Dislcaimer and Notes: Super Smash Bros. and all involved games and characters belong to Nintendo. No profit is sought, blah, blah, blah.

This is a storyline that I've roleplayed out on AIM/Trillian with my buddy, Blender, to try to work out my base-ideas. The storylines we created became interesting. It borrows from an idea I've used before: "Heaven for Heroes" was my very first Smash Bros. fan fiction and dealt with the "Smash as Valhalla" concept in a far different way. This is a story without any planned ending, just a "meandering tale" playing with non-canon idea about a setting, for as many arcss as we have thought and can think of. As always, my focus will be on characters that I currently know and am interested in. (Mainly The Legend of Zelda, Kid Icarus and Fire Emblem: Awakening). For fair warning for shippers and anti-shippers: This story set will contain Link x Lucina, which my friend and I have dubbed "Lunk."

Spoilers for various games apply, especially those listed.

TALES OF THE WAY-STATION

1: Trying to Seize Peace with a Sword

The wind combed the grass on the hills as a lone man sat with his back against it, his sword and his shield resting beside him. The land was big and the Mansion was confining. As huge as the Hands' Smash Bros. complex was, Link preferred the wild places to spend his off-time in. The environs of this place were plenty vast enough to accommodate his needs as well as the needs of the wild creatures that also lived here.

Not that anyone truly "lived" in this world.

After many miles beyond the forest, the city, the mountains and the desert the land fell off into jagged cliffs and an endless void like an ocean speckled with distant galaxies. Link rarely went that far, but sometimes he rode to the edge on his faithful mare. He wondered, morbidly, what would happen should he or another person was to jump off or fall off the edge of the world, but it was not possible. There was an invisible barrier that kept anyone from being capable of trying such a stunt. Beyond that, the dead could not be killed, anyway.

This place, sometimes called the "Smash World" after the "smashing feasts and fights" system of entertainment that its guardians had created was a place where the dead lived. The souls of fallen warriors from many different countries, worlds and universes were gathered here at the discretion of a deity everyone called Master Hand for the fact that he appeared to them as a giant, gloved hand. He had a brother-deity, the Crazy Hand, but the left hand was not as much for management as the right and was rarely seen. The Hands were representative of Order and Chaos respectively and it was speculated that they had a greater over-deity behind them. According to the Master Hand, he had dealings with the various gods that presided over the many worlds and was able to choose people to bring to the Smash World according to his whim.

The place was generally understood not be an ultimate afterlife, but a way-station for weary souls that needed either to work through personal issues or, in some cases, like Link's, it was a place for souls to hang out in between incarnations.

Link had been here many times. Sure, he had experienced the Golden Land of his Three Goddesses, but when he was taken away to here after one of his many lives had ended, it was the Smash World that he'd chosen as his place of waiting. The Hero of Hyrule was basically a spirit under contract to return to his world and country when they needed him. It was a pact he was caught in with his nation's divine-descendant ruler, Zelda, and with the great villain that was here, too, the King of Evil, Ganondorf.

Everyone here was here for different reasons, so they had learned from the Hands and from each other. Link merely required a place of rest to refresh his soul before its journey into another life. While he did not remember his past lives during any given lifetime, they all came back to him here, as well as memories of past stays.

His latest life had been spent fighting clouds of darkness as a shape shifter. A surprisingly useful curse had turned him into a wolf for part of his journey. His hero's journey had been grueling but relatively short to the life he'd had after it, which had been, for a legend chosen by the gods, surprisingly mundane. After defeating the shadows and Ganondorf, and losing a dear friend to her own world, Link had done some random "hero's work" by clearing out monsters where they appeared near towns. He'd served as a guide for people settling unexplored lands. Eventually, he'd settled into life as a shepherd, or a goatherd to be more precise, just as he was before he received the Hero's call. His last life had been a far easier life than some he'd had.

Link had been given the privilege of dying as an old man this last go-round. He'd died much younger in many other lives. He'd been hanging around the Smash World for about thirty years this time, not that time mattered here. Everyone who came here was given the appearance and health of their "prime" form. He'd come here as young as he'd been in his Sacred Hero-days rather than the wrinkled, bristly old man that he'd been on his deathbed, racked with pneumonia.

The people here were given physical forms and could experience everything that came with them. Pleasure, injury and pain, hunger, thirst, touch… It made them more comfortable than being some kind of wispy, disembodied things or mere clouds of consciousness. The only two things that could not happen here in regard to physicality were pregnancy and death, though the people here could be said to "die" eventually in regards to their leaving. When someone "left" this land, it came as first a feeling, then a fading and merely meant that they were returning to life in their home universe (as Link so often had) or that they were ascending to the true afterworld that was meant for them.

As it was, while Link was a simple man-between-lifetimes, here to hone his skills, as it were. Other souls were here for far different reasons. He and Zelda were bound to Ganondorf – who was here for "containment" purposes. Other villains and even heroic people were here for redemption purposes.

Strangely enough, a lot of the "working oneself out" could come through violence. The Hands had created stages for combat and even various contests and tournaments for fighting. Link did wonder how much of a "redemptive exercise" these things were and how much was just entertainment for the Hands and for the people of the adjacent city who also lived in this place. The "Smashers" or "Fighters" as they were called never knew if the spectators to their battles were also lost souls or if they were wholly mortal and just happened to live here or what. None of the residents of the Mansion-proper had a chance to interact with them directly.

Sometimes, the warriors here would voluntarily take battles – setting up matches for themselves, their friends and their rivals, independent of tournament-play. It was all an interesting kind of warfare – one that was ultimately pacifistic. Since no one who was dead could die again, the closest thing that was in place to mimic death was for a loser to become a trophy. When one had taken too much damage or had taken a one-shot fatal blow, they vanished and rematerialized somewhere on the grounds as a statue and stayed that way for a while. It was a recovery-measure. Everyone came out of trophy-form fully-healed. How long one spent as a statue was dependant upon what kind of damage one took. A simple stab to the heart would put someone out for about a day. Being torn to pieces by other fighters or stage-hazards could put one out for a week.

There was a trick to falling asleep as soon as one became "trophified" but not everyone got the hang of it at first. Link was one of the few fighters who sometimes willingly stayed awake in trophy-form on occasion. This was mainly because he didn't want to miss watching matches that his friends were in. Whenever Mario, for instance, was slated for an interesting match and he'd been made a trophy, Link would have Ike or Donkey Kong or somebody else strong lug him to the spectator box so he could watch even while "ill." Then again, Link had been the avatar of courage in his lifetimes and was brave (or perhaps foolish) enough to torture himself with being conscious in such a state.

It was much harder for others. He recalled watching each of the Robins nearly go mad after they'd awakened from their first respective trophy-states. Each of them had trauma connected with being taken over by something that was not them, of having their will overwritten by "Fate." The trophifying wasn't exactly like that which they'd suffered during their natural lives, but being trapped like that had been triggering to them both. As it was, they'd perfected the art of going immediately unconscious if they were ever felled. Zelda was the same way, which was understandable after her latest life. Link remembered when she had been made a magical puppet by Ganondorf. Even in this afterlife state, his body bore a scar from when her body had battled him. Perhaps he had needed the mark as a part of his memory – a stark reminder that he had lived.

Many interesting beings came here to rest and to fight. Link was one of the eldest souls here, having shuffled in and out of this place on a "revolving door" plan. This meant that he had been privileged to see many souls come and go. The Robin-twins were among the newest arrivals and tended to go by Robin and Rob respectively, or sometimes Mrs. Shepherd and Mr. Grimm – surnames they had chosen for themselves. They were a couple of people whom Link found particularly intriguing because they were, technically the same person. They were different versions of a life born into different universes. This, alone, meant that they were separate beings, but they really made one wonder about "what might have been." They made Link wonder if there was a "Linka" or "Linkelle" out there somewhere in the multiverse. As it was, there was "Toony" – a Hylian hero of a separate linage that carried Link's curse and blessing of being chosen by their gods to fight evil in a splinter-timeline he'd inadvertently created in one of his lives.

Link had found Robin Shepherd, the lady, out in a field by the Mansion a few years ago. Many of the souls arrived unconscious and she had been no exception. He was walking on his way to the river to fish when he'd seen a cloaked figure on the ground. She gently awakened. He helped her up and she immediately started crying bitterly about how he wasn't someone named "Chrom." Apparently, she had expected to see this Chrom-person. She'd hit him in the chest weakly with a balled-up fist and he'd hugged her and calmed her down.

Link did his best to explain where she was and she had taken it surprisingly well. Not many fresh warriors readily believed that they had died. Many were angry or aggrieved by the concept. Robin was not. Being dead seemed to be a foregone conclusion for her, although she did seem to be surprised to be conscious. In her time here, Link had gotten to know her story and between her tale and what Master Hand had to say of her, he greatly respected the woman. In her words, she had "died slaying a dragon." The reason why she was upset upon awakening to his pointy-eared face rather than that of someone she knew from her world was that she had been ardently hoping to be given the gift of restoration and resurrection because of a "promise of invisible threads."

Instead, she was here – dead and perhaps waiting for those bonds to come together. She had left behind children in her world. Even a noble death wasn't beautiful for someone who had left behind people in need of care.

Robin's problems, however, seemed to pale in comparison to those of her fragment-universe "brother." Rob Grimm had arrived shortly after she had, waking up in the same field as Link had found Robin. Luigi and Pikachu had found him. While Robin had died slaying a dragon, Rob had been slain by a version of that very same dragon. Link had learned that the manner of slaying wasn't in any kind of normal manner. The poor man had been "eaten" body and soul. Rob was made up of the fragments of a soul gleaned out of a dark deity that had taken him over. Both he and Robin had explained that the ways that they existed had to do with differing decisions and circumstances. In any case, Link knew that Master Hand had decided that "a moment of despair should not define a person" in his case. Rob's presence here was a matter of redemption. He was a quiet fellow who spent most of his time with Robin, who had taken on the role of his therapist.

They were hilarious when they played games together. They'd been master tacticians during their lives and passed free time with games of strategy. Link often found them hunched over a Chess board in the garden, stuck in a stalemate to the point of being in a mutual trance-like state. They could be that way for hours. Link had no idea how to play Chess. He'd just go up to them then they were like that and re-arrange random pieces on the board to mess up their game just to break them out of it, usually when it was time for dinner. Link had once caught them so still, so stuck in concentration on a move that their namesakes were landing in their hair and using their heads as a launching platform for flight.

Link decided to wander back inside. He was in the mood for a coffee. He'd had enough of tootling on his ocarina into the uncaring wind for one day. He grabbed up his sword and shield – ah, yes, he was scheduled for a match with the gorilla and the auto-racer tomorrow, wasn't he? He wondered if Mario would have another cock-and-bull story for him about how he'd died… Link was certain that man had either multiple lives like he had or that he just liked making up stories. "Lava, Mario?" the Hylian would nod. "Oh, a fire-bar this time! Oh… snapping piranha plants?"

The Hylian found himself alone when he entered the back door and walked down the corridor that was the quickest way from the back-field to the cafeteria. His ears perked as he heard a bang and a clatter. He ran to where the sound had come from – one of the storage rooms for extra weapons. Yeah… what he'd heard was pretty much the distinct noise of a rack of inactive beam-swords falling to the tile.

He opened the door to see, collapsed upon the floor among fallen weaponry a very blue figure. He wondered "What is Marth doing in here?" at first, until he noticed the person's long, flowing hair. It was a woman – and from what he could see of her face turned to the side on the tile, she was beautiful.

Link stood still as her eyes fluttered open. She caught sight of him, swiftly sat up, reached for her belt and pulled a sword on him.

To be continued…

Yes, I blatantly ripped off a thing from the anime/novel series "The Twelve Kingdoms" – the Void Sea, just in case anyone caught that reference.