Eclipsed Memories Portrait 16: The Booby Trap

This is the last portrait before the final battle, of which I have at least five planned for so far. I will probably not be able to put together quite as many pictures now, since my employer Rick Jones has called me in more days to tune his pianos and learn the piano technician trade.

This rather detailed digitized pencil sketch shows Peach's father, the Mushroom King, tied up in the center of a large chamber within Wart's fortress complex. This area was in truth a large booby trap, created to test the Princess' wisdom. Seeing the King there in the center of the room would surely bring out a desire for the Princess to go and set him free . . . only for the ground to collapse from beneath her feet and swallow her alive (like Korah and his followers in Numbers 16:31-33). This scenario could easily be made into a bad ending if this story were developed into an actual RPG. However, though the first impulse was to rush to his aid, Princess Peach was not that gullible. Running an entire government requires a lot of wisdom, and this wisdom saved Peach from an untimely demise. She sets off the trap with a large boulder and everyone watches the ground crumble before their eyes and into the precipice.

It's interesting to remark that, while I was putting this together, my dad told me about a YouTuber that posted videos of inventive mousetraps and rattraps. This portrait reminds me of trying to catch rats, for they are extremely intelligent rodents. The wisest of them have even learned how to set it off, using a simple tool such as a stick to activate it. The YouTuber then showed the viewer how to lull even the smartest of them to their demise by laying out a bunch of unset traps day after day until they develop a false sense of security. Then he set all the traps on a random day and woke up the next morning to discover a dead rat in every single one of them. However, don't expect such tricks to work if your victim is sentient, like in this picture.

This scene is found in Chapter 18 of the FanFiction edition of the story (www.fanfiction.net/s/13398828/…). By the way, for the sake of detail and clarity, the yawning chasm is not shown to scale. It would actually be much wider − too wide for any of them to cross over.