Disclaimer: Wreck-It Ralph and Ralph Breaks the Internet are the property of the Walt Disney Company. All other copyrighted characters and games are the properties of their respective creators. Title from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Author's note: Hi there! Have you read Terminal, Fallout, and Peripeteia? This fic, while not necessarily part of that series, is sort of fic 3.5, between Peripeteia and The Rest of Forever. I recommend reading my WIR fics in order, which you can find on my profile.
Swizzle had a girlfriend.
This was a shocking development for like, any number of reasons, so when Taffyta saw them kissing for the first time in Game Central Station, she thought her reaction was 100% justified. Sure, she lost the top two scoops of the ice cream cone she was eating and got strawberry ice cream all over her gloves to save the bottom scoop, and sure, she stopped so fast in her tracks that Candlehead and even Rancis crashed right into her, but like, come on. Swizzle. A girlfriend. Two days later, Rancis was still complaining to her about the knot on his head every time he rolled up next to her at the starting line for each race, and her response was the same every time: "But Swizz has a girlfriend."
Then the race would start and she wouldn't have to think about it for three minutes.
Taffyta tossed a spent lollipop stick to the ground as she leaned against her kart waiting for the next quarter alert, staring at her feet. Her legs still looked weird to her. They were…longer, and had this shape that seemed out of place. Like the way the DDR characters looked, but on them it was normal. Not that Taffyta, or any of the Sugar Rush racers, looked like the characters from DDR. Ha, she wished. Or…did she? She didn't know, because the whole thing was just still so weird, even nearly seven months after the upgrade.
It wasn't just that she looked different. She saw the world differently. Things that she'd cared about before didn't seem as important now, replaced by an entirely new set of concerns. And even the things that she still cared about, she cared about in a different way. She thought about stuff differently—her whole brain felt different. Trying to articulate it even in her head sounded stupid, because how did you talk about going from nine years old to twenty-five literally overnight? She didn't have the vocabulary.
A kart engine grumbled behind her and she glanced over to see Candlehead staring at the steering wheel of the Ice Screamer in intense concentration, her hand on the gear stick while she revved the engine. "Taff, does my kart sound funny to you?" she asked.
Taffyta glanced up at the cabinet's screen but couldn't see anyone preparing to play imminently. It was always slow in the middle of the day, and it was March, so all the kids had just gone back to school after spring break. She could take some time to help Candlehead. Ambling over, she said, "A little bit. What's up?"
Candlehead's eyes narrowed in concentration. "I don't know, it's like this…do you hear it? Like a weird kind of…trilling sound?"
She gunned it and Taffyta listened hard, wrinkling her forehead, only looking up as someone yelled from the side of the track, "Candlehead, do you mind? I'm doing my mindfulness and it's really hard with you making all that noise!"
Gloyd smirked as he walked by Crumbelina, eating a handful of candy corn and saying, "You should try it during a race, maybe you would've seen those Sprinkle Spikes that way?"
Crumbelina didn't look very mindful. "Shut up."
Taffyta smirked and turned her attention back to Candlehead, who didn't seem to have heard any of this. Looking worried, Candlehead said, "She seems kinda sluggish, too. Oh, why did this have to happen in the middle of the day? I don't have any time to figure it out and fix it between races!"
"You could let someone take your roster spot," Taffyta said innocently.
At that, Candlehead looked up. "Taffyta," she said, her tone outraged.
"Ooh, that was kind of low," another voice said behind her. Taffyta looked over her shoulder to see King Candy leaning against his kart, one arm slung over the high-backed seat. "Must be that third place 'win' catching up with you."
Taffyta made a face at him as Candlehead asked, "King Candy, do you think my kart sounds weird?"
"Soundsth like the valve train," he said casually.
"It's not," Candlehead replied in frustration. "I just checked it the other day and it's fine. Ugh!"
Leaving Candlehead to it, Taffyta turned to face King Candy, smiling a little. "You know, I wouldn't talk, Your Majesty. Didn't you get ninth place earlier today? And if I'm doing the math right, that means you came in last."
Putting a gloved hand over his heart, he said, "And that was a really low blow. If you recall, there was a four-year-old playing who couldn't even see the screen."
She shrugged, pursing her lips to fight the wicked smile threatening to spread across her face. "It still looks the same on the stats." It was kind of funny, when she thought about it, that of everything in the game, he was the constant these days. Everyone else had changed, grown up, but not him. Well, technically he had grown, since at his request she'd coded him to be the same height as her after the upgrade had made her a foot taller, but she wouldn't have known unless she'd…well, known.
The upgrade had brought him closer into the fold that the rest of the racers already shared, too. That had already been happening slowly after Sugar Rush had been reset and he'd been revealed not as a king at all, but a game-jumping usurper. At least, it had started happening once everyone had stopped being afraid of him. But even if he had never really been a king, well, he was still a grown-up. But the upgrade had been the great equalizer where that was concerned, and though none of them ever really forgot who King Candy was—or had been, or was trying not to be—well, he'd been one of them for so long that in the end the pull of emotional inertia was too strong to overcome.
"It's definitely not the valve train," Candlehead announced in a muffled voice. Her head was buried in the hood of her kart, and Taffyta heard her ask, "Do you want ice cream or something? But I can't give ice cream to you, it'll make your gears slip!"
King Candy raised an eyebrow. "Maybe some frozen yogurt?"
"Ew, gross," Candlehead replied without bothering to look up.
Taffyta giggled at Candlehead, then turned back to King Candy, crossing her arms over her chest and pursing her lips at him. "So, did you notice we have the exact same number of golds today?"
His face lit up and the competitive gleam in his eyes was unmistakable. "Do we really?"
"Uh huh."
"Well, we'll have to change that," he said, rubbing his hands together with glee. "You know nature abhors a tie."
Taffyta wrinkled her nose. "I don't think that's the saying."
He waved a hand, and at that moment, there was the unmistakable sound of voices approaching the cabinet. "Sweet, it's free! Man, I hope Vanellope's on the roster today—"
The quarter alert blared through the game, and as it did, Taffyta shot a look at King Candy. His emotions, changeable as always, had flipped a switch from ebullient to pensive as looked up at the cabinet's screen, where it was possible to see a faint overlay of the avatar selection screen.
"—aw, she's not."
"Maybe she's not in the game anymore since Mr. Litwak installed that update," another gamer's voice said.
"No, I'm pretty sure she disappeared before that…"
"Glitch," King Candy muttered under his breath as the player finally selected an avatar—Candlehead, who squeaked that her kart wasn't ready yet and why couldn't they just have waited a few more hours—and made all of them scramble for their karts.
As Taffyta started hers, she glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. Now that Sugar Rush had been unplugged once, he was even more sensitive to any perceived disinterest from the gamers. Maybe 'sensitive' wasn't the right word. Paranoid, then. Yeah, that sounded more like it. There were undeniably fewer players than there had been ten years ago, but everyone in the arcade complained about the same thing. Gamers skewed older; people who'd played when they were kids in the 90s who'd come back in adulthood to recapture part of their childhood.
That was the kind of sentence that Taffyta would have been able to articulate prior to the upgrade, but not to really understand. She got it now, though. Sometimes she wanted to recapture her lost childhood, too, even though hers hadn't been the same kind of ephemeral, fleeting time that the gamers experienced. She'd been nine years old for twenty-two years, and then, overnight, she was twenty-five. Still, it sometimes felt like it had been less complicated, even though that definitely hadn't been true.
"Hey," she said as the marshmallow floated into position at the starting line. When King Candy glanced at her, she grinned with just a tinge of wickedness. "I was going to say don't worry, except maybe if you're busy thinking about something else, it'll make it easier for me to win."
"Oh ho, really," he shot back, looking delighted. Present him with a challenge, and he almost always snapped out of a funk. Easy as pie.
The light turned yellow and she flashed him a victory sign, still grinning smugly.
As the signal blipped from yellow to green, tires squealed, engines roared, and all nine racers rocketed away from the starting line in a cloud of exhaust and cocoa dust.
Chocolate Town had undergone a few minor tweaks when the game had been upgraded. The buildings were taller and the track wound twice more through alleys than it had previously. There were tons of balconies hanging over the road now, too, with cotton candy laundry dangling over the track that had to be dodged. There were also honey pot beehives all over the meadow just outside town, and if you got too close to them, they'd chase you away to protect the Bit o' Honey inside. They were definitely programmed to be meaner in this specific spot because the ones in Strawberry Fields had never bothered Taffyta.
It was a track that technically speaking wasn't difficult. But the hazards made it easy to play dirty, and the Sugar Rush characters were the most vicious racers in the arcade. Taffyta swore as she swerved around a flapping sheet hanging from a balcony, only to hit the strategically placed Sprinkle Spikes that someone had left there. Rancis, Snowanna, and King Candy blew by her before she got going again. The sheet tangled itself around the front of Pink Lightning for a second and Taffyta fought the drag, then finally accelerated past it.
Then, she had to make a decision—take the shortcut through the maze of alleys or stay on the track and snag a power-up?
Instinct made the decision for her and she cranked the wheel hard to the right, sending her kart careening down a narrow, cobblestoned alley. Two more hard right turns and she could see the track—Jubileena, in first, zoomed by, then Candlehead, in second. Taffyta held her foot down on the pedal and shot out of the alley, drifting around the ninety-degree corner and hearing tires squeal as the rest of the roster braked and swerved around her.
She met King Candy's eyes and flashed him a smug smile as she gunned it and pulled ahead of him. Now, to catch up with Candlehead and Jubileena. She heard the whizz of a Sugar Rush behind her and glanced in her mirror. Just Minty, coming up from ninth place.
She burst through a power-up and cycled through a mental list of the best places to drop the Sticky Slick that it settled on. Then, a flash of movement in her mirror caught her eye. "Are you kidding me?" she muttered. King Candy and Crumbelina both had A La Mode power-ups, and since they were in the meadow now, they also both had an unobstructed shot at her. Oh well, nothing like a challenge.
Narrowing her eyes, she kept one eye on the track in front of her and one on the two of them in her mirror as they both launched a scoop of ice cream towards her. The calculation of the scoops' trajectories was automatic and she shifted, getting just enough speed out of her kart to shoot underneath the ice cream as both scoops plummeted to the ground. They both splattered on the road just behind her and she felt a glob of cold wetness land on the back of her neck and slide under the neckline of her jacket and dress.
Not that it made her safe from either of them. Especially not King Candy. There wasn't much doubt who would win their jockeying for position. By halfway through lap two, as Taffyta streaked through the town's alleys, still in third place, Crumbelina had fallen back and King Candy was right on Pink Lightning's tail. She tucked her elbows in and leaned low over the steering wheel, but he still pulled alongside her.
"So," he said cheerfully, leaning an arm on the side of his kart.
She spared a glance at him out of the corner of her eye as they both whipped past a hanging cotton candy sheet that hadn't been there on lap one. "What?" she asked in a bored tone.
His tone casual, he said, "I was thinking—malted milk ballsth, those Sprinkle Spikes are still there—anyhoo, I was thinking, two heads are better than one, right? And I'm not talking about the fact that I have two faces, hoo-hoo—the thing is, if we team up, we could take those two down."
They rounded the final corner in the town and Taffyta looked over at him again. "You want to team up? During a race?" She laughed. "And you think I'm going to fall for that?"
"What? No! I mean, yes, it's not—" He swerved to grab a power-up since Jubileena and Candlehead had taken the middle two and Taffyta nabbed the next closest one. Well, that was something, he hadn't tried to steal hers. Returning his kart to parallel hers again and downshifting to stay next to her—show-off, yeah yeah, she got it, his kart was faster—he said, "Seriously. Want to give it a try? I'm just going to beat you if you don't take me up on this one."
"Oh yeah?" She watched a bee dive for Jubileena, but the other racer avoided it. Its path back to its hive might bring it close enough that it would set its sights on Taffyta, too. "So who wins if we team up?"
Unconcernedly, he waved a hand. "Oh, plenty of time to figure that out."
Another fifty-seven seconds, to be exact. She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. "What did you have in mind?"
He grinned brightly. "Dependsth on the power-up you just got."
"Sweet seeker."
"Well look at that. Same here."
The bee dove and both of them swerved out of its way. For just a moment its angry buzzing was louder in her ears than her kart's engine, but soon it fell back, unable to keep up with her. In a moment, they'd cross the starting line for the final lap. Only forty-six seconds to decide. Rancis, Candlehead, and Taffyta had driven as a pack often enough during the Random Roster Race, but Taffyta was the one in control in those situations. If she wanted them to do something, they'd do it. She was a better racer than them.
This was different. As much as she wanted to think she was just as good as King Candy, she knew that he was just the tiniest, barest bit superior to her. It kind of felt like taking charity to team up.
Forty-four seconds. On the other hand, the two of them could bring down at least one of the leading racers, and that was at least one place better than she was in at the moment. She made a decision. "Okay. If we take them out in the meadow, the bees will get them and slow them down even more. We can't be more than a second or two behind them when we get Candlehead or else we won't have time to hit Jubileena."
He shifted. "My thoughtsth exactly."
When he accelerated past her, she upshifted too, tailing him closely through Chocolate Town. Jubileena got a Sticky Slick, but there was no way Candlehead, King Candy, or Taffyta were going to hit that. Whatever Candlehead got, she didn't use. Taffyta watched the other racer's face reflected in the Ice Screamer's side mirror, and then, pursing her lips, yelled to King Candy, "Hey!" When he slowed slightly and dropped back, she said, "Candlehead has a Sugar Rush."
"How do you know?" he asked, his eyebrows shooting up.
Taffyta kept her eyes on the road. They were about to leave the town and burst into the meadow. "She has a tell. And that's one of my tricks, so I'm keeping it to myself."
"Hoohoohoo! Fair enough, my dear."
Nodding to him, she said, "Let's go."
He gave her a wicked grin, accelerated a kart-length past her, and fired his Sweet Seeker.
Candlehead saw it coming and used her Sugar Rush, blowing past Jubileena, who wailed as she saw the Sweet Seeker homing in on her in her mirrors. She went up in a cloud of brightly colored smoke and glitter, and before they passed her, King Candy had slammed on his brakes to fall into third place, behind Taffyta.
Candlehead was laughing. Taffyta smiled smugly. "Sorry, pal," she said, and fired.
They were so close to each other that Candlehead barely had time to scream before the Sweet Seeker slammed into her, sending her kart rolling end over end towards a bee hive. Taffyta raised one triumphant fist into the air and steered across the finish line in first with one hand on the wheel. King Candy crossed the finish line half a second behind her, followed by Crumbelina in third.
She slammed on her brakes and turned Pink Lightning one hundred and eighty degrees to face King Candy, and as she took her helmet off, she said, "Did you just let me win?"
Waving a hand, he said, "Please, Taffyta, I never let anyone win. What do you think this is? I'm not running a program for disadvantaged racers, here."
She stuck her tongue out at him and he echoed the gesture, laughing when she grinned at him. Then, another quarter alert blared through the game, and the day's nine avatars prepared for the next race. And then Taffyta remembered again—Swizzle had a girlfriend. "Rancis!" she said in an aggrieved tone.
