(A/N: I like this chapter! It's the first one I've liked in a while. As always, be sure to listen to the song/the whole album as you read! TDCC actually came out with this album really recently, and I like it a lot. It's not as poignant/fitting for the characters it represents as How Do You Feel Now? was, but it's still good.

Hope y'all like this chapter!)

CHAPTER XI

FALL

Think I already know it's out of my control.
Found no solution but to let the pieces fall where they fall.
Even with nothing left, I've got more than you.
I wanna let you in
And we'll begin.

Two Door Cinema Club, "Good Morning"
Gameshow

Once again, Silas bit his tongue, promising himself that he would ask Araceli about her pills and liquor someday. Had they not gotten close enough yet? He supposed not. As much as she shared with him during their last long talk in the Gummi Ship, the two really hadn't been acquainted for that long.

How long had it been since they began their journey together? Surely no longer than a week, at this point.

They touched down on another world and, like clockwork, Dylan woke from his slumber. How he managed to sleep so peacefully during every trip and wake up immediately as they reached their destination almost every time was a mystery to Silas. Meanwhile, the smallest little thunderstorm, and he was wide awake.

He tried not to think about the thunderstorm.

"Halloween Town," Araceli announced as soon as she unbuckled herself and began leading the other two out of the Gummi Ship. Dylan offhandedly admitted that he had never actually been to Halloween Town, so Silas assumed it must have been a while since Araceli herself had been there. Would things be very different?

Silas loved the place the moment he set foot on the strange, swirling ground.

He was surrounded by gravestones that were almost cartoonish in appearance: top-heavy, mostly unmarked, and shaded in the same coral and cream colors. Emerging from the spiked, brick wall surrounding the cemetery were snarled, curling wrought-iron fence posts, wrapping around to a hinged gate at the very end.

It was nighttime out—either that, or it was just a very gloomy day, the sky overcast with clouds darker than Silas had ever seen back home.

"What the hell?" asked Dylan, looking down at himself.

Silas had hardly seen his two friends, as he had been so preoccupied with the magnificent creepiness of the world around him, but they had changed, too. Dylan's standard shirt, jacket, jeans, and boots were replaced with an odd-looking pinstripe suit, a deep blue in color and stained with a dark red in patches that Silas could only assume was blood. It looked like he was wearing makeup, with the skeletal pattern of teeth, cheekbones, and black holes for eyes painted atop white skin.

Araceli was equally transformed. Her grey dress was replaced with a black one, longer and certainly harder to move around in, with gothic lace spilling over the edges of her sleeves and hem. A black, pointed hat flattened her short, wavy hair, and even her staff had changed: the beautiful, silvery-white weapon was replaced with your run-of-the-mill broom.

They were a skeleton and a witch. He knew this place was called Halloween Town, but did it have the power to magically give its residents costumes?

"I did this," said Araceli, as if reading their minds. "We'd be rather conspicuous otherwise."

Silas looked down. He wore fuzzy, fingerless gloves with long, black claws protruding from them, the pale brown of the darkest points of his hair. Even his shoes were replaced with similarly clawed boots. His black shirt and jeans remained, but the shirt had a big claw mark gaping open to bare skin, and his jeans had been torn at the knees.

Ears. He felt the top of his head and came in contact with fuzzy ears. He must have been a werewolf of some kind. Silas had no interest in seeing how hideous his face must have looked in this outfit.

"Okay," he said, "so where's the keyhole?"

"It's—" Araceli began, but was interrupted by something white and fast zipping past her face.

All the stopped to stare at the thing, which seemed to come to a screeching halt by a lone gravestone. It was floating, and looked like a dog in the face, but the rest of its body was like a small sheet, and fairly transparent. There was no doubt in Silas's mind that this thing was a ghost—in a place called Halloween Town, it seemed natural.

It was growling in their direction. Silas, with eyebrows high, looked over at Dylan and Araceli, but they caught on before he did, staring backwards: it wasn't the three of them that the dog was growling at. A horde of Heartless had followed it all the way to the cemetery.

Unsurprisingly, these looked nothing like the Shadows and Soldiers and Hook Bats that Silas had gotten himself familiar with. A few were these bizarre, brownish phantoms which seemed to have a single crazy-looking yellow eye still stuck in their heads, with the other dangling lazily from an open socket. Their long, pointed fingers hung down as if from broken wrists, and their mouths were a zig-zag of stitches. They wore torn shirts which bore that familiar Heartless emblem on them.

With a foul screech, a couple of them stared directly forward, a yellow light erupting from their single eye in Silas's direction. It seemed to turn red almost immediately, and the things began violently rotating in the air. The others threw back their heads so that their chained eye popped back into place.

A couple of the Heartless were different. These looked like deathly thin mummies, wrapped mostly in white cloth of some kind with only a single eye showing. Their ribcage was exposed, and sharp-looking discs circled their torsos. Their fingers and toes were long, spiked, and deep gray.

Araceli was smart enough to not hesitate. She lifted her broom (which, despite its shabby appearance, was every bit as capable as her staff), and bolts of lightning rained down from the sky and onto the Heartless.

Silas nearly screamed. He didn't mean to, but he couldn't help it. The lightning came down so quick, and with a thunderous crash. Jumping backwards, he tried to ignore Dylan's stare, and hoped that Araceli didn't notice. With trembling fingers, he grasped the hilt of his Keyblade—which was mostly the same, save for darker colors and a gnarled thorn taking the place of the ribbon—and told himself that he was safe. It was fine.

He went after the mummies, still feeling a tinge of uselessness against all of those Bolt Towers back at Disney Castle. He found they moved more slowly than expected, and in such a jerky way that he was able to mostly dodge them and smack them with the Keyblade as soon as they were caught off-guard. Suffering maybe only one hit to his leg, he managed to do away with them.

Maybe he wasn't as useless as he thought.

Dylan and Araceli made quick work of the ghost Heartless, and the dog, timid and looking in each direction, eventually made his way toward the three of them, whining.

"This world is definitely unlocked," Araceli muttered, placing a single hand straight through the dog's head. He didn't seem fazed, but Dylan and Silas couldn't help but laugh, not knowing what they were expecting to happen when she tried to pet a ghost.

"Zero! There you are!"

The voice came from a tall figure creeping toward them from the entrance of the cemetery. Its thin, spindly legs made great strides, and the tail of his black suit jacket floated behind him with each wide step. His skin was pale as all get-out and he was entirely bald; it wasn't until the creature approached that Silas realized he was a skeleton—not like Dylan's costume, but a real, honest-to-God skeleton, with holes for eyes and a nose, and small bones for fingers.

"Thanks for stopping Zero," said the man in a friendly tone, approaching them. The dog—Zero—showed immediate excitement and floated right up to the man. He must have been his owner.

"We didn't," Araceli said, and explained to the man that a bunch of Heartless were following him.

The skeleton man frowned (could skeletons frown?) and said, "I know. They're back. I intended to use them as decorations a while ago, and didn't realize how dangerous they were. There have been complaints left and right."

He smiled again.

"I'm Jack," he said. "Jack Skellington."

The three introduced themselves.

"You know, you remind me a lot of these other visitors we had. Especially you, with that giant key," said Jack, pointing at Silas. He willed his Keyblade to disappear, and it did.

Araceli gave a single nod, as if she didn't need any more explanation. "Here for the same purpose, no doubt," she said. "We have reason to believe End of the World has been restored, or a similar, more powerful world has been created. Halloween Town is not the only world whose keyhole has returned, unsealed."

Jack said, "But I thought we were safe once Sora sealed our keyhole."

Sora?

Araceli responded, "We thought so, too. A world's keyhole should never need to be sealed again after the first time it's sealed. We still don't quite understand." She stood up a little straighter. "But we're here to help seal the keyhole to Halloween Town again."

Jack nodded and said, "Is it in the same place as before?"

Silas looked over at Araceli, who said, "Unless it's been moved by a very powerful force, it's probably where it was those years ago."

He knew she was thinking about the keyhole in the Underworld which had been moved, apparently, by Hades. Perhaps you truly did need to have godlike powers to do something like move the portal to a world's heart.

"That's going to be a problem," Jack told her, trying to wrangle Zero as he barked and circled him like a vulture. "Nobody can reach where Oogie Boogie's castle was."

"Why's that?" asked Araceli, crossing her arms.

"The curly hill won't uncurl."

xxx

Sheridan recognized the building where Nissa led them as the same one which he passed on his first trip through Radiant Garden and over to Villain's Vale. It took some twists and turns without the copper-piped building before they ended up in anything resembling a human's home, and even those rooms looked like they hadn't been touched for the better part of a year.

The old-fashioned, circular room where Nissa led them was veined with pipes like the rest of the building, but behind them were ornately-designed cream-colored walls, bordered with three-shelved bookshelves which were nearly his height. Stray books littered the edges of the floor, as if a rabid dog had rubbed all over them in his attempt to get dry after a bath.

The floor had tiles equally as ornate as the walls, but the beauty of the room was destroyed by its state of cleanliness. Multiple shards of… something were scattered about the ground, and boards displaying scientific models were haphazardly placed upon the various surfaces, save for the table right in the middle, behind which a single, dangerously-pointed chair sat. Multiple cobwebs connected the bookshelves together. The place could use a serious cleaning.

His fists tightened and flexed. He desperately wanted to fix this place up. It made Sheridan uneasy.

A single portrait hung on the wall of a regal-looking man with tanned skin, a slightly pointed ear, and long, gray hair, swept back as if he were standing in the wind, with two stray pieces hanging about his angular face. He wore a white coat of some kind with a kerchief rather than a tie, which made Sheridan think he may be a scientist. Only half his face was visible.

"That's Xehanort," said Nissa as she strode through the room. "This was his study."

"Who is Xehanort?" asked Mariko.

"Was," corrected Nissa, leading them to the wall just beside the large portrait. "Xehanort was an important researcher in the study of the heart, and apprentice to Ansem the Wise. He created most of the Heartless you see today in his experiments and, at one point, even became a Heartless himself. He's gone, now."

How could a person create a Heartless? Sheridan almost didn't want to know. "What happened to him?"

"Drowned in darkness. So it goes," mused Nissa, biting her lower lip. "A very skilled Keyblade wielder defeated him before closing the Door to Darkness some time ago. His Nobody—like you two are—was named Xemnas. Xemnas worked with a troupe of other Nobodies in order to find a way to restore their hearts and make them Somebodies again. He was killed, too."

She turned to them, and smiled.

"But a lot of the members of Organization XIII—his followers—did recover their hearts. So I have high hopes for you two."

Sheridan smiled, if only because he thought he should, over at Mariko. Her eyebrows knitted together, but she nodded.

"The computer's through here," Nissa explained once she realized there were no more questions, and placed one hand against the wall. This time, Mariko looked back at Sheridan, looking equally as puzzled as—if not more than—she had moments before.

For a moment, a tiny patch of the wall glowed beneath her fingers before the entire thing lit up, and the wall disappeared, leading to a long, gray, metallic hallway.

She turned back towards them and said, "I've been here before," as if that answered all their questions.

As though the wall was never there in the first place, she began trekking down the hall, and Sheridan and Mariko dutifully followed.

The hall led quickly to an open balcony with frosted-glass floors and a single metal railing; it looked out upon confusing-looking rooms, out of which hundreds of black cylinders protruded, and between which a sliver of the bright outside world was visible.

They hung a right and came upon a room that was nothing short of a technological marvel. It was no wonder this Xehanort chose to keep the room private; should a thief steal anything, there was no doubt he could hock it for quite a bit. On the leftmost edge of the room was a large computer with both an oversized keyboard and monitor—was Xehanort a giant?—and the other side held dozens of smaller monitors as well as some large, circular device for which Sheridan couldn't begin to guess its purpose.

"Don't touch anything," she warned them gently, the way a mother would with her children on their first trip the museum, as she strode up to the computer. She typed away at the thing (and seemed to know the password right off the bat) before inserting her device into a slot in the side of the monitor, and waited for its installation.

"Hopefully this ancient thing can handle this program," she said. "It was pretty state-of-the-art a few years ago."

They were in luck. The program installed quickly, and Nissa booted it up. Immediately upon opening the program, multiple sections of the universe were displayed as tiny pictures, and a few of them pulsated. She clicked one which did, and an image of space loaded on the screen, with a single red dot blinking at one of the stars. She zoomed in on it.

"Halloween Town," said Nissa. "It's not… too far from here."

"Is that Araceli, definitely?" asked Mariko.

"No, not definitely." Nissa took her hands back and crossed them over her chest. "But it's the closest sector of the universe to Disney Castle, where we saw them last, and it's really unlikely that they got all the way to the other sectors that were blinking."

"Okay, so we go to Halloween Town and intercept them there?" asked Sheridan.

"Maybe," said Nissa, "or we wait until they're on the move."

xxx

The Curly Hill was, indeed, curly. It seemed to erupt from the ground like a limb, the base peppered with more gravestones and the expanse below littered with the dim glow of happy-faced jack-o'-lanterns. They had just rid the area of another mess of Heartless—Search Ghosts, Wight Knights, and a third kind that Araceli called Wizards, which looked exactly how they sounded.

"The ruins of Oogie's castle are just beyond that wall," said Jack, "but the Curly Hill hasn't uncurled in a while. Not that anyone's been trying to get over there."

"How did it usually… uncurl?" asked Silas.

"This stone, right here," Jack Skellington informed him, walking over to a gravestone and tipping it slightly in one direction. Nothing happened.

Dylan walked up to the tall brick wall across from the Curly Hill. "Can't we just climb it?"

He clawed at it for a moment, pacing across the expanse. It seemed there was nothing adequate to grab on to except for the very top, which was just out of even Jack's reach.

"Maybe we could jump from the top of the hill," suggested Silas.

"I don't think you'd make it," Dylan said.

"And even if you did, you'd likely get impaled by the iron spikes on top," said Araceli. Silas frowned; there had to be some other way across the wall. "Hey," said Dylan, "stand on my shoulders, both of you." He hunched down at the wall.

Araceli looked at Silas, and he glanced back at her. "How would you get over?"

"I'll wait here," Dylan said, "with Jack. You need to get over there to lock the keyhole."

"He's right," said Araceli, walking up to Dylan. "We'll be quick."

Silas could tell that the two of them had done this before, because they knew exactly which foot to start with, and Dylan was able to stabilize himself—Silas imagined all of Araceli's muscle was quite heavy, so he was impressed—before standing upward. Araceli gingerly grabbed the edge of the wall, hiked herself up to stand on it, and carefully avoided the metal spikes before hopping down to the other side. With a giant thud, she hit the ground.

He gulped, and tried to imitate exactly the way Araceli had stood on Dylan's shoulders, but they were considerably shakier this time around. The first time he tried to grab the edge of the wall, his hand slipped, but he got a good grip the second time and stood, shakily, on the barrier.

Araceli was small beneath him. The jump didn't seem so high from the ground.

Silas held his breath and jumped, but it felt more like a fall. His ankles stung from the impact, but he managed to land, crouching, without tumbling over. He straightened himself up and tried to look like it wasn't a big deal, but Araceli wasn't even looking; she was already making her way across the short bridge, which seemed to hover over a river of sickly, atomic green.

"It's across here," she told him, and he followed.

What he saw next was nothing like he had expected: a deep, deep crater. If Silas thought the drop down from the brick wall had been deep, this would drop him all the way to the Underworld. Nothing but purplish dirt, rocks, and the remains of a brick fence (with a few stray jack-o'-lanterns) waited for them beneath.

"Down there?" asked Silas. Araceli nodded.

He summoned his Keyblade—it seemed to come to him without much of a problem now—and pointed it down to the very center of the crater.

It was there: the keyhole, bigger than any he had ever seen, stretching over nearly the entire expanse of the pit. But nothing happened. The familiar beam shot out of his keyblade, but it couldn't quite reach the keyhole.

"We probably need to get down there," said Araceli.

Silas glanced around them. There was no ladder down (or back up, for that matter). "How?" he asked.

"I've done this before."

Silas sighed. How was she so well-traveled? How did she know the locations of all of these keyholes? Instead, he chose to ask her, "Why were you here before?"

"Exploring, mostly, with an old friend," she said, but then bit her two lips together, as if she said something she didn't mean to.

Araceli couldn't have meant Dylan—he freely admitted he had never been to this world before. In fact, it only makes sense that she would have had other friends exploring the worlds with her since she had been on a journey of her own since before even meeting Dylan. He wondered whatever happened to him or her—Araceli's old friend.

"Do you trust me?" asked Araceli, holding a hand out to him, interrupting his thoughts.

"We're going down there?"

She nodded again.

Silas took in a deep breath. He did trust her—he trusted her implicitly. Araceli had never led them wrong; in fact, any danger they were ever in was sprung upon them, and never the direct result of Araceli's guidance. She knew her way around, she knew what she was talking about, and if there was anyone who could get these keyholes sealed and Sheridan defeated, it was Araceli.

He frowned. Why did he have the Keyblade? Why not someone like Araceli?

Silas said, "Yes," and grabbed her hand. They jumped.

Silas and Araceli fell, fell, fell down the crater. At first, Silas screamed (and thought he probably sounded like a young girl by doing so). In no time, his scream turned to laughter. Whether it was terrified, nervous laughter or a genuine adrenaline-rush, he couldn't be sure. But he loved every second of it. He loved the fear. He loved the fall.

It wasn't until they were less than twenty feet to the pit that Araceli lifted her staff in her left hand, and a strong gust of wind spun beneath their feet. The fall faded to a gentle float, and they daintily hovered to the very bottom of the crater, just outside the glowing border of the keyhole.

Silas's hair was all disheveled and wind-blown, as was Araceli's. She didn't smile or show any hint of adrenaline-junkie that Silas felt, but her cheeks were pink. She looked quite cute with a bit of blush to her face.

He laughed again, not quite letting go of her hand when they landed. "That was amazing! Whoo!" he shouted, lifting his Keyblade into the air with his other hand. "That was incredible! You're incredible! How did you—"

Suddenly, he felt a brush on his lips. Araceli pulled her head backwards almost immediately after, and stared down at her feet.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I don't know why I did that."

Silas stammered, but still smiled, and took away his hand. "It's okay," he said, but was truly still trying to process what happened.

Araceli, not looking him in the eyes, tossed her staff between both of her hands. "You should be able to lock the keyhole, now.

Silas nodded, and pointed his Keyblade at the keyhole. They certainly were close enough now. Somehow, the tiny light of his weapon was enough for even this enormous keyhole, and, with a glittering glow, it burst to life, and faded out of existence, just as the two keyholes before it had been locked.

"Excellent," said Araceli. After a pause, she said, "You know, you still have to name your Keyblade."

"Do people name their Keyblades?" he asked, and Araceli nodded.

He twisted it around in his hand for a moment. Every name he could think of—Thunder Bringer, Storm Cloud—sounded stupid in his head, and so would probably sound even stupider out loud. He did not know what to call this thing, until he heard something from the very core of his being—his heart (Nico's heart?) tell him "Ostro."

"Ostro," he said, which sounded much better than anything he could come up with. Silas wasn't a hundred percent sure it was an actual word, but he was sure it came from Nico, and he trusted his knowledge more than anything.

Thanks, Nico, he thought.

"Ostro it is," Araceli said with another nod.

Silas was grinning ear-to-ear until a disappointing reality hit him like a falling boulder. "So, how do we get out of here?"