In a random act of craziness, two heroes from completely different worlds swap places: one finds himself on Starship Mario, traveling to the far reaches of the universe. The other winds up in Hyrule Field, battling demons he knows nothing about, wit...
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Chapter 4
Sector 7-MA | Starship Mario
Starship Mario's crew spent the next day or so assessing the ship's damage, and pounding out the dings where possible. It took concentration and teamwork to do so — the ship, they were coming to find, had taken more than a pounding during their journey through the space storm. In fact, Lubba was beginning to suspect that if their ride hadn't had reinforced bulkheads and veins of diamond-armor plating, the hyperlight flight would have crumpled them like an accordion.
Of course, they also kept looking for the missing crew members and Mario, but they were quickly losing hope on that front. By high noon that day, the crew had searched the ship top to bottom five times, and no one had seen so much as a mustache anywhere on board.
And as if that wasn't enough to put Lubba in a bad mood, all the damage reports he received from his comrades were incredibly distressing:
"Mister Lubba, sir, decompression safeties keep going on in the ventral hangar deck. We're looking for holes, but until we plug all of them, we'll be venting some of our oxygen supply into space."
"Mister Lubba, the Nav and Tactical computers are fried. We're working on repairs, but we need more data cabling."
"Mister Lubba, some of the crew members are getting sick from the gamma radiation from that nebula, and we're running low on Star Bits."
"Mister Lubba, we've checked our supplies of Power Stars, and we've found that seventy-five percent of them combusted during the hyperlight flight. Luckily, they were safely contained in storage, else the ship would be in two billion pieces by now. But with the Grand Star reaching its threshold in nuclear fusion, I estimate that our fuel reserves are now below ten percent."
That last bit of bad news was the worst of the bunch. If Lubba had ever had any doubts before, they were now assuaged: we're stranded. Without the Power Stars, Starship Mario couldn't even move at sublight, which was a catastrophe in the making. In a place as incomprehensibly vast as outer space, moving faster than light — or slightly slower than the speed of light — was the only way to actually get anywhere within ten thousand years. If they could only move using conventional engines, then...
Don't panic, don't panic...
Too late. Lubba could feel his blood-pressure rising. Quickly, he extracted himself from the group of Lumas and toads giving him, Yoshi, and Captain Toad their reports, floating from the upper deck down towards the sidewalk.
"Hey, Lubba!" Yoshi called. "Where're you going?"
To the garden. He needed to clear his head for a while.
***
Starship Mario | Brig
He must have paced his cell twenty-seven times now, but Link still couldn't see a way out of it.
