CHAPTER 9

It was practically five in the morning by the time they got home, Taffyta yawning widely as they walked through the door and trying to say in the same breath, "But like, did you know Calhoun could do all those impressions?"

"I will admit, that wasth a surprise." King Candy drew her curtains shut, not like it mattered, since the constant lemon drop sunlight still streamed in from outside. "But, you know, I think she might have been a little drunk."

Taffyta looked at him, her eyes wide. "Really?" She'd never been around a drunk person before.

Chuckling, he said, "Don't tell her I noticed. She'd probably kill me."

She didn't bother arguing, because it might have been true. With another yawn, Taffyta went into the kitchen to grab a glass of water. She guessed she should go upstairs to try to get a few hours of sleep before the arcade opened.

"So," King Candy said. Taffyta turned to look at him as she gulped down her glass of water. He crossed his arms over his chest, leaning against the wall in the living room. Suspicion masked as nonchalance was radiating off him. "Felix was being awfully…nice to me tonight."

Taffyta clunked her glass down and picked up a bon-bon from the kitchen table, wondering how long it had been sitting out and if it was still safe to eat. "Yeah?" she said distractedly.

"You don't find that just a little bit odd?"

"Not really," she said, inspecting the bon-bon for mold. It was unlike her to leave anything out, but she hadn't been the greatest at housekeeping lately. She knew King Candy hadn't done it; he left everything spotless. There didn't seem to be anything wrong with it, but she didn't have a clue how long it had been out, so just to be on the safe side, she tossed it in the garbage, then turned back around. He was watching her.

"What?" she asked.

His eyebrows were raised. "Felix. What's his angle?"

With a laugh, Taffyta said, "Felix? Felix doesn't have an angle. He's just nice." She went into the living room and plopped down on the couch. "He told me you guys used to be neighbors, back when the arcade first opened. Shouldn't you know he's just friendly?"

"Yes, the—hoo-hoo—good old days." He fidgeted with the lapel of his jacket. "We were neighbors," he admitted. "But we weren't friends. We were…well, I guess we were supposedto be, because, you know, we were both the stars of our games, but we never really got along." Making a face, King Candy said, "He was such a goody-two-shoes, you know, that whole aw-shucks schtick; it alwaysth kind of drove me crazy."

Suddenly, Taffyta didn't feel tired. King Candy hardly ever talked about when TurboTime had still been plugged in, and she hardly knew anything about that time of his life. It was obvious he didn't talk about it because the memories hurt him. That whatever people thought about him, and however much he played it off like he didn't care, it was a wound that still hadn't healed. "So you never hung out with him?" she asked.

With a shrug, King Candy said, "I guess I did. Look, it was different back then; if you were a good guy you socialized with the good guys, and if you were a bad guy—well, if you were a bad guy you pretty much socialized with no one. So honestly, even if none of us liked each other—or, hoo-hoo, I guess really, even if no one liked me, that was it. We were the in-crowd, I guessth, but, well, let's just say, there wasn't a lot of love lost when I stopped drinking root beers with them."

"They didn't like you?" Taffyta asked, wondering who exactly had been part of this "in-crowd" besides Felix. He hadn't volunteered that information, and she wasn't sure if she should ask.

"Not much has changed around here, as you can see," he said flippantly.

She tilted her head. This wasn't the first time he'd said that he'd never had any friends. His life must have been so lonely. It made her chest ache.

With a sigh, she got to her feet, then said, "I'm going to go to bed for a few hours." For a moment, she looked at him, and then, that same pain behind her sternum, she crossed the room and wrapped her arms around him.

King Candy didn't move for a few seconds, but then he patted her head awkwardly. "What was that for?" he asked when she let go of him.

She shrugged and walked to the stairs. "You just seemed like you needed it."

A glitch garbled his form as he stared at her. He opened his mouth to say something. Then, he glitched again and closed his mouth. "Good-night," he said, giving her a tiny salute.

Taffyta nodded and padded up the stairs. Only one more day before they put their plan into action, and she probably disappeared from the roster with King Candy's code change. She wanted to make it count so the gamers really knew what they were missing.

Ugh, why was it that when Taffyta needed her, Vanellope was always nowhere to be found? The arcade had closed after another mostly miserable day of racing, and it was now or never—Taffyta needed to ask Vanellope to turn the randomizer off.

She'd checked all over Sugar Rush with no luck, even going so far as to ask Beard Papa, who she still hadn't forgiven for the way he'd talked about King Candy, if he'd seen her. No, he hadn't, but was Taffyta still hanging around that bad element? Sweet little racer like her should keep better company. She'd chucked her lollipop at him and he'd had to duck to keep from taking a strawberry dum-dum between the eyes.

Finally, she'd had to concede that the president probably wasn't in the game. She duly headed out to Game Central Station, where the first people she encountered were Crumbelina and Swizzle, playing baseball in the outlet entrance. They hadn't seen Vanellope.

"Are you looking for her?" Swizzle asked.

"Um, duh?" Taffyta said. "Why are you two doing this here, anyway?"

Crumbelina made a face. "Surge told us we're not allowed to play in GCS, 'cause it's destructive and we gave Zangief a concussion. Whatever. He's just a buzzkill."

Normally Taffyta would have agreed and joined in for a round of Surge Protector abuse, but now she just said, "Okay, well, if you see Vanellope, tell her I'm looking for her."

"Sure," Swizz said. "Hey, sure you don't wanna play?"

He threw the gobstopper ball towards Crumbelina and she swung the bat so hard that it flew out of her hands and ricocheted off the wall, slamming into the train with such force that it dented the neon car.

"Uh, that's okay, but thanks for the offer," Taffyta said, heading out of the outlet towards Game Central Station. Dying outside Sugar Rush hadn't ever seemed like much of a concern, but being within fifty feet of Crumbelina and Swizzle during this game suddenly made it seem like a definite possibility.

She didn't have much luck finding Vanellope out there, either. Of course, she had to be strategic about who she asked, since a good quarter of the arcade had shouted something nasty in her direction and/or tried to poor root beer on her in the past month. Donatello hadn't seen Vanellope, neither had Tron, or Paperboy, or Norwood. Finally, she asked Zombie, cringing away from his dribbling bodily fluids the whole time. "Vanellope, go! With Ralph. Burgers. Never bring any for Zombie. Errrrggghh."

"Soooo, BurgerTime," she said, inching backwards. "Thanks." Something pinkish dripped off him and she fled.

BurgerTime was close, at least, but the minute she stepped across the threshold into the outlet, a zap of blue electricity buzzed along the ground and Surge Protector materialized in front of her. "Are you kidding me?" she groaned, yanking at her hair.

"Just a routine security check, miss," he said, clicking his pen and making a note on his clipboard.

She craned her neck and hopped up and down. "What are you writing?" She hadn't even done anything!

Adjusting his glasses and peering down at her, he asked, "Where are you headed, Miss Muttonfudge?" Instead of answering, she stared up at him, one hand on her hip and a flat look on her face. "Ah," Surge said. "I'll just put you down for the obvious, then. Are you traveling alone today?"

"Do you see anybody with me?" she snapped.

Raising his eyebrows, Surge scribbled something on his clipboard, muttering as he wrote, "Refuses to comply with questioning."

"Oh my god!"

She shoved past him, ignoring him as he yelled, "There's a limit on how many burgers you can bring out of there!"

Taffyta arrived at the BurgerTime train to find Ralph and Vanellope getting out of it, and she was so relieved to have found the other girl that for a second, she forgot to be nervous about the upcoming conversation. At least this time, there wasn't much to be nervous about, because Taffyta already knew what Vanellope was going to say. No. The answer was always no. What was the point of getting nervous about something when you already knew the outcome?

Waving, she shouted, "Vanellope! I've been looking for you."

Vanellope glitched to her side and Taffyta tried not to jump. She was never going to get used to that, ever. It was one thing to see it, and hate it, on the track, but it was another when they were, well, literally anywhere else. "What's up, Taffyta?"

No beating around the gumdrop bush this time. Taffyta planted her feet squarely on the ground, drew herself up to her full height, tried to project confidence. "Vanellope, can we get rid of the randomizer and go back to the Random Roster Race? It's…it's just not working."

Instantly, Vanellope was on the defensive, and she glitched backwards a few steps. "Aw, c'mon, do we have to do this right now?"

Ralph crossed his arms over his chest and glanced at the president. "You want me to go, kid?"

"No way," Vanellope replied, eyeing Taffyta. "Because this isn't going to take long." With a frustrated noise, she said, "No, Taffyta. The randomizer's fair, it's the only way—"

"Everyone gets a fair chance to race, yeah, I know." She'd heard it all before and it made her tone come out more sneering than she'd meant it to.

Glaring, Vanellope shot back, "I don't know what your problem is, you've been on the roster plenty!"

"Ugh, that isn't the point!" Taffyta said.

"Yeah, so what is the point?" Vanellope demanded.

This had escalated way faster than Taffyta had meant it to. She took a deep breath to calm down. "I just don't…think it's working." Now she was repeating herself. Maybe it was time to cut her losses and end this conversation. Could she just walk away? Would that be too weird?

Shaking her head, Vanellope said, "Nope. N-O. Just because you don't like the randomizer doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it. C'mon, Ralph."

As she stormed past, Taffyta opened her mouth to respond. She almost said, It's not just me, it's everyone, we all hate it! But she bit her tongue. Bad enough that she was going to help King Candy break into the code vault. She didn't have to make Vanellope feel bad on top of it.

The two of them disappeared from view and Taffyta let her shoulders sag. Yet another failure. Though, was it really a failure when she'd already known in advance what the outcome would be? Pretty philosophical, Taffyta.

She hesitated in the station for a moment, not wanting to follow Ralph and Vanellope. It would look pathetic if she went trailing after them. Instead, she headed into BurgerTime and ordered a bag of burgers to go, then stuffed it in her jacket to evade detection by Surge. To her relief, Vanellope and Ralph were nowhere to be seen in Game Central Station, and she booked it back to Sugar Rush.

When she walked through the front door of her house, she found King Candy sitting at the kitchen table, hunched over a small electronic device. He glanced up at her as she approached and said, "Isth that BurgerTime burgers I smell? You know they've got a really particular and distinctive odor of, I don't know, would you call it grease and dust? Maybe a dash of nostalgia…"

"Yeah, it is, and ew, you just made them sound really unappealing."

He shrugged as she put the bag down on the table. "At least it's less cliché as a secret ingredient than love, right?" Opening the bag, he breathed deeply and added, "Nothing quite like a BurgerTime burger."

Taffyta grabbed one too and started eating, asking around a mouthful of bun, "So what's that?"

King Candy looked at the burger he was holding in one hand, then at the little box he'd been working on, which was now sitting on the table between his elbows. "Oh, this." He ate a few bites of burger. "You know, I forget how good these are." When Taffyta just raised her eyebrows, he picked up the device with his other hand and said, "This is what you're going to use to trick the sensors in Game Central Station into thinking I'm game-jumping."

When he held it out to her, she hesitantly took it. "This is it?"

"You say that like you were expecting something more exciting."

"I mean…a little bit." She slid it back across the table to him. It was just a plastic box, black with a single gray button. It was disappointingly light-weight. "Is it done?"

Taking another burger, he said, "Almost." Then, giving her a direct look, he said, "Let'sth do it tomorrow."

There was a twist in her stomach—a feeling equally of dread and excitement—and she squeaked, "Tomorrow?"

He held up two fingers. "I believe I specified two days and that would be, you know, tomorrow."

She stared at the device. "Yeah. I know."

Even though she wasn't looking at him, she could tell that he was staring at her. "Listen, Taffyta." When she didn't look up at him, he ducked his head so that he was in her field of vision. "You do want to do this, right?"

"Yeah. Of course."

"Because if you don't…" His eyes narrowed a little and he rested his elbows on the table, still holding her gaze. "Look. Taff. I need 100 percent buy-in on this. My plan—our plan—kind of, sort of depends largely on you. So if you're having second thoughts…"

Quickly, she said, "No, I'm not. Seriously." When he raised an eyebrow doubtfully, she repeated, "Seriously. I just…I mean, it's kind of a big deal, isn't it? I'm just nervous." Taking a deep breath, she added, "But I want to do it. It's the best way to help the game. It's the best way to make Vanellope see that we have to bring the Random Roster Race back."

King Candy leaned back in his chair. "She said no, then."

"Huh?" Taffyta asked, startled.

"The glitch? You said you were going to ask her about it." He picked the little remote control up again and squinted at it. "Always figured it was going to be a waste but, hoo-hoo, these are the sortsth of life lessons you just have to learn for yourself."

"…Huh." Maybe that was true. It was hard to imagine Vanellope ever agreeing to any of Taffyta's requests ever again—like since she'd done her one favor, that meant Vanellope never had to listen to her again. Taffyta clenched her fists in her lap. "Tomorrow morning, after the arcade opens? Vanellope's not on the roster either."

With a grin, King Candy said, "Tomorrow morning."