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Roxas     CASTLE OBLIVION
    CONTROL ROOM

It's been a while since anyone has been called to visit Castle Oblivion... and curiously, a small, quiet job offer for a potentially lengthy escort mission has been issued that would get new persons in if they wanted! Arrival is facilitated by an ominous swirling vortex that probably prompted most people to just not take it, though.

The interior of Castle Oblivion is a blinding white-on-white with grand windows that don't actually function as windows, light grey tile patterns that break up the blinding whiteness of the floors and ceiling, and towering columns.

Xemnas sits at a desk in a room that has been re-fitted with the trappings of a laboratory and office. To the right side a large projection of a book, mostly translated, can be seen. If it is compared to the version physically in possession of Lilian, considerable changes have now occurred. There are pieces missing from the bestiary in particular.

A new segment in the actual book talks about a specific sub-category of monster... and curiously it comes in an immediately understandable language.

        THE UNVERSED
    These cute little guys are a result of a damaged Heart uncontrollably externalizing its feelings in the form of a fragmented Eidolon. In all probability you'll only ever see one batch of these in this timeline, but it's not technically impossible for more of them to crop up.

    By the way...

    If a bunch of them blob together, they can basically function as a real Eidolon. That's a sort of spiritual copy of whoever they're from, if you're not aware. People who are empowered by bonds can call on them, and people who are very self-reliant can summon their own to act as a second body. Unversed are sort of a messed up take on the latter. Neat, huh?

That's a new tone. The book is talking to you directly... or seems to be, anyway.

Roxas is standing beside Xemnas's desk, holding a compass in the palm of his hand. Its needle is currently spinning uncontrollably, though occasionally it slows and lingers on something. The book, at least once. Xion, on another occasion. A wall, on a third.

Once again, Roxas has a rather dreamy and spaced-out look to him.

Xemnas, a blonde-haired bearded man in a black coat, clears his throat. "I apologize for the vague objectives on this occasion. Or indeed, the vague objectives that will persist going forward. As you may already be aware, beings such as ourselves are the remnants of those who have lost their spiritual core-- their Heart. Roxas is an unusual case, who came into being with a fragmentary Heart... and few of the other components that make up a 'Nobody'. He has no true memories of the life of who he was before, and that is a puzzle I should like to solve."

"We will be using sympathetic magic," he gestures towards what Roxas is holding, "in order to seek out lingering spiritual connections. This is ordinarily a simple process, but it is complicated by the degree of separation. So we will be engaging the problem in an unorthodox fashion."

"You will be journeying into Castle Oblivion guided by the compass," Xemnas says, "and I believe that its properties will draw out the missing threads in an attempt to rearrange them. I do not know what to expect once you have begun, save that you will certainly not be returning through this Castle's halls. You will be venturing through the Nevernever, and the Compass will lead your way."

"The most common possible threats throughout are Faeries, but more than likely you will encounter things that should be long gone." Xemnas glances knowingly towards Lilian's book.

Towards Cloud, Xemnas turns and gestures. "You, young man... are not of this world, but you have sympathies with it. There are things that you can learn here-- of yourself, and of your own world, that will be of value to you. They may be painful, but I believe they will be fruitful. In the meanwhile however, you will be compensated appropriately."
Tamamo     Among those new to these ventures, and to this location, is Tamamo no Mae. She gives Xion a small wave, decides not to interrupt Roxas's focus on the compass, and listens to Xemnas.

    "Among those patterns within my notice, there is one of naming." She's speaking to Lilian, having arrived by her side, but not so quietly as to avoid being overheard. "To refer to each by what it lacks speaks of a certain focus upon wholeness. Ah, but then, even should they be called unversed, may I assume them lacking in words and letters? Perhaps it will not be so, a name being only a name."

    The mission, to a curious degree, she finds perfectly understandable, needing no further explanation. "A convenient tool, is it not, that guides one to one's missing threads? I wonder if it so similar to that magic of my familiarity as it does appear."
Go Shijima      Through the ominous swirling portal, unhesitant, steps Go Shijima. He's a young man with amber-brown hair in a somewhat unkempt, very slightly frizzy mop, parted at either side, his other most notable feature being the white zip-up hoodie with red racing stripes. There's a moment where he has to adjust to the bright white-on-white interior, briefly bringing a hand up. When he lowers his hand, it's not long before he finds his way to the combination lab-office. He's got a natural sense of direction, even in somewhat disorienting places.

     "Yo, Roxas," says Go with an informal wave, but a kind of guardedly-aloof tone. The book's talking draws his attention, briefly, towards Lilian--but he works on the regular with a talking belt, and with sapient miniature cars, so the nature of his attention seems more focused on what's being said than where it's coming from.

     When Xemnas speaks up, Go's attention then shifts towards him. Desk, beard, mention of objectives--these are things which lead Go to believe that Xemnas is, vaguely, the 'boss' of this particular operation, and so he listens, albeit with crossed arms.

This guy... one of Roxas and Xion's pals, or maybe even their boss. I wonder how much stock they put into what he says. Is he the reason they always have to make everything so complicated, back home? Or did they form their opinions some other way?

     The purpose for the compass is explained, by Xemnas, and he casts a glance towards it, observing that it appears to flit every so often towards Xion. As Tamamo speaks up, he makes a blunt observation. "Sure," notes Go. "They're, like, an item. Maybe the Hearts they came from were the same way, and that's why the compass keeps pointing to her." He then glances towards the book. "Dunno about that, though..."

But it does explain why he understood, or seemed to, about why I'm so bent on what I'm doing...

     "I'm trying to figure Roxas out, too," says Go to Xemnas. Evidently, mention of compensation for Cloud has sparked an idea. "So I'll help you. When we're done today, I wanna talk to you about how you can compensate me." A gesture around the laboratory, at the various sophisticated instruments. "You seem like you're in the know about Hearts. What I have in mind... maybe it's outside your expertise, but, like I said. We can talk about that later."
C Not being a stranger to strange, swirling magic tunnels, Crow had no qualms about taking this one to Castle Oblivion.

It's basically how his first date panned out, after all, but that was neither here nor there. Crow's interest wasn't so much of the monetary nature, although it certainly served to entice Cloud Strife, so much as it was the information that could be gathered. More specifically, Vita had shown an interest in it, and that meant it was in his best interest to appease her curiosity.

And given the nature of where they were going, that being a place called Castle Oblivion that could only be reached via magic portals, Crow thought it best not to delegate it purely to Cloud, or to pair the mercenary off with one of his lieutenants.

    "A talking book, huh.."

Far from the strangest thing he'd experienced, it was quaint. He'd almost been eaten by a pack of ravenous books before, even. But that's a story for another time.

So these Eidolon .. basically, they're powered by will, or faith. Faith in yourself, or in others. Or I suppose you could call it the power of Belief.

C's red visor glints, as he adjusts his cape, "You said you'll be using 'sympathetic magic' ... but the goal is to use the Castle to make any connection that exists between him, and the person he came from, apparent. Like finding the right vein to stick a needle into."

In other words, the world inside the Castle functioned in a way that made something like that possible. It stood to reason that it may carry similar properties to the Infernal Castle, or the Trial he faced underneath Ordis.

That Cloud would have a connection to this place was surprising, and only solidified the idea in his head that it was a brilliant move of foresight to come here himself instead of letting someone else handle it.

"I have an interest in that place, so I don't mind taking up the job offer. So for now, we're all ... buddies."
Xion Is Castle Oblivion the true face of 'white privelege'? Well, being there you will definitely get the impression that it's not a privelege living there. Like living with your color correction turned off, getting a blazing whiteblind effect from contemplating the wall, and the almost-textureless and useless white on white on white windows.

Still, in Xemnas' office, there's the feeling of reality that isn't present in some of the interstitial areas of the Castle.

Here, the heavy desk and bookshelf-adorned walls make the double-white walls seem shining and bright between the cracks.

Xion seems sleepy as she idles in the office, her 'work clothes' (see: Black on black with silver cult cowled coat) open at the center to reveal a grey T-shirt underneath with a sunset pattern in the center. She speaks up to Tamamo's question, rubbing her eyes with curled gloved finger.

"Actually, it's really the opposite. Heartless are dark creatures, but they're actually made out of what a heart is. Nobodies are people who don't have a Heart -- you'd think they were Heartless, but those are actually all Heart! Unversed are..."

Xion lifts her finger from her eye, dropping the curled fist into her open palm. "... Heartless that are too heartful?"

She's just making shit up. Ask Xemnas or Zexion for brain trust questions.

Go, of the line-up of helpers, gets the second response out of Xion: "I'm glad you came, Go. Our jobs aren't really that different! I think you'll learn that today."
Hibiki Tachibana     Compensation's great, though it's not entirely Hibiki's reason for being here. She's pretty in tight with Xion by this point (she hopes) and eating burgers together with Roxas is very much excessive qualification for the 'pal' title. Pals enough even for something like this? Positively. The Darkness-Coded Portals were kind of sketchy at first, but she knows they're not as bad as they look by now.

    Given that, and Castle Oblivion being named...well, Oblivion, she was almost expecting a lot more black. Not blinding white. It's very awe-inspiring. And regal. And easy to get lost in. To be honest, getting to visit a place like it is kind of its own reward for helping. Though with any luck, it won't be the last time.

    "It sounds like the kind of thing that I'd be surprised if it /wasn't/ vague," she intones from her position leaning against a wall, extra careful not to accidentally mess with any of Xemnas' lab equipment. The nature of the X-crew's existences is one that gets her thinking for a few moments...but ultimately, it all comes down to something simple. Hibiki looks to Roxas and nods. "If it means learning more about yourself, then we can't let anything stop us, right? Even more if it's such a special case."

    As she pushes off the wall to stand tall, there's a tiny little resolute fistpump to show solidarity. She's heard about the Nevernever, but actually going through it...well, it'll definitely be an experience. Though she also gives a glance towards the talking tome with a 'hmm'. "Unversed, huh..."
Cloud Strife The mercenary calling himself Cloud isn't exactly a stranger to the musings of a magical phenomenon, but he can't quite shake the pangs of unease from seeing something like that manifest. Not that he hesitates to enter to be translocated with everyone else. After dealing with the swirling vortex of indistinguishable energy dealing with the contents of the interior itself was easier than a walk in the slums.

The initial awe, which to Cloud takes the form of slightly shifting his eyebrows and giving a single glance to the room with no other distinguishable facial changes, dies down quickly as he folds his arms once the man named Xemnas begins speaking. For the large part, he picks a corner of the room to stare at and focuses on it, and tunes out most of the conversation, content to keep to himself without interrupting or intervening. He didn't need to grasp the entire makeup and sociology of the threats he'll face and thus he makes his disinterest clear in his stance.

There are a few exceptions to that dismissive stature he adopts, however. As he mentions the curious case of Roxas' past his center of gravity shifts almost imperceptibly to put his weight on his other leg, the action causing his bangs to swipe across his field of view to spare but a glance up at the mention though he quickly recovers and pretends that didn't catch his attention by looking back to that same corner. Unfortunately, his desire to keep a low profile was shattered when spoken to directly with such choice wording. He keeps his vision squared, but can't will himself against turning to look at Xemnas directly once he mentions that there are things he can learn about himself here.

"...I'm just an Ex-Soldier doing Mercenary work, no more or no less. The only thing I value is payment." He lied. As natural as that was to say, he felt the personal compulsion to inquire further but strained it down like a backed-up gutter, his shoulders relaxing as he exhales and decides not to think about the potentials of that.
Lilian Rook     The fact that the Book of Prophecy has been updating fairly considerably lately is the primary reason that Lilian has returned here, though she'd been meaning to take some proper time with Castle Oblivion for some while now. The book, with all of its strange indecipherable allusions to ancient light and dark and futures that haven't happened, taking on this tone and subject matter, is enough for her to contact the Organization on her own.

    The fact that this lines up with a particular mission regarding Roxas, consistent ally and friend of Xion, as well as the most reliable way to get in touch with all the other Xs, is fortunate. It's also one of few things that she is reasonable content to help with, without feeling the pressing need to go behind people's backs to squeeze for some ulterior objective. "It's been a while. Longer than I'd originally intended. It's good to see you again." is the kind of tone she takes, for a change, though she hardly knows Xenmas that well, and Roxas doesn't especially need to hear it, being a fellow Paladin and all.

    "I'm familiar with the 'sympathetic' aspect. This isn't my first time with it, if it's anything like that Galbadian affair. It's a shame we don't have more specific instructions, but I'll trust you know what you're doing, with that--" she glances at the compass, frowning almost imperceptibly as it points at a wall. "--thing. I don't have any worries regarding 'problems' along the way, but I'd rather not be left wandering that chaotic mess of painterly nonsense logic."

    She gets as far as trying to greet Cloud in a "Good to see you again as well. You look well. Bulked up after last time, or is that my imagination?" before Xenmas goes ahead and spoils it by revealing this is a completely different Cloud somehow, after she's already called him by his Galbadian superhero name. Unfortunate. So she turns her attention back to ask one last question. "Is Roxas invested in this? Or is he simply the only one whom that device will work for?"
Roxas "It is a curious thing that we call any but Pureblood Heartless, the Heartless, for they have obtained Hearts," Xemnas muses towards Tamamo. Regarding the magic being performed, he plucks one of his own hairs, lays it on the desk, and takes from his hand a magnet-on-a-string. Something beneath him -- on closer inspection, a circle inlaid in silver onto the floor, just beneath his seat -- shines. The compass points towards the hair on the desk.

"A rather practical sort of magic, this. I do not know what resemblance it bears to your own. Some of these steps can be skipped with preparation of course, but when all the pieces are at hand..." He pushes a foot over the circle, causing the shine to end and the magnet to sway towards nothing in particular. Xemnas puts it down on the desk, takes the hair, and with a rubbing between his fingers obliterates it with a tiny plume of fire.

"It is complicated," he admits, "when those pieces are rent apart. The longer the separation, the less the connection remains. I had hoped that Roxas would recover these pieces naturally, as Nobodies do."

"Hey," Roxas replies to Go, raising a hand a little weakly. He frowns, "Sorry, I'm a bit fuzzy-headed. It's like... I don't know, tv snow inside your head? I'm being pulled in a few different directions. I guess my pieces aren't all in one place..."

He looks a little confused at the way Go talks about him and Xion. Then, he glances at the compass. "Ah... no, the 'people we were' wouldn't be like that. That is to say, while I don't know the 'old me', we do know who the 'old Xion' was. Anyway, I still have my Heart. It's just... not a whole Heart. It's, um, ripped? I don't feel some things."

"Like..." He seems to struggle for a moment, then gestures at Lilian, "Lilian thought I was jealous of Chase hanging out with Xion, but that's not a thing I can feel."

Xemnas receives Go's approach with loose interest. He inclines his head, "Of course. My expertise is in spiritual composition, but I am a former Wizard of the Council. My abilities are varied. Even if..." He lifts the magnet-on-a-rope, "All you need is to find something that has been lost."

Towards C, Xemnas replies, "It is... a matter of difficulties. One of the key components that Roxas is missing is 'memory'. Or more accurately, intellectual memory. He encounters people and things that stir feelings in him, but the mind and the heart are disconnected on this. What remains of his Heart knows how to feel, but he does not know the why of how he feels that way. We are using the properties of this castle because it interacts uniquely with memories. The compass itself is a tool to narrow the results."

"The book," he adds, gesturing towards the translation on the wall, "is a temporal anomaly. The copies do not quite share the original's properties. It is more accurate to say that it is still being written."

The Exposition Christopher Lee does not correct Xion's statements. He might just find it funnier that way, if he had a sense of humor.

Roxas receives Hibiki's fistbump gratefully, but he still seems lethargic during this exchange. He nods, "Thanks. And, um... magic is always sort of vague like that. I think if it was totally constant, it couldn't be magic."

To Lilian's concerns, Xemnas replies, "You will not be trapped wandering. To 'return to safety' will be easier than to find your way back to where you will be, more than likely. Though it may be I will be surprised."

Instead of responding to Cloud, Xemnas simply reclines a little in his office chair in response to Lilian greeting him the way she did. He smiles, knowingly, and inclines his head in implicit acquiescence to Cloud's insistence of payment as his motivation.

"Its fine," Roxas interjects towards Lilian. "I've been trying to figure some of the things going on with me out. Xemnas offered a solution. I think he's interested in the results, but I don't think it's something with 'big gains' for him."
Roxas The moment the group steps outside of the command room, lead by a still-lethargic Roxas, the castle's halls begin to change, demarcated by the columns on either side. A string, becoming clearer and more obvious with each step, leads from Roxas's compass to the fore, a sort of luminous black. With the first set the backdrop merely begins to fade. With the second, it begins to become dusty and barren. Red-brown rock and sand surrounds you on either side; you're moving through a canyon, the columns are barely visible. By the third the castle is simply gone, the expansiveness of the canyon feels real. You find yourself in an open area, atop a hill that slopes down towards a flat expanse dotted with weapons.

Some of you have been to the Keyblade Graveyard before. It feels a little less disturbed than it was that time, though... that is to say, it doesn't appear as if a battle has taken place here recently. It is more neat, at rest. Only on moving through the crossroads of the keyblades thrust into the ground does trouble begin: The very same creatures pictured in the Book of Prophecy begin to arrive, jittery and obnoxious. They're not difficult to dispatch but begin to harass and follow.

They're like enormous, aggressive rats.

The thread leads to the foot of a plateau, where a humanoid figure stands. It is black-and-white, with a fibrous suit that almost resembles muscle tissue. It doesn't have a face exactly; or if it does, it's concealed. An emblem LIKE a stylized pair of eyes blown up too big crisscrosses the front of its helmet.

It is holding a Keyblade. It isn't a familiar one; apart from being monochrome it is jagged and gear-like, with a thorny keychain. The length of it is wrapped in dark chains. The vibe of this creature is that it should not have such a thing. Nevertheless it does.

The black thread winds its way through the air and connects to its right wrist.

Roxas pauses, his expression brightening a little-- in awareness, but not in demeanor. He pockets the compass.

It's only at this point that some measure of brightness and energy returns to Roxas's voice, "Do we know each o--"

The Shade dashes forward and swings at Roxas, who brings forth a silvery-white Keyblade with a fleur-de-lis tip that is most certainly not his own to block, sliding backwards from the force of the impact. The teeth encompass a glassy heart, part of which has long since fallen away.

Before Roxas has the opportunity to counter-attack however, the Shade swings his keyblade into the ground and sends a shockwave of ice spreading out across 'approximately everywhere'. The swarming, jittery creatures from before form a ring around the group after this, not so much observing as just sort of 'doing jittery rat things' in a circle. Occasionally they'll join in to be pesky add complications, but not frequently enough to really register as anything but 'a thing that got in the way of a swing or a shot'.
Xion "Okay, Mercenary Man!" Xion claps Cloud on the back with her hand, smiling, after Lilian asks if he bulked up. "We know a guy that looks like you who works for Galbadia. If you're his mercenary cousin, though, that's fine too. Honestly..."

Xion's bright blues linger on Cloud's mako greens.

"... A Kamen Rider taught me that if you don't accept payment, you're disrespecting yourself and everyone else who has powers. Fighting is dangerous, even for an ex-soldier, and if this is how you live, then of course we'll compensate you."

Following her supportive words with an 'mm-mm', Xion barely tracks Roxas explaining their relationship, ~~creating further confusion~~ explaining it thus: "We're partners!"

MEANWHILE, AFTER GOING THROUGH SIX LOADING ZONES THAT A MINUTE EACH --

Xion sway-arm struts through the KEYBLADE GRAVEYARD, feeling very confident. "With Lilian and Tamamo here, plus a whole lot of friends and allies *and* a Kamen Rider, there's no way a few weird rats will stop us!"

Unfortunately: The Rats Are Not What Is Causing The Battle Theme To Loop

"Look out, Roxas!" Xion calls, as the lethargic fellow brings up his blade to stop the Shade's advance.

Attempting to start grinding through the rats before they interrupt someone's attack string, the black coated girl is caught unaware by the Shade's zone-filling ice area attack and sent back into the ring of Rats to get kicked and bit by tiny rat-attacks until she jump-rolls away, the particular energy of someone experiencing 'oh gheez oh man I want to press the Away Buttons!!!' and having to react.

Back inside the ring, Xion spins about throw a spray of tiny blue spheres 'behind' her back at the rats - each of which explode in a gush of water-aspected magic.
Lilian Rook     "It interacts 'uniquely' with memories?" Lilian question-repeats to Xemnas. "That's the first I've really heard of it. In what way?" She seems satisfied on a different subject when Roxas confirms that this is more or less his idea, loosening a previously imperceptible stiffness in her posture. A degree of guarded she doesn't necessarily have to be, mixed in amongst many other psyche locks. "How magnanimous." she says, slightly facetiously.

    "Still. I've heard a few things about the Council. I'm not terribly surprised that someone who was on it would have these sorts of talents and passing interests. You'll have to tell me more about it later." She even manages to smile, faintly, at Xion. "A Rider I particularly agree with. Fighting for free doesn't indicate nobility; it indicates suicidal disrespect for your time and safety."

    Lilian isn't *terribly* equipped for combat at the minute, which isn't too surprising given the vague nature of the request, but she knows well enough about the generalized level of strife and supernatural weirdness going on in this world not to be totally unprepared. It's not too hard to slip some of that expensive designer bullet and stabproof fabric under the current red and white layered rufflepunk ensemble she'd probably been casually wearing for a group shopping trip or something, nor all that tough to slip a handgun into that quasi-purse messenger bag that's typically full of occult supplies anyways.

    She's a little more careful than usual, when initially venturing into the canyon, and then the sight of the Keyblade Graveyard, but maintains near-point wedge formation in the vanguard. It isn't until seeing the scattered blades themselves that she actually retrieves the sidearm, clicks one into the chamber, and flicks on the capacitors with a little flywheel whine. Before that, she is merely conversational about "I suppose, if you think about it, Oblivion, meaning the absence, of all things can imply the presence of all things as well. If you're in a place with nothing, and thus 'nowhere', going in any direction can only take you 'somewhere'." She just has a vivid enough memory of this place to not remain chatty for long.

    Determining the lowest level of Unversed to be minor threats at best, Lilian remains at the fore, confidently strutting forward with only the handgun out for now, keeping it tilted and close in to her chest to look around the expansive space, then bringing it up in the blink of an eye and putting several whine-cracking shots into the roving mobs when they appear. Not enough to indicate that she's trying to beat anyone in kill count. Enough to thin them out, conserve ammunition, and let others take them out, so she exerts as little effort and spends as few resources as possible. When they come to assault her personally, she fades back into the group with the smooth and alacritous movements of a rehearsed dancer, or hovers off the ground with little fizzles of black static around both feet so she can pick off a few more while out of their reach.

    She pauses at the hulking, ominously shaped enemy with a mock(?) Keyblade unnaturally in its grasp, however, stancing up and aiming properly from a respectful distance. "Isn't this thing sort of out of place?" she says, keeping her voice down as if being cautious of 'talking too loud' being a potential activation trigger. "And should it really be holding one of those things?" When Roxas goes up to it, she adds "Should you really be *talking* to it?"

    That thought is quickly interrupted when the answer demonstrates itself as 'no' via Roxas being assaulted on the spot. Lilian fires several times the instant it charges, expertly placing a quartet of high-calibre monster hunters into a center mass grouping --but it's still a sidearm; she she doesn't exactly have the stopping power to actually divert it from its lunge in-hand, and it doesn't appear to have any sensory organs to aim for to make up for that.
Lilian Rook     Before she can do much more, several off the ambient adds leap attack her from behind. She wheels and disengages from the primary target, leaning into a zigzagging series of hopsteps back and away, weaving and kiting with hairpin steps to blast them away as they pass. The wave of ice is thus an immediate, blindside problem. Practically guaranteed to hit. She--

                -----[stop]-----
    Quickly hops on top of one of the lunging Unversed, contorted into a dying posture mid-air, and step-jumps off of it over the height of the jagged frost wall, obligingly paused in all its glittering, rapid-formed menace. The magazine tumbles out as she flicks the release to reload, hangs in the air, and then is snatched back to be stowed away as she slams the fresh one home. Gaining some artificial airtime with that black static again, she lands inside the perimeter of the ice magic.
                -----[start]-----

    --teleports directly *through* the damage circle of floorbad, and inside its 'aready attacked' range, transitioning the center of her stance to her shoulder and rushing straight ahead to close distance, rapidly firing dozens of rounds in an increasingly close range blitz maneuver at the Shade's side.

    Closing in to absolute minimum range, power flows through her limbs, and her sprint turns into a half-slide where she can pivot and sweep kick out the Shade's feet from under it, pressing the muzzle into the direction of a topple and thumping several more straight into its skin and weird meta-fles, and ducking low so she can skid out from under it to the other side across the ice, before it can either fall on her or catch itself --and not without using the slippery terrain to turn and continue firing even while sliding away in a backwards direction.
Go Shijima BEFORE DEPARTURE - Castle Oblivion

     Maybe Go *does* need to find something that's been lost. He'd had a fairly straightforward idea in mind... but that Xemnas appears so multitalented appears to have gotten his brain working. "Cool."

So it wasn't like that, before Roxas and Xion were... I don't know. Born? Met? Then... jealousy or no jealousy, that'd be a pretty strong case for...

     The apparent fuzzy-headedness of Roxas, combined with Go's line of thought, gives him the idea to share his most recent thought--but his mouth ends up pulling into an annoyed frown when Xion says their work is the same.

     Go regards her with his hands in his pockets and the archetypical Cool Kid disdain, head tilted, eyes peering down the nose and everything. "Tch. I never doubted *that,*" he sullenly replies. She's quite Rider-coded, when she wants to be, so of course there's little reason to doubt they do the same work, in a general sense. "My beef with you is how you do it." His demeanor lightens up a little. Just a little--standing up straighter, hands out of the pockets, not *so* much of a sneer, a hand running through his hair. "Don't worry, though. I'm not here to cause trouble. ...I know you mean well, at least."

     That admission seems to brighten his mood enough to have him back to his usual gregarious, laid-back exterior. Lilian, Tamamo and Hibiki get a friendly smile and finger-gun of acknowledgement, as he steps forward to place himself more in the 'center' of everyone, without obstructing Xemnas or anyone's view of him.
Go Shijima DEPARTURE - Into The Keyblade Graveyard

     There are two new faces here. "By the way... I'm Go." His smile is now equal parts friendly and confident, owing to the gleam in his eyes and the ease in his posture, as he glances between C and Cloud. One casual salute-wave to split between the both of them. "When I'm suited up--you can't miss it--call me Mach. Let's get going, yeah?"

     When everyone gets going, the shifting halls of the castle become dusty natural canyon, it's hard not to notice, and harder still to contain his wonderment. "What's with the scenery?" asks Go with evident interest. "Is this because of Roxas?" He quickly has reason to hope that it isn't, out of a sense of general empathy--because the Keyblade Graveyard isn't a welcoming place. He's never seen Roxas' keyblade, but he assumes a friend of Xion's would have one.

     Less so, in fact, for the presence of the Unversed. Go doesn't suit up to remove them, instead relying on his martial arts. It takes a few nicks and near misses before he can reliably deal with something 'not human shaped,' but he fashions a solution, being a quick study--baiting them with feints by exposing a leg in their strike zones, then withdrawing to strike with the heel of the opposite, or making hard palm and elbow strikes against the ones bold enough to leap at him.

     By the time this Shade makes his attack he's already in the process of transforming. The means by which he does so is a belt; blue and silver, the centerpiece of which looks kind of like the muffler of a motorcycle. He lifts a tiny white-and-red bike, inserts it into the belt, and presses down. It snaps neatly into place, with two bursts of flame from the 'exhaust,' followed by an announcement and a jaunty jingle seemingly made of bike horns:

                              Signal Bike! RIDER!!                              

     "Let's..." His right arm is held up, bent upwards at the elbow, left hand resting beneath the elbow. There's a dramatic flourish to reverse their positions, and a self assured nod. "Henshin!"

                                     MACH!                                      

     A sleek bodysuit of lightweight white armor with two red vertical stripes down the left side appears, complete with a blue-visored full motorcycle helmet with V-shaped antennae, and a waist-length shoulder cape also at the left side. On the right side of the chest, at shoulder level, there's a wheel with the hubcap facing outwards.

     "Track..." A jumping snap kick to bat away a leaping rat. Landing, mashing the button on his belt four times, "Eradicate..." A white energy pistol appears in his free hand, with a large wheel at the business end of the weapon. "I'm always at..." Several blasts are made, blue darts of energy lancing through the swarm of rats. "Mach Speed!"

     There's a mind to finish this quickly--indeed, he's always at Mach Speed. If they wail on this guy enough, he'll spill... and Roxas can stop feeling so fuzzy. "Kamen Rideeeer..." Leaping into the air, over the swarm of rats, he attempts to do that, with a dramatic kick, his arm windmilling three times for sheer showboating: "Ma-!"

     He's struck mid kick attempt by the freezing cold, his momentum stopped immediately. He falls, into the waiting swarm, mobbed as tooth and claw draw sparks, writhing in pain as the suit's biofeedback kicks in. "Get off!"

     The Zenrin Shooter's front wheel spins rapidly, circling Mach around on the ground in a tech-assisted ground roundhouse, his feet thudding in rapid succession against the rats until he's back standing.
C "I see," C says to Xemnas, "What an interesting place you've got here."

A place that interacted oddly with memories, then -- it really was similar to the Reverie Corridor. But that would be something Vita could contemplate, he had a job to do. Following Roxas and the others out, deeper into the Castle, he keeps a close eye on the architecture. The further they went, the less conventional it all seemed, as if it were supposed to be more of a vague idea or maybe a parable of a place rather than somewhere that really existed.

    That there had been another Cloud some of these people were familiar with had him quirking an eyebrow. The mercenary was an amnesiac -- something that didn't take C long to discern, but, if he was supposed to be Galbadian ...

Dressed in all his glorious toku rubbersuit, C shrugs his shoulders in Xion's direction, "That's not a bad way of looking at it. It's not really a virtue to look a gift horse in the mouth."

Eventually, they find themselves in the 'Keyblade Graveyard'. Having never been here before, he wouldn't know that it was different than usual.

However, it did remind him for the third time of his stint in the Reverie Corridor -- to The Trial. That place held not only a similar atmosphere, but a near identical connotation.

A long while back, he'd supposed that some things across the multiverse tended to be approximately the same, or equivalent, across worlds. He supposed this might just be another similarity.

        "Oh...?"

The Shade is quick to attack as Roxas approaches it. Its appearance was like a shadow, if it were being reflected out of a funhouse mirror, and it wasn't alone.

The gaggle of creatures encircling them hamper C's efforts to make a swift retreat, the ice-type attack spell only being warded off by a clever application of his cape.

Thankfully, Xion seems to be quick on the uptake of getting those miscreants out of the way. C, himself, brandishes his double-sided lance in a careless manner.

He had no intention of letting any of them get in his way as he attacks, like they had when he'd attempted to evade.

Sigurd Edge began to turn pitch black at the ends, as if the metal had simply been swallowed into some kind of bottomless void.

It didn't look right, as if the space around it was simply disappearing into the black.

    "Darkness."
    "Sunder them!"

Swiping, the black extends like a wicked scythe that attacked anything that was unfortunate enough to be in the way between it, and The Shade.
Hibiki Tachibana     Magic can't be constant. Makes perfect sense, in retrospect. Roxas' lethargic demeanor is a bit worrying though, but also understandable given the circumstances. It sounds like this compass and his fragmented Heart having a reaction with one another...honestly, how 'fragmented' is it, really? And will hunting down everything this compass leads them to make him whole again?

    She'll just have to watch out for him as best she can. Fortunately, they have a lot of people on the job. Go gets a slight grin back, along with a nod. Hard to feel worried with a team like this.

    Then they're onward, and she's both surprised and not surprised by Castle Oblivion changing as they go. Like a scene change brought to real life, they're steadily brought into the cliff-lined canyon that is the Keyblade Graveyard--a place Hibiki has certainly never been, but she can appreciate the solemn atmosphere. And given they're the kind of weapons that Xion and Roxas use...she'll probably get a history lesson someday.

    For now, the moment is ruined by these things showing up. One off-screen transformation and some blunt force trauma later, she's very much on her guard as the pests hound them all the way to the plateau ahead. "No, but they're sure persistent." She replies back towards Xion, when the source of the thread leading them to their goal comes into view. And then rushes them down.

    "Roxas--!" Hibiki almost immediately moves to try and defend him, but the Blizzara catches her in its icy grip, simultaneously blowing her backwards and freezing her down to her core. She ends up being knocked into the Out-of-Bounds Barrier created by the shadowy things, and threaten to do their jittery rat things in her general direction. There are actually a lot of unarmored parts of her body to scratch and bite at!

    Which mostly succeeds in getting her angry enough that she responds with a massive stomp down into the earth. The impact creates a booming shockwave of her own meant to send the pests flying in all directions, followed up with smacking any remaining ones aside with a series of rapid blows ended with a wide-ranging spinkick. Hibiki transitions this into a lunge forward as the circle likely closes back up--intending to close the distance with the Shade and deliver a bullet-like punch into its side to Draw Aggro.
Tamamo     "I do remember something of this," Tamamo says to Xion, nodding. She's not even commenting on the name 'nevernever,' though she does ask, "Are we still within a castle?" at around the point where they are clearly outside, on an open field.

    Tamamo leaves the rats(?), mostly, to other people, as if fully expecting that she, too, is an escort target, despite that clearly not being the current mission objective. She has a reason for that implicit understanding, perhaps.

    When they find the Shade, she considers herself ready for its attack, beginning with, "Shall I--" before the ice reaches her at once, her talismans still clutched in one hand. It's a far hastier downward swing of her mirror that blunts the blow of magic, the mistimed guard knocking her up into the air, before she executes a neat flip and lands, with an upset huff, on her feet.

    "Not so, twice, I should think," she says, and scatters a fistful of burning arcs. They land in a wide circle, the paper talismans failing to burn along with the fire they create, but instead creating a Solar Flame-aspected de-icing field, minimally harmful on its own, but controllable on Tamamo's part, and potentially restrictive for her opponent.
Cloud Strife There's a moment where Cloud looks around at the antics of Lilian as if in absolute disbelief that she's approaching him with such a casual and familiar gait despite he himself having no idea who she is. His head reclines slightly to avoid her gaze as he opens his mouth to respond but fails to actually get anything decipherable out. Instead, he only manages to let out some weird kind of exhale that's somewhere between awkwardly embarrassed and annoyed. The end result of this would be him trailing into actual words after that immediate reaction, "What he said.." in an attempt to play it off and maintain his own atmosphere. He does wonder just who this 'other Cloud' was even if he manages to suppress it. Did he have any relatives..? For some reason, it doesn't seem all that impossible to believe.

Luckily he has some time to recollect himself from that exchange he didn't know how to deal with as they walk out of the castle into the changing terrain that seems to morph itself into some kind of deserted canyonscape. It kind of reminds him of the wastelands around Midgar, just with a significantly more clayish hue and tons of what appeared to be weapons strewn about here and there. It's uneasy, yet there's a certain tranquil nature to it all. One that is abruptly interrupted by the creatures they were forewarned about. Cloud looks over them and draws his blade, content to prevent himself from being ambushed as he analyzed the progression of their aggression. He remains confident, even as the Shade appears before them. He doesn't quite realize the implications and had assumed the mysterious entity to be about the same level of immediate danger.

It's that complacency that leads into his next response, where he twists his blade to the side to attempt to block the incoming attack with the flat of his blade. However, even with the girth of his blade, it covered too much area with too much strength. It flies past his haphazard attempt to protect himself as patches of frost crack and expand over his armor and exposed skin as he feels himself reel from the blow, his hand locking into place from the frigid temperature.

"-...Tch!" He clicks his tongue momentarily at that as he finds himself hounded by the still mostly passive jittery creatures that block his path and surround him in the moments he's unable to move properly. Shards of a hardened cold splinter from his body as he tenses his muscles and pulls his sword from the ground stabbed there prior to stabilizing himself. That was embarrassing, and to fall into this situation so soon after what happened prior. In the mists of vapors, he swears he sees a flicker of white hair. It's but a glimpse, but the swirling emotion of his own thoughts and the promises of memories seems to have riled something he thought he kept choked down. His eyes narrow. Sparks begin to fly as he slams materia into the slot of his blade in ignorance of the mooks around him as he says but one thing, "Out of the way."

With a brutish flourish he immediately does a complete radial spin with a blast of electricity flowing from his blade as he breaks into a sprint towards that...phantom? He's riled up but he isn't completely sure why. Right, he's here to show off why he's good to pay for the job. Regardless of those thoughts, his body acts almost independently. He flips the Buster Sword into a reverse grip and launches it into the air as the lightning causes an iridescent spiral before he himself jumps up to catch it midflight. His expression seems unchanged even as the blade erupts into a pyre of fire that combines with the sparks to form a plasma that coats the crude-looking metal. Like a streak of lightning, he aims to slam the weapon into the source of his immediate ire.
Xion Xion has a bunch of helpful battle commentaries, as a proper Party Member #2 In A Kingdom Hearts Plot:

"A Rider I particularly agree with. Fighting for free doesn't indicate nobility; it indicates suicidal disrespect for your time and safety."

"Tetra has go-go-ghost powers, so I think he appreciates the kind of weight getting close to death has!" Xion comments, while field-goal kicking a rat back towards the outside of the ring.

"My beef with you is how you do it."

Xion stops mid-kick of a rat. The rat looks up with beady goon eyes. Xion frowns, considering. "Demi." She incants, and a ring of twisted black holds the rat in place. Taking a measuring set of steps back, Xion runs at the rat Unversed and hops up before causing the rat to simply explode on the spot -- into no munny OR rewards, as it was fight potpurri.

"Okay. I can mix it up! I'm really good at that."

"That's not a bad way of looking at it. It's not really a virtue to look a gift horse in the mouth."

With a rat in a half nelson, Xion nods. "It's not a virtue to sneer at gifts, but it's definitely a virtue to know your own worth!"

<I Wonder What This Place Is!> // <Are We Still In The Castle?>

"This is the Keyblade Graveyard! A big battle took place here a long time ago. More recently, there was this awful monster called JENOVA that a bunch of people fought. It was causing a hole, in the center there, where darkness was pouring out. Back there--"

Xion shoulderthrows a rat, following through to point in the middle distance to a clifftop outlook where a clock tower rises, the facing window a glowing yellow of designs, and a broken hole at the bottom that has been literally caution taped and papered over.

"If you go that way for a while, you can get into the clock gears, because clock gears are inside a clock. From there, it spits you out into a maintenance area. It's a sympathetic connection, since all this stuff is actually in the Underground."

Xion raises a teaching finger while a rat leaps onto her shoulder. The finger curls into a fist as she punches the rat annoyedly. "Xemnas' compass shortcuts that by being really, really sympathetic -- I think! So, if you start going someplace holding a compass... eventually you get where you need to, as long as you follow it to where you want to go."
Tamamo     When she has a moment (while retrieving other talismans from up her sleeves, drawing glowing sigils in the air, and stepping from one point of the battlefield to another), Tamamo remarks on topics that strike her interest.

    On mercenary work: "All things are done for a reason, no? If one wishes for no payment, then one asserts that there are other reasons for one's actions. Whether it is necessary to make such a statement is a matter of circumstance."

    On magic: "There are many kinds. Some call that which is well-explained 'merely magecraft,' though it is often no less useful, for its constancy."

    On nobodies: "I cannot help but wonder, when speaking of a fragmented heart, or of a missing core, whether it is not so different to bunrei, 'spirit separation,' a process of natural familiarity to myself. To be yet not be another, to be an aspect that, itself, is a whole... ah, but it is a natural presumptiousness to see others in the terms of oneself, and one I would have called a very 'human' foible, before."

    While side-stepping Unversed rats without quite breaking the rhythm of whatever it is she's preparing, "If so, please pardon such curiosity."
Roxas Roxas backs off of the attacker. The thread spools out between them, but it doesn't seem to "exist" exactly. That is to say, no one is interacting with it directly. He makes a noise of alarm when Xion attempts to interject in his defense and goes flying back into the ice-- and the RAT RING. He plunges the unfamiliar Keyblade into the ground and raises both hands, motes of light glimmering at the ends of his fingertips. Columns of light swell up out of the ground and begin to dance through the rats, sending them flying-- before swerving and crashing towards the Shade, who doesn't get hit by them but is forced along more predictable lanes.

The Unversed (rats) part around Xion's assault, dissolving away into nothingness-- and each particular disappearance causes the Shade to jerk violently as if he had been struck. It growls in a voice that is almost-- almost! familiar to her, drawing its mockery of a Keyblade back.

// Should you really be talking to it? //

"I--" One of the hands Roxas is orchestrating Boss Templates with rises to his temple. He looks frustrated, and a little pained. "I don't know, I think it might... be 'me'."

The Shade is interrupted by Lilian. A noise of alarm -- it's not Roxas's voice, Lilian can tell that much -- escapes its throat, which must be something like a human's underneath that ridiculous suit. It whirls alarmingly quickly, preparing to counter-attack but it gets swept to the ground and shot repeatedly on the way down.

It certainly makes human noises when it's hurt, too, but rather than blood a seeping sort of gaseous shadow comes off of impact points. Rather than getting to its feet it simply vanishes, reappearing in the air above Lilian. Simultaneously this move is great at reversing a situation like this and absolutely stupid; it doesn't seem to have a whole lot of control mid-air, and simply plunges down with an aggressive sweep of its blade.

When it hits the ground it gestures towards Xion, and... and the Unversed still on the field compress together and turn into a big, stupid dark blue rat tornado, whirling threatening towards her. Everything comes back to tornadoes.

Even Kamen Rider Mach, as it happens. Tearing through the Unversed around him in a great circular motion, he finds himself clear-- and nearby, the Shade staggers as if struck. There are no sparks, but more gouts of gaseous darkness that disperse into the surroundings. Like it's a suit full of nothing but the stuff, and each blow is letting out a little more.

The Shade makes a noise like breathing hard, and tries to sweep its Unversed Tornado harassing Xion towards Kamen Rider Mach.

"No, this place... it's a real place. In the Nevernever. Something happened here. All of these used to be... people like us." Roxas gestures between himself and Xion.

Although the Shade recoils when C's attack scythes through the Unversed that swarm between itself and C, and even rakes along its lower torso, leaving darkness spilling out into the void, there's a pronounced... lack.

"Why is somebody like me, fighting with these guys?" The Shade of Vanitas demands, rushing in with a clumsy but powerful charge, lacing his own blade with smoking darkness as he strikes towards C in an effort to wound him identically to how he had been wounded. Xion doesn't know his voice-- but some of her borrowed memories do.
Roxas As soon as it has passed C, Hibiki plunges in and strikes it in its wounded side. It gives a furious cry of aggravation and whips about with its free arm, just straight up attempting to seize her by the throat and throw her into the Unversed Tornado. "Go away, pest. You're not my kind of person at all."

He sure is talking shit for a guy who's gotten beaten around pretty damned good.

The Shade of Vanitas finds himself standing in fire. He issues a furious howl as his body crackles and burns, and whips his Keyblade in her direction. A fireball issues forth, appearing straightforward at first but then splitting into several different fireballs that track towards her if she tries to get out of their way.

This is around the same time that Cloud comes at him. Cloud cleaves through the front of his helmet and delivers a devastating blow that rakes his chest, leaving a wide-open wound that doesn't look... normal. What's inside is a pulsing, lamplike yellow. Like candle light viewed through the frosted window of a shop in a painting. Beneath the mask is a monochrome face; black-haired, but Xion certainly remembers it.

But the Shade of Vanitas notices something-- he looks up, smirks, and jumps back away from Cloud, re-assuming a ready stance, notwithstanding that his body is in tatters.
Roxas Cloud feels a sudden prickling in his mind. There is a woman standing atop the plateau under which the group is fighting; she is clad in black. Short blue hair has faded to a blueish white, with patches of her true hair color here and there. It has been some time since anyone has seen Aqua-- and truthfully, few here are particularly familiar with her. But when she looks down at Cloud...

                                  Who are you?                                  

Cloud is the only one who can hear the voice, and it creeps at the edges of his consciousness, uncomfortably insinuated into his being in an identity-distorting way.
C Twirling his weapon to adjust his grip, C prepares himself as The Shade charges with a nearly identical attack. The two blades clash as he makes to contest the blow. The two exchange a pass at high-speed, one that C unfortunately, finds himself on the losing end of. "Ung!"

A spray of red liquid from a direct hit washes the ground of the graveyard, with the black-bedecked rebel stumbling. Pitch dark vapor wafted from the wound in his side, pungent in both sight and smell.

    "Heh ... guess I got ahead of myself, there."

To keep his balance easily, he plunges the back end of his lance into the ground to support him as the battle raged on, taking a moment to recuperate before he made good on his suggestion to Kamen Rider Mach.

Reaching into his cloak, he re-equips himself with his Orbal Revolver, and a .. playing card?

    Yet, it brimmed with magic.
    "Is this your card?"

The card burns up, unleashing a hex on The Shade of Vanitas to stifle his nimbleness, inflicting feelings of illness and lethargy. C slips one of his specialized bullets into the cylinder and closes it in a swift motion before raising it and firing, a flash of purple flame flaring from the muzzle as a multicoloed magical bullet aims to slam into him, ready to explode into a transparent membrane that amplified magical damage and dimmed beneficiary effects.

With the Nemesis Bullet away, C tosses the revolver high into the air and grasps onto his lance, yanking it out of the ground. "Alright, 'Mach', now!"

Red energy charges the tip of his blade as he moves to close in by propelling himself with a kick to deliver an imbued strike that unleashes a thundering red strike of lightning.

With Cloud suddenly being as despondant as he was, they couldn't have two people warming the bench.
Cloud Strife A single one of the Ex-Soldiers eyes wince after immediate contact. Perhaps he was too stewed in his own mind to notice it but...as his mind catches up to his actions it recalls a word stated that escaped his notice prior.

JENOVAH.

His fingers slacken minutely across the grip of his blade as he becomes more aware of the weight of his blade than he ever has before. It's barely embedded into the ground, so it should be simple enough to draw it from the earth below and bring it to bear to the smirking visage of the now unmasked Shade. There have been moments during his missions where he was so grossly injured or damaged that he slowed down, or wounds that the mere presence of physically hinders him but this was not one of those occasions. It should be simple. It should be easy. He's done it all his life.

...Or has he?

The prickling only amplifies as the entity jumps away from him. His stance remains the same with his weight behind the blade as if he had just finished swinging, but he doesn't appear to make any movements. His head tilts slightly downwards, his locks of hair painting his face in shadows as the dilemma only escalates. The world in his eyes fades to the vision of a noise that replaces the graveyard with uncertainty for what feels like an eternity, his mind trying to recall his own memories to patch up the cracks forming. He tries to think about what to do, or how to overcome it, but even thinking became too hard to do.

. . .

Through the fluttering of his golden fringe he catches a glimpse of something through the static that clears his vision enough to make her out and gives him enough stimulation to cause him to cast his eyes up to keep her in his gaze with his mouth ever so ajar.

'Who are you?'. It was such a ridiculous question to ask. He's said it before, his name was _____ Strife.

Hold on. Something was wrong there. He was..._l_ou_ S__fe. Right...that's who he was. So there was no point in asking that question, she should know. Anyone who looks at him should get that same answer. He inhales deeply despite the mere act being the same as drinking soup full of needles as his nerves remember he's still alive. It's still hard to move and at some point, it appears he started clutching his head, but he can still take his free hand off the blade to launch a haphazard fireball with nothing but inner deceit and will force its way through towards the Shade before collapsing fully to one knee.
Tamamo     Tamamo does, in fact, first try to dodge the incoming fireball. It's after it splits up into homing projectiles that she gives up on the idea of dancing out of its way, and again brings up her mirror as a shield. It's joined by several additional shields, these ones insubstantial patterns of energy flowing up from the lines of fire around her, and this time, though it's a heavy assault, it only burns through her arrayed defenses, rather than sends her flying.

    "Why are you fighting?" She asks this directly of the Shade. Her form gradually transforms as she speaks, like the stripping of an illusion, revealing a little of her similarity to the visible Sun. Bright flames instead of red fur, though at once the same, leaving uncertain whether this is a figurative appearance. For a spirit, concrete answers of physicality are hard to find.

    "It is a question worth pondering. Will there be answers revealed, when you fall?" The light is dangerous. That should be intuitively obvious. One does not merely stare into the Sun. And yet...

    "Would you find an answer, in victory?" It's difficult to look away. Like a compulsion, or a spell, (or a seizing of the camera,) more so than the eyes and line of sight, it's an effect that grabs ahold of one's attention and refocuses it on her words.

    "Why are you here? Who are you? Answer." Those words are a burning trap.
Go Shijima      "Cool," says Go to Xion, mid-swing, as the dust clears from his Zenrin-assisted ground fighting. It's not clear whether he's saying that about the history of this place and the mechanics of the compass, or about her promise to mix things up. Maybe both?

     He infers from Xion's explanation that the Graveyard may or may not have to do with Roxas. There doesn't seem to be much knowledge about his Heart or who it belonged to when it was whole, but this Shade figure certainly seems to be related to him. Why else would Roxas suddenly perk up in that way?
<J-IC-Scene> C says, "Hey, I've got an idea -- how good are you with that gun of yours?"
<J-IC-Scene> Go Shijima says, "It's my thing! What're you planning?"
<J-IC-Scene> C says, "Well, in that case, I'll give you a nice, exposed target to shoot for massive damage."
<J-IC-Scene> C says, "If you thought my lance was cool, just wait."
<J-IC-Scene> Go Shijima says, "Got it!"

     There's honestly a bit of eagerness in the exchange. Go still has an earnest fondness for things that are hype and look cool, however buried it might sometimes be beneath the baggage that comes with being a Rider. When he's back on his feet, something peculiar catches his attention, enough to briefly override his enthusiasm with a stronger, more analytical interest:

He just flinched, like I'd hit him, and not the Unversed. Then... this is exactly what the Book warned us about! A group, functioning as a whole Eidolon...

     C's plan involves attacking a weak spot for huge damage. He knows just the tool for that sort of job. As the tornado advances on Xion, he takes a moment to belt-fumble. The miniature bike in his belt is exchanged for a different one; yellow wheels, red chassis with a painted on set of shark teeth and mischievous eyes.

                          SIGNAL BIKE//Signal Change!                          
                                     DANGER                                      

     The hubcap of that wheel on Mach's shoulder changes to display a yellow road sign indicating dangerous terrain ahead, with a silhouette of a bullet and an exclamation point. He takes aim, after a brief glance towards C to capitalize on that Card-Induced Debuff--

     But his path is blocked by a tornado. A huge one. This, he elects to deal with in perhaps an ill-advised fashion; namely, by attempting to 'ride' it. He takes off running, with the sound of a superbike's engine revving his body loses its definition, untrained eyes picking up only a red white and yellow blur.

     He attempts to run directly up the tornado--and immediately, it goes poorly. He's sucked in, ensnared, beaten, bitten and clawed by the Unversed which comprise it, carried all the way up, likely as a prelude to being thrown from a great height, once those vicious things are done with him.

Not my best idea... but I can still get free! I've gotta take advantage of that knight-looking guy's attack!

    His movement halted, sparks showering down from on high, things look bad, and they are bad. It's only thanks to the suit's built-in thrusters and its superhuman strength that he's able to beat his way into freedom, stray Unversed still clinging to him until they, too, are thrown with a frustrated, spirited battle cry.

     Go pulls the trigger. That is to say, he mashes it. Now, there's another swarm on the field. Tiny bulelts with fanged, grinning maws and mischievous, malicious eyes slowly emerge from the gun. It honestly seems like a pretty lame attack...

     Until the handful of shots which were fired grow rapidly into the size of small automobiles, using very much -not- decorative fangs to try and maul their ensnared target like a pack of feral wolves, while Go takes off, intending to keep himself moving.

With so many of those things, and this guy's magic... I can't keep sticking to the ground!
Hibiki Tachibana     Unexpecting such a furious and sudden reaction, Hibiki is gripped by the throat and hardly gets a chance to quip back before she's tossed aside through the air. She'll just have to settle for something while she's tumbling out of control towards the storm of whirling Unversed. "You can tell when we just met...!?" And then she's once again immersed within the swarm. But this time...

    <J-IC-Scene> Xion says, "I knew it!!! I knew it'd be a ratnado!!! It's always a TORNADO!!!"

    If jittery critters weren't bad enough, getting caught up in this is ten times worse. She's caught up in the rotation (ratation?) of it, battered across her entire body over and over while struggling to regain her bearings. Stubby little limbs and sharp heads scratch and cut along her whole body, along with the blunt force impacts--these things aren't so cute anymore. As the damage piles up, there's a moment where she remembers - how the Shade of Vanitas recoiled when Xion forced some of the Unversed to dissipate. Then...

    Gritting her teeth, Hibiki fires her Symphogear's thrusters to force herself down to the ground, where she steadies herself in the center of the tornado. Slamming her leg pistons hard into the earth does wonders for stability. Bracing herself to stand strong against it, Hibiki pulls back a fist--which begins visibly shining an electrified gold as the piston pulls back and Gungnir's energy is diverted into it. "Hraaaaaaaah--!"

    Her fist strikes upward at the same moment the gauntlet slams back inward, releasing what's built up all at once. It's a totally violent and unrestrained release, taking the form of a series of streams of light and energy that rage around more like fire, to wash over as many Unversed as possible. She's going to try and destabilize this Ratnado by blowing it apart from the inside! And just maybe, have their mass disappearance affect the Shade enough to leave it wide open to the others.
Lilian Rook     Teleporting enemies. Not the worst thing ever, but pretty annoying for Lilian. Especially since she's not equipped to trade right now. More than anything though, the suggestions of a human voice, gutteral and strange, and moreover human grunts of pain, have her a little more disconcerted and thoughtful than she should be.

    Of course, when it disappears in front of her, Lilian startles into looking around herself, checking directly behind for the back attack that is usually popular with teleporters, and only noticing its shadow over her second, glancing upwards in time to make an audible "!", and--

                -----[stop]-----
    Lilian tosses the emptied handgun to her left hand, stowing it away with a sharp dive of her arm at the same time she reaches for that cruciform black pendant with her right. Eerie smoke seeps between her fingers, carrying red embers. A flick of her wrist extends the full length of wicked black magnetite into existence, like igniting a lighter. She brings it up.
                -----[start]-----

    --quickdraw her blade in the blink of an eye, raising the hilt and twisting the flat down towards the oncoming falling Keyblade rush. It catches with a dissonant, glassy clang, the backside of the blade thumping into her, and sends her skidding, barely in control on the ice until it's abruptly melted. Teetering over backwards, she quickly gives into the momentum, turning what would be a pratfall into a graceful bicycle flip. "Close." she sighs, the 'that was' being silent for brevity's sake.

    "Considering the amount of damage we're doing, I hope it isn't a valuable part of you." Lilain expresses to Roxas. "No, I suppose I'm considering what I'm about to do to it. It sounds like a person. Nothing like you, however. Is it someone you know? A past relation?" A brief pause. "Well, it usually seems that burying anything that bleeds black tends to put wrongs right in this place. So that's what we'll do."

    A quick flourish turns the sword to a point-on stance, which Lilian settles into like a coiled spring, one open palm only loosely pressed to the pommel while she focuses and waits, watching the sequence of attacks lay into the Shade, steadying the weapon straight and level, gathering her energy, slowing her breathing. Thin red light surges into the intricate etchings all the way down the length of the blade; patterns like climbing flowers had bloomed all over it that radiate uncomfortable, palpable menace, rather than beauty. Just *before* a split second window opens up in the increasingly haphazard beating from the party, right when Tamamo lays her hold on the Shadw, she whispers, in a second language, "Cleasa.", and then Lilian's form splits into a mere intersection of fizzling, after image-like shadows.

    A narrow line of canyon sand spits upwards and violently blows away, tearing past the Shade in a brief, ice cold gale. Lilian is on the other side, her hair and skirt pulled one way, then whipped the other by the wind wake. Intertwining ribbons of black and red, coiled around each other in the way of a Celtic knot, with no end and no beginning, follow paths that most certainly must have been traced by her sword in that instant, but that would mean three mutually sequences of cuts happened simultaneously, wouldn't it? That doesn't stop the spiral pattern from being a brutally eviscerating force, suited to turn a cattle carcass into so many flying meaty triangles, even before the uncanny sword's natural, diametric opposition to the Outsider archetype is taken into account.
Xion It's not the first, or the second, or even the third rat that makes Xion notice the feedback damage... But eventually she notices it. A twinge like psychic feedback with every poof.

Mid-Ratbullying Xion pumps the breaks. With a rat-Unversed gripped in one gloved hand, as if to choke it out or simply crush something important in her palm, her extreme look of Determined Fight Eyebrows is broken by another wave of displeasure. Familiar and not.

She tosses the unversed away, looks to the Shade. "You're..."

TO NOT GET OWNED BY TORNADO, MASH [X]

"... I know you, you're..." Xion flatfoots, expression twisting with knowing-but-not-knowing.

ARE YOU GOING TO MASH [X]?

"It's right there, you're..."

YOU HAVE FAILED TO MASH [X]!

Xion gets sucked up by the terrible pain (literal, figurative) tornado, spun around higher and faster, faster and higher, until she's hollering a quiet (to the party) 'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa' from the very outside-top. Useless for the ground fight AND for exposition, the black-coated girl is cast even higher into the sky. Her dazed expression catches on a CLIFFTOP MYSTERY LADY, but she has no Triangle left in her. No interaction opportunities. First, there is defeating the Tornado.

"If I need to mix it up, then I've got just the trick!" Xion announces woozily from the skybox, gesturing with a medallion in each hand -- one of a red-coated white hair, and one of a Wuxia Male Protagonist. From the red medal, crackling red power flows into her corona, a devilish defensive barrier around her flowing out and changing the color of her coat. A fierce kiop-roar overlays, wristlets with retracted claws added to complete the partial transformation.

"Stylish X Tora!"
(Pronounced 'Stylish Key Tiger', yet another Translation Travesty.)

Summoning keyblade to hand, she hurls it back down into the tornado's eye, closing her eyes. Mid-air and falling she takes a very deliberate stance. "Royal--!" She announces, then, with a comet-like fall, snaps to the keyblade buried in the ground, a distinct cracking clash-sound occuring as she re-enters reality right inside the Tornado's hit-box.

"TIGER-BOMB!"
Her hands move on their own. She is untouched even among the storm, thanks to her Royal Guard. The Reversal--

She physically grips the base of the tornado, and then kicks her leg out and... somehow back-throws the entire thing as one coherent entity.

Because it *was*.
Roxas The Shade of Vanitas turns to glare at C, grinning in apparent satisfaction at having 'revealed' his 'true nature'. Vanitas knows nothing of C's true nature, and really is just happy to have such a tangible result. He prepares for another attack and just gets SHOT! He swears as the cursed bullet takes him in the left shoulder, jerking him backwards. He manages to bring his Keyblade up in time to catch the spear-charge a little more favorably, pushing it off to one side only to be struck by lightning anyway.

Vanitas bats the fireball Cloud sends at him away, scorching his hands lightly but otherwise deflecting it.

He turns his attention towards Tamamo-- and curiously, he seems to grow greater for the illumination. The lambent glow within his chest gleams a little brighter, the yellow of his eye socket intensifies. Though he looks at her, and though he is surely hurt for doing so, his answer is quick.

"Nobody. A fragment of a fragment of Ventus over there. It'd be easier to call me 'Darkness'... and if I won-- well. I'd get the Key to Kingdom Hearts again." The Shade of Vanitas answers.

Between that exchange and C's curse however... Vanitas has made a mis-step in anticipating his viable defenses. He scoffs at the ridiculous cartoony bullets that Kamen Rider Mach conjures for him, starts to try to move, and... finds himself sluggish as hell. His reaction is tooth-gritting more than blinking in surprise and attempting to bat them away as he had Cloud's fireball.

It does not work as well, for obvious reasons. The Shade howls in fury, his body smoking and steaming from cumulative damage.

The swing of a fist and the action of a piston into the Unversed Tornado produces a great BURST of darkness ejection off of the Shade of Vanitas's back, as if he had been impaled through the body where Cloud had slashed him and it had come out the other side. He makes an agonized noise and turns towards the much-diminished tornado, stretching out a hand.

In answer to Lilian's questioning, Roxas simply makes an uncomfortable noise and shakes his head, as if to say that he doesn't know. Concern registers on his features for an instant when the deciding factor becomes how the Shade of Vanitas bleeds.

"But... I bleed like that, too," he says.

As it happens--

Though the Shade of Vanitas is caught as firmly in Lilian's strange spiral pattern of evisceration cleanly, lines running up and down his body to expose the bizarre light that hums within, the "Outsider" effect tangibly does not trigger. The Shade, good or bad, is very much an "element of a human", even if it isn't a complete human.

It lands on the ground with a thump, groaning. The fact that the Shade of Vanitas is still alive at all is a small miracle. He reaches one hand out, desperately, towards the Unversed Tornado. As Xion lifts it -- and she does and can lift it -- the mass lessens as Vanitas sucks it back into himself. The thing that hits the ground with a thunderous BOOM and sends small plumes of smoke rising off of Vanitas's body is greatly diminished, and evaporates easily on contact with the ground.
Roxas The strangely grayscale Keyblade whistles through the air and lands point-down, embedding itself a couple of yards between Roxas and Vanitas.

Roxas looks at it dully, pulling the Keyblade he'd summoned earlier from the ground. It glimmers silver as he steps towards Vanitas, the string between them thickening on his approach.

Once he reaches the grotesque and chained Void Gear used by the Shade of Vanitas, he picks that up too, and stops.

"Finally planning to embrace what the Master had in mind for us, you little nothing?" The Shade of Vanitas asks.

Roxas shakes his head and raises the two strange keyblades, so that their shafts meet around the thread connecting him with the shade.

"I didn't... come looking for the pieces of myself to take them back," Roxas says. He brings the blades together with an audible cracking of glass. It separates at the middle, cracks apart, and falls to the ground in a scintillating display of colors.

"I came to throw them away."

The Void Gear vanishes from his hand, and the silvery-white Lost Memory shatters, replaced immediately by the dominantly white Oathkeeper.

The Shade of Vanitas looks offended, but doesn't seem further bodily injured by that act.
Roxas Aqua stares down at Cloud. If her own mentality were to be examined, buried deep within 'herself', it would probably not be much different from his. But she isn't really acting of her own volition, is she? Her extremities are bare, but visibly blackened. Her eyes are distinctive and reptillian, though they're yellow rather than the distinctive blue-green of mako treatment.

                                 That's wrong.                                  
                              I know Cloud Strife.                              

That's not strictly true of Aqua. But the thing wearing her body does.

                             Cloud Strife is weak.                              
                       A little boy with borrowed power.                        
                   Captain Galbadia, a dream of dead heroes.                    

Without moving an inch, Aqua tugs at the virus that exists in Cloud. It's not the same one, exactly-- not precisely. But... JENOVA responds to JENOVA. It's close enough.

                                 Come with me.                                  

The thing wearing Aqua's skin smiles. It's a predatory thing.

                      You'll kill the King of Darkness...                      
                           ... and hand me his crown.                          
Lilian Rook     "Don't take it so literally." Lilian huffs in Roxas' direction --breathes, really, vocalizing in one exhalation-- whilst already surveying her handiwork, and its strange results. Of course, she certainly hadn't been all that loose with its interpretation, but any attempt to clarify specific meaning is pointless. Given the vague connections between the Shade and Roxas and whatever he's here for, it'd be a game of playing Who's On First Base at best.

    "Asides, this one is obviously very different from the rest. I'm not *entirely* sure what we're looking at." Yet that curled lip at the way the Shade speaks to Roxas isn't exactly hidden. "But it seems bad enough. And your intentions are quite clear. It doesn't seem to be in a position to resist; I'll tidy this up."

    Excepting a sudden, strenuous objection from Roxas --or a convincing physical interjection from somebody else-- Lilian does exactly what had become essentially inevitable the minute shots were fired, and teleports right up to the debilitated Shade from behind, for a simple, nameless thrust straight through the back and out the chest.
Cloud Strife The Ex-Soldier named ____ visibly tenses up, his joints locking as he collapsed to a knee after that attack. Truth be told, he didn't even notice exactly what the result of the ensuing chaos was. That wasn't even enough to register a blip in his psyche as the world bleaches in color to the point it hurts to look at. Eventually, that contrast is raised to such a point that it was virtually translucent, a backdrop to the only source of his now uncharacteristically clear focus. It would simply be too much of a blessing to be able to tune out her form. Even if it's coming from the voice of a monster, the words are said with allure.

...There's not really a point to resisting, he thinks. The barriers of his mind, the towering walls of diamond built 10 inches thick begin to crack under itself, the slam of her compulsive explanations causing the facility of his psyche to shudder and screech like a skyscraper during a hurricane. He lurches forward as his body moves without his conscious effort, shakily pushing itself to a stand.

It shouldn't be a hard decision, a hard act to do. It was common sense. The idea that he'd have so much trouble with doing what he normally does is outlandish enough to bring him to pause in of itself. Why he hasn't already followed her orders is silly, but for some reason, he still can't push himself to do it.

Fires burn at the edge of his vision. Was this his memory, or someone else's? He wasn't sure. A puppet..? It seemed so clear now that it was the only thing on his mind, or it should have been. At least until his body goes against his caving sense of reason and grasps the hilt of his blade. There's something about her that evokes a different response than obedience that grasps around the metaphorical wrists of his mind letting go on the edge of a cliff. It's unfound disdain. JENOVA responds to JENOVA, but the memories of a Cloud beyond puppetry only barely manages to draw him from fully giving in as his will to fight sparks back from the kindling it had nearly snuffed out inside of. He inhales and looks back at her and the reforming terrain. His resolve isn't fully there, nor is his understanding. It was a grudge even he didn't fully understand. A plight fueled entirely by his body, though...even with that, he doesn't seem to be in much of a position to do much else besides coping with his current capacities off of an unknown grudge alone.

It's a remorseful stance he takes. Begrudging even. His mind understands that it'd have been easy to follow, to accept that as who he is. And to some extent, that seed is there. It's his spirit that prevents him from leaping into those flames. A spirit that tells him to continue To Fight.
Go Shijima      Something is wrong--anyone can see Go just hovering in midair, his agile barrel rolls, weaving and erratic flight patters halted, his head not turned towards the Shade, or to his allies, but down, at the ground, as the Shade of Vanitas is struck by his hard-light attack.

     Roxas, or perhaps Ventus, has taken one step towards what he wants, severed something. But his mind isn't on that. It's on Tamamo, or rather, what she'd said, moments ago, after Go spotted her on one of his fly-bys.

<Tac-Paladins> [4] Go Shijima says, "Tamamo... are you... talking to it?"
<Tac-Paladins> [4] Tamamo says, a little distantly, "Yes?" Then, "I am directing it to listen."

Is that so common? I thought maybe it was just Xion and Roxas not getting it... but, Kiriko wants to do things that way. And Strawberry. I don't think she could use that Beam of hers on a Roidmude if she tried. X and Hibiki...

     His fist clenches. The Zenrin Shooter trembles in his hand, as internal struggle overrides his ability to be Here. He's practiced at suppressing that struggle, but he made the mistake of slowing down, just for a moment. It caught up to him.

     "WAIT!"

     "Lilian!" Another sound of a superbike's engine revving, his form once again a blur, this time with the blue of his flight thrusters at his back blending into that blur. The Zenrin Shooter's wheel is brought upagainst the tip of her sword, as she makes her thrust from behind.

     He ends up in a baseball slide that will be painful for the Shade--but not lethal. The wheel spins, turning the blow aside, and not in a safe way. It ends up piercing his shoulder before the suit's kinetic dampeners eventually divert it into a painful slice.

     Sparks fly from Mach's suit, it crackles with energy as its ability to mitigate damage has met its limit for this session. His hasty, irresponsible parry has de-belted him, complete with the AI's tone-deaf

                                   Good Work!                                  

    Beads of sweat trickle down his brow, and there's a slight spot of dried blood on his lip from one of the Unversed, undoubtedly. It's some kind of pure dumb luck that he wasn't seriously injured--but he's making eye contact.

     "I don't think this is right. So what if Roxas, or this jerk, don't have complete Hearts... if there's enough in there for them to make their own decisions... that's enough for me! I don't know who this guy is... and he probably doesn't, either, anymore. But he deserves the chance to find that out, even if he's just a bunch of damn rats in a trenchcoat."
Xion Xion rests, there, on her back, after her partially-aborted attack. Aborted by Vanitas re-absorbing the power within the tornado, and also by victory being at hand.

It's never worth going all-out for no reason! So, red-coated and golden-bracered, with her star-toothed keyblade jutting hilt-up from the earth, Xion thinks...

And feels. There's so many feelings. Battle is always like this, but the particular character of the darkness here -- the darkness of Vanitas, who Lilian moves to dispatch directly. Sitting up, Xion squints at the motion in progress, a lethargy in her own head. This wasn't... bad, right? Vanitas hurt Roxas, and worse, mis-named him. The person he was before. A lost link.

<J-IC-Scene> Tamamo slowly works over the point. "To most, I should think, a bunrei is a unique individual, no more alike than parent and child, or sibling to sibling. And yet, they may return, and become again a part of the whole, for they were always of the same being. It sounds as if a contradiction, yet such is truth."
<J-IC-Scene> Tamamo says, "I am and am not She of the White-Gold Face. I am that aspect of her, that which held a specific interest, and I am myself."
<J-IC-Scene> Xion says, "If you went back, would you still be you? And, split again, remain you after?"
<J-IC-Scene> Tamamo says, "If I returned... rather, when I return, I shall cease to be as I am. There would only be that returned aspect of Her, with the answers I have gathered, my curiosity, I shall hope, fully sated. Perhaps, however, it shall not be as this ideal dream, but as it was, that time some thousand years past, when I was forced to abandon all."
<J-IC-Scene> Tamamo says, "I did separate once more, to appear as I am now. Rather... putting aside some trivial matters of causality, that is what has happened."

Bringing a foot under her, Xion rises, gripping her weapon only to dismiss it back into inventory, her hand closing around a silver shimmer and a soft 'shink!' that swiftly disappears. "Tamamo... I don't think you were wrong at all. Nobodies and Bunrei as you've described them are pretty similar. I'm glad you can understand... I'm pretty sure."

A wan smile tugs uncertainly at her lips, flickering like a TV that doesn't quite get reception. "Glad's when you feel light in your chest, right? A little fizzy in the eyebrows? ... Sorry." Her eyes fall, the smile finally losing to a flat expression. "Nobodies are like bunrei who weren't wanted, and the friends of the original want to kill us to bring their friends back or..." A slow gesture, towards Roxas and Vanitas, which more indicates Lilian's advance for a killing stroke than any active cutscene about feelings.

"... pick up where they left off. We don't go back. We just... stop existing. Nobody gets the benefit of our lives. I guess that's why Xemnas calls us 'Nobody'. We're not anyone. But if there's an original person..." A tightness comes to her expression, then. A trained determination and more behind - an almost devil-may-care smirk that strikes oddly to her usually warm cheeks.

"We're not it. And we all want to live way more than we want to give up what we still have so someone else's friends can trade us for them, or put us in their place. If Roxas doesn't want to be... Ventus, he shouldn't have to be. That's just some sleepy guy in the basement, anyway."
Xion                                    Good Work!                                  

Xion snaps her attention back on Roxas, Vanitas, Lilian, and now Mach as he gets belted by the strike Lilian had meant to get rid of the threat.

"Mach!" She calls, but he's fine. Her expositional reverie had skipped through that whole cutscene (and Vanitas' extreme aura of every dark feeling all at once pouring out of him like smoky blood had distracted her from CLOUD(?)'s existential crisis completely), leaving her once more flat-footed in the middle of a minor crisis.

Mach just saved the guy trying to mess with Roxas.
And she doesn't disagree with the reason he did it. What a time for Go Shijima to reach his own understandings.

Uncomfortable (and thus Smirking Like A Jackass), Xion moves to Roxas in a hurry, making sure to interpose herself between Mach/Vanitas and her partner.

"Lilian -- he talked about a Master. You should definitely figure that stuff out, if..."

"... he's still going to keep existing."
C Holding his hand up high, the revolver twirling through the air lands grip-first with a soft gasp of air, and is promtply pointed at the collapsing Shade. The only thing that stops him from firing is Go, who poured his heart out to stop Lilian from doing the exact same thing he had been intending to.

Part of him, the cold part of him constantly seething in the back of his brain, suggested he pull the trigger regardless. No sense in leaving loose ends untied, right?

... but, doing that after such a heartfelt cry would leave a bad taste in his mouth. And unlike other matters, he didn't carry a personal hatred in this situation to force his hand.

C stows his weapon back into its holster and twirls his Sigurd Edge, letting the polearm rest on his shoulder as he begins to walk over to Cloud, his wound aching the whole while.

Whatever was wrong with the usually dependable mercenary, he could tell, wasn't something physical. Not exactly, anyway -- but they'd already been warned something like this might happen. This was a place that could affect one's memory ... and Cloud, particularly, was told he might experience something truly painful.

That old geezer, he probably knew that whatever this was, would happen exactly like it had played out. C's hand slaps down on Cloud's shoulder, in a camraderie fueled clasp to attempt and firmly provide him with an anchor in reality.

    "Cloud."
    "Don't tell me you're already clocking out, before I've even paid you?"
Hibiki Tachibana     The tornado of Unversed is blown into and hoisted up (Xion can do that!?)and slams back down...! Though with a lot less impact than she expected (or hoped for), with the Shade's quick retrieval of most of its mass. But a power bomb is a power bomb, with a tired-looking Hibiki giving her a quick thumbs up and once-over to make sure she's also okay before her attention quickly goes back towards the others.

    The shadow of the fragment of Roxas in some way or shape, she's not sure of the specifics of their relationship, lies defeated on the ground. Not destroyed, but suitably defeated in her eyes, especially once Roxas takes his Keyblade from the earth and does...well, she's not sure. But with Void Gear and Lost Memory being replaced by the singular Oathkeeper...she imagines it's not a bad thing.

    Throwing away the pieces of himself...it's easy to say it's probably the right thing, given what little she's seen of the Shade of Vanitas, but she does wonder if he means /all/ of them, not just the very bad-looking ones like this. Maybe just experiencing them is enough? She really doesn't know enough herself to say...nor is she in a position to make a call on it. But it's something she's definitely caught up for a moment thinking about.

    As far as she's concerned, it's Roxas' perogative to decide what happens to the Shade...though the sheer suddenness at which Lilian takes action surprises her enough - and also snaps her attention enough away from Cloud's own inner battle - that she's not able to move nearly fast enough in time herself. Kamen Rider Mach /is/ though, and after a long and tense moment, she lets out an exhale she didn't know she was holding. "Go..."

    For her part, she's going to remain on the sidelines, with a small and invisible grin underneath her scarf. She's surprised. In a good way.
Roxas                    What's wrong? Isn't this what you wanted?                    
                                To be strong...                                
                            No, to be the strongest.                            

That smile on Aqua's face lingers. She plucks an image from Cloud's head and becomes someone else. It's not a great stretch, making herself look like Tifa Lockhart. A bit more hair, darker, simpler garments-- but close enough that it doesn't make a jarring difference to her silhouette-- to anyone who happened to be observing her from below.

The change in tack isn't for them anyway.

                                    Cloud...                                    
                              Wanna do me a solid?                              

But the situation below changes too radically. Aqua, wearing Tifa's face, glances towards the fallen Shade of Vanitas, and then towards all the other people standing about. She takes a couple of steps back from the edge of the plateau, and dissolves back into darkness.

The oppressive presence lifts from Cloud's mind, but the question that was asked lingers... along with an intuition of a location he's never heard of or been to:

Japan.
Roxas "I'm not Ventus. I don't think I ever really was," Roxas says, moving forward several paces to stand beside Xion. He throws an arm over her shoulder, which might at first appear to be an affectionate gesture. But he starts leaning on her heavily, and she'll understand fairly readily that a lot of the energy has gone out of him.

He looks between Lilian and Go, his expression conflicted.

"I don't... necessarily want him dead. But I sort of just don't want anything about him, either. He's not tethered to me anymore. Whatever relationship we had, it's done. But I don't think he deserves to exist less than I do."

The Shade of Vanitas shuts his exposed eye, his expression souring visibly. Another of the "Flood-type" Unversed appears beside him in concert with his annoyance. He reaches over and squashes it one-handed.

Another one appears immediately afterwards. It's a bit bigger.
Cloud Strife Cloud Strife? eyes focus back as the aches of his mind shatter into an ephemeral dizzying memory, like waking up from a dream you can't quite recall. All of that truly happened, but once his nerves jolted to remind him to live in the present tenses up enough the crack some of the rubble around his sword as he withdraws it from the tattered soil.

"...Japan..." The mercenary mutters. He's not sure why either. He tries not to put much purchase into his lapse of memory just now. It's odd. The adrenaline is still pumping through his veins as if to warn him of danger, a sensation that he hadn't felt during the interlude as if his body tried to goad him to remember, but it falls on deaf ears. "I...Of course not. There was another enemy here I had to deal with."

The Ex-Soldier twirls his sword and places it upon his back as his hand drifts to his face for a moment as he is left with things to consider. Then, he manages to put together exactly what had transpired here as he adopts.

"I managed to...beat an enemy and discern information from it. Do you know of a place called Japan?" He says, in what he believes to be the truth. His mind reformats the information to naturally put together that image of Tifa into his earlier memories and some faux promise to get to Japan in a neat package to prevent it from colliding with his beliefs.
Roxas "We don't go there, the path is blocked," Roxas says matter-of-factly, and completely unhelpfully. He sounds sleepy.
C     "Japan? Yeah, I've heard of it."

It was where Adachi was from. It might even be possible to go there, if he could convince the man to take them through his TV.

Roxas interjects, however. C tilts his head, "Is that so? ... well, if Cloud needs to go there, it can't hurt to look into it."

C crosses his arms, "But if I help you go there, then there's one mission I have for you that you'll have to do for me, no matter what. Even if you leave my employ, you'll have to do it for me."

"If that's fine with you," he says, placing a hand over his wound, subtly, "Then I'm all for helping you get there."
Xion "Oh, you beat a hidden enemy? Lucky!" Xion's smirk transforms into a rakish grin with a fellow-favoring warmer 'nice going buddy!'.

"I couldn't sense any more enemies outside the ring, but..." The red-coated Nobody shrugs, her transformations cancelling into a pair of medallions that float besides her before she gathers up with a sweep of her left hand, her right supporting Roxas as he leans on her.

"... I was definitely busy. Thanks for looking out, Cloud. You're worth every Munny!"

To her, the fractured mind of Cloud, the frantic hold onto any sort of reality that lets him keep on going...

... Is totally normal. She believes him, because she has no reason to doubt the cool mercenary found a foe in this darkness-ridden graveyard and dispatched it while the rest fought Vanitas.

"Japan... I think I know who to talk to, but people won't like it."

It's Adachi. And she's right. Not even Adachi likes listening to Adachi.
Hibiki Tachibana     Someone has to bring it up, so Hibiki does after a moment, where her attention goes towards the other conversation on the side.

    Namely, because of where she's from. She looks between Xion and Roxas kind of awkwardly. "...Something happened...to the Japan here?"

    Yup, there's going to be a lot of triangle pressing in the future.
Roxas "No, no. It's, uh. Just always been like that. The Underground of Japan is super dangerous," Roxas explains to Hibiki, gesturing one-handed as he does so. "So people like Xion and I, we'd need to take a boat or a plane. But then leaving quickly would be out of the question. So we just don't go, and neither do most people in the supernatural community."
Cloud Strife narrows his eyes at C for a moment. He isn't entirely against the idea of favor for a favor but there are some bare minimums that even he won't do, though he hasn't seen C to be someone reprehensible. Regardless, if it's something completely against his ethics it would take more than some promise to get him to cross a line. At least that's the assumption. "...I intended to take missions regardless."

He looks away after stating this with a nod, hiding a smirk as Xion decides to compliment him about some fictitious enemy that they both assume he defeated with the same degree of certainty. He isn't sure what the plan was, but he'll agree to it if it gets him to Japan. He's not sure why entirely, he just knows it's important.
Xion "Huh? Nothing *happened* to Japan. It's always been..."

Xion is utterly out of her depth. "... Japan? The people that know would be... Well, smart people, like Zexion or Xemnas."

Beat. "Or Tohru Adachi. He's from there!"

There's an expository beat. Xion feels the Half-A-Triangle-Press and interprets it as One Full Triangle Press from Hibiki and continues Roxas' explanation.

"Normally, the Realground - RG - is the world experienced by people. The Underground - UG - is the layer above-" She doesn't stutter. The UNDERground is ABOVE. This is yet another Gosh Darn Opposite World Garbage Thing to remember, everyone can tell. "- like a frequency you can tune into. You can go from the Underground to the Nevernever, which is like UG with no RG, from there. It's how we got here, because Castle Oblivion is in the Nevernever."

The complex, unskippable, single-segment explanation continues, Xion's left hand gesturing vaguely. "Normally you can just walk places, but we can use the Corridors of Darkness, which are actually between spaces and not corridors at all - it's the space between locations. Um..."

The explanation reaches its conclusion. "... Japan's like trying to plot a course in a storm, where the compass doesn't work. You navigate the Corridors by moving from one point of light to the other. Like stars, relationally. Towards or away from. I tried going 'towards' Japan once, and..."

Her expression falls. "There's no lights to go by. That's why we have to go by boat or plane. Get all that? Sorry, I had to get drilled by Zexion for a week and I probably forgot some parts."
C C nods his head, having an understanding with Cloud. They were Comrades now, after all.

"Right. Adachi might let us go, if we ask nicely. He's ... I guess I'd say he's also my 'Comrade'."

"Although, I wonder if we'd have to use a boat or a plane inside there, too? I guess we'll see."
Hibiki Tachibana     "Oh." Hibiki raises an eyebrow at Roxas, finding 'Underground' and 'super dangerous' to not be the first thing that comes to mind when she thinks of Japan. Hers anyway, and it's only just now coming to mind how messed up some others might be. Xion exposits on the details, with the singular eyebrow raise being joined by the other one at the messed up layering here. Wait, Corridors of Darkness aren't corridors? Why are they named corridors then? Did Xemnas name them? Are they just...called that?

    She sort of thinks she gets it though, with a solemn nod and a slight downtilt of her head as the explanation reaches its final part. It's hard to misunderstand that part, at least. And the more she understands how wrongly named things are around here, the less she wants to think about it--and Hibiki is pretty good at not thinking. "...No lights at all, huh? I didn't know it was that kind of place. Sounds...bad. But if you have to go there, guess there's no choice." She glances towards C and Cloud, gesturing slightly with a hand. "And I'd rather not let you get caught up by trouble before we get that game," she says towards the Rubber Toku-Suited NotVillain in particular.