Chapter 25 – April

Sixer watched as the snow melted over the next few months, leaving the deep green of the pine trees to bleed down into the earth as the grass started to show itself again. He got the feeling that Pine was helping the plants grow quickly, but he decided against asking. What Pine did was his business, and Mizar was likely encouraging him to see if he could make spring come sooner.

That didn't make the ground any less muddy, unfortunately.

Sixer looked down at the mud from where he stood on the porch. If he was going to see what Maria wanted with being out today – and talk to her about what was troubling him – he was going to have to get his boots dirty.

He did not think it wise to let that anywhere near his tails, however.

Maria shook the mud off her boots. "Man; I hope the berry trees didn't get too overwatered. I may have to replant and dig a trench to make sure that they don't get oversaturated or something."

Sixer stepped onto the squelching ground, making a face as his boots sank a little into the mud. He raised his tails up to about knee-height, rather than letting the tips settle around his ankles – no way was he going to let them go that low.

"Hey, Sixer."

Sixer looked up while Maria walked over, taking big strides off the clearing. It was a wonder she didn't lose her balance.

Maria stopped in front of him. "I'm heading out to check on the berry trees; I think they might be getting ready to drop some berries soon." She frowned when she saw the look on his face. "Is…something wrong, Sixer?"

"I just…" Sixer paused. This question had been bothering him for some time. He needed to word this right. "What you said before. About…how many times have you been taken?"

Maria looked a little surprised. "Taken?"

"No longer in control of your actions."

Maria's expression shifted slightly. She motioned for him to follow her. "How long have you been curious about that?"

Sixer shrugged as he fell into step behind her. His tails were high enough that they weren't going to get dirtied by any mud that might be kicked up as they walked. "I'm not sure. It's been something I have been thinking about a little since you said that the Dark Arms had done the same to you."

He probably would have asked her back in December, but…he hadn't felt like it was okay to pry, back then.

"This has been bothering you since late last year?" Maria looked at him in surprise. "And you didn't think to ask before now? Why?"

Sixer ducked his head a little. "I…wasn't sure if it was a question I was able to ask."

Maria's expression softened. "While it isn't a part of my past that I like to talk about very often, I would have let you know if I didn't want to talk about it if you had asked."

"Oh."

He…supposed, that made sense.

His ears started to droop. Did that mean that Maria wasn't going to tell him?

"But that doesn't mean I'm not going to answer your question. You of all people deserve to know, considering what you're going through."

Sixer's ears perked up from their slowly-drooping position at Maria's words. The surprise on his face caused Maria to smile a little.

"I think you should know first that the Dark Arms weren't the first people to make the attempt and succeed," Maria began as they walked through the trees. The area smelled of rain and wet, growing things. It felt like an entirely new smell to Sixer, but…at the same time, it stirred some old memories of Gravity Falls in him. "The first incident happened right after I left the Pokémon world, in the next dimension that I arrived in."

"S-so soon?" Sixer was surprised.

Maria nodded. "I was seventeen then; I was sixteen when I met you at the Guild."

To be so young, and already traveling across dimensions with the weight of saving worlds on her shoulders…it sounded almost impossible.

"The world is one that I'm familiar with because of video games – my brother used to play a lot of them and had picked up this one at some point. Basically, this dimension had a lot of problems with robot uprisings because of a man named Albert Wily, a genius roboticist who was constantly at odds with a former colleague, Thomas Light. I arrived during a rebellion in the later years, when Wily was starting to lose his mind. I learned before I got nabbed that it was probably due to him using a certain kind of teleportation that wasn't safe for human use."

Maria paused for a moment, letting Sixer absorb that.

A civil war of sorts between two rivals in robotics.

A part of him wondered if Fiddleford was ever going to end up in a similar situation.

"When I got there, I ended up getting caught by surprise by one of his robots – a humanoid one who threw buzzsaws at people. He…got me pretty badly. I was able to melt him down to slag, but the cost was high – I almost died from the combined energy exhaustion and the blood loss. I'm lucky that MegaMan – one of Light's earliest creations and his surrogate son – was in the area. He brought me back to Light's lab and…well, they saved my life, but at a cost."

So that's how it had happened.

Sixer made a soft "Ah." When Maria looked at him curiously, he elaborated, "That's why you're no longer human."

Maria nodded. "Yeah. As much as that means I'm no longer physically weaklike one, though, that doesn't mean that I'm strong against everything. I ended up gaining weaknesses to other things in the process. Like the idea of reprogramming a robot to suit your needs." Her expression went grim. "Wily didn't know I'd been human, so when he attempted to…turn me to his side in the only way he knew how, it…it wasn't pleasant."

Sixer didn't have to imagine what Maria was alluding to. There was likely a lot of pain involved.

"I'm lucky that a few friends stepped in to help Light reverse the problem," Maria continued. "And that I apparently had built-in defenses. I can be forced to make a portal into another dimension when in that state, but it only creates a window like when I attempted to go back into your timeline. A couple allies saw the window and made a one-way portal to Light's dimension and helped him reverse the program's effects. Most of them, anyway – I've got pieces of it left up in here, but they redid it into a defense mechanism."

Maria tapped the side of her head while Sixer's eyes widened. They had managed to turn her curse into something else?

…could the same be done with his?

But that didn't explain—

"If it's a defense mechanism…then how were the Dark Arms able to do what they did?" Sixer asked.

"Well, it turns out that the Defense Protocol only jumps to action when the invading program in question wants to wipe out something that makes me me, or tries to get me to do something that I wouldn't do under normal circumstances."

They reached the clearing with the berry trees as Maria spoke, their boots now caked in mud. The trees were small compared to the pine trees around them, but the leaves were fully green.

"So the Dark Arms found ways to circumvent that…until they tried to make me kill my brother," Maria continued.

Sixer sucked in a breath. "Your family was involved in this as well?"

This was really the first time that she had mentioned family being involved in her World Jumping endeavors directly. She mentioned that a brother had played games similar to a world she accessed, but…this was different.

"Just my older brother, but…yeah. He was on one of the worlds that the Dark Arms fused with other ones. He'd been doing some work there at the time and…well, the Dark Arms didn't think they needed another World Jumper when they found out he could do the same thing that I could." Maria frowned. "I've always been against being the one to take another person's life, especially since I started World Jumping when I was 16, so that on top of the thought of killing my own brother helped me snap out of their control and gain an immunity to their tech in the process. If they try to pull the Mind Tech thing on me again, they're going to get booted out of my head in a matter of seconds. They tried to take me back enough times for me to know that."

Tried – oh no.

"…which is why they were interested in what had been done to us," Sixer said slowly. "Because they wanted to know what had been done so that they could find a way around those defenses."

Maria's expression sobered. "Yeah. They'd be the first ones to try something like that, but not the second to try and take me back. Wily and I crossed paths a few months after I'd left his dimension. He tried to take me back and reactivate the Protocol's original programming, but a friend of mine intervened. The Protocol had this weird quirk back then of latching onto people I trusted and having them take control for a bit, if they knew the activation codes. It felt a bit restricting, but it never got as bad as how it was with Wily."

…what? That was possible?

Sixer stared at Maria. "You trusted people enough to put yourself in that position?"

"If I had to. You can ask Stanford about it – I actually let him activate it when I first met him in order to prove I was trustworthy. That was before I ran into the Dark Arms, and before he got home. After the World Collision, though, the Protocol stopped doing that. I guess it's just defensive now, after what happened."

Stanford knew about this?

That was…

…but who else?

Sixer frowned. "How many others?"

"For the Protocol, you mean?"

Sixer nodded.

"Well, Captain America was the first – he was there when Wily tried to take me back." Maria started ticking the names off on her fingers. "Then there was…Optimus Prime, when he was suffering from momentary memory loss – he's a Cybertronian, one of these big mechanical aliens who can transform into vehicles. Same for Wildfire, who is a close friend and may as well be family…and then my cousin Joshua and Stanford. Those are the only people who have really made use of it, and out of all of them Joshua's done it a couple of times." Maria made a face. "He had a thing about trying to keep me from being reckless. I didn't exactly like how he went about it."

"Oh."

That was the second family relative she'd mentioned. First a brother, now a cousin…and this cousin had no qualms about taking the reins.

He wasn't sure he wanted to meet this Joshua.

"Got any other questions?" Maria pulled a couple large, cylindrical wicker baskets out from under her jacket, then marched over to one of the closest berry trees and looked up. "I can answer them as I check the trees to see if there are any berries already."

Sixer hesitated, then followed after her, being a bit more careful in how he walked across the muddy earth.

The other thing he was troubled by – he should tell her that now too.

"…Cipher has more Henchmaniacs than just the ones Fiddleford asked about."

Maria paused, one hand on the trunk. "Do you mean, he's always had more, or something else?" She glanced back at Sixer.

Sixer's tails fidgeted. "He made deals with others. Their loyalty for whatever power they chose."

Every single person who entered the Fearamid with that in mind came out…different. Chaotic, but loyal. Those who didn't go in for a deal were either forced into one or…given a different, but still terrible fate.

"He willingly picked up more minions?" Maria's eyebrows rose. "I'd have thought that he was content with the numbers he had already."

Sixer shrugged helplessly. "Like I knew what was going through his head. He could have been attempting to gain more minions for his invasion into later dimensions for all I know."

"That certainly does seem likely." Maria leaned against the tree behind her, frowning. "But looking for willing people – I'd think they were more desperate. Joining with Cipher was probably their only way to survive the apocalypse, and after being changed…I bet they didn't even think if their families anymore, much less who they were."

"That was the case, from what I remember," Sixer replied. "He…every deal made to give someone those abilities turned them into something that was no longer human. I don't know if there is anyone left alive who is still who they used to be."

It was a grim thought, considering the state his dimension was more than likely is.

Maria nodded, frowning. "Yeah. Either they're changed, killed, or stuck in Cipher's throne room like trophies." That was a grim thought, but a truthful one. "What about the dimensions that were added on after yours?"

"I never saw them after the initial assault. He…he kept us out of the way, when he…." Sixer trailed off, his voice becoming quiet. He was always kept up in the throne room, after the initial barging in. Kept as a sign of what happened to people who tried to turn against Cipher.

…among other things.

Maria's gaze hardened. "When Cipher's been taken care of, I'm checking on those worlds. Weirdmageddon was reversed without doing any permanent damage to Gravity Falls here; maybe the same is true for the dimensions you were forced to invade."

"Do you truly think that there's a chance what has been done could be undone?"

Maria blinked at Sixer's question, then nodded. "Yeah. I do. It might not be the same when all is said and done, if it can return to how it was before, it will." She smiled a little, but there was a fire in her eyes. "We just have to take care of Cipher first. Then everything else should be okay."

Sixer blinked, eyes widening in awe. She was this focused that everything was going to be all right? But how? "Is it because of your experience with the Continuum Shift that you know this?"

"Partially. I also had the chance to watch what happened to Stanford's Gravity Falls, but with his events portrayed as a cartoon. As soon as Cipher was defeated in Stanley's mind – and Stanford wiped Stanley's mind with the memory gun – Cipher's minions were pulled back through the rift, which sealed shut behind them. And then the world just…went back to normal." Maria shrugged. "I'd say there's a pretty good chance it could happen for your dimension and the others affected, too."

Sixer considered that, then nodded. He could see how that might make sense.

Then there was a chance his world could return to normal – at least in form. He wasn't so sure about the people who might have made deals with Cipher.

"Come on. I think at least some of these trees might be ripe, so let's have a look-see and get some of them taken back to the Shack." Maria turned and started to climb the berry tree that she had been leaning against.

"Didn't you say you would leave half for the members of the forest to take?" Sixer asked as he approached the base of the tree.

"Yup! And that's still the plan! I just need to get a portion of the berries from each of the trees and we'll leave the rest for the other creatures to take until the next time the berries are ripe. Or until I run low in my supply, one of the two."

Collecting the berries didn't take more than a few hours. By the time the two were done, there were muddy footprints all over the tree trunks and more than a few baskets filled with different kinds of berries.

Maria made it a point to leave the rest of the berries on the branches so that wild creatures could reach them, rather than plucking them off and leaving them on the ground.

As she and Sixer left the clearing, she saw the Multibear waddle in, rubbing the sleep out of the eyes of one if its bear heads.

"Go for that one!" Maria pointed at one of the trees with purple-blue berries. "Chesto Berries are a natural wake-up call!"

Multibear snorted and looked over in surprise at her voice, then looked over at the tree. He grunted and started towards it.

Maria grinned, then looked at Sixer, who was watching the Multibear with an expression of curiosity.

"I wonder how many heads his parents had," Sixer said.