Yoshi felt a splotch of pleasant warmth seep through most of his lower body, and his eyes turned from the blank screen to look at what was causing it. The surprise immediately turned to disgust as he looked down at Duck Hunt Dog, right leg hoisted up and splashing a yellow stream of urine against his body and his tongue. Yoshi tasted salt and gagged; the unwelcome warmth of the urine became even more unwelcome cold as the droplets ran down his leg.

Just as Yoshi started to wonder whether his day could get any worse, Duck Hunt Duck perched herself atop his nose, lifted up her tail feathers, and –

Plop plop!

Yoshi's right eye twitched.

All he had wanted was some blueberry pie. Just a simple breakfast of his favorite food to get the day started and satisfy his morning hunger. Afterwards, he would wake up Ness, who, not being a morning person, would groggily try to back throw him out of his room. Once Ness finally threw in the towel, he would accompany him down to the Dining Room for a second round of breakfast, and – well, who knew where the day would go from there: An argument about the faster mode of transport, or a session of brainstorming and belly-aching laughter as they invented jokes to torment their fellow Smashers with. Some crazy, unnecessary adventure would follow, and, to cap it all off, a trip to the ice cream store for their daily dose of dairy goodness.

Instead, here he was, stuck to a pole, freezing to death with poison circulating in his system, a splash of yellow and a splotch of white marring his legs and nose, the intoxicating fumes of which were almost a secondary source of poison in themselves.

Not a good start to the day.

Yoshi watched the retreating forms of the Duck Hunt Duo as they split the last slice of pie between themselves, and his belly tortured him with another gurgle of impatience. The waves of acid were cascading down upon the walls of the organ, demanding food, food, food, burning his stomach and starting an internal fire that spread wildly to his intestines and his kidneys and his liver, so that it felt as though his entire inner body was ablaze with hunger.

Forget the hunger, dammit – you're freakin' poisoned! If you don't get that antidote soon, you're going to die!

Yoshi's vision suddenly turn woozy – the scenery became blurred, the backs of the Duck Hunt Duo wobbled and briefly multiplied, and when he closed his eyes to blink, he was tempted to keep them closed.

He shook his head and brutally shot his eyes open again. The worst part was that he wasn't sure whether the wooziness came from the hunger or the poison – he had suffered far adverse effects from the former before, including falling into a coma for eight days because he didn't have anything to eat for a mere four hours. To add to the uncertainty, the fatality of the poison was debatable in itself – after all, when was the last time anyone had died in Event Matches? Or Smash Bros., for that matter? The cartoony physics that dictated the workings of the universe meant that no injury was ever gruesome or even the slightest bit bloody – and if –

Wait… Cartoony!

If Yoshi's left hand wasn't currently gripped around the handle of the saw, he would have nosepalmed. Cartoony! Of course – hadn't that what this whole plot had been so far? The random music that suddenly played in the background when he woke up, or the way he floated over to the pie through the pure act of simply sniffing, or how he had managed to turn himself into a tornado in an effort to untangle his tongue from the pole – all were antics very specifically native to the world of the zany-to-the-max –

"There's baloney in our slacks!" Ness randomly sang, opening his window before disappearing back into his room and immediately closing it again.

– and if such medium was what this fanfiction took inspiration from, then surely – surely – whatever mutilation he inflicted upon his tongue would be temporary and relatively harmless. It had to be! He could see it already – he would scream, briefly, from the pain. Then he would tie the severed ends together, or perhaps stick them back with a stick of superglue he would cartoonishly pull from his secondary stomach. The shot would briefly transition to Samus and follow her narrative for a while. Then it'd switch back to him and his tongue would be reattached, good as new, as though the butchering of his tongue was but a figment of his wildest imagination.

Of course, that probably meant that the poison would simply only knock him out as opposed to actually killing him, but Yoshi would rather get out of his tongue-tied situation sooner rather than spend Birdo-knows-how-long freezing his tail off and starving himself to death, with nothing but the stink of piss and shit to whet his appetite.

And besides, the sooner he got to those pair of assholes and beat them to a pulp…

His mind resolute, Yoshi began to fiddle with the saw in his left hand. He tried to bend his arm at the elbow to align the teeth of the saw against the base of his extended tongue, but as his head was tilted at a slight forty-five degree angle, such a position made it almost impossible to keep a steady grip and hold the saw against his tongue without feeling a tight strain in his palm and fingers. To fix this, he looped his arm around the pole and tried again. Now his arm was in a more natural position to strike down with the saw, but his giant nose was also in the way of the blade. He stretched his neck as much as he could, bent his head back, and, finally, found himself in a suitable, albeit highly uncomfortable, position to begin sawing away.

Yoshi's breath rattled as he exhaled deeply, breathing a hot mass of mist that temporarily clouded over his face before dissipating into the cold.

He lowered the saw, and felt a single, jagged tooth poke the fleshy surface of his tongue.

Immediately he lifted his hand back up. No, no, no no no. If he was going to do it, he was going to have to do it fast, with no second to even think twice about the unrelenting waves of agony sure to file away at his nerves for hours to come. He who hesitates is lost, or permanently stuck to a telephone by the flesh of his tongue – whichever the situation was more apt for. Yoshi gulped, and a noticeable bulge traveled down his throat.

If metal didn't strike flesh the next time he lowered his arm, he was never going to be free.

The guillotine of his arm quivered for but a second, as Yoshi held the saw high up above, the gleaming row of razor teeth sparkling briefly in the sunlight.

Then, without thinking, without even a moment's warning to steel himself –

His hand dropped.

There was the dull sound of something wet rupturing and releasing all its contained fluid in a loud, moist burst.

Pooiiiicckkk!

The shot now switches to Samus to follow her narrative for a while. As it was, she was in the Smash Mansion's Roost Café, in her casual chartreuse-and-white herringbone top and a pair of patched jeans. As the Roost Café was in the West Wing, Samus, by right, was supposed to be banned from the location for at least another month. She didn't give a damn, however, due largely to Master Hand's current absence from the Smash Mansion.

She sipped her Blue Mountain coffee (no milk, no sugar) while Peach slammed her Mocha (lotsa milk and even more sugar) down onto her saucer, rattling the cup and spilling some of the coffee over the brim.

"You what?!" she shrieked.

Samus rolled her eyes at the overreaction as she gently put down her cup. "I said, I coerced the Duck Hunt Duo to get Yoshi's tongue stuck to a pole, trick him into thinking he's ingested some poison, and tell him that his only way to survive was to cut through his own tongue with the saw and swallow some "antidote" before he died."

Peach was at a loss for words. For a while she sat still, hand holding the cup rattling and spilling even more coffee, this time onto her dress.

"Why would you do that?" she squealed when she regained her voice.

"Revenge," Samus smiled simply as she took another sip of her bitter, bitter coffee.

"But Samus – what if he dies?"

"He won't, weren't you listening? There was no poison inside the milk. The antidote's just water. Death is literally not possible for him right now – not that it ever was."

"What if he cuts off his tongue?"

"You really think he has it in him to do that?" Samus shook her head. "And you're forgetting the physics of this world, Peach. Even if he does cut it off, it'll probably just be a bloodless procedure. He'll be able to fix it by just retying it, or using superglue. Or something." Then, still noting the worry and the doubt clouding Peach's face, Samus continued, "Listen, I told you – I'm not evil. Yoshi's punishment is that he'll be tied uncomfortably to a stiff pole for an hour with the mental torture of being torn between the excruciating choices of unendurable pain and certain death. That's it."

"That's it?" Peach repeated, taken aback by the audacity of Samus's tone of delivery.

"That's it," Samus affirmed, misunderstanding the implication behind the repetition. "Soon as the hour's over, I'll go back down there with some warm water, splash it over him, and set him free."

Peach simply sat back as she regarded Samus with incredulity stretching the features of her lips and eyes. In her silence, the classic sounds one comes to expect from a popular café took over their conversation – the hissing steam of some backdoor machine, a chorus of garrulous laughs from the expansive seating corner that currently housed Fox, Falco, Ike, and Shulk, and –

"I wanted my Kilimanjaro blended with Falcon Punch, you bespectacled birdbrain!" Captain Falcon was shouting over the counter. "Aren't you supposed to be some world class barista or something? How can you screw up such a simple instruction?!"

"Sir, with all due respect, the Falcon Punch is not coffee. It is punch, coo," Brewster said as he calmly polished a plate.

"Whatever! It's the best drink in the world and you're an idiot for not blending it! Do it over!" Captain Falcon emphasized his disgust with an exaggerated pull of his tongue outside his lips, pushing a perfectly good cup of coffee across the counter and sending it crashing to the floor by Brewster's feet.

"Sir, this is a café for coffee. Coo. We do not serve the Falcon Punch here."

"Oh yeah?! Well then, it's time for a little menu change!" Falcon lunged forward, grabbed Brewster by his collar, and pulled back an arm rippling with the raw muscles of pure power and superior strength. "One Falcon Punch, coming right up!" Flashing a super sexy manly pose and a super sexy manly smile for that one glorious freeze frame, the enraged racer cried out, "Falcon –"

"Please, sir –" Brewster grimaced with monotonous fear.

"Let's get out of here, before that idiot manchild sees I'm here and tries to ask me out on a date," Samus muttered to Peach. Leaving their unfinished cups of coffee on their table, Samus and Peach crept out from the café, taking the long way around the inner perimeter of the café as arm exploded into motion and fist went from zero to infinite velocity in the single tick of a second.

"– PAAWWNNCCCHHH!" The super sexy manly cry for all that was right and just with the world was accompanied by a brutal demolishing of the wall directly opposite the impact zone. Brewster's unconscious body slammed through several layers of brick and wood and stone to land face-down in a fresh pile of snow well outside the café. His cracked spectacles joined immediately after, landing, lens-first, into the patch of snow directly beside his left wing.

As the scene transitions back to Yoshi, we see that he, too, is face-down in the snow, the red saddle and curved horns peaking out from the snow like little hills. The saw has sunk, blade-first, into the patch of snow directly beside his left hand. Yoshi's back heaves up, stays up for two seconds, and compresses again, indicating life. He is not dead; he is simply calming himself down.

Yoshi finally sinks his palms into the snow and lifts his upper body from the snow. His eyes and mouth are both serenely shut, and he again breathes deeply through his flaring nostrils. Breathe in, breathe out; breathe in, breathe out. It feels good to be free again, and Yoshi savors the freedom, delighting in the rotational, translational movements offered to him in all plane of directions. He shakes his legs, wags his tail, tilts his head in both directions, testing the extent to which the freedom of movement had been relinquished to him.

The plan had worked. Nothing to worry about – everything had gone as predicted. Of course his tongue could be reattached by simply retying it! In a world where the slash of a sword leaves not even the shallowest scratch, such methods of surgery are not only serviceable, but also highly efficient in its time and medical properties. Why blow all your money on Doctor Mario's suturin' and stitchin' when all you need is a little D-I-Y to get the job done?

Yoshi shakes his head as he reaches for the antidote. It was a crazy morning, but he had gotten through it alright. All that was left was to guzzle the antidote and purge the poison from his body, and the story would come to a close. He pulled the stopper from the bottle, held it up to his face, and opened his mouth wide –

– to spew forth an abundant waterfall of demonic crimson. Puddles of deep red corrupt the purity of snow white, and the air stains with the unmistakable smell of rich, heavy iron. The severed stump of a worm that is now what is left of his tongue pokes out its head, which sports spherical tumors of maroon that well up and burst to ejaculate undying streams of fresh untainted blood. Yoshi rasps and chokes on his own fluids, hawking and splurging a blasphemous concoction of blood and saliva and phlegm. He falls to his knees, his eyes roll to the back of his head; through the cascading pool that drowns him within himself, Yoshi half-gurgles, half-screams – Gnrnnnnggghrhgblrrggrhhrbhnrgghbrnh! Fffff – ffffff – ppggpgnnrhghrghfff!