The good news was that Yoshi was able to find an end of his tongue not ablaze and finally pulled it free from the pole, Charizard's flames providing more than enough heat to unstick flesh from metal.
The bad news was that by the time Yoshi was done putting out the fire (through a combination of throwing snow upon it and stomping with his boots), his tongue was not so much a tongue as an overcooked slice of meat left to rot on the side of a barbeque grill, charred black and no more distinguishable from the coals underneath, unduly forgotten in the heat of some rambunctious party.
Yoshi felt a giant blob of tear bubble up in the corner of his left eye.
His tongue, he knew, was beyond saving. Even if he brought it to Doctor Mario now for emergency surgery, all that he would have upon waking up would be a black, mottled, lifeless length snaking forth from his mouth, a mother rejecting her failed abomination of an abortion. In place of his tastebuds would be a coating of crumbling carbon, incapable of taste and moisture, concealing underneath tough, chewy sinews of meat that, quite ironically, would be tasteless in itself, given the nature of its preparation. To wrap his sensual tongue around the tantalizing body of some wet, dripping food, drenching the dancing tastebuds of his erect tongue with the sweet and the sour, the bitter and the salty, all coming together to form an orgastic explosion of flavor and sensation – such pleasures were now impossible, permanently purged into the persistent taste of grime and coal existing as a ghost of an odor in his mouth and perforating his nostrils to give the illusion of taste.
Still though. Still, he had to try. Wallowing in his sorrow would do nothing to offer even a sliver of hope for his tongue's recovery – no, revival, for it was dead, as devoid of life as the inanimate pole that now existed as a bent, burnt, black skeleton of its former self. But dead or not, his tongue would not be making the necessary reincarnation if he just stood there. And so, wiping the tear from his eye, Yoshi gathered up the well-done rope of steak and wrapped it several times around his waist.
Before he turned to run back to the mansion, he struck down Charizard with an acid glare that could have melted even the thickest of steel beams.
He was gone before Charizard could shudder in the overpowering waves of fear that suddenly inundated her body.
"Ya know, I don't think he liked that very much," Charizard said out loud as she stared at Yoshi rapidly disappearing over the hill leading to the mansion. "Like, maybe spitting on that pole isn't what he meant? I bet that was just the Kalos side of you talking."
"Excusez moi," Greninja retorted haughtily. "But I find zat very – 'ow you say – very stereotype." She wedged a Torkoal-branded cigar in between her tongue and upper lip, leaned forward to light with Charizard's tail flame, took a long, deep drag, and then continued, breathing heavy clouds of black smoke as she did, "eet ees not ze fault of mine zat ze miming of Smashairs 'ere leaves mooch to be des –"
"Like, what~everrrr, girl," Charizard interrupted as she took out some lipstick from one of her bags. She applied a generous heaping upon her upper and lower muzzles, before smacking the thick, bloated red lips in a few customary trial kisses. "Viva la-la Kalos and all that stuff, but I'm like, gonna go find my Bowser-pie now. He totally won't be able to resist me after this makeover!"
And before Greninja could correct her that it was vive la Kalos and not whatever twisted nursery rhyme she had just quoted, Charizard was off, leaving behind a small trail of dying flames as she flew to the mansion for another round of the impossible Get Bowser to Give You Even a Shred of His Affection game, a game which Charizard had failed miserably ever since her induction into the roster.
"Zat girl will nevair learn ze true definition of peine d'amour," Greninja muttered in a mixture of pity and exasperation.
Yoshi very much felt like panting as he tore open the brand new door of the Doctor's Office, but refrained himself from opening his mouth at the last second. He instead settled for hunching over slightly, pupils dilating and constricting with every massive breath he took through his enlarged nostrils. Once he was sure he could maintain a calm, collected composure, he walked, as steadily as possible, to the counter where Luigi sat behind. The leaner, lankier brother was in a sterile uniform of white, a neat, spotless nurse's cap replacing his typical green one. He looked bored as he perused a ragged magazine whose cover featured a pair of glossy cherry-red engorged lips opening to unleash a thick, wide, equally-red panting tongue. "Catch The Rolling Rocks live in the Smash Mansion", screamed the cover, but Yoshi was more affixed on the illustration of the disembodied mouth. He stared at it, noting just how satisfied the mouth looked, as though it was saying to Yoshi, Look at me. I am a mouth who is a proud owner of a tongue. Do you see it? Do you see my massive red tongue, fully functional and completely one with me? Do you see how it slopes downwards past my lower lip, yet never falls and runs away from the warm, damp, dark confines that is its permanent home? Where, might I ask, is your tongue? Has it lost its way, has it run away? I do not see it. Surely you must have been a bad owner for it to run away. Perhaps you hurt it, injured it in some way. Yes – yes, I think that is what happened. You have been a bad master, a very bad master indeed –
Yoshi snapped out of it by slapping his cheek. A projectile spit of blood flew from his temporarily-open mouth and splattered against the wall. One final deep breath, and then he waved his arm in front of Luigi to get his attention.
He barely looked up at Yoshi before mumbling, "Hello, I'm Luigi – I mean, Nurse Luigi – and welcome to the Doctor's Office. What can I do for you, Yoshi?"
Clearly, he did not like it when Peach was having her off days.
Yoshi took out a sign, upon which was written: I NEED TO SEE MARIO.
Luigi narrowed his eyes at the sign and looked down at the magazine again. "Mario? There is no Mario here. There is Doctor Mario, but no Mario." Luigi glanced upwards again, and whispered, with a bit more of an apologetic tinge to his voice this time, "Sorry, Yoshi. You know a-Mario. Protocol."
Yoshi gritted his teeth as he took out a black permanent marker and made the relevant change. Tiny rivers of red flashed briefly from in between the crevices of his teeth before he pulled his lips over them again, with the sign now reading: I NEED TO SEE DOCTOR MARIO, 'DOCTOR' stuffed in between the 'SEE' and 'MARIO' with an upward arrow.
"Do you have an appointment?" Luigi sighed, thumbing through a green record containing endless lines of scribbled names. Yoshi shook his head.
"Then take a number and a seat. Ma – I mean, Doctor Mario will see you shortly," Luigi finished, flatly squishing a button to eject a slip of paper from the mouth of a Chain Chomp-shaped ticket machine. Yoshi took one look around him and nearly stepped back from the shock. The whole place was full. There were barely any seats left on the couches and the chairs as his eyes flitted over Smasher after Smasher, all with slips or folded wedges of papers held in between their fingers, all glancing regularly, like clockwork, at the screen that flashed the next number to step into the actual office within the Doctor's Office. He saw Lucas absentmindedly scratching a rash on his left forearm, opposite whom was Link, blowing his nose with a blaring honk!, much to the chagrin of his seated neighbor, Lucina, who had some heavy bandage applied to her right knee.
Yoshi quickly turned back to Luigi, held up a new sign, and rapped the counter to get his attention.
Luigi read: IT'S AN EMERGENCY.
"What kind of emergency?" Luigi said sharply as he suddenly sat up, snapping the magazine shut. He was finally registering the look of desperation that silently screamed in its tortured anguish for help, help, help, and Luigi's eyes darted over the entirety of Yoshi's body, seeking out some visual purchase to clue him in on the source of pain that was so clearly wearing away at Yoshi's composure and sanity. The dinosaur scribbled his condition on the reverse side of the sign.
MY TONGUE'S SLICED OFF.
"Mama mia, Yoshi! Why didn't you say so earlier?!" Luigi cried as he jumped from his seat. "Oh, wait. Duh…" He smacked his forehead with an open palm in his brief moment of idiocy, and then he looked down at severely singed sash that wrapped around Yoshi's belly and put two and two together. He looked with magnified eyes and spoke with shaking lips, "H – how did this happen? It – the physics of this universe – it's not possible –!"
Yoshi shook his head and jabbed, repeatedly, frantically, at the door behind which Mario was seeing his patient.
"Of course, yes, I'm sorry – now's not the time for that! Come on!" Luigi leapt forward, grabbed Yoshi's arm, and pulled him through the mass of waiting patients, shoving through legs and barging through an occasional shoulder or two to reach the front of the door.
"You're cutting!" King Dedede glowered, glaring at Yoshi as he put himself in between Luigi and the door just as the latter was about to place his hand on the doorknob.
"It's an emergency!" Luigi yelled back, attempting to reach through King Dedede's massive bulk.
"Yeah, well, it is for me, too!" King Dedede snarled back, throwing Luigi off balance with an aggressive shove. "I burned my tongue!" He stuck his tongue out of his beak to show that it was, indeed, burned.
"Well, he doesn't even have a tongue!" Luigi roared back, pushing himself up and smacking the back of Yoshi's head to forcefully open his mouth –
– revealing a spiraling vortex of red and black energy, the eye of the whirlpool staring cold from deep within the grottos of Yoshi's mouth. Sickening incantations of hellish origins distort the medium of sound, as though the demon himself has taken hold of Yoshi's larynx and forces him to summon, through the offer of limitless blood that drains his veins and heart, the beast that will ascend the depths of hell to wreak the apocalypse upon those who do not worship the devil. The blood that spews –
"You see?!" Luigi cried as he forced Yoshi's mouth back shut. "Yoshi's bleeding so much, some demonic overlord thinks he's trying to summon him by sacrificing so much blood! He needs to see Doctor Mario, right now!"
King Dedede frowned, cocked his head, and stared intently at Yoshi. Then he said, "I dunno, I still think my burned tongue is worse. I couldn't even taste any of the Waddle Dees I ate this morning, it was that bad."
Luigi's jaw dropped to the floor, and Yoshi's would have too, if it weren't for… You know. For a second they just stared dumbly at King Dedede, who was looking increasingly smug with himself as he mistook their expressions of disbelief for failure to contradict the greater priority of his medical concern. Before he could gloat, however, there came a voice from behind all three of them.
"You think that's bad?" Link huffed as he approached, nose red from all the rubbing and blowing he had subjected it to for the past hour. "I've got the worst bout of Deku Fever right now. I can neither taste nor smell, which means I've got two of my senses restricted from my use. If anything, I should go first before all of you!"
"Oh, grow up, all of you children," Bayonetta smirked, strutting to the growing scene of selfishness and impatience. "I just got nerfed to the deepest abyss of Inferno from the latest patch, and yet here I am, silently enduring my unjust punishment without so much as a single peep." The right end of her lips curled upwards into a leering smirk as she stopped beside Link, daring anyone to respond with a contemptuous thrust of her left hip.
Pretty soon there was a chaotic uproar of Smashers, each trying to one-up the other in terms of the severity of his or her current ailment.
"I got heartworms!"
"I got hernia!"
"I got herpes!"
Yoshi turned to Luigi with a sign that read: DO YOU GET THE FEELING THAT SOMETIMES YOU AND I ARE THE ONLY SANE ONES HERE?
Luigi took Yoshi's hand and patted it reassuringly. "All the time, Yoshi," he said gently, massaging the spaces in between Yoshi's fingers with quick tight squeezes. "All the time." He gave him one more nod of camaraderie, from one non-insane Smasher to the other, and than raised his voice to shout: "Everybody, SHUT UP!"
Shut up they did, and all eyes turned to Luigi as he cast every face peering at him with a resolute glare that radiated intensely with great dismay, as though he was the victim of some abject betrayal. "Here you all are, selfishly arguing over who has the worst injury and who's in the most pain, when the answer to all that is standing right before all of you!" Luigi grabbed Yoshi's arm and pulled it up over their heads, a duo of green arms serving as beacons of righteousness and recognition of true merit. "Are you all blind? Can't you see just how much more grievous, just how much more agonizing this is than whatever minor infection, whatever small hurt you so pathetically blow out of proportion?!"
The other Smashers were beginning to look unsettled, with some even looking down in increasing doubt and self-disappointment. Yoshi turned to Luigi, flushed with a magnitude of gratitude and affection he had never quite felt for his old friend. He might have lost all ability to communicate his thoughts, desires, emotions, but he had found one just as good and effective in the altruistic voice of Luigi's. The man's tongue was the dinosaur's, siphoning the words that Yoshi's throat yearned to birth and striking it forth vicariously, so that it was, in all effect, Yoshi's words permeating the eardrums of all before them. Now, if only Luigi's tongue could pick up the hint of desperation that would sternly tell all that it would indeed be he who would need to see Doctor Mario first…
"I mean, how can any of your weak-ass injuries compare to this?!" Luigi shouted, and he lowered the sleeve of his outstretched arm to reveal – a tiny scratch mark barely an inch long and not even half an inch wide.
"Holy shit!" Wolf snarled in complete exclamation as Sonic screamed like a little girl and fainted immediately afterwards. "What the hell happened to you?!"
"I was absentmindedly scratching my arm when I scratched a little too hard," Luigi said in his most bravado voice, throwing out his chest as he squeezed the flesh of his arms in order to more clearly emphasize the shallowest gash in the history of shallowest gashes.
There was a sudden outburst of unabashed admiration and respect that praised everything about Luigi, from his abnormally high pain tolerance to his dashing good looks.
"Hardcore," Chibi Mac squeaked in awe.
Of course, there was one unimpressed Smasher among the masses of collective idiocy. Yoshi hunched over, eyelids only half-open in exasperation, as he looks into the plane of your computer screen and lifts up a giant sign that simply reads SIGH. Then, refusing to waste any more time, he quickly turned, ran for the door, and barged into Doctor Mario's office.