Chapter 19:
Fork in the Toad

~Masamune~

"That should be the last of them..." Toad commented as he looked at the young mushroom girl.

"Yes..." Ten mumbled, "Of the ones that lived at least... the Transakoopas will be looking for us now. I would suggest we make haste and leave"

Toad simply nodded, put the girl in his hands and followed Ten through the caverns. Whether or not they were undetected, or were simply being toyed with. They managed to reach the exit without being caught.

Upon reaching outside, on the west side of the castle they beheld a terrible sight. The seven koopa kids laughing. Around them laid limp mushroom bodies, the ones still able to move were pushed around like rag dolls. Standing by the walls the several transakoopas were gathered whispering amongst theirselves. Toad rushed out to help his comrades, but was held back by Ten.

"What are you doing?" Toad exclaimed angrily.

"You will get us killed by going out there. The outnumber and outpower us. We must escape now and leave them behind." Ten answered in such a calm manner, Toad wondered if he even cared.

"But they'll die!" Toad replied.

"Not likely, the koopas, from my experience, are not known to execute prisoners. They are more valuable to him as prisoners..." Ten said, "For now... we must flee from here before they discover us."

Toad clenched his hands tightly, looking at his fallen comrades and Ten quietly.

~

Later, the group, which consisted of Mario, Luigi, Yoshi, Peach, Geno and Mallow, were seated at the banquet hall of the Nimbus Kingdom.

"So... how did you guys get in anyway?" Mario asked while they were eating, "I was by the stairs and never saw anyone come in..."

"Well..." Luigi went on to explain about Booster, the path, Croco and so forth, "... so we went through the secret entrance, used the old elevator and came in behind a bookcase. We thought there would be guards"

"Booster huh? And Croco? Those are two I thought we would forget..." Mallow mused.

"You said there was an elevator, we didn't have to climb all those stairs!?" Mario exlaimed slightly irritated.

"That's what I said..." Peach trailed off.

"Ahem, may I propose a tribute to our heroes for saving us from the Koopa villains!" The Nimbus King said joyfully.

Meanwhile, in the main hall...

"Aww man! Those plumbers totally shellacked Itu and Boss Lak!" A bummed out Hammer Brothers exclaimed.

"Bowser's gonna have our head! I told you the Hot Spring were a bad idea!" Another hammer brother retorted.

"Well now what are we going to do? Bowser will be mad, Kro!"

"Well... maybe we should pound them in. Better than facing Bowser, right Fro?" Kro said.

"Uh-huh, let's show 'em what REAL Hammer Brother can do!" Fro exclaimed.

Back in the Dining Hall...

"Mallow, dear, do you plan on going on with them?" Mallow's mother asked.

"I can't chicken out again mom... I'll show Bowser not to mess with us Nimbus people too" Mallow proclaimed.

"Well, we better go then..." Luigi suggested, "We have two days until Bowser said he would execute his full plan"

"Ok, let's go!" Yoshi exclaimed.

Outside of the castle...

"Hey you, buddy!" Wario shouted, tapping the shoulder of a strange looking man.

"Huh? Who? Me?" The odd man replied.

"Sir!" A snifit exlaimed.

"I beleive he is, Booster!" Another Snifit finished.

"So he is!" Booster laughed.

"Yes...." Wario answered slowly, "Did you see a man named Mario go in that building?"

"Mario!? Don't we know him?" Booster replied.

"Yes sir!" Snifit 1 exclaimed.

"He stole your bride-to-be!" Snifit 3 added.

"Oh yeah! And gave me that big cake, I had indigestion for a week, the fiend!"

"Allow me..." Jinx interrupted, "Did you see him enter the building?"

"Hrrm... is Mario spelled with a L?" Booster thought out loud.

"No sir!" Snifit 1 proclaimed.

"That was his brother Luigi!" Snifit 3 finished.

"So it was" Booster replied.

Jinx shook his head, finally making progress, "Did he go in?"

"Hmm... I think so, he went with Snifit 2 and my old Bride to be...."

Jinx looked back at Wari oand Waluigi, who bore devilish grins on their faces. The bug like warrior began to doubt their loyalty, but pushed it behind him. As the three went on to the castle.

"What are we going to do about that tower now?" Snifit 1 asked.

"Hmmm... maybe we can keep it here! And live there!" Booster exclaimed with excitement at the prospect.

~Ace Rimmer~

"What... where would we go?" Toad said with some confusion. Leaving those innocent people behind was just not what his heart told him he should do. But he knew the odds against him, and they were more than a bit risky. The uncaptured portion of the group was further back in the tunnel while Ten and Toad scouted ahead.

"I don't know exactly." Ten said, "But they probably think that that was the entire group of our survivors out there, so they may've left their guard down. We should go to another exit, hopefully a more covert one." Ten turned to walk back, but stopped when he sensed that Toad wasn't following him. "What is it?" Ten asked.

"They trusted you." Toad said frankly. "They trusted us. I can't just leave them behind." Ten turned and walked back.

"We will not profit by confronting them like this." Ten whispered calmly, "There are a whole regiment of tranlakoopas, guards, and not to mention seven of the meanest kids spawned out there. Do you really think you... we can take them on?"

"N... no." Toad looked down in guilt. He knew he couldn't help them now, but his conscience still bothered him. His mind was racing, flipping from one side of the arguement to another. He looked back up with a decision that he found difficult to say. He took a deep breath. "Let's go. But!-" He raised his hand and pointed directly to Ten. "But... we will come back." Ten nodded and signalled the others to fall back.

"Ten," Toad said while crawling through some narrow passage, "You said that they're all out there, watching that grim specticle?". Ten nodded. "Well, maybe we can 'borrow' some equipment." Ten stopped in his tracks, as did Toad, processing his suggestion. He turned his head to Toad.

"Are you suggesting we steal some weapons?" Ten said, a bit shocked.

"Yeah. Why not? I mean, there's probably some spears and swords just lying around. Maybe even some wands and potions if we're lucky. All these people need is a bit of a crash course in warfare." Ten thought about their chances, once properly equipped and somewhat trained, in defeating the koopas outside. He was pessimistic, but the single factor that made the difference was Toad's words echoing in his mind: 'They trusted us.'

"...I may be able to help. There's a crew quarters somewhere around. Maybe there's some hope yet." Ten said, with a bit of hesitation.

"Hope is all we need..." Toad said.

~lzn64~

Ten nodded, concealing his admiration for Toad behind a grim face. The other mushrooms realized that they weren't leaving the stuffy depths of the trasakoopa's castle, and a dissatisfied murmur swept through the crowd as Toad cleared his throat to get their attention. He was quite accustomed to being the leader by then, and easily lapsed into the somewhat bossy, but gentle tone that the other mushrooms had grown quite used to obeying.

"Listen, I know you've all been through a lot... and I won't lie to you. We're in more trouble then we thought." As a fresh wave of mutterings swept the crowd, Toad felt a frown crease his usually smiling face. He hated doing this to them. He told them, as briefly as he could without leaving out the important details, about the plight of the first group and the mission that they, the second group, would now be expected to try to carry out. The mushrooms accepted the new turn of events listlessly; most of them had never really believed that they would be able to walk out so easily in the first place, and had prepared themselves mentally for this sort of disaster.

Ten couldn't help admiring Toad's mushrooms, not only did they have the benefit of a good leader, they themselves were exceptional followers. When Toad turned to him, motioning to lead the way, he had already worked out their positions relative to the scattered barracks he knew about. They walked in relative silence, each mulling over their own thoughts, pessimistic or otherwise. The only sound that were heard throughout the trek were the hollow steps of the treading feet on stone, and an occasional whine from a tired youngster.

After an unknown period of time, Ten slowed their pace and eventually stopped in the center of another moderately sized chamber. Lazy shafts of light filtered down to them through a heavy metal grate above them, allowing their strained eyes to relax the slightest bit. Ten locked eyes with Toad and pointed upward, wordlessly conveying his message, for fear of guards listening above. Toad nodded his understanding and relayed this message to the company by equally quiet means.

After listening in a nearly total silence for a few minutes, they decided that the guards did not realize that they had only one half of the group in their grasp, and had let down their security. Their mistake, it seemed, as the mushrooms piled various items scattered throughout the tunnels to constuct a makeshift ladder-staircase that led to the weapons storage room. Toad was naturally the first to test the doubtful ladder, but found that it served its purpose quite well. He managed to lift the grate just enough to get it over the lip of the depression it was set into, and grunted as he leaned his entire weight onto it to move it aside. The ladder rocked alarmingly for a second, then stabilized, allowing Toad to climb into the room above, motioning for the others to follow.

When all had made the climb into the room, they couldn't help but feel a bit giddy with relief. The younger mushrooms laughed and joked with each other, the tension momentarily replaced with a new confidence in their abilities. Ten and Toad set about searching for weapons that could be used by the makeshift militia, sorting through a variety of spears, daggers, and strange metallic objects they had no ready name for. They made their way across the spacious room, and about halfway around Ten stopped, looking at a wall in surprise.

"Look at this, Toad," He called, pointing at an engraved inscription in the corner. "Seven cubes long and seventeen wide, if you're fat enough, you'll get the prize..." He read, obvously puzzled by the strange words. "What do you suppose that means?"

"It doesn't sound very cryptic to me," Toad admitted. "Maybe some bored troopa wrote it down for a laugh after some sucker got roped into looking for the 'prize.'"

"Maybe..." Ten agreed, but he didn't sound very convinced. He let it go for the moment, and busied himself with rummaging through a slightly rusted pile of metal, made up of shell-shaped plates and other pieces of koopa armor.

Across the room, three of the more mischievious youngsters, two boys and a girl, began a playful sparring equipped with helmets five times their size and thick wooden staves far too long for them to handle properly. They laughed as they played, tiring themselves out but glad to let off some steam. A well placed whap by one the boys sent the other boy off-balance. because he had already been a bit unsteady due to the heavy helmet on his head, he crashed headlong into a seemingly solid wall, hitting with a curious hollow "bonk" noise and an alarmingly loud crash. That caused the elder mushrooms to turn around in fright and confusion to face them.

The assaulted child set about to bawling, more from fright than actual pain, and was immediately comforted by his parents, who rushed to soothe him. The other two children were properly scolded and led from the scene, and with that the crowd dissapated, leaving Ten to muse about the wall before him. He had heard the sound that the helmet had made; it had not been that of solid meeting solid. He tapped the wall experimentally, reafirriming his suspicion: the wall was definitely hollow. He motioned to Toad, who joined him with a puzzled look on his face.

"What is it?" He asked, somewhat annoyed at having been interrupted in his search.

"This wall..." Ten answered. "It's a false wall. There's something behind it." He tapped it with the hilt of a short dagger he had picked up, creating the hollow noise that betrayed its cleverly hidden secret. Toad's eyebrows raised in surprise, and he flattened his hands out on the wall, looking for a catch.

"How do we open it?" He inquired, sliding his hands along the wall experimentally.

"I have no idea, but undoubtedly there's something very important behind here, if it warrants being hidden so carefully."

"Yeah..." Toad muttered, moving along the length of the wall. Ten joined him, and their combined efforts piqued the interest of the others. After extracting the reason for their search, they too attempted to find the mechanism that would lead to the door's opening. Eventually, Toad found the minute crack in the wall that signaled the point where the two slabs met, and most likely opened at, but still had no idea as to how to get them to do so.

As Toad ran his hands along the thin crack, a sudden rumbling caused him to gasp and jump back, and watch in wonder as the thin line widened into a moderately wide gap, then stopped with a grinding that made him wince. The sides shuddered once, then halted altogether, obviously jammed on something. The incredulous mushroom whirled around, and his eyes fell on a grinning Ten, who was standing on the other side of the room with a self-satisfied grin on his face.

"Am I good, or what?" He congratulated himself, enjoying the look the others were giving him.

"How did you...?"

"Oh, it was easy. See that inscription over there? It tells you how to open it. These cracks on the floor form squares, even though they're not perfect... some sort of look like triangles, and they're not the same size... Anyway, just start at the door and follow the directions... go seven up and seventeen over, and that small square there," He pointed to a tiny square, the same color as the rest of the floor and with no distinguishing qualities, "that one opens the door."

Toad looked at him in frank disbelief, then turned toward a girl who was giggling in front of the inscription. He frowned at her, but she spoke before he could manage to get his questions in.

"Guess that means you were fat enough," she laughed, her eyes sparkling micheviously.

"Um, well," Ten blushed a bit, and looked at the floor. "It's this armor, you know, it adds a lot of weight, and I had to jump on it a few times, too..."

"Sure..." The girl replied, grinning at him with open amusement.

"Whatever..." Ten muttered, glaring at her.

Toad ignored this, instead opting to peer inside the hidden chamber, where little light was getting in due to the small space the doors had opened. The shadowy light caused some of the objects within to glitter tantalizingly, and Toad squeezed inside to get a better look at them. He made his way across the rectangular room, and lifted one of the glittering stones, which was embedded on the end of a smooth wooden rod. He blinked, remembering this item from somewhere, and furrowed his brow. His concentration was broken by Ten, who joined him in the darkness a second later.

"What is that?" He peered curiously at the wand, and when no answer came he shrugged and started toward another shimmer, faintly blue in the half-light. There turned out to be a total of eight wands, but there were empty holders for two more, obviously currently in use by two koopas of great importance.

They were brought from the dark room into the light, and set on the floor in the middle of a curious crowd. Toad couldn't help feeling that he had seen something like those somewhere before, but he couldn't quite place where. They obviously hadn't been disturbed in quite a long while, the poor condition of the doors and the think layer of dust on them testified to that.

The inevitable question, "What now?", was soon asked, and Toad found himself unsure of how to answer it. He did not know how the wands worked, or even what exactly they did, but he knew that they would be taken along just the same. He saw that the others had been properly outfitted; though most of the armor did not fit due to its being shaped for a koopa's form, the weapons came in handy. Each mushroom over the age of twelve was given something to defend himself, or herself, with. The four or five moderately skilled mushrooms, Ten included, set about teaching the fundamentals of fighting to the bright pupils, most of which caught on after only a few lessons. Those that didn't were taught enough to at least prevent damage, if not to inflict it. They were no match for an organized army of koopas, or even a disorganized army for that matter, but it would have to do.

"What are we going to do about those doors?" Toad suddenly remembered the open doors, an obvious indicator that there were still loose mushrooms about and a sure-fire alarm trigger if the stolen wands were as important as Toad suspected they were.

"Doesn't say how to close them, just how to open them," Ten shrugged. "This place obviously hasn't been visited in a long time, why would they now?"

Toad sighed and agreed, still unable to shake his uneasiness. He watched the others dissapear back into the tunnels, toting their weapons and occasionally their children. He slipped in after them, strained to close the hole again, and then climbed to the tunnel floor. The first flutterings of excitement and fear stirred in his stomach, as the realization hit him: They were going to fight the Koopa Kids. It was an unheard of concept; only Mario and Luigi could do that. But they weren't there, and there was no telling if they were even alive or not. It had been assumed that they would always be around when the koopa troop got nasty, and the realization that they were on their own, which he had suppressed throughout their journey, hit him full force for the first time. He had been expecting the plumbers to pop out at any moment, to tell him that this was all just a test that all mushroom retainers underwent at some point- and that they would take it from there, thank you very much- and the thought that they might not be alive to take charge again scared him quite badly. He let none of this show as he followed Ten back toward the Koopa Kids, a heavy bag containing the wands slung over his shoulder. A troubled silence overtook the company, as the truth dawned on mushrooms, each clutching one weapon or another- They were doing this themselves. Without assistance.

And it was in this frame of mind that they advanced upon the door, the portal that would lead them to the world of sunlight and sand- and possibly a terrible death. Ten stopped outside the door and took a deep breath, his heart beating fast and an unwanted fear settling in his guts as he pushed the door forward.

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