Well hello there!

My incredibly boring spring break has prompted me to write another Action Replay chapter. Aren't you all so lucky that I'm lonely and stuck in my house with no car or friends, babysitting my little sister. As a result, today's chapter is very long...like much longer than I'm usually going to write these chapters. So please don't read the next one (I'll probably be back in college by then) and go ARGH WHY IS IT SO SHORT because in all fairness, this is the freaky long one XD

Disclaimer: I don't own Disney, SEGA, Activision or Konami. If I did my spring break would be way more fun.

Choko's POV

Choko yawned and stretched her arms up over her head, arching her back like a banana. Sugar Rush had a nice rush of gamers at the arcade today, people still marveling over the added content in their console. To be fair, they were probably the only Sugar Rush Speedway outside of Japan to have a story mode, so Choko figured someone had spread the news. Mr. Litwak-sama's arcade in general seemed to be getting a lot more business ever since Vanellope-heika altered the game data; it was nice to imagine that Sugar Rush did something sweet for the arcade.

Choko shook her head to clear her thoughts—it was best to stay humble about any feelings of popularity, lest you end up like Turbo—and turned towards Honey-chan and Skrillex-kun, who were bouncing on giant gumdrops. "Having fun?"

"You bet! For a racing game made around my time, you have really good graphics." Honey-chan did a double front flip off the gumdrop and landed in the Codemobile, tightening one of her pigtails. "Makes me jealous for having such rigid polygons."

"Oh, Mr. Litwak-sama's nephew came around...2010 I believe it was, and he gave our game a graphics update. I don't remember too well, seeing that technically I didn't exist until last year."

"Yeah, that was when he added me to DJ Hero 2." Skrillex-kun lightly hopped off the gumdrop and started brushing at the sugar crystals stuck to his back. "He comes around when he's not in college and keeps the games nice and shiny to compete with new stuff like Hero's Duty. I think Sonic the Fighters is due for an update..."

"Yay! Maybe now I won't look so jagged in-game." Honey-chan helped clear Skrillex-kun of the sugar crystals, and tapped her bottom lip. "Emi, one of the girls from DDR, was visiting Amy a few days ago and was talking about her game needing something updated, I forget."

"Speaking of which, that's where we're going today." Choko hopped into the kart and turned on the engine, waving to a passing Minty-chan. "From what I saw between races, it looked pretty bad—Mr. Litwak-sama put them out of order! But I heard him say that worst case scenario he'll just call down his nephew, so they're not in danger of being unplugged yet..."

"That's good; DDR consoles aren't doing so well and ever since Arcade Infinity went under a few years back, music-based games as a whole are declining." Skrillex-kun crossed his arms, relaxing back into the seat. "Good thing my console gets both my game's fans and all the old Beatmania fans, otherwise I'd be in a very bad place."

"Same here; I'd freak if I saw a Fighting Vipers anywhere to dilute my gamers." Honey-chan let her fingers dangle as they passed through the cord, playing with the static shifting her pixels. "I also heard that Gameland three cities over went out of business and half their games got picked up by a Dave & Busters across state."

"No way, they were doing so well!"

"Yeah, the Dr. Robot—I mean Eggman—from M. Sonic's game heard some baseball players talking about it. According to some high school kids, the owner decided to become a monk and sold off all his things, so now Litwak's Arcade is pretty much the last arcade around here. Good thing that Dave & Busters needed more Mario Karts, and some gamer's cousin wants to collect the Q*Bert game, but no one knows about what happened to the rest of the Gameland consoles..."

Choko was quiet as she crossed GCS towards DDR's port. She wasn't around to remember the gradual decline of video arcades, games being taken in by either big chains or collectors. In fact, between all the Asian-exclusive and unusual and out-of-production games she's been seeing, Litwak's Arcade was a safe haven for anything beyond a Street Fighter II. But surely the games at Gameland and Arcade Infinity felt safe before their games were unplugged—Arcade Infinity was the cornerstone of Southern California! Now they were scattered across the state to a Dave & Buster's or a Gameworks or a Chuck E. Cheese or...or a grocery store if they were lucky! Otherwise...Choko hoped that the gamer's cousin was serious.

Pulling up to the DDR transport, Choko clenched her fists. She had just started to live, she didn't want to get unplugged due to something so sad as money running dry. So next to keeping Sugar Rush nice and popular—screw being modest, lives were on the line!—she needed to keep the last DDR machine off Route 83 from being unplugged, bringing down her arcade, her home, and scattering the friends and life she had just gained. "You guys ready?"

"Yeah, I think I got all the sugar crystals.."

"Wait, you missed a spot."

"My face!"

Choko laughed and hopped into the train waiting at the station. No, she didn't want to be split up from these characters, even if they were mixed with extra nuts.

The second they walked in Skrillex-kun swore. That was never a good sign for anything.

Three seconds later a bunch of strobe lights around the club scene of DDR went wild, blinding them and making Choko's code frazzled.

Five seconds after that, the catchy J-Pop music playing glitched, and Choko swore she was back in a virus-ruined Sugar Rush, unable to speak or breathe...

The music cut off as Yuni-san came forward, her eyes wild with fear. "Oh crap, are you guys ok?"

Honey-chan pulled Choko to her feet, Skrillex-kun held up around her shoulders. "We've had worse, but nothing like that. What's happening in here?"

"It's a nightmare, nothing's playing right and the visuals are going crazy because the music controls the game, and that's just the simple stuff." Yuni-san threw her arms up, glaring at the disco ball swirling in the ceiling. "Every time a gamer would fail a stage because hello, we're having a meltdown here, someone would get trapped in that song! Like...the arrows and the stage track would suck us into the data and we were completely stuck. A total game over would sometimes send people back, but now half the cast is stuck in this...this..." Yuni-san sighed, anger lost. "This isn't some oni glitch the player brought on, this is something I've never seen before."

Skrillex-kun stood up and walked into the center of the dance club, where a DDR dance pad was mounted. He pulled out his headphones and slipped them on, listened for a bit to something Choko couldn't hear, before shaking his head. "There's five songs playing behind the mute you put on. I can imagine that this cluster"—oh look, an adult world—"of a music playing error made the stage layout falter in its rhythm-tracking program and start pulling in the stage data of the other songs, making a glitched out junk level that your friends are stuck in. Do you know which songs they might be in?"

Yuni-san nodded, pulling up the music list from a giant hologram screen. Choko was impressed with the interior of the game; there wasn't a need for a hologram screen in Sugar Rush but it would be nice to have one. "Eight songs, if you count Dark Rinon who is more of an event than a character. So..."

Honey-chan stepped up to the dance pad, the soft blue and pink lights illuminating her ID tag. "Eight songs to beat. I'm pretty fast with my footwork, and Choko's a little J-Pop fiend, and Sonny's the greatest rhythm tracker of all time. I think we can do it...if we stay on easy mode, of course."

Yuni-san summoned two more dance pads, and Choko hopped on, watching the music list narrow to the ones containing the trapped avatars. She recognized a few of the songs—Tobikomi had a good relationship with Konami—and grinned, waving to the small crowd of surviving dancers. How bad could it possibly be?

Round Robin POV

"Left! Left!"

"Choko, you gotta keep the quarter notes down, the step pattern is based off of 'You are a Star' on easy mode. Just ignore the triplets, those are garbage data."

"What the heck? Those arrows are going off the screen!"

"Ignore them, they're a bunch of liars...just what in the world is this song supposed to be anyway? I'm picking up a lot of garbage static..."

"Sounds like Kimono Princess...sort of...not really..."

"...wait, I don't have three legs! How do I hit those all at the same time?"

"Quick, lemme...just...there!"

"Honey-chan, get back on your pad! You're missing all your arrows!"

"I'm screwed over already, you're the one we gotta keep alive."

"Ok, the song layers are falling apart so I guess the stage is almost over. Honey, get back on your pad."

"!"

"Honey-chan, are you ok?"

"..ouch."

"Aaaand that's it, no more arrows!"

"I still have some...did we fail?"

"Looks like we got a...D. We got a D."

"何？(Nani)? That's horrible!"

"Doesn't matter, we saved Emi. Onto the next song!"

Honey bounced on the tips of her toes, resisting the urge to grab onto the bar behind her. It was just too distracting to even breathe, trying to pick out arrows to stomp on. By this point she was pretty sure her shoes were on fire, or at least melting. Wiping swear off her forehead, she doubled down on the eighth notes and thanked Amy for helping her with her footwork. A few arrows decided to make pinwheels across the screen, and how in the name of Chaos was she supposed to figure that out?

Deciding that it couldn't possibly hurt to see how her fellow Codebusters were doing, she glanced at Choko and nearly fell off the pad and died.

She was flopping on her pad like a fish, randomly hitting the pressure sensors.

Honey choked on her laughter as tears ran down her face, finally grabbing onto that stupid bar. Skrillex ended up saving their butts and Alice, but by Chaos, why didn't she have a camera on her?

"..."

"..."

"..."

"..."

"...you know, between the really girly singing and the messed up instrumentals and that Rena girl flailing in the background...it sounds like the Powerpuff Girls theme."

"...Sonny, I love that you know what that is."

Skrillex dropped to the floor in a hand plant, counting off the beat in his head. It was like a glitchy Guitar Hero, nothing he hadn't fixed before becoming a Codebuster. Just as long as he kept his head in the game and didn't dare look at Honey doing the can-can, he was going to pull through and save the guy currently being mauled to death by killer arrows in the background and everything was going to be fine and...

...

...just what the heck was playing underneath Sakura Sunset? Was that...that was Speed over Beethoven? But...but that song wasn't even a part of the game!

Something in his brain snapped and he crashed down on all fours in a rage, beating the pressure sensors like a pair of bongos. How dare this twisted bastard of a glitch play songs that it wasn't supposed to! What was the point of an exclusive soundtrack if at the drop of a hat, the program goes fok it, let's play some dummied out songs?! Did they not care, did they not think that some upset DDR Extreme fan would try and screw with the game and create crossed over music data that would crash the machine? Any DJ off the grid could tell you to never get rid of a fan favorite in favor of some crappy licensed song by Vanilla Ice!

Skrillex snapped out of it when the results screen gave them a B and freed Julio. Standing up and primly adjusting his undercut, he ignored the horrified starting of Choko and the raging hysteria hiding behind Honey's tight-lipped smile. Everyone had their moments and the guy was saved so he didn't get why it was a big deal, he was totally justified!

"And left! And right! And double step!"

"This sounds like a little like LOVE SHINE, Suri loves this song..."

"KEEP IT UP!"

"What the heck was that?"

"It seems as if we've saved the announcer."

"Well, that's a good—leg cramp!"

"Oh jeez oh jeez, Choko just try and—"

"Choko!"

"Can someone stretch out that leg and get her back on the pad? She's dying out here!"

"Ok Honey, we gotta pick up the slack or we'll fail the stage."

"These stupid electric arrow row things are making me so upset."

"You're telling me, there's too many—"

"OH NO, TOO BAD!"

"Wait, what is—"

"OUTSTANDING! KEEP IT UP! AMAZING!"

"That announcer is distracting me! Skrilly—"

"THE CROWD IS CHEERING!"

"No, they're fixing Choko! At least be factual when you're BREAKING MY CONCENTRATION, ok?"

"100 COMBO!"

"Who has a—"

"OH NO!"

"Yuni, turn him off!"

"We can't, not until the stage is finished and we save Bonnie!"

"200 COMBO!"

"...I hate you."

Choko held her arms out to keep her balance, holding her breath as a very difficult cluster of arrows came up on her side of the screen. Seriously, she had no idea what kind of person could dance nonstop without missing a single arrow. Maybe all those "perfect attack" gamers were androids, or mirror match people.

Nearly slipping to keep her dance meter out of the red, Choko looked down to see the chocolate sole of her shoe melt off and slide very sadly off the dance pad. Sniffling, she mourned for her beloved shoe, then steeled her reserve; she could save her precious shoe, but Gus-san needed her to keep dancing! Changing her malleable shoes into unrelenting peanut brittle geta, she shook a fist at the screen and stomped extra hard on the dance pad.

Later, when they had gained their inadequate ranking and saved Gus-san, she helped Emi-san wipe down the dance pad. It was rude to leave a mess, after all.

"...wait, I know this song!"

"Which one, the screeching one or the scratching one, or the—"

"Not those ones, the good one! It's Butterfly!"

"Oh, I love that song! I thought they took it out!"

"Nope, I guess it's in here, or at least enough of it was dummied out to be kept in the data."

"...I've been searching for a man~"

"Are you guys seriously doing this?"

"All across Japan~"

"I guess you are."

"Just to find my, find my samurai~"

"Wait, singing helps pick out which arrows match..."

"Someone who is strong~"

"And we have to save Baby-Lon..."

"But still a little shy~"

"...and where else are we going to have a reason to break out into song?"

"Yes I need, I need my samurai~"

"AI YAI YAI, I'M YOUR LITTLE BUTTERFLY! GREEN, BLACK AND BLUE, MAKE THE COLORS IN THE SKY~"

Honey smirked as her dance meter glowed in rainbow colors, her pigtails smacking against her back. Deciding to be cheeky, she pivoted around on a left step, flashing Skrillex a grin as he did a shuffling move to catch a handful of rogue arrows. Choko, feeling left out, dropped in a split kick, holding it as the freed dancers cheered them on. And that began the madness.

Honey held her arms out like a prima ballerina as she span and pivoted, even dancing backwards. Hair swirled around in ribbons, the red C on her back a blur as she worked the dance pad like a skate rink.

Skrillex was less flamboyant in his turns, but he was entirely fluid in his shuffling, feet barely leaving the floor unless he hit the deck to kick out. His glasses flew off his face but he caught them causally with a wrist flick, one with the music.

And Choko was something else entirely. Half disco dancer, half belly flopper, she utilized the quick movements of her short limbs to compensate for the large dance pad, resulting in half-cartwheels and arrows caught with the tip of her finger.

By the time they finished the stage, Yuni-san and the rest of the avatars were cheering wildly, the announcer cutting back in to gush in awe. Rinon broke out of the twisted stage as they were rewarded with an AAA score.

Choko stood up to catch her breath, before asking merrily, "So did we win?"

Skrillex's POV

In the darkness of the code well, it was usually difficult to pick out problems. Back when he was a lone ranger, Skrillex would spend days combing through DJ Hero 2 to try and find the subtle sparkling glitches that impacted his game's performance.

Not so much with DDR.

At the center of the game's code was a giant spitting mess of leaking data and twisted cables, making gut fill with unease. This was a bit more than he was expecting, even with the music abuse upstairs.

Grabbing onto Honey and Choko's wrists, he swam down into the fray and shoved character code boxes out of the way, sparing them from being corrupted by a free line. Honey quickly started pulling apart the crudest of tangles, Choko diving into the heart of the pink and blue matter. "Ok, make sure to be gentle with separating level data and stage programming. They are very interconnected with these kinds of games and too hard of a break will dummy out the content."

"You have experience with this?" Honey had to use her teeth to convince a glitching data connection that no, mixing two stage designs was a bad idea.

"Like Queen Van said at the beginning of our grand adventures, I'm the guy keeping Guitar Hero and DJ Hero 2 functioning. DDR may be from a different producer, but it's all the same kind of animal." Fok, he chipped his nail polish on a code box. He needed to ask that Sour Appleblossom kid where she got such pretty colors.

"...ok, I have this clump cleared. What about music data?"

"For now keep it where it is unless you really need to disconnect it. We need to match arrow spread layouts to the correct songs, otherwise we have Butterfly playing over Pluto the First's arrows."

"Seriously, screw that song! It's never ok to have the arrows pause randomly!"

"皆さん (Mina-san), I found the heart of the problem!"

Skrillex followed Choko's voice to find two code boxes fused together, glowing a malevolent yellow. Two innocent boxes holding the level loading engine and the music memory; separate they made this console of Dance Dance Revolution X2 incredible, but fused together due to years of little glitches adding onto frustrated gamers pounding on the dance deck..."Choko, leave that mess to me. Help Choko sort out which levels go with which songs after I separate this beast..."

He slid into the gap Choko left and plugged his Action Replay into the cancerous growth sticking out of the boxes. Many of the codes were useless for what he needed, but at the bottom of the list was his favorite tool of choice: the Jaws of Life, perfect for emergency code repair.

Grabbing onto the tool, he angled the cutter right above the glitching code boxes, and with a battle cry slammed it downwards. Code splashed and spattered around his face like burning oil as he tore away at the glitch, half-blinded by the angry colors bursting out of the broken code boxes. Turning away to spit out a mouthful of goopy static, he inhaled and dove in deeper, relentless in his pursuit for justice. This was for the avatars stuck in a jacked-up nightmare. This was for every DDR game going unplayed due to Konami saturating the market. This was for every arcade going under due to overhead costs overpowering the declining stream of arcade players. This was for Mr. Litwak's nephew, who gave him life and friends to enjoy it with.

And this...this was for half-adding songs and not letting the fans enjoy the music!

He broke through the glitch and an explosion of junk data blasted him into the lifeblood of DDR, held up by programming cords as the two code boxes reset themselves to their normal states. Choko and Honey were cheering, and he exhaled. That went better than expected.

Vanellope's POV

Vanellope watched Sour Apple showcase a large collection of nail polish to Skrillex, who was in turn offering some of his eyeliner back in his raccoon-eyed emo princess days. Vanellope had tagged Skrillex as a little pretty boy—he was way prettier than Ralph, and it didn't help that he was only a little bit taller than Felix—but she was impressed at how committed he was.

Then Taffyta showed up with her mascara bounty, and Rancis with his famous flugger oil, and Pollipop with her carbonated face cleansers, and suddenly every racer with a secret stash of pretty-making products came out of the candy cane wood work to set up shop in her castle's courtyard. Choko, after fixing her favorite shoes, dove into the fray with her hard biscuit pumice stones, and Vanellope laughed as Honey started haggling with Bubblebetty over her scented bubble bath.

King Candy came onto the balcony with her and sputtered about unsanctioned markets and permits and the need to regulate the trade of gold foil candy coins. Vanellope then asserted that as Queen of Sugar Rush she was establishing a local market every time someone wants to have one, as no one else would really object to that, and he patted her head and and agreed that it was a marvelous idea.

Smiling primly, she watched Marzipanne explain to the others how to properly use a quadruple wanded curling flat iron by using Skrillex and Lemonetta as her guinea pigs. She really loved being Queen of these psycho candy babies sometimes.

oni glitch: present in DDR Extreme, this was done deliberately by gamers to access dummied out oni/challenge levels for songs that did not have an oni/challenge difficulty level. As the DDR in Litwak's Arcade is DDR X2, I couldn't use this glitch.

何？ (Nani)?: What?

皆さん (Mina-san): everyone

And that's their adventure in DDR X2/Dance Dance Revolution X2 (I hope everyone knows what my acronyms are...)

As discussed in this chapter, a lot of arcades and arcade games are suffering, especially in the musical dance/rhythm genre, which is why Skrillex and Yuni are concerned about it. Honestly, in this day and age (as stated by Choko, they are now in 2013), arcade characters should be well aware of their situation, and eventual end in a Dave & Busters (going strong, best option), Gameworks (many places have gone out of business...), Chuck E Cheese (probably good, but undesirable with their customer base), grocery store (lowest of the low), or collector's home (cut off from their friends). Litwak's Arcade is a lot like the James Games by my old school: dependable customer base, imported games, and going strong after so many years. So to all the Mr. Litwaks out there, please don't go out of business; as much as I love the Disneyland arcade after WiR came out, it will probably go out of style and Disney will lock up their consoles again.

So onto DDR: in that game, you dance to the arrows laid out to the music. Simple enough...except the two are dependent on each other. Put one arrow layout on another song and you have a nightmare track where nothing syncs up. Now mix five songs and five stages together and play them at once...I get nervous thinking about it. This glitch was caused by little arrow trips and glitches adding up like a cancerous growth, unchecked by the game's normally functioning code-cleaning program. DDR machines also suffer a lot of percussion damage from kids stomping too hard and hitting the display monitors, making the glitch worse. Then when some kid, thinking that DDR X2 was DDR Extreme (2), got upset that some fan favorite songs like Butterfly were taken off and smacked around the machine, the glitch growth got bigger and bigger until it fused the music and level data together into a real mess of a glitch, sucking in dance avatars and probably attacking them with deceptively painful arrows that were let loose by the glitch.

The Round Robin POV involving dialogue-only can be interpreted as anyone's POV, even Yuni's. Otherwise it's more obvious who's in control.

Why yes, I love Butterfly and it's my favorite DDR dance track. Why do you ask.

I hope that you enjoyed this chapter, and please tell me how I did! :D