Phew! I'm finally able to finish this chapter, enjoy!

Chapter 16: Seven Turns Nine Turns Zero

The melted wax from the lava lamp Lahla had broken and burnt her hand on had gradually melted, as it oozed its way slowly to a nearby stereo on the same table, and as the time went by with Lahla's successful intervene, the stereo was sizzling and letting out sparks of malfunctioning.

"They're next, I knew it. Someone whom I was talking to earlier had told me that the two of them were on the ride." Goombella pulled out a photograph she took of Goombario at the line of the ride. She saw the two of them in the side behind him, talking to a ride attendant. The head of one of the brothers was blocked by Goombario's hat, but the most conspicuous clue in the photograph was what was above them. Placed above them, placed on an upper edge for the making of a Circular Roller Coaster was a scaffold, with a poster of a woman model displayed upon it. Goombella blinked.

"Are you looking at your pictures again for the clues?" asked Lahla. "If Ernest and his brother are next, then I'm scared; I don't want anyone else to die."

"Thomas Fan, and Wendy Koopa had died already after Poochy," said Goombella, looking up at the shocked face of Lahla. "But we can't do anything."

"They're…dead?" she asked. But Goombella just stood up.

"Stay here Lahla. I need to go and find them, if it's possible."

"No, let me come---"

"There will be chaos going on, and stuff much worse. The only way for you to not freak is out is to just stay here, and I'll be back as quickly as I can." Lahla simply nodded her head, as Goombella hurried off with a pile of photos in her hand.

The noise was extremely louder than the first time she had entered. Goombella looked around at the people around her, trying to find her way through to the front stage. She stumbled into a large Koopa Troopa wearing a mix of clothing.

"Outta my way!" he bellowed, juggling a trio of boning knives. She fell to the ground, as a knife flew into the air from a sudden flip of his wrist. But he caught it without any hesitation, and Goombella hurried to her feet through the dancing crowd.

She was next to the front of the stage, but could not see any of two brothers at all anywhere. That was, until smoke suddenly rose from the ground, covering the entire stage until a row of people rose up from below. Out from underneath from below the floor were the two next victims.

"Ernest! Ernest!" she cried. But she wasn't heard over the thundering noise, and it seemed as if they were ignoring her. The noise erupted even more when a jazz guitarist suddenly appeared from behind the curtains, playing at full sound.

"Ernest! Over here!" she shouted. She looked around to discover a way to get one of the brothers' attentions, and picked up a magazine on the floor besides her and threw it onto the stage at them. One of the brothers, who turned out to be Ernest as Goombella had thought, was startled and fell back at the flying object, then looked at the crowd frantically to see who had just done such a strange and bizarre act.

A show girl stepping down from the spiraling stairs above them had gotten her shoe heel stuck under the wooden steps, and was attempting her best to escape. She fell through suddenly with a sudden shriek as a huge section of the stair case suddenly collapsed, and Dernest had no chance but to look up at the falling debris of wood and metal about to clang into him.

The intense noise suddenly collapsed as the section of the stairs crushed Dernest from above, stabbing him in many numerous places and crushing him splat against the floor, spraying blood among the many people, including his horrified brother close by. A ripple went through the crowd and erupted in horror as well, as Goombella found herself in a crowd of rushing people running for their own safety, as the performers on stage had immediately jumped away from the scene. Screams erupted in a second.

But the show girl was still dangling from high above on what was still left of the stairs. As Ernest, in horrified shock, slowly stepped towards his dead brother in front of him, he was taken aback to see the lady fall from above, and as Goombella let out a muffled scream, her high heels tore through Ernest's neck before she collapsed unconscious on top of him. His detached head rolled across the stag and fell among the still-left audience, who yelled simultaneously and ran away in the speed of light. The only things left on stage were three bodies, two of them insensible.

Immediately as Goombella turned around, still getting the horrid thoughts out of her mind, police entered from the opposite side of the room. People who still hadn't realized the catastrophe which had recently occurred were still enjoying the "party", but she saw someone at one side of the room who was running his fastest away from what she assumed was the authorities.

"Drew!" she yelled, running towards him. But he still wouldn't stop running, as he climbed onto a table full of equipment and food and ran across it, causing many objects to fall away at the huge mess. He finally got stopped as he tripped on the table cloth and fell forwards on his face onto the floor. Goombella suddenly remembered that he had done the exact same thing on his picture.

In his picture, his shirt had tugged down a tablecloth for the children's birthday party as he turned around, just as Goombella had flashed a picture. There were balloons in his picture, and a couple of kids sitting around, but the sudden turn of the red tablecloth had made a peculiar illusion effect: fire?

Drew slowly got up from the ground, rubbing his scratched face. He was standing in front of the table which Lahla had been staying on, and where she had destroyed the lava lamp.

The stereo on the table was already at the peak of malfunctioning, letting out a large zap and releasing smoke into the air. Finally, the lips of the radio opened up, and not long after did two discs shoot out at the speed of light, threatening to kill Drew. He ducked to the ground at the last second, as the discs immediately flew over him and high into the air.

The wires holding up a rather large piñata of a skull in the air were suddenly snapped off by the soaring discs, which made the heavy piñata to drop down onto the edge of confetti cannon used for the finale part of the Masquerade Show, which would never happen nor occur. But the cannon was pushed down, and instead of aiming to the ceiling, it was aiming right at the poor helpless prey on the ground, and the trigger was activated.

Before the fiery cannon was about to shoot and kill another, Goombella had already reached him before Death. She ran to him as fast as she could bring herself, grabbed his jacket and pulled him away, just as the stream of confetti was shot out at over one-hundred miles per hour, blowing away the table full of items and food like a piece of paper. As they both looked back, they saw smoke, and a large, busted cannon, along with part of the exterior floor destroyed and burnt to crisp. Drew looked at the effects, then at Goombella.

"You saved my life…again," he said, giving her a hug of appreciation. Goombella was surprised, but was all settled to see that she had saved her companion, whom had helped her greatly in the past week.

He was the one who knew what they were going into, and the one who had assisted her greatest, while Death made his fastest way down the list, and as more killings had passed, and as more secrets and succeeding moments were found, their friendship grew. And although Lahla would still always her best friend, she couldn't help feeling that Drew, too, was a better one to her.

From the time of the pitiful death of the taxi driver and the fiery intervene of Drew, six bodies, all traumatized in different, unimaginable ways, and were shipped off in an emergency helicopter to the Mushroom Kingdom. One other, a person with a snapped neck and a cracked face, and who had a remarkable sense of knowledge and an enormous obsession for water, was left behind when a musician had mistaken the coffin for a bass guitar case.

As the helicopter hovered its way across the Las Vegas Strip, a coffin fell out after a piece of the metal wall detached, containing the body of a very stubborn and spoiled victim who had almost found the good side of herself before her death, who had two large holes in her head, as if two sharp objects had punctured it. It landed on the thatched roof of a motel with the lightest and most softest POOMPH!

Not very soon after did another coffin suddenly fall out. It contained the body of a person who had poor grammar, as the reason was that he was raised young on the roads of Moo Moo Farm. As he suddenly won the lottery, he had enough money to finally attend to school, and this had too resulted in his video game obsession and his obsession with the electronic game "Conquer and Divide, and soon years later, he was accurately divided while in his favorite room: An arcade. The coffin crashed into the pavement floor of the private parking lot of the New York New York Hotel, but soon after, was picked up by a garbage truck and thrown with rotten bananas and rodents.

As it crossed the rocky plains of the Grand Canyon, the helicopter shifted to its side to avoid a large boulder, moving a coffin to its side and across the baggage carrier compartment. The coffin contained a body with a detached head, with the body's prized possession, a collared chain first-place prize of an Annual Punk-Off lying right besides it.

It was a leather collar sewn with the designs of sixes, with chain dangling below resembling the thin and metal designs of a raindrop, a thunderbolt, the sun, a crescent moon, and below all, a circle shaped bead with a crystal embedded to the center of it. No wonder it was easy enough to be trapped under an escalator. The coffin finally collapsed out when another coffin pushed it to the side, as the coffin plunged down to the rocky depths hundreds of feet below, breaking into numerous pieces.

While crossing high above the whimsical trees of a giant forest, a tree branch caught from below the baggage carrier compartment and punctured the bolts and screw, releasing a section of the floor away. Immediately, a coffin fell out as well, containing the body of a smart and intelligent person which had his brain literally burned out of his mind, and who had gone mentally retarded at the last few seconds before his demise. It vanished in the trees.

Another coffin fell too from where the previous one had fallen out. It contained the brittle, and nearly turned to ashes body of a hip cheerleader girl who used to previously be the girlfriend of a mass killer psychopath, and who had happened to never be aware of her surroundings, especially the day when the radio she was listening to had tumbled into her Jacuzzi. But none mattered as the body disappeared into the forest, shattering at the bottom as it made impact with the forest ground.

Before landing as it nearly approached four hours before midnight, the last and finally coffin had happened to fall through the back when its tail boom propeller was pushed back, cutting slowly an exit just big enough for it to slide through. The helicopter tilted backwards for momentum, and the coffin plunged down and out, but this time into the splashing waves of Gelato Beach. This was the body of an intelligent person who had a rotten attitude, and who had a life with no purpose. Unfortunately, he inhaled a bit too much from his briar pipe on the day of his death.

SPLASH!

The helicopter landed safely at the Mushroom Kingdom Airport, and as the confused and bewildered pilot found no coffins on board but just the evidence of numerous holes and openings, he assumed somebody had taken them out, for he believed he happened to fall asleep the minute he had landed in his helicopter, while the coroner had no other way to retrieve the coffins but to tear through with a large machine. So he signed their death certificates, gave them to the coroner he assumed had taken the bodies already, and as the slightly confused medical examiner looked at the pieces of papers one by one, the pilot went home satisfied.

Thank you for reading, I will update...momentarily. Weiver Esaelp guys!