The fire had come first, sweeping through the lower research labs in a bitter, vengeful blaze. It reached the halls and tore down the corridors as though it were on the scent of something, prowling, snarling and roaring as it clawed its way through every door and licking the white castle stone black in its wake.
    The sirens had sounded and there were a thousand soldiers up and running before the first of them drew their breath. But the fire wasn't the real problem by then, not by miles. No, it was what had started it burning. It was the thing that had gotten out.
    Section sergeants were at every door ordering men out into the blaze, water spells and buckets at the ready and weapons too. In minutes there came the first bursts of gunfire, like volleys of far-off thunder, rising up and spreading in every direction. There were people shouting, too many voices, too many directions, and soon there were screams as well.
    He didn't know how he'd made it down to R&D 7. Some part of his brain was still connected to the place, drawn to it inexplicably like some yet unsated addiction. The place where they'd put his friend's body. Locked away in glass like a slumbering maiden while the whole world around him turned to ash.
    It was in the belly of R&D 7's lab where he felt it, that hard, brutal presence beating like a hammer against his forehead. Brutal unreality, an intolerable aberration, a tear right down the center of all his given awareness. It was standing there in the middle of the lab floor, stream of flames like spring flowers blossoming underfoot as it walked. Hair like rain and eyes like poison, its one wing that the researchers had yet to detach raised and flared like an ashen cowl over its head.
    The creature's hair streamed down around its face like mercury, tinged orange by the firelight glow. Its back was to him, wing poised, sword at ease at its side, bent over the opened stasis chamber where Zack Fair slept without his heart.
    The soldier stood in the doorway and felt the chill rush over his skin. He tried to move. To do anything: to fire, or scream, or run, but he couldn't. The creature leaned its body down on the edge of the stasis bed and spread itself over Fair's body, climbing on top of him like it was a child or a pet, pressed hip to hip as the wing curled over as an umbrella for them both.
    'Who has stolen your heart from you?' it mused, tracing its fingers over Fair's lips. A voice like wind, like the whisper of the air burned away in the choke of the flames. 'My dear Zachariah. Who has carved away your soul?'
    The soldier wondered whether he was here, whether he was really seeing this. How it was possible to witness this, to be in this place, without memory or cause except a subconscious drawing him to this beast. He watched helplessly as the beast kissed Zack Fair's lips and then plunged its sword straight through his chest.
    The soldier felt Fair's scream. Felt it out of his own throat, felt the hot tears roll down his cheeks. Mad with agony, the soldier ran straight through the lines of fire as they whipped and tore at his skin; his finger squeezed down on the rifle trigger as if pulled of its own accord, spraying gunfire anywhere, everywhere, because there was nothing left to protect.
    Bullets ricocheted, dug into the walls and chipped solid stone, exploded beakers and test tubes and empty stasis caskets in a shower of glass that rang like chimes when they fell, and the creature, the thing, looked up at him, with a bloody smile on its face.
    "How small," it said, rising, wiping the side of its blade on its arm. "How is it that I could possibly be borne of something so pathetic?"
    The soldier didn't even see the sword move. He felt it cut across his torso, the cold pour of blood and guts and the way his throat seized, how his knees collapsed from under him and suddenly the flames reared up around him, and that monster was smiling down at him with its wing like a grim reaper's scythe, not laughing, except with its cool acid eyes.
    "Why don't you disappear?!" the soldier screamed, cried, coughed with a mouth full of blood.
    "Do you know my name?" it asked. Almost singing. "I have a name now. I named myself. You should be proud. Dear, weakling father..."
    "You're no one!" Strife shrieked through his pain. "You don't exist!"
    The monster held something out in his fist. A small crystal, glowing in the firelight. Almost heart-shaped.
    It closed its fingers tight around it and squeezed, until it shattered in the creature's grip.

    Riku opened his eyes.
    The blankets that had kept him warm on the cabin floor had slipped off sometime in his unrest, crumpled and damp at his knees. He was dripping sweat. Panting, eyes stinging in the darkness he couldn't make familiar.
    He picked himself up and sat with his back against the wall, tensing the ache out of stiff muscles, mindful of his bandaged wounds. By the corridor lights he could make out the edge of a shape opposite him, the other figure watching silently from the cabin's lone bunk. He rose his head to meet the gaze and, just as soon, understood, and nodded.
    Cloud asked him, in not so many words, if he often experienced resonance like that in dreams. Riku shook his head. He answered that Cloud had just been dreaming loudly.
    After a while spent in silence, with only the far off scuttering of Cait Sith up at the helm to listen to, Riku said, "How old were you?"
    "By then, no older than you."
    "What age did you volunteer?"
    "Fourteen."
    "Fourteen," Riku repeated distantly, looking at his knees. He blinked the sweat out of his eyes. Thought, I'd wanted to be a soldier too, at that age...
    ~Soldier,~ Xehanort sneered. ~Chaser.~
    "Chaser," Riku mumbled at the floor.
    ~The King's killdoll.~
    "The King's killdoll."
    Cloud said nothing.
    In the silence, Riku thought that perhaps he had seen too much. Not a simple nightmare, then-- more a memory. The kind that didn't get spoken of because the wound was still too fresh and spread too easily.
    ~Be glad,~ said Xehanort. ~Now we possess an advantage.~
    This isn't an advantage for shit, Riku told the ghost sternly. I won't let you make it into that.
    ~You have no concept of whose presence you reside in. Had you but the knowledge...~
    I don't want to dive into your head. Not anymore. And I won't have you diving into anyone else's.
    That made Xehanort laugh. ~This resonance is wholly yours. Don't you wish to understand why?~
    Riku ignored him. He refocused himself. Cloud was still watching from the bunk, frozen as though some part of him had been struck numb, seeing the weight of what had happened, and regretting it.
    There was something so familiar in his form, in the way he wore his shame and shyness so withdrawn. There was an ethereal quality to his appearance, something irrevocably tarnished, something that had been hollowed out and then filled up but never really restored, like a fallen angel that might have been absolved but would never be forgiven.
    He looked as much a ghost as that monster in his dreams had. He was something misplaced, possessed by some other sort of light.
    ...Light...
    "Your eyes glow," said Riku, realizing suddenly what he was looking at.
    The aquatic hum flickered in the darkness. A blink.
    "So do yours," Cloud answered. He stuttered on the last word, as though he'd meant to say "his."

    Kairi prodded at her potato soup with the back of her spoon. It looked more or less edible, but the knowledge that Jim had a hand in it was putting her off from her appetite. She was generally familiar with what boys' hands were soiled with, after all.
    She humored him anyway, as manners dictated. Besides, she had pants now. She could afford to be a little generous.
    They were alone in the galley, the two of them, delivered unto a bit of peace and quiet after Kairi's brush with death had been taken care of. Jim Hawkins had gone and whipped up the soup while Kairi was getting a particularly uncomfortable shot from the ship's medic, and after it was over Jim had had the boyish chivalry to escort her back to let the drugs do their work away from the froth of diseases otherwise known as their crew.
    Jim watched Kairi anxiously as she took a bite. He shifted impatiently when she stalled in the chewing to rub her neck, the red mark where the ship medic had delivered the detox shot with a very unsanitary-looking hypodermic gun. It looked infected and probably was, but if she wasn't dying of it in the next few hours it was probably not going to turn into anything nasty. Try telling her that, though.
    "You should have seen Sparrow," Jim told her brightly, confident from his inn-working experience that people ate better when they were happy. "When he heard he'd been beat by a girl that was all but dead on her feet, his jaw nearly hit the deck. I think he's scared of you now."
    "Yeah, well," Kairi said with forced loftiness, stabbing at a too-large chunk of what was probably carrot. "If he is it's all the better for me, now isn't it?"
    "He's fixing to betray you."
    Kairi looked up at him mid-chew.
    "Okay," Jim conceded. "That's a bit like saying onions get hairy if you leave them under the sink. Still."
    "I'm not worried."
    "It's all right that you aren't. Think about the civilians here a little."
    "Oh, grow a spine," Kairi said, exasperated. "Do and you'll already be one up on Jack."
    She scooped through the soup for more of the carrot she had found before. Jim's chest fluttered. Active spoon-poking was usually a good sign.
    "So who're Sora and Riku?" Jim asked brightly. "I take it they're dating?"
    The spoon handle clattered loudly against the side of the bowl. Kairi exploded.
    "Who in the world searches that much for their best friend? Huh?" the girl demanded, fingers curling into angry fists. "He goes out, he says he's gonna be right back, but what's he do but get lost for a year, looking for a guy! And when we all get back, what's he say? 'Oh, I can't kiss you, Kairi, I need your dad's permission! Let's go to the pier like we've done every summer of our entire lives and hold hands and ride the ferris wheel instead! What, you want to go find a hotel? Hey listen I think I'm gonna go hang off my boyfriend's arm for a few hours instead!' The only one making a move at all is his stupid second personality! And then it's not me he wants to do anyway! I just-- I-- Gaaah!" She stood up furiously, kicking the bench out from under her. "I'm gonna go spar with Jack."
    Jim leaned back. "'Spar'?" he queried, as nonchalantly as he dared.
    "Yes. Spar," Kairi snapped back. "I'm perfectly capable of wanting something without settling for-- for subtext, you know!"
    The young Hawkins rose from his chair. "Look," he said, "I'm sorry for bringing it up-- I didn't know it was touchy--"
    "Yeah, well, you're a moron."
    "You're a bit harsh to someone who just made an honest mistake," Jim pointed out. He experimented corralling her in with an arm around the shoulder. She untensed a little under the touch. "Look, I'm sorry if I've been an ass. And I'm sorry about this Sora guy-- You're right," he added, lighter: "it is really weird to go hang around another guy like that. Especially when there's a girl like you around."
    She smirked. Jim flushed. All right, so it was on a bit of the board-to-head side. But he persisted,
    "If it were me I wouldn't even have to think twice."
    The smile took on a sort of wry amusement. "I bet you don't even think once," Kairi told him.
    Jim recoiled from the remark. "Give me a little credit," he said, suddenly aware how close she was standing to him. She wasn't that much shorter than him; and with her red hair and blue eyes, it was like being laughed down by his own reflection. "Whatever else you could say, I'm the one guy on this boat with pure intentions," he contended.
    She chuckled. "I don't think you have pure intentions at all."
    "None?" Jim grinned, leaning closer.
    "Whatsoever," Kairi confirmed, letting him.
    What happened at that point was that the deck they were standing on, and indeed the entire ship, rocked sharply starboard, amid a boom of thunder as something large deliberately and conscientiously collided with the Pearl's port bow.
    Kairi hit the table near her hip and began to fall. Jim caught her, steadying on the edge of a bench.
    "You all right?" Jim got out, about as startled as she was.
    "Y-yeah."
    There were sounds overhead; shouts; Jack's lion yowl mixed in there somewhere ordering all hands to stations and raise shields.
    They were under attack.
    "So much for dinner," Jim muttered.
    "Dork," said Kairi, pushing out of his arms to make for the stairs. "I said I hated subtext."

    "Talk!" Irvine ordered, shoving the rifle against the llama's nose.
    It flailed. "I-I-I-I-I don't know anything!" it cried, breathing in panicked gasps owing to Reno's quarterstaff pinning his neck against a tree. "No hurty! No hurty! Please no hurty! I'll get you imprisoned for life, I'll send imperial jaguars after your wives and kids, I'll-I'll...!"
    "You were clocked inhabiting a stage-three transmogrification in a single-stage zone," Reno barked. "You are ordered to revert back to your normative manifest state or face full penalty of metaspatial law under sections two-dash-seven-dash-eight, paragraphs fourteen, sixteen and seventy-nine of the Allied Worlds Charter--"
    "Guys," Sora tried to speak up.
    "I want my lawyer!" the llama wailed.
    "--anything you say can and will be used against you in an interworld tribunal under section five-dash-fifty-six, clause sixteen, paragraph nine. Refusal to cooperate with Allied Worlds Charter designations will result in--"
    "Look, guys," said Sora, "I don't think--"
    "But I didn't do this!" it shrieked.
    Sora glanced around awkwardly. It was like being on watch while your friends were bullying someone down an alleyway.
    While they were landing, Irvine had explained to him --in very brief terms-- that there were a number of priorities any Chaser had while on missions. They were the leading disciplinary force the galaxy had to offer, he said: the front line was wherever it happened to exist. Sora just hadn't expected it would mean something like this.
    The worst part was how they seemed to be getting so into it.
    "Who turned you into a llama, sir?"
    "I don't know! Get offa me!"
    "What were you running from?!"
    "It's a jungle! Have you stepped inside one lately?! Look, d'you know who I am? Do you know who I am? I'm the emperor!"
    Sora watched the Chasers hesitate a moment at that. Irvine said, "Our ident tags for this world indicate a Grand Sorceress Yzma as the official ruler of its territories."
    "Yzma! Yes!" the llama cried with relief, nodding up at Irvine. "She used to sign all my paperwork when I was a kid and I didn't feel like reading things, or when I was too bored to find a pen, or the window was open or it was a Tuesday-- And, she... Okay, so she kinda gets ahead of herself, but--"
    "Did the sorceress turn you into a llama?" Sora spoke up, aware even as he said it that it was among the most absurd things he had ever uttered in his life.
    The emperor-llama flattened its ears at him. "I liked you better when you were just standing around like an idiot, hobo-kid. No. Like I told your other little fat peasant friends, I'm the emperor! Yzma would never do something like that to me; I'm the whole meaning of her existence! And would you get off?!" it snapped at Reno, twisting its head around and biting at his arm. Reno yelped and pulled back.
    "He is starting to sound bona fide," Irvine said reluctantly, retracting his rifle as the llama righted itself on its four legs, taking an undue amount of time to sort out its hooves. "The world ident does say a standard imperial monarchy typical of Mesoamerican golden age, and those are patrilineal."
    "That's right," agreed the llama, rearing its head up proudly. "Whatever it was you're babbling on about in your ver-nac-ul-ar. I knew you'd see the error of your limited underclass thinking," it said loftily, clop-clopping quite ungainly over the rocks to start preening its fur with its nose. "Please. Me, in trouble for something? Pssh. Arrest Emperor Kuzco! Maybe I oughta have you all killed anyway, you know, for a bit of a warning..."
    Reno, the least impressed, remarked, "I can see why someone wanted you gone."
    "Yeah well, if Yzma hadn't gone around telling everyone I was dead it might be easier to get back," it sniffed. "Making herself Empress in my absence, what a ham. Does she know she's so fired or what?"
    "Uh," said Sora. "With due respect, um, your... majesty? Don't you think it's possible that..."
    "Hey your highness," Reno said over him, getting to the point: "what's two plus two make?"
    The llama tsked indignantly. "I don't have time for your meaningless folk games."
    "Your sorceress turned you into a llama to usurp you," said Irvine, who was also now feeling like any words strung in any order were going to come out this surreal.
    The emperor-llama pondered this. It said eventually, "...I guess she does have that 'secret lab' where she keeps on plotting my demise..."
    Sora held his head in his hands. The Chasers sighed.
    "Right," said Irvine, shouldering his gun and opening the input pad on his forearm bracer. "I'm filing a report. Some of our people should get back to you within the next pulse-cycle."
    "We're not helping him?" Sora asked, stunned.
    "If it were just arresting him for illegal transmog, we could shuttle him in with us," said the corporal, shrugging. "We don't have time to go hunt down a negligent wizard."
    "But..." Kuzco's ears drooped. "What'm I gonna do?"
    "There's no other 'little fat peasants' you can guilt into helping you?" Reno suggested, in a tone that was not entirely undeserved. "Or, let me guess, you've been dethroned for a while now and no one even cares you're gone and, gee, you wonder why."
    "Oh, burn me to the core. Did our mommy not love us enough as a child?" the llama shot back.
    "Did yours tie your shoes until you were twelve?"
    "Bite me, cotton candy head."
    "You guys can't turn him back yourselves?" Sora asked Irvine, frowning over the noise.
    "You're used to traveling with the Court Wizard," the cowboy noted, tapping in the last of his filing. "There ain't many that can perform shapeshifts that still get their asses stuck in basic infantry. Besides, it's a stage-three. That means she used a potion, so we'd need the antidote to reverse it, and both are likely her own manufacture. My advice, highness," he continued to the llama, interrupting Reno's latest retort, "is to find a sympathetic set of hands to get you on your way. Our turn-around in this quadrant isn't what it used to be."
    "But the jaguars!" the llama bleated.
    "The ones you were going to sic on us, sir?"
    "The other ones! And I'm still going to do that, by the way."
    Irvine, entering the last of his footnotes, didn't even reward that with a glance. "Sir," he said dryly, "causing harm to and-or allowing harm to come to a Chaser in a noncombative setting is a first-level offense against the Crown of Disney. We invite you to try."
    "You smell like serfs to me."
    This, however, earned a look. "Your highness," Irvine said, "you claim to be the acknowledged, rightful ruler of this kingdom, which we have classed as an Enlightened World. You must know about the Allied World Charter and its agents."
    "The witch chick signs his papers, remember?" Reno reminded.
    "Right. The sorceress," the corporal sighed, punching a new command line into his console. "Could you describe this woman for us, your majesty?"
    "Would 'scary beyond all reason' cover it?" the llama asked.
    Sora's attention drifted, his gaze meandering down the rocky edge of the river bank. The mud in his hair and clothes was baking itself dry by the sun, and scorched rock was burning the soles of his bare feet as he shifted, but the air was cold. It felt like someone was cranking the AC to max right against his skin; a dry cold, like something had even sucked the breeze away.
    He had to be imagining it. He'd been in a few jungles in the time spent with Donald and Goofy, and each had been an all new experience in the strange and inexplicable. Anyway, any sort of world that harbored talking llamas wasn't one in which to go around questioning the meteorology.
    "How 'scary beyond all reason' are we talking here?"
    "Look, pal, just trust me on this one."
    Sora noticed that Roxas was agitated in his head. Fidgety.
    If this is about Reno again, Sora began.
    ~I'm not the one who was mudwrestling with him.~
    It was being friendly!
    ~If you were girls Irvine would've needed to excuse himself to his bunk. As it is, I can't believe you didn't cop a feel.~
    Not for lack of effort on your part.
    ~I do what I can.~
    Up the shore, the llama was drawing in the mud with a stick in its mouth. It seemed rather frustrated by the whole affair.
    This is just sad, Sora despaired at Roxas. So what was Namine to you, huh?
    ~Okay,~ said the Nobody, annoyed. ~Are you at all comprehending the difference between a candle flame flickering in the distance and a hot iron branding your inner thigh?~
    Reno is getting nowhere near my inner thigh.
    ~You're so self-loathing. Hey, whip it out real fast, will you? I mean the keyblade!~ Roxas amended himself quickly, over Sora's silent screams of mortification. ~The KEYBLADE, you idiot! Something's bugging me. I wanna verify.~
    Sora, still reeling with the mental images, grit his teeth and did as instructed. He held out his hand.
    The summoning light bounced and refracted off the bottom of the stream and dressed the rocks in intricate lace for a split moment, then retreated. The weight of the guard hung in the curl of his fingers and the metal hummed happily in his grip.
    Sora turned it over in his palm for Roxas's benefit. Well? he asked.
    He received no answer. In the corner of his vision, Sora became aware of a hanging light, like a trace of stardust, spreading and outlining shapes in the air.
    Shapes that breathed, silent and cold. And stared out from the sunken pit of their eyes.
    Sora would like to say he didn't scream. Screaming a second time always made you a chicken.
    Unfortunately, stigma could be damned, because that was exactly what he did.
    ~Crap,~ said Roxas. ~I guess it can suck, being right all the time.~

    Cloud Strife was a man of many talents. Aerith had once described him as a "jack of all trades," someone for whom many things came easily and whose scope of abilities was far wider than for most-- and this was a fairly astute observation. Apart from being a recovered paranoid schizophrenic with psychosomatic amnesia, for example, Cloud was also a first-rate dicer with a hunk of metal the size of a lamp post, a dedicated sullen bastard, and a fabulous drag queen. Although he forbade his friends from ever mentioning the last bit.
    One of the things Cloud Strife was not was a proficient artist, a fact that was particularly smarting at the moment, especially in conjunction with his utter inability to speak for more than four sentences at a stretch. It had been his intention to leave these explanations to Reeve, who inexplicably liked kids, at least in that sort of abstract way possessed by all intolerable humanists who have never had to deal with children directly in their lives. Reeve, however, turned out to be as coherent a speaker as he was anything else at the moment, and after half an hour of derailing discussion of astronavigation into musings on toenail cuticles, Cloud found he had been landed a mess far in excess of what he'd had to start with.
    He had subsequently tried to force the ship's tutorial manuals on the boy, a fate worse than death that the ex-soldier would not normally wish on anybody. Unfortunately, in this particular case Cloud discovered that Reeve, in his wisdom, had wiped that section of the databanks to make room for extra save-files for his excellent spider solitaire replays, for which the damn cat was unduly proud.
    So it was left to Strife to sit Riku down with a pad of paper and explain things. As discussions went this was not, he guessed, among the most uncomfortable --he still heard horror stories from Leon of the time 14-year-old Sora received The Talk-- but that wasn't easing the process any. For one, he had to draw the ship three times to convince the kid it was not, in fact, a disfigured cow.
    "Metaspace is divided into six levels. Strata," Cloud said, soldiering on. He sketched out a line and cross hatched it in five places, elongating the middle one to indicate the separation. "Most of the worlds are centered here, along either side of the division plane. Light worlds above, dark worlds below. This is the area you're probably most familiar with."
    "And every world has a mirror?"
    "No."
    Riku frowned. "Then I don't see--"
    "The same amount of matter exists. How it collects into stars is different. They're just two halves of the sphere-- they're not reflections. For the most part." He pressed onward. "The halves revolve in opposite directions along respective central axes-- these spires here." He indicated the lopsided carrot things drawn to either side of the division.
    "A star near the center revolves faster than one toward the edge?"
    "Yes-- No. Wait," said Cloud, brow furrowing with distant memories of old astronomy classes. "Yes, but not in proportion. The laws are different than they are on stars."
    "Uh... huh," Riku said slowly.
    "It's not very important," the ex-soldier said defensively. "A star toward the outer edge can take three hundred million years to revolve around the spire. To our eyes they're fixed."
    "Except they're not anymore," said the boy, "are they?"
    Cloud eyed the kid for this unapproved preemptive reasoning. "Right," he said grudgingly. "A storm is distorting space. All the worlds on a given plane lie in rough rings like this--" The sketch he made was vaguely reminiscent of a series of coffee cup stains on the paper "--and something has begun forcing them to run into each other. So stars are colliding. We think it began near the eighth degree, here--"
    "--That's more like the twentieth degree--"
    "Eighth degree. Two thirds out from which is Disney Castle, here. As far as we know, that was the first world to get attacked."
    "What do you guys know about this enemy?" Riku said to Cait Sith, who sat pawing at the crumpled remains of Cloud's less successful attempts.
    "About as much as either of you do, son," the cat answered.
    "But your body's at the castle, isn't it?"
    "Yyyeah, about that, heh," the plush toy said awkwardly, scratching behind an ear. "My immersion unit can only be disabled from the outside. And no one's come by to spring me out, so..."
    "You've been in there a year?"
    "Well, they might've forgotten about me."
    "Or there's no one left."
    The cat shuddered. "Oh please don't," Cait Sith complained. "If you can't think positive the least you can do is think silently. Cloud, he's as terrible as you are."
    "We don't know anything," Cloud said firmly. "Until we do we only waste time speculating."
    "What's certain, then?" said Riku. "Right now?"

    Jack was quite sure he wasn't enjoying this.
    The crew of his blessed Black Pearl had given it their all, he was dreadfully sure: pistols and cutlasses drawn and snarled battle cries at their lips, up on the starboard rail even before the first of their attackers had boarded, but in moments the other vessel had twice the Pearl's number to arms and moments after they'd had a four to one, and soon the entire deck'd been overrun, and Jack Sparrow was stopped in his tracks.
    He stared down the barrel of the pistol pressed to the tip of his nose. Galvanized steel neo-flintock with a beam concentrator modded to its power cell, nothing he had had much first-hand experience with, but knew well enough from second- and third-hand encounters not to treat it lightly.
    Its owner was only passingly anthropoid, but the grin communicated across all biological barriers.
    "Capte Jak Sparra, I prezume," it said. It wore a trihorn, to not entirely great effect.
    "Sorry," said Jack, voice squeaking for how the gun compressed his nose. "'Fraid tha's the cyborg wit the peg leg o'er there you be wantin'--"
    A monster fist that was more tentacles than fingers grabbed the collar of his shirt and twisted. "They be no triks played noe, Capte Sparra. Wot we wants is simple. Be a gentlemin an we leaves yer crew in peace."
    "Ah. Well," said the captain of the Black Pearl. "We're off to a great start wit that already, hey?"
    "Bring uz tha girl," the creature snarled, tightening its grip until Jack made a bit of squeaking noise. "An' be tellin' yer mens ta stand dawn."
    "For the men-- I'm sure they would happily oblige," Jack coughed, "if not presently concerned wit matters o' getting maimed to itty pieces, mate."
    The thing growled, beady red eyes jiggling. It reared its head back and barked something into the starlit air, alien syllables echoing against the blackwood rails. In the corner of Jack's peripheral vision, he saw the invaders' shambling figures hesitate and back down, retreating from the Pearl's now thoroughly baffled crew. Swords and pistols dropped to the deck. Annamaria and an entourage of others appeared at Jack's side, scaring off everyone except the pile of tentacles that had its opponent pirate captain at gunpoint.
    "Jack," Annamaria began.
    "Not now," Jack grunted.
    "Deal za deal, Sparra," spat the monster. "Whares tha girl?"
    "M'afraid ye may need ta specify," Jack knitted. "We've a few o' them. S'ard ta keep track, you know, long summer nights and all that. Take Annamaria o'er here--"
    "The keybearer."
    "Ah," Jack said awkwardly. He could feel two crews' worth of eyes staring at him, though given the state of some of those crew, the number of eyes involved was likely above the standard. Jack held up a finger to beg the captain's pardon. "'Scuse me, a mere second..?"
    The tentacled beast released its grip and dropped Jack back onto his heels. He steadied himself, swaying ungainly on his feet, then turned to address his avoidant quartermaster. More specifically, by grabbing her by the wrist and moving them back a few paces.
    "Devil wench," he told Annamaria angrily. "I thought we 'ad a deal."
    Annamaria irritably wiped a spot of blood off her cheek from where one of her opponents had gotten a bit too close. "I ne'er said we was exclusive, Jack."
    "Well it's bloody typical, if y'want my opinion," he hissed at her, aware of the other captain's jelly eyes burning into the back of his neck. "Go on; call 'im off 'fore we 'ave a death or more on o'r hands."
    "'Fraid we's not what you co' call fast friends," Annamaria warned.
    "Splendid. Well, then, best'n we be sure to keep that girl out of sight, wouldn't you agree?"
    His quartermaster seemed genuinely affronted. "Whyfore, Jack?"
    Jim Hawkins, had he been there, might have said Jack's lower jaw all but hit the deck. "Why?" he repeated, mortified. "Why?"
    "I know where she keeps the map," Annamaria confided, glancing to either side of them as she leaned in close. "We'd be needing her out o' our hair right quick in any case..."
    The air felt cold. Jack's throat burned with indignation. "See 'ere," he told the woman. "'Ave you taken leave o' your senses? There's time an' place, lass."
    "We's waitin's, Sparra," the tentacle beast sang, from over by the starboard rail.
    "Ah, jus' a minute!" Jack waved back to it. He made a show of investigating a barrel of rope hedged near the main mast. "Won't be a tick!"
    "Time an' place or no time a'tal, Jack?" Annamaria whispered, stooping close to his ear while he checked under a grate. "Don't be tellin' me ye've gone soft."
    "I've a plan for this oll yet," Jack replied adamantly. "An' anyone knows y'don't fold on the firs' hand."
    "Sparra," the monster cautioned. Around Sparrow and his quartermaster, the monster's crew edged in a little closer. Jack started to feel claustrophobic. "We wonts have yus wastin' or time!"
    Jack climbed to his feet, waving and smiling what he hoped was the more disarming of his smiles. "Ah, er, seem t'ave misplaced her!" he declared, over Annamaria's stammering protests. "I know: must've left 'er back on the docks. Silly li'l mistake, forget me own head next, hey? If'n you're set true upon the bird you could always hang by tha Port Montressor for-- You know Montressor, aye? Splendid docks, shiniest docks the stars ever saw--"
    If Jack had been equipped with large ears like Doctor Doppler (presently cowering near the stern), they would have drooped with the rest of the pirate's body when he heard a familiar voice shriek by the head of the stairs.
    "'Ere i' is!" boomed a gelatinous blob sporting an eyepatch, holding a squirming teenage redhead aloft with a thick pseudopod. "Tha keyblade masta! Boss! I's tha keyblade masta righ' 'ere! The limey wuz hidin' 'er!"
    "No no no," Jack Sparrow called out over Kairi's shrieks, waving his arms and jumping up to be seen over the heads of the tentacle monster's crewmen presently crowding around him with knives and pistols. "Y'have us wrong, mate! That lass there, she's just a governor's daughter! A civilian! 'Armless little fing!"
    This remark fell on dead ears --or whatever the tentacle beast had that was equivalent to ears-- mostly owing to Kairi's contribution to the conflict. Which involved a lot of flailing and kicking at the air and insisting that she was the keyblade master, damn it all, put her down or every last one of them was going to pay, et cetera, and otherwise make enough of a fuss to convince Jack that the universe really did have something against him.
    Kairi lashed out with her free arm, and light flashed in the palm of her hand.
    That's right, Jack thought with resignation: go on. Muck things up. It's already been a barrel of laughs, this trip.
    A glow just past the edge of sight caught his attention. Jack looked down at the deck. There was a thin line of light like stardust swirling up through the wood, coiling and taking shape and waving its massive length like a worm struggling into the sun.
    Murmurs and a few shouts ran across the deck, scurried footsteps as people hurried to dance out of the way of the tendrils coming up by the dozens now, swarming and unfurling in a veiny, pale network of lights.

    Irvine tapped his last fresh cartridge against his shoulder armor and loaded it, slapping it into the base of his rifle with a loud clap of his hand.
    "Right," he panted, wiping sweat and dirt off his forehead. "Observations, private."
    "Cadaver bodies," Reno answered, snapping the casing off an ether and pushing the needle into a tractioned arm. He gritted his teeth against the brief fit of nausea. "No-- nnh-- apparent response to pain or other sense stimuli. Probably something parasitic-- reanimating tissue. Detectable homogeny roughly seventy percent with-- gnh-- unexplained variables. How you holdin' up?" he asked Sora, gripping him by the shoulder.
    The boy didn't answer, just nodded, staring at nothing, pushing palm against the wound in his side. Barely a scrape, it was barely a scrape, the kid was lucky to be in one piece.
    They'd managed to pull back to the waverer when things got too hot. The things had come out of nowhere, swarming up out of the rock, the water, between the trees. They'd been all over the place and no one had even seen them...
    Kuzco huddled in a ball of fur in the corner, gibbering. The ghosts he'd felt in the jungle, he said. The ghosts that'd followed him.
    "Followed us too," Reno muttered. He squeezed his eyes shut and held his hand over Sora's wound to try the healing spell again.
    "Inferences," Irvine persisted, leaning close to the hatch doorway to see how close the things were now. "What can we guess?"
    "Resonance forms," the private struggled out. "Ectoplasmic cadavers. They're in a half-state, probably coming out of between-space."
    "Or?"
    "Or going through between-space. But, fuck, that shouldn't be--"
    "Conclusion, private."

    "That they have no being," said Cloud, laying down the pencil. "They just are. Remnants of forms. Phantoms or poltergeists, able to use any technology or walk straight through it if they like. And they..." He shook his head.
    "What?" said Riku.
    "It happened so quickly at the Garden that we couldn't tell what was happening at the time. They... absorb people. They incorporate it into themselves and make it part of them."

    "You bastard," Jack snarled at the other captain, dashing to escape one of the translucent worming coils. "You utter bastard. Just wasn't enough for you in the end, hey?"
    But the beast in the trihorn wasn't answering. It had stiffened, tendrils of its mouth jerking and then freezing still, edges and pores humming with the same traces of light that outlined the phantoms.
    Jack looked past creature and discovered the same thing happening to the entire invading crew. They stood in place, eyes tranfixed above them, as if something had taken hold of their forms. A final low moan escaped their demonic mouths as the lights streamed out and curled and twined over their flesh, outlined joints and seams, and what could only be those devil lightning wires, twitching beneath the sinew.

    "They..." --Riku couldn't believe he was even saying this-- "...assimilate them?"

    "Grammercy," Jack Sparrow heard someone say, maybe the cook. "They's all machines."
    And as Silver said it, the sunken dark pits of the creatures' eyes began to hum in abyssal glow, and the machines began to move.

    "My conclusion?" Reno repeated. He looked to Waver 6's hatchway, to the bright sun-drenched jungle where shades and veiny edges of shapes slunk and crawled and advanced, too many to count, and way too many to ever kill.
    "Get us the fuck out of here, man," he said.
    Irvine clenched his teeth. "Can't," he grunted, resting temple against the barrel of his gun. "We'd never clear it. She needs a good twenty yards to get airborne."
    "It's twenty-eight to the treeline," Reno argued. "We could make it."
    "You've seen what those things do with metal."
    "You could cover us."
    "There's only one clip," the corporal gruffed. "That ain't even gonna slow 'em down."
    Reno Conway pulled himself up onto his knees, then onto his feet. "There's gotta be a way."
    "There ain't a way."
    "There fucking is. We didn't make it off that ship just to die in some pissant jungle," he said defiantly. "Tseng'd kill us twice if he saw our ugly mugs again in a hurry."
    But even the keyblade wasn't working. Reno knew. And how did you harm something even a weapon of the heart couldn't touch?
    Sora pulled himself up with a short grunt. He pressed at his aching temple with the side of his hand; the keyblade flickered and faded under his fingers.
    Outside on the rocks, the silvery shining outlines vanished into bleached sunlight.
    Sora blinked.
    It hit the keybearer so fast he didn't even have the time to be surprised at himself.
    He put his sword arm forward and summoned his weapon once more. Felt the hum in the bar of its staff and watched the stardust light up in the veins of a hundred swarming phantoms outside their door.
    Sora remembered what Reno had said back on the ship. About an enemy that hollowed hearts out from the inside and devoured them. He thought about school, about anatomy and physiology classes and contrast injections used for magnetic imaging, how the veins will carry a solution and leave a particle trace through every artery, outline the body in a perfect glowing map of its entire shape.

    "They can advance through anything," said Cloud. "No fear. No thought. They're nothing. All they are is... residue."

    "Residue."
    Kairi deflected the zombie's attack and jumped back, dodging streams of light and currents of cold dead breath.
    ~They eat hearts,~ said Namine. ~It leaves traces through their bodies that resonate with the keyblade.~
    Getting that, Kairi snapped back. So what? It isn't much help if the keyblade can't stop them!
    ~Working on that!~
    Working a little faster would be nice!
    She ducked one of the Kraken's tentacles and ran shoulder-first into the stern cabin wall. A familiar hand caught her arm.
    "You okay?" Jim panted, smoking pistol in his grip.
    His bangs hung in his face, stuck with blood and gunpowder. He vibrated with a sort of intensity that she hadn't felt off him before, something dark and raw. It was the fierceness Kairi felt off Sora and Riku, that animal ferocity that millions of years of evolution and civilization had not managed to train out. A little bit of a reminder that any boy was just half a step from being a monster.
    Damn. He looks hot.
    ~What was that about concentrating?~ Namine demanded.
    Kairi came back to herself with a start. She averted her eyes, flushing, swaying suddenly as the adrenaline rush started to rebound in her system. She was starting to get worn out. The creatures just kept coming-- for every one that Jack and his men managed to take down by virtue riddling its body so full of holes it could be marketed as a brand of cheese, there were eight more that came up over the edge of the other ship, swimming across the nonspace divide between their decks and landing bootfirst on the Pearl's ashen black planks. Overwhelmed didn't even cover it.
    And the thing-- what Jack called the Kraken-- It threw down a tendril thick as the mainmast and slid through sail and rope and wood as easily as though it wasn't even there, a ghost form clawing from the belly of the ship, but it ripped through flesh and shredded a person in half, tearing out a blue shade and the crystal star of a heart and crushing them both into dust.
    Half of Jack's crew were down. Annamaria had taken a bad hit to the thigh, Jack himself was just gone-- They were trapped, outnumbered and overpowered, and all Kairi's split personality could figure out were the damn things' diet. Only once had the keyblade landed a successful hit, and that was when Kairi had dropped the stupid thing and it had burped a flash of light from its tip, sending the Kraken thing shrieking and flailing its tentacle as fast as it could in the opposite direction. But chucking her only weapon on the ground for a discharge seemed like a pretty lame, nay, a piss-poor tactic to have an overgrown sea-urchin scream a little.
    "You're a real good luck charm," Jim said to Kairi. "You know that?"
    Hell. She knew she'd left something at home. At least her keyblade wouldn't have to look like the refuse from a crafts store bargain bin, if she had some other keychain with which to alter it...
    Kairi flashed, inexplicably, on something she had seen Sora do once, inside Kingdom Hearts. Sora had later described it as a 'merge,' transitioning along with Donald into a form that couldn't use the keyblade in a normal way. It had had to take it up sideways and hold it close to the guard, channel power through its center bar like a...
    And suddenly, every gangster movie Kairi had ever seen in her life came flooding back to her.

    "Irvine," said Sora. "Get away from the door."
    He took the keyblade up in both hands, one at the head of the guard and the other wrapped around the neck, and drew it back, bracing the handle against his shoulder.
    The Keyblade was a magnificent and versatile weapon. It was the manifestation of its wielder's heart, and the blending of the hearts of others. It touched and mingled with the spirits of worlds, the souls of saints and warriors, and compressed it down to particles and shape and crystallized light. The Keyblade thought. The Keyblade felt. It responded.

    Cloud extended his hand. Riku, with some reluctance, handed over the blade.
    He wondered for a moment why it didn't vanish from the ex-Chaser's grip, but the light in Cloud's eyes took hold of him.
    "The Keyblade is particular. It fights the things that supposedly can't be fought. Darkness. Nothingness."
    "A vacuum?" Riku asked.
    "If it's in the user's heart, definitely," Cait Sith said confidently.
    "No heart stays strong," said Cloud, eyes low. "Everything chips away. Everything falls apart eventually."
    A strange burning sensation rose in Riku's chest. It made his pulse thump at the base of his throat, and moved his hand to cover Cloud's over the hilt of the blade, and gripped it tight.
    "The heart's anything it needs to be," Riku said resolutely, gaze straight into the ex-soldier's eyes. "It only follows the keyblade can be too."
    Cloud's gaze threatened to waver, but it held strong on him. A warmth spread up through Riku's fingertips and swallowed the flesh of his arm, raw energy singing like an untamed current in the marrow of his bones. It was a different kind of sensation, pliant, neither inviting nor rejecting Xehanort's ghost-fingers as they reached out and tasted the first curling wisps of its power-- and swelled hot and fast through his body like the burst of a flare off the surface of the sun.
    Riku grabbed the hilt away from Cloud. He angled the edge of its blade in his grip single-handed, saw the glimmer of shape in the corner of his eye, and fired.
    The Keyblade did the rest. The Keyblade knew how to do the rest.

    The Keyblade made a fucking awesome submachine gun.
    ~Really, Kairi,~ Namine huffed, as the Kraken screamed the scream of a thousand damned souls, or something like that. ~There's no reason to get obscene.~

    There had been rocks there. There had been a stream with muddy shallows, a leafy treeline. There had been phantoms.
    None of that was there now.
    Sora needed help from the llama to drag his ass off the floor. Talk about a hell of a recoil.
    Roxas was congratulating him as though he'd just proven his virility. Reno's shining eyes were not helping matters.
    Irvine snapped them out of it. A beam cannon was all well and good but there was the little matter of its relatively narrow range of effect, and the fact that the monsters were coming in from all sides without worry for trivial things like "doors" or "foot-thick solid plasteel-reinforced unobtanium hull." When Irvine nearly lost his arm reaching for the initial run sequence console, it was quite clear that the waverer was a bad place to be.
    Sora, in hindsight, was sure they must have panicked like lost boy scouts at that point, but he couldn't remember it. He'd become far more concerned with running, dragging a llama by its hoof with one hand and wielding the world's strangest rifle with the other, with two bozos chasing up from behind like a pair of wolfhounds lumbering after a master that has promised very good steak.
    It was very nearly nostalgic.