Chapter 71
The Old Mansion
It took Goofy shaking him for Sora to know that it was a good time to get up. Since the sun was always in a twilight position, it proved unhelpful in providing an indicator for when morning had come. And since Sora had for a long time back home been known for taking naps on the beach, that meant Sora was the last one still asleep by the time Donald had gotten fed up with waiting for him. The duck had wanted to cast Thunder to jolt him awake, but Goofy managed to convince him to let him try a gentle nudge.
"Morning," Kairi said when Sora finally opened his eyes. "This place has a cafeteria. Now that you're awake, we can all go get breakfast."
Sora got out of bed and stretched. "Sure thing," he yawned.
After breakfast, they checked out of the hotel and took a walk around Market Street. They ran into Hayner, Pence and Olette as they were coming down from the train station. It was Sunday, so the three of them did not have school that day.
"Hey, guys," Sora greeted. "What's up?"
"Morning," Hayner returned the greeting. "So, we were thinking about what you told us yesterday, about Roxas and Naminé, and we were thinking of going into the Old Mansion to check it out, figure out more about them and everything that had been going on."
"You want to come?" Olette asked.
"Sure," Sora replied. He looked to his friends for confirmation, and they all nodded in agreement.
"Great! Follow me, then!" Hayner said as he began marching past the group and walking toward Tram Common. The others began to follow him.
"Why are we going this way?" Kairi asked.
"Did you see the hole in the wall on the far end of Tram Common?" Sora asked. Kairi nodded. "Well, that leads out into the woods. Go through the woods, and you'll find the mansion."
"Okay. Thanks."
The party of nine passed through the Common and, sure enough, came to a hole in the far wall large enough for a person to walk through. Kairi wondered what sort of force could have made a hole like that. They passed through one at a time and came into a thick wooded area. For the most part, the heavy canopy of the trees blotted out the sky, and the dense amount of trees prevented almost any sunlight from coming in horizontally, though some light was able to shine through the treetops, allowing the group to see in front of them.
They walked a short distance straight ahead, then gradually arced toward the left. Soon, they could see, through an open path free of trees, a clearing in which sat an old mansion. With their target in sight, they made their way toward the clearing.
A brown brick wall extended beyond the front doors on either side of the building and came together, meeting in the middle at an iron gate, creating an enclosed front yard. The gate hung wide open, having been left that way since some time before Sora, Donald and Goofy had woken up in the basement. Stone structures resembling archways sat between the gate and the mansion itself, but they had suffered extensive damage to the point that they were hardly recognizable beyond appearing as a few broken columns. A row of bushes sat against either side wall.
The mansion stood two stories, with gable roofing on the sides and a single-story-size tower in the center with flanking spires. There was a round stained-glass window in the center of that tower. A small turret with a tall conical roof stood on the roof on the right half of the building. There were windows on either side on the second floor; the window on the right offered a look into a brown-decorated room with brown curtains while the window on the left offered a look into a white room with white curtains.
Once the party and stepped past the gate, Pence pointed at the window to the white room. "So, that was Naminé's room?" he asked.
"Yeah," Riku answered.
"Must've been lonely," Olette said sympathetically, "being up there all by herself."
Riku nodded. "Yeah," he agreed.
"Alright. Let's check it out," Hayner said. "But watch out for those 'Nobody' things. Remember last time?"
Sora, Donald, Goofy, and Mickey remembered finding Hayner, Pence and Olette injured in the yard, surrounded by a group of Dusks that had ambushed them when they had come to investigate the "Second Twilight Town". Pence and Olette adjusted their positions so that they were safely enclosed between the Keyblade wielders, the wizard and the knight. Olette tried to pull Kairi into the safety circle, but the redhead gave her a confident look that let her know that she could handle herself against possible attackers.
Hayner, either in his confidence or bravado or due to simply missing the visual cue, remained in the lead. He led the group to the front doors and pulled them open. In the center of the foyer was a table with a metal-rimmed glass case, in which sat a bronze model of some sort of building. There was a set of stairs on either side leading up to a higher level which overlooked the lower section of the room. There was a door on either side wall, next to each set of stairs, though debris blocked access to the door on the right wall. In the back, between the staircases, a glass double door led out into a courtyard behind the main building. A chandelier hung from the ceiling above the glass case. On the front-most wall directly across from the upper landing, a golden coat of arms depicting two unicorns was mounted.
The group climbed the leftmost stairs and turned to approach the door leading to the room on the southern side of the building. Kairi stepped forward and opened the door, being the first to enter the room in which her Nobody had lived.
The entire room was white, even the table, the chairs, and a statue on the table resembling a potted flower. It was eerie how there was no color in the furniture.
"Jeez, I can see where the idea that she was a ghost girl came from," Hayner remarked. "This place doesn't have a spot of life in it."
However, that was not entirely true. A few seconds after Hayner made that comment, Pence, Olette and Kairi noticed numerous pieces of paper strewn about the place, each one scrawled with crayon drawings. Most were taped to the walls while a few lay on the floor. Riku had already been in this room before, with and without a blindfold, so he already knew what he would find.
Pence walked to the wall opposite from the door and examined the pictured taped there. "Hey, take a look at this. This one looks like you three," he said. Sora, Donald and Goofy stepped up, with Kairi and Mickey not far behind, and saw that Pence was right. The crayon sketch showed Sora, Donald and Goofy, with Sora wearing his original red jumpsuit, blue vest and yellow shoes.
"She really was quite the artist," Kairi commented.
"Hey, take a look at this!" Olette called from the other side of the room. The others walked around to see what she was drawing their attention toward. "Aren't these two Roxas and Axel?"
Sora nodded. "Yeah. That would be them," he answered.
"Then I wonder who these two are," Olette mused.
The rest of the party examined the sketch closely. They realized that the drawings of Roxas and Axel were from a rear view, and they were facing two other characters who appeared to be wearing black hooded coats.
"Organization XIII?" Goofy guessed.
"Those guys weren't the only ones to wear the coats," Mickey reminded him. "And why would other Organization members keep their faces concealed around Roxas and Axel?"
Kairi noticed one character's figure. "Did the Organization have women in their group?" she asked.
Mickey took a moment to ponder the question. "Well, I think there was one. I never met her, but Larxene was number twelve, the most recent member before Roxas."
"Larxene?" Sora repeated, recognizing the name. "Wasn't she at Castle Oblivion working with Marluxia?"
"Castle what?" Hayner asked, having no idea what he was talking about.
"Long story," Riku waved the question off.
"From what I heard, she was an utter sadist with lightning powers who toyed with your jumbled memories and emotions. I also heard that you were the one to defeat her," Mickey explained.
Sora imagined the scenario. "Huh. Almost makes me wish I remembered doing that," he mused.
"If she came back as a Somebody, maybe one day you'll get the chance to do it again," Donald suggested.
"Thing is," Kairi said, bringing the conversation back to its original topic, "Roxas wasn't in the Organization that long before Larxene was eliminated. And Naminé didn't really have a full sense of self then, either. So I can't imagine it being her."
"Say, Riku," Mickey said, getting the silver-haired teen's attention, "you think the other figure might have been you?"
Riku shrugged. "Maybe. I kind of remember running into the two of them together, and then fleeing. But the details are fuzzy. I'm not quite sure what they were looking for when they tried to chase after me."
Sora raised an eyebrow, quite curious by this statement. He had noticed the previous night that Roxas had claimed to be unfamiliar with the name "Shion", but he looked as though something inside him had resonated to the name, as if there should have been something there but any memory was inaccessible. He wondered if something similar had happened to Riku, much like how his own memories had been messed with previously.
Looking around at the rest of the drawings, Sora, Donald and Goofy recognized scenes from their first adventure. It made quite a bit of sense that Naminé would have drawn those scenes, as those had been Sora's most recent memories prior to her coming into existence, and those would have been the among the most prominent scenes she would have seen. When Hayner, Pence, or Olette inquired about a page, Sora, Donald and Goofy would explain what had happened as best they could.
"Hard to believe that there are so many different worlds beyond our own," Pence said.
"That was a story we had all been told back on our island," Riku told him. "But it is pretty darn cool when you get to see your first new world."
"It's never not cool," Sora agreed wholeheartedly.
"So, Naminé had 'visions' of your memories, and she could rearrange your memories and your friends' memories?" Hayner asked for clarification.
"She could also synthesize memories that weren't already there," Riku added.
"Freaky," Hayner muttered. "I guess, even though she wasn't a ghost, there sure was enough about her to make a Wonder."
"I wonder what else they had in this place, putting together an entire copy of the town," Pence mused.
Sora crossed his arms, slightly confused. "Didn't you take a look at Ansem's computer in the basement?" he asked.
"Well, I tried, but the rest of the data was heavily encrypted," Pence explained. "I couldn't get much farther than turning on the portal with the password you gave me and a medium-quality rendering of the town."
Riku chuckled. "DiZ told me after the fact that ice cream was a stupid password, but I convinced him to keep it. I said: 'Nobody would ever figure out that the secret code to your super-secure computer would be a snack that everyone loves!' And he bought it."
Everyone laughed. "I guess that explains the hole between dimensions in that simulation," Sora joked. "I wonder what other kinds of bugs he let get into the system when he was in one of those moods."
"Hey, you know, since Riku was working with Ansem during that time, he might be able to help you look further into the computer files," Goofy suggested.
"That's a good idea. Thanks, Goofy," Pence said. "Come on!" He led the group out of the White Room. Kairi followed a few seconds after and was the last to leave her other half's room.
When they took their first steps through the upper level of the foyer, they saw a swirl of grey thorns materialize in front of them. When the swirl faded, a trio gray humanoid figures with strange-looking heads and traditional-looking robes stood in front of them. These figures had a pair of sheathed swords slung over their backs.
Sora, Riku, Kairi, and Mickey jumped in front of Hayner, Pence and Olette and summoned their Keyblades, with Donald and Goofy a step behind them in defensive positions and summoned their staff and shield.
"Great! More of these things!" Hayner complained. "What's their quirk?"
"The Samurai Nobodies attack with both of their swords, and also the sheathes," Riku explained.
"How does that work?" Hayner asked, baffled.
"How does anything work with these things?" Sora countered. "Some can swim halfway through the floor, and others get dragged around by giant living hammers. At some point, you learn that there are things that you just don't question." He raised his Keyblade to deflect a sword strike and retaliated with a strike that sent his opponent reeling.
Kairi parried each of her adversary's strikes, which was not easy when it was slashing rapid-fire with both its swords and its sheathes. Riku's enemy found itself on the defensive when he blocked it from striking with a Dark Shield and teleported behind it to strike. Mickey was left as the odd swordsman out, so he decided to help Kairi rebound after her Samurai broke past her defenses and slashed her across the leg. He attacked the Samurai from the side, catching it off guard as he struck it in the arm. The first attack knocked it off balance, and he dealt a vertical swing that knocked it over the railing. Kairi recovered and cast Zero Gravity on the Samurai, bringing it back up to her level. She delivered a series of slashes and stabs until the spell faded, at which point the greatly-wounded Nobody dropped to the floor and disintegrated into clouds of a paper-like substance when it crash-landed.
Sora's Samurai took a duel stance, and Sora took a similar pose to meet its challenge. He waited for the right instant to clash with its strike. However, he was half a second too slow, and it attacked as he was beginning to raise his counter. The Samurai slid by him at lightning speed, dragging its blade through his gut. However, aside from some broken tissue and a bit of bleeding, Sora was not harmed too badly.
"The timing always gets me," Sora grunted. He spun around and delivered three hits. As he moved in as if to finish the combo, he took a step forward as if breaking into a run, then vanished. Half a second later, he reappeared behind the Samurai, in a position indicating that he had just finished an attack. The Samurai exploded, the unseen attack having brought an instantaneous victory.
"Whoa!" Hayner gasped. "What was that?"
However, Sora was too busy fighting to answer. Just as Riku had vanquished his opponent, six more Nobodies appeared, each resembling a tiny mercury-colored humanoid with a teardrop for a head and shoes for hands. One of the Creepers shifted into a floating sword and swiped at Sora and Mickey. Mickey parried the blow, sending it off balance. Sora struck while it was trying to regain its wits and it fell back to its normal form. Mickey, Donald and Goofy began attacking some of the other Creepers. Two of the creatures collapsed into balls, pulsed like beating hearts for a second, and then vanished. They came down from above in the form of spears. Kairi screamed in pain as one impaled itself into her foot. She sliced through the transformed Creeper several times with her Keyblade until it faded to nothingness. Donald noticed the injuries being racked up and cast Curaga, healing all wounds.
Noticing the hole in her shoe, Kairi glared at the other Creepers. "I really liked that shoe!" she yelled in frustration. "Aerora!" A powerful gust of wind blew through the mansion lifting the lightweight Creepers into the air. As the Nobodies were unable to defend themselves in this condition, the party struck them in midair until they were no more.
Once everything had calmed down, the heroes dismissed their weapons. They turned around to find Hayner, Pence and Olette, whose jaws had dropped in amazement.
"That was so cool!" Pence shouted excitably.
"Seriously, what was that when you just disappeared and reappeared and that thing went kablooey?" Hayner asked.
It took Sora a moment to figure out what he was talking about. "Oh. That? Our friend Leon called it 'Zantetsuken Slash'. I don't really know how it works. Best I can tell, I warp into a different plane where my speed increases for a few feet. My physical form doesn't connect with anything in front of me, but the Keyblade's energy reaches back to this plane. Since I don't actually touch the Nobody, or Heartless otherwise, so the Keyblade's raw power still slices through it. So, I guess that does more damage, somehow," Sora explained, with some difficulty.
"Huh. Well, that is a pretty neat trick," Hayner said.
Kairi pouted at the stab hole in her shoe and looked at Sora enviously. "How come your clothes don't get damaged?" she asked.
Sora shrugged. "I think I got a few cuts and holes over the last few months," he admitted. But I guess the fairies' magic made it so they repaired automatically."
Kairi crossed her arms in annoyance. "How come you're the only one who gets the magic clothes?" she muttered.
Sora shrugged. "Next time we see them, I'll ask them to do something for you."
"Either way, we should get to the computer room before any more of those Nobodies appear," Pence reminded them. The others nodded in agreement and continued walking around to the door on the opposite side of the foyer from the White Room.
The walls of the library were lined with shelves upon shelves of books. An alcove set into the wall in which the door was built held a statue resembling a unicorn head with wings. A significant portion of the floor was gone, leaving a staircase leading down two floors into a room with dark blue metal walls and floor with glowing green lines and squares around the place.
The party of nine descended into the highly-advanced basement where Ansem the Wise, in his guise of DiZ, conducted his work on the Simulated Twilight Town, ensuring that Sora's memories would be restored, and spying on Organization XIII via Riku. Riku knocked on a door beside the stairwell. The door slid open and they walked through one-at-a-time. They entered a room containing a large computer console with screens mounted above it and a small circular alcove to the right. None of the screens were active, as Pence had shut the computer down after he had finished using it months ago.
"Alright, let me turn this thing on," Pence said as he sat down in the chair and started pressing buttons to activate the computer system. A few seconds after flipping the Master switch and pressing the power buttons, the console started to light up. The screen directly in front of Pence lit up and, after a moment of loading, brought up a text input box requesting a password. "Okay, 'Sea-Salt Ice Cream', and…" He typed the password in and hit ENTER. The box disappeared and the screen remained blank while the computer loaded. The other screens gradually came online. One depicted a silhouette of Sora, with a blank graph that looked as though it was supposed to monitor vitals. "We're in!" Pence shouted triumphantly.
"Let's start with the Other Twilight Town," Hayner suggested.
Pence nodded. He double-clicked on a folder labeled "TT_Sim". A text input window appeared, requesting a password. "Hey, Riku?" he called out, prompting him for something to type in.
"Grid-nine-five-D-greater-than-sign-zero," Riku instructed. Pence nodded and typed it in: "Grid95D0". He hit ENTER.
A window opened up showing numerous .exe files, many of them sharing names with the town's citizens. At the top of the list, Pence noticed a folder labeled "Footage". He double-clicked on that and uncovered six files, "Day_ 4", "Day_ 4", "Day_ 4", "Day_ 4", "Day_ 4", and "Day_ 4", as well as a seventh, apparently AutoSaved, file, " 4".
"Freaky," Hayner said. "He had a copy of everyone, right down to Mrs. Cole's cat. And he used it to create a duplicate of our world."
"Why is it still recording?" Olette asked, noticing that the file size for the "Video1" video file increased all on its own. The file seemed to be far larger than the other files.
"Let's find out," Pence said. He double-clicked on the video file and a window popped up. A video played, with the screen segmented into nine sections. Each section showed a different part of town. The audience at the computer could see shoppers milling about Tram Common, an older woman swatting at bees with a broom, Seifer and his partners sparring in the Sandlot, Hayner, Pence and Olette themselves chatting in the Usual Spot, business as usual in the train station, people walking around and talking amongst friends at Sunset Terrace, a kid skateboarding at the Station Heights of Market Street, and a kid with a funny-looking witch's hat swatting trees with a foam bat in the Old Woods.
"They're just going about their business…" Sora observed.
"One would have thought Ansem would have shut this thing down after Roxas was done in it," Donald commented.
"Maybe he just left it alone when he left and it was just running on its own," Goofy surmised.
"And they're acting all on their own. Ansem did this at the end of the summer, right? He didn't install any conditions for the rest of the year," Pence mused. "And yet they're acting as if they've been doing this stuff their entire lives."
"Maybe from their experiences during the first week, acting out what they were programmed to do and how they were programmed to react, they developed a will to do those things on their own and have just been doing what to them is their everyday lifestyle," Kairi suggested.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Hayner asked.
"Kairi thinks they developed hearts of their own and are following their own will rather than what Ansem programmed into them," Sora summarized.
"What do you mean by 'developed hearts of their own'?" Olette asked.
"We've started to think that anything with a mind of its own, such as Nobodies or programs for example, can have a heart of its own, even if it didn't start out with one," Riku explained.
"Yeah, I'm just going to pretend I understand that," Hayner remarked.
"Hold on. Pence, can you go back out of the video folder?" Sora asked. Pence nodded, closed the video window, and click the back arrow on the file explorer. Sora took the mouse from Pence's hand and scrolled down past the names until he could see a list of locations. "Quick question, is there a beach around here?"
Pence nodded. "Yeah. It's outside of the town line, and you take the second train to get there," he explained. "Why do you ask?"
"Because it looks like there isn't one in here," Sora answered, pointing to the list of files named after locations.
"You're right!" Pence said on closer examination. "Why isn't there a beach?"
Riku chuckled and rolled his eyes. "Ansem said that it would only give the Dusks another access point to breach the system," he explained. "So I had to go to the trouble of tripping Roxas and stealing his Munny on his second day when he and the digital versions of you guys wanted to go to the beach so that you wouldn't fall into a void of a hanging hyperlink just because Ansem couldn't invest in securing his system."
Sora laughed. "He might as well have risked the extra access point since the Dusks breached the system on day one!" he quipped.
"What? Really?" Hayner gasped, amused.
"Play the video, Pence," Sora requested.
Pence entered the footage folder and double-clicked on the first file. They watched footage from Roxas' first day in the simulation. After it was over, everyone burst out laughing.
"It wasn't even ten minutes before the Nobodies had started messing around!" Hayner teased between fits of laughter.
"And he couldn't be bothered to make a beach!" Sora added.
"I called him out on it," Riku claimed. "It was pretty ridiculous. And then he told me to get rid of the Munny pouch because it 'didn't belong in the real world'. I mean, come on!"
They continued laughing, until they grew tired of it.
"Hey, what else do you think is on here?" Hayner asked.
Pence closed the video window and the file explorer and scanned around the desktop, looking for interesting shortcuts. He hovered the cursor over a folder labeled "Secret Ansem Reports". "What do you make of this?" he asked.
Sora waved it off. "Eh, we already found all of them," he said in a disinterested tone.
"Okay…" Pence hovered over a folder labeled "Xehanort ORG". "What about this?"
Mickey's face lit up. "That might be helpful," he said.
Pence double-clicked on the folder and a text input box appeared. "Password?" he requested.
"Revenge, all in capital letters, then the number thirteen," Riku answered.
"This guy had issues," Pence muttered. He typed the password in and hit ENTER. A file explorer opened up. "So, what's a 'Xehanort'?" he asked.
"Long story short, he was responsible for a lot of suffering in the past several years," Riku explained. "His Nobody was the leader of Organization XIII."
"When we defeat a Heartless and its corresponding Nobody, they reform as the original Somebody," Donald added. "But we haven't found anything about Xehanort coming back, even though a lot of the other Organization XIII members returned to normal. So, we're hoping to get some answers."
"Got it," Pence said, sort of understanding. He scrolled through the list of files. "Say, you want a copy of these files?" he asked. "Might give you some clues."
"That would be great," Sora said.
"Use this," Mickey said, taking a flash drive out of his pocket and handing it to Pence. Pence plugged it into a USB port and began dragging the files into the drive. When the progress bar filled up and the files were all copied, Pence ejected the drive and handed it back to Mickey, who pocketed the drive.
"I'm afraid that's all I'll be able to help you get into," Riku said apologetically. "I didn't really spend a lot of time in here, mostly providing updates and overseeing Roxas' week in the simulation."
"That's alright," Pence assured him. "I'm glad we got to see what we could." He started to begin shutting the computer down, but Riku stopped him.
"Hold on a moment," Riku said. "There's one thing I'd like to do. You guys go on ahead. I'll join you when I finish up."
Pence nodded and made room for Riku. The party then exited the room and returned to the mansion's foyer. They waited by the display until Riku rejoined them.
"You sure the stuff on that little stick will help you?" Hayner asked as they stepped out the front doors.
"Could give us a few leads," Mickey said. "If Ansem had figured out any of Xehanort's greater plans, this might help us understand what happened to him."
Sora crossed his hands behind his head. "It was interesting taking another look through the old mansion."
"Sure was," Goofy agreed.
As the group exited through the woods to return to town, Kairi remained behind for a moment. He opened up her tablet pouch and pulled out a piece of paper. She held the paper in front of her and stared at the two hooded figures in the drawing with Roxas and Axel, wondering what it all meant.
"Naminé, why aren't you answering me?" she asked in a mumble. "Who is this girl?"
When her questions were met with silence and a hesitation that she could clearly feel within her heart, Kairi sighed. She slipped the drawing back into her pouch and ran to rejoin her friends.