Chapter 2: Homemade Tazers Are A REALLY Bad Idea

Vividoll: Iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiits time… for another bio!

Name: Manic

Age: 16

Personality: Manic is really laid back; all he ever wants to do is practice his drumming. Xen really likes to hang out with him because Manic isn't patronizing to him like Sonic and Shadow sometimes are. Manic loves video games, and is one of Sonic's two triplet siblings. Although he can be naïve and sometimes even careless, Amy has a huge crush on him.

There are lots of good ways to spend an afternoon. You could draw. You could write a story, like I'm doing right now. You could even blow the hours of 1:00 to 7:00 playing "Sonic Mega Collection" until your brain rots, just like I did last week. (My doctor says the brain rot isn't permanent, so as soon as my I.Q. gets back up to at least 80, I'm gonna do it again. ;D )

There are also a few not-so-good ways to spend your afternoon. Like selling bathtub moonshine, trying to dress the neighbor's pit bull in a little Victorian dress complete with petticoats, or trying to eat a porcupine.

But there are also really, really, really bad ideas, like what Manic was doing right now. He had found a whole Do-it-yourself website on the Internet, and found an interesting little project: How to make your own Tazer gun. Needless to say, the green hedgie just had to try it out for himself.

He had gathered the essential ingredients, a disposable camera, some copper wire, and a medley of other electronics parts. At this very moment, he was assembling the pieces at a desk in the living room.

"Let's see… I take the battery out of the camera, attach this thing to that part… add the copper wire here…"

Sonic, Xen, and Shadow were all out together, looking for some wild berries to bake into a pie. Xen claimed he knew where the best ones grew, so they had all gone out and left Sonic's little brother alone. Normally, you should be able to leave a sixteen-year-old by himself, but Manic had a tendency to do really dumb, really dangerous things when he was bored. Like that time he decided to make stew in the bathtub or the time he decided to build his own hang glider. (The hang glider experiment had ended in a one-week stay at Knothole General Hospital.)

So Manic had finally put his invention together. Upon firing the gadget, he realized that this was not the kind of Tazer that shot the little blue bolt of electricity between the prongs when fired. His disappointment didn't last long however, when one look at the printed out how-to guide told him to just put something metal between the prongs to get said bolt of electricity. Therefore, Manic walked over to a doorknob, positioned the Tazer so that the edge of the knob was between the prongs, and fired.

"Cool!"

Sure enough, the green Hedgehog got his blue bolt of electricity. This satisfied him for a while, until his thoughts began to drift to the possibility that the gun might not actually work as a weapon.

"I ought to test this on a real flesh and blood target…"

Manic's first thought was to test it on Sonic's dog, Muttski. But then he got to thinking that Sonic would probably kill him if the dog died. So he began to toy with another bad idea…

"Maybe I could just give myself a little half-second jolt…"

To be fair to Manic, there was a little voice in the back of his head telling him, "Don't do it, Manic! This is a very bad idea!" but it couldn't drown out the much louder voice from the rest of his head telling him he needed to see if his new toy worked. So he put both prongs to his leg, pushed the button on the camera, and HOLY CRAP!

…

Manic woke up about an hour later; Tazer gone, both shoes and one sock missing, every muscle twitching, and he had wet all over himself.

After collecting what remained of his proverbial bearings, Manic went looking for all evidence, so he could cover up the past three hours. One shoe and the missing sock were found on the fireplace mantel, the other shoe was in Muttski's bed (The dog was chewing happily on it when Manic found it.), and the still working Tazer gun was in the kitchen floor. The gun was still in one piece, save the left prong, which was stuck in Manic's leg.

Upon finding the Tazer, the other three hedgehogs busted into the house without knocking, as they always do. Sonic zipped up to Manic and slapped him on the back

"Yo, Man! You managed to avoid killing yourself this time! Good job, bro!"

So as Sonic zoomed off to the others to start on the pie, Manic couldn't help feeling he'd committed the perfect crime, so to speak.

But when he caught sight of his Tazer gun in his hand, he couldn't help wondering how one little jolt could've hurt so badly…

It took the doctors at the hospital ten days to completely heal all of Manic's electrical burns.

End of Chapter 2