Chapter Text
Luigi hunched down on his hands and knees in an back alley somewhere in Brooklyn, his gloves drenched in water and mud, long since discarded and shoved into his overalls back pocket for safekeeping.
He stuck some pipe glue to the rim of a union pipe piece to reconnect the water flow between the two apartment blocks next to each other, the owner of the two blocks figured it’d be cheaper to connect them to the same water system. Which was smart if you asked Luigi, not using the underground water mains that provided most of the households in the city their water and using your own system was generally a really good investment. If not rare for inner suburb housing, it was more reserved for secluded residences due to the water pressure decreasing over such an expanse of distance from a main resource.
Luigi’s brother, Mario. Was currently working on the other side of the city, divide and conquer and all that. seemingly neither of them had particularly difficult jobs that day so it seemed redundant to go together.
But it meant Mario had to drop off Luigi and then leave. Which meant Luigi would probably have to hang around for longer than he’d like to in a dirty old alley, waiting for Mario to pick him up.
Of course Mario would probably finish up his job quickly and come racing over as soon as he could so Luigi couldn’t really complain, they were getting paid two incomes which was nice.
Luigi sat up and switched off the torch he had strapped to his forehead with a sigh. Cracking his back with a twist of his torso.
He was only 27 but plumbing really made you bend and hunch way too much to sustain any semblance of unstrained joints.
His phone buzzed in his pocket and he quickly checked his screen to see it was Mario calling him
“Ciao! Luigi, mi dispiace per questo fratello, ma la donna qui ha spinto troppa lettiera del gattino nel gabinetto e quando l'ho finalmente scaricata è tornata su attraverso i tubi e ora è nella vasca da bagno, quindi insiste che pulisco la sua vasca anche se lo è non è nemmeno colpa mia ma vabbè”**** Mario apologized over the phone hurriedly, only to be cut off by an agitated muffled yell Luigi couldn’t decipher in the background “so I guess I’m saying I’ll be a little late to come pick you up, is that okay???” Mario asked switching back to English. Luigi could bet on the previous yell being something about finding offense to Mario speaking in his native tongue.
“No problemo bro!” Luigi responded, a smile could be heard in his voice but his face showed nothing other than disappointment and despair at the turn of events.
“Im a so sorry once a more! Bye bye see you soon! Love you! “ Mario called ending the call and leaving Luigi to stare blankly at the green tinged screen.
dejectedly Luigi snapped his phone shut and pocketed it with a sigh. He grabbed his tools off the floor and taking out a handkerchief from his other back pocket, he quickly give them a wipe down before neatly putting them away.
Luigi stared up at the sky, it looked like it was going to rain, as if his day couldn’t get any worse.
“Hey just coming to check on you!” An unfamiliar voice called from behind Luigi, he jumped ever so slightly to turn around and notice the landlord of the two apartments gently smiling
“H-h-hi! I was a just a now finishing up” Luigi beamed, closing the clasps of his tool box shut.
The landlord pays Luigi and they both say their goodbyes hurriedly, before parting ways.
Luigi sat at the bus stop, slowly munching away on the muffin the landlord had given to him as a thanks.
Chilly air bites at his bare fingers so he stands up and paces back and forth to warm himself up, a bus pulls up and he shakes his head no at the drivers questioning gaze .
He watches the bus drive off and sighs, he COULD take the bus home but he really should just wait for Mario to come pick him up, his phone had gone flat only a moment ago and he had no way of calling his brother. He didn’t want to hop on a bus and leave his brother worried and wondering where he was.
So to entertain himself Luigi did some random stretches using the bus stops bench, when he got bored of that he rested his tool box down and decided to clean all his tools once more.
A loud Pop! Similar to the sound of a car backfiring, causes Luigi to startle and knock his tool box onto the floor, scattering his equipment everywhere. He scrambles on his hands and knees to pick up all his stuff. Accidentally knocking his round cylinder tin of Pipe glue with his elbow, he watched in horror as it bounced over the edge of the curb.
Getting up off his knees Luigi ran over to the curb, noticing the drain perfectly positioned right where his Pipe glue would of landed after falling off the edge of the curb and into the gutter.
He groaned, that was easily $20 dollars worth of Plumbers cement literally down the drain.
“Hey! Hey! HEY!”
Luigi startled, looking up to see an old lady with her hands on her hips glaring down at him behind her glasses
“You a plumber?” She sneered, poking Luigi in the nose with one crooked finger
“I uh- um” Luigi stuttered
“well?! Are you!?” The woman yelled, flinging her arms into the air “this is an EMERGENCY”
“Y-y-yes Signora ” Luigi answered, shyly looking down at his feet
“You coming or what?” The woman scolded, Luigi looked up to see she had walked off a little while away and scrambled to grab his tool box and follow behind her obediently.
Luigi wondered why he was even following the lady in the first place, she wasn’t going to make him work for free was she? Luigi sighed, if Mario were here he’d of already hassled a few hundred dollars out of the lady for not scheduling a time for them to fix whatever needed to be fixed.
“Ya see that pipe right there? Just up and bust as I was throwing out the trash! And you just so happened to be within the vicinity when it happened! Lucky you!” The odd woman explained, gesturing to the broken pipe spewing gallons of gallons of water onto the alleys floor.
Luigi winced, he couldn’t fix the pipe permanently, he didn’t have the right materials right that second, but he could do his best to patch it up temporarily. He told her this and she just shrugged nonchalantly in response.
“I err uh-mamma Mia, you a- wouldn’t happen to know a where the main water supply is??” Luigi asked, taking off his hat to flick off any dust that may of been on it.
“I do actually!” The woman exclaimed, leading Luigi out of alley and down into an underground parking lot next to the alley with the broken pipe.
“I live in one of the apartments here, the landlord has had to turn off the water to the building a few times” she explained, showing him a water valve poking out from the ground in a little plastic cage Near the back of the car park.
Luigi crouched down, flipping the plastic cabinet open and turned the valve off, checking the water meter momentarily to see the volume of water passing through the pipes to be unusually high, confirming Luigi didn’t just turn off an entire apartment blocks water supply for no reason.
He couldn’t imagine how bad that would be for the Mario Bro’s company if he was caught making such a huge mistake as that.
He probably should of contacted the Landlord beforehand but he was really doing them a favor anyway, but still, the owner of the building should probably know that one of their pipes had burst and an Italian plumber was turning off their properties water supply.
He was sure one of the residents would be quick on that front anyway, so he decided to just brush off the anxiety of getting in trouble for doing the RIGHT thing and follow the old lady back to the bust pipe.
As he was leaving he couldn’t help but feel like he was being watched, not like the feeling was uncommon for him, but still, he glanced over at a wired off section of the car park, then over at the few lonesome cars to his right. Nothing.
He decided to leave it alone and get back to work.
He sighed in relief to see that the pipe had stop spitting water 5 feet into the air, the water now only slowly dripping into the giant puddle below,
Luigi rolled up his sleeves turning to the old lady again with unease “you are- a didn’t happen to have any a towels or- um err what a the word?? Ehhh-“
“Tea towels?” The lady finished for him
“Si! Tea towels, grazie” Luigi thanked her tipping his hat, a habit he’d picked up from his brother, or maybe his brother picked up from him? he couldn’t remember.
The lady scurried off to go grab all the towels and tea towels she said she owned and left Luigi to it. He sat his tool box atop an old discarded chair missing a leg and rummaged through it, picking out a pipe wrench triumphantly.
He tightened the wrench around the pipe and measured the distance from one jaw to another. He tucked away what the diameter was in his head and waited for the old lady to come back.
After only a few minutes he head the sound of bead bracelets clanking together, signifying her arrival.
She carried multiples towels in her arms and had a rag clamped between her teeth.
Luigi gingerly grabbed the rag from her mouth and thanked her with an unsure smile.
Soaking up the water slowly leaking from the broken pipe and wiping away any dampness from the exterior, Luigi got started on filing down any rough bits around the damage sight with a metallic file.
He arms ached from the effort, he grunted and with one final scrape of the file against the copper pipe he leant back on his heels
Luigi centers a rubber sleeve over the burst, putting a metal clamp over the top he grabs his screwdriver from his pocket and tightens it up.
“Okie dokie then!” He exclaims, standing up to face the woman only to come face to face with an empty alley way.
“Huh” He whispers, slowly walking back towards the alleyways entrance
“Signora ! Hello Signora!?” He called, scratching his head in confusion.
He sure hoped he didn’t just get conned into fixing some strangers bust pipe, for all he knew that old lady could of been the landlord herself. If so,Luigi wasn’t too happy ,but there really wasn’t much he could do at this point but try and get in touch with the woman again and hassle her for payment.
But that didn’t really make much sense, he told her what he was doing was a temporary fix. The whole pipe was likely due for a replacement. He couldn’t say how long his patch up work would even work for. It’d most likely start leaking within the next month or so through the patch, which would just accumulate into a huge water bill over time.
Luigi groaned, taking his hat off to nervously card his fingers through his hair. Life just couldn’t be easy could it?
He started to worry now, had something happened to the old lady? Was she alright? And with that thought he hurriedly started running down the street yelling for a unnamed “Signora?”
His frantic search led him back to the car park she had shown him beforehand,
making his way through the mostly empty parking lot he continued to call for her.
His search eventually led him to the laundry room of the apartment, inconveniently located outdoors closed off by a metal gate in the car park .
Luigi gently pushed the gate open, it creaked in protest before banging against an old washing machine covered in cobwebs.
Luigi startled, cowering with his arms crisscrossed across his face in fear. He peaked from between his arms and let them fall to his sides once not detecting any real danger.
“Hello? Sigora?? Are you a here??” He called nervously, his voice echoing throughout the car park and laundry “room” which was just a bunch of washing machines dumped into the corner of a car park and closed off by a metal fence and gate.
He walked past pile upon pile of discarded clothes, the smell of sweat and dirt permeating the air.
Luigi covered his nose to protect himself from the stench, pushing aside bedsheets and shirts hanging from wires crisscrossing across the room, working as makeshift washing lines.
He felt his foot get caught on something and went flying into a tall basket of dirty clothes, flailing his arms wildly he also managed to pull down some of the washing lines down upon him.
With a shriek of surprise Luigi quickly tore off the dirty bed sheets that seemed to of been trying their absolute best to merge with him physically and become apart of him permanently.
He shuddered, both from the cold and from fear. He wasn’t a very level headed man, well he was fine when it came to being alone and in familiar Environments. But unfamiliar places and confrontation left him a mess.
Which was why when a tub of washing powder fell to the floor and spilt powder all over the place, Luigi screamed and jumped 3 feet into the air.
“You are a okay Luigi! You are a can do this!” He hyped himself up in a hushed whisper, pushing past even more hanging laundry.
A cold draft suddenly hit his face, making him shudder, as his skin involuntarily seemed to shrink around his skull in reaction.
His throat felt too dry and yet too wet and his hands shook, he didn’t like it here, it was cold and it stank and he kept tripping and knocking things over. It was awful.
Luigi’s next steps felt like he was walking on dislodged rocks in a fast flowing river, the ground seemed to rock back and forth under his weight and be covered in wet moss.
In reality nothing was wrong with the ground at all, it was simply just concrete. But fear got the best of Luigi’s better judgment and everything in sight and in contact to him was a threat.
Luigi rounded a sharp corner of stacked up washing machines.
His heart sank ever further down his body at the sight in front of him, surely his heart had slipped out his ass and he was dead by now Luigi thought.
He must of been dreaming or he was dead, those were the only logical explanations to whatever the hell was in front of him.
Luigi turned heel and ran, but not before he could trip on flat ground and knock his nose into the corner of a washing machine.
He groaned, reaching a hand up to his face to gather the liquid he could feel running from his nose and down his lips and chin onto one of his fingers.
A quick glance at his hand confirmed that yes, his nose was bleeding profusely.
“Oh mama Mia” he sighed in despair, he wanted his brother.
He turned back towards what had sparked such a reaction out of him in the first place and shuddered.
Laundry machines were smashed into pieces and strewn across the room, and in the middle of the wall was a giant gaping hole, a hole the height of at least double Luigi’s and with a width triple that.
It was really less of a hole and more like a tunnel, or a pipe. But it was so BLACK, so endless to its depth or distance Luigi couldn’t make sense of it.
It struck horror in his heart, it wasn’t of his world he was sure of it, it was some
Sort of portal or veil into another one.
He didn’t know how he knew this he just did, the pipe, he’d decided was it’s purpose , was not human.
He took notice of how the washing machines seemed to off burst forth from a force behind them and with a chilling terror Luigi came to a realization.
“Something came through” he whispered to himself in Italian, his ability to conceptualise anything in English escaping him.
He couldn’t imagine what unimaginable horrors could of burst through the giant pipe, was it a tunnel straight to hell?
A cold draft kept flowing from it, and brushing Luigi’s face softly, Luigi took a few shuddering breathes, slowly backing away from the pipe, too afraid to turn his back to it.
His back hit something solid, he reached his arms around behind him and felt for the edges of the washing machines, blindly navigating the space behind him by touch.
He only got a few more paces backwards before his back hit more washing machines, his terror murdering any sense of spacial awareness he had.
His hand slipped around the edge of the machine, it must of been rusted and recently used from how rough and warm it felt against Luigi’s palm, but now it was moving, ever so slightly shifting against Luigi’s hands.
Luigi tried to manoeuvre around the turned on rusted washing machines but was only met with even more of them, actually it felt like only ONE giant rusted, warm washing machine.
“Hands to yourself greenie”
Translation for Mario’a lil call :
(hi luigi! sorry about this bro, but the woman here shoved way too much kitty litter down the toilet and when I got it to finally flush it came back up through the pipes and is now in the bathtub so she’s insistant I clean her bathtub even though it isn’t even my fault but oh well