Author's Note: Apologies for the late update; finals consumed my life for the first half of the month. We'll be back on track from here on in. As always, enjoy!
Mario quickly assumed battle stance. "I don't want to start this off by fighting you, Doopliss. So get lost before I have to!"
"Nyuk nyuk nyuk!" laughed Doopliss. "'Fraid you don't quite understand, Slick. The only reason I'm here is to lay the smackdown on you—for the Empress!"
"And she was a fool to send you out here alone against me," Mario commented dryly.
Doopliss snickered. "Heh, you're still dumber than dumb, 'O Great Legendary Hero.'" He raised his voice. "SIC 'IM, GUYS!"
Instantly a dozen Doopliss-like white-sheeted creatures rushed into the room from behind Doopliss and surrounded Mario and Quicksilver. They had tufts of red hair atop their heads, whereas Doopliss wore a blue-and-red party hat, but other than that minor difference they were identical to the original. They all snickered at Mario.
"Wh-What? Who are these guys?" exclaimed Mario.
"Say hello to the Duplighosts, Slick!" Doopliss announced with a smirk. "I found out I'm not the only one who can copy people. But I am the best, so these guys are led by yours truly! And we're gonna knock you silly now, Mario—so get ready, 'cuz I'm comin' for ya! Duplighosts—ATTACK!"
As the Duplighosts closed in on Mario and Quicksilver, Quicksilver pushed Mario down to the floor and began spinning his halberd over his head, making that threatening buzzsaw sound. Doopliss's grunts backed off, and Doopliss himself stared at the silver-clad figure in shock. Slowly a grin spread across his face.
"...Well, well, lookie who we have here! Imperial greetings from the Empress, Quicksilver," Doopliss said with a snicker. "You here to help me pound this dumb plumber?"
"Stand down, Doopliss," Quicksilver responded, still spinning his double halberd. "You have no business here."
"Huh?" Doopliss spluttered, incredulous. "Hey, you're on my side! The Empress—"
"No such thing. Now back off before I slice you and your gang into pieces."
Doopliss was stunned. "...Quicksilver?"
"Back off, Doopliss."
"Looks like Fleetfoot here has turned traitor, guys," Doopliss announced to his gang. "He deserves a whipping, so let's give one to him and Mario too! ATTACK!"
"Stay down, Mario," Quicksilver told Mario hastily. "I'll handle this."
As one the Duplighosts leaped into the air and hurled themselves headfirst at Quicksilver. The silver-clad figure raised his spinning halberd over his head, and the Duplighosts struck it and were flung in all directions.
"No, no, not that way, you idiots!" Doopliss yelled. "Copy him and use his own attacks against him! C'mon, morons, THINK!"
The Duplighosts all turned into exact copies of Quicksilver and began advancing toward the original again. The real Quicksilver stopped spinning his halberd and stood his ground, grasping his weapon in both hands. Together the Quicksilver clones swung their own halberds at him.
In one superfast sweep Quicksilver parried all twelve halberd strokes with his own, then smashed one of the clones backward into the wall of the treasure chamber, breaking his neck.
"Hmph, this is rather dull," Quicksilver remarked as he flashed around behind another clone and hacked him in half. "These Duplighosts of yours are too slow, Doopliss."
The remaining ten Quicksilver copies abruptly burrowed into the heaps of gold that filled the room.
"Ah, now this makes things interesting," added Quicksilver, experimentally stabbing his halberd into a pile of treasure. "Ready or not, here I come!"
Mario watched as Quicksilver combed the mounds of wealth for the vanished clones. Suddenly two arms wrapped themselves aroud his throat from behind, choking him. He gagged and struggled.
"Let your guard down, huh, Slick?" Doopliss snickered from behind him. "Now it's just you and me, and this time I'm not losing!"
"We'll see, Doopliss," choked out Mario and stomped on Doopliss's toes. The doppelganger yelled and let go of Mario, clutching his throbbing toes and hopping up and down in pain.
"YEEEOWCH! THAT HURTS!"
"It should," Mario retorted. "It's supposed to." He wound up and slugged Doopliss in the stomach, sending him headfirst into a pile of gold.
Doopliss pulled his head out of the heap of coinc and focused on Mario. His eyes gleamed red, and he vanished in a puff of purple smoke, leaving behind an exact copy of Mario himself.
"Now let's see you beat me, Slick! You're fighting yourself!" taunted Doopliss-turned-Mario. "I'm such a super GENIUS!"
"Oh, so now it's 'super genius,' is it?" asked Mario sarcastically. "Last time it was just 'genius,' and I really don't think your I.Q. has improved that much."
Doopliss pulled out a large wooden hammer and brandished it threateningly.
"Hey, no fair!" exclaimed Mario. "How can you copy a hammer when I don't have my hammer with me?"
"Heh, I've been training for this, Slick," Doopliss snickered. "How about this?" A long yellow cape appeared on his back.
"Cheater!" cried Mario. "That's my Magic Cape!"
"Nyuk nyuk!" taunted Doopliss. "Now I can copy any old move you've ever made, Slick. Practice makes perfect!"
"I'll still take you down, Doopliss," Mario challenged him.
"Yeah, sure, Slick, like I'm gonna believe you!" Doopliss launched himself into the air and flew over Mario's head using the Magic Cape, swinging his copied hammer into Mario's face and flooring the plumber.
The next thing Doopliss knew Mario was actually sitting on top of him as he flew through the air. "Huh? H-How'd you do that?"
"It's called a backflip," Mario answered curtly. "Time for you to get yours, Doopliss!"
Mario ripped the cape off Doopliss-turned-Mario's shoulders, dropping both hero and doppelganger onto the mounds of treasure. He held Doopliss pinned while he wrenched the hammer out of his hands.
Doopliss cringed. "Ack! No—don't kill me! N-Nooo!"
"I'm not going to," Mario informed him, "but I am going to give you a beating you'll never forget!" He brought the hammer down on Doopliss's head.
"YEOW!" yelped Doopliss, reverting to his normal white-sheeted forn. "STOP!"
Mario hit him again.
"YEEEEEEEEOWW!"
Doopliss hollered one last time and slumped down into the piles of gold, unconscious.
Mario batted the limp Doopliss out the treasure chamber door with the hammer. The Quicksilver clones popped out of the heaps of gold, turned back into normal Duplighosts, and ran out of the room after Doopliss.
"And good riddance," Quicksilver flung after them.
Mario faced Quicksilver. "I think you've got some explaining to do," he said seriously.
Quicksilver sat down on a closed treasure chest half-buried in gold coins. "...I was hoping I wouldn't have to tell you this, but Doopliss took the lid off the can of worms, so to speak." He sighed. "Yes, I used to work for Cyanara."
Mario said nothing, waiting for him to continue.
"I just...couldn't stomach her associates. All of them disliked me from the start, and the tensions only grew worse as time went on. In the end I left, and I promised myself I'd do anything I could to get back at her deluded assistants."
"So this is more of a revenge thing for you than anything?" questioned Mario.
"My personal vendetta," Quicksilver acknowledged. "It drives me on. And someday...someday I'll get rid of every last one of those maniacal—" He caught himself and took a deep breath, trying to relax his tense muscles.
"Quicksilver," Mario began, "if you're telling me the truth... I really don't have room in this quest for a person who's just out for petty revenge."
"They're evil," Quicksilver said emphatically, "and I'm going to stop them."
"What about Cyanara herself?" Mario asked pointedly.
Quicksilver, for the first time, was at a loss for words. "...Personally I never had a problem with her—I mean, she was pleased with me and was very supportive of my efforts," he finally admitted, "but...now that I think back, that was only the surface... I remember thinking she had some ulterior motive in all of it..."
Mario nodded. "This isn't a fight against a person, Quicksilver, although even I would like my own revenge on Cyanara and her servants. This is a fight against a force—the force of evil. So are you in this for revenge...or for what's right?"
Quicksilver slowly rose to his feet and met Mario's gaze squarely. "For what's right."
Mario smiled.
"Now come on; we've got to find that third artifact. Let me check with the Aeshma Sword. If it refuses to point toward the artifact, we're really close to it." Mario laid the Aeshma Sword flat in his hands and waited.
Suddenly the Sword floated up from his hands and pointed straight to the back of the room—north still. Mario stared at it in disbelief.
"we were wrong," he said at last, taking the Sword out of mid-air and sheathing it again. "It's not here. The Sword wasn't pointing into Wario's castle—it was pointing through it."
"All that work for nothing, huh?" asked Quicksilver stoically. "Oh, well, we keep going anyway. Lead out."
Mario led the way up to the main lobby and back outside, into the forest. He and Quicksilver took to the trail again, threading along the narrow path as they trekked ever northward. It was dark outside by this time. The sun had set, and Wario's Woods was even gloomier than ever. Mario had to strain his eyes to see any distance ahead through the thick shadows.
"At least the spiders aren't out at this time of night," Mario remarked. His shoe abruptly squashed something.
"Yuck!" Mario exclaimed, pulling his foot out of a now-smashed jumbo spider. "Maybe I was wrong."
"Got one over here, too," Quicksilver added, wiping the yellow spider mush from his silver boot.
Mario felt something brush against his ankle and instinctively pulled away. "Another over here!"
Suddenly Mario felt his ankles surrounded by a living, writhing mass of something. He froze and lit a fireball in his right hand. In the brief second that the fireball burned, Mario saw what was encompassing his feet.
"They're everywhere!"
"Ouch!" Quicksilver exclaimed as one of the spiders bit his leg. He cut it in two with his halberd. "Don't just stand there, Mario—run!"
"Easy for you to say!" Mario yelled back as he fought the creatures off his legs. "Yeowch!"
Suddenly Quicksilver was at Mario's side, pushing him forward. Mario found his feet at last and began running as fast as he could down the trail. The horde of spiders followed, biting at the duo's heels.
"Why don't you just pick me up and run?" cried Mario to his partner.
"You'd burn up from the friction, just like a meteor burns up in the air as it falls!" Quicksilver answered, easily keeping pace with Mario's running speed. "I can take that heat, but you can't!"
"Then quit talking and RUN!" Mario yelled.
Just as Quicksilver was about to rocket down the trail at his near-light speed, both he and Mario were suddenly snapped up into the air, dangling over the trail by ropes knotted about their ankles. Quicksilver accidentally dropped his halberd, and it fell into the mass of spiders teeming a few feet below them.
"Uh, Quicksilver?" Mario said at last.
"Snares," Quicksilver groaned. "And I lost my halberd so I can't cut us free."
"So how do we get down? I mean, my head is starting to really not like being upside-down," Mario grunted, feeling the blood rushing into his head as he hung by his ankle.
"...That won't be a problem," Quicksilver replied slowly. "Look."
The two upside-down partners looked far down the darkened trail and saw hundreds of tiny rhythmically-bobbing lights slowly coming toward them.
Mario stared at the lights. "Torches."
"Whoever they are, they'd better hurry," Quicksilver noted with a false nonchalance, "because those spiders down there are starting to climb the trees, and any minute now they'll be dropping onto us from above."
"veeeery comforting," Mario replied with a roll of his eyes. "Either we get eaten alive by jumbo-sized bugs or we get captured by who-knows-what. It's great to know we have such good options."
As the torches came closer, Mario and Quicksilver heard chanting. They strained to make out the words but could not. Apparently the chanters were speaking in some foreign tongue.
Suddenly a spear whizzed past Mario's ear, and he involuntarily jerked his head aside. "Great, they're shooting at us. I love it when that happens!"
"Really?" inquired Quicksilver.
"NO! LOOK OUT!"
Another sharp spear shot past Quicksilver's leg. "At least their aim is rather off," he commented hopefully.
"Drop the pointless chit-chat and GET US DOWN!" yelled Mario. "My head is killing me!"
Before Quicksilver could reply, the torch-bearers came up to them, holding their flaming torches high to light the surrounding forest. In the flickering light Mario could see that they were Shy Guys, hundreds of them, all wearing grass skirts and facial paint. Some had feathers strapped to their foreheads, the plumes waving in the air. All of them carried spears. The group of savages stared at Mario and Quicksilver in silence.
"Uh... Hi," Mario said at last.
The leader of the group pointed at Mario with his spear. "It beum him! Takem chief!"
"You speak English?" asked Mario, surprised.
Suddenly the army of Shy Guys swarmed forward, hurling spears at an alarming rate directly over Mario and Quicksilver. The rain of spears scattered the mass of spiders.
"They must be trying to cut the ropes," Quicksilver called to Mario over the shouting Shy Guys. "I just hope they don't throw too low—whoa!"
A spear cut cleanly through the rope holding Quicksilver, and he dropped painfully to the trail below. Mario was sprawled out beside him a few moments later. Both of them lay on their stomachs in the dirt, stunned by the fall. Quicksilver, however, had the presence of mind to grab his halberd, retract its blades, and replace it beneath his vest.
The Shy Guys now swarmed around them, pulling them to their feet and tying their hands behind their backs. Mario and Quicksilver were hustled down the trail away from Wario's castle in the direction the tribesmen had come from.
"This is like a bad dream," Mario commented grimly, watching the shadows of the trail dance in the flickering torchlight.
"One we won't be waking up from, either," added Quicksilver. "At least they aren't hurrying us too fast."
"Are you kidding? I can barely keep up without falling on my face!"
"You forget I can run at near-light speed. This is slow-motion to me."
"...Oh."
On they went, hurried along by their savage captors through the now-overgrown trail. Thorns caught the legs of Mario's overalls frequently, not painfully thanks to the tough denim, but stickily enough to make onward travel difficult. They brushed right over Quicksilver's silver boots, however. This thorny method of travel continued for a quarter of an hour.
Abruptly the trail terminated in a wide clearing ringed by flaming torches. Hundreds of painted-and-feathered Shy Guys in grass skirts also circled the clearing, standing between the torches. Each had three drums, beating them in a haunting, throbbing rhythm, combining with the dancing shadows and the cold moonlight for an eerie effect that made Mario's hair stand on end.
"Man, that drumming could get on a guy's nerves after a while," Mario muttered as he and Quicksilver were led to the center of the clearing.
Suddenly a monstrous shape loomed out of the torchlight at the far end of the clearing. A dozen tribal Shy Guys were bearing forward a largs stone object, its identity indiscernible in the shadows of the flickering light. Mario and Quicksilver, still held by their captors, watched as the Savage Guys slowly lowered the ponderous object to the grass and scurried away to resume their places in the ring of torches. The drumming increased to a frenzied pitch, growing faster by the moment.
"I'm starting to not like the looks of this," Quicksilver muttered to Mario.
"I didn't like it from the beginning," Mario muttered back.
The drumming was now a torrent of hysteric pounding. Howls and other haunting cries rang from the throng that lined the clearing, reverbating in Mario's head until he felt he could take no more. Suddenly two giant torches on opposite sides of the large stone object burst into flames, illuminating the stone and revealing it to be a throne of sorts. On this throne sat the biggest Shy Guy Mario had ever seen, easily five times larger than the average Shy Guy. He was dressed in red with green paint streaking his white facemask. His large grass skirt had obviously been custom-tailored to accomodate his massive girth. He frowned and put up his hand.
Instantly the drumming stopped.
During the minute of surreal silence that followed, Mario saw something on the massive throne. The torches' uneven light revealed a five-line inscription on the throne's base. He strained to make out the words.
Eternal dark,
Masterful light -
Both lie in thee.
Learn thou thy way
And save that life.
The words that life clicked in Mario's brain. "'That life'—it's a continuation of the inscription I found with the Amrita Sphere, the one that talked about the 'fated life'!" he whispered to himself. "Somehow I get the feeling these inscriptions were meant for me, but—"
Something else caught his eye. There, pressed into the granite beside the inscription, was a green leaf.
"CHIEF GUY, OO-HA!"
The sudden shout of the Savage Guy throng startled Mario out of his thoughts. He looked up to see the big Shy Guy staring down at him. Finally the Shy Guy spoke.
"You Mario." His deep bass voice made shivers run down Mario's spine.
"Uh, yeah, I'm Mario."
"Me Chief Guy."
Chief Guy. The name, combined with the looks of the imposing chief, suddenly made Mario recognize him.
"Hey, I know you! You're—"
"YOU QUIET! NO TALK!" bellowed Chief Guy.
Mario obeyed—fast.
"Me lookum for you long time, Mario," began Chief Guy. "You heap big. Me bigger than you now. You no more kill Shy Guy. Me makem sure you no kill more Shy Guy."
"What?" Mario exclaimed. "No no no, you don't understand! I—"
"NO TALK!" roared the chief.
Mario shut up. It was obviously useless to argue.
"Men," ordered Chief Guy, "you takem Mario and friend, get wood, tie them. We makem big bonfire, burn Mario and friend! Then them no more kill Shy Guy!"
"OO-HA!" shouted the Savage Guys, rushing to do their chief's bidding.
"Please, Chief Guy," Mario pleaded, "can I explain?"
Chief Guy looked sourly at Mario.
"I don't hurt good Shy Guys! Just the bad ones that help guys like Bowser!"
"You... You kill Shy Guy!" Chief Guy argued.
"No, no," Mario hastened to say, "only bad Shy Guys."
Chief Guys frowned, growing impatient.
Mario grew desperate. Obviously the chief was not taking his word for it. An idea struck him, an idea related to his previous acquaintance with the chief.
"Chief Guy," he suddenly asked, "do you like drumming?"
The big chief's eyes lit up. "Me likem drum!" He smiled.
"I can drum too."
"You...know how drum?" questioned Chief Guy, puzzled.
"Yes," Mario replied. "Why don't we see who's better—me or you?"
"You want drum, me drum too?"
Mario nodded. "If you win, you can burn us if you like. If I win, you let us go, and—"
Chief Guy hung on Mario's words.
"—You give me that leaf on your throne."
"YOU WANTUM CHIEF GUY'S LEAF?" roared the chief in outrage.
"Don't worry," Mario replied, "you're better than me, right? You'll win, right?"
Chief Guy narrowed his eyes and thought for a moment. The Savage Guys returned with the wood, and the chief held up his hand.
"No burnum Mario yet! Me, him—we drum!"
Loud shouts broke out, eventually settling into a throbbing "OO-HA! OO-HA!" as Chief Guy brought out his large drums and settled them before him. One of the Savage Guys cut the ropes around Mario's wrists and handed him a set of three drums. Mario set the tall drums in front of him and stood ready.
"I can't believe you're actually doing something as crazy as this," Quicksilver said aloud.
"Hey," Mario replied, turning to look at his partner, "I've been in crazier jams than this."
"You'd better win."
Mario nodded. "I plan to."
Chief Guy pounded on his drums for silence. "Now—WE DRUM!"
The Savage Guys gave one last throaty shout to signal the drumming duel's start.
"OO-HA!"