Riku had struggled. He had fought, and gotten bloody, and cornered, and shortly thereafter struck on the head with a very large rock. Waking up bound and blindfolded in the corner of a stone tower was not among his best shining moments either.
    "Tear the stuffing from me tail, Goliath!" a shrill, chirping kind of voice, that seemed to be coming up from about ground level. Just see what ya fledglings 'ave done fer us now!"
    "Hey," said another voice, lower and brasher but very much not at ground level. It was the voice Riku had heard in the alley. "He had a sword!"
    "Oh, aye," said the first, patronizingly, "and every human goes by wit a sword is suddenly an A-class Super, is he?"
    "He summoned it out of nowhere!" the second argued. "I saw it from the roof!"
    "Regardless," said a third voice. This one was far deeper, in the same way the bottom of a wrought iron cauldron feels deep, blackened and rough and booming. If anyone made a case for this 'Goliath', Riku had a terrible suspicion it was him. "We have no quarrel with a mere boy such as him. If he is not among the rogues then he is of no importance to us."
    "He put up one hell of a fight," the younger-sounding one pointed out. "Nearly smashed my beak, I'm telling you. And here, look at his sword, look--"
    There was a silence for a moment. Riku shifted, twisting his arms against the ropes. Someone had tied him up with a good bit of care, that was certain. Maybe he could shrug off the blindfold if he scraped his temple against the wall...
    "Not man metal," murmured Goliath.
    "Tisn't metal at all," said the small creature's voice. "No, nor a Super's weapon, we've not to fear. But aye," it quavered, "I've seen the likes o' this before."
    Riku gave up and just accepted the blindfold. He had worked with them before, even if he was a year without practice. What he needed more than anything now was concentration. If he could focus...
    ...If he could focus...
    ~Your mind is slipping,~ Xehanort whispered, almost gleefully. ~Would you care for a hand, my son?~
    I ain't your son, nutcase.
    The ghost persisted. ~Your body is weak. Its addictions turn to illness, its form turns to depravity. A thousand drugs from a thousand vials, all torn from your body's fragile little system...~
    And all I've had to eat is seagull, Riku thought grimly, cringing under the rising nausea. He could feel the cold sweat breaking out over his skin, the uneasiness of every muscle, the brackish taste in the back of his mouth-- come to think of it, that was more plausibly the result of the fight in the alley. One of his teeth was loose.
    Focus.
    He tried to think of some of the things Mickey had taught him. Picture the weapon in your mind. Recall every nuance of its blade, the feel of the handle in your grip, the weight of it in your hand. Make it real in your mind and it will make itself real. Focus.
    ~Weakling.~
    Shut up.
    ~Give me your body. You waste it in your impotence.~
    "Kooee," chirruped that high voice, suddenly close. He felt small furred fingers at the edge of his blindfold. "D'you mind answering a few questions fer us now, lad?"
    Riku blinked into the darkness. For a moment he wasn't sure the blindfold had really been removed. It was the thick of night now, moonless, and wherever they were --high up, that was certain-- it was far away from the city lights. There were no lanterns, or so much as a torch burning. It took a few seconds for his eyes to catch up and adjust, to see what he was currently face to face with.
    ... A stuffed cat.
    "Witch me widdershins, keep ya steady," it was saying to him. "Mos' folk think tha same when they sees the like."
    "You're a cat."
    "Aye."
    "And... you're..."
    "Full o' cotton fluff and fairy magic, yes, aye, and ye'd be doin' ya best to bow too, lad."
    Riku's swaying vision managed to take note of the tiny brass crown set between its ears. The cat beamed at him.
    "Cait Sith," it said, with a courtly flourish. "King o' the Manhattan Clan."

    Cloud opened his eyes.
    He had not been asleep, not really. A soldier forgets what sleep is, when the battle fields begin to stretch from the trenches to his home to beyond it. A soldier dreams while awake and kills enemies while unconscious, can count the mortar fire as easily as sheep. So Cloud Strife did not rest. But when he opened his eyes, the streets were alive and shining under full night vision, and he could smell the creatures' trail like a vivid streak carved out of the air.
    Something large. Something with wings. Accustomed to these streets but not native. Nothing that shape could grow in a city like this. Something transplanted.
    Something else as well. Musky, dirty; shy and sickly. Something that shuddered with its own power, at once ashamed of it and ill with love for it. The feelings were as real as any other smell, as real as taste or color. Cloud's eyes flared in the darkness and the darkness washed back a tidal wave of thought and noise and shaking unharnessed energy pleading for abuse.
    There was magic here. Magic that shouldn't have been, but had taken root anyway. And other, stranger powers, newer and unbidden, sharp violent spikes of light on the ethereal map, no way to even disguise themselves.
    By his side, Fenrir's energy console burst to life for a brief moment. He saw it only as an image in the corner of his eye, a fading glimmer of prismatic light. The light of a keyblade bearer.
    He climbed out of the cockpit and forced Fenrir's busted hull doors closed by hand. He locked the Buster Sword into the brace on his back.
    The signal was close. He could feel it in his mind now, maybe not even real, maybe it had never real, but it still burned in the fore of his thoughts, the way Aerith used to come to him in dreams. Tasting it, smelling it, hearing it rebounding in his ears, crystalline and so close, so close. How could he not notice it before?
    Too faint to be on ground level... Cloud looked up, scanned the skies through a narrow slit between buildings. The stars were bright tonight-- for him, at least. Maybe not for the rest of the people of this city, or at least, the human element of it.
    Scanning the skyscrapers' black silhouettes, he nodded briefly to himself and went to look for a way up.
    Cloud searched around the alley walls until he found a fire escape ladder secreted against the brick. He tested the bottom rung with a foot to check its stability. It creaked, but then, not many things were meant to sustain the weight of a sword nearly the size of its owner. If he was fast he might make it--
    As the crash that shook the alleyway soon after attested, he did not.
    Cloud kicked the remains of the fire escape aside in fury and combed his hair back into place with his fingers. Stupid primitive worlds with their stupid primitive ladders made of stupid primitive metals...
    He left the alley with Fenrir and tried down the street. The sound-taste of the signal was still burning in his mind, clawing rattishly at his consciousness, nibbling and burrowing deeper inside the longer it resided there. (Come to it, Sora did have a kind of mousy look to him.) Pathways like ant trails spread out before him, suggesting doorways and stairwells and fences, leading in a hundred weaving directions. They didn't differentiate, choices without logic, the central theme being up, up as far as possible.
    The sidewalks were deserted now. Manhattan at dusk had indicated all the makings of a dedicated nighttime city, but right now it could well have been a ghost town. There was a tension in the air that there should not have been, filled with violence and blood, all unseen. So quiet it bordered on the obscene.
    It was the silence that had Cloud step back a moment and listen. Something was following him, had been for at least a block or so. Small, light on its feet, but so nearly soundless that there was no question of its intentions.
    He let it follow him a few blocks more, down a broad alley without cover. Part of it was a dare to see if it would stop. When it didn't, it gave him ample room to swing.
    The Buster Sword was a 1st Class Chaser weapon. Attached to machinery, a blade of its size can par the hull of a passenger jet in half. Human wielders were expected to do likewise. Which was why there weren't many that could handle it.
    Cloud Strife swung the Buster Sword in a perfect arc through the air, a sixty mile-per-hour swing capable of tearing through solid steel or stone, and struck nothing. Struck nothing so forcefully, the sword was repelled and torn right out of his grip.
    It crashed through a stack of garbage bins at the end of the alley and upset a family of stray cats, who were otherwise having a peaceful night.
    Cloud stood frozen for a moment.
    He looked back at where her had swung. Instead of the nothing that had been there before, there was a faint shape, barely visible; a shimmering ultraviolet sphere carved out of the air. And at the base of it, folded up on the ground and shielding herself, was a shaking, terrified twelve-year-old girl.
    For some reason, she was wearing a red leotard. He really didn't want to ask why.
    When a few more seconds passed without another sword blow, the girl peeked up through her arms. She was wearing a black mask across her eyes, aiding in a kind of haunted raccoon effect but not much else. She looked perturbingly normal in other respects.
    Very cautiously, after Cloud courteously gave her some distance, she climbed to her feet. The force field dissipated.
    "H-hi," she said awkwardly.
    Cloud didn't budge.
    "You, um," she stammered. "You can go get your sword thing if y-you want. I won't do anything."
    Cloud glanced back at the heap of trash bins. And then, slowly, edged towards them,  not allowing the girl out of his sight for a second. He scooted over in among the wreckage and fumbled blind with one hand until he found the handle, and then as quietly as possible returned it to its strap.
    The girl was still there, shifting weight from foot to foot.
    "Hey, it uh, didn't break," she babbled. "That's like really unusual. You must have really strong... sword... stuff. Metal."
    "Unobtanium."
    "Yeah. That stuff. I'm not scared of you, by the way."
    Cloud eyed her. "Do your parents know you're out this late?"
    "Yeeeeah, about that," she mumbled, fiddling with the ends of a lock of hair. "They kind of... Um." She looked up at him. "So just checking here, you're not with them, are you? The monsters?"
    The local problem. Right. Not his business after all.
    "No," he said, moving on his way. "And I'm busy. Go play in the river or something."
    "You're not from around here," the girl went on, trotting after him. "And you're not one of us. D'you fight them with that sword?"
    "No."
    "That was your rocket ship in the alley, wasn't it? Are you from outer space? Are you from Krypton?"
    "No."
    "My name's Violet."
    "N-- What?" He looked over at her. "So?"
    "Violet of the Incredibles, hello? I'm a superhero? We were the first to break the ban and go rogue; we're famous!"
    "I don't care," said Cloud. This alley was completely ladder-less just to spite him, he was sure of it.
    "It's all because of these monster things that the Supers have had to come outta hiding. We were fine for the longest time, and then suddenly these things showed up all over the city, and overnight the city changed. Mom and Dad had to go out and investigate but they disappeared and so my brother Dash and me--"
    Violet stopped. She had accidentally walked ahead of the spiky stranger, on account of him stopping dead in his tracks in the middle of the pavement.
    "The worlds have merged," Cloud muttered into his collar. "You're not where you're supposed to be at all. Where you're meant to be doesn't exist now."
    And the local problems weren't local anymore.
    "These monsters," he said to Violet. "What are they?"
    "I dunno, but they're these huge bat things," she said. She pointed a finger skywards. "And they live in this castle at the top of the tallest building in the city, way up--"
    Of course.
    Well that answered everything, really. The spatial storm he had seen following him since Radiant Garden had gotten as far as here as well. And naturally the keyblade master had to run straight into all of it. And now he was about to get involved, because it could never be simple, like finding Sora in a corner fiddling with his shoelaces. Oh no. It had to be the full-flavor local experience.
    The only question remaining in Cloud's mind was why on earth this girl had approached someone as obviously amiable as himself. He decided to dispense with the pleasantries and ask.
    Violet stared up at him as though he was blithering.
    "Um, you're cute?" she said, as though this should be obvious. "In that kind of man-eating chinchilla way."
    "...Chinchilla."
    "Yeah."
    "You're a very bored little girl, aren't you."
    "So will you help me find my mom and dad or what?"
    "You said they're 'up'?" Cloud asked, gesturing. The tower could be seen faintly past the rooftops to their west, where its stories disappeared into the clouds. Violet nodded. "Then it looks like we're going the same way anyway."

    Captain Jack Sparrow was doing quite well for himself these days. He had always been of the opinion that the only variables to his success were the being in the right place at the occurance of the right time, and when the worlds merged that was precisely how things had turned out.
    He would never confide it in anyone, but truly, Zola-or-whatever-his-name-be had proven a bonny of a good source. Prior to meeting him Jack would have never dreamed that there were other lands out there past even the horizon, and that these lands were all ready and rarin' to get robbed blind and manipulated sideways three times from Thursday. If Jack were a religious man, he'd've likened it to a kind of euphoria, divine ecstasy: the worlds had opened up, spiritually and literally.
    So when the waters thinned and brought shores of metal, manned by creatures never intended but from the mouth of hell, Jack was there at portside with a monkey-and-hat routine before anyone had brought the peanuts. He scammed, cheated, double-crossed, exploited and plundered like he had never before in his life. Soon, he was sailing the star-waters in a Black Pearl outfitted with her very own faux-tawn thrusters and anteegrav modyuls whotchacalls. Oh, and cannons. He made sure she had the very best of cannons.
    He felt a little pang of guilt for still needing to borrow Annamaria's boat to fish his dear out of the Intergalactic Space Authority impound lot for speeding violations, but naturalization was a long and ongoing process, he always said. Or he would have if he'd known what 'naturalization' was prior to a towering heap of metal telling him that's what he ought to be working on doing if he wanted to avoid further incidents. It apparently had something to do with not going over 15 light years per second in a 10 light years per second zone. Well, when in Rome.
    But he was, on the whole, doing well for himself, even considering he had accidentally sunk Annamaria's boat in a backwaters port one night when he was drunk and had accidentally picked up a male Artkuthulpalian prostitute (now there was a story for a cold winter's night). He was richer than he had ever been, pleasurable company was available in any size, sex, color and number of orifices he desired, and that wet blanket of a Turner child was as far away as he was ever going to get. Things were so perfect, Jack's confidence was, for once, not just a silly facade.
    All the same, it surprised him when he got a parrot from a certain former companion, telling him she had news that he would be quite interested in, if he cared to drop by Montressor after his next raid. The message came with the assurance that bygones were thoroughly bygones; she wouldn't hold the boat incident against him if he forgot that little business with shooting him through the throat, and in the meantime there was a joint venture they could both invest themselves in and profit. Annamaria promised him it would very much suit him to hear what she had to say.
    Now, Jack knew better than to outright trust the woman, but she was consistently genuine where matters of interest were concerned. She may try to kill him as soon as he reached port, but so long as it was after he heard whatever she had to share, it was somewhere he was quite willing to venture.
    She was smoking a pipe when he arrived, lounging with her boots up at the back of one of Montressor's dingier pubs. She smelled like driftwood and she wore a thick bandage around her hand, as though something quite sharp and testy had had a go at her.
    "Captain Jack Sparra," she greeted as he approached.
    "Her highness the honorable," Jack returned, bowing.
    She didn't look over at him, and waited for him to get closer before she spoke again, lower, "Old bosom friend Jack. D'you recall once when we stood on the rocks o' Tortuga and y'told me a story, of a lad wit a strange weapon at 'is side?"
    "Aye," Jack relented, drawing up on a stool. "He 'ad a tight arm on that fing as well, as I recall."
    "I recall ya sayin' it," said Annamaria, chewing lightly at her pipe. "But that was then and this be now, aye? If'n ye had another chance to have a shot."
    Any lesser pirate may have fallen off his chair at that point. "Where is it," he hissed.
    She smiled at him. She'd had a new alloy tooth set in since last they'd met. "Planetside," she said. "At an inn. But I won't be tellin' ya where witout somethin' for me trouble, Jack."
    "I'll get you another boat," he said at once. He could afford it now. "A great big one."
    "Nay."
    "Crisp solar sails and full rear shields and a pure adamantium hull. She'll blow the Space Authority clear outta the water."
    "I want your Pearl, Jack."
    Captain Sparrow backtread. "Tisn't any treasure in the eighty seas that's worth--"
    "Not now," she said, fixing her eyes dead on him. "I want t'be in line for it fer when you go down in a cloud o' blood, Jack, as I know ye will. I want t'be on yer crew."
    'Slackjawed' was not a very glamorous description for a facial expression, but it was among the best to fit Jack's look at that moment.
    The captain of the Black Pearl recovered himself. "Second mate," he said.
    "First."
    "Quartermaster."
    Annamaria inclined her head. "Quartermaster," she agreed. "You'll regret that heavily, Captain Sparrow. Do we have an accord?"
    "The location," Jack insisted.
    "After me lunch break."

    Jim took the next shuttle planetside after his shift, jaw and pride bruised a bit too much to stick around Montressor longer than he had to. His mother wasn't going to be too happy to see him, he was sure-- she always had some complaint, if not his jobs then his school work, and if neither of those then his hair. He'd never understand what she had against his hair.
    The Benbow Inn was a self-sustained outpost on a coral ridge, overlooking the West Nitrogen Seas. It was quiet and removed, for the most part, but the locals enjoyed the food and kept the place busier than Jim Hawkins's mother could really handle by herself. Jim showed up in evenings to help her with the evening rush, but it was never enough. Whether he scrubbed pots in the kitchen for hours or went solar sailing out by the old refinery, she nagged exactly the same.
    This afternoon the Inn was quiet, just an old couple and Doc Doppler, who was there so often he might as well be paying rent.
    Jim hated himself for recounting it, but he'd heard his mother close down the dining hall on more than one night with the old doctor still there, and heard a single close of his mother's bedroom door, with quiet voices he had done everything not to listen to.
    There was a need for patronage, Jim knew that, but the part of him that had grown up seeing Delbert Doppler as a big gangly uncle still found there were some pills too hard to swallow. And he would rather keep things that way.
    Doppler and Mrs. Hawkins waved him in as he entered, asking the usual questions. Doppler was the first to notice the bruises and stutter out the inquiry, mention about controlling one's temper and growing up a little, yes, this isn't the playground anymore, Jim, and his mother despaired quietly and told him there were leftovers in the kitchen if he was hungry.
    "I think I'm just gonna go turn in," Jim told them, moving past them for the stairs leading up to the rooms.
    "Did something happen at the job, hon?" Mrs. Hawkins asked.
    He hesitated on the creaky step. "I, uh, might've been let go."
    "You were fired?" Her voice was growing shrill. "Oh, Jim, not again, that's the third job this month--"
    "I'll find another."
    "Young man," Doppler intruded, "the ability to hold a steady job is one of the cornerstones of adult life, something you would do well to a--"
    "How many corners does this adult life thing have, Delbert?" This had been nagging at him a while. Much like his parental units.
    Dr. Doppler stammered. "Well," he said, adjusting his spectacles with a stubby finger. "I do believe you're missing a bit of the point, old Jim..."
    "I'm going to bed," Jim sniffed. "I'll do my homework in the morning."
    "Wait. Jim!" her mother protested. "Before you go up there--"
    He didn't stick around to hear it. He already knew her routine. Washing up and getting his clothes into the laundry, write that apology to the ranchers for tipping their cybercows last weekend, sweep the porch before the shuttle comes tomorrow. It was like she thought he couldn't remember anything.
    Jim and his mother had their rooms in the attic of the Benbow Inn, out of sight and mind for their patrons. He had spent his entire life in this room, overlooking the docks at the edge of the reef; had spent countless nights at the same lone window that once let him glimpse his father's retreating shape just before he disappeared for good.
    It was a lonely, tiny little room, personality junked on with the utmost care and vanity, the way that any teenager would. What used to be cartoon wallpaper of majestic schooners had been replaced with band posters and stolen construction signs, his old wooden desk heaped up with junk and the derelicts of homebrew projects. The solar sailer he'd put together by hand rested in the corner, content as a well-sexed hog: the one thing in his room that had a real sheen of affection on it.
    And then there was his tiny bed, the same one he had slept in from a kid, now ratty and lumpy with the springs digging up through the padding if you sat down on it wrong. It had been years since he'd made the covers. Usually he just left the sheets as he'd woken up in them, a crumpled pile that would accept his body just the same the next time he flopped down, which he did presently.
    Jim frowned. The lumps must have shifted again. There were odd pokey bits where he couldn't remember and a big soft pillowy section about even with his pelvis. He manhandled the padding trying to get it into a more sensible shape.
    His lumpy, squishy mattress grunted. It squirmed and dug sharp toes into his shin, murmuring, "Sora, you big lug, find your own bed..."
    Jim opened his eyes. He looked over his shoulder at what he had been lying on top of. It blinked muzzily at him.
    And then screamed.
    Jim shrieked as well. He scrambled off the mattress and hit the floor hard on his rump. The young redhead curled up in his sheets climbed up on the bed, squeezing a terrified owl to her chest like a teddy bear.
    "You!" the girl shrieked. "What're you doing here?!"
    "What'm I doing here?!"
    "Yes, you!"
    "That's my bed! Why are you in my bed?"
    "It is not!"
    "Yes it is!"
    "No it's not!"
    "Yes, it-- MOM!"
    Ten minutes later, the teens were glaring at each other across the kitchen table, untouched tea in front of them and a flustered Mrs. Hawkins catching Jim both up on why there was a young woman in his bed that he didn't specifically put there.
    "She didn't have anywhere else to go, hon!" his mother explained. "She'd have been shipped off to one of the slave colonies if Delbert hadn't stepped in and made a story up about her being your cousin. We'll sail into town to get her some clothes tomorrow--"
    "But she's the girl that got me fired at work!" Jim protested.
    "His partner was trying to kill Archimedes!" Kairi argued. "She's the reason those robots got a hold of us in the first place! And he was oogling at me! Oogling!"
    "You didn't have any clothes on! What was I supposed to do?!"
    "You pervert! You're disgusting!"
    "I'm the pervert? Who sneaks into a guy's bed dressed only in his PJs? And who's this Sora, anyway?"
    Kairi flushed. "Shut up! You're such a jerk!"
    "Nutcase."
    "Slimeball."
    "Ah. Kids," Doppler attempted. "If we could bring it upon ourselves to be reasonable--"
    "Slut."
    "Prick."
    "Tramp."
    "Hobo!"
    "--Er, excuse me--"
    "Beg your pardon," Archimedes spoke up, clawing out from under Kairi's borrowed shirt. He shook his feathers out to straighten them and only succeeded in fluffing up like a dandelion. "If the both of you are quite through--"
    "So you really do talk!" Jim burst out without thinking. He hadn't been quite sure whether he had been hallucinating earlier.
    "And a good deal better than you do, boy," said the owl, lifting off from the table to perch on the soup pot rack. "At the loss for any better intermediary it seems I must step up to the branch, as it were!" he declared, sounding as though this was a despairingly common occurrence.
    Doppler and Mrs. Hawkins, who had been preparing themselves to physically separate the two teens if necessary, actually relaxed at the introduction of this new voice of reason.
    "I think what we all need is a clear understanding of what's happened," Mrs. Hawkins said, with decent motherly sensibility.
    "Right you are, madam." Archimedes fluffed his breast imperiously. "Now. Kairi. If we could retrace our flight, ah, that is, our steps, back to the island, where this all began, I believe we will all find--"
    The owl got no further, for all his good intentions. His perch shuddered under his claws as the whole inn thundered, shaking under the might of a booming knock at the front door.

    Wedge set the gummi nanites into regenerative mode and pulled up the diagnostics screen. The Uncle Remus had come away from that storm-fight bruised but steady, which couldn't be said for its crew. The sergeant in particular looked as though he had a keyblade stuck so far up his ass he was probably going to sleep standing up now. Wedge couldn't begin to say how hard it was to take the ship through its integrity readings with a stone-cold Wutainese ninja breathing down his neck. Wedge had a large amount of neck, for one thing.
    "Sarge," Biggs spoke up from the helm. Wedge's stomach fluttered with relief. "Y'know that reading we caught just before the hurricane. The ship with the Chaser ident."
    "Yes?" Tseng said, rising.
    "It musta cloaked and ran, sir. There's no record of it in the logs after the storm hit Category Four."
    "No, this man doesn't cloak." The sergeant hummed a moment to himself, reaching Biggs's console to take a look at the readings. "Possibly he ran into atmosphere and we lost the signal."
    "So he was going after the keyblade master?"
    "I couldn't tell you." Tseng straightened up, smoothing the front of his jacket. He climbed down from the fore station and started for the corridor. "It's no concern of ours now, regardless. Keep radars up in case he makes a repeat appearance, and in the meantime, about-stern and take us back to the castle, if you can. Get a fix on the Cornerstone: nothing else in the galaxy produces a signature like that; it should only come up once."
    Certainly not three times, the sergeant added to himself, embarking down the personnel hall for the rest of his rounds.
    The keyblade master was sparring with Irvine in the training hall. The cowpoke had taken an immediate brotherly shine to Sora, which wasn't at all unusual-- he could befriend a cactus if his heart bled for it enough.
    Reno Conway was leaning by the door when Tseng entered. His deference to his commanding officer only went so far as edging over so Tseng could have a place to stand outside of the entry way while watching the match.
    "Haven't given him the formal welcome yet?" Tseng asked, not glancing over.
    "Thank you, nice to know my basic human integrity is respected aboard this ship, sir," Reno replied. "I'm sure Beatrix would be jealous anyway."
    "Conway, Croissouix doesn't notice you when you're with her, much less any other time."
    "Ah," said Reno, smiling at the sparring boys. "My mistake. You'd be jealous."
    A lesser sergeant might have blushed. Tseng merely rolled his eyes and made a mental note to give the firebrand extra kitchen duty. Some things weren't even worth dignifying with the thought.
    Irvine was holding up pretty well on the mat. He had far less experience with hand-to-hand fighting than much of the rest of the squad, having been sent on to specialist training fairly soon after his internment, but he definitely wasn't giving the keyblade master any quarter here. Every blow that Sora landed, Kinneas was able to return three times over, ducking and spinning with ponytail swinging at the base of his neck, light on the balls of his feet just like some champion boxer.
    No, thoughts on his character aside, Tseng had to agree there was something pure and graceful when the boy fought. Something artful and devastating, kind of like his cooking...
    Tseng put this reflection on hold when he noticed how the keyblade master was faring. Or wasn't faring, perhaps.
    "Kinneas! Good gods, stop!"
    Irvine, shaken out of his zone, hesitated and froze. He drew back his arm. "Hey, but sarge--"
    "Do you want to kill him?" Tseng demanded, stepping between the two. Sora had collapsed onto the mat, wiping his bloody nose with the back of a hand. Tseng crouched down beside him to steady his shoulders. "What in the King's name were you doing? You should be going easy on him!"
    "I was going easy on him!"
    "Iffs not hiff faul'," Sora insisted, blood streaming down despite his best efforts to stop the flow. He looked like he was going to be sporting a black eye soon as well. "Relly. You don' haff to--"
    "Sir, if Elena's detox isn't working for you..."
    "He's a year out of practice, in case you've forgotten," Reno called over from the doorway. "Just leave 'im alone, sarge."
    "M'fine," said the keyblade bearer, resisting Tseng's efforts to help him to his feet. He climbed up on his own, with unsteady knees, dabbing at his nose with the edge of his shirt. Someone had loaned it to him, likely Reno, but the sparring had already more than ruined it.
    Tseng frowned. "I insist our medic take a look at that before you continue. And you," he added to Irvine: "in the future, defer properly to the Keyblade Master."
    Irvine and Reno's mouths both dropped open. "What," Irvine said, "we'll just hope to hootenanny those Heartless will curl up and die out of respect when he gets close?"
    Tseng decided that remark wasn't worth dignifying either. "Even you at your most vigorous can't do much for our lord when we see him in a month's time," he told the boys. "That was Biggs's rough ETA for the HQ."
    Sora wiped the last streak of blood away with his wrist. "Disney Castle?" he asked, voice a little clearer now. "We're not going after my friends?"
    "It was our order from King Mickey to return with you as soon as possible," Tseng said, sensing this would be a lot easier if the boy wasn't nearly eye level with him. "We've been delayed long enough. You must understand."
    "But they're out there alone somewhere! You can't just ask me to leave them behind."
    "With respect, lord, there's every chance they're already dead. You nearly were. Besides," said the sergeant, delicately bracing Sora by the shoulders, "it is you alone who is important now. The Keyblade Bearer, the one who will open the Door to the L--"
    "But they have keyblades too."
    Tseng hesitated a moment. Two bunk signals...
    He shook his head. "Surely not, lord."
    "You know about that, don't you?" Sora demanded, taking a step away from Tseng. He scanned the sergeant's face, looked to Reno and Irvine. "Right? The Cricket Reports? Jiminy's records? It's all in there!"
    The Chasers shifted uneasily under his gaze. He had done it again, tread unknowingly on something that was used to being kept quiet. And here again, he saw, was the same propaganda the voices had once used on him. The Chosen One, the single and solitary Keyblade Master, you and you alone. And that wasn't right. That wasn't right at all and they should know that...
    Going around treating him like a lord. He wasn't anyone special at all. If anyone should have been picked up in that drift, it should have been Riku! And here they all were--!
    "My liege, stress has affected your thinking," Tseng said gently. "The strain of all these previous events has..."
    Sora's face fell.
    Unless it was simply that no one else did know...
    And then something else was nagging at him. It was Roxas who noticed it.
    "Wait a sec," Sora said to Tseng. "What did you call me?"
    'My liege.' That was what Fei's Other had called him on the beach.

    Jim turned the orb over in his hands.
    The stranger had come, and just as quickly the stranger had died, in the middle of their dining hall floor, gasping hoarsely about that which Jim Hawkins now held in his grasp. The map, the stranger had wheezed. The map to the stuff of dreams, lad.
    Kairi and he had fought over it like a pair of siblings, but in the end Kairi was a girl and as a result invincible, so she won. Over Doppler's complaints of an elusive, elaborate code that might take years to break, whole fleets of scientists to decipher, Kairi had the thing open in roughly three minutes, and then it was time for the light show.
    Afterwards, the map hummed warmly in Jim's palms and the glowing holograms of bearings and planets were etched cold into his mind. And no one was quite sure what to do.
    "Never you mind, my dear," Archimedes chided the girl, such that it was clear any terms of affection were a formality only. "We have more important matters at wing here. Getting you back to the keyblade master and his knight, for a start--"
    "That map was a road to Disney Castle," Kairi stressed. "If we could just get a ship--"
    "And who, who would sail with you, girl? Who?" Archimedes spread his wings, remiges fanning out like teeth. "Have you looked outside lately? These stars are no longer our own. Disney Castle may not even be where it was now. It may not be there at all."
    "Even so! Sora and Riku might be--"
    Once again, the residents of the Inn were interrupted by a knock at the door. This one was, at least, a lot milder.

    A knotted clawed hand reached down and picked the tiny king up by his cape.
    "Never ye mind the ol' rascal," assured the wizened old gargoyle. "He's a bit a' whatcha call a loony, but 'e's a useful bugger."
    Riku, eyes now adjusted to the darkness, could make out the figured hovering over him. He supposed the normal human response would be to be frightened, but by this point he had had his fill of deadly talons, bloodstained fangs and enormous leathery wings to cease to be impressed.
    The reaction didn't go unnoticed by his captors. "I take it you are not from around here," rumbled the one Riku supposed was Goliath. "Are you aware of the danger which threatens this world?"
    "Yeah," leered the younger one, who looked nothing so much like someone had plucked a chicken and dropped him in a pot to boil. "Would you say maybe you're part of it?"
    "...I... What?" Riku managed. "I'm sick and my ass has fallen asleep."
    "Are ye a Super, lad?" said the elder gargoyle, stifling the cat's protests with an arm. "For ye see, we was very intrested in that weapon you 'uz carrying."
    Riku pondered a moment. It was an effort, now, disorientation mingling with the withdrawal haze, but yes, they did have his sword, didn't they? Well, that wasn't right at all.
    He had to change that.

    "You really know nothing of the Chasers?" Tseng asked.
    "First I've heard of you in my life."
    "But... my lord, you're the--"
    "A wartime Keyblade Master," Irvine reminded, coming to Sora's defense. "It's not as though we put out a newsletter, sarge."
    Xian Tseng shook his head. "There is so much to explain. Incredible; in two years' time, the King made no effort at all to... How could we put this? In simplest terms? You are what we are trained to be."
    "...I don't understand."
    "The Chasers were formed to inherit the Keyblade," said Reno. "Long before Disney even started his empire."
    "King Mickey didn't...?"
    "Of course not," said Tseng. "The Chasers have their origins as far back as the Keyblade War, the one that split the metasphere."
    Sora shook his head. "I still don't get--"
    "The Chasers were founded by the first Keyblade Master," Tseng said. "We are honor-bound to the Throne of Disney but our true Master is none other but the Chosen One."
    "It's the 'One' part I'm just really not getting."

    The ropes fell in shreds.
    Riku rose up. Easily, without pain or vertigo, the power blossoming up from his hand into every joint and vein. Even Xehanort's presence was pushed back into the corner of his mind, silenced and blinded by the light of Riku's keyblade that King Mickey had helped him form. The Way to the Dawn.

    Ascending the tower with Violet in tow, Cloud froze, a sharp and sudden pain flashing through the fore of his thoughts, bleeding into his vision.
    "This... isn't right at all," he gruffed, shutting his eyes against the light. "What's that brat gone and done now?"

    Jack Sparrow held up his hands. One of them was holding a pistol, however, so the gesture didn't mean much.
    "Don't mean to cause a fuss," he chimed, beaming at the group in their shrinking huddle.
    He strode in through the inn doors and walked in a circle towards them, like a large predatory cat would. He also noted the corpse crumpled in the middle of their floor. "Seems you've got more'n yer plate's share to begin with, so if we could just make this quick..." He leveled the pistol at the closest, which happened to be Jim. "The keyblade, if you would be so kind."
    Jim paused. "Not the map?"
    Kairi only wished she was within range to kick his shin.
    "No maps, lad; keep yer hair on. May I say that's a splendid haircut you be sportin' there."
    Jim Hawkins, defying virtually all expectations, stepped back and drew the map closer to his chest. "There's no 'key' here. You got yourselves the wrong number."
    His eyes caught a shape leaning against the doorway. The light was glinting off the smirk of her silver tooth.
    Well, there went that plan.
    "Bargain wit em, Jack," Annamaria said airily. "Maybe we will settle fer a map, dependin' on the type."
    Kairi recognized the woman as well. She saw where this was going. "The map's nothing," she said, taking a step forward. "It only shows the way to--"
    "Atlantis," said Jim.
    Six sets of eyes turned toward him. Not including the dead man's, fortunately.
    Jack grinned. "Oh, aye?" he asked, twisting at the braid of his beard. "The treasure o' a thousand worlds, the forgotten city...?"
    "What are you doing?" Kairi hissed.
    "What're you doing? It's you they're after!" Jim whispered back, just as sharply.
    "Boy," Archimedes reminded, "that thing is a map to many worlds. Its value is immeasurable!"
    "An attractive offer," Jack, meanwhile, declared. "But I'm a rich man, mate. I've a mind more for the exotic than trifles."
    "It's all we've got," Jim told him adamantly.
    "Moron," Kairi huffed, mostly because she couldn't remember the boy's name yet. She stepped in front of him. "I'm not allowing you to make decisions for me."

    "But we're sure of it, my liege."

    "This thing?" Kairi demanded, holding the keyblade high in a shock of light. "Come and get it."