Chapter 5

Sector 7-MA, 34 LY from the center of the Cold Core Galaxy | The Spelunker – Storage Level

Link threw up. Again.

This made the third time, so now Link was lying next to a vile-smelling puddle that was making this entire compartment stink like...whatever he'd last eaten. Star Bit soup and mashed potatoes, with a little bile on the side.

Still, worse than the stench was having to breathe it in for the past...Link didn't know. He didn't have a timepiece, but he estimated that he'd been curled up in this cramped room for at least two and a half hours, lying on his side in the fetal position between two boxes mysteriously marked "1-Ups, this side UP" and inhaling regurgitated stew, which only made him feel even more nauseated.

"Goddess help me," he groaned, rolling over onto his back. His stomach protested loudly, probably enough to cause an echo. If anyone had been around to hear it, Link probably would have died from embarrassment.

Fortunately, his hiding spot was some kind of storage compartment, a little-visited place on this...ship. At least, what he thought was a ship. He was finding that there were a lot of things he didn't know. And at this point, it was driving him a little insane.

After he'd bashed Charlie's head against the prison bars, knocking the toad out, Link had wrangled the keys from the toad's belt and freed himself, at last, from his prison cage. Pressing a button on the wall had opened the knob-less door, and beyond he'd found a dimly-lit metal corridor, with a ladder at the end leading up to a small landing. Beyond it had been another level, a hallway with blood-red carpeting.

After that...he didn't know. He'd snuck around, trying to find the exit door to the accursed dungeon, only to find the place more convoluted than the Lakebed Temple, something he never thought he'd say. Effectively, he'd gotten lost.

So he'd gone with Plan B: Get your weapons, find a hostage, blackmail your way out. Unfortunately, he hadn't found anything to arm himself with, his gear or otherwise. In fact, disturbingly, he'd been unable to find his effects: the Master Sword, the Hylian Shield, the Hero's Bow, his bombs, his Hawkeye, his Clawshot, the Gale Boomerang... Since his captors had changed his clothes, he'd assumed that they'd stashed the weapons somewhere close by, but if they had, he hadn't been able to find them.

And he'd searched — searched and searched and searched, ducking away from voices and checking rooms, compartments, storage cabinets when he'd stumbled across them. But he'd found less than nothing, and had felt disgustingly vulnerable as a result: weaponless. His memory might've been fragmented, but he remembered this much: he hadn't gone a day in the past six months without some kind of weapon weighing him down, making him drag his feet. When he used to unload at the end of the day, at last sliding his enormous packs off of his shoulders and from around his waist, he used to complain to Midna about the aches the weight had left behind.

Now, he felt positively naked without it.

Out of options, Link had been forced to resort to Plan C: find somewhere to hide until you can figure out a way to escape. He'd found a lift that had taken him to another level of the dungeon, an incredibly strange one: a huge metallic cavern, one he'd almost thought of as a dock of sorts, with ships locked into separate stations by metal clamps.

Except these ships had no sails: in fact, they hadn't even been shaped like the ships he was used to, with hard snouts and crow's nests and masts and quarterdecks. So how could they be expected to float on water?

Link hadn't much cared at the time. He'd chosen one — a toadstool-shaped barge nearly seven stories tall — and, when no one had been looking, had snuck aboard, finding a nook where he could hide: the storage compartment. He'd planned to hunker down for a good two or three hours and think, plan how to make his next move.

But then, forty-five minutes later, the ship had started moving, the boxes rattling and the floor rumbling beneath him. There had been an awful pitching feeling, as though he was falling, and then it had stopped. But there'd been pain in his head — pain telling him that he was moving — and then came that sudden bout of nausea that had his stomach crunching inward like an accordion.

After that, time had become...indistinct.

Except for now — now, nausea was crushing his insides again, making every nanosecond more painful than the last. He grasped the rugged edges of the boxes as the inside of his mouth began to taste like rupees again, spittle dripping from between his lips. He tried to breathe through it, to no avail — a moment later, his stomach forced him onto his knees again, and he threw his guts up for the fourth time that day. Or tried to — nothing much came up this time except for a few drops of bile. At this rate, he'd be tasting his own stomach acid for days.

I've got to get out of here! Clearly, this had been the wrong place to try and hide. He didn't know if it was the cramped space or the metal in the floor or what, but something was making him sick, and if he kept throwing up all of his sustenance he probably wouldn't have enough strength to fight his way out, if it came to that.

Panting, Link fought his way to his feet, using the edge of the "1-UP" boxes to levy himself to his full height. The top of his skull brushed the ceiling: apparently, this...ship, or whatever, had been designed with dwarves in mind, not fully-grown Hylians. Luckily, this fully-grown Hylian's knees weren't too shaky — he was able to keep his feet when he reached them and, breathing deeply, made his way towards the door, a metal slab that lay behind a couple of boxes stacked high in one corner.

Just before he reached it, the floor tilted, actually tilted — Link went down hard, his elbow landing in that puddle of his own...

Blast it! Link hissed, enraged, but froze when a muffled voice came from beyond the door.

"Curse Jerry! Doesn't he know how to fly this thing?"

"Probably just spatial disruption, Captain," said another voice. "Navigating through so many hyperlight jumps tends to put a dent in the shields, you know."

Link peered around a pile of boxes and saw two tiny, toad-like silhouettes in the space beyond the door. His heartbeat hammered in this throat, and his vomit-covered sleeve was quickly forgotten: Are they coming in? Not good. The stench alone would alert them that someone was stowing away down here. What would they do if they found him?

As he scanned the room for an adequate hiding place, the toad called Captain complained, "I still can't believe this. I mean, come on! Deep-space scan? When they already have a probe going at it? Lubba's just trying to keep us out of the way, I bet you that!"

"Bet?" his companion snorted. "Io let us know that up front. Prickly little Luma, isn't she?"

Captain growled. "We should be down there with them, searching for Mario. We can contribute. We can help. Why can't Lubba see that?"

"They do have a point though. Mario might not be down there. Wouldn't those stranded Lumas have said something if he was?"

"The transmission was garbled. Not even the techies could clean it up. Truth is, we don't know what's going on down on that planet, except that it's hot enough to deep-fry a chicken, never mind its egg. If Mario really is down there..."

There was a long, loaded silence.

Then, the other toad spoke up: "It's okay, Captain. We've got plenty of 1-Up Mushrooms aboard. Mario, whatever state he's in, will be fine."

"They do him no good out here!" Captain snapped.

"You're right." The other toad took a thoughtful pause. "You know, our mission doesn't really have a time limit."

"Yeah, and?"

"We're not far behind the SAR op. Maybe could fly with them to the edge of the planet. Establish a stable orbit, monitor what's going on down there. If they do find Mario, we high-tail it down from the atmosphere, get our 1-Ups down there ASAP."

"Huh." Captain sounded impressed. "That's not a bad idea. We can tell Lubba we heard the SAR op in distress, and were obligated to help. Plus, if it saves Mario, he can't get all in a huff about that, can he?" There was a small smack, the sound of a hand landing on a shoulder. "Make it happen, Ben."

"You got it!" Footsteps, slowly fading. Link leaned forward, straining his ears. Had they gone?

Hiss! The door suddenly slid open, admitting a petite figure into the room: a toad, with a search lamp strapped to his huge head growth.

Cursing inwardly, Link spun around, heartbeat pounding inside his throat as he considered a place to hide. Quickly, he dove into a dark cranny between two wooden crates, concealing himself as best he could. As the footsteps grew closer, Link, for the first time in his life, wished that he were a Twili: capable of completely melting into shadows, disappearing into the dark. Big as he was, he could barely conceal himself behind the boxes.

"Pee-yu!" The toad made a gagging sound as he came further into the room. "What is that stench? Did something die in here?"

More footsteps: in the gloom, Link could barely see the toad a few paces ahead, towards the eastern side of the room. He was holding his nose with one hand, stumbling about crookedly with the other. "Shrooms, I can't see a thing in here!" he complained. He reached up and switched on his headlamp, the resulting beam of pasty light nearly blinding Link. "Ah, that's better. Now let's see... Aha! Here we are!"

He patted a box labeled "Cheeps", and reached inside, retrieving a wrapped package from within. Inside the package was an outrageously bright red-and-yellow salmon, one wearing the most traumatized expression that Link had ever seen on a fish: its eyes were nearly bugging out of its sockets, something you didn't really see in the fresh-catches around Hyrule.

"I really hope that someone knows how to cook this thing," Captain muttered under his breath. "I haven't had fried Cheep in who knows how long, and—"

The room suddenly shook again, violently, and the floor once again tilted. Boxes toppled from the top of the stacks, slid across the floor, and knocked into one another. One crashed down onto Link's head, so heavy that it nearly cracked his skull clean open — he roared in pain as stars exploded in his vision, drowning out the darkness.

The shaking stopped, and the room settled back into place, unbalanced boxes upending onto their sides. Still in pain, Link blinked, trying to focus, wondering why stars were still flashing in his vision. A beat later, he realized that they weren't — the Captain's headlamp was trained his way, wobbling a little as the toad shook.

"Who's there?" came the shaky voice beyond the light. "Is...is someone here?"

Link ground his teeth together: curse it! The toad must have heard him cry out. This was not good. The toad was coming closer, still shaking.

"Come...come out!" the creature demanded. "Don't worry, I-I won't hurt you. Come on out!"

Link wished he could take the toad's word for it. Unfortunately, seeing as he was part of the group that had put him in that cell... More footsteps, ever closer. Link realized that something had to be done, soon. He thought fast: Plan B. Of course. You're already made. Surprise him. Maybe taking this toad hostage would earn him some answers to his questions.

He crouched, getting ready, muscles growing turgid. More hesitant footsteps. Not yet...not yet...

Then, a splat. An astonished pause. "What the... Ew! Is this throw-up?"

Perfect! Link leapt into action, springing from behind the boxes. His movement was completely unexpected: the toad shrieked, loud and hard, as Link grabbed him by the shoulders, intending to swing him against a stack of boxes and—

His heel hit the puddle of vomit, and he slipped. Both of them went crashing down unglamorously, Link's weight crushing the Captain beneath him. The toad choked as Link struggled to right himself, dragging his pants leg through the foul-smelling goop as he did so. He cursed, vehemently: why do I have such bad luck?

Trying to ignore the awful smell, Link swung the toad against the boxes, as he'd intended to earlier. Threats were poised at the tip of his tongue, but after a moment, he realized that they were unneeded — the toad was already sobbing for mercy, and he hadn't even been shown a fist yet.

"Please don't hurt me!" he wailed. "I don't have any money, b-but you can have any of the food you want! And the Mushrooms, too! Take them all! All of them! Just don't hurt me, please!"

He repeated the plea several times, despite Link's attempts to interrupt. Finally, growing impatient, Link roared, "Shut up!"

The toad went mute, frightened tears gleaming in his eyes. A flash of pity went through Link, but he hardened himself against it. Growling, he said, "Hyrule."

"W-what?"

"I want to go to Hyrule. How can I get there? Tell me."

"Hi...Hi-rule."

"Hyrule," Link repeated.

"W-wait..." Captain squinted up at Link, pushing the tears down his cheek. Then his eyes widened, awed. "Stars," he exclaimed. "You're..." He pointed an accusing finger at Link's nose. "You're that guy! From the cell! The one who switched places with Mario! H-how did you get here?"

"You're running out of time, little toad," Link snarled, shaking him. "Stop stalling! Tell me how I can get back to Hyrule!"

"I...I dunno!" the Captain squealed, squirming in Link's grip.

"You're lying."

"No, I'm not!" the toad wailed. "Please! I've never heard of Hi-rule! Honest! Now lemme go!"

Again, a strike of pity went through Link — the toad's fearful face was so earnest that it was hard not to believe him. But in a situation as precarious as this, he had to be sure. Lifting the toad by his collar, he marched over to the door, palming it open. He stepped into a vaguely-familiar metal hallway, the beat of his ridiculous clogs against the metallic floor ringing out like drum beats.

"I heard you talking to another toad earlier," Link said in a threatening voice. "Your comrades are nearby, aren't they?"

"Y-yes..." Captain gulped. "I mean, no!"

"Where are they?" Link demanded. When the toad didn't answer, he roared, "Tell me! Now!"

"C...Central Command," the toad whimpered. "Please, don't hurt my friends!"

"Directions," Link spat.

Two metal stairways, a carpeted hall, and then a short lift led up into a large, open chamber with shining, nearly transparent floors. A massive panoramic window dominated one side, curling around them like a half moon, and a huge toadstool-shaped dash dominated the center. There were a bunch of toads milling around it, and they all looked up. Identical alarmed expressions lit up their faces when they saw Link stepping into the room, carrying the Captain by the collar.

"Captain Toad!" one exclaimed.

"What is going on?" another cried.

"Release him!" demanded a third.

Link blinked once, twice, three times, working to concentrate. The room was a huge distraction: he'd never stood in a place so wide and sterile and...white, lights planted in the floor making it feel as though he were standing on a glowing pond, the air cold and tasteless enough to rival that of a freezing cavern.

But the window...it was the window that kept drawing his attention, to what lay beyond. It looked like the night sky: blackness, sprinkled with clusters of stars. But something wasn't right... Something was significantly different. Though black, this sky looked a little warm: rosy, almost, heated by the light of the...sun? But where was it? He couldn't see it, just a monstrous, red blotch in the far distance. And...holy goddess, where was the ground? From where he stood, just outside the lift, Link could see no earth. Just colossal balls of light floating in the far distance, big enough to be the moon. Only bigger. Closer, and on fire, glowing as though theirs surfaces were coated with magma.

What was going on here? Nausea put Link's lower stomach in a vice once again, making him feel as though he was...up high somewhere, up high and very, very far away from Hyrule. The taste of rupees entered his mouth and he tried to breathe, refocus.

"...umped me when I was in storage!" Captain Toad was sobbing. "He told me he'd kill me if I didn't take him to you guys!"

"Kill you?" another toad said, aghast.

"Please, release him," pleaded another. "Just tell us what you want."

"I want—" Link started.

"He wants to go to Hi-rule!" Captain Toad said. "I told him that I didn't know where Hi-rule was, but he didn't believe me!"

"Shut up!" Link snapped, shaking the toad. The creature went limp, like a rag doll.

The toads' expressions hardened into hatred. "Monster," one of them hissed.

Link ground his teeth. If only they knew what an honorable man he really was. But circumstances dictated that he act like a malevolent kidnapper — it was the only sure-fire way to get what he wanted. "Can you help me or not?" he said. "I don't want to hurt your friend here, but..."

The toads exchanged anxious glances, whispered urgently among themselves. Then, one of them, a blue one with glasses, said, "All right, we'll help you. Just...don't kill anyone yet. Give us a few minutes, and we'll figure out how to get you back to Hi-rule."

"You have three." Link dropped down onto the steps leading to the lower floor, placing a pale-faced Captain Toad in his lap and keeping a hard grip on his shoulder. "Countdown begins now."

The toads unfroze, scrambling around their central dash. Link, eyes narrowed, watched them for a moment: they were poking at the dash's smooth surface with their stubby fingers. Link might've thought the actions ridiculous, but, to his surprise, he saw images moving beneath the table's ice-like surface, streaming around the circumference of the circle like a graphic river. It completely baffled him: what devilry is this?

After a moment, his eyes, once again, were drawn back to the panoramic window, and the rosy night sky he saw beyond, to the massive bodies of magma that glowed somewhere below him. Try as he might, his mind could not comprehend or reconcile the sight with any of his memories of the night sky — and he had many. Hell, he remembered howling at the moon once, on a cold, winter night, in the form of a wolf.

But there was no moon here, or sun. Hairs on his arms rose at the idea: that there was no moon or sun, two essential, eternal, familiar constants in the land of Hyrule. No, just stars organized into unfamiliar constellations, and a sky that seemed to be stuck in twilight.

A pang of homesickness struck him, deep and painful. More than ever, he wanted to go back to where things made sense. To where he belonged, threatened by Twilight or no. Goddesses, he prayed, eyes turning back to the working toads, get me home.

***

Starship Mario | Infirmary

Once again, the ship was searched top to bottom. But, like Mario, the prisoner seemed to have just...disappeared.

"That's impossible!" Charlie roared. He was outraged, and had a right to be: he was now sporting a welt on his cap the size of a baseball, despite a Yoshi's attempt to ease the swelling with an ice pack. "He's not Knabbit! He can't have just slipped away!"

"You're right," Lubba said soothingly. "He's here. We just have to find him." Though he was a little disheartened at the results from the first search, and they'd looked everywhere. Would looking in every cranny a second time do any good?

"Say again what happened, bud," Yoshi said, crunching on a carrot.

"I told you," Charlie said irritably, "I promised to bring him a green apple, and he slid his tray under the bars. When I bent to pick it up, he grabbed me by the neck and bashed my head against the bars!" He hissed as the Yoshi pressed the ice-pack harder against his welt. "Shrooms, that hurts like fury. I'm surprised I don't have brain damage!"

"Was he that strong?" Io asked skeptically.

"Like DK! And fast, too. Halfway through, I didn't even know what was happening!" He sighed. "I can't believe I was nice to him. I can't believe I offered to get him dessert. Guess I just made a prize fool of myself."

Lubba patted him reassuringly on the shoulder, but inwardly, he was troubled. This...human in Mario's clothes was becoming less of an anomaly and more of a threat. If he was vicious enough to attack Charlie, then the entire crew was at risk, what with him roaming at large. They had to find him and subdue him in whatever way possible, fast. Before he hurt someone else.

Lubba was just about to suggest another search when the automatic door on the far side of the hospice slid open, admitting Pollux inside.

"Mister Lubba!" he cried as he floated forward. "Bad news!"

Lubba spun. "What is it?"

"We just picked up a distress beacon," the orange Luma said.

Gasps. Lubba's heart sank. A distress beacon. All ships were equipped with one: they transmitted whenever the ship was lost, so that Starship Mario could pinpoint their last known location for Search and Rescue.

Heart pounding, Lubba asked, "Which ship sent the beacon?"

***

Sector 7-MA, 34 LY from the center of the Cold Core galaxy | The Spelunker – Central Command

"What do you mean, you don't know?" Link snapped.

"I told you!" the toad said. "Hi-rule isn't in our database! There's no record of it anywhere! If there's no record, then we can't get you there!"

Link held up Captain Toad, gave him a couple of shakes. "Have you forgotten that this guy's life is at stake?" he roared. "Stop wasting my time!"

"Don't kill me!" Captain Toad begged.

"Look," one of the toads said, desperate, "I'm sorry, but there's nothing more that we can do. If we can't find the record in the database, then our navigational computers can't generate hyperlight coordinates. That's the way it works."

Link remained silent, fuming and glaring down at the toads. Honestly, he'd only understood half of what they said, but the bottom line was the same: they, for some reason, couldn't take him back to Hyrule. And that seemed to be the truth.

So what did he do? Make more threats? Give up, laugh it off, say it was all a joke? Yeah, right: they'll probably throw me back into a cell! And that couldn't happen. He had to get back home. Sooner rather than later.

Taking his silence as a threat, the toad with the glasses said, "Okay, how about this? Do you know what system Hi-rule is in?"

"System?" What the hell did that mean?

"Yeah, system!" the toad said impatiently. "Or galactic cluster. Galaxy. Whatever. Maybe we can narrow things down a bit."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

The toads exchanged puzzled looks. One said, "All right...description then. What does the planet Hi-rule look like?"

Finally, they were speaking his language. "It depends on what part of the country you're in," he said. "The Ordona Province is mostly woodland—"

"Country?" a toad exclaimed. "Hi-rule is a country?"

"Yes, country. A kingdom."

Groans. "Great!" one of them complained. "He wants us to find a country somewhere in the middle of three billion galaxies!"

"Needle in a haystack," groaned another.

"Or in a stack of needles!" the first said. "Look, buddy, that's too narrow. We need a broader range. Start with the planet. What's your planet's name?"

Link glanced around the circle, to where the toads were watching him expectantly. Impatiently. He felt heat rise to his cheeks.

"I don't...understand," he said.

"Am I not speaking the right language?" the toad jeered.

The heat intensified. "I don't know what you mean by 'planet'," Link snapped.

His words were met with an awed silence; the toads looked at each other again, disbelieving, scorn in their eyes. That made his teeth gnash; he didn't recall saying anything stupid.

"Okay, so you're one of those," a toad said finally.

One of those? "Those what?" he demanded, tightening his grip on Captain Toad. A squeak from him put a lid on some of the attitude rising from the others.

"The 'unaware'," the glasses toad explained. "Civilizations that haven't yet learned that the land they live on is a celestial body, just like the stars in the sky. Primitive races, usually, who haven't gotten a firm enough grasp on astrology to formulate those kinds of theories."

Link rubbed his mouth, trying to disguise his confusion. Unsuccessfully. With an impatient huff, a toad pressed something on the ice-like surface of the table, and some sort of...fog suddenly rose from the surface, shifting and morphing until it resembled the night sky, with bright pinpricks of light representing the stars in between. The sight was mind-blowing: the picture was so clear that Link imagined he could reach out and capture one of the stars in his hand. He stepped closer to the display, amazed.

"Look," the toad who'd summoned the fog said, "look familiar? The night sky and stars, right?"

"Right," Link said, entranced by the display.

"Wrong!" the toad said. "If you zoom up really close...to this star, for instance..." Reaching over, the toad reached into the fog and actually tapped one of the stars. The smog shifted, the other stars fading away as the one that was tapped grew larger and larger in size, until it was no longer a pronged piece of dazzling light, but...a large sphere, one that was no longer glowing. Its surface was a patchwork of blue and brown, overlaid by swirling masses of white that looked a lot like... Clouds? Link didn't know. He felt like he didn't know anything anymore.

"Not a star," the toad said. "A planet, a celestial body that moves in a fixed orbit around another body, like a star. Your Hi-rule resides on such a place."

Link stared at the display, at the...planet, as it rotated about an invisible axis. Words had come up on the lower screen: Tellius, they read. Population, 779 million. Known divisions: Daein, Begnion, Goldoa... The list went on.

"I don't understand," he said.

"Okay," the toad said. "Let's zoom in closer." He tapped the fog, and the smoke shifted again, zooming in on the planet, on a splotch of green beneath the white cover swirling about the surface. The fog reorganized itself until it displayed a startlingly familiar picture: a prairie, tall stands of grass swaying in the wind, shadowed slightly by passing clouds and mountains standing proudly in the distance.

"Look familiar?" the toad asked.

Link was struggling to put this all together. "What are you saying?"

"Hi-rule...or wherever it is you live, is just a small piece of probably a much bigger landmass," another toad said. "If you had wings — or a ship — and you jumped from the surface of your country and flew high into the sky — towards the sun — without stopping, and then paused and turned around..." The display zoomed out again, to the rotating, blue-brown sphere overlaid by white. "It would probably resemble something like this. A planet. Truth is, buddy, you live on a star — we all do. At least, that's how it looks from afar." The display zoomed out again, until the...planet was nothing but a dot of starshine painted onto a canvas of black.

"And yours isn't the only one," another toad cut in. "There are billions out there, like the one you just saw. Billions of them, with billions of different types of creatures living on them. Like us. Like you. But they're all so far away from each other that it's very unlikely for any of us to meet."

Link swallowed. This was too much. Too much, too fast. He was trying to process it all, but it was going down hard. He tried to circle back to the problem at hand: "So what are you saying about Hyrule?"

"Either we can't find it because no one entered your planet's record into our database," the glasses toad said, "or it's because it's too far away to get to in your lifetime. Our computers are...primitive compared to Starship Mario's. We only have data for planetary bodies we can reach within 345 thousand light-years. If Hi-rule is beyond that scope, you'd be dead and buried by the time we actually got there, even if we started the journey three days ago."

Link leaned against the dash, feeling dizzy. "If Hyrule is so far away," he whispered, "then how did I get here?"

It was the question of the year. Just barely, he could comprehend what the toads were proposing: that worlds like his floated about in this black, endless void with the stars, too far away from one other to make the chance of meeting another from another world anything but a fantasy.

Yet here he was. Here. He. Was. Among these people, on their ship, demanding that they return him home. How had he gotten from there to here, if Hyrule was lifetimes away?

"I don't know," the toad said. "I'm sorry."

Link gripped the dash, even though he'd expected the answer. But every time he heard it, it made him a little more frightened. He was more than a man now — he was a living phenomenon, his presence here and now an unnatural feat that should have been impossible. And if no one could explain it...did he even have a chance of getting back?

Movement behind him — by the time Link could even begin to become suspicious, it was too late. There was a sharp pain in his back, one that shut down his legs, and then he was on the floor, his feet falling heavily behind him. Elated shouting rose up.

"Nice work, Jerry!" a toad cried.

"I try," the toad Jerry said proudly. "I'm glad I had my Taser on me!"

"Yep! Sucker never saw it coming!" A toad jabbed Link's side spitefully with his foot.

"Are you all right, Captain Toad?" another said.

"Fine," Captain Toad panted. "Close call."

Shadows cast Link into shade as the toads came to stand around him, stares cold and unfriendly. One asked, "What do we do with him now?"

"Let's tie him up, move him back down to storage," Captain Toad said. "Louis! Get into radio contact with Starship Mario. Tell them we've found the prisoner aboard, and we're flying back to return him to his cell."

"On it, Cap'n," Louis said.

The rest of the toads clustered closer to Link, rolling him over and pushing him into a sitting position. He wanted to snarl at them, spout threats, but he had trouble moving his lips; in fact, he couldn't even glare properly. His entire body felt like jelly, flaccid and unresponsive. What did they do to me? He couldn't ask — in fact, all he could do was watch, lifelessly, as they lifted his feet and tied his ankles together, and did the same with his wrists. Inside, he seethed: I can't believe I let distract me like that!

"Okay, he's ready," Captain Toad huffed after a minute. "Let's get him down below."

Before they could, there was a righteous noise, loud and high. The floor, once again, rocked, more violently than ever before. The toads fell to their hands and knees, dropping Link, who began to slide forward towards the window. He thudded to a halt against the dash.

"Louis!" Captain Toad cried. "What's going on?"

"Cap'n," Louis gasped from a seat near the window. "The...the planet! It's..."

He wasn't able to say anymore: everything crashed again, shook viciously, and suddenly the panoramic window angled downward, towards the massive, frothing sphere that Link now knew to be a planet. Everything was shaking so much that he couldn't see properly, but it was hard to mistake the huge, scalding meteors roaring past the windows, tearing through space like righteous arrows. Soon, they were all that Link could see: flaming missiles and the rapidly-approaching, frothing sea of magma that seemed to burn the very stars around it.

"Get us out of here!" Captain Toad screamed.

"C-Can't!" Louis shrieked. "Hyperlight is down! So are engines and thrusters." The toad turned, his eyes glowing with hellfire. "We're going down, Captain!"

Link heard no more: the toads screamed, but their voices were drowned out by the shrill wail of alarms, and the pained groans of the ship. The temperature in the room rose, and rose, and rose, until Link saw his blue overalls catch fire, then his shirt sleeve. Then pain, pain he could do nothing about, still paralyzed as he was. Tears poured from his eyes, blurring his vision, but he could see enough: the planet was still coming, closer, closer, until the window rivaled a door peering into the depths of hell itself.

Then...complete and utter destruction. Annihilation.

***

Starship Mario | Infirmary

"It's coming from the Spelunker, Mister Lubba," Pollux said. "They've gone down on the magma planet's surface."

"What?" Yoshi cried. "What the heck were they doing down there? They were supposed to be going out for a deep-space scan!"

"I don't know," Pollux said. "We're still gathering information."

"Find out more," Lubba said.

Pollux nodded and retreated, the infirmary door hissing shut behind him. Once it did, Lubba actually floated down to the floor, head in his hands. The Spelunker. The Toad Brigade. Captain Toad. Gone. It couldn't be true. It couldn't be...

"W-wha...What do we do now?" Charlie said shakily.

No one answered. That was because there was nothing they could do. Except pray.

***

Extras: This chapter's soundtrack: Billions and Billions by Stellardrone.

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