"So I heard Robin's going to have babies."
"...Ganon, I know you're bored as of recently, but you should really cool down with the jokes. And what're you talking about? Robin's a dude."
"Hm? Wait, I didn't mean Robin. I didn't mean Robin at all."
...
...
"...Theeeeeen who is the fortunate woman who has babies?"
"I dunno."
"Whaddya mean you 'dunno'? Just a few seconds ago, you were-"
"OH! Heck yeah. I, the King of Evil, just figured it out. I guess I'm better than you in some ways, Captain Falcon of the 99 Dragons.
Marth is going to have babies."
"..."
...
...
...
"...Wait a minute..."
...
...
...
...
"...Don't tell that to Marth."
"Much obliged. And I'll be honest; I nearly believed you there."
"SIR MAC! I MUST ASK OF YOU-"
"No."
Little Mac had been walking around the gym for the sake of exercising lightly. Activities such as walking were highly overlooked, despite the fact that it helped out with stretching muscles and churning some calories. People often stated that walking was "overrated," but Mac thought otherwise. Walking made people less lazy, though many lazy people often blamed the entire concept of walking to be ineffective. Most of such people were those who did not exercise from the very beginning.
One did not need to be a champion to walk. They only needed the will to improve, reflect, and repeat.
With that said, a woman known as Lucina had been following him throughout the majority of his walk.
"E-Er...! Uh," Lucina stumbled over her own words, "I... wish to inform that ?"
"..."
"Oh! How about this? I challenge you to a friendly match that will determine who will claim Robin!"
Something about Robin must have brought terrible luck on Mac.
The boxer glanced at Lucina, who, at this point, looked like she was about to burst into a fit of anger and tears. And in fact, she did feel like bursting into tears at the thought of being unable to retrieve Robin's sanity. The man in the pink jumpsuit was the primary reason as to why Robin blew up.
Though he did not really know why she thought that he was stealing Robin away from anybody, the lightweight boxing champion figured that he could also use this to measure the extent of the weirdness within his soon-to-be fellow contenders in the Smash Tourneys.
Little Mac stopped walking, startling the wielder of the Falchion. Turning to her with an exasperated, yet determined look, the boxer gave her a sharp glare.
He slowly reached out for her.
Lucina felt confused at the sight of a fist near her face. The man in the pink jumpsuit remained still for three seconds.
He then flicked her forehead.
"Ow!"
After the little flick, Mac relaxed his shoulders, taking a small step back. Smiling a little, Mac spoke more than two words in a sentence for the first time.
"You're too tense."
The blue-haired woman blinked, her hands hovering over her forehead. She bit the bottom of her lip, lowering her hands, as she sighed to let out all of her tensed emotions. She did, indeed, feel a little too tense over the matter, but she still cared about Robin. Looking up at the man in the pink jumpsuit, the woman strengthened her resolve and looked much calmer than before.
"I would like to kindly request of something to you, Sir Mac."
"...?"
As Lucina attempted to inform Mac about a deal revolving around a certain tactician that she knew of, the boxer suddenly felt something vibrate in one of his hoodie's pockets. He reached for it, only to take out an old flip phone. Doc Louis was calling him about something.
Without any hesitation, Little Mac turned away from Lucina, who continued to talk about her turmoil, lifting the phone by his head.
"Yo, Mac! Ey, we need to change up that phone soon, ya?"
Mac shrugged, only to realize that he was on a phone. He grunted, which served perfectly as an auditory alternative to shrugging.
"Anyway, I've got a few stuff to talk with you about. 'S 'bout some info I got about the tournaments, along with your debut here. Still talkin' with the Hand here- no pun intended-, but once we're clear with everything, I'll go talk to you about it. In the meantime, keep getting along with some of the contestants, aight?"
The boxer nodded, putting away the phone when the call ended with Doc Louis laughing encouragingly. He looked up, wondering just what he should do during his free time.
He then realized that Lucina was still talking, now going on about how Robin saved an entire world before. Little Mac was beginning to wonder whether Robin came from some sort of fantasy version of a Batman universe, but then he remembered that Batman did not go well with fantasy without being influenced by weird changes in the first place.
Thus, he decided to stop thinking about unimportant matters for the sake of returning to reality. But now that Lucina was talking about some sort of Grima thing, he straightforwardly concluded that she was going a little nuts over the man who wanted to play Chess with him for the night.
Before Mac bailed out of Lucina's lengthy explanation of how important Robin was, however, a familiar person approached him and the blue-haired woman.
Donning a stealth suit that Mac could not exactly forget quickly about, a man with a headband walked toward him with a scowl.
"..."
"..."
"...and then Robin told me, 'But I do know that I could help you,' and it was then I knew that he was truly a great person. He even gave Chrom a coconut pie- AGH! I, uh..."
The scruffy man wearing the stealth suit raised an eyebrow at blue-haired swordswoman, who stared at him incredulously.
"I'm... I'm terribly sorry not to have noticed you, Solid Snape."
"...It's Snake."
"Snake! Yes, Snake! Not Snape!"
Mac decided to keep Snake's name in mind to make a good impression, though he was more interested in the idea of a man named "Snake" staring at a magazine with a cover image of a bikini-wearing turtle. After all, Snake himself did not exactly look like a person who would... stare at bikini turtles in the first place.
And it seemed that Snake figured out that Mac had seen him, for he turned to him with a dead serious look on his face.
"Your name is... Mac, right? So, if I remember correctly, we met under circumstances that might have created some misunderstandings of some sorts."
Mac nodded, fully admitting that magazines with bikini turtles tended to bring a whole lot of misunderstandings. The fact that he was thinking about this without laughing out of a mix of horror and pure confusion made Little Mac wonder how crazy the boxing tournaments he contended in exactly were.
Snake, however, did not seem to know how to clear misunderstandings, as he took out the same magazine he had earlier. Opening the magazine, he gave the boxer the weird magazine. Though Mac had second thoughts about reading through a magazine with a bikini turtle on its cover, he noticed something strange about the magazine's contents.
Instead of some horrifying sight to behold, two white pages and several black lines were present. The formation of the lines let Mac notice that it was some sort of tournament bracket.
The man in the stealth-suit whispered to the boxer, "I'm going to be participating in a tournament held around here, y'see. Thing is... no one is supposed to really know about how the brackets are formatted until the battles actually begin. I like to think about how to face my opponents before the battles begin, so it's only natural for me to gather this much information. As for that magazine cover I found... It's just weird enough to ward off any suspicious peeps. Except for turtles."
Leaning away from Mac, Snake explained without whispering, "I'm only telling you this because no one ever saw me with that magazine before, and you don't really look like someone who'd go off telling on others, anyway."
Though Mac wondered if whether what Snake was doing qualified as cheating or not, he decided to stay out of the entire business and nod. He did find Snake's explanation surprisingly believable, and considering the things he had to go through before he arrived in the strange world, he found it easy to believe the man. To assure Snake that he would not be telling anyone the truth behind the disguised magazine, Mac gave the man a quick thumbs-up. Snake nodded back, a small sigh of relief emitting out of him, before slowly leaving Mac with Lucina once more.
"Sorry for the small talk," the gruff man muttered as he left. "I have business to attend to right at the moment."
Everything that just transpired, however, looked completely different from Lucina's point-of-view.
Lucina froze still at the sight of Solid Snake taking out a magazine with a bikini turtle on its cover.
W-...What on Ylisse is that?
She then stiffened when he opened the magazine and gave the stupid thing to the boxer known as Mac.
Why is Snape giving a magazine with a bikini turtle on its cover to Sir Mac?
Why did Sir Mac receive that magazine?!
WHY DOES SIR MAC LOOK SO INTERESTED?!
The blue-haired swordswoman, by no means, hated Mac. The sight of him reading through a magazine with a bikini turtle on its cover, however...
Oh yes, and Snake did seem interested in the magazine as well. In fact, he whispered to Mac, and Lucina was barely able to make out several words.
"I'm...going to...part...y..., y'see..."
I'm going to party, y'see.
"I like to think about...face...battles..."
I like to think about face battles.
"...it's...natural..."
It's natural.
"I...peep...turtles."
I peep turtles.
I peep turtles.
I peep turtles.
NONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONONO- That's just... Sir Mac! Please knock some sense into him or something!
Little Mac nodded with a knowing smile... not at Lucina, but at Snake.
AGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! This man is dangerous in more than one way! I need to do something about this, or else Robin too might start to-
Lucina snapped. By the time Snake began to leave, she vanished at the speed of light without fulfilling anything useful for her troubled friend at all.
With Lucina gone, life became mysterious and serene for Mac again.
After exercising further more in the gym, the boxing champion took a walk around the mansion he now resided in. While waiting endlessly for some deal to be made between Doc and the Master Hand felt a little tiring in some ways, he did find the large mansion itself to be entirely unique in its own way. There was nearly everything that a millionaire might want, yet not everybody decided to live like millionaires. To think that the mansion was a house for champions further spiked his interest in the tournaments that were held in the strange world.
Everything felt so in-place, and that surprised Mac more than anything. The creators of the entire tournament had to be both geniuses and incredibly powerful sentient beings. If Mac learned anything from those weird space alien movies, it was the thought of finding something not human be more than what humans could ever be. In a sense, Mac had discovered something that should have scared him rather than pleasantly surprising him.
Walking out of a hallway, Mac looked around. He still had time, and Robin was (thankfully) not a Chess addict that never left the lobby. Time seemed to move so slowly in the mansion.
What should I do?
The boxer looked around, his hands in his pockets. He had been wearing the pink hoodie for a particularly long time, though he really had no problems with wearing the comfortable clothes. It endured through his years of training, and served as a lucky token for harsh times. Though it never provided the same amount of warmth as a sweater would, Mac never felt cold with the hoodie on. He just felt a passion that would never die, even after time moved on to a wholly new generation.
Mac noticed a hallway he never really entered before. Unlike most of the hallways around, this particular hallway led up to only a single pair of double-doors. After walking down the spacious area, he stared at a single word etched on a golden plate neatly attached to one of the doors.
Garden
He tilted his head by instinct, wondering if there really was a garden inside the mansion. Before he was able to open the door, however, something else opened it for him.
The doors burst open, allowing Mac to face...
...An air conditioner.
Mac slammed the doors shut when he noticed a paper that read "Under Construction!" pasted over the air conditioner. Why on Earth an air conditioner would take the place of a garden that was not even present, he did not know, but he decided not to further question the interesting(?) morals behind the people of the strange universe.
Leaving the mansion itself, however, proved to show more things to the lightweight boxing champion. Leaving out of a convenient back door, the boxer eventually left the mansion for a brief tour.
The backyard of the mansion was ironically consisted of a huge field of flowers and a flat field that looked identical to that of a fancy park's.
In fact, this field looked just as vast as the mansion did, the only difference being that the serene field had nothing but the skies to look up at. Mac noticed a familiar woman hunched over a small bed of pink flowers.
Curiosity stirred within Mac when he failed to figure out what the blonde woman did with the light pink flowers. Walking up to the woman, Mac found himself standing to the lady's right, his hands still in his pockets.
Silence prevailed for a few minutes, and Little Mac watched the lady known as Peach care for the flowers tenderly. He presumed that she had planted the pink bed of flowers in the eye-soothingly vibrant sea of flowers. Mac found it interesting to see someone directly taking care of plants with such careful handiwork; after all, no matter how many parks filled New York, Mac had not seen a single soul actually caring a whole lot for the flowers. Perhaps he had only seen Wall Street celebrities instead of people who had interesting hobbies during the years of his career.
Mac swore that he saw the flowers make some sort of dancing motion for a brief second, but quickly forgot about the soft-colored flowers' strangely delicate movements when he heard Peach's voice.
"Hello!"
"..."
"I'm sorry if I didn't see you earlier, Mister Mac. I'm terrible at paying attention at a lot of things at once!"
Mac shrugged as he moved a small step away from Peach. The lady stood up with a polite smile.
For some reason, the image of Doc Louis mentioning his favorite kind of "flower" nearly made Mac snicker for no justified reason. Fortunately for the boxing champion, he managed to remain calm and not look like a weirdo that randomly giggled at the air.
"Um," Peach said, attempting to successfully piece her words together in an attempt to get a conversation going, "I've recently grown an interest in growing flowers, as you can see."
Before Mac made any kind of response, however, Peach let out a soft-spoken "Oh!" before motioning over to the flowers.
"I have never seen these kinds of flowers until not too long ago, actually! They come from a land not too far from my home outside of the mansion. From what I've seen, the flowers dance if you tickle them! I've only just found out about these strange flowers."
Flowers that reacted to tickling... Now that was entirely new.
Mac looked over at Peach, then at the flowers. They seemed like completely normal flowers, but as soon as Mac crouched and tickled one of the plants, it really did begin to dance away from him.
The flabbergasted boxer apparently made a funny face, for Peach laughed at the look he had when he turned to her.
Perhaps it was not the dancing flowerbed that did not draw him into staying a little longer in the field, however. Peach herself had many interesting qualities to her, though most of them had to do with her unique background. The land she lived in seemed like an extreme contrast to the world Mac lived in. Compared to Mac's world, Peach's world seemed to have more flowers and a much larger dose of joy in it.
A world shaped like a big, rosy peach described her world quite well, it seemed.
Several hours later...
Mac walked out of his dormitory with his pink jumpsuit on.
There were several amazing things he discovered in his dormitory. The first amazing thing was his laundry machine. It literally finished its job in one minute. How the heck a laundry machine could be designed to do everything a good laundry machine could possibly ever do within a minute, Mac did not know of, but he liked it. The machine even had an automatic drying function on it, though there were obviously several exceptions that could not use the function. Luckily for Mac, his hoodie remained to be faithfully amazing in its own way, seeing how there were so many ways to clean it so quickly for everyday use.
The second amazing thing was a donut-shaped music player that also had the ability to make coffee. Mac may not drink coffee as often as he eats chocolate, but perhaps Doc Louis would find some sort of epic use for the coffee maker. The music player seemed to be a portable kind, but Mac decided not to bring it out with him due to how expensive it looked.
And to top off the two amazing things he had in his room...
A small printer rested snugly in his living room. While it seemed like a regular printer, the machine had absolutely no purpose other than to print out free chocolate bar tickets from the local market nearby the mansion.
Things were already looking promising for his stay at the mansion.
Taking a look at the time with his old cellphone, Little Mac decided to take one final jog before meeting up with Robin. This time, however, he intended on jogging outside of the mansion for good.
"Outside of the mansion" was what he saw and what he got. Clusters of fancy buildings and unique streets lay distant from the mansion. Restaurants littered many nooks and crannies, and so many strange creatures walked around the place. There was some sort of brown mushroom-shaped buggers (some walking around with backpacks wrapped around their bodies), anthropomorphic fish people, penguins, armored skeletal people with unfitting shopping bags within their hands, and even a bug-eyed thing that just could not be described with a detailed explanation.
All of the strange things were starting to look somewhat commonplace for Mac, and that greatly bothered him. With that in mind, the lightweight boxer walked into a bank out of pure curiosity.
Everything felt so different, and even though there were not any groundbreaking differences between his world's banks and this world's banks. Blame the variety of creatures roaming around the whole place.
The boxer decided to sit on a nearby coach, closing his eyes and relaxing for a quick break. A fair amount of distance existed between the mansion and the city, which made the entire jog take a surprisingly long time. He slouched over, his body melting onto the irresistibly comfortable couch.
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
...
A few minutes later, he heard a window crash.
So much for quick breaks. Mac quickly put on his boxing gloves.
"MWA HA HA HA HA HA!" An armored space pirate with some sort of 90's plasma weapon roared as people screamed out of surprise and fear. "MY NAME IS-"
Little Mac got up, walked over to the terrorist before Star Punching him.
The space pirate's chin seemed to widen for a split moment before the pirate crashed through the roof of the bank. Blue skies hiding behind a crude hole signified the crystalline day.
Mac actually improved the signature Star Punch he had, though he never exactly used it on an alien before. Also, the alien talked pretty slowly, and that was enough for him to put on the boxing gloves he brought around with him.
After taking a deep breath, Little Mac shook his head. If he were Sandman, the alien would probably fly into the moon or something. The man in the pink jumpsuit looked around the bank that had gone quiet.
...Bank?
Oh yeah, Mac thought, now remembering where he was. I'm in a bank.
Everyone in the bank gave Mac an amazed look.
Mac gave everyone a blank look.
Suddenly, the sound of explosions erupted just outside of the bank. Turning around swiftly, the lightweight boxing champion leapt over the window that the space pirate happened to crash through. Landing shortly after the jump, the boxer left the one-floor building, his gloves close to his chest. For some reason, he had a notion that things were not going to end well.
There were three other intimidating space pirates running through the streets, bags of what appeared to be gold coins slung over their shoulders. Whatever stood in their way, they attempted to shoot down.
And Little Mac was in their way.
Now that I'm taking a closer look, he thought, doing his best to calm himself down for a possible battle, these aliens look really frightening. Where did they come from?
Frightening or not, they were harming the city. Mac was not one to run away and let others get hurt, even if he was not some super hero that everybody loved. And he also thought about testing some of the new techniques he learned on the gun-wielding freakshows. He did not know how their weapons functioned, and he had no means of being able to dodge a bullet.
...But if he had seen through Piston Hondo's Hondo Rush combo before, then that probably would have been more than enough to see through things such as bullets. He would have to be careful before going in.
Mac pulled his pink hood over his face. Doc Louis or Master Hand might recognize him if they were anywhere close to the city, but no one else had yet to see the boxer up-close.
Thus, he ran towards the aliens, not knowing that they were the same aliens that gave a certain bounty hunter a fair amount of trouble.
The three space pirates, unlike the particularly excited one Mac met earlier, immediately raised their weapons without talking. Cold blood seemed to run down their veins, but Mac's boiling adrenaline just might have outmatched their precision.
All of them were pointing straight at his head. Where would he go? How could he approach them? What could he use against them?
Then he noticed that all of them were right-handed, judging by the way they held their one-handed weapons.
There.
Mac dashed left before jumping towards the nearest space pirate. His glove collided powerfully against the alien's head. Sent airborne from the strong punch, the pirate flew straight towards one of his comrades, causing both of them to fall straight into a laundromat. They strangely landed straight into one of the laundry machines, which began to wash the two of them with great efficiency.
"Grr!"
The remaining space pirate stopped running, putting away his weapon before causing a golden blade to slide out of its left arm.
Uh oh.
Little Mac brought his gloves up to his face, his eyes sharply looking into the alien's. He saw nothing but two glowing yellow eyes and a lean body that belonged to a very mean creature.
Apparently, space pirates regularly did not speak, for the alien creature screeched before slashing at Mac. The boxer dodged left, then right, then right again. He then ducked from a horizontal slash that could have left him in two bloody french fries before doing a Happy Meal maneuver from a vertical slash.
...Okay, so now was not the time to think about stupid puns.
All fifteen slashes made by the vicious pirate only met contact with the air, with Mac continuously stepping back. Hissing at the lightweight boxer, the space pirate stepped back before raising its firearm.
Now.
As abruptly as he landed, Little Mac suddenly launched himself toward the alien, connecting a right hook against the alien's chest. He then immediately followed the hook with a jab, then another hook, and then a dozen phantom punches that clearly caught the creature off-guard. Swarms of punches pummeled the hostile creature that Mac had just met. Finally showing his opponent some mercy from his seemingly endless combination of hooks and jabs, Little Mac tightly clenched his right fist.
Landing his glove against the pirate's chin, Little Mac jumped towards the skies, spinning around like a drill. That alone was enough to knock out the alien creature, much to his surprise. As he fell back down to the ground, the boxer noticed something strange.
How were my attacks so effective against them? If I'm right, they had armor on them.
What Little Mac did not know was that a majority of the stronger fighters in the WVBA had the potential to destroy such things as "armor." Mr. Sandman, for example, did not know what armor even was in the first place.
Mac landed on his butt.
Oof.
Following his fall, the pirate he defeated followed suite, crashing onto the ground. Muttering out a perfect stream of curse words in its alien language, the creature fainted on-spot.
With the creature taken care of, the lightweight boxing champion looked around before standing back up. Dusting the back of his pants, Little Mac lightly stretched his wrists before turning.
The boxer jogged away quietly, planning on leaving the scene before anyone had the chance to go talk to him.
"Sir Macintosh!"
By the time Mac returned to the mansion, Robin arrived at the lobby. The white-haired man sat with a chessboard set up neatly. The lightweight boxer smiled at the excited man he would soon face in a game of Chess.
"You have come earlier than I thought, Sir Macintosh," Robin said, speeding through his words unknowingly.
Little Mac replied simply, "You too."
"Well then... Shall we begin?"
The tactician known as Robin had a strange personality that Mac found to be quite interesting. Somewhat clingy to topics that interested him, Robin had a childlike spirit of competition, along with a mindset of a genius. If only one method in solving a problem existed, Robin was the kind of person to come up with another method that worked in bizarre ways. In fact, Robin's strategies loosely resembled that of Mac's own strategies on the boxing ring, the only difference being that Robin knew how to make strategies involving a group of people.
A hero of a war was not to be underestimated, no matter what. Robin did eventually explain a little more on who he was, albeit a little reluctantly. The tactician feared that Mac would find the entire tale too confusing to understand, but the boxer simply found his story to be fascinating to listen to.
A war that ended by the one who began it... Robin did fight through something beyond comprehension. Perhaps he had much more wisdom than the boxer did, considering the philosophies that Robin lived up to for the sake of being not just a good tactician, but a good person as well.
Though, Little Mac still failed to understand five-sixth of what Robin just said. What he did know, however, was that Robin had more than what met his eye.
Maybe befriending him during his stay in the tourneys would be a good idea.
Mac lost the first game, then won the second. Meanwhile, Robin was having the time of his life, much to a hidden Lucina's worries.
Little Mac, however, did not know about what he would be facing that midnight...
For that night, something returned.