KaylaKissesKangaroos—Your wish is my command! Enjoy this chapter…I hope it answers some of your questions. And thanks for reviewing!
Raccon Girl—Because I am evil! *insert evil laughter here* Anyway, the cliffhanger is over. I hope you're happy. ;)
Jenna—Oh, don't worry. We're all exhausted around now. *rolls eyes* And I can't wait to see your new story! When is it going to be uploaded? I want to read it ASAP! Anyway, thanks for reviewing! You rock!
Alicia—Are you kidding? Ralph says it in the movie! What's the first rule of Hero's Duty? By the way, I've missed texting with you. Is everything okay?
Chapter Seven
Wreck-It Ralph was attempting to climb one of the tallest trees in the whole forest. Black and Vanellope blinked, smiled at each other, and raced over to the same tree, which they proceeded to climb. They were so small and nimble that they managed to make even more progress than Ralph in less time. "Hi, mister!" Vanellope called out once she was lying on a branch way above the grown man. "Hello!"
"What's your name?" Black wondered, swinging her legs over a branch.
"Kids, get down before you hurt yourself!" Lulu begged, wincing at how old she sounded, like somebody's mother. Wait…wasn't she technically their mother now? The kids ignored her as they continued to talk with Ralph.
"You're not from here, are you?" Vanellope asked, resting her chin in the palm of her hand. "Are you a hobo?" She was hanging upside down from a branch now, using her legs to support herself.
"Please get down from there, Vanellope!" Lulu shouted. "I don't want for you to break anything!"
"Relax, Smarties," Black yawned, copying Vanellope's position. "What do you think we do when we're not racing? We climb trees! And we haven't gotten hurt once!" Vanellope was now in the middle of taunting Ralph about his bad breath and voice.
"Listen, I've tried to be nice…"
"I've tried to be nice..."
"This conversation is over!"
"This conversation is blah-blah. And, uh, I wouldn't hold on to that if I were you." Ralph was holding onto a branch with double stripes. He rolled his eyes and said something about being a part of the candy cane tree department.
"The Double Striped branches vanish," Black said in a matter-of-fact way, examining her cuticles instead of the giant that had almost tumbled out of the tree.
"GUH-DOI," Vanellope added for extra measure, giggling. "Why are your hands so freakishly big?"
"I don't know," Ralph said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. "Why are you so freakishly annoying?"
"SWEET MOTHER OF MONKEY MILK, A GOLD COIN!" Vanellope gasped, noticing the reason for Ralph's tree-climbing activity. He had a gold medal on the highest branch.
"Guys, let's be nice to Mr. Hobo," Lulu suggested, and the other two giggled. "His hands are big because it's part of his job to wreck things. And he's from one of the other arcade games."
"I remember!" Black exclaimed, her red eyes widening. "I think I've seen him around! He's from Fix-It Felix!" She suddenly glared at Ralph. "Who owns that medal, anyway? It's one of Felix's, isn't it?"
"No, it's mine!" Ralph insisted. Thanks to the antics of Vanellope, he was clutching a branch, hovering inches away from the ground. "But I'll tell you the truth right now. I'm not really from the Candy Cane Tree Department."
"Lying to a child," Vanellope scolded, shaking her head. "Shame on you, Ralph."
"And we already knew that without your help, Genius," Black reminded Ralph, who rolled his eyes.
"But I am telling the truth about that medal! It's my ticket to a better life!"
"Well, it's my medal now, okay?" Vanellope broke into another glitching attack, but it ended just as quickly as it had begun. Ralph, however, had noticed what had happened. Vanellope shouted at him, "See ya, chump," before leaving the forest with Black and Lulu behind her.
"You are going to give that back to him, right?" Lulu asked. Okay, that wasn't exactly a question. As the new "guardian" of these girls, she wanted to make sure that they did the right thing. She did NOT want for them to end up like Taffyta and the members of her gang.
"Oh, I will," Vanellope smirked. "After I win it back, I mean."
"No, I don't," Lulu corrected. "What do you mean?" Vanellope spat on the medal and polished it as she explained her intentions.
"This is what I'm going to use to enter the race."
"Oh, hello, GLaDOS, welcome back!" The robot Wheatley greeted when the antagonist of Portal entered her domain. "How did the meeting go? Alicia here has been telling me all about it." His words were kind, but his tone was cold and resentful. But GLaDOS was patient.
"Wheatley, we've been over this before. You are not the antagonist of any Portal game. You are the comic relief and the love interest."
"But I could be the bad guy!" He insisted. "I mean, I was a much bigger threat than you were as a stuffed potato!"
"I will shove you into a potato if you don't quiet down," GLaDOS growled. "Make yourself useful, Metal Ball. Find the footage of these games: MARIO and Sonic dot exe. And MARIO is spelled with all capital letters."
Wheatley gasped. "Why in the world would they want to see those things?" He demanded, shaking like a leaf. "And I know which MARIO game you're talking about! There, press the play button! You should be able to see them." Alicia spotted Jenna sitting in a chair in front of a large screen, and she went and joined her friend.
"They have the right to know," GLaDOS said, as casual as a stranger talking about the weather, answering his first question. She pressed a button, and an image flickered onto the screen. It was the main screen for a Mario game, but everything was different. The name of the game was simply: MARIO. And the protagonist appeared, but he had been changed. His color scheme was darker and his smile was missing. But the familiar jingle of the start button being pressed sounded, and a message popped up on the screen:
"Welcome! This is Dinosaur Land. In this strange land we find that Princess Toadstool is missing! Looks like MARIO is at it again!" This puzzled Alicia and Jenna, but they kept watching, curious to see what was going to happen. MARIO passed Yoshi's house and entered an act called Never Come Back. Inside this stage, all of the items had been taken and the Dinosaur Coins could not be taken, no matter how close you came to getting one. MARIO hit a message box, and received this "hint" from the game:
"Point of Advice: I hate you."
Eventually, MARIO came across the place where Yoshi could be rescued and used in the game. A message showed up on the screen:
"Hooray! Thank you for rescuing me! My name is Yoshi, and on my way to rescue my friends, MARIO trapped me in that egg."
Not too far from this point, another message was found:
"…but…is there anything I can do to change your mind?" After losing Yoshi to one of the bad guys in this level, another message box containing points of advice appeared.
"Point of Advice: This is the selfish way out."
"What the hell are they talking about? Jenna exploded. "We're just playing a freaking game! How is that selfish? What did Mario ever do to them?" When she looked back at the screen, MARIO was entering Iggy's lair, which opened with a line of message boxes. All of them read the same thing:
"Don't you think you've caused enough trouble? –Yoshi"
After a lot of walking, MARIO reached the end of this stage, and was now about to defeat Iggy, the first of Bowser's many children. This boss was the easiest to take out, and following the victory, a small video clip played of MARIO retrieving a Yoshi egg from the castle before blowing it up. At the bottom of the screen, these words began to appear:
"Victim #1: Eyeballs were unable to be found. The victim was found lying on her carpet. Causes of death unknown, hand marks with unidentifiable fingerprints were found all over the corpse." Following this statement, a picture of a face popped up. The eyes were missing, and what was left of the skin was a deep orange.
Alicia and Jenna gulped, resisting the urge to vomit. Wheatley had turned away from the screen, unable to watch anymore, but he did mutter, "Victim Number One, obviously. How many others were there?" GLaDOS was calm and silent when she pressed another button, and the screen changed, switching to the starting menu for a Sonic game.
Cheerful music played, and Sonic was shown wagging his finger and winking at the camera. For a moment, the two girls relaxed, thinking that maybe this would be a little less disturbing than what they had just witnessed. But then, for a split second, Sonic's face changed so that he appeared to be crying blood. And the girls knew that they were wrong.
The list of characters to play from was now shown: Tails, Knuckles, or Doctor Eggman. Knuckles and Eggman were locked, so only Tails could be played. But he looked terrified of what was to happen. In spite of this, he was selected, and the name of the first stage was shown as eerie music played in the background.
He was in Hill: Act 1. And he kept moving forward as the music played, and again, the girls let their guard down a little. The only thing that seemed to be unusual was the lack of enemies…at first. And the only woodland creatures that could be seen were bloody corpses and piles of bones.
But then the audio stopped, and Sonic was standing in front of Tails. As Tails walked closer and closer to the blue hedgehog, static came over the audio, and it grew louder and louder with every step that was taken. When Tails took his final step, Sonic opened his eyes and revealed that they were dark crimson. The screen faded to black, and a question was asked of the audience.
"Hello. Do you want to play with me?"
"No, I don't want to play with you!" Wheatley shouted. But the game footage said otherwise, as Tails was taken to a new stage. This one was called Hide and Seek. The ground was flat, and in the background, a fire burned. Tails was staring at the camera, terrified of what was going to happen. But then he took off running in one direction. After only a few seconds, Corrupted Sonic flashed across the screen in various places, but then stood where the stage "began" on the left of the screen. Intense music played as he gained upon Tails, who was struggling to run away. But when the hand of Corrupted Sonic grazed the tail of the fox, Tails looked at the audience and began to cry.
He paused when Corrupted Sonic appeared to his right, posed to strike and kill him. For a minute, the two of them didn't move. But then Corrupted Sonic lunged, the screen cut to black, and the bloodcurdling scream of a woman was heard.
"You're too slow. Want to try again?"
The character select menu was back, but Tails was no longer accessible, leaving Knuckles as the only option. The stage that he was placed in was dark and depressing, and the ground had tubes of red liquid on it. Grim music was playing, and Knuckles ran for a whole minute before the first sign of trouble was shown. Red static distorted the screen, and Alicia began to sweat, fearing for her favorite Sonic character. When the picture returned to normal, the tubes of blood had opened, covering the stage with blood…and Corrupted Sonic was standing in front of Knuckles, posed in the same way he had been before he killed Tails.
"Found you."
Corrupted Sonic became a blur on the screen, but he remained in one place. Knuckles tried to run at him, but whenever this happened, the evil hedgehog would simply teleport to another area. When it was all over, Knuckles was sitting on the ground, sobbing as Corrupted Sonic stood behind him, smiling. When he lunged at his next victim, the screen cut to blackness and the same female scream from before was heard.
"So many souls to play with, so little time. Wouldn't you agree?"
Doctor Eggman was the only character left, and he was placed in a stage with no name. He walked down flights of stairs until he encountered the hedgehog he claimed to hate. And then the screen turned to snow. When it ended, static was still heard on the audio, but what could be seen was Corrupted Sonic grinning from ear to ear, blood dripping from his eyes. On the wall behind him, these words were written in red:
"I AM GOD."
Red snow broke this photo apart, and then this question was asked: "Ready for Round Two?" When it cut to another scene, Alicia and Jenna really did vomit. Corrupted Sonic was racing around in a merry fashion, his red eyes glinting. Behind him were the decapitated and strangled bodies of his victims. The audio was nothing…just the twisted laughs and screams of men and women. And the image changed one last time, to Corrupted Sonic glaring at the audience as they read the writing on the screen. It was in Japanese, but Wheatley translated it for them. He didn't even look at the screen to remember what it said. "And my diseased soul screams. Will you be the walker of my shadows? Delight me with sinister sin. Our funeral of euphoria will break Satan's black heart."
Alicia was crying, burying her face in her hands as she screamed in anguish. Jenna was white in the face, unable to move an inch. "You were wondering, perhaps, about my reasons for being defensive of the world we live in. Now you know. I hope you're happy," GLaDOS added, her voice full of bitterness.
This was the last thing that the girls heard before they fainted.
Sonic dot exe and MARIO are real games, but I left a lot of details out of the MARIO game, such as a fire flower that couldn't be reached, the pointless stage named Yoshi's Island, MARIO being able to run across air, a message consisting of nonsense, a message in binary, and the stages that followed Iggy's castle. Footage of both games can be located on YouTube. (If you want to view Sonic dot exe, then search for Version Four. Yes, there are FOUR versions of this game. The fourth version will be used in my story.)
Both of these games will be playing prominent roles in this story. I promise you, though, that things will be toned down.
Review, please.
