Cabinet Man vs. the New Kids on the Rock

Part one: prologue

    The Pinball Wizard arcade looked a whole lot different at night. The overhead lights, the many neon signs that decorated the walls, even the screens of the other games--all were turned off, powered down to conserve energy. And, for the record, it wasn't as if Cabinet Man terribly minded that practice. He'd programmed himself to see in the dark, after all. No, it wasn't the darkness that bothered him, but the empty silence… especially in contrast to how bustling the place had been earlier.
    Cabinet Man surveyed the empty arcade to make sure that no humans were around to see before letting his screen light up and extending his metal limbs. With an echoey mechanical groan, he began doing his nightly stretches: twisting his arms, shaking his wires around, flashing his screen in different colours, twirling his joystick around. A sense of profound relief washed over him. After sitting still all day, waiting in vain to be played, it felt so good to finally move around again. The only ache that his stretches couldn't diminish was the persistent growl of hunger in his stomach.
    "Whatever happened to the good old days, zzt, when people came from miles away just for me?" he sighed aloud. "The championship qualifiers, and nobody bothered to so much as look at me…"
    "H-hello? Who's there?!"
    The sound of a distressed voice cut through Cabinet Man's melancholy and snapped him to attention.
    "What's this I hear, zzt?" he chirped, screen lighting up with excitement. "Some poor lost maintenance man wandering around… my luck is finally picking up, bzzt!"
    He bounded across the arcade in the direction of the voice as fast as his metal limbs could carry him, already beginning to salivate at the thought of sinking his teeth into whatever poor sap had wandered in. However, to his confusion, he didn't see any humans. Instead, he saw a dim light coming from the other end of the arcade--the screen of another game? Puzzled, he approached the lit-up screen. What he saw upon reaching it stopped him in his tracks.
    There, upon the screen of what had been a normal non-sentient game just a few hours prior, was the pixelated image of a human in a suit, visibly distressed, soundlessly pounding his fists against the screen. When Cabinet Man approached him, the suit-wearing man's eyes widened.
    "What… what in god's name are you?" he gasped.
    "I could say the same to you--I've never seen you around here before." That was only half true; Cabinet Man was well acquainted with all the other machines in the arcade, including this particularly unpopular one. But he had never seen any of the other games come to life before! Trying not to let his screen glow too brightly at the prospect of finally having a companion after all these years, he asked, "What's your name, zzt? How'd you get here?"
    The pixelated man frowned in a way that somehow managed to come across as unmistakably haughty, despite the limits of the graphics system. "I… why, I'm Mitch Dollarton the third. Surely you've heard of me?"
    "Can't say that I have," Cabinet Man admitted. "But if you're an arcade machine now, then it doesn't matter who you were as a human, zzt! It's not like stuffing your organs into an arcade cabinet is a decision you make lightly. It's an irreversible procedure!"
    "Organs?" Dollarton spoke the word as though it were a curse, which Cabinet Man might have been mildly offended by were he not so intrigued. "Wha--no! That's not what happened at all! Surely you were watching, earlier, when those filthy plebeians cheated--"
    Cabinet Man's eyes reflexively narrowed at that. "Cheated?"
    "Yes, those lowlifes had the nerve to accuse me of cheating simply for having the means to be well-practiced at the game," Dollarton huffed. Onscreen, his little pixelated avatar tugged at his suit jacket collar. "And then they went ahead and… and entered the game, somehow! It was preposterous."
    "I hate cheaters," Cabinet Man buzzed, scowling as he remembered all the scoundrels who used to try to hack into him and mess around with his circuitry back when he was popular.
    "Even my own line bouncer turned against me," Dollarton continued, his haughty tone taking on an undertone of self-pity and resentment. "And then that--that ridiculous man in those garish street clothes zapped me into this machine."
    "Ohh…" Despite this fellow's vaguely unpleasant attitude, Cabinet Man couldn't help but feel a little sorry for him as he realized what had happened. "So you're saying you don't want to be an arcade machine?"
    "Yes! I mean no! I mean--of course I don't want to be an arcade machine," Dollarton griped. "Why would anyone want to be an arcade machine?"
    "Speak for yourself, zzt," Cabinet Man buzzed indignantly. "But either way, too bad. Like I said, it's an irreversible process."
    "You mean… I'm going to be trapped like this forever?"
    "Hey, it's not so bad if enough people play you." No sooner had the words left his speaker than Cabinet Man remembered which game machine he was talking to. He may not have been played much since the 80s, but this poor machine… he couldn't remember seeing a single person play it since its installation. "Hmm. Well, it looks like you're in for a rough time."
    "Isn't there anything you can do to help?" Dollarton pleaded, clasping his 8-bit hands together and blinking plaintively. "If not to get me out of this godforsaken contraption, then…" Suddenly, his screen flickered like a flash of lightning on a stormy night, and the image of the sad pleading man changed to that of a man with devil horns and a devilish grin to match. "Then at least to punish those cheaters who put me in this position in the first place?"
    Cabinet Man thought again of the punks who used to come in and try to tamper with his wiring. Not one of them had gotten away with it. His stomach growled louder, hungry for a return to those glory days of human consumption.
    "I love punishing cheaters, zzt! And I haven't tasted human flesh in far too long…" He grinned, screen glowing bright with excitement. "Who do you want me to punish, zzt?"
    Dollarton laughed, with a wicked glint in his tiny pixelated eyes. "I'm glad you asked. They're these three miserable little urchins who call themselves the New Kids on the Rock…"