The Imagiverse

The Chosen Few, though slightly disappointed, took a sigh of relief and sheathed, shut down, and packed their weaponry. In a sense, they had defended the Centre from total annihilation, simply by being there. And it would seem reality, or fantasy rather, had taken it's usual, if still warped, shape. From the crowd came a few cheers, whether it was directed at the Chosen Ones or Laadan was rather unclear. Adam would glance around at the crowd, then begin to grin and raise a closed fist, an expression associated with a boxer who just realized he had, in theory, won because his opponent was knocked out by a falling searchlight, before Max would elbow him, the bump amplified by his superhuman muscles.
The misfits' eyes would explore and, possibly for the first time, notice the collateral damage caused. Several buildings lie in ruins, several unnamed critters, persumably the victims of the imploding Innovatium, were hopping around, and there were some irate shopkeepers that needed some answering. In the middle of the cracked arena, the alien had now, quite literally, shrunk under the deflating feeling of Guilt.
From within one side of the street, a figure would budge through the crowd, muttering things like "''scuse me" and "pardon me" as he approached the scene.
He didn't follow the usual three-dimensional rule of a living entity. For some unknown reason, the paper stick figure was able to travel from A to B without folding over or, more accurately, blowing away in the wind. His white mohawk hair rose like a frozen tide, his entire being outlined in black, as if he was a doodle that was pulled straight out of the page, or more accurately, cut out. The stick figure was wearing nothing but a pair of orange shorts, his stick torso bare. His face was crudely drawn on the circle of his head, his eyes two shakey lines. The overall appearance looked like something a pre-schooler would draw.
He went by the name of Fancy Pants, the youngest member of the Chosen Ones, and considered the heart of the group.
"Excuse me, did I miss- oh," said Fancy Pants.
The band of heroes turned.
"'Ey, Fancy," said Adam, waving. "You missed a bloody good fight."
"Sorry," said the stick figure, who was the type of person who punctuated almost every sentence with an apology. "I should have come earlier, but it was my sister's birthday."
The Chosen Few sneered in a vacant, "typical" way. Fancy Pants was very enthusiastic when joining the group. At a younger age, he trained solely to become, at least, as great as the Chosen Ones, fighting crazed penguins and the like. Of course, he learnt a valuable lesson on the fact that, in person, your heroes aren't as great as they cracked up to be.
"Fancy," said Max, pointing an arm at the shrunken alien. "This is Laadan. In a way, he, or it, did all the "defendin' against an intruder" for us. He's the alien I was talking about."
Fancy would glance at the thing. Well, you see something new every day, and the sight he was witnessing was definitely new in his book. He wasn't sure to address Laadan, partly because he didn't know how to address the eldritch, but mainly because it looked like it wasn't in the mood.

"Please do not refer to Laadan as it," she says in response to Max, wrapped tightly in the strange cloak wings, now pulsing a soft blue reflecting the current mood. She had been called an it, treated as a beast and chained up deep down by Chuza, the superego. It was not without reason, she was once a chaotic mass of impulses once. It was only later that she became something more, an individual with her own conscience. "Laadan may not be any Rebecca Lappet but Laadan is a she."

She had completely butchered that reference somehow...

She turns slightly, looking back to the open portal that Kira escaped into. "Axe man could return to finish this... at least... Laadan would."

"Sorry, she," said Max, rolling his eyes.
"Rebecca Lappet?" said Adam. If he had eyebrows, they would scrunch up. "Never heard of her. Is she a fashion model?"
"No idea," said Fancy Pants.
"Funny thing," Jack said. "We don't watch teleffithion a lot, do we?"
"You know us," said Max. "Busy busy."
The Chosen Few would follow Laadan's gaze towards the open portal. A part of each of them wanted to go through it. But, where will it lead? Do they really want to fight that guy again? He looked pretty tough, and they never fought a dual demon before.
"Weeelll," said Adam, uncertainly. He had a nagging suspicion he was going to go where no other figment had gone before. Maybe it led to Grand Gaia, where he heard there were beings stronger than he had ever encountered. At the time, he wanted a challenge.
Now, though...
"Whaddya think, guys?" he would say, looking around at his compadres, who were getting the same feeling, and weren't as enthusiastic.
"Why not?" said Fancy Pants, shrugging. "It would be one helluvan adventure."
The Robloxian would grunt. "Maybe I could get some real action," he said.
"Yeah, why not?" said Jack. It would seem the Chosen Few had come to a decision, albeit a hesitant one.

"Laadan would have gone anyways, but... Laadan appreciates that it will not be a lone journey," she says in a low tone, nearly a soft growl before leaping over the gap and standing before the gate. She looks back then at the gap, then at the street light she ate at the beginning of the fight and proceeds to lash out her tongue, grabbing it and creating a makeshift bridge over the chasm Kira created. It was actually not normal for her to give this much thought or consideration. Then again, guilt was not something she felt normally either.

With one more glance at the damages she heads into the gate.

The Chosen Few glance at each other before stepping towards the portal.
No one had ever travelled to Grand Gaia before. It is one of those worlds that make themselves apparent. The Imagiverse is growing by the minute, so it wouldn't be surprising that it had developed a new world. Or had it already existed? Who knows.
One by one, they stepped into the portal, into the uncharted world of Grand Gaia.

Behind Laadan, there is a slight cacaphony of thumping and cursing, which is revealed to be the Chosen Few falling over each other. They haven't mastered portal travel yet, even with their experience with everything else. It was always the collected momentum of travelling thousands of light years across the Imagiverse that always catches them off-guard.
The pile, from the bottom upwards consisting of Fancy Pants, Jack the Ducky Boy, Adam Skelecoot and, unfortunately for the formers, Max the Robloxian, stood up.
Adam scanned the forest with the look of mild disappointment. It would have been nice to teleport in a city, or anywhere near civilisation. Instead, they have been stranded in the middle of nowhere, in a world they've never been in before. As far as the eyehole can see, there was just trees, fauna and more trees.
The Chosen Few, as a whole, shared the singular feeling of one that, when expecting a holiday country to be an exciting experience, had found out that, in fact, it was too bloody hot and the food was crap.
"Right," said Max, who wasn't going to stand around all day. "Which way?"
Fancy would shrug. "I dunno. Just go one way and, if we read the edge, we go around the forest until we find somewhere to stay. If there isn't a town or something already there, course," he would add.
"Sounds good," said Adam.

The Chosen Few would look the new figure up and down. The warrior seemed to run by the theme of the primordial flame, much to the displeasure of Fancy Pants. The sword was a nice touch.
There would be a collective mumble that run by the theme of "friend, yeah, definitely friend".
"Ur, 'scuse me, but, ur," said Adam, taking a cautious step forward. "Could you direct us to the nearest town?"
Behind him, there was the sound of metal slapping flesh from an exasperated Max.
"Uh yeah," said Jack, ignoring Max, "we theem to be lotht."

The group would follow behind Laadan. The sound of monsters and demons sparked their collective interest. Nevertheless, they need to settle down somewhere before they go any further.
"Is this the Grand Gaia you were talking about?" Fancy whispered to the red-bandana'd skeleton, who was vacantly examining the forest.
"Oh yeh," said Adam. "John wanted to visit it, to, you know, research it and that. Shame he didn't come, but, then again, we were cleaning up some bodies by Skele Manor."
"Come again?"
"Oh yeah, we got attacked by bounty hunters when those two girls - you remember me telling you? The warrior-musician wossname, hybrid sisters? - those two girls left for Grand Gaia."
Fancy Pants would turn his gaze forward, nodding. The main worlds of the Imagiverse had known each other for so long, nearly hundreds of years, that they got to diplomacy and so on. The idea that there was another world they never even heard about...
But then again, the Imagiverse was growing all the time. He vaguely remembered Jonathan telling him about Ideas, the blueprints of everything in the Imagiverse, that grow until they ripen into whole worlds. That was how places like Toontown and Anti-Earth came around.
Grand Gaia must be a very recent world, if they never knew it existed.
"Say," said Adam, bursting his thought bubble. "There's a God here? What sort of god is it?"

At the news of the nearby god being one of the strongest, Adam would grin, revealing that his front teeth were gone, giving him a buck-toothed look. "Sweeet."
Gods were a common part of the Imagiverse. They embody, or control, certain aspects of their daily lives, like the sun rising and setting, death, life, the weather, the list goes on. They are so common, in fact, especially in the Discworld, that it had come to a point when believing in them seemed a waste of effort. It is obvious they exist, and denying their existence brings a sticky end to atheists, so gods are not so much as worshipped as acknowledged. Believing them is much like believing in the milkman.
In Grand Gaia, however, they appear to be different. Whilst the other gods in the Imagiverse aren't too bothered with mortals, gods here are savage, bloodthirsty, power-hungry beings, who seemed to have warred against the mortals for maybe centuries. The idea that a god would dislike mortals wasn't new to the Chosen Ones, as apparent in Evil Hand, the God of Fear, and Caedor, the Blood God, but the thought of a group of gods terrorising an entire world was, to put it lightly, a bit intimidating.
"Wait a minute," said Fancy, who was considering this currently. "I get that you lot are several steps below the gods in the sense of power, but, hope I don't sound stupid saying this, why do these gods want to kill you?"

Listening to Chuza's observation on his position on heroing, Adam thought about how jaded he had become during his time in the Imagiverse. It was just that he had seen things that people would go mad witnessing, malformed abominations that roamed the outer cortex of the Imagiverse, decayed visions of untold suffering and madness, the threat of having everything he knew be reduced to mere threads flapping across the frayed fabric of his reality. It's not that he had gone mad from these revelations - it is practically impossible, his mind is so vacant as to be a vacuum, sucking in any anomalous hysteria and destroying it entirely - it was just that he had gotten rather empty in the process, this being evident, to those who had known him the longest, in his characteristic vacant stare which seems to be directed somewhere thousands of miles away.
"Well, that, and that I've really got nothing to lose," said Adam.
The Chosen Few would receive a pint each of beverage, thanks to the generosity of the sisters. Max, having a liver bigger than his stomach, would down his pint in one go. "So, Vargas," the Robloxian would say, examining his empty pint. "You stood up against some Gods, did ya? By the sounds of them, that must have been demanding, to say the least. I've yet to compare these Gods of yours to the ones we have to deal with. One god, Evil Hand his name is, is the boss of a sort of demon mafia in the Imagiverse. He's, in a way, the godfather of Chaos, taking charge of all the evil in the Imagiverse. Bit of a ponce, though."
"Oh, Evil Hand?" said Fancy. "Yeah, he's-he's an oldie in terms of villains, in fact, he used to be alright, but he found that box, didn't he? The one that held a whole mass of Chaos that would become the Darkness. He opened it, it consumed the central sun of the Imagiverse - after that, they had to make seperate suns for the worlds - and it corrupted him, making him it's leader."
There would be a collective affirmative mutter from the group.