She and Riku arrived back in Merlin's study, with Marahute swiftly unsommoning herself before the small room could become too crowded from her presence.
"Welcome back, you two!" Goofy called, all but leaping across the room to engulf her and Riku in a hug that nearly lifted the both of them off the ground; Sarah chuckled as the silver-haired boy squirmed.
"Nice to see you again too, Goofy," she said, giving the anthropomorphic dog a one-armed hug, as Riku managed to squirm free. "How long were the both of us gone?" she asked, directing her question to either Donald or Merlin; those two were more likely to have been paying attention to the time, after all.
"Three and a half hours, Sora my boy," Merlin said, making his way over to where their quartet was starting to gather once more, with Kuromaru hurrying to fetch her supply-pack.
"Though, I must say that those two spells you crafted were rather intriguing," Merlin said, then paused for a moment, a considerate expression coming over his face. "Was there any particular reason that you chose to cast your spells in Wutaiese?"
"Personal preference," she said easily.
"Interesting," Merlin commented.
Before anyone else could say anything, the sound of two sets of footfalls drew the attention of everyone in the small study.
"Cid, Leon," Merlin greeted cordially, then paused, clearly having noticed the expression on their faces. "I expect this isn't a social call."
"No, it isn't," Squall said, gaze hardening as he focused on Riku. "Maleficent sent an ultimatum: she's going to launch an all-out attack on this World, unless we hand Riku over to her," the brunet said, the expression on his face becoming distinctly curious, and just slightly hostile, when his gaze fell upon the silver-haired boy. "What did you two do?" he demanded, the hostility in his gaze transferring neatly to Sarah, as he turned his gaze to the boy pretty much everyone still thought she was.
Sarah chuckled. "Well, we tracked her back to her base of operations, rescued one of her prisoners out from under her proverbial nose, and managed to run a live-fire test on those anti-fairy weapons I had the Moogles working on for us," she continued, smirking as Squall raised an eyebrow and Cid began to snicker.
"So, finally managed to get some good data on how those things work, eh?" the blond pilot asked, looking like he'd be pleased to have some new data, but he'd be just as happy to hear a good story to go along with it.
This time, Sarah laughed outright, if softly. "She took two bombs filled with powdered salt and iron fillings to the face," Sarah said, smirking as Cid burst into guffaws that couldn't remotely be called soft. "She did not like it."
"Looks like you really came through for us with those weapons, kid," Cid said, chuckling.
"You don't really mean- I mean, you aren't just going to give me to her, are you?" Riku asked, though there was an odd, two-toned quality to his voice that Sarah wondered if anyone else had taken note of.
There was also something else – something that had far-reaching effects, at least according to what she could remember of the second game, anyway – at play. All in all, there was something about this particular situation that didn't feel remotely good.
"Sora, what do you think we should do?" Squall asked, the suspicious look returning to his face, but clearly focused on Riku.
Considering the way she'd been staring at him, Sarah found that she couldn't really blame the man.
"Goofy, you and Donald go get Fere prepared for departure," she advised, turning to speak more directly to her traveling companions.
"Sora, you're not really gonna give Riku up ta Maleficent, are ya?" Goofy asked, sounding as genuinely concerned as she'd heard from him.
She chuckled, raking the pair of them with a sharper gaze than she'd ever had occasion to use before. "No, we're going to ram Maleficent's little ultimatum straight down her throat," Sarah smirked, then sobered, standing straighter as she sought to impress the gravity of their current situation upon them. "But, in order to actually do that, I'm going to need Fere prepped and ready to leave ASAP." She paused, nodding sharply in response to Donald's salute, then swiftly continued on. "And for that, I need you both in the hangar getting her ready for departure, while I stay here to see if there's anything else I'm going to need to make sure that we all get back as safely as we can."
Nearly before she'd finished speaking, Donald had turned, and would clearly have been swiftly on his way out of Merlin's study, if Goofy hadn't grabbed his collar and forced him to stay at least long enough to say goodbye to those who were going to be be staying to discuss the finer points of what was going to end up being two missions in one, all told. Once Donald and Goofy were safely out of earshot, Sarah turned her attention back to Cid and Squall, though a fair bit of her focus was reserved for Squall, since he seemed to be the more soldierly of the two.
"All right, I think we can use this," Sarah said, once she was certain she had both of their attention. "Maleficent has more prisoners than just the one we rescued, so if my people and I can keep her distracted, you could probably extract them without her catching on until you and your team were well away," pausing for a moment to think, Sarah licked "her" lips and then continued. "I think we'll be able to cover a small team, up to five people, but any more than that and things could start getting dicey."
"How many people are we going to have to extract?" Squall asked, clearly considering what she'd said.
"No more than six," she said, after a moment spent calculating just how many of the Princesses of Heart had been taken through chance, misfortune, or enemy action, before deciding to just assume the worst while hoping for the best. "Possibly less, but you guys know better than I do how Maleficent has allies, to say nothing of her current army of Heartless, so she might very well have been able to capture the others that Riku and I weren't able to get to, so you'll want to be prepared for that," she continued.
"Here's hopin' she didn't," Cid said, chomping on his long toothpick – or shortened kebab skewer, she'd never quite seen the thing long enough to tell – with a ferocity that suggested he wished it was something else entirely.
"Here's hoping," she said, nodding to the blond pilot.
"Why didn't you speak about this when your two companions were still present?" Riku – or, more properly Rikunort, since it'd become obvious just who was in charge of the body, in light of False-Ansem's current screw up – asked, the smirk on his face making it all the clearer as to who was in the proverbial driver's seat.
At least for anyone who knew how Riku usually acted, of course.
"Operational security," she said; Cid and Squall seemed to understand the concept perfectly, but Rikunort seemed curious, so she continued. "Bluntly, I'm not going to put innocent lives in Goofy's hands when I know he has butterfingers."
Of course, as if on cue, Donald and Goofy made their way back into Merlin's study.
"The ship's all ready," Donald said, then began looking a bit curious, himself. "What were you and Riku doing, Sora?"
"Making sure things were all settled on this end," she said, as their two groups merged and began making their way back to the hangar once again.
"There's one last thing I should handle for ya, before you and yer crew lift off," Cid said, tone suffused with the kind of gruff good-humor that she'd come to expect from the man.
"Fere has enough guns to chew through Heartless ships like a meat grinder. What else do I need?" she asked, tilting "her" head in an invitation for the pilot to elaborate.
"An upgrade to your coolin' system," Cid stated, a definite undertone of amusement to his words. "Yer ship might've been designed from the ground up ta eat Heartless ships – somethin' I fully approve of, don't get me wrong – but those guns a' yours heat up the more ya use em; and with as many ships as yer gonna be facin' on the way ta Hollow Bastion, Fere's guns'd melt before she'd made it halfway through the path."
"Makes sense," she said, as their group made their way through the hangar doors and Cid, Squall, and Sarah herself began to break off from the main group. "Riku, you were staying at Hollow Bastion before you met up with us," she said, turning so that she could catch Rikunort's eye. "Do you think you could remember it well enough to draw a map?" she asked, curious to know just what False-Ansem's angle was now, as well as what his next play was going to be.
"I suppose I could recall enough to provide you with some intelligence, yes," Rikunort said, the sly smirk on his face only superficially resembling any expression that Riku had ever worn.
Sighing under her breath as Rikunort joined her, Cid, and Squall on their way to Cid's personal workroom within the larger area of the hangar, Sarah leaned in to mutter in Rikunort's right ear.
"Rein it in, hambone. Most people don't have the sense to spot a suspicious person, but some people pay actual attention."
Rikunort chuckled deeply. "How long have you known?"
"Longer than you think," was all she offered in return.
Soon enough, the four of them arrived back in what she'd come to recognize as Cid's workshop.
"What were you two kids talkin' about?" Cid asked, a gruffly amused smile on his face.
"We were conspiring against you," she deadpanned, smirking as the pilot chuckled and reached down to ruffle "her" hair.
"Real runny, kid."
"Let's get down to business," Squall said. "We don't know how long those prisoners might have," he continued, his serious gaze shifting to zero in on Rikunort. "Riku, we're going to need whatever information you can remember about Hollow Bastion's interior layout."
~KH1~
He could hear the music a lot better than he'd ever been able to before, but it still sounded like it was coming from really far away. And, there was also something else… He could almost tell where it was coming from, if he listened really, really hard…
~KH1~
"So, that's everything you can remember about Hollow Bastion's layout," Squall said, and for a long moment it seemed like he wanted nothing more than to sigh and let his shoulders slump under the weight that he was clearly forcing himself to carry on his own. "It isn't much."
"Yeah," she said, stepping over to the table where Rikunort had just finished drawing a map for them. "You're going to need a guide, if this is all you've got to go on." Sarah turned her gaze back to Rikunort; she knew that the man had a serious god-complex, but it remained to be seen just how she'd be able to use it against him. "Still, if that's all you can remember, I guess we'll have to find a way to work with that."
Watching Rikunort's expression as he snap-turned around to stare at the boy he was pretty much fully aware that she wasn't, Sarah raised a challenging eyebrow. "What do you mean?"
"Well, you've been staying with Maleficent long enough that you should have learned something from her, but either you're not very observant, or she outsmarted you," Sarah shrugged, an easy roll of "her" shoulders, even as she watched the expression on Rikunort's face twist into one of wounded pride; hook, line, and sinker. "Either way, disappointing as it is, I suppose we're just going to have to be satisfied with what we have."
When Rikunort grabbed the pen he'd been using to make their map, adding to it with the short, sharp motions of someone who was either supremely pissed off or – as in this particular case – had something to prove, Sarah forced herself not to smirk.
"All right, I think we should be able to work better with this," she paused for a moment, considering whether or not to offer Kuromaru's services as a tracker; still, Squall wasn't the type to trust a Heartless, and Cid hadn't interacted with Kuromaru nearly enough to know what the little Shadow would and wouldn't do when it was presented with a challenge. "Right, let's get going," she continued, giving Rikunort's left shoulder a light tug to get him moving, too.
As the pair of them turned to make their way back down to the main hanger bay, she side-eyed Rikunort; it was clearly a situation she was going to have to deal with sooner than later, but for the moment she could afford to focus on the operation that she and hers were about to take part in. It was still something she'd keep in the back of her mind, of course.
Once she and Rikunort had returned to the main hangar bay, the four of them all piled into Fere and launched with only a minimum amount of chitchat; though Donald seemed to be side-eyeing her for some reason. Still, given everything they had on their respective plates, Sarah wasn't looking for anything else to pile on.
Just like Cid had said, there were a metric fuckton of Heartless ships in their way, and as Fere chewed through them the way she'd been so comprehensively designed to do, Sarah allowed herself to relax a bit.
Once they took up position in orbit around Hollow Bastion – she always found herself wondering if these little planets were named after the most prominent feature on their respective surfaces, or if the reverse was true – Sarah narrowed "her" eyes as she studied the large, rather steampunk looking castle that stood over what seemed to be the north pole of the planet.
"Now, since Maleficent is bound to have both defenses and an understanding that someone is going to be answering that little ultimatum of hers, she's bound to have a swarm of Heartless in place," Sarah said, narrowing "her" eyes as she studied the layout of the steampunk-looking castle laid out not-so-neatly below them. "Still, she's more likely to have them set up to defend the lower levels, so our best bet is probably going to be coming in from as high as we can," she paused for a moment, considering the layout of the castle below them; Sarah couldn't recall offhand if she'd ever seen the whole of the thing laid out in-game, but seeing it live and in person like this would have been different in any case. "This is probably our best bet," she continued, pointing to a balcony near the topmost spire of the steampunk castle they were about to invade.
"Sora, we'd never be able to get in through there!" Donald exclaimed. "Maleficent is going to have the entire castle locked down tight! And besides, there's no door!"
"Where we're going, we won't need doors," she said, Doc Brown's voice coming just as easily to her as all of the other impressions she'd done. "Donald, take us in," she directed, settling back into her seat as she wrapped "her" hands around the weapon-controls once more. "We do this hard and fast enough, Maleficent shouldn't know we're coming until we're already there."
Narrowing "her" eyes as she felt Donald obligingly push Fere into a steep dive, setting the ship on a course that would take them in fast and low over the indicated balcony, Sarah laid on the triggers and blasted a hole clear through the stained-glass looking wall of the castle. She even managed to remove the near corner of the roof itself.
"All right," she said, popping her harness so that she would be able to stand up quickly. "We can jump out here," she said, turning her gaze back to Donald, who looked a bit freaked out for some reason or other, though Goofy seemed worried, and Rikunort was for course smirking. "But, I want you to program the auto-pilot to get Fere out of here as soon as we leave. No sense letting anyone we don't know hitch a ride back to Traverse Town with us."
Goofy almost seemed ready to say something, but almost angrily hushed him. Weird, she mused, standing and turning to where the small forms of both Kuromaru and her supply-pack lay on Fere's deckplates.
"All right boy, I want you to stay back in the ship," she said, even as the little Shadow looked poised to hop up to its favorite spot on "her" back. "Stay here, boy," she directed, pressing "her" right hand down on the little Shadow's head, so that it would at least have some idea of what she was trying to convey. "Good boy," Sarah said, once she was satisfied that the little Shadow wasn't going to try following her into combat.
The four of them departed quickly, jumping from Fere's boarding ramp as it lowered, and Sarah turned to look over "her" right shoulder at Fere as their ship lifted off again. Entering the castle at a run, Sarah signaled for their group to break up as they stampeded over the remains of the wall.
"Why do you want us to do that?" Donald demanded, a suspicious cast to his face, while the four of them paused for a moment to catch their respective breath.
"If something is going to hit us, I'd prefer not to have everyone bunched up like this," she said, casting a glance backward to make sure that there was nothing stalking them or trying to jump them from behind. "It's pretty much asking to be cluster-bombed."
The four of them jumped apart, and Sarah scanned ahead for anything else that might be approaching them from deeper within the castle. She caught a brief glimpse of Donald as they all continued on their way; the drake didn't seem particularly happy, but that could wait. It was something to keep in mind for later, though.
As the four of them continued on their way deeper into the castle, Sarah flicked a glance at Rikunort when she felt him sidling up next to her.
"So, what was your true purpose in bringing us to this place?" he asked, a smirk on his face as the pair of them continued on their way.
"About what I said," she replied, narrowing "her" eyes as she glimpsed furtive movement in the darkened rooms up ahead.
Just as Rikunort looked poised to press the matter, a massed group of assorted Heartless rushed them, and there was no more time for idle chatter. The Fire Whip she'd been idly toying with back in Merlin's workshop – another variant of her Thunder Whip; both of them based on Alex Mercer's Whipfist – did as good a job against this new batch of Heartless as she could have asked for, though the fire-using Heartless did have a slight resistance to the element; though not so much the sheer force of impact, of course.
"You!"
"Hiya, Mal!" she chirped, grinning in a way that she'd often heard referred to as irritatingly cheerful. "It was starting to look like you were throwing a party, so we decided to invite ourselves."
"You insolent brats! I had all my most powerful Heartless positioned to guard the entrance to my fortress! How did any of you cretins make it past them?!"
"Wouldn't you like to know," she deadpanned, smirking.
A blast of purple-black flames – oddly enough limed in blue-white, which made for one hell of a contrast – splattered at Maleficent's robe-covered feet, and Sarah had only a moment to flick a glance back at a smirking Rikunort, before Maleficent all but roared in fury and transformed into a dragon. The four of them quickly split into pairs, jumping apart as Maleficent spewed black-laced yellow-green fire at them.
"So, what do you intend to do now?" Rikunort asked, a distinctly intrigued expression on his borrowed face.
"Well, Smaug she ain't, so let's see if we can find some way to pierce that hide of hers," she said, narrowing "her" eyes as she looked up at the rampaging form of the dragon Maleficent had become.
Rikunort looked more than a little confused by her choice of words, but Sarah was already moving by then, so even though he seemed to have more than a few questions, he still moved when she did so the pair of them were able to avoid both a slash from Maleficent's claws and a powerful blow from her tail. Given her previous suspicion that Maleficent was Winter Court – if indeed such things existed in this neck of the woods; something to look into later, if she found the time – she was also reasonably sure that Ice magic wouldn't do much good against her. So, gathering herself as she recalled the Keyblade, Sarah concentrated on the Thunder magic that came so quickly and easily to her.
"Spreading Thunder Lance!"
Compressed lightning in the shape of the weapon she'd named exploded out of the Keyblade, burying itself in Maleficent's broad chest. Narrowing "her" eyes as she Maleficent twist and writhe as the Lance's energies spread through her body, Sarah allowed herself to relax slightly. Between Donald pelting her with fireballs, Goofy turning himself into what was basically a humanoid battering-ram, and her and Rikunort continuing their barrage with Thunder and what she was beginning to suspect was the Darkness she'd heard False-Ansem talking about every so often; though she suspected it would start happening a lot more, now that he was apparently taking a more active hand in the course of events.
The scent of fresh rain on warm concrete alerted Sarah to the approach of someone else onto the battleground, but for obvious reasons she couldn't turn and look who it was.
However, the familiar sound of a Gunblade firing brought a small, pleased smile to "her" face; Squall's Gunblade had a distinct snap-crack when it fired, though the explosion itself was fairly unremarkable. Especially considering where they all were and what they were currently doing.
Once they'd managed to drive Maleficent off – though she got the distinct feeling the fairy would be back, if only because Sarah hadn't actually seen her die – Sarah turned her attention to Squall and Cid.
"Nice to see you guys made it here," she said, as the six of them all began mingling in the aftermath of the battle. "How did things go on your end?"
"We managed to get all of them out," Squall said, tilting his head slightly in what seemed to be a gesture of acknowledgement, gratitude, or both. "There were six of them, just as you said," a small smile – almost imperceptible, as though he'd almost forgotten how to form the expression – on his face.
"Yeah, ya did real good, helpin' ta rescue the Princesses like that," Cid said, wearing an expression of gruff, good-natured amusement that seemed to always be lingering on his face.
"The Princesses?" Donald demanded, looking more surprised than she'd seen him in quite a while.
"Yeah," Squall said, nodding. "Sora's plan was to distract Maleficent's attention, so that Cid and I – alongside a team we picked – would be able to rescue them from her," Squall continued, the small smile she'd seen still firmly on his face.
"Glad to know we gave you the cover you needed," she said, offering the man a smile of her own.
"Sora, you shouldn't have been keepin' secrets like that," Goofy said, a look of honest – if mild – reproach on his canoid face. "We wouldn'ta told."
Swallowing a scoff – since for all of Goofy's unabashed lack of subtlety, he was still a friend – Sarah turned her attention back to the tallest of her traveling companions. "I'd have been happy to tell you, but the problem is with discretion," she folded "her" arms, looking up at Goofy. "The problem is that you have none," she continued, then turned her attention to Donald. "And, while you do have a better track-record with secrets, anyone can see that you're a chronic fretter, and I didn't want to risk tipping Maleficent off," she said, narrowing "her" eyes slightly. "Not with something this important."
"I suppose that makes sense, not wanting to put the Princesses in any more danger," Jiminy Cricket said, marking one of the rare occasions when he made his opinion heard.
"I guess," Donald said, though he didn't sound particularly happy.
Goofy was understanding, as usual, and so the conversation turned to another subject.
"So, how did you manage to make it past Maleficent's defenses?" Squall asked, a confused expression on his scarred face.
Sarah chuckled as Donald and Goofy started to hem and haw a bit during their attempt to explain.
"We took a more direct route to get inside, you might say," she smirked, gesturing for them to follow her as she made her way back toward the balcony they'd entered through.
"You weren't kiddin' about bein' direct," Cid said, laughing heartily as the six of them came to the remains of the window they'd come in through.
"Most people would think to guard the lower-floors and main entrance, so that's where you'd encounter most of the opposition," she said, smirking amusedly at the incredulous expressions she was beginning to see on Cid and Squall's faces. "And, most people would come in through the ground-floor entrances even if they were trying to be stealthy."
"But not you, eh kid?" Cid asked, clearly amused.
"I am not most people," she confirmed, smirking back in response to the man's grin.
There wasn't really much to say after that, and so the six of them split back into their respective groups once more. She, Donald, Goofy, and Rikunort all made their way out onto the balcony where she'd used Fere to blast their way in when they'd made their initial incursion into Hollow Bastion, and Sarah still wondered if that was the planet's name, or just the castle's. Happily enough, it seemed that Donald had indeed programmed the auto-pilot correctly, and so the four of them were soon teleported back onto Fere Invictus, thus officially putting an end to this particular excursion to Hollow Bastion.
Fere's guns chewed through the ranks of Heartless ships in front of them, blasting a corridor just wide enough for their ship to basically pour herself through on their way back to the clearer spaces surrounding the other planets they'd visited. Once they were clear of Hollow Bastion's Heartless-infested spacelanes, Kuromaru let go of the tight grip it had maintained on "her" arms while she had been manning the guns, curling back up in "her" lap as the five of them flew back to Traverse Town again.
As the interplanetary space they were traveling through became increasingly familiar, Sarah allowed herself to relax just that much more. Sure, she would have to settle things with Rikunort before she could truly call this day done, but other than that this day had gone very well.