21st Century Yoshi presents
THE LIBERATED PASTPart Six: Bolt From The… Greens?
By Sk8er Grl
DISCLAIMER: Sorry mates, but I don't own all these wonderful and beautiful copyrighted things. Guess you'll have to find a non-sucking-up plagiarist to sue.
Did you notice that nobody reads these author notes? Oh well.
Well everyone, I guess that last chapter surprised you some! I mean, ME having Luigi kick the bucket in my own story? Naw, it couldn't be. Or could it…?
Also, a guest appearance by a certain cute dinosaur and from a well-known mail carrier. And Bowser pours his little heart out.
Started: 28/10/02
*
Bowser growled and grumbled to himself as he stumped up the dark stone passage.
It was too dark; he knew the dungeons fairly well, but he was looking for something. Bowser held the torch he had taken from Herman. He huffed a small flame and set alight. He held the torch up to the cold wall and regarded it briefly.
Not here. It was further along.
Bowser walked on until he reached a seemingly unremarkable blank wall. He held the torch up and bathed it in flickering orange light. He smiled to himself and reached out, pressing hard against the wall. It made a grinding noise and bits of mortar fell away, then it swung open slowly, revealing another dark passage.
Bowser walked through the doorway and closed the door behind him. It immediately blended in with the rest of the wall, as if it had never been there.
Bowser hurried down the hidden passage and walked into a large, empty room.
Empty, but for a gigantic winch with a humungous chain wound partway around it. And a large group of Whomps, Thwomps, and Chomps.
"Alright you lot!" yelled Bowser. "We're weighing anchor! Get moving!" he snarled.
The giant chain was stretched from the winch to a hold in the floor. Now the Whomps, Thwomps and Chomps positioned themselves along its length. The Whomps gripped it with their round hands, the Chomps dragged hold with their teeth and the Thwomps had smaller chains fastened around them and around the enormous Island Chain.
The head Thwomp shouted a command and as one the group of inorganic creatures began to pull. The Thwomps leaned back and heaved. The Chomps gritted their teeth and tugged, almost invisible in the darkness except for the highlights of light that glinted off their spherical black bodies. The Thwomps levitated into the air and strained against their chains.
Far below, in a small patch of forest, the ground began to quake. It was centred about a massive chain dug deep into the ground. The grass bulged. Brown gashed snaked their way out from the chain. There was a creaking and old trees leaned over. Then with a twisting and a snapping and a groaning the ground suddenly exploded. Chunks of earth, grass, bushes, and trees flew into the air. Animal fled. Birds flew away. It rained pieces of forest for a few seconds.
And the gargantuan anchor rose slowly into the air. It cast a huge shadow over the destruction, glinting in the sun as it spun gently.
"Alright, the anchor's up!" roared Bowser. "Get on that winch!"
The enslaved creatures lined up at the winch. The handle had been extended to fit all of them along its length. The Thwomps were chained in, the Chomps closed their teeth around it and the Whomps grabbed hold.
Slowly they began to turn the winch. All of them were forced to stretch to the height of their reach in order to make the handle go all the way around. For a while there was no sound except grunts of effort from the slaves and groans from the colossal chain and winch.
After the anchor had been raised, the winch was locked and the slaves were allowed a rest. Bowser clapped his hands twice.
"DUE NORTH! GO!!!"
At this the entire island spun around in the air until the castle was facing north, then slowly at first, it flew off in a straight line.
Bowser hurried away, back up the secret passage, through the dungeons and all the way upstairs until he was at the highest point of the castle. The wind blew through his orange mane as he leaned on the parapet. Way up ahead, he could see something large, winged and red. The dragon. As he had guessed, it was heading north.
Bowser smiled grimly. "You can run all you like, friend. You'll just have to learn that there isn't really anywhere you can go…"
~
It was dark. It was cold. Above all, it was silent. There were no rats, not even the sound of water dripping.
In the Dark Dungeon, you could be dead and not even know.
Herman huddled against the cold steel plating covering the bars. He shuddered, from both cold and fear. It wasn't so much the dark energy that frightened him. You didn't really notice it. No, in the Dark Dungeon there were… other things.
Herman moved deeper into the shadows.
Hiding in shadows was mainly habit, because there was nobody to see him in the dungeon. Or was there…?
Being in the shadows also gave him the advantage of being able to see everything else better. There were things he didn't really want to see, but he would rather keep an eye on them than let them get behind him…
Herman's eyes widened in fright as a pale, ghostly white light began to suffuse the dungeon. Here came one…
From the centre of the light appeared a translucent spectre. It was the shape of a girl, no more than sixteen, with blank, empty eye sockets. She was followed by an old woman, a man in strange robes, a group of women ranging from around fifteen to fifty, some of them holding babies, and a man with a ghostly rope around his neck.
The dungeon was filled with a rush of sighs and whispers as the spirits floated around the cell and murmured amongst themselves.
The first ghost narrowed her empty eye sockets at Herman. "You, again?"
Herman whimpered, and shivered. The dungeon's temperature had gone down a few degrees with the appearance of the spectres.
"It was bad enough our last resting place was disturbed, but we cannot even haunt the building that destroyed it because it is strewn all over the place!" she said, in shout that was at the same time, no louder than a whisper.
"What do you want from me? I never did anything wrong!" cried Herman.
"Neither did any of us. We were innocent of the crimes we were killed for. We all died for no reason. Do you know how that feels?"
Herman screamed once, and passed out.
~
The dragon reached the altitude it had been searching for, and went into a shallow dive. It could fly like this for ages without having to flap once. In spite of being scared out of her wits, Peach was impressed by the dragon's grace in the air.
The wind whipped her hair out into a golden fan across the dragon's chest. She held her crown on with one hand, and with the other she gripped the dragon's foreleg for dear life.
The dragon itself was not sure where it was going. Something was reaching out across space and time, pulling it northwards. He didn't know it, but the spot he was focusing on was the northern border of the Mushroom Kingdom.
At the end of the dragon's tail, Mario was also hanging on with all his might. But he was too preoccupied to be frightened, which was lucky because hanging onto the tail of a confused, fire-breathing dragon flying at 100km/h at an altitude of one thousand feet was possibly the most dangerous and terrifying situation he had ever been in.
But Mario never even gave it a thought. With tears in his eyes he yelled at the world in general.
"I'm sorry Luigi!" he cried. "I never meant any of those things I said!" He paused as the event played itself over in his mind for the thousandth time. "If I hadn't made you mad you never would have been in the house in the first place!"
The dragon's sensitive ears picked up sounds coming from right behind him. It could also feel a weight on his tail that was causing a fair amount of drag. It couldn't turn its head to look because in the middle of flight that could cause him not only to turn around but also, lose all aerodynamics and fall straight out of the sky. At this speed it would probably already be dead though, from breaking it's neck.
Instead the dragon slowed down and shook its tail hard.
"AAH!" said Mario as he was whipped through the air. His grip was loosened and he plummeted toward the ground.
The dragon felt the weight be released and began to ascend.
Mario, however, kept descending. The dragon had been at somewhat less that a thousand feet at the time but he still had a long way to fall.
"WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUH!" he yelled.
Mario landed in a tall tree, and bounced off the branches and tumbled into a bush. They broke his fall, more or less. He lay there and groaned for a moment, but it was a very uncomfortable moment so he climbed out laboriously. Scratched and bruised, but still alive, Mario stood up and looked around.
He was all the way across the other side of the kingdom. Ahead of him lay a large plain, and beyond that, the northern border. High above him the dragon flew onwards.
Then, another shadow passed over Mario. He looked up to see the bottom half of a flying island, with a gigantic anchor sticking out of the bottom. On top of it he could just see a large, black castle.
"Oh, no," he said. "It's Bowser!"
Mario began to run, ignoring the pain that was causing him to limp. He ran faster than he ever had, following the path of the dragon and Bowser's flying island.
~
Back in Toad Town, Toad was about to set out to the castle and see what all the destruction had been caused by, when he heard a knock on his brand new door. As he ran to answer it, the knocking came again. It sounded urgent.
He opened the door. "Oh, hello—"
"No time for greetings Toad, this is an emergency. I need all three of the Power Caps."
"Oh, right, I'll get them…" He took the Invisible Cap, the Metal Cap and the Wing Cap from the safety of the locked chest they were kept in.
"What's the emergency?"
"The Princess has been kidnapped."
"Well, wait, I'm coming—" but it was too late.
At the post office, Parakarry was the only one in. He was out the back when he heard a frantic binging from the little bell thing on the front desk.
"I'm coming, I'm coming… Wow, what happened to you, —"
"Quick, Parakarry, I need this letter sent."
Parakarry realised that this was an urgent situation, and didn't argue or waste time.
"Yoshi's Island? I'll have to go through the warp pipe. It won't take a minute."
He jumped into a green pipe behind the counter, and emerged a few minutes later, followed by a familiar green dinosaur.
"Whit-whitu!" (I got the message, what's the emergency?)
"Thanks Parakarry. Come with me, Yoshi, I'll explain on the way."
~
Peach shivered as the dragon reached the northern border. It was much colder here, and darker. And scarier.
There was nothing but bare ground for kilometres around. Even the grass was scarce. But against the barren landscape loomed a dark, forbidding shape.
It was a deserted, tumbledown old castle. It looked like it had once been large and impressive, but now it looked like a sinister old ruin. Most of the towers had crumbled and fallen down. There were holes in the wall and roof where massive black stones were missing, and some of the stones were scattered around it. But it was well built and still stood quite firmly.
The dragon swooped down towards it and deposited Peach in the most sturdy of the still-standing towers. From there she could see down into the main room of the castle because nearly the whole roof was gone. The dragon flew into the hole and landed on the overgrown flagstones that had once been the floor. The whole castle shook as it did so, and Peach was afraid her tower would collapse.
The dragon stood and roared defiance at the world, then settled down to wait. What for, the Princess had no idea.
She found out soon enough. As she took a look around her room, full of furniture and fixtures that had been destroyed or rotted from exposure to the weather through the hole in the wall, she glanced up at the sky and saw a large silhouette blotting out the sun.
As she watched, the thing floated towards the castle ruin and stopped, hovering, right above it.
Peach gasped as she realised what it was. "Bowser's flying island!"
Below her, the dragon awoke and looked up. It growled, and flew out through the hole in the ceiling to meet the island.
With a sudden roar, King Bowser himself leapt from the edge of the island and grabbed the dragon's neck. It bellowed furiously and sprayed the sky with fire. Still Bowser clung fast, and the dragon flew back down into the castle. Peach was bowled over in its wake and steadied herself against the wall.
Down in the main room, the dragon landed and slammed its neck against the floor. The castle shook and Bowser was dislodged. He scrambled to his feet and faced down the dragon, panting.
"You can't win," he said. "You can't escape me. You need me! Without me, you are just a big, lost, misfit, killing machine! But together you and I could do anything… we have the power to take whatever we want, and nobody could stop us!"
The dragon roared in reply, and breathed flames. Bowser dodged them.
"You defy me? I raised you! I taught you everything you know! I own you!"
The dragon growled a reply.
"You own yourself? Well, for someone that owns themselves, a princess and an old ruined castle isn't much to show for it!"
The dragon growled again.
"It's more than I have? Is that a challenge?"
The dragon roared.
"Yes, I will fight you!" replied Bowser. He drew breath and countered the dragon's flame with one of his own.
Although the dragon was much more powerful, it was used to using a lazy flame because there was nothing that ever required a more concentrate one. However, Bowser knew all this and he concentrated his fire into a powerful blaze of such intensity that it cancelled both of them out.
The dragon narrowed its eyes and began to draw breath for a more powerful flame. But Bowser took the opportunity to spray a weaker gust of fire into the vulnerable area of the dragon's face.
It screamed and reared in anger more than pain, because its scales were tough and heat-resistant. Then it spurted a line of regular flame at Bowser with such suddenness that he didn't have quite enough time to get into his shell, and he growled in pain as his face was singed. He fell over and hid in his spiny shell.
The dragon roared triumphantly and spread its wings. Then it took off through the hole and flew around the castle proudly.
Peach gasped and crept down the old stairs. She sneaked to the entrance into the room where Bowser lay and peeked in.
He never stirred. Peach listened carefully; the dragon had landed outside the castle and was standing guard. She hurried into the middle of the room and crouched timidly at Bowser's shell.
He slowly extended his head, arms, legs and tail. Peach quailed at the sight that met her.
The left half of Bowser's head was black, and most of his mane was burned off. His shell was scorched also. His left eye was closed.
"Are you alright?" asked Peach, when he made no further movement.
"Yeah, yeah," he muttered.
"But your face—it's black!"
Bowser reached up a claw and scraped at the blackness. "Just soot. Dragons aren't the only things with scales you know."
"Your eye—"
"The soot in it hurts something chronic, but otherwise it's fine! Why are you even bothering about me? I'm the bad one, remember?!"
"Well, excuse me for caring!" said Peach in a huff. "Since you are hurt, I wasn't going to tell you how horrible you have been to that poor dragon, but if you want—"
"Alright, alright, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be rude and I'm sorry about the dragon. This whole mess was for you, y'know."
"What do you mean?" said Peach. "You sent this dragon to terrorize my kingdom and kidnap me, so you could impress me by defeating it?"
"No," growled Bowser. "I wanted to use this dragon to get rid of Mario!"
"What? Kill Mario? You horrible creature, why in all the world would you do that?"
"Because that miserable little plumber had everything that I want!" he snarled.
Peach stepped back involuntarily. "What does he have that you could want do much that you would resort to killing him?"
"Family. Friends. You."
Peach flushed. "Me? I don't know what you mean—"
"Oh come off it, Princess," said Bowser despondently. "I've seen what you're like about him. And he's crazy over you. Like me."
Peach's eyes widened in realization. She kneeled down again and took Bowser's head in her arms. "You poor, misunderstood creature. Is that what this has been about? All these years, all these kidnappings, and I never had a clue. Why didn't you say something?"
"Why? What good would it have done? Beautiful princesses aren't interested in freaks like me."
"Just because I'm not about to marry you does not mean I would never consider being friends." The Princess looked at him sadly. "All this "I'm so evil and scary" business never did you any good. But just because you made some mistakes—"
Suddenly a roar from outside interrupted them, and then the castle doors swung open slowly.
Mario fell into the room, dragged himself up, and shut them behind himself. There was a crash as the dragon landed on the roof and some of it collapsed. Huge stones crashed to the ground.
"A TRICK!" cried Bowser, leaping to his feet. He rounded on Peach. "You were just distracting me, weren't you? You never meant a word you said!"
"No, Bowser, I was telling the truth!"
Bowser placed his hand around her neck. "You were keeping me occupied until Mario got here!"
Peach screamed. Mario ran to her and freed her from Bowser's grip. Bowser roared and turned to attack Mario, but then the dragon leapt through the roof and landed heavily.
In the moment's distraction, Mario dove behind Bowser and grabbed his tail. He yanked hard and tripped him up. Then he began to swing Bowser around. Bowser snarled and struggled, but Mario swung him faster and faster. Then suddenly, he let go, just as the dragon lunged. Bowser flew into the air and smacked into the dragon.
They both fell and landed heavily. "Come on Peach, let's go!" Mario cried, taking her hand, but Bowser and the dragon had gotten to their feet. They barred the way to the door.
"Not so fast!" yelled Bowser.
Without warning, the doors swung violently open. They crashed against the walls and one of them pinned the dragon's tail. It roared in pain and distracted Bowser.
A tall figure stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the light that came pouring in.
Mario's eyes widened in shock.
TO BE CONTINUED…
Finished: 30/10/02
Who is the figure in the doorway? What is Herman's species? Where did the ghosts come from? What will Bowser do now that he has confessed all his secrets to Peach? What will Peach do now that she knows them?
If you want to know the answers to these questions, I want at least one review that comments on the Mario and Luigi fight scene in chapter five, as well as on the events of this chapter.
Bye guys!