Chapter 80: The Great Freezy Flake Star Bunny Chase
The Launch Star shot me the short distance to the larger snowy planet. As before, it featured a bunch of snowy trees, snow Goomba statues, and Li'l Burps, as well as the lone Chance Cube that I still suspected would instigate a boss battle with Bowser if I spun it and it landed Bowser-side-up. But now the planet also featured a bunch of opaque crystals, and a Rock Mushroom in the lower area. Oh, and the snow Bowser statue that was at the far end of the planet last time was gone, and the ice tunnel that had been behind it was walled off.
So, in lieu of that, I had no doubt that the way off this planet was hidden in one of the snow statues.
I ran down to the lower area of the planet (and defeated several Li'l Burps), then made my way over to the Rock Mushroom. But also present on the planet were a pair of Star Bunnies. And as I neared one of them, he hopped towards me. "I hid a buncha Star Chips in the snow! Can you find 'em all, boiyoing?!"
WHYYYYYYYY?!
I turned to him. "Why did you hide the Star Chips in the snow? Why couldn't you have just left them out for me?" Here we go again, A-minor creatures making my journey harder than it needs to be for whatever asinine reason the Star Bunny was undoubtedly gonna throw up.
"Because originally there was an intact Launch Star on this planet, boiyoing!" the Star Bunny said. "But then my buddy and I overheard the Li'l Brrs-"
Li'l BURPS!
"-plotting to steal the Launch Star so you couldn't complete this mission. So under the cover of night, boiyoing, we took the Launch Star and broke it into five Star Chips and hid them from the Li'l Brrs. We were just trying to help you. Boiyoing."
I scoffed. "No you weren't! If you were really trying to be helpful, you would've left the Launch Star intact and just gotten rid of all the Li'l Burps. Because all you need to do is Star-Spin near them and then hit them, and I know you Star Bunnies are all capable of Star-Spinning."
The Star Bunny cocked his head. "What's a Li'l Burp, boiyoing?"
Oh my gosh, I was done with this stupidity.
I grabbed the nearby Rock Mushroom and, resisting the urge to mow down the Star Chip-hiding Star Bunny, rolled into a nearby Goomba statue. Sure enough, it exploded into a mound of snow…and a Star Chip. I grabbed it and then looked around for the next-closest sculpture.
The next Goomba also yielded a Star Chip, and then my journey took me over near the second Star Bunny. As I passed by, he chirped, "I never said I hid any Star Chips around here! Nope! Definitely no-"
Suddenly, he was interrupted by something going "Boiyoing! Boiyoing! Boiyoing! Boiyoing!" over and over again.
"Oh," he said. "Hang on, boiyoing. That's my ringtone." He reached into his pocket, pulled out his phone, and held it up to his ear. "Boiyoing? Oh, hey Sidney. Sup?"
Seriously? Star Bunnies answer the phone by cursing and everything's a-OK; I do it and everyone calls me rude.
To quote Scarlet Witch from Doctor Strangetoad in the Multiverse of Madness: "That doesn't seem fair."
I sighed and rolled towards the nearest Goomba sculpture to the Star Bunny. But when I stopped rolling and emerged from my rocky shell, I saw that I had missed the Goomba by a fraction of an inch, and instead blasted a nearby snowy tree into a few snowballs. Wait, what? These trees weren't actual trees covered in snow, they were just…snow sculpted to look like trees?
Well, that was just stupid.
"Oh boiyoing, that's terrible!" the Star Bunny talking on his phone said. "What happened?"
I turned back towards him. Well, now that I knew these trees could be destroyed, I was more suspicious of the tree right behind him than the Goomba several yards away. I turned into my rock form again and rolled towards the tree. As expected, it exploded into snow and revealed a Star Chip.
"PFAH!" the Star Bunny spat, shaking his head. "Could you repeat that, please? Someone just blew up a tree behind me and I got a bunch of snow in my ears."
I grabbed the third Star Chip and looked around the rest of the planet. There were several more sculptures of Goombas and trees, so I figured I'd just knock them off one at a time until I found the last two Star Chips.
"Did he, now?" the Star Bunny said. "You're sure?"
Didn't really care what he was talking about, just wanted to find those last two Star Chips, thank you very much.
After rolling through a few more sculptures and not finding either of the other two Star Chips, I stumbled upon a Warp Pipe hidden inside one of the trees. Okay, maybe one of them was down there. I walked over to the pipe and leapt down it.
I wasn't sure what I'd expected to find on the other side, but it certainly wasn't what was waiting for me: an underground vault with stone walls, a floor that was split between ice and colored stone blocks…and that monkey from the Fluffy Bluff Galaxy. The one with the sunglasses and pineapple hair who I'd initially thought was a robot the Koopalings created. What was his name? Chimpy Kong? Something ending in Kong, right?
"Well, well, well…," he said. "You just rolled into the domain of The Chimp."
Really? His name was just The Chimp? Coulda sworn there was more to it than that.
He continued, "You've heard about my gaming skills, right?"
I stood there, waiting for him to continue, but he refused to say anything else. After probably twenty or thirty seconds had passed, he leaned towards me and said, "Well? Have you heard about my gaming skills or not, yo?"
"Sure, yeah," I said. "Yeah, your gaming skills. They're, uh, they're something."
"Which of my speedrun videos is your favorite, man?"
"Uh…'Dino Piranha Speed Run'?" I wasn't even entirely sure I knew what the flip he was asking me.
"What?" The Chimp asked, confirming my suspicion that I'd answered wrong. "I've never heard of a video game called Dino Piranha. Sounds sick, though. What's it about?"
"It's, um, it's the one where you end up on this planet with this big, Piranha Plant-type monster, and you've gotta fight it by hitting it in the head over and over with its own tail club. And…yeah, that's about all there is to it."
"That's it? What about the NPCs? How high-quality's their dialogue, yo? You know what I always say: a game's only as good as its worst NPC."
…Okay, what in all mommy-flipping, Yoshi-farting Dorrie turds were we even talking about anymore?
"Look, are you hiding a Star Chip down here?" I asked. "That's really all I'm looking for. Those Star Bunnies up on the surface hid five of them around the planet, I found three, and I'm looking for the other two."
"Star Chips?" The Chimp asked. "No, there's no Star Chips down here, but I might have-"
"Okay, thanks for your time, then," I interjected, turning and jumping back into the Warp Pipe. This wasn't a conversation I wanted to drag on any longer than absolutely necessary.
But I had barely reemerged from the Warp Pipe on the surface than something hit me in the head, flinging me onto the ice-covered lake nearby.
What the FLIP?!
I turned around to see the two Star Bunnies glaring at me. Oh you've gotta be kidding me.
"You know, I'm starting to think we should've let the Li'l Brrs steal that Launch Star after all, boiyoing!" one of them said. "All this time we thought you were a hero, and then I hear about this."
"Look, whatever you've heard about Sam, I'm sure it's been blown way out of proportion," I said. "If you want him set free, take it up with the Piantas. Their Head Honcho claimed jurisdiction over-"
"What the boiyoing are you going on about?" the other Star Bunny asked. "And who the heck is Sam? No, I'm talking about you collapsing my friend Sidney's cabin on top of him just because you thought he was a wimp for being scared of that snow monster that's plaguing the galaxy."
Oh.
My.
GOSH!
Do…do people ever get tired of twisting the truth just to paint me as this monster I'm not?
"And technically it's not even Sidney's cabin you destroyed," the Star Bunny continued. "It's Simon's cabin. Sidney's only there because-"
"Yeah, because Simon Airbnb-ed the cabin to Sidney, I heard all this from him already," I groaned, getting up. "Look, I didn't mean to wreck his cabin, alright? This is the first time I've used a Rock Mushroom, and I accidentally rolled into his cabin because I didn't know how this power-up works. I'm sorry, and it won't happen again."
"'Accidentally'?" the first Star Bunny scoffed. "Like how you've been 'accidentally' destroying all the sculptures all over this planet, boiyoing?"
I pointed at them. "You're the ones who hid the Star Chips in them! What was I supposed to do?"
"You were supposed to only destroy the ones with Star Chips in them!"
"They all look exactly the same, you idiots!"
The first Star Bunny elbowed his partner in crime. "Did you hear that boiyoinging load?" He waved his stubby arms around in mock anger and did an exaggerated, borderline racist, impression of my Italian accent. "'They-a all look-a exactly-a the same!' And he calls us idiots, boiyoing."
"Let's get him," the second Star Bunny said.
I got up and frantically looked around for other possible hiding places for the last two Star Chips. There was another tree next to the lake, and a final tree and Goomba back at the higher starting area. And if those didn't work, I just realized, the opaque crystals scattered all over the planet might be hiding the last two Star Chips. I was hesitant to try them, though, because crystals also occasionally concealed enemies, and unlike their transparent counterparts, these crystals didn't allow me to see if what I was about to set free was then going to turn and attack me.
I curled into a rock again and tumbled towards the tree next to the lake. Which was significantly more painful than rolling across the snow, because with every rotation, my nose was smashing down onto something hard instead of something soft and cushiony. I kept yelping in pain as I tumbled towards the tree and finally crashed into it.
Nothing was inside it. Great, so I subjected my nose to that torture for nothing.
I got up and turned around to see the Star Bunnies hopping across the frozen lake towards me. Deciding I would only start smashing open the crystals as a last resort, I started long-jumping back towards the top of the planet and the last two remaining snow sculptures.
This was just completely ridiculous. Aside from my frequent verbal spats with the Piantas of Isle Delfino back in 2002, I had never been forced to suffer through this many encounters with openly hostile A-minor creatures in all my 30 years of going on these stupid adventures. But even there it was just Piantas. Here it was Star Bunnies, Lumas, Whittles, Bees, probably Gearmos too eventually, on thin ice with the Piantas, and at this point I wouldn't be surprised if the Penguins come after me at some point for associating with Percy given how un-Penguin-ly aggressive he tends to be.
I reached the top of the planet and rolled into the snow Goomba first, revealing a Star Chip hiding in it. Four down, one to go. No doubt the other one was in the snow tree, and then once I collected that one I could get out of here.
Suddenly, a third Star Bunny(?!) landed right in front of me out of nowhere, shouted, "BOI…YOIIIING!", and Star-Spun me in the gut. OW! I flew backwards towards the snow tree as the Star Bunny hopped toward me.
I crawled backwards away from him. "Where the flip did you come from?"
"My cabin, boiyoing!" he shouted. "Rather, what used to be my cabin."
Wha-? This was Sidney? How the heck did he get from his planet to this-
Wait a second.
Oh you have gotta be kidding me.
The LAUNCH STAR! He must've used the Launch Star on his planet to fly here. Because all you need to be able to do to use a Launch Star is Star-Spin, which Star Bunnies are capable of doing. Oh great, so even if I reassembled the Launch Star to get off this godforsaken planet, all three Star Bunnies would probably follow me right to the next planet!
I stood up. "What happened to being scared of that red-nosed snow monster?"
"I'm starting to think those stories I heard about that snow monster were actually prophecies, boiyoing," Sidney said. "Prophecies of you! You're covered in snow, your nose is looking pretty red and smashed-up, and, well, you're a monster, boiyoing."
Is…is there some sort of secret lottery I don't know about that's promising money to whoever can come up with the absolute dumbest lie/assumption about me? Because it's like every hater I come across is actively trying to come up with an even more moronic basis for their hatred than every previous one I've heard.
I turned around and rolled into the snow tree. Oh great, there was nothing in it. So that meant the final Star Chip must've been in one of the crystals in the lower area of the planet. I turned around; the trio of Star Bunnies was closing in on me. I wagered the only way I'd be able to get past them in time was by turning into a rock again and rolling to their left, then off the edge of the drop-off to the lower section of the planet.
"Where you gonna go now, huh, boiyoing?" Sidney taunted. "There's nowhere to run, so let's just get it over!"
Don't you quote Evanescence at me! You're a bad guy; you haven't earned the right to quote Evanescence!
I went to spin, curled into my rocky, spherical form, and rolled past the Star Bunnies off the precipice. Once I was already falling it occurred to me that maybe I could've taken out the Star Bunnies by rolling right at them. But then again, knowing my luck, the fact that that seemed like it should work was all the confirmation I needed to know that it would, in fact, not work.
I crashed to the ground (thankfully not on my nose – snowy ground or otherwise, that would've been painful) and kept rolling around, but had no idea where the heck I was going. Finally I rolled into a crystal and reverted back to my normal, walking form. All that was inside the crystal was a bunch of Star Bits. I turned around to see the Star Bunnies Three hopping down the slope towards me. Great; which crystal should I try next?
In a stroke of improbable luck, the next crystal I shattered contained the fifth Star Chip. I quickly grabbed it, and a Launch Star appeared nearby….
…right behind the approaching Star Bunnies.
Let's see, I could try rolling around them, but I knew there was no way that would work, because unless I'm rolling in a straight line, I have no way of knowing where I'm going. I could try running around them, but no doubt they would know what I was trying to do and just cut me off.
Then I remembered my thought about rolling directly into the Star Bunnies. I still somehow doubted that would be enough to defeat them, but maybe it didn't matter if it would be or not. Maybe all that mattered was that the Star Bunnies think it would be enough to defeat them – which I didn't see any reason to doubt – and thus hop aside and let me into the Launch Star.
So I aimed myself towards the Star Bunnies, balled up again, and started rolling.
Next thing I knew, something hit me in the nose (AGAIN?!) and I was sent hurtling backwards, no longer with my rocky shell around me. I flopped onto the icy lake once more and sat up, moaning.
"Dang, Sidney, how'd you do that?" one of the other Star Bunnies said as the three hopped towards me.
"Aw, shucks," Sidney stupidly said. "It was nothing really. I've just got really good foot-eye coordination. Waited for his face to be aimed towards us and then…." He leapt and Star-Spun. "…gave 'im the ol' what-for, boiyoing."
So he Star-Spun my face? That's what knocked me out of my rocky shell? The exact same thing I had to do to knock Bowser out of his rocky shell in my first galactic adventure?
Yeah, that settles it, he was using a Rock Mushroom during that battle.
Dang it, why was every Star Bunny I encountered on this quest proving so infuriatingly competent at fighting me. Then again, who was I kidding, I knew why: because they could Star-Spin. Suddenly I was grateful that Bowser can't Star-Spin, or no doubt fighting him each time would be even harder.
Well, I mean, he did kinda Star-Spin when he used his weird dark matter twirl attack or whatever he called it in my first galactic adventure. But even then, he only used it during one of our battles, and then seemingly got bored with it after a couple tries and went back to trying to ground-pound me.
I staggered to my feet and realized that my nose was clearly very badly swollen, given that it was taking up about a third of my field of vision as opposed to the fifth of my vision it usually dominates. Dang it, that did it. These Star Bunnies were gonna pay.
I wasn't sure how they were gonna pay, but that was irrelevant.
I looked around for any alternative ways to get past them. I could try going back to the top of the planet again and rolling down towards the Launch Star, but I didn't trust that the Star Bunnies wouldn't see through that, give up on chasing me, and instead just stay back to form a perimeter around the Launch Star. That would be the smart thing to do, and it seemed that Star Bunnies and Topmaniac were my only two enemies that I couldn't bank on making stupid moves at every turn.
"Are you gonna do something or what?" Baby Luma snapped. "Come on, they're just three rabbits. We've got a Power Star to collect here!"
What the heck was his problem today? "Oh, and I suppose you're sitting on a brilliant way out of this? What, are you gonna crumb-clump together another laser to blast them with?"
"You think I need a laser to defeat these clowns? Ha. Watch and learn." With that, Baby Luma grabbed my cap and flew towards the Star Bunnies.
"Seriously, Mario?" Sidney laughed. "You're sending a baby to fight your battles for you? Wow, that's pathet-"
Baby Luma swung the cap back and smacked Sidney across the face with it. The Star Bunny grunted and faceplanted into the snow. The other two Star Bunnies gasped, and Baby Luma took advantage of their momentary distraction to take them out too. He swung the cap back in the other direction to hit the second Star Bunny, then whipped it through the air and clocked the third right in the nose. Both of them remained standing for a second before falling over.
"Call me a baby one more time, I dare you!" Baby Luma shouted. "Well? I'm waiting! Call me a baby!"
"Hey, it's okay, calm down," I said. "Come on, look, the Launch Star – let's get in it."
Baby Luma exhaled and floated back over to me, landing on my head. "Let's go."
…Yeah, I had no idea what was going on with him today. I was just glad that in this instance his newfound anger issues were benefiting me.
So before the Star Bunnies could recover from their cap-whacking, I ran over to the Launch Star, got in, and flew on to the next planet.
The Launch Star shot me straight up towards the new planets I'd seen while approaching the galaxy. But in an unprecedented stroke of ass-over-end backwards logic, halfway to the planet, everything around me vanished in a whiteout. What the flip? Where the heck did this snowstorm come from? Everything around me was clear one second, and then the next I could barely see my gloves right in front of my face (granted, it didn't help that my gloves were the exact same color as everything else around me, but still, I'm sure the effect would've been the same if my gloves were neon green or orange). What, were there some sort of cloaking devices around the planet or something? So that from the outside the snowstorm wasn't visible? But if that was the case, then why wasn't all this snow falling past the cloaking devices onto the planet I'd just come from, which was directly below it?
*sigh*
Do you…do you see why I get so fed up with these adventures?
I landed in a mostly fenced-in area at the start of the planet. The wind whipped and howled around me, driving snow into my face. I squinted against it. I could just barely make out a checkpoint flag ahead of me, near another tree made of snow. I snagged the checkpoint flag and then continued through the small gap in the fence beyond it that seemed to be the only way to advance. Through the gap, the fence slanted away from me to both the left and right, so I figured the area of the planet I'd now entered was wider than the one with the checkpoint flag.
First I headed to the left, but upon finding nothing there except a coin and then a dead end drop-off, I backtracked and headed right. In that direction I found several blocks, a Li'l Burp, and another snow Goomba sculpture that I was dismayed to realize I had no means of destroying without a Rock Mushroom or Fire Flower. But as I continued exploring after finding that, a shout drifted towards me on the wind.
"Where the boiyoing are you, Mario?!"
Well, it certainly hadn't taken the Star Bunnies long to recover and follow me through the Launch Star. At least in this blizzard there was no way they'd be able to see me. And a quick look behind me showed that the snow was quickly concealing my footprints, so they wouldn't be able to track me that way either.
Now I just had to hope they didn't have some other bogus trick they could employ to find me like smelling where I'd been or seeing in x-ray or infrared or something.
Next I found a Warp Pipe that I decided I would ignore unless I'd exhausted every other option and there was clearly no other way off the planet, because the last thing I wanted was for it to lead to another useless bonus area like The Chimp's room, and then when I reemerge from the pipe I get ambushed by the Star Bunnies again.
After encountering another Li'l Burp, I turned down a path next to a large rock formation and ended up in another area inhabited by…oh crap, another Star Bunny! I quickly noticed that there was another exit from this area, marked by a lone coin, so I dashed towards that. It looked like it led down a slide of some sort, which I wasn't exactly thrilled about given my past bad experiences with slides. But more than I wanted to avoid another slide, I wanted a way to get away from this Star Bunny, so I kinda had to take what I could get.
But as I ran away, the Star Bunny called, "The wind and snow makes everything white! That deep WHOOSH from here goes right through my head! Boiyoing!"
Against my better judgment, I turned around. "What?"
"I was just saying how I can barely see anything in all this snow. Hey, have you heard the stories about the snow monster with the big, red nose?"
"…Yes?" I warily said, watching the path behind him for any signs of the other Star Bunnies catching up to me.
"You don't seem scared, boiyoing," the Star Bunny said. "I sure am. Wait…are you going to fight the snow monster?"
"Uh, sure. Why?"
The Star Bunny hopped towards me, and I braced myself for an impending fight-or-flight situation. "Let me help you! I want to fight the snow monster too, but I'm too scared to do it by myself…boiyoing. But with you around I'd feel a lot braver!"
"Um…." I struggled to come up with a reason he'd buy that he shouldn't follow me. Even if he was friendly for now, for all I knew, as soon as he came with me his phone was gonna ring, and it was gonna be one of the other Star Bunnies calling him and telling him to start wailing on me. "…no, I don't think you coming with me would be a good idea."
"Oh." The Star Bunny frowned. "Why not?"
"Because…."
Baby Luma smacked me on the head and I yelped. "Make up something!" he whispered. "Tell him, I don't know, that that coin at the top of the slide there means rabbits can't go down it or something. Anything!"
"What's going on, boiyoing?" the Star Bunny asked.
"Nothing, it's just…Baby Luma, he gets cranky when he wants his formula bottle," I said, wincing as Baby Luma yanked on a clump of my hair (we were gonna have to have a serious talk when we got back to Starship Mario). "No, I don't think you should come with me because, uh, see the one coin at the top of this slide here?"
The Star Bunny looked past me towards the slide. "Yeah?"
"Well, there's a, a legend that seeing a solitary coin placed at the top of a slide means that slide is full of rabbit traps."
The Star Bunny hopped backwards. "R-r-rabbit traps?"
"Yeah. Rabbit traps. We find them from time to time around the Mushroom Kingdom. No one knows who plants them there. It's just…one day they're not there, the next day they are. Then the next they're gone again."
"Really? Huh. I'm surprised Hariet hasn't covered them on her podcast. I'll have to call in and suggest that she do an episode on them next."
"Hariet?"
"Yeah, Hariet. She's a rabbit, and she's got this podcast all about rabbit-related phenomena around the Mushroom Kingdom. Down the Rabbit Hole, it's called. I'll have to contact her and suggest that she talk about rabbit traps on her next episode."
Suddenly, I heard another shout on the wind: "Get back here, Mario!"
The Star Bunny turned around. "Who said that, boiyoing?"
"I think it was the snow monster," I said. "Gotta go fight him. Bye." Then, before he could protest or the other Star Bunnies could arrive, I blindly leapt down the slide.
Thankfully, this one wasn't riddled with enemies and obstacles like the one in the Tall Trunk Galaxy was. All that was further down the slide was another coin, and then before I knew it, I'd reached the bottom. "Thanks for the idea, Baby Luma," I said.
"Sure," he replied.
Waiting for me at the bottom of the slide was another checkpoint flag, Lumalee, and a Launch Star. I ignored Lumalee because I only had 28 Star Bits and, in my experience, Life Mushroom/1-Up Mushroom Lumalees are always whining for 30 of them.
I instead got in the Launch Star, and almost as soon as I took flight, the snow around me disappeared. I quickly looked back and saw that, once again, from the outside, the snowstorm was invisible, and I could clearly see the planet. I saw two of the three Star Bunnies hopping around about halfway down the planet, so hopefully I would be able to finish the mission before they caught up to me, since I was clearly near the end of the mission on account of Lumalee showing up. Heck, maybe the fourth Star Bunny would share with them that load of B.S. I fed him about the rabbit traps and they'd believe it, but I severely doubted I'd get quite that lucky.
