gonnawreckit | 100m: I'm gonna wreck it! [Action]

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100m: I'm gonna wreck it! [Action]

[Action (1)]

[This nine-foot tall, barefoot giant of a man finds himself waking up in any old house or apartment, maybe even in the forest. Completely oblivious to the pink wings on his back for now, he instead comes to attention and begins looking around in confusion.]

What? Where's... No! I can't have been taken to another game. I... I was right there! I was gonna save- I... [And his voice goes soft.] Vanellope...

[His eyes are close for a moment, mournfully. When they open, they're filled with hurt anger. And his unusually massive fists are soon put to work... wrecking his immediate surroundings in an angry tantrum, while he shouts loudly. He could keep going until there's nothing left. He will hold himself back from hurting actual people, but he will at least shove aside those who get in his way at emotional heights.]

[Action 2]

[Later on, after being calmed from his tantrum, Ralph trudges through town, defeated and feeling ashamed. First day in a new game and already he's been playing the bad guy. So he makes his way through the item and clothing shops, finding one item in the former which gives him a strong, bittersweet feeling, and then he makes his way out of the village. He only stops at Good Spirits for a round of root beers, trying to keep to himself. That evening, with a sack of bricks over his shoulder, he seeks a nice stump to sleep against, in between bouts of the freezing rain.]

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[Some jelly drips down from his mouth as he speaks.]

You don't understand. It's all part of our programming. A game needs a good guy, and a bad guy for him to fight, so gamers will want to play! Felix is the good guy, and I'm the bad guy. There's no use fighting the program. That'll get us all unplugged. [He shuffles a bit uncomfortably.] But, uh, I may have asked some questions only a little like yours about the way I was treated after hours...

Your...programming?

[Gamers? Getting unplugged? Yeah, she has absolutely no idea what he's talking about here.]

[He blinks for a moment, remembering some of the reactions his attempts at explanations got earlier.]

Yeah. I mean... we're video games. The actual characters in video games. You know that, right, kid? The games that you play on video screens.

[She shakes her head.]

Nope! Not at all. What else can you tell me about it?

Geez. How do you even have fun? Well a game's like... you have a screen where all the characters are and you have controls. You control one character and do what you can to win the game. In Fix-It Felix Jr., you play as Fix-It Felix to repair the building and stop the bad guy. Me. So we all act according to our roles we're programmed for, so that no one will think the game's out of order. Since... the game runs on electricity. If the game gets unplugged? It's game over. Anyone inside the game will go down with it, and anyone who escapes will still be homeless.

I see...[Except no, she's still really confused about all this. But! She will roll with it.]

But if you're all supposed to be part of the game, how would you even escape?

There's still a way to leave. Every game has a tunnel going through the wires that you go through to leave the game. That leads to Game Central Station. It's kind of a hub connecting all the different games in the arcade. Most people leave their games after hours just to socialize with characters from other games already. And homeless characters are stuck there.

Well, if there's a lot of different friends they can make there...it can't be so bad!

[Even if not having a home, a place to belong, sounds hard.]

Oh, they can still get by and stuff. But it's no way to make a living. They have to live off of whatever comes their way, and they don't even have a stump to sleep against. I do try to bring them a cherry from Pac-Man when I can.

[Ha! She's got you now. Rapunzel grins.]

See? I knew you weren't so bad! That's a very kind thing to do!

That - that doesn't count, okay? Maybe I can do some little things like that right, sure, but any other time I try to be one of the good guys? One of the heroes? I only wind up being even worse.

Maybe...maybe you just had an unlucky streak! Look - why don't you tell me about your dream?

[He raises an eyebrow.]

My - my dream?

Yes! [Oh, you are in for it now, Ralph.] Your dream! You've got a dream, don't you?

You are still barking up that wrong tree, Goldie. Anything like a dream that I had? It's gone. Dead.

[Oh, Ralph. Rapunzel is giving him a look to make it clear that she doesn't by that for a second.]

Come, now. Everybody has a dream! Even if they forget about it, or think it isn't really possible...everyone has one. So what's yours?

[He huffs and slumps in his seat. Then he puffs himself up before he starts to ramble.]

Alright, sister! You wanna know? Let me walk you through my dreams as they happened. My first dream? Was to be the good guy. A hero. After 30 years of having to act like the bad guy and then get treated like the bad guy after hours, I was sick of it. I wanted respect, I wanted to be able to go to parties and eat cake and hang out in the penthouse and not sleep in garbage! You think that's easy? You think it's so simple? It's not!

[He slams a fist on the table, hard enough to shake it.]

You need a medal to prove you're a hero. Bad guys don't win medals and they never should. I left my game, and I sneaked into another game to get a medal. It worked, in a way! I got the medal. I thought I was so smart, I thought I was a hero already. But then I wound up falling into another game and losing my medal, and it only got worse from there. Oh, and to skip ahead a bit? When I went back to the game, I did get to stay in the penthouse with my medal. Except that the game was out of order because not only had I been gone for too long, but my game's hero went missing trying to find me to fix up my mess!

[To her credit, Rapunzel does sit and listen to his whole rant, even if she looks a bit startled when he hits the table. She doesn't interrupt him though, intent on hearing him out.

All this about needing medals to be a hero...maybe it was a cultural thing. But she didn't believe it, and she had to try.]

There's nothing wrong with being a good person. [She asserts.] Even if people think you're a bad one. But you don't need a medal to be a hero. You just need to do the right things.

Maybe you're right. [A grunt.] Except that doing these "right things"? They've only become wrong. Because that's all bad guys can do. Let me tell you about what happened in the game where I lost my medal. Sugar Rush. A game for kart racing that's full of all kinds of candy. This... [His face softens as he remembers her.] this kid, she took my medal and used it to enter a race because she didn't want to be just a glitch anymore...

[She tries to follow along. Even if references to things like 'kar racing' go completely over her head.

But she gets the feeling there's something fundamental she needs to figure out before he proceeds.]

A glitch?

Right. A glitch is... a part of the game that doesn't work right. When the code's messed up. It makes the character... fizz in and out. Glitches are problems for games, because... because it can make people think the game is broken if they see one. So a glitch can get a game unplugged. [His face droops, as if reliving something horrible.] And... and it's the worst for a glitch, because... they can't leave the game. No matter how hard you try, you can't get a glitch outsider of her game. She'd... go with the rest of the game.

[Still a bit hazy, but she understands...mostly.]

So...so why did she want to be in the race so badly? [It must have been a lot to take his medal like that. It sounded pretty important to him.]

She... she was kind of like me in a way. I was tired of being treated like a bad guy. She was tired of being treated like a glitch. All the other people in her game... they shunned her and made fun of her for being a glitch. She lived alone in some garbage at the Diet Cola Mountain. So she took my medal and used it to enter the race because she... she believed in herself. That she'd win and gamers would want to play as her even if she had a glitch. Dumb kid. Got me believing that, too. [He shakes his head.] There's more to it than that, but I didn't find out until later.

So did she race? Did she win?

[Because she has a bad feeling about this. But she wants to know.]

She did race. And she... she never made it to the finish line. [He shakes his head before continuing.] Thing is... the kid convinced me to make a kart for her, and she loved it even though it was a piece of junk. At first, I thought we really had a chance. That she could be a race, and I'd get my medal back. That's when King Candy came knocking - he told me all the horrible things that could happen from a glitch being in the game. That it could cost her her life. And he gave me back my medal. So I did what... what looked like the right thing. I wrecked her kart.

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