The mushroom running towards him with angry eyes was called a Goomba; Lallio had no idea how he knew that as the jaunty theme music for the level began and he scrambled forward, but he knew it regardless. It didn’t matter; what mattered was that he had to deal with it before it killed him. Lallio leaped in the air, coming down directly on top of the wrathful mushroom, and it was dead, and he was not.

Next, he had to face off against some Koopa Troopas. Well, at least they weren’t the Koopa Paratroopas yet.

*
Lalligi waited impatiently for his turn to begin. Tuurio was jumping around feverishly in a vain attempt to get away from the flurry of hammers being hurled at her, but she was trapped against the left side of the screen and had already been knocked down to her normal size, so it would only take one more hit to end her turn.

Lalligi hated waiting like this, but he knew he’d been lucky: if Tuurio had kept passing level after level, he might never have gotten a turn at all.

*
The Fire Flower shifted colors back and forth as Lallio sent the Koopa shell off, clearing away the others rushing towards him. Even though the Buzzy Beetles were impervious to the fireballs it provided, a Fire Flower was a very nice thing to have, since those fireballs could take out even one of the Hammer Brothers in one hit, and were really the only way to kill a Bowser avatar that hurled hammers.

Lallio knew someone who’d love a garden full of Fire Flowers, but not necessarily so that he could take out Goombas or even the avatars of Bowser, King of the Koopas. With no enemies left to be cautious of, he looked at the Fire Flower for a long, long moment, and he thought of Emil…

Oh, how Tuurigi wished she could be a bird. If she took the time to look at herself, she could practically see wings instead of arms, and plumage of a softly glowing blue instead of her green overalls. Unfortunately, she had to deal with the situation before her, and do it before that stupid timer ran out, so indulging in imagination would only hold her back—for now.

Tuurigi set her teeth grimly and faced the situation before her: the Hammer Brothers were in her way again, and she was already just her normal little self. It was truly annoying that she couldn’t fly in this game, but it couldn’t be helped, either. Tuurigi shut her eyes for a brief second, barely more than a long blink, and whispered, “Help me, Sigrun.”

She wasn’t quite sure why she said it, or who the plea was directed towards, but just saying the words made Tuurigi feel better, somehow.

“You can do it, Fuzzy-Head!”

Tuurigi jerked and jumped, bumping a hidden block accidentally. Wait, had she really heard that oddly familiar exhortation, or simply imagined it? Before she could decide, she saw that the block she’d bumped had belched out a Starman; she almost didn’t even have to jump to catch it. The music changed abruptly, even as Tuurigi’s image did, flashing between her usual palette and a negative version. Now blessed with a brief period of invulnerability, she ran right through the Hammer Brothers and everything else in her way until she reached the stairs. OK, she was almost done with this level.

“Thanks, Sigrun.” Again, Tuurigi wasn’t sure just why she said the words, but they felt right.

“I knew you could do it!”

With two mighty jumps, Tuurigi grabbed the flagpole in front of the diminutive castle, pulling down the pennant and clearing the level…

Emil collected the final Heart Framer and prepared to run for his life. He could get past the gauntlet of Gols and to the chest if—and this was a big if—he could just keep running past them without stopping; this would be a bad time for the controls to freeze. He really wished he could run like Lalli, but Lalli wasn’t here. In fact, Emil was only here because he was trying to rescue Lalli, wasn’t he?

The music swelled triumphantly after Emil grabbed the pearl, the screen changing to let him know which new level he would be challenged by next. Well, he wasn’t quite done with the floor, but he soon would be. Pass this floor, on to the next, and eventually he could free Lalli.

Once the screen shifted into the new level, Emil studied it carefully, noting all the features and hazards of this new level as he slowly planned out how he would grab all the Heart Framers without dying (again) or having to quit (also again). Fortunately, he had plenty of time to work it all out, since there was no timer here; Emil hated having to give up and restart a level, but one slip was all it might take to ruin his solution, especially since the things he could push—both the Emerald Framers and the eggs—could only be pushed and not pulled.

Unfortunately, on this new level there were plenty of hazards and monsters placed in such a way as to render it nearly impossible for him to grab all the hearts and get to the chest before he got killed (again). Well, Emil knew that there was a solution; he just had to figure it out, and he would—eventually. He really wished Lalli could be here to help him, though…

The lava Lalligi had to cross was almost as red as Reynir’s hair, which reminder of his goal only served to anger Lalligi more. Why were he and Tuurio the ones who always had to go and rescue Reynir? There was just no rhyme or reason to it, but that felt like it was part of another story, so Lalligi ignored it and pressed on.

There it was: the drawbridge and the Boss Enemy that Lalligi had been expecting to find for the last five minutes now! Spitting fireballs as quickly as he could, Lalligi jumped to avoid the bursts of flame the King of the Koopas was sending his way. Now that he thought about it, Lalligi had to admit that the fact that both he and his opponent used fire but could still be hurt by it was highly ironic.

Lalligi felt his guts tighten: the Bowser avatar had gone down too easily by far for it to have been anything but an avatar, and behind it was only a small mushroom figure. Lalligi grabbed the ax and brought the drawbridge down to officially clear the stage, but his guts stayed knotted with dread. Before the little mushroom figure spoke, Lalligi knew what he would say: “Thank you, Lalligi! But our princess is in another castle!”

Princess Reynir Toadstool of the Mushroom Kingdom and the long red braid was so annoying that sometimes Lalligi didn’t want him to be rescued. Even so, he knew he’d have to go on trying; just because the fight was hopeless didn’t mean you could just quit. “Stupid Reynir,” he muttered, already girding himself for the challenges the next world would bring.

Reynir almost dropped his controller, his head automatically moving from side to side. Hadn’t someone just called him? Or had it been his imagination? He shook his head in confusion…

The hunt was on.

Sigrun gripped her pistol with the fierce intensity that meant that, while she knew that this was “just a game”, she wasn’t kidding around anymore. A lifetime’s practice at staying silent kept her from growling aloud, but anyone who looked at her would know that she was outright snarling inside. Carefully not looking at her, Reynir swallowed hard, but when the duck flew out from the brush, his thumb automatically played back and forth across the arrow keys, sending Sigrun’s prey in wild, spasmodic turns back and forth and up and down across the screen as she tried to blast it down.

“Oh, duck,” Reynir said. It was going to get away: Sigrun had missed her last shot for the round. He headed the miscreant avian to the top of the screen and off to whatever “freedom” a computer sprite could have when it left the game.

Reynir hated what was coming next almost as much as Sigrun obviously did; he considered it highly unsporting of Mikkel. But there was nothing he could do to stop it except to let Sigrun win, and she’d be even more infuriated than she already was if he took it easy on her. Sometimes, you just couldn’t win, no matter what you did.

A moment later, Mikkel popped up from the brush, put one paw over his mouth, and slowly slipped back under cover, his silly giggle making his ears flop rhythmically. Reynir was glad that he couldn’t understand what Sigrun yelled back at him, as it was most likely obscene enough to turn his hair white.

Fortunately, Sigrun had hit enough times to pass the stage, and there was another stage to go before the game was over; maybe Sigrun wouldn’t end up killing both Mikkel and Reynir if she couldn’t shoot the ducks…

Lallio had finally reached the end of his quest, and successfully rescued Princess Reynir! That would show Tuurigi who was the greatest plumber of them all!

Lalli shook his head, suddenly confused. Wait… Tuuri was dead... wasn’t she? He looked around, his confusion growing by the second. Why was he in this weird blocky place, anyway? And where was Onni? Where was Emil? Where were any of them?

Lalli heard the kade laugh from somewhere that felt like it was outside of where he was, in some way that Lalli just couldn’t describe. Lalli gathered his every bit of strength and stubbornness into one terrific blow, a monumental push born of his need to get out from wherever he was, aiming it at where he thought the kade was—

—And found that he was somewhere else entirely. It was another weird, blocky place, but a completely different weird, blocky place than any level he’d played through thus far.

He was not alone, either. The figure before him was even weirder than everything else around him was: a fuzzy blue ball with two eyes, two legs, and two arms. Somehow, though, the ridiculous figure felt familiar.

“Oh, hey, Lala—I mean, Lalli.” The voice was Emil’s. Of course it was Emil’s. “What are you doing here? I thought this was supposed to be a one-player game.”

“Trying to get free of—our enemy,” Lalli replied, a bit cagily. He wasn’t sure how deeply Emil was still under the kade’s enchantment, so he’d have to be cautious until he knew what he had to work with.

“Well, we still need to push some Emerald Framers around so that those Medusas don’t kill us before we open the chest; that’s how we solve this level.” Emil gestured at some weird purple things in one area of the screen.

The music was starting to annoy Lalli; it must have shown on his face, because Emil said, “Yeah, it doesn’t change until you solve the level or die.”

Emil grabbed the pearl from the chest, and all the monsters disappeared. At the same time, a stairwell opened partway across the screen.

Emil and Lalli scrambled over to their escape route…

Just in case it wasn’t painfully obvious, before this story opened, the kade imprisoned the crew in re-creations of classic NES games: Lalli and Tuuri in Super Mario Brothers; Sigrun, Mikkel and Reynir in Duck Hunt; and Emil in The Adventures of Lolo. Where’s Onni, you ask? Oh, he’s around… somewhere…