Plot Summary: Vanellope is on the internet, and Ralph is back at Litwak's. Something else besides distance was bound to come between them eventually, and it does, in the form of Ralph's new young friend. After a tragedy caused by Vanellope's jealousy and resentment shatters her world, she is forced to reevaluate her life choices, and seek help from one of the internet's leading mental health specialists, the stern but compassionate Dr. McAfee.
This is probably my most ambitious fanfiction project yet. My goals in writing this story are to cover areas of the sequel that I (admittedly) found lacking, such as Ralph's needs as a person being seriously considered, Vanellope's character development, life at Litwak's arcade with Wi-Fi, and how the murkiness of the internet severely and negatively impacts the lives of the video game characters inhabiting it. Mental illness is especially going to be a big theme in this story. If you're uncomfortable with that, I suggest that you stop reading here.
Wish me luck. This fic's going to be a doozy. But I'm looking forward to the adventure that writing it is going to be.
Disclaimer: I do not own Wreck-It Ralph, or any of the video game/Disney characters who will be appearing later in this story.
Rewriting the Program: Chapter One
A Death and a Birth
Mr. Litwak sat solemnly in the lawyer's office, dressed all in black, feeling low but also relieved that his Nana's funeral had gone smoothly without a hitch. The weather had held up, though a few dark clouds had loomed threateningly over the proceedings. Nana was buried next to her husband, as she'd requested, in the Litwak family's plot of land in the city's cemetery (Litwak's own parents were buried there too). He had done his duty.
It had been a tragically small turnout, though. Many of her relatives had already passed on, as had many of her friends. There were only a modest handful of mourners, most of them acquaintances and staff from her retirement home. Mr. Litwak's younger brother Jeffrey hadn't seemed to think it was worth it to fly out for it.
"Jeff, this is our Nana," Mr. Litwak had reminded him over the phone a few days prior. He did his best to mask the hurt and disappointment in his voice. "She practically raised us when Mom was sick, remember?"
"I do remember. I'm just really swamped with work right now. I can't possibly get away. I'll send flowers—"
And he had. They lay on Nana's grave, a paltry tribute to a long, difficult life of hard work and sacrifice for her loved ones. Mr. Litwak's grandparents had come to America from Poland, knowing little English and having even less money to their name, but they had built a life together from scratch, opening a coffeehouse, working fourteen-hour days, bringing up three children and raising their eldest's two boys after he died in a bus accident and his widow fell ill with heart disease…
Mr. Litwak shook his head sadly. And Jeff was too "swamped with work" to come say goodbye to her. He sent an eyesore bouquet in his place instead. It was insulting. He'd expected better from his brother. Where had loyalty to family gone in this world?
The lawyer was shuffling papers on his desk. "Mr. Litwak, I am very sorry for your loss."
Mr. Litwak nodded and gave a small, grateful smile. "Thank you."
"Your Nana was a very good woman. She lived a full, decent life."
"She was. And she did."
"She and I devised her will a decade ago," the lawyer went on. "She never once requested to change it before her demise. I will read it to you now, with your permission…"
Mr. Litwak nodded again. "Please do."
The lawyer cleared his throat and began. "I, Julianna Serafina Litwak, do hereby declare myself of sound mind..."
"A bit of a stretch of truth, but alright," Mr. Litwak thought. In the last few years of her life, when he duly visited her every Sunday to take her to church and then out and about, his Nana asked to go to a Polish market that had been closed for nearly half a century. And she thought Ralph and Felix were the names of his roommates, not the names of the main characters from his arcade's oldest and most popular game. She kept asking how they were. He kept telling her they were doing just fine. They were always busy. That's why they couldn't come visit too, but they sent their good wishes.
"Being such, I leave to my beloved grandson Stanley Reynold Litwak all of my monetary assets, for him to spend as he pleases…"
"What about Jeff?" Mr. Litwak asked at once. "Jeffrey Markus Litwak. Her other grandson. He's still alive, in Ohio."
The lawyer peered closely at the will. "There's no mention of him. You are her sole heir."
"I see." Mr. Litwak's mustache twitched as he thought about how his brother would react to this news. Would he even care? Would he regret his filial neglect at all, when he discovered Nana had passed over him? "I know it's in poor taste to ask, but how much has she left? You see, I never interfered with her finances when she was alive. She never wanted help. She was a strong-willed woman to the end."
"It's quite a lot," the lawyer said, much to Litwak's surprise. His Nana had never presented herself as a woman of wealth. She'd worn her dresses until there were gaping holes in them and Mr. Litwak had to insist on her ordering something new. "Quite a lot. Your grandmother made some very good investments when she was younger, and she bought some very valuable stocks. She was also very frugal, and you probably already know. If you'd like, I could write down the number for you."
"Please do." Mr. Litwak was no longer quite so surprised. His Nana had been a ruthless penny-pincher, now that he thought about it. She was the kind of woman who would sit at the kitchen table and determinedly slice the bad bits off discounted fruit rather than buy fresh fruit at full price. She would also make everyone go to bed early to save on the electricity bill. He remembered how, as a child, his grandmother had made it plainly clear to him and his brother that if they wanted anything that wasn't a necessity, like a comic book, a trip to the cinema, an ice cream cone, or even a new tie to wear to their confirmations, they were going to have to earn the money for it themselves, through paper routes, dog walking, shoe shining, and helping out around the coffeeshop. They had to go out and find their first part-time jobs the day after they turned fourteen. By the time they were eighteen, they were expected to be ready to set up on their own.
And he had been. And he'd worked long and hard for everything he wanted. He'd saved and scraped to buy a failing arcade from its previous owners, and put his sweat and tears into making it successful. Even after nearly forty years, it was still doing well enough to stay open. He thanked his Nana for that. No one else could have hammered perseverance into him like she had.
Jeff had that perseverance too, but not the gratitude to go with it. He was resentful of their harsh upbringing, Mr. Litwak knew. He probably still remembered how the other kids used to tease them for the clothes Nana made for them from scratch to avoid getting fleeced by clothing shop owners. He'd been maddeningly jealous of the neighbourhood kids whose grandparents spoiled them, who took them out for ice cream, to the cinema, and to the zoo, who slipped them extra pocket money when their parents weren't looking. But shouldn't he have let go of all that by now? Couldn't he reach into his album of memories and see Nana for what she was, a devoted, hardworking woman, who only wanted her grandsons to grow up into strong, respectable men capable of standing on their own two feet?
The lawyer scribbled the grand total of Mr. Litwak's inherited fortune on a scrap of paper. "I have smelling salts if you need them," he joked dryly.
"That won't be necessary. I'm not a fainter." The lawyer folded the paper and pushed it forward. Mr. Litwak, after taking a long moment to prepare himself, opened it and read the number. His eyes widened instantly. He almost did faint.
That same day, Mr. Litwak wasn't the only one who received some astonishing news. Back in his beloved arcade, in a game called Fix-It Felix Jr., a massive bomb was about to be dropped.
"Vanellope, honey, we have something to tell you," The game's hero Fix-It Felix Jr. spoke into his game's antagonist Wreck-It Ralph's BuzzzPhone. He, Ralph, and his wife Sergeant Calhoun had Vanellope on speaker. "And we need you to stay calm about it and not freak out."
"Ralph finally got a girlfriend?" Vanellope teased. The bad guy frowned unappreciatively.
"No, kid, this isn't about me. Well, actually, it kind of is."
"What are you guys going on about? What's the news?" Vanellope asked.
Ralph took a deep breath and said it quickly. "Turbo is alive."
"WHAAAAAT?!" Vanellope shrieked, so loudly that Ralph had to hold the phone away from them all. "No, no, no, he CAN'T be alive! He died in that volcano! His butt got fried! Sour Bill said he saw it! And some other people too! No one ever saw him when I was still there! How can he still be alive?!"
"He regenerated," Ralph explained, when Vanellope had calmed down enough for him to speak. "It turns out he programmed himself well enough into Sugar Rush to regenerate when the console was plugged back in. But don't worry, he's in Hero's Duty, in captivity."
"And he's going nowhere, at least not yet," Sergeant Calhoun added. "We'll let you know what we decide to do with him, but let me tell you, he's never stepping foot in a racing game again."
"Phew! Well, that's a relief!" Even though they could just hear her voice, they could tell Vanellope's mood had just flipped over like a pancake, as it often did. "He didn't mess up anything else in Sugar Rush, did he?"
"No, he was in hiding. Everything in Sugar Rush is fine," Ralph assured her. Well, that was the first half of the news over with. The three adults all looked at each other with the same unspoken question flashing on their faces. Now who's going to tell her the next part?
Felix eventually stepped up to the plate. "Vanellope, there's also…something else…"
"…What?" Vanellope asked nervously. Felix, glancing uncomfortably at the others, began to recount the story.
They had been in Sugar Rush, watching the random roster race. Well, not Ralph, but Felix, Calhoun, and some visiting marines…
Everything had been going swimmingly, as usual. Taffyta, who had recently been elected the new president among the game's inhabitants, had been doing pre-race announcements when the ground began to shake beneath them all. At first everyone thought it was an earthquake, or Diet Cola Mountain exploding again, but the mountain was calm, unlike the citizens, who instantly began to panic.
"It's coming from the mines!" someone shouted over all the yelling and screaming. They meant the Rock Candy Mines, which were an unfinished underground track the racers rarely used because it was too dark and dusty down there to drive.
When the upheaval passed, and all was still again, Taffyta immediately jumped into action. "We need to go assess the damage," she insisted to the others. "The roster race can wait."
When they got to the mines, they discovered that the rumbling they'd all felt had been a disastrous cave-in. They couldn't even get through the entrance and into the tunnel leading down to the underground track. It was completely blocked off.
"Turbo had been hiding out in the Rock Candy Mines for months, surviving on the candy he chipped out of the walls," Felix told Vanellope. "He chipped at the wrong spot and caused an avalanche of rock candy."
"I'm liking everything about this so far," Vanellope admitted.
Felix sighed, dreading the approaching climax of the story. "Well, you're not going to like what happened next…"
They heard Turbo start screaming behind the blockage, and he wasn't just screaming for help. He was screaming in pain. Wretched, nightmarish, ear-splitting screams of pain. They all guessed right away that he'd broken a bone, or that something heavy had fallen on him and he couldn't move. Or both.
"And you didn't just leave him there?"
"Vanellope."
"Sorry. Go on."
It had taken the collective effort of the Sergeant, Felix, Duncan, Wynchel, most of the racers, and the marines to dig through the wall of rock candy chunks. They worked as fast as they could, like an assembly line, passing rocks backwards to toss them out of the way. And Turbo just kept on screaming. He screamed and screamed until their ears were ringing, and all they could do was keep on passing back and throwing away rocks.
Then, all of a sudden, his screaming stopped, only to be replaced by another sound. Something that sounded like a frightened, squealing animal calling for its protector. A sound that none of them had ever heard before yet, somehow, recognized immediately.
"Is that a—?" Felix began to ask the others uncertainly. Everyone froze to listen. Oh, dear Konami, it was.
"Come on, you lazy dough-sacks, dig!" Sergeant Calhoun shouted at them all, and they all tripled their speed. Felix had wished with all his heart that Ralph was there. He would have been able to smash through all those rocks in seconds. But he never visited Sugar Rush, not since Vanellope had decided to live on the internet. There was nothing for him in that game anymore, so he just stayed away.
When they, the rescue team, finally broke through the wall of red, blue, and green rock candy and rushed down into the mine with torches and flashlights, they found Turbo, laying on the ground among the rubble in a pool of blood, barely breathing, barely alive, but alive all the same.
But him still being so wasn't the most shocking part of the discovery, because laying across Turbo's chest, hurriedly wrapped in a soiled jacket, sticky, howling ravenously, and dangerously tiny, was a…
"BABY?!" Vanellope cried. She sounded as baffled and disturbed as they all felt. "Are you serious?! You guys are joking, right?! You're pulling my leg, right?! Is it April Fool's Day already?!"
"Vanellope, it's May. We just had April," Ralph said. "We're not joking, though I really wish we were. Turbo had a baby."
"When Turbo regenerated, he came back as a Cy-Bug hybrid," Felix tried to explain. "Cy-Bugs can have babies on their own without any...assistance."
"Asexual reproduction. Don't sugar coat it," the Sergeant cut in. "The cave-in made Turbo go into premature labor."
"He didn't even realize he was…expecting," Felix added. "He thought he had a tumor, apparently. Some sort of abnormal swelling."
"Awwww, geez Louise. This can't get any weirder!" Vanellope exclaimed. "What about the baby? Is it…okay? Is it a hybrid too?"
"The baby's in an incubator and under the care of my medical unit in Hero's Duty," the Sergeant answered. "And yes, it's a hybrid. A surprisingly well-formed one, too. We'll see how it does."
"Why do you guys keep saying 'it?'" Ralph snapped suddenly. "He's a boy and he has a name! Turbo Junior!"
Both Felix and Calhoun stared at him, taken back by this sudden defensive outburst.
"What's with you, Wreck-It? You got adoption papers ready or something?" the Sergeant asked him.
"No, no I don't…" Ralph scratched his neck uncomfortably. "It's just, uh…well, I'm kind of the reason this kid exists, so I feel responsible…"
"Well, you don't need to feel responsible. We've got everything covered," the Sergeant said. "And Vanellope, if you can, put us in contact with your friend Yesss. She knows what's what, and we need to talk to her about what sort of high-security correctional facilities are available on the internet…"
In the Hero's Duty medical ward, Turbo, simultaneously a prisoner and a patient, quickly made himself a menace, demanding, at all hours of the day, that his baby be brought to him, and lashing out at the nurses and doctors and even the marines when they refused.
The baby had to stay in the incubator, they tried, fruitlessly, to explain to him. He was too small and too weak to be moved.
"Too small?! Too weak?! Whose baby are you talking about?! Not mine!" Turbo cried, wild-eyed and deranged. "I want him now! He's mine!" But the medical ward staff wouldn't budge.
Nobody was surprised when Turbo, forever and always an egomaniac, insisted on naming the baby Turbo Junior, after himself. He harassed the Hero's Duty characters until they swore on their mothers' graves not to name him anything else. "It's my right to name him! I gave birth to him, in that filthy candy mine, all on my own! If you people change his name, I will hunt you all through hell!"
Everyone promised not to change the baby's name, mostly just to make Turbo shut up about it. The only matter on which Turbo was cooperative was the matter of his sterilization. He, to everyone's immense relief, consented to the procedure without a fight. He didn't want to go through that again.
"Junior doesn't need siblings. He has me," Turbo told the doctor and nurses as they prepared him for the surgery. "He's going to be a great racer someday, you know. I'm going to teach him how to drive myself. The gamers will love him."
The doctor and nurses all looked at each other uneasily. They were under strict orders not to give Turbo any hint of what was planned for him.
"I'm sure your little boy will do great things someday," one of the nurses said tactfully.
"He will! He will!" Turbo exclaimed excitedly, both eyes twitching in a rather disturbing manner. "He can't be anything but great! He's mine!"
"Turbo, we need to put you under now. Are you ready?" the doctor asked him.
"Yes, yes, get it over with." Turbo's mind was racing as they strapped the anesthesia mask over his face. He kept murmuring to himself as the gas gently lured him into a state of senselessness. "Turbo and Turbo Junior. We'll be a team. The best…the best the world has ever seen…"
He wouldn't wake up in that medical unit, or even in the arcade. The dose they'd given him had been much stronger than necessary.
The Hero's Duty characters knew what they were doing was cruel but necessary. They had all seen the video that Turbo's former assistant Sour Bill had sent them at their request, the racing footage of "King Candy" trying to beat a nine-year-old with a car antenna and crash her into a traffic island. There was no disputing it. Turbo was not mentally sound, nor was he fit to raise a child. The baby's safety had to take priority over their consciousnesses.
The Surge Protector had cleared out the Game Central Station, as instructed. There was no one around to stop the mixed group of marines and medics as they wheeled the caged, comatose criminal to the Wi-Fi entrance. His sterilization was complete. He would have no more babies. He would have no contact with the one he had, either.
Turbo was going to prison, on the internet. Everyone had agreed unanimously on this. He couldn't be kept at Litwak's anymore. He was too much of a danger, to all their games. He was an experienced hacker. What world would he try to take over next if, by chance, he escaped justice again?
Ralph, Sergeant Calhoun, and Felix were all waiting at the entrance, to see Turbo off for themselves. They looked at the unconscious ex-racer and king with equal parts disgust and pity. For every spark of satisfaction they felt for their decision, there were two piercing stabs of guilt to follow it.
"We're not doing anything wrong here. He made his own choices. He has only himself to blame," Sergeant Calhoun said to her underlings, whose expressions were all glum and remorseful. She sounded like she was trying to reassure herself as well.
Felix turned to Ralph. "Did you call Vanellope?" he asked.
Ralph nodded. "I did. She's not going to leave Slaughter Race until she gets word that Turbo's safely locked up. Shank's not going to let her leave, either. I know that kid. She might try to sneak a peak at him, just out of curiosity."
"J-Junior…" They heard Turbo mumble drowsily in his cage. "Where's my…baby…"
"He's waking up," Private Thompson said to the others. "Come on, guys, we need to hustle."
"Be careful with him, and don't let him out of your sight," Sergeant Calhoun ordered as they pushed Turbo's cage through the entrance. As he had many times before, Turbo disappeared into the darkness, but this time, everyone knew exactly where he was going, and who he would be when he re-emerged again: an inmate on a life sentence, in a jail cell far away from them all.
The rest of the arcade, unaffected by any doubts of morality, was overjoyed at the news that Turbo was now permanently exiled from Litwak's Arcade. "He's gone! He's really gone!" they cheered, hugging each other and dancing about. "We're finally free of him! Thank goodness for Wi-Fi!"
At last, the shadow of his decades-long campaign of invading their games and terrorizing them all was lifted, and they could sleep easily again.
And Turbo Junior, who soon reached a healthy size, was moved out of the incubator into a proper baby crib, where he slept the peaceful, unhindered sleep of an innocent soul.
End of Chapter One
The scene is set. Now, on to chapter two! Please review!