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[OOM] Day Eighty
Eden’s woken up by a pain in his left eye.
It’s the first time it’s happened, as far as he knows, and it’s excruciating, like someone’s digging a sharp object into his retina. He covers his eye on instinct, as if that will help. It doesn’t.
But the pain seems to ease somewhat if he’s up and moving around, so he doesn’t try to go back to sleep. Instead, he runs through the motions of practicing keyblade forms.
---
It’s just before the sun switches on when the sky over Daybreak Town tears open.
The tear isn’t large: Maybe a dozen meters in one direction, three or four in the other, just large enough to be seen from the ground. It only remains open for a few moments, long enough for something brightly coloured and burning to come flying through, careening about in a wide downwards spiral, Heartless clinging to it as it falls.
It lands near the fountain square, almost dead in the middle of town.
Eden watches it through his window, brow creasing a little. Then he yawns, grabs his coat, and heads for the door.
“I must recommend staying away from that crash site,” Chirithy remarks, as Eden passes. “There’s no telling who or what it might be. Better to let the Foretellers deal with it.”
“Noted,” Eden replies, blandly, and then immediately forgets he said anything at all.
---
At the fountain square, he finds several things of note.
The first is a Heartless, like a stretched out Shadow in a lion mask and brightly coloured cloak, with a bright blue, almost marshmallow looking cube clutched under one arm.
The second is Mog, a wooden keyblade in hand, attempting unsuccessfully to menace the Heartless.
The third and fourth are a duck and -- some other kind of animal, cowering behind Mog as the Heartless advances on them.
Eden pauses for a moment, squinting at the duck, then tugs the Wisdom Card from his belt, peering at it, then at the duck, then at the card again. The one on the card is a stylised, artistic representation, but they’re undoubtedly the same person. They’re even wearing the same hat.
The sound of a wooden keyblade snapping jolts Eden back to the situation at hand. With an irritable noise in the back of his throat, he summons his keyblade and leaps between Mog and the Heartless, bisecting it with a single swing.
As it dissolves into darkness, he can practically hear Mog’s sigh of relief. Before the Moogle gets the chance to say anything, though, Chirithy is there, materialising atop Eden’s head.
“Mog,” Chirithy says, tone sharp. “Explain. Who are these people?”
“Well, I -- …”
“You’ve got no manners, Chirithy,” Eden chirps, settling easily into his usual gormlessness, throwing a lazy grin over at Mog. “Hey. Hey, Mog. Hey. Hey. Hey. Who’re your new friends?”
“I wouldn’t call them friends, we only just …”
“The name’s Goofy!” The non-duck says, happily, meandering out from behind Mog. “Cap’n of the Royal Knights of Disney Town!”
The duck follows this up by opening its beak and emitting a series of noises that Eden thinks are words, but he can’t decipher even a single one of them.
“That was completely unintelligible,” Eden chirps.
“It’s mostly context clues,” Goofy admits.
“I caught perhaps every third word,” Chirithy adds.
The duck makes more noises. Eden folds his arms, leans in, and really listens this time.
“... No, I’ve got nothin’,” he decides, eventually.
“We were travelin’ to a place called Traverse Town,” Goofy says. “We’re meant to meet someone there, y’see, but before we could get there, we got sucked into some kinda -- gawrsh, I don’t know what you’d call it.”
The duck lets out a short, squawking noise.
“Right! That,” Goofy said. “And there were Heartless everywhere, and then we crashed, and they took all of the blocks from our ship.”
“Huh. Sounds like a cool day,” Eden grins. “Well, anyway, that sounds like a personal problem, I’m going back to bed.”
The duck lets loose with a string of angry noises, waving his -- wings? Arms? Eden’s honestly not sure, but the flailing is very outraged.
“Donald’s right!” Goofy says. “Y’gotta help us get those blocks back!”
“... Do I, though?” Eden asks, cocking his head. “S’doesn’t really seem that appealing.”
“Please do, I can’t open my shop while it’s surrounded by burning wreckage,” Mog mutters.
“These two do not belong in town,” Chirithy says. “Since we’re here, we may as well render them assistance.”
“You say ‘we,’ but you mean ‘me,’” Eden remarks.
“I do,” Chirithy replies. “But I’ll register it in your Text as a mission. That way you can earn munny from completing it.”
“Should’ve led with that.”
---
Eden spends the next few hours jumping from world to world, tracking down and killing any Heartless with the strange, marshmallow like blocks.
Goofy and Donald help, some. It’s not the same as having other keybearers around, but Goofy is handy with a shield, which he uses alternately to bash Heartless in the face and as a kind of makeshift throwing weapon, and Donald is a magician with admittedly less magical power than a keybearer, but with a lot more versatility.
They stop by Wonderland first, taking several red blocks from Heartless scattered across the world before interrupting one Heartless midway through building itself some kind of red marshmallow block motorcycle, killing it, and taking its blocks.
They visit Agrabah next, tracking several Heartless out into the desert to take the blue blocks they’re carrying. They even find a Heartless in some kind of blue-block sand submarine, but the contraption falls apart before Eden even manages to hit it.
When they’re done, Eden almost has to coerce Goofy into leaving with him (“But they’re holding a parade for this Prince Ali guy! He’s got seventy-five golden camels!” “I don’t know what a camel is. Get in the portal.”), but before long they’re off somewhere else.
They visit the Dwarf Woodlands next where there is, at least, no parade to distract anyone.
(Donald says something sullenly as they walk, but all Eden hears is something about purple peacocks.)
The Heartless, each one clutching a yellow block, are more scattered here. Eden’s just finished grabbing the sixth yellow block when an entire bright yellow car nearly slams into him, missing him by a hair’s breadth, before its Heartless driver wheels it back around for another charge.
Goofy stops it with his shield, and Donald takes out the wheels, allowing Eden to stab the Heartless with extreme prejudice and take the blocks.
---
Back in town, the three of them get to work putting the blocks together. Eden’s eye is still aching, but the pain isn’t so distracting anymore.
More interesting is that he realises as he works on the gummi ship that he has no idea how any of this technology works. He can’t look at the blocks and instantly discern how they function together the way he can with the machines in town. At best, he can apply what he knows about other machines to the task of rebuilding this one.
When they’re done, they step back to take a look at their work: A red, yellow, and blue vehicle with four wheels and a window at the front.
“Um. Gawrsh,” Goofy says. “I think we made a mistake somewhere. I don’t even think this is a spaceship.”
“I blame Donald,” Eden says, folding his arms.
Donald lets out a series of angry squawks at him, and starts pulling the vehicle apart, throwing blocks into a pile nearby.
“Donald has a point,” Goofy remarks to Eden. After a moment, he seems to remember to clarify: “We don’t have all the blocks from the ship. I guess we still need to find some more.”
---
They circle back through Wonderland again, then to Agrabah, then to the Dwarf Woodlands, mugging blocks from Heartless as they go. Along the way, they even manage to save a sleeping dwarf from rising water levels in the mine -- courtesy, it turned out, of a Heartless who’d built some kind of gummi-block based water-spewing hovercraft.
Chirithy summons them back to Daybreak Town shortly after that, opening a portal that takes them directly to the beachside park. Eden’s not really sure why, at first, but then he sees it.
Well. He hears it first. The sound of propellers.
On the horizon, fast approaching, is some kind of flying, missile-laden, propeller’d device of black, marshmallow-y blocks, with a tiny Heartless in the cockpit.
“... This is the best day of my life,” Eden grins.
Which is about when the flying machine starts firing.
---
Rolling out of the way of a missile, Eden pulls his Magnera and Balloon cards from his belt, sweeping them across his keyblade and releasing a stream of brightly coloured balloons homing in, rapidly and indefatigably, on the flitting shape of the gummi flying machine and its Heartless pilot, before exploding into fireballs of a dozen different colours.
The machine emerges burning from the explosions, its main gun giving off a momentary, high-pitched whine before letting loose with a beam of reddish-violet light, crackling through the air towards them.
Goofy moves forward before it can hit, holding up his shield, digging in his heels as the beam pushes him back.
Eden quickly sweeps the Wisdom card over his keyblade, reconfiguring it into a bow, and nocks an arrow of light, aiming it through the glare of red light, at the machine’s cockpit. Beside him, Donald raises his staff, summoning a swirling ball of fire.
They fire at the same time, and the arrow smashes through the cockpit and out the other side of the machine, just before the fireball sends it careening into the water.
Goofy cheers loudly, grabbing Donald and dancing around with him, while the duck squawks and yells in protest, nearly screaming what Eden presumes are meant to be insults.
“We may have to do some swimming to retrieve the blocks,” Chirithy remarks, materialising atop Eden’s head.
“Again, y’keep saying ‘we’ when I’m the one doing everything.”
“True enough.”
Eden shakes his head, heading towards the water’s edge. “All right, let’s -- …”
The surface of the water explodes into a spray of steam and smoke, as the flying gummi machine screams out of it, still burning, roaring into the air. A low hum tears through the park as it charges its beam.
Eden eases one foot back to tap against the ground, planning to close the distance with a burst of speed and finish the machine off.
He’s stopped by the pain in his eye flaring suddenly brighter, like a lightning bolt crackling through his skull, and he slams his hand over his eye out of instinct, clutching it, shoulders stiffening. Pain isn’t something that usually bothers him, a transient physical response that he can easily ignore, but this pain threatens to force him onto his knees, leaves him paralysed in place.
With a crack, a hole tears in the sky above Daybreak Town. It’s smaller than the last, barely large enough for a person.
A shooting star comes flying through it, rocketing down towards the beachside park, and as it falls it resolves into a shape: Small, with big ears and big feet. As it falls, it summons a keyblade to hand, slicing through the flying machine before landing at the edge of the beachside park.
The flying machine explodes in a shower of blocks. Eden half expects the pain in his eye to pass, but instead it’s only growing more unbearable as he looks at the big-eared animal thing.
Goofy and Donald immediately drop to one knee, pressing their hands to their chests.
“Your Majesty,” Donald says. It’s the first actually comprehensible words Eden’s heard him say.
“Your Majesty?” Eden asks. He’s in too much pain to bother with the act of cheerfulness, and his words come out both rumblingly sonorous in their tone and dull in their lack of emotion. He can just about see Goofy doing a double take.
“Gawrsh, are you okay?” Goofy asks, and moves to support Eden. The big-eared thing turns to give him a concerned, sidelong glance, and Eden’s fairly sure the pain in his eye triples the moment they lock gazes.
Goofy seems to notice that’s something wrong, because he’s quick to wave his hands placatingly, smiling broadly. “It’s okay! He’s a friend! This is the king of Disney Town,” Goofy chirps. “This is His Royal Majesty, King Mickey Mouse.”
It’s the first time it’s happened, as far as he knows, and it’s excruciating, like someone’s digging a sharp object into his retina. He covers his eye on instinct, as if that will help. It doesn’t.
But the pain seems to ease somewhat if he’s up and moving around, so he doesn’t try to go back to sleep. Instead, he runs through the motions of practicing keyblade forms.
It’s just before the sun switches on when the sky over Daybreak Town tears open.
The tear isn’t large: Maybe a dozen meters in one direction, three or four in the other, just large enough to be seen from the ground. It only remains open for a few moments, long enough for something brightly coloured and burning to come flying through, careening about in a wide downwards spiral, Heartless clinging to it as it falls.
It lands near the fountain square, almost dead in the middle of town.
Eden watches it through his window, brow creasing a little. Then he yawns, grabs his coat, and heads for the door.
“I must recommend staying away from that crash site,” Chirithy remarks, as Eden passes. “There’s no telling who or what it might be. Better to let the Foretellers deal with it.”
“Noted,” Eden replies, blandly, and then immediately forgets he said anything at all.
At the fountain square, he finds several things of note.
The first is a Heartless, like a stretched out Shadow in a lion mask and brightly coloured cloak, with a bright blue, almost marshmallow looking cube clutched under one arm.
The second is Mog, a wooden keyblade in hand, attempting unsuccessfully to menace the Heartless.
The third and fourth are a duck and -- some other kind of animal, cowering behind Mog as the Heartless advances on them.
Eden pauses for a moment, squinting at the duck, then tugs the Wisdom Card from his belt, peering at it, then at the duck, then at the card again. The one on the card is a stylised, artistic representation, but they’re undoubtedly the same person. They’re even wearing the same hat.
The sound of a wooden keyblade snapping jolts Eden back to the situation at hand. With an irritable noise in the back of his throat, he summons his keyblade and leaps between Mog and the Heartless, bisecting it with a single swing.
As it dissolves into darkness, he can practically hear Mog’s sigh of relief. Before the Moogle gets the chance to say anything, though, Chirithy is there, materialising atop Eden’s head.
“Mog,” Chirithy says, tone sharp. “Explain. Who are these people?”
“Well, I -- …”
“You’ve got no manners, Chirithy,” Eden chirps, settling easily into his usual gormlessness, throwing a lazy grin over at Mog. “Hey. Hey, Mog. Hey. Hey. Hey. Who’re your new friends?”
“I wouldn’t call them friends, we only just …”
“The name’s Goofy!” The non-duck says, happily, meandering out from behind Mog. “Cap’n of the Royal Knights of Disney Town!”
The duck follows this up by opening its beak and emitting a series of noises that Eden thinks are words, but he can’t decipher even a single one of them.
“That was completely unintelligible,” Eden chirps.
“It’s mostly context clues,” Goofy admits.
“I caught perhaps every third word,” Chirithy adds.
The duck makes more noises. Eden folds his arms, leans in, and really listens this time.
“... No, I’ve got nothin’,” he decides, eventually.
“We were travelin’ to a place called Traverse Town,” Goofy says. “We’re meant to meet someone there, y’see, but before we could get there, we got sucked into some kinda -- gawrsh, I don’t know what you’d call it.”
The duck lets out a short, squawking noise.
“Right! That,” Goofy said. “And there were Heartless everywhere, and then we crashed, and they took all of the blocks from our ship.”
“Huh. Sounds like a cool day,” Eden grins. “Well, anyway, that sounds like a personal problem, I’m going back to bed.”
The duck lets loose with a string of angry noises, waving his -- wings? Arms? Eden’s honestly not sure, but the flailing is very outraged.
“Donald’s right!” Goofy says. “Y’gotta help us get those blocks back!”
“... Do I, though?” Eden asks, cocking his head. “S’doesn’t really seem that appealing.”
“Please do, I can’t open my shop while it’s surrounded by burning wreckage,” Mog mutters.
“These two do not belong in town,” Chirithy says. “Since we’re here, we may as well render them assistance.”
“You say ‘we,’ but you mean ‘me,’” Eden remarks.
“I do,” Chirithy replies. “But I’ll register it in your Text as a mission. That way you can earn munny from completing it.”
“Should’ve led with that.”
Eden spends the next few hours jumping from world to world, tracking down and killing any Heartless with the strange, marshmallow like blocks.
Goofy and Donald help, some. It’s not the same as having other keybearers around, but Goofy is handy with a shield, which he uses alternately to bash Heartless in the face and as a kind of makeshift throwing weapon, and Donald is a magician with admittedly less magical power than a keybearer, but with a lot more versatility.
They stop by Wonderland first, taking several red blocks from Heartless scattered across the world before interrupting one Heartless midway through building itself some kind of red marshmallow block motorcycle, killing it, and taking its blocks.
They visit Agrabah next, tracking several Heartless out into the desert to take the blue blocks they’re carrying. They even find a Heartless in some kind of blue-block sand submarine, but the contraption falls apart before Eden even manages to hit it.
When they’re done, Eden almost has to coerce Goofy into leaving with him (“But they’re holding a parade for this Prince Ali guy! He’s got seventy-five golden camels!” “I don’t know what a camel is. Get in the portal.”), but before long they’re off somewhere else.
They visit the Dwarf Woodlands next where there is, at least, no parade to distract anyone.
(Donald says something sullenly as they walk, but all Eden hears is something about purple peacocks.)
The Heartless, each one clutching a yellow block, are more scattered here. Eden’s just finished grabbing the sixth yellow block when an entire bright yellow car nearly slams into him, missing him by a hair’s breadth, before its Heartless driver wheels it back around for another charge.
Goofy stops it with his shield, and Donald takes out the wheels, allowing Eden to stab the Heartless with extreme prejudice and take the blocks.
Back in town, the three of them get to work putting the blocks together. Eden’s eye is still aching, but the pain isn’t so distracting anymore.
More interesting is that he realises as he works on the gummi ship that he has no idea how any of this technology works. He can’t look at the blocks and instantly discern how they function together the way he can with the machines in town. At best, he can apply what he knows about other machines to the task of rebuilding this one.
When they’re done, they step back to take a look at their work: A red, yellow, and blue vehicle with four wheels and a window at the front.
“Um. Gawrsh,” Goofy says. “I think we made a mistake somewhere. I don’t even think this is a spaceship.”
“I blame Donald,” Eden says, folding his arms.
Donald lets out a series of angry squawks at him, and starts pulling the vehicle apart, throwing blocks into a pile nearby.
“Donald has a point,” Goofy remarks to Eden. After a moment, he seems to remember to clarify: “We don’t have all the blocks from the ship. I guess we still need to find some more.”
They circle back through Wonderland again, then to Agrabah, then to the Dwarf Woodlands, mugging blocks from Heartless as they go. Along the way, they even manage to save a sleeping dwarf from rising water levels in the mine -- courtesy, it turned out, of a Heartless who’d built some kind of gummi-block based water-spewing hovercraft.
Chirithy summons them back to Daybreak Town shortly after that, opening a portal that takes them directly to the beachside park. Eden’s not really sure why, at first, but then he sees it.
Well. He hears it first. The sound of propellers.
On the horizon, fast approaching, is some kind of flying, missile-laden, propeller’d device of black, marshmallow-y blocks, with a tiny Heartless in the cockpit.
“... This is the best day of my life,” Eden grins.
Which is about when the flying machine starts firing.
Rolling out of the way of a missile, Eden pulls his Magnera and Balloon cards from his belt, sweeping them across his keyblade and releasing a stream of brightly coloured balloons homing in, rapidly and indefatigably, on the flitting shape of the gummi flying machine and its Heartless pilot, before exploding into fireballs of a dozen different colours.
The machine emerges burning from the explosions, its main gun giving off a momentary, high-pitched whine before letting loose with a beam of reddish-violet light, crackling through the air towards them.
Goofy moves forward before it can hit, holding up his shield, digging in his heels as the beam pushes him back.
Eden quickly sweeps the Wisdom card over his keyblade, reconfiguring it into a bow, and nocks an arrow of light, aiming it through the glare of red light, at the machine’s cockpit. Beside him, Donald raises his staff, summoning a swirling ball of fire.
They fire at the same time, and the arrow smashes through the cockpit and out the other side of the machine, just before the fireball sends it careening into the water.
Goofy cheers loudly, grabbing Donald and dancing around with him, while the duck squawks and yells in protest, nearly screaming what Eden presumes are meant to be insults.
“We may have to do some swimming to retrieve the blocks,” Chirithy remarks, materialising atop Eden’s head.
“Again, y’keep saying ‘we’ when I’m the one doing everything.”
“True enough.”
Eden shakes his head, heading towards the water’s edge. “All right, let’s -- …”
The surface of the water explodes into a spray of steam and smoke, as the flying gummi machine screams out of it, still burning, roaring into the air. A low hum tears through the park as it charges its beam.
Eden eases one foot back to tap against the ground, planning to close the distance with a burst of speed and finish the machine off.
He’s stopped by the pain in his eye flaring suddenly brighter, like a lightning bolt crackling through his skull, and he slams his hand over his eye out of instinct, clutching it, shoulders stiffening. Pain isn’t something that usually bothers him, a transient physical response that he can easily ignore, but this pain threatens to force him onto his knees, leaves him paralysed in place.
With a crack, a hole tears in the sky above Daybreak Town. It’s smaller than the last, barely large enough for a person.
A shooting star comes flying through it, rocketing down towards the beachside park, and as it falls it resolves into a shape: Small, with big ears and big feet. As it falls, it summons a keyblade to hand, slicing through the flying machine before landing at the edge of the beachside park.
The flying machine explodes in a shower of blocks. Eden half expects the pain in his eye to pass, but instead it’s only growing more unbearable as he looks at the big-eared animal thing.
Goofy and Donald immediately drop to one knee, pressing their hands to their chests.
“Your Majesty,” Donald says. It’s the first actually comprehensible words Eden’s heard him say.
“Your Majesty?” Eden asks. He’s in too much pain to bother with the act of cheerfulness, and his words come out both rumblingly sonorous in their tone and dull in their lack of emotion. He can just about see Goofy doing a double take.
“Gawrsh, are you okay?” Goofy asks, and moves to support Eden. The big-eared thing turns to give him a concerned, sidelong glance, and Eden’s fairly sure the pain in his eye triples the moment they lock gazes.
Goofy seems to notice that’s something wrong, because he’s quick to wave his hands placatingly, smiling broadly. “It’s okay! He’s a friend! This is the king of Disney Town,” Goofy chirps. “This is His Royal Majesty, King Mickey Mouse.”