Interview Six: Zymech (2)— 1507

Zymech: (Hisses) Fuck you.

The Inquisitor: …Please...

Z: You muck-raking cactus sodomizer. You worthless, sordid scum of nothingness. Fuck you.

TI: May we please…may we please…

Z: I wonder how many people wouldn't have died…if you hadn't made me forget.

TI: Please…that is not how…please…I am not…I cannot...I have tasks…

Z: Fuck you! Fuck you fuck you fuck you! I can't…I've been so tired these last few years, I can hardly breathe out there… But now that I'm here…I can feel my old rage again, like it was just a day ago you made me realize the truth about the Queen, and then let me go back without it. I had the hope, and then… you took it away.

TI: I have nothing to give…or take…please…understand…

Z: Let me leave. Let me out. LET ME THE FUCK OUT!

TI: This…this is the final. My last chance…I can't…Even anger will not let you leave. Please…

Z: Who are you? Who the hell are you? What do you want?

TI: I want to die. I have left my seeds in the ground, now I want to wither and die.

(Pause.)

TI: But…I can't…unless I find… Everything changed…I had hope too, but now…

Z: You…really are some miserable bastard, aren't you?

TI: I…please… You can't leave until…I try…

Z: …

TI: …Please…

Z: If it'll make you go away.

TI: Thank you…thank you…

Z: Get on with it.

TI: ...Right. Yes. Right… Yes. How…how is every…thing…?

Z: John is dead. Eleme is back in the Sarasan Empire, trying to keep things from completely coming apart. Lukas is gone…spiritually, anyway. He's like a robot these days. And GENO…the original Mecha2…is scrap metal.

TI: I'm sorry…

Z: You don't feel sorry, and I can tell, so don't say that.

TI: …

Z: You're not really alive…are you? Don't try to bother with the niceties of us living beings, then… they don't even feel real when we use them ourselves, anyway.

TI: Manners?

Z: None of it's real. We're acting nice…and feeling none of it. It's all masks…

TI: (She'z uh beginning to loozen and talk more…good…) Zo…

Z: None of it matters to me anymore. Not the manners, not the goals… the goals of Lukas and Daisy. It's all going to come tumbling down any day now. Winning the Triwar, and uniting all of the countries surrounding the Oho Sea into the Sarasan Empire will mean nothing soon.

TI: (She's zzz really going at it…)

Z: Naturally, people were unhappy from the beginning. Daisy ordered a systematic destruction of the former Beanbean Kingdom's and former Subcon's cultures. I and others tried to fight her in the sham of a senate that was created as part of the terms of our former revolutionary war, but we could never get anywhere.

TI: But you tried hards, right? That is…that's what…s…important.

Z: Shut up. (Pause) I remember thinking, subconsciously, that it was all okay. As long as the mass killings were over…as long as Daisy didn't have any real control anymore…I was fine with her being alive, and for the Beanbean Kingdom and Subcon to be assimilated into our territory. I mean, the compromise was the only way.

Z: …Subconsciously, I was relieved by it all. Relieved that I and my friends had made it through the disaster of a lifetime somehow…and that we had managed to create some kind of a happy ending.

TI: But…but consciously?

Z: I pretended to be furious. I pretended that Lukas' bizarre actions could not stand, and that I would knock them down. Even if I couldn't see that…bastard face-to-face, I would wage my war from across a field of politics. I would reach him one way or another…

TI: ...

Z: It didn't work. And, as things began to get worse and worse, the government continued to break down. As it turned out, Daisy was still not satisfied. It turned out that she had been…working on a sort of plan for the last twenty years, a series of ingenious plots devised to conquer the Mushroom Kingdom, as I told you last time. She was determined to follow it through, even though the former Mushroom Kingdom had become a useless hellscape. She had already worked too hard at this point to not continue forward and take it…

TI: A…plot…?

Z: You've heard Daisy is insane, haven't you? That all she does is lay in her dark room and gnaws at whatever comes within her grasp…alive or not. That she scratches endlessly into her arm and on the walls…raving…screaming…at nothing…

TI: (A memory…?)

Z: It's all true…and false. Just like…everything. She can still plot, despite her ghastly ignorance. She can think, despite the complete loss of a mind. And she can see everything, even without eyes.

TI: But…

Z: Shut up.

Z: (Breathes deeply, with the echo of a shudder) In its simplest incarnation, Daisy's plan had two steps: First, the elimination of the land's most powerful species, the yoshis, and secondly, the elimination of the world's most powerful forces: the Mario Brothers. Both the yoshis and the Brothers presented a defense that Daisy, or rather, Sarasaland, could not hope to surmount directly in conquering the Mushroom Kingdom, so, she plotted a series of indirect attacks.

TI: The yoshis…

Z: You get it already, don't you? First she made herself friends with Peach, somehow, despite being a demonic bitch, and managed to convince the stupid girl to banish all the yoshis from the land. Heh, well that was easy enough, wasn't it?

TI: Hm…

Z: But she knew that Mario and Luigi would not be so easily gotten rid of. It would take much longer…and putting things in place behind Peach's back… in order to get rid of the plumbers.

Z: So she tested them. After Sarasaland's alliance with the Mushroom Kingdom was secured, Daisy engineered a fake kidnapping, forcing a particularly deformed goomba named Tatanga to pretend to hold her hostage. It was stupid and crazy, but it worked. The poor purple bastard was only doing it to save his two sons that Daisy was holding prisoner. He was fully prepared to be killed by Mario…as he was. The best fucking part is that one of the sons had starved to death in a lightless dungeon cell months earlier, and the other just plain disappeared. Ha! Ha! Ha…

Z: And it was all just to test Mario and Luigi. Daisy was secretly trying her best to kill them while pretending to be held hostage…

TI: That's…awful…

Z: I said enough with the fake sentiments.

TI: …

Z: So she confirmed for herself that they were too powerful. Far, far too powerful. Impossibly. It must have fascinated her, because she began to try to find out why they were that way. She tried to lure them back over to Sarasaland many different times, but they refused… I suppose she had let them see her and had been terrified.

TI: Ha ha.

Z: It's not a fucking joke. …Wait, is that actual merriment in your voice? No empathy, but you can laugh, huh?

TI: (Meekly) …Please continue.

Z: She…or, rather, her puppet state government, sent people to the Brothers birthplace, Yoshi's Island. This was twelve years back or so, when the place still existed. To make a long story short, the investigators couldn't find any reasoning behind the Brothers strength…or even where they actually came from. Eventually though, a few years later and in another search, they did find something.

Z: Someone else who was interested in the Mario Brothers.

Z: A mage. I don't know if they were male or female, Magikoopa or a Beanbean Agent or a Vuuduu or whatever, but… I know they agreed to return to Sarasaland with the agents and to tell the Sarasan Council—and subsequently, Daisy—of what they knew about Mario and Luigi.

Z: They wouldn't or couldn't tell of how the Brothers gained their powers, but they could say…they could say how they could be gotten rid of, and provide the initiative necessary to set off the deaths.

TI: What…?

Z: You're on the edge of your metaphorical seat, aren't you?

Z: It was simple: either Mario or Luigi had to turn on the other. If the two brothers fought to the death, one would die and the other would probably be weak enough to finish off.

Z: The mage knew the brothers were too close; he knew that magic would be needed. He also knew that the attack, like the one against the yoshis, would have to be indirect. A cursed object, specifically transported by an unaware third party, would work well.

Z: It was almost perfect. The mage's plan, whatever it was, seemed to work, since Mario and Luigi both disappeared within a month of the plan being enacted.

Z: But the plan was too much. The entire Mushroom Kingdom ended up a flaming wreck, even before Daisy could get her wretched claws on the place. Within a week.

TI: Wow…

Z: Actually, Daisy was fortunate that happened, in a way. If the Mushroom Kingdom hadn't been destroyed, she would have gone on with her plan to attack and invade, leading to a double back attack by the Beanbean Kingdom and the Revolutionary Army growing in her own backyard. Hell, we might have even sat back and let the Beanbean Kingdom destroy the distracted main Sarasaland government… and then who fucking knows what would've happened.

TI: ?

Z: It's pretty fucking funny. It all started because the Beanbean Kingdom set up a bomb attack on a group of Sarasan diplomats who were staying in the Mushroom Kingdom, purposefully framing the Mushroom Kingdom so that Sarasaland would take the excuse to attack. I mean, of course Beanbean knew that Daisy had been plotting to take over the Mushroom Kingdom. Their Intelligence Agency was the best in the world.

TI: …I remember…you telling me. But now youu know…more…

Z: Just think…how different things could be. If any one little thing had changed… Who knows? I'm sure everything would be just as bad, though.

TI: Pezzimizm…y—

Z: Shut up. There's nothing left to me except pessimism. If I was any emptier, I'd just kill myself now.

TI: Don't…

Z: All I live for now seems to be the miserable operation I'm trapped in. The great Sarasan Empire… its people are weary, its leaders mindless, and its figurehead the spawn of Smithos.

TI: …

Z: So here we stand, about to charge into the Mushroom Kingdom from the Northern Tundra. We couldn't sail through the Western Ocean…oh no. No, with the way the weather is now…

Z: It's so sad in the funniest way that the only thing we can find ourselves doing— the course of action that has been delivered to us by fate— is to fight a final war for a dead land. A fitting place for our final resting place.

TI: …Poetic.

Z: …I became more interested in literature after Lukas left us. I used to enjoy listening to him ramble on about whatever he was reading…

Z: I wonder what he thinks of all of this.

TI: I don't understand…

Z: Shut up. Shut up. Shut up! I'm not here to satisfy your curiosity. I'm not here to answer your pointless questions!

TI: Then why are you revealing information…?

Z: Because I'm vent…

Z: …Hells. Hells. Damn it. I want to leave. Where's the exit?

TI: Wait…um, please…

Z: No.

TI: This is very important…

Z: %$# !

TI: Please…

Z: If I answer ONE more question, can I leave?

TI: …

TI: Yes.

Z: …What the hell is it?

TI: Please…please tell me if this number sequence is familiar to you.

Z: …? Are you fucking kidding me?

TI: A…and, if it is, where did you hear it. Please. I, I only get one more chance and I need precise, place…

Z: …

TI: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13—

Z: —21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610… Shit. That sequence is stuck in my mind so bad it just rolled out of my mouth… Yeah. I know of it. It's… I haven't heard it for a long time now, but…I remember… it was in my father's robotics notes. Hm. It was important…for the special kind of spring he used. A mathematical formula for its design…

(…)

Z: …Hello?

?: Who Was Your Father?

Z: …What? And who is this now?

?: Who Was Your Father?

Z: That's none of your damn business! Let me out!

? 2: Wait— This Thing Is Still On. Turn It Off.

? 1: What Are You Talking About?

? 2: Listen To Me For Once And Turn It Off.

? 2: And you. Answer the—