Once that'd all been taken care of, the four of them teleported back up to Fere so that they could leave the planet behind at last. Once she'd blasted her way through the usual squads upon squads of Heartless ships, clearing their path back to Traverse Town – so that they would be able to get back without getting Fere damaged, or being blown off course or anything like that – Sarah allowed herself to relax as Donald brought them back into the hangar again. Settling back into her seat, Sarah relaxed just that much more as Fere came into range and was towed back into the hangar.
~KH1~
When that weird kid who was still pretending to be Sora went off to have dinner with the duck – who was a jerk – and the dog guy – who was a lot nicer – Riku tried to tell the kid that he was going to try to meet up with that guy that the two of them had been talking to about Darkness and how to use it, but he seemed to have guessed. Waving to the kid, and getting a promise that he'd pick Riku up a burger and some onion rings for dinner, Riku chuckled as he walked away.
Reaching out to the Darkness all around him, Riku soon found the familiar Heart of the man who'd been helping them.
"You've returned," he said, sounding happy.
"Something weird's been happening when I try to draw on my Darkness," he said, thinking back on the songs he'd heard – really faintly, but they'd still been there – while he'd been sparring with Hercules and those other guys.
"Indeed?"
"Yeah," he said. "I've started hearing some kind of songs. A lot of them were really exciting," he continued, grinning.
"Exciting?"
"Yeah," he said, nodding. "I think there were people singing, but it was either really quiet or really far away, because I couldn't really tell what any of them were saying."
"Interesting," the man said, folding his arms. "See if you manage to hear anything else, the next time you find yourself pressed to using your Darkness."
"I will," he said, turning to make his way back to the hotel where he, Kairi, and that weird kid were all staying.
~KH1~
When the scent of fresh rain on warm concrete hit "her" nose, Sarah paused for a moment to see if False-Ansem was about to eject himself through the balcony door again, before the smaller form of Riku resolved itself from the swirling mists.
"Hey, welcome back," she called, once Riku had become fully visible again. "Your food is on the table. It's actually packed into a special case, to keep it warm."
"Thanks," Riku said, making his way over to the table, after a brief pause to check on Kairi.
"All right, you little magpie, fetch," she ordered, folding "her" arms as she looked sternly down at Kuromaru, who'd curled up on her bed.
She'd been noticing that her supply-pack had been getting slightly heavier during the course of the journey that she and her group had been undertaking. Once Kuromaru had brought Sarah her supply-pack, she zipped it open. Inside were four loose papers, a few manila folders, and what seemed to be a sock, stuffed with loose coins.
Tossing the bag down on her bed, Sarah flipped through the folders. They seemed to be some kind of information about the Heartless, amusingly enough.
"Hey, what're those?" Riku asked, making his way over to where she was sitting.
"I'm not entirely sure of that, myself," she said, turning to straighten the sheaf of papers she was holding, using the nightstand. "I'm going to go ask Cid about them," she continued, turning back to Riku as she settled down on the bed for a moment. "You want to come with."
"Sure, let's go," Riku said, after a moment's pause.
"All right, then," she said, hopping up from the bed, as Kuromaru latched itself to "her" back and Riku fell into step beside her.
The pair of them made their way out of the room, stopping for a moment to put on their respective shoes, then continuing on their way through the Second District. Taking her shortcut as they made their way to the front door of Cid's shop. Tucking the papers and the folders under "her" left arm, Sarah reached out to open the doors, when Riku opened them for her.
"Thanks," she said, as the pair of them made their way inside, with Kuromaru along for the ride.
"Hey kids," Cid greeted, waving to the pair of them as she and Riku made their way up to the counter he stood behind. "What brings you back here?"
"Kuromaru's been picking up some strange things," she said, putting the stack of papers that the little Shadow had been picking up from… wherever they'd originally been.
"These are Ansem's reports," Cid said, looking pleased and a bit surprised. "And, I think I heard Merlin mentionin' some kind of old book that the Heartless destroyed," the blond chuckled, slanting a glance at Kuromaru. "Kinda funny that a Heartless would be the one ta find 'em again."
"I guess I should go see Merlin about these, then," Sarah said, taking a moment to straighten the papers she'd been carrying.
"I'll come with you," Riku said, all but appearing at her side as Sarah prepared to leave.
"All right," she said, more than a little amused as she and Riku left Cid's shop on their way to the Third District.
Once the pair of them had crossed the courtyard that dominated the Third District, pausing for a moment as the flame-marked door retracted into the ceiling and the drifting rocks lined themselves up into a neat path for them to walk across, Sarah led the way as the pair of them plus Kuromaru continued on, crossing the lake to Merlin's tea kettle-shaped house.
"Welcome, Sora, Riku," Merlin said, rising from his chair to greet the pair of them with a hearty handshake each. "Cid informed me that your Heartless managed to find the scattered pages of the book I have been repairing. I also have something for you, as well, Sora," the old wizard said, digging through a small box on the desk he'd been sitting behind when she'd first lifted the checkered curtain that served as a door for this place. "I constructed this Keychain with the aid of Yen Sid, considering you obvious interest in both creating new spells, and studying so that you may determine just what is possible," Merlin continued, smiling widely as he fetched a chain with a star-topped wand at the end of it. "I named this new creation of mine Wizard's Apprentice. Do try it out."
"Thanks," she said, taking the Keychain with her left and summoning the Keyblade into her right.
Once she'd attached said new Keychain, Sarah watched as the Keyblade transformed into the new form that had been created for it. The teeth of the key became the right half of a five-pointed star; the shaft became a deep, purple-blue, blazoned itself with tiny, twinkling stars; the grip and the hilt turned blue and gold, respectively, outlined with five-pointed stars that glimmered silver in the light, and the star-topped Keychain now dangled freely from the bottom of the reformed Keyblade.
"Looks good, but what does it do?" she asked.
"It will aid you in gathering Mana from the surrounding environment, and it will also make a record of the new spells that you create," Merlin said, gesturing to a gold-embossed book with a dark-blue cover.
It was almost the same color as the TARDIS, actually.
"Interesting," she said, looking from Merlin to the book that he'd either created or repurposed to use with the new Keychain he'd clearly spent a lot of time crafting. "What do you want me to do with these?" she asked, holding out the four pages that Kuromaru had managed to recover from one or more of the other planets that she and her people had found their way to during the course of their search for both King Mickey and a way to stop the Heartless incursion.
"Those were torn out when my book was damaged by the Heartless," Merlin said, adjusting his glasses as he leaned down to set down the book he'd presumably created and picked up a nearby book. This one looked more like a storybook, and there was even something familiar about it, too… "So, if you would be willing to place them back inside, that would be very helpful."
"All right," she said, taking the book, as he handed it over to her.
When she started to put the first of the four pages back into the book, however, Sarah found the room she'd been standing in washed away by a sudden burst of white light. When the light cleared at last, Sarah found both herself and Riku standing in what seemed to be the center of an empty clearing. Shades of Myst, she mused, as "her" eyes landed on a nearby fallen log.
"Did we… Are we inside the book?" Riku wondered aloud, staring around the clearing the pair of them had ended up in.
"I think we might be," she said, catching sight of what looked like some kind of a living stuffed toy. "Hi!" she called, once she'd gotten close enough to see that she was looking at a stuffed toy.
A bear, in fact; wearing a red t-shirt and nothing else.
"Oh, hello," the bear said, sounding like a rather genial old man; Sarah couldn't have quite said what she'd been expecting him to sound like, but it hadn't been that. "Have you both come to say goodbye to Pooh, too?" he asked.
"Is that a friend of yours?" she asked, curious about how many people – human or otherwise – there were in this world-inside-a-book that she and Riku were currently standing in.
The bear actually laughed in response, though he did so softly.
"No, that's my name," he said, chuckling. "I'm Winnie the Pooh; Pooh, for short."
"So, you're trying to say goodbye to yourself?" she asked, smirking and biting back a laugh of her own. "How would that even work?"
"That's what I was trying to think about, before the both of you showed up," Pooh said, cheerful expression still firmly on his face.
She and Riku shared a look; semi-amused in her case, meeting Riku's disapproval.
"There's no point sitting around here doing nothing," Riku said, standing up abruptly from the log where the three of them had been sitting. "Why don't we find some of the other people here?"
"Oh, they've all gone away," Pooh said, the oblivious cheerfulness of his tone beginning to become more than a little sad, considering their present circumstances.
"What?" Riku demanded, snapping back around to face Pooh, after having started off in what looked looked like merely the direction of more clearing. "You mean that, every one of your friends has disappeared, and instead of looking for them as hard as you can, you're just going to sit there and wait for yourself to disappear, too?!"
Riku sounded like he was on the verge of some form of apoplexy, and while that was really kind of funny, it would be better see that nothing went too wrong.
"Let's see if we can find them, then," she suggested, standing back up herself.
"Right," Riku said, nodding sharply.
"So, where was the last place you saw them?" she asked, moving to stand in front of Pooh so that the pair of them could speak more clearly.
"Well, I think that I might have Piglet around the honey tree," Pooh said, pronouncing the name of what was presumably one of his friends as though it had three syllables rather than two.
"All right, which way should we head if we want to get there?" she asked, suspecting that Pooh's desire to go to this honey tree of his was more wishful thinking than anything, but she figured that it would be as good a place to start as any.
As she and Riku fell into step behind the bear, Sarah wondered for a moment just what it was that Pooh actually wanted. She didn't know if he could actually eat or anything, but she supposed that it wouldn't be the strangest thing she'd had to deal with since starting this whole, strange journey of hers.
The tree that she and Riku were being lead to turned out to be a large, tall, bushy thing. It was taller than any of the other trees she'd seen anywhere else on the other planets that she and her people had visited before they'd come here to this place. Really, this tree seemed almost like it'd come from a forest back home.
"So, who exactly were you expecting to find here?" she asked, turning to look at the little stuffed bear that was currently leading their procession, hoping to remind Pooh that they were here to do more than just sightsee, since it was starting to seem like he'd forgotten.
Pooh didn't seem much in the mood to talk, if the enraptured way he was sniffing the air as he stared up the length of the tree was any indication.
"Well, it looks like it's just going to be the two of us searching for Piglet," she said, giving Riku a sidelong smirk as the pair of them stopped before the clearing that the towering tree stood at the center of.
"Yeah," Riku said, narrowing his eyes as he shot a glare at the teddy bear that had led them to this place.
"Come on," she said, stepping around the bear and making her way into the clearing.
Scanning the grounds, looking for anyone who might fit what could only loosely be considered a description. A flash of darting pink, just at the extreme left of her current field of view drew Sarah's attention to the ring of bushes surrounding the base of the tree, and she turned to Riku. "Come on."
Riku nodded, and the pair of them split off to circle around opposite sides of the large bush at the base of the tree in front of them. For once, Riku's marked tendency to leap before he looked served their purposes, driving the small – nearly hand-sized on even Sora, she realized, once she'd picked the little thing up – pink-suited pig out of the bushes and into "her" arms.
"Hi," she said softly, trying to calm the little pig down as it shivered in "her" arms.
"Hello," the miniature pig – presumably the "Piglet" that that Pooh had mentioned – said, then quickly turned to face Riku as the silver-haired boy made his way over to where the pair of them were.
"Calm down," she said, reaching up to gently hold Piglet closer as he tried to squirm free. "He's not that bad, once you get to know him."
"He really thinks I'm scary?" Riku asked, sounding like he didn't quite believe it.
Sarah chuckled. "He's nearly small enough to fit in your hand, Riku. At that scale, most things are scary."
Riku smirked back, and the pair of them made their way back over to Pooh.
"We found your friend," she said, once the pair of them stood in front of the stuffed bear again.
"Oh, hello Piglet," Pooh said, once again pronouncing the name in that odd, tripartite way he'd done before.
"Pooh!" the little pig called happily, and Sarah let him down from "her" arms now that he didn't seem apt to run off heedlessly anymore. "I'm so happy to see you!" the little pig exclaimed, the sheer difference between their respective heights drawing up something of a comparison between herself and Kuromaru.
Even in Sora's body, she still stood half-again the Shadow's height.
"Of course, Piglet," Pooh said, with that same tripartite pronunciation; Sarah was was starting to think that it was just a personal quirk, since it didn't really sound like any kind of regional accent she'd ever heard. "I could never leave you."
Smirking amusedly at Riku – since it hadn't been that long since the pair of them had had to give the bear the proverbial kick in the ass he'd needed to get moving again – Sarah noticed that Riku actually seemed angry about what they were both seeing. She clapped Riku's right shoulder before the silver-haired boy could do something impulsive, the way he tended to do when she didn't keep a lid on him.
Sarah shook "her" head, knowing that there wasn't much point getting into an argument that would only waste time and stir up bad feelings that neither of them needed at the moment.
"I found what you wanted," Piglet said, hurrying back into the bushes to fetch a large, pale-blue balloon.
"Thank you, Piglet," the bear said cheerfully, grinning widely as he looked up the length of the balloon's ribbon. "Now I can finally have some honey!"
"Oh?" Piglet asked, sounding about as curious as Sarah felt. "How are you going to do that?"
"I shall float like a bee up the honey tree, see?" Pooh said, gaze taking in the entirety of the towering tree before them all.
"Oh dear," Piglet said, voice quavering as he, too looked up the length of the tree the four of them now stood in the shadow of. "Would y-you… I mean, if it's not too much trouble, would you mind protecting Pooh from the bees?" the little pig hesitated a long moment. "I mean, if it's not too much trouble."
"Sure."
"What?" Riku asked, turning to look at her with an expression of frank incredulity.
"You ever climb a tree this big?" she asked, raising a slightly challenging eyebrow at the silver-haired boy as she turned back to him. "It's really good exercise. Besides, swarming bees make quite the challenging target," she said, watching the expression on Riku's face change and knowing that she had him.
"All right," Riku said, grinning as he himself looked up the length of the towering tree they both stood at the base of.
The pair of them leaped up into the lower branches of the large tree before them, and Sarah made sure to keep "her" eyes on the bear's progress as he made his way up the tree. Once he started closing in on the first of the beehives that hung from the branches of the tree, Sarah recalled the Keyblade and took aim at the closest of the hives, just as it had begun swarming with bees.
"Tornado Shotgun!" she shouted, gathering her personal stores of Mana and combining it with the environmental Mana of this place to create a horizontal tornado that tore through the swarming bees, scattering them and throwing the hive off into the distance.
"That was great!" Riku called up, as Sarah herself clambered up to a nearby, higher branch.
"Thanks," she called back, pausing for a moment to catch her breath.
Turning to watch Pooh as he continued on his way up the tree, Sarah herself climbed up to the next branch. The hive hanging from that branch was already beginning to swarm with bees. Aiming another Tornado Shotgun at the hive and all of its swarming bees, she smirked as she watched that one fly off to join its partner.
Looking up the length of the tree again, Sarah sighed with more than a little relief as she saw that the crown of said tree was only a few feet above them.
"We're almost to the end, if you just look up," she called, turning to look back at the silver-haired boy climbing below her.
"I'll take the last one," Riku called back, and she could actually hear the grin in his voice.
"First come, first served," she volleyed back, continuing on her own way up through the remaining branches.
"I'll show you first," Riku laughed, and Sarah briefly caught the scent of fresh rain on warm concrete, before the silver-haired boy landed on a branch two above the one that she was currently clinging to.
He must have miscalculated the distance, however, because the next thing Sarah saw was his foot slipping from the branch where he'd clearly been about to place it, forcing her to dismiss the Keyblade and grab for Riku, just as he'd started to shift his weight to his right leg and hence to slip in earnest. Managing to snag both the back of his yellow shirt as well as his left arm as he fell backwards, Sarah ground "her" teeth as the silver-haired boy's full weight started dragging her downward.
"You're stronger than you look!"
"Thanks," she ground out. "Do you think you could grab onto something?"
"Yeah," Riku said, grabbing onto a nearby branch to brace himself, even as Sarah began feeling like "her" arms were about to be pulled from their sockets.
Once she'd gotten free of the encumbrance, Sarah sighed in more than a little relief as she clambered back up into the tree after nearly having been pulled off the branch when Riku had missed his next step up. The sharp, sudden sound of what was unmistakably a a balloon popping drew her attention back to Pooh, just as the bear himself began free-falling out of the tree.
Oh, lovely, she groused, leaping down from the tree even as she recalled the Keyblade once more.
Narrowing "her" eyes as she took what little time she had to consider just what it was that she needed to do so that the pair of them could land safely, Sarah took a deep breath.
"Rebound!" she shouted, aiming the Keyblade at where the pair of them looked set to land, using a variation of the power she'd used before to quite literally blow those beehives out of the tree that the three of them had been climbing, but shaped differently in this case.
Sarah could almost see the cushion of air as it formed underneath them, even as she herself grabbed Pooh under the arms and braced him against "her" body as they struck the cushion and were buoyed back up. Once the pair of them had landed softly on the ground again, Sarah stretched with a certain sense of satisfaction. The sight of Piglet dashing over to the pair of them – followed at a much more sedate pace by Riku's assured, loose-limbed amble – drew Sarah's attention back to the other two who had accompanied her and Pooh to this place.
"Oh, that was very b-brave," the little pig stuttered, shifting on his tiny feet as he looked up at her and Pooh where they stood.
"Thanks," she said, stretching "her" arms behind "her" head. "Is there anywhere else you guys can think of that your friends might be?"
Piglet looked thoughtful, but Pooh's sudden outburst drowned out whatever he'd been planning to say.
"Rabbit!" the bear exclaimed, popping back to his feet as though he'd been spring-launched. "He's bound to have plenty of honey!"
"Is food the only thing you ever think about?" Riku demanded, exasperation clear in every line of his face and body.
"Of course not!" the bear returned, cheerful as ever. "Good food is always better with company!"
With those as his parting words, Pooh set off determinedly in what figured to be the direction of the aforementioned friend whose food he was speaking so fondly of. When the four of them reached yet another tree – fairly tall and bushy, though it didn't have much on the one they'd walked away from not so long ago – standing on a hill that almost looked like it'd been pulled from Middle Earth, Sarah chuckled. "In a hole in the ground, there lived a Rabbit." Probably isn't a person around who'd get that reference, she mused, a small, amused smile curling "her" lips.
As the four of them made their way over to an actual hole – though this was in the side of a hill, rather than directly in the ground – Pooh, naturally, was the first one to speak.
"Rabbit!"
"Go away! There's nobody here!"
Smirking, Sarah stepped forward. "Well, if there's nobody here, then who are we talking to?" Rabbit hemmed and hawed, and Sarah let him stew for a few moments before chuckling. "All right, Rabbit, we all know it's you. Is there any particular reason you're not interested in visitors at the moment?"
"It's hardly visitors in general," Rabbit said, sighing as he relented. "It's – well – Pooh bear is with you," he continued, an obvious hesitation in his voice.
"He's a bit single-minded when it comes to eating, yeah," she conceded, side-eyeing the bear in question as she spoke. "But he doesn't really seem bad to me."
"You've clearly just met him, then," Rabbit said primly.
"Oh-kay," Sarah said, casting another sidelong glance at the bear that she and Riku had been basically shepherding from one end of this strange forest to the other. "If I promise to keep him in line, will you let us in? We've been traveling for a long time, and I for one would like a place to sit down."
Rabbit sighed deeply, seeming to wrestle with himself for a long moment, before finally relenting. "Oh, I suppose. Come to the front door, and I'll let you in."
"Thanks," she said, turning to follow Pooh as the little bear hurried over to what was presumably the front door that Rabbit had directed them to use.
Above the door itself was a rather clumsily spelled sign, indicating that either the one who'd made it didn't actually know how to spell "house", or that they had a rather interesting taste for phonetic spelling. It was interesting, but not pressing enough that Sarah paid much attention to it beyond noticing the thing. As the four of them made their way into the cozy little house at last, Sarah smiled as she got her first look at the interior.
It did resemble a Hobbit hole in more than a few aspects; at least Peter Jackson's conception of one, anyway.
Sweeping the dirt-floored and –walled space around them with her gaze, Sarah caught Riku's eye as she saw the silver-haired boy looking around for himself.
"Nice place," she said.
"I guess," Riku said, though he looked a bit dubious.
Turning to watch as pooh started to grab for what seemed to be his third pot of honey – misspelled as "hunny", natch – Sarah rolled "her" eyes as she made her own way over to the table.
"Take it easy, there," she said, reaching out to grasp the bear's right wrist before he could dive face-first into that one, the way he seemed to have done with the other two on the table. "If you eat all of that, Rabbit's not going to be happy with you," she continued, beginning to suspect just why the lapine had been so eager to keep the bear out of his house.
"What do you mean?"
"Well, would you be happy if someone came to your house and started eating all of your food?" she asked, tilting "her" head slightly as she briefly settled into the chair next to him.
"I guess I wouldn't like that very much," the bear said, looking mournfully down at the pot of honey he had in held in his lap.
"Extraordinary," Rabbit said, hurrying over to the table where she and Pooh had seated themselves for the moment. "I've never seen anyone get Pooh to stop eating like that! Is there anything I can do for you?"
As if on cue, "her" stomach growled; Sarah laughed softly. "Some lunch would be nice."
"Looks like Pooh wasn't the only one who wanted some food," Riku said with a smirk, just before his own stomach growled.
"You were saying?" Sarah drawled, raising an eyebrow at the silver-haired boy as the pair of them faced each other amid the homey clutter of Rabbit's main room.
Pressing his right hand against his stomach, Riku looked away, an expression of amused annoyance on his face.
Rabbit chuckled softly. "I suppose I could fix a nice carrot salad for the both of you."
"Thank you," she said, pausing for a moment to consider something. "Do you have any dressing?"
As it turned out, Rabbit favored a dressing that tasted a lot like some of the better Italian-style dressings she'd eaten. It was a nice reminder of home, as well as a pleasant meal in and of itself. Once she and Riku had finished their meal, and Rabbit had tidied away the dishes – at his own insistence, though Sarah had offered to help – the sound of someone laughing, as well as what sounding like a distinct series of impacts, drew the attention of pretty much everyone in the house.
"Oh, no," Rabbit groused, running out from behind the sink he'd been previously working at.
"What is it?" she asked, rising from her own seat at the table where she, Riku, Pooh, and Piglet had all been seated.
"Oh, it's Tigger," Rabbit said, fretfully making his way over to the door. "He bounces here, there, and everywhere, and I was just worried-" Rabbit paused for a moment, seeming to realize just who it was that he was talking to. "Would either of you mind going out there to make sure he doesn't trample my vegetable patches again?"
"He's done this before?" she asked, raising an eyebrow as she turned to face Rabbit more squarely, who'd gone over to stand at the front door.
"Oh, I know he doesn't mean anything by it, but I always worry when he's out there."
"Ah; he's not very careful, then?" she asked, rising from her seat at the table and casting a glance back at Rabbit. "All right, I'll take care of this."
Making her way back out of Rabbit's cozy underground house once again, Sarah quickly caught sight of the disturbance Rabbit had been talking about. It seemed that – as appeared to be the custom in this storybook world – the given name of this newcomer was as perfectly descriptive as one could ask for. Tigger was indeed a tiger, just as she'd been led to expect.
The sound of familiar footsteps coming from behind her let Sarah know that Riku had decided to invite himself along on this particular errand, as well. She'd a passing curiosity about why that was, but she figured it would be just as easy to ask him after they'd left this particular world as it would be to pause for that kind of thing right at the moment. If she remembered anyway, considering the triviality of the question.
When the stuffed tiger, hopping around as he was, caught sight of her he immediately turned her way, all but launching himself at her.
Stepping smoothly out of the way, Sarah chuckled as she found herself reminded of Hobbes' propensity for pouncing on Calvin when the kid would come home from school.
"Good afternoon," Sarah said, grinning as she turned to look at the sprawled form of Riku, as Tigger stood back up, seeming rather surprised to have tackled Riku instead of the boy pretty much everyone else still thought she was.
"Get off me," Riku grumbled, giving Tigger a shove as he stood up to brush himself off.
"Nice dodge," she said, smirking at the silver-haired boy as he turned to stare at her; well, at Sora, anyway.
"Shut up," Riku said, though there was a grin on his face as he spoke.
"Oho, you thing you can avoid one of my bouncaroonies, do ya?" the stuffed tiger demanded, a challenging grin slowly overtaking his plush face.
"In a word?" she returned, raising an eyebrow and smirking at the living plush toy as he raised himself back to his full height. "Yes."
Tigger's eyes narrowed, even as he grinned all the wider. "Well, we'll just see about that!"
She was just about to call out something else – possibly "come at me, bro" since this seemed to be the kind of situation for it – when Tigger leaped right at her. Spinning aside in what felt like the kind of pirouette that an ice skater would have done, Sarah chuckled as the stuffed tiger tumbled and rolled over to land at the base of a small, wooden fence that bordered what seemed to be a patch of carrots. Which was pretty much the reason that she and Riku had gone out here in the first place, so Sarah kept it in mind.
When the stuffed tiger tried to pounce on her for a third time, after making the rather adorably amusing gesture as though he were pushing up his nonexistent sleeves, Sarah grabbed his leading arm and assisted the stuffed tiger's forward momentum over "her" right shoulder, where he rolled to a stop against a small, wooden-slat bridge that spanned the width of a small stream that flowed through the length of the well-maintained garden.
Leaning down and slightly forward, Sarah crooked "her" left pointer finger, beckoning the stuffed tiger. "Here, kitty, kitty."
"I'm no kitty!" the stuffed tiger declared, putting his mitten-like hands firmly on his plush hips. "I'm a Tigger! T-I-Double "Guh"-ER!"
"Of course you are," she said, smirking at the plush toy as he clearly gathered himself for another leap.
Rolling with the impact of the stuffed tiger's next pounce, Sarah landed on "her" back, kicking Tigger up into the air as Riku started laughing. Bouncing the stuffed tiger around in the air for as long as she could stand laying on the hard soil of the garden path underneath her, she popped back up after launching Tigger into the air with a two-footed mule-kick, using the residual momentum of the kick to propel herself upright again.
Riku seemed interested by the action, but before she could turn her attention to him, Sarah noticed Tigger about to land once more. Reaching up to grab the stuffed tiger's leading arm, Sarah swung him up onto "her" back – where both Kuromaru and her supply-pack had previously rested, but which for the moment had been bare – and made her way over to a softly chuckling Riku.
"So, looks like you won," the silver-haired boy said, grinning as he fell into step with her and the pair of them made their way back to Rabbit's house.
"Seems that way," she said, turning the sole corner between them and Rabbit's front door.
Which, interestingly enough, seemed to be the only door that this particular house possessed. Riku's amused laugh drew her attention back to the silver-haired boy.
"You're just as much of a kid as Sora is," he said, leaning in close so that he could both speak directly into "her" left ear, as well as giving her a playful nudge to that same shoulder.
It was Sarah's turn to chuckle, then. "I'll tell you one of the great secrets of the universe, Riku: there is absolutely no point in growing up if you can't be childish, sometimes."
As the pair of them covered the last remaining distance between then and Rabbit's door, Riku scoffed.
"You just made that up," he said, with the confidence that seemed to come so naturally to him.
"No, Riku, I didn't," she said, chuckling softly as she opened the door and let the both of them back inside.
"Oh, thank you so much for looking after my garden!" Rabbit exclaimed, practically leaping across the room to meet her and Riku as the pair of them made their way inside, Tigger still firmly on "her" back.
"You're welcome," she said, scraping the dust and dirt from Sora's shoes as she and Riku crossed the threshold on their way back inside.
Keeping a rein on Tigger proved to be somewhat easier than she'd originally been expecting, with the stuffed tiger seemingly content to be carted around on "her" back while she and Riku made their way back over to the table where Rabbit, Piglet, and Pooh were all seated. His fingerless paws clenched briefly around "her" shoulders as she pulled out a chair for herself.
"Hello, Tigger," Pooh said, as Sarah settled down in the empty seat next to the stuffed bear. "You've just met my new friends, Sora and Riku."
"I bounced Riku hello," the stuffed tiger said, a definite smile in his voice. "But, Sora bounced me good," he continued, laughing good-naturedly. "It was fun!" he enthused, shifting around on "her" back as though he wanted to pull free then and there. "I really gotta show 'im my bouncin' spot! If it's gotten around to comin' back yet," Tigger continued, sounding about as thoughtful as someone like him ever seemed to get.
"That is what we've come here for," she said, settling back into the chair she'd been sitting in, even as she carefully arranged the stuffed tiger on "her" back. "To make sure that everything goes back to normal, considering everything that's been happening lately."
"Oh, that sounds like quite a lot of work," Piglet said, speaking for the first time since all of them had returned to Rabbit's house the second time.
"It's really not so bad," she said, turning to look at the little pink pig who seemed to be wearing Calvin's shirt. "And the hospitality has been nice," she continued, casting an appreciative glance back at Rabbit, sitting at what might have been called the head of the table if this particular table had been any shape but round.
"Why thank you, my boy," Rabbit said, sounding both pleased and a bit flustered to hear the praise that he'd rightfully earned.
Sarah knew that some people were like that, but Rabbit's attitude seemed more like honest shyness than any kind of attempt to fish for compliments.
"Come on! Lemmy show ya my bouncin' ground, Sora!" Tigger exclaimed, clearly having had more than his fill of sitting around.
"All right, all right," she said, standing even as she felt a semi-amused smile stretching "her" face. "You can come with us, if you want," she said, turning to Riku.
"I'm coming," Riku said, as he stood up.
The three of them led the way out of the house, but they weren't quite alone, since the rest of the living stuffed toys seemed intent on following them, too. Tigger was more than eager to call out directions at what was swiftly starting to seem like his normal volume, and since not even Rabbit – who seemed to be the most inclined to correct any mistakes that Tigger made in the grip of his obvious enthusiasm – spoke up to contradict him, Sarah was perfectly willing to follow the stuffed tiger's directions until they either arrived at their destination, or someone else – more than likely Rabbit, since he seemed like the type – contradicted him. As their group crossed a well-built bridge across a stream that looked only just too small to be called a river, Sarah raised an eyebrow as she saw Pooh come to a stop at the rough center of the span.
Before she could call out to him, Pooh's own voice rang out across the expanse.
"Hello, Eeyore!"
Making her way over to the railing where Pooh was standing, Sarah heard a slow, deep voice returning Pooh's greeting. The newcomer, likely another friend of the group that she and Riku were traveling among, looked like a stuffed donkey – really, the species represented here were all over the place; it was kind of funny – swimming up the stream. Or, not so much swimming as wallowing and allowing the currant to carry him along. Their group went down to meet with him on the insistence of the rest of their number, and Sarah found that the donkey – as opposed to the laid-back sort she'd taken him for at first – was a great deal more depressive than she'd have ever expected someone from this little storybook world to be.
He'd also apparently lost his tail, as well.
The occurrence seemed to be common enough that none of those present seemed overly concerned. Though they were perfectly willing to help, so the job went faster than it could have otherwise.
Once they'd all arrived at the place Tigger seemed so eager to show off, Sarah found herself facing the sanded-looking stumps of what had to have been some truly massive trees directly in front of her, while off to the side was a little see-saw, with the whole clearing ringed by bushes. It was just the kind of place that Tigger's enthusiastic descriptions had painted for her as she and the rest of their group had made their way to this place.
When Tigger leaped free of "her" back, Sarah let go and turned just in time to see the stuffed tiger basically dive-bomb Riku.
"What's so funny?" the silver-haired boy demanded, having clearly heard her chuckling, even with as quiet as she'd been trying to be.
"You do know that the best way to dodge is not to be there in the first place, right?" she asked, smirking.
Riku's expression twisted into one of amused annoyance in response. "Dodge this."
When Riku tried to dive-tackle her in return, Sarah skipped back and out of the way, leaving him to fall on his face in the dirt again.
Tigger, as well as new friend of his who was apparently named Roo, came over to meet with the pair of them before she and Riku could get into another scuffle – brief or otherwise – laughing as they called for the pair of them to play another game. It was something that Sarah recalled from back home, and clearly something that Riku remembered, as well.
Riku seemed as though he would have objected more strenuously if she hadn't goaded him, just that little bit. Soon enough, just as she'd come to expect, Riku seemed to start enjoying himself about halfway through the game. She knew that he'd also deny it to hell and back if she actually tried to talk to him about it, so Sarah simply smirked at him.
"Yeah, yeah," he grumbled, but there was a playful expression on his face as he did so. "Don't look so smug."
Sarah chuckled deep in "her" throat, even as Riku punched "her" right arm in a gentle, brotherly sort of way.
When the light began to fail at last, she and Riku broke off from the game that was clearly set to continue without them, and moved out from under the cover of the canopy.
"So, I see you enjoyed yourself," she said, as the pair of them made their way toward the large clearing they'd been heading for.
"It was kind of fun," Riku grudgingly admitted. "But it's still a kiddy game."
Sarah laughed, reaching out to playfully muss Riku's hair. "Riku, you're a hopeless case."
"Am not," he retorted immediately, punching "her" right shoulder as the pair of them continued onward into the clearing.
"Are so," she volleyed back, returning punch with one of her own, then dodging the next swipe that Riku made at her. "Well, I suppose I shouldn't tell you what I've been thinking about," she continued, grinning at Riku just as the silver-haired boy seemed about to try for another punch.
"Wait, what?"
Drawing Marahute's golden Summon Gem out of Sora's left pocket, Sarah tossed the shooter-marble sized sphere lightly into the air, then caught it neatly between the first two fingers of "her" right hand.
"Well, you haven't seen a forest from the air before, have you?" she asked, offering him a smirk with just a hint of challenge to it.
Riku stood open-mouthed for a handful of moments, before he grinned in response. "All right, I guess that makes up for the way you kept teasing me."
"Of course," she said, lowering "her" eyelids amusedly.
Riku jumped right onto Marahute's back as soon as Sarah summoned the eagle, just as she had been expecting, and the three of them soared up into the air together. Riku laughed gleefully as he was pressed down into the giant eagle's feathers by the sheer force of acceleration, then popped back up when they'd leveled off again.
"It's so quiet up here," Riku said, a contented expression showing briefly on his face, before he turned back to her with a smirk. "I mean, now that we're past all the wind."
"Yes, that generally is considered the loudest part of a flight," she said, smirking right back at him. "Unless you start trying to do stunts, of course."
"Stunts, huh?" Riku echoed, his smirk growing all the wider.
"What do you think, Marahute?" she asked, turning to speak to the giant eagle currently ferrying them around the airspace of this little storybook world and getting a curious-sounding "peep" in return. "You up for a wing-over?"
For just a moment, she'd been entirely too tempted to say "do a barrel-roll"; but, of those present, only she would have actually gotten the reference. And, while making references that no one else got was kind of amusing at times, it really served better for annoying people she didn't like.
"Wing-over?"
"Riku?" she smirked, hunkering down just that much more on Marahute's back even as she turned to face him as well as she could when he was seated directly behind her. "Brace yourself."
Riku barely had time to make what sounded like a noise of confusion, before Marahute flipped herself over in the air. Whatever he'd been intending to say came out as a triumphant sounding whoop, followed by giddy laughter.
"That was great!" Riku exclaimed, and Sarah could hear the grin in his voice. "Can we do it again?"
"What do you think?" Sarah asked Marahute, smiling as she received a happy cry that sounded distinctly like confirmation in return.
The three of them ranged over the sky for some time longer, swooping and diving and ranging over the eaves of the forest beneath them, and even finding a lake that she and Riku basically went water-skiing over with Marahute's help. However, Sarah soon caught sight of another, smaller, brown-and-cream bird who seemed to be following them, and gently directed the giant eagle to slow down so that the newcomer would be able to catch up.
"Hallooo up there!" the bird called, and Sarah saw that it was an owl who'd been following them so closely.
"Good evening," she called back, since the first hints of dusk had begun to fall, so she couldn't very well call it afternoon anymore. "What did you come up here for, if you don't mind my asking?"
"Of course not, young man," the owl said, his voice sounding like an odd mix of posh upper-class and absent-minded professor; really, it was more than a little interesting to hear.
As it turned out, Pooh and the others wanted to say goodbye, since it was the end of the day and everything looked to have been fixed.
Directing Marahute to follow the owl – whose name turned out to be Owl, natch – Sarah found the three of them being led to a clearing that seemed to have been filled with all of the living plush toys that she and Riku had met during the course of their stay, and even a few that they hadn't, which was fairly interesting considering how thoroughly they seemed to have explored this storybook world.
Bracing herself as Marahute came in for a landing, Sarah climbed down from the giant eagle's back, stretching "her" legs for a moment as she and Riku made their way over to chat with the inhabitants of this storybook storybook world a last time before they left.
"It's good to see you again, Sora and Riku," Pooh said, as the stuffed bear waddled over to where the three of them were standing, just as she had been about to dismiss Marahute back to her Summon Gem again. "But, would you mind introducing us to your other friend?"
"Her name is Marahute," Sarah said, as the eagle in question leaned over "her" right shoulder to get a better look at the living plush toys beginning to gather around them in earnest.
"That's a pretty name," Roo said, the little joey hopping over to look up at Marahute where she was, leaning her head just that much farther over Sora's right shoulder.
The eagle preened, and Sarah chuckled softly. "I think that's her way of saying thank you."
"Well, you're welcome," Roo said, smile growing all the wider as the pair of them continued speaking.
"Look, Sora," Pooh said, once it was clear that Roo had nothing more to say. "I even managed to find Small."
"Oh, a beetle," she said, wondering for a moment if this was a Disney thing or a Kingdom Hearts thing; beetles didn't seem particularly Disney-ish, and Small seemed to be a pet… Perhaps it was simply because bug-hunting was a popular pastime in Japan. "Neat."
Those who were actually capable of speech finished saying their farewells – and Sarah even got to meet Roo's mother Kanga – and then the three of them departed through what seemed to be an actual hole in the sky.