Chapter 35 – April

It took time for the winter to retract its claws and let spring take over, but when spring arrived it arrived with a vengeance.

When Maria stepped out of the Shack and into a morning that smelled of living green things and pollen, she knew that she had to go and check the berry trees she had planted at the end of last summer.

Being mid-April, they had to be ready to produce a crop by now. And produce berries quickly.

Maria stepped off the porch and into the muddy mess of melting snow, growing grass, and overwatered dirt.

Maria lifted a foot and shook off the mud that was clinging to the sole of 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."

Across the clearing, boots squelched into the earth, and Maria looked over. She blinked when she saw Sixer looking down at the mud on his boots. He must have seen her step out of the Shack and followed suit, or he had plans of his own today.

She wondered if he ever did have plans of his own.

"Hey, Sixer." Maria walked over, taking big steps in order to pick up as little mud as possible while Sixer's tails rose up to hover above his knees. "I'm heading out to check on the berry trees; I think they might be getting ready to drop some berries soon."

Sixer didn't offer an answer at first. He looked…well, Maria guessed that he was worried, from how his brow was furrowing.

The look on his face caused her to frown a little. "Is…something wrong, Sixer?"

"I just…" Sixer paused. "What you said before. About…how many times have you been taken?"

The question felt like it was coming out of the blue. "Taken?"

"No longer in control of your actions." The look on Sixer's face didn't change.

Ah.

Maria hadn't given him all the details, had she?

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."

"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."

"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, which Maria found to be a good thing. "The first incident happened right after I left the Pokémon world, in the next dimension that I arrived in."

"S-so soon?" Sixer sounded surprised.

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

To think that she had ever been that young felt impossible now, but her physical form spoke more of the truth in that than anything else.

"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, wondering if Sixer was going to ask something, but when he didn't, she kept going.

"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."

Sixer made a soft noise of understanding. 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 weak like 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."

Thinking back on it, she could feel the phantom pains of electricity running up and down her spine, her senses failing, her mind growing fuzzy…then nothing.

The blankness that had followed while standing and waiting between orders now made her horrified.

"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.

"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. If there were blooms or berries, Maria couldn't tell – not at just a glance.

"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?"

"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."

Being stuck in a lab with them plugging things into her neck while keeping her submerged in a water-filled tank had not been her idea of pleasant. Especially since she'd turned the water to steam near the end, right before they cryofroze her, damaged inner workings and all. Waking up to find a Mind Tech'd Captain America had not been a good memory for her.

"…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."

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."

Considering that she didn't like the idea of being controlled by anyone anymore, and she was much more capable of handling herself, it made sense that eventually the program would adapt and become something else.

Especially after how the MindTech had torn through her systems.

Sixer was frowning now. "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." Sixer looked like he wasn't sure what to think of that.

"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."

She heard the mud squelch behind her as she walked up to one of the trees. Sixer's footsteps were a little less certain than hers. She put the baskets down on either side of the tree and looked up the trunk at the branches.

"…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."

That wasn't what Maria had been expecting to hear.

"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."

Maria nodded, frowning. "Yeah. Either they're changed, killed, or stuck in Cipher's throne room like trophies." That was a grim thought. "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.

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, somehow looking like he was…in awe? "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.

"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.