Rainbow Road [Super Mario Bros.]

1

Truth is stranger than fiction, and the truth was that while it definitely didn't have any railings, Rainbow Road was not, in fact, a high-end race track suspended fully in space, built for the entertainment of rich people with go-karts.

Actually, it was built for paupers — in fact, Queen Toadstool called it "the salaryman's highway to Orbit City".

Travelers still had to pay a pretty hefty fine at the gate —150 coins for an outgoing trip, oh my! — but those who hadn't the funds to invest in a spacefaring craft hot off the line — who conversely went for a whopping 150 million coins each! — could take the Rainbow Road into the exosphere by whatever means they saw fit: bike, car, shrooms, by foot if you fancied a very long walk directly into outer space. In the coming years there would be a much quicker way for the peasants to access the growing pool of job opportunities in Orbit City — Queen Toadstool promised that an orbital elevator was in the works — but that there was an alternative route that was longer but nearly as efficient was, in itself, quite astounding.

Most people, of course, went by car — well, if you can call driving your car into the Rainbow Gate's vehicle dock, locking it to a metal tram, and allowing it to be dragged into space on a track in a line of other vehicles "going by car" — but in the years following Rainbow Road's official opening, a growing number of Mushroom Kingdom citizens voluntarily and enthusiastically hoofed the journey into the cosmos, citing the incredible vistas and great benefits all that walking did for one's health.

It even became an organized event: the yearly Rainbow Walk-A-Thon, which began at the castle in the capital and ended with a giant celebration at Orbit City's Cosmic Sunrise Hotel. The annual event started with a measly thirty or forty curious health nuts, but over the years swelled to almost three thousand participants, which earned them spots on television and brought in huge donations to the organizations funding the event.

This year, one of those participants was Mario Mario, champion of the Mushroom Kingdom himself. He was by no means a newb — try a three-year veteran of the Walk! — but this year's event brought him particular excitement, as he'd managed to convince his younger brother to join him.

Luigi Mario, on the other hand, was less enthused...by several orders of magnitude. He'd seen plenty of pictures online taken by Rainbow Walkers — pictures of the planet from the exosphere, telescope shots of the moon in startling clarity, sunrises and sunsets — and he didn't like how high up from the actual ground they were going to be. He had a crippling fear of heights, and the knowledge that the highway had no railings was also of chief concern to him.

Mario tried to reassure him — "We don't need railings: Rosalina helped install gravity wells around the Road, don't you remember?" — but quickly gave up. When it came to things Luigi feared, he couldn't really be reassured, not until he was past them. Hopefully, he would cure himself of his acrophobia when he finally stepped into the lobby of the Cosmic Sunrise Hotel.