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Ralph is greeted at the bar by a napkin. "Late for what?" he asks, and gets another napkin in reply. "Me? But why?" Napkin. "What kind of 'special occasion'?" Napkin, eyeroll. "Fine, fine, don't tell me." He sighs and heads around behind the bar. "Could I get a few drink suggestions? To go with the theme?" The specials board fills itself out:

SONIC: THE FIGHTERS
Miles "Tails" Prower
Sonic the Hedgehog

STREET FIGHTER II
Blankatini
Bloody Bison
Chun-Li ice tea
Flash Kick!
Hadouken!
Shoryuken!
Spinning Piledriver
Yoga Flame

SUPER MARIO BROS. (on PlayChoice-10)
Boo Shot
Bowser
Goomba
Princess Peach
Warp Pipe

TEKKEN
Kuma's Furry Cup
Nina Colada
Paul Phoenix Rising
Yoshimitsu's Poison Breath

"...all righty then." He turns to face the customers and tries to look happy to be there. "What'll it be?"

[In honor of his canon now being in Japanese cinemas, have a tending Ralph! Open to new threads until it scrolls, and to new tags until your brainmeats can't do it anymore.]

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"That's what Vanellope tells me. She didn't believe it at first, but..." He trails off and snaps two fingers with a mildly tectonic sound. "...hold the phone. You must be that kid she mentioned! The superhero!" He seems impressed. "She didn't say you looked like Kano's good twin."

"You know her? Of course you know her." He's not sure what to make of her telling about him, though. She sure didn't seem impressed. At all. "Cyborg. Nice to meetcha.

"But I don't really have much in common with Kano. Just the eye." He's not really big on Mortal Kombat in general. Mainly because Beast Boy always wins.

"Nice to meet you too, Cyborg." He holds out his entire right hand for shaking. "And I wouldn't say it's an 'of course' with Vanellope. Sure, our cabinets are in the same arcade, but hers was there for 15 years before I found my way there, and even that was an accident." He smiles. "But a happy one.

"And of course you don't have a lot in common with him; you're the good twin. For one thing, he's okay with drinking the hard stuff. Probably because he's not as much of a rebuild as you." Ralph catches himself. "That's... not a sensitive subject for you or anything, is it?"

"Not really, not these days." But his tone does imply he doesn't talk about it much anyway.

"I guess the good guys aren't big drinkers, inside or outside a game.

"So you interact with other games? That's kind of cool."

"But you'd rather not talk about it anyway. Fair enough.

"It depends on the game, really. Felix — the good guy in my game — doesn't drink anything stronger than root beer. But those Street Fighter guys... if Tapper could run out, it'd be after closing on a day when they've had a tournament. The last ones standing are usually Zangief and Cammy. Then again, she does have that ex-Shadoloo thing in her backstory...

"Yeah, we can take short hops down the power cord to Game Central Station and back. Well, I say 'short hops', but from the inside, it's long enough that most power cords have tram service. As long as we stay in our own cabinets during business hours and don't get killed outside our own game, it's all good."

None of that makes any sense. Well, except for the part about how some of the rougher characters drink too much. That seems totally right.

"You met Enzo yet? He's an AI also, but in a very different way."

"No, but you're the second person to ask if I've met him, and the third to mention him. I didn't connect the name that Gordon Freeman guy asked about with the green kid Vanellope mentioned meeting.

"I obviously need to meet the kid, so I can ask him what kind of whacked-out system architecture his home even has, that just playing games on it can screw up the hard drive. Or did Freeman get that wrong?"

Edited (Vanellope-mun points out that she must've mentioned Enzo.) 2013-03-25 01:13 (UTC)

"No, that sounds right. The rules in his world are very different.

"I actually checked on it, and it's not like that where I come from. Games are just games. No AIs, so far as I can tell." Which is good. Anything else would make the games less fun.

"And you look like someone who could check from the inside if he wanted to." Ralph thinks about that for a moment. "On the one hand," and he actually holds up one of his gigantic mitts for illustration, "that means I probably can't ever go to your world. But on the other," he raises the other hand, "it means your world's games don't get some of the more... interesting bugs they can have in mine."

"You mean bugs because the bits of code are self-aware and don't do what the players want?" Sometimes he wonders if that is the case in all games. It would explain a lot.

"You've got the right idea, but you're probably not thinking big enough. Imagine one of the drivers in a racing game hopping over to that new racing game that's stealing all his thunder. Or think of a bad guy who's getting tired of nobody in his game appreciating what he does, so when he hears about a new game where maybe a bad guy could win a medal like his good guy gets at the end of every round, he sneaks off to climb the building and fight the bugs. He already climbs a building in his own game, and he figures the bugs will be like the ones in Centipede; how hard can it be?"

"Yeah, I can see how that's bad. The players must be ticked off at that.

"Though it would add a wild card to the game. After you play something enough times, maybe that's not a bad thing." Yes, Cy is actually just a bit bored with his games. At least till the next big thing comes around.

"Sure, a little surprise can be a big help. Now that Vanellope's got control of her glitching, the kids can't get enough of her. But calling the kind of surprise I'm talking about 'bad'? Is the most masterful understatement since the death of Chun Li's father." Ralph stares at his own feet for a moment. "That racer, Turbo from Turbo Time, crashed the RoadBlasters cabinet when he crashed his car into the player car, and got his own game unplugged along with it. And the bad guy didn't realize Hero's Duty, the game with the medal, was a rail shooter."

Ralph stares at a point about 20 feet behind Cy's right shoulder. "I had no idea at all what I was doing. It turns out Cy-Bugs are about the size of a compact car and have more teeth than a Dee Jay vs. Blanka match. I didn't really know how to use the fancy space-marine armor I *ahem* borrowed from Markowski, and I'd never held a gun in my life. It is some kind of miracle I didn't get myself killed — and if we die in someone else's game, there's no respawning. It's welcome aboard the Permadeath Express, all the way to the end of the line.

"And by bugging out like I did while the arcade was open, I left Felix high-and-dry. If I'm not there to wreck the building at the start of the game, he's got nothing to do but stand around with his teeth in his mouth. Man, I tell you, I am so lucky to have him to clean up my messes. And lucky Mr. Litwak only stuck him with an Out of Order sign for the day."

"Wow, that's a lot to deal with." And to make sense of. "I guess I sort of understand why you'd be frustrated. In a way it's like you have free will but don't.

"Which is how it is for everyone. Maybe." Philosophy isn't Cy's strong suit.

"So this sort of thing is going on in every arcade. There's like a thousand of you interacting with a thousand Turbos?"

"Maybe. I've never been much of a philosopher, really.

"Every arcade in my world, anyway. I don't know how many Fix-It Felix or Turbo Time cabinets are still in operation, or many of them are in arcades that have Sugar Rush or Hero's Duty or both. But I'm pretty sure our Vanellope is one-of-a-kind, and I know our Turbo isn't around anymore."

"We don't have those games. At least as far as I know. And I don't go to arcades often. It's all GameBox or online for me," he notes. "Probably another sign the rules are different."

"Sounds like it to me. I hear a little bit about consoles, and 'GameBox' sounds like a combination of two of the names I've heard. Does your world have a game company called Tobikomi? They're the makers of my game and Vanellope's."

"Nope." He could list all the companies that ever made games, so it's easy to say no that fast. "But we have lots of games like yours and like hers."

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