"Hello everyone and welcome to the ninth grand Mario Kart Tournament!"

...No that didn't sound right. Peach had been working on her speech for the premier race of the next Mario Kart tournament all night. Through long and tedious thought processes and careful wording she had succeeded in getting absolutely nowhere with her speech. For seven tournaments, she had to deal with this long process of speech writing. Her mother was the writer of the very first one before a bizarre accident took her life. So for every tournament afterwards, Peach had gotten better and better at speech writing...which was more like starting writing it earlier and earlier. So here she was, five months until the opening race of the tournament struggling with a speech.

Fortunately the speech writing was the least important check on her list. Looking over the list of current tracks for racing, she realized that the company had only eight out of sixteen new courses for the upcoming tournament. Due to contract errors and donors dropping out after disputes in the last tournment, certain tracks were still being acquired. Not only that, but all sorts of issues were popping up everywhere with new and old tracks alike.

A pipe leakage in Pirahna Plant Slide got into Dolphin Shoals and polluted some waters, making them untraversible by normal means. Frustrated Cheep Cheeps now plagued the waters around the Bubba Cave system. The new cloud track was being overrun by fuzzies. And to top that all off, the new Rainbow Road, a staple of the Mario Kart franchise, after half a year of work already, had lost all power and lost color. All of these problems plus more created a huge problem for Princess Peach.

The racer roster for the upcoming tournament was also still undergoing changes. Certain previous racers who were dropped but requested a return were still being denied a return after new, more popular figures (not to mention more generous donors) were entering the pool instead. Peach had increasing the roster to fifty racers but the tournament would hardly accommodate so many racers. Not to mention the cap of 32 courses which would leave eighteen without a signature course. She still had not even sent out invitations to ANY of the racers, a move that had been done a year before the tournament in the past. So now, five months before the grand opening of the tournament, Peach was sitting at her desk real late at night staring at the sheets in front of her and trying to figure what in the World 1-2 she was going to do with all of the plans falling apart.

"Lady Peach...you still up?" Peach looked up from her papers. Toadette was in the doorway, looking concerned for her Princess.

"Oh uh...yes. I was just looking over some of the papers for MK-9." Peach replied groggily. She had not gotten any sleep in two days and one could only go so far on Coffee and Chuckola energy drinks. "I will probably get some sleep very soon." Probably.

"Princess, you know you shouldn't worry about these things so much." Toadette reassured her. "Mario Kart always turns out well in the end even with all of these difficulties. I mean whatever happens, it can't be worse than Wario Coliseum before Project 7." Toadette was referring to an event before the seventh tournament that nearly canceled a whole Prix. Wario Coliseum, a universally loved course, was set to return for the tournament with new gliding segments. But as it was being set up, the course collapsed and a track that had a huge legacy for Wario was crushed. The budget for the replacement course was also crushed as well due to Wario pulling out as a donor.

"That's true but..."

"No buts! You have to prepare for the televised racer announcement tomorrow and I am NOT having you go up there in front of everyone with a Moo-Moo lick in your hair!" Peach felt the top of her hair. It did seem rather frizzled. "Not to mention that you haven't even notified the racers yet! If you hurry up and give me the list, Parakarry and the Mail Koopas might be able to get them to the racers in time." She picked up all of the papers from Peach's desk and put them in her folder. "You need to sleep!"

Peach got up and walked over to her bed. The cushiness of her Sahasralan imported comforter feeling a lot better than her desk chair which she got as a birthday present from Toadiko from some Pawn shop. "Toadette I don't know anymore."

"What don't you know?"

"I don't know if I can do this any longer."

"Princess..." Toadette stopped to think of the right words. "What would your mother say right now?" Toadette continued before Peach could answer. "Do you think that if she was faced with a situation like this one that she would just give up? Or would she fight through it and make this tournament better than all of the ones before it?"

"She would...she would fight through it."

"Exactly. Which is why you can't give up, not yet. Your mother put in a lot of work to make sure that people from all over the world could compete against eachother in a fun racing tournament. It's all up to you whether or not you will continue that legacy!"

"Toadette...thank you."

"No problem Peach!" The toads hardly ever used her first name when addressing her so the expression was one of sincere friendship that comforted Peach. "Now get some sleep, you are going to need it! I can finish up the rest of this work."

"Thank you so much. Goodnight Toadette."

"Goodnight Peach." Toadette turned off the light as she left, leaving Peach in the darkness with nothing but her thoughts.

I have to do this...for mom. She fell sound asleep within minutes.