Nuclear Phantasy
By Magikoopa981
Act One: Scattered Pieces
Chapter One: A Day in the Life (Episode Ensemble 1)
Exactly three years after he had gone missing, Luigi was found wandering in the dark of a black forest.
He looked fine physically, and his eyes, though slightly dimmed, still held a glimmer of their charming old shine. It had to be remarked, however, that he had lost his mustache hair, that the hair on his head had been shaved down to practically baldness, and that his iconic green hat was gone.
He was also cradling a baby girl in his arms, an infant so intensely peaceful that the guards who found the former hero wandering through the woods both made sure to describe the quiet child in their reports.
The little girl's hair shines most wonderfully, One guard wrote. He was reprimanded by his supervisor, the captain of the guards, for the seemingly out of place comment. However, a comment of the other guard who found Luigi was even stranger.
The little baby opened her eyes and looked at me. I felt a floating sensation, and I landed back on the ground, either mentally or literally.
We escorted Master Luigi back to the Castle.
End of Report.
That was in fact the totality of the report, not even bothering to explain when or where Luigi was first spotted.
The responsible guard was nearly put on probation, until the supervisor saw the baby for himself the next day.
"Good Eldstar," Captain Toad's pipe fell slack in his mouth and nearly tumbled out, "That baby is blessed."
Most of the people who came into contact with the child went away with the same general feeling, but the effect seemed to fade away after a few days until the only thing of major interest regarding the quiet infant was its origins.
Although Mario was happy at first to discover his brother was alive, his feelings quickly transformed into shock and anger as Luigi refused to explain himself.
The question of where he had been for the last three years was always answered the very same way:
"I don't remember."
A tea bag of black substance drops into a cup of nearly boiling water.
"Maybe he's telling the truth, Mario."
Queen Peach could offer little else as she slipped back into the large royal bed, lower half pushing into the close comfort of the covers, watching her husband prowl angrily around the bedroom in his striped pajamas.
"I'm his brother."
Mario stopped and clutched the air, looking halfway at Peach. "I've known him my entire life. I can tell whether he's lying or not."
He resumed his pacing, back and forth, until Peach's patience failed her.
"Okay, so what?"
Mario stopped moving and stared at her again halfway. "What do you mean, 'So what'?"
"So what if he won't tell you, Mario?" Peach sighed. "He's his own person. He has his own life. So what if he came back with a little baby? Did we ask him permission for…?"
"Oh, don't even try to compare it!" Mario slammed a hand against the wall. "We thought he was DEAD!"
"Mario, for Eld's sake, lower your voice..."
"In the midst of all the chaos, the wars, the..." He swallowed and his voice dropped, "The bombs... He seemed like another casualty. Another casualty in the list. And now he just comes back, out of nowhere, acting like he doesn't owe us anything, no explanations, nothing..."
"I'm not saying it's all right, Mario," Peach slipped out of bed and drew up alongside him, holding his shoulders, "In a perfect world, Luigi wouldn't have vanished at all... and the world wouldn't be in the state it is now."
Mario turned his head so that he could see outside to the bedroom's balcony and the white moon, and have his Peach in the side of his right eye's vision.
"But even if things are not perfect, we can still be good." She squeezed his shoulders, "You'll forgive him this silence because he's your brother, won't you?"
Mario said nothing, but stared out at the moon.
"You'll forgive him because you love him, yes?"
"Of course," Mario finally replied, "It's just too much right now. With last night's news, and now Luigi suddenly back... and he doesn't know anything about what's been happening..."
His voice drew away as the sound of little feet pattered up outside the door—
—A sound that was conspicuously absent in the halls of Koopa Castle, home of King Bowser Koopa and two of his three remaining adult children, Lemmy and Wendy Koopa. It had been twelve years since Peach and Mario had gotten married, but rather perversely, only seven since Bowser had last kidnapped Peach. Since that time, however, the world had changed drastically, and Peach had never been in danger of being torn out of her home against her will. The disruption of the previous fourteen-year hot war (at various degrees of heat) between the Mushroom and Koopa Kingdoms seemed to create a number of new wrinkles in the world fabric, coming to a ghastly height four years after the end of Bowser's kidnappings when three different wars had erupted in quick succession.
One of these wars was the Koopa Kingdom's War of Succession. No longer able to focus on Mario and the Mushroom Kingdom as 'the enemy', it had come time for Bowser's royal children to turn on each other and finally answer the question of the throne. There could only be one new king after old papa was gone, after all.
"Like a game of chess, there were eight major pieces at play," The infamously biased historian Giboon wrote, "A war on one side, the bad side, with the pieces turned against each other."
Wars of Succession were generational traditions in the Koopa Kingdom. Because of the many concubines a Koopa King enjoyed, he was bound to have a large number of children. The oldest child was not necessarily the brightest or most capable, so centuries ago it was determined that having the children of the king fight for the right to rule was the most efficient way to determine the next ruler.
"It's completely barbaric," Giboon wrote in the uncensored first edition of his text, The Nuclear Age: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Explosions, "Clearly, the Koopa Kings would have a more peaceful nation and prevent this kind of war altogether by simply ridding themselves of concubines and having as little sex as possible."
Ever since he had been born, Bowser Koopa Jr. had been the apple of his father's eye, the favorite son to succeed as king. The senior Bowser focused on training his son, and gave him sole access to technology clearly superior to that accessible by his siblings. The other children, besides perhaps Morton, clearly noticed the discrepancy.
Ludwig, the eldest, was perhaps also the smartest. He was quite capable at engineering, far surpassing any of his siblings besides Iggy, who even still struggled to keep up. Ludwig secretly studied the technology that Bowser Jr. was given lone access to, and secretly built his own that would counter-hack Junior's. Thus, when the time came, the War of Succession had officially begun, and the siblings were permitted to attack each other, Ludwig activated his machinery. Junior's versatile clown copter was promptly shut down and put at Ludwig's direct control.
Junior had just killed Morton in his own bedroom (the confused gray-shelled man-child had never had a chance to begin with), and in a flash found himself paralyzed, bolted down in his own clown copter by seat belts he had not even been aware of.
Junior never saw his killer, but he did get a close look at the saw blade that rose up from his own machine and beheaded him.
The elder King Bowser disappeared for the next two weeks of the war, and said very little besides for another whole year after returning. The plot to kill off his unwanted children had gone hopelessly awry. In any case, there was no ending the war— the Koopa Kingdom did need a successor.
Bowser only prayed that it would not be Ludwig, whom he had despised more than any of his children even before the slaying of his beloved successor. Ludwig had always been cold and calculating, probably incapable of feeling anything besides near-sexual ecstasy in the completion of his inventions and during personal successes. Perhaps he could be a good, even great, ruler, but he was an ugly individual, even in Bowser's eyes.
It would only take a few weeks more for Ludwig's own death to come about, however. His own focus on offing Junior had left his back open to a carefully planned surprise attack. The executor, fun-loving Lemmy, was perhaps the last person Ludwig expected.
A few years later, Lemmy was the honored heir to the Koopa throne when Luigi quietly made his return in the west. Almost no one in Bowser's domain cared, especially in the modern age where the power of individual men, even of the Mario Brothers, was like the bite of an ant.
It was perhaps only Wendy Koopa who took real notice of the old hero's return. For her, lost in a sea of books of spiritual significance, it was a sign.
She was not the only person in the land who believed the end of times was coming, but she was the most influential, not to mention most recognized. Since shortly after the beginning of the Succession War, Wendy had taken close refuge in religion, seeking for the reason of suffering of the world and a way to get closer to God. She read bits and pieces from every faith, but spoke aloud in terms of Starism, which she had grown up with.
"The power of Eldstar is absolute," She spoke at one of her gatherings, "But Eldstar has begun to turn away from us, from our sin."
She looked across the waves of the crowd and had a sudden vision of her late mother. Her eyes moistened, and she gripped the stand anew. "Eldstar loves us! It is a fact. But even greater than his love, in this wretched day and age, is his disappointment!"
Some people in the crowd moaned, arising like rumblings of thunder.
"Oh yes." Wendy's eyes narrowed, and she searched out towards the horizon for something. "We drink alcohol, and we fornicate profusely, and we no longer pray or go to the temple or..."
She paused. The crowd watched her breathlessly.
"But it is really what we do that is our greatest sin."
The words came to her.
"...We think we are Eldstar! We think we are God!"
The crowd moaned, more people this time.
Wendy's eyes crackled with lightning. "Oh yes! We turned away from Eldstar, from God, because we thought we no longer needed him! Because our little machines and our little science made us believe we could!"
The crowd trembled.
"You!" She suddenly bellowed, pointing straight at the center of the audience, near to the front of her podium.
"Me?" A little old lady goomba squeaked.
"You!" Wendy repeated. She leaned forward. "When was the last time you spoke to God?"
The little old lady gasped. "Why, I... I made my morning prayer, this, this morning..."
"This morning?" A look of horror struck Wendy's face. "Hours, and hours ago...? You've turned away from Eldstar for so long?"
The little old lady quivered in fright. "No, I..."
"You must live with Eldstar, you must live in him, for every moment of every day. The moment you stop being with him, you have doomed yourself." Wendy looked up to the sky. "I breathe him, I eat of his flesh, I drinketh his blood..."
"Have you never read this?!" She suddenly screamed out.
The crowd fell into renewed hush.
Green swamped Wendy's vision and she felt a gentle peace fall over her.
"You think I am a visionary," She said, "You think I've seen things that others can't. Well, I'll tell you, I'm just a follower too. I am not a prophetess. I see Eldstar in my dreams sometime, but my example follows near another."
No one dared ask who. Most believed she was just speaking humbly.
"I'm no one," Wendy shook her head, her eyes beginning to glaze over, "I'm no one..."
She turned in place several times, like a dazed ballerina. Recognizing the signs, two followers rushed up to the front of the stage and caught Wendy as she fell.
"The power of the Spirit has exhausted her," Someone near whispered, "Praise be."
"Praise be." The crowd echoed.
"Save us." One voice said. A starving koopa mother, kneeling in the dirt among the depths of the crowd. She had lost her mind moments ago, and now dug into the dirt with a single feeble finger, deaf to the cry of the baby on her back.
With seven sides, the simple symbol was drawn: the image of the god that no one wanted to look at.
"Rocket." She gasped, and fell unconscious.
She and her baby were quickly taken to a nearby shelter,
"Rocket." Toadbert repeated elsewhere. "A fantasy rocket."
He moved towards the whiteboard and looked back towards Yoshi, "Do you mind if I...?"
"Go ahead."
As Yoshi watched with a troubled expression, Toadbert picked up a black marker and began to draw the symbol of the rocket, the missile- that image which had become ingrained into the psyche of virtually every person in the Mushroom and Koopa Kingdoms.
Toadbert then took a blue marker and added a large blue cloud around and over the rocket. He capped the marker and looked expectedly towards Yoshi.
Yoshi, standing up, leaned forward on his cane. "What is that? Steam?"
Toadbert grinned and looked back to the drawing. "You're on the right track. Think more... magical."
"Magic?" Yoshi shook his head. "Toadbert, I hardly know enough about science to talk about this stuff, I certainly don't know about magic."
"Well, it's not literally magic," Toadbert gestured dismissively, "Trying to predict magic's reaction to mechanical engineering is like trying to perfectly control the emission of gas."
He paused. "...Which is something of what we're doing here."
Yoshi waved his cane. "Just tell me."
"Okay, okay." Toadbert was clearly getting too excited to hold it in anyway. "Right. Well, as I'm sure you know, we haven't had a revolutionary upgrade in missile technology since Gadd passed away in 2000, right? He allowed us access to the world of nuclear engineering in the first place, and made steady advancements up until the design of his fifth nuclear weapon, codenamed the V5. Over these next seven years we've made hardly any progress...sure, we can make bigger and bigger booms, but..."
Toadbert rolled his eyes, "There's no real advancement to the art of it."
"It does not need to be artistic," Yoshi cleared his throat, "It's not meant to be used at all. It only..."
"...needs to act as a proper deterrent. Yes, I know." Toadbert sighed. "But the Koopa Kingdom has been weirdly quiet since the end of their successionary war" He crossed his arms. "I'm not the only one who thinks they're developing something new over there."
"...So you're preparing a deterrent ahead of time." Yoshi said, not without a hint of irony. "A deterrent for the future deterrent. A big leap forward."
"Yes!" Toadbert shot up. "Now you're getting it. And now get this: Codename Rocket Phantasy."
"Sounds like a bad videogame."
"Ha!" Toadbert smirked and turned back to the whiteboard, "Maybe it is a little silly. I don't know, I might just name it again in the V series, once it's completed... ...Uh..."
He looked around, then turned back to Yoshi again. "Do you have purple?"
"No."
"...Oh." Toadbert frowned. "Okay, well..."
He picked red and began to draw several curly lines stemming out from the rocket's cloud. "So pretty much every missile so far has promised large impact at a single point, then radiating out with weaker and weaker intensity from the epicenter."
"Obviously."
"Yes..." Toadbert gestured, "That's very fine... but what if we expanded the range of the missile? Extensively?"
"Can't we already reach the furthest edge of the Koopa Kingdom?"
"Not like that," Toadbert waved a hand, "No, no. I mean, the range of the destruction."
Yoshi cocked his head.
"So obviously every rocket gets a bigger ka-boom..." Toadbert widened his eyes and made a motion with his hands extending. "But that's boring. What if we created multiple hitting points for a single rocket?"
"Like a rocket with multiple missiles?"
"But better." Toadbert gripped his hands together tightly. "What if there was the threat of a single nuclear missile destroying an entire nation?"
Toadbert paused for effect.
"Toadbert, you..." Yoshi began gravely.
"Yosh, I'm a rocket scientist." Toadbert rolled his eyes. "This is what I do. Create better and better things that will, of course, never actually be used. Our threat will keep the other side from using theirs, and their threat will stop our side from using ours. Deterrence!"
He pointed a finger in the air. "That's part of the Phantasy, Yosh. It's only a vision."
Sola Toadstool, princess of the Mushroom Kingdom and probable heir, was only seven-years-old when she lost an amount of vision in her left eye amounting to a ring of shadow, a permanent condition that would still be a family secret five years later when Luigi returned with his own daughter.
Mario and Peach, distracted with another secret of their own, failed to notice the slight hesitation their daughter's eye reacted with for three days.
Mario slammed a fist down on the royal dining table, shaking the silverware with a short but tremendous clatter. "Were you trying to keep this a secret from us?"
Mario's temper had become an unpleasant surprise visitor ever within the family ever since Gadd's first nuclear bomb had replaced him as the nation's protector.
"No," Sola lied, face straight as a line, "I thought maybe it would go away."
"What is it?" Peach said calmly, but still with a hint of fear, "You're not blind in your left eye, are you sweetie?"
"No," Sola replied calmly, "It's like a big dark ring. I can see its outline with both eyes open, but with just my left it's almost big enough to cover everything."
"Sweet Mamar." Mario shook his head. "How did this happen?"
"I don't know."
Mario stared at her, his eyes burning.
"Mario." Peach put her right hand over his. "What is wrong with you? We need to get Sola medical attention, now."
Mario shook his head. "You're right." But his tone of voice still portrayed his anger.
That his own little girl would lie straight to his face, with those big eyes and that calm manner...
Sola's brother, Lumen, registered little of the conversation except his sister's brave manner, the sheer will she extolled in facing her father, and in generally braving the terrifying injury she had suffered. The look in her eyes, both the healthy right and the damaged left, shone with an inspirational light.
Her expression haunted him that night, and a small seed was planted in his heart.
The seed properly sprouted eight months later, a few days after the 2003 New Year, when Lumen went to see a movie with his Uncle Yoshi.
While Yoshi hogged the popcorn, Lumen watched the film with wonder— his third, but the first that made him feel like he was glowing. About an hour-and-ten minutes into the film, near the climax, the protagonist realized what he had to do, and, standing on a rock, looked toward the sacred mountain he had to climb with a certain echoing expression on his face.
The look of determination and will throttled Lumen, and he felt like the air had been knocked out of him. A string of fuzzy memories danced through his mind, until he realized that he had found his purpose, his expression: film.
"Why're you standing up?" Yoshi glanced over. "The movie ain't over yet."
I saw a film today, oh boy
Lumen sat down slowly, a chill running up the back of his spine.
"Are you okay?"
Doopliss the duplighost, meandering weakly down an alleyway, ignored the person behind him. It's the very end of 2006, about to be 2007 again— and the New Year.
And for Doopliss that holiday meant the same sorry thing it always did: he was about to lose another full year of memories, this time of the year 1999— to join the great void that all his memories older than seven years sank into.
This time was especially bad, though: now he was going to have no more memories of the time before the Cold War began. Now his entire memory would be drenched in an anxiety that would seem to have always been a part of life.
"No no no..." Doopliss fell up against a wall.
A young koopa girl in a red shell passed him by, head ducked.
"I can't do it…" He said a moment later to the again empty alleyway.
More than most, the duplighost felt anxiety over the great bomb. His nature as a ghostly fabric made him more susceptible to world vibrations, of the metaphysical waves occurring all around him. The little and big fears of the people regarding the bomb wound themselves all the way up inside of him, so that the more scared society was, the heavier he himself became with tension.
He thought back while he still could to 1999: back when he was thinking even farther back to better times, doing things he couldn't remember anymore. Memory of a lost memory. He thought maybe he used to be a fun guy. Now he wasn't even going to remember remembering being fun.
"Buddy," Someone came up behind and put a hand on his shoulder, "You seem like you need help."
"We all need help," Doopliss moaned, "Oh god, the bomb's gonna kill us all. One of those stupid bastards is gonna fire the rocket, and we're all going to die. It's all gonna be gone, all of us, everything, everyone, dead."
"Holy moly, buddy," The green man with the strange glasses and ever-present grin put another hand on Doopliss' other shoulder, turning him so they faced each other. "You gotta get a grip on yourself."
"Why are you grinning?!" Doopliss' jagged mouth opened in disgust. "Why are you so happy?"
"Because," The man suddenly burst into outright laughter, "I had one of these!"
Before Doopliss could react the man had forced a glowing green bean into his mouth.
"What...?" Doopliss gasped, but he was unable to spit the bean out: it was already crawling down his throat.
"Eat your greens, you sheet-rat!" The green man cackled, releasing Doopliss, and then prancing away into the shadows.
"Urrgghhhhaaacckk-!"
Doopliss tried to cough the thing up, but it was no use. As a duplighost he hardly even had a throat anyway: the bean was already being dissolved in his pseudo-stomach.
"Wait-" Doopliss gasped, but it was pointless. He was falling forward, chin to the ground, beaten: a familiar position.
He felt his body grow numb.
Why did you kill me? He thought about asking, but even before the question had finished forming in his head, he could tell he wasn't going to die. No, he could sense in fact that he was about to take a vacation.
"Oh scheizer..." He mumbled as waves of light colored his vision.
The fireworks popped and crackled as the people moved through the streets, calling out: "Happy New Year!"
That year Luigi would return with his daughter wrapped safely in his arms. Sola and Lumen, fraternal twins (following along the weird rhythm of the world), would both turn twelve. And one person, in the midst of tears, would begin to plot nuclear war.
/A/N/: I know I said I wouldn't write another fanfiction, but... I had this seed of an idea, and before I realized, it had started growing.
