Nobody Will Ever Look at Bananas in the Same Way Again
Peter
When Peter says yes, approximately five things happen at the same time.
Firstly, Fangirl unclips Snow White and Arya’s chains. Arya springs to her feet and helps free everyone else. Hermione shoots Fangirl with a flurry of questions, demanding who she is and why she’s helping them and how she got her eyeliner so neat (Peter might have misheard some of them. There’s kind of a lot going on right now). Fangirl squeezes Hermione in a hug so tight that all the words are knocked out of her, then beckons everyone to get in the kart.
Secondly, it finally crosses Harley Quinn’s messed-up mind that Fangirl is not just another race contestant. She shrieks orders at her stormtroopers to stop her or die trying, because the dinosaur buckaroo contest starts in five minutes. Middlingly, the crowd of party guests rush towards the racetrack in a blur of capes and fangs and swords. Second-to-lastly, one vampire has enough common sense to drop her plate of churros and fetch one of the ladders the stormtroopers used to reach the racetrack earlier. And fifthly, those churros smell so damn good that Peter’s tummy rumbles (ok, that’s maybe not quite as import as the other things. But baked goods are always worth noting).
Peter reckons they have about two minutes before the stormtroopers, vampires, and tech company billionaires scramble up the ladders and start shooting away at them.
Leia hovers over him, loose chains dangling from her handcuffs. Peter swerves so that the metal doesn’t smack into his face. Leia detaches the chains from the track with a satisfying clink! Peter clambers to his feet.
Fangirl is waiting in the driver’s seat. She toots the horn and yells, ‘get in, losers! We’re going escaping.’ Legolas and Leia both dive for the front seat, and there’s an awkward moment where neither of them wants to give it up or to be seen as nabbing it, but then Arya slips between them and claims shotgun instead. Leia and Legolas have to pile into the back next to Hermione and Snow White, shoving and elbowing each other. Peter tries to squeeze in next to Snow White. Hermione chucks a backpack onto Arya’s lap, but there’s still not enough space for Peter, so he climbs onto the back end of the kart. He’ll just have to hang on here and pray to whatever god is worshipped in this weird world that his spider-stickiness superpowers keep him from rolling off onto the road.
Fangirl presses something on a little white remote, and the engine roars to life. The back of the kart vibrates like the floor of a nightclub. ‘Ready?’ she calls.
Peter shouts ‘no,’ at the same time as everyone else calls, ‘yes.’
The kart surges forward. Peter clutches an exhaust pipe. The crowds below cry out and hurl anything they can at them – grenades, doritos, throwing stars – but most of their missiles don’t make it high enough to reach the racetrack. The faster the kart goes, the more the track swings from the ceiling, and the more wildly Fangirl veers from side to side. Peter wishes he had some travel sickness pills. The kart skids round a corner. Tyres screech against the metal. Legolas, Leia, Hermione all collide onto Snow White. They yell at each other, but their voices are drowned out by the thundering engine and shouting crowds. These karts really need seatbelts.
‘Hold on,’ Fangirl warns. Hold on has got to be one of the least helpful instructions you can give someone during a car chase. Like, what does she think Peter’s doing back here? Yoga on his tiptoes?
Peter raises his head enough to peer over the side of the track. Stormtroopers are climbing up the ladders, blasters strapped to their backs. To Peter’s surprise, Harley isn’t following them, but is shouting at what looks like a sentient toadstool in a waistcoat. Peter really hopes she’s giving him a mushroom risotto recipe, but doubts they’re that lucky.
They’ve almost driven across the whole hall. A few yards away, the racetrack vanishes into a shadowy corridor.
‘What the hell is through there?’ Leia demands. ‘More castle? More monsters? More parties?’ She hisses the word parties as if it were the vilest of all three things. Honestly, Peter doesn’t blame her.
Peter guesses they’re about to find out. The kart dives straight into the darkness. Peter waits for his eyes to adjust, expecting to see the silhouettes of dungeons or fiery lava lakes or equally hot vampires. But he can’t see anything beyond the kart. It’s like they’re floating in nothingness. Jaunty music plays out of nowhere.
Legolas demands, ‘what sorcery is this?’
‘I think… I think we’re being taken to the next level,’ Fangirl replies, ‘like, of Mario Kart.’
‘Next level?’ Peter wails, ‘I don’t know how to play Mario Kart. I don’t even want to learn to play Mario Kart. Animal Crossing takes up enough of my time as it is! And we can’t stay trapped in a video game forever. We’ve got a demon clown barbie to escape, and a Steven Spielberg to find, and all of fandom to save, and…’
‘We’ll be fine!’ Fangirl reassures him. ‘You just need to focus on not dying. I’ve so got this. I one spent, like, a whole summer playing Mario Kart. I win at everything but Rainbow Road, and everyone hates Rainbow Road, so it doesn’t really count, and…’
The words Rainbow Road echo, as if a dozen Fangirls were whispering to each other. Rainbow Road, Rainbow Road, Rainbow Road…
Fangirl turns pale. ‘Scrap everything I said. We’re doomed.’
The volume of the echoes rises. Rainbow Road, Rainbow Road…
‘Okay, I’m going to need all hands on deck,’ Fangirl continues, ‘because this is basically hell with sparkles. If you see a glimmery pink box, then you’ve got to grab it, unless it’s slightly more red than pink, in which case don’t grab it and try to get other people to grab it. And you’ve got to avoid all the bananas and shells unless you have already got a pink box and are holding a banana or shell behind you because that stops you from being hit by other shells unless it’s a blue shell in which case we’re all totally doomed. Got it?’
‘No,’ everyone replies unanimously.
The echoing voice is so loud that it’s no longer a whisper, but a hissy scream. Rainbow Road, Rainbow Road, RAINBOW ROAD.
The cheerful music stops, and Peter’s stomach flips like when a roller-coaster drops suddenly. He prepares to visit hell with sparkles.
The darkness lifts. Their kart is hemmed in by eight other cars and bikes, packed behind together like jenga blocks behind a chequered start line. A multi-coloured pathway twists and spirals and plummets through the star-studded inkiness of space, seemingly suspended by imagination instead of physics. The road glitters with a thousand colours sweeter than nature could ever come up with, as if someone had smeared the track with a thousand slushies, then put an Instagram filter on it. Peter spots the crimson of strawberry laces, the amber of lemon sherbets, the bottle green of toxic wastes, the rose of candy floss. Parts of the road are bordered by a golden railing, but others are exposed to the depths of space, and presumably a nasty painful death if you’re not an immortal cartoon.
A final three contestants materialise onto the track behind them – a stormtrooper in a stroller that’s way too small for him, a sentient mushroom in a tractor that’s way too big for him, and Harley Quinn astride a fuchsia pink motorbike.
Maybe it’s the adrenaline, or the shock. Or maybe Peter’s just seen so much weird stuff in the last two days that his standards of ‘weird’ have been lowered to the point that he no longer thinks oh my days what the hell was that my mind is so blown my whole understanding of the universe hath been chucked outeth the window, he just goes, sure.
Floating numbers begin counting down. Other carts rev their engines. Hermione is muttering, ‘so, if we drive too quickly we risk plummeting into space and we die, if we drive too slowly Harley will catch up with us and we die, if just about any other vehicle crashes into us, we probably die, and if we die all of fandom dies, and Harry and Ron dies, and…’
Someone must have thought that list too depressing to continue, because a claxon beeps. Engines roar to life, Fangirl releases a button on the remote, and each kart speeds ahead, bashing against each other in a blur of beeping car horns and screeching breaks and disturbingly happy music. The road plummets like a waterfall, and their kart plummets with it. Peter feels like his stomach stayed behind at the start line. A ghost’s bike smacks into back of their kart. Peter clings onto the boot tighter. An Italian guy with a moustache so twirly it lowkey borders on xenophobia is knocked off the road, and wails, ‘Mamma Mia!’ as he disappears into space. Funny, he sounds kinda like Star Lord.
Harley Quinn is stuck behind a pack of karts, but accelerating rapidly and narrowing the distance between her and Peter’s friends. She shakes the drinks tray which the sword and wand are webbed to. Hermione’s body tenses. Peter wonders if Harley is swatting a bug, before registering what Hermione already has – she’s trying to use the wans to cast magic. Gold sparks fly out the wand. Hermione gasps. ‘I hope she’s never studied Latin!’ Peter hopes that nobody has ever had to study Latin. Legolas draws his bow, elbowing Leia in the face. He releases an arrow, but it bounces right off the tyres. Whatever made these vehicles resistant to falling through outer space must make them immune to elf arrows too.
‘Glimmery pink boxes!’ Fangirl shouts.
Sure enough, the road ahead curves like waves, and is littered with glowing cubes. The contestants veer into each other as they each grab one. Some now hold tiny mushroom heads, some speed away surrounded by a halo-like glow, one morphs into a rocket and bulldozes its way into the distance. Arya and Leia lean over the edge to grab one. One slips past Leia’s fingers. She curses with frustration, and shoots the box twice for good measure. Arya manages to spear a box with one of Legolas’ arrows like a kebab skewer. She takes one look at it and chucks it to Peter. He has to roll across the boot to catch the box. The surface is jelly-like, and shimmers like a bubble.
Harley’s box pops and morphs into a stack of green turtle shells. Peter has no idea what they do, but the wicked gleam in her eye suggests he won’t like it. He holds his breath, waiting to find out what magic item they’ll get. Maybe one of the glowing stars or the massive rocket or…?
A banana.
Peter supposes he shouldn’t have expected their luck to suddenly do a U-turn. ‘Why do we need a banana?’ he calls to the front of the kart. ‘I swear my potassium levels aren’t important right now!’
Harley hurls her green shells, and they bounce off the railings, zig-zagging their way towards them.
‘Hold it out behind you,’ Fangirl yells.
‘He can’t lose his hand,’ Leia protests, ‘the web-making is his only useful power!’
‘Yeah,’ Peter agrees, ‘the web-making is my only useful… hey, hang on a moment…’ Peter would love the time to think of a snarky comment back, but he’s a smidge preoccupied by the green shell hurtling towards him. He holds the banana out behind the kart like a tail, closes his eyes, and prepares to break at least five bones. The shell smacks into the banana instead of the kart. Peter’s fingers remain intake. The second green shell rebounds off an archway and blasts like a cannonball into the stormtrooper’s stroller. The stormtrooper tumbles over the edge of the rainbow and falls into the nothingness of space.
Peter makes a mental note to add bananas to his grocery list before the next apocalypse prevention quest some adult forces him to go on. They’ve gotta be way more effective against alien invasions than the Captain America shield is, like, half the time!
Legolas stares at the railing. ‘And you people… you play this game for amusement? For relaxation?’ He shakes his head, mumbling something like ‘foolish humans,’ ‘Frodo would never’ and ‘breakfast potatoes’.
The road splits into a figure-of-eight shape. Fangirl twists the remote as far as she can, and the kart swerves up onto the edge of it. Peter’s teeth bang against each other. He lifts his head up, and sees a ghost topple over the edge. Fangirl is now in 1st place. Peter grins. Who would have thought that devoting days of your life to a stupid video game could turn out to be such a vital investment?
Fangirl shouts over the thundering engines, ‘so, where are we going?’
‘As far from here as physically possible?’ Hermione suggests. Her knuckles are white from gripping her seat.
‘Like, generally? What’s the next stop? Ride dragons through space? Fight zombie Disney princesses in Hogwarts?’ Her face lights up. ‘Ooh, do I get to meet the Avengers? Can I pretty please meet the…?’
Legolas cuts her off. ‘It is of the utmost significance that we find an inter-storyworld teleportation device that serves as some form of connection between stories so that we can return to the mortal realm and the hall of He Who Knows Everything, in order to…’
‘PORTAL TO STEVEN SPIELGERG,’ Peter translates. Before he can summarise why or how the hell his life has got to this point, he notices a rising whirring noise. A new turtle shell, with the spikes of a medieval mace (scary) and the wings of a pigeon (less scary) is zooming through the air in a stream of blue light. Harley and her magic mushroom friend are just metres behind them. She gives Peter a cheery wave with her non-webbed hand, like, yoo hoo!
‘Good news?’ Snow White asks hopefully.
‘Err,’ Fangirls voice has suddenly gone up an octave, ‘well, it’s not exactly an ideal thing to happen at any time, but there is a possibility we might not die on impact, and might just be caught by Harley Quinn, or…’
The shell hovers over their kart for a moment, then explodes. Blue light blinds him. Their kart is catapulted into the air. Peter clings onto the boot for dear life. As the blueness fades, Peter can glimpse the pink of Harley’s bike zooming past them. Snow White sobs, Leia yells obscenities, Hermione pukes over the edge, and Fangirl shouts, ‘RESTART!’
Everything pauses. The shell, the other racers, the irritatingly happy music – everything. The kart is suspended a metre above the road. Harley’s expression is frozen mid-shout, like someone has taken a badly-timed photo of her.
‘Oh my days, that actually worked,’ Fangirl gushes, ‘I didn’t think it would but it’s how my friend’s cheating sister used to cope with blue shells.’
Golden letters float in mid-air, spelling out ‘restart race,’ ‘back to race,’ ‘select new race’ and ‘exit game.’
‘Exit game?’ Arya’s voice is the most excited Peter has heard it. ‘We could leave hell with sparkles just like that?’
Hermione wipes her mouth on her silk train and nods eagerly.
Fangirl lifts her eyebrows and opens her mouth to speak, then hesitates. Peter knows that face. It’s the I’ve-had-an-ingeniously-stupid-idea-but-I’m-scared-these-people-will-judge-me-for-it face he sees in his mirror.
‘Go on, tell us your plan,’ Peter encourages.
‘We could get drowned or exploded or stabbed or digested, but I promise it’ll be really fun until then. And it might even work!’ She glances nervously at the others’ reluctant expressions. Hermione turns pale like she might vomit again. ‘Look, I know I can’t use a sword or the Force, and I never had the luck to get a Hogwarts letter or be bitten by a radioactive spider, and I have way more acne and flab than any movie character, and I can’t stop spam mail from invading my inbox, let alone monsters from invading my kingdom. But I promise you that I know Fandom better than anyone hero you will help, and any villain you will fight. You say portals are made from loopholes between fandoms? Nobody is better at finding connections between their fandoms better than I am. Trust me, I would have wayyyyy more friends if I wasn’t so good at it and wasn’t connecting everything in a conversation back to my favourite books every five minutes to the point of near-universal irritation.’
‘Peter…’ Legolas warns.
He ignores the elf. If Legolas is so keen on Thy Mighty Deadpool’s prophetic powers and on Peter being the quest’s leader, then he’ll just have to get used to having a madman in the driver’s seat. ‘Do it,’ Peter says in his best Emperor Palpatine voice.