Knuckles the Echidna has one best friend ever.
His best friend is a big green rock.
He loves to sit there by the big green rock and not say anything.
Sometimes he gives it a hug though.
Rouge the Bat thinks this is very strange, and more importantly, she wants to make him feel strange about it.
"I have many friends, all of them rocks," she says. "All these rocks love me and want to live in my house."
"Not my rock," says Knuckles. "My rock doesn't want to live in your house."
"Yes it does." Rouge puts her hands on her hips. "Your rock does too want to live in my house. It would rather live there than on your stinky stupid island where we are now. We are here now and I hate it so much."
"Nuh-huh," says Knuckles.
"Does too," says Rouge.
The only way to settle this, they decided, was to ask the big green rock who it wanted to go with.
"C'mere, big green rock," says Rouge, slapping her thighs and trying to make noise to attract its attention. "You want to live with me because I'm so cool and have so many friends who are also rocks."
"C'mon, big rock, you know me," says Knuckles, also slapping his thighs for similar reasons. "You love to sit here on this island with me and make it float, and I also love how you do that."
"I have a house," says Rouge, still slapping her thighs, "a house where you can live in with all of my friends. It is so much better than living on this island. It is a smelly island populated by a smelly echidna but not you, you smell great, you smell like green."
"Remember when I threw you that birthday party?" says Knuckles, still slapping his thighs. "You loved it when I mashed that cake into you."
But the big green rock does not move or do or say anything because it is just a big green rock. And Rouge and Knuckles are still there, to this day, slapping their thighs. The moral of this story is that you have to know when to hold them (the big green rocks in your life) and know when to fold them (your clean laundry when it's out of the dryer.)