Chapter XI
Lich recoiled. “KIA?” he spoke in Mushroom. “What, by the Elementals do you–”
“Just the thing I want to ask you,” the agency head replied calmly.
He looked at the Mushroom. Cekyura T. stood about two-thirds of the Yoshi’s height, with his striped sky blue and white crown, typical of Mushrooms from the forested south of the country. His security tag pinned to his black business suit caught the light, taking Lich’s gaze off his garish jade green, bright orange and fire-engine red tie. Flashing a smile, he began to pace up his office, the walls panelled with large polished sheets of a light wood. Lich took a moment to look around his abode. A few dark-leafed potted plants were scattered about to give a more home-like feel in the windowless room, along with a number of lamps at strategic locations. Even with no window and the lamps’ soft yellow light, the room was still quite bright. Cekyura paced towards a small leather lounge setting gathered around a glass coffee table. At the other end of the room stood an impressive glassed cabinet, displaying some colourful vases and other pieces of glassware within, glowing thanks to a light above each of the two shelves, with a cupboard underneath. A number of certificates and mounted medals were on the walls around the room. On the large dark-stained wooden desk in front of him was the usual clutter of paperwork, along with a computer monitor and keyboard, and even a standing photograph, turned towards his comfortable leather chair, which was assuredly of the rest of his family. It could have been any executive’s office, except for a guard clearing his throat behind Lich.
“Let’s just say that we probably spared you and your brother’s lives from the KBT,” the Mushroom explained, bringing Lich’s attention back to him. “We received word that you were on your way here to Talk’gu. By the time you got here, they would have set up the ambush they’re organising right now. Your gratitude is appreciated.”
Lich gulped, taken aback. “But, how did you–?”
“We’ve been tracking you for some time, Mister von Kippo,” Cekyura said. He looked ahead of him as he spoke, “You have this habit of coming into the Kingdom with a very powerful weapon which you claim is for self-defence–”
“It is,” Lich interrupted.
“But the other way around,” he cooed with a grin towards him and continued, “when you go between the Archipelago and Fa’Diel.” He turned as he reached an armchair and came back again. “When two von Kippos, both with powerful weapons, entered Kingdom jurisdiction at Toad Town Airport the other day, we could not help but wonder what you were up to, especially when we heard gunfire immediately on the other side of the Koopan border.”
Lich frowned and shuffled his feet ashamedly as the Mushroom stopped and waggled a finger. “Now that, heh, is not for us to decide what to do with you since that is Koopan sand there,” he continued, “but seeing that you are responsible for what the media is calling the ‘Va’kotiku Massacre’,” he performed the classic “inverted commas” gesture, “and that you woke up this morning in the middle of Ak’gorak, we figured that the desert was fast becoming quicksand and swallowing up one of Fa’Diel’s prominent figures.”
“So, you came to my aid,” Lich sighed.
“Yes,” he smirked, and started to pace back again. “Just because you may have been able to fly in, yank one of Bowser’s gold teeth from his mouth with that toy of yours and fly out again doesn’t mean that you can survive this place. In fact,” he paused at the cabinet and leant against it, “you seem to be doing entirely the wrong thing.”
“I am following what I considered to be best military practice,” Lich defended himself. “Minus my gaff this morning, I seem to be doing everything by the book.”
“Then please allow me to state a very important fact,” he smiled as he returned to his standing position behind the desk. He placed his hands on it, leant on them and leered up at him. “This is not Fa’Diel. The Pandoran Army has never stepped foot here, let alone put, gasp, ‘foreign ideas’ into their small xenophobic brains.” He smirked again and added, “Which you no doubt know. You’ve risked your tail coming back here, but you’ve drawn the cutting knife closer to it by what you’ve done. I don’t think storming the border crossing, fighting street battles and – which you even admit is wrong – wandering blindly in the darkness into the middle of the enemy’s army base is best military practice, you know.”
“Then what is?” Lich demanded.
The Mushroom
flashed a grin and continued his pacing back towards the cabinet. “We know a
lot of things about you, Mister von Kippo. Where you
were born, where you went to school, your close friendship with the Guardian of
the, what is it,
Lich nodded. “Yeah.”
The Mushroom smiled. “Don’t be surprised, Mister von Kippo. We do know a lot about you. Except one thing: why you’re even here at the first place.”
“I’m here because my mother laid my egg,” Lich answered.
Cekyura chuckled and then frowned, leaning against the cabinet again. “Very funny. Perhaps I should make it clearer for you. What brings you, a convicted criminal whose crime is against the highest authority in the land, into the Realm?”
“Why do you want to know that?” Lich asked.
The Mushroom stood up straight. “Please do not test my patience, Mister von Kippo. To be honest, I would have rather let the KBT catch you and your brother than use my precious resources at the very strained time of a lockdown, which you have brought upon the Realm, to bring you to a place of safety. Higher powers deemed that the two of you were worth saving. To me, you’re just an idiot who’s given me a lot of headaches I don’t need. Now, I can very easily have the two of you put into the back of a truck and dumped in the middle of the street before a kan’bar of Magikoopas, or else you can answer my question.” He grinned in feigned innocence. “Which shall it be?”
Lich sighed. “I’m here because I made a promise.”
“A promise?” the Mushroom replied, interested, approaching him. “What sort of promise? A dare from a game in the pantheon?”
“A promise that I made to a Koopa, now dead.”
“Oh, I see. That sort of promise. To honour someone’s memory by carrying out his final wishes.”
“To put it in other words, yes.”
“You seem to know a lot more about the Koopas than we thought you did, Mister von Kippo,” he answered, stopping beside his desk. “This does come as a surprise.” He turned and raised his finger, as if he remembered something as he paced back to the cabinet. “You did study Koopan at university, correct?”
“I did,” Lich answered, in the language.
“But your brother, he…well, I presume he hasn’t learnt anything except a few touristy terms? ‘Hello’, ‘Goodbye’, ‘I don’t speak Koopan’, ‘Excuse me, where is the nearest public toilet’, that sort of thing?” Cekyura asked, turning around as he reached it.
Lich nodded.
He slapped his hand to the front of his crown and winced, shaking his head. “My goodness, you’ve entered the quicksand field and he hasn’t got a rope. Please don’t think that you’re clever, I beg of you.”
“I got this far,” Lich growled.
“And you would have been able to take two more steps before they threw you into the deepest basements of the KBT headquarters.” He lowered his hand and raised his head. “Do you know what they do to Yoshies down there?”
“I don’t want to,” Lich answered.
“Good. You don’t. Because I’m sure it will be ten times worse for someone with as big a crime as yours.”
He began to pace again to the other end of the office, his head lowered in thought. It was not until he reached the lounge that he turned and spoke, “I suppose you had better tell me what your plans are.”
“Why?”
“That truck ride to see the pretty blue Magikoopas is looking appealing, Mister von Kippo,” Cekyura warned as he came back the other way, his pace slightly faster.
“It comes in two parts. I take three Koopas out of the Realm and neutralise another few.”
“I see. Who are they?”
“Whom?”
Cekyura pasued and shrugged. “All of them.”
“The B’ralku and the Gr’tokoru.”
He stopped mid-step behind the desk and turned to him. “Did you just say, ‘B’ralku’ and ‘Gr’tokoru’?”
“I believe I did, why?”
The Mushroom began to laugh, which was quickly taken up by the guards behind him. “The B’ralku and the Gr’tokoru,” he said, planting his hands firmly on the desk again, and then mockingly wiping away tears from an eye. “That’s a good one. Come on, who are they?”
“As I said,” Lich growled.
The laughter pattered out as the head agent stared at him, dumbstruck. “You’re not…” He stepped around the desk and stood before him. “You’re not…serious, are you?”
“Yes.”
They started laughing again. Cekyura leaned back on the desk for support, half-sitting upon its edge. “Oh, man, this is going to be great to tell at the end of year party. ‘There was this Yoshi, who was actually a bigwig of sorts, who got tricked by a dying Koopa prankster into ending one of the biggest family feuds in the Realm’. Ha ha! You’d better tell me who this clown was so that I can regale the others with your story.”
“Telg B’ralku,” Lich answered.
The laughter cut out suddenly. “Telg B’ralku?” Cekyura asked, gripping the edge of the desk. “Telg Rak’potot B’ralku?! Pull the other one, there’s a whole symphony orchestra up there.”
“If you don’t believe me, I have right here a letter from him and his service medals.”
Lich withdrew them from Storage, but with the position of his hands in the cuffs, they fell to the floor. Cekyura nodded and a guard withdrew a wand from his belt and waved it over the objects. The electronic squeals it produced were short lived as he picked them up and handed them to the Mushroom with a nod. Upon receiving them, he read through the letter as he returned to the other side of the desk, and sat down. He began to type furiously on the keyboard of his computer, and after a minute of consulting the data in silence, he frowned, and held up the letter beside the screen. His head looked back and forth between the paper and the monitor repeatedly for another minute, before he turned to the medals.
“A B'kraktgoto'pekttoru First Class, a K'titolko and a T'gataltok, three highly prized medals within the KBT,” Cekyura reported. “Either you know your stuff about him and have had these pressed illegally and written a letter in a close copy of his handwriting, or else you are telling the truth. Either way, our forensics department here will verify this. But,” he clasped his hands together and leant forward, “let’s just suppose that you are being truthful for a moment, here. Things do not quite add up. We know that Telg, or ‘Tob’ as he calls himself here, has not made an transmission we have been able to intercept for quite a while now, and to have this come out of the blue is quite surprising. The fact that you have his medals – highly prized medals, at that – indicates that you might have had something to do with this. If you have, now is the time to tell it, because seeing this, I cannot gauge your loyalty and relative co-operation anymore.”
Lich frowned.
This was something he did not want to talk about, but it seemed he had no
choice. “I don’t know fully what happened, either. Over the past few months, I
have experienced a whole heap of lost memories and fuzzy patches. But from what
I can recall, I remember making that promise to him. The fact that I even have
this letter and those medals confirms that, to me, anyway. What I do know is
that I am not the only one who has experienced this, as this seems to have
affected selected people associated to
“I see. Mister von Kippo, has the thought crossed your mind that he might have been using you?”
“How do you mean?” Lich asked.
“Did you know that he was one of the Koopas assigned to investigate you after your little…theft?”
Lich blinked. “Well…no. Maybe. Now that you mention it, something does seem oddly familiar about what you say.”
“Hmm. I see. By the words of this letter, you seemed to have been a trusted confidante of him. That is, if he is dead. But, it is possible that he might have tricked you into this promise, and then given his life for his Bauzur so that you may come here and be captured; or worse, pulled a disappearing act on you and be organising your torture chamber right now.”
Lich’s eyes widened in surprise. “That…that can’t be true.”
“Why not?”
“I…seem to have a dream, probably out of a recollection, where I see him get killed. And, I fail to see why he would sacrifice himself just for the sake of having one Yoshi caught, even if I do have strong Fa’Dieli links. I mean, wouldn’t that be more appropriate for Mario or Luigi?”
“I have seen the KBT do stranger things, Mister von Kippo,” Cekyura warned. “Don’t forget, you are guilty of a particularly heinous crime, which falls in the same category as Mario and Luigi’s. One of the lines in this letter that concerns me is,” he recited, “‘Even if I do not get off this accursed planet, I know you will, at least someday’. This might have the indication of a death wish for him, and also for you.”
“I am,” he sighed, “not entirely certain of that line either, but…I feel that as part of the mass disappearance, I may have been warped to another world – I mean, planet,” he corrected himself to speak the right Mushroom vocabulary, “where he was also.”
“Have you been taking any sort of drugs, Mister von Kippo?”
“What?” Lich recoiled, offended. “No!”
“Apart from Kakkaran coffee?”
“No! And, how do you know–”
“Your deliveries come through the Kingdom,” Cekyura answered, smirking. “Do you suppose that you might have had some sort of drug put into your system that alters your memories?”
“I…I shouldn’t think so, I seem to recall previous events of my life just fine, thank you,” he growled.
“I see. Nevertheless, we will check to see if anything’s in your system. Eg’lk?” he addressed the commanding Koopa.
“Yes, sir?” he spoke in Mushroom.
“Could you please retrieve Mister Ark von Kippo?”
“He is currently in the med-holding bays, sir, recovering from subjugation.”
“Very well. The moment he comes around and can stand freely, please bring him here. As for Mister Dyluck von Kippo, please escort him to Section Five.” He turned his attention to Lich again. “We will just run those checks for those drugs. After I have talked to your brother and I’ve received those results, I will consult my superiors as to what action we need to take. Thank you, Mister von Kippo. Eg’lk, if you will please.”
“You heard what Mister Cekyura said,” he commanded the other guards.
Lich was grabbed by the crooks of the arms again, turned around, and marched out. “What happens in the meantime?” he turned his head to call back.
As if Lich had never been there, Cekyura T. had taken the next piece of paper from his in-tray, placed it on top of the medals and Tob’s letter, and began to read.
“Keep walking,” Eg’lk commanded.
He turned his head back and sighed. He figured he would be in for a long wait.