Sonic Insanity

Finally reached that 900 review goal, guys, and thanks much for doing so! Dare we shoot for 1000? I know that depends mostly on my writing output, but give me your opinions too!

I took down my Harry Potter forum, sorry. But if you want to go to a General forum that I like, go to Failed Redemption's profile and go to her Goths forum.

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"This plan sucks," Shadow objected before Knuckles had even opened his mouth.

Knuckles glared daggers at the black hedgehog, upping the ante by increasing his glare from "daggers" to "battle axes." "Shadow, so help me, I am doing this for your benefit! None of us need Sonic twittering around like an amorous buffoon, doting on his ricocheting beetle intestine, so just pay attention!"

"Sonic never called his new pet puppy anything as ridiculous as a ricocheting beetle intestine," Tails argued.

"Go on a diet, fatty," Knuckles answered bluntly. "Anyway, this is my new plan, or 'wheeze' as they say in J-O-E."

"Joe? What do you mean, Joe?" Tails complained unwittingly.

"Jolly Old England," sneered Knuckles as if this moronic acronym should have been obvious to anybody. "I say, old lad, toodle-pip, what what, cheerio… you know, that sort of thing! I see you've been poorly educated," he concluded, contemptuously snorting.

"I am easily twelve times smarter in my sleep than you are during your most inspired moments of genius," grated Tails through clenched teeth. "Secondly, I was educated using facts, evidence, information and theories, not according to your ridiculous initials for England that you made up."

"Guys, stop fighting!" Shadow shrilled at the ceiling. "Explain your plan, Knuckles."

Favoring Tails with a wicked glare, Knuckles pulled down a large, widely varied assortment of presentation equipment. He yanked down a previously unseen projection screen from the ceiling while lugging out a slide projector. He also mounted a large computer screen on the wall with a Power Point slide show. Finally, Knuckles painstakingly hung a chalkboard from a hook, dusting off his hands and gazing at it all proudly.

"Eh… Knuckles… is this all necessary?" Tails inquired.

"We'll find a use for it," Knuckles replied in a slightly forced, too-casual way, which did nothing to allay Tails' fears. "Anyway, so since this is a complex multimedia project, I'll have to use two separate mediums for presenting it."

"But there are three-" Shadow began to protest.

"SHADDUP!" Knuckles shrieked, his eyes flashing. He fired up the Power Point and a title slide appeared. It said Population Of Gunderschtankenhagensvenstanskibardendorfmunnelpetrovich, Poland Reaches 157- Previous Historical Record Of 153 In 1661 Shattered In A Landslide and showed a picture of an orca whale jubilantly jumping above the surface of the ocean.

"Are either the headline or the picture relevant?" Shadow asked unsurely.

"Hopefully not!" Knuckles declared. Tails felt chills of foreboding erupt along his spine. "Anyway, so what we do first is take advantage of Tails' knowledge as a computer hacker to access the computer that prints out the designs on lottery tickets."

"You know, just because I'm good at technology doesn't make me a hacker," Tails grumbled bellicosely.

"Yes it does," Knuckles childishly demanded, hoping to convince Tails of an obvious fact.

"No it doesn't!"

"Have it my way!" Knuckles snarled, giving in.

"Shouldn't it be have it your way, Knuckles?"

"Yeah, when you say your it's referring to me!" Knuckles proclaimed. Tails actually understood the logic behind this, however twisted and stupid it might have been, so he contented himself with whining under his breath.

"Anyway," Knuckles went on, "with Tails' help we access the computer that prints out lottery tickets. Tails will then print out every number that is possible to be a lottery ticket during that round. Knuckles and I will find the printing press that prints out these tickets, take out any security, and hijack them all while Tails guides us from HQ!"

"What do you mean, HQ, Sonic's house?" Shadow growled, but Tails saw something far worse. Knuckles had clicked to the next slide, and the picture of the leaping orca whale dissolved to the sound of gunfire to an even worse image. A random audio snippet from Grey's Anatomy played while the words Figure 1.3A faded in. Surrounded by many lines, graphs, tables and charts was a step-by-step diagram of how to correctly make a ham and cheese submarine sandwich.

"Knuckles," Tails tried to say, but words failed him at the inanity of this slide and he fell silent.

"So, once we have a copy of every potential lottery ticket," Knuckles went on, "we will hijack the 'real' lottery ticket shipments so that we don't have to worry about a duplicate win. After burning the 'real' set of tickets, we will submit all the fake tickets that we made!" A new slide came up, this one featuring a man sitting on a giant postage stamp while screaming at the sky, while the words Elvis Sighted On Jupiter By Hubble Space Telescope flashed below this image. "With every ticket made, we're sure to win!"

"Yeah, why are we even printing out another set of tickets if we're going to hijack every ticket in the first place?"

"Because those tickets have already been registered to specific people!" Knuckles clarified.

"Well, why don't we hijack the shipment going away from the lottery headquarters instead of towards it?" Shadow demanded.

"Maybe if we have time," Knuckles conceded, even though this was an alternative strategy, not something extra to do. "So, allow me to more specifically detail the breaking and entering of the lottery HQ." He strutted proudly over to the slide projector. The first scene showed a black stickman, a yellow stickman, and a beautifully artistically designed image of Knuckles that was exactly the same size as the stickmen.

"The black stickman represents Shadow," he explained, "and the yellow one represents Tails."

"Why aren't we as detailed as you?" Shadow asked grumpily.

"Budgeting, my dear Watson," declared Knuckles. "So, the lottery facility is on a massive island of rock in the middle of the ocean with sheer, steep cliff walls that cannot be climbed. So Shadow and I will Chaos Control there and push all the guards off the cliff when they're not looking."

"How will we keep them from screaming?" Shadow asked.

"Easy," Knuckles responded with the ghost of a smile on his face (the smile had died in a gardening accident). "So, after that's taken care of… you know what, we'll just make it up as we go along, it's not like anybody will die or get permanently inconvenienced."

"We might," objected Shadow. "The author might use our infirmity/death as a cheap way to end the fanfiction."

"Yeah, but the fact that he acknowledged the fact that this would be cheap shows that he won't do that," Knuckles argued. "And since he's the author, he can make us do it after all. Author, what do you say?"

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks," the author declared, emerging from a vase on the cupboard with much difficulty. "I say you go."

"But it's a stupid plan!" Tails grumbled. "Why am I always picked on and derided?"

"Tails, you owe me after how I hooked you up in Chapter 74," Mecha Scorpion replied.

"What do you mean by that?" snarled Shadow and Knuckles.

"Not much," Mecha mumbled, looking nervous. "Later!" And he was gone with a twinkle of his eye. As if eyes twinkle.

"Anyway," Knuckles resumed, "my plan is good. Let's do it."

Afraid of the consequences, Shadow and Tails gloomily acquiesced.

Meanwhile, Sonic was having a devil of a time with his angelic puppy dog, which he had decided to name Claudio as a tribute to the lead singer of one of the worst bands in history.

"So I told her, get lost, OK? You're, like, obvs not my types, but she didn't get it, you know?" Sonic chattered, flipping his hair. "But she was being so weird, asking me if we could hang out and telling me she liked my eyes, so I, like, OMG, had to lay down the law!" Sonic tittered and his puppy dog took advantage of this distraction to make a bid for freedom. Sonic snatched Claudio back and continued his story. "I told that woman what was what, right? She has to know how I do things, or it won't work out!" He sighed. "My mom is so persistent sometimes… she's so totally overprotective."

The puppy tried not to sob. Whatever Sonic's mother had done to him, it had probably been catastrophic and unqualified to be called proper parenting. It tried to lunge away again, but Sonic grabbed the puppy.

"We can't ever have a real relationship like this!" Sonic fretted. "We should take a long vacation… somewhere in the Caribbean… I know! Dominican Republic, here we come!" And Sonic drove off to the airport at the exact same time as Knuckles, Shadow and Tails drove to the airport in order to hijack the airplane bringing the tickets away from the lottery.

Of course, this did not happen overnight. During the time it took for both of these groups to plan their flights, Sonic was downright awful. He spent all their recreation money for the month on indulging his puppy, refused to allow certain foods, music, games, movies, books, clothes or words to be used or brought into the house, he bossed everyone around, and he generally acted most disagreeable. It was only coincidence that their flights were on the same day from the same airport. They were both very surprised to find that they were all going.

"All right," said Sonic, "I guess we'll all just take the one car."

So the five of them, including Claudio, set off in the one car and reached the airport in good time. While Knuckles made crude jokes about shoving Shadow's mom through an airplane turbine, Tails chafed under the authoritarian regime of the author.

"Guys," he muttered to Shadow and Knuckles, trying to keep them from fighting, "how are we supposed to get all of this weaponry on to the plane?"

Knuckles guffawed. "What do you think this is, some kind of security check? Their regulations are very lax, I'm sure."

"Yeah, how about that sign that says no cocktail napkins because they could be used to smother the pilot?" Shadow asked skeptically.

"SHUT UP! I have an ingenious plan to get around that," hissed Knuckles, pulling a kit of disguises out of his bag. Sonic was too engrossed with Claudio to notice any of this illegal activity.

"A turban and a fake beard? And Muslim robes? Won't that just make them suspect us more?" grumbled Tails uncooperatively.

"Exactly!" beamed Knuckles. "If they act suspicious of them, we'll accuse them of racism and we'll get through free as criminal birds!"

"They'll still check our luggage and when they see 40 pounds of explosives and bolt rifles, they'll arrest us for sure!" argued Tails.

"That's what Sonic is for," Knuckles grinned. Nobody even wanted to ask what this meant.

They proceeded through the line, and Sonic was soon to be up. While Sonic cooed at Claudio, overcome with infatuation, Knuckles delicately arranged the turban on Sonic's head and slung the robe over his shoulders.

"Sonic, you've got something on your chin," Shadow declared, catching on to Knuckles' fiendish plot while sticking the beard on Sonic's face. He then slipped a case of explosives that they hadn't needed into the midst of Sonic's luggage.

"Please put your luggage through the scanner, sir," said the security guy, glaring suspiciously at Sonic's Islamic demeanor. Sonic, shrugging, passed the suitcases through, and one of them set off the alarm.

Immediately a group of security men pinned Sonic's arms and legs while another opened the suitcase. "Bombs!" they gasped. "Trying to blow up an airplane, were you, you terrorist?"

"I'm not a terrorist!" frothed Sonic, tearing off the beard, robes and turban. "I don't even know how these got on me! I'm not Islamic or Muslim!"

"You could be a Mormon terrorist!" accused the guards.

"WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!!?!?" shrieked Sonic at glass-shattering volumes. "There's no such thing! My dog and I just want to go on a vacation!"

"How do you explain the bombs in your luggage?" the security guards asked.

"They're not mine! They're somebody… else's… wait a…" Sonic came to a fast conclusion, his jaw sagging with horror. Throwing DVDs, making him out to be a virgin, mooching off of him for a good year now… that was one thing. But getting him arrested for attempted terrorism? That crossed the line!

"KNUCKLES!" shrieked Sonic, whirling on his innocent-looking echidna housemate.

"Aaaaaah!" screamed Knuckles. "Get the terrorist away from me!"

"I'm no terrorist! I'm a terrorist like Nickelback makes good music! You planted all this stuff on me! WHY DID YOU DO THIS?" howled Sonic outrageously.

"I've never met this man before in my life! Somebody stop him!" whimpered Knuckles. The guards complied, six of them holding Sonic down.

Sonic was more mad than ever seen before in this story. His vision tinted red and steam snorted from his nostrils. He had been pushed over the edge! This meant WAR!

"HULK SMASH!" roared Sonic as his muscles swelled like melons and he tore free of the security guards. Now an eight-foot behemoth, Sonic began to tear everything to pieces in a mad attempt to get his shovel-sized hands on his aggressor-in-chief.

"RUN, Tails, RUN!" screamed Shadow, dashing away at high speed. Tails did not comply, merely flying through a window to go back home for some sanity. Shadow and Knuckles sprinted madly through the airport, Sonic hot on their heels and smashing all obstructions out of the way.

"You almost cost me my life!" shrieked Sonic, snapping an arrival times board over his knee and using half of it to surf down the rail of a down escalator, which brought him within inches of the terrified duo. "My reputation, my dignity, my moral code, my everything… gone because of you!" He seized a flagpole bearing the Armenian national colors and hurled it like a javelin, which slid through the gap between Shadow and Knuckles and almost impaled them. "I'LL GET YOU BACK, I PROMISE! YOU'LL WISH YOUR FATHERS HAD USED CONDOMS AFTER I'M THROUGH WITH YOU!" Steam erupted from his ears like geysers.

It was then that Knuckles did something very unwise. He turned around, stuck his pinky fingers in the corners of his mouth and pulled as hard as he could while waggling his tongue. His ring fingers pulled at the skin under his eyes, making them obscenely large while he rolled them obnoxiously. With his thumbs and index fingers he pulled out his ears to Dumbo-size proportions, and with his middle fingers… well, you can imagine. After this intricate arrangement of his facial features, he began to prance around like a court jester while laughing in the most high-pitched, irritating way imaginable. Headwater Daddy himself could not have chuckled in a more blood-curdling way. And after this routine, he bent over, slapped his own posterior insultingly while winking impudently at Sonic, and then started doing an impersonation of Sonic's mother.

"You idiot!" roared Shadow, dashing forwards still. At the sight of this, Sonic became even madder than before. As Knuckles wisely turned tail and fled, the grotesquely muscular Sonic took hold of the case of explosives that Knuckles had tried to plant on him and hurled them right at the awful echidna. Knuckles performed a ridiculous contortion to avoid this while smacking his own haunches rudely.

"Don't provoke him, you loon!" screamed Shadow. "He'll catch us and then we're done for!"

"Well, thousands of children die in Africa every day!" screeched Knuckles. As Sonic went bug-eyed at this randomness, Knuckles seized the Armenian flagpole that Sonic had thrown at them and used it to pole vault himself and Shadow through a plate glass window and onto a runway, where a plane was about to land.

"CHAOS CONTROL!" he bellowed, grabbing the fabled Emerald from Shadow. They appeared inside the plane's cabin and quickly knocked the pilots out with karate while seizing the controls. The plane, just about to land, took off again.

"Knuckles, what about the passengers?" Shadow grumbled.

Knuckles grumbled but obeyed, pressing a button. Instantly the floor of the passenger cabin fell out of the plane and everybody fell a mere five or ten feet onto the runway. The floor sealed up again. "There, happy?"

"Not really!" cried Shadow with distress as they flew past a skyscraper on which Sonic was standing. He snapped off the spire and hurled it at them, and they heard it clip off the very end of the wing. Sonic tried to reach out and grab the plane, but he lost his balance and fell off the skyscraper with a thud.

"Go get Claudio!" Shadow shrieked from out of the plane, and Sonic rapidly turned back to normal, too concerned about his little pet to care about the provokers.

"Well," breathed Knuckles, "that's good. Now we just have to get that dog out of the house."

"Knuckles," said Shadow, "hasn't the lottery ticket plane already landed?"

"…Curses."

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Will they ever find a way to get Claudio out of their lives? Review to maybe find out!