Wally Bear and the NO! Gang
This is a fictional joke story written by DaveTheUseless. Don't take it seriously, fellas.
I bet you've heard of the war on drugs. I think that's an indie rock band. More importantly, though, it was a sociogovernmental response to the rise in drug-related crime and consumption in the USA. This resulted in the spending of millions upon millions of dollars to counter the problem, with mixed results. As part of the process, First Lady Nancy Reagan to trademark the slogan "Just say no!".
I was sitting alone in a crackhouse apartment. I had no jobs and no friends and nobody loved me. I couldn't afford cocaine strips, so I was snorting pixie stix candy and pretending it was the real stuff, while blasting the Pixies' Surfer Rosa on my 1980s-style boombox. As it turned out, 'Just Say No!' had failed me...or, perhaps, I had failed it. That was when the doorbell rang.... It must have been Johnny, to drop off my daily supply of high fructose fake blow.
As it turned out, it was something else entirely: it was an 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System cartridge. I put on my Buddy Holly glasses so that I could read the title on the spine: Wally Bear and the NO! Gang. Turns out they made a game out of the war on drugs, in order to help or indoctrinate young minds, or whatever. Having no plans that night--or any other night for that matter--I dug my toploader NES out of my closet, + prepared for vintage gaming bliss.
... Or so I thought. The title screen loaded up, and... something impossible happened. Instead of 8-bit sprite graphics, it was a picture of a superrealistic looking bear, w/ his head stuck in a honeypot! The pot had a marijuana leaf on it!
I was confused. My favorite politician of all-time, libertarian presidential candidate Gary Richardsonbergopoulos, taught me that pot never killed anybody... but what was a pro-pot message doing in an anti-drug children's video game?
I continued playing the game. The titular character, a flamboyant skateboard riding bear named Wally Bear, was telling his parents that he was going to go out skateboarding. They asked him where at, and there was a lot of pausing, and ellipses on the screen. I was alarmed at what Wally did next. In all capital letters, he screamed back at his parents, "I'M GOING TO GO BLOW SOME DUDES IN A MOVIE THEATER ALLEY FOR CRACK, OKAY!?". Then... he ran out of the house. The game's introduction scene was over.
The first level featured the player skateboarding down the street... but that wasn't the whole story. Throughout the whole stage, you had to skate really fast because the narcotics cops were chasing you! My heart skipped a beat when one of the cop cars sped up and caught me. I was given a game over... but that wasn't the worst part. The game changed over into a game over sequence in which Wally Bear was stripped down and... cavity searched. "Fucking bear", the cop's dialog read. Then he grabbed Wally's skateboard, and he...he rammed it up Wally Bear's furry asshole. Highly realistic gore engulfed my CRT television screen. What was the meaning of all of this!?
I went to restart the game, and the intro sequence was the same, except for one key difference. Wally, instead of being a bear... was now a bear skeleton.
To recap: I was playing a retro video game in which sunglass wearing, skateboard riding bears must outchase the police to play the harlot for drug money. I guess that made sense... if the game was unauthorized. It must have been unauthorized. I put the hacked NES cartridge away, and prepared for my 5PM bedtime. ...But that was when I heard a knock on my door. ...Johnny? "Come in!", I hollared.
Yeah, it was my friend, Johnny (I know I said I had no friends earlier, but I was high off the stix).. He wore an 'As I Lay Dying' t-shirt, and was carrying a 7-pack of Schlitzbeer. Also, he was a skeleton. "How's the game going?", he asked me quizzacally. "It isn't", I said. "Get it going", he said, and he tossed me a beer. 3 1/2 cans later, I was drunk enough to put the game back on. I let out a drunken scream when I got back to the intro, however...
Wally was still a skeleton! This game didn't have battery backup! That, and I didn't hold reset when I turned power off. "They say that once you're saved, you always are, forever", Johnny added, holding up a copy of the Book of Mormon. Maybe I'd have time for theology later. I guided skull n' bones Wally through Stage 1 without being penetrated by the narcs again. I celebrated with another beer. Beer. Bear. Whatever. I high-fived Johnny, and his bony hand fell off. He picked it up and smited me with it. We didn't care. We were drunk. We sang Creed's "My Sacrifice" together before proceeding to Level 2. It was a Subway stage in which Ricky the Rat threw heroin pills at you. Seemed like a waste of perfectly good heroin...
Hopping over pills and cartoon rats proved to be a cinch, given the game's smooth gameplay mechanics and controls. I laughed my way through the thing until I got to the end of the level. But then, I... I was shocked out of my mind! There, sitting on the last seat of the subway train... was an 8-bit version of a naked man wearing glasses. After squinting really hard, I realized who it was: it was Jared Fogle, from Subway! "Eat at Joe's!", he exclaimed! I tried to skateboard past him, but it was no use. A boss fight began. I had Wally jump on Jared's head with his skateboard, and... I screamed. Jared exploded. Highly realistic gore poured out of Jared's body, and someway, somehow, it shot right out of the TV set and into my mouth! I turned around and looked at Johnny. He was now stained blood red from Jared's exploded corpse. ...I never did like Jared. Yeah, he was a horrible man, but that didn't mean I wanted to eat his corpse! "I wonder how many grams of fat that was", Johnny snickered. I never wanted top eat Subway again...
Drunk off beer and blood, I continued through the game. My reaction time was a little off, and I died a few times. Thankfully, the game was now letting me restart those levels, instead of giving me game overs. I wondered why, but I was drunk, so fuck if I know. My mom called and asked if we had dinner. I told her we had subway, and I hung up the phone. I got a death from being attacked by a bird, not too long after that. 'BE NICE TO YOUR MOTHER, YOU STUPID FUCK', the game said in all capital, blood red letters. To my horror, I realized that this game was somehow watching me. But how? And why me? When I finally made it to the movie theater level... things got even weirder.
Do you remember those old guys from the Muppets, Statler and Waldorf? Well, there was a bunch of them, and they were... well... they were shitting off the second floor balcony. I tried skateboarding over the feces, but it was molten like lava, turning a fiery red as it hit the ground and incinerating everything in its path. As I sped my way toward the end of the stage, I could finally see the sign with the name of the film on it. "Titanic: The Poor People Version.' I practically lost my mind when I heard 2 entirely audible adult male voices emerge from my TV set: "We didn't even get to watch the thing!", shouted one of the old men. "Yeah! We were dead before the shit even stank!", shouted the other. ... Dead? Regardless, I rejoiced, knowing that I had almost beaten the game! Eyeing a couple of dudes wearing punk rock t-shirts and sporting green and red mohawks, I smiled. And smiled. And smiled wider. I was going to beat the game!! I smiled really, really, really wide... but only to be... denied my victory. Just before I could skateboard my way to 8-bit retro video game glory...
The cartridge exploded. And I don't mean 'caught on fire'. I mean... it exploded. And I don't mean pins and plastic, or anything like that.... My crackhouse apartment living room! It was covered in shit! It stunk to high heaven as it exploded out of the toploader NES and engulfed Johnny. There was now a brownish-reddish skeleton, smothered in Jared Fogle's organ juice and Statler and Waldorf's repugnant excrement. "Hurgfuffgigglefluffxayhwzxyg!", Johnny screamed. But it was no use. He was choking.
Johnny... was dead...
Weeks had passed. Then months. I gave Johnny a proper burial in the backyard of an abandoned Denny's. Afterward, I decided to head on in and grab a bite, briefly forgetting that it was theoretically abandoned. Turned out there was a blonde-haired lady inside, tending bar, even though there was no one else around. "Could I get a white Russian?", I inquired. "You can get a one-way ticket to psychological hell", the lady replied, Wiedling a knife. She chased me around the restaurant like a bat out of hell, trying to cut off my dick. The hot pursuit ended when a breaking news report interrupted a really boring 49ers football game...
"We interrupt this broadcast with a special news bulletin. Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Richardsonbergopoulos has announced that he his suspending his campaign, after scandal has revealed that during his tenure as New Mexico governor, he had ordered the tossing of the lifeless bodies of his political opponents into the desert. Fox News has learned the exact location of the incidents, but upon further investigation, found nothing but cartridges of the classic Atari 2600 game 'E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial'.
At that moment, something inside of me snapped. I ran out of the restaurant and hopped into my Ford pickup truck. The blonde-haired girl went back to watching football and Fox News and tending bar to no one. My truck had no GPS, but I imagined that I set it to the New Mexico desert from the news. Not having any clue how to actually get there, I ate of the peyote plant in hopes of finding guidance through my spirit animal.
I was sucking on the pricklies of a cactus when I finally saw it. It... it was Wally Bear! "You should've known better than to do drugs, Benji.", be began. "The only high you shall enable yourself to receive is on life. And on taco bell and mountain dew products." I got really pissed off and flipped Wally Bear the bird. What was that skateboard-riding flamboyant doing, lecturing me on how to live my life? "Johnny's dead, Benji. But he didn't die months ago. It was back in high school, when you snorted lines and made a pact to jump off the Springfield Gorge. You chickened out." He smiled. Really wide. Really sinister-like. He looked... disheveled. "But he didn't." Hmm. Strangely, I didn't feel very apologetic. I mean, this is why I vote libertarian. If people choose to hang themselves with the rope that liberty allows them, well... "Your lack of a conscience is... unbearable to me, Benji."
I'd like to tell you that I found the New Mexico desert... but I didn't. Wally Bear turned me into a prophet. Turns out his game got buried along with E.T., and the souls of dead politicians merged with the games to create haunted cartridges. Johnny was one such politician. He gave me the cartridge because he hated me for what I did to him back in high school. He became a corrupt politician in the afterlife. It was all part of a plot to get back at me. And he died. There was only one way to make things right. I sold my leftover crack to a kid for his skateboard, and I started riding my way. My way toward the Springfield Gorge...
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