"Good," Xu said when they accepted, and hmmed for a moment, studying them, then handed them each a sword for a test bout. Fighting with a sword was nothing like fighting with a keyblade; the balance and grip were different, the blade didn't absorb shock as well as the keyblade did, and he couldn't use this thing one-handed as easily as he could his keyblade. Xu seemed pleased, though, calling them off to try a slightly different sword on Sora. This one felt a little better in his hands as he and Riku circled, blades clashing, and the parries Leon had shown him - how long ago had that been? - worked better with a sword than they had with the keyblade.
"Very good," Xu said, and made a note after she took the swords back. "I'd like you to do three bouts a day - morning, afternoon, and evening, after the usual Twilight Town mealtimes when the crowds are biggest. The swords are kept dull, to minimize stupid people injuring themselves or others, but keep an eye on the audience anyway."
"Anything else?" Riku asked.
"I expect a good bout," she said. "Don't fake it, don't try to be dramatic, just a good solid fight. Festivities officially start tomorrow night after the sunset fireworks, so be here for a bout when the first crowd comes through. Get your pay after your last bout of the day."
"Yeah, we can do that," Sora said.
"Good. I'll see you tomorrow night," Xu said, and went back to setting up her booth.
Riku was still closed-up and shut-in, despite using Sora as a pillow all night. Maybe ... well, it was too late now to decide this hadn't been a good idea. He'd have to find some way of making it better. They picked up some food and drinks for what was going to be a long day and went to meet the others.
Kairi'd had the same idea, so at least they'd have plenty to eat, assuming his stomach quit twisting itself into knots. She introduced everyone, Riku and Hayner eyeing each other suspiciously, and they walked through town and the broken spot in the wall to the old mansion. It wasn't in any better shape than before, or any worse shape, and the passage in the library had been closed.
"Seifer's snooped around here," Hayner said, opening it with the book on the table. "We figured out how to close it from below, too - there's a switch in the wall under the stairs."
There was almost no furniture down here, just the seat at the computer that no one wanted; after Olette closed the passage, they arranged themselves in a loose circle on the floor with the food in the middle. "So, why don't you guys start?" Hayner said.
It was easy to start and a lot harder to go on, almost reliving the sheer terror of the early days, even without going into all the detail he could have; he'd had no idea what was going on or what he was doing for, well, a lot longer than he liked, and he'd been afraid the keyblade had picked entirely the wrong person. Kairi couldn't help much, and Riku wasn't talking yet, and he made himself hoarse talking all the way up to Captain Hook.
"What were you doing?" Olette asked Riku, while Sora drank thirstily.
Riku's mouth twisted painfully. "Being a fool," he said, and paused, gathering himself. "I landed in Hollow Bastion. With Maleficent. She played me - never mind. I kept trying to prove I wasn't afraid of the darkness, that I was better than Sora, and I kept falling further into it."
His voice was flat and expressionless as he went on, about finding Kairi, Pinocchio and that whale (even thinking about the whale made Sora's eyes and heart hurt remembering), and there was a lot he was leaving out, but that wasn't really a problem because it wasn't the details they really needed to know. The problem was that Riku was stiff and tense except for his hands, slowly tearing a sandwich wrapper into tiny pieces, and Sora decided Riku's aversion to public affection could go to hell; he shifted over enough that he could reach easily and slid his arm around Riku's waist. Riku almost pulled away, then blinked, looking down at his hands, and swept the pieces of wrapper into a pile; Sora felt him lean, just a little, into him as he brought his part of the story up to Sora's, and somewhere before they got to closing the door, he relaxed enough to drape his arm over Sora's shoulders.
"...man. That's really tough to believe," Hayner said, eyeing them both with respect. "It's not like I think you're lying or anything - "
"But that's pretty incredible," Olette agreed, sweeping Riku's shredded wrapper into a bag. "If it wasn't for that stuff in the computer, it'd be even harder to believe."
Pence nodded, thinking hard. "The keyblade. Hey, weren't there keyblade stories in those folklore books Instructor Trepe assigned last semester?"
"Yeah, there were - she's the one that assigns us all the weird stuff like that," Hayner said.
"Instructor Trepe?"
"One of the teachers at our school," Olette said, tossing the bag at Hayner. He grumbled and shoved it into the larger bag they were using for trash. "She's - really intense."
"She's been teaching here for seven or eight years. Seifer can't stand her."
"You can't get away with anything in her classes," Hayner said. "She's the toughest teacher we have."
"Anyway, she assigned us some keyblade stories. I can't remember them really well, though," Olette said. "But where do we and Roxas come into this?"
Roxas debated briefly, then stepped out and sat down between Hayner and Riku; Hayner, Pence and Olette stared at him in confusion and something that wasn't really recognition in their eyes. Naminé stepped out and sat down between Sora and Kairi, getting equally confused looks and no recognition at all.
"Riku," Naminé said, "we'll have to take the story for a while, since Sora and Kairi can't."
Riku nodded. "You were there at the beginning, and I wasn't."
"My name is Naminé," she said quietly, and rather sadly. "I ... I was never in anyone's heart, but I wanted to be. Even if they hadn't scared me into doing what they wanted, I wanted a chance to be real."
Sora didn't remember. Naminé had told him all the story she knew, about how he'd been tricked into Castle Oblivion and she'd stolen and rearranged his memories piece-by-piece, putting herself in Kairi's place, until the Organization had been picked off one by one and she'd been freed, and he still couldn't remember; it was just words, even though it had all happened to him and he couldn't remember anything. Not voices, not faces, not the Castle itself. Sometimes, even with Naminé's reassurances, he wondered what else he might have forgotten, whether it was important, whether maybe things would have been different if he had been able to remember. Riku's story was equally familiar, Riku less tense and his voice less flat, and he hooked his fingers around Sora's belt by the time he'd explained, sort of, about DiZ and fighting Roxas.
"I thought it would help Sora. He wasn't recovering as fast as I wanted him to," Riku explained, unnecessarily.
"So DiZ turned me into data, messed with my memory and stuffed me in a fake Twilight Town," Roxas said, still bitter about it. "I ... it's weird. I don't really know how long I was there, or how I really met your alternates. But we were friends at least for a while."
Sora could see the confused recognition when Roxas talked about Twilight Town and what he'd done hanging around with their alternates, and how things had spiraled out of control when the Organization came hunting. Even though they couldn't remember - none of it had happened to them, after all - they could see that those others were doing just what they'd have done; Olette was thinking hard, Pence looked deeply disturbed, and Hayner looked pissed. After that it was Sora's turn, and now all three of them could talk, bringing them up to date on everything.
"Did DiZ ever really learn anything?" Olette asked. "I mean, he kept trying to reduce everything to data himself, no matter how many times it failed."
"Man, he pisses me off," Hayner said. "We're people, not puppets!"
Riku frowned, and said, slowly, "Maybe he did. Too late to matter to anyone but himself, but I think he did."
Roxas shook his head, not believing a word of it.
"Let's take a break," Pence suggested. "I think my butt fell asleep."
They got up and stretched, wandering around the room and down into the pod corridor for a few minutes; the pods were dusty, but still powered by whatever was keeping the computer running. Pence said he didn't think it was the Twilight Town power grid, because eventually someone would notice, and they'd never seen any cables to carry the power; maybe there were solar panels on the roof or something.
Olette ran her hands along the cool, smooth glass-like surface of one of the pods. "Did DiZ build all of these?"
"I think they were here when he came here," Riku replied.
The pods ran the length of the corridor, the panels at the bottom still glowing; some showed signs of previous use, like dirt and scratches, a few hairs or scraps of cloth, or a few stray white feathers for the one Donald had slept in. Sora was relieved when Hayner declared them really creepy, because they were making him twitchy. It wasn't just that he'd been in the big one in the room at the end - Naminé said she'd made that one, and it had just been right at that size, maybe because of how completely she'd rearranged his memories. Well, maybe it was, but he wondered who'd been in these things, and why, and how long the pods been here, waiting to seal up someone else. He shook himself; it wasn't like the things could swallow him up and steal another year out of his life.
"Hey, you ready to show us what you found, Pence?"
There was more data on the computer than Sora had imagined possible: extensive notes on Heartless and Nobodies, video recorded in the fake Twilight Town and the real one, notes on and pictures of Riku, Naminé, Sora and Roxas, a variety of still images and videos from several different places, lengthy notes about Castle Oblivion, Organization XIII's dark world and that castle, some notes about various members of the Organization (the vengeful bitterness about Ansem the Wise's former assistants and apprentices made Sora queasy), an entire directory of history files about Radiant Garden, Twilight Town, and Destiny Islands and some kind of notes DiZ had been taking for something, and another directory of everything he'd been able to find about Keyblades and their bearers.
"There's tons more like that; there's directories I can't even open," Pence said. "He sure knew about computers."
"I don't," Sora admitted, and then thought of Radiant Garden. "But I might know somebody who does."