Mario found himself in a dark, empty land with nothing around him other than the purple floor. The place seemed to be at the bottom of a gigantic hole, a hole so deep that Mario could only see a small glimmer of light above him and even this speck of light was surrounded by the dark nothingness that filled the hole.
"What is this place, why am I here and how do I get out?" Mario asked, hoping for a response from a familiar voice.
Instead, Mario heard nothing recognizable, just a noise that sounded like someone had applied a distortion filter to an old man, a noise that seemed to become louder and more audible every few seconds.
Then, the noise turned into words, "You were on a place that people commonly refer to as Mushroom Kingdom U, you, your brother, Bowser, and Peach all fell off of one of the many platforms during an intense battle. I can't speak for the others since I did not see them, but you had a long fall and you were knocked out when you hit this floor. As for where you fell into, I can not yet reveal that."
"W-Who is there?" Mario asked, not even sure if the thing coming at him was of a species or race he could name.
"Who am I? Well, let's find out, shall we?" the thing said, stepping out from the shadows and into Mario's view.
Mario finally got a good look at the thing coming at him, its shape was vaguely human but not defined enough to tell for sure, though Mario believed the messy shape was due to the mass of black fire surrounding it on all sides. This black fire also made the creature massive in size, it was over two times Mario's height. Due to its size, its steps shook the entire ground and made a loud thumping noise.
Suddenly, the thing produced a scythe above it from seemingly nowhere and swung it at Mario with such speed that Mario only noticed it at two separate points in time, when it first materialized and landed in the beings grasp, and when it was on his left, for it had been sliced through him.
"What! How?" this was all Mario managed to say before falling onto the ground, hitting what was left of his back against the purple floor.
As Mario's vision blurred he saw the figure start to come out of the black fire to gloat at his easy victory, but just as the figure was about to be fully out of the black fire, Mario's vision went black as Mario fell into unconsciousness. The only thing Mario was able to see before this was that the figure inside of the fire was not touching the ground when it came out of the fire.
"NO!" Mario screamed as he jolted awake, sweating like crazy.
Mario looked around his room, surprised that he was still alive.
"Oh, it was only a dream, but it was so vivid and felt real, I guess it was just a bad nightmare. I should probably use the bathroom before I go back to sleep, besides, I need to shake off this uneasy feeling."
As Mario walked to the bathroom he took in his surroundings trying and failing to take his mind off of the dream that he had yet to convince himself really was a dream and not a vision of the future or something similar.
"I hope this doesn't have anything to do with the smash tryouts happening tomorrow. If it does though, I'm sure we can handle it, it wouldn't be the first time someone has tried to sabotage them." Mario told himself when remembering the mass of memes and backlash that came from not letting Waluigi be a competitor back in ultimate.
When walking back to his room Mario walked past Luigi and thought about telling him about the dream.
"Luigi! Get up I need to tell you about something!" Mario said while shaking Luigi to get him up.
"Huh, What do you want Mario, it's one in the morning and I'm very tired," Luigi responded groggily.
"I had a vivid dream and I think it might have been a vision of the future. I think that someone is going to sabotage the smash tryouts or maybe the competition following it."
"Mario did you put shrooms on your pizza again, I told you not to do that anymore, they always give you strange dreams and then you wake me up in the middle of the night talking about random shit."
"Luigi you don't understand, this time the dream felt real, it was as if I was actually there when it was happening," Mario responded, knowing that he wasn't going to get Luigi to listen to him at this hour.
"Mario, that's exactly what you said when you had the dream about the giant goats terrorizing the local bowling alley."
"Fine then Luigi, go back to sleep, I was sure this dream meant something but your probably right, it probably was just a dream."
Mario walked back to his room, still not fully convinced that the dream was fake. He wanted to try and talk to someone who wasn't half asleep but he decided not to since he needed to rest up for the smash tryouts.
"On the bright side, if this is real I might be able to do something about it instead of being useless like in the dream," Mario told himself as he started to drift off to sleep.