𝕀 𝕨𝕚𝕤𝕙 𝕀 𝕨𝕒𝕤 𝕝𝕚𝕜𝕖 𝕪𝕠𝕦 ◎ SMG4 (gender neutral) reader insert

1: what the hell

I awoke on the ground. Sitting up, I blinked a couple times, shaking off weariness and the last of the urge to go back to sleep. I looked around with unseeing eyes when it hit me.

I was on the ground. Outside.

I shot up like an arrow. The more I looked at my surroundings, the less I recognized them, and the more wrong they looked.

I was in a small forest, in something generally resembling a clearing. The grass was short, almost like it was mowed, and the shrubbery was sparsely distributed in even, little growths in unusual places. The trees, at first looked normal. But the more I stared, panicked, into the green, I realized how goddamn similar they looked. Their branches, stems, bark, hell, even leaves looked eerily similar, with one tree just being a rotated copy of the next.

I felt light-headed. Probably from the hyperventilating I was doing. A path started to form beneath me as I paced, back and forth, trying to figure out how the hell I got into the middle of nowhere overnight. Snooping around the area yielded no results, just more of those uncanny trees. On the brink of tears, I just picked a direction and ran.

My stamina soon ran out, and my run was reduced to a jog was reduced to a crawl. Pain shot through my ankles, my lungs screamed for air, my vision began to cloud. But I kept going. It couldn't get much worse than this. The world wasn't real, didn't feel real. I was hopelessly lost, and even if I somehow found civilization, there was no way I was finding my way home.

The forest cleared. No subtle transition into a field. No fences, no bushes. Before me stood a large castle, surrounded by an idyllic little park with crystal clear water in it's moat. I turned around. Like everything else, the gradient from forest to park seemed artificial. Computer generated. Well, at least it was a sign of life, I thought.

Something kept nagging me. A feeling, like deja vu, tapped my shoulder every once in a while. Hey, look at that shrub, it said. You know this from somewhere, just like that stained glass window, it said. I ignored it. I had to stay focused on figuring things out. I had to.

As I began to reach the drawbridge (rather a pretty regular bridge) of the castle, the door burst open. Out of it, something ran, no, scuttled, at breakneck speeds and directly in my direction. I yelped and jumped aside as the thing just narrowly missed me. It screeched to a halt, with a sound like grinding metal, and as it got up I realized it wasn't an it, but a they. As they turned around, I saw that, to my confusion and probably shock, it was-

"MARIO!!"

A voice rang out, sharp and annoyed, somewhere within the castle. The video game character looked around, almost like an idle animation, and only then did he notice me. His face, with a comedically large mustache, lit up with excitement, or mischief. I couldn't tell. "WHO ARE YOU??? ARE YOU HERE TO BRING MARIO SPAGHETTI???", he yelled, running up so close to me I could feel his breath. Well, he actually said something along the lines of  "Mama mia! Ahahahahaa! Spaghetti!!", yet somehow I understood what he meant. I blinked. "Uh. I'm-...I'm not here to deliver anything I'm just confused, I don't know where I am-" Mario interrupted me with something I can only describe as a loud thinking noise, before his face distorted and he shrugged: "Well, if you don't have spaghetti, you're useless to Mario!" With that, he walked straight past me, back into the park.

It took me a second to come to. "Wait!" My voice shook. Mario turned around, and looked at me expectantly. The cogs were turning in my head. I had to convince this guy to help me somehow. "If... If you help me find out where I am, I'll... Cook you some spaghetti carbonara?" There was a prolonged silence, before the plumber made a very loud "YIPPEE!" noise, once again invading my personal space. "WHY DIDN'T YOU SAY SO BEFORE?? Come on, Mario will show you to SMG4, he will find where you're from!"

With that, I was dragged into the sprawling castle. I think something inside me died that day.

■□■□■□■□■

A/N

Words: 736
Sloppy beginning. Not proofread. I'm working on ibuprofen and a dream right now. Leave suggestions, or don't. The fun stuff will take a little bit. Hopefully I am being believable but also silly. Mario deserves to be an eldritch horror.