A/N: Many thanks to turbomun, who graciously gave me her permission to publish this fic based on her fan-favourite work, 'Ghost Boy'. I strongly recommend that you guys check it out and give her some glowing reviews!
It was dinner time at the Sugar Rush castle.
Fix-It Felix Jr. emerged from the kitchen, carrying dishes of steaming hot food. Seated at the dining table were the three hungry people he considered to be his family: his dear wife Sergeant Tamora Jean Calhoun, his old friend Wreck-It Ralph, and the nine-year-old President of Sugar Rush, Vanellope von Schweetz.
Once everyone had been served, Felix removed his apron and joined the others at the table. The four of them held hands, closed their eyes and began to say the thanksgiving prayer:
"Our Coder, which art in Japan, Konami be thy name…"
Suddenly, there was a loud KABOOM, and the entire fourth wall of the dining room was pulverized. As the gingerbread dust settled, out from behind the edible rubble stepped…
"Elvira?" exclaimed a disoriented Ralph incredulously. "What are you doing here?!"
Miss Elvira McMagic was the main character of a new fantasy-themed game in Litwak's arcade. Elvira's Quest had arrived on a temporary tour a few months before, and proved to be relatively popular with Litwak's patrons for a while. However, neither Ralph, Felix, or Calhoun knew much about Elvira except that she was a rather gentle mage whom they sometimes saw hanging out at Tapper's and Game Central Station.
The character standing before them now was anything but. Although it looked like Elvira, there was something terribly wrong with her… something terribly familiar.
"Oh, my name's not Elvira," said the mage, in a strangely-familiar sing-song voice. "It's… El-Virus! Hoo, hoo, hoo!"
Vanellope screamed. She knew that laugh all too well. "King Candy!" she cried in terror, clambering desperately onto Ralph for protection.
"Turbo!" Ralph growled. He had not forgotten how the former good guy had cruelly destroyed Vanellope's life for fifteen years, all to feed his lust for attention. The sicko had lied to him, her, the citizens of Sugar Rush and the whole arcade just to make himself relevant again. And now, despite dying inside a game not called 'Turbo Time', the evil racer had somehow returned to cause more trouble.
Ralph was not going to let him. In righteous indignation, the wrecker lunged at King Candy, attempting to crush him with his massive fists. Without breaking a sweat, the king cast a powerful spell that sent Ralph and Vanellope flying into the wall behind them.
"Ralph!" cried Felix, rushing to their aid. Behind him, King Candy approached the trio, intending to finish them off. But before he could do anything, Sergeant Calhoun was back with an enormous semi-automatic weapon.
"Hey, slimeball!" she snarled at him. "Eat this!" she said as she unloaded round after round of ammo in his direction.
Not one bullet hit its mark. A protective magical shield suddenly appeared around the king, deflecting all of Calhoun's fire uselessly into what remained of the gingerbread walls around them. Irritated, King Candy turned around to deal with the soldier lady himself.
That proved to be a mistake on his part. Ralph had recovered, and with a mighty roar, he tackled the evil monarch from behind. Having gotten King Candy in a chokehold, he threw him to the floor and pinned him there.
"That's the last time you will hurt any of my friends!" Ralph shouted. "I'm gonna lock you up in the fungeon, and then I'm gonna throw away the key so no one will find you ever again. You should have stayed dead when you had the chance. How the land are you even still alive right now?!"
"Hoo… hoo… hoo!" choked out King Candy. "That's… one thing… you ought to know about… me… by now, Ralph…" he continued, with a dangerous determination in his eyes. "I cheat."
With that, a blinding flash of powerful light burst forth from the king, breaking Ralph's hold on him and sending the wrecker flying once more. However, it was also finally too much for Turbo's heavily-modified code to handle. The racer's form suddenly began to break out in glitches, revealing the various layers underneath. First Elvira, then King Candy, and finally… Turbo himself.
When Turbo saw what was happening to himself, he cried out in horror and rage. "No!" he shouted, desperately trying to stamp out the involuntary changes. "Not this! I'm the most powerful virus in the arcade – the greatest racer ever! I'm not a kid anymore, I never was! I'm not going back to being a kid!"
"A kid?" Felix asked himself in puzzlement. Of all the things he could have thought of to describe the chimeric monstrosity before him, 'kid' was probably dead last. In fact, he could not recall ever thinking of Turbo as a kid. And yet… hearing it now from Turbo's own lips, it kind of made sense – the pettiness, the emotional immaturity, the constant desire for attention…
As Turbo thrashed around the middle of the room, trying to regain control of his appearance, he suddenly let out a bloodcurdling yell. "Gaaah!" he screamed. "Stop that! Whichever one of you is doing that, I order you to stop! Stop – stop it – STOP IT! Yeaaaaarghh!"
And then, just as suddenly as it had started, it was over. The mad racer fell silent, the glitching stopped and his body went limp. All was instantly quiet again, as it had been before Turbo gatecrashed everyone's dinnertime.
Tentatively, Ralph, Felix and Calhoun approached the comatose figure in front of them. He looked just as Ralph and Felix remembered him from the arcade's early days. Back then, who could have imagined that he would end up here? Against all odds, he had cheated death twice – once in RoadBlasters, and then once again in Sugar Rush.
Sugar Rush – where he had jaw-droppingly taken over an entire game for fifteen years without anyone noticing! If Ralph had not 'gone Turbo' himself and wound up there, there was no doubt he could have continued his King Candy charade indefinitely. It was thanks to pure luck that Vanellope had unmasked him with the aid of Ralph's stolen medal.
Speaking of Vanellope, where was she? She had disappeared from the room during the altercation. Suddenly, the three adults heard the sound of a child sobbing in the hallway. A few moments later, Vanellope emerged from around a corner, with Sour Bill by her side.
She scampered into Ralph's large arms, bawling. Ralph, ever the faithful comforter, scooped her up and stroked her gently on her back. "Hey, hey, there, kiddo," he said kindly. "It's okay, everything's fine. Look!" he said, gesturing to the floor. "That mean ol' Turbo's been totally KO'd. He won't hurt you ever again."
"I know," Vanellope sobbed. "I killed him."
"You what?!" sputtered Calhoun in disbelief.
"I went into the code vault with Sour Bill and ripped out his code," sniffled Vanellope. "I had to do it or he would just come back. But still…"
"But nothing," said Ralph. "He was supposed to have died a long time ago, after he destroyed his own game. He had absolutely no business coming here. In fact, as princess…" Ralph caught himself. "I mean, as president of Sugar Rush," he corrected himself, "you had every right to evict him from your game."
"I know that, Ralphie," Vanellope replied. "But I'm still just a nine-year-old girl, and I… I've just destroyed someone's code!" she cried with horror.
"Someone who first tried to destroy your code, Vanellope!" Ralph reminded her.
"I know, Ralph!" she yelled. "I know he's done terrible things to me all these years! I know he's the one responsible for making me a glitch. I know he's the one who stole my game, my life and my whole reason for being away from me. And yet…"
"… I still can't do it!" she finished, burying her face in Ralph's chest as she burst out crying again.
Ralph was silent. He simply didn't know how to respond to that. Somehow, despite all the misery and suffering that monster had brought her over fifteen years, this little girl still couldn't bring herself to kill him. For a moment, Ralph regretted that his creators had made him a wrecker. Destruction was his raison d'être – his very reason for being! How was he supposed to comfort someone who didn't want to wreck anything?
A lightbulb went off in his mind. Of course! he thought. I may not know anything about fixing stuff, but I know someone right here who does!
Ralph turned to the little man standing right beside him. "Felix!" he said gratefully, "do you have any ideas?"
"Certainly!" Felix replied with a smile. "Come down here, Vanellope!"
Vanellope climbed down Ralph and walked over to the man she considered an uncle. She had stopped crying and was wiping away her tears with her sleeves.
"Vanellope," Felix began gently, "Back when my game was active, do you remember what we used to do for the homeless characters in Game Central Station?"
Vanellope nodded. "You took Q*bert and his friends in and made them part of your game."
"That's right," Felix said. "And when my game got unplugged, Tammy gave me a job in her game." He turned to look at his beloved wife, whom he had had the unbelievable good fortune to meet when Ralph went Turbo. Calhoun reciprocated his smile, remembering the day her new husband had come into her life to fix it without a hammer.
"Now," Felix explained, "Turbo doesn't have a game of his own anymore. He hasn't had one for… jiminy-jaminy, thirty years now. But I still remember when Turbo Time was popular, and what he was like back then. Believe it or not, he was in some ways just like you."
"Really?" Vanellope asked him in astonishment.
Felix nodded. "He was a young racer whom all the players loved. They used to queue up for hours just to play as him." He conveniently left out the fact that Turbo was, well, the only playable character in Turbo Time, causing Ralph to let out a little snort.
Vanellope didn't seem to notice Ralph subtly calling Felix out on his bullroar. If she did, she didn't show it. "I think… I think I would've loved to see him in action," she said finally.
"I think you already have, kiddo," said Ralph drily.
"Wreck-It!" hissed Calhoun. She was a far better diplomat than Ralph, and she knew that her husband was painting a very specific picture of Turbo for Vanellope's sake. She would be damned if she allowed Ralph to wreck this delicate effort.
"You still can, sweetheart," Felix continued. "How about…" he paused, unsure of how Vanellope would react to what he was about to suggest. "… how would you like to reprogram Turbo to become a Sugar Rush racer?"
"FELIX!" Ralph cried in horror.
Calhoun clocked him with her weapon. "Quiet, Wreck-It!" she barked, anxiously attempting some damage control. "Let him finish!"
"Reprogram him?" asked Vanellope. Her tone of voice suggested that she really wanted to be on board with the idea and only needed to be convinced that it could work. Felix mentally breathed a sigh of relief. He could work with that.
"Yes!" he told her. "I have some experience working with code myself; so what do you say you and I head down to the vault and see what we can do with Turbo's code? We can erase his memories all the way back to the day before his game was destroyed, so that he won't remember anything that made him go bad or want to kill you. You could then teach him how to fit into Sugar Rush as a bonus racer."
Ralph didn't realise it, but he had been holding his breath for the last half-minute. Of all the things Felix could have said to Vanellope, this had to be the most mind-bogglingly insane. Give Turbo a second chance at life? Had they forgotten what he had done to them even in just the last half-hour? They could all have ended up dead at his hands if Vanellope had not tranquilised him in time!
Meanwhile, Vanellope was silent, deep in thought. That was a rare sight for Ralph; his best friend was usually an inveterate chatterbox and an irrepressible bundle of energy. He hoped, and he prayed that she would at least have the brains and the good sense to put her mortal enemy to bed for good. Surely she knew that had their positions been reversed, that psychopath would not hesitate to make her a distant memory.
After what seemed like an eternity, Vanellope finally broke her silence. Four words came from her lips.
"Alright, let's do it."
In that moment, facepalming seemed too mild a reaction for Ralph.
Felix was exuberant. "Splendid!" he exclaimed. "Let's go now!"
Hand-in-hand, Felix and Vanellope headed off to Sugar Rush's code vault together, with Sour Bill leading the way. They both knew they had to act quickly before Ralph tried to change their minds.
Back in the kitchen, Ralph sat on the floor in stunned stupefaction. He could not believe that his two closest friends had essentially decided to commit mutual suicide. Not just for themselves, or for him and Calhoun too, but for the whole arcade. Why could they not see that Turbo was too dangerous to be left alive – or rather, brought back to life?
Ever the independent woman, Calhoun had left the dining room to join her husband and Vanellope in the code vault. That left Ralph alone with everyone's uneaten dinner. Ralph realized that in their haste to save Turbo, Felix had forgotten to fix the dining room with his hammer before they left. No matter; Ralph was accustomed to living in a dump anyway.
Slowly, Ralph scooped up all the uneaten food in his large hands, and dug in. Even when the whole world was going crazy, at least he got to eat, right?
THE END.