Chapter 69: Purple Reign II: Purple Death from Outer Space

Suddenly, the Berry Planetoid (?!) came flying out of nowhere and smashed full-on into Sam (barely missing me, for that matter), flinging the rabbit across the planet. "BOIYOIIIIIIIING!" he screamed. Simultaneously, Bartholomew dropped to the ground and stopped rambling on about wetting himself, and the duct tape over my mouth vanished; I'm assuming Piancho's club also stopped bashing him over the head, but I couldn't actually see him anymore from where I was standing, so I didn't know for certain.

I stood up and shook off the water that the Berry Planetoid's crash-landing had drenched me in. Great, now who the flip was on the Berry Planetoid? Because given how close Sam and I were when the planetoid crashed into him, I had zero confidence that whoever was piloting the Berry Planetoid was actually aiming for Sam; for all I knew, they were trying to kill me, and were just a lousy shot.

Then Jacques's head poked over the side of the planet. "Hey Mario. How epic was that entrance?"

Wait a minute. It looked like Jacques's head, but with that godforsaken Not-Toad Brigade harassing me at every turn, this could just as easily have been Not-Jacques. There was only one way to know for certain: by asking him the one question that the Not-Toad Brigade has proven, time and again, unable to answer correctly: "What's Captain Toad's first name?"

"Bartholomew," Jacques said.

Okay, so this was Jacques. "Sure, your entrance was epic, but we've got big problems here. Remember Star Bunny? Well, he's back, he's got a real name this time, and he's got infuriatingly ambiguous superpowers to boot."

Daniel and Blue appeared beside Jacques. "Yeah, we know," Daniel said. "Sorry it took so long for us to get here. That blast Star Bunny used to cripple Starship Mario knocked out some of the systems on the Berry Planetoid here, but not enough to make it crash. It took a few minutes to get her back up and running fully."

"Well, now that you're here, come help us fight these Lumas or something." I turned to Mal. "Look, you and your team clearly know more about this…Purpleforce stuff than I do. So how the heck do we stop Sam, because I have no doubt that the Berry Planetoid hitting him dead-on did absolutely nothing to stop him."

"Who's Sam?" Daniel asked as he ran past me towards the battle.

"The Purpleforce Drainer is the only thing that can stop him," Mal replied. She turned and whistled at 8-Shirt Guy, who was currently wrestling with Lumalee for control of the latter's batons. "Lamar! I need you to get the Purpleforce Drainer and pass it back to me!"

He grunted and yanked on the batons to no avail. "Why can't…someone else…do it?"

"Because you're the fastest of all of us!" She summoned another fireball and slung it at Lumalee, who yelped and spun backwards through the air. "Go!"

Lamar nodded and took off sprinting towards the hut. Mal wasn't lying; he really was fast.

Meanwhile, the members of the Toad Brigade were helping to hold back the Lumas, as most of the Piantas were still uselessly writhing about on the ground and whining like a bunch of babies. I grabbed a club that one of the Piantas had dropped and was looking around for a target of choice when Lubba locked eyes with me.

"Mario!" he said. "There's no escape for you this time. No Starshroom to fly away on, no galaxies to fly to to get away from me." He nodded to several Lumas floating towards me. "Go get the guy in the purple shirt. Mario's mine."

Mal stepped between me and Lubba. "Look, Luma, from what I know about this universe, I'm not too fond of you, but I'll give you one chance to call off your forces, sit this out, and let us apprehend Sam like we came here to do."

"I'm not letting you do that," Lubba spat. "Sam is my friend. I'm not about to let you haul him off to some dank, smelly prison for doing nothing wrong."

I couldn't help but snark, "Really? Because that's exactly what you did to me when you locked me in your closet!"

"You stay out of this!"

Mal folded her arms. "Do you accept my offer or-?"

A blast of Purpleforce energy hit her in the side, throwing her onto a small island near the edge of the planet. I turned to see Sam ominously floating towards us, energy crackling all around him. "You've messed with me for the last boiyoinging time!" he chirped.

Two of the witches and the unicorn blasted at Sam with their various attacks to hold him off. Meanwhile, Lamar was still running towards the Purpleforce Drainer; Energy-Sword Witch, Crossbow Lady, the Piantas, the Toad Brigade, Percy, and Yoshi, who had finally recovered from Sam's attack, were fighting the main force of Lumas; Waluigi was now, it seemed, getting wedgied by two others; and the VamPuppet was still standing around counting Lumas a.k.a. being completely useless.

So it looked like it was going to come down to me vs. Lubba, one-on-one, after all. Lovely. I mean, yeah, technically he's my nemesis and whatever, but I really wouldn't have minded pawning off the final battle with him onto Mal or one of the other members of the Purpleforce Council who could just one-shot him into oblivion.

This duel was probably gonna end up being exceedingly stupid, but I couldn't keep my brain from playing "Duel of the Fates" as Lubba and I stared each other down.

Lubba floated towards me and gave what he probably thought was an intimidating shout but was really more like a constipated grunt. I spun the club around and prepared to swing it at Lubba, but then ended up smacking myself right in the thigh with the club. OW! I fell to my knees and the club landed in the water next to me with a splash.

Man, how the heck do all the people in the Toad Wars movies manage to swing their photonswords around like crazy and not hack off one of their own limbs in, like, two seconds?!

Lubba grabbed me by the crotch and lifted me up – of course, where else would a lowlife like him grab me by? He sneered in my face. "No one to save you now, Mario. You're all mine."

Suddenly, Baby Luma whacked Lubba in the face with my cap; Lubba yelped and dropped me….

…right on my face, causing me to get yet another gosh dang mouthful of wet sand.

"I forgot about you, you traitor," Lubba said to Baby Luma.

"I didn't forget about you, you butthead!" Baby Luma squealed.

"Jerk!"

"Doo-doo face!"

Well, this had gotten surprisingly infantile real fast.

Lubba swiped at Baby Luma, but the smaller Luma easily dodged. But then Lubba grabbed my dropped club from the water and swung it into Baby Luma. Club and Luma collided with a bizarre twang! sound, and Baby Luma drifted lazily through the air, his eyes crossed. Lubba grabbed him and raised the club again. I got to my feet and was about to yell something to get Lubba's attention, but Percy beat me to it.

"HEY!" he quacked at Lubba from several yards away. Both Lubba and I turned to face him. He held a Luma restrained by both of its arm-appendage-things, suspended in front of his beak. "Put Baby Luma down, or I eat this Luma!"

Lubba gasped. "You wouldn't."

"Oh, I very much would, quack quack."

"Lubba, would you please let the Baby Luma go?" Percy's hostage shouted. "I don't want to die!"

"Calm down, Lumalarry," Lubba said. "Everything's gonna be okay?"

Lumalarry? What the flip sort of name was that?

Percy scoffed. "Lumalarry? What the QUACK sort of name is that?"

Huh. Well, you know what they say about great minds….

Percy moved Lumalarry (*bursts out laughing*) closer to his beak. "I'm not messing around, Lubba. I'll do it!"

"Alright, fine," Lubba said. "Drop Lumalarry, and I'll let Baby Luma go."

"Ohhh, no, no, no. That's not the deal. You let Baby Luma go, then I put Lumalarry down."

I had to wonder if there was a dual meaning to Percy saying he would "put Lumalarry down."

Either way, I took advantage of Lubba being distracted by this verbal equivalent of a quick-draw duel he was locked in with Percy, and quietly got up and crept up on Lubba. All the other Lumas were busy fighting Yoshi, the Toad Brigade, the Piantas, or the Purpleforce Council, so it didn't look like any of them would be getting in my way.

As I crept up behind Lubba, I shot quick glances at the other fronts of the battle. Mal, the witches, and the unicorn seemed to have resorted to a policy of containment concerning Sam, as they were simply firing an unending salvo of magical bindings at him so he was forced to be constantly freeing himself, with no time to go on the offensive. And across the planet, Lamar had finally reached the hut, but the Lumas Lubba dispatched after him were close behind. Did he even have any superpowers? I mean, he was fast, but not full-on superhumanly fast, more like…peak-human-ability fast. Which didn't exactly give me much confidence about how he'd fare against a bunch of angry Lumas.

Suffice to say, Waluigi and the VamPuppet had set my baseline expectations for the usefulness of any of the Purpleforce Council's members pretty damn low.

"How do I know you're not just going to eat Lumalarry anyway if I let Baby Luma go?" Lubba demanded.

"How do I know that if I let Lumalarry go first, you're not just going to brain Baby Luma anyway?" Percy countered.

"You have my word."

"Well, you have my word."

"Your word doesn't mean anything to me."

"Well, your word doesn't mean anything to me!"

I looked around for something to hit Lubba over the head with to knock him out. The only thing I found was a fruit. Fruit? Well, that was officially useless, but at the very least, the presence of fruit probably meant that Yoshi could be hatched somewhere on this planet. So if he somehow managed to get himself killed in battle like back at Junior's Fearsome Fleet, I could just re-hatch him.

Well, in lieu of something harder like a coconut (seriously, this was a beach galaxy and there wasn't one coconut to be seen?), I guess my fist would have to do.

I prepared to take my swing at the back of Lubba's head, but then a stupid Luma had to go and shout, "Lubba, behind you! Look out!"

Lubba whirled around to face me, and my hastily-thrown punch merely hit him in the side of the gut. The attack did basically nothing to him, and he swung the club down towards Baby Luma. But at the last second, Yoshi's tongue shot out of nowhere and grabbed the head of the club, then retracted.

Only Lubba somehow managed to maintain his grip on the weapon and was pulled along with it. "Son of a-!" Yoshi shouted as Lubba barreled into him, knocking him over. In the resulting skirmish, Baby Luma somehow got free and gained possession of the club, and started spanking Lubba with it.

Percy shrugged. "Welp, that just happened." Then he opened his mouth wide and tossed Lumalarry inside.

…

Okay, I did not expect him to make good on that threat to eat Lumalarry. I guess if nothing else, it was kinda refreshing to meet someone else who has the balls to stick to their guns when they make a threat.

With Yoshi and Baby Luma giving Lubba a thorough, humiliating, and thoroughly humiliating beatdown, I looked around for some other mini-battle to partake in. I spied a few nearby Lumas ganging up on Bartholomew, so I headed over to help him out.

Meanwhile, Lamar had grabbed the Purpleforce Drainer and seemed to be scanning the planet. Mal looked away from Sam for a second and saw him. "Agatha, Rachel, Twilight, cover me!" she said to her compatriots, before backing up and firing a green fireball into the air like a flare. "LAMAR! I'M OPEN!"

He turned towards her, but suddenly the Lumas closing in on him lunged towards him. He scrambled around two of the Lumas, ducked under a third, and leapt out of the hut. He got to his feet and reared back his right arm, which held the Drainer. Then, just as all four Lumas plowed into him from behind, he sent the Purpleforce Drainer hurtling across the planet like a rocket.

…Okay, so maybe he did have superpowers after all.

Bartholomew, the Lumas, and I all stopped punching each other just to watch the Drainer arc across the sky over our heads. Something about that throw was strangely mesmerizing. It was a thing of beauty…the speed on the Drainer, the perfect spiral on it as it corkscrewed through the air.

"Woah…," one Luma gasped.

Another sniffled and said, "It's gorgeous…."

Sam saw the incoming object and fired his eye lasers at it, but one of the witches – Agatha? Rachel? Twilight? – summoned an energy shield to block the lasers. But this backfired, as Sam's attack ended up ricocheting off the shield and hitting the unicorn's horn, cracking it and flinging her backwards. And with Mal, the unicorn, and one witch incapacitated or otherwise occupied, Sam broke free of the shadowy tendrils the other witch was binding around him. He leapt at her and dealt her a Purpleforce-superpowered Star-Spin to the gut, flinging her into the water several yards away.

Mal, meanwhile, leapt into the air and grabbed the slightly overthrown Purpleforce Drainer one-handed. She pressed a few buttons on it, turned, and aimed it at Sam. The rabbit, meanwhile, shot his eye lasers at her and chirped, "I've boiyoinging had it with you!"

But just as the lasers were about to hit Mal, they were warped and redirected into the Drainer. Then a large cloud of purple light emerged from Sam, and was also sucked into the device. "Noooo!" Sam moaned. "My powers! Give them back, boiyoing!" He hopped towards Mal, but one of the witches hit him with an energy blast, flinging him towards me and Bartholomew. He started to get up, but Bartholomew kicked him in the head, knocking him unconscious.

"That's for possessing me, you creep!" Bartholomew said.

Suddenly, the Lumas Bartholomew and I had been fighting resumed their attack. "Look what that Toad did to Sam!" one of them shouted. "We must AVENGE HIIIIIIIIM – OW!"

Mal shot a fireball at the Lumas, knocking them out of the air. "Do those guys ever stop talking?" she asked.

"Not really," I said.

After that, with the super-OP'ed members of the Purpleforce Council no longer preoccupied keeping Sam at bay, taking care of the rest of the Lumas was fairly easy. Yoshi and Baby Luma had managed to knock out Lubba as well (so, I guess I did get to delegate that battle to someone else after all), and with their leader incapacitated, the Lumas were completely incompetent at forming a unified fighting force. Heck, a bunch of them weren't even bothering to fight us, and seemed to just be puzzling over how to outdo their mustache mischief by tying Waluigi's legs in a knot.

Several minutes later, Sam, Lubba, and the other Lumas were all restrained in more of those black shadow tendril things, the former two still unconscious and the rest of them shouting at us, though I had no idea what they were saying thanks to the gags over their mouths.

"Well, uh, thanks for your help," I said to Mal. "So…what do we do with these guys now?"

"We're taking Sam back to the Purpleforce Domain with us," Mal replied. "He killed three of our own before attacking you. He's ours to deal with. The others…we shouldn't bring them with us. We're only supposed to get involved in matters directly relating to the Purpleforce, which Lubba and the other Lumas don't constitute." She sighed. "But…I'll make an exception this one time if you want. I know how big of a pain in the ass these Lumas have been for you, and how incapable you are of keeping them captured."

…She just had to throw in that little dig at the end, didn't she?

But either way, she had a point. I was getting sick and tired of one breakout after another from Lubba and his cohorts, no matter how securely I thought I'd captured them, due to ridiculously absurd, unforeseeable circumstances like the Star Ball crashing into Starship Mario at the Rolling Masterpiece Galaxy, and now Sam blowing the Starship out of the sky.

"Sure," I said. "You want to take them, go right-"

"Hold it!"

I turned around to see Head Honcho Piancho approaching us, with what looked like a giant welt underneath the bandages wrapped around his head. He pointed to Sam, Lubba, and the Lumas. "These troublemakers have caused havoc in our lovely Starshine Beach Galaxy." He beat his chest. "Head Honcho Piancho VI claims jurisdiction over this!"

Oh my gosh…he was Head Honcho Piancho VI?! Which meant that when he complained that Sam blasting the Purpleforce Drainer across the planet damaged the statue of Head Honcho Piancho VI, he was talking about a statue of…himself. So he was one of those weirdos who insist on talking about themselves in the third person.

Uh huh. Well, that was all I needed to know about him.

Mal crossed her arms. "Sam stole the Purpleforce from us and used it to attack you, giving us jurisdiction over this. The others…." She turned to me. I shrugged. "…you can take Lubba and the Lumas into custody if you want."

I didn't really care whether the Piantas or the Purpleforce Council ended up with the Lumas, as long as they weren't being held captive on Starship Mario anymore where they could be set free by another improbable stroke of rotten luck. If the Piantas ended up with them, then I'd just make sure that once Starship Mario was fixed, I never came back to this galaxy again.

Head Honcho Piancho shook his fists and pointed to his bandaged head. "But Sam's the one Head Honcho Piancho wants the most! He's the one who committed this dastardly deed against me!"

"And before he came here, he killed three of our own," Mal argued. "Triple homicide trumps blunt force head trauma." Her eyes flashed bright green for a second as she glared at Piancho.

Piancho put up his hands defensively. "Okay, okay. My apologies. Head Honcho Piancho agrees to your deal. You get Sam, we get the Lumas. So sayeth Head Honcho Piancho."

Oh my gosh, this third-person thing was getting out of hand. I refused to listen to this garbage anymore, so I instead headed over to Starship Mario, which was being looked over by the Toad Brigade. "How's it coming?" I asked Bartholomew. "How long do you think it'll take to fix?"

Bartholomew sighed. "A few days, probably, and that's just to fix everything absolutely necessary to make the Starship spaceworthy again. All the electronics are busted. We're gonna have to reboot the ship and order replacements for basically everything."

Great, so that meant I'd be stuck here for a few days. Stuck here with Lubba, the Lumas, and my severe reservations about how securely they would be held captive in that time span, given my lousy luck in such matters.

"Alright, well, we'll be heading back to the Purpleforce Domain now," Mal said. "The bindings around the Lumas won't last once we pass through the portal. Is there somewhere here that you can contain them before we go?"

"Oh, yes," Piancho said. "We have many cells beneath the surface where we can hold them. Damp, moldy, cells filled with the constant, echoing sound of dripping water. I assure you, the Lumas will be thoroughly miserable down there. Come, I'll show you the way." He beckoned Mal after him. She enchanted the restrained Lumas with green magic and levitated them next to her, then followed Piancho.

Well, if I was gonna be trapped on this planet for several days, there was one thing that would make it a bit more bearable. I turned to one of the Piantas who was still hanging out nearby. "Hey, you. Are there TVs anywhere on this planet? I had one in the Starship but it's probably wrecked now." I would make sure to order another one with the replacement parts for Starship Mario, but after the day I'd had, I was gonna need TV that night. And I didn't care if Baby Luma gave me grief about not honoring our every-other-day agreement, but so help me God, I was gonna be watching The Punishroom. If, on top of all this other nonsense, I had to sit through Baby Luma's stupid Hallmushroom Christmas movies, I was gonna end up taking one of the Piantas' clubs and bashing my brains out with it.

But the Pianta suddenly gasped as though I'd just cursed at him out of nowhere. "No, there are no TVs on this planet!" he shouted. "Why would you say such a thing? Television is the work of the devil!"

…

Sure, because what I really needed in that moment was another reason to hate Piantas.

Instead of saying anything, I bit my tongue and walked away. The only thing that could possibly make this situation worse would be getting stuck on this planet for several days with not just a group of uptight, club-wielding Piantas, but a group of hostile uptight, club-wielding Piantas.