CHAPTER 4

"See, I was just thinking, if he's racing he's happy, and if he's happy, he's less likely to take over the game—wait no, not that I think he's going to take over the game, but—"

Oh, fudge, it was all wrong. Taffyta made a frustrated noise and flopped back against the wall of the castle. Sugar dust stuck to her sleeves and she brushed at them roughly, but most of it stayed stuck. The lemon drop sun felt hotter than usual today, which she knew was stupid, because the weather never changed in Sugar Rush.

Okay, let's like, try this again.

She stood up straight, breathed out, and centered herself. "He's really miserable, and I think if he could race, then he won't do anything he'd regret—argh!" She turned around the kicked the wall, which just hurt her foot, which made her hop around like an idiot clutching it before she almost lost her balance and fell over. The sun still felt too hot.

Taffyta drew in a deep breath and tried to calm down, pulling a lollipop out of her pocket and sticking it in her mouth. Then, she looked up. The back of the castle loomed above her, sparkling pure white in the sun. The castle was built into a hill, with a steep slope in the back, and it was a place that she'd staked out many times over the years to perfect whatever difficult conversation she wanted to have. There hadn't been many with King Candy, but sometimes she'd wanted to ask him for something that she thought he'd say no to. A shortcut that only he knew, or a secret passageway. Nothing, in retrospect, that was very scary at all.

She was pretty sure she was at the same level as the fungeon. There were small, barred windows set into the wall not too high above her head, and she wondered which one had been King Candy's. The last thing she wanted to do was to blurt out something idiotic that would make Vanellope think he had designs on the game again. The president might lock him up again.

The request to let King Candy live outside the castle now seemed like it had been easy as pie. Why had she been scared about that? This was scary. In the fungeon he hadn't even really had the ability to live a real life. It was just waiting around. But now he did, and she needed to convince Vanellope to let him race again. She didn't think she'd ever forgive herself if she couldn't.

It had been two weeks since he'd been released, and his mood hadn't improved much. He was definitely glad to be out of the fungeon, but that was about all you could say. At least he was a good house guest. He cleaned up after himself, he was quiet. He didn't stay out late, not that he had anywhere to stay out late at. There was an unofficial ban on him going to Game Central Station. Every game in the arcade had an alarm on it programmed to sound if he tried entering, and Vanellope had insisted that it get installed at the exit to Sugar Rush once she'd allowed King Candy to have supervised excursions outside the fungeon.

She wiped at her forehead. It was so hot. Oh, who was she kidding? She knew it wasn't really that it was any hotter, just that she was nervous, and it was making her sweat. Gross. Taking a deep breath, she glanced towards the path that would take her back up the hill to the front gates of the castle. Kart engines grumbled in the distance and with another breath, she started up the path, knowing that she hadn't figured out how to word this request yet but hoping something would magically come to her in the moment.

Yeah, that would work. Faced with Vanellope she'd be totally eloquent and articulate and her argument would be…just…like really, really great.

Climbing up the hill, she started to feel confident that this was actually going to work. Sure. She was smart, she was really charming, she was—"

"ARGH!" Taffyta shrieked as she stepped onto the road and a kart almost ran her down.

Vanellope swerved in a cloud of sugar and cocoa dust and came to a stop on the other side of the road. "Whoa, Taffyta! Are you trying to come up with new obstacles for the tracks or something?" She pushed her goggles up onto her forehead, her hair sticking up in all directions, and leaned an arm on her steering wheel. "I like the entrepreneurial spirit but I think we can probably come up with something a little less lethal."

Her hand over her heart while it raced, Taffyta squeaked, "Yeah. Probably."

Jumping out of the kart and tossing her helmet onto the seat, Vanellope asked, "So what brings you to Chateau von Schweetz?"

Taffyta made herself breathe normally. "Can we go inside? I uh, I wanted to talk to you about something." Oh no, oh no, no no, this was not a good start. She'd already stammered once, she was not oozing confidence and charm.

Luckily, Vanellope didn't seem to notice her nervousness. "Yeah, sure," she said. "I'm starving, anyway. Want some cake? Ralph brought it over."

"Ralph bakes cakes?" Taffyta blurted, unable to keep the incredulity out of her tone. Dumb move, maybe—Vanellope might think she was making fun of Ralph.

But Vanellope exploded with laughter. "Ralph baking! That's a good one. Nah, Mary bakes them. She's one of the Nicelanders, you know?" Taffyta did, but only vaguely, having never actually talked to one. She'd only seen them in passing. "I keep telling Ralph he doesn't have to bring them. Because we live here, you know? But he does anyway, and actually, Mary's a pretty good baker!"

In the throne room—er, office—Vanellope glitched over to her desk, opened a drawer, and pulled out a rainbow layer cake. "Here," she said, thrusting a piece towards Taffyta.

For a second, Taffyta just stared at it, her stomach feeling far too shriveled to possibly accept a single crumb of this. "Um, Vanellope," she said.

"Oh! Hey, I almost forgot, you're on the roster tomorrow. Didn't see you down at the Royal Raceway starting line so if everyone tells you the same thing that's totally on you for skipping class."

Even this news, which normally would have thrilled her, didn't do anything to loosen the pit in her stomach or the chokehold that her nerves had on her throat. Had she actually been feeling confident about this less than five minutes ago? Maybe she needed psychiatric help because her emotions were definitely yo-yoing.

"So, what didja want to talk about?" Vanellope asked around the huge mouthful of cake that she'd just shoveled into her mouth.

Everything seemed to come into sharp, crystalline focus suddenly, and it reminded Taffyta of nothing so much as the moments just after she'd swallowed a poison-bright green powder in Extreme EZ Living 2. That sparkling clarity had given way to the virus that had nearly killed her and Sugar Rush. Perversely, she almost hoped, just for a second, that something really bad might happen right now to get her out of this conversation.

Come on, Taffyta. You came here. Grow up. You can do this.

She missed the way the throne room used to look. All the different shades of pink, everything sparkling and regal. There was nothing wrong with the green that Vanellope had redecorated with, but it wasn't the same. Though Vanellope wouldn't want it to look regal, Taffyta guessed. Was green presidential? She didn't know any other presidents, or any other game that even had one, for that matter, and—

She was stalling. Vanellope was staring. Taffyta took a deep breath. Held it. Let it out. Then, finally, she said in a rush, "I think you need to let King Candy race again."

There was such a long silence that Taffyta was starting to wonder if she only thought she'd opened her mouth and spoken, but then Vanellope said, "Excuse me?"

Licking her lips, which suddenly felt very dry, Taffyta repeated, "I think you need to let King Candy race again. He…he's really unhappy."

Vanellope's face had gone from smiling to slack to betrayed so fast and totally that it was hard to remember that they'd been having a pleasant conversation a minute ago. "You're kidding me, right?" she asked, though it was obvious from her tone that she knew Taffyta definitely wasn't. "Hardy har har, Taff, good joke and everything, but how about you cut it out and tell me what you really want to talk about?"

With a hard swallow, Taffyta said, "That is what I wanted to talk about."

A few crumbs fell from Vanellope's lips, and she reached up and wiped at her mouth with her sleeve. "Well, I don't wanna talk about it." Her glitch rippled up her from her feet to the ends of her ponytail and she turned around, promptly ran into her desk, glitched again, and then turned back around to face Taffyta. "I can't believe you'd even ask me that. You know what he did to me the last time we raced together!"

"I know, I know!" Taffyta said, twisting her hands together. This was going really bad. Had she expected it to go any other way? "But Vanellope, if you'd just like—just listen for a second—he's totally miserable—"

"Big deal!" Vanellope shouted, glitching again so that it garbled her voice. She had never, not once since becoming president, raised her voice at any of her fellow racers. There had been times before when she'd yelled at them, but they'd all laughed and taunted her more. What was funnier than the glitch thinking she could possibly intimidate any of them?

There'd been a time, five years ago or longer, when Taffyta, Candlehead, and Rancis had caught Vanellope trying to break into the kart factory. She had drawings, plans, of the way she wanted her kart to look. Who knew how she'd gotten them; Taffyta hadn't thought to ask. As they'd ripped the drawings up and chased her off, Taffyta had sneered, "Even if you didn't get us unplugged, you know what the real tragedy would be, Vanellope? You'd embarrass yourself so bad that you wouldn't even be worth making fun of anymore. Even the NPCs would be laughing at you!"

Vanellope had clenched her fists and gritted her teeth and yelled back, glitching all the while, "Guess what, Taffyta! Someday I'm going to be a racer, and I'm going to remember every nasty thing you ever said to me, and maybe then you'll want to be friends and want something from me but I'm not going to help!"

The three of them had just laughed again, jumping in their karts and peeling out so that cocoa dust pelted Vanellope in the face. Taffyta hadn't looked in her mirror as she'd driven away.

They'd all had this one precious thing that Vanellope had wanted, and she'd wanted it so badly that she'd tried just about everything to get it. Racing. That was what it came down to, wasn't it? They all wanted to race. They were all programmed to race. And now Vanellope was the one with the power. Taffyta was the one coming to ask for something, and Vanellope was surely remembering the fifteen years of torment and bullying at her hands, and at King Candy's. What did Vanellope care if King Candy was miserable?

There was a pounding on the door right at that moment, and before any Oreo guards could appear to get it, it creaked open. "Hey, there's a lot of yelling in here. Everything okay, kid?" said Ralph as he entered.

Vanellope was still glitching intermittently, and Taffyta suddenly found herself too scared to say anything. Ralph had hated her before, because of the way she'd treated Vanellope. Things had gotten so much better between them lately. What if that all got ruined? She was lucky Ralph hadn't already given her his scariest bad guy look.

"Kid?" Ralph asked again, reaching the two of them and looking back and forth. His eyes lingered suspiciously on Taffyta for a second before he knelt down next to Vanellope. "Hey, President Fart Feathers, what's going on?"

At that, Vanellope cracked a smile. "Hey, Stinkbrain. It's nothing." Then, she glared around him. "Taffyta just asked me something stupid."

Even though she knew it was true, this still stung. Taffyta clenched her fists, and Ralph noticed. "Yeah, look, I know the whole giant fists, tiny head thing makes it hard to believe, but I'm not as dumb as I look. What's the problem?" He looked at Taffyta again, and said, more to her than Vanellope, really, "Is Muttonchops giving you a hard time about something?"

"No!" Taffyta protested. "I just asked…just asked…" She trailed off at the look Vanellope was giving her, feeling herself give up. This was pointless, just like she'd always known. Vanellope was never going to let King Candy get behind the wheel of a kart ever again, and it was hard to blame her.

But then, something hardened in her, and she curled her fists tighter. "I just asked if King Candy could race again."

"See?" Vanellope growled. "Stupid."

Taffyta braced herself for Ralph's temper, but to her surprise, he just stared at her. "Yeah, I gotta admit, it's not exactly your brightest idea ever, Muttonfudge."

The iron inside her stretched, getting more brittle, but didn't break. "I know it's not," she snapped. "But guess what? I have to try! I know he's Turbo, and he took over the game and tried to kill Vanellope! I know he did everything he could to keep her from racing! And I know that you're never, ever going to forgive him. Okay? I get it! But if anyone should know what it's like to not be able to do the one thing in the world that you're supposed to be doing, that your whole code is written to do, then it's you, Vanellope. You know how miserable he is, because you were too!"

"Because he made me miserable," Vanellope shot back, glitching so badly that it was hard to understand her. "Maybe I never should have let him out of the fungeon."

Taffyta felt like she'd been punched in the gut. She hadn't really thought that Vanellope might imprison King Candy again.

"Whoa," Ralph said. "How about you both take it down a notch, okay?"

Vanellope crossed her arms over her chest and stuck her lip out, looking unimpressed, and Taffyta tried to breathe normally. Her throat felt like it was one more fungeon threat away from closing up and making her burst into tears, and she didn't want to cry.

"I'm not gonna let him race," Vanellope said again.

"But—" Taffyta started.

"No! No way! It's not gonna happen! Right, Ralph?"

Putting his hands on his hips, Ralph said, "Right."

That was it. Here came the tears. Taffyta grit her teeth and calculated how close she could get to the throne room doors before she started sobbing.

"But I hate to say it, Taffyta's got a little bit of a point," he added. "You let him out of the fungeon, kid, but he's still basically in prison." He hesitated. "Maybe there's something he can do. Besides racing."

Vanellope uncrossed her arms and put one hand on her hip. "Hm. Interesting." She looked at Taffyta, who suddenly realized she hadn't taken a breath in way too long, as though by not moving or breathing, she might affect the outcome of this conversation. It was pretty obvious she couldn't. It might be better for them to forget she was there, and that this idea, whatever it was, to cut Turbo some slack, hadn't originated with her. "What does King Cavity do for fun, besides try to murder little kids and steal their thrones?" Vanellope asked.

Ralph held a up a hand before Taffyta could respond. "The little twerp deserved that." Vanellope looked smug. Glancing at Taffyta, Ralph went on, "What about letting him visit Game Central Station? We can keep an eye on him, make sure he doesn't get up to anything he's not supposed to." He paused, and Vanellope looked very doubtful. Too doubtful. She was never going to go for this. "Hey, you might as well reward good behavior, kid."

"What good behavior?" Vanellope grumbled.

Taffyta straightened up and fixed Vanellope with a direct look. "He saved me from that virus when I got sick three months ago. He saved the whole game when it got infected, even though he could have left it to die. And ever since then, he's never tried to escape, and he's been…well, I know not nice all the time, but he's been okay, hasn't he?" She turned to Ralph and appealed to him. "Right?"

"He's definitely showing some improvement," Ralph said. "I mean, the bar was pretty low. But still."

There was a long silence, and then Vanellope said, "Security has to be really good. No way am I gonna be the dum-dum who let Turbo game-jump again."

"He won't game-jump," Taffyta said vehemently. When Vanellope looked at her, one eyebrow raised disbelievingly, Taffyta repeated, "He won't. He doesn't want to leave Sugar Rush." She hoped she was putting on a convincing performance, because the truth was, she wasn't quite sure that King Candy wouldn't leave Sugar Rush and never look back, given the chance. Sure, three months ago he'd decided to stay, but that was before he'd been locked up for, well, three extra months, and before the full reality of not being able to race had hit him. Maybe he'd step through that outlet and be happy to be gone.

"I'll be with him," she added. Not that Vanellope or Ralph would probably think much of this as security. But it suddenly seemed very important that Vanellope agree to this. Sure, it wasn't racing, but it was something to do. If Vanellope agreed to this, Taffyta would owe Ralph big time. So would King Candy. And they'd owe Vanellope too, but that was nothing new. Taffyta would keep reminding him, and he would keep scoffing, but maybe slowly, the two of them could start to get along. And maybe that could start here.

Vanellope looked at Ralph again, who motioned to her with his hand. "Ugh," she said. "Fine. But you better not make me regret it, Taff. And," she added over the sound of Taffyta squealing and clapping in happiness, "we have to have some ground rules, okay?"

With effort, Taffyta made herself stand still. "Right, yeah. Ground rules, of course. Duh."

"Rule number one!" Vanellope said grandly, pointing a finger in the air. "No unauthorized visits to Game Central Station. That means you get my permission first."

"Maybe just have them tell you first," Ralph suggested.

After thinking about that for a second, Vanellope agreed, "Sure, fine. Rule number two, no going in other games."

After the elation of the previous moment, it felt like Taffyta's heart plummeted off the side of Sno-Cap Peak at this. "Not any other games?" she asked. "Then what's the point? Game Central Station is fine but it's going to get boring after like, an hour."

"Yeah, you're not wrong," Ralph said. "But speaking as someone who knows his way around this arcade—"

"Knows his way around the arcade bathrooms, that is," Vanellope said.

"Hey, I saved you from using the ones in Burger Time," Ralph said, and Vanellope shrugged in acknowledgement. "Anyway, no one's going to go for Turbo wandering in and out of their games. He can go to Game Central Station. Any games, though, he's going to have to get permission from whoever's in charge."

As much as she wanted to argue, Taffyta knew this was reasonable, and realistically more than King Candy ever should have hoped for. "How do I get permission? I don't even know what to start," she said.

Ralph picked up Taffyta's untouched piece of cake and took a bite. "I can give you a hand with that."

"What? But…but…" Taffyta suddenly found that her mouth wouldn't work quite right. Why would Ralph be helping her and King Candy? He didn't like King Candy at all, and he only liked her a little. "Why?"

With a shrug, Ralph said, "Guess I'm in a good mood today."

She opened her mouth to press the issue, then thought better of it and clamped it shut. Maybe she didn't want him to think too hard about it. Instead, she awkwardly stuck out a hand. "Thanks, Ralph."

He smiled kindly at her, and Taffyta understood for just a flash of a second why Vanellope had trusted him so quickly when he'd come crashing into their game and disrupted the fifteen year stasis of everything. "Maybe those Bad Anon meetings are paying off or something," he said, then gave her a pat on the back that Taffyta could only assume was supposed to be gentle. It almost knocked her over.

Taffyta glanced at Vanellope, who had the end of one of her hoodie laces stuck in her mouth and was flickering with glitchy blue binary occasionally. It was obvious that the president still thought this was a bad idea. Well then, Taffyta would just have to show her that she was wrong.