It is December 24th, Christmas Eve, several hours before midnight, and a young Amy has been waiting all day for this moment. As she looks into the keyhole of the two large closed doors, she sees a magnificent Christmas tree and presents surrounding it next to the warp fireplace. "It's so beautiful." Amy said with awe, and who could blame her, I certainly can't. The dark oak doors to her living room emitted a warm glow on the pink hedgehog's face. Suddenly, in the middle of Amy's moment of peeking, the doors burst open and Dr. Eggman, a family friend of Amy, hollers with cheer,
"Ho ho, Christmas is here!" Eggman seemed more jolly this time of year, suspicious if you'd ask a person who knows the doctor. In the blink of an eye, Amy darts past Eggman and runs into the living room, everything shown and glittered in the loveliest manner, who oh who can describe them all? "I can! Now this here is a model of an Egg-1 chopper, and this is a syringe of Substance Exe, forget you saw that one, very touchy side effects. Oh look, it's a Cho-Cho-Train, chugachugachugachugachuga whoo-hoo!"
Ahem, excuse me, I'm trying to narrate.
"Well Mr. Narrator, you said you wanted someone to describe all of this stuff here."
That was a rhetorical question; just pretend I'm not here.
"How can I when I hear a big booming voice going blah blah blah all of the time?"
Just ignore me. Now the audience will think this is an entire broken-fourth-wall thing.
"You started it…"
Just get on with it,
"All right, have it your way. Woo, somebody needs some Christmas spirit around here..." This year, Mr. Eggman... "It's Dr. Eggman, I spent 10 years doing mad science to get the title of Doctor." Whatever, DOCTOR Eggman, made a special gift for young Amy, she crouched down and he approached her, hands holding something behind his back, "All right young child, this took me all..."
This took him all year to build.
"Right, all year… It is a beautiful..."
It is a beautiful nutcracker doll, in the form of Sonic if anything else. "Hey, you're no narrator; you're just a big surprise spoiler!"
Just ignore me and give her the doll!
"All right all right, here is the no-longer-surprise-nutcracker, just take it all ready." She takes the doll in her hand and gasps,
"He's so handsome!"
"Why thank you, you know I have been taking care of myself with the jogging and weightlifting... Ho ho, you're talking about the doll, ho ho. Yeah he's cute too." She winds up the doll and sets it down as it begins to play an interesting song as it begins to dance, spin, jump, flip, and crunch nuts. The song lasted for several minutes, as both Amy and Eggman were in disbelief watching the mechanical acts. As it finishes, she picks it back up, "I just love it, thank you Dr. Eggman."
"Wait a minute!" The doctor snaps and swipes the small toy from Amy's white gloves, "It isn't supposed to dance, spin, jump, flip, or play music. What the heck did I do to this thing? Must be a loose cog or something..." With a yank of the wrist, he unscrews the doll's head clean off and looks inside, wait, did I read that right?
"Oh no, you broke him!"
"So what?"
"He was perfect, leave him be,"
"I don't care, he still qualifies as mine."
"Mr. Narrator!"
All right, just for that, I'm kicking you out of the story.
"Wait, what?"
POW!
"AHHHHHH" Dr. Eggman screams as he is flung out of the front door of the house by an 'unknown force' and face-plants into the snow, NEVER to appear later in the story. Back inside, Amy wraps his head into place with a pink ribbon from a nearby unopened present and cuddles him.
"I will take great care for you, a nurse you till you are as good as new." Upon securing the bow, she sighs at the intricate design of the wooden figure. "There, just as handsome as ever, if only you were real, I would dance with you without end." Glad Eggman didn't give her a Chao doll or else she'd be all over that thing, but never mind. At one moment, during her examination of the doll, Amy thought she saw the nutcracker smile, maybe it was just a trick of the light or something else. However, out from nowhere, a blue beam of light strikes Amy in the back and it shrinks her down to the size of a mouse. She goes in a panic of the now gigantic presents and comically large booby traps displayed in front of her, hey, if I saw a 50 foot clown, I would be running. She trips on a skateboard and rolls into the tree, tangling herself in a string of golden tinsel dangling down from a branch, unable to free herself. Tugging with all of her might to be freed, she notices a shadow against the planked floor below her, contrasting greatly with the orange glow of the fireplace. Amy then looks up to see the nutcracker walking on its own straight to her, it pulls out its sword and cuts her free from the tinsel. The nutcracker then helps her down to the wooden floor and begins to speak with the smoothing voice of Roger Craig Smith,
"Amy, I want to thank you for your kindness." Amy was no longer frightened, in the twinkling of Christmas lights, her nutcracker looked more handsome, almost exactly like Sonic, if you dressed him up in red soldier clothing.
"Are you, real?"
"I'm not entirely sure myself, I guess this is the first time, I'm, alive." The odd tune plays from her new friend and they begin to dance for what seemed to be days, but was really an hour or two. She wished this would never end, for this was to the young girl, a dream come true. Their dance was cut short by a sudden violent tremor of squeaking and whirling blades loudly and all about. Oh my gosh, the hulking black fur with green streaks in it, the red beaming eyes, the hulking mass even larger than Sonic the Werehog, it's Slash, the Supreme Lethal Anthropomorphic Super Hedgehog flying the model Egg-1 helicopter. The now-massive chopper lands several meters away from the small critters and Slash walks out with a blue sleek shrink ray in his left hand and a golden spiraling scepter with a white floating pyramid and the end of it at the other hand. He throws down the two weapons and bellows,
"This is stupid, shrink rays, helicopters, magic nutcrackers, I'm out of here! Bye-bye."
Wait Slash, you know the villain wins...
"He does?"
Yes yes, the bad guy wins in the end, getting the girl, and showing the audience you can't get everything you wanted from life, and that the cruel world of reality is what you need to ready yourself for."
"You're joking? I was just created out-of-the-blue to be a villain for this thing,"
Nope, you can trust me 99% percent of the time.
"Really?! Then I'll do it!" Now, since Slash is madly in love with Amy from when he first laid eyes on her, he picks up the scepter and charges at the nutcracker and Amy. He delivers a might roar of terror as he runs.
"Don't worry Amy, I'll protect you!" Sonic proclaims. But, as the hero begins to swing his sword at the beast, Slash was quicker and encased him in a cage of ice via the scepter, followed by freezing Amy in another separate ice cage. Although the nutcracker quickly chops his way out of the ice in less than a minute, Slash has already hooked up Amy's cage with the Egg-1's tow-cable and has taken off to his secret lair in the refrigerator and closes the door behind him. The Nutcracker dashes to the front of the fridge and asks himself upon thoroughly glancing at the behemoth object, "How am I going to get in there?"
"Hey ya Sonic!" Knuckles, the red echidna, cheers and he approaches the hedgehog nutcracker from behind. He was the same tiny size as he was and didn't seem aware of the at-hand crisis and setup.
"Knuckles, why are you shrunk and what are you doing here? You are not in The Nutcracker,"
"You do not want to know the answer to the first question, trust me, and for the second, I am now!"
"Then what are you supposed to be?"
"I 'be helping ya."
"No, what role are you playing?"
"Uh... what was The Nutcracker again, uh... I KNOW... Hamlet... maybe… I'm 60% sure I'm Hamlet,"
"Can I get a little help here?"
Nope, although he's a good friend of mine, the dimwit is your problem now; I'm staying out of this one.
"Knuckles, what role are you playing from The Nutcracker? Not Shakespeare, Christmas,"
"I'll be the... the guy with the wings that'll get you to Slash's ice domain."
"The Sugar Plum Fairy?" Immediately, a large pair of pink, sparkly wings pop from Knuckles' back, leaving the poor fella with two extremely red cheeks.
"Oh poop."
"Embarrassing, but it'll do." Knuckles grabs the hero's pink ribbon on his head and flies up through the ice dispenser, nearly freezing his wings in the process. Inside the freezer drawer of Slash's domain, the evil villain, who will win in the end, it trying to put a golden wedding ring on Amy. Yet, considering that she is in an ice cage, Slash's sharp claws are massive, and Amy's ring finger is extremely small as well as the ring, this will surely take a while.
"Hold still!" The monster yells, she replies as would anyone else,
"No, never!"
"I said hold still!"
"You heard the lady," the nutcracker exclaims from the other end of the place alongside Knuckles, "let her go you oversized rat!" Slash looks back and sees the Sonic nutcracker and the two rivals slowly walk to each other, weapons at hand, face to face, ready to strike.
"Prepare to be firewood."
"Prepare to be iced." Slash quickly makes the first move by leaping back and fires an ice beam, but the hero jumps over the blast and the two engage in a sword fight. Knuckles swiftly walks over to the ice cage and attempts to free her. He first tries smashing the bars with his fist, but it doesn't work. He pulls out a Swiss-army knife that was on his person and tries to slice the bars, it doesn't work, he then pulls out a plasma gun, doesn't break a single chip in the ice. A bone saw, uses his head, paper clips, an anvil, a ballpoint pen, even a flamethrower fail to free the poor girl. Where the heck is this guy getting this stuff anyways?
"I got an idea!" Knuckles cheers to Amy, "I'll eat the ice, after all, it's just a giant snow-cone if I'm not mistaken." He pours a small tin bucket of cherry flavor on it and proceeds to lick it, but gets his tongue stuck on the ice soon after the flavoring.
"Ice work..." Amy snarks at him,
"Great pun..." He replies sarcastically, with his speech slurred with his tongue stuck,
"Says the guy with his tongue stuck on ice." The nutcracker and Slash continue to fight, as suddenly, the hero slices a patch of fur off of Slash... in his dairy-air.
"YOU'RE GOING TO PAY FOR THAT!" Slash screams and slices the ribbon off on the nutcracker's head and chops a hefty chunk of wood out of the torso. The hero, extremely weak and barely standing, gets an idea. As Slash begins to freeze his rival at the monster's feet, the nutcracker dashes out his way, causing him slip over the ice he now created and falls from the freezer drawer down into the cold water dispenser by the ice dispenser. With the scepter at hand still, it freezes the water, encasing him in ice. The hero then dashes to Amy and Knuckles and slices the ice bars freeing Amy,
"My hero!" He then proceeds to free Knuckles, but the sword as grown blunt from the fight and ice slicing so he can't free the tongue-stuck ally.
"Don't worry," Knuckles barely says, "I'll be fine, this ice still taste great, it'll just take a while for it to melt." Amy then notices the ribbon is gone and the large hole in the nutcracker's wooden chest.
"Are you okay?"
"I'm fine," he replies, "let's get out of here." So they make their escape through the ice dispenser except for Knuckles, but he's fine. Arriving safely out of the fridge, the nutcracker and Amy hastily shove a nearby wooden chair against the door. For a moment, the two believe they have won, but they had forgotten about one thing. Seconds later, a large shattering sound can be heard and it grabs their attention. The Egg-1 has blasted a giant hole out of the fridge and it now begins to chase the two hedgehogs around the house. Inside, a Slash covered in frost laughs manically as missiles, bullets, and ice beams hail from the large helicopter. They come across the giant syringe with Substance Exe behind the Christmas and decide to throw it. As the massive chopper dives at the couple and is about to slice them, they toss the syringe at it. It jams the whirling blades and the tube bursts as the collision crashes to the ground. Through the puff of smoke, Amy and the nutcracker look upon the wreckage of the Egg-1 chopper, large fragments of broken glass, and the purple liquid known as Substance Exe running along the floor. As soon as the smoke dies down, the nutcracker falls to his knees and groans in pain.
"Nutcracker?"
"Amy, I think my gears are broken, I may not last long." She looks into the hole in her friend's chest and sees several of the many gears smashed, frozen, sliced, or merely missing. Suddenly, out of the smashed toy model, rises Slash in his enormous 3 meter size, but has black eyes with pinprick red pupils, more teeth that are sharper than before, and a crazed persona to match it.
"Exe Slash!" The humongous beast roars in pure rage and goes face to face with the nutcracker once more, but Amy goes between the two with both fear and bravery locked in her eyes. Exe Slash ignores the girl's standing and flings her into the kitchen next to the fridge with a swift backhand and proceeds to attack the nutcracker. He begins hacking and slashing at his wooden structure, knocking whole slices off with his bare nails. Amy gets up and finds the ice scepter next to her and fires an ice beam at Exe Slash, only for it to freeze a small patch of fur, not doing any damage to him. The giant then yells at the sliced up nutcracker,
"Now to finish you off!"
"Never!" Exe Slash looks back and sees a light blue beam strike him right in the face, shrinking him down to the size he was before, followed by an ice beam, encasing him a cage of ice hovering in the air. The ice cube then falls onto the skateboard and slowly rolls into the fridge, causing a slight bump upon contact. The cherry-flavored ice cage with Knuckles stuck to it was at the edge during this time, and the small bump of the skateboard flung the winged echidna and the ice o fall on the end of the skateboard opposite of the shrunken beast, launching Exe Slash's ice cube to fly out of the kitchen window and into the barren snow. Amy, dropping the scepter and shrink ray, runs towards the pile of wood chips, gears, and shredded fabric. "Nutcracker?" She looks around and finally finds the only thing still intact, his head, and the tune begins to play once more, but in a slowed and scratchy tempo. She kneels down and picks up the head in her arms, the once warm living flesh began to feel like the cold dead wood the nutcracker was initially. The nutcracker barely opens his eyes and scratchily puts his final words together,
"I-I-I l-lov-v-ve y-you A-A-Amy, g-g-g-g-g-goo-oo-ood bye..." With those final words, the tune fades away, and the brief life of the nutcracker on the night of December 24th dies. The clock begins to chime twelve times, Christmas Day, the outside world was fast asleep, not a single sound could be heard. The fire was out of wood and has been reduced to a few embers, and the only thing to be heard is the weeping of a tiny hedgehog. A beefy figure walks to Amy from behind and rests his hand on her shoulder, she looks to see it is Knuckles, free from his ice situation.
"He's dead." Knuckles glances at the wooden head and speaks, trying to comfort the poor creature that knelt beside him,
"The nutcracker, soldier of Christmas, knew no wrong, who gave his life to protect those whom he barely knew. We'll forever remember him and give tribute to him every stroke of midnight on Christmas Eve."
Amen Knuckles.
"Come on Amy," he pulls out the shrink ray and points it at Amy, "you ready?" Amy takes one more look at the nutcracker and nods at him. She sets down the head and Knuckles sets the shrink ray in reverse and fires it at her, growing her to her original size. He then aims at the mirror and grows that to the size Amy could use. She grabs the gun and returns Knuckles to his normal size as well as the scepter and then picks up the nutcracker head with her white gloves. Knuckles finds a small, wooden, chest on top of the mantle. He reaches his arm out, picks it up, and turns to Amy holding it between his gloves. "Let's put the head in here, we don't want to freak Sonic out." She takes one final look at the disembodied head before putting it into the chest,
"Goodbye nutcracker."
"I'll take care of the chest, good night." He heads outside into the calm winter night and Amy goes to bed, dreaming of her and the nutcracker dancing with his tune ringing in her ears. Six hours later, she awakens from her bed and heads downstairs to see the wreckage in the light of day, the wood chips, the smashed fridge, the Egg-1 model with broken glass and Substance Exe, even her cage which is now a puddle of cherry coloured water. The young Amy had friends who were coming over for Christmas, so she cleaned the place up in an hour, the wood chips brought in emotions that had her hesitate for a minute, before sweeping them up. 7 o'clock, and one by one, Tails, Shadow, Rouge, Omega, Cream, Cheese, Vanilla, Silver, Blaze, Vector, Charmy, Espio, Big, and Froggy enter and sit around the Christmas tree. They shared stories and wished each other merry holidays as the presents were passed around to each individual. Amy, being the wallflower of the party, looks over the unity of friends before asking,
"Hey, where's Sonic and Knuckles?" Tails then replies, after taking a sip of hot chocolate from his porcelain cup,
"Sonic's giving a warm Christmas hello to Dr. Eggman and his bots..."
And I am narrating this story.
"Yeah, what he said."
"Well Okay then." The morning proceeded as normal despite the absence of Sonic and Knuckles. However, midway through the present giving, the front door could be heard being opened and closed. Dr. Eggman then appears, popping his head of the corner and into the living room and says... wait what?
"Hey guys!"
Didn't I get rid of you?
"I just came by to get the magic ice scepter I found behind a dumpster and my evil shrink ray. Where are they anyways?"
I donated them to the government.
"What? NO!"
Happy holidays Eggman, and goodbye.
"Wait, nonononononono!"
POW!
"AHHHHHH!" Dr. Eggman is flung again outside and falls into the same hole as before, this time, the 'mysterious force' making sure he NEVER comes back. When the gift sharing seemed to have come to an end, Amy had not received a present. Yet, Knuckles shows up to her house in the nick of time and presents her with a small chest...
"Is this?"
"Wait," Knuckles replies, "Narrator…guy, are you going to spoil it?"
"Oh, well you might as well do it," Amy slowly opens the box to see what is inside. It is the nutcracker, restored to perfect condition and looks even more like Sonic than initially before. "Tails helped me fix him, although we couldn't bring him back, he can still crunch nuts pretty fat. Turn the key to find out the other half of the surprise we built in it." Amy winds up the brass key impaled in the back and sets the nutcracker down on top of the mantle as it begins to play the tune she immediately recognized as the Flower Waltz.
"It's so beautiful, thank you."
"No problem at all Amy."
"I just-"
"That is a nice tune." A voice speaks from the hallway, the source walks out and it turns out to be Sonic. "Sorry to be late, but I just had to visit Baldy McNosehair and give him my Christmas gift, oddly enough, I didn't find him in his lair."
"What gift did you bring me?"
"Oh um..."
Sonic had forgot to get Amy a-
"Shut up, random, giant, ominous, voice… thing, I got her something... a-uh-a dance."
"A dance?"
A dance?
"Yes, let us dance to this funky beat." Amy giggles to herself at Sonic's proclaimation and nods in agreement. The two walk towards each other as Amy puts her hands on Sonic's shoulders and Sonic puts his hands at Amy's hips. They then began to dance along with the music as everyone else begins their goodbyes and head home, one by one. Outside, a small werehog pops out of the snow, back to normal and out of the Substance Exe craze. Slash yells out, in a rather high-pitch voice,
"Hey, you said I would win!"
Sorry Slash, I made a mistake, enjoy the winter being small, and he will for much longer.
"Wait what?"
Back at Amy's house, the two hedgehogs continue to dance together. As the blue and pink slowly spiraled around each other, Amy thought she saw the nutcracker smile at her while Sonic's back was turned, maybe it was a trick of the light or something else...