A/N: Welcome back! I'm back to the usual three chapters per post this time around. Also, like I did last year, on August 25th (the two-year anniversary of the start of "MGT") I'll post a special Mario's Galactic Tale Annual installment, which will be composed of three short tales that help set up what will be coming next in the MGTU. Until then, please read, review, and enjoy!
I do not own Super Mario.
Chapter 65: Washer Woes
Upon arriving back on Starship Mario, I saw that I now had 30 Power Stars and 14 Comet Medals. If this quest worked by the same rules as my first galactic adventure, I was halfway to being able to reach Bowser's final base, since that required 60 Power Stars in my first galactic adventure. Then again, this adventure had already thrown a whole bunch of rules from the first time around right into the big, cosmic woodchipper, so I wasn't betting any money on needing 60 Power Stars this time around.
I contemplated what to do next. I could either head back out there and see what the two galaxies I'd unlocked by completing "Huge Trouble with Big Wigglers" were…or I could take a break to the slightly more tolerable task of unpacking more of the boxes on the helm to further repair the Starship. I decided on the latter. At the very least, assembling nightstands and hooking up appliances followed a set of logic that my adventuring beyond the Starship most certainly did not.
…Or so I thought.
See, assembling the first nightstand went fine, but then I decided to switch gears and hook up the washer. I opened the flaps of the washer's box, and sitting on top of the appliance itself was the sheet of paper that (I'm assuming) explained how to hook it up. Only, in a twist of rotten luck that would only happen to me, the writing on the paper had somehow ended up getting smudged beyond legibility, so I had no flippin' clue what the flippin' flip it was trying to tell me.
"Maybe we can still hook it up ourselves," Baby Luma said. "Well, yourself. I'm too small to be of any help."
I pushed the washer off the helm, through the interior of the Starship, and down to the laundry room. Where my situation got worse still.
See, there were four sockets, all the same size, in the wall that the washer had to be hooked up to: one red, one black, one orange, and one teal. And there were four corresponding hoses, all the same size, in the back of the washer that had to be connected to the sockets: one pink, one green, one purple, and one that was covered in the words "TACO TUESDAY" repeated over and over in yellow lettering for no apparent reason. Whatever happened to the good ol' days, when red went into red, green went into green, black went into black, and the days of the week weren't associated with random foods just for the sake of alliteration?
"Well, huh," Baby Luma said. "This is…interesting."
Gee, ya think?
So I headed into my room and sat down at the laptop I'd commandeered from whoever its former owner was, the one that that Luma was using to look up different torture devices when Lubab trapped me earlier in the week. I figured there were probably instructions for setting up the washer online somewhere.
Yeeeeeeaaaaaahhhhhhno.
The company that made the washer, Gearmo Manufacturing LLC, apparently didn't even have a website; it seemed the only way you could buy their products was through UPS. So I headed to the UPS website to see if the instructions were included somewhere on the page to buy the washer.
They were not.
Only then did I notice that the washer had gotten one star, based on 11,596 reviews. Usually I don't pay any attention to the reviews something gets, because the few times I've bothered reading them, the bad reviews are always people bitching about stupid stuff like (I wish I were making this up) "i ordered this toaster in grey and when i opened the box it was the wrong color the color it showed online was #808080 on my hex color palette and the color that came was #8c8c8c this sort of error is unacceptable f*** you Toadwork Industries."
Welp, it turned out this time I should've read the reviews beforehand, because for once the twist of rotten luck I ran into did not only happen to me. Everyone who ordered the washer said that the instructions were smudged, there was no way to contact Gearmo Manufacturing to get the proper instructions, and the hoses were all the wrong colors (someone even went spouting off on the Taco Tuesday thing for three whole paragraphs). And then I read another review saying that the reviewer tried randomly inserting hoses into sockets until they got the washing machine to work, but they hooked it up wrong and the washer exploded, which sucked because randomly inserting hoses was my backup plan.
Great, so I had a washer, but had no idea how to use it.
Maybe the Toad Brigade could figure out what to do.
So I headed up to the helm and called down into the helm hole: "Bartholomew, would you come up here for a minute? I need your help."
Bartholomew walked to the edge of the hole. "Oh, hey Mario. Sure, I'll be right up…on one condition."
Oh great. "What?"
"You agree to answer any and all questions I ask you about the multiverse from here on out…and you let us sing the Toad Brigade Happy Work Song as we do whatever it is you need our help with."
"Goodbye."
Great, I could feel my relationship with the Toad Brigade was beginning to freeze over too. The days of being able to safely call them my allies were probably numbered at this point. Before I knew it they'd be staging their own mutiny and trying to break Lubba out of prison or something.
"Well, fiddlesticks," Baby Luma said, and I fought the urge to inform him that "fiddlesticks" is the dumbest word in all of existence. "Thanks for not giving in, Mario. I hate that song. But if they won't help us, then who else is there who would know how to set up that washer?"
I was struck by a profound sense of sadness that this was the level I'd sunk to: being puzzled over how to set up a flippin' washer. Come on, I was a plumber! This sort of stuff is what I do! Was I…past my prime? Were my best days behind me?
Shut up, Mario. Have a midlife crisis some other time.
To (a bit belatedly) answer Baby Luma's question, no, there wasn't anyone else who could help us. I had no reason to believe either Yoshi or Percy would know how to properly hook up a washing machine/bomb without accidentally detonating it. Lubba's cohorts might know what to do, since they'd been on the Starship from the beginning, but there was no way I was letting them out of the Warp Pipe (or, in the Co-Star Luma's case, the closet) and risking another full-scale uprising over this stupid washer.
So now, after years of fighting all sorts of despicable villains threatening the Mushroom Kingdom and/or Sarasaland, I'd finally been bested by…a washing machine.
FML.
Well, with this nonsense throwing a wrench in my plans, I decided that maybe continuing my mission to rescue Peach was the better option after all. Sure, the daily goings-on on the Starship usually make more sense (although that clearly was not the case today), but at least battling the Koopa Troop, I could punch whatever was pissing me off. If I tried punching the washing machine, I'd probably just get hurt.
Gearmo Manufacturing…I swear to God, these Gearmos are these most annoying creatures on my galactic adventures. And yes, I know I've probably said that exact same thing about some other creature previously; the holder of that title changes on practically a daily basis. And today, it was Gearmos.
I stepped up to the steering wheel, grabbed it, and steered Starship Mario past the Supermassive Gala – wait one flippin' minute! Now the Starship was detecting that there was a Secret Star in the Supermassive Galaxy? Where?! There was no Hungry Luma, no hidden Warp Pipe, so where the flip was it?
Wait a minute…there was one place I hadn't explored: the underside of that seemingly pointless planet right before the one with the Big Wigglers. Dang it, there was probably something down there.
Yeah, no way was I heading back to that galaxy this soon. That Secret Star could wait…or maybe just never be collected, depending on what my Power Star situation was looking like as I got closer to Bowser's final base.
So anyway, the two galaxies that were unlocked now were called the Honeyhop Galaxy (what did I tell you? Honey-themed.) and the Flipsville Galaxy. Welp, as I already said, the Honeyhop Galaxy was out, because of the threat that Bee sent to me after the Great Honeybloom Bee Chase. Honestly I probably would've skipped over that galaxy anyway just because honey-themed galaxies are annoying, but this gave me a more concrete reason to do so.
Which left the Flipsville Galaxy, the one whose icon was a bunch of small rooms. But what the flip did "Flipsville" mean? That everyone there would be flipping me off as soon as I arrived? The "-ville" suffix struck me as odd, since that would imply a town or city, which seemed at odds with the whole "galactic" theme here. Unless, of course, the Flipsville Galaxy was an ecumenopolis or something, in which case I could officially say it had the most inaccurate galaxy icon I'd ever come across.
So I flew towards the galaxy, and continuing the streak of dread-inducing mission titles I'd been subjected to recently, the first level in the galaxy was titled "Flip-Flopping in Flipsville." Because now I was considering something I hadn't considered before: the uncanny similarity between the name of this galaxy and the name of the Flip-Swap Galaxy. Great, so for all I knew, this galaxy would be a giant city made entirely of those gosh dang Red-Blue Panels. And if the Flip-Swap Galaxy was just that galaxy that introduced them to this particular adventure, who the heck knew what even harder gimmicks Bowser had planned with them down the road?!
Welp, it was this, risk being stung to death in the Honeyhop Galaxy, go back on my word and head back to the Supermassive Galaxy, or see how many Star Bits the Hungry Luma on the World 4 map was demanding. I still was not risking backtracking through that multiversal mess at the end of World 3.
Flipsville Galaxy it was.
