Chapter 20 – Couch Discussion
The elevator at the back of the Avengers Tower lobby ended up going higher than Sixer had expected, and being in an enclosed space for that long with six other people was a bit tight.
"So, are you a metahuman?" Gear asked, watching Sixer's tails flick around in the tight space. "Or do you have another name for mutated DNA in humans in your dimension?"
"A-ah—" Sixer blinked at the question. "I…wouldn't say that I'm human. Are you at all familiar with tales of a creature called a kitsune?"
"Kitsune, kitsune…." Gear tried out the word a couple times. "Nope! Can't say I'm familiar with it. You hear anything like that, V?"
"Can't say I –" Static paused. "Waaaait, wasn't there a monster collecting game that had a creature based off that? Some kinda Asian-based monster that does stuff with will-o-wisps and plays tricks on people?"
"Oh yeah…there was that thing. I'd almost forgotten about that!" Static nodded.
Sixer frowned in confusion at the two of them. "…yes, that is essentially it."
Maria noticed his confusion and nudged slightly. "V' is a variation on Static's real name. You'll probably get properly introduced in a bit."
"Ah." Sixer relaxed slightly.
The elevator came to a stop, and the doors slid open, revealing a man with a glowing triangle of tech sitting in the middle of the short-sleeved shirt he was wearing. Next to him stood a teenager who looked like he was about ready to murder somebody if they so much as looked at him the wrong way.
"I don't see anybody looking at me like they want to convert me," the man commented. "Is that a good thing, or are you planning on ambushing us and brainwashing us in our beds tonight?"
Sixer pulled back sharply while Captain America shook his head.
"We took care of the problem, Stark. Thankfully, someone happened to be in radar, and I was able to call her in." Captain America stepped out of the elevator, giving the two a clear view of Maria, Vash and Sixer.
Stark's eyes widened in surprise, and his expression brightened. "Well, whaddaya know, the kid's back in town." His gaze moved to Sixer, and a frown came across his face. "And she brought a guy who looks like the cult kook."
"I'm a counterpart of his," Sixer said. "Call me Sixer, if it helps you tell us apart."
"Uh-huh." Stark eyed Sixer. "Where'd Maria pick you up from?"
"Part of a long story that Strange wants to know about." Maria stepped out of the elevator, followed by Static and Gear. Sixer followed after her. "Hey, Bruce."
"Were you drawn here because of Rogers' call, or are you here because we will be having more difficulties in the future?" the teenager next to Stark asked.
"Actually, I'm here because I wanted to talk to Strange about something that I need help with."
Bruce Wayne raised an eyebrow, then looked at Sixer as the kitsune moved past him. "That's a first."
Sixer met the young man's gaze for a moment and frowned at the age that hid behind the young man's eyes.
The floor they'd stepped into looked like a large sitting room, and judging by the windows, it was pretty high up the tower.
"Hey, kids, you know the rules – no masks up here!" Stark called after Static and Gear.
"Yeah, yeah." Static pulled the mask off his face. Gear removed his visor, then pulled out a pair of glasses and set them on his nose. "So, are you gonna get into that story you wanted to tell us about, Maria?"
"In a second, I'd like to get Sixer properly introduced first." Maria motioned for Sixer to follow her over to a large sitting area where two other figures already were – a blond-haired young man, a black-haired young man who looked like a skinny twig in comparison to the first. "Hey Thor, Loki."
Sixer spluttered in surprise as the two looked over.
A grin broke across Thor's face immediately. "Maria! It is good to see you!" He rose from a U-shaped couch and grabbed Maria in a hug, then looked over at Sixer curiously. "And who is your friend? Loki! Look who Maria has brought with her!"
"I see him." Loki rose from the couch and approached Maria and Sixer as Thor released his hug. "This is an interesting day, if you have brought a kitsune into our presence. What brought the two of you together?"
Sixer glanced at Maria at the question. "It's…complicated."
"Isn't it always?" Loki looked like he was about to smile, but then a frown appeared there instead. "Something's wrong."
Before Maria or Sixer could move to react, Loki had grabbed Sixer's wrist and held a hand over it, muttering a few quick words.
When the flame tattoos appeared despite Sixer's attempts to remove his hand from Loki's grip, the entire room seemed to freeze.
Loki looked up slowly and met Sixer's uneasy expression with a cold one of his own. "Maria, I should hope that you have an explanation for this. Kitsune aren't spirits that are meant to be bound in this manner."
Maria was between them immediately, one hand on Sixer's arm as she met Loki's gaze with a guarded expression of her own. "That's part of the reason why I'm here, actually, and it's apparently somewhat connected to the little cultist problem you were having before I got here."
Loki's grip loosened on Sixer's wrist, letting Sixer get his arm out of the trickster god's grip. Maria let go of Sixer's arm at the same time. "Is it, now? And how is it connected to that?"
"If Zealot hadn't shown up and attempted to claim this dimension for his Cipher, there might have been a chance that someone else had," Sixer replied. "If Maria hadn't intervened before then."
Loki's eyebrows rose while Thor frowned. "Well then. Are you going to tell us more?"
"That's the plan," Maria replied. She moved over and sat down on the couch and looked around at the others present. When they slowly moved to sit on the opposite side of the couch that she was on, Sixer went and sat next to her. Vash, who had been quietly watching the conversation, sat down on her other side.
Maria smiled up at the two in thanks, then turned her attention to the rest.
"Okay, so Sixer and I… ran into each other about a year and a half ago. I'd just helped a couple wanderers get back to their dimension when he and his family showed up. Turns out, the same demon who was trying to get his cult here had a counterpart who thought it would be a good idea to basically enslave Sixer and his family." Maria glanced over at Sixer. "Although, you should be telling the details of that, if you're comfortable with it. It's your history."
Sixer's ears pulled back slightly, but he nodded a little. When he looked back at the group, he met Loki's frowning gaze, then the guarded expressions of Wayne, Stark, and Strange, and the openly curious looks from Thor, Static, and Gear.
"To understand fully what my dimension fell prey to, I should probably start with how Bill Cipher and I crossed paths. To put it simply, I was young and naïve, and the demon took advantage of that. But that is not where this occurred." He motioned to his ears.
"You were…not born a kitsune?" Thor asked.
Sixer shook his head. "No. I wasn't. Cipher…well, I found out his true intentions after my assistant stumbled across something that likely wasn't meant to be seen. I called my brother in to assist me in stopping the demon in the only way I knew how, but unfortunately…I ended up getting pushed through an unstable portal of my own design and out into the multiverse, where I was on the run from Cipher and any bounty hunter who heard of my existence."
"Bounty hunters?" Static repeated.
"What kind of bounty did you have?" Gear asked.
"…Cipher put an entire galaxy on my head," Sixer replied carefully.
The group stared at him.
Loki whistled. "Impressive. You must have done something that really annoyed him."
"Not letting a dream demon out of his dying dimension and into mine will do that." Sixer's tails flicked uncomfortably at the stares from the others. "And continuing to live through thirty years of inter-dimensional travel while attempting to find a way to stophim only made him continually annoyed with me. And then…my brother reactivated the portal in an attempt to bring me home, unknowingly causing a rift that Cipher could use to break into my dimension. I…tried to do what I could to seal it, but it wasn't enough."
"He broke into your dimension?" Static winced. "Geez. How bad was it?"
"He threw physics out the window and made everything that had sense to it make no sense." Sixer's ears pulled back. "For a time, he was confined to just the town that we happened to be in at the time – Gravity Falls, in Oregon. It…It wasn't until we attempted to banish Cipher that he finally decided to make his move."
Maria looked at Sixer worriedly, and when he didn't say anything else, Maria said carefully, "Cipher changed Sixer, his twin brother, and their niece and nephew into different magical beings. And at the same time, he…he basically bound them to him. They couldn't do anything against him, and he used that to his advantage."
"He took over other dimensions," Wayne said shortly.
Sixer nodded.
"But clearly, that is no longer the case," Strange commented. "I assume Maria was the one who brought a change to the status quo, but how did that occur? You mentioned you were bringing people home when you met him, Maria?"
"Yeah. A counterpart of Sixer and his twin. I wasn't expecting to have extra trouble on top of a possible Cipher trying to make Weirdmageddon happen, but...well, it made me remember how I was during the whole Dark Arms debacle." Maria shuddered slightly.
The simultaneous wince that went through the others caused Sixer to stiffen in surprise.
"You were…you were there for that?" Sixer asked in surprise.
Gear nodded. "Maria, uh, kinda almost killed me and her brother before she was shaken back to her senses? So you were that bad?"
Sixer sank back into the couch. "...unfortunately."
Maria gave Sixer a concerned look and rested a hand on his shoulder, then looked back at the others. "A year after that, Cipher broke into the dimension we were in – a second Gravity Falls. The Dark Arms were involved."
"You have got to be kidding," Stark said flatly. "I thought those damn monsters had died when you hit the reset button."
Maria glanced at Sixer. "Well…apparently not."
Sixer nodded slightly. "We…saw the Continuum Shift from my dimension, in the early stages of its decay. Two Dark Arms approached afterwards, intending to lay a bounty on Maria's head with…his…help. He agreed, but asked that they help him with something in return later. That ended up being the merging of four alternate dimensions into one dimension – the Gravity Falls we were…ultimately sent to. Because of how my family and I had been changed, we…served as something of an anchor for him. A natural rift to weaken dimensional barriers and start Weirdmageddon in other dimensions. This second Gravity Falls was the last world he attempted to take, but far from the first."
"We had a year before Cipher broke into that dimension, and we took that time to help Sixer and his family recover," Maria added. "When Weirdmageddon Round 2 happened, I got captured. Cipher and the Dark Arms wanted to do to me what had been done to Sixer."
"But they didn't," Strange noted.
"They tried. But it turns out my power core serves as a one-time defense against that, and the distraction that Sixer and others set off was enough of one that it gave them a chance to get to me while Cipher's back was turned. I was unfortunately unconscious for the fight, but Sixer and his family did manage to kill that demon."
Loki leaned forward and steepled his fingers. "And how was that possible? I was under the impression that such a creature could not be killed."
"Under ordinary circumstances," Vash spoke up.
Maria nodded in agreement, then looked up at Sixer.
Sixer cleared his throat. "We…came to the conclusion that he was a demon that ran on deals. He made plenty of them with desperate people, giving them power in exchange for their loyalty so that they could survive the apocalypse. But he never made a deal with myself or my family. He forced this current state on us, and as a result racked up interest. In the end, he…paid that debt with his life."
Loki's eyebrows rose. "Interesting. One would think he would have not overlooked that little detail."
"He thought he could do what he wanted with us," Sixer replied. He sighed, his expression dropping. "Considering that he paraded me around my dimension like a trophy afterwards, I…"
Sixer trailed off and closed his eyes for a moment, but saw the destruction of his own dimension instead. He shook his head and felt a hand touch his.
Sixer opened his eyes and noticed Maria's hand resting on his own.
"Hey, he's gone," Maria said gently. "You don't have to think about that."
Sixer considered that, then nodded slightly.
"…man, I don't even wanna think about being stuck like that." Static shuddered. "The Dark Arms almost getting into my head was bad enough."
"That binding you mentioned earlier." Strange was frowning, leaning forward in a similar stance to Loki. "That is connected to what Loki revealed, isn't it?"
Sixer glanced down at his wrists and – when he noticed that the flames were still present – pulled his sleeves over his wrists a little more forcefully.
Maria's expression turned grim. "That's the reason I'm here. Cipher did something to Sixer and his family that bound them in such a way that if they aren't bound to somebody they are going to die of mass organ failure as the will to live drains from them. I am not over-exaggerating.
"Then when you cut his connection to Cipher, you took Cipher's place as Sixer's controller," Strange said.
Sixer's ears drooped.
"A-at least she hasn't made him do anything stupid," Vash spoke up quickly. "Auntie put guidelines for themselves to keep anything stupid or terrifying from happening to them. She's been careful with Sixer."
"I don't doubt that," Strange said. "According to what the others have said of the Dark Arms incident, you abhor mind control with a fiery passion, and as this is very much related to that, I can understand that you don't want what happened to you to happen to him as well."
Sixer frowned at Strange's words and glanced at Maria. "Wouldn't he know about what happened if…?"
"When the reset happened, not everybody remembered the previous timeline," Maria replied. "Strange is one of the people who doesn't remember, and the number of people who do are very small. Most of them are here, actually."
"Oh." Sixer nodded.
"And you're right, Strange, but the problem is that I don't know how to reverse this particular problem." Maria hesitated, looking between Sixer and the rest of the group for a moment. Then she lowered her voice. "The problem involves his soul, and that is something I am not well-versed in."
The looks that crossed their faces varied between surprise to horror to a morbid curiosity – the last belonging to Loki, who eyed Sixer with a raised eyebrow.
"If I did to Sixer what you did, would I learn of this secret?" Loki asked.
Sixer didn't see Maria move.
In the blink of an eye, Maria was on the other side of the room, in her armor, her Buster aimed at Loki's face.
"You try it, and you are going to put him through that feeling of death a third time, and that is something that I will not stand for," Maria hissed through gritted teeth. "If you try it, I'll hit you with an equivalent amount of force that I hit Pyronica with, is that clear?"
Something flickered across Loki's face for a moment, and he leaned back, raising his hands. "I was just asking, but I get the message."
Maria remained where she was for a moment, then lowered her Buster and stomped back over to sit between Sixer and Vash, who exchanged wide-eyed looks over her head before looking back at Loki.
The trickster god seemed disinterested now.
"Considering that you would be taking that man's life into your hands, I should think that you would learn the truth, but you would have an angry World Jumper on your hands as well," Strange commented.
"I haven't seen you that mad since…well, back then," Static remarked.
Gear nodded in agreement.
"I have my reasons," Maria replied shortly. She deactivated her Buster and shifted out of her armor.
"And they are good ones," Strange acknowledged. "Unfortunately, this is beyond what I am capable of. If it is affecting his soul and was brought on by a demon, it might be better if you sought after another magician who lives in this dimension."
Wayne turned sharply. "She is not going to him."
"I don't see why she can't. John Constantine knows of the dark arts and what demons can be capable of. He is the one who alerted Loki to the cult's presence, after all."
"John Constantine?" Maria frowned. "Can't say I've heard of him."
The heroes across the couch stared at Maria.
"You haven't heard of him," Captain America repeated. "I find that a little hard to believe."
"I'm not all-knowing about everyone in every single dimension I come across," Maria replied. "You said he knows something about the dark arts, though…I'm not sure how I feel about that."
"He mostly does things involving stopping demons, rather than getting involved in them," Strange replied.
Wayne folded his arms and frowned deeply.
"…uh huh." Maria frowned.
"If it makes you feel any better, I can come along with you and make sure that he doesn't summon anything dangerous," Strange added. "Although, the worst thing he'd be willing to do is call for Etrigan."
Sixer raised an eyebrow while Maria blinked once. Twice.
"…That'll help," Maria admitted. "When can we head out?"
"You want to meet the guy now?" Static asked. "But – you just got here!"
"And this is a problem I would like to solve quickly," Maria replied. "I don't like being bound to Sixer like this. I don't like the idea of being the one to – to lead him along! Yes, I'm not Cipher, but that doesn't mean I should let myself get comfortable with this."
Sixer shifted slightly at Maria's words.
Loki glanced over. "Perhaps it would be better to invite Constantine here? His home might not be the most…comfortable place for your friend." When Maria looked over at Loki, he added, "His house has created an avatar for itself that oftentimes interacts with people. And its – or rather, her– chosen shape is rather revealing."
Sixer paled immediately.
"Yeah that sounds even better," Maria agreed quickly.
Stark sighed and rose to his feet. "All right. Strange, how are you going to get in contact with this guy?"
"Leave that to me," Loki replied. "He'll likely be here by the end of the day. I simply need a moment to meditate for a while." He rose from the couch. "Give me a few hours."
Sixer and the others watched Loki walk out of the room.
Thor cleared his throat when Loki was out of sight. "Well, I'm feeling hungry. Young Parker showed me recently how to make a 'Sloppy Joe.' Would anyone care if I—"
"Friday, order pizzas," Stark said immediately. "I am not going to subjugate our guests to Thor's cooking."
"Ordering pizzas," came a voice from the loudspeaker. "Any preferences?"
Thor scowled.
"I think the usual mix," Stark replied. "And, uh – you two, what are your favorites?"
"It's…been a long time since I've really been able to decide on a—"
"I'll take a Hawaiian," Maria spoke up.
"Pineapple on pizza?" Stark made a face. "Why?"
"I like it. You got a problem with that?" Maria raised an eyebrow.
Stark sighed irritably and ran a hand over his face while Sixer looked between the two of them. "All right, fine. Add a Hawaiian to the order, Friday."
"Order sent."
They sat in silence for a moment, staring at each other.
"So…since we know so much about Sixer, how about we introduce ourselves?" Gear asked. "I mean, that was a lot."
"Yeah, I like that idea." Static grinned. "Let's do it. No pop quiz afterwards, though."
Sixer chuckled a little.
"Hey, we got a laugh out of him!" Static elbowed his friend. "Okay, cool. How about I go first?"