SonicVGC

So, I’m sitting there, tending bar, when in walks someone I haven’t seen in a long time, Sonic.

Now, Sonic usually has a lot of energy in him and this time was no exception. But, um, he seemed a little… reserved this time. And he sat down and ordered a cranberry juice.

I say, “You don’t usually get cranberry juice.”

He says, “I know. Well, I’ve… I’ve been through quite a lot.”

He seemed very twitchy to say the least. He was constantly fidgeting with his hands, looking left and right all the time.

And I said, “Mr. S, what’s wrong?”

And he says, in a very, very fast manner, he says, “Well, I’m clean, I-I don’t do the stuff anymore.”

And I say, “What stuff?”

And he says, “Well, you know, I have a very addictive personality. I-I talk fast. I just… I need speed. Speed. It’s all about the speed! And after a while, I just… I got addicted.”

And I say, “Addicted to what?”

And he says, “The rings, man! I got addicted to the rings!”

And I said, “The golden power rings?”

And he says, “Yes. I was addicted and I just got out of rehab.”

And I said, “Oy, wait a minute. You went to rehab for golden rings?”

And he says, “No, I went to rehab for crystal meth. But it started off with the golden rings. You know, after a while it just makes you go faster and faster and faster and it just wasn’t enough.”

“It’s all about the speed, man!” he says, talking faster and faster, just getting more and more twitchy.

He says, “I couldn’t go fast enough. I had to go faster and faster. Beyond the speed of light, beyond the speed of sound, beyond the speed of… speed.”

I didn’t know what that meant, but apparently he knew.

But it got to a point, he said, where it was just starting to rule his life. You know, he’d go to pawn shops, pawn off all his material possessions, just for rings. Just all for rings. It was so sad. And it got to a point where he felt that the pawn shop was ripping him off, when they weren’t giving him the best deal. So, he does that spin where he kinda turns into a saw, however the hell he does that. And destroys all the material in there, all the possessions. Everything. All the pawn stuff just totally destroyed. Well, that lands him in a bit of trouble and, unfortunately, he’s sent to jail.

But luckily, he says his good friend, Tails, bailed him out and it was all okay. But, um… But Tails had a different agenda. You see, Tails was a bit of a… a bit of a ‘pusher’ if you know what a mean. And he says, “I have something even better than golden rings.” It’s these things called Meth Rings.

I didn’t even know you could make rings out of meth, but there you go. Shows you what I know.

And Tails says to him, “You don’t even have to steal. First one’s free.” Then you have to pay and then you have to steal. But, yeah…

So, he gets really addicted to the Meth Rings. And, unfortunately when you get really addicted to these kinda things, they have horrible, horrible side effects. Why do you think he’s blue? It’s a side effect! How many blue hedgehogs do you know?

But that wasn’t the only side effect. He was physically pushed to the limit. I mean, before, he was built like Arnold. He had muscles and biceps you wouldn’t believe it. But, now, I mean, his legs and arms, they’re… they’re like twigs…

And he kept telling me, “It’s all about the speed! All about the speed! I couldn’t get enough!”

He was so into it that he couldn’t even see really what Tails was doing. You know, that he was a dealer. I mean, that was one thing. But, when he found out he was working for Robotnik, that was the last straw. You just wouldn’t believe that Tails and Robotnik would be working together. But apparently Robotnik got him addicted to the stuff earlier on, too. That’s the power of those rings. It is a drug, it is an addiction.

And, unfortunately it was just getting more and more out of control. You know, he was picking fights with all the big ones: Speedy Gonzalez, the Road Runner, Flash. He would always challenge them to races and, of course, he would always win ‘cause he’s hyped up on the rings. It’s like steroids… in ring form… with meth.

So, he’d go around, picking fights with everybody, racing them all. When he ran out of ideas, he challenged Slow Poke Rodriguez. Boy, that was a miss match, I can tell ya.

“But that wasn’t enough,” he says.

“It was all about the speed! More speed!” he says.

After a while, he started outrunning race cars, trains, all because of the ring devil. Always chasing the golden dragon. I think the lowest point was when they found him at Six Flags on the Batman Ride just going around on the loops over and over and over and over. They would have done something earlier, but people just assumed he was one of the costumed mascots.

They finally found him face down in a bathroom urinal with a traffic cone on his head and cotton candy in his bum. That was a sorry sight for the kids. Seeing an American icon with his face down in piss. People thought they drowned a Smurf. It was a sad sight, to say the least.

Finally, the police decided this was a problem. And, uh, needed to be dealt with. So, they locked him in a rubber room where he was bouncing off the walls. Literally, he can do that. With his super sonic speed, he was literally bouncing off the walls. It was quite an embarrassing sight from what I understand.

“But,” he said, “those days were over. I’m just gonna have some cranberry juice at the Pixel Palace and that’ll be it.”

I told him, I said, “Why did you need the speed anyway? Was it really necessary? I mean, when you have so much in your life and you have so much going for you, why would you need drugs? The natural high of life, that should be enough. Speed is not the answer. Drugs are never the answer. It’s life. Life, that’s the answer. Not speed. It’s never speed.”

He then pissed all over the bar and ran circles around the tables. He also did a tap dance on the chandelier singing “Go, Speed Racer, Go.” See, he was on Speed at the time. I-I didn’t know that.

So, I get a little jilted and call Pixel Palace security. And he strips down totally naked and starts dancing across the bar. ‘Course, stripping naked for him is just taking off the gloves and shoes. But for an animalmorphic life form, that’s still very shocking.

So, security comes in and tries to get him to calm down. But he wouldn’t have any of it. So, he rushed to the roof, howled at the moon, insisted he could fly, jumped off the building, and plummeted to the sidewalk. See, he couldn’t fly. Turns out the only thing that could stop momentum like that is the ground. Five inches of thick cement to be exact. Two inches after they pealed him off the sidewalk.

And he looks at me as they drag him to the police car. And he says, “If at first you don’t succeed, a chicken ate your hamster.”

…Did I mention he was on drugs?

It’s so sad to see things like that. It’s just so sad. A great American idol succumbed to rings. Meth Rings.

I don’t know when people are gonna just wake up.