~Prologue~

"Do you hear the baby stars? These newborns will grow up to become galaxies someday. When stars die, they turn to stardust and scatter across the cosmos. Eventually, that stardust reforms to create a new star... And so the cycle of life continues. But the cycle never repeats itself in quite the same way... So...you'll see."

-Rosalina, Super Mario Galaxy

If there was any one word that could sum up Mario 'Jumpman' Mario, it would be cheerful. He often had a wide smile plastered just below his famous moustache and was generally known to his friends and family as kind and caring, to the point where he prioritized others over himself. You were hard pressed to find anyone in the Mushroom Kingdom (besides a certain overgrown turtle and his lackies perhaps) who had a single bad thing to say about him.

Outside the Mushroom Kingdom however... things got a bit more complicated.

Mario was famous. His fame stretched far beyond his own world and whispers of his escapades seeped into every crevasse of every universe that he could only dream of visiting one day. And with fame came the inevitable detractors who wondered if he even deserved any of this attention in the first place.

One of these detractors lived in a nearby dimension parallel to the Mushroom Kingdom, where thousands of years in the past animals had evolved in a similar course to humans where the only difference between the two was outside characteristics. Known as "The Blue Blur", Sonic the Hedgehog had been compared to Mario since he first took down Dr. Eggman at the mere age of ten.

And Sonic couldn't understand why. Sure, they could have both been considered child prodigies, he'd heard that Mario had saved his girlfriend from a giant ape when he was sixteen, and sure that turtle on steroids seemed to be a recurring problem but that was nothing compared to what he'd been through! He'd had to fell a god, an experiment gone wrong, deadly robots and a mad scientist always hell-bent on world domination. Sonic thought he deserved to be recognized more for his adventures. He wasn't shy about expressing those thoughts either, constantly taking potshots at Mario and making his distaste clearly known.

The "rivalry" made Mario uncomfortable. He hadn't asked for his fame and suddenly an egotistical kid from another dimension had been dragged into the crossfire by the media. On one hand Mario felt for him being constantly compared to someone else, but on the other they didn't even know each other. How could Sonic claim to hate him when they'd never met face-to-face?

Eventually Mario learned to accept Sonic's rude remarks as a passive annoyance that would be a perpetual part of his life. After all, Sonic was entitled to his opinion and trying to change that didn't seem like it would be a possibility.

Until it was.

In a void between dimensions, two god like entities with powers far beyond comprehension observed the various worlds and an idea formed - a tournament in which the strongest they had observed would fight amongst each other to see who was the most powerful in the entire multiverse. Mario had already been invited twice and one of the deities had selected him in helping choose who would be invited to the third tournament.

And thus, the rivals fate was set in stone.

The story begins again Monday September 2nd, 2024