Welcome to Sigma Smasher HQ!

A Player One Luigi Fic (AU belongs to @tiny-prom )

Doopliss taking the place of TEC-XX and learning from Junior what friendship is, literally (lil guy has been isolated from other kids until Junior snuck into his room by mistake)

Also I may have envisioned Doopliss being held captive by whatever the equivalent of the X-Nauts are and Junior meeting him when he gets kidnapped for the Ritual Shenanigans(TM), but this also makes sense. Doopliss learning about the world outside the environment he's been kept in and realizing his "caretakers" may not have the best of intentions after all...

Further swap ideas and general rambling for the TTYD part of the AU below!

use tools

Can be taught to speak (like parrots)

Have huge brains for birds

like seriously their brain-to-body size ratio is equal to that of a chimpanzee

They vocalize anger, sadness, or happiness in response to things

they are scary smart at solving puzzles

some crows stay with their mates until one of them dies

they can remember faces

SIDENOTE HERE BECAUSE HOLY SHIT.  They did an experiment where these guys wore masks and some of them fucked with crows.  Pretty soon the crows recognized the masks = douchebag.  But the nice guys with masks they left alone.  THEN, OH WE’RE NOT DONE, NO SIR crows that WEREN’T EVEN IN THE EXPERIMENT AND NEVER SAW THE MASK BEFORE knew about mask-dudes and attacked them on sight.  THEY PASSED ON THE FUCKING INFORMATION TO THEIR CROW BUDDIES.

They remember places where crows were killed by farmers and change their migration patterns.

Every day, I would watch Buck from my window until one day I opened it and started talking to him. He was small and gangly and he couldn’t caw right. His feathers were all over the place and I felt a kinship. So I made a deal with him. I told him that if he could do it, if he could fly, then I could find the strength to get up. Well… near the end of the season, after talking with him every day, I finally saw him get out of the nest. He went to the edge of his branch, braced himself, and jumped… and just before he hit the ground, he soared back up into the sky. I cheered harder than I ever had before.

That winter, Buck left the area. I was crestfallen. I felt like I’d lost a friend. But I was so damn proud of him. 

Cut to the next spring? I’m walking up the driveway one day when suddenly I hear a sound… a broken caw. I look up, and Buck is sitting in a tree above my head. He stared at me and puffed his feathers, then hopped down in front of me and cawed again. I was so damn thrilled, and I told him how proud I was of him. He ruffled his feathers and then soared off into his old tree. 

That summer? I heard two broken caws. One from Buck… and one from his chick.

i tried to get close and take a better look and one of them dived super low and tried to attack me. so i went back in the house and chopped some sliced raw meat and tossed it at him from a distance.

a few more times later, very soon after, they could tell i was trying to help, and did not attack me. i was “allowed” to walk up close and pick him up, he couldn’t drink water properly so i had to dip my finger in a bowl and stick it in his mouth.

i did this few times a day and it went on for about a week before he disappeared, i thought he recovered and left, but he came back the next day and lands on me, and i see him around the block quite often, and he would come sit on my shoulder for a few minutes and then fly away again. i feel like i’ve adopted a son.

As a side note, I volunteered at a rehab (Hope for Wildlife), where they were rehabbing a crow with a broken wing–who was named Russell Crow. He kept pulling his bandage off so a sleeve was cut off some old clothing and put on him like a little sweater. 

okay. so. this is actually how i got into botany in the first place; i got an unpaid internship at a greenhouse in high school and realized, very quickly, that we live in a jurassic park hellscape where big companies breed plants solely for their looks and performance, and i found that so fucking weird that i couldnt get enough of it and fell down the rabbit hole. i don’t find them bad per say; i find them weird and how they manage their product in terms of policing their retailers is very sketchy to me, but they’re not like, monstanto-level off the shits (yet). with mother’s day next weekend we’re coming up on one of the biggest greenhouse/ornamental plant industry sales days of the year, next to valentines’ day (which favors the rose industry especially), so this is an exceptionally convenient time to talk about this. 

proven winners is one of the biggest ornamental plant companies in the united states, possibly the world. you might know them from their patented white flower pots. they’re centered in california (as, actually, a lot of these large flower producers are) and they manage a HUUUUUUGEEE network of giant industrial flower greenhouses. 

like, you have to understand, all garden retailers have to buy their shit from somewhere, and although the centers and local greenhouses selling proven winners stuff are often small and independent (unless ur talking like…flowerama or something), a large portion of the plants themselves, like many things in capitalism, form an industry of their own dominated by a handful of oligarch corporations, of which proven winners is one. small retailers order bulk products from these companies, should it be through full-color paper catalogs (which exist, btw, and are wild in and of themselves to look at; i actually have a few back home that i keep around solely bc they’re incredibly fascinating in a slightly offputting jurassic park kind of way), online, or through a sales representative for their region. 

it depends on what they’re ordering, but they can buy seeds, plugs (the black trays of like….tiny plants you buy at garden centers to put in planters? the ones that come in, like, six packs? those are called ‘plugs’), and in the case of perennials, woody plants of various ages, among other things. these plants are bred, marketed, and sold on a goddamn industrial scale. it’s wild. 

now….this is where it gets absolutely fascinating to me. this isn’t just proven winners, but proven winners is one of the top contenders of this. some highlights of how plants are actually marketed on an industrial scale: 

-plants come out in collections. like, you have horticulturalist designer people who put their names on some stuff and they all go out as like, The New Hot Thing™. 

-they always promote their top selling stuff, and the plants that won awards, and like, the most popular flower arrangements and stuff. this in and of itself, again, isn’t like…..bad, it just feels weird how plants are marketed as objects rather than living things, you know?

-these plants are 100% bred and optimized for their commercial value and how they look. see the above point about how it feels like they’re treating them as objects. 

-every year, there are new plants, which are put at the front of the catalogue and like, show them off as the Hit New Products. these are all part of the year’s collective collection, so like, proven winners has their 2019 collection all ready on their site in a special little tab: 

FUN INDUSTRY SIDE STORY: looks like they have some new orange petunias this year, which reminds me fondly of the 2017 purge ordered by the USDA of a ton of illegally GMO orange petunias….

you see, orange petunias don’t exist naturally, so what companies do is either 1. systematically breed orange into them, which can take years, or 2. take red petunias and just put in some coding for yellow from the maize genome, which makes them orange. usually, you have to submit all this paperwork and go through a ton of government red tape to sell GMOs, including required trials conducted by the federal government, but what some of these large ornamental seed companies were doing was just….not telling the government and just kind of…pretending that they bred them. so in 2017, a netherlands team noticed that these were like….kind of Suspicious™, and started doing some tests….and accidentally uncovered like, this huge international orange petunia scandal across all these companies, over 30 varieties of illegal petunia being sold internationally. they had to alert the actual EU, which then alerted the USDA, who then gave an actual government order for these large companies to literally burn, bury, or otherwise destroy all their industrial stock of the proven illegal GMO orange petunias. 

small retailers who had bought them assuming that they were legal were allowed to keep and continue selling what they bought, but the actual producers were ordered to just fucking. violently destroy everything. the USDA informed these companies that they could sell them again, but only if they were put through the proper government channels and received proper certification. i checked the old recall list and didn’t see these, so i’m assuming they’re like…Legit, but. im 👀 somebody test these lol

AAANNNNYYway that aside, if you would like to see the Proven Winners 2019 Flower Collection Showcase™, they have a bunch of……weird kind of ads on their youtube channel showing artsy pics of their new shit. to this day i can’t pin down exactly what about them makes me feel slightly uncomfortable, but you really do get a sense that they’re selling an object to preform, which i guess is the point, but…idk, it’s just a very different view of plants, i think, then i personally have. very sci-fi-y, if you will. all their ads are like this; these video are essentially very similar to what you get from their print sales booklets, but in video form.

see, last but not least, my biggest beef with proven winners is the weird way they handle their company. 

you get inspected by the plant police.

im not kidding. for those not very familiar with plant reproduction, you can grow vegetative clones of plants through a process called taking cuttings, where you cut off a part of the plant and put it in a new pot under the right conditions, and it develops a root system and becomes a genetic clone to the parent. obviously, anyone can do this with a lot of the proven winners plants, especially because PW plants, as i’ve noticed, tend to be bred to be more vigorous. 

ok so a couple years back I worked at a local greenhouse and we sold Proven Winners and they were HANDS DOWN managment’s least favorite company to deal with because:

The aforementioned Plant Police, who are the worst possible version of ‘police washout mall cop’ and ‘geriatric bitchy HOA snitch’.  Our local Plant Cop was this woman named “Elise” and her picture was stapled up in the breakroom with instructions to Radio 3 if we saw her.  

I’ll get to Radio 3 in a minute.

their product was uhhh… kind of crap? everything we ever got from them was real leggy, prone to carrying Sudden Death Mold, and frankly just didn’t do as well as some other brands in CO. 

They attracted the WORST customers.  You know the kind- the infamous haircut, knows more about plants than the people with actual horticultural degrees and sixteen cupons but only two of them are for this store, and either on their phone or screaming at their children at the register instead of checking out.

The only reason managment dealth with them at all was  1. People would request PW by name, so managment maked it up a ridiculous percentage and made bank on brand loyalty 2. PW’s delivery trucks would actually show up when scheduled with what was actually ordered so they could be relied upon to deliver, unlike pretty much every other grower :/ 

So it’s fucking MOTHER’S DAY, aka Hell On Earth for greenhouse retailers, and we’re understaffed in Greenhouse because some popular band was playing at the local indie bar Saturday night and everyone but me and Kate called in “sick”, so it’s two of us and sometimes assistant manger craig dealing with literally 3K customers an hour. 

Fucking Elise decides it’s a good day to do a surprise inspection. 

I’m breaking up a fight over at tomatoes when this woman grabs my arm, physically pulls me away from the woman whose order I’m writng down and hisses like a rattler at me “I need to see your greenhouses.”

I winch my arm out and get gouged by her nails. “Sorry, our greenhouses aren’t open to the public, and I’m working with her now.” I’m seven hours into a twelve-hour shift so far after coming in at 5 to unload the trucks, I can’t hear myself think over the echo in the greenhouse, and my panic over crowds has reached such a frenzy that I think my heatbeat could rival a hummingbird’s. I’m dehydrated despite my best efforts, hallucinating smells and my forearms are bleeding profusely from moving roses earlier. I no longer expirience pain or fear from exhaustion, but this woman makes me uneasy.

“I’m with Proven Winners and I’m here for an inspection.”

“Proven Winners are over there by the fairy garden supplies.” I say, still not sure what she’s on about.  I don’t do faces at the best of times and in the current retail-induced feuge I barely register her as a human being. I go back to trying to write ‘amish paste’ for what feels like the fortieth time, and Elise grabs my arm again and DIGS HER NAILS IN, before physically pulling me out the back door and towards the greenhouses.  

The first of the Quanzat huts/greenhouses is filled with columbines, one of the few non-crop plants that’s grown on-site because they’re in such demand and grow well here. Elise points at the rows and shakes my arm.

“WHERE ARE THESE FROM?” she demands. 

“Here? Ma’am this place is off-limits for customers, if you have questions I can get the greenhouse manager-”  I fumble for my radio (we all got walkie-talkie type radios because yelling over a 13-acre property is impractical) , and try to call the manager.  “Radio Adam? There’s a lady who needs some questions answered in Greenhouse 1?”

“NO I NEED TO SPEAK TO JEFF.” she shrieks, name-dropping the owner. “TELL HIM ELISE [REDACTED] IS HERE FROM PROVEN WINNERS AND IF HE DOESN’T GET HERE FOR AN INSPECTION I’LL HAVE THE POLICE SHUT DOWN THIS ENTIRE FACILITY!” she howls at me.

This Woman, I decide, Is Out Of Her Goddamn Gourd.  The mangers are all up to their armpits today and even if they could hear me wouldn’t be able to physically wade through the crowds for a good 10 minutes.  I click my radio over to Channel 3.  Channel 1 is for directing delivery trucks. Channel 2 is for staff. Channel 3 doesn’t work- it doesn’t connect but it DOES make your radio make a very loud higher-than-most-people-can-hear EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE noise.

This summons The Dogs.

Jeff’s family is from West Texas where the land is vast, the coyotes are many and nobody fixes thier animals, which is how he found and adopted two of the strangest dogs I’ve ever worked with.  Teddy and Bob are Anatolian Shepherd/Rhodesian Ridgeback hybrids, which is to say they clock in at 125lbs each, with body-bulder like reddish gray bodies, black masks and mane of fur that tapers into a full-body mowhawk of long hair along thier backs.  Jeff had to dock thier ears and tails for health reasons which really only adds to the illusion that Jeff has a pair of hyenas.

I can hear the crowd outside shouting as they race out from thier hole under the potting shed and they barrel into the Quanzat hut and stand on either side of me, snarling and bristling like they were trained to, which makes Elise finally let go of my arm and back up.  In an impressive feat of teleportation, Jeff turns up three seconds later.

“YOU!”  Elise and Jeff mutually bellow at each other.  The Dogs snap at the air.

“I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU STILL HAVE THOSE THINGS.”  Elise shrieks, picking up a potted columbine to throw.

“I’M SURE THAT YOU STILL HAVE A RESTRAINING ORDER.  GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE AND LEAVE MY STAFF ALONE.” counters jeff.

“oh shit i’m bleeding.” I say, belatedly realizing she’s gouged holes in my arm that have been freely bleeding for at least three minutes now.  Everyone takes a moment to stare at my arm which is looking like a prop from a Tarintino film.

“Actually, go have a seat in my office.” Says Jeff, suddenly, coldly calm. He takes out his cell phone and dials 911.

Elise screams, throws the potted columbine, and is promptly tackled by assitant manager Craig, who had gone around the back. Jeff ducks and the pot clips me in the face becuase that’s just how this day was going.

Anyway, I got a zillion pictures taken of my arm, had to give a statment and then went back to work because it was literally me and Kate covering the entire greenhouse on our busiest day of the year and as shit as that was I couldn’t abandon her to the Hordes.  Got double overtime and hazard pay for the full day so I wouldn’t narc to the labor board over it, and The Dogs refused to leave my side which really improved customer’s attitude towards me. 

Heavily used Hercules as a reference and a base for the panels!

Also dont be weird in the comments

>:[

I have decided to issue a correction. Now they're getting married.

Okay, this one might be a little long, takes a bit of setting up, and involves some headcanons.

And I will emphasize that the relationship is "uneasy" and they're not exactly inviting each other to watch movies or anything. Grubba should be thankful that Prince Mush even wants to speak to him and give him occasional updates on how the Glitz Pit is running, at his request, while he's sitting in jail and later under house arrest (albeit a cozy house arrest at his tacky rodeo clown of a home, but he has to do it all with an ankle monitor).

Prince Mush is just something of a saint, very mellow, and extremely forgiving. He's just a bit of a wide-eyed shonen protagonist fueled by the power of friendship.

To explain why Prince Mush is so understanding where Grubba was coming from with his most terrible actions, both Prince Mush and Grubba have similar backstories - they were originally from poor backgrounds but then climbed their way to the top to become champion fighters.

This leads me to believe that Prince Mush grew up as a fan of Grubba. Especially since I made Grubba the type of fighter that had a LOT of merchandising and star appeal thanks to some rather aggressive contracts by his fight promoter/agent, who swooped in and saw a business opportunity. Prince Mush had secondhand toys of Grubba that they found in the local Rogueport goodwill because the store shelves were just flooded with them. Prince Mush bought some of his T-shirts and had a few of his toys.

And Prince Mush and Grubba got along for a good several years! Prince Mush had a very cushy Champion's life and his family got to see all of his matches and he was very comfortable! Grubba made sure to NOT treat Prince Mush the way he was treated in the past. Prince Mush had health benefits and vacation plans. Everything was good! Grubba was a good maybe-a-father-figure, maybe-just-an-older-friend type of cool old dude.

Until, one night, Prince Mush alerted Grubba to a strange machine that he found underneath the Glitz Pit Arena while he was training late one night. After Grubba asked him if he told anyone else (Prince Mush thankfully said no, so no killing spree for Grub), Prince Mush lead him to the strange machine and asked him "who could do such a thing?"

Grubba responded by hitting him in the back of the head, knocking him unconscious. They didn't even have an epic battle between champion and monster; instead Grubba panicked, acted like a cornered rat, and then immediately had to cover up the resulting disappearance.

Cut to a few more years later where Prince Mush is suddenly waking up in the Glitz Pit Arena and his own sister is telling him how he straight up died and his blood was on Grubba's hands, all while a little Italian plumber is waving at him and going "wahoo".

So in short, Prince Mush doesn't remember his own death and has to get all of his information secondhand from other people who were way way more traumatized about the events.

And Mush, being Mush...can't bring himself to hate Grubba.

At least, not totally.

Jolene hates Grubba with every fiber of her being and is very much a "if I see you outside of prison, it's on sight, mfer" type of person. Rawk Hawk has really mixed feelings about Grubba and oscillates between rage-filled hatred and survivor's guilt where he second-guesses all the nice things Grubba ever did for him, knowing that he could've been drained and shoved in a dirty old attic. He even visited Grubba in jail and had a shouting match with him as both of them had to unpack a lot of mental baggage. Rawk Hawk's change of heart is fueled by the fact that Rawk Hawk has grown self-conscious and scared of becoming as lost as his mentor.

Prince Mush? When he pieces the story together - the young star exploited at a young age so afraid of aging, so afraid of giving up his own business, that he'll use a magic demon artifact to render himself immortal at the cost of his own humanity and becomes a paranoid monster that can't get close to anyone without hurting or killing them...

He just finds Grubba sad.

And when he tells Grubba to his face while he's sitting in the prison cell, Grubba wishes he got the anger instead.

Having his whole empire crumble and having to live with the consequences of his actions just renders him a pathetic, broken man. He needed wellness checks during his first week of prison just to make sure he didn't do anything drastic. (being away from the Crystal Star that made him young and strong for the first time in 40 years and realizing that he was gonna wither and turn into an old man made him just a touch suicidal for a little while)

On top of all of this, once it becomes more common knowledge that the Crystal Stars were connected to the Shadow Queen, Grubba isn't even sure how much of his actions were his own or if he was Corrupted By the Amulet. Everyone - including him - believes he was mostly in control, but it sure doesn't feel good either way having to second-guess just how much of the past few decades were of your own free will and how much of it was demonic influence and you were just Golluming your way into murder because the shiny rock needed more blood for the blood god.

TTYD is very much a game that ends on the idea of forgiveness for the villains. I'm not going to have Prince Mush stay with Grubba ala Vivian hanging out with her shitty sister Beldam, but Prince Mush seems like a cool enough dude to at least extend a hand and say "yeah you killed me, but now you're in a position where you can't harm anyone else ever again and since you're a paranoid and have like 60 mental illnesses, I'm not going to kick you while you're down and instead tell you that the Glitz Pit isn't on fire and that my sister Jolene is doing a GREAT job".

And eventually Grubba...feels more at peace with himself than he's been in over 40 years.

How do you think the Rube Goldberg of Death would play out for each of the Koopalings if they were put under the Final Destination premonition curse?

(This came from me thinking about Morton writing Final Destination fanfiction and going to ask Iggy for help because he wants there to be at least some accuracy with the deaths. Iggy is both concerned and respectful with his request.)

GIGGLE IM READING THIS AT 7AM THIS IS SO FUN

when i was 11-12 i wrote mario murder mystery fanfiction and honestly i think i kinda cooked. in some ways. i was 12 and im in no way a child prodigy. i hate young sheldon. its called player 2 its on wattpad go read it and make fun of me. before you read this. i got a wattpad girlfriend out of writing it. somehow. i reread it to authentically answer this ask and i expect financial compensation for what you have put me through.

gore of your comfort character below. not overtly gory. i think. i yap all this exposition long before the actual content

Bowser is not usually the type to bottle up his feelings, but the timing isn't exactly ideal.

(Also I think the chicken guards forgot Luigi is still supposed to be a prisoner.)

[prev]

Wow, look at that very happy and uncomplicated couple. Really makes you wanna read about them, right guys

Alternate cover for IDW issue 25 by Jonathan Gray.