Chapter 17: Chasing Solutions

A knife zoomed across the air, right towards the torso of Goombella. She immediately jumped back and away as she turned to look at the person who had done such a thing: Ludwig was standing on the chair two tables down, his eyes bloodshot and his breath rapidly flowing from his flaming mouth. He stepped down to the ground.

Drew could sense the danger approaching, and he stood in front of Goombella. "He tried to kill me earlier," said Drew in his lowest voice towards Goombella. "He's going crazy." Goombella just stared into the eyes of Ludwig, as if she were stuck into a deathly trance.

"What did you do to Wendy?" Ludwig growled ferociously, his voice echoing through the empty area. "My father will be very pissed off at you guys when he learns the news that she's dead! Murdered by a bunch of losers!"

"But we didn't murder her! You did yourself!" Goombella nearly yelled back. She would have that of rewording her sentence, but at a time of being next on Death's list with a psychopath targeting her as well, she couldn't think at all.

"Look out!" shouted Drew, as Ludwig picked up another boning knife from the table besides him. Goombella ran for her fastest as the knife flew into the air like a football, barely missing her by a few inches, and as Drew leaped up at Ludwig, she headed directly to the stairs to the upper floor immediately.

"Stop it---Ludwig!" Drew shouted, struggling to hold his arms together. The knife in Ludwig's hand shone in diverse directions as they struggled, until Drew managed to throw Ludwig against the table behind them.

"Get away you killer!" Ludwig roared, as his knife was knocked out of his hands. "You deserve to die too!"

"Calm down…Ludwig, enough! Stop…Ludwig! Listen, stop right now---" With one mighty push, Drew was knocked backwards to the ground, hitting his head against the destroyed, brittle stereo, as it broke into pieces. Ludwig immediately ran after Goombella.

Drew got up, dazed. Frantically, he was lucky to see Goombella's handbag right besides him. "The pictures!" he realized. Without hesitation he ripped open her backpack, and saw a stack of photographs placed in the second pocket. He flipped through them, looking through all the other photographs one by one. Lahla's picture; he had no idea where she was. Ludwig and Wendy's picture; he saw the hook railing under the movie poster behind Wendy's head, and the House of Wax poster next to Ludwig. He found his own picture, and saw what looked like a large shoot of fire coming from the tablecloth. "If Goombella saved me from looking at my picture," he thought, "Then it's my turn to do the same." He flipped over the final picture.

She was still on the line to ride, with a line of the landscape and buildings barely visible behind her. She looked startled and was stepping back as if she didn't know someone's was going to take her picture. Then there was the obvious clue. A long, blurry horizontal crack in the photograph was crossing Goombella's torso.

"Where do I go now?" Goombella said to herself in panic, running up another set of stairs. She found a small room with two elevators on the sides, and pressed the button. The light appeared, but flashed off before she could regain her breath, but continued down the hall to another flight of stairs. She let out a pitched shriek as she bumped into Ludwig right away, and Goombella fell backwards onto the carpet, as Ludwig fell back against the stair railings. Goombella backed a few steps away.

"You slaughterer! You'll pay right now, this second!" Ludwig threatened in a loud boom as he regained his steps quickly. Goombella ran back to another staircase leading up behind her, as Ludwig followed in his most sincere anger. He was running out of breath.

Goombella panted her way up the long flight of spiraling stairs until she reached the upper-floor balcony. She looked over the entire, gigantic area, and saw nearly nobody visible, but only the remains of smoke flowing from the confetti cannon and the debris and smashed wood on the front stage, plus the three bodies still visible on the stage, She saw far back away that there were still some people, either cleaning or having no idea what had occurred on the other side of the area and playing and gambling at ease. She quickly darted across the long hall, but a boning knife flew across the air and jabbed into the stair rail right in front of Goombella. She shrieked and climbed the set of stairs behind her.

Nearly out of breath and as weak as a feather, she reached the top step, and then took a relieving five second break. What's with Ludwig? she asked herself in panic, "Has he gone mad?" At the sound of rapid footsteps and a threatening yell below, she darted down the red hall to her right.

She reached the end of the hall, but it wasn't the end as she thought, but had another longer, lengthy hallway to the left of her. As she was about to run down the long hallway on the right, she couldn't help but make notice of the large statue figure of an overlarged woman's face placed and stuck against the wall, which had numerous pointy spikes sticking out from its mouth and color-changing crystal eyes. Its height and length were three times as large as Goombella, but she immediately went the other direction of the eerie figure, but first, ducking under a metal chain

There were two stake posts on the sides of the face, and all the way on the other, dead end side of the hall was another one stake post. The three stake posts held a metal chain, stretching over sixty feet, around them, and as the two stakes next to the large face figure had the chain wrapped around them, the lone stake at the other end of the hall had the metal chain barely attached to it by a piece of scotch tape, which was tearing and soon to let go. The chain formation was shaped in a triangular form.

Goombella ran down the hall, but soon realized that at the end of the hall was emptiness except for single wood stake supporting the chain all around Goombella. She heard footsteps coming from the other hall which she had entered by, fast and paced footsteps. She was trapped with no place to go.

"Stop Ludwig! Stop doing this!" she beseeched helplessly, stepping away. The footsteps only increased.

"Please don't kill me!" she cried. She knew that Ludwig was just about to turn the corner and spot her.

With nowhere else to hide, she immediately ran her fastest further down the hall to the dead end, but stopped suddenly and stumbled back in alarm. The chain was disconnected from the stake post at the end of the hall, and exactly like a sling shot, the chain zoomed like a deathly blur across the long hallway. The sound of a whipping, metal swoosh was heard for only a second, coming rapidly nearer at Goombella, for she stood where she was in fright. The rapid, running footsteps she had heard earlier whom she thought was Ludwig had immediately appeared behind her.

"I got you!" Drew yelled, diving forwards with his arms wrapping around Goombella. The chain zoomed right over them as Drew pulled both of them to the ground, saving Goombella from her awful fate,

But Ludwig had appeared at the last second all the way at the end of the hall, behind the two of them. As he saw Drew running towards Goombella bringing her down to the floor, he had no time to hesitate but to step a few feet backwards in sudden panic. Although the chain had not ended up hitting him because he went behind the two stakes on both sides of him, he was pushed back enough into the large figure of the woman's head. Her crystal eyes had suddenly turned into a crimson red color.

They just stayed to the ground, as Goombella and Drew didn't even bother to lift their heads from the carpeted floor when they heard the disappearing and dying shout of Ludwig Van Koopa. The pointing spikes emitting from the mouth of the large woman's face had been driven through him, and Drew had the reluctant urge to turn around and see three long, skinny metal spikes sticking out of Ludwig's stomach, oozing with blood. Ludwig had the confused, blank stare across his face as his body slumped forwards, dead. He looked back away.

"Goombella?" Drew started, getting up from the ground slowly, "I think we can get a way to cheat Death."

"Where's Ludwig?" she asked suddenly, getting up from the ground. She turned around before Drew could warn her, and her she covered her mouth in shock.

"Just like in his picture," stuttered Goombella, turning away to look at the other, blank side of the hall instead of the bloody exit. "That woman's face on the wall looked just like the face on the House of Wax Poster, right besides Ludwig…"

Drew took the crystal out from his pocket. "Remember we were discussing about Yoshi as we were reading the articles about all the deaths before us? This crystal has 'Yoshi was the closest' marked on it like we saw earlier. I suddenly remembered he was a past victim in Princess Peach's situation. He died when he fell in his cooking pond in his restaurant when it malfunctioned. He got burned to death in water."

"Water…" realized and repeated Goombella, "That has something to do with this right? This crystal needed water to perform this certain effect for this message to appear. Yoshi was the closest to cheating Death, but how?"

"He was supposed to originally be dead by drowning in water in the first place," explained Drew. "Koops the psychopath had killed him by drowning, and Peach brought him back alive along with her other friends to---"

Goombella interrupted him and stood up suddenly from the ground. "Are you saying that when Peach revived her dead friends by using the machine of E. Gadd, Death was after them because of that? Because they weren't supposed to be alive?"

"Err, that's what Jill had told us in her report we read on the computer," said Drew. He continued as he saw no reply from Goombella.

"And plus, she had met Peach physically herself and learned all about it." Goombella thought it over in her mind, and rolled the information of Peach's situation with Death's Design. Something about it, which she could feel directly from her body, did not make sense at all.

"That can't be," Goombella said suddenly, her thoughts suddenly getting together. "Death doesn't go after you after you're revived. You start a new life. That whole thing Peach was talking about…Peach was lying!"

"What?" asked Drew in a tone of full confusion.

Before he could debate on what exactly Goombella had said out loud to him, they both saw something emerging from the other side of the hall, only a few feet away from them. The blank, wooden wall was melting slightly into a gooey substance which both Drew and Goombella had even seen before, and they backed up away in fright. The wall started to glow into an ominous shade, and they saw a figure, shrouded in a black cloak with all around him foaming gas spread, step out from the solid structure and float down onto the ground in a menacing fashion.

"You…you got to be kidding me," stuttered Drew. Goombella grabbed his hand in fear, and they both stood as still as statues as the figure flew floated slowly towards them. The gas gradually and conspicuously began to disappear, and the two of them stood face to face to the hooded and dark, murky Death.


As you can see, the end is kind of near and is approaching as quick as Lahla's death. With all this work and stuff, my updating will be much less often, but to those who are new and just read this, I hope you like the story! Oh, I'm trying to break a review record so please…!

P.S. I'm planning another story, but I'm not sure if I should make it into a Mario theme. It's about people playing a game to get into college, with a twist of killing. I'm thinking of possibly a Neopets theme, despite I rarely play on that site these days? Thank you for reading this chapter.