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It all seems to happen in a moment. The girl is caught by a darkness. The boy pulls the girl free, but is caught in turn. The boy smiles as he knows his friend is safe. Someone screams, “SORA!”
There is emptiness.
The boy falls. It is impossible to say for how long. The very concept of time is foreign to this void. To the unprotected there is little difference between a moment and an eternity.
As the boy falls the emptiness claws at him. It takes. The boy tries to hold onto what the boy is. The boy is strong but the void consumes.
The boy’s will denies the void, and the void changes. No, it does not change. The boy is now falling through a different void.
At some point, the boy stops falling.
There, at the bottom of this emptiness, the boy finds another. The other is not a boy. Truly, the other is not even a person. Yet the other is kin to the boy.
The two see the same nature, a need to help others, held in each other.
The fall has taken from the boy.
The other lacks much of what it needs.
The two know, together they can help each other. Together they can help so much more than they can alone. They are in agreement.
The two become one.
Yuffie groans as light hits her eyes. She rolls over in her bed. Just a few more minutes of sleep wouldn’t hurt right?
Well, Leon will be grumpy at her, but is that so bad? He will just give her a disappointed look and a sigh. The internal scales in his mind that determines whether he treats her like an adult or a child will tip and…
Fine.
Tired and disheveled, dressed in her pajamas, Yuffie steps out of her room. She shambles down the hall to the hotel’s communal dining area.
As she enters she sees someone rummaging through the fridge. Yuffie freezes.
At this time, there are only around fifty or so people in Traverse Town. Yuffie knows everyone of those people on sight, even if in her current state of drowsiness she definitely could not name every one of them. Yuffie has never seen this spiky haired kid in her life.
That means this kid fell into the realm between worlds. It might be that this was only a minor incident, and they will be able to send the kid home by the end of the day. It could also mean that he is the sole survivor of his world.
Yuffie dreads having that conversation.
The kid turns around with an apple in hand. “Hay, Yuffie,” the kid says as he passes her on the way to the table.
Yuffie blinks.
She blinks again.
“Do I,” Yuffie says with confusion, “know you?”
The kid laughs.
Leon opens the door. The man is clean shaven, dressed, and ready for the day. He looks at the kid, then to Yuffie, then the kid. “Who’s the kid?” Leon asks.
The kid turns to Leon. “You too?” The kid says with a smile. “Yuffie I get, but I didn’t know you liked making those kinds of jokes.”
“Kid, I’ve never met you before,” Yuffie says, unsure what was happening. “Who are you?”
“What do you mean, I’m…” the kid says before he trails off. His brow furrows with thought. “That,” the kid says, “is a good question.” After another moment of silence, he turns and opens a door.
Yuffie knows that the door leads to a closet. She knows at this moment she should be looking at an assortment of cleaning supplies. Looking through the doorway, she should not be seeing Merlin’s laboratory complete with wizard.
“Merlin!” the kid asks with concern. “Who am I?”
The next hour or so is filled with a battery of magical tests and experiments. Using beakers, potions, scrolls, a stuffed doll, and half a dozen other mystical objects Merlin does everything he could to determine who and what the kid is. The wizard smiles as he makes one final note in an intimidatingly large tome and looks on at the boy with interest. “Fascinating,” the wizard says as he examines the boy.
Leon, who has been patiently leaning against the wall while magic happened, asks, “What’s fascinating?”
Yuffie, who has been impatiently twiddling her thumbs groans, “Please say you know what this kid’s deal is.”
“In a moment,” Merlin says, waving away the question before turning back to the boy. “Tell me, how long ago did you meet us?”
“Ummm,” the boy thought, “maybe four-ish years ago?”
Merlin nods. “And what do you remember before that?”
The boy furrows his brow as he tries to remember. “I… don’t know. Something. People who needed help? Maybe a beach?”
Sitting down in his chair Merlin strokes his beard. “Yes, as I suspected. Can you close your eyes for me?”
The kid closes his eyes.
“How many chairs are outside the cafe in the first district?” Merlin asks.
“Six,” the kid answers without hesitation.
“How many doors are in the hotel in the second district?” Merlin asks.
Again, the kid answers quickly and accurately. Merlin continues to ask the kid about details throughout Traverse Town. Every question, from the color of the clock tower, to the number of bricks in the town square, the kid answers with the same ease that another would say the color of the sky.
“And what does all of that mean!” Yuffie whines.
Leaning forward, Merlin looked directly at the boy. “I believe that you are Traverse Town.”
The group is silent as they take in the statement.
“What.” deadpans Leon.
Yuffie throws up her hands and cries out, “What is that supposed to mean! How can this kid, who’s a flesh and blood person, be a town? No, a world! That doesn’t make sense!”
“Am I flesh and blood?” The kid mumbles to himself.
“You see,” Merlin says as he takes on the cadence of a lecture, “we already know that Traverse Town is an unusual world.” The wizard picks up a book and opens it to a diagram showing various worlds arranged in a funnel shape with Traverse Town at the very bottom. “It seems to be located in the lowest known point, or maybe the nexus, of the realm between. It is the place where most of the things that fall out of a world end up. In some ways it is less of a world, and more of a collection of what has been lost.”
Leon nods.
Yuffie groans.
No one notices the kid looking over the equipment scattered around the lab.
“One of the truly interesting things about Traverse Town is that it seems to disappear completely when it has no residents,” Merlin continues his lecture, showing no mercy for the suffering of the young ninja. “Whenever everyone manages to return home, the town seems to stop existing. We don’t know of any time the town has remained in existence more than a month or two before we started living here.”
“What does that have to do with the town being a kid?” Yuffie grumbles.
The kid starts picking up various pieces of equipment and poking his hand.
“It has been theorized that Traverse Town’s helpful nature is not by chance, but because the world has a will and is trying to help. It appears to those who fall into the void not because of some quirk of how the realm between worlds operates, but because Traverse Town is actively trying to provide shelter for the people who need it,” the wizard continues, relentlessly imparting knowledge whether or not anyone wants it. “The fact that we have stayed here for so long may have led to the will of Traverse Town to grow into something more than it was.”
There is a thud which causes Yuffie, Leon, and Merlin to all look over at the kid. The kid holds up his hand to examine a trickle of blood.
His hand has a knife stabbed through it.
The kid nods proudly, and says, “I do have blood.” Smiling, the kid looks at the other three, who stare at him in silent shock. The kid looks back at his hand.
He looks at the other three, then back to his hand.
The kid screams.
There is a lot of screaming.
After a good amount of panic and a healing spell the kid is sitting down as Merlin examines the kid’s hand for any lasting damage.
“So, ummm,” the kid says feeling awkward and trying to change the subject away from his recent action, “I’m like, a fake person made by the world or something?”
“No,” Merlin says in a firm voice. He waits for the kid to look him in the eye before continuing. “We don’t know exactly what you are. You may be purely the manifestation of a world’s spirit. You may be someone who the world entrusted its will to. Maybe you are the ancient heart of the first person to be lost in the realm between and became a world to help others.” Merlin shakes his head. “That doesn’t really matter. If there is one thing my tests have shown me it is that you have a real mind, and real emotions. You are not fake. You’re a real person, and you shouldn’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise. Not even you.”
The kid nods. He does not really understand what the wizard is getting at, but he thought it sounded good.
Leon nods and says, “That’s good enough for me.”
“So what do we call you?” Yuffie asks.
The kid thinks for a minute before shrugging. “I don’t know.”
“Traverse seems like an obvious moniker,” Merlin says thoughtfully.
Leon kneels to look the kid in the eye. “Does that sound good? Do you mind if we call you Traverse?”
The kid shrugs. He does not know his name. Yet, somehow he knows that Traverse is not his name. It is kind of his name, but not really. It’s more like a title, or a family name, rather than the name that is totally and completely his own. Maybe that is good enough. The kid smiles and nods, “That’s fine.”
Leon frowns for a split second before he pats Traverse on his shoulder and stands.
Yuffie grabs Traverse’s hand and returns the kid’s smile. “Great! Then let’s go introduce you to everyone, Traverse,” she says before leaning in and whispering, “Quick, before Merlin starts lecturing us again.”