Sonic Insanity
A reference for you punk fans out there:Take a look at this stanza from the Dead Kennedy's hit song, "California Uber Alles."
Now it's 1984Knock, knock at your front door
It's the suede denim secret police
They have come for your uncool niece
Now look at the chapter titles for chapters 84, 85, 86 and 87. Coincidence? I think not! Especially since I wrote the chapter titles myself. Oh well.
Yes, I do include altered punk song lyrics in my chapter titles. A time-wasting puzzle of Tool-like proportions, one only Headwater Daddy and myself caught onto. Kudos to anybody who knows enough about the Dead Kennedys to care.
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"It wasn't a terrible movie," mumbled Shadow halfheartedly. "I mean, we were all insulted mercilessly, and the filming techniques were very unprofessional-"
"They looked like they were drawn on a cocktail napkin using a makeup kit!" howled Sonic, swerving unsafely as he drove them back to his house from Ye Olde Sonic Follye. "It was horrible! There aren't words to describe it!"
"Well, I thought it was OK," Shadow insisted. "It was a frenzy to emulate, but pineapple won't sauce fourths!"
"What's that supposed to mean?" raged Sonic, gripping the steering wheel so tightly that it creaked.
"Uh, what's that not supposed to mean?" Knuckles observed scornfully.
"The capital of Argentina?" Sonic guessed hopefully.
"Sorry, that is what it was supposed to mean," Shadow smirked, much to Sonic's fury. "Way to go there, genius extraordinaire. So what is the capital of Argentina anyway?"
"I don't know, Ethiopia?" snapped Sonic, frustrated and annoyed.
"Incorrect! The answer is Spaghetti-Os!" cackled Knuckles. Shadow winced as Sonic's head exploded from fury, and opened a window to vent out the car.
They drove to Sonic's house without further incident. At least, without much further incident. Sonic was annoyed that Knuckles had convinced them to go see the movie, which in fact he had not. Knuckles refused to apologize for his behavior.
"Why not?" snarled Sonic. "It was horrendous! Only Parker Poser over there liked it! What's your excuse?"
"As your mother always told me," Knuckles howled with hysterical laughter, "'If you're going to do something, stand behind it!' Now, I can't refuse a woman who's asking for a-"
Tails sighed and wondered why they even had a car when Sonic's supernova-like eruptions of rage kept vaporizing them. After the mushroom cloud disappeared, Sonic and Knuckles fought all the way home. As they got in the driveway, Sonic began complaining about his bruises.
"I feel like I've been hit repeatedly with a golf club," he whined as they advanced toward the house.
"Don't you mean, hit multiple times with a metal sports instrument?" Knuckles corrected him.
"What's the difference?"
"What isn't the difference?"
"The similarity?" Shadow suggested innocently, only to find himself at the receiving end of more blows.
As the Furious Foursome entered the house, Metal Sonic began to sweat furiously. He had located all the items from their plan but one, the Click DVD, as was established last chapter. There was no choice. He would have to take desperate measures into his own desperate hands! Er, wait a minute. But regardless, he would do something or other. Immediately an ingenious idea burst into his head, inspired by memories of his idyllic and lovely childhood… A flashback commenced.
Metal Sonic was playing happily on the floor. Eggman, his bristling mustache twitching, was reading a newspaper while sitting in an armchair. Metal Sonic's mother, who he had clearly fabricated just to construct a good flashback, was busy preparing eggs on the griddle. Their pair of old basset hounds, Hellcat and Dorothy, were basking lazily in a sunbeam. Metal Sonic blissfully made "vroom, vroom" noises as he pushed his toy truck across the floor.
Suddenly Eggman stood up, and everything froze. Metal's fictional mother cowered in the corner. Metal himself stared uncertainly. The ends of Eggman's mustache began to twitch furiously, moving back and forth like canoe paddles. The faster they went, the deeper red his face became. Then he swooped down upon the inert basset hounds and seized them.
"SCURVY!" he bellowed, swinging his beet-red face like an ox as he toted the passive dogs. "Scurvy and the plague, running rampant in my house! Vile, foul, corrupting diseases of the flesh!" He shook the dogs, who whined melancholically. "Festering illnesses in canine form! HAH! I hath found thee out!" He dropped them with disgust, grabbing his wife's griddle and brandishing it at the fleeing hounds. "That's right, run like the cowardly infecting blights you are!"
"Dad, how can a basset hound be a disease?" asked Metal Sonic confusedly. "I mean, maybe if they had diseases, but they clearly don't…" He quailed as his father's bulging eye swiveled to find him. For a moment they glared at each other.
"Um… er… MEDIOCRITY!" he roared, chasing after the bassets and plucking them up again. "Shiftless idlers, contributing nothing to the well-being of this family, eating us out of house and home! Lazy, good-for-nothing knaves and jackanapes! Nothing but constant ineptitude as soon as I set foot in the door!" His teeth were bared in a vicious snarl.
"How exactly are they inept?" asked Metal skeptically, returning to his toys.
"They're financially inept, for one thing!" shrieked Eggman. "You never see them with any money! No, they're too busy living off their friends, the ungrateful paupers that they are!"
"They're DOGS!" shouted Metal Sonic furiously, overcome by confusion and rage. "How are they supposed to make any money?"
"Aw, listen to Mr. Bleeding Heart Liberal over here," sneered Eggman contemptuously. "'The dogs can't get good jobs because they're a different species, it's the white man's fault, society is prejudiced, bla blah bla!' You soft pansies don't seem to realize that your 'affirmative action' is no solution for mediocrity!"
"IF THEY CAN'T SPEAK, WRITE OR COMMUNICATE IN ANY RECOGNIZABLE LANGUAGE, OPERATE MACHINERY OR PERFORM SIMPLE TASKS OF ANY KIND, HOW ARE THEY BEING DISCRIMINATED AGAINST?" howled Metal Sonic with unbelievable amounts of fury. His mother cringed.
"That's exactly what I just asked you!" growled Eggman. "Here you are, a typical liberal whiner, sticking up for the underdog, always defending the minority!"
"This isn't a political issue!" cried Metal. "This is about you accusing our pets, who aren't supposed to serve a real purpose in the house, of being diseases and then of being lazy and mediocre!"
"Oh, sure, divert the issue!" seethed Eggman. "Sounds exactly the sort of thing a liberal flip-flopper like you might come up! INDECISIVENESS!" he shrieked. "If there's one thing in this house I can't tolerate, it's indecisiveness! Or is it hypocrisy? Hmmm… maybe indecisiveness… but then again, I do really dislike hypocrisy… on the other hand…"
"You're being both, you indecisive hypocrite!" raged Metal Sonic, unable to cope with these levels of ridiculousness. He stomped upstairs to his bedroom. Eggman waited until his son had left the room, smiled warmly at his wife, and sat back down in the chair, petting the basset hounds affectionately as he did so. The flashback ended.
Now, you may wonder what strategy Metal could have possibly picked up from such lunacy. The plan was simple: He would pose as a mediocre scurvy victim, hoping to be unobtrusive, and hopefully Eggman would seize him out of the house before Sonic and the gang showed.
"La de da, having infectious diseases…" he warbled.
"Try citrus," asked a grizzled old bum sitting next to him.
"WHOA! Rob Schneider? What are you doing here?" exclaimed Metal Sonic.
The old bum hiccupped and swigged from a bottle of hooch. "Well, ya see, everybody got tired of me piggybacking off of Sandler's popularity. I released film after film in an unending attempt to flood the market and give people no choice but to see my horrendous films."
"I can remember," Metal Sonic said wistfully. "The Guy Getting Punched In The Face? What were you thinking? Nobody wants to see 90 minutes of that!"
"Apparently my devoted fan base did," argued Schneider.
"Your 'devoted fan base' consists of mental patients, 11-year-old boys and in-flight movie purchasers!" yelled Metal. "How can you claim that anybody cares about you and your idiotic career? The Benchwarmers? How many people saw that- 200? 300?"
"Anyway," growled Schneider angrily, "your boss Eggman caught onto my theater-flooding scheme and did it himself, except with bad sequels to bad movies instead of just bad movies. I had been one-upped, or one-downed if you will. I tried to sue him for copyright infringement, spending all my money in legal fees in the hopes that I might make a profit from the suit."
"And?"
"It was a disaster!" Schneider moped, drinking again. "He got away with my plan, and the judge threw me out of court because he hated my movies! I went to every court in the world- same response! My mother kicked me out of her house just for The Hot Chick!"
"I would have too," Metal Sonic mumbled to himself. "So what about your buddy Sandler? Couldn't you have worked as his pool boy or something?"
"That's where the Click DVD comes in," Schneider said, pulling the movie from the inside of his grubby coat.
"You've got it? Give it to me!" yelled Metal, but the bum held it out of reach.
"Listen to me," Rob Schneider said urgently. "I had been betrayed by Eggman, so I came to Sonic and his friends for help. That's what their plan was about. They were going to try to blackmail Sandler into giving everything to me. Once they'd done that, I would repay them by giving them the rights to all of Sandler's movies, so that they could make sequels, do George Lucas-like re-releases, and do whatever else they wanted with them. With so much money, I would be in a perfect position to get revenge on Eggman, my enemy!"
"So what does the Click DVD have to do with it?" Metal asked skeptically.
"Sonic and his pals were going to blackmail Sandler by threatening to make him watch Click," Schneider babbled. "No man can bear to watch himself sink so low… well, except me, of course."
"You didn't even have to sink," Metal said with disgust. "So what were the rest of the supplies for? The stuffed monkey? The rocket catapult? How were they involved?"
"I don't know," Schneider admitted. "I think they were part of an unrelated plan to go eat lunch or something."
"You know, it really has taken an extraordinary amount of time for he and his friends to get in here," Metal Sonic observed, after bursting into fiery rage at Schneider's last statement. Very coincidentally, Sonic, Knuckles, Tails and Shadow could be heard coming through the front door at that very moment.
"So what isthe capital of Argentina anyway?" came Sonic's voice from the hall.
"What's not the capital of Argentina anyway?" Shadow said rudely. A massive fight began.
"Um… I'm gonna pretend to be a mediocre leper right now," Metal said to Schneider, who shrugged and disappeared through a hole in the universe created by his own worthlessness. The robot tried to blend in casually with…um… actually, he just huddled against the wall and hoped they would overlook him. Or under-look him, if possible. Needless to say, they noticed him as soon as they entered the room.
"Oh look, some guy with typhoid, how entirely not suspicious," Tails said offhandedly.
"That's not really weird," Sonic said loudly. "Maybe he's just about to leave while we all turn our backs at the same time…"
Metal Sonic, overwhelmed by suspicion, burst out of his disguise. "All right, you caught me! But I'll escape!"
Everybody in the Sonic crew looked at each other sympathetically. Except for Knuckles, who was staring murderously at the ceiling light.
"Metal, we were trying to let you escape with your dignity intact," Shadow said. "Your disguise was so pitiful, we needed to give you a chance to walk away with a minimum of embarrassment."
"I'm your enemy!" roared Metal. "What motivation could you have for doing that?"
"Uh, what motivation couldn't we have for doing that?" Sonic smirked.
"Um… so I guess now we get in a fight or something?" Metal Sonic asked.
"Not so fast! Why were you in our house!" Knuckles demanded.
"I was stealing the components to your Adam Sandler plan," Metal admitted, shuffling his feet.
"Oh, that," Sonic said cheerfully. "Thanks a lot!"
"WHAT?!?"
"You see," Shadow explained with great patience, "we all hated Rob Schneider so much that we were just setting him up. That Click DVD was the last possession of any worth that he owned!"
"How is that movie of any worth whatsoever?"
"There… um… was… a receipt inside for store credit," mumbled Sonic. "But now that you have it-"
"Actually, he has it," Metal confessed. "He had it in his coat and then he ran off with it."
Everybody swore dejectedly. Well, Tails said "aw, jeepers," but you get the idea.
"I guess his career will go on," Shadow sighed unhappily.
"I suppose so," grumbled Knuckles ungraciously.
"Can I go now?" Metal Sonic asked.
"Yeah, sure," Sonic said. "I guess that's the end of that little plan."
"One thing I don't understand though," said Knuckles, his brow furrowed. "Why is it that-"
"Yeah, anyway, nice weather, ain't it?" Shadow smirked obnoxiously, provoking another huge fight. Tails uneasily tried to dodge it in order to get to his room in peace and one piece, but a furry black arm reached out and yanked him into the brawl with many squawks of protest. Meanwhile, back at the Egg Base…
"TREACHERY!" bellowed Eggman, pointing a finger dramatically at the ham, lettuce and honey mustard sandwich.
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Hope you enjoyed the chapter! I'm taking a short break so don't expect an update for maybe a month or so, rather than around two weeks as usual. Thanks to everybody for reading and I hope I'm back shortly. Review!