When Jesse suggested taking out the guards, Joker raised an eyebrow, although his mask obscured it. If the Shadows could move through the lasers and they couldn’t, any fight would be a tough proposition. At best they would need to confine the whole struggle to one of the nine subsections of the room, and the four were spread out between them. Avoiding an unnecessary fight completely would be the better option, although unfortunately he couldn’t be one hundred percent positive about the giant paintings working like they used to. To not risk further embarrassment he figured it best to use an alternative plan, and luckily, the FBC’s director offered a few more.
He considered Jesse’s ideas, noting as he did her excellent aim in being able to plant a thruster all the way across a room full of lasers. He doubted the Shadows. It probably went unnoticed with all the other brightly colored beams around. In the end, he found himself liking her first plan. “Going small’s a good idea,” he whispered. “We’ll be able to go right under the lasers, and if we need to hide, we’ll be small enough to use the plant pots.” As Jesse began to put the plan into motion, shrinking herself to less than a foot in height, Primrose came up with the idea of using one of the monsters from the last room for transportation. Joker considered it, but was not convinced. “Can’t strikers only appear for a short while? Go ahead if you like, but I think we might have a more surefire way to get over there quickly. Don’t we, Mona?”
The not-cat nodded. “Yeah, that’ll work. Alright Jesse, go ahead and shrink us!”
As a whole the team waited while Primrose made contact with the essence of the Makami. The hunting wolf spirit seemed eager for a companion, more so than the Hippowdon by a long shot, and the spirit linked to the dancer’s own, restoring a semblance of existence. After that, it was time to begin. One brief session of getting zapped later, the Thieves walked right through the no-collided vent grate and into the open. Being this low to the ground put things in a wildly different perspective, Joker found, but at least it wasn’t because he was Rattled this time. He shuddered at the thought and crouched beneath the bench while a guard plodded by. Once the coast was clear, he gave Mona the thumbs-up. “Okay, now!”
“On it!” The thief jumped into the air and disappeared in a puff of smoke. A second later the
Morgana Car hit the floor, no bigger than a breadbox but large enough to accommodate both the three Thieves and their two new friends. “Not a moment to lose!” Mona’s voice came from the vehicle, his tail wiggling around excitedly in back. “Get in!”
Once everyone piled in, Mona raced forward. Across the golden tiles he zoomed, passing under laser after laser with a rather close for comfort amount of clearance. Twice he came to a gentle stop, both to avoid a guard’s patrol and screeching his tires while doing so, and once he threw himself into reverse to hastily correct after an overextension. Jesse’s remotely-triggered thruster saved the day there, distracting the guard long enough for Mona to skedaddle. In the end the car cruised straight through the employee access door without detection, either from the Shadows or the lasers. In contrast to the glitzy main rooms of the gallery the stairwell was a standard affair of concrete and and metal, although bearing a greenish tint, and once Mona let his passengers off he turned back to normal so that everyone could be returned to their normal size with the Tool Gun’s Undo button.
“Good work,” Joker told the team. “Even if we sometimes go in guns blazing, discretion is part of the Phantom Thief code. Let’s stick to it.”
The group climbed the stairs to the next floor. In a stroke of bad luck the employee access area they found turned out to be nothing more than a connection between two floors, rather than the extensive web that Joker hoped for. Still, he felt confident in their choice. If this place still had no basement, going up brought them closer to the distorted gallery’s sanctum, where any captives must surely be held. Jesse lent a hand by no-colliding the exit door so that Joker could poke his head through for a discreet look, and he was immediately struck by just how different this wing looked.
Here the subtly unnatural green tint that had tainted the staircase grew to a staggering potency. Everything seemed to swim or shimmer ever so slightly, as if the room was filled with crystal clear water. Sculptures of primeval beings, their gods and demons of stone and gold so lifelike as to seem frozen in time, stood in the open space; paintings of creatures and cryptids that seemed too lifelike to be the product of imagination hung from its walls. Joker saw no guards, and one door to the right. On the left end a couple steps preceded a raised section of honor, in the middle of which a stylized but no less ghastly
portrait rested among lit candles. In fact, candles seemed to be the only light in the entire area, and there were a lot of them. Joker pulled his head in, showing the others his affronted expression. “Okay, it’s some sort of eldritch nightmare gallery in there,” he reported. “I’m sure everything’s cursed, so let’s just make a run for the exit on the right without looking at anything.
This didn’t seem to surprise the Thieves, and they got ready to book it. They waited for their leader’s signal before rushing through the door and to the right through a gauntlet of unnerving art pieces. Joker rounded the corner of one of the gallery’s four wedge-shaped dividing walls and in an instant became a dark blur as he dived back into cover. Standing in front of the door was a single guard, unmoving. “Looks like we can’t sneak by this guy. It’s probably a strong one,” he murmured. “But I can get the drop on it to kick things off. Get ready.”
He zipped forward as a blur once again, swooshing into hiding behind a statue’s plinth. Another dash brought him into the cover of a glass display case. Then he surged from the shadows, boosted off the wall, and landed on the Shadow’s back. “Show me your true form!” he demanded as he reached down and peeled the guard’s mask off. It contorted wildly, forcing him to jump clear, then melted into liquid darkness. Joker joined the others who pulled up in front of it, weapons out and ready to fight. A moment later the Shadow reformed in a wave of bone-chilling power, putting out every candle in the shadow gallery and plunging it into viridian darkness. From the void emerged an
abominable thing that immediately unleashed an accursed scream. That hideous clamor filled all six with primal Fear. Instinct took over, and they turned tail to scatter and hide throughout the gallery. With a gibbering noise uncannily close to laughter, the Shambler began to stalk its prey.
Despite Nadia’s effort her opposition proved a worthy challenge--and since her adversaries were mere cushions, that made her feel pretty much worthless. Still, she grit her teeth and pulled, squeezing Bella out of her pillowy prison a bit at a time. Unfortunately a sudden cry shattered her focus, and reflexively Nadia crouched down with ears flattened and tiny razor-sized claws at the ready. Her bright eyes made vision in the darkness of the room not a problem, but even still she couldn’t see the source, as the heaps of household items obscured whoever it was from view. Other voices reached her from different directions, turning her ears this way and that. All sounded vaguely familiar in their intonations, but not quite recognizable in their pitches. Shaking off the eerie feeling that brushed at her, Nadia took a deep breath and got back to her task. If she wasn’t alone, all the more reason to get Bella out as soon as possible.
Luckily, the struggle didn’t last long. Reinforcements arrived in the form of a little boy in yellow, although since he stood taller than Nadia she begrudgingly guessed she needed to change her point of view. Either way she appreciated him identifying himself the moment he appeared, which cut through some of the confusion and confirmed in the feral’s mind that whatever happened, it happened to everyone. “Hey, Mirage! You know, you seem awfully childish all of a sudden. It’s me, Fortune. And this is Bella.” The minuscule Abyssal waved. “Here, take her other hand!”
A little grin escaped Mirage at Ms. Fortune's humor, enough to show a tooth missing among his pearly whites as he took the joke as a chance to help cope with their situation. "No
kidding!" He responded, reaching out to grab hold of Bella's other hand. Her hand seemed small enough to disappear into his own, so he ended up grasping a bit of her forearm to help in pulling her out from her soft, cushiony doom.
With two sets of hands the task went quickly, and after only a few moments Bella was out. Even better, she managed to stand, despite the near-instant loss of the new power she’d gained. Her relief turned to confusion as she gave herself a proper once-over. “How could this happen?”
Nadia sighed as she gave a shrug. “Magic, I guess. We lost our stuff, powers, everything. But at least it seems like we’re thinking the same. And...I remember these clothes.” She took hold of her threadbare sleeve, feeling the cloth. “This was the stuff I was wearing before the Fishbone Gang adopted me. At first I thought we were just made younger, but...it’s more like I was sent back in time.”
Mirage slipped his goggles over his eyes, fingers slowly trailing the band around his head with disbelief. "Yeah, I remember my Ma giving me these. Said they made me look sporty and adventurous." He added with fond reminiscence. It seemed to make Nadia smile.
Still wearing a face of consternation, Bella shook her head. “I don’t remember ever being like this.”
“You mean, you don’t remember anything from your childhood? Like, at all?” Nadia asked in disbelief.
Bella tugged on her hair, shifting uncomfortably. “No…” She took a step back, nearly stumbling, but managed to catch herself with the help of her tail. “At least I can sort of walk. This must have been before my muscles atrophied. And they have less to hold up, anyway.”
“That’s good, ‘cause we’ve gotta get movin’,” Nadia declared. “My instincts’re sayin’ we’re not alone. We can’t fight like this, so if anything finds us, we’re toast. Let’s hurry up and find the others first. I heard voices from that direction.”
She scurried to the end of the sofa, hopped back onto the bed where she landed, and made for the other side. With a frown she noted that the furniture seemed much bigger than it should have been considering her size adjustment. If everything were to scale, that would have made her under a foot tall, which couldn’t possibly be right. The idea of being reduced to a kid in the first place was annoying enough without things being more unfair. She came to a stop at the other end of the bed and eyed the small drop. The bottom layer of this room appeared to be a sea of small objects like clothes, toys, and especially shoes like an enormous ball pit, albeit one that rose and fell in hills and mountains. Something occurred to her for the first time, making her gulp. “All these...th-these clothes and things. Were they all…?” She trailed off as horror twisted her insides, preventing her from finishing the thought.
With shoulders hunched and arms crossed she looked ahead. Some ways away she saw a mountain of pillows tumble down, with a telltale childlike figure sliding down it. This one she recognized as Bowser Junior, who must not have been as affected by the curse. Getting there wouldn’t be a problem. Nadia hopped off the end of the bed and onto the ground layer.
‘Into’ the ground would have been more correct, however, for she instantly sank to her belly button in the item pit. Alarm bells went off in her head, telling her to get out, but no matter how she tried to climb on top the small things kept shifting beneath her, sinking her back to firmer, more compacted footing underneath. With a snarl of frustration she found that moving through it was even worse than trying to push through an actual ball pit, since everything was irregularly shaped and tended to catch. “This sucks,” she hissed, but she didn’t know the half of it.
After a few more steps there came a clatter from in front of her, and she went wide-eyed in fear. Something was moving through the ground layer. It moved fast, it moved noisily, and most terrifying of all, Nadia couldn’t even catch a glimpse of it--only the items it threw into the air as it carved through the mess
straight toward her. “Uh oh,” she muttered in deadpan fright, too desensitized to scream, before she turned herself around toward the bed and went as fast as she could.
She put all her hope on the unseen monster not being able to leave the ground layer and pushed through until she could sink her claws into the edge of the blanket that hung down and scrambled up. Mirage and Bella reached down and helped haul her up just in the nick of time, and as Nadia clawed her way back on top, the monster came to a sudden stop right below her. Which Mirage childishly mocked, pulling up his goggles just to tug the skin beneath his left eye downwards and stick his tongue out at it. “No snack for you today, buddy!” He boasted confidently.
Then the blanket corner went taut, its end clutched by the unseen foe, and it started to pull. Beneath Nadia, Bella, and Mirage, the blanket began to slide toward the edge, and them with it. The little feral released a guttural noise that sounded like she was being strangled and sprinted the other way as fast as her legs could take her. Mirage letting out a panicked “Crap, crap, crap!” As he regretted taunting the monster, but managed to keep pace. But Bella wasn’t so lucky. With a squeal she fell down onto the blanket and was carried atop it toward the edge of the bed. “Bella!” Nadia cried, reaching back with an open hand, but before the Abyssal could be yanked off the edge her snakelike tail lunged at the bedpost. Its teeth dug into the wood, turning it into a lifetime that saved Bella from certain death. Holding her breath, Nadia crept to the edge of the bedsheet-clad mattress and looked down to see the last of the blanket disappear into the ground layer. Only after a few moments of silent stillness did she realize how bad she was shaking. For the life of her she could not remember being more scared. Except once.
She got to her feet and brushed her hair back, her tail sweeping back and forth in agitation. With Mirage she helped Bella back from where she dangled, and all three stood at the edge of the bed. “...Jeez. The hell was that…?” Trying to compose herself and focus, she took a number of deep breaths in and out. “So. The floor might as well, uh, be lava.” She pointed a claw at the pile of pillows. “We need to get over there, but we’ve gotta stay off the ground.”
Mirage pounded his small fist against his chest with his signature grin back in place. "Well, at least it's not real lava-- I've been there, NOT fun." He said in a surprisingly nonchalant manner, all things considered, but the task before them made him try to tune into some optimism. "Alright kids, time for some hardcore parkour! Where you play for keeps and if you fall, you get eaten by a mysterious monster." He let out a small huff that was a mix of frustration and repressed fright as that optimism momentarily faded. "No pressure,
no pressure at all."
The simple plan of action made her look at the terrain in a new light, seeking routes that didn’t involve touching the danger zone for more than a moment at a time. Up ahead the mess trended upward like a hill. Across the first stretch of junk she saw a large suitcase lying open, stuffed with drab clothing, and right after that a dresser on its side, halfway sunken. Then the hill seemed to come to a peak, and the pillow pile not too far beyond that. As she already knew, however, the suitcase was too far to wade to. “We need...some kind of bridge,” she thought aloud. Still a little nervous, she looked around her immediate surroundings. The four-poster bed with all its cushions lay at a slight angle with Bella’s sofa on the far side and a leaning bookcase against the headboard. By its foot an office chair poked up from the ground, the kind that swiveled. A small
fan lay face-down in the junk near where the monster surely still lurked.
Mirage bit the inside of his cheek as he tried to think, scanning the area in front of them. If the game was keeping away from the ‘splash-zone’, then a small idea came to mind. “If it can’t come up to grab us, then we could hop across those big pillows.” He suggested, gesturing ahead at the assortment of throw pillows and cushions. “They might sink down if we stand on them for too long, so we’d have to keep moving.” He added, with a bit of concern as he looked down at Bella, noting she had issues escaping from the blanket issue they’d just experienced moments prior.
The tiny Abyssal looked embarrassed. “Um...I don’t suppose I could ask for some help? I can mostly walk on my own, but jumping might be a problem.”
Mirage's eyes widened for a moment, followed by a few blinks at her request. Back when he was a kid, he was the one getting the piggyback rides as he was the smallest. A complete change to now, where he was the tallest kid in their current small-numbered group. "I've got ya. You're looking at the best athlete to ever grace a galaxy-wide television network! Only...
Slightly miniaturized." Maybe the 'best athlete' thing was a bit of a stretch since there were a few folks more agile and parkour-experienced than him, but he could keep up! Kinda! He could get Bella across this, at the very least.
“In that case, I’ll handle the pillows. We’ll use ‘em like steppin’ stones!” Nadia ran over and grabbed one. Thanks to its light weight she could haul it around easily, and after she dragged it to the edge of the bed she tossed it down onto the ground layer. It rested on top of the junk without sinking, and even when the feral dropped down after it for the sake of experimentation, it didn’t move. “Hey, it’s got enough surface area so that it doesn’t sink!” she called, glad for a lucky turn at last. Her principal concern, however, was that the monster might not care about the pillow. Such things didn’t come to mind when one pictured a safe platform or barrier, after all. But the moments passed without any stirring beneath the junk, and Nadia breathed a sigh of relief. “Looks like this’ll work. Toss me another!”
"No sinking, bonus!" Mirage cheered, glad one of his own fears was no longer a factor. Quickly, he made a small system with Bella where he gathered pillows and she began to toss them down to help Nadia in making her platforms. This process slowed a bit as Mirage began to burrow through some junk to try and reach bigger pillows to make travelling across easier, throwing an assortment of clothing and small household items to the side as he worked. As he dug through the junk, he came across a small but strange looking device that he only took note of because it seemed to have a trigger. A small,
gray gun-like object kind of shaped like a top hat.Picking up the device, he pointed it towards the leg of a somewhat large but useless to their traveling efforts nightstand and curiously pulled the trigger, resulting in a ‘POP’ sound as the gun shot out a similarly-colored projectile that stuck to the piece of furniture. Walking over, he attempted to recover the item to see if it was reusable, but even as he tugged, it seemed to be stuck in place in a very sturdy fashion. Brought back to reality as Bella called that they needed more pillows, causing him to tuck the weapon away in the side of his shorts as he went back to work.
One by one the pillows dropped into Nadia’s waiting hands for her to run out to the end of her makeshift bridge, pulling each behind her as she hopped nimbly between them. She worried about running out, but was relieved when she reached the suitcase with a few pillows still stocked up on top of the bed. She went back over to the bed just to make sure, then called up. “Okay, come on you guys! Be careful!” Before heading over herself, however, she reached out to snag the fan from the ground layer. It was just the right size and heft to be carried, and she couldn’t help but think it would come in handy.
Once past the pillows steps the trio hurried over the suitcase, across an almost too-big gap, and up the dresser. When they reached the top of the hill, however, they found it to be a cliff overlooking a big furrow in the ground level. Nadia crossed her arms. “Ohh, purr-fect...”
A shout from close by got her attention. She quickly spotted a little boy with dirty blond hair atop a cupboard. Running through Blue Team’s roster in her head, she figured that it had to be Link. “Over here!” she yelled in reply, jumping up and down as she waved. “Fortune, Mirage, and Bella! We’re headin’’ your way!”
Mirage offered a wave with one hand, having Bella on his back still as he hadn't particularly found a good place to set her down. He noticed Link seemed to have found a weapon of sorts, which was admittedly smart. He noted that after they got regrouped he should probably do the same, as something was better than nothing, even if he wasn't particularly good at swinging objects around. Not to mention having the strength of a small child on top of that. "How're we getting across, though? Can't just toss some pillows here." He questioned, noticing that Nadia seemed to be scanning for a solution.
Nadia re-evaluated her surroundings and realised there was a broom leaning against the edge of the dresser. Its head lay somewhere down in the middle of the ravine, but her head was full of dumb ideas. “Ooh, I’ve gotta try this.” With a grin that belied all the terror sustained only minutes ago, she grabbed hold of the broom handle and propelled herself off the edge of the dresser. “Here goes!”
Holding on for dear life she managed to pole-vault over the chasm and to the other side, steering herself toward a ripped-up green recliner. Although yellow stuffing protruded from its many slashes and holes, it cushioned her landing just fine. “Whoo!” she squeaked as she bounced down. “Nailed it!” Feeling more than a little better about herself she climbed up the recliner’s back to where the handle had come to rest. Another bright idea hit her, and she lifted up her new fan. When she turned it on it blew with a lot more power than she expected, and the broom shaft practically flew back to the other side. “Wow, that actually worked. Here, you guys try!”
Eyeing the broom, it was slightly concerning. Mirage was sure it could hold him, but the question was more if he could hold on. Eyes shifting around for a moment, he sat Bella down and held the broom, allowing her to get a grip first with her tail. He took a deep breath, fully investing in this attempt to go down as he dropped his weight on the broom. The entire way down, he was screaming, and as they made it to the bottom, that screaming was muffled as he landed face-first into some of the yellow-stuffing of the recliner, though it quickly stopped as he stood and regained his composure, noticing Bella with a slight head-tilt at his actions. Face red, he offered a light pat on the back to Bella as they hurried to catch up with Nadia.
After a few more hops Nadia slid down the side of a grandfather clock past Mount Pillow to land on the bed where everyone seemed to have gathered. This one was even broader than the one she woke up in, although it wasn’t the four-poster kind. More important, of course, was everyone on it. Blazermate jumped out to her immediately, as the Medabot looked fresh and full-sized.
Makes sense for a robot, I guess. Everyone else, however, was in the same boat as her. She scampered up to greet them. “How d’ya do, fellow kids?” There seemed to be two junior Bowsers, one of which she took to be an ensmallened Bowser Senior. There was a boy she did not even remotely recognize as Geralt until he said so, and another boy she recognized just about instantly as the Cadet. “Hey there, monster pun-ter! Still got the one brain cell I think, so everything’s fine there. As for what I can do…” she put her hands up in resignation. “Zilch. I mean, I can see in the dark pretty well, and my claws are still sharp, but that’s about it. No Life Gem, man. I can die as hard as anyone now.”
She distanced herself from that gallows humor by checking a few of the remaining team members. The snow-white girl could only be Rika, of course. Having never seen Kamek without his robe it took a moment to realize the rather normal-looking Koopa must be him. And the brunette all done up with flowers and ribbons… “Sakura?” Nadia beamed. “You’re so cute! If I were still big I’d wanna scoop ya up, give ya a big hug, and buy ya ice cream or somethin’.” Only after spouting all that did Nadia realize that her friend seemed to be in bad spirits. “Oh...uh…”
She was saved as Peach arrived, floating down from some high-up perch thanks to her little parasol. Even as a four-year-old the princess was the very picture of dainty, but it was determination written on her features. “Hello, everyone,” she said, her voice the highest out of everyone’s. Doing her best to keep her composure despite the indignity of it all, she told the others, “Like Link I went up high to look around. I saw just one door, but no handle or anything. Must open from the outside. There are holes in the ceiling that stuff falls through, but I saw a vent in the wall, too.” She pointed to just about the exact opposite side of the massive room. “We might be able to get out through there, if we can get up somehow. As for a plan...” She glanced between the assembled heroes. “I figure there’s a good chance we can end this by tracking down the demons that caused it. Then there’s nothing stopping us from putting down that creep. But they’re way up at the top, and we’re down here, so we’ve got a long way to go.”
Nadia raised her hand like a schoolchild. “So you guys know, there’s something scary under the junk. I didn’t see it, but I saw it cookin’ through the stuff tryin’ to get us, and it ate a blanket tryin’ to pull us in. So we gotta stay on top of something.”
The grim expression on Peach’s tiny features left the feral feeling like she wasn’t the only one with a fun discovery to report. “I thought I saw something too,” she whispered, glancing upward with a hint of anxiety. “In the shadows, hanging from the roof. Upside-down.”
Once again Nadia shivered. “Great. This just keeps gettin’ better.” She moved to the edge of the king bed and looked off into the darkness, trying to spot either the new monster or the escape route Peach saw. “Guess we’ve gotta make our way over there.”
The princess moved up to stand beside her. “While I’m not saying to split up, we shouldn’t travel in one big pack if there are enemies around. We’ll attract more attention and get in each others’ way,'' Peach advised. Her eyes landed on Nadia’s fan. “And let’s keep an eye out for anything that might be of use in the junk, but be careful you all don’t put yourselves at risk of the monster below. And we may want to be careful about how much more noise and spectacle we make.” Though she managed to hide it, her heart beat like mad. This was not going to be easy, but they were going to make it through. “Let’s go.”
Navigate through a bizarre obstacle course of lost things, your route yours to decide. Keen eyes and opportunistic hands may find Paired Tools. Be wary of the nomes scrounging here and there. Move quickly but quietly, lest the hanging shadow descend 
