Disclaimer: I don't own Jack or his brother whose name starts with 'S' and ends with 'T'.

Later that day, Snake was in a secret government base located somewhere underneath Washington (If you ever had the misfortune of discovering the location of the base, the suits would send black helicopters to come get you, in Whisper Mode). It was in this base that Dr. Crygor, the latest mad scientist/technorati who the government had contracted to create morally ambiguous or just plain cool inventions, did his thing.

Crygor had gotten this most prestigious of jobs after he had saved the life of the previous president, who had been turned into a zombie following the outbreak of a zombie virus. Using that big, juicy chess club brain of his, Crygor managed to single-handedly create an anti-zombie virus vaccine from the skin folds of a flying squirrel, four tuffs of dog fur and two cups of blue Gatorade and thus saved America from a potentially dangerous zombie apocalypse.

Snake, with his lampshade collar, stood in one of the base's subterranean garages, where Dr. Crygor was completing the finishing touches on a black '67 Chevy Impala, which Snake was going to use to try to find Mario and Luigi so that he could fix President Wario's clogged toilet.

Dr. Crygor climbed out of the car and shut the driver's door behind him after he was done fiddling with something on the dashboard.

"Well, I think that about does it," he said, stepping back to admire his handiwork. He turned towards Snake. "It's got air foils to get you where you need to go in a hurry, a CD player and even cup holders. The only question you need to ask yourself is if you're in any condition to drive that thing."

Snake shrugged carelessly. "Doc, let me tell you something," he said behind his lampshade. "I've been on missions that were so physically and mentally challenging that they would have given Jack Bauer a stroke. If I could get through stuff that bad, I think I can drive with this thing on my head."

"Nonsense, Snake," said Crygor. "Based on what you told me happened in President's Park, you're in no state to drive an automobile. Maybe you should let me come with you."

Snake waved a hand. "Don't bother, I'll be fine."

"I insist, Snake," said Crygor, his single red eye full of seriousness (Either that or it was just light reflecting off of his visor). "It's much too dangerous for you to be driving cross-country with that thing on your head."

Snake stood there in thought for a moment. Then he looked at the doctor and said, "Sure, you can come."

Crygor was surprised that Snake had caved in that quickly. "Really?"

"No, not really."

"Awwww…"

"Okay, I'll let you come with me."

"For real?"

"Nah, I'm just screwin' with ya."

Crygor was starting to get pretty mad with Snake by now. "If you won't let me come, I'll tell President Wario about that cardboard cutout of him that you use for target practice!"

"Why, you son of a—"

"Now, now," said Dr. Crygor, wagging a finger at the man. "Let's watch our language, shall we? My granddaughter is here with me today." He waved to a pretty little red-headed girl with a heart-shaped hairclip in her hair who stood at the far end of the garage; she was wearing glasses, a lab coat, black pants and pink boots.

"Hello there, Penny!" he called to her.

"Hi, Grandpa!" she called back sweetly to him.

"What are you doing over there, Penny?" asked the doctor.

Penny stood next to Mike, her grandfather's robot slave, uh, servant who had two microphones on top of his head. She held up a screwdriver in her right hand. "I'm going to discover the inner workings of Mike!"

"No, Penny!" shouted Crygor as he ran to his granddaughter. "Don't do it! Do you want Mike to go on a homicidal rampage again?"

The girl smiled brightly. "Don't worry, Grandpa," called Penny reassuringly. "I won't make the same mistake twice!"

Roughly a year ago, Penny had messed around with Mike's central processing unit and turned the loveable karaoke robot into a bloodthirsty assassin with an insatiable desire to kill all carbon-based life forms. Thankfully, Dr. Crygor was able to act quickly and managed to rewrite Mike's programming before he could go on a widespread killing spree (The only casualty of Mike's rampage was Barney the Dinosaur, but no one really cared that he got killed).

Penny started unscrewing the panel on Mike's back as Crygor ran to her; the robot swiveled its head around to face the girl and said to her in his Auto-Tuned voice that was so Auto-Tuned it would put T-Pain to shame, "Please, little girl, don't deactivate me. I can't bear the thought of the darkness again…"

Too late.

Penny had opened the back panel and had started screwing around with Mike's motherboard. By the time Crygor got to the other side of the garage, it was too late. Mike was fading fast.

"Oh, no…" said Mike in a weak voice that sounded a lot like William Shatner's. "My photoreceptors… They're… getting dark…" Mike made a sound like a record screeching and shut down entirely.

Crygor came to a dead stop in front of his granddaughter and Mike. "Penny!" he said angrily, his hands on his hips. "What did I just tell you not to do?"

"Um… not deactivate Mike?" she asked innocently, putting her arms behind her back to hide the screwdriver. She looked down and kicked the ground with her right foot.

Condensation had begun to form on Crygor's visor; he was pretty mad now. "Now whenever he comes back online, he will try to destroy us all!" Dr. Crygor held his arms above his head as he said this, overdramatically shaking them as an overdramatic representation of how cheesed he was at her.

"Jeez, Grandpa, you really need to calm down," said Penny. She reached into one of her lab coat's pockets and took out a small black device that looked like a car starter. She pressed a button on the device and suddenly, Dr. Crygor began to dance around the room while salsa music played loudly from inside his chest.

Penny came over to where Snake was and whispered to him, "Mommy and Daddy say that Grandpa shouldn't stress himself out so much, so when he was sleeping last night I reprogrammed his pacemaker." She smiled and proudly held up the device. "Now whenever he gets angry, I just press this button and he starts dancing."

The two of them stood there as they watched Crygor dancing around the garage. "Wait until I tell your parents about what you did to me, Penny!" he threatened, doing a pretty awesome-looking flip. He then came back down to the ground and slid on his knees, holding out his arms and crying "ARRRRRIBA!"

Penny looked up at Snake and made a face. "What happened to you?" she asked. "Why are you wearing a doggy's collar?"

"I don't want to talk about it," said Snake in his gruffest voice possible.

Taking a hint that Snake wasn't exactly the nicest guy in the world, Penny made her way back to the far side of the garage. Crygor twirled to where Snake was and he whispered "Take her with you, she's crazy!"

From the other end of the garage, Penny called to her grandfather, "Hey, Grandpa! Wanna see the modifications I made to my kitty?"

Crygor shuddered as he spun back towards his granddaughter.

Sometime later, Snake and Penny were strapped into the Impala; the door of the subterranean garage opened and they drove out through a long dark tunnel to the surface.

Once they were above ground, Snake, who was driving, had parked the car and was briefing Penny on his plan. "Alright," he said to her. "Seeing as how Luigi's in Missouri, we'll go there first, and then we'll head to California to get Mario."

"Oh, great," said Penny from the backseat, rolling her eyes. "Just what I needed; a road trip with a smelly old man with a lampshade on his head."

"Hey, you think I'm any happier about this arrangement than you are?" asked Snake, briefly looking at the girl as he started the car and drove towards the nearest interstate. "I'm only taking you with me because your grandpa thought you were too much of a handful."

That seemed to shut her up.

Hours passed as they sped down the interstate; Snake was dangerously bobbing and weaving from lane to lane as he struggled to see through the ridiculously small eyeholes of his Elizabethan collar. He seethed inside, thinking about how much he hated Wario for not only having to be his lackey, but that the skinflint wouldn't even give him decent health insurance, which had forced him to go see a veterinarian.

"So, how did you get that thing on your neck?" asked Penny with all of the innocence she could muster. The sound of the girl's voice metaphorically pulled Snake back into the real world and out of a violent revenge fantasy, where he was torturing a certain morbidly-obese political figure with a power drill and playing "We Built This City" by Starship.

"Huh?" He briefly looked over at her, feeling his hatred briefly disappearing. As much as he tried to hide it, Snake always loved children. That's why he got into the children's music industry in the first place, aside from the obvious fact that his house got wrecked and all that stuff.

His heart couldn't help but break every time he saw the smiling face of a child. They were so innocent, so precious. It was a shame they had to grow up and become adults.

"I said, how did you get that thing around your neck?"

Snake sighed. "Well, let's see: I got attacked by a flock of geese while on a helicopter ride, dragged through a pine forest and smashed through the walls of some buildings and then came the mousetraps."

Penny just sat there in the backseat, listening to Snake's tale of woe. "And then to top it off, Wario gave me a lousy medical plan and I had to end up going to a veterinarian!"

He could see from the rearview mirror that Penny was trying hard not to laugh at his story. "You can laugh if you want to, kid," said Snake, his voice full of sadness. "I think I need to laugh after all of the stuff I've been through for the last few years."

From the backseat, Snake could hear Penny begin to giggle wildly and pound the seat with her fist, laughing from Snake's story. The man joined in with her laughter, happy to forget about Wario for at least a moment.

When they had finished laughing, Snake briefly looked in the backseat and said to Penny, "I don't think we were ever properly introduced. My codename's Snake, but you can call me Dave if you'd like." He held out his hand for her.

"My name's Penny Crygor," said Penny cheerfully, shaking his hand and smiling. "And I want to be the world's greatest inventor, next to my grandpa of course. It's nice to meet you, Mr. Snake."

"Nice to meet you too, Penny."

A second later, the girl's face went pale. "Uh, Mr. Snake?"

"Yeah?"

"You'd better get back to driving, 'cause your about to hit a big truck!"

Snake spun around and looked out the windshield. He saw that a huge semi was barreling down the highway, straight for them. He violently turned the wheel and swerved out of the truck's path. The driver laid on his horn, shouting unheard obscenities at the Impala. Snake drove the car back into the right lane again and said to the girl in the backseat, "That could've been bad for both of us. Thanks, Penny."

"You're welcome, Mr. Snake."

Snake looked straight ahead at the highway before him (Well, as straight as he could through the collar's eyeholes). He sighed; he could feel some angsty thoughts coming upon him.

Every time he saw a child like Penny, he secretly wished that circumstances would have played out differently in his life; how he wished he could have had a normal life like all of those children he used to play for. He never had much of a childhood, being the fact that his training as a solider practically began the moment he learned to walk. No child should ever have to go through what he did.

He pulled himself out from his dream world; he could see his exit coming up. "Alright, Penny. We're about to make our first stop."