The original idea of this struck me absolutely ages ago, but I’ve only just written it. It’s based on something Ace said, very early on in the first series. Seems Semi-AU to me. It also deals with one of the less common fanon theories about the Sixth Dimension that it began as a real world and degenerated into a videogame as a result of mortal tampering.

It was originally a drabble, with just a minor theme but it became somehow became longer. I hope it’s decent for something inspired by boredom on a Sunday morning.

Disclaimer: I don’t own these guys; so blame any coming strangeness on my overactive imagination, not Rick Sigglekow. The Buzzbeast name is also unfortunately, not my own character. (If it was I would have included it in the series.)

Scarab D.

She had always been taught that victory was her birthright. Her duty. The principle to be maintained at all costs, in the name of her father, and her father’s father and his father before that, etcetera, etcetera… Failure is never an option. Sixteen years old, and she already knows that much.

Rather took some of the fun out of it, that.

His grey-blue eyes are gleaming as he attacks her –tries to attack her– with the thin shards of lightning that leap from his wrists. She’s faster. Always faster. It’s rather difficult to keep a hold of her when she can teleport right out of his grasp as soon as he catches up with her.

How old is he? She wonders, not for the first time. Fifteen perhaps? Younger than her, certainly, perhaps by a year or more. You can see it in the clumsiness of his attacks, and in the way he takes it far too personally when she strikes him in the back. His frame is sturdily built, his eyes gleaming and his hair pale blond and cut very short. They fight amongst the ragged hills overlooking the circus where they found each other less than two hours ago, in a place where neither of them is supposed to be.

He strikes again; she doesn’t bother to teleport out of the way this time, she jumps instead, leaping sharply straight out of his line of fire. Each shot he fires she dodges, and returns with one of her own. She clenches her hand into a fist then opens it and sends a cloud of smoke or a spattering of crystals right into his face and leaping back, laughing before he can retaliate. He’s scowling, even as he’s wincing in pain from the fragments of crystal in his eyes, and she can tell that he either doesn’t like losing or just isn’t accustomed to it.

Then she finds herself staggering, and she’s losing her balance before she realises how close she is to the edge on the hillside. Her arms snatch out, scrambling for a handhold that doesn’t exist, before her instincts take over. The boy’s hand reaches out for hers, but misses because she’s no longer there. She vanishes mid-fall and appears again behind him, laughing a little as he takes her place, teetering on the edge of the hillside, ready to fall. Then she finds his arm reaching back to grab hers. She tries to pull away, but staggers a second time and they end up crashing into each other and tumbling into the grass beneath the circus tent, her falling right onto his stomach and probably knocking all the air from his lungs.

She smiles, sweeping a russet strand of hair sharply back behind a pointed ear, as he pushes her off and picks himself up. She takes the opportunity to let loose a few harmless, but irritating, crystal sparks into his face, stinging his vision. He can’t win, and she’s not afraid to let him know it.

‘That wasn’t funny,’ he mutters, rubbing his face and blinking hard, trying to get rid of the crystal.

‘That depends on your sense of humour, doesn’t it?’ She smiles. She’s starting to think he doesn’t have one.

‘I don’t want to play this.’

‘Who says we’re playing?’ She grins. ‘We’re too old for children’s games.’ She leans over and teasingly tugs at his sleeve. ‘You fight like a child, though. What are they teaching you up at that ridiculous academy? The fine art of chess?’

He frowns at her. He might be sulking, but she knows that Lightning Knight Cadets aren’t supposed to sulk, so if she asks him he’ll only deny it. He pulls his arm away from her.

‘I said I don’t want to play.’

She scowls at him, irritated. ‘Just because you can’t win. You started the game in the first place. Don’t pick fights if you aren’t going to finish them, just because you’re frightened to lose.’

‘Lightning Knights don’t lose,’ he responds indignantly, brushing the dirt from his uniform.

She scoffs. ‘You’re not a Lightning Knight, yet.’

‘I will be.’ By now he’s standing up and reaching out a hand to help her to her own feet. ‘We don’t lose, because we fight for justice, and that prevails above everything else, dark elf.’

Dark elf… privately, she clings to that word for a moment. In fact, she’s amazed he called her it. But then, she supposes, it is the kind of thing a Lightning Knight might be expected to know. The name seems to have become an obscure one these days, fading out into history, like much of her kind, like much of everything these days. She hasn’t been called a dark elf by anyone in… years, and yet she still knows it’s what she is.

She doesn’t let any of this surprise show on her face however. She just rolls her eyes, wondering if that is the ninety-ninth or the hundredth time she’s heard his speech about “truth, faith, and justice in our time” in the last two hours. As if she hadn’t already been able to tell what he was from the uniform, the insignia on his sleeve and the stormy glimmer in his eyes. ‘What makes you think I care about your stupid code of riddles? Lightning Knights know less about the real world than you do about anything.’

The look on his face shows her she’s hurt him with that. He withdraws his hand and opens his mouth, but a clattering nearby interrupts what he’s about to say. Someone has heard their “game” and is coming to investigate.

Time to leave, she thinks.

‘Run,’ she says, scrambling to her feet and giving him a shove towards the only exit. For him, anyway. With direct matter transportation on her side, there’s no such thing as a wall that can keep her imprisoned.

She takes a moment to watch him, pausing to scowl at her before he turns and runs across the field. Without being able to see it from here, she knows that he is running back towards an imposing, concrete building with countless turrets and glass windows, standing on the horizon. She thinks about what goes on behind those concrete walls where simple, idealistic children like him are turned into “heroes”.

She hears a gateway creaking open behind her. There’s a sound of someone screaming nearly, going on about trespassers and private property. She realises it’s definitely time to go, teleports past the barriers and into the fields beyond the circus.

That’s when she starts to run. She runs as fast as she can, as far as she can and never stopping, even when she is far away from any possible danger. Something crunches under her foot, and she doesn’t stop to see which unfortunate creature she’s trampled on.

She stops only when her lungs are screaming and she’s far away from the circus and the Realm of Illusion. She finds herself in the hills looking out onto a scattered horizon of buildings, dimly lit highways and portals, leering out of the evening sky. They seem connected to nothing but the air. No transport is using them. Their cores glow a soft orange, signifying them to be empty and on standby. The whole picture is a beautiful sight, but she knows there is something wrong about it. There are highways, but less traffic than there used to be. More aptly, there are fewer people to provide the traffic.

How long has it been since a child was created in the Realm of Illusion? How long since a portal opened to the Twelfth Dimension? Or the Ninth? Rumour had it that the last visit to the Ninth had revealed a veritable wasteland, dead of everything. Time was the one thing which was constant, between those three particular realms at least, she was sure of that. So what was happening to interfere with everything?

Gaps, she thinks, reaching out her hand towards the evening landscape. That’s what it is. Holes in… something. Both the landscape and, it seems, in her own mind. She wonders if she is the only one who has noticed it. The Sixth Dimension is changing and has been for years.

It’s all rather childish supposition, really. The kind of silly thoughts that come out of the minds of idealistic people like the Lightning Knights. But they’re thoughts she can’t stop herself from entertaining, no matter how much she wishes she could.

She sits there on the empty hillside for a long time, watching the sky change colour. The too-large sun is weeping into the surrounding clouds and turning them crimson. Thinking about Lightning Knights, and holes-in-the-world. And, for some reason, him.

What is the name of the world they’re in now, anyway? The Third Dimension? Earth? Not that it really matters. She always proclaims that she prefers the Sixth Dimension’s unnatural colours, labyrinth-like realms and neon skies, to the sullen stench of this mortal-ridden dimension. Yet she also secretly knows that the world she thinks of would not be there, if she were ever to return. Not really.

On the day she left that place to come to this new dimension with her master and allies, things in the Sixth Dimension were already changing. More so than they ever had done in her childhood. There were no holes in the horizon any more as there used to be when she was a child. In fact, things were far worse than that.

There are whole realms gone that she is positive used to be there. People that she once barely even acknowledged existedhave faded away to become just parts of the scenery of the world around them. Places she used to know like the back of her hand have changed into something entirely different. There are blank spaces in her thoughts where memories should reside of certain people and places, though somehow she gets the impression she has remembered more than most. She can’t explain the reason. Maybe her inclination for taking other forms is allows her to view the world from the standpoint of others, giving her a better idea of what should and should not be.

Even the Knights’ code isn’t the same anymore. It’s… blunter. More idealistic. And, if she may say so, far more ridiculous. “Do Right and Fear Not”? Since when did bravery and justice require the absence of fear? It’s as if reality as she knows it is out of joint. As if somebody has been tampering with everything she has ever known to be real. Nothing much makes sense anymore. People remember only vital details and points about their existence, as if other memories and awarenesses are not considered important. And, in truth, she knows it is only the beginning.

Theirs had been the last of the portals to be working. The Amulet of Zoar opened it for them with a last, staggering burst of power, giving all it had to propel them between the Sixth Dimension and this new, stranger world. So many holes in their past and their present… Is she the only one who sees them? Surely not.

Their fascination with those television boxes completely bemuses her, magazines –another thing she has never understood. An idle mortal source of distraction. Such entertainment was never necessary in her world. And now she sees the mortal children in pictures, playing games on those boxes with glass screens using joysticks and hand held controllers. She sees them on pages of magazines, doing the same thing. Now and again, she even sees him, his face splashed momentarily on a screen or through a window, as she walks the streets disguised in a mortal form. It’s… puzzling.

She thinks back to a time when she would sit on the hills of her world watching her strange disjointed home as it changed before her very eyes. She remembers a time she would have done anything to understand the reasons. Anything for some kind of explanation. Now she sees one. And she wonders if, perhaps, she is better off in ignorance.

If there is a part she is intended to play, she’s followed it, so far. With great finesse and capability, she might add. What else is there to do? In a world so devoid of the Sixth Dimension’s colour, so confounded with rules and complications and strange messages, compliance to expectations –whoever’s expectations they are– is the only stability she has.

So now she is just… here. And he’s here, and she remembers it all. His eyes are still the same, greyish blue. Storm-cloud coloured, as a mortal might poetically call it. His features are quite firmly imprinted in her mind. Though her impression of him is now somewhat different to the teenager with the hurt expression and sullen frown, whom she met so many years ago in the circus realm. Before she knew anything about him, except for the fact that he was a Lightning Knight. She wonders if he remembers that she’s a russet beneath the spider headwear.

She wonders if he remembers her throwing shards of crystal into his eyes.

She wonders if he recalls tumbling over into the grass and getting dirt on his uniform.

She wonders if he remembers the day his home was razed to the ground, or if he has any inkling of an idea that it was partly her brilliant spy work for Lord Fear that almost brought about the fall of the Lightning Knights of the Sixth Dimension.

The once-thin shards of electricity have changed into full-blown shocks as he goes in to attack her again. The heat of it sears close to her pale green skin. She stares at his storm-cloud eyes harder than she should do, willing him to see something of the truth that she has clung onto while others forgot.

She sees nothing but anger.

It goes on. She screams, fights, and plays her part. She makes her shallow threats and gestures and he returns them.

He followed her to this new dimension, and then again here, to this large, concrete building that looks disturbingly like another place she remembers from long ago. But it’s not her whom he’s here for now. No, he’s come to save the friend she’s been sent to destroy. If necessary, he will destroy her. The short history between them is all that exists for him now, and it is a history of war, battle and hatred between him and the man whom she now calls her Lord. She is Lady Illusion, and he is Ace Lightning, foremost of the Lightning Knights. Never anything more. Never a child, sulking over a lost play-fight.

Does he remember?

It’s in the midst of the fight that he throws an attack back in her face, pauses, and lets her know the answer to that question, with a question of his own.

‘Still wanna brag about your power, playmate?’

The way in which he says it is mocking her. A childish taunt, harking back nearly forty cycles. His eyes glimmer, he blinks, and within them is a spark of recollection that should not exist. He shakes it away quickly, but the words have already been spoken, and inwardly, she finds herself smiling even as outwardly, she is scowling in hate and pain.

A broken down circus, a large grey building with towering turrets, a grassy hill and a crimson sky all leap to the front of her mind. Do these places still exist or have they been changed now too, into something she no longer recognizes as the world they both once called home? She feels as if she is dealing with the loss of everything, except for the power that still charges through her veins. No, that she still has a claim to. That she will not lose.

And him? He is still there too… She can’t begin to explain why. Perhaps, they were both considered important enough to remain. She knows that idea makes no sense, but then, what does make sense these days?

She plucks a few shards of pure energy that most humans probably don’t even know exists out of the air. Transmogrifying them into her signature, a crystal ball explosive. Ready to attack again, and destroy, and tell herself that she feels nothing.

But, in truth, what do such things really matter, when all she was created for was victory in the name of men who do not exist do not exist ancestors, the family heritage. The principle to be maintained at all costs, in the name of her father, and her father’s father and his father before that.

There we are. It originally included another middle part, involving the academy and the Lightning Knights which didn't quite gel correctly,and it is partly because oflack of combining ability, and part difficulty with an irritating, ancient computer that is reminiscent of the 70's, I've chosen to post them seperately as opposed to finding some way to combine them. All the same I rather like the briefness of this in comparison to that.

Hope you like it. Concrit is much appreciated.