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Disclaimer Me Do: I own nothing you recognize. And most of what you don't recognize, I still don't own.
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November 7, 2010
Kary was enjoying a thick, green beverage in a cafe when the system she was connected to began to explode.
Experience, GP, enemies slain...
The fallen slowly sipped on her sweet, bitter beverage as the lines filled themselves out, listing out the various items that had been acquired.
And the notice about the vocation system crashing seemed a bit... worrisome.
"Well, that's not ominous at all," Jinx said as she used a finger to underline some of the things the system was saying. "Pret-ty sure Alchemist was supposed to hold off on doing something like this without us."
Seated at the table alongside Kary, Yuffie was somewhat busy cutting apart a steak made out of hamburger. The girl, rather than commenting, simply stuffed a heavily-seasoned piece of meat into her mouth.
"Considering the notifications, that would imply that he's returned." Kary slowly swirled her straw around her tea, mixing the powder that had settled on the bottom. "You should wait for an explanation before being too harsh on him."
Jinx narrowed her eyes at Kary, making an effort to angrily slurp at her grayish-purple drink.
"...I thought you were supposed to be a demon," Jinx complained as she leaned forward, placing her elbows on the table. "Why do you have to sound so reasonable?"
"It's a matter of balance," Kary helpfully explained. "You provide the youthful exuberance. Yuffie is innocent. Alchemist has obviously chosen to be the one who tampers with forces beyond mortal ken. That leaves open the role of someone who keeps the group grounded and directed."
"...Except you keep on telling us to go and burn things down," Jinx pointed out, pulling her straw out of her icy drink to point at Kary. "I'm not sure how that helps."
"That's because you've yet to accept my suggestion and burn things down," Kary helpfully explained. "We should really give it a try, I'm sure you'll see why I keep offering it."
Kary happily sipped at her macha drink while Jinx looked at her oddly.
It was hardly her fault that the girl didn't appreciate the finer things in life.
Catching sight of Alchemist stepping out of the bathroom, his hands freshly washed as he approached, Kary carefully looked the man over. He seemed mostly unharmed, though she noted he was wearing a belt now when he hadn't before.
The man sat down at the empty spot next to Jinx and picked up his glass of lemonade, acting for all the world as though he hadn't even left. Kary let him take a long, deep pull from his glass before she began asking her questions.
"So," she began, once again swirling her straw through her tea. "How was your trip?"
"Not too bad," he explained as he pulled over a tablet that was on the table. He began to place an order, some kind of fruit-filled cake from the looks of things. "I had a lot of fun, actually. Spent the trip running ahead of some death goddess and stealing treasures out from under her nose. I would've brought you and Jinx along... but Gael? The old man at the village? He kind of blindsided me."
"The one in red, yes?" Kary asked, taking the pad from him to peruse their other treats. Ice cream was something she'd never been able to enjoy in the past and she now found it... too sweet, really, but it was also novel. "I've noticed he would often find some place out of the way and simply sit."
"That's the one," Alchemist agreed, grabbing the tablet and handing it over to Jinx. "He's not exactly used to having so much freedom. When you can do whatever you want, the hardest part seems to be making up your mind. Guy's stuck in the mindset that he's a human doing and not a human being. If he's not doing something, then what is he?"
Kary sipped her drink and let Alchemist's statement hang in the air. Jinx slowly turned her head to look at Alchemist, clearly surprised that the man didn't seem to recognize the similarities.
"So is that what you're gonna be like when you get old, dad?" Yuffie asked, voicing the question that Kary and Jinx were both thinking. "All needing to do stuff or you'll get depressed and weird?"
"Possibly," Alchemist agreed as he continued nursing his lemonade. "I'd do a better job shaving, though."
There was a break in the conversation as the group's various confections were brought out. Lemon sorbet for Kary, strawberry and cream cake for Alchemist, Jinx had ordered a plate of round rice-balls filled with different flavors of pastes and Yuffie had stolen the tablet sometime and ordered a massive ice-cream sundae for herself.
"So, I'm thinking we can head out tomorrow. Head on to Egypt, do some sight-seeing. Not going to Cairo, though. We'd get mobbed by scam artists the second we hit the streets." Alchemist dug his fork into his cake and held up a slice. "Anything special we want to do here before we go?"
"I wanted to visit Mount Fuji," Kary told the group as she brought up a small spoonful of her treat. "There's a shrine at the summit."
"Can we visit the Sainen-Ji Temple?" Yuffie asked. The girl was slowly turning around the tall glass her sundae had come in, looking for the best angle of entry. "I wanna see the grave of the best ninja this world ever made!"
Kary turned her gaze towards Jinx, watching the girl skillfully grasp her treat with a pair of chopsticks.
"What?" Jinx asked once she noticed the attention the fallen was paying to her. "I'm good, alright? I'm actually more interested in the pyramids."
"Mmm," Alchemist hummed, slowly chewing on his cake. He swallowed and drank some more of his lemonade to wash it down. "So, we can do one of those today, then the other one tomorrow. I'm thinking we should do the Fuji trip today, we're going to have to really wash up afterwards."
Kary waited until her beloved had placed another piece of his confection in his mouth before she spoke up.
"I suppose that is fair," Kary began, Alchemist's eyes locking on to her face as he chewed. "You'll have to help me, however. Volcanic ash can get absolutely everywhere."
"...Alright?" Alchemist said after swallowing. "I'll wash your back if you wash mine."
Pouting, Kary buried her spoon into her sorbet.
That wasn't the reaction she was after.
That wasn't the reaction she was after at all!
-----
November 7, 2010
Roy Harper, Speedy, kept his hands in his pockets as he followed along behind a grey-skinned girl at the Star City High School.
If he'd wanted to, he could've been skipping school. The Justice League was having another all-hands on deck emergency and were not being shy about conscripting the sidekicks...
To review data.
He'd gotten a handful of updates throughout the day from Robin. The kid was stuck going through the delivery information of something like twelve-hundred trucks in Europe that were involved in auto-accidents when their drivers just up and vanished, leaving behind their clothes.
One-thousand, two-hundred trucks. From semi-trucks to smaller box trucks for local deliveries. Apparently, Robin was saying that there had been a lot of injuries but less than would normally be expected for those kinds of numbers because it had happened during the darkest hours of the morning with the least amount of traffic on the roads. At least a quarter of the trucks had just been stuck idling at stop signs or red lights, their drivers missing.
Roy knew that Oliver knew the actual cause of what happened, the man couldn't lie to save his life. He could clam up and keep it a secret but he had dozens of tells that he did, in fact, know something.
And if they wanted Roy to work on something without letting him know what he was actually doing?
Roy would rather just go to school.
Which left him in his current position. Following behind Jinx as the girl obliviously went about her day, wholly unaware that she was being watched. Being observed. Her every behavior-
The girl turned to him, her pink, slitted eyes narrowing the same way a cat's would as it watched its prey before she smiled at him, large and wide and showing off two rows of very, very sharp teeth.
With a sigh, Roy gave up his little cat and mouse game to just approach the girl.
"Couldn't you just pretend you didn't know I was there?" he asked, adjusting a bag slung over his shoulder with six different, very heavy books inside.
"But Roy-toy!" Jinx gasped with wide-eyed and incredibly fake enthusiasm. "That'd be lying!"
"Yeah, yeah. I'm used to it," Roy said, grumbling just a bit as he walked alongside Jinx towards their next class. She was a year ahead of him but he'd placed well enough to take some more advanced classes.
He found the girl to be oddly tolerable. High praise considering...
Honestly? Roy was just angry. A lot. At almost everyone.
Oliver, Robin, Kid Flash, Aqualad- hell, even Batman! None of them noticed when he'd been replaced by a clone!
It made dealing with them, with everyone in the Justice League a lot harder than it should be. It left Roy feeling like an outsider rather than a member of any part of the team. Which also, oddly enough, saw him getting along fairly well with Shrike or that weird meta, Player One.
"How are things in the wizard's tower?" Roy asked as they made their way into a stairwell with dozens of other kids.
"Eh, they're good," the girl responded, just in front of the boy. "I don't think Al really gets the whole 'vacation' thing. He just got done helping some of the other residents build a new forge last night. How about you?"
"Got a choice between some unpaid intern bullcrap or coming to school," Roy explained as they kept moving with the sea of bodies. "I picked school. Things at home are getting kind of uncomfortable. Did you know Ollie was planning to propose to Dinah?"
"If he wants her? He's free to make that mistake," Jinx told him, lining up with several other students along the wall opposite to the door of their class. "Did you know that she sticks her hair to the wall of her shower? That's just gross!"
"...Something, something, broken people," Roy mumbled with a shrug. "I think they think they have a connection through work."
"And I think Dinah needs to stop trying to be a therapist and maybe go see a therapist!" Jinx declared with no small measure of heat. "That bitch has issues."
Roy sniffed, refusing to acknowledge the point considering he didn't really think anyone could be in their line of work without a laundry list of issues. He was self-aware enough to know that normal, well-adjusted people didn't run around in tights, punching out metahumans or super-gluing boxing gloves on to arrows.
"Yeah, well, she's a florist," Speedy argued, looking down the hall to see if the teacher was on their way. "I bet she knows how to cut up and hide a body in a garden bed."
"Let's not even go there, okay?" Jinx asked before literally shuddering. "Anyone ever tell you that Poison Ivy has a talking mutant Venus Flytrap named Frank?"
"...Why?" Roy asked, literally coming up blank.
"I have no idea, okay?" Jinx admitted, adjusting the strap of her backpack as the teacher came into view at the end of the hall. "But the last time she tried taking over Gotham? I watched her feed some of the homeless to that creepy-ass plant."
Speedy shuddered just imagining it.
Some days, he really, really appreciated the fact that he wasn't in Gotham.
-----
On the list of things Alchemist enjoyed about the teleportation spell, the ability to just up and go wherever he wanted was incredibly high on the list.
Sure, he'd weaponized the spell in the past. Used it to drop things into deep chasms or move them into the way of their own attacks but that was honestly a pretty niche use. Being able to go from the summit of Mount Fuji and all the way to a tourist-trap hotsprings resort up in the mountains? On the same day?
That was the real joy of being able to teleport.
"This is nice," Kary, next to him, commented. They had a private hot spring on a balcony overlooking the forested mountains below. Yuffie and Jinx had the same accommodations in the next room over. "I wish they hadn't gotten so upset when I went to look at the heart of the volcano, though."
"Probably not used to folks that can actually get right next to it," Alchemist told the woman. Kary crawled through the tub towards the balcony and leaned half out of it, taking in the distant forests and mountains. "Way I understand it, not a whole lot of metahumans over here. Never really too sure why... Probably just can't express themselves, that'd be my bet."
Leaning back and closing his eyes, Alchemist could hear splashing just beyond the walls. Probably Yuffie.
"Hey..." Alchemist opened his eyes and sat up a bit straighter, drawing Kary's attention to him. "I've got something I've been meaning to talk with everyone about."
"Oh?" Kary turned around fully and leaned back against her side of the steaming tub. "What about?"
"About this reality. About leaving it, if that's what we want to do." It was something that Alchemist had thought about, off and on, ever since he'd woken up as Lesley Winters. "Jinx, Yuffie, you two able to hear me?"
"Yeah!" Yuffie shouted over the divider between their balcony and his.
"I hear you," Jinx's voice was a lot quieter, more muffled.
"...I thought that we were largely trapped here but for the intervention of Gaia and her Instant Quests," Kary commented, referencing something that Alchemist had told her back during their jaunt into the world of Dark Souls. "You did say that the Source Wall surrounds this multiverse on all sides."
"I did," Alchemist confirmed. "And it does. But it has a few holes in it. They lead out to specific places. One is pretty much a couple of dead-ends and the other can lead out to infinite potential."
Alcemist leaned back, looking up towards the stars in the purple sky as dusk faded to night.
"One of the holes is in a reality where most of the Justice League turned into a bunch of controlling lunatics. We can punch out through there and get into a small cluster of multiverses where everything is called something-realm. Eathrealm, netherrealm, out... outerrealm? Outrealm? Something like that. That's connected to a magical hell-world, a reality where robots took over the world and a few others." Alchemist remembered seeing a lot of footage for the various Mortal Kombat games but he hadn't played any of them since... the X-Box? Right around there. "That's our dead-end direction."
The wizard was struggling to remember something as Kary sidled up next to him and pulled one of his arms over her shoulders.
Robocop was also connected to that reality, wasn't it? Or, if it wasn't, it was definitely connected to the Terminator reality. Either way, that one was worse than a one-way ticket to Hell...
Robocop involved going to Detroit!
"What's the other one?" Jinx asked through the wall.
"The other one is a bit of a longer road but we can pretty much go wherever we want after a bit," Alchemist told her. "We'd need to get through the hole into a neighboring multiverse which is really similar to this one but kind of better and kind of worse. Generally a lot more racist but that's mostly because there's this bacteria thing there that's psychically controlling their Canadian's into being assholes."
Marvel. Alchemist missed the good old days when it was just a handful of colorful, sarcastic characters swinging around on webs and making a mockery of the newspaper.
Now it was political.
"That multiverse leads over to a really big multiversal cluster. All kinds of realities over there, from vampires and werewolves to androids and their struggles to be more than mere machines. The demon, Sparda, he has a few kids over there." Alchemist continued. At the same time, he was opening his inventory and digging around for something cold to drink.
"I'd heard he had children," Kary commented as she adjusted her position so she could lean her head on his shoulder. "Do you know their names?"
"Dante and Virgil," Alchemist told her as he extracted a can of lemonade. Beer may have been traditional but he didn't have any with him. "There's actually a path to the demi-fiend's multiverse from theirs."
"Reminds me of something, Al," Jinx said through the wall. "That Magatama actually do anything? Did you get anything out of it?"
"...I don't think so," the wizard admitted, taking a moment to actually ponder on it. He -could- feel something but he hadn't unlocked any sort of special ability or skill when he'd leveled up.
Alchemist supposed that would've been Gamer fiat, converting something complex or spiritual into something a lot simpler and directly rewarding for the player. With that in mind, Player One probably would have unlocked the various skills as she leveled up whereas he did not.
Considering the game in question borrowed a lot from Buddhist principles, Alchemist supposed he should try doing something a little different. Maybe try looking within and trying to coax those vague feelings he had into something a bit more concrete?
"I'll have to meditate on it," Alchemist decided after a few moments of thought.
If nothing came of it, then nothing came of it. Alchemist would have experienced a handful of minutes of excruciating agony for nothing. On the other hand, the only real cost would be some GP and time.
The majority of the Magatama didn't have anything that Alchemist needed, anyway. The majority of the elemental ones were locked up behind boss fights and, regardless, Alchemist's own spells would likely be as strong as or stronger than those. Some of the passive abilities would be nice, such as the ability to outright ignore banishing spells or a further boost to elemental damage but...
The demi-fiend was primarily a melee fighter. His best abilities revolved around punching things harder.
Though... If the monster retained -all- of his abilities and passive skills rather than being limited to eight like he was in the game, he'd be very nearly invincible. Immune to all status defects, reflecting all forms of damage and, if something did pierce through? Simply absorbing it instead. The only thing he didn't defend against was Almighty damage, which had a very limited number of skills attributed to it.
Alchemist cracked open his can of lemonade and took a small sip.
He could put in the effort, figure out the various skills within the Magatama and eventually learn how to perform a Supreme Strike, or Freikugal...
Or he could just cast Ultima.
"Anyway," Alchemist said, forcefully bringing his mind back on task. "From the robot reality we can go to a hub reality and, from there, make our way to the reality that Yuffie came from."
Or countless others, Alchemist didn't mention.
"We can visit Wutai?" Yuffie asked, her voice high-pitched and fast. "Oh sweet Leviathan! We could visit Wutai!"
The sound that Yuffie made afterwards was a long, very-high-pitched squeal that, honestly, Alchemist hadn't even known humans could make.
The mage simply squeezed Kary against his side and took another sip of lemonade as he waited for Yuffie to run out of air.
He knew he'd told her that they could revisit her world at any time. He didn't see what was so special about being able to do it in real-time.
"I'm not telling any of you this because I've decided to pack up and leave," Alchemist explained once Yuffie stopped squealing. "I'm letting you all know that, if things here do get too bad, we do have the option to just pack up and leave."
"Doesn't that sound like giving up, love?" Kary asked him, reaching to take his lemonade out of his hands for herself. "I'm not sure how I'd feel about letting these people drive us from our home."
"You make it sound like I'd leave anything but scorched earth behind me." Alchemist didn't have any plans to eradicate everything, but... He was fully capable, between his destructive magics and transmutation magics of ensuring that he wouldn't be leaving anything behind that he didn't want to.
Up to and including the various gods, goddesses and undead he'd pulled out of other worlds.
"...That's weirdly comforting," Jinx admitted from her side of the wall.
Alchemist thought so as well. He didn't have any plans of uprooting himself and what he'd built, but...
It still felt nice to know that he had the option to, if he wanted to.
"Sweater vests?"
