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Steve struggled to get his point across, and Mario could honestly sympathize. He hadn't always been able to talk. He could leave notes on signage, but during conversation, he could be limited to body language: nod yes, shake head no, hop up down and for… excitement, usually?
(Of course, 'Jump-man' Mario respected anyone who could achieve a good hop in the air, even if he understood not everyone was capable.)
It was hard to understand what he was thinking unless he covered a wall in signage, but he was a helpful fellow, big into improvement. Not a day passed by without Steve adding some little resting spot or garden or library. He had already received a talk about his animal farms – sensitive eyes, and whatnot, but when he wasn't actively fighting, his building skills were usually a force for good.
Usually. Sometimes it was hard to tell. Take, for example, the mysterious purple portal that Steve had put up near one of the stages. Now, most people participating in a Smash tournament had at least some tolerance for mysterious glowing portals, but the exact purpose of it… well, all Steve had thought necessary was a sign reading 'Food' and a slab of steak sitting in a frame.
"I mean, there's gotta be food on the other side, right? That's what the sign says." Pit said. (Good kid, Mario thought. Brave.)
"Or it could be where he makes his food," Luigi muttered.
Before they could speculate anymore, a silhouette began to form in the purple, solidifying into the blocky form of Steve. He crouched up and down aggressively, which seemed to be how he communicated a good mood. He turned from them, to the portal, back to them, to the portal, punching at the spiralling field of purple like he was gesturing for them to go in.
Mario, Luigi, and Pit all looked at each other for a second. None of them were opposed to adventure or even teleportation – see warp pipes and Palutena's door, respectively – but not all of their comrades had the same idea of what was appropriate to do with friends, or what danger even was.
It might have been risky… but Mario couldn't help but feel a bit sorry for Steve, crouching and punching at the air so aggressively. Mario shook himself out a bit, stretched his legs, and then stepped into the portal, his whole world suddenly tinting purple and warping.
When clarity returned, he stumbled forward into something that seemed like… a mimicry of a train station or bus stop? Which was strange, considering that Steve was, as far as he knew, some sort of hermit. And it was always mimicry: vending machines made of brightly colored blocks without any contents beyond bottles in frames, desks with no one to stand behind them, shelves stuffed full of books that were empty, cover to cover… It wasn't the most unnerving thing Mario had every seen, and it honestly had a note of something tragic about it. The emulation…
(Well, maybe he shouldn't use the e-word like that. It always gave him a chill.)
Pit, Luigi, and Steve soon followed through the portal as well, and the Steve did a lot more punching at a line of red carpet that stretched out of the room. (The signage, again, said food.) Once Steve figured he had gotten his point across, he led them down the red wool path, passing out of the waiting area and into a tunnel of fitted brick. It reminded Mario of Bowser's castles, more than anything, with the sparse torches and the faint red glow in the distance.
That glow was faint because of a turn to the… left. It was left, yes. Not left like backward left, left like… nevermind. That was sidescroller habit talking. They took a left and saw that the hall was now all windows, letting in the dim red-orange glow of…
"Mario? Is this h e double hockey sticks?" Luigi muttered.
Again, Mario wouldn't use language like that, but it really seemed like fire-and-brimstone heck. Inside a great cavern, plateaus of rugged red rock stretched to the horizon, dangling precariously above a vast sea of glowing lava. A few strands of glowing lava – that special, funny lava Steve could pull from his pockets, seemingly – fell like waterfalls. It was almost like Bowser's castles, just without any end. The land stretched away to a red foggyiness occasionally broken up by flashes of bright, unnatural blue or sickly white.
"The underworld…" Pit breathed, tracing the path of some flying creature that looked like a mix of a ghost and a squid. Mario hadn't seen anything like it… but his impressions of squids and Boos didn't lead him to think it was nice. (It was crying, sure, but the Boos liked to play coy… and Steve had decided to keep them behind glass.)
Steve, not noticing their shock at all, keep on hopping his way down the tunnel. "Mamma mia, slow down my friend!" Mario went into a run keeping up with him. At the very least, the few of lava and flaming vistas through the glass below him didn't scare Mario all that much – he had run over similarly nasty things on top of much flimsier platforms. Steve always had good workmanship.
Luigi and Pit followed along, quickly catching up to Steve and Mario, but they hadn't managed to shake off their nerves either. The tunnel travelled across a lava sea, strange little creatures walking on top of the surface, and then hit land, land with something like soil instead of the strange, burning rock they'd seen so far.
Soil! A shore (on an ocean of liquid magma)! You might even call it sand! Good, you'd think. Mario liked his beach levels as much as the next man, but all three of them quickly realized that there was something off about the dark brown soil their tunnel traveled over and then cut into: it was full of wailing faces, frozen in time.
One of the creatures of this strange realm, a bipedal pig in armor – different from the rotten varieties that shambled across the plains, which Mario hoped were not a part of Steve's diet – shambled across the soil, his glowing boots provoking a reaction from the ground, kicking up bright blue ghosts that spiralled off into nothingness as he passed by.
Before Mario could start worrying too much about the makeup of that soil and whether walking on it was doing… Before he could get too deep into that, they arrived at another sort of station like the one that held the first portal. This one had just an empty frame, but before any of them could get too terrified, Steve activated it with a flint and steel and jumped right in. Mario and company were right behind him.
Fortunately, they were disgorged back into the normal world, in what Mario recognized to be an alleyway next to a cafe that was somewhat popular among Smash contestants – they'd saved ten minutes, maybe fifteen? Steve shifted excitedly, turned the portal off with a bucket of water, and then headed off into the restaurant like he had just gotten out of car and not brought them on a trip through hell.
"I'll buy," Mario suggested. Food would get their mind off of things. Hopefully.
"Is this hell?"
Steve puts down sign reading "i'm not a theologian"*