Sonic Insanity
I'm not doing a Christmas-specific episode, sorry, guys. This is just a run-of-the-mill Sonic chapter, although I hope it will still be funny- despite uhyeahitsteamdark's allegations that the last 40 chapters were crap.
To Link the idiot of time- read the other chapters and see what you think.
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"Guys, I just got my first job!" Tails shouted, running into the house. Shadow stuck out his foot casually and Tails tripped over it. Ignoring this indignity, the fox righted himself and waved a flier with gusto. "I got a job at the pet store two blocks from here! I'll be a sales clerk! Can you believe it? I finally have a job!"
"That's more than I can say for some of the resident squatters-in-chief!" Sonic grumbled angrily, glaring at a supremely unconcerned Shadow.
Knuckles, however, was incensed at what he viewed as untrue allegations. "Blasphemy! Lies from top to bottom, I say! I had a job as a… er… um, I cook sometimes!"
"Yeah, but it's always HORRIBLE!" screeched Sonic.
"Hey, Sonic, you want a piece of me?" snarled Knuckles, leaping to his feet with fists balled. "I could destroy you in a fight any day! Any hour! Any minute! Any second! Any millisecond! Any week! Any fortnight! Any-"
"Guys, can't you go one second without a fight?" Tails pleaded.
"What's not fighting?" Knuckles asked, the epitome of ignorance. Shadow ignored him and took out a copy of Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.
"WHAT? Nintendo, in my house! I won't stand for it! Out! Out!" Sonic stood poised at the phone, looking for the poison control number.
"You're just jealous that this game is far better than anything you've ever been in!" Shadow accused him.
"Hah! Since every game you've been in also featured me, that applies to you too!" boasted Sonic arrogantly.
"GUYS!" shrieked Tails. "Who wants to come see my new job at the pet shop?"
"Sorry, Tails," Shadow said, looking sincere, "but I have an appointment."
"What? You didn't tell me," Tails replied, confused.
"And that appointment is playing Twilight Princess," grinned Shadow, flourishing the Wii controller, accidentally letting go of it, and throwing the remote through the TV screen.
"Not anymore," grinned Sonic wickedly. "Now you have to buy me a new TV as well."
Spitting sparks and threatening lawsuits everywhere, Shadow jammed the money for the TV into Sonic's hand, Chaos Controlled another TV into the house, and started playing the game again, this time with the controller taped to his wrist.
"Knuckles, do you want to come?" asked Tails, ignoring Sonic's confusion and wrath.
"Any season! Any month! Any weekend! Any year! Any epoch! Any age! Any eon! Any-"
"OK, never mind," Tails conceded. "So, Sonic, you gonna come along?"
"Sure," growled Sonic, lurching along after Tails. They reached the pet store without further incident, although Sonic kept looking concernedly back at the house.
"So, this is where I work from now on," Tails declared exuberantly, indicating rows upon rows of noisy cages and glass containers filled with animals. Sonic, however, had stopped dead upon entering the store. His gaze was focused solely on one thing, and whatever it was had wrought an incredible change in his demeanor. His eyes had dilated as if he was bewitched and a blissful smile stole over his usually cynically smirking mouth.
"It's beautiful!" he cried rapturously. Tails was reminded queasily of how Amy spoke whenever Sonic was not close enough to be chased down. Oh my goodness, it's the most precious, adorable, luvverly little animal I've ever seen! Nobody will ever take my baby from me!"
"Sonic," muttered Tails, not actually even aware what Sonic was talking about at this point, "you don't even own this thing yet."
Sonic whirled fiercely upon the fox. "It's not a thing, it's a widdle puppy dawg! Oh yes you awwwwe! Awen't you da cutest widdle fing?" He swept down like a phantom of indulgent affection upon a quivering pooch with fluffy black fur and a lily-white bow between its ears. Sonic pried at the bars of the cage, sinking into a morbid depression at the thought that cold steel separated he and what he assumed to be his dog. He sank to the floor, beating on any available surface and weeping at cruelly denied love and all the woes of the world.
"WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY?" he screamed, voice throbbing with emotion inconceivable. "Why, WHY must I be spurned? When I found what mattered most to me… it was ripped away from me! WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY?" He seized himself around the throat and began punching and thrashing around on the floor, apparently fighting his inner demons physically rather than emotionally.
Tails sidled fearfully away from the prone, shuddering form of his friend. He was suddenly consumed with a desire to be as completely disassociated from this lovelorn lunatic as possible, in order to retain any shred of dignity that once might have been his. He called from the opposite end of the store, "Sonic, you know, if you just BOUGHT your little puppy dog, things wouldn't be so bad, you know? You might not be driven by an insatiable, unquenchable thirst to judder and jolt around on the ground like a character in a Claymation movie with half the frames missing…"
Sonic, weeping enough bitter tears to flood the store, raised a stricken face, overcome by the sorrows that life held. Glazed with pearly misery, his suddenly overjoyed face resembled all the malicious demons the world contained. "I knew my adoration could never be held at bay! Love conquers all, my brave little trooper… I will liberate you from this prison that cruelly divides us!" Strutting boldly up to the front with the unwilling puppy's cage in tow, he began looking around for a clerk. Tails suddenly remembered what his job was and went up to the front.
"Hi, I'd like to purchase this adorable little watermelon here," Sonic declared in a businesslike manner, as if Tails and he had never met.
Tails fought to keep his bile safely in his throat. What kind of twisted, maladjusted beast referred to a puppy as a watermelon? "OK, er… that'll be 28.34." (AN: I hardly know what the going rate for puppies is, so I just made that up.)
"Your bail is about to be paid, my pet!" Sonic crooned in a triumphantly saccharine manner, thoroughly frightening every pet in the store to the point of cardiac arrest. Fishing out the sad remnants of his depleted bank account, he gave it to Tails and just as quickly stole more money out of the cash register.
Tails sighed. If Sonic was irresponsible enough to grab money and have temper tantrums in a store, how could he provide a decent life for this shell-shocked puppy? Oh well… hopefully things wouldn't get too horrible. "All right, Sonic, I have to work now, so I'm trusting you to safely return your… eh… watermelon home, and keep it away from anything dangerous, understand?"
But Sonic was long past any sort of safety regulation discussion. "Rascal and I are going to have so much fun together! Fido, you and I will eat Chinese food and give each other haircuts and play Trivial Pursuit together under the stars while drinking lemonade! Oh, Whiskers, you adorable little…" His prattle trailed off behind him, then ended abruptly as the pet shop door slammed shut behind him.
Amy, "coincidentally" standing as close to Sonic as the restraining order permitted, scuttled up to him in complete disregard to the legal system. "SONIC! My angel, my beloved! So, I'm discussing the nuptials with my parents and they're thrilled, they can't wait to meet you, in fact-"
Sonic didn't give the fatuous pink hedgehog a second glance. "Piss off, Amy, I'm taking my doggie home for us to play together."
"Oh, really?" Amy gasped, impressed for some reason. "What a hunk! I hear taking care of animal really improves that six-pack you're sporting… you muscular man, you." She gave his stomach a tender, seductive caress, letting her delicate touch linger for a short moment.
Sonic was too in love with his dog to give this stroking any attention. "I said go away, Amy, my puppy and I are busy."
Amy stopped, her insides turning to ice. She had managed to convince herself that Sonic's steadfast, noisy rejection of her advances was mere denial. But to hear him so brusque and firm… did this mean he had really given up on her? Tears filled her eyes, and also part of her ears (due to a disastrous surgical operation on her sinuses a few weeks ago), and without a word she stomped off to think about things.
Sonic gave her back a passing look, then returned to his indulgence of the puppy. Girls were so emotional, always outpouring their every feeling and thought to anybody who might listen. Not he, though! Sonic was a man, and he would hardly dither on about every minor detail of his life, like some kind of blog-writing nitwit.
"So, do you know what I ate for dinner yesterday?" he asked his puppy, breaking his promise immediately.
Meanwhile, back at Sonic's house, things were not going exceedingly well. Much to the contrary, in fact. Knuckles was still spouting units of time measurement, miraculously having not drawn breath the entire time. Despite the sincerest efforts on Shadow's part to silence the insolent blabbermouth, Knuckles simply would not shut up. This annoying drivel had driven Shadow to the point of miserable depression, nearly parallel to that Sonic had been experiencing a few minutes ago, and he lay in a state of inebriated wooziness on the couch while Knuckles continued to babble.
"Any century! Any decade! Any millennium! Any movie's international premiere! Any religious holiday! Any non-religious holiday! Any stage of the lunar cycle! Any autumnal equinox! Any winter solstice! Any solar eclipse! Any intermediately well-known celebrity's birthday! Any date on any pre-Julian calendar!" spat Knuckles in an unending stream of worthless idiocy.
"WHYYYYYYYYyyyy," shrieked Shadow at Yoko Ono-like levels of unintelligible wailing. "Can't…" He dragged himself off of the rum-soaked couch to another bottle, the last full vessel amongst countless shattered ones. "We not…" Unable to deal with the profound complexity of navigating the bottle's cork, he snapped off the neck against the edge of the table. With a shaking hand, he brought the alcohol to his lips, dousing his entire face in the beverage. "Beeeeeeeeeee SOOOOOOooooBEEEEEEER!" Shadow shrieked, desecrating any Tool fan's memory of the song as rum trickled down the premature lines in his haggard face. "Just… HIC! Want…" He savored what little of the drink had actually been accumulated in his mouth, wiping his face with his hands. "To start…" The bottle drained, he threw it hazardously at Knuckles, who allowed it to shatter against his skull without a pause in his monologue. "THIS OVER!" he bellowed drunkenly, wasted beyond any previous comprehension.
"Any graduation day! Any moment during the Ides of March! Any previously unheard of unit of time! Any… any…" Knuckles' supply failed him, and he clammed up tightly.
Shadow turned a bleary half-smile at this annoyance turned silent. "Finally… hic… gonna shut up?"
"NEVER!" shrieked Knuckles, hunching and contorting as leathery demon wings erupted from his spinal column. His mouth elongated and stretched in a horrendous, fang-filled gaping maw and Knuckles began flapping grotesquely across the room, venomous claws shooting from his fingers, while belching fire and taking huge swipes with his spike-studded tail. Shadow watched this with polite interest, then ignored this plea for attention and started reading a magazine. Realizing that this was not going to annoy Shadow, Knuckles reluctantly transformed back into an echidna and started juggling rubber bands with difficulty.
The doorbell rang, and Shadow stumbled drunkenly from the couch.
"I'll get it!" called Sonic, and Shadow heard running to the door and the door opening. "I'm home!" Sonic called, causing Shadow to pass out from a mixture of overdrinking and uncomprehending confusion. "Look, Cuddles, this is your new home! I promise we'll have lots of fun, and we can eat goldfish and pizza bagels and watch The Andy Griffith Show until we fall asleep and love each other and-"
Shadow's mind was rudely hauled out of its piteous wallowing, focusing into a razor-sharp logical component of his psyche. Whatever happened, he had to make sure that this situation with Sonic and "Cuddles" did not escalate out of control.
"Sonic," he called, "let me see your new pet!"
"DON'T SHOUT!" screamed Sonic at a volume far greater than Shadow had spoken at. "We don't need verbal aggression in this house anymore- delicate ears are afoot!" He gestured at a fluffy little puppy dog that he held in his arms, which was looking around warily and disdainfully.
"How can an ear be a foot?" Knuckles asked, ambling out. "And who's that hot hunk o' love in your arms there?" he added, licking his lips in a dastardly manner.
Sonic and Shadow looked at each other with more than a little concern.
"This is my puppy, who I have yet to decide a name for," Sonic declared. "He will be living with us for the rest of his natural life, and I will not tolerate any misconduct or bad behavior! He's impressionable right now and he doesn't need deconstructive influences!"
"OK," said Shadow, intimidated. "Well… er… what do you want to do? I've finally figured out how to play the Wii without destroying some part of the TV, although somehow I got the nunchuk to control the volume at one point. Does your little anonymous puppy want to watch me play?"
"NO!" shrieked Sonic, covering the puppy's eyes. "Video games are too violent! He doesn't need to watch you play a game about killing monsters!"
"I doubt he would actually understand any of it," objected Shadow. "Fine, then; if your puppy is too sensitive then I'll just play it myself. I've spent 45 hours consecutively fishing!"
"Sonic wasn't even gone for more than an hour," Knuckles objected, but as nobody loves Knuckles there was no response.
"NO! No video games will be played in the house! They're harmful and detrimental to a child's upbringing!" whined Sonic.
"Your puppy is not a child, dammit!" Shadow roared, infuriated beyond compare. "He is a dog that will not be traumatized if somebody plays a T-rated video game in the same house as him!"
Sonic's eyes narrowed. "Do not swear in front of my adorable little camel parasite!" He stroked the "camel parasite" tenderly while staring at Shadow with malevolence in his eyes.
"I," growled Shadow, matching Sonic's glare with just as much hatred, "will swear as much as I damn well please in front of your furry basket case, and if you or the frigging dog do not like it, you can both go the hell away and leave us adults to do what we want!"
Sonic dropped the puppy, who scampered gratefully away, and clenched his fists. "Take that back, or I'll… why, I'll abolish you where you stand!"
"Ah-ah-ah, you can't fight in the house!" Shadow smirked craftily, waggling a finger deviously. "You wouldn't want to set a bad example for that fuzzy loaf over there, would you?"
Sonic, fuming and irascible, dropped his fists and walked over to his puppy, scooping it up. "My tiger tyke and I will go about our business, and if you do anything that may damage his upbringing, I'll throw you into the spinning blades of a grain thresher, dice your bleeding carcass with a meat cleaver, and feed the remains to your mother while throwing dripping globs of sewage at her!" Ignoring the profane threat he had just issued in front of his sweet little bundle of weed killer, Sonic walked off dignifiedly with his puppy in tow.
"Hey guys, t'sup?" said Tails, entering just as Sonic left the room.
"Tails," grinned Knuckles, "wouldn't you like to do something so we could… control Sonic's abnormal behavior? Doesn't that idea appeal to you?" Somehow he had maintained a grin throughout both sentences, and the smile was growing larger.
"Um… yeah, I guess…"
"Well," Knuckles continued, his smile growing exaggerated and cartoonish as it threatened to engulf his entire face, "I've developed an ingenious plan to win the lottery so that we can buy this house from Sonic and as a result, make him do what we say!" Tails watched with morbid fascination as Knuckles' grin swelled past his nose. "And the first thing I intend on doing," Knuckles smirked, his teeth disturbingly bright and shiny, "is make him get rid of that little ball of rat fuzz!"
"OK, sure," said Tails cautiously. "What's the plan?"
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The story resumes later, review.