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KOOPALINGS: THE TEENAGE YEARS

by Eightane / Foxy Boy

CHAPTER XIX: LOVELY GRUDGE

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It was as the king had heard, concerning the fight in castle triage. What started as grumbling - Bret coming to terms with a host of grievances - became him flipping his food tray. Water and a plate of unsalted food hit the floor, and the room's acoustics made it thunder. It might have been for this startlement that the old Koopa man at the next table told him to "Simmer down for christsakes, get a hold of yourself". Bret looked up to him with impatience whipped into fury. Impetuous, and far outside of caring, he took this as a sign he should stand up, kick the spilled glass under the elder's table. Todd was already raising up to stop him. But in a second's time the old man cried out, his ankle slammed by hard plastic, and the doors to outside this canteen burst open.

There had been a silent alarm pressed by attendants at the order counter. Two white coats were atop the fire bro's, but with gilded badge; The surgeons knew about the royal guard Bowser stationed, half-undercover, but no one in the eatery would have. Least prepared of all were the two friends of Lemmy. One gawked at the manner of the soldiers, throwing a chair that was in the way, doing more while they corralled the trouble than its maker had. The other was the one they came up on, grabbed at the elbows, hard enough to split bone. Bret hissed as their claws dug into tendon.

"You got nowhere to go, kid." One almost crooned at him, anxious to.

"Came to the WRONG place for going mental!" The second was less personable. He practically spat. Todd didn't see everything in this upsetter, but the boot he wore grinding into Bret's foot was hard to miss, not unlike the piercing yowl.

This... Didn't feel kosher. It turned him toward the idea of help, most immediately. As they tried to start dragging, Todd leapt above a fallen seat, both to the doors that would lead to ER's corridor. "Whoa guys, he's no danger, he's just had some bad news!" It didn't matter how he lied, so long as they bought it. But all it served to do was make them slow enough to talk at him, and even then, with no patience nor elaboration.

"There's VIPs here. You don't fuck around, get him out NOW and he stays free." They were almost outmanoevered by him; nimble for a small, minor, trifling guy, but they let him go just in time to not be embarrassed by him. They did so by flinging him onto Todd, it nearly knocked him down. The guards stood tall as rugby galutes, waiting for his confirmation. A sheepish nod is all he could do, but it sent them on their way. The direction they walked made sense, back to where men in surgery were close-by. The younger two were compromised in this odd time, embarrassed, awkward, but Todd thought nothing while Bret put distance from he to his buddy. The just-as-straight friend gladly let it go.

The kid brushed off his coat, but looked more heated than ever, and it was only half for what any of the past minutes brought. "Don't ask, I'm fine. Movin' on." He started to turn.

Todd's statement stopped him... "If you move without me, you're just keeping me out of whatever's messed you up." ... It was sufficient to.

"Well... I, uh..." He wasn't bashful nor guilted, but looked into every corner of the walkway, suspicious. "... Let's do what they said, man. I have shit to say but not here."

Todd hadn't the need to ask a single thing more. They were two men on a mission, to depart here past the receptionist, out the glassed entry from hospital back into well-lit, carpeted palace vestibule. It would eventually give way to stone and practical arches, power and theatre in the castle keep. This place had been built closer to commoners than king, by no accident; in a way the architecture sent its message. No noble ever slept closer to crisis care than those who ran their errands. At this moment no one was down on their luck and nearby where they needed to enter the medical wing, so there came their first solitude. Bret got down to it.

"I was in the library - local branch, in Deerfield, it was shelled pretty bad when Mario rolled through - tryin' to scavenge. That fat bastard had the stones to ruin a pretty cool place to talk with girls, even if the army did that collateral shit while he walked right by... But after I went in with a satchel, got all the books I ever cared to check out safe and on me, I saw it. Lyin' right on the Kareem Campbell memoirs, I had to snatch it up. The shit I didn't think I'd find, man..."

He looked down before Todd could ask. To his shirt, where there were no pockets. He reached under the tail of it, up and behind the chest of it... Todd heard a sticky peel, like he took an item he'd taped up.

It was exactly that; after a moment's burden of wrestling with the shirt, he wrenched the small, piddly paperback out. No larger than a pocket bible or a child's 'first reader' rhyme collection. But it was history in those pages.

Bret flipped through it with leaf-out, showing the lot of info printed. "How much y' know about geneology?"

"I... Gotta say nothing, really, just what everyone knows..." It wasn't part of Todd's curriculum; this also meant it damn sure hadn't been a younger dude's yet. "... I take it that thing taught you stuff about it that matters?"

Bret poured out the cold, hard facts. "It taught me not to trust a speck of pollen from a pine tree, if it so much as goes up my nose. It's a primer of the noble families, like all the titled koopas from now to 3,000 years back. Looks like it was meant for if you ever find yourself havin' business with them, a meeting or appointment and you need to know who's who and who hates who. The shit you shouldn't bring up." An eclectic idea for printing a book, but not one without reason. "So it's got all of Bowser's line, and his father's father's father and yadda yadda." He cocked his head. "Who else do ya think I found among 'em? I'll give you two guesses. There ain't time for three."

The way Bret had started talking now put alarm bells in Todd. "... You?... Morie?"

The smile back was resplendent. "Fuck no, and hell yes. 'Bout halfway through that, I spotted a set of names. Jebedissah Wright, young woman who studied law on the North Side, but didn't wind up practicing. The last Duke of Jalience married her. Jacob Huralt, 4th Duke of... Well, that."

"Okay... There were dukes and earls and shit? When?"

Todd's incredulity was not a surprise. Bret buckled down for more depth of it; his 15-year-old mind was rare in how he tolerated doing this. "Right!? Never heard a peep about 'em in class, ever. Turns out you-know-who buried half of them, they were... Closer to the ancients than they're worth. Some were direct decendants. Others, well, mysticism and the shit they left behind, it had a strong pull. Know how tycoons and rich guys are overwhelmingly Masons? Same shit. Only it came down to something."

"... I don't..." Todd ran out of steam before saying the rest: 'like where this goes'. He'd already caught onto part of it.

"Anyways, the guy was the last one to have a king's favour. Our king. There's tiny pics in here of billiards games, in a rec room I've been in with Lemmy, it's a palace place. They were drinkin' buds. Then, Jake up and vanished one day. And I don't mean in a 'Bowser had him offed' way, not here. He absconded with his fortune, left his wife and their baby son to go start a new life with Henna Black, some unsung dame from burlesque, like her day's Dita Von Teese. Missus Wright, or Huralt, by then the Duchess, raised Morie on her own."

Todd's countenance fell. His shoulders did the same. Shock was written heavier on him than the legion of wee letters stamped on that history-primer. He looked closer, at the tiny thumbnail, almost like an insert... The infant face, wrapped in swaddling blanket, was one guy only. He heard Bret quantify it. "Whether he writes M.H. or M.W., full name, right in there. All the minor nobles got a pic of their spawn. Open another ref' book or reader, and you're likely to find jack shit."

Bret was frank in every way. "You don't KNOW how many other books, webpages, the half-encrypted shit I had to get into, just to find another place it shows that. I mean... There's editions that were old, updated since then, and the new prints missed entire chapters. The old ones didn't have postscript or intro's that showed Royal Assent... Y'know, where the sitting monarch signs off on 'em, like it's his personal approval. ALL the newer ones bear it."

"Y-.... Yeah, but that could be a change in how they do it, like... If they drafted a law about needing that, some point or another."

"And you're right, that would be good logic. I don't blame you for thinkin' that, since I thought of it too. There was no legal change there. Not in 97 years." He closed the little book with a loud clap, considering its mass. Held it out to Todd, and while his friend looked it over, started through the innards of it, Bret fleshed out the details. "And that change was taking it away, the standard. It's King B's decision, every time, signing off. Almost all the changes, books, took Morie's and the Huralt's names the fuck out. Now I ain't stupid... Hold a gun to my head and I'd say it was that Bowser lost his pal, never any courtly-type vengeance for the woman 'n' kid that fucker left. Either way though, you wanna tell me how likely it is to you that he don't know who Wendy's dating?"

"..... "

"Oh it gets SO much better. His Dad the Duke was, well, a Duke. He can represent the king in places or ceremonies so long as it's okayed from on-high. And he'd done that, more than once... Bowser has his staff but he was still a single dad, of seven. Three times we had Duke Jake play chief, and two of those were representing one thing. I want'cha to do me a solid: turn to page 174 in there, read the caption under the image."

Todd looked into the little book, looked once up at Bret with an uneasy reluctance; it told of how little he looked forward to finding out. But as he gave in and flipped to the right place, there it was, a man in white coat shaking hands with the smiling Duke, dapper in cuff links and honourary medals. He looked the part alright, and the man in white had every mark of a scientist. Todd read through the caption, and as he went his speaking slowed down. "Jacob, 4th Duke of Jalience and upper Rhodes, shakes hands on the Atomic Deal with committee chair Dr. Elbert Gadd... The deal would go on to... Shelve all aspects of the state's... N-..."

"It's a'ight, take your time. I had to."

"... Nuclear program." Todd glanced up, no, stared up, at his studious pal, in disbelief.

"Yeah. What I fear ain't that he was killed for knowing too much, it don't seem likely and the rest of the math won't add up. I'm afraid of what comes out of it, past- and present-tense together. The same half-buried books who had more to say about the Duke than this, also spelled out that he was doting. Before he went and cheated and fucked into the netherworld, they called him a 'close father' to his offspring. Now I hate my dad. You know he's got issues, and I ain't gonna bring 'em out again, but even MY pop found time to tell me a shitton of things he thought I should know."

Todd put all the pieces together in a jiffy; Bret had made it a snap for ANYone who could've been there. "How much do you think Morie got, as far as secrets from his sperm donor?"

"That, Todd, is exactly what I gotta solve." He put his hands together; they weren't calcified enough at his age to crack the knuckles, but he went through the motion. "And I dunno any other way to, than holing up in the castle. Keepin' wise to where Wendy goes, if he pops in. Alertness."

"Now hold on a sec, wait-" Todd interjected a protest, feeling sensible.

"-I ain't gotta! They wouldn't think shit if they see us there, we're a prince's posse! Sure I don't like the idea of spying, 'specially on someone's fucking love-life, but what other ideas you got!? There's a man who doesn't want us to know we made nukes. This kingdom, this damn country we're a part of. And he sits in the highest seat. Top it off with how the man who made it possible had a son who's porking his daughter. I don't have a G.-D.-answer for what it means, why it feels like a ticking time bomb. This is how I get one."

Todd's mouth opened, but lazily; he owned no point or a set of words that would fight Bret's. So he put it to different use. "We'll lay low, and try to feel it out until we catch on a lead of some kind. Dig us, we're like rogue detectives."

"Works just fine for me." Bret said it strong and sure, as their feet closed in on the end of this hall. There was a black vinyl strip that wrapped the floor, ceiling, walls; it made the transfer from ornate walkway to resplendent stony castle a hard line, but in a way not wholly making sense... Unless you used a wheelchair. Their shoes clacked on the new ground and they encountered people again, subjects who funneled through the first floor. A freeway of women and men on missions, more of the king's doing and for his purposes.

Todd was pushed past by a mid-level guard, a Captain; he had pockmarked skin and a scar down his neck, and a faint whiff of his breath brought cherry tobacco. Todd recoiled, more than needed; he did this again when a short lass brushed his leg, trying to get by with a basket of herbs for the cooks. He felt hot, a little trapped... Claustrophobic, after the info-dump and its scare. This startlement would only go worse without remediating. He found an open spot to squeeze over and eventually reach the wall; his panic lessened when he leaned on its coolness. He wasn't mortified, but he'd be overwhelmed for a while... Bret was not far off but stayed in the thick of moving people, even mingled with a few that they knew from galavanting here with the skater-prince. Todd's face showed an impressed nerve, with Bret handling this well and having tones of a real, authentic investigator. He barely came off like a teen trying to wear Bogart's gaze and swagger.

Bret asked a few light icebreakers, just some open-ended questions of the older help. "I bet you don't miss the green carpet from the '70s, before His Majesty upgraded" or "Was it ever this busy when the Duke showed up?" Leading in with the first's type, hitting them with variance of the second, seeing what would stick. Todd saw this happen, enough times to start counting on a second hand, and he came off the wall. Sympathizing with all of it, he tried the same thing, with less luck. His low talent with guiding talks and/or level of charisma became clear to him, while Bret chatted, introduced himself to some, made out like a socialite who just got his voice back after some movie-quality accident. True, it wouldn't amount to much; half the folks around Bret were perplexed or made efforts to end the chat, they knew it was unusual for him to be this way. But he wouldn't give up... And neither would the friend of his here, the one who saved him from goons in the canteen. They didn't have Lemmy right now but they'd by-God be there for one another.

It's just unfortunate they couldn't prep for who showed up, another face among this thick crowd. He would have slipped right by were Todd not watching and lucky. Up a staircase the man went; the back of Morie's head had Todd heading towards it, and when Bret saw him move so fleet and direct, he knew to follow, though Wendy's beau had already left his sight around the curve of spiral stairs. A shaken, unready Todd brainstormed assumptions; pretty much all of them painted Morie as a sleeper cell, a bitter child who hides a haness plot. Bret would think the same, once he caught up to Todd's heels and got a glimpse of the guy they shadowed.

They would have botched everything if they'd known right then. The extent to which the truth related or didn't.

And they resolved to find her, the princess unwise to who called her sweetie. They would never want a good person used, and Wendy was like a stepsister. Still they had no route to finding out where she was, or right now, what she fought.

Wendy was in shambles. She staggered on stronger legs than most, not trying to be quiet. Pieces of shirt hung off the rest of her top by thin strips. Tears streamed cosmetics down her face in a swirl. As her feet and Iggy's both knocked over concrete pebbles, plasterdusted wood and beams, she kept ahead. Her heart wanted most to find that armory. Three steps behind, the cerebral brother looked up, to a hawk circling the city's rubble; anything was better than to be that creature, face-down at all this ruination. Not missing even a grain of the disaster. Smelling carrion of a lone origin.

He wiped his eye, but made no sound, except for tripping over objects left and right. Wendy didn't care to ask him to pay attention; there would never be a wronger time for it. Deep down she had pangs, missing a certain face, his flowing tones like cocoa'd milk, and she swore she'd return to it, confront her intentions; she'd have to make it out of ground-zero first.

She would reach that storehouse. It would happen before she felt thirst again. But feel it she would, and those involved would find it fatal.

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It all played out in an eerie slowing of normal time. Lemmy's boots crushed the ground; he left a light kneeprint when one steadied him on the odd, mealy dirt. Grass blades ripped apart at the wind off his body's jumpdown. They weren't solid. Strong though he was, his eyes almost squinted at the sparkle of fruit on constructed trees. But if he had, Larry's awareness and gun would have blew apart more than just the one Magikoopa nearest him. Tittering, then silent, it held a look in its eyeglass like it sized up how best to vaporize this koopa prince without so much as a cough. But the robed old man went down like a stack of bricks, plugged through the forehead as Lemmy stood. Two seconds had passed since the flying leap. Lemmy dusted off his shins, and another magikoopa jerked with full body, once. A bullet through the throat tends to do that.

He dropped slower than a piece of flat paper. Larry's own shoes slammed the lowland loam and fake turf before the sorcerer's back came to falling rest. Lemmy glanced at him, then the pair of casualties... And his smile radiated. "That's how you skin a cat-bastard!!" A turn of phrase, and unbeknownst to Larry a stray thought to Mouser and an era long-gone. It was fitting, he felt, as they turned sidearms on the horde of Kamek followers, however overpowered the arms be. Lemmy fragged one through the pupil while unrelatedly the pyramid shimmered, imposing but a trigger for rage, Larry's head in a blinding pain. Lemmy's didn't feel so hot either, getting tense from the fruit's twinkling at them. It all made little sense, especially once they saw what the magikoopas did when being slaughtered. Nothing.

Larry put the rifle on his shoulder, tagged what looked like a female through the nose. She collapsed, writhed as she failed to die, but made zero sound. Not a peep or plead. The fire in their bellies grew dim; Lemmy wiped sweat, they were out of breath together, but as they backed up to each other there was too much question to go on. Lemmy turned partway back, talking to his bro while vigilant of every moving mark here. "L-Larry, they ain't answering back... Won't scream..."

"I see that, man!" The younger sniped, frantic as he aimed and re-aimed the barrel, indecisive on the target. Those who had not been hit were as statues. Emotionless, motionless, no rise to be gotten from them. Larry's face scrunched into pain as the shrillness, that noise developed. No longer a piercing tone, it wobbled, bifurcated into two long droning pitches. They were noncomplementary; he almost doubled over, but Lemmy's back had his straight as an arrow. He nevertheless couldn't hack it much longer. "GodFUCKINGdamn these sons o' bitches, what the ever-loving-"

He fired off a round, as something seemed to block his vision an instant. It had swooped, so quick he didn't even process the colour. No idea where it went. He aimed upward, shot into where he felt it had gone or come from. Hot steel whizzed through the air, and Lemmy turned around in a second. "Knock that shit off, we ain't got cheat codes for infinite shells!"

"Don't tell me how to war! I just had somethin' buzz me, couldn't even catch the shape! We... We're boned, Lemmy..."

His voice was going paltry. In his grey matter, the grip on wakefulness started slipping. Woozy, disoriented, the tone took its toll. Lemmy watched his spine curve, as he stumbled, tripped over his own feet, and landed with Lemmy's hands under his arms, keeping him from an assfirst dirtsmack. He was angered nearly insane. "We're nothing, get the FUCK up you shitass! Don't you sign our death warrants! SQUEEEEZE that trigger, or I'm pullin' my bowie and slashin' you myself!"

Larry had only time to look up, his legs jellied, speechless at what his sibling just said. Speechless also for his fading strength... The tone had not just invaded his ear, but greyed everything. Shapes were becoming clouds, as if reversing the process where they saw these pacifist magicheads take form. Only everything lost form, even the sky, whose blue was the last faint palette to pale out before all was shapeless, then all was black.

The elder brother struggled: lifting an unconscious man was like picking up a sleeping cat. He tried and triumphed, getting Larry to his flaccid feet. The only way to keep standing was a hug... He held Larry's chest to his, gunstraps and ammo belts and all, until his teeth ground with agony. The obelisk had been Larry's kryptonite, and those glare-emitting sacs of fruit his. He couldn't keep attention, not on his own feet, not on the unfeeling retches in robes, either live and staring on them paralyzed or on the ground leaking red from endings at royalty's hand. The clan in power, anyway, as they'd come down to massacre. The female who bled out under all of this, face to the sky, at last outstretched her hand... Small, it reached up, shaking as the last bit of her power truly left her, and the curtain of eternal rest came down...

... She survived, pulled up to her feet at the clap of two hands. They were supreme. The sound had sourced from the point, the tippytop of the triangular building, and when that clap came there were two things it killed instantly: the hum from under its feet, and the deadly light from those transmuted breadfruits. Kamek's smooth face hid every line, all its age under spellcrafts, but his grin he hid inside himself. No victory or giddy joys escaped through his face, which remained as stone and unmoved, when both koopalings shook off the radiation that beguiled them separate. He had plenty of time to stare straight on, eyes trained at the hate and retalience whom entered his land for one reason.

He was uncharacteristic. With a skew of the chin he looked to the woman his clap resurrected. She made it gently - dignifiedly - to a stand again, and her poise toward her king was nothing less than reverent. His mouth, showing two fangs sharpened in the shine of real day, had the slightest pleasantness. "Go my child. Home is where all ours are called to, when the world has made you little."

It was sweet and stumped both of the princely duo. It was nothing, however, next to the development after. She nodded, it became a bow, and she slid off with those capetails like a beautiful slug before her entirety faded. She became translucent... Then, on another flick of their eyelids, she was vanished.

And with that, one-by-one they went the way of her. Some curtsied, most bowed, but all of them went quick and formless into the vast blank of nothingness, no exit visible to ferry them off. Almost like spacetime itself dissolved to hide and capture them.

Kamek himself bowed; to the sky, an angle and direction FAR removed from that which pointed to Bowser's lands. His hand came up during, with ferocious speed; it coincided with a loud *bang* from Lemmy's wielded gunmuzzle. He might have known a simple weapon won't kill this monster, but he hadn't thought the bullet may be snatched from the air. Kamek's suave ways swirled the ammo round in arcs that sashayed. Style guided as it went above his head. Light immersed his garments. He then swung it down forward and opened that palm to flat. Liquid metal oozed down the trappings of his fingers, greased knuckles with a dense dark shine. All traces dripped off his hand in time, as if his form was Teflon. Larry's throat let a gasp free, and Lemmy, the duke of half-pipes whose cowboy side had awakened, found it hard to access this new self; his body closed in toward Larry. They were neither one deterred, thinking only of how enraged and broiling they were merely seeing him again. And now this. His murders were fresh on their hearts the same as what appeared to be their own, cutting down pawns that were truly hypnotized, or mindless, or... Without souls.

Their skin hived. It crawled as their minds processed and despaired. Nothing ever robbed this heavily their hope.

He had material to speak. They held pointless guns with nowhere to go. His eyebrows etched into the stern ire they'd more expect, but now, with it his voice echoed, a metallic howl too real to be robot and too harsh to be of life. "I can't fathom happiness without mortals. Your indiscriminance is no laugh to me. Noble. All of what you were fell away, when it came to me. I speak simply since I recall it fell proper on the ears of impudent children. But I fear I no longer have to. As I live and breathe a militia was reborn from two hormonal progeny, I see. And I cannot resist asking, was this your idea? Or is it from the two wrinkled balls that spat you both out, of he who thinks with them and a con-man's discipline of wisdom?"

"Shut your ignorant FUCKhole!!" Lemmy had nineteen pounds of killing metal on him and no chill. Even if his three guns didn't each whisper to him in this such moment, Kamek knew how to work a crowd, of two million OR two. Larry worked into a frenzy, hands swiftly latching on Lemmy, restraining him from a fool's errand as the latter lunged at the pyramid. He didn't get closer than five feet from its base, his right arm outstretched to near the gold; he twitched through that arm as Larry pulled him away to see red leaking from a place on his mitt... No, not one place... They were shocked to find as they inspected it, the blood came from every pore. They didn't have to be Iggy or any other brainiac to tell that coming close to Kamek made his aura melt the trespasser half-away.

"Hahahah, not bloody likely, as another's princess once suggested. Force a calm and listen: I come with additions to you, not subtraction. Think less on who you no longer have; mindless men in armour who worshipped fear. They distract from what you don't know." Larry put ears to all of it but still inspected Lemmy's hand... Drops of red rained down, the limb was clearly atrophied as Lemmy shook it loosely with another twitch. The times he'd tricked off of rails at home and come down on his family jewels... The broken arm and leg from jumping that cement truck on what used to be the East side... They were nothing like this pain. He did as much listening as Larry, though it felt like tiny bugs burrowed in his scales, ate away his wrist and finger tendons, invisible pirhana. Kamek loomed prideful as the two assassains no longer even reached for their guns. "The call to epiphany's arrived. If I say the words, you would melt as the iron I turned weak as chocolate candy. Why haven't I?... Have you an answer?..." He looked up, this time to where Bowser's cities and realms would lay across the world's curvature. Not a phrase was given unto that absent redheaded pig. He returned to talking down, not truly condescending. Instructing the pair who leaned on each other and trembled, unsure of all things. "Have you even the courage to stand solo anymore?... Well I judge you not, and cackle none. It was no fault of yours, lacking guidance. A string of years where I was to keep you safe, complacent, unto your only parent's wish. Time attended in full by me. He was occupied with this, going hand-in-hand with his stranglehold. He raised you to love the lie. Thus, I cast no blame for you defending him to death. With heart you protect entitlement, effects of his mined loyalty." He at once looked reflective and regretful. "A part of me saddens, you now hit those mines for his sake. I know you now as I ever did, frightened kids. An innocent start for the bittersweet."

His sleeves enlarged, how it occurs when robewearers lifted both arms. Larry's eyes went large, he knew magic was on the way, black and destructive as everything he heard from righteous Kamek. Lemmy also saw the forthcoming, and shoved right onto Larry, pulling them both to the ground. No blast of fire or volts or ice came for their heads, though. His movie-star tackle was smooth pointlessness. No, what Kamek forged now drew from next to him, beside the gleaming perch that had screamed in the prince's head. Kamek drew from the land itself, and fog again rose from brittle strands of grass-hair and sugary dirt grains. It rose tall. Many stories, and it eclipsed him at peak-standing height. Fifty feet. Sixty-five. Eighty, and with "wings" of white mist branching off, creating arms. A hole appeared at center of its below-space; there were legs now. It took on colour and form as the elders dead and living had, but so different... Terror-fueling..

Salt rolled over Larry's upper lip; into his gaped maw the taste flowed. Light and heat faded on them as this giant blocked those; its brown hue was rustlike, pallid and a red scree over segmented rock. Kamek's chitter came to their ears, amused as they were horrified that a stone golem's among his tricks. The sheer height and mass was nothing; unto them its piercing cry boomed, like an airplane breaking Mach 3 covered in brass whistles. Larry toppled to the dirt, his ears agonied and teeth chattering and asshole taut. Lemmy hobbled, but a drunk in stumbles he wasn't; no part of this empty show would scare him, not one deed of a soulless husk. He'd seen the like through an LCD screen, him at at controller, far too often. His feet were steadfast. Though he fumbled with the cold steel over his back he managed to pull another gun while this rock-ogre-thing screamed bloody murder.

Larry thought his brother brandished it for the beast: he well and truly cheered when Lemmy's hand slapped on the barrel, his other on the trigger. But this wasn't for the living spell who pursued... And no molten steel left that gun. Iggy's mind was alive in that skater AND himself for a split-second, as Lemmy kept it on the chest of rock until right when he put pressure on the finger, whereupon he swung around. Aim was blessed and true as it sent a full grenade to Kamek, beaning him in the twisted face, shattering on impact. Kamek's eyes, chops, snout, took a full dose of fluoroantimonic deathburn.

Larry's eyes lit up. "YE-HEAHHHHHH!! BRO YOU FUCKIN' CLOBBERED IT, NOTHIN' BUT NET!!! TUUUSSK!! " His fist shook to the heavens. Lemmy's shoulder stung as he smacked it with love. Lime-green trickles and creeks flowed off Kamek, who retched, but had more trouble just standing. Gold and sandstone melted like ice under him, the liquid broiled and protonated all. He danced, one might say, trying to miss the cracked points and liquefying runny fizz he'd stood on. Gravity bowed not to him, and it pulled his struggling frame to tumble down the side. Like a log, sizzling away at every piece of block his body touched. The building thundered, its shape had been warped beyond structural integrity; while Kamek rolled to a stop face-down it began a slow implosion behind. Layers of wet yellow steamed and smoked. The sorcerer lay still on the ground. Larry and Lemmy hugged in the closest hold since preschool days; joy and relief was theirs, as were callous laughs at this dead asshole.

The giant still stood. It screamed once more. This time, Lemmy yelled right along with it, as his person shook like Larry's. Their smiles grew faint, and left, as Kamek's arm moved below them. Then bit by bit, the rest of him pushed up. His low laugh started quiet but growing and their hearts sank to lower than he'd laid. Once he made it to his feet, their sorrows multiplied; next to them another thundering had the building de-melt. Standing back tall, as if time reversed. But it hadn't, as they continued forward in the cruel fate this battle made.

"Stupid is as princes do," he quipped in sweet tones, just goosepimpling them to the limit. The pyramid loomed higher; his thoughtless repair tacked on another level of stones, an obvious play of might. His creations were impervious, as him.

"But why!?" Lemmy beseeched no one, not aware of what he stated aloud. "The fuck could you DO that kept it off!? In the name of Wart-" His swear-word was meager, as were his vocal cords, going soft on him. The answer was in front of his face; in the dirt, the trees and their dangling pods, in the very three or four they'd killed upon crashing this party.

Yes, Kamek's hands brushing off his cape were gratuitous; all dirt wicked off him as if oiled to unstickable. His face showed not a wound or smudge. Instead, it had calm peace. He wore its ego expertly. "Life is tangible, our beings mere atoms in the proper grouping. Should I will mine to no longer be flesh, affix my essence to a formula, I become."

Lemmy's hand balled to a fist; his knuckles nearly cracked. A vain "GAHHHHHH!!!" departed him but the shriek of war was neutered, unoptioned. It was probable the magic bastard's Teflon, the same as what their secret gun was moulded of. Lemmy dropped the firearm, ducked down; a fist big as a car sailed over them; an angry giant took a step their way, slowness and its lumbering bought them precious time. Larry meant to run but his head went down, Lemmy pushed on it, aloof while he struggled to look taller for half a second. "Go on then, 3D print your way outta HELLFIRE!!" Larry slipped a hand into his, and yanked, so when the giant punched again it missed them by a mile. Dust and pebbles rained on them from its joints moving, and the stone fist shattered a tree. Fruits sailed through the air as water-filed beach balls. The leaves and trunk rot away in seconds. Demon-rock-beast wailed its irritation and both princes had fingers in their ears just quick enough.

Also barely fast enough was Lemmy, repaying Larry's save with likewise when Kamek's rod appeared in left hand. A blast of plasma sailed over their hair; an inch-square section of Larry's had been in the beam's way. Smoke and a gross scent alone remained. Larry patted and felt at his coif but paid all mind to the traitor's wand. Its dazzling was so new. Frills origamic around the ball at its end, a mix of sights in the orb too heaping to separate. Too much to identify.

Larry's panic grew incalculable. He knew by all intellect the wizard had worlds in that evil tool. All form could manifest, burst forth from it. Genocide had been done, only being introduction.

And another instinct clawed at him; perhaps a god took pity and whispered it, or maybe his awakening - guts marshalled - just came later than the call to arms of Lemmy's. He took his brother down by the legs, sweeping. There was no warning for this, but neither for the bristling explosion; The pyramid had little use now so the top half freely destructed, sheared off by force. It had been remade still wet with failed killing dose of acid; Kamek was immune, and made the moody atronach as himself; when the sand and gold's destruction sent showers of superacid over them, to their left and right, no change happened in the golem.

They dodged another fist brought to slam the ground; brains bounced inside their skulls from earth-shattering imprint. Larry and Lemmy scrambled to a run, circled another tree, more nimble than the beast in chase. But their feet were on stepping stones; where the acid hit dirt, it receded, melting everything but what Kamek wished to shield. Holes in the ground became pits. Chasms. Larry said a wordless prayer of thanks that no drop of stuff hit them to maim or deform... Lemmy cursed God and Satan both for getting no help from either, running from this dolt's toys rather than a true face-off. The rock beast whiffed in the air, but kicked as well, trying to bean them with one well-placed heel to the back. If he connected, the man's spine would be jelly, whichever took the brunt. Lemmy hopped this hole and hopped that, did a cartwheel over one deeper melt-pit, getting by. They could not make one mistake. Larry ran wide and jumped other sides, splitting up to confuse the monster. Kamek laughed all he wanted, since no two mortals could puzzle this harbinger.

Lemmy turned and pulled his rifle, firing into the face of stone; no eyes and no other opening meant no point to this endeavor. He cursed another string and watched Larry try to vault a hole widening from acid's boil; he almost missed the foothold, but kept moving with flutterfeet; the beast of rock flung a fist that almost caught up. Larry felt the wind off it on his elbow, and yelped as the aura sandblasted him. Running harder, he was raw as a sunburn there, breathless, losing steam. He rejoined Lemmy; they were backed up to the dry parts of a pyramid. Gold was hot to the touch of their palms, then shoulder blades; they were backed up to it, nowhere to go. The golem's chest dripped rock bits on them. Kamek's voice trilled as his pet readied the blow, one giant impact that would make them bloody parts on a valley. "You were better men than you should be, by origins. But all is foretold. Your father's smear on us, is lore and legend now!!"

Neither prince closed their eyes. Larry's face twitched as certain doom swung 30 tons of igneous weight their way. There was silence as it seemed to them, fear muffled ear. Lemmy's gun he dropped. His face he braced, he latched fingers over his features, the base instinct for a last moment.

Larry had no thoughts. The 'life flashing before you' was a lie, for in this no slideshow of loves or mistakes or defining moments hit him. The idea of losing years to drug, and she who bore him to sickness, all the foibles of childhood, they had no impact.

In fact, nothing did.

The rock ogre missed again; magic had not seen fit to guard his feet, when acid etched sand out from under his toes. A tripup, less graceful than Larry's, stole his victory and gave them escape. Kamek's teeth gnashed. They sprinted away, around the pyramid which wouldn't fall, below the man who would not die. Glorious pillars rose just behind their legs, all of sizzling alabaster, so hot their back singed. 1 million degrees Celsius, formed at his laziest thought, if they'd only catch those princes. The sorcerer spat, hardy in hate. "COME WISE to what you're in, PESTS! Stop delaying the certain, you will NOT SET FOOT on HIS poisoned lands again!!" He had confidence for such reasons as the sheer cliff they'd scale to get anywhere out of his hamlet. He did not control thoroughly the beast of stone, thus, the anger in its footsteps as it rounded the pyramid, catching up one two-metre-deep print at a time, was its own. Larry leaned back and peppered it with slugs, this time on the shoulders. No slowing down and hardly any chipped away. They used corners to survive, and in Kamek's haste he drew up a molten rod while his big baby shuffled, under its path precisely.

What the brothers could not do, his own carelessness did, and wrecked the beast into a tumble of boulders. It scattered on parched ground. Barely any movement from the head, or separated core; the elongated stones that had linked to make arms, were as lone and still as if laid out by glaciers millenia ago.

They looked to the felled beast; it had been upon them, tasked only with killing, but the enemy ended it. Poor aim... As Lemmy gasped so briefly, it was now known. Imperfection, and the magikoopa filled with hate and bile. There was no quarter called, they had halted at the sound but got going again, just in the nick of time. Kamek's emasculated scream fed their panic, ordering them dead, firing light columns that burned dirt to smoke, caught a tree near them on flames so hot they were colourless. It went up like paper, they meanwhile were getting tired. No plan, nothing but shifting where they ran, going serpentine, the occasional look at pure evil so they'd keep abreast of what he tried.

And try more he did. With another swing of the scepter giant purple wings emerged, stitched to a black ball. He had cast off a flying hellion... They ran harder, feeling it pull at them, its sphere-body a portal to the underworld. Lemmy yelled to Larry, two paces behind now; its batlike shriek showed it hungry to devour him. Larry stretched out his hand, pulled at his brother. The imp tugged at him like a black hole, crunching masses not into singularity but a drop to lakes of fire. Larry knew horror like he'd never imagine. His brother's head pulled firmly back, the skin around his eyes stretched, that familiar face deshaped as he helped it against the pull of something that should not be.

Kamek's screeching turned to nonense. "HAVE YOUR TIME IN TORMENT!! I HAVE BROUGHT YOUR TAXI!! PAY YOUR INHERITED FUCKING FARE!!!" They were doubtless he had lost it. The bat-demon-hole continued sucking in Lemmy, perilously close to gobbling his mass, although the sounds its evil belched went to waver. In a short time Larry found it easier to yank at his bro, free him from danger. They didn't look back this time, as it fizzled, stopped holding aloft and dived in a tailspin. It proved more daunting than the slow rock beast, but with short life. Larry almost wanted to laugh, but neither found it right. As Lemmy aimed at the traitorous scum, fresh off the high of living, he squeezed off a round, one holopoint.

"ACHGH!" Came the report back, from a magician hurt. They had time to regather wits while he shook his arm, the nondominant one which didn't hold wand. Scarlet ran down from above its midbend. Rivulets. He stared at what had just been inside him, lost... They would PAY.

He kept cool. Poured more words of power into his shielding. The oversight he fixed now, they would not touch his majesty a second time. And as he drew up matter from beneath - made his golden pyramidal podium dry - he kept all moisture in safe suspense, and besides this he concocted the terrible.

They were still at a loss for direction. "Whaddo we do with ourselves, G'!?" Larry tried to say with humour, now holding on the skater's hand tight as baling wire.

"Good goddamn question!!" Lemmy shouted with fleet feet. Instincts made him grab the gun, better knowledge made him let it go. He felt an idea coming on... It was close to full, on the edge of realized.

Then they heard it.

"Boys? Is that really you?"

All the sudden, little mattered. Still surrounded by sinkholes acid fizzed in. Those fruited trees collapsed into the same when roots were exposed. But not even the glasses they never saw past gave them pause now. Larry didn't know the voice, an appeal from forever. Lemmy, older by ample time, could never forget it. They spun heads to where they heard from. The sight was... Hallowed. Righteous, a vision of beauty, love.

She stood with legs close and humble. Eyes green as the deepest brackish sea. Her thighs outplumped her chest, which neither man noticed excepting how Wendy favoured her. More beautiful than goddesses. Wrapped in silk and white platinum, dressed as matron and angel, wife of a king.

Their mother's voice sang sweetly her lament, able to see and be before them, at last cheating the past.

Lemmy dropped a tear, wiped more with his sleeve. She called out first to him. "My sweet little one. You've come so far. Both of you strong, your hearts nobler than lions, they blossomed as I've looked on. Oh, Lemmy... I wished for so long to hold you, remind you of my faith... My baby's hazel peeks..." His jaw went loose, overcome with emotion. His eyes, now bluer than blue, had not started that way; the first year of his life there was brown and pewter, flakes of them in irises like stained glass. He had forgotten when his father used to tell it... Having it back, a truth about his years of helplessness, trust and love, it was a religious experience. Crippling. Real.

Both men were timid statues. Tall toddlers in fatigues, dressed and solid like soldiers. Inside they felt the pangs, channeled a childhood. To their right and 80 feet higher, Kamek held the acid drawn like salve from fixed pyramid. He could repel it, propel it, pour it back at intricate will. They hearkened to the dead voice of she which passed from this coil... It would soften the bitterest heart. "There's so many things I'd say, had we the time. Our land is dying. I looked on for years, from the ether, no way to tell you. It crushed me, feeling I'd failed you. Oh how I wished to be there, telling you what's to come. Helping you to stop itRPPLGHH--"

Her confusion sprung from a bullet, whirring through the smoky haze of her ear. It had nothing solid to hit. There was no blood. But in her recoil, after Larry had cocked his gun oh-so-quiet and sent off a message to say what's true and fake, her kind gaze came back stone and freezing, a dead-level expressive that seared the air. Something the real queen would never have worn.

She was in heaven. Indelibly for years, starting on the breath she took that Ludwig thought of every day. Not some 'ether' as the stinging, cruel joke of this stand-in tried to stake such claim.

Lemmy's jaw froze; he saved from crunching his lip and tasting iron. Knuckles pale, eyes swelling red as her mist de-stabilized and blew away into the far winds. His cheeks boiled in anguished rage; of course she hadn't been real. But the tormenting had no cause nor end. He blinked once, thanked Larry wordlessly for doing what he couldn't.

Then the vile one spoke more of and to his own ends.

"I trust you're enjoying the reminder of who you'd be lucky to see when today is done, pretenders. It's all harmless, isn't it? Her goodness once is certainly no falsehood. As for if you meet her on the other side, that's for destiny's arrangement. I bear no witness." He radiated more than light; as if a shape of him entreated on the fabric of space, and their minds were oppressed by it, turtles held under a terrific boulder, squeezing air from them. They held up to this so thinly, ankles wobbling, on a sliver of strength. "Don't weep for your country. It goes to able hands. Your father had those at a point... He did not always spit on my respect. Fortressess were built, sub-rulers picked and vetted, placed on their region's guard. You were impermeable, and I could bide my time. I shudder at the ruthless drive that died... That fool's dragon hit the far corners of his reach, and gave in to stagnance. And the hedonism. His sin I despised not, it was SO frightfully common for the world of men nor koopas, when riches come. Greed has its own grace like a metered dance. But it became nothing more, a plaintive race to excess. We were dead lands, with no direction. What is a nation, children, with no place to add and live our power through the END of another!?"

His speech which had started pious, rolled to the depths of bile. He was fiery, and as the snarl capped him off, Lemmy blasted a cap below him to that pyramid. Two stones under the peak, not near to Kamek, but chipping the gold and sand. All impurities that weren't karats flung off randomly; a yellow fragment tagged the wizard's arm. He shook it with a "Yow"... Indeed undignified. The shielding he'd put up had its limits. Larry and Lemmy shared a chuckle; Kamek heard this as his face went purple, driven mad by the shaming, moreso by their bond...

"KISS ALL your emptiness farewell!!" The words were hissed, no tone or melody period. He curled his wand back, yanking hell's fury from the cosmos. A rune of molten earth sliced through the sky, born from a rip in space; intricate rows of boiled rock sailed in streaks to the princely pair. They were faster than thought; Lemmy squawled as a splash hit his hipbone, but away from his walking gait. He rolled around and came up not hobbling, it was a flesh wound. Skin sizzled around its pain, however, a deep scar that would fester. He could not think of first aid now; Larry's hands pounded his pecs, not a scratch on him and hyped to get this escalated, and ended. Kamek threw blue orbs of soul-death, fireballs with traps for any spirit who met its end by them. The brothers tossed themselves away from each, avoiding and evading, doing parkour against the more solid 'trees' or sides of acid-wrought pits. They squeezed off bullets between every group of killer balls. One struck and sheared the ring finger of Kamek's right paw clean off; it landed thoughtlessly on dirt far away. He grew another one in seconds, outclassing any starfish. He hated with a pureness simply impossible. "You will never see the glory of this place made real!! HHHAAAHHHH!!!"

They were fortunate enough, and focused, keeping clear of their doom while things of his making toppled around them, brought down by himself. Inside of them, buried where this moment wouldn't start to think on such points, lay knowledge that he told several truths. They went above trueisms, though it didn't buy him license to eradicate. Bowser was the crowned king. Their protector and father, and his respect by and large was earned. But there were stories of the campaigns. Secrets and men in leagues with others. He was very likely not entitled to the throne... Ultimately it SHOULD be him, as it lies so unsafe if Kamek's and thus herded by the minds of ancient gods. Power siphoned into twisted minds and hearts of empty skin. The fact had naught to do with rights... Nor, as they learned now, chances. Darker times returned, with the gods of loss, Kamek himself one amongst them.

Torrents of plasma chased the koopas like snakes who swam. Yellow sprays too were after Lemmy like missiles, the last of that acid round he'd flung at Kamek, still wound into a kill-trajectory, sometimes swirled into the billion degree dark orbs. They screamed when one came within a metre from them, heat and evil burning their scales and stealing hope and peace. Larry hid his growing warm spot on his trousers' front quarter. Pissing in fear. The short man with emptiness, a jaded knight of hollow ways and means, was so much scarier.

Their mother's image had not lured them here. Lemmy knew in the chest that held in dread and panic's coronary, winded, thirsty, suffering as Larry did. He knew it was not them who brought them here, either.

******************************************************************************

Mario's fogginess arrived with the push of a million screams inside of him.

... He awoke and his face instantly flushed, in the shape it was. But the state had been so different only moments ago. Bloodied, stripped of skin, in gravest tatters. And those ills he still possessed the agonies from, bringing his shriek. He was awake, he had a voice, coming out of fresh cords with a dermis over top, if very weak and uneven. Then a much deeper one shouted him to silence. "FUCK OFF with that, plumber! Or you'll find the speed at which my mind changes!"

Gruff, melodramatic. Tutored by the finest uppity coaches from decades ago. Bowser's brogue overscored the plumbr's wails, which incidentally lessened, trailed to their end as the pain itself died down. He'd reoriented. The fact he had external organs, the rest were jarred but improving... It worked wonders bringing the brain out of shock. For the most part. He still felt a rise, turned to look over the side of the table, and puked.

Bowser's sword sang when he sheathed it, shaking off last drops of blood. Entrails had long lay inside this hellhole, now it was the good doctor's himself, and those of his poor unfortunate aide, stupid though accessory to madness. The king turned to face a sick human man... His cape lay low in the windless room, green body aglow in clinic light, and red mane spread over the cove between his horns. Truly he pitied the plumber. "Enough, unless you want me to think I risk life and limb for a daycare student. You'll find nausea wears off if you ignore it." Mario felt fire in his gut. It was the first sensation since losing torment; brought in were a host of questions, not spoken. Had he regenerated? How much had been a dream, or was any of it? Did... Did the ruthless king feed him something to make HIM koopa-fied, with this heartburn?

Some impulses were close. "Mario, Mario. Such a punctuated place you manage to find." Bowser toyed with him, uncaring in the least. Playing out the reasons, his ideas, slow as luxury molasses. "So you're not in the keep, I'm sure you realized. Truthfully I forget this place more often than I remember it... Not much in the way of use nowadays. A king who lives long enough to soften will dispense with frivolities, like torture. I thank seven causes for the, eh... Well, the heartening." Mario leaned up. Against all probabilities his mind barely reeled; to this end he'd noticed the choice of words, Bowser's 'I thank' as opposed to 'You may thank'. He tapped at the side of his own head, shaking shock away with a disconcerting ease, listening to the green one. "If I'm not able to stay watchful of the ones who hide in shadow... I regret that. Please understand."

"WH...W-why?" Plumber started strong, then his tone hit a bottleneck. Nothing here fit.

"Why? HAHAHAHAH!!" The king went the opposite way, falling into amusement. "You can't imagine. I'd dare not waste the descriptors. There is something, however, you may follow. A man married to his job feels poor when he sees the proof of failure. Consider this catacombs my feeblest expenditure." He reached into his cape; a toothpick was stuck in, as if a pin, and this he pulled free to chomp down on. Not to menace or cajole; he had fondness for the taste of balsa. "But, the loss of integration is where it started. I had plans, Mario... You were to play such a part. Even as the infant cries of a firstborn blessed me, for so long I held out. But then, another. More afterwards. It's hard to say what a man feels, when his old life is ripped so slowly from him, and in time he finds himself aiding in it." He came closer. Mario felt something he'd have sworn he'd never see nor be offered; the thick rump of His Majesty set down next to him, as lax as the king was sobered. Warmth Mario perceived with this nearness. "What the devil do I do with you, now that my security's memory..."

It all came out so fast, and to Mario there seemed no rhyme or reason. He had to inquire. "First, you-a tell me why I'm not-a worm food. In pieces on-a the floor." His moustache moved none. Stern, and he would not move until the answer.

He didn't still when the king so graciously offered it. "A creation of my own. I credit my chefs, they are magnificence embodied with an oven. What flows through your veins is infused mushroom: a pureè with enhancing herbs and essential fungal oils. You will never know the time and expense therein. Yet it's so much nothing to me. The vaults never needed emptying." He turned to breathe on Mario - uncomfortably close, to ends that the plumber guessed were backhanded - and his thoughts took a turn for the ordinary, judged by his track record. "My wretchedness has class and potential... You're aware I could lean, open wide this jaw, and your head would be gone. No token of good faith would fix it. Consider, though, what I've done. The vial I injected into you was no quick-spun miracle cure, rather an option I've kept frozen in my quarters for years. Preserved."

"I... Don't-a know what to-"

"I know what you don't know." Not impatience, but firmness. "You DO get that I plan, at times meticulous. Other times it's just-plain-daffy." He lifted both brows; this was a playful turn for the slightest moment. "It falls to a king to foresee all circumstance. And in that I also let myself down. I won't sugarcoat this:" He made certain through Mario's eyes the Italian was listening. Assured of this, he took the most laboured of breaths, ended with a sigh. "Kamek has overgrown my stable of routes to peace. It only starts with attacks being futile, and as all my mages, consultants, men on whom I stake my very kingdom, and my own mind show together... I am bested." He grew quiet.

Completely, unwafflingly quiet.

Mario - wrapped in fear, confounded more than any time before in life, but feeling how the fright wasn't his - did the insane. With his mended hands, chest and organs now vibrant, he pushed himself from the table-perch to the same seat, but just inches away from Bowser. Hearing the monarch's blood run cold. Seeing arteries in pale green rise and fall on the pulse. Hypertense. "You are-a many things. Forgetting... That, I can't-a deny I never thought this would come down to another."

The way Bowser's scalp furrowed, sent clear the message as he wet his dry lips. "The sorcerer wants no tribute, no allegiance. Not when the delights of war sit on his tongue, doled out from any plate he wish."

In Mario's blood, the magic of a 'shroom superenergized had made its way to his grey matter. In his mind, alert and with less limits than ever, he tossed the situation like dough.

While it stuck, the King of Koopas lifted one hand, put its large shadow over a human shoulder, and with claws retracted, out of sight, he lay it down on the tender flesh. Unarmoured, while unmolested. "This concerns many things, plumber. I cannot speak for you, though I doubt not your guesswork, as to if your world will fall. Greed may stop, even hunger might, but a taste for something never truly dies. But before we walk down the path of 'how long until' and all the endings he'll tack on... I'm... I'm a proud man, Mario. There's no way for my worries to retreat. This land I will lose. The castle will fall. And where my pride turns to terror..." He gripped on Mario's shoulder, tightening, gentle but now with a grab like he begged inside to borrow power. Sad anger. Furious anguish. "The sons and daughter I'll survive, if Kamke's choice is to spare the figurehead. Trust that I don't think he will. But if ANYONE is spared when he rolls over the countryside, and lays to rest freedom, liberations... All in the bosom of dead men and women, mass graves, every one defiled as they sleep without peace, as if THEY wear the pearled dress of an innocent beauty the fates envied!!"

Mario had tried to slip free; when emotions heightened, his fear was recentered on Bowser. But the king didn't let go, until this moment, where his arm released the hold. It sank, as did his chin, hands weak, chest full, and a stream of pure heat flowed out when the king wept. Tears hit the floor, collected on his hands, his sternum heaved with the cries and abandonment of might. Nothing went through his head as it poured saltwater, save for bitter stings of the eight names that kept cycling through. Only one was not a bundle's which he'd sired.

The human looked on, empathetic with his eyes misted. Bowser sobbed out will and strength, clenched his fists for all the weak force he could now do. Two of those names had walked to the beyond, sent and trusted. Perhaps the worst mistake he'd ever make, so nigh on the eve of ruin. Snot filled his nostrils, tracks flowed down facial scales from red swelling eyes shut tightly. He could muster just one further question. "W-wwwWHY MUST I BRING DOOM ON ALL THAT COUNTS, FROM THRONE AND MISERY!!?"

None understood. Mario was no different, denied proper facts of two princely soldiers in the outlands. Bowser had planned that, too, however impetuous. Lost a colonel just to seal his lips. Sent them off to kill, but to die. No convincing would get through to him that they were coming back. So he rued, shook with impotent loss, filled the room with heavy shrieks when breaths intook between sobbing.

And so Mario thought. And thought.

... He returned to the king's face, smelling brimstone on Bowser's fangs. "If he's-a grown too powerful to take on, maybe there's hope in-a numbers."

Bowser collected himself; in truth hearing another's words jolted him back to the present and the notion of what he looked like right now. Wiping his nose, faced away to tend the more soaked parts of his cheeks and chin, he nonetheless seemed unconsoled. "Not by my will, but the thread we hang from. I..." He wiped some more, took in lungfuls like he'd starved for air. The help it fostered was priceless, as it eased the explaining of another cold truth. "I have sentries, agents, just as he with all his magic assassains and spies. They've recalled to me the moth I saw, in the Grass Land prairie just yesterday with Wendy beside me. He had control of it. Some cyborged automaton, no doubt living by whim of dark arts. Positively voyeuristic with intel for Kamek. As it's told to me, once it flitted back to the valley it had sealed a worse fate than annhilation."

"The... Valley?" Mario lilted on the second word, thinking first of the pale brown cavern where this blackheart once occupied Dinosaur Land.

It seemed Bowser anticipated this. His head shook. "Afraid it's not one you'd ever have known. When the traitor split off like a spore, the Empty Third is where he wound up infecting. He's brought the land down hundreds of feet, hiding in plain sight what he amasses, however many killers or assets. It sits below us, since the gods are of the Earth." Bowser cut eyes feebly to Mario; it was a weary thing to even recount the lore. "They have their elders, his kind. Nothing came of it, not a sign of ill will. Until it did."

At this point, Bowser wouldn't cry again; it would take being less crushed where he could breathe enough to let it out.

Mario had for so long resented most of what he'd heard, but from the source who now laid it out in detail.

He had but one choice to make. A single-branched decision.

"Bowser... I-a won't suffer your people to pay your past. And my own, they won't-a be next on any long line of extinctions."

Had they been making eye contact, instead of Mario towards him and the ruler toward the grimy floor in gloom, the human would have seen the flash. A bright spark, which may never come again, on the gaze of a monster.

There was time only for Bowser to stand slowly. Lift himself at the core, his crowned head to the sickening white of there's lighting. Inside of him was gratitude, a muted happiness that there may be another day, before a quake shook every brick in the walls.

They both froze, instantly on-guard. Just as quick a Boomerang bro burst through the door, looking queasy and pale. "Y-Y-Your Honour, I mean majesty, there's s-something coming over the hills! We're under siege!! H-Hrrrk-" He coughed up what sounded like breakfast, lunch and a recent midnight snack. Bowser's snout poured smoke; he was more angry that he couldn't know right now whether the soldier's vomit was for the stench and gore of this forgotten haunt, its crime scenes, or the surely-Kamekborne wave of attack.

His cape blew behind him, his feet in solid running that squished 'sanitary' towels and red ponds alike. That cape never touched the ground between Mario's torture chamber and the LCD torches on bleak straight stairway up to the ground floor. In his ears all the way were the boots of a rival, a sworn foe, who might now discover their imminent fate as one.

Outside, the troops ere red-cloaked, skyborne. Each with their wand of reaping. Gran Koopa City was overrun not from perimeters, but as a swarming mass of person-size mosquitos. Settling over buildings, the Toadies blowing fire in pillars through offices, houses, turning all to dead and ash. Only four seconds elapsed while the tallest tower in uptown was taken down, standing stable and erect until the holes blew through, making it a Jenga column. It fell sideways, and all the nearby saw before the smoke filled them and inhalation killed, were the unluckier denizens on the side of plummeting. Some fell out windows before momentum caught them, absorbed them back into a tumbling 5 million pounds of steel. No one inside the city limits escaped it all. One by one, three by three, or thousands at a time, they fell. Screamed their last.

Such a strike was more than unprecedented. Cleansing of the home they covetously claimed. Nine minutes from the moment where a turret guard saw what had looked like planes flying in formation, and at that span's end the castle alone still stood.

Grand Koopa City was goddamn nuked and purged, and now the memories themselves would end, in withered bodies or evaporated with the matter of the minds who carried. Vaporized to burnt dust.

By now the king found his way through the melee, panic on the ground floor as most huddled at interior rooms, some lay over piles of estate treasures, foolishly trying to save their own history. Many more took decorative lances from statues, from the armory, to cut their own wrists or slash through ribbons of flesh on chests and stomachs, ritual suicide. Better in their eyes to choose death than lose life to genocide.

King Bowser looked through peak-shaped portholes in the castle wall. Mario jumped high to the lookout astride him. Theirs were the stares of faithless men in the terror of a final day. Bowser had the added torment of his streetscapes, his people, ERASED.

Before Mario could let himself down, go over and throw his arms around the leg of a broken man and leader, Bowser spoke flatly. "You were given half of the infusion. The rest is in the loft, where my bed and bureaus sit. If anyone yet guards the throne or its chambers, I'll call up and they will answer." His toxic sadness unfolded into rage at those abandoning posts. Mario cared not, hearing Bowser's message. "You'll be given the other half. You submitted to helping me, that much I don't have to estimate. And when you join with me to push these hellions to the gates of Inferno, you will have earned all pardon."

Nothing in his last sentence came emphasized, as every bit held import. Mario had but a choice; remain here, fated to die by fanatical hands, or fight Kamek as he'd done of his own motive tens of times, but for his own freedom and assurance he'll be spared. Mario's gut turned once; this undercurrent and the whole of Bowser's language sounded more along the ordinary. Any belief in that promise lay on desperation. Bowser was still selfish, most likely vile and at all times inward-focused. He would not be rebuilt in a day.

And... Neither would one brick of this town, collapsed in its own mass grave.

So Mario's hand went into the King's. And the squeeze, firm and close as with lifelong partners, sealed the pact.

******************************************************************************

Wendy was calm; defending herself from the here-and-now, all was blank on her features. Her boots crunched cement pieces, exploded first by bombs then the pressure of stepping on them. Her dominant thought: a strange, unsettled gladness over how she had only someone familiar here. Iggy knew not to ask questions. He trusted her directive as they staggered through bits and parts of many a shelter. Strewn about as if they weren't linked to untold lives.

She sputtered as a lock of her bangs came down on her nose; with sweat and some residual blood clinging, the hairs stuck like glue to moisture, curled into her nostrils. Her hand shot up, took hold of the offending strands, and pulled them hard. Uprooted from her skull, and she gave not even a whimper for the short time of pain. They were then thrown to the ground where she made them a silken example; not EVERYthing would come to rest from fire and murder. On, meter by meter, to the secret old armory. Her mind called back to the gleam of gunmetal, smells of refined sulfur. Not like this smoldering wreckage, the indelicate work of true evil. She had a power they didn't, and never could. No prophecy foretold it, not an elder tribe nor any words on scrolls that burn as easy as these bungalows and midrises... No, but for the training Daddy had ensured her, atop direct and fond work she ensured herself, their limitations would be shown for what they are. Iggy groaned as his foot slipped; a jagged portion of stucco scratched up his leg as it came down shakily.

"You okay Ig's?" She bellowed without anger, still managing compassion to a man who'd done his part.

"Yeah... Roy might say I just 'jacked myself up'. It's skin-deep, however, I'll persist."

She chuckled, for the first time today. "Larry might say that, but Roy would use a lot harsher... Y'know..." She knew not how to end it with grace right now. Adding to the heartbreak around them, Roy was out of sight. Someone might know his location or deeds, but it wouldn't be her. Neither was it the koopa prince who now saw her look back, while he ran his hand up the skint flesh. The breath he drew through his teeth hissed.

"Don't do that!" She chided. "It peels back more of the skin when you drag it like so, you're gonna take longer to heal. You know the ropes about field medic stuff."

"O-of course. I just... Don't see much purpose in thinking ahead...Not now."

Wendy stopped short on a dime. She turned, looked down Iggy's nose from a vantage point two feet higher on a pile of cement she had prayed in silence wasn't hiding limbs or organs under her. There wasn't a syllable exchanged. She went back to making forward progress, over fallen walls, between furniture shards and boxsprings, one foot at a time. He didn't lag behind.

She refused to think consciously of what they passed. None of the corners were committed to memory; it helped greatly that she could never tell now which side of town they trampled through. Thinking of the landscape, urbanity in ruins, only held behind it thoughts of Haley. Once she came close to bitterly dwelling, she screamed instead. Iggy threw out a stammering "E-everything peachy?" prior to realizing it was mind, not body. Nothing had hit her, she didn't fall through anything, so the moment was left behind like so much else.

Noises had been flame-borne; the crackle of persistent bursts, flammable fuel, or glass crunching as things were burned into structural failure. They averted eyes, as one five-story office went to implode. Smoke ejected upwards and the solid matter did the opposite, falling in on itself. They were grateful there'd been no shrieks or protests to God while it happened; no one was inside. Or alive to feel it.

A new noise cropped up. Steady, regular ticking, like that of a faraway clock. Wendy stopped again; Iggy hadn't been quick to comprehend this time, so his body stopped when her arm went out to the side, like a drawbridge forbidding. The ticks were perfect rhythm; she saw dust on a flat slab of ex-ceiling, moving down inch by inch as the rumble helped gravity's pull. Her eyes went larger than truck wheels. She grabbed up Iggy like an oversized luggage tote, dragged him right-side-up by the collar into the nearest standing shell of a home.

"What's going on?" He said as brief and strong as someone like him's far extreme. She held her finger to her lips; red polish on ruby gloss that told him flatly to shut it up, if her fears were accurate.

He got no outward proof. Then, the first roar of an RPG shattered the one window not blown-out already in there. They were thankfully clear of it; tempered quartz glass just rained down on the floorboards. Another propelled strike, though, and black smoke exploded from the nearest duplex. When it cleared there was a third of what stood before; flames were thick again. The ticks and tocks were on the rise. No clock made a sound quite so... Thick, like a thousand footsteps' report. She knew this foley. Over top of Iggy she simply fell, with reasons. He had been in the light of an opening, a corner of the dwelling lost to the first wave. Here came the second - as her ears worked overtime - somewhere northeast. Closing the gaps. Murky voices echoed through ex-neighbourhoods, doing more with black plasma and deathbursting wands than the munitions which opened buildings like walnut shells. They were all of Kamek; they came to 'clean up' what the air squadrons hadn't aced from above.

Rockets ripped through three-story townhomes. The untellable sound of pure, bespoke sorcery and lightning-hot beams underscored them. Then to the audio of grief, of bargaining in hysterical tones; Wendy shut her eyes to abort all tears. There were survivors, and soon, more parts of history. She lay low and heavy on Iggy, feeling somehow in her gut that the more she pressed down the safer he'd be. Logic didn't matter. It had gone from here, when all that was innocent succumbed. More and more by the second, whole blocks cut down. She longed to shut off her nose, also, the skin and flesh burning into aroma was so much to bear. She whispered, to an Iggy who lay still. "Like a footrest, or a stone. You're out of sight and mind... They don't look for us. They won't know of us. They don't, and we're not out there."

He felt pulled together by the wisdom and support. She didn't miss a syllable, lost not one change of pitch to fear. "We hole up here until they go. The first came and went, these will do the same. Both of us endure, and before night we're still due to be there, Iggy. Can you picture it? All of them running scared. Before twilight we'll turn the tides!"

No matter what, her rep' as brilliant military mind AND muscle when the going got tough and bloody, it never took a holiday. He found a faith he'd never latch onto, without such constructive push. They kept unseen when bullets whizzed through the alleyways, ricochets put *ping* in their ears alongside the cursed yowling. One went straight through the missing windows above them, straight over Iggy's head by two feet flat. He trembled, but it was short and controlled, half each by himself and her. Another grenade-type round sent a post office to hell; it sounded like a landslide. They were not in position to see the brick cascade, rolling out the front. The tiny arms and feet poking up, some full-grown Snifits, some not quite. All casualties of rows after rows in cloak. Battalions of the deceiver. Every soldier had spells and arms, each man owned a kill count.

From Wendy's throat on down, she lay stiff. The shadows came. Under windowsill and blown-out business parks, the left flank of Kamek marched. Booming volleys of artillery. Whole blocks razed by diverse forms of sour spellcraft, and light went in and out of Wendy's perception, blocked by a row, then another row of soldiers tossing egg-shaped bombs and/or cantrips. Then another. She had nose painfully tight on a brick's edge, beside the head of the brother she shielded. They breathed not, inside, holding it in. Outside the hoarde cursed man woman and animal. Heat grew ten fold in the once-bustling town, as firestorms mounted to engulf and melt steel, in commerce depots skeletonized. Their boots stamped shape on the scorched earth as death's true helpers. Goosesteps suited them, and the treads caught bugs that scurried under. All they saw was obliterated. Iggy screamed, losing his control while his ears bled, explosions at a constant that shook them. Wendy forced her hand over him, stifled his mouth, as her back lay white in plaster dust knocked down in the quake of takeover.

There were pieces hitting them now, a floorboard fell to Iggy's thigh but miraculously glanced off, and he was kept from sounding off by now. Wendy's ears picked up the craziest Deja Vu, in the shock and fear; a lesson from far back in school had the faint memories that flashed through her head. Then a floorboard bashed her below the head, at the upper shoulder, and her grunt was also muffled under First Executive Koopa Bank's tower coming down at six blocks distant. 34 stories poured into the tallest manmade structure in this capital, and it brought hotels down with it as the debris went flying from a Toadie in white robes; a senior among them, given the privelege of making it 'bow down' at the 4th floor like a tree post-axe. By luck it went to the opposite of two heir's hiding place, and still the dust and smoke blew down to them. Curtained in black soot blown fifty miles per hour. Their coughs were short, and did not continue. Holding breath again, the tears stung their eyes.

Voices would get so loud they drowned out the attack. It became clearer and clearer to Wendy - in this blinding dust and smog - they were in the ruined room's center. Not only for the risk of the weight of this deathtrap collapsing middle-first, but for the eyes of Kamek, watching always through the pairs of those he sent. For they were HIS, in every essence. Never born yet living. Slowly...Low, excruciatingly sluggish, they crawled together toward a near wall, right under the side of this place made ownerless. Wendy felt sorry for Iggy as he scraped the brick and splintered wood below, wounded, seething quietly. He held in the noise more passively now; she took her hand away to better move, kept nothing arched high. At agonized last they reached the edge of the wall, and prayed. And sat. And perceived light through the tiny windows made by cracks that opened out. Very little was exposed, but they both were granted places where their sight could penetrate. No matter how they wished not to, necessity and the bane that is curiousity bade them to look on this war. There was no real surprise, with toppling rooves, a few of the trapped jumping to their death or screaming as murder found them. Wendy was especially unflapped, as her wits started to come back, even rise with adrenaline as they'd bought themselves time. Iggy watched the jackboots flatten ground, the exact same spot for every killer who marched, except where rubble moved after they made it so. Wendy sorted through her brain; they couldn't count on having hours or days while the worst played out. Her words were weak, a purposed mutter, all where Iggy might pick up on it between the shots. "... Do you know... What they failed me for in 5th-tier Karate, and I had to retake it?"

Iggy made his head shake shallow. "N-nope..."

She reached back, to her waistline. Out of her side she pulled a curious item, flat as a flounder but in iron silver, and on the end a modified hole. She had it backed out, and the remote-shaped device revealed a button. She held tight to it, checked her arm's position, strained her focus on the feet of a passing platoon... And saw a gap where she had clearance from there to a corner at the next road over.

Her finger mashed the button, and a hot green line of light marked the corner. A small dot, used as aim, and one second later the device shot one metalloid sphere, hundreds of MPH. It was no pellet, as the target she sacrificied, martyred by proxy, blew to smithereens, and fifty Toadies nearby with it.

There was silence for two breaths. They descended on the site, no sign of who had done this, beyond their reckoning. They dogpiled the ruins, came up empty on perpetrators, then to the old apartment block nearestby. No one there either. Their search took them in the wrong direction, and Iggy wanted to clap joyfully. They all funnelled through the streets, chasing the answer for who might dare challenge their serving of the cause and of him. Wendy could not rejoice, as when she thought she might, the wall collapsed halfway down. In the shape of a Toadie, who fell through this panel of weakened wood and brick.

The secret gun had but one shot, max ammo. Kamek's follower who fell through, dazed and shaking it off, looked into the place... Away from where they lay, and then outside. He did a sit-up to climb off his ass and ran back out, sure that his fellow soldiers were onto something.

Wendy relaxed herself, trying to calm her heart down. Iggy's frozen shock only stopped when he shut eyes so tight he saw colours, imagining it hadn't happened, or that he was away from here. A strong mind and vivid mentalities made this able to help him; Wendy pulled herself up, and did the same for him, getting them ducked down but standing. They staggered, wasting precious time, no one around them for now. But they'd broken the pattern. No more piling into the city at every node, for now, against Kamek's apparent orders. Their legs and feet woke up, shook off the hits and bloody scratches from ducking in here. They had their chance. Across the room they stepped, out a back window whose shutters lay half-a-story down, on a culvert. They had ten feet to drop down, and Iggy went first, insistent on it with gesture. Wendy let him, and trusted him to know to roll into it. He did, and as he cleared the landing spot, Wendy hopped down behind. There was no trouble finding reason to go fast. No second chance was happening.

There was a maze of alleyways, delivery drives, a web of them in such neighbourhoods. Wendy trusted her past, its teachings, the study and acts that brought her here. Checking over every fence like three hawks. She found cover at unlikely trees, awnings, grage doors off the hinges from battle's concussives. Their feet moved at every juncture, never still. After close calls, shaving off seconds here and there at shortcuts, she passed a curve, and the exact point was swallowed moments later, under sweltering cloaks, reforming lines. She had saved them both, more and more.

Near the outskirts, they broke into a fence, Iggy's glasses earpiece making a fine pick for a 6-dollar lock. Behind the fence was a derelict tunnel; Bowser's Blue Line rail system had bypassed this leg years ago. Passengers never graced here since, and neither did the electrified system. Wendy saw Iggy shoot in the gate ahead of her, already onto her idea. He knew enough about infrastructure, in his own hobbied ways.

Sun and the flash of fiery clouds faded, their legs were at full-clip now. In the blackness they ran, until Iggy's phone could be shook by him and its flashlight turned on. They hadn't tripped once; the mental picture of this place when they were kids and they broke in for kicks stayed cogent, fun as it had been. Now their hearts raced, salty drops poured off them. 2.4 miles to the other end, and an unfinished planned suburb that never came to be. But no one had seen. They were home free, not about to be victims.

If now lacking any home, in the sense of city. Peoples around. Friends. They couldn't bear to think on it, and they didn't. But neither were they free. This they knew closer to their fluttering tickers, speeding in escape. Closer to that armory, second by second

... Wendy had no will to live. But hers was not the will that drove her shoes to go with Iggy's, with all she'd do to steal back, kill back, drive the beasts from their flattened mourning den of a land. The throne, its daughter, its sons, the close and dear, they would not be scrubbed.

******************************************************************************

The southeast side took a major beating, but nothing they couldn't handle. This city had its own tragedies before anyone invaded, and one could call the entire section Roy shuffled through its own example. Years of poverty, ignored by city council, block after block passed over for beautification projects, lost in the push for urban reinvestment... No sir, a siege wouldn't fell it any worse than the tensions there did. And it held up so far, not high on the list of places for vaporizing. All things in due time, however... Roy did his own running like Wendy and his nerdbro, but less in panic, AND less poise. Huge sneakers hit the pavement; they slid coming up for another step. His neck wrinkled as its thick mass swung his head. Left, right, no luck yet but the building was sure to be close by. Honestly he'd never come out here with sober goggles, so all the harder to get his familiar bearings.

He didn't find it; but shortly they found him. As his holey jeans whipped past a handicap ramp - the doorless doorway of a seven-story brick eyesore, never washed since the first tenant moved in - There was a hand out of the darkness. Normally it had light, but with the whole city going down piece-by-piece, power was long gone. So the hand big as Roy's head got him by the forearm, and dragged him into seedy quiet.

"Ngrfh-... The FUCK are you!?" The prince bellowed in due course. His toughness had an equal, though, and here in its 430 pounds of Sledge-bro, ink up its left arm in whorls of green and black, stood the man who stole him into here. Roy knew the answer to his reflexive question; he also smiled now. Half the battle was won.

"I'm pestilence, bringer of lies." The big non-noble said out the corner of his mouth. It had bass, but weakened by years of Pall Malls and shooting up. The beady eyes, tremendous chin, they all danced more and more. Roy lifted his arm, this fatassed tank of a guy did the same, and they bumped heads hard enough to daze each other while the fists clasped. It had been ten months, at least.

Roy was keen to make things right, if they needed doctoring. "Hal what the hell's good, man? Hahaa you ain't look a bit older!" He now beamed the teeth, straighter and whiter than anything in Hal's hard-luck mouth. But the fellow scoffed and hit him with an elbow. It got Roy's ribcage. It stung. Yep, same old Hal.

The sledge fattie knew what Roy had meant, while he pulled up on the waistband of his blue shorts. "Go on, say it's cause this hides wrinkles. Dare yuh, double-dog-douchenuts." He stepped back, a bit more skimpy than the norm, even if those shorts always suffered on him. No homo with the man with the money and the pedigree.

"Oh I'm not THAT crazy."

It was still a bit more brightside than their average connection. Which Hal went about fixing, with flatter tones. More annoyed. "What'chu want."

Roy leaked sweat. This is what he hadn't looked forward to, more than going out in the Toadie storm. He scratched at his head, all the hair he didn't have. "Uhh, heheh... It ain't like that..."

Hal, for all his posturing, took no time at all going from fraternal to uninviting. "You serious, man? You came all the way out here, and I'm makin' NO dough?"

Shit, Roy just realized the way he told his last sentence; too close to how it went when he'd been down here for a hookup on-credit. And his credit had long been maxed, even if he was here for that. Not today. So he collected his balls - even adjusted them for good measure - and spoke fast, lest he get pushed out the open exit by this big boss, belly-first. He didn't want another bounce sumo-style. "Ho-hooold up, I'm not scorin' today!'

Hal had bulges in that waistband: the front, and the side. Graciously, he reached for the second of those. He was used to so much, this line of work. "Then you tell me whether you thought you'd walk away with more'n you had. I'll tell you after that if you're next in a line of would-be-bandits. Show ya where they're buried, just under Merle's flowerpots-"

"-Hal NO!!" He caught the patriarch about to unwrap the cotton from a steel piece. It wouldn't meet the open air today; Roy let his breath go and his asshole unclenched. Once it got this far, he knew he could explain.

The fat dealer confirmed this, and his irritation had peril wrote on it. "Talk then, ya prison-bitch. Don't tell me you ain't here for high."

Roy did indeed conform to that. His hands went high, his stubble trembly. "You got it, man. Now's not the time, I know y'know. So if I'm here we have real shit." He'd spoke it dead-set on being crucial about it. Afraid of Hal's reaction if it wasn't spelled out, while he SHOULD have been afraid no matter what. The thicc bro didn't take his hand far from the Glock in the garment hiding his junk.

And Hal had a mouthful. "Oh really? And here I thought my sis and uncle both gettin' scrubbed in one hour was a reggie day!!" His slang for regular. He stood like an actor doing 'casual', clearly feeling anything but. The gesticulations got wilder, more street, while anger rose. Roy sweat like pigs in a sauna. "Yeahhh, all these explosions I can't fuckin' hear my KID over, his gawddamn screamin' while he starves since my customers're road pizza, I thought all that's fake trouble!! SO glad you're here to set the record straight!!"

"Hal, dog, I'm here to help you!"

"Sure as I got one tiddy bigger, they got NO struggle in this mansio-... Say that again." He was no longer escalating. Pitch leveled off.

Hope within Roy was relit, after it flickered. He hadn't wore this eagerness, this childlike scope of wide eyes and unchecked posture, since... Well, before he could shave down there. Before any of these people entered life for him. When the 'down' hadn't caught him up.

So he tapped into it, now. What Hal heard was an open plea, in warmth that so often was liability in these poor dwellings. Denying the crusted walls, dirt and molded corridors of squatters. Roy had to, for what he now attempted. "I'm here to help. And you can help me too. Won't be complicated."

Hal, for all the cold lack of abstract bones in his body, didn't fail to understand. The gun was safe now, his overgrown arm left it to bake against hot-blooded scales. "So you say. Hop in the back w' me," He said with a thumb he pointed backward into dark space beyond the front foyer, "We'll sort this shit you bringin'." He had one chuckle for the end of that; it put Roy on further ease, despite terseness. Just how the big guys roll, he'd often found; and this one beckoned him to a sunless curve, where they took a left, one tiny LED on the ceiling from their generator, unfound among these rooms on his walk to the rear of the place. But he knew the path by heart.

Today there were no locked doors; not a moan in them, in feminine voice. Neither were men bickering, hushed but mad, working out the weight or the strength of powders. Brothel and 'yell' services were a recent past, and in calamity's push it's there they would stay. Roy smelled evidence of all of them, but almost didn't, accustomed as his nose was. They entered the brightest spot, and the most interior: lanterns sat around the space of a two-room 'loft' made out of a patient room and a closet. Anyone could tell this had once been a massage clinic: now, Hal's son and his crying lived here, three months old in the arms of a skinny mother, bags under her eyes, pale in the cosmeticless face. She was healthy but tired; Hal leaned down, labouring with his own heft to dote on the boy, fix his onesie which was pinching his arm. He and the mom shared a kiss. The generator was here and small as one of those lanterns, and had a crude pipe out the top so they wouldn't die to carbon monoxide.

Roy knew a functioning family when he saw it in any form. In truth he rather liked that most everything in here had probably been stolen. He dipped his head and clutched at his collar, showing Hal's lady respect. Roy knew he was welcome to sit, and did so cross-legged-style, while Hal half-sat-half-fell back on his ass, and dug under the blanket on the floor. They were on a mattress, blown out by the years and him... Hal found what he dug for, and a joint came out in his fingers from the starry-patterned comforter. "Hit this?" Hal phrased like a question.

"Nahhh, any other time." Roy answered. He still had a bit of nerves that didn't come from the dude nor being in personal space with the small family of big people. His whole reason for here, now, was spilled. "Look Hal... I 'mma put it to you straight, I need Brooke. Kurt,too. The whole block, it's looking like. And I got a phone for 4-way conference calls. It's gettin' used to-day."

"Whoa. Whoawhoa, Royboy." Hal sat high as he could, smushed at the legs and ass by his own substance. "You're pressed. We're dropping like flies, it ain't gonna change. I get that we all want out but if you think they'll follow you back to Rich-Bitch acres and guard on you, I have shit news."

His wife/girlfriend tittered, amused. She gave a bottle to the living siren, and its cry stopped. Roy laughed also, but thoroughly. "Then I have better. I'm tellin'em to meet at the statue on 4th and Geary Drive. Ain't takin' back the Hamptons." He looked Hal dead in the face. "We're not takin' on body counts, either. Not ours."

The face of a plump dude brightened. "That's somethin' I can't hate hearing. But you want to dial up the family? Get us all gallopin' around, spreadin' death and shit. Am I gettin' that right?"

"Not a tad bit off." Roy smiled inordinately, proud every time he actually managed to sound like the noble he was. He reached inside his jeans, behind the band to a secret pocket, the one place he trusted his newest phone staying.

From behind his ass, a female voice scared the goddamn FUCK out of him. "You're on too many steps, then, sugar."

Roy swung around and readied his fist in reflex, for shock not gender. None of them reacted much, but to snicker more. He looked up at a standing 5'3" of pure-vamp. Ruby-dyed hair, swooped up and behind, sculpted. Piercings paired on her nose, both sides over the tiny nostrils. She had a jacket of dull green, heavy with armour sewn in. And in her hands, none other than an XK-237, lot 4... Pride of Dark Kingdom's assault hobbyists. The infamous gun whose magazine comes double-staggered, slicing through pigiron like paper. The dye was hard to come by, too, for her coif up there. He knew Brooke believed in limited everything; by God she didn't make a soul wonder why. And staring on the monied man in here, the toothpick in her lips rolled while teeth chopped it. Chew-toy be damned, she had perfect diction. "That can stay right down there by the bulge. You understand."

He did, and ignored the extra layer of joke, eyebrows up to the sky in good vibes of a natural high. If she was here already, then the rest... He didn't wonder long, they appeared behind her, crowding the door frame before a word could leave him. He started showing out. "Mother o' God, you're a better sight each time! And let's see... X', Kurt, can't sight you through that decked-out-... Fuck!"

He tripped over words; there were shoulder plates on Kurt, the raven with a glandular problem. Epaulets bigger than Brooke's head. Metal, curled and formed over his broadness, the full-court B-ball player of the troupe when public parks were still unvaporized. X-man was Xavier, a Fire Bro wiry and endowed with a brain and a half... He didn't believe in shielding, but half the worst thieves around believed him to be the boogeyman, as he silenced them one by one. A few more lay behind but Brooke's gunmuzzle put them obscured for now. No space had ever been crowded by so much hard-knock stock.

Roy's feet were soon supporting him again; he shot up and carefully approached the lady-in-platoon-gear. His eyes resisted trailing down, thanks to her firepower. "You didn't pay a psychic to see me comin', I hope."

"Nnnnope." She sang, as her troupe had the chuckles now. "You really are married to yourself, if you think your idea of takin' it back was yours." She sniffed one time, bothered in the sinuses. "Wanna know what's been bumpin' around the ghetto? Look at us."

"I... Don't have to..." Her garb and her ways always did this to him. As the temperature rose, he tested out just what he had in store with plans. "No time though. I was thinkin' like an infiltration. They can't kill what they don't pick up on, and X' here, his guile, girl... This is such a yes..."

Stammering some, his eyes finally failed to stay high. She rolled hers; his mistake was redundant. "For now I'm dude. Know how a woman judge feels, on the bench in robes?" She held the gun high; in that angle the fact it was loaded stuck out. "Not that different, I'm guessing. So try me, fly fisher."

She made fun of the obvious, and Roy's growing throb rewound, respectful. And a twinge scared. He spoke more. "I... Can wait, there."

Kurt, bypassing 'hi' as always, got to the meat of this. "We can't, so you were right there. Caught us on last-minute checkup. We're going west; around back of the wealthy spots, we'll head off the worst of 'em like a cursive 'J'. It's in nobody's playbook." His voice lay high for such a muscled creature.

Xavier had a sidearm, and the strangest vest; white and gold, green trim, all plasticine; deep and machinelike, though sewn to polyester on his corduroy shirt. There were places for lights but none shone. Whatever the tech, it was switched off. But his gloom preceded him. "Wanna know where Greg got off to?" Anticipating Roy, since their movement showed an absence conspicuous.

The prince nodded.

X' looked upwards. Then down, to his feet. A moment of silence.

Brooke let Roy in on better things, while he swallowed the lump. "Yerr always the charmer, X'. But he... He didn't go alone. I call that comfort, now. Roy I ask you this point-blank, and honestly I don't care what you say back. So it's on you." She scratched her shoulder; the mites were hard to stop in trashed homesteads. "Where do you see YOU, when we step out there and Mission:Impossible all over 'em?"

He didn't have to think about it. His chin lay high as a man's could without silliness factor. "In the thick of it. Like Ig's or X' here'd say, quest with a clan. The ones under this roof with me. Tell you what... Payin' more than arm service." Meanings of the last part concerned intellect.

He had a way with words, short ones, they all recalled, but was obvious as fuck when telling the truth. Brooke formed the first of a grin from this. "Then you'll see what's really been changing." He heard, and thought at first about the whole neighbourhood. She skewed into turning sideways, showing her figure. "I'm wearing combat Spanxx." It teased him, though they all guffawed, and she knew it wouldn't lead to ANYTHING with that kill-toy in her hands.

Still, the notion of more than that as different, it struck Roy. The drug buddies, casual partners, the days of covert burglaries, sure they were suspended here and now. Behind her lashes and curled pale lips were memories of stores they helped put under; burgled doodads they sat on or sold for all things smokeable. Gangs in unfriendly quarters who carried scars. But were those targets... With this world anymore? Or were they tangents, just a pile of memories collected, like pogs...

They had much conversation about this, without one letter said. Faces locked. Gun loaded. And with a blink, both left the bygone to its time. Xavier's mouth opened for a plan. "We squeeze under the inlet at 6th Street, that follows the buried creek. When they capped it it was Koopa Alps marble they put down; those dickless Toadies can't chop through that without a battery hitting it four straight days, I prah-mise y'. They've been here half of one."

Kurt's nod was slow, skillfully smooth. Roy shot back with the first thing he thought. "So they're not pickin' up on us crawling under city water. And that goes out tooooo, a mile out, do I got that right?"

"Close." He shook his smaller head. "That wall inside, we always joked about having the graffiti of a pizza mascot? Well I walked right into the planning department an hour ago. Easy to lift blueprints when the staff's lying in-state on the floor. Glass blew in when the ranks came, they were cut up like fries. But, check it out." He walked around Brooke, hit his head on the muzzle of her gun, and cursed in Olde Fier tongue. Then he reached in his long sleeve, yanked a roll out, and unfurled it facing Roy. Schematics for the whole block.

He explained while Roy's mouth lay open. "Courtesy of the map for underground power lines. Not only has this got every waterway for five miles every turn, but those yellow lines'll keep us off the live wire grid, all around. And we set charges behind us; I can do ANYthing with Windex and a few fertilizer caps. We'll get through without a cave-in but they can't say the same." He rolled it back up, and dropped it by accident. A sigh, but it rolled to Roy by coincidence of gravity. The koopa prince picked it up and studied all his lesser mind could.

Brooke held her gun higher, so Xavier wouldn't forget piano lessons, or more important, facts of this. Roy was left flabberghasted. "If you're sneakin' into the uplands, which ends that same spot... You're headed for the castle."

"Dingdingdingding!" Brooke quipped.

"And that means..." His expression slid down to lower moods. There was a drain of complexion.

Kurt huffed; he arched his beak to make it loud and clear. "We don't know for definite. But if they brought a thousand friends here, drop the 'r', and if it's hit about everywhere important, since this slum ain't anyone's priority..."

Roy caught the underpinned. Before he spoke, Hal cut into the topic just to keep from forgetting. "S-sorry I 'bout had that pistol in your face. We're all stressin'." Tensions were high, and Roy wasn't.

The prince felt no rage for such as that. He forced a smile, and put his head down to rub forehead space. "Heh, no it's cool bruh. Keep that bile around. We're gonna put it to 'em." He trusted Hal would lay low, with family to worry over; but it supported landlord AND crew, the armed warriors, a doorframe full of hope. Roy's plain speech drove his own heart to rise. "Whatever they're doing with the palace, they're not."

Xavier cheered. There wasn't much energy for the rest to celebrate, nor time. Kurt's alto spelled out a little more. "There's more to what we're aiming, we'll fill you in. Hope you're good to go."

Not a pause at all. "Fuck yes. Move out."

Brooke judged with her face, unseriously. "Careful, dude. I can ask to be captain, and I'll get it." With her trusty gun, half her torso in size. Held like a feather.

X' ducked under Kurt's fists, swinging as he walked to more open space. "Oh, and don't freak out if some of what we say is in code."

Roy nodded, but it slowed down more and more, confused. He was still himself.

There was a moderate goodbye, to Hal who'd let them shelter and regroup so long. The sheepishness of his girlfriend was its own farewell. Roy, for whatever reason, waved at Hal when walking backwards but didn't look at him. The baby boy, he was toe-headed. Brown eyes. Skin unwrinkled, naturally. If Roy or anyone needed motive for victory... For trying, in a struggle none would know until it happened... He didn't think of the turrets or royal guards.

The 'air of the group was setup. Stealth-inclined. Roy dismissed ideas that Kurt's broadness made a sneak a silly directive; this wasn't a sitcom. He thought outside of the troupe just once, as they went to check the entrance for an all-clear to start outside. Across the way - and miles of open space - there were two men, a proper-hardcore training result, both with names of 'L' and carrying similar genes. They would right wrongs in the den of the beast. And for his contribution, it looked as if their soldier prince brute force tactics were inferior to these groups' organizing.

Hushed words of a signal bounced from Xavier, who went first, back to Brooke. They shadowed trashcans and concrete stoops, spots amidst the torn-up and ruined blocks. Every move was catlike, except for X's. They were statues when seven men in robes flew over, goose-formation. Unseen, they moved like lightning when the last of the toes of those Toadies went behind rooves.

Brooke nodded to Xavier, it seemed at random. No chance gesture though, and Roy was lucky enough to see him smirk, reach on the console over his breastplate, press something. A kilometer south, another explosion, but one with different 'teeth' than what Kamek's troupe did. It happened in Harper Pond. A body of water thundered, and the splash sent screams through the air after.

Part of Roy's back muscle flexed with chill oncoming... It would seem there had been sacrifice made, for the greater good. They lay low as snakes' bellies, watching evil's cohorts assemble through the sky, converging. A successful dupe they'd done; four people managed to make 400 think a missile was breaching the surface. Several minutes of time and cleared skies were now theirs.

A true ratchet-pack Roy had joined. Crawling as one through low shrubs. Sprinting through the street when cover ran out, to the next haven. Breaths were hard but quiet. They looked back at every chance to check the status of all others. Roy felt adrenaline like no needle could give; these were a band of siblings, made through no birth; they had everything to lose and thus they played to perservere. At one corner of a bombed-out school, a cellar door opened narrow to the darkness. Kurt went first, getting that out of the way. His crumbling the edge as he squeezed in eased it for the rest. Roy said little; he listened and listened, no room for less, no desire to selfishness. Theirs were the blueprints, in script and in their heads. Multicultural lunkheads and trap-setters, basic guns but hard barrels. The allies Bowser never asked for. The kind he'd never trust. Thieves, a legitimate branch of chance.

To be continued...