Disclaimer: I don't own Nintendo. What, did you think I did?
You might want to read my story, Smashing, eh? before you read this, or you might not know who some of the characters are. Or maybe you will. I don't care.
A Trivial Matter
Or: An insane and pointless story
It was a dark and stormy and clichéd night at the Smash Mansion, and everyone was bored out of their minds. Some didn't have minds, so they easily kept themselves amused by irritating everyone else.
"Hey, Marth, guess what I'm doing," said Roy.
"I don't know, nor do I want to," replied Marth, Roy's more serious friend, from behind a large, boring, book titled, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
"Aw, you're no fun," pouted Roy. "Link always plays that game with me."
"Proving that he has fewer brain cells than I thought."
"Hiya, Smashers! Wassup?" said Master Hand as he entered the room. Most of the people in the room gave him a look that said: "Are you high?"
"Hey, what's the problem with everybody?" the Hand asked.
"We're totally bored, that's the problem," responded Sheida, who was sitting by Marth and Roy, trying to drown out their bickering.
"Well, I know just the solution. What say we play a nice game of Trivial Pursuit?" The people in the room who hadn't given Master Hand a weird look before now did. "Aw, c'mon, it'll be fun. Besides, it's better than sitting around scratching yourself," he said, turning toward DK.
With much complaining, whining, and moaning, the Smashers got up from their seats and walked over to Master Hand, because there was nothing else to do.
"Great! Now, we have 36 people, which means we can have six teams of six. So, here are your teams:
Team Mario: Mario, Luigi, Peach, Daisy, Yoshi, DK
Team Zelda Emblem: Link, Zelda, Young Link, Marth, Roy, Sheida
Team Villains, etc.: Bowser, Ganondorf, Mewtwo, Seung Mina, Ness, Tom Nook
Team Pokémon: Pikachu, Pichu, Jigglypuff, Wes, Rui, Cloud
Team Spacepersons: Samus, Captain F., Falco, Fox, Olimar, Sonic
Team Misc.: Banjo, Kazooie, Kirby, Mr. Game and Watch, Popo, Nana
There was mumbling and murmuring as everyone got into their teams, but not without a little complaining.
"Why do I have to be on the villains' team?" whined Mina.
"Because you're pre-menopausal enough to be one," mumbled Bowser.
"Team Spacepersons?"
"I can't eat cheese while playing?"
"Quiet, everyone," Master Hand said. "The rules are simple. You roll a dice, and whatever type of space you land on, you have to answer that type of question. If you get it right, you get to roll again. If you get it wrong, you don't. If you get a question right on a big fancy square, you get a piece to put in your token. The first team to make it to the center with all six pieces filled in wins (that might not be exactly how it goes, but it serves the purpose). Got that? Good. I will read the questions.
"So, Mario, it's your turn." Mario rolled a three. "Okay, if you need help, you can talk to your teammates. The first question: What are the names of Mars's two moons?"
Mario didn't know this question so he turned to his teammates, who supplied him with a plethora of useless answers such as:
"Laurel and Hardy!"
"Abbot and Costello!"
"Clinton and Gore!"
"Look, guys, I don't think those are right..."
"Of course they are!" said Luigi. "I checked online at !"
"Sigh...I'll just guess. Is it 'Bush and Cheney'?"
"No, it is not 'Bush and Cheney'. Now, it's team Zelda Emblem's turn." Link rolled a five. "This question is: "Who is the host of 'Wheel of Fortune'? Link, you get to answer this one."
"It's Pat Sajak, Link," Marth was telling him. "Trust me."
"No it's not," said Roy. "It's Ronald McDonald."
"What the...it is most certainly not Ronald McDonald!"
"It is too. On BBC, anyway."
"Don't listen to him, Link."
'Twas quite a quandary for poor Link; should he trust someone who could recite the first 25 digits of pi, or someone who thought that Lord of the Rings was written by William Shakespeare.
"Umm...uh...I DON'T KNOW!" Link cried, and rushed off to the bathroom.
"...Right. Well, now it's Bowser's team, so...Kirby! Don't eat the dice!" Kirby spat out the black-spotted cube.
"Eww, I don't want to touch it," said Bowser, recoiling from the dice in horror. "It's all slimy and icky and it has Kirby germs on it."
"Oh, for the love of...I'll roll then," said Ganon, who rolled a two.
"Alright. The question is: Who wrote the novels Emma and Pride and Prejudice?"
"Jane Austen?"
"Whoa, you got one right! How did you know?" asked Master Hand in a state of disbelief.
"I dunno, Jane Austen was the name of my dry cleaner."
"Well, you get to roll again." Ganon rolled a four. "This question is: What does RNA stand for?"
Mewtwo was using telepathy to tell Ganon that the answer was ribonucleic acid, but unfortunately, Ganon misinterpreted it as "vote Republican" (don't ask me how) and punched Mewtwo in the face.
"Ganondorf, you know I would never say that," Mewtwo said while getting smacked repeatedly.
"Maybe your liberalism was all a cover-up to hide your true identity, Donald Rumsfeld!"
"WHAT?"
"You heard me. I bet that's Donald Rumsfeld under that clever Mewtwo suit."
"You think I'm Donald Rumsfeld in disguise?" Mewtwo was starting to get more than a little annoyed.
"Yep, and I'll prove it, too." Ganon tugged hard on Mewtwo's face, a la Scooby-Doo, but to no avail. Instead, Mewtwo blasted the King of Thieves with a Shadow Ball and sent him flying into the coat rack. "Okay, I believe you now," Ganon said, a bit dazed. "But I still think someone from the White House is spying on us. Like Bowser. That could be Paul Wolfowitz under that shell. And maybe Mario is really Dick Cheney," Ganondorf continued, sneaking furtive glances at the "suspects" in question. "And I think the reason that Seung Mina's so cranky is that she's really...Condoleeza Rice!" The King of Evil finished his monologue by laughing manically.
"Ganon, are you crazy?" Peach said incredulously. "Mina is NOT Condoleeza Rice!"
"Hey, wait a minute," interjected Mr. Game and Watch. "She's sweating." It was true, there were several beads of sweat rolling down Mina's normally calm face.
"Hmm..." Ness mused. "Ha!" Ness grabbed her face and tugged as hard as he could muster. A second later, he was holding a limp, rubber replica of the Korean girl's face, complete with eyeholes. In what used to be Seung Mina's body was the head of a black woman.
"Curses! I've been found out," she said, and ran out of the mansion yelling, "Forgive me, Karl Rove!"
All the Smashers had looks of pure amazement and astonishment on their faces at the revelation they had just experienced, when Seung Mina stepped out of the bathroom and said casually, "I'm back! What'd I miss?"
"Get her!" Ganon yelled, a trickle of foam forming at the corner of his mouth.
"No," said Mewtwo, who was using his psychic powers to restrain Ganondorf. "Mina, you're not Condoleeza Rice is disguise, are you?" Mewtwo asked suspiciously.
"No..." Mina responded, looking at Mewtwo like he had sprouted several extra appendages.
"You're not Laura Bush either?"
"No."
"Well, I think it's time to move on," said Master Hand with a nervous chuckle. "It's Team Pokémon's turn, and hopefully they're not as liberal. No, wait, I didn't mean that...OW!" The Pokémon Team's dice was rolled and the question read. "Name a city in the nation of Hoenn."
"Ummm..." Pikachu thought for a second. "Omaha. Final answer."
"Omaha's not in Hoenn!"
"Is too. Just look at a map."
"The only map of Hoenn I have is in my Pokémon game."
"Well, there have to be cities that aren't on that map, right? So, how do you know Omaha isn't in Hoenn?"
"Well, I...oh, fine. Roll again." Pikachu obeyed the Hand's request. This time, the marker landed on a fancy square with a blue outline. "Okay, Pikachu, if your team gets this question right, you get a piece to put in your thingamabob." Pikachu made a disgusted face. "What is the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina?"
"I don't know that! Do any of you know?" he asked his fellow Pokémon. Jigglypuff and Pichu shook their heads. "Cloud?" A negative on the hero's part. "Wes...say, where did Wes and Rui go...oh. Smashers, may I advise you all to not go into any broom closets, thank you."
"Ahem, let's get back on topic," said M.H. "So, do you know the answer?"
"Yonkers?" Pikachu hypothesized hopefully.
"No."
"Galveston?"
"Pikachu, you only get one chance to answer, and that's not right anyway."
The other two teams' turns passed without incident, probably because they were saner than everyone else. The only oddity was when Falco answered "Joe Lieberman" to "Who invented the cotton gin?". Before there was a chance to revel in the sanity, however, it was Team Zelda Emblem's turn again. Since Link was still in the bathroom doing God knows what, and Young Link thought the game was too hard, Zelda got to answer the question.
"So, Zelda," Master Hand said after Zelda had landed on one of the fancy squares. "Which baseball team won the 1996 World Series?" Zelda didn't normally keep up in the sports world, so she asked her colleagues, which proved to be a bad idea. Marth was even more ignorant of the sports world than Zelda herself; possibly a side-effect of being able to recite Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher by heart. Roy didn't waste his time watching sports when there were, ahem, "other things" on TV. Young Link might have known, only he was too busy testing his new invention, Miracool Whip. Sheida probably knew, but according to Popo, she had entered the precise broom closet that Pikachu told her not to, and was now in shock.
"I...um...was it the Chartreuse Sox?"
"That team doesn't even exist!"
"It does in Hyrule, along with the Puce Sox and the Off-white Sox."
"Look, I don't think..."
"How do you know that they don't exist, hmm?"
"That may have worked for Pikachu, but not for you. Now it's Mewtwo's team's turn." Zelda looked apologetically at her teammates. Marth gave her a "hey, you win some..." look, Roy a "this game is stupid" look, and Young Link wore an "I am never mixing any food together again" expression.
"Now, then, Mewtwo's turn." Mewtwo rolled the dice. "Alrighty, which type of pickles like bleu cheese?"
"What?"
"Sorry, that's just a typo. I meant, how do you say 'milk' in French?"
"Lait."
"I think you cheated, Mewtwo," said Fox from across the board.
"How could I cheat?"
"You could have used your telepathy or x-ray vision to get the answer," accused Fox.
"I don't even have x-ray vision," said Mewtwo indignantly.
"Which narrows it down to the possibility of telepathy."
"I didn't cheat, I already knew the answer. Je parlais français!"
"Is that supposed to mean, 'I am a cheater'?"
"Alright, you two, break it up," interrupted Zelda, ever the peacemaker. "This is silly. I read Mewtwo's mind, and he is definitely not cheating."
"Wait, you can read minds?" asked an interested Roy.
"Yeah..."
"Ok, what am I thinking?"
"Roy, I am not going to translate that into words."
"Hey, you got it!"
By this point, Master Hand was about ready to rip apart everyone's atomic structure, ion by ion. "Everybody shut up!" Silence fell on the group, as if an irate teacher had screamed and popped veins at a group of unruly pupils. "Now, it's either play this game sanely, or play Twister twice as sanely." The whole congregation fell into a shocked silence, as Twister was not a game that one played with an ounce of sanity.
"Ok, Master Hand, we'll be good," said the Smashers to the Hand, like schoolchildren with the threat of no recess upon them.
"Good. Pokémon, you answer this one. In what Mesozoic period did the Tyrannosaurus Rex live?"
"Shake that groove thang!"
"No..." Master Hand said, quite confused, until he saw that the outburst came not from the Pokémon, but from Link, who was mamboing up the staircase.
"Link, what were you doing in the bathroom for almost twenty minutes?" asked Captain Falcon, expecting an answer that he didn't want to hear.
"Oh, just sitting, contemplating life, shakin' my groove thang..."
"Never mind."
"People!" shouted Master Hand, extremely annoyed. "Look, since I want this to be over with as much as you do, whichever team is the first to answer this question correctly gets all six pieces in their token and wins the game. What is your name?"
"Tom Nook!" shouted Tom Nook (no, really?).
"No, I'm sorry, that's incorrect. Well, looks like it's a tie. Thanks for playing," Master Hand said extremely quickly, and rushed off with the game board to parts unknown.
"Well, that was anticlimactic," observed Olimar.
The next day...
"Everybody," Master Hand addressed the Smashers. "I feel like I shorted you on the board game last night. So, to make it up to you, we can play this game!" He held up the box to Cranium. "Let's play it tonight!"
"Arrghh..."
"Oh, God..."
"Whimper..."
"Shake that groove thang!"
FIN
O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O
Well, I hope you liked that. Depending on the reviews I get, I might write a sequel where the Smashers play Cranium. Anyway, expect more of Smashing, eh? in the weeks to come, and as always, review!