[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/6W7bqko.png[/img]
[h2][color=FD0000]The Koopa Troop[/color][/h2]
[sub]and the twilight princess[/sub]
[b][color=FD0000]wordcount:[/color][/b] 1,642 +3 (+2 rapport)
[b][color=FD0000]Bowser: Level 14 [/color][/b] EXP: [color=FD0000]//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////[/color] (223/140)  (+1 bonus pending)
[b][color=SpringGreen]Bowser Jr: Level 14 [/color][/b] EXP: [color=SpringGreen]/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////[/color]////////////////////////////////////////////// (106/140)  (+1 bonus pending)
[b][color=Aquamarine]Midna: level 10[/color][/b] EXP: [color=Aquamarine]/////////////////////////////////////////////[/color]///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// (44/110) (+1 bonus pending)
[b][color=FD0000]Location:[/color][/b] Carnival town: Ballyhoo’s Big Top
[hider=warp locations]
[s]
Central hub: Smash City Alcamoth
Accessible locations:
Peach’s castle
Limsa Lominscuttle Town
Lumbridge
Twilight Town
Kosm’s Beach
[/s]
[/hider]
[/center]

Just a little bit before the end, the koopa king and prince ran out of time, which left them grumbling, and then dismayed at how they’d probably just barely lost a podium position as a result of their early termination. Who was to blame for this was rather obvious. In two ways actually. For them, they were quite sure that had she not attempted/succeeded at sabotage that they would have won (unable to see how their own actions had lead to their downfall). For everyone else, Minda was obvious, in that she stood out, because like Nadia and Juri she arrived back in the waiting room fighting. 

As for what she was fighting, well, anyone not distracted by the cat fight would have seen Minda glance around only to lock eyes of a second version of Ganondorf who’d appeared from nowhere, this one armed only with the single distinctive white blade that Toriel had intended to slay him with.  

The princess immediately charged the reflection of the king of evil (who simply sauntered towards her in turn) thrusting her treespear forwards in a swift stab. The man casually blocked the blow with the flat of his blade however before lunging past the reach of her long weapon with an elbow barge, knocking her back. He followed it up with a thrust of the white blade which Midna narrowly evaded, earning the king only a scratch for his efforts. Despite the smallness of the wound, the blade of light seared the princess badly, causing her to hiss through her teeth as she stumbled back.

As much as Midna wanted to just shoot her foe to try and gain some space, the princess now had enough understanding of guns to know that it was a bad idea with people behind her foe. So instead she dropped the twin pistols she’d been trying to use, leaving her hands empty as the mirror image dained to charge her now to follow up on his blow. He slammed down with a powerful two handed blow of his blade, which midna caught with the guard on her spear, using a fair amount more effort to do so than the king had done to block her own attack.

Rather than pull back however, the reflection pushed forwards, keeping their blades locked and aiming to simply power through her guard. It was working too, that glowing blade of light getting closer and closer to her forced as he forced the speartip back. 

Resisting the urge to grab the spear with all four hands and to simply try and hold, the princess struck back, swinging empty hands at her hated foe, only for an obsidian ax to fade into her grip as she used a crescent moon slash to quickdraw her only other remaining bladed weapon. The reflection of her foe reacted by stepping back such that it was he, this time, who received only a scratch. Or at least he should have. To her confusion the blade seemed to simply slip right through the reflection, meaning it was not set aflame like she had intended.

Not put off by this failure, she followed through with her plan, letting go of the cumbersome fire ax rather than try and arrest its swing. Then she struck forward with her shadow hand, followed by several quick jabs with her spear, only for the king to block them all with more perfect parries, causing her to snarl in frustration.

Rather than continue to throw herself at a wall, she darted left while summoning her flygon from a portal and sending it right. Rather than be surrounded however, the king leapt up and over her, before trying to stab her in the back as she spun to follow him, scoring him another seering cut on the princess due to the spear limiting her turning speed.

Then he was back on the defensive, blocking a beam of purple fire from her flygon. That, at least, was the opening she needed, the princess darting her blade forwards, slipping it past his guard as he tried to move to block both attacks, and delivering a swift stab. This one too, however, failed to count for some reason. 

Frustrated beyond end, when the king acted to knock her spear aside, she let him, releasing her grip on the weapon and causing him to overextend due to lack of resistance, before lunging forwards with fingertips wreathed in glowing purple dragon’s claws. He made to grab at her, but the princess opened a portal and promptly blasted the man in the face with a shotgun spray of sand to throw off his vision long enough for her to dig her claws into him in-order to find something that she could hurt.

Or that had been the plan anyway. Instead one of the larger and sharper of the millions of void black sand particles won the luck of the draw to be the first to bypass the reflection’s ethereal nature, and deliver a tiny cut to it, taking its one and only hitpoint in the process. As such, rather than getting to get stuck in with her claws, the princess blinked in surprise as the reflection shattered from that single tiny blow, and she instead went stumbling through the space where it had been.

[color=Aquamarine]”huh”[/color] she said to herself contemplatively after she’d stabilized herself, before rubbing at her wounds and finding that, at least to her touch, it seemed like the light seared gashes were not actually there, only a pair of razor thin cuts. [color=Aquamarine]”an illusion then”[/color] she correctly assessed, only to cringe when a young voice complained that [color=SpringGreen]”That’s how it ends? Lame. I wanted a nice dramatic stabbing or something”[/color] and turning to find Jr and Bowser had been snacking while watching her duke it out with the reflection of Ganondorf

Minda opened and closed her mouth a few times, before simply agreeing that [color=Aquamarine]”no you’re right, that wasn’t cathartic at all”[/color] and then saying that [color=Aquamarine]”do that again so I can take him down properly this time”[/color] 

That got a laugh and a kneeslap from Bowser, before he agreed [color=FD0000]”yeah, sure, I definitely want to see that backstabbing schmuck get his”[/color] only for the other, more important, fight to come to an end and for the regularly scheduled entertainment to get back on track. Still, by the time the fourth game had been explained, and they were all in a spooky town and wearing witch hats, any animosity from the previous game had been swept away by that age old adage: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

The trio stuck together as they searched for hiding spots so they could talk and trade stories, and while ‘he shot me in the back while we were trying to take over the world” and “he stabbed me in the front while trying to take over the world” weren't exactly the most compatible tales, shared animosity still did wonders for diplomatic relations between the kingdoms (in exile) of koopas and twilight.

[color=Aquamarine]”He has to be lying about not remembering destroying that kingdom, surely?”[/color] the princess was saying when they got to the part of Bowser’s relaying of what Ganondorf had been up to where they were talking to Asgor. The king for his part shrugged and was saying that [color=FD0000]”might have been a different him”[/color] but was prevented from getting to the revelation about respawning by jr piping up that [color=SpringGreen]”Papaaaaaaa, I think we’re running out of time to hide somewhere”[/color] the prince having been the only one paying attention to that while the older royals gossiped.

[color=FD0000]”Oh, right, yeah”[/color] Bowser replied, now actually paying attention to where they were and what they were doing. The former was in a library. The latter was finding something, anything, that the king could conceivably disguise as because he really was the limiting factor here with his size.

He [color=FD0000]”Uhhhh”[/color]ed for a moment, and then turned into a bookshelf, which got him stuck at an angle in between a pair of existing shelves in just the most blatant hiding spot ever.

[color=Aquamarine]”Might want to try that somewhere else”[/color] Midna suggested, as she hung from the raptors by her shadow hand, and then proceed to turn into a hanging chandelier big enough for someone to stand on (and thus big enough to contain her mass).

[color=SpringGreen]”Yeah try against a wall papa!”[/color] jr called over. In contrast to his towering papa, jr had both the smallest form while standing, and an even smaller one when curled up in his shell. He did so now atop one of the tables, having slammed the biggest and heaviest grimoire in the library there, and promptly turned into it. Then he used the opening and closing of his cover to flip off that table and to get as far as possible from the base prop he was copying as possible, winding up on another table across the hall.

Once he was there however, there came a crash, as a moving bookcase knocked over another, followed by another crash and another as an entire column of shelves went toppling over domino style. Papers and knick knacks went flying, but when the dust cleared, the first bookshelf was nowhere to be seen.

For about 5 seconds anyway, after which the elevated Midan worked out the koopa king had simply flopped his own on top of the first knocked down shelf to join the mess he’d made. With how much time they’d wasted nattering on, it was probably the best he was going to do, she guessed, as she used her hanging spot to peek out an upper floor window to see if she could spot the seekers (of props) approaching.