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The darkness. The silence. The void.

A heartbeat....breathing....

A pair of eyes snap open, pupils pulsing open to absorb....no light...

"AHH!" Ozzy shouted, jerking up into a sitting position. His startled breath panted, heavy with the pounding in his chest.

"WHAT...what...where..." he stammered, wide eyes searching through the pitch darkness. His arms moved and flailed invisibly. Like his sight, he reached...searching...grasping for anything...for any hold on the moment.

He paused, the sound of his beating heart clouding his hearing.

"Hello?" he said aloud, the word drifting into the darkness. "HELLO?! Where am I?!"

For a moment, nothingness replied in kind.

Then...

"...Ozzy...?"

His head jerked back and forth for the voice. A familiar voice. A female voice.

"...Lyly?" he replied. "Is that you? Where are you?"

"...I am here..." her voice replied, somewhere near him. "...where are you? Where are we?"

"Lykopis..."

Gaunt.

"Edmund?!" Ozzy yelled. "Gaunt...what's....where are you?"

Ozzy suddenly felt a thin hand grasp his shoulder, causing him to jerk suddenly...

"...here..." the whispery voice of their teammate replied. "...right behind you..."

Ozzy reached up, grasping the hand. But...it wasn't a hand...was it? Something wasn't right. The fingers....they were....hard...thin...almost like...

"............Gaunt.......?" Baxter muttered.

"Yes, Ozzy...it's me...I can see you..." Edmund replied. "Lykopis is to your right..."

Ozzy let go of the hand, reaching out to his right. Sure enough, her worn grasp found his.

"Lyly...you okay?" he asked.

There was no reply for a moment.

"Baxter...." she said. "...your hand...it feels so.......cold..."

Ozzy frowned, opening his mouth to question, when...

"Hello?!"

"Icarus." Lykopis replied. "You are here, too..."

"Yeah...wherever here is..." the voice stated in the darkness. "...who's with you?"

"It's me...and Gaunt..." Ozzy said. ".....do any of you know what the fuck just happened?"

"We were....we were in Spain...right?" Icarus asked.

"Yes. Spain." Lykopis replied. "We were on a mission.......were we not?"

Ozzy frowned, his memory of the previous moments as foggy and unforthcoming as the darkness itself.

"Gaunt." Ozzy began, trying to clear the cobwebs. "This...darkness. Is it you? Can you do something about it?"

"I have nothing to do with this....nor, it seems, can I do anything about it." his normally eery voice replied. "I have been trying to absorb it...to communicate with it...........nothing..."

Suddenly...a noise. Everyone went silent, searching the darkness. The noise stopped. Then, after a moment, it returned. A...gurgling...of sounds. Snaps and clicks, muttering and spitting in rising and falling tones.

It stopped again.

".....o-k-a-y...what was that...?" Baxter began nervously.

Before anyone could reply, a sudden sharp light pierced the darkness. Ozzy's eyes immediatly crunched shut, involuntarily turning from the sudden exposure.

"...oh.......oh my....god..."

It was Icarus. His voice....startled...shaken....what?

Ozzy forcibly pryed his own eyes into an open squint, turning towards the illumination. It was a moment before he could easily make anything out. Shapes, at first. Then, slowly, details started to come.

The light. A soft, white glow. Coming...glowing...from...

"...Icarus?" Lykopis questioned, her now somewhat dim form visible near Ozzy. She started to find her feet, staring with similiarly squinting eyes towards the light.

Ozzy stood as well, shading his own slowly accomadating vision. And what he saw was....confusing, at best.

"...guys...?" Icky asked, staring at his own hand, his voice sad, and small...like a child. "...guys...what's...what's happened? What's going on??"

The glow of light was coming from his own fingertips.

"What's happened to me?!!" he asked, his voice growing into a startled shout.

The light reflected and glinted off thread-like streaks of metal, covering his arms...his hands...his face. It covered him like a spider-web.

Like....circuitry...

Lykopis started to answer, but none was forthcoming. She looked to Ozzy for answers, but, was suddenly taken back with what she saw.

Baxter...noticing her expression...stared for a moment, before looking down at himself.

His skin...the light....the light was reflecting off his skin. Off his........metal....skin....

"...oh...." was all he could say, staring down at grey, metallic hands. The metal seemed to cover his entire physical form. He had seen this before. In that other dimensional place he and the La Perdita team had visited a few years back. That 'dark' dimension.

"Lykopis. Baxter. Sidewinder. Gaunt."

Ozzy and Lykopis turned quickly around. There, standing behind them a few feet away, stood Victor Reilley.

"...I thought I smelled you guys..." he said, his voice calm and even.

Ozzy's horrified expression should have clued Victor into the fact that something was wrong. That is...if Victor could see it.

His eyes....gray and upturned.

He was blind.

"...does anyone have a flare...or a light of some kind?" Victor asked, seemingly clueless to his own impairment.

He was still in the dark.

"{{{{++)<,.}}}}||||\\\|||**0^^=+))*:***" the noise stated suddenly, everyone jerking towards it's origin.

Adem Different walked up to them, a curious expression...as ever...on his face. He looked back and forth at them, pausing on Icarus and Victor.

"}}}|*}}|\\\|||**0^?"

The noise...the screeching, strange gurgling sound...it was coming from him.

He was speaking it...

"}||\_----_*)(?" he said again, curious as to why no one was responding.

"...jesus..." Ozzy stammered. "...what the fuck is going on..."

"My...my hand..." Icarus mumbled, tears in his eyes, caught totally in his own predicament. "...how...how is this..."

"{*()+---?"

"People...what's happening?" Victor asked, oblivious. "Where are we? Can you see something?"

Ozzy and Lykopis turned back and forth between their transformed comrades. Ozzy, paused, looking hard at Lyly's face.

"Lyly...." he began, walking towards her to get a better look. "....that scar..."

She squinted in confusion, even as Ozzy placed a metallic finger up near her left eye. Lykopis reached up, running her fingers along a long, thin scar that ran from her left eyebrow, down across her eyelid, breaking only for the eyeball, and continued well into her cheekbone. She rubbed it back and forth, confusion clouding her vision. What she couldn't feel, however, was the intricate, black tribal tattoo that attempted to cover the scar.

"...your hair...has gotten...longer..." Ozzy stated, noticing her ebony strands, stretching clear down to her backside, expertly braided in intervals.

"{{+__--*!" Adem demanded.

"ADEM, I CAN'T UNDERSTAND YOU!" Ozzy suddenly yelled. He spun towards Icarus. "I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE FUCK'S HAPPENED TO YOU EITHER, ICARUS!"

The moment was catching up to him. To all of them.

"AND VICTOR..." he started, spinning towards the man.

"I'm blind." Victor suddenly stated. Very calmly. Very evenly.

Ozzy's mouth was still open, even as the irritated wind drifted out of his lungs.

"....yeah chief....looks that way..." he mumbled.

Victor said nothing. Made no expression one way or another. He simply stood there, absorbed in his own thoughts.

"Ozzy..." Lykopis said in an unusually quiet voice. "...what has happened to us..."

"We all seemed to be....changed..."

Lykopis clenched her jaw, as Gaunt stepped into the dim frame of light. A long, flowing cloak of shadows...seemingly thicker than the lack of light around them...covered a hidden form. But his face....his face was........gone.

A stark, black skeleton stared back at them. The only thing reminescent of the man they knew, his round, black-lensed spectacles, covering what they could only assume were empty sockets.

The Shadow Chancellor studied his skeletal hands briefly, before a small chuckle emanated from a moving jawbone.

"It seems I have lost weight..." his muttered with a black humor.

No one said anything for a moment. Not even Icarus.

"Drake." Ozzy began finally. "Where's Marshall?"

"Drake Marshall is dead."

Everyone turned towards the foreign voice coming from the darkness. Footsteps could be made out, clicking against a hard floor. Coming closer...

"As is Thomas Foxe."

...and closer...

"Who is there?!" Lykopis demanded, immediately reaching for her sword.....which wasn't there.

"No need for arms, my dear..." the voice came closer. "...I'm here to help..."

A figure stepped just into the dimmest perimeter of Icarus' light, hands fumbling with something.

A click of metal, and the thin pop of a small, orange flame briefly appeared.

An inhale.....and then, a small gust of smoke.

Tobacco. Cigarette smoke.

The figure stepped fully into the light...

"...to try and shed a bit of light on your problems..."

Everyone peered back at the bald man, in the worn coat...smoking the cigarette...

"My name is Prometheus." he stated evenly. "Let's bring you all up to speed, shall we?"