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a-mad-scientist-approaches · 7 years ago

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Multiverse is a Curse Word (5)

Whoooeeeee getting RIGHT through this. The next chapter is not the last one, but it is the last one I have a draft for, so there’ll be a bit of hiatus after that. In the meantime, enjoy!

This weird mash-up of Gravity Falls AUs is due to the imaginations of *ahem* myself, but also: @hntrgurl13, for her wonderful OC Adeline Marks, the Dimension Jumper AU, and the Drifting Dimensions AU; @the-subpar-ghost for the incredible Adrift AU; and @scipunk63 for the (eventual) Addiford ship which sucked me in like quicksand.

@deadpool-demon-diva and @thejesterlyfictionista, you know what an update means. It means you READ IT. Please.

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Chapter 5: The Gnomes Were Less Scary

“Resistance,” came Wesley’s voice over the speaker, “you all know the plan. We are nearing the drop zone, so ready yourselves. Once we are inside the main building our primary objective is to secure file WEE.rc736.”

Mabel couldn’t stop a snort of laughter escaping her. Addi flashed a brief grin, but Ford continued to stare tensely into the middle distance.

“This file contains all the information Wikert Expansion Enterprises has about our resistance cell. We must not allow it to remain in their hands. Our secondary objective, to be accomplished only if we are certain of completing the first, is to seize control of the facility. The data centre there is the most advanced in the galaxy, and losing it will be a severe blow to our oppressors. Marks and our newest hacker will lead the infiltration into the hub of the building, while the majority of you will follow me in keeping our enemy occupied. Good luck.” The speaker went dead.

Ford knelt in front of Mabel and placed his hands on her shoulders.

“Mabel, listen to me very carefully. When we get down there, do not stop to look around. Do not try to help anyone who is hurt. Listen to everything I say,”

She could feel a dribble of fear starting to creep down her spine. They’d been in plenty of dangerous situations since they’d met, and her and Dipper were no stranger to a bit of action and adventure (thanks to the general weirdness in Gravity Falls), but this time felt different. She wasn’t making any snap decisions in wild, random scenarios which were funny when she looked back on them. Now, she was about to walk into a virtual warzone – a carefully planned attack that relied heavily on everyone knowing exactly what their job was and what they were going to do. Strategy was usually Dipper’s area, whereas she always left room for improvising. Now, she didn’t even have her grappling hook anymore.

“You need to stay with me at all times.” Ford continued. “If that becomes unfeasible, then you go to Addi. Otherwise, keep a tight hold on my belt.” His face softened. “You’ll be okay.”

This stuff was serious. Maybe she shouldn’t’ve made such a fuss earlier.

“Your belt’s not gonna come off and show everyone your space pants, is it?” Mabel asked weakly in an attempt to lighten the mood.

It worked. Ford gave a small smile and kissed her forehead, while Addi coughed to hide her laughter.

“Over drop zone,” said the pilot into the speaker.

There was a clunk from the rear end of the ship. Mabel watched as the other aircraft also released canisters. They plummeted down towards the circular arrangement of buildings below until she could no longer see them.

There was an immense cracking sound, and what looked like four shockwaves spread out from underneath the ground. She could hear the boom as one building collapsed entirely into a hole and another crumbled like LEGO pieces. The central structure, shaped like a massive disc, was the most undamaged.

The black sky lit up with green laser fire. The shuttles dived. Three of them landed close to the building providing the brunt of the attack, resistance fighters pouring out to meet soldiers. Mabel’s shuttle flew over them, towards the disc building. As soon as they touched down, Mabel hit the release on her straps and wrapped a hand around Ford’s belt. She saw Addi press a button on her sword, and when she led them out lasers shattered against an invisible force field.

The building was right in front of them, but Ford made a sharp turn to the right, firing his gun left as he did. The blast caught a soldier in the shoulder, but Mabel didn’t even see him fall as they were sprinting over wrecked, uneven ground towards a piece of masonry that had risen out of the floor like an iceberg. She skidded to a stop behind it, crouching and looking around for everyone else. When did we get separated?

Addi was behind a similar piece of rubble, closer to the main entrance. She was rifling through a … probably unconscious person’s pockets and belt pouches, her face unreadable behind circular goggles and a scarf covering her mouth and nose. The rest of the people from the aircraft were similarly behind shelter, half of them in the process of moving to engage the enemy, half remaining behind to cover Ford and Addi as best they could.

“Are you alright?” came Ford’s voice. He’d pulled on his goggles and scarf too.

“Uh huh,” was her automatic reply. She was honestly just guessing. There was so much adrenaline pumping through her she doubted she’d feel it if she got hurt.

“GOT IT!” shouted Addi. She pulled an ID card out of the soldier’s pocket and left her cover, running towards the door. “Override locking mechanism, authorisation G260500!” she read off. The door buzzed open.

Mabel resecured her hold on her uncle and then took off running again, trying to ignore the scorching heat of lasers passing close by them or the sparks they made when they hit the ground. The white lighting of the indoor hallway dazzled her, but Ford kept running, dragging her along until they rounded a corner and almost crashed into Addi. Thundering footsteps behind them heralded the arrival of the hackers’ defenders.

Addi’s arm wrapped around her shoulders in a quick hug.

“Holding up alright?” she asked.

“I remember …the first time … I was chased by … scary things.” Mabel wheezed. She sucked in a deep breath. “They were just gnomes … but still.”

“Bit scarier now, isn’t it?” Addi responded gently.

“Psssh, I’m fine,” Mabel waved away, attempting a grin.

Addi ruffled her hair. “We’re halfway done,” she reassured her.

They continued on.

⃝

By the second time she had to cannon into her uncle to save him from being hurt in a hallway attack, Mabel’s nerves were shot. She was jittery, sweaty, and she just wanted it all to be over already.

Addi slammed her forehead into the face of the last attacker, who dropped like an anchor. Pretty much everyone was cursing at their various injuries now, which would probably be funnier in hindsight. Ford tossed Addi her sword, but she handed it back to him and gestured to the right corridor of the junction they had stopped at.

“That leads to the control centre.” She explained, breathing hard. “Go straight ahead, then follow the signs to the left. This button here,” she indicated on Big Bertha, “activates the portable E-field.”

“Adeline, I can’t-” Ford started.

“Don’t be stupid Stanford, you need some kind of shield.” She inclined her head slightly to Mabel, and Ford nodded slowly.

“Then you take this.” He gave her his gun.

“Whoa, we aren’t splitting up, are we?” realised Mabel suddenly.

“Someone needs to raise the divider so that when we delete the file from the system, we delete it from Wikert’s entire network,” Ford explained quickly.

“I’m just gonna pretend that makes sense,”

“See you soon Mabel,” Addi said, heading down the left corridor with half the squad and determinedly not looking back. Trying to quench the thought that if they kept dividing then soon there’d be none of them left, she held her uncle’s hand as they moved off again.

“Almost there,” Ford said quietly a few minutes later. Everyone was tensing up as they closed in on their destination. Boots made almost no sound on the floor, and the violent noises from outside were dying down.

That could either be really good or really bad, reflected Mabel. They rounded a corner and almost ran smack into a significantly larger group of soldiers.

“Dang it,” someone said in the following surprised moment. Ford pressed the button on Big Bertha just as both sides opened fire, and unstoppably forged a path right through the middle of the soldiers. Before she knew it, every single one of the people in the hall were running towards the double doors of the control centre at the end.

“Hold them off!” hollered Ford, and then it was just him and Mabel, and she was through the opening, racing across the concrete floor, letting go of Ford’s hand so he could pull out some sort of space USB, and coming to a halt, staring around.

The room was huge, and behind the large hologram table Ford was already working on were hundreds of miniature satellite dishes, which glowed orange and pointed directly at the metallic back wall.

“Aww, they’re babies!” laughed Mabel.

“Mmmhmm.” Said Ford, already engrossed in the mainframe. “Where’s Adeline with that divider?” he muttered.

Suddenly the entire back wall shuddered and rose off the ground slightly.

“Ah, there she is,”

“That is one big divider,” Mabel breathed, as the wall groaned again and jerked upwards again.

“What is with this system?” Ford said angrily.

“Have you hit a wall?”

“No, if anything, it’s too easy to hack, not at all like the resistance base,”

“Well that’s good isn’t it? Something’s finally going right for us!”

There was an increase in the volume of shouting in the hallway. Mabel turned and saw the last standing resistance member catch a laser through their head.

It was as though a bucket of ice had been poured over her. She stood staring, frozen, as she watched the blue-uniformed figures start to run towards her. There was no escaping the fact that every one of those resisters had just been killed, not knocked out, not subdued, but murdered. She’d stepped over bodies on the way here, but she’d thought – no she’d hoped that they were just sleeping. The people who had attacked them in the corridors, she’d seen a few go down to blows from Addi and Ford, but what about the ones that hadn’t? What about the ones the resistance had gone for outside? How was the resistance doing? She had heard explosions when they set down …

One of the people running towards her was outpacing the others. She was tall and light, but strongly muscled, and her legs were propelling her forwards quickly.

Ford hadn’t noticed yet – it had only been a couple of seconds, and besides, he was busy copying the file.

On the wall to her left was a square of blinking lights. Mabel might have been new to alien technology, but she recognised a control panel when she saw one, and she was willing to bet a room as important as this would have a security lockdown protocol.

She snatched Addi’s sword from the table and sprinted towards it.

She was twenty feet away when the being entered the room, heading towards Mabel, perhaps realising what she was intending.

Mabel was ten feet away she heard the simultaneous sounds of Ford yelling out and the pursuer firing at her. The shot sizzled by.

She was five feet away when she felt the being grab her shoulder and push her off-course.

She was three feet away when she jumped, twisted fully around and drove the sword as hard as she could into where she knew the control panel was, in a move Addi had demonstrated. Her momentum spun her around again when she hit the ground, so she was facing the doors as a reinforced metal plate thudded irreversibly down over them, trapping the rest of the soldiers on the other side.

Mabel looked wildly around for the one who had gotten through, hand reaching out blindly to remove the sword.

It made a squelch as it came away. Then a thump as a body fell to the floor.

Mabel gazed numbly at the blood covering the weapon up to its hilt. It was the same colour as hers. She looked past it to the blood slowly seeping out onto the floor. There was a lot of it. She had to step back to avoid it.

“Oh,” she said faintly.

The face of the woman she had just killed drew her eye like gravity. The woman she had murdered had four eyes, all of them a yellowish-brown. The flat, herbivore-like teeth visible in her snoutish mouth were flecked with blood due to how Mabel had stabbed her through the spine.

Addi’s sword clattered out of her hand, the sound echoing around and around.

“Oh my God,”

Ford came up behind her and tried to turn her away from the scene.

“Oh my God,” she repeated, still looking at it. She was starting to feel dizzy.

Ford used more strength this time and pulled her around to face him.

“Mabel, Mabel listen to me.” He knelt down and stared directly into her eyes. “This was not your fault. What happened was an accident, okay?” His face looked drained of colour. “Mabel, she only missed that shot because she running …”

If it wasn’t her it would’ve been you. You gotta do what you can to survive, right? That’s how Grunkle Ford’s managed, right?

Mabel gathered a bunch of the man’s coat in her hand. She felt so light she might float away.

“She – she didn’t deserve-”

She pitched over and vomited on the ground next to Ford. He held her upright as she retched again, but when she drew in a rattling breath the clammy, shaky feeling didn’t stop. She felt like everything inside her was trembling, about to come loose and fall apart. That’s when the crying started.

She was crying harder than she had ever cried in her life, drawing in huge breaths through a tight throat and letting them out in machine-gun chokes that wracked her body until she had no air left and had to start again. She couldn’t take it, she had just done something more awful than she thought she was capable of ever doing, and it had been an accident, but there was this overwhelming feeling of relief because it hadn’t been her, and that was wrong, and if she was evil enough to think that who’s to say she hadn’t meant to do it …

There were too many thoughts swirling around her head. She screamed into Ford’s chest.

⃝

“Yes!” cheered Addi, as the hologram beeped in acknowledgement of her command and the divider trundled upwards unimpeded. Orange light from the data centre beyond poured into the communications section.

Pleased, she watched Stanford’s deletion signal fly, synching with the rest of Wikert’s database. Any back-ups or storage copies would be wiped when the attached virus came into contact with them, and resistance cell 736 would cease to exist in cyberspace.

The door to the communications centre opened and Wesley entered.

“The compound is ours.” he announced. More clapping and cheers from the resisters. “The oppressors have evacuated.”

Breathing a sigh of relief, Addi powered off the hologram.

Thank you for using the services offered by Wikert Expansion Enterprises: Technological Branch, it flashed before blinking out.

She frowned, an uneasy thought niggling at her. That can’t be right, this place is military owned. Wikert’s technological branch is operated by civilians …

Moving slowly, as though any wrong step could bring the world crashing down around her, Addi made her way over to the body of an unlucky soul who had been caught by a blast in the short struggle for control of the room. She turned him gently over and examined his ID tag. Underneath his name and authorisation code was:

Wikert Expansion Enterprises

Technological Branch

Security Chief

Adeline covered her mouth with a hand, not breathing. Slowly, she lowered it.

“Shit,” she whispered, “shit, shit, shit.”

“Yes Marks, you have something to say?” Wesley said, smooth and unworried as ever.

“You jackass.” She turned to face him. “You cowardly, worthless piece of crap. You-” her words ran out. She started again.

“I have wasted five years on your so-called force for change. I have undertaken I-don’t-know-how-many missions. And now, I find out that you have manipulated me, lied to me, told me the places I attacked were military institutions when the people who lost their lives today can barely be classed as police officers. I can’t believe you. You say Wikert is the oppressor,” she snarled, “well you’re doing a damn good job of matching them.”

“Ease your mind, I did not always lie to you. You have rarely been involved in our … let’s call them missions with a more collateral nature. Whenever I did not tell the truth it was always for your own good,”

“It was always so you wouldn’t lose my support! You disgust me.” She turned on her heel and walked under the divider towards the data centre. “Don’t try to contact me again. I’m done.”

The little orange satellites warmed her legs as she passed them. She didn’t notice it too much. Her entire body felt flooded with heat and rage. How dare he. She refused to think about. Not yet, at least. She would not think about all the attacks she had led. Or the people she had cut down. Or the triumph that came at the end of a mission. Or the exhilaration of feeling as though she had been doing some good in the multiverse. Or how it had all ended up as just another inevitable mess.

The data centre was oddly quiet. Resisters should have been celebrating in here, too. Instead, there was nothing, except for … the sound of crying?

Stanford was sprawled on the ground, hugging Mabel tightly. There was a body of another security guard nearby.

“What’s wrong? Where’s she hurt? Is it bad?” Addi raced over and knelt facing her old friend. He looked immeasurably tired.

“No, no, she’s …” he nodded to Addi’s left.

Big Bertha was lying on the ground, bloodstained. The faint glisten of a small red handprint showed on the hilt.

“Oh no …” Addi felt her stomach twist and her eyes fill with tears. “Mabel, I am so sorry, this is all my fault.” She reached out to take one of the girl’s hands and was surprised by the strength and desperation with which her grip was returned.

“This wasn’t-”

“A military base?” Stanford finished. “I know. It was far too easy to unlock the system.”

Mabel’s sobs were slowing.

“Let’s go,” Addi said quietly. Ford carefully stood up with the exhausted child in his arms and Addi retrieved and sheathed her sword. When they walked back into the communications centre, Wesley was the only person remaining.

“In all the excitement I think everyone has forgotten the reason we came here.” He held out his hand.

Mutely, Stanford passed over a cybercube, containing the only hard copy of information about resistance cell 736.

“Thank you,”

Before they could exit, Wesley spoke again. Adeline felt that he had no idea when to shut up. “In return for your help I am allowing you to leave unhindered. However, if our paths cross again, Marks, you should remember that you have seen the inner workings of my operation and have been privy to much of the information I believe this cube contains. You should also remember what I done in order to eradicate all traces of it.”

For a moment Addi thought Stanford was going to turn right back around and punch him. Heck, she was tempted to herself. Then the moment passed.

She couldn’t stop herself from having the last word, though.

“No,” she said as she strode away, “remember what I have done.”

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