Chapter Four: Life Itself

What did Luigi keeping his dead-end job have to do with him attempting to become a successful writer? Basically: He had gotten very good at the job, so there was low stress to learn more, and as there was no way to move up, there was also no responsibility to seriously sweat over the work. He did not have to take his job home with him, either. And he had figured out the mechanics of the job so well that he could sneak in writing time during certain "gap" periods in-between tasks.

This meant maximized brain space to focus on the writing of stories, and working with art in general. Some days Luigi could keep headphones on and listen to music for the full eight hours of the work day. Doing this, he had managed to get through several "all time great" music album lists, as well as several podcasts of interest. Everything he listened to, he tried to justify as helping in his story work. For the music, for instance, he reminded himself of a theory about rhythmic sound being the closest thing to truth, according to some such philosopher, and the emotional energy it provided could inspire ideas. This wasn't wrong (if you believed it), but being frank, he could often lose himself to music for hours, and not really build anything of constructive value in his head.

During official break times at work, he would tend to read. Luigi, still reading too much for his somewhat young age*, had found a book called—

[*Counterpoint: One can never read too much. The more you read, the more knowledge you have at your disposal. Knowledge is power. Read as much as you like. Reading builds empathy. Reading increases emotional intelligence.

*Countercounterpoint: Knowing too much leads to unhappiness. Youth should be spent mostly out playing in sunlit fields and dancing with women. Unused knowledge is useless knowledge. Books cannot really teach you about the world, direct experience is much better. Novels and fiction only confuse people as to true reality.

*Countercountercounterpoint: Fuck you.

*Countercountercountercounterpoint: No, fuck you.]

Breathe. Breathe—

Okay.

(Lean back now, lean back and breathe!)

Okay.

Early in the year, Luigi had found a book titled "The Ninety-Nine Most Influential Books of All Time". The book contained a list compiled by a literary critic, containing his choices of the 99 most influential books in history. This included religious texts, works of philosophy, and several novels.

"Right," Toadette nodded, "And one title was what?— 'Abaddon's Search for Miracles'? And you'd never heard of it before? Okay."

Toadette was wielding a pink baseball bat. She was out on a field, practicing swings on baseballs shot out from a pitching machine. Luigi sat on the bleachers.

"I'd heard of most of the books," Luigi stared at the pitching machine, waiting for the next ball to spring, "Obvious stuff like Bibles, Plato, Homer, Shakespeare. More 'modern' people like Freud, Einstein. And then one of the choices for most influential books of all time… was something called 'Abaddon's Search for Miracles'. I'd never heard of it, and the title was absurd too. What kind of book could that be? So I started looking into it."

The pitching machine shot a ball. Toadette swung. Crack! The bat connected, and the ball went flying. It arced high. Luigi clapped.

Toadette watched the ball land. "Right," She continued, "And then you found out this was a book written by a cult. And your literary critic claimed it had a hidden influence on the last hundred years of history. Like politicians, artists, and writers everywhere from the 1920s onward were secretly connected with this group, this 'Path of the Three Forces'."

"Yes…"

"Okay." Toadette got into stance for the next ball. "So then what?"

"I got a copy of the book, 'Abaddon's Search for Miracles', and some of it's pretty interesting. The writer calls himself Abaddon. It's a nickname… He lived about a hundred years ago, and was the most famous student of the guy who started the group, who he only refers to as 'H'. H appeared mysteriously in the 1910s teaching a system of philosophy he claimed he had discovered from a secret society. An unheard-of system of how the universe works, and how a person can become a 'new kind of being'."

"H aside, you'd have to wonder who would want to call themselves Abaddon."

"Mm." Luigi scratched at the side of his head. "It's rather foreboding, isn't it. I still don't know why the author calls himself that. He doesn't seem like an evil guy. In his writing."

"Heh." Toadette chuckled. "People don't usually want to portray themselves as evil."

"But then why did he give himself the name of a demon?"

"I dunno! I'm not researching these nuts."

The baseball flew out. Swing. Crack!

"It's funny, the more I read their ideas, the less I think they're nuts. Some of the ideas are kinda useful."

"Oh boy," Toadette turned to face Luigi, arm resting on the top of the bat, "You're drinking the kool-aid, huh? Cults really get to people fast."

Luigi grinned. "It's delicious. And much better than drinking Flavor Aid."

"Hey," Toadette pointed her bat at him, "That's sick."

"Anyway, I feel more and more like I'm joking when I refer to this group as a cult." Luigi grimaced. "As far as I can tell, they don't actually worship anything."

He debated telling the next part of the story— That he had done some searching, and discovered that the group associated with this book, descended from Abaddon and his teacher H's ideas, still existed. One hundred years later, there were Path of the Three Forces groups operating in every major city in the Mushroom Kingdom as well as several other countries. They still existed, doing… Whatever they did.

And Luigi had decided to give the faction operating in Yoshi City a phone call.

"Why don't you give this a try?" Toadette woke him back to the present. She was waving the bat around. Now that Luigi looked closer, he realized the pink was pink for Peach— pink with a little crown symbol on it.

Buckets, bats. Everything was branded these days. The world was obsessed with individuals. Celebrities, queens, presidents. Focal points to worship and blame for all the world's problems.

But who was Luigi to be cynical about this? He had been a minor deity for some time. Then he fell out of the world. Now he was aiming to become a major deity. And putting aside tired questions of free will, weren't these fundamentally his own efforts moving him forward?

"C'mon, just try swinging," Toadette insisted.

"Only if there's a green bat," Luigi replied, immediately regretting it.

Of course there was a green bat with an 'L' on it. In the storage shed, next to cluttered bins of red M bats, pink P bats, and green spotted egg bats, there was a dusty bin with two or three fully-green L bats at the bottom. Luigi reached in with his long right arm and pulled out a stick like it was some long-lost artifact.

While he held it, his stomach felt wobbly. It took him a moment to realize the feeling was embarrassment. He didn't even wear green clothes anymore, let alone a hat with his damn initial on it.

He came back out onto the field wearing a red-spotted "Toad" helmet. Toadette laughed.

"Hey. I'm not going to get hit in the head for this." Luigi loosely swung the green bat around. "Cripes, it's been a long time since I've done this. Hey, you know I used to play when I was little? And I'd get hit in the head all the time."

Toadette laughed again.

"Yeah, yeah." Luigi took up position on the plate. "Just kids pitching. Same with soccer too, seemed impossible— a ball would get kicked halfway across the field and squarely find the back of my head."

"That's how you know you were chosen. That's how you knew you were going to be special one day."

"Ha ha. Back then I certainly would have preferred Mario's special." Luigi eyed the pitching machine. "Just plain good at anything he picked up. Sports. Making friends. Romance. Battles."

"Battles?" Toadette raised an eyebrow. "When you were kids?"

"Yeah. Well."

A ball shot out. Luigi swung—

Miss!

Just a little over 9999 more hours, and I'll be an expert, He thought stupidly.

"What do you mean by 'battles'?" Now Toadette was sitting on the bleachers where Luigi had been. "I get the sense you're not talking about 'Cops and Robbers'."

"Mm. You only moved to Yoshi City a few months ago. You've lived in mainland Mushroom Kingdom your whole life, right?" Luigi tried to concentrate on the pitching machine and the conversation at the same time. "Twenty years back, this place… Yoshi's Island… was pretty dangerous. We had come out of an even worse time, fifty years back, when different human and yoshi tribes were fighting for control of the land. Real warfare. Battles, hundreds dead on both sides— whichever sides there were in all the confusion. There were booby traps in the jungles, too. God, I think they still find traps sometimes. Really unpleasant stuff." He was starting to sweat a little.

A ball shot out. He swung. Missed again.

"As to be expected," He chuckled to himself. He had forgotten all about the embarrassment with the bat's color, and now had more of a tense tightness in his belly. "Anyway. My family lived in a pretty nice village, all things considered. We were far away from the last of the skirmishes… Hell, smaller than skirmishes— we were far away from the incidents that happened. That stuff was on the other side of the island. But my parents were always scared of more fighting. They themselves had been in… hell, they met each other in… one of the armies that fought in the wars. They were scared of the fighting coming back, so they raised Mario and me a little bit like… a little bit like we were soldiers."

A sharp pain flashed for a moment in Luigi's liver area. It began to fade away before he could try to understand it.

"Soldiers? Yikes." Toadette spoke more softly now. "Explains why you were so good at saving Peach."

"Yes."

A ball shot out. Luigi swung. The ball connected with the edge of the bat, tumbled, and landed near third base.

Progress.