Brash Buster

Mack in Town, Part 0: Standing a Chance

(First written from May 22nd, 2021 to February 14th, 2022)

  1. Mack in Town, Part 0: Standing a Chance
    1. Glossary
    2. Story
    3. Afterword

Glossary

This section details various relevant parts of the story. Underlined entries have links to pages that explain them in further detail (including events that take place after this story).

  • Beaker: A character who debuted in the second season of the 1970s-1980s TV series The Muppet Show, and one of the eponymous “Muppets”. Introduced as the assistant of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, he demonstrates experiments from Muppet Labs, which often lead to him ending up in slapstick scenarios. While some of the other Muppets in the Chaos Zone are depicted as stronger and more otherworldly than in actual Muppet media, Beaker is directly based on official Muppet media.
  • Coins: The main currency in the Mario series.
  • Dr. Bunsen Honeydew: A character who debuted in the first season of the 1970s-1980s TV series The Muppet Show, and one of the eponymous “Muppets”. Various other Muppets appeared in Chaos Zone before him, and are depicted as stronger and more otherworldly than they are in actual Muppet media. Bunsen is depicted as otherworldly, but not necessarily stronger.
  • Dinosaur Land: The main location of the 1990 video game Super Mario World, and the home of the character “Yoshi”. Before this story, it was briefly taken over by an assorted group of characters, Mack being one of them, and Yoshi ended up having to stop them.
  • Fireproof Paper and Flammable Water: Creations of Muppet Labs, seen in Season 3, Episode 18 of The Muppet Show. Despite its name, Fireproof Paper is actually quite flammable.
  • Mack: A character from the 1996 video game Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. A robot built by Smithy, who has long since defected from him, wandering the world causing trouble aimlessly. His time both under Smithy and on his own has done harm to his reputation, with the Mushroom Kingdom and Dinosaur Land being two places of note that he terrorized. At the start of this story, he’s still bitter about losing a battle against the hedgehog-like “Metal Sonic” several months ago.
  • Muppet Labs: A company first mentioned in the 1970s-1980s TV series The Muppet Show, seemingly led by Dr. Bunsen Honeydew, with Beaker usually demonstrating their products. The Chaos Zone suggests Muppet Labs creates some of the same technology seen in The Muppet Show (such as fireproof water and flammable water), while also being more of an otherworldly force.
  • Mushroom Kingdom: The main location of the Super Mario series of video games. In the 1996 video game Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, Mack briefly took over the town.
  • The QCF: Besides what the story itself explains about this machine, its name is a pun on “Quarter-Circle Forward”, a way of describing a common button input in the “fighting” genre of video games, which the QCF (the machine) and its training regime is a reference to.
  • Room HtH: Besides what the story itself explains about this room, it is a reference to the mini-game “Helper to Hero” from the 2008 game Kirby Super Star Ultra, which consists of the player selecting a character to fight against several opponents in a row.
  • Smithy: A mechanical blacksmith from the 1996 video game Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, and the creator of Mack. His desire was to create a world of weapons, but Mack defected from him on poor terms after Smithy’s plans failed.

Story

(The story begins in an empty area, some time after Mack lost a fight with Metal Sonic)

(A few minutes later…)

(Cut to Mack and Bunsen standing outside “Room HtH”)

(Cut to some time later…)

(The story then cuts to outside the room the above section took place in: “Room QCF”)

(Later, back inside Room QCF…)

(The battle continues…)

(Just outside the room…)

(The story continues in Part 1)

Afterword

At the time that I started this writing, I had only used Mack two or three times in Chaos Zone, and had failed to give him any character besides being a troublemaker. Giving him an outlet to hone his fighting skills was my initial idea on how to develop him more (which might have been influenced by the generally fast-paced action-packed feel of Chaos Zone as a while when this plotline started).

Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker (from the Muppet franchise) being figures of mysterious power was me trying to play off a trend of many other writers of Chaos Zone, where similarly comedic characters (such as Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, or real-life actor Will Smith) would be all-powerful deities, sometimes acting wildly different from official media; Kermit the Frog (the star of The Muppets) had already been used in such a role, and Fozzie Bear (a fellow Muppet) had been alluded to in a similar fashion. As a genuine Muppet fan, I chose to give Bunsen and Beaker a vague high position of power while also trying to stay true to their characters in official Muppet media.

The idea of the “Quintessential Cyborg Fighter” was a tongue-in-cheek reference to the fighting game genre of video games; the design was lifted from a cyborg seen in Street Fighter II: The Movie: The Game (released in 1995), with its reactions to combat being based off what I knew about playing fighting games.

While I started this plotline with the intent of ending it once Mack had learned to fight, I felt dissatisfied when I actually got there, realizing that I hadn’t actually developed Mack’s personality; just because he was strong didn’t meant he was more than a troublemaker now. This is how I got the idea to give him a longer plotline, where he could explore the world and develop from proper interactions with characters. It’s also why I refer to this section of the story as “Part 0”; it’s technically relevant to the greater story, but was originally planned as a smaller story, with the greater scope of Parts 1-4 not being invented when this part started out.