When their ship had made her way a comfortable distance from the hangar, Sarah squeezed the triggers for the ship's guns and held the things down. Any and all enemy ships that crossed into their line of fire were blown into useless, unrecognizable shrapnel, though Sarah found herself wishing more than a few times for more and better types of guns. Still, the standard load out chewed through Heartless ships well enough to clear the way for them to continue onward, at least.
Soon enough, they were looking down upon their new destination from high-orbit, and from there crossing into mid- and finally low-orbit. Seen from so high above, the small planet that they were currently settling into orbit around was a rather pleasant looking place; the varied greens of meadows and forests nicely offsetting the small blue patches of what were either large lakes or small, inland seas. All in all, it looked like a rather nice place to visit. But, as Donald selected their LZ and began the landing-cycle, Sarah couldn't help but wonder what new obstacles and challenges they were all going to end up facing on this little planet.
Well, I suppose it's time we all found out, Sarah reflected, as she rose from her seat and swung her supply-pack back onto "her" back.
Smiling slightly as she felt Kuromaru nuzzling her through the fabric, Sarah fell into step with Donald and Goofy as the three of them plus one made their way off the ship.
"Either of you two know which way we'd be best served heading?" she asked, sweeping both Donald and Goofy with her gaze.
"That way," Donald said almost immediately, pointing straight forward, further into the forest clearing that their ship had landed reasonably close to.
"Fair enough," she allowed, nodding sharply.
The three of them made their way into the clearing, crossing into a meadow filled with daisies nearly as far as the eye could see. As the three of them continued to explore the meadow, Sarah began to hear a rather familiar sound: the plaintive mew of a distressed kitten. The three of them had split up at her suggestion, in order to cover as much ground as they could manage during the course of their search, and since it seemed like the kitten she'd started hearing was in her chosen area of investigation, Sarah turned her attention to searching for the kitten, rather than continuing to hunt for some nebulous, undefined other thing that might or might not be able to help them along on their current undertaking.
Soon enough, she'd managed to find the little thing; and it was a little thing, not even half-grown, judging by the size of its paws and ears. For the sake of being accurate about a creature that actually had a physical sex that she could identify, unlike Kuromaru and its seemingly genderless, sexless ilk, Sarah gently picked up the little kitten and looked under its tail; her tail, rather.
"What's the matter, little kitty?" she asked, gently stroking the kitten from head to tail-tip. "You get lost out here?"
The kitten mewed all the more plaintively as Sarah sat down next to her, pushing her head into Sarah's borrowed right hand, and Sarah obliged her by scritching at her ears. The more she observed of the kitten's behavior, the more obvious it became that – however lost this little kitten might have been – she had only become lost recently. She was clearly still feeling the loss of her caretaker, as well as anyone else she might have been living with.
"Aww, where'd you find the kitten, Sora?"
Looking up, Sarah smiled gently at Goofy. "I think she's lost; I heard her crying when I made it halfway through this clearing."
"Well, leave her," Donald said harshly. "We don't have time to go around helping lost kittens."
Before anyone else could say anything, the little kitten got back up, firmly butted "her" folded left leg, and started heading determinedly forward.
"I think she wants us to follow her," she said, for the benefit of her two companions, if they hadn't surmised that already.
"We don't have time for this!" Donald protested, as Goofy started tailing the kitten with her. "We have to find the King and stop the Heartless."
"If you want to continue your sweep of the meadow, be my guest," she said, giving the short-tempered drake a rather unimpressed look. "But this is the closest thing to a lead we've got, and I'm not going to reject it out of hand."
Donald looked like he'd have been saying something else, if only he could figure out how to properly word things, but the expression passed and all he actually did was to sigh long and loudly as he fell into step with them.
In the end, the little kitten led them to a hole in the ground that looked like it would be a nearly impossible fit if she'd been in her proper body. So, perhaps there were some advantages to her current situation. Of course, there were advantages to nearly every situation; one simply had to look for them. Crouching down in front of the hole that the little kitten had pointed out with her right front paw, Sarah reached out with "her" own right hand and grasped the top of the hole, while also giving the little kitten that had led them all there a few gentle strokes between the ears.
Sticking "her" head into the hole, after a few, long moments of attempting to peer inside had left her no more aware of what might have been at the bottom of that hole than she'd had when she started looking, Sarah found that the darkness was just as pervasive as ever, but she got the impression of vast depths almost directly beneath her, and the scent of fresh air wafting up toward her only confirmed that there was something more than she was capable of seeing right at the moment.
"I think this is a lot deeper than it looks," she reported, crouching and slipping off her supply-pack so that she could rummage through it for the other items that she was going to need for this next part of her investigation.
Pulling out one of the water bottles she carried with her, she scruffed Kuromaru's antennae in passing as the Shadow peeked its head out at her, and set the bottle down so that she could begin the next phase. Plucking two large fistfuls of long grass from the stands alongside the burrow hole she was investigating, Sarah folded them over double, twisted the lower parts into a knot so that she would be able to hold the whole thing together a bit more easily and then began to soak the bottom part of her makeshift torch and the hand she was going to use to hold it: "her" left. The soaking would serve to discourage the spread of the fire for at least long enough for her to get some sort of a look at what the little kitten had led them all to.
"Donald, you mind lighting this for me?" she asked, holding up the torch and tilting "her" head toward it. I'd like to get a closer look at where we all might be going."
Donald and Goofy both looked stunned; they'd probably never seen anyone MacGyver up a short-use torch to further investigate a hole in the ground before.
"Sora, that would be too dangerous," Donald said, after a few moments of hesitation. "Fire magic isn't a toy."
"Well, if you know a better way to get some like down this hole so we can see where it leads, I'm all ears," she said, turning slightly so that she could give Donald some of her attention while she spoke. "If not, then would you mind?"
She shifted into a half-kneeling position, holding up the torch so that the drake couldn't be mistaken about what she wanted. Donald seemed to be deep in thought, staring at the short-use torch in "her" left hand with the kind of intensity that most people reserved for solving difficult math equations or things of that ilk, and then the drake closed his eyes. Sarah wondered briefly what could have drawn such intense focus on Donald's part, but since the fact that he needed such was plainly obvious, Sarah put her curiosity aside and just settled herself more comfortably to await the conclusion of whatever it was that Donald was attempting to do.
"Light!" the drake bellowed at last.
Four spheres of the stuff, shimmering with colorless radiance, erupted from the tip of Donald's staff, and Sarah raised "her" eyebrows slightly as they all came to float gently around her.
She chuckled softly. "Yeah, that works, too."
Tossing the now-superfluous short-use torch into a stand of tall grass, pretty much the same kind that she had used to make it in the first place, Sarah firmly grasped the top of the burrow hole she was going to be taking a deeper look into, and leaned the upper-half of "her" body into it once more. The scent of warm earth and all the things that lived in it was rather faint, but that could be very easily explained by the gaping chasm that Sarah could now see opened up just beyond what faint sunlight could make it into this odd, not-so-little burrow hole.
Even with the four spheres to light the way, the chasm still appeared fathomless; and so Sarah pulled herself back out of the burrow hole, with only a minor bit of help from Goofy that she could have just as easily done without, and sat back on "her" haunches in front of it.
"Well, I definitely say that that hole is bigger than it looks," she said, dusting off "her" hands from the bits of loose soil that had been clinging to them. "I still couldn't see the bottom, even with the extra light."
"That's not good," Donald said, glaring at the burrow hole like it had personally offended him.
The kitten mewed plaintively again, so Sarah scratched her under the chin and behind the ears until she'd calmed back down, all while Donald and Goofy were having a rather heated discussion held entirely in whispers.
"Anything I should know about?" she called over, even as the kitten rolled over to lay against "her" left leg and Sarah began rubbing her soft, furry belly.
"No," Donald called back, more than a little snappishly.
"We were just tryin' to decide whether we should follow the kitten, or keep lookin' for somethin' else in this meadow," Goofy called back, cheerful as he ever was.
"Fair enough," she called back. "Keep me posted."
Donald and Goofy's little discussion continued for a bit longer, though given the annoyed expression on the drake's face it seemed like Goofy had been the one to come out on top that time.
"So, which way are we going to be moving out?" she asked, rising smoothly back to "her" feet and dusting off Sora's shorts.
"We're going to be going down that burrow that you and the kitten found," Donald said, sounding supremely unenthusiastic about the whole prospect.
"Fair enough," she allowed. "You know any spells that could be used to cushion our fall? I'm not particularly eager to shatter any bones in the landing."
"Yeah, I know some," Donald said, now sounding resigned to what they were going to be doing next.
"Why don't I go first?" Goofy offered.
"It might be best if I go first," she said, thoughtfully peering into the depths of the burrow hole for a few moments before turning her attention back to her compatriots. "No telling what we might end up finding down there."
"Golly, that's generous of you, Sora," Goofy said, smiling brightly.
She smiled back, just as the little kitten that had led them all here in the first place mewed all the more insistently for the time she'd been silent. When the kitten stood up on her hind legs, latching onto the left leg of Sora's shorts with every one of her tiny front claws, Sarah looked back down. Crouching so that she could gently extract the kitten's claws from the hem of Sora's shorts, Sarah stroked the kitten's little head.
"I suppose you want to come with us, right?" she asked, an amused smile on "her" face for the rhetorical question she was asking.
The kitten mewed all the more plaintively up at her, and Sarah smiled more gently as she scratched the kitten behind the ears and made gentle sounds of reassurance to the distressed animal. Donald made some easily-ignored protests in the background, but he couldn't really stop her when she tucked the little kitten safely away in Sora's left pocket unless he was willing to actually do something.
"See you on the other side, gentlemen," she said, having seated herself just outside the entrance to the burrow hole like the thing was just one more waterslide that she was planning to go down. "Allons-y!"
Flinging herself feet-first into space, the first thing that Sarah noticed as she fell was that, however it was happened, the force of gravity was severely lessened once she'd made it past the boundaries of the borrow hole she'd started down. The walls she was falling past now were also noticeably different than the crumbled soil that she'd passed so quickly when she'd first let herself fall into whatever this strange place was, and Sarah couldn't help the thought that it all seemed rather familiar, if only from some movie that she didn't remember all that well.
Maybe it was something Mom liked, she mused, turning to look toward the ground so that she would better be able to judge the distance, so she'd know just when to crouch for the landing. As it turned out, the ground was coming up at them even as she watched, so Sarah swung "her" legs back under "her" body just as "her" feet touched the floor, crouching to lessen the already-negligible impact of her landing.
Donald landed pretty well himself, but Goofy ended up performing a rather spectacular belly-flop when he did.
"Are you all right?" she called, since the anthropomorphic dog had seemed rather stunned by his encounter with the ground.
Before he could answer her, however, they heard the sound of someone in a great hurry rushing past. Sarah thought that he – it turned out to be a white rabbit wearing various shades of red – had a rather stereotypically fussy-sounding voice.
"Looks like we found our next lead," she said, as the rabbit dashed past them without seeming to notice that they were there in the first place; not really the best idea, that. "Let's go."
The others were quick to agree to that, with even the kitten giving an encouraging mew as the three of them – plus two now, considering her current passengers – set off after the rabbit. They pursued him up to a door, set neatly at the end of the tunnel that he had run off into, but before any of the three of them who were actually capable of speech could say anything, the rabbit pulled open the door in front of him. Then he pulled open another, smaller door; he repeated the process twice more, leaving their group facing a substantially smaller opening than they would have been otherwise.
Sarah raised "her" eyebrows. "Well, that was interesting."
It was yet another time she found herself grateful for Sora's smaller stature; navigating these tight corridors would have been a bitch and a half if she'd still been as tall and comparatively broad-shouldered as she was normally. Once all of them had managed to slip through the comparatively smaller space behind the smallest of the four doors, Sarah found that they were only just in time to watch the rabbit, looking quite a bit smaller than he had before, go dashing through another door at the far end of the room that they were all now standing on the threshold of.
Making her way further into the room itself, Sarah took a moment to study her new surroundings. The room itself was done in pale shades of pinkish-lavender, and the floor was a checkerboard pattern of terra-cotta and peach tones; not a scheme she would have put together on her own, but rather complimentary all the same. Inside the room it seemed rather crowded, however: to her left were a pair of brownish-orange, rather plush looking chairs placed side-by-side next to a rounded shelf that had itself been build into the corner of the room; a corner that didn't even have the same color scheme as the rest of the room, being a sort of off-white with a pale-blue diamond pattern as opposed to the rest of the room's pinkish-lavender with stylized, orangish-red carrots in those same, pale shades; and oddly enough, the near-left corner was the only one that such could be said about, with the three others maintaining the color scheme of the room itself.
She wondered if there was a particular reason for that.
However, the two chairs weren't the only things contributing to the generally cluttered feeling of the room they were all standing in now: still on the left, just a bit past the chairs, was a bluish-purple clock, like one of those old grandfather clocks if they'd been made by someone who had a serious thing for rabbits, and just beyond that, in the actual far-left corner was a tall, four-poster bed that looked freshly made. And all of that was just on the left side of the room.
The right, though it possessed less furniture, was no less crowded than the left, owing in large part to the brick-and-stone fireplace that took up most of the wallspace on that side, though the right side of the room wasn't completely devoid of furniture: there was a large, yellow vase sitting under a dull silver faucet that looked about the right size to be displayed at the front of a Ripley's Believe It Or Not. The only other pieces of furniture were towards the center of the room: a potted flower of some indeterminate genus with large, pointed white petals, and in the very center of the room was a three-legged table that looked like it had been made entirely out of blue-tinted glass, and in front of it, at least to anyone who'd just come into the room the five of them had, was a pinkish-magenta cushioned chair, with a red-checked pattern and a pair or rabbit-style ears on the back-cushion, and the supports of said chair appearing to be made of the same blue-tinted glass as the table itself. Sarah wondered briefly how that was even supposed to work, but since her curiosity was admittedly idle, Sarah put it aside and turned her attention back to the path that their current quarry had taken.
"How do you think he got so small?" she asked, having taken note of the clear differences in the rabbit's size from when he'd run into this odd little room, to when he'd run out through that other door.
"No, no, you're all simply too big."
"Who said that?" Donald demanded, whipping around to check all of their angles of approach, few as they were at the moment, with his staff raised and ready to bring down arcane destruction raining down on the head of anyone unfortunate enough to have raised his ire.
Crouching, since the voice that had just spoken had sounded like it came from somewhere below them, Sarah called out. "Hello? You still in here?"
"Must you all be so loud? This is the second time I've been woken up today."
Sarah chuckled; here was something you didn't see everyday. "You think it might come with the territory? You are a doorknob, after all."
"Even a doorknob needs his sleep," the talking doorknob, who had a rather masculine-sounding voice for a genderless, animated inanimate object, said.
"Fair enough, I suppose," she allowed. "Do you know of any way we might be able to get to what's on the other side of you?"
"You'll want to have a bit from the bottle on the table," the doorknob said, pointing back over "her" left shoulder at the tinted-glass table behind them.
"What bottle?" she wondered aloud, turning "her" head just in time to see a bottle literally appear out of nowhere. "Huh; that's convenient."
Rising back to "her" feet, Sarah stepped over to the table and picked up the bottle.
"Drink me," she said, reading the tag that had been tied around the small neck of the transparent bottle. "Well, that's about as succinct as you can ask for, I guess," she said, chuckling a bit at the sheer absurdity of the situation.
Peering a bit closer at the liquid inside the jar, Sarah found that it was as perfectly clear as tap water.
"Nothing ventured, nothing gained, I suppose," she muttered, taking a small swallow of the liquid.
Passing it off to Donald, she tried to identify just what in the hell the stuff she'd just had a drink of had tasted like. It hadn't been tasteless like tap water, but all the same she wasn't quite sure just what flavor it actually was.
Cherry soda? She paused, the flavor on "her" tongue fading away almost as quickly as she'd had the chance to notice it. No, turkey sandwich, maybe? Again, that was sort of what she was tasting, but the flavor vanished before she could really do more than notice it. The next flavor she was briefly aware of was the taste of well-brewed root beer, and then least of all fudge; though that of all flavors did linger on "her" tongue, prompting a soft chuckle.
"What's so funny, Sora?" Donald asked, as the three of them moved to rejoin each other across what had become a rather large space.
"That was a rather interesting combination of flavors," she said, then paused for a moment as a thought tame to her. "Or maybe I should call it a succession; none of them actually blended," she continued, speaking more to herself as the four of them made their way over to the doorknob. "Anyway," she said, turning her attention to said knob. "We're all the right size now, so would you mind letting us through?"
The doorknob chuckled, prompting Sarah to raise an eyebrow at the thing in response.
"I don't suppose I mentioned this before," the thing chuckled again, and Sarah lowered "her" eyelids slightly in annoyance. "But I'm locked."
"And here I am without my lock picks," she deadpanned, over Donald's exclamation. A moment's concentration brought the Keyblade back to hand. "I do have this, though. Do you think this might work?"
The doorknob blinked twice in surprise – Sarah took a moment to laugh inwardly at the sheer surreality of the situation – as she held up the key-shaped weapon with a questioning sort of air. "Well," he said, sounding about as flummoxed as he looked. "I suppose there wouldn't be any great harm in trying."
That said, the doorknob opened his keyhole/mouth wide, and Sarah stepped forward so that she was in reach with Sora's comparatively shorter arms. A hand on the left of the doorknob's brass plate face helped Sarah to steady herself as she lined the Keyblade back and up into line with the keyhole. Gently inserting it, Sarah bit down on the inside of both Sora's cheeks in an effort not to laugh aloud at what she was doing. You try not to think about porn, she mused, turning the Keyblade slightly and hearing an answering click from deep within the door somewhere.
As the door swung smoothly open and the three of them walked through, she saw the pair of eyes on the other side of the door blink to life.
"Do have a safe journey," the doorknob said, already yawning and looking like he was about to nod off again.
"Thanks," she called back, just as the door clicked closed and the doorknob fell right back to sleep. "Interesting guy," she commented, as the three of them fell into step once more, after having to separate to file through the door.
"Yeah," Donald muttered, though he sounded like he had a rather more unkind opinion.
The three of them made their way through what seemed to her like the outer-edges of a neatly-trimmed hedge maze, and Sarah could only be grateful that they wouldn't be required to solve the thing. Sure, puzzles and brain-teasers were fun, but only when one had the time for them; judging by everything she'd heard, and everything she could remember, this mission of theirs was time-sensitive.
The sound of raised voices drew her attention first, but Donald and Goofy were quick to take notice, as well. Taking point, Sarah followed the sounds to a clearing that had obviously been set up as some kind of makeshift courtroom. Narrowing "her" eyes in thought as she listened to the accusations being laid out, Sarah could see the shape of the situation before them; and what the price of silence might very well be.
"Your Honor," she called, stepping away from the shelter of the hedge maze's entrance. "Permission to approach the bench?"
The judge: a large, heavyset woman with her black hair pulled into a severe bun, wearing a fur-trimmed dress whose pattern reminded Sarah a great deal of Harley Quinn, looked up from the pronouncement she was making. The two of them were a bit far apart for Sarah to discern something as subtle as facial expressions, but given the loosening of tension all along the woman's upper-body, Sarah was tentatively willing to call her attempt a win.
"What a polite little boy." The woman had a fluted, fluttery, "upper-class" sort of laugh. "Of course you can, my dear."
"Thank you, Your Honor," she said, making her way up to the podium where the woman presided over the court. "I don't intend to presume, but I believe I have some evidence that could shed a great deal more light on this case of yours."
Now that she stood closer to the presiding judge, Sarah could see the expression on the woman's face change from one of honest pleasure to that of rather grudging curiosity. "Hrmph. Well, I suppose that such a polite request deserves to be at least considered."
"Thank you, Your Honor," she said again, in spite of the very real urge she had to roll "her" eyes; elaborate courtesy was the key to handling these kinds of people, and her passing annoyance was not worth taking the very real chance that someone might be murdered for a display of it.
Removing her supply-pack, she set the thing gently down on the ground and unzipped it. Kuromaru peered up at her for only a few, fleeting moments, before the little Shadow clambered right back up to the place it had claimed on "her" back.
"This is a Shadow," she said, waving "her" left hand back at Kuromaru where the little Heartless perched. "It's one of the weaker forms of a kind of creature – or class of creatures, I suppose – called Heartless. My companions and I have been encountering them more and more often on our travels lately. I don't know of anyone who knows where they actually come from, but I do know that Kuromaru here is the only one who doesn't seem to be actively hostile," she continued, as the judge folded her arms and pursed her lips.
"So, you think it was one of these Heartless creatures that attacked me?" the judge asked, sounding more than a little annoyed.
Sarah put that aside and forged on. "Given what you described your assailant doing, it'd have to say that definitely sounds like the Heartless' MO," she paused for a moment, considering her next words carefully. "It was discovered some time ago that the only things capable of destroying the Heartless are powerful magics or certain types of weapons," she paused for breath, and to gauge the interest-levels of the people around her; the presiding judge in particular, since it was more than clear by now that she was the one in charge of everything.