Desert Truck

            “Shit, man,” Green Koopa Troopa groaned, squirming uncomfortably in the passenger seat of the eighteen-wheeler Red Koopa Troopa was driving.  “It’s too hot.  Where are the ice flowers?”

            “In the glove box,” Red Koopa Troopa said, his eyes half-open but still fixed on the road.  “But we used them all when we drove through World 6.”

            Green Koopa Troopa groaned even louder, flailing his floppy yellow arms in frustration.  Excess sweat in his shell sloshed out, instantly evaporating in the dry desert heat of World 2.  “World 6 is the ice world.  Why the fuck did we use the ice flowers in the ice world?”

            “I don’t know.”  Red Koopa Troopa checked his mirrors.  Nobody else was driving through the straight, barely-visible sandy road through the endless dunes, just as it had been for the past seven hours.  “Okay, we’re clear to pull over.  I need to take a leak.”

            “You know what, that’s a good idea,” Green Koopa Troopa said.  “I have an experiment I need to do anyway.”  Red Koopa Troopa didn’t reply, despite years of lab-partner experience as evidence that Green Koopa Troopa was not somebody who should be performing experiments of any kind.  He was busy trying to figure out where the white line at the side of the highway was, which proved difficult due to everything being covered in sand.  He sighed, resigning himself to eyeballing it, and gradually slowed the truck to a stop.

            Red Koopa Troopa walked a good three screens away from the truck before relieving himself.  He knew it was a little silly of him—after all, Green Koopa Troopa would not only pee right in front of their truck when he needed a break, but would often call Red Koopa Troopa over to see how many letters of his name he’d managed to write—but he just couldn’t pee when he thought he was being watched.  It’s why he had to transfer from the Ghost House so quickly.

            When Red Koopa Troopa walked back to the truck, rapidly rubbing his hands together as though the friction and heat was a substitute for some nice hand sanitizer, Green was laying on his back, staring at the sun with a deadened look on his face.  He had even kicked his tiny green shoes off, using his bare feet to gently tap the ground so he could rock back and forth on his shell.  “I knew it,” he croaked.  “I was right.  Look at the sun, Red.”  Red Koopa Troopa sighed, glancing skyward.  As expected, the sun was full, bright, and furious, its brow furrowed in a glare and its teeth bared in a vicious snarl.

            “I see it,” Red Koopa Troopa said.  “It looks the same as the last time I came here.”

            “Yeah.  It’s really warm and really angry.  I get scared and overheated from looking at it.”  Green Koopa Troopa looked at Red Koopa Troopa, eyes wide.  “And it’s actually cooler out here than it is in the truck.  The truck is hotter than the desert.”

            “Maybe that’s why we used all the ice flowers, even though it was cold out,” Red Koopa Troopa said.  “When you’re driving a truckload of lava, it’s hot wherever you are.” He nudged Green Koopa Troopa with a red shoe.  “C’mon, get ready to go.  I need to climb up and see how the cargo’s doing, and then we’re back in the car.”

            Green Koopa Troopa immediately started whining, but Red Koopa Troopa ignored him, clumsily climbing up the ladder to the top of the eighteen wheeler.  As before, the boxcar they were hauling, a massive rectangle of smooth, black rock, was almost completely filled with molten earth, glowing a dull red and so hot sand particles the wind blew into it simply sparked and vanished.  The heat dried up Red Koopa Troopa’s eyes, so he could only bear to look for a few seconds before climbing back down, but it looked like there hadn’t been any spills or leaks.  “We’re good,” he coughed, hobbling down the ladder.

            “How far are we?”  Green Koopa Troopa had hopped into the driver’s seat.  Startled, Red Koopa Troopa climbed into the passenger’s seat.

            “Is my shift up already?”

            “You have maybe forty minutes, but if I’m going to be stuck here, I’d rather be doing barely anything than doing nothing.”

            “Gotcha,” Red Koopa Troopa said, thankful for the break.  His eyes were still tearing up from looking at the lava, so he wasn’t looking forward to driving again.  “Also, we’re two hours away, I think.”

            “Blech.  That’s not too bad.”  Green Koopa Troopa floored the accelerator, and the truck lurched to life, speeding down the road well above Red Koopa Troopa’s preferred zero-to-four mph above the speed-limit rule of thumb.  “You know who have it fucking made?”

            Red Koopa Troopa smiled.  They’d had this conversation before, and it was always a fun topic to revisit at the end of a long drive.  “Who,” he asked.  “Is it the Koopa Troopas in World 8?”

            “The Koopa Troopas in World 8,” Green Koopa Troopa repeated.  “They go to work, get assigned to lava management, and they have to take lava aaaaaaaaall the way from the volcano to the pipe system directly hooked up to the castles at the base of the volcano.  Twenty minutes, both ways.  Poor babies.”

            “Meanwhile,” Red Koopa Troopa said, “Bowser’s bastard children and the Boom-Boom guys and whatnot, they see Bowser’s awesome lava castle and go ‘oh gosh, I want one of those too,’ and—“

            “And Bowser says yes!”  Green Koopa Troopa was really getting into it now; Red Koopa Troopa could see him fighting the urge to honk the truck’s horn in frustration.  “He says, ‘sure, let’s waste thousands of hours and millions of coins loading trucks with lava and driving it to World 1.  The very first castle in territory we just invaded, the first place the, the fucking, Benizio brothers—“

            “Mario brothers.”

            “Yeah, them.  The first place we’ll lose when the war that always happens happens.  That’s a great idea.  Waste the resources we could be using for supply lines and more soldiers to prevent sieges, or a campaign to win the hearts and minds of the toads.  Nah, those are stupid ideas.  Let’s keep doing the thing that fails literally every time.”

            “Not like lava is even the only obstacle,” Red Koopa Troopa said, staring out the window.  Through the swirling sands, he could make out a poor, unfortunate pokey, segments wiggling desperately, sinking into a dark-brown blotch of quicksand.  “There’s resources available in World 2 they could use instead of lava.”

            “Yeah, yeah! Exactly! World 2 has sand, why not make some spikes out of that? Get some super-hot sand that you have to walk through barefoot? Quicksand? Sandstorms?”

            “All good ideas,” Red Koopa Troopa said, “and there’d be less lava-based accidents in the workplace.”

            “Oh, don’t even get me started…”

            Red Koopa Troopa did get him started, and the two ranted and complained in high spirits until they parked near the gates of World 2’s castle, a square, grey mass breaking the infinitely extending landscape of sand.  Their spirits fell when the castle’s foreman, a goomba hopping around in a comically oversized green shoe, refused to let them unload the lava.

            “We’ve been driving for fifty hours,” Green Koopa Troopa yelled, “with lava.”  He gestured pointedly at the giant, smoking boxcar behind him, as though the goomba had somehow missed it.  “We don’t have any housing here; our union requires a week’s notice on that kind of thing.  What, are we supposed to sleep in our truck when the freezing desert night shows up?”

            “Oh, poor you, the union that you have won’t help because you didn’t plan ahead,” the goomba responded in a surprisingly deep, gravelly voice.  “Thanks to the Reznor Court, us goombas aren’t allowed to unionize anymore.  That means half my guys don’t have insurance, so I ain’t letting them unload any hazardous materials until we can get the proper equipment.  So unless you see some Lakitu clouds and titanium-string fishing lines around here, I don’t think this is going anywhere.”

            Red Koopa Troopa sighed.  Like Green Koopa Troopa, he desperately wanted to drop the lava off and get to their hotel in World 3.  But at the same time, he didn’t want to put dozens of goombas at risk of bankruptcy because some stupid rhinos on a ferris wheel decided they shouldn’t be able to pay for extra lives.  “Okay, look,” he said.  “This lava’s going to cool down in maybe twelve hours if we don’t get it into the pit with the heated walls.  Then we’ve got a giant rock, and I don’t think Boom-Boom is going to believe that Mario will have trouble jumping over a rock.  Then we all lose our jobs, and probably a few of us get squashed or fed to piranha plants or something.  And that’s not good.”

            “Yeah, I guess doing nothing won’t cut it,” the goomba admitted.  “But what can we do?”

            Green Koopa Troopa looked at Red Koopa Troopa pointedly.  “We could take all that talk, all those words, and do something real with them.”

            Red Koopa Troopa blinked, eyes wide with fright.  This was disobeying their bosses, the union, and nearly every law there was about driving eighteen-wheelers full of lava.  But as he looked at the goombas milling in front of the castle, several with missing eyes and squashed, malformed heads from having to support too much weight, he realized Green Koopa Troopa was right.  There wasn’t another option in this situation.  “We’re going to need a lot of sand,” he said.

            The castle fell three days later.  Mario waltzed in with a cape and murdered everybody, flying over most of the obstacles, and fracturing Boom-Boom’s skull three times before he touched the ground.  But to Red Koopa Troopa and Green Koopa Troopa, excitedly watching and re-watching the news, that wasn’t important.  That was just garnish on the real story: security footage that shoed Mario trying, and failing, to jump over the sand-spikes, they’d had built, and briefly losing his cape before getting a new one eight seconds later.  “This is what it feels like,” Green Koopa Troopa said, turning off the TV just before the news showed Mario immediately recovering from the minor inconvenience they had participated in.  “This is what it means, Red.  We made a difference.”