"…. Excuse me?"
"I live here now, blue boy. I abandoned my physical form and now I'm living in your suit 'cause waiting for someone to save the day again is BORING."
"…"
"Also I'm in trouble and this is literally the last place my bro will look."
O…Kay. The others probably needed to hear about this.
Alph continued to head to the airlock as he formulated a response. "Can you… Help us?"
Crazy Hand flickered into a sprite that looked like the thumbs down and frowny face emotes combined. "Nope! I left like, all of my power back in my physical body when I escaped. You know, like… A starfish. You take off its leg and it grows another starfish, but until it's done the leg can't do any starfish stuff, like eating or whatever." A loading bar appeared across him as he thought. "My brother did the same thing actually, and now that dumb blob is tearing this world apart to take our power for itself! … Ooooh, you guys better hurry up!"
Crazy Hand living up to his name by squeezing enjoyment out of a deadly catastrophe.
"… Alright then. Um, can you tell me why destroying the world makes it more powerful?"
The airlock door sealed behind them as Alph talked, already starting to hiss as it depressurised.
"This whole place is actually our combined forms. Our floaty hand bods are just avatars to communicate with you lot. It has our avatars, so it can grab our power too." Crazy Hand didn't even give Alph enough time to respond before he continued. "Ah, wait, you're not getting it. Hang on."
The little loading bar appeared over his sprite again, and with the creeping sensation that Crazy Hand was about to pull something whether he understood or not, Alph took his chance to hop out of the ship; The light of the tractor beam illuminating the encouraging sight of Bowser Jr dangling Toon Link into the burst hull of Olimar's spaceship by his ankles.
"Excuse me, guys! I-"Alph's tongue jammed midsentence as Crazy Hand's words started to come not from his speakers, but from just beside his ears.
"Oh, cool, you lock up when you sleep. Listen, I'm gonna make you hallucinate for a sec. Check this out."
The world burst into a kaleidoscope of shape and colour that did nothing to stop Alph's frozen legs from dumping him bodily onto the ground.
The colours gave way to a blank void, and Crazy Hand's voice floated in from afar.
"Okay pay attention because I am about to drop some mega exposition on you."
Alph wondered why he wasn't panicking.
Had the day been so unbelievably terrible that being forced into sleep paralysis while Crazy Hand did a sick kickflip on his cerebral cortex wasn't worth sweating over?
No.
Some little whisper at the back of his mind told him that Crazy Hand was suppressing that part of his brain in his desire to perform.
"See this spooky dark space we're in? It's the void between worlds. And in a sec- Ah, here we are," An illusionary pair of Hands appeared. "Together, we pulled this place apart into a sweet little pocket dimension." The nothingness around them domed out visibly, gaining a strange sense of depth.
"And then we built a perfect little world for you cute little… Uh," Crazy Hand paused. "Physical beings."
The hallucinary hands shook, fingers interlacing, bodies peeling like blooming flowers into headache-inducing shapes that Alph suspected extended far beyond the standard three dimensions.
"It took a lot of energy to get this place all spick and span, you know. That thing out there is cracking it like an egg, carefully, carefully trying to squeeze the yoke out without destroying the whole thing!"
The twisting flower-shape, complex beyond complexity, popped; The fully formed landscape spilling from its insides like water from a bubble.
The Hands rose back out of the bubbling mass of the land, still raw and cooling, their forms… Different. Thinner fabric, less… Metaphysical heft.
Then after a short pause, they both started furiously breakdancing.
"I forget what I'm trying to explain here but I think you get it." Crazy Hand helpfully chimed in. "I'm getting outta here now, way too squishy."
As his voice faded out, everything dissolved into a normal, if not short lived, dream.
Alph reawoke to the soothing sounds of a furious argument.
"Get out of the way! I saw it on tv! I know what I'm doing!" Junior shrieked from a few feet away.
"No! No one is doing CPR!" Toony shot back with equal ferocity. "He's breathing already!" Toon Link turned around to gesture wildly, only to make eye contact as Alph bemusedly sat up. "… And also awake!"
"Told ya he'd be fine!" Kirby called out, sitting atop what appeared to be Olimar's fridge; recently dragged out of his craft, judging by the deep scrape in the ash behind it.
"Um… How long was I out?" Alph asked, trying to ignore the mental image of Bowser Jr attempting first aid.
Link hummed thoughtfully, "Like, ten minutes? What even happened?"
"Uh," Alph's brain hit a wall as he tried to think of an explanation that didn't make him sound completely nuts. "Crazy Hand's, um," Mind? Essence? "… Consciousness escaped the Dark Matter monster that consumed his body, and he uploaded himself into the Drake and my suit the moment I turned it back on."
"You know technically by most definitions I'm not conscious. I don't have a brain!" Crazy Hand piped up. "Anyway keep going I wanna see how you handle the next bit."
"… Then he tried to tell me what's going on by knocking me out and making me dream it." Alph winced, his attempt to sound not-crazy failing.
"Oh yeah, that happened to me once." Kirby said. "You see anything useful?"
Alph blinked. Of course, Kirby was practically a professional hero; His day-to-day was insane enough to prepare him for anything.
Steeled, Alph took a breath. "Well, to start with, he showed me how this world was built…"
"… After that he made an analogy about eggs, then got off-topic and forgot what he was trying to show me. I woke up not long after."
Toony hummed thoughtfully, "Okay. At least we have a better idea of what's going on now, what with the world being slowly destroyed and all. Not a big fan of the time limit this is gonna put on us, but I've squeezed out of worse things." He paused, fiddling with his belt as he thought. "Big question is, if it's so powerful why doesn't it just destroy this whole place now and snap up the energy that pops out?"
"That would destroy almost everyone here except me and my bro." Crazy Hand paused just long enough for Alph to repeat his words to the group. "It'd need to protect itself or find a way out first; Even if it's stringing about me and Master Hand's avatars it's still like, 95% physical, the void would shred it!"
Kirby popped out of Olimar's fridge with something suspiciously green and leafy hanging out of his mouth. "Hold up, Dark Matter came from the void. It'd be fine."
"Ah hah!" This time, Crazy Hand's voice burst from Alph's Kop-pad. "I was hoping you'd ask that! Also I'm in your tablet now."
"Oh, what?" Bowser Jr yelped, breaking out of his sulking for a moment, "You were telling the truth? We gotta deal with this guy too now?"
Crazy Hand ignored him and ploughed on. "Maybe the REAL Dark Matter came from the void, but this is an assist trophy made by yours truly! It's the closest we could get to the real thing without accidentally manifesting a piece."
"Though Master Hand banned it because it was TOO close and totally unmanageable, so I chucked it into a match to prove him wrong and aren't you glad I did because you lot are way closer as friends now."
"… We're facing imminent destruction, dude." Kirby intoned from the fridge.
"Oh, you'd be fine-"
Junior cut across with a yell of "And we're not friends!" Before diving back into his Clown Car and pulling out his mobile phone. "I'm done here, this sucks. Take me to my tower right now or I won't give you a head start when I ring my dad and tell him what's really going on!"
When nobody started moving, he waved the screen about threateningly. "I'm dialing!"
"Okay, okay, I'm coming." Alph stood up and stretched the stiffness out of his limbs. Spotting Olimar's ugly welcome mat sticking out of the dust nearby, he flung it into the Drake's tractor beam with a well-aimed throw for safekeeping, barely noticing how it twitched awkwardly as it was drawn in.
Once everyone was settled safely back into the Car, Alph pulled out the Kop-pad, set up the map, and grinned as it started to display their previous steps. Finally, the first real progress since this whole mess started! "I've got the directions."
The Clown Car puttered back over the treetops as the occupants sat in awkward silence.
"Hey,"
Well, almost all the occupants sat in silence.
Alph's ear twitched as Crazy Hand switched back to speaking through his helmet's internal speakers, one hand reaching up to knock the volume down a few notches.
"I found that cute little distress message you recorded earlier, so I made some adjustments and did you the favour of beaming it to every device in range." The cobbled-together Hand icon appeared in the shape of a thumbs-up. "And then I thought why stop there? So, I made them beam it out too and now technically it's a computer virus but I'm pretty sure everyone's heard it by now."
"You… Made it into a virus." Alph caught Junior's confused glance back as he suddenly broke the silence and pointed to his helmet in an approximation of an explanation. "Wait, what do you mean by 'adjustments'?"
"Anyone with access to a screen now has all your contact details!"
It was that exact moment that a message pinged up on the Kop-pad's screen.
'Dear Alph,
It's good to hear you're still alive.
Care to tell me why I just had to manually purge a virus from my suit at three in the morning?
-Samus Aran.'
Alph's first thought was; 'Stars, it's late.'
His second thought was; 'I never built messaging functionality into this thing.'
His third was; 'I should apologize.'
Crazy Hand, for lack of a better word, beat him to that last point, as a message started to compose itself on the screen.
'lmao whoops'
"Oh, stars." Alph's groan drawing worried glances from everyone else as more messages started to flood his device from friends and foes alike. It was going to be a long night.
((Back at it again with the short exposition chapter because that's just how it be sometimes.
Things have turned out slightly more dire than assumed! Oh dear.
We'll be back on the normal 'trying not to die' next time, now with the added bonus of possible communication between different groups of survivors! How will this change things?
Oh man if only I, the author, knew…
And remember, this fanfiction machine runs on reviews! My writing is a purely validation-based economy so please at least tell me what I'm doing wrong/ What you'd like to see/ What you think is going to happen!
See you all next time :3))
