Hello. Salutations. Good evening. Guten Tag. Konichiwa. BonswhatevertheFrenchsay. Salut. Guten Abend. Gute Nacht. Guten Heimatlosenfriedhof. How you doing? Don't answer that question; I won't be able to hear you regardless of what your answer is. You could be suicidally depressed after alien sea cucumbers just invaded the world and sucked out all the brains of all things you find beloved and left you with only a transcript of this paragraph, but no amount of saying your answer out loud will cause it to transcend the barrier of the Internet and reach my ears. Unless you send it to me via review or PM, in which case I might even see it.

Also, for those of you not initiated yet, this story got a name change this chapter! Much better than the dumb hashtag thing that the website wouldn't even let me put in the title anyways. Hopefully it's acceptable, but feel free to send a message if you think you have a better name. Enjoy the madness!

Omega stomped his clanking feet down upon the light-gray concrete of the sidewalk nearest the gas station. He had crossed the street with little huff. In his opinion.

"INFRASTRUCTURE TRAVERSING MISSION COMPLETED SUCCESSFULLY," he stated, mechanical voice devoid of emotion. "SURVEYING FINAL RESULTS."

The advanced war machine rotated his head in a half-circle, scanning over the small mid-city highway.

First was the Chao Diner, now across the street from the hulk of the E-series, which (somehow) stood unharmed. The road itself seemed to tell a rather dissimilar story, as one could easily make out the figure of an overturned pickup truck in the road's central turning lane and a bunch of other crunched up automotives forming lines around it that stopped traffic. The infamous GUN semi had been tossed onto its side and now rested on a row of cars.

A mob of random people, all fully grown adults, stood across the way from Omega and, with the shocked look upon each of their faces, he did not require his advanced-level scanners to tell him that every last one of them needed a change of undergarments.

To complete this ensemble of chaos, an innocent squirrel's flattened corpse graced the center of the freeway.

"MISSION RANKING: A-97% COMPLETION."

Up above, a surviving stoplight switched from green to red, as if it were trying to tell (or yell at) Omega that this crisis could've been averted had he waited two friggin' minutes to cross. Omega sniped down the inferior device as punishment for its back-sass.

"MISSION RANKING: S-100% COMPLETION."

Taking shelter in the convenient store, the pump patrons of the gas station watched, horrified, as the monster that had decimated the nearby street approached, a blood-red armored reaper, fire reflecting in its eyes the same way hatred reflected off its soul, tiny hamburger clenched menacingly in hand.

Omega ignored the patrons, luckily, for they weren't in the way. His objective was oil, not body count. Currently, anyways.

Before the nearest pump stood an abandoned convertible vehicle sporting yellow taxi cab print, looking as though it were guarding the fuel station from Omega and his big, meaty-I mean-metal claws. But as you and I both know, dear reader, a taxi cab is as effective a blockade to a killer robot that wants oil as a cat is to a fifty-ton mouse that wants a cheese wheel. Less so, in fact.

Omega got a grip on the cab and flipped it over. The taxi cab did not object to this, of course, because as everyone knows, taxis can't speak, and therefore cannot object to being tossed. It did, however, pee its pants a little, because as everyone once again knows, taxi cabs are fully capable of wearing pants.

Do not question, child. The right for taxis to wear pants is the result of their long and hard-fought war against the Persians, and other hostile varieties of feline.

As the car fell, the taxi's owner-an African Federationalist wearing tacky shirt and hat, as well as a name tag reading 'Hello. My name is: B.D. Joe'-screamed. "My baby!" The store clerk wisely slapped a hand over the Joe's mouth and restrained him.

Omega looked from Joe to the now-crumpled, upside-down, alarm-blaring cab and drawled, "I SEE NO FAMILY RESEMBLANCE."

"What?" the store clerk asked.

"I SAID I SEE NO FAMILY RESEMBLANCE!"

"What!?" B.D. Joe cried.

"GOSH DANG IT!" the robo ranted, "IT'S A PAINFULLY OBVIOUS JOKE WHERE I COMICALLY MISS THE POINT! DID THE TWO OF YOU LEARN NOTHING IN CLOWN COLLEGE?"

"What!" they screamed in unison. Then the clerk thoughtfully added, "We can't hear your intimidating mechanical droning over the sound of the car alarm!" He pointed a funger at the cab.

"OH." Omega said, before he converted his arms into steamrollers. In a single minute, the cab magically became silent (and flat).

Joe screeched as though his heart had somersaulted into and out of his skull. He ripped himself from Mr. Clerk's grasp, becoming a panicked horse (metaphorically, of course), crashing through the store's doors, and bounding forth to his car's corpse.

He fell to his knees on the metal sheet. "You've killed her! You maniac! You monster!"

"I AM A ROBOT."

"She was all I had!"

"THAT'S PATHETIC."

"Whyyyyyyyy!?"

"BECAUSE I FELT LIKE IT."

"If... if only I could talk to her... one more time..."

Although he often wasn't inclined to empathize, sympathize, or pay even the remotest of respects to the lives of others, Omega felt something move inside of him. Never before had he seen a man care so greatly for a machine. After much deliberation, Omega realized that only he could fix the man's crushed heart.

...So he took his steamroller-arms and he crushed the man's heart. And his lungs. And his ribcage. And his face. And anything else relatively close to a corporeal body part. From the store, Mr. Clerk watched in jaw-dropped confusion/ horror as Joe became a poster-thin paper person upon his taxi. The end result looked something like a giant brown pat of butter on a very flat square of taxi-colored toast.

Omega stepped back and admired his handiwork. "NOW THE TWO OF YOU ARE UNITED FOREVER."

"Thank you!" Joe cried. Tears of joy flowed from his tear ducts, which you really couldn't see because they had been flattened below the other parts of his now deformed 2-dimensional face.

Mr. Clerk reeled, his confusion growing exponentially.

Because his heart (that is, his Human Empathy Artificing Reaction Transistor) had sweltered (overheated) due to Joe's love, Omega was not content to leave the duo on the pump station pavement, so he grabbed the flattened slab, raised them up, booted up his oragami subroutine, and approximately Pi seconds later the machine held in his hands a large paper airplane made of squashed human, squashed taxi cab, and squashed squash (Joe apparently held various thematically appropriate foodstuffs in his pockets pre-flattening. The reason for this is unknown.)

Mr. Clerk began suffocating on his confusion, for it was too large for him to breath through.

"BE FREE, YOU WORTHLESS CONSUMER ROAD VEHICLE!" shouted Omega gleefully. "AND YOUR TAXI TOO!" He then threw the airplane. Through the air it sailed, its grace unparalleled by any other flying mish-mash of yellow vehicle metal and human body parts (Sorry, Magic School Bus). Ahead of the pair was a future where the two would no longer be separated by trivial things like taxes or social interactions or speed limits. Not that those had ever stopped them before, but whatever! They would finally be forever together, free to explore their mutual LOVE! Glee ran through B. D.'s veins, and his laugh could be heard as he and his taxi happily sailed into the sunset.

Dong.

Unfortunately, The Sunset was actually the name of the gas station's dumpster supplier, and Joe only managed to say "D'oh!" before the airplane fell in and the dumpster lid fell on top of them.

At this point, Mr. Clerk's confusion had grown so massive that it ruptured the gas station ceiling. It then mutated three heads, elongated spines, and a miniature Rascal Flatts concert, and-after that-booked itself a flight to Tokyo so it could get a start on its new career as a rampaging kaiju.

Omega turned toward the only remaining gas pump, as if what had just happened had not just happened. "FINALLY. IT TOOK ME THREE FLIP-A-DIPPIN' CHAPTERS OF SENSELESS BABBLE BEFORE I COULD GET ONE DIP-A-FLIPPIN' CONDIMENT." With this completely normal declaration, Omega walked toward the only remaining pump and, with his delicious burger clenched softly in his trembling claw, pulled the nozzle from its slot.

'Please select a payment option,' read the pump.

Omega glared at it with the heat and force of an inverse supernova.

'Holy Mother Geneva Convention.' the pump now read. 'Take all my gas, take my money, take my rewards card, just don't hurt me!'

"PROVIDE ME WITH YOUR OIL, INFERIOR MACHINE."

'...

'My what?'

"WHAT ARE YOU, DEAF? GIVE ME YOUR OIL!"

For the record, gas pumps do not have ears. "But... but... I'm a GAS pump. I don't do oil...' it protested.

Omega glared at it with the heat and force of an inverse inverse supernova.

In a process not dissimilar to a man spewing grape juice from his earlobes, the gas pump spewed oil from the nozzle-the only reason that it managed this was because it's fear of Omega spontaneously provided it with the willpower to break the laws of physics, creating a wormhole somewhere within its hose that sapped oil off of some far off rig in the middle of the Pacific. Keep in mind that this particular gas pump exists on Mobius, not Earth, and the ocean in question only exists on one of those two planets.

The black liquid oozed across the pavement, and Omega chortled gleefully (while deactivating the disintegration ray he had been preparing for the non-compliant pump) as he removed the upper bun of the burger and brought the delicate meat up to meet the most succulent condiment a machine can acquire. So great was the cheerful robot's delight when the sauce made contact with the beef that he accidentally launched a round of fireworks from his shoulders, vermillion and azure and emerald spirals that swirled their way into the heavens and combusted into dazzling starbursts while also setting fire to a passing biplane.

"FINALLY!" Omega shouted, holding his double-broiled oil burger to the heavens so that it could outshine them (It didn't for obvious reason, but don't tell Omega that). "I HAVE FINALLY DONE IT! NO ABSURD DISTRACTION IN THIS WORLD COULD PREVENT ME FROM ACHIEVING MY GOALS!"

Unfortunately for Omega, the basic principle of Murphy's Law states that saying anything remotely close to "Nothing can stop me!" is almost a guaranteed method for conjuring up something that could stop him.

The gas pump began to rattle.

"YES," continued an oblivious and uncaring murder machine. "THERE IS, IN FACT, NOTHING IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE THAT COULD POSSIBLY DEPRIVE ME OF THIS SENSATION OF UNBRIDLED VICTORY."

Somewhere along the central span of the hose, a massive sphere of pressure appeared like a mouse in a snake's belly, and crawled its way the nozzle, which happened to have been dropped on the ground in such a way that the hole pointed directly at Omega's precious, exposed food product.

"BECAUSE I AM AWESOME AND SUPERIOR TO HUMANKIND AND IMMUNE TO THE UNIVERSAL KARMA THAT MY ACTIONS WOULD BRING ABOUT IN A FAIR WORLD."

Suddenly, in a vision-obscuring burst of flying oil, the dark figure that had been crawling through the pipeline of oil launched with eye-burring speed at Omega's burger-holding claw, its own claws extended in feral slashing position, its eyes glinting with a hazy, malice-filled reflection of the sesame seed buns.

Then Omega used his free hand to slam dunk the intruder's face into the concrete.

"I TOLD YOU, SISTER!" he declared. For a robot speaking in a monotone, his voice sounded rather singsong. "KARMA IMMUNE!"

It was around that moment that Omega realized that he needed to watch his language. He was starting to speak as though he had more personality than the average robot did, and that didn't synergize too well with the "Uncaring murder-inclined machine" image that he had worked so hard to cultivate. To correct his slip up, Omega immediately turned to his inky assailant, and interrogated him in his usual droning tone: "YOU THERE. INFERIOR MORTAL BEING. YOU HAVE ATTEMPTED AN ATTACK UPON MY HARD-WON NOURISHMENT. I WILL GIVE YOU TWO SECONDS TO EXPLAIN YOURSELF BEFORE I VAPORIZE YOU. PLEASE NOTE THAT YOU WILL BE VAPORIZED REGARDLESS OF WHETHER OR NOT YOU PROVIDE A SATISFACTORY ANSWER."

Growling, the figure peeled his face from the concrete. With a start, Omega recognized that the creature was, in fact, a hedgehog. A black hedgehog. A particular hedgehog that he recognized well enough.

Meanwhile, while that was happening, a completely unrelated incident was also going on somewhere in an unnamed African country as some poor explorer had fallen off of a cliff, and was currently hanging from a branch for dear life. If I were you, dear reader, I would seek him out and help him up while you wait for the next chapter to release.

*gasp!* Another main series character joins the fabula of this tale! And they have it out for Omega, I guess. How intriguing. It's too bad we have to wait for that dude in *Africa to stop hanging from cliffs, otherwise* I'd post *the* next chapter imm*ediate*ly* and-

***What the-?*

*What*the-!?"****

*OK, WHO LET*** ALL THESE * * * BLASTED ASTERISKS IN HERE**!? I*MMA K*LL *EM! WI*LL S*MEB*DY GET*ME A BLO*DY FL**PING FLY SWATTER, P*L*E*A*S*E?