A/N: And here's the interlude from Bowser Jr.'s perspective. This one answers which of Bowser's backstories is the real one and also ties back to the "Blue Cowboy Assassin" from Chapter 26. But more on that in the closing note; I don't want to spoil anything….

Interlude: Staff Meeting

Hey there; me, Bowser Jr., again. Yesterday Mario made it to Dad's Lava Lair. Apparently he estimated it taking Mario a lot longer to get there and named the level "Bowser's Big Lava Power Party" with the expectation that Mario arriving there would coincide with Dad throwing his 275th birthday party. Apparently it didn't.

So this morning I awoke to hear Dad yelling, "I! HATE! MARIO!"

Welp, nothing out of the ordinary there. That's how Dad starts, like, 99% of his days: getting out of bed and professing his hatred for Mario. In fact, if Dad starts a day without yelling that, Kamek performs a mandatory physical on him.

But throughout the day today, that was basically all Dad said. His answer to every question, response to every statement, was, "I! HATE! MARIO!"

Early this afternoon, I saw a message tacked to one of the walls in the Galaxy Generator. It read: "ALL MINIONS NOT CURRENTLY ON ASSIGNMENT FIGHTING MARIO TO THE STAFF MEETING ROOM AT 4:00P.M.! NO-SHOWS WILL BE FIRED!" And forming decorative edging of-sorts around the edges of the paper were the words "I HATE MARIO" written over and over again.

Yeesh. This was serious.

I had no clue what said staff meeting would be about – staff meetings are notoriously unpredictable. One time it was to cross-examine all of us to figure out who the mole in our ranks was (it ended up being, fittingly, a Monty Mole), and the next time, we were all held hostage for over 19 hours until a Chomp confessed to being the cause of all the clogged toilets around the castle.

So once we were all in the staff meeting room, Dad shut the doors and then faced the massive 3,000 square foot table in the room. I couldn't be sure, but it seemed like, even though he wasn't talking, he was still making growling noises to the tune of "I! HATE! MARIO!"

After several minutes of this near-silence, one unlucky Goomba took his phone out of God-knows-where on his body and started playing Candy Crunch on it. Bowser immediately looked his way and said, "You. What are you doing?"

"Me?" the Goomba asked.

"No, your chair," Bowser snapped. "What are you doing?"

"I'm playing Candy Crunch, sir. It's a lot of fun. I'm up to level 2,845,395,128. Rumor has it that 10,000,000 more levels are going to be released this Friday, and I want to be all caught up by the time that happe-"

Dad breathed a stream of fire at the Goomba, incinerating him, his phone, and the chair.

Yikes.

"Okay, morons," Dad finally said in his usual awesomely condescending manner, "we need to do something about something. That something is the scourge that is Mario."

A Koopa raised his hand.

"What?" Bowser snapped.

"The something that's Mario," the Koopa said, "is he the something that something has to be done about, or the something that we're doing about something else?"

"What the heck are you babbling on about?"

Just shut up, Koopa. He just killed a Goomba, for crying out loud.

"Well, you mentioned two somethings, and then you said 'That something is the scourge that is Mario.' But it wasn't clear which something the something that's Mario is."

Another stream of fire and that Koopa was no more.

"So, Mario defeated me again yesterday, because what else is new?" Dad said. "First order of business, whose fault was that for even letting him make it to my planet?"

Well, we all knew that blame fell on the final two Hammer Bros. in the level for getting so caught up in throwing insults – and stupid ones at that – instead of hammers at Mario.

"However," Dad continued, "I'm not gonna dwell on that now, because I know from last year's Toilet-Clogging Trial that it takes forever for one of you nutjobs to fess up to anything. So I'm going to circle back to that. Because Mario beat me anyway, and this time, he didn't even FIGHT ME! He…he made me…feel something, something other than the rage I've felt 24/7 for the past few decades. And for that he needs to pay!"

"Yeah, Dad what exactly happened?" I asked. "This morning The Galaxy Times claimed you're, like, going insane or something."

"He got me thinking about my backstory," Dad said. "And for some stupid reason, I actually revealed it to Mario."

"Doesn't he already know your backstory?" Lemmy asked. "You know, how you were Baby Bowser and then there was all that nonsense with the Shroobs invading the Mushroom Kingdom, and you ended up teaming up with your older, future self?"

"Lemmy, for the ten thousandth time, the Mario and Luigi series never happened! The Mario Brothers think it did, but it was just a dream that Kamek put them in while I kidnapped Peach back in 2005, and for some reason they woke up thinking the dreams had actually happened years before. No, no, my real backstory, the humble beginnings I came from, and for some reason I found myself revealing it to him. And then…that feeling came."

"Despair?" Kamek suggested.

"No, that's not right."

"Fury?" I asked.

"No, no, we got all that fury slime out of my system."

"Sadness?" a Boo said.

"YOU KNOW I HATE THAT WORD!" Dad breathed fire at the Boo, but it passed right through him and incinerated an innocent Bullet Bill next to him. Well, innocent for now. For all I know, had he not died, he might've ended up failing Dad tomorrow.

"So why did this warrant a staff meeting?" a Thwomp asked.

"Because I now have a new plan to present to you all. I'm going to need to cut back on all your salaries to fund this, but I'm pretty sure it'll work."

Dad's taking money from us? Oh no, did he already blow through the funds he set aside for Super Mario Odyssey, as he's tentatively naming his next evil plot? That was fast. "Dad, you need more money for Odyssey?" I asked.

"No, not that," he said. He slammed this morning's issue of The Galaxy Times, which he had been holding, onto the staff meeting room's central table. It was open to an ad halfway through the paper, proclaiming that some bounty hunter named Cad Bane was having a "2 Hits for the Price of 1" deal.

"My salary was revoked entirely after I clogged your toilets last year, though," the guilty Chomp said. "So how are you gonna cut my salary?"

"I'm gonna halve the money I spend on your food, you fool," Dad said. "Instead of the wet organic food, we're switching to dry kibble made with genetic engineering."

The Chomp sighed.

"Back to the point," Dad said. "Yes, we are hiring this Cad Bane guy to whack Mario and Luigi for us. With our luck, he'll be successful and nobody will ever rescue Peach. He brags in this ad about how he's gone up against things called Jedi before, whatever that means, but I assume that's impressive in the bounty hunting world or something. But he was apparently the guy who killed Jay Gatshroom a couple weeks back too."

"Ugh," Kamek said. "I couldn't stand that guy. Wasn't he the one who always called people 'you old tennis ball, you'?"

"Exactly," Dad said. "I do question this bounty hunter's legitimacy a bit, given that in this ad he says he's well-known all over 'the galaxy,' but doesn't specify which galaxy."

Oh no; he was pulling the old "I'm-gonna-be-vague-about-my-past-accomplishments-so-you-can't-verify-my-credentials" trick.

"But it's worth a shot. And if he fails or chickens out or abandons his mission, he'll have the entire might of the Koopa Troop coming after him."

"Dad, do you think we should try tracking down that guy Deadpool instead?" I asked. "You know, the guy who crash-landed in the Fiery Flotilla earlier this month and probably sterilized Mario with that blow to the crotch?"

"No, because I have no way of tracking him down or contacting him. But this guy gives a phone number you can apparently use to contact him. I'll try setting up some sort of payment plan over the next several months; I'm not really sure if that's how this sort of thing works."

This was awesome! Ever since I was in kindergarten, I've always wanted to be a bounty hunter! I should get together a list of questions to ask this Cad Bane guy if the two of us get the chance to talk!

"Meeting's over; all of you get out of here," Dad said. "And for God's sakes, someone CLEAN THAT URINE OFF THE BATHROOM MIRROR! It wasn't funny nine weeks ago and it's still not funny now!"

A/N: So yes, Jay Gatshroom's killer was none other than Star Wars bounty hunter Cad Bane. And yes, he will be going after Mario. Not right away, but it's coming. Anyway, hope you enjoyed these chapters, and please R&R!

Also, I'm currently planning to write a prequel to this fic at some point in the future, centered on Mario's experiences during the events of Bowser's Fury. I've been replaying it recently, and I think it could be another pretty entertaining tale from this cynical Mario's perspective, especially having to team up with Bowser Jr. This probably won't be coming for quite a while, since currently I'm spending most of my time on "MGT" and "Avengers: Eleventh Hour," but I thought I'd put it out there now. Let me know any thoughts or ideas you have about the Bowser's Fury story – I've got basically none of the plot worked out, so at this point any suggestions you have I could easily work in :)

Next up: death by playground equipment, the further desecration of Mario's tux, and "Bumble Beginnings"!