Hey look an update!
It's October and people are celebrating being terrified, so to kickstart the slow spiral into possible terrors, I decided to post a chapter.
For those of you that followed when this was first posted, no you're eyes are not deceiving you, this is now a horror fic. The horror aspects will probably suck like all Hell, but we'll get there in due time.
And now the disclaimer,
I do not own any of the characters, locations, etc that may appear. These concepts are owned by Nintendo. Please support the official release of the Mario series and other franchises they posses.
Everyone remembered the first day of the apocalypse; it had started as a completely normal day. The shift into chaos had happened so suddenly, it had been overwhelming for everybody. The sky tore itself apart, all light vanished, and the ground violently opened into endless crevices. The discord was in every corner of the universe as entire worlds, entire dimensions collided into one another, either merging together as one, or erasing themselves from recoil.
Then, as quickly as it had started, it had stopped. The surviving worlds were in ruins, forced to rebuild from the ground up as all the skies were covered in a sheet of darkness. Everything grew colder and crops refused to grow. Many thought it couldn't get any worse, but it did.
As if by some divine punishment, the deceased awoke from slumber in the form of grotesque abominations, and a plague of madness spread with them.
The mentally ill were the first to fall; within the first day alone, the inhabitants of every asylum and hospital underwent a horrible transformation. Their thoughts became twisted, animalistic, more aggressive and gradually their bodies morphed and mutated until they were unrecognizable from what they once were. They broke loose from their confinements and proceeded to maim and slaughter everything in sight, causing the already immense army of eldritch abominations and walking corpses to grow with each new death.
Slowly but surely, the mutating malediction, soon referred to as "corruption", began to affect almost every single person alive, although much slower then that of the patient zeroes; the Corruption's origins were unknown and seemed to attach to people at random, even the most isolated of individuals were succumbing to the corruption until the number of corrupted beings greatly outnumbered those that were still healthy in a survival of the fittest.
This was the reality of things now, no magical prophecy to fix everything, no glimmers of hope, just a struggle to survive until one's inevitable demise.
"Another lovely day in Hell." Mario grunted to himself as he woke up from slumber. His once cheerful smile and bright clothes had become increasingly duller as time passed by; the top half of his overalls ripped off along with the sleeves of his shirt, and his quirky responses to everyday occurrences watered down into sarcasm. He turned his head to the side of the room where his dear younger brother, Luigi, was resting, certainly more peaceful than he had been. Ever since the first breakout of corrupted beasts, Mario had insisted his easily-frighten twin stay inside their house, safe from danger and relatively isolated from the rest of The Wasteland while he tried to find the source of the problem. From his explorations, he discovered that several worlds had collided with the Mushroom Kingdom and its neighboring countries and was quickly introduced to the hostile species of these worlds.
He couldn't remember how long he'd been searching, but it had at least been several months according to the calendar they stopped using when the days no longer aligned properly; using the clock to tell the time became obsolete when it inevitably died, and since the sky was always covered in the same dark clouds, they couldn't even use the sun to track the time. So essentially, time had little to no meaning now that there was no way to track it. It was probably better that way.
Mario clutched the hammer beneath his bed and rose to a sitting position on the worn mattress. He got off the bed with a soft "thud" and sluggishly approached the front door, barricaded by a number of objects in case the lock failed. Luigi was slightly startled by the clatter of things that were removed from the barricade so his brother could leave.
"Morning bro." Luigi said, briefly drawing Mario's attention away from the door. The brothers looked at each other eye-to-eye before the older of the two went back to his work. Mario exited the house and closed the door behind himself while his little brother bid him a nervous farewell, never daring to peek outside. Luigi leap from his bed onto the hardwood floor soon after and did his self-administered chores to pass the time until his red-clad sibling returned; visiting neighbors was out of question, as was any other activity that had to be done outside, so he did whatever he could to not die from boredom.
He wasn't afraid to leave initially, he helped Mario with rescuing people that were trapped or injured, but then one of the toads they were rescuing became aggressive without reason, prompting Luigi to panic and Mario to retaliate. They burned the body when news spread about the dead coming up from their graves. After that he refused to leave the house in fear of another attack, and it stayed like that until present day. "It's probably better like this." Luigi thought to himself. He grabbed a pair of torn overalls from Mario's side of the room and a sewing kit, returned to his side, and tried to repair the many rips and tears the had accumulated, a task that would keep him preoccupied for a solid amount of time.
Several hours passed, Luigi was now checking on a small cluster of pots in one corner of the house. The pots housed minuscule numbers of young mushrooms, small fruit, and other plants for consumption, growing under a sun-lamp at its lowest brightness; while the tiny amount of "sunlight" did make growing the plants harder, it certainly seemed to keep the lamp's batteries alive for a longer period of time. He had to be careful to give each plant just enough water to stay alive while still having enough to drink for himself and Mario.
Something slammed into the front door, Luigi turned, startled by the noise. He grabbed the hammer underneath his bed and snuck towards the door, anticipating an attack from some sort of corrupted monstrosity. A gush of frigidness swept into the room as the door violently swung opened from the other side. The young plumber held up his weapon in defense and braced for the oncoming attack of an unnamed terror.
FOOLS! Now you have to wait for another month for an update (probably).
Jokes aside, I hope you enjoyed what you've seen.
Remember, reviews will help me A LOT, even something as tiny as a grammatical error or constructive criticism will improve my writing for future readers!
And with that, Adios.