Well, here we are again, with another chapter of our tale!
Luigi: I hope we don't hafta go through another bug forest!
Don't worry, you don't.
Luigi: Are you sure?
Yes.
Luigi: Are you sure?
Yes.
Luigi: Are you sure sure?
YES! Here we go already! Sheesh! No one trusts you anymore..kids these days..
The Journey To Restore Our Waterfall! Chapter 5: Mystery, Magic And Trolls!
When last we left our heroes, they'd just escaped Bewaretheinsects! Forest, and saw a village on the horizon. Now they've reached it. What will they find there?
The Smashers were exhausted from their antics in the bug forest, and were glad to reach some form of civilization, even if it was only a village.
"Easy for you to say..bet there's not even a restaurant.."
Well, Yoshi, we can't always have what we want, can we?
"I guess.."
Zelda patted Yoshi's back. "Besides, it looks cozy enough, anyway."
"Easy for you to say.."
Zelda groaned and withdrew her hand.
As soon they set foot past the "Welcome" sign, a fat man with a white mustache sprang out at them.
"WELCOME to Su Amaryl Village! I am the Mayor! It's SO good to see TRAVELERS stopping by!" He took a look at their startled faces, chuckled, and said "Boy, there sure are a LOT of you! I can't even find the parents! Let's see, how many kids? Ten? Twelve? Pets, too? A dino, a bird and fox with clothes that walk.. Wow..some kind of rodents..whoa, a HUGE Grandpa! Looking kind of dry and scaly, eh? You should try using lotion sometime! And toys for the young'ns, too, eh? Two pink balloons with silly faces drawn on them! Adorable! And you drag the family doctor everywhere, too! Lucky you, you never hafta worry if the kids get sick! Ooh, an action figure made of ink, eh? I gotta feel this.."
He reached out to touch Mr. Game&Watch.
"EHT! I am NOT a toy!"
Mario stepped forward. "Sir, I'm afraid you are mistaken. We are not a family. We're on a Journey to Restore our Waterfall! (TM)"
The Mayor looked befuddled for a minute, then said, "Oh, you're that group from that hit video game series! I remember now! Don't worry, no need for introductions, I know all your names. I also know of your heroic talents, each and every one of you!"
Suddenly, he got a look as if he'd just remembered something. "Speaking of which, our village could just about use your help at this time. Come, I'll tell you about it and show you around. You see, our village has always been fine, food-wise. Garden crops and baked goods and the like. Until just recently, anyway. Trolls have been sneaking in here at night, and stealing our food! Can you BELIEVE those rascals? Our food! Why? We need you to help us, Smashers! We need you to figure out why they're stealing!"
"Sure, we'll help!" said Luigi. "Right, guys?"
"Yeah!"
An hour later found the Smashers to be enjoying themselves throughout the village.
"So, what kind of funky name have ya got here, anyway?" Jigglypuff asked the village elder, who was wise about such things.
"My dear, it is the last name of an ancient magic carpet merchant who settled here centuries ago when it was just a camp with two or three folks. He sold all of them carpets, and other people saw them using the carpets, and all flocked here to buy them. Soon there were so many they set up an entire village, and named it after the merchant, who still traveled, but always came back once a year, until he passed away."
"Cool!" said Jigglypuff.
"But that's not all," continued the elder, "Everyone liked the magic carpets so much, they begged Maginn Su Amaryl to teach them how to make them, and that is why the village's specialty is still magic carpets."
Kirby and the Ice Climbers dashed around the village frantically, in pursuit of- "CORN DOGS!"
Yee-es, corn dogs. They searched high, they searched low, they searched to, they searched fro. They searched in barrels, they searched in stores, they searched in- hey, get back here! Of all places to look for corn dogs..
"But we gotta find some!" wailed Kirby. Suddenly, a fast movement caught the corner of his eye. He turned around and found the Ice Climbers struggling to contain something that was also..struggling.
"Kirby, look, we caught an ugly bunny!" said Nana excitedly, holding it out. It was plenty ugly, but not quite a bunny. Instead of fur, it had mucus-colored sandpaper-like skin, and long, floppy ears coated with coarse, short, hair, and big feet and hands with grotesquely long, pointed greenish nails, one of them broken, caked on the underside with dirt. It was a troll!
"Guys, that's not a bunny! That's a troll!" said Kirby, "Come on, let's bring it to the others!"
"Wow, I can't believe you three caught a troll!" exclaimed Young Link, gaping at the struggling creature. Kirby and the Ice Climbers smiled smugly.
"Astounding, you guys." said Dr. Mario, "Now we must get the facts from this thing about stealing the food, remember?" He yanked the troll away and sat it in front of him. "Now, then," he said, "Explain to us nice Smashers why you have been stealing food from this village."
The troll shifted uneasily, its huge, sunken eyes darting side to side, then suddenly burst out in a raspy, wailing voice, "It's our colony! We's goin' 'ungry out there! All 'o our food's disappear'n!"
"And what exactly is it that you eat?" asked the doctor.
"Well, it's a special type o' rock, ya see. It's all, shiny-like, but it ain't like a jewel. Plus also it's all brown, whiles most rocks is just gray. Anyways, they usually grow right in our lil' village, but now they're gone! They're gone!" And it burst into tears.
Dr. Mario looked thoughtful, then said "Well, this sounds most mysterious. We will have to look into it."
Samus looked at the sky. "But it's almost dark, so tomorrow we'll help you guys out, and for now we'll get some get some dinner and go to bed." she said.
Marth yawned. "Sounds good to me." he said, "Hey, troll. Go get all of your colony and we'll make you all a nice pot of stone soup or something. But you'll have to have ordinary gray stones, until we can unravel this mystery."
Way later, after everyone was in bed at the village inn, Captain Falcon was having trouble sleeping. "Ah just ceean't do it!" he said as he strolled through the dark, silent roads of the sleeping village, "Ah hafta haive mah teddy barr named Mr. Tufty, and ah forgot 'im at home, so now ah won't sleep without 'im! It's TOO dark 'n' scary without him!" He was near a bridge at the edge of the village. As he got closer he found that, on the rocky ground not too far beneath the bridge, he could see the troll village. As the trolls seemed to be no bigger than two feet, it appeared quite miniature, almost like a toy set. Then he noticed something moving.
Captain Falcon looked closer, and saw it was a shadowed figure carrying something and sneaking leftways of the troll village. Now, on the left end, there was a bit grassy ledge above the village, before it merged into a HUGE,wall-of-dirt thingy. It was entirely vertical, with no other ledges or crevices, almost entirely smooth. The shadowed figure put whatever it was holding up onto the grass first, then climbed up. Unfortunately, Captain Falcon, watching with great interest, sneezed right as it picked up its item. When he looked again, it was gone! "Ah cain't..berlieve..ait's.." But then he fell asleep before he could finish, lying right there by the bridge.
The next morning, the rest of the Smashers found him still sleeping there. Pichu giggled and said "Why's he sleeping out here with the bugs and stuff?"
Suddenly, the Captain sprang up from his sleep. "Mah-ah!- Oh..it's mornin'.." As soon as he saw the others, his eyes widened and he started gibbering, "Gais, gais, laist naht-i-it was-ah know ah saw it-ah-"
Roy gestured impatiently. "Whatever, Captain, but it is now the time for ingesting our morning meal. Come along, before the food ratio dwindles down to nothing."
Suddenly, a woman holding a rolled-up maroon carpet came stomping by, talking angrily to herself. "I knew it, I knew this would happen again! My beautiful carpet, RIPPED! A BIG, UGLY, HOLE! Ugh! Ugh! Why me? WHY?" Suddenly, she stopped in front of the Smashers and thrust the rolled-up carpet in their faces. "LOOK AT THAT! JUST LOOK AT THAT HOLE! IN MY NEWLY-MADE MAGIC CARPET! WHO WOULD DO THIS? WHO?"
"Er, that is too bad, miss," said Pikachu, "When did it happen?"
"Last night! It was fine last night, and now this morning, I wake up, and this UGLY HOLE is here! Just like the other day!"
Pikachu looked curiously at her. "Do you mean this has happened before?"
The woman glared at him. "Yes, of course it has, you big fat yellow mouse! The other day, I said! Exactly like it happened today!"
Suddenly Captain Falcon remembered something. "Hey, that remahnds meh! Gais, last naht ah saw 'n odd shadow movin' in the troll village! An' it was holdin' somethin'! Somethin' big! It started clahmbin' that cliffsahde over thar but thin ah snayzed and win ah looked agayn it was gone! Plumb dissy-peared!"
Mario rolled his eyes. "All right, we'll check it out, but can we PLEASE eat first?"
After breakfast, the Smashers trooped down to the troll village to see if they could find some clues. But they couldn't seem to find anything suspicious, inside the troll's houses or out.
"Well," said Peach, "I don't know what happened here, because we can't seem to find any clues as to where those rocks could've gone!"
However, Roy's sharp brain was beginning to detect bits and pieces of suspicious things that no one else seemed to notice.
"Everyone, over here!" he called. He was standing in front of the cliffside around where the Captain had showed them he'd been the night before. "See this? You cannot see the top, but it is merely just the side of a very high cliff. And the Captain says he saw someone who was holding something big "disappear" here last night, right? Well, what if the rocks are disappearing because someone is hiding them way up on the cliff?"
Mario raised an eyebrow skeptically. "And how would they get up there?" he asked.
"The magical carpets!" Roy stated. "They use those to get up there! That's what the shadow was carrying! And that's why that woman's magical carpets are frequently torn! Because they keep using them to hide the rocks!"
Eager to see if Roy was right, the Smashers went to the village and borrowed a magical carpet each. "How do you work this thing?" Bowser asked.
Jigglypuff raised her paw. "The elder showed me how! First, unroll it, then kneel on it and hold the edges, and say Up, carpet!"
The other Smashers did as she said, and their carpets rose straight up in the air and kept on rising up and up, until after about fifteen minutes, they reached the cliff top.
Zelda gasped. "Well, would you look at that!" she exclaimed.
On the cliff, there was pile after pile of brown rocks that looked just as the troll described, shiny, yet the unusual color of brown. "It appears as if you were right about this mystery, Roy." stated Mewtwo.
"But we're not done yet," said Popo, "We still hafta figure out who did all this!"
So they gathered up all the rocks and lowered their carpets to the ground. Roy, still thinking about what Popo said, glanced at his carpet. It was one of the ripped ones. Suddenly he noticed there was something stuck in one of the loose threads hanging from the rip. Curious, he pulled it out, and discovered it was a hunk of green, filthy fingernail.
"So you see," Roy explained to the residents of Su Amaryl, "The trolls pretended to be going hungry so they could steal your food!"
The townspeople were abuzz at this news.
"But why?" someone called out to the caged trolls at Roy's feet.
"Cuz we were sick o' them lame ol' rocks an' wanted some'in NEW for a change!" called out the leader troll, the one with the broken nail.
The Mayor stepped forward and addressed the troll. "Well, that can be arranged! You needn't have stolen from us! And Smashers, how can we thank you for helping us?"
"WITH CORN DOGS!" cried Kirby.
The Mayor chuckled. "Very well, Kirby, you shall receive corn dogs! And also, I would like to give you all of you who can't already fly a magical carpet of your own!"
So the Smashers left Su Amaryl with magic carpets, a solved mystery, and of course- "CORN DOGS!"
Ah, but their journey is far from over! Next time, the Smashers must cross one of the most famous landmarks of The Magical Realm Of The Toaster, The Fairy Kingdom! But then the spoiled Fairy Queen wants to marry Marth! Will the Fairy Kingdom have a new king?! Tune in next chapter and find out!
