Wario saw the lights go out on Broadway.
The road disappeared from beneath him, and for an instant he was standing on something pretentious like a voidal waste, before common sense and the auxiliary power kicked in at once and his corpulent frame basked (as much as a frame can bask – a humorous absurdity) in the comfortingly rational incandescence. He wondered why they had done it.
"Why did they do that?" he wondered amusingly, making you laugh. He wondered and pondered, and squandered his remaining time. "I don't want to go back there," mumbled reluctant Wario, who didn't want to go back at all.
"Oh, go on," said Barry Road Way, the proprietor of Broadway Corp, from down the Barry Road Way, which had been snappily named after he in 2008 when Broadway was established. Or was it the other way round? Wario had always known him as Waluigi. "Go on, Wario. Come back to us."
"I just don't have the money," Wario said, very sadly. He said it badly too – he slurred and tripped over those fat lips of his, his biggy ziggy moustache flapping with every exhaled phoneme, of which there were many because like you and me, Wario spoke the English language.
"Go onnn," Barry said, his voice silky smooth and shiny-toothed. Barry shone when he spoke. Wario was a bit jealous of him sometimes. He could still remember their first interaction, when they met in the bowels of Trowel Academy, that most ivory of towers in Diamond City where the two of them had flirted with everything – the local totty, each other, the faculty, but mostly the idea of a career in that most platinum of ideals, that most argent of lifestyles, the Daying Life of Agriculture.
CHAPTER 1
THE DAYING LIFE OF AGRICULTURE
"Argh," Wario enounced morosely.
"Urgh," the one he called Waluigi announced mostly. With the rest of his words, he used his neck muscles to direct them to his friend, the one next to him – not that fat fool Wario, him and his snuffling snout and his crippling addictions, but the one he could really say he sort of loved. A bit. Maybe a few bits. How many bits in a bot? Waluigi couldn't remember.
Los of things were starting to evade his mind as of late. Just this past week, every instruction he'd taken in during his youth on how to clench a fist had just gone, replaced by some song he'd heard during his Toadco Shaturday Shopping Shpree (SHASHOSHP). One of those radio songs, played on those damned speakers. He'd love them to become non-speakers. Mutes. He'd love to rip out the condescending fucking tongues of every one of them. But that could wait, for a later date. His hunger he would sate, but first he needed to speak to Kate.
"Play us a song, Barry," was all she had to say in return. In return to what? He'd forgotten already. Who was Kate?
She wasn't there. Oh, yes she was. Right there. On that spot. You know, Barry. That spot. That fat spot.
"You're being silly again," she said with a mote of caution, and a mite of causation. "Play it, you big welly head."
He hadn't the heart to tell her he couldn't remember a thing about playing music. His lips wobbled, upper and lower, in a kind of beautiful harmony. A thousand melodies dissolved into his addled, rattling, embattled, prattling mind, but they vanished with little more than a horizontal wipe every time his mind's hand made a furtive grasp for the things.
What was his name?
It was Barry. Always Barry. Never not Barry. Never knot Barry. Don't do it.
Who told him that? Wario. Who was Wario?
The man standing down the road seemed a stranger. Quivering jowls communicated intimidation rather than that soothing kind of pliability he'd come to look to in times of life-strife. Barry started to shake, mind, body and soul, and his moustache drooped. It was really funny.
A thousand years grasping, a thousand years chasing his sanity, packed into a single hypersonic minute of mental action. Truly mental action it was. His mind was on a mad one. There were eagles in his daydreams, diamonds in his eyes. But what kind of star was Barry?
The star of Broadway. Of course. Wario needed to come back to Broadway.
But how? For that matter, who? Wasn't he... some classmate?
He couldn't take his eyes off of the looming squatness down the road, so he just lashed out at Kate and struck her to get her attention. She wasn't there. Was she in reach? Was she there to teach him anything? She was an angel, wasn't she? That was why she came to him.
It wasn't Kate. It couldn't have been. Barry couldn't look at people whose names started with K. It was a comical genetic thing. He bloody loved that comic, he did. Arseholes Who Can't Look At People Whose Names Begin With K. Seminal work in the funny titled media field. The laugh track in Barry's head was stuck on a loop. One day he'd get tired of it, he was sure, but it was nice all the same to have that backing. Whatever he said, someone would find it funny. I can relate.
Have you met me?
What a stupid question. Who hadn't met Barry Chuckle? That elicited a chuckle or two from the mental crowd, who were taking off their t-shirts and chucking bottles of napalm at him in some throe of heavenly elation where logical thought was held hostage by craze and waterboarded by frenzy. Bottles of napalm. He wasn't sure that was how it worked. But it was funny. The idea brought him even more recursive laughs.
How was the stand up circuit like in his head? He had some great setups about additional marijuana.
What had he been moping about before? This was clearly the route to take.
Toadette. That was her name. Not Kate. He couldn't strike her because she was about two and a half feet tall. That was so funny, he just about burst his appendix.
He fell to the ground shoulders-first, ungainly, like a puppet structurally collapsing like a tower struck by nefarious government schemes like an ice sculpture meeting a hot air vent like you choosing to read a fanfiction about Wario.
This wasn't Wario's story anymore. This was Waluigi's.
But he was already dead.
Dave Mario woke to a naked bulb on (or was that off?) the ceiling and (rather less excitingly) a naked Peach Toadstool in the bulbous bed that humorously resembled a mushroom, which he slept in most nights. Some nights he didn't sleep at all, out of worry for Luigi or whatever else it was.
This part of the chapter was going to be brief, out of a lack of interest for Mario. Dave, though, he always preferred Dave. Calling him Mario was too... too Mushroomarvel. That was the Mushroom Kingdom's equivalent to Marvel, the multimedia entertainment corporation of our world responsible for such hits as The Amazing Spider-Man, The Defenders, Tales of Suspense as well as second-rate drivel like Iron Man and the vapid so-called stories of the supposedly Incredible Hulk.
Dave was what he was born with. That was what mama gave him. Her first gift... and her last, as it happened. But it wasn't the last thing she ever did for him. Before she took that Warp Pipe home from the Mushroom City General Hospital and was snaffled up by a hungry Piranha Plant in a grisly slapstick fashion, she put an order in for another son, which the infernal stork dropped off like it was nothing about a week later. Luigi was taller and leaner than pudgy little pudgeball Dave, and he loved stories, because he was a infantile whelp who didn't like sports.
He loved in particular the story he made up to explain their most peculiar preadolescence situation, growing up with nary a parent nor guardian in sight. He decided that they were both ordered via storkmail, and that an evil wizard stole Luigi mid-flight. Dave, he said, fell to a tropical island below, where the native dinosaurs cooperated as a herd to save him from harm and reunite him with his beloved brother, drawing tongue-in-cheek comparisons with the plot of Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island.
Dave had never liked the stories. He was kind of an unlikeable prick, which you must have come here expecting. It's in fashion, or was 11 years ago when I last paid attention to Mario fanfiction. You ever go to Lemmy's Land?
But now, of course, Luigi was off living his high-falutin' life as an unexplained missing person.
He went to bed in tears sometimes. Dave, that is. Who knows what Luigi did before bed these days? He probably didn't even have a bed. Maybe he'd already gone, to be with the Yoshis in that balmy paradise of his own design. Or was it Yoshies? The inscription on the action figure Luigi had commissioned had the E, he was pretty sure. But it didn't make any grammatical sense. But, but but but, Luigi was a stickler for grammar. Of course he was, the weedy little mouthbreathing loser.
It didn't make sense to Mario. Nothing made sense when he was this uncomfortable. And like a neat Sim surrounded by puddles of dishwasher leakage, he felt most uncomfortable at all times in this place. This penthouse, this prison of Princess Peach's vile rosy design.
He shot a glance at the slight slutlet splayed under the fungus fibre quilt. Her noodly arm stuck out from the textile sandwich like a stick of succulent celery untouched by the sweaty peanut butter jumble within, brushing against his big bad gut. He drank in the perfume, the body odour, the hairless pink crook of that fabulously foul elbow of hers, and everything that adorned it. That tattoo, her last bruise, the bionic gear.
Living with a princess was stifling. No other word could describe the smotherance, the suffocation, the synonyms for stiflement. There was never air to breathe, never in-betweens; these nightmares always hung on past the dream.
He looked away, out of the stained-glass windows of the apartment; but he couldn't ignore the abstract likeness of the tasteless tart beside him blown into each one, not with that kind of weather. There was no sunshine. No you and me. There were no good times. How impossibly queer.
Dave Mario leaned back, and sunk into his pillow. He contemplated the ups and downs of jumping, but came to the same conclusions as usual. The same shit, on what he hoped was a different day. It was hard to tell with how murky and grey the outside un-view was.
Then he decided to kill Wario.