Sonic Insanity
Last chapter, guys! I appreciate all your help, support and reviews over the years, and the great feedback you gave me. With that, let's bring this insane powerhouse to a close with THE LAST CHAPTER!
Notes:
Sorry Linds the stupid, but… uh… what was your old name? Sorry I forgot anybody.
Also, I don't really think I can drag this out to 100 chapters. There aren't that many people still reading as far as I can tell (or at least reviewing) so I think now's a good place to stop.
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Tails' hand moved frantically. His breathing was shallow and ragged as his hand pumped repetitively. His eyes jittered slightly, and once he actually caught his breath. The powerful surge filled his entire body just before the tip exploded in a release of fluid-
"Tails seems a bit too enthusiastic to learn how to pump gas," Sonic commented, watching from the snack shop as the fox filled their car up.
"Hey, at least he's paying for it," Shadow shrugged. "Have you seen how expensive gas is lately?"
"Wow, I'm sure nobody ever thought up a joke about that before," sneered Sonic.
"But it's already costing more than your mom! 3 bucks per gallon is ABSURDLY high, for women or gas!" chuckled Shadow exuberantly. Sonic growled and filled his shopping bag with chips and sugar drinks.
"All right, where's Knuckles?" he grumbled, looking for the echidna. Of course, he immediately found him.
"Two of the Hustler magazines… one Playboy… four Barely Legal… twelve Midget Goat Ranchers Monthly…" Knuckles instructed the clerk at the checkout counter.
"Is everyone ready to go?" asked Shadow as they got in line.
"Yeah, why are we at this gas station in the first place?" asked Sonic.
"I didn't ask if you had a question, I asked if you were ready to go," growled Shadow.
Sonic stepped forward menacingly and accidentally bumped into an overweight man. "Sorry," he muttered, but soon noticed Shadow's expression. "What?"
"That man," whispered Shadow, petrified, "has killed children."
"What? Really?" Sonic, looking a little worried, eyed the man once his back was turned. "Shouldn't he… you know, be in jail or anything?"
"Nobody can ever pin anything on him," muttered Shadow. "In fact, he only kills children, and he kills them all the time."
"So he's like a serial killer? How does he do it?" asked Sonic, morbidly fascinated.
"Watch," said Shadow, "and pray to Morgan Freeman that Tails doesn't come in here."
A small child entered the store and started playing next to the boxes of diet soda. There was a perceptible change in the overweight man's behavior. His head turned and his hands began to twitch. Sonic couldn't see his face, as his back was turned, but he could imagine it- a piggy, bloated grin.
Then- faster than Sonic would have thought possible- the overweight man lunged across the store and sat down on the young child. There was an awful crunch and the man got up, sidling away. The young boy was nowhere to be seen.
Horrified and outraged, Sonic turned to Shadow. "We've got to stop him!"
"How? The Sitting Man's evaded police for thirty years!" hissed Shadow. "You saw how fast he moved!"
As Shadow and Sonic argued, Knuckles manipulated the controls of the Overweight Man Machine that he was piloting. Pulling levers and switches, he tried to simulate human movement as best he could by controlling the robot. Tails, who had been disguised as the little boy, had gotten into the robot through a compartment in the robot's leg when the robot had sat down.
"Why are we doing this?" growled Tails. "What possible use could there be for a robot of a fat man who sits on children?"
A twinkle appeared in Knuckles' eye. By that I do not mean that his eyes appeared merrier, or that there was a gleam of light, but that there was actually a physical object in his eye called a twinkle. Blinking to get it out, he replied, "It's all Transformers, my dear boy."
"What?"
"Transformers! Robots in disguise!" crowed Knuckles. "This particular transformer is echidna-operated to prevent that pesky AI stuff from taking over! In normal unobtrusive mode, it's a normal child-killing fat man. But in the other mode…" He chuckled. "Want me to show you?"
"All right…"
Knuckles pressed a series of buttons, and in the blink of an eye, they were being lifted off the ground. Machinery whirred all around them, leaving Tails without anything safe to grip onto. Knuckles, concentrating tightly, guided the machine through its transformation. Inside the gas station, Sonic and Shadow gasped (well, Shadow was in on the plan, so he was just acting). The fat man had suddenly turned into a massive fat man visibly made out of iron.
"SURRENDER NOW OR NOBODY GETS HURT!" blared Knuckles. "Unless, of course, you're a sniveling pansy like Sonic…"
Sonic was absolutely astonished by this. "KNUCKLES? What kind of balderdash is this? Who… who… who masquerades as a child-killing fat man transformer?"
"QUIET! MAMA ALWAYS SAID NEVER TO TALK TO FOREIGNERS!" Knuckles howled in a highly racist manner. "They'll give you warts!"
A sly smile was spreading over Sonic's face. "You think you've won… whereas in fact, I too have a transformer!"
"Where? Your grasp of technology doesn't even extend to copy-pasting text!" cackled Knuckles.
"All around you!" roared Sonic triumphantly as the gas station all around them underwent a miraculous change. The pumps turned into fingers, the hoses morphed into sinews, the snack bar turned into the head- individual pieces came together. Cars were crushed in the grinding of gears as the entire paved area that the gas station sat on turned into a massive, hinged armor plating. Sonic and Shadow got behind the snack bar counter, which metamorphosed into a huge control panel even as it was lifting off the ground. Tails gazed at this scene with complete astonishment. Knuckles, who had been reading a newspaper, put it down and examined their transformer.
"Most amusing!" he chortled. "But, you see, that won't be any match for my giant fat man here." The robotic fat man lovingly patted its belly at Knuckles' command, but he accidentally pulled the switch too hard and the fat chunk of metal belly was pulverized. "Um, er, PREPARE FOR ANNIHILATION!" he screamed.
Both robots charged at each other more violently than famished cats with hot dogs tied to their backs, and faster than if Headwater Daddy himself had been chasing them on his trademarked hover trolley. Which he probably would have too, being a gluttonous lunatic. (Hint: he wasn't hungry for the hot dogs.) Their steps shook the earth with vaporizing crunches. Only one would survive, unless they missed each other due to the pilots' mediocrity. They prepared to collide full on in a gloriously meaningless CGI orgy.
"Here we go!" Knuckles hollered, thrashing around like a live fish in Eggman's meticulous grasp. "Here we gooooooooooooooooooo!"
Just as the two transformers were about to run right into each other, the whole gang was suddenly on Angel Island. The Master Emerald was shining brightly in the shrine.
"What? How'd we get here?" Shadow asked, looking frantically around.
"Um… let's just go back home," said Sonic, shivering.
They stepped out of the shrine and found themselves facing a tall hill that none of them had seen before.
"This is weird," Knuckles said. "Shadow, can't you just warp us out of here?"
Shadow reached for his Chaos Emerald, but it had already detached from his belt and was floating up the hill away from them.
"HEY! Let's get it!" Tails yelled, and they began pursuit, confident that the emerald would stop at the top of the hill. However, fifteen minutes later, they still hadn't reached it.
"Phew! Let's take a break," gasped Sonic, sinking to the ground. The emerald floated tauntingly just up ahead. They turned around to see how far they had gotten from the shrine and gasped. They were exactly the same distance from it as they were when they had started.
"What's going on?" yelled Tails, his face screwed up. "I don't like this!"
"It's all just a bad dream, don't worry, Tails," Sonic tried to reassure him.
"A bad dream? This is great!" Knuckles cheered.
"WHAT?"
"Think about it! No responsibilities, no duties, nothing to bother us! We can just stay here as long as we want with nothing to worry about!"
"You idiot!" raged Sonic. "Do you see any food around here? We'll starve to death! We're cut off from all civilization! There's no chance for survival!" He was astonished to see a perplexing grin slide over Knuckles' face.
"Well, maybe you don't have any food," he smirked, reaching into the Master Emerald. His hand sank right through it and he pulled out an entire roast chicken, which he jovially gnawed upon.
"WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?" the three other furries chorused lividly in a hellish trio of screams.
"La de da, you ladies ain't got enough to eat?" chuckled the echidna blissfully, reaching in again and accessing several watermelons. "I set this up years ago! Didn't you ever wonder why Eggman was always after this?"
"It's a power source!" screamed Tails.
"A power source for him!" Knuckles yodeled belligerently. "There ain't enough food to sustain him for years on end! He's gotta have an unlimited source of snacks, and that's what the Master Emerald provides!"
"So what happens when it breaks into pieces?" Shadow grumbled.
"The energy core of the Emerald is sustained by a very careful gravitational and magnetic reaction," explained Knuckles, using a pointer to point at a blackboard. Much like his previous plan to get the lottery tickets, the objects on the board had no relation to what he was talking about.
"When the shards are fused together, the atomic levels are uniform, creating a balance that holds the core in place," he continued, indicating a porpoise munching on a pair of boots that were arguing with each other. "But if any part of the Emerald is detached from the main body, the core is thrown out of balance and explodes, sending the shards flying." Knuckles carefully pointed at each section of a three-part diagram- a tree cutting itself down with an axe held in its branches, many rows of the number 69 forming an unspeakable ASCII image, and a monstrous jar of tomato sauce rolling up a flight of stairs.
"When the shards are brought back together, the core can maintain its balance, providing a food center!" he concluded, only to find that his audience had disappeared.
"Guys?" he said frantically, looking up the hill. They were nowhere to be seen. "GUYS?"
And then he too was warped magically back to their house. The other three guys were there.
"What's happening? Why are we just appearing and disappearing all over the place?" he gibbered, craving an answer.
"I don't know, but let's all hold onto something and try to stay here," Tails proposed. There was nothing better to do, so they all got into their car, removed the seats, and sat down in the living room wearing the seatbelts. After a while, this grew very boring.
"I'm bored," Knuckles said, just as a letter flew in through the window.
"It's addressed to me!" squealed Tails, coming out of a closet underneath the stairs.
"What?" Knuckles asked, frozen with fear.
"Yeah, it is! See, 'Tails the Fox, The Cupboard Under the Stairs, Number 4, Privet-" Suddenly Sonic, who had become very fat and spoiled suddenly, seized it from him.
"Daddy, it's mine!"
"Give me back my letter!" roared Tails, wearing black robes and holding a wand.
"Now, now, Dudley, Harry," Knuckles chided, sporting a large mustache and seizing the letter. As he read it, his face changed from blue to purple to colors nobody had heard of. He threw Sonic and Tails out of the room and slammed the door, talking to Shadow.
"But Vernon, he has a right to know!" wailed Shadow.
"We swore we'd stamp it out of him, Petunia!" blustered Knuckles. "We won't tolerate his funny business any longer! We'll send him to St. Brutus' Center For Incurably Criminal Boys, not this magic hogwash!"
"It's Hogwarts, not hogwash!" screamed Tails, barging into the room. "Give me back my letter!" Suddenly tens of thousands of letters came streaming in through the fireplace. Knuckles hurriedly ran over to it and lit a fire, incinerating the falling letters, but by then Tails had grabbed one and read it.
"It says the story's going to end!" Tails said fearfully.
"What? Really? Let me see!" argued Knuckles, snatching it back.
"Can we not do another Linkin Park cover?" Shadow said snidely.
"So now what?" Sonic asked. "What do we do?"
"We could say good bye and then go watch TV or something," Knuckles suggested.
"Um… all right," said Tails. He climbed on top of the sofa and spoke. "Ladies and gentlemen, one and all, thank you for seeing us through to the end of-"
"Anyway," announced Shadow, shoving Tails off the sofa and standing in his place. "Yo. Thanks for reading the story, you were great, but the author's tired of it, so… maybe another story, eh? Bye."
"Goodbye!" everybody who had ever been in the story said, from the fan characters, to the main characters, to the cameos, to the celebrities, to Headwater Daddy, and finally Eggman.
"All right, that's a wrap," said Mecha Scorpion, sitting in the director's chair as the camera crew packed up. "Now all we gotta do is edit it all into a presentable form and it's Oscar town for us, boys!"
"I can see it now," said Shadow dreamily. "And Best Everything goes to me!"
"No, me!" argued Knuckles.
"Me!"
"Me!"
"ME!" chorused everybody who had been in the story. A giant fight ensued, and Mecha left the room, turning the lights off as he went.
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BEST ACTOR
Sonic the Hedgehog
Tails the Fox
Knuckles the Echidna
Shadow the Hedgehog
Eggman the Human
BEST ACTRESS
Amy the Hedgehog
Cream the Rabbit
Rouge the Bat
Tikal the Echidna
Sonic's Mother
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR(S)
Team Chaotix
Mecha Scorpion
Headwater Daddy
Metal Sonic
The Babylon Rogues
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESSES
Um… ain't too many…
BEST CHAPTER
(Choose from any of them!)
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Goodbye, everybody! Review, and don't forget to vote!