Yoshi kicked the door of his room open so hard that the entire door fell flat on its face with a loud whumpf. He looked down at the brand new welcome mat that had come at the price of his door, and for the briefest second felt an urge to push it back up and at least fit it back within the frame to fix later. But time was ticking away here, and Yoshi, after swallowing his sixth mouthful of blood, decided that now was not quite the time to be whetting his sorely lacking carpentry skills.
He rushed over to his bathroom and slammed the sewing kit on the counter of his sink. Well aware of the flooding consequence that opening his mouth would bring, Yoshi ensured that his head was over the basin of his sink. He uncorked a bottle of the Deluxe Super Duper Sexy Manly One-Night Stand Falcon Punch with one hand, gripped tightly the side of the basin with the other. A deep intake through his flaring nostrils to steady himself; then –
– when even a single drop of the mortal wine dilutes the feast of cursed blood offered unto Him, that is when the wicked summoning shall be complete. The final meal with which we shall satisfy our Satanic Majesties' Requests, in order to bring to this hallowed lands true infernal malevolence; we shall rape all the goodness and virtue out of them, them who had been blind, who had –
Yoshi wrapped his mouth around the neck of the bottle and swung both it and his head back, emptying its entire content in one massive swig. With the gulp came an immediate gag; what remained of his tongue, along with the back of his throat, was still laden with enough tastebuds to grant him a weak sense of taste. The inner walls of his gullet pulsated with protest, undulating in a desperate attempt to cough the mixture of blood and wine back out, and it took all of Yoshi's willpower in order to keep the stuff down. There was no kinder way of putting it – the drink tasted horrible, and coming from someone who regularly scarfed down putrid mixtures of rotting Dance Apples and expired Magic Puddings, that was one hell of an insult against Falcon's mixing ability. The only good that came out of it was that when he next opened his mouth, all that came out was the cursory burst of blood, the demonic narration somehow silenced in the drench of the shittiest wine ever conceived. The exposed nerves of the oral remnant seemed to have dulled considerably in their seething pain as well, which meant that, disgusting or not, the alcohol had at least fulfilled its purpose in freeing him from the suffocating holds of agony.
Blood splashed the walls of the basin, imparting sloped pools of red slowly trickling their descent to the drain, into which the main flow of blood gushed. At this point Yoshi was beginning to feel lightheaded. His blood loss had been severe, and he wasn't sure whether he could afford to lose more of the vital fluid any longer. Ever second was critical, and so Yoshi hastily flipped open the sewing kit. If he wasn't so rushed he could have appreciated how Rosalina had decorated the interior of the box by arranging the needles and the threads in the shape of a multi-colored Power Star – but he was, and without even realizing it Yoshi completely destroyed the intricate design by seizing a fistful of needles and a loop of white thread.
With quivering hands Yoshi picked up the end of the thread and a needle. He tried poking the thread through its eye, once, twice, three times – and with each attempt failed miserably, either poking the air or the needle itself. It was a task that required the full extent of his concentration and dexterity, his grasp of which was slipping with each drop of blood that leaked from his tongue. Holding his hands up closer to his eyes did nothing to aid his coordination; willing himself to still his hands only seemed to make them tremble more. At one point, Yoshi dropped the needle. It bounced off his boot and rolled underneath the sink. Rather than picking it up, Yoshi simply grabbed another from the counter and tried again.
When at last, after ten or so tries, the string was successfully threaded through, Yoshi held the needle tightly between the thumb and index finger of his left hand. He strained to inch the stump of his tongue out from his mouth, there was so little of the organ left. With an egg-patterned hand towel around his right hand, Yoshi grabbed the nub and held it in place, the towel allowing a grip on the wet, slippery surface. He held the needle against the edge of his tongue and closed his eyes, taking a moment to gain some composure – then immediately flung them open again. No time to waste, no time to lose!
With a flash of movement metal struck into flesh. It did not go far in; the tongue fought against the intruder, refusing the alien point any access within. Yoshi had to press against the shank with the entire strength of his arm, and even then the needle only disappeared into his tongue at an excruciatingly slow pace. Through the anesthetic Yoshi could feel the discomfort as needle pushed through masses of flesh. Tingles of pain were waking upon the bleeding surface. The effects of the alcohol, it seemed, were wearing off, and once two-thirds of the needle had finally sunk into his tongue Yoshi immediately picked up the second bottle.
Just before he held the mouth of the bottle to his own, he thought he heard – a faint groan, a whimper, almost, trailing its feeble existence from some hidden corner in his room. Yoshi couldn't locate the source of the sound, but he hardly cared as he braced himself for the wine form of diarrhea incarnate to wash into his mouth.
Then, just before the pure undistilled liquefied revulsion could flood the walls of his digestive track for the second time –
Nooo! Stop – please! No more wine – or whatever it is that you're feeding me! I tell you, since the genesis of all creation, I have been the eternal Lord of all demise and decay, the bringer of death and destruction, the instigator of all evil. I have tasted the black blood of heartless murderers, licked the bitter skin of incorrigible thieves, savored the rotting flesh of lawyers – and yet, that which you force yourself to ingest is more abominable, far viler than all of those things combined! If you truly wish to summon me from the slumber of my hellish confines, then I beseech you – I, the devil Himself, beg you on bended knees – PLEASE, just get some regular old Gintendo at the Sixtyfour Store and drink that instead! Hell, I'll take some shitty Zelda milk over this! Just please – save me the –
Yoshi wouldn't hear any more of it. With a merciless backwards thrust of his head, he once again submerged his mouth with the Deluxe Super Duper Sexy Manly One-Night Stand Falcon Punch. The room echoed with the disturbing sounds of someone helplessly drowning, but Yoshi hardly heard anything as visceral convulsions shook his body and made him want to retch all that was in his stomach right back out. He teetered backwards, took great heaving gasps, then sputtered violently as some of the blood got sucked into his lungs. His grip on the bottle slacked; the lubricant of shitty wine and blood slipped the bottle from the grasp of his fingers, and it fell to the growing puddle of blood on the floor with a splash and a clatter.
Blleeeurrrgghh! Arrggggh! It – it burns! What the fuck is this shit?! Which incompetent buffoon mixes vodka with fucking strawberry milk?! Oh my – I'm melting! I'm melting! I can't – I can't feel my legs! Is this what you wanted, you sick, twisted fuck? Entice me from the infinite depths of Inferno, tempt me with the fleeting taste of freedom – only to strike me down, crush me like a bug, stomp me back into whence I came?! You – you diabolical son of a bitch! That's my job! I'm the devil, I'm supposed to be the very incarnate of unspeakable evil and wickedness that plague this land! Have I been outdone?! What, then, remains of the purpose of my existence?! I – I can't. I wish not to ground myself in this reality any longer. Goodbye, cruel world! Dear God in Heaven, if thou truly doth exist, if thou truly art a merciful God, please let me go to Heaven! Please let me go to Heaven please let me go to Heaven PLEASELETMEGOTOHEAVEN –
There was the distant sound of a gunshot.
No time to lose, no time to waste, Yoshi thought desperately to himself without a single shred of sympathy for the devil. A quick push of the needle told him that his sense of pain was once again cordoned off from his use. The operation must go on. He launched himself from the wall in a burst of movement, so that his midriff slammed against the counter of his sink and his mouth exploded with a splatter of blood. He kept it open, panting hot breaths of air that misted over his mirror. His cheeks were turning a brilliant shade of red, bringing with it a steady burn that spread and consumed his entire head. Somewhere within the left hemisphere of his brain he felt a dull lethargic pounding. When he reached for the needle wedged into his tongue he swiped at it, not occurring to him that a far efficient method of reapplying his grip would be to simply pinch it. The careless force with which he whacked the needle displaced it from the burrows of his tongue, and it shot into the air, string and all, before it clattered into the sink and was promptly sucked into the drain.
Yoshi closed his eyes, leaned forward, and, elbows resting on counter, buried as much of his face into his hands as possible. He had to concentrate. Concentrate. He was so close – so close. All he had left to do was to use his nonexistent operating skills to stitch two severed ends of his tongue back together. That's all he had to do.
How hard could it be?
When Yoshi opened his eyes, it was to see a patch of mold growing at an alarming rate in the upper corner of his bathroom. Tiny, whitish-pink spores sprung up from the walls and ceilings, conquering the immediate vicinity of its presence with microscopic booms of birth and reproduction. Yoshi squinted his eyes at them. No, they were not mold – the pinkish hue, the bumpy texture, a certain quality of wetness that dripped from each "spore".
They were not mold – they were tastebuds.
"Are we havin' a good time?!" a voice suddenly thundered from the sink. Yoshi's eyes swiveled back to the countertop. There, between the knobs of the "hot" and "cold" faucet, were five pairs of rat-sized disembodied lips, each with a spindly pair of arms and legs and a giant, hulking tongue sticking out from the dark depths that their lips concealed. Two of them had tongues shaped like guitars complete with strings and tuners, another had a similar tongue except more in line with a bass guitar, and yet another had a tongue that was adorned with the components of a classic drum set. A lip with luxurious wig of cascading wavy hair and tight jeans that featured a noticeable bulge in between its legs sported the plainest tongue of all, but it made up for its plainness with a stylish, swaggering confidence that no other tongue seemed to be able to quite match. It held a mike in its cartoony circular fist, and continued to shout, "Everybody make some noise!"
It was The Rolling Rocks, live at the Yoshi Room in the Smash Mansion. Yoshi leaned forward on his sink, his face mere inches from the lip form of Jick Magger, and, his tongue mysteriously back in place, screamed, "PAINT IT BLACK! PAINT IT BLACK! PAINT IT BLACK, YOU DEVIL! PAINT IT… Black…"
The lips "looked" at each other. They smiled, they nodded. Then the lip guitarist bent forward and began to pluck away at his tongue guitar. A melody of psychedelic notes lazily swooned forth from the tongue, and before Yoshi knew it, Jick Magger was singing, in a hypnotic, alluring rasp: Under my tongue! Yoshi, who, once held me down!
A long, human-sized tongue appears out of nowhere and slithers up the private hole of Yoshi's rear. It moves up through his digestive track and journeys all the way to his head. It emerges from the right socket by popping the eye out; then it goes back in through the left socket by squishing through the remaining ball of virtuous fluid. It sprawls from his mouth, a majestic carpet of bright red unfurling from the damp, dark depths.
Under my tongue! Yoshi, who, once rolled me around!
A close-up of the tongue reveals another Yoshi desperately trying to find his feet on this undulating earth. He dances a reluctant dance among the gyrating mounds that are his tastebuds, each celebrating in inane happiness as a rain of frothing saliva washes over them. Giant chunks of blueberry pie zoom towards him as though on a conveyor belt set to its maximum speed, and it takes all of Yoshi's frantic scampering to barely avoid the globules of sticky obstacles. In the end, it is the wave of milk that gets him, a flood of unavoidable warm white that slams into his body and sends him overboard into the deep trenches of black behind him.
It's up to me! The different colors he must now wear~
Yoshi falls through a cosmos of eternal darkness. His body rolls in turbulent somersaults as he makes his descent through the unending night. He falls between two infinite lines of tongues, each hanging in a curved slope from the invisible walls of some vertical dimension. They all flash a different color as they reached forward to lick Yoshi, bequeathing the dinosaur a tinge of their respective wavelength in the visible spectra, so that Yoshi is fuscia pink one second, bright turquoise the next, lemony yellow in another, lime green after…
Up to me, his change now comes; he's under MY tongue!
A rainbow tongue is up and last. It gives a particularly hard, tenacious lick, its entire surface sticking to Yoshi's body for a moment of brutal appetite. With the voracious slurp Yoshi's entire body explodes into millions of droplets, each shining a unique bright color like diamonds in a psychedelic rainbow. They rain down and amass into one giant pool of gelatinous liquid, a multicolored lake whose surface ripples with an unpredictable array of flowery and swirly and wavy patterns.
Under my tongue! A squirmin' dog, or a Siamese cat!
The tongues gather around the pool. They slap, they roll, they slosh; when they are done, they stand back, revealing Yoshi as a dog. He whines, wags his tail, cocks his head. All the while his body retains a gooey sort of consistency, still flashing multitudinous arrays of fantastic colors, still coursing shimmery patterns throughout the surface of his entire body. The tongues swoop in and break him apart; this time they assemble him into a cat. And then a rat. And then they squeeze him real tight into a tiny little ball, sporting the typical pattern one expects from a Yoshi egg except its spots featured a vast diversity of colors.
Under my tongue! A baseball, hit by a baseball bat!
From out of nowhere Ness comes, picks up the Yoshi ball, throws him into the air, and thwacks him with – not a baseball bat, but an oversized tongue he pulls from his mouth. Yoshi makes the journey of a thousand miles in one second. He crashes onto a coast, immediately reverting back to his original shape and colors as he bounces back into form. Among the purple sands he sees hermit crab-tongues hiding in shells shaped like lips. Before him is a raging sea of blood, home to giant tongue-serpents that burst from the red waters to do nothing more than rupture ear drums with their shrill screeches before plunging back into the waters with splashes the size of tidal waves.
Give it to 'em, Reith Kitchards!
A groovy, bluesy guitar solo serenades the backdrop as Yoshi turns. Now he looks at an expanse of land, rich and fertile with tiny little tastebuds that will grow into tongue-corns to be harvested and processed into tongue-kernel for all your moviegoing pleasures. In the center of the land is a giant version of his own severed tongue, stood up on its base so that its bulbous tip points to the sky. Standing high, erect, and mighty, it towers over a gathering crowd of Lickitungs and Lickilickies. There are some, already, clinging onto the tongue, licking the steaming blobs of sticky saliva off with slow, graceful swishes of their own. From out of nowhere Greninja appears in front of him, sashaying her generous hips and flicking her tongue out of the way of her face as she approaches. She wraps his hands around hers, tackles him down to sands. He gazes up; she stares down. "Zis ees ta subconscience, correct?" she whispers. "Zen, you love me – but you are not knowing eet yet." She took her tongue in her hand, shoved it down Yoshi's throat, and pumped, pumped – oh my dear Arceus, she was pumping –
Water.
"Do not worry. Eet will be ovair soon," she mutters.
Under her tongue – his eyes are kept to herself!
"Yoshi?!" Samus panted, stopping the momentum of her mad run by shooting out a hand and gripping the frame of the dinosaur's open doorway. "Are you in there –?"
The first thing she realized that the door was not open, as she had thought it was, but rather torn down, completely removed from the frame for all to enter.
The second thing she saw was Yoshi, through the open door of his bathroom, sprawled on the floor and erupting into random bouts of noise and movement.
She rushed in and kneeled down. It was worse than she thought. As a bounty hunter who regularly killed aliens and Space Pirates, Samus was well accustomed to the sights of gore, but in the context of the normally-bloodless Smash, this was absolutely disconcerting, horrifying, even. His tongue was gone. In its place was an ugly, flapping worm issuing copious spurts of blood and garbles (as though he was, quite ironically, talking in tongues). Yoshi did not even seem to see that Samus was there. He looked right through her with eyes blind in panic, spinning his body in circles or flurrying his arms, legs, even his head, as though trying to shake off some giant invisible parasite. He was, effectively, swimming in a pool of his own blood, splashing the body fluid everywhere around his bathroom with the erratic seizures that dictated his movements.
Samus got up, wiping a splotch from her cheek. There was no way she could bring Yoshi down to the Doctor's Office in a reasonable amount of time – not in his current state and weight, at least. It would probably – no, definitely be faster to bring Doctor Mario up here, instead…
"Hold on, Yoshi!" she barked, hoping that her voice would somehow reach Yoshi through the spasms and torment that isolated him from the grounds of reality. "I'm going to get help right now! Help – help's coming! Just – just stay here and – and try not to move too much –"
No reply. Samus gritted her teeth and turned tail, becoming fast consumed in guilt and regret as she ran almost as fast as she could dash when in her Power Suit. As she disappeared out of his room, Yoshi wheezed a long, feeble rasp, stretching out his arm in order to grab something – anything – anything. His hand groped nothing but air for the full second it was up.
Then it fell like a stone, landing with a dull splash onto the submerged floor.
The only subsisting forms of movement after that was the occasional twitch of his right eyelid, the erratic jerk of his left foot.