Young Writers Society

"No. Tell it again." said Baba stubbornly. "That explanation is too complicated. Baba doesn't like it."

Baba pulled their straw hat down low, and drew up their knees.

Actually, no. Baba didn't want another explanation, simple or otherwise. They'd know what happened. Eventually, they'd know. And when they did, they might have to fight. There might be no going back. They had their best friend back again, after all these years, just to- no. No. They wouldn't think about that yet.

Baba edged toward Vil, towards Levi, and hugged his arm. They rested their head on his little shoulder.

"Don't tell Baba just yet." Baba said quietly.

Vil let out a quiet sigh.

He could understand why Baba didn't want to know. The truth was complicated, and he was sure they were questioning just what kind of person he was now. He wasn't the same person he had been when they met years ago. He wasn't a naive little kid who followed Axel everywhere.

"I have to tell you," he said. "I wanted to tell you everything after I fixed all of this-"

He gestured down at himself.

"-but a certain pain in the ass decided I didn't get the choice to."

Terra, in response, looked just a little bit sheepish. It was a good show of guilt, even though Vil was sure the dream eater had absolutely no remorse for prematurely revealing Vil's secret.

Vil reached a hand up and started playing with the charms dangling around his neck. He let out another sigh. "It was stupid of me to think that I could hide this, anyways. You're a part of this now thanks to your keyblade. Kate and Lira are, too. I have to tell you the truth. The whole truth, even though it's messy and I hate how stupid I was for never questioning..."

He paused and gave a little shake of his head. Now wasn't the time to be getting frustrated with himself.

"I have to make sure they don't get to you," he said. "And if I do, I have to make sure you don't make the same mistake I did by trusting them."

He was stupid? Why did he think that? Who was telling him that? Where did they live and how hard were their bones?

"If they get to Baba," Baba began ferociously,"-What they're getting is a good whack to the-"

The entire table lurched violently to the right. Baba, Vil and the giant biscuits were all thrown together into the tin wall, as the whole thing slid across the table-top.
The table shuddered back into place, only to lurch again, causing them to tumble once again.

Baba scrabbled over Vil and up to the top of the tin wall, quickly while it remained still. They spotted the giant puppy, now yapping and jumping at the tables' edge.

Oooh no. Oh, no.

"Vil, toss me one of those biscuits!" yelled Baba.

Kate Braced herself against the wall of the tin and scowled. "BAD DOG!" she shouted down at the puppy, "DOWN!"

Vil's back went slamming into the metal side of the cookie tin. As the table shook, he thought he heard a familiar noise. It wasn't until Baba asked for a biscuit and Kate started berating the source of the shaking that it finally clicked.

Vil quickly pulled himself up over the side of the tin. It would have been easier if he switched back to his other form, but he had already used that one enough today. He'd take the frustratingly younger and smaller one right now.

He looked down.

An enormous puppy was trying to knock the table over. Either the puppy had grown or they had shrunk. Either way, this was going to be a pain.

"That's easier said than done," Vil said to Baba, clinging to the tin as the table shook again. "We're the same size as them!"

He groaned as the shaking continued. Wonderland had size changing food. It wasn't always the same food, but at least that part of the world remained constant. If they ate the cookies, they'd probably grow to a size that made more sense when with the dog.

But what if the cookies shrunk things instead? Maybe the trick was to get the dog to eat the biscuit and grow smaller, or to just avoid the whole situation all together and slip away instead of changing anything's size.

"Break off a piece, then!" said Baba.

(Baba could have done this on their own, but thought it would be nice to welcome Vil back by engaging some teamwork.)

"We don't know what that would do-" Vil started to shout back, but he was cut off by Terra suddenly tearing off a chunk of cookie right next to him. Vil watched in horror as the dream eater swallowed it.

A moment later, Terra grew.

Which wouldn't have been so bad if Terra was sitting in the center of the table, but Terra was arguably closer to its edge. The table—along with the dream eater and the three keyblade wielders—went toppling down towards the ground where the puppy was pawing away.

Vil, Kate and Baba were all sent flying through the air.

Baba was flung high in the air- this was becoming a familiar sensation, lately- only today Vil was here to smack into Kate instead of Baba- little Levi thrown into Kate's face for a concussive reunion.

Baba shook their head. Poor Kate. This was going to be so confusing for her.

...Oh, yes, the GROUND.

Baba threw themself in a direction as best they could, and clamped tight onto a falling biscuit.

The sudden blur of motion and weightless toppling, followed by the crashing of someone's bony body into Kate spurred a colorful tirade of cussing from her as she shoved the form away. She maneuvered her limbs in the air, imitating a starfish until the ground came too near and she ducked into a roll. She fumbled the landing, and her shoulder POPed as it made contact. She rolled onto her back and stumbled to her feet.

"Fuck," she muttered as she sprinted out of the way of the falling cookies, the curse drowned out by the din of the table crashing to the ground and the rain of tin and cookies that came with it.

Once the dust settled, Kate got a good look at the person she'd shoved off her in the air. Her eye's widened slightly, burning a deep maroon. The light was fractured by a crack in her glasses. She hadn't noticed they'd cracked.

"You fucking fuck-faced bitch," she growled.

Vil hadn't been nearly as lucky with his fall. When he crashed into the ground, he crashed hard.

His body wasn't nearly as fragile as it had once been, but it still hurt like hell. If Terra hadn't been far larger than him right now, he would have grabbed the dream eater by the cuff of the neck and berated him for what must have been intentional.

But before he could find a cookie to eat so he could do exactly that, Kate finally seemed to realize who he was.

"Oh fuck," Vil said. Because what else were you supposed to say when the most angry person you knew decided to get angry at you? Worse, what were you supposed to say when you knew it was entirely justified?

Actually no, a cookie probably wouldn't be enough to break Baba's fall. They had to think of something else. Baba may have been a scarecrow but they still had bones, they were very sentimentally attached to those bones, and they didn't want to break them.

"Terra! Terra Terra!" Baba called out, and sort of swam in the air to try and meet the dream eater.

Terra swam toward Baba in turn, and caught the little scarecrow in its mouth.

Oh, well. That was one way not to hit the ground. It was solid.

In the process of this midair rendezvous, Baba lost hold of their cookie. The pieces fell onto Vil and Kate's heads, pattering them with comically large crumbs. Free snacks. Good for them. -Hang on, were they arguing about something?

NEVERMIND that's a later problem, that's a 'when the Giant Dream Eater lovingly toting Baba in it's mouth stops playing with the Giant Puppy' problem.

Because that was exactly what Terra was doing and it very much was a problem.

"HeEeELP!" Baba cried out.

Kate clenched her fists.

"You-" Her furious tirade was cut off before it could start by a shower of enormous crumbs like hail from the heavens, accompanied by the frantic squealing of Baba the scarecrow.

Kate jumped back and forth the dodge the crumbs and glared, just in general.

Baba's cry for help managed the scrape at the edge of Kate's rapidly intensifying rage, just enough for her to glance over and see the tangle of problems the stupid sack of hay had managed to trot into.

"I'll fucking deal with you later, fucking trick ass bitch," Kate growled before stomping off to help Baba.

Kate made her way a fair distance from the others and scooped up a crumb. If it worked for the damn animals, it would work for her. She gobbled down the crumb and waited. Waited. Waited.

She sighed in frustration and turned to yell at Levi about it when she realized he was about the size of a dormouse at her feet. The puppy was puppy-sized, Terra was Terra-sized, and Kate was a bit bigger than Kate-sized, but she wasn't saying a peep about that.

Terra still had Baba in their mouth like a straw flavored chew toy they were being more careful than average with, so Kate went and got Baba out of their mouth, holding Baba by the scruff like a particularly tiny kitten she'd just fished out of a puddle, and placed the sack down on the ground.

Vil really wasn't sure if he was supposed to be relieved by Kate deciding to deal with him later. At least Baba was alright—part of him was surprised the two were actually getting along.

Following Kate's lead, he grabbed a crumb off the ground (wincing when he realized how disgusting that was) and swallowed it. He grew back to his normal height without any issues. Terra, suddenly realizing he was no longer the taller one of the two of them, gave him an incredibly innocent expression when he grabbed him by the collar.

"I'm not letting you eat my dreams for a week," Vil said.

Terra, who knew that he would give in after the first nightmare that night, just gave him a very smug look.

Vil groaned.

"You are the bane of my existence," he said, shaking his head. Before he could reprimand Terra further, he suddenly felt something pawing at his legs. He looked down. The puppy, which Vil hadn't ever seen in Wonderland before, was currently trying to reach Terra. It probably wanted to continue their playtime.

Vil stared at the puppy.

The puppy stared back.

"Fine," he relented. "I can pick you up, too."

A moment later, he did exactly that—reluctantly switching to his other form so he could more easily hold Terra under one arm and the puppy underneath the other. Neither seemed to mind how they were being held.

"Thank you, Kate!" Baba called up. "Can you hear Baba from up there?"

Baba hoped that Kate and Vil could hear them properly from where they stood a thousand bazillion feet in the air. It'd be a huge bother if they couldn't. Come to think of it, they were going to have a problem catching up, now that leg length disparity had ballooned like this.

Not being able to eat food hadn't really been a problem for Baba, until now. Something about this Wonderland that opened your eyes to the things you hadn't missed.

A happy glob of saliva dripped from the puppy's mouth. Baba jumped out of the way of the off splashes.

It was sort of fun, jumping around on a giant checkerboard floor. Like the joy of stepping on sidewalk cracks, or avoiding them, only multiplied by a lot.

Experimentally, Baba hopped from a black tile to a white tile. It sank a little.

"What-"

As Baba's tile had moved, the tiles under Vil and Kate began to shift irritably, like an impatient child. In tiny increments, up and down, with no uniform pattern. As if to say, 'bored now', the ceiling began to melt.

"Does anybody have a pocket!?" Baba called out anxiously.

Kate snatched up Baba without thinking and stuck them into the breast pocket of her floofy little dress as the ceiling melted like the wax of an enormous hollow candle.