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[anons-artchive]

The Metamorphosis of Gordon Freeman [Chapter 2]

Chapter 1

Chapter Summary: Gordon has some shit to do, and Benrey seems insistent on being there as well. Where’s he been? Why aren’t the rest of the Science Team concerned? What hell is “imprinting?”

Word Count: 9,884

Notes: From this Chapter onwards it gonna be at least partially blatant that Gordon…is kinda a jerk to the Science Team? I don’t see it depicted much in the fics I’ve read, but Gordon is kinda a shit person in HLVRAI, so I wanted to try my hand at writing him that way. If you don’t feel comfortable reading a version of Gordon that is kinda controlling and apathetic towards his friends, might wanna just skip out on this fic.

Also I know this is the funny “Gordon Feetman dick slip” fandom but I’m just letting y’all know that this chapter does contain like one joke about sex? It’s more like Gordon mistakenly thinks that’s what’s happening during the “Imprinting” Scene so if you wanna skip that, the bit starts at ‘Gordon tensed up…’ and ends at ‘Neither am I…’. I’ll separate the joke with some “***” just to be extra careful.

By the good graces of some god, or maybe a programmer somewhere, a vehicle pulled into the driveway just before Gordon started to leave to pick up dinner. It was an orange and black minibus that Gordon recognized quite well. The gaudy-looking Volkswagen had been “adopted” by the Science Team about three years ago, during an impromptu investigation into the unassuming remains of the Black Mesa Research Center. The van’s actual owner was one of his neighbors from across the street, and he was pretty sure the only reason she allowed the Science Team to even look at the van after their rocky first encounter was because she found their shenanigans amusing.

Regardless of the reasons, the arrival of the Anomalous Materials Van (AMV) was always a good sign.

Bubby was the first to exit the van, from the driver's seat, of course; he would accept no place less in any vehicle if it could be helped. There had been plenty of times where Bubby was so outraged at the prospect of somebody else driving that he would quite literally drive himself (mind you, the man could apparently turn into a car at will) to wherever the group needed to go, regardless of if he had any passengers or not.

“You’re here early…” Was all Gordon could whisper as he exited his home in sweatpants and an MIT hoodie. The sight of even one living team member made his relief audible.

“I know.” Said Bubby, “I didn’t plan to be here before the food arrived, but Tommy wanted somebody to make sure you weren’t having a fucking heart attack when he found out…” He looked over to where the former security guard was looking out one of the windows. “that was going on. Harold and I seemed the most qualified to handle things until everybody else could make it over.”

Gordon looked over as well to catch Benrey exchanging funny faces with one of his neighbors. From what Gordon could tell, the neighbor in question was wearing a bun in her hair, meaning it might have been Gina, checking to make sure the AMV was still in good condition. He couldn’t tell because the windows there had been tinted, but that was his best guess.

“Where is Dr. Coomer?” He asked.

“Hello, Gordon!!!” Exclaimed a muffled voice inside the AMV. The doors to the rear of the van swung open, and the good doctor himself shot out of the trunk like a spring onto the opposite side of the road. The sound of broken glass matched itself with the humorous manifestation of a Coomer-shaped hole in his neighbors’ window, followed by the gleeful utterance of “Hello, Dr. Cross!”

Bubby looked in the direction of the mess his spouse had created. “I think he earned nine points for style on that one.”

“I don’t think we should be encouraging property destruction.” Gordon said firmly. “I’m pretty sure that’s frowned upon, usually, by most people.”

“Gordon,” Dr. Coomer announced his spontaneous appearance. “We’re not people!”

“Right, yeah, artificial intelligence, yeah, I know. But the least we can do is pretend for a while? If not for our sake than for the sake of my neighbors that have to deal with our bullshit.”

“If you don’t want our bullshit at your house,” Bubby reminded Gordon. “We could alway just host the bullshit at mine and Harold’s instead.”

“I’m not fucking doing that. I am NOT fucking doing that!” Gordon immediately shook his head violently at the suggestion, “Last time we tried that we nearly got Forzen and his weird cousin killed. Not exactly the best way for us to mend bridges with them.”

“If they didn’t want to party Bubby Style, they shouldn’t have agreed to party during Ed Balls Day.”

“What does that-?”

“Why do you think Forzen’s cousin is weird?”

He gawked for a second. “I-wha-? Don’t just dodge the original topic!” Gordon let his arms fall to his sides. “Whatever. I just don’t think we should be, you know, keeping the Xen aliens as pets until they’re somewhat domesticated first? It’s like trying to take care of raccoons or possums, they’re still wild animals and you shouldn’t be encouraging that shit.”

“Technically only one of his pets is from Xen, but I guess I can see where you’re coming from.”

Benrey popped up in the middle of the group, uninvited of course. “You’re playing nice with bootboys now? Laaaame!”

“Not all of them, dear god no. Just the ones that were smart enough to leave.” Bubby explained, “Did nobody tell you that?”

“No.”

“Oh. That’s my bad then. I thought Tommy would have told you at least, since you two are friends. Forzen and a bunch of other soldiers left the US military following some shit involving a ‘double cover-up’ after we left for Xen, and now they’re trying to sue BIG TIME. They’re all sharing an apartment on the other side of town. We’ll have to take you over to visit at some point.”

Gordon turned to Bubby. “Hey, can we go back to the part where you and Dr. Coomer came over to make sure I was okay?”

“Hello, Gordon!”

“Hey, Dr. Coomer.” He waved. “You and Bubby are awfully calm about the fact that Benrey is back. How long have-?”

“Terrible news, Gordon. Tommy and his father are VERY busy this afternoon. I’m afraid Benny showing up when he did has caused a pileup of paperwork on their end.”

“Oh shit.” Gordon and Benrey both muttered. The latter seemed to show a hint of actual distress at the news.

“Now, gentlemen, there’s no need to feel downtrodden. Tommy will show before the movie starts. Let’s get inside before it freezes over out here.”

“Actually-!” Gordon rummaged around his pocket for his keys, “I kinda have to get everybody’s food. I trust you guys to not destroy my house so…”

“Hello, Gordon! Go right ahead. Everybody’s orders except for your own should be on the ‘food list’ that Benrey gave you.

“Oh cool. That certainly saves me a lot of trouble.” Gordon took out and unfolded the list for emphasis.

“Did you get my text?” Asked Bubby.

“Yeah. Sausage melt, mushrooms and tomato on your browns, pecans for Coomer’s waffle.”

The older man lifted his chin up smugly. “Good.”

Gordon folded the paper back up before getting into his car, waiting a moment after he turned on the engine. Normally this was when his mind would go fuzzy and when he came back to reality he would be at the Waffle House ordering food.

He let out a long sigh and turned to look at the back of the car.

“Can uh, can I come too?” Of course it was Benrey.

“I’m not going to steal anything from the fucking Waffle House, dude.”

“Yeah but, I still wanna come with you though, please and thank you?”

He turned back around and silently started driving.

-

Gordon was very, very thankful that Laszlo was working tonight when he went to get food; he was also thankful that Benrey had enough self-control to stay in the car for about fifteen minutes when asked to do so. He would have preferred if Benrey hadn’t gotten out of the car at all, but he wasn’t being disruptive or anything, and he actually seemed insistent on making sure the orders were correct when they came out (you know how it is with ordering out for more than two people) so it was mostly fine. It gave him and Laszlo time to catch up.

Gordon enjoyed talking with Laszlo, the guy had been a freshman in college when the Science Team first moved into Poastgame, and just a few months from now he would be graduating with a Bachelor’s in Philosophy. He supposed the younger man’s enthusiasm for his studies reminded him of himself from when he was still young and not yet broken by the events of Black Mesa, or at least a version of himself that theoretically existed but never did, and that was why he always felt eager to talk with the young man while he waited for the food to be prepared.

Faint smudges of green covered the edges of Gordon’s vision while they talked, and they lingered after he had left the Waffle House and was driving home. It took Benrey trying to talk to Gordon about something that made the color fade away, if only because he now had to focus on something else.

“Sorry man, could you repeat that?” Gordon requested, “I wasn’t listening. I’m not ignoring you on purpose, I'm just, you know, focused on other things right now.”

“Oh yeah, no problem. I said I saw a uhh,” He smacked his lips, “Vonnegut. In the Waffle House. I wanted to shoot it but you weren’t freaking out about it so I didn’t.”

“That was Gary, he’s cool. Most of the Vortigaunts are cool now, actually. I’m surprised you didn’t notice the abundance of Xen life sooner, although I guess you were busy sleeping and playing Heavenly Sword.”

“I noticed. Just didn’t think any of them could do people stuff.”

“Most of them don’t, the Vortigaunts an exception.”

Earth, outside of some notable areas, had actually been handling the Xen wildlife pretty well, all things considered. Gordon was surprised at first, but had accepted it pretty quickly when it became clear there wasn’t going to be an ecological collapse anytime soon. The Post Game had been crafted with peace in mind, but he did recall something about an ‘inevitability’ that would come up ‘within the next 20 or so years,’ so he was on edge about every tiny thing that changed around him, at least until he was certain it wasn’t going to cause a problem.

Benrey was a pretty sizable change in his life, so any kind of small talk with him was making him incredibly nervous right now about that inevitably. Did the rest of the Science Team know about the inevitability? Of course not, they didn’t need to worry about that, this was a problem for Gordon Freeman alone to be nervous about.

Perhaps Benrey could sense his nervousness, because neither of them talked for the remainder of the drive home.

-

Tommy and Darnold had arrived before the food did, and they had ended up bringing the movie for that night. The main menu for the disc played on loop while they all ate, and everybody enjoyed their food. Gordon had to remind Tommy partway through dinner to not drink too much soda, receiving an indiscernible look from the man before he obliged, but other than that there were no issues while they ate.

The rest of movie night also went well, a surprise to Gordon since he was expecting Benrey to cocoon everybody partway through their viewing of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It would have been thematically appropriate, at least as far as Gordon was concerned.

Something that was bothering him though was how, well, unbothered everybody else was by comparison about Benrey’s presence. The guy had enough time between his PS Plus running out and him getting to Gordon’s house that he got everybody’s orders for the night, which was fine, but that definitely was not enough time for everybody to get the shock of “Holy shit Benrey is back” out of their systems.

So, why was Gordon the only one even marginally concerned? It had been one thing during Black Mesa, he had been annoying at best and traitorous at worst, but after everything that happened he expected…something else? The theater, the heist, none of those were safe from Benrey, and nobody seemed bothered by this except for Gordon.

Like always, Gordon Freeman was wrong until proven right. All he could do now was wait for Benrey to act out so he could have the justification to kill him again.

As the credits rolled, everybody stretched, and said their goodbyes. Coomer and Bubby gestured for Gordon to follow them to the AMV.

“Gordon, we need to talk.” Coomer said once outside.

“A good old yehaw, as Bubby puts it?” He tilted his head.

Bubby nodded. “Yes. It’s a bit late for it now though. Let’s meet up at the same time tomorrow. Depending on how it goes, it might be a long one. The others have already agreed to it.”

“Okay?” Fair enough, I guess.”

“Good.”

And with that, the older men drove off. Tommy and Darnold left not long after, leaving only Benrey to deal with as Gordon came back inside.

Always Benrey.

He sat on the back frame of the couch, his legs wedged between the cushions on the couch’s back while he pressed himself against the wall. It reminded Gordon of a meme Tommy showed him that depicted various incorrect ways to sit on a sofa.

“Yo.”

“You gotta go, man.” Gordon sighed, “It’s almost midnight.”

“Nu-uh.”

“What-?!” He huffed, “Why? What do you need now?”

“You gotta come to my house now. You said you wanted to come but you couldn’t because you were busy with Movie Night stuff.”

Shit. He did say that, didn’t he? He shouldn’t be surprised that the rules you follow for fairies would also apply to Benrey somewhat. “Okay. Well, where’s your house at? How far away is it?”

“S’not that far. I can take you.” Benrey held out his empty palm.

Gordon’s anxiety skyrocketed.

This was it. This was how he was going to die.

At least he watched a good movie and ate some pretty decent waffles before the end.

Gordon didn’t actually die, of course, but he almost wished he had with how disoriented he felt by the time Benrey had finally gotten them where he wanted to be. Gordon had never noclipped before, he was pretty sure nobody except for Benrey and those fucking skeletons could anyways, and he certainly didn’t want to do it again after being dragged along for about five minutes through trees and dirt and stone and possibly somebody’s house, all at an absolutely wretched speed. The sensation of going through an object, to the best of Gordon’s own description, felt like his insides were being tickled with sandpaper. He wasn’t a fan, but he could probably tolerate the trip home if given enough time to mentally prepare himself.

Now that they had reached their destination, though, Gordon couldn’t decide which he dreaded more: the return trip home (if he returned home), or whatever the inside of Benrey’s house looked like.

The outside said ‘house’ wasn’t even a real house. It looked like a decently-sized gardening shed that had been left behind at an old depot and moved into the woods they were currently standing in. The aged quality of the wood was perhaps made up for by the artistry on display; shades of blue and gray were tastefully painted on to make a pretty exterior, but that was somewhat tarnished by the obnoxiously colored fairy lights that decorated every edge of the shed (because of course the alien fairy-man would have fairy lights). There was also a handful of generators behind the house, at least one of them was keeping the lights on.

“Come inside. Come see my house.” Benrey said, his tone sounded friendly, which Gordon was not in any way used to.

Gordon wanted to run, but Benrey had already established that he could go disgustingly fast without even trying, so he wearily accepted the invitation like some reluctant vampire.

The inside was a bit closer to what he expected. The walls were unpainted, there was a plastic grocery bag filled with…something, and the floor was littered with video game cases, cigarette butts and dead leaves. Benrey’s gaming setup was a small flatscreen tv with a long crack running from one corner to the other, a PlayStation console with controllers, and a bizarre collection of wires, meshes, and other stuff that clearly served a purpose. It scared him, it made him want to scream, and yet he was genuinely curious about what exactly it was.

It was too much, he had to know.

“Hey.”

“Yo!”

He pointed at the Wire Wad. “What the fuck is that?”

“That’s the internet.”

Gordon looked at the Wad again. “The internet?”

“Yeah. I don’t have money for internet. So I just made my own. It works good. I could teach ya. Never have to pay for internet ever again, you’ll save SO MUCH cash bro.”

He shook his head. “No thanks. Gonna politely decline that for now. Still got plenty from the heist. And also the government.” He was pretty sure Benrey was just leaching off of somebody else’s service provider anyways. Still though, if that thing was actually allowing Benrey to play online games, that was pretty impressive in his eyes. Gordon didn’t know how modems and routers were made, or really even how they worked. Didn’t make Benrey any less of a freak or a threat, though.

“Tommy’s dad gives you free stuff too?”

“No! Nononono, I meant the U.S. government. Does Mister Coolatta actually work for a governmental body? I’ve never asked, he scares me too much to ask.”

Benrey shrugged and turned on the console and the flatscreen, sitting on the floor as he did so. “I saw his office once. It has so much fucking emu in there. Only government people have offices.” He smacked his lips obnoxiously, “But yeah, he probably works for the government.”

Gordon quietly tried to parse what was truth and what was Benrey talking utter nonsense. Because if there was one thing he had to start reminding himself of again, it’s that Benrey was a master of making shit up. He had totally forgotten that fact with their conversation in the yard, and while it seemed like he was mostly telling the truth, he was starting to suspect that Benrey maybe didn’t sleep for 4 years straight, or eat squirrels, among other things. He believed the squirrels more than he did the sleeping. He certainly didn’t lie about the microwave though, there wasn’t a single one in sight.

“Wanna play games?” Benrey asked.

Did he have a choice? He didn’t exactly have any way to get home without Benrey’s help.

“Yeah, sure, fine. Can’t really leave anyways.” Gordon replied in a defeated tone. His skin crawled in discomfort. “Just not for too long, though. I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow.” He was about to sit next to Benrey, but the man quickly stood upright again. “What-Why are you standing?”

“You should leave.”

“I thought you wanted me to play video games with you.”

“I did.”

“Then why’d you change your mind?”

“You gotta go to the doctor bro. That’s more important than video games.”

“I’m not going right now, it’s an afternoon appointment. I just don’t want to play too late and not have enough time to sleep and get ready in the morning.”

“Oh you’re a naughty little boy.” Benrey’s face morphed into something mischievous. “Staying up past your bedtime.” He took Gordon’s hand, his right hand, to drag him back outside. “We can do video games tomorrow.”

“Don’t-!”

“Let’s goooooo!” And off they went, noclipping back home. He hated this. He HATED this. He HATED THIS so much.

Gordon yanked his hand out of Benrey’s the moment they stopped moving.

“DON’T FUCKING TOUCH ME!!!” He hissed. Orange and red speckles covered his vision as he distanced himself. “Don’t you dare touch me without asking first. Especially not my hand. Especially not THAT hand.” He tucked his right arm around his waist and used the spare one to gesture for emphasis.

Benrey wore that stupid, blank, unreadable expression again. “Oh. Shit.” He looked around at anything in front of him other than Gordon. “I did kinda take without asking that time, huh?”

“Yeah. You did.”

Gordon would have preferred an apology of some sort, but he supposed that Benrey silently ragdolling onto the driveway would have to do instead. He contemplated running him over in the morning, since the man’s body never de-spawned upon death like Coomer’s or Bubby’s, but he had a sneaking suspicion that Benrey didn’t actually die of guilt like Gordon would have hoped, and that running him over would probably make him mad.

He could have thrown him in somebody’s yard. Half of the houses in Gordon’s side of the neighborhood belonged to a former Black Mesa employee, all of whom had come from departments untouched by the Science Team, and all of whom had packed heat to escape in one piece. At least one of those people would know enough about Benrey to shoot some buckshot or a laser-guided rocket at him.

And yet, as the color left the edges of his vision, he couldn’t help but feel some sort of guilt? He shouldn’t have, Benrey was by all means his tormenter.

‘But he’s not hurting you now. He’s never really tried to hurt you on purpose, even the hand was an accident. He sounded rather surprised when it happened. Annoying at best, remember?’

Gordon wished desperately that he could block out that tiny voice that occasionally tried to pull him towards the irrational. It only got this vocal if the irrational thoughts were especially tantalizing.

No, no, no.

He would not feel sympathy, he would not humanize the (not) human incarnation of an internet troll, and he certainly wouldn’t ever talk to the man again (less he felt compelled to have those irrational thoughts again).

Gordon huffed and marched up to his front door.

The knob jiggled, but did not turn.

Gordon always left his keys in the house when he got in, and he always locked the front door when it wasn’t in use.

Benrey had noclipped them to his place when they were inside Gordon’s house, which was where Gordon’s keys were.

The scientist that still somewhat resided in Gordon mumbled to him. ‘Option, what are your options?’

He didn’t have a spare key. He always told himself he’d get one in case of an emergency. And now here he was, without a spare hey.

He couldn’t pick a lock, didn’t know how.

He couldn’t break any windows. After the Science Team had made a habit of breaking his windows, either by accident or on purpose, Gordon specifically hired a guy to install whatever shatter-proof glass they had in Black Mesa. It was probably a fire hazard, but Gordon could always just open the window if he was inside. He had a heat-resistant hand now, after all.

‘Well, time to consider asking for help.’

It was already after midnight (at least that’s what time he felt that it was), so everybody else was probably asleep; Coomer and Bubby because they were old, Darnold and Tommy because they had a job and an internship, respectively, they had to be awake for in the morning. They were all either heavy sleepers or kept their phone silenced when they slept, a new development after Gordon had convinced everybody he wasn’t going to be waking up from any more nightmares.

Forzen and his fraternity of ex-military buddies were probably still up, but they were half an hour away, and Gordon didn’t have his car keys (in the house) on him to drive over or his phone (also in the house) to call them and pick the lock.

No phone meant he couldn’t call anybody from his “Normal Friends” Group to help either.

All of his direct neighbors were people he barely knew, plus his neighbors across the street.

Yeah. No. He was not asking those two.

One of them had direct ties to the Biological Research Department in Black Mesa, and anybody that worked in the department responsible for those accursed prototypes was not to be allowed favors.

He also didn’t think he had the confidence to talk to his more normal neighbors for fear of judgment. How was he supposed to explain to a normal person how he got locked out of the house like this? There’s no way this was a common occurrence. Granted, he had never asked before how common this was, but he certainly wasn’t going to find out like this.

Gordon sighed, hung his head into his palms for a bit, and walked back to Benrey’s limp form to stare at it.

“Yo.” Benrey’s newest vessel walked over from the corner of his vision after a little while. “Thought you were going to bed.”

‘Process of elimination, Freeman.’ His inner scientist said.

“………Can you please noclip me back into my house?”

-

Given that Benrey had saved Gordon from being locked out for the night, he supposed it was only fair that he gave in to the irrational thoughts just this once and let Benrey stay over for a while. Disproportionately nice, maybe, but he honestly couldn’t see that shed lasting longer than another week or so before eventually falling apart. So really, Gordon was giving himself some favors by making sure Benrey didn’t inevitably become homeless.

By the time Gordon had showered to get the feeling of dank forest out of his skin, Benrey was already making noise in the kitchen. He offhandedly gave him permission to do so, knowing that it would be better in the long run to let him get all the snooping over with on night one.

Gordon threw on something only loosely defined as pajamas: some tacky bell bottom pants that he had no recollection of buying (and wouldn’t dare wear in public) and an oversized shirt lovingly gifted by some former coworkers that read ‘I survived the falling portion of HEV training and all I got was this shirt’. The latter was one in a large collection of novelty shirts, almost all of which were related to Black Mesa in some way, shape, or form.

He considered walking over to Benrey wearing the shirt that Forzen’s cousin had printed to say ‘I don’t have enough words to express how sorry I am about the hand thing. I’m not sure what hell happened there or what prompted it, but it was super fucked up’ in a massive wall of text. Gordon figured that it was on-the-nose if he wanted to get an apology out of Benrey, but he was listening to the irrational thoughts right now, and those were telling him to be nice, so he wore a different shirt. It was probably for the better, that shirt itched like hell.

He walked out into the hallway to check on his tormentor.

The man had pulled out the couch cushions and unfolded the blanket to create a fort.

“Please put those back in the morning.”

“Yo! Didn’t see ya man.” Benrey was sitting on the ‘ceiling’ of his fort. “Just testing out the structural stability of Fort Benrey.”

“Cool, alright. Gordon’s going to bed now.”

“Bedtime?”

“Yeah, bedtime. Good night.”

“Good night!”

“Good night, Benrey.”

On the way back to his room, Gordon took a quick detour to the bathroom to brush his teeth and contemplate what the hell he was doing to himself. There must have been something wrong with him if he was actually letting some stupid irrational thought compel him to let Benrey stay with him. Something wrong with his head, perhaps? He supposed it was a good thing he was going to the doctor tomorrow.

Finally, he made his way to the bedroom.

“…Really?”

Benrey sat at the foot of the bed awkwardly.

“Whatever. It’s late, I don’t care.”

He had to move around the smaller man to finally get into bed. Benrey didn’t move until Gordon was already under the covers, upon which he then attempted to tuck Gordon in and turned off the lights.

“Hey, uh,” Benrey spoke softly and with perhaps the most clarity Gordon had ever heard. “So Tommy explained the hand thing to me while you were outside. And I’m, uh. Sorry. About that. I didn’t know They would do that to you. And I didn’t know your hand wouldn’t grow back. Or that the hand thing would fuck up your brain chemicals.”

“What prompted this?” He shifted around to his usual sleeping position.

“I just. I wanna be a friend, ya know? I did kinda do too much with the passport thing. It was a new rule, I wanted to be S-Rank security guard and enforce it properly, but I wasn’t gonna push it, ya know?” Benrey tilted his head. “But you were stressing so fucking bad dude. I thought you were nervous about the test because everybody was talking about how big and important the test was that day. I thought ‘oh shit this guy is super stressed I totally need to un-stress him’. So I-”

“So you asked for my passport?”

“Yeah sorry it was all I could think about, other than Heavenly Sword. I thought it would be funny. You started sorta laughing and I thought it was working, so I followed you around and kept doing it.”

“So what about that fucking Boss Fight?”

A pause. “Tommy says I overdo my jokes sometimes. I thought I was being a silly guy, a funny fella. Thought I was keeping you none-stressed, but I was actually making you big-stressed. And that’s bad. You were getting mad and I didn’t know why, and it made me mad. Making Mad, collectors edition, now with special edition Benrey apology cut! I wanna be a friendly fella, just a funny little guy.” He looked at Gordon with another one of those almost-smiles, “I’m trying to be nice and read, uh, better. So we can be friends. And not be mad anymore.”

Gordon looked at Benrey blankly. “I don’t think I fucking believe you. You’ve said so much shit to me in the week we knew each other that I genuinely don’t know if I can or should believe that story.”

Benrey’s face was unreadable in the dark room, but his eyes definitely conveyed an emotion he didn’t recognize on the man. “Okay.”

“Okay. We done now?”

“Ya-no. Uh. I was gonna ask if I could. Imprint on you.”

“Imprint on me? Like a baby duck? What do you fucking mean by imprint?”

He shrugged. “I dunno man. It just feels important.”

“This isn’t going to kill me or fuck me up in some way?”

“Don’t think so.”

Gordon let out a long sigh. “Okay, yeah, fine. We can do that. I’ve learned by now that there’s no point in arguing with you.”

“I mean, I won’t do it if you don’t want me to. It won’t work if you don’t want me to.”

He huffed, “Do you want to do it or not?”

“I do but I’m not gonna force you.”

Talking with Benrey was like arguing with a cat. Cat says it wants one thing, you give it the thing, and then the cat doesn’t want it anymore. Except with Benrey you could give him what he wants and then he’ll have a stupid loophole to say you didn’t actually give it to him.

Gordon slammed his head into his pillow with an annoyed grumble. “Make up your mind man. Whatever. Good night.”

“Good night.”

-

About four hours later, Gordon sat back up.

He couldn’t sleep. His curiosity had been piqued by the imprinting thing, and the fact that Benrey hadn’t forced that shit onto him only made it even more intriguing. Damn those irrational thoughts that plagued his brain, and damn his inner scientist for being a nosy little bastard.

Benrey hadn’t moved from the foot of the bed, but he had definitely been sleeping because, when Gordon shined his phone’s flashlight at him, his eyes flicked open like a switch.

“Hey, you promise that imprinting thing isn’t gonna turn my skin green or put eggs inside of me?”

“Wha-? Oh, yeah. Pinky prommy.” He extended a balled-up fist and held his pinky out.

“Fine.” He laid both arms out in front of himself, using one to exchange the sacred promise. “Do whatever the fuck it is you need to do. I am giving you my trust and my permission to fucking…imprint on me.”

“Thank you.”

He watched Benrey hover closer to him, landing himself within arm’s length of Gordon. He sat with his legs splayed out like a fawn, which was an interesting sight.

“You can uh, imprint on me back if you want.”

Gordon shook his head. “I don’t know how to do that.”

***

Gordon tensed up as a horrible thought came to mind. “Wait wait wait! Hold on, is this-?”

Benrey, in another rare moment of clarity, realized what this probably looked like and burst into laughter. He coughed up a cloud of pink sweet voice and immediately covered his face. “Bro what the hell? What’s WRONG with you? Noooooooo!”

Gordon, ever vulnerable to Benrey’s seemingly contagious laugh, couldn’t help but join in. His vision turned a similar shade of pink to the Sweet Voice. “I didn’t know! I didn’t-!”

“You should have started with that!”

“I should have! But I didn’t!”

They laughed for another minute, Benrey uncovered his face. “You’re gonna kill me, man. I’m not even into that stuff.”

“Neither am I, I think. I’m not sure. They don’t have a manual for that kind of thing.”

“True, true.”

***

Benrey sat on his knees, fully composed once more. To Gordon’s surprise, he pried his helmet off to reveal a head of dark and messy hair. “It uh. Works better without the metal.”

Oh no. It looked…greasy. So horribly greasy. He was sure it would be so soft if Benrey ran shampoo through it several times.

“Gonna have to ask you to hold still.”

He was already doing that, but now he was extra careful about moving. As a scientist, he was obviously observing an alien mannerism in-person, so he obviously wanted to see what happens without accidentally manipulating any variables, that was all. Just a curious scientist wanting to be the control group, obviously.

Benrey leaned forward and gently butted his head into Gordon’s chest; they sat like that for a few seconds. There was a barely noticeable feeling in his heart akin to having a little knot of string tied around your finger, and he was sure that if he didn’t like the feeling he could easily remove it with a mere thought.

He didn’t feel obligated to remove it, though. It took actual effort to notice the feeling at all, and like Benrey promised it wasn’t hurting him in any way. He could easily wake up tomorrow and have forgotten the imprinting had taken place.

Soon, Benrey pulled away from Gordon. “That was it. You wanna try?”

Sure, why not. He didn’t need an irrational thought to humor this guy.

“So I just do what you did, and then what?”

Benrey shrugged, simply watching Gordon. “You just know what to do.”

“Fuck.” Gordon exhaled, bumping his head into the other man’s security vest. He waited, but he didn’t feel any different. He tried visualizing different things: a knot, ducklings, even hand-holding at one point, but nothing seemed to transpire. “I can’t do it man.”

“S’okay.” Benrey said calmly, “Probably don’t trust me yet, we can try again later.” He smirked, “Now go bad to bed, naughty boy. Sleepy boy. Gordon Sleepman.”

“Fuck off.” Gordon tried to say venomously. It came off as more humored than anything. Now that Benrey had mentioned it, Gordon did tend to laugh at Benrey’s nonsense a lot. That was a problem for Future Gordon to worry about, right now Present Gordon needed to sleep.

-

He woke up to a shower of toast, all sorts of toast.

Burger buns, rye bread, sourdough, white bread, any sort of bread Gordon kept in the house had appeared to him in toast form, most of it burnt, some of it nothing more than just a little warm, and occasionally a perfectly light brown slice.

“I made you breakfast.”

“I noticed.” He grumbled and pulled a slice of wheat toast out of his hair.

“You have a lot of bread.”

“I have a lot of visitors and need to do something to keep my hands busy when I talk to them. Some people talk over tea, I talk over a turkey and ham sandwich with melted American cheese.”

“You could probably just use a stim toy but okay.”

Gordon ignored him.

After ‘breakfast’, he got changed and drove to the doctor's office. Like with the Waffle House trip, Benrey was insistent on going with him, to which Gordon had to hurriedly explain to him that going into a medical facility while dressed like a fucking cop was not going to fly. If he wanted to come with, he was going to need some normal clothes.

Benrey stood in the driveway with those sad eyes again, like a lost puppy. Gordon held firm, he was not going to let Benrey win this time, so he drove off.

Benrey had other plans, of course.

It took Gordon looking up from the tablet he was supposed to be checking-in with to realize somebody else in the waiting room was looking over him. Literally.

“Owwwww. That’s my CHIN bro.” Benrey hovered in front of Gordon, rubbing over his stubble. He was dressed in jeans and an old band t-shirt that fit him very loosely.

Gordon had to admit, Benrey cleaned up pretty nicely, even if he had obviously stolen his outfit from his laundry to do so. He wouldn’t have been able to pick him out in a crowd unless he paid attention to the eyes.

The hat was new though, and clearly not meant for New Mexico weather. It was a hand-stitched beanie with a puffball at the top. He decided not to ask where it came from and instead patted at the chair next to him so Benrey didn’t freak out the other patients with his noclipping.

The man was completely quiet after he sat down.

It wasn’t out of politeness, Gordon could tell. His eyes were darting around at all the different people waiting with them, not lazing around emptily like they normally did, although they did occasionally droop enough that he had to pinch the webbing between his hands to force himself into focusing again. He paid special attention when people talked to each other.

What was it that Benrey had said last night about ‘reading better’? This might have been it, Benrey trying to ‘read’ his surroundings and how people acted in a normal setting. It made sense if that was the case, Benrey being ‘Not-Human’ meant he probably wasn’t raised on Earth or given an understanding of Earth culture; Gordon mentally beat himself up for not realizing sooner that, duh, obviously the guy that’s ‘Not-Human’ doesn’t know shit about Earth. It wasn’t an excuse though, he’d been here for a month, he should have spent more time figuring out Earth stuff instead of playing video games.

Gordon would never be that easily distracted if he was an alien, he decided.

After the tedious process of checking in and waiting ten minutes past when his appointment was supposed to be, a nurse called him over. Benrey attempted to tag along and was immediately surprised when he was barred from following Gordon past the waiting room.

“Come on man, big lame.” Benrey gently frowned.

“It’s a matter of privacy, sir.” The nurse said.

There were no further attempts to get inside, but he was obviously unsure what to do with himself.

Gordon sighed, “If it freaks you out so much that you can’t follow, how about you go take a walk around the place? There's like, a food court, and the lobby has lots of plants to look at, and a nursery on the opposite side of the building.”

“What's a nursery?”

“Uh, room where they keep all the babies. I gotta go now,” Gordon pointed at Benrey. “please stay out of trouble.”

Benrey looked like he wanted to ask something, but had little time to do so before Gordon left with the nurse. For the next half-hour, he would be blessed by the sweet and merciful gods of patient confidentiality.

-

Benrey wandered around the hospital, hovering a foot off the ground while he did so. Sure enough, there were plants. Unfortunately, they were fake plants, he could tell because they tasted bad. He was still hungry, despite eating breakfast with Gordon.

His metabolism completely shutting off when he slept meant he hadn’t needed to eat much until a month ago, and even then he hadn't eaten more than maybe once a week. In the past day and a half, Benrey had noclipped over multiple long distances.

He did the math in his head: he could travel 10 miles per minute (10 mi/min), the trek to his house from Gordon’s was about five minutes, then another five back. This morning he traveled two minutes from Gordon’s to Tommy’s to borrow some money, then one more to Bubby’s because Tommy wasn’t home, three minutes to the mall to buy a cool hat so nobody saw his gnarly gamerhair, and then finally eight minutes to find the right doctor’s office since he wasn’t used to tracking Gordon’s new scent. There was also the distance he traveled before he and Gordon met up yesterday, his place to Gordon’s to Tommy’s to Bubby’s to Darnold’s (two minutes) and then back to Gordon’s (two, he and Tommy were neighbors).

If he did the math right, and he usually did, that was about 360 miles in the past two days. No, he wasn’t going to show his work.

Needless to say, Benrey was understandably hungry. His Hunger Meter was only half full.

He should have gone to Black Mesa to grab a food suit while he was out, but Black Mesa was Empty Stomach distance away, and there was a high chance the suits were either gone or out of juice, both edible and electrical. Benrey didn’t want to return to Gordon’s house on an empty stomach, because then he would be tempted to eat ALL of Gordon’s food, and that would make Gordon mad.

Benrey didn’t want to make Gordon mad. There was the food court, but food costs money, and Benrey spent his money on a cool hat, which meant his alternative was to steal food, which would also make Gordon mad. Eating squirrels was an option, but that would make Gordon mad, too.

Lots of Benrey’s options for being Not Hungry would make Gordon mad. Maybe he could talk to Tommy about getting food together.

First, though, Benrey wanted to check out the nursery. That was where the babies were? He hadn’t met a baby before. He’d seen pictures of them, especially Gordon’s ugly-ass baby, but that had probably been a bad picture and was not representative of how all babies looked. Benrey knew how outliers worked.

Maybe Benrey should go introduce himself to a baby.

-

Gordon had a hard time trying to focus on what his doctor was saying. It was obviously nothing bad because he wasn’t being given a serious tone, but he simply couldn’t focus, how could he when he had clearly seen a trail of Sweet Voice appear in the room with him?

There he was, waiting for the doctor to show up, nervous as can be, as he typically was at these appointments. He was practicing some of his self-soothing techniques, mostly the square breathing one, and he had closed his eyes to block out visual distractions. Nothing abnormal, blue taking up the black space until he was ready to open his eyes, and as a silly little goof he decided to half-sing during his final exhale.

He opened his eyes, now calm.

Or he would have been if he hadn’t seen a wobbly trail of blue sweet voice traveling upward.

Even at the fucking doctor, Benrey couldn’t be bothered to give Gordon some privacy. He told him some places to visit, what the hell was his problem?

He silently stewed in his frustration, pretending to listen to his doctor, knowing that if there was anything important or wrong going on with him then he would be completely glued to what the other man was saying.

For some reason, he felt like this appointment had gone by much more quickly than it normally did; actually, everything since Benrey showed up had been going by much more quickly, like he was only really conscious of the more important things going on. He could remember everything he was witnessing in the normal amount of detail, but he didn’t really feel like he was experiencing it all correctly.

Probably the stress, and by ‘the stress’ he meant Benrey. Leave it to his tormentor to destroy Gordon’s sense of time by mere presence. And of course, he was so nervous about his invasion of privacy that he forgot to ask about the irrational thoughts thing, great. Whatever, be could drag Benrey about the privacy thing on the drive home.

God, the drive home. He’s gonna have to actually drive home instead of letting Fast Travel do it for him, again.

He really would prefer to just abandon Benrey here and go home himself, get his number from Tommy and leave a text saying he ‘accidentally’ forgot he was still at the doctor’s office. Alas, Gordon was a responsible adult, and he knew it would be cruel to the normal people of Poastgame to leave Benrey unattended for much longer.

It didn’t take long to find Benrey. Following his inquiry about the nursery, Gordon suspected he would try looking for it, and he had been right! The man stood in front of the massive pane of glass of which one could easily look at all the babies inside. The window was smudged with the imprints of Benrey’s face while the man himself was standing stock still mere inches away from it.

In one hand, Benrey had a small pile of pamphlets, and in the other he had one of his fingers trapped in the mighty grasp of an infant, held tenderly by a young woman that, along with her husband, seemed unbothered by the non-human. The couple was so unbothered, in fact, that they were clearly carrying a conversation to Benrey about something.

Gordon stepped over to get Benrey’s attention, he could see now a vague expression of wonderment in his face while the baby cooed at him.

“Bro.” Benrey whispered, looking at Gordon. “They so small? Can’t even hold a Game & Watch. Too small. Look at their little gamer hands.”

“Dude, they’re babies.” Gordon sighed, “They can’t even roll over until they’re a few months old. Of course they can’t hold a Game & Watch.” He looked at the couple, “I’m sorry about him. He’s a little-”

“Oh, it’s fine.” The man interrupted, “He actually cheered her right up. We couldn’t be more thankful.”

“I’m cool with the kids.” Benrey sounded proud about that.

“That’s great, Benrey. We need to go home now.”

“Okay.” He wiggled his finger free, getting a laugh from the baby. “Byeeee friendddds.”

The couple said their goodbyes as well while Benrey quietly tagged behind Gordon back to the car. He was the first one to break the silence of the car, of course, about halfway through their drive.

“Babies are cool. You said you have a baby, right? Joshua?”

“I did but,” Gordon felt a lump in his throat. “look, it’s a long story. Maybe I’ll explain it later.” He stopped at a red light, letting out a long sigh while orange crept into his vision. Focus, Gordon. “Hey. Why were you in my exam room?”

“What?”

“Why were you in my exam room? Don’t play fucking dumb with me, I saw the fucking Sweet Voice in my room.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, man.”

“Yes you do, YES you DO! Don’t fucking lie to me.”

“Please stop yelling.” Benrey monotonously requested.

“I just want fucking answers!” Gordon glared at Benrey, “I’m letting you stay with me, I don’t know why but I am. I could easily revoke that decision.”

“You’re getting mad at me for no reason. I didn’t DO anything!” He looked out the window, refusing to meet Gordon’s eyes. “You’re being a bad friend.”

“I don’t know what that has to do with anything we’re talking about. You said YOU wanted to be friends. A good place to start is respecting my privacy.”

“I did! I went into the lobby and tried to eat the plants and then I read about babies at the nursery and I met a baby.” Benrey looked at Gordon now, hyperfocused and stern. “I know I make stuff up to be funny, but I’m not this time!”

Benrey spewed blue at Gordon, who swatted it away angrily.

A car behind Gordon honked at him to move. “The light JUST turned green, fuck you!” He glared at Benrey again before slamming on the gas. “Whatever!!!”

They both exchanged quiet swears under their breaths for the remainder of the ride home.

Gordon just wanted to go inside and find a way to distract himself from Benrey.

The smaller man didn’t even bother waiting for Gordon to exit his vehicle when they finally got home, deciding instead he was better off noclipping into the attic. His intentions became clear when Gordon attempted to re-align the couch cushions for when the Science Team arrived, and was swiftly assaulted with the sound of stomping above him.

Benrey told him something, but it was muffled by whatever was between the floor of the attic and the downstairs ceiling.

“Can’t hear you! You fucker.” Gordon growled.

He put on some TV to pass the time, not even bothering to fix lunch for himself. He knew that eating three meals regularly was a necessity, one he found out the hard while spending time with the Science Team early on. He had been pretty good with feeding himself though, and he didn’t want to break his streak because of some shit Benrey pulled, so he shuffled to the kitchen to make himself some cheese toast.

Benrey was dangling through the ceiling and into the boxed goods cabinet, audibly crunching on something he had found like a wild animal. Either he had been hungry, too, or he was trying to get back at Gordon by eating his stuff.

His shirt rode up just a bit from how he was positioned, exposing just enough of his stomach for Gordon to notice he didn’t have a belly button.

‘Probably not a mammal.’ His inner scientist mused.

‘You should poke it.’ Chirped an irrational thought.

He shouldn’t have, but Gordon did, in fact, poke Benrey’s stomach with the handle of a spatula he was using.

Benrey made a noise like a stalling car and pulled himself out of the cabinet.

“Not cool, man.” He mumbled, clipping the rest of the way back into the attic.

Gordon didn’t care, he had a cheese toast to make. A few slices of white bread, generously topped with grated cheese, were slid into the toaster oven, and a few minutes later Gordon had procured and eaten his delicate cuisine in a fraction of the time it took to make. A low maintenance meal, but filling enough to tie him over until he and His Boys got together to have that talk.

It did make him weary, though. The rest of the Science Team never planned anything ahead without Gordon. Given the timing between Benrey’s return and this spontaneously-planned talk, Gordon could only suspect that they were connected.

As if on-cue, there was a rapping at the door, followed by a ring of the doorbell.

“Cut it out!” Benrey phased through the ceiling to shout at Gordon.

Their eyes met, and Gordon quietly swung open the door.

“Oh. Hi Bubby.”

“Hello.” The pyromaniacal man strutted inside, “Why do I smell toast?”

“I made toast.”

“Ah, yes.”

“Hello, Gordon! Hello, Blobby!” Coomer bounced in.

“Hey Dr. Coomer.” Gordon laughed, “Come in, come in. We’re waiting for Tommy and Darnold again?”

“It’s only fair, Gordon. This concerns them just as much as it concerns the rest of us!”

“Of course, of course.” Gordon locked the door behind Coomer.

Immediately, he got another knock.

“That sounds like Tommy, let me-”

The door opened on its own, a man donned in an inexpensive suit on the other side, the outside he stood in covered with a familiar ethereal blackness. Gordon almost thought it was Mister Coolatta, but upon the visitor walking into normal lighting he was happy to see it was just Tommy dressed up like father.

“Tommy! Oh my god, you had me scared for a second.”

“Sorry Mister Freeman.” Tommy blushed, “I thought that this was a conversation that required a serious outfit.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah!” Tommy stepped through the doorway, the door closing on its own.

Gordon opened it back up curiously…nothing but a normal neighborhood on the other side. The sound of rocket boots came from behind the house and settled down when Darnold planted his feet firmly before the front door.

“Dr. Freeman, it’s good to see you again so soon.”

“Yeah, man. Come on in, always happy to have you around.”

“Thank you.” Darnold tilted his head left and right, “I do hope you still feel that way after we get this meeting over with.”

“I don’t see why it would?” Gordon’s inflection came off a bit more unsure than he had intended, “I mean, it’s one conversation.”

The seating arrangement around the TV had a sofa across from the screen, a loveseat to the right, and a recliner to the left. Coomer and Bubby usually took the loveseat, and Gordon usually took the recliner since it was his own house. That left enough room on the couch for Tommy, Darnold, and at least one more person (or a very large dog) to all sit together. So, of course, Benrey sat in the middle.

Gordon looked around at everybody, each of them passing awkward glances at each other, aside from Benrey who was just looking directly at the ceiling.

“Hey, so, what’s up?” Gordon asked, “What’s the talk about?”

“Well uhhhhhhh, it’s a bit complicated.” Bubby spoke first.

“So it’s about Benrey, got it.”

“Yo!”

“What?” The older man looked at him quizzically. “No? Of course it’s not about Benrey, we already know he’s back. Nothing much to be done about that.”

“Yeah Mister Freeman, Benrey is a functioning member of society.”

Gordon gestured vaguely at Benrey. “This guy? A fucking-a FUNCTIONING member of society? Benrey?”

“I don’t see why he wouldn’t be!” Darnold exclaimed, “He was very polite last night, he even got all our orders for dinner.”

“Yeah, well, clearly you weren’t there when he plotted to get my fucking arm cut off.”

“Now Gordon,” interjected Dr. Coomer, “I think you’re forgetting that Dr. Bubby was also involved with the ambush that took your hand.”

“I didn’t tell them to do that!” Bubby growled, “Benrey can attest to that. He didn’t tell them to do that either, they just-!”

“Whatever, it doesn’t matter.” Gordon deliberately interrupted Bubby. “You know he snuck into my doctor’s appointment today, right? Started spewing Sweet Voice into the examination room before my doctor showed up.”

“I DIDN’T FUCKING-!” Benrey got up, huffing out orange balls of light with every breath.

Tommy pulled Benrey back to his seat, the latter man looked at the floor in frustration.

“Mister Freeman, Benrey would never invade someone's privacy that way.” Tommy frowned.

Gordon audibly growled. “This guy literally harassed me when I went to use the bathroom at the movie theater!”

“No, I waited for you to finish first.” Benrey argued, “I’m not gonna look at your junk on purpose.”

Gordon got up and paced around his living room, violently ruffling his hair around to avoid getting physically violent.

“He’s not going to look at your junk on purpose, Gordon.” Bubby reiterated unhelpfully.

“This is the same guy who’s day was apparently ruined by a slip in my suit! I don’t get why you guys are defending this fucker!”

“Because you’re being a fucking dick!”

“I’m not being a dick!”

Coomer spoke up, “You kinda are being a dick, Gordon.”

“Dr. Coomer?! What the hell?!”

“Dr. Freeman, I think you should calm down before we finish this conversation.” Suggested Darnold.

Benrey seemed to feel that now was a good time to butt-in, “Yeah, you uh, you should calm down.”

“No! I don’t WANT to calm down! I want to get mad!”

“You shouldn’t though.”

“Why not-!”

“Because bad things happen when you get mad.”

“What-?”

Gordon’s vision went blurry before he could say more, he hunched over a shelf to steady his suddenly weak knees.

This wasn't the kind of blurry where he skipped long drives or conversations where he already knew the outcome, and this wasn't the kind of blurry that had frequently plagued him immediately after the Resonance Cascade where his mind muddled all reasoning with resurfaced memories of Black Mesa. He felt a tightness, no, an obstruction in his throat.

This was choking.

He was choking.

He could faintly hear Tommy and Dr. Coomer, talking to him, could barely see them getting up to help him.

Yellow and orange filled his vision, and just as quickly vanished. The color seemed to flush itself into his throat while he coughed and hacked, his arms giving out as he fell on his side in agony and distress.

His eyes drew themselves over to Benrey, who's face now wore an expression that looked so foreign on him. He only barely hid it while covering his mouth to try and keep yellow and red orbs of Sweet Voice from spilling out.

Fear.

Benrey was afraid.

Gordon felt nauseous.

What could be so bad, so wrong with what Gordon was experiencing, that Benrey was afraid?

What did Benrey know that he didn’t?

Gordon tried to scream.

The more he tried to scream, the more his head began to thump, louder and louder, and the more it felt like he was coughing up a gobstopper the size of a mule, until finally the pressure became so unbearable that all the fear and anger swelled out of him in a hundred brilliant shades and hues. The colors dulled into confusion, and then wonder and then fear once more while his throat continued to provide discordant screaming noises.

The chorus of people screaming around him did nothing to relieve Gordon's overwhelming terror.

Eventually, however, the screaming died down. His throat had become too raw to continue, and the colorful lights that accompanied it lessened into a perpetual trickle.

Almost everybody in the room was mumbling to themselves or to a neighbor about the situation, equally confused and scared as Gordon, except for Tommy.

The young man looked at Benrey, who’s face had shifted from fear to a sort of dawning combination of embarrassment and guilt. He looked at Gordon, allowing a thin stream of alternating pink and cyan Sweet Voice to fall from his lips in what Gordon must have assumed to be an attempt of mutual understanding.

Finally, Tommy looked back at Gordon. The guilt on his face was much more palpable compared to Benrey’s “Mister Freeman, you must be feeling a lot of emotions right now.”

“Oh, oh god... I think... I think I'm gonna be sick.”

[anons-artchive]

Front Facing Worm Benny

[anons-artchive]

Here’s some pecking noodles (Something something all art is derivative)

[anons-artchive]

Some doodles of the non-canon worms of Metamorphosis AU

If you saw the version of this I accidentally posted at 3 am, no u didn’t

[anons-artchive]

The Metamorphosis of Gordon Freeman [Chapter 1]

Summary: Gordon finds out four years too late that not wearing your helmet into a chamber filled with otherworldly radiation is going to have some strange effects on the human body. Luckily for him, there’s somebody that can help him accommodate to his new alien powers…unluckily for him, that somebody happens to be a certain former security guard that can’t seem to stay dead.

Chapter Summary: Gordon receives an unwanted visit from somebody he hasn’t seen in a long time.

Word Count: 4,406

Notes: So originally this chapter was much longer, and included Movie Night, but I realized it was getting REALLY long and I thought the initial conversation between Gordon and Benrey acted as a good introduction of things to come. The start of things getting jostled up in Gordon’s life.

Black Mesa had been busy for a while when it came to Xen. The details were of a need-to-know basis, and not everybody in Black Mesa had those qualifications, but that didn’t change the fact that the survey team’s most recent yield of specimens came with an unexpected addition.

Could they call it a man?

It looked like a man.

Correction, it almost looked like a man: average height, a slightly notable stomach, some dark and greasy hair…perfectly normal from a glance.

This wasn’t a normal man.

Normal men don’t bare razor sharp teeth.

Normal men didn’t tank loads of bullets with anything less than a few bruises.

Normal men didn’t come back from the dead.

Normal men don’t spew orbs of color from their snarling mouth.

Normal men don’t have scleras the color of honey and irises that were some sort of horrible color out of space.

Normal men don’t scale walls and ceilings completely nude, their eyes, fingertips, feet mysteriously concealed by shadows with no discernible source.

This wasn’t a normal man.

This wasn’t even a human, masculine or otherwise.

This was something else.

This was something unworldly.

This was something familiar to Black Mesa, despite the shape it currently took.

This was something Black Mesa’s scientists hadn’t seen for a long, long time, and they were going to take advantage of that.

-

SUBJECT: Gordon Freeman, PhD.

CURRENT LOCATION:

Random County Middle School

Poastgame, New Mexico

TIME: Containment Failure + 1491 days, 5 hours

EMPLOYMENT STATUS: It’s complicated

-

Gordon sat in front of a desk, a stern, withered figure staring back at him from the opposite side. Both were obnoxiously business casual, although his interviewer clearly had something a bit out of date. He grinned at the older gentleman, who simply maintained his analytical glare.

“You say you want to be a… science teacher… Dr. Freeman?”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s why I’m uh… that’s why I applied for the job here, yeah.” He nodded.

“It says here you graduated from MIT, very impressive.”

“Thank you” spills from Gordon’s lips without a second thought, his scrutinizing assessor briefly redirects his gaze from the paper back to him. It feels like an eternity before he switches focus once more.

“I am very curious about your previous employment, as well as the noticeable gap in your resume.”

Shit. Fuck. Damnit.

What could he even bring up as an excuse that didn’t break his confidentiality agreement?

There was so much shit that went on in Black Mesa: the shady business practices were just the start, the blatant coverup of alien lifeforms wasn’t exactly a reasonable excuse either, nor the multitudes of identical human men that were apparently illegal and wanted by the state of New Mexico, and he was pretty sure so much as whispering about the experiment that destroyed his workplace would paint a target on his back. Again. And he really didn’t need a repeat of last year’s ‘Ed Balls Day Celebration’.

That wasn’t even mentioning the complete disregard for OSHA safety regulations (he didn’t care if Tommy said it had been up to code, it most certainly was NOT in his eyes), the medical malpractice (he was pretty sure what happened in the mixology department counted as this, but he really didn’t want to throw Darnold under the bus considering how nice and genuinely helpful the guy was), the clear disregard of human decency that was the accursed laundry room and it’s wretched coin-guzzling dryers, the-

“Doctor Freeman, I am waiting for you to answer my question.”

Gordon stuttered, suddenly his train of thought failed to provide any sort of plausible answer. He deployed his most reliable excuse. “I’m uh, I’m kinda not supposed to say anything? Kinda supposed to keep quiet about what happened to the place. As for the gap… well…” Most people don’t like it when you tell them the reason you have a gap in your employment is because you spent two years attempting to mentally recover from the trauma of your last workplace, and even more people dislike when you tell them the rest of your gap has been from you trying to get a job and then failing, because the idea of anybody having such a long gap in employment is an enigma to anybody trying to hire, at least as far as Poastgame, New Mexico was concerned. Still, he couldn’t exactly lie about what he’d been doing for the past four years, so he told them exactly what was up with the gap in his resume.

As expected, it did not please the other man in the slightest.

Gordon looked deflated by the end of the interview, looking much like one of the numerous tweens currently outside the office, waiting to hear about their grade-school criminal records.

“Doctor Freeman,” the interviewer started, “this is a middle school, as you are clearly aware. You, good Doctor, are an MIT graduate. As far as I’m concerned, this job is way below your paygrade, and even if it weren’t-“

Gordon zoned out, replaying the interview in his head. He was doing everything right: the right clothes, a nice resume, being totally honest with the guy, didn’t accidentally swear like he did at his previous interview…What sort of arbitrary rules could he have been forgetting?

For a guy that had once ragged on his former co-workers, both living and deceased, about not being able to act like normal people, he was starting to feel like maybe he was a hypocrite with how much he struggled to follow basic etiquette.

Surely, the Resonance Cascade hadn’t ruined his social skills that much in just a week, but who was he to judge? This was the same guy that got nervous about making phone calls (It’s not even that hard! It’s talking to people! You love to talk to people!). Even then, he probably shouldn’t judge, Tommy got nervous about phone calls too, but Tommy seemed a bit more justified given his tendency to change his words mid-sentence.

If there was any factor of justification for Gordon’s awkwardness (and this was a pretty big one that even HE forgot about sometimes), then it was the additional matter that he was a video game character, one whose entire personality and backstory had been sculpted together by some person bumbling around their room in a VR headset for several hours. Now that the video game was over, Gordon had to rely on what was “taught” to him by the player, and that was more than enough to make him feel like a badly rolled DND character. He couldn’t even air his grievances to the Player, they had left not long after exporting their save file to whatever server was housing the Post Game. He did have an opportunity to talk to them, once, but trying to remember too many details of the conversation hurt his head; if he had any chance to tweak or change himself, it was that conversation, and clearly he had wasted it.

So, yeah, Gordon didn’t have an excuse. He was kinda stuck being the prime antithesis of a normal person, it seemed.

He nodded at the interviewer when he seemed to finish his speal, shook the man’s sweaty hand, and gave his empty thanks for the “opportunity” to speak to the man at all before making the drive back home. He couldn’t recall the details between when he left the school and when he got home, his memories always got fuzzy when he was driving by himself. He had enough video game knowledge to suspect it was Fast Travel. For a moment, he wondered if it was possible to turn off, but knowing his luck his attempt to do so would just end up turning his prosthetic arm back into a mini-gun, and then he’d have to figure out how to switch it back to normal.

He should have just asked the rest of the Science Team about the car thing years ago, but he had been putting it off after he decided it was preferable to being left to stew in his thoughts for the entire drive. And now he was suffering the consequences of his inaction, wondering only now if he could toggle Fast Travel and Mini-Gun Hand. Hell, maybe he had the power to toggle game difficulty this entire time and he wasn’t utilizing it, he would really like to switch Job Hunting to “easy mode.”

Whatever. Too late to find out now.

Gordon didn’t really need a job, anyways, given the hush money and all, he just needed some form of normalcy to keep himself from focusing on the events that got him here, thinking about that stuff for too long got him stressed, and bad things tended to happen when Gordon got stressed.

Needless to say, he was pretty sure the horrid little man sitting in the middle of his lawn was not a good omen of things to come, both for his stress levels and his attempts at normalcy.

He let out a long, irritated sound, similar to when one needed to be vocal about an upset stomach, and stepped out of the car. Benrey didn’t seem to notice Gordon quite yet, but he knew better than to let the smaller man be left unattended outside. He could call the police but… he’d really rather not on principle alone. He and the Science Team had all agreed that in case of emergencies, they would call each other first (against Gordon’s better judgment), and then either an ambulance or the fire department second.

Benrey… technically wasn’t an emergency right now. He was just a minor annoyance at best, and if for some reason the man did escalate into a greater problem, Gordon had the benefit of it being movie night at his place tonight. If something went wrong, and he couldn’t contact the Science Team for whatever reason, they would know, and they would raise hell at whatever was causing the problem, because at this point not even a second Resonance Cascade (god hope no such a thing occurs) would be able to stop those people from executing their weekly plans after four years of proper bonding time.

Gordon moved between his house and Benrey, keeping a good distance as he did so before engaging in any sort of conversation. He wanted to be as close to the front door as possible in case the non-human gave chase…not that it meant much since Benrey could noclip, but the idea of safety gave him comfort, even if it wasn’t ensured.

“What are you doing here?” He asked a bit too casually. He was sure his voice would better convey the confusion and dread he was feeling once his brain snapped out of what he could only best describe as a new stage of grief dedicated solely for rediscovering somebody who really should have stayed dead.

Bafflement, he was pretty sure what he was experiencing was bafflement. He wasn’t sure why, though. He’d seen Benrey come back from the dead quite a few times, but that all been four years and 31 days ago (and still counting). At that point you can’t help but reasonably assume somebody like that is going to stay dead this time, but apparently that was not the case for Benrey. That also wasn’t surprising, when he thought about it; the cheapest way to create a threat in a sequel is to just bring back the final boss from the first game.

Oh god, was Benrey going to be his Dr. Wily? Was Gordon going to be stuck defeating the same creep over and over and over again for the next 30-something years? He couldn’t do that, his body still hadn’t recovered from the first time he fought Benrey.

The other man tilted his head slightly to Gordon, as if wanting to acknowledge him but not quite processing he was there. “mm…ding dong…” He poked at Gordon’s thrift store garden gnome, its cheeky smile and unbroken gaze were something Gordon had looked deeply into a few times too many since he got it. He wanted to think the longing it exuded wasn’t just his imagination, but he had accepted by now that it was probably his lonely mind playing tricks on him. He was more willing to accept this as imaginary compared to the skeletons.

“Hey,” Gordon spoke up, “Hey man, I asked you a question.”

“…what?” Benrey looked around again, less sluggish than before, this time locking eyes with Gordon. The smaller man’s face was almost an inverse of the gnome’s, they shared the same vacant stare, but the rest of his expression gave him a more pensive look.

Unlike the gnome, however, Benrey’s face could actually change, albeit subtly, such was the case when it morphed into a small smile upon recognizing Gordon. “Yooo! What’s up! Been a while, man. Been like…” He stared directly at the sun, or at least appeared to do so, his eyes squinting not from the glare but from his trying to process something. “…four years, and a month! That one month is pretty, uh, important.”

Gordon exhaled slowly. It sounded like one of those terrible, pig-shaped noise makers Tommy and Dr. Coomer had bought at the Dollar Store last week. “Whyyyyyy? Why now? Why are you-?” He felt a familiar anger boil over, and suddenly his tone and body language had gone from exhausted to brimming with rage. The edges of his vision went slightly red. “Okay! Okay, I’m going to disregard the fact that you can apparently tell how long it’s been since you last harassed me simply by looking at the position of the stars in broad-fucking-daylight, WHY, OF ALL TIMES, ARE YOU BACK? RIGHT FUCKING NOW?!?!”

He could swear he saw Benrey flinch slightly at his outburst, but he wasn’t sure. The man almost immediately responded with his usual calm.

“I told you man, that one month was important. I got, uh, my PS+ renewed. Played the whole time.”

Okay, that…sorta explained where he’d been for the past month, at least.

“Let me guess, Heavenly Sword?”

“Yeah!!!”

Gordon had the displeasure of witnessing the familiar sight of Sweet Voice spewing from Benrey’s lips. The man’s joy seemed to overflow at him remembering such a basic detail from his nonsensical monologue.

“It was so fun!” Benrey continued. “I got to play on a full server, throwing frags and shit at other people, really great cool stuff.”

The red faded from his vision. Despite wanting to so badly…Gordon simply could not stay mad at him. He was just sitting there, in the grass, blabbering on about Heavenly Sword like an excited child. Damnit, the man was even fidgeting with the hem of his shirt while he talked. Was Benrey even a threat, now? Did four years of whatever he was doing mellow him out?

Gordon’s brows furrowed, he should have been focused on the how and why of Benrey being in his front lawn like a sad dog, but for some reason his mind was derailed to the point of fascination by Benrey’s Adventures in Free PlayStation Plus.

“So you got PS Plus, were you, were you just doing that for four years? Were you just gaming the entire time?”

“Nah man, I was…sleep.”

“For four years? You slept for four entire years?”

“Yeah I got really tired after the uh, the heist. So I had a big sleep. I woke up though. That was kinda sucks.” That checked out, considering what happened after they had their heist in another world, but now Gordon was concerned about how Benrey remembered the heist; nobody was supposed to remember the heist except for Gordon, he vaguely recalls that he and the Player agreed to the Science Team forgetting the heist. Tommy kinda remembered, but only the parts where he had asbestos poisoning. Well, he supposed since Benrey didn’t count as a member of the Science Team, maybe him remembering wasn’t a problem, for now.

“They gave me one month of PS Plus after I woke up and came back. I like video games…can’t play video games in the other place though, so I agreed to the free month.” Benrey continued. He nodded and shook his head while explaining his story, always at the appropriate times where a head movement seemed necessary, almost like it was practiced.

“So you…” Gordon continued the conversation, trying to feel out if maybe he was being led into a false sense of security. “You played Heavenly Sword for a whole month without eating or sleeping?”

“Yea-no?? I ate…pigeons and…” He looked directly at Gordon, he was processing something again, “…tree rats.”

“Squirrels?”

“Yeah those.” His scrunched face changed to a neutral-looking smile.

He had seen Benrey eat pigeons back in Black Mesa, so he wasn’t too surprised the man had eaten squirrels; it seemed like a logical next step. It made sense, Gordon was pretty sure a diet consisting solely of cheese puffs and 7Up (he was pretty sure that’s what gamers ate) could kill even the hardiest of immortals.

Actually, Benrey didn’t mention eating any sort of fruit just now, did he just leave them out on purpose or, was he some sort of obligate carnivore? He probably should have focused on that more than on what he asked next.

“You cooked those before you ate them, right?”

“No. Sorry, I don’t have uh…microbe-wave.”

Gordon just stared at him. He shouldn’t have been surprised, but he was.

“Tastes better with the hair on ‘em anyways.”

“I’m not a medical doctor, but I’m pretty sure…that you’re gonna get a disease…” Gordon tried to choose his next words carefully. He really, really tried. But his brain was fried from the interview and the exhaustion was starting to catch up. “…Salmonella. You’re gonna get salmonella if you keep eating raw meat like that.”

It was Benrey’s turn to stare again.

“Oh, who am I fucking kidding?” Gordon threw his hands in the air, “You’re some sort of thing from another world, the bacteria probably just goes right through you!”

“There are…” Benrey paused, his face morphed into a mischievous, shark-toothed grin. “…yo there’s Bakugan in my meat?”

He laughed. Gordon laughed and laughed and laughed until he fell over drunk from the shock of Benrey’s statement, and then laughed until the tap ran dry and he was sober enough to wheeze a response. “No! That’s not-Benrey that’s not what I said at all. I expect that kind of joke from Tommy! Oh my god…”

All of the neighbors peaked over or around to see the commotion at this point. Gordon didn’t feel any need to acknowledge them any as he shakily pushed himself upright, they were used to the bullshit that followed him around by this point, they were just really nosy. They were gone as quickly as they arrived, by which point he was now sitting on the opposite side of his gnome. “Do…Do you wanna like…come inside or something, man?”

“No, I don’t like the color beige.”

In his hysterical drunkenness, Gordon had almost been willing to invite Benrey into his refuge, but the hospitality had now been lost.

He was seeing red again. “How did you know my walls were-? Did you noclip into my house?!” He took his glasses off and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “Fucking-! I keep getting fucking distracted! Dude!!!!”

Benrey watched Gordon gesture wildly with the hand not carrying his glasses around, directing every movement towards him.

“Why are you HERE?!” He screamed.

Benrey looked at the ground. “That’s uh, private information.” Slowly his head drifted towards Gordon again, he could faintly see the man’s creepy eyes follow the seams of his suit. “…Yo, we dressing up for movie night tonight?”

Gordon stiffened, standing back up. “How do you know about movie night?”

If Benrey knew about movie night, then either somebody told him, or…

“Tommy told me.” Benrey answered quickly, “Well, uh…he told his dad, and his dad told me. Mister Coolguy, Mister Govern-Mant, he got me the free month of PS Plus.”

Benrey fidgeted with the hem of his shirt again, sort of messing with it like he was messing around with a game controller while his mouth bubbled Sweet Voice and word salad.

“Like…he said he was going to buy more when it ran out, and now it’s been a month and my PS Plus ran out…twenty minutes ago.”

“We’ve been talking for about five minutes or something,” Gordon looked at his wrists. There wasn’t a watch on either of them, but it felt important to visually convey the flow of time. “So you’re telling me that your PS Plus ran out fifteen minutes before you got here, and you couldn’t wait another five or so for Mister Coolatta, for Tommy’s dad to renew it again? The PlayStation has games that aren’t multiplayer, you couldn’t play any of those for a while?”

Benrey averted his gaze. “I could but…”

He waited, but Benrey didn’t continue his statement. He was starting to consider the possibility that Benrey was lying out of his ass right now and that he had simply stolen enough information from the Science Team to keep Gordon preoccupied while they all died a slow, painful and permanent death before killing Gordon himself. He waited another two minutes before breaking the silence, hoping maybe that Benrey didn’t know that Gordon knew what he was planning. “But what? Why won’t you play single player games?”

Benrey looked at the ground again. “…I’d like to go inside the house now please?”

“Uh-?”

“WAIT! Can we go to my house instead? Pretty please?” He asked in earnest, pulling off a fucked-up alien version of ‘sad anime eyes’.

Well, if Benrey really was distracting Gordon to leave the Science Team dying somewhere, he did a scarily good job at hiding that fact. He must have been trying to get him into a secondary location to finish the job.

Hastily, Gordon tried to come up with an excuse while he put his glasses back on.

“Uh, sorry man. I wish I could, but uh, the guys are gonna be here in about…an hour, and I still need to change into some normal clothes and figure out what we’re eating for movie night. So-“ He twisted away from Benrey pulling something out and trying to force it into his line of sight, reminding Gordon of his various intrusive thoughts of being kidnapped in the past few years.

Benrey frowned. “Bro it’s paper.” He shook the parchment around for demonstration.

Through a partially-covered mouth, Gordon asked “Can you please not shove paper in my face?”

Benrey responded by wobbling the paper more until Gordon finally accepted it.

“Fine, what is this?”

“Mm…list. Food list.”

“Food list?”

“Food list.”

The paper that the list was written on had been improperly torn from a spiral notebook; you could easily see where the lower half of the page was simply ripped instead of following the tear-away lines. The handwriting on it, by contrast, looked incredibly clean, almost like it was typed out aside from a few blemishes of human error like scribbles over spelling mistakes or a long line from where somebody had made an order and then at the last minute asked for something completely different, much to the chagrin of the transcriber.

“…This is really nice handwriting.” Gordon admitted.

He felt his phone buzz in his pocket, prompting him to look over his messages.

One of them was an unflattering picture of him from a few minutes ago, dying of laughter in his front yard, sent by his neighbors from across the street to the neighborhood group chat.

‘This idiot can’t even comprehend the true form of Gnome Chompski’s attack. XD Ignore the guy in the back dunno who he is.’

Thanks Gina and Colette, very cool.

The other message was from Bubby, so maybe the rest of the Science Team wasn’t dead after all. At the very least, Bubby wasn’t dead.

‘You’d better be goddamn home by now. I’m changing my order again. I want a Sausage Melt, and I want my hash browns smothered and diced. Also, Harold wanted to make sure you added pecans to his chocolate chip waffles. If you forget those nuts again and he cries, I WILL make it your problem.’

“Did Bubby change his order again?” Benrey asked, his expression dead serious. He didn’t wait for an answer, apparently he could just tell from Gordon’s expression and considered that enough to snatch the paper from his hands and scratch out one of the orders with a pen he pulled out from hammerspace. “This fuckin’ guy, I can’t believe it. This is the THIRD time man.”

“I think I can handle the orders from here.” Gordon said. He got the list back without much of a fight, which was preferable to getting into a tug-of-war over a piece of paper.

“I will…see you later?” He slowly backed away from Benrey to get inside his house, tripping as the terrain switched from grass to concrete beneath his feet. “I’m going to go inside now and…do the stuff I said I needed to do!” His hand clutched the door knob, and immediately Gordon turned around to wiggle it open. His face paled with realization that his initial plans to bolt at the first sign of a threat would not have worked anyways, not solely because Benrey could noclip through objects, but also because Gordon would not have had the time to unlock his front door before Benrey did…whatever the fuck he had planned.

Just like in the horror movies.

Shit.

Gordon was a fucking horror movie protagonist and he wasn’t even one of the long-lasting ones. He was the final girl from the first movie that they kill off at the start of the second to make a point.

“Hey man, you dropped this.”

A key ring appeared in his peripheral vision. Gordon strained his eyes to meet Benrey’s line of sight, the man had that deceptively innocent smile from before as he held the keys out like a joy-buzzer.

He took his keys back with the speed and grace of a claw machine, unlocked the door, and just stared longingly at the interior for a minute.

“Inside? Inside for Benrey?”

“Yeah, sure thing man…” Gordon sighed and walked inside, letting Benrey follow behind. If he was going to die, might as well get comfortable first.

[anons-artchive]

Small url change!

princessofanons-artblog -> anons-artchive

[anons-artchive]

Small url change!

princessofanons-artblog -> anons-artchive

[anons-artchive]

Drew some of The Guys (plus Lazulo and Yacque snuggles)

Sterling is an unofficial third brother, he’s from Hero Arena

The squiddo belongs to @nekopad-alpha ! We were in a whiteboard together.

[anons-artchive]

Super Paper Swap: Ch. 1-4 (OLD)

Word Count: 2,510

Chapter Summary: The Pure Heart is just within reach, but can Luigi face the beast sits at the end of the Yold Ruins?

In spite of the unforgiving dunes of the Yold Desert, Luigi and Co. had found the strength to bypass the shifting sands and had found the Yold Ruins. They ventured inside. "These ruins are awfully chilly, this must be the home of the Ice Beast!" said Blecky as they delved deep into the ancient structure.

Chapter 1-4: Monster of the Ruins

The torchlit Yold Ruins seemed devoid of any heat, the walls and floor were icy cold and slippery, and the blue fire that allowed the group to see anything seemed to drain the warmth of everything around them. The blue discarded shells of buzzy beetles lied scattered across the ground, the rest of the small foes having given up their life force to the torches.

The sound of bones clattering was heard ahead, getting closer and closer. Our heroes approached the noise, believing it to be the ruckus of another mindless enemy. In actuality, the sound was from a more self aware group of foes who were in charge of skewering any foreign entities that entered the the Yold Ruins in search of its secrets.

The heroes, armed for attack, found themselves face-to-face with a pair of skeletons with spears in their hands. One of them, purple colored and wearing a spite on its head, commanded the other, a blue colored skeleton, to attack the group in an ancient tongue. The lesser of the undead charged with the likeness of a jouster, prompting Luigi to dodge out of the way and make way to the leader. Said leader was much smarter than it's blue counterpart and allowed the hero to make his way towards it before swinging its spear at him at the last minute; miraculously, the attack only made a scratch, witch baffled both Luigi and his foes.

The purple skeleton, after some thought, indicated shock at a realization of some sort and promptly bowed to the hero. Its partner followed suit.

"Hero," it spoke "my apologies for not immediately recognizing your sacred light."

The abrupt change into hospitality was a surprise to Luigi, who usually expected the oversaturated kindness first, followed by a sour betrayal. He decided to go with the turn of events with a pinch of salt.

"Who-"

"WHAT THE HECK IT WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!" Blecky interrupted, still bitter about the fight with Mimi and anticipating to sink his teeth into battle instead of being a flying encyclopedia.

"We are the guardsmen of the Yold Ruins, the resting place of the Lineland Pure Heart. As protectors of such a relic, we have been entrusted powers that decimate all beings unworthy of entering these ruins; you are protected by the great creators and are therefore immune to our powers." The blue skeleton uttered, unfazed by the bat's attitude and not particularly interested in answering his question.

"English please?" Blecky asked in annoyance.

"We have been expecting you."

"Thank you."

The guards, whom Blecky declared to be skellobits, took it upon themselves to escort the group to the Pure Heart's location, both out of common curtesy and as an apology for attempting to turn the main character into Swiss cheese.

The skellobit guards navigated the twisting and interlocking tunnels with ease, skewering pesty buzzy beetles into dust-filled shells and shoving aside the slightly smaller but slightly more annoying cousins of the spiny tromp, the spiky tromp, into less job-interfering locations. All while other skellobits and their tiny wormlike counterparts, the skellobaits, passed by as if they had already known of the hero's arrival just minutes before.

According to their guides, the skellobits and their leader were once dwellers of the afterlife, but were allowed chances at redemption among the living. By accepting their tasks of protecting the Pure Heart, they forfeited the immortality they would normally have in the living world by filling their empty bodies with something akin to a mortal soul. This information ceased to bother them over time since the Yold Ruins were incredibly reclusive and the species are a whole had lost interest in causing trouble. Even their leader, who had been incredibly viscous, found he had more interest in preoccupying the Yold Town children with snow each year he awoke instead of trying to claim the Pure Heart he once desired to obtain for himself. Over the years, the species as a whole had become docile towards non-aggressive entities and had insisted on staying in the ruins after all was said and done, so they were given permission to do as such.

The frozen atmosphere seemed to become more mild to Luigi as the skellobits led them through the maze of brick and sand. Even as they got closer to the end and both groups ran out of conversational material, he felt warmly welcomed by the undead guardians.

The party approached the exit to the ruins, an open entryway into a Parthenon-like structure. Luigi felt an ominous wind in the premises and decided to jump underneath another 'save block' for good measure; he hadn't realized until that moment, but he had done the same thing before fighting Mimi. Such a habit was common for him when his subconscious suspected danger ahead of him. Perhaps Mimi was planning a second round to their previous fight.

He shook off the strange looks from his peers and followed the guards into the outside world. The structure was even colder than the ruins they had come from, so much in fact that there were icicles forming on the ceiling. Not a grain of the sand outside entered the pillared building as a cold breeze emerged from the center of the room. The source of this breeze was the chilling aura of a giant blue-boned beast in a deep slumber.

He stood as still as a ice sculpture. The bottom half was a golden canon-like device with a pair of proportionally large wheels and a thin black tail that curved upwards; the upper half was a typical skeleton chest and spine, but had the toothy head of a common dragon resting on its shoulders. The arms were thin like the tail, but gave the impression that they could break anything they grasped; likewise the six angelic wings on his back, although seeming small and frail, had a feeling of deeply hidden potential in the form of incredible flight capabilities.

The towering beast's crimson eyes eyes snapped awake to stare down at the plumber and his companions. He scanned the hero from head to toe and into his very soul, silently judging every flaw and imperfection before speaking as a living embodiment of frostbite.

"Hero, bathed in the light of thy great creators," he boomed. "your journey hast already been a treacherous one, and yet you hath only collected the first Pure Heart. I am Bonechill, the guardian of the second Pure Heart. My job is eliminate intruders and thieves, which thou are neither. As such I giveth thee permission to pass into the room behind me."

Before Luigi could thank the great beast for his kindness, a snicker echoed through the chamber.

"My my my, if it isn't the Man in Green. It's so nice to see you again." The feminine voice teased like a nagging secretary. Its source dropped from the ceiling between Luigi and Bonechill. "Now marks the spectacular arrival of Nastasia, the Ringleader of Darkness!"

"Who? Wait, have we met somewhere before?" Blecky questioned, eyeing the entertainer with suspicion.

"In a way, yes. But we can dwell on such information later. Now is the present, and as it stands this encounter is rather boring. Don't worry though, sweet little Nassy knows how to spice things up a bit for the audience!" She adjusted her glasses when she finished talking, a ring of red sparks circled Bonechill, who was sorely confused the entire time, immediately afterward.

The great beast twitched and rattled until the sparks dissipated, he closed his eyes and breathed heavily.

"My work here is done for now. So long Green Thunder!" Nastasia taunted before teleporting away from the chamber.

Bonechill's eyes opened slowly, his breath was deep and monstrous.

"Who dares approach me?" He thundered, "A puny mortal, a pathetic prophetic hero is what dares to witness me? Hero, you have made a poor decision to challenge the mighty fallen angel Bonechill and as such will be destroyed by my hand! The Pure Heart you seek shall be mine!"

He let out a mighty roar as hoards of skellobits surrounded him, entranced by the same spell that was driving him mad.

"Blecky! What's wrong with him?" Luigi called out, hammering away at the skeletal foes.

"He's under that madwoman's control! You'll have to defeat him!" The bat responded as he avoided a swarm of winged skellobits.

The amount of skeletons was copious to say the least. Every time one was defeated, a number more of them took its place like the head of a hydra. Luigi was slowly ruining out of strength, items, and patience with each hit he was forced to take. The skellobits weren't the only problem as Bonechill blew a gust of icy breath every minute or so. The icicles on the ceiling would grow in size until they were too heavy and would explode into a flurry of shards onto the floor. Large chunks of ice blasted from Bonechill's canon between breaths, increasing the amount of carnage.

The struggle became even greater for Luigi when his hammer was knocked out of his hands by an enemy, forcing him to grab a discarded spear from a previous foe. The pointed end of the weapon jabbed into the ribcage and through something partially solid, the skeleton disappeared into dust, leaving its own spear behind.

Mortified, Luigi pulled back the stick in his hands. The powers of its original handler still coursed through the weapon's material. Perhaps he could use this to his advantage.

Luigi grabbed the second spear and charged into the masses with the pointed ends of both weapons facing forward. The hoards dropped like flies from the mere touch of the weapons' heads, making a clear path to Bonechill himself.

Bonechill, however, was much tougher than his minions; his skeleton and canon were guarded by a thick layer of scales that deflected the attacks of the spear. The only part that seemed vulnerable was the head, so he threw the long stick with all his might towards that direction. The effect was immediate as the sharp spearhead imbedded itself into one of Bonechills eye sockets, the impact shook off a layer of scales.

Using this strategy to his advantage, Luigi called over the pixls to help him as he threw his second spear, which busted part of the jawbone. Blecky distracted the skellobits with his skilled flying capabilities while Laddie entered the Next to collect spears without being attacked. Luigi tossed Boomer into the golden canon during the chaos, destroying the inner mechanisms and forcing Bonechill to only use his ice breath.

With a bundle of spears and Luigi's hammer in tow, Laddie returned to the normal dimension to drop of their delivery. This prompted Luigi to engage in tossing spears at the beasts head until only frail bones remained. A gentle glow rested inside the place where Bonechill's heart would be, which Luigi instinctually aimed at with the last of his spears.

The spear and the light blasted apart, causing Bonechill to topple over and all of his minions to vanish. He let out a rumbling noise akin to shivering as he stared daggers into Luigi's soul.

"Bozzo had a message for you..." Luigi chocked up with guilt as he spoke. "He said 'Hi.'"

A glint of recognition briefly appeared in Bonechill's eyes before they went completely blank, like they were turned off by a light switch. The hot desert wind invaded the room, now that the icy aura from before was expelled, and carried away the fragile bones of the ice beast, now lost to the sands of time.

Luigi and company slowly made their way to the Pure Heart's holding room with their own hearts heavier than the brick they walked upon. The room was similar to most of the hallways that littered the ruins except the walls were beautifully decorated in unspeakable patterns, the guards that once occupied the stone chamber having meticulously cleaned every nook and cranny for the arrival of the hero.

A transparent figure sat at the opposite end of the room, covered by a smooth green cloak over a yellow toga-like article of clothing. The only other distinguishing thing about the figure was their green star-gem mouth, long locks of reddish-blondish hair, and distinctly masculine physique. He rose from the floor, soon hovering over it, and approached the group with a sunset orange Pure Heart in his arms.

"Welcome, hero. I am Merloo, a 1,500 year old soul that has long anticipated your arrival. Your presence indicates that all worlds are in the process of collapsing, correct?"

"Yes sir." Luigi and the others answered in unison.

"I see. Listen well hero, for I have important information that must be disclosed."

Luigi nodded, waiting to absorb all vital information like a sponge.

"A long time ago, my people built a great and prosperous civilization filled with power beings. But despite such power, we were completely powerless against one thing and one thing only: The Dark Prognosticus.

"The creator of this terrible book is unknown. What was known, however, was that it foretold future events thousands of years ahead of its time and that the very last page described a chaotic power that would devour all worlds.

"To stop such a catastrophe from happening, we created an object fueled by the essences of love itself to counteract the chaos, the Purity Heart. To protect it from evil hands, we divided the Purity Heart into eight Pure Hearts and sent them to different dimensions where they could be found by the hero of prophesy."

"Is that all you have for us sir?" Luigi asked, just in case there was some hints or tidbits that would help in the long run.

"Well I have this exhilarating tale from my youth you might be interested in." He replied.

"Uh-maybe some other time." Luigi dejected, still feeling the weight of an empty victory.

"...He would have preferred it like this." Merloo assured Luigi, who felt the heavy burden lighten just a bit with that response.

"Go forth hero, we are depending on you." With that, Merloo released the Pure Heart to carry itself into Luigi's possession.

Before finally disappearing, Merloo entrusted the fate of all worlds with Luigi, and proceeded to set himself at rest after waiting 1,500 years to deliver his message. Although Luigi found himself in slightly greater spirits by having the seconds Pure Heart in hand, he knew there was a long journey ahead to find the remaining six.

"We'd best return to Flipside." Blecky exclaimed as the group made their way towards the red-outlined door that appeared in front of them, leading them back to the faithful little town between worlds.

[anons-artchive]

Super Paper Swap: Ch. 1-3 (OLD)

Word Count: 2,357

Chapter Summary: The journey to the Pure Heart continues deep in the Deserts of Yold.

A quick and inelegant sneeze emerged from Luigi as the warm winds of the Yold Desert blew sand into his face. Luigi, Blecky, and the other pixls continued their search for the Pure Heart with the expansive desert ahead.

Chapter 1-3: The Sands of Yold

Believing they had removed the terror of Yold Town had filled Team Luigi with a sense of accomplishment and the determination to push forward towards their goal, despite the intensity of the sun above. The journey, of coarse, would be a long one since the Yold Desert was, well, a desert; to fix this problem, Luigi decided that everyone should tell stories and get to know each other.

Blecky, to start off, was Merlee's loyal helper; he was created by Merlee and held a incredibly strong psychic link with her, he went around Flipside to send messages between Merlee and the townsfolk while she studied the Light Prognosticus. He did other miscellaneous things like take care of the cat he found, whom he dubbed 'Voidslayer', but that was about it.

Next was Laddie, who considered themself to be a curiosity of life, having been created alongside Boomer and several other pixls, but as a failed prototype. Their activation after continuous failures was unexplainable, especially since they first awoke after the activation of the other pixls and should not have been able to live. They were considered a miracle, but they suffered from an 'obsessive desire to be free', that even they couldn't comprehend.

Following Laddie was Boomer, who plainly stated himself as a 'straight up pyromaniac'. Despite his tendency to destroy everything in sight, he had a soft spot for his friends.

Finally, Luigi introduced himself with the typical self-claims about being a normal person that wants to make life better for others. Plain and simple.

While Blecky's stories of his shenanigans were humorous, Laddie's stories of his psychic link with Bestovius and Bozzo were heartwarming and Boomer's stories of carnage were therapy-worthy, everyone agreed that Luigi's tales of heroism were the most interesting and exhilarating. His accomplishments against Peaches tyranny and bravery against incomprehensible creatures was admirable to say the least; the sharing of personal events brought the normally dysfunctional team

Aside from several aggressive goombas and the ever-terrible squig, the only new enemy the team had to worry about was the common bald cleft, a sentient rock with feet and a tough defensive stat. They weren't very bright and could easily be tricked into falling into quicksand or into one of Boomer's explosions.

After their tenth encounter with a bald cleft, Luigi decided to ask Blecky about the creature in Yold Town; apparently it was called a Shlurp, but it was, curiously enough, not native to the Linelands, causing the group to wonder how such a creature had managed to travel dimensions.

Before they could try to find an explaination for such phenomena, however, Bestovius appeared behind them, saying he wanted to make sure the group made their way to the Yold Ruins in safety; he spoke like he did when they first met, with lots of pompous, and Laddie seemed to shift uncomfortably in his presence, like something wasn't right. Help was help however, so they let him follow.

This would immediately prove to be a bad idea as every action Bestovius made seemed to slow down the group's progress and bring attention to hoards of enemies. Not only that, but Laddie continued to complain about their psychic link with Bestovius being nonexistent, which only happened if a pixl was too far away from a master or if said master is deceased. Bestovius was alive and obviously nearby, so the lack of a connection was bizarre.

There had even been a scenario where there was a large, unavoidable pit of quicksand that could only, by process of elimination, be passed through within the Next. Bestovius refused to lend his power to lead them across, instead insisting that Laddie do it so they could get use to the Flip technique, something that the mentioned pixl claimed as uncharacteristic for the wizard.

Nonetheless, they trudged onward.

Bestovius commanded the group to stop. They obliged, hoping that he would make himself useful as the team approached the end of their wits.

"What could possibly be your reason for us to stop here of all places?! There's nothing here but sand and palm trees!" Blecky finally spoke up.

"It's important that you stop here." The wizard said. His voice sounding out of place.

"There is a giant, world consuming hole in the sky Bestovius! If you insist on us stopping here, then please, for our sakes, enlighten us on what good this will do."

"This will do much good little bat." He looked at them emptily.

Bestovius then disappeared in a cloud of purple smoke, and in his place was Mimi, dressed in robe that looked appropriate for desert travel. The glare she gave the group was cold enough to make the dunes themselves become ice.

"Mimimimi. You were all quite foolish to fall for my trap. Granted, it's hard to assume the recent behavior of someone as off-putting when you barely know them."

"Who in the name of the makers are you?!" Laddie blurted out.

"Looks like a troublemaker to me." Luigi replied, his hammer tightly clenched in his hand.

"You'd be very much correct hero. I am Mimi, professional shapeshifter and one of Mistress Tempo's four highest ranked followers. I've been given a rather simple job today, so I'd appreciate it if you'd submit before it's too late and let me capture you. It would save us both the time and energy of having to fight." Mimi spoke with utmost seriousness and kept all eye contact on her target. Every word she spoke was deprived of joy or youth.

"Over our dead bodies!" Called out Boomer, who was shaking in anticipation for a battle to stir as he sensed his boss's preparation to attack. Luigi silently lifted his hammer and marched a few steps forward, his eyes filled with a courageous fire.

"So be it then. Come forward prophetic hero, and face my true form!" Mimi boasted before violently snapping her neck.

The woman's head then spun over her shoulders like and owl, but rapidly with spasmodic movements from the upper body and the gruesome organic sounds of bones cracking. The head bent backwards mid-spin, pausing with the face in the direction of its provokers; the eyes were now empty pits, the mouth was in a crooked grin, and the ponytail swung like a dead snake on a branch instead of swaying in the wind like hair normally would.

The body went limp as the sides of the head burst from a protrusion of spindly arachnid limbs, a pair from the front had green claw-like extensions while the ponytail curved upward like the tail of a scorpion, the very tip of it tinted with a color akin to black nightshade berries.

The horrifying scorpion creature made a gruesome sounding cackle before charging towards the group, who all immediately dodged out of the way either in fear or by instinct. When her initial attacked failed, she used her claws to dig into the sand, concealing her and making it more difficult to be harmed.

The tail sprung out behind Luigi and swung itself at him, stinger first. The impact left the burning feeling of poison coursing through his veins before the tail sunk back in the sand. The plumber tried in vain to attack but would end up missing or getting hit before he could retaliate; he eventually had to use an item he had gotten at the store in Yold Town, it healed him of the damage he took and cured him of his poisoned status, bringing him back to his peak.

All they had to do now was actually land a hit on the hiding shapeshifter. Laddie took the group to the Next, and was surprised to see their foe there as well. Fortunately, the Next provided them with a method to attack Mimi in the form of ripples in the sand.

Boomer dropped himself when the ripples appeared in front of Luigi, the resulting explosion forced Mimi to leave her hiding place and attack on land, where her lack of eyes and reliance on the movement in the ground made her eyesight significantly lacking. She attempted to use the vibrations on the surface and shot a barrage of poison-covered onyxes from her tail towards the direction of most movement.

The precious stones narrowly missed the intended target who responded with a throwing a certain bomb-shaped pixl into the arachnid's face. The blow was so powerful it detached one of its recipient's legs, leaving her with only seven legs and two claws. This gave Luigi an idea as Mimi dug back underground from the pain.

Instead of going to the next, Luigi searched for even the slightest movements in the sand, when the movements were right underneath him, the tail would appear to sting him, where he would dodge the stinger. He'd place Boomer when Mimi began to get too close, ensuring her to rise out of the grainy earth and once again shoot rocks at him. Then he'd either use Boomer or his hammer to knock another leg off of the enemy until only the claws remains.

Without legs to move, Mimi used her tail to shoot onyxes and then her claws to attack short range. A well placed explosion when the claws began to snap easily removed the last of her limbs as she flailed pitifully in the sand.

The purple clouds engulfed the grotesque head as Mimi returned to her other form, noticeably leaning to one side and clutching one of her arms in pain.

"I suppose I have been beat then. No matter, we will retaliate with more power in due time." She said, the words straining to leave her mouth.

"We'll fight as many of you freaks as we need too!" Blecky retorted, "We aren't scared! We'll fight the Void itself if we have too!"

"I'd like to see you try, little bat. It would give us a good laugh at least. I'll take my leave now." And just like that, she teleported out of the scorching desert.

Blecky was visibly steaming in anger at the shapeshifter's snarky attitude towards him. He glared at the Void before finally speaking again.

"Luigi, you know what this means right?"

"We're being hunted down by the Mistress?"

"No. We have to fight the Void."

"DO WHAT?!"

"SHE INSULTED MY SIZE LUIGI THIS MEANS WAR!"

It was at this point forward that Blecky became determined to physically fight the Void with his own two claws and would not hesitate to drag everyone he know along for the ride, all because someone had referred to him as small.

Void fighting shenanigans aside, Luigi had a Pure Heart to find, and moved further into the desert as his riled up bat companion and other two pixls followed suit.

With the battlefield far behind them, the group entered a strong sandstorm. They halted at a unusually tall palm tree with crimson leaves when it became obvious that the wind was becoming too intense. Climbing the tree was utterly useless, the wind was just as powerful at the top of the tree, making the storm just as unnavigable.

They continued forward in search for the ruins, but were halted by a large creature that hid in the storm. Without a way to see, the group fell back and looked elsewhere, finding a stone statue soon after.

"'Pluck from the tree of red palms a stalk of its crimson growths. It's opaqueness and the storm are but an illusion.'" Luigi carefully read aloud the inscriptions on the statue's worn top half. The bottom half was less buffered by the wind and read, "'The tail of a Jawbust is a dousing rod and a key to never-ending love.'"

Although the information given by both carvings was somewhat confusing, Luigi kept this information in mind when he trekked back to the red palm tree.

Utilizing his expert climbing skills, he carefully scaled the Arecaceae until he was able to reach one of its bright leaves.

The leaves were indeed less opaque then they appeared when Luigi held the one he grasped up to his eyes. It was like looking through a pair of literal rose-tinted glasses, except the only good thing that could be seen was a lack of any sandstorm; the storm was completely invisible, allowing him to navigate through it with ease.

They met the large enemy from before, a purple dragon creature. Blecky was able to confirm it as a jawbust, a though skinned monster whose only weakness was its bright glowing bulb on its tail. Naturally, Luigi did what he was best at and slammed his hammer onto the bulb, forcing it to writhe in agony. The ferocious jawbust couldn't withstand the pain and ripped it's tail off its body to stop its suffering.

Boomer assured our hero that it was completely normal for one to feel guilty about leaving a jawbust to its ultimate demise, but said plumber was too busy squeamishly picking up the discarded tail to notice and continued to feel guilty about it regardless.

On the upside, the beast was now gone, allowing them to go in the direction it was blocking. Lo and behold was the Yold Ruins just ahead, constructed out an ancient kind of brick. The sealed entrance was the maw of a gargantuan stone dragon keeping watch of the marine blue platform in front of it.

Luigi stood onto the platform, as if by instinct, and pulled out the jawbust's tail. The bulb fit perfectly into a circular indention in the platform's center. When nothing happened, Luigi removed the bulb, activating a mechanism in the entranceway that allowed the dragon's maw to open wide. A chilly breeze escaped its rocky throat.

Glancing at his awed partners, Luigi stuffed the tail and the red palm leaf into a reserved location in his bag for important items and took a bold step into the prophetic ruins.

[anons-artchive]

Super Paper Swap: Ch. 1-2 (OLD)

Word Count: 2,910

Chapter Summary: Luigi, Blecky, and the newly-recruited Laddie continue through towards Yold Town for a chance to rest, unaware that their next stop has a mystery afoot.

And so, Luigi learned of the mysteries of the Next with the help of his newest partner, Laddie. While the achievement of obtaining a new partner was incredible news, our hero did not have time to celebrate as there was still a Pure Heart in need of being found.

"Follow me!" said Blecky as his keen senses led them the looming mountains ahead, the towing barrier protecting the Pure Heart hidden somewhere on the other side.

Chapter 1-2: Afoot in the Foothills

For a mountain trail leading to a populated area, the Mount Lineland pathway was an incredibly difficult road to navigate, if you were a normal person that is; luckily, Luigi was anything but normal by many standards. Case and point: Luigi's Super Jump, which allowed him to leap to heights not possible for the average man, made navigating the mountainous region a breeze. Then the enemies appeared.

It began with an encounter with a goomba and a koopa troopa, a typical sight to see among members of the Koopa Kingdom, they looked perfectly normal and indistinguishable from normal members of their races, but their behavior was peculiar. The second they spotted Luigi, they tried to attack him, actions usually attributed to them being forced under Princess Peach's commands out of fear to oppose her; this simply wasn't the case however, they attacked willingly and with a great amount of determination.

Naturally, Luigi's first action was to fight back, albeit with reluctance since he always felt a tinge of guilt in harming the normal docile creatures. The goomba ran towards Luigi, bearing its teeth as it jumped towards his face. A single swing from Luigi's hammer was enough to knock the angry fungus out cold, leaving only the koopa to fight back. It tucked its body into the ruby-colored shell on its back, using its hind legs to spin the shell at a remarkable rate and launch itself at the plumber. The attack was unavoidable, but it allowed Luigi to attack from up close as he kick the turtle in the stomach, forcing it to fall helplessly on its back and pass out when the initial impact, added with being injured and upside-down, caused it to experience a concussion.

With their foes unconscious, the trio was able to examine the cause for the sudden madness: a tiny, green sprout with a single leaf fashioned like the tail of an eighth note.

"Who would've thought such a tiny plant would be the source of our 'treble'...wait." Luigi fumbled when he realized the pun he had made and vainly tried to cover the mistake before receiving an expected glare of disapproval. Surprisingly, the look he got from Blecky wasn't one of distaste, but rather one of shock; he swore he could see a visible smile on the bats transparent face the second they made eye contact.

"I did not realize you had a 'forte' in the art of word-play." Jested the bat. What followed suit was back-to-back puns between the two parties as they moved their former foes to a safe place away from the scorching elements of the sun and proceeded upwards on the mountain trail. Laddie lagged behind them to avoid the annoyances in front of them and moved closer when the material their companions had began to run flat. At the very least, Laddie was glad the bickering duo had found common ground.

"Those are spiny tromps."

"OW!"

"You can't fight them."

"Thanks for telling me ahead of time Fang Face!"

'So much for common ground.' Thought Laddie.

The team had reached a part of the trail that was a long slope...infested with spiny tromps. The circular, spine covered rocks had a knack for conglomerating on the slopes, hence why the mountains were 'difficult' to navigate everywhere else except for the slope straight to town.

"All I'm saying is that maybe you should let me finish my analysis before you approach things all willy-nilly."

"I was trying to knock it out of your general direction you bat brain! It would have steam-rolled you into oblivion if I didn't interfere!"

"You were the one that wanted information."

"You couldn't have flow out of the way?!"

This was getting tiresome.

Laddie hovered between the other party members on the hill they argued upon, droning out the slander that was beginning to erupt and flipped them all into the Next, where the rolling foes were seemingly nonexistent, thus allowing the group to continue onward.

Another plus was that the fighting had stopped when they flipped. The hill they originally stood on was also missing in the Next, causing Luigi to plummet to the ground from his spot.

They reached the top without anymore hassle, only to be halted by an obvious gap between them and the town.

"Looks like Green pulled the bridge up...stay here for a second." Laddie didn't give either person time to respond as they flew to a distant house where the guard of the drawbridge apparently lived, a rather unorthodox action since the group could probably climb up the lifted bridge and leap to the other side, but the ladder shaped pixl needed some time away from the others, and they needed time apologize, so it seemed like a good way to kill two birds with one stone.

With nothing to do, Luigi and Blecky sat down and decided to engage in small talk, a nice change of pace compared to the yelling and word-play of before.

"I'm sorry about earlier..." Luigi was the first to admit. "I've been worried about my friends and brother, and the sudden task of rescuing the entire universe is a lot to chew as well."

"..."

"I guess I'm just incredibly reckless when it comes to having too much on my plate to handle at once. You know what I mean?"

"Not really," Blecky replied. "But I'm assuming it must be very overstimulating...I'm...also sorry. I should have realized that organic beings get stressed under different circumstances than pixls, I'm just so used to people that already know me and immediately listen to me. I should have been thinking about your problems alongside my own."

"It's ok...I forgive you." Luigi assured the bat. The mention of 'organic beings' bugged Luigi a bit though, were pixls not organic? He decided he'd ask later.

Laddie finally began their trip back to the duo, it had taken longer that usual due to Green somehow ending up in the Next and needed some time to calm down. When they arrived, the drawbridge had made its way down, over the seemingly bottomless ravine below.

Laddie saw a tall figure in green robes and an almost impressive mustache wave to them with a spear in his hand, the trio waved back or attempted to wave back as they cross the wooden bridge into Yold Town.

Yold Town didn't have much going for it, it was a small town on a isolated mountain, neighboring a ridiculously large desert that harbored hidden ruins which, in turn, were guarded by a ferocious guardian that protected a sacred treasure at the very end of said ruins. Needless to say, the town was very lackluster compared to what was ahead of it, so the prospect of anyone passing by was far from unheard of.

The trio were quick to notice a sense of unease among the townsfolk, they were nervous and glare at one another with untrusting eyes, the only exception was a young boy hopping around town in search for a playmate. The boy approached the visitors with beam of joy on his face; Laddie noticed the child's arrival and seemed to smile as well when he appeared.

"Laddie Laddie! You came back! I knew you would!"

"It's good to see you're well Bozzo." Laddie flew to the boy and gently pat him with one of their wings. "My friends, please meet Bozzo, my usual partner." They introduced him to Luigi and Blecky who couldn't help but gush at the child's playful nature. The number of eyes staring at the boy were unnerving to say the least.

"Why's everybody acting so strange?" Asked Luigi, wondering if the group had done something to wrong everybody.

"You mean you haven't heard?" A feminine voice answered. The voice's owner, a young woman who had been near the town store, moseyed over to the group, gentle pushing the child aside. "Word has it that someone from town tried to end the Mayor's game earlier today, not long after he sent his 'that' pixl", she pointed at Laddie, "over to his cousin's house in Lineland Road. Apparently he sensed this attacked ahead of time and needed to keep his special flip-magic away from his attacker. He says the assailant was someone from the town itself, so we've all been on edge trying to figure out who it is."

A failed assassination attempt? Seemed rather fishy to Luigi.

"The Mayer, I'm assuming his name Bestovius?" The hero inquired.

"Yes sir. Why do you ask?"

"I came here to speak with him. Would that be possible?"

"I don't-"

"Of coarse you can talk to Grandpa! I can take you to him!" Bozzo interjected and grabbed Luigi's hand to walk him over to the end of town. "Bye bye Miss Babs!" He said as they left.

On the way there, Bozzo talked about how much he missed his 'best friend Laddie' and how excited he was to see the beast that lived in the Yold Ruins make his annual visit to the town and bring snow to the children. This visit, known as "The Day of Ice", was a tradition that had been around since the Pure Heart was first placed in the ruins and that the beast, according to Laddie, was a creature of the heavens that insisted on remaining in the Linelands as a mortal being to bring joy to the children of the dessert. Luigi found this tradition to be incredibly heartwarming to say the least, and filled him certainty that, with this information in mind, his journey for the Pure Heart would be a bit easier.

Bestovius was an odd fellow to say the least, but that was to be expected from someone referred to as a 'Flip Wizard'. He was a red-cloaked man on a magic cloud, his eyes obscured by a pair of foggy glasses underneath a blue hat. The orb-shaped mouth characteristic to members of the Shaman race was emerald green and perfectly aligned underneath a thick mustache.

Such a man would be expected to be rather slow in both mind and body, but his quick movements and way of speaking begged to differ; he greeted the heroes with a swift and pompous "Hello" and a brash "What do you want?". Luigi, not being one to be startled off by harsh words, approached the elderly mayor and made his claim to find the assassin. The bewilderment in Bestovius' eyes was enough to tell Luigi that he would accept his offer.

He led them to a empty house in the middle of town, their place of stay for the night. Bestovius only spoke about the murder on the trip there, the rest of the walk was silent aside from Bozzo's occasional chime-in about how cool the town was, to which Bestovius himself would scorn for the child to quiet down. Bozzo's expressed confusion seemed to indicate that this behavior was abnormal for the mayor; Luigi wanted to shrug it off as Bestovius' nerves making him jumpy, but the wizard had proven to have a calm demeanor over everything else, it was as if he didn't recognize the boy as his own grandson.

Nonetheless, there was still an assassin loose in town, and such information made it difficult for one to sleep when nightfall arrived. Luckily, Blecky offered to keep watch for the night, just in case the assassin appeared; unluckily, the assassin did appear, and did everything in their power to put Blecky and Laddie to sleep before throwing the trio into a secret room underneath the house they were sleeping in. A heavily guarded room. Protected by thwomps.

Granted, the assassin made the poor decision of trying to trap our main character who, regardless of the obstacles ahead of him, would stop at nothing to accomplish his end goals. Yes, it would take a while for everyone to wake up, but what mattered most was that they would wake up at all.

Upon waking, the first things Luigi noticed was that it was very dark and that his companions were far from conscious. The next thing he noticed was the heavy breathing of Bestovius next to him and a gross gurgling sound on the opposite side of the room. The thing he noticed immediately afterward was the lack of his trusty hammer being in his possession.

The sounds of gurgling death rammed towards Luigi's direction, its attention drawn to his movement. He stood up, surprised to find himself unharmed, and ran to one of the side walls, hugging it as he slide to the opposite side of the room to draw attention to himself instead of his friends.

He felt a switch, and instinctively yanked it upward. Something large dropped from the ceiling and clunked onto its side, its single content, whatever it was, rolled out. Luigi's pursuer could be heard slurping up the spilled treasure. A hissing noise commenced and the room lit up from the place of the hunter, a simultaneously gelatinous and heavily-armored creature with millions of tiny legs akin to soggy french fries, grey-purple body plates, and a single, giant, blue-lipped mouth, puckered up as if to prevent its meal from escaping.

Stacking out of the mouth was a light blue fuse, the only light source in the room. The burning fuse entered the mouth briefly before the monstrosity combusted, miraculously not leaving any insides behind, making it easier for the author to keep this story at a K+ rating; what was left behind instead was a key, Luigi's hammer, and a bomb-shaped object.

The blue colored bomb sprung to life with beady light blue eyes and a pair of semi-circular wings of the same color. He moved with the rhythm of a ticking clock, jittery but rapid.

"BADA-BOOM! Talk about a rude awakening!" Yes, he's got a Jersey accent now, don't question it. "I ain't one to appreciate being interrupted from a nap, but I've been trying BLAM myself out of that box for the past 1,500 years or something, I was going crazy in there. Actually scratch that, I was crazy to begin with." He stuck out his fuse and held it out like a hand, "Name's Boomer, BADA BING. I'm assuming your one of them Legendary Heroes I gotta team up with, right?"

"Yeah. Um." The hero hesitantly shook the...hand...fuse, "I'm Luigi."

"Luigi, eh? Nice name." He spun around the plumber, the movement somehow created a irritating ringing inside Luigi's head that stopped as soon as Boomer ceased his spinning. "You da boss now, so here's the deal: I put up my special psychic link exclusive to you and the other heroes, you use it to help fuel my pyromaniac-like tendencies, and BADA BING, BADA BOOM, we blast our foes into dust." Luigi nodded and plucked the two remaining objects off the ground.

The key fit perfectly inside the room's only exit, and quickly unlocked; the spiked rectangles known as thwomps that slammed outside were impossible to avoid without being squished, so Luigi decided to wake his friends so he could avoid the beasts in The Next, but Bestovius had been far ahead of him. The magician, carrying Luigi's other partners, took them to The Next with much more ease than Laddie ever could and led them to the other side of the room where a ladder led to the house above.

The light outside indicated for it to be midday, the commotion outside indicated that everyone was in a panic at the disappearance of the mayor, and the confused mumbling of Bestovius seemed to indicate that he had no memory of the previous day, aside from sending Laddie to Watchitt.

"That creature...I think it took me...when I had left my guard down." Bestovius muttered, something about his voice seemed different, more genuine than before. "Are Bozzo and Laddie doing well?"

"Yes sir, are you alright?" Luigi responded, concerned for the old man's well being.

"That creature was quite aggressive, but I think I will be fine. I'm more concerned about your quest, dear Hero of Light. I shall tell Red to lower the bridge to the desert, you can stay here until you are ready to leave."

Luigi's team stayed for another night at the town, this time without the fear of some monster assassin looming above their heads; they met the shopkeeper, a look-alike cousin of the one in Flipside, and became more aquatinted with the members of the small town. Bozzo seemed quite relieved that his grandfather was acting like his normal self again and asked Luigi to say 'Hi' to the ice beast when he found the Yold Ruins.

The following morning, Team Luigi bid farewell to Yold Town, a red clothed figure waving goodbye from his distant home, and headed towards the Yold Desert. Following behind Luigi was no longer two but three pixls, loyal to the end and ready to face the scorching heat and blistering sand alongside their human leader.

[anons-artchive]

Super Paper Swap: Ch. 1-1 (OLD)

This is a post version of my 2017 Super Paper Mario AU Fanfiction, Super Paper Swap.

Word Count: 2,037 words

Chapter Summary: Luigi’s multiverse-spanning adventure begins! As he and Blecky travel across Lineland Road to find Bestovius, they meet strange new friends and foes.

In a feat far greater than anything before, Luigi had been tasked with saving not one world, but all worlds in the universe. This, of course, would not be a small task. Could he really prevent Mistress Tempo from from pulling off her sinister plot? Would he reunite with his friends and brother? These and many more questions buzzed through Luigi's brain as he transversed the very fabrics of space to the start of a truly inter-dimensional adventure.

Chapter 1-1: The Adventure Unfolds

A bright morning sun greeted Luigi and Blecky when they passed through the other side of the red door. To Luigi's surprise, all traces of said door quickly vanished when it closed behind them. Leaving an empty spot where it had previously stood.

The world of Lineland was a typical plane: grass everywhere, colorful flowers popping up here and there, tall hills with gentle slopes, the usual. What wasn't usual were the illusions in the sky that seemed to depict mathematical equations and the still prominent Void looming above.

Blecky's ears twitched as he circled the area around Luigi, quickly returning with some excitement in the way he was flying.

"I can sense the Pure Heart!" Exclaimed the bat.

"Oh good! Is it close by?"

"Of course it's not close by you big goof, it's still far away from here! Lucky for you, my keen sense of direction will get us there in no time. First things first however, we need to find Bestovius."

"Then so be it." The plumber mumbled as he moved forward, the most logical direction given that a sign reading "Lineland Road" was placed in that very direction with a noticeable dirt road next to said sign, also heading in that direction. Needless to say, it was quite obvious which way they needed to go, so they walked, admiring the brace new world around them as they did so.

Aside from luscious variety of flowers and a single species of tree, there wasn't a lot of life in the area until our hero approached a tiny pink creature with many legs and a little round mouth. The tiny hairs on its head shuddered by the approach of the tall man in green.

"What is that?" Luigi asked, the pink thing squeaked and bounced in response to the loud man.

"That is a squiglet, its power is tantamount to the common goomba in your world. Their immediate instinct when they meet someone new is to bounce up and down and squeak in the most persistent manner, so their completely harmle-what are you doing?" Blecky watched in confusion as his partner pulled out a small package of crackers and gave one to the squiglet who happily nibbled on the salty disk.

"Completely harmless, right?" Luigi stood up and walked past the content critter as his pixl companion followed in annoyance. When Blecky himself was offer a cracker, he begrudgingly accepted the snack and perched on the plumber's head as he ate.

Soon they approached a locked door edged inside a small hill which, in turn, was surrounded by a fence made of a type of brick or stone. The fence had no defined signs of having an entrance and even covered the top of the hill, which left climbing it out of the question, not that it mattered to Luigi, he was too busy trying to figure out the meaning of this 'door to nowhere'. He eventually caved in and asked Blecky, who at this point had long since left his perch on Luigi's head, about the situation.

"Listen closely my friend, this 'door to nowhere' is actually a lesser dimensional door and our only method of cutting some huge time off of our journey, don't ask me how, but they will. Unfortunately there's no way for us to get in under normal circumstances, we'll have to find the owner of this barrier."

Luigi nodded as they shuffled pass the door and continued forward. He asked Blecky why he couldn't just teleport them to the Pure Heart like he had when they arrived in Flipside. The bat explained to him that his job as a pixl was not to teleport, rather this 'special ability' as it was called was temporarily gifted to him by Merlee to find the one of the legendary heroes. When pestered about what his actual powers were, he insisted that he could unveil illusions and analyze things of interest. Luigi found these powers to be rather pointless, claiming that anybody could do either of those things, not realizing how soon he would be eating those words.

The two of them had found a particularly tall and steep hill with a small, cream colored house on top. Based on the local points of erosion, it looked like there had been a time where a smaller hill lived next to the taller one but had long since vanished, in the place of this humble, smaller hill was a ladder. A broken, and therefore unusable, ladder.

It was at this point Luigi showed his partner what a 'real' special ability looked like and used his famous Super Jump to reach the house. Upon entering the house, he was surprised to find the building completely empty. This didn't shock Blecky in the slightest.

"I do believe this is where MY abilities come in." The bat said in a smug voice as he pressed a claw on one of the walls, revealing a hidden door. "Bleh heh heh, you sure are lucky to have me around aren'tcha? I guess you could say my illusion piercing abilities aren't as useless you initially thought?" He teased, his voice saturated in sass.

Luigi invited himself into the next room where he met a very angry old man and a terrified pixl. The hero couldn't let out a single 'hello' before the elder lunged and attacked him with his cane. This attack resulted in a chorus of screams from members of both parties for a good number of minutes before Luigi could scurry away from the brutality that was a senior citizen with a big stick. The old man, being rather persistent, continued to chase Luigi around the room for a decent amount of time while Blecky and new pixl decided to become aquatinted with one another.

Eventually, Luigi was able to reason with the old man who introduced himself as Watchitt, Old Man Watchitt to be precise. Now that he wasn't being chased, Luigi was able to notice the details of Watchitt's person, such as his deep blue tunic, the pair of yellow glasses hidden under his sombrero-like hat, the mustache-and-beard combo he was sporting, and his uncanny habit to blurt out 'WATCH IT!' between sentences.

"I suppose I should apologize for my aggressive mannerisms. WATCH IT! You see, this darn fairy fella is a friend of my cousin, who I rarely meet now in days. Apparently there's some commotion going on in our childhood home of Yold Town and he sent this pixl over so I could WATCH THEM until some legendary hero shows up or something. WATCH IT!" Old Man Watchitt explained to his visitors.

The pixl he spoke of, known as Laddie, had the appearance of being part of a ladder, with purple sides, two blue-green rungs, a visible pair of eyes between the rungs, and two pairs of semi-circular wings.

"Nice to meet'cha." Greeted the somewhat shell-shocked pixl, its wings still shivering long after the race of a thousand minutes had ceased. "If I might ask, how did you get here? The dimensional door from Yold Town is locked, the ladder outside is out of order, and the door to this room should be invisible to the naked eye of almost every creature imaginable."

"Well you see, we came here from Flipside-"

"FLIPSIDE?!" Laddie was quick to interrupt Luigi. "Did-Did Merlon send you here?"

"Only because I need to receive the power to flip between dimensions from Bestovius." Was Luigi's brief answer as he anticipated another interruption.

"About that, Bestovius gave me some of his 'flipping powers' before sending me off and told me to only give the power to a mustached man in red garments."

"Red garments? He must have been expecting a visit from my brother then."

"Your brother?!" Both of the pixls asked in surprise.

"Yeah, we're twins...kinda. He's just a bit older than me."

"Where is he?" Laddie continued to question the hero.

"I...don't know." Every other person in the room wanted to fall at the ground at this respond.

As the inquisition between Luigi and Laddie continued, it became increasingly obvious that the ladder-shaped pixl would need to follow the bat and plumber duo for them to find the Pure Heart and save the universe.

"I suppose there's no other choice, you need to find the Pure Heart, and I need to find the man in red. We have to work together for either of those things to happen, so from this point onward, I'm sticking to you guys like mentally traumatized glue." And just like that, Laddie joined Luigi's party, upgrading the dysfunction duo into a troublesome trio.

Before leaving, the group requested a key to the door outside. Watchitt was happy to oblige, provided that they never entered the vicinity ever again, a simple request really. It was agreed, and the misfit musketeers that were Luigi, Blecky, and the newly recruited Laddie continued onto their heroic endeavors.

Reaching the locked door, Laddie used their recently acquired ability to 'Flip' the team into a place known as the 'Next Dimension', otherwise known as the Next. While everything looked relatively the same, there was a feeling of extra depth to the world, like turning a statue a certain way to view it from another angle.

In the new perspective, Luigi noticed large chucks of the fence were completely nonexistent, the gaps were large enough even for Bowser to squeeze through. Laddie returned them to the Normal Dimension when they entered the inner boundaries of the fence where they could now unlock and go through the illusive 'lesser' dimensional door.

When asked about the properties Next Dimension, Laddie explained that the length, width, depth, and even existence of objects between the two dimensions varies, hence why the fence from before did not fully exist in the Next.

Out of curiosity, Luigi asked about Laddie's normal powers.

"Well, normally I have the ability to create and repair ladders. As of right now, however, my gift has been overwritten with Bestovius's; until I give the flipping ability to somebody, it's the only ability I can use, so we better hope there aren't any ladders in the near future in need of being fixed." He answered, the ladder-shaped pixl finally growing accustomed to the plumber and his odd partner, as hinted by the lack of shivering in their presence.

The obstacles ahead of them were few and usually required a brief a trip to the Next. One visit in particular had occurred near a tall hill with a spring next to it, Luigi requested a flip to see if the hill could be passed through in the Next, his explanation being that he considered springs a challenge to his jumping abilities. They flipped, Luigi was right about the hill being hollow, as expected; what wasn't expected was the hoard of hungry squiglets living inside the hollowed out hill. They ultimately used the spring to spare Luigi the grief of having to attack the harmless critters.

And then there was the squig. "It's just like a squiglet," Blecky said, "expect its purple, and it-"

"OW!"

"-shoots rocks at people." He didn't even bother hiding the grin on his face when Luigi was assaulted by rocks during his feeble attempt to feed this different-colored and semi-hostile squiglet.

Other the the occasional squig attacked, curtesy of Luigi eventually squishing the first one with his hammer, nothing else seemed to stop the hero as he eventually approached a sign indicating his eventual arrival to the mountainous region of Lineland, Mount Lineland, leading to Yold Town. With the afternoon sun shining bright, our hero headed forward in anticipation to finally meet the mysterious Bestovius in his town of residence, unaware of the dangers ahead.

[anons-artchive]

Super Paper Swap: Prologue (OLD)

This is a post version of my 2017 Super Paper Mario AU Fanfiction, Super Paper Swap.

Word Count: 5,285 words

Chapter Summary: Mistress Tempo begins to set her plans in motion, starting with the marriage between two unlikely individuals. Meanwhile, Luigi wakes before a strange fairy that needs his help to save all worlds.

Author’s Notes: I fixed a mistake from last week’s chapter where I said it was the Prologue, it has been corrected to say it is the Introduction. THIS chapter is the Prologue. So, if there is any confusion, that’s why.

Princess Peach gradually awoke to the sound of distant mumbling. She didn't dare open her eyes due to the terrible ache in her head that felt like a pebble violently shoved into her cranium. She wasn't lying on the floor or floating in mid-air, she was standing on solid ground. She wanted to rub her head, but she was already holding something in both hands.

"Ooooh" She moaned from the pain of her migraine, "Where am I?"

There was a sweet and sinister sound of muffled laughter, "Mhmhmm, rise and shine your highness." The voice was familiar, too familiar.

Peach strained to open her eyes, but when she finally did, she desperately wished she hadn't. Before her was an alter with Bowser, somehow wearing a white tux, on the opposite side of it and floating behind the alter was Mistress Tempo with a suspicious looking book floating beside her. She looked down to find herself wearing not her usual dress, but instead a white wedding gown. In her hands was a bouquet of matching flowers, their fragrance seemed to lessen the pain flooding her head.

A great cheer erupted from behind Bowser, the sound of a thousand koopas and goombas in celebration. The sound made her feel ill, these creatures had no right to be happy, they were a nuisance and a threat to her people.

"Wh-what's going on?" The princess asked, her question came out as a mumble from the splitting headache.

A small pulse of energy dispersed next to Tempo, and from its source appeared a most peculiar being. He was roughly Mario's height, maybe taller, wearing some sort of yellow robe so long that it looked like it would fold upon itself if its wearer were on the ground and a shawl over his shoulders that hid his hands from visibility. His seemingly distraught face appeared to be a mask, white on right side, black on the other; he had a yellow hat with tiny ears poking from the top and three purple stems from what might have been a jester's hat jutting out from underneath the first hat and being weighed down by golden bells. Around his neck was a blue collar with another bell underneath the chin that seemed to hold up the shawl.

"Ah, Dimentio, what news do you have?" Tempo spoke to the strange jester-creature, apparently called 'Dimentio'.

"Preparations are complete Mistress! You are free to begin the ceremony as you please." Dimentio exclaimed, his voice seemed to flutter as he spoke. One of the stems twitched, as if alerted by something, and turned his head in the direction of the twitch, towards Princess Peach. The assistant cowered a bit at her sight.

"Chao my friend, you must be Princess Peach. It is pleasure to meet you." Dimentio bowed to the princess and then turned back towards Tempo, his voice becoming timid when he spoke to Peach, almost like he was scared of an unfamiliar face.

'At least he was polite.' Thought Peach.

"Yes, this is our lucky lady!" Tempo said with a childlike grin. "Now how about we begin?"

The sound of bells replaced the chattering of the audience below, Tempo faced the alter, still grinning like an idiot. She cleared her throat before speaking in a more proper and serious tone.

"Bowser, fearsome King of the Koopas, do you take Peach to be your lawfully wedded wife 'till your games be over?"

Peach looked towards Bowser, his expression showed hesitation as he stared back at her.

"Y-yes?" He stuttered, looking back at the monotone dressed woman.

Tempo broke her composure as cracked another grin and began to giggle to herself. She was quick to readjust and continued with the ceremony.

"Peach, noble and pure-hearted princess, do you take Bowser to be your lawfully wedded husband 'till your games be over?"

"HOLD ON THERE LADY!" Peach wasn't having any more nonsense; she was going to get answers. "Under royal decree, I DEMAND that you tell me what's going on this instant!"

"Heeheehee, isn't it obvious your highness? This is your wedding!" Tempo was absolutely giddy with childlike amusement towards the nonsensical events that were unfolding. This behavior had begun to tick off Peach, especially since the Mistress had acted so formal and benevolent before. It was like the change in scenarios had made her into a different woman.

"Ok," the princess grumbled, "but why, in the name of whatever divine being you believe in, am I marrying THAT goody-goody, bumbling, buffoon?!"

"Um, yeah, and what's with the 'fearsome king' thing you said earlier? I hope you meant to say 'friendly king', that sounds a bit more fitting." Bowser interjected, albeit nervously.

"Stay out of this Koopa!"

It was at this point that the two decided to bicker, ironically enough, like an old married couple while Tempo proceeded to laugh at the insanity before her and the audience members murmured amongst themselves.

"Please princess, I'm just as lost on the details as you are, but this lady seems to have gone to a lot of trouble to plan this event and something tells me she's not going to take 'no' as an answer. Let's just go with it, maybe this marriage will be good for us."

"No! Absolutely not! And who picked out this RAG of a wedding dress?! It's awful!" The princess, in a fit of rage, threw the bouquet in her hands at the hysterical Mistress Tempo. Her anger seemed to skew her angle, causing the flowers to instead hit the Mistress's unfortunate assistant square in the face. Tempo's laughter was halted by the sudden assault towards Dimentio, her expression switched to that of confusion as she eyeballed Peach.

"I demand to be returned to my castle this instant!" Peach proclaimed with her arms crossed.

She heard a single snap of fingers, and suddenly her headache became unbearable, it felt like something was both worming itself into her thoughts and clawing its way out of her skull. Numbness and a strange, controlling force spread through her body; she stood up strait, stiff as a plank, staring directly at the opposite side of the alter. Dimentio, who had been flailing about seconds prior, was upright again and holding his right hand in preparation for a snapping motion. The distraught on his face looked more like worry.

"I apologize Princess, but your sudden lashing out is somewhat unnecessary. Please don't make this any harder than it has to be and answer Mistress Tempo's question.

"Do you, Princess Peach, take Bowser to be your wedded husband 'till your games be over?"

"No." Peach refused, the pain was making her dizzy.

"I was going to be gentle, but you leave me no choice." Dimentio snapped his fingers, the pain increased exponentially. Something in her mind took hold, her thoughts overrun with ideas that weren't her own.

"Now Peach," Tempo glared at the princess with a deadpan look, "do you take Bowser to be your husband?"

"...yes...I...d-do..." As soon as she finished speaking, Princess Peach collapsed to the ground; a small green sprout was faintly noticeable on her head, having been previously hidden by her crown.

The entire room shook like an earthquake, the crowd erupted with screams of panic and fear. Near the very back of the crowd, a certain red plumber was startled awake from unconsciousness by the commotion.

"What the-? Where am I?!" Mario managed to pick himself up and get his bearings. He quickly recognized three of the figures at the top of the staircase.

"HEY! What's going on here?!" He began to push and shove his way to the top.

A blinding black light emitted from the alter with a large, shadowy, and ominous heart-shaped object at its center, seeming to leak with destructive power. The heart rose up to Mistress Tempo, who began to laugh, this time with a more maniacal tone.

"HAhahaha! Finally, we have unleashed the Chaos Heart, as was written in the Dark Prognosticus!"

"Marvelous work my mistress!" Dimentio chipped in, the whimsical flutter in his voice reappearing.

"HALT FIENDS!" Mario stepped in, finally reaching the alter.

"Oh? Who might you be?" Tempo asked, her curiosity peaked by the small man. "I don't believe we've been formally introduced."

"Mario. Plumber and older brother. I'm here to stop you before cause any more trouble then you already have!" He pulled out his hammer and prepared for a powerful attack. Dimentio flew between Mario and the Chaos Heart in a defensive stance.

"Please wait a moment sir! There's no telling what might happen if you're not care-" He was caught off-guard by the plumber actually throwing his hammer at him. The impact forced the assistant to collide with the Chaos Heart. Neither Dimentio nor the Chaos Heart were damaged, but the small jester still clutched his head after the attack.

"Beat it freak-face! I'm here to take down your grayscale boss! Huh?" Mario noticed a sudden reaction with the Chaos Heart.

The physical contact with Dimentio seemed to cause the heart activate its power; the entire room rumbled and the already blinding light grew so bright that all vision was completely obscured.

Sometime later, the light cleared, revealing an empty room. Tempo, Dimentio, and the ominous book, known as the Dark Prognosticus, reappeared unharmed.

"Are you alright Mistress?"

"Perfectly fine my friend. I'm not sure what I can say for the other though, but I'm assuming they're still in one piece." She turned to him. "The Chaos Heart is secure and ready for use, please try to round up the members of our wedding crash, they might be of help to us."

"Yes Mistress!" He paused. "So I suppose you are prepared to turn to a new page of dark prophesies?"

"Yes, we shall put them to good use." She held her arms high up into the air, "Darkness, open wide your mouth! Consume all worlds as is foretold in the prophecy, and give us your power to use as we desire!"

"Hey!"

There was a voice.

"Wake up!"

There it was again.

"Luigi! Wake up!"

It was calling to him, loud and clear. His eyes opened very slowly, it took a while for him to see the creature, but it was there. Right before him, on the ground he lay upon, was a sort of fusion between a pixie and a bat.

The bat-shaped creature was completely blue and seemed to be made out of polygonal shapes. The "wings" were like an outline for a right triangle but with the 90 degree point facing upwards and the line itself having the thickness of being drawn with a large highlighter. There were three much smaller triangles that were positioned like ears and a tail. This bat was just the right size to fit inside a hollowed-out watermelon of normal size, which was surprising tiny compared to bats Luigi was familiar with that were typically man-sized. The pixie-like part came from the way the body seemed to glisten and shine in the light. He could almost make out a pair of eyes and a fanged mouth that glowed an orange tint, but only when he squinted, almost like it was an invisible face of sorts.

"Are you awake yet?" The bat asked in a surprisingly creepy tone.

Luigi instinctually grabbed his hammer from his side to swing at the creature. As soon as he stood upright, the pain from earlier rushed back to him. The damage inflicted from just one attack was overwhelming, how could one person be so strong? He used the hammer as a crutch.

"Hey now! Don't freak out!" The bat flew up to Luigi's eye level, "This is just the way I talk." I's voice, although not as creepy as initially thought, was still a bit unnerving, but the squeaking sound it made things a little more humorous.

"You wouldn't happen to be Luigi would you?"

"Who's asking?"

"I'm asking!"

"And you would be?"

"Blecky! Bleh heh heh!" The bat introduced himself with pride in his voice. "I'm a pixl, a special type of fairy." Well, Luigi was almost right with assuming he was a pixie.

"Hey, you wouldn't happen to have met a lady called Mistress Tempo would you? And with a princess and monstrous king as her captives?" Blecky asked Luigi with concern.

"Well," Luigi scanned the room, "judging on the lack of people in this room, I'd say yes and double yes."

The pixl briefly flinched, "Oh geez, so she's already beginning to form the void..." There was a hint of anger as he spoke. "We don't have much time, come with me!"

"What?!" Luigi wasn't given much time to react as the bat latched onto his chest and he began to feel a spinning sensation. For a second, he neither felt nor saw anything; even the pain from before seemed nonexistent.

When the spinning ceased, Luigi was no longer in Bowser's Castle. Instead, he was on a plateau made of some sort of white brick or other building material. The ground he stood upon had a design completely alien to him and the sky was an odd khaki color. Blecky let go of Luigi and flew about a foot away from him while a figure approached them. Luigi slowly stood up to observe them.

The figure in question was female wearing a red, flowing gown with a yellow, and somehow segmented, sash over her shoulders. She wore a yellow, pointed turban similar to one worn by a fortune teller with a four-point star hanging at the end. Her face was obscured by a large pair of red glasses and a white cloth with a faintly visible star patter covering her mouth. Her yellow-orange hair was held around the back by the turban to appear incredibly short and curly. She seemed young, but something told Luigi that she may have been ancient and simply didn't act her age.

"Blecky my dear," asked the mystery woman "who is this you've brought here?" She examined Luigi from afar, "Shirt of blue, trousers green, and a mustache cut crisp and clean! A lucky find my little Blecky!"

"He must be one of the four mentioned in the Light Prognosticus, there's no doubting it! Oh, and his name's Luigi."

"Can someone explain what's happening right now?" Luigi asked, clearly confused by the whole situation.

"Of course my friend, let me come to your end." She moved next to Blecky. "Welcome to Flipside, a town between dimensions. It's quite far from the Mushroom Kingdom, and that's no pretension.

"My name is Merlee, descended from the crafters of the town you see. I study ancient texts to stop the end of all worlds from the vortex above us that swirls." She directed her attention to something directly above them. Surely enough, there was a small, black and purple vortex up in the sky, occasionally lightning seemed to spark inside of it and a purple mist would appear and disappear at random.

"What is that?" Luigi asked, he felt like he was going to be asking many questions in the near future.

"That is The Void my dear, a hole in the fabric of space. It's location we cannot quite trace, it will, in time, grow large enough to consume all and leave nothing in its place. It was created by Mistress Tempo, the woman who has given you woe. She wields the Dark Prognosticus, a most sinister tome; its dark prophesies foretell our doom." Merlee spoke with a solemn tone.

"'A fair and lovely princess...a furious monster king...the union of these two will call forth the Chaos Heart, the consumer of worlds...and the Chaos Heart will ravage the sky, and so bring forth The Void'" The bat's words sounded prophetic and bold.

"This quote is from the Light Prognosticus of my ancestors long ago, another passage in it goes as so: 'The Void will swallow all...naught can stop it...unless the one protected by the dark power is destroyed. The hero with the power of eight Pure Hearts will rise to this task.' Now hero, this I ask..."

She then pulled out a large heart-shaped object that glowed many brilliant shades of red; the gentle touch of its shining rays on Luigi's skin seemed to heal him of all his wounds as the pain that was bothering him before immediately disappeared when the heart appeared. It floated just above the mystic woman's head.

"Will you take this Pure Heart whose light upon which you bask?" Merlee asked, her voice trembled, as if the possibility of him saying 'no' absolutely haunted her.

"I can't say no to such a desperate request," Said Luigi, "especially if the universe is in danger. Merlee, I accept my destined task, and with it, the Pure Heart with which you beseech upon me!" The spark of his inner heroism shined in his eyes as he spoke. Despite her face being obscured, Merlee was obviously smiling when she was given his response.

"Excellent Luigi, with that I bestow the Pure Heart onto thee!" The heart floated to Luigi, descending from above him into his arms, surprising him with how light it was for its size.

"Blecky," Merlee looked back to the bat, "please lead Luigi to the heart pillar of this town, I'm sure he could use you to get around."

"Righto!" The bat flew in front of Luigi's face, "Follow me!"

The green plumber did as the bat asked; they went down an elevator in the left-hand area of the plateau. As they went down, it turned out the plateau was actually the top of a giant white tower in the dead center of Flipside; there were at least two visible floors below the top of the tower, but Blecky insisted there were three floors and a basement, he mumbled something about a second basement as they exited the main lift connecting the second floor and the tower.

There was a fence a number of feet away from their side that seemed to block out some outskirts of town complimented by another fence behind the tower. There were two large buildings on each side of the tower and an elevator between each building.

The buildings seemed small at first glance, but the distance between them made the rest of their structures visible, showing them to be a bit more spacious then initially thought. To the left of Flipside Tower was a house of warm, sunny colors and three noticeable star-shaped windows above the door; to its left was an elevator button to the third floor and a cream colored shop with a red roof. The right side of town had an inn with the same coloration as the shop, a currently inactive elevator button for the first floor, and a cream colored building with a green roof, housing the town fortune teller, as opposed to Merlee who only looked like a fortune teller. The town was scattered with different people that all appeared as if they were made of geometric shapes, they were friendly, but Luigi was a little unnerved by them.

Blecky led Luigi to the left side of town to the third floor elevator which magically materialized around the two when the button was pressed and quickly took them up. The third floor wasn't much to look at, two fences on either side and a view of the outskirts, but on the opposite side of the floor was a white pillar with a tiny of amount red barely visible at the bottom and a heart shaped opening facing the outskirts. Looking up, Luigi could once again see the sky, and in addition to that was a view of Flipside Tower in its entirety; it had to have been about a hundred feet tall based on how Luigi was standing.

"Come on Luigi! Over here to the Heart Pillar!" Called out Blecky, the bat had already flow over to the other side of the floor, bursting with excitement. Luigi passed by two townsfolk, one of them a young girl that was fascinated by the void's mysterious nature; he decided to not tell her about the true nature of the vortex and simply let her admire it.

As he approached the Heart Pillar, he felt a resonance from the Pure Heart that grew strong the closer he got to it. When he finally reached the pillar, the Pure Heart seemed ready to launch itself out of his arms.

"Set it free Luigi!"

Luigi did as Blecky said, the Heart Pillar sent out a pulse of energy that pushed him back ever so slightly; the Pure Heart flew ever so gracefully into the hole on the pillar, glowing ever brighter. The light made clockwork patterns around the heart for several seconds before finally dissipating.

He felt something gently sit itself upon his head. Two tiny, familiar ears peaked from above into his field of vision.

"Hi there." Blecky chirped in a bat-like fashion. "I'm tired; you know your way back to the tower right?"

Luigi nodded as the bat nestled for a nap. Before Luigi could walk to the elevator, he was approached by the little girl from before. "Hey Mister, have you seen that hole in the sky?" She hopped about in anticipation.

"Yes, I have. It's pretty scary looking isn't it? Hopefully it won't hurt anyone." He rubbed the back of his neck as he answered, nervous that the child would ask about the intimidating vortex. Instead he was surprise when the child looked at him with confusion, was it something he said?

"Scary? You're a really weird mister, assuming something is gonna hurt someone because it's scary. Maybe it only looks scary and is actually very nice." She giggled, her innocence keeping her blissfully unaware of how dangerous the Void truly was. "My name's Ellie, what's yours?"

"Luigi." The plumber answered and cracked a grin when little Ellie danced around him, repeating him name between fits of laughter as if she had heard the funniest name in existence, her pigtails bopping up and down with every movement. An older man walked towards the two, drawing Ellie's attention. She ran towards him excitedly, the conversation they had was unintelligible to Luigi. He headed in their direction, towards the elevator, Ellie waving goodbye as he passed by her and who he assumed was her father.

Back on the second floor, Luigi decided to examine some of the buildings before making his way to the top of Flipside Tower. Through the glass door of the shop, there was a taller woman setting up items for her future customers, her golden hair was held up in a messy bun. The sun-colored house had a note on the door, "Merlee is out, please wait for her to be about." was written on it in the fanciest cursive he'd ever laid eye on, this was obviously Merlee's house. On the other side of town he could see a cloaked head peaked out of the door of the fortune teller's house, briefly glancing in Luigi's direction near Merlee's house and the tower elevator before cowering back inside and locking the door.

Walking to the space between the rhyming shaman's house and the tower, Luigi felt the need to jump, as if there was an invisible object of importance there that somehow saved him from a nonexistent problem; this was a normal feeling for him that usually only appeared in places of importance. He jokingly referred to these particular spots of personal security as 'save points' and never bothered to question why they existed, they just did, and that was perfectly fine.

By the time he had made it back to the top of the tower, he was surprise to see a red door next to the elevator, engraved in a number of clockwork patterns. Merlee stood in front of the door, admiring it like it was work of art. Blecky woke from from his slumber and flew to the mesmerized shaman woman, when she did not say anything, the bat instead nudged her for attention, startling her out of her trance.

"Look my dear, a door does appear! This dimensional door will do its part to lead you to the next Pure Heart. Blecky," she then turned to the pixl, "use your powers to guide our friend through the new space. When the Pure Heart is found, please return to this place."

"But of course!" He replied with no complaint.

Merlee handed a small, red-and-white striped object that looked similar to the warp pipes of the Mushroom Kingdom to the green plumber.

"So long as a signal to this return pipe is near, its power will return you here. Use it when you must my dear." So explained Merlee about the so-called 'return pipe' she had given him.

"A friend mine lives here, Bestovius is his name. The Light Prognosticus foretells he will grant one the power to flip through the dimensional plane. Go forth hero; let your destiny be claimed!" With those last words, the shaman woman allowed Luigi entrance through the door.

Our hero's adventure was beginning!

Elsewhere, in a dark, sinister, and rather large room, Mistress Tempo was having a meeting with Dimentio and two of her three other high-ranked followers. Dimentio stood to the Mistress' left, silently and slightly behind her, while the other minions were several feet in front of her, enthralled even by the sight of their emotionally unstable leader.

"Good news everyone, our beautiful Void has successfully ripped itself into the dimensional fabric of space itself, just as foretold in the Dark Prognosticus. It's only a matter of time until it consumes all these sad and sorrowful worlds." Tempo spoke out in an overly enthusiastic manner.

"That sounds absolutely superb my Mistress. You'll erase all those troublesome worlds and rebuild without war or fear, just as you promised, correct?"

"Of course Mimi, I have not backed down from my word in the slightest; our perfect worlds will arrive in due time." Tempo replied to Mimi, a young woman roughly Dimentio's height, if shorter, with green skin and matching green hair held up in a sporty-looking ponytail. Her yellow tube dress, sporting a red collar and belt, fell to the knees of her thin, black, mechanical legs. Her fuller exposed arms were just like her legs, and her eyes were empty and constantly stern-looking.

"If I might ask Mistress, where is our other co-worker? He is late to our meeting." The woman next to Mimi commented.

The woman, known as Nastasia, was an older woman, although she showed no signs of being any specific age. Her skin was a dark blue color that aggressively clashed with her messy, hot pink hair with purple highlights; the bangs were, for the most part, brushed to her left side while the rest of her hair was held up in the sloppiest bun imaginable, the fact it stayed up seemed to defy all laws of physics. Two fanged peaked out of her red-lipped mouth and her eyes were completely obscured by her orange, oval-framed glasses. She dressed similar to a ringleader, but not quite. The 'tie' she wore was a white, circular gem with a orange metallic bat wing on either side, the jagged trim of a white shirt revealed itself from underneath a magenta colored suit with a single white button and the sleeves folded up slightly to reveal the inside of the suit as completely white. Her knee-length pants were grey, puffy, and had a decorative white gem on either leg; her legs were otherwise covered up by white knee-high socks and her black, one-inch-high-heels. Her most important feature was her cape, externally, white at the top, but slowly speckling down into a light pink in the middle, to a light blue at the bottom; the inside was, oddly enough, the same color of purple as The Void outside the giant windows on the left and right walls of the room.

"Do not fret Nastasia, our friend is merely building his strength, he is a man of war after all, and a man of war must train himself if he wishes to bring himself closer to the end of conflict." Tempo's reply was more annoyed to the pseudo-ringleader than it was to Mimi, as Nastasia was constantly trying to find an excuse to get her co-workers in trouble, and, if not that, to cause mayhem amongst said co-workers to coax them into, at the very least, arguing with one another.

"Quite ironic wouldn't you think? To bring a man of war into an effort to remove things such as war from the universe?" Nastasia back-sassed to her boss, knowing that Tempo was far too kind to ever fire her.

Tempo did not reply to this comment directly, instead she looked away, the annoyance now completely obvious, as she mumbled something about different stroke for different minions, she quickly returned to her enthusiastic demeanor, "Disregarding Nastasia's comment, let us discuss more important matters. The Dark Prognosticus is our recipe to ending these rotten worlds of old and making all of our dreams come true, and like every recipe, we must follow its instructions carefully, otherwise it will become a recipe for disaster instead. Dimentio," she directed to conversation to the immediately startled loyal assistant, "what are the whereabouts of our green friend from the Mushroom Kingdom? Does he live?"

"Miraculously enough, yes. Yes he does." The jester fidgeted as he spoke, seeming put off by something.

"Excellent, deliver him here to us then."

"About that..."

"Hm?"

"I'm afraid he's no longer in the castle or that dimension."

"...oh..." Tempo was silent. She clasped her hand over the necklace in a brief moment of concentration. She gave him a forgiving smile and release the necklace from her grasp, "That's ok then. Do we have a clue where he's at?"

"I can sense dimensional disturbances in a further off dimension, it's most likely the hero of prophesy." The purple stems attached to Dimentio's head shuddered, not from fear but rather from the disturbance.

"Really? Heroes will be heroes I suppose. Mimi, I know your power alone will be enough to halt his progress, but just in case he decides to put up a fight, do not under any circumstances end his game. Weaken him until he can no longer stand his ground and deliver him here. Keeping this man alive is vital to ensuring our success!" Mistress Tempo commanded her follower with delicacy and precision, making sure she understood every word.

"With pleasure my Mistress." Mimi turned to her feminine co-worker, "Nastasia, would you be interested in coming along? I know you have important vampire business to be attending to, but I think this would be worth your time, you know, female bonding time and such."

"Why not? I've not much better to do, and watching you fight brings shivers down my spine. As for that vampire comment, I'll let it slide for now. Just don't be surprised if there's a swarm of bats in your room somewhere down the line." Nastasia was quick to answer Mimi, never ceasing to contain her off-putting grin.

"Oh! And be sure to update our friend before you leave!" Tempo hastily requested to the two women before before they teleported away.

"So, you wish to stop me?" Mistress Tempo asked quietly. "Clearly you do not see error in the worlds we live in." She held her arms out wide, as if ready to preach to the heavens above, "No matter, I will be your guiding light, and show you to the path to eternal joy. Hurry if you must hero, for it will not be long before these worlds meet their end!"

[anons-artchive]

Super Paper Swap: Introduction (OLD)

This is a post version of my 2017 Super Paper Mario AU Fanfiction, Super Paper Swap.

Word Count: 3,239 words

Chapter Summary: Even on his days off, Luigi can’t seem to catch a break as a new adventure begins to unfold.

Author’s Notes: As of this post, this chapter and all others to Chapter 3-4 are in heavy revision, however said revisions are not yet complete. The writing of this chapter is not fully reflective of my writing style as of 2024, as such grammatical errors and other issues are to be expected.

Countless centuries ago, legends foretold of a book of prophesies that revealed a number of tragic future event. These futures were so terrifying that the book came to be called The Dark Prognosticus and was sealed away for the protection of all that lived. This is the tale of this book's last owner it is a tale of-

Oh? You say you've heard this story before? A tale of four heroes, of tragedy, and of love? I assure you that you might find this version of the story a bit different from what you remember. Don't worry, it's not too different from what you remember, although the details might be a bit "scrambled". Have I caught your attention once more? Then let us continue.

This is the tale of the book's last owner; it is a tale of love.

————

Our story begins in the humble home of two brothers, twins in fact, although one was slightly older. Their names were Mario and Luigi. The older of the two, Mario, was a plumber, and a skilled one at that. The younger brother Luigi, while also a plumber, invested more of his time on a different job; he was the famous hero of the two main kingdoms of the land, the Mushroom Kingdom and Koopa Kingdom.

Luigi was well renowned for being noble, if a bit cocky, but always striving to follow the path of justice, so his heart was always in the right place. His social image depicted as a brave and sarcastic hero, but those that were close to Luigi recognized him as a normally gentle person who cherished the fruits of his labor by making the most of every day that goes by without mass chaos interrupting the peace; days such as those were quite rare since there was always something going wrong. Today happened to be one of those peaceful days...for a very brief while.

"Quite a peaceful day, isn't it brother?" asked Mario, who was enjoying a cup of morning tea. The older brother of the residence was wearing his usual attire of a blue shirt under his red overalls with a bright red plumber-cap, adorned with his first initial in a white circle on the front, on his head.

Luigi, whilst in the middle of his own cup of tea, nodded before gulping down what was left of his drink and responding verbally for his brother so he did not come off as rude. "Sure is bro, sure is." Luigi wore the same clothes as his brother, however, instead of red, the younger brother wore green overalls and a green cap, and instead of a "M" on his cap he wore a "L". Both brothers had short, somewhat curly brown hair, a black mustache, sapphire blue eyes, and pale skin that was typical of their Italian ancestors. The peculiar choice of overall color had been a choice made by the brothers' parents when they were little as a way of finding one another if they got lost, after all, no normal parent would buy overalls in a color other than blue. The blue shirts, on the other hand, were consistently bought because they were the cheapest color to buy, no special reason, they were just cheap.

Mario was the older sibling of the two brothers, yet for some reason he was shorter than Luigi, a fact that drove them crazy when people couldn't correctly identify which of them was the oldest. Regardless of the annoyances that came with being twins, the brothers loved each other very much, the real problems, however, arose when it came to personal interests.

"Heh, I almost wish something interesting would happen." Luigi added, "If it were something to unite the kingdoms, that'd be pretty nice."

"Maybe if the entire kingdom was this peaceful all the time," Mario mumbled to himself, "you'd act more like a plumber and less like a lunatic adventurer."

"What was that?" Luigi asked, having caught part of his sibling's response.

"Oh? Nothing little brother, nothing" Mario was hesitant to answer. Unlike everyone else in the land, he didn't approve of his sibling going out on dangerous journeys with such a slim chance of survival. It had been that way since they were babies, a mishap with a stork ended up separating the brothers while being delivered, and poor Luigi had been dropped by the stork. Mario had felt helpless in being able to protect his younger sibling and had taken it upon himself to protect his brother from any harm, a feat that became much more difficult when they grew up and Luigi decided he didn't want to take the family business, plumbing, as a full time job. So as an alternative he decided to keep these feelings to himself, not that it helped since Luigi could always see right through him. Every day Mario hoped that something would convince his brother to stop adventuring, it would at least make people stop asking about his own capabilities as a hero; a major problem with being biologically related to a well-known person was the fact that, once people knew you existed, they expected you to be at just as good at whatever your sibling did that made them famous, and if you were an older sibling you were expected to be greater than them, which wasn't the case for Mario. He wanted nothing to do with traveling to new places or gaining new skills, he was just too stubborn to be convinced of anything, he usually made up for this by making plans for things to do with his brother during off-days.

"Hey bro," Mario perked up after a moment of embarrassment, "how's about we go talk to Princess Peach? Maybe she'll be willing to make some negotiations today."

"If it makes both of our lives easier, sure. Why not?" Luigi replied with a good-humored tone, with both parties satisfied they put away their now empty cups and prepared to leave.

The princess Mario spoke of was the ruler of Mushroom Kingdom, a very bad ruler actually. She was, to put it lightly, a huge jerk to everyone that she didn't consider a citizen of her kingdom. This wouldn't be a problem if she wasn't responsible for removing a number of natural inhabitants of the land from their homes to create the kingdom, not only that, but she was always looking for an excuse to find more territory to conquer. She meant well, but only for the well-being of her people, everyone else was tantamount to a wild animal for all she cared. Luckily, Mario and Luigi were a special exception, if only for the fact that she and Mario were both romantically interested in one another.

The brothers were ready to set off until, "Hey, why're you bringing your hammer?" Mario asked in reference to the hammer his brother carried along as a weapon of choice.

"Just in case the princess decided to cause trouble. Why'd you bring yours?" Luigi retaliated, having noticed Mario brought his hammer as well.

"In case you decide to try something stupid." Mario returned his brother's smart alec remark with one of his own. The two of them laughed at their brotherly humor and left the house.

Not even a minute after leaving, they heard a loud scream and immediately followed the sound to its source.

————

The brothers approached the screaming to find one of the inhabitants of the mushroom kingdom, a short, humanoid being wearing a blue vest and a spotted mushroom for a cap, commonly referred to as a toad. The toads were Peach's loyal subjects and relied on her to keep them safe, otherwise they would be in too much constant panic to save themselves. The fact a member of this species was in panic was a bad sign.

"SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING! ANYTHING! HELP!" The mushroom man continued to shout until the two brothers were able to calm him down.

Mario was the first to step forward and speak with the still shaken toad, "Look at me bud," he stood in the toad's line of sight and clasped his hands around its head, "What's going on? What's with the calls for help? Talk to me." He spoke in a voice that was stern but also collected, it was his way of calming people down when they were anxious or scared and it seemed to work well on toads.

"You wouldn't b-b-believe it!" The toad began, stuttering occasionally," Our c-castle was raided, and the princess was-was-"

"Was what?"

"KIDNAPPED!"

"WHAT?!", both Mario and Luigi asked in shock.

"But how? Usually you guys are the ones causing such chaos, and most of the time you only go after koopas as opposed to princesses." Mario wasn't wrong, normally Peach would send her followers to capture members of the Koopa Kingdom for forced labor, their King would be captured a brainwashed to do her bidding until Luigi came in to fix everything. With this in mind, one would think the princess of the Mushroom Kingdom would be prepared in case someone tried to kidnap her in retaliation, but somehow her captor had gotten the upper hand on her.

"Sounds to me like the tables were completely turned on you guys." Luigi couldn't help but bring up the irony of the situation. Mario on the other hand was incredibly worried, he let go of the toad and paced around his brother to assess the situation.

"We should get as much help as possible. I'm sure our old turtle friends won't mind a visit if it means getting on the princess's good side." Mario was referring to the koopa troopas that inhabited the Koopa Kingdom who had the appearance of man-sized, bipedal turtles. The koopa race was quite peaceful and desperately wanted to make peace with the Mushroom Kingdom, so the brothers knew the likelihood of both kingdoms negotiating would increase if the koopas were able to help.

Luigi was surprised by his brother's automatic decision to ask the koopas for help since Mario wasn't very fond of them for being "troublemakers"; by troublemakers, he meant that their tendency to be captured was usually the main reason Luigi had to save their king.

It then dawned on the little brother that Mario must have been incredibly desperate to save the princess if his first instinct was to find help for people he normally disliked. With that in mind he was quick to agree with his brother before a second thought could be made. "Good idea bro! Let's go on ahead then, shall we?"

Mario didn't hesitate to follow his younger sibling as they moved onward towards the volcanic region of Koopa Kingdom. The toad, in shock from the events that had unfolded in about a minute, decided to only watch the brothers from afar and ponder as to wether or not asking two plumbers to save the kingdom's acclaimed princess was the best choice of action.

—————

In the heart of Darkland, the volcanic region of the Koopa Kingdom, was a castle made of grey brick and decorated in several places with black igneous rock, this castle was the home of Bowser, the Koopa King, and his supporters, with whom he was having a meeting with in the central room of the castle.

"Alright gang," said a deep and monstrous sounding voice, "today we will attempt to enact diplomacy between us and the Mushroom Kingdom!" This voice belonged to non-other than Bowser himself, who gave a tender smile to his allies which consisted of a variety koopa troopa and short, brown mushroom people known as goombas. Bowser himself was a much larger koopa with orange scales, a cream colored belly, a green face, red eyes, and red hair. The spike on his green shell, the horns on his head, and even the two spikes on his tail were neatly filed down to half their normal size to appear less threatening. He worn no clothes except for the thick, cuff-like bracelets on his wrists, upper arms, and around his neck; the cuffs had been around him since the day he was first manipulated by Peach, even now the princess was the only one that could remove them, and she always refused to do so, maybe today she would have a change of heart.

The crowd in front of Bowser roared with excitement, anticipating their adoring king's speech. Bowser smiled and spoke as calmly as his naturally booming voice could.

"Today, we will march onward to Mushroom Castle and negotiate a truce with Princess Peach; with the help of our friends, the plumbers Mario and Luigi, we will finally unite all species in this land for the betterment of everyone!" The crowd roared even louder than before, the winged parakoopas and paragoombas summersaulted in mid-air, hammer tossing Hammer Bros. noogied each other and linked arms, and hooded magikoopas swung their wands in a type of ceremonious dance. Very faintly, the word "guests" begin to pop up from the chatter between Bowser's supporters until it was audible to his non-existent ears.

"We have guests?", Bowser was a little surprised that anyone would visit him but was happy to welcome them inside anyway. "Hehe, why didn't anyone say something beforehand? Move aside gang, give our visitants some room to breathe." And so they did, revealing none other than Mario and Luigi as the King of Koopas approached the center of the room. The sight of the brothers brought a big, dumb smile on Bowser's face as he greeted the two of them.

"Well if it isn't my two good friends, how've you guys been?"

"Fine Koopa, fine." Mario muttered, just loud enough to be heard. Luigi stood and watched the exchange between his brother and his friend, having insisted that Mario talk to Bowser since he was the one that decided to ask for his help.

"That's good to know. What's brings you two here anyway?"

"You mean besides abusing the fact you always leave the front gate open?"

"I have a very good reason for that!"

"Princess Peach was kidnapped!" Luigi interjected, trying to avoid the start of an argument. "We thought you'd be willing to gather a search party to help us find her."

"Kidnapped?!" Bowser was in shock, "That's absolutely terrible, it's a good thing you came to us when you did we were-" his sentence was interrupted. A voice broke out.

"Release me! Release me at once!" The voice spoke, seemingly from nowhere.

Suddenly, a wave of energy coursed through everyone as a figure trapped in a magical barrier appeared, floating several feet above Mario, Luigi, and Bowser. Immediately, everyone recognized the figure as non-other than Princess Peach herself. She was between Luigi and Bowser's heights but had the same skin and eye color as the brothers; she was wearing a black dress with magenta below knee height, and an orange broach on her chest. She wore a pair of white gloves that went up to her elbows, a sash around her waist, colored magenta, and a golden crown lined with circular, orange and magenta gems placed on her seemingly delicate, blond hair. Everyone knew that Peach was not a force to be reckoned with, despite her dainty appearance, and if the incredibly unamused look on her face was an indication of anything, it was that the person responsible for containing was in for an unpleasant experience once she found a way out.

The barrier shifted to the right a few feet to make way for the next person that entered the room. This new arrival was somebody no one in the room had met before. It was a young woman of around the same height as Peach, if a little taller, wearing a long, sleeveless dress. The dress was white with a black sash around the neck and the waist and thin trims on the bottom of the dress in various shades of grey. The woman herself was slightly pale and had long, white hair with a rainbow bow, in the shape of a butterfly, tied into it. She floated in the air with her eyes closed and one hand clasping a black, heart-shaped locket that was around her neck.

The neutral expression on her face turned to that of malice as she opened her dark purple eyes and looked down upon her audience. "I'm afraid your dearest princess has been taken by no- other than me, Mistress Tempo." The evil woman introduced herself, her voice sounding like that of an angel that had recently fallen from the heavens.

"You kidnapped Peach?", Bowser asked, feeling a chill go down his spine as Tempo seemed to look through his very soul, "I can understand wanting her as a close ally, but I doubt she's going to be on good terms with you when she gets out of that barrier you've trapped her in."

She laughed at his response, "Hehehe, such a silly little turtle. You do not understand my reason for capturing the princess, I require this royal maiden for the destruction of all worlds." She spoke in a "matter-of-fact" sort of way.

"The destruction of all worlds?" Mario asked in the faintest of whispers, his eyes wide open in terror. He was about to pull out his hammer, but suddenly-

"Not on my watch lady!" Luigi jumped up to tackle Tempo to the ground, but was halted when a magic box trapped him in mid-air. He couldn't escape.

"What? How did you-" His was interrupted as the box exploded and dropped Luigi on the ground, unconscious and badly damaged. Mario immediately ran to Luigi's side, calling out his younger brother's name, but his words fell on deaf ears.

"I'm afraid petty fools cannot fair against our power." Said Mistress Tempo, she glanced at a corner of the room, as if someone else was there, and then down on Luigi with a saddened look in her eyes.

While everyone else was taken aback by the mistress's power, Bowser was quite upset by the events that had unfolded and decided to resolve the situation before more of his allies were harmed.

"Now you listen here Missy! You can come into my castle uninvited all you like, but when you kidnap and assault my friends, THAT'S WHEN YOU'VE GONE TOO FAR! THAT IS WHEN I ABSOLUTELY CANNOT ACCEPT YOUR COMPANY!" Bowser yelled at the top of his lungs, blood boiling like molten lava.

"GO GET HER TEAM!" The enraged Koopa King fiercely ordered, his followers obeyed and closed in on the mistress.

Tempo looked at the army around her, clearly annoyed. "Very well then, in that case, Bowser, King of the Koopas, I shall take you and your 'friends' as well."

"Wait, what?" asked a rather confused Bowser.

Mistress Tempo smirked as she materialized a baton in her hands and raised it into the air; from behind Tempo, a black vortex opened up and pulled almost everyone in room into itself. The various screams were heard until the vortex closed, leaving only Tempo herself and Luigi still visibly in the room.

"Hm hm hm," Mistress Tempo appeared to speak to herself, "preparations are finally in order, and I barely had to strain myself. Now all that remains is for the dimensional void to appear as foretold in the prophesy."

With that, she vanished as quickly as she appeared, leaving only Luigi. An unknown amount of time later, he began to hear a voice calling to him.

[anons-artchive]

Isn’t it strange how much time changes us?

[anons-artchive]

Some expression drawings for my Lotisian species from Spore that I first created in middle school. After some heavy redesigning, some of their physical characteristics and colorations are partially inspired by Rana clamitans (aka the Green Frog)

[anons-artchive]

It’s 3 AM on a Sunday. Why did I make this?