Let's Hit The Road 2 - A Not So Serious House
#2 of Chronicles of FinalGamer 4 - Hit The Road
With the Freelance Police and their captured criminal now out of their forced self-hugging, the three "patients" endeavour to navigate deeper into the mockery of an asylum, only to find a more uncanny relation to the infamous madhouse that might not have been intentionally made upon its construction.
Sam & Max are copyrighted to Steve Purcell, FinalGamer to me.
The corridors seemed to stretch into eternity, with very little indication as to where they went, like a labyrinth of madness. Literally even. Their first objective was to get their clothes and weapons back, Sam still robed in a straitjacket along with James. The raptor tagged along, seeing as the ones he could trust were the two of them, despite their intentions to arrest him. "Uhhh guys," began James to break the silence, "are you...really going to try and put me in jail?" "Well of course," said Sam, "you ARE a murderer." "Look, seriously, I killed a guy who deserved it, and you're never finding the body, it's in another dimension and everything! How can you put me in court without any evidence!?!" "Ohhh we can try." "If we can sue people for protecting their own homes," said Max with gusto, "then we can damn well put you in the chair!" "Oh wonderful. The only reason I'm with you two is you're not crazy...well at least one of you isn't." "Sam, can't we just beat 'im a li'l to make him shut up?" "No way Max, we need to keep each other well protected!" "Ya mean with this?" Max swiftly put his hand into his throat with a surprising non-gagging motion, widening out the throat in a rather disturbing way. They could see him groping around the insides of his oesophagus, eventually seeming to reach into his own stomach and pull out his amazingly flexible arm, to reveal a wet Luger. A slim dangerous-looking antique pistol. James was both grossed out and surprised by this. "Wh-wha-how did you do that!?!?" Max giggled crazily. "Just a li'l trick I learnt from carnies." "I guess they had to give us something for bringin' back their sasquatch," said Sam. "And I even learnt who John Muir is!" "Who?" "...I forget. Whatever, let's git outta here!"
With Max in front as the only armed ally, they passed cell after cell after barred door and the odd out-of-place wooden desk with various papers laid upon each. One straight corridor lead to a large room. A chair sat in the middle, wired to a generator, the cables snaking out like Medusa's hair. "Uhhh I thought this was an asylum," said James, "not death row." "Seems they still use some of the good ol' electroshock therapy," replied Sam. He shrugged with indifference as they searched the room for a further way out. A stairway was in the corridor they came from, but it only offered an office and the balcony above the room. Soon there came a horrendous scraping clang. "Hey Sam!" Max's shout out came from the same direction. "I found some airducts!" "Good work Max! Airducts always offer a viable escape route to the outside world." The three crawled in with Max at the lead who kept his gun ready to fire. Sam was in the middle and James was at the back. Normally I like to be in the middle of two guys, thought the raptor to himself with a snigger. "Something funny back there my Cretaceous killer?" asked the canine curiously. "Oh no, no, just remembered something I saw on TV long ago." "Really now? What show was it?" "OOH, was it Spongebob?" Max shouted excitably back to his friend and their suspect, "I love that guy!" "Max, the only reason you like Spongebob is the actual quality of effort the show has in a wasteland of animation that exists in our time, neutered by political correctness and the abandonment of their audience for the internet and video games." "Yeah I know, that's why he's the only good thing on!" "Or in the case of Nickelodeon, the ONLY thing on." Confused evermore, James just let the two talk away to distract themselves as they reached the other end of the airduct, sadly not finding the outside but a much wider corridor that somehow seemed familiar. "Did we...get passed through here?" said the raptor looking around at the moonlit walls. "I think so." "Then that must mean an elevator's nearby right?" "Smart thinkin'...why you helping us anyway?" "Same reason why I'm following you, I want to get out of here. And let's be honest, you guys have one good gun between you but, you can't maul someone real good up close." "Well I can't no, but my li'l buddy here's a furry chainsaw." "Sometimes I make toothpicks out of human bone!"
Everything the rabbit did freaked James out slightly. Especially his smile. The smile of a shark, livid with razor sharp teeth. They walked on, seeing at one end a larger room with some sort of control office, sitting in the middle of the hall among walkways leading to it. The other end had a huge well-secured door of very thick steel and several large bolts tightly fastened. With no way to go but one, they headed to the larger room. A skylight was far above them, too far for any of them to reach. Several airducts were in the place as well as the main many-windowed control center of several desks and computers. Heading into the central part, they tried to turn on the computers, and were soon greeted with a startup sound and a logo of four multicoloured squares. "What the-It's Windows XP!" asked Sam. "What?" said Max with outrage. "They didn't update to Windows 7 yet?" "Seems so." "Great, it's like a British elementary school! Next thing yanno we'll be using FLOPPIES!" "Now now Max let's not go overboard. Hey kid, you good with computers?" "Uhhhh I used them a li'l?" said James reluctantly. He wasn't sure how his own era's computers were compared to this. But he walked forwards to try and open up the interface protected by a password. It seemed simple enough, turn it on, type something in. "Right, password, any suggestions?" "Uhhh...parcheesi!" "...wwwwwhat?" "Guess not..." "Well, it's gotta be something easy to remember for everyone using it here right? So...it must be to do with the asylum itself." "Well we got this clue here on the right." Sam pointed to the small question mark beside the password entry bar. "Wha...oh right." The clue to the password popped up on the side to say "the one thing this place doesn't have." All three of them wryly grinned at each other and said in unison: "Sanity." With that, they opened the interface easily, making James throw his arms up in disbelief. "Holy crap, that was the password?! Seriously?!? What a fucking moron, who set this shit up!?!?!" "I guess some things'll never change." "Pfft, so you think. In my day passwords were a little bit more difficult than blatantly easy riddles." "Hate to tell ya kid, but yer too young to say 'in my day'." "...riiiiight."
Technically he was right. Hell if you wanted to consider the fact he was sometime in the early 21st century and he was from another world's 36th century, he was INCREDIBLY young. Of course nobody did consider that, because that would be stupid. Nevertheless they opened up the main program, combining the little computer knowledge they knew, and eventually found one interesting picture. "Gadzooks," cried out Sam with cheer, "a topographical reference sheet of the mental institution!" "...you mean a map of the asylum?" "Yep. Seems to be of all the floors too." "Well, uhhh can we take it with us? Gotta be a printer connected or something." "Ooh there is, look!" Sure enough in a separate room of the central housed cubicles, Max found a printer, which they hoped was connected as James clicked on Print. They awaited the smooth whirring sounds of printing, the map soon within their hands as they took the few sheets of paper along, clipped together with a paperclip they found. "Awesome, we can get out of this place!" "Not so fast my Prehistoric perpetrator, we gotta figure out the best route out of this place. And I get the feeling some of these vents are a tad too high for us to handle." "Yeaaaah, I don't think we can handle those either. I guess we have to head through the corridors again?" "Looks like it. We also have to head here to get our stuff back." Sam pointed on the map to a room labelled Storage, which was two floors up by elevator. The three then walked through the place trying to find the elevator shaft. After another walk through some larger corridors that seemed to go in a circle, they reached the elevator. "So..." began James as he saw the looming size of the elevator shaft itself, "Where's the button?" A wide chasm of beams and rafters reached high above them. The room itself was huge to begin with, wide enough to hold a battalion. "Uhhhh..." Sam walked to what would normally be the elevator entrance, and pushed a rather inconspicuous button. A grinding and a whirring came from above. They smiled softly at the sound of it working, only to frown when the grinding turned into a horrendous crunching sound. "Oooh, I think Mr. Lifty has a tummy bug!" piped up Max cheerfully. Soon the crunching turned even louder, until a screeching snap split their ears and they saw an ominous square shadow falling towards them. "GET DOWN!" James rushed the two detectives to the door they came from as the elevator slalomed into the floor with a horrendous crash, some of the metal splintering into the walls around the room, various parts clanging off the walls and crunching between things. As the dust settled around the now permanently out of order lift, Sam quipped: "I guess somebody didn't read the weight limit." "In a country like this," addex Max, "they oughta make these things stronger!" "Pffft whatever," scoffed James, "we're still going up whether this place wants us to or not!" The raptor kept his determination strong as he looked up the ruined shaft, trying to see if there was a way they could navigate upwards.
"You guys know how to climb at all?" "Sure, me an' Max went climbing in the jungles once, we can handle this." "Well, if you say so...wanna go up first or shall I?" "Ahhh I see what yer tryin' to do here bud, you ain't getting away from us THAT easy. I'll go first, then you, then Max, keep ya with us at all times." "Whatever." And with that, Sam bravely grabbed onto the first broken support beam and lifted his way up with James saying: "At least you're wearing pants this time." "They were in the laundry-unghh...Max spilt some of his ant queen juice on it." "I thought you'd make a good mate Sam," replied the rabbit, "how else was I supposed to convince her?" "Normally you give a girl some flowers or chocolate first." "Ohhh Sam, yer so old-fashioned, in this day and age you just waltz up to anyone ya want and it's yay or nay." "Oh totally," said James, supporting the rabbit. "The dates I had, I never used flowers." "How about that girlfriend of yers?" "I gave her a fossil." "...now when you say fossil, you DO mean an ancient skeleton that you definitely didn't murder right?" This only made James scowl upwards at Sam, turning evermore irritated at this portrayal of him as some kind of sociopath. "Okay, YOU get a girlfriend, let HER get strangled to death and then tell me what the fuck YOU would do! CAN'T YOU FUCKING UNDERSTAND THAT!?!?" "Woah now, I was just sayin-" "Your wisecracking attitude is not helping here you fucking mutt! I'm trying not to gut you everytime you make a snide comment to me, especially about Daisy, but the last person who did that got their head fucking smashed into a table!" "Well you're not helping your case any!" "Why am I even going with you!?!? I can just run off right now and leave you morons to get killed here!" "Well I thought you had some kinda conscience," theorised Sam. "That maybe you wanted to get punished, some sorta persecution complex perhaps brought on by a series of confrontations with authority concerning events beyond your control." "Oh fuck you, you don't even know half the shit you're saying." "I certainly know more than you kid, and I know that murder isn't the way to go about avenging loved ones, but bringing them to justice is. That way the world'll know what they did, and why they deserve the punishment they deserve." "Oh I'm sorry, I misplaced my badge in my other pocket. Oh wait! I'M NOT THE FUCKING LAW!" "LLLAAAAAAAWWWW!"
Max's sudden shout of the word made the two stop and look at him weirdly. "Max...have you been watching Judge Dredd again?" "I can't help it, Sylvester Stallone talking like a stroke victim amuses me." He said this in a childish way, which made it all the more creepy with his leering grin. But it helped enough to distract the two as they said no more and climbed up the shaft, trying their best to keep themselves on the rafters. James had little problem scaling the place with his natural agility, and neither did Max with his bountiful toonish energy. Sam however found the going hard for his not so healthy body, and the two had to help him. "Come on Sam, you can do it," said Max with encouragement. "Uff...ungh..c-coming lil buddy...this is a li'l...trickier than...climbin' mountains...hhh...hhh...not as much...footholds." "Hey, if you could beat up McGruff, you can climb an elevator." "That cheatin' bastard had it coming and you know it." Eventually they managed to reach halfway up the shaft and find a suitable maintenance ledge to relax on, sighing together and seeing they still had some ways to go. James asked the canine detective: "You SURE the map says this is the only way?" "Has to be, there's no stairs in this place that head up to the upper floors. Only way we could get higher are the vents and we couldn't reach all of 'em." "Yeah...I wish we had like some kind of grapple hook or something but I guess you guys don't have one." "Nope, never occurred to us that we'd be scaling elevator shafts often." After a small break, they continued their ascent, carefully navigating each and every girder as well as around the maintenance ledges that offered some more freedom. "Phew, now we can finally see about getting our stuff back," said Sam as they managed to clamber to the ground level. Finding a vent that easily gave access past the security doors into yet another larger corridor stretching out before them, there lied only more security doors they had to navigate around. As they did so after the second similar corridor, they heard a voice shouting out: "CHAAANGE, YA GOT CHAAANGE!?!?!" "What the-" The voice came from down the hall, where they saw a rather scraggly looking young man with a short beard, short hair and glasses. He seemed to scream at himself in up to three various voices. "I WANTED TO HAVE SOME COFFEE BUT THE MAN DIDN'T LET ME PEE ON THE-" "SHUT UP, GOD!" "Listen, we can just sort this out if you-" "NO! FUCK YOU, FUCK THIS SHIT AND FUCK THAT ZOMBIE FISHERMAN!" The man was huddled in a corner rocking back and forth in a straitjacket, giggling to himself as he seemed to be arguing with nobody but himself.
A deep voice coming from above the group said: "Careful, he's dangerous." "Wh-who said that?" "He's armed, watch it." The voice lowered to add a warning. "Don't mention anything about nerds." "Why shouldn't we mention nerds?" asked Sam. And with that the young man stood up, showing he had a handgun underneath his clothes, giggling madly: "N-nerd? Ehehehe, nerd? ...NNNNNEEEEEEEEEEEERRRRRRRD!" And then he started shooting wildly in all directions with pure vitriolic fury, the raptor and detectives ducking behind cover until the inmate ran out of bullets several shots later. Max tried firing back two shots himself, but they missed wildly in turn. Soon however the armed inmate got a solid thwack to the back of his head by some small black-cloaked thing, knocking him out soundly to lay sprawled out on the floor. "Well...that was interesting," said Sam as the three got out of cover from behind a partition. "He wasn't so bad compared to the others here." The voice was still in the room and they couldn't see its owner. James walked over to the inmate's body to see the name on the tag. "Douglas Walker...huh, what's his problem?" "Dissociative Identity Disorder," said the mysterious strong voice with roughed edges. "Saw what he claimed was the worst movie that ever existed and had a mental breakdown in a movie theater, thought he was three people in one." "Jeez." Sam crossed his arms. "I wonder what that movie was, but how about we see you for a change, mysterious mister voice?" "I'm right here." The voice came from their feet. They saw a rather large bat gazing up at them, wearing some sort of black armoured suit that mimicked muscular human abs. A small yellow belt was around its waist, and a black cowl showed his eyes and covered his ears, which were neatly set into human-like ear sculpts to make Sam blurt out: "GAH, a large flying fox!" "A wha?!?" "Pteropus Vampyrus, native to Southern Asia, and wearin' a fruity getup if I may say." "No." The creature, though small and only reaching up to Max's knee, spoke with that same strong deep voice that resonated with strength and had the tone of grooved sandpaper. He also looked very solemn with his wings wrapped around his body like a cloak.
"Who are you?" asked James, to which the winged mammal replied: "I'm Manbat." "...what?" "I think you got the name a li'l mixed up." said Sam who was interrupted by the bat. "Who I am is of no concern to you. You are Freelance Police?" "Why yes we are! Finally, someone who recognises us!" "What happened?" "Well we were trying to arrest this guy for killing a cat, who he claims killed his girlfriend-" "He actually did you fucking faggot, so stop saying it like it's a claim." "-and he came from some other whole dimension apparently, so we thought that maybe he was pulling our leg and took him to what he called Crossville, which was here. But then the police there thought we were crazy and threw us all in here." "...I see." Manbat's reply was terse, as if disbelieving the entire thing while half-considering the three as actually insane. "You tryin' to get outta here too?" asked Sam. "More like trying to keep someone in." "Ahhh. Could it be some kind of nefarious supervillain with a twisted history of ultraviolence all carried off with a deliciously mischievous sadistic air, and has become synonymous with you as your true rival and perhaps more?" "...I can see why you're a detective." said Manbat with a slight sense of being impressed. "Takes one to know one, buddy," replied Sam with James adding: "And he forgot to wear pants when we went to Crossville." "LAUNDRY DAY. So, Mr Manbat, do you know how we can get outta here?" "I'll assist you, but once we get out onto the island grounds, you're on your own." "Fine by me." And with that, they followed the strange masked bat in their quest to escape the asylum. As they were lead onwards, the two detectives murmured between themselves. "Hey, Sam...this guy looks a li'l...familiar dontcha think?" "If you're saying he was inspired by a certain masked vigilante that is coincidentally connected to this crazy house and the reason why it was made, then yep." "I CAN hear you," said the masked vigilante. "Oh, sorry Mr. Manbat, it's just you look-" "I know." "...you uh...gonna explain that?" "It doesn't matter what I am. What matters is what I do for the good of the city." "Uhhh okay. Well, I'd be real happy if you could get us to where they took our stuff, then we can head outta here." "I know this place well. Stay close." They followed the flying fox dilligently throughout the asylum, with James wondering if the asylum was really this crazy, or if the entire world he was in was always like this. At the very least, he was being amused through it all, even if he didn't understand anything they were referring to. He wanted to get to somewhere peaceful in order to just warp out of the place again, or try to at least. He wondered why he hadn't done so before, regardless of his situation. But instead the raptor kept walking close to Sam and Max, for as much as they thought of him as a vile murderer and he thought them to be empty-minded inattentive morons, they were the only ones he could trust.