Once upon a time…
At the century’s largest salesman convention, a foul-smelling fatty was peddling his precocious potted plant. With very little luck that day, and surrounded by hundreds of other sellers and their wares, he was feeling spiteful and angry, and stumbled into a fight with a vacuum cleaner salesman after an argument escalated. His carnivorous, sentient, vicious vine could move anywhere and it could even double as a leafy leaf blower. It was much, much better than a little pink blob that could suck things – no matter how much sucking it could do! But in the row that ensued, the man and his plant blew up the vacuum cleaner and killed its owner, quite by accident. He fled into the eaves of the castle, the sinister scrub trailing behind.
This castle, rented by the world-wide association of salespeople for their annual convention, was a zen affair nestled in the richly thicketed mountains of Japan. From the highest floor, the view of the afternoon sun propped by the distant peaks was as breathtaking as the tubby, terrified product placer’s realization that his sin had been witnessed by two vigilantes dealing more than justice: an experienced woman selling toy robots, wearing a bright yellow dress, and a fresh young sales-swords-man with a catalogue of utility chimps. The stylish sellers rooted, er, routed the petulant plant, but the frightened fatso killed them, too, and escaped. The robot and the monkey were left mangled and useless. Wheezing, the escaped death-dealer fled again, and delved into the wilderness beyond the castle, deeply forested, to escape from his crime and his past life.
Up, up high in those deep green forests which shroud the mountains of Japan, that fat man stumbled and wheezed as he hauled his stubby legs away from the luxurious Edo-styled castle on the mountainside, glowing and now hazy in the clementine-flavored sunset. Behind him were three dead bodies, four shattered samples, and one very dead career. Blobby pink vacuum cleaners, laser-launching toy robots, eerily-grinning utility chimps, his grinning leafy greens—three sales people peddling their little inventions. Three lives he’d stolen in one blind moment of rage, after that one sucker had laughed at his potted pet plant portfolio. He’d come to the salesman convention, all the way to this cedar-scented wilderness, all the way from from Europe, all to make a name for himself and his multi-purpose potted plants. Now it was all wasted, along with his best red suit, now covered in sap, tatters, and tears.
Meanwhile, in a rustic dojo not too far away…
A blond-haired man in a metal-plated ball-cap was sitting, dejected, on the old dilapidated dojo steps. His muscles glistened as he sighed and pulled his miniature ponytail through his hand: an old habit. The jet-coiffed, olive-skinned old Master was insistent that the future Master of the dojo would be the Master’s grandson, another black-haired tan man. Time and time again, the melancholy blonde boy had triumphed over the grandson, his rival: his bouts were clean, his heart was pure, his hat was quite sharp. He had dedicated his life to impressing his Master, but to no avail. Anger swelled within him.
Suddenly, something tubby stepped into view, hugged (just barely) by the setting sun. A familiar-looking man with a red hat and blue overalls and a foreign letter on his brow. And a few scrapes and cuts, the evidence of a long journey.
“My god!” said the young man, leaping to his feet in Japanese. Before him stood a squat figure, and as the plum-colored light glimmered on a spectacular mustache, the young man realized exactly who it was that had graced his master’s dojo. “Mario! It is you, isn’t it?”
“There are some who would call me by that name,” said Wario, after a pause.
Suddenly, from inside the building came a horrible cry, a fastball from hell in the pitch of a squealing demon, and an equally horrendous scream. The two capped crusaders rushed inside to find the dojo’s Master, an ancient, prune-like man, whose shriveled appearance was unnervingly unset by leathery black wings which sprouted from incredibly muscular shoulders. After a furious and senseless fight where the geezer gutted his own grandson, the tubby man and the blonde man thoroughly destroyed both of the dark men and decided they may as well take over the dojo as well: for, during the fight, Wario had discovered a technique he wished to study: the power of the Big Fist.
Wario and Terry (which was his name) restarted the dojo as a pair of mixup-masters, and sent out a call for recruits. Alas, the only applicants were mere misfits: a weird humanized hedgehog from Korea, a psychic boy who longed to improve his physical strength, and a creature so disgusting it will not be described here. In a remarkably destructive demonstration, the miniature esper thrashed the two other applicants and was welcomed as the Big Dojo’s first starry-eyed student.
After some months of training, the Big Dojo attend a world-wide tournament held on a private island. Master Big (his secret moniker) felt a big anxiety about the potential of big popularity if they won, but settled nonetheless into his big, cushy first-class chair. He dozed, surprisingly daintily for a man of his great girth.
And woke up when he was blasted from his seat by a nigh-explosive punch, out of the plane and almost out of the tentative cradle of life. Fingers digging into the slick metal wings, he assessed his own terror as a blank-faced robotic doll, a fine-tuned trainer turned terminator, climbed from the flimsy fuselage, trailed by a fine-faced young woman, a smarmy young fellow and a sleek geezer. This was a hit team sent by the sales people in revenge for his sales sins, and they brought big business. Unfortunately for them, business was bad and they fell to the Big Fist and his best blonde friend, who dusted his palms after the fight, eyes gleaming, knowing that his friend was hiding a complicated past. They arrived at the tournament as planned, a little unnerved but thoroughly warmed up.
In the junior division, the psychic boy was teamed up with a young sword-wielding lad in a silly outfit, and they barely survived their final bout against a thick-headed swordsman and the real danger, a furry, Korean creature who became stronger and brighter the more he was hurt. The fight climaxed as the sun crested the sky, and while the sunlight glittered off of fighting mats and sea foam, the two young men clasped palms in victory as the canine catastrophe howled into the chasm below the arena.
The swordsman with the silly hat felt his heart grow big with camaraderie, and was soon initiated as the fourth member of the Big Dojo.
But the sensational victory of this slick new school in the students’ tourney did not stop with that final fracas. In the heated final match of the Masters’ tournament, the two cap-wearing Big Dojo leaders squared off against another terrible pair: two Korean mutant animal creatures: a bird with a gun and a dog with a bag of bombs. It was an incredibly close fight, but the two cap-wearers won thanks to the humongous power of the Big Jutsu fighting style championed by the fat master, and the explosive power of its most secret move.
The celebratory newspaper photograph caught the attention of Mario, the President of the United States of America. Mario is angry, very angry, furious that this impostor is using his image for personal gain – for even though he never admits it, the fat man has never outright denied his masquerade as Mario. The Japanese cannot tell Europeans from Americans, and though no one ever asserted that the massive Master is President Mario of the USA, the man’s chubby charisma, with his wink and his smile, would make them think: “Maybe…”
And so, bristling with pride and wrath, the President invited the whole of the Big Dojo to the white house, ostensibly to award them a Presidential Medal of Might and Merit. But immediately upon initiating a suspiciously silent ceremony, Mario and his entourage attacked the dojo delegates in full presidential regalia: Super President Mario; his brother Secretary of State Luigi; First Lady Peach in a gold-plated dress; and the commander of the armed forces: Captain Falcon. In the melee, Wario was horribly battered, but—thanks to the heroism of the two youngest dojo members, who tagged in to take on that blue-collar commander and his atrocious advisors—the President’s whole cabinet was laid to waste in the secret fighting rooms behind the oval office.
When everything was settled, Terry said: “Now we’re in trouble, what are we going to do if the President is seen to be missing?”
And Wario looked around and said: “The President is right here.”
On the third term of his presidency, President Mario of the USA changed. He got bigger, for one. He adopted a new policy that encompassed his entire country: Make Things Bigger. He made taxes bigger. He made the deficit bigger. He made the military bigger. He made the roads, the homes, the people of the country bigger. He made every state a little bigger, especially Florida. He made the country bigger by annexing Canada and Mexico. He made the presidential term limit bigger. He made his cabinet bigger. He added thirty more judges to the supreme court. He asked the Legislature: How do I make the constitution bigger? His new amendment was the biggest yet, and made the freedoms and liberties of the American people much bigger. The private sector was furious that government interference got bigger, but they couldn’t complain because the American economy was so much bigger too. Even the dollar got a little bigger. People said it was just a big re-election campaign, but they also said: America has never been so big.
This went on for quite a while, and the President decided he wanted to accomplish something no one had ever done before. He wanted to make the planet bigger. But he wasn’t sure exactly how—maybe make humanity bigger, maybe make the scope of human civilization bigger. His favorite idea was really to make the planet bigger, and so this led into a cross scientific enterprise plus peace meeting at Shadow Moses Island in Antarctica, a neutral zone, with the new country of New Zealand Korea: Shadow Moses Island, where representatives from both countries were collaborating on research that would make the planet itself a little bit bigger.
Now, I need to tell you something important about the history of New Zealand Korea, or NZK. NZK had actually sent delegates to Shadow Moses Island in the hopes that the President would come himself, and then the delegates would kill him. NZK had been founded by salespeople: the very same salespeople who had found three dead bodies and a torn-up plant at the top of an old castle, all those years ago, and wept and howled and had vowed revenge with one-hundred percent interest, compounded yearly. New Zealand Korea was a country steeped in caffeine-free sin, and came about like this:
All those years ago, some months after the great fighting tournament on some forgettable island, two spec-ops salespeople, dedicated but nigh-forgotten, submitted their final report on the twin tragedies connected to one wide load. One of these was a tough, buff old man, about six feet tall and heavily muscled, who sold very good hairpieces. The other was a mysterious woman covered in black armor, who sold artificial intelligence software. Were not their hearts both bundled in maximum-security attaches, perhaps they could have loved each other… but the cost of love is hard to squeeze onto a balance sheet.
This pair of partners had known the agents sent to dispatch Wario on the way to the island tournament, and had seen later, after bitter and baffling radio silence, that the President of the United States of America actually turned into the very man who had wronged them, this ingratiating fatso whose cursed hands must still drip with ichor. Action Item One and Only was approved with astounding alacrity, all expenses billable: they would need to destroy the US of A, and would need backing from a whole nation of their own to do it.
And so from their base on that same island, the salespeople decided to take over New Zealand as a way to start their new empire. New Zealand was easy to storm into because only the Prime Minister, who was a young attractive woman with multiple personalities and hair colors, lived in the capital. At the time of their operation, she was having a peace meeting on top of a mountain with an extremely black aboriginal and some kind of poisonous frog. The two black-hearted hate-hockers invited themselves in and unexpectedly stole the allegiance of the aboriginal, who himself slaughtered the prime minister and pledged on behalf of the whole aboriginal population to serve the sales force. They toasted over high-dropped frog legs.
Next, the new government of New Zealand decided that in order to take on the USA, they would need nukes, and the best way to get nukes was to take over North Korea. But they also needed manpower to run their new country, and needed super-sleaze agents who could schmooze entire countries, so they went to hell to ask Satan for help—salespeople are of course good friends with Satan. The two hell-divers stepped through a flaming portal and in hell, they petitioned Satan, a giant scaly beast, for assistance and succor. Satan granted them the powers of two barbaric demons: a big evil turtle thing and a big evil dragon-lizard thing, both fire-breathing hellspawn, after the salespeople defeated them in combat. Satan also restored the man’s red-haired youth in exchange for a really excellent hairpiece.
Staying in the shadows as all salespeople do, they sent their demons on an air-drop mission to North Korea, and after fighting off an aerial defense force of semi-psychic furry humanoid experiments, the creatures crash-landed in the castle of the glorious leader of Korea: King Kim Jong K. Rool, a big fat evil crocodile who was waited on by two more anthropomorphized super-soldier servants. One was a fox (with a gun), one was a wolf (with a gun), and both were cousins of the Korean delegation who had been sent to the martial arts tournament: the bird (with a gun) and the dog (with some bombs). How small the world is! If only the two parties had been privy to their shared interests—perhaps a King K. Kontract could have been drawn up. Instead, Kim Jong K. (for Korea) Rool, strung up and sliced up, bled out all over his beautiful carpets, which never rolled up quite right after that.
Now having taken the country of Korea, the salespeople spun a deal with South Korea, allowing the two long-separated countries to join together once again with the demilitarized zone becoming a New Zealand territory. It was really all under the same government, but the borders were open between the three regions; the terrible reign of Kim Jong K. Rool was over; and everyone in the Koreas finally started to calm down. The little strip of “New Zealand” was a wonderful little buffer area. The demons were also sent over to Australia to take it over, but it was really only some animals over there and everyone kind of forgot about it. The nation of New Zealand Korea was born that day, covered in the blood of the old king. Now the salespeople had nukes, a powerful military, and lots of empty land to send all of their future American prisoners.
Now, back to the present. Back to Shadow Moses Island.
The portly President of the USA was no fool, and sensed danger from this up-and-coming military country. He sent his two young champions to the island instead of going there himself, where they clashed with none other than that same aboriginal ambassador and an evil assistant. The Americans tasted victory, but the revelations from that cursed conference echoed outwards: now, in the bloody aftermath, it was obvious that the hazy, blood-orange horizon glimmering over Shadow Moses portented a great war.
As the first act of a diabolical play, NZK sent an invasion force to the biggest American state: Florida, which the President had made the biggest and a little straighter and thicker for obvious reasons. Since America’s guard was obviously up, the sinister salespeoples’ goal was to blow the state to smithereens by sneaking in a nuclear device disguised as a regular old robot. Two escorts brought the bot to an island outside of Miami, but were heroically interrupted by some of the greatest American heroes ever: Florida Man (a thick-set brawler with a mullet and a perpetual smirk, who wears his bathrobe all day outside), Florida Boy (a blond-haired pretty boy who runs around in swim trunks), and Skater Girl Who Wears a Beanie All the Time Even Though it’s Really Hot Outside (who does that very thing). The hit squad bit the dust and the heroes reported to the President: an act of war had been committed on American Soil. And so grimly the president said: “Heroes, go strike back at New Zealand Korea.”
The next piece of communication to the President was one that blackend his brow: Florida Man, Florida Boy, and Skater Girl Who Wears a Beanie All the Time Even Though It’s Really Hot Outside had all been slain in New Zealand Korea by more mutant animals custom-commissioned to be weapons of war. The president crushed the communique in his fist. His big fist. President Wario stared at his fist a long time, and then sighed. He picked up his cherry-red phone-shaped phone, monogrammed with a slick “NKZ” (his adopted son had mistaken how monograms work), and dialed directly the head government office of New Zealand Korea. The president said: “Let’s finish this fight. Four versus four, televised to the whole planet. On the moon.”
The battle on the moon, upon whose outcome the course of nations and the whole world would be set.
At the appointed hour, the whole population of the entire planet looked to the sky and the future. And what they saw was exactly what the President of the United states had wanted: they saw the beloved hero Mario (older and stouter with age); his Vice President, Terry, with his famous metal-brimmed cap; and the President’s two adopted sons, who had become staunch, strong-hearted defenders of the American way as they had grown up: the young psion had channeled his psychic power into fiery explosive punches, had trained his body earnestly and with dedication over the years, and had pulled round him the massive mantle of the Commander of All Armed Forces. The awkward young man who flailed with a trainee’s sword at the martial arts tournament all those years ago had crafted an impossibly fine blade as his partner, and stood now, in fighting stance, with that weapon well-balanced in his hand.
On the other side of the view screen stood four terrifying figures representing the young, violent country of New Zealand Korea, whose nightmarish initials stood simply for sin: those two twisted salespeople: one who had re-gained his original age, gray and angry; one who had never lost any age at all, and who now could not remove her power armor lest her whole body crumble, but who was still incredibly deadly. And behind them skulked two ageless, demonic figures, still dripping with spittle and evil and shadow.
It was a furious battle. The NZK forces where a whirlwind of years of hatred and eons of sin, but the Americans had a leader. The President had learned that the biggest fist of all is the one that is guided by a big brain, and in the greatest deal of his life—for, despite the fate of nations in the balance, it was his precious fighting family that were biggest now in his heart—President Wario dealt a flawless victory in the greatest battle the world had ever seen. Unbelievably, the NZK fighters, their forces of will twisted into a bloated lance, forged over flaming years of desperate hatred, failed to steal even one precious life from America’s fighting force.
In the aftermath, with none of the country’s leaders left alive, the ministers of New Zealand Korea hurriedly signed an annexation treaty from which blossomed the Big United States of America, and as the years passed the BUSA grew to cover the whole planet and then, later, grew bigger still. And so it went for many generations…