT MUST REST WITHIN A MIGHTY BODY, AND MINE IS QUITE MIGHTY INDEED! IT SHALL NOT FAIL IN THIS TASK!"

"...Yes," Zuko said awkwardly, edging away from him. "We can see that." He mouthed please make him stop! at Roy.

Roy mouthed I tried, he just won't stop! back at Zuko. Armstrong continued to flex and pose. Hobbes imitated his poses, a bit annoyed that he was just too lean to pull it off. Getting back on track, Roy continued. "But I digress. If you have been made a target of this Mr. Lyle, I would be extremely careful if I were you. Nothing good ever came out of any dealings with Wolfram and Hart or it's employees."

"We've been told something like that," Zim agreed. "Is there anything else?"

Roy shook his head. "Nothing that I can think of. Good luck with whatever you're doing, guys, but as for me, bereaucracy calls. I'd like to see if there's at least one good thing we can get out of this." He gave the Umbra Eternis a long and contemplative look.

Calvin, noticing his expression, whispered to Hobbes, "You still have that shield you made from it's armor, right?"

"Yeah," Hobbes whispered back. "I still have it on the ship."

"Nice thinking. Wouldn't want them taking it away to do some analysis. We could do some cool stuff with that armor."

While they were talking, Roy had walked off, and sensing weakness the crowd rushed in past him, eager to confront Zim on the fine details of his defeat of Kimblee before they had to hear it from the news people. Hobbes, thankfully, marched forward and announced himself as Zim's spokesperson, and had the expected effect of focusing their attention on him so that Zim and the others were left alone. "Good man," Zim said. "He might be good to send as our diplomacy person, actually."

"He does stuff like that a lot," Calvin said, raising an eyebrow at Zim's intelligence. He sighed, flexing a little bit. "I dunno about you guys, but I'm still not sure how our ship works. I think I'll find Cyborg and talk shop. Maybe he has a manual or something. Someone get me if anything exciting happens."

"Hang on," Zuko said. "We haven't decided what we're going to do next. What's our plan?"

"Plan?" Calvin said blankly.

Zim looked at them questioningly, not sure what they meant. "Think he's talking about your itinerary, Boss," Morte stated. "You was supposed to be sightseeing, picking up supplies, getting some last minute things done? Then Kimblee went and wrecked it."

"Oh, right, that." Zim frowned. "Well, I'm certain that we're far past our leaving date at twelve o' clock, so I see no reason for us not to at least try and keep some semblence of an agenda and leave right now."

Hobbes shrugged. Zuko nodded. Calvin yawned disinterestedly. Morte said, "But you already got done with a fight. Isn't it a bit much to already be raring to do something else?"

"No," Zim said flatly. "If anything, it has only fueled my enthusiasm! And if there's anything we're missing, I'm sure we can find a spaceport to pick it up in. They were all over the place in my home universe, and these different universes can't be too much different from mine, after all. They have humans, just like Earth, and the fact that they apparently come from dozens of worlds is astounding on it's own besides the fact that they seem largely similar."

"I suppose I should say something to make you think more sensibly, but honestly I'm just too wolf-chewed tired to try," Zuko confessed. "I still think we should say our goodbyes to the others before we go; if we die on our journey without saying goodbye first, they'll feel bad forever."

"You are an absolute fountain of gloomy thoughts," Zim complained. "It's like standing next to a geyser that spews angst comas. And anyway, I have that covered. Come on, let's go find Minimoose." He noded at Morted. "You! Go wait at the ship. Me and Zuko will finish our matters first. I do not expect it to take long and I...er, uh." All thoughts were put to a stop when he noticed a few bodybags being carried off to austere motorized wagons on the street, the various faction people carrying them unusually somber.

"...I don't think we did it in time to save everyone," Zuko said, voice heavier than usual and a bit distant. Zim saw him looking at a few people who hadn't joined in the good mood; Zim suspected that, based on how solemnly they were watching the dead bodies being carried away, they were almost certainly family members or friends of the deceased.

"...Next time," Zim said quietly. "We will do better than this."

Zuko nodded. "Yeah. We will."

They gave each other furtive nods. As they watched solemnly, a thin voice near them said, "Pardon me. If you would wait a moment?"

Zim looked and saw Mr. Herrimen looking at him beseechingly. "Yes?" He said warily.

Mr. Herrimen looked at him for a good long while, having some trouble marshalling his thoughts. A grand speech clearly formed, almost on his whiskered muzzle before dying, thought improper and unacceptable for the moment. This happened at least three times, Zim patiently waiting for the figment who's home and domain had been destroyed not even a few hours ago to say his piece. Eventually, Mr. Herrimen choked out, "Thank you. For everything."

"...All I did was beat up the bad guy."

Mr. Herrimen bowed his head. "You freed the people he killed to obtain that damnable Stone. So many of my people have their loved ones and lives back. You avenged everything that has transpired here today, and returned more of it then I could have ever dared hoped for." He took in a long, rattling breath and ground out, "So I say this again. Thank you. Thank you for everything you've done for us."

"Ah?" Zim said. He fidgeted and managed to say, "Ah, er, um. You're welcome?"

Mr. Herrimen leaned forward in his wheelchair. He stuck out his hand. Bemused but understanding, Zim took his hand and shook it, understanding the gesture for once.

Mr. Herrimen left at that, seemingly choked up and with rather weepy fur around the eyes, and when he was gone, Zim was distracted by a movement somewhere in the distance, near the bunched-up trees on the grounds. He looked closely and saw what appeared to be a black-cloaked figure on a large white horse, bearing a scythe, and fading in and out of few was a small group of strangely translucent figures, gathering closely around the cloaked entity.

Zim peered closely. They didn't appear to be in any distress; a few of them seemed mildly put-out, but for the most part they seemed more relieved than anything, and certainly not of them were particularily unhappy. For some reason he thought a few of them looked familiar, and thought he had seen some of them during his time in Foster's last night, and at least one of them in the bodybags he had seen being taken away to pay respect to the dead. The cloaked figure looked directly at Zim, apparently surprised, and Zim stared at the being's eyes, which were bright blue lights within a dark hood. The entity raised a hand that looked alarmingly skeletal, and it took him a moment to realize that it was a greeting.

By the time it occured to Zim to return the gesture, the hooded being had gathered up the crowd, somehow fitting them all on his horse and started to ride, and then they were gone.

"...That was strange," Zim said, feeling like he had just witnessed something rather important and disgruntled that he didn't understand the significance.

"What was?" Morte asked.

Zim gestured towards the woods. "Didn't you see that?"

"See what?"

"A guy in a cloak on a horse. He took some people away; teleported or something."

Morte looked the way Zim had indicated. "I dunno, Boss, I didn't see anything there."

"...Huh," Zim said, thinking Great, MORE stupid hallucations. He made a point of ignoring the indignated voices of Razael and Sammael. He decided it was probably just a consequence of channeling too much magic or something stupid like that and pretended he hadn't seen anything.

...

Not too long after that, after a still unconscious Kimblee was carted away to await his trial and with everyone pitching in for decency's sake, the rubble was soon cleared and piled up as directed, packed it together in the middle of where Foster's had originally stood. At this point Team Phantom showed up fully rested up to see what was going on and also join in on the party which was now reaching critical mass. Zim and his crew had decided to stick around and enjoy it for a while, basking in the attention they were getting from the grateful, the well-wishers and the simply curious. (The grudging but genuine thank-yous from people he'd offended last night such as Bonnie Rockwaller and her crew helped. The thank-yous from people like Freya, Captain Razor and Andre the Jagermonster were even nicer.)

When it was done, the rubble stacked up without any care for type of material or how it was supposed to be positioned (and they were assured that those things weren't important), a simple alchemy reconstruction matrix had been drawn in a wide perimeter that roughly matched the dimensions of the previous Foster's building after some brief consultation of the original schematics, and everyone who was still there ordered into a group in front of the whole thing and waited, mostly people who had lived at Foster's and had been assured that the whole 'nowhere for them to live' situation was about to be fixed.

When the crowd was sorted out, it became clear that alchemy was going to be used to repair the evil that a rogue alchemist had done to this place: eight of the strongest alchemists that could be found on short notice - Scar, Roy and Armstrong among them, along with five other people Zim couldn't be bothered to remember their names - had assembled around the reconstruction matrix, and had put away their respective specialized transmutation equipment (those that could, that is) as it wouldn't be required right now. They took up positions around the reconstruction matrix, ignoring the mutinous mutterings from the anti-alchemy people (who were a bit justified in being traumatized by improperly utilized alchemy), though Scar probably had his own misgivings even if he kept quiet about them. "What are they doing, exactly?" Zim wondered aloud in his place where his crew had gathered alongside Teams Avatar and Phantom with Abel for company, Appa standing away from the crowd and kept company by Aang and Ron (who had an unexpected affection for the sky bison).

"Using the remains of Foster's as raw materials," Calvin said knowingly. "Even the parts of it that were vaporized. I saw them getting guys to gather up all the dust they could find. It'll probably be a bit smaller all the same, but it should work."

"What should be smaller?" Morte asked. Calvin just smirked, gesturing towards the alchemists.

Roy seemed to be indicating that they begin. "Gentlemen?" He said simply. The other alchemists nodded curly, and he laid his hands to the ground the reconstruction matrix had been inscribed on, and the others followed suit, all of them placing their hands down and concentrating hard.

Nothing appeared to happen immediately (though Zim felt a faint pressure from the area that reminded him of the tide coming in) and some people in the crowd who weren't familiar with alchemy complained. "Is that it?" Sokka asked. "I thought they were supposed to be doing something-"

"Hush," Abel said from directly beside him, making Sokka jump. "Wait and see."

"But it's boring!" Toph whined.

"This is SCIENCE!" Calvin snapped. "It's not supposed to be entertaining for your benefit, it's supposed to be FOR THE BENEFIT OF MANKIND!" They stared at him. "Uh...yeah, sorry, knee-jerk reaction. People complain about science, I start rambling about it's awesomeness. Impulse control thing."

After that everyone got quiet, and the pressure built, coinciding with a faint tingling of the teeth. Several people, Zim among them, felt a strong sense of subliminal movement (again, like invisible tides moving around them), and perhaps because of that the grass directly around the alchemists was moving without any wind to be doing it, and still most of the people there didn't notice it and muttered something about putting on a lousy show and wasting time and other stuff like that. (They could be forgiven for it; most of the complainers were Foster's regulars and they'd had a really bad day.) A few people shuffled around awkwardly to put the stress off their tired legs and made ripples in the crowds were people shuffled aside so they didn't get hit and the people next to them did the same weird and so did the people next to them, and Zim had a bunch of people bump into him because he wasn't paying attention, which was very invasive, and so he didn't notice that people had suddenly stopped talking.

He looked to the alchemists, and a moment or two passed before faint and lovely flashes of blue light ran along the reconstruction matrix, scribing out a circular pattern around where Foster's had once been only a few hours ago. The air wavered and shimmered, strange afterimages in the wake of the flashes as if potential other realities were being half-glimpsed through the incredible power at work. The flashes grew brighter and increased in number; first slowly, and then with greater speed and ferocity, the alchemists pouring more power into their work.

"Okay, something's happening, something's definitely happening!" Katara said, stepping back a bit.

Zim had a moment of alarm before he calmed done; the sight of the lights were similar to what Kimblee had done, but were altogether different, and it was plain that this style of transmutation was totally different from Kimblee's rough and brutal methods of tearing energies apart and throwing them around with reckless abandon. This blue light, though, was soft and gentle, it's soothing blue vastly different from that baleful red, sliding from the earth with all the irresitable power of a vast cosmic process of rebirth and renewal glimpsed by the many small parts that composed it. It was beautiful to watch, wondrous in all the ways that Kimblee's Stone had been awful, and some people had other reactions.

"Zuko," Sokka said suddenly. "That light! It looks like..."

"I know," Zuko said, suddenly thoughtful and giving Aang a brief glance, noting that the young Air Nomad was totally entranced by the light. "It looks like the glow from the Avatar Spirit."

Silence greeted this pronouncement. Toph surprised everyone when she didn't make a blind joke but said, "Hey, Aang, do you feel that? The ground right under us...I feel something moving around us. And it's...nice. Like I was standing over a huge river and a little bit of it diverted somewhere else." She smiled faintly. "Feels pretty good."

"Well, that's alchemy for you," Abel said kindly. "Not all of it is like what Kimblee practices." They nodded briefly at him, unable to take their eyes away from the blue light now actively streaming up from the ground, swilring around the reconstruction matrix in steady waves, more flashes of light crackling inside the area.

The blue light surged, and in a single moment the remnants of Foster's Home glowed with the same blue light as the alchemical energies were channeled into it, infused with them before breaking apart into their fundamental elements and taking the form of a briefly shapeless mass, and then the ground itself turned the same shade of blue as the light all around, weaving and shining as if to dispell the darkness that Kimblee had brought down upon them.

It lasted for a moment, the alchemists pouring yet more power into the very fabric of the ground itself, spinning pure potentiality into the deconstructed remnants of Foster's materials, recreating the cycle of life and death and rebirth in miniture and drawing power from that great cycle. One by one, the auxillery alchemists fell back, leaving Roy, Armstrong and Scar to finish the process (as they were the most powerful and skilled alchemists present, except for possibly Calvin but nobody had asked him for help) and they pushed the last of it into the final stage.

It was done in a single flash, the ground seemingly leaping straight up and transforming as it went, shaping itself into a new form that Armstrong controlled due to Roy being fairly unskilled in this sort of thing and Scar being content to allow Armstrong to do it. The crowd watched hopefully, and many of them were amazed at the wondrous sight of the ruins of Foster's being reborn into a new building by the same power that, misused by a madman, had ended it, and now was resurrecting it by the means of good men who used it's power wisely. Those who had thought it a strictly evil power were silenced or at least stayed silent, Zim among them. "You see? Calvin said quietly. "Now you know why the real alchemists say 'Alchemy is to be used for the benefit of mankind'." His eyes gleamed zealously. "That is it's purpose! Discoveries polished out of theories and experiments, adapted into techniques and methods, and inform the body of centuries-old scientific laws and philosophies that tell it's students the arts of fixing a broken and negative world!"

"It does?" Zim said. He wasn't even remotely skeptical, and as a scientist it was fascinating to learn about this foriegn art.

"That's the whole premise of alchemy," Calvin said, with all the honest earnestness of someone who truly and genuinely believed in what they were talking about. "It fixes what's broken. With the power of alchemy, there is nothing that can't be repaired, made whole again or turned into something better than it's components!" He made a fist, quivering with the intensity of what he was saying. "These worlds we know bleed with negativity. They churn with sin and pain, and they make cycle of revenge and suffering that propagate the misery. And even so, they can still be made better! Add positive ideas and feeling to the flow and that flow will be made positive, wiping away the negativity until nothing is left of the bad old remnants! That is the heart of alchemy! Moving on to improve the world one little bit at a time, moving the cycle on and making things better, walking with the cycle of life and death and rebirth, and bit by bit fixing all that is broken! A true alchemist makes himself the fulcrum of that cycle in miniature for the benefit of mankind." His voice took on a slightly bitter tone. "A lunatic like Kimblee would never understand that." The bitterness stopped, and he sounded happy when he added, "This is what alchemy's all about."

He had good dramatic timing; he had finished his little speech just as the broken remnants of the original Foster's Home were transformed and incorporated in the process of the alchemical ritual, reborn into a new shape that spread out over the grounds in new floors and walls that seemingly sprouted up fro mthe ground, growing while new foundations and underground causeways were made underneath. Higher walls appeared, more floors swelling up and creating new rooms and chambers and hallways, a new building taking shape in a matter of minutes. Zim watched, and thought that Kimblee's efforts seemed almost entirely for naught; they could do nothing for those people that he had killed, but at least Foster's Home could endure as a testament to his utter failure, and no sooner had he finished that thought than rooftops appeared, finishing the process (and perhaps suitably, as it had been where Kimblee had started the death of the old building), and it was done at last.

Dust billowed up, stirred by the sudden mass shifting, and conviniently hid the finished structure from view. Blue light sparked, like heat lightning flashing behind clouds, and the alchemists staggered back, winded but pleased with their efforts. "It is finished," Scar said triumphantly, as though this were the final victory over Kimblee, all his efforts for naught, as even Foster's Home, the place where his evil had begun today when he took the lives of over a hundred people and obliterated their home to show off his power, had been reborn.

The dust cleared. Roy and Scar were the closest and their reactions were enough to clue everyone that the final result wasn't exactly expected and a dumbfounded silence ensued. Armstrong simply flexed dramatically and cheerfully said, "Behold this most baroque and grand result of the dream of Foster's and the alchemical techniques of my forefathers! A synergy formed in the bonds of retribution and justice! People of Foster's, YOUR HOME HAS RETURNED TO YOU!"

"...It has?" Bloo said blankly.

Bloo had a bit of a point, since it was pretty clear that the building now standing proudly over the grounds wasn't exactly the image of Foster's Home; it occupied roughly the same amount of space and about the same size (it had to be, given that it was made from the recovered materials of the old place), but while the old building had been a single huge mansion that made more space by going straight up, this was actually a series of fairly dense three buildings arranged in a circular pattern around a broader circle, the one in the middle being the densest. A number of elegant walkways open to the air connected the three buildings at various levels, with sturdy enforcements arranged into minimalistic designs, and there were matching light escalators placed into the walls.

It had the same sort of style that you would have expected from a guy like Armstrong; the resources at hand had forced him to use as little as possible with his preferred style, but he had done a good job of making it look as tastefully bizarre as he could. Cheerful looking gargoyles that looked a lot like Armstrong making poses that happened to double as educational fitness lessons if you did them in the order they were positioned at peered from every surface, many of them part of a water runway system or serving some other subtle fuction, and matched nicely with the plentitude of balconies that had predominated on the outermost rooms on the last building, all the way up to the rooftops, which were slightly arched but suitable for someone to walk around on. There seemed to be a particular order to the buildings, too; while all off them were plainly residential, the middle building seemed to corrospond to a administration and central hub for the new house, a straight section going straight to it's front doors and the sidewalk on the ground going right there, so that the other two buildings appeared to be shaped like horseshoe rings around it. It's front doors, oddly enough, were set into what looked like a giant replica of Armstrong's body, flexing a mighty pose. (He was making an identical pose, and someone took a picture.) The other two buildings were more egalitarian, the outermost building slightly larger and with the most accomodations for the more unusual inhabitants of Traverse Town with specific requirments, such as isolated quarters or aquatic environments, and the middle building curiously appeared to have slightly more rooms, perhaps meant as a priority rooming area.

"Well?" Armstrong said hopefully, looming over Captain Razor. "What do you think, my good man?"

"Uh," Razor said meekly. "It's...uh...really great?"

"Wow," Bloo said, awed. "That's awesome!"

Armstrong beamed. "Oh, such thanks is marvelous to behold! YOU ARE WELCOME!" He hugged both Bloo and Razor, crushing them both with his massive strength, but sobbing too manfully to notice.

"Dude, stop crying, you're embarrasing yourself!" Razor said, inbetween trying to breath with Armstrong literally squeezing the breath out.

"Real men have the courage to show their tears to the world!" Armstrong said. "At least that's what I tell my sister when she hits me for being a weakling. Oh, the humanity of my unfeeling sister!" He sobbed louder, drowning out their protests. "I can only apologize for my inability to recreate everything as it was; I cannot remake your possessions, or the precise nature of your quarters, but I can at least give you back your home, and also a library I added for the sake of it, and plenty of other things I can't remember just now! TONIGHT YOU CAN GO TO YOUR NEW HOME AND REST EASY!" Bloo and Razor squeaked their approval, promising him many grand thanks if they would just please put him down now. He obliged, to the lasting gratitude of their spines. (Or whatever Bloo had for a spine, the poor blob-thing.)

Scar and Roy looked at each other, silently vowing never to speak of this voluntarily. In the meantime, the crowd stared at the house with measures of surprise and confusion. A short debate broke out before people started trickling out of the crowd, curious and wanting to see what their new home was like, and plenty of people followed in suit after they debated it's merits among themselves before deciding to take a look.

"That's, uh, that's an interesting house," Sokka said faintly.

"You realize we're gonna live there for the time being, right?" Toph said.

"...Aw crap," Sokka said.

"It's not so bad," Katara said, even as she eyed it dubiously. "I mean, it's...artistic. That's something, right?"

"Eh," Danny said.

"I think it's fascinating," Sam said appraisingly.

"I like the way that Armstrong guy thinks!" Tucker said brightly. Sokka stared at them in horror.

"Huh, so that's why Dad didn't let his co-workers come home to do interior decoration!" Kim said. "Or maybe it was because lots of them are basically insane."

"Feel free to believe both of those," Gibbs said from directly behind her.

Angilaka took out a notepad. "Note to self," She said as she jotted a few of the building's coolest features down. "See if Armstrong is seeing anyone. Or, at the very least, if he's teaching any modern art classes." Beside her, Pants-Man Audrey whistled innocently, knowing perfectly well that Armstrong was a professor in modern art but choosing not to tell her right then.

"Are we recording this?" Courtney asked a technician with a camera.

"Yes!" The technician said.

"Awesome! That's a great shot for the story! A tacky building, but a great shot. I can see human interest all over it! Also, weird gargoyles. But mostly human interest. We got a big story on our hands folks, make the most of it!"

"Have fun!" Beth said cheerfully.

"Good luck with your insane co-workers," Courtney said. Beth nodded.

Shego stared at the new Foster's building with a disgusted look. "Holy crap that's tacky. You could kill people with it's tackiness."

"An obscure field of assasination, but worth checking out," Deadpool commented.

"You guys have no respect for modern art," Lin and Greed said, their voices overlapping each other.

"We should get that guy to redo Titan's Tower," Cyborg said in admiration, in a more buoyant mood after some talks with Calvin on the finer details of the ship he gave them and general discussion on the matters of super-science vehicles. "If we can get him to tone it down a bit."

"I know Armstrong pretty good, and trust me, this is him toning himself down," Winry said dryly.

"That is pretty nice," Aang said near Appa, and leaned over to see what Zim thought of it. "Hey, do you see Zim anywhere?"

Ron shrugged. "I thought he was with his guys right by your team."

Aang looked closely, and saw that Zim wasn't anywhere in sight. "Man, he left before anyone could even see him going! And he took Zuko with him..." He grimaced manfully and slumped back. Ron watched him, concerned, and Aang looked up at the sky with a wistful sigh.

Zim, Calvin, Hobbes, Morte and Zuko had quietly left while everyone else had been reacting to the sight of the new Foster's Home, moving through the crowd and making it to the street bordering Foster's domain that their ship had been moved to get it out of the way, parked next to the mobile hospital and looking so unsteady that it should have fallen over. That it hadn't was a tribute to Cyborg's engineering skills, tacky though the result was.

Zim glanced back at what the crowd, and faltered a moment when he saw his friends realizing that he had left with his crew, looking around for him and their calls for him lost in the crowd's chattering. He couldn't help but see them, because with his ocular implants it was a simple matter to pick his friends out of the crowd: Aang and Danny, Sokka and Katara, Toph and Tucker and Sam. And without meaning to, he extended the same gesture to the people he had only just met: Abel and Scar, Cyborg and Winry, Kim and Ron (and Rufus too), and the many people that Zim's crew had fought alongside today, though he didn't care as much about them and didn't really know their names anyway.

"That's a nice house," Morte offered. "Kinda tacky, but I've seen worse."

Zim ignored him. His gaze lingered on Minimoose, the little robot he had made - that he was, in a sense, responsible for and could even be loosely considered his child - and he forced himself to look away. Knowing that he would definitely return was the only reason he could do it without hating himself, and he still felt like a coward. He shook his head; they needed to move quickly. "Do we have everything we need before we leave?"

"Yep!" Hobbes said, hoisting up the extradimensional dufflebag filled with the fruits of his earlier shopping expedition. Zim wondered where it had been but didn't really care.

"Anything we're forgetting?" Zuko said.

"Don't think so," Calvin said, distracted by a slim device that was a sort of electronic book; they were sold as blanks, and information was downloaded into them so they could serve as back-ups or references. In this case, Cyborg had downloaded all the pernitent information for their ship into it, making it into a user's manual. (Though he warned that it might still be a little unpredictable. The remnants of technology that ran on such bizarre laws that Calvin's inventions wouldn't have any other consequence.)

"If there is, we won't remember it," Morte joked.

"Unless we do remember it," Zim said, misunderstanding him. "But then we won't, because we will have forgotten, and then we might remember, unless we've still forgotten, and then we won't have remembered it, so we might rememfer it and then it won't be forgotten, except if-"

"We get it!" Hobbes said, cutting him off. Zim grumbled.

"Well...okay then," Zim said, wishing he had a cooler thing to say. "Let's get going!"

Calvin and Hobbes rolled their eyes at his lameness, and Zim glared at them for insubordination. Predictably, they ignored him and walked up the open cargo doors and into the ship, heading straight towards the bridge. "At long last!" Morte said. "It feels like we've been here for...what, five years or something?"

"Don't exaggerate, it only feels like that because of how long it takes to get anything done," Zuko replied. Morte laughed. Zuko gave Zim a significant look as they started to walk after Calvin and Hobbes, and Zim stopped where he was, looking up at Zuko expectantly. "C'mon," Zuko muttered, walking to the ship slowly with the air of someone who had something serious to say.

Morte gave Zim a significant look. "Looks like your second-in-command wants a bit of a personal word," He said quietly. He floated ahead faster than Zuko was walking, so that he was politely out of range of them and couldn't eavesdrop.

Zim watched him go and looked at Zuko. "You're my second-in-command?"

"I am?" Zuko echoed. "Huh. You have strange choices in personnel."

"Well, only a second-in-command would constantly question my command decisions. So, what is it that you wanted? We need to leave before anyone notices that we're gone."

"Yeah. About that." Zuko scratched the back of his head, looking unusually awkward. "I don't...look, why do you want to leave now? Without even saying goodbye to anyone?"

"You were there," Zim said. "We said our goodbyes. More or less. Anyway, and they might have tried to hold us back for a while if we had. Best not to give them that chance and leave while we can."

"I know," Zuko said. "I'm not arguing against that. It was the calm and rational decision, and really weird coming from you. But I don't think that's what you wanted to do."

"...No," Zim said quietly. "I would have preferred not to do this." Zuko raised an eyebrow. "I wanted to say goodbye properly. I wanted to look Aang in the others in the eyes...or bellies, but it's not my fault every one I know is freakishly tall. But like you said, giving them the opportunity to try and talk some of their precious 'sense' into us would bring more harm than good at this point. We needed to leave now and get this mission started, and we couldn't afford any more delays."

"Even though you're almost certainly going to forget your mission and goof around on random stuff that gets your attention?" Zuko pointed out fairly.

"Well, yes," Zim said dismissively. "But that goes without saying. And...I think it's better this way. Almost certainly. Probably. I guess. I don't want Aang to get upset like he might in a face-to-face confrontation." True, Aang hadn't been that upset when Zuko had announced that he was leaving with Zim, but things had been hectic and he only had until now to realize that Zuko - their Zuko, the fifth member of Team Avatar, their representative from the Fire Nation and the guy that was just as good as Aang's older brother - was going to leave on a dangerous mission and there was no knowing when he come back. Or when any of them would come back.

Everyone on his crew was leaving someone behind, Zim thought briefly. Dropping their lives for this mission of his, and he didn't even know why Calvin and Hobbes and Morte were doing besides 'our king told us to'. It was an interesting thought.

He returned to business. "I don't want to go," He said again, voice nearly-whispering and hurt, like a little child that didn't want to be away from his family and was only just realizing this, but had taken too many steps to back out now. "But there's other people that need to come and make home here."

Zuko nodded, slowly and seriously. Zim knew he was thinking about Dib and Gaz and Gir and anyone else they might find. "I understand." He clapped Zim on the shoulder, tremendously awkward in this little gesture of solidarity but honest all the same. "That's the biggest reason I'm going with you. I'm paying you back for all the times you helped us out." Zim looked up at him, eyes wide in bemused surprise. Zuko smiled, lips quirking at the unmutilated side of his face. "That's what loyalty counts for. You've stuck by me and the rest of my team when we showed up out of nowhere on your world; now that we're stuck in the same boat, it's only fair that I return the favor."

Zim couldn't speak for a moment. "...Thank you," He blurted out, so quietly he hoped Zuko hadn't heard him and he could pretend he hadn't said that.

Zuko had. He issued a hoarse laugh that sounded more like a amiable growl and made that awkward smile. "No big deal," He said, shuffling away and not making eye contact. "Just looking after my own."

Zim was so surprised by that that Zuko had walked away and into the ship, his hands stuffed into his pockets, before Zim recovered and dashed off after him into the cargo hold, and the doors closed after them with finality.

Zim and Zuko went up the steps of the catwalks overlooking the cargo hold, going through the doors at the bridge-side and walking into the bridge to find Hobbes anxiously strapping himself into the safety harness at one side of the wall and Calvin already in one of the seats, priming the ship for taking off; studying gauges, measuring power output, directing energy to the appropiate processes, shutting off safety limiters and enabling whatever super-travel system this ship had, that sort of thing. Zim hopped into the other seat, Morte bobbing over it like an anxious mother-hen and Zuko followed Hobbes example by strapping himself into a harness at the other side of the room.

"Geez, you guys are wimps," Calvin complained. "Once we're free of the planet, the ship's personal gravity systems will kick in. It's not like we'll be thrown around once we're clear from orbit."

"I'm not taking any chances," Hobbes said. Zuko clearly shared this sentiment.

"This entire mission will be filled with you two complaining, won't it?" Zim said. "Right. Science officer boy!"

"My name is Calvin!"

"Yeah, you. Is the ship prepped?"

"As much as I can figure out..." Calvin took a look at the 'reference guide' Cyborg had given him and took a quick look at the sections referring to prepping the ship to take-off from a planet and start moving from world to world. With a grin he set it down, indicated a flashing light on the dashboard over a sign that said 'Ready To Roll' and said, "Yes! Good to go!"

"Then let's get to it!" Zim declared, reaching out to do just that, and paused. "How is that done? You have the reference booklet."

"Oh, yeah." Calvin reached for a button-laden lever that had an astonishing resemblence to a stick-shift, set between the two pilot's seats and moving it's setting from 'Atmospheric Flight' to 'Inter-World Travel'. It clicked into place, and Zim saw several displays switch at once, displaying readouts of local atmospheric conditions and suggesting exit methods; at the same time, the propulsion discs on the outside of the ship slid on concealed tracks into slightly different positons, powering on and producing a movement field in a more streamlined form that suggested the shape of a bullet, bouncing the ship into the air and rocketing it into the sky.

Hobbes and Zuko were lucky to be strapped safely in; the sudden acceleration would have knocked them around otherwise, and Morte was unceremoniously tossed around, Calvin and Zim quite oblivious to this, though even they noticed the floor vibrating slightly under their feet, the ship moving even faster than it had at any point during it's fight with Kimblee. "Wh-wh-why's it moving so fast!" Hobbes yelled, voice stuttering from the vibrating put on him.

"It has to move this fast to escape the planet's orbit!" Calvin declared, grinning like a maniac; he was a total speed fanatic, and this was almost as good as being in a speedy wartruck armed to the teeth in a racemeet. "Cyborg explained it to me: we move at maximum speed and shoot right off the planet like a bullet, and then once we're in space we can safely activate the interdimensional travel function!"

"And that is?"

"I dunno. Way he described it to me, it sounded a bit like Immaterial warping!"

"Oh," Hobbes said, not sounding entirely reassured. Zim agreed, since he had no idea what the 'immaterium' was but it sounded ominous.

The ship surged forward, moving fast enough to disregard gravity, and the clouds fogged up the cameras for only a few moments as the ship barreled into the skies above the city (and the vibrant green glow of it's propulsion field was now bright enough for the friends they left behind to see them far above the skyline and watch them go, fading to a gleaming speck as they passed through the nanomachine layer). Whiteness pushed away on the visual displays, streaming off in interesting spiral patterns from the propulsion field sliding them away, hints of blue and black visible in gaps as the clouds gradually got thinner, the atmosphere becoming less of a barrier. The ship's rocking got more intense, the combination of the ship's construction and the shielding effects of their propulsion field protecting them from atmospheric conditions or freezing or burning up from solar heat or the host of other myriad exiting the planet problems.

"We're reaching the outer atmosphere," Calvin reported, plastered back into his seat by the speeds they were going.

"Mmf," Zuko mumbled, having been smashed into the wall after he moved around at the worst possible moment and he'd been bounced by the ship's rocking face-first into the wall. "I hate sailing."

"We're going into space and then sub-space, not sailing an ocean," Hobbes said.

"Space is like an ocean."

"Depends on the universe, actually," Morte said.

"It does?" Zim said, aghast. He shuddered at the thought of such a terrifying 'verse.

By now they were so far up that the clouds had thinned to nearly nothingness, and Zim saw the planet's surface far below, and the ship had rocketed them up to incredible speeds so that they were now so far up that they couldn't see Traverse Town anywhere except as a faint speck on the continents below: a dark shape cradled in a shallow depression between small mountains and an inland bay that opened up into the ocean. The world of Crucible spread out before him, the immense continent made present to him, and since he had never taken an interest or found out what the rest of the place was like it was a shock to see the continent spreading out: the wild forests growing madly all over the mountains near Traverse Town and spreading out until gradually thinning out into an arid savannah that extended for as far as he could see, lakes and oasises interrupting the dry landscape here and there, and around many of them there were the unmistakable shapes of ruined cities and ancient metropoli, undoubtedly scavenged for all they were worth, and Zim was momentarily floored by just how many of them there were, that the ones he could see plainly had merely fared better than the barely recognizable wreckage that constitued most of the area. The entire savannah seemed little more than an expanse of nature quietly claming the territory of a long-dead and forgotten people, and it was a sobering thought: what could have destroyed a civilization like this so violently and left the world itself alive?

He thought of the Heartless, who had proved themselves so adept at destroying everything they encountered, and he began to plot. He was cheered up a bit when he paid attention to moving masses on the savannah and the moutains and in the sea, and he wondered what they could be until he realized that they had to be people, moving in massive nomadic groups upon the savannah and clustering in newer cities near the larger oasises and in civic fleets on the ocean big enough for generations to live on those boats without ever stepping foot on land. He was floored for a moment at the thought of them, those non-Traverse Town inhabitants he hadn't given any thought to, and he felt a little happier for it. Even on this world that had been hit by an unknown catastrophe, life endured and didn't seem to be bothered. Surely, then, the survivors from his world could flourish and start their lives over.

"What are you grinning about?" Calvin asked him.

"I'm just plotting," Zim said honestly. Calvin gave him a suspicious look and shrugged.

His view of the continent grew wider, until the cities had diminished to mere suggestions and only geological features could be picked out, and when Calvin floored the ship and it accelerated in another jolting boost, even those got smaller. He could just barely see suggestions of mountains, green blurs of a massive forest and a vast expanse of sea dotted with islands popping up like the fallen change drawer of some exceedingly absent-minded god, and smaller sub-continents directly south of the one Traverse Town was from, and then even that view was blurred out by the clouds they had left behind them.

He checked a gauge that said that they were almost clear of the atmosphere, and he sat back to ready himself, but didn't really need to since the aggressive rumblings of the ship were calming down and becoming steady. The whiteness of the clouds had faded to a mere film and finally even that was broken through as the ship's internal gravitional generators created an opposing force to the planet's own gravitational pull that effectively launched the ship free and let it shoot forward, clearing the atmosphere in a burst that caught Zim completely by surprise (the ship was primitive and advanced in different respects by his own high standards and it kept catching him off-guard) and-

He saw stars.

The ship slowed, cleared from the planet and drifting peacefully into space and settling into stillness. Zim and the rest of his crew stared at the sights presented to him on the visual displays, and while it was said a lot that space was a whole lot of dangerously chaotic emptiness filled with relatively few islands of stability, they saw no evidence of it here. Space before them seemed alight with activity; the sun that bordered the planet of Crucible was blazing light-years away, an apparent speck on the horizon that turned the entirety of visible space into what would have been a painfully bright vista if the ship's filters hadn't dampened it, and it was still enough of a radiance that even the Keyblade was dampened by on a massive scale. They saw other planets there, at least three in this particular solar system, and unlike Earth's planets these looked inhabited; Zim could see the signs of sentient life even from his brief sight of them, his ship's instruments reporting signals and broadcasts coming from them. "No one told me this solar system was inhabited," Zim murmured, wondering why he hadn't picked that up in the Hitchhiker's Guide.

"Probably wasn't relevant," Morte said. "Besides, they had to be terraformed first. Those planets have some heavy technological assistance to stay okay, you know?" Zuko stared at him disbelievingly. "What? We were at a museum, I checked out what they had to say. Those planets weren't colonized by whoever used to live on this planet, and if they were, there's no evidence of it."

"What happened to those guys, anyway?" Hobbes asked.

"My money's on 'eaten by cosmic horror that's still on the planet'," Morte said.

"An interesting question, but not one that's relevant to us," Zim said. For a moment longer, though, he stared at the sight of space before him; welcoming darkness lit up by distant nebulae and stars, the suggestion of the merest ends of galaxies pointed out on a helpful display screen that referenced it with the most recent findings on astrology. Several other ships, larger than his ship, patrolled around Crucible, presumably monitoring the traffic to the planet to prevent crashes or attacks, and they were large blocky affairs that looked truly ancient and well-maintained, and by spacefaring standards they were decently sized ships; Zim felt like he was in a toy boat compared to these beauties. None of them hailed Zim or opened fire, and he took that as a signal to move onward. He nodded at Calvin, and the boy took hold of the control rods and moved the ship onward. The green propulsion field activated, and instead of slimming itself around the ship it spread out, looking like a net or a construct to catch something, and the ship started moving again at considerable speed that would see them leaving the planet behind in less than fifteen minutes; without the atmosphere to compete with, the ship would move a great deal more smoothly.

"Rev up the ship!" Calvin said, holding tighter and looking determined. Zim followed his example, grabbing the control rods in his own seat and thinking of the resolve he had made last night and earlier today to find Gir and Dib (and Gaz, he supposed) and bring them home to Traverse Town and maybe get a start on destroying the Heartless. The handles hummed in his hands, and he saw the power scale light up again, the spiral-pattern bars appearing and spinning out. "Come on, just a bit more...I wish I knew how this stuff worked..." The spiral gauge fluxed out, until the entire thing was green, and other colors swelled up at the edges. A sign above the stickshift lit up, reading 'Fired Up', and a panel that Zim hadn't noticed opened up, revealing a screen and a button.

Zim grinned, and hit the button.

On the ground below, Aang and the rest of Zim's old crew watched the green flash up in the sky and the tiny airbourne dot vanish with it, and from the look on Aang's face they knew perfectly well what it was. "Good luck, you guys," Aang whispered, a cheery grin on his face.