Sonic Insanity
UPDATE: I decided to re-post the chapter cause I thought it could be funnier.
Cliffhangers are good. Accept them as a way of life, shadow the hedgyhog. Clear your mind of irrationality and doubt and embrace that path.
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"What are those strange figures coming over the horizon?" Tails asked, pointing at Metal Sonic and Eggman, who were not 'over the horizon' but only about ten feet from them. Unfortunately, nobody was listening. Amy was too busy trying to make out with Sonic. Sonic was too busy avoiding Amy. Shadow was too busy laughing at the fate of children who were too short to ride the rides. (They're still at Twinkle Park, remember.) Knuckles, however, wasn't really doing anything.
"Knuckles!" Tails insisted. "Look at those two guys coming right at us!"
"Shut up, Tails, nobody likes you," Knuckles seethed randomly. Tails burst into tears, and Amy began to comfort him instead of her blue hedgehog. Sonic, enormously relieved, was still offended at the insult to his little buddy.
"Ooh, big man!" he said mockingly. "How about you put your money where your mouth is, Knuxie?"
"Knuxie" took this comment literally and inserted a thick stack of quarters between his teeth, trying to bite them in half. His teeth began to creak threateningly and he spat them out. Tails caught all of them and smiled. Female attention and free money… both for free! Wait a minute…
Anyway, so Knuckles smirked, despite his failure to prove anything. "What are you going to do, fakir?"
Shadow prudently dodged out of the way as Sonic flung a park attendant at him, cartoon character costume and all. The Wile E. Coyote impersonator landed on a piano, accidentally causing the most beautiful melody ever played to occur. But nobody was listening, so the secret was lost. "See what you've done? You've gotten him to start this whole 'fakir' nonsense and I won't stand for it!"
"Good thing you're sitting down," Knuckles sneered. Sonic's response was to pull a ship's mast out of nowhere and slam him in the face with it. Knuckles went sailing, landing only three feet away. So maybe he just tripped over his feet or something.
"GUYS! And Amy!" Tails shrieked in such a high voice that it caused light to be refracted differently and temporarily bathed the world in orangey grey. Apparently he had decided that imminent death was a worse fate than losing Amy's attention. "Eggman and Metal Sonic are approaching!"
"No, they're just my paparazzi," Shadow scoffed. "They're so drawn to my natural good looks and charm that they can't resist taking photographs…"
"No, they're MY paparazzi!" Knuckles argued. Shadow pulled the ship's mast out of thin air again and smacked Knuckles upside the head with it. This provoked a huge fight. Knuckles grabbed a guitar, stuffed Shadow into the guitar through the guitar's sound hole, glued all the strings together with flammable glue, doused the guitar in gasoline, sealed it inside a guitar case, doused that with oil, dropped it in a tub full of kerosene, and hurled the whole thing into the ground so hard that the gas line was penetrated. He then dropped a match and… well, you can imagine what happened. There was an explosion the size of Philly and most of the park was destroyed, leaving a large battlefield for them to fight.
"Eggman!" Sonic shouted. "Good thing I spotted him, or he would have had us!"
"Better give up while you still can!" Eggman called courageously, hiding heroically behind a disgusted Metal Sonic. Tails throttled the air, furious that Sonic had gotten the glory again.
"Hey," Sonic thought to himself, "I brought some weapons, didn't I?" To make a long story short, there was a flashback in which Sonic got the weapons, which happened two chapters ago so there's no need to go over it again. "Five in all… so that means each of us can have one!" He quickly hurled the key blade and the pistol far into the distance. "I mean, three. So Amy and Shadow will just have to go without. Actually, I doubt Shadow survived that little explosion…" He glanced around. The black hedgehog was nowhere to be seen.
"Hi, fakir!" grinned Shadow, sitting on top of Sonic's head.
Sonic almost exploded just as immensely as the one that Knuckles had just staged. "How did you survive?"
"Well, I gotta tell ya, it IS a difficult job, escaping colossal explosions that occur right on top of you and things like that," Shadow explained, hopping off his rival's head. "But I've learned the ropes of the job and with time, I've gotten better at it!"
Sonic was madder than an old wet hen… with the bird flu… in a vat of turpentine. "You don't get better at something like that! There's no option but instant death!"
"Well, I remember things a little differently," Shadow grinned, his nose gleaming in the sun. "But I gotta tell you, if you don't succeed at escaping… it's a fate worse than death."
"It IS death!" shrieked Sonic, cardiac arrest clearly just around the corner. "You'd die instantly due to the heat! You probably wouldn't feel anything! That's much better than most deaths!"
"Perhaps a flashback would be helpful at this time," Shadow began, drawing such a deep breath that clods of dirt disappeared into the vacuum without a trace. Thankfully, everyone was spared Shadow's undoubtedly absurd flashback, because a huge robotic fist swung at him and flung the black hedgehog into an electrical billboard. He punched a hole cleanly through it, yet somehow landed on the same side of the billboard on which he was thrown… perhaps he sailed all the way around the world.
"How did you get a machine?" Sonic bellowed at Eggman.
"I built it for him!" Tails squeaked.
"WHAT?" howled Sonic.
"What's the big deal? I felt sorry for him! Maybe he should succeed once in a while!" Tails defended.
"Not against US!" shrieked Sonic, resolving never to consider Tails cool again. He knew that since Tails had built the robot, it was sure to be actually good. Well, there was that one time… he resolved to forget it. "Tails, Amy, you go over there. Shadow…" Sonic pulled the weapons out of his "pockets." He had a shamshir, a sawed-off shotgun and an automatic machine gun. He tossed the two guns to Shadow (grudgingly, but he knew that he and Shadow were the best fighters) and gave him a nod. "On my count-"
"What do I do?" Knuckles questioned interrogatively.
"Um… go guard the women and children," Shadow told him.
"What children?" Sonic asked, and they chuckled as Tails screamed about being called a woman. Then they realized that even if Tails was a girl, he was still young enough to be a child, and Amy was only 12 or something anyway, so the joke was ruined.
"How about what women?" Shadow attempted.
"So Amy's a guy or something? Eh, that one's OK, I guess," Sonic shrugged. Ten seconds later, Amy was glowering and Sonic was sporting two black eyes, a bloody lip, and bruises everywhere. "Er, I mean, that's the worst joke I've ever heard…"
The four fighters (Sonic, Shadow, Metal Sonic, and Eggman) slowly circled each other, meaning Eggman ate popcorn on the sidelines and Metal Sonic studied his metallic fingernails impatiently while Sonic and Shadow bickered.
"What happened to the machine?" Sonic asked. "I thought Tails built him one…"
"Well, it turned out that Tails didn't have the materials to make a machine on the spot, so it disappeared," explained Shadow.
"Wait, so how was it ever built in the first place?" Sonic raged skeptically.
"Nobody noticed that there weren't any materials," Shadow cackled, while Knuckles elbowed Sonic playfully in the ribs. While Sonic's blood pressure went into quadruple digits and beat-downs were dispensed, Eggman smirked. "This is just a game, surely they realize that. They won't beat us because they have to follow the rules!" Where he derived this was not clear, but it might have had something to do with the referee shirt and whistle he was wearing.
Suddenly, Shadow and Sonic pulled out their weapons and began fighting Metal Sonic.
"PENALTY!" screeched Eggman, his face purple. "I've never seen such cheating in all of… er… in all of sunflower seeds! Not that I'd be caught dead eating such healthy food!" He began to blast on the whistle in a thoroughly obnoxious manner, but nobody was paying any attention. They were too busy fighting.
"AAAAAAAAAAAGH!" screeched Eggman. "This is worse than that one time when…"
Flashback…
A very young Eggman was tinkering with a robot. "Hah!" he cackled irritatingly. "With my new device, all the world's candy manufacturers will be forced to give up their warehouses to me! Now what to call it…" He critically examined the man-shaped figure. "THE EGG BOARD OF HEALTH OFFICIAL!"
"What will you use it for?" Eggman's little brother asked.
"I don't have a little brother," Eggman snarled. The little boy disappeared and in walked Eggman's mom.
"What's that machine for?" she asked.
"I don't have- oh, never mind," Eggman said dismissively. "Point is, this robot will report all the candy warehouses as unfit to produce food. Then their caches of candy will be delivered straight to me!"
"But the Board of Health will consider the candy unsafe and keep anyone from eating it," objected his mother.
"SHUT UP! I hate you! I'm leaving this house!" Eggman shrieked, packing up a suitcase groaning with food. He stormed out the door, running as fast as he could. What he didn't realize was that he'd exited through a balcony door, and he ran so fast into the railing that it collapsed and he fell four stories down.
"Abraham Reynolds Eggman, you get back here!" his mother shouted, but her son took no notice and went away, not looking back.
End flashback…
"So, after that," Eggman narrated to no one, "I ate all the food in 4 hours, causing my weight to increase drastically. Then I found the deed to a multibillion-dollar military empire lying in the gutter somewhere, and I had it all!"
"Your name is Abraham Reynolds Eggman?" Knuckles smirked. "Hoo hoo hoo!"
"What kind of stupid laugh is that?" Metal Sonic asked, but too late he realized that Knuckles' laugh had been intentionally stupid in order to distract him. Sonic and Shadow's plan went into motion.
Sonic hurled the sword at Metal Sonic. The robot easily jumped over it. But suddenly Shadow shot his bullets at the sword. His bullets somehow wove themselves into fine-quality chains, wrapping around the sword and pulling it back. Metal Sonic landed, and the sword-whip slashed him multiple times. The robot was sent flying backward into an inflatable castle.
"WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?" howled Eggman, flabbergasted at the massive scale of the coincidences and implausibility that had arisen before his very eyes. "This is… preposterous! Well…" He mustered up all his breath, swelling before their eyes. "You think you've won, but I've got something for you- your mother was a ham sandwich!"
Eggman jumped into his escape pod thingy, which was somehow floating next to him, and flew off.
"That was a pitiful your mom joke," Sonic said.
"Joke?" Shadow said blankly. "I never could distinguish her from that myself… wet meat right in the middle of two guys… er, pieces of bread…"
The sound from the explosion that resulted over Sonic's head from that comment still lingers in some people's ears.
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The "mother as a ham sandwich" plot line will not be continued after this, in case that's not clear. Next chapter will feature something far more horrific… Knuckles cooking. Actually, it's just the build-up to Knuckles cooking, but then the chapter after that will feature the real ordeal.
So, here's a pretty fun game I learned.
How many elephants do I have?
6.
How many now?
3.
So, what number of elephants?
5.
How many?
2.
Come on, how many elephants are in my possession?
9.
But how about now?
4.
And… now?
2.
Who thinks they know the secret? (Tucker's Mayflower, don't say anything.) There is a pattern, I'm not just making up random numbers.