Sonic Insanity
Since yesterday was the 1-year-anniversary of my last update, I thought I'd throw everybody a bone by doling out another chapter just for the hell of it. Review as always, guys! 1200 and rising!
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Last time on Sonic Insanity…Sonic's violent renegotiation of his contract with Sega led to him no longer being in Brawl, and the fanboy backlash led to all-out-war. Sonic, Tails, Knuckles and Shadow sought shelter in the basement. As this chapter begins, our heroes have just heard a loud hammering on the door and are about to investigate. However, the chapter does not begin in Sonic's house, but in a tall Japanese skyscraper…
Yuji Naka lay dead, slumped in his executive chair, blank eyes staring infinitely out through the windows of his massive office. The table was empty save for a sheet of paper with a clean hole blown through it, and a small pile of papers that had once formed Sonic's contract with Sega. Silence filled every corner of the room like a herd of fat, quiet ponies, with the exception of a small patch of lava bubbling behind a small hole in the wall.
Headwater Daddy, dripping with fiery magma goop, emerged triumphantly from the patch of lava like the victor of some devastating battle. His pride was somewhat misplaced, seeing as he had voluntarily hidden in the lava until Sonic left and Yuji Naka was dead, but that was beside the point. With the grace of a vulture he dragged his red-hot body, which had inexplicably weathered the furnace-like heat of the lava, over to the wastepaper basket. Cooling his hands to a satisfactory temperature, he deftly plucked a small scrap of paper from the trashcan… a single iota of paper with the name Sonic T. Hedgehog written in blood upon it.
Smirking, Headwater Daddy pocketed this fragment of paper, lifted the phone from the office desk and dialed a number.
"Yes?" came the voice over the line, distorted using security technology. As a result, Headwater Daddy had no clue who his employer was.
"Well, scrum-diddley-doo! I gots the secret signature," explained Mr. Daddy with a cacophonous cackle.
"How soon can you get it to me?"
"Awww, baby, don't play me that way!" snickered Headwater Daddy, pacing around the office. "I'm just a will o' the wisp! And when there's a will o' the wisp, there's a way o' the wisp! And the way o' the wisp… IS ULTIMATE, MINDLESS SERVITUDE!" he shrieked into the phone.
The voice sighed coldly. "You'll be retrieved in twenty seconds." The line went dead.
Headwater Daddy ceased his boisterous tomfoolery long enough to put down the phone, and then searched for some item with which to blot the lava from his person. The curtains by the window looked ideal. Sniggering, he traipsed lackadaisically over toward them in order to clean himself off.
The window exploded in a whirl of cascading glass. All of it was sucked out into a giant dimensional portal which had appeared with a great cataclysmic splashing noise outside the window. Clutching the signature tight in his fist, Headwater Daddy faced his destiny with a cunning smile and one crossed eye. He leaped out of the office building through the portal into another world.
MEANWHILE…The hammering on the door intensified, yet nobody was eager to answer it. A furious bout of quibbling sprung up between Sonic, Tails, Shadow and Knuckles as to who would undertake this chore.
"Come on, guys, I'm exempt!" pleaded Knuckles, using a word that he had once used to impress the ladies by showing off his large vocabulary. "I did it last time!"
"Last time you answered the door, Knuckles," sighed Shadow, "it was a pizza delivery man, and you paid him no tip and ate half the pizza yourself. So no, I don't think you are exempt, you piece of shit," he concluded, using a word that he had once used to infuriate Gerald Robotnik. He had been subsequently beaten, stuffed in a duffel bag and trampled by gravity tigers. But that was another story.
"What say we draw straws?" piped up Tails.
"Good idea Tails, does anybody else have any-"
"What about my idea?" pressed Tails belligerently.
Sonic, Shadow and Knuckles sighed and looked with commiseration at one another before turning on the irate Tails with a collective fatherly air.
"You see, Tails," began Knuckles with a studious tone, but the banging on the door commenced and they were distracted from ridiculing Tails into reforming a plan of action.
"What say we draw straws?" said Sonic, desperately presenting the idea as his own out of greed and egotism, and everybody was too frantic to disapprove. Well, Shadow wasn't frantic. He just didn't care about Tails' intellectual property, whatever the hell that meant. Shadow had long been plagued by accusations of thieving others' intellectual property, most notably in a court case in which his entire existence had been called into question as an act of plagiarism. Some accused him of being a cliché antihero with no distinguishing traits, in response to which he shot them all dead, said a badass one-liner through clenched teeth, and strolled out the door in slow motion. How dare they call him unoriginal…
"So draw your straw!" said Tails brightly, indicating the straws he had clenched in his hands.
Dubiously, Knuckles seized one and pulled… and pulled… and pulled… inch after inch of straw material emerged from Tails' palm with no end in sight. Inches became feet, feet became yards, and yards improbably stretched into units of measurement previously considered inconceivable. Finally the other end was reached, and Knuckles was left with a straw nearly as long as a city block.
"Well, despite the staggeringly inconvenient and unbelievable means by which I drew that straw," growled Knuckles, feeling fury grip his temples like a crablike plague of frustration, "at least I'm sure to have the longest straw."
However, it was soon demonstrated that this was not necessarily the case, as Shadow seized his own straw only to find that it was of similar proportions to the one Knuckles had drawn. All gritted their teeth as the banging grew more persistent and Shadow hauled nearly a quarter mile of straw out of Tails' fist. Finally the end was at last procured, and Shadow disgustedly dropped his four-foot-high pile of straw next to Knuckles' stack.
"How in the hell are we supposed to determine which of these is shorter than the other?" groused Tails, as if he was not directly responsible for this situation. He plunged his hand into his own fist and drew yet another straw of mammoth size. Nearly five minutes passed while Tails turned blue in the face from tugging and yanking. At long last he too unearthed the long coil of straw in its entirety and stuffed the nearly hay-bale-sized pile into a disused bucket.
"Sonic, your turn," they encouraged him in unison, anticipating yet another tedious ordeal.
Sonic, vesting all his worldly strength in the fingers of his right hand, grabbed the last remaining straw and drew an absolutely tiny grain of hay no longer than the nail on a baby's pinky finger. It was so small that Tails must have been balancing it on the edge of his fist rather than actually holding any part of it. Such an incomprehensibly minuscule particle must have been painstakingly whittled down to the shred of an iota of material it now was. Sonic's face contorted into a grimace of earth-shattering, vindictive rage.
"WHY IS THERE SUCH A STARK CONTRAST IN SIZE BETWEEN THESE PIECES OF STRAW, TAILS!" he bellowed so loudly that the knocking upstairs temporarily abated.
"It's phallic symbolism," said Shadow.
"It's modern art," said Knuckles at the same time.
"It's a coincidence," Tails chorused.
The confusing mishmash of vocal sounds made Sonic's head spin. However, when all was said and done, it was generally agreed upon that Sonic must answer the insistent hammering on the door. So up the stairs he trod, waving a shovel around in what he hoped was a fierce brandish, decreasing in confidence by the second.
"Come on, guys, this ain't fair!" he pleaded. "I'm a hedgehog! I have rights!"
"So do we," came the muffled response as Tails and Shadow began a DDR tournament downstairs.
"What!" shrieked Sonic with fear. "How can you be partying when my very life is in danger?"
Shadow looked blankly at him. "I thought that was the point."
Sonic was madder than an octopus in a November landslide. Hissing and spitting like a demented violin, he chose to release his anger by imagining Shadow's head being cut off in beautiful, 300-esque slow motion. Sonic stomped up the stairs and yanked the door open, ready for anything… wait… what was this?
No… it couldn't be! He could have never expected anything so horrific and repellent in all his days. The monstrous visage silhouetted in the doorway gave him a wide grin and then lunged forward, knocking him all the way down the stairs. Sonic crashed loudly onto the cement floor with a wet splat as his assailant pawed viciously at his chest. He thrashed like a jellyfish in a blender, trying to escape the sickening fate in store for him.
"Shadow, Sonic needs our help!" yelled Knuckles, rushing to Sonic's aid and trying in vain to pry the beast from his fallen friend.
"I'm playing DDR!" came the distracted reply.
"SONIC COULD DIE!"
"WE MUST ALL MAKE SACRIFICES!"
"WHY DON'T YOU MAKE A SACRIFICE AND HELP ME OUT HERE?"
"WHY DON'T YOU MAKE A SACRIFICE AND SHUT THE HELL UP?"
"I WILL DIE FOR THIS!" screamed Tails as he executed a brilliant combo on the dance pad, effectively ending Shadow's chances of winning. With obvious reluctance Shadow set off at a glacial pace to assist Knuckles and Sonic in their battle with the mad attacker.
"Gotcha!" grunted Knuckles as he finally delivered a powerful punch, sending the creature flying. It hurtled into a wall and was temporarily stunned. Tails and his sidekicks, if by sidekicks you mean "obvious superiors," gathered around the monster's form to see who, or what, it was. Its vicious eyes flickered open and it spoke in a hellish sirenlike screech.
"Hi, guys!"
"AMYYYYYYYYY!" wailed Sonic in a tone suggesting utter damnation and obliteration of his soul.
"Sonikku!" she warbled, and began to plaster him again with kisses and worse. Shuddering with disgust, Tails extricated himself from his sweet dance moves in order to help Shadow and Knuckles restrain the pink hedgehog by cramming her inside a pickle jar. They poked some air holes in the lid and wedged it tightly.
"Amy, why are you here?" Sonic yelled, clutching the jar in his hands and warily holding it at arm's length.
"I saw that there was some kind of nuclear holocaust happening at your house and I wanted to see if you were OK!" gurgled Amy with sickening optimism.
"WHAT!" roared Sonic. His house had suffered many fates over the years. The amount of damage that had been wreaked upon was nigh unbelievable. But for it to be gone? Were the Sonic fanboys so desperate for a revival of their hero that they had to resort to rendering his house a smoking crater?
"Somebody go outside and see," he ordered harshly.
"Don't do it, Sonic! You'll surely perish!" pleaded Tails.
"I wasn't putting my ass on the line," said Sonic with disgust. "I propose that the cloned bitch go investigate the surface and tell us what's going on."
"You're just upset that one of my kind can become President, you racist," sniffed Shadow.
"Shadow, having black fur and being African-American are not entirely the same thing," Tails belabored to explain.
"Being good at inventing shitty machines and being intelligent are not entirely the same thing!" yelled Shadow nastily.
By popular consent it was decided that Shadow was indeed to check out the surface. Sonic supported this because of his undying enmity for Shadow. Tails supported this because of Shadow's cruelty. Amy supported this because if Shadow died, Sonic would pay more attention to her. And Knuckles had meant well by voting for "the black guy," just as he had done in the 2008 presidential election. Little did he know that, just as with Barack Obama, they had only voted "the black guy" to take on a position of incredible danger and little reward.
"If I don't come back in an hour, come up and rescue me," Shadow half-ordered and half-pleaded.
"No," was Sonic's only response.
"Shadow, you're not going to go out of our sight," sighed Tails. "Just take this gun with you." He handed the black hedgehog a small straw with spitballs in it.
Shadow nervously poked his head out of the basement door. The house had been utterly razed to the ground. Nothing but small twisted fragments of glass and brick remained. Metal shapes writhed in broken shards out of the rubble, and the entire neighborhood had been reduced to a smoking wasteland where no object stood taller than five feet. Fires consumed ash-choked lawns and dying trees. The sky rumbled like God's stomach high above, streaked with oily red clouds.
"Everything appears fine," he reported buoyantly, traipsing downstairs with a dreamy smile.
"Really?" asked Sonic uncertainly.
"The house is still standing," beamed Shadow in a friendly way.
A massive earthquake-like tremor shook the basement, causing the heroes to lurch uneasily back and forth. Everybody stumbled and fell, searching for something to hold onto. The shaking lasted no more than a minute before ending. When it subsided, the four furries picked themselves up and dusted themselves off.
"Well, did it look like there was still any sign of danger up there?" Tails asked Shadow.
"It looked like the attackers have cleared out," said Shadow, which was technically true.
"Well then let's get revenge on those assholes!" yelled Sonic, stomping his feet. "I want some compensation for having my life put in danger!"
"Who are we getting revenge on now?" asked Shadow skeptically.
Sonic's eyes burned with a feverish obsession and his mouth curled into a sick, monomaniacal grin. He twitched with bloody joy as he began to scratch a plan into the sand on the floor. Why his basement floor was covered in sand was not only unclear, but it would never be made clear. Ever.
"First, we barter with Satan for passage into Hell," he seethed in a sing-song whisper. "We may have to sell Tails' soul in the process, but it's better than nothing. Besides, we and Hades go way back. Once in Hell, we will find Yuji Naka's ghost and kill it, or maybe just bother it until we get tired. Then we'll hunt down every single Sonic fanboy. EVERY LAST ONE! WEASELS!" he shrieked, not in reference to the fanboys. He just liked yelling the world 'weasels.'
"Sonic, what about the fanboys that didn't have anything to do with this?" asked Tails reasonably.
"NO SURVIVORS!"
"How are we going to traverse Hell in search of Yuji Naka's ghost when Hell is said to be full of unspeakable evil and suffering?"
"We'll go skiing," said Sonic determinedly.
"Skiing," repeated Knuckles with mounting anger.
"Skiing."
"IT'LL BE A COLD DAY IN HELL BEFORE I SKI THROUGH THE NETHERWORLD!" shrieked Knuckles, stating the obvious.
"Maybe we should just go look for some food and shelter," proposed Tails.
"FOOD AND SHELTER?" yelled Sonic, kicking a chair over and standing on top of it somehow. "FOOD AND SHELTER? THAT'S YOUR BRIGHT IDEA, TAILS? OH LOOK, DISASTER'S COMING! WHAT DO WE DO! ACCORDING TO TAILS OVER HERE, FOOD AND SHELTER IS WHAT WE NEED! BAH! YOU MAKE ME SICK!"
"Well, what would you suggest?" Tails asked testily.
"SOME MAY QUESTION MY ETHICS, MY METHODS AND MY WAYS," yelled Sonic, quoting a great poet, "BUT MY BUSINESS IS MEAT, AND BUSINESS PAYS! NONE QUESTION ME NOW, FOR I AM THE BOSS…" He turned on Knuckles with an unfathomable, longing, craving, hungry look in his eyes. Out came the steak bib and serrated knife. Out came the long tongue, licking his chops with a horrific sucking sound. "REAL BABY BACK RIBS, DRIPPING WITH SAUCE!"
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Has Sonic permanently gone off the deep end? Will they ever escape the basement? Who is Headwater Daddy's shadowy superior? We'll see in a year from now! Read and review!