3: Orange, Yellow and Read All Over
Mario and Luigi stood by the bed of a sleeping Peach. The watched her breathe in and out ever so peacefully as they wondered what their next plan of action should be.
"Hmmm," Mario thought out loud. "Maybe we can cut the two of them apart?"
"I dunno, bro," Luigi replied, " I don't think that bond is really there. Like we can't really touch it. He said it was magic, remember?"
"Oh yeah, right." He scratched his moustache.
"Our ideas are running dry without any clue what this thing even is."
"Magic isn't really my strong point." Mario got an idea. "You think we can ask Kamek about this? I bet he knows a lot about magic."
"I'm not sure he's gonna be too keen on helping us out," Luigi figured.
"Another good point, bro." He turned back to the resting princess. "Who else would know a lot about this stuff, then?"
"Y'know, maybe the person who knows the most about Peach's magic is Peach herself."
"So you're saying we should just wait for her to wake up and ask her about it?"
"That's about right."
Mario gave a thumbs up. "Sounds good, Luigi. But…"
"Hmm?"
"How long is that gonna take?"
"We've got some time, Starlow said she was gonna be alright," he assured Mario.
"I sure hope she's right."
The magically-bound captives arrived at a decrepit, dimly lit area. The decently sized room was illuminated by many candles suspended on dusty, metal chandeliers whose light gave decent visibility to the indigo of the carpeting. The atmosphere was perfect for reading, being bright enough to distinguish small text yet dark enough to not worsen a headache. The room was filled with dark, wooden bookshelves which housed many worn books of magic and spells, either neatly placed or strewn within. A table by the far wall, supporting some randomly placed texts and a lit candle, was accompanied by two chairs on opposite sides.
"This is your library?" Starlow looked the room over. "It looks really… interesting."
"Kamek puts his magic books and junk in here so maybe he's got something that can fix this," Bowser returned.
They walked in, noting the books on the floor and the cobwebs in the corners of the ceiling.
"How 'bout I look over here," Bowser gestured to the left side of the room, "and you look over there?" he pointed to the right side of the room. "If you think you've got something, tell me and we'll check it out."
"Sounds good." She tried to fly over to the right, but was instantly reminded of their predicament with a sharp tug back toward Bowser.
"Ack!" She fell to the ground. The tether glowed, adding a bit more light to the room's moody environment.
"Oh yeah." Bowser grinned nervously. "Sorry 'bout that."
Starlow rolled her eyes and flew back up. "Maybe I'll just look at this shelf and you can look at that one," she offered.
"Yeah let's do that instead."
Starlow scanned the amassment of colorful books of which to possibly read over. The majority of them bore no titles, but were emblazoned with symbols to offer some clue as to what they held within. Being rather unfamiliar with magic, she couldn't conclude exactly what each book did. Bowser wasn't having any luck, either. Pinpointing the book that read of magical people-binding energy ropes was far from easy.
Starlow sucked her teeth. "I can't really understand what each of these is for."
"Me either," Bowser agreed. "Why don't we just pick a few and look em over? One of these has gotta have something we can use."
"Yeah alright."
Bowser took out a yellow book that bore a star symbol. He glanced at Starlow, once again noting the small, pulsating star over her head. "Close enough I guess." He tucked the book under his shoulder. He scanned the shelf again for anything else interesting looking and spotted a jade book whose symbol was rather odd, sporting three arrows in a circle. "Sorta looks like a rope," he concluded and added the book to his collection.
Starlow located a pinkish book with a heart symbol upon its spine. "Well, whenever Peach uses her magic, hearts appear everywhere, so this might have something about that in it," she assumed. She put her feet on the spine and tried to slide it out of the surrounding books. When it got the the edge of the shelf, she prepared to lift it outward and upward but underestimated how heavy the book actually was and was met with a sudden plummet to the floor. "Wah!" she exclaimed as she tried to hold on. She closed her eyes and braced herself for the impact with the floor, but it never came. She opened her eyes and looked around to see what happened and saw that Bowser had caught the book in his free hand.
"I gotcha," he said almost protectively.
"Oh," she blushed at him. "T-thanks." She released the book so he could comfortably position it in his hand.
He grinned at her. "Whaddya do without me to help you carry your books?"
She smiled at him. "Ha well y'see I saw the book on the shelf and I guessed it wasn't that big so I grabbed it because I didn't think it was gonna be that heavy but it was and I-"
He put his hand with the book up, stopping her. "Hey, hey, take it easy, I get it. It's fine."
She stuttered and finally managed to get out, "Thanks, again."
"No sweat, now let's check these for anything useful." He made his way to the table in the back of the room. "I hope we don't gotta keep this up for long, reading ain't really my thing."
Bowser set the books on the cluttered table. To make room to read the selected books in the light of the candle, Bowser put all of the other books into a tall stack and lifted it off the table. As he did this, Starlow watched him lift up the large novels with ease. She could've sworn she'd saw his bicep twitch before he set them on the ground and spread their selection across the table. She caught herself staring in fascination before making her way to one side of the table, which permitted them the maximum distance they could be from each other.
"Bowser?"
He sat in the chair opposite her."What?"
"What's it like to..." she hesitated, looked down and looked back at him, "to have arms?"
He raised an eyebrow at the question. She panicked as she took this as a sign that he didn't know what she meant by asking it.
"Y'know because I don't really have any arms to do anything with and I see you doing all kinds of cool stuff with your arms and I think it's awesome that you can work em out so you can lift even heavier things and make them look neat and I just wondered what it was like." She blushed before looking back down at the table.
"Y-You think my arms are... neat?" Bowser looked at his hands, then at each of his biceps then back at Starlow. She looked up at him and chuckled which earned a small smile from him.
"Well, it's a pretty awesome experience," he began, "with how you can grab stuff and punch stuff and work em out like you said. Since I'm so used to it, I use them without even having to think about it, sorta like blinking. And sometimes, if you think about it too much, they feel like weird bendy poles with spikes on the end," he wiggled his fingers for emphasis. "But I feel like my arms have a deeper meaning."
"Oh?" Starlow leaned in, intrigued.
"Yeah, I feel like my arms are a metaphor for my will. Like the more powerful they are, the more I can do," he looked at his hands and made fists. "But yeah, it's pretty cool."
Starlow was taken aback yet again by Bowser's words. Her presence was beginning to unravel more and more complexities about his perspective on life. She was hooked into his words like a good book, literary attention that would be better spent (in their current situation) on studying magic books. Bowser glanced over at Starlow to be met with her gaze of amazement.
"Chippy?"
"Bowser that sounds fantastic."
"What, my explaining? I was just rambling on about… arms."
"You made having arms sound like some cool adventure! You should write stories, you're good with your words."
"If I hate reading books, why would I write em? That's like self destruct!"
She chuckled again. "C'mon, let's quit messing around and check these books. They're not exactly pamphlets."
"Ready when you are, Miss Triceps." He opened the book with the three arrows on the cover. She nudged open the star-bearing book and looked at the contents. The book appeared to be an encyclopedia about the different kinds of stars present in the world.
She looked up from her book at Bowser. "This book is all about stars it seems."
Bowser kept scanning the pages of the green text. "Does it say anything about energy?"
"Hmm, I'll keep looking." She nudged each page searching for anything about star power. She saw pages with headers about Green Stars, Red Stars, Starmen and Crystal Stars. She stopped at a page about Power Stars after seeing the word 'energy' on it a few times.
"I think I found something! Okay, it says 'The energy contained within a Power Star is not completely understood but is often sought after for its near indefinite emission. Energy extracted from a Power Star can be used to alter most forms of matter or create almost unbreakable physical bonds.' Interesting," she finished.
"That was about Power Stars. Aren't you a Star Sprite?"
"Yes, but we contain similar energies as a Power Star, though they're not as powerful as those from a Star itself," she explained.
"Oh alright then. Does it say how to stop the energies from doing whatever they're doing?"
"Uhh," she skimmed the following pages some more. "I'm not seeing anything about stopping it, unfortunately. I guess star power is meant to last when you use it."
"Dang it, I thought we had something."
"Peach was in the machine longer than I was, so I'm pretty sure most of this tether is made of her wish power. Whatever you got of my star power just mixed with it and probably made it a bit stronger."
"Hmm," he made a thinking face. "So this thing is using you like a battery to keep itself strong?"
"Probably so."
"Batteries gotta run out sometime. Do you ever stop making star power?"
"Yeah, I only need to die and it's all gone," she said sarcastically.
Bowser looked back at his book. "...There's probably another way."
Starlow closed the book and set it aside with a small kick. She slid the pink book over to her side of the table and nudged it open. Fortunately enough, through what she gathered from the contents, the book was about wish power.
"We scored with this one, Bowser! It's all about wish power!"
He did a fist pump. "Nice, we'll be separated in no time!"
Starlow's smile faded a bit. "Yeah, no time at all."
She hadn't given much thought to how she'd feel about being separate from him again. Did she want for their magical bond to be broken? Sure, no two people can stay in close proximity of each other forever without going insane, and Starlow did not want that by any means, but say their proposed solution doesn't work and they remain bound to each other indefinitely. In that situation, she wouldn't exactly mind being stuck with Bowser. By simply providing her presence, she'd discovered so many things about his personality already and she didn't want to stop. Now, she wasn't going to act upon this matter without any say from him because he was the other half to their situation, and since, she presumed, he'd like to be apart again, she'd have to think of ways that she could keep sticking around to hear the rest of the complex mystery that is his personality. She kept pondering about the hypothetical as she glazed over her book.
Bowser had long determined his book to be unhelpful in the situation, but found its contents too interesting to discard it. The novel read of transformations of creatures possessing various energy forms. He'd learned how different types of energy can change different creatures in different ways, and how certain combinations of creatures and energy types alter DNA. Biology wasn't exactly Bowser's cup of tea, but his interest peaked after reading about star energy and what it could be used for within an entity possessing it. The chapter read on and on about the specifics of star energy's effect on DNA but he skimmed it until he found a list of incantations to be used when energy users weren't familiar with controlling their power. One incantation caught his eye: reciting it granted a star energy user the ability to shapeshift at will. It was obvious who he had this ability in mind for: his companion across the table, deep into her reading. He recalled that she could already change her shape when she turned into a guide for one of the Mario Bros. attacks back in the battle on the top of Peach's Castle weeks ago, but assumed that she couldn't take on more complex forms, such as a different body, or else she would have done so already. Bowser remembered what Starlow had said about how cool it would be to have arms, so he figured that she thought having a whole body would feel even cooler. He planned to present the ability as a surprise to her. It was the least he could do after she complimented his use of wording while describing the experience of having arms. It takes a pure heart to admire someone who outperforms you somehow, and he secretly admired that about her.
With this one spell, he thought, she can have a whole dang body. I just gotta get her to say it and presto.
He flipped to the back of the book and found a blank page. He was about to write the incantation on the page but fell short on the lack of a writing utensil. He looked on the table, underneath the table and all around the floor for a marker or a pen or even a super short, chewed up pencil. He fell back in his chair in defeat when he got an idea. Bowser looked over at Starlow to see she was lost in thought. He held out his claw and tried as best he could to breathe fire onto it without her noticing. He shaped his lips as if he were whistling and out came a thin stream of flames. Glancing back up at her and seeing that she had yet to notice, Bowser quickly put his claw into the flames and held it there for a few seconds before taking it out and stopping the fire. He tapped his now hot claw on the page and it made a small black burn mark. Using his finger like a stylus, he burned the incantation onto the page before his claw became too cold. When he finished, he sped up the cooling of his finger by waving it around in the air, drawing the attention of a now aware Starlow. She looked at his finger, then at his eyes and he gave her a guilty grin.
"Whatcha doin?"
"Oh, I was just, uh…" He forced a cough and covered his mouth. "Didja find anything in there?" He pointed at the pink book.
"Uhh," she blushed once again. "There's a bunch of stuff in here about what wish power can do, but yet again, I didn't find anything about stopping it from doing what it does," she tried to convince him.
It didn't feel good to lie to him about it but it was probably for the better, she assumed. The book did actually explain the properties of wish power's interactions with creatures, but she'd rather not tell him of the method that can be taken to stop it. In her time skimming the pages for anything helpful, Starlow read that wish power is fueled by the strength of the user's desire. If two entities bound by this magical force of desire wish to free themselves from each other, they must express their own desire for each other to relieve the bond of its duty. She concluded that there was no way she could tell Bowser that they had to 'want each other' to set themselves free and have it happen. There was no guarantee that he'd emotionally follow through while consciously aware that he was being forced to do so, leaving Starlow to decide to take the solution into her own hands. She planned to get Bowser to emotionally warm up to her through step by step interactions. That way, after they are set free, he can better choose how he wants to feel about their relationship with each other free from any induced emotions. Starlow was happy with her plan and had a great deal of hope that it'll work, but the first step was convincing Bowser that she knew no better.
"Again? Man, that sucks. What's the point of writing a book about something if you're not gonna put everything you can into it? That's a lazy author!"
"I know, right?" She faked annoyance at the book's anonymous author. "So close to an answer, too!"
"It doesn't help that this book is useless, either," he slapped the back of his hand against the page he had written the incantation on. "It's a real kick in the pants."
"Do you wanna keep looking?"
Just then, Bowser's stomach growled, making them both look at his belly. He stood up and gestured toward the door. "How about we take a lunch break?"
"I'm down for that," she smiled.
She started toward the door but froze when she heard a quick rip. She turned around to see Bowser with a page ripped out of the book he was reading.
"Okay, what are you doing? And I want an answer this time."
He looked at the page then back at her. "Oh, this? I, uh... saw something bad scribbled in here about me and… I ripped it out so I can... go give Kamek a piece of my mind about it," he lied. "Some nerve he has…"
"Uh huh," she squinted her eyes at him. "Riiiight."
"So, uh…" he tried to change the subject. "Whaddya wanna eat for lunch?"
"Oh yeah. I guess I could have…"
He listened to her ramble on about her indecisiveness on a meal choice while he slowly tucked away the page with the incantation written on it. They made their way out of the library and down some more stairs, the both of them knowing something the other doesn't. They kept their mouths shut (aside from discussing what to eat) and made their way to the castle's kitchen.
Wowee this is a long one, took quite a while to write. If you have any questions or anything, feel free to pm me.
I'll fix up any formatting problems I see later.
More on its way soon, folks, have a nice day!