Barks and Bytes - A Sonic Boom Story

Chapter 9 - Now What?

Returning to present day...

"Now I remember," Sonic pointed out with surprise. "I saved Tails from those bullies, who became the Lightning Bolt Society later on."

A weeping Knuckles wiped his tears and sloppily blew his nose with a napkin. "That was the most...deep story I've ever heard!"

"Don't you mean the 'deepest?'" corrected Amy, with narrowed eyes.

"I don't care, I just want to cry!"

Then, Zooey started to confess, "I guess I shouldn't have been so hard to Tails in the first place. He's a sweet guy, and maybe I should've understood him a little more."

"No wonder why Blades of the Rebellion meant so much to him!" exclaimed Sonic. "It paid tons of homage to his past: his friends, The Odd Guardians, and messages about diversity and equality." All of a sudden, he began to think. "So, I think it's time I give Tails a little hand, despite how he kept this part-time game-making job as a secret for the most part."

"I could help out, too," responded Amy. "I have a Talk-A-Lot account, so maybe I could check out what had happened with him recently. Let's do this."

While Sonic and Amy began to use their computers to investigate the cyberbullying scandal, at home, I decided to move on from Blades of the Rebellion and instead play other games that I had, like Brain World, 4096, Sevens, Construct-a-Chain, and Too Wrong to Be Right. As it shocked me, all of the those games turned buggy and glitchy until they became completely unplayable, similar to what happened to my game. "Wait a minute, what just happened?" For each game, I rapidly tapped every button on my keyboard. "Not a single one of these are working!" I groaned after that. I couldn't figure out what was really going on exactly, neither could my online friends when I called them:

"Do you have a minute, guys?" I asked. "I wanted to play some other games, but..."

"Let me guess, all the other games are getting infected?" answered Willabelle. "Felt your pain when I tried to play Mighty Bomb, only for it to close down. Unfortunately, we couldn't find the cause of the situation, despite our hard inspection!"

"You know," replied Mic, with his eyes closed, "It was bad enough that someone, whose name starts with 'T' and ends with 'A,' made another account to re-submit those ghastly recolors of Tails' drawings...and even used them to sell T-shirts."

"I'm telling you, that girl is an IDIOT!" yelled Tim, with his mouth wide open.

"You know what, I had it!" I scoffed, banging my desk. "Everything we've done has been hopeless. Someone stole and defaced my art, our game got incurably buggy, I lost Zooey, I failed to attend my concert, I had to give every fan-turned-troll refunds, and now, this! Let's give up already. Now, I'm just going to watch TV to finally get my mind of this wild goose chase. Tails out."

"Whoa, you still haven't been yourself, Tails," informed Tom with widened eyes. "I know you're so upset, but keep in mind that we all have our bad times, right?"

On the television, while slouching, I was hoping to watch the Comedy Chimp Show, but I stood up straight when as a surprise, what I got were the breaking news, hosted by Soar the Eagle:

"Attention, all gamers! At all costs, check your computers for any form of malware. Despite the support of the viral Optimizing-Omelette, there have been numerous complaints of every PC game being overwhelmingly infected by some powerful virus from a particular unknown source! Also, being connected to the Blades of the Rebellion recall, the Talk-A-Lot admins have been taking an investigation and discovered that many fans' accounts have been hacked by a crazy cybercriminal, who used all those stolen accounts to harass the creator, making it seem like if those fans were being particularly obnoxious. In all, this has been a troubling event when it comes to gaming." Visuals had included footages of various games glitching as well as images of the real users' complaint letters to various game developers and screenshots of the hackers' comments on the social networking service."