Chapter IV
I felt like kissing Sara. She just nonchalantly solved the riddle we broke our heads over for weeks. But it was probably better not to, with Finn around. I got enough shit from him without giving him a reason to.
He probably wouldn't have noticed it. Finn was walking around the studio rambling about the discovery and what our next move should be. I wasn't sure if he was talking to us or himself.
"I know you usually beat me when we played it, but maybe we can play together. Double our chances. Or the three of us. But then we still need to solve that last line. And..."
"OK, OK, Finn. Snap out of it," I said. "We must keep our heads cool and figure it out step by step. Let's just go there and check it out."
Finn and Sara agreed and I teleported our party to my Thunderbird 4, still in Satoshi's orbit. From there it was a pretty short flight to our destination: Super Mario World.
"Here we go!" a still overenthusiastic Finn yelled.
Even though the world was named after one single SNES game from the Super Mario franchise, the planet itself was home to every game from the very elaborated universe surrounding the Italian plumber.
I brought up a screen with various spawning options on the planet and chose "Grand Prix". Finn and I visited this place many times before. And we were not alone. Mario Kart was one of the most popular Nintendo titles in the OASIS.
When our avatars appeared on the planet, we didn't just land, but were shot out of a green tube into a familiar Super Mario landscape.
"Wear your stupid hats," Sara said. "To find the one you must face."
"Good idea," I said, equipping it right away from my inventory screen.
Finn rolled his eyes at my eagerness.
I pulled the goggles down to see which Pokémon inhabited Super Mario World.
"Some Foongus and a Squirtle," I told Finn, knowing he wondered the same thing.
My brother chuckled.
Our party made its way to a console where players could select the settings of their Mario Kart match. I think the three of us were all a bit overwhelmed by the many options we could choose from. We had to decide on the go-kart we wanted to drive in, whether we wanted to compete against other players or NPC's, on which tracks and the version of the game.
The Mario Kart franchise was even older than Pokémon and contained dozens of race tracks by now. The most famous of them were the classic circuits that already appeared in the very first game, back in 1992. One of them was called the Rainbow Road.
To win a gold medal on that circuit, players had to compete in the Special Cup. Often this was the final and most difficult grand prix. It consisted of four circuits. Rainbow Road was the grand finale.
A lot of players considered this track the most difficult of all. It was set on a rainbow in outer space, with a lot of twists and turns. When you missed a sharp turn or got off road because of another reason, you'd fall into the abyss and lose valuable seconds. One slip could do enough damage to ruin all your chances at winning the Special Cup.
"Should we do a test drive?" I proposed.
"Nah, let's dive in right away. Trial and error!" Finn said.
"Which one?" Sara asked.
"How do you mean? The Special Cup," Finn answered.
"Yeah, which one? There are at least twenty of them."
The default option were the tracks as they appeared in the last Mario Kart released, specifically tailored for the OASIS since Nintendo long stopped manufacturing their own consoles. But a hunch popped up. It wouldn't be the last time this hunch would come out of the depths of my mind, it's this hunch that probably makes my story worth telling.
"Wait, let me look up something," I told my companions.
With a few hand gestures a tab opened on my user interface, containing a list of all released Mario Kart games.
"I think you have to scroll all the way down," I said to Sara. "Let's try the Mario Kart 64 version. Released in 1996, the same year as Pokémon."
"Nice!" Finn reacted, still high on adrenaline. "Let me look something up real quick too."
For a minute or two his avatar stood idle while my brother browsed a tab.
"Sweet!" he said upon return. "This is going to be easy. Rainbow Road still had little fences back then, you can't fall off."
That definitely was good news. I didn't play the game for ages and even when I did play it, I was never particularly good at it. For example, the game had a drifting mechanism you really needed to master in order to win against other human beings. I never did.
We joined Sara at the terminal to fiddle with the other settings. We selected the fastest version of the game, 150cc. We had no idea if that would be a requirement for solving the riddle, but we were starting to feel confident anyway.
Only two human players could compete at the same time in grand prix mode, just like in the original game. We decided it had to be Finn and me, because Sara didn't own a Silph Scope. The item was earned as a quest reward on Satoshi and was bound at pickup, not allowing people to trade it. Sara would watch us in spectator mode and we enabled a direct audio connection between the three of us during the races.
I picked Toad, Finn chose Bowser.
"Really?" Sara said accusingly. "You can literally play this game as brothers, but you pick a mushroom and a dinosaur?"
"I don't think he's a dinosau..." I replied, but her facial expression made me realize that wasn't the point.
Sara pressed a button. We jumped on the edge of a green tube and looked down the rabbit hole. A very pixelated D.K.'s Jungle Parkway was waiting for us at the bottom.
We pulled down the goggles of our Silph Scopes and jumped into the tube. After a few feet we noticed the OASIS had transformed us into the 2D sprites of our chosen drivers. We stepped inside the go-karts waiting for us at the start of the course, while a 16 bit tune was playing.
There were eight drivers in total. We started out in the last two spots. The game would randomly generate a NPC that would be the one to beat, in the first race we would find out which one it would be this time.
A turtle came hovering above us on a cloud, holding a traffic light. The race was about to start. When the light went from red to orange, I instinctively throttled and I noticed Finn did the same. A little trick that - with the right timing - could give an extra boost. When the light jumped to green, it appeared to work.
We had a great start. The game had overruled the effect the Silph Scope normally had on my vision. The goggles were two long cylinders, messing up hand-eye coordination in a way that became annoying when you were going fast. Like taking part in a race.
The NPC's were getting behind. But the biggest difference between Mario Kart and other race games was that you could pick up power-ups. Items that gave you an advantage, like shrinking all your opponents for a short moment. The further you were behind, the more powerful items you got.
At the end of the second lap Finn already got hit by a couple of red turtles. Target seeking missiles that stop their victims for a few seconds. A bit of an annoyance, but not enough to lose our lead. Most power-ups the NPC's picked up were used against other NPC's.
I crossed the finish line first after the third and final lap, followed directly by Finn who blocked a couple of those red turtles for me. The first NPC to arrive was Wario, making it clear he would be the one to beat today.
We went on to the second track, called Yoshi Valley. Now I was in pole position. The traffic light reappeared. I started accelerating when the light jumped to orange, just like I did on the previous circuit. But somehow I was too hasty and stepped on the pedal a nanosecond too early. I didn't get a boosted start, but instead my engine blew up, grounding my kart for a moment. Immediately I was last in the race.
Yoshi Valley was more of a challenge than the first race. There were mountain passes we could actually fall from, while we also had to avoid giant rolling eggs. I soon found myself struggling to get back ahead.
Being behind meant I got the better power ups, although not all of them were game changers. Luckily I did pick up a yellow star that made me quick and indestructible for a while. This was the help I needed. I quickly caught up with Finn and Wario, while knocking over every obstacle and NPC I hit along the way.
"Finally, there you are," Finn laughed when he noticed me approaching.
Still the sharp turns on the narrow mountain passes were a pain. That there were multiple routes to choose from confused the hell out of me. Halfway the third lap I started losing ground again, all of a sudden I was fifth.
Another power-up. This time I got not just one, but three red turtles. Shooting off the NPC's ahead of me, I got back just in time to finish second.
"You son of a bitch!" Finn yelled over the comms.
"What?"
"You shot me!"
I did not finish behind Finn like I thought I did, but Wario took first place in this race. In the overall ranking I was still number one, but my lead got a bit smaller.
"Sorry! Not on purpose, I swear!"
"Idiota," a female voice mumbled.
The third track was a tricky task as well. The Banshee Boardwalk was another chaotic test for our reflexes. Bats were flying around my ears while I tried to make sharp turns in the ruins of an old castle. I managed to avoid falling off the boardwalk into the sea, but the NPC's seemed to get a very unfair amount of powerful items they all directed at Finn and me.
Over the comms I heard the same Spanish swearing that the referee in Bueonos Aires had to undergo yesterday. Someone else didn't agree with the distribution of power-ups either.
In the final lap Finn managed to get ahead and take the win this time, but I was lucky to finish third behind Wario. Which led to the situation in which the three of us collected the same number of points going into the final circuit. Rainbow Road. Whoever would win there, would win the cup.
