“Once this stuff starts dissolving, it has to be removed.
With your body, your intelligence and physical strength will drop by seventy percent for at least seventy-two hours, and you still had the balls to eat it raw.
What the hell were you thinking?”
“If it isn’t removed, you little shit, you’ll be dead within twenty-four hours.”
Rick’s punch forced the fruit pulp out of Morty’s stomach.
Before Morty could even get angry or ask what the hell was going on, Rick’s explanation finally reminded him of the one thing he had been unable to recall before stepping through the portal.
Mega Fruits and Mega Seeds couldn’t be eaten raw!
They had to be thoroughly processed first!
[I’m screwed…]
[I forgot about that…]
Only moments ago, Morty had been at the absolute peak of his life, using that boundless intelligence to work out technologies like nuclear fusion and the Meeseeks Box from scratch.
Now the world before him was becoming ordinary again.
The fine analytical ability that came with his heightened intelligence was plummeting.
Then the physical weakness hit.
His legs began to shake, and he slowly collapsed to the ground.
Rick looked down at him in disgust.
“You’ve been running around with me for six months.
Do you seriously still not know what you can eat and what you can’t?”
“Do you think Cthulhu’s squid strips are edible?” Morty asked weakly.
Rick turned to look at the Cthulhu family of four in the distance, currently being bombarded by the Galactic Federation.
He coughed lightly to hide his embarrassment.
“Well…
don’t you think they’d be nice and chewy?”
Morty said, “…”
The portal gun was completely out of portal fluid, so Rick wasn’t in any hurry to take Morty away.
He planned to wait until the Galactic Federation finished driving those four monsters off, then find a chance to hitch a ride on a ship to Interdimensional Customs.
The two of them sat down against a tree.
Rick wasn’t the type who could sit quietly for long.
As he watched Cthulhu getting the shit beaten out of him, he began telling Morty things he would never normally say.
“Morty, this has already gone way beyond what I expected or planned.
You know that, right?”
“You’re too hungry for it.
Too desperate to make yourself stronger.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but arrogance is one trait I really don’t want you developing.”
“So while your IQ is temporarily in the toilet, I want you to remember one thing.”
“Once a Morty gets arrogant, he inevitably causes an endless chain of horrible consequences.”
Morty’s IQ had temporarily been cut by about seventy percent, but those words immediately triggered a memory.
Rick had said the same thing after Evil Rick and Evil Morty appeared.
Looking back, those words clearly carried a deeper meaning.
Morty remembered Evil Rick restraining Rick and searching his memories, only to find images of Morty as a child.
His heart skipped a beat.
At that moment, the answer to a long-standing mystery finally became clear.
Morty and even his own mother hadn’t seen Rick in twenty years!
So who was the young Morty in Rick’s memories?
The answer was practically staring him in the face.
[Could the Evil Morty who appears later be the one Rick personally raised?]
[Is he training me so I can fight Evil Morty?]
Morty sucked in a sharp breath.
Being treated like a tool felt like shit.
But he also knew that every gift came with a price.
If Rick hadn’t chosen him, Morty would either have lived out an ordinary, uneventful life or been picked up by some unreliable Rick.
Instead, he had ended up with the man who was unquestionably The Rickest Rick.
He had already come out way ahead.
But now that he understood the situation, Morty also began thinking about leaving Rick.
He didn’t want to spend his entire life living in Rick’s shadow.
He deserved a life of his own.
Morty would not remain Rick’s lackey.
For the first time in six months, Morty made up his mind to run away again.
While Rick wasn’t looking, he quietly picked up a Mega Fruit that had fallen to the ground, peeled it, removed its flesh, and stuffed some of the pulp into the small plastic water bottle in his pocket.
He would rather die than shove that thing deep inside himself.
Absolutely not.
The battle in the distance continued for another half hour before Cthulhu and the others were finally blasted away, bringing the conflict to a temporary end.
Those monsters might have been overwhelmingly powerful in their own stories, but that was only because the humans in those stories didn’t have enough firepower.
Rick had said it before.
When something started acting mysterious, spouting cryptic bullshit, and pretending to be some unknowable horror, the trick was not to play by its rules.
Just blow the fucker up.
Even if the enemy was made entirely of spirit, finding the right way to attack it meant you could still kill it.
Afterward, Morty followed Rick as they slipped aboard one of the planet’s ships and traveled to Interdimensional Customs.
Once they made it safely home, Rick dumped Morty onto his bed.
Using the thirty percent of his intelligence and physical strength he still had left, Morty reached under the bed and pulled out the Meeseeks Box.
He pressed the button on top.
A little blue man about five feet ten inches tall appeared out of thin air.
“I’m Mr.
Meeseeks!”
“Do me a favor.
Put this bottle in the freezer.”
After giving him the simple task, Morty watched Mr.
Meeseeks leave the room.
Morty had always believed Rick’s little invention had plenty of room for improvement.
In the show, Mr.
Meeseeks had failed to teach Morty’s dad how to play golf, yet another one had managed to help his mom become a more complete woman.
The problems in his parents’ marriage had already gone far beyond what ordinary humans could handle.
Yet Mr.
Meeseeks had managed to offer his mother a little motivational advice and help her feel more whole inside.
So Morty decided to use all the fruit pulp he had brought back to upgrade the Meeseeks Box.
Once Mr.
Meeseeks became capable of scientific research, Morty wouldn’t have to rack his own brain over all that headache-inducing R&D.
[I’ll call it Meeseeks 2.0.]
With that thought, Morty fell into a deep sleep.
Downstairs, Rick had just stepped out of the garage when he saw Mr.
Meeseeks placing a plastic water bottle packed with fruit pulp into the freezer.
With Rick’s intelligence, he immediately figured out what Morty was planning.
Trying to hide it from him while searching for a way to make the human body absorb Mega Fruit pulp?
Still, Rick didn’t interfere.
Infinite Mortys meant infinite possibilities.
And this Morty was different from 99.999 percent of all the others in many ways.
He was starting to look one-of-a-kind.
That was exactly what Rick wanted.
He had no interest in an incompetent Morty, but he didn’t want one who was completely impossible to control either.
Morty’s current behavior proved that the last six months Rick had spent educating him and drilling ideas into his head hadn’t gone to waste.
[I can’t wait to see what he eventually becomes.]