Okay, here's a little something I've been working on since before I moved. It's taken me a long time to get just this Prologue compiled, and since this whole chapter just came from my first post, it's probably gonna take me a ridiculously long time to get the next few chapters out. Pretty much what this is is a first-person re-write of Heartfelt Adventure done from Bobbi's point of view. This prologue chapter covers the Heartless attack up until the whole world-destruction bit.
So here's a proposition for anyone who's interested. A challenge, if you will.
I propose/challenge anyone who is interested to do exactly this. A rendition of Heartfelt Adventure from whichever point of view you prefer done solely with your character(s) as the protagonist/person the current story is following. If you have multiple characters and want to do a few chapters with the story following them, please feel free. It doesn't have to be exact to the posts, embellishment is much loved, and if there's any tweaking you want to do, please do it. This is kind of something to see how everyone views Heartfelt Adventure, and more importantly a more in-depth look into the events leading up to and throughout the RP.
You don't have to do this if you don't want to. It's just something I'd like to see and read if anyone is interested.
Now, without further adieu, here is the Prologue to Bobbi's side of the story. Bobbi's Heartfelt Adventure. (listed title pending, might come up with a better one, might even get lame enough to post it on Fanfiction.net if enough people dare me to)
Oh, by the way, it's so ridiculously long because I was writing it with the intention of posting it on fanfiction.net, and possibly making an actual "doujin" of sorts out of it later on. That, and I hate short chapters.
razz Might also post this as it's own thread to avoid cluttering of my art page, but don't think it'll be worth the effort to have two threads up here since I barely have enough material to cover for one.
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Kingdom Hearts: A Heartfelt Adventure
Based on the Gaia Online Kingdom Hearts Role Play
Written by Mizu_Kage_Hikari
PrologueI don’t know how this all started for the rest of them. But I remember how it started for me...
I was on my way home from work, had just gotten off the bus, and crested the last hill to my house when I spotted an ominous-looking storm on the horizon. Growing up on the Great Plains, I was used to seeing violent storms, even watching them come in, so I thought nothing of the lowering, dark clouds, or the odd flickers of what I thought to be lightning. I do remember thinking the storm looked a little odd, but since I was now living on the coast rather than the prairie, I just chalked that up to not being used to the weather systems.
My parents had uprooted my brother and myself from the only home we had known in Omaha to move us out to Seaport City. The house was nicer than the one we had left, and my parents were getting much better pay, so we were a great deal better off, but I missed the rolling hills and salt-free air of my home state. I never knew two places in the same country could be so entirely different. Not that I hadn’t been away from home before, oh no. I’d been to the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, and the Black Hills and Badlands of South Dakota. We even went all the way to the U.S./Canada border once. But I had never been so far from home that the very air smelled different.
Pity I was only about 19 when they did this, otherwise I could have just taken my chances on moving out on my own, despite my crappy wages working at ShopKo. Actually, hell, the crappy wages were nothing compared to the almost non-existent hours I got. My job out in Seaport, even though it didn’t pay much more, at least gave me better hours. Well, except for that day. That day I had gotten off at noon, two hours earlier than scheduled, because the bakery I worked at was just so damned slow. My managers, coworkers, and I had figured that the gorgeous weather was keeping people out and away from their bagels, but the storm I saw rolling in put the lie to that theory. Heh. Little did we know…
I was a little surprised to find the door unlocked until I remembered that my brother didn’t have school due to summer vacation. One sad thing about being graduated from high school was the fact that I lost all track of time. My sense of time had never been all that good, anyway, but after graduation it just got ridiculous.
After I finished letting the dogs out and back in, I popped in my
Kingdom Hearts 2 disc and my personal memory card, booted up the PS2, and sat myself down for another beat down by Sephiroth, since I didn’t feel like tackling the Gummi Ship tasks that day. After about five rounds of getting my a** handed to me by the greatest silver-haired bishi of all time, I finally shouted “Seph, you
jerk!” laughingly as I watched the animation of Sora bobbing up and down on the screen. As I leaned back on the couch, I looked over at the three-year-old chocolate lab puppy sitting next to me. She raised her head, her whip-like tail thump-thump-thumping on the couch as she gave me that hopeful, “pet me love me feed me” look.
“Well,” I said in a resigned sigh, “he beat me again, Mollers. I--”
The rest of my sentence was cut off by puppy tongue slathering my face with puppy kisses. I grabbed Molly firmly by the collar and pushed her away, mock glaring into those adorable yellow-brown eyes of hers.
“You’re disgusting,” I told her. This earned me another kiss, despite the fact that I held her firmly at arm’s length. When that dog wanted to kiss you, by God, she was going to kiss you. I made a sound that was somehow a groan and a sigh at the same time, and pulled her closer, vigorously rubbing her ears and scratching behind her collar, basically lavishing her with all the sorts of attention she just loved. I noticed the older dog, a black lab mixed with goodness only knows what that we had named Rosie, staring up at me with hopeful eyes.
“I’ll get to you in a second,” I promised her, just before getting smothered by exuberant puppy love. “Oh, God, that was my kidney!”
After I finally got Molly off my lap, (who knew sixty-five pounds of dog could even
fit on my lap?) and gave Rosie all the attention she deserved, I stood up off of the floor and dusted my hands off on my pants, looking out the front windows to the house across the street. The light outside had gotten pretty dim for three in the afternoon, and I figured the storm was going to break soon. So I moved to let the dogs out, but for some odd reason, they were sticking close to my legs, rather than going outside to do their duty.
“What’s wrong with you guys?” I asked after the third time Rosie almost knocked me off my feet. “You’ve been outside for one of the coastal storms before…”
When I heard Rosie start to growl and saw her bare her teeth, I looked in the direction she was staring, and just about lost my feet. The sky was overcast with the dark, purplish-black clouds I had seen rolling in just a few hours ago, and flickers of lightning arched across the sky, but it wasn’t the weather that made my knees go to jelly. It was the things I saw crawling their way up through the pavement of the street in front of my house, swimming through concrete as if it were no more substantial than funky-colored water.
Shadow Heartless. I knew those bug-like creatures well, with their tiny bodies, large heads, and lamp-like yellow eyes. Worse, the hand-claws that could rip into your flesh and pull out the very essence of your self, your heart. No, not the living, beating heart, but that mystical thing along with the mind and soul that no scientist could ever figure out, one of the three elementary pieces that made up a human being. That heart.
I did the only thing I could think of to do. I shouted.
“Hey, Steve? Do you still have that baseball bat in your room? I think I need it! Steve?”
Yeah, I asked my brother if he had a baseball bat. Pretty lame, I know, but I wasn’t the sort to freak out at the sight of the weakest enemy in my favorite game of all time. I’d beaten Xemnas with an over-sized funky-looking key by button mashing, I wasn’t about to let some puny Shadow Heartless get the best of me just because I wasn’t Sora. Unfortunately, there was no response from my brother, which worried me. If nothing else, he would have screamed at me to shut up.
I slammed the porch door closed, just in time for one of the Shadows to smack against the Plexiglas as it tried to attack me. I tried to wade my way through the mass of dogs around my legs and managed to break through, sprinting the twenty or so steps to my room. I didn’t have much in the way of defensive means in there, just a plastic katana I got at the Family Fun Center back home at my best friend’s sweet sixteen. It was likely to break and bend and be totally useless, but at least it was better than nothing.
The Christmas bells I had on my doorknob year round jangled loudly as I wrenched the door open, my eyes roving the absolute mess that was my bedroom, hoping to see that katana. I found it right where I thought it was, propped against the wall behind my bed where it would be handy for fishing dog toys out from under the bottom bunk.
My hand closed on the fabric-wrapped plastic hilt just as I heard that faint scrabbling noise that let me know one of the Heartless was trying to find purchase on the parquet flooring my mom had installed. I turned, swinging the katana — plastic sheath and all — at the Heartless.
I cried out as a blinding flash of light ripped into my eyes. Instinctively, I flung up both arms, trying to block the light, but even with my eyes tightly shut, it still stung. The flash lasted barely longer than a bolt of lightning would have, and when I blinked away the daze, my breath caught in my throat.
No way, I thought as I finally gasped in some air. Laid out before me was a stained-glass mosaic that seemed oddly familiar from my adventures in
Kingdom Hearts and
Kingdom Hearts 2. The design was different, and unfortunately, I couldn’t quite make it out from this angle, but I knew the general art style, and the inky blackness stretching out endlessly overhead was pretty much a dead giveaway. I was in the Dive Into the Heart, also known as a Deep Dive.
I could just hear Destati playing in the background, too. Probably just my imagination, but it was very fitting, and very soothing to hear one of my favorite songs. Especially that one, the song that had been there for Sora right at the beginning. Just the fact that it was there for me, too, was a huge relief. Actually, it was kind of ridiculous how relaxed I felt.
“This is odd,” I said aloud, just to see if my voice would echo the way I thought it should. It did. I was about to get really,
really obnoxious about the echoing, but another voice interrupted me. A voice that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.
.:So much to do, so little time…:.
.:Take your time…:.
. biggrin on’t be afraid…:.
.:The door is still shut. Now, take a step forward. Can you do it?:.“Psh. Naw, my legs are broken,” I drawled sarcastically as I took that step. There was a second flash of light, not anywhere near as painful as the one that brought me here, but harsh enough that I squinted against it. When I could see again, there were pedestals of white marble all around me, most of them holding a different colored orb of light floating above it. Or, they seemed different colored to me. They were also white. Make sense of that one.
.:If you give it form, it will give you strength. Choose well.:.I knew what that meant. I remembered this from the first game, remembered it distinctly. Remembered agonizing over what to choose, which would benefit me more, which was more accurate to the story line and myself… Now, the choice was clear. There was only one of these pedestals that was calling to me. Only one that seemed to draw me in like a moth to the flames. With a great deal more calm than I should have been feeling, I walked over to the nearest pedestal, and reached into the glowing orb of light. I saw my hand silhouetted against the shine for a brief moment before it was engulfed in the gentle, warm ball. It felt like warm sunlight on my hand, and as I reached in deeper, fully expecting my hand to come out the other side at any second, my fingers closed around something quite solid, wrapped in leather, but I could feel that there was cool metal beneath the wrappings. The world shone again, and I found myself holding a silver longbow and quiver full of equally silver arrows.
.:The power of the Archer. Unswerving loyalty. An instrument of fierce justice. Is this the power you seek?:.“Always,” I realized, breathing out the word as I stared at the magnificent weapon in my hands.
.:You have gained the power to fight.:. The voice sounded pleased, which I supposed was a good thing. Then, I heard that scrabbling noise behind me, and I whirled on the spot, drawing an arrow from the quiver and setting it to bowstring, aiming, and loosing all in the same breath. It seemed like instinct, and I stared as the silver arrow streaked through the air and impacted on a Shadow Heartless that had been sneaking up behind me.
.:Nice shot! You’ve got it. Use this power to protect yourself and others.:.“What else would I use it for?” I murmured sarcastically. I was still stunned at the sight of what those arrows could do—there was a nice scorch-mark where it had impacted after passing through the Shadow—and was barely even aware of what I was saying. Honestly, I was lucky I was even breathing right then.
.:There will be times you have to fight. Keep your light burning strong.:.
My light, huh? I thought, staring down at the silver bow in my hands.
I always thought of myself as one of the Twilight, but I guess… well, we’ll just have to see.
.:Behind you!:.I whirled again, the arrow catching one of the Shadows mid-leap, square in the chest. Another one was right behind it—in fact, there was pretty much an entire horde. One by one I shot them down, kicking several back into firing range in the process, but I had taken quite a few hits by the time they were all gone, and I could feel warm blood trickling down my arm. The wound didn’t hurt, but from all that I had read before I knew that I would certainly notice the wound later once the adrenaline had worn off.
I looked around to be sure the entire horde had been wiped out. One hand clutched the wound in my biceps, the other held the bow and quiver. I looked around at the damage I had caused, not quite sure what to make of it. Sora's adventures never effected the surroundings like this, but then again, Sora never had a weapon that exploded on impact, either. I lifted the silver bow in my hand and studied it for a second, wondering what gave it it's explosive power. The metal was engraved with runes that looked like a cross between Celtic and hiragana, and somehow gave me the impression that the bow wasn't quite finished yet. Like it would grow with me as my journey progressed.
Pfft, journey? At the time, I thought it was just a very, very vivid dream or something, even with the blood pooling at my feet. I figured I should probably do something about that, but if this was following the game so closely so far, there was probably one of those "this is an item" events coming here that would give me a Potion or something.
Yeah, I wish. Not even the freaking treasure chest like Sora got. I started looking for a way out of this place so I could get back home, go back to a normal life for three days, and
then deal with the chaos. Those three days like Sora had would give me enough time to get prepared for the epic journey. Like put together a lunch or something. Six like Roxas had would have been even better, come to think of it. But no, no I didn't get that three day respite. I had to deal with the crap right off the bat!
I finished studying the bow and looked around for something else that was familiar, and saw the ornate white door across the glass platform like Sora had. There wasn't a wall attached to it, and I only then noticed how weird a door looks without its wall, but since it was obviously the next objective, I walked over to it. Not with the same dopey "what's a door doing here?" look like Sora did, but briskly and with a purpose.
I was going to open that door.
.:Hold on,:. the echoing Voice said as my hand touched the handle.
.:The door won't open just yet. First, tell me more about yourself.:."I don't do interviews on Tuesdays," I said, looking around for the voice, but of course it wasn't anywhere to be seen. Instead, oddly enough, I found myself in a little glade from home that my friend Shidai and I had found. It was pretty much the only secluded and peaceful natural area in my city that I could actually get to, and hardly anyone ever went down there, so I would sometimes drag someone down there with me for a retreat from the world. Sitting on the fallen logs, and one out in the middle of the pond forming at the bottom of the glade, were three of my friends from Omaha. Well, two of them were from Omaha, the other was from somewhere in Illinois. I knew her from the internet, and she was standing out on one of the rocks in the pond in a Yoga position. I had a picture of that same pose I had snapped with my dad's camera while she was visiting floating around my computer somewhere.
My other two friends were on the fallen tree stretching out over the pond. One was sitting on the trunk that had settled into the ground near where I was, and the other was perched out on the left-hand fork of the tree over the pond, her bare feet swinging back and forth and looking like she wanted to jump in. Considering which of my friends it was, she probably did.
I walked over to the friend of mine who was closest, Patricia, who was something of a father-figure to me back home. Yeah, my group of friends and I were very gender-confused, but it was fun. I sat on the log next to her, and noticed her brown eyes following me in a way that was so much like her, and yet so not like her at all.
"What are you afraid of?" she asked. I would have been taken aback if I didn't remember this part of
Kingdom Hearts. Still, it was kind of weird hearing that question in her voice even though I'd actually heard it a few times before. I gave the question some serious thought, wanting to answer as accurately as possible.
"Being alone," I admitted, my shoulders hunching against the chill that ran down my spine. There was someone I had left behind that I desperately wanted to get back, and no amount of cellphone calls and sneaking off to the library for internet connection was going to bring us together again.
"Being alone?" Tricia repeated. There wasn't any scorn or disbelief in her voice, only curiosity. "Is that really so scary?"
Somehow it seemed fitting that those words were coming out of Patricia's mouth... I nodded once and stood up, moving on to my next friend, Rebecca, who was the one dangling over the pond. Instead of heading out onto the branch with her, I walked down to the side of it, crossing my arms on the weather-smoothed wood.
"What do you want out of life?" my
imoutochan asked. Rebecca referred to me as her older brother (
aniki) and I called her my little sister (
imoutochan), so naturally we've had some discussions about this before. The more I heard something familiar coming out of my friends' mouths, the more relaxed I felt. This was something familiar, something I could deal with. And for right now, the Heartless weren't threatening me. I had the odd feeling that time didn't affect me here.
As with Patricia, I gave Rebecca's question some serious thought as well. Her tone of voice asked for a different answer than the one I usually gave, so I actually had to think about it for a bit.
"I guess I want... to be happy."
"To be happy, huh? Hmm..."
I found it interesting that Rebecca seemed to be giving my answer some thought as well. I pushed away from the tree and headed out to Michelle, the last of my three friends shown. I had to take off my shoes and socks and roll up my pants so I could wade out to her, and the water was cold enough to make me gasp. However, the rough and sharp stones I was used to in that part of the pond had been smoothed and worn so that it was actually comfortable and easy to cross the shallow water to the exposed rocks.
"What's most important to you?" Michelle asked, barely even waiting for me to get across. My right hand immediately went to my left and felt the heart-shaped ring that was a permanent fixture there. A small smile crossed my face as I brought both hands to my heart. It was the closest I could come to hugging him right now, and the feeling of the ring was warm and comforting.
I stared around at my surroundings, needing a moment to figure out how to word my answer, and noticed something about the glade was actually a bit different than my memory of it. The landscape and setting reflected a small valley with the glade and pond taking up the entire space of it, just like the glade at home, but up the valley walls (small hills, really) weren't the brick and pavement of Elmwood Park, but instead the worn, faded sandstone ruins and virgin forest of my mindscape, the retreat I had in my head for when I just couldn't deal with the world anymore. Which brought me to the conclusion that this was just a dream.
If so, it's the only lucid dream I've ever had in my life. Except maybe the one where I was building tents with my cousin Kaleigh, but I'm pretty sure that one doesn't count.
But if this was my mindscape, then why weren't Tika, Mizu, and the others here...?
I remembered that their voices had faded after my loneliness had ebbed. It was kind of depressing, because their presence would have been comforting then, especially Mizu's, as she was part and parcel of the
Kingdom Hearts universe, as far as I was concerned, anyway. Tika would have been a wonderful comfort as well, especially with her sarcasm and tendency to joke about pretty much anything. But ever since my beloved had come into my life, the need for my schizophrenia to keep the loneliness at bay had become less and less with each passing second, and their voices had faded within a few short months. That was almost a year ago, now...
Anyway, the subtle differences were enough to convince me this was something fabricated in my head and not something actually happening, but I went along with it anyway. After all, if it happened to Sora, and was happening to me too, that meant my prayers had been answered.
Heh, be careful what you wish for...
"What is most important to me..." I mused aloud, staring into the deep blue water of the pond. Difference right there, at home it was a muddy, ugly green-brown since it was a stagnant creek bed right there. Peaceful, but I think I prefer the bright blue of clear water...
"I... don't know," I admitted to Michelle, the Voice, and to me. "I don't know what's most important to me. There's just so much... I think... I think what's most important to me is knowing the other half of my heart is safe, happy."
I breathed a heavy sigh, a sweet smile crossing my lips, and I raised my eyes to meet Michelle's.
"Corny as it is, I think true love is most important to me."
The landscape gently faded and returned me to the platform I was on. I shivered, unnerved by the transition from warm, sun-lit forest to cold, dark, stained-glass tower thingies.
.:You're afraid of being alone. You want to be happy. True love is most important to you,:. the Voice said, completely monotone yet somehow sounding compassionate at the same time.
.:Your adventure begins soon. As long as the light is shining, your journey should be a pleasant one.:."Well, I can try," I said, halfway back to the defensive sarcasm again. Yay for mood swings.
.:The day you will open the door is both far off and very near.:.I snorted. Yeah, I remembered that part of the games, and I also remembered what was coming next. I gripped my silver bow in my hands and headed up the spiral stairs that had magically appeared out of thin air at the edge of the platform. Once up there, I took a look around, but there was pretty much nothing else. I remembered that Sora was supposed to have run into several groups of Heartless, followed by Darkside at the end of this spiral tower of stained glass that I was on.
As I scanned the platform, trying to see if there was any hint of Heartless popping up any time soon, I noticed there was already a spiral glass staircase on the other side of it, and just caught the tail end of a group of people going up it in quite a hurry. As they disappeared into the inky blackness above, I called out and ran after them, but right about when I hit halfway, the stained glass platform shattered beneath my feet. As I fell through the darkness and shattered pieces of light and color, I remember thinking "What? This wasn't part of
Kingdom Hearts!"
Go ahead, laugh. Looking back on it, I have to laugh every time, too, so I won't feel bad if you giggle or anything. It was pretty stupid.
I snapped back to reality just in time to raise my plastic katana to intercept a Shadow leaping at my face. Instinctively, I drew back the bowstring, and--
Wait a minute, bowstring? Katanas don't have bowstrings! That's what you're thinking, right? That was pretty much my thought process until I reflexively loosed the arrow and realized that I didn't have my katana, I had that silver bow I got in the Deep Dive. The Shadow diving at me had the most hilariously startled look on it's face as my arrow pierced it right between the eyes, and then it dissipated into roiling black smoke that quickly faded, a small, pearlescent pink heart floating away from where it had been released. I whirled and shot another arrow into a Heartless as it scrabbled for purchase on my mother's parquet flooring, and winced at the scorch mark caused by the magical explosion of silver sparks resulting from the impact of my arrow.
"Oh, Mom's gonna kill me..." I grumbled as I stared at the scorch mark. I had a moment of respite, as apparently those two were the only Heartless in the house so far, and I flumped down onto my bed, staring at the silver bow in my hand.
"Well," I said to it, "this may not be the Forgotten Realms, but I name you Taulmaril."
The bow had reminded me of a weapon crafted highly similar to mine from a series of books written by R.A. Salvatore. They were based in the Forgotten Realms of Dungeons and Dragons, and the particular weapon my bow reminded me of was a bow as well (go figure), crafted for an Elven queen from Dwarven steel, and wielded by a human girl named Catti Brie, who was raised by dwarves after a goblin raid had killed her parents. Like my bow, the bow in the books had a quiver full of magical silver arrows that exploded into silver sparks on impact, and returned to the quiver a few seconds later or so because of the magic cast on the bow and arrows in their forging. I couldn't tell if my arrows returned to the quiver in the same method, I just knew that I never seemed to run out no matter how many I fired, and my bow was pure silver, or mythril, or something like it.
Well, anyway, literature lesson aside, Taulmaril seemed to suit my bow, since that was the name of Catti Brie's bow.
I allowed myself a brief respite to catch my breath. I was horribly out of shape, always had been, but I'd been getting better since it was like a mile walk from home to my bus stop, and I took that trip twice every day. Not to mention the 60 sit-ups I did ever morning and night... Still, wasn't used to all this fighting-for-my-life stuff. Fighting-for-my-heart stuff. Whatever.
After my breath had calmed and Molly and Rosie stopped their restless pacing and whining, I noticed that the house was a lot more quiet than usual. I also remembered that my brother hadn't answered me or anything when I was screaming for a baseball bat. My heart immediately leapt into my throat and I broke into a cold sweat as my head put two and two together.
My brother, the obnoxious snot who always seemed to get his way if he just whined loud enough, the complete brat who always seemed to enjoy tormenting me about something, yet we seemed to get along very well, wasn't in his room. He wasn't in the house. I looked up from my seat on the edge of my bed, and stared through my open door to across the hall. The bedroom door to my brother's room was shut, which meant he was in there, but there hadn't been any answer, I couldn't hear any T.V. or anything going, and I didn't hear him making any of the sound effects that meant he was messing with his action figures like the eight-year-old he used to be. That could mean only one thing...
He was already gone.
"Dammit," I muttered, doubting the little snot could have been taken. I stormed across the hallway and kicked his door open.
Nothing. Not even a sign of struggle. Or at least, not that I could tell in the über mess my brother's room always was. I stared around at the typical carnage of his room, and eventually gave up. For all I knew, it was like that this morning before this whole Heartless attack thing started. The kid was a slob.
I slammed his door shut once again and headed back into the living room. My intent was to go for the front door, but of course as soon as I went past my own door without stopping, the dogs decided that was a good time to act like chickens again and crowd around my feet. Hard to believe you can trip over something the size of a Shetland pony, but Rosie had a knack for being smaller than she really was. Make sense of that.
I somehow managed to make it out the door, and once there, I was just about knocked over by the hurricane-force winds. The storm I had seen brewing had broken, heralding the arrival of the Heartless. I became grateful for Molly and Rosie's presence, since they had gone from cowering behind my legs to a defensive presence, growling ferociously at the incoming Heartless. I knew that I wasn't a melee fighter, never had been, and Taulmaril only proved that in my eyes, so I knew having my dogs and their formidable teeth between me and the Heartless would be a great asset.
I finished off this Heartless swarm and looked around, wondering what I needed to do or where I needed to go. I knew the
Kingdom Hearts video games always gave some sort of hint as to the next step. That was when a flash of orange light off in the distance caught my attention, and I glanced up to see a signal flare miles off towards the coast. Sadly, the only reason I knew it was a signal flare was because I had watched a lot of movies that for some odd reason involved a signal flare going up.
It only took me about a half-second to make up my mind what I was going to do. I was heading towards that flare. As I started out, I forced myself to take a deep breath and try to keep my breathing regular. Normally I'd just walk to the bus stop and catch the bus, but since that flare went up in the opposite direction and it only looked like it was a couple miles away, I steeled myself for a nice long jog. The longest jog of my life.
I'm not very athletic, by the way. In fact, calling me a lazy bookworm is pretty accurate, or at least it was back then since I tended to spend over 90% of my time curled up on the couch reading a book. We didn't have internet yet so I was really missing my cyber-socializing, since it was so rare I could get to the library. Most of my paychecks were going towards the minutes cards on my cellphone.
But yeah, anyway, about that flare. I barely even made it a block when I noticed something dark and foreboding looming up in the distance. And stupid me was headed right towards it. I glanced up long enough to take the ominous
thing in, and skidded to a halt.
"Ohmygod," I sighed, then got a little more vocal. "Not Darkside, too!" My eyes were wide enough that if I hadn't been looking so damned far
up my eyeballs would have rolled completely out of my head. As soon as I said that, though, my body noticed it wasn't running any more and all of a sudden decided that it wanted to be out of breath. Which of course hurt my chest since I'd been living with a pair of chain-smokers for my entire life. I probably have lung cancer for all I know, that's how bad they were.
I stood there clutching my chest as my breath wheezed in and out of my tortured lungs, coughing every now and then when the pain became unbearable. Sooner than I thought, probably because of the exercise I'd been getting for the past three months, my breathing returned to relatively normal and my lungs stopped hurting. I was still breathing heavily, but I could handle it. Barely.
I glared up at Darkside, who was unfortunately too far away for me to do much about it. I looked around, hoping to spot an alleyway or side-street or something that would get me to it faster. I didn't know my way around Seaport City like I knew my way around Omaha, but I thought I saw a street sequence that would be at least a little bit faster than the route I was originally going to take. I had a bad habit of choosing the main-streets over the shortcuts, especially when I don't know my way for sure. This was mostly due to the fact that I knew damn good and well what happened to hapless persons of the female persuasion when they went down those dank and dark alleyways without back-up. Well, I had back-up, and a super magical bow and arrow, and with the Heartless running around I figured the drunks, rapists, and other gutter trash had already been taken by now.
Part of me kind of doubted anyone would miss them. Well, except for the druggies, but they were probably Heartless food by now too. I kind of wondered if the Heartless weren't making the world a better place in their own morbidly subtle way.
Pssh, yeah right.
Since I had already decided on what route I was going to take, I moved my legs first into a fast walk, then back into my trot. I kept it at a slower pace since my brief respite wasn't enough to let Rosie catch her breath again. The poor old girl was probably in worse shape than me, mostly due to her age, and I was pushing her a little too hard right now. But I had to get to that Darkside, to stop it if I could.
Kind of a futile effort, and I even knew that then, but I'll be damned if I'm going down without a fight!
Well, even if Rosie had been still in her exuberant puppy stages and capable of out-running me, I still wouldn't have made it in time. The alley and street sequence I had mapped out from what I saw at my resting point ended in a dead end.
Heh heh heh, dead end. I'm so punny.
I glanced up to gauge my distance to Darkside, and believe it or not, I figured I was close enough to possibly do some damage. The thing was so friggin'
big I could have probably hit it half a mile ago. I pulled to a stop in the middle of an intersection and raised Taulmaril from her position on my shoulder. I don't really remember when I slung the quiver over my back, but I reached behind and felt for the fletching of one of the arrows. I had one between my index and middle fingers sooner than I thought, and I drew the long silver-tipped arrow from the quiver, and placed it against the bowstring. Taking up the stance I had learned during a field trip in eighth grade, I aimed Taulmaril high, high above Darkside's head, and drew the arrow back against the string so far the top of the fletching brushed my ear, and if I chose to I could lay my cheek against the shaft of the arrow. Taulmaril's draw was smooth, and somehow I knew my aim was true, so I loosed the arrow.
I didn't even see the arrow hit. Not only was I too far away, but there was this huge flash of of light emanating from the heart-shaped hole in it's chest. That flash of light actually blinded me, and as I threw up one arm to shield my eyes against the light, I felt my feet leave the ground as the entire world was sucked into this enormous black hole in the sky. As I spiraled into the black abyss, I heard my dogs whimpering and whining as they were pulled into the darkness with me.
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