PART I

I

I was asked why I wanted to change my nickname from Dy to Lich, when I said I hated it when I was younger. So, I'll give you the reasons. But, even better, I'll give you the whole story of me.

But before you can understand where I come from, let me give you a bit of a background.

My father, Reuben Tristram Yoshi, grew up in a middle-class suburb in Yoshiville, with my mother, Kara Selan Yoshison, living in another suburb a few miles away. Mum and Dad attended the same schools, and they absolutely hated the guts out of each other. My mother claims my father threw eggs at her with regularity - yes, my father was an egg-layer, as I am. Us male eggies are becoming extinct, I tell you…

So, my parents were well used to each other's presence, and it was no surprise that when they got to high school, the teenage prankster of my father continued his jokes, often landing in trouble. Due to the tall buildings in the high school, he brought along a blue Koopa shell to fly up to his classrooms- it was during the war, and my great uncle Bloshi, the blue and aerochelokoopatox filled friend of Yoshi Yoshi himself, sent the shells to my father's family. Nowadays, you wouldn't do something like that unless you wanted pro-Koopa Assimilation people after your blood.

So, once, my father pretended that he swallowed the shell and force fell outside a classroom window, lying in a heap on the ground. The class ran down and gathered around him. They were about to call the ambulance after playing dead for a few minutes, so he promptly spat the shell out into the teacher's face. That's where I get my occasional playful streak from, I guess.

However, strange as it may seem, my mother, secretly, much admired my father's rebelliousness, and started to date him - and eventually, after leaving high school, they were married in a Temple of Aphrodoshi.

So, they were married, and to complete their dream, they needed money and two children. My mother's sister, Tia Lilly Yoshison, had a store on Dinokan, so they started working there. However, my father was looking for a more staple job, and looking through the employment pages of the Dinokan Times, he found a position of an innkeeper open. So, he applied, and since he was the only one, he got the position. The ad said that the inn was in a small town called Kippo, with friendly people and a nearby waterfall into an old volcano crater called Gaia's Navel attracting tourists who would go there to bathe in the rockpool to receive its assumed healing qualities. He went to the Dinokan office of the Kor Undi chain of inns, and was given a form to sign, which he did. He was then given a Yoshian-Pandoran dictionary, two one-way plane tickets to the Mushroom Kingdom, then two one-way warppipe tickets to the planet Fa'Diel, to go in the next three days. He was outraged by the fact that Kippo was on another planet, and was about to storm out of the room, when he was given a magnifying glass and read the fine print on the form. It said that once he signed, he was on the job for at least one year, protected from being fired, and there was no backing out. It was legal in those days for that to happen.

With no hope of backing out, my parents packed up, said goodbye to my aunt and left Dinokan. I’m not sure how much later it was, but Golden Robo-Yoshi sent a missile into Dinokan and sank it after they left. My aunt was evacuated, fortunately. That's the closest I've been to that robotic freak. Yes, I've followed tradition and spat on his name.

The plane ride, my mother says, was one of the scariest she had been on in her life: the pilot blacked out at one stage, and the plane took a sharp dive. They recovered altitude thanks to the co-pilot, but it was enough to keep my mother away from aeronautical things for the rest of her life.

After arriving in the Mushroom Kingdom, they stayed overnight, and saw the sights of the main city, such as the palace and casino. They placed a few bets, but didn't win anything.

As they were leaving it, however, my father's wallet was stolen, which contained the warppipe tickets and the key to their hotel room. There were no police around at the time, so the only thing they figured they could do was to go to the hotel. Fortunately, they gave them a spare key, and they were able to stay. But the problem still remained about the warppipe, and unable to speak Yamamushroom, they were unsure whether they could get to Kippo, or if they'd be stranded in the Mushroom Kingdom.

So, the next day they went to the warppipe, and after insulting the toadette behind the counter through his bad translation - he can't remember what he said - my father was taken away by the security guards, leaving my mother alone in the terminal. My father returned a half-hour later, after the guards got their translator in. When asked what he had said, he was then slapped across the face - it was something very insulting. So, after being told the correct thing to say, he was forced to apologise to the toadette, and then got his tickets.

They then went through the warppipe. When they got to the other side, they found that their luggage was not there, and had been sent to Earth by accident. They waited and waited, and received it after ten hours in the Matango Terminal - don't even spend ten minutes in the Matango Terminal, I recommend. The Matangese run around underfoot like there's no tomorrow, and bump into you. All the seats are made from straw too, so you either have the choice of standing and being trodden over by the Fa'Dieli mushrooms, or sitting down for three minutes and ending up itchy from the pointy stalks.

After they received their luggage, they went to the Cannon Travel Agent. My father thought "Cannon" was just the name of the company, but when he found out that "Cannon" meant being shot out of a cannon and landing face first on the ground - no mats, no water, nothing but actual ground - he wanted to find another way to Kippo. The agent, who could speak a few words of Yoshian, told him: "No other way".

But he, when told that he no hurt, Mana um what’s the word protection when land, he was slightly relieved, and decided that he had better try it, or else the company would find him and might do nasty things to him, if they couldn't sack him.

My father and mother were blasted out of the cannon, and landed in the middle of Kippo. The villagers were stunned to see the two Yoshies - only a handful of Yoshi tourists had come that way before - and they all gathered around them. My mother was worried, but my father simply told her to relax, pulled out his dictionary, and looked up the words to say very hurriedly. He then said, "Parano…Re…tasan…karundi."

He meant to say, "Hello, I am the new innkeeper", but through no understanding of sentence structure, and mispronouncing the word, he proclaimed to them all that he was a piece of grilled fish.

I guess my father started all that was to happen in my youth at Kippo.