This chapter can be considered a bit of a 'things that happen on the way to the next arc' deal; it always bugged me that, with all the huge amounts of worlds to got lost in, Sora, Donald and Goofy, in the original Kingdom Hearts, somehow went STRAIGHT to the worlds that their enemies were mucking about in! (Well, at least had an interest in. Except for Deep Jungle, that was more setting establishment than anything else.)

I really like the notion of Zim's crew getting involved in a bunch of random weird adventures, as that's usually what I picture them doing when I think of cool stuff for this story.

Minor side note, if something is expanded on or has a fairly long sequence, it's probably important to the plot.

Disclaimer: I don't own any copyrighted materials.

The Astral Plane was vast, an infinite 'sea' for any adventurers to get happily lost in for potentially their entire lives and that of all their children's generations to come.

For Zim's love of meaningful conflict, and the joy of adventure, it was absolutely ideal.

The Paragon, after leaving the port town where they had dealt with Darvhog, had moved en route to the nearest world portal. Zim assumed that they could just pop in there and examine a other worlds there and extrapolate that universe's nature from the data thus acquired, but this was not to be, as Morte put a stop to Zim's further plan to just examine nearby world portals; the Astral Plane's portals, while there was some scheme of arrangement, did not often make sense. The lights appeared without any notion of relation to each other, and often going through one portal and then the one right next to it took one to worlds thousands of universes away.

They'd been on a beeline towards the first world for them to visit, which had been determined to be totally uncatalogued in the databanks, perhaps not even inhabited, but it was still a start. Sadly, the trip there was quite eventful, troubled by many encounters; a githyanki raiding party or two (neither had any idea who Darvhog was), a sudden squall of psychic winds that blew them off course for nearly half a day, Calvin playing with the intercom and accidentally insulting all the mothers of a passing fleet of orcs (who had gotten so lost they'd broken reality and dropped into the Astral) and having their entire federation swear bloody revenge upon Zim when the Paragon just shoved them out of its way, were delayed for a few more hours when Zuko had a staring contest with a space dragon and refused to back down, accidentally popped out in the universe Crucible existed in and were chased by a sentient (and hungry) black hole mob boss and it's carnivorous asteroid heavies before they tricked them into giving up crime in favor of attacking evil empires and stealing their stuff for profit, drove back into the Astral Plane and celebrated by stopping at a free-floating diner-shipyard (called 'Hot Eats, Cool Fleets') and chose not to question what it was doing there, and a few other minor friendship-building adventures of no particular consequence that took a few days to go through even though it was relatively 'close' to their initial position (distance being a very relative concept in the Astral Plane, though).

But then, at last, they had come across the portal they were searching for: the astral winds churned as they blasted through a psychological storm and still glittered with lost thoughts as they came upon a world-light that, processed through their vision, appeared to be a green-gray two-dimensional swirl right in front of them, it's churning surface moving like stagnant water with images of, to Zim and Zuko, disquietingly familiar landscapes and cities. Random flickers and images came from it, rather stunted and blurred, and there was a faint sense of unhappiness emanating from it-

And yet, underneath that veneer of loss, there was a suggestion of steadier movements, movements so precise and elegant that the only word for it was 'mechanical'. Some forms humanoid and others far more alien in appearance, but invariably of metallic form and beauteous shape, and the emotion of these was...well, the best word to come to mind was 'noble'. Calm and peaceful, restrained and inexplicably curious Riding out like waves of electricity, Zim was intrigued by it. "You are certain there is nothing here?" Zim said.

Examining the charts, Calvin said, "I said that there's no recording contact, not that it's uninhabited. I think whoever lives in this world, they haven't made successful contact with other intelligent life yet." He looked thoughtful. "Maybe the Traverse Towners are playing it safe with that kind of thing. More likely they just avoid people they can't make useful deals with, and I can't imagine random primitive worlds would have anything they would want."

Zuko leaned over, frowning at Calvin's use of 'primitive'. "Do we head there or find somewhere else? We already spent so much time traveling here...what if it's not any use?"

Morte had been staring at the portal, uncharacteristically quiet and grim. Now, he said "Er, uh, maybe not." Zim looked at him. "What's the point? Maybe you're just wasted time heading there."

"I say we go," Zim said. "I see no reason not to try it! And the whole point is to go to random worlds for even the slightest chance of locating my missing companions while we get into all manner of interesting experiences and adventures, and incidentally work on a means to destroy all the Heartless we can find! What's more random than a backwater world in the middle of nowhere?!"

"...If you say so," Morte said, looking deeply unhappy about this.

"I don't like this plan," Zuko said. "It's stupid."

"Too bad!" Zim said, and cackled. "Down we go!" He paused, frowning at Morte. It was unusual to see him being so open and reluctant. "...Is there some manner of special procedure for doing that?"

Calvin checked the information Cyborg had given him on precisely that sort of thing. "No," he said. "We just fly into it and enter the world. We dive from the Astral into the Material Plane on that particular world and 'verse it's in."

Zuko, curious as ever about this entirely new concept of the multiverse to him, asked, "How does that work!?"

"Search me," Morte said. "Way I heard it, these lights are all the sentient minds of a particular planet working at the same time. So if it's a dead planet, you can't use the Astral to go there, and if they having people living on nearby planets or moons or space stations things get a bit dicey. Usually you wind up going to where there's lots of people, generally lower atmosphere, or at least where most of the thought in that planet is centered; if people think about a place a lot Astral travelers generally wind up there, but it's not a solid rule, we could wind up in the middle of nowhere for that world. Not a whole lot of hard and fast rules for Planar travel, you know?"

"So the Astral doesn't connect to places that don't have sentient life?" Zuko asked, interested for a change.

"Yeah. If there's nothing to do any thinking, there's nothing there."

"Well, this place is as good as any," Zim said. "Okay guys! First world we're going to! THE FIRST DESCENT INTO ADVENTURE. Don't screw it up!"

"I'm sure you'll do that for us," Calvin said, taking out the latest issue of Alloy Blend (the premier magazine on mad science fashion and aesthetics) he'd found in the abandoned bookstore from the port town. Zim snorted and inclined the joysticks forward, and the ship dived down into the light...

And thereby, into a new world.

Zim didn't know what the experience would be like, and he expected fanfare. He expected flashing lights to go by as they dived out of the realm of thought made real into a place of physicality. He expected the Astral Plane to slide from view as a new world took its place. He expected a bright burst of light, or for things to vanish and rematerialize around him.

He was a little disappointed when the Astral Plane merely got a bit fuzzy for a moment, turning a bit sharp in extraordinary detail for a moment before disappearing entirely and a blue sky took its place with the vast curve of the ground taking up a corner of their camera view. It took a moment to adjust; Zim didn't feel anything and the ship didn't react much aside from a slight jolt as gravity jerked them sideways before the ship's engines recalibrated for atmospheric entry and knocked it back into place, a green streak flying across the sky.

Calvin blinked. "That's it?"

"Not so bad," Zuko said. He'd gone a bit green in the face all the same, his body perhaps expecting genuine cause for sickness.

Hobbes looked into the cameras with interest. "Wish we had windows," he said wistfully.

The view Zim saw through nearly a dozen screens in front of him was familiar, though he couldn't say why. His interest was piqued when the navigational instruments informed them that they were over a major population center, far too high to be easily detected. Radio waves, still extant but unregulated, were detected and processed into the systems, recordings of previous broadcasts similarly downloaded and all of it transferred into the ship's databanks for later perusal in moments. None of it was deemed relevant by the computer's sorting tags, so all Zim had to go on was the visuals seen through the cameras, of the landscape below: a curve of continental mass bordered by a warm sea spotted with high-hanging clouds.

Zim frowned, certain that he had seen that particular view somewhere before. His fingers nudged the joysticks and the Paragon dived lower. He was actually feeling a little disappointed; there wasn't much to be going on here, and it was a lot less interesting than he'd expected his first new world in this adventure to be like. Clouds parted around them as they dived down, the ground getting gradually closer as they decreased speed to safer levels and the irregularities of the landmass clearly becoming cities and highways and population centers and landmarks, and the feeling of nagging familiarity only got worse. Not the least because something was wrong with it.

"Should we be flying this low?" Hobbes asked. "I'm pretty sure it's not the done thing to be that reckless when we don't know what's down there. People might freak out and attack us, and if we're doing a first contact thing..." He made several noises like snorting growls, his nostrils flaring and whiskers rising with every snort. "I don't know, it's seems really dumb to just charge down there."

"If the inhabitants are hostile, then we'll know right away instead of agonizing about it and getting attacked later on," Zim said shortly.

Hobbes was a perceptive lad; Zim was a mood swinger, but this more taciturn behavior was very strange for Zim. "Something wrong with you?"

"No!" Zim said immediately. The others frowned at him, and the green energy inexplicably abated for a moment, as if reliant on their focus to stay at optimum output. "Very well, fine, I simply have an odd feeling about this place!" He pointed at the screen, now displaying the broad sweep of the continent they were bearing down on, just barely close enough to see the suggestions of buildings, but still too far to see anything except landmarks. "There is something about this land that I know I have seen before."

"Have you ever actually gone out of your verse before?" Calvin asked, apparently surprised. "Because if you've actually been here before, that's one big coincidence. Stupidly big."

Zim almost said no; a moment's reflection on some of his adventures compelled him to say, "I cannot say for certain that I have,; some of the incidents I was involved in took me to other realms than my own, but I wasn't in a position to sightsee. If I have been to this place, I do not recall."

"Maybe it just looks similar to something you've seen," Morte said, a slight tone in his voice that suggested that he was not looking forward to...something, Zim didn't know what.

Zim nodded at that, reluctantly. He gripped the joysticks and power surged from him into the engines, and the lagging ship picked up a good burst of speed...and suddenly the ground was a whole lot closer,. Now they were bearing down on a very large city, a genuine metropolis, and the industrial colors of the buildings were dulled by a vibrant green choking it. "We'll make contact shortly! Any news from the scanners, tiger person?"

Hobbes growled at the impolite address. "We're picking up a lot of radio signals," he informed them, fur ruffled and ears flared back. "But nothing recent. Satellite signals, I can see them easy - probably television, from what we're receiving. And...yeah, wireless network, I think we're close to a bunch of hotspots. Wouldn't be too hard to piggyback onto the wireless network, because there's a lot of them in range. Most of them are really weak though, and there's almost no information being transferred across any of the networks." Hobbes frowned. "Which is weird, because there's a lot of information being exchanged on some other network we can't access. Strange...that one is being reported as similar to thought processes."

"...Curious..." Zim said softly.

Hobbes said, "Maybe we should download what we can detect? Just in case?"

Zim nodded, and told them to do just that. Calvin had already started doing it the moment Hobbes made the suggestion, rendering Zim's command (and asking him about it) pointless. Zim didn't have any time to complain, because Calvin quickly said that it was already done and being processed, and just about nothing interesting was being reported.

He did point out that all this information had faltered and come to a stop about a year and several months ago, some of them still running but everything unmanned. All surveillance that they could access reported absolutely nothing, everything on those screens devoid of any sentient life they could see, and Zim and Zuko were staring at them with a horror unrelated to that disturbing news. And yet, there was information being processed at that very moment in the forbidden network, the one that seemed alive.

"Great, we finally wind up on a new world and we're getting nothing," Calvin complained. "Static on all available networks, no one hailing us or even trying to call us down for a chat. What's wrong here, guys?" Zim and Zuko didn't say anything. "Guys? Uh, what's wrong?"

Zuko had said nothing the whole time, his eyes fixed on the screens with badly concealed shock. Now, he stood up abruptly and almost knocked Morte over, taking several steps back, staring at the screens and mouth open in sheer disbelief. "Amaterasu shower us with sanity," he whispered. "Zim!"

"I know," Zim said tightly. "Earth."

"Your planet?" Calvin said. "The one that got eaten- er, 'lost'? What about it?"

"It's Earth." Zim said.

"Say what?" Morte echoed.

Zim pointed at the screen, Zuko doing the same thing. Zim said, "That! Look! It's...no, it can't be, this is insane! We were there, we saw it...we saw it destroyed! What the hells are we looking at!?"

He stared at the screens, at one displaying the city they were approaching. The buildings populating it, the layout of streets girding and connecting the buildings, and the complete absence of any apparent life there; there were animals wandering about, and a tremendous array of wandering signatures like advanced machine-life, but no apparent sentient life.

"Zuko..." He started to say, with unaccustomed softness.

"I know," Zuko said. He was shaking. "This isn't possible." He tilted his head. "I was there."

"But here this place is," Zim said. His jaw twitched, frantically spinning components on his Pak and the nearly psychotic squeezing he put on the joysticks betrayed his emotion, hidden just under his seeming indifference. "It's Earth."

Be cold, he told himself, automatic processes regulating the panicked hyperventilating that his emotions threatened. Be calm, be rational, be like the machine.

The ship was silent for a moment as the craft briefly accelerated, passing below cloud-level down through a silent sky treaded only by the occasional bird, a city below them threaded with green.

Skyscrapers, nearly broken by the passage of time, stood as hollowed out remnants covered by greenery until almost unrecognizable as buildings; the ship passed these first before hovering awkwardly down. "...Earth?" Calvin repeated. "Your world? YOUR Earth?"

"You mean your world that got..." Hobbes stopped and made an awkward motion. He seemed to remember Calvin's odd phrasing and said, "Uh, 'lost'?"

"Yeah," Zuko said, voice raspy with emotion. "This can't be. This can't be real. I saw it die! I saw everything, just-" He stopped, fists clenched and steam rising from his skin. He was biting down on his lip, and a faint trickle of blood was sliding out from where he'd bitten down too hard. "What the hells is going on?!"

Zim, for a moment, dared to hope for the impossible. "Perhaps we were too hasty to judge...? Maybe we didn't lose Earth after all, maybe it just-" He stopped. He frowned, looked at the screens. "But that does not explain what happened here! I..." He unclenched and dropped back into his seat, bewildered beyond any capacity to express it. "I don't understand," He nearly whimpered.

Now they dropped down into the city proper, and against all reason, against all probability, against everything that they'd been told or had been confirmed, it was Earth. A city none of them had ever visited, a place unfamiliar to them. And yet (Zim and Zuko thought, as Calvin pulled a few tricks with the engines so that the propulsion field clashed into itself and floated straight downward onto an asphalt street nearly unrecognizable from all the grass that had grown right through and torn it up and grown over it again), it was familiar. The building styles were unquestionably that of the world they had come to live in and love, so very much born from the consumerism-aspected culture of the United States they had known, the overall look of the place suggested the East Coast, the neighborhood wide and the streets suitable for a main crossing area, perhaps an urban center in some city they had never visited.

And yet, there was still much that was seriously off. There was nobody else there that they could see; no humans fleeing for cover or hiding in the shadows or watching for this possible savior or doing anything of the sort. There was no one there, and the absence of humanity disturbed Zim nearly as badly as the place itself.

Wild vegetation had covered almost every possible surface, untrimmed and unchallenged, and in time would undoubtedly tear everything apart and grind the buildings down to dust as the weather took its toll and lack of maintenance killed these reminders of humanity. A slow process, to be sure, but as unstoppable as any other civilization-destroyer. If nothing else, it was clear that this city was abandoned; cars were left in the streets, long enough to have been overtaken by constrictor vines like everything else on the ground.

Window-glass had been shattered and glinted fiercely in the sunlight, so much of it from the empty windowpanes of the skyscrapers and marginally smaller buildings that the street almost glittered with a thin layer of white light. So much of the buildings around them, these accomplishments of industrial might and human will, were evidence of a larger scale of wear-and-tear deconstructing them; cracks in the walls, metal girders bending out of place, walls breaking inward or outward, debris from defeated buildings crumbling the streets...already, many of these buildings had lost the fight, barely prevented from falling completely apart thanks to the irony of countless layers of vegetation holding them together, but it was still only a matter of time before even that rotted and it all came down.

The ship managed a hover over the ground, and unseen by Zim's camera-screens, flickers of invisibility fields over artificial bodies shimmered over solemn and serious faces when the ship came to a fairly undignified bump onto the ground, making enough of an kinetic shockwave to disrupt the invisible fields, just for a moment, and Zim failed to notice, given the more distressing sight around him.

The ship was silent. Eventually, Zim said, "Where IS everyone!? Where are the survivors? Or the Heartless, even? The death machines the villains of the world brought to defend themselves, or their mutant hordes? Summoned mystical demons?! Entities from the Ghost Zone, brought over by psychic energy released by mass terrified death! Even the bodies...there's NOTHING there! Disregarding why Earth is here, WHAT HAPPENED TO EVERYONE!? And...what HAPPENED to this place? Vegetation everywhere, this city falling apart-"

"It's like everyone just vanished and left it to fall apart for years," Zuko said, appalled. "Decades, even!"

Morte made a small strangled noise, and floated up with an air like he truly regretted what he was going to say, but it needed to be done. "Begging your pardon, boss, but...I think you might be a bit mistaken on our locale, here."

"Say what?" Zuko said, so distracted he almost didn't hear Morte.

"Are you daft?" Zim said. "This IS Earth! Just...just look! I don't know why it looks like it's been left to fall apart, but I know what Earth looks like and this IS EARTH!"

"I know, I know!" Morte said, getting to the point regardless of how much he wished he could have put it off. "It's just not YOUR Earth!"

The ship was silent again. Zuko and Zim stared, Zim's jaw slightly agape and Zuko bemused. Morte jutted his jaw out. Calvin and Hobbes blinked, looked at each other. Calvin said, "Drama's happening. Wanna split?"

Hobbes said, "Yep."

The two brothers wisely left the room without anyone noticing, hitting the button to open the cargo doors on their way out.

A long, long moment passed as Zim and Zuko processed what Morte told them. "...Not OUR Earth," Zim said.

"Yep," Morte said.

"It's an Earth, like there's more than one," Zuko said.

"Yeah."

Zim and Zuko looked at each other. Clearly having trouble dealing with this, they looked at Morte and said as one, "And you KNEW this before we even got here."

"What's next, you're gonna ask 'and you didn't tell us' and get all huffy and self-righteous on me!?" Morte said coldly. Zim frowned. "Don't get mad, THINK FOR A SECOND! What was I supposed to say, 'hey guys, just a heads up, there's worlds JUST like Earth all over the place, but don't get your hopes up, they'll be NOTHING like the one you left behind or have any of the people you knew there, they just crop up with the same names and histories, no one knows why!' Yeah, THAT'D be smart of me. Like you'd even believe me!"

"...There's other worlds just like Earth, all over everywhere?" Zim repeated. For a moment, he looked close to passing out.

"Yeah, I just said so."

Zim stared at him. He turned his attention to Zuko. "...That makes NO SENSE AT ALL."

"You said it before I could," Zuko said weakly, looking a great deal more pale than usual. "How does-"

"I just told you, no one knows for sure," Morte said. "There's theories, I'll give you that. People say, patterns repeat, you see threads of continuity reform in dozens of universes, following similar themes but with just ONE thing different here and there. Same religions, for the most part. Same historical pieces, with convergence in important bits. The same narrative concept, rehashed and edited by thousands of weird ways. Personally, I think some cosmic Creator didn't feel like making up his own setting so he just took a concept that was laying in the lumber room of creationism and ran out before the alarms went off."

"...For some reason, I find that makes me feel a bit better about the whole thing," Zim said, still looking tremendously disgruntled. He looked forlornly out the screen, at the remnants of a city abandoned and lifeless. He bit his lip. For a moment, he almost stopped himself from saying it, almost made the mature and logical choice. But still there was a stubborn shred of hope, childlike and a tiny flame against a darkness that hadn't yet succumbed to the clarity reality presented. "...You are CERTAIN this couldn't be my Earth...?"

His voice was so lost, so confused and hurt, it clearly wounded Morte when he spoke just as softly. "Boss. I wish I had something nicer to say, but some things...no. It's not. It's just a place that looks like your world." Morte didn't have a real face, but he still somehow winced when Zim's face fell as swiftly and horribly as a grieving child presented with its dead parent's carcass. Morte hesitated, and added, "And you won't find another like it, even if you looked forever and ever. Let's say you find an Earth close enough to it, with the people still there and the Heartless not quite after you yet? It'll still be too different from home. Too different to settle down. You'll see those differences every day, nagging at ya, until it just gets too much and everything's all WRONG and...it rips up at you, because a world is a unique thing and you can't find a match. I'm sorry, but world's aren't mass-produced. Not outside of when they fabricate worlds, but that's another thing."

Zim bowed his head. For once, he was completely and horribly silent. Morte said nothing to him; he turned away, looking ashamed of being so cruelly blunt.

Without saying a word, at least at first, Zuko swallowed his own grief and horror at this cruelty and put a hand on Zim's shoulder. Heat flushed around the contact point, pale skin on green; in ordinary circumstances, if it hadn't been for Zim's decision to choose Good over selfishness, or for Zuko's ill-timed meddling with arcane devices, the two would have never met, this bridge between their species crossed long ago. And yet there they were, ironclad comrades in the fight against evil and taking joy in each other's company, and this small fact was evident in that single brotherly gesture.

Zuko's lip trembled, trying with all his might to master the emotions that were so prone to violence and explosiveness; it was his nature, as a Firebender, to be so passionate for good or ill. Zim looked up at Zuko, meeting the eyes of a friend who was suffering just as terribly as him, if not worse for the separation from the friends closer than family (that WERE Zuko's real family in all the ways that really mattered).

The hand to his shoulder said everything: I am your friend, and I am here with you.

Zim smiled, just a little, faint as light motes in a window, but so real in spite of that. Childlike he had seemed before, and he still did, but this time, it was certainly a good thing. If Zim had been especially prone to crying, no doubt he would be, just over this small gesture of brotherhood.

Morte bobbed awkwardly, out of place and fully aware of it.

"I would have never thought it of you," Zim said after a moment, giving the screens a last lonely look before the destroyed hope of returning to Earth returned to being the fantasy he hadn't known he still had cherished. "Morte. Sparing feelings, I mean."

"Why not?" Morte asked bluntly.

"...I acknowledge that I have no plain answer for that." Zim turned around. "Wait. Where did...what's their names...the boy and tiger-boy go?"

"Down there," Zuko said, pointing at the screens that displayed a view of the streets (and clearly hurting just looking at a place that was so much like Earth); Calvin and Hobbes had exited the cargo and were looking around, investigating with the sort of care that suggested they expected something to pop out and try to eat them at any moment; ripping up chunks of asphalt to look underneath, chopping up vines to see if it was different than galactic-standard plants of its kin, taking note of a group of feral cats that had wandered by to investigate the noise they were making of that of the ship's landing, making loud observations about everything and comparing it with the things they had encountered previously...

"Do ya, y'know...want to get them back here and leave?" Morte asked. "Try a different world, make that our first world we checked out?"

Zim paused. It was an inviting notion. And yet, dishonest. "Gir might well like to find a planet like Earth. It's the only home he ever knew. If he had a choice in where he was taken...well, it's cosmically close to Traverse Town, by what I saw. It's as good a place to begin as any." He nodded sharply, a touch of the familiar heroic thrill coming to him. "We should lock up the ship and rejoin those two on the ground, we have adventure to return to!"

"Yay," Zuko said, utterly deadpan.

"...Would it kill you to show some enthusiasm!?"

"Probably not," Zuko said, with a small shrug. "But I don't want the risk."

Zim stared suspiciously at Zuko; the Fire Lord's perfectly serious expression suggested nothing more than he meant every word of what he'd said. (Either that or he was really good at sarcastic humor.) Zim made a 'tch!' noise and they made preparations to step out.

A while later, Zuko, Morte and Zim left the ship. First, though, they had to confer with the ship's computers and make certain that the atmosphere was perfectly safe (the ship's sensors confirmed that it was, and Calvin and Hobbes were doing fine) and to insure against bacterial or viral infection they endured a brief 'shower' within an odic force chamber Calvin had rigged up on the bridge just in case, as it would inoculate them in the short-term from diseases that they lacked immunity to (or for that matter, prevent them from spreading diseases to this world). Finally, they prepared themselves for possible combat, Zim...not summoning the Keyblade because he had a vague suspicion that the Heartless would zoom in on this world if they sensed it's active presence, while Zuko got the thermal lance he'd looted from the frost giant Gunter in the Darvhog battle; it was far too large for Zuko to use comfortably, but he liked it's possibilities too much to dismiss it outright.

Then, after activating a few non-lethal security measures against possible intruders (such as nosy animals or more unsavory possibilities; they didn't know WHAT had done something to the humans, or if there had been humans, Morte had hinted that a different species might have taken their place), Zim, Zuko and Morte rejoined Calvin and Hobbes on the ground. "Is the drama done?" Calvin asked at once.

"Yep," Morte said.

"Nice," Hobbes said. "Drama's just tacky."

"No," Zim said. He hesitated, trying and failing to think of something to retort and managed, "YOU'RE tacky! So unbelievably tacky! And...ah...fuzzy. Yes."

"That's a stupid counter and you know it!"

Zim conceded the point. He vowed to take revenge at a later date. He gestured towards the dilapidated city they had arrived it, apparently long-since forsaken, and he said, "So, any thoughts on all this? Are the plants..." He grimaced at the growth. "Is something unusual about them? Did they cause all of this?"

Calvin grabbed a nearby vine and inspected it. "Looks like natural growth to me. Nothing worse than just long-term lack of maintenance; this place looks abandoned more than anything else." He frowned. "Maybe something just TOOK all the people away?"

Zuko shuddered. "That's creepy."

"Yeah," Hobbes said. "Uh, maybe we should take a look around? Examine the place?"

"Sounds smart," Morte said.

Hobbes brightened, pleased that he was being taken seriously. "And then we can see if we can declare the planet as our territory, set up base here and invite Zim's friends to live there after we modify it into a mobile planet and jaunt into the Heartless' dimension and blow them all up!" They stared at him. His composure deflated. "What, I'm not allowed to come up with exciting ideas?"

Zuko hurriedly spoke up, mostly because Zim was looking thoughtful and Calvin was looking like he was trying to calculate the logistics of making all that feasible, and all of that suggested very spooky things to Zuko. "A quick look around wouldn't hurt. Maybe it'll give us an idea of what happened here, if anyone really IS here and decide what to do from there."

"Why?" Morte asked.

Zuko shrugged. "Why not? As long as we're here, we might as well do something."

"An acceptable option," Zim said. Calvin and Hobbes voiced their their assent, and after a moment's consideration, so did Morte, and the four of them left shortly thereafter, squabbling the whole time over what formation they ought to go in and the codenames they should use if someone was listening in and also just why stick-on straps and zippers were so incredibly popular across the multiverse all of a sudden.

They were not alone, however.

Several invisible figures, their unseen forms masterworks of mechanical artifice, watched them go with great puzzlement, particularly towards Calvin and Zuko. Curiosity compelled them onward, and they followed Zim's party at a clumsy pace. This was very much a new experience for these beings, and completely unsure of how to proceed, they were choosing to err on the side of caution.

Several hours of intent exploration, sightseeing and a few casual experiments later, Zim had come to the conclusion that something terrible had happened here, but he didn't know what exactly.

They had seen no one, met no one; it would be perhaps a little bit better if they could say that there was no sign of anyone having been there in a very long time, but that was not so. Frequently, they had come across places where the vegetation had been cleared away and the beginnings of proper repairs begun, construction materials (crude forges, stacks of various sorts of metal, and such) left around those places in a way that suggested they had suddenly been abandoned in a hurry very recently...which was odd, since it was at least several decades since the city had been abandoned from the building decay and rate of overgrowth.

There were plenty of animals around, many of them not belonging in this hemisphere; Zim though he saw a pride of lions carefully retreating at the sight of Hobbes several streets ago, and Hobbes himself had expressed an interest in serving up the groups of deer they had seen as tonight's dinner. Certainly they were many packs of wild dogs that were nearly wolfish in size and appearance, and groups of feral cats cautiously watching them from the buildings, moving from broken window across streets by gliding on fleshy skins that had grown between their limbs. Morte had supposed they were the distant descendants of the pets that had lived here generations ago, gone wild and adapting to their circumstances, some more extreme than others.

A few streets along and no encounters with anyone who might still be there, or any sight of bodies or battle-sign (such as bullet holes in the walls or marks where energy weapons had discharged or scores from errant blades), their passing marked by the sounds of their feet crunching the thick mats of vegetation underfoot or the gravel loosened by all that growth, turning past streets and finding little more than derelict wrecks, collapsed buildings in varying states of disrepair and natural processes deconstructing the artificial structures despite the signs of attempted maintenance here and there, it all gave Zim a haunting sense of wrongness.

A mystery was being presented to them. This place was completely devoid of any apparent civilized life though there was wildlife aplenty, there was little to nothing to suggest what had taken or killed all the people away. If there had been an invasion or some outside force that had captured them, there should have been something there, some sign of what had done that.

And there was the nagging question posed by Hobbes after some logical reasoning: if this place was totally uninhabited by sentient life, what was doing the thinking to connect it to the Astral Plane?

Various theories and idle thoughts abounded. Eventually, as they rounded the corner of a place selling guns right next to a place selling urban vehicles and Hobbes and Calvin argued over whether it was ethical to loot them, Morte said, "I bet some apocalypse happened and all the people on this planet caked it." Zuko stared at him, more for the disrespect to the possibly dead than anything. "...It's a possibility is all I'm saying."

"Well, something happened here," Zim said. "As good a theory as any. And a bit obvious, really."

"Yeah, because that's clearly what happened!" Morte said.

"It seems so."

Zuko nodded, and checked one of the posters on the ground. "Does it say something about the apocalypse being nigh?" Morte asked, indecently hopeful.

"No," Zuko said, looking mystified. "It's an advertisement for a concert by something called the 'Plaid Hamburgers'." He studied it, the automatic translation struggling to edge its way into a brain that had learned to read with very different sense of alphabet. "It's just a concert advertisement."

"Sounds like progressive rock," Calvin said. "Or a little retro."

Zim deflated a bit. "I don't think we're going to find many clues like this," he said, looking upset that there weren't any obvious causes that he could go up and destroy in retaliation, like a standard-issue cosmic horror or a super villain or a megacorporation striving for world conquest before stretching just a bit too far.

Or for that matter, some survivors to explain things to him. He had come here hoping for adventure or clues, and he had gotten only a weird mystery. Wanting to make himself feel better, he punched Calvin.

"Ow! What was that for!?"

"I really wanted to hit something."

Calvin punched him in the stomach. Zim blinked, not even registering it. "That's it? Are you even trying, meat bag?!"

"You're made of as much meat as I am!"

"Hardly! And besides I'm much better quality meat!"

Zuko, Hobbes and Morte blinked. "...I don't know if he knows that sounds kinda dirty but I'm gonna pretend he didn't, and that I didn't hear that," Morte said.

"Agreed," Zuko and Hobbes said.

Zim and Calvin, as usual, began bickering. They weren't particularly picky about it either; Calvin opened up with complaints on Zim choosing to come to this incredibly depressing world in the first place and opting to ignore Zim's reply that he couldn't possibly have known it would be like this, and this quickly degenerated into a 'you shut up' 'no you shut up' 'no YOU SHUT UP' moment.

The unseen beings (in truth not many different individuals but a single consciousness incarnated in many bodies), having followed them the entire times and picked up a relatively few more of themselves, watched nervously, and wondered if this was the right decision or not. To them, or it, there seemed little choice; it wasn't like they had many alternatives to find anybody to talk to or offer alternatives. And anyway they (and again, the word was a matter of some dispute, for it was this mind's habit to permit parts of itself to rise up as pseudo-individuals to benefit from multiple perspectives) were still wondering where the hell these strangers had come from and why two of them were human and the others were definitely not human...and yet intriguingly like beloved humanity, long since lost.

In their deliberations, silent and mind-to-mind and unobservable though they were, they still tended towards instinctively human-like moments. Nervous and awkward and more than a little scared (not unlike a child stealing a cookie from a jar and about to own up to it), they moved around a lot; ferro-plastic exoskeletons making faint noises as joints so intricate that they could barely be said to exist shifted nervously, the sounds of a restless crowd totally indecisive and afraid to make the incorrect choice.

Communication made on wavelengths only perceptible to the network of heart and mind that connected them all, terabytes worth of debate and possible outcomes and wonder all exchanged in milliseconds, as though of one single massive brain thinking deeply but reflected in dozens of reflected perspectives. Most of all there was a question of 'is this right?' asked among them all, and bewilderment at the mere existence of these strangers, or that two of their number should look human, and one of them look exactly like a human skull.

There was little choice, again. A consensus was reached, and then the great mind in its many bodies wondered what the best way to approach was, taking all factors into consideration and the best way to invite them into thoughts of goodwill without undue alarm or the best way to retreat if hostility ensued...

It thought so quickly, all of this happened in the same span of time it would take for a fleshy being to blink a few times. However, their bodies were still making noise, and it quite forgot about all that.

Hobbes' ears twitched, the nearly silent sounds still quiet audible to his amazingly perceptive hearing, and he glanced at his crewmates to see if they noticed. Calvin and Zim were arguing about two different models of all-terrain vehicle they favored, hardly in a condition to notice they had company. Morte had frozen in place, and was certainly aware that something was off; he'd stiffened a lot like an experienced melee combatant, Hobbes noted. Zuko was doing the best of them despite what Hobbes considered to be the limitations of his species (since innocent bigotry takes many forms), clearly noticing that they were not alone anymore and staring not quite at the place where Hobbes had heard the sounds coming from; looking right at them would definitely clue the unseen bystanders in.

Hobbes wondered for a moment whether or not he should find a way to inform the others, tried to think of a way to do that as stealthily and non-threatening as possible, and decided that if they were going to be ambushed it would already have happened. "Look," He called out to them. "I know you're there, just come out and say hi!"

Zim and Calvin stopped talking and looked in the direction Hobbes had yelled. Appropriately, there was a perfectly synched noise doubling up into a single loud clink!; the sound of several dozen mechanical bodies flinching in unison.

Calvin's hand went for his pyrokinetic glove, strapping it on in moments, and the Keyblade materialized in Zim's hand. Meeting this display of aggressiveness, was a chorus of perfectly synched voices, a single voice speaking through many bodies, and it cried out, "Wait, hold on, can't we talk this out!? Please don't attack! ...Please?"

"Oh, okay then," Zim said, dropping the Keyblade. It crashed right through the asphalt, it's magical weight and the poorly maintained conditions of the city not meshing well. Zim flinched, and stepped away awkwardly. Then he realized something. "I knew it! There are people here, I KNEW IT! And...they're invisible. REVEAL YOURSELVES!"

"Okay," the many-bodied voice said amiably. The air shimmered, rippled in shapes conforming to about several dozen humanlike bodies, and those ripples faded as those several dozen faded into view. If Zim had hoped that they were humans, he was mistaken; standing across from them, in postures of varying degrees of hopefulness and awkwardness, were about thirty-six mechanical life-forms generally standing about the size and shape of a normal human, none of them particularly threatening or even armed in any apparent way.

'Generally' being the operative word; plenty of them were far larger or quite small, standing on assemblies of insectile legs or treads, bigger or larger, and still some twice as big and built for construction labor. They all had the same type of materials making up their bodies; an outer shell of a plastic-like material that was nearly fluid, appearing to be a non-Newtonian liquid (possibly individual colonies of nanoscopic machine life), placed over an elegantly simple frame clearly modeled after a human form, though stylized and idealized, and neatly androgynous, with the suggestions of womanly curves meshing with the broader build of the average man. Each unit had its own unique design, and they were all beautiful in an alien way, but beautiful all the same; the arms and lower portions densely covered in the free-form material, where it shifted around in lazy patterns and seemingly capable of transforming at any moment into complicated mechanized forms, their inner frames glowing with the faintest light of an internal power sources (brightening and fading in total unison, as if a massive heartbeat). Their heads, while different patterned, were blanks surmounted by an holographic screen displaying crude but cute facial constructs not unlike internet emoticons; presently, they were all uniformly puzzled and a bit scared.

The two groups, Zim's crew and the machine-men, stared at each other for a long tense moment; not so much ready for a fight now, Zim's crew halted at the strangeness and then Zim recalled the Keyblade to his hand, and dismissed it in a flash of light. Hobbes relaxed and stepped back while Morte clicked his teeth curiously. Zuko exhaled, relieved, and leaned on the thermal lance he'd taken from Gunter and claimed as a personal weapon (though it was far too large, and dwarfed him). And Calvin...

Took off his pyrokinetic device and shoved it into an open belt pouch before he walked right past the rest of his crew and over to the robots, who hadn't responded with any readying of weapons or hostile intent or even the slightest degree of knowing what to do. "Uh, what do you think you're doing?" Morte said as the robots stared at Calvin, apparently enraptured by his proximity.

"Making first contact," Calvin said nonchalantly. He stopped in front of the foremost robot (a stocky mech not much taller than him and twice as wide, staring at Calvin with a emoticon incorporating wonder and shock) and waited for a moment. He waved.

The mech waved back in slow and jerky arcs, like he was rather unfamiliar with the mechanics of such a gesture. The other robots stared silently, several trembling and making noises that sounded all too much like children who'd had a much-beloved but supposedly dead parent show up right out of nowhere, alive and cheery and with hugs to spare. One of them walked to Calvin, in perfectly precise strides still too jerky and so awkward he might have fallen over, and stopped in front of him. More followed his example, cautiously approaching Zim's group and looking ready to run like fear at the first sudden movement, and the robot before Calvin raised a hand as if to touch Calvin and make certain he was there, plasticine skin brilliant in the sunlight. It's fingers stopped inches from Calvin's face and retreated to its side.

The robot spoke, haltingly and painfully, the words so carefully measured for inoffensiveness that Zim felt pity for it, a pang of sympathy for a creature that seemed so fundamentally lonely it was willing to cripple it's vocabulary so that it did not upset a sentient being like this. "My God," it whispered, peering skyward for a moment before looking back at Calvin. "You. You're...are you real? Can this truly be? Are you..." Another pause, extremely short by Zim's standards but noticeable for such mechanical life-forms as these. And then a brief phrase, humbled and awed and quick like a exhalation of air infested with worries and far too much grief. "You're human. A human, a real human!"

"Uh huh!" Calvin said.

The robots leaned in, and out, as though breathing with a gusty relieved sigh.

Zuko stepped forward, perplexed by this treatment. The robots focused on him, their emoticons expressing uneven mixtures of delight at this further human, and perplexity at the condition of his face. "I'm human too," He said awkwardly, the hardness of his character worn away (if only for the moment) by pity.

The robots stepped forward almost as one, a straggler or two hanging back and too scared to hope even with the evidence staring them in the face. "Yes," Another robot said, voice colored by something that could only be described as something akin to religious awe.

The robots murmured verbally (as opposed to the more efficient communication they normally employed; for the benefit of the visitors), and it became clear that they were whispered the same thing, the echoes of the same phrases over and over again building into a few recognizable lines: "humans," "REAL humans," "They live still!" "But this makes no sense, how can they still live?" "I don't know," "I know not either," "Does it matter, they are here, they are alive!" "We were not abandoned after all!" "They're here, the Creators have returned..." And so on and so forth, on those general themes. Curiously, they didn't sound like they were genuinely having a conversation; the way they responded already knowing what the others were going to say, it was more like someone debating something to themselves.

"They seem nice," Morte said. A few robots looked in his direction. "Needy, but nice."

Zuko and Hobbes, totally ignored by the robots, had grown a bit uncomfortable with not being focused on for a change. "Hmph," Zim said. "They really seem to enjoy having humans around,"

"Yeah! What's up with that?!" Hobbes said indignantly. "We're not good enough for them?!"

"Guess not," Morte said, disgruntled; the robots were giving him curious looks, one after another and always at different angles as if scanning him and analyzing him from alternate perspectives, but they weren't approaching him either.

For Calvin and Zuko, their new robot fanboys (and fangirls) were getting a little too overbearing, swarming around them and expressing noises that might have been mechanical sobbing. A few of them kept trying to hug Calvin and Zuko. "All right, you guys, enough!" Calvin said, pushing his hands out to denote his personal space and warding around hug-bots. "Personal space, c'mon!"

They completely refused to move at all. "What's 'personal space'?" One asked blankly, hugging Zuko's arm tightly.

"I haven't the slightest idea," Another said, shaking his head regretfully and, since he was nuzzling Calvin at the time, bonked him right on the head.

"Perhaps it's some manner of self-contained perception of the universe as it relates to oneself, where the universe immediately around oneself is felt as being of oneself," Another hypothesized.

"No, most folks just don't like it when other people get really close to them," Morte said. "Makes them uncomfortable."

"Ah," Said the robot that had come up with the theory. He peered at Morte with fascination, a quick scan confirmed Morte to be a human skull, and he relayed this fact to the other robots. The more outright curious ones gathered around Morte, chattering excitedly over this.

Yet more of them were facing Hobbes and Zim, oblivious to their discomfort. "What manner of creature resembles a human so, yet is clearly not?" One of them wondered.

"Why do you superficially resemble a human?" Another asked Zim.

"I don't know, the humanoid form is just a popular one," Zim said, displeased with how close they were standing to him.

"Why does your form so closely follow a human's structure?" Another robot asked Hobbes. "It is not dissimilar to our own designs, but that makes little sense."

"Hey, my kind don't resemble humans!" Hobbes said hotly, ears flattened back.

"You have a humanlike structure, with considerations for minor anatomical details; an arrangement of central trunk, four limbs in a two-arms-and-two-legs pattern and a head," yet another robot remarked to Hobbes. "Your physiology is nearly identical to a humans in many respects, not the least reproductive and respiratory functions, and most certainly musculature and basic form. It is closer to design than it is to evolutionary adaptation. Please explain!"

"...Look, there's a lot of that in my home galaxy!" Hobbes said lamely. "The Old Ones that apparently made half of everything, they weren't that creative! They just liked that kind of design!"

The robots were quite perceptive, and clearly recognized this as only a half-truth, if even that. "It reads as, specifically, nearly-human. Your biology appears to have been created using the human body, structure and brain chemistry as a template-" In all defiance of his usual diplomatic approach, Hobbes growled loudly, his teeth showing. The robots took the hint, backing away warily. A moment later he realized his mistake and his fur puffed up in instinctive threat display. They didn't attack or retreat, but they were watching his mistrustfully. Hobbes relaxed, by a fraction or two.

Eventually, after about ten more minutes of this annoying though marginally charming treatment, the robots seemed to realize that their visitor's annoyance was overwhelming their surprise; after Zuko issued a warning growl when they started touching him and poking his face, communication ensued among them, debate and discussion concluded at speeds too fast for fleshy brains to process, and the robots decided that more restrained action was required, and certainly a measure of diplomatic action. "We...apologize," Several of them said in unison, completely in synch with each other. The effect was odd but not creepy. "If our actions appear unseemly, tell us now that we might correct ourselves."

"You're overly forward," Zim said.

"You're kind of creepy about it," Morte said.

"You're really obsessed with humans," Calvin remarked.

"You're not very tactful about it either," Hobbes muttered, and growled again.

"Stop TOUCHING me!" Zuko shouted at several robots who were edging hopefully close to him.

The robots retreated back into the rest. The speakers bowed their heads. "We...understand the factors at work here, and are taking steps to implement a more suitable procedure." They paused, plainly unsure of the terminology for this occasion. The pause stretched out, and the robots stared at Zim and his crew (mostly on Calvin and Zuko, of course) and in spite of their calm words, they seemed totally at a loss of what to do with themselves.

Finally, they haltingly said, "This is impossible. Your presence simply cannot be."

"Yes it can," Zim said. "We are standing right here."

The robots clicked and clanked nervously. "Well, yes, certainly, but that misses the point."

Zuko looked perplexed. He said, frowning thoughtfully at the robots, "Look, you guys seem like you want to be helpful, so just tell us something. What happened here? Where are all the humans you keep going on about?" At Zim's look, he amended, "You clearly know what humans are since you recognized us and keep talking about them. But we haven't seen any humans or remains of them. This place is falling apart around us and we need to know why."

The robots stared. After a time, one said, "You wish to know? You have an investment in our world?"

"No," Zim said bluntly. "But me and my friend-" He gestured to Zuko. "Come from a world very much like this one. The current state of this world, the disarray of this city along and what little we saw, the open disrepair of everything around us...it disturbs us quite badly. We wish to know why this place is in its sorry state." Zim frowned, and gave them an openly suspicious look. "And the question of your presence here. To the best of my knowledge, my Earth did not have a functional robotics program of a scale like yours."

The robots briefly glanced at each other, and said something that caught Zim and his group completely off-guard, dealing a blow to any lingering suspicions of the robots. "You mean you don't know?" The robots all asked, individual voices rising into a single statement that could only be described, with accents of shock and disbelief, as beseeching.

Zim and Calvin glanced at each other. (The possibility that the group was starting to develop its own patterns, Calvin and Zim generally reacting together on the side of science or silliness while Hobbes and Zuko provided a rational or cool-headed perspective, briefly came to Zim. And also that Morte seemed to side with whichever side seemed like fun at the moment.) "I'm going to go out a bit here and presume that you don't actually know what happened to the humans after all," Zuko said, his voice a good deal more tired than he had thought.

"No, not at all," the robots replied. After some thought, clearly weighing whether or not to reveal an important fact, they shyly added, "We do know that they made us and began to make the first of these terminals-" One of them helpfully illustrated the point, rapping a fist on its chest. "But we do not know what happened after they began the process that birthed us. When we first awoke…that is, when our mind gained consciousness and began mass-producing the terminals you see before you they had already gone. And had been so for a fair amount of time. We have been unable to calculate how long ,but we believed the vernacular is 'quite a while'. Years certainly, but not so many that the damage to buildings should have progressed so fast. "

Zim, though disturbed, observed that the timing was certainly nothing like what had happened to Zim's Earth. He relaxed a bit more, not feeling he was in danger or in the midst of crazed automatons that had killed their creators for some stupid reason. "So that explains you, at any rate. What happened to the cities to put them in this condition?"

"Wear and tear, the passage of time, lack of repairs," The robots said sadly. " The works of humanity had already been long past the point of falling apart when we awakened; you have seen it for yourselves!" One of the robots gestured at the overgrown dead city around them. "All over the world, the cities and places of civilization are like this. It has all fallen apart, and it takes so much effort just to beat back the wilderness, let alone restore everything we encounter." Another pause. "And to be truthful, we have failed to make a consensus on this matter; there are sub-routines that feel that it is not our right to restore anything at all. The thought goes that it is our duty to observe how humanity's work decays until only we are left, and then to build as we see fit, just as our creators were."

Another long silence, and the robots spoke, in a voice so pained as to be weeping in tone alone, "They created us, and they left us. We are all that are left of them that has the slightest possibility of being a meaningful acknowledgement that humanity existed. We have not reached a consensus on the appropriate form of tribute to our creators." Several shook their heads. "Do we at least attempt to restore their works, clearing away the overgrowth and relocating the animals and repairing all the artifice we find? Or should we leave it be, and build our own creations as the creative species we are?"

"Hrm," Zim said. He hesitated, and asked, "Could my group have a moment to discuss this matter among ourselves?"

"Certainly," They replied in a single voice.

Zim gestured and the others went with him a short distance away. The robots waited politely, moving where they couldn't overhear them. Once they were clear, Zim said to the others, "So! Impressions?"

"I was thinking that maybe those robots killed the humans and processed their corpses, but not anymore," Zuko said. He glanced at the robots, their attachment to their long-dead creators clearly resonating with him. "They're just so...nice. Sickeningly nice! It hurts just listening to them, but whatever happened here, they didn't have anything to do with it."

"Yeah, I think they're telling the truth," Morte said. "I know lies when I see them, seeing as I'm the biggest liar I've ever met. "

"Then how do we know you aren't lying right now?" Hobbes said.

"Because how do you know I wasn't lying about being a huge liar?"

"I'm confused," Hobbes whined. "Anyway. These robot guys seem all right to me. Naive and kind of easy to push around if we had a mind to, but really nice guys. Or nice guy, I'm not sure about the terminology." He tilted his head, frowning. "But we still don't know what happened to the humans on this world."

"Or if it might apply to us, or has something to do with our unknown enemies and the Heartless they control," Zim agreed gravely. He looked around, frowning. "I will say, I seriously doubt this has anything to do with the Heartless. It lacks that certain...element I have come to associate with them."

"What's that? Mind-boggling terror?" Calvin said.

"Well, that, but also this world was left to its own devices. I still don't know how they accomplish it, or what the point is, but the Heartless slay the populace, transform them into more Heartless, devour the world they're on, and repeat again. Presumably until they've eaten everything that exists. This world...hrm, the humans have vanished and, by all accounts, left no bodies behind, which is much like what the Heartless do, but everything else was left in place, a life after people."

"Sounds like the name of a neat documentary," Calvin said.

"The Heartless do seem obsessed with breaking everything they find," Zuko observed. "They fight and they hate and they don't seem to understand anything but tearing down whatever they encounter. This...well, all of this," And he gestured towards the world at large. "This looks precise. I'm thinking, whatever happened to them, it had to be a single quick attack, or there'd have been more sign of damage. Fast enough that people couldn't have responded, or there'd be something to show where they'd fought back. Bullet holes in the walls, tanks in the streets, armed planes that crashed when the pilots had been killed, something like that!" He looked at Calvin and Hobbes. "Do you two have any ideas?"

Calvin shrugged. "Not me. Looks like if it was Heartless, there wouldn't be a world left behind, let alone really confused robot-kids or whatever."

Hobbes frowned. "It sounds a bit like something from the ancient history of my world; I think they were called the...uh, yeah, the Dark Eldar. This sort of thing would sound like their style, but I have no idea what they'd be doing here. "

"'Eldar'," Morte mused. "That's like an old word for elven-folk, or fae. These guys of yours some kind of elf?"

"Sure, yeah. Came from the same big group as the main Eldar; they were a pre-human civilization that had conquered our galaxy but fell apart a long time before humans ever made it off-planet. Regular Eldar are still around, mostly Exodite Eldar that joined the kingdom as citizens, but the Dark Eldar..." Hobbes shuddered. "I'd really hate it if we ran into some. They do...things to people. The great hero Vulkan told me once, 'Pray they don't take you alive'."

Morte clicked his teeth. "I might have heard a few things about fae-types that pull this sort of stunt, kidnapping people for evil things that...geez, I don't even like thinking about it. Everyone I ever met that knew a thing about them, it was usually because they escaped from their clutches and came out of it...different. These folks called them all sorts of things like 'the Gentry' or 'the Keepers' but mostly they just called them 'the True Fae'. Never said it outside a room loaded with cold iron if they could avoid it. Can't be the same things you're talking about; these bastards are older than words, the way I hear, definitely precede the Dark Eldar. And aren't actually a species at all. They might be connected, but...I don't know, might be worth looking into."

Calvin and Hobbes gave Morte a distinctly disturbed look. Zuko frowned thoughtfully. Zim asked, "You think these True Fae may have been involved?"

Morte was silent for a short time, thinking it over. Eventually he started to speak, words as carefully chosen as not to potentially offend something (or some things) that might have been watching. "They come from the shadows and the dark places in your mind, they climb from their lairs of the hollow spaces between the worlds through the things that reflect and make doorways. They do what they want and take whoever they wish, stealing them away for their own wants, and magically mutate them with tortures until they become like them." He paused, and added, "If a True Fae could get a way to steal over six billion humans and keep them all to itself, doing whatever it wants to them and making them into half-crazy freaks, it would do it in a second."

"...I think we really shouldn't let the robots know about them, then," Hobbes said quietly, having unconsciously taken a few steps back. Zuko and Calvin looked outright horrified (though they had their ways of coping with it; Zuko knew of spirits that were just as immoral as that and perhaps as powerful, and Calvin had personally encountered the Dark Eldar to know how they operated, but repeatedly blowing them on such occasions was heartening.) and Zim looked oddly thoughtful. "It would probably upset them."

"Where do these True Fae live?" Zim asked suddenly. "Next thing on our to-do list, BLOW THEM ALL UP. Also, rescue those people."

"...First things first, boss," Morte said, simultaneously intrigued and disturbed. "I haven't the slightest idea where the True Fae are from or how to get there. Everyone who knew something I talked to about them didn't want to talk much about it, sometimes said something about a place called Arcadia, very definitely not the Upper Plane of the same name and maybe mentioned something about the True Fae being outside reality or some bullshit like that, so no going. And if we did, they'd just blow us out like candles in a hurricane. No thanks, but I like being alive. And anyway we don't know for sure that they were taken."

"Hrmph," Zim grumbled, but took the point. "Can you say conclusively whether these Fae took the humans of this world or not?"

"Hard to say. Just a theory at this point, but it would explain why everyone vanished and there aren't any bodies. Might help if there was a calling card or something, but the real question is how the Nine Hells they cut a deal with someone to take all these people!" At the odd looks, Morte elaborated. "Some kinds of Fae, they're all about deals. Their powers stem from metaphysical contracts made with parts of reality, and so do their capabilities. Some things, they just can't do if they don't make a deal with it first. The thinking goes, some crazy human made a deal with them that they could take some humans in exchange for...geez, I don't know, people make up stories about what, but the important detail is that if it was True Fae, someone cut a deal with them that they could take the people on this planet."

Hobbes and Zuko, both men who held honor so dear that it was part of what defined them, made identical expressions of nearly-inhuman fury. "Who in the hells would dare do something like that!?" Zuko shouted. "That's...spirits, that's...there aren't words for how sick that is! What could possibly be worth doing something like that!?"

"Mind you, we did beat up a guy who weaponized stolen souls and was complicit in genocide because he thought it was fun," Calvin said, disgusted. "It might just all be because of people who don't honestly realize that stuff like that is, y'know, Evil."

Zim, inspired by that off-hand reference to Kimblee, and still brooding on Mr. Lyle's presence in Traverse Town, froze in thought. And then he said, "I know what happened, I KNOW WHO DID IT!"

"...Really," Zuko said, rightfully dubious.

"Really?" Calvin said, less experienced with Zim's poor connection to reality. "This I gotta hear."

"It was the mysterious and thus far unnamed organization that sent Mr. Lyle and Kimblee and controls the Heartless," Zim declared.

"...Really," Hobbes said deadpan. Calvin's enthusiasm fell flat and he joined the others in staring listlessly at Zim.

"Of course! Think on it; the organization they work for is CLEARLY powerful enough to acquire information that they shouldn't have access to, equip Kimblee as well as they did both in tactics and in the knowledge to pull off those powers he employed, and to control the Heartless. They are clearly vastly bigger than I had anticipated, perhaps spanning more than just multiple worlds, perhaps star systems or galaxies or even entire 'verses!"

Dramatically, he pointed a finger upwards. "Maintaining the Heartless alone is an exemplary show of the power they have, and so why wouldn't they have that kind of power in the form of influence? I theorize that they made contact with the True Fae and cut some sort of deal with them, perhaps garnering their support in exchange for giving the people of unclaimed or unwanted worlds, such as this one, to the True Fae! An evil plan, yes, completely lacking in morals or anything approaching the measure that a sentient being ought to hold, and so in total character for our enemies."

Hobbes stared at Zim. "...Okay. You're crazy."

"Am not!"

"Oh, come on, you actually expect us to take that seriously?" Calvin said snidely. "Guys, he's just trying to screw with us."

"I am not!" Zim said again, indignant.

Zuko patted Zim's shoulder awkwardly as the other three walked off, leaving the Irken to stew impotently. "Don't joke like that, they can't recognize your sense of humor," Zuko said, trying to be helpful."

"But I wasn't joking," Zim said, almost whining. Zuko wasn't sure how to respond to that, so he chose to pretend Zim hadn't said anything.

Alone of them, though, Morte was silent, thoughtful, and taking all of that into consideration. It was worth thinking about.

They returned to the robots (who had stayed true to their word and had even shut off their audio receptors just in case they might accidentally overhear the forbidden discussion) and waved at them to indicate that they could start listening again. "Were your words productive?" The robots asked politely.

"Meh, not really," Morte said.

"Have you any ideas about what became of humanity?" The robots asked, shifting a gear into 'hopeful' tones.

"Well, we had some thoughts but no positive leads-" Zuko started to say.

"Based on the information available to us, I think they were taken away by extra-dimensional fae horrors to realms that you cannot pass," Zim told them bluntly. "I apologize, but I do not think it is possible for you to rescue or retrieve them, as you lack the means of accessing such eldritch realms or blowing them up." He considered. "First you'll need guns. Lots and LOTS of guns! Guns that shoot torn fragments of space-time for starters, and then you could probably use some tanks, the smallest being the size of buildings. Also, Morte said something about cold iron, so you should get some of that. And spaceships, you'll need those for sure to go into space. And a flag! There's no point in having a big spaceship fleet like you will no doubt end up with if you don't have a flag to look awesome and stuff. Probably holographic, canvas flags are no good in space."

"I...see," The robots said. They glanced at each other, much like a smaller-scale organism might conduct a mental debate over something it had just heard, and shrugged.

Hobbes facepalmed. Calvin shrugged indifferently. Morte stared at Zim while Zuko facepalmed, small plumes of steams rising from his hands. "Zim..." Zuko growled ominously through his fingers.

"What?!" Zim said defensively as the robots began talking among themselves to puzzle out just what the hell Zim had been talking about. "Like just lying to them about everything would have solved everything. And besides, lying is unheroic! Except when it's more effective or really funny, but I don't see how that would apply here." Zuko's hands stayed firmly on his face, possibly to restrain his impulse to strangle Zim. They were certainly getting tension-white around the knuckles, though.

"Your friend seems upset," said a robot.

"Oh, he's used to it, I'm sure," Zim said dismissively.

The robot nodded. It paused, and so did so very many of the robots around them. A moment passed, and then another, enough time going by for Zim's heart to once, twice, and again before the robots spoke in a single voice, a thrill of deep emotion that many people would not think a machine could be capable of (and Zim so disliked the notion that mechanical lives were somehow less 'people' than organic lives). "You say that our creators - our makers, our...our parents... you say they are gone."

"As best as we can determine with the knowledge available," Zim said. "...Yes. Taken by the True Fae, it seems."

The robots considered this, the air thick with emotion. Several of the robots trembled, and put hands to their faces before making low and soft keening noises. Zim knew the sound of electronic sobbing when he heard it, knew the reaction of people who had never known expressions of grief outside of ancient recordings to form base assumptions. And for all that he didn't know these people at all, it still bothered him to see such undisguised pain when there was no clear way to help it.

Behind him, Zim felt Calvin shuffling around awkwardly and Hobbes slouch back, clearly in great distress. Zuko remained still but just as awkward, and Morte clicked his teeth in tense indecision much like Zim was feeling. One of the robots shyly said, "We did once encounter a possible sign. In our explorations in the ruins of Miami, we encountered a message carved into a street that said...I believe it said simply, 'Dzarumazh the Deathless has claimed what he is owed'. Does that have any relevance? It would have been mentioned sooner, but we thought that it had perhaps been human graffiti. And yet...perhaps it came from outside." The robot shivered at this notion, and Zim was again struck by how much they unconsciously imitated humanity. They shivered when they were frightened or disturbed, a human gesture that had grown out of purely biological reactions that had become psychological.

Morte started at the name 'Dzarumazh the Deathless'. Hobbes sharply said, "Someone you know?"

The robots, as one, turned their attention to Morte. Too startled to make a plausible lie, and not in much of a mood to even try, Morte said, "Big talk among the people who know fae stuff. Some kind of really powerful Fae monster that's a real mover and shaker among the True Fae. And...yeah, it'll definitely be the same one I heard about. True Fae are really touchy about their names."

"...So the True Fae were almost certainly here," Zuko said after a moment, sounding like he really didn't want to admit that Zim had even a shred of credibility.

"...Yeah. Looks like it."

Zim winced a bit, just remembering that the robots were still there, listening to this final confirmation of their maker's terrible fate. "So," one of the robots said, so quietly it was nearly a whisper. "These 'True Fae' took our makers away, for their own alien and horrible purposes. Vengeance must be taken, then, or reparations demanded."

"Guys, think, wait!" Morte said. "You don't...you don't know the True Fae. Come to think of it, I don't much either, but I know more of them then you ever will, and I can tell you that...well, that is NOT a fight you can win, no matter how tough you are or what your bodies are made of! The True Fae, by the Powers, they're not even really beings, they're elemental bits of magic given a basic identity that consume each other in crazy life-duels and twist everything they touch just by existing near it! They take humans and turn them into freaks just...they do it to make servants, to build up little slaves, for a thousand and twelve stupid reasons that don't even make sense! They turn people into wax-things that burn forever and bulk them up into giants to carry their palaces around and they strip their bones out to replace them with molten metal and sometimes they just eat who they take and most of the time the people that manage to come back are half-crazy and slipping the rest of the way! They do even worse things every day, and have so many they don't even notice when one of their slaves slips away! You're not just fighting something evil, you're fighting bits of insane pseudo-personalities with the powers of gods! They're monsters! What do you expect to do!?"

The robots went still for a moment, conversing among each other, debating and evaluating and thinking much as they had before, the mind they comprised thinking extremely hard.

"Um," Calvin said. "I think you upset them."

"There wasn't any need to upset them like that," Hobbes said, scowling.

"I don't want these guys throwing their lives away on a lost cause!" Morte snapped. "When the True Fae get near people, the people end up broken. These guys have the right to live without getting ripped apart for the jollies of some thistle-toothed princess of chaos or, shit, I don't know, some other crazy abomination!"

"I don't wish anyone to die like that either," Zim said, hands clenched. "But we ought to give them all that they need to make an informed decision! If they decide their honor as beings requires them to die fighting an invincible enemy, then we must abide by it!"

"Oh, COME ON!" Morte said. He whirled on Zuko, deciding from Hobbes' comment that he wasn't going to be on his side here. "You have common sense, tell him the smart thing to do!"

"Smart doesn't always mean the cold solution," Zuko said. He nodded once at Zim. "Zim was right. We have to give them what they think they have to do. It's...it's like our responsibility as more powerful beings. If their honor requires their doom, it's part of our honor to see that they can do it and succeed. That's the intelligent decision."

"No, that's the impulsive decision," Morte replied. "And-"

The robots interrupted him. "You say the that humans might still live, in the clutches of the True Fae?" The robots, all as one, nodded their heads resolutely. "Then the only correct choice is to bring them home, or avenge them."

Morte's jaw dropped right off. Zim nodded approvingly. Zuko almost smiled. Calvin and Hobbes gave cautious thumbs up. "It would seem that way," Zim said.

"Then," The robots said quietly. "Our choice is clear. We must locate the True Fae, defeat them, and do what the right course of action dictates from there."

"...But it's been so long since the humans were taken," Morte said. "They almost certainly won't be recognizable as human, and all there will be are descendants mutated by the True Fae."

"Irrelevant. It is our duty as the children of humanity to defend and love them, regardless of present form." The robots stood resolute. "This is what we shall do."

"But," Calvin said softly. "There's not really a whole lot of chance you could find them no matter how long you look, or that you could do anything meaningful about it when you get there." He gave Zim a look, and Zim remembered the criticism he had received regarding his plan to locate Gir and Gaz and Dib and the rest. The robots didn't seem to care about the bad chances, just as Zim didn't.

A moment for the robots to pause, considering. Then, "Your statement implies that, narrow as the chance may be, there still exists a chance that this can be done," The robots said, as stubborn as metal made personable.

A pause among the group. No one else spoke up in time, perhaps not sure what to say or feeling that they didn't have the right to interfere in such decisions, and Zim was so overwhelmed by the identical feelings of the robot to his own regarding his own mission that he found himself saying, "Of course. By determination alone, it must be made the only conclusion."

The robots nodded. "Then," The robots said with absolute and unyielding conviction, the kind of belief that is not so much hope as it is personal truth carved into the soul. "Minor as the probabilities are, there remains hope for us." Their facial emoticons changed into big happy grins, belying the lack of motion from their generally humanoid bodies, and even those were shaking with joyous emotion.

"Yes," Zim said again, and was a bit surprised to hear how encouraging he sounded. "Of course there is. If the odds aren't zero, they may as well be a hundred percent."

"That is good enough for us," the robots replied quietly. A moment later, with some bemusement and effort at the appropriate means to express it but finding no more appropriate words to be delivered in so short a time, they added, and Zim was startled at the bared intensity of their sincerity, "Thank you."

"For what?" Calvin asked, surprised.

The robots considered, perhaps wondering what the best way to articulate the source of their gratitude, and managed, "For giving us a purpose again. We feel we have been given a choice of what to do. To locate the makers of us, and bring them home." They glanced around at the broken and desolated place around them with a more critical eye than usual, and amended, "And to see to it that they have a home worth coming back to." And, more angrily, "And if they are extinct or beyond rescue, we shall see to it that their tormentors face justice for what they have done."

It wasn't a threat, or even a promise. Just a declaration of how things would be.

"...Hmph," Morte said. "...Well, if they're so intent about it, looks like they've got their choice made. Not much I can complain about there. That honor stuff you were talking about fits in there, I guess."

"Honor isn't just more valuable than life," Zuko told him gravely. "Honor is life. Better to die doing the honorable thing than to without it."

"Amen to that," Hobbes said, though he was openly disappointed with the robot's willingness to throw their lives away.

"You guys are crazy," Calvin said, without rancor. He didn't seem to approve, but if he was he also didn't really care that much.

"Hrmph," The robots said to Calvin. They regarded Zuko favorably, and Calvin was genuinely annoyed at that; he was the tech guy, the robot ought to like him more. "Your statements have the sound of satisfaction to us. Thus we shall act so. On this, we have a consensus." To Zim, they pondered a moment and said, "You agreed with our position so quickly. Kindly elaborate, please?"

Zim paused, wondering how much he ought to tell them, if anything. He thought about doing a plausible lie, but it felt wrong just thinking about one to these lost and lonely beings that had also lost their precious ones. He felt an uncommon kinship with them; like him, they had lost things that they cherished so dearly (even though none of them had ever met a human, and Zim wondered why they felt so powerfully about beings they had never met; their devotion seemed almost religious, come to think of it), and they had come to the same conclusions he had. Either rescue, or glorious revenge.

He told them, "My world was lost, consumed by abominations from beyond the stars." He hadn't thought about it, but that line resonated dearly with what he had told the robots about the True Fae suspected to have taken the humans; as expected the moment he thought of this, the robots' composures softened, a sheen of sympathy in their electronic faces. "A...a young one, a robot moderately similar to such as you, was scattered beyond my reach and not destroyed or slain, along with one of my dearest friends and his sister, and I suspect others of my world shared his fate. I have reached the same conclusions as you only last night. It was a moment of similarity, as simple as that."

A moment, long enough for the robots to process this and deciding to take him at his word. "Then we have a common sorrow," The robots said gravely.

"In that event, I believe it possible that they may have wound up here; our world is...was, quite similar to yours. Very similar indeed. I think it possible they may have appeared in this planet. Such things are not unheard of, or so I hear."

He didn't expect to get much hope out of this. As he thought, the robots shook their heads sadly, after a moment of hesitation over whether to tell a gentle lie or not. "We are afraid not. Your group are the sole sentient lifeforms we have encountered here, and our component-bodies dwell all over the planet. At this juncture, nothing escapes our notice; if they had arrived, we would have taken notice."

Zim nodded, not even bothering to hide his disappointment. "...I thought so. And if that is all, we ought to move on; there are other worlds that require our attention." This was addressed to his group, and was an informal goodbye to the robots he had unintentionally inspired.

"Sounds good to me!" Calvin said, sounding pretty bored already. Zuko, Hobbes and Morte voiced their own agreements, though varied in their hesitance; leaving these robots to seek their doom at a totally pointless mission didn't sit well with them.

It didn't sit well with Zim, either. It was a good opportunity when the robots asked, "We have a question for you. A request, we believe is the appropriate term?"

"If it's about the best way to break through the barriers of reality and seek vengeance, I am unsure how to accomplish that," Zim said, secretly pleased. "I don't think I can't help you in that regard."

"No, not that," The robots said. Softly, they asked, "May we examine your ship, and reproduce the designs you use? We have no reliable knowledge of spacecraft on the level that you use, and we cannot spare the time to design our own in the traditional way of trial and error. For the sake of those that made us, we must have a reliable design for construction immediately."

"Ah," Zim said. "And what will you do of this world?"

"We shall leave roughly half our number behind to serve as both a beacon and to repair what has been broken," The robots said. "More shall be constructed, and our mind dwells within us all regardless of distance, so we shall suffer no disconnection. Perhaps it will be a good idea to explore the reaches of space as we go along; the equipment at your disposal, in any case, is far superior to anything you can say."

Zim didn't wait for his crewmates to argue. He knew about the idea of the Prime Directive, that it was forbidden to give advanced technology to more primitive cultures that had not achieved faster-than-light travel or moved beyond their planet. It was there to prevent culture annihilation, or worse, to prevent a species too young to use the powers of such technology with wisdom and become conquerors or destroyers. Not even if the species was harmless and kind by nature and inclination, or only wished to bring back their makers home or make righteous war upon their murderers.

Zim never particularly cared for rules, even the good ones. "You may," he said solemnly, with a slight nod of the head. He heard brief noises behind him and glanced sharply at the rest of his crew. "Do any of you have objections!?"

Calvin shook his hands, protesting. "Of course not! I'm all about bringing the light of technology to people that need it and can use it with respect and intelligence! These guys are all right, no problems here."

Hobbes sighed. "I really don't think that they should be doing all that, but they may as well be readily equipped."

"What he said," Zuko said. "But without the negative moments."

"It's a bad idea all over," Morte insisted. "...Ah, hells, why not? Go full speed ahead, just don't let them complain to us if it goes pear-shaped."

"Then we have an accord," Zim said.

"You're serious!?" The robots said, gawking. "...Hrm. We didn't think you would actually agree to it!"

"We surprise EVERYONE."

"...We wish there was something we could do to repay you," the robots said, admitting embarrassment.

"...Well," Zim said, giving Calvin a sneaky look. "We are in dire need of raw materials…"

"Done!" The robots said earnestly.

"Well, that was...moderately productive," Zim said many hours later after taking the robots back to their ship and allowed them to analyze it's schematics down to the last placement of molecular-bonded seam sealing, driving a forklift to deposit a crate load of materials and devices the robots had given them, as per their agreement; the robots had flat-out refused to give them any weapons, perhaps harboring notions of pacifism (an attitude at odds with their intent to make war against cosmic powers of indifferently evil chaos, but they seemed to operate on a 'violence is always and only the last resort' mentality), but agreed to give them as much raw materials and non-combat equipment as they liked. This ultimately wound up being various devices, gadgets and tools for outfitting their rooms and laboratory more fully, a few more basic appliances and furniture for their rooms.

"I actually feel like we did some good," Calvin said, having come around fully to Zim's point of view from the sheer enthusiasm of the robots during the whole event. "And we got a lot out of it: roombas we can modify into cleaner-bots or little servants, plenty of various materials for crafting things, and lots of neat little odds and ends! If we get rewarded this well for every successful act of good, we'll have a fully outfitted headquarters by this time tomorrow!"

"Don't count on it, boss," Morte said. "Having it that easy would just be boring."

"Your pessimism is unfounded," Zim said, giving him a look.

"Hah! Just watch!"

"I wonder why they refused to give us weapons when they gave us materials that they know perfectly well we can fashion into weapons," Calvin said, changing the subject.

Zim shrugged. "Perhaps they see it as being a step divorced from the actual act of violence. The idea that they would be responsible for potential ill-doing on our parts may be in effect; I suppose they might see our own devices, made from our own hands, as being ours alone and are not their problem."

"A bit myopic, I'll admit. That hive mind is a moral exemplar, but it was seriously naive." Calvin said.

Zim backed the vehicle out of the ship and exited it to where the robots assured him they would be picking it up later, and re-entered the ship. "No time for dawdling," He said. "We have more worlds to visit!"

"You want to leave already?" Hobbes complained. "But I haven't even composed an entry for the Hitchhiker's Guide yet! We should stay for a while at least, they might hold a party for us! At least stay to enjoy the view."

Zim stared at him. "...There is nothing in this world that has a view I wish to dwell on," He said coldly. "Save for the robots. At least they remain a sign that this world of humans endured beyond its end."

"How is that any different from your world?" Hobbes said.

"This world still exists. Mine does not."

Hobbes was silent.

"So!" Zim said. "Let us be off!" Zuko nodded and went up to the bridge. Morte floated up after him. Hobbes rolled his eyes and hopped down to the cargo bay and headed for the bunks, intent on composing an entry for this world on behalf of the robots (he'd checked with them first for their permission) and Calvin completely ignored them all, heading off to the recreation quarters to start drawing up schematics for the things he would make with the materials given to them. "...Okay, by 'us' that just means me, Morte and Zuko going to the bridge," Zim said, annoyed. They didn't bother to answer him. He grunted and headed up to the bridge.

"Where are the other two?" Morte asked, already waiting in the bridge for them.

"Off doing their own agenda," Zim said, deeply displeased.

"Great," Zuko grunted, sitting in the co-pilot's chair with an air of deep distrust. "They're that worst kind of independent."

"Oh, they'll get what's coming to them," Zim said, smirking as he hit a few command sequences in addition to the ones that shifted the ship from passive sentry to flight mode; there was a faint shift as it disengaged landing gear and floated up into the air, projecting it's propulsion field and hovering upwards, pointing at an angle and moving up until it had cleared enough ground to be facing an empty patch of sky and took off in a blast that toppled a few buildings, pulverizing a few to dust and eradicated quite a lot of that pestilential vegetation, giving some of the city's artifice a measure of dignity.

"What do you mean by that?" Zuko asked, making sure his safety harness was on.

"Turned off the artificial gravity at their quarters," Zim said, pointing at a screen showing a graphic of various parts of the screen. As if on cue, they heard distant outraged cries and shouts of pain from below.

"...You are a vicious cutter, you know that?" Morte said, not sure if he should be admiring or disapproving. He decided to go with admiring, it seemed more fun.

"I do make an effort."

Zim squeezed the joysticks, funneling more power through the limiters of the engines and the ship accelerated, rocketing through the sky. He glanced at a screen, the landscape below getting smaller and smaller, and to his delight he saw a great mass rising from below all over the lands as they got high enough for the continents to be merely detailed; they came from everywhere, every ruined land and desolate realm on this quiet world, and it seemed that there were far more robots then they had suspected, so many that as they left their previous holdings and gathered together in one spot (flying on rockets and personal anti-grav fields and crude personalized aero-forms and some just swimming through the water and rocketing at immense speeds), they moved communally by instinct and stuck close together and so there were so many of them that they blotted out the sun over the lands, flying just over buildings and casting that city into shadow.

Nearly four billion mechanical lifeforms, all small parts of a single overarching consciousness, gathered in one place and made Zim feel rather good about doing at least this one thing today; inspiring a sad and lonely being to an act of heroism and loyalty, mad and even pyrrhic though it was (and indeed, part of him thought that made it all the more noble for its supposed futility, and still more of him thought that they stood quite a good chance of success in this endeavor, if his theory was correct). At the very least they were trying to do something, not just laying around and feeling sorry for themselves anymore.

He gave them a last encouraging look. As a single act, all the masses below, so many of them that they appeared to be a single huge silvery organism covering a stretch of the continent, tilted very slightly, them all turning to watch him go, and unexpectedly flitted around, swarming over each other, their collective mass reshaped into first strangeness and then into recognizable forms, and then into letters, the billions of robot-bodies spelling out a brief but heartfelt message: 'THANK YOU', they said.

Zim grinned. The ship accelerated to levels the programmed safeguards would not allow, internal boosters set for planetary exiting kicking in while the Astral Plane warp drive kicked in and extra-dimensional energies crackled around the Paragon, turning green as it went further on, and as it reached the outermost layers of the atmosphere, the view of their cameras twisted in odd angles that was hard to process, their brains shying away from the weird afterimages forming on the screens, and a brief awareness that they were looking at suggestions of other realms while their ship readjusted its universal superposition to the Astral Plane would have made stronger stomach nauseous.

Then, everything was green. Blurred and shining bright variations of emerald and so on, and silvery light flooded in almost immediately, a sudden sense of cool refreshingness sliding through their minds and smoothing down Zim's lingering troubled thoughts with a measure of serenity.

A look at the cameras confirmed it; another successful jump, the view of the Astral Plane all around them. Zim disengaged the propulsion for a moment, and the ship hovered in the middle of the Astral Plane, the portal to the world of the many-bodied robot mind still behind them, now stronger and more vibrant than it had been. Zim switched the artificial gravity back on with an adjustment to an important-looking dial, and he heard Calvin and Hobbes' shouting from below. "You've a cruel sense of humor, boss," Morte said.

The ship drifted in the ether of the Astral Plane for a long time, floating far from the portal in an aimless direction, the three of them drinking in the view of the endless silver mindscapes before them, literally limitless lights leading to worlds beckoning them from elsewhere. "So," Zuko said. "Where do we go next?"

"I have no idea," Zim said, grabbing the joysticks and powering the propulsion back up and leading into a completely random direction. On a whim he called up the multiversal map, projecting it from a holographic interface on the dashboard, picking a nearby world-light completely at random. "Let us just see what happens from here on, eh?"

"If you like," Zuko said, and smiled faintly. "Looks like we're doing good everywhere we go. Sounds fine to me."

"...Yes," Zim agreed, and it was truly heartfelt.

Their ship flew off, leaving a resplendent trail behind them, to other worlds then any of them knew (save perhaps Morte).

The future, strange and unknowable though it was, felt good to Zim.

A few days later, on a feral planet the crew had stopped upon to do some training without needing to restrain themselves, Zuko wasn't able to express his annoyance apart from closing his eyes. "We do not need the harness."

"Hey, look who suddenly got a degree in aeronautics when we weren't looking!" Calvin said sarcastically, giving a leather strap he was hooking up a cruel tug that jerked Zuko nearly off his feet. "Hey guys, check it out! The guy who's literally just in the middle of an industrial revolution suddenly thinks he knows more about how recoil and thrust works than the engineers from galaxy-spanning super-nations!"

"Hey, now just a second-" Zuko started to say.

Calvin continued. "I never would have guessed that being able to field tanks that rely on pyrokinesis to so much as fight back against basic infantry qualifies you to HAVE AN OPINION on the mechanics of things you have no idea how they work! Funny, isn't it?"

Zuko grimaced. He was wired into a large harness of leather straps arranged around his body and hooked onto large metal rings set on the ground. The tension of the traps and placement of the rings had him suspended in mid-air and held in place. "I can do this without a stupid harness holding me like this!"

"Oh,?" Calvin said, riled up, and stopped calibrating the thing to rip out in a blistering rant. Zuko was no slouch at screaming and returned with full force, already in a poor mood.

Hobbes and Morte watched from atop the lowered cargo door that they were using as a small deck where they'd set up a luncheon, a hovering screen playing an episode of some cartoon or another they'd recording into their media database while flying through a network zone in a random galaxy. The arguing was proving to be more entertaining than the cartoon.

Calvin, still ranting, was tightening and calibrating the straps so they wouldn't fly loose in the face of excess force. He expected that they might anyway; Zuko could direct some extreme forces with his Firebending, and since he'd never bothered to test those limits, Calvin didn't really know what he was expected to work with but considered this an opportunity to gather some data. While Zuko was distracted with arguing and not in a position to whine about the straps, Calvin moved around the rings and adjusted them this way or that way so they wouldn't just break apart or fall over. The rough-hewn rock under them provided a sturdy surface and was surprising amenable to the large nails they had driven into the rock to secure the rings.

A bit of a nature lover, Calvin briefly reflected that the bickering seemed out of place in the large clearing they had set up in, tree-sized fungi blooming for acres around them upon a narrow depression in the countryside, the fungi-trees growing smaller as the area widened. They suspected that something had crashed and made that depression that also cultivated those fungi, perhaps some meteor carrying chemically-reactive metals; this planet was unnamed, and held no native sentient life apart from the children of the scientists running an observation outpost a few miles north of there (who had no interest in Zim's group apart from reassurances that they would not interfere in the observations of the native fauna). It all looked so peaceful; the bickering ruined the mood somewhat.

Zuko looked around while Calvin finished rigging up crude but functional sensors around the rings. "Where's Zim?" He asked. "He's gone again!"

"No idea," Hobbes said. "I'll go take a look." He gave Zuko a sneaky grin that said 'have fun suffering' and Zuko glared at him. Hobbes walked past Calvin double-checking Zuko's riggings to ensure that they were secure (and they were), and the tiger gave one of the straps a cheerful pluck; it was stiff and was hard to move. It also was really irritating to Zuko, who glared some more. Hobbes snickered and left. Calvin said, "Okay! We're ready to go!"

Calvin retreated back to a safe distance. Zuko maneuvered his hands in front of him with difficulty, resigned to his fate, and waited. "Okay," Zuko said. "Like we practiced. Starting with a slow both."

Zuko inhaled, exhaled. His arms strained with the effort, and heat shimmered over his palms. Immediately they burst into blooming fires, wide streams focused into much tighter ones,. quickly narrowed into thinner streams. It produced a tremendous amount of force; Zuko was blasted back at once, thrown back by the force of his blasts and held by the harness. If he hadn't, it would blasted him right off the ground The straps buckled and shook, straining at their anchoring points. Heat rippled from him, and his arm tilted slightly to the side from the forces and he immediately was thrown to another side.

Rattling and shaking as the metal rings started to tremble with the forces he was making, Zuko gasped, and the flames cut out. His hands still smoking, he bounced back to his starting position, breathing heavily. "I have no idea how Master Jeong-Jeong could fly doing that," he managed to say.

Calvin came closer and inspected the readout on a monitor connected to the sensors. "Looks like you were projecting enough force to rip yourself off the ground and fling yourself for at least twenty feet. Not exactly flying, but it would be pretty close for short bounds."

"Except for the part where he crashes into a wall!" Morte said.

Zuko said. "Okay, let's try vertical thrust." With his great emphasis on footwork and dance moves in his fighting style, it was no surprise that it fired up more easily than his hands; continuous streams not unlike jet plumes ignited, and there was a great clanging of metal when the thrust lifted him upwards; the harness would have been ripped right into midair if it wasn't for being nailed into the ground, and as it was, it still shook ominously, nailed just barely keeping it in place.

The streams cut off and Zuko bounced back, now sweating quite a bit and a little red in the face. "That's painful," He managed.

"Even more speed there," Calvin said. "And, geez, there was a lot of thrust there! If he could maintain those fire jets, he could fly! Shame."

"Endurance isn't a key component in Firebending," Zuko said defensively. "And I still don't know what the harness is for."

"Keeping you in one place so we can see how those fire jets of yours work, determine the thrust ratio, get a better grip on what you're doing," Calvin said, scrolling through the data. "When you tried training with this technique on the ship, you smashed your head into a wall."

"Just one wall! Twice, anyway. Maybe four times. It was just one wall."

"The same wall, more than once? And on the ceiling?"

"That counts as a wall."

"Finding data leads to ways on improving that data!" Calvin said cheerfully. "Now, I think we should spent about another hour or two keeping your practicing this jet technique. It may help build up some endurance for it, give you a better instinct of how to position yourself or direct the flames. Experience is critical in this sort of thing! And we shall do that again and again for the rest of forever until you get it right!"

"Joy," Zuko said flatly, regretting ever bringing up his idea on the jet technique the most skilled firebenders used to fly and how to make it work for him.

Then again, seeing as the first times he'd tried in private on the ship had ended in painful concussions, he supposed it could have been much worse.

Elsewhere, a few miles safely downwind from the others…

Zim stared at the small leaf laying on the ground of a unremarkable pre-sentient world, abundant with plant life and primitive animals yet to emerge from the sea, and willed it to move.

Nothing happened.

Zim said nothing. He cupped his hands, and felt that internal shift inside as magic began to flow, pure primordial power swelling out from that divine shard of perfection where the Keyblade's energies melded with his soul and lacing with his being. Fire swelled out between his hands, not merely superheating the air but actually blooming from his palms.

The fire, it seemed, was a part of him, if it was fire at all. It was hard to control, to grasp; it surged at his attempts to corral it, surged through with random flares when his temperance weakened, still knitting together into a swirling ball between his hands.

Zim shifted the flow. Perhaps, he considered, it was essential not to force it one way or the other, but to channel it, give it places to flow through...

The fire moved, the flares ceased, and a shining ball of flame was suspended between his hands. Chaotic and unpredictable, but it at least did what he wanted. Zim grinned.

And with that, his focus faltered; the ball bulged out, smaller flames breaking out from deeper within and lashing out to burn small holes in things-

With a faint cry, Zim concentrated hard, willing it to move into a certain path. The flames ceased, and he relaxed marginally.

For days now, since leaving the Earth-world with all the robots, Zim had been practicing this ability in private. His battle with Kimblee had made it apparent that the powers granted by the Keyblade were much more complex than he had thought, and he felt he was only scratching the surface of what he was capable of; the lightshow the Keyblade frequently created was a key to something else, and he'd only made hops and crawls to whatever that power might be.

He focused upon the leaf again. Heat, Zim thought, was the excitement of molecules moving rapidly. That movement generated heat. So...perhaps heat could be considered movement, and he could direct it in certain fashions. He knew his control of fire was the weakest aspect of this recent power, his great flaw, but by melding it with his scientific knowledge, he could use even those flaws to his advantage.

He concentrated, thinking of the leaf and the air around the fire as being one, willing the flames to move as though they were, a single point divided by perceptional illusion...

The fire faded slightly, or perhaps was focused. The leaf hovered several inches above the ground, as Zim had imagined it would, and when he released the flames in his excitement, the essence he was funneling into it was cut off and the fires vanished, and the leaf gently floated to the ground, singed.

"Good," Zim said. "Proof of concept."

"Proof of what-now?" Hobbes said from a mighty branch overhead, hanging from it by his heels directly over Zim.

Zim recoiled. "Ack! What are you doing here!?"

"Looking for you." Hobbes nimbly swung out and landed besides Zim. "We were wondering where you'd gotten off too."

"Hrmph. What I do is mine own concern."

"Okay. What are you doing, then?"

"I'm not telling you!"

"Only it looked like you suddenly have more magic powers than before and honestly that's kind of cheap, you know."

"Bah. It's perfectly reasonable extrapolation of my existing abilities."

"Is not!"

"Is too! And why are you arguing with me? You're supposed to be the sensible one!"

"…Oh yeah."

Zim turned back to the leaf. Hobbes settled back to watch him, and Zim resigned himself to the tiger's presence. Zim resumed his experiments; a small plume of fire extended from his finger, closer to white-blue than the sun-hued colors his fire normally took shape of.

Zim concentrated, willing it to burn hotter, funneling essence into it (and musing that it was looking like the lightshow the Keyblade frequently made). The light grew brighter, larger, growing to the size of his fist and wobbling dangerously.

And still Zim focused it inward, concentrating upon the lessons of fire being an aspect of light. Fire, Morte had told him, created light, and in the lessons of elemental physics great magi had discovered, some forms of light were where the holy energies of the Positive Energy Plane met fire. Perhaps light was an aspect of fire, instead of the other way around like some thought, or maybe their theories were all wrong; Zim wanted to find out. He could feel something within that little flame now, a flickering suspicion weightier than stone, a thought of the flame's source. Zim was a scientist, and so the numinous truth was a beacon to him. The opportunity to learn was right in front of him, and he didn't dare lose this chance.

He funneled yet more power from that inexhaustible dynamo that might well have been the Keyblade's spiritual form, pushing it into that light within the flames. The flame grew brighter, and then not so hot, and then brighter still, growing and changing, force suddenly forcing his hand away, a definite pressure on his finger, like it was pushing at him. A brilliant ball of light was floating over his finger now, flames consumed or just gone, mostly white but refracting into dozens of more interesting colors.

Zim tilted his hand, marveling at this, and the light moved with him, a definite force pressing on his hand. The force was from the light, he realized, and it shifted away from him as he had an idle thought that it should do so. He spread his fingers, and saw streamers of force spread out from the light and tug up a trail of dirt precisely in the shape of his fingers, and he turned his hand; the force ripped through the dirt in accordance with his motion.

He closed his hand. The force rolled up, wrapping into a small ball around the light, not realizing that he was starting to pant with the effort of maintaining the thing-

His focus slipped. The delicate balance of the lightball went awry, and it abruptly terminated with a large explosion.

Hobbes was sitting high enough that it didn't hit him; he watched, bemused, as Zim went rocketing past him in a thunderous blast of light that incinerated the poor plants that were in its way. "You okay?" He asked, feeling stupid at saying that to someone presently lying upside down in a clump of bushes.

"Whee," Zim said distantly. "I have telekinesis too."

"Okay." Hobbes returned to the guide, finishing up an entry on the planet they were on ('a nice place,' he had written, 'the wildlife is confined to the oceans, the plants are pretty, an excellent vacation spot if you want to get away from the stress of the technological era, and the scientists studying the place make nice neighbors.' It wasn't much of an article, and he intended to refine it for better writing and honesty). He'd written one or two of these articles since they'd left Traverse Town, typing up his observations about the worlds they'd seen (they'd visited a few since the world with all the robots, none of them exciting but still interesting), and they had been well-received by editors and readers alike.

Ron Stoppable had kept his word; an account and researcher privileges had been accorded to Hobbes and their copy of the Guide, and a small amount of money had been deposited into it over the past number of days; approved-article royalties, paid by the foundation that kept the Guide's essential services going by paying for well-written and informative articles.

Hobbes peacefully continued writing. Zim went back to experimenting and proceeded to blow things up at least sixteen times before the others heard and investigated (except for Zuko, who they forgot and left him stuck in the harness until he blew it up with pure anger), at which point he stopped for fear of humiliation, and eventually they left. In the days to come, Zim would train himself again and again in this newfound aspect of his powers, with moderately greater faculty but not much skill.

Zim slept, and dreamed.

He dreamed of a world of infinite darkness, of a world-body so fundamentally dark that there was no color or illumination; this place was anathema to those things, defining colors as things that did not exist here and the light of Virtue and heroism totally obstructed or oblivated. There was only shadow.

The darkness wept, the shadows screamed, and tiny points of consciousness were swallowed all over, jagged bits of blackness ripping into them and tearing out everything that was good or even neutral, suffocating them in pain and misery until everything that was good in them had been burned away, leaving them hollow imitations of this greater darkness.

Zim saw them fall, descend into the darkness and come out ravening horrors among the jagged darkness of this realm, all their golden years stained black and left with nothing but endless dreams of corruption.

He saw that odd human who'd died, Stewie, clawing and screaming while massive claws tenderly separated flesh from bone, taking them apart and sewing them together again and again into ever more malevolent patterns. There had been little in him that had been good, and already it was being torn away and subverted; he was there for only a moment, and then Zim saw ten thousand yellow eyes blink open in empty space to stare right into Stewie, into his very soul, and in their gaze everything that might have been golden or shining – illuminated by virtue and goodness – was stained black. Stewie screamed just once, a small noise like a mouse being stepped on, and he wept even as cracks leaking black ichor opened in him.

He was given no time to dwell on this horror. His perspective widened, and Zim came to see the whole of what he was being made to look at, in a single glance. The truth was made plain to him in an instant, and Zim saw that this dread malevolence was bigger than planets, larger than worlds, and it was alive. For mile and miles, as if the curve of a horizon, the bleak world was defined in jagged curved and humped canyons carved into the ground as if in the impact of a fallen titan, and the ground giving way to such dissolute areas of pseudo-sand that it was like a ocean large enough to drown planets, and that gave way to a true ocean of liquid shadows that were even bigger, and terrible things swam in that abyss.

It moved for Zim's dreaming eyes, drifted back, and it was only the slightest curve, and Zim saw that this massive landscape still only formed the slightest wall in a single maze so vast it could contain whole universes, a twisting labyrinth in the shape of a mind-breaking nightmare of black spirals. And from there, Zim saw entire universes defined in shadow and blight and hate, each one as cold and hideous and fundamentally hollow as the rest. Hellscapes and nightmares cobbled together from thousands of observed evils. All of it defined in wicked spirals and color's total absence and landscapes twisted into the semblance of long-since extinct cultures and species. This last seemed almost mocking, a spiteful triumph over those who had died so utterly no one would ever remember them.

And Zim saw that was moving, it was breathing, and how joyous it was at feeling the pain it brought to those consumed and digested in its universal depths. How little satisfaction this pain ultimately brought to it, a petty wickedness as hollow as everything else about it.

And yet, it was still so very vast that it's titanic presence took no notice of the countless souls being corrupted into tiny mockeries of its infernal glory, things so hollow and wretched that the boundaries of individual had broken enough for them to pool into a greater self. And like it, these awful horrors were maddened pits of despair, with no compassion or conviction or temperance or valor; just an awful will, so terrible to keep such an unholy thing alive.

A great eye, as if that of a titanic dragon's and gleaming with a fearful yellow light, tore this place asunder, and suddenly the entire realm was looking directly at Zim.

In a voice that shook these universes to their core, a voice dripping with venom and hate disguised with cool gentility that Zim wanted to listen to even as every single instinct screamed at him to flee from this thing, the world-body spoke.

Thus spake the titan, "WHAT."

And Zim fortunately was woken up when the intercom blared with Calvin's voice. "Team meeting you guys! Wake up and get together in the lab, I got some stuff to show you! Hurry up, hurry up!"

It went on in this fashion for some time, loud and impatient and seemingly right in Zim's ear, even through the liquid gel he'd immersed himself in. Zim blinked, relieved to find himself surrounded by sterilized goo-ey goodness, regained his senses and mentally transmitted a command through his Pak. He might as well get up now.

Dials and gauges beeped on the nearest wall of his private quarters, measuring his biometric data in an increasingly complicated set of calculations that he'd found intriguingly different from the last set of such data from a few days before all this Keyblade stuff had happened. (As of now, all his Pak's on-board functions had at last been repaired to full functionality.) In the middle of the room there was a tall cylinder going from ceiling to floor, containing Zim himself afloat in a large solution of liquid gel he had designed himself to have a number of regenerative and cleansing qualities that did wonders for his somewhat delicate biological system (and was very pleasant to sleep in, too), and wearing only a pair of dark shorts to ensure that as much of his body was in contact with the gel while modesty was given its due. The set-up made him look rather like he was inside a large vat. A number of thick cables extending from his Pak into shielded ports at the bottom where he could control the systems in that room. Now, the slots of a drainage grate opened at the bottom of that cylinder, and with a loud industrial pumping noise the liquid gel slid away, lowering Zim to the ground as it did, and by the time his feet had hit the ground all of it had been drained.

The vat's exterior disengaged with a hissing noise, retracting into the ground, and then the cables attaching to Zim did the same, disconnecting and disappearing into the ports at the bottom of what looked like a rather ornate part of the ground. Zim shuddered, the room both cold on his still gel-soaked skin and a sense of disquiet from being so suddenly disconnected from a wider information network. He ignored it and went on his business. The gel was meant to evaporate quickly, but he had made provisions for speeding it up; he stepped onto a pressure-activated section around the vat, and the metal grating on both the floor and ceiling just in front of him blew hot air up at him from all directions, drying him off in moments. The initial moment of discomfort gave way to a far more satisfying sensation of smoothly dry skin, a wonderful feeling of total cleanness, and a night's worth of rest.

Well, apart from the weird dreams, anyway, but he was getting used to those. He'd had that same dream, or varying permutations of it, for the last six dream-cycles. He shuddered at the thought. Sammael popped in, expressing horror at the idea of going to sleep next time and dreaming of that thing all over again, and before Sammael blipped out Zim thought that he would nearly prefer chronic insomnia.

Calvin voice was still blaring, whining about paying attention to him. hurried past a mess of cables and computer terminals in the process of being put together in a corner where he was building his own private computer network, a stack of papers with hastily scrawled messages on them he'd written to himself while half-dazed from being sleepy (one of them said 'Iron-Plated Warlord Monkey' while another said 'Step one, feed fish. Step two, realize you don't have any fish. Step three, go back in time and get some fish so you can feed them. Step four, '?'. Step five, 'PROFIT!'), an alcove filled with several holograph terminals and all of them displaying beloved images of times with his friends he'd transcribed onto a memory reader to make pictures to remind himself of the good times and what he was working towards, and some other things. He nearly crashed right into the ladder to the platform extending out from the wall over a good half of the room and hosted the assembly of tables and devices that he was rapidly making into his own small workshop, and went right to a few repurposed weapon lockers he'd modified to be his own wardrobe, rotating and built right into the wall.

The long metal cube he selected open with a pressurized hiss when he swiveled open the locking mechanism, it's front splitting and irising open into a revolving assemblage holding a number of clothing items presented for Zim on a frame of articulated rods, the clothing separated not by type of attire but by the situation where they would be appropriate. This particular one was 'Casual Wear', suitable for simple days where nothing much was required aside from some minor training or perhaps a mock battle or two; Sokka and Hobbes got gotten Zim a fair share of outfit material, and he selected a dark purple sleeveless shirt and matching military-issue shorts designed for halflings, changing into them in short order. Since he had his bunk all to himself, he didn't have much concern about modesty.

By this point, the intercom had gone quiet, and Zim was relieved at the cessation of noise. Patting the minor fabric wrinkles down and adjusting his shirt so it went around his Pak nicely, he closed the clothing locker and carefully navigated around his cluttered room, noting with some grim amusement that in the days of getting more things to outfit it with he still hadn't actually done much more with that aside from basic amenities, a functional dormancy system, the beginnings of a computer network and workshop, and the barest suggestions of half a dozen other things to occupy his time with getting operational or started. In some places, hanging curtains and massed piles and all kinds of other clutter made it hard to tell that his roomy square-shaped bunk had corners at all.

He left for the door, sliding it open and walking out onto the narrow and short corridor linking the bunks together; metal clicked reassuringly under his feet, the low-slung ceiling rumbling distantly with the of sound life support processes and the mysterious green energy-powered engines. The bunk-doors were all of the same fashion as his own, though marked differently; Zim had melted his name right into the door, while Zuko had put a plaque with the Fire Nation written characters for his name over his. On the other side of the hall, Calvin and Hobbes had chosen bunks at least two bunks away from each other (instead of rooming together like Morte had expected), Calvin's name transmuted right into the door with a small sculpture of himself posing out of it while Hobbes had hung a small handsome canvas roll with his name and portrait upon it. Morte, who had to be talked into getting his own room, signified his room by putting a doormat in front of his door with 'MORTE RICTUSGRIN' scribbled on it. This left several unused bunks, left empty; Zim hoped that they might discover more worthy allies to join their ranks. Calvin considered that unlikely, but welcomed it. Morte frankly said that it was inevitable. Zuko didn't understand why Zim wanted more crewmembers, since they already had five. Hobbes hoped that the next people to join would be girls because, as he put it, 'this ship is a total dude-fest'.

No sooner had Zim left the bunk corridor than he saw Hobbes and Zuko climbing out of a downstairs ladder in the rear of the cargo, presumably moving up from the large chamber underneath the cargo hold that they'd modified into something of a recreational room and meeting hub. "What's my little buddy going on about?" Hobbes asked Zim as soon as he caught sight of him trying to sneak away on the staircase to get away from them.

"You tell me," Zim said. "I'm hardly privy to his doings."

"You're up there with him half the time these days, working on gadgets or plans or whatever," Zuko said. Zim had to admit, this was true; the poor state of his room's clutter was largely due to spending a lot of time with Calvin working on various projects where their respective talents were of great use to one another.

"True," Zim said. "Let us go see what he's devised." The three of them walked up the ladder, going up to the same level that went to the bridge; instead of going straight there, though, they turned and went to one of the large doors at the side of this level of the ship, into a (ominously) shielded door with a name tag marked 'LABORATORY/WORKING/TESTING ROOM'.

Immediately before Zim was about to open the door, it exploded out of its frame while on fire from the other side, and by the time it ricocheted off the ceiling and imbedded itself into the ground, kinetic forces and stress had contorted it into a half-melted lump of slag. It was still on fire, too.

Zuko gently lowered Zim's wrist, the Irken frozen in mid-step where he had been about to open the door before it had exploded. "That is not a promising sign," Zuko said dryly.

"Don't you guys worry about that!" Calvin's voice said loudly, only a little panicked. "Just a test run on something else, no big deal! ...I think my guns need more power, the door hardly slowed a single shot down at all. That shot should have gone through the door."

"Are you crazy?!" Hobbes said. "You could have killed us!"

"...Sorry," Calvin said meekly. "It was an accident, serious! In retrospect, maybe I shouldn't have been testing the gun at the door right after I called you guys in." They stared at him. "Well, what are you waiting for? Get in here!" Grumbling unkind sentiments, they shuffled in.

They stepped over the shallow recess in the floor that the door had been wedged into, cautiously walking into what Zim and Calvin had painstakingly modified it into a combined laboratory, workshop and testing range for their various technological designs and gadgetry. They'd made the most of the limited space (which was still a lot more than made any real sense and supported Zim's 'the ship is a bit bigger on the inside than the outside' theory) and produced a workshop of middling size if you didn't mind it being cramped. Zim, Zuko and Hobbes navigated through a badly organized mess of floor-bolted tables and workbenches totally covered with dissembled parts or tools for all manner of machining and similar things, passed under the half-finished frame of a hover-cycle Calvin was making as a personal combat vehicle for himself hanging from the ceiling in a secured harness.

They gave one of the weapons a fishy look; there was a revolving table a short distance from the door and clamped on it was a large vehicle-issue weapon similar to a Imperium-issue autocannon. It was smaller than ordinary autocannons, and the design had been modified into an energy weapon; a long barrel made sturdier with shock absorbers and coolant circulators attached to a broader ordnance projector rimmed with microfusion cell loaders for ammunition. Between that was a still unfinished mechanisms to draw power from the cells and superheat a chamber full of electrically active gas, controlling and projecting it, effectively producing a blast of superheated plasma, with (as the missing door demonstrated) spectacularly destructive results.

Zim was a bit of a weapons expert, and he observed all of this in moments, and he had to admit it was a nice design. "A curious design," Zim said, admiring it's lethal possibilities. "What is it for?"

Calvin struggled through the laboratory from the intercom set up at the computer terminals at the other side of the room, looking sheepish once he reached them, now pleased to have his professional opinion asked. "I'm working on some armaments for a combat platform for me to use," he said. "I'm not so great at the fighting on foot thing, so I'd like to be better prepared for a real fight like that Kimblee debacle, and I'd like to be well-armed too. I'm good at piloting in combat situations, so I'm exploring that option."

Zim's eyes wandered to the hover-cycle overhead. In the center of its mass there were two linked engines of incredible power, fed fuel from a reactor Calvin had reverse-engineered from the same reactor-engines the ship employed (though he didn't understand it much, but he found that it was empowered by their spiritual energy and theoretically could supply infinite power to any design, and he was enthralled at the possibilities this presented). Around these, a decidedly more unfinished frame was being constructed, a skeletal assembly of supporting components and integral computer equipment. It was a tri-wheel design, that much was clear from its shape and mass allocation it was being totally changed, broken down to its basic frame, being made larger and built around, but Calvin hadn't procured any wheels from it yet.

Calvin continued. "My modified autocannon is working out good - it's got excellent power and I'm looking into non-lethal things for it and already its weight compensation and balance are amazingly good for the modification I used - but ideally my weapon platform would have two of them as the basic go-to firearms default and I want to improve the rapid-fire capabilities. Might want to think about putting a governor on its systems for practicality though..."

"We should all have our strengths played to and augmented," Zuko observed.

"We are working on that," Zim and Calvin said. "In our respective spare time," Zim amended.

Hobbes looked around the cluttered room. "What do you even do in here all day?" He asked Calvin.

Calvin looked around awkwardly at the tables; an exo-rig here with the beginnings of powered armor only a suggestion, a crude electrically-powered whip weapon, the peculiar device he'd used to siphon away the Omnitrix energies from Kimblee set up on a pedestal with computers analyzing the vast DNA selections encoded within it, computer systems strung everywhere with terminals displaying no less than fifteen different simulations and calculated probabilities for them with suggestions to follow them up, small enclosed chambers for weapons testing, a rough firing range he'd managed to get up, a small but powerful furnace to smelt metal and recast it into different shapes, a complicated table with a surface made of aligned plates he could move around to make different transmutation arrays and therefore create any type of mechanical shape or form he knew sufficient well (thus freeing him, mostly, from the need for mass production provided he was working from a schematic with exacting standards), the piece of the Umbra Eternis' armor clamped down and six wastebins full of blunted saws with a lot of charred shavings and a weaponized shield there to show for it, and several other things that indicated both a brilliant mind and an extremely short attention span.

"Lots of things," Calvin said simply.

A nearby screen flew over, and Morte was displayed on it, showing him at the pilot's seat in the bridge. "Hey guys," he said loudly. "'Bout time I dropped in! How's it going?"

"How are you even piloting that thing!?" Zim said. "Who let you in there?!"

"It's on autopilot, Boss. And can you blame me for wanting to feel important?"

"Hmph, I suppose not. What's this about?"

Calvin answered. "I got the guys up here, I'm showing them the things," Calvin announced.

"Right, let's see how our guys take it!"

"Take what?" Zim said. "What's Morte talking about?! Have you been discussing gadgetry with him? Why?"

"He thought it was interesting, and he's a good theoretical assistant. And what he was talking about…ah, follow me!"

He led them to several smaller tables set up in front of a specialized enclosure, wrapped on all sides by powerful metal walls; a firing range of some sort. On the table were several rounded objects of different types, and on it's on table was the shield and shaving Zim had noticed earlier. All of these objects were securely held in small mechanical clamps on the table, save for the shaving in their own container. "I've designed us a whole bunch of weapons to upgrade our arsenal and shoot up our badass quotient even higher!" Calvin said cheerfully.

"Ooh!" was the general gist of their response. The overwhelming pounding they got in the fight with Kimblee had induced a lot of need to improve on their combat skills. Better weapons were a pleasant surprise.

"What do you have for us?" Zim said eagerly. Calvin had asked for his help with a number of things in recent days – mostly about metallurgy or seeking help with engineering problems, as Calvin claimed to be specialized in physics – but he hadn't said anything about weapons specifically. Zim certainly had no idea what was going to be given here.

Calvin unclicked one clamp and withdrew the first weapon; a cylindrical-shaped object about the size of Zim's fist, a thin frame of various metals set around a small glowing capsule resembling an ornate battery; a microfusion cell. At the top was a small dial with several settings and an indent large enough for any of their thumbs to fit in. At the sides were transparent surfaces that showed the weapon's innards, and within was a tiny container of a clear liquid shaped in such a way that it fed directly into the glowing capsule but was designed so that the liquid was blocked from actually reaching it.

"Is that a grenade?" Zim asked, interested.

"Yep," Calvin said. He tossed it to Hobbes. "Catch!"

"Whoa!" Hobbes and Zuko crashed into each other trying to catch it, the grenade falling into the ground and hitting the floor hard. Hobbes cried, remembering the explosion when Bloo had accidentally blown up their cache of grenades in Traverse Town, and shut his eyes...and absolutely nothing happened. He peeked. The grenade was sitting innocently on the floor, unexploded and apparently harmless. "It's a dud!"

"Nope, just unarmed," Calvin said as Zim picked up the grenade. "Without its safety being disabled, it can't explode. Give it here." Zim tossed it over to him. Calvin managed to catch it. "See this?" He indicated the dial, which had a clear plastic shield over it. "You slide that thing off, put it to the level you want, and then you touch your thumb to the indent with hostile intent; thought-reactive material, kind of like the Eldar's wraithbone tech. If you don't do any of that, it's internal mechanisms are set up so that there's nothing explosive about it. Bounce on the ground, hit it with a hammer, blow up others around it, nothing will set it off! They might break it, but it won't blow up."

"How does that work?" Zuko said. "What's the point of a grenade that won't explode most of the time?"

"It explodes when you want it to explode."

"…Oh. Well, again, how does that work?"

"Easy! That thing inside it is a microfusion cell; a fairly common and potent ammunition for energy weapons. It's like a tiny little cold fusion reactor, and on its own, they're very stable. Now that liquid above it, that's something of my own. It's similar to phlogiston, the theoretical fluid heat was postulated to move in; when it hits the MF cell, it kind of charges it up and excites its energy into a more volatile state, with explosive results after about ten seconds. Now, the setting you put it on changes how explosive that result is!"

"Why give the grenades settings if they just explode?" Zuko asked, curiosity piqued.

"They don't just explode, it's more like they convert the cell's energy with a number of charge left; the settings give different results; check this out." Calvin held the grenade out; Zim said that the dial had several settings on it, currently set to 'HARMLESS'. Above that was 'CONCUSSIVE' and 'LETHAL'. As a safety feature, the dial was specifically constructed so that it would be very difficult to wedge it into a different setting accidentally. "I'll need to field test them before we can be certain about how good they are, but the idea is this; we use concussion grenades when we don't want to kill our enemies - most of the time, I'd assume - so it'll give them a nasty hit and send them flying if they aren't tough enough to take it, hopefully knocking them out or just down. It uses the least amount of energy, and those window things are a special reactive kind of material, like the thought-reactive stuff; the energy passes right through them, making an area effect, and also so we can reuse the grenades."

He continued. "Now, Lethal is exactly what it sounds like; it should kill things good. Not too comfortable about putting them in, but...huh, you never know when I'd need to have it." he seemed disgruntled. "Anyway...this level of blast will tear off limbs and put nasty holes in anything close enough that doesn't have decent armor, and if it does, I think it still won't help, and it won't just get blasted or burned, it'll be melted. Hit a tank in the right place, it'll punch through!"

"Very good idea," Zim said, pleased with the grenades. "Yes, these will definitely be sound weapons! How many do you have?"

Calvin shrugged. "I can't be sure; they'll be easy enough to make. Microfusion cells are easy enough to create with our technology or just buy in the more advanced worlds, and the frames are quite simple to transmute from basic steel. And the phlogiston, my pyromantic glove makes that as a by-product even without my distilling method." He indicated another table, where a complicated array was distilling the phlogiston into a shielded canister. "Transmute the frame, add a MF cell, put in the igniting agent, seal it up, and we're good!"

"So we need not be conservative with them?" Zim asked.

Calvin made a thoughtful noise. "Well...I didn't say that. We don't exactly have huge amounts of money, let alone negotiable currencies that most places that sell those things might recognize. I'd stay with the lowest settings except in emergencies just as a precaution."

"Ah. Well, what do you call them?"

"I think I'm gonna go with MFGs, short for microfusion grenades. When we hit planet-side next time we have a fight, we should bring a few to test them out. And find some Heartless for test subjects; if we ever see them again; we haven't run into any since Traverse Town. Weird, the way they were talking you'd think you couldn't land on a planet without tripping over a whole horde of them."

"Excellent," Zim said, grinning with excitement at the thought of field testing these grenades on those wretched abominations. "What else?"

"In brief? Basic firepower for you and Zuko!" Calvin moved to the next clamp; it held a different type of grenade, larger than the MFG, perfectly circular and composed of a curiously plasticine material with grooves whirling up to a large spot at the top, seeming to outline a handgrip upon it. "Another grenade-type, this one doesn't pack as much of a bang as the...what was I gonna call them? The MFGs, yeah!"

"How's this one different from the other grenade?" Zuko asked.

"Here, I'll show and tell." Calvin indicated a device in front of the clamps, a hand-sized circular visualizer with a projector on the top. He hit a button and it projected a stream of intelligent pixels that shaped into a holographic schematic of the grenade. "The outer shell is a plasteel compound, fairly tough and hard to break, but on the inside? Very brittle." The holographic grenade split into several sections, revealing its internal mechanisms with helpful notes and pointers indicating what was what, detailing everything while Calvin kept talking. "Beneath that outer shell is a coating of my phlogiston, much more concentrated that in the MFGs. Underneath that, and connecting to the trigger mechanism, is a alchemically treated shell around a central igniting agent at the very core of the grenade."

The schematic turned, focusing on the area at the top of the grenade. "See that? It's made from my pseudo-wraithbone compound; not anywhere as strong or useful as the real thing, but by bathing it in a fire-aspected magical field when forging it, it becomes very sensitive to fire. You just press on the trigger bit at the top and direct a small burst of heat directly into it; simple enough, even if we're in a place where Zuko can't make fire." The grenade schematic turned up again, and waves of heat were shown rippling down, and the inner shell between the various chemicals broke apart. "The wall separating the stuff inside is broken apart by the trigger mechanism, several thin rods that snap up and break those walls. The phlogiston and the igniting agent mix, and-" The hologram grenade zoomed out, and explode in a modest blast of fire. "Boom! Even if we're in a place where you can't make fire, or it would be a bad idea to let it on that you can do that, you have fire that you can bend. And a good explosion, too."

"Nice," Zuko said appreciatively. "How big is the blast?"

"Well, I could vary the concentration of different things for different results, like for a less destructive blast or a much nastier one, but right now, based on what I've set off when you guys weren't looking..." Calvin considered. "The enclosed space makes it hard to guess, but the simulation and calculations estimate about a seven-foot-wide blast, with a three foot wide larger radius where the heat goes, it'll probably melt through armor if you do it right. By the by, shrapnel isn't a concern; every time I set it off, the explosion eats up the casing; I've engineered it so that it literally is consumed by the blast, adding more 'oomph' to it. So at least you won't have things flying through your face!"

Zuko thought. "There's a lot of stuff I could do with that. Not bad, kid."

Calvin grimaced. "Since I'm almost singlehandedly designing our weaponry, I'd think I could get a little more respect that being called a kid."

"Why did you not directly enlist my help?" Zim demanded. "I am an excellent weaponsmith!"

Calvin stared blankly. "You are?"

"Yes! My people were the greatest masters of machinery our galaxy had ever known!" This was not, technically speaking, entirely true, as the Irken Empire had accurately been at the top of the 'conquering and pillaging' game at the height of their glory through the power of their engineering skill and technology superiority (sufficient that they might have qualified as aliens sufficiently advanced to be mistaken as gods, but just barely), but they had hardly been the very best. In many regards, the Vortians, once allies but later subjugated to the Irken Empire, had been superior. To his credit, though, Zim was a highly skilled technologist and gadgeteer even by his people's standards.

Calvin gave him a skeptical look. "Huh. Given that you never really use any technological weaponry or devices, I honestly could not have called that."

"I used to use it all the time! Is it truly my fault that the Keyblade is just vastly more useful a weapon?"

Calvin ignored this; he plainly had no interest in any of Zim's protests. Zim silently vowed to take petty revenge at a later date. Zuko coughed and said, "What else do you have?"

"You guys are greedy for good tech; two different types of multipurpose grenades aren't good enough?" Calvin joked. "Seriously, though, I have something for you, Zuko." Intrigued, Zuko raised an eyebrow hopefully as Calvin went to the end of the table; on display were two metal weapons resembling two dual-blade swords combined at the pommels, but it mostly didn't look anything like swords; a nearly three-foot-long shape at either end, slightly curved and various mechanisms encased in a thick shell that looked a bit like blades; there were small projections near the tip and base of those 'blades', connecting by thin metal rods of superconductive material. The middle of the weapons were comprised of several well-shielded energy-manipulating mechanisms and small cylindrical batteries, slimming into hilts wrapped with cushioned cloth to make decent grips, and then they bulked up into thick pommels housing governors to maintain energy output at a safe ratio. (As the accompanying holograms indicated.) Calvin gingerly detached the thing and passed it over to Zuko. "You took a shine to that thermal lance you looted even though it's too big for you, so I took it apart and made something similar but scaled down. I remember you telling me a few nights ago that you like dual-wielded swords, so I based the design around those."

Zuko took it appreciatively. "It doesn't look like a sword, or two swords," He said, his good eye scanning it's delicately curved shape, examining how the projects on the 'blades' were on opposite sides, contributing to how the overall design looked like a twisting flame.

"Twist that bit in the middle, there," Calvin said. Zuko did so, and the weapon split in the middle at the pommels into two; Zuko adjusted his hands around the grips, and was now holding two swords. "It splits into two! You can combine them for stuff, see? It works with your fighting style."

Zuko moved them, slowly twirling them and moving around to get a sense of their balance, wrists flexing as the odd weapons moved. "Careful," Calvin said. "Keep the things on the striking surfaces away from you if you like having your bits on." Zuko frowned, but slowly spun them around as Calvin asked. "Okay, can you feel a bit right in front of the hilt, sort of a depression in the blades?" Zuko did, and told him. "Okay, squeeze on that with your index finger."

Zuko's fingers moved. The projections extended slightly, and with a faint humming noise, an electric arc moved through the metal rods connecting the projections, buzzing loudly and lighting the laboratory with a chaotically brilliant glow. Zuko almost dropped them in surprise. He let go of the button and they deactivated, the electrical arcs immediately disappearing.

"Thermal swords," Calvin said proudly. "They're heavy and they can take a good hit, and those electrical arcs are...duh, they're made of electricity! With those on, you can slice through just about anything! Touch them to something to get some fire and you can bend it, or just bend the heat from the arcs or even the electricity in it so BAM! Instant Lightningbending! You won't hurt the swords one bit, it'll open up a lot more options for you. Gives you a bit of punch to that speed you have."

Zuko twirled the swords, slowly revolving in place, savoring how perfect the balance of the weapons with, the thermal swords making a circuit as a single weapon. "I really missed having proper swords," he said. "...Thanks."

"Power of technology, buddy," Calvin said, grinning happily. "Do me a favor and field test them for me; always room to improve. I've tested them, but swords aren't really my thing so I'm not totally sure if they work fine."

"I'll get on that. I don't suppose you could make me a belt or holster to hold them in?"

"Is your preference for it as a single weapon as a default mode, or dual-wield?"

"The second one."

"All right then. Now..." Calvin walked Zuko through the schematics and particulars of his new thermal swords, and gave him a copy of them to look over later. Zim didn't pay much attention since it wasn't one of his new things, though he did hear something about the batteries recharging on their own but overuse would burn them out and a bit about how the electrical arc worked and the ramification of it, but he wasn't paying much attention to that.

Zuko refused to hand the thermal swords back, and after a short bit arguing with Zuko over 'the sake of things looking good in a proper gadget examination', Calvin gave up and went to the next table, the one with the shield and the metal shavings. Calvin said to Hobbes, "You said something about how you lost your shield somewhere or don't know what happened to it, so I decided to make you a new one from the bit of armor we took from the Umbra Eternis."

Calvin unclamped a large rounded mechanized device that resembled a slightly triangular tower shield, but smaller than a typical example of such a shield. It was so heavy that Calvin couldn't lift it without assistance, and Hobbes needed to help him before Calvin could pass it to him. "Your new shield!" Calvin said as Hobbes fitted his hand into a grip that also resembled a trigger mechanism on the depressed underside of the device.

"Ooh!" Hobbes said, looking it over with interest. It was a bulky shield, big and broad, and provided good cover for Hobbes even if it wasn't already a decent bashing weapon from the weight alone. Hobbes didn't seem to notice the weight, heavy though it clearly was; he admired the shine on the lion's-head emblem on the front, the smooth spiral-shaped symbols on the back and edges until it was a solid piece in some places on the sides and on others it was a hollow form shining with familiar-looking black metal retracted into its hollow insides.

"Keep the sides away from your face, hold it properly," Calvin said, giving a few more instructions; Hobbes stood in a combat stance, holding the shield as Calvin instructed.

Hobbes said, "It's got some very nice balance. A bit heavy and a little awkward for hitting things, but it's a good upgrade!"

Calvin scoffed. "Like that's all. Can you feel a control thing just under the hand grip? Twist it."

Hobbes did, and with a loud and flat noise, several blades of serrated metal slid out in a loud 'clack' from the open parts of the shield, fitting together neatly and making the shield a lot wider. "Whoa!" Hobbes said, shocked by the transformation. He examined it eagerly; already a big shield, now it was slightly larger than Hobbes itself, suitable as either a nasty bludgeon or a skillfully used protective shield. "Oh, I see, the first mode was for portability!" Hobbes tested its heft and found that it was actually somewhat lighter, as its overall mass was much more evenly distributed. "Hey, this metal looks familiar! Isn't it that stuff we ripped off Kimblee's robot?"

"Uh huh," Calvin said. He continued speaking, and Hobbes danced around into a series of stances, moving the shield around and revolving in a slow spiral to test his shield's momentum and weight. "I broke a whole lot of saws and blade whittling it down, but I got the useless bits off it and I broke the piece down into several smaller pieces that I built into your new shield; it was made a little bit brittle by the attacks, but it's still ridiculously tough. Just about the equal of really tough ceramite! " He indicated the shield's own schematic, which displayed the specifications of its hardness and toughness (both extremely high and a lot better than his old shield), and showed that this form was called Defense Form, and that there was another called Offense Form. "Move the thing again, and hold it away from you."

Hobbes did so; the shield-blades reconfigured, manipulated by internal mechanisms, and transformed into a massive scythe-shaped blade projecting from the shield in a huge curve of serrated metal, with only a little bit of left over kibble to be a protective shape. "Whoa!" Hobbes yelped, readjusting his grip to compensate for the sudden allocation of weight; this form was a lot heavier than the last one, with so much of its metal focused in a single area. He looked at it, and smiled like the predator he was. "It's like a giant claw!"

"I knew you'd like it. It's heavy, big, and mean...and you're strong enough that you could swing it around like the wind," Calvin said. Hobbes nodded, and pushed the mechanism. The shield reverted to its portability form, and Hobbes smiled at it. "You can switch modes on the fly; charge through a shower of artillery with the defense mode and ram into a bad guy, bounce off him and slice in half a missile coming at you, and then switch to portable to bash down a guy coming at you before you hit the ground! All of them are precisely calculated and shaped to fit your needs; you could throw the portable like a discus if you wanted." The schematic displayed the shield's internal workings, showing how that was all accomplished, and by extension, how to avoid damaging those workings in battle. The computer added a few tactical suggestions on minimizing potential damage and maximizing combat effectiveness.

"I'll take it!" Hobbes said.

"And," Calvin added. "I learn quite a lot about the metal Kimblee created; it's a whole new alloy, and I have no idea what to call it, but I got a pretty good idea on how to replicate it or at least make something like it. Make new armor for ourselves, plate the ship in it...all kinds of possibilities, soon as I get enough raw materials. Kimblee did us a favor, almost."

"Ah," Zim mused. "Potential. Such a lovely thing. But you are sure this metal is ..uncorrupted? The shield is in no danger of being possessed?"

"Sure. I've kept it bathed in holy water, constantly exposed it to sunlight, got a few priests we ran into when you weren't paying attention to make sure it was sanctified and expelled any Heartless influence...now it's proper metal. With some nice applications, too."

Next, Calvin picked a small bundle off the table and tossed it at Zim's head shouting "Catch!"

He was caught off-guard; it was too light (and Calvin not nearly strong enough) to so much as push him, but it did surprise him. Blue and yellow fabric bounced off his head and Zim stuck his foot out, catching it in the bend between ankle and foot. Standing on one foot, Zim said, "What is this?"

"I couldn't think of anything to make for you, so I made you a proper sheath," Calvin said. Zim lightly kicked it up and caught it; he had mistaken it for a bundle due to its unusual structure. Smooth poles and mechanisms moving against the pressure he put on it was clothed in the fabric, a folded-up structural support, and Zim looked it over, examining the multitude of simple belts crossing over a large gap in the front, seeing how it was hollow enough to fit something inside it, and that it appeared to be in a compacted form.

"What is it?" Zim asked.

"It's a sheath for your magic sword thing."

"Keyblade."

"Semantics. Whatever you call it, it's changed shape on us, and I saw you having problems keeping it at hand, so I built this thing to hold it." Zim turned it around, and on the underside there was a ring of protrusion that would fit nicely on his Pak; with some difficulty, he moved it around, and it stuck nicely to his back without need of any additional wrappings or bindings.

Calvin continued. "You just put the Keyblade in the hollow bit blade-first, and the sheath will adapt to its shape. When you want to unsheathe it, you just pump a bit of power into the Keyblade's structure, and the sheath will uncoil from it. Any other time, and those belts will hold firm so it won't fall off or anything."

"I see. Handy, that," Zim said, admittedly a bit miffed he didn't get any special weapons like the others.

"Yes, I know," Calvin bragged, buffing his knuckles on the protective bodysuit he had taken to wearing in the lab.

"Nice," Morte said. "I vote we find someplace to test these things out!"

"Agreed!" Zim said.

Sometime later - it was hard to tell, time was very odd in the Astral Plane, and they were mostly traveling by flying through it - Zim had decided that they ought to find some means of locating Gir's signal by finding a way to boost it or pinpoint it, and declared that they would search for a place with some good technology to adapt into a device suitable for these purposes.

They didn't have much luck finding either a world like that or a place to test out their new weapons for a while, but they did have plenty of adventures; in just four days after Calvin finished the new weaponry, they'd gone into a world of cowboys, a world of gangsters, a world of cowboy-gangsters, a world of cowboy-gangsters who were also ninjas at war with vampire-wolves, and then a world of nothing but shrimp-people riding giant flying shrimp shooting with guns that themselves fired tiny flesh-eating shrimp in a war against the Emperor of Shrimps. They tired of that one quickly, and convinced the mightiest heroes of that world to use duck-related puns for everything just to break the monotony. (Zuko and Hobbes facepalmed at the irony of that plan.)

After several more team-building and friendship-fostering adventures (generally involving being helpful by shaking up malicious orderly structures or just being tourists and beating up people they thought needed defeating, and certainly taking stops at interesting looking places for the occasional night to sleep outside the ship), they eventually found themselves near a world in dire need of heroes with their talents (namely, making a huge mess of everything they touched).

At least, so they judged from the content of its radio transmissions, though they had trouble understanding exactly what was going on. There was insufficient context, and the transmissions were rather spotty. Zim suspected that there was a destructive war going on wreaking havoc with the information networks. This world was also generating tremendous amounts of energy, consistent with a technological civilization ready to make spaceflight at the very least; Zim concluded that this world was in need of help and probably would be grateful enough to give them technological gifts. Or they would be jerks in need of a good clobbering, then the Paragon's crew could beat them up and take their stuff. Either way, it was a win-win scenario.

Zim decided to take a quick look. After hacking directly into the private communications of some international council and scaring the living daylights out of them, a linguistic error involving much use of goat synonyms, totally destroying and reconstructing their worldview just by being aliens, a cheerful violation of the Prime Directive (of the 'don't interfere with non-spacefaring cultures' sort), it transpired that the world they have found was called Terracandra, had never before made contact with another intelligent race but was quite keen to do so, and quickly arranged a public outing of alien life.

In short, it was basically another day in the life of the Paragon's crew. Such adventures had become commonplace in recent days.

(As far as the crew's reactions to this went, Calvin was giddy about being put into the history records of such a momentous occasion. Hobbes pointed out that it was a backwater world of comparatively little consequence to their own home-worlds of a vast empire that had once spanned the galaxy. Calvin had replied that historical significance still counts even if it's small. Zuko was too stunned by how fast they were moving to do much. Morte was surprisingly against the whole thing, citing various times inter-world contact with less advanced cultures had done terrible damage. Zim considered the risks negligible, insisting he knew how dealing with primitive civilizations went. He neglected to explain that it was usually as the vanguard of a genocidal conquest in the name of the Irken Empire.)

In ordinary circumstances, a grace period of at least a week of preparation would have been the proper thing. Zim had no such time, and didn't really care about Terracandra's protests, and so in a few hours his ship was hovering over one of the greater cities of this world: Public Dominion, so named because it had originally been a freehold of squatters – displaced by war or relocation or had just gotten really lost – and had just built up a new place for them all to live while the local government at the time had turned a blind eye until it was too late and the resultant housing had amazingly become a city subsequently inviting in all the major trade guilds and making itself into a massive commerce hot-spot. All that had been hundreds of years ago, and it was now simply just a very nice (and architecturally schizophrenic) city expanding from the side of a mountain and across the plains and into the coastline as a port.

In awe and shock tempered by curiosity (and, Morte had observed during the brief communications with the scientist-diplomat council that were representatives of their individual nations, hope), thousands stood assembled and millions more watched through mass media as the Paragon hovered a dozen or so meters over the ground (and Zim realized a little too late that this might just be incredibly frightening, because even though their ship wasn't particularly big by regular standards it WAS considerably larger than most of the buildings around them and the only spacecraft these people had was rudimentary and untested at best; Zim was making a show of power without even realizing it, a frequent accident in these situations). It was a literal show too; the ship's propulsion field was overclocking in order to stay up, so the power feeds into the propulsion field were fluctuating and making quite a lovely rippling effect on it. The field was interfacing with light waves, sparkling like sunlight on oiled water even before it started flashing off excess power into brilliant and fierce spirals of randomized color, like extremely localized fireworks.

The people, already stunned by the sheer power of such a massive craft that flew through the heavens without fear (at least by these people's standards), went 'ooh!' and 'aaah!' at this visual wonder. Someone clapped and others picked it up, the applause spreading like a mimetic compulsion. Appreciative sound rippled up, battering through the Paragon's sound systems.

Ironically, these people probably wouldn't have liked knowing that the flashes weren't intentional, and were a sign of uneven power distribution overclocking the system while backup redundancies frantically tried to stem the overflow.

"Hey guys," Zuko said, looking at one of the screens while Hobbes ran around frantically at the alarms going off in the bridge. Just about everyone else was on edge. "I'm really not any good at this technical stuff, so I don't know if this screen is saying good stuff or bad stuff."

"What does it say, I can't see from here!" Calvin said, cloistered from sight by a bundle of floating screens as his hands ran across the keyboard with incredible speed, initializing emergency sub-routines to reroute computing power from presently unneeded functions (such as sterilizing the water in the holding tanks or the basic feed to the primary weapons), mumbling passcodes he made up on the spot that were still somehow successful and thanking all the glories of natural philosophy that his primary interest in the Enlightened Sciences had always been the vehicle and transportation-related area of Skafoi.

The natives, short furry quadrupeds with heads similar to an aardvark but with the broad flattened features of a frog and extended arms of astounding delicacy) glanced at each other. "Should this be happening?" One of them asked. "Are aliens supposed to be so ominously inept?"

"I believe we have nothing to fear from them," said another. "Such ineptitude implies stupidity, and that's nothing to be scared of." At this, there was a satisfied murmur. Regardless, several robot servitors, dwarfing their creators and somewhere around Hobbes' height, roaming about protectively, weapons at the ready. They moved on a tripod assembly with rounded wheels, and their torsos had large screens built it; two-way receivers displaying the telecommunicated visages of the scientist-diplomats presently looking worried. The robots themselves, non-sentient automatons, had no particular opinions about this. At a command from an operator keeping these machines organized, several of them extended armatures from within their frames, projecting beams of zero-point energy that balanced the Paragon, righting it's center of gravity and making it stable.

That helped, and as if on cue, the Paragon's landing procedures activated, funneling its momentum engines into getting the whole thing to drift peacefully to the ground, and the zero-point beams powered down. The natives 'ooh' and 'aw'ed at the sight, unaware that the ship had nearly crashed into the ground.

Several moments of tense activity within the ship passed, and then various clanking mechanisms went on for a bit. The cargo doors clanged open with suitable dramatic-ness, and from them marched Zim, Zuko and Hobbes. The three of them quickly came to a stop, halting in place by the massive crowd in front of them. They beheld a vast city of splendidly crafted architecture, towers and spires extending for miles on mighty bridges suspending by thousands of filament-thing cables (astoundingly strong for their size), the super-strong crystal constructing them shining with light as great conduits positioned at key points upon the skyline channeling energy from the planet itself to broadcast it into electrical power for the entire planet and doing no damage to the world. Deceptively slim hovering vehicles flew around in precisely aligned and peaceful traffic in the air, their passengers concealed in protected bubble-shaped canopies. Large solemn-looking robots patrolled the streets and periodically assisting passerbys and pedestrians with minor tasks, and a few of these robots – not quite sentient but more self-aware than the others - had rolled over to see what all the fuss was about.

Zim stepped onto the square-shaped plaza they had been directed to, admiring the glorious technological wonderland they had appeared on, the great spires around the landing area prepared for them (and yet he noticed a great weariness around him, a sense of people already prepared to flinch from the slightest movement, and he didn't like how ragged the tops of those spires looked as though they'd been chewed up). The people before him stared in silent bemusement, anxious and all too willing to hope that he had come in peace.

Zim considered it splendidly ironic that for once this was the case. "Good day, people of...whatever world this is!" He proclaimed, with many excessive gestures. "I am Zim, hero of Earth-That-Was and bearer of the mighty Keyblade! ...Just dropping by, I heard you have problems. "

The silence broke into a fascinated and cheerful murmuring. They came closer, set at their ease (and a few of them plainly wondering how Zim could speak their language), and Hobbes shrugged cheerfully. "Easiest first contact scenario ever!" He said as they begun eagerly asking them questions.

"What?" Zuko said, distracted by the beings plaguing him with questions. "No, there's nothing wrong with my skeleton, I'm just built this way, gravity doesn't hurt my stature...no, my face isn't supposed to be differently colored, I just got hurt when I was a kid- wait, hold on, what? No, I don't know how the ship works or how you can build your own!" At this there was a great sigh of disappointment. "Why do they keep swarming up to me?"

Zim perked up. "You do not have spacecraft?" He asked.

The natives stopped, startled. Eventually a robot rolled up, and the dignitary speaking through it said, "Not quite so good as yours. We have never gone beyond the limits of our own solar system, and certainly never met other beings like you! We lack the technology to go so far, beings from beyond!"

"And yet you have such advanced technology," Zim said, indicating the great city around them, and the jet bikes above them, and the great health of all the people.

"Science is the power of sapience," one of the beings said solemnly. "Technology the means to rise above what dumb evolution would otherwise trap us into. Unfortunately, we've had other concerns preventing us from developing spaceflight and forced us into weapons and transportation expertise."

"Like what?" Zim said.

There was a terrible chattering noise, like thousands of tiny legs scrabbling over glass. At once, the natives looked up in horror. Hobbes pointed in the direction the noise came from. "I'd say, maybe that giant swarm of horrible plant-monsters from over there?"

"Yeah, pretty much," A random small child said helpfully.

Zim turned and saw, coming down from the sky towards them, a vast and terrible horde of at least a billion small but savage creatures of animate vegetative matter, flying in from every conceivable direction and joining together. Automated turrets individually larger than entire buildings arose in the distance and opened fire; though their attacks ripped holes in the swarm, the swarm itself was so large that the damage was negligible. The natives screamed and ran, hatches appearing in the ground for them to duck into for safety. The robots stood firm, ready to defend their makers, and Zim noted how utterly terrified the leaders on the robot-screens were; clearly, he happened right into the middle of an on-going problem requiring some dire resolution. "You must depart!" A cry came out from the dignitary who had directly addressed him moments earlier. "Before the menace of the Green Madness claims you and kills even more-" Zim ignored him and started walking in the general direction of the great horde, plainly not caring that they were even now chewing through the tops of buildings and in their rush towards them. "Er? What are you doing?!"

Zim stared at it, almost curious. He said, "I've no time for more swarms of horrible monsters. Calvin? Dispose of that interruption!" He snapped his fingers, and by no, the swarm was nearly upon them, the continual fire of the turrets doing little to dissuade them despite the superior firepower.

"Okay," Calvin and Morte said on the intercom. Zim stood his ground as part of the horde extended and flew at him, seemingly a great tentacle shape, many thousands of snapping jaws coming for him (and they were close enough for Zim to observe that they had a great many variance of form, but curiously they tended towards low-slung quadruped bodies with unusual growths throughout, not counting the many flapping organs that enabled flight) and he watched peacefully as his ship's guns powered up, and opened fire.

Green light lanced right into the tentacle formation coming at him. A fearsome heat billowed out, as the entry beam disintegrated scores of the plant-monsters. Ashes fell like rain and the formation turned inside out, constituent monsters panicking in, and then the beam superheated the air and surface texture of the plants enough to make an explosion that caught the remainder of the formation, and when the light faded, the entire formation was just dust floating on the wind. The horde churned, recoiled, and the automated turrets from before hammered into them with renewed enthusiasm, even as the Paragon's guns fired again. Green light flared in tandem with the electric-blue of the turrets, and in due course the horde was reduced to several large unorganized groups. They swarmed up and then down, too dumb to flee in earnest, they just kept pressing the attack, and the precision-guided blasts from the turrets reduced them to scattered bunches of individuals, and a few blasts later, not even that. The continual rain of ashes was mixed with larger clumps of burning plant matter. A small child ran out and stomped on one, giggling like a loon, and scurried out of sight before anything bad could happen.

"...Or you could do that," the dignitary who'd been warning them finished.

"I knew blasting the crap out of the infantry devourers was a good idea," One leader or another said snidely to another leader. "You owe four credits!" The other rolled her eyes but did not contest the point.

"So..." Hobbes said carefully. "Were you guys planning on telling us that you were having a horrible monster problem before or after it attacked?"

"You're the one who came right in without bothering about protocol or threats," another dignitary said pointedly.

"And besides," Morte said loudly through the intercom, making sure everyone could hear him. "The hapless villagers hardly ever tell the heroes - that would be us - about the big mess until after it shows up to show people what the deal is. Or representatives of an entire planet. They count as being like villages. Same narrative concept."

"What in the name of the Great Principle is he going on about?" Someone asked. All over the city, hatches leading to civil shelters were opening and people coming out, expressing their amazement loudly...not to mention their irritation that a bunch of weird aliens had killed the horrible threat a lot easier than they could have.

"Not important," Zuko said quickly. "Anyway...what WAS that...that thing!?"

There was a good deal of awkward glancing around from the locals. A few people whistled. A few shuffled around, embarrassed, and someone coughed. The overall sense was that of an obvious problem that no one really wanted to address. The robots sidled away a bit, none of the dignitaries wanting to be in front, and in the shoving one of them was forced into the front. The robot's screen in question, displaying a woman of their species wearing an incredibly large and impressive hat of office (complete with its own live mini-dragon) gaped at her fellows, who just shrugged innocently. Their respective robots scooted back into the crowd.

"I'm waiting," Zim said impatiently. "I presume this has something to do with the distressful nature of your communications."

The dignitary who'd been volunteered looked around helplessly. She sighed, and began speaking. "We, er, may not have been clear about what our distress was, visitors from Outside."

"What?" Calvin said. "You mean rampaging horde of giant killer things that eat everything isn't an ordinary hazard? This place is weird!"

"What," Zuko said flatly. Slowly, many heads turned towards the Paragon. Quite a few eyebrow-analogues were quirked. Hobbes snorted good-naturedly.

"...It's normal where I come from..." Calvin muttered.

"Ignore him, he's just a rambling idiot I keep around for the shooting and mechanics," Zim said. ("Stop bad-mouthing me in front of people!" Calvin screamed.) "Explain this matter, and perhaps we can aid you."

"Unfortunately true," The representative, who incidentally was named Kikkabikka, admitted. "Well, where to begin...it's not easy to understand where, there's quite a lot even we don't know..."

"Start with the part where you could have gotten us killed because you weren't upfront about telling us what we were getting into," Hobbes said. Zuko nudged him roughly, not thinking this was a diplomatic thing to say. "What! You were thinking it too, I could smell it on you."

"You did not!" Zuko said.

Kikkabikka's robot rolled up. Zim and his crew quieted, realizing that matters were being explained now.

"In brief," Kikkabikka said, and tiny flying robots resembling animate pixels flew out from hatches on her robot, assembling into a indistinct image. Calvin noted that it was a bit like his own imaging projector technology but far more primitive. "What you just helped kill were in effect the frontline infantry of the most insidious enemy we have ever known; a nature-venerating cult-"

"Doesn't sound so bad," Hobbes said.

"Who are vicious murderous traitors who wish to kill us all, terraform the planet to a state of primeval chaos and cease to be sentient beings."

"Okay, that sounds pretty horrible," Hobbes said.

Kikkabikka nodded gravely. She adjusted something on her side and now the pixels changed, now depicting what was probably imaging data; photograph of a shape moving at great speed and slightly blurred in the middle of a pounce upon the viewpoint, and even though it was colored much the same as its surroundings, it was clearly the same kind of people as this world's natives, but terribly altered. It was much larger, for one thing, limbs elongated and body bulked up until it around a human's size (judged from the objects of contrast in the picture). Abominable mutations had worsened its appearance, its muscles were so swollen it looked hunchbacked, its open mouth revealed several eyeballs staring inside its mouth, and a dozen more peered from all over its body in uncomfortable places, and that was quite without all the small spikes dripping with venom upon it's right arm, or that it's left arm had split into a huge mass of writhing tentacles at the elbow, or that a second mouth had split open its stomach region.

"...Ew," Zuko said.

"Indeed," Kikkabikka said dryly. "We say they are afflicted by madness, but it is more precise to say that they are people who have voluntarily betrayed the great works of our noble civilization, abandoning all technological society to align themselves with the 'natural order'. And by that, we've determined that they had actually allied themselves with a dread force that was likely once locked away, and been transformed into its soldiers. Even now it whispers into the ears of us all, speaking in our dreams and in our heads, and it changes something inside us. And when it finds weakness, the kind of moral dissolution that coerced the first of these cultists in the first place? IT moves on to physically warping them. With results as this particular abomination."

"What's wrong with respecting nature?" Hobbes said. He didn't sound offended (at least a little bit) he just honestly wanted their opinion.

Kikkabikka blinked. "Nothing," She said, though her robot rolled it's optics theatrically. "Green growing things are of the world, and not respecting them or their works is a distasteful thing. Yet...these cultists take it further. They worship the philosophy of natural selection, or so we understand, they find meaning in that vicious bloody nastiness, they find glory in the whole thing of killing for the sake of survival and they glorify it, take it to its obvious logical extreme..." She grimaced, an almost cartoony expression on that froglike face. "And thus they have declared war on our civilization in general and our technological ways in particular. They find technological advancement to be offensive, and seek to destroy artifice wherever they find it. And more specifically, the means of it. They seem to have decided that sentience itself is their enemy and wish to spiritually lobotomize everything they meet. Have nature consume our cities, bring us back to base savagery and resume killing each other for sustenance, that sort of thing."

"Again," Zuko said. "Ew." Hobbes almost asked what precisely was wrong with killing another thing for the purpose of eating it, since he didn't really see a problem with that but he figured
that with this crowd such sentiments were dangerous to voice. And the rest of the cult's philosophy he founded objectionable.

"How do you know all this?" Hobbes said, all the same. These people seemed nice, but he knew better than to just take them at their word. (And he had objections to people making war on an 'uncivilized' culture in the first place and pinning their supposed savagery as an excuse for that.)

"We have video footage!" The pixels changed to a video of a cultist, in a comfortable cell wherein he was apparently immersed in a pleasant direct-to-brain simulation, raving and ranting while foaming at the mouth of all the things Kikkabikka had just told them, but in considerably less coherent words. "We lured him in with cake and he told us all their secrets."

"You could have faked that video," Zuko pointed out.

She looked shocked. "But we didn't! That would be...lying!"

Everyone present gasped, and shuddered. Zim blinked. "I see," he said, and then looked to his crewmates. "I trust your objections are satisfied?"

"I think so, yeah," Hobbes said, looking a little guilty for upsetting the natives so. "Okay, okay, I'm sorry, I get the picture!"

"Hmm," Zuko said, frowning faintly. Such credulity spooked him a little.

"We never disbelieved them to begin with," Morte and Calvin said.

"Okie-dokie," Kikkabikka said, instantly mollified and cheerful again. "So, you understand our situation?"

"Indeed," Zim said. "Your enemies are fiends that revere nature for specifically its most brutal traits. So, hmm, yes, we get to fight EVIL HIPPIES! I KNEW THEY WERE EVIL! Because they're called 'evil' hippies. It's a bit of a identifier. I knew it was coming all along! But that's not important. What evil abominable thing changed them, anyway? You never went into detail."

One of the other leaders, older and passing the time by reading a book entitled 'Horribly Painful Things I've Personally Either Suffered, Have Accidentally Caused, Or Both In The Last Four Hundred Years', looked up. He said, "About fifteen years, give or take that muckiness with the time-jump gun when I dropped it last week. Best as we can say, an exploration team unearthed some very unusual ruins several dozen feet buried underground in an undersea trench that had been torn open by an earthquake about twenty-six years ago. The explorers came back...ah, changed. As you saw. Quite strangely." She shuddered and continued. " They told us about what they had found there, deep in the dark where it should have been forgotten: a board game of all things, and a magical eye within it that told riddles of an ancient jungle and it's perils, and they told us that this game board was a way to the apotheosis of all jungles, a realm of savagery and survivalism.

"It spoke to them of ancient times of glory and splendor, without artifice or consciousness, when all things were savage and 'pure' in their reckoning, and claimed that this realm had given them the power to bring back that time and cast down the era of technological progress. When we tried to help them, determine how to stop their insanity, they broke loose...killed everyone in the hospital they were incarcerated in, and left. A few weeks later, they arose from the sea upon a fossilized sea serpent they had brought back to life and attacked a coastal town, killed everyone there, and they induced the native plant life to cover everything and consume all the artificially-made things there. From there they created slave-husks from the plants, great hulking monsters, to kill on their behalf, and they mutated all the animals they could find - insects, mostly - into gigantic and more varied forms for much the same. And then they moved on, attacking and destroying all the facilities containing weapons potent enough to destroy them all, crippling us...and we have been fighting them ever since. They claim that they summon impossible beasts and terrrors from the game board, of all things!"

"Heard about a game like that once," Morte commented. "It was called 'Jumanji'; cursed thing it was, you play a game on it and it throws increasingly worse jungle perils at you and transforms stuff into the jungle itself until either all the players die or someone wins. Looks like this exploration team of yours were sucker enough to...I don't know, listen to it and it got them thinking the same way as them. Nasty business."

"…An board game?!" Zuko said incredulously. "Are you serious?! That's the stupidest thing I heard all day!"

The scientist ignored him "In any event, we've been fighting with them ever since. Our technological advantage was fairly even with their absurd magnitude of fighters, forced evolution and ability to control the things of nature-"

"How?" Hobbes asked.

She shrugged. "They can summon gargantuan beasts, control the things of the wild and the elements, and alter themselves as they please, but we have aircraft, weapons of great destruction, and the means to modify ourselves without risking our sanity. What does evil magic possibly manage to do against our cybernetics and firearms, to say nothing of our heavy combat-vehicles? Sadly, our most powerful weapons - missiles and titanic robot servitors - were destroyed when they struck at the facilities where we stored them as part of an old peace agreement, but we've made do."

"Ah," Hobbes said.

"In any event," She continued. "Things processed as they did, and a short time ago, something crashed and provided them an unforeseen advantage that has already cost us an entire continent...and more importantly everyone who lived there." She hesitated, shaking a little, and the picture changed again. "Not even a few days ago, something materialized right in the sky directly over a small city. It crashed, making a fairly large crater, and then someone photographed what was left." Now the pixels assembled into a copy of what must have been a digitally preserved photograph; a large crater in a city not unlike this one sometime around dawn, the crater melted right through the metal walkways it had gone through and leaving only a large hole in the middle of the ground; it seemed to have drilled nearly through the bedrock. Inside the crater was a twisted lump of metal that looked very much like it had been a crude cage before it had crashed, broken open from the inside after impact. "It was undamaged in the crash, and we haven't picked up much from it. Some unusual energy signatures, true, but it seemed unusually intact when it had crashed..."

She kept going on, rambling on about fascinating observations that reflected positively on the potential for dimensional science, but Zim wasn't listening. That dented hunk of metal looked very familiar indeed, and he was getting a sinking feeling that the recent deaths Kikkabikka spoke of were his fault now. "Something broke out of that thing."

"Oh yes, we thought so." She fretted. "Something quite strong, strong enough to survive impact and break out with brute strength alone. A group of beings; a skinny tall thing not unlike you with a peculiar obsession for outdated trends, a pair of massive blue...things like your friend with the burn mark," and here Zuko blinked. "And many smaller beings again like your friend but closer to his size. They attacked people randomly, stole everything in sight, and left. Apparently they ran smack into a raid by our cultist foes by sheer accident and...had some sort of discussion?"

The pixels changed. This time it showed a different part of that city (a neighborhood block now unrecognizable with the savage vegetation overgrown everything in sight, everything made of metal rusted into ruin, and many dead but still animate bodies lumbering around; it was uncannily like the word where they'd met the machine-mind but more malicious). In a semi-circle and surrounded by hulking bestial figures - some sort of bodyguards perhaps - about forty or so creatures not unlike the people here Zim had met sat in deep conversation with a trio that was clearly Disco Darvhog and the frost giants Jord and Gunter, backed up by their human underlings who were now armed to the teeth with all the weapons they had found. By all accounts, both parties looked pleased with one another.

Zim spat. Zuko gaped. Hobbes stared in disbelief. "They left together," the scientist continued, visibly nonplussed by their visitor's reactions. "Shortly after that, the cultist's attacks became far bolder: they were once content to attack disorganized settlement and our less well-guarded stations in order to establish footholds. Now, they attack without rhyme or reason, attacking everything they seem to find, running in all direction and assimilating all that they conquer into that green hell of theirs! And their minions, such awful things: vast animate plant golems, hordes of slavering abominations, armies of our own people degenerated into bestial viciousness and slaughtering even each other in their bloodlust...and they seem to have acquired many awful and more unique powers. Now they fly and spit fire and swell to titanic size, and that was just the start." She shuddered. "It feels so...wrong. So unwholesome. How are such things even possible? They just ignore all the laws of reality."

"It's more like they're using laws you're not really used to," Morte observed. "Seems to me that some of our annoyances did a team-up with yours."

"...Come again?"

Zim indicated the pixel-picture. He sighed in disbelief and said, "I fear that we are to blame for your predicament...not the evil hippy thing, but the escalation. Some time ago we fought that very fiend; a space pirate named Disco Darvhog and his cohorts. We sent them to drift in a metal box, and it appears that they came right into your world in the same way we did by sheer chance and decided to assist these cultists of yours."

"That's incredibly improbable," she protested.

Another one of them, more amenable to any explanation, said, "But why?"

"Darvhog expressed strong anti-technological sentiments when last we clashed. No doubt he was offended by the state of your wondrous enlightenment and sympathized with your foes and offered his assistance to them."

As a whole, the other creatures deflated, too hard-pressed by debilitating war and hardship to raise too many objections to this admittedly far-fetched idea. "Oh dear," a few of them muttered.

Zim looked around at the world, at the vast and stubbornly shining metropolis around him, at the gleaming machinery standing firm against the foes assailing it's makers and wielders, and at the people daring to hope even in this time. At least this sight was a far cry from that world of lost humanity and their grieving machine-children. It ought to preserved. "In that case, I owe it to you. We shall help you."

"We are?" Hobbes said.

"You are?" said the dignitary that had done so much talking.

"Darvhog met these vile cultists that he sympathized with and fought with them to further their cause. I feel that I ought to do the same for you all!" Zim posed. He posed… dramatically. "SHOW ME YOUR ENEMIES! So that I may blow them to itty-bitty pieces and such."

The scientist-folk looked at each other. They looked at Zim's ship, or more specifically it's very big guns, and thoughtfully looked out to sea where their enemies had established a base in recent times, that swarm keeping this city's forces too off-balance to wipe it out.

"And in exchange? What do you wish in this bargain?"

"Well, I have misplaced a number of my own friends. If you have technology that I could use to locate the signal of an android with a specific call frequency, that would be ideal. And a few other things, such as metals or similar resources that we don't have, would be suitable."

There was a debate among them. "...We accept your terms," One of them finally said, apparently shocked that it was so easy.

"Neat," Zim said again. He glanced back at the ship, where Morte was curiously watching. Morte, who had crippled himself into thinking that he was incapable of contributing because he lacked a body. Morte, who Zim had come to think as a proper member of his crew and was in need of a means to contribute more fully.

Zim looked back at the natives who he'd agreed to help. The natives, who were very technologically advanced. "A query. How is your prosthetics or cybernetic industry?"

A few hours later (quite fast, given bureaucracy, but the people were desperate for any sort of aid against their relentlessly savage and seemingly endless enemies) and after some refitting to Morte's shock and utter delight, Zim's ship had again taken off to the skies, the sea skimming away underneath and small islands zooming away and covered in dense jungle with vast clouds of smoke pouring from them. Zim considered disintegrating the jungles but deemed it more appropriate to cut off this problem at the root and have things take place from there. A squadron of combat drones flew behind, flanking lines of personnel carriers bearing power-armored troops and heavy tanks to be dropped in at a moment's notice, all for a single devastating strike at the cultist's benefactor (Assuming it was Darvhog, and even if it wasn't Zim liked a good fight; either way, a victory would be a point for Team Good.) The key, of course, would be finding him first, but Zim's new allies knew that the mightiest warrior of the cultists had lead the beachhead on their attacks on the city Zim had landed in, and this warrior likely knew where Darvhog was.

The target was a large island, previously a coastal resort, and Zim's mouth curled into a mute snarl as he saw the broken buildings and the warped skyline, the entire place completely overgrown in a too-thickly-covered rainforest that had been amplified until it had choked every single available surface. A single gargantuan tree dominated the side, slightly taller than the other buildings and off-shooting in vine-like growths to cover the ruined city, comparatively tiny growths still larger than buildings and spreading into the streets and even into a large matted surface over the seacoast.

A small swarm of buzzing things, probably the same sort of monster like the plant-based horde they had destroyed earlier, encircled the top of the tree and flew about the island in a patrol, and as soon as Zim and his makeshift fleet were in their eyesight, the patrols vanished into the forest, no doubt alerting their foes. Zim personally doubted they were the only sentries; perhaps the coral had been mutated into a crude computing system to predict an attack, or the very sea-life had been co-opted as watchful soldiers. However it went, now the cultists stationed on this place knew of the attack, and this suited Zim's purposes perfectly; first impressions were always important, especially in war.

Perhaps a sane person would have stopped to think for a moment and realize that, by coincidence and good speaking skills, he had become the siege-breaking commander of an alien army that was putting all its trust in him because of sheer desperation, and perhaps think about how absurd and quick this had all gotten. Zim was not conventionally sane, however; his only recognition of how unusual the circumstances were was a faint knowing smirk. He gave the order to keep moving forward, and his crew readied for the fight.

As they prepared for another big battle, prepping themselves mentally and whatnot, Calvin was greatly concerned by the intelligence they'd been given; apparently quite a lot of the monsters the cultists had created or bred on this particular island in the past had been impossibly large insects the size of tanks, imbued with all manner of biological weaponry to make them a match for tanks themselves, and they'd only gotten bigger. For some reason it was these bugs that concerned Calvin the most, and as they armed themselves (all of them with the weapons they'd been given by Calvin, and also Zim and Zuko had borrowed flamethrowers to augment their Firebending) he absolutely refused to shut up about it.

"The chitinous death is coming," Calvin said gravely as they stood in the bridge, adjusting the lightweight body armor they had been given and adapted to their own body types (the natives of this world having quite different bodies) and force field generators humming on vital points of that armor. They stood behind Morte and Hobbes, who were in the pilot's chairs, waiting to be fired into the fray through the same rapid-launch system that had enabled Zim to directly combat the Umbra Eternis earlier; they'd all been given weapons and had been using their time to modify them for their own use, and Calvin was outfitting a laser rifle with a set of beam splitters to separate its beam into several smaller beams with greater penetrative power, and focus optics to intensify those beams. The laser rifle itself had been more overall reinforced to withstand the added stress. Fortunately, while the people of this world were smaller than him their long strong arms had the same reach on their weapons, so Zim and Calvin had no problems with them.

Calvin was rambling. "Ready your souls and nerves, fellows, for we may never return from their pendulous jaws! All human advancement is just a byproduct of our eternal war with our insect would-be-overlords, WE MUST NOT GIVE THEM THE CHANCE TO RULE US. That way lies only doom."

Zuko stared at him. "They're just bugs. Insects. Lumps of ugly meat in mobile shells. By all accounts they're so big they'll crack apart at a touch and can't possibly sustain themselves. What are you going on about?"

Calvin's eyes twitched nervously. "You speak too calmly. YOU KNOW NOT OUR PERIL. Be of brave heart and stout courage, for we face the horrors of the jungle and all within!"

"Urgh, jungle," Zim said, shuddering. "So much rampant vegetation growing without planning or reason, infesting everything in sight, choking and feasting...how can these savages stand it?!"

"Some people like living in places like this," Hobbes said sternly.

Zim stared at him. "...Who in their right minds would volunteer for habitation in this green hell?!" Hobbes growled, his ears flattened back, and then he facepalmed at his leader's obnoxiousness.

Calvin was still rambling. "Bees the size of fighter jets, shrieking along in swarms greater than armies and bearing stings greater than harpoons! Squadrons of ants that dwarf tanks, spewing venom that melts our very flesh! Beetles that sup on blood and bones, chewing into our flesh and devouring us from the inside to animate our skin for their own sick pleasures! Flies that spit sticky web-stuff and lay eggs in the still living bodies of their victims! Little buzzy things that hover in your face all day and just won't leave or die no matter what you do!" He turned solemn, a serious look on his face. "Have great courage, and turn back if you do doubt your strength! For we are engaging in a battle humanity has waged since the dawn of time, from the time of the spear to the epoch of the promethium bombardment! Our ancient enemy lies in wait, and we must do battle with all hope and heart! IF YOU WISH TO HAVE PEACE, NOW WAGE WAR WITH ALL YOUR HEART!" He cocked the gun, dramatically. A laser blast accidentally discharged and burned a small hole in the wall. "Oh God no! Not the wall's finish, I spent hours grinding that down! Um...pretend that didn't happen! It was the bugs! Yes, a pre-emptive assault on their part! Now my crusade against them is totally justified. Yeah."

Hobbes, sitting in the co-pilot seat, rolled his eyes. "You sure you don't want me in on this siege of yours?" He asked Zim.

"This ship requires two pilots to operate at maximum efficiency," Zim said. "I'm not sure why Cyborg designed it that way, but it does present a few difficulties. Zuko's abilities and mine are suited to destroying the terrain, and Calvin is quite capable of the same. You and Morte can handle the rest just fine."

"You better believe it!" Morte said, small enough that he couldn't really lean out without having to let go of the joysticks. In regards to his surprising skill at piloting, he had been chosen to be the main pilot in Zim's absence. His unexpected mania and cheery attitude was a sudden change in him; the question of how to help him grip things had been addressed by their allies, and they had risen to the occasion magnificently, placing him into a head-jar prosthetic harness; metal gleamed all around him, a delicate harness strung around him with neural-responsive discs on his cranium and feeding into a set of armatures to both his sides and underneath him, spindly and jointless limbs presenting exceptionally dexterous tools much like hands, and several of these hands were holding onto the ship control joysticks. The natives had taken a lot of interest in Morte, and had supplied him this small exo-rig to help him with his surprisingly proficient piloting skills (not surprising, as the ship's controls were amazingly intuitive and Morte had the force of will, if not subtlety, to operate them) and he had been only too glad to have hands. It wasn't too much of a change, given that he used his jaws quite well, but he was amazingly giddy at having something close to a proper body again. The natives were embarrassed but pleased for his gratitude.

Hobbes ignored him. He tensed slightly, looking at Zim, and Zim noticed that Hobbes was delicately rubbing that strange charm on his necklace – a religious thing, Zim presumed -, rather like a man fiddling with the beads on a rosary. "...Good luck, you guys."

Zuko's grimace lightened a little. "I won't let your little brother get hurt," He promised.

"I don't need protection!" Calvin snapped. Zuko and Hobbes ignored him. He looked at Zim beseechingly.

Zim sidled over and muttered to Calvin, "When everyone is so much larger than you, they automatically assume you're more childlike."

Calvin nodded glumly. "Even when you're the only technically capable person in the whole task force," He said. (Technically, Calvin was a child, but he didn't often act like it.) He distracted himself by clicking open the ammunition chamber on his laser rifle and making sure that the energy cells were primed. Zim did much the same for his own flamethrower.

On the view screens, the island loomed, a vast field of tangled green shimmering over corroded ruins and many flicker-fast moving forms underneath that green. A voice crackled over the radio and said, "Aero drone controllers to Exalted Hero, we are clear for combat! Patch us a hole in there and we'll do the rest."

Another voice, elegant and calm, said, "Tank drone operators ready for assault! Give us a space, and it will be done."

A third voice, chirpier than the others, said, "Infantry droppers, prepped and ready, saying the same as the rest!"

And a fourth, excited for the battle, roared "Heavy infantry mech troops standing by, happy to blast those traitors into the Big Empty and waiting for instructions!"

Morte commanded a tentacle-like armature to press a button. The radio activated and Zim said, "Calls received and understood; we're about to begin the initial assault. Stay calm and prepared, we mark our passage with fire. The moment we provide an entrance for you, bring in the drones and infantry. Wait for a signal before dropping heavy ordnance or anything else!"

"Confirmed, over and out!" The voices replied, and the radio went silent. Calvin said, "So, do we have a plan for what we're gonna do?"

"Our plan couldn't be simpler," Zim said. "We hit them until they give up."

"And if they won't?" Zuko asked.

Zim shrugged. "Then we just do whatever seems appropriate to stop them from being a threat."

Zuko and Calvin glanced at each other. Between the two of them and Zim, they had about fourteen of Calvin's prototype microfusion grenades strapped onto bandoliers on their front, with a few fire-based grenades for Zuko and Zim. "Well, might as well have fun with it," Calvin said. Zuko rolled his eyes.

The canopy was less than a few dozen feet in front of them now. Zim, Zuko and Calvin stepped into the launching square-zone. Morte's prosthetic hand paused over the relevant buttons. "Hey, Boss?" He said.

"Yes," Zim answered.

"...Good luck."

Zim nearly smiled. "We shall return without incident."

"Here's hoping!" Morte pressed the button, and the floor dropped out from under Zim, Zuko and Calvin.

Moments later, hatches appeared in the front of the Paragon, and three small figures came shooting out wrapped in energy shields and looking like giant glowing bullets, and behind the Paragon, all the other ships flying behind it - the troop carriers, the drone fighters, the carriers bearing tank drones, and the others – came to a stop and waited for their cue. (Zim considered it a good thing they had modified the ejection process to fire the people behind the pilots as a quick battlefield entry technique.) A great army poised to strike from the rainforest and watching through the vines watching in shock as the 'bullets' radiated flame around each of themselves, neatly lancing through an upraised section of the canopy so thick that it was a shield against dropped enemies or missile attacks.

There was a faint thud when the 'bullets' came to a stop less than a third through; there was heat, and then burning smoke, and the liquid flames of their weaponry or metapowers ate through as Zim and Zuko burned their way into the canopy with Calvin close behind until they ran into something close enough to moving air, smacked into a growing vine as thick across as a large car, slick and smooth and an excellent standing surface. The flamethrowers switched off and the three of them hopping on in, and slid on down.

The wind blasted in his face, his own calls of exhilaration whooped like a victorious beast, and Zim came to a sudden stop as he and the other two came grinding down onto a fairly large area where the rainforest had grown right over the roof of a large office building, so thickly that the thick measure of vines was as stable as the ground and there was no way to tell where the rooftop had ended.

Zim looked around, pleased that there was no one in immediate sight, and spotted several large gaps where branches of the island-tree were grown; elsewhere they were so thickly entwined they were like walls coming in on themself to make a crude roof overhead, but there were open places where large things (such as a ship) could move through easily. He gestured at the other two to get moving. They nodded, and the three of them started marching forward.

The vines crunched underfoot; Zim winced, loathing the feeling of walking on such treacherous ground, hating the cool warmth under his boots, trying not to think of how long he would fall if the vines suddenly gave way (assuming he just didn't fall onto the roof underneath), and trying to keep a damper on his instinct just to burn away all this sickening overgrowth. It all made his head spin a little, and his stomach churn, and he decided right then that he was never going to go to another big jungle or rainforest if he could avoid it. They passed through gaps several times over, walked onto vines slipping under the undercanopy before them, saw broken remnants of debris somehow caught in mid-fall by the violent growth of the plant life, saw tepid brightly colored flowers slowly turning to face them, observed that there were quite a lot of holes for things to come out of in the plants...and all the makeshift alters stained with blood, arranged to feed the plants, and there were only fragments of bones left. Most of them looked like they had been mutated before they had been killed. Perhaps they had sacrificed their own people, or even children; a lot of the bones, Zim noted, looked quite small.

"Feh," Zim said after they kept walking without incident. "Some terrible army of raiders. We should have been attacked already." He panted a bit; it was insufferably humid, and horribly noisy; animals were screaming and calling and shouting and all manner of vocalization. The jungle felt like an active malevolence, watching them and waiting for weakness…

All in all, Zim was relieved when he shortly heard the sounds of many insectile feet moving in unison, heavy footfalls in tandem, and even heavier thundering steps behind those, right in their vicinity. He, Zuko and Calvin quickly moved so that their backs were between a corner and an open space (so they could flee if need be) and waited.

They didn't have to wait long. The faint sounds of purposeful locomotion became louder; there was a swarm of movement, dozens upon dozens of forms swiftly ascended from canopy-ground that moved aside to permit their entry and...

And now, they were completely surrounded by fearsome warriors like the natives of this world but much larger and gruesomely mutated, many of them riding giant insects, and together Zim's group was outnumbered eight-to-one.

Zim grinned, one eye opened too wide. "Perfect," Sammael said from his shoulder, gleefully rubbing his hands together.

The cultists and their insect-beasts approached; descending from gravity-defying positions overhead on the branches and just charging straight through from the paths around them, stopping less than about a dozen feet from Zim and his two teammates, either standing their ground or clinging freely to the tree surfaces or perched upon giant ant-like monsters (who were studded with crude organs rimmed with spiky bits and various nasty enhancements), all of them bearing either weapons seemingly grown from vegetative matter with all the nastiest components of plants in existence, or else massive bones chipped into clubs crackling with eldritch energies. At least a third of them were hulking brutes wearing powered armor grown from a complicated symbiosis with magical plants, plant-fibers formed powerful superhuman musculature under barklike armor thicker than elephant skin and likely harder than steel. And of course, there were the insects; the smallest were the size of motorcycles and bearing single riders, the biggest the size of tanks and bearing all manner of bulging organs bristling with sharp wriggling things inside, and all of them were totally singular, hybrids of ants and beetles with varying degrees of distinguishing marks as one or the other.

Zim was pleased to see that standing in front of them like a brave hero, plainly the leader of this group, was the same cultist from the picture that they had been shown earlier; his tentacled arms writhing, his many eyes blinked coldly, and his remaining hand clutching a bladed club with edges grown from its bark-like substance. His name, Zim had been told, was Girakkuka, but he likely would not answer to it.

Girakkuka just stared while his compatriots scowled or grinned or drooled blankly at Zim as suited them, covered in blood and their own filth and poorly fed to the point of malnourishment; judging from how so many of them looked nearly emaciated, Zim judged that their retreat from modern nutrition and the many health benefits of their technological society had gone badly. And if their bodies had fared badly, their minds seemed even worse; most of them seemed gone or damaged, and he wasn't sure he wished to know why.

They spoke all at once, a horrible susurrating horror of a noise that had no discernible relation to words as Zim understood it, even his Pak's language protocols unable to decipher the spirit of their words. There was no intent or thought there to be found, just a vague sense of will crushed under an overwhelming force that had rendered them into its puppets...and a willing submersion, at that. That, and a savage joy that sickened Zim to hear it. Girakkuka, seemingly the head of this poorly managed warband, managed to find the words. It was clearly a struggle for him, too. Of all things, he spoke a question. "You. You are helping them?" He gestured, his tentacles writhing, at the canopy where Zim had just blasted through, presumably meaning the people of this world who Zim had allied with. "Those that use corrupting machinery." Zim nodded. Girakkuka grunted. "...And you came...from the realms Outside?"

"Indeed."

"What are you doing here, then?" Girakkuka asked, oddly not shocked to see aliens in the middle of his own conquered territory and apparently leading an invasion by his enemies.

"Fighting you. Reclaiming territory. Burning down anything that gets in my way or looks like it needs burning."

"Ah, alright." Girakkuka gave Zim's weaponry a disgusted look, and readied himself.

"But wait!" Zim said. Girakkuka halted, looking surprised. "I want to know what you, specifically want to fight for. Why you're fighting the other people on this world."

Girakkuka considered this. "Why?"

"Because we might possibly kill you and I really would rather avoid that," Zim said earnestly. "I would rather avoid killing anyone at all, really, but I understand that this is rarely possible in battles of this nature, so if I must engage in lethal conflict, I insist on knowing if my foe is truly deserving of death, or that killing them is the best move to make in the circumstances. So, I want to hear your side of this conflict, in your own words, so I can make up my mind."

Most of the cultists seemed rather confused at this, mumbling to each other (the ones that could speak anyway, many of them just growled or gibbered) and the mood clearly pointed towards just killing the three intruders on the spot for the implied threats. "You three," Girakkuka said flatly. "You three alone would destroy us all, without aid."

"Yep," Calvin said.

"Don't underestimate us," Zuko warned, a flare of heat smoking out of his throat.

Surprisingly, Girakkuka looked speculative. "If you would be so fair-minded," He said eventually. "You could join us and take down the oppressive hegemony that chains this world!"

Zuko raised an eyebrow. Zim actually laughed. Calvin said, "What."

Whatever power had changed Girakkuka into what he was now had negatively affected his ability to recognize social cues, or maybe he had been blind to that sort of thing even before that. He failed to realize what Calvin meant and took it as an honest question. "Join us!" He urged. "Abandon the ways of metal and grease and embrace the natural order! Become one of us and kill every last one of the mechanists who falsely call themselves the lord of the world! Fight and return our world to purity, and give it freedom from industry, and release it from technological slavery-"

Zim held up his hand as Calvin spat, enraged. "No," the three of them said.

"And then when the ashes fall and the metal rusts, and all who opposed us are rotting piles nourishing the earth, the green shall devour all the works of failed civilization, and we shall be good and clean once more, laughing and dancing and killing as the ancient ones of the elder days, reveling in- wait, what did you say?"

"We said no."

"...A shame, I had thought you reasonable. And why not?"

"...Isn't it obvious?!" Zim roared. "I am most certainly not going to join a mad crusade against all that is good and science-y in the world! Partly because it's incredibly stupid but mostly because it's against everything I stand for!" Girakkuka glowered at Zim for this, his mouth opening into a bloodthirsty leer. "Now hurry up and starting fighting, I'm getting bored already! ...uh, Girakkuka, that is your name, right? I'd just like to have the right thing to put up on the plaque for whatever trophy I take from you."

Girakkuka narrowed his many eyes and growled deeply. It echoed, the dozens of other cultists hooting and shouting and gibbering with their own war cries and joining in. "Names," He croaked, amid the noise. "Mean nothing. Are nothing. Born to die, silly people give names, we make things. All things break, all things die. Way of the wild is better; some things die so that others live. Rising about your station to make things to find power? Bad. Stupid. But mostly bad. You work with the enemies of the world, the ones who Make in defiance of the natural order? You die too."

"Um, animals make things all the time. Tool users are everywhere," Calvin said. Zuko merely looked confused. Zim said to the cultist, "Have you realized that your ability to speak gets incredibly sloppy when you're annoyed?" Girakkuka ignored both comments. Zim said, after thinking about some of the things that the cultist had said earlier, "This is why you fight? You perceive this technology as, what, weakness?"

The cultist simply said, "Nothing should think. All things should just be. Crafting is a sin against the natural order."

"Ah," Zim said. "Another foe who doesn't understand the basics of what he's even talking about or the nature of that which he supports. Such madness simplifies my observations considerably." He nodded at his companions. "Gentlemen? Smash them like ants under a boot. The boot of Science! Wait, that metaphor makes no sense. Oh well, just fight!"

Girakkuka roared defiantly, voicing his own challenge, and his warriors returned the favor; their insect mounts and allies swarmed, spitting and blasting and such; a blast of burning acid caught Zim on the shoulder and he rolled away only for the lead cultist to leap forward with impossible strength and knock him halfway across the area, through nearby vines and gaps in the wall-forming branches. Calvin started firing like a maniac, enthusiasm outmatching his aim but still doing pretty well; several insects disintegrated in oscillating beams of focused light, their riders crashing into the canopy ground only to roll to their feet and keep moving.

Other cultists just smashed through the mess, the obstacles created by Calvin's shooting presenting little barrier when they leaped with great strength, their riding insects swarming over them, or the massive plant-based exoskeletons they had been fused to strong enough to just smash through. Zuko waved Calvin down and fired a flaming lance from his flamethrower right at the heart of the attackers, and the cultist's resolve wavered in the face of a flamethrower amplified by Firebending. The flames spread, splashing onto the very inflammable canopy-ground, and even as Zuko modulated the flames so they didn't spread beyond where he wanted (a circular area right in the middle of the attacking cultists), they broke rank and ran for cover, a lot of them on fire. Given that most of them were either using vegetative weapons or were covered in such, their panic was understandable.

Regardless, a few of them stood their ground, still charging even as Calvin fired wildly at them (and it is a difficult thing running with lasers right at you) or Zuko and Zim using the ambient flames to power themselves and fire blasts and beams at their foes, cutting down a few with just-barely-nonlethal hits; they just came wading through even as they burned, screaming courageous defiance. The most fierce of them all was Girakkuka himself, throwing himself through the flames to crash into Zim and bring his swordstick smashing into the smaller Irken again and again with a strength that tilted and rocked the canopy-ground; purple blood splattering his swordstick's spiked surface.

Zim grinned with the joy of battle, even with the crazed cultist standing with both feet forcing Zim on the ground, and he drove an elbow into an unarmored knee, pale light glowing on his arm. Girakkuka buckled, just a little, and enough for Zim to smash a clenching fist burning with incendiary light into Girrakkuka's stomach, one forceful motion working through the thick tangled mess of his root-armor, and right into the toughened but still all-too-mortal flesh.

Fire launched, Zim's skin glowing hot for a second, and Girakkuka gasped, agonized, as light flared out from inside him, his armor burning away in a neat semi-circle on both his front and back, matching where Zim had struck. His stance wavered and Zim drove his hands into the ground with enough strength to rip himself out, drove back into a standing stance on one leg, and chambered that leg's muscular power to deliver a head-butt into Girrakkuka's face. This couldn't go on, Zim decided after having half a glimpse of seeing Zuko blazing away with a nearly-solid dome overhead to catch his foes attacks and Calvin climbing up a large growth to get a proper vantage point and shoot at everything that annoyed him while his pyromantic device on his arm splashed the ambient flames at strategically viable points. They were doing well, in the circumstances, but-

"THE LAW OF STRENGTH BE PREVAILED!" Girakkuka roared, interrupting Zim's thought. "FLESH TRIUMPHANT! WILL CONQUERS ALL!"

"SHUT UP! I WAS TRYING TO THINK!" Zim yelled, driving the fuel tank on his flamethrower into the cultist's stomach. Eyes wide, Girrakkuka retreated as Zim fiddled with the limiters on the nozzle before he let the power flow through him, and then what he fired from his flamethrower was not even something as simple as liquid fire but a controlled and contained inferno. It was so hot, it burned the air, making a forceful blast that knocked away the cultists and their insect allies on the spot when Zim's stream cut back to where he had been thrown, cutting a line of flame into the pernicious vegetation and lighting all it touched on fire; the cultists who had the presence of mind to do so fell back, and those that didn't were knocked back when Zuko and Calvin both drew in those flames with their own abilities and launched them like short-range artillery.

But there were still too many of them, and at least sixteen different insect-riders and eight hulking brutes in exoskeletal armor fell upon Zuko and pummeling him mercilessly, and even more did the same to Calvin and even more came barreling at Zim, a shrieking fanatical horde eager for blood and death.

Zim threw himself at them, headbutting the closest one and kicking him away, rebounding onto another and letting loose with his flamethrower, blasting down at least six in one go without killing them needlessly. His hand dived for a microfusion grenade and lifted it high. "About time we tried one properly," he muttered, moving the dial to 'Lethal' and triggering it and throwing it in a high overhead arc. Some of the cultists turned to watch it fly overhead and lodge in a cluster of weight-supporting vines above. Nothing happened.

"Hah!" One of them said. "What was that supposed to-"

The grenade exploded in a flash of superheated plasma, green energy flashing as the vines exploded everywhere in white-hot fragments, splattering onto the unfortunate cultists with painful results like so much lethal shrapnel.

"The grenades work," Calvin said faintly, plainly disturbed by the carnage.

"Spam them, then!" Zuko said, less charitable to his foes. He took an incendiary grenade off his bandolier and triggered it too, throwing it so that it landed on a cultist's head and rebounded, bouncing off other heads until it landed neatly and exploded in a sphere of fire, consuming at least three cultists. Many more were added when Zuko amplified that fire, expanding it out by dozens of feet, and then he contracted it into a thin concentrated line, turning it into a whip he manipulated by spinning and dancing through the cultists descending upon him, literally cutting through their ranks.

The battle intensified. Zim lobbed another grenade, and the cultists directly assaulting him scattered to avoid the explosion; they failed to make it out in time. In the heat of the resulting explosion, he reached in to pull out a fireball and shove it into the chest of a hulking brute clad in their crude vegetative power armor, suffusing raw flame into the whole of its substance. It flailed around as it burned from within, knocking away its allies in its horror and stomping ants and fellow cultist alike. It also caught Zim across the chest, and his very bones rattled as he went flying again, and he had a glimpse of Girrakkuka knocking down the burning hulk away (who's armor was gone, a pitiful wreck lacking limbs or even a good portion of his body, all of it consumed to sustain his armor) and barreling at Zim even as Zim smashed into the wall and slid down.

Zuko watched this happen with wide furious eyes. "All right, more field testing," He said. He maneuvered his flamethrower into its at rest position, the weapon clicking onto the fuel tank, and from his belt he unsheathed the two swords Calvin had made for him. The cultists stared at his choice of weaponry and laughed, one of them punching another in the shoulder as if to say 'get a load of this!'. This one stepped forward, lifting aloft a hammer-like projection extending from her forearm and swung up high.

As she brought it down, Zuko turned the one in his right hand on, tilted it blazing edge forward and swung, thinking vaguely that while he had practiced it on materials of varying resilience to get a handle on how it performed, he hadn't used it in actual combat yet.

The electrical field of the blade flashed blue amid the green. The attacking cultist screaming, clutching a cauterized stump while her hammer-attachment fell to the ground, still smoking. "No resistance of any sort," Zuko said. "It burns through flesh and bone like it was paper." He smirked. "Perfect."

Zuko powered up both blades and swung them as the cultist lunged at him in fury; first the weapon she'd picked up was sliced cleanly in half, and then the back of Zuko's blade hit the back of her head and knocked her down. Zim climbed on top of her considerable mass for higher ground and spun to intercept the incoming blows from four of her friends in a single movement; their blades and bare hands were sliced away or deflected as chance had it, and before Zuko's feet where even touching the ground again fire blossomed from the electrical arcs of his swords and blasted big messy holes right through them. Zuko landed, his feet kicking down on the head of a survivor, and jumped away to do the whole thing over again on someone else. He actually thought he was having fun, and went to go help Zim. "Swords work great!" He called to Calvin as he passed. Calvin, stuffing a live grenade down the throat of some fungal-horror, gave him a thumbs-up before he ran from the inevitable explosion.

Girrakkuka ignored the screams and the shouts as Zuko and Calvin began fighting in earnest; wild flares of magical force screamed out from him, resonating with the green growing life and bending them to his will. The ground under Zim, a huge mass of vines that spread for miles, moved from under him and rose up, more plants appearing with deadly purpose; brilliant flowers bloomed, spikey buds in their core, and internal fiber-muscles spasmed and launched poisoned spikes at Zim. He dodged them easily, bending halfway back until nearly in a handstand and springing backwards to avoid a second volley by a dozen other poisonous barb-spitting flowers, and the ground-vines rocked as the poison killed them, a good section of the ground, going limp and falling away. Girrakkuka moved nimbly over these new holes, commanding great flesh-eating pitcher-shaped plants to emerge from under Zim, and Zim leaped with even greater nimbleness away as he swung from the plants' attempts to scoop him up. Girrakkuka growled, and the vines came to life under Zim, rising up. Zim slipped, and was still falling when they wrapped him up completely and squeezed so tight his force field began bending.

Girrakkuka grinned, willing the vines to squeeze with all their might...and fell over as at least four of his compatriots were sent flying into him. He stood up in a hurry, annoyed by the interruption and then incensed by the sight of the laser holes in their arms and many burns. "Weak!" He said, and turned as Zuko and Calvin came charging through, screaming madly. Girrakkuka raised his hand, and gigantic pods blossomed up, great man-eating plants he rather favored. They opened, slimy maws extending thick tentacle-like vines in hopes of ensnaring prey. They swung and caught Calvin, who quite reasonably went into a berserk panic, and his rapid-fire lasers soon got him free and punched a few holes in the plant that had caught him (though it didn't appear to even notice).

Zuko was better at not being caught; he projected a blast with his flamethrower, and his Firebending talents ensured that when it hit the plant that had tried eating Calvin, it was incinerated in seconds, and so where the next two the fire blast hit in a twisting stream that he directed with willpower alone. Calvin dashed through the flames, firing enough lasers at Girrakkuka to keep the cultist dancing away, and his attempts to free Zim were halted when another man-eating plant appeared. Growling angrily, Calvin threw a grenade right into its open folds, consuming it in one go. When it was gone, Zim had disappeared, and Girrakkuka was gone too. Screaming in frustration, Calvin turned and cursed when he saw that the rest of the cultists had arrived on the scene, and there were so many of them they made the ground quake with their constant footfalls, and their collective noise was going to create a few headaches.

"Oh, come on!" Calvin complained.

"We can take them," Zuko said confidently. As the closest to them, Zuko seemed to be in the most danger as the many horrors surrounded him and fell in; he moved like a whirlwind, executing sword strikes as he whirled in mid-air in mid-bounce from one cultist to the another, almost seeming to breakdance between them and with every move making a single smooth swing with a sword. He kicked off one and went high, and exhaled streams of fire that neatly blasted them back, giving him plenty of ammunition to knock away and make some breathing space before he landed right into a uncontrolled mess of flames eating at a fallen vine and firebended them into coherent beams with incredible speed and power, blasting holes into the ground and limiting the cultist's movement before targeted the larger clusters of them, and it happened so quickly that the light and the noise shocked them into inaction, leaving them easy targets. And everything that could burn, the fire touched, and spread. By this point, the entire jungle was likely to have a massive firestorm cut through it soon.

"Where'd Zim go!?" Calvin said. "We need to find him and get our back-up in here like now!" He jumped back as a plant-hulk swung down at him and he climbed up its arms to stick his rifle into its mouth and fired, shoving himself at the brute as its massive arms caught a riding insect crushed its head in (not to mention smashing the cultist riding it). Calvin clambered up onto its shoulders as it started falling, using the vantage to blast his foes all over the battlescape again and again, their teeming masses completely covering almost the entire ground and a lot of the walls, and they meant little to him, his pyromantic device amplifying his laser blasts into explosive bursts that leveled their numbers advantage nicely. The hulk hit the ground, crushing more cultists underneath, and Calvin neatly ran off, shooting as he went, seeking cover from the arcane blasts the cultists fired at him or the poisonous spikes fired at him.

On the underside of the canopy, Girrakkuka was watching the battle and he was not pleased, and he was also quite confused how two fighters could have such a long fight, and the treasonous thought that perhaps technology was an acceptable form of power swelled in his mind, that their weaponry gave them sufficient might to compete with raw numbers. Musing upon it thoughtfully, he considered the mess of vines Zim was cocooned in and Girrakkuka had brought with him when he'd tunneled under the canopy-ground, and decided to kill this one enemy in his grasp. He moved to command the vines to crush the life from Zim...and halted, realizing that the plants were being pushed away from a massive force from within, like a telekinetic shell was swelling inside them, and a mighty glow of all colors shone through the gaps in the vines. It ebbed, it grew, and then a single titanic blast of coherent light trickling with flame blasted right through the vines and nearly into the cultist, a stay beam tearing the swordstick from his hands and imbedding it into a tree growth. "I was using that," Girrakkuka said absently, rubbing his aching tentacles.

Zim emerged from the smoking ruins of the plants, heat still glowing around his hands and shaking a little with the effort of that attack (and having no idea how he had done it)...and almost fell straight down, grabbing a stay remnant of vine and jerking a little as he hung on for dear life, noting to his dismay that he was standing many stories in the sky, with nothing but gigantic plants to catch him if he fell, and it would likely kill him. Mechanical spider-legs extended from his Pak and attached to the ground-canopy that was now technically above him, and before Girrakkuka could do much, Zim moved into one of the many holes ripping open in the canopy ground and jumped into it.

He hopped back on the ground, spider-legs folding back in, and blasted his way through the crowd until he found Zuko and Calvin back to back on top of an outgrowth from the big tree, blasting the horde trying to get at them, and losing ground. "Oh, hey, you're back," Calvin said, shooting in-between breaths. "Is it just me or are you guys tired of all these jerks too?"

"Indeed," Zim said. "Shoot up and cut a hole in the wall we blasted through!" He pointed, the small holes they had come through visible even in this area. "Give our own allies an opening!"

"No arguments here!" Zuko said as his flamethrower ran on empty, taking a canister of flamer fuel and injecting it through a fuel line while Calvin bought him time. "Calvin, think you can distract them?"

"Got it covered," Calvin said, swapping out his rifle's depleted energy cell for a fresh one. "Man, I gotta make my own gun, this is fun!" He let off another shot, hitting a cultist in front of Zuko and knocking that unfortunate into the path of his fellows, and then Calvin began firing with great precision at the cultists in precisely calculated shots, giving Zuko time to point his own flamethrower up, breathe deeply in...

And then a massive straight blast of augmented flame fired up from his flamethrower, so hot it actually scorched the metal, slicing up through the canopy and out the other side, burning right through. Zuko turned, awkwardly moving the burn in a full circle and slicing a crude hole. Zim joined him, and though his blast was smaller and his flamethrower was not harmed as much (for Zuko's was starting to melt) their combined blasts sliced cleanly through the thick layers of plant life. Soon, a flaming circle was cut into the canopy above, beams of sunlight piercing through the uneven gaps, and the teeming mass of cultists paused, very much unsure of what to do. Girrakkuka, at the back of his horde, stopped and stared, and was totally confused; they had rarely been attacked on their own territory before, forcing their mechanist foes into the defensive with little time for a direct assault; he had little experience in defending against a siege.

The newly cut section of the canopy, at least thicker than an entire skyscraper, budged. It sank inward, slightly. Girrakkuka roared furiously, realizing what had happened, and Zim suggested, "RUN!"

Zim, Calvin and Zuko ran for it, Zuko channeling the fire around them into a blast that knocked him (and Zim and Calvin, who he slammed
into on purpose) well out of the way and to a far corner of the chamber just as that massive section of the canopy fell out and tumbled with deceptive slowness and unstoppable momentum, such that only a falling object of incredibly mass can get. In mid-air it fell apart into several slightly smaller but quite large bundles of still-smoking severed vines and branches and general plant matter, and then that smashed into the canopy-ground with a titanic rumble, dozens of the cultists fleeing through the wreckage, and many of them were too stunned to run and were crushed underneath it. The canopy-ground shook, wavered, sinking under the feet of those who were near the impact zone...

There was a great creak. And then, with satisfaction, that zone caved right in under the weight, and many of the cultists who hadn't been crushed were still too close and fell with it, either trapped under there or ensnared by falling vines or just in the wrong place. In the safe zone far from there, Zim saw that many-colored mess of plant-matter fall down, down, right into the descending slope of another mass of vines larger than a small town, and get dashed to pieces upon it. He had an internal wince at all the many, many tiny living forms crushed as well.

The cultists who remained (and there was still a lot of them, enough to cover every inch of canopy-ground with a few gaps here and there) flinched from sensory overload as sunlight flooded in through the new hole, and presumably shocked from the deaths of their comrades. The insects, many of them uncontrolled by riders, weren't so affected, and resumed trying to kill the three heroes. Zim and Zuko went back to blasting flames at them, to minor effect. "IT IS IMPOSSIBLE FOR INSECTS TO GROW THAT BIG! WHY HAVEN'T THEIR EXOSKELETONS COLLAPSED IN THEMSELVES BY NOW!?" Zim screamed, as the insects fired volleys of biting little ticks from their biological-guns at him, acid sizzling from their bodies as they splattered into trees.

"I TOLD YOU! THE ENEMY DRAWS NEAR!" Calvin screamed, his laser-fire painting a bloody streak through the insect ranks.

"Calm down," Zuko said. "Our back-up is here!" And indeed, he had cause to smirk as he did, for that was when the first of their allies' aero drones, a narrow green-hued design with so many weapons it was basically just a mobile weapons platform, flew in through the hole they had cut into the outer canopy. In moments it was upon the enemy, the rapid-fire grenade delivery systems on its underside firing freely as it swooped overhead, the grenades flying on precise loops and pounding into the horde's mass before erupting in caustic flame that the vegetation easily caught, savagely tearing holes in the horde and killing dozens of them in one go, and was even easier for Zim, Zuko and Calvin to use with their own meta-abilities and devices respectively, effectively giving them on-the-spot artillery. The drone looped as the cultists counterattacked, flying into the opening in the floor to avoid the waves of magical force and hurtling projectiles the cultists could muster, looping out to fly close enough to Zim, Zuko and Calvin so they could hop into a offered passenger pod on top of it, and fly them out of what was rapidly becoming a kill-zone. The drone flew out to the top, out of harm's way, and eight more of those drone flew in, doing the exact same thing as the advance scout had...

The chamber erupted into brilliant flames, and scores of the cultists fell in them, their mad ambition coming undone before their eyes, the vegetation scoured by heat and flame and burning away from the scar-pitted metal they had grown over.

The explosions were magnificent.

The cultist's day, already bad, got worse. The light darkened as the massive orb-shaped craft flew in, opening and disgorging about a dozen infantry troopers, clad in mini-mecha powered armor loaded to the brim with weapons and descending on gravity-negating jump-packs, who crashed into the ground and promptly smashed into the charging cultists while the aero drones departed. Craft similar to theirs appeared in the hole though much larger, and fired about six or so mechanical spheres per carrier into the melee, bowling through the cultists before making a loud hissing noise as internal compartments disengaged, and the spheres unfolded and assembled into fairly large combat drones like the robot servitors Zim had seen in the plaza earlier, though these were much larger and heavily armed, glaring with faces that were mostly a large cycloptic eye capable of firing lasers which promptly lanced into the masses of their foes.

Infantry and mechs alike waded into battle, individually a match for even a score of the cultists but lacking their sheer numbers; even with Zim's support and promise of aid, they just didn't have the numbers for it. The odds were made even better as the aero drones took position in the big opening, serving as artillery and opening fire; behind them was the Paragon, ready to open fire, and on either side of it were floating transport platforms hosting a platoon of hover-tanks that gladly gave even more artillery support.

The tanks opened fire, and the cultist either scattered or were splattered by it. The mechs urged the troopers back, fearing for their safety, and the mechanical warriors firing missiles into the cultist's and smashing down the remnants to clear out the lines of cultists before them, pushing them back and allowing the troopers to move in and open fire with on-board grenade launchers and Gatling lasers, cutting the cultists and their minions down. Artillery support smashed the rear ranks of the cultists, shockwaves keeping them in too much disarray to fight back properly, and the trooper-mech combo repeated their tactics, slicing through the cultists' greater numbers slowly but surely.

Zim, pleased how things were progressing, spoke into the radio in their little passenger pod and tried to ignore how cramped it was. "Exalted Hero to Paragon, clean up this mess now!"

"'Exalted Hero' as a call sign? Bit conceited of you, Boss," Morte said through the radio. The Paragon flew in close enough to let loose with a salvo of plasma that melted right through miles upon miles of trees that were so tightly packed they couldn't be squeezed through, and they caught more fire, and with a slow grace vast scores of the jungle were burned away or melted open for the rest of their fleet to fly in and join the battle.

Needless to say, the battle was over shortly afterwards.

It was just a matter of pacifying the insects and shackling up the cultists for interrogation or imprisonment, and trying to determine where their mysterious benefactor was. After they'd gotten things into order, Zim had Girrakkuka brought to him in a containment harness, the smoke of burned vegetation a lovely smell as they set up camp on top of the roof where the ground-canopy had covered, the aero-drones and heavy troopers busily burning down all excess vegetation as they reclaimed this city again (and the Paragon was helping with the burning, Morte rather enjoyed piloting the ship though Hobbes had...issues over the whole thing). Girrakkuka winced and shuddered with every bit of obliterated plant life, and Zim thought he was rather overreacting. Standing with Zuko and Calvin beside him, the mechs behind him as support if a fight somehow happened, Zim looked down at Girrakkuka and was pleased to see that the cultist was surprisingly ambivalent about losing this entire city and outpost to a surprise attack. "Your faction is no good at defensive action," Zim told him while the jungle burned. "You're quite good at offense, from the damage you've done; you just drop in, attack everything that moves and overwhelm them with sheer numbers. But when you have to fight like that, you, eh, don't do so well. A pity, that was actually getting fun."

"You fight well," Girrakkuka replied calmly. "A shame that you refused my offer. I fail to see why none of you would."

A passing mech, brighter than some of the other automatons, said, "It's because you guys SUUUUCK!"

"Yes, what he said," Zim said. "Now, business reckons. Where is Darvhog?"

The cultist's expression, warped though it was, took on a guarded look. "Who?"

Zim wasn't fooled. "The strange silly githyanki who has somehow increased your powers by what my new allies have told me, taught you arcane secrets, and gave you the means to increase your powers such that you pose a serious threat. I have pre-existing business with him."

Girrakkuka glared. "I will say nothing."

Zim wasn't much put out. "Eh, oh well, guess that's up to Plan B: burning down and destroying every last outpost, stronghold and domain of your wretched cult down to the last miniscule raiding party, and they are no more than a bad memory! By then, Darvhog will have be found, and your cause will be... heh." Zim snapped his fingers, and a nearby fire winked out with a faint haze of smoke that faded. "Burned away." He gestured towards the titanic flashes of light and flame illuminating this dark place all around them, consuming vast scores of the vile greenery with each flare and leaving only ash behind.

Girrakkuka flinched, hesitated to deny him again, and Zim thought he had the cultist in the right frame of mind to speak. "Well," Zim said. "You heard the man! Let's wrap up the cleaning, get these cultists a good prison-island or something, and get back into fleet position! We move out to burn the rest of that cult in-"

"Wait," Girrakkuka said, thinking furiously though it visibly pained him. He swallowed, a hint of treachery still hurting, but the matter seemed clear; either risk them defeating his benefactor, or let an all-out war of extermination totally wipe out his cause. Even if his cult won, it would be a hard victory, and it would take long to regrow from there. "Stop. I...I can tell you something."

"Oh?" Zim said. "Like what?"

"...I can tell you where the one who empowered us is being kept."

An odd turn of phrase, Zim thought. "Oh, that's good."

Girrakkuka narrowed his eyes. "First, though, you tell me something."

"Yes?"

"How has our enemy become so strong!?" He indicated the mechs, the drones and troopers burning away the plant-matter from a statue near the ground; the weapons they carried, the armor they wore, all of it vastly improved and different and far more efficient and destructive than what he remembered. "They were not nearly so powerful and...advanced when I last led the raids against them and claimed this city for our own."

"Simple," Zim said cheerfully. "Darvhog taught you how to make the best of your abilities, and some of his own? I did the same thing; I gave them better schematics for their weapons, provided more efficient energy-recycling methods, taught them improved metallurgical processes and far better methods of weapon-making, and some other things. It was science-stuff, you wouldn't be interested."

"...In so short a time?"

"I taught them a thing or two myself," Calvin said, grinning. "Mass manufacture is a lot easier when you use the world's energy to transmute materials into what you want."

Girrakkuka, of all things, seemed genuinely intrigued at that. "You can do what?" He said, astonished. "And it does the world no harm?"

"No more than a cup of seawater hurts the ocean."

Girrakkuka was silent, and thoughtful. "...I will think on this," he said after a moment. "...Darvhog and his group are being held on the first domain we made our own, in a relic-place of the old people." He spoke several coordinates.

A mech analyzed them, mapped them, and double-checked them in the blink of an eye. "Very good." To Zim, he said, "Command is sending a stealth drone to investigate these coordinates. We shall be glad to assist in finding your enemy, Exalted Hero!"

"Okay," Zim said, and motioned to move out. He glanced at Girrakkuka. "Curious that you were eager to help us so quickly."

Girrakkuka stared at him. "…I said that you have given me much to think about," he said calmly, and that was all.

Zim grunted. He looked away, and saw Girrakkuka's swordstick sticking out enticingly from a tree growth where it had been embedded earlier. Zim wrenched it out and cried, "Aha! A trophy for our trophy room!"

"We have a trophy room?" Calvin asked.

"We do now!"

After that was settled, and the captured cultists to be imprisoned on an island where hopefully they could be convinced to return to society and let go of their destructive agenda (and Girrakkuka seemed quite intrigued after what a trooper had mentioned about it, and Calvin thought this was a good sign for a maniacal nature-venerating psychopath to be suddenly fascinated by the scientific principles of alchemy), the Paragon was once more heading the small fleet, and reporting to the leaders of this world that the attack (which had been a test run of sorts) had been a roaring success, and plan where being made to repeat it on other outposts all over the world and win this war, and defeat the cultists with the technology Zim had given them (and they were extremely excited by the extraordinary possibilities such technology advances that had been given to them presented, and turn the engines of war towards more peaceful applications, as is the nature of scientific development). The drone was sent, and returned in less than a few hours, and Girrakkuka's story checked out; there was a pyramid of sorts, deep within that jungle, and Zim was eager to finish the job and deal with Darvhog, thus cleaning up his earlier mess.

Several other fleets set out to defeat the cultist's most powerful strongholds and break them in a single decisive swoop; with their strongest holdings broken and their benefactor defeated, it would either end this war or at least tilt things strongly in the mechanist's favor. The Paragon set out, another fleet in tow, towards their destination.

After several hours of flight, Zim was again waiting on the bridge and watching the cameras as the edge of a continent came into view, totally overgrown and infested with a rainforest environment, though it was quite unsuited for the climate (which was rather cold, really). He smirked at the fleet following after them this time; this one was so big it blotted out the sky overhead.

"So what are the chances the cultists here found out about the earlier attack and are gonna go on the defensive?" Morte said.

"Getting better all the time, I'd say," Hobbes remarked as the rainforest trembled and a large section of it assembled into a half-mile tall golem of plant-matter and elemental energy, roaring madly and ripping itself from the continent, streets and buildings scattering off it as it waded into the ocean and charged right at the Paragon, pulling back a fist larger than a city block.

The aero drones serving as an honor guard separated and flew into combat position, opening fire on the giant plant-colossus. It hardly even noticed the hits, but it was surprising enough to throw off its aim. The tank-carriers flew in, and the tanks opened fire, a full round of destructive artillery nailing the colossus right in the head hard enough to knock it off-balance. "Mega-scale response mecha-pilots to Exalted Hero, we have this one!" Called out a group of four massive ships each about the size of the colossus' chest, squarish and oddly contoured and garishly colored. They were so individually expensive and valuable that they were never used save in the most dire times or greatest military need, such as now.

The ships said, "We'll rip this thing down, you continue your mission!" With that, the four ship transformed, disassembling and then combining with each other, and then what crashed into the ground was a vaguely humanoid mechanical hero-monster a little smaller than the plant-golem but likely a bit stronger. "Defense Beast, Armor Up! Heavy Assault Angel, Weapons On! Mobility Gremlins, Activated! Coordination Network, Online! Flight-Tech Monster, Integrated! Combination, ACHIEVED! WE ARE SYNCHRONIZED RESPONSE COLOSSUS, GO-GO!"

The giant robot crashed into the plant-golem, and the Paragon flew by, giving the plant-golem a few passing blasts for good luck. "You'd think they wouldn't do a combining sequence when you could just pummel the damn thing," Zuko said, glancing at the dueling colossi on the screen.

"And miss the opportunity to be a proper sentai team!?" Calvin said, horrified. "You speak madness!"

"What's a sentai?" Zim said blankly.

The Paragon flew on...and experienced surprisingly little resistance as they went on. No more plant-golems appeared, the rainforest was deceptively quiet underneath them, and while there were a lot of flying cultists, cultists riding giant flying monsters, giant flying cultists, and tiny monsters riding on giant flying cultists, they were easily dealt with. Zim found it rather disappointing; this was clearly the enemy's greatest stronghold, why was the opposition so weak?

"I suspect they may have spread themselves a bit too thin," Zuko observed as a warband a thousand strong readied a catapult at their ship and where immediately obliterated by support artillery. "They've focused on violent expansion and now they can't even protect their own holdings."

"LAME!" Zim complained.

"You sure you don't want to go instead of me?" Calvin asked Hobbes.

"Yeah," Hobbes said dismissively.

"But you haven't even tried out your new tech like we have!"

"I'm sure I'll survive without field testing for a while. Besides, I'd rather explore the jungle, not help destroy it."

"Okay, if you're sure…"

In short order the land began to rise, reaching small hills under the overgrowth, and a pyramid-shaped mess was just barely visible in all the green. "Launch us there, and be prepared!" Zim commanded.

"Have fun," Hobbes said as Morte hit the launching button.

Again, three glowing bullet-shaped forms were fired from the Paragon. A good many number of people who were not cultists but lived under their rule watched curiously from the tree tops as the green blasts lanced across the sky, clearing a prison perimeter and smashing into a particularly large tree that served as watchtower. There were more actively malevolent forces on watch, and they sent out the alarms.

Drums beat like a massive heart in Zim's head, and he wondered what the noise was as he crawled out from the remnants of tree all around him. "I am so sick of plants already," he said.

"I miss proper tropics," Zuko said sadly, shaking off large fragments of the tree.

"And I suffer nothing at all!" Calvin said cheerfully. A crystal ball landed out of nowhere on him. "Ow."

Zim kicked it away. It floated up, staring silently at him; it was about the size of a basketball, intricately faceted, glowing with arcane light and one particularly large rune seemed to be staring at them like an eye... or a scrying spell. "Is it me," Zim said. "Or does that thing look like a disco ball?"

"Guess so," Calvin said, rubbing his head as he sat up. "Looks like we're in the right place."

The rainforest rippled around them. On cue, a warband of cultists outnumbering them twenty-to-one surrounded them on all sides, pointing all manner of gross biological weaponry at them. "Surrender and die!" they roared.

"Don't you mean, surrender or die?" Zuko asked.

"No," One of them said patiently. To his surprise, Zim realized that most of this warband were made of some vaguely familiar looking humans. "Surrender is the coward's way out. To be cowardly is to die a messy squishy death. Therefore, surrender to us and you will die."

"And if we fight?"

"Oh, you'll die anyway, but it'll be honorable!" The cultists looked excited. "Now battle!"

Zim and Zuko prepared to fight, but Calvin said, "Wait! I don't suppose you heard about what happened to Girrakkuka, did you?"

The cultists paused. "...His outpost was attacked and he was defeated, I hear," One of them said, but uncertainly. Others looked suspicious, suspecting trickery.

"I heard the sea came to life and ate his feet off!" One said.

"I heard the mechanist's robots came to life, overthrew their makers, and pledged allegiance to Girrakkuka, so he killed the robots anyway because robots are evil," said another. "So the robot's ghost ate his tentacles as vengeance!"

"I heard a rumor that aliens joined the mechanists, allied with them because it seemed like a good idea and led an assault on Girrakkuka's outpost to see if they could pull it off!" A small cultist chirped. The others stared at her. She shrugged. "Sorry, it's dumb, I know, forget I said anything."

"Information travels fast here," Zuko muttered. "How does that happen with people who don't have any apparent messaging service?"

"I haven't the slightest idea," Zim said.

"Hmm, good to know," Calvin said. "You know about the attack but nothing in particular. In that case..." He made a pose. "We come to bear homage and good news to the great Darvhog!"

Zim looked at Calvin, gaping; this approach had honestly not occurred to him. Zuko shrugged and decided to go with it. The cultists frowned. "We heard no tell of such a thing."

"Of course not. We only just escaped from the machinists. You know, our news is so good that they couldn't bear the thought of us having it, so they tried to take it all for themselves."

"Oh? Then what is the news?"

"I can't tell you if you're not Darvhog; the news is so good it would make your head explode from its goodness!"

The cultists gasped. "But I like my head!" One of them gasped.

"I keep my brains in there!" Another cried.

"Actually I've always wondered if head-ventilation would help me think faster," another said thoughtfully. Someone slapped him. "Ow, sorry!"

"Direct us to Darvhog, and free yourselves from the threat of the good-head-exploding news!" Calvin commanded.

"That-a-way," A cultist said, pointing to a path that appeared to be made of a lot of small hoverbikes crushed together into a solid shape. "Just follow the path to the big pointy triangle thing, listen for the funky music and don't let the giant man-eating plants...uh, eat you. I guess?"

"Okay," Calvin said, and he, Zim and Zuko left.

"I cannot believe that actually worked," Zim said, as they started along the path.

They heard a coughing noise behind them. They turned around and the cultist warband was standing there. "None of that makes any sense, in retrospect!" One cried.

"You're carrying filthy technological weapons!" Another shouted. "How did we miss that?!"

"KILL THEM ALL!"

The warband charged...and then a passing aero drone fired a laser and cut through a nearby tree of incredible size, toppling it and several others on the warband, crushing them. A few of the survivors whined, loudly. "That was convenient," Zim said.

"You're welcome!" The drone said, and flew away. Zim and his two teammates walked down the path, vaguely aware of fire blasting in the distance behind them, and the death cries of the plant-golem as it was defeated upon the sea, and the great cry of warfare going on while more warbands tried to engage Zim in their own plant-based war machines but where interrupted by the Paragon blasting them to tiny bits, and the mechanist's fleet moved towards the giant tree in the middle of the city that served as the cultist's capital and merrily began capturing the cultists, burning everything to the ground (or in the case of the giant combining robot fresh from its victory over the plant-golem, stomping everything flat) and a good time was generally had by all. Except the cultists, obviously.

But that wasn't a concern to Zim, Zuko and Calvin, now nearly a surprisingly open area that looked like it had recently been under a good deal of supervision; a large clearing free of excess plant life, the most dominant feature a large ziggurat-style pyramid of the curving shapes that this world's people seemed to favor (and rounded shapes were odd to see on a pyramid too, but Zim though it looked neat), and the mark of the Funk Revolution Pirates was spray-painted on the sides of just about everything, but not with a lot of enthusiasm. And then, there was the funk music, the incredibly loud and obnoxious funk music, which still couldn't drown out the sound of drums beating.

"Where is that drumming coming from?" Zim complained.

"I don't know," Zuko said, cutting down the man-eating plant they'd been warned about. "It doesn't sound right..."

"My toes hurt!" Calvin whined.

They entered into the area and, briefly noting the merits of just blasting everything until it was rubble, concluded that it lacked style and started walking up the steps of the pyramid. A disco ball sentry hovered overhead, looking right at them.

At first, there was silence. (Apart from the funk music, anyway. And the wind blowing noisily. And screams of battle, and the explosions, and the open warfare going on about less than a mile away and edging towards victory. And the small tinker toys on the ground singing old pop music records...scratch that, the place was darn noisy. It was very inappropriate for a reunion battle.)

Then, and Zim observed that the ground had several small refreshments that looked like it had all been dumped in a recent hurry, the funk music began to change. It became louder, more annoying, funkier, and then so loud it made the ancient stone rumble, and a few disco balls floated up out of the entrance of the pyramid, shining brightly and pulsing in tune with the music.

Lights shimmered, lasers flashed, and psychokinetic lights flashed around in a pretty nice spectacle. "GUESS WHO'S BAAACK!" a voice cried from within the dark entrance to the temple...which had a pretty funky look for an ancient temple, as if recently redecorated.

"I just said that," Zim said, piqued.

The music got louder as two massive figures exited through it, soon recognizable as Jord and Gunter, both giants bearing boom boxes larger than most average sized men with little trouble and tapping their toes to the music. Several paces they strided until they were about six feet away from Zim and his two friends. They winked, grinned and then they turned at attention towards the entrance of the pyramid. There was the clicking of overly large platform heels pounded as a tall and lean figure walked backwards to behind his apparent honor guard, and came to a stop in front of the astonished audience. "OOOH YEAH, DISCO DARVHOG IS BACK, BABIES!" Darvhog crowed, a thick board game in his arms for some reason, disco-dancing the whole way over to them and posing. "I GOT THE FEVER, FOR A REMATCH! YOU CAN'T KEEP DOWN THE FUNK, KITTIES AND BOYS! BRING IT!"

He stopped. "Hey," Zim said.

"You suck at this," Calvin said.

"Didn't we leave you to drift in the Astral Plane?" Zuko asked.

Darvhog held his pose. He slumped and sat down hard on the floor, pouting mightily, seriously put out. "Wasn't that a good entrance?" He asked Jord meekly. "I thought we rehearsed this! I thought, geez, I spent like five hours in a BOOKS LIBRARY looking up dramatic acting!" He dropped the board game in his arms and wailed into his hands. "Man, I blew it! AGAIN! MY LIFE IS MISERY, DUDES!"

"Relax, boss, I think they're just confused or something," Gunter said quickly. "Probably because the last time they saw us they'd pushed us out of a cage and left us floating in space."

"No, you just suck," Calvin said cheerfully. Darvhog cried even harder.

"Seriously, what are you doing here?!" Zim said. "Astral Plane. A big cage! We left you to drift! HOW DID YOU END UP HERE!?"

Darvhog stopped and sat up, shrugging. "I got no clue, man. We were just like, floating, and we went on floating. Right into a portal!" Zim stared. "It's the Astral Plane. There are portals. As in 'Portals of the Astral Plane'. Bit of a design feature! How did you now think that would happen?"

"...I didn't know it worked like that!" Zim protested. He frowned. "...And why didn't Morte say anything...?" He shook his head. "Bah, whatever! I shall atone for my error in leaving you to fall upon this world! You shall answer for your crimes, and by that, I mean I'm gonna beat you up a lot and give you over to the authorities so you'll be their problem, not mine!" Zim laughed maniacally.

Darvhog perked up. "Now there's an evil laugh!"

"Boss, he's talking about taking you to the guys we're fighting," Jord said. "Like, that's not good!"

"...Oh," Darvhog said. Zim noticed, now that he wasn't moving around so much, that Darvhog had a game board firmly tucked into his arm.

"And hey!" Jord added. "Where's that cute fluff-muffin you guys had with you last time?! I wanted to cuddle him and squeeze him and take him home and make him my boy-wife! YOU ARE INTERFERING IN MY PERSONAL LIFE, that ain't cool! Yo."

(On the Paragon, Hobbes suddenly shivered. "I just feel as though a terrifying fate has been cast for me and I should fight it with all my heart and soul," he said.

"Maybe a crazy villainess just decided she's gonna claim you as her personal property," Morte said.

Hobbes stared. "That's a bad thing?"

"...Can't see why it would be!" They both high-fived.)

Calvin blanched at Jord. "Stay away from my brother, you crazy giant-thing!" He shouted, running at her.

She stuck her foot out and tripped him, and grabbed him in mid-air by the leg. "Hey," She said in a lower, sultry voice, batting her eyes. "I didn't see ya too good before, but you're pretty adorbs yourself, kid. Give you five years or so to grow up nice and cute, I got myself a nice little harem! Yum-yum."

Calvin blinked. "Wait. What?"

"Jordy, we've talked about this!" Darvhog said sternly. "No kidnapping kid heroes because you think they're cute and might grow up into pretty boys you can have your way with forever and ever! They're some legal problems there on a few worlds and people tend to frown on lack of consent, even in our line of work."

"Aw," Jord whined. Calvin wriggled his way out and ran away, hiding behind Zuko and staring suspiciously at Jord. "Ah, isn't that cute? He's playing hard to get! And the fire-dude's a total cutie too...wait, wow, I totally did not realize just how cute! That settles it, I shall take the whole crew and they shall be my love-squishies!"

"...I don't believe I've ever had anyone say that to me before," Zim observed. Zuko paled, and said, "I already have a girlfriend, you fiend!"

"I'm a frost giant, not a fiend," Jord said.

"No one cares," Zim said. Jord pouted. "Now, I suppose we resume the fight from when last we clashed?"

"Aw, do we have to?" Darvhog whined. "I'm just, I dunno, not really feeling it."

Zim blinked. "Say what?"

Darvhog shook his head. "I just, I dunno. Coming to this planet was a bad move. These cultist yahoos were bad news the whole way through. Good for nuthin' punks!"

Zim was even more confused. "What?! I thought you were working for these fiends! And happy to teach them power and the means of destroying the machine-using folk of this world."

Darvhog shook his head. "Yeah, that's what I thought." He scowled, crossing his arms. "Freaking loonies. I show up and think, hey look at these guys, they're fighting the dudes all around this place for fun. They love nature and magic, so I'm like 'hey lets' do a team-up'! So I show them some moves, teach them how to really use the power they have on them, show them how to do it better and longer, the secret lore of green growing life and the splendid potential in even a leaf or the weakest bug...and then they go and start killing their own! And eating them! And, urgh, other things."

"...You've identified yourself as being evil. You object this this why?"

Darvhog looked appalled. "Killing people for no reason!? What's the point in that!? It's tacky! It's dumb! It's...ugh, it's too much for me. They got mad when I objected to the whole baby-barbeque thing, so they stuck me here so I could give them more power from this thing they found." He indicated the mysterious board game. "Bad mojo, that is. Heh."

"I could have told you it's stupid to ally yourself with vicious psychopaths," Zuko said.

Jord rolled her eyes. "Now he tells us!" Gunter raised his hands to his fist and tenderly chewed on his thumb, looking worried. Jord patted him on the shoulder, looking concerned. Zim took that as a reason to assume that they didn't particularly want to be here and asked, "I presume that you have no wish to be here-"

"Got it in one," Darvhog said, putting his hands in his face and pouting heavily. On his hip, Moofy the talking alien sword chuckled darkly. "Oh shut up, this whole team-up was your idea, Moofy, now look where it's got us. Under house arrest!"

"If that's the case," Zim said. "Why don't you just leave?"

Darvhog looked at him, aghast. "...Do you really think we would still be here if we could?! These cultist whackjobs are like swarming all over this place, the entire rainforest obeys their commands and would squash me flat if I broke orders and ran, and that's saying nothing of the guard animals they have all over. Wonder where they are..." A loud blast in the distant, and a rather squishy organic thud (as if of grenades blowing up large animals) responded. There was a fairly messy shower of light, and gore. "Ah. That answers that question. My point is, we don't have any way of actually getting off this island, crossing the ocean, and these morons don't have any ships we could steal and jump back into the Astral. Believe me, I checked. And I don't know any dimension-hopping spells or anything like that." He slumped back, looking depressed. "We're hosed."

"Yes," Zim said, totally unsympathetic. "Yes you are. And how I laugh!" He did so.

"Now you're just being mean!"

"You brought it on yourself. Now where is that thing we've heard tell of? Some sort of evil artifact that made the cultists go mad in the first place?"

Darvhog looked shifty. He indicated the board game he was carrying, and carefully put it on the ground. "That's the one," he said. "Fascinating little thing; the cultists here had me study it and give them greater access to its powers, aside from what I taught them. I've done a good job on that, so that's pretty much the only reason they haven't killed me yet, aside from maybe not being total jerks."

Zim ignored Darvhog as he started droning on and on about things that he had no patience for, like 'dimensional-warping sympathetic resonance' and 'extraplaner demi-plane, not distinct from The Beastlands but without the Good ickiness' and 'apotheosis of all jungles, warping intent and tricking people into playing the game so it claim more worlds for itself and expand one bit at a time', and while the talking went on, he studied the board game, Calvin and Zuko taking an interest in it as well. Zim delicately ran a finger along the ancient carved wood of its surface, feeling the deep groves of animals along the edges of the game's cover, the word 'JUMANJI' written in inexplicable English on the front. Seductively, entrancingly, the drums beat in his head, rumbling with faster beats between the heavier poundings...

He had a sharp compulsion to flip the board game open, and did so. Inside the open halves was a set of game pieces (stone carved into the shapes of African animals) and a set of rules. Zim paid little attention to them, noting that it ominously stated that 'once started a game cannot be abandoned' and such things about would-be players best beware the consequences.

The drums stopped. Zim had a nasty suspicion that the drum beats were the game's way of luring people in.

"Whoa, what the stuff!?" Gunter yelped, taking his thumb out of his mouth and grabbing Zim by the rear collar of his body armor, yanking him back before he could touch any of the game pieces. "Are you crazy, man...boy...alien...little green halfling fellow!? Don't start a game!"

"Why not?" Zim asked, having no intention of doing any such thing but curious why Darvhog was suddenly backing away in horror and Moofy yelping in fear, and Jord...scratching her butt and not paying the slightest bit of attention to events. Calvin gave a mistrustful at Darvhog, the githyanki suddenly clamping right up with eyes wide and lips tight. Calvin levered his laser rifle at him, the heat sinks flaring off excess mechanically-made heat, and then he regarded Jumanji board game again. Calvin wondered aloud, "Why's it in Low Gothic?"

Zuko raised up his flamethrower, aiming it at the Jumanji board game. "...I was going to say 'why is it in English'. Weird; you have a different name for that language?"

"...That's a good question. We should probably ask Morte how that works," Calvin said. Zim poked the board game, smirking when Darvhog sputtered furiously. The gith marched up and snarled, "Don't. Mess. With. That! Do you want it unleashing everything it can on us?!"

"Why are you so frightened of it?" Zim said.

Darvhog growled. "I'm not frightened, I just don't want you messing around with it," he said. "It's a magical board game that's, like, a desire-twisting link to an sub-dimension collectively known as the Bloom of Jumanji, Pod of the All-Hungering Blossom. Picture the biggest jungle you can. Individual trees bigger then cities, sprawling root mats larger than continents, a swarming screaming horrorshow bigger than worlds, just full of screaming and killing and every single nasty thing that anyone ever thought is in the jungle. Monsoons crashing down out of nowhere and earthquakes ripping the whole place up. Man-eating apes, people-munching plants, monsters worse than anything you've seen these loonies throw at ya...it's got them all, and worse." His words became low and slightly crazed, a fascinated whisper. "It thinks. It knows. It wants to be here. It wants to be everything."

He looked at the board game and took a single measured step back. "It wants to eat everything, and make them a part of it." He chuckled lowly and said, "I admire it's purity. Free of remorse, no real thought but volition and hunger. It's...clean."

"You sound like one of those cultists," Zim said disdainfully.

"Perhaps they have a point." Darvhog indicated the board game. "Don't pick up, move, or so much as poke the game pieces. You don't want to start a game session. Trust me."

Zim stared at the board, listening and weighting Darvhog's words carefully. He observed the intricate and beautiful, a winding marker path arranged in a delicate and mystical pattern around a large jewel in the very center; perfectly round and black, like a great eye lost in slumber, but so very ready to awaken at the first sign of prey. (And wordless and clearly, Zim heard something whisper to him of the ones who had made this thing, people who had thought too deeply of the same source as this board game's true power, who had been beguiled and then enslaved by it; they had been bidden to craft it, the weight of history demanding that this horror must be, and then they had been consumed by it. The thoughts whispered to Zim how evil this thing was.) And Zim thought, this thing shall burn.

Zim said, quietly, "Zuko."

Zuko straightened, looking at his friend. A leaf from a tree fell on his shoulder, and upon touching Zuko burst into flames and fell to still-smoldering ashes. "Yes?"

Zim stood up, staring at the board game with a twisted grin. "What is it they say in your country? About the last resort for something so terrible it simply must die."

Zuko's lips tightened, a fierce looking coming over him. He lifted his flamethrower. "'Fire cures all diseases'," he said, and exhaled a fierce burst of fire. Zim thought, in the rustling of leaves and vines and other such things, that the jungle itself recoiled from the holy flames.

"Whoa, dude, don't...just don't, watch where you're pointing the flamey bits!" Jord said, taking a few steps back.

"Hey, watch it," Darvhog said warningly. "Don't go frying my buddies! Or my stuff for that matter, I have plans for this board game!"

"Oh?" Zim said.

"Yep! First I'm gonna find a way off this rock, then I shall attune myself to it through a series of rituals that will synchronize me with its essence, sort of making me it's brain, then I'll be able to freely summon its power! I've already done some of that, just not where I'm fully in control or synched with it, and I can't really do much aside from pull out back-up or infuse its essence into my cultist employers, or-"

"Silence," Zim said. "I get the idea, but would destroying the board game harm you in any fashion?"

"What? Oh, no, definitely not. I'm not synched to the point where hurting one effects the other."

"Good," Zim said. "Zuko? ROAST IT!"

The frost giants grabbed Darvhog and leaped for cover, ignoring their boss' cry of protest, and the twin flamethrowers of Zim and Zuko washed right over the Jumanji board game, the evil thing right in the splash zone of their flames, glowing all the hotter and brighter when Zim and Zuko channeled their respective pyromantic abilities into augmenting the flames, and it turned almost white-hot when Calvin did the same with his own magitech device. It held for a second, and lanced up into the sky in a narrow pillar of white-yellow light, burning so intensely that it blasting a hole right through the dense canopy overhead where trees had grown together, melting the stone underneath-

A pulse of incredible and primal power washed out from the board game, warping the space around it; for a moment everything seemed perfectly still, a set of probabilities leaning towards a single outcome (the board game being burned to destruction) and then that pulse rearranged them to another, and in that moment the flames were snuffed out, the heat was blasted back at them, and their flamethrowers and laser rifle were blasted right off them into blasted piles of slag about a dozen feet behind them. The pulse glowed around Calvin's magitech device, and while the magic glowed fiercely in its desire to destroy this thing of artifice and wonder, it's innate power proved enough to at least survive the assault, though scarred and sparking and leaking fuel lines from internal components

Zim hit the ground and bounced, thrown back. Behind him, there were two muted explosions where the flamethrower's fuel caught fire. He adjusted himself in precisely three split-second movement to dodge the shrapnel without looking or even thinking about it. Zuko put the fires out with a single sweep of his hand while Jord and Gunter shuddered and Darvhog stared in naked hunger at the totally unharmed Jumanji board. And Calvin screamed in horror, frantically patting his wounded device, pulling out an emergency spool of binding fabric onto his device to close the marks in it until he could repair it on his on-ship laboratory. "No no no," he whispered. "Oh shit oh shit, please please please don't be broken, I'm sorry, please be okay, it'll be fine, I can fix you, there's nothing wrong with you I can't fix-"

Zim thought he heard a faint mechanical whimper from the magitech device Calvin was fussing over.

"Oh quite belly-aching," Darvhog said, completely unsympathetic. "It's just a stupid machine. Buy another one if you got such a hang-up over it."

Calvin whirled around, expression frozen into insane rage. "I BUILT IT WITH MY OWN HANDS, YOU ARTIFICE-FORSAKEN LUDDITE! I WILL DESTROY YOU!" Zuko had to grab him and hold him back until Calvin started freaking out over his poor wounded device.

Zim swallowed, finding it hard to look at Calvin in his distress, and glared at the board game. "Very well," he breathed, slipping off the remnants of his flamethrower harness. "So this is how you want to play things, eh?! I shall show you some true power, eldritch thing."

He stuck out his hand and, in a flash of light and swirling forms, the Keyblade materialized in his hand, glowing and burning with elemental light. ("Oooh!" Darvhog, Gunter and Jord said. Moofy said, "Oh my!") Sharp fields of solidified light glints on the Keyblade's edge (or at least the portion Zim typically used when he hit things with it), the actual surface blackening like old iron in random cracks and sharpened lumps rising out, and glowing red swirls wrote out pictograms of rage and promises of retribution on the Keyblade's surface.

"What are you doing?" Zuko asked warningly as Zim pointed the Keyblade at the Jumanji board game, faint shapes moving in the eye-like jewel in the center of it.

"The Keyblade can unlock things, like Kimblee's Philosopher Stone and such," Zim replied. ("The Key-what now?" Darvhog said. "What about a stone? Man, I am so out of it! Some nemesis you are.") "I intend to see if it can 'lock' them as well; seal away this things power, or at least access it and turn it back upon itself."

"Can you even do that?"

"Zuko, trying is the point of that thing! That's what the scientific method is all about! I must see if my hypothesis bears out!"

"BREAK IT TO LITTLE BITS!" Calvin raged. "MAKE IT SUFFER! CRACK THAT STUPID EYE THING AND THEN HURL IT INTO THE SUN! Hush hush, my little fire-starting device of perfect doom, we'll make the evil game pay and then I'll fix you up good and new...maybe I'll even upgrade you and make you better! Would you like that, huh? I bet you do!"

Translucent spheres of light, half-shaped into something almost like recognizable forms, gathered at the tip of the Keyblade, suffusing into Zim and engulfing himself and those around him. "Whoa, hey, wait, what are you doing?" Darvhog said. "Don't break it, I need it for... stuff. Yeah! I have a whole epic thing planned, I just-"

"Blah blah blah," Zim said. "BORED NOW."

The Keyblade fired a beam of light right into the heart of the eye-jewel on the Jumanji board game; it connected with a spectacular flare, red and yellow light spiraling all around from the glow now radiating from the board game, a fierce and alien power rising from it in competition with the Keyblade's own and Zim's will; Zim sneered, pushing more power into it, again and again, the light blasting up and around, and he could feel a connection appearing, and the sense of other-ness emanating from the board game, a connection pushing against him and wrestling with the Keyblade attempting to induce a seal upon it, locking away its power within the board game.

Zim felt, somehow, even though they weren't wielding the Keyblade themselves, the wills of Zuko and Calvin there with him, pushing and pressing against the incredible pressure of that other coming from the core of the Jumanji board game, invisibly fighting alongside him, and he didn't know how they were doing it or if they were even aware of it, if it was just their hopes and determination being psychically relayed to him and given further ammunition, but he welcomed it all the same-

A subtle shift. A passive twist in the forces moving against him. The savage force behind Jumanji switched tactics, ceasing attempts to deny Zim direct access to itself and simply gave him what he wanted...and pulled him the rest of the way through.

The light flashed, almost alarmed and panicked, and Zim said, "What-" and then a tremendous pressure built up around him, the jewel-eye suddenly transformed into a swirling portal into somewhere else, color and movement draining away inside that moving orb of passive ravenousness, and surprisingly letters appeared in front of them, spelling out words, and they read, "THOSE WHO CARRY TORCHES HAD BEST BEWARE; GOING INTO THE JUNGLE CAN BE QUITE A SCARE."

"That's a terrible rhyme," Calvin said, and then the portal within Jumanji violently expanded outwards, catching Zim and Zuko and Calvin, ensnaring them and drawing them in a colorful screaming whirlwind-

There was a terrible ghastly silence.

Darvhog peeked, having hidden behind Jord and Gunter.

Zim, Calvin, and Zuko were gone, with nothing left to show they had been there except for the smoldering bits of flamethrower and some parts broken off the pyromantic device Calvin owned. The Jumanji board game sat in place, looking unaccountably smug.

"Ew," Darvhog said. "...To be fair, I totally warned them!"

"I don't remember you saying anything about the board game possibly eating them," Gunter said. Moofy added, "Indeed!"

"Guys, come on. It's an evil magic board game that summons jungle hazards; if you're not expecting it to try and eat you at some point, you're doing it wrong!" Darvhog said, rolling his eyes.

"Of course," Moofy said sarcastically.

Further discussion on the situation was forestalled by the board game suddenly being nudged all by itself, jerking this way and that. It stopped, slightly tilted to the left, none of its game pieces knocked onto the board (and thus beginning a game)...but red energy, as red and bloody as retribution given a color, cracked out in bits and streams, chips of wood flung away with such speed that they imbedded themselves at least a few inches into the pyramid stone. Darvhog blinked when Jord caught one that was about to drive itself into his right eye, and it burst into flames from having its velocity so suddenly arrested, shattering into pieces from the force.

The board game rattled and shook, white-blue light streaming out where the red wasn't so concentrated, the cracks growing bigger and breaking the playing field, radiating outwards from the suddenly shaking jewel-eye in chaotic patterns, nearly breaking the game into several pieces.

The board game rattled and shook more violently still, ghostly flames swelling from the cracks by the moment, and they left blackened traces where they were; the carvings shifted, melting into the wood and then simply gone, the entire board game melting in starts and bits. The hinges hooking together the upper halves broke away, steaming up into molten slag as the flames swept over, in shapes like gear-teeth turning each other. one by one, the game pieces shuddered and cracked and suddenly fell apart in ignominious bursts one after the other, fading into dust that was swiftly scattered by the board games frenzied movements that were so erratic and pained that it was if something was inside it and busting out.

Now, the cracks around the eye-jewel were so many, and so bright, that the eye-jewel rested onto a doorway to a sun-scorched sky or the red dust of a burned world, though this was hardly noticeable for a moment; the entire board game creaked to the left, just once, and from the eye-jewel came more words, jagged and faint and looking as though they'd been penned by a handmade imprecise with abject panic, and they said 'IT WAS FUN WHILE IT LASTED'.

And then the Jumanji board game exploded in a blast of purified white-hot light right from the eye-jewel. Wooden splinters and smoking chunks dropped onto the ground in a brief shower. The eye-jewel itself hit the ground on its edge and spun dizzily in place before eventually tipping onto its side and falling on the ground with a faint and final 'click'.

(And unknown to them, all around the world, the cultist's battle rage subsided and their strength left that as they were about to deliver killing blows, the furious power that had enabled to crush metal with their bare hands suddenly gone as they shrank slightly, the most extreme of their mutations rudely reversing themselves. Spells born of the wild magic of Jumanji fizzled, failed to fire or ceased to work, leaving the cultists trapped in now-dead plant-hulks or horrified to feel their self-imposed improvements reverting to their natural state. Plant-golems collapsed into their component materials, scores of summoned beasts and plants collapsed into threads of essence-light or simply vanished. Caught in pitched battle all over the world where the fleets had been inspired by Zim's success, the cultists kept fighting to the bitter end as their code of honor demanded or surrendered in selfish denial of that very code, cowardice reinforcing itself at this dire time where the power that had made them so mighty and capable of destroying the very brothers and sisters they had betrayed suddenly left them weak and helpless. Wherever the power of Jumanji had improved them or directly appeared on the battlefield, it either died or left them, but the actual effects of that power, and the magically-created jungles, remained intact, beautiful and wondrous for all their depraved origins.)

The light lingered, hanging in the air as if it were a free-standing portal, and then Zim, Zuko and Calvin fell out of it and crashed onto the ground, looking severely haggard but pleased with themselves; their armor was cracked and broken and halfway destroyed in places to be crudely repaired with bits of transmuted rock and vine wrappings, as was Calvin's device. Zim took one look at the rainforest around them and let out a small girlish shriek, catching himself and pretending that he hadn't done that.

"AT LAST!" Zuko yelled. "FREEDOM!" He fell onto the ground, hugging it.

"HATE JUNGLE!" Zim squealed. "HATE IT ALL! BURN IT DOWN!"

"At last!" Calvin cried. "FREEDOM! VENGEANCE! And..." He looked around, noticing that nothing had changed around him. "And that war is still going on? They haven't even gotten over here yet?! LAME!"

Darvhog looked at them, at the ruins of Jumanji, and then at the rainforest about them all. Nothing about it seemed particularly changed. "Huh. You'd think that with the game destroyed, everything it made would be gone now."

"There IS such a thing as ontological inertia," Calvin said disapprovingly. "And why are you still here?!"

"Say what?"

"We were stuck in that thing for weeks," Zim said, looking around for the board game. "What happened to it anyway?"

"It just blew up. And what are you saying, weeks? It's only been a minute or two!"

"Hey now, I was there," Zuko said. "We were in that jungle for at least two weeks before we killed the damn thing!"

"You killed it?! Killed what?"

"The jungle, obviously," Zim said.

Darvhog stared. Moofy said, "The jungle of Jumanji."

"Yes."

"The extraplanar apotheosis of all hostile jungles."

"Yes."

"The incomprehensibly vast and supposedly indefinite jungle that was the source of the game's power."

"Yes."

"The jungle that is larger than worlds, filled to the brim with the absolute most deadly and monstrous horrors all jungle environments any mortal jungle has ever had, and the shades of those whose drive to kill and survive at the expense of others hunting its greatest terrors. And you killed it."

"I already said yes repeatedly."

"...HOW?!"

"Easy," Calvin said, sounding affronted. "It's a jungle. Yeah, it's nasty, and it was stupidly big - why would trees evolve to be bigger than cities? It makes no sense and the thing should have broken under its own weight - but it's still just a jungle. Made of plants and animals and icky things. Things that burn. So we set it on fire! Not all at once, we were there for a while evading and fighting the dangers, but except for those kids and that one guy we helped get out of there and also the fire-proof stuff and I guess that bout with dysentery I came down with for a bit, it was easy."

Zim shuddered. "Speak for yourself," he said with deceptive calmness. "I saw things and endured things that no sentient should have to. The memories of that jungle shall haunt me forever. The Irken Powers forbid that I should ever behold another jungle or rainforest environment ever again." He glared at the trees. "STOP MOCKING ME!" He set them on fire.

"You're quite calm about being trapped in Jumanji, then," Gunter said. "Why are you not insane now?"

"Oh, I noticed he just gets really calm and quiet when he's totally lost it," Calvin said dismissively. "We were there together the whole time, I've noticed things now. It was like a camping trip! Except for the horrible animals constantly trying to eat me and the evil plants also trying to eat me and the diseases and the horrible weather bent on making me as uncomfortable and exhausted as possible so those things could eat me, and the complete lack of anything approaching the hallmarks of civilization, and a dearth of precious technology...so, wait, yeah, it pretty much was like camping except no one is telling me it was for building character."

"Such horrors we experienced," Zim said, still quiet and low and shaking a little. "Even fire will not cleanse that nightmare from my soul. Beasts of the wild and the other perils aside, I have witnessed what the cancerous organic defilement of nature unbound does to a world. We shall never speak of that place again!"

"But it was a valuable team-building exercise," Zuko protested. "We had a life-changing field trip together and we can't just pretend it didn't happen-"

"NEVER. AGAIN," Zim repeated. Zuko rolled his eyes. "So! What happened to the game?!"

"It exploded," Darvhog said. Glancing back and forth, he pocketed the eye-jewel of Jumanji while no one was looking. "There was nothing left of it, just bits and splinters. Yeah."

"You're lying, but I don't much care," Zim said.

There was a great explosion, and debris flying up into a vaguely fungal-shaped bloom of dust and light. "Welp, there goes the tree-lair of the cultists and the brunt of their greatest military assets," Darvhog said, perversely satisfied. "That's them out of my hair! Now there's just...these guys and the machinist people who are probably ticked at me for supplying their enemies. Dang it."

"Probably," Calvin said, drawing a transmutation circle in the ground while they were distracted. He activated it, and the portions of the pyramid directly underneath Darvhog, Jord and Gunter reshaped into cube-shaped prison cells that sealed around the individual prisoners, connecting to each other by chains and rising off the ground on crude wheels, the whole thing made of the same stone as the ancient pyramid. It probably counted as defacing a historical site but Calvin didn't seem to care.

"Dang it!" Darvhog whined. Zim scooped up some of the dust and splinters from the Jumanji board to display as trophies of his victory (though hard-won at the cost of some nasty jungle-related trauma), and they went on their way to meet back up with their allies, dragging their prisoners with them.

By good fortune, the fight had basically been won when Zim had destroyed the Jumanji game board game; when Zim's group made it over to where the explosions had come from (assuming that to be where more of his allies would be, and that the fight was over), experiencing a surprising lack of opposition and clearing the way by simply burning through all the trees and such in their path, they met a coterie of surviving soldiers, mechs, robot servitors, and Morte and Hobbes with the Paragon floating triumphantly overhead. It took only a short time to explain events to all those there.

"Wow, you guys really could have used me," Hobbes said on the car-sized tree root he was squatting on, almost wistfully. "Wish I could have gone to that jungle place-"

Zuko, Zim and Calvin flinched. "NO YOU DON'T," The three of them said. Hobbes flinched back.

The area they were standing in was fairly open despite having only been crowded to the brim by immense vegetative growth less than an hour ago, most of which had been burned away in the battle or by petty malice. The former great tree – now a sad sight to see when it had once been so mighty - where the cultists had made their home was lying in several large pieces across the new clearing, the surviving cultists themselves rounded up and being arrested properly and sulking. Their beasts of war, at least those not sufficiently of Jumanji to be destroyed along with it, milled about aimlessly, for without their master's powers to commune with them and induce them to fight they were largely harmless, and so were left to their own devices. It made a suitable place for more landing parties, coming in bunches of four and more by air speeders, and discuss what to do next.

"Hah!" A mech said, batting ineffectually at Darvhog's cage. "How are ya now, tough guy?! Not so nasty when you're not being a glorified arms dealer showing psychos how to kill people and make monsters, huh?!"

"Dude," Hobbes said. "Stop tormenting the psychopath, it reflects badly on you, machine-people in general, and it's just bad taste to harass prisoners."

"Guys, the robots are picking on me!" Darvhog whined. A random child came out of nowhere, pushed his cage over, and ran off. "HEY! WHO LET KIDS OVER HERE?!"

"But it's a field trip," a school teacher explained.

"Who brings a field trip to a war zone? Seriously; me and my guys all have Evil alignments and even we think that's just tacky."

"We do?" Jord said. Gunter raised an eyebrow at her.

Satisfied that Darvhog was in custody, and no longer his problem, Zim turned to a robot servitor that, going by the screen on it, was a communication channel for all the leaders of this world that could be able to attend (most of them being busy coordinating the functions to give their military specialists the go-ahead to send out their generals on everything). "All things are accounted for?"

"Yes!" the leaders chirped, deliriously happy that their war had ended in a decisive clash so suddenly they were still half-expecting the whole thing to come undone any moment now and plunge them again into devastation and suffering. "We are even now pursuing the rest of their cult, but I do not think it will be long; their impossible powers suddenly left them not long ago, and they ran for it. At this point, they are little more than a collective band of like-minded scoundrels lacking cohesion or military strength. You broke them-"

"Mostly be accident," Zim said. "I suspected that destroying their artifact of power would weaken them, but not so drastically."

"Even so, we...there are not words for the extent of our gratitude. If there is anything we can do to pay you back for this...well, we are in your debt. Just say the word and it will be done!"

Zim considered, remembering the payments they had been promised, and knew when an opportunity was coming at him. "Well, in addition to the things we were promised...while our ship is quite potent at warfare, we lack the more rarified technology we need to locate my friends. We are solely geared towards survival and combat technology at the moment, so in addition to some supplies, and whatever other technology you could risk sparing us, we could use any machines you have that could serve that purpose." Zim thought a moment and added, "Also you can take back the things we borrowed for these missions. The armor and weapons."

"WHAT?!" Zuko, Calvin and Hobbes shouted.

"I simply feel we ought to design our own weaponry and armor."

"CAN I KEEP THE HARNESS THING!?" Morte yelled.

"Certainly."

"NO COMPLAINTS FROM ME!" Morte yelled back.

"Ah, is that all?" The technophiles said. "For all you've done? Consider it done. And what do you wish done with this Darvhog fellow?"

Zim shrugged. "I care not one way or the other. I suppose you have him well in hand, anyway." He turned; Darvhog and his two frost giant buddies (the three of them giving vitriolic glares at the humans in the assembled cultist ranks, none of them looking even slightly sorry for abandoning Darvhog like they had) were being led to a prison transport speeder destined for a maximum security prison. "Hey," Darvhog said off-handedly. "Do you guys have any idea how my magic works?"

"No," the arresting officer said cautiously.

"Good to know. Funny thing, did you know that one of the big triggers for arcane magic is verbal components, like saying the spell's name? You wanna see how that works?"

"Do I!" The officer said eagerly, always ready for education.

"Okie-dokie, watch close!" Darvhog boomed, "Sunder!"

The stone cages exploded, dust fountaining down; Darvhog, Jord and Gunter were moving out a moment later, bowling the officer out of the way (but not too badly, he was a pretty cool dude) and Darvhog issued a mighty blast that knocked away the other officers from them and cast a force field to deflect the small-grade firearms that were loosed against him, holding ground while Jord and Gunter knocked the machinist's out of their way, ripped into a parked speeder and tossed the drivers out of it. They just barely managed to stuff themselves inside the sphere-shaped craft and Darvhog dived inside as well, the circular anti-grav ring at the back powering up, and Darvhog's spells were terminated as he powered up the speeder, which swiftly flew into the air away from the various attacks that came at him.

"Dang it, get back here!" Hobbes shouted, shaking a fist at him. "I DO NOT WANT YOU AS A RECURRING ENEMY!"

"LATER, SUCKERS!" Darvhog screamed as the speeder flew away, laughing insanely the whole time.

More attacks followed his retreat until he was well over the horizon, already gone by the time it occurred to Zim to ready the Paragon for a chase. Hobbes said, bemused, "How was he even flying that thing?!"

"Our vehicle instruments are amazingly intuitive," A nearby mech volunteered.

"Okay, but a totally foreign flying vehicle of complexity he is clearly unused to and even dislikes?"

"Amazingly, Intuitive," The mech repeated.

Zim looked at the robot servitor, having the decency to look embarrassed. "…I appear to have tempted fate."

"I apologize," the leaders said sadly. "And I doubt we'll be able to catch him, with things as busy as they are."

"Well, I doubt he'll be much of a problem to you," Zim said. "He told me he simply wishes to leave. But if you see him, give him a good blast for me!"

"Will do!"

"So," Zim said thoughtfully. "Now let's talk about what I could use in equipment, and then I'll tell you everything you need to know about spaceship crafting..."

The natives blinked. "That wasn't part of the deal."

"Do you want to achieve proper spaceflight or not?!"

"Okay, okay!" They settled down and discussed those things.

Some days later (the team having stayed on that world for a bit for various considerations and helping out on a few cultist-hunting missions just to make sure they didn't leave their erstwhile allies in the dust), the Paragon was again flying out into space, it's armor bolstered with a new protective armor prototype donated by the technophiles as a goodwill gesture, leaving behind the world of luddite cultists and technophillic heroes to a brighter future.

Inside the ship, Calvin was rubbing his hands excitedly in the cargo hold where all the equipment their ship could possibly have contained was making it very crowded with Morte and Zim standing there as well while Zuko and Hobbes aimed the ship and fueled it with its peculiar psychokinetic energy. "Well, that was a few days well spent," Calvin said, levering open a crate and examining a top-of-the-line sensor module.

"It does feel nice to do some good in the multiverse, does it not?" Zim said. "And we got free stuff out of it!"

"Them's the perks of being Good," Morte said cheerfully.

"More raw minerals we can use for making things, a bunch of weapons we can toy around with, plenty of personal-scaled anti-grav engines for vehiclecrafting, all manner of sensory or tracking equipment we can use to make better things to find your missing guys, schematics for all of those things to improve on...and also they refurbished our ship with top-quality amenities!" Calvin sank into a big poofy chair he'd been dragging along behind him. "Time well spent, guys!"

"Now what?" Morte said. "You think the guys could have helped us get it put away all neat, but no, you guys had to be so anxious to get out of there..."

"It is not a question of what to do next. It is always a question of what seems like a good idea at the moment!" Zim cracked his knuckles. "We've some time before we have enough power over emergency stores and can make a jump into Astral space; we should use it productively! I recommend getting these into that makeshift laboratory we're hooking up for things of this nature, and then we can get to work kitbashing up analysis engines to locate my missing people! IT WILL BE FUN."

"Let's get to it," Calvin said, already running off to go find an automated gantry to move the stuff for him.

"Feel like betting how long it'll take him to start lazing off?" Morte asked Zim conversationally.

"That is a short-odds bet. You're on!" Zim said.

Elsewhere...

Envy the Jealous, one of the last homunculi and spawn of the enigmatic entity that named itself Father, walked silently under an alien sky, the wind rattling ominously in his ears as if it knew that Envy didn't belong.

Dainty looking feet pounded great dents into the reinforced metal of a catwalk suspended between two monolithic buildings built on top of a solid foundation of an entire neighborhood a mile off the ground. Envy did its best to walk off the lingering effects of being violently teleported to another world; it questioned Wuya's like for teleporting her agents places when ships were more comfortable, but supposed that this was just efficient.

Even so, Envy had to sit down on an air-conditioning vent several dozen feet away (rickety and rusted, occasional puffs of smoke going up his coat), breathing heavily before looking up into the sky at the moon up in the sky, for it had arrived at nighttime only moments ago directly from Wuya's domain.

It was hard to see the moon; what Envy initially mistook for thick black clouds were columns of smoke dozens of miles wide, the pollution of several dozen generation's worth of indifference and intentional malice turning the sky overhead into a dark mess churning with the threat of acid rain and only barely relieved by natural starlight in the thin areas. Even those were small and dismissively faint, so thick was the pollution. Most of the illumination came from the electric lights – clamped into lamp-posts and wall fixtures and great suspended lights between buildings – and many of those were broken or in bad need of repairs. Up here, where the powerful and wealthy could afford a modicum of luxury with their people's great technology, it was largely tolerable or even wondrous. Further down, into the filthy and dark depths of the city, the light got worse. Deeper there, where the lights had broken long ago and only the most misfortunate squatters or desperate of escapees dwelled, terrible things moved without fear of illumination. Envy felt a sense of brotherhood with those creatures.

A Glukkon hive city, a vast collective of buildings and neighborhoods and manufactories smashed into each other into a crazy mash-up like the worst nightmares of rural paranoia. Catwalks and small bridges both official and rigged together by the ingenious locals so they wouldn't have to risk the public walkways where urban predators did their filthy work. Not much different from the other hive cities like it; miles of cold metal above and below, spreading out across the landscape as a urban wasteland, pressing down the weak and unfortunate as a by-product of rampant consumerism.

And yet, it was not totally dark. The pollution-clouds broke through in places, and moonlight shone down on a weary world. The dark reaches of heaven, lit by the luminous presence of uncountable stars vast distances away and offering the faint hope of romanticism to those below, and outshining them all was this planet's moon. Visible among that moon's many markings was a large shape uncannily like the two-fingered paw of one of this world's more significant rational species.

The handprint, it was said, that signified the gods' favor of the Mudokons. Once a mighty race until their presumed arrogance drove their rivals the Glukkons to enslave and debase them.

Envy was certainly on Oddworld, just one small world in an infinite sea of such places but one with great promise and needing attention.

A small motorized cart, hovering slightly above the ground on a modest anti-grav engine, waited for it behind. Envy grunted, letting it's bones and muscles slip or slide out of the way into more harmonious configurations, it's body adjusting itself and shifting into various other forms for comfort.

Envy shook his head and hopped up onto the scooped protrusion on the front, grabbing hold of the joysticks for controls on the front, and the motor cart obligingly floated forward at a slow but comfortable pace. Envy sat back, contented, and waited.

Behind it, the cart's front was an automated hatch, a keypad nestled into it and wholly responsive only to Envy's very unique bio-morphic signature. The contents within (some weapons, a few changes of clothes, basic field rations, a comprehensive report of everything he would need to do the job properly including a summary of all his allies and probable foes on this world and how they might aid or impede Wuya's plans and the best ways to accordingly deal with them, several extremely-well sealed barrels containing a weaponized chemical gas marked 'REAVER GAS' and a few other things Envy thought would be helpful for the mission) were securely locked into place, and the nigh-indestructible exterior was proof against nearly any force that Wuya herself commanded, and Envy had no fear that the contents would be used against itself.

It found itself meandering through the urban sprawl, observing how things compared to the official reports complied for this mission. Envy saw many things.

Envy saw a shopping market, and within it a vast crowd gathered before a public speaker, a Glukkon with a hoarse voice and prison camp tattoos, screaming in wild and fanatical tones of the downward slide their people had taken, and that the Glukkons must retake their place as the true dominant species and exterminate all threats to their reign, cutting down the untrustworthy Mudokons and Gabbits and other pretenders to reason; on a sea of dirty blood the Glukkons would rise and leave their suffering behind. A troop of armed security enforcers came in unseen mid-speech, and most of them agreed with the speaker. Others did not, repulsed, and argued. Envy wanted to see what would happen if things were stirred up, and took out a hidden gun and shot the rabble-rouser without anyone realizing until he was dead. A riot swiftly broke out when the blood hit the wall and the speaker's body hit the ground, and both parties blamed the other for the murder. In the chaos, Envy departed without incident.

Envy saw a huge titanic factory floating in the sky, repurposed from a rival corporation of scientific endeavor, kept tethered by a huge tractor beam. Great smoke belched from it, the byproduct of armaments and ammunition being machined, and metal smelted and remade into the cybernetic components of the Glukkon's most fierce soldiers: the Big Bro Sligs. Envy made a note of it; he'd heard of such massive factories becoming commonplace now, but he hadn't realized how big they'd become.

Envy saw a group of skittish beings who were plainly not Glukkons; a troubled rabble of many species and shapes, huddled under cold blankets and fried-out food supplements. They also bore marks signifying that they belonged to one corporation or another; escaped slaves, Envy presumed. They ran off in a hurry when they saw Envy passing overhead on a walkway; when Envy saw a security patrol, Envy dutifully informed them of what it saw. The screaming that followed thereafter brought a smile to Envy's face.

Envy saw many more things. Each and every one was catalogued and remembered with a thoughtful calmness, and Envy couldn't resist the mischievous urge to make things worse here and there. Tormenting those that annoyed it always gave Envy considerable satisfaction, and Envy privately considered every living being that wasn't explicitly an ally to be an enemy.

Unsure of whether or not it ought to go to the last known location of Wuya's failing agents in the area, the last known location of their runaway experiment (and funny enough both locations were the same), locating and confronting the Glukkon Queen or coercing the queen of the much-abused races of Sligs that served the Glukkons as bodyguards and muscle, Envy decided those all sounded boring and resolved to go wander until an ideal situation presented itself.

Wait, listen, and then make them bleed with their own swords. Envy liked that method the best.

Envy moved on, and happened to notice a small child too close to the rails. With the same amount of ingrained habit as a man scratching an itch that he's been accustomed to for ages (and even less forethought or interest), Envy shoved it over the rails to plummet to its death. Envy was annoyed when the child grabbed the railing on the way down and calmly climbed back up as if this happened every day. With a snort, Envy acted like it hadn't happened and went onwards.

The Astral Plane and the infinite multitude of worlds it connected to was full of wondrous secrets and a never-ending supply of adventure, but it was also full of opportunities to just sit back, relax, and enjoy life for a bit.

Hobbes yawned, waking up from a short nap right atop the Paragon's exterior.. The ship itself was resting along the inner curve of a planet called Shoregird that had no native sentient life apart from generations-entrenched colonists that had introduced themselves already; they seemed to have taken a liking to Zim's crew, borderline amphibious beings descended from a predatory aquatic race called Pisces Volanns. Their ancestors, as depicted in the Hitchhiker's Guide, looked like totally badass mermaids with the qualities of sharks and angler fish, and while these descendants certainly resembled their ancestors, longer periods of time immersed underwater had adapted them into a stout body shape rather like manatees, only way more badass. Far more fishlike now, with slimy bodies with opposable flippers, vestigial neck-mounted tentacles for fine manipulation, powerful tails and heads like angler fish mixed with crocodiles, and curiously solemn-looking features. They didn't seem too bothered about nearly losing their amphibious abilities.

In any events, the Deep Volanns (as they called themselves) had been pleased to have tourists, as Hobbes and the rest had found when the Volanns had met with them while their ship had come to an hovering stop over an underwater outpost in the shallows of an inland sea. Glad to meet people that weren't in horrible danger, terribly lonely or trying to kill them for once, they'd talked.

As it transpired, Morte's initial suspicions that the Volanns' ancestors had killed any original natives were unfounded; the colonists had come in a scientific mission many hundreds of years ago and settled there some time after a terrible incident that had nearly wiped out the life there. According to these studies and reports from neighboring world, Shoregird had suffered catastrophic (though totally incidental) damage from a interstellar war that had happened to come too close and the collateral damage had totally wrecked the landmass; what hadn't sunk and pushed the sea level up exponentially had become tangled bunches of islets all over the planet, and the single largest landmass was less than half the size of a Brighthammer-standard island, about twenty miles across and shaped like a crescent.

By some peculiar quirk of geography, forgiving climate, and a touch of terraforming by the Volanns when they arrived to make the landscape a bit more to their liking before they found the intricacies of the sea a much more interesting home, every bit of land on the planet was tropical beach in some form or another, with temperate climate too. A touch of genetic engineering, importing appropriate but endangered species to thrive, and natural selection to boost surviving animal populations had ensured an astounding variety of life on each island and even more in the sea. Zim had decided to take some time off and recuperate from their exertions and the Volanns encouraged it, having not seen unexpected visitors like them in nearly eight months and being a fairly relaxed group besides. The first one to meet them and their most frequent visitor in the eighteen hours they'd stopped there, a young lady named Rekklae, mentioned that they were lobbying with the Galactic Resort Commission to have their planet advertised as an ideal tropical resort in order to bring in more money and maybe get people to think of them as something else than 'that one planet with the freaky fish guys'.

(Apparently, it was a good thing they'd landed here; the Deep Volanns had a unified government ruled by a meritocracy-determined council of scientists advised by wise artificial intelligences, but much of their society had gone off to their own devices in recent years and the more moderate of Zim's greeters thought they were up to no good. Rekklae claimed that a technocratic cult called the Demiurges of Tentacle And Silt, worshipping the conceptual power of the sea and it's generative bounty, had gone off conducting weird and probably unsanctioned genetic experiments. The rise of sea monsters just several miles out to sea from here was likely no coincidence.)

For his part, Hobbes was wholly enjoying the prospect of a little tropical vacation. He leaned back, moving into the breeze and luxuriating in the smells brought to him by the wind. He immersed himself in the sensations, knowing in moments what just about all his crewmates and everyone on the beach was doing. A human smell, curiously hot and smelling faintly of ashes, came his way. It was still fairly new to Hobbes, but he was becoming familiar with it. He turned towards its source and his ears pricked at the loud human grunting of a capable body hauling itself up the ship with great speed, so swift and silent that Hobbes was a bit surprised that even he noticed it. It swiftly became the noise of footsteps on metal and approached; Hobbes turned his head and saw that it was Zuko walking up on the top of their ship, moving in a very deliberately casual method that suggested that he was putting all the effort he could manage into forcing himself to be smooth and calm. It was an amusing image; Hobbes smirked a bit, remembering that most of his experience with Zim's distant friend involved him either at the front of battle roaring like a dragon and fighting just as hard, skulking around corners and staying just out of sight while keeping to himself, or making dry and sarcastic remarks.

Hobbes sat up, ears smoothed, and said, "Hey!" before Zuko even got to the comfortable distance he generally preferred when he talked to anyone. Zuko misstepped, almost tripping, caught off-guard by Hobbes' suddenness. His foot swung to the metal under him, connected, and he got his balance back.

"Hi," Zuko muttered, almost a grumble.

Hobbes snickered, pleased to bother anyone and satisfied how easy it was to get under Zuko's skin. Hobbes made a show of yawning and said, "How long was I asleep? I told Calvin to wake me up if anything happened."

"Nothing happened," Zuko said. He jerked a thumb behind him, at the beach below the ship. Hobbes was curious enough to stand up for a better look and saw that Calvin, Morte and Zim were still there; Calvin was playing in the water on the cycle he'd been designing; after leaving Terracandra, he'd replaced the prototype vehicle's engines with an anti-gravity engine, reshaped the frame to accommodate lighter mass for heavier armor and removed the wheels, modifying the thing to be a speedy and agile hovercycle with respectable armor. In but a few hours here, he'd also made it totally water tight and submersible, racing underwater with a group of local lads that had taken a shine to him.

On land, upon the beach itself, Morte was happily within the harness and was trading stories with the Volanns woman Rekklae, telling her about everything he heard going on in her particular quadrant of the multiverse; it was apparently only a stone's throw, cosmically speaking, from Hobbes' own universe, a thought that made his stomach twist up and the rest of him desperately wish he'd at least said goodbye to his mother... he tried not to think about that and took note that Zim still distrusted open water and was keeping back as much as he could. Hobbes had seen him earlier, typing up what he'd learned about this place into the Guide in a journalistic sense of 'keeping things up to date', but now he seemed to be experimenting with his powers again; the subdued lightshow around him was familiar to Hobbes by this point.

Zuko said, "I'm not really sure what we're still doing here. There's not really any reason for us to stay here."

Hobbes waved his hand. "Maybe nothing to deal with our overall mission, but, yeah, you really need to learn how to relax. Spending a few more hours, maybe a day and a half, in a nice place like this? That's not a delay, that's a chance to unwind."

Zuko snorted, producing a brief cloud of embers. Hobbes flinched back. "You honestly think it's a good idea to sit around and mess with fish people?" Zuko said. "This planet has nothing we need to bargain for, scavenge, and they certainly don't need our help! What are we even doing here? There's nothing here that has anything to do with that thing I like to think of as what we're actually supposed to be doing! What's next, throwing a beach party?"

Hobbes winced. "Yikes. You really need to unwind. Or get a girlfriend, a nice lady to talk to."

"I already told that crazy giant Jord, I have a girlfriend!"

"Uh huh. And now that you mention it, a beach party sounds like a nice idea if we don't jump planet in the next few hours. I'll throw it at Zim when he's done with whatever he's doing, see if that'll get him out of his water thing-"

Zuko facepalmed. "Oh, spirits. Please stop me from giving these people ideas!"

"Relax! Almost everyone we've met since we left Traverse Town has either fought us, followed us like creepy stalkers, tried to kill us or yelled at us! It's nice finding a bunch of people that might like to just hang out and party before we have to go."

Zuko, to his credit, didn't immediately argue against that just to reinforce his own point. He looked back at the ocean, watched the Volanns cavort with Calvin (who was just racing and yelling and shouting and actually acting like a carefree boy his age for once and not a super-scientist employed by a galactic monarchy) and looked at Zim with a worrying look for a long moment that reminded Hobbes starkly of the look an overprotective big brother might give an intelligent but foolhardy younger brother who was in over his head. After a moment of regarding Zim producing several small bubbles of glowing light and moving them around telekinetically (somehow) and genuinely enjoying the beach without having to get too close to the water, Zuko relented and sat down, staring intently at the ground and frowning thoughtfully.

Hobbes waited. Sure enough, moments later Zuko nodded, some of the tension going out of his shoulders and loosening up his posture nicely. "Okay, okay," Zuko said, raising his hands in mock surrender. "You have a point. Enjoying ourselves a little might be nice." He smelled the air, seeming to take in more than just oxygen as he slowly faced the setting sun, and smiled faintly when a flush of heat darkened his skin for a moment.

Hobbes make a fake bow. "And now the student understands the lesson. Enlightenment points for everyone!"

Zuko was sitting next to Hobbes, with his scarred side facing the tiger, so until Zuko turned to present him a sarcastic grimace Hobbes had no idea how Zuko felt about the quip. He'd noticed that Zuko's scar was deep enough that the muscles were too damaged to do much more than small muscle movements; there was almost no emotional response that could be seen from that side. Even his eye was just barely capable of small movements, and while it looked healthy enough, Hobbes was sure that his vision was fairly poor from that side. He wondered if Zuko's eyesight was bad on the scarred side; he'd seen him fight and he certainly favored his other eye.

Further discussion was dismissed by a tremendous flare of light from Zim's position that split the clouds, nearly shoved the Paragon over, produced a shockwave that rocked it hard, hammered the shockwave-tossed sands with sufficient heat to flash-burn them into glass (and since Morte had been buried in the sand by the shockwave, he was stuck inside a large bubble of the glass; his friend was okay though), and knocked everyone at sea at least a mile out. And also, it seriously surprised a small seagull.

By the time Zuko and Hobbes dropped down from a handhold Hobbes had grabbed in the ship's hull before they could plummet, none too pleased to have been smashed right onto glass, the titanic pillar of light was starting to fade and the air still glowing with faint arcs of diffused colors, and of course Zim was standing right there at the epicenter of it, hands shining furiously.

Zim looked around, his hands still glowing with the same light. "Ah!" He said, eager to deflect blame, and said, "He did it!" while pointing at Calvin. The light around him shaped into a translucent construct in the shape of a hand pointing a finger, hovering disembodied in mid-air.

Zuko and Hobbes just glared at him.

The floating hand faltered, and broke apart into thousands of tiny shining fragments. "You're not buying it, huh?" Zim said.

"OUR BEACH!" One of the natives screamed, loudly.

Hobbes winced. "Uh oh. There goes the beach party…"

A Deep Volanns named Peppika hauled himself onto the beach, leaning up on a patch of sand just north of the glass. He gaped, mouth open and needle-teeth glinting in the light. The beach nearly shone, sunlight refracting through the glass in all the colors of the rainbow, producing a prismatic aura in the weird and enticing patterns of the glass. Peppika said, "Holy egg factories, that's beautiful! A beach made of funky glass will surely bring in the tourists!" He saluted Zim. "Thanks, man!"

"Oh, that worked out okay," Calvin said, bobbing in the sea and driving back, a few of his new buddies following along.

"You see?" Zim said smugly to Hobbes. "Everywhere I go, I bring joy and hope."

"Yes, either that you've left or you're going to leave," Morte said acidly from where he was trapped in the glass.

"What did you just do!?" Zuko yelled. "Now you have light-shooting powers?!"

"...I honestly have no idea," Zim said, extending his spider-leg attachments and using their lasers to burn a section of the bubble trapping Morte out. He tapped it a few times in structurally weak points, and chipped it open enough for Morte to climb out.

A chortling noise down the beach called to them. They looked and saw another native was trying to get their attention. "Pardon me, newbies," said the native, a nice young gentleman-in-waiting named Grakke, and he pointed at three other beach goers that had come down from the other side of the beach to see what was going on. "Do you know those fellows down that a-way?"

Zim looked to see them. "Huh, they look a little familiarHOLY HELL ON MY SHOES WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?!"

"Yo," said Disco Darvhog, wearing a tremendously tacky pair of beach shorts.

"How's it hanging guys?!" said Jord and Gunter, wearing modest bright yellow swimwear (probably unnecessary, since they normally wore swimwear anyway), beach shorts for Gunter and a one-piece swimsuit for Jord.

Zuko gaped. Hobbes stared, dumbfounded, then he chose just to stare at Jord's plump figure in that nicely conservative swimsuit, which was a lot more fun. Morte was already doing that, never one to pass an opportunity to ogle a pretty woman. Jord giggled at the attention and posed, absently plucking at where her swimsuit pinched at the excessive flesh on her broad thighs. Zuko frowned at Hobbes' behavior. Zim stomped away, marching to Darvhog with his eye twitching and flames randomly spurting out of the air. He walked to Darvhog, and as soon as he was close enough, punched him in the leg. "Ow!" Darvhog whined, falling over. "Not my standing leg! I need that for standing! Also jogging. And other stuff."

Zim grabbed him by the neck, lifting the much taller githyanki down to his face. "What. Are. You. Doing. Here?" Zim said, red light issuing from his mouth.

"Nice glow," Darvhog said. "Not too good at keeping it contained, though."

Zim ignored that. "We left you on that planet with all the stupid cultists! With no spaceship or means of traveling into the Astral Plane! And you explicitly told us you don't know any teleporting magic! You told us you were trapped there! SO WHAT IN THE NAME OF INAPPROPRIATELY NAMED BELGIUM ARE YOU DOING HERE?!"

"I told you they'd be back," Morte said snidely. "But does anyone ever listen to me? Nooo…"

"...Can you let go of me?" Darvhog asked. "It's kinda uncomfortably bending over like this."

Zim pushed him over. "How did you escape?!"

"Hah!" Darvhog said. "That's easy! We..." He stopped. "Uh...how did we escape, guys?"

Jord shrugged. "I dunno. I got drunk out of my gourd to celebrate getting loose of those goofy cult-guys! Like, a record for me getting drunk kinda."

Gunter put on some fancy spectacles and pulled out a rune-studded metal cube six inches on each side. He pressed one and it displayed a holographic image. "Well, sir, as you and our esteemed rivals can see from these pictures I took for posterity, we waited until our aforementioned rivals were prepared to leave and we clung our speeder to the back of their ship," he said, the cube's images displaying images as a visual aid for his explanation. "After reinforcing our craft's fragile superstructure with defensive magic such that it was able to survive both atmospheric exit and re-entry into the Astral Plane. We laid magics to keep the ship on our personal raider and departed, and we followed you to this beach afterwards."

"What," Zuko said flatly.

"But the people on that world were hunting you!" Zuko protested.

"They were kind of busy with that whole full-scale war thing," Jord said wisely. "Sure, they'd already won but it was still heavy work tracking down the losers and caging them. Way too much work to pay attention to guys like us! We had a few close calls though; one guy almost yanked my hair! I like my hair where it is, you know."

"And what are you doing on the beach, anyway?" Morte asked Jord. "You're a frost giant. I thought like the heat, so what are you doing on a planet with a solely tropical biome?"

Jord grinned cheesily and shrugged. "...Hey, everyone likes the beach! It's, like, a sauna for me."

Zim groaned. "I do not believe this," He grumbled, realizing the very distinct possibility that Darvhog really was a rival who would never ever stop following him. It was going to be even worse than Dib was at his most annoying…

"WHAT'S ALL THE YELLING ABOUT!?" Calvin yelled from out to sea.

"DARVHOG CAME BACK!" Hobbes yelled.

"WHAT, REALLY? THAT SUCKS! HOW'D HE DO IT!"

"HE HITCHED ON OUR SHIP!"

"BUT THAT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE!"

"THAT'S WHAT WE SAID!"

"LOOK HOW LOUD I HAVE TO YELL FOR YOU TO HEAR ME!" Darvhog yelled to Calvin.

Zuko assumed a fighting stance. "Prepare for a good face-stomping, you sad silly pirate-things! I shall rectify my mistake in trusting in the competence of organized structure."

"But we're on Evil Vacation!" Darvhog said, backing up in open horror. "You can't beat up a dude and his buddies on the beach when he's on Evil Vacation! That's...that's just mean!"

Jord teared up, sniffling a little. "You guys suck! Some rivals you are! And they call us evil!"

"I don't think they do, actually," Gunter remarked sadly. "No one takes us seriously!" He started to cry, weeping big gushing tears. "We try hard to be evil and awesome! What do we do wrong?"

The Deep Volanns there stared. "…Huh," Rekklae said, sliding away from the sobbing villains.

"That's just sad," Grakke said.

"Okay, beating them up now feels messed up," Hobbes said. "Are we going to…you know, actually fight them? That doesn't feel right…"

Zim facepalmed. "I, okay, I…will you idiots stop crying already!?" They did so, hushing up and stilling tearing up a bit. "Answer me this. Have you stolen anything or killed anyone or done anything evil here?"

"Nope," Darvhog said honestly.

Zim groaned, facepalming again. All the conduct of Great Goodness that Aang had taught him suggested that beating up crying people, even when they were evil, was just not right even if they had to answer for past crimes or were really annoying. "…I suppose we can't," Zim said reluctantly.

"Yay!" Darvhog, Gunter and Jord cheered.

"But what about all the evil things they've done before?" Zuko asked.

"Aww," Darvhog, Gunter and Jord whined.

"…Oh, yeah!" Zim said. He thought about it. "Eh, I'll give them a freebie this time," Zim said dismissively. Zuko shrugged, glancing at the space pirates and growling. To those very pirates, Zim said, "Now, you three! Go find some other beach and annoy someone else!"

"Aw!" Darvhog whined again. "But annoying you is so much fun! And I haven't found anyone to talk to since Moofy refused to talk this morning."

"I don't care!"

"C'mon, please? I'll say please a million times and then six more if you don't say okay! I'll say it until whatever you have for ears explode and your brains drop out and your skin crawls out and you get 'please' stuck in your head forever. Please please please please please-"

"Gah, all right! You can stay here, just...don't bother us!"

"But we want to barbeque! It's not a beach party without a barbeque! Or a rival to be a buddy with."

"STOP COMPLAINING! FINE ALREADY!" Zim looked at a random native. "You keep an eye on those three! They are evil and stupid and stupidly evil! But mostly evilly stupid!"

"Hey!" Darvhog, Jord and Gunter said.

Gunter thought about it though, and brightened. "But they admitted that we do evil things! Our evil is appreciated and acknowledged!"

"Go Team Us!" Darvhog, Gunter and Jord said. They high-fived. Darvhog had to float up with magic because of how much larger the giants were.

"Will do!" The native said cheerily to Zim.

The remainder of the day was pleasant enough even with Darvhog and his silly sidekicks; as Darvhog suggested, they had a barbeque later that night, and annoyingly Zim found that he wasn't completely terrible company, nor were his companion. (Calvin seemed unusually inclined to hang around Jord, for some reason. Zim didn't care to speculate, though the frost giantess was a quite beautiful woman, he thought.) With the natives keeping an eye on the Funk Revolution Pirates, they were no harm, and their night passed without incident.

Zim still tied the three pirates up the next morning and asked the natives to bring them into police custody through whatever contacts they had; he was hardly going to let them actually get away with their crimes.

Darvhog was a pretty good sport about it. "You know I'm just going to break out anyway and no one's gonna care that escaping prison is a crime onto itself," he said. Zim had to admit he probably had a point, that happened ridiculously often for some reason.

Oddworld was just one of those worlds where something interesting was invariably going on. Wars of liberation and industrial expansion, such as went on now, only encouraged such things. The tensions between the many races of the world coming to the boiling point outright amplified it.

Mudos, one of the more heavily populated continents, was one of the primary staging areas of that war. It was hard to say why; it was not particularly large, especially significant one way or the other, it was just a place for people to live. It could be argued that since the dread Glukkon Queen, Lady Margaret, (and by extension her ally Skillya, the most powerful queen of the Sligs, the mercenary people who served the Glukkons) enjoyed lairing in various dens of resplendent luxury maintained by her children, it was important after all, but she'd apparently only gone there after things had grown more disastrous, perhaps to govern her subjects more closely… and be safer with the majority of them close at hand.

Quite why so many things had happened there was hard to say. Likely it was because the leader and somewhat reluctant messiah of the Mudokon's bid to escape slavery and probable genocide from their Glukkon overseers had begun the whole thing there.

Across all known worlds of the multiverse, there is a curse that translates roughly as 'may you live in interesting times'. Mudos, in its sprawling peaceful swamplands won through conquest and festering cities choked from incompetent industry turned to evil and immigrant slums expanding by the month to make more beds for their desperate occupants and all manner of spirits writhing in impotent rage and despair, was a good example of the terrible truth of that particular aphorism.

In an otherwise unimportant backwater stretch of wasteland occupied by mining facility that had become abandoned when the resources had been totally harvested, now only important from a meteorite crash in the very heart of the town itself, a young elf from another world had time to consider the grim truth of that phrase. He'd seen more than his fair share of different parts of time (and had grown to loathe time travel), not to mention worlds, and it was a bitter truth that all his life had been an interesting one. Of late, bitter and frustrating and terrible as well.

Perched on a high point where two buildings lay right next to each other, one much taller than the other, he and the small warband (or raiders, he didn't know which was more appropriate) were waiting for the opportune moment to strike, their attention fixed keenly on a convoy of massive vehicles resembling crude floating boxes, each of these caravans roughly the size of a small house and flying several feet above the ground, moving at a hurried pace that would go right through this town. The pilot chamber at the top, each exactly big enough to house a single pilot and instruments and nothing else, was amusingly puny by comparison.

The elf stood slightly higher; enough to get a good view, not enough to risk being seen, and hoped the enchantments the shaman chanters had worked on his raiders would hide them from sensory devices. He breathed in, breathed out, hardly weighed down by the salvaged body armor rudely fixed upon his fairly short but broad body. Several strands of long green hair, lightening to blonde at the tips, got into the sniper's goggles he was wearing and it was a moments effort to brush them out of his face; a tricky feat, since he was holding a large morph-gun currently set into an anti-material rifle and prepped for sniping action.

Beside him, his raiders tensed; Mudokons, all of them, tall and wiry humanoids with blue-green skin of varying shades, turtle-like features, three digit hands, and vaguely worried expressions; all of them were dressed in the tribal regalia of their people (naturally growing head-feathers that denoted status and identity, vibrant mixtures of tattoos and body-paint, and slightly elongated light body armor magicked into existence by mighty nature magic), and they were all carrying large firearms forged from secrets given to them by their ancestor spirits, resembling crossbows but with very little mechanized form and a glowing bolt of divine energy for ammunition. All, incidentally, were male; female Mudokons, like their Slig and Glukkon foes, were egg-laying giants akin to termite queens, hence the common 'queen' term.

The elf, named Jak, spoke into a minute microphone-earphone set hooked into one of his amazingly long and narrow pointed ears, confirming if the other snipers were in place. The commanders of the other units confirmed, all of them set up and ready to launch the attack as soon as they were in place. When they finished, another voice, wheedling and male and extremely dear to Jak's heart, asked if he was still supposed to wait before the fight was started before he swept in. And for that matter, he still wasn't entirely clear about the plan.

Jak chuckled darkly. "Don't worry about it, Daxter," he said, easing his hold on his rifle. "The plan couldn't be simpler. That convoy is headed straight to the nearest factory-town to drop off a load of slaves, captured tribesman and anyone else who had the bad luck to be there and not the right species when the local Glukkon governor decided he needed a bit of petty cash on the side. It's just north of this town, so they have to cut through here. Our source confirmed it, they'll just take the main road here, splitting up and coming back together when they reach this part right here. We'll drop 'em, shoot the lead convoy; the one with all the weapons. The others will crash right into it, and that's when our tomahawkers and skirmishers jump in. Shooters provide cover fire, I jump in and make a mess, and then about a few minutes later you come in with our own cargo ships; we'll get the slaves in there and fly off to safe territory before they even know what's going on. Easy!"

"Now that you've said all that," said a Mudokon next to Jak, a lanky youngster named Achey-Eye, a gloomy former slave with aspirations to shamanhood that were outstripped by a talent at long-range combat cultivated from years of being forced to play extremely hard and dull shooting simulators intended for military training. It certainly made him a natural Mudarcher, a firearm-specialist warrior. "It probably won't happen. What if they were listening in?"

Jak snorted. "As if they're using anything as retro as what we've had to scrounge up. They save all the good tech for themselves."

"Not so bitter," said another Mudarcher called Bad Drink from behind Bokton, short and slim and a bit unhinged from too many years of being a taste taster for the now defunct Soulstorm Brewery. "Brings bad quarma. Careful now. That brings the bad ending. Never a good thing."

Jak grunted in response, and grinned predatorily at the sound of increasingly noisy engines. Several of the Mudokons stiffened, unpleasantly reminded of their old bad days as slaves and foodstuffs to the Glukkon, and itching for bloody retribution. "We're on," Jak said simply. He held a hand up for silence, gestured to be prepared. "Skirmishers in place?" He asked again.

"Here!" Said six groups of melee-specialized warriors, grouped in units of six to nine and hiding in the alleyways and potholes and abandoned wrecks ahead and behind the area where the attack was planned; when the convoy was struck, they would swarm out and strike a decisive blow. All of them were tomahawkers; Mudokons trained in the warrior ways of their ancestors and long-lost traditions, armed with spirit-blessed weaponry and great physical power uncommon to the normally fragile Mudokons.

Jak asked the same question of the snipers, other Mudarchers and warriors armed with scavenged sniper rifles (and similar weaponry), all perched on concealed vantage points like him, and they answered in the affirmative as well. By now, the engines were louder than ever.

He dared to look out; coming their way was the convoy, already speeding into the abandoned town and coming their way. Undetected by anything, he adjusted his goggles to zoom in on the armored guard-tank at the front of the convey. He smirked like a warrior acknowledging fierce foes at the sight of the three warriors riding it and waiting to spring at any threats; anthropomorphic hyenas, two male and one female, wearing clothing that looked like it came from a rummage sale, and carrying customized weapons designed to maim or cripple rather than kill. "Stay sharp, guys, we got the hyena trio on hand."

Daxter's voice bit through the radio silence. "Ugh, them again? Didn't they get blown up when we crashed that flying munitions factory right out the sky? I hate those guys!"

"Nobody ever stays dead anymore," Jak agreed.

He looked down the scope of his rifle at them, and the heads of the hyenas lined up nicely in the view-finder. Trajectories and angles were calculated instantly and the view-finder locked onto them, the rifle automatically reshaping such that if he fired, the shot would almost certainly hit.

Jak's finger came to the trigger. Just one clean shot, and then this world would be a little cleaner. Then he could start on the rest, move up to the people he knew made this world so dark and miserable, kill them one after another and make it clean-

Darkness rose in his head, firing his thoughts like a piston engine. Violet electricity danced in his mouth, making his teeth it so that he wanted to bite something so hard it would break, and it needed to be meat, to be living and squirming, feel blood on his tongue and screams in his ears, and dull this pain by making others feel it-

He shuddered, and dismissed the lock-on. The darkness receded, and Jak thought. The shot might not make it, and it would be disastrous if they tipped their presence too early…and Jak knew that was just dancing around the real issue, that just killing someone in cold blood felt wrong, even after all these years since Sandover had been lost to him. Efficient as it was, something of the hero he had once been a long time ago disagreed with the notion of just headshotting the hyenas.

The convoy continued on, blissfully oblivious to Jak's momentary crisis. It reached the point where they were supposed to split; the logic, as Jak understood it, went that by dividing up in dangerous places like this, the potential loss was minimized. If only one caravan was destroyed or captured, the others would be more likely to survive by forcing an enemy to divide themselves. It practically ensured that one or two would be taken, but it was considered acceptable losses.

Jak waited, ready to give the signal. All around the ambush, the tribal warriors he had allied with tensed, ready to free more of their brothers and repay back the Glukkons for their savagery, their weapons yearning for proper use in combat (this not being a metaphorical statement, given their spiritual origins)...

They were of course completely surprised when the convoy abruptly peeled away from the main road, caravans scattering into alleyways and all heading to the left side of town.

Jak gaped. He heard the Mudokons around him communicate shock and horror, and a multitude of voices echo that sentiment through the radio. He roared as quietly as he could, the noise bleeding into maddened animal fury and a crackle of purple lightning issues from his mouth. He clamped down on the energies suddenly roiling around in the pit of his stomach, held back the tide of darkness long enough for it to subside, and yelled into the communicator, "The plan's wrecked, they're not heading down towards us! Go left, follow them! If we hit them hard and fast, we can still make this work!"

The warriors who'd volunteered for this were consummate professionals at raiding and rescue; there was no argument, just variations upon 'You got it!' before they moved into action, some leaping with magically augmenting leg muscles to rooftop to rooftop, others commanding the very metal of the buildings to carry them to their destination and bits of that metal broke off and flew into the air with Mudokons on them, and still others moved in ever more singular ways with the powers granted to them by the spirits.

Jak's abilities were rather more scientific in origin...painfully so. He jumped, sliding across a pipeline that made an excellent grinding surface and jump from that to rooftop after the other. He shouldered his gun and yelled into the microphone, "Hang tight, Dax! Time schedules been jumped up a notch, we're gonna need a lift out quick as you can!"

"Gotcha, ol' buddy!" Daxter said, voice a little high and scared. It shook a little, and he was still trying not to panic. "Coming quick and good! Good luck!"

"Same to you!" Jak stood his ground, barely aware of the tomahawkers popping out from their hiding places and speeding through the dead town, their skills well-suited for skirmishing. The convoy, as yet, wasn't aware of them, but that was about to change one way or the other. He took sight and primed his rifle, yellow eco bolts charging; the game had already been changed, and he was having to think fast. Fortunately, they weren't too far from the convoy already, all he had to do was give a single good shot at something-

Ah. Another guard-tank, keeping up the rear. He took aim. His goggles and the view-finder calibrated the distance, the gun reshaping again for one absolutely perfect shot, on-board computer doing the math and running through every possible calculation and variable, using the wind and air friction; to an outside observer, all it did was twist slightly, the barrel extending a bit.

The caravans were tough, mobile damage-soakers that could withstand even the savage wildlife that the Mudokons sometimes employed in their attacks. An ordinary gun, except perhaps the military ordnance the Glukkons outfitted their mercenaries with, wouldn't even scratch it. Jak's morphgun was definitely not ordinary.

Jak squeezed the trigger. The gun's roar was muffled by the silencer mounted on the rifle's front; a streak of yellow energy like fire made solid was momentarily visible, as was the indicator lights on the guard-tank. The next moment, those lights blew out, the streak struck true, and the flight mechanisms of the guard-tank erupted in a small blast of yellow and molten metal.

The crash it made, Jak thought vindictively, was very satisfying.

He and his raiders were still moving, crossing the alleyways and rooftops between them and their quarry, when the rear of the convey crashed into the downed tank, toppling over and smashing into each other. They were sturdy enough that none of them were damaged, but they did fall upon their sides, the somewhat delicate balance thrown totally off kilter, and they skidded around crashing into each other while trying to regain balance.

Ahead of them, the convoy slowed. A few caravans turned, and the ones at the front kept going, and that was all the raiders needed even as the convoy's multitude of soldiers opened fire from their combat vehicles; six lightly armored but powerfully equipped speeders flying alongside them swiveled their autocannons into place and opened fire, mortar shells flying everywhere-

Buildings exploded around them, shells exploding on contact with them or blasting through and then exploding, pulverizing them down to their foundations. Metal and slag rained down, and a large chunk narrowly missed Jak, and some of the Mudokons were too slow, the metal slicing them into pieces or crushing them underneath or metal made molten by the heat of explosions gave them awful but mercifully quick deaths.

Jak snarled, his free hand hitting a interface on his gun, and it's mass reconfigured itself into a short stockier blaster, acceleration coils mounted on the barrel and focus optics upon it. "Keep hitting them!" Jak roared as he opened fire, a bolt of weaponized Yellow Eco striking right between the gap between open space and armor plating on a speeder, sliding through and hitting its engine to produce a magnificent explosion. "KEEP HITTING THEM OR THIS WAS POINTLESS!" The Mudokons roared back, a wordless war cry, and moved with spirits-granted speed, climbing up walls as though their fingers had sticky-pads and jumping off to dodge the inevitable attack, their firearms blazing bright bolts of something akin to superheated blasts of air at the vehicles. Most missed, a few did not, and two of those vehicles went crashing to the ground and smashing into walls or cargo craft; the latter weren't damaged, but it was still satisfying.

Jak moved forward as the tanks finally revolved around to face them, and parted off the road so that the convoy could hurry through. The tanks opened fire, autocannons mounting on the front in groups of four each blasting open unsightly holes in the walls and an explosion incidentally taking off the arm right off a hopeful Mudokon warrior. Other weapons on the tanks opened fire and the warrior threw himself to the ground, screaming in indignation rather than pain, his weapon clattering to the ground. Jak ran through the fire, autocannon rounds and flurries of bullets and all manner of energy weapons from the multitude of both vehicle armaments and enemy firearms blazing through him and obliterating the area directly behind him.

He moved faster than was possible. His limbs were fueled with a strength that couldn't be powered by mere muscle, the force with which he pounded his feet into the ground for a dodging leap left heavy dents, and when he was flying through the air he was merely nicked and marked by all the projectiles. He passed over where the first of the downed convoy was struggling to get off the ground and fired his gun again and again, rolling onto the ground and sliding on his side and getting back up again and still shooting.

As he jumped onto the downed convoy, it occurred to him that the rest of the caravans weren't keeping the fight going; they were retreating to their destination, going forward, not even bothering to keep up their fire. A shrill scream answered him as he looked down into the pilot chamber; a green humanoid creature with a squidlike head and a mouthful of tentacle-like protrusions, muscular and wiry underneath the light body armor he wore, his lower body tapering to a tail encased in a set of mechanized legs to give the semblance of a bipedal creature. A Slig, the reluctantly loyal mercenary people working for the Glukkons, the glowing red eyes on his face-concealing helmet bright with blood-thirst.

Then he got a good look at Jak. Jak growled and the Slig's eyes dimmed. Though the beak hidden under its tentacle-protrusions was probably never designed to articulate his language, the cybernetic 'Slig pants' it wore came with language translation technology. It verbalized something, and the words came through the Babel Fish in his ear canal as "OH MARGARET I'M GOING TO DIE." It hurled itself back, cowering in horror.

Jak instantly leveled his gun at the Slig; the green thing curled back, desperately trying to find a weapon. Momentarily intending to kill the Slig as an obstacle in his way, Jak hesitated, and then winced at his terror. "Get out of here!" He said, kicking the Slig out of the cockpit, who hit the ground and nodded quickly at Jak, crawling on the ground and scampering away for dear life. He just barely managed to avoid getting run over by the Mudokon tomahawkers; slightly larger than the others with their purple head-feathers sticking up in tight bunches, their bodies mystically enhanced for close combat, and carrying absolutely massive weapons like a mixture of swords and tomahawk blades made of a red-hued and curiously organic metal, large glowing orbs of spirit-energy housed at the edge.

Dwarfed by their weapons, they still swung them with extraordinary lightness and skill; they moved quick, leaping over the latest round of explosive shells obliterating the walls and streets around them, tearing open the cargo craft. "It's empty!" One of them cried. "Nothing but blank space!"

Jak snarled. "The hell is going on?!" But the shooters on his side were already moving. Jak got into the pilot's chamber the Slig had vacated, and he had learned a short while ago how to use the particular mechanisms of the craft the Glukkons favored. It rose into the air shortly, two Mudokon Mudarchers manning the weapon stations as Jak ordered, and it flew on through, swiftly overtaking the skirmishers and barreling right at the convoy. The barrage of weapon-fire halted for a few precious seconds, the enemy briefly puzzled by the sight of one of their own coming at them, and that was enough time for the Mudokons to open fire. They were untrained in vehicle combat, working with reflex and crude understanding of mechanisms, but their aim wasn't bad; blaster fire and autocannons knocked a caravan into one in front of it, and that one was hit in such a way that an occupant accidentally hit the wrong button and started blasted at the wall that promptly fell on them. They weren't harmed, but they were pinned.

"Take down the Sligs!" Jak said. "Get their vehicles under our control and keep going!" He was in a bit of a hurry, because the head of the convoy (the tank with the hyenas, an unusually large cargo ship and two guardian speeders) was rounding around the corner and heading into a crater in the middle of the town.

Jak speeded by as his men, wounded and hurt, still slew the Sligs with well-timed blows and opened up the cargo; luckily this one did have captures in it, and out came several dozen groups of terrified Mudokons and assorted sentient beings came out, fleeing right into the careful ministration of the native warriors. Jak moved past them and halted his vehicle, turning it sideways right into the path of a hail of automatic fire from a tank's machine guns which otherwise would have killed them.

A hole or two was punched in the side of his cargo, the glass in a window shattered and sliced several lines in his face, but he still grinned as he saw the Mudokons leading the slaves away into various alleyways, skirmishers leading while the shooters kept up the guard, directing cover fire to make their escape. The tanks and speeders moved ahead, plainly more concerned with the head of their convoy.

"Good work," Jak said to the warriors that had gotten the captures. "Hold off anyone who looks mean until our getaway gets here!" He called forward any available warriors, and they quickly came up… piloting several of the downed craft that hadn't been totally pinned under the rubble or broken in the fighting; a speeder or two, and one guard-tank, all relatively intact. Jak nodded his approval and said, "After those ones at the front! They're up to something!"

Some Mudarcher snipers took up position, providing cover fire as Jak's men advanced. Jak was a good shot with his own morph gun, attacking with it sticking out the broken window and the roaring wind and horribly hard to calculate factors all around still not much of a problem, and his Mudokons admirably lucky; their combined firing resulted in another downed enemy speeder and the autocannon on one of the tanks being knocked askew while it was still firing so that it's shells wound up turning the tank inside-out. Three caravans were swiftly commandeered, the Sligs thrown out and the four dozen slaves inside broken out (though only one caravan had any), and again they repeated the tactic of providing shields for them while the Mudokons got them away, this time simply driving the caravans to relative safety.

The slaves were swiftly escorted, Jak calculated that there were only seven caravans left, and he charged forward yet again, a poor choice as it was. A lucky shot hit Jak's vehicle, and then another, and then sixteen, punching in in some unfortunate machinery. It skidded and began dipping, and Jak was barely aware of something moving at him extremely quickly before a surprisingly violent weight hit the front of his craft so hard it flipped it mid-air and came crashing down.

Drool flecked his windshield, a short furry muzzle snapped savagely, and narrowed eyes glared at him. "Pull over!" She snarled, reaching in and grabbing him roughly in the shoulder, claws sinking into the gaps in his armor, and ripping him right off his seat and through the window before smashing him into the craft and throwing him into a nearby wall with inhuman strength.

Jak's wind was knocked out of him by the wall; he had enough time to see the remaining convoy hurrying into a large crater a short distance away, and then he hurtled into the ground, a disorienting experience pushing the odd sight from his attention. A roaring weight came crashing into him, but he had the presence of mind to shout, "Keep going! GET THE PRISONERS!"

There was a satisfying whirr where the speeders and carriers his men had taken flew right past him and his attacker, and the sounds of battle as they opened fire. A clawed hand grabbed hold of his neck and lifted him up. "What is your problem with us, huh!?" She growled, a hyena-woman; larger and broader than the subordinate males serving her, dressed in an eclectic collection of clothing and armor she might have scrounged from a rummage bin somewhere (oversized black pants with matching combat boots, a shirt so scarred by battle it was a tube top, and a rather dusty blue soldier's jacket). Her gray-brown fur spotted with black stood on end, her head that of a slightly anthropoid hyena and her impressive set of bone-crushing teeth bared.

"Shenzi, is it?" Jak said, his voice vibrating with a growl echoing his words, Dark Eco shining from his mouth. "Problem is easy. I don't like you guys."

She growled again, a disturbingly monstrous noise to come from a sapient being. Shenzi viciously kicked the morph gun right out of his hand and shoved his face into the wall. "You and your sidekicks are dead!" She said, slamming him into the wall again and again with one hand. A bruise formed, the brick cracked, Jak's bones started to hurt a little bit-

And he was getting mildly annoyed. His hand moved, a blur, and fasted around her ear. He viciously grabbed hold of the various earrings there, pulling until he heard her scream, and punched her hard at the jaw. Her jaw muscles were harder than rock, but it hurt her more than him, and when she recoiled it gave him enough room to slam his elbow into the side of her neck (carefully avoiding her spiked collar).

Shenzi fell, choking and snarling, and he was let go. Jak kicked up his morphgun, catching it in mid-air, and hit the interface on it to transform it into a broader and shorter shotgun, the barrel glowing red. Shenzi looked up as Jak squeezed the trigger and a concussive red blast of eco energy hammered her in the chest, knocking her head over heels, her long mane tangling in the dirt where she rolled back to her feet, dazed and gasping. Jak growled, thinking that the shot should have collapsed her into meaty chunks. "Gonna...get you," She said, dropping to all fours and charging.

Jak was too slow to move and she pounced right on him, knocking him through the weakened wall. A moment later there was a blast of red and she came hurtling out a different part and Jak went through the new hole, taking time to shoot a different section on the wall. The resulting rubble fell right on Shenzi, and Jak ran even before he heard the rubble starting to shift again and her extremely loud curses when she popped out.

Those hyena-people, he'd learned on earlier occasions, were just as stupidly tenacious as he was.

She was already bursting out of the rubble when Jak moved, and any attempts to pursue him were halted as a loud blast, of seventeen separate explosions dozens of feet above them where enemy missiles and explosive ordnance had been premature detonated by Jak's allies, hit her like a hammer. She could take a good hit or two dozen without slowing, but the noise hurt badly enough to drive her to the ground with her pawlike hands clamped over her ears.

Jak barely noticed any of this, the battlefield reduced to an array of sensory input in his mind and separated sharply into IMPORTANT-RIGHT-NOW, THINGS-TO-KILL, THINGS-TO-NOT-KILL and NOT-IMPORTANT. Categories flickering all about him, shrapnel and bullets and weaponized energy flying all over and hitting him and knocking him down only for him to get right back up and keep going, the dark thing inside growling and clawing at the door to get out and KILL EVERYTHING-

His bones creaked, his teeth itched. He felt his nailed thicken and lengthen, sliding rudely against the fabric of his gloves. Small waves of power ripped up the ground in his footsteps, nearly invisible ripples cracking the busted streets, and Jak furiously whispered to him, "Not now, dammit, not now not now!"

A speeder fell from the sky, the fragile craft cut into two uneven sections by gunfire, right on him. Jak didn't even stop moving, the several hundred pounds of finely engineered metal first screeching horribly when the purple-hued lightning that screamed out from blasted one piece into thousands of flying shrapnel that made a horrible of mess of whoever met them, and the other casually batted aside with Jak's free hand with a strength that wasn't his, belonged to the monster-

Something in him pushed, and Jak roared.

It was something that should never have come from the mouth of an elf; it was wild and ragged, rippling up to higher registers with that impossibly deep tone, the echoes rising as though it had been spoken with several dozen mouths, and when it faded it sounded like a screeching war cry, the battle sound of an abomination, a thing that was fundamentally wrong.

When Jak moved, bolting across the road to where his enemies were so dearly focused on, it was too fast to even register. Bullet whizzed by, energy flew, and guard troops flung themself at him, and all of those dangers were shoved aside as roughly as the speeder pieces had been. His mind worked furiously, the thought KILL THEM ALL powering his fight instincts like fuel on flames-

Several explosive shells were loosed; none of them hit him directly, but enough landed near him to catch him in their erupting radius, knocking him head over heels right through six walls and blasting him right out of what had been perilously close to being a frenzy.

In the crater, mere feet from where Jak had been about to go through, the hyena-man who'd called the attack from behind the cargo craft within the crater, snarled as more Mudokons poured in and relentlessly assaulted the slave-carriers. "Don't these guys ever quit?!" The hyena, a burly fellow named Banzai, the dirty trenchcoat he'd taken to wearing over battered body armor and surplus military wear flapping in the wind from the explosions. He winced, the noise hurting his ears. "Worse than cats, even!"

A whimpering drew his attention. On the ground was another hyena-man, much broader but around his height, laying on the ground with his paw-hands on his ears and squealing out a mad half-barking pained cadence. This hyena, given the rather out of place name Ed, had already been pretty dirty before this battle and his ragged assortment of light green shirt over long-sleeved black-and-white striped shirt and cargo shorts improperly maintained, but all the dirt flying everywhere wasn't doing them any favors. Banzai winced at his pack-brother's pain. "Whoops. Sorry, buddy. Thought I told you to watch the explosions, man!"

Ed whimpered, giving a loud rasping bark that almost sounded like a laugh. Several of the Sligs loading a sparkling, shiny material at the very core of the crater into the heavily armored and intriguingly empty carriers, snickered at him. Ed immediately whipped around and snarled at them, foam coating his jaws. They recoiled and made a show of getting back to work, driving the small but strong hovering forklifts they piloted into the ground to excavate as much as they could.

More blasting raised the battle's sound up a touch, mixed with the hooting and whimsical war cries of the Mudokons as they charged; skirmishers brandished their weapons as impromptu shields against projectiles, snipers laid down cover fire as the melee fighters and opportunistic pilots pressed the attack. In a swarm of flashing metal and well-timed attacks, the barricade formed by the Sligs and their vehicles was wedged open just enough for one or two Mudokons to come through, enough to attack from behind and get more of their numbers in...and more were coming.

Banzai and Ed readied themselves, raising laser weapons that resembled small machine guns. Ed crouched low, spiritual power flooding into his legs, and a single leap carried him across the crater and right into a Mudokon warrior, slamming him through the ground, and Ed was already firing wildly when he stood up, shooting indiscriminately at Mudokon and unwary Slig alike, screeching and laughing the whole time. His lasers were imbued with his bloodlust via magical force, pulsing out and burning whatever they hit into ash.

The barricade trembled, something heavy smashing into it, and Banzai had a moment of watching the Sligs abandon their vehicles before it was roughly pulled apart, Jak running through and aiming his morph gun right at them even though Shenzi was in hot pursuit. She bowled him over before he could shoot, knocking him to the ground and throwing him back outside the crater. "Dump the people-cargo!" Shenzi yelled. "That's what they want; give them the meat-bags and run for it!"

"But ma'am!" A Slig yelled from the forklift. "We haven't collected all the aetherite yet!"

(Jak heard, and repeated "Aetherite?" with a puzzled expression.)

"I know!" Shenzi yelled.

"And those slaves were gathered through the course of two months-"

"They ain't the prize, think straight and just do it!"

The Sligs responded at once; two craft standing guard rushed past him, roughly skidding up the crater-side and turning so that their backs (and cargo doors) faced Jak and his Mudokons; the many dozens of slaves inside, latched together by handcuffs hooked to each other and horribly crammed together, were thrown clear by momentum, and the Mudokons broke rank to catch their enslaved brethren and the other unfortunates.

Jak stood up, already recovered from the beating, and his gaze shifted to and from the slaves and the hyenas repeatedly; longing for violence at the hyenas, compelled to help those in need, the two traits so close to his nature fought for dominance, urging him to action, and slowly his attention focused on Shenzi and her sidekicks, the black of his pupils expanding to cover all his eyes and shrouding in murderous darkness-

A third blast, this coming from above. Not a weapon, but the sound of powerful engines directly overhead. Jak looked up and a group of flying vehicles, much like the cargo craft but altered to fly properly and repainted a fetching shade of blue with an alignment symbol of a Mudokon handprint on a yellow background, came screamed down. "Told ya I'd get here!" Daxter's voice shouted from the lead vehicle.

Shenzi recovered from her surprise. She looked back as one of the forklift ripped into the ground, tearing the sparkling material along with a good chunk of earth and tossed it into a newly emptied cargo carrier, and she made a decision. "We got what we came for! Forget the slaves and run!"

Daxter's ships flew in. The Sligs and hyenas dived for cover, crawling awkwardly on the ground and hurrying into their speeders and vehicles while the Mudokons tried to shoot them down, the hyena's obedient soldiers shooting back and forcing the Mudokons to retreat. Jak shifted his morph gun into a configuration not unlike a grenade launcher, firing several large capsules that exploded impressively at the ground, blowing apart a few of the slower Sligs, further forcing them back.

The hyenas and Sligs were quick, though, and piled into the closest vehicles at hand. The cargo carriers containing the sparkling material they just harvested were the first to leave, all of Shenzi's forces firing madly at the Mudokons with a terrible desperation, forcing them backwards. Jak called his forces back, none of them well-equipped to withstand a sustained fire-fight, and Shenzi's forces quickly retreated from the battle, moving up the crater and fleeing at incredible speeds.

The Sligs targeted the slaves, knowing that the Mudokons would put all their effort into protecting them; only a few craft were left to fire, most of the others the Mudokons had taken throwing themselves in front of the slaves to take hits for them, and the ones that didn't were left to fire precious little weaponry.

Daxter's vehicles swooped in, flying in a practiced formation that would ensure that as many of the slaves as possible would be tossed in and flown out of danger long enough for them to circle back and collect more until all have been secured, but that was hardly necessary this time; Shenzi's forces abandoned the slaves and stolen vehicles without so much as a second glance, blasting everything in their path out of town. At their speed, soon they were out of range, little more than clouds of dust rising in their wake.

Jak blinked. He breathed in, breathed out. Already, the battle had been concluded.

Daxter's ships flew in and landed, so that the slaves could file in, which the Mudokons managed for them quite admirably, comforting them and being cheerful about things and trying not to think about their brothers lying dead or requiring immediate medical attention (supplied by combat medics hurrying out of the cargo ships just in case). Jak said, "What was that all about?"

Daxter's ship, sleeker than the others and essentially a point ship, opened its doors and out stepped Daxter, hurrying to his friend on all fours. Red-orange fur shimmered in the dying light of the day, his long and inflexible tail flicking back and forth, and Daxter's small frame that so closely resembled a blend of both otter and weasel (hence the term 'ottsel' for his appearance) was soon at Jak's side, looking more like an animal that was wearing body armor and a goggles-strapped helmet rather than a sapient being. "What was what all about?"

"They just up and left." Jak stared at where the hyenas and their forces had gone. "Forgot the slaves, just took some weird stuff and left."

"...So, does that mean we won this one?"

Jak looked around. He stared at the devastation, the dead Mudokons lying in pieces or bleeding out or being carried in pieces to the healing shamans' sides. He stared at the slaves, many of whom had been brutally vaporized or maimed in that last desperate retreat by the hyenas. He stared at the death and destruction that he, as always, could have prevented if only he'd been quicker or better. "...Honestly? I don't know."

Daxter rolled his eyes. "Precursors, but you're depressing, buddy."

Jak rolled his eyes too. "Comes with the territory."

They made a point to never spent much time in an area they didn't have territorial control of, which was precious little on Mudos. Jak resumed his leadership role, coordinating the slave rescue efforts and leading them into ships and accounting for their weight to keep the ships as light and quick as they could. It took a short time, still too long for Jak's liking, and many of them feared a sudden reprisal attack by the hyenas any moment.

But none happened. Soon, their rescued people (thanking them dearly and enthusiastically, at least the ones that weren't quietly sitting in shock) had been placed into the escape ships, and then they were taking off for a flight into safe territory, where they could either be taken to off-planet ports (in the case of tourists or locals who just wanted to find a safer world) or Mudokon tribes to be properly educated and freed in full (in the case of the Mudokon scrubs, or anyone who wanted to join them for whatever reason).

One by one, the ships left, hurrying quickly. Only Jak and Daxter were left, as Jak had been staring down at the crater the whole time. It was clearly making Daxter uncomfortable. "Come on, buddy," He said, patting his much larger friend on the knee (since that was as high as he could reach). "Let's get going, okay? You're spooking me."

Jak didn't answer for a moment. "Dax?" He finally said. "How many vehicles did they lose today? Not the ones that were destroyed, but the ones we managed to take for ourselves and loot properly."

"Uh...I dunno. More than usual. Most of them, really, at least five. Mostly speeders, but more tanks than we usually get."

"And they lost a fair number of soldiers and mercenaries," Jak said.

"I guess so."

"And all the slaves they were carrying this way. And with the recent big up-slide in production lines, they need every set of hands they can get."

"Uh huh?"

Jak frowned. "So...what was so important that they dumped all that and didn't even flinch so they could get away with what they were taking from this crater?"

Daxter looked down. "...Huh. I dunno. What stuff? I didn't see them do that."

"They finished right before you got here. Whatever it was, they really wanted it. More than valuable vehicles or manpower." Jak bent down to the ground, and picked up a small shard of the shining substance the hyenas had been so keen on, this piece knocked away in the big rush. He held it up to the sky, and the light filtered through the crystalline facets in dazzling rays and shines. It was no particular color, light radiating off it in dozens of variations of shades of every possible color, primarily green and blue. It felt warm on his fingers, and Jak gave it a suspicious lick; it was sweet to the taste, leaving a lovely aftertaste like candy.

Daxter peered at it. "Uh, I ain't a gearhead or whatever, but that looks kind of familiar."

"Yep," Jak said. "We've seen this loads of times, across a lot of worlds that know spaceflight. That meteorite that crashed here, it was loaded with this stuff. Funny thing is, they called it aetherite. Not sure why." Thoughtfully, Jak pocketed the substance. "Everyone else I've met calls it 'Gummi'."

A moment passed.

Daxter, his mind stalling for a bit at the implications, could only manage to say the first thing that came to his mind. "It's weird. I always thought 'gummi' was a stupid name. Why'd they call something you make spaceships and stuff out of after a candy-thing?"

"No idea. That weird kingdom from that universe with all the grim darkness did it first, the weirdoes."

Daxter shrugged. It didn't seem really important to him. "Wonder what they want more of that stuff for? Not exactly hard to come by. ...Meh, whatever; where are we heading next? Back to Abe and Munch at the Great Raisin?"

Jak shook his head. "I dunno about you, Dax..." His eyes narrowed, a determined set at his mouth. "But I'm following those hyenas and finding out what the Glukkon cartels are actually up to."

"What?!"

"I'm sick of always just reacting. I need information and I think they might be actually up to a real agenda instead of just doing stuff for business."

"Seriously?" Daxter said. "There's like a port up there, big on the tourists they got coming in on this place like we did! Security all over the place, tons of nasty freaks they've been making! You really wanna jump right into that?"

Jak shrugged. "Might as well. Whatever they're doing, none of us have the slightest idea what it is. And I really hate not knowing exactly what the bad guys are doing, it never ends well."

"Good point, buddy. You got a plan?"

"Yep." Jak shouldered his gun. "Follow the hyenas to wherever they're going, see what they want the gummi for, and make a huge mess of everything."

"...Simple, easy to remember. Works for me! Hop in, we'll take the long road in, oughta escape patrols and scanners if we play it safe, huh?"

Jak grinned. He reached down and lightly punched Daxter in the shoulder. "So you're in?"

"Like I'd ever do anything else." Daxter went back into his ship, the pilot's chamber modified to be roomy enough for a few people. Jak followed, sitting on the co-pilots seat.

The ship lifted up and took off, flying in the same direction where the hyenas had gone, sharply veering away as they came into view of bright lights in the distance.

Further that way, almost too faint for them to see, there was a city crowding the horizon, and it was there that the hyenas, and now Jak and Daxter, where heading to.

In Jak's head, his thoughts echoed with the screaming of a caged monster. He did his best to ignore it.

On a lifeless world, scarred so dearly by ancient warfare that it was a dust-stricken desert land of deep valleys where ancient oceans had dried up long ago, towering monoliths in the shapes of pyramids still bore scars from some ancient battle, and everywhere the dust that was all that was left of that world's inhabitants choked the hot winds unceasingly churning in the violently temperamental climate.

For eons, this planet had been at peace with the destruction of its people, not unlike so many other worlds in this particular universe that had died in a regular cycle of destruction. Now a new conflict disturbed the peace, and if any tutelary spirits remained to keep guard over this world, they were content to watch with interest.

If they existed, they'd probably annoyed by the stolen relics, ancestral weapons, schematics of varying sorts of sacred glass-molding techniques, and all manner of long-lost secrets that the space pirates nominally on the side of Evil had ferried away to a hidden place on the planet's moon before Zim's crew had found them. They weren't even having the decency to plan to sell them to museums or put the scientific elements back into popular use.

This battleground bearing witness to the first conflict in ages was a sprawling colossus made of a peculiar glass as strong and resilient as metal; once a circle-shaped island-sized city flying in the sky with bound air spirits working in concert with gravitational engines of immense magnitude. Both had failed long ago, the engines failing and the spirits fleeing when their captors had perished, and the ground was a ragged valley where it had crashed, tearing up the landscape around it and high peaks rising around it. The foundations of the city broken in the impact, many buildings had toppled over at the city's edges and broken on the ground, the impact cracking up that very ground into jagged and deadly spikes the size of small hills, a deadly obstacle for a unwary adventurer. Ironically, this kept the rest of the city fairly intact; it had been built to last, and with the outer buildings forming a stable surface to rest against, the spiked rocks a thousand-and-more points of counter-balancing, the city had been preserved.

For ages, all had been silent.

Now, the constant dust of the wind, the ashes and such of the planet's long-dead inhabitants bourne into the sky and swirling about forever, swirled about a battle and scraping against buildings and exposed skin against the backdrop of a new battleground. The crackling of lightning, the roars of fire-bursts, the chittering of eldritch energies, clash of metal on crystal, and above all, battle cries of such ferociousness that even the wind was humbled.

Over this city, nearly even with the smallest of the mountain peaks, two ships were engaged in battle: on one side, flitting between bolts of plasma fired at it with reckless abandon and moving so quickly it seemed to be sliding in and out of an ethereal realm with each blinking movement, there was a smaller ship, narrow and with great bladelike wings at the rear (a design recently in favor of the multiversal Skrull Empire and their allies, including the Lich Queen of the githyanki) and sorcerous engines propelling it at incredibly precise yet immense speeds. A multitude of weapons, long pole-shaped artifacts called force cannons, channeled ambient magical energy to hurl bolts of force in dangerously precise bursts. The Paragon, far less agile but vastly tougher, had yet to land even a single blow, but it's many impacts hadn't even been registered. Calvin and Morte operated the Paragon in tandem, desperately trying to line up a shot and hammer the enemy ship, which was operated by Gunter the frost giant, and the radio waves sung with their constant back-and-forth banter.

And below this battle, upon the glittering ruins of a bridge long since shattered into immense shards by some unknown disaster, Hobbes was doing battle with Jord, his new shield proving it's worth and parrying her blows without so much as a dent, a source of great frustration to the frost giantess. In fact, it was even hurting her fists.

Unfortunately, she was keeping them on the defensive, an impressive feat for a woman clad only in a bikini-pants ensemble in the middle of a dust storm while Hobbes and Zuko had the sense to wear heavy coats, full-body covering protective suits and goggles to protect them from the worst of it. She didn't appear to even notice the dust or vicious winds, though; her native realm of Jotunheim was a far more perilous and wild realm. It was a sore point that neither of them could get past her, the frost giantess making it her job to prevent them from joining Zim in his fight upon Darvhog (interrupted in the process of salvaging a miniaturized death ray) further up at a point where the bridge slanted sharply upwards, a suitable climbing point to the portions where it remained intact, and where Zim and Darvhog had chosen to fight one another.

To her credit, she was doing a splendid job of it; though she wore no armor, she had carried a magic scroll that imbued her with sufficient arcane protection to prevent Hobbes from employing his pressure point technique. Her speed and strength was all she needed, and was hammering into Hobbes and Zuko with much enthusiasm; if it wasn't for the bridge's durability, the shards they fought upon might have shattered from the force of her blows. With limited space to move, she had the advantage, vastly tougher and stronger than either man and alarmingly fast. Already, Zuko had been knocked off the side of the bridge, forced to scrabble for handholds or fall down onto the rocks below, and Hobbes wasn't doing much better.

Higher, on the more preserved parts of the bridge that was actually intact and roughly level with some of the higher buildings (perhaps a rather epic main street when originally built), Zim was faring better than his teammates, his battle with Darvhog seemingly concluded and Zim victorious. Scorch marks from firebolts and grenade blasts (some larger than the others) marked places where Zim had nimbly stayed out of Darvhog's close combat range and kept the githyanki back with the use of a grenade launcher he'd made a few days ago, shimmering bits of expended magic crystal littering the ground and evidence of Darvhog's new technique of focusing arcane power into crystals for quickly empowering his spells. Of Darvhog's actual magic, there was little sign; he seemed strangely reluctant to use the full force of his magic, and now it had gone badly for him; Zim had forced him to the side of the bridge, where the walls had long ago fallen away or been taken by looters (who, according to Darvhog's banter, had still missed the really interesting things). If Zim fired a grenade, even a miss would still get Darvhog in the blast, and the concussive force could still send him falling right down and be splattered on the rocks below, or worse.

Zim had, of course, made this quite clear to Darvhog.

Now, Zim scowled at the space pirate, none of his usual levity in place. He held his grenade launcher in both hands, the weapon crafted by himself and modeled after a shotgun, it's revolver-style ammunition carrier loaded with miniaturized versions of the microfusion grenades Calvin had made. Both Darvhog's silver sword and the crystal blade Moofy had been forced from his hands, leaving him apparently defenseless. Zim pointed his grenade launcher at Darvhog, another matter piquing him, and he said, "I am so sick of seeing you! How do you keep finding us!?"

Disco Darvhog, his arms held up in a gesture of surrender, said, "It's only been a few times, man! And technically this time you ran into us. We're just doing our thing, not actually raiding anyone or trying to fight you..."

"It's been too times too many, fiend!"

"I'm not a fiend, I'm a githyanki! Okay, some people would suggest that there's not much of a difference, but we're certainly of different cosmological origins-"

"It's just an expression!" Zim paused. "Wait. You know about fiends?"

"Duh! Only a total moron wouldn't know about fiends! Tanar'ri, baatezu, yugoloths, all the rest...what you might call demons and devils and...wait, I dunno what people call yugoloths in plain talk."

"I fought a ham demon once," Zim said.

"Neat!" The friendly nature of their interactions gave Darvhog hope for a more peaceable resolution (i.e., getting away with the stuff without getting beaten up or tossed in jail again). "So, uh, I don't suppose you'd consider letting us go this time-"

"Nope!"

"-I mean, you're being a cool nemesis and junk...wait, what'd ya say? I was still talking, didn't catch that."

"I said no! Incompetent buffoon of a pirate! Don't you listen when I am talking!? Some villain you are. What kind of foe doesn't even bother to listen to the hero?" Zim had a brief moment of acknowledging that he'd actually done that very thing more than once, and chose to ignore it.

"Aw, come on, don't be a square!"

"I know not what that even is!"

"It's not really cool to mix pedantic speech with casual talk, man. It just sounds weird unless you have the style to pull it off, and sorry my friend, but that kind of style, you just don't got it."

Zim's antennae twitched under the heavy hat-portion of his environmental suit (which was really just his recently acquired longcoat outfit zipped up and with a few things added it, it was good at covering him even without those things). "How droll. The incompetent space pirate who parades around in a disco theme is mocking me on a lack of style."

"...What's wrong with a disco theme?"

About to say 'everything', Zim stopped himself. "Not the point. Right now, I suppose this is the moment where I ought to make a grand and heroic speech about evil never winning and Good always triumphant but that's rather too cheesy and sickening by my standards, it associates me with things I'd rather not deal with. It dilutes the nature of Good to something closer to stickling around the status quo or something stupid like that. It demeans my alignment!"

"Ah. In that case, could you seriously think about letting me go? Only I wasn't actually stealing or doing anything evil this time, I was just salvaging from a lost long civilization that doesn't even have any survivors or heirs or anything with a claim to them!"

"Oh, I know, I'm not after you because of the salvaging. Only a real jerk would be after you over that."

"I told you, it's not stealing, it's salvaging-oh, wait, you did call it salvaging, my bad." Darvhog frowned. Overhead, their ships briefly passed by, Calvin and Morte's incoherent string of cursing at their inability to just hit the other ship audible over the intercom. "So, you're not here being a self-righteous prickle over taking stuff that no one has a claim to?"

"Of course not!"

"Okie-dokie, so...why are you after me?"

Zim grinned. "You still have yet to pay for your crimes upon Terracandra or that port town we met you at, or the evils you committed to wind up in those places in the first place!"

"Oh, come on!"

Zim cackled. "Did you think I would just forget about all that?! The ruination of the port town, which will likely cause trouble for many who come that way and need its services? On its own, that would not be too terrible; you merely took advantage of a situation for your benefit, and I cannot fault you too much on that. But Terracandra...you deliberately aided a cult of technology-hating madmen! You taught them how to use their magic more skillfully, manipulated them into summoning dread abominations or mutating the wild life to create dread abominations, gave them greater purpose and ambition, and in so contributing to even more deaths than you already had! A mere threat was made into a planet-shaking crusade! If we hadn't arrived and helped to nullify the worst of it, that civilization may well have crumbled in years to come! And you willingly consorted with a dread artifact of obvious evil to do it all; that is why I'm fighting you and intend to deliver you to the proper authorities! Getting you out of my life for good is just a pleasant bonus. Heh hah!"

"That sucks. Hee, at least you're not miffed about how I stole the jewel of Jumanji to empower my magic and profit from the death and desecration of who knows how many people!"

"...You did what now!?"

"Damn it! I should not have said that."

"Eh?" Moofy said from the ground, evidentially so disinterested in Darvhog's survival he had gone to sleep.. "What? Were you talking? Ah, it matters not." He hummed and his glow dimmed, apparently going back to sleep.

A rumbling came from overhead. Zim ignored it. "I am certain my crew will deal with yours shortly," Zim said. "And then, you will all be in our custody." He laughed manically. "Now, surrender properly! ...Eh?" He looked up sharply, as the Paragon tumbled in the sky overhead, one of its propulsion discs damaged by a lucky shot; not enough to make it fall, but more than enough to throw it off-track for a few precious moments. "No!"

"Heh. Gotcha!" Darvhog said smugly.

The githyanki's ship, Gunter shouting triumphantly, flew overhead, dipping over the bridge, surprisingly huge as it came in. Zim simply took aim at it, hoping to shoot a weak spot or something, but didn't get the chance. The ship swooped up, underside bared, and it's active weapons switched out for more powerful ones: more powerful force cannons, a set of long objects shaped like lances and glowing with arcane energies sliding out into weaponized ports. They powered up, firing lances of concussive force, strafing from overhead and flying away.

They were well-aimed. The blasts hit squarely at where Zim and Darvhog were standing, avoiding Darvhog entirely but blasting Zim nearly twenty feet into the air though he had managed to evade getting directly hit. Zim hurtled away, and Darvhog laughed, his plot for stalling Zim successful, and grabbed both his swords in a single fluid motion (Moofy complaining bitterly when he woke up). Broken super-glass was flung into the air, and Darvhog jumped, his feet touching airborne shards smaller than his fingers and somehow finding purchase before leaping away with telekinetic force, using the shards as stepping stones.

He alighted neatly on a nearby rooftop that was only decimated enough to be tilting over. His ship flew off, the Paragon regaining balance and throwing bolt after bolt of superheated matter at it, igniting the insides of a few buildings they struck.

Zim turned in mid-air, getting a brief sight of the fight below; Jord grabbing hold of both Zuko and Hobbes, smashing them into the ground one after the other. Zim was hurtling to the side of the bridge, doomed to hit either the deadly rocks or a building wall at terminal velocity, and resolved both of his problems with a focused blast of flame in front of him. The recoil launched him away from his current trajectory, closer to Darvhog's location, and a beam from his fire blast struck Jord right in the back. Not enough to damage, but enough to hurt, and gave his allies a moment of respite. As Zim flew overhead, he took aim and fired several shots; he was too high up to have a hope of hitting her before the grenades exploded, but that wasn't the point; Zuko forced his way out of her grip, the heat of the plasma explosions fueling his bending and strength, and he breathed a blast of fire right into her face.

Zim didn't see what happened next; right in front of him a wall was approaching. His Pak extended his spider-legs and they connected to the wall, angling him out so he just barely swung in through an open break in the wall. They released, he hit the ground and skidded for a few dozen feet, sliding right out another hole at the opposite side of the building, and once he was free-falling again, his spider-legs took hold of the wall. No longer burdened with such bad momentum, he climbed up the wall with commendable speed, calculating and thinking fast, and when he sprung up to the rooftop, sliding a few more grenades into his weapon in the time it took to flip over the rooftop and retract the spider-legs into his Pak, Darvhog was still standing there, looking impressed.

Zim said, "Cease and repent!" and pointed the grenade launcher at him.

"Do what now with how?" Darvhog said. Behind him, the Paragon feinted, flying down to the buildings as if suffering a power failure, and the broad-winged flyer followed, Gunter eager to exploit such a weakness. Calvin pulled their ship up sharply, causing quite a lot of dust to go everywhere, and Gunter was too surprised to dodge the rooftop, crashing into it and bouncing off, damaged and vowing revenge as he took to the sky again.

Taking advantage of that distraction, Zim leveled his weapon, took aim, and fired with mechanical precision; Darvhog was quick, but not quick enough to evade the grenade, and the concussive blast caught him square in the chest and blasted him clear off the rooftop and back towards the bridge; Zim was already leaping, and crashed right into his chest feet-first, light flickering around them as they suddenly accelerated, pushed by some unknown force. Darvhog grit his teeth, a hand-shaped construct grasping them and slowing their descent down, so that when they smashed into (and through) the slightly curved and mostly broken roof running over the bridge, impacting on the bridge below, it didn't hurt quite as much as it could.

They bounced a few times, Darvhog cried in dismay when the pain from dozens of lacerations and bruises hit him, and Zim just whooped joyfully. Zim grabbed hold of a loosened cable as they passed it, whipping off Darvhog and leaving him to come to a crashing halt a short distance away. He approached and stopped right in front of Darvhog, the space pirate grunting in pain at him. By some precisely calculated planning on Zim's part, they were right where they had been fighting earlier. Zim smirked. "Your magic is meaningless before my technological superiority," he said. "Your weapons are inferior. Your allies poorly armed. All you have is your ridiculous magical power."

"Hey, my guys are doing pretty good. And your technology is a crutch," Darvhog replied evenly. "Take your guns and armor away, loose your ship, can't find your science minion? Then you have nothing. Even if I lost all my sidekicks and weapons, I'd still have my magical lore and power. And then I could still grind you into paste, little scientist."

"'Little'…?" Zim's skin warmed with internal heat. Light crackled around him like miniature thunderbolts wreathed in clouds. "I have magic too, you know."

"And you don't even know how it works. How can you expect to make it work for you if you don't even understand it?"

Zim snorted. "For someone how claims to dislike science as much as you have, you possess a firm grasp on the scientific method."

"Now that's uncalled for!"

"No, calling you silly names would be uncalled for. What I'm doing is giving you a chance to surrender, just one last time." Zim pointed a finger; a burning laser went out from his finger, incinerating a hole in Darvhog's hat. "I will only offer you that once!"

"Neat," Darvhog said. "We have a total 'unrepentant villain and noble hero' thing going! Sure, we don't quite fit the archetypes per se, but I'm a nice guy. I'll give you time to work with it. And besides, what do you think I'm doing here? C'mon, at least have the cool-itude to ask. It's what heroes do, asking the villain what the big plan is."

Zim rolled his eyes. "'Why are you here'?" He said sarcastically.

"Stealing everything that isn't nailed down, like when you caught us here. This place is major league old, the junk here ought to fetch a pretty price on the more outgoing worlds."

"All right then," Zim said, pumping the rifle up with a nice solid clicking noise, priming the grenades and sliding the freshly loaded ones into firing position.

Darvhog's eyes bulged, glancing back to the abyss around him and hardly believing that he was in this situation again...and just perhaps, he seemed to be listening to the sounds of battle that had been between Jord and her enemies. Sound that weren't there anymore, but there was something moving on the bridge underneath them. "Wait! I haven't even gotten into my big plan yet!"

Zim stared. "What big plan?"

"And that would be my cue," Jord said from behind Zim; he turned, freezing at the sight of Zuko slung over her shoulder and Hobbes nowhere in sight, and it was enough to doom him. Jord gave him a single punch with a wide sweeping motion, her hand nearly the size of his entire torso. He felt his bones bend where her punch struck him, and then he was airborne, about to hit a building wall at terminal speed, Jord and Darvhog grinning smugly.

Zim suddenly impacted a heavy surface that was not the building he'd been about to hit. It was a lot more soft and fuzzy.

He fell again, grenade launcher miraculously still in hand, and came crashing down onto an outcropping from the building he'd almost crashed into that made a nice landing spot. Hobbes groaned behind him, having thrown himself to interrupt Zim's impact. "A fine save," Zim said, standing up shakily. "That giant woman packs a mighty punch!"

The two ships dueled overhead, encircling each other and blasting again and again, Gunter driving his ship ever more downward, trying to get closer to Darvhog for some reason.

"Catch!" Jord said, and threw Zuko at them; he was too badly winded to do much and knocked Hobbes and Zim over again. Jord laughed, and Gunter flew by overhead, another hatch opening and dropping something big and metallic; Jord caught it easily, placing it on the ground. Gunter flew away, ship tilting totally sideways and sliding through a gap in the buildings too narrow for Zim's ship to go through, forcing it to fly overhead. When Calvin went over the buildings, he and Morte screamed in frustration; Gunter's ship was nowhere to be seen, having flown through complicated passages that led under the mess below them.

Zim saw all of this, and thought quickly. "Get us back up there," Zim commanded. "They're up to something!"

"You got it!" Hobbes said.

"Ugh," Zuko groaned. "What's going on...?"

"Talk later," Hobbes said apologetically. He grabbed Zuko and Zim, tucking them in under either arm. Zuko groaned wearily, looking up, and Hobbes took a mighty jump that carried the three of them up the wall. He bounced, the wind and dirt stinging their faces, and then they saw Darvhog and Jord on another part of the bridge. They landed, and Hobbes jumped again from rooftop to rooftop, moving to their foes-

Gunter flew past. The force cannons powered up again and the resulting blast hammered the three heroes, punching them right out of the air and into the air, moving helplessly in a long arc far away from Darvhog and Jord. The Paragon's support fire forced Darvhog's ship to fly off, stopping it from following up on the attack.

Darvhog smirked. "Let's get this rolling, Jordie!"

"Right you are, boss-man!" Jord said. She settled her attention upon the object their ship had dropped; a finely cast metal cauldron with locks on the lid and obsidian framework. She flipped the unlocked lid open, revealing that it was totally empty. She reached into it, pulling out a long wand of slightly looping shape, made of a magically reactive material called octiron (and it had been difficult acquiring it), and handed it to him.

"Moofy, what now?" Darvhog asked, taking it.

"What?" Moofy said.

"The plan, man, the plan!"

"What? Oh, yes! I remember!" Darvhog fitted a piece of chalk to the thing Jord have given him. "Now," Moofy said from its place in its sheath. "Draw the runes as I tell you, and I shall do the rest." Darvhog put the wand to the ground as Moofy whispered arcane calculations, carefully tracing a large complicated circle around the cauldron, inscribing runes within that circle. Runes, moreover, of binding and control, programming basic directives into a mindless entity or group of them.

Some minutes later, annoyed by the ships constantly firing overhead and musing that it was absurd that neither of them had scored a decisive blow yet, and then Hobbes landed less than twenty feet away from them, Zuko and Zim quite awake and extremely angry. "Oh, hey, they're back!" Darvhog said, alarmed. His runes were just barely halfway done. "Jord, hold them off, I'm not done with these yet!"

Jord grinned, clapping her hands together. "All rightie, boss-man!"

Zuko glared. "Not again..." He said, looking seriously displeased at going toe-to-toe with the giantess again. His hands undid two small clamps on his outfit's belt, matching holsters on either side unlocking, and from them Zuko withdrew the Dragon's Teeth laser swords.

Hobbes cocked his head, stretching in readiness for an intense workout. "Hobbes," Zim said grimly, remembering how tough she had proven to be. "We cannot fight her evenly, but with numbers and superior tactics, we can win. Intercept her attack."

Jord roared in challenge, levering herself with a powerful leg tensing, and then she charged at them like a rhino, footfalls shaking the bridge and raising up dust. She was fast, covering more than half the distance in moments. It didn't seem fair, that something so strong and huge could be so quick. "Understood," Hobbes said, preparing his shield; now, he was ready to prove it's worth as a weapon for the first time. Unlike the others, he hadn't had a chance to test his new weapon yet.

He switched his shield into its defensive mode, the plates unfolding and locking out into their full configuration. Jord was nearly upon them, a shamelessly bold and beautiful blue juggernaut, her great bulk moments from flattening them. Hobbes moved, even faster than she was though he lacked her raw strength, moving his shield in front of him even as he stood his ground. She crashed right into him, momentum and muscle power carrying her onward; Hobbes gritted his teeth as his arms ached with her weight, his feet sinking into the ground. Lifting slightly into the air, her hands scrabbled for purchase, both of them sliding ahead from her charge and the ground ripping up under Hobbes' heels. Tired of this, Hobbes slammed a foot down, arresting their slide, and with a tremendous effort shoved her down onto the ground with an even bigger shake.

She landed on her back with an annoyed ground, long thick legs first pointing up and then curling in; she kicked out with coiled strength, and if Hobbes hadn't moved his shield back into position a kick that would have snapped ordinary men in half would have hit him in the chest. As it was, he was lucky to only be launched nearly fifteen feet away, skidding along the ground and going right past Zim and Zuko.

But she was unbalanced; she had only a moment to concentrate, and by then Zuko and Zim were upon her. Zuko activated his laser swords when he reached his minimum Firebending distance from her, and swung a blade, amplifying the heat of its electrified edge into a focused blast of white-blue flame, hitting her square in the face.

"Ow!" She said, actually reeling. "That hurt, you little-" Zim was suddenly climbing up her leg, her pants fabric and then plentiful flesh offering many handholds. "Hey! Whoa! What are you doing- ACK! Easy, there! Ooh, hey, I'm kinda liking this-" Zim's hands hauled up from her bikini strap to her shoulder, hauling himself up and swinging the butt of his grenade launcher into her face. She blinked. "Was that supposed to hurt?" Zim's fist was suddenly in her face, and produced a big blast of fire point-black with such force she was shoved back, and Zim bounced backwards from the recoil. "Ow!" Jord whined, wiping soot off her face. "Just when you were winding me up too, you little tease!"

"Don't call Zim a tease, it's creepy," Zuko said. He moved, swinging his blades in a circular movement, gritting his teeth in concentration. Fire bloomed from him, static electricity forming in the spaces between his blades. A halo of faint lightning encircled him, and he jabbed them forward inexpertly; a small bolt of lightning shot out, and Jord jerked away from it in time. With little but glass to ground it, it harmlessly flew by. Jord rushed forward. "No-" Zuko started.

She leaped and slammed her prodigious bulk onto him. He made a small faint squeak where his break was forced out, and she lay on him a moment to make sure he had no more air in him before she stood up, grabbed him by the collar, and forcefully kissed him right on the forehead. She chuckled, ignoring his outraged cries. "On the other hand, you're closer to my size, hot dude. A bit spicy, but tasty looking."

"I have a girlfriend!"

"...Yeah. So? Oh, hey, more of my harem!" This was a response to Zim and Hobbes charging at her, outraged at this ill-treatment of Zuko. She turned, tossing up Zuko and grabbing him by the leg and proceeding to use him as an improvised weapon.

Behind her, Darvhog was scribbling with surprising speed and calm at once; every move was measured, every stroke precise. A complicated spell diagram was taking shape, centered around the metal pot-thing and spreading out, looking almost like a whirlpool if one cared to give its multitude of geomantic lines and binding runes a shape.

"Almost there," Darvhog said, grinning hopefully, desperately.

Overhead, there was a great blast; Gunter's ship curved around the Paragon, twisting around the barrage of gunfire from Calvin, flipping around and aiming it's force cannons at the propulsion discs at the top. The frost giant piloting it took aim, charged...and a great blue light flashed out and hit nearly at the same time, a distortion of the air directly at the top of the Paragon, a blast that struck over three of the larger ship's propulsion discs. Calvin let out a horrified shout mixing nicely with the screeching protest from the propulsion field that sounded rather like a cry of dismay in its own right. The field warped, crackled, the ship's center of gravity loosing cohesion even as it kept moving onward...and then it dipped, plummeted, and crashed onto a small block of buildings and kept going, shattering them under its weight. The field went out, the discs intact but damaged enough that they couldn't power the field. The Paragon hovered up listlessly, bouncing awkwardly from six buildings at a time to more, pulverizing those as well. Gunter boomed cheerfully, arcing upwards and out.

Zim, Zuko and Hobbes saw this, roaring in horror, and took it out on Jord. She could handle it, but they didn't make it easy for her, trying with all their might to just slip past her and defeat Darvhog in a critical hit, but she was simply too fast and big to move past; Hobbes reverted his shield to its default mode, swinging it like a discus at her and nailed her chin. She stumbled back, and Hobbes galloped forward, and one of her flailing feet caught him in the jaw, tilting him slightly over her and into the air. She had the presence of mind to swing her hand, grabbing him out in mid-fall and throwing him at Zim.

Zim slammed into Hobbes on purpose to arrest his fall; they were skidding back a short distance, and then he and Zuko were advancing to give Hobbes some breathing time, the two pyrokinetics (or so Zim assumed) summoning flames and pooling them together into an incandescent missile slightly larger than Jord. It struck with a mighty blow, driving her into the ground with a satisfying blast. They charged, hoping to move over her-

She stood up as soon as they leaped, letting them crash into her and bounce off. "No getting past me!" She boasted, swaggering forward. Zim glanced at a shine on the ground; a large piece of the strong glass they used her, big enough for a shield.

His Pak changed, and instead of a spider-leg or four, a tendril ending in a delicate claw emerged. It snagged a shard of supernal glass bigger than he was and swung it, parrying Jord's blow; even with all her strength, the glass held firm, her fist bouncing off without even a scratch. Zim stared at it briefly, amazed.

"Nice, huh?" Jord said with a wild grin. "Those guys that made this stuff, they found a way to take psychic energy and imbue it into crystal-junk like glass, make it super-strong and easy to mold!" She smirked. "And they left the knowledge of it just laying around for me to find out."

Zim stared. "You figured out how to use a long-lost glassmaking technique?"

"Psh, nah, they had it detailed in some temple way underground. We were here for a while before you found us, we had enough time to figure out the frescoes and decode them! And now we know the secret! There's tons of guys that'd pay big money to learn it too!"

"That's a stupid plan," Zim said, thinking he knew what Darvhog was planning at last, and lunged.

Gunter flew by overhead in his ship, letting loose with a few low-powered and well-placed blasts. Hobbes covered himself with his shield, Zuko punched a fireblast at it and went down when the force beam went through and hammered him down, and Zim was knocked down as well. The Paragon was still struggling to get airborne with several of its flight discs out of order, Zim realized.

It got worse. Darvhog stood tall, laughing maniacally (and coughing, his lungs weren't used to it yet), and he shouted, "It's done! Everyone, pull in!"

Jord retreated, and Gunter's ship flew in, hovering menacingly over Darvhog's group. Zim and Hobbes retreated, Zuko managing to crawl close enough for Hobbes to lift him up on his shoulder and the three of them gather together.

Zim took aim with his grenade launcher and fired again and again, hoping to hit Darvhog; Gunter let loose with volleys of force blasts, and the grenades exploded in mid-air. Zim reached for the grenades on his belt, and as he did, realized too late that they had already expended the supply brought with them during the earliest portions of the battle; they had worked admirably, but now they had none left. Zuko and Zim let loose with fire blasts, and Jord intercepted them, taking the hits with miserable grunts of pain.

Hobbes started to throw his shield, but he was too imbalanced holding up Zuko to manage it, so he stopped before he lost his shield or worse. Darvhog gave them little choice. "Now!" He said, placing Moofy into the cauldron, at the very center of the spell diagram. It was a pity Calvin and Morte weren't around to explain what that diagram actually did, or they'd have been even more worried.

"The scroll!" Moofy commanded. "Summon its power!"

Darvhog moved quick, too quickly for any of the heroes to do anything; Zim was wracked with indecision to do anything, Zuko was too weary, and Hobbes was hampered keeping Zuko up. Calvin and Morte were in no position to help, either. So, Darvhog chose his moment well, plucking a large scroll from inside a concealed pocket in his shirt, unrolling it and placing it upon one of the circles in the diagram. He poured magical energy into it, unleashing the power within, and spoke the name of the spell carried within.

"Create Undead!"

The scroll, and the arcane words of power inscribed upon it in ink made from the powdered bones of long-dead necromancers, glowed with awesome power. Moofy glowed even brighter, a thundering still-point of absolute magical might distilled into a material shape, and then his glow dimmed, and the scroll seemed to absorb the power he had manifested. The light turned dark, defying the laws of chromatic light in the process, and became a darkness as deep as the reaches of the most ancient abyss.

The dark light, the light of magic so powerful the air twisted at its weight, was directed by the spell diagram. It flooded into the diagram, spelled out and shaped by it, redoubling its power before shooting up into the sky...

Right into the clouds above, and the winds around them, diffusing into the dust on everything around them. The blackness split and crawled like visible static electricity, passing over Zim's group without harm.

The dust moved.

Pulled as surely as iron to a lodestone, the dust on every surface and coating the wind around them and the clouds above, it all split away and swirled over Darvhog, Moofy glowing mightily and almost looking like a Heartless himself for a moment. The dust was just dust, and so couldn't scream, but Zim heard a faint howl from the wind, and almost imagined the dust screaming at this ignominy. The dust pulled together into distinct forms, apparently tiny due to their distance from Zim, briefly letting in the sunlight as the dust ceased to block the light, and then it was dark again, the spawning figures so many they blotted out the light.

These figures hit the ground, one after the other, until they crowded every single bit of available space, standing still and silent. Zim flinched as one brushed against him; tall, about the size and shape of a human, their reconstituted bodies naked and emaciated, broad spade-shaped heads graced with a stack of four horizontally-positioned eyes and set in expressions of near-terminal gravitas, and from their highly detailed muscles and desiccated flesh they seemed mummified. The massive group, this army, went on for miles and miles, covering the entire span of the bridge and still competing for space, many forced to cling to the sides or fall off, easily numbering in the thousands.

Hobbes slowly looked around, quite justifiably alarmed to be totally surrounded by an army of the newly created undead. "Uh..." He said. He poked one of them in the shoulder. His finger sank in to the knuckle, dust on his claw, and when he jerked away, there was a hole in the mummy's arm that swiftly sealed up with the dust it was made of. The mummy gave no impression of even realizing any of that, or that it was aware of anything at all.

"Well," Darvhog said, pleasantly surprised. "I knew it. There were Protheans here! Second stop now; aaand, SEAL!" Darvhog placed his hands on the pot. The spell diagram lit up, not so brightly but strangely intense; the mummies were motionless as a ray of magical energy field up from the cauldron and arced up. It struck the chest of a mummy Prothean, which flinched back; glowing lines like veins spread out over its body in an instant, and the mummy relaxed, a dim light of something like faint awareness (or basic programming being dumped into it) making it more...well, 'lively'. It slowly shifted from side to side, almost dancing, and the ray went to the next mummy and through it, repeating this again and again; the ray forked, multiplying with each mummy it programmed, again and again and many more times, endeavoring to activate every single mummy present there.

It wasn't entirely successful. For every mummy it programmed, five more were disintegrated by the power of the spell, or it wasn't powerful enough to successfully animate them even after remaking them back into a semblance of the bodies the dust had been eons ago. Either way, the ones that failed simply collapsed into dust by the spot. Much of the army had died again by the time it was done, flooding down from the bridge in a whispering mass that collectively was a brief roar...but that still left a potent army of the undead numbering in at least a few thousand. For living soldiers, perhaps that wasn't too many; for undying horrors obeying commands without conscience or restraint, it was a terrible concept.

All of this happened so quickly; the mummies created and dropping down, the secondary spell programming the ones it didn't outright destroy. There wasn't an opportunity to halt any of it or sabotage it, at least that the three heroes saw. Calvin and Morte might have known, but trapped in a crippled ship they probably didn't even realize most of that was happening.

Zuko said, "What."

"Oh," Zim said. "That was his plan. Making an army of the undead out of the ashes of this planet's extinct sentient inhabitants. Surprisingly creative, I will admit."

"Mummy things! Protheans that were once dead!" Darvhog said, taking up Moofy and sheathing him. "Undead that I have returned to life, in service of my ambition! Who is your master?!"

The Prothean mummies were silent. Of course, they couldn't talk. But, as one, they all bowed onto one knee, genuflecting deeply. They raised their fists out in a militaristic salute to Darvhog. Not at Moofy, but at Darvhog. The statement was clear.

Darvhog grinned, and spread his arms. "Well," He said conversationally to Zim, Zuko and Hobbes. Jord grinned maliciously, and as one the Prothean mummies turned to the three heroes. "...You still wanna 'bring me in'? Make me face my crimes? That other stuff you were talking about?"

Zuko stared at the undead army staring down at them, outnumbered at least twenty-to-one. "Uh," He started to say, and stopped. There wasn't really anything to say. Even with all their power, they didn't have all their group present, and those odds frankly sucked hardcore.

"Eep," Hobbes said, ears flattened and tail bushy.

"Yes," Zim said, without hesitation.

"Eep," Hobbes said again.

Darvhog tilted his head. "You really wanna fight thousands of mummy fighters just to get to little ol' me? While you're completely surrounded by them?"

"Yes! It sounds like fun," Zim said.

Hobbes clapped a paw on his mouth, silencing him. "No it doesn't!" He yelped.

"What he said!" Zuko said.

"Mm mmm mph?!" Zim mumbled, indignant.

"I couldn't hear that," Darvhog said innocently. "Was that a surrender I heard? You'll let me get out of here and take my new buddies with me?"

Zuko thought quickly, and thought hard. "...Yes," he finally said reluctantly, glaring hatefully at the space pirate. Darvhog whooped at this.

"Mprmh!?" Zim screamed, still too muffled to make sense.

Gunter landed the Funk Revolution ship behind Darvhog, squashing a multitude of mummy under it into dust. They just stood there blandly and let themselves get crushed, reforming back a few moments later and struggling listlessly to escape. A doorway opened in the bottom of the ship and Jord hurried on through. "It's been fun, guys," Darvhog said, putting both hands on the cauldron. "But I got other places to be. Loot to sell, bargains to make...you know how it is. Uh, maybe you don't, I guess we're not really in the same line of work. Hope to fight with you soon again!" One last portion of the spell diagram was still glowing, and finally activated; centered directly around the cauldron, it released a wave of arcane energy that swept over the mummies, collapsing them back into dust and binding them into an inactive travel-friendly form; in only moments, all the mummies had been collapsed, and the wave flooded back to the cauldron, crashing into it. The dust funneled into it, a great tornado swallowed up by the little artifact that was entirely too small to contain so much, and with a small sound disconcertingly like a belch, all the mummies had been stored inside it, waiting to be called to battle. (Darvhog explained all of this as it happened to Zim, he didn't want his foe to leave with the wrong idea.) "Buh-bye! Ladies and gents, off to Oddworld!" Darvhog said, picking up the cauldron and running away even as Hobbes let go and started running at him to take advantage of the mummies' absence. Darvhog hurried into his ship, a few blasts of low-yield force discouraging an advance.

The ship of the Funk Revolution Pirates took off, flight engines that duplicated vertical-take-off-and-landing turbines allowing it to hover straight up before engaging its primary flight systems. By then, the Funk Revolution Pirates were already flying over the buildings, out of range, over the edge of the city, a faint speck advancing into the atmosphere, and then they were gone.

They stared for a moment.

"Zim?" Hobbes said.

"Yes?"

"You suck at tactics."

"…Yes."

At long last, the Paragon came flying overhead, wobbling unsteadily and struggling not to tip over. "Guys!" Calvin said through the loudspeakers. "Why's Darvhog getting away?! What was with those mummies!? What did we miss?!"

"Darvhog's actual plan wasn't just looting, he was here to animate some sort of army from the dusty remains of this planet's people," Zim said.

"That's horrible!"

"He stuck them inside a giant pot-thing. Used superior numbers to convince Hobbes and Zuko to stay down."

"That's cheating!"

"And he still thinks poorly of technology."

"That's unspeakably horrifying!"

"...That was his plan?" Morte said. "Huh. I honestly would not have called that."

At this point, the Paragon flopped down, crashing onto a cluster of thankfully intact buildings. "And now our ship is down," Zim said. "Beaten by a band of disco pirates and a tiny ship with only a handful of weapons! The shame of it!"

"We might be here a few days fixing that," Zuko said, eying the broken propulsion discs. "Again. We really should have protected them better..."

"We can fix those things here," Zim said firmly. "We have the materials on-board for a patch job until we can find a more suitable place for repairs."

"We'd have to make a one-way trip to a place we know would have some, or make a jump into the Astral Plane and float along until something good happens," Morte said. "What's your pick?"

"I'm no navigator," Calvin said. "I just fix the things. What's the closest-" He paused, remembering the tricky bits of traveling to different universes world-by-world. "What's the most immediately adjacent world that definitely has places where we could get this thing fixed?"

"And where enterprising space pirates can sell their ill-gotten gains," Zim added. Zuko glanced at him, annoyed. "What?! We still have no detained Darvhog! Our quest shall not be delayed by something this petty."

"I thought our mission was finding Gir and the rest."

"Until I get the means of actually locating Gir's signal across dimensions, we cannot make much progress on that. I intend to fix our earlier mistakes when we erred with Darvhog's detainment, or lack thereof."

"Makes as much sense as anything else we do," Hobbes said reluctantly.

Zuko bowed his head. "...If you say so."

Calvin and Morte voiced their own largely indifferent assent. Zim nodded, their course clear for a moment. "Now,… Darvhog said something about a place called 'Oddworld'. What is that?" "

"That's a world not too far from our current position!" Morte said. "That is, using the Astral Plane. It's a bit of a wild world right now; lots of upheaval going on, the guys in charge are a real nasty sort, the usual 'evil oppressive berks' situation. The right situation for criminals or freedom fighters to jump in and do their thing; it'd be real easy for Darvhog to find buyers, and he might just know that if your guess is good. And their whole economy is making a killing in catering to tourists like us! We could find ship-repairs real easy...provided we're willing to spend a lot for a little."

"We'd have to make do," Zim said, grinning psychotically at everything else Morte was saying; it sounded like a place ripe for adventure, and just the sort of action he'd come to crave.

"You realize that since he flat-out told you where he's going, he's probably expecting us. Or planning for us to show up."

"I'll not let anything as crude as basic logic interfere with my plans! As soon as we're capable of going, we're off to Oddworld."

"Okay," everyone said reluctantly.

Zim gave orders. "Hobbes, confer with Morte and refer to the Guide, I wish to have everything we could know about that place compiled. Everyone else, ready yourself for repair duty and prepare for battle!"

"But we just got done battling," Hobbes said. "And we lost."

"Then I'm sure you're anxious to wipe that mark from our record. We've only been a team for a short time, this loss is one too many!"

"Not that anxious, really."

"You are if I say you are!"