Disclaimer: The characters in this chapter do not belong to me, nor does the setting; however, the events that follow with these characters in this setting during this chapter all belong to me, except any events that occur in any media that was already created by Nintendo before this chapter was written.
Chapter 1: The Pink-ish Visitor
It was a bright winter afternoon on Pop Star. The snow glistened in the sun, and the occasional snowflake that yet fell from the wildly burning sky would melt away, projecting a miniature rainbow through its crystals. All the waddle-dees were safely tucked away in their waddle-dee homes, staring out at the splotches of periwinkle that painted the great orange sky while sitting comfortably in their waddle-dee chairs and sipping hot waddle-dee cocoa, and some of the young waddle-dees would see the white stuff outside and head off to Mama Dee's room scratching their round head-bodies as to what the stuff was.
Outside the comfort of home walked a young, brunette, notably short human in a deep red hat with the seeming of the top half of an apple, a semi-baggy green polo shirt, a short black dress that seemed to ripple, and a long, black, thick coat with art supplies sticking out. She trudged heavily through the snow, her feet sinking as she struggled to carry an easel taller than herself that contained a vibrant painting of a tomato. With a final gasp, she plopped herself down against a tree, planting the exhaustingly heavy easel into the snow. Not particularly wanting to stand back up, she reached up to the easel and pulled down the canvas, then placed it into her lap. Reaching into her coat pocket, she felt around for her paint bottles. She laid them out in the snow, reached behind her canvas to pull out a palette and paintbrush, squirted some red, yellow, green, and white out onto her palette, and began to paint.
The paintbrush dipped into the white paint and swished across a spot on the tomato, creating a sort of shine that truly blended quite well with the sunlight in her actual environment; it then dipped into the green and carefully created a wild trail from the top of the tomato that all at once seemed to become apparent as a vine extending in a swirly pattern across the canvas. Admiring her work for a moment, the human realized one last thing missing. Her face straightened back to complete focus, eyes squinting like little beads to get a clearer glance at her project, and with a graceful swipe of her brush, she…
Completely destroyed her creation.
The snow stopped falling and the wind stopped blowing. It was as though time had stopped entirely. She had sent hours, hours trying to capture the elusive maxim tomato perfectly by memory alone, and a single swipe of her paintbrush, just one little misplaced paint splatter, had extended itself disgustingly across the canvas and irreparably defaced her was-to-be-masterpiece. This always happened. It happened with her last piece, when she was painting His Majesty, King Dedede, in a suit of armor. It happened with the piece before that, when she was trying to capture the joy experienced mutually between a young cappy and a frog at the beach. And now it was happening again. It could only be fate, she decided as she stared emptily at her painting, feeling her rage dissipate to a cold, dense sorrow. She wasn't meant to get it right. She was just a pawn, destined for failure for someone else's sake. She slumped down further into the snow. Suddenly, it was much colder outside than it had been before. It felt as though a freezing wind was then blowing through the trees. Fwoosh. They were shaking. Shaking with her sorrow, her fear, her anger. WhoooshPlop. Dropping lumps of snow that were sitting on them before.
An especially large lump of snow dropped in the human's lap.
She looked down at her lap, not for a moment wondering about her purpose. "Of course," she said aloud to herself, slowly drooping her head into the pile of snow on her lap. "So this is my fate: to be a landing pad for a pile of snow."
"Poyo...," replied the lump of snow sadly.
Wait a minute here.
The human could do naught but sit there in the snow, staring up close at the lump of snow that had just, of all things that snow might do, or rather almost certainly would not do, opened up its mouth, or at least someone's or something's mouth somewhere, and spoken to her. Furthermore, this large snowball's mouth, or at least the mouth out of which it spoke, possessed or at least had emitted the very voice, the very infantile, unintelligible uttering, of a baby, and the particular variety of the voice of a baby that seemed to be manifested in this voice was most akin to…
Kirby...?
She felt her heart lifting from the pit of her stomach up into the pale blue clouds. It didn't matter anymore that her painting was ruined or that it wasn't snowing or that a cold wind was practically blowing over all the trees, because whatever the case may have been, Kirby was almost certainly inside of that lump of snow. Surely, her old friend had been sleeping peacefully up in the tree, blanketed by snow; naturally, he would have fallen out when the wind blew so very hard and cold, as would anyone. She hadn't seen Kirby in... well, practically forever. This was good. This was wonderful. Frantically, she dug through the snow, eager to see the happy little puffball smiling up at her. "Poyo!" called Kirby excitedly from inside the snow, surely awaiting the sight of his friend.
What slowly emerged from the snow was very different from what the young painter had expected. Shaking off the cold, white powder, what seemed to be a bundle of clothing climbed up out of the human's lap.
"Kirby?" said the painter to the lump of clothes, beginning to accumulate doubt. Last she checked, he didn't tend to wear clothes; it was a bit illogical for him to be covered in clothes unless they were someone else's. Yes, that must've been it. He must've gotten into someone's clothing because it smelled like food or something. What a very... very Kirby-ish thing to do. There was simply no other way to describe it.
"Kirby," she laughed, "you little monkey, you! Did you really just--" The girl's humorous musings were cut off as she saw the pile of clothes grow to reveal that it was not a pile of clothes at all, but what was slowly transforming into a human shape facing away from her that became more and more clear in form as she watched on in awe. The slowly rising stranger cast a vaguely ominous shadow that floated over the luminous white crystals on the ground. The girl's fear and awe boiled down to a repetitive agony. The being just kept growing; despite it still being smaller than her, she couldn't help but wonder whether the mystery of just how big it would grow would ever end.
Naturally, she found it somewhat of an exasperating relief when she saw the being stop growing when it was about her own size.
The stranger slowly turned toward the young painter, and she wondered if he had a sword or maybe a gun. Maybe he was going to kill her. She was going to die and her life was still meaningless. It just couldn't get any worse.
"Poyo!" interjected the new human happily, turning toward the painter to reveal a particularly androgynous and cheerful human being, complete with a thick pink hoodie, pink cargo shorts, pink slippers that vaguely resembled bunny rabbits, and a childlike face with bright blue eyes and a fascinated sort of smile that seemed to reflect a certain absence of any understanding whatsoever.
Comprehending her obvious psychological folly, the painter could barely contain herself. It would have been rude to laugh at the young man, but it was hard to resist after seeing such a humorous sight. Imagine that, a young man in nothing but pink. Honestly, pink! And to think that she thought this clearly harmless boy was going to kill her. How foolish!
"Poyo?" inquired the stranger confusedly, watching the familiar fellow restrain her laughter with the palms of her hands, allowing oodles of giggles to leak out. The painter could imagine him wondering just what in the world she could be laughing about.
"S-sorry," stuttered the painter between hysterical exhalations. More closely examining the stranger's clothes, she saw that he seemed to be a foreigner... From Aqua Star, perhaps? The cotton lining of the hoodie seemed to be a giveaway.
"Are you lost?" she asked. Aqua Star was quite a ways away; to get to it, one had to go by Rock Star. Anyone who had come from Aqua Star all the way to humble little Pop Star couldn't possibly have done so intentionally.
"Poyo...?" The boy seemed incredibly confused, tilting his head to the left as though to let his brain fall to that side of his skull to better process the strange language. The language must have been new to him, decided the painter; she recalled that people on different stars have very different languages. The Aqua Star language seemed very similar to the infantile babblings of her old friend, Kirby. What she couldn't decide was whether this meant that Kirby was more knowledgeable than she thought or that members of Aqua Star were really freaking stupid.
Come to think of it, there seemed to be a lot of things about this stranger that were parallels to things about Kirby.
"Hey, my name's Adeleine," the painter said to the Kirby-esque stranger, shaking his hand. "Let's be friends, okay?" She knew that it probably didn't mean anything to him, but she hoped that her meaning would get through clearly anyway.
"Poyo!" The newly-befriended stranger cried out in what seemed nothing short of pure joy and leapt unrestrainedly toward Adeleine, throwing his arms around her and knocking her to the ground. "Whoa, hey!" laughed Adeleine. Her many short-lived, futile attempts to break free of the sudden hug, constituted of rolling about in the snow helplessly, did naught but bring the boy along with them. What a strange manner of greeting, thought Adeleine. What with all the water around, it was difficult for her to imagine how people on Aqua Star could well survive such a greeting without being pushed over the edge of their island and falling into the ocean, but she put the thought out of her mind; what was the point, after all, of ruining a good time with trivial pondering? That day alone, she'd already gone through depression, hope, doubt, horror, angst, and laughter just to get to joy; she ought to have been appalled at herself to so easily begin to lose that position of joy for which she'd worked so hard, but she was having too much fun to be appalled at anything, really.
In-between a few attempts to break free, Adeleine was all but certain that she saw, out of the very corner of her eye, a spherical figure darker than shade standing completely still in a distant tree, partially concealed by its leaves. The figure's cape seemed to flow gracefully behind it in a nonexistent wind.
If anyone is reading this, I very much encourage them to review it; I could use some advice.