I am once again here to demand Prince Shade being a wholesome father to Bowsette Jr. the last one was a direct injection of goodness into my bloodstream.
I'm with this guy, me want see more Prince Shade.
Prince Shade, Kidnapped Extraordinaire Part Five [Super Mario/SI]
Kitchen Island was a place of food. Captain Syrup was a good cook. No, scratch that, she was an amazing cook. She was also very good with children, seeing how she pacified Bowsette Junior with a large ice-cream cone and had the girl intrigued with the idea of a 'fashion' show with some stolen clothes from unlucky ship travelers.
She did have a questionable line of work though, and seemed interest in gold just as much as she was interested in my ability to eat whatever she cooked, but then again my stomach hadn't been born of starvation, water and bread, but of all-you-can-eat buffets in the Mushroom Kingdom and feasts that clearly, couldn't have the food left to spoil!
"I'd eat your cooking every day," I said with a sigh of bliss. I patted my stomach, feeling drowsiness overtake me.
"That can be arranged~" Captain Syrup said cheerfully, a smile on her lips.
I would have arched an eyebrow, but the drowsiness completely overtook me, and I fell peacefully asleep. Oh.
Wow. Well, what to say-she was pretty good at her kidnapping job then...
---
Bowsette Junior was wondering when the 'fashion show' would begin. Her ice-cream had just been finished, and she was staring at a stage in a theater-like room expecting some manner of model to pop out at any moment. She tapped her feet against the ground, and then started getting annoyed.
"What's the matter with you people?!" she grumbled, standing up from her seat. As she neared the stage and flipped the curtains open, they fell down to reveal a wooden wall. "What!?"
As she turned around, she noticed that most of the theater's chairs were only cardboard, and that the door had been replaced with bars while she was waiting for the show to start. Had they imprisoned her!? Absolutely not! She rushed to the bars, pulling on them back and forth, "Let me out or you'll regret it! Let me out! Dad! Mom! Someone get me out!"
One of the pirate gooms, the creatures that formed the backbone of Captain Syrup's army, decided to poke at her with the tip of his spear. It did remarkably little to her toughened hide, but quite a lot to her simmering anger.
"You think you can do this to me? Bowsette Junior!? I'm the daughter of Bowsette! I'm the future Koopa Queen! I'll burn you to roast! Char you on coal! See how you like my flames!" and with that said, she filled her lungs with air and then spewed out a mighty bout of fire. Well, in her modest opinion it was an amazing amount of fire. In truth it just slightly burned the pirate goom, and made him scarper.
But it
did work in making her jailer lose the key to her cell. Which meant she was free! And angry!
And when her mom or her dad found out about this, then Captain Syrup was gonna be sorry! She'd be praying forgiveness on her hands and knees and she, Bowsette Junior, wasn't gonna give any mercy! She was going to fill her with fire! Yeah! That was what she was gonna do as soon as she found what hallway led out of the dungeons and back to the kitchen!
...Had she been brought here through that passage, or this door? Well, only one way to find out!
---
I yawned as my eyes opened to a sumptuous bed. Uh. I had slept like a log after lunch apparently. Captain Syrup was scribbling a letter by the nearby desk, humming all the while. I tried to stand up, but my legs and arms were strapped to the sides of the bed.
"Ahem," I said. "This is new. And low. Bowsette never sunk this low."
"I'm simply holding you prisoner for ransom," Captain Syrup pointed out. "I have both the statue and the Toadstool's prince. I'm pretty sure this time around, your kingdom's going to pay up."
"Eh," I said with a sigh. "Knowing how things go, your people are about to have a very bad time."
"Is that a threat? I think I might come to like a feisty partner!" Captain Syrup said, sounding quite cheerful about it. Was she willfully ignorant of how things went? Considering the place I was in, probably.
"I swear," I muttered. I gave a hesitant attempt at prying my wrists free from the manacles, but much to my surprise they were quite tight. "This isn't your first time tying someone up to a bed, is it?"
"How did you know?" she asked, grinning and sashaying closer.
"Well," I sighed, "It's a bit of a pity though. If you had left my arms free, I might have snuggled with you out of my own will."
"Aw, I actually didn't think about that-" she said, blinking. "Well, I thought this was going to be considerably harder."
"You're a good cook and I'm sure there's a sweet girl underneath the pirate attire. How about you just let one of my arms free rather than both, so you can trust on me being honest about snuggling?" I mused with a cheerful smile.
Bowsette had learned a long time ago that to leave one of my arms free meant that I could actually choke-hold someone into catatonic slumber -breaking necks was a big no-no around these parts, so everything was pretty much non-lethal- and had soon decided to just stop tying me up. Since, again, she could be devious and yet moronic at the same time.
Captain Syrup didn't have Bowsette's knowledge.
She also expected a 'snuggle-hug' and not a throat constricting moment that soon ended with her unconscious and with me filching the keys from her person to then free the rest of my limbs.
As I massaged my wrists, I exhaled. "Now, to find Bowsette Junior and leave this place."
I wasn't that worried that she'd been hurt. I left Captain Syrup unconscious on the bed, and then left through the main door. Outside, a pair of penguins holding on to
beer mugs of all things stared at me ever so briefly. I arched an eyebrow.
"Are those supposed to be weapons?" I asked, offhandedly walking towards them.
The two penguins looked at one another, and then threw their beers in my direction. My mouth closed, the malty liquid splashed against my face and then dripped down my clothes.
I blinked.
They stared at me in wonder.
I cracked my knuckles and drew closer. They started squawking and running in circles from sheer fear -for some reason- and then slammed into one another and knocked each other unconscious as I proceeded past them. Sometimes I wondered whether the insanity was born that way, or whether some manner of god nurtured it into existence.
After the penguins, however, were more 'normal' enemies. Small, chunky wolves with daggers, molemen twirling spiked maces, and ducks holding on to boomerangs.
"Honestly, I would have rather preferred the beer throwing penguins," I grumbled as I hastily ducked behind the cover of a convenient hallway-table, half a dozen of knives slamming into the sides, five boomerangs flying back and forth overhead, and the molemen advancing while emitting sharp war cries.
The moment they got close enough, I lunged with my cover forward, slamming it into the first in line. The table broke, bits and pieces of wood remaining on the ground as two of the legs remained as makeshift clubs in my hands. I ducked under a swing, slamming a cub in someone's back, twirling like in an action movie going slow-motion, a kick took down the knee of another moleman, and my teeth clenched around the tip of a dagger that had gotten too close to my face.
"ffffff-" I hissed out as I spat the knife out. It turned out that they had smooth edges and were made of some manner of hardened foam. It hurt, but it did not actually shatter my teeth. Were my teeth all there? "Look where you're throwing those!" I yelled at the chonky-wolf, who looked quite chagrined. He had aimed for my body, not my face.
My left hand let go of the club, grabbing instead one of the molemen's twirling maces and spinning it into a couple of charging ducks, boomerangs held high while quacking angrily in my direction. They flew off in the air like humans when Sauron swung at them; their feathers exploding brightly in the air as they fell on the ground with stars twirling on their heads.
I took aim and threw a club at a chonky-wolf, who answered by jumping to play fetch with it; then, he got a boomerang in the stomach as finishing blow.
The rest of his peers were soon met with my unrelenting assault, and ran away while yipping in fear. I exhaled, looked at my ruined clothes, and then scratched the side of my head. "Not so tough when it's not one-hit KOs uh," I chuckled. "Just how many floors is this place anyway-and where's Bowsette Junior? Should have asked someone-"
I noticed a moleman trying to scamper off, failing futilely to dig his way on the floor below. I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, and opened the nearby window.
"Where's the kid?" I asked, calmly.
"D-Dungeons! B-Bottom floor!" he said.
I looked down at the castle's entrance from the window. It was quite a few floors down. "Where's the stairs?" I asked, and once I received a reply, I happily let him go to the tender mercies of gravity.
He bounced back up to the same floor without a single scratch on him, as it turned out the grounds of the castle were made of some manner of bouncing toffee-like substance. With that out of the way, I decided chairs were for morons.
My bouncing-landing led me to power-jump across the grounds to the main door, just in time to watch them burst up in flames as Bowsette Junior emerged from their cindered remains, feral smile on her face like a miniature cute Godzilla and clutching in her hands an unconscious Pirate Goom.
"Dad!" she said cheerfully at my sight, before dropping the Pirate Goom and lunging for me. I bent down on one knee to steady myself, receiving and returning the hug while shaking her right and left a bit.
"Hey there kiddo!" I said cheerfully, raising her up by her midriff with both of my hands so that she was eye-level with me. "Guess these guys were really mean. Can you believe they knocked me unconscious? Are you okay? Did they hurt you?" I then placed her on my shoulders, holding her legs tightly so she wouldn't risk falling down.
"Pfuit!" Bowsette Junior snickered, "As if they could! One of them tried to poke me with a stick, but I burned them! And then broke free! And then I burned a few more! I was looking for ice-cream but I got lost-" she said, "Do you think we can break into their kitchen and get some? It was really tasty!"
"I don't know, might be too much sugar in our diet already," I said. "Did you remember to brush your teeth? Where's your travel kit with your toothbrush?"
Bowsette Junior didn't answer at first, and then she coughed. "I think I burned it. By mistake."
"Sure. Sure." From one of my pockets, I filched out a spare one. "Let's find their ship and get back to Auntie Daisy. I'm sure their ship has a water basin or something."
Bowsette huffed and kicked her legs back and forth against me. "Brushing teeth is for losers! You rip them out, and they grow right away!"
"That's Koopa genetics at work," I pointed out. "But why go through the pain of ripping them out? Just take care of them! Less pain that way! Also, don't you want to give people bright, happy smiles?"
"Terrifying smiles!" Bowsette Junior said instead, huffing. "I want people scared of my smiles!"
"Well, same thing. Can't do a terrifying smile with half the teeth missing from your mouth, or growing back slowly now, can you?" I said with a chuckle, the trek to the docks apparently having to go through some manner of haunted woods.
A pity, because woods burned very brightly when they had the unfortunate problem of being scary to Bowsette Junior.
"It wasn't my fault!" Bowsette yelled as I simply dashed through the flaming woods that would soon become ash and cinder. "He scared me!"
A ghastly 'sous-chef' was guilty of giving a big 'boo' attack. The end result was flamethrower-mode engaged until everything stopped being scary, which again, resulted in me running with Bowsette Jr under my arm all the way to a cliff.
Thankfully, at the bottom of the cliff was the ocean, and close-by was the ship.
At that point, I just jumped into the sea uncaring of gravity, physics and everything obvious. Bowsette Junior screamed in sheer delight, a long-lasting 'weeeeeeee' that ended with us both slamming into the water at terminal velocity, breaking through and then swimming towards the anchor-chain of the docked ship.
From there, it was startling easy to climb aboard and pull up the anchor, setting sail just the two of us back to Daisy's summer palace, while behind us, Kitchen Island apparently burned.
Sugar was a very good fire-conductor; very flammable, especially when it spread to areas where alcohol or liqueurs were involved.
Half an hour later, and I began to relax. Bowsette Jr. was cheerfully running around the ship, finding 'treasures' and working on stuff. As long as she didn't rip pieces off the keel, she could experiment with whatever she wanted -that wasn't gunpowder, or explosive.
"That was fun!" Bowsette Junior said, a captain hat once belonging to Captain Syrup now firmly planted on her head. A cutlass in her right hand, she swung it right and left against invisible enemies. "Let's do it again tomorrow!"
"Once was enough for this year," I said with a chuckle, before frowning as a dark shape loomed over us, a foreboding chill filling my heart.
I glanced up, and saw a massive genie-like shape flying, Captain Syrup in the palm of his hand. "You thought you could escape without even saying goodbye to me!? Nobody leaves Captain Syrup! Nobody burns down Captain Syrup's kitchen and leaves! NOBODY!"
And as she yelled that and threw what looked like vividly explosive bombs from her hand, I spun the helm of the ship and dodged. They exploded in the water, but I kept the ship going wind-side.
"Man the cannons Bowsette!" I yelled, "We're taking them down!"
"Aye, aye Captain-Dad!" Bowsette Junior said, rushing to load a cannon on the side and then readying herself. "Ready to fire at your command!"
With a spun of the helm, the ship turned. With an explosion nearby, the rocking wave lifted us up at the right angle, and with my command, a cannon ball slammed into the Genie's guts and hurt him a bit.
"Back in my days, cannonballs were made of iron, not hardened lumps of sugary-coal," I growled under my breath. "Reload Officer-Daughter!" I barked.
"Aye aye!" Bowsette said cheerfully.
By the time the fifth cannonball made of sugary coal struck the genie, it finally collapsed down into the waves and we were truly cleared for the stretch home.
"All in all," I said, "I was expecting worse."
"Come on dad, when we're having this much fun together," Bowsette said, "What could possibly go wrong?"
The genie, promptly, re-emerged from the water ready for its second phase.
Seriously, where were Maria and Bowsette senior when you needed them!?