CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Bailey and Tapeworm tore out of the nursery as quickly as their feet would take them and came upon the battle scene in a matter of moments. Ursa raced ahead of Tapeworm and immediately jumped into the fray, knocking his armored opponent out of the way with a quick swipe of his paw. Recognizing the guardians of his friends already viciously fighting for their home, the two quickly jumped into the fight.

Bailey sent out blasts of light and darkness out of her hands as she fought the armored humans and beasts alike as they came towards her. Every now and then as she whipped around to try and fend off the next wave of attack, she caught glimpses of her friends as they fought alongside her. She watched as they fought viciously, sometime teaming up with each other, other times teaming up with their guardians if not fighting alone and wondered how they could do it.

How could they continue to fight these things when they had lives too? Not just the souls that were residing deep within them, but their actual lives. Did they have children? Were they on their own? Were the people that were fighting with them their friends or surrogate family?

She ducked out of the way as a leopard flew overhead and twisted around, shooting a blast of light at it. She watched as it screeched in pain, falling onto its side, and scrabbling its paws towards the ground. Bailey continued to shoot blasts of light towards the leopard as it continued to lie on the ground. The bolts of light continued to grow in size until the bolt of light converged and started to grow in length.

What…what's going on? She thought, watching as it continued to increase in size and brightness. The light became so blinding that she had to close her eyes and turn away, lowering her hands as she did so. The second she made that movement, the light faded and she was struck in the stomach by the blunt end of a sword. She back peddled, hoping to catch her balance, but fell to the ground. Bringing her arms up, she did her best to shield her face as the warrior stood above her and brought the sword high above his head. The sword started to come down, but a commanding voice bellowed over the grounds, halting all movement around her.

"How dare you destroy my Kingdom when there's a peace settlement in effect?" Bailey turned around and spotted Mother Nature standing on a balcony, looking over the grounds in front of her. "Who is the leader here?"

"I, Magnus," The man at the front of the group called back, holding a spear up high into the air. Bailey swept her hair from her face. "Your rule and the peace settlement were broken when you went down to destroy Earth, when there was no one else here to run the kingdom. In your absence many of us have fallen under a new leader."

"And who may I ask is this leader that you speak of?"

"Uriel of Earth!" Magnus shouted back, his voice echoing amongst the ever silent crowd. "The supreme ruler that will turn our kingdom back to the way it was. Back when things were run well around here."

"You all and I know that Uriel isn't someone to be trusted on their own. Just as Gattaca has made his mistakes, Uriel has made the ultimate decision that can't be taken back unless we show him that running off on his own, not taking the punishments of his past misdeeds will allow him to fall further into the darkness that is eating away at his heart and tearing away at our kingdom." Mother Nature glared down at Magnus and the rest of the warriors that had followed him. "Now begone before the utmost punishment shall befall upon you all." She gazed around at the group that stood in front of her. "Those that have traveled from Earth to the Element World, please come insight as there are very important and pressing matters, which have unfortunately come to my attention sooner than anticipated, we need to address."

She scanned the grounds of the kingdom once more before gesturing towards the row of unarmored humans that stood in straight line in front of the entrance to the castle. At the same time they lifted their spears and crisscrossed them before starting to take a few steps forward. There was the sound of drums that filled the air, slightly different than the Mystic Melody the inhabitants of the world were used to. And as Bailey watched in surprise, those that were in support of Uriel backed away and left the area until they were completely out of sight.

"Bailey, are you okay?"

Bailey looked up to see Geneva and Gattaca standing before her, both looking down at her in concern. Slowly nodding, Bailey looked back and forth between the two of them. They had no troubles when it came to helping her fight, even if it were people that used to be under their rule. They didn't hesitate for a moment, just went right into the fight.

Like Cody did, she reminded herself. Maybe that's what they and the rest of the group had been trying to tell me…ever since they told me about their fight with the Elementals in the first place.

She remembered that day just as clearly as any other day that was incredibly important in her life. Not only had she been completely blindsided by it, but she actually fond it to be a bit clever that Cody was using their whole situation and as a cover for a project. Not only would he have gotten a good grade for the things he had seen firsthand, but from what she understood it was a good way to make sure he was keeping tabs on his friends as they were continuously doing their own thing before their three year adventure had started.

Bailey could only watch as Reihu moved closer and closer to her. Right before her eyes, his green eyes changed from one that was a human to cat-like eyes. And as he smirked, his canines grew longer, and his hands and feet turned into paws as a long tail appeared behind him.

"Leave her alone!"

Reihu merely snorted at Cody's outburst and continued towards Bailey. She backed up as far as she could until I hit a brick wall, and cowered in fear. Closing her eyes, waiting for pain to come, or even the feeling of his paws grabbing onto her arm, but nothing happened. Bailey heard the sound of a cat wailing and hissing in fury and opened her eyes to see that Reihu was soaked from head to toe, his clothes dripping water.

Reihu snarled and whipped his head back around to face Cody. Bailey got up to her knees, still hiding behind a trash bin, and gasped when she saw that in place of Cody's arm was a watery tentacle. Cody looked annoyed, but uncaring at the same time.

Looking behind him, Bailey saw Koto inching closer and closer to Zack, his hand stretched out, nails gleaming.

"Zack! Watch out!" She shouted, getting his attention.

Without turning around, Zack balanced on his left foot, and shoved his right leg backwards, hitting Koto in the stomach and sending him back a few feet and into a brick wall. Koto pulled himself out of the wall, as if he had landed in a pile of pillows.

Before Bailey knew it, Zack, Cody, Reihu, and Koto were in an all out brawl. But to make it even weirder, the faster they moved, she could have sworn they started to glow. And she don't mean like they have a healthy glow, but actually glowing. Zack and Cody were glowing red and blue, respectively, and it was weird to see. The weirdest part was what came at the end of the fight.

Koto punched Zack across the face and the blonde boy stumbled back, holding onto his jaw. He quickly wiped the blood from his chin and sank into a fighting stance. His hands started to flow red and as the light got brighter and brighter Bailey realized that the red light was turning into flames. Before it could even register in my mind what was happening, Zack's entire right arm was covered in flames. But Zack wasn't reacting to it at all, as if he wasn't being burned.

He shoved his arm forward with the cry of "Fire Ball, Ignite!" And a wheel of flame rushed out towards Koto. Koto quickly jumped into the air, turned completely into a wolf, and landed behind Zack. He pulled his lips back and snarled at Zack before taking off down the street.

"Tsunami Wave!" Cody's arms were glowing blue. He raised his arms over his head, and Bailey heard a gurgling sound behind me. Turning around, she saw the water from the canal rising high in the air, creating a large wave. "Water Whip!" The large wave condensed into a long thing line of water and as Cody snapped his arm down, it rushed towards Reihu.

Like Koto, Reihu jumped over the water, turned into a lion, and disappeared down the street.

Zack and Cody wiped their hands off on their pants before turning towards her. Cody walked over to her and gently pulled Bailey to her feet as Zack looked around, eyes wide with worry. "Codes, what's she doing here?" Zack whispered to Cody, not so subtly. "No one is supposed to know-"

"Don't worry about it now, Zack." Cody replied as he finally turned to look at his brother. "We have to get back to the SS Tipton before it leaves without us." He turned back to her. "Are you ok, Bailey?"

"W-What was-"She stammered, trying to find my words to ask the burning questions on my mind.

"Don't worry about that now," Zack butted in. "I think we may have attracted some more," he looked over at me before turning back to Cody. "Unwanted attention. We have to leave. Now."

"Got it." Cody replied and grabbed onto my wrist. "C'mon, Bailey!"

…

..

.

"Bailey. Psst. Bailey, wake up!"

Groaning, Bailey looked over at my clock and saw that it was only 12:10 in the morning. Annoyed, I turned back to the person that was standing by my bed. She was getting ready to curse him out, in the way that we do it back home, before she realized that Zack was standing by my bed. Bailey immediately shut up and wanted to listen to what he had to say.

Ever since they had gotten back on the boat, Zack and Cody hadn't talked about the incident at all. They just stayed quiet. During dinner they didn't say a word to her. They just kept on eating and eating and talked to the guys. At the time she thought they were trying to make her forget the whole thing, and she even tried that herself. But there's no possible way that you could forget someone being able to shoot fire out of his hands. Or someone being able to turn into a wolf. Or someone being able to jump to the ground from the roof of a nearby building and not getting hurt at all. It was all that she could think about. Even going to sleep, she had a dream of Zack and Cody fighting someone, or something really bad.

Bailey couldn't see what it was, but she could tell that it was something very important to them.

"Zack, what is it?" She finally asked, swinging her legs to the floor and glancing back to make sure that London didn't wake up.

"C'mon, we don't have much time." Zack replied before turning away and leaving the room. She quickly followed after him. He led them through many hallways and many turns, and Bailey wasn't even sure where we were going. (And that was saying something as she studied the whole map of the boat for fun when she was waiting for figure out whether or not I had been accepted to Seven Seas High.)

"Where are we going?" She finally asked.

"Don't worry, we're almost there." Zack replied, not looking over his shoulder.

They continued walking down towards the bottom of the boat for about another ten minutes before Zack came to a complete stop in front of a door that was hidden by a stack of boxes and lightly rapped on the door. The door opened and Zack slid inside, glancing back over his shoulder one more time before beckoning me inside. "You owe me big time for this, bro," Zack was saying as she entered the small room. Cody closed the door behind her and walked over to a couch that was in one of the corners of the room. "If Moseby caught me then I would be in really big trouble, and I can't afford to miss anymore days of work."

"Yeah, yeah." Cody rolled his eyes and turned to me. "It's a good thing that you came here, Bailey. There's a lot of stuff that we need to explain to you."

"What was going on?" She demanded, placing my hands on my hips. "Who were those people? And why did you-"

"If you'd let us explain this would all go by much faster, toots." Zack replied and defended himself when Cody glanced over at him. "What? I'm tired! And she wasn't supposed to find out about this anyway."

"Actually, she was." Cody replied as he crossed his arms over his chest. He continued to have a conversation with his brother as if Bailey wasn't even there. "I had a dream, recently. And in my dream it said that soon there was going to be someone that was going to find out about us, that would be a good friend and be really helpful."

"Why is it that you had the dream?" Zack demanded, sounding like he was joking. "Usually whenever we have dreams that have to do with our elements, we share one." Cody shrugged in reply.

"I don't know how it works," he admitted. "And neither do you for that matter. But I knew that the dream was talking about Bailey as soon as she had demanded what our science project was going to be about." He said and finally turned to look at her. "I bet you're wondering what this all means."

"Uh, yeah, I'm kinda in the dark here." Bailey replied, starting to become annoyed with being ignored and having none of my questions answered.

"Ok, I'll answer the first and easiest question to answer," Cody replied and flopped down onto the couch next to Zack, motioning for her to take the chair that was across from the couch. Bailey sat down and pulled her legs up into the chair. "The reason that I wasn't really surprised with you being in the alleyway is because I knew that you would be there; because of the dream and because I purposely left my search on my computer uncleaned."

"You did that?" Zack demanded and slapped his hands over his face. "I can't believe you would be so stupid! Anyone could have seen that!"

"No, only I did." Bailey said, trying to keep the tension down. "I cleared the history right after I was at the computer."

"Ok, here's the other thing that's going to be really hard for you to understand," Cody paused and looked over at Zack, as if he was asking for help. Zack sighed and rubbed his forehead before leaning forward, clasping his hands together.

"Cody and I…we aren't human." Zack explained his eyes boring into hers. "We're Elementals. And the things that we did with fire and water, that was real." He took a breath. "I hold the element of fire and Cody holds the element of water."

"And those two guys, Koto and Reihu, they're after us," Cody jumped in. "But they're not the only ones who are. There's a whole group of people who are trying to capture us, to get rid of our elements, and they will kill us to get what they want."

"But…" She was so confused. "How did all of this happen?"

"That's going to take a while to explain." Zack hesitated.

Bailey got comfortable in her chair.

"I have time."

And now it seemed that time was the only thing that he group didn't have. Or did has Father Time had powers that neither of them could ever begin to imagine. Nor did she think it was possible for the powers that Mother Nature, Geneva, Gattaca, nor Uriel had. She always enjoyed reading stories and learning about superheroes and the impossible, anything bigger than Kettlecorn was something she had been interested in, which caused her to join the SS Tipton in the first place.

But I never thought it'd bring me to this, Bailey thought as she followed her friends back into the castle. She hung behind them as she walked slowly, her mind trying frantically to wrap around everything she had ever learned while she had been traveling around with these guys. And now…

Slowing to a halt, Bailey's eyebrows scrunched together. Something had just truck her as odd, something she hadn't thought of before that made a lot more sense than she had originally thought it would. Cody had said that he had a dream about me, being able to help them. If that were the case…then maybe I was supposed to them from the very beginning. If the prophecy is true, maybe I had been destined to go onto the SS Tipton, meet them, saw what was going on and help them out. Or maybe…

Bailey grabbed Geneva and Gattaca's attention and turned towards them with a deep frown on her face. "Am I some sort of reincarnate?" She demanded as soon as she had their attention. "I don't have the same sort of powers that the others have, neither does Aaron. But why am I still able to use the powers of light and darkness without any effects coming back to me? How come I can talk to you in my head and borrow your powers and…and do all of that but am still told that I'm a regular human. How can I be human and be part of the prophecy?"

"My you have a lot more questions than I anticipated you would," Mother Nature's calm, melodious voice wafted over to Bailey. Geneva and Gattaca turned around and bowed towards their mother before stepping aside so that she could stand directly in front of Bailey. "Though from watching you for the duration I needed, I've always been aware of the fact that your intelligence is something that should be heralded."

Bailey swallowed thickly. It was obvious that this woman ran the entire Element Kingdom while Father Time, despite being her husband, was a step below her on the power scale. She knew from the research she had done in science over the years that it was just following nature in general. There was to be no time with nature and no nature without time; however how were you able to display the passage of time without nature being the medium that showed it? Same as for the Element World, she supposed, though Bailey wasn't even sure how many other areas of the World were being run by Mother Nature or if there were other parts of the World than what they had seen.

Not only had it not existed to her—it being a foreign object more than anything else—for a long time, but there were still so many faction of it that baffled her. How was it created and had it always been closely linked to Earth? If any of the research that Christian and Core was any indicator, they needed to get back to Earth as soon as possible.

"I don't mean any disrespect," Bailey said quickly. "It's just…we're not getting a lot of information that could be useful to us. And…we don't know what's happening back on Earth."

As the words came out of Bailey's mouth, Mother Nature's eyes darkened. She sucked in a deep breath, the emerald coloring of her robes swelling with the force of the intake before letting it out calmly. She turned on her heel and led the group back into the room they had been in when eating lunch before, but Zack stopped her, speaking up for the first time since the fight.

"Bailey's right," he insisted.

Bailey could tell from the look on his face, the suspicion and weariness that he still wasn't sure whether or not to trust Mother Nature. Though, she was sure his thoughts were still clouded by what had happened to Blazen the last time he had fought her. His guardian had nearly died within a few attacks from the arbori, just to protect him.

If it wasn't for the fact it was the job that the guardians had taken ever since they agreed to take on their animal spirits, Bailey knew Zack would do everything in his power to keep it happening again. To anyone.

"We don't know anything, we don't ever have any answers to our questions," he said. "You know more about Uriel than we do and you still haven't told us how to defeat him."

"If we knew," Mother Nature said calmly. "He wouldn't have gotten away from us in the first place." She looked over at her husband, who slowly lifted his chin as he regarded the blond teen. "Fire Bearer, you are right to be worried, as we are worried about the outcomes of both worlds. I'm responsive to the mistakes I have made as I felt the connection between our worlds crumbling as you humans continued to pollute the Earth, but I now know you are not all that way. You can trust me."

Zack frowned.

"I implore you to retire to your bed chambers," Father Time spoke up. "Because tomorrow you start your training."

A/N: So funny to know that I had finished the last story at around this time (word and chapter length). Then again the last story moved a bit quicker as the chapters weren't so long, but it's still interesting to see. Especially considering I borrowed/re-worked a scene from Mystic Melody into this story and was able to see how things had changed/progressed back then.

Cheers,

-Riles