11th installment of the VGNU.
It's common in the Mario family to make bad deals, but this time it might just tear the brothers apart for good.
Sometimes, there are worse evils than magic turtles and space dragons. For example, corporate greed.
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Luigi stood alone in the cemetery, looking down at his father's grave. The last time he was here was when they'd met with Pauline... before all this started. After that...
"Just another thing y' never told us," Luigi spat.
It wasn't that he didn't understand their decision to keep it a secret. Until they fell into the Mushroom Kingdom, he didn't think either himself or his brother would believe it. He didn't hate them for not telling them sooner... he hated the situation itself, and how it was beyond anyone's control.
He knew, that if things could've been different, they'd have done everything they could to keep things from going as sour as they had. It wasn't like Mario "Jumpman" Mario and Pauline had wanted to fight a talking Gorilla, or deal with a corrupt mayor trying to take over Italy. And he doubted they wanted for their children to be delivered via stork, or to travel across the universe to save eight different planets.
It felt random... like a bunch of unrelated situations they just happened to be thrown into... and then for their old man to die like he did, for his own brother to make some joke of it all, and for their mother to be okay with it like it was just time to move on already... None of it made sense, it didn't feel right.
But one thing stuck out in Luigi's head, a detail that wasn't only painfully obvious, but was something that he'd already spoken to both Pauline and Mario about during production so long ago. The guy who was putting this whole thing together... the guy in charge of the Nezumi Production Company...
Everything about him just felt skeevy. The kind of man with a long shadow. He'd fire actors because they looked at him wrong. He'd cancel projects because he felt it was boring. It was all or nothing with someone like him, everything had to be perfect, or else. After having spoken to several people who'd previously worked with Donnie Feldman, they all had the same thing to say:
"Watch your back, and play nice."
And then there's the set up. Were they really supposed to believe it was all that easy? Getting their play onto Broadway was already something they didn't expect to go over so well, and the movie deal being practically handed to them... That doesn't just happen, right?
... But the worst of it was, his brother and mother weren't the least bit worried.
They kept telling him to calm down. Just accept that good things happen. That, after all they've done, maybe this was the universe's way of saying "I'm sorry, whoops!" But, with all that's happened, was he really expected to believe that?
No matter what they told him, it still didn't sit right with Luigi. No matter how he looked at it, he could tell, something was out of place. Too much had happened throughout their lives for this to be so simple.
This couldn't be random. There was a plot here... and he would do everything he could to uncover it... even if Mario wasn't here to help him.
He looked down at the grave of his father, wondering what he'd say. "But you're not our father... are you..."
