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??/??/???? (Legend of Legaia)
The Seru-Kai was a strange realm, even by Alchemist's standards.
Which, considering he'd been to the inexplicable landscapes of the Item World, the realm of Dark Souls which had been eating itself in both a literal and metaphorical sense, and even the liminal barrier realms in White Knight Chronicles? His standards were, similar to a college frat boy on his fifth beer of the night, incredibly low.
The 'entrance' of the Seru-Kai terminated onto a floating, semi-transparent hexagram that seemed somehow crystalline and gaseous all at once. The space that surrounded them was filled with strange, fractal blue lights which seemed to almost be breathing.
"Woah..." Yuffie breathed out as she followed Alchemist into the place. "It's so... pretty."
"Kinda," Tiffany agreed. Turning slightly, Alchemist could see that the girl had crossed her arms over her midriff in discomfort. "Does it feel like we're trespassing, here? 'Cuz it feels like we're being watched and someone's not happy about us being here."
"We are trespassing," Alchemist admitted as the gate sealed shut once Tiffany entered. "The god of this reality, Tieg or Rem or whatever you want to call it, once attempted to keep this world separate from Earth. One-thousand years ago, some of his direct servants rebelled and chose to invade the Earth instead. It was the event that allowed the Seru to cross over in the first place."
Alchemist stretched out an arm and waved it towards the distance, where a massive tree reached towards the heavens.
"As the Seru aren't supposed to be on Earth, Humans aren't supposed to be here. If you two weren't bonded with Terra and Mule, your bodies would dissolve and your souls would be ripped free. What would happen to you after that?" Alchemist shrugged as he began to walk forward. "I truly do not know."
"...Wait," Tiffany called as she ran to catch up with him. "If we need a Ra-Seru to survive here, how are you okay? I didn't see any on you!"
"I'm a dragon," was Alchemist's answer for the girl. The trio briefly stopped as Yuffie saw a treasure chest and ran over to open it, finding a piece of chest armor inside before they continued on. "I go where I want."
Floating through the strange environment were what looked to be large suits of unusual, advanced armor covered in spikes and tubes. Other entities looked like... well, truthfully, Alchemist did not know how to describe the creatures. They had sharp, vicious beaks on tiny bodies with large wings and long legs that ended in wicked talons. Then there were the nautiloids.
The mage did not understand what had possessed Tieg to take nautiloids out of the human world, imbue them with incredible elemental powers and gift them the ability to float. He just didn't.
"Are they gonna fight us, too?" Yuffie asked as a flying suit of armor passed by them. It seemed to be in a hurry, aiming towards the tree in the distance.
"I was expecting they would," Alchemist admitted. He watched the Seru dart towards the tree, only for it to smack into some kind of barrier and fall back. It fell a dozen meters through the empty sky before it managed to right itself, then it began circling the tree. Occasionally it would try and strike out with one of its two lance-like arms as though it were testing something.
"...They aren't desperate or frenzied enough to attack everything on sight," the mage mused as they swiftly covered the distance.
He'd been expecting opposition from the native inhabitants of the realm, as the heroes of the game had experienced, but the implication had been that those same heroes had arrived far later than Alchemist had.
"...But they are getting desperate?" Tiffany asked as Yuffie darted back along the route they were walking, apparently having seen something they missed.
"They are," Alchemist told the girl as he waved once more towards the massive tree that simply floated in the distance. "The corpse of the Ra-Seru, Jedo, was resurrected by the forces of evil in this world. What came back... wants to kill everything. Including himself. Especially himself."
Once Yuffie rejoined the group, they got moving again.
"He's fused to a martial artist, a man that wanted to be the best. Who hated everything that stood in the way of those ambitions." Alchemist sighed quietly as he watched more and more Seru fly towards the tree, swarming around the invisible barrier keeping them from attacking the intruder. "That man, Songi, believes himself immune to the same brainwashing that happened to everyone who accepted the Mist of Rogue. But, somewhere along the way, the man's ambitions changed from being the best, being a winner, to becoming a god. It... doesn't make much sense, if viewed from outside. If he kills the tree, he kills this realm, which kills all of the Seru. Which would send the human world back to the stone age, possibly ending with all of humanity dead. Then what would he rule? What's the point of being 'god' on a dead world?"
"...That's kind of a lot," Tiffany said as they approached a glowing bridge of light that led from one hexagonal panel up to a platform of similarly impossible light, wrapped around the trunk of the absolutely massive tree. "Do you think, maybe, he just... didn't think about that?"
"He'd have to be really stupid," Yuffie said before she ran ahead.
"That's fair," Alchemist agreed as they ascended the bridge of light. The giant tree, the Great Genesis Tree, was massive beyond words. It dwarfed Alchemist and his team countless times over.
On the side of it, growing like a fungus, was a parasite that spiderwebbed around the tree. And, at the base of the tree, siphoning the power drained by the parasite, was a very muscular redheaded man who stood about one-hundred and eighty-eight centimeters tall. On his right wrist was a purple, horned arm-band with a large, glinting jewel in the center.
"Songi always did seem like an idiot."
The light pouring from the tree cut off as the tall redhead, Songi, dropped his arms to his side and turned around. His dull blue eyes, more akin to painted rocks than anything organic or human, slid across Alchemist's group before settling on the armored man.
"Tch!" Songi spat on the platform before crossing his arms. "I knew Gala couldn't be here so fast."
The man's voice was deep, yet there was still a sort of whining pitch in the undertone as he spoke.
"No matter," the redheaded martial artist continued as he uncrossed his arms and crouched into a ready stance. "You'll make a fine warning when he arrives!"
The man pulled his right arm back, maddened light gathering within the jewel upon his Ra-Seru, and-
"Stay," Alchemist demanded as he used Wish to cast Control Undead.
-nearly jerked his arm out of socket as, when Songi went to thrust outwards, his hand refused to move!
"What?!" Songi shouted, confusion and anger apparent on his face. The man jerked his arm, then turned to glare at his unresponsive Ra-Seru. "What have you done?! How are you controlling my-"
"Disengage," Alchemist demanded as he walked towards the man.
"What?" Songi asked, confused at the very unexpected turn of events. "If you think I will leave, you are- What?!" The martial artist cut himself off abruptly as he turned back to look at his Ra-Seru.
Which was pulling -away- from Songi's arm.
"No!" Songi screamed as he reached out towards the floating wristband. His fingertips just brushed against the dull gem within it when he pulled back and practically bent in half. "No! It- It hurts!"
Songi fell over on his side, his arms and legs convulsing in clear agony.
"It hurts! It hurts-it hurts-it hur-" Songi's screams of pain cut off abruptly as Alchemist snapped his fingers...
And the man turned to stone.
"...Is this another one of your 'Bad guys are victims' things?" Yuffie asked as she carefully peeked around Alchemist's frame to the statue that had agony written clearly across its face.
"...It is," Alchemist admitted as he snapped his fingers again, turning the fungal parasite along the side of the Great Genesis Tree to stone. Unlike Songi, it began to break apart under its own weight, the majority of it falling to the depths below.
With that task accomplished, Alchemist turned his gaze to the undead Ra-Seru, hovering in the air where it had left Songi.
Shaking his head, and silently thankful for the fact that he couldn't taste bile while within his Incorruptus, Alchemist opened his inventory and began to hunt for a handful of items.
A plain, unadorned wooden chalice, a canteen of Holy Water, and, most importantly, a small vial filled with a toxic-green potion within which a tiny heart beat.
An elixir of youth.
"What are you doing?" Tiffany asked as she cautiously approached whilst Alchemist mixed both liquids together within the Holy Grail.
"Fixing this," Alchemist explained as he held the concoction up to the floating undead. "Drink."
For a moment, nothing happened. The horned Ra-Seru seemed to shudder in place, attempting to fight the command before its resistance faltered and it pitched forward, burying its horns in the liquid within the chalice.
Foul, black smoke began to erupt from the entity and it shook in place, obviously trying to fight the command.
"Dad?!" Yuffie shouted, grabbing on to his armor. "Mule- Mule says it's screaming! It's screaming like you're killing it!"
"...I am," Alchemist admitted as the smoke began to thin and the colors of the godling began to fade. "Jedo, as he is, needs to die."
Once all of the foul, black smoke had filtered off of the Ra-Seru, light began to shine from its twisted and abused shell. It glowed brighter and brighter, reaching a point that went beyond bright and into blinding-
Until the light faded and showed that, where Jedo had been?
Now a glowing, crystalline egg floated in its place.
"So that Jedo, as he was supposed to be, can be reborn."
Alchemist took hold of the floating egg, gently cradling it against his side as he reopened his inventory.
The danger to the Seru-Kai and its power source, the Great Genesis Tree may have passed...
"So, what's next?" Tiffany asked as Alchemist pulled a few bags of dirt out of the inventory, along with a single seed from an ash tree.
"Not much. A little bit of gardening, throw a few healing spells at the big-ass tree over there," Alchemist said with a lazy shrug as he debated what to do with the statue of Songi. "Then we can head on home, do a bit of training until we're ready to dip into Juggernaut."
If Alchemist had eyes at that moment, he would have narrowed them in consideration as an idea came to him. If he had lips, they would have split into a wide, evil grin.
He knew -exactly- what he was going to do with Songi, the former unwitting slave of Jedo. It would be a long, grueling punishment. Some might even consider it a form of torture.
Alchemist, however, considered it to be the best out of the many, many bad options available.
-----
Robin paced nervously inside of the demi-plane, just in front of the door that led outside to that... that.
That thing!
Raven and Starfire had been watching from the air as Alchemist, Player One and, somehow, Levia-chan had all walked into the flesh garden without being consumed. They'd reported to him how all of these monsters had swarmed down on the group and then all the monsters were just frozen in place.
Completely frozen. Like, in the middle of shooting lasers frozen.
Everything he was learning just kept pushing the perception of danger higher and higher up and Robin wasn't sure what they were dealing with, not anymore.
So, when the door opened?
Robin was ready to get some answers!
First, Yuffie bounced in. The small Asian girl was just... bubbly and excited, even though she also looked dirty and worn out. She waved at him and sent him a wide, toothy grin that seemed more hostile than good natured but Robin kept his mouth shut and waved back.
Player One was next. The girl looked subdued and tired but it wasn't the emotional wreck he'd... Robin didn't think he instigated the girl's issues the other night but she clearly had a problem and she'd been more than ready to yell at him about it. Right now, though, she just seemed like she was tired after a long day.
Finally, the man that Robin had been waiting for stepped through the door.
"Alchemist!" Robin shouted as he approached-
Then froze as he saw the man cradling a small, red-haired infant against his chest.
"Alchemist," Robin repeated at a far lower volume as the older man bounced the fussing child in place. "I... have a lot of questions."
"Well, walk and talk, Robin. I need to get this set up for a moment," Alchemist distractedly told him as the door pulled shut behind him and he started walking towards his house. "What's wrong?"
"I need to know why you threw that 'goblin' person into the tentacle pit," Robin demanded, making sure to keep his voice and tone even.
"There were a lot of reasons for me to do that," Alchemist admitted as he opened the door to his house and stepped in, Robin on his heels. "One, it showed you that you should be careful about that location. Two, it showed -me- what would happen if a biological mass of sufficient complexity was detected by the Juggernaut. Three, there are something like twenty people trapped inside of the Juggernaut, Robin, and I'm going to have to figure out how to extract them without killing them. That last point is going to end up eating a lot of goblins."
"...What?" Robin asked, the various questions on his mind ramming into a wall at the admission from the man. "What do you mean- You're using the goblins to experiment- Is that going to kill them?!"
"Quite likely, yes," Alchemist admitted without a hint of shame as he snapped the fingers of one hand and a baby seat appeared in one of the chairs in the dining room. The baby that Alchemist tried to slip into the seat kicked and fought, putting up a very admirable effort as the man patiently worked on getting the child secured. "Robin? If I tried to just rip someone free of the Juggernaut, they will die. I'm going to have to figure out if there's a window where that can be prevented or, if not, figure out some other way to have the beast reject its victims. Considering at least two of Juggernaut's victims are literal children? I'd like to figure out how to prevent it from being as traumatic as possible."
Robin didn't know what to think of that. It felt... wrong. Using things that could feel, that could scream, and just using them to gather data as they suffered and died felt...
...sick.
Alchemist clearly didn't consider the goblins as being worthy of humane treatment.
Or, at least, if he did? He considered the lives and comfort of real people and especially suffering children to be far more important.
And Robin didn't know if he could argue that. He was sure that Alchemist was biased, his words were definitely not positive when he talked about the goblins, but Robin couldn't imagine that the creatures were as... simple as the man claimed they were.
But if there were actual kids, trapped inside of the monster and in pain like the goblin had been? Still was?
"Where..." Robin raised his head and looked to the baby that Alchemist had brought back. The man in question had actually moved on to the kitchen and seemed to be in the process of filling a bottle with formula. "Where did you find the baby, Alchemist?"
"Oh, I found him under a tree while I was out," Alchemist glibly told him as he walked back into the room with a bottle in his hand. The little red-headed baby loudly smacked the table in front of him and pushed and slapped at Alchemist as the man tried to carefully feed the nipple on the bottle into the child's mouth.
"What about his parents? Won't they be looking for him?"
"Oh, they're dead."
"...Did you kill them?" Robin hesitated to ask. He didn't -expect- that Alchemist did but he was coming to understand that he didn't have as good a read on the dragon as he'd thought.
"That would be quite the trick. They died ten years ago." Alchemist's words, distracted as they were as the baby finally failed to avoid the bottle, hit Robin like a truckload of bricks.
"...What?" Robin asked as the child started to drink his food. "That doesn't- How could they have died ten years ago? The baby looks like he's six months old! At most!"
"I have a fairly limited number of Elixirs of Youth. They can, as the name might suggest, reduce someone's age. The further back one goes, the more they lose..." Alchemist began to explain, heedless of the frightened widening of Robin's eyes behind his mask. "And little Songi here ended up a mutated monster whose mind got all twisted and turned around when he got brainwashed by an omnicidal abomination."
Looking at the innocent blue eyes set into the obviously Asian face of the baby, Robin couldn't see it.
But... maybe that was the point?
"Killing him would have been easy," Alchemist continued, heedless of the thoughts filling Robin's head. "Fate itself had lined everything up for him to expire. Time, place, circumstance... But the man was not a monster of his own choosing, Robin, and that... that has to matter."
Robin swallowed and looked up, expecting to see the cold, mad gaze of the Joker in Alchemist's eyes.
Instead? The look on Alchemist's face was somehow sad. He seemed to be focused on something far, far away and the memory obviously troubled him.
"And I will not be an executioner for the convenience of 'fate'," Alchemist said, his voice soft. "If I get blood on my hands, it won't be the blood of a slave..."
Robin didn't know what to make of that. He didn't know what to make of Alchemist somehow turning a man into a child, either.
"...What's going to happen to the kid?" Robin asked as he pulled out a chair to sit down.
"There's a monastery nearby," Alchemist vaguely waved one hand towards the door that led into the demi-plane. "They take in orphans and raise them, train them in the martial arts of some war god. Songi was taken in by them ten years ago, right after his parents were murdered. I'm hoping they can do a better job this time if they're not working against that trauma. I'll take him there in the morning."
"You're not going to try and raise him yourself?" That actually surprised Robin. From his experience, people in Alchemist's position always seemed ready to take in orphans and train them in whatever esoteric knowledge they specialize in.
"I'm already raising Yuffie," Alchemist told him as Songi loudly sucked on the bottle of formula. It was almost empty and the baby wasn't slowing down in the slightest.
"...Yeah," Robin agreed with a wince as he thought on Levia-chan and just how energetic the girl was. "You really don't have time for a second kid, do you?"
The look Alchemist sent Robin spoke volumes.
-----
Raven listened to the discussion in the other room with one ear. She wasn't doing a great job focusing on it, nor was she doing a good job paying attention to her book.
She kept getting distracted by the television instead.
Beast Boy and Cyborg both liked to play fighting games. Robin, when he could be coerced into sitting still to relax, actually enjoyed shooting games.
Jinx the dragon, currently pretending to be a girl, was playing a game about... blocks.
Alright, that wasn't entirely fair. Raven had seen the production date during the into of the game and it was a few years old, so by her understanding of computers, limited though it was, the graphics were fairly solid for when the game had been made.
Legend of Legaia looked like an interesting game, following a concept she'd never seen in the smattering of game collections spread throughout the occupants of the tower she lived in. When Jinx had started the game, it had started with a scrolling script that explained the setting and showed how things had gone wrong, how the in-game story had come to a world that was nearing its end.
The game was a play. A story, and it was one that Raven didn't know.
Jinx had been controlling the star of the show, a blue-haired boy named 'Vahn' that was fourteen, according to the little booklet that was inside of the game's case, when Alchemist stepped into the room. He had the baby with him and it...
Raven had never seen a baby with an angrier face.
The man avoided the cables strewn across the floor as though he knew exactly where they were without ever once looking down. It was the kind of practiced ease that she'd only ever seen from Cyborg.
"Couldn't you have just left him in the other room?" Jinx asked, her eyes glued to the screen.
"Yes, I could have," Alchemist answered, oddly calm. Raven was fairly sure that a lot of people would have been offended at the question. More would have been offended by the implications behind it.
"So why didn't you?" Raven found herself asking as Alchemist situated himself on the couch, next to Kar'Yashlan. There was something about the woman that made Raven's teeth itch but she couldn't pin that issue down, at all.
"Kids need enrichment to develop curious minds." Was Alchemist's answer as he extracted a book from a black plane that briefly appeared in front of him.
And that... was that.
Alchemist just held the kid against him as he read the book, something about a woman named Princess Cimorene from the few bits that Raven managed to catch. Jinx kept on playing her game. Kar'Yashlan kept reading her book.
The most exciting thing that happened was this little, black cat jumping up on Raven's lap. The creature was oddly cold to the touch, though his fur was well-kept and downright fluffy. And he had horns.
"...So, what kinds of things will you be working on when you aren't experimenting on goblins?" Raven finally asked as Jinx maneuvered Vahn towards the front of his little walled village during the night.
"That's... actually a good question," Alchemist admitted as he looked up from the book. Songi, on his lap, had dozed off several chapters in the past and the man hadn't even noticed. "I need to actually fight and defeat some opponents for some of my equipment to get stronger, but I've only actually 'defeated' one foe here..."
"I would actually quite like to learn the arts of the Fell Blade, Love. If you wouldn't mind?" Kar'Yashlan asked. The woman reached over to briefly squeeze the man's thigh and a slim smile spread across her face.
"We can make a day of it." The way Alchemist smiled as he said that... Raven couldn't quite understand it. She'd seen weapons practice, from Robin's shadow dancing and then the literally violent brawling that Alchemist and Kar'Yashlan seemed to engage in. How they could enjoy that, it just didn't make sense to her.
The man leaned back in his chair as the image on the television changed. It showed a massive, demonic face. Blank, glowing white eyes and absolutely huge, needle-like teeth preceeding a hellish screech. The baby woke, tears in his eyes with a scream that would wake the dead!
It startled the cat on Raven's lap so badly, he jumped off. And left a series of claw marks on Raven's legs. Which had her nearly jerking out of her seat as she hissed in pain.
"He must have recognized the sound," Alchemist muttered, just audible as the scene transitioned back to the three-dimensional blocks. Looking over at him instead of the six ragged, bleeding scratches on her legs, Raven saw that Alchemist had taken to bouncing the crying child on his lap.
"...It was pretty unique, yeah," Jinx agreed as, on-screen, pixelated creatures that looked like helmets with beaks atop a spine with pincers for hips started attacking the villagers. "Is that what the Juggernaut sounds like?"
Raven froze, her eyes locked on the screen. Vahn had just entered a fight in the game and the creature, 'Gimard' according to a blue plaque on screen, looked incredibly similar to some of the monsters that she'd watched try and swarm Alchemist and his group.
"Maybe?" Alchemist answered, just loud enough to be heard over the crying child. "I've only personally encountered one of them today."
"...There's more than one of those things?" Kar'Yashlan asked, actually putting her book down to focus on her... lover? Boyfriend?
"Well, there could've been." Alchemist shrugged, as much as he could anyway, as Songi's crying slowed down. "The other one was aborted just before completion. As of right now? Only one, complete, Juggernaut exists."
A part of Raven thought it was odd how Alchemist was specifying about the status of the Juggernaut. The rest of Raven was focused on the less than pleasant act of using her cloak to dab at the blood from the cat's claws.
"No!" Raven demanded as, from the corner of her eye, she saw Alchemist raise his hand, ready to snap his fingers. "I don't... I don't like letting other people cast magic on me. I'm fine. I'll be... I'm fine."
The man tilted his head to the side, slightly, not unlike a cat that wasn't sure what to make of what it was seeing.
"...If you'd like, I do have a book on basic healing magic I'd be happy to lend you," he offered as he lowered his hand, settling it around the abdomen of the child he was holding. "...You have an opportunity to freely learn a few new spells. Perhaps it would be a good idea to pick up some structured spellcasting? Instead of just using the manifestation of your soul?"
"...Is there something wrong with that?" Raven had to ask.
Regardless of the answer, she was going to accept the offer to learn some healing magic. It was rare, even on Azerath... and the scratches the cat left behind stung.
"Outside of the protections afforded to your material form, there are some simple barrier magics that could be used to trap your soul." The man leaned back in his chair, one leg bouncing to keep the fussy baby from making too much more noise. "Not to mention how easy it would be to wound your soul like that. Things like Etrigan, Circe and LeFay would all have an easy enough time doing... quite a lot of things to you, really."
Raven pressed against the scratches, dulling the pain with pressure.
That hadn't been a problem so far, but she also hadn't fought anyone who could make it a problem, either. It was easy to be a big fish if there wasn't anything else in the pond...
"Hmm... Hey, Kary? Would you mind if we had a guest with us while we work on teaching you those sword arts?" Alchemist asked, almost distracting Raven from her bloody task.
"So long as they don't interfere, I certainly won't have an issue."
"Fair enough. Hey, Raven?" The half demon looked up at Alchemist, his eyes, and Songi's eyes, locked on to her face. "You mind asking Beast Boy if he wants to learn how to be a werewolf?"
He...?
What?!
"...I'll ask him."
Either Alchemist meant something completely contrary to what Raven was expecting... Or he knew where a pack of wolf-man creatures were that he wanted Beast Boy to learn how to transform into.
Either way, she'd find out for sure -after the fact-.
"Oh, you have an affinity for shadow magic? What a coincidence, me too!!!"
