Anny opened her eyes slowly. Still lying down on the floor, she stretched up as she yawned. She had finally woken up.
“So it’s morning…” she said out loud, noticing that her surroundings weren’t that dark anymore.
Anny got up and rubbed her eyes. She then put her arms down and looked around. What she saw was not what she expected: she could not spot a single kirby.
“Huh, what is going on?” she thought, looking around the room. “Did I oversleep?”
Thinking about it for a moment, she realized it wasn’t all that odd. “Okay, fair, I went to sleep late last night… due to all that. So it’s why I would oversleep. But then, where is everyone anyway?”
Anny couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong. She couldn’t spot anyone at all, and the house was also silent, meaning that no one was inside. But why would that be the case?
Not being able to resist her curiosity, Anny started to walk around the house, with the goal of finding someone, or at least any clues about what was going on. She headed towards the exit door of the room she was in, until she eventually left it and entered a long corridor. Still not finding anyone, she continued walking towards a ladder at the end of the corridor that went up. When she eventually reached the ladder, she started to hear something.
“Huh?” Anny thought, trying to identify said sound.
However, it was impossible to identify it, as the noise was very low and muffled. Disappointed, Anny decided to simply climb up the ladder, figuring the sound would become clearer. And as she did, indeed, the volume of the noise started to go up, and Anny finally identified the sound: it was voices.
“Voices? So I guess these are the others?” she guessed.
Not being able to understand what said voices were actually saying due to their still low volume, Anny continued climbing up the ladder, until she eventually reached the floor above. She got off the ladder and looked around, only to see that the room was empty as well.
“Hmm, I guess they are outside?” she wondered. “But why—”
“And that’s basically it!”
“…Huh?” Anny recognized that voice. “Was that Cla—”
“Funny, right?!”
Worried, Anny started to walk fast towards the exit door. She had a good guess as to what was going on, but she didn’t want to believe it.
As she was going through the door, she heard someone else talking.
“Sorry but… did you really say you and the other kirbies with permanent Copy Abilities are…”
“Clones of Kirby, yes!”
“CLARE!!!”
Finally outside the house, Anny found Clare, and everyone else that had slept in Kirby’s house that night: the other kirbies with permanent Copy Abilities, as well as Kirby, Keeby and Kirsy. Looking around, Anny found everyone in utter shock, although Keeby and Kirsy were instead extremely confused. It was uncannily silent.
Desperate, Anny looked at Clare, furious, and said, “Clare, what have you done?! Did you…”
“Anny… sorry, sorry!” Clare said, with a sad face. “I was asked why we left the house last night and… well… I started talking, and…”
“Oh…” Anny said, as she realized Clare hadn’t really done it completely on purpose.
“It’s my fault,” Percy spoke up, looking down. “I never imagined… This would happen…”
Anny looked at Percy. “Wait, so if Clare told you everything… does this mean you also…”
“…Yes,” said Yan, who was next to Percy. “We all remembered. Slowly but surely.”
Anny looked at Clare again. “But why did you tell everyone?!”
Clare looked down and said, “It wasn’t everyone at first! But we were all outside because of breakfast, and everyone started to come, one by one, since the story kept getting more and more interesting…”
“Oh, I see. But…”
Anny was about to continue questioning her friend, but before she did so, she realized it really wasn’t worth it. She had already found out that it wasn’t truly Clare’s fault, and that it wasn’t exactly the time to argue with her best friend: they had a much more complex and dire situation at hand to deal with.
In fact, after getting lost in her own thoughts for a couple seconds and coming back to reality, Anny realized the weird silence had stopped. What replaced it was a series of parallel conversations of all kinds. Looking around, she noticed every clique was having a conversation about what they had just learned. And those weren’t just any conversations: in particular, all of them were uneasy. Everyone was troubled.
After realizing the new current situation, Anny looked around her, and noticed that even Percy and Yan had started talking to each other. The only quiet kirby near her was Clare, who looked sad. Noticing the rare situation of her friend being silent, Anny figured out she had no other choice.
She took a deep breath, looked at Clare and called her out, “Clare, are you okay?”
Hearing her friend, Clare looked at Anny and said, “Ah, yes… I was just thinking of what happened, and…”
“We never really discussed this properly, us two, huh?” Anny pointed out.
“Yeah, yeah!” Clare said, dropping her sad face. Deep inside, all she wanted was to talk to someone about the situation, so she said to Anny, “So, let’s talk about this!”
“Yup!” Anny said, smiling.
And so, Anny and Clare started talking about the situation, joining everyone else into discussing what they had just learned. The only group that wasn’t talking about that subject was Kirby, Keeby and Kirsy, due to the simple fact that Kirby was frozen in complete shock. Keeby and Kirsy were next to him, looking at their friend.
Kirsy waved to Kirby, in front of him. “Kirby?”
Keeby poked Kirby. “Kirby, are you ok?”
Kirby continued frozen. Still worried, Kirsy continued, “Kirby… I know this is hard for you, but…”
“And I know what it feels like, to get a memory suddenly back like that,” Keeby complemented.
“You just have to accept it, Kirby!” Kirsy continued. “And think positive: this explains what you wanted to know! Now you know how these kirbies all exist.”
Indeed, that was very much true: Kirby now knew how those kirbies just appeared one day. But he was still in complete shock, after all an extremely unpleasant memory had just come back to him. Ignorance truly is bliss.
“Kirby, please, we want to help you! We want to talk!” Keeby sighed. “Where is the Kirby I know?”
Kirby was still processing everything he had just learned, or rather, just remembered. However, after hearing what Keeby had just told him, he realized that standing there frozen and doing nothing wouldn’t help the situation at all.
As Kirby slowly came back to the real world, however, he realized all the kirbies with permanent Copy Abilities were loudly talking to each other. All that noise made it impossible for Kirby to process his own thoughts, and he could not concentrate at all. Annoyed about that, on top of the fact that he had just learned he was cloned without his consent, anger started to slowly build on him, until he could not take it anymore.
“SHUT UP EVERYONE!!!”
That was what Kirby promptly shouted. In a blink, every single kirby that was talking stopped and looked at him.
Panting, and now seeing that everyone was looking at him, Kirby said, “Everyone… that won’t work! We have to discuss this properly ourselves! …All of us.”
Indeed, while Kirby had shouted to ask everyone to stop talking out of anger, he also did it because that was his first thought after he came back to his senses: talk to his own clones about the whole situation. After all, he wasn’t even sure how to treat them moving forward. It was so awkward for him to think about it, that he wanted to have open dialogue with everyone.
The kirbies slowly understood and agreed. As he saw a couple of them nod or quickly mention they agreed with him, Kirby smiled.
“Thank you, everyone…” he said in relief. “I know that this fact we all just remembered is hard to swallow, for all of us, hence why I wanted to talk to everyone.”
Kirby stopped for a moment to think where to even start. He really had no clue, until he figured he should ask something:
“So, since we had part of our memories erased and now they are back, do any of you remember anything else important?”
What followed was a chorus of “No”s. All the kirbies had gotten back their memories just before when they were hit by the attack from Marx, and so they all remembered the same thing.
“I see, I see…” Kirby stopped to think for a moment, and then concluded, “Makes sense.” With something else on his mind, he immediately followed, “As for me, I am still wondering how on that day I woke up on the same spot I slept, if I was thrown away like you all after the attack.”
“Right,” Daisy spoke up, “there are still some pieces of the puzzle we do not know. It is a bit upsetting… but I suppose we learned the bulk of the truth.”
“Yup…” Kirby nodded. “I suppose only Marx and Panee at this point know the rest. And I guess that simirror.”
“Mhm,” Percy agreed. “But we cannot ask Marx, and we have no clue where that simirror is… And I doubt Panee would tell.”
“Speaking of Panee… I wonder why meeting him and talking to him didn’t make us remember anything?” Jake wondered out loud, in a thoughtful position.
“I wonder if it’s because the stuff he told us was vague?” Natty guessed.
“Yeah, even the stuff he told me to provoke me was kinda vague…” Kirby said, in a thoughtful position like Jake’s.
“…Do you think he did that on purpose, maybe?” Drake guessed.
“Possibly,” said Yan.
“And what about seeing him?” Diego mentioned. “Anny seeing Marx jogged her memory, but not Panee…”
“I mean…” Raven looked at Diego. “Look at how unique Marx is compared to Panee,” she pointed out.
“Fair, I guess,” said Diego, looking at Raven.
Those questions were all that was on everyone’s minds at that moment. So much that, without them realizing, the scene changed to a silent one once again. No one was talking to anyone anymore, as everyone stopped to think about those questions.
In the midst of that silence, however, Yan heard some very light sounds of grass. Unsure what was going on, he looked around, behind the bushes of grass near him, where he thought he heard the noise from.
“Yan, what are you doing?” asked Percy, noticing his friend was looking around.
Still looking around, Yan said, “I thought I heard something… Hmm…”
“Do you think it was someone?”
Continuing looking, Yan said, “For some reason… I thought I heard Panee.”
“Huh?!” Percy was surprised. “But why would he be here?! To try to capture us again?”
“I’m not sure…” Yan said, as he kept looking. “But I am being cautious anyway.”
After not finding anything, Yan turned back and saw that the kirbies were back to talking to each other, so he went back to focusing on the topic at hand.
Yan’s hunch certainly wasn’t wrong: the source of that noise was indeed Panee walking behind the bushes. What happened was that Panee managed to hide behind one bush far enough from Yan, which made him not be found. Noticing that Yan hadn’t found him and had stopped looking for him, Panee sighed in relief:
“Phew. So close…”
He moved a bit closer to the circle the kirbies were in to hear them properly better, but quieter this time around to make sure Yan wouldn’t hear him again.
“So it really worked…” Panee thought to himself, as he watched the current situation of the other kirbies from behind the bushes. “The domino I dropped then dropped the others one by one as I expected… Or at least, most of them.”
At the time, what Panee was watching involved Kirby trying once again to talk to his clones, since they were back to talking to each other. Once he realized that, he raised his voice:
“Everyone, please! I want to continue.”
Hearing that, the kirbies slowly stopped talking to each other once again. With the silence back one more time, Kirby proceeded:
“So, I’ve been here wondering… Are you all alright?” he asked, with a worried face.
“What do you mean?” Matt wondered.
Although he found the question odd, Kirby still answered with the obvious, “I mean… You just learned you’re clones of me…”
“Well, in my case, sorta,” Matt said, indifferent. “It’s weird, but I mean, what can I do?”
“I am… So scared…” Dana murmured, wide-eyed.
“I still can’t believe it…” Zan quietly said, looking at himself.
“This isn’t true! I know!” Daniel yelled, unconvinced.
“This is awesome, actually!” Luke shouted, with a big smile.
As Kirby heard all those comments, he realized his own clones ended up being a really diverse group, since all their reactions were unique from each other.
“How did this even happen, I wonder?” he thought. “I mean, if they are really clones of me… How are they so different from me, and also different from one another?”
However, before he could continue thinking, his thoughts were interrupted by a familiar voice.
“Everyone.”
Recognizing it, Kirby turned back. And surely enough, the source of that voice was in his sight, at the top of a small nearby hill, with his cape wrapped around him.
“…Meta Knight?!” Kirby was surprised. “What are you—”
“Hello Kirby…” Meta Knight looked at the other kirbies around, and continued with emphasis, “…And Kirbies. So, it looks like you finally remembered.”
Kirby became even more surprised. “Huh?! Wait… Do you mean…”
“Yes,” Meta Knight calmly said. “I knew about your cloning, Kirby. All this time.”
Kirby’s surprise knew no bounds. “EH?! But then, wh—”
“And I’m here to explain it all better.” He opened this cape, and pointed his sword forwards. “So, get ready…”
20 Times Kirby! 