YAY! CHAPTER 20!

Thank you all for bearing with me as I steadily work my way through what is turning out to be a very gripping anime. XD Seriously. Cannot stop watching. I was writing this while I waited for episodes to load on the computer (If there are any mistakes, now you know why ;_;).

But anyway! Onto the story itself!

Thanks to RaymondDullstone, Lord Lithos Maitreya, Sir Starll, PKLOVEOMEGA, Mariko Midori, Azura, Foxpilot, Diagon the Uber Lord of Lawlz, Clara the Wolf, Upsilon Four, SgtPeppersLHCB, and Rawkhhawk2.0. Sadly, it's gotten to the point where if I respond to each reviewer individually, this section will simply get too long. Please understand that I mean that as a compliment! I LOVE all of your reviews. They usually make me smile or laugh. Please keep it up; I will read and love them all! I'm going to make some general remarks that most reviewers seemed to write about instead of responding individually (if enough people make a fuss though I might have to go back…): Yes, Marth epically failed when he fell down the hill. He's a talented lad. XD Genevieve IS a jerk, and you all have permission to start an Anti-Genevieve club if you like, but I'm telling you now she won't be around much longer (hooray!). The MouseMaster is exhausted. What else is new? Please regard me kindly and keep it up, even though this section will no longer be as extensive as it used to be!

Disclaimers: None of the SSBB/SSMM/Pokemon/Fire Emblem things belong to me. Neither does Shigeru Miyamoto-Sama. He's actually a real person, thus making him kind of hard to steal.

Please read, enjoy, and then review! I love all of the reviewers and favers!

Chapter 20: The Divide: Part 6

"What did Marth give you?" the red haired boy bellowed at Ike as the latter exited the locker room and waved off the man who had come out with him. Ike recognized him from the stage and made the connection with the note; this must be the 'red haired, easily annoyed' kid that Marth had warned him about. He definitely looked 'easily annoyed' at the moment. He practically had steam coming out of his ears.

"Nothing," Ike shrugged, yanking on the strings of his sweatshirt to make them a bit more even. The kid—Roy—stalked up to him as if he could actually hurt Ike and glared up at him.

Ike couldn't help it; he burst out laughing.

"What's so funny?" Roy snapped.

"I'm sorry," Ike chuckled. "It's just…" He covered his mouth with his hand and bit his lip in an attempt to be polite. "I'm sorry."

"What?" Roy asked irritably, his blue eyes flashing.

"You're just so…short," Ike smirked, gesturing with his hand to the top of Roy's head, which only came up to a little past Ike's shoulder. "I was expecting someone bigger, you know?"

Roy scowled, his face flushing. "Look, just stay the heck away from Sheik, alright?"

Ike blinked. Of all the things he expected, that wasn't it.

How was he supposed to respond to that?

xXx

"Are you sure you're alright?" Quincy's mother fussed over Marth, who was holding an ice compress to his head and sprawled out across one of the living room couches.

"I'm fine," Marth insisted, trying to get up for the seventh or eighth time only to be gently pushed back down again. "Really. I've had much worse, you don't need to worry. I once broke three ribs during the war and I wasn't treated with the same kindness then as you've given me now for a little bruise."

Quincy's mother grinned, suddenly quite taken with her son's friend, and finally left him and Quincy alone as she went back into the kitchen.

"You have a nice mom," Marth said lightly as he sat up and tossed the ice pack onto the coffee table.

Quincy squirmed, embarrassed. "She's always been kind of clingy."

"Don't worry about it," Marth shrugged, propping his elbows up on his knees as he shot a glance towards the doorway. "Do you think your mom would let you come with me later today?"

"Why…?" Quincy asked.

The Altean grinned. "We're getting back into Brawl, my friend. But we need a large group of people so I wanted to get as many people as I know in on this as possible. I tried going to Roy first, but you probably saw how that worked out, didn't you?"

Quincy shook his head. "No, we don't get Brawl out here anymore. Our cable got knocked out about a month ago by a Skarmory with a broken wing."

Marth looked hopelessly lost, his cobalt eyes uncomprehending.

"A very big bird ran into our antenna," Quincy simplified, making gestures with his hands to help elaborate. He mimicked an explosion. "No more TV."

"Oh," Marth laughed, and then stood up to stretch. "Well, the point is that things are screwed up and I want you to help sort them out. Will you come?"

"Of course!" Quincy enthused. "Just let me grab my bag, we can go right away!"

"No we can't," Marth sighed. "We have to wait until all the fuss has died down at the stadium. Then we'll go."

"Fuss?" Quincy echoed, sitting down on the couch.

Marth laughed to himself. "Yeah. There was a bit of an issue between myself and the lovely Genevieve. You remember her?"

Quincy had burst into bitter laughter at the phrase 'lovely Genevieve.'

"You're going to get back at her, right?" he asked vehemently.

Marth shrugged and tried to lace his fingers behind his head before remembering his bruise and cringing. "We'll have to see how things work out."

xXx

"Look," Ike told Roy, thinking that he had to convince this little kid they were on the same side ASAP. "Whatever it is with you and Sheik, I don't care." He waved his hands in the air and continued to speak quickly when he saw Roy's face harden. "Which isn't saying that I'm going to completely ignore you. You were here first, okay? I get that. You have first dibs."

Roy looked pleased with that.

"But you need to get what I'm saying now, kid."

"Don't call me 'kid!'" Roy blurted.

"Fine!" Ike snapped. "Frankly, I could care less about you right now. I don't care if you hate me. I don't care if you love Sheik. At the moment, I don't care that I love Sheik—and I'll remind you that you're…what, thirteen years old? Fourteen?"

"Fifteen."

"There is no way," Ike whistled. Roy's eyes sparked. "But my point is that nothing is set in stone at all, okay? None of that matters at the moment. You can challenge me to a rival's brawl or something after all this is over and you can try to beat me up and steal the girl all for yourself. I don't care. What matters now is getting rid of Genevieve so we can all get our lives back! You haven't been here for longer than five minutes, so how the heck do you know what's going on? Maybe you're a ruthless backstabbing teenager, but I'm not!" Ike was startled to hear how much emotion he was putting into his words. He was almost shouting. This whole Genevieve thing had been bothering him more than he thought. "I came here because I wanted a break of all that. I wanted a place where I could do what I was good at without worrying about hurting people—and now they want us to hurt people! Are you honestly okay with that? If someone handed you a sword and told you to slash at someone—at Sheik—with the intention of cutting them to ribbons could you do it?"

For once, Roy didn't have a snappy answer.

"Of course you couldn't," Ike whispered, starting to wind down. "Because Marth's said that you're a good kid."

Roy suddenly couldn't seem to make eye contact and lowered his gaze to the floor.

"Look," Ike said, alarmed to hear his own voice shake a little. "I know you didn't want to leave this place. It's a great place. I get that now. But this is not the same place you left, okay? I'm not asking you to like me. I'm not asking you to let me take your place. I'm asking you to make your own place again. I'm asking you, Roy, to help me make Brawl what it was again, so you can enjoy the real thing."

Roy blinked, still at a loss for words. His hands were clenched at his sides.

"So will you help me?" Ike asked quietly, and offered the Fire Emblem boy his hand.

xXx (AN: and thus a wonderful friendship was born!...Or not. XD *shot*)

Samus had basically locked herself in her room for a week, only coming out for meals and brawls. She stayed in her room mainly because she didn't see much point in coming out, secondly because so long as she was in her room, she could make sure that no one else came in her room.

"Can you at least talk to me?" she asked that night, crouching down to the slumped figure curled up next to her bed. "Are you doing okay?"

Pit looked up at her despondently, his eyes hollow-looking and blank. Something flickered deep inside of them, and he seemed to muster a great amount of strength to sigh, "I'm alright."

Samus tucked a strand of hair behind her shoulder as she sat down cross-legged next to the angel. His room had been across the hallway from hers. She heard him screaming in the night and, after checking to see if the hallway was clear of undesirables, ducked into his room to see what was wrong. Since then, he had sort of been hibernating in her room. Almost completely catatonic. She hadn't gotten him to tell her exactly what had happened yet, but she couldn't bring herself to kick him out. If he wanted to sleep on the floor all day, that was fine with her. It gave her someone to talk to, even though she was sure that he wasn't really listening.

Something flipped underneath her door. Standing up and absently tugging on the hem of her tank-top to roll it down past the top of her pajama shorts (it kept riding up), she could see that it was a piece of white paper. Great. More announcements.

She reached over to her bedside table and picked up her set of heavy duty, sound-canceling headphones and snapped them over her ears, reducing the rest of the world to a dull buzz of static. Her hands automatically sought out her MP3 player and pressed the 'shuffle songs' button as she forced herself to crouch down next to the door to try and pry the note away from her carpet without tearing up her nails.

Unfortunately, the first random song her MP3 dragged up was one that Marth had recommended to her; 'Grace Kelly.' With a soft yelp, she yanked off the headphones and sent them skittering against the floor, where they banged against Pit's leg. He looked up, but he was too exhausted to be surprised—he hadn't gotten more than three consecutive hours of sleep the entire week.

Scowling at her mutinous music player, she finally got the note in her hands and tugged down on her tank-top again so as not to accidentally moon the angel lying unresponsive behind her. The first word of the note was enough to make her heart skip.

'Marth says we're getting out of this. He says we have to be ready to move at any time. Be ready. If you want to get rid of the counselors and the stupid rules, then trust him. Doesn't matter if you hate him or love him or don't know him at all—he's got some idea. Be ready to move if you want things to be back to normal.'

The cryptic note was typewritten, but there was something written underneath in a handwriting that Samus thought was Ike's but couldn't be sure—his and Link's handwriting were remarkably similar. 'Marth says hi, "Sam." ;) What's all that about?'

Samus slid back onto the floor, unsure what to feel.

"What is it?" Pit asked weakly.

"He says we have to move…whatever that means," Samus said, crumpling the note up in her palm.

xXx

"Sooo…." Quincy was saying as he blew into his cold hands and took the video camera that Marth offered him. The whole device had been rewired courtesy of one Professor Oak, one of Quincy's parents' friends, and now it was hooked up to a laptop that Marth had propped up on his knee. The glow from the screen made his face look paler than it already was in the twilight. They were camped out just below the Brawl stadium, putting final touches on what Marth assured Quincy would be a fairly easy plan to execute. Quincy found that sort of hard to believe, considering that Marth had been on the phone for the majority of the afternoon, speaking in rapid-fire Japanese to at least ten different people. Any time not spent on the phone was spent peering over Professor Oak's shoulder and asking questions.

"So what?" he asked testily—he had been getting increasingly more anxious as the day wore on.

"So what do you need me for?" Quincy asked meekly. "You obviously have a better idea what you're doing."

"I'm doing the talking, you're doing the recording. You're my camera guy. I can't do both," Marth explained. "Some people need to see this."

"'Some people?'" Quincy asked as he yanked his baseball cap off one to run his hands through naturally spiked hair. "What are you going to do?"

"I'm proving to the higher-ups that their 'trinkets' aren't responding well to the new leadership."

Quincy rubbed absently at the still swollen shadow on his cheek, wondering if Pit and Pikachu were still okay. "How are you doing—Oh! With the video camera!"

"Exactly," Marth nodded, pleased that Quincy had gotten it. "But you have to understand that this is all extremely last minute. I had originally planned to stage a protest or something, but considering the fact that Roy went by the way of Benedict Arnold, I couldn't do that anymore. We need complete cooperation for this to make the right impact."

"But from what you said it sounded like Roy's not going to cooperate at all," Quincy protested.

"Roy's not an idiot," Marth said, then cracked a grin and revised. "Not a complete idiot, anyway. He'll have realized how bad things are from the moment he stepped inside. Or someone will have initiated him—hopefully in a very rude and eye-opening way. The twerp deserves it. But now the protest idea won't work as well, seeing as Roy joined their little party about eight hours ago. Now we're doing a combination of two things."

"Which are…?"

"A walkout and poetic justice," Marth grinned, his teeth flashing in the light from his computer screen. He stood up and shifted the laptop to his left arm as he picked up a long coil of what looked like rope. "You swear this will work?"

"It's an escape rope," Quincy nodded. "If we can get it up to the stadium somehow, it'll pull us up. I've seen these things take the weight of a Snorlax before and be totally fine."

Marth pretended to know what a Snorlax was and internally wished that Quincy would stop using references that he didn't understand. It wasn't like he blabbed on about Dracoknights and battle strategies all day. "Right. Take out your Char-whatchamacallit, please. It's going to have to fly the rope up there to latch onto one of the window sills."

"Got it," Quincy nodded, suddenly feeling very espionage-y as he pulled out Charizard's Poke Ball and chucked it at the ground at a precise angle so that it released the pokemon as it struck the ground and then bounced back into his hand. He gave Charizard the rope to hold in its hands and—when Charizard briefly refused to move—kicked the pokemon's side softly.

"Isn't that animal abuse or something?" Marth asked as the larger pokemon took flight into the dark sky.

"Nah," Quincy shrugged. "Just Ball-sleepiness. They don't like moving immediately after being released if they don't have to."

Marth nodded, watching the rope uncoil as his feet as the pokemon flew it higher. "So you're absolutely positive this thing will hold our weight?" he asked for the second time.

Quincy shot Marth a surprised look, and then said in a voice of mock horror, "Marth! I never would have guessed the Prince of Altea to be scared of heights!"

"Oh shut up."

xXx

Ike finished shoving the little slips of the paper under everyone's door and leaned against the wall at the end of the hallway, wondering what else he could do to speed things along. He had no idea when Marth would be coming. It could be in another week, or it could be in the next thirty seconds. Who knew?

He started to turn around to go back to his room to brainstorm when he bashed into someone's head.

"Jeez, I'm sorr—" he started to say, then recognized curly red hair and continued with, "Actually, no I'm really not."

Genevieve held up a slip of white paper in-between her fingers. "So what's this, Ike? Just something you thought you'd do for kicks?"

Ike enjoyed a moment of blissful detachment—he honestly didn't care what she did to him anymore. "Whose door did you get that from? I hope they read it first."

"Don't worry," Roy said, stepping out from behind Genevieve. "I did."

Ike scowled.

"Really, Ike," Genevieve murmured, taking a step closer and officially putting herself inside Ike's personal bubble. "Why must you make so much trouble? It's getting ridiculous."

"Really, do you mind?" he snapped, all but shoving her away from him. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed a few Brawlers filing silently out into the hallway behind the newly traitorous Roy, but he no longer cared.

He tried to push past her, not seeing her hand flash towards his face when he did so. He recognized the movement an instant too late and staggered back against the wall, his hand flying up to block a hand that had already cracked across his cheek.

Ike wasn't sure what he had expected when Genevieve slapped him. An angry mob maybe? At the very least, he had expected someone to shout something—preferably something profane. But there was just silence.

"See, Ike?" Genevieve said, her flushed face smug. "They all have moved on, accepting the problem. But you're so stubborn that you can't. Or maybe it's not a question of stubborn-ness, maybe it's a question of intelligence, hm?"

"If Ike is stubborn, what does that make me?" Roy suddenly barked, making Genevieve turn around in surprise.

"I mean," Roy continued harshly. "At least Ike knows that what he's doing is worth being stubborn for. But me? I'm just an idiot." He smiled softly. "So I guess all I can do is try to change, right?"

Genevieve blanched.

Ike blinked, unable to process what he was hearing as he cupped a hand to his stinging face.

"Smile, Genevieve," Roy whispered. "You're live in Japan."

And then he stepped aside to reveal Quincy, and the video camera he was holding with the little red light pulsing gently on the side. Quincy let go of the recorder to make a hand gesture that a kid his age probably shouldn't know (he learned from Marth), waggling the offending fingers as he cackled evilly behind the camera.

Genevieve made a sound sort of like the sound a cat makes when unexpectedly thrown into the bathtub.

"Say hi," Quincy suggested.

"You should actually say 'konnichiwa,'" Marth said, stepping out from behind Ganondorf, holding a laptop with a live feed from the camera shown on the screen. "And then, I might suggest that you continue with 'gomenasai, Miyamoto-Dono'? It means, 'I'm very sorry—'"

"I know what it means!" Genevieve spat.

Marth smiled slyly as he stepped in front of the camera, spreading his arms wide as he addressed the internet audience. "Good evening, Sir." He sketched a small bow towards the camera. "I think that after that little demonstration…" He gestured vaguely towards Ike, who was still standing up against the wall. "…We are all ready to begin."

Yep. I loved writing Quincy's mom and Marth talking. XD It was fun. And the whole Ike/Roy thing was entertaining too...And Marth is secretly afraid of heights! Who would have thought? ;P

The next chapter will be the last one. I figured that this whole mess started with a Marth monologue, so I'm ending it with one as well. I'm sorry if it seemed to wrap up a little too quickly, but I was ready to be done with this thing. ;_; Forgive me.

Please review!