Hello once again, my faithful audience!

Here's another chapter with one of my all-time favorite arcade games, filled with various puns and glitches and proof that Mr. Litwak has questionable software in his arcade.

Disclaimer: Disney owns Sugar Rush, SEGA owns Sonic the Fighters, and Activision owns DJ Hero 2, and Crazy Taxi is owned by Hitmaker/SEGA (developer/publisher)

Honey's POV

There was nothing sweeter than the ability to walk without pain.

It was a horrible way to go on vacation, having her leg snapped in half with only her wonky regeneration cycles to fix it, but Honey figured it was a battle of wills and patience that she eventually won. Besides, her Sonic was so sweet and caring the past few days, always checking up on her between fights and running down to Tappers to get her root beer floats.

And now she was cleared for Codebuster duty, her first night back set with a mission to Crazy Taxi. Sonic the Fighters had a really crappy view of the arcade, being mostly blocked off by Sugar Rush and Hero's Duty, so she was kinda excited to go about the arcade and actually see what all these gamers are into nowadays It certainly beat being a statue for 11 Chaos-damned years.

Waving bye to Sonic—he walked her to the Sugar Rush port, what a gentleman!—she skipped into one of the nifty go karts and sped down the cord, her new and improved leg jumping up and down. Choko had suggested getting Fix-It Felix to fix it with his hammer, but her code was still shaky after years of being a broken block of pixels; 'fixing' may end up deleting her leg!

Parking at the mouth of the giant candy mountain, fighting down a small urge to see if she could actually eat the scenery, she peered down to see Choko and Skrillex zooming up the sour patch rainbow bridge. They were both grinning brighter than a handful of rings, and she felt a small burst of friendship-flavored warmth in her belly. "Honey-chan, you're here!"

"Like a run-of-the-mill total bone fracture could get me down." Honey struck a fighting pose, Choko giggling into the sleeve of her pink kimono. "Now I'm back and better than before."

"As much as it's painful to say it...we missed ya, Honey." Skrillex flashed a genuine smile, lit up by the screen of his laptop. "Ready to go?"

"Heck yes I am!" Honey jumped into the back seat and flipped Skrillex's undercut—the punk was keeping up with the beauty regimen Queen Vanellope set up, his hair was just fabulous!—before settling back into the marshmallow seat. She had missed this car way too much. "So Skrillex, this Crazy Taxi's game by your end of the arcade, right?"

"Yeah, there was some real weird stuff happening from what I could see. Flying pixel-pigs and whatnot."

"I see. Isn't that game a racing game?"

"Nah, but it has a car though."

Honey could feel the sudden spike of giddy anticipation burst out of Choko's small frame. "What do they do in there?"

"From what Joel told me, you drive around shuttling annoying taxi...people, until your timer runs out."

"Do you get points for driving fast?"

"Oh yeah. Driving fast, driving off road, driving on the sidewalk...it's called Crazy Taxi for a reason."

"Ah, I see. Just checking..."

Honey grinned as they rocketed through GCS, various people on break diving out of the way as Choko shifted gears. Honey winked to the Surge Protector as Choko bypassed the Crazy Taxi's cord transport and made static burn against the Codemobile's undercarriage. Apparently Honey wasn't the only one excited for their newest mission.

Honey lifted an eyebrow at the chaos in the streets. Cars were flying through the air, the wall boundaries were shifting to trap unlucky pedestrians, and the taxi was halfway sunken into the ground, the taxi avatars furious yelling at them to fix it. "So Skrilly, have any idea what the hell is happening?"

"This is a legit SEGA game as far at the soundtrack is telling me, so the anti-piracy trigger hasn't been set off. Choko, you have any idea?"

Choko kicked the side of the taxi's wheel, and watched the car sink fully into the ground. "On bad days in Sugar Rush, sometimes the racers get stuck in the walls or end up glitching in the air. But once the arcade closes down it goes back to normal...besides, we can't fix whatever's wrong if the taxi is stuck in the ground."

One of the taxi drivers came forward, eyeing the Codemobile. "Not necessarily." She looked back at the others, nodded, and grinned. "The taxi's just a special agent that's allowed to execute the gameplay. If, say, one of your Action Replay things could locally alter the code of your car to make it act like an agent, you're set to go."

Choko blinked, then turned towards Skrillex and Honey. "Are we allowed to do that?"

"Allow me." Honey cracked her knuckles and unhooked her ID tag, changing it into the Action Replay cartridge. Slapping it down on the hood, she closed her eyes and focused on the golden code flickering below her palm. It was one thing to glitch things back to their normal set—on her break she honed her glitching skills to fix code objects in her own game without an Action Replay—but this...this required knowledge of altering the function of an object. Just like changing a dummied out joke character into a fully functional fighter...Honey grinned as the code of the Codemobile aligned with the Crazy Taxi's data, growing larger with longer rows of seats and a little fondant T hood ornament. "I think it worked. How do we find out?"

Choko started the engine and a menu screen appeared over their heads, tracking their time and money gained. Skrillex whistled and hopped into the Codemobile, flashing a thumbs up at the taxi drivers. "Stay away from the buildings, they eat people. We'll be back once we fix the game."

"Right on, little man. Does your friend need a tutorial on how to play?"

Choko pulled in Honey to sit in the middle—darn, Skrillex called shotgun—and grinned manically before driving headlong into a client with a green money sign over his...little space aura. Honey blinked and turned towards Skrillex, who was fiddling with the car's radio to sync up with Crazy Taxi's soundtrack. "Sonny, I think we broke Choko."

"Meh; sanity is for fools anyway."

Skrillex's POV

Skrillex shoved his backpack down between his legs as Choko launched their car into the air. The guy they were ferrying to the cable car stop could give a damn about running over pedestrians as long as they "were safe". Choko knocked a cable car out of their way, making a bunch of people scream—their screams were hilarious, he needed to stop hanging out with Joel—and then they were airborne again, earning tips for their work. They made the stop with 35 seconds to spare, earning $700 for their trouble.

700 foking dollars after a clear case of reckless driving and endangerment. Honey shared his incredulous double take at their counter, then held onto each other as Choko crashed through what appeared to be a hotdog stand to get their next client. Skrillex was mildly surprised that SEGA got the rights to say "Pizza Hut" in their game, but what did he know about copyrights and realism in games.

He gripped his stomach as Choko swerved through oncoming traffic. They were getting mad tips for an already wonderful fare, but holy crap, he should not have stuffed his face back at Queen Van's place. He focused on the music coming out of the chocolate speakers...wow, SEGA even got The Offspring? Nice.

With the wind flowing through his hair and the palm trees up against the blue sky, it accessed programmed nostalgic feelings. Apparently, he was born and raised in California, which SEGA was known to base their good games off of. Fixing his glasses, Skrillex said screw it after Choko drove off a ramp to land at their destination, and sang along to the soundtrack.

Honey was looking at him like he was crazy, but she was just too proud to admit that this was pretty fun. Crazy, but a thousand times than the TRON disaster.

As Choko picked up a new customer, Skrillex noticed that his speech and the music started skipping to the beat of the walls flexing their boundaries. Huh, he didn't expect lag to be an issue screwing up the game, but it made sense. In such a high-intensity driving game that encouraged Choko and the gamers to drive through obstacles for maximum profit, one moment of slowness could trip the car and stick them inside a wall.

"Choko, the lag's killing the game!"

"I know, I can feel the car fighting with the game's engine!" Choko shifted gears and drove off the road to get to the park, brown eyes narrowed with manic concentration. "We gotta smooth out the flow, otherwise we're going to get stuck ourselves and run out the timer."

"I can fix that!" Once the client jumped out of the car Honey started fiddling with her Action Replay, casting Choko an aside glance. "Technically, if we stop now we can say we won the game."

"And get an F grade?" Choko giggled, and Skrillex wondered how someone so adorable could made his adrenaline run. "Oh Honey-chan, we're better than that. Much better."

Honey paused, then shrugged, her fingers raising golden static. "Drive to your heart's content. I'll keep the lag from sucking us out of the road."

Choko squealed then raced backwards through pedestrians into another customer; once again copyrights were nothing in the face of SEGA. "Sonny-kun, do you have a map? I need the fastest way to KFC and the arrow's not giving me a good reading..."

Skrillex opened his laptop and accessed the code of Crazy Taxi, finding the tracks. "Ok...to KFC...ok, just loop past the 10 and keep going right. The left is a sinkhole of pin turns and we don't have time for that."

"On it!" While Choko managed to drive on only half her wheels to make the correct turn, Skrillex pondered the Californian dialect. Joel would've said that Choko should go past I-10, dropping the "the" and adding back the "I". But that just sounded hella retarded...

"It's cuz you're from both Northern and Southern California and he's Canadian and Canadians are weird." Honey nodded sagely from her seat, and Skrillex conceded that Honey had her intelligent moments. Only sometimes. "I didn't know you could sing so nicely."

"My programmer was really into making me just like the real Skrillex guy." Skrillex head banged as Choko drove up a mountainside to get to church as a few cars glitched in the air, singing along to the radio. "What about you Honey, what's in your programming?"

"Well, I was based off of this Fighting Vipers character named Honey. SEGA thought it would've been cool to add me into Sonic the Fighters, seeing how my game's engine is pretty much a copy of Fighting Vipers, but AI never really made it in there."

"Ah, bummer." Choko drove further up the mountain to get back onto a road and asked for his map. She looked at it then nodded and drove through incoming traffic again. "The important part is that you're here and not in that bus." Said bus was in the throes of super lag, tearing itself apart as the game engine slowed down and caused it to lose control of its determined path and go crazy into a wall.

"It's the little things...hey Choko, where are we going?"

"Shortcut!" Choko drove off the helipad station and onto the freeway, rocking out to the song that was on. Huh, Skrillex didn't peg the little J-POP fan to like harder punk; it made his heart warm to know that even little candy brats could appreciate 90s music.

"Choko."

Their car slammed through a moving truck and Skrillex forced the truck to glitch out with his Action Replay.

"What are you doing."

Their client tipped them heartily for sliding in between three oil tankers without crashing and dying.

"Choko."

The pint sized driver grinned and sped up.

"STAPH."

The Codetaxi did a flying spin off the road, Honey screaming about Chaos and super modes and crazy little girls. Skrillex didn't scream but cheered as they landed and sped off in the opposite direction, crashing through more unfortunate fruit stands to get to the baseball stadium.

"Honey, it's best not to question the driver..."

"Sonny, I just healed my broken leg. I do NOT want to be put back in Dr. Mario's office cuz Choko drives like a crack head!"

Skrillex turned up the volume. Really, they had over two grand in the bank and 74 seconds on the clock. They were doing just fine.

Skrillex hated lag. He hated, hated, hated lag.

In his game it turned his songs into a foking mess with note detection going ni ni and any combos going straight out the window. In Honey's game it froze up the characters and let the CPU get cheap shots. In Choko's game it turned Story Mode into an ordeal of rubber banding bosses beating out the avatar just because their wheels decided to get stuck in the ground.

In Crazy Taxi, it made cars glitch into each other as their paths crossed and weren't updated.

Choko grinded the wall next to the R. B. station as Honey punched cars out of their trunk, the client glitching and tipping them every half second. That part Skrillex was ok with—money's money, no matter how it's earned—but by the power of Havok Physics, how the heck were these cars getting stuck in their undercarriage?

They only earned a Normal payout due to being three seconds over Speedy, but Choko took it in stride and drove through a wall to get to a new client. Skrillex threw up his hands; now Choko was asking for it. "Babychild, you need to drive with respect to the—"

"I don't care!" She drove under the scenery and gunned the engine, everyone screaming as they glitched through the game. "The engine's lagging, the boundaries are shifting because the game's too busy path finding that it's forgetting to cycle through the scenery, and I'm tired of getting beaten off the roads because the AI wants to go all Magic School Bus on me! I'm driving and I say we're making up new gameplay, so you just keep the soundtrack moving, ok?"

Skrillex sank back in his seat and whistled as they made it to their stop with time to spare. "You're the racer, you're the boss."

Choko giggled. "Why thank you, Sony-kun. Now let's get some more money~!"

Honey laughed loudly, shaking her head. "Isn't she adorable?"

"Sweeter than Nutella—speaking of which, did you know that the first ingredient's sugar?"

"No way, I thought it was hazelnuts!"

"Nope, first sugar then palm oil then hazelnuts and cocoa. I feel lied to, but it's freaking delicious..."

Choko drove down a steep incline, avoiding the curving roads for a direct path of madness. Honey, keeping one hand on the dashboard to ensure that the car, didn't lag, turned back to talk to their client. "So how is your day going, sir?"

"Let's move it!"

"Well, that's nice."

Choko plowed through a sidewalk full of people, their screams making Skrillex and Honey giggle as their client told Choko to watch the road. As if his pre-recorded phrases had any idea of the majesty of Choko's insane driving.

Honey settled into the seat as they made a quick stop at the mall and sped off into another customer. "I bet you three pennies that Choko will breach the $30,000 mark before we finally time out."

Skrillex shook his head. "At the rate she's going, make it $50,000."

Choko's POV

As she pulled into the Sky Bank, Choko gave herself a little fist pump.

She was a queen of the race track, anyone who had played Sugar Rush new that. As the penultimate boss and the only Japanese character, she was the developer's little way of bringing some kick ass East Asian style into the foreign arcade scene. She was quick and dirty and covered in chocolate: she was Choko Pockystix, the best darn racer Crazy Taxi will ever get to see.

Ok, maybe that was a little arrogant of her. But she didn't even need the map now, she knew the track by feel, by the shortcuts and the holes in the wall boundary. Picking up people glitching under the ocean? No problem, happens all the time. Need to transverse three kilometers in ten seconds because the timer lagged out? She could get there in five.

She shifted gears and drove through the bank, Honey keeping the Codetaxi from glitching out and getting stuck on a wall. Sure, she was kinda sorta technically cheating, but it was a crazy world they drove in; she had to keep that meter running and the money flowing, a never ending bakery of madness and mania.

Choko picked up a redheaded woman and sped onto the highway, smirking as the woman tipped her handsomely for drifting through five lagging cars. This game was fun when it was broken, the laws of socialization and rationality and physics able to bend to her whim. She wondered if Sugar Rush could be made to act like this after hours. Vanellope-heika admitted once that her battle against the evil virus was kinda fun in hindsight, in a morbid way.

Quickly drifting around a gridlock of frozen cars, she launched herself into the air and up over the track, sliding across the boundary like it was melted chocolate. Skrillex-kun and Honey-chan were talking about the pros and cons of Nutella frosting next to her, and it was a valid argument. Perhaps she could experiment with her flavors...

Yet another oil tanker got stuck her her back wheels and Choko sighed. How was she supposed to beat the game if the game wouldn't let her drive? Stupid AI, trying to path find its way through the only working avatar...

She dropped off her last customer by the starting point of the game and baked as the final three seconds—really, she could get so much done but Honey-chan was looking a little sick—clocked out. They were transported to the results screen, her cheerful smile in the place of the female driver's picture.

"I made $61,098.54! 159 customers, Crazy class, 1st ranking... 素晴らしい (Subarashii)!"

Skrillex-kun and Honey-chan were laughing really hard; must be the excitement of completely wrecking the scoreboard for future generations of gamers to come. They shall all come to fear her name... "Let's put in our initials! C...H...S, by age of course."

Honey-chan ruffled her hair—minding the pocky stick pin of course, they were rather delicate—and turned towards the Crazy Taxi avatars, who were cheering wildly. "Now that's settled, where's the code well of the game? We gotta unclutter your game engine's code if you want any chance of beating Choko's score."

"I doubt anyone's coming anywhere close to that!"

Choko blushed. They were too sweet.

Vanellope's POV

Vanellope spread the Nutella on her cinnamon swirl bread, Nilla taking notes at her side. Skrillex was sagely correcting the Nutella rationing of her fellow racers; Bubblebetty put on too much and Adorabeezle too little. The entire cast of Sugar Rush was at this info-gathering tea part, Honey opening the tightest of Nutella jars.

"My Lady, it appears as if Rancis Fluggerbutter has attempted to fix flugger oil with Nutella." Nilla pushed up the licorice glasses on her nose. "We may have to take him to the infirmary for sugar overdosing treatment."

"See to it that he's good to go for tomorrow's race. He's been planning to get into the Racer Roster all week and missing out tomorrow will make him throw a little diaper baby tantrum."

"Of course." Vanellope liked Nilla, she was very dependable in a world of sugar rushing brats. Granted, Vanellope was the Queen of sugar rushing brats, but that gave her a little leeway to poke fun at others.

She took a bite out of her bread and sweet mother of monkey milk that was good. "Sonny, where did you learn about this?"

Skrillex nodded for Marzipanne to add a bit more to her cookie, before shaking his head. "Lemme tell you Queen Van, the guys back at DJ Hero 2 are a bunch of closet sugar addicts. They would go crazy if they ever came here..."

Vanellope shared a glance with King Candy and giggled, rubbing her hands together. It wasn't fair just to pick on Skrillex and Honey and Ralph, surely she should spread the wealth with the rest of the arcade.

"WHAT IS THIS MYSTICAL WONDERLAND?"

"Ok Suri, you've never been to Sugar Rush before, just let the sugar soak in a bit—"

"DUDE IS THAT A RIVER OF TAFFY?!"

"Fro, don't do it, you'll regret it—"

"I MUST BECOME ONE WITH THE COLA MOUNTAIN."

"Joel, step away from the mountain, it'll burn—"

"THERE'S A FOUNTAIN OF PIXIE STICKS!"

"Pixie, remember your New Year's resolution—"

"OHJESUSTHEFLOOR!"

"...Queen Van, can I get a un-stickifier or something? Half the DJs fell into that molten pit of melted lollipop goo, and they're unhappy about that."

素晴らしい (Subarashii)!: awesome!

Havok Physics designed the physics engine of DJ Hero 2. Suri/DJ Surikizu, Fro/Fro Train, Joel/deadmau5, and Pixie/Pixie Dust are all characters from DJ Hero 2, and let's face it, how would you react if you went into Sugar Rush?

Let's recap about Crazy Taxi: it's a game where the only thing keeping you from driving through the scenery to get to your destinations on time are the wall boundaries. Because that game is so erratic—it encourages you to be as violent and manic as possible in your driving—its engine would have a hella hard time keeping both the avatar taxi cab and the computer AI cars on the road and functioning. As the day goes on, more and more code gets cluttered in the engine as little glitches and bugs take their toll. Usually, once the arcade closes the engine has time to go through its uncluttering cycle and keep itself running without lag. But something happened during gameplay, and the engine didn't go through its cycle. Cue ultra lag launching cars and getting people stuck in vibrating walls; this happened to me once and I abused the glitch like Choko did.

Her high score is based off of the high score in the Gameworks (ironically enough, owned by SEGA) by my house. Seriously, it must've taken that gamer an hour to rack up so much cash.

Nutella is delicious but so bad for you. Use it sparingly.

Skrillex pointed out interesting differences between California English and the rest of the world English. In SoCal, we call the Interstate 10 freeway "the 10". In NorCal, they call it "10". Everyone else calls it "I-10/Interstate 10". That's just a weird thing I've noticed going between states. Also, NorCal people say hella; in real life Skrillex lived in both parts of California, and says hella As a SoCal girl, that's weird XD

I hope you liked this chapter, and feel free to tell me how I did!