Greeting, my faithful readers!

Now that the Codebusters got their minds opened and expanded last chapter (say what you will about my story universe, but I love long-lasting continuity ramifications), I'm bringing them back down to the arcade earth with one of the most famous glitches of all time.

Disclaimer: I don't own Sugar Rush because I'm not Disney, I don't own Sonic the Fighters because I'm not SEGA, I don't own DJ Hero 2 because I'm not Activision, and I CERTAINLY don't own VS. Super Mario Bros, because I'm not Nintendo. A girl can dream, though...

Honey's POV

Honey giggled as she and Sonic lazed about in her tiny house, talking about everything and nothing as he played with her hair. She was technically on call for the Codebusters, but after Skrillex assumed partial godhood and Choko became a pig farmer/code transplantation expert, Honey was allowing herself to just relax and plot world domination with her best friend. Speaking of which, "So...wanna play truth or dare?"

Before he could respond—judging from the healthy blush on his cheeks things were about to get interesting—Amy started pounding on her door. "Honey! Your code friends are here!"

Darn, she really wanted Sonic's opinion on M. Sonic's scandalous girlfriend. "Duty calls, blue boy wonder. I'll be back before the arcade opens."

After she changed into her uniform he walked her out to the port instead, and she was definitely spoiled by the company of good men. Skrillex could learn a thing about properly respecting her awesomeness. Waving bye to her best friend, she skipped over to her other best friends. "Back on the job so soon after contacting another world, huh?"

"I think it's good to keep up the work ethic; we don't want our skills getting soggy like overly milk-soaked cookies, now do we?" Choko's favorite pig was in the front seat so Honey stifled her laughter into the upholstery of the back row. "Besides, I don't think it's a good idea to keep Mario-san waiting."

Skrillex whistled lowly, fingers racing across his laptop. "Mario's a real legend, I wonder what went wrong in his game..."

"Probably a turtle koopa thing got lodged in the cloning matrix or something." Honey stretched, not really accidentally knocking his glasses askew. "Got your super powers under control, Dr. Manhattan?"

"If I feel the urge to reorganize someone's code, I'll be sure to start with you first."

"Glad to know, Sir Too-Hipster-For-Hipsters. Put on enough mascara today?"

"I do not wear mascara!"

"You're looking rather raccoon eyed today—is that glitter?"

Thus began a grand and record-setting slap fight down the cord, Choko swerving to knock them against the door handles. Her pig was making little pig noises and Honey lost it, collapsing in a fit of giggles and bringing the rest of her fellow code masters with her. "What is—hah!—what's the pig for, china doll?"

Choko parked the car and fixed them with a very grave stare. "Mr. Waddles is equipped with cherry liquorice laser cannons; if anyone so much as breathes funny on my cart, they will be eliminated."

By the time the cast of Vs. Super Mario Bros showed up, Honey and Skrillex were in fetal positions on the ground, trembling from the aftermath of a throughout laugh-lashing. "Mama mia!"

"Mr...Mr. Mario!" Skrillex pulled himself up, and Honey gave him credit for getting his breath under control. "It's an honor to meet you; what seems to be the problem?"

"It-sa my brother, Luigi! He's been a-trapped all day, and we canna a-find him."

Princess Toadstool—that was her name, right? Damn 80's games and their subsequent character updates—nodded, wringing her hands. "Bowser last saw him practicing underground, but that was before the arcade opened, and ever since then he's just been missing."

Choko nodded and jumped out of her car. "If you could take us to his last reported location, that would help, Toadstool-hime."

Mario jumped into the air. "Then let-sa go!" Honey trailed behind them, fighting down the urge to grin. Sure, he was Nintendo's golden boy and she was still getting used to the post-Console Wars political scene, but he was just so cool! She and Skrillex shared a grin as Choko began digging for answers on the dessert-adaptable qualities of mushrooms. Maybe today they wouldn't face certain death at the hands of cool and unusual glitches.

Honey peered into the pipe leading to the end of World 1-2, looking for any sign of Mario's wayward brother. "Are you sure he got lost in here?"

Bowser roared in the affirmative, and Honey translated for her friends. "He said that had he gone through the pipe as usual, the game would have registered his presence in the data logs. As it is now, approx. 5 minutes before the arcade opened he fell off the grid somewhere in this room."

"...and you got all that from one roar?" Skrillex coughed discreetly into his palm, but Honey and Bowser only laughed.

"Talking character problems, dearest. Did you find anything Choko?"

Choko was staring at the layer of bedrock below the bricks of the main floor. "Is there anything behind that pipe, Mario-san?"

"Just the warp-a pipes. He would-a appeared somewhere else if he-a taken them."

"Hmm..." Choko bit down on a pocky stick. "How do you get to the warp room?"

"Through the ceiling." Princess Toadstool pointed at the moving platforms descending from darkness. "It's the only way I know of to get in there."

"Uh huh..." Choko hopped across the platforms and faced them. "I don't buy it." Quickly running back, her raised foot hit the corner of the bricks and she pulled back. She landed on the brick layer below and began to glide through the ground towards the back of the pipe. "What happens if I jump into the first pipe before the rest of the warp zone ends?"

"I..." Mario watched as Skrillex and Honey did the same move, wringing his hat. "I have-a no idea where the game will a-put ya."

"Only one way to find out!" Honey helped the vertically challenged Choko and Skrillex jump into the pipe before the room finished loading. "And we are entering...World -1."

"Minus World?" Skrillex suddenly flickered, and his eyes grew wide. "Oh crap—can everyone swim?"

"Swim? Why do we need to—"

Choko's voice cut off as they materialized under water. No, Honey couldn't swim very well; she didn't really have the chance to learn in the sixteen years she spent trapped in a dark void. Swimming upwards, she banged against the water's surface but no dice. This was so dumb, why didn't they bring Mario, she was going to drown and Sonic was probably going to go Turbo and kill this game in her honor and...

And she didn't need to breath. Honey blinked as Skrillex and Honey floated under her in shock. Taking a risk, she inhaled the strangely sweet water and called out, "Since when does water not act like water?"

"Water's not water when it's made in 1986." Choko doggie paddled up and over a coral reef strip, leaking bubbles but otherwise perfectly fine. "Why bother with super drowning skills when the name of the game is to get through the level as quickly as possible?"

"In the defense of drowning, Labyrinth Zone would like to have a word with you." Skrillex was actually not-retarded in the water, as opposed to Honey's flailing and Choko's tiny arm movements. "But this is a good thing: now we don't have to change the code so we can last long enough to find Luigi."

"Where is the green sheep of the Nintendo family anyway?" Honey clung to Skrillex's hair, trying to orient herself. Spending her entire life talking to a hydrophobic person didn't help with the 'holy Chaos I am now a mermaid' factor of this lovely trip.

After punching a squid in the face when it tried to eat Choko, the three cautiously swam through the periwinkle water, Choko giving into the urge to hoard coins. The music was rather relaxing, and the stupid fishy enemies were easily punched into oblivion, and Honey admitted that as far as weird glitch levels went, this one was rather nice.

Luigi wasn't in this Minus World, and the pipe leading out approached. "Ok guys, he must be in there. Probably in yet another castle, but who am I to judge."

They exited, waiting to be loaded out of the water...and teleported back to the beginning of the level.

Skrillex groaned about infinite loops, Choko flipped upside down and complained about water in her ears, and Honey punched a squid in the face. Screw this Nintendo game, this SEGA girl wanted out!

Skrillex's POV

Skrillex floated by the pipe, trying to figure out how to get out. He sent in Honey solo to see what would happen, but nothing changed, and he was getting sick of the dreamy waltz grating against his dubstep-orientated ears. "I'm going to try to convince the game to let us out, ok? Just keep looking for Luigi."

"Dude, we've been through this level five times." Honey kicked dully at a coral plume. "I think the game ate him."

That was a possibility Skrillex didn't want to consider, because Joel read way too much Lovecraft between songs. "Choko, you saw the weird brick glitch that got us here. Any idea how he could've glitched out?"

Choko shrugged, but eyed the tiny space above the pipe. "Luigi-san is not the most...graceful of men, correct?"

"So it goes." Skrillex moved into the lotus position, relaxing into the rhythm of the game's coding.

"So if he were to freak out over being stuck in an infinite loop with a countdown timer—" Hah, the countdown timer was cute. Luckily Princess Toadstool got rid of that nonsense once they showed up. "—would it be a stretch to say he glitched himself into the wall?"

"Told you the game ate him."

Skrillex let Honey and Choko figure out how the wall managed to eat Luigi, and closed his eyes. Breathing and talking through the water was weird as fok for an air-breather, but this way he literally taste the code. Sinking deeper into the collective world of this glitched out level, he tapped into the game engine. 'Ok, let's see what's going on here. /search World -1 data about common game physics i.e. death regeneration power ups.'

...Interesting. They were in World 36-1 without the data for '36', which explained the lack of number in Minus World. What else was missing...ah, they were missing the data that warps the characters out of the underworld to the over world in World 1-2. Reaching out, he plucked a flag from the internal level editing data and placed it in Minus World. 'What else, what else... /search Player 2 avatar aka Luigi.'

Luigi was stuck in the wall. Reminding himself never to let Joel share his books with Honey, he tried resetting Luigi's data. His code burned under his mental hand and Skrillex frowned. 'Stuck, are we? Well, lucky you has two Codebusters ready to play save the princess.' He opened the code in his Action Replay and searched for the one Choko and Honey needed. 'I need me a phasing code, let them reach in and grab this bastard...that'll work.' Plucking it out, he applied it to Luigi's immediate block. Choko would be able to identify him easily now, and now all they needed to do was beat -1 and advance to -2. 'Alright then, that it for now. Oh, and /set coin amount rosebud !;!;!;!.'

Returning from the game matrix, he heard Honey yelling at Luigi and Choko squealing with delight. Never say he didn't take care of his friends.

"Ok team, we gotta go to Minus World.2 and get the heck out of here." Everyone grunted with agreement as his statement; Honey was busy trying to coax Luigi out of the mess he got in. "He's not phasing through?"

"Nope, the useless baby's too afraid to curl out of the weird locking glitch he's in." Huffing, Honey undid her pigtails. "I'm gonna tie him to me and try to glitch out; if we time it right we'll all get through the flag before the wall eats us."

"Good idea; carry on." Skrillex watched Choko collect all the coins, smiling to himself. "Get ready kid, we're moving on from this loop."

"Do we get to breathe air again? Not that I mind this too much, but I prefer to drink my tea, not inhale it."

The block Honey phased through began to shift and Skrillex tapped the flag pole. Triggering the end level program, they were warped into World -2, landing in yet another underwater level. Honey appeared to their left with her hand in the wall, her expression livid. "The wall ate my hair!"

It was true; her normally long hair was cut off into a short bob. Choko gasped then patted her shoulder, and Skrillex got the uneasy feeling that this wasn't just feminine distress. "Do you need anything, Honey-chan?"

"Just to get through this chaos." Honey jerked on her arm and shook her head. "I got a hold of Luigi but he's not giving."

Skrillex was tempted to break in and fix that mess, but then the pixels in Honey's hair shifted and he refrained; she was still glitchy despite fixing her code, and the last thing he needed was to break his friend in half in a hostile environment. "Let's just go."

There was little of interest in World -2. It looked like a castle dungeon level—which made sense; technically they were in World 3-4—set underwater, and was completely deserted. Choko blew up the bridge to 'kill' the Bowser data, and they advanced to the congratulatory screen. Honey glitched, Choko looked around for a princess, and Skrillex sighed with relief as they fell into Minus World.3; they could finally breathe air.

"Huh, this looks like the last le—AH FOK!"

Swarms of super fast goombas and koopa troopas and that stupid foking latiku on his stupid foking cloud showed up to try and murder them. Honey was defenseless as she was half stuck in a wall, so Skrillex and Choko formed a line of defense. "Save the princess, Choko!"

"Banzai!" Choko kicked a koopa in the face, scuttling the shell into a group of goombas. Skrillex held his laptop over Honey's head as spiny shells rained from the sky, and a goomba bit his butt. Shrieking, he punted it into oblivion and pulled on Honey's arm. "Charge the exit!"

With Choko acting as a very cute, sugar-powered lawn mower, the Codebusters made their way through the level. Fragments of enemies exploded everywhere as coins rained from the heavens, and Skrillex wondered what he did to deserve this. "Spiny shell at four o'clock!" Choko jumped off his shoulders to tackle the latiku, the smarmy bastard, and the resulting impact knocked a wave of goombas to their doom.

Honey glitched harder in his arms with every enemy appearing, and Skrillex needed to disconnect her and Luigi from the game's inner coding. "Choko, I'm, playing god again. Can you be a dear and fight off the Golden Horde?"

"You got it, Sonny-kun!" Really, he needed to bring her to DJ Hero 2; everyone would love her sweetness and willingness to commit gross enemy genocide. Exhaling, he dove back down into the code.

'Oh Luigi.' Luigi's code was spazzing all over the place, and he could heard the poor baby yelling for someone to save him from the evil ghosts. Ghosts? Honey's code splattered against an enemy cloning algorithm, and suddenly their opposition was a lot stronger. 'Nope, nope I'm not having that. /reset HoneytheCat and Player 2 avatar aka Luigi.'

Luigi was freed from the code but Honey sank in deeper, coming apart at the pixels. 'Oh, so you wanna play, Mr. Lovecraft Engine. Execute /killnpc all, /return HoneytheCat and Player 2 avatar aka Luigi to location World 36-3.'

Honey's code still was scattered across the game, but she and Luigi returned to Choko's side. Blinking out of Data-mode, he yelled, "Take Luigi to the end and beat the level! I need to fix Honey!"

While Choko whipped Luigi into shape, Skrillex analyzed Honey. The filler code holding her fragmented avatar together had been sheared out by the glitch, and now she was frozen, wall-eyed and smiling. Suppressing a shudder, he cracked his knuckles and blinked back in. 'Back to this. /locate ChokoPockystix.'

She was about to enter World -4, and Skrillex felt a swelling sense of foreboding. Checking the corrupted level data for Minus World.4, he wanted to scream. 'She's going to crash the game! Honey's code will be wiped out in the reset!' Thinking quickly, he picked up his Action Replay. 'Ok, I have 3 seconds. But 3 seconds isn't three seconds when code moves at the speed of light.'

Choko's POV

Choko blinked as Luigi-san drop kicked a latiku with his head. She was expecting an eccentric weakling with more screams than substance. And while he did shriek like Skrillex-kun at his worst, and drop kicked with his head, he was remarkably less lame than she pegged him for.

Waiting to be loaded into World -4, she hoped that Honey was ok. She was there when Honey was still a broken statue; she helped bring her to life! But she had faith in Skrillex-kun, and was sure that the next level would bring better fortune.

They waited in darkness for the level to load, and...nothing. There was a blank void and Choko had trouble breathing because dip her dots, the game had crashed! Screaming along with Luigi-san, they ran around like headless candy corn chickens waiting for the slaughter. "Sonny-kun! Get us out of here!"

She shouldn't have expected him to respond, he was probably saving Honey-chan's life. Not to mention that he probably wasn't omniscient. Hyperventilating, Choko bit down on her Action Replay. "Luigi-san! How do we get back to the main menu?"

"I don't a-know!" He tugged on his mustache. "We need to die to get-a back during normal game-a-play, but we have crashed the game-a! Mama mia, big bro is gonna kill me!"

Choko grabbed his mustache. "If he's going to kill you, we need to get out of here first!"

"...oh, I guess we can-a stay here..."

"Do not despair, Luigi-san!" She unhooked her cartridge, the soft blue glow illuminating the fire in her chocolate brown eyes. "There's always a way out, no matter the reason or location." Looking over the codes, Choko sat down on the bottom of the void. "Let's see...do you know anything about your game's debug mode?"

"No."

"Forcing the watchdog?"

"No."

"Doing anything that will trigger a game over?"

"A-no." He slouched with a sigh. "I bet big bro would-a know how to do all that-a stuff."

Choko stood up. "Don't say that! I am but one of sixteen racers, but we are all as important as even Vanellope-hime. You're more than just a Player 2 palette switch, you know." She smiled as his expression. "Come on, I've never met anyone else who could head-butt an enemy to death. You're fast, you jump very far, and you have a lovely mustache. You're as important as Mario, you just need to know that for yourself."

Something changed in the code of Luigi, and he jumped in the air. "I may not be as strong as Mario, or as popular or-a well respected or anything like that...but I am-a good at being bad. And that's what game-a overs are all about!"

"You got this!" Somehow Luigi managed to slip on nothing and break his neck, triggering a death in an empty stage. The darkness faltered and glitched before they fell into the space by the main hub. Luigi gasped then ran around cheering, Choko showering him with coins. Usually she showered gold-foil chocolate coins on friends who needed a boost, but there were as shiny as any.

"...and that's all I know."

Princess Toadstool-hime floated next to her in the code well, trying to locate Skrillex-kun's influence in the code matrix. Mario-san and Bowser-san were upstairs congratulating Luigi-san for ending his horribly lame streak, and Choko hoped that her friends were also safe. "Do you see anything unusual, Toadstool-hime?"

"There is a lot of code floating freely against the others..." Princess Toadstool-hime held up a delicate strand. "I believe this is code for hair."

"Honey-chan!" Choko collected the code and searched for more fibers. There! She floated towards a trail of scattered code, absorbing it back into her Action Replay. The trail ended by the level data fr World 1-2, where this whole mess began. "We must hurry, Toadstool-hime! If Honey wakes up without her hair..."

Both of them shuddered; the sudden loss of long hair was worse than death for some avatars. Racing through the halls as fast as the princess's heels could carry her, they jumped back down through the pipe to see a strange sight.

Three Honey-chans were laid around Skrillex; one normal, one blonde haired and pink, and the other black and white. Holes in each of them were being nicely filled in by Skrillex-kun, who seemed very smug considering that he didn't have any clothes on. "Oh hi Choko, Princess. Just fixing my friend, no big deal."

Choko nodded dumbly as she held up her cartridge. "I have data for her hair."

"Thanks, I was wondering where it went." Skrillex-kun frowned. "I think we should wait to put that back in; now she's mixed up with my clothes and my right eye, and I'd like to sort that mess out before putting too much back in."

"Perfectly understandable." Now Choko needed to giggle because one of his eyes was facing towards the wall, just like Mr. Waddles and Miss Pinky and all her pigs back home. Princess Toadstool-hime must've had the same idea, because then both of them were trying not to self destruct.

"Huh, what's so—oh come on ladies, it's not that bad! Haven't you ever seen a naked wall-eyed DJ before? They're all over the place, just ask Joel!"

Vanellope's POV

Too many people were crowded in the waiting room outside the Royal Infirmary/Bakery, but Vanellope didn't have the heart to throw them out. If Ralph got half his code gutted through a foreign code web, she'd want to crowd up in people's faces too.

The tinier Sonic was in the process of eating his hand, the bigger Sonic and Chun-Li—and wasn't that was a dangerous mix of speed and power and odd couple heights. Hammer-man was a bad influence on people—making sure he didn't bite off too much. Amy was arguing with Tails over the last cookie on the display, a bunch of shady looking villains were canoodling in a corner, and Knuckles was being lectured by Ralph because breaking every sugar-stained glass window in a senseless rage was both dangerous and very disrespectful.

Glad that somebody was beating manners into that thick skulled nimrod, Vanellope tapped on the operating door. "Can I get somebody for a press release? I'm pretty sure the sight of C. Sonic crying will cause everyone in the arcade to spiral into a soul-destroying depression."

Dr. Mario stepped out, as grave as a grape gumball. Everyone froze, not daring to breathe. "I...I'm-a not sure how to say this..."

"WHERE THE FLYING MOTHER—" such language!"—CHAOS IS MY HAIR?! I THOUGHT YOU FIXED THAT LAST YEAR!"

Baby Sonic burst into giggles as Honey stalked into view, perfectly patched up and radiant from a dip in a rejuvenating honey pool. Skrillex and Choko followed her, rolling their eyes as Honey raved about this was a disgrace, her model clearly called for pigtails and here she was with a mop. And waiting the rest of the week for her code to settle was apparently a crop of baloney, because she wasn't a fragile rice paper doll who needed to be babied. Vanellope approved of the sentiment—it took forever for Ralph to stop freaking out over her tele-glitch before her game got reset—and handed Dr. Mario a thick wad of credits for the bakery. The cotton candy heavens knew that he needed it.

Honey was ranting and raving to C. Sonic, who simply shrugged and twitched his nose. Immediately she calmed down, fluffing her black liquorice colored locks. "Oh, you think it's pretty?"

He nodded and she glomped him, and had she been a Sugar Rush native Vanellope would've bet sugar sparkles would've fallen around them. Snorting, she climbed on Ralph's shoulder. "Hey Stinkbrain, can you do me a huge favor?"

"What do you want, Queen Boogerfarmer?"

Honey was pulling C. Sonic and the rest of her crowd out of the room, babbling about how he sould've said something about her hair three minutes ago. "If I ever act like the heroine of a bad dating sim, kindly punch me into Diet Cola Mountain."

"Dude, what happened to your eye? It's following me all weird-like."

"And why are you wearing clothes made out of...is this candy?"

"Unless someone hands me a Red Bull in the next five seconds, nobody's hearing nothing."

Minus World! Easily one of the most famous pure glitch levels out there, Minus World occurs when you enter either the far left or right pipe in the Vs/Super Mario Bros warp zone before the entire screen loads. Normally it's an endless loop, but level editors reveal more freaky glitch locations; on the American versions World -4 is always a dead end, but on the Famicon you can actually "beat" the game.

Vs. Super Mario Bros. Is an arcade version of the NES game. Normally, a Mario in an arcade is from the much more mainstream Mario Bros., but I wanted more from this chapter, and let's face it: if Litwak got Sega Sonic Arcade in America when it was only released in Japan, then he probably got this game too.

Idk if Princess Toadstool is named Peach in the first game, so I left that part out. In my mind, the Princess with strawberry-blonde hair is Toadstool, while the blonde is Peach.

Honey is still pretty broken, but they fixed her again. Skrillex's code commands are a mix of single player commands from Minecraft (makes sense, that where he learned them) and cheat codes (rosebud !;!;!;!;! for The Sims brings me way back). I looked up actual computer commands but they're exclusive to each platform and I figured the current codes work fine enough.

Sonic and one of the Chun-Lis are indeed dating. Felix started a revolution for short guys everywhere.

Just a heads up: the next chapter doesn't involve death and destruction, although it is canon. So you can skip it if you want, but I'd like to think you wouldn't.