“Sure glad we won that battle.”

“Yeah, sure, it was great. What the hell is next?”

“I’m too goddamn shit tired to care. What do you say we get two rooms at the local inn of some kind and fuck loud enough for Tails to hear? That’ll color his ass jealous in no time.”

Cream smiled wryly at Shadow, her love of loves. “Fueling the fire for his angst, huh? I’m game.”

“Me t- oh. Game. Right.”

Well, you can guess what happened after that. They all went to the Local Inn, the local inn of Mansecks and it was surprisingly easy to drag Tails with them. They even told him of their vividly vulgar plan, twice. And he didn’t even roll his eyes at them. Of course, Shadow was too busy reliving a much relived fantasy involving loads of nudity and Tails’ inner flesh to see this, and Cream was too busy… whatever it is she thinks about. Cock. Cream is just one of those characters who neither calls for a complicated background nor deserves one. She looks cute and vessels dreams and fantasies. Besides, who doesn’t like cock? Prove to me you don’t like it. Tyler, who knows where Tyler was, I don’t keep track of this shit, shut the fuck up.

One thing is for certain: Tyler never orders soup under any circumstances.

Entering the inn, our vastly diverse crew of ever expanding heroes broke away from the leader and fanned out in a formation to listen to the desk clerk, and what ensues is exactly the kind of useless bullshit RPG character development that taxes your thumb’s ability to press a button over and over again. Lowers the replay value like a motherfuck.

“We’d like some rooms, please,” our questionably mysterious hero says cheerily to the inn keeper. Press enter.

“Certainly, siiiiiiiiir,” the inn keeper replies in an unnecessarily drawn out way which represents a bad writer’s attempt at inserting as many quirky characteristics into secondary sprites as possible. Press enter three times. “Would you like some rooms for the evennnnning?”

Choose one. “Uh, yeah, fuckface. Rooms. You know, rooms?” Press enter.

Here, the scene pauses for comedic effect, two full seconds before the next word bubble pops up. The unending interior safe area music repeats and starts over. “Ahhh, yessss, rooooooms.” Loading time. “I see you have 4 members in your paaaarty. How many roooms?” Choose one.

Their pocketbook depth easily displayed, Shadow’s inflamed libido forever in mind and always thinking on its toes, he had no problem picking one. “Two, please.” Press enter.

“Ahhhhhh, twoooo, for one niiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii-”

“Oh for fuck’s sake…”

“iiiiiiiiiiiiight. Here are your keys, sir.” You have received Room Keys (2). Get it? Like in RPGs.

“Let me ask you something.”

“Certainllllly, siiiir.”

“Uh huh. What’s your name?”

The character answers anyway, in spite of the redundancy. “Halberttastro.”

“That’s not your real name. Don’t kid me.”

“David R. Ellis.”

“… Not-”

“No.”

“Sure? Not the one who-”

“No, not him, sir.”

“Just, a little strange, with the R and everything-”

“Well, I’m not him.”

“That’s weird.”

“You are in luck. Bill Lee did a William Tell routine on his wife and now we have rooms available.”

“I get it. Referential. Hand the fuck over the fucking keys.”

**********

Cream cheerfully entered their hotel room, bouncing over to the queen sized bed that defied all anachronistic facts, though there probably aren’t any. “So, what next?”

Shadow took a deep breath, making sure to impress her by puffing out his chest really far. “First, we spend the night here and waste time. If we don’t choose the option to skip ahead, we’ll be able to get the very hard to find sword handle, which will come in handy when we meet the blacksmith in the next town over, although, it isn’t a very fun boss battle if you can kill the guy in two hits. It’s really more of an option for replayers.”

“They can’t think of enough ways to make this story unlikable, can they?”

“Nope. After one night here, we will be met by David R. Ellis, no relation, to follow a lead. The note he gives us will lead us to an abandoned house out in the dangerous, random fight ridden wilderness that will take us days to traverse. When we arrive, there will be a short fight, and we won’t kill the mysterious old guy hiding behind the very fake but very dangerous monster hologram. He will point us to another town, and give to us a device what’s purpose shan’t be revealed. We’ll arrive in Asssecks, no relation, to find the old man’s homeless brother to give him the device. We will find him in an alley, the problem being that any attempt to speak with him will only be met with a series of meows and growls. We’ll have to scour the alley for ten minutes to find the cat translator, then we will be able to understand his dream to become a real cat. We, then, must find a mage to do this for us. Only then will he uncover the secret of the device.”

“Which will lead us to the other Chaos Emeralds?”

“Not yet. We’ll find the mage halfway across town, a rather attractive female who specializes in transformations, but as it happens, her house was ransacked the previous night by a gang of street toughs, and they stole four valuable pieces of her spellbook. We then have to wait until nightfall to track down each of the toughs, the first of which is easy enough to dispatch, the second of who is tougher since he figured out how to make himself invisible, the third of what is even more so because he pawned it off, so we have to wait for morning to buy the page back from the local pawn broker, then wait until nightfall again to track down the fourth tough whom has decided to burn the pages. We then have to take the pages to an alchemist to negotiate a free reconstruction, since we will be out of money by then. After that, we’ll have the pages to make the mage turn the old man into a cat, and then he will tell us what the device is: a compass that points directly to the king’s palace across the sea!”

“And that’s where we’ll find the next Chaos Emerald?”

“No! After hiring a boat to take us across the sea (more random monster battles here along with boat training yes I am speaking in parenthesis), it will turn out that the king is too depressed to do anything but mourn for his single son and his inability to find a suitable wife. He, predictably, enlists our help to find him a woman. We scour the surrounding town for one he likes, even entering a boat contest because hey that boat training isn’t for nothing, but during the course of this, the prince manages to fall in love with you. The king will be outraged and try to have us killed. At the last moment, you will produce a deus ex machina from the sky in the form of a knife that literally falls from the heavens, like in the story of the Dodo. Your past will be too mysterious for the prince to handle and then he’ll decide to follow in his father’s footsteps and marry his mother. Done and done. This entire ordeal will give you the ability to “see” where the next emerald is: at the bottom of the sea!”

“Uh, Shadow-”

“Getting there. So that’s the end of the first disc.”

“No, no, stop.”

“… What?”

“I swear you’ve done this joke like 27 separate times.”

“… Funnier every time.”

“Uh, no.”

Shadow crossed his arms, assuming a militant pose in every imaginable sense. “Every word is important.”

“But-”

“EVERY. WORD.”

**********

“He’s a hack. The only good thing he ever directed was Homeward Bound 2: Lost in San Francisco.”

“Jack doesn’t like current events or name-dropping for name-dropping’s sake, particularly when its only purpose is to blanket the user in a false sense of superiority. It is a maneuver that anyone with a hobby can do, and Jack thinks hobbies that are not his own are a complete waste of gray brain matter and should be subject to reintegration into the collective whole.”

Tails had frankly stopped listening after “ and hoped to end the tirade with one word. “Deep.”

“Jack doesn’t go for deep. Jack moves rhythmically around the surface and hits all the right spots.”

“A guy with a small dick says that to make himself feel better.”

Tyler’s furrow browed and his eyes flashed angrily. Nobody but nobody belittles Tyler’s cockmanship. “Jack wishes for your death.”

“Jack needs to stop thinking that he’s big time.”

“Very well. Could you cram as many movie references as possible into one story?”

“I’m afraid the time for that has come and gone, my friend.” But it hadn’t.

“You can spend your time on more important things.”

“This is important.”

“Writing down every episode of every television show you’ve ever seen and rating them on a one-to-ten scale is important?”

Tails quickly put away his giant notepad, and pulled the acquired Chaos Emeralds out. “That’s not what I’m doing.” He admired the shiny, pseudo-realistic sheen of the surfaces of the emeralds. “What do you think happens when we get them all?”

“Don’t want to ruin the surprise.” Jack’s grin grew into a smile and vice versa, his teeth matching the sheen of the emeralds and the cold fever of the eviscerating comfort of the wooden bench grillsomethingorother

Tails was disappointed. “Oh come on.”

“Fine. The game ends.”

“You call that surprising?”

Tyler’s attention was drawn across the room, following the approaching noir author tribute figure. “Is that Sonic?”

“Oh God, that emotional holocaust is coming over?”

Indeed, he was indeed. What is painful about this for Tails is that Sonic tasted more like a bean sauce than a derlicious marinara sauce. Tails was allergic to beans, and loved his sauce. Sonic was therefore unwelcome to the party, and just when he and Tyler were beginning to have an actual conversation.

“Hello, fellow flesh piles,” said Sonic, tipping his fedora, stolen from the mutilated corpse of Knuckles. “Wallowing in a state of self-despair, are we?”

“We are now.”

**********

Cream pulled away from the floor. “I think Sonic is downstairs in the restaurant.”

“No, he went downhill long ago.”

“You should say hi.”

“I don’t like the way he says nigger all the time.”

“He… doesn’t, but you should get with the times. Nigger is the new black.”

“He’ll say it if I go down there.”

“He won’t. He’ll say ‘Shadow! I haven’t seen you in a coon’s twat.’”

“Yeahhhhhh, a bit racist.”

“You have to admit, it does sound like a long time.”

“By themselves, the words are fine, but together, I have qualms. We stay here.”

“In that case, let’s get you inside me right away.”

“Aw, but I want to watch The Brood.”

“How the fuck do we manage to watch a Cronenberg film every time we’re alone together?”

“You would prefer gay sex?”

“… What?”

“I bet you would.” Shadow eyed her disapprovingly. “Queer.”

**********

“How does this even work in a videogaming sense?”

“It cuts back and forth to the conversations, I suppose.”

“Games don’t ‘cut’, shut up.”

“Relax. Remember what Shadow says.”

“Uh, ‘I won’t make love to a woman but I’ll fuck the shit out of her.’”

“The other thing.”

“‘I have qualms.’”

“Yes, but no. ‘Always-’”

“Ah yes, ‘Always look before you reach impact point.’”

Kays leaned forward, apparently with them the entire time. “And ‘Sonic is afraid of girls.’”

“Shadow is full of deep stuff.” Tails interrupted Tyler before he could speak. “Besides cock.”

Sonic looked shocked and offended. “He says wha about me?! For?”

“Because you’re around them for five seconds before you scream ‘Oh God, why are you so talkative!?’”

“… Huh. Well! This is the last time I share varbage with you coon twats.”

“Sonic, this version of you represents all that is pointless in both fiction and the digestion thereof.”

“The foot grew into a new robot years later. After awhile, I named him Haircut. The end.”

“Not funny.” Tails then set Sonic’s coat on fire. “Never crossover into other universes, no matter how nice of a coat you have,” he said, not even bothering to raise his voice over the sound of his pain.

“Jack is glad we finally had some proper closure on that.”

“Where were we? Oh yeah. So what do you think he means when he says “drivin down your freeway?””

“Family is important, above all other things.”

The décor starting to get to him, the view hurting his eyes, and the smells, well, not too pleasant either, Tails shrunk far into his seat under the weight of this very superficial, very worthless life. Desperate for a glimmer of hope, he looked for common ground. “You feel how pointless it is?”

“.. Jack doesn’t.”

“I don’t even know why I’m here.”

Someone was hit on the head. Everybody laughed.

And then a waiter came by. “Sirs, what will you have?”

Tyler spoke up first. “I will have the soup.”