Jump 077: Captain SNES

Jump 077: Captain SNES

Location: Videoland
Age: 24
Identity: [0] Another Masta: Captain N
Drawbacks: [-800] Halcyon Days, Isn't It Ironic?, The Final Countdown

[100/1800]  Can't Catch Me
[700/1800]  Beyond Despair
[Free]      A Lot Of Free Time
[800/1800]  Like A Damn Fiddle
[1100/1800] What They Deserve
[1700/1800] Beyond Hope
[Free]      Game On
[1800/1800] All There In The Manual

Frozen in suspended animation over a pit of pure omega energy, right up until I wasn't anymore. It's really quite the thing... to go from being in mid-air, finger on the trigger of my zapper from when I was finished off Mother Brain at long last, to tumbling onto broken ground.

From there, I was able to leave and see more than just the bare bones of what had changed in Videoland. Some of the old warp zones were still intact, even if others had been moved... and some came out into places that were no longer quite intact, such as the Warp that had been in the old Palace. Things were decidedly more... dark, for lack of a better word. Grim, maybe. The Palace of Power had fallen in a literal sense sometime after I was dropped into suspended animation, the thing crashed down and played a part in creating the Desert. Which was itself disturbing. I could FEEL the damn thing, the entropy wanting to break everything down to dust.

Coming out of the desert, through the broken gate and into what I later learned was the city of Nexus, I didn't expect it to look like everyone there was preparing for war. And my appearance was not exactly welcome - those present thought I was corrupted by my extended exposure to omega energy, or in fact played a role in releasing the Sovereign of Sorrow. Harbinger of the End, apparently, is what some of them called me. Frankly, had I not cheated with precognition, Alex Williams would have blown me to smithereens with his Super Scope from off-screen.

From the frying pan to the fire, I suppose.

I cracked wise that if my time in Videoland was a series of TV shows, then this would likely be the movie, but the would-be gamemaster was unmoved even as I told him to make sure that we get a happy ending instead of a stupid twist, before I ran like the dickens because apparently absolutely everybody wanted to either imprison me or straight up murder me. Of course, I was able to sneak around and get a little exposition - the Desert came into existence due to the deaths of so many who were fighting the Sovereign, so the entropy I felt really was exactly as it seemed. This is an anathema to Videoland, no wonder it disturbed so many so greatly. They didn't even have the context to understand it.

There was only one thing for it, to be honest: to take the fight straight to the Sovereign. Videoland runs on theme and cliché, so it's not a surprise that the Sovereign was able to begin assembling her forces essentially immediately, and by the time anyone was aware that she was already active she'd already sent one world to oblivion. Of course she had to try to go after a bigger world after the first, and of course she wanted it to be one that would remove a major threat, so she went for the Mushroom Kingdom. And again, fully cheating, I got there fist.

Mario and Luigi are many things, but fools they are not. Granted, on seeing me they immediately went after me, but I managed to talk to them. To get through to them and convince them that I wasn't her general - if anything, I had more reason to stop her than anyone else. And so I was prepared to do whatever needed to be done when the Sovereign and her army of Touched arrived in the Mushroom Kingdom. It very nearly became a three-way brawl when reinforcements arrived from Nexus, until Peach pointed out that maybe they'd be better off focusing on the obvious enemy rather than a potential one.

It turns out that the Sovereign is in fact vulnerable to being paused - thank you, NES controller - and the fun of pausing is that allies don't necessarily stay paused while enemies do. Doing this over a battlefield is enough to bring hope to even the most hopeless, which... works well to purge much of the Sovereign's effects from her thralls.

As for the Sovereign herself, she was bisected by a C'tan phase sword. This of course set Alex off on a spree of cursing, which... was kind of hilarious, if nothing else. The Touched were routed, a large portion of them were in fact cured of being Touched, and the remainder were blocked from escape and rounded up. The fatalities here numbered a total of... one. Which set Alex off on another cursing rant. I just faded into the background while he was busy doing all of that, and let him do what he was going to do.

The rest of my time was spent just getting the lay of the land and letting Alex play Game Masta(tm), while I travelled between worlds and helped folks in the worlds I visited. The Pantsless Wonder could deal with putting out all the big fires. I'd already done my time and I was prepared to take it much easier this time around.