They had lived a happy life. They had three extraordinary children who loved them very much; a boy the age of twenty, a girl of seventeen and another girl of ten. Their children said they loved them every day and never got into fights with each other; more rather they hugged jovially and without shame when they had the chance- to parents and siblings alike.

Once, though Paula would not remember, Ness had woken up next to her and had gone for a search party to look for the red yoyo that had been on his bedside stand that night. The yoyo held a lot of emotional and physical memories for him; he had owned the yoyo since he was six when Porky, his childhood best friend, had given it to him.

Ness still remembered all the times he and Porky had been playing around in their front yards and Ness had shown Porky yoyo tricks he had learned off the Internet, sometimes knocking the seeds off white dandelions to improve his aim, though it was still fairly sloppy.

And so, on the evening of April the nineteenth, with the entire family with stomachs full of steak and drowsy from a day of work, play and education, each of the children went in their parents' room one by one to say good night after getting in their pajamas, brushing their teeth and hair.

The lights were off, the house was close to slumber.

"Hey, Paula?"

Paula rolled over and looked at Ness, who was on his side. "Hm?"

Ness, in one fluid movement, wrapped his arms around Paula and kissed her softly for a few seconds before pulling away. "I love you so much, I want you to know forever."

Paula nodded softly into his chest, murmuring that she still felt the same for him before drifting to sleep at the same time Ness did, neither knowing that they would never see each other again.

Paula woke up, with her eyes still blissfully shut. She heard the hushed voices of people around her, and she tried to stretch but found she could not move and assumed Ness was playing a trick on her, so she opened her eyes and mouth to object and immediately wished she had not. She was strapped by her arms, legs, torso and neck to a table tilted at an angle. The was a thin, white sheet draped across her entire body sparing the head, and she could guess what was underneath.

She was in a room, like a hospital room, if a bit bigger. There were strange people around her wearing ridiculous nurse uniforms that hid their faces, and they almost looked like pigs. There was one person in the room that wasn't wearing something over their face- Doctor Andonuts! He was scribbling something down on a clipboard, and he was facing away from her.

She called out to him, "Lloyd! Doctor Andonuts, what are you doing here? Why am I pinned down to this table, can you let me go?"

Doctor Andonuts turned around, realizing Paula had woken up, and smiled weakly as he walked over to her. "Greetings, Paula," his voice wavered and his eyes could not be seen behind his glasses, "I... I see you still remember me, right down to my first name."

Paula was confused as to why her friend seemed so gloomy. "What's wrong, Lloyd? Where are we, anyway? Are these guys friends of yours?"

Doctor Andonuts looked at his feet guiltily, avoiding eye contact with the lady as he mumbled, "I would rather not explain anything at the moment, it's for the better. I will say this; I'm only doing this because the Pig King ordered it be done to you, specifically you, and you have every right to hate me forever for this." With that, Doctor Andonuts turned, whispered something to a nurse and left the room, seemingly in a hurry as he took off his glasses and pawed at his face.

The pig person Lloyd talked to came over to Paula and took off his mask, revealing a face of hesitation and reluctance. Paula eyed him curiously. "Who're you?"

The pig person did not answer but took out a full syringe with a suspicious liquid. He came closer to Paula, who realized what was going to be done with the syringe, why Doctor Andonuts had left in such a hurried way and why he was wiping his face. With wide eyes, Paula begged, "No, please don't do this! That's poison, isn't it?! Please just let me go, I have a husband and three aspiring children to look after, the eighteenth birthday of one of them is today and I'm hosting the party! I can't go now!"

Paula pulled at her restraints, using all her strength in her right arm and successfully breaking the metal strap that crossed her wrist, then her left arm, and she used both hands to yank off the pin at her neck, leaving only her legs. By then the pig person had called over some of his friends who pinned her arms down manually, but even then her acquired strength over the years and the need to be with her family overpowered the opposing side as she jerked. The syringe entered the hand of one of the pig people, and within seconds it dropped to to floor.

Paula broke free of all her bonds and made a mad dash out of the room, delivering a quick hit to anyone who got in her way as she tried to find the exit.

She had gone down a few flights of stairs and knocked out quite a few uniformed criminals and had heard pig people everywhere using walkie-talkies to communicate with someone called "Commander." Paula didn't have time to think about that as she found a pair of double doors with a glowing green sign that said- The exit!

She almost made it to the handle before they opened before she touched them, revealing a figure about her height wearing a black jacket, orange army pants, black boots and a gray, metal mask that had a glass piece like an eyepatch over one eye; the other eye was merely hidden by the shade of the mask itself.

Paula drew back during her sprint and released a powerful punch to this man, but he caught her fist in his left hand and twisted it, bringing her to the floor as he planted his knees on her shoulders and she writhed to escape his hold on her. A pig person came up to this masked man and congratulated him for catching Paula single-handedly as she snapped and thrashed about. The pig person called him "Commander" when she said this, so Paula knew that this was who everyone in this place had been calling out to.

Paula was not strong enough to get out of the commander's grasp, much less defeat him. As a last-ditch effort before the exhaustion of running about the building set in, she raised her hands and took hold of his sides under his jacket and striped shirt with her nails, making him tense up and grunt with pain once, so she dug her fingers into his skin hard and deep and started thrashing even more to make him let go of her.

Sadly, he quickly took her hands and pinned them to the floor so she could not cut him anymore, his head dipping lower and closer to her in relief that the job was almost done and her nails were not ripping his stomach to shreds anymore. A pig person holding the syringe came up behind Paula, and the commander took both her hands in one of his and covered her eyes with the other, putting a metal thumb in her mouth to silence her so she could not see the pig person inject her with poison and could not scream when she felt it race like fire through her veins.

The stars shone bright from their perch in the velvety blackness of the night sky as the two onlookers snuggled together, both for warmth and so one wouldn't fall.

It had been one year since Paula had been poisoned and Little Miss Marshmallow had been born, and by the time Paula had been reconstructed and renamed she had been modified to look more like a twelve year old girl than an older woman to suit the Pig King's tastes.

She nudged his shoulder, the stars reflecting off her eyes and in turn reflecting off his when he acknowledged her. "Commander..."

"Hm? What is it? Are we flying too fast? High?"

Indeed, it was the one year anniversary of the date when Little Miss Marshmallow had joined the Pigmask Army, though the commander was the only one out of the two who knew how that happened. Little Miss Marshmallow had kept track of the days with her year-old internal calendar, so here they were on April twentieth, flying about the Nowhere Islands under a cloudless sky. The commander had even taken off his mask for the occasion and was holding it tightly against his chest, revealing his bright orange hair and alert green and red eyes.

They had been out there a long while, taking the chance to relax and enjoy the night air before duty calls made them go back. The commander gently touched down on the top of a certain purple literal skyscraper with spikes, the building itself reminding both chimera of how far they were from their assigned bases.

Sitting on the edge of the Empire Porky Building, Little Miss Marshmallow and her commander could see pretty much the entire island they were on, as well as the distant Tanetane Island and much of the ocean. She turned to him; she could not remember exactly what she said, but she thanked him for celebrating what could be her birthday so kindly.

"You're welcome."

They sat in silence for a long time after that, and a sharp intake of breath from the commander made her turn his way. Before she could react, her shoulders were grabbed by the sleeves and she was pulled close to the commander. She literally could not speak; it was hard to do that when a person was blocking one's mouth.

He separated from her as quickly as he had pulled her to him and looked down at his boots, unflinching but aware of the hand that had landed on his chest and on his back a few minutes before. He was silent for a long time before he sighed quietly, "I'm sorry, that was barbaric of me, I'll... Take you back to Thunder Tower now..."

The commander got up to let Little Miss Marshmallow on his back to fly back to Thunder Tower, but her hand rested on his sleeve, not allowing him to go anywhere and pulling him back down. He sat again and was pulled into a hug by Little Miss Marshmallow, which surprised him very much. "MROB..."

Her hair was in his neck and chin as she hugged him tighter, and he hugged back, knowing a special bond had grown between them in that night and that he could not bear to tell her how she had been created, how he was the one who had helped kill her. He now felt like it was his- one of his jobs to protect Little Miss Marshmallow, now that their feelings had been announced through actions to each other.

A few days after that night, Little Miss Marshmallow had been guarding the yoyo when a strange group of people had come into the playroom, used the hot tub without her permission, stolen most of the presents littered about the room and had damaged the jukebox in the corner. This did not upset her so much as the fact that the boy leading the group had gotten a skin cell on the yoyo's glass case when he looked into it.

She immediately challenged the boy and his group, and during the battle she was all too aware of how similar he and the commander looked, it was like they brothers- No, they looked more like twins.

The group defeated her with a flurry of stick swings, kicks, swift punches and bites, and her last thought as all her internal mechanisms fizzled out or malfunctioned was of whose yoyo they were taking from the glass case. There were just enough mechanisms online inside her to raise her hand and whisper, "Ness..." as she exploded, her last thought of her husband and how dumb she was to not have fought her own reprogramming to regain the memories of her real, first life.