It was mid day. Shadow the Hedgehog was roaming the streets of his tear-soaked hometown, listening to Nickelback and reminiscing an era when he felt happy. Suddenly, he heard a voice.
"Shadow..."
"M...Maria?" Shadow whispered, his voice lower than he felt every day carrying the weight of his sins. "Is that you?" Unfortunately, it wasn't Maria. It was the local casino, which used illegal government technology to find out the name of anyone who walked by its doors of temptation and call out their name through a large speaker. But Shadow did not know that.
"Maria!" he cried out as he ran into the brightly decorated doors of delusion.
"Huh?" said a random gambler whose name happened to be Maria.
Shadow did not care. He went up to the counter, and as the face of a young, unfortunate looking adult male who was thoroughly not Maria stared back at him from behind the counter, he realized what he sought was not and would never be in a place like this (or anywhere).
"Damn," he said edgily, just like Maria had always told him not to in the week he had known her. It was the one thing she had particularly stressed, next to drinking, doing drugs, and gambling. They had even sworn an oath.
"Gambling will never do you any good, Shadow," she had said. "You'll just get obsessed; you'll lose track of time and you'll never ever get back the money you spend! So promise me you won't ever gamble if we go to that planet?"
"Okay!" he had said like the naive fool he was.
But, he figured in the present era, he had already disgraced her memory with the fact that he had even stepped foot inside this cursed building. So what was... one try at the slots?
He lost! But what was another? And he lost that one too. So maybe he'd win the next one, just because he'd spent some money already, so why not? Or maybe he'd win the next one, or the next one, or the next one, or the next one, and before he knew it, it was 9 pm at night and he, Shadow the Hedgehog, now had $7 to his name.
"Damn!" he said. He got up from the slot machine he had been camping at, and it felt like being woken up from the pod again as he stretched his body. Maria was right, he thought as he skated out of the casino and vowed to never come back.
The End.