Some of you may be disappointed to hear this, but Vanellope has no parents. NONE of the racers have parents. They can take care of themselves (I mean, they can drive better than most adults). Also, it's just a video game. Sorry, I'm just tired of people insisting that there was an original King Candy that Turbo impersonated. Seriously guys, it doesn't make sense, and Raymond Persi (who worked on the movie) already debunked that myth on his tumblr, which is sadly missing. Now, on to the chapter.
Chapter 3: King Candy is Not Vanellope's Father, Okay?
"First… I'm hungry. What's there to eat around here?"
Sour Bill just stared, waiting for the real question. When it seemed like the stranger was actually serious, he sighed. "I'll take you to the kitchen."
As they made their way down there, Turbo continued to play the part and told Sour Bill all kinds of rules. "And no matter how awesome a new game might be…" he said, cringing in anger. Realizing his emotions, he finished normally, "You must never abandon your own game to put the other one out of order."
"Ok…"
"Oh, last thing to remember: It's not whether you win or lose, it's how the gamer plays with you." Turbo added mentally, But outside regular gameplay, winning is everything.
Sour Bill questioned, "Weren't you supposed to tell all this to Vanellope?"
"You can relay the info back to her."
When they got to the kitchen, Turbo took a seat in a cookie-cushioned chair at the chocolate table while Sour Bill opened the sugarcoated fridge. How does anything function around here? Turbo wondered, despite knowing that video games didn't have to follow logic. The green candy took out a few plates of food and placed them on the table.
The first one Turbo noticed looked like a purple blob in the shape of a turkey. "What the heck is this?" he asked, pointing to it.
"Taffurkey," Bill answered. "A turkey made completely out of taffy."
"Ew." So his first guess was correct. He pushed that plate away and examined the next one. "And this is?"
"Sweetloaf. Basically a cake with various candies mixed in."
Turbo pushed it aside. "Pass. What about the last one?" It looked like something that had been freezer-burned, but he couldn't be sure.
"I actually have no idea, it was just in the fridge."
Not being a fan of mystery food (and too sick of candy already), Turbo sat back and asked, "Don't you have any normal food?"
Sour Bill suggested, "You could eat the eggs by themselves."
Turbo growled, but was too hungry to argue. "Oh fine. But make them hardboiled."
So Sour Bill carried out his request and he handed the racer a plate of peeled hardboiled eggs.
When Turbo took a bite out of one, it still had a sweet taste. "Hey, why does it taste weird? Did you add sugar to the water or something?"
Sour Bill put the cooking pot away as he replied, "All the 'water' here is actually just Tropical Punch Kool-Aid."
Turbo gagged but still managed to swallow. "Ugh, maybe I'll just have them raw." Sour Bill sighed again and dumped the carton of eggs in front of him. As Turbo cracked an egg and gulped the yolk, he tried remembering the layout of the throne room. There must be some secret passage that could lead to the code vault. He looked at Sour Bill again and wondered, Could the servant to the ruler know something as secret as this? "Excuse me?"
"Are you hungry for more raw eggs?" Sour Bill asked dryly.
"No, but I need to know something that possibly only you know about." Turbo cleared his throat and continued, "Arcade Committee protocol requires me to look at the game's code. Just in case there are any bugs that could ruin the game."
"I am not sure where you would go to do that…" Sour Bill said as he put the eggs back in the fridge.
"Oh is that so? I figured you would know something about, I don't know, a code room?"
Sour Bill just gave a blank stare. "…What?"
Now Turbo was impatient. He quickly seized the candy's body and hissed in his face, "Listen, Sour Ball, I—"
"Bill."
"…What?"
"My name's Sour Bill."
Turbo blinked in confusion at the little guy's dull reaction to being apprehended, and he continued, "Right, right, Sour Bill. I know you know about the secret code room. And if you don't tell me where it is…" He sniffed the candy and finished, "I'll just grab myself another snack."
"Well, if you wanted more eggs—"
"I was talking about YOU!"
Now Sour Bill was visibly frightened. "No, you wouldn't!"
Turbo glanced at Sour Bill's hands and feet and noted slyly, "Ooh, your feet are jelly beans! I wonder what flavour they are!"
"No! I'll have to crawl!" cried Sour Bill.
"If you don't wanna crawl, then bawl!" Turbo ordered. "Where is the code room?!"
"But I really don't know what a code room is! Honest!" Sour Bill wailed. "This is the first time I've heard of such a thing! Oh please don't eat me!"
Turbo glared at the green ball, then put him down. "Well you're going to help me find it. Besides, the princess did say to assist me with whatever I needed. We'll start in the throne room." He trudged out of the kitchen with Sour Bill meekly following.
In the throne room, Turbo felt the wall for hidden buttons. He looked under the carpet for trap doors, but all that was there was candy dust. A couple of sneezes later, Turbo checked the throne itself (or the part that wasn't attached to the kart Vanellope drove off in). Even so, there wasn't anything special.
"Oh, of all places!" huffed Turbo. Behind the throne there were a bunch of curtains covering the wall. "Sour Bill! You are the one that takes care of this castle, right?"
"Uh-huh…" Sour Bill replied, who was checking one of the pillars.
"So why would there be curtains behind the throne instead of a regular wall?"
"Uh… decoration?"
"Or…" Turbo pulled back the curtain a bit, and saw a dark hallway. "Aha! Come with me!" Sour Bill cautiously entered the hallway with Turbo. Thanks to his glow-in-the-dark eyes, it was easy for the racer to navigate to a metal elevator door. Turbo pressed a button near the door and it opened up. The two of them went inside and descended to the lowest part of the game console.
At last, the door opened up to a corridor lined with glowing tubes. "Now we're finally getting somewhere!" said Turbo. He and Sour Bill approached a massive locked door. On the door Turbo recognized a large Nintendo Entertainment System controller. "Is that company everywhere nowadays?" he grumbled as he took out his napkin. "Let's see how this works…" Turbo pressed the D-pad up, up, down, down, left, right, left, and right. He pushed the B button and then the A button. Finally, he pressed Start.
The door opened up so Turbo and Sour Bill could see a large network of coloured boxes and wires floating in a black abyss. "Turbo-tastic!" gleefully cheered Turbo. He kissed the napkin and put it away, then took a step inside. But the zero gravity area caused him to float in a single spot. He flailed wildly and cried, "Wh-whoaa! Grabmegrabmegrabme!"
Sour Bill awkwardly grasped his arm and pulled him back onto the doorframe. "…Well, you wanted to see the code room. Can we go now?"
"NO! I must be able to get to the code boxes," Turbo said, glaring back at the network.
Bill narrowed his eyes in suspicion. "I don't remember you saying you needed to do that…"
Turbo hesitated, then told him, "You must've forgotten. It is imperative that I inspect the boxes."
The green candy started to turn around uneasily. "I don't know. If it's that important, maybe I should consult the princess first."
That put Turbo over the edge. In one swift motion, he snatched Sour Bill before he could get away and yelled, "Look! I didn't get this far to let that pint-sized twit get in the way of my plans for game conquest!"
Sour Bill's eyes widened to perfect circles. "What?" he breathed.
"Now I'm going to be the best racer in this game, and you're going to help me!" Turbo pulled the shocked candy closer. "Or else…"
Bill nodded his head (body?) and stammered, "Y-yeah, ok, sure. D-does this mean there's no Arcade Committee?"
"Of course there's no committee!" Turbo spat. "But the rules still apply. Got it?"
He nodded fearfully again.
Satisfied, Turbo dropped Sour Bill and looked out at the code thoughtfully. "Now, if I want to be able to come back, I'll need some sort of rope to tether myself."
Sour Bill backed up slowly and suggested, "You can wait here while I go get one from the supply closet upstairs."
"Ohhhh no you don't!" Turbo stomped over and grabbed Sour Bill with one hand. He marched toward the elevator and said, "If you go anywhere, I'm coming with. I don't want you tattling little Miss Sticky-Hair on me."
Once the two of them had found a Twizzler rope and had gotten back to the code room, Turbo tied the rope around his waist and Sour Bill held onto the other end.
"Now remember," Turbo warned as he prepared to jump into the anti-gravity field, "if you try anything funny, like let go of the rope and lock me in, I can and WILL delete you from the game. Got that?"
Sour Bill gulped nervously. "Yeah."
"Good." Without any second thoughts, Turbo jumped in. His body became weightless as he floated slowly towards the mass of code. "Whoa!" he chuckled. "This is kinda fun. Weeeeee!" He did a little spin.
"Glad you're enjoying yourself."
Turbo ignored Sour Bill's sarcastic comment as he looked for a certain code box. Out of the mostly blue boxes in the middle, it wasn't hard to spot a lone red one off to the side. He swam over to it with a smile. "Hello, Turbo." He gently picked up the box with his name on it and carried it with him to the center of the group. "This is where you belong now." He double-tapped his box to open it up, which revealed an orderly bunch of smaller boxes with different labels.
This was where things were going to get tricky. He decided the first thing he should do was add his code to the game so that he would be able to regenerate in the unlikely event of dying. "There. Now the only way I'll die permanently is if my code gets rewritten somehow and I do something stupid." He laughed, "But what's the chance of that ever happening?"
Sour Bill just rolled his eyes.
Next, Turbo resolved to change his name. "If I'm going to be the leader of this game, I'm going to need a name that fits with the whole sweets theme," he called out to Sour Bill. "And it should be royalty-related, but there's no way I'm disguising myself as a princess. Got any suggestions?"
"Hmm…" Sour Bill looked at the floor thoughtfully. "What about… Prince Pistachio?"
Turbo turned his head with a scowl. "That's not a candy, you moron!"
"But Pistachio ice cream is delicious."
"Yes, yes it is…" Turbo agreed. He shook his head. "But I still don't like the name. What else ya got?"
"Uh… Duke Nougat?"
"Nah…"
"The Count of Mr. Christie?"
"Ooh, that's good!" Then Turbo frowned and muttered disappointedly, "But it's a copyright infringement."
Sour Bill sighed. "Fine. You think of something."
"Ok, ok." Turbo closed his eyes in concentration. Let's see… What's the highest order of royalty? A king, that's it. Ok now, what's another word for "candy"? …Eh, screw it. "I'll just call myself King Candy."
Bill stared unimpressed. "…Really."
"Look, that's the name I like and I'm sticking with it." Turbo changed the text on his name box. Now it read "KING CANDY". Just like his real name, it was simple and to the point. "There. Now to come up with a disguise." He selected his appearance box as he said to himself, "Something regal. Colourful, but not overloaded with sweets. A disguise befitting a champion who is both wise and powerful."
"Not to mention loony…" mumbled Sour Bill.
"I heard that!" Then he lit up. "Wait a minute, that's actually not a bad idea…" Turbo was going to stand out too much if he remained levelheaded. He would blend in much better if he were a king who was overly cheerful and a bit insane.
And so he set to work, creating new clothing boxes and customizing them. He started at the bottom: his red racing boots became purple flat shoes with red gumdrop jingle bells at the tips. "Hm, pretty comfy," he noted, wiggling his toes. Next he created golden pants that were poofy at his hips (he didn't know what they were called, only that a lot of classic kings wore them). Turbo studied his character model so far. "Mmm…maybe not that poofy." He reduced the poofyness a bit. Then he made a white shirt with a big fancy collar and cuffs. "Oh! Gotta have a bowtie." He created a red bowtie out of a shiny candy wrapper.
Sour Bill pointed out, "I don't think kings actually wear bowties."
"Then that makes me the greatest king of all!" Turbo reasoned proudly. He proceeded to fashion a royal purple tailcoat with two golden buttons on the back. To complete the look, he created a small golden crown that floated above his helmet. Turbo examined his new outfit and concluded, "I look like a fruit." He grinned sneakily. "Perfect!"
"Your face still looks creepy."
"Quiet, you." The racer formed more boxes and created a new skin for his, well, skin. His face and hands were now a fair flesh colour and he gave himself rosy cheeks. He made his eyes white with brown irises, which of course overrode their natural bioluminescence, but it made him look normal (not that he ever thought he was abnormal…). He also whitened his teeth.
Turbo checked his appearance once again. "Hmm…better, but it still resembles me too much. The old me, that is." He played around with facial features until he settled on a large, round nose and bushy eyebrows. To hide his helmet, he made his head large and bald with gray tufts of hair at the sides. He wasn't exactly thrilled about looking like an old man for the rest of the game's life, but it did a great job masking his true face. Plus, he already had the smile lines, so there was that. He turned around to face Sour Bill and asked, "How do I look? Not bad for my first try, if I do say so myself."
The green candy sat up drowsily. "Huh?"
Not actually caring about what he thought, Turbo turned back to his code and tried locating his audio box. It was a bit of a challenge finding it among the now tangled mess of code, but he eventually did. "One last thing. Gotta change my voice in case someone recognizes it." He tweaked the settings and tried out different accents. "Ahem. Howdy, y'all! This here's King Candy! Nah, that's no good. Hmm…what about British? …'Ello, chaps. King Candy's my name. Pip, pip, cheerio! Meh, not quite. Italian? …It's-a me, King Candy! Nope. Maybe Spanish, maybe Spanish… Hola, amigos! Soy King Candy! Que pasaaa? Bleck, no. Have I tried American, yet?"
Sour Bill replied drearily, "Tried and failed."
Turbo groaned. He took another look at himself, trying to hear what his new persona's voice would sound like. "Something wacky…" he mumbled to himself as he fiddled with the options. "Something fun…" He was starting to feel exhausted from the tension-filled activity of the day; the coding alone had taken him almost 4 hours straight. Turbo sighed and rubbed his eyes. "This all better be worth it."
Just then, Sour Bill spoke up, "That's pretty good."
"What is?" As he said that, he realized he was speaking with a funny lisp. A smile stretched across his face. "Hey, you're right! Hoo-hoo! It's Turbo-tastic!" The smile faded. "Oh. I guess I should change my catchphrase." He was sad about having to part with it, it being a part of him as much as racing was, but it would be an obvious give-away as to who he really was. "Eh, I can think of a new one later. Right now, I've got a princess to deal with." He closed his box, which had now grown 10 times its original size and collected more threads due to all the add-ons.
Vanellope's code was a purple box with her name on it not far from where Turbo placed his own box. He glared at it menacingly as he opened her files.
Sour Bill sounded nervous as he asked, "What are you going to do to her?"
"Delete her from the game, what else?" Turbo replied bluntly. He wrote out the deletion action, waited with great expectation, and…
A dialogue box popped up that read: "Action Denied".
Turbo's face fell. "What." He clenched his jaw and balled his hands into fists. "WHAT?" he repeated.
"Something wrong?" Bill asked.
Turbo continued to glare at the message in anger. "It won't let me delete her!" He furiously tried again, but it still didn't work. "WHY WON'T SHE DIE?!"
"Maybe only the programmers can delete important characters?"
Turbo shook his head in frustration. "She's probably protected by some sort of anti-virus software. So yeah, only the programmers can delete her." How was he supposed to get rid of her now? Even if she allowed him to be a part of the game, there was no way he was going to share the spotlight with the princess, who would probably attract more players just because she was shockingly cuter than him. …Unless she wasn't a princess… He took a look at her code again, formulating a new plan. Turbo began altering her code rapidly.
"What are you doing now?"
"The game says I can't delete her," Turbo started, "but it won't stop me from rendering her a glitch!" After locking her princess dress and racing uniform, he grabbed some clothes from the "Unused Skins" box and haphazardly threw together a civilian outfit. Then he attacked the most threatening part about her: her teleportation ability. He managed to "break" it in a way so that it would cause Vanellope to glitch sporadically. Once she was all messed up, Turbo closed her box and began angrily tearing out all of her threads, severing her connections in the game. He pushed her box far away from the main group and left it to float by itself.
You don't deserve to rule this kingdom, Turbo thought bitterly. The last thing he had to do was get rid of every memory of Vanellope and his former self. Since he couldn't delete those either, he created a royal chest with a pad lock and scooped the "Racers' Memory" and "Citizens' Memory" into it, locking the chest.
Figuring that must've been it, and there wasn't much time to do anything else, Turbo yanked on the rope, signaling Sour Bill to pull him back out of the code room. As he exited, he was met with a confused stare from the lime candy. I wonder how much of this he remembers… Turbo decided to test him out. "Why, whatever is the matter, Sour Bill?" he asked, acting in character.
Sour Bill narrowed his eyes in concentration. "…King Candy?"
Turbo mentally sighed in relief. "Hoo-hoo! That's me!"
Bill frowned. "…Why did you try to delete Vanellope and locked up our memories?"
Turbo chuckled nervously while adjusting his bowtie. "Heh, what? Oh! Oh yes, her. Well see, I—I had to try to delete her because… wait, how much do you still remember?"
Sour Bill put a hand on his head and strained to think. "Just basic game stuff, how Vanellope is a racer an—"
"No she isn't!" interrupted Turbo. "I mean, not anymore. Well, she wasn't that important anyway… right?"
"Yeah. Right," replied Sour Bill, who seemed to honestly believe that.
"Good. But that's just between you and me." Turbo closed the code room door before he forgot and continued, "Now, as for the reasons behind what just happened, let's just say it's much better to not know how things used to be."
"If you say so, your Highness."
Sorry again for the lecture at the beginning. It's an interesting theory…if it were possible. But it's not, for several reasons that I'm not going to discuss here.
Also, from now on imagine Turbo's dialogue in his King Candy lisp, as I won't be writing it out. ...Except for here: Pleath review! Hoo-hoo! :D
