I imagine no one can even remember what this story is about by this point. Ah well. Might be more of this as we approach Christmas, as I should have time to replay the game yet again and get my bearings in Wonderland around then.

Progress

Sora was barely standing by the end. Somewhere along the line he'd fallen off the side of the raised chimney while lunging for one of his opponents, only for a dozen new heartless to appear to reinforce the reds as he hit the ground. When it was over, he slumped down against the stones of the giant chimney, breathing heavily.

Kimi offered him a potion. "You suck," she observed.

Too tired to care, he just said, "Thanks," and took it.

"I wonder what happens after you die?" she mused.

"I think I'll be dead," Sora pointed out flatly. He drank the potion, feeling the fire race through him.

"No, I mean, the save points are also healing points and reset points. Like, when you hit continue. Is it, like, game over reset? Or are we supposed to say Donald and Goofy dragged your fragile ass back to the save point? Because, I mean, you wouldn't figure Maleficent'd just let them...actually the cutscenes repeat too, so definitely you'd think, but then why are your items used up, I mean it's a game and all so some of it's just mechanics but which..."

Sora tuned her out. He was still feeling shaky, but the potion had helped. Most of the coldness faded, but some of the cuts remained, a sickening contradictory mixture of numbness and chill and ache. Even the burns of the red heartless were like that, leaving cold wounds after the first shock of heat.

"...don't see why the rules are different from those dorks, maybe it's just a player thing? But there's no way of knowing until it happens. Sora, you'd better not die and screw everything up."

"I'll try," he told her tiredly, looking around. Far to his right was the wall, or floor... He still wasn't sure how to describe it. There was another painted yellow pot or vase there, with an empty black center. He found himself wishing someone had drawn in flowers or something. When he'd been normal sized it'd been no big deal, but in his present shrunk form the darkness couldn't help but look faintly sinister, and he was already on edge from everything else.

"What now?" asked Goofy as Kimi wandered off.

"I'm not sure," he admitted. And this wouldn't even be necessary if you'd let me rescue her! he thought, but he didn't say it. "Let's look around," he said instead. "The forest was constructed like a puzzle. That might be the same here too."

"That's true," Donald said. "But what are we looking for?"

Sora considered. "Maybe another doorway. Like...under that yellow pail or something."

Goofy nodded enthusiastically. "I'll go check it out," he said, heading up onto the chimney and dropping out of sight on the other side. Donald followed.

Kimi was over by the...faucet, Sora identified after a few seconds delay. It was about as high as either of them. She was whacking the faucet knob awkwardly with the flat of her sword.

Sora headed over. She was trying to turn it, he realized. "Let me try," he said. She stepped back and he swung the keyblade to strike the topmost tine.

It turned, and water came out and fell sideways.

Sora was hit by vertigo, and reached out to grab the edge of the faucet, suddenly certain gravity was about to reorient.

It didn't. The water fell anyway, hitting the painted yellow vase in the black, empty center.

And it popped up at the same moment, to grow upwards - or sideways - to accommodate the water. Seconds later, the flow stopped. Sora waited for gravity to reassert itself and the water flow back out, but the newly real vase remained still, the center still solidly black and showing no sign of the water that filled it.

"Weird..." Sora breathed, starting toward it. As he approached it remained impenetrably black, even once he was standing right in front of it. He peered inside, finding no sign of the water. Sora reached out one hand, groping to see if the water was high enough to touch.

"Stop dawdling," Kimi said behind him, and shoved.

Sora breathed in quickly, throwing his hands in front of him and bracing himself for the cold water.

He landed painfully flat on the ground, somewhere bright.

"You're a total klutz sometimes, you know that?" said Kimi.

Sora was lying atop one of the flat not-really-hedges. It felt kind of like strong cardboard. He pushed himself to his feet, turned around to face Kimi, and realized the wall behind them was just the side of the box painted sky blue, with no sign of the portal he'd gone through.

"What just happened?"

"The pot thing's a doorway," Kimi said, like this was obvious.

Sora continued to stare baffled at the unbroken blue not-sky of the box behind her. "There's no doorway there."

"Huh?" She glanced reflexively over her shoulder. "Oh. Yeah, a bunch of them are weird like that. Anyway, there should be stuff up here. I - "

"I have to find Alice!" Sora yelled at her. "We can go exploring later!"

She started to argue, but he ignored her and jumped back to the ground, breaking into a jog for the forest.

"Where were ya, Sora?" Goofy asked when he came through the tree gateway.

"Kimi shoved me through a one-way portal in the vase," Sora said. "It didn't lead anywhere. You guys?"

Donald shook his head. "Nothing under there," he said, gesturing at the popped-up yellow bucket.

Sora sighed. Now what?

Sora thought about their options, running through what he knew to figure out the next thing they could try. If there wasn't anything under the popped-up bucket, and the popped-up vase on the other side only led back to the hedges and the mad red queen's area, as Kimi had so enthusiastically demonstrated to him, then... Kimi, he remembered suddenly. Kimi, ignoring Cid as he talked to examine the empty furnace on the other side of the room instead. Even if she didn't actually know what would happen, she seemed to know a lot about how different worlds - or at least this one - worked. She'd been examining the furnace when there was nothing there. Maybe that was because sometimes there were things hidden in them, on some worlds.

"Let's check the fireplace," Sora said, heading for the stone chimney and climbing up. Goofy and Donald followed.

At the bottom was an empty, black area. They crouched at the edge and peered in (Sora couldn't help but listen nervously for sounds of Kimi approaching from behind).

"Do you see anything?" asked Donald.

"No...but I'm not sure what I'm looking for," he admitted. If they jumped down the gravity would trap them at the bottom. But they needed to go down to explore it. "I'll jump in," Sora decided. "If something goes wrong and I can't climb back up, you guys'll have to figure out how to get me back up, okay?"

"You can count on us!" Donald said.

"Thanks." Sora took a deep breath, steeled himself, and jumped into the darkness.

For a second he was falling down. Then there was a weird flipping feeling and he was falling up, tumbling through cupboard doors. What?

He was on the opposite wall. Above him he could just make out Donald and Goofy standing on the ceiling - or the opposite wall, because the ceiling was the wall where he...he dropped the attempt to make sense of things, feeling it was only making him more confused. The ceiling, he thought again, more firmly. Kimi had been right, sort of. Maybe this was the world she was from and so it was how she expected things to work. That'd explain a lot.

He headed back through the cupboard. There was another flip and then he was shooting past a confused Donald and Goofy. "It's the right doorway, I think," Sora said excitedly. "It brought me to the other side of the room."

"The ceiling?" Goofy asked, looking up.

"...yeah," Sora admitted. "But there's gravity over there too. Besides, it doesn't seem like we'll get hurt if we fall, remember last time?"

Donald nodded in agreement. "All right," he said. "Let's get going!"

They jumped down through the darkness, hurtled up into the light.

Shadow blossomed from the air, and the world returned to violence.

For a time everything shrunk to the space of the battle, and then it ended and his perceptions could expand again to see what was around him.

"Hey," Kimi said. Sora found himself unsure if she had appeared during the battle or shortly after it. "So you found the way over? I was starting to wonder how you'd manage to get this far without my help." She was using a weird tense again. It probably didn't mean anything, and he thought again, Confused. "Oh hey, bear." She headed for a low wall with a giant teddy bear lying on its back. - Sora's vision reoriented a second, though the vertigo was getting less disconcerting, and he revised his description: a teddy bear sitting on a shelf. A thick rope that would be string if he was his normal size ran between the top of the low wall/bottom of the shelf to the ground he stood on/wall of the room. He'd gotten as far as noticing that it looked like it was, from normal gravity, holding the shelf up when Kimi swung her sword, slicing the cord in half. The shelf collapsed and Sora watched the bear plummet sideways to land on one of the chairs.

"Stop destroying things!" Sora yelled.

She gave him a startled, baffled look that transitioned rapidly to self-importance. "Don't you know anything? You're supposed to do everything, if you weren't supposed to do something you wouldn't be able to. You can't progress otherwise - well, maybe you can sometimes, but you'll miss items."

"What does that have to do with progressing? Destroying stuff is the polar opposite of progress!"

Kimi rolled her eyes, pointed sideways or down, depending on how you looked at it. "There's a painted book," she informed him with put-upon patience. "Next to the chair. And above the chair is the bear, and now the bear is in the chair." So it rhymed. What did that matter?

"And...?" he prompted.

"Well, you have to, I mean probably, do something else. Like move the bear again when you're big. The whole room's a puzzle, remember?"

Sora thought again of how familiar she was with the nonsense rules of this world. Her reasoning had been so confused back on the island, strange leaps of logic that unfailingly brought her to the wrong conclusions but worked here. "Are - "

"Huh? Yeah?"

She hadn't said anything about being from here. If she'd forgotten her world, like Kairi, he didn't think he should bring that up. "Never mind," Sora said.

"Whatever."

Something occurred to him, and he said, "But why couldn't we just have gotten big again and moved the bear from the shelf?"

"Because it doesn't work that way," Kimi said with unshakable conviction. Then: "What you said about progress, that isn't true. You always have to destroy something to progress."