#003. Tongue-Tied Torture Pr0n

Starring:
Yoshi


Winter mornings, across all mediums of entertainment, are often portrayed as a period of drawling depression, a time when heat and light, essential ingredients to nourish the waking body with much-needed vigor, are brutally purged by the prevailing chill of wind, ice, and clouds. Not in this fanfiction, however. No – today was a beautiful winter morning, with the finest powders of snow streaming gently from the skies, imparting upon the skeleton of trees and the lonely dead earth a fresh blanket of pure, incandescent white, and the peeping rays of harsh sunlight were kept soft and dimly-glowing by the protective arms of serene clouds. It was so beautiful, in fact, that the Ranz des Vaches segment of Gioachino Rossini's William Tell Overture began playing (play from 6:10 on the first result you get when you type 'William Tell Overture' on Youtube. Come now, don't be lazy), and it was to this soothing tone that Yoshi awoke. He stretched his arms and back, let out a wide, content yawn, smacked his lips a little bit, and opened his eyes just a peep, gazing dumbly into some insignificant distance in his room. As per all mornings, it was his seven-o-clock hunger that woke him, and his stomach prodded at his legs and feet with acid-laced spears, willing him to get up, up, up and stuff himself until he burst.

…But first, a quick breath of fresh winter air. He shuffled over to his window, heaved it open, and leaned against the sill. As he thrust his head back and flared his nostrils wide to get as much of that good ol' winter air as possible, a pleasant aroma, depicted rather cartoonishly as a wisp of translucent black, wafted through the air, got caught in the vacuum of Yoshi's ginormous nose, and was promptly sucked into his olfactory system. Immediately Yoshi's head snapped back into place and his lower jaw dropped onto the sill. His tongue unrolled from the deep burrows of his mouth, dripping with copious amounts of dinosaur spit, while his normally-round pupils took the shape of pies – delicious, hot, steaming pies. For that was exactly what he smelled – the delectable scent of piping hot pie fresh from the oven, boasting the sublime flavor of (sniff sniff) – blueberry. He was sniffing a blueberry pie – his favorite pie of all time. The magic power of lustful, voracious want lifted him right off his feet, and Yoshi floated as he traveled the trail of scent aerially, as though his entire body was a cable car following the path of a cable that twisted and turned, turned and twisted, until at last he reached his destination.

There it was – a pan of the most appetizing pie, golden crust flaked with tiny gems of cinnamon, blueberries brooding and tempting, like damp sapphires, under the bars of a lattice cage. It was resting on a random brick wall, with no one in sight – but this hardly mattered to the dinosaur. Yoshi swiveled his tongue in a great circle around his face, giving his nose and his chops an ample wash. He was just about to swallow the pie, pan and all, in one gulp, when he caught sight of a card leaning against a glass of milk.

He picked it up and read:

HeY yoShI! I'm YOuR NUmBer one fAN! plEaSe TaKE THIS bLUeBERry PIe as A gifT FoR bEing AN AwEsOMe sMASHEr! BuT driNk THe miLk FIrsT! PrETTy PlEASe!

The whole thing was written, not by hand, but magazine cut-outs of letters varying in size and font.

"A bit suspicious," Yoshi muttered to himself. Then he said, louder, "Buuuuttt… Who am I to doubt the kindness of a stranger that's giving me some scrumptious pie? Sure thing, kind stranger!" And he wrapped both hands around the glass, lifted it to his mouth, and downed the milk in one gulp. He let out a "kaaaa~" of contentment as the warm fluid washed down his digestive tract, commenting, "Oddly almondy. But still delicious!" He turned, rubbing his palms together, and said happily, "And now it's time for –!"

– the pie was gone.

"AAAAAAGGGGGHHHHH!" Yoshi screamed in horror, bringing his hands to his cheeks as he turned his head frantically for pie, pie, pie. Where the hell did it go? It was right here! He bent over and checked the bottom of the wall, and then he stood up and leaned over it, scanning the other side. He was just about to dig through the snow with his bare hands when he heard an all-too-familiar laugh behind him.

Yoshi wheeled around. There was his pie, still wafting its glorious scent, held high and mighty by the arm of the oh-so-detestable Duck Hunt Dog. He was taunting Yoshi with his trademark laugh – full set of perfect white teeth smiling wide, a coy hand brought up to the side of his muzzle as he let out a series of 8-bit chuckles. Perched on his back, also emitting a series of infuriating honks from her beak, was his duck, who, after a few customary quacks, proceeded to peck away at the pie.

That was when Yoshi lost it. "THAT'S MY PIE!" he screamed, and immediately a cat-and-mouse – umm, dino-and-dog chase occurred: Yoshi ploughed through the snow, while the Duck Hunt Dog scampered with relative ease due to the benefits of being a quadruped, pie kept safe in wings by the Duck Hunt Duck. A bird's eye view of the Smash Mansion and its encircling perimeter would show the chased and chaser making a full round around the Smash Mansion, scaling the walls of the mansion vertically, and even burrowing underground, with neither party showing a hint of exhaustion, such was the burning desire for food.

"Get back here you stupid mutt! Don't make me go over there and kick your butt!" Yoshi yelled with fist pumping the air. Then, legs still a blurred mess of high-speed movement, Yoshi brought a finger to his chin as he gazed thoughtfully upwards. "Oooh, I just made an unintentional rhyme! Let me try again…" He cleared his throat, and shouted, with greater clarity this time, "Stop right now you dumbass duck! Lest you want me to – FUUUUUCCCCKKKKK!"

Yoshi's eyes popped out from their sockets, bounded only to his brain by the thinning cords of his optic nerves, as he saw, right before his very eyes, the Duck Hunt Duck offer the pie to her partner's mouth, who opened wide and took more than half with one single clean bite.

"I'LL KILL YOU!" Yoshi screamed as his eyes snapped back into place. He reeled back his head and with a great spurt of energy, unleashed his wicked tongue from the depths of his mouth. It zipped through the air at Mach speed, like a great long slippery bullet homing in straight for the kill. It whipped at the Duck Hunt Duo several times, always missing due to a well-timed series of dodges from the dog and duck – a quick lift of the hind legs, a brief take to the skies, a random cartwheel through the snow.

"I'll get you this time!" Yoshi murmured with a pernicious intent as cold as the very snow he was crushing under his boots. He twirled his head again, this time keeping his eyes trained on the Duck Hunt Dog, and, after a moment of steadying his head and affirming the position, blasted his tongue away.

His tongue finally hit something quite solid and for a triumphant second Yoshi thought he had finally caught them. Then his eyes widened as he saw that his tongue had not attached itself to the warm, furry surface of a living creature, but rather the cold, metallic exterior of an inanimate telephone pole.

The effect was immediate. Yoshi tried to stop his momentum by digging his heels into the snow, but he still crashed, head first, into the pole, and fell with a pathetic splat into the surrounding snow, tongue stuck to the pole which reverberated briefly from the impact. When he sat back up, it was to the sight of his pupils bouncing off the walls of his eyes and a trio of kooky stars circling his bruised head. After a quick shake of his head, Yoshi warded off most of his daze to see the Duck Hunt Duo, quite a distance away as they once again laughed at his predicament, with the added insult of the Duck Hunt Dog's paw stained rich blue as he popped a piece of the pie into his good friend's beak.

That got Yoshi right back up. "Shun ovv a fittch!" he growled, and charged straight ahead at the meddling duo. He got respectably far, stretching his tongue thin as he scrambled to get his hands and severely mess up the twin laughing faces that incited so much boiling fury in his blood. But nothing can ever last forever, and the same law applied to Yoshi's tongue: At the last pull, the muscle released all its tension, and with a loud crackle came the inevitable compression that unleashed all the elastic energy held within. Yoshi's pupils constricted in wild surprise as he stopped momentarily in his tracks, before he shot back to the pole and slammed the entire back of his body with even greater momentum than before.

He snapped out of it just in time to see the Duck Hunt Dog use his foot to mark a line at the last of Yoshi's bootprint in the snow.

"You thinn aah 'an't reesse you‽" Yoshi yelled, and, scarcely a nanosecond after picking himself up, started to pull away at his tongue. It refused to budge – the warm, fleshy surface had already melded with the cold embrace of metal. Yoshi pulled it once, twice, thrice, heaving with all his might and even kicking against the pole – but all to no avail. He landed on his bottom, and for a moment looked quite dejected as his stomach expressed its displeasure with a croaky growl that lasted fifteen seconds.

Then an idea struck.

Yoshi picked himself back up, dusted his rear, and for a brief second adopted a stance of someone ready to run the marathon of his life – arms poised and bent at the elbows, hands curled up into fists, one leg up and the other ready to burst with movement. Then he turned into a spinning, blurred tornado of green that spun around and around and around the pole. Turning into a tornado always resulted in things being untied in the cartoons, after all, and seeing how cartoony this whole thing up to now was…

The Duck Hunt Duo cocked their heads in the opposite direction as they looked, in confusion, at Yoshi's sudden plan of relative randomness. By then only a single wedge of pie remained, and Duck Hunt Dog was just about to reach for it when the tornado stopped.

They gasped.

There was Yoshi, now with his entire body bound to the pole. Entering tornado mode had somehow caused his tongue to lace around almost his entire body, and Yoshi struggled to even wiggle a single finger of his right hand or both feet, with the only part of the body that retained even a modicum of locomotion being his left arm.

Needless to say, the Duck Hunt Duo exploded into deafening peals of laughter as soon as they registered the pure ridiculousness of Yoshi's tongue-tied situation.

"Strrrp raaffing! Uurrnghh…" Yoshi struggled against the shackles of his own tongue, but the organ, like a resilient superrubber designed to withstand even the most brutish of forces, budged barely a centimeter, the result of many arduous, hard-fought battles that called for an evolution of strength. After a full two minutes of rolling around in the snow and laughing their respective furry/feathery butts off, the Duck Hunt Duo picked themselves back up, high-fived each other with a resounding clap!, and strode over to Yoshi with heads upturned proudly in their victory.

As Yoshi tried desperately to aim a swing with his left arm, Duck Hunt Dog took out, from seemingly out of nowhere, a saw, a bottle of clear liquid, and… An old box T.V. from the 90's. He pushed the saw into Yoshi's left hand, placed the bottle far out of reach from Yoshi in the snow, and set the T.V. directly in front of him, while Duck Hunt Duck rested on Yoshi's shoulder and pecked his face in the general direction to the T.V. Once he was sure that the screen had Yoshi's undivided attention, Duck Hunt Dog took out a remote, aimed it at the box, and hit the power button.

Yoshi's confusion at the whole ordeal was only further exacerbated by what he saw on the grimy, grainy monitor – a facial close-up of a creepy mask, and Yoshi felt an involuntary shudder shake him to his very core that was independent of the unbearably mounting winter cold. For the mask sported some of the most utterly disturbing features that were truly dissonant to the humanlike traits Yoshi was used to from his fellow Smashers. A pair of lifeless, black-as-beetle eyes with no evident sign of the friendly white sclera; blood-red patterns that looked suspiciously like Metroids facing opposite directions on each cheek; a long, almost shovel-like nose whose pointed tip partially blocked the center of its jarringly blue lips; a rectangular chin sectioned from the rest of the face by deep-cut lines that stemmed from the corner of the lips and extended vertically downwards to the bottom of its face. The only warm, pleasant human quality the mask had, in fact, was a rich ponytail of golden-yellow hair that sprouted from the top of the mask and cascaded towards its left side – and all of a sudden, Yoshi felt a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach as he recognized, immediately, the Smasher whose face must be hidden behind such hideous features.

When it spoke, it opened not its lips, but the rectangular chin, which slid downwards and upwards, opening and closing to form the mechanism of a mouth.

"Hello, Yoshi," it rattled in a deep, throaty voice. "I want to play a game." It paused. "Here's what will happen when you lose." The shot quickly changed to show a glass of milk – the same glass which Yoshi had downed just a few minutes ago – along with a bottle of what was labeled with a deathly skull. "The Moo Moo Milk you drank had some crushed Toxic Orbs dissolved in it. Due to the chemical components of both, the Toxic Orb in your system will not take effect until an hour from now. However, this does not make its ingestion any less fatal. Death has simply been postponed for the hour of reprieve that the Moo Moo Milk has granted you. Once the hour passes, you will feel a violent convulsion seize your body, and you will die."

There was another brief pause, during which a flurry of black and white static flashed the entire screen. Then the mask continued. "The antidote lies in the bottle which Duck Hunt Dog has put in front of you. It is, of course, out of your reach, given your current situation. That is where the saw comes in. I believe I do not have to say anymore. The rules of the game, I think, are now painfully obvious." One final pause, where the mask simply stared, emotionless and unmoving, directly into Yoshi's ever-widening eyes. "I mean, if you weren't such an immature little brat, Yoshi, you wouldn't even be here right now. But nope! You just had to stick your giant nose into places where it didn't belong. Well, you're paying for your sins now. You better hurry up, Yoshi, before the hour passes. Make your choice."

The recording ended up with another explosion of static, this time even louder and even more jarring, before the screen blacked out and showed nothing but the dulled reflection of Yoshi's tongue-tied body.