Chapter 13
Easily a Frightening Sight
Mario's group huddled close to each other and dared not to do anything other than wondering about what to do next, as they were surrounded by guards and workers. With his gun pointed at them, one of the guards said, "Come with us quietly! Don't you dare try to do anything!"
"What do we do? What do we do…?" asked a nervous Luigi.
"Keep-a calm," Mario said to him. "We'll just go with them quietly for now…"
The guards closed in on the Smashers, the yukkuris they rescued, and Chen, but all of a sudden, the latter jumped at the guard in front of her and slashed him across the face. The other guards immediately pointed their guns at her and told her to stop, but the nekotama, with swift movements, attacked and struck down most of the guards and then rushed down the hallway really fast.
"Stop her! Don't let her get away!" one of the guards shouted, and then some of the guards gave chase.
"Quick! This is the time to act!" Luigi said, but he stopped thinking of doing anything when the guard next to him pointed his gun at him. "Or maybe not…"
"Your female friend will be joining you very soon!" he said to the Smashers.
"Well, at least Chen escaping will allow her to…" Olimar said, but he immediately stopped for a second, as he realized that he was about to spill the fact that there were more of them here, "come up with a plan to rescue us…"
"Yeah," Mario said with a nod.
Snake's side managed to find the yukkuri storeroom, which was accessed through the recreation room. When they entered the room, they were greeted with the sight of cages lined along the walls and stacked on top of each other, all of them containing yukkuris. "Wow! That's a lot of them, more than Pyronicus's place!" Diddy commented.
"Looks like it's going to take a while to get them all out of here…" Pikachu said.
"Not with Yukari on our side," Pichu reminded him. "Let's hope she can make our job easier."
Snake took out his smartphone and dialed a certain number. He waited for a response, and when Yukari's voice was heard on the other side, he said, "It's me, Snake. Yes, we've reached the storeroom. Can you come here now? What? You need to get a clear look at what the room looks like first? Okay, I'll record it using the video camera function." He ended the call and then used his smartphone as a video camera to record the room's appearance.
"What are you doing?" Link asked. Snake was about to answer him when suddenly a gap appeared next to the cloned soldier, and Yukari stepped out of it.
"She needs to know what this place looks like first before she can come here," Snake told him.
"As long as I know what that place looks like, I can go there," Yukari explained. "Either that, or I can simply wander around the space between dimensions and try to search for this place through luck, but that's going to take a while."
"Then how did you get in contact with Master Hand?" Pichu asked. "You don't know where he lives and what his place looks like, don't you?"
"I've seen pictures of Onett before, so I'm able to go to that place using my ability," she replied. "After that, I asked the people there until I found out where you Smashers live, and then I was able to meet Master Hand after that."
"So you met the rest of us already, eh?" Snake asked.
"What do you think?" the demon asked him.
"I'll take that as a yes," he replied.
Yukari then looked at cages. "Well, they sure stuffed up this place real good! Not a problem for me, however. She walked up to one of the cages and observed it. "Seems that these cages are embedded to the floor, so it would be impossible to move them somewhere… How about you guys get these poor things out of these cages first and then gather them together in some kind of container? I will then create a gap for you to send them through and back to the ranch we made."
The Smashers nodded and then got to work. There were carts, cardboard boxes, and plastic containers in the room, so they used them to store the yukkuris, telling them to take it easy and that they were going to take them out of here while doing so. The cage doors were locked using pegs, and pulling out the latter was no issue at all.
In the midst of doing this, Snake's smartphone rang, so he answered it. "This is Snake."
"It's me, Fox," said the voice on the other side.
"What is it? And where are you guys? It shouldn't take you that long to come here," Snake said. "Even Donkey's group got here before you!"
"Let's not talk about that now, can we?" Fox said to him. "We saw trouble here…"
"What happened?" Snake asked.
"While making our way here, we saw Mario's group being led by guards down the hallway… They're caught…" Fox told him.
"What?!" the cloned soldier asked in shock.
"Therefore, Falco, Parry, and I have decided to follow them to look for an opportunity to help them," Fox said. "Oh, and by the way, Chen isn't with them for unknown reasons. Maybe she got away."
"Well, let's hope she can deal with things on her own," Snake said. "Anyway, the rest of us are in the storeroom with Yukari now, and we're helping the yukkuris get out of here."
"Go ahead and help them," Fox told him. "The rest of us will go and help Mario and the others."
"We'll rush over to help as soon as we're finished with everything here," Snake told him. "Try your best in the meantime and don't get caught, okay?"
"We will. All right, we're setting out," Fox said, and then he ended the call.
Snake lowered the smartphone from his ear, and the others went up to him and asked what happened, so he told them about what he heard from Fox. "Mario and the others are captured?!" Link said in shock.
"Chen is missing too?" Yukari said, not sounding shocked or worried in any way. "You don't have to worry about her. Like I said before, she's capable of defending herself. She's even capable of getting out of this place with no effort, I tell you."
"So you're saying that we don't have to worry about her at all," Pikachu asked, and Yukari nodded in response. "Well, if you say so…"
"I'm also sure she's on her way to help your captured friends too," Yukari said. "Therefore, you can be sure that your other friends will have support. In the meantime, we should finish up what we came here for. After that, you can head over to help them, assuming that they aren't done with things there yet."
"Yukari is right," Snake said. "It is times like this that having a large group is a good idea, because we can get different works done separately. Leave Mario, Luigi, and Olimar to Fox's group and Chen. Plus, I'm sure Mario's group can hold things up by themselves too. They're not the kind of people to go down without a fight, maybe except Luigi."
The Smashers nodded in agreement, and then they went back to helping the yukkuris out of their cages.
After hearing about who broke into his factory, Arnold was, without a single doubt, full of rage, knowing that the group of people who got on his nerves these past few days was now causing him trouble. "I can't believe that those outsiders actually came!" the chairman angrily said while walking in circles over and over. "Knowing what happened to Pyronicus, I should've seen this happening from miles away! It was only a matter of time before they storm into this place without my permission and cause trouble!"
"Well, you can't really blame them for breaking into this place unnoticed when the security here isn't tight," Dr. Blak told him. "Can't blame you for not tightening the security here too, since we never had any cases of people breaking in without permission… It's really the concern of yukkuris trying to break out of here that we're concerned about, but even that never happened before, so… Yeah, you get what I mean…"
"I'll teach them a lesson about coming into other people's territory and trying to make it out with belongings that don't belong to them!" Arnold said. "The only possible reason they're here is to rescue the yukkuris! Of course, they're here to rescue the yukkuris, after the story they made up about some monster threatening to destroy our world if we keep on killing yukkuris! They're just finding an excuse to make their actions justifiable! There is no justifiable reason to rescue yukkuris! None at all! Yukkuris are trash that should be destroyed no matter what! Every form of abuse and torture towards them are justifiable! There is and will never be a justifiable reason for helping them!"
As he was ranting about this, the door to the room he was in opened, and the guards led Mario's group inside. "Here they are, Chairman Arnold," the guard in lead said.
Arnold immediately went up to the Smashers and loudly said into Mario's face, "Ah! So you troublemakers are here, and about time to, even though I'm in no way glad to see your ugly mugs!"
"Geez… Thanks for the friendly welcome…" Luigi sarcastically said.
Arnold looked at the reimu and the koreimu that were in Olimar and Luigi's hands respectively and said, "So you came all the way here to rescue trash like them, eh?" Without saying anything else, he pulled the reimu over by its hair and then snatched the koreimu out of Luigi's hand. He hurled the reimu onto the floor and then stomped it over and over. The yukkuri screamed and coughed out its fillings with each stomp until it finally stopped doing so, and then Arnold flung the crying koreimu across the room, splattering it against the wall.
"How could you?!" Olimar said in horror.
"I can say the same to you too for rescuing them!" Arnold shouted at him while pointing at him. "You think you can walk in here like you're the boss of this place and do whatever you want?! Listen! I'm the boss around here, and nobody here is allowed to do certain things they want to without my permission! Also, where are the rest of you people?! The rest of them are definitely somewhere here, and I want them all here at once!"
"There was a young girl with them," the lead guard told him, "but she got away. The other guards are going after her."
"There's even more! I know it!" Arnold said. "Search every single part of the factory, especially the storeroom! If they're here to rescue the yukkuris, then that's the place they're definitely at! Head over there at once and bring them all here!"
Outside the room, Fox, Falco, and Parry overheard everything, and after hearing that Arnold was sending guards to go and search the storeroom, they were shocked. They immediately went away from the door and hid around a corner to avoid being seen by the guards when they came out, and then Fox quickly dialed a number on his smartphone. "Snake! Bad news! Guards are heading over to the storeroom!"
"Great… That's the last thing we need…" Snake said into his smartphone. "We still have a lot of yukkuris to pack into containers, and going by this pace, we definitely won't make it before the guards arrive… Looks like we'll have to make it out with whatever we can for now…"
Hearing what Snake said and understanding the situation, Yukari pointed her arm at the door and caused a large gap to appear in front of it, covering it completely. "You don't have to worry about anyone coming in here anymore," she told the Smashers.
Pikachu looked at the gap and said, "What did you do?"
"Just made it so that they'll end up in the wrong place every time they try to come in here," Yukari replied.
The guards reached the recreation room and immediately headed for the storeroom. However, they were greeted with the sight of the outside of the factory's front door when they opened the door. "What the?!" said one of the guards in surprise. They stepped out and looked around, and they were sure that this was indeed the outside of the factory.
"How did we end up here?!"
"Did we go through the wrong door?"
"Let's make sure again!"
The guards ran back through the gap and found themselves back in the recreation room, and then they turned around to look at the door they just went through to make sure that they didn't go into the wrong place. The sign above the door clearly wrote "Yukkuri Storeroom", but no matter how many times they rubbed their eyes, they were looking at the outside of the factory when they looked at the scenery behind the open door. "What is this all about…?" a guard said in confusion.
Back in the room Mario's group was taken to, Arnold was still shouting and ranting like crazy at the Smashers. It seemed as if he was never going to come to an end about this. "I don't think I know where he's getting at anymore…" Luigi commented. "He's not getting to a point or anything… All he's doing is ranting about how much he hates yukkuris and people who like them and such…"
"Better than throwing uz into prison or handing uz to da authorities, at-a least…" Mario said.
"I think his ranting will make a great Youtube video," Luigi then said. "Think about it…"
As Arnold was ranting nonstop, the door opened, and a short man with swirly eyeglasses and black hair resembling a clump of grass came in, looking very impatient and excited. "Dr. Blak! You got to see this!" he said. "I made it! I finally finished the project I was working on!"
"Ah, you must be talking about that one!" Dr. Blak said.
"Yes!" the short man said. "Please come and take a look at it at once! It's totally awesome!
Arnold, finally having stopped ranting, asked Dr. Blak, "What was he working on?"
"You know how he always has been excited by biological experiments related to yukkuris," Dr. Blak said to him. "He's been busy working on something. Creating a new life form, you can say."
"Creating a new life form?" Olimar curiously said.
"Why do I have the feeling that I'm going to have problems sleeping tonight if I see what his project is…?" Luigi wondered.
"Please come and take a look at it at once!" the short man said. "I'm can't wait to show it to you!"
"Well, Mr. Chairman, as long as we have these intruders within the range of our eyes, they can't do anything," Dr. Blak said to Arnold. "Let the guards deal with the others, so let us go and see Dr. Joe's creation now."
Arnold glared at the Smashers and said, "Fine! And in order to ensure that these three don't get into any trouble, they must come with us! I must make sure that they are within the range of my eyes at all times!"
So the short man named Dr. Joe led Arnold, Dr. Blak, and the Smashers to another part of the factory. Fox, Falco, and Parry followed them quietly, at the same time making sure that there were not spotted by anyone.
The former group came into a room that had test tubes all over the place, and each of them was filled with liquids of different colors and contained a yukkuri each. They also saw scientists performing various kinds of experiments and such on yukkuris, such as dissecting them alive, dropping chemicals onto them to see the reactions, killing them with weights in order to obtain physic-related answers, and more.
"Eiki wasn't kidding when she said they perform inhuman experiments here…" Luigi said.
"Even scientists don't treat lab rats like this…" Olimar said.
"You got a problem with the way we treat yukkuris here?!" Arnold angrily said to the Smashers. They did not say anything in respond, but simply followed him and his two scientists.
Dr. Joe led them into another room that had a large, circular hole surrounded by railings. "There it is!" Dr. Joe said to the others. "Behold my greatest creation yet! The Many-Faced Yu-Tarantula!"
Everyone looked at the thing that was in the hole, and the Smashers were horrified at what they saw. It was basically a large blob with numerous amounts of faces and four pairs of large spider legs. The eyes were looking all over the place, and the mouths were closing and opening nonstop, making the sound "yu" and saying "take it easy" slowly over and over. The sight of this bizarre creature was enough to make most people lose their appetite.
"I knew I shouldn't have come here…!" Luigi said in horror.
"Mamamia… What-a eez that-a…?" Mario said in shock.
"What you are looking at right now is created by sewing the faces of a total of 88 yukkuris together, and after forming it into the shape of a ball, fillings and paste cores of various kinds of yukkuris were put inside!" Dr. Joe explained. "The spider legs, as real as they may look, are actually artificial legs created from metal. The Many-Faced Yu-Tarantula wasn't able to move at first, due to its leg not being part of its body, but after a day had passed, the legs became melded to its fillings, so now it is able to walk like a real animal! Isn't it awesome?"
"You created this from several yukkuris?! How could you?!" Olimar said in shock and anger. "And what's the point of making an abomination like this?! Life is not to be played with like this!"
"How dare you call my masterpiece an abomination?!" Dr. Joe angrily said when he heard what Olimar said. "People who have no appreciation for art like you will never understand the awesomeness of my creation! You have no right to criticize my awesome work! Can't a genius create something for fun?!"
"I want it dead at once!" Arnold suddenly said.
Dr. Joe was shocked at hearing this. "What?! You can't be serious, Mr. Chairman! I just made it!"
"I did not pay you to make yukkuris to live, but to make them die!" Arnold told him. "I don't care if they are suffering or not in that grotesque form; the fact that they are still alive angers me to no end! The appearance also makes me want to throw up! Kill it at once!"
"Mr. Chairman! Please don't!" Dr. Joe pleaded. "Please at least let me take it back home and keep it as a pet! I'll take it out of here if you don't like it!"
"Now, now, Arnold," Dr. Blak said to the chairman, "you don't have to get so upset and worked up about this. You know the kind of person Dr. Joe is, and since he spent so much sweat in making this, why don't you just let him to take it home? As long as you don't pay him a visit, I'm sure you'll never lay your eyes on it again."
"No! The chairman is right!" Olimar said. "That thing must be killed! That sort of abomination must not exist! The fact that those yukkuris are still alive is what is most terrifying about this! They are forcefully merged together to become this monstrosity and may have very well have their minds permanently scarred! It is better to end life than to leave it in a state of eternal torture and suffering!"
"Unexpected words for someone who wants to protect yukkuris, eh?" Arnold said to him. "What's with you wanting that thing dead all of a sudden? I thought you want to protect yukkuris!"
"Right, we are here to protect yukkuris from the likes of you people, but you just had to make it so that euthanizing is the best answer to solving things! We may be on the exact opposite sides on the treatment of yukkuris, but I'll agree with you for once that the abomination before our eyes must be put to an end right now! Know this, however, that we will still grab every opportunity we can to save yukkuris from monsters like you!"
"The only monsters here are you people!" Arnold shouted at him. "The law of this place states that you're not allowed to interfere with the way we treat yukkuris! And what do you do? Make up a bizarre story about you trying to save this world from some monster? You're just trying to find a poor excuse for justifying your actions! People who love yukkuris like you and try to stop us abusers are the real monsters! Dr. Blak, call the authorities at once and get them to arrest these people!"
"As you wish," Dr. Blak said with a nod.
"And order for that monster over there to be terminated at once! Such a horrifying sight makes me want to puke!" he added.
"No! Please! Don't!" Dr. Joe begged.
Suddenly, they heard the sound of people crying coming from the previous room, so they rushed back into that room to see surprised scientists and guards knocked out on the floor, and standing at the door was Fox, Falco, Parry, and Chen. "Might as well go all-out now that we're spotted!" Falco said. "And by the way, kid, nice skills!"
"Don't judge a book by its cover!" Chen said.
"Why you?!" Arnold angrily said to them. "You're here to rescue your friends, right? Don't think any of you are going to get out of this so easily! I won't let you steal the yukkuris too!"
"You won't stop us so easily, Arnold!" Fox said to him. "Even as we are speaking, our friends are getting the yukkuris out of here without anyone stopping them! By the time we're done dealing with you, the yukkuris in the storeroom will be gone! We do not wish to cause too much harm to any of you here or this place, so you better not go too rough on us!"
"I told you none of you are getting out of here so easily or getting any yukkuris out of here!" Arnold shouted back. "Guards! What are you doing?! Hurry up and get them at once! Notify the police! I want to see these people arrested and behind bars at once!"
Suddenly, there was the sound of explosion, and the whole place shook as well. "What happened?!" Dr. Blak asked in shock while looking around.
"I have every reason to believe that the rest of the outsiders are up to no good!" Arnold angrily said. "Those fools better not have done anything to my factory, or else they're going to pay dearly for this!"
Fox looked back and said, "I'm not sure if I want them to be the reason behind that explosion…"
"Whoever is behind it, things are becoming a lot more fun now, isn't it?" Falco said. "Gotta give whoever did that a big thank you for this!"
Meanwhile, in the east side of the factory, the guards were panicking and firing at the intruders while avoiding the gun shots returned by them. "Report to the chairman at once!" one of the guards shouted. "Tell him that PETY is here! And they're coming in with heavy firepower!"
TO BE CONTINUED
Dr. Blak's design is based off Master Xehanort, that bald, old guy with a silver goatee, from the Kingdom Heart series, so yes, both him and Dr. Joe are OCs.
Not much really happened in this chapter, and that biological yukkuri horror, to be honest, won't be playing any role at all. I just wanted to show how twisted some of the people working for Arnold are.
I apologize to anyone who found this chapter underwhelming. I'm sure the next chapter will make up for this, seeing how PETY has entered the fray.