Level 5
"DO THE HARLEM SHAKE!" NO!
How 'bout that for a wake-up call? That's exactly what I got.
"So whassup?"
It wasn't until I noticed six other freaks to my right that I even conceived an idea as to what in the sweet name of everything unreal happened.
"Finally he's up and running!" I heard a rather unfamiliar voice shout, seemingly in my direction. The Australian-based source moved closer as I tried to put two and two together. "Hi! I'm Marine the Raccoon. Moon was telling us all about your plan to get us all past the last level, so we wanted to..."
I hate nagging questions. "Wait, what do you mean by 'us'?"
"My friends. Who else? That over there is Clyde, Blake, Ula (foxey lady), Amy, and Rouge. I wish Silver was here." I wish Amy wasn't. "So we wanted to take the time to give our thanks to you. I was about ready to give up! What about you gals... and guys?" A clamor of agreement floated in the atmosphere. "But anyway, now that you're here, let's dance the night away!"
Evidently I had the wrong song in mind. "Sure. Everyday I'm shufflin'." As soon as I started shufflin', everyone gave me an awkward look, including Moon.
Marine said, "No, silly. This is how you do it." Suddenly the Game turned into a costume party accompanied by THAT song.
Agitated from the impact of that Harlem effect their dancing had influenced, I lost my mind. "Amy?! Don't tell me you listen to that song too?!"
"Come on, who doesn't? Talk about that beat. It's funky, it's catchy, and the dance moves are an instant classic. And of course, DO THE HARLEM SHAKE!" Talk about a reality check. First Knux and Tails, and now Amy was acting rather awkward. Them girls seemed to get right at the guys' faces. "Come on! Aren't you gonna join us?"
I was really annoyed that I always had to be the outlier. I couldn't possibly stress clearly enough how sickening it was to be the odd man (or... hedgehog) out, especially when it had to do with the Harlem Shake. "No! I really hate that song, and I'm NOT gonna get it stuck in my head! Don't you know how many people have seen the video on YouTube?"
"Who gives a damn!" shouted the freak in ebony.
"I know, right?! Only Justin Beaver is worse than this!"
All the girls turned to me and Moon and gave us nasty looks. Amy started towards me. Don't move a muscle. "Ok, for starters, it's BIEBER. For another, we can like his music all we want."
I turned to my left. With a cool expression, arms crossed as usual (at least when it made sense), the ebony freak nodded in agreement. I pulled my view back to Amy Thorn. "I don't know if you've heard... but 'Bieber' is a word in German that translates to 'beaver'. So in an essence, I can legitimately refer to him as Justin Beaver. Or as I like to call him... Justin the Beaver." Moon gave me the "thumbs-up".
Instead of retreating, Aneurysm-It Amy only invaded my personal space further. Don't even breathe. "So you wanna play it that way, huh. I don't blame you. Let's have at it!" She hurled her body weight towards me, ready to make a full-body attack, giving me no time to retreat. But it turned out I didn't need to, for at that precise moment, the foxey lady yanked her shirt. The distance between that petite nose of hers and that petite nose of mine literally equaled two centimeters.
"Amy!" Ula scolded at the man-handed tomboy. "There is no need for violence in a situation like this! So what if he doesn't like Justin Bieber? There's no point in getting him to think otherwise with fights! And furthermore, his opinion shouldn't have an effect on yours!"
Meanwhile, to my left still, with that usual am-I-the-only-one-bothered-by-this-madness expression on his face, which was regularly occupied by his trademark scowl, the completely-ebony-with-no-strip-of-red hedgehog asked openly, "Am I the only one bothered by this madness?"
"No."
Apparently Club-It Clyde knew what I was thinking at that moment. "DO THE HARLEM SHAKE!" Of course that only made the madness worse for me, but not Moon — aha! — thus contradicting what he just said. The real answer to that question was that I was the only one bothered by this madness. That idiot!
"Come on! You know you want to!"
Still agitated, I shouted, "NO! I CAN'T DANCE!" That statement was as true as Scott Raynor. The main reason for that was that I kinda lost my moves after Michael Jackson apparently faked his death. Consequently, moonwalking became just impossible for me. There, I said it. Quit asking me about it or telling me otherwise.
The ugly voice arose from the commotion on the PA system. "Attention all gamers, stand on the red line." O rly? What if I don't? And yet no one else had the same idea going around her or his mind. The red line was the boundary between safety and game over, for one misstep over the laser boundary would result in falling to one's death. "Choose your youngest player." A small platform formed from the debris scattered around the off-limits area of the level. Marine stepped forward onto the platform, which floated in mid-air. "Choose your most emo player." Moon barely won over Clyde in that category, mainly for his looks. "Choose your strongest player." Amy tried to take the next position, but Clyde shoved her out of the way, not willing to let a girl show him up with a hammer.
I zoned out from whatever was going on in level 5. At this point I wanted to be back in level 2. Rouge was looking at me in a weird fashion. I took three steps in her direction. "Rouge, why do you hate me?"
Her resulting expression caught me off guard. "That's bogus! I don't hate you."
"Then explain why you flunked me from History!" I didn't have any report cards to back it up, but I didn't need any. Ok, to tell you the truth, I didn't actually flunk that class, but the instructor, who just so happened to be that Bat Girl, constantly put me down because I was the shortest student in the class.
I knew that she knew what I was talking about, but she refused to admit it. "I don't understand. You were like, the best in the class. I could've sworn you read all 300-plus issues ahead of time."
"Yeah, well I didn't! But YOU were the one who picked on me for being the shortest!"
"What? I did nothing of the sort! I know you aced half of those exams. As far as I'm concerned, you have this talent that not many others have. And besides, I could've sworn I put the correct scores in the gradebook... maybe someone tried to sabotage your reputation?" The problem was, I didn't have a reputation.
"Yeah, we'll see about that," I said to her in a threatening tone.
"Choose your shortest player." I fail at life.
Rouge motioned me towards the last mid-air platform, supposedly designated for me, for I was the only one here who stood at less than three feet. "You'd better get out there. They won't be waiting much longer." I did as she said.
On the first step, I felt as if I might've fallen to my untimely demise. And I thought that was nothing. But then the platform started to move beyond my control. Shake shake shimmy. Again, I didn't want to do that, but lacking a sense of balance, I had to go to certain extremes to claim it back.
The black metal bars appearing in front of the other players' feet out of nowhere occurred to me only after I noticed Clyde and Marine and someone else pulling theirs up and whacking them at players to their sides for fun. They also shouted that forbidden phrase over and over and over.
"Face your opponents," the announcer guy said quite clearly. At the moment the words came out, three of the girls' faces were swept by nervous looks. Evidently they didn't want to fight each other. And that made sense.
"The winner will proceed instantly to level 6. The losers will be given an immediate game over. And they cannot come back... EVAR." Total Drama reference.
Immediately the three girls shared their emotions. "This is too much. I can't do this," Ula trembled.
Amy shrugged. "Oh well. I'm going for the short one."
"The short one?!" I reacted openly. "Really?! Why not the emo? Why not the youngest? This is bias!"
"Fight!"
"Bias...?" Amy's face twitched a bit. "THIS IS SPARTA$%!" She lunged out at me like a total maniac. I used my metal weapon as a light saber to deflect her attack. Seeing as I'd stunned her momentarily, I drifted to the side so as to avoid the early action.
I waited.
Rouge didn't look too thrilled to see my act of wimpy. "What are you doing!"
"None of your business," I snapped. The only reason for that being that it was correct in more ways than four.
"Dude, get out there or you're never gonna win!"
I pondered for five seconds. In that short time, I noticed Amy trying to attack everyone in her path. One unfortunate freak lingered there for too long and was struck by the pink-glowing piece of metal that symbolized Amy's color. In other words, an Irishman walked into a bar. "No way. She's too dangerous."
Rouge tried to convince me otherwise. "Look, sometimes in life you have to tackle tough obstacles head-on in order to succeed. In this case, Amy is one of them, ok? Now get back out there and kick some ass!"
Actually, Rouge was like my personal motivator or whatever. I'd first figured that was the case about four years back when I started that species-appropriate history class. Too bad there was no one on YouTube to describe the history associated with the Sonic Comics who did so in a similar fashion as John Green with his Crash Course series on the Earth-related, human-associated subject of World History. (Actually, his brother Hank also had a Crash Course series for Biology, but the World History series was obviously better... because of the Mongols.) Not that I needed a personal motivator, but I felt like if everyone was gone, I'd become a nervous wreck. But then again, that was growing up, in Mark Hoppus's words.
When she yelled at me to get back in the game, it was at that moment when I got a clue as to what would happen had I delayed any further. With the boost of energy (and confidence) that came from the only girl in Team Dark, I powered back into the competition.
Already I was ambushed by Amy. "You're never getting away, you son-of-a-bitch!" Apparently she was still pissed over not so much. She jabbed my face so hard she nearly gave me another black eye. But the Sparta was still to come. She rammed her bar at me, charging like a beast. I had no time to dodge her attack. A sudden force jolted me in reverse, giving me no control over how far I went, where I was going, or how badly the resulting throbbing pain pricked like thorn. Enter the smaller life count: 2. "I'll kill you if it's the last thing I do!" she yelled as I tried to get up. I'd just leaned forward a touch when the same force pried itself through my silver chest hair, fighting into my abs. I could feel it. A piece of my ribcage snapped. My life count was now at a minimal level. Make it stop...
"Kid, don't give up! You can beat her back! Just stay up!"
That was all I needed to hear. Another relatively short boost came to me as if I'd gained an extra life (although clearly I'd never get one at this point, considering Amy was about to kill me first). Trying to fight back the sharp throbbing sensation that surged through my whole short body, I lunged the metal bar I'd managed to keep all this time forward (what, you thought I dropped it like a dumbass?) aiming at the pink hedgehog who tried to attack me at the same time.
An interesting chain of events followed. For starters, my weapon hooked sharply and struck Amy right where she was told to put her money — the emoticon looks like a dollar sign attached to a colon — when she tried to flirt with Sonic. No, I didn't give a damn that I'd just hit a girl. I figured both of those Team Dark members would've accepted it — after all, it wasn't them. Even so, I was still given no time to react accordingly, as the sharp end of her metal bar made an uppercut motion in the worst part of my body possible. Sooner or later my neck would be liable to snap. And when it did, it only added to the already impossible sense of throbbing all over me. Where's that 0... WHERE'S THAT 0!? But in the midst of this impossible pain, everything... ceased.
Stopped.
Went away.
Total black.
I should be in the basement by now.
I'm waiting...
Any day now...
Where did my shirt go?
The only light around me was barely visible; it looked like it came from so far away.
Then it hit me.
Suddenly I knew.
I'm dead.
DAMN YOU AUTO-CORRECT$%!
