User blog:Weirdweirdweirdo/64pasta 2023: SMOG

My submission for the 2023 64pasta competition. Not connected to any of my previous ones, and minimal corrections, all I did was fix those red line typos as I noticed them. I also wrote it at midnight with minimal planning, so yea, have fun.

The
Jolly Roger Bay. You think it's a peaceful level? You're wrong. I am the only person to date to find this level's true nature. That is why I'm sharing it with you all today. You all thought Wet-Dry World was the creepy shit? You haven't seen nothing.

It started just a few days ago, when I was playing Mario 64 on an authentic Nintendo 64 I got from my dad. One of his friends worked at a company with some kind of partnership with Nintendo, so we were on "the list" to get the cool things, which is why I have this. Anyways...

I had played the game several times before over the years. I didn't long for anything more from it, I liked the game's simplicity. I was content with only having 121 stars to collect each time I played. But I guess the game decided to shake it up on me... Of course it did.

Up until now, Jolly Roger Bay had been my favorite level. It was such a fun and calming environment. The one off-putting thing about it was that weird fog in the first mission, so I always tried to race through it. And I had always found it weird there was some weird invisible ship in the air... And then the worst of both worlds hit me.

There were weird little... Weird little guys in the map. They weren't anything I recognized from a Mario game, but my memory of what exactly they looked like were foggy. Heh. Whatever. They were all commenting about the fog and looking for some kind of treasure.

I shrugged it off, assuming I triggered some weird easter egg like I've done before with the Aquarium Limbo, and collected the first Power Star exactly as I regularly would, and there was a weird black screen for a bit as a clock chimed. Did something happen to Tick Tock Clock?

No. I went back into JRB, and there was a fully animated and modeled ghost ship in the air. One of the NPCs were gone, and the fog was even worse. The others were saying that ghosts had descended and taken away "Barry" or something? I thought that was weird, but moved on, and I got the Unagi mission.

Another clock chime. Another NPC disappeared. The fog was worse. You could even see it in the sky. Earlier the ghost ship was pretty translucent and could be missed if you weren't looking at it, but it was more... Physical now, more opaque. Unagi was gone too, which I was honestly pretty happy about. I found the treasure, another clock chime.

The guy who wanted me to help find the treasure, Colorado or something, was gone. The ghost ship was more... Real, the fog was bigger. It was in the sky too. It was even poisonous too, so it was more like a smog. You could even see the NPCs coughing every now and then. Who thought this would fit in a children's game?

I completed the 4th and 5th missions, the effects got more intense. I don't need to keep reiterating. But the 6th one was completely replaced. "FEED THE SHIP". For a second, it just flashed "FEED ME" instead. What the Hell?

Everyone was gone. All the NPCs. All the enemies. Even the plants and clams. The smog was killing me even in the water, and the ghost ship was completely solid. The only idea I had was to use the cannon to shoot at the ship... It led to a subarea.

It was a sized-up version of the ship in the main part of the level. The music was the endless stairs theme, but somehow even more off-putting. Nobody was there, and I could go inside the area.

Everyone was there.

Everyone was dead.

They were covered in blood.

They were disemboweled.

I stood there horrified, but then some text popped up on the screen.

"I was so hungry for more. I couldn't stand my nonexistence. So I killed them all. I'm devouring them all. All I need is one more and I can escape this painting. I can escape into your world. Feed me."

Suddenly, the door to the outside of the ship was sealed off with that one weird box from the main level, and water & smog started filling up the room. I tried to break out by punching, kicking, diving into the door, it didn't work.

Mario died.

The game crashed. I can't get it to run anymore. I've been feeling weird too, though I can't tell if something's wrong or if I'm just on edge because of the game. My dad isn't acknowledging my presence either, but I assume he's just busy.

There's some smog outside.