CHAPTER FOUR
"Really?" asked Wario. "Is Princess Peach really dead? Really?"
"Yes!" wailed the Toad. "Yes! Yes! Dead! Yes! O! Dead! So dead! She has passed, from… Bowser!"
"O, such a shame!" wailed the Wario. "For so fair a princess, to meet so grisly an end, by the hand of so foul a demon king!"
"That is interesting," said Vegeta, in between mournful sobs. "My friend, Piccolo, the second-wisest of all of my friends, after the great King Kai, wiser even than me, is the son of a Demon King. Perhaps there is some correlation?"
"That is a cunning theory," said Wario, through tears, "but I'm so sorry, but I don't think you're very right. The Demon King Bowser's issue is named as follows: Ludwig Von, Roy, Morton Junior, Wendy O., Lemmy, Iggy, Larry, and Bowser Junior."
"I see," Vegeta sniffled, snuffling. "I suppose it was wrong of me to jump to conclusions there."
"It was not wrong," said Wario gravely. "You merely acted without thinking, which is a common thing for any fallible man to be susceptible to doing."
"You are so right," said Vegeta. "So, what do you think happens now that the Princess is dead?"
"I suppose her heir will ascend to the throne," Wario mused. "After all, that is what usually happens upon the death of the ruling monarch of the Mushroom Kingdom."
"I see," said Vegeta. He wiped the last of his warm tears from his warm face with his warm gloves, which being white reflected much of the sunlight that bore down on them. They were only warm due to Vegeta's incredible ki. And how incredible it was! Wario felt close to swooning, every time he took a breath. Vegeta was so strong! And so brave! And so wise! "You know," he continued, "the ruling monarch of Earth is a dog."
"I didn't know that," said Wario. "How interesting! Tell me more about this Dog-Monarch while we travel to my son's school, if you please."
"It would please me to enlighten you," Vegeta smiled. "'King' is the title given to a male monarch in a variety of contexts. The female equivalent is queen regnant (while the title of queen on its own usually refers to the consort of a king). The domestic dog (Canis lupus familiaris or Canis familiaris) is a member of genus Canis (canines) that forms part of the wolf-like canids, and is the most widely abundant carnivore. The dog and the extant gray wolf are sister taxa, with modern wolves not closely related to the wolves that were first domesticated. The dog was the first domesticated species and has been selectively bred over millennia for various behaviors, sensory capabilities, and physical attributes."
The little man in the sack sat in the sack. His head was out of the sack, but his body was in the sack. There was another, smaller sack on his head.
"Herr Sniper," said the Medic, who was healing the automobile and keeping pace with it on foot outside the window. "Will you please ask the prisoner how he is?"
"Certainly," said the Sniper, who was sat inside the automobile, as was everyone but the Medic. He removed the head-sack from Professor Elvin Gadd's head. "How are you, Wanker-Bogan?"
"My name is Professor Elvin Gadd," said Professor Elvin Gadd, "and I am anything but fine! You have all caused me much grief! I do not know who you are, or where I am being taken! What is the meaning of my capture? Am I to be used or taken advantage of in some way?"
"I don't know," said the Sniper. "I'm just driving."
"Actually, I am driving," said the Soldier, who was the sixth-tallest of the mercenaries, and spoke with a thick military accent. "You are talking to the prisoner."
"Oh, you're right," said the Sniper. "I am the Wanker-Bogan in the end, I suppose."
"Quite so," said Professor Elvin Gadd. "You have all snatched me up, hours before I was to regale the Mushroom Kingdom, and perhaps even the world, with my revolutionary resurrection of the late Princess Peach!"
"Legislative size is a tradeoff between efficiency and representation; the smaller the legislature, the more efficiently it can operate, but the larger the legislature, the better it can represent the political diversity of its constituents. Comparative analysis of national legislatures has found that size of a country's lower house tends to correspond to the cube root of its population; that is, the size of the lower house tends to increase along with population, but much more slowly."
"That's so interesting," said Wario. "You are very knowledgeable about the different branches of modern government, Your Highness Vegeta."
"Yes," said Vegeta. He did not seem overly enthused. Pools of water were forming on the ground, flanking his flat feet; brisk and stridal as his brisk strides were, it appeared that when His Highness wept, he wept for all his planet whole, and people too. Gouts – not drips or drops or splats or splots – of salty sorrow fell from his eyes, each wearing another caldera into the well-paved road they walked brisk and stridal down. Wario felt terrible for the civil servants whose job it would be to repair the damage Prince Vegeta was doing to Toad Town's lengthy High Street (which was so lengthy its denizens would on occasion take to calling it Long Street) – not only would they be forced to briefly abandon their doubtless-manifold civic duties, but all in throes of grief over the passing of their lady liege that may well have given the lot of them a similar case of the crying to Vegeta's. Wario wanted sorely to console his friend, to rub his back or massage his shoulder or squeeze his large hand, but he was finding it hard enough to keep up with the brisk and stridal pace, so contented his globular self with rubbing his massage-ready hands together, in the hopes that he could generate enough heat to evaporate Vegeta's tears before they collode with the asphalt.
The walk took less than an hour, but much more than half of an hour. Wario estimated it was around three quarters of an hour, which could be divided by mathematicians into 45 minutes, before they came to something interesting enough to slow Vegeta's pace from brisk to merely stridal: a carnival.
"Might this take the stress from our heads and the yoke of grief from our weary shoulders?" Wario mused through out-of-breaths. But Vegeta did not take heed, instead soiling one glove with grey tearstain smudges and clenching his opposite fist so that his fingers bent against a most meatiest palm.
Yellows and reds shocked Wario's pupils, bunting streaking flimsy and mimsy, gaudy and bawdy, across the fallaciously blue sky. Closer to the ground (stationed upon it, in fact) were rides, where market stalls might otherwise be, lining the road they walked down and taking up unsavoury amounts of pavement space. Idly, Wario thought to bring this up at his next board meeting.
It all seemed too happy. Wario felt very sad, and he thought Vegeta might be feeling the same way, and this carnival seemed so happy. It made Wario feel even more sad. He felt like crying, but refrained for Vegeta's sake. The teacups, the merry-go-round, the tenacious roller-coaster, the concessions stand, the bumper cars, the bodacious roller-coaster, the slumper cars, the very-go-round, the helter-skelter, the wharf, the boring roller-coaster, the pumper cars, the ticket booth, the baby park, the Ferris wheel, the bumper cars; it was all an affront, and its affrontage made Wario's whiskers recoil from the fun and happiness and pleasantness.
And yet, there was nothing to do but walk through it. There were other avenues – alleyways that snoke around the carnival area, stairwells in buildings that would take them to the rooves – but Wario's was the way of the straight and narrow, and to err one way or another would be to fly in the face of all that he learned at Trowel Academy. Straight they went, straight as Vegeta's strong and straight spine, and boldly did they stride as Vegeta's boldly stridden lateral musculature.
Wario saw something as they passed the teacups. Inside one such teacup was a man, who looked rather out of place. He looked out of space and out of time, and he sat in a teacup like a man in a boat. Sad he looked, and grizzled too; white, grey, bushy, leathery, clad in a suit of deep blue, perhaps like the place he came from.
"Good day, sir," said Wario as they passed him. He twitched Warioward and snarled.
"Do not trouble this gentleman," warned Vegeta. "I have fought and regrettably killed men with his disposition."
It would not do to cross Vegeta in such a state of emotional disarray.
"Have a rotten day," said Wario, and they left the bedraggled and frazzled somewhat-seaman where he was.
Past the terminus of the High Street, Vegeta stopped a behelmed Toad Police Officer by hailing him. "Hail, Toad Police Officer," he said, and explained the manly sight they had both beheld. As they continued on to the Smartypants Sector of Toad Town (where the area's schools had been constructed in a single century of peace), Wario's long and acutely pointed ears picked up low rumblings on the TPO's Kids Walkie Talkies for Children in a selection of Kid Film Cartoon Characters Wireless Mini Twin Toy Walkie Talkies:
"Young officer on the other line, heed this message. A man has been spotted in a most atypical place, but in accordance with what has been aforesaid. Something very extraordinary is going to happen at the Long Street carnival."
Goku and Frieza fought.
Excellent and Exemplary was the appropriately-prefixed Elvin School for Learning from Upper-class Teachers, or EEESLUT, that welcomed Wario and Frieza, or Wario and Vegeta, with open gates later in the afternoon. Not prestigious or exclusive by any means, it was run and staffed and operated and led and directed entirely by upper-class teachers with a charitable streak, open to all the most disadvantaged and unhappy children of the world. Perfect was such a place for Wario's children – bally Mario, funny Yoshi, and bravest of them all, little Luigi the passed-on piece of perfection pie that he so loved – and so he did not think more than three times before asking his babes' admission of the directorate.
Chiefest of the chiefs was Elvin Gadd, who once took a dead little bird whom Hammer Brother had struck with a Hammer and jerked him into jerky undeath in an experiment local media had dubbed 'extremely scary' – and who, despite the confused insistences to the contrary that the faculty gave Wario and his partner, had not in fact been sighted on the premises for upwards of seventeen thousand millennia. This had rather baffled Vegeta, whose home planet apparently considered a millennium to be a thousand years rather than one seventeen-thousandth of a day. Once the confusion had been cleared up, everyone was a great deal happier, and Vegeta was laughing with the rest of them over school sushi that tasted oh-so-delicious.
"Cheep-Cheep is a fabulous cook, is che not?" asked the Big Penguin, head of the Frosty Department. Our heroes had nothing but praise for cher culinary skills, and there was much happiness and excitement and great pleasure between each and every one of the people in the room. Then they remembered Elvin Gadd was missing, and they all cried.
"That's enough crying," said Wario after a short time, and they all stopped crying. "Now is the time to find Professor Elvin Gadd. Do you know where we might start investigating his disappearance?"
"You will carry this investigation out through only me," said Toad Police Chief Chadwick Toadman, "for only my jurisdiction covers this territory. If a man is missing, we will find him. If a man has gone missing, we will go and find him."
"OK," said Wario, and they all co-operated. Very soon, but not too soon, the police had used their technological marvels to track Elvin Gadd down. He was in a car that was going very fast towards a destination that appeared to be nothing in particular. The Toad Police promised they could take our heroes to the place where they were headed before they would get there and they would all stop them before they could get their cargo to their destination.
They went there. There were many trees. On this plain they saw a car approach. "Stop!" said the Toad Police. "We will not stop," said the driver of the car. "Please stop," said the Toad Police. "Not at all," said the driver of the car. The car ran on bulky legs and gasoline and trumped the roadblock like it was nothing.
"They will not get away from us," said Vegeta, allaying Wario's trepidary fears, and offered a hand to his fat ally. "To me, Wario! Lo, we shall catch them in the act, and seize their vehicle for the good of the realm."
Strongly forth did Vegeta lurch, bringing Wario by the arm and shoulder with him, and they easily caught the back of the large automobile that drove swiftly towards the sky. Up and up they all went, and suddenly they were in space. Wario was so scared that he dropped his hat on the space and away it went.
"That's a great shame," said Wario, as Vegeta tore the automobile in two and powerslammed its passengers into an asteroid, "for my coinpurse was inside that mustard cap of mine. And there are few things I love more than money!"
Down at the asteroid, Vegeta killed one man and slew another. He smote a third, and only six strange men were left to question.
"Let us bury our dead," pled one of the men in red. "Very well," said Vegeta, but no sooner did he blink than did the men as one make a lightning-fast break for the heavens, glowing bright red like they had received some sort of supercharge that turned them into Übermenschen. Of course, Vegeta was quicker than they, and again did he seize them; but this time, Wario did not follow. Left on the asteroid was he and one half of the car, as Vegeta disappeared with their assailants into the heavens.
"Here in this car," Wario surmised, "must be evidence of Professor Elvin Gadd's seizure."
And evidence there was. Evidence of the most damning sort...
"Hello, Wario," said Professor Elvin Gadd in the wreckage. "You have found me safe and sound, but cut short have been my days, and prematurely snipped has been my lifeline. My destiny-rope has frayed, and the hair on my fate's head is falling victim to alopecia of the most heinous sort."
"I beg your pardon, Elvin," said Wario, hatless but feeling hairless, "but I am only a simple man, who has learned only to farm and to run a large business and to raise three children, and many of these words sound no more like words to me than something silly, like 'gritmib'."
"I am dying," said Professor Elvin Gadd. "My life is ending, and there is little time for me to communicate what is important."
Elvin Gadd perished on that asteroid, and the last of Wario's tears flew east towards the great blazing Sun.