Chapter 2: The Action Begins Part 2
"Characters of the Arcade, we are the Cheetahmen, and we have come to warn you that your
world is in grave danger!" The words out of his mouth shocked the crowd.
"Grave danger? From what?" asked the blue hedgehog that had arrived a little before Ralph and Felix. "And who are you? You're almost as fast as I am, almost but not quite" Sonic grinned, cocky as ever.
"Sonic they're the Cheetahmen and it's not good that they are here." Ralph said looking over at
the humanoid felines. "Hercules why are you and your brothers here, I thought we got rid of
your game long ago."
"The seal is weakening Ralph, and it's not good, soon the 52 will begin to awaken like we have and the consequences will be dire." Hercules replied his voice distorting slightly for a second like a record being pulled backward.
"Seal, I'm not following, care to fill me in Ralph" Sonic said confused.
Felix walked over to Sonic. "That's right, your game was released that same year but you were plugged in slightly too late for you to remember this, in fact Ralph and I are probably the only ones left who were around back then. Anyway this happened about 10 years after Ralph and I were plugged in, around 1991. I remember like it was yesterday, Mr. Litwak ran into his arcade extremely excited about something. Turns out he had just bought what he thought at the time was the coolest thing ever, Action 52. From what I heard around Tappers it was supposed to be a big thing, cartoons, action figures you name it, of course as you know none of that actually happened."
At that one of the Cheetahmen began roaring and swinging his arms wildly like he was about to attack. "We were robbed I tell you! We were going to be famous! How dare the ungrateful kids not buy our game!" The other two grabbed him to keep him from acting out any more.
"Calm down Aries, settle down and let Felix finish." Hercules demanded.
"All right" Aries grumbled, "but hurry up, I'm not good at being patient!
Felix didn't like the sound of that. "OK, anyway Action 52 had 52 different games on it, a concept Mr. Litwak thought at the time to be extremely cool. Of course when he actually plugged it in and started playing, he immediately regretted it."
"That does sound cool, why would he possibly regret it?" Asked Sonic.
Felix shuddered. "Bugs, bugs and glitches everywhere. Bad hit detection, bosses that didn't show up, levels that didn't load, it was awful, I heard Litwak say in his exact words "This is the biggest glitch fest I have ever played" and that's saying something considering according to Sonic he's played Sonic 06."
Sonic didn't like that last statement. "Hey, I liked that game, it wasn't nearly as bad as people say it was!"
Ralph laughed "No it was worse, Unleashed was good though."
"Can we please stay on topic" Aries growled "We don't have much time here"
"Ok, Ok," Felix apologized "anyway where was I…oh yeah, Litwak unplugged Action 52 after about a day. It was a good thing too because the game was causing...problems."
What kind of problems?" Asked Sonic
"Well, people that went in most of the time never came out, and those rare few who did come
back had been driven completely insane, saying things like "no, no more flashing" and "level 4
does exist, I know it does!", and that's not going into what came out. The Cheetahmen here
may be programmed well enough to stay in one piece but a lot of the game characters couldn't
keep their code together outside the game, they were falling apart and pretty much constantly
in pieces, it was sad really."
"While that does sound disturbing, I'm not seeing how that could affect us" Sonic said, scratching his head.
"Well, the thing about badly programmed games is badly programmed AI and…well, do you remember the Cy-bugs?"
"You don't mean"
"I do, the normal enemies of the game weren't, aren't, programmed well enough to have any sense of morality and sentience. While the Badniks in your games may attack, they are only like that during gaming hours, after hours they are kind of nice guys. Not so with these enemies, they attacked everyone, anytime. They were pretty much wild animals. After the arcade closed and the game opened to the station they all began swarming out attacking everything in sight, it was terrible and we couldn't hit half of them with their bad hit detection, so it was a great relief as sad as it sounds when Litwak eventually unplugged it…except, the game didn't go away."
"What do you mean it didn't go away" Sonic asked still very confused, "It was unplugged, shouldn't it, you know vanish?"
Felix sighed "yes that's what we thought too, and we didn't know how it happened all we knew is that Litwak unplugged it and it didn't disappear, and we were still being attacked. Worse yet, this phantom Action 52 was causing slow but dangerous data corruption in the Station that would have transferred into the games, shutting down the entire arcade. Eventually as a last resort, a high level Black Mage from Final Fantasy cast a powerful sealing spell to lock it up so that nothing could get in or out, trapping the friendly characters inside but saving the arcade. The corruption thankfully wasn't permanent and the data fixed itself overnight. Everyone involved vowed to never speak of the matter again so that's why you've never heard of it before, and everyone's been safe from it ever since."
"Until now." Hercules said ominously. "The seal has been weakening constantly from the strain of the faulty programming on the other side. Already the more stable characters like us are able to escape, and according to Apollo, about 10 hours are left before it breaks completely and floods the Arcade with enemies, and this time the most vicious of our game's evil-doers are aware of the Arcade's presence. In short, you have about 10 hours to do something about this or everyone in this arcade will most likely perish, but no pressure." TO BE CONTINUED!