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World 4-2: Midnight Bathroom Stall Assault
One fine night, with the ease of venturing out on a moon viewing picnic, King Koopa and his company strolled unchallenged into the Mushroom Empire.
The borders of the Mushroom Empire boasted no fences. Where the queen's world began and the domains of others ended, there were no walls, fortresses, watchtowers, or even so much as a rickety wooden 'Keep Out' sign to mark the invisible boundary. Patrols seldom pounded the dirt of these outlands. Here the grasses and weeds grew tall, yet birds and beasts were scarce. The hills and clouds that had eyes looked upon this green pause of open land with blank expressions. An innocent stranger, ignorant of the local geopolitical situation, would see no warning or hint as to the importance of the ground he trod. Peach preferred it this way. Hidden, anonymous borders increased the odds of victims wandering onto her turf, never to return. An entire Toad family could feed off an unlucky trespasser for a week.
A few miles in one met the sparse outcroppings of the Toad suburban sprawl, housing tracks like a speckling of black mold in a dank corner of an under-sink cabinet foretelling the full blown infestation to come. Careful not to clump together, the Koopas kept low and avoided the streets when they could. They sprinted through backyards, over unkempt moss lawns, passing grubby swing sets and slimeboxes and barbecue grills closed and cold.
Koops' handpicked team for this mission consisted of twenty-four elite kommandos: fourteen combat specialists; six engineers well versed in explosive demolition; three heavy weapons experts of stout hammer brother stock; and one magikoopa. Bowser huffed and steamed, doing his level best to match the pace of his elite soldiers and not make too much noise doing it. Behind him Iggy ran smiling, tongue lolling free, noodly arms trailing, a wicked child set loose to play. He wore a white lab coat equipped with many pockets, all of them crammed with junk he was always threatening to show off. Along with the mad scientist threads, his multi-colored hair made a mockery of the dark blues and browns everyone else wore to blend into the night. Luigi brought up the rear, the quietest of the lot, hammer in one hand, a fresh plucked fire flower gripped ready in the other.
They were especially cautious around windows and doors. The wishful thinking involved ran thus: if a Toad happened to look up from whatever glum activities kept them busy of an evening and they caught a glimpse of what was marching over their property, then hopefully the sight of so many badasses bristling with weaponry would discourage interference. The queen's citizens were well conditioned to deny their curiosity and stay inside when strange noises and shadowy figures of a martial aspect passed by their homes at odd hours. Toads were cowardly by nature and more fond of their own spotted, spongy hides than of duty to the empire. No matter the rational, the risk of discovery was great. Peach may have offered a generous bounty for news of invaders, and if a Toad thought they could call in a tip without risking foreign soldiers skinning their cap from their stem, they just might decide benefit outweighed risk.
For several blocks it seemed as if the band of rescuers would manage the unlikely and creep their way unseen through the whole damned neighborhood. Then the inevitable claimed its due, as it always must before the end.
Over a high fence and through a thorny hedgerow, the Koopas blundered in on two Toad children playing 'prisoner of war' in their back yard. They were barely older than sprouts. Scattered around them were action figures of Koopas and Goombas and assorted enemy races in varying stages of disassembly. A Bowser doll had been decapitated, a nail hammered through its shell. Beside it, a Luigi action figure waited its turn with firecrackers stuffed into its joints, the fuses twisted together. The brats were holding the face of a hammer brother figurine into a match flame, savoring the way the plastic blistered and curdled, when they squinted up at the soldiers rustling and grunting their way through the clumps of blackberry bushes at the edge of the yard. When the soldiers stopped to stare back, the kids sprang up without so much as a yelp and ran for their two-story mushroom house. Behind them they slammed closed the sliding backdoor.
Koops looked to Bowser, who after a second's hesitation, nodded. The captain motioned two kommandos toward the house—Gep and Garry, a Goomba pair of close-quarter specialists.
They cut the lines running into the house, careful not to sever the phone service and power to the other homes on the block, lest neighbors venture out to investigate. The house's windows went dark while those of the other homes remained lit. Toads were more comfortable in darkness than Koopas, but Goombas shared their affinity for lightless environments, by virtue of being close evolutionary cousins.
Faces scrunched in concentration, Gep and Garry unlatched the backdoor's simple lock and crept inside. Unasked, Luigi circled to the front of the home, both hands on the haft of the hammer.
The rest settled into what concealment they could find and concentrated on staying still and listening hard. The air barely moved. A quiet night, yet silence pooled nowhere deeper and more profound than inside the walls of the little two-story house.
A king must make hard decisions, or else he is no king at all, Bowser reminded himself. A restless cold nausea trawled his guts and this too he accepted. A king took such things upon himself. What other way was there?
After what felt like both an endless hour and too short a time to finish the work with the diligence the situation demanded, Gep and Garry emerged and mouthed the signal for 'all clear.' They fastidiously scraped their footpads over the moss while Luigi appeared around the far corner, wiping his hammer with a child's overalls.
Koops had words for the reassembled party, spoken in the quiet, disappointed tone he reserved for reprimands. "This was sloppy, Koopas. Let's step lighter and crawl lower from here on in. Now, put your shells into it. We've got time to make up."
Further in the spacing between houses narrowed until one lopsided abode curled against another, and the neighborhood less and less mimicked the architecture and layout of civilized kingdoms. Weatherboard cottages and brick single-stories gave way to a crop of hovels and split levels installed inside hollowed out giant toadstools and mushrooms. Groves of fungus grew in place of trees, rippling ridges of fungal 'ears' climbed walls instead of vines, and great spore balls and various porous growths crowded the lanes like shrubs run feral. As the Koopas traveled deeper, the plant life with which they were familiar grew scarcer until it vanished entirely, while the fungus stems increased in height and girth, swollen bulbous caps reaching gigantic proportions. Some fungal life burned cold blue and green with luminescent light. Other fruiting bodies grew shaggy with whiskered growths. The wild gardens of the Toads graduated into a dense jungle of pale, shivering life.
A thousand, thousand spores danced moonlit on the stagnate air and made every indrawn breath an adventure. All smelt of wet decay and mildew and a strange, dirty spice that burned the nostrils the more one inhaled it. Bowser felt his sinuses crawl and soon they were all stifling sneezes and dabbing at dribbling snouts. A heavy damp freighted what little of the night breeze reached them. The soldiers scrunched necks down into shells, pulled up collars and retied scarves over nostrils.
Above the highest toadstool loomed inward-leaning canyon walls which shielded fungus and Toad alike from the cleansing rays of the sun. There were many such furrows gouged out of the landscape by Toad engineers. To walk into the queen's domain was to leave the surface behind and descend into a half-buried land of shade. Here was Toad Town proper. Like the cool patch of northern lawn a house might overshadow, where the grass grew thin and the gray caps and moss thrived in the dearth of sunlight, the Toads were a slimy and diseased race multiplying in the breaks and crevasses of a shattered geography just as mold thrived in the cracks between bathroom tiles. The Mushroom Empire was a poorly ventilated, unwashed shower stall kinda place. A dominion of scum festering under the planet's toenails.
Since it would hardly do to walk boldly down open streets lined with the packed rows of homes and businesses, the rescue party braved the suburban jungle near the canyon walls. They boosted each other over fences and hacked through the undergrowth. All the while, they stayed alert for any Toad unlucky enough to discover them. At least they now had plenty of cover. What few warp pipes they found were sealed, the lids warded with sensor spells.
Like any other jungle, wildlife stalked the dark places beneath the caps. Ululating howls rent the clammy jungle night. Occasionally the glowing undergrowth would thrash, hunter and prey squealing and growling, then all went still with no sighting of the creatures behind the commotion. Eerie croaking and lilting notes of wild song combined into an atonal symphony, the music of the shuddersome wildlife of the deep underground imported up to this once-alien habitat made suitable for them. Toadstool towers would yaw and sway suddenly, fibrous trunks groaning as they bent before the passing of some hulk marauding unseen mere meters distant the line of struggling kommandos. Eyes, in twos and threes and sixes, glowing with the deadlights of ghosts, watched from the black hollows between mottled trunks.
Kollins, one of Koops' lieutenants, recoiled from a nearby strand of ink caps with a yelp. Koops clamped a hand over his beak and hissed for quiet.
"Hell was it?"
"Something sickly yellow, and segmented. And long. It had more legs than you could count in one look."
"Wiggler," said Koops. "Leave 'em alone and they probably won't eat you. Keep your damn traps shut. This plan relies on discretion, remember? Besides, there's far worse living among these mushrooms than wigglers. We don't need their attention."
"Like what?" asked Kopernicus, a green recruit.
"Keep yapping and you might find out," growled Bowser. "Haul ass. We're behind schedule."
"We'll make up time once we get out of these damn residential zones," said Koops in the lowest register he could manage.
It took the better part of the night for this to happen. Hours of cutting and slogging through the Town Toad jungle, over how many miles there was no guessing, until change arrived like a slap to the snout.
With all the abruptness of glancing down mid-stride to discover a bottomless pit yawning where one was about to set one's foot, the canyon walls to either side ceased and left the sky open. The road ahead rolled downslope into miles-wide flatlands. Here the suburbs of Toad Town transitioned into the commercial zones of the Mushroom Empire capital city—a sullen, gray waste brooding under ten thousand cones of orange sodium vapor light. If land was formed from emotion rather than strata of stone and clay, then this place manifested the sinking feeling when one catches their lover scratching shell with another Koopa.
On the lip of this titanic bowl of earth the rescue party paused to survey the obstacles yet to come. In contrast to the wild crowding of Toad suburbs, the capital was a bleak grid of strip malls and factory outlet plazas and restaurant chains and warehouses farther than the eye could see or the nose could scent. The queen allowed her subjects to grow their homes at random, but at the seat of her power she brooked no inefficiency. A semicircle of drear hotels reared in the distance like a prehistoric shrine of monoliths erected by giants, the towers dark save for a few pale scales of backlit windows. The hotels hosted visiting merchants and diplomats from other kingdoms. Bowser had twice been a guest at one of those hotels. The capital was the only aspect of the Mushroom Empire foreigners were allowed to tour. If they wished to survive they obeyed the rules. A ways behind and beyond the hotels were the walled palace districts of the wealthy elite. Though he was a king, he had not been invited to enter that exclusive enclave.
Desolation stole into Bowser. The vista before them paved over his soul. Though not his first view of the capital, its effect upon him remained undiluted by revisits.
This had been a fair land, once. Clear, sweet streams, fertile plains, verdant forests where the trees and clouds smiled upon all who walked below. In those days the Toads kept to their grottoes deep underground and seldom harassed the vigilant republic of peoples who ruled this domain with wisdom and respect. All this changed with the coming of Queen Peach Toadstool.
The story of her origin had as many versions as there were tellers to spin the tale, but a small number of commonalities hinted at underlying truths. Despite the efforts of many scholars, of which only a few now survived, Peach's life story remained mysterious.
A popular version told of a debauched cabal of Toad wizards laboring for years in an unspeakable fungal nursery deep beneath their subterranean cities. There they made pacts with the darkest pantheon of Great Powers and worked increasingly intricate and loathsome transmutations upon a specially bred destroying angel mushroom, until at last it yielded from its delicate body the queen, fully formed and hungry to wreck destruction upon their hated enemies, the surface dwellers.
Less popular was the rendition where Peach arrived in the capital of the Old Kingdom, little more than a waif wrapped in the filthy tatters of a dress too soiled and sun bleached to guess its original color or styling. She spoke a language none had heard before, yet she mastered their tongue in a month. After two months the waif was revered as semi-divine for she could work miracles of healing and cause crops to thrive with her blessing. Not until her most devote acolyte betrayed her into the dungeon of a rival mage did the young woman start on the path of evil. Bowser gave more credit to this version of the story because he had personally witnessed the truth of alternate worlds beyond his own.
Whatever the secrets of Peach's beginnings, history recorded well what happened next. The young woman commanded fierce and subtle magic and thereby gained a following and wealth. From the springboard of a loyal cult, Peach launched into politics. Her platform was simple: the commoners were impoverished by the poor, and only the wealthy could save prosperity for everyone. With the aid of the rich, Peach undermined every service which benefited the common good. Soon the streets burned with riots and public institutions toppled to the cheers of ignorant partisans. By the time the Toads rose up en masse to exploit the chaos and begin the genocide proper, the new queen had destroyed the few upper class holdouts who refused utter loyalty to her regime. Her eldritch might strengthened during these few years. On the final day, of the last battle of the civil war, Peach cast a spell powered by the blood sacrifice of half a million war dead. The magic sundered the land in deep, long running canyons and heaved over its hills. The opposing armies perished in the tumult, and the Toads found the surface changed more to their liking. Darkness fell over the land.
Bowser spoke in a quiet rumble. "Take a long, hard look over this shithole, Koopas. Especially if it's your first time." Breath fogged as it jetted from his nostrils. Outside the jungle the night was cool. "I want each of you to remember what it is you're fighting for. Not just for a warm home and family. You fight to stop her from inflicting this," he swept an arm across the urban sprawl before them, "on the rest of the world. On our homeland. With Mario's powers at her command, this crawling filth will spread to every inch of the globe."
The kommandos muttered grim resolutions to each other and gazed upon the capital with glassy eyes.
"Say what you want," said Iggy. "At least there's not much grass you have to mow. Low pollen count down there too, which is nice." He bit into a spotted pear, smacking his lips, oblivious to the general disgust aimed in his direction. "I always thought, if Mario's powers are so easily exploited, then perhaps we should simply kill—"
"Silence, worm."
Iggy snapped his jaws shut, cheeks dimpling with pleasure.
Luigi seemed not to hear the exchange between father and son. As usual, he kept his own counsel. Eyes glittering like pieces of jet at the bottom of a cold river, his focus stayed locked on the immensity of metal and stone crouched against the horizon, the main keep and surrounding towers of Castle Peach. The lair of the queen seemed to hungrily swallow the light of stars and moon and lamp.
"Break time's over. Let's go."
They descended in a serpentine line, keeping the road on their right, close enough to watch for traffic, far enough for the darkness and scree to hide them. The slope was stony and steep. What few trees grew in the cursed soil were twisted runts. A few rugged trucks crunched up and down the road, but no Toad stopped for a look around. The long, painful, dirty march down was mercifully uneventful, until they reached the city wall.
Peach might see fit to leave her borders temptingly open, but like any other autocrat she demanded total security for her own backyard.
A heavy shutter of steel behind a latticework portcullis sealed off the arched tunnel that ran beneath the fortifications. The city wall rose five stories, riddled with windows and narrow slots for weapons fire. Guards paced the battlements at the wall's top in platoons of fifteen. Sentinels lounged about and sometimes even kept watch for a minute or two at nearly every cluster of windows, on every floor. It would take some serious hardware, wielded by at least two thousand determined troopas, and a hearty payload of explosives to force their way through into the city.
Luckily, they had a magikoopa.
Seeing the time to contribute had arrived, Karry stepped forward, wand in fist, a blue scarf concealing a bald head. Strange lights sparkled in the lenses of his spectacles as he assessed the enemy's defenses. After a moment, he took a shivering breath and rolled up the sleeve on his wand arm. The red jewel on the wand tip danced with the same strange lights circling in his glasses, which were not yet bottle-bottom-thick. Karry still had a lot of reading ahead of him.
"All right, I know what to do."
Iggy stepped in the way. "Hey, wait a sec. I know a nifty way to get through this without—"
Bowser backhanded his son. Iggy reeled back, glasses askew, blood trickling from one nostril. The Koopaling let out a shuddering gasp. Bowser stabbed a finger towards the back of the group, facial expression communicating his desire for Iggy to stay the hell out of the way. Iggy shuffled to the rear, smiling.
Karry cleared his throat. "Right then." Up twirled the wand. A nearby section of wall vanished, the cement and mortared bricks collapsing into golden-shelled Koopas and feral Goombas.
"Follow me." In single file they walked through the neat and narrow rectangular hallway his spells conjured from solid barriers. A sizzling tang of magik permeated the air as scales raised their tips off the skin. Shapes spilled from the wand, written in beautiful, awful colors whose names danced into the mind of all who saw them, only to vanish a second later.
Bowser glanced behind to see the konjure Koopas waddle back into the gaps and return to their true forms of stone and plaster and pipe. No mess, everything put back in its place, Karry left no trace that an invading party had come this way.
Leaving behind no evidence also meant no witnesses. About halfway through the wall, Karry's sorcerous tunneling opened into a restroom stall. A Toad sat on the toilet, reading the Mushroom Post. He startled, eyes widening, toilet bowl filling rapidly as a column of Koopas marched into his personal space. Karry hauled up the wand and transformed the porcelain throne into a trio of ravenous spiny turtles.
Three more times they surprised Toad sentries. Each time the konjured Goombas and Koopas fell upon the Toads and smothered their screams, doing their grim work silently with beak and claw. Finished, they dragged the remains back to the holes and reverted to form, the blocks stained yellow with Toad blood, the bodies sealed out of sight within the walls.
In the final encounter, one Toad was quicker than the rest and took off at high speed down a narrow hallway. Karry was quicker. The wand jewel flashed and the guard slammed to the floor, a solid cube of mortared bricks. A curiosity for his fungus-in-arms to discover later, but much less noteworthy than a corpse.
At last they emerged on the other side. The wall towered silent behind them, no alarm raised. Before them, the capital. What had been a vast sprawl when looking down from on high had narrowed to a glum street, poorly lit, lined with the same repeating half-dozen or so franchise storefronts occupying most of the lots.
Karry chugged water, breathing heavily. Iggy favored him with a prim nod. Bowser slapped the magikoopa on the shell and gave him a big grin. Off they crept, keeping to the deeper shadows, mindful of anyone that might be watching from the wall. The concrete wastes of the capital enveloped them.
Hiding became harder. Vast empty lots and wide streets bereft of traffic accompanied many city blocks. These long, flat stretches of pavement required great caution to navigate in stealth. The rescuers scurried from shadow to shadow, finding what pathetic sanctuary they could in doorways and alleys, behind dumpsters, and under the snaking arches of overpasses.
Sometimes there was no avoiding these huge, exposed spaces. Going a longer way around would waste time they didn't have. Sunrise was a scant two hours away and it was a surefire death sentence if daylight traffic caught them out on the streets. In the absence of all cover there was nothing to do about it but run.
For Bowser, the worst parts of this mission were these dashes over open ground, blood pounding in his ear holes, his tender sides stitching up. He imagined what he'd do if a blinding spotlight swept them up in its blazing circumference. Would he freeze up, dive to the ground, or what? He'd rather face an enemy he could see than be exposed and cornered by invisible enemies hiding behind their lights and walls. Raised voices and shouting and fire. A direct confrontation, yeah, that'd be the ticket. The panic of others he could deal with. He fed on it. To chase and catch and crush the soft lumps of Toad heads between his jaws—ah, that would be a fine treat after all the damnable suspense. Keeping quiet and small sawed against his nerves. Bowser yearned to throw his weight around and make some noise.
They were not alone in the darkness. While few civilian Toads walked the streets after hours, the ones lurking through the back alleys and the unlit spaces were a whole different breed. Street gangs and worse, miscreants of a miscreant race, who dared defy Peach's curfew. They tittered from behind dumpsters and watched from storm drains, weapons catching the cold glare of parking lot lights. Bowser had no doubt they'd pick the corpses of his men clean if they got half a second's chance.
Several blocks into downtown, leering goons crowded the alleyway ahead of the Koopas, while another four cut off escape from behind. Hammers and bats wrapped in barbed wire, zip guns and hand bombs improvised with little skill in basement workshops from the scraps of bullet bills and bob-oms.
Their leader swaggered forward, chains dangling from one fist, a razor glittering in the other. "Always heard Koopas were stupid, but damn. What'd you think you were gonna find here, soup meat? This ain't your neighborhood."
Bowser breathed heavily. It wasn't from aerobic exertion. "Buddy, you might not believe this, but I'm grateful for you. From the bottom of my stomach, thank you." He stepped forward and belched, hard. Where the gang captain had stood, a dust devil of hot ash and cinders whirled. Bowser was on the next closest thug before it'd finished flinching back from the heat. He crushed the squirming thing to his chest and gaped wide his jaws. Around him, the hard slap of Koopa boots as his squad moved up to claim their own kills.
Not one of the hoodlums fired a shot or detonated a grenade. Not one escaped, though a few managed to make some noise before they went. The wet work quickly done, Bowser and Koops ordered the kommandos to continue on at a leisurely pace. Though they were desperate to run, it was vital they not show weakness to the rest of the lowlife spectating from the darkness. In the garbage reefs of another alley three blocks away, they held position for ten hideous minutes, hunkered down, listening for sounds of pursuit. For all the feral fungi's seedy ferocity, none emerged from their hiding spots to challenge the invaders again. No sirens blared in the night, no watchtoad patrols swept down the streets.
The night nearly over, driven half mad by suspense, the Koopas' winding trek at last brought them before the high fences of the Castle Peach grounds.
This close to the castle they didn't dare make casual use of Karry's magik, for fear it would be detected. One of the engineer kommandos worked his own brand of magic on the tri-layer fence with a pair of klippers, sheering through just enough links to pry up a tongue of fence wide enough for someone to crawl beneath. When the squad had passed under, the engineer tied the links closed with translucent fishing line. Bowser and his troopas turtle shuffled over an immaculate lawn, invaders then of not only the domain but of the residence of the queen.