Bowuigi Shorties 4: Cannonball
Where there are volcanoes, you will find hot springs. It’s one of nature’s many little consolations for letting you live near an uncertain burning crushing death.
The Koopa Kingdom, being half active lava flow at the best of times and completely uninterested in promoting tourism, was lousy with pristine steaming pools, in every size, shape, and depth imaginable, with temperatures ranging from lukewarm to wet magma.
The deep rocky lakelet Luigi was visiting with his husband and some of their children was on a setting he’d describe as “poached plumber.” Apparently it was the perfect swimming temperature for Koopas. Bowser was sprawled out on shellback, floating in perfectly balanced bliss, his plastron just inches above the water’s surface.
Luigi, muggy and relaxed, laid on top of him to get a break from the heat. He rested his chin on his hands and marveled at the kids’ energy. Larry, Lemmy, and Junior were splashing and screaming through the scalding water with all the verve of children at the local pool.
Actually, there was a lot of screaming going on. Luigi cracked an eyelid. Playing had evolved into playful roughhousing, and from the way Larry was glaring as Junior argued stubbornly for five points in whatever game they had made up, it seemed likely to drop the playful part very soon.
“Bowser,” Luigi patted his living raft lightly.
“Muh,”
“Kids.”
“Muh?”
“Listen.”
Bowser raised his head a little further out of the water, then sank back in with a lazy sigh. “They’re playing, they’re fine.”
Luigi propped himself up and tried to wake up a little. “They’re about to drown Junior.”
“Water’s fulla minerals. He’ll float. An’ he knows how to store air in his shell.”
“Bowser…”
He let out a theatrical groan, “Darling, Tesoro, love of my life, I spent all last night staring at numbers tryin’ to make ‘em into bigger numbers. Now I’m sooo close to that inner peace junk everyone keeps yappin’ at me about, and you want me to give it all up…” dramatic pause “for this.”
Luigi snorted in spite of himself. Bowser always got silly in the water. “Just say something. Please?”
Bowser sighed again. “Kids!” he barked without moving his head or opening his eyes. “Don’t drown your brother!”
Three young voices chorused back in the key of whine:
“I wasn’t really!”
“BJ’s not cheating good enough!”
“They can’t drown me, shuddup!”
Languid, Bowser’s paw came up and made a vague saluting gesture in Luigi’s general direction before sinking back down. “Arright, got their attention. Take it from here, partner.”
“You know, I was up last night doing the same inventory you were,” Luigi pointed out in a reasonable tone of voice.
“That’s prob’ly why you’re so anxious right now,” Bowser drawled back. “How ‘bout you lie back down and we take a nap?” He started pretending to snore.
Luigi rolled his eyes and clapped his hands before the Koopalings went back to their alleged attempted principicide. “Calmati bambini, calmati! Pummeling each other never stays fun for long!”
“It’s not fun when someone’s cheating either!”
“But we used to fight you and Zio Mario and that was always fun!”
“There’s nothing better to do! It’s boring here!”
Luigi shook his head. “C’mon, now, that’s not true. I’m sure there’s lots of fun games you haven’t played yet.”
<<<“Like what?”>>> the chorus briefly became a choir. Luigi faltered slightly under the weight of their attention.
“Uh,” he sat up and looked around, ignoring Bowser beneath him trying to keep his equilibrium as he shifted. “Uhm,” This was a pretty barren spot, all things considered. “Why don’t you…” Not much around to spark the imagination, unless they wanted to hit each other with rocks, which they definitely would. An ancient scree pile had calved into the water at some point, leaving a sheer jagged cliff face of half-compressed stone towering over the edge of the spring…
Luigi waved his arm vaguely at it, “Why don’t you climb to the top of that and see who can do the best cannonball?”
He was met by three blank stares. Lemmy tilted his head and eyeballed Luigi. “How do you… do a cannonball?”
“Oh, it’s a word for-“
“You mean make them, right?” In the tone of one correcting an obvious mistake, Larry said, “Only Morton knows that spell, Babbo. He left to spar with Roy.”
“No, it’s just a type of-“
“You want us to poop on each other!?” Junior yelled out of nowhere. Luigi went red and waved his arms, but his words were drowned out by Lemmy and Larry’s uproarious laughter. Bowser’s chest heaved like he was holding in a giggle too, but when Luigi whipped around to glare he was still pretending to be asleep.
Arms crossed and pouting, Junior tried to defend himself, “well you fire cannonballs at the ground out of airships, so-“ his voice faded to an embarrassed mumbling.
“Look, why don’t I just show you myself,” Luigi cut in at the first lull. He dipped a foot into the water and suppressed a yelp. In his own embarrassment he’d forgotten it was hot.
“Too late to back down now,” Bowser muttered under his breath. Luigi shot him one more glare and grit his teeth as he slid off of him. He swam awkwardly to the edge of the pool and clambered up the back of the rocky slope.
He looked down at the pool. All the Koopas were watching him. Even Bowser had opened his eyes and stood up. “It’s all good, Luigi,” he kept murmuring to himself. “If it was actually gonna hurt you, you’d bounce off it and Bowser would catch you.”
Waiting made it worse. Before he could lose his nerve he closed his eyes and did a high jump off the cliff. He yelled, “Cannonball!” for the sake of tradition, then tucked his legs and arms in and braced for impact.
A minor slap on the behind, and it was over. The splash sounded big. Being submerged wasn’t as hot as Luigi had been expecting. Then a few seconds passed and it was even hotter. Luckily Bowser had been right about the water being buoyant. He broke the surface and fought to get his face away from the heat.
“There,” he told the kids. “Whoever makes the biggest splash wins.”
“Wins what?” The question shot out of Junior like a bullet.
Luigi scratched his head. He hadn’t thought that far. “Uhhhh… five coins?”
Junior paused and digested this information. “Why do we need coins?”
“People use them to buy stuff,” Lemmy explained.
“Oh.” Junior paused and digested this information. “But we don’t use coins. We just… get stuff.”
“That’s ’cuz King Dad’s the King.”
“Oh.” Junior paused and digested this information. “That’s a dumb prize.”
Luigi’s mustache twitched to the one side. “Well excuse me. I’m not royalty.”
Lemmy continued being helpful. “Yeah you are, ‘cuz you married King Dad.”
“I knew that wedding was too good to be true,” Bowser rumbled with a smirk.
From across the dimensional barrier, Luigi felt his blue-collar parents tossing and turning in their sleep. He put up his hands. “Okay, okay. Forget the coins. How about winner gets to choose what I make for dinner tonight?” Bowser raised his eyebrows. Before he could say anything, though, the kids were tumbling over each other trying to climb the bluff.
“One at a time!” Luigi shouted. “And you have to beat my splash too!”
“I don’t think you thought this through, Babbo,” called a voice from the shore. Luigi turned to see Iggy. He was back from his hike, setting down a few interesting-looking stones underneath their parked Clown Car.
“What do you mean, Iggy?” Luigi called back.
Iggy turned and pointed to his shell with a thumb. “Surface area.”
Above them, Larry yelled “Cannonball!”
“Oh no…” Luigi started swimming away, but he was too late. The wave from Larry’s impact swamped him. His eyeballs felt like they were being steamed. He surfaced with a sputter and continued his journey to the shore.
Larry surfaced with a gleeful squeal. “I want homemade Thwomp Burgers for dinner, Babbo- hey! Why’re you looking away, did you even see me!”
Luigi turned back. “I saw you, Larry! Great jump. You still have to beat your siblings, though.”
“That was the biggest splash ever!” Larry insisted. “No way is BJ gonna blblblshblub-“ He’d made Luigi’s mistake of not leaving the danger zone. Junior splashed down every bit as violently as his brother had. They both came back up coughing and whining. Luigi waded back in to help, but Junior pushed him off and wheezed triumphantly, “Spicy fried chicken!”
Larry, who had been crying to Luigi about water in his nose, abruptly shifted his attention to Junior. “No way! My splash was bigger than yours!”
“Nuh-uh! I saw it from above, it was tiny!”
“That’s because you were far away!”
Luigi tried to mediate. “Don’t worry boys, Iggy’s watching on the shore. He can judge the splashes.”
“But he’ll just pick Lemmy ‘cuz they’re twins!”
“Guys, look out! Lemmy!” Iggy shouted.
“See!” Junior shrieked. Luigi didn’t hear him. He was looking up. Lemmy had pulled his wand from somewhere and was busily gathering magic. With a wave, an orange and yellow bouncy ball just slightly smaller than the circumference of the pool appeared in the air and began a stately descent.
Luigi didn’t keep watching. He grabbed Junior and Larry by an arm and towed them with all the strength his legs could muster. It was too slow. Both kids were almost his size already, and much, much heavier.
If Luigi had kept watching, he’d have seen Lemmy jump off the cliff and bounce lightly off the ball, speeding its descent. He turned a neat triple backflip in the air, deliberately killing his momentum at just the right moment to fall spiky shell-side down. He caught up with the apex of the ball just as its nadir kissed the water below it, and fell through.
-BOOM-
The wave exploded outwards. For a second there was a massive crater in the lake’s surface, then it collapsed back in on itself, dragging Luigi and the other two Koopalings with it. Water crashed in from all sides and spat out a column that threw them several meters in the air.
After he hit the water a chaos of churning and burning bubbles was all Luigi could see for a while. Eventually he figured out which direction was up and swam to it. He broke the surface to find a pouting Junior and Larry staring at a line of bubbles in the center of the pool.
Lemmy didn’t keep them waiting. He burst out of the water with a triumphant cheer of “Breakfast for dinner! BREAKFAST FOR DINNER! Yeeeeeaaaaaahhhhhhh!”
<<“You cheated!”>> shouted Junior and Larry in stereo.
“Mamma Mia…” Luigi covered his eyes and rubbed his forehead as the arguing came back around.
“I still jumped.”
“You used a ball to make the splash!”
stomp
“No, I used my shell, like you.”
Stomp
“You used your shell on a ball!”
Luigi looked up. There was another sound besides the kids yelling. It sounded like-
“We didn’t use magic, so you can’t use magic!”
Stomp
-slow, deliberate footsteps-
“All Babbo said was to do a cannonball and make the biggest splash and I did.”
STOMP
-getting closer-
STOMP
-somewhere over their heads.
Luigi looked around. Bowser was not in the pool.
“Babbo! Lemmy cheated!”
“We wanna do-over!”
Luigi looked up just in time to see Bowser bend his knees for a big jump-
“SWIM TO THE SHORE, KIDS! NOW!” Luigi screamed. The three of them looked up at Luigi’s tone, followed his gaze to their father, and took off through the water.
Bowser jumped, high, high into the air. Higher than should have been possible from a standing start. At the top of his arc he did a somersault in the air and curled into a ball, his shell magically stretching and shifting to become a perfect spiked sphere.
Luigi and the kids had just managed to get their hands on the edge of the pool when a cry of-
“CANNONBAAALLLLLL!”
-came hurtling out of the sky on a flaming ball of spikes.
It was a very different type of BOOM than the one that Lemmy had made. Water flew up in a single mass and pattered down as torrential rain.
“This is why I put my sulfur under the car!” Iggy yelled over the scalding downpour.
“That’s great, son!” Luigi yelled back, “Wish I was down there right now!”
It was over in a few seconds. Luigi, his skin bright red, crept up to the edge of the pool.
It was a crater. Maybe an inch or two of water left in it. More water flowed from a crack about halfway up the wall. It would be awhile before it was full again.
And there at the bottom, on his shell, spikes wedged in the stone, looking more than a little sheepish, was-
“I’m kinda feelin’ steak tonight,” said Bowser.
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