Under normal circumstances, Tony would do his best to fully understand something before trying to destroy it. Not this time, though... the Luxio had had enough already, and so he continued scribbling on the stone floor of his basement.

For years now, some corner of his mind kept tossing around the strangest thoughts - of wearing diapers, of returning to his Shinx form, ...of simply behaving like a tiny kitten. Tony did his best to ignore it all for as long as he could, then actually acted on these thoughts a few times in hopes of satisfying whatever weird curiosity he had. That didn't quite work out - it only became harder to shove those thoughts back into that corner. It was ridiculous - he created and still led a nation from nothing, he didn't have time for this nonsense!

It felt like this stuff had buried itself into the very core of his being - ironically, the Luxio was now hoping for that to be the case.

He stood up and inspected his work - a chalk outline of an elaborate magic circle, large enough for him to comfortably lay down in - to confirm that there were no obvious flaws with it. If he had put everything together right, this construct would theoretically assist him to separate his soul from his body safely, or at least with slightly less risk of suddenly falling unconscious.

Tony felt like that there was nothing more to change in the design, so he promptly activated it. Purplish streams of energy gathered near his outstretched handpaws and flowed down into the complex patterns of the circle; then, when the whole thing was filled, it levitated barely an inch above the floor and began rotating. Now... if he used the circle to grasp... and took a few steps forward...

The Luxio moved, and yet at the same time, he didn't.

He turned around and saw nothing, and yet he was right there in that space.

His soul had been prevented from moving along with his body, and while it wasn't quite visible, he knew exactly where it was, because it was him.

Now... was the babyish stuff embedded this deep? His soul immediately responded to the unspoken (not that it made a difference), vague question, a part of it shifting away from the rest ever-so-slightly. Perfect.

He slowly, carefully started reshaping his soul through thought alone, aiming to separate the 'little' part as cleanly as possible from the rest of it. No matter how he arranged the thing, though, it seemed that the undesirable part was too deeply intertwined, and more than a few perfectly acceptable attributes would have to be caught in the middle... Oh well. It was a perfectly reasonable price to pay, Tony told himself, trying to ignore the sense of impending doom from what he planned to do.

Once the soul was arranged in the best way possible, Tony hesitated, staring into the not-quite-empty space in front of him. He slowly reached to his right, and then in a single motion - he drew a heavily enchanted silver longsword out of nowhere, and slashed at the tenuous 'bridge' between between the parts of his soul with all his force.

The Luxio staggered, immediately feeling - among many other things - the indescribably ominous sensation of a thousand memories becoming irrelevant. He managed to toss his blade aside before collapsing forwards to the floor; he could tell that he wasn't going to stay conscious for much longer, and so he checked his current situation once more.

The part of his soul that he wanted to keep? Just floating there nearby, seeming rather disturbed - of course, it had just been sliced in half.

The circle? It still seemed to be functioning normally, so it should reunite his soul with his body and deactivate itself within a few minutes.

The other piece of his soul? Frankly, the Luxio had no idea, and yet that didn't worry him as much as it should have.

As Tony laid motionless, everything fading around him, it occurred to him that he was supposed to meet with a good friend of his in half-an-hour from now... Oh well. It wasn't uncommon for him to mysteriously disappear for days at a time, and surely being in recovery from splitting his soul would be a better excuse than some of the other stuff? Then everything would be back to normal, but better...



He had no idea how wrong that prediction would be.