One night Pikachu woke up to hear a noise. It sounded like someone was rummaging through the closets.
"Charlie?" He whispered into the darkness. A quiet snore came in response from the next bed.
"Charlie!" Pikachu shouted louder now. The snoring stopped and a yawn could be heard. "Huh, what's going on?" Asked Pikachu's brother.
"I think someone is in the house."
Charlie pricked up his ears, but he couldn't hear anything: "I think you're just imagining it."
But then someone sneezed and Charlie hopped up.
A short "thump" sounded and Pikachu asked almost casually: "Did you run into a wall again?" "Yes." "Wait, I'll turn the light on."
A moment later the overhead lights came on. Not far from Charlie was a brown, mushroom-shaped creature with large canine teeth protruding from its closed mouth.
"Hey, isn't that a gumba from the Mario games?" Pikachu asked, but Charlie had discovered something else. The drawer in which the gold notes were supposed to be was open and empty; the gumba itself had a huge pouch hanging on its back.
"Oh dear, I've been caught! Get out of here!" Shouted the Gumba. He used a strange object and opened a kind of portal into which he disappeared.
"Please stay here, you dog!" Shouted Charlie and followed him before Pikachu could stop him.
Pikachu wanted to follow, too, but then the strange portal closed.
"Great, what do I do now?"
He looked around and saw that Sparky wasn't home.
"Where is this girl now?"
***
Charlie felt as if he was being dragged through a vortex. He didn't know how long he flew through this "vortex", but at some point he landed in an old wall and everything turned around him. To clear his head again, he shook it.
"Okay, so where am I?" Charlie muttered.
"I can answer that question for you," came a voice from nowhere.
"How, where, what? Who said that?"
"Me?" Said the voice.
"And who are you? And most importantly, where are you?" Asked Charlie.
"Well, I am voice."
Now Charlie really didn't know what to say anymore. Somehow he didn't understand the context of her sentence.
"You are ... voice?"
"Yes, that's my name. Whenever you hear a voice from nowhere, that's me."
"Oh, okay, I was wondering. So where am I now?"
Voice replied cheerfully: "Well in the castle of Princess Toadstool, ruler of the Mushroom Kingdom! Although, at the moment Bowser rules the kingdom."
Charlie first had to process the information he had just received. A moment ago he had woken up in the middle of the night and found a burglar who had stolen the gold notes. When he followed this burglar, he must have somehow got into the world from the Super Mario games, but why?"Hey, uh, listen voice, did a gumba come by here?" He asked the disembodied woman.
"Uh, wait a minute, let me think ... Yeah, but it was a long time ago."
"A long time ago? But I went into the portal shortly after him! Okay, I have to go after him and get the notes back."
"Do you mean golden, glittering ones that make music?"
Charlie stopped right in front of the door he was about to open.
"Yeah, how do you know?" He asked.
Voice answered him: "Well, Bowser's court magician Kamek used such notes to completely change the lock and to seal doors everywhere. I think behind these doors there are portals to other worlds."
"Ah, thanks for the information."
"Stop, wait!"
Charlie paused again and clenched his teeth angrily.
"What now?" He asked grindly.
"Couldn't you save the castle and defeat Bowser? I mean, you have to look for the notes anyway and you could be right there ..."
"I'm supposed to what? Do I look like a hero. Better let Super Mario do it."
"But," said Voice with a trembling voice, "he was already here and wanted to save the castle, but he didn't come back. What if something happened to him?"
Charlie struggled with himself and finally decided that he could give it a try.
"Oh great! Wait, let me give you something to thank you", said a happy voice.
A blue backpack appeared on Charlie's back.
"What should I do with that part?" He asked confused.
"Well, you can put things in there. So you could, for example, transport the notes better." Charlie was about to reply when he saw a familiar figure in the corner of his eye.
"Hey, you're the guy who stole the notes!"
The gumba turned around in surprise and shouted: "The dog!"
He took refuge in the nearest door. Charlie followed, growling, almost forgetting to open the door and run into her.
The room beyond amazed him, however. In the room the floor was covered with thick grass and trees stood around. A butterfly fluttered past him and landed on a flower, where he got some nectar.
Charlie wandered around the room in amazement. A bird was twittering somewhere.
So that's what Voice meant when she said the lock had been changed.
Finally he found the gumba standing in front of another portal, like the one with which Charlie had entered the strange world.
"I finally got you, you thief!", The dog yelled at the little mushroom man, "get back the notes you stole immediately!"
"But I don't have it anymore."
"Don't you want to hear? Then I must use force!"
Without further ado, Charlie attacked poor Gumba, bit him, scratched him, tossed him around, and inflicted other unspeakable torments on him.
Finally the gumba was on the ground and surrendered.
"And now," said Charlie, "you put the notes out, otherwise something will be set again straight away.""I told you that Kamek used it and hid it, Charlie," the voice intervened.
Charlie looked at voice first (or at least pretended he could), then the gumba, and then the tree next to him.
"Have you already noticed that this tree has grown particularly beautifully?"
"Don't distract," shouted voice angrily. The gumba meanwhile crawled into the portal to run away.
When Charlie noticed that his opponent had disappeared, he growled at his voice: "Great, now he escaped because of you! It doesn't matter if he doesn't have the grades anyway, we just have to look for them."
He entered the portal and landed in another forest, but this time it was where it belonged. A sign indicated that it was the gumba forest and in fact some specimens of the brown mushroom were walking around here. Immediately to the right of Charlie was the first gold note, but when Voice insisted that he should pick it up, the dog just shook his head: "No no no, that doesn't work that way. Gold notes are very sensitive artifacts. If I put them in If you were to carry it in your backpack, they would break and no longer work. We need a magic music pouch or something like that first. "
"The gumba from earlier must have used one too, otherwise he wouldn't have been able to wear it."
"Oh, right, I didn't even notice it. Come on then!"
And so Charlie and the invisible person named Voice set out to explore the Gumba Forest.