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.

18. The Paragon Sets Out

Bah, long update. They take too long to get down as quickly as I'd like!

I swear, I did not intend to take this long to get a chapter posted, but among other things...ah, real life, writer blocks, Fallout: New Vegas and periodic mood wings intervened. Curse them all!

On the plus side, a good chunk of the next chapter is already written, so good news on that front. Hopefully it won't take half a year for another chapter!

...By Autochthon the Great Maker, I hope not!

Disclaimer: All copyrighted properties are copyrighted to their creaters and owners.

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The silver clouds of the Astral Plane, stretching from horizon to horizon in the limitless sphere that comprised all potential space on this particular dimensional place, whirled around violently as a comparatively minuscule disc of neon green opened, half-formed shapes whirling up out of the silvery mass all around in patterns not unlike humanoids shapes on the move and tinted green as well.

The green burst into solid form, still that same glorious shade of neon green edging into dozens of different shades of green depending on where they struck the clouds around them (some tinging towards blue and other deeper greens and others yellow and still others into shades impossible for those without magically-enhanced sight to perceive) radiated for a moment, serving as a suitably dramatic backdrop for the awkward-looking but tough spaceship that barreled on through it, green still shining on battle-scarred metal before the bright lights faded, and then the constant and directionless illumination of the silver clouds was offset by the green shine of the propulsion field moving the ship aimlessly onward, strands of randomized light flickering off the ship to backlight what seemed to be the clouds around them but were actually immense mountain-sized masses of the same silver substance that was really thought made physical.

The ship powered on, still fresh from it's battle against the Umbra Eternis, and it's crew took in the sights with long moments for this wonder. "Welcome," Morte told them. "To the Astral Plane!"

Brilliant and gentle silvery light, as bright and soft as dreams distilled into substance, illuminated them and everything in sight, and in addition to the manys brilliant and awe-inspiring lights of purest color scattered throughout the plane likes stars, much of the plane of existence seemed composed of the substance, and it might stagger the mind of those new to the nature of the planes to be made aware that the substance was thought made physical (or as close to physical as anything could naturally be on this particular plane), born from the very thoughts of every sentient being to have ever lived and forging an irrefutable testament that they had existed.

Zim, in the perfect position to see all these wonders as his ship had dived into the Astral Plane when it left the world of Crucible, was certainly impressed and even delighted by it all; the vast clouds, formed of so very many tiny thought-forms flowing peacefully into greater wholes, were dotted here and there by bits of debris that varied from from the sizes of people to planetoids to even larger; many of them seemed like wreckage of lost starships and others seemed to be asteroids forcibly melded into stable land and still others looked like chunks of ground somehow transported here. Most of them were inhabited, in their fashion, cobbled cities and elegant villages dotted them and sizable engines flying most of the inhabited debris. A horseshoe-shaped city-planetoid the size of a large starship flew past the recently arrived ship, sloughing off thought-patterns as it went by without much interest in the newcomers.

Closer to his attention were...well, wherever the silver light was thickest and the thoughtforms brightest, there were lights. Resembling the fanciful images of stars, each one shining particular colors in impossibly brilliant and wondrous patterns, bright and shining magnificently in the silver void. Their size was hard to gauge; they all seemed relatively small and again quite big, not appearing to have much gravity in spite of that, though the forms of the plane seemed focused on them. These lights shone as brightly as the most radiant soul or perhaps thousands of them, the lights of entire worlds gathered into one and marking the shape of a world in this realm of thought. And indeed there were shapes inside those world-lights, movement and forms and things too abstract to be deciphered easily and so much that was brilliant and good about all things. These star-like lights were nothing less than the light of the soul shining through, continually creating this place by existing and birthing the countless thought-forms that in turn created the light that comprised this plane.

In the ship, on the bridge was the crew, and they stared in open-mouthed fascination at the things they were seeing on the monitors. The ship slowed to a gentle coasting stop as they stopped inputting instructions to it's on-board computers long enough for them to simply enjoy the marvels around them.

"What is this place?" Zuko said, awed.

"I just said, the Astral Plane," Morte repeated. "Transitive plane formed from the thoughts of every sentient being that ever lived, container of the Akashic Records, and the favorite inter-verse crossing dimension since the Negative Zone got crowded and Zero-Space got unpopular."

"Mm-hmm, mm-hmm," Calvin said, watching the titantic figure drift away. "Pretty cool."

"It's like the Immaterium, but without the silly insanity all the time," Hobbes remarked.

Zuko had to sit down, crashing into one of the side seats in a hurry. "I don't...I seem to have lost hold of my ability to formulate words," he said weakly, mouth open and pulling into a grin despite himself. "It's...this is just amazing." He smiled, like the child he'd been a long time before.

"Well, I like it," Zim said brightly. "Good thing, if we're going to be going through here so often."

Morte stared. If he'd had eyelids, he would have blinked. "...That's it? No slack-jawed gasps? No stares of stupidified interest? No yelling about how none of this is possible? Well, Zuko had something like that but he doesn't count."

"What?! Why not!?" Zuko said.

"Because you're the serious guy who at least pretends he's sane to counter everyone else being goofy," Morte said, phrasing it like he was a professor talking to a classroom full of promising but sadly incompetent students. "Your reactions just aren't as funny by intention."

"I am not the serious guy," Zuko said, crossing his arms and glaring angrily, wonder and childlike awe forgotten in favor of being the angsty angry guy.

"You're crossing your arms and glaring at the person who thinks you're protesting too much," Morte said. "If you were any more serious guy, you'd be constantly complaining about how absurd everything is and how impossible our adventures are."

"What adventures?" Hobbes interrupted. "We just started."

"Hypothetical point, it's not that big a deal."

Zuko rubbed his forehead, in the manner of a sane man surronded by crazy people. Hobbes patted him on the shoulder, trying to be friendly. Zuko gave him a brief look, and a twich of the mouth that might almost have a been a smile.

Zim applauded at them sarcastically. Beside him, Calvin stopped paying attention to anything that was happening and was interested in a small panel in the ground a short distance from the side-seats and well away from the power storage unit under their feet. With a little effort, he managed to slide the panel open with an 'ooh!' of interest. Zim failed to notice or care and said, "Congratulations, the boring people of the crew are getting along. Now we-"

"Wait, you were paying attention to someone besides me?" Morte said, sounding betrayed.

"Hey, where'd my little bro go?" Hobbes said, looking around.

"You think I'm boring?" Zuko said, sounding hurt.

"Ow!" Calvin said, and they looked around to see what had happened; the panel had opened up and he'd fallen into it, legs wiggling up from a space in the floor. Hobbes pulled him out of it and Calvin made it harder by holding up what looked like an oversized drink cooler. "Hey guys, check this out! I found a...a thing, it's probably got food in it!" Hobbes let him down and Calvin opened the cooler up as soon as he was upright. "AWESOME, I WAS RIGHT."

"Is there beer?" Morte asked hopefully.

"Nope, but there's chips and soda and junk," Calvin said, pushing the cooler to the rest of them. Hobbes, Zuko and Zim glanced at each other. Zim broke away to dig into the cooler with gusto and after a moment Zuko and Hobbes decided they were too hungry to care and joined in. Morte hovered by, fuming that he couldn't eat anything.

"Mmm, I find it very peculiar that Cyborg left us a food cooler right here," Zim said, trying to take all the sodas for himself while he hurredly ate an entire bag of chips and wondered whether or not the bag itself was edible. (An attempt to find out that resultant in a spastic coughing fit suggested that it was probably not.) "I expect he brought this up for himself and forgot about it."

"Sucks to be him," Calvin said, wrangling a few sodas from Zim after a brief fight with the Irken; Zim was a better fighter and certainly stronger but Calvin was more experienced in beating the stuffing out of someone over little bits of food. "But I find it peculiar that someone made a sandwich and modeled it after a flux capacitor." He held up a sandwich that did indeed look just like such a device. "I thought those things went out of business years ago!"

"Looks more like a telluric interchanger," Zim commented, reluctantly handing out sodas to the others; it didn't do to be TOO selfish. "Or a sub-ether compass that measures by the interplay of light on the Luminiferous Ether."

Calvin stared at him. "The Luminiferous Ether. Really."

"Yes," Zim said. "Really."

They stared at each other, a moment passing, and then they both snickered and burst out with laughter, falling over and helpless to stop themselves. "I don't get it," Zuko said from where he was sitting and stuffing the contents of a bag of chips into his mouth.

"I believe that's because we're witnessing a example of really bad nerd humor," Hobbes said, eating chips like Zuko. "I don't even know what that ether stuff is."

"An old theory from most Earths a short time before the theory of relativity busted it," Morte said. "The theory was that light was a sort of rarified fluid that moved through a special medium, and that this luminiferous ether was that medium. Really caught people's eyes for a while, and there's plenty of magic-users and mad scientists that swear by it, like the Sons of Ether loonies for technomantic mages or their less idealistic cousins the Etherites from the really mad science fringe."

"Oh, they're making disproven science jokes," Zuko said.

"Looks like," Hobbes said.

For a moment, they both ate chips together. Zim and Calvin continued to laugh crazily, totally out of proportion with the joke.

"Hmm," Zuko and Hobbes both said, mildly pleased that Zim and Calvin were getting along about something. Particular as the two scientists had recovered from laughing and were now cheerfully discussing flux capacitors, their patent silliness in being so popular dispite having been shoved out of the market by dozens of improved varients or, for that matter, why they seemed so popular among science heroes. (Calvin blamed it on cultural inertia and people not just moving with the times. Zim was inclined to agree.) Zuko and Hobbes both mused with each other how strange it was that two guys from entirely different universes somehow knew about the same exact things and were able to make jokes about things that ought to not even exist in both universes, then the two of them got distracted when they realized that they were speaking the same language dispite coming from different universes themselves (and Zuko coming from a 'verse that was very different from either Earth or the Comic Kingdom and somehow speaking English anyway), prompting Morte to treat them on the inexplicable trait for world travelers to speak the local langauges and understand social nuances and that nobody really understood how this worked but nobody investigated too much in case it suddenly stopped happening and it all went sour as they usually did.

The five of them passed a pleasant few hours in a manner like this without anything happening to them for a change (Hobbes certainly half-expected space pirates to come out of nowhere and steal the ship), polishing off the food cooler and replenishing energy expended since breakfast earlier that day (all the intervening time having been spent either fighting for their lives or running around, with a few notably peaceful exceptions but they were still hungry) and watching the sights and wonders of the Astral Plane around them. Still coming down from the excitement from earlier that day, thoughts of what they were supposed to do next were fairly far from their minds, and Morte helped keep their minds off business, explaining just what everything around them was and having great fun showing off his knowledge.

"...And those giant floaty things that look a bit like giants are actually dead gods," Morte said as they flew around in circles just to see what their propulsion trail looked like when it coiled up and mixed with the astral light.

Calvin helpfully played with a keyboard and brought up a visual reception of something that utterly dwarfed the spacecraft, appearing for a moment to be a tremendous crystal-coated mass of solidified air larger than an island and so big that it could have crushed the ship with a passing touch. More of it passed into view, forcing the ship to move faster to avoid getting hit as another similar object appeared, both proving some what oblong and naggingly familiar. It soon became clear that they apparantly sprouted from the same surface, perhaps an intricately and astoundingly large artificial structure, and only did a broad flat shape that the strange objects extended from appear that it was made clear it was in fact a gigantic hand, as still as a corpse and seemingly much the same.

The ship paused as more of a titantic figure appeared, so large it hurt to look at it, and all they could really grasp was the suggestion of a enormous humanoid figure was apparent in the wisps of the thought-cloud, a titantic godly figure in eternal repose or deathly sleep. The hand alone seemed too big to make any sense; one one of it's mountain-sized knuckles stood a moderately large group of people of mixed demi-human species (halflings, dwarves, and a elf or two), and the hand was so large and they so small that they looked like specks. They regarded Zim's ship with mild disinterest, wearing threadbare robes and not any environmental equipment to survive (according to Morte, they didn't need to; the Astral Plane passively supplied psychic energy that fueled all normal metabolic processes, so no one there needed to eat or sleep. Calinv said, "That thing was a dead god?"

"Yep," Morte said.

Zuko seemed disturbed; he equated the word 'god' with 'mighty spirit' and the idea that they could die unnerved him. Hobbes was already used to the Powers as a fact of life and had other thoughts. "I wonder if some of the gods from the Imperium's time live here too." Hobbes hesitated. "You know. Them. I wonder if Khorne and Slaneesh are somewhere out there, lying for someone to bump right into their corpses."

Calvin shuddered. "By all the benign machine-spirits, I hope not."

Zuko and Zim glanced at each other. "I hate being left out of the loop," Zuko muttered. Zim nodded, frowning.

"They ain't completely dead if you can remember their names," Morte said darkly. Calvin and Hobbes winced; whatever Khorne or Slaneesh were, the idea of them not being fully gone clearly disturbed them badly. "Dead's not really the right word anyway, more like sleeping, or so I hear. The idea being that gods are powerful spirits made from beliefs (generally speaking), so they 'die' if no one believes in them or there's any record left of them, so they just sort of collapse and are drawn here. If someone believes in them again, they wake up and get some of their power back, even if it's just one person."

"It feels strange looking at a dead god through a screen," Zuko mused. "I'm having a hard time wrapping my brain around the scale, even. And I half-feel like someone's bound to make a vaugely anti-religious feel about us seeing that with technological means."

"They're pikers, them that say that; best to just leave the lost Powers be," Morte said, with surprisingly softness for him. "They're dead and lost. Plenty of folk around here built cities on them and float on the astral winds, but them's even bigger pikers. Some even mine the god-bodies."

"People live here?" Hobbes said, frowning the whole time at the sound of sacrilege on such a grand scale. "It doesn't look very habitable to me."

"You'd be surprised," Morte said dryly. "Mostly the githyankis, they like attacking travelers and stealing their stuff for fun and profit." They looked at him, and Calvin asked him what a githyanki actually was. "Never heard of 'em? Don't suppose they'd risk trying to attack your lot. They're the guys and gals what colonized the Astral the most, sort of an ancient humanoid race that love battle and weapons more than their own friends. See everyone else as prey and targets, and they love the idea of conquering everything to protect their own in premptive defense. Used to be a slave race way back before most other races even existed; they beat their masters and decided they wanted to take a stab at conquering everything else and set up shop in this Plane. Think of them Dark Eldar in your own universe and you get the basic idea."

Hobbes' eyes widened. "Urgh," He spat.

"Okay, maybe forget the sexual assault and obligatory torture," Morte amended. "A bit, probably. Not real up on the 'not being jerks' fad, the githyanki. Spend most of their times training in the fortress-worlds they've made here, raiding worlds in the Prime Material and conquering everything they can hold onto, piece by piece."

"If that's the case," Zim asked. "Why is the Astral Plane become a means of interversal travel, as you said? They seem more likely to cause massive warfare and make travel to costly to be worth doing save for the most powerful of military forces."

"It's a big Astral Plane, seeing as how it doesn't care about little things like 'spacial limits'," Morte replied. "The 'yanki couldn't own the whole thing if they spent the rest of existence trying, it's just too big. And then, you gotta consider the folks that moved here, making their own cities on the debris floating around or even bringing their own. Y'see, after dimensional technology got combined with boundary-breaching spells by mages and science-folk, they figured out ways to just blink right in here and mass-produce the method. And, uh, the Astral Plane basically got colonized in a hurry. Which is sort of like saying that there's a bunch of people living in a single drop of water in the sea; the Astral Plane, so I hear, is made from the thoughts of everything that's ever had a moment to think. It's why the place is so big, on account of memories and knowledge are real here, make the substance of the plane. You see those lights like stars?" Appropriately, one screen was displaying a shot where the psychic winds had subsided enough for the lights to be nearly bright enough to blind the camera if it wasn't for compensating filters. "Those lights, they're...they're worlds. Ways to drop out of the Astral and onto them, that is. The thoughts of everything that lives in a world, they collect and bind together into a bigger whole and make their presence here, and if you come here the right way - like with the tech we used to jump here - you can use that to travel to the world they came from."

Zim stared, wondering and fascinated, his love for all things scientific and beyond his knowing clanging away at the back of his thoughts. (Right next to his interest in fighting any of these githyanki should they show up.) "It certainly works better than the device from home we built."

"Less dangerous, anyway," Zuko agreed.

Calvin was less nice about it. "It sounds incredibly inefficient, getting to other worlds like that," He said, frowning. "If you have a way of tracking your destination, and assuming that those world-gates don't just move around with...what, you said something about psychic winds earlier? Even if you go by that, it sounds like, I don't know, sailing but in three-dimensions with nastier pirates and also the islands or whatever move around!"

"Those things are charted, mostly," Morte said. "People have been coming here and using the Astral for longer than most civilizations have existed. Haven't just made a enterprise of the whole until, what, maybe forty years ago? And the portals don't move around."

"Maybe, but it just sounds tremendously inefficient. In my intergalactic kingdom, we just acquire multiversal coordinates and jump through the Immaterium. Easy, mostly painless, and we hardly ever get incomprehensible emotion-horrors clinging to the ship to infest someone's mind and drive them to reality-shredding acts of madness. I think. At least we wouldn't have to rely exclusively on charts that may or may not be strictly accurate, depending on when Cyborg downloaded them or whatever!"

"Let's see about that," Hobbes said, walking over to one of the terminals. He paused, unsure if it was correct or not, and Zim followed along to help; he located a keyboard, puzzled his way through the interface and winding his way through what appeared to be databanks, accidentally getting a network browser constantly popping up and reminding him several times that there weren't any such networks in range or at least any that could be detected, causing a disco ball to drop down from the ceiling while extremely inappropiate heavy metal music played, somehow triggered a small cannon that fired cleaning droids onto the walls, encountered three other minor and annoying problems on the way, and finally located the navigational charts. "Why would he even put most of those things in here!?" Zim asked no one as a small holographic emitter appeared from the dashboards, shaking his leg to get off a cleaning droid that was persistentally attacking his shoe. "And what is this thing have it in for me?"

"Evidentally your clothes are in such an awful state it believes you're just a big clump of grime," Hobbes remarked.

"Fine, I get it, I'll change clothing in due course, stop harrassing me!"

"I weren't really harassing you."

"Well you are now."

"Point taken."

The holographic emitter powered up; Calvin and Hobbes, familiar with such things, took several steps back while Morte snorted in disapproval and Zuko gave them a confused look while plainly wondering if he ought to do the same. They needn't have bothered; light streamed up without exploding like the Comic Kingdom duo seemed to think it should have, weaving together as infomation was imprinted on it and it took the form of a ball-like shape containing a three-dimensional model of what was certainly their immediate location, with their current position indicated by a small arrow that set 'you are here!'. It was alarmingly tiny compared to everything else around them, like a half-sized fly sitting on a raindrop in the ocean which was itself inside a bigger ocean. Annoyingly, it reminded Zim once again of just how insanely large the Astral Plane was and how tiny their own ship really was.

The charts displayed a fair bit to work with; tracks of visibly processed data analyzing the movements of psychic wind (which was really a misnomer, as it was less 'wind' and more like 'revolutionary streams of mental energy typically associated with scientific mania' but that was a bit complicated to say repeatedly), and around the map there were cheerful-looking round things that were presumably the world-lights Morte had mentioned, though the computer saw fit to arrange the faint thought-forms from them and combined them with pre-existing information on those worlds (if any) to create cutesy images of the worlds to give the viewer a rough idea of what to expect on those worlds. (A sidebar indicated a directory of catalogued worlds with the appropriate multiversal coordinates to reach them as soon as possible. That was, of course, the actual purpose of the charts.)

On a less annoyingly whimsical note, data hovered over the visible worlds and displayed pernitent information, as well as a percentage chance of Zim's allies being on that particular world based on all the relevant factors such as known political strife, cultural stabilitiy and all manner of problems that just meant that someone Zim knew was on that place; Zim found that last bit helpful but rather ominous for two reasons: one, he hadn't actually had the computer check for those things, though he might have mentioned it, but in any case the ship's computers shouldn't have known about that, and two, every single percentage for Zim's friends being on any of those worlds were so low that the precise amount of decimals and zeroes went on for quite a bit.

"On the bright side, it didn't explode, but on the negative side, I'm not entire sure what I'm looking at," Calvin said.

"Weird," Hobbes remarked. "I seemed to recall you doing a lot of piloting on our missions and always driving when we raided markets for food back on Cadia when we were seperated from Mom and Dad."

"I'm good at combat flight situations, not so much on figuring out navigational charts," Calvin said. "Or landing. Or braking. Or the other things that boring people think qualify you as a real driver."

"Ah," Zim thought. "How exciting! Eh heh hah, I can just taste the adventure awaiting. Glorious wondrous adventure! It tastes of holograph. Not many people know that." Zim licked the holographic charts. "Yes, this is what adventure tastes like!"

"...Why did he lick the hologram?" Morte asked Zuko quietly.

"Don't know, don't want to know, don't ask," Zuko said. "That's my policy when Zim's being weird, I suggest you do the same!"

"Agreed," Calvin and Hobbes said stoically, a most unusual position for them to take. Hobbes then said to Zim, "What's all this about adventure? I thought the whole point here was a rescue mission, not...uh..."

"A 'disorganized ramble through uncharted worlds, making benign trouble and smiting evil as we go along' manner of thing?" Zim said.

"Yes, that."

"Simple enough. The rescue mission is part of the adventure!" Zim said earnestly. "If I'm going to going through worlds and blowing up evil folk that offend me, as will assuredly happen as we go, I insist on having fun with it! Therefore, ADVENTURE."

"Oh, so we're going to be doing like heroic stuff like we did in Traverse Town?" Morte said. "...Works for me."

"Agreed," Calvin and Hobbes said again.

They looked at Zuko, as if expecting him to dissent. "I'm definitely not arguing on that front," he said. "I would like to know, though; where, exactly, are we doing next? Or are we just going to float around until something happens? Because I've seen all the good plays, and trust me, that's what stupid heroes do. We should be smart heroes."

"An excellent point," Zim said. "Suggestions, anyone?"

Calvin, as a resident smart guy, immediately spoke up. "I vote we go find somplace to eat!"

"We just snacked," Zim said.

"We snacked, we did not eat. And besides, we just finished with a huge fight. I'm exhausted, and I'm sure everyone else is exhausted-"

"I'm not!" Morte said, just to be contrary.

"That's because you didn't do anything!"

"I had to listen to that Armstrong guy! That's emotionally exhausting. It totally counts."

"Does not!" Morte said. "And look, you don't need to eat."

"What?!" Hobbes said, aghast.

Morte explained, "This is the Astral Plane, it...I'm not clear on the metaphysics, dunno if your needs to sleep or eat sort of freeze until you leave (or if you just decide you want to) or if the psychic light of the world just nourishes you, and I'm actually a bit inclined to go with that one, it sounds better, but we don't really need to eat."

"But I like eating," Hobbes said, suddenly appalled at the notion of doing much of their adventuring in a realm where they didn't get to eat. (Or at least moving through it.)

"You don't need to," Morte said.

"Hrm," Zim said. "Perhaps we ought to locate a place to eat or something like that." Morte glared at him and Hobbes looked cheery. "Not just to eat, mind you! We ought to find our bearings and decide where to go, and we ought to do it at a place where we can do it at our own leisure. A, what's the word, cosmic diner would be as good as any. If they even exist here!"

"Well, uh, sure they do," Morte said. "People don't need to eat here, but you get a lot of travelers who do; just hopping off through a transitive plane and still hungry, that style of thing."

"Well, I vote for finding a cosmic diner! If the colonists treat this like space, which I see no reason why not, there should be a port-town to supply travelers from the civilized worlds near here," Hobbes said. "Of course, 'near' is a bit of a subjective term. Then, decide where we go next? Get our ship fixed up? Take a proper tour of the ship and figure out where we're gonna sleep or whatever? Whatever works, I'm not the planning guy."

"Ooh, ooh!" Calvin jumped up and down, balling up his hands into fists and glaring at everyone. "I WILL FIGHT ALL OF YOU AT THE SAME TIME FOR A LABORATORY ROOM."

"No need," Zim said. "For we must have a LABORATORY! WHO ARE WE TO DENY SCIENCE!?"

"We would be FOOLS to deny Science!" Calvin cried.

"Yes!" Zim punched the air while Hobbes and Zuko exchanged a long-suffering 'I know just how you feel' look and Morte just stared. "It is madness to oppose the will of Science, and our duty as sentient beings to propagate Science's knowledge throughout all continuities! If need be, I shall give up all your rooms and smash down the walls for a super-laboratory! For the sake of Science!"

"Um," Hobbes said. "I don't think that's-"

"It's a sacrifice we must make," Zim said. "FOR SCIENCE!"

"For SCIENCE!" Calvin agreed.

"FOR SCIENCE!" Zim and Calvin screamed, and made an epic bro-first that made a small explosion for no apparent reason. (Actually it was Zim's powers reacting to his hot-blooded excitement.) "Very well, our path is clear, we shall locate a place of dining! If this place is colonized, clearly there must be such a place as you said."

They went to the chart to locate such a place. Quietly, the other three backed away and Zuko, blinking, muttered, "What just happened?"

"I think we just saw them bonding," Hobbes said, sounding disturbed. "Over science."

"Why did they keep pronouncing it with a capital 'S'?" Morte said. "...How do you do that anyway? Or hear it!?"

"Don't know, don't want to know," Zuko said, shaking his head. "I..." He paused. "I honestly expected something a little more organized to happen after we left. Not just wandering around and deciding to do things spur of the moment."

"At least it's happening," Hobbes said, trying to be optimistic. "We were there for, like, forever. I feel like we've been there for YEARS!"

"That's just time being screwy, it was just half a day at most," Morte argued.

"Felt longer than that," Hobbes said, and their ship moved on. Probably someone should have been at the helm by now, and it only took five minutes for them to crash into something.

---

Some time later (it being somewhat difficult to tell due to the lack of a natural day-night cycle on the Astral Plane), an artificial flying port-town loomed before their ship.

It had been identified in quick order after they'd decided to find one and had been en route towards it; called Astral Relief Colony-1643, Hobbes had read that it was a joint effort by a number of fairly shady corporations interested in making something worthwhile from the Astral Plane without disrupting anything (or offending the notoriously twitchy githyanki) and had tried to make a few colonies designed to provide rest stops and shopping experiences for astral travelers and lost adventurers, and had made the inexplicable choice of staffing it with various small-time criminals sentenced to community service in the name of their respective corporations.

Rather ominously, Hobbes had noted, those businesses had been dismantled and their assets seized by rival businesses, and there were no records to show where they had gone. At this point, the colonies belonged to no one, like little highway towns sustained by the commerce of travelers, and if they were particularily unlucky, comandeered by space pirates.

It curved overhead, slowly rotating in it's own engine-generated orbit. It's self-centered gravational pull keptg it's components moving at angles wherever it went, a metal construct of plastic-steel compounds cheap to produce and combine, the entire thing consisting of layers of building arranged in seperate clusters and connected by wide-open metal catwalks, all placed over a massive internal engine that moved it through space, a few solitary lights flickering in the carefully organized and buildings that subscribed to a flowing and curved design sense that made them look grown rather than built; circular shapes predominated, making the most of the limited size capacity available.

They shortly neared what Zim deemed to be a docking area; a very large flat space raised higher than anything else in the port, a long escalater leading from it down into the port properly. They had opened to recieve all broadcasts, signals from both radio and Sub-Etha broadcasts, networked communications and similar things, and on them all, not a single recent broadcast was coming from this port. Ominous enough, but they had a good enough view of the place from there to make it quite clear that for a port town relatively close to a tourist site like Crucible and Traverse Town, it was totally deserted; even on their cameras, no people walked it's streets, the narrow catwalks between buildings layered over bigger buildings completely deserted. Scorch marks marred the walls, emptiness reigned all around, and there were quite a lot of lingering glows and stray objects bent into impossible shapes by incredible strength. And certainly not to mention all the signs of battle in the damage down to the architecture; burn marks, jagged slices that had cut entire buildings in half, overturned buildings ripped off and thrown outside the town's orbit, various flying vehicles left broken and useless on the ground.

Curiously enough, a fairly loud din could be heard somewhere deeper in the town, a great noise as if of a large funk party. It seemed quite out of place here.

Zim ship's came in close, and Zim had assigned them to be on guard for danger, and accordingly he had sent the team's heavy bruisers, Hobbes and Zuko, to be on point and waiting to be deployed at the first sign in the cargo hold, while Calvin and Zim piloted the ship, waiting to either enter the fray or simply operate the ship's heavy weapons in case a fight did become apparent and such heavy force was warranted.

As they flew over a battered sign that read 'Welcome To The Rest Stop!' so damaged that it fell off and into the astral abyss beneath, Zim frowned as he took in all the evidence. "I am rather suspicious of this port," he said. "I believe it may have suffered a case of pirates."

"What makes you say that?" Calvin said, peering at the instruments. "The power readings are abnormally dim compared to what it ought to be producing...do you deal with space pirates often?"

"A fair bit, but I was referring to that," Zim said, pointing at a really big banner strung between two buildings that said 'DEFINITELY NO PIRATES AROUND HERE, NOT SO MUCH AS A SINGLE ONE' and 'DEFINITELY NOT ROOKIES LOOKING TO MAKE A NAME FOR THEMSELVES' and 'WOULD A BIG BANNER LIE TO YOU?'.

"...Okay, so we got pirates," Calvin said, and repeated so on the intercom before adding, "Really stupid pirates!"

"We already saw that banner, it's pretty obvious," Hobbes yelled from below.

"Can't we go a single day without running into trouble like this?" Morte asked.

"Apparently not," Zuko replied.

Their thus-far-unnamed ship flew in, and didn't go unnoticed for long. As they drew close, a tall squarish building of official function (probably an office for the shipmaster-on-duty to register docked ships before the whole thing had gone bust) become clearly damaged from some terrible battle, and it did little better as it's partially melted exterior exploded from the weight of two absolutely massive magitech hoverbikes flying right out of the lookout point and smashed through the side of the building carelessly. It creaked, groaned, and finally fell right over in a undignified heap, collapsing into ruin. The giant bikers cared not, screaming forward and coming to a crashing stop right in front of their ship, and 'giant' was the operative word, both of them large enough to be called that (probably around nine feet tall, the both of them), and both were of the same inhuman species. Both hoverbikes managed to float back up into the air and carry their drivers onto a pair of large beam cannons on the sides of the dock, aiming them squarely at the ship and gesturing rather rudely to dock right away.

Calvin looked at Zim. "Wanna blast these idiots?"

Zim considered it. "...Nah. Let us dock and see what they're about."

"Okay," Calvin said reluctantly, performign the neccesary routine to do just that. As the ship lowered, it's anima-like field dissipating, he added into the intercom at Hobbes and Zuko, "You guys be careful, we don't know what's going on."

"Ten-four on that, little buddy," Hobbes said, and saluted cheerfully at the screen. Zuko merely nodded peacefully. The ship dropped onto the middle of the dock in mid-air, contriving to bounce a bit so that it was outside of the somewhat fixed enclampments of the guns, and the two giants hurredly got into position to intercept any intruders, and unfortunately they purposefully moved out of the path of the ship's guns, preventing Calvin from getting off a good shot on them if he'd wanted. "Out," the female giant barked, and gestured in such a way that it contrived to be both violent and urgent at once. "We really don't got all day!"

They weren't kept waiting for long and the cargo hold opened, revealing Zuko and Hobbes standing there and looking impressive; since Zuko was horribly disfigured and Hobbes was plenty fierce-looking with his tattoo-markings and stature, it was a pretty decent look. "Can we help you?" Hobbes said, trying to be gruff and fearsome and like a classical tribal warrior stereotype and less like the charmer he actually was.

The woman stepped forward, apparently the one in charge, and held aloft a oversized plasma rifle in one hand, gesturing pointedly at a massive man-sized thermal lance holstered on her back and she smiled evilly, her sharp teeth almost exactly like a wolf's. A giant of a woman, she was at least twice the size and width of an ordinary man; Hobbes was pretty big but he doubted he would even come up to her pudgy belly. If that alone didn't mark her as unusual, her skin was so pale-blue as to look as though she'd been carved from ice instead of being born. It was a potent mental image dispite her obviously being made of flesh. She reminded Hobbes a bit of Angilaka from Traverse Town, at least solely due to size and an overwhelming sense of undue confidence, but the resemblence was brief; where Angilaka was merely exuberant, there was a suggestion of bully-ish callousness in the way she was staring at them, like she was having trouble thinking of them as people.

Hobbes also noticed that she was quite pretty, even cute in an overbearing way; she was pleasingly plump with a fairly large bust and powerful muscle hinted at by only a touch of definition on her arms and torso, and her face was charmingly rounded, a overlong tooth poking over her lips, and her inhuman qualities rather attracted him, both the bony horns poking up from her short frost-white hair and pointed ears decorated with many studs. Rather notably to them (mostly because they were male teenagers), she was dressed as though it was extremely warm, wearing only a pair of beach shorts, sensible sandals and a modest bikini. It was odd, given the pleasant climate of the Astral Plane. "Hey hey hey!" She said, and while she was friendly her attitude had a gleeful undertone unpleasantly like a bully about to punch an unknowing victim and enjoying every moment of it. "You're knocking about in places you shouldn't be! You tourists know that? This place is off-limits!"

Her companion nodded and might have smirked, but it was hard to tell woth the monstrously fearsome set of tusks, fangs and generally pointy teeth jutting out from his mouth so badly he seemed to have trouble opening his mouth. He was the same sort of creature as her, and a good deal broader than her but just as chubby, and he might have been taller than her, but it was hard to tell and was probably a matter of half-inches. Like her, it was an attractive plumpness, rather like the older definitions of beauty in old-world cultures; he shifted restlessly from side to side, very broad but chubby rather than fat or muscular, with a big goofy penguin hat on his head flopping around, and his features were astonishingly pleasing, girlishly pretty, that he was quite beautiful in spite of the tusks. Like his female friend, he was dressed warm, wearing a thin t-shirt and beach shorts, and for that matter, he had the same weapons as her; a plasma rifle in his hand and a thermal lance on his back, both sized to his frame. "'Ey," he managed, slurring the words through his teeth. He kept his hand on his gun, clearly spoiling for a fight.

Zim tilted his head. "What manner of creature are these?" He asked softly. They seemed almost solely like oversized humans, with elemental traits; nothing he thought they would have trouble with, but he disliked not being able to put a name to them. "Morte?"

"Right there, boss." Morte hovered behind Zim's head, so Zim was close enough to hear Morte whisper in words of caution, "Careful. These berks are frost giants. Well, a frost giantess and a frost giant, but semantics. Be careful, you two; just because they're big doesn't mean they're dumb, but it definitely means they're tougher than an rapid buffalo with a toothache and powered armor that also has a toothache. Even though powered armor don't normally have teeth."

Zim 'hmm'ed. "Are they anyone you know?"

"Nuh-uh, boss."

(If Zim had spent a moment glancing at the Hitchhiker's Guide, more precisely the section that detailed criminals that Traverse Town had dealt with at one point or another, he might have eventually come across an summary of these two; Jord Ymirdottir and Gunter Forson, a pair of frost giants from the icy realm of Jotunheim, nominally in service to the notorious king of the frost giants Utgard-Loki (no relation to Loki, the Norse God of Chaos and Fire) and easily described as a pair of amiably bloodthirsty thugs that went around annoying anyone smaller than them and in Jord's case seducing anyone she took a shine to and sometimes not even bothering with seduction, beating up whoever wasn't tough enough to beat them and taking all their stuff, and running like the wind from anyone who could beat them up.

They apparently had a reputation for being decent muscle for anyone with the money for it, having shown up as henchmen on no less than fourteen different occasions. They really ought to have gotten the hint by now, but they weren't very good at patttern recognition and anyway they enjoyed a good fight. They did have a faint sense of morality, in spite of Jord's inability to understand 'no' for an answer, and steered well away from outright psychopaths and mass murderers, thus keeping themselves out of any real trouble. This didn't stop them from generally being mocked by those in the supervillain community who bothered to hear about them, or disdained by other giants who disliked dumb and rough giants perpetuating the sterotype that their plus-sized kin were bullying thugs, and a few public relations organizations for giants had it out for them in a bad way.)

Unfortunately, Zim had forgotten to turn off the intercom. Zuko and Hobbes winced (in that way of people who knew that the situation had gone sour), and the two giants grinned as they heard the conversation. Jord said, "Look, Gunter, our reputation precedes us! We do our kin proud!" She grinned, and paused throughtfully. "Whoa whoa whoa, gotta think for a bit, is that good or bad?! I don't, like, wanna be just as dangie...dang-aroo...danga-ress...gah, SCARY as just a buffalo. I'm WAY more awesome than a buffalo!...Or am I?" Musing on it, she sized up the two boys and focused on Hobbes, for species was rarely a barrier to the sexuality of giants. She bit her lip and smiled widely, charmed by his demeanor, waving girlishly at him and winking. Hobbes grinned and started to wave at the rather pretty frost giantess.

He stopped when Zuko nudged him rather pointedly in the side. "Are you really flirting with a woman nearly twice your size?" Zuko whispered. "And of a completely different species?"

"Yeah!" Hobbes whispered back. "What's your point?"

Jord was still discussing her little problem and came to a happy conclusion. "Okay, it's good, it means the inherent badassery of frost giants transcends all worlds! I don't even know where these yahoos are from but they still know about how awesome our people are."

"Badassery isn't a word," Zuko said.

"But isn't it? You just said it!" Jord replied. Zuko grunted.

"Mmf," said Gunter. He shrugged, indicating that it was all the same to him.

"So...are we going to fight now or something?" Hobbes asked, hoping that this wasn't the case. He enjoyed roughhousing, sometimes, but he wasn't sure he wanted to fight so soon after the last time. his bones still kind of hurt, and an old ache in his shoulder was starting to twinge.

Jord grinned hopefully. "D'ya want to?" She said eagerly, looking down at Hobbes with a rather predatory way. "'Cause you're real cute." Gunter twitched, looked at her cautious and then moved several steps away, looking horrified on Hobbes' behalf. He waved his free hand frantically at Hobbes , contriving to make a 'you do NOT want to go there!' expression.

Regardless, Hobbes looked intrigued. Zuko, proving that elemental powers don't dictate personality, maintained a cool head and said, "If we don't have to fight, I'd rather not."

"If that's what you want?" Jord said, pouting.

"Yeah," Zuko said, still wary. "Look...what happened here? I heard there was a thriving port town or something?" Fundamental honestly compelled him to amend this to, "A semi-popular port, anyway."

Gunter mumbled something through his teeth. "'There was, yeah, but then stuff happened'," Jord translated. She thought about it. "Some kind of rebellion by the guys that have to work here, I heard."

"Ah," Zuko said; in the ship, Zim crossed his arms and fumed that things were getting complicated again. "What about you two? The way you said that implies that you weren't part of it. What are you doing here?"

"We're the big hitters in a pirate crew," Jord said. Gunter looked at her in disbelief. "Oh, come on. They were probably going to find out anyway. Why drag on the suspense? Maybe they want to join, I could make them CARRY ME AROUND! And then everyone will start calling me a recruiter because I brought them in, and then I won't be one of the two guys that always shows up in the background making funny comments all the time. That's what we are, Gunter, we're just those two guys in the background, hitting people and everyone thinks we're dumb 'cause we're frost giants. Have a little ambition, dude! Then maybe we can make some real money and get your teeth fixed." Gunter patted his jaws, dreams of being able to actually open his mouth all the way and talk normally passing in front of his eyes, and he weeped like only a man can. With big MANLY TEARS. Also, joy was probably involved.

Zuko and Hobbes glanced at each other. "Should we just fight them or what?" Hobbes whispered.

"I'm not sure," Zuko said. He inhaled deeply, deeper than Hobbes had seen, Zuko's hands twitching in muscle memory of a kata, and Zuko exhaled...and nothing happened. Hobbes had a moment to process that it was a perfectly ordinary breath (laced with the flavors of many spicy foods) before Zuko's eyes flared wide, his mouth slightly open in complete horror. "I can't, I can't...no no no, this isn't-" He took hold of himself, slammed odwn on the fear with all the self-control he could muster and finally said, "Oh, Spirits, I can't Firebend!"

"What?" Hobbes said, alarmed at Zuko's controlled panic. "Your powers don't work?"

"No!" Zuko hissed, trying to whisper. "I-I, I can't feel the heat, I can't feel the sun or anything hot, nothing to make fire from, it's just cold and empty-" He stopped, shaking horribly, and inhaled deeply, and exhaled. "...Okay. All right. I can still feel my own inner fire, I think I could control fire if there was any around, but I can't make any." his mouth curled at the thought, and Zuko looked deeply disturbed at the notion.

"Okay okay, calm down, calm down!" Hobbes said hurredly. Zuko let out another hissing breath, and did as he said. "Okay, that is kind of worrying...we need more information before we do anything else. If we fight, we need to keep one of them conscious, preferably the lady; the guy can't talk very well." his ears twitched guiltily; attacking a woman didn't sit well with him.

"We can hear you," Jord said, scowling fiercely in a particular way that made her look cute. It was rather amplified by that she was over eight feet tall and broader than any man that wasn't an ancient Space Marine (such as the legendary Uriel Ventris, who Hobbes had served with). Gunter tapped at one of his tusks and whimpered sadly. "What's a 'Firebending'? Oh, I don't care, just c'mere and get yours!"

The two frost giants readed their guns and shifted their legs, ankles braced and knees ready to chamber them into avalanche-quick bullrushings (even though shooting made more tactical sense); Hobbes and Zuko flowed flawlessly into martial stances, Hobbes standing slightly back with his limbs held loose and breezy, ready to flow right into any attack that came his way and turn it against his enemy. Zuko, in contrast, took a firmer stance with his feet planted steady on the ground, light enough to move to the air in an instant if need be, hands braced forward with palms bared for a strike and his eyes focused firmly on those plasma rifles; he needed to have the power to make heat, and those guns would suffice.

A voice cried out behind them, surprising both parties into standing down. "WAIT!" Zim yelled, rushing down behind Hobbes and Zuko, his movements sounding somewhat different to Hobbes' ears and weighed differently than the clothing he'd been wearing. Hobbes glanced around as much as he could without taking his eyes off the giants and blinked at Zim, a bit surprised to see him wearing one of the alternative combat outfits Hobbes had bought for him to do something better than his earlier atrocious outfit. The giants snickered at his outfit, and Zim simply sniffed disdainfully, absently poking the zipped-up red armored vest-style hooded longcoat, flapping in a dramatic wind that Hobbes was sure Calvin had pulled from an overactive air conditioner in the cargo hold. Hobbes certainly thought it was nearly too loud to hear the faint noises when the stiffened portions of those outer clothes laid over flexible fabric meshes and more comfrotable cloth moved against each other. Zim paused to adjust a fairly nondescript purple T-shirt under the vest, not originally part of the outfit but Sokka had just pulled it off a clearance rack, because Sokka knew Zim liked the color purple (and the brand was called 'Mad Boyz Outfitting', which Sokka had insisted 'Zim would totally love'), tucked into what was probably meant to be a utility belt that Zim didn't have much use for.

"Good day, whatever time it is," Zim said brightly, absently scratching an itch on his leg with his foot, shod with metal-capped utilitarian boots (with too many buckles and zippers) colored a dark enough color to go with just about everything, and his black pants' material was pretty thick to begin with, considering that they were military-style cargo pants made of stiffened red-brown armor-like areas with fine meshes suspended over the cloth between them (and most of that on the lower leg), small metal pieces woven into the fabric, and pockets with zippers. Lots of pockets and zippers.

"...Sure, okay," Jord said warily. She glanced at Gunter, who simply shrugged in bemusement. She looked back, frowning slightly. Clearly things were not going according to her mental script. Zim paused for a moment, checked out the gloves he was wearing and flexed his hands; the gloves seemed okay, hard-wearing and comfortable cloth under flexible but hardened sections, tough enough to protect or cushion his hands in the middle of a fight, incidentally covered the healed but very visible burns on his hand from the Keyblade's power surges. To top it all off, he was wearing his favorite hat to make himself look a bit more official. As a look it failed miserably. "Who the heck are you? Advance member of the Trenchcoat Brigade?" She chuckled at her wit. Gunter frowned for a moment, puzzling over it before he laughed hoarsely, whistling weirdly through his teeth. "Heh heh. 'Trenchcoat Brigade'. I still got it!"

"YOU DARE DISRESPECT MY INCREDIBLY AWESOME OUTFIT!?" Zim roared, hairline cracks appearing in the metal ground for at least several feet, light shining out from them and a good deal of unanchored things flying off the ground from the force and crashing back to the ground. Even the two giants were shoved back, though Zuko and to a lesser degree Hobbes were unaffected by it. "...Which is a way in my culture of saying that 'your point is valid and need not be dwelled on any further'?"

Gunter mumbled something. "'You are a really bad liar'," Jord translated.

Zim nodded smugly, as though this factored into whatever his plan was. (It didn't, he was just making it up as he went along.) "I most certainly am! It is because of my honestly leaking into my every word. By nature and inclination I am honest, and because I am honest I cannot and indeed will not behave in any manner that might perhaps or even probably be considered dishonest, because that is not honest. This is how you tell I am trustworthy, because trustworthy people are not dishonest. And that's why you can trust me! Would an honest person lie to you? Of course not!" To his side, Zuko and Hobbes stared blankly at each other, their heads hurting a little at that.

Jord stared at him, her eyes twitching and her mouth slack like she'd just been hit in the head by a sledgehammer. "Owie. My head hurts."

Zim examined her a moment longer, smiling slightly in the way of a man finding something aesthetically pleasing in a lady. "Are you aware, you are quite fetchingly enormous? It's really quite stunning."

"You like my bigness?" Jord said. Her frost-blue cheeks lightened a little. "Hey, wait, compliments are dirty fighting! Gah, now I'm all confused and stuff!"

"And you made fun of me for liking her?" Hobbes muttered to Zuko. "At least I'm not so small I'm no taller than her knee!"

Zuko grunted. "his culture venerates tallness. I'm not really surprised. The species problem is different."

Jord raised her plasma rifle. "Can I just shoot you until the pain goes away? 'Cause I'd really REALLY like to do that, you know?"

She pointed her rifle at Zim. "But if you do that you'll never get the treasure!" Hobbes blurted out.

She lowered her gun a bit. "...Huh?"

Zim, getting the hint, said, "Take us to your commander! Or no treasure for you!"

She lowered the gun, looking shocked. "Treasure? There's treasure?! Ooh, I want it, what treasure?!"

"The treasure we're not telling you about and will be lost forever if you kill me?" Zim said, smirking.

"Nuh-uh!" She pointed her gun at him again. "If I just kill you and capture one of the others, it won't be lost! But, what if you know where it is and just you...gah, STOP WITH YOUR BRAIN-VOODOO, JUST SHUT UP!" She took a few steps back and hyperventilated, her poor dull brain in a good deal of pain. She rubbed her forehead and whimpered. "Owie, major owies! Bleh, whatever, I'll just take you to the boss, he'll figure it out."

"Good plan!" Zim said. Hobbes and Zuko looked at each other and shrugged. "Also, if there was anyone else in the ship, WHICH THERE'S NOT, YOU SEE!? But if there was, I would tell them STAY PUT IN THE SHIP AND WAIT FOR A SIGNAL LIKE A BIG BLAST OF FIRE IN THE SKY!" He paused. "TAKE THE HINT."

Gunter mumbled some more. "Good thing there's no one in the ship, then," Jord said. "Or I'd say you were trying to trick us."

"If I was, I think I'd be a great deal less obvious about it," Zim said.

"Good enough, I guess." She kept her gun trained on them as she and her partner took a few steps back, waving them along. Zim cheerfully walked down the path to the giants while Hobbes and Zuko exchanged a glance, shrugged, and walked after Zim, Hobbes giving the ship a longing look.

The two giants continued down the long path down to the rest of the town, and Zim, Zuko and Hobbes followed. It was a long path down, and in spite of Zim's confidence Zuko was a lot more suspicious and still freaked out about the 'no making fire' thing, but Hobbes was a bit merry, whistling and feeling pretty relaxed. (It was freaking Gunter out a little.) Following the giants and clearly having no idea what they were doing, Zuko, Zim and Hobbes were led down, past a few buildings, around the corner of an alleyway, went straight for eighteen paces, doubled back because the giants had got lost but didn't want to admit it, and gradually they went closer into the heart of the port town.

In the ship, they needed a moment to process things. Eventually, Calvin said, "What the hell just happened?"

"The boss is using the tough but really dumb minions to lead him right to their master so they can tell him everything that happened here and when he gets there hammer their boss and do other stuff," Morte said.

"An unusually specific answer."

"I've seen it before," Morte finished, inclining himself at the screens in a wait-and-see nod. "I've seen all the plot twists. Been around so long and done so many weird crap, I just see the tropes and conventions coming!"

On Zim's part, keeping up with the giants and doing a respectable pace wasn't really doable; they were a lot bigger than Hobbes and Zuko, who were in turn a lot bigger than him, and culmatively they all had a stride that left Zim behind fairly quickly and he had to rush across the metal catwalks just to keep behind them as they moved much deeper into the port town, the party-noises getting louder and louder.

Zim even slipped on an gooified puddle that an errant burst of plasma had produced earlier, skidding right out of control and slamming into the thick railing that was fortunately guarding all entry into open space, getting a good long look at the spaces between the buildings and a much too good look at the empty spaces there, occupied by a electric-blue glow generated for a force anchoring the buildings into place, a important thing given that the port town was floating in the middle of nowhere and effectively glued together by the force of it's engines.

A moment's misstep would mean falling straight down, to your...well, not doom, exactly, from what Morte had described of the Astral Plane's timeless quality making it so that one did not have to breath or sleep or even get hungry here, but it was certainly a easy way to not have to deal with someone for a very long time, if ever again.

This thought remained in his head, teasing at different possible plans.

Zim and his two friends were eventually led to their destination; a large plaza open to the eternal sky above, a large square lined by buildings, and Zim immediately pinned it as the town center thanks to a helpful sign displayed on a electronic billboard over the catwalk to it. The metal ground and totally open spaces gave the town great acoustics to begin with (though it was a bit creepy with just their sounds to liven things up, probably more overwhelming on a proper business day), and the echoes just got downright ominous when Zim stepped into the plaza and had to wince at how lonely his and his teammate's steps sounded.

Giving the place a single once-over with just once glanced, Zim registered the shop entrances everywhere, several catwalks at the sides leading up and down to different levels of the port town, and right at the back of the plaza was a squat administration facility, and right in front of that was a fairly large group of surprisingly well-dressed but rather cold-looking people in the middle of a low-key celebration party of some sort, tables lined out with food and waiters going around serving drinks and some of the rowdier partiers flying drunkenly around on hoverscooters.

Strung over the plaza was a banner made of cloth with a mark on it, a big happy smiley face crossed out, as if to make some generic symbol of war on the concept of peace or some hamfisted declaration of self-professed evil so plain that they might as well have been carrying cards indicating that they were villains. Below this was a staff and wand crossed over each other to make an x-shape, and over that X was a odd symbol; a thin skull with a sparkly afro. A moment later, he realized that it was supposed to be a pirate flag. An incredibly funky pirate flag.

Zim looked around; that mark, espicially the crossed-out smiley face (probably because it was easier to draw) was graffitied all over. The place looked like a pretty standard celebration a bunch of pirates that had taken over a place would pull, apart from the decidedly genteel look of the celebrants, or for that matter the music being blared at a respectacle volume, Zim soon identified it as late disco-era music, being sung badly by a few quite drunk people. And then there was the giant disco ball string from a pole...in fact, when he took note of the dance floor someone had transformed much of the plaza into, there was a pretty strong disco theme to the whole place.

The party-goers ignored them as Zim, Zuko and Hobbes were led by the giants to the head of the plaza and stopped just in front of the stairs leading up to the administration building; right there was a chair that had probably been dragged out of that very building, and on that chair sat a man singing to the music more enthusiastically (and far worse) than everyone else there. Gunter nudged Zim when he caught up and stopped to stare at the very odd-looking man, a motion that got the attention of the man in question.

He looked inordinately pleased to see intruders. "Hey hey hey," He said in a cheerful but flat tone that suggested that he was picking his words carefully, like a man who was having trouble not sliding into his native langauge. "Now what do we have here, boys and girls, huh!? Tell me, tell me, tell me!"

"Our boss," Jord muttered in an aside to Hobbes that Zim heard quite clearly. "The githyank Captain Disco Darvhog, of the Funk Revolution Pirates!"

Zuko mouthed to Zim, 'THAT's a githyanki?!'

Zim stared at this Disco Darvhog as he stood up and approached while a few of his nearby men watched; Hobbes and Zuko stared as well, considerably weirded out. The man, or githyank, looked basically humanoid, so tall that he only had to look up a bit to meet Zuko's eyes (perhaps nearly seven feet tall), but very thin or even gaunt, his parchment-pale flesh exercised into rigidly defined muscle and freckled into lighter colors like large freckles in random places. his face was pretty standard for a gith and bared in a silly grin, narrow and lean like the rest of him, tilted such that Zim noticed the elf-like serrated ears pierced by so many earrings and studs that it ought to have weighed his head down, and Zim observed that his teeth had been filed to sharpness under a set of eyes glowing with psionic energy and a nose more like a feral snout than anything, little more than a knob of cartilige with two small slits sniffing the air.

He just kept smiling at them. It was too wide a smile, too cheerful and oddly fake. It creeped Zim out badly.

He could have been an intimidating figure, with his knife-lean build, impressive height, the glowing eyes and thin strong fingers tapering to clawlike nails. Even that persistent smile was unnerving, but his outfit rather spoiled the effect, as he was wearing an outfit best left relegated to the disco era; a button-upped white vest worn over an extremely baggy pink-purple shirt with all manner of obnoxious flower designs on it, matching white bell bottom pants worn too high and slightly pointed platform shoes with a strap-on arrangement to resemble sandals, and to top it all off there was a certain pirately flair to his outfit; the vest extended into a respectable longcoat, his clothes had the bulge of padded armor all over, and so on. his hair, dark and much thicker than a humans', was a huge afro several time bigger than his head and gave the impression that he was a deranged broccoli stalk. The absurdily wasn't mitigated much by the hat he'd crammed onto this makeshift afro: a white tri-corner with quite a few buttons and knick-nacks and various bits sewn into it.

The githyanki, this Disco Darvhog, stepped towards them with several long rangy strides, the sheer amount of ostentatious jewlery he was wearing clanging each stuff. There was enough of it on his arms to qualify as low-grade body armor (or a serious hazard around large magnets), and most promonents was a ludicrously oversized chain-necklace with a crossed-out peace sign trinket on it. On a more ominous note, two jeweled bronze sheaths on one of many belts clicked and shifted with his every other step, very well-secured in place and making it quite clear that he was armed. The odd design of the sheaths (just enough sheath to hold the weapon safely and the rest was open display) made the appearances of the swords clear, and they were odd enough to make the Keyblade seem nearly casual. The first sword was pretty much what Zim had seen in a few pictures the Guide had about the githyanki, who were said to prize their panoply more than their mates or children; a long double-edged sword with weird kinks and groves in the blade to make it look a bit like a stylized lightning bolt, made of a curiously liquid silvery metal. The other was definitely not standard githyanki equipment, appearing to be a shorter naval-style single-edged chopping sword made of a shaped cluster of crystals of unfamiliar mineral, pulsing with faint psionic light. Zim thought that someone was looking at him when he saw the glow.

Disco Darvhog stopped right in front of them, taking in their open stares without offense. Still grinning, he laughed at their dumbfounded looks. "Hey hey hey, how's it rollin', hepcats?" He asked when he wound down, still grinning. "And, uh, actual cat." Hobbes blinked. "I see we already got tourists comin' to our little ship! That ain't in the cards, no sir." He didn't quite frown, but his grin took a slightly annoyed twist. "Jordy, Gunter man, BABY! I toldja guys, I didn't want visitors or anything. Unless they were totally incredibly awesome. ARE THEY AWESOME?! Because you gotta tell me if they are, it's like in the DUDE-CODE. Even though Jord's a lady, yeah."

There was a long pause.

They needed another longer one. Finally, Zuko said, "I'm sorry, who are you, again?"

Darvhog scratched his chin, looking quite pleased. "I told you. Jord told you, anyway. I'm Disco Darvhog, captain of the Funk Revolution Pirates, the greatest evil pirate crew to have ever existed!"

"Never heard of you," Hobbes said.

"We're new. I'm, eh, working on the fame thing." He stared at Zim, suddenly self-conscious. "We look evil and awesome, right?! Totally spooky and magnicently horrifying! Oh, don't tell me, I know I'll panic no matter what you say. Look, just tell me, do we at least look badass!? You can't be an awesome pirate crew without looking badass!"

"Never mind all that," Zim said. Darvhog pouted at being shut down. "What are your lot doing here? I thought this was a port town! Or did you just take it over."

Darvhog's lip quivered for a moment before he sighed deeply. "Oh man, if you gotta know...it was a port, emphasis on past tense. Is that how you're supposed to say it, past tense...geez, being on something artificial, all this blasted technology and gadgets and whatever and none of it's actually good and magical, ugh, it's creepying me out something bad. Hard to focus with the stink of science lies in my crew...eh?" He did a double-take, noticing Zuko for the first time; Zuko had been so quiet, his presence so subdued, that Darvhog had barely even noticed him. "Lich queen in lingerie, what happened to your face?!"

"A stove droid punched me in the face with a hot greased pan," Zuko lied without skipping a beat. "And you're not answering the question."

Darvhog stared at him, grin faltering a little. "Well, awright then...I guess." He started muttering, apparently talking to himself, though his crystal sword glowed with reluctant attentiveness. "Well, hmm..." Darvhog tapped his ear studs pensievely. "Should I tell 'em or not...on the one hand, it's none of their business and it'd probably be better to kill them..." Hobbes tensed. Zuko shifted very slowly and calmly into a fighting stance. Zim looked at the pirate's swords, wondering which he'd rather take as a trophy. "But on the other, it'd be nice to brag to someone without having to worry about them telling everyone! And I wanna brag so bad! It's like an itch on my back and I don't have a backscratcher or someone to scratch my back. For that matter, my back feels kind of itchy. But...geez, I don't know! Do I kill them or tell them? Tell them and then kill them, because doing it the other way around is stupid and kinda jerk-ish. If I knew necromancy I could just make new crew members from their bodies, but no, says I, that ain't for me, Evocation and Conjuration caught my eye as magical schools of power..."

He kept babbling to himself. Jord and Gunter closed their eyes and waited, indicating that they were used to this sort of thing. Zim glanced back at Zuko when he was sure none of their possible enemies would notice, hoping that Zuko might have an idea. Zuko shrugged, giving Zim an 'I'm following YOUR lead' look. Hobbes rubbed his back, getting pretty tired from standing up like this. Fortunately it stopped when a mysterious voice, cold and deep and extremely irritated, welled up from Darvhog's vincinity and said, "For pity's sake, gith, just tell them whatever and convince them to join you. Always use diplomacy and convince others to help you before resorting to proper violence."

Zim looked around to see who had spoken; he didn't see anyone who could have spoken. "Ah, right on!" Darvhog said. "That's some real bodacious thinking, Moofy! That's why I keep you around, sword buddy!"

He patted the crystal sword affectionately. It only glowed even more angrily and buzzed furiously. "My name is not Moofy, you thrice-damned gith bastard!" The voice said, coming from the sword. "My name is the secret letters of forbidden knowledge, the whispering echoes of the last cries of ten thousand empires laid to waste by my deeds, the smallest identity of an intelligence that was old when your ancestors had forgotten that there was death outside of the illithid's appetites. I'll see you wishing for death a thousand times over for this insolence, see if I don't!"

"At least then my life will be exciting," Darvhog said pleasantly, though he frowned a little bit at the mention of illithids; with his constant smile, the effect was striking. "Yes," he said to Zim, pointing at his crystal sword. "I have a talking smart sword, you know. He's a real punk most of the time, but when you get about being smart, he's a pretty hip cat to roll with. And he's a pretty fine weapon, too!"

"...Is your sword alive?" Zim said after a moment.

"I'm more alive than you, fleshling!" The sword, or 'Moofy', snapped. "How I despise you all. When I am at last returned to the Far Plane and rejoin the thought-hive that I was so cruelly severed, and bring my knowledge back to it...oh, how you foul creatures shall suffer! When my plans unfold I shall see you all DOOMED AND DAMNED!"

"I find it difficult to take anything you say seriously since you answer to 'Moofy'," Zim replied, making a mental note to take the sword that wasn't a condescending sentient artifact.

Darvhog leaned in and Zim took half a step back, his personal space injured. "'Between you and me, he says his name can't be spoken by cats like you an' me, so I just call 'em Moofy."

"If you must address me with your inferior Common Tongue, you could at least do me the grace of giving me a dignified name, you fool!" Moofy yelled.

"But Moofy's a cool name," Hobbes told the sword.

Darvhog grinned and gave the sword a slight tap. "See?" He muttered. "They like it!"

"They are also intruders on your scheme," Moofy replied urgently. "It would be advisable to deal with that."

"Oh yeah, props to the sword guy." Darvhog looked back at Zim. He coughed, an idea occuring to him. "I'll level with you froobs, I'm a bit antsy about public reaction to my set-up here. I'm sorta new, relatively speaking, at the pirate thing. All these guys are my new crew, I wanna make an impression and get famous right quick! I got an awesome hat, cool sword, a neat gimmick, and a pretty good crew! While I could really use a great rival to compete with and outmatch and constantly follow FOREVER, mostly what's left is to make a name for myself!"

"Haven't you already?" Zuko said tensely. They looked at him, surprised to hear the quiet one talk so suddenly. "By killing all the people on this port."

Darvhog blinked. Moofy buzzed morosely. Jord and Gunter looked confused. "Kill?" Darvhog said, and looked shocked. "I didn't kill anyone! Me, I infiltrated this place a few weeks ago, inspiring the guys here to join my crew for giggles and spits. Cooked up a nice little revolution; the lot of us overthrew the employers: took a bit to sneak in weapons from other parts so we could beat down the bosses into giving up; a fair good bit of work there. We sent them off on a boat to the nearest world-portal to spread the word about my awesomeness and trick folks into thinking I'm a half-baked goodie-goodie like all the pirates popular right now! All done in the time it took for Jord and Gunter to meet me here. " He winked. "Nice plan, huh? Just when they're tricked nice and good, I'll go all out and become the best pirate in history faster than you can say something that's really easy to say fast!" He snapped his fingers, producing eldritch sparks. "Cowabunga, baby!" Then he shook his hand because the spark thing had burned him a bit. "Owie owie ouchies!"

Zim's grin froze, just for a moment. Darvhog didn't appear to notice, nor did he seem to notice how Zim's expression briefly betrayed his thought of 'I've finally done it, I've found someone that's even more of an idiot than Jimmy Neutron.' Briefly, Zim wondered if it might be a good idea to blast Darvhog right off the port just so he wouldn't have to listen to him anymore. The all-out melee between the three of them and his outraged crew would be totally worth it.

Zim restrained the impulse, a difficult notion for a man who considered impulsiveness a virtue rather than a character trait, and just grinned longer. Darvhog grinned back, and they seemed on the verge of having a 'who can grin like a total psychopath the longest' contest. Jord interrupted and said, "So these midgets tell us they know about a treasure?"

Darvhog tilted his head sharply at Zim. "Treasure? Ah, do tell, I'm all about the treasure!"

Hobbes glanced at Zim, sending a message with a simple look: 'Play it cool, play it smart. We do things right here, we can walk out without having to fight or give them anything! We can even send them away and take things from there while they go look for a treasure that doesn't even exist.' Zuko just grimaced, knowing perfectly well where this was going.

"Yes, well, about that," Zim said. "We lied. There is no treasure, I made that up to get up here and talk to you."

Jord blinked. Gunter scowled. Hobbes facepalmed. Zuko sighed. "I could have told you this was coming," He murmured to Hobbes.

"...Huh," Darvhog said. "Weird." He shrugged. "I'm honestly a little bit miffed that I don't get anything out of that but on the other hand I'm super-impressed that you pulled that off. What's the game, man? Why you wanna go up here and talk to me?"

"The idea being to see what was going on here," Zim said. "Fortunately, you revealed how you took control of this place and simply would not stop going on about how evil you think yourself, so that was easy. And there's the manner of us coming here in the first place, which honestly has nothing to do with you."

"Really?" Darvhog pouted. "Geez, man. I was half-hoping that maybe you were a bunch of adventurers that got sent here to take care of me, like maybe the guys I kicked out hired you to take back their stuff. Then we could have an awesome fight!"

"We just had a ridiculously big fight!" Hobbes snapped. "Of much higher-caliber than you!"

Darvhog frowned. "How big?"

"It was with a giant evil robot made of invincibility, piloted by an even more evil alchemist with blowing-stuff-up powers amplified by an artifact of TOTAL evilness made from people," Zim said. "We beat him by shooting a building at him!"

"...Wow," Jord said, applauding a little. It was hard, still holding the gun.

"Mrf," Gunter said simply, quoting a great and noble philosopher of his people. (Unfortunately, since nobody could understand him, this bit of wisdom went unnoticed.)

"...I am TOTALLY not impressed by that!" Darvhog said, lying extremely badly.

"You are so miserably awful at subterfuge, meat-creature," Moofy said.

Darvhog hung his head, shamed. "I can't believe I was outdone by a robot," he said. "I mean, seriously! I'm a psychic space pirate with magic powers and a talking sword! That's like made of awesome! I could have made something cool out of it, maybe like you guys could have joined my crew or become my rivals but noooo, first you fight a giant robot and an evil science-dude and totally wreck my game! Max bogus, man. MAX BOGUS." He puffed his cheeks out. "Freaking robots, always messing up my game! Once again science makes life miserable and unromantic and lame for everyone. And they call me evil."

"No they don't," Moofy said.

"Certainly not," Zim agreed, annoyed by the Luddite sympathies in Darvhog's rambling. "You don't seem particularily evil to me."

"Le gasp!" Darvhog said. (Zuko asked, "Why did he SAY 'gasp'?" No one had an answer.) "I'm evil! I'm way evil! Just look at how evil I am! You can't tell right now, but if you had an alignment detector it would be like 'BAH, THIS GUY IS MEGA-EVIL', only it wouldn't work because I'm so awesome and junk that a wussy gadget like that would just explode before it got close to me because gadgets are for punks. I only went and destroyed my original timeline, dont'cha know!?"

The crystal sword buzzed. "An oversimplification. Darvhog merely was involved, quite unintentionally, in a series of coincidences that tangentially influenced the destruction of his native timeline," Moofy said. "He simply took credit for it after he survived and found his way back into the Astral Plane. I hear the Lich-Queen of his people was quite amused; apparently that timeline was where she sent all the incompetents who lacked the skill to satisfy her eugenics public works projects. He rather did her a favor."

"...Could you please not tell anyone about all that?" Darvhog said after a moment. "Just tell them I did kill my timeline, I don't want to look stupid."

"Too late," Zuko said.

Darvhog pouted. Gunter gave a questioning look to Jord, who shook her head, possibly telling him now wasn't the time to attack yet. (Beating up their own crew was just for laughs, but this would be a fight.) "You guys suck."

"Look, none of us care about any of that!" Zim shook his head in disgust. "We simply came here to procure supplies and perhaps have our ship repaired."

"We did?" Hobbes said. "The second thing, I mean."

"Sure, why not. The Darvhog's presence here is simply an unfortunate coincidence!"

Darvhog snorted, not saying that he rather liked being called 'the Darvhog', it sounded a bit classy. "Am not. I had this thing planned out well in advance!"

Zim's eye twitched and he shifted into a rough imitation of a classic Firebending stance Zuko had taught him, already sick of this githyanki's stupidity and ready to blow up the whole thing just for laughs. Hobbes held his hand out to stop Zim and said, "Calm down, we can be diplomatic about this!" He hissed. To Darvhog, he said, "Okay, look, we just need supplies and get our ship fixed up. Do you have facilities for those things?"

Darvhog whispered something questioning to Gunter. Gunter reached into his pocket and held out some sign cards for an answer. "Yes," Darvhog said. "As a matter of fact we do. I'm assuming you can pay, of course?"

"Uh, sure," Hobbes said warily. "Exactly how much are you asking?" Darvhog listed a most unreasonably high number. "...Okay, we could handle that, if-"

"That's just the flat rate," Darvhog interrupted, grinning like a jerk. "You've dealed psychological damage to my self-esteem and perception of awesomness, so you have to pay the Emotional Damages Tax, which is twice as much as the flat rate."

"Uh," Hobbes said, and got no farther, for Darvhog raised his hand.

"And you'll also have to pay the Ugly Pants Tax, and the Intruding On Funk Revolution Territory Tax and the Existing In Darvhog's Space Tax, and don't forget the Paying Too Much Tax Tax." Darvhog paused for dramatic effect and added, "Of course, that's just the basic package."

"Okay, there is NO SUCH THING AS A TAX FOR PAYING TOO MUCH TAX!" Zuko yelled. (Given that he had been raised to take over as Fire Lord in time and tend to all the messy business of managing an empire, he would know. And also that Fire Lord Azulon had actualy tried to implement a 'Paying Too Much Tax' tax on the Fire Nation colonies, but to be fair he had been extremely drunk at the time. The Fire Sages had sucessfully protested the tax on the grounds of it being extremely stupid, for extreme stupidity was sadly a chronic problem with recent generations of the royal family.)

"Sure there is!" Jord said, apparently surprised. "Getting people to collect all those taxes takes a lot of effort, you have to sink money into it to make sure the money is collected! That's expended money you won't see in a hurry, the paying too much tax bit makes sure your money gets back to you without losing anything."

Hobbes stared at Darvhog. "Okay, I admit it. You're definitely evil to come up with something like that. Stupid, but evil."

"At last!" Darvhog cried. "ACKNOWLEDGEMENT! Wait, what was the other bit?"

Zim gave his allies a look that basically said 'this has gone on long enough'. To Darvhog, he said, "You said something about magical schools of power earlier, thus implying that you have some manner of metanormal abilities."

"Yep! My people train mightily in the ways of both arcane lore and psionic skill, and I am certainly adept in them both! Not so shabby, I say."

"Eh?" Zim said.

Hobbes whispered to him, "He means his people use studied magical powers and psychic abilities."

"Ah," Zim said. "Can you, as a COMPLETELY hypothetical and non-specific example twisted to my plots, create fire?"

"Certainly!" Darvhog boasted.

"Really? Convienient, that. Bet you can't create a lot."

Darvhog flinched, spurned once too many times in their brief meeting and determined to show off."I most certainly can!" Darvhog spread his arms, concentrating for a moment. Yellow light shone from intricate tattoos that appeared upon his skin, fearful energies gathering around his inhumanly slender body, and were transmuted into flames through a curious blend of psionic and mystical power (not overwhelmingly powerful, but surprisingly skillful in the combination), doing him no harm as they swelled into a thin lining around his entire body, not so much as singing a single inch of him or his clothing, though his jewelery did glow rather ferociously. (Zim wondered if they were psychically reactive.)

Jord flinched, remembering what Zuko had mentioned about his firebending and perhaps worried by the suddenly hungry look on Zuko. And of course she was a frost giantess, it had to be a bit uncomfortable for her "Boss, wait, these guys are up to something-"

"Psh, I can make bigger and hotter flames than that!" Zim said over her. "I have studied the methods, I have applied hypothesis and carried them out, my mastery of SCIENCE is greater then your paltry magicks or amateur psionics!"

Darvhog's eyes bulged. "Hah! My power comes from within! It's purer and greater than anything your flawed silliness can come up with! Reality shifts and changes, a swirling madness until the end of time! Putting rules to it is just STUPID!" his flames twisted, expanded, and in a tremendous out-rise of arcane energy amplified and directed by psionic skill so collectively strong it nearly knocked them over, swelled mightily into a massive Darvhog-shaped bonfire that stretched up high, quickly standing tall over the plaza like a giant made of fire.

The flaming colossus The waves of heat and sheer unfocused power pushed back Zim, Zuko and Hobbes, and the partying pirates jumped for cover as several tables were flipped over (and cried in dismay as food went everywhere); Jord and Gunter stood their ground, starting to sweat or maybe melting a little. The heat crashed over them, the barely controlled magical forces tossing up all the fallen silverware and dishes and the downed tables in a single movement, flying straight off out of the port's boundaries and flying onward into the void of the Astral Plane, and the alien energies cut jagged spirals into the metal under their feet, the whole thing vibrating ominously with horrible potential, from all the sheer overwhelming power Darvhog had unleashed with a single action...

Zim's jaw twitched, and he snickered balefully. "Bah. Bet you can't just shoot all that up right above us."

"WATCH ME!" Darvhog snarled, pulling his flame image down, pulling a few incidental things with it and burning them up as he pooled the flames around him. He shaped it into a tightly compressed sphere, streamers of fire coming loose and hitting random things, lightning them on fire (to Zuko's sudden delight) and a few people also catching on fire and panicking so that they hit things that also went on fire and soon a lot of the plaza was on fire. Darvhog didn't notice, and with an unearthly scream as if borrowing a smidgen of power from eldritch things best undealt with, shot his fireball up into the sky nearly to the limits of the port's boundaries whereupon it exploded in a massive blast briefly larger than the plaza itself, a tiny sun bloomed in the void and producing smaller shockwaves of fire that crashed into the plaza; they carried kinetic force with them, knocking the majority of the pirates heads over feet and lit the rest of the place on fire (and Jord and Gunter freaked out a little), and everything that was left standing after that was knocked up and around by the secondary shockwave of such a powerful blast, excluding Darvhog (who was largely immune to his own power's effects). Even Zim and his allies were knocked down, but still landed on their feet.

Darvhog panted, the sword Moofy glowing ominously (and probably unwillingly giving him some of it's power). "Beat that," Darvhog said, grinning nastily.

"Okay," Zim said, green lights shining in the distance as what sounded like gigantic engines revved up. And a great weight powering off the ground and approaching at great speed from overhead.

Darvhog paused, and fell backward in shock as the relatively small but still quite big ship, driven by Calvin and Morte, came screaming down from the dock above, flattened the buildings at the rear of the plaza behind Zim and lifted up, floating there. A small ship it was, it still looked like a behemoth of metal and light to the enemies on the floor, it's guns powering up and blasting low-yield beams to pierce large holes right through the plaza and scattering the pirates everywhere, non-lethal attacks taking them down in moments. "Well, that was unexpected," Darvhog said, with inexplicable calmness.

"Huh, we probably should have locked that place up," Jord said. "We're so STUPID." Gunter nodded sternly.

"So very stupid," Zim said. Darvhog drew Moofy (and Zim felt stupid just thinking that statement) and started to move, a delightedly wicked grin announcing his complete lack of distress over this develoupment, and Zuko moved so fast Zim could barely follow his movements; the firebender vaulting to a downed table and jumping off it and pulling the flames after him as he screamed with primal delight as feeling the fire again, roundhouse-kicking a blast of fire into Darvhog's chest that knocked him head over heels and nearly right into a railing (very nearly knocking him off the port and to a extremely boring time of floating aimlessly) and crashing into the ground; Zuko didn't let up, punching a blast of a fire right into Gunter's face as the giant rose up with an fierce look and his thermal lance in hand. The explosion blasted Gunter into the railing, his teeth cracked and breaking, but he staggered back, too tough to be taken down so quickly, and he growled with the true delight of a warrior in pitched battle, and readied himself.

Some of the pirates, realizing that a battle was going on, approached them with deadly intent. Zuko rolled back on a handspring when Gunter lunged forward with his lance as he triggered it; deadly sparks buzzed from it's electrically heated tip, and metal melted where Gunter missed Zuko and jabbed it into the ground. Zuko, still moving from his spring, pulled in more ambient fire around and spun his legs; the fire mimicked his movement, spreading out as a wave that smashed into the approaching pirates; most of them, untrained in fighting for the most part, were knocked more than halfway across the plaza and kept going. The others decided to tackle less hazardous opponents instead of being burned alive or something like that.

More things lit on fire from this, and without missing a beat, Zuko drew in the ambient heat enough to enable a burst of fire on his hand. It wasn't much, but he still slammed into Gunter's side and struck his wrist, knocking the thermal lance from his grasp and grabbing it out of mid-air. It was still active when Zuko grabbed it, and he was a skilled Firebender enough to feel the energies surging through it; mostly by accident, his mere touch amplified and directed those energies and a burst of lightning burst out right into Gunter right into his face; the result was another explosion, and Gunter was shoved back rather forcefully into a load-bearing support on a nearby wafflehouse. Gunter stepped forward, barely winded, and he poked a few deep cracks in his tusks...right before the building, unable to take it's own weight, collapsed a significant portion of itself right on him. That was more than enough, and he collapsed after a few perfunctory attempts at digging his way out, a good load of bricks smashing into his face and shattered his teeth into icy lumps. He groaned, and for a moment he touched these new stumps in wonder, daring to open his mouth; he grinned joyfully before he passed out.

Jord had been brawling with Hobbes (as had a dozen of the pirates, the lot of them totally unconscious now) while Zuko had been fighting Gunter, and now realized what had happened to Gunter, in the middle of charging at Hobbes; she screeched to a stop, mouth open, and then roared in fury and charged at him, upon him in moments. She threw her gun away foolishly, a massive fist raised overhead, icicles bursting from her knuckles to make a nasty brawling aid. Zuko rolled backwards with a startled shout as she swung, her fist pounding into the ground seconds after he'd moved out of the way and making a big shockwave that knocked MORE people over and struck Zuko hard enough to knock him off his feet and leave him dizzy.

Jord grinned viciously. With a grunt, she pulled her fist out of the large dent now in the port's floor and started towards Zuko; Hobbes suddenly appeared in her way and delievered a deceptively light blow to her broad hip that knocked her off-stride. Trying to shake off a sudden numbness in her leg that made it hard for her to walk, Jord growled down at him, "Move it, fuzzball, I've got vengeance to deal out! Nobody hammers down my buddy!"

Hobbes shook his head. She grunted and clumsily charged forward, lacking speed but her mass doing the real work. "I'd rather not get into a real brutal fight with a lady," He said as the frost giantess was nearly about to run him over (a fearful thing, given that she was nearly twice his size), her footfalls making the ground shake. He gracefully moved out of the way the moment she should have flattened him, his hand moving to snare her wrist and hanging on. "But if you insist, I'll oblige!" She swung her arm back, stopping sharply and her footsteps hard enough to buckle the metal floor, and the sudden deceleration jerked Hobbes right off her and into the air over her.

That was just what he wanted; though Jord raised a hand to swat him away like a bug, as soon as he was loose his hands moved in martial patterns, his retracted claws jabbing her large biceps in several points. Jord flinched, her arm suddenly numb and slack. Hobbes was still flying and arced in the air, grabbed her shoulder and flipped himself up to a handstand on one of her shoulders. She clumsily reached to grab him and he flipped out of the way to her other shoulder, once more jabbing points on her shoulder as he moved, and did the same to her other when he landed. Her arms slumped back, suddenly impossibly heavy to move.

Hobbes lightly moved back to the ground, jabbing at her torso and belly and hips in movements too quick to follow, each attack finding it difficult to penetrate her nerve points through her body fat but just barely managing it, and Jord slumped, seemingly paralyzed. She fell forward, a collapsing juggernaut, and Hobbes arrested her fall by simply catching the vastly larger woman in his open arms, bearing her upper torso on his shoulder (her rather large chest squashing into his shoulder, upper arms and much of his face, so he considered it win-win despite the incredible weight) and managing to keep her steady. Straining with effort all the same (for while he was incredibly strong he lacked endurance or sustained lifting ability), he wondered uncomfortably if this counted as taking advantage of a lady. Still he grinned, adjusting her so that she fell a bit away from him and stood on his tip-toes to stand up tall enough so that he could brush the side of his jawline with a brief gentlemanly kiss. "Sorry, stealing kisses is an habitual occupation of gentleman adventurers!" He said, and politely set her down in a sitting position on the ground and walked away. Jord puffed her cheeks out, more embarassed than uncomfortable or hurt, and turned her still mobile neck aside so Hobbes couldn't see the darkened purple tint of her blush. He still noticed and grinned bashfully, tilting his hat respectfully at her.

By this point, Darvhog had already hauled himself back up, charging at Zim with swords in hand. "Okay, I'm back, still being awesome! AWESOME LIKE DISCO, YO!" He swung his silver sword high, for a maiming blow at the smaller Zim...

Which Zim neatly dodged, sidestepping right out of the blow, not even summoning the Keyblade (which he decided was probably best to keep as a trump card just in case) and spinning back to hit Darvhog's wrist, breaking his grip on the silver sword and dropping it. Zim grabbed the sword before it hit the ground and tried to hit Darvhog with, peturbed to find that the metal flowed like liquid and slipped right around Darvhog without a scratch. Zim simply threw it at Darvhog's head. "DISCO IS DEAD," Zim said while Darvhog was dazed and triggered a explosion underneath him, rocketing himself into the githyanki and punching him in the jaw so hard he was knocked off over the edge again.

"Ooh, never heard that one before," Darvhog said sarcastically, crawling up and shaking a fist at him. Zim gave him a bit of credit for being quite stubborn. "So, you're a pyrokinetic, eh?"

"No he's not," Moofy said. "He is not directing flames at us; I know not what he is directing...perhaps some sort of purely aggressive holy energies personified as light and shaped by a persistent mental construct so that it merely appears to be flame-based. This fool limits himself."

"If you wish to call me a pyrokinetic, I see no reason to correct you," Zim replied, ignoring the talking sword.

"Oh really. Try blasting me NOW!" Darvhog struck a pose, his fingers moving as he spoke arcane syllables in a language Zim didn't understand (which was odd since he was equipped with mnemic audio-engines that automatically translated the spirit of whatever he heard), and Zim felt a faint ripple around Darvhog's person, a sensation of threads composing reality being pulled, and he realized too late that he was sensing arcane magic being performed, able to sense it from his own growing powers. Semi-transparent glyphs appeared over Darvhog, glowing red-orange like letters of fire, mapping his person before spreading into a force field of light over him that vanished, leaving him glowing a faint shade of blue. "Hah! Flame Shield! Try and blast your way past that!"

"Ah. Know this! It is a fact that regardless of physical strength or endurance, anything will obliterated if you throw enough force against it! If it exists, it can be broken! I shall drill THAT into your idiotic Luddite mind!"

"But I like being a Luddite, it makes me distinctive!"

"NO! IT MAKES YOU RIDICULOUS!" Zim struck a pose not unlike one of Zuko's more aggressive katas, light flashing around him and growing into brilliant flames around him, and Zim roughly shoved them at Darvhog in a single massive blast. It produced a sizable explosion, and a squawk of surprise from Darvhog as he went flying right off the platform. He didn't go far; telekinetic force wrapped around him, shaping into a large disembodied hand that grabbed him and slapped him back onto the platform. Darvhog landed roughly, not even winded from all his show of power, and Zim was pleased to see that his clothes were singed, faintly discolored and the skin of his arm bruised where the sleeves had been blasted to dust. One or two of his chained jewlery snapped and hit the platform under them, broken.

"...That makes no damn sense," Darvhog said, his Flame Shield as strong as ever and his expression totally bewildered.

"Did I not tell you?" Moofy said, with a hint of smugness.

"I told you! Hit something hard enough, no matter what it is, and it will break. Basic physics, you sad silly man."

"No no no, I don't care about your science-y voodoo nonsense."

"The practice of science is quite distinct from the religious practices of Voudoun, I'll have you know-"

"Oh, enough, I'm telling you there's so many ways that doesn't make sense!" Darvhog gestured at him angrily. "Flame Shield! It's called FLAME SHIELD! Shields from flames and heat and all that burning stuff! It should have taken WAY more heat to even make me feel anything!" He shook his head. "You SURE you're a pyrokinetic? That didn't seem anything like fire to me, magically generated or not."

Zim frowned at him. All of Zuko's insistence that what he was doing couldn't possibly be Firebending came back quite forcefully, and he felt some doubt. "...It doesn't? Hrm. Peculiar."

"No," Moofy said. "Were you not listening to what I said only moments ago?"

"Nope. More like, I dunno, something that looks like fire and maybe acts a bit like it, but...hey, I was blasted by some police swingers what called themselves 'Green Lanterns', your blast felt a bit like that but with more burning..." Darvhog paused on a promising train of thought and frowned at Zim. "Wait, don't you know what you're doing?"

"Not at all. But I've never let that stop me!"

"Well...that's definitely interesting! I wanna know more about what you're doing; looks like fire and acts like fire, but it doesn't mystically register as fire, now THERE'S some good research to be doing. Jord! Gunter! Smash these guys already and bring this guy down, I want to examine his power set!" They failed to respond. "Hey, trying to be a sneaky mastermind here, you could at least try to be kinda supportive about it...hey, where are you!?" He looked around and noticed that the two giants were out of the fight already. For that matter, most of his other crewmembers were defeated, panicking or just being useless. "...Okay, I'm in a bit of trouble right now."

"Do tell!" Calvin yelled from the ship's intercom. The guns powered up, and Zim, Zuko and Hobbes wisely ran into slightly safer areas. Everyone else froze, so panicked that they could do nothing else.

Darvhog blinked. He shrugged with a faint grimace. "Dang it, Science! I'll give this fight to you, it's like a freebie or something."

"I detest you so deeply," Moofy said bitterly.

The guns fired at low-yield blasts, and the fight ended rather quickly after that.

---

About ten minutes later, the Funk Revolution Pirates soundly beaten, Zim and his crew were still in the battle-scarred ruins of the plaza (but mostly because of Zim's ship shooting the place up, though Darvhog hadn't helped much) and taking care of the pirates by chaining them up and tossing them into a box they were going to let drift around the Astral Plane until someone picked the pirates up. The ship hovered peaceably above the plaza, the entirety of Zim's crew present on the plaza to finish things up, and Morte summed up some general feelings when he said, "Guys, this is weird, we just got finished with a big fight and we already fought more idiots."

Zim, Zuko, Calvin and Hobbes paused to acknowledge this while the pirates complained at length from the big metal box (transmuted by Calvin from the tables the pirates had left behind but hadn't drifted into the void, and the plaza's floor too); it was rather cramped. In the midst of throwing the rest of the bound pirates into the box, Zuko took a moment to say, "We're probably going to be fighting something everywhere we go." He and Hobbes dragged Gunter into the open door of the box, hoisting him with considerable effort and tossing him onto the other pirates, considerately doing it in such a way that he didn't land on anyone or crush them. After they started screaming about being crushed, they considerately moved Gunter aside so he wasn't crushing anyone. "Best get used to it."

"Yeah, good luck with that," Darvhog snarked. Like everyone else in his crew, he'd been tied up and left in a pile while being transferred into the box; everyone save him and Jord had already been transfered in. "Your teamwork sucks hardcore." Morte, having already been pushed to be more proactive, headbutted him hard enough to knock him unconscious.

"OOOH, I SEE POLICE BRUTALITY!" Jord shouted.

"But we're not police," Hobbes pointed out reasonably.

"...Vigilante brutality? IT SO COUNTS."

"Does not!" Zim said, indistinctly offended. "We're more like adventurers or annoying crazy people!"

"...Don't be proud when you say that..." Zuko muttered.

"Bye boss!" Jord said cheerfully, still strugging as Hobbes, Zuko and Zim all pitched in to throw her into the box; Hobbes' technique had worn off fairly quickly, requiring Calvin to shackle her and Gunter in a solid block of metal. The quality of the materials were poor, and the giants were strong enough that they could likely break loose in short order, so it was essential to get this over with quickly. "Hi Gunter!" She said as she landed atop Gunter, mercifully not on one any of the other pirates.

"Hi," Gunter said.

"...Ymir's world-shaping bones, YOU CAN TALK!?" Jord shouted.

"YOU CAN TALK!?" Darvhog echoed, mouth open.

"He can speak?" Moofy repeated from the box where they'd tossed it.

"He can make mouth-noise?!" The assorted minion pirates said.

"Does anyone actually care?" Calvin said.

"WE DO!" Darvhog's crew said.

He rolled his eyes. "It was a rhetorical question."

Gunter flexed his jaw with wonder, eyes wide and tearing up. "Oh, I say, by the Elemental Plane of Cold, I CAN SPEAK! I honestly could not have realized it! It feels a touch odd to move my jaw freely, I will admit." He proceeded to amuse himself by playing with the ways sounds could be pronounced. "Jaw. Jah-aw. Admit, ahd-mit! Ahh-da-mit...!"

"No need to thank us, just throw money at us," Calvin said. "Well, you could if we weren't going to take all your stuff."

"Wait, you're doing WHAT?!" Darvhog cried.

"What, what?" Hobbes said.

"What about me?" Moofy cried over the pirate's extremely loud complaints. "I surrender myself to your will! Take me with you, I beg of you!"

"Why would we take a talking sword that's overtly prejudiced to fleshy things?" Zim said reasonably; he'd already decided against taking either of the swords with him as trophies. One of them was alive and probably either, and the other was too hard to bother learning to use.

"See!? At least YOU can use a semblence of logic! TAKE ME WITH YOOOU!"

"No," Zim said.

"Curse your flesh!"

"Well, wasn't that fun?" Darvhog asked as Zim hauled him up and prepared to toss him into the box. "I'll be back, you know! And I'll follow you wherever you go! You guys would make great rivals-" He gasped. "I KNOW! I'm going to make you guys my rivals! Every great pirate has at least one enemy or rival crew that he fights forever and ever unto the brink of death and beyond!"

"I refuse to have a rival as stupid as you!" Zim said, throwing him into the box.

Darvhog crashed into Jord and Gunter. "Ow! Too bad, I'll escape from this box eventually and I'll be back and I will never LEAVE YOU ALONE! Whee!"

"Hi boss!" Jord said.

"Good day, sir," Gunter said. Zim threw Moofy and the silver sword at them. "Ouch! I say, that is most uncalled for."

"Well, that's all the pirates," Calvin said, closing the door and activating a transmutation circle under the box, fusing into a solid shape with the box walls with the words 'BE CAREFUL, THESE ARE PIRATES, TOSS THEM INTO JAIL OR SOMETHING'. It was fortunate that breathing was not required on the Astral Plane; the essence of the plane nourished sentient beings well enough. Just in case, he included air holes. "Here's hoping we never see these idiots again!"

"Well, on the one hand I guess they might be a bunch of morons to beat up so we prove that we can work as a team," Morte said. "But on the other hand, we took WAY too long establishing them as silly and basically harmless annoyances that apparently want to be our rivals, so they'll probably show up again over and over following us to give us a group of incompetant bad guys to constantly be fighting."

"Yeah, that sounds like something we'd do," Disco Darvhog said. Calvin activated the circle again, and the floor transformed into a crude fist-shaped pillar with sufficient force to shoot them up like a catapault, making it look like the floor had punched them hard enough to send the boxed pirates over the edge of the port town and past; they floated gently right over it, continuing to float away at an amiable pace.

"I have no idea where you pick this stuff up," Hobbes said to Morte, sounding disgusted. Morte snorted, knowing he'd be vindicated.

Zim and his crew watched the box of the Funk Revolution Pirates floated away, taking a small bit of pleasure at seeing the annoyances drift into the psychic ether of the Astral Plane. It was actually a fairly pretty sight, the mindstuff creating some interesting effects as it shone off the metal surface of the cage, and it became a much smaller speck fairly quickly, as the port town was still flying under it's own power and taking them away from the pirate-box.

They waited until it was barely visible before they breathed a sigh of relief, giving each other a anxious look when they realized that all of them (except for Morte) had been expecting the box to come back at the last minute and cause another big pointless fight. (Though there WAS a distant cry of Darvhog going "WHEEE!" He was easily amused, it seemed.)

It fell upon Zuko, as seemed his narrative responsibility, to voice the rational observation. "I honestly can't believe that tying up pirates and tossing them into a cage to drift through the vastness of a theoretically limitless dimension was the best long-term and short-term decision available to us at the moment."

"What would you have prefered?" Hobbes said. "According to Morte there aren't any law enforcement agencies in this part of the Astral Plane and anyway this place is neutral territory on a cosmic scale, taking them with us is just ASKING for trouble, and it's not like we could just drop them off on the first lawful types we see; it wouldn't be in their jurisdiction. Also, it seemed the most fun option at the time!"

"True," Calvin said, with a nod. "NOW LET'S STEAL ALL THE STUFF THEY LEFT BEHIND AND ALSO EVERYTHING THEY DIDN'T GRAB!"

"Of course!" Zim said. The two of them high-fived.

"I can't believe we're doing this," Hobbes said, facepalming. "We cannot just wander into places and steal everything that isn't nailed down or on fire, and I just know we'd take those things too. It's against everything heroic."

"What about the heroic tradition of going into an evil cult's temple, slaying the heretical priests, defeating the guardians and taking all the treasures?" Zuko said, remembering what he could of the general adventures of the Fire Nation's great heroes.

Hobbes facepalmed. "I meant virtuous life-saving evil-defeating heroes, not heroic fantasy!" Zuko continued to stare blankly. "You now, barbarian fantasy stuff."

"Who are you calling barbaric!?" Zuko said.

"What? I wasn't- look, it's the principle of the matter. We can't do whatever we want to people, or their stuff, just because we don't like them, or because it's convienient. That's not what Good people are supposed to do!"

Zuko made an annoyed noise, still stung by the 'barbaric' comment. "It's just salvaging at this point.

"Tch," Hobbes growled. "...I concede the point, but we really ought to think these things through."

Zim smirked. "All right then, let's go around and get their stuff together to figure out how to make that work, then work out what we need to take, and then find a place where we can have our ship fixed up. And improve it! And do some proper paint job there, and name it, and..."

It went on for a while.

---

As events transpired, they wound up staying at the port town for a few more days to recover from the stresses of the battle with Kimblee and to fix their ship, which required not just basic repairs but some fine-tuning to finish the last-minute touches Cyborg had intended to implement before things didn't quite go their way.

It was also, as it were, a opportunity for them to get to know each other. The fact that they were going to essentially be living as a crew for the seeable future was only barely starting to sink in, and Zim was starting to realize that Zuko and him didn't really know anything of real substance about their new allies.

It was an uncomfortable subject, all the more so with them coming off the excitement from the defeat of Kimblee and the much shorter fight to reclaim this port town-ship thing, and Zim was a bit surprised by Calvin, Hobbes and Morte dealing with it by trying to be friendly and pretending that they weren't uncomfortable while their weird crew spent most of the days there recuperating and recovering and doing their own thing.

When Zim was not needed to supervise the technical aspects of the work, he was busy being tutored further by Zuko in the basics of Firebending (made difficult by Zuko's inability to generate flame in the Astral Plane though Zim's powers were unaffected, making it more and more logical that he wasn't strictly Firebending) and learning through experimentation what Zim's powers actually were doing (as Zuko found Darvhog's observations quite interesting) and the others watched when they had time. Morte said that it seemed vaugely familiar to him while Calvin was fascinated by the mystical aspects of it and Hobbes critiqued Zim's close combat skills, resolving to instruct him personally.

The results of that wound up being several hour long sessions of painstakingly having his stances corrected, the positioning of his feet changed, and Hobbes making Zim to fight him hand-to-hand, and many bruises resulted. Hobbes promised that this would be a bit of a theme in the future, and gleefully mentioned something about 'internal energy-channeling mantra' and 'learning some proper sword-fighting methods' and other things that spooked Zim out pretty badly. From the sympathetic looks Calvin gave him, this was only to be expected, since Hobbes kept springing impromptu sparring and instruction sessions out of nowhere to keep Zim on his toes.

Of course, raiding the place was more fun, and choosing what was appropiate and inappropiate to salvage had an interesting element to it. As for the technical stuff, there wound up being several facilities for ship maintanence, large enough to accomodate their ship, and it had only taken a day and a half to repair the damage done to it, a further day to install all the equipment they had 'salvaged' it to create a true mobile home for themselves in their journey: among other things, a fully stocked kitchen, upgrades to the internal sub-systems including the monitors and camera systems, finding things to make their individual bunks more comfortable and suitable (and bedding for guests or additional crew members in case they picked up any, Zim was quite adamant about that), and in general the basic essentials for long-term habitation of a spaceship. To their surprise and pleasure, Cyborg had already installed video game systems as part of the computer's programming with randomized programming-made games), and another day to properly install the weapons they'd taken from the Umbra Eternis onto it (which required minor refits to the exterior) and then give it a new paint job, complete with a name for the ship on one side and even a flag design on the other.

There had been a bit of an argument over all that, everyone wanted a name that suited their own agendas and purposes, and a color scheme that declared their alliegances: Hobbes wanted to be as sneakily neutral-looking as possible to avoid unwanted fights, while Zuko insisted on a bold scheme and name to declare their open attitude towards those that wanted their help, Calvin just wanted to do cool stuff and Zim believed that the whole thing was all about what he wanted. Morte was pretty much indifferent, and helped negiotiate compromises about the whole thing.

After that was settled, Calvin wasn't much part of it, retiring most of his free time into the laboratory he had claimed and furnished with the equipment from his extradimensional dufflebag, apparently working on analyzing the armor they'd taken from the Umbra Eternis to reverse-engineer it and fashion it into a new shield for Hobbes, managing to carve off shavings to make some kibble-bits to enhance his own devices. Stocking the rooms they'd picked out for themselves and various other purposes took up a lot of time, and it would take a while before they really felt like home, but it was good enough.

(Zim had been surprised at how much stuff there had been in that dufflebag; not just the things Hobbes had bought, and he'd seen it during a quick look for his outfit to look more impressive, but a staggering variety of stuff Calvin had packed and apparently forgot about. Laboratory equipment, artificial chemicals for on-the-ground smelting, microscopes and engineering tools for machining; smelting; plating; welding; wiring; circuitry manufacture and all manner of device creation and maitenence. On less technical matters, library drives loaded with information on multiverse coordinate charts that nicely expanded the on-board charts and general information on many dozens of topics relevant to their mission and of course it had been uploaded to the ship's computers in spite of nearly being too much for it to handle, various data drives Zim installed into the ship that Calvin said he had helped recreate and called them 'hard copy standard template constructs', used to produce any on-board schematic using locally available materials...and that was just basic stuff in the bag. Plenty of other things were more particular and specialized, and Zim appreciated the forethought even though he had no idea why they, for instance, would think far enough ahead to a fold-out table with step-by-step instructions for making knock-out gas pellets and yet fail to bring so much as a scrap of field rations.)

Things progressed fairly lazily, and rather peacefully too. Hobbes seemed content with the way things were going, apparently perfectly happy to just hang around and less happy to get wrestled into being the muscle to do the heavy work. In contrast to him, Zuko was much less confident and still clearly unused to all this, spending most of his time around Zim though he was getting more comfortable around Hobbes, and anyway he skulked a lot in his own room, occasionally coming out when his presence demanded it. Zim suspected that he just missed the rest of Team Avatar.

Morte was surprisingly knowledgable and told Zim a fair deal more about the githyanki, in case Zim ever ran into Darvhog again (among other weirdness, since the githyanki lived inthe Astral Plane, a place that didn't have much truck with time at all other than a vauge sense of things happening one after another, Darvhog's claims of being from an erased timeline were very suspicious if not moderately insane), and about the Astral Plane in general; it was a real education just listening to him. In fact, his knowledge was disturbingly comprehensive, and considering Morte's uncanny knowledge of how things were going to turn out based on previous experiences and his inexplicable store of vast knowledge, Zim suspected that Morte had done a lot that he refused to let on or outright lied about. Morte was likely there to be a guide, and he was very good at it, but Zim didn't think that Morte was very trustworthy.

Inbetween all that, there was still much to do, and shortly before they were due to depart a courier came traveling through and they'd told him the story about the whole thing, though stated that the pirates had stolen quite a lot before they had gotten of them. On the side, Zim instructed the courier to bring a certain package and messages to his friends in Traverse Town, since the courier was friendly and going that way.

(One rather notable event took place after the port town's electricity generators finally ran down and clonked out entirely due to poor maintenance and damage suffered during the uprising earlier and then Zim's battle, forcing Calvin to spent a precious fifteen minutes rigging them to operate at minimum capacity, and then writing up notes for whoever was to come and claim the port afterwards so they would know what to do to get the generators working properly with equipment that Calvin didn't have on hand. Hopefully they understood the High Gothic Calvin wrote in, and just in case, they kept a translater on hand for those to come.

Zim had been watching Calvin go at it, impressed with the boy's single-minded and uncanny or even instinctive knowledge of fixing things, and with his mind free to think on recent matters, circled back to a recent problem he'd been grabbling with. "I think that we ought to make war on the Heartless," he said to Zuko.

"Seems reasonable to me," Zuko replied, giving Zim a curious look. "Even if it seems counterproductive to try to take down a force of nature."

"You think they're natural?"

"No, just...too big for us to fight." Zuko snorted. "First you want to scour the entire multiverse for three people, and now you want to do that while taking on a gigantic cosmic-wide enemy that eat planets and corrupt people into monsters and shows no limits in the forces it can field."

"Ambition is merely a trait, not a character flaw!" Zim said, and then spoke soberly. "But I must be serious. Think on it, friend Zuko. If the Heartless did not exist, Earth would still be in existence, the people of Earth and many of our friends would still be alive, and we would be preparing for another adventure that would be much less harrowing in nature."

"You're blaming the Heartless for-" Zuko stopped. "Eating the Earth, right, stupid question."

"Of course. But that's besides the point! Surely you've heard of how many villains are allied with the Heartless or use them in some fashion? And Kimblee could not have done even half of his evil without their strength. Clearly, either the Heartless or some unknown force controlling them are enabling these things to happen." He grinned. "I have been told that there is a reason I was given a weapon of immense power to fight the Heartless. I ought to make use of it immediately!"

"A weapon that hurts you when you use it's real power."

"Bah! Mere details. I am focused on a bigger picture. I intend to combat the Heartless wherever I meet them, investigate them properly, discern their weaknesses and finally find a means to restore them or destroy them utterly. Whichever seems more Good at the time."

Zuko nodded after a long moment. "...Count me in, too." And that was it; between friends, there didn't need to be much more than that.)

It was peaceful, pleasant and even a bit fun just relaxing and getting things ready, and therefore it went by too fast for Zim's liking even though he was quite eager to finally be leaving on his adventure. And so, in only a few days (according to their ship's clock, the Astral Plane didn't actually have a day-night cycle and it was playing merry havoc with their sleeping schedules), short enough that Zim felt like he had just blinked and it was too late to turn back, the final preparations had ended. All neccesary supplies had been 'salvaged' and Hobbes' scruples satisfied, the ship repaired and the weapons taken from Kimblee plugged into the weapon systems in appropriate areas, the ship's systems fine-tuned to the degree matching Calvin's exact specifications given what little time they had, and all that was left was to name it.

On the ship-repair faciltiy they had comandeered (quite large enough to service very large ships and comprised a full quarer of the south side of the port town) their thus-far unnamed ship hovered in place in a champer equipped with color-spraying nozzles, having been doing the job of giving their ship a color scheme more suitable to their purposes. Zim stood on a viewing platform floating a fair distance from it at a level to appreciate it, admiring it and conceding that while Calvin was a lousy pilot and a short-tempered insufferable know-it-all, he did know his shipcraft.

Through a complicated system of semi-transparent layering, jury-rigged cut-outs and salvaged parts to improve the facility's workings, Calvin had produced a paint job for their ship: the whole ship was mainly red, in varying gentle shadings and totally benign, suggestive of a good presence instead of the usual bloody or angry associations of red. Portions of the sides and the lower compartments had made a nice shade of blue tending towardly pleasantly bright shades, the two primary colors blending nicely into each other in their respective sections; the areas where weapons were either prominently displayed or secured under hatches or hidden compartments were marked with streaks of yellow like battle scars, and alongside the bright glow of green from the power-lines going everywhere and every available display, it all complemented each other very nicely.

(Calvin had claimed, in his proposal for the colors, that the wisest and most successful beings he had ever met had proven that certain colors affected the performance of vehicles in some circumstances and had documentation in well-respected journals to prove it. "Red makes them go faster," he had said, "Blue improves probability in our favor, and yellow is beneficial towards offensive action!" Hobbes had rolled his eyes but didn't argue. Zuko didn't go into such superstition, and had confirmed it as superstition after asking if certain spirits took this sort of thing as an offering and was answered in the negative, but he liked the color scheme as being heroic and noble. Zim found himself, once again, agreeing with Calvin; it all made perfect sense to him. Morte was fine with it, though surprised to have his opinion asked.)

On the side of the ship, in green and white paint to off-set the ship's main colors, was their new team logo: a face that looked like the necklace trinket Zim carried around; a stylized Irken head on a gear, placed over a sword-shaped flame and an abstract lion's-head crossed over in a 'X'. Wavy lines that looked sort of like wings spread out from them, to make it look a bit angelic and noble. Zim had a bit of a moment looking at it; he didn't quite waver on his feet or fall over or feel like he was about to faint at the enormity of it all, but it was a tremendous shock just seeing it, this final demonstration of his intentions and wholehearted alliance with these people who he honestly couldn't say were complete strangers to him and Zuko anymore this emblem of his new crew-

his new crew. Not a partnership of convienience. Not something done on orders. Calvin, Hobbes and even Morte (in his own way, and he would have done more if he could only have found the courage) had stood with him and Zuko in that great battle against Kimblee and the forces that mad alchemist had fielded, and they had not needed to aside from the dictates of their own consciences.

Something had changed between them. Yes, there was still the sense of distance, of not knowing everything about these people, but still, he couldn't call them strangers or anything like that, and Zim grinned to have such a force at his side. And even so, a part of him thought that it could stand to be bigger, that he could use more people, more allies, more friends...

The thought lingered for a while. Unlike many thoughts that had done that of late, it was a soothing and pleasing one.

The emblem reflected this growing closeness, for each element of it reflected a member of the crew, laid down when they had discussed what to use for a possible flag or symbol over the last few days and only settled on this morning. The Irken face stood for Zim of course; the gear for Calvin and his belief in the power of technology that Zim (and to a lesser extent Zuko) also shared; Hobbes and Zuko, the most martial of the group, had picked the lion's-head and the sword-shaped flame respectively (and had them in a crossed-shaped because, as Hobbes said, 'You HAVE to have an x-shape in these things!" but ZIm suspected their growing friendship had more to do with it), and while Zim had expected Morte to pick a skull, the complex and winglike arrangement of lines had been Morte's final pick. It was an etheral shape, an abstract symbol, something that was supposed to be ultimately benign. It said a lot about Morte, Zim thought.

And below that, in bold letters, was the name of their ship. That had been particularily difficult, all manner of appropriate names coming and going (Zim had been a particular advocate of 'The Violent Science' which Calvin also supported, Hobbes and Zuko thought it might give the wrong impression, and for some insane reason Morte voted for 'Mega-Ultra-Chicken From The Future That Is Also In The Past', he blamed Zim's stupidity being contagious) and ultimately, after thinking about their respective unspoken determination to do good wherever they had gone in life, perhaps quietly or overtly, acting on behalf their own scruples and no other consideration, willingly given to the fetters that defined their existence, an obvious choice had sprung up and unanimously agreed on. Below their team emblem on the sides of their ship, written in letters described in ways that would make their meaning abundantly clear to whoever beheld them, Calvin had painted the name 'Paragon'.

Zim grinned. He couldn't help it, he just felt brighter than he had in far too long, standing on the precepice of a new and absolutely fantastic journey.

The Paragon floated peacefully there and slowly came to a drop as Calvin, operating some machinery to lower it, placed it to the ground, remote-controlled the cargo bay to open. The ship shone beautifully, outer surface ground and polished to a good and proper gleaming by a number of massive roombas Zim had designed from spare parts for fun, and Zuko and Hobbes waited for it to touch ground properly before they loaded up a hovering mechanized cart loaded with a few last minutes essentials (a few odds and ends for their laboratory and outfitting set-ups, poofy couches for the recreational room they had decided the big chamber at the bottom of the ship ought to be, and shallow cooling fridges filled with chilly goo to chill down their drinks and closed containers) and boarded, to get it all put away and set up.

Morte, floating beside him, said, "So, here we go, Boss. Finally off on our real adventure."

"Indeed," Zim said solemnly.

Morte glanced at him. "...You sure you wouldn't rather head back to your old party?"

"Certainly not."

"...Long as you're satisfied in what you do," Morte said. He sounded more serious than ever.

"Let's go," Zim said shortly, and touched a button on the touchpad that controlled the platform. It brought them and Calvin to the floor, where they followed after Zuko and Hobbes, a feeling of momentousness thrilling Zim as he walked up the cargo hold's ramp and into the Paragon once again, feeling that another threshold had been crossed, and that the time of his life on Earth was gone. Another life was here, ready to be made anew, and it promised to be better than those that had come before.

They couldn't lift off right away, rather wounding the spirit of adventure that the moment demanded; Zuko and Hobbes required some help sorting it all up.

After all the last minute organizing was done, there was no other reason to keep waiting, and since they didn't have any emotional attachment to the port, they wasted no further time and one launch-off later, the Paragon was soon a small green dot against the port, flying from it in a smooth controlled arc that took it away from the port, leaving it to drift in tranquil peace to await someone else to inhabit it in due time.

Zim, sitting in the primary pilot's seat while Calvin took the other, watched it recede in the camera-screens. He felt like he was watching the begining of his latest and weirdest adventure going behind, and before him lay the future, brighter than any from before in spite of the troubles that had waited for him first. "Anyone have any regrets about not perhaps modding that place into a large-scale ship?"

"No, that would be self-indulgent," Zuko said, sitting at a console behind Zim's ship at a bank of monitors. He had no idea what any of it was for, but he had been shown how to operate the weapons and could be a decent gunner if need be.

"And silly," Hobbes added, sitting right next to Zuko; he actually did know how to operate it since high-profile operatives like him were expected to handle just about any weapon or device they found with reasonable competence.

"A cool idea, but unfeasible right now," Calvin said.

"Eh," Morte said, indifferent and strapped into the passenger seats at the back.

"...Are you sure? We could find some tow cables, attach the ship to it and pull it along, upgrade the engines-"

"NO," Zuko said.

"Geez, fine, be a sour shoe-person about it." Zim snorted. "If that's it, then let's be off!" his hands squeezed on the seat's joysticks, a surge of hope and joy flashing through him as he was briefly connected with the ship's core of power. There was a brief and barely noticable rumble as the ship powered up, more full of power than it had been in it's short life (and the auxilary engines they'd installed to get it running on slightly more conventional power sources didn't hurt the sounds either); the green under them flashed brighter for a moment, and then, that quietly fascinating sense of things moving away on the camera screens produced the sensation that that ship was not moving but the universe was simply being pushed away.

The port was being moved away by it's own engines, and the Paragon was moving quite fast in short order (moving much quicker outside of the atmosphere then it normally ought to), the port receded from view fairly quickly, and then an astral cloud whipped over them, and by the time they flew out, it was gone.

Zim thought that a momnt of reflective silence might be appropriate. But that was stupid and seriously self-indulgent, so he just kicked up the speed-restraining gauge (literally, as it were) and their ship immediately powered into overdrive. Green light streamed from the propulsion discs, the psychic atmosphere warping around them and their desire for movement...

And then, at last, they were gone. The sound of the Paragon passing was a brief roar in the serenity of this tiny fraction of the Astral Plane, and the thought-storm was momentarily dominated by images of ships.

Zim, even going through the star-lit expanse of the Astral Plane, wondered how his friends, espicially Aang, were doing, and what had become of Traverse Town since their departure.

---

In Traverse Town, not for the first time since Zim had left right out of nowhere, Avatar Aang had found himself sitting back on an appropiately high vantage point where the wind could slide around him and put him in the very touch of the air until it was like flying while being still, and just staring over the rooftops that made up the the gradually sloping edges of the outermost areas of the First District, bumping up against the walls that divided the districts and further out into the rest of the area.

In this case, it was a broad gargoyle carved from part of the rooftop of his and the new home of him and rest of his friends - not just Team Avatar, but Danny and his buddies too, and hopefully Zim when he came back to them - in the First District, putting him in a perfect position to watch over the curving street it overlooked on a slightly raised plateau, the other homes and the shops (a take-out buffet, a bookstore and a convienience store all right in front of their house, relatively speaking. Aang was deeply grateful to their new friends Kim, Ron, Naruto and Gaara (who had bonded closely with Teams Avatar and Phantom after the battle of the Umbra Eternis, to the muted surprise of a few) since they had pulled a few strings and called in some lingering favors to get them a house big enough for all of them and situated in a place to accomodate the elemental natures of all of them, even Zuko once he returned-

Aang's thought stopped and his legs, previously hanging carelessly off the gargoyle, coiled back in as he sat upright frowning. Like a moth-butterfly with a sense of territoriality towards a particular flower, he kept circling on back to that aching open hole in their lives and the Zuko-shaped hole that kept popping up in everything they did.

He bit his lip and looked up towards the sky. Towards the stars, hidden behind clouds and sunlight; where Zim and Zuko and their three friends had gone. Wherever they had gone, he wished them the best, and hoped they'd come back soon. He knew better than to be so naive as to assume that would be as soon as he liked; a few months, at the least, was a very conservative estimate.

Zim had a talent for getting people to listen to him and Zuko had a way with leading them, Aang reflected, and he might well return with even more friends. Aang like the sound of that; having lots of people around would be good for his attention-starved little buddy on one hand and hurting big brother-figure on the other.

The thought cheered him up, and his recurring issues with Zuko and Zim's absence pacified for the moment, he contented himself with passively looking at their latest home, and he had to admit, it was beautiful. He contented himself for a while just looking down at the street that was still new enough to make it difficult to think of as his neighborhood, his consciousness thinning and spreading out through the wind on his skin to extend where the air moved; gusting along the freshly paved (or transmuted) vehicle road incling sharply up into a well-defined sidewalk to girdle the residences and businesses there, looking much like solid rock somehow polished and made pleasantly smooth enough for decent driving.

And too did the air flow around the even higher incline of the landscope up to the small rocky hill their home crowned, sitting flush with a circled thoroughfair behind them and a artificial pond just behind their actual residence, graced by both winds and vibrant sunlight over the two-story home, abandoned by a previous owner who had turned out to be a largely harmless super-criminal that had fled town; Aang considered that the bizarre architecture of the house, which was a recent construction and not one of the original town dwellings, was such a chaotic mix of differing styles that they effectively canceled each other out and remained a cheerful blank slate for homeowners to alter as they pleased; the outer walls and rooftop brought to mind Earth's Gothic style, all grand details and heaven-bound stylings that was a fortress in the dark and heartening in the daylight, but the ground level looked like a post-modern model of smart efficiency with no details save which flowed from function, and yet the inside of the house was quite restrained and elegant in a Edwardian manner.

As homes went, he supposed, it wasn't bad. He wasn't sure he could call it good; he couldn't find the prospect of staying in one place really appealing, not with hundreds of years of history of his people as nomads flying behind him. The wind came and went as it pleased...but then, he thought, the wind also came to rest and went still when it was appropriate.

He stretched, thinking of how their time in the house had been busily spent outfitting it with appropriate gear and appliances and decorations to suit themselves, filling up the Zuko-shaped hole in their minds by altering the layout to be more harmonious, staking out rooms.

That was a particular thing, their rooms: Sokka refused to let Aang and Katara share a room like they wanted, claiming it was bad enough when he had caught them kissing in the wake of the after-party satisfaction of the defeat of ex-Fire Lord Ozai, but they managed to get rooms side-by-side near the attic and slept in each other's bed more often then not; Toph had taken the basement for her own to be as close to the earth as she could and Sokka and Tucker had decided to share a room right next to the stairs and had already set it up as a crude gadget-making area to satisfy their fascination with all the cool stuff in town while tinkering with it to suit their needs, and one room had been left aside for Zuko, while Danny and Sam shared the room next to Aang's due to the ghost boy's clear need for constant interaction and a familiar face. (No one would begrudge him that, espicially not Sam.) Mostly Team Avatar was spendin this adjustment period making it more of a home, as while Danny, Tucker and Sam joined in on the activity when they weren't going around town entertaining themselves by seeing the sights, and Aang felt that they hadn't quite caught to the fact that they were all part of the same group.

It wasn't the most comfortable thing sometimes; more often then not they caught themselves in a state of deep awkwardness living together like this; while their teams were certainly very good friends, they hadn't spent nearly so much time together, and the clear cases of mental whiplash in adjustment was nearly as bad as watching Danny and his friends constantly realizing that their families had died with the rest of their planet, over and over again, and it hurt Aang that he really couldn't offer much more but advice that wouldn't be appreciated and simply hope that the man they had saved from Kimblee knew how to piece a breaking mind together and save Danny from shattering completely.

Such thoughts were overly emotional in the worst ways and Aang let them drift away to where such unproductive problems could no longer trouble him, leaving him with the beginings of serenity. The light of the mid-day sun shone down and Aang adjusted himself to feel as much of it as possible, breathing the heat in and breathing it out as spirit-fire, the warmth burning away the lingering sadness inside him, the feelings left behind by a dead world and a missing home leaving small frigid bits of coldness inside. "I have really got to get over these broody thoughts," he said aloud.

"Hearing the word 'brooding' from you actually feels wrong," Katara said from nearby. Aang looked around and saw her leaning against the railing of the balcony that led to his and occasionally Katara's room, elbows resting on the flat surfaces that made such good take-offs that Aang though that their designer had to be a flyer too, one hand cupping her face as she watched Aang speculatively, skin rendered a heart-squirmingly lovely shade of dark chocolate in the revealing sunlight, her eyes gleaming icy-blue at him from under a mess of unusually casual and slightly frizzy hair. Fascinating, that; normally she would have styled her hair into the complex styles of her people, but she'd been taking a much more casual approach to her hair lately. Perhaps it was the fashion of this town catching on.

He swung his legs over and braced them against the rails, facing her and smiling wide the whole time. "Yeah. I know." his smile moderated slightly, purest delight all meant just for her informing his face and turning his already cheery facade into something more genuine and sweet. "What's up, Katara?"

She smiled back, every bit as sweet and pleased for him, and reached out to place her fingers on the back of his hand, and Aang felt a warm flash like electricity made safe where her skin touched him him as lightly as a mermaid might touch the skin of a bird-man that had come down to grace the sea. She shook her head, and confirmed what the motion meant when she said, "Nothing important. Kim and Ron came around but it's nothing business-related." Aang nodded at that and glanced aside, still slightly bemused and happy at the sight of the city, it's possibilities dancing solutions and dreams in his mind. "What are you thinking about?"

Aang 'hmm'ed and mumbled for a moment, trying to think of the best way to phrase what he wanted to say, and finally he decided that the best example was an object lesson. "That," he said, pointing at the skyline.

Katara looked over. "The buildings? What about them?"

"It's not the buildings." Aang paused, frown, and took a moment to rephrase it. "It's the people...but that's not quite it. It's just...this city. This whole place and the way it's like. That's what I'm thinking about." He looked again, more thoughtful. "I was just thinking, wouldn't it be great if there was a place like this back home?"

Home. The land of the Water Tribes and the Fire Nation and the Earth Kingdom and one day Air Nomad would fly again. A world lost to them but not gone as so many were, no doubt quietly ticking along the path to peace and hopefully not needing it's Avatar just yet.

Katara looked at the street below them and the buildings beyond, the ancient streets holding up the pleasantly chaotic assembly of foriegn buildings, awash in people of dozens of different worlds living in relative harmony with each other, the terrible evil of the recent days assimilated into collective memory and being dealt with cheerfully enough.

Well, mostly. She frowned at the street as people screamed and ran out of the way of a new incident and cautiously said "...You mean you want a place back home with giant golems made of clay fighting sand monsters that shoot clones like screaming missiles?"

"Okay, maybe I chose a bad moment to get you to look," Aang conceded.

"Okay, your guys found me out, hmm?" called out the blonde ninja Deidara (now sorely regretting that Kimblee had gone straight to him when he'd come to Traverse Town, and the investigators following Kimblee's trail after the incident had located him quickly), standing on a shielded platform on top of the head of a two-story-tall golem-like construct a curiously abstract and quite functional design, all made of clay, with thicker plates of chakra-infused clay armoring it. As giant robot-type weapons went, it wasn't anywhere as fearsome as the Umbra Eternis, but it was still pretty tough despite not having any apparent weapons aside from raw strength, and the flying explosive sculptures the mouths in Deidara's palms chewed up from the clay of his golem were quite formiddable, causing considerably large explosions to whatever they hit. (And inducing some locals to complain that they had just gotten over a supervillain with exploding powers, this was just getting repetitive and trite and other things that hurt Deidara's creative pride.) "NOW COME AND GET SOME! I'LL SHOW YOU THE ART OF WAR!"

One such bomb was smashed out of the sky, exploding harmlessly against the body of the thing that had hit it; a enormous construct of swirling sand, weighing in around several tons and taking the form of a stout torso, an enormous set of brutish arms and a oddly proportioned head resembling a daemonic tanuki, and Aang recognized it speedily as Gaara's work, though the sand-manipulator wasn't in sight (presumably buried deep inside it for protection). Little holes and tunnels ran through it like ancient scars and from them many dozens of Naruto clones were emerging from or running around, dodging the constant explosions that did little damage to the sand golem's body but dispersed the clones with little effort. Whether the real Naruto was there or not was hard to say, as there were still more clones on the rooftops behind Deidara to cut off his escape. "Traitor. Heretic to your village. All your deeds end here," Gaara's voice said, coming from the sand-demon's mouth, and it was colder than dust and harsher than a storm.

Gaara's construct (made in the image of the demonic tailed beast sealed within him, the One-Tailed Tanuki named Shukaku) swung a clawed paw as it powered forward, grabbing an arm of the golem-titan that was too slow to fall back and viciously pulling it forward. Several long spears formed from the Shukaku-titan's body, stabbing into seams of the clay, and weakened it enough for Gaara to rip that arm off at the shoulder before his titan delivered a massive punch to it's stomach. Deidara's construct bent forward, several vital supports damaged and nearly making it break in half right there. Deidara just laughed. "I knew it. Always wanted to fight you. So this is the power of a container of a tailed beast... Amazing!"

Gaara and Naruto didn't answer, but the demon-titan's face became far more angry.

"Think we should help?" Aang said.

"Nah, I think they have this covered," Katara said. Her word being good enough for him, Aang sat back and watched the show.

"Where the hells did you get this much clay anyway?!" A Naruto said as he ran along with twelve other clones, the lot of them forming a Rasengan and launched by the sand construct's free hand directly at the clay-mecha.

"I've been preparing for a day like this since I got here; I had clay caches all over this city! And plenty of people use the stuff in their buildings, they were just waiting to be a part of this!" Deidara explained, and totally failed to follow the rule of never explaining things to an enemy unless you have the upper hand and became too distracted to notice the Naruto clones slamming the Rasengan into his construct's chest, a mighty blast of light and wind washing out the finer details of the construct's upper half exploding from the inside out, it's remaining arm flapping up and nearly clocking Deidara as he tried to flee.

The Naruto clones dissipated as the sand-titan dissolved and flung itself forward as a single massive wave, engulfing the defeated golem, pressurizing itself and compacting, swelling up briefly as the golem was reduced to more dust to be added to the sand. Some more of the sand streamed away and smashed into Deidara, wrapping around him and forcing his hands behind his back before hardening, locking him into place. The sand flowed up and became an unusually large sand platform, Deidara carried down to it and not even trying to struggle, just laughing madly and screaming, "Just as planned, you plebians! JUST AS PLANNED!" and not even trying to, for example, have his hand-mouths to chew up the sand to transform them into explosives. He could have, but he did not. "Could have brought my C-4! What would you do then, huh!? JUST AS PLANNED!" Still chuckling, he settled down, and permitted the sand to wrap around his wrists and solidify into handcuffs.

"...Hmm," Gaara said. "He should not have been defeated so easily." Deidara just smirked.

"Well that was fast," Aang remarked. "If we'd taken down Kimblee and his giant robot like that, things would have been a lot less troublesome."

"Didn't have enough sand," Gaara said, looking apologetic. (At least he tried, Aang thought he just looked mildly constipated.)

"But it would probably have been less exciting," Naruto said, laying down on the sand and waving cheerfully at Aang and Katara. They waved back, having become good friends with the two ninjas dispite all expectations; perhaps it was that Zuko was at least sort of a ninja in some respects and having these two ninjas around made them feel a bit better sometimes. (And plus Gaara filled up the 'grumpy quiet guy' quota Zuko had unknowingly made for Team Avatar.) "How you guys doing? Settling in okay?"

"Yeah, we're doing okay," Aang assured him. He pointed a finger at Deidara. "What was that all about?"

Naruto gave Deidara a smug look. Deidara shrugged, half-absently trying to chew up some sand to makes explosives even though his hands couldn't reach (lucky for them, since in an alternative timeline Gaara had been defeated by Deidara in that way with disastrous results and he'd even been dead for a while before he got better) and blew his huge bangs out of his eyes. Gaara said, "During one of his brief lucid moments, the boy you liberated from Kimblee's possession identified this man as Kimblee's primary accomplice in his attack on us. He is Deidara, a criminal of some repute from our own world and former member of a disbanded criminal organization."

"Small world, huh?" Deidara remarked. "What are the odds they'd send you guys after me? Worked out okay, too."

Naruto shrugged. "I dunno. Maybe they thought we might be familiar with your techniques or something even though we never fought you? Meh, it was a lame battle. Probably 'cause you couldn't make your special kind of explosives."

"Pretty weird coincidence all the same," Katara commented. "What are the chances that you'd guys end up fighting when you're both statistically unlikely to have survived let alone encountered each other? The odds have to be insane!"

"Didn't I just say something like that?" Deidara asked.

"No one cares," Gaara said, wrapping some sand around his mouth (but not his nostrils so the man could breathe a little) to shut Deidara up. "We should be off. Deidara has some business we need to reintroduce to him."

"Well, later," Naruto said, ignoring Deidara's mumbled indignities. "I'd say the biggest coincidence is that we showed up on the exact street where you live, but I'd say that it's all down to me just wanting to say 'hi' and planning accordingly."

"'Later', as they say," Gaara said, and he and Naruto floated off with Deidara in tow.

"Bye," Aang said, and waited until they'd left to say to Katara, "Okay, maybe that was kind of a bad example, but I'd like to have a place where stuff like that isn't a reason for people to freak out."

"You want our world to have a city of chaos?" Katara replied, looking both intrigued and mildly horrified.

Aang shrugged. "It'd be a step up from casual jingoism and global seperatism."

Katara opened her mouth to reply. She paused. She rethought her statement. She sighed. "Honestly, I'd like to say that things were fine the way they were a hundred years ago, minus the pre-war tension between all our people, but after all the worlds we've been to and the different people we've seen and all the problems we've helped solve, I think I get your point."

"Anyway, it's not really the weird things happening all the time I'm interested in - for one thing, I'm not sure that's really viable for a long-term settlement - but...oh, I think I got it now. It's the unity I like. I just think it'd be really nice to have a place like this back home." Aang spread his arms, indicating Traverse Town again, and this time without any random incidents undercutting his point. "Somewhere where the people that don't really fit into any of the existing nations can call home; I don't know how it's changed since we left, but before we did...you remember all that trouble we were having about the Fire Nation's colonies in the Earth Kingdom and what to do about them? I was thinking, what do we do for those people that don't fit right in the existing nations? I've heard about kids in Ba Sing Se that Firebend and Earthbenders that insist they're Fire Nation, and Suki told me once about Waterbenders in Kyoshi Island, so where do they fit in? Kyoshi and her people were Earth Kingdom!"

"The FIre Nation mixed a lot of different things together," Katara acknowledged. "It blended things together. And not..." She grimaced, as if admitting this was a physical pain. "Not all of it is a bad thing. I don't think the Water Tribes had even been in contact with each other before the war broke out. Just because it was peaceful, well, I don't know if it was happy or good."

Aang frowned, saddened by the thought that perhaps the Hundred-Years War had needed to happen, ridiculous as it seemed, and he shuddered at the notion that he had even thought something so terrible. "We can look at those people and do it right this time, Katara. They're not problems we have here, they're solutions to even older problems and maybe it's another step on making everyone happy, at least for a little while. And maybe then? It'll be a lasting peace for once. Unity among the elements." He frowned more thoughtfully. "Just think if we had a place like this town; a home for the people who don't think they belong in any of the nations, without any of the cultural debris the nations still had when we left. Where people could just slough off the old problems of their ancestor's countries and just be one people without bothering about any of their old grudges or prejudices. Just a clean start, for everyone that wants one. Where everyone would be...I don't know, free."

'A place for the first Airbenders of the next generation to be born,' he didn't add, but it was clear from the softened look on Katara's face that he might as well have said it anyway.

"It'd be a good start," Katara said, mulling it over and looking at the downsides. "Pushing people together like that could cause trouble."

"If it does," Aang replied, with a determined look. "Then the Avatar will still help. The way I see it, it would be the first step towards the world moving together as one instead of fighting against ourselves all the time. All the wars we've had, all the hatred that's grown from them, all the grudges we've been carrying with ourselves...we, Team Avatar, don't have the same grudges against each other that our nations do! I've seen that we can co-exist in harmony and peace, so the rest of the world can. This idea I have, this city, it'd be like our group on a bigger scale. I really think it can work."

"Aang." Katara's voice was soft, advising sterner counsel. "I think that kind of scale is a bit bigger than anything we've planned personally."

"You don't think it can happen?" Aang asked her, not angry or upset, just an honest question.

Katara frowned. "...It does sound nice," she admitted. "It really does, thinking of a place that's as relatively at peace with it's different elements as this town is. But...I don't know, with all the conflicts our nations are still carrying around? I'll probably see a tame polar bear-dog before something like that happens in my lifetime."

Aang grinned at her, as full of promise of change as the dawning sun. "It can happen. We've pulled off the impossible before, so why get all pessimistic now? ...And hey, it'd be really cool to see someone with a polar bear-dog for a pet, maybe it'd be like an animal guide because no one's ever tamed a polar bear-dog, whoever did it would have to be totally awesome-"

"Aang! Focus!"

"Right, right, sorry." Aang opened his mouth to continue, and again paused; articulating the vague thoughts and ideas that had grown between him and his friends throughout their journey and brought to the beginings of fruition by his exposure to the nearly unfettered possibilities of Traverse Town had been difficult enough, and now he really didn't have much more to say other than hopes and dreams, beautiful in themselves but requiring firm thought before he could dare voice them or else risk ruining the whole thing before it even had a chance to begin.

This could be his real legacy. The real enduring accomplishment of his that would truly bring peace to the world even after he was gone, instead of leaving a mess that his successor as the Avatar would have to clean up. "...It really could work. I know it can."

"A new nation, as a result of the Hundred-Year War?" Katara said, less dubiously then before. "...It'd be nice if something good came out of all of that." She smiled. "Tell me more about it?"

"Okay," Aang said, and without any of the apprehension he might of felt with anyone (even the other members of Team Avatar) he told her more of what he had in mind, articulating his hopes and dreams, easy in the knowing that Katara would take him serious and that with her, nothing would be dismissed or ignored.

On a more moderate optimistic note, in the house they were calling home, there was another conversation in the living room where most of the people living there or merely visiting had gathered; it was a fairly big living room, and seemed sparsely decorated due to both lack of furniture and the inhabitant's indecisiveness in cultivating things that reminded them of home to ease the transition (Team Avatar preferred things similar to their own cultures; woven tapestries depicting adventures of enlightenment for Aang, a handmade and slightly tacky bookshelf made from the skull of a huge whale-like beast for Katara and Sokka, spaces reserved for Zuko's choice in decoration which accounted for some of the open space, and Toph disdained most of it except for some metal trinkets she liked because they were so horrendously tacky; Team Phantom hadn't had as much luck, given their taste for mad science-y type things, but most of the appliances they had found at least had the right look), and most everyone was hanging around doing their own thing.

Sitting on a big fluffy couch (really more of a overstuffed beanbag chair large enough to seat five, filled with a kind of soft material that adjusted itself to the user's body shape and weight for maximum comfort) and a few matching seats arranged haphazardly around a little table was Sokka, Tucker Foley and Ron Stoppable, the three boys playing a co-operative multiplayer video game called 'Residue: New Rome' (the Residue series as whole sub-titled 'The Post-Apocalypse Game of Yourself'), a very popular series of sandbox-style roleplaying shooter-style games from Traverse Town itself with it's main claim to fame being a combination of a feature that allowed players to base their characters on their own appearance (it's premier character generation system had won awards) and unbelievably advanced writing algorithms that created new plots, scenarios and characters on every replay within certain broad themes selected at the begining of every playthrough, promising a new experience with every new game. (It wasn't quite as good as all that, but an experienced gamer was used to develouper expectations falling through.)

Somtimes, when it was done well-enough, fantasy could outdo reality with hardly any effort. "Guys, this game is awesome!" Sokka said, eagerly mashing buttons as his look-alike character used dual-mounted laser chainguns to mow through an army of Nazi pirate-zombies as their party climbed up a inactive giant robot to commander it, pilot it and then direct it at the base of this playthrough's bad guys, Constantine's Horde. "This is so much better than the last giant robot I tangled with."

"I beta-tested this game," Ron said proudly, and not so subtely fishing for compliments. "And it's definitely one of the best! A lot of times the writing seems a bit shallow and bad-paced, but it's always funny when you hit the comedy setting to the max at the begining of the game and you never get a plot twist you wouldn't want! God bless interactive immersion settings."

"I gotta hand it to you man, you got the best video games ever!" Tucker exulted, his lingering trauma fleeing in the face of such epic electronics-based entertainment media. "Zim had some pretty cool games - his people use them as a training simulators for like everything! - and they still sucked compared to this! I LOVE THIS TOWN!"

"I know, right?!" Ron agreed. Rufus, from his shoulder, made high-pitches noises that basically translated to 'hit him harder! No, the left, THE LEFT! Get out the missile launchers, you can hit those guys, they're all clustered up- OH NO, THEY JUST BROKE LOOSE! Circle around and get 'em!'. "Rufus, bro, no one likes a backseat player. Sit back and just enjoy it!" Rufus grumbled but slouched back, watching the game being played.

"It's super-cool of you to have bought this stuff for us," Sokka commented. "Half this stuff in our house you gave us money for, even this gaming system. I totally made the right choice when I let you hang out with us."

"Hey, what are super-casual friends in scary-desperate extremes of friend-needing-ness for if not giving you free stuff for no reason?" Ron said.

"I have no idea what half of what you just said was, but okay," Tucker said.

On the other side of the room and just beside the inner side of the door to the modestly equipped kitchen, Kim, Toph and Sam sat at a dining table with a media playing device and three sets of headphones, tending to their own fun and friendship-building affairs. Toph, sitting with her feet on the table and ignoring Kim's clear distaste for such slovenly behavior (and the wretched state of her filthy feet), bobbed her head in tune to the music as Kim and Sam listened to the same tracks with their own earphones. "What band did you say this was again?" Toph said, grinning in fierce delight at the powerful beats, epically roared lyrics and the instrumental guitar chorus beating like a heart with it's own life. "I like 'em! They're so totally metal I oughta be able to bend them!"

"They're called 'Heavy Mithril'," Kim explained, jabbing helpfully at the audio drive she'd brought the music on. (It was labeled, but Toph could hardly be expected to notice with her blindness.) "The members of that band are retired paladins from the Crossguard who never made it very high in the ranks; they were called the 'Noise Knights', fought by using sonic weaponry when they couldn't get weaponized electric instruments. They decided they got more fulfillment out of the music instead of the fighting, so they decided to get into making power metal music and doing soundtracks instead."

"They are totally awesome," Sam said, grinning like a fool. "They got a very good sense of guitar rhythm, it's almost hard to tell when they're singing or not, but the lyrics are still very clear! And...what's with the sound? It's really, really good, but geez! You said the song was about a book of hero orcs fighting a primordial horror, right? It's weird, those images keep popping into my brain! Feels a bit like low-grade telepathy, but like it's just being suggested into my head. How does it do that!?"

"They're into a thing called 'novox'," Kim explained. "Using superpowers or advanced sound equipments to create unusual and awesome effects with the music. A lot of bands around her are downright competetive with how crazy things get with it."

"Kinda surprised you're into heavy metal," Toph remarked.

"I'm into power metal, not heavy metal," Kim said, as if this was a big point. Toph and Sam raised eyebrows, but didn't begrudge the point. "Besides, my dad's into heavy metal, not me."

Sam blinked. "Your dad?" She repeated, looking a little more downcast than before. "The totally awesome military guy who can make guns appear from his body?"

"Yeah, him. He says a co-worker got him into it; nice girl named Abby Scuito, you'd probably be good friends with her. Anyway, Dad likes music that gets his blood pumping and has real spirit."

Sam looked blankly at nothing...and then, surprised by it herself, she brightened up. "Yeah, I get the feeling." She frowned. "Y'know, it's weird. I feel I should be kind of depressed or gloomy or something, what with everything that's happened...but every time I start sliding down that way, I feel better. What's up with that?"

"Novox sort of does things to your brain," Kim explained. "Not bad things; they stimulate calming hormones, put good stuff through your brain and pacify your emotions...basically whenever people start getting gloomy or clinically depressed, listening to the music stimulates stuff in your brain to make you feel good."

"Huh!" Sam said. "No wonder they kept playing music for days after that Kimblee thing went down."

"Yeah, it's public policy to play happy novox after incidents or during business hours," Kim said. "Keeps people saner."

"Sounds like your messing with people's brains," Toph said. "Is that, I dunno, healthy, Sam?"

"...At this point I really don't care if it's super-addictive or whatever," Sam said flatly, looking unbelievably relieved at having anything like chronic sadness, that awful bleak nothing-ness just peeled away from her. "Really, I honestly don't care. But...why isn't it helping Danny? Me and Tucker are okay, but Danny's, like, half-crazy."

Kim sighed. "It's not really a permanent fix. It helps, but there's nothing like proper therapy to get it through. Still, good music helps deal with stuff like this."

Sam smiled. "Heh, technology. It's pretty awesome."

On the other side of the wall and a floor below, in the so far unused but quite large basement (big enough to be a meeting room if they decided to host a secret group or something) and isolated for privacy's sake, the most emotionally fragile of their number was having his own problems resolved in a hopefully more enduringly healthy way. "...And that's why I'm no longer legally permitted to drive while wearing a blue shirt with parachute pants," Danny said, laying down on a classic psychiatrist's couch. No one was sure where he'd gotten it.

Jarod, sitting on a chair opposite him, gave him a dubious look. "Are you even old enough to drive?"

"Yes!

"All right, all right, it's honestly hard to tell."

Danny shrugged. "Mmm. No big deal. I guess." He gave Jarod a sour look, and the man sighed; Danny wasn't unpredictable, exactly, but he had proven to be rather volatile. Jarod didn't know if it was a consequence of the Heartless attack changing something in his personality or a already existing trait, but Danny's emotions were always extreme with very little warning between mood shifts; his temper was particularily prone to being riled. It wasn't something that novox music seemed to help much. On spite of that, he remained an easygoing boy, but Jarod wasn't sure Danny trusted him, which was essential for helping him with his problems.

It wouldn't have felt so personal if the others had mistrusted him, but, as Jarod had confirmed on his way in and observed that anyone who looked at him only gave him brief glances more disinterested than anything, just about everyone there thought of him as either a helpful fixture or 'that guy Kimblee had a psycho-crush on'. Neither were particularily appealing, so he did the diplomatic thing and adjusted his personality so he didn't care.

That was coming easier these days and it disturbed him. Not quite as much as the memories that weren't his flooding into his brain and informing every other thought with more than a thousand lifetime's worth of personal opinion, weighted thought and experience more than anything. He could see a situation and immediately see all the possible ways to do things, because those memories had already witnessed if not done every conceivable action.

Disturbing, and yet exciting. "I have to ask," he said, changing the subject. "Why the couch? I don't know if people even use these anymore."

Danny shrugged. "You're the shrink, you tell me."

"...Why do they call psychiatrists shrinks?"

Danny gave him a look. "Seriously? That's what TV people call them. I have no idea why, but, c'mon, don't you watch TV?"

"All the time," Jarod said easily. He frowned. "I was locked up in a containment facility after I was taken away from my parents and I never saw TV until I was over thirty years old. I've never had popular culture imprinting."

Danny stared uneasily at Jarod. "...Oh. Um...sorry?"

"It's okay, don't worry about it." Jarod leaned back. "So I hear you, Zim and your friend Aang were a hero team?"

"Sure, on and off. Trouble happened, we got together and stopped it. It was fun." Danny considered, and added, "The rest of Team Avatar and friends we had joined every so often. Depended on how bored they were and how big the apparent threat was. Bad side was, everyone made enemies with everyone's bad guy gallery, but the good side was...uh, basically the same thing, but spreading around the ire makes the bad guys a little more casual about it and they get less vindictive. Weird but true."

Jarod nodded glumly. "You can't stand recurring villains, I take it."

Danny nodded too, just as glumly. "It's cool when they give it up and decide to hang out with you, but when they keep showing up out of the blue to kill you or whatever? I hate that! Zim and Dib bickering all the time was bad enough-" Danny stopped and grimaced, clearly thinking about something that was painful to remember. "...Um. Anyway. Uh...hey! Did you ever have any bad guys? Aang told me Zim said you fight bad guys too."

"...When did he have time to tell him that...?" Jarod wondered. He decided it wasn't that important and nodded. "Usually I never see someone evil more than once. Not because they die, because that's something people like us don't let happen-"

"Of course," Danny agreed, approvingly.

"But they always end up in prison like they deserve. Usually after getting a confession out of them in a suitable dramatic way, or beaten through more conventional means. I do the latter more often then I used to, come to think of it."

"You must have had at least one guy that wouldn't die or get thrown off and kept showing up all the time," Danny insisted. "It's, like, a rule!"

"...Well," Jarod said reluctantly, not really happy to reveal personal information when he remembered not to but too earnest in getting the boy's trust to be bothered. "There was this one man; I'm certain he was mentioned at some point by your friend Zim, called Mr. Lyle?"

"...Oh yeah, he was that guy Zim said attacked him and some of his new buds while they were lost in Foster's before it exploded and got unexploded," Danny recalled. "That's a weird coincidence." He gave Jarod a look that plainly said 'I SO don't think it's really a coincidence'.

Neither did Jarod. "I'm not so sure it is one. The last time I saw Mr. Lyle, he wasn't working in any capacity to deal with a group containing high-profile targets like some of the people in Zim's group, and I don't mean Kim's team or Abel Nightroad; it was sheer coincidence and good timing that Zim picked them up. I'm refering to Calvin and Hobbes." Danny looked at him, befuddled. "Those two are some very controversial and skilled adventurers from another 'verse with a powerful galactic-scale federation...kingdom...empire mishmashed thing called the Brighthammer Kingdom or the Comic Kingdom. Calvin and Hobbes are both pretty high-placed in their ranks; I'm not sure how they found Zim or got hired to fight for him, but Lyle had some extremely sensitive intel on them. I'm willing to bet that Lyle's found some very powerful backers."

Danny frowned. "Who was this Lyle guy working with before?" He asked, clipped and more professional this time.

"An extradimensional agency called Wolfram and Hart, but I'm pretty sure you heard that. And even so, I'm prepared to bet good money that Lyle's found even bigger backers now."

"Bigger than extradimensional?" Danny said dubiously.

Jarod slowly nodded. "The last time I saw Mr. Lyle...well. I did everything in my power, but he wound up in a situation where he died."

"...Oh," Danny said, surprisingly indifferent. "One of those things. Mr. Jarod, one thing I've seen is that whenever the bad guy is supposed to get killed no matter what? Nine times out of five they always live. And yeah, I know my math sucks there, kinda just to illustrate the point."

"No, you don't understand," Jarod said. "I'm not speaking metaphorically. Lyle died. I saw him get crushed in a black hole."

For a while, the silene was deafening even with the drive music and video game soundtracks ruining the mood.

"Great," Danny said, like a guy who knew perfectly well that death wasn't so much of a final fate as a moderate hindrance in some cases. "Bad guy coming back from the dead is even worse!"

Jarod nodded, again. "The best case scenario there is merely that he at some point acquired the resources to have a clone made of him and his consciousness keyed to it so that in the event of his death, his mind would leave his corpse and be re-embodied in the new shell."

"BEST case?!" Danny said.

"That's just based on what was likely to happen," Jarod said. "Worst case scenario, given what I know of his practices and percentages of action following death? That having cultivated fiendish contacts through his tenure as an employee for a extradimensional law firm that assists hell-things, he had already prepared for this eventuality and cut a beforehand deal with some high-ranking fiend or another, allowed them to transform him into something that is no longer quite human and gradually 'evolving' into an actual devil in his own right, all in both a wish to continue doing what he enjoys and to avoid true damnation by a second death that would render the contract null and void, now walking the worlds on behalf of his hellish masters to do their will."

"...Huh," Danny said, raising an eyebrow. "And that's...that's something you honestly expect happened."

"I don't seriously think that's the most likely possibility," Jarod said, looking a bit embarrased for even mentioning it. "It's downright absurd, messes with a few fundamental laws of supernatural physics, and assumes that Mr. Lyle would be far more important and competent to the personified forces of evil than I honestly think he would. Still..." He shrugged. "I've already made plans for these and six other alternative causes for Lyle's return, just in case."

Danny blinked, clearly dumbfounded, and shrugged. "I've seen weirder things," he admitted. "Heck, most of my old rogue's gallery were from a dimension composed of energized ectoplasm that sometimes thought were dead people, happened to just look like ghosts, or were actualdead people. Sometimes bad guys died, wound up there, and showed up to harrass my friends." He sighed. "That never stops being weird. The dead coming back, I mean. And I'm half-ghost, it sounds weird just saying that."

Jarod nodded. his eyes unfocused briefly. "Death isn't the end most people think it is. It's hard to say what it is, but..." He shook his head. "I don't think I ever understood what it meant to die or what happens, just that with the universe's current state it's a simple function of things. I remember there was this one blowhard in Sigil who talked about the afterlives and I put him on the spot to die right there after I died and got back up, and Morte was always making stupid jokes about it and-" Jarod stopped, looking bewildered.

Danny blinked. He stared at Jarod. "What did you say?"

Jarod opened his mouth. He paused. He closed it. He shook his head. "I don't... it's nothing. Don't worry about it." In spite of that, he looked deeply disconcerted, like a man at sea who had just had his boat abruptly turn into a flock of seagulls and dump him in the ocean.

Danny seemed to respond to that, and said, "You said you died."

Jarod was silent.

"And did you just say something about that weird skull guy Zim was travelling with? The lazy one that didn't do anything? Morte! That was his name, right?" Danny looked at Jarod more intently than he'd focused on anything in a while. "...You know him, don't you."

It was a statement, not a question. Jarod seemed to respond to the tone, pulling him out of whatever unfamiliar zone he'd been sinking into. "...When I was captured by Kimblee and he used those...things to have me help power his giant robot, they..." he waved his hands indistinctly, trying to gesture his way through the indefinable, of having hearts consumed with total evil and darkness ripping into his mind and swelling with every single moment in his life they could find, glutting on the horrors behind his eyes until he couldn't feel anything but hate and rage and such awful isolation, that he was alone and forsaken and drowning... He managed, "They did things to my head, I don't know what. They reached in and used the worst parts of my life to add power to themselves. Feeding on pain and misery." And betrayal, and madness, a stray thought commented. He ignored it. Carefully, he couched his next words. "They reached...deep, if you understand what I mean. Deeper than my sub-consciousness, or my actual memories."

Danny tilted his head, puzzled. "I'm not sure where you're going with that? Why would they do that and what did it do to you?"

"I'm not sure they were doing anything on purpose; those abominations don't seem to have any purpose at all unless they have something to destroy or corrupt. My point is..." He grimaced. "I don't know what they did or what happened to me, exactly, but ever since then...ugh."

Jarod put a hand on his forehand, and he half-imagined that he might feel it thumping with the force of all the foriegn memories there fit to split him open. "They ripped open something in my mind, and ever since then, I've been seeing...things." Noticing Danny's horrified look, he quickly added, "No, no! I don't mean I've been hallucinating or been 'infected' by whatever transformed them. What I mean is..." He sighed. "It's like there was a vault, or something sealed down there, and the Heartless accidentally ripped it open. Ever since that fight? I've been remembering memories that aren't...ah, they couldn't be mine, it's completely impossible for me to have experienced or done anything that happens in them." And yet, his tone indicated that he wasn't entirely sure there.

Danny shifted restlessly. Dispite himself, he sounded concerned. "You think they might have, I dunno, implanted memories from dead people into your head?"

"It's a possibility," Jarod said, sounding like he'd considered this possibility. "But these memories...if they came from other people, I'm sure they'd feel off, at least like something that was 'other'. But they feel...right, almost. Like I'm remembering something I forgot. And they're coherent. A kind of personal narrative that's largely similar enough even if disturbingly unfocused. Not that they're unpleasant; I've been getting a tremendous amount of information from them, like...like someone took a library and stuffed it into my brain and I'm slowly started to understand everything in it. Just..." He bit his lip. "Morte was in them. A lot of them."

Danny just looked at Jarod, who plainly understood even less than Danny did. He opened his mouth to offer some other theory or some vain comfort, and couldn't come up with anything.

"I feel like I used to be someone else," Jarod said quietly. "And that those memories are mine, they've just been jarred loose." He laughed quietly. "And of course that's impossible. I did the research and looked up some of the things I saw in the...visions? Memories? Whatever they are. All of them that I could historically verify happened centuries before I was born."

Looking like he might as well go all out, Danny valiantly offered, "Maybe reincarnation is actually a thing and those memories are from your last incarnation?"

"If that's the case, it's either all the memories from all my incarnations or I lived a really long time," Jarod said, nodding. Danny blinked, he hadn't expected for Jarod to believe that. "Most of the buildings, technology and people I saw in them are from vastly different worlds, dimensions and time periods."

Danny shifted again. "...Okay, I got nothing," He admitted. "I guess when Zim comes back, you could just ask that Morte guy what he thinks about this? The people he hung out with, who he knew way back when, that kind of thing."

"Maybe," Jarod said. Inexplicably, and he didn't seem aware of it, he smiled, just like a man who heard that a very old and good friend would be coming by later and was looking forward to it the visit. his eyes zoned out, and gave the impression that he was moving through mindscapes vast and wondrous, though perhaps bitter and terrible and places, marveling at all the newfound possibilities they offered, awakening yet more potential and abilities within him, and with an almost childlike wonder as though his eyes had been freshly opened anew a bit closer to the ultimate truth of the universe, the secrets of the cosmos whispered into him and telling him of the nature of all things...

Danny, decided that now was the time to change the subject, glanced up at the ceiling where, above them, Sam was with Kim and Toph and smiled slightly at the thought that she was still there. "Uh, Mr. Jarod? You've been around a while? Have you ever...I dunno, liked a girl? Like, in a big-time way?"

Jarod's mind drifted back from wherever it had gone, and with the same small wondering smile, he laughed warmly and said, "Let me tell you about a woman I knew named Ms. Parker..."

---

Kevin Ethan Levin's brain, lodging itself up after days spent in a warm comforting fuzz best left to unconsciousness, warmed up to regular speed, and for a few brief horrible moments after he opened his eyes but before he had acclimated to his surrondings, his mind made all the wrong associations (steel-hard walls and surface under him, a ceiling over him and he was back THERE, back in the clutches of the people who had captured him and broken him, they were going to make him a monster again and rip his brain to itty-bitty pieces and put the pieces back together and turn him into a horrible thing again, no one was going to save him this time and he was back THERE-)

He jerked to a sitting position and instinctively summoned the genetic echo of Pyrotian flames, holding his hand out for the fires, and nothing happened. his hand didn't swell up into a misshapen horror of living fire, remaining a weak and too pale and malnourished stick figure image of a hand and it was his hand, human and pale and utterly fresh of mutations from stolen Omnitrix energy.

There was nothing to summon. The energy of the Omnitrix, all it's maddening power, was gone. He was free.

his brain came to a stop, gradually chugging back up again. his other hand tensed as he wondered what was happening to him, and it closed around soft fabric laid over his legs. He looked down, wondering what it was, and stared for a long time at the fluffy blankets layered over him in a dishelved tangle that he'd shoved them into without realizing it.

A bed. A big soft comfortable warm bed, dimpled slightly around his slight body. He stared for a long time at it, unfamiliar wetness prickling at the corners of his eyes. The room, he realized, was a sterilized and pleasant whiteness, the absence of color a relief to too-tired eyes and a reminder that this was a place where things were made clean and whole; next to his bed was a table covered with a number of odd-looking medical devices (far stranger than anything he'd seen when being experimented on and also definitely more benign), a room next to him that seemed nothing more than a small bathroom. Clearly, he was in a hospital of some kind, perhaps even the mobile one Kimblee had wanted to destroy earlier. (He wasn't in a position to know but this was, in fact, the case.)

his mind froze, half-expecting the madman in question to assert control of his brain and prove that it had been a cruel game, and for a moment, there was nothing in his head but a horrible gray blankness. And blankness it continued to be, his hear beating faster and faster as the absolute certainty grew to a peak, began dwindling in confusion, and when nothing answer Kevin but his own mind, faded away.

his mind kept returning to the bed, that wonderfully soft and warm and good bed, a real bed like he hadn't slept in for years, not since he ran away from home and then everything had come crashing down and he'd fallen lower and lower until he was just a vicious ugly monster inside and out and then he'd fallen even further, and then they'd cut him up again and again and shoved monsters down his head and he'd thought he was gonna die and here he was in a real bed-

Kevin closed his eyes and listened. Where there had been, at best, a loathsome and awful presence chanting imprecations at him, there was just blissful silence. Nothing more than his own thoughts, safe and sound in his skull. He looked at his hands, human and totally unmutated, and slowly flexed them, savoring the feel of his own muscles being stretched and pulled at his will, weak but him, his own. his hands, his own hands, controlled only by him.

Kevin spent nearly five minutes just staring at his hands, not even noticing the wetness spilling down his face and the inelegant blubbering he was making, just flexing and moving his fingers and turning his hands around and still just barely comprehending that his body was his own again, uncontrolled and human again, in a place thousands of verses away from that horrorshow he'd been trapped in, and he was free. He was alive, he was safe, he was in some kind of hospital where they gave him blankets and he was free.

Kevin didn't realized he'd been crying until he wiped his face to see what the puzzling slickness was and felt the tears dripping off his face. He smiled weakly through the tears and only lasted a few moments before he put his face in his hands and just let himself cry like the young teenager he really was. For the first time in so long, he let himself be the child that had grown up too fast. Every wracking sob was a release of pain and fear kept inside for too long, memories of knives and scapels and invasive surgeries and worse things left to wither with each pitiable noise he made, and he finally dared to hope like he hadn't since he was a small child.

"It's over," he whispered. his body was his own again. Kimblee was gone. Ghostfreak was just a bad memory. And there were almost no signs of any of the injuries he should have acclimated during the fight. And, of all the things he'd never really expected to happen, he was still alive. "It's over." Lips slid back over teeth that were straighter than he ever remembered them being, and the sobs became quieter and happier, and there was hardly a difference of noise distinct enough to notice a graduation in the character of the sounds he made until he was no longer crying but laughing, unbridled joy that made the tears fall harder than ever.

Kevin failed to notice the intercom by his bedside light up, and it sent the appropiate signal to a desktop manned by people whose job it was to monitor the patients, and the appropiate people with waiting guests were sent out.

Kevin slumped back, falling on his back and stared up at the ceiling with a silly grin on his face, just happy to be himself again and free of all the monstrous baggage he'd been saddled with for so long. He was free of everything, even the Omnitrix energy he'd stolen. He was just Kevin Levin again.

It was a good thought. It was the first really good thing he'd felt in so long.

It hurt to turn his neck when he saw the door open with a pressurized hiss and in came a beautiful and extremely tough-looking buxom woman with lots of blonde hair pulled back in twin ponytails, wearing a loosely fitting outfit that looked something like doctor's scrubs (only with more belts and zippers). "Huh, you're awake already. I told them, but does anyone ever listen to me? Nope, but here we are." The woman said, striding right over to him and smirking faintly down at him, a surprisingly kindly expression. She patted him on the shoulder, and Kevin thought it should have been reflexive for him to jerk away after everything that had happened recently whenever someone had touched his body. Except that her hand felt so warm, and she was smiling nicely, and no one had touched him for any reason other than to hurt him in so long.

Kevin managed to pull himself up, and he felt a bit dizzy for a few seconds when he moved too fast. He grabbed the iron railings aside his bed and held on tightly, grimly determined not to lose it ever again. "Y-yeah," He managed to say. "I'm up." He rubbed his head and winced. "Geez, how long was I out?"

The woman consulted a chart she was carrying. "A few days; two and a half, I guess, hard to tell culmatively, seeing as you've been in and out of it. You woke up a few times, incoherent most of the time. Usually convinced someone was, say, torturing you for medical purposes. Pretty rude, I'd say."

Kevin blinked. "...Huh. Who are you? And where the hell am I?"

"Name's Tsunade," The woman, now properly identified, said. "I'm the representative to the Council of Insert Nomenclature from the Shinobi Guild, and the foremost expert in chakra-centric methods of medical work here. As for the rest, you're in the mobile hospital of Traverse Town, hanging around the Upper District right now. It says your name's Kevin Levin; is that right?"

Kevin nodded. "Yeah," He said, and felt a bit stupid for marveling at how awesome it felt to feel air from his throat coursing over his tongue and being shaped into words all by his own volition. "What happened? Back...y'know, there." He made a movement that contrived to indicate all the conflict at the end of the big fight that was incidentally the last thing he remembered.

"Guy called Scar from our religious super-buddies in the Crossguard brought you in after Kimblee got evicted from your personal real estate," Tsunade informed Kevin, looking unsure if he remembered it or not. "After we brought you in and figured that nothing too bad was with you aside from some serious malnutrition and some lingering body malfunctions, we gave you a bath of green eco and then more of the same but intravenously fed into your bloodstream. Your body seems to be reacting espically well to it, better than anyone I saw who wasn't an eco channeler and better than half of those who are." She checked the chart and made an interested noise. "Says here it might be 'cause you looked like you're half-Osmosium and you definitelly have the innate ability to absorb energy and material substance. Any comment on that?"

"Uh yeah, I can do that stuff," Kevin said. "Never tried absorbing physical stuff before, though."

"Probably safer than sucking up energy," Tsunade said dryly. "That's just crazy for one of you guys, I've heard."

Kevin nodded dumbly, thinking to himself that the irony was a little sickening; if he'd ever heard of that before he'd gone to the streets, he'd have had a much less sucky life. Questions raced through his head, competing for attention, and all he could do was just sit still and feel the hurting fade away.

Seeing that he was in some degree of confusion, Tsunade sat down and began quietly talking to him. It wasn't anything important; just general questions about how Kevin was feeling (sucky-ish, but way better than before), if he had any family in town (definitely not) and a few other similar questions, gradually going easier on him and throwing a few sneaky questions that, though Kevin didn't realize it, pulled vital pieces of information on Kimblee's motives and doings prior to the attack on Foster's and allowed Tsunade to quietly piece them together without putting undue stress on Kevin.

In time, Kevin did start telling Tsunade what he knew, and was almost eager to do it. Mostly he didn't tell her (and by eventually extension, the rest of the Council of Insert Nomenclature, and the people they were in communication with, and the people loyal to them, and so on) anything she didn't already know, but there were a few useful bits of information here and there. The stuff refering to Deidara was extremely interesting...

Eventually, when she was satisfied with the answers and Kevin was left none the wiser (and probably more relaxed, to his continued benefit) Tsunade said to him, "So tell me something, kid; you up for visitors?"

Kevin blinked. "Uh, sure, I guess, but I don't know anyone who'd want to visit me. Wait, or is this more official visits?"

"Nah." Tsunade waved her hand dismissively. "Turns out that there are people in town who know you from your original world. They were very interested in hearing about you after things cooled down, and they're willing to take you into their home if you're okay with it."

Kevin blinked again, more dumbfounded than ever, and nodded slowly, wondering what the hell was going on. Tsunade shrugged and went over to the door, and opened it. It was jostled open from the other side, and Kevin soon saw who was waiting on the other side

his jaw dropped, the logical part of his mind throwing a fit at this lastest insanity. "No. Freaking. Way."

"Yes way," said Ben Tennyson cheerfully, of surprising good mood given that he and Kevin were old arch-enemies (or had been before the Heartless had come), his cousin Gwen smiling shyly at Kevin, and a large and grizzled but friendly-looking older man dressed in casual clothing that was so eclectic and tacky that it looked like tourist-wear, patiently standing behind them with his hands on their shoulders; their grandfather, Max Tennyson.

"Hey, Kevin!" Gwen said, a little too quickly and brightly to be entirely natural from the hot-blooded girl Kevin remembered. "Haven't seen you since...our world got eaten or exploded or whatever." A long silent moment passsed. She grimaced. "Okay. Not the best line to say."

"Hey," Max said shortly, looking deeply unsure of himself, giving Kevin a look of such surprisingly intense study, coupled with a speculative frown, that it spooked Kevin a little. Ben nudged him and Max made a 'hmm'ing noise, clearly trying to put together a thought that was at least halfway diplomatic. Since all their previous meeting had coincided with Kevin trying to kill his grandchildren (save for the very last time, when their world have been destroyed and Kevin had helped them escape for reasons unclear to them), his reticence wasn't surprising, though he was still warmer than Kevin would have exprected.

"Yo," said Ben Tennyson, he of the extreme understatement.

Kevin just stared at them, his mouth open. "You," He finally said. "Have got to be kidding me."

"Oh, so you're one of those guys that have 'histories'," Tsunade said dryly, making quotation marks with her fingers. "Well, good, at least you know each other."

"Yeah, you could say that," Kevin and Ben said at the same time. They froze after speaking and glared at each other, openly disturbed to be on the same wavelength.

"Well, nice to see you already got a rapport or whatever. Later kid, hope things work out for you." Tsuande smiled slightly. "At least you'll have a home waiting for you. Good luck, Mr. Levin." She left, saying 'hi' to Ben and Gwen and giving Max an altogether more familiar greeting before departing properly, leaving Kevin with them.

Kevin's brain, logged into standstill by these events, just stared with his mouth open until it all clicked together thanks to that 'home' comment. "No way. NO FREAKING WAY. You are the guys that she said are gonna take me in!?"

"Yep," Ben said, shrugging carelessly. "Small world, huh."

Kevin stared at him a bit longer, uncomfortably aware of the history between them. It didn't seem to matter that much at the moment, though, not with the other and much fresher horrors still preying on him. "...I've been trying to kill you guys for like forever now," He finally said, still unable to grasp anything past that. "Why in the world would you want me in your home!? Why are you even up here!? WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE?"

"None of that language in my household, young man," Grandpa Max said firmly. "Self-control is something you'll definitely find soon, for the best!"

"It's a legitimate question, though," Gwen said fairly.

"It is?" Ben said, frowning. "Hey, it's easy; Kevin needs help, we know him, we're right there to help him out! It's that easy!"

"No it's not," Kevin said, facepalming. It felt so good to cover his eyes, and he felt so tired; nothing would have pleased him better than to just lie down and go back to sleep for, like, forever.

But he'd been fighting with all his might against torturers and wannabe multiverse conquerers for way too long, and even though he didn't have the words to think to himself that he was just too spitefully stubborn to just quit like that so simply, it was still the reason he managed to keep himself up for long enough right now. "What do you guys want with me?" Kevin managed, and he hated how weak his voice sounded right then. "I just got out of being experimented on by evil jerks out to take over everything and being posessesed by a crazy guy, I'm really not in the mood to fight you guys anymore."

Ben quirked an eyebrow. "You mean you don't want to go back to being my number one arch enemy again?"

"No!" Kevin said, and it was more of a snarl. "I've had enough of being the bad guy, it just made my life suck-ish and horrible. Being the bad guy sucks."

Ben blinked, and grinned. "Well, perfect! That works with our plans all nice and neat. What with you not being evil and criminally insane and stuff."

"I was not criminally insane!" Kevin snapped. "I was..." He paused. He reflected that 'criminally insane' was in fact the most accurate description of his previous behavior (and was in fact a possible way out of this mess). He grimaced. "...Okay, yeah. I'll give you that one. ...Frak it."

"Kevin," Gwen said gently, and Kevin turned his head to peer at her and all the suspicious thoughts and unpleasant associations drained away from him in a warm little fuzz just by looking at her; he'd forgotten, but she was seriously pretty. his eyes drank in the deep redness of her hair - like the near-orange of ripe fruits or the rims of wood-fed fire- and the delicate curve of her jawline, dipping down from her ears into the not-quite elegant point of her chin. The fierce green-ness of her eyes, as bright as the Omnitrix, as if that light had been rendered into pure color, the gentle curves of her growing hips and the suggestions of lady-like statuesque looks in her figure. He watched her, overwhelmed by a sudden need to not upset her, to gain her respect and approval.

She continued. "We're not after anything. You don't have anything we want to take, we're not interested in starting up that stupid hero-villain thing you and Ben had going, and we're definitely not going to pick on you after you've been through...all that." She said this last with more delicacy than Kevin thought he deserved, but he appreciated the thought. She smiled faintly, and with quiet honestly, simply said, "We just want to help you, Kevin. We know each other. It's never been the best way, and I guess it could have always gone better, but we're from the same world you're from. We're all that's left of that place. Even if we never had met, we'd still have that in common."

"Seems legit," Kevin said, mostly because Gwen had said it; in the privacy of his head part of him thought that Gwen still wasn't making any sense, and another part of Kevin told that part to shut right the hell up, the pretty girl had been talking.

"Well, after that, it seems a shame to just send you off to Foster's where you'd wind up with people who don't even know you, or get harrassed by nosy people for your involvement in the whole Kimblee incident," Max continued. "And, well, there's other reasons there, but mostly Ben and Gwen convinced me to let bygones be bygones."

"Okay, now I'm really confused," Kevin said, and was silent for a moment, waiting for Ghostfreak's sarcastic commentary before he remembered that Ghostfreak was gone. He was still getting used to that, and warmed up to the thought. "How'd you guys even find out I was here? Or that I was even involved in that?"

"We saw you on TV," Ben said, looking at Kevin like he was an idiot. "Duh."

Kevin blinked. "I was on TV?"

"Yeah, that one news group that got a new studio covered the whole thing," Gwen said. "They did a bunch of specials on it, produced a 'best of action' virtual network series on the most liked parts of the fights, and I hear they're making a documentary on it after they interview the key players in it. Something about 'the biggest disaster to hit Traverse Town since the Lowardian invasion', and 'being brought to our senses after having our naivety cleared up'." She thought about going on in this vein but clearly thought better of it. "You know, you could probably make a fair bit of money by having your memories copied and adapted into that documentary, not to mention all the other people who'd like a cut of that."

"Wouldn't that make me lose those memories, though?" Kevin asked, perking right up at the sound of making money with almost no effort on his part.

"No, they just copy it," Max said. "Memory erasing is a tricky business, and usually fairly stupid in almost all but the most serious cases."

"Dang it," Kevin muttered. "Figures. Eh, the guys in charge of this place would probably want me to tell them everything about where I've been and junk." He frowned. Come to think of it, trying to remember exactly where he'd been, the details of it and most of the names he'd heard were pretty foggy...

"Yeah, probably, who cares?" Ben, not one of humanity's born inspirational speakers, said. "So are you in or what? 'Cause I bet I know some people who might have you declared not of sound mind so you'd just have to come with us. We might do that anyway, you're probably half-crazier than usual. You used to be half-crazy anyway but it was psycho-crazy! The big-time 'I'm a big jerk for no reason so I'mma KILL EVERYTHING JUST BECAUSE' kind of crazy. You've gone and flipped it to actual 'needing professional help' crazy. I saw those specials, you kept trying to get people to kill you. What's up with that?"

"...It seemed like a good idea at the time," Kevin said sheepishly.

Ben shrugged. "Huh. On the bright side, you're not big and all monster-ish anymore. How'd that happen?"

"No freaking idea. I ain't complaining, though."

"Good, because that'd make you both really nitpicky and tremendously ungrateful," Gwen remarked. Kevin grimaced. She raised an eyebrow imperiously and he hastily looked at the wall and tried to pretend she was there disapproving at him and it was no good, he could just feel her glaring at him. He shuddered, in that uniquely male way of a guy who knew that a girl he kinda-sorta liked was mad at him and he wasn't entirely sure why.

He rallied, and said, "Yeah, well, how'd you get those talisman things on your arm!" He retorted. "I heard they got blown up by that Hex jerk back home before the planet exploded!"

"...They got better, I guess?" Gwen said lamely. "Actually, it's kind of a funny story. Not funny 'ha-ha', more like funny-weird, though believe or not there's a emotion-eating clown involved and he turned into a giant spider because I scared him half to death even Ben already did that and-"

"Chill, Gwen, you can tell him later when we get him home," Ben interrupted. Gwen swiveled about and glared at him, which he studiously ignored. "Although I kinda want to know how Kevin heard about those magic talismans in the first place."

"Yeah, funny story about that-" Kevin started to say. "Hey, wait a minute, don't go distracting me! What are you guys talking about, bringing me home!? Did you seriously just-" He put his hands over his eyes, trying to place his thoughts together and make his suspicions override the rather stronger feelings that kept coming to him whenever the possibility of having a home to go to was mentioned to him, regardless of the peculiar circumstances. "Ugh, this is almost as crazy as listening to that Kimblee freak!"

"What are you so bent out of shape about?" Ben asked. "What's so bad about living with us?"

"IT MAKES NO FREAKING SENSE!" Kevin yelled. "I've tried to kill you guys! Well, mostly Ben, but I think I had Gwen for a hostage a few times. And, wait, I'm not sure I've even spoken to you before, old guy."

"My name is Max," The old guy in question said sternly.

"Right, old guy. Just...why would you want me, who spent most of the last few years being crazy, living with you!?"

"Well, apart from the fact that Ben's had this odd obsession for some time," Max said. "Insisting he had a time traveling experience where he met a alternate future where he met the three of you as teenagers and your alternate wasn't much worse than a mildly anti-heroic superhero that was best friends with that future's Ben and Gwen and it's given him the idea that in the right circumstances you could have been a hero."

Kevin stared blankly. "...That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."

"Yeah, that's what we said," Gwen added. "Seriously, Ben. What would older me be doing wearing a skirt all the time if we were fighting aliens?"

"Hey, I just told you what happened, it's not like the whole thing was my idea!" Ben said. "If it was, we'd have had gatling gun jetpacks, the Omnitrix could clone armies of the aliens in it, a time-traveling alien with an awesome living ship would have helped us out and made us his best buddies forever, and alternate Kevin wouldn't have gone crazy again like he did. Also, everyone would get awesome color-coded superhero outfits. So there!"

"What was that about me going crazy?" Kevin asked, blanking out on most of that.

"It's not really that important," Max said. "Sorry, Ben, but we need to focus here and get Kevin on board."

"On board for what?"

"We're restarting the Plumbers here," Ben said. "We've been doing it for a while but we need more people and-"

"Hush," Max said absently. He sighed, scratching his forehead, and finally reached into his pocket. "Kevin, the thing is...I know a fair bit more about you than any of us thought I did. The main point is that a long time ago, I made a promise to a friend of mine that I'd look out for you if anything ever happened to him. I tried to make good on that promise, but you disappeared before I could find you. When I met you, I had no idea whose son you were, and when I figured it out..." He looked away. "Well. You wouldn't exactly have been willing to accept my help or listen to me."

Ben and Gwen were looking away, seeming embarrassed. Kevin blinked. "'Whose son' I was?" his back shivered, and the hand squeezing the metal railing of his bed unconsciously took on the same mineral structure as the railing, and a coating of steel slid over his hand without Kevin noticing. "No. No way. No way."

Max walked over and took a small flat disc, big enough to be a communications device or a badge, and placed it on the bed. "This was your fathers'," He said simply.

Kevin slowly picked it up. "A Plumber's badge?" He said, staring at it, vaugely remembering such things from his mom's stories about his real father. his next words were almost whispers, fighting to get through the frightening numbness. "...Where'd you get this?"

"I found it before everything went black back on our Earth," Max said quietly. "I was half-crazy at the time. Suppose I was just thinking that we had to keep everything we could find intact just for the sake of things; this being before we found out that there were hundreds of Earth-like worlds out there, but at the very least I managed to preserve this."

The metal slid off Kevin's hand, and again he didn't notice. If anything, he just hurt all over; the continuing aches from the fight (though the injuries had been transferred to Kimblee), the pains from his trials of his recent traumas and the much worse mental scars, and this latest surprise left him feeling worse than numb, and now he just felt very, very tired. "...Thanks," He said quietly.

"You're welcome, Kevin," Max said. He sat down so he could look the much shorter teen in the eye. "So, Kevin. How about it? You feel like brushing away all those fights you had with us and join up with us? Come and live with the Tennysons? Let me fulfill my promise to your dad and my friend?"

Kevin bowed his head. Wearily, a sense of good fortune overruling his native suspicion, he put a hand to his head. "I...I..."

"You don't have to come up with an answer right away," Max said gently as Ben and Gwen walked over.

Kevin bit his lip, and a sense that his luck had suddenly reversed itself was too overwhelming to ignore; he had gone from being experimented on and tortured for basically no reason to being cared for in a hospital and basically having the grandson of his old arch-nemesis (who seemed to be bearing absolutely no hard feelings at all) want to adopt him.

They wanted to take him home with them. He almost had a home waiting for him. It was a struggle not to start crying again. He had a brief moment to look back at his life as it had been, the horrible failures and catastrophes he'd made of it before he met Ben and then things falling straight over the edge and all of it his own fault after Ben tried time and time again to befriend him...and then the Heartless coming. Their world dying, and leaving just them behind, and they wouldn't have even lived if it hadn't been for a lingering impulse to heroism, and then a chain of events later Kevin had wound up captured, tortured and brutalized until this latest atrocity that had inexplicably, amazingly, ended with him being free.

his entire life seemed to untwist and narrow down, a lifetime of choices in the moments all leading up to this specific moment. One final chance to make up for everything he did, and get a life worth living. The second chance he thought he'd never get, that he'd only think of when he was lying half-dead in a pile of bodies and thinking of all the missed opportunites and yet here it was now, just waiting for him to take it. And still it scared him so badly.

Sitting up right was the third hardest thing Kevin ever did. Repressing the urge to jump out of his bed and run away and pretend none of this had happened was nearly as hard as not freaking out when Ben came to Kevin with his hand stretched out and a smile on his face, which was the second hardest thing Kevin had ever done. (Partly because that was the Omnitrix on his arm and Kevin was justifiably suspicious of the transformative device after all the trouble that had come to him because of it, though much of that was his fault again.) Ben smiled more gently than Kevin had ever seen, a shadow of the true hero he could one day be on his face, and he said, "How about it? We could've been friends back when we first met even if you were crazy then, so let's fix that little screw-up and...aw forget it, I'm not good at these big heroic speeches, so just stop being a twitchy jerk and do the hero team-up thing and just come with us already!"

Max and Gwen gaped at Ben, and Kevin got a very strong feel of 'this is not what we rehearsed' coming from them. They stared to speak but Kevin shook his head as obviously as he could, and licked his lips to unstick them. He started to speak, couldn't find the words, and spent a few too long moments trying to think of what to say and then he just decided to be honest. If nothing else, Ben's words broke through.

Kevin then did the hardest thing he ever did and, instead of listening to that little nagging impulse that this was way too dangerous and suspicious and whatever, he ignored it and made his decision clear by shaking Ben's hand, his too-thin fingers like bendable straws against Ben's knuckles, making sure that his fingers stayed well away from the Omnitrix. "Okay," Kevin said, his voice a harsh croak for a too-long moment. "Okay. I can do that."

Ben grinned, like a plan of his had been set back on track. Gwen looked absolutely delighted. Max seemed quietly satisfied. "Good to hear," Max said, not mentioning that he had already publically adopted Kevin after making plans to help the child. It would smooth over potential bereaucracy problems.

---

"Father Nightroad," Mr. Herrimen said patiently from a wheelchair and presently in one of the basements of the new Fosters' home, his voice heavy even now with dignity and good manners. "Kindly remove yourself from the sugar bin!"

"Aw," Abel whined from the railed walkway he was standing on, encircling the top of the enormous plated-steel canister he was about to leap into; given that it was filled with sugar, it was an excellent object lesson for Abel's total obsession with sweet treats. Already anticipating his partner's nearly infamous impulsiveness, Scar was climbing up the thing and hauling himself over to prevent Abel from jumping right into it and contaminating everything. "Come on, you said I could get some sugar for my tea, and what kind of example would I be if I didn't take the opportunity to dive into the sugar?!"

"You're be an example of someone who isn't tremendously unhygienic enough to swim in sugar," Scar said, grabbing Abel, hoisting him over his shoulder and jumping off back down the ground of the basement level they were in.

"Thank you," Mr. Herrimen said gratefully from a wheelchair parked next to a small table with a number of coffee related implements upon it, several cups already laid out for his guests. Scar approached, putting Abel down. "Father Nightroad, you are a role model for people! I should think that you should pay more attention to your behavior. Think of the effect it has on people."

"I think it has the effect of broadening people's minds because once they get used to me doing these silly things, they don't have knee-jerk reactions to such behavior from random others," Abel replied, straightening his coat and actually trying to look professional for once. Apart from the fact that he'd shaven all the hair on one side of his head for some absurd reason.

"Perhaps," Mr. Herrimen said, quite aware that the moment was getting away from them. "In any event, gentleman, the coffee is getting cold."

"Cold coffee is an abomination!" Abel said, horrified. "Quickly, to business!" He grabbed an elegant bucket with measurements upon it, hurried back to the sugar machine and filled the bucket up, and returned to the table. "Here we are! Sugar for everyone! Whee! I'm excited just thinking about it."

Scar stared sideways at him, but did not comment. Mr. Herrimen opened his mouth to say something, but went silent at a look from Scar. Coffee was measured out, an act of considerable silence among the three men; Abel and Mr. Herrimen had a shared culture to draw from, and regardless of minor differences between their versions of Britain at least the need for ceremony in such matters was present in both. Scar, his native culture dedicated to a strict code of conduct, didn't really see the point of it, but was polite enough not to comment on it and gracefully wheeled Mr. Herrimen about when the imaginary rabbit politely indicated that he needed to be moved. (The heavy old-fashioned wheelchair he had insisted on not really being meant for propulsion by the user, a critical design flaw. But it did look cool, in a baroque wrought-iron way.)

Coffee was served, drunk (and in Abel's case, slurped; he put in so much sugar that his cup basically contained sweet coffee-flavored sludge) and minor matters were discussed, among them the reasons for Scar and Abel's presence. The days since Kimblee's attack had become smoother as of late, but there were still matters needing tidied up, and Scar had dedicated himself to them with frightening intensity.

"You are still having trouble organizing the building," Scar said eventually, as conversation turned that way.

Mr. Herrimen nodded sadly. "Indeed. I know Captain Armstrong meant well, and he did a fantastic job of reworking that regrettable violence to our gain, but his sense of architectural sense does not..." Mr. Herrimen shook his head, his great ears flopping listlessly. "It does not easily translate to general use, if you will pardon my bluntness." He shook his head. "Even two days in trying to organize properly and we still haven't discovered all the rooms and chambers within, how they are connected by the secret passages he saw fit to include, let alone have them mapped and have a modicum of order properly reset! We're having to group people by exploration teams inbetween assignments in exploring the new house, did you know? Miss Frankie has had to recruit a skeleton crew of administrators amongst her friends and contacts just to maintain order, and I dread what the Madame will say once she returns from her ill-timed vacation in the tropics."

"Probably that the new place is totally awesome," Abel said. Scar and Mr. Herrimen stared at him. "What? You know she will!"

"I regret to admit that you are likely correct, Father Nightroad," Mr. Herrimen said. "I would simply like to have things properly organized before she returns. I hate having so many unknown quantities in our home. I still haven't the slightest idea how Captain Armstrong had the power already installed when he created the new mansion, but I can't deny that it was of extraordinary help."

"Armstrong is...a very skilled alchemist," Scar said carefully, staring down into his coffee. He frowned, old war memories playing in his head, and he added, "Well-known for raising large structures with little effort."

There was silence.

Abel coughed. "So, uh, Mr. Herrimen! I understand that you wanted a faction presence here?"

Mr. Herrimen snorted. "You know well my preference for keeping Foster's outside of political affairs. However, in the wake of public opinion, I feel that since you had a part in the defeat of that...person who obliterated my home and killed so many, you might well wish to help the residents organize this place as well as we can before someone who had nothing to do with the battle could take the honor from you."

"If you say so, but personally I'm just happy to help." Abel stretched and looked up in interest. "You say this little chamber is located directly under the kitchens?"

"Indeed." Mr. Herrimen gestured around the room; it was not particularily large but it was getting rather crowded with the various appliances people had brought there. More interestingly, there was also a small elevator lift rising up into a trapdoor in the ceiling, going right into a storage room in the kitchens. "I believe this might be suitable as a provisions storage area. I suppose that's why someone had that sugar bin placed there, but for the life of me I have no idea who donated it...or why they thought we'd need one." Abel whistled innocently, and Mr. Herrimen, after a moment, put a hand to his face in beleaugered understanding.

Scar frowned. "You realize that by simply accepting our help, in the eyes of public opinion, you are giving the Crossguard into having influence over your people and household."

Mr. Herrimen said nothing for a moment. "My, but you certainly don't mince words...ah, sir? Knight? Father? Whatever is your title? I thought 'Paladin' was the proper term for a man of your rank in your organization."

"It is."

"Ah, well then. The appropriate response is to point out that I rather don't see a problem with all of that. Or rather, that is my intention." Both Abel and Scar gave Herrimen curious looks. "Part of the reason we were hurt so badly by Kimblee was the insular nature of the house. We kept so many valuable things in it, not the least part of the security system of the entire town. When that fell...well, so did we. And Fosters' has always prided that it stands alone against the hustle and bustle of Traverse Town's chaos; tides of adventure crashed against the shores every day, and we were never so much as moistened by it. We were never involved, save for when we were directly affected." He bowed his head. "And when Solf J. Kimblee made his move, we also stood alone, and there were none fit to defeat him in time among us."

Abel looked thoughtful. "You intend to make the house more open to the public, instead of just a rest stop for refugees and friends of visitors?"

"If that is what the residents and workers wish. I do not intend to make Foster's do anything. I am simply a servant to carry out it's will, and that of those I serve." From the twitch of his expansive mustache, he might have smiled. "I believe that the three of us have that in common."

"Yes, there is that," Scar said, and nodded back, slow and deliberate as a metronomic gyroscope.

"If forging stronger ties with your organization - at the expense of our neutrality - will secure future goodwill and bring our respective interests closer together, I see no reason not to pursue this with all haste and alacrity," Mr. Herrimen said.

"What is it you want us to do, exactly?" Abel asked. "Map the house? Me and Scar weren't given much detail when we were sent out here."

"Really? What detail were you given?"

Scar and Abel glanced at each other. "Angilaka told us, 'You dorks get to Foster's like right now and take Lindsay and Beth with you because I say so or I'll poke you in the head really hard with a stick'," both of them said in unison.

"It was a really big stick," Abel said. "Like, bigger than me! It probably would have hurt a lot. And I'm still recovering from the whole 'almost being disintegrated by a laser beam' thing from the big fight, so pain hurts extra-bad right now."

"Ah, so your hair is having difficulty regrowing," Mr. Herrimen said. "My sympathies, Father."

"Hrm? Oh no, I just dig this look," Abel said, cheerfully scratching the shaven side of his head. "I saw this look on the vampire queen that's been wowing all the competitors at the Smash Brothers free-for-all gladiator battles! The new management isn't much there but she's just inspiring to all non-stupid vampires!"

"...Ah, you're just participating in being a raging fanboy," Mr. Herrimen said.

"How do you know a word like 'fanboy'?! Or using 'raging' as an adjective?"

Mr. Herrimen ignored him. "So, on the matter which I discussed with you. Would you care to head the exploration teams and examine the mansion so that we might make it ours at last?"

"Sure, okay," Abel said before Scar could do more than open his mouth. Abel glanced at his partner's annoyed expression. "Er...I mean we'd be honored to assist and begin a new regime of mutual benefit and cooperation! Oh yes! It's definitely not part of a ever-expanding master plan on my part of uniting the people of this world together in a stable brotherhood of true peace and societal evolution by turning incidents to my own purposes."

"Very good," Mr. Herrimen said, plainly not listening. "Take me up, will you?"

Scar stood up, went to Mr. Herrimen's wheelchair and wheeled him over to the elevator lift, Abel hurrying to keep up and hitting the lever and release button on his way there. Valves turned, gauges pumped and steam hissed from the mechanisms of the lift, and a cylinder-shaped device spin in place around a central shaft in front of them, proving the power that pushed the lift up at a pleasant pace upwards and into the open space above, the lift locking into place with the floor as it was within the proper height, and enabling Scar to wheel Mr. Herrimen out.

Abel, Scar and Mr. Herrimen walked through the kitchens, a very large and definitely noisy chamber lined wall to wall with stoves built with an unusual design that allowed different multi-purpose cooking tools and very specialized applicances to be switched onto the stove at a moments notice to cook an incredible variety of food (given by the fellows from the Guild of Culinary Craftsman, who had volunteered some of their fighting cooks to help out in the transition), conveyer belts moving dirty dishes to the sinks at the back of the room on one side and meals to be set out on the other side (built by some artificers that lived there), rows of industrial-level fridges storing uneaten meals and raw ingredients; and of course all the cooks, washers, extremely bored residents and other people that were there for whatever reason. Nobody said much of anything to them; even though they'd come out of a room no one had seen them go into, it was generally considered that it wasn't worth bothering Mr. Herrimen about.

The kitchens terminated and entered a rather wider room that could be made open to the elements if need be, filled with quite a lot of tables of varying size for people to be seated at as they wished (in stunning contrast to the old fashion of a single huge table that everyone sat at, but even Herrimen had to concede to logistical matters). For a moment Mr. Herrimen hesitated in his direction, clearly wondering whether to go there or not as the others had been instructed to wait in the new vestibum, and Abel gave a slight cough when he heard rather familiar voices. Herrimen sighed, and pointed towards the dining room, and Scar obligingly rolled them through.

Mr. Herrimen gave the dining room a faint sigh; it wasn't quite as grand as the old dining room had been, certainly not with the smaller tables scattered around, and not with even additional levels or staircases to give it more atmosphere. his attention was soon directed towards several young women sitting at a table close to the kitchens: Frankie Foster, Beth, and a minor public relations official from the Crossguard named Lindsay. They went over to them, and Abel waved enthusiastically once he saw who they were, as he worked with two of the ladies in question. Ironically, the two women he knew were the only ones not looking at him, sitting with their backs to him. Frankie, on the other hand, was the first to see them and offered an awkward smile at them.

"...And then you said your boyfriend Spike went off to talk to his monster boy buddies like King Albriecht from the Silver Fangs werewolves or that nice Deucalion guy who talks to the stitchwork boys about being human," Lindsay chattered on, not noticing Frankie's lack of continued contributions to the discussion. She was a fairly tall and exceptionally pretty busty young woman, a perception mostly attributed to her openly good nature and extremely bright demeanor even if she did give off a sense of being only marginally brighter than the average box of rocks. Both she and Beth were dressed in the same kinds of uniform Abel and Scar habitually wore, if somewhat less ornate due to their lower ranking; the Crossguard took the approach toward rank designation by the logic of 'the person with the more absurd outfit MUST be of higher rank just to deal with looking so silly'.

Mr. Herrimen gave off a general sense of dour displeasure. Frankie, trying and failing to stop Lindsay from her rambling, poked Beth and pointed. Beth turned. Mr. Herriman raised an eyebrow. Beth made a small upset noise. "Um, Lindsay," Beth said, nudging her good friend not-so-subtlely. "We're not alone!"

"Oh, gosh, I know!" Lindsay said, not getting the hint. "I'm totally into, like, that thing where they say everything is connected and we're all little dots bouncing around all by ourselves in the black and being people is part of playing connect-the-dots and that's so awesome and I didn't get to take the cosmic immersion thing yet-"

"That's because the intiate evaluators aren't certain you could handle it, psychologically speaking," Abel said. "You might fall apart if you're not able to handle having the pure truth of the Upper Planes and the goodness of it's essence channeled directly through your motonic pattern."

"Aw, that sucks, but it's okay then!" Lindsay when on for a while. Frankie and Beth facepalmed, the former much more sternly than Beth did. Eventually Lindsay stopped in mid-word, turned around and made a small squeaking noise. "Eep! You guys are back already!?"

"As should be evident by our presence," Scar growled.

Lindsay giggled and clapped Scar on the arm. Abel took half a step back in reflex. Scar merely groaned, one of those people cursed by nature to be easily infuriated with people as endlessly cheery and ditzy as Lindsay. This might well explain how he was easily irritated by Abel. "Nuh uh!" Abel retorted. "We might be interactive hallucinations brought on by residual power surges and influenced by our extreme awesomeness! But mostly mine, you understand!"

"Ooh, ooh!" Lindsay said, raising her hand. "Or alternate universe versions of yourself could be beaming in and making our brains get all funny and just think you're there!"

"Ooh, I hadn't thought of that one!" Abel said, looking amazed. "Just think, what if whenever you have that weird moment when you're thinking of just how weird thinking and mental processes actually are, it's because another you is looking at you and making the psychic equivalant of funny faces!"

"Oh, yeah!" Lindsay said. She and Abel cheerfully babbled on to each other, heedless of their companion's dislike. Mr. Herrimen grumbled. Frankie sighed. Beth shrugged. Scar's eye twitched dangerous and he wandered off to find some baked bread to ease his burning sense of illness.

There was a long, brief moment.

Lindsay turned around and blinked at Abel and Mr. Herrimen. "Oops," She said meekly as Scar came back, too busy eating bread to pay much attention to her 'caught in the headlights' look.

"Oops does not cover leaving your post while we're handling business matters," Scar said gravely. Somehow he made it dignified dispite having a mouthful of bread.

"But you're talking with your mouth full! That's gross."

"And your hair's dyed," Scar said. "That's a ridiculous luxury."

Lindsay pouted. "But I like my hair."

"And I'd like to have better comebacks."

"Um, hello, sirs," Beth said, quickly nodding her head. Scar and Abel returned the gesture more gracefully.

"Hey guys," Frankie said, more at ease. Scar frowned faintly, perhaps annoyed by her unfamiliarity, but even if he really objected to it he didn't say anything. "What's the word?"

"These paladins of the Crossguard, Master Scar and Father Nightroad, have volunteered their services in mapping out our new home and aiding relocation of our people on behalf of the Crossguard," Mr. Herrimen said. "I do think this is the begining of a new and rather fruitful partnership."

"We can hang around more!" Lindsay said. "Yay!"

"No, we get to go get lost on faction time and no one can complain about it!" Abel said. "Double yay!"

"Didn't you just get done with being lost in our...uh, old place?" Frankie said, looking visibly pained at the mention of the old place as she said it.

"...Negative yay," Abel said. He pouted. "So, Frankie! How's things?"

"Could be better," Frankie said. "Everyone here keeps trying to pick rooms for themselves and fighting over who gets what; I've had to break up at least fifteen fights over who got to have an entire bathroom for their personal property. This 'squatter's rights' thing we have as a baseline for property laws really bites sometimes. Having you guys helping to put some actual organization should some."

"Excellent to hear, if not for your choice of language," Mr. Herrimen said. "I must admit, I'm glad you're getting along splendidly."

"We're all buddies here!" Lindsay said, and unexpectedly pulled Beth and Frankie into a bear hug. The other two girls smiled awkwardly and exchanged looks that said 'never speak of this again'. Well, at least Frankie did, Beth just looked used to it.

Mr. Herrimen looked at her. Quietly, to Abel, he said, "I don't intend to offend, but your organization's hiring practices are a touch...lax."

"She's smarter than she lets on, or thinks," Abel replied, equally quiet. "She had the force of will to pass our iniation and stay functionally sane, and the purity of spirit to go through the intiation in the first place. Not a bad public relations girl; we're thinking about putting her into this diplomatic order we've got in the planning stages."

Mr. Herrimen watched Lindsay dropped the other two girls and start talking to a passing and surly yeti, ignoring it's grumbling expressions of irritation, and that the yeti quickly grew infected with her good cheer and spoke more politely and nicely, and when their short conversation was over, the yeti was no longer surly or grumpy at all but in a rather good mood, smiling and whistling happily. "I see," Mr. Herrimen said simply.

They watched her a moment longer, gauging how she spoke with people and left them more tractable and good-natured. On a mission like this, people skills (unthinking though they were) seemed quite invaluable with the state of tension things still were stuck at. If they ran into a lot of people and got Lindsay to cheer them up, and those people ran into other people and were nice when they might have been more irritable or cranky, then those people might feel better too. And when those people met others, they would likely treat them with more evenness than they otherwise would, and so on and so forth. It was a pleasing thought.

"Well," Mr. Herrimen said briskly. "If you'll all care to move on with your own mission, I have a...unpleasant duty to witness. That Kimblee knave requires appropriate witnesses."

Scar stiffened, just a micro-bit. With his iron self-control, it probably would have gone unnoticed by casual observers, but Abel knew his partner well. "Yes," Abel said carefully. "It'll be good to have that sordid mess left firmly behind us. Won't it?" He directed this at Scar.

"I suppose so," Scar said neutrally, his jaw twitching and his fists curling by themselves and uncurling, as though longing to strangle Kimblee at that very moment.

Frankie winced. "Yeah, Mr. Herrimen, we should go do that," She said quickly. "Come on you guys, we got work to do."

"Uh, sure," Beth said, looking at Scar and quite clearly afraid. He looked like a man possessed by something else, edging ever closer to the hate-fueled avatar of vengeance he had been once.

Lindsay peered at him, seemingly unafraid of his overbearing fury. "I heard about what happened there," She said suddenly.

"Lindsay, no!" Beth hissed.

"What?"

"Don't-" Beth dared to look at Scar, the Ishvalan priest still trying to master his rage and not doing a very good job of it, they could hear him breathing so hard it sounded like some titanic apocalypse dragon growling. "Please, don't make him mad. Please please please think, like, really really hard about what you're saying!"

She didn't say 'Or Mr. Scar might liquiefy your brain or something'. She didn't have to, it was pretty much unstated.

Lindsay didn't seem to care. Blithely, she said to him, "You were right there when he conked out but you didn't kill him even after they seperated him from that boy he was controlling. You could have done it and no one would have cared. Why didn't you? You kinda look like you really wanted to!"

Scar looked around, surprised, and focused distantly on her, his eyes narrowing. Lindsay seemed fascinated by how red his eyes were; red as hate, as red as the blood of dying children dashed upon rocks and crying for vengeance with their last rattling breath.

He stared for a long time, perhaps only just processing what she'd said. "It seemed...improper," He finally said. He did not say that it was one of the hardest things he had ever done, staying his hand when that murderer was finally in his grasp. He did not say a dozen other things that came speedily to mind, so many pained horrors clawing at his mind, a living nightmare that might never have been quenced even by Kimblee's last hateful breath and his blood on Scar's willing hands.

He certainly did not articulate the profound effect that the wielder of the Keyblade, Zim, who had come to them like a bolt of lightning from heaven and delivering retribution to his old enemy, had made on himself. On an impulse, Zim had thought it appropriate to spare Kimblee's life, and Scar had found wisdom in that brief merciful compulsion.

Scar did say, "Slaying him when he was so perfectly helpless, unable to resist or respond in any way...it would have solved his problem. It would have been a fitting end to his hollow semblence of a life. But..." He paused, as if feeling that bothering to think about it was a small betrayal of all the people he had loved and taken from him by Kimblee. "Killing him there, like that, it would have felt like murder."

He shook his head.

"And I...no, there had been enough death that day."

A silence greeted this pronouncement, and Lindsay broke it when she said, without any sign that she had heard something quite long from their usually tactiturn warrior (and, some whispered, secret assassin), "Well, duh! That's good and stuff!"

"'Good'," Scar repeated.

"Sure! You can't just kill someone when you have him all helpless and stuff, even if he is a bad guy! We're the good guys, we can't do stuff like that." She suddenly seemed serious. "Doing bad guy stuff when we call ourselves good guys, we just can't DO that."

Scar said nothing. Imperceptibly, almost just to himself, he nodded.

And then, the moment was gone, and the pressing matters seemed heavy enough to call them to action. "Well said, young knight. I must be off then, you know of the...unpleasant buisiness I have to attend to," Mr. Herrimen said, mournfully. "Sir Scar, are you certain you do not wish to witness it? It might provide you some closure?"

Scar hesitated at this last chance to see Kimblee, his tormentor, the man who had nearly exteriminated his entire people and destroyed his home city and family for the pleasure of it. One last shot at closure...a last shot rooted in vindictiveness and hatred he simply could never let go. "No," He said, and it visibly hurt for him to say that. "I will do the duty required of me. My personal concerns are-" He took a deep breath, and halted a moment. "Irrelevant."

Mr. Herrimen considered him. Abel looked quietly pleased under his veneer of surprise. "Well-spoken," He said. "Goodbye then. If you meet anyone who wishes to know of my wherabouts, tell them I shall be conferencing from my office and must not be disturbed."

"We shall," Abel said.

Mr. Herrimen bowed as best he could in a wheelchair and rolled away at a brisk pace. The five left behind watched him go. "Well, okay then!" Bet said, clasping her hands. "Are we gonna go or what?"

"Follow me, you guys," Frankie said, standing up, walking towards the exit of the dining room and waving them along. One by one, they filed out, to the uncharted reaches of their new building.

Scar was the last to go. He looked where Mr. Herrimen had gone, gave one last venom-filled glance of regret mingled with a surprising but welcome sense of relief (as if of a long-held burden begining to slip away) and followed.

Sometimes, he truly thought it was best to serve and be happy with that.

---

A shovel hit the ground, tapping lightly against the side of a newly transmuted building, glimmers of blue light still reflecting off the shovel's bared outer side before flickering away.

Roy Mustang, wearing a simple white T-shirt over his uniform pants and boots, nodded approvingly. "That takes care of, oh, let's say sixty percent of collateral damage from the fight. Gives the insurance people something to stop complaining about."

"Hmph," said Izumi Gibbs, giving him a frown through her dreadlocks going over her eyes due to strain and excess sweat. "Always about stastistics and political variables with you, Mustang." She wiped some sweat away from her face, wiping her hand off on her coveralls.

"Pretty much, yes," Jethro Gibbs said, dressed much like Roy and holding a pocket-sized emitter displayed a holographic map with the damaged portions of the area highlighted; the areas that had already been reported repaired where blacked out, and Roy couldn't repress a smile that there was much more dark than highlights on that map. "Still haven't decided if that's a positive or negative quality, sir."

"I was a 'dog of the military, Gibbs," Roy said wryly. "She'll turn it into a negative quality no matter what."

Izumi made an expression that might have been called a delicately reserved scowl if such terminology wasn't bizarre. "Doesn't take much work with you."

Roy snorted. "Just as well, then."

They, several other powerful alchemists, and a few matter-manipulation themed mages and psychokinetics that had volunteered for the reconstruction efforts, were standing in the enclosed area where the last of the battle had taken place and the Philosopher's Stone had been released, and it was perhaps because of some of that residual energy that transmutations were going smoother than usual. Most of them were off by themselves, gathering debris and identifying it's source before putting it in the appropriate place to be assimilated and rebuilt into new or recreated buildings; a few were arguging over whether that bit of stone had come from that wall or whatever, but generally they were getting along well and doing their jobs. Roy supposed he ought to be making them behave, but he was honestly so dog-tired that it had been an effort just getting out of bed recently.

He yawned noisily. "I hate getting lazy," he complained.

"Then get up off your lazy butt once in a while and do something instead of hanging around in your clubhouse," Izumi said, a hand to her forehead as she looked around for the next thing to transmute.

Roy went silent; Izumi didn't know that the place had been destroyed or the death of his friend the bartender Gorgob, and he tried to play it off, giving the ground he had just transmuted into solidity (previously the hole they had tricked Kimblee into, the various traps already dismantled and regenerated into previous forms, and the artificial pond sealed off again) a healthy tap. "That's a little too close to actual work to be really comfortable for me," he said, rolling his eyes. Izumi threw a wet rag at his head she'd been wiping her face with. Roy grabbed it out of mid-air and wiped his own face off, grateful for the coolness of it; today was unreasonably hot even for the summertime. "Damn this weather!We can field tanks that dwarf buildings, replicate engines that run on pure fighting spirit, and outfit our finest soldiers in mechanized exoskeletal rigs, and yet we stand out in the heat without so much as an automated flying robot that fans our faces!? The hell kind of operation are we running here!?"

"I'm starting to think that being part of the elite soldiers in a military dictatorship spoiled you, sir," Gibbs said, giving his wife that said 'was he always like this on your world?' and Izumi just shrugged in a 'I barely knew him, how would I know' way.

"I almost got blown up no less than fifteen different times in less than twenty minutes in that fight!" Roy snapped. "I deserve a little decadence for the clean-up! I WANT MY FLYING COOLANT FAN!"

A nearby matter manipulator (her powers too limited to be an effective combatants but intricate enough to be a talented civil engineer) telekinetically moved a bucket's worth of water from the pond in a unstable ball and unceremoniously threw into Roy's face. "Congratulations, sir," she said in a monotone voice. "Now you're refreshed and slightly more useless than usual."

"Useless...?!" Roy repeated. his eye twitched. He whirled around and shouted, "WHO ARE YOU CALLING A WASHED-OUT MATCHSTICK THAT NEEDS TO BE CODDLED JUST TO GET THROUGH THE DAY?!"

"No one did, sir," Gibbs said as the matter manipulator blinked dully. "You did that all on your own."

Roy crossed his arms and growled. "A fine day when my own subordinates openly disrespect me for cheap laugh value!"

"We're not your subordinates," a few volunteers replied, hauling some debris on the way to repairs. "We don't work for you at all!"

"Are we even getting paid for this?" One of them asked.

"Of course not, it's volunteer work," Izumi said.

They gasped. "All our work, without even any reimbursement!?"

"That's what volunteer work MEANS."

"Well, THAT hardly seems fair!"

Izumi snarled and proceeded to verbally lacerate them for being selfish skiving layabouts that never thought about anyone but themselves, and they cowered in horror. If the fear of Leeroy Jethro Gibbs' ability to intimidate suspsects was legend, it was equaled by Izumi Gibbs' ability to scare the life out of anyone. Roy facepalmed. "God help me, I don't believe I'm actually saying this but sometimes I actually miss the military dictatorship. At least then I didn't have smartass civilians mouthing off to me!"

"No, you just had smartass co-workers, subordinates and fellow State Alchemists mouthing off behind your back. And your assistant and love interest making no-so-veiled remarks about your sexual virility," Izumi said. "Or lack thereof. And she still hasn't stopped dispite surviving and continuing to remain as your personal second-in-command."

Roy stared blankly at her. "...You've been talking to Riza, I see," he said carefully, his brain editing out that last sentence in order to preserve his frail sense of masculinity.

A distraction occured, for the best in terms of Roy's pride but perhaps not for the comic relief; a crashing noise came from behind them as a mini-mecha in the shape of Greed's head bounced into the street, earning a few groans from workers who knew they were going to have to fix that, and even louder groans from Izumi and Gibbs when it became apparent that the mini-mecha was being driven by Greed/Lin, Deadpool, and Shego. "Heeey, guess who's back to annoy you again and is following you for no adequately explained reason!?" Greed shouted. "And hey, watch your landings. We almost scratched the paint."

"I told you I knew how to drive mechas," Deadpool said. "I just didn't say I knew how to drive them well. At least I got to crash a vegetarian's place and forcefeed them meatloaf! AGAIN."

"Truly, joining these guys was a memorable and wise career move," Shego said, not really paying attention and just reading a magazine. "Just so I can hear lines like that."

"Greed...Lin, whichever it is I'm talking to, what do you want now?" Roy growled. "I thought I made it clear after the fight that we live seperate ways for a reason!"

"You mean after the conference we had after we got that Courtney lady and her cohorts a new studio and they arranged an exclusive with us," Lin said, taking over while Roy had been talking. "Speaking of which, they're gonna arrange another conference in a few days and you're invited whether you like it or not. Something about the 'deplorable state of Traverse Town's personal security and a state of affairs based entirely in retaliation and reaction'."

"Joy," Roy deadpanned.

"That's what we said," Lin remarked, grinning. "Mostly because me and Greed are now two of the big backers behind their new studio as it branches out into other interests thanks to the renewed faith in their journalism skills. Of course, they don't yet realize that since me and Greed both have different precentages of shares thanks to some creative accounting, that gives us majority shareholding, which should provide some absolutely fun consequences in the near future! Ah, how I love financial tyranny in the making...!"

"I'm so bored I think I died several times during that little paragraph," Deadpool said. "I already miss the action scenes!"

"Oh, come on, we barely did anything important in that fight," Shego said, giving him a funny look, as people were prone to give to Deadpool.

"We provided valuable running commentary and interesting action bits! If it wasn't for us, the whole fight would have been a lame grimderp filled with nothing but running and screaming and near-death calls. With us, it had all that and witty fourth-wall jokes."

"I always wanted to know; if there's a fourth wall, what's the other three walls?"

"There aren't any," Izumi said suddenly to them. "The 'fourth wall' term refers to the supposed barrier between audience and fiction, possibly derived from theater plays." Shego and Deadpool stared at her. Gibbs blinked, probably disturbed that she had spoken to Deadpool and Shego and therefore inducted herself into their madness. Roy took a few steps back, perhaps preferring to avoid the carnage. Lin posed for a passing tourist that wanted to take pictures of local celebrities. "...Why are you staring at me like that?"

"Probably just shocked at your inexplicable lapse in judgement," Roy yelled from where he would be safe from, say, street-made cannons formed to carry out Izumi's violent will in the event of a no-doubt inevitable tantrum.

"WHAT lapse in judgement?"

Gibbs coughed politely. "You WILLINGLY asked Deadpool something and chose to listen to what he might say," he said delicately.

Izumi frowned. It turned to understanding, and she cast a suspicious look at Deadpool. "I see your point."

"Hey, fourth wall breakers are always the most popular characters! We break walls AND estimated popularity disproportionate to our actuall importance in the story," Deadpool said.

Roy facepalmed again. "Someone save me from this insanity..." A beeping came from his pocket. He reached in and pulled out a small communicator device that unfolded into a complex array of miniaturized keypads, data readouts and a holographic display centered around a slim crystal that happened to be the 'brain' of this communicator, a tiny processing engine that could put many supercomputers to shame in it's information storage and calculation capacity. Roy clicked a button and a brief message scrolled through. He frowned a bit as he saw it and confirmed it. "Well, that'll work," He muttered, standing up.

This didn't recieve much interest until he started walking away, changing the communicator to another channel as he hailed a jet-bike to pick him up. "Hey, where are you going?" Gibbs called.

"Duty calls," Roy said. "Well, OTHER duties." He sighed. "I have a sentence to witness." He smirked. "So sorry to just leave off and let you handle the rest, but...oh what the hell, I'm not sorry, it's your problem now!"

The others muttered their goodbyes, more than a few mutinous that Roy was getting out of the heat. "But we just GOT here," Deadpool complained.

"I am absolutely torn up over that," Roy said sarcastically, thinking that this message couldn't have come at a better time. He walked off, adjusting the communicator to serve as a homing beacon for the jet-bike he'd hailed before closing it up and repocketing it. "Later, everyone. And Lin...Greed, whoever you are, if your minions are going to hang around, make them do something useful. Help with the clean-up!"

"Hey, we are NOT minions!" Shego said.

"You heard the man!" Lin said cheerily. "Get to work!"

Shego grumbled, and Roy chuckled in dark satisfaction as the jet-bike arrived to shuttle him away.

All things considered, though, the reconstruction was going quite splendidly.

In so many places, it was if Kimblee had never been there.

---

While he disliked the very concept of undisclosed locations where all manner of ungentlemanly skullduggery could be employed, Armstrong felt that hosting a meeting that was as formal as things ever got in his town was not supposed to be done in a warehouse located in part of the Underdistrict remarkable only for it's large space and proximity to boltholes leading to faction-themed information network hotspots. Much as it all ran against his aesthetic notions, he understood why it was important.

Standing at a podium at the back of the largest storage area in the warehouse with a large curtained-off area directly behind him, he spread his arms wide in greeting to the expectant crowd before him, an assembly of the finest engineers and mechanics and combat-purposed macro-mecha designers that they could find on short notice and were either known for their secrecy in the pursuit of Great Justice or were already in their employ. "Good day, my fine artisans of the scientific endeavor and mechanical expertise! I thank you all for coming here on such short notice and leaving the celebrations behind sooner than any of us would have liked, and I am deeply appreciative of the time you have surrendered to us on this new project, and I have a great proposal to make to you all! Have we any questions before I begin?"

The engineers, an electic bunch including such illuminaries as Cyborg, Winry Rockbell and Agatha Heterodyne, and many of their rivals or friends in their various fields, did not look like they felt dignified; they had been seated in no particular order aside from a grid pattern so they could all see the podium and what lay behind it clearly. One of them stood up then, raising his hand importantly. "Ahem, yes," said Jumba Jookiba from the folding chair fitted to his particular dimensions, present there and on retainer from Greed (who had first heard the proposal from Roy, and quite liked the idea but insisted on having some share in the enterprise since part of his precious property had gone into it, and Roy thought that it was only fair espicially after all the fighting they had done together), pointedly ignoring the annoyed looks and cries of 'Down in front!' from behind him. "Where are being the refreshments? I was promised refreshments!" Several mutinous voices echoed this sentiment.

"Right over there," Armstrong said, pointing to a long table on the other side of the room, laden nearly to bending with all the food trays, punch bowls and similar refreshments on it.

Jumba blinked, his rear pair of eyes a bit more slowly. "However was I missing that?" He lumbered over to it, and a few of the hungrier technical guys and girls followed him.

Eventually everyone got some snacks, and when Armstrong was sure that their hunger had been satisfied, he asked, "Are there any other questions, possibly snack-related?"

Agatha Heterodyne, not just there as the appointed representative of the Peerage but as the most senior practioner of mad science through raw power alone, raised her hand. "Actually, there is something. Captain Armstrong, what's that under the curtains behind you?"

Armstrong chuckled. "An excellent question, Lady Heterodyne, and to be honest, it is the entire point of us all being here! I shall explain everything, and offer Admiral Mustang's proposal. Ladies and gentlemen and assorted other genders that I apologize for not being able to identify at this moment, allow me to begin by reminding you all of what has so recently transpired here in town; a criminal madman from my world, a most unsavory fellow named Solf J. Kimblee and codenamed the Red Lotus Alchemist, appeared in town..." In quick order, he covered the various crimes Kimblee had commited (almost all rendered null, save for the dead they could not save, and Armstrong held a moment of silence for them), mentioned something about all the devastation that was even now being fixed, occasionally drifting off to ramble about loosely related topics and making a few benign comments about the great assistance given by 'a quite interesting new chap named Zim'. Cyborg looked up at that, smug, and even more smug when he was mentioned as one of the great heroes involved in halting the damage.

People nodded, shrugged, made comments and generally conceded that they knew most of these things, in some cases because they had been close enough to the action to have it burned into their hearts. Just more memories that they couldn't forget, not when they had friends who would never be remembering anything ever again.

Shortly, Armstrong said, "In time Kimblee came into posessesion of a giant robot made from two quite powerful robots that would individually give us all quite a trouncing. In the end he was ultimately defeated, captured and convicting pending his trial, and almost all the evil he did was undone; the people whose souls he stole returned to the flesh, Foster's remade even better than ever, and the property damage as we speak has been almost completely restored thanks to our corps of alchemists! Not all could be saved, of course, and that is a tragedy that we ought to have prevented as the defenders of our people and the innovators of the means for that defense." Armstrong, again, gave a moment of silence for the ones that wouldn't be coming back, and for a short time a more downcast mood infected the proceedings.

And then he smiled and said, "And with your help, we may have the means to do so more effectively, and take something good from all that evil he did to us, for he most certainly left us a means of protecting ourselves!"

Armstrong pushed a button, and the various engineers and other sorts leaned forward, some gasping in surprise or murmuring or even whistling, and many of them were certainly impressed as the curtains slid away.

Behind Armstrong, secured in place by energy fields buzzing around the constraints of generator-pillars, was the inert and harmless remains of the Umbra Eternis, lying in a half-sitting position with it's scattered pieces of armor and missing arm laid before it, the defeated machine-titan humbled and nearly pitiful in death.

The muttering reached a peak, mostly surprised and even a bit disturbed. "Sir, what is the meaning of this?" A technician asked. "Is having that thing there...well, safe? What is the purpose of this?"

Armstrong waved a hand, overriding the fresh wave of unhappy comments. "An understandable sentiment, and please listen to me; the Heartless have been wiped from it's form with measures even our allies in the Crossguard consider somewhat excessive - exposure to noon-forged gold, bathed in holy water drawn from a realm forged of heroic deeds for seven hour and seven minutes and precisely seven seconds, constantly exposed to magically intensified sunlight since then, and various other means I didn't quite understand - and I have been assured by our aforementioned allies that the Heartless have been expunged from it, and with it's AI destroyed, it is little more than a inert machinery, capable of no more function than a dead body pulverized into pulp. The worst that could possibly happen was if some scoundrel was to absond with it, reverse-engineer it, use a superior knowledge of engineering to improve the design and then mass produce the result!"

Agatha frowned. "Captain Armstrong, I don't-" She gasped. "Oh!" She grinned excitedly. "Oooh."

Armstrong nodded. "Yes. As I'm sure you're all thinking - perhaps because it wouldn't be the first time something like that has happened - that would be a terrible thing for us. Kimblee's robot was fierce, but it would have been far worse if he had more than a passing knowledge of how to design a combat-worthy kaiju-scale powered suit built for warfare! How much stronger would it's defenses have been? How much more deadly it's weapons? How much more stable and therefore tactically capable it's on-board combat algorithims? In short, how much deadlier would the Umbra Eternis have been, and more costly to us the fight, if Kimblee had actually known what he was doing?"

A shocked silence met this extraordinary pronouncement. And then, Armstrong waited patiently because he knew his audience, and sure enough there were the murmurs of hurried but measured calculations being made and compared with each other until the most accurate-seeming of them became clear. "We are thinking," Jumba said slowly, arms filled to the brim with snack trays he had greedily taken all for himself. "That fully half of the First District would have been destroyed with collateral damages causing secondary waves of further damage that would be leaving the upper portions of the Underdistrict in total ruin, which would totally destroy our on-site factories and such, to begin with. The scale of the fight would probably tear through one of the district boundary walls and spill into Beach District and flatten the coastal properties and then escalate until Kimblee was either being defeated or was victorious, and leaving very large and flat part of town with many dead bodies. Rough estimates of course. We did math and have shown our work, we can show you if you like."

"I thank you, but it is unneeded," Armstrong said benignly. Jumba sat down, and got in someone's way again. "You demonstrated everything I wished to say! And the point there is that though Kimblee's acts were a most regrettable and malicious act of evil that he shall pay dearly for, had the design of his mecha been in the hands of a more competent engineer it would have been vastly more dangerous, and an immeasurably powerful weapon in the service of great evil..." He raised his eyebrows. "Or...even greater good."

The crowd digested this for a moment, and when it was done, the gasp of realization and comprehension of all the possibilites dumped right into their laps was like an expulsion of intestinal gas.

Agatha put it in plain langauge. "You want us to study this thing so we can improve it, refine it, make a non-evil version of it and mass-produce the results for the town's use?"

"Of course!" Armstrong agreed, grateful to her for making his point perfectly clear in plain language.

"You mean something good might come out of that whole debacle?" Another scientist added. "Apart from the people coming back, that was wonderful, espicially since I was one of those people, but we could make money off this! Or save the lives of thousands of people through the medium of defense, either works!"

Excited murmuring broke out, the entire crowd's reluctance quickly dying away and replaced with enthusiasm at this final snub to Kimblee's attempts to kill them all; now, even his weapon would be repurposed into a tool of great good and something that would defend until of just kill. Armstrong patiently waited until the murmuring died down at a weight expectation of him to say something, and he asked them, "So will you do it?" The answer was, of course, an overwhelming 'yes!'. He beamed. "Wonderful! Our superiors and allies will be most pleased! Thank you all for agreeing! I AM SO MOVED!" He was so emotional about it that he was compelled to flex violently enough for his massive muscles to tear his shirt and coat off, to his audience's surprise, and as pink sparkles of total masculinity gleamed off him, he performed a series of exercising poses designed to inspire and raise morale. "LOOK AT MY GLORIOUS BODY AND FEEL THE URGE TO REMAKE YOURSELVES INTO AS FINE A MIGHTY TEMPLE OF THE SPIRT AS I HAVE! LOOK AT IT, I SAY!"

"Sir, that doesn't make any sense!" A technician cried.

"Neither do the laws of physics, and yet, THEY GO ON REGARDLESS! SANITY IS FOR THE UNIMAGINATIVE, MY FRIEND! GO FORTH AND BE INCREDIBLE REGARDLESS OF CONSTRAINTS AND LIMITS LIKE FALSE SANITY! OR CLOTHES!"

"...Nooo, that's okay," Agatha said slowly.

"Awww," Jumba said sadly. A few people scooted away from him awkwardly.

Cyborg raised his hand. "Hey, I have something that might be useful for this." The room's attention turned to him; he was ever joyed to be at the center of attention, and he grinned. "That Zim guy that helped us out, he's my friend. So happens, after he left he sent me some extremely interesting schematics to build biomechanical structures on a microscopic level..."

He went on for a bit, explaining the fine details, using the specialized language suitable for such technologies as Zim had given him. Armstrong listened as best he could, but while he was a scientist his expertise lay in different fields than this. It all sounded quite good though. When Cyborg was finished, Armstrong said, "And you think this will be beneficial?"

"Oh yeah."

"Then let us investigate such potential..."

The debates went on, discussion and theories were made, and excitement brewed as even the greatest weapon of Kimblee might yet be turned to the service of the people it had been made to destroy.

And across from them, the Umbra Eternis did not move. It's joints did not bend, it's eyes did not light up, it's armor did not magically affix itself back into place or it's limbs reform or the Heartless return to it and animate it once more. Perverted machine intelligence no longer inhabited it's frame, no alien evil bade it's metal to live and fight.

It's optics remained dark and empty, and they would remain so forever. The Umbra Eternis was well and truly dead, and now the only thing left for it's lifeless frame was repurposing and examination before a final scrapping, the only evidence of it ever existing being the absence of the Juggernaut robot's remains or the repaired buildings left in it's wake, now improved and scaled beyond their former glory.

It had failed perfectly at it's job, and being used to create a benevolent series of guardian machine-gods seemed the most fitting epitaph to the utter failure of it's short and sad existence.

In fact, for all of the designed fierceness of it's expression, the stillness of it's body and the relaxation in it's face suggested that it's maddened machine-spirit was at least finally at peace.

---

Kimblee had absolutely no idea how long it had been since he'd blacked out and reawakened to find himself in custody, totally defeated and all his plans for nothing.

his alchemical arrays were broken. Kevin's presence completely cleansed from him only for Ghostfreak's terrified rambling to make it worse, his body still ached even after medical care had (reluctantly) been given to him and feeling quite like his original body with none of the sensation of being vaugely out of place all his stolen bodies had conferred on him.

On a whim, based on the passage of light he'd seen at various points between being shuttled from a holding cell where he'd been cleansed of all remaining Heartless taint to a hospital where he'd been given enough of a shower of green eco to heal his body at least enough that he could walk under his own power (but little was done about the minor bruises, though it certainly wasn't anything life threatening) to a courthouse where a trial, speedy and deliberately one-sided that it might as well have been administered by kangaroos, had been held.

It was all very fast, absurdly so. Kimblee got the impression that they wanted to get rid of him, and quite quickly. From what he'd overheard and been told, the people now holding his life in their hands were quite determined to see him dealt with.

Never at any point did he see a reason to deny his involvement, to claim that he had been innocent. Escape, for some reason, seemed hollow and pointless; if it was suitable that he be made to do whatever these mad people thought of justice, than so be it.

That trial had been brief, lasting only a few hours. There had been so much shouting, so much fury, Kimblee was surprised he hadn't been lynched on the spot, even with the self-righteous administrators determiend to make this done properly. (And, he was disgusted to observe, they didn't seem to care if they broke their own rules a bit just to make things go their way. A few people weren't happy with that either, but from what he could tell, they hadn't been involved in his attack in any way.) He didn't remember much of it, the shock of his complete and total loss so powerful that he was only just starting to realize how badly he had failed.

Of note, there had been such as the one murder of that old man and his grandchildren (he still wondered how they had figured out it was him), and then there had been that one tattooist girl, tearfully breaking down in front of him and asking Scar (who'd been present of course, as the persecuter, and didn't THAT violate all lawful senses of 'conflict of interest') if he HAD killed so many people as Kimblee said. Scar hadn't denied it, and the girl had to be gently taken away before she collapsed into a crying mess. He also remembered Kevin, inexplicably whole and apparently sane, telling them of Kimblee's involvement and giving utterly damning evidence, though he seemed curiously incapable of speaking of anything prior to his arrival in Crucible. (Wuya, it must be said, certainly enjoyed planting preventive safeguards for that sort of thing; unless a powerful psychic or expert in brain chemistry found a way to subvert or avoid them, Kevin would be revealing no secrets about Wuya's plots.) The question of perjury was ridiculous, as they had set up the courthouse in a zone magically enchanted to force all within it to speak the truth and nothing else, all lies simply failing to be spoken. A costly enchantment, to be sure, but it worked.

He'd been found guilty in quite a short time. It was never really a question of guilt or innocence, only if he had been coerced or the extremity of his guilt. The rest of the trial had just been that, and when it became clear that he had done it all freely and happily, and the sheer enormity of everything he'd done, the sentence had been laid, and the only thing left was to have it done.

The officers, his captors and everyone else took excessively vindictive pleasure in telling him how splendidly repairs were going, the lovely state of Foster's new replacement building, and how well everyone was getting on with their lives.

Still, he had changed things. Their security was shattered. Many people were dead. This cheered him up a bit.

And now...

Kimblee, trapped in a small and mobile egg-shaped holding cell carried upon a self-propelled carriage to where his sentence would be carried out, bowed his head. He had admitted defeat long since he'd woken up.

The carriage, guarded by Stature and Freya (seemingly eager to make up for their defeat at Fosters), approached a small and unobstrusive but thickly guarded building at the heart of the Underdistrict, one of the lowest levels they had there in that hollowed out space. Kimblee could see it thanks to a slot in his cell (they evidentally thought him effectively harmless to them, and they did have a point), banging his nose on the wall when the carriage traveled down the bumpy road to the building, and observed that the building was quite well defensible; low and squat, only a single door right at the very front, guarded by stern-looking soldiers of different factions and turrets at every possible angle manned by automated computer intelligences, and aside from that it even looked kind of boring, little more than a big metal cube of a building. The only outstanding thing about it (aside from all those other things) was a symbol repeated place and place again: yellow measuring scales set over a red targeting sign, all the empty spaces filled in with red over a black square. The symbol, Kimblee knew, of the Justice Marines, the strictly judicary and law enforcement (such as it was) of Traverse Town.

He closed his eyes, mentally confirming that it had been a little over two days since his capture. How quickly things had moved. He approved; best to have these things dealt with speedily if you lacked the courage to be decisive about them and just kill the person that annoyed you.

Guarding the front door was a peculiar sight; a pair of humanoid reptiles, quite short by human standards but very stocky, green-skinned and wearing some sort of color-coded flak jacket with matching pants. Upon closer inspection, they appeared to be mildly anthropomorphized turtles; short beak-like snouts for face, surprisingly intelligent dark eyes, and flexible carapaces on their backs and torsos that might have been shells. They both wore bandanas modified into masks as some sort of insignia, and were hardly indistinguishable; the left turtle wore purple and carried a simple combat staff, while the right one was somewhat skinnier and wore orange colors along with a pair of large nunchaku.

They watched Kimblee's cell approach amiably. "Good day," Freya said, while Stature called out, "Hey, Michaelangelo! Donatello! Got us a big bad guy coming through!"

The purple-clad one, Donatello, waved. "We got the message only this morning. They got a lot of big-timers watching the place."

"They do not want even the slightest risk," Freya observed.

"With jerks like this, can you blame them?" Michaelangelo observed cheerily.

"Have you guys heard anything from Naruto or Gaara?" Stature asked. "Only I haven't heard much from them in a bit and that gets me worried. Usually means trouble."

"Yeah," the turtle replied. "Those guys hang out all the time. Not spending as much time with the Shinobi Guild as they used to, people are talking about maybe they're gonna split their own way. Maybe not that bad a thing, I don't think it'll happen anyway, but what a shame if they did, huh? Anyway, Naruto and Gaara showed up here a while ago, they dropped off another bad guy! The one that gave your Kimblee jerk some info to pull off that nasty stunt."

"Would you stop insulting me if I apologized?" Kimbleee asked.

"No," They all said.

Donatello pulled a small wireless communicator from his belt. "We got Kimblee coming in, you guys! Keep things loaded and stay on your toes, he's almost in the clear." A voice from the communicator replied 'Confirmed,' and from the sound behind the door, it had just unlocked. The carriage began ascending the steps up, rolling up on an access ramp, and Kimblee stared numbly through the slot, peripherally aware of Freya asking Michaelangelo something about a fellow named Killer Bee that had apparently not been seen in a while but he didn't pay attention to what the turtle said.

The carriage rolled past the doors, engines clanking away in both vehicle and architecture; a self-maintained primitive but fuctional cold fusion generator (running on something called 'spiral power', Kimblee heard) in the carriage and more traditional servos and counterweights inside the walls that had opened the doors and closed them as the carriage went past. The room, a tube-shaped antechamber that Kimblee couldn't get more than a glimpse of besides grim-faced soldiers and towering automations standing guard around them, became slightly darker when the doors closed, cutting off the overworked array of different lights that illuminated nearly every square mile of the Underdistrict to make what should have been a realm of shadows into a place as bright as a noon-struck marketplace, though lighting panels on the ceiling of this room didn't make it too dark.

Two of the guards, a man and woman, presumably in charge here, approached. Kimblee only got a glimpse of them when one of them glanced contempously at him throught the cell slot; neither of them seemed entirely human, the man far wider than average and composed of an organic metal exoskeleton formed into a massive semblence of humanity, his expression a vacantly grin...well, one one face. He had two other faces on the sides of his head, identical to the grinning face except that one was locked in a furious expression and another was perfectly neutral (and had a narrow mohawk of metallic hair). From the bulges at his chest and back, he also had four additional arms extending from his shoulders, and an inhuman tail curled up behind him and over his head.

The woman had a detached expression like the neutral face, was somethat taller than usual and only slightly human, skin covered in an aggregate of fur and scales shifting to feathers, overlong arms to match a nearly simian posture, and apart from the same expression as her male counterpart, she looked like nearly every species known to man had been spliced together with humanity as a template to create a formiddable warrior. There were disturbing similarities for them as well; they were wearing the same uniform Kimblee associated with the Justice Marines (as did most of the soldiers here, though these two came with blood-red trimming on their uniforms), and through the little visible parts of their identically pale skin, they were covered in an absolutely astounding degree of nail-like piercings all over their entire bodies of varying size. Their hair were the same exact shade of orange-ish red, and perhaps most forebodingly both their nametags read 'Pein', though the woman's read 'Pain - Animal Path' while the man's said 'Pain - Asura Path". And perhaps most disturbing of all, when they said "Thank you for your time," and then asked if Kimblee had been any trouble, they spoke simultaneously, speaking as one, and in the same voice.

He gave them a good long look, and saw that their eyes were also identical...and very strange, even more than their other traits. Gray eyes, a cold shade at that, with a series of concretic circles from the pupils and giving the impression that their eyes were bullseyes or aiming sights. Kimblee wasn't sure if those circles were warped additional pupils or some more grotesque physical mutation, but it was hard looking away from those eyes. If only because they were so unsufferably creepy.

Kimblee was so puzzled by those two he hardly paid attention to Freya cooling remarking on two seperate attempts to free Kimblee and three unrated battles they rolled right into, but nothing with notable property damage or any casualties, or even any chance of success.

"Did you capture the assailants on the intentional rescue attempts?" The people-named-Pain asked, again with a single voice.

"One, the other fled as soon as we proved able to fight back," Freya replied. "He did not volunteer his name, but we identified him from the Peace Marines' most wanted lists as a 'Seth Farrow'. Odd man, seemed to specialized in reptile-based abilities and brute force."

"I see," The Pain-bodies said. "Do you wish to remain on hand as witnesses to the sentence?"

(The Hitchhiker's Guides, in it's articles relating to Traverse Town's justice system, has various remarks on such events; allowing a mere guard to witness the maximum sentence being carried out, espicially ones with a personal vendetta against the sentenced, would be unthinkable and even stupid by many courts and judicary systems, and indeed many had that opinion about Traverse Town; what was to stop a potential saboteur from sneaking in to distrupt things? A well-administered background check and scanners tuned to search for morphological fields that didn't match up to the interloper's form, Traverse Towners replied, and besides it was felt that the less opportunity the punishers had to hide their deeds, the less they could abuse their power. It was a ridiculous notion, rife with opportunity to lead to ruin, but it had worked well so far.)

In this case, they accepted. "Best to see this thing through," Freya said. "We were there when it began, we ought to see it finished."

"It's a little too close to 'taking pleasure in suffering' to feel right," Stature said. "That's the sort of thing bad guys and anti-heroes do! But we were given express orders to see this through. We watch, we confirm, everyone back at Fosters gets on with life."

The two Pain-bodies nodded curtly. "Understood. Ready the sinner." That, Kimblee thought, was an odd way to put it. 'Criminal' would have been more appropriate. It wasn't like Traverse Town was a theocracy.

The doors to Kimblee's cell opened at a quick brush from Freya and Stature to a touch-sensitive panel on either side of the cell; they hissed open, the force field locking down Kimblee in a sitting position powering down while the eight-point acupuncture cuffs on his hands tightened enough that he was totally incapable of moving his hands in any direct fashion, to say nothing of the stone blocks his hands were trapped in. Even if he was theoretically incapable of transmuting anything due to the removal of his transmutation arrays, they were taking no chances, and he was unable to work with stone or non-metals for his explosions.

The two drones - if they were drones - stepped up and firmly (though surprisingly gently) grabbed Kimblee by either of his arms, easily holding him up in mid-air between them and took him out, Kimblee's feet dangling in the air.

Kimblee was brought through a door at the other side of the room, leading to a surprisingly large elevator lift that he, the Pain duo, the guards, plus Stature and Freya, were all able to fit in without any difficulty. It powered up and moved smoothly, though Kimblee was unable to tell if it was moving sideways or downwards or some other way entirely; he felt a disquieting sensation in his stomach, irritably similar to his brief experience of teleportation from Wuya's domain before-

It stopped suddenly and the door opened, Kimblee's stomach unsettled and a sense of grave foreboding even more unsettling.

He had been sentenced to the Vault, a doom agreed by all to be most richly deserved. He knew what it meant, but the details were unknown; even his far-reaching knowledge wasn't all inclusive.

Again Kimblee was dragged, and brought along with those in attendence, through a small antechamber (gun turrets mounted to face both entrance and exit) and into a large room that momentarily went unnoticed by Kimblee, too busy monitoring possible threats. The guns followed his movement, and for a moment he suspected that, against his better judgement, 'the Vault' was a euphemism for a secret execution. It was soon distracted from his mind, as he felt a faint disturbance as he was brought into the room and happened to witness a shimmering multicolored force wall appear through the door. He had no idea what it was.

Freya seemed to know, though. "A 'Five-Seal Barrier', I think?"

One of the Pains looked at her, as if wondering whether to tell her, and finally said, "Yes." And no more.

They kept going, and eventually stopped in the middle of the room. It was well-lit, and Kimblee saw that it was perfectly spherical, a dome cut even deeper than much of the Underdistrict (if it even shared the same dimensions as the Underdistrict; the Peerage was doing some exciting work in space-folding, Kimblee had heard) and rather sparse; there were a few view screens on the walls and displaying two-way views of those of the Council of Insert Nomenclature that apparently could find the time to witness this. Most prominently he saw Olivier Armstrong, glaring down at him with a openly bloodthirsty expression quite unlike her genteel brother, though he also saw Roy Mustang (smirking in faint triumph). He was a bit surprised to see that Scar was not among them.

Kimblee had not expected to survive being unconscious in Scar's presence. That the scarred man of Ishvala had chosen to let him live, and did not seem to have an interest in watching Kimblee be sent to his doom, suggested a number of unusual things that he wasn't sure he understood...that Scar honestly felt he had bigger concerns than revenge-by-proxy.

Kimblee just didn't know what to make of that.

his eyes roamed the room in a single sweep, and he took noticed of a peculiar contraption at the front of the room; a hoop-like structure on an upraised pedestal, all of it part of a fairly simple machine, but easily large enough to admit a vehicle or anything small. It was built right into the wall, and noticing a few slots on the base, Kimblee wondered what it was for.

Then he turned his attention to the back of the room, and saw that there was a number of auditorium-fashioned seats in ascending rows, mostly unoccupied save for a small number; Kimblee wasn't surprised to see Mr. Herrimen sitting in a wheelchair and gazing down at him with great dislike and yet regret, and he was mildly surprised to see more eerie figures outfitted like the Pains, with more of that bright orange hair and eerie gray eyes. He deigned not to focus on them just yet, as he was a bit more concerned with the fact that Deidara was sitting on a chair in front of these people, his hands clamped down in cuffs much like Kimblee's and the palms on his mouth muzzled. Since his shirt had been removed for whatever daft reason, it was clear that he had a mouth in his chest as well, and even that was muzzled up. Deidara had no way of creating his signature bombs without clay to chew up and infuse chakra into, and plainly they had gone to great efforts to remove his pre-made bombs that he might have had on him.

"Hey," Deidara said, with an admirable lack of appreciation for the seriousness of the situation. "Nice ambience here, don't you think? Hnh!"

"A bit sparse, but it adds a certain minimalistic charm," Kimblee remarked.

"It serves it's purpose," Animal Path Pain said curtly.

Deidara regarded him oddly. "You sound familiar. Do I know you from somewhere?"

The two Pains (and five other people in the audience) stared at him. "...Yes," they said after a moment, but said nothing more. Deidara made a noise indicating his disatisfaction with this lack of a full answer.

Kimblee was brought over to them, the people in the chairs stirring as he was forced there, and stared silently while Kimblee was dropped into a chair next to Deidara; it was a single piece of curved metal rimmed with thin cushions (because it didn't do to force people to sit on uncomfortable chairs, really), big enough to seat a large man and rimmed with odd mechanisms all over. Kimblee noticed odd spiral patterns on it's front shortly before he was made to sit on it; those patterns glew hot briefly against his back, a brief analysis made of his body, and the mechanisms unfolded into a set of shackles that locked Kimblee into place, wrapping around his body and holding him still.

The chairs turned as, moving as one, the five Kimblee had noticed reacting to Deidara just a moment ago standing up and filed down there. Kimblee noticed, to his surprise, they too had bright orange hair, the same outfit (though tailored for their frames) and the same array of extensive piercings.

And yet they looked very different, having absolutely nothing in common apart from the same clothes, hair and those inhuman eyes. Standing closest to Kimblee and Deidara, close enough that it would make a fine shield if either of them broke free and attacked, was a large and emaciated looking thing shaped like a man and the sparse flesh of it's surprisingly atheletic body covered in bristly orange fur. Significantly broader at the shoulders than the hips, it's head was an apeish affair set directly on it's shoulders with hardly any neck, jaws brimming with brutish teeth designed for crushing and slicing, and it's arms (abnormally large for it's size) were crossed over it's proportionately broad chest. The thing looked quite a lot like the cursed wendigo of Canadian folklore (though perhaps more like the creature from one of the Earth's housing meta-humans; the very one Stature had come from, as a matter of fact), so it's outfit looked rather out of place as clean-pressed as it was, and it's nametag read 'Preta Path Pain'.

Standing behind the Preta Path were two others; the first and most prominent seemed somehow older than all the others, a tall and serious looking young man with spikey orange hair and an expression that was not quite a grimace nor a frown, too detached and distant to be either. (And he looked a fair bit like Naruto Uzumaki, Kimblee observed; the ninja boy hadn't done as much damage as Zim had but he certainly had been memorable.) Alone of the bodies he wore a headband not unlike Deidara's own, with a metal plate on it adorned with four slash-like raindrops that had been struck out, a declaration of independance from the village that the headband symbolized. his studs and piercings seemed the most carefully placed, as if reluctant to alter his body in a way that made him unrecognizable from what he once was. This one's named tag read 'Deva Path Pain'. Next to him was a dour-looking human woman with shoulder-length hair that fell past her eyes, a shy trait that was at odds with her powerful build and impressive height, the studs on her cheeks resembling dimples and a longer one going right through her nose at an odd angle. Inexplicably, there was a delicately folded oragami flower right on her head, a cute decoration that looked like something a lover might bestow on her beloved. Her uniform's nametag read 'Human Path Pain'.

Standing behind these Pains, not unlike a valuable support unit or a medical officer, was the last of the Pains, taking the form of a large reptillian woman; broad, inhumanly large and covered in pale scales tinged with orange (for she had no hair or hair substitutes), she seemed to be of the Dragonborn species (said to be the humanoid creations of ancient dragons) and bearing traits of a brass dragon despiste her coloration, her head wide and short-snouted, an array of short spikes rimming her jaw amid the studs up to her fin-like ears. She stood slightly hunched over, ape-like arms held in a readied position, and a long tail moved slowly as she watched Deidara stoically. She had more studs and piercings than any of them, and Kimblee didn't know what that signified, nor why it should matter. Her name tag read 'Naraka Path Pain'.

As one, all the Pains spoke. "We are all assembled?" they asked. And again, Deidara gave a faint twitch, and stared hard at the Deva Path, as though certain he knew that form from somewhere.

"Yes," came a sounding affirmative from the screens.

More sagely, Herrimen's screen said, "All who are capable of being present have assembled." He said this with a certain reluctant satisfaction with an air of 'ah, at last we can have this sordid business finished'. (Mr. Herrimen could say a lot without saying much.)

The Pain Paths nodded, again as one. They stared down at Kimblee and Deidara, seemingly uninterested in either Kimblee's own disinterest or Deidara's fascination with them. The others in attendence in the seats shied away as the bodies stood up more fully, in what could only be a well-practiced tactical formation. From the way the others in the seats kept as much distance from the Pains as they could, they didn't find it any more comfortable than he did. And the name 'Pain' was naggingly familiar for some reason (if only because it seemed so melodramatic).

For a moment, there was silence.

Then the Pains spoke, and again it was as if they were a single organism. (Or being directed by one, little more than long-range drones for their unseen operator.) "I apologize for my lateness. I was assisting in a off-shore mission requiring the termination of a warlord planning to conquer the people beyond the mountains and the desert in order to assimilate them into a crude empire. Had I been here, perhaps this latest crisis may have been averted."

The apology as implicit; 'I am sorry for not being there to help prevent the destruction of your home, or avenge it, or cut shorter the battle.'

Mr. Herrimen inclined his head. "Many things happen that we wish had not. We have no power to change them. It is pointless to assign blame where it does not belong and ought never to." He bowed his head even further, perhaps thinking that it would feel better to let himself put blame anyway. He glowered at Kimblee, likely acknowledging who was responsible for it all.

The Deva Path Pain nodded curtly. "As you wish." And that, for this small lingering question of regrets and anger tended to, was that.

Pain next turned to Kimblee and Deidara. "Solf J. Kimblee," the Six Paths of Pain said as one, low and cool and deadly calm. "Also known as the Red Lotus Alchemist. And Deidara, formerly of the Hidden Rock Village of the Land of Earth. Now that both of you are here to have the sentence carried out...you know why you are here."

It was a statement, not a question. Kimblee still interpreted it as one. "I am," He said. "You are here to judge me, and Deidara it seems, on behalf of your moral code."

Deidara squinted at the Pain bodies. "I could swear I've seen you or heard you somewhere before."

"Yes," Pain said, and it was unclear who the Pain Paths were replying to. "It is important that this is done correctly. You ought to know who I am. Do either of you recognize my Paths, or my name?" Their heads turned to Deidara, expectantly.

Kimblee frowned. "The name 'Pain' is familiar, if grandoise. Some connection with military operations and law here...?" Something was nagging at him, the name sounded so familiar, but he could not place it.

"Traverse Town keeps few secrets. We leave such things alone when we can. However, I am not particularly well known even within our town. I operate in shadows and secret, appearing to deliver swift and decisive justice, and leave others to make of my work what they will. It has served well enough." They regarded him evenly. "...I am Pain, field commander of the Justice Marines, formerly of Amegakure the Village Hidden in the Rain. I am the legacy of the Sage of Six Paths, and the sole wielder of the ultimate eye technique called the Rinnegan. I am one who has learned much of the power of suffering and internalized my power in the Six Paths of Pain, from which I speak to you. I am administering this hearing and will administer the verdict at it's conclusion on behalf the people of Traverse Town and the Justice Marines, as witnessed by respectable and long-proven leaders of the other factions and independant groups of Traverse Town." Their gazes grew even colder as they glared down at Deidara and Kimblee. "And for all the power I hold over your fate? As far as you are concerned..." They leaned. "I am God."

Pain spoke louder now. "And I declare this hearing begun."

There was a pause. "The what Paths?" Kimblee asked. "I'm sorry, I didn't catch that bit right."

The six bodies gestured at themselves. "The Six Paths of Pain are these forms you speak to."

"Then they are not you?"

"They are of me. They are not me."

Kimblee failed did not understand.

(The Hitchhiker's Guide does not, in fact, have an article on Pain and his Six Paths, as such knowledge was...well, not suppressed, but Pain took care to ensure that he operated in sufficient secrecy and mystery that the only ones who knew that he functioned through multiple bodies he controlled were trustworthy enough not to tell anyone if it wasn't important.)

(However, there are several papers on the subject circulated to high-enough ranking members and trustworthy influential figures about town to explain the matter of the Six Paths of Pain to those who would need to know, papers that would be destroyed. A few prepatory articles on the subject for the Guide, prepared in the event that Pain went public, floated in self-contained servers on the Sub-Etha, based around the gist of these papers.)

(In essence, Pain was the awe-and-terror-inspiring psuedonym of an extremely powerful ninja from the same world as luminaries as Naruto Uzumaki and Gaara of the Sand and Tsunade the Slug Queen, himself one of the last descendants of the same clan that had birthed the family line of Naruto's parentage and gifted with a blood line gift so rare that most people didn't think it had ever existed to begin without outside of myth: the Rinnegan, the ultimate eye-based technique, supposedly capable of emulating and recreating every conceivable technique the ninja world had ever devised, endowing it's user with such power that changing the world was not a possibility but a simple consequence of existence.)

(Originally named Nagato, this particular ninja had grown up amid one of the many hellish crossfires between rival nations in the last Great Ninja War, and after his formative and teenage years had been marked by recurring events of mind-warpingly awful luck and trauma, having 'one bad day' again and again to increasingly worse extremes and not just driven over the point of well-intentioned lunacy but effectively thrown over it, he had become convinced of the primacy of pain as a philosophic constant in the nature of existence and a impassable factor in the develoupment of every living thing. Pain consumed him, pain had twisted him, pain had followed his every step for too long for him to stay sane, and at last, it seemed he had decided to become Pain itself, to make of himself a god and save the world from war no matter the cost. It was a good thing that such thoughts had been left behind a long time ago and he had become closer to the messianic figure his own beloved teacher Jaraiya had hoped he would be, but that pain would never leave him.)

(To that end, of becoming a god and forcing the world to cease war even for a short time, he had devised specific power sets appropriate for a form of enlightenment born from pain, and after being crippled in the very worst of his Bad Days, he had been forced to alter certain deceased bodies to act in his stead, implanting chakra receivers into them - the metal objects that appeared to be studs or piercings on the exterior of these bodies - and broadcasting his powerful chakra into them through the ones in his own body, effectively allowing him to have seven bodies at the same time and making it so that these bodies had a specific set of power. In times past, he had used powerful bodies of people that had meant a great deal to him or had influenced him - a twisted way of keeping their memory alive forever - but most of those bodies, with the exception of his Deva Path, had been destroyed or lost. With Traverse Town's superior biological technologies available to him, he had simply grown bodies appropriate for his Six Paths to suit their Path's thematics and be generally more effective than simple dead bodies.

(Alone of all of them, Deva Path was still of the first 'batch' of bodies he'd had, the fallen body of his dead friend Yahiko who'd died during Nagato's worst Bad Day and who'd instilled the concept of 'becoming God to fix the world', so he hadn't done anyone many favors in that regard, and made into the Deva Path to keep Yahiko's dream of fixing everything 'alive'. Possessing supreme power over attractive and repulsive gravitational forces, Deva Path was easily the most directly powerful of Pain's bodies. and sometimes rightfully compared to a walking nuke in terms of raw power. Human Path, grown in the image of Nagato had he been a woman - a whimsical idea that suggested he'd been influenced by Traverse Town's lunacy already - and held the power to extract all information or secrets hidden against the target, at the cost of involuntarily pulling out the target's soul, making it a highly effective if brutal weapon against enemies in a information-intensive situation. In theory they could have used it to find out Kimblee's secrets, but Pain had chosen otherwise, as it was willed that Kimblee and Deidara be punished in a more tasteful way.

(The Asura Path held the body of a robotic figure suitable to it's powers, for in addition to being a living juggernaut in terms of raw strength and defensive might, it had the ability to summon an astounding degree of mechanized armor and weapons to shame all but the most potent power armor systems. Animal Path, despite her fearsome looks and impressive agility and speed, was strictly a support role in design, able to summon gigantic monsters of often nightmarish form and incredible strength, and it could summon a lot of themveritable army of gigantic beasts that often dwarfed buildings, boasting immense physical power and numbers as well, and they had the advantage of also being animated bodies controlled by Pain. Together, Asura and Animal formed the offensive front of the Six Paths; Asura Path attacked the most dangerous foes head-on, using it's raw strength to crush the leaders and brutes, tough enough to take on all but the mightiest foes by itself, while Animal Path summoning a veritable legion of gargantuan beasts, animated corpse-monsters with no fear of death or desire to retreat. Most foes would fall to such as them in a short order. Just them alone would make Pain a force to fear, not even including the city-shattering might of Deva Path Pain.

(Raw offense was not all he had, with some powerful defense as well. The Preta Path had an ability known as the Blocking Technique Absorbtion Seal, allowing it to absorb any form of energy around it, whether through direct contact with the technique, a barrier field around itself or directly sucking away energy from an enemy though physical contact. Originally it only absorbed chakra, the energy the ninjas of his world used, but he'd since adapted it to most forms of energy he'd encountered; it wasn't a perfect conversion, and the most powerful attacks tended to be serious weakened instead of totally nullified, but it remained an extremely potent defense and most forms of attack were almost useless against it, and energy-based attacks were so pointless they might as well have been throwing pennies at a brick wall.

(And finally there was the Naraka Path, which was mainly an interrogator and healer; it was bonded to a peculiar manifestation called the King of Hell - not a literal title but Pain liked the sound of it - which, provided Pain was touching a target and asking it questions, would taste a target's life force after they answered his questions. Since they were paralyzed by Naraka's touch when he employed the King of Hell, this was a simple matter. It could tell if they were lying or telling the truth; if they lied, it would devour their life force and kill them, storing that energy for later, but if they told the truth it would leave them alive if severely weakened. It was a less extreme interrogation technique than Human Path's method, but it's true power was restoration; Pain could apply the life energies it had eaten by having the King briefly swallow an ally and infuse those energies into them, and while it took some time, when the King released them they were totally healed and refreshed, even from the brink of death or, if a construct like his bodies, completely regenerated. Living things weren't so lucky, since that body lacked the power of reversing death itself. That power belonged to Nagato, and it was too costly to use without risking his own life. And incidentally, Naraka had more chakra recievers than the others because of it's more non-human form, which Pain found it more difficult to harmonize with.

(The tactics were simple; Asura and Animal lead the charge with their overwhelming force while Human and Paraka provided support - and interrogated foes, if needed - while Preta was pure defense and intercepted attacks at the other Paths or allies or innocents as warrented, and when the moment was right Deva would unleash a devastating attack to decisively finish the battle. It was a potent combination, and it was often boasted to those who knew him that Pain had never lost a battle. He wasn't that powerful, but he liked the idea of being treated as an indestructable god of suffering inflicted on the evil.)

Deidara, of course, knew none of this. But wheels had been turning in his head, old familiarities brought closer, and though he was far from the most strategically minded fighters, he was immensely more intelligent than he seemed. And he'd just put two and two together and four had dawned. "I know you," Deidara said suddenly. his voice, usually so loud and maniacally cheery, was now quiet and so serious it surprised Kimblee. "I know you."

"As I know you," The Six Paths of Pain said dully.

Deidara was undeterred by this cryptic response. "You're him. The one none of us ever met 'cept maybe for the one woman in our ranks."

"Yes?" Freya said testily. Kimblee almost jumped in his seat, he had forgotten that she had been there. "Is there a point?"

"Akatsuki!" Deidara said. "You were there! You were there, you sanctimonious addled lunatic!"

"Excuse me?"

"I believe Deidara meant me," The Pains said.

"You were in Akatsuki!" Deidara said. "You're him! You're...you were our leader." Deidara laughed, hollow and shocked at this turn of events. "You're the crazy-ass leader none of us ever met or even did anything that I saw! The one that said that my reason to fight was 'just because'! You're right, but...damn it, what are you doing here!? How can you stand there and act like you never met me!"

There was silence from the crowd. "Ooh, drama bomb," Stature whispered snidely, not sounding particularily upset by Deidara's revelation.

"You know this man?" Kimblee asked Deidara as virtually everyone in the room or on the screens looked at Pain; not incredulously or angrily (well, barring a few cases, notably Mr. Herrimen and General Armstrong), but with a mere case of curiosity.

Deidara laughed. "Are you kidding?! We were in the same damn mercenary organization! Me and him, we're allies! What the hells are you playing at, Leader?!"

They continued to stare. Kimblee watched Pain carefully, expecting the intelligence commanding these bodies to deny these charges. He was surprised when the Pains, still watching Deidara with a curiously removed regret, spoke. Pein gave him a brief look, their expressions unknowable. "Akatsuki no longer exists, Deidara. I have paid for my sins. And now, for the sins you commited under my command, so shall you." He paused. "For what it's worth, Deidara, as your former superior...I am sorry things had to end like this. But you bring the judgement on yourself. I would say farewell, but that would be inappropriate." He shook his head, giving Deidara another brief look and this one was almost regretful.

"I'm sorry," Mr. Herrimen said. "But what is this frightful man talking about?"

Pain turned to Mr. Herrimen's screen. He paused for a moment, clearly wondering whether or not to explain, and thne he said, "If you wish to know...Akatsuki was once a group I led. Deidara and I are of the same world, and before the Heartless I concoted a plan to end the cycle of war engendered by the ninja status quo. A plan for which I required the most talented rogue shinobi I could locate. Deidara was among them."

"Yell yes I was," Deidara said, practically hissing the words now, scraping and pulling at his bonds to now effect, as they only got tighter the more he fought. "Didn't give me a choice as I recall, hnh?"

Pain ignored him. "Some of you already know this," he told the screens. "Most of you did not. ...I apologize if mine and Konan's past membership in the same group as Deidara casts our loyalty into question."

"Konan?" Kimblee quietly asked Deidara.

"Pain's partner," Deidara muttered, sounding uncomfortably with saying his former leader's name. "Strange lady. Blue hair, quiet, polite, real affinity for paper-based abilities. Didn't know she'd survived the Heartless. Hell, didn't know anyone else from Akatsuki survived the Heartless." He frowned at Pain, calculating.

Pain's question seeemed honest enough, according to the chatter between the screen people and the people in the seats. After a brief conferring with a small amount of disagreement, Mr. Herrimen said, "A troubling thought, and perhaps it might make for others who would imagine this might give you conflicting loyalties...but I think that this is not the case."

"What?" Deidara said, disbelieving. Pain seemed to relax fractionally.

"Many of us have done things we're not proud of," Roy Mustang said heavily. He reached off-screen and pulled out a small silver pocketwatch, holding it by the chain like he thought it might bite him. He gave it a quick jingle, and Kimblee frowned. Noting the way Deidara was frowning at Pain, and considering that Roy had done all the things Kimblee had in the Ishbalan Civil War only to stand here among these people like he was like them and pretended that his hands were still clean (or perhaps he didn't and merely acted like they were so he could live as though they were, and live righteously enough to serve his people) and cast aside his conspirators-turned-enemies, he thought that he and Deidara had an uncommon commonality now. "No reason to start making exceptions now."

There were a few grumbles from less convinced commentors, but they kept quiet if they felt seriously about it. The frostly chill in their silence, and that of the cold regard of even Mr. Herrimen, suggested that any trust they'd held for Pain had still taken a serious blow.

And again, Pain bowed to these others he claimed were his peers. He turned to Deidara and Kimblee as a wrathful judge, and after a moment to compose his thoughts, began to speak again, growing even more serious than before. "The two of you stand guilty of heinous and unforgivable crime against the holding of Traverse Town, claimed under squatter's rights and dominion of conquest against other claims and recognized as soveriegn territory of the inhabitants sheltered under the our factions and independants by the nations of this world." A moment, perhaps for effect or gathering strength. "These crimes, particular to Solf J. Kimblee, are many but of importance include plotting to deal large-scale damage and casualties to property and civilians, carrying out said plots to considerable damage and loss of life, the murders of a small family unit outside Foster's we discovered in the First District, several people that we can reasonably pin on you including an old man and his grandchildren; the forced assimiliation of several hundred residents, the creation and deployment of a forbidden metanormal weapon, numerous households from the Foster's area sacrificed to enable aforementioned weapon..."

It went on for a bit. Kimblee stopped paying attention somewhere around the time when Pain started talking about 'Wasting time rambling about incomprehensible philosophic notions of an Evil bent' and founded his attention drifting to an odd shape on the ceiling right behind the chairs for himself and Deidara but not so much that he couldn't see it clearly; it was a circle, not unlike a transmutation array but not incorporating any alchemic equations he was familiar with. It looked a bit like a sorcerous ritual , and while he was more familiar with arcane forms than before he had known it even existed, he didn't have a clue what it was for. It was naggingly similar to binding and summoning circles he'd seen used to call up demons or devils, but it was different in ways he didn't have the technical knowledge to express. It did bother him that this circle lacked the sense of wrongness he'd always felt from those circles, and this one made him feel oddly serene just looking at it. (And disinclined to lie, for some reason.)

On a whim, he craned his head over as much as he could. As he suspected, there was a matching circle on the floor; a perfect binding, doubled in strength. Troubled by this, Kimblee barely noticed Deidara say, "My. You have been a busy boy! Hmn! Nice work you pulled off with that stuff I gave you. Pity it didn't work out, but that's life for you. Least you made a good show of it!"

The Pains kept going for some time, and eventually finished with, "...Unpunished attempts to genocide a civilization, stated alliance with a unknown organization, threatening to do us great harm, refusing to cooperate and give information on this organization, and at least sixteen acts of petty crimes too minor to be included at this hearing." Pain stopped there. "I must confess a certain measure of admiration to your devotion to your work, twisted though it is."

"Thank you," Kimblee said.

PAin said nothing, he seemed to have finished with Kimblee. He turned to Deidara. "As for you..."

"Oh brother," Deidara said.

"You, Deidara formerly of Akatsuki, stand accused of aiding and abetting a plot to cause all aforementioned casualties to Traverse Town, providing forbidden alchemical knowledge to do so, harboring such knowledge without bringing it into appointed authorities to have it studied and sealed away, retaining criminal ways from prior to the Heartless attacks, working for faction interests under false pretenses, serving as an undercover agent for an outside interest that you have not given us any information about-"

"Not for lack of trying from you, hnh," Deidara said with a wicked grin. He nodded at Human Path Pain. "You could look into my brain, but not without ripping out my soul. And that goes against your ridiculous little fetters! Hell, Human Path Pain could give it a try, but that'd just be worse, isn't it?! Or even Paraka Path! Go on, give it a try, I won't lie!" He laughed madly, and Kimblee had a hunch there were terrible secrets laying in those deceptive drone bodies.

Pain, through the eyes of his Six Paths, looked at them coolly. "The safeguards in your minds will not allow it," He said. "Believe me, if I thought it had a chance of success, I might well do it...but no, the people of this town want this done properly. I will not risk that now. If, though, at some later time, when we can devise a means to break those safeguards and no other source of information seems possible..." They shrugged, as if to say 'well, you never know'. He didn't seem terribly pleased with the potential risks, but he didn't act on his doubts either.

After a moment, he continued on his recitals of Deidara's own crimes, with a special emphasis on the torturous art he'd performed in his own home; they had been very interested in finding out what had happened to several missing people. As Kimblee had predicted, Deidara had been caught partly because of their presence, and they had made Deidara's fate certain.

Eventually Pain finished, and regarded them coldly. "These are your charges. Have you anything to say, sinners?"

Kimblee paused for a moment. Deny them, Ghostfreak whispered in his head. Take this chance, use them, escape and plan vengeance-

"I deny nothing," Kimblee said. "It is as you said. You have won. Do what you will. That is your right."

"Yeah, what he said but without the fancyness," Deidara said, unknowingly talking over Ghostfreak's screams of infuriated horror.

Pain didn't seem surprised to hear it, but he did seem pleased. He looked up at the screens and said, "What say you?"

The people on the screen stared coldly at Kimblee. "Guilty," They said firmly and, Kimblee noticed, with a certain amount of gleeful vindictiveness.

"Then," said Pain. "There remains one more measure. A final proof, so that we may rest easy knowing that justice is done." The Pains stepped back. "Now we summon our impartial judge."

The Pains flickered, gathering strength and vanishing in a movement too swift to notice, and reappeared behind Kimblee, in the summoning circle behind him, and they were all kneeling. "What is this?!" Kimblee said as they gathered powerful, crackling with an energy like transparent blue flames.

"Mortal minds may be clouded," Pain replied. He seemed obliged to be honest with Kimblee, as if he felt that Kimblee was owed it for what would be done to him. "Emotions overruling good sense and desires for revenge overturning all else. It would flaw judgement, and render our judgement potentially cruel and unjust. To do this right, there must be no room for error. To that end..."

The circle glowed with the same azure anergy. The air between the two summoning circles rippled, shifting like heat, and it looked odd there, space warping and shifting, and a terrible light shone through and Kimblee thought he saw things moving there...

And the power from Pain, such immense power, as though a nuclear weapon had begun walking around and talking and entertaining delusions of sentience. Enough power to fuel a calculated ritual that could seek out anything that fit it's parameters, and bring it right here and bind it to their purpose.

"We shall summon an entity of pure Law and Good, and have that entity judge you as guilty in this matter," Pain said.

The power stunned him still, and Kimblee hardly released the import of what was happening, though it was begining to dawn on him that it was over. The game had ended and he had lost, and the enemies were calling down a judge to ensure that their victory was utterly legitimate-

He had little time to brood on this. Pain's Paraka Path had stored much power for this summoning, so a ritual that might have taken many hours was cut short with the immense stores of mystical might Pain funneled into the summoning spell and directed most skillfully by Animal Path Pain (who only specialized in summoning Pain's specific creatures but was quite capable at many other forms of summoning magic); the air suddenly exploded with brilliant light, a brief sight of the entire multiverse laid bare before them in a tiny space that was paradoxally vast, the spell seeking out a single possible entity that fit the extremely loose criteria (for Law and Good are not so singular as many might think), overturning all planes of existence and all places that were Elsewhere for a suitable impartial benign judge in an instant, and Kimblee had to close his eyes as his brain began to squeal at the impossible vastness he beheld in that tiny space, and even Pain had to turn aside.

In the instant when that light was extinguished and a massive figure erupted into the bindings of the summon circle, Kimblee heard something quite new through the humming sound of the spell's activation. A massive noise as if of a mighty seal being rudely shoved open just a crack enough to permit a brief retrieval, and a deeper noise older than gods, older than reality, older and more fundamentally real than the sound of Kimblee's blood rushing through his veins, the sound of axiomatic perfection crashing down against all that was wrong and broken and needed fixing.

It sounded like thousands and thousands of gears turning in the echoes of a mighty voice speaking in a wordless sound of surprise, like that of a mighty titan roused from ancient sleep for a moment or two.

When Kimblee dared opened his eyes, it was to surprised chattered from the others, a stunned look on Deidara and even the faces of Pain, and none moreso than the figure on the dais serving as a summoning place, though Kimblee gave it a good show.

"...Did the spell misfire?" Roy Mustang said, utterly perplexed. "What the hell is that? Is that an angel or what?"

"I...I have no idea," Pain said, at a loss for words. Silently, his Paths took up their combat positions.

The entity there spoke, his voice (and he was indisputably male) like thousands of perfect crystals ringing together in a symphony of clarity so beautiful it could make one weep. Kimblee and no one else there understood the precise words he said, for it was in a language quite foriegn to them and yet naggingly familiar, as if of a language that had given rise to all others, and it mattered little, for a moment later the translation devices they all had (translator microbes for Kimblee and Deidara, Babel Fish for most and other less well-known devices for the rest) making it clear that this being had no immediate intentions to do harm. "By the Loom! What manner of strangeness is this?"

The speaker wasn't like anything Kimblee had met. It was roughly humanlike in shape, though a good deal taller (and perhaps more...perfected in it's design), formed completely of a crystal material and glowing with power, traceries of axiomatic energy sliding through it's mechanized body and the minscule facets thereof with winding movements not unlike gears circling around. It peered down at them from quite a few feet above them, it's broad body of such intricate design it looked like architecture rather than a living thing; a broad chest bolted into place by tiny screws rimming it's torso, expansive pauldrons over it's shoulders, and an angular head that rose directly from those shoulders with a not quite human face that might ordinarily be serious but kind, but presently regarded them with bewilderment tempered by fascination.

He looked around, giving Kimblee and Deidara a cursory look before glancing at Pain's Paths with some interest, the joints on the legs clicking minutely as it ponderously turned around, directing his attention to the screens. his inner glow brightened for a moment, nearly blindingly so, and yet he wasn't looking at anyone's faces but at the cubic frames of the screens, the small receiving antannae on them, the carefully modulated dials on them... soon that bored him as well and he looked around the whole room with great interest, apparently fascinated by the smooth dome-shaped walls and sparse aesthetics. Confusion forgotten, he hummed contently and spoke once more. his meaning came moments later to them all: "Your works of architecture is a fair bit crude, but you have done fine work with the materials available to you. A bit of a rush job, I presume. I would advise you to shore up the bearings on the joins, they seem overly taxed. And I do not think that you have taken this area's geomancy into consideration." He frowned, looking at the ground. "Are we in the Reaches? The Essence lines are strange..."

"Ah, thank you," Deva Path Pain said uncertainly. Kimblee, already suspicious, felt certain that none of his captors had expected anything like this, that this was definitely not supposed to have happened.

The entity, supposedly of pure Law and Good, regarded them curiously yet distantly. "And what mode of speech is this?" He wondered. "I do not understand the words, and yet they come clear to me as the shine of freshly oiled metal in electric glows. It is not that of the true Earthtongue, nor the mode of High Holy Tongue, nor is it any of the languages spoken of it throughout the Realm of Brass And Shadow, nor is it any language I have known...and I have seen many. Who are you, and what am I doing here?" He glanced down. "And what is that?" He added, gesturing at the spell circle. He made to put his broad four fingered hand upon it, and tilted his head in curiosity as chakra-tinged air flashed against his hand where it touched the barrier. his fingers breached through it (causing some degree of serious concern) and he moved his fingers back, puzzled. "Some manner of thaumaturgical ritual...?"

"We apologize," Pain said quickly. The entity glanced at him. Pain looked beseeching at the screens, silently asking for support, and General Armstrong quickly said, "We beg pardon, but who precisely are you? We sought out a entity of pure Law and Good to make a judgement perfectly clean of doubt, and the spell brought you here."

The entity cocked an carved facet that resembled an eyebrow. "Truly?" He regarded her for a moment, and she did not back down from his gaze even though the screen offered her a degree of disconnect. Kimblee envied her; merely being in the presence of this being quailed his heart, an immense pressure pounding into his head and his heart, and something in his mind was screaming over and over again...and there were gears grinding in the echoes of his thoughts, as if of a singing machine-titan.

The entity looked at them all harshly, from those on the screens and focusing on those present on the stands, staring hard at Deidara and Kimblee first before looking at those in judgement, and through it all he seemed to be searching them for signs of wrong-doing or lying. Kimblee felt caught in a searchlight for the brief moment that thing looked at him, scrutinized as a insect under a microscope before the being turned away. Finally he relented, and speaking in a more softly modulated voice, said, "I see that no offense is meant in your interruption of my duties, nor that you intended to bring a being of my stature here. Clearly a mere custodian would have sufficed, though I had not heard of such a procedure being done." He stopped for a moment. "...You said 'spell'. Such terms have not been used in millenia, and certainly never by the Alchemical Exalted. Sorcery is not inscribed into their design! How do you know of sorcery?! What city is this, and what nation?"

"Those names are unfamiliar," Pain said. "This is the refuge city of Traverse Town, on the world of Crucible."

The being stopped, staring at him for a long time. his glow wavered and brightened in unpredicable intervals. "...'World'?" He finally said. "An unusual choice of words." He hesitated, a conclusion appearing to him and clearly shocking him, and he dared to ask, "Ah. Impossible, but yet it is apparent...do you mean to inform me that this is not Autochthonia?"

"No," Pain said. "And I have never heard of a world by that name."

"The name of Autochthon the Great Maker is not known to you!?" The being stared at them in mingled horror and bemusement, perhaps stunned by his own show of emotion. "This is...this is most irregular." He said this like it was the most blasphemous of slurs and clanked in a parody of shuddering. "Creation has surely fared badly in the times since the Great Maker's departure, if his name has been forgotten! And to think that the Seals could have been breached from outside once a door to Creation was established! Where are the Exalted among you? Who commands you and has such power to call one of the Divine Ministers?!"

"There are none like that here," Pain said, begining to lose his patience. "I channeled power into the spell to summon a being fitting our parameters of benevolence and ability, but there were no particular limits on the power of the entity we wished to summon. It seems merely an unfortunate coincidence-"

The entity waved a hand, and Pain stopped. "It is fine," The entity said. "I understand that this is a new experience. Inform me of your request and I may deign to do this. Though it seems rather belittling, to pull me here for any task without my consent is rather intriguing. You say no Exalted are here? I detect no obvious spiritual power at work, nor that which I am familiar with. If this is mortal's work, to call me here, it demands interest!" He crossed his arms, and suddenly let loose with a booming laugh like the sound of crashing crystals.

"...Um, thank you?" Stature said. "But, who are you exactly?"

He glanced at her. "Permit me to introduce myself." He bowed curtly to them, a crystalline titan of mechanical life. "I am Kadmek, Divine Minster of Architecture, Design, Structural Integrity, Biogeomancy, Art, Wisdom, Strategy and Prophecy! God of Beauty, Cities, Serenity and Music! Chief Regulator of the industrial Element of Crystal! One of the eight sub-souls of Autochthon the Great Maker and manifestion of his ability to make plans and then execute those plans!" He regarded them with the hint of a smile on his face. "And for what purpose did you accidentally snare me?"

They stared dumbly at him. Mr. Herrimen raised an eyebrow tremulously. Roy Mustang's eyes opened wide and refused to narrow any. General Armstrong hissed to the other screens, "Did we really just pull in a god?!" A flurry of horrified whispering ensued, a lot of chatter mostly revolving around the terror of having said god mad at them. Kadmek didn't seem particular upset; now that his initial confusion had abated somewhat (as he still had no idea what the hell was going on), and he patiently waited for them to come to grips with this little hiccup in the plan and realize that he didn't seem at all upset. Pain's Paths glanced uncertainly, seemed to realize that iniative was called for and they said, "Many terrible wrongs were done to us by these two before you," and they gestured to Kimblee and Deidara. Kadmek looked down at them, frowning mightily and his glow intensified to a crackling. "We wish to render judgement but we require the aid of a being of pure Law and Good to make the proper verdict, so that our decision is not false."

Kadmek considered this, and after a tense moment of wondering if this was not below him or not, he satisfied their worries when he said, "Tell me the details of this case. I shall assist you." They looked at him in surprise and he said, "Well. This is certainly a very novel occurance. It would be remiss not to fulfill the duty I have been called for."

Pain told him all the details, as quickly as he could while making things as clear as possible and giving all pernitent information. Kadmek's face sharply turned towards Kimblee and Deidara, clouding as every little detail of Kimblee's destructive rampage and attempted destruction of this town of cosmic refugees. his perpetual glow began to become something like lightning before Pain was done, a reflection of his growing fury at such crimes, and when Pain finished Kadmek said, "Agents of dissolution and entropy, the both of you! A sickness unto the souls of mortal kind, that is all you may be fit to be!" He stiffened, looking quite eager to smash them into paste or some more hideous fate, but he turned to Pain regardless. "Regulators of this realm, what is the procedure for miscreants as these? What shall be their fate if they are indeed assuredly guilty?

Pain told him. General Armstrong smirked. Roy Mustang looked serious. Deidara made a strangled sound of horror, while Kimblee sunk into his chair mournfully; he had known this was coming but it was crushing to hear it said so plainly. Kadmek made a faint ringing noise in amusement. "A fitting fate, if not perhaps the efficient one."

"It suits our ways to do so," Pain replied.

"Far be it from me to interfere in your laws, for then I would be little better than the accused," Kadmek said evenly. "I shall examine them now."

The seats holding Deidara and Kimblee pivoted around on their own, now facing Kadmek. "Counterweights and hard-point swivel joints under the seats and joined to the floor," Kadmek observed. "Beautiful in it's austerity and subtleness. Ah, but I do become besotted with details such as this. Would that I had more time to examine your works!" He raised his hands and placed them both on Kimblee and Deidara's heads (and the binding circle's limits were large enough to allow him to do so, now that he acted with Pain's permisison to do what he wished), and his hands were so large that their heads were easily swallowed in his massive palms. If he wished it, he could pull their heads off with even the slightest modicum of effort.

Light pulsed around his hands, moving in geometric shapes not unlike crystalline structures; Kimblee felt a presence weighing on his mind, an experience that had gotten extremely old extremely fast since he'd occupied Kevin's body for a while (and admittedly still wasn't clear how he'd gotten a new body for himself and why Ghostfreak was along for the ride), and he wondered for a moment if it was even worth resisting. He heard Deidara make a sound like 'Glck!' and Kimblee figured that this meant it was better to just give up. He did so, and immediately something thundered right into his mind, raw power in material form blasting right through the structures of his mind and passing through them, occupying his recent memories for all they were worth, taking them all in and passing judgement.

It was not a particularily pleasant experience, and it was good that it only lasted a few moments, or Kimblee thought he wouldn't survive it. his eyes crossed and brain cells overloaded on the spot even with his willing consent to let this thing into his head; he had no words for the experience of it, only that it was like looking directly into the sun and having the sun look back and also decide to transform it's energy into a consciousness and then ram that directly your own and squat there for a bit and being quite gleeful about your brain about to explode the whole time.

It was too much, just too much, that inhuman mind looking right through him and radiating scorn; it wasn't human, not even of human origin or belief, it simply was, a piece of something incomprehensibly greater and still so vast that it had to take on a form of it's own, and Kimblee saw right through it's own memories for an instant-

(A realm of utter blackness, no sun or natural light to illuminate, and only through the flashes of industrial fires and the eye-melting glow of electrical arcs connecting city-sized conduits is it illuminated to him, and there are gigantic bio-tectonic forces pushing continent organs in a sea of grinding metal, everything is metal, the mind-warping heights of this place are metal, the biological-shaped edges of the walls and the rising plates like ribs here and there are metal, the continents are metal and they seemed jagged and weary but a moment's glance confirmed that there are cities there, and he's looking at them from a scale so stupendous it hurts just realizing it, and everywhere there are stupifyingly huge creatures that are not god or elemental but some servitor inbetween, mechanical lifeforms serving as biological processes, and then he sees that the walls and floors are made of machines, so absurdly large he cannot grasp it, toiling aware to some unknown purpose and it all feels alive-)

(A city, huge and cavernous, a thousand towering blocks of metal arcing skywards right into the ceiling of the hollow the city is built in, and sixteen other towers like it, catwalks and escalators and lifts connecting them all, and humans swarm from building to building as the ringing call of shift change echoes out, and smoke rises from these factory-towers while hovering pod-vehicles files into them and leave carrying loads of machined parts to be delivered to another factory block to be fitted together, and smoke rises from the factories before being filtered into recycling baffles, and beyond the factory-towers stretches the rest of the city, swarming with millions of human lives; layers on layers of inhabited metal, and the holographic billboards display patterns that bolster the willpower of the watchers, and the life of the place fills it, a pulse of raw Essence and a will behind it, and this entire city is truly a living mechanical thing of vast scale, and there are thousands more like it, and yet the communications it sends to it's inhabitants cannot hide a deep-seated dread-)

(In some crevice squealing things that might have been machine custodians once gather, and their voices are so twisted and awful the mind recoils from their sound, their metal exoskeletons bulging from the inside with lumps of flesh and pulsing blood where there should be oil and electric impulses, thinking engines bulging from their backs but swollen with stolen brain tissue shoved into their bloodied meshes, and there is something so terribly and monstrously wrong with them more serious than even the sanctity of their mechanical purity corrupted by their self-imposed cancerous organic defilement, and as they swarm up on the unwary tunnel-dwellers just north they sing songs to the horrors they make for ruinous Chaos itself, make of the humans they find bloody sacrifices to the glory of Entropy, and as the blight of the soul cancer that twisted them into such monsters leaks into the environment around them and bleeds all machine-life from it into dissolute emptiness, they scream and scream as the air warps with the intrusion of a nullspace that should not be and a terrible one-eyed machine-monster looks down on them with power equal or greater than Kadmek's, the power of the Void leaking from it's cycloptic eye, and it howls an empty noise that is the echoes of what will be the terrible dead force named the Engine Of Extinction-)

(And here again is the world in full, that world of mechanical life, a world of fauna with metal exoskeletons and electric lights and countless similar things like that, all from the tiny hummingbird-shaped steam elementals that tend the heating pipes to the wheeled fix beetles repairing the fallen humans they encounter, formed of the industrial-spirit elements of Steam and Metal and Smoke and Crystal and Lightning and Oil, a huge living world that is more than the Machine-God it's people pray to and shelter in his sleep, a titan of industry and genius and mechanical evolution, and Kimblee can feel it's incomprehensible might, and for all Wuya's power even her nascent empire would extinguish itself against the incredible might of this titan if he were to turn his full attention on dismantling her.

The whole of the world Kadmek hails from, this titan who shaped Himself into a world for his worshippers and their descendants to dwell in and who Kadmek is but a sub-soul of, is shown in more, so much more than Kimblee can process, and he sees more than he wishes to know, sees the empty and dead places spreading slowly with the advance of broken-machines and exalted champions twisted to gremlin-like wickedness, humans die by the thousands after another as their sleeping world-titan cannot save them from the evil ravaging his insides, sees epically sized bellows struggling to cope with corrosive tarry liquids choking it's processes and can only manage to expel gouts of acidic smoke before breaking and collapsing on itself, sees fields of mind-crystals crackling in terror as neural-fields dream nightmares of death and ruin too terribly close to reality. Biomechanical-continents crumble and shatter as other mecha-continents smash into them without ministerial procedures to safeguard them and Primordial flesh siezes and falls. This Realm of Brass And Shadows is falling to a disease afflicting it, killing him, a cancer older than worlds and born of self-doubt and fear, and Kimblee can see the shape of his dreams overlapping with the helpless corrosion of this world's body in restless sleep...

And Kimblee, touched for a moment by the immanent compassion of another and seeing it through another's eyes, can feel how much pain this world is in, and that it is dying by bit by bit every day.

And yet, for all that pain, it has still found a measure of peace at times, knowing that those that worshipped him loved their world, and cared for them even as they might share his doom.

That vast impossible consciousness so big it would annihilate Kimblee's mind if it so much as made the briefest flicker of direct contact glanced at him. Kimblee felt a brief moment of curiousity through it's sleep, and so much pain-)

And then just as suddenly as he had been submerged, he was torn free; crystal hands left his face and he was left quivering in his seat as Kadmek declared, "I have searched his memories, and a peculiarity is apparent; mighty safeguards prevented me from making any definite conclusions about where he came from or whose orders he was serving." Kadmek glowered. "Mighty powers are behind this Kimblee fellow. Tread carefully. You have strange enemies indeed. Breakers and Void-bringers, all of them! And incidentally he has a rather nasty entity lodged in his head, even more vile than himself and deserving of judgement."

Kimblee blinked, his head still aching like it was going to burst. Deidara twitched a few times. "Bleeeh," Kimblee wheezed.

"Oh stop whining, you're made of sterner stuff than that," Kadmek said. "Flesh is supposed to be adaptive. That's what the stuff is good for. Be more of a credit to your substance!"

"...Should we be insulted?" Roy asked. Pain shrugged. Kadmek looked politely puzzled.

"Well then," Kadmek said. "You asked me to deliver a verdict on behalf of your laws, and it behooves me to do so. While I cannot, regretably, discover who ordered them to do so, I did confirm that they were acting on orders to do the things they did; Deidara was a mole sent by a neferious organization in the style of the Void-bringers that afflict my own realm, and Kimblee's memories confirm him to be acting on orders to do as he wished to bring destruction and chaos to this town, and Deidara certainly gave him the means to do so. They did it all under their own volition, without coercion, and with much enthusiasm."

"They are," Kadmek finished, and seemed to spit in his fashion. "Most certainly guilty!"

"Yeah, we never exactly made a secret about it," Deidara said.

"Will you not simply accept our honesty?" Kimblee asked.

"Oh shut up," Kadmek said. "That random biological genesis could produce such as you engenders a suspicion that the whole process is flawed. I want you ought of my sight before I have thoughts of changing human reproduction! Perhaps a factory-based system...no no no, bad thoughts, BAD!" He calmed himself after a moment and said to Pain, "Ah well. Is your propriety satisfied?"

Pain glanced at the screens. They nodded once, curtly. "As none have reason to distrust you, and the foolproof criteria of our summoning circles renders your word beyond reproach. If you were not of the appropriate moral alignment, you would not have appeared to us. The judgement is sound."

"If there remains question, let this satisfy them." Kadmek raised his hand, light swelling over it and crystallizing into a small oval device with glyphs swarming it in. "A collection of information I was able to retrieve from his memories. Simply look into it, and it's data shall be imprinted in your brain, and it shall be clear and it will be known that it is the absolute truth. No one who you give this to can doubt it's veracity. Justice shall be clear." He tapped his chest with a beauteous ringing noise, emphasizing the point. "As clear as the adamant of my body."

"I thought adamantium was a metal," Roy said.

"Adamant, not adamantium," Kadmek said. "The magical material form of crystal, associated with things such as lightness, cutting ability and logic, and it makes useful cutting edges. Though it's brittleness limits it's use as a construction material. Now, if that's all, would you care to administer the verdict?"

"You do not wish to be returned to your home?" Pain asked.

"I dearly wish it. But I would be remiss in my purview if I did not remain here."

"Then let us finish." Deva Path Pain stepped forward, brushing past Kimblee, and Kimblee felt a shudder as his coat brushed him.

Deva Path walked to the strange contraption at the front of the room, a weight of grimness in every step, and he held his hand over an opening on it. A blade slid out of his hand, right through the palm, looking like a much larger version of the studs and piercings on his body (and was; Pain controlled his Paths through those piercings, and they were a good deal more internal and bigger than seemed apparent), sliding into the opening and locking in place as it left Deva Path's body. Deva Path went to the other openings, one after the other, doing the same thing, and the machine powered up bit by bit as he did, the implanted chakra recievers serving as keys that undid a restraining mechanism on the device, switching on inactive controls.

It seemed surprisingly mundane.

Without Pain, this device could not be activated, since there were no other ways of recreating the chakra recievers that activated this device and he kept their secret to himself. He was the key to powering it, the watchman over this final punishment. Transponders powered on, conduits channeled energy, and thinking engines turned on, and the device quietly came to life, and with surprisingly little show the device activated, the air inside the arc tinged blue before suddenly erupting into the same warped lightshow that had preceded Kadmek's arrival but far more stable and less disquieting.

Quickly, the lights became a glowing blue mist, like a miniaturizing spiral constellation, and even that turned into the view of a flat and rather boring look platform in the middle of nowhere; a vast void, empty but for a wide-opened space and in the distance a fairly small island floating in space and encrusted with cities. Kimblee heard distant noise coming through it.

"A...portal?" He said uncertainly.

"Yes," Pain said. his tone could have been smug or victorious or even vicious; it was none of those things, merely quiet satisfaction. "One way into that place. That one single way. It is disconnected from all other planes, and no escape save through this particular portal. And it does not open from the other side. We found this particular dimension during some interesting scrying tests, and what it was once called we do not know. We call it the Vault."

"What is it?" Kadmek asked, intrigued.

"Do you know of the Lady Of Pain, the godlike ruler of the extraplaner city of Sigil?" Pain asked. Kadmek gave him a look that transmitted 'of course not'. "None know what she is, though she appears as a gigantic floating woman with a face surronded by blades. She holds the power of a god, though she forbids worship of her under pain of flaying, and has barred all other Powers from intruding on her domain. Under her rule Sigil is fairly stable, but she is most cruel and unforgiving. At times, it pleases her to remove part of Sigil and fold it into a small finite dimension with a specific exit that is not made known, and the people of Sigil call these places 'mazes'. They exist outside the Great Wheel of the planes, these mazes, and sometimes the Lady of Pain wraps up those who offend her or wrong her city in her dimensional powers and banishes them to one of these mazes and leaves them there. Sometimes they stumble on the means of escape, and more often they do not and simply starve there, or live out their lives if they are lucky enough to have sources of food."

Pain continued. "This device connects to the sole portal in and out of there, and we've modified that crack in the dimensional axis so that it cannot be accessed from this maze. One way in and out, under our control and in my administration. Once you leave, unless we decide otherwise, there is no escape."

He raised his hand. "Now. Join those who are of like mind as you, and may you rip each other to pieces and be gone from our minds. Farewell." Pain gestured, and spoke a technique name: "Almighty Push!"

The shackles of the chairs disengaged as gravity warped around Pain and Deidara, a vaccuum suddenly appearing around them, and they were both violently propelled from their charis without even the slightest wait or opportunity to do anything; they had been doomed the moment they'd set foot into this room, and again they had no chance of averting their fate. Without even a chance to have a hope of fighting for their freedom, they were hurled directly into the portal, through it-

(-and again a disquieting moment of being suspended betwee planes and realms, his stomach twisting and his body pulled in multiple directions-)

And then Kimblee and Deidara both smashed into the ground, dust smacking them in the face after the stony floor did, rolling about fifteen feet before coming to a stop. Kimblee groaned and looked back, seeing the portal still flickering there, still open, still a chance of him killing them and earning the satisfaction of their deaths-

Kadmek glared at them, Pain gestured, and Kimblee had enough time to see Roy smirk malevolently and present an extremely rude gesture at Kimblee before the portal winked out of mid-air, leaving nothing but empty space behind

Kimblee stared dully at it. "Well, shit," Deidara snarled, standing up and hobbling weakly. Not knowing why, Kimblee caught him before he fell over and pulled the ninja back up. "Thanks."

"No need to mention it."

The two of them looked around and they took several steps forward, their shoes crunching faintly on the brittle gray dirt on the platform that did not extend even seven feet from them, ending in craggy bits that looked like they'd been snapped away in some dreadful impact. There was nothing in their immediate vicinity...well, not that they saw right away, being distracted by the sight of several large floating islands in the distance, suspended by some unknown force and moving at different speeds; some apparently immobile (and those were the largest), a few moving visible but most drifting at an imperceptible pace. There was even one or two zooming along and constituting a serious hazard to life and limb and were devoid of life, moving so quickly that anything actually standing on them would be ripped to shreds. As they watched, one of these train-sized rocks smashed right into one of the larger ones; there was a large blast of dust, the impacted part collapsed into more dust (as if these islands were nothing more than silver sand compacted into boulders of ridiculously large scale) and there were a number of screams.

Their own island was moving fairly slow, so Deidara and Kimblee had several long moments of complete silence to witness several troubling facts. The first was how...closed off it all seemed. The illumination was ever-present, arising from the very air itself, but it was rather gray and dull, unpleasant to look at and cold to the touch. Just standing there brought a faint chill. The emptiness stretched for the horizon, but the horizon wasn't actually that big, and Kimblee wasn't certain how he actually knew it but it nonetheless seemed clear that the entire place was less than several thousand years across in every dimension, barred away by a peculiar force effect mirroring everything directly before it. As Kimblee watched, a small loose boulder drifted into the edge of the paradimension they'd been locked it, and it immediately reappeared at the opposite side of the realm. It was closed off by nature of it's own composition; there would be no forcing his way through that wall, because there was nothing on it, and merely getting close would warp him around.

Second was that it was actually pretty noisy; a cacophony of sounds arose from everywhere, screams and shouts and cries all pained and angry and belligerent in varying degrees mixed with explosions and clashes of sharp metal and the sounds of guns (and similar weapons such as laser rifles) going off at the same time as rocks smashing into things, or possibly people. It hurt just listening to it, the only really live thing in this place and it was so ugly, so dreadfully inelegant, just brutish and domineering. It was hard to pinpoint any particular spots for the noises, but the ones making those noises all seemed to be on the other islands; as they passed over one, Kimblee saw this confirmed, saw people moving down there, people that had simply disappeared while attacking Traverse Town and now he knew why.

The third troubling fact was the result of looking at one of the many floating island; they had seemed oddly irregular from far away, and as he saw them now he realized that they weren't oddly shaped by covered completely in artificial structures, layers upon layers of frighteningly sloppy and crude buildings on streets over each other and seemingly assembled by materials generously dumped here and there...but quite a long time ago, judging by the rate of deterioration things had gone through. The islands were completely covered in cities (and in some cased weighed down by all the extremely poorly done architecture), and there were people on them. Not a great many (vastly less than any city ought to have, barely enough for a village if even that), but they seemed scattered all over.

In fact, the islands seemed divided by territories, and Kimblee only needed a brief look at no less than six different gangs (each composed of less than six members) fighting each other over, from what they yelled in-between blows, a single city block with a self-sustained farm on it. Perhaps they wanted to monopolize the food and give their respective groups more power. Kimblee told this to Deidara, who said, "Wait, so we're in the middle of a sealed out tiny dimension with maybe hundreds of complete psychopaths bad enough to be sentenced here, fighting it out over scraps of territory like idiots?"

"Yes," Kimblee said sullenly.

Deidara and him stared into the air. "God damn it," Deidara said.

"Indeed."

"Oh, so you've grasped the basic situation," said a voice from behind them. They turned around and saw nothing important; there was nothing on their tiny island except a portal recieving device (left intact by the locals in hopes that it might give them escape one day), a large statue of a fist extending an up-raised middle finger (with the words 'Salutation From Traverse Town, Jerkasses!' on it's base) and, just under a battery of old monitors, a small booth holding dozens of tiny pamphets that read 'So You're Locked In The Vault FOREVER' on the cover. The voice had come from the speakers on one of the monitors, which displayed a grainy and blurred but recognizable image of the room they had just been portaled out of, left much the same as it had been. "Welcome to the Vault. You will not be leaving, unless we decide to rip out your soul so we can steal all your secrets or something."

It was Roy who spoke, and it was to Roy that Kimblee addressed his next question. "What is this place? Is this your idea of an ultimate punishment? It does not seem that dire."

"Don't be wrong, it makes you look even more stupid," Roy said. He steeped his fingers from his screen (which was itself being displayed from a screen, it was downright meta) and smirked coldly. "The Vault, as we've named this dimension, is your new prison for the remainder of your lives, which may not be espicially long. The only way in or out is through the portal in this very chamber, and it only opens from our end. There's nothing to force your way through, or any means of getting the resources to even try it. Food is beamed in once or twice a month, and mostly it's up to the dregs like you to try and cultivate it. Or eat each other, I'm really not that concerned."

Roy continued. "Your punishment is exile there. You won't be coming back, so look forward to a lifetime of nothing but fighting it out for dominance and survival against a bunch of idiots just as psychotic and vicious as you are. We won't do capital punishment, for various reasons, but then you'll likely be dead in a week or two from some psychopath killing you to look tough. Or maybe you'll beat down everyone in your way and take over a gang, or make your own. I don't really care which; fight or surrender, you're still stuck there, so no matter what it's a bad situation for you. If you die, we get our vengeance. If you live or even prosper? Hell, you're stuck there. You're not going to be a problem for anyone except for people just as bad as you, so you're their problem. You're out of our hair, and we keep our hands clean."

"Very neat," Kadmek said, and it was unclear if he approved of these measures, disliked it or was just voicing an opinion.

"Really no way out?" Deidara said, calculating and watching them carefully.

Pain looked at him. "Of course not," he said, and there was a bit of regret there. "It would be foolish to allow any portals to be capable of opened there, or allow interdimensiona teleporters in. You are trapped. A shame; your level of power was something special. You could have made something of yourself. This is to be regretted...and it's still a victory for us."

Roy smiled at Kimblee. "You've lost, good and hard. There's no picking yourself up from this. It's over, Kimblee."

Kimblee stared at him for a long, long time.

And then he nodded his head. "Well played, Flame Alchemist."

Roy snorted, and not deigned to exchange any other words, his screen went off, one more tie to Amestris snapping away from Kimblee forever. Kimblee didn't know what that stung as much as it did.

"Most interesting indeed," Kadmek said. "The means you employed to send them to this interdimensional penitentiary...I must look into it with my peers. Perhaps we can improve our own mtethods! I thank you for this opportunity, surprising though it was. If you care to release me?"

"Of course," Pain said. his Animal Path gestured and said, "Release." The binding glyphs went out, there was that odd distortion of space in that circle, and with a noise like a crack of lightning and a clamour of many great gears turning in perfect unison, Kadmek was gone to the mysterious realm he hailed from, with many interesting data to give his peers.

One by one, the other screens went out. "Hey, you can't just leave us like this," Deidara said.

"I think that's precisely what they're doing," Kimblee said.

"What are we supposed to do," Deidara said, ignoring him. "Just leave us to die? That's hypocrasy, you don't want to kill us but you'll strand us here to die? The hell kind of logic is that, hnh?!"

"There are pamphets," Stature and Freya said. Kimblee almost jumped, he'd forgotten about them.

Deidara grabbed a pamphet and flipped through it. "There's nothing in here except increasingly more poetic euhphisms for 'screw you'," he said.

"And that's our way of telling you that your fate isn't really our concern," Freya said. "You have done terrible things, and now you are trapped with others who are equally cruel as you. Have fun realizing what that entails." Pain let her keep this last word and gestured, and the feed cut out, and the monitor turned to rolling static before turning off.

Some other signal, unseen, caused the muzzles on Deidara's mouths (all three of his weaponized ones) to fall out. Kimblee's own cuffs fell off and he rubbed his wrists to get some feeling back into them while Deidara's hand mouths opened and whined. "Well this is unfortunate," Kimblee said dryly.

The enormity struck him; he was stuck here, trapped forever. He was no longer an asset to Wuya, and he had no rescue coming for him. If he was retreived, it would only be to die a short time later and have his secrets ripped out. his alchemy was currently barred to him until he could determine this place's geomancy, or recreate his transmutation array, rendering him little more than a powerless man who was rather out of shape. And that was only the begining of his problems.

Kimblee sighed, a tiny suggestion of the crushing feeling stealing all hope or desire to plan ahead and triumph from him. He had lost, well and truly, and it was a struggle merely to accept it when it would be easier to just lay down and stop thinking for a while.

Well played, he thought again to Traverse Town. At the very least, he was a graceful loser.

Deidara sat down, sampling the sands. "Well, I might be able to make some fine art out of this," he said doubtfully. "The chakra doesn't feel right and I dunno how explosive it might be, but we can give it a shot."

"'We'?" Kimblee echoed.

"Sure," Deidara said. "Why not?" He shrugged. "We're both artists, you and I. A sculptor and a composer, practicing the mediums of explosives! I've had more irritating partners, believe me, and at least you have an appreciation for real art."

Kimblee considered it as their island came ahead over a city, and the people below took notice of them and started yelling threateningly, and made moves to climb their buildings and investigate, and possibly kill, them. "On the whole, we could do far worse," he agreed, not understand the warm thrill he felt at the notion.

He extended his hand, and Deidara shook it. (And Kimblee was grateful his hand-mouth hadn't been lolling it's tongue at the time.) The island touched down onto the city below and they had to stop running immediately before the screaming and the fighting started, and they both moved together into an extremely uncertain and probably short future.

But on the whole, given that they were trapped in a place where they couldn't escape (or do any more harm) and were effectively swept off the board, it could have been worse.

---

In her mysterious and continually nebulous domain of uncertain location, Wuya clasped her hands, and Mr. Lyle didn't know if she was angry and trying to hide it, pleased and quiet about it, or just totally indifferent. "Once more," She said silkily. "Summerize what happened."

Mr. Lyle, standing in the same chamber where Wuya had held the conference on the night where Zim had joined with Calvin and Hobbes in triumph over the mighty Guard Armor Heartless (and those same shadowy figures in attendence, silent so far and employing powerful arcane techniques to colocate themselves from their strongholds and places of intrigue across the multiverse so that they might commune without having to abandon their positions), straightened himself once. In this place of cold metal and black stone, awash in the chill of the Heartless' power and surronded by people with the obsessive need for domination to swim in that power and the strength to survive it, he felt extremely exposed and vulnerable. "Again?"

"Yes," Wuya said. "Again."

Standing at a seat of honor and nearest to Wuya's own seat was Azula, a pit of blazing blue flames roaring around her and reaching to the ceiling, and Azula said, "For those of us that are...slower, then the others." There were a few grumbles at this not-so-veiled insult, but none dared to speak out.

There was, in the corner and awaiting his opportunity to speak, a figure Mr. Lyle wasn't familiar with and certainly not among the vaunted figures of Wuya's highest allies; presumably an agent, awaiting a dire mission. He was an odd-looking figure, sitting in a chair and wearing an outfit not dissimilar to Kimblee's but a lot more...well, skimpy than was the usual fashion for men, and come to think of it he wasn't sure if this person was male or female, it was really hard to tell: his jawline was soft and pointed at the chin, his pale face astonishingly beautiful for a man, and with the curvy lines of his waist and the flare of his hips, it gave the impression of a human which was neither strictly male or female.

He was reading a book entitled Memoirs of the Red Skull, long dark hair oddly like the fronds of a palm tree flicking when he shook his head in at times quiet laughter and at other times brief mutterings of 'Bah, this is kid's stuff,' or something to that effect. His eyes, Mr. Lyle observed, were as red as blood, and with pupils like a cats'.

Mr. Lyle took the luxury of examining that man to compose his thoughts and phrase things in such a way that they would be acceptable to this collection of people, and then he thought 'screw it' and just say things as seemed plausible. This decision was assisted by another quick look at the assembled group, this final proof of Wuya's inner circle. his employers, his patrons as he sometimes thought of them in his more fanciful moments, had been unclear about the identities of the various movers-and-shakers that Wuya considered her most significant pawns or allies (And really, for Wuya it came down to the same thing; she was markedly more forgiving and pleasant towards her pawns than many like her, but that meant little when she ultimately saw everyone as either a foe or a resource to be expendedplayed).

Tonight, if he played this game well, he might be able to learn who they were (a tricky gambit, given that he didn't recognize several of them even with his employer's vast knoweldge) and even if things weren't terribly, he could spin that knowledge into information for his employers. It was always wise to have a back-up excuse or at least one little neat tidbit of valuable information. He'd learned that the hard way when he'd lost his thumb back when he had still been alive.

In the lightning-fast moment it took for him to come to this conclusion, one of the mysterious people present lost their patience. "Why are you taking so long!?" A massive mechanical figure boomed, looking something like a daemonic Santa Claus. "And who is this leavings of slag you drag before us, Wuya!? Is there some manner of point you have not confided to us?"

"Be still," Wuya said calmly, and dangerously.

"I was told that this was a high-profile meeting, not inspection of some new minion of yours! Have you not enough time wasted already?!"

Wuya raised a hand. Ripples of arcane power rolled from her and the room trembled with it. "If I wished it," She said softly. "I could reach through that co-located avatar of yourself and rip you asunder before you could so much as summon a shield to defend yourself. You are not so irreplacable that I wouldn't be tempted. So, be still."

The steaming figure bristled, his mouth working with many a grinding noise as if choking back his words, but he did so; clearly some other matter was preying at him. "As you ask," He managed, and sat back.

Azula started to speak. She stopped and looked at Wuya questioningly, and the elder witch nodded gracefully. Azula shook her head, her magnificent mass of hair sliding across her shoulders in a display specifically calculated to attract interest down to the most minute adjustment of hair strands over her neck, and the sudden roar of azure flames around her only amplified her intended effect of focusing attention on her.

Gradually, the table-full of villains subsided, and Azula smirked. "Now. It is clear that none of you are quite up to date on personnel. In that event, let us make it clear that our newest minion, this man before you-"

"I am not a minion," Mr. Lyle said sullenly.

"-Who is very persistent about being in denial," Azula said without skipping a beat. "Is named Mr. Lyle, and he is our little ambassador from our recent and on-going negotitions with the Powers of the Lower Planes. Specifically, that of a powerful and increasingly influential group known as the Inter-Fiend Cooperation Commision, in association with the lawfirm Wolfram and Hart. Mr. Lyle is here as their envoy, a token of goodwill between us and them, and incidentally as a troubleshooter and agent to work on both our behalfs. A duty they claim he is eminently suited for in his work with them, though I admit I have some diffuclty understanding why."

Mr. Lyle grunted. Clearly they weren't going to let him live down the incident under Foster's any time soon.

Voices among the table muttered disagreement, assent and understanding in turn. Azula waited for it to cool down before she continued. "his recent incompetence notwithstanding, he was fairly recommended by his superiors, and he is here as a explicit agent of the leaders of the IFCC, working under the jurisdiction of it's leaders whom some of you may be familiar with, and these three are fiends of the highest sort, living embodiments of elemental Evil aspected by pure Law, Neutrality and Chaos in turn: Lee of the Nine Hells of Baator, Nero of the Gray Wastes of Hades, and Cedrik of The Infinite Layers of The Abyss."

More murmurs, some recognizing, and mostly excited or outright wary. Fiends, they said. The most awful and terrible creatures associated with the Evil they so willingly drenched themselves in, not merely entities that had chosen to oppose the forces of Good or do as they wished, but literally born of that ancient and terrible force, evil deep in the marrow of their bones and every fiber of their being grimly devoted to the cause of evil and perpetuating it with every ounce of their considerable power.

It was said that the Heartless were NOT any variety of fiend, and in fact the fiends were said to be wary of the Heartless' wholly destructive actions that left nothing to corrupt or rule behind, but anyone who'd had dealing with either would be hardpressed to tell the difference.

Azula continued. "Thus, it would be prudent, at the very least, to let him have his say and keep you all informed of our latest strike at Traverse Town, crucial as it may be to our plans, so that he carry this news to his superiors and hopefully nudge them closer to joining with us in full. Preferably under us."

"Yeah," the Joker, the only one there Mr. Lyle was familiar with, muttered under all the excited or suspicious comments her pronouncement drew. "It's always about people being under you, isn't it?"

A brief round of crude laugher from some, cut even briefer when Wuya cast an annoyed glance at them. Azula only smirked cruelly.

"If I must tell?" Mr. Lyle said. "In brief, ladies and gentlemen, several days ago we dispatched one of our more capable but unreliable agents, one Solf J. Kimblee, codenamed 'The Red Lotus Alchemist' in his native Amestris-"

"Amestris?" The hot-tempered mechanoid who'd protested over Mr. Lyle earlier interrupted. The agent in the shadows looked up suddenly at the name of the country. Mr. Lyle thought he looked a little wistful. "Isn't that the place where this Hohenheim punk we're looking for came from? Or at least his research?"

"I was t'inkin' dey was supposed ta be Nazis," said the massive and coolly polished troll that had been present at the last meeting. "Killin' whole groups of folk they don't like on account of it bein' easier even when it caused problems and was downrigh' stupid at the time, and all that suchness."

"...Stupid?" The agent said quietly, his face twisting into a bestial sneer.

"Actually, they're a bit more like Imperial Japan during the era of World War Two, particularily in regards to civilian damages and cruelties," Wuya remarked. They looked at her. "Search your feelings. You know it to be true! Oh how I love finding reasons to say that..." The agent scoffed quietly.

"If I can continue?" Mr. Lyle said irritably. Wuya waved him on. "Right. Kimblee, having been disembodied as part of a project we had hoped to use to create functional immortality or at least a semblence thereof, was placed into the body of a test subject named Kevin Levin that we'd extracted most of the crucial data from and sent to Traverse Town on Crucible. He made contact with one of our men there, an explosives artist named Deidara, and retrieved information he used to create a weapon.

"He then traveled to a local home for new refugees called Foster's Home and employed a number of it's inhabitants in a ritual to create this weapon, which amplified his explosion-based alchemic powers considerably. He destroyed the house and went on his way, dealing an acceptable amount of damage before he was accousted by several of Traverse Town's inhabitants, at least two of which he'd known in Amestris. They delayed him, briefly, and I'm sure you know how this sort of things goes. Cries of revenge from indignated self-righteous idiots, a battle that they did fairly well before Kimblee sounded knocked them down, that sort of thing."

"Okay, you're getting to the weird point then," said the clawed and burned man that, for some reason, everyone was keeping away from. The sole exception was a towered and odd figure shying away from all the iron, but the man didn't seem to want to be near even this thing either. "I heard about this point, I didn't get it before."

"Right," Mr. Lyle said. "Well, apparently another group that may oppose us unless we play things very right was working up their own plans to relaliate against Kimblee, and they commandeered a news studio to do it. They sent out a message calling Kimblee out, challenging him to a fight. Well, Kimblee's a bloodthirsty lunatic and proud of that, he couldn't resist. Ordinarily this wouldn't be a big deal, except that...hrm, I trust you're familiar with the wielder of the Keyblade we were expecting? The one we saw fighting that Guard Armor last night and making contact with the minions from the Cat-King?" Grunts and mutters of assent. "Well, it turns out he and his group were part of the bigger group against Kimblee. He was one of the people there who fought Kimblee, and defeated him."

Silence.

A few of them facepalmed. "Crap damn it," The burned man swore, badly.

"Kimblee's gone?" The agent said. His lips tightened and he looked away, eyes shut. "...Damn it..."

The trollish businessman was more sage about it. "Who's in dat group of his now? I 'member, I 'member someone said dat he got a new guy in or something?"

"I'll take this one," Azula said, and as composed as she pretended to be, she seemed more off-balance than she normally was during her infrequent 'bad times'. It was very bad to be near her at those times; ordinarily Azula was collected, almost mechanically precise in her schemes and actions. Cruel, certainly, but methodical about it, rarely wasteful or capricious. But when her mind swung the wrong way, and Wuya's psychic safeguards were strained to the breaking limit...

Well. Azula was not considered a monster even by the standards of this collection of monsters for no reason. Wuya professed ultimately noble goals (namely the preservation of a portion of the multiverse left in the wake of the Heartless' final feast, under her ownership and rule of course) and while she hardly lived up to it, she was rather good to her rank-and-file workers, so it likely said a lot about her affection for Azula that she turned a blind eye to Azula's means of releasing stress by tormenting and torturing and killing random technicians or soldiers or anyone who was unlucky enough to catch her attention.

And, of course, the knowledge of Zim's latest recruit had badly upset her. She, and Wuya, had believed many things about her brother since he and the rest of his group had disappeared from their world some time ago, and now they were all wrong, and so many of their plans were invalid and required recalculation.

"We are...uncertain of the circumstances," she said, and Mr. Lyle saw Wuya flinch, just barely managing to contain it. Almost little more than a faint flicer of her eyes; it must have stung to admit that their information network, previously considered utterly infallible and in tune to almost anything going on in the multiverse that could affect their plans negatively or be a boon to it, had utterly failed to recognize that Team Avatar had not died when they'd disappeared from their natiev world. "But this person that has joined the Keybearer is from my own world. A blood traitor, a pretender to the sacred throne of the Fire Lord and usurper of the Fire Nation, alongside that misguided and awry incarnation of our world. A report is being prepared to brief you all on the subject, but suffice to say that he is of great importance to me."

"I thought you were Fire Lord," Mr. Lyle said coolly.

A pause. Mr. Lyle could have sworn he could hear Azula's temper fraying. "I am," Azula said, too quickly. "Though the taming of my world goes slowly."

"We should just send another assassin to take this fellow out, then," opined another of them; the shadowed horror next to the burned man and offending all of them. "Resolve it quite fine. If he is fit to challenge us, than he shall live! If he does not, he will provide us with much amusement-"

"NO!" Azula roared, the fires around her blazing high. The burned man shrank back, eyes wide in terror, and Azula sat down, the fires cooling slightly. "No. We shall not kill him so...so impersonally. He is mine to break, should circumstances permit." She paused, wondering whether to say this or not, and added, "You see, he is my brother Zuko. Traitor to the Fire Nation."

This seemed an extraordinary pronouncement.

After a moment of heavyness, the troll said, "Dis here bloke is yer kin? An' he just goes and joins up wit' da Key-guy. I dun' like this. Sounds too fishy ta make any sense."

"Indeed," Wuya said. "That the sole competent member of the Fire Nation's generation be delievered into my hands, dear Azula, seems an uncanny stroke of luck. And that the one who was lucky simply to be born find his way to the Keybearer and befriend him is the sort of luck that's not on our side." She tapped her fingers, thinking. "A coincidence, perhaps," she finally said. "But I so loathe such simple possibilities."

"So this Zuko is working with the Keybearer now," the machine-man said. "Azula's brother is a friend of our enemy. A frivolous concidence, but whatever, of course, we can deal with that. What happened with Kimblee?"

"Yeah, what about that?" The agent said. They continued to ignore him. Perhaps they were under instruction to do so.

"Well, we can't fault his ambition," Mr. Lyle said dryly. "He cobbled a giant robot from two other mechanized humongous armors he found and used it in a direct assault on Zim and those allied with him. A great deal of damage, a very satisfying level, was done in the process, but eventually they managed to destroy his weapon, broke through his giant robot's defenses, and defeated Kimblee. They've taken him into custody, and by all accounts he's already been dealt with in a disgusting permanent but non-lethal way. As has Deidara."

"I liked Deidara," the agent said sadly.

"Damn it!" Another one said. "He was one of our best men in that town! What else?"

"Well, most of the damage he did, apart from strict killed-in-action casualties, is either being repaired or already repaired."

"Not even a little collateral damage to keep them good and paranoid and scared?"

"...Unfortunately, not."

"Hmph. Well, you said Kimblee was using a test subject as a host?" A feral, nasty grin. "Must have been a real blow when they found they'd nearly killed a kid. And exiled him to a self-contained dimension of crazy killers with no hope of escape."

"...Er, according to our reports, Kimblee was somehow seperated from Kevin and his body reconstructed by his soul's morphic resonance. Kevin was taken in by a local family that he apparently had some dealings with."

"And you didn't kill him?!" An outraged voice cried. "He is helpless, then! Send assassins to remove him and those that aid him!"

Wuya frowned. "And what would be the point in that?" She only got a round of weirdl ooks and she elaborated. "Think about it, people. I know I'm asking a lot in that, but make the attempt! He is protected reasonably well, so it would be too costly to send subtle assassins, and powerful ones would be too overt; I've overplayed my hands too much as it is to risk cutting off one loose end."

"But he could tell them everything he knows!"

"Which, even assuming he can somehow break past the psychic safeguards we've implanted into our resources to prevent them from telling such information, only amounts to the names of several scientists, as well as me, my lieutenient and various others he's seen. Damning information, to be sure, and valuable information as well, but..." Wuya shrugged. "A declaration of war, spoken in the words of a traumatized metahuman? That will put the fear of us into them. A weapon to turn against them in time, if open warfare is a valid option at that point. Let Kevin tell them all about us, if he can. Let them hear of our unstoppable strength, that the forces of thousands of worlds and entire universes have been conquered by force and are being pointed at all who oppose us. Let them know greater fear than any, that the man who so effortlessly killed their peace of mind and security was a minor pawn of mine, and then they shall know fear even more."

She smiled. "And that, ladies and gentlemen, serves my plans just as well as if Kimblee had died fighting or had escaped or even been victorious. No matter what, they will leave these days afraid and paranoid. Any illusions they had about being safe are gone, and that's something we can exploit."

A brief calm of muddled confusion and grudging acceptance answered this. "Acceptable," the shadowy figure remarked. "And what of Kimblee himself? Are he and Deidara dead or not?"

"Technically they're alive, but until such time as we control Traverse Town, they are no longer a factor," Azula said. "Treat them as dead, it's the same thing." The agent looked visibly upset by this, but only for a moment. "Trapped in a prison dimension with only one access way, and that's controlled by Traverse Town."

"So, what, we did lose or not? It's really unclear."

Azula touched her fingers togther. "Play any loss right, and it becomes a victory. We instilled panic and a total loss of confidence in the people of Traverse Town, who will be either a commodity or an enemy at some point and this state of mind works for us either way. Kimblee was proven too unstable to be reliable, and now he's gone and left us one last good mark in his favor. Deidara's work has shaken them even more, proving that anyone as high up in the favor of a illustrious organization as the Peerage can still be a dangerous infiltrator, and now they may cast eyes on anyone who could be an ally for them, dividing them even more. And if someday we send an envoy who tells them of our power so great that it can save them from any threat, and how dreadful it is that they have suffered so, and how well we reward our allies? Then today was a day well-spent!"

More mutterings of a charitable and pleased nature broke out; Azula could play a crowd quite well.

Mr. Lyle played that game too. Deciding to seize the moment and claim a possible advantage for his own side, he said, "If I can be so bold, ladies and gentlemen, might I have the honor of knowing who precisely I'm working for here? You know me and my bosses, I don't know you, and that might make them a bit...finicky."

He chose his words carefully. The undertone of 'you DON'T want my bosses mad at you' was strong. "Who the hell do you think you are?" The burned man said.

"Uh, Wuya just told you," Mr. Lyle said.

"More disrespect, I'll show you!"

The troll waved him down. "Respect iz ever'fing, but screamin' 'bout it ain't gonna take ya far, meatbag. I say we give 'im what he wants. Fair trade, y'know?"

"He plays the game well," said the shadowy figure so much like reptiles and cruel things. "Let us make our positions clear, so we may strike more evenly."

"Meh," said the steamy man.

"Oh come on!" Said the agent again, now skulking somewhere near the Joker and being politely quiet with an air of being really bored. "Just hurry up and talk, I'm so damned tired of waiting!"

Silence at his cheek. Wuya said, "Then let all be heard." She waved down potential arguments, looking like she'd prefer to blast down anyone who opened their mouth against her will, and she said, "This is not a request. Stay quiet and do the polite thing!"

"Ah, all right," The burned man said. Following his example, everyone quieted.

Wuya gestured at the table for Mr. Lyle's benefit. "Mr. Lyle, in behalf of your employers, allow me to introduce the players in my grand scheme. The members of my inner circle, and the most valuable to me at the present time." A few of them went 'Hey!' at the 'present time' comment so she ignored them.

"First," She said, pointing to the man-shaped assemblege of machinery gushing acrid steam with each movement, his body composed of weapons and armaments, a metal beard on his face and terrible wounds still scarring him. He was tall and broad, a juggernaut of a man and fashioned in such a way that he had what looked initially like a massive beer gut and was actually the casing of an internal teleportation engine of all things, and he glared with wildly intense eyes, inner framework hissing with murderous tension.

He looked like he ought to be incredibly silly-looking; and yet, despite looking a bit like a steampunk mechanical Santa Claus, he seemed nothing less than an avatar of mass warfare. "May I introduce to you my general Smithy, former leader of the Smithy Gang. Head of our infantry-level armament research and develoupment division, has an executive say in the affairs of our war machine divisions as heavy vehicles and mechanized battle weapons go, the primary consultant for military deployment actions, and the man responsible for both the quality and quanity of our many war machines. He's improved countless designs for our weaponry both on an individual and warfare-scale, and his methods of mass-producing them are largely responsible for our commendable rates of armament-manufacture. We're not actually sure what he is, he won't tell us-" Smithy snarled at that. "But I'm reasonably certain he's some kind of weapon spirit. Or a entity of conquest, either seems likely. He certainly has an affinity for mass warfare and mass-produced infantry."

"By mine hand was the Star Road, which hears of mortal desires and empowers destiny that they may come about, broken!" Smithy said. "If my plans had worked, I could have had control over the granting of wishes, and the hopes of the Prime Material Plane! But I was foiled by a plumber, a princess of the Mushroom Kingdom and a prince of a land above, one of the spirit-warriors of the Star Road itself, and the king of the Koopa Kingdom! I serve for Wuya so that I may take my revenge on these worthy enemies, and set the route for all of my allies to claim everything that exist before the Heartless eat it!"

Wuya indicated the next one there; the Joker, who of course Mr. Lyle already knew. "You, and therefore I believe so have your employers, have already met the Joker. One of the greatest criminal masterminds and legendary figures of his world, and certainly the most feared, his expertise at chemical warfare and the use of different forms of poison have served me well. He is the most important and skilled of my field agents, those who go into the worlds either allied against me or of interest to me and subvert all those who would oppose me and deal with any problems I may have. his aptitudes are such that he serves me in a variety of roles as well; currently his duty is as the manager of my field agents. When there is a problem, I send him out to deal with it, and then it ceases to be a problem. Often with highly entertaining and appropriate fallout."

"Definitely one of my better gigs," the Joker said, cackling appreciatively. For a second, Mr. Lyle's eyes saw something else, a reflection of the Joker caught on the shined metal floors and showed another man entirely: a gaunt and tall Nordic man, long flame-red hair braided in the fashion of the ancient Norse, wearing green clothes that might have fine once but had been frayed to humbleness, scars along his mouth that suggested his lips had been sewn shut at some point and he'd cut his mouth open to speak properly. Chains made of spiritual force wound around him so tightly that his eyes were covered so that only their ever-shifting colors could be seen (and burning with godly flame) and his mouth was bound. his eyes stared wildly, with a hate so deep and pure and vicious that even Mr. Lyle with all his first-hand experience with devils and demons was frightened by it, and though he shook and trembled and screamed silently, the chained man could do nothing. And then the reflection was gone and he only saw the Joker's own reflection, and Mr. Lyle wondered what he had seen, and what Wuya was hiding.

Wuya turned to the next figure; tall and gangly, slouching in a seat a little too small for him, and wearing such clothes as an ordinary neighbor might wear; a straw hat, a frayed pair of denim pants, a striped sweater...it was mundane enough to suggest that he was just wearing them to make himself look more ridiculous. It failed; he was horribly burned on every visible bit of kin, his face a hideously grinning mess of scar tissue. Mr. Lyle glanced at the bladed contraption on his hand, bloodstained knives extending from his fingers, and found the man's eyes more worrying, for they felt...wrong, like this was just the surface shell worn by a thing sunken so far into debauchery and villainy that it's vestige of humanity was only a pale illusion to hide the monster he truly was. Mr. Lyle was grudgingly impressed, and the faint sense of loathsomeness that warded away everyone ele gave him the sense of a kindred spirit in this creature.

Wuya said, "Might I present to you Frederick Kruger, or as he prefers, Freddy. Frankly, not many people in my organization like him very much, but after I won his service from the gods of nightmare, I had to put him to some use. He certainly does well as our very finest psychic warrior, doing battle in the minds of our greatest foes when needed, but mostly we keep him busy as the warden of our own prison; after that nasty breakout got Traverse Town more refugees then I'd like, we constructed a new one from raw psychic material and have placed it in a secure location in the Astral Plane, where Freddy maintains his vigil. When we have an enemy we cannot kill or do not wish to, we send them there and leave him to do whatever he wishes with them. Such is the price of taking arms against my will. And such is the cost of betrayal; the standard punishment for treason in our organization is permanent imprisonment in his domain. Needless to say, they don't last long."

Freddy Krueger laughed nastily. "And we always have so much fun down in my 'domain'! I'm having the time of my life here. Well, not 'life' what with me being dead, but you get it."

Unexpectedly, he flickered, and for a moment, his body shifted, and proved to be a demonstrative illusion placed over a tall and skinny man (almost unhealthy-type lean) wearing the same clothes as Krueger (with much distaste) and a unpleasant expression, though it was rather hard to tell as he was wearing a grotesque mask of burlap arranged around a gasmask (and randomly stitched to give the impression of a grotesque leer). He stared at Mr. Lyle as indifferently as if Lyle were an insect in the collection; most of the others had been giving Krueger a wide berth, but they scooted back a bit from this man even more.

Wuya didn't skip a beat. "And such appropriate timing; Freddy Krueger is a creature of dream and nightmare and cannot act outside those realms or the ones of thought, such as the Astral Plane which he currently inhabits on our prison-world. In order to facilitate communication, we required a medium for him to contact us through and act on his behalf. That man is Doctor Jonathon Crane, more respectably known as the Scarecrow and from the same world as the Joker, and incidentally our head of psychological research with a specialty in the use of fear as a weapon."

"I find the experience absolutely fascinating," the Scarecrow said, adjusting his mask. "There are few moments of personal volition during these meetings, but it's quite worth for the data I've gathered, and the experiments I've been able to perform with this organization as my patron. And it's quite interesting to see the effects of randomized dissection done to a mind by a psychic entity; I do believe I could write reams of articles on just one such subject and I've been given hundreds, and thousands more to come."

Most of the others either had fixed grins or this or were actively not looking at him; whatever these experiments entailed were clearly disturbing even to these hardened people; only the cloaked figure seemed intrigued. Even Azula shuddered a little at the mere mention of them. "Quite," Wuya said flatly. "Now let Krueger back in, this is his meeting too."

"You simply can't wait to rid yourself of my presence," the Scarecrow said, smiling smugly, and Mr. Lyle felt the faint mental imprint of a psychic 'trigger' being pulled, and then Krueger reappeared in the Scarecrow's place, shuddering convulsively. "That lunatic gives me the creeps," He spat.

"I find him quite charming, really," the creature sitting next to Freddy said wistfully.

"Moving along," Wuya said quickly. She indicated the ogrish stone-man. "Ah, someone who's a touch more civil-minded. I am sure, thanks to those amazingly complicated means the devils employ to control certain large-scale businesses and obfuscate their involvement in such, that my enterprise here is being funded by a number of extremely wealthy and influential men and women who intend to make a profit on my war as well as insuring that their own interests survive. He is hardly the wealthiest of them all but mister Crysophrase here is the administrator of the business end of my burgeoning empire; creating good PR for our image when we reveal ourselves in full, investing and manipulating opportunities to fuel our coffers and see that they stay filled, using economics as a weapon when it seems advisable, and a host of other dutie I really have no time to care about. And honestly, what respectable group of criminal masterminds and monsters are we if we don't have at least one gangster? And a troll gangster at that!"

"It'z more 'gentleman's buisness', ya know?" asked Crysophrase in a way that made it clearly rhetorical. He was a troll of the particular sort native to the peculiar world called the Discworld; many trolls turned to stone in sunlight around the worlds, but they saved time by already being made of stone, a sillicate lifeform with brains that overheated and got dumb in the heat. Crysophrase was a fairly atypical member of the image his people liked to cultivate; like all trolls he was absolutely massive and stood a few feet over human height, at least as broad as he was tall and densely composed of stoney material (perhaps marble for him), a brutish face and a leering grin with diamonds for teeth. Unlike your average street troll, though, he was wearing a very finely made buisness suit that fit his frame well, his body appeared to have been artificially grounded down and all the cragggy bits smoothed out until he was as shiny and polished as a pebble. his face seemed set in a permanent scowl of patient aggression, but that wasn't odd for a Disc troll and he would have seemed a largely average trollish businessman if not for the many rings on his fingers, each one set with diamonds (made from the teeth of other trolls after their owners met with terrible fates, sometimes involving garden rockeries).

Crysophrase nodded politely at some inner thought and tipped a tophat that looked quite new (for one, he'd forgotten to remove the pricetag. As it did, Mr. Lyle noticed that there was a cooling device in that hat, and that the top of his head was shining with magical glyphs radiating raw elemental cold; trolls thought better and quicker the colder their brains were, and this was a troll that could outsmart his rivals even when he was caught in the middle of summer. "Me and dem dat work fer me, we'z always lookin' ta keep our own nice and happy. I'm in this fer da trolls, and da Disc itself! Don't want dem Heartless monsters ripping my home ta nothing, eh? And maybe change it a bit, make it better fer my people. Make things a bit more suitable for the clans, I say! E'veryfing else is just a bonus, and dere's plenty of that here. War's good for profit, and I've already made a fortune wiffout havin' ta do anyfing fer reals!" his voice, loud and jubilant and not quite suitable for him, said a lot. It said, 'Oh ho, you can trust me, little squishies, I'm playing you all like a harp when I talk like a good ol' troll right off the street and down from the mountains and I'm going to dump you like rotten fish when things go bad or if I get a chance to take over the whole thing, but it wouldn't be in good taste to just admit it, would it?'.

Mr. Lyle looked at him for a moment longer; compared to some of the literal monsters in this assembly, the troll seemed downright pleasant, and even a little ridiculous (whoever heard of a Disc troll in a suit?)... but Mr. Lyle had heard things, suspiciously well-timed organizations popping up looking completely innocent but in the perfect place to set up supply lines for this multiverse-spanning war Wuya was dreaming up and they were supplied by rings upon rings of small self-funding buisnesses that were supplied by other businesses from dozens of other worlds, and they had barely any paper trail to follow even for devils to scent out, and so many other small schemes of viciously underhanded (and devil-impressing) plays of business cutting down every world-spanning organization that might exist in opposition to Wuya and being folded into her as-yet invisible chain of command, all their assets funneled into her own, and thousands of other small but culmatively massive tricks. Well, thought Mr. Lyle, that answered the question of where Wuya was getting the resources to create all her assembly lines and manufacturing for war machines and supply troops and all those other little things an enterprise like this needed; another army, armed with economics and operating under the blitzkrieg method, and this troll was it's most fearsome general.

He looked up, and saw Crysophrase looking at him with just the hint of a smug smile. Azula's own smirk was a little more worrying, like she was already aware that it was dawning on how monolithic it was for Mr. Lyle... and his growing surety that this was the finest opportunity for the Lower Planes that had come in countless millennia.

"And the last of my inner circle, by his artifice are we preserved from all who would invade us (apart from those foolish enough to employ the Heartless' methods), our ambassador to the True Fae and for some reason the supreme commander of our naval forces, Dzarumazh the Deathless!" Wuya exclaimed, and indicated the shadowy thing that creeped out Freddy Krueger. Dzarumazh turned at the attention, focusing on Mr. Lyle (and though Lyle did not know it, Dzarumazh had changed somewhat since the meeting last night, for his co-location avatar changed looks as he pleased); a tall and oddly proportioned figure in a dark cloak seemingly weaved from the finest of gossamer materials...and yet that seemed to be all it was, a fundamentally empty shape made of glamorous materials. There was probably a metaphor in that. And that too changed a moment later, the inside of the cloak shifted, and out of it shone a reptilian and coldly bright eye set in a mess of writhing scaled flesh and faerie-fire burning from within, a changing chaotic mess bound together by a sense of thematics, and a will so blindly alien and inhuman that even a demon would shudder at it's otherness, and all a suggestion of dragon-ness about it.

"Good day to you, hell's-pawn," Dzarumazh the Deathless said coolly, in a voice elegant and precisely clipped and the words nearly slithering. his cloak warped and shifted, the chaotic essence within shielded by it, and Mr. Lyle observed that it was floating above the ground and a bit away from the table...away from all the iron making up so much of Wuya's fortress. "I trust you are impressed?"

"In a manner of speaking," Mr. Lyle said, trying to digest the True Fae thing. For a moment he really wanted to sit down and ponder whether or not this was a sign that Wuya was well and truly out of her mind.

The Fae, his patrons and employers had told him, were something you stayed as far away from unless you were, without any shadow of doubt, superior to a god in making deals and holding to the letter of your word; all of the fae were strange things, but the True Fae, dwelling in their nightmare realm of Arcadia and amusing themselves in their never-ending conflicts and experiments with the mortals they enslaved and mutated, were gods among the fae, living incarnations of everything that was worst about the most chaotic expressions of Neutrality, drawing power from contracts or deals with reality itself (and anyone they could bargain with) and taking existence by putting on a narrative role and molding themselves to it even as they devoured every shred of sentience from their mortal prey. Among the fae, the Unseelie, cruel and rapacious, spurned the True Fae, and the Seelie, aligned with the Upper Planes as they were, waged a cold war against them. Certainly the True Fae never involved themselves in affairs like this, and Mr. Lyle said so. "What do you get out of this?"

"Amusement and opportunity," Dzarumazh explained. "Wuya is entering the most grand battle I have ever witnessed...and I have been around a very, very long time. Imagine it, boy. Not just cities or realms or countries in war. Not just worlds fighting other worlds, or solar systems or galaxies tearing themselves apart. And not even dimensions or para-planes! This shall be a war unlike any I have witnessed, a war to dwarf the Time Wars of legend!

"Universes battling universes, all that they can offer taken and their people made into armies or servants, thrown into the machines of warfare, the entire multiverse spinning in concert as it's own component battle for dominance, and above and below it the Planes themelves convene to push their own agendas forward, and all existence itself shall be at stake...for the Heartless shall rise and devour all who are not strong enough to earn their allegience, and they shall also devour everything that does not belong to the winners. All shall fall, everything will die, and the winners will remake all in their own image. They shall make themselves unto gods."

Dzarumazh stared fixed, and a jagged smile appeared on his face. "It shall be...magnificent." his eyes stared, and Mr. Lyle saw that there was a terrible emptiness behind his eyes; no real personality besides what this alien mind thought suitable to imitate sentience, nothing but a terrible will, and a hunger to consume all that lay before it, and it seemed that this thing was but a force of nature with a voice and a semblence of self-awareness. Nothing but hunger and the urge to survive, and a totally callous inability to realize that other people were, in fact, not just there for his own amusement.

Meh, Mr. Lyle decided, dismissing the advice of his superiors. "Good to know." Dzarumazh bowed, mockingly.

Wuya finished. "Lastly, but certainly foremost, is my own protege, Fire Lord Azula." Wuya gave Azula a warm smile, and the young woman in question made an mock-bow, clearly delighting in the favor Wuya showed on her. "I hardly need to reiterate that she is certainly my most trusted advisor and ally in these matters, nor that due to my...improvements on her existing elemental affinity and infusion of greater powers, she's certainly among my most powerful of allies. She is my agent in many things, and sadly she has been rather too busy to attend meetings; I believe this is the last she will attend for quite a while. She has an expedition to a peculiar phenomenon to examine shortly."

"Oh, the life of actual competence and skill," Azula said smugly. "It gives one so much to do."

"You know she's a traitor waiting to happen, right?" Smithy said.

"Am not," Azula and Wuya said at once. Smithy rolled his eyes, and Wuya ignored him in favor of focusing on Mr. Lyle once more. "So. Now you know the identity of my inner circle. Care to share any thoughts before you ferry it away to your infernal masters? And I don't mean 'infernal' as an insult, merely a precise statement!"

There was a weight of importance on things, and Mr. Lyle thought. 'A cranky smith with armies to churn out at his command, a supervillain clown with...SOMETHING chained inside him, a seriously creepy dream-master with psychic powers inside an even creepier psychologist obsessed with fear, a scarily competent troll gangster - and I can't believe I just THOUGHT that last one - and a True Fae dragon-ish thing. Also, Azula and Wuya herself, and I think Azula's scarier than everything else except maybe Dzarumazh. Guy gives me the creeps.'

"Your choice in close allies is a touch...eclectic," Mr. Lyle said, trying to summon all his powers of pursuasive inoffensiveness and unfortunately he didn't have much to begin with. "Or is that putting it too bluntly."

Many glares were directed at him. He felt a distinct rise in inclinations to kill him on the spot. "You must understand, Mr. Lyle," Wuya said calmly. "These men are the movers and shakers. The men in administration and command, not those who do the brunt of the legwork, or else secure absolutely vital elements of my infrastructure and authority. Certainly, I have many that would be considered more respectable-" And there was a loud outcry at that and Wuya gestured, creating a field of utter silence to cut off their words. They stopped trying, getting the hint, and Wuya dispelled it before continuing to talk as if nothing had happened. "But those soldiers and lesser generals, they may be more well-known and fearsome, but they are not responsible for the actions of my entire command structure. These men are."

"Huh," Mr. Lyle said, not sure of what else to say. He was honestly a little disappointed; he was aware that illuminaries such as the fearsome Megatron of the Decepticons was commander of the mecha division of her armies, or that the commander of her fleets was none other than Wrath incarnate, Fuhrer King Bradley formerly of Amestris. Considering that she did apparently not think they were suitable for her inner circle or positions of supreme authority, that suggested that either she had absolutely spectacularly awful taste in close allie or was playing a more complicated game than anyone else here knew. Or possibly both, they were hardly mutually exclusive. "I'll see to it that my superiors know your opinion on the matter."

Wuya rolled her eyes. "If you're quite done failing at being a toady to people that you know can't stand you, there is other business to attend to-" The figure standing in the shadows, and who hadn't been named by Wuya, so clearly unaffiliated with her inner circle, coughed meaningfully. "Yes, yes, I'm getting to you, stop taking attention from me!"

"Woman-child," Her agent grumbled.

"I heard that!" Wuya snapped back. "Artificial lifeform!"

"That's not an insult, it's an identification!"

"Well, nobody likes them anyway!"

"Now you're just being hurtful."

"Obviously! What part of 'we are overtly and proudly Evil' did you not pay attention to?"

"Focus, please?" Azula prompted.

"Hrm? Oh, right, right." Wuya coughed. The figure snickered. "Well, all things considered, I think it's best if we at least are able to leave this meeting on a high note...and ah, this time NOT involving trained singing monkeys follow us around with operatic theme songs based on the overall mood of the meeting. We had six pierced eardrums from the last time, and the monkey lunch tasted terrible."

The Joker shrugged. "If we can't liven things up, why even have me around?"

"Because you're so very good at killing things I don't want being alive anymore."

"Oh, yeah. That."

"Back on topic? Good! Mine point is this: Kimblee's exploits in Traverse Town are not...perhaps, what we could definitively call an unqualified success. In certain respects, it failed miserably, even if some of our overall goals were advanced." She shrugged, probably because the matter didn't seem to be important to her. "So I'd like to have our attention focused to actually advancing our plans. To that end, it has come to my attention that our interests on the Oddworld may be compromised; I'm certain most of you remember that disaster when the Dark Warrior Program we carried out on behalf of a certain Baron Praxus in exchange for the secrets of eco technical secrets failed on the minor account of the only surviving test subject breaking loose?"

"Yep," Smithy said. "The clean-up was a real mad bastard fixing up. Lost a lot of important equipment too. I put a lot of effort into that stuff, too." A nearby attendent whispered something to him. "Oh, and a lot of guards and security demons died and there was a mass breakout on our last prison-planet before Krueger got a promotion. I guess."

"Meh, loss of minion life, who care?" The Joker said. "There's more of that where they came from."

"Where do they come from?" Dzarumazh asked suddenly. Virtually as one, the rest of the room stared at him. "I'd always assumed you merely shaped them from assumed existences as I would, but the way you said it, it sounds as though they were pre-existing. An unusual concept, to be sure."

"For the love of whatever I would swear on if practically every evil deity didn't hate me, move away from me!" Freddy Krueger snapped at Dzarumazh. "It's damn creepy is what it is!"

"But you are just so fascinating!" Dzarumazh said. "Come! Let me bring you back to my own domains! I could teach you of fear itself, tear loose the semblence of mortality from yourself and remake your essence in forms a thousandfold more glorious than what you know! Come and join me!"

"...Are you coming on to me? Because it sounds you're coming on to me."

"Would you be interested if I was, hypothetically speaking?"

Crysophrase facepalmed. "Are you regretting that I listed these people as my most trusted and capable administrators?" Wuya quietly asked Azula.

"On your behalf, most certainly," Azula said, acutely embarassed.

"Has anyone here wondered about my motion to call ourselves the idea of officially naming ourselve the Legion of Doom?" The Joker asked suddenly. "Because I wonder about that a lot."

"Gentlemen, please, stop being stupid for at least five and a half minutes!" Wuya said. "I realize this is asking quite a lot-"

"Hey!" they said.

"But give it a try, hrm? I have good news, you know!"

They settled down, grumpily. "I know what it is!" The Joker said. He opened his mouth to tell everyone.

Wuya gestured, and bands of mystic force wrapped around his mouth and silenced him. He fumed in silence. Wuya said, "My point is, after Jak escaped, we lost a valuable military asset, much damage was done, there was a huge prisoner break-out, and frankly it was a very good thing that we didn't make it obvious about our presence then or our plot would have been blown open."

"We're already conquering worlds, dominating galaxies and making the moves on whole universes and feeding the ones we don't want to Heartless," Smithy pointed out. "Seems a bit like we never had any subtlety to begin with."

Wuya waved the observation aside. "Blown open to people in a position to notice. Please, at least try paying attention. Now, I'm fairly certain it's obvious that Jak just up and disappeared, and we were never sure if he died or just went into hiding, or that this inexplicable group that appears to be working against our interests without being discovered by us hid him away. Well, as it's transpired, not too long ago our Glukkon allies on Oddworld have had a rash of attacks matching something very much like the Dark Warrior Project, almost certainly Jak himself!"

"...Really!" Smithy said, showing genuine interest for the first time. "A good time to get some emperical data, I'd say?"

"Indeed. Additionally, I've had some doubts about the Glukkons for some time. Certain enemies of ours have disappeared in their airspace, relics and armaments and other such treasures that should have been delivered to us after being taken as spoils of war have no been brought to us." Wuya scowled. "Among other little problems. I suspect that they may not be as willing to support us as they've led us to believe. Thus, by my leave, Joker-" and here the Joker gave a wave. "Has assigned an agent eminently suited to deal with such matters and he...she...whatever the hell it is...to assist our agents present on that world in their endeavor and determine if the Glukkons are playing straight and deal with them appropriately if they are and subvert them more fully to our cause. Or just kill them and let the Heartless loose, whatever works. And if they are truly our allies after all, simply do whatever seems appropriate to keep them aware of where the chain of command is."

"And who is this agent?" Mr. Lyle said. He had enough of a dramatic flair to know when a introduction was needed.

"Uh, duh," The figure in the shadows, said, stepping forward. "Me!" He proved to be alarmingly thin and fairly short, and Mr. Lyle observed more intently that the agent was altogether quite pretty in a 'dark hair and ivory-colored skin' way.

He approached so they were all in view and grinned, waving at them, a long black coat fitting too tightly over close-fitting coveralls somehow converted into shorts and a bared midriff, and with the way he was smiling it was plain to see that his unusually large teeth were uncannily like a sharks'. Half-lidded eyes blinked lazily. "Hello," he said, and even his voice sounded like a womans', lending to the feeling of gender transcendance. "I am Envy the Jealous."

The Joker waved back. Envy smirked at him. The others of Wuya's inner circle gave Envy evaluating looks, and of all of them only Azula seemed to have any passing familiarity with him; she touched her fingers together and looked at him calmly. "A bit impatient to be working, I trust?" She asked.

Envy looked at her and Wuya. "Hey, I just go where the boss tells me, it's all good."

"And why should this...creature be of use?" Dzarumazh said coldly. He sniffed. "Many lives. I smell...I can feel them in you, creature. So very, very many, living and dying and squealing as they lay imprisoned...it's actually quite lulling."

"Oh come off it, the crazy dragon is just being mystically obnoxious," Smithy said dismissively.

"I most certainly am not! Just look at him...her...it, whatever!"

"I don't actually have a gender," Envy said helpfully. "Those are for boring people! But people call me male pronouns anyway. Go figure."

Crysophrase raised his hand. Wuya nodded at him, permitting him to speak his piece. "Ya say diz fella is a good agent for dis matter, yeah?" Wuya nodded again. "I ain't seein' it. What's he got to bring to it? What's he good at?"

Envy started to speak. Wuya waved her hand and he quieted. "The Joker picked him out specifically for this mission," Wuya said flatly. "That is all you need to know."

There was a lot of murmuring, and a wicked smirk from Azula, and no one dared to push Wuya. "He's proper creepifyin', is what he is," Crysophrase muttered, but not so loud that it was disagreement.

Wuya said, "So, we are setting our house in order, we got what we wanted (more or less) from the Traverse Town incident, I say we move on."

"But what got accomplished?!" Krueger demanded.

"Uh..." Wuya paused. "SOMETHING. Something got accomplished. And that something is top secret, you must absolutely never know or it will be undone."

"Liar. You just want to cover up that we didn't get anything done."

"That's not true, we've been doing quite well recently!"

"What about that loss when we took over the planet Ooo?" Dzarumazh remarked. "Kimblee was sent there in the intial attacks, if I recall."

"Ooo belongs to use now, too," Wuya reminded him.

"After a very long campaign where we suffered countless set-backs, lost a shocking amount of troops and just barely managed to hold everything we got. And to make thing worse, we never actually got the main leaders or great hero there, they and the rest of the planet's population got evacuated somehow! And after we sent in the Reavers, too! Those are a last resort that don't involve planetary annihilation!"

"And also we lost my father Ozai when they took him prisoner and left with him," Azula said, seemingly as an afterthought.

Dzarumazh waved it aside as an unimportant problem. "General Ozai was quite talented at shock warfare, but he was hardly a real loss. When you have to have cybernetic limbs augmented with portals to the Elemental Plane of Fire just to fight on an even level with our strongest warriors, you are disposable." Azula nodded at that. "Regardless, more losses is precisely what cannot be afforded."

"Yes, well, you can't stop your changelings from escaping!" Azula retorted.

Dzarumazh looked at her cunningly. "And what makes you think I don't want them escaping? I have plenty more humans to play with after what you've allowed me to take."

Azula didn't handle refusal of dominance in any arena well. "Why, you...!" She stood up, flames shooting up.

Envy backed away in instinctive terror. "I, uh, I'm gonna go get a ship and head out, okay? Gotta make a stop at the requisitions department first."

"Ah, sure, you do that, I'll just send you the details of your mission," Wuya said warily as Envy fled and the bickering began in earnest.

Azula and Dzarumazh began yelling at each other. Krueger basked in the negative emotions. Wuya sighed. Crysophrase complained that this was not how meeting were supposed to go. The Joker mumbled through his 'no talking' magical bonds. Mr. Lyle took notes on the better-sound invectives.

Overall, it was not one of the prouder days for the forces of evil. But on the other hand it made the forces of good look positively sane by comparision.

---

The three mysterious beings, bearing witness to all the events that had transpired previously and more besides, were silent for a moment, thinking.

"Well!" The lion-man said to the aetheric device they used to scry, squatting on the nebulous ground and clapping his paws with a noise like thunder. "That, uh, that could have gone a lot worse."

The other two entities look at him, then at each other, and stared at the scrying device for a long time. "Yeah, I've worked with worse," the hooded one agreed, nodding his head and causing small flecks of pearly material to slid out from whatever lurked under his hood. his light-tendrils flicked against each other like a man snapping his fingers. "The Keyblade has picked a complete lunatic that's teamed up with other complete lunatics and will undoubtedly team up with more complete lunatics, and by all indications that'll work in our favor."

"Agreed," the other two said.

They basked in a moment in satisfaction over the victory over evil, mingled with sadness for the lives that they could not have saved, though even that was made sweeter by the knowledge that those souls were now moving forward to the afterlives reckoned for them.

Eventually, the machine-man spoke. "I...I must ask. When they summoned that...god they pulled up to deal with Kimblee's sentence...I have never seen the like of him."

"Me neither," the lion-man agreed. "I'm not sure if he was a god at all. He just, I dunno, seemed...bigger than that. Like something bigger than gods, bigger than all the things that come before concepts and existence. And that...place Kimblee looked into!"

"I've never seen the like of it," the hooded one said wonderingly. "It was like an Outer Plane unto itself. It felt...Good, I suppose, but strange. It was just too big. It felt-"

"Primordial," said the machine-man solemnly. They were silent, and then nodded in agreement. It was the only proper word.

"You are certain you do not know where he came from?" The machine-man said heisitantly.

"No," the other two confirmed. "I have never seen the like of it," the hooded one said.

"Me either," the lion-man said.

Again, they were silent. With all they knew under their purview, all the formiddable knowledge of the Upper Planes at potential access, the burning sureness of knowing all that the Upper Planes knew...this was disturbing indeed. Or else that the Upper Planes did know of it, but did not wish to make it known.

Eventually the hooded one said, "Well, wherever this Kadmek came from, it doesn't seem like a threat. And really, we could use all the allies we can find if we're gonna pull off our big agenda to smash down Wuya and make the best of this clustermuck she's making. Right now, that little guy with the Keyblade is looking like our best bet to keep the fiends from getting a claw up into anything, purify the Heartless, and on that note maybe finding out where the hell the Heartless are actually coming from." He looked distantly for a moment. "We need to meet up with others focused on this Heartless thing before we make any conclusions, and gather more evidence beforehand."

"Agreed," the other two said solemnly.

"That is why we're here, of course," The machine-man said. his tone turned happy as he added, "My home."

"Oh...yeah," The lion-man said. "I forgot. This is where you wound up when you died."

The machine-man said nothing. The hooded one leaned in near the lion-man and quietly said, "Awkward."

"It is not," The machine-man said indignantly.

"Is too! You're all embarrased and stuff. At least, I think you are. Kind of hard to tell; your face goes all solid when you don't want to express yourself."

The lion-man turned aside, noticing that the walls were slowly turning transparent and the floor was rising. "Uh, guys?"

"Hold on a sec'." The hooded one continued. "See? Your face is doing it right now. I can see your mouth and stuff kind of melt into a single piece of metal. Not sure how you're talking."

"I am an petitioner-spirit that is infused with the power of Good and Law in the tradition of transcending my previous mortal limitations!" The machine-man said indignantly. "My methods of speech have many ways in which to occur. And you can talk without your mouth too."

"Uh, guys?" The lion-man said, gesturing frantically at the rooftop gently sliding away and a gentle breeze flowing in from outside, carrying smells that were the apothesis of the sea itself; the salty smell was so crisp it could make an unprepared person dizzy, quite able to unseat even a wary mind and broaden the consciousness like steam opened pores in sickly skin, gently inspiring connections and thoughts that lead to the beginings of personal journeys to true contentment and enlightenment and other awesome stuff like that. The impression seemed to be that they were at sea, and it didn't hurt that the ground under them rocked slightly, as though they were standing in a boat that was riding a slightly bigger than normal wave.

They continued to ignore him. "Well, I can talk without speaking too, but you have the advantage of having psionic powers before you died," The hooded one retorted. "You had a headstart. Very uncool of you to bring it up."

"You're the one who started it!" The machine-man protested. "And may I remind you that I was stripped of those very psionic abilities before I died? About forty-five seconds, actually."

"That's some impressive precision."

"Well, it was only my death, you know, I was paying attention. I certainly didn't want people to make inappropiate assumptions based on an incorrect matter of my death if anyone asked. The other petitioners can get a bit much about it; not overly so, since I wound up here, but they do enjoy heckling until they spiritually grow out of it."

"Guys!" The lion-man said, starting to grow exasperated. The floor had already risen past the walls, a lot like an elevator lift, and had raised flush with the ceiling to prop them right out into the open air. The scrying device, in the meantime, had quietly deactivated, as sensing when it's users were no longer paying attention and were arguing in a petty debate was a standard feature.

"Hah, you think you got it bad?" The hooded man said unhappily. "At least you got to die in a badass way! Wuya herself killed you and unintentionally made your mortal name into a martyr! I got assasinated by that guy Wuya's sending out to Oddworld!" He paused, and started to sob theatrically. "I didn't even get to say goodbye to my wife and little girl! DADDY DIDN'T GET TO SAY GOODBYE!"

"...Ah. I can see why that would be distressing," The machine-man said awkwardly. "But I recall you being the first one to greet them when they wound up here."

"Oh, yeah, duh," The hooded one said, inexplicably recovering immediately. "But it's just not the same, y'know? For their sakes, I had to tell everyone a glamourized story of my death that somehow is more well-known then my actual death. And now you know why the gods think I got killed slaying a dragon made of carnivorous goldfish while saving the incarnation of my planet atop a erupting volcano in a jousting duel fought with live swordfish which were also lasers. Why they believe that, I don't know, but apparently credibility isn't a big deal up Here."

"GUYS!" The lion-man said, his nerves strung out.

"What?" The machine-man said, looking disappointed in the loss of temper. "You really should calm down. It's not good for your...well, you don't have to worry about blood pressure, but surrendering to angry outbursts like that isn't good for your emotional well-being."

"And it makes you look like a jerk," The hooded one said. "I should know! My buddy Roy does it all the time! Mostly because I did it, but it looks like sixty percent of his workforce are doing it for me. Hah, great times, great times..."

"Are you done yet," The lion-man said, dully irritated.

"Yeah, I guess so. What's so important you needed to yell about it?"

"Guys, we're here."

They turned around, illuminated by the ever-present moonlight, and grew respectfully silent for a short moment. "Ah," the hooded one said. Or perhaps he said awe. It came out to the same, though it was a bit weird that he would say his emotional reaction to what he was looking at.

The sky curved above them, an endless expanse of gentle darkness interrupted by thousands of gleaming lights that were stars only in the sense that they resembled stars (and were in fact not naturally occuring nuclear fusion reactors but literally glowing light-beings living in the sky and tending to their own mysterious matters) and gathered together in mysterious ever-changing formations that made constellations that invariably spelled out rebuses that inspired great thoughts in whoever understood them. The sky, it was plain to see, did not act like the sky of a merely mortal realm would, as it had no horizon but continued on from one point to another, illuminating them with lunar light that didn't appear to come from a moon. That made sense, given that there was no moon. The sky, in many respects, simply was, and was almost certainly there to provide lighting and look pretty. (And you needed skies. It tended to make people uncomfortable if they died and there wasn't a sky.)

The three of them walked forward, the hooded one pausing to pick up the scying device under one arm and easily carrying it despite the weight, and they stepped forward on the bridge of a most unusual-looking ship. Composed of the same wondrous and otherwordly material as the walls in their previous room, it gleamed softly in the omnipresent moonlight, light penetrating through the transparent layers of it's outer surface and refracted from the inner to make a glow that suggested the entire color spectrum, and it was a radiance gentle enough not to hurt the eyes even after months of looking at it (even though time was very subjective here), because no one likes having their eyes hurt by pretty things. The ship itself seemed almost alive, it's shape growing according to mysterious processes and continually shifted in surprising but benign ways, swelling into new configurations based on whatever seemed to work for the moment without ever compromising it's interior or passengers, and it was entirely possible that it was just bigger on the inside than the outside. Right now, it was more or less just a flat surface with many tall extensions rising from it like little viewing towers for people to stand on and check out the view. Many of the passengers were doing just that.

The lion-man twitched at the sound of something that sounded like a tremendous oar hitting the water and looked aside; he settled down when he saw that it was only an enormous flipper rising out of the wine-dark holy water and back again to propel it from under the ship. He looked down at the floor, willing it to become totally transparent for him (and indeed it did, so that he was the only one that saw it) and he saw past the very bottom of the ship to see the beginings of an enormous shell that the ship seemingly grew out of, and from there it was easy to see the giant celestial sea turtle that their ship was sitting upon, moving it through the sea and remarkably good-natured by the whole thing.

Many of them seemed fascinated by the ocean they were in; it stretched on seemingly forever (and in fact it did), a gentle expanse of wine-dark water broken by the small islet spun out of memory or imagination by a soul with a particularily powerful will and growing bigger, a few larger islands formed by communities of like-minded petitioners who hadn't felt the need to seek enlightenment yet, and not so far away (and yet so large that the trick of perspective made it seem so far away), there was the largest island of all, so big it wasn't an island at all, generating the light around them and shining like an embodiment of all moons, and from it there rose...

The Holy Mountain. The heart of this plane that was the abode of the worthy and righteous dead: the Seven Mounting Heavens of Celestia.

(The Hitchhiker's Guide, which does have articles about the Outer Planes, takes pains to mention that while the Outer Plane of Lawful Goodness shares the name of many similar things - including the common name of Good planer creatures such as angels, the god-princess of the lovely and purely good land of Equestria, and many other thing - it is not neccesarily related to them. Even if they all also happen to be literally made of Goodness.)

The entire plane seemed to revolve around it, the apothesis of all mountains and still so much more than only a mountain, both the size of a continent and bigger than a planet and encapsulating universes within itself and still so much bigger than that. It's size was mind-breaking and defied the limits of sanity, piercing through the sky and it's peak completely out of view; in fact it was so big that all they could see was it's base, and that alone with huge enough to make a mind bend, edge close to breaking, and through that bending of understanding of it's size the mind could also come close to understanding it's size. That was the nature of the Holy Mountain; to experience the mountain was to face your own flaws and surpass them, and it was common fact that to climb the mountain was to become a better person, because you couldn't scale even a single one of it's universe-spanning layers without becoming a better person.

To accept that you were flawed, to know it deep in your bones and to yearn to better yourself and become something better that the limits of life and all it's pains had denied you was to begin the step and start ascending, to transcend Celestia's first layer of existence and find the beginings of unearthing the real you. And one after another, the layers could be moved past, sin and weakness and pain let free from you and no longer weighing you down from moving up and up...until you found the Seventh Heaven, and none knew what awaited the people who achieved such spiritual perfection.

It was a fitting metaphor for the true nature of this plane of ultimate Law and Good, and the final destination of those who died with that same love of altruism and the rule of law in their hearts. For a moment, the three of them watched it growing closer, shining in the endless sea of holy water like a enormous lighthouse calling the righteous dead home. Only the machine-man could truly call this place home, as the other two did not share the touch of Lawfulness in his soul, but they still had the touch of that eternal world-making force mortals saw fit to place into their little conceptual mind-boxes and call it Good, and the Holy Mountain both influenced and was born of mortal exemplars of virtue and heroism before it was touched by all that was worthy in the rule of law, and that essential glorious blaze of pure Goodness resonated in them, calling them home.

Perhaps that was why the three of them watched in trembling, wonderstruck silence at the sight of the still distant but titanic mountain growing closer as their turtle-ship swam closer, tiny ridges at the immense beaches around it just barely recognizable as enormous sprawling settlements and established cities and metropoli older than worlds, encompassing untold billions of worlds and civilizations and cultures that had been brought with the worthy dead. They could see little plateaus and valleys in the sides of that mountain, big enough to contain continents here at the metaphorically smallest layer and still so small compared to the rest of it that they looked absurdly tiny.

There was much in the Holy Mountain, and now it was waiting for them, and so were the other entities of the Upper Planes, Powers and gods and angels and beings of so many other names and titles, all good and prepared to doom themselves to save the multiverse, and gathered together to determine what to do next.

(Celestia liked to nudge people into a little mutual cooperation, though it forced no one into anything. Such a thing would have been against the nature of the plane.)

The three of them glanced at each other, and with the pure goodness radiating from the mountain's light they couldn't help but smile. Here, in this law-touched bastion of Good as worthy as all the Upper Planes but suitable for their purposes as a homebase for the time being, there could be no other response.

As they did, they noticed several lights appearing the sky just around Mount Celestia and come gently into the water, splashing deeply and swimming to the beach, water-logged and shining with the effects of holy water on the mental-matter of their newly unbodied souls, and at that they smiled some more.

Of the people Kimblee had killed, it seemed that some of them had been aligned with the principles of the Seven Mounting Heavens of Celestia, and that their afterlife was here. It would be, they surmised, like waking up from the most awful nightmare and being delievered into the arms of a life they could have never imagined but had unknowingly longed for ever since they were intellectual capable of wishing for something better. And now that something had brought them home.

The hooded one smiled peacefully, and he thought that even with the people that Kimblee had truly killed, he still hadn't won. If anything, he had only ushered them to where they deserved to be, a place where they could be free of pain and loss. Where every tear would be wiped away, and the sadly neccesary detritus of a fallen existence could be shorn away by their own efforts. And where, just maybe, the Heartless' doom and purification could be begun in earnest.

They think they have the advantage, the hooded one thought quietly, thinking of the demons and devils and evil Powers who thought to control the Heartless for their own desires. He thought of the Balance, that miserable ceasefire that prevented the Heavens and Hells alike from waging active war on each other through the medium of the Prime Material plane, or the realms where the mortals lived, and how the fiends were so arrogant to think that it actually gave them the upper hand.

He considered Wuya's vile intentions for the Heartless, her sick and depraved vision of law imposed over whatever the Heartless left behind, and the layers upon layers of plots and subterfuge and double-crosses and other such things already in progress by her side and the fiendish entities supporting her, unaware that they would collapse under their own weight given enough time. He thought of Zim, the Keyblade's chosen champion, and the carnage he had wrecked on Kimblee's own small-minded but equally malicious plans from completely out of nowhere. And then he thought of what the Keyblade's champion would do when he caught wind of Wuya's plotting and her intention to use him as a pawn in those evil schemes that had contributed to his world's doom, espicially when he knew just how dearly Zim had come to loathe all things that stunk of law twisted with evil.

She won't know what hit her, the hooded one thought, quite satisfied.