Your work here is done.
A huge crowd of metal fans are banging their collective heads to the
imagined music of Wretched Goat Broth, you've got a strange new coin,
and your monster friend is motioning for you to jump in and drive away
with him to whatever other video game challenges await. Better that you
play along with all of this, no pun intended. You hop into the driver's
side seat and floor it.
You drive down the road and the rough dirt gradually gives way to
asphalt. You're back in... some city. Though you can't say that you know
where exactly you are, you feel at peace. This drive is really helping
you relax. The wind whipping against your face just seems to caress your
problems away, and this whole trapped in a video game thing doesn't seem
quite so overwhelming. Looking over at the passenger's seat, you see
that Ruggy has fallen asleep. He's almost adorable, and having the top
down is significantly reducing his smell. You silently hope that the
drive will never end, that you won't have to roll up on any unspeakable
horror in order to escape from this strange world, that you won't wind
up back in that basement plunking away at your computer while you fall
in and out of one mid-life crisis after another. A sight just caught in
your peripheral vision rouses you from your reverie:
The conspicuous sign
goes speeding past, and as you watch it go, you wonder if you maybe
should have stopped to investigate. Then again, maybe it was just there
to indicate that you should drive past it to the actual goal. You turn
your eyes back to the road and see that isn't the case:
Panic. You slam on the
brakes, but it's obvious that you aren't going to stop in time. As you
bow your head to pray for some kind of deliverance, you notice that
there are a bunch of lettered buttons on the steering wheel. Huh, wonder
how long those have been there. You're not feeling particularly picky
right now, so you start furiously mashing the whole panel. Not long
after the first mash, your seat springs upward as though propelled by
rocket engines, or at least some souped-up pneumatic jacks. You go up
and up, and you can see something gleaming in the distance just over the
top of the wall. That must be the next goal! You're almost over the
wall! You're gonna make it! You're gonna...
