The Pipe

A friend of mine saw this shirt, and commented that it needed a fiction based on it. I wanted a short diversion, so I obliged. Enjoy. ;P

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  It has been three years since the Princess vanished for the last time. Nobody thought it could actually happen. For countless years Bowser had come to kidnap the Princess, and the Brothers would rescue her. It was a strange routine, but it was life in the Mushroom Kingdom. Why argue against what worked. Besides, she’d long ago ceased to be anything more than a figurehead. It’s not like she ever participated in any of the Castle Courts… Tennis and Basketball aside.

  At first, the toad were afraid. What would become of them? Sure, she was only an icon, but her presence had kept the Koopa King from launching an actual attack against them. With the Princess to distract him, the toad could more or less go about their lives as they wished. Bowser very rarely came beyond the Mid-Lands, and the people there were used to the constant struggle for possession of their lands. But now…

  Eventually the fear gave way to apprehension, which then became unease, before finally settling into a nice light discomfort. At least, for a little while. It turned out that the Princess wasn’t the only one to disappear. Reports came in from the Mid-Lands that King Koopa hadn’t been seen in quite some time. This wouldn’t have been too remarkable on its own, as he occasionally launched off to set up some elaborate scheme that would distract him and the Princess for a blissful few months. But with the princess already gone, no word from the Brothers, and rumor coming out of the Badlands saying things were quiet over there as well… Unease began to creep back in.

  And then the horrors began. Koopa’s Kids were found strangled by piranha plants. The whole lot of them, as if someone had just shown up and began stringing them up over the walls of Bowser’s Keep like some sort of sick decoration. Shortly after that Kammy and Kamek bobbed up from the bottom of the Great Lakes in Mid-Land. Nobody had seen them for some time, but the word was… they were going on about Peach coming back for them when they disappeared.

  King Koopa eventually turned up. He and Mario were found lying together in his chambers looking as if they’d just fallen asleep there. No marks on either one of them, but their faces were frozen in mirror masks of terror. It was then that the Badlands began clearing out. A mass exodus, and all the while people carrying on about the lady of the pipes, or something like that. The stories were unclear. All anyone knew for sure was, there was something dark in the Badlands, and nobody knew what to do about it.

  Then just as things seemed to be at their worst, Luigi turned up, alive. The story he brought was unbelievable.  Princess Peach had been hidden in Pipe Land this time…. Only the Mario Brothers caught up with Bowser in the Badlands, and thoroughly trounced him there. After that they went to the Pipe Lands hoping to find the Princess… but eventually had to return to Bowser’s Keep to drag him out there to help them. Nobody could find her… and then both the Koopa King and Mario went missing. One morning Luigi woke up and they just weren’t there.

  He’d heard the stories about the Koopa Kids, and of Kammy and Kamek, but he didn’t know what was happening. When he learned that his brother and Bowser had turned up he was distraught, but set out to figure out what was causing all this. That was the last anyone heard from him.

  Time passed without any further horrors. Life began settling down, and people had even begun to move back to the Badlands. The going story was that Luigi had succeeded in stopping whatever it was that was happening, but had either been killed in the process, or had left to mourn in peace. Nobody knew what to make of the crazy ‘Lady of the Pipes’ story, but in the end, it didn’t really matter.

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  The Chancellor was tired. It had been another long day in the courts, and again the people were talking about choosing another ruler… as if that would help anything. No matter how they tried to explain the minimal impact the Princess’s disappearance actually had on the political system, Every little hiccup was blamed on her departure.

  Coming into his chambers, he was surprised to find a rather gaunt looking toad standing in the center of his room staring down at the floor. In his hand he held a dirty looking letter closed in the pink stationary that Peach had been fond of. Who would bring my mail here? he wondered before asking, “What is the meaning of this?”

  Looking up with a hallow expression that caused the Chancellor to take a step back, the toad intoned, “Here is a letter… from the Princess,” as he raised the envelope towards him.

  Uncomfortable as the young toad made him, the Chancellor stepped forward to take the letter, “Ummm… thank you for this. You can leave now,” he wasn’t sure what it was, but the starved looking toad gave him the chills.

  Waiting until the interloper had walked down the hall, he locked his door and looked at the envelope. It hadn’t been sealed, so even if it somehow had in fact been written by the Princess, which he doubted, there was no telling whether or not it had been tampered with. He almost didn’t open it, but he’d never been accused of a lack of curiosity, so he flipped the letter open and pulled the grimy sheet out.

Greetings,

  If you see any ghosts, be careful. They will give chase using Goomba’s shoe. The White Block contains magic powers. Be careful, the thief escaped. The creatures trapped in the ice will come to life. Please come to the castle, I baked a cake for you. I am well, hidden in the darkness at the end of the world.

                Princess Toadstool

  Standing there in horror, he let the letter fall from his hand. The Archives… Nobody had access to those… the boy! He ran into the hall, and down the corridor he’d seen him take. At the other end of the hall, he stumbled into one of the guard.

“Where did he go?!” he shouted without preamble.

“Who?”

“The boy! He just came this way, where is he now?” he snapped back.

“Sir, there hasn’t been anyone besides you and the watch in these halls for hours. Is everything okay?”

“I…” he didn’t know what to say, somehow the kid had snuck by, “I’m fine. Just keep your eyes open, and let me know if someone turns up who shouldn’t be here.”

“But of course sir,” the guard saluted, wearing a confused expression.

  Turning, he walked back to his room and stopped in the doorway. Sitting there in the center of his room was a warp pipe. He’d heard they could be summoned, that apparently the Koopa had the secret… but no toad had ever managed it. If this was here….

  Seven Moons… a voice he almost recognized came floating out from the pipe. Low, and whispered, with an edge that carried the promise of death as plainly as if it had spoken the threat aloud. Too scared to move, he could no more than watch as the pipe slowly lowered itself into the floor leaving no trace that it had ever been there. The words hung, if not in the air, then heavily on his psyche. This… this cannot be…

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  The chancellor was found one morning hanging out the window of the keep’s highest tower. Days before his death he’d been heard mumbling apologies to the Princess, and going on about a secret archive that should have never been opened. The only thing out of place in his belongings was a strange grubby looking letter in the Princess’s stationary. In respect of his privacy, the letter was stored away with the rest of his personal artifacts to be delivered to his next of kin.

Hush-a-by Baby...

  Heh, there was another competition on dA (By an individual group this time) and this one (The "Tales of Time" Competition) asked for a creative work based on a "Classic Story" of the past. I chose the Nursery Ryme Rock a By Baby (Suggested by my Roomie) and used the 'Original' iteration of it to inspire this tale...

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Hush-a-by baby…

  Running through the woods he could still hear its voice… or whatever it was… whispering through the trees. Daylight had left long ago and this thing… it seemed content to stay just out of sight, whispering at him all the while.

  And worse, the things it whispered, while sounding innocent enough, had some kind of… power… to them. With these newest words, the screaming he’d been doing, in the desperate hope that someone… anyone… would hear him, had stopped in his throat, and he could no more scream than he could fly. Even trying made it harder to breathe, which running as he was, was not an option.

On the tree top…

  The rustling of the leaves above him caused his stomach to drop. It was no longer behind him. Stopping where he was he looked about desperately trying to find it. If he was prepared when it tried to drop on him he could… what? Die prepared? He had no weapons, not that he would know what to do with one. He had nothing to fight it off with. He had been playing in the forest behind his home against his mother’s rules… rules he wished now that he had followed.

  There were things in the forest the adults had all said. Men would go out at night and never return. Some said the injuns had taken them… but the stories of nightmare creatures filtered down anyway. He thought they were just stories… stories to frighten children into listening to their parents, but this didn’t feel like the kind of story he wanted a part of…

When the wind blows…

  No longer was it just a rustling above him. The trees seemed to sway with those last words, as if a forest itself had begun to dance in tune with this thing’s desire. He had no doubt what the thing wanted, him. He’d wandered into the woods at night, and now he was through. He’d never again see his mother’s stern but loving smile, his little sister’s annoying, but somehow endearing gurgling, or his father’s disappointed frown.

  They’d only moved to the new lands the year before. He’d been excited by the opportunity to see a new world. Something completely different than the boring life he’d lived up until that point. He was sick of his schooling, and the thought of living in a new world full of adventure had excited him to beyond bearing. When they’d landed, he wanted to do it all, explore, fight injuns, find gold, but life on this side of the water turned out to be far less exciting than he’d hoped.

The cradle will rock…

  The ground felt as if it moved beneath his feet, throwing his balance and sending him tumbling through the underbrush. The sharp thorns of whatever it was he had been standing next to tore into him, and his face was smashed unceremoniously into a nearby tree. Grabbing the wood as one would hold log floating down the stream in a flood, he felt as if it were somehow sturdier than the ground he was failing to stand on.

  No longer able to keep his balance on the forest floor he tried his luck pulling himself up into the lower branches of the tree… which somehow seemed unaffected by the rocking and roiling of the earth below. The swaying of the trees seemed to have moved to the ground below somehow, so he made his way further up into the branches above, his thoughts of making it out alive now almost gone entirely, his thirst for adventure no longer seeming so inspired.

When the bough breaks…

  Between one branch and the next, the entire tree let out a sound as if something inside it, something important to keeping the whole thing together, had just been torn out of it by force. With a shudder the tree began falling apart, almost in slow motion, that breaking sound echoed in all the trees surrounding him as the entire forest now sounded as if it were tearing itself apart.

  Desperately trying to find a grip on something that wouldn’t just drop him to the ground below, he managed to hold tight to a particularly large branch that was angled across a nearby tree, and as such it was falling far slower than the rest. As the branch itself snapped he dropped the remaining few feet to the forest floor and curled into a ball covering his head as if his arms would do anything to protect him from the trees collapsing all around.

The cradle will fall…

  Silence. The sound of the breaking falling trees, the low rumbling that had accompanied the roiling of the earth, even the wind and other more natural sounds of the forest had quieted. Daring to uncover his head, he looked around at the carnage around him, and was stunned at what he saw. The trees standing tall as if they’d never moved. The ground as flat and undisturbed as if no one had been this way in years, and certainly not as if it had just be rolling like a stream beneath his feet. It all looked perfectly normal…

  Standing, his legs unsteady as they expected the earth at any moment to toss and turn once more, he looked around in disbelief. Looking down at himself, the tearing of his clothing had not vanished, it was as if ‘he’ were the only thing in the forest that had been affected by… whatever it was that had just happened. Shaking in fear, he began to wonder if it was possible that he had…

And down will fall baby…

  A scream, his mother’s scream, pierced the night, and all the blood felt as if it had drained from him with that sound. His little sister. He didn’t know how he knew, but in that moment he knew that something had happened to his little sister. All this time it hadn’t been him in danger, it had been her. All of this was a distraction, or something worse. His sister…

  Running back toward the house, towards the sounds of his mother’s wailing, now punctuated by a sound from his father that was nothing like he'd ever heard from a man he'd seen as invincible. Screaming out at the night, the things power over his voice now lifted, “Take me!" he tried to bargain, helplessness flooding him, "Don’t hurt my sister! She doesn’t deserve this! I disobeyed my mom, not her! She’s just a baby!” Screaming into the night, his voice was swallowed by the darkness, and the only answer he received was its final words…

Cradle and all.