Family Feud
Starring Mime, Rhyme, Lifty, and Shifty

(note, there's quite a bit of dialouge in this episode, all in squeakense of course, but I'd prefer not to have to put down "in squeakense" each time someone says something! Don't worry though, the things I have in store will make reading it worth your while, hee hee)

Special Note: If you've read Show Must Go Fawn, then you know Rhyme's my character... plus, any future Rhyme fics you see posted... are all my full doing!

It starts in on the local arcade/happy fun time place. Mime and Rhyme are enjoying the sites, the fun, the whatnots... Mime with corndogs and popcorn and Rhyme with cotton candy and one of those hilarious novelty foam fingers (hee hee oh that Rhyme!)... when they see Lifty and Shifty playing one of the ticket-earning games and decide to say hi.
Of course, when they see Mime with his corndogs and Rhyme with his foam finger, they both laugh and say "What, the circus close down??". This gets Mime and Rhyme a little annoyed and Rhyme shoots back with "Heh, easy for you to say, you're on the run so much you never get to SEE the circus!". Lifty pipes in "Well, at least we're actual brothers!! You and Mime are merely cousins!!".

Rhyme says "Hey, just because we're cousins doesn't mean our bond is weaker... Heck, I bet our bond has made us both TOUGHER!" "Oh yeah? What do ya say to a little set of trials then? 3 simple challenges to see who's bond's made the other stronger?? Best 2 out of 3 wins!!"

Mime and Rhyme talk for a minute (or rather Mime motions and Rhyme talks) before turning to the raccoons and saying "You're on! All we need is a referee!" Suddenly, they see Disco Bear walking by, on his way to the Dance Dance Revolution machine most likely, and ask him to help them out.. Disco Bear starts to say no, but Giggles happens to walk by and, seeing Disco Bear with the kids, marvels at seeing his softer side and blows him a kiss... Enriched by the fact that he actually got a girl to blow him a kiss, he agrees to be the judge for the contest...

For the first challenge, they head towards the fun time place's gravitron machine, one of those machines that looks like a huge flying saucer from the outside, and tell Disco Bear how it works... All 4 of them, having already sampled some of the arcade's yummy treats, are gonna go on the gravitron ride and see which team can be the last to have one of the members lose their lunch. Disco Bear asks nervously if he has to go on too... Lifty asks "Why, do ya get sick on rides?". Disco Bear quickly replies "No! I just don't wanna get any puke on me!"

All 4 of them share a frustrated look before Rhyme says "No... I think they have a security cam inside the ride videotaping it to make sure no one gets high on more than the rides! (there's your lesson for today, kids, drugs are bad mmmkay?) We can use that..." As Disco Bear breathes a sigh of relief, Lifty, Shifty, Nutty, Toothy, and Petunia all board the ride, but Mime looks a little nervous... Rhyme senses his nervousness and calmly reassures him that he'll be by his side if he starts to feel queasy... With a deep breath, Mime heads onto the ride with Rhyme in tow and Disco Bear tells the ride operator, Cro-Marmot, to put it on the highest speed.

As we pan inside the ride and hear and see the device start to move we see how they're all set up... In this order, it's Mime, Rhyme, Nutty, Toothy, Lifty, Shifty, Petunia (this order will come to be very important very soon)... At first, the ride's slow and all 7 of them are enjoying the light feeling of being pulled against the padding (on the inside of the ride, there's massive padding). But soon, the ride kicks up and while 5 of them are still enjoying it and even humming the HTF theme song, 2 of them are starting to feel a little upset. As we look at Mime and Lifty, we see sweat starting to pour from their heads as their tummies start to rumble.

Soon the ride's in full motion and all 7 of them are being pulled tightly against the pads. Mime starts to feel really queasy and starts to gag, his face turning pale green, but Rhyme, whose time doing acrobatics has helped him grow a strong stomach, gently asks him to hold it in as long as he can... Toothy starts to laugh at seeing Mime's cheeks puffed out, but soon we see a candy apple fly right into his eye (He sure has a lot of eye injuries, don't he?). As he screams, we pan to Nutty, whose candy is loosened by the momentum starting to scream as all his candy "clothes" start flying into Toothy's head. The sucker stick gets embedded into his forehead, and Toothy screams in massive pain as he feels the stick touching his brain. But soon the candy cane flies right against his throat, pinning it against the padding and poor Toothy, helpless and unable to lift his arms to remove it, slowly and painfully feels the candy cane crush his windpipe, suffocating him to death.

Mime, who's already nauseated, sees Toothy's impaled head dripping with blood and can't hold it in anymore... The poor deer barfs right onto the column holding the top of the ride up and Shifty laughs loudly in victory. Rhyme just says "You did your best..." as Shifty jeers and taunts them. But soon he hears Lifty's nauseated groans and, looking out of the corner of his eye, realizes his face, pushed against the padding, is pointed right at Shifty and Petunia. Seeing his brother's cheeks bulge as vomit starts to build up, he screams "No... No... No!!" right before Lifty opens his mouth and barfs all over Shifty and Petunia (of course, the second Lifty opens his mouth, we pan to outside the ride and only hear the sounds of massive vomit splattering and Petunia and Shifty screaming bloody murder!)

Soon we see the ride finally starts to slow down, eventually coming to a stop. As the door opens up, we see Rhyme come out first, weary and clean. Then we see Mime come out, his shirt with a big barf stain on the front. Nutty and Lifty quickly follow, Nutty scared outta his wits by seeing his candy kill Toothy and Lifty wiping his mouth, groaning. But then Petunia and Shifty come out and we see why they screamed... They're both COVERED in Lifty's lunch and Petunia is going insane, shrieking "Unclean! Unclean!!" Disco Bear looks at Mime and Shifty and asks what the hell happened? Rhyme, the only one not worn out from the ride, simply says "Shifty won, but Lifty lost his cookies all over him"...

As they start to walk off, probably to get Shifty hosed down, Petunia, who's gone mad from being saturated in Lifty's puke, desperately looks for something to clean herself with. Then, seeing Cro-Marmot's ice block and so crazed she's unable to think clearly, runs to him and starts trying to scrape off the vomit onto the ice block! Of course, due to Cro-Marmot's ice block being so cold, her skin freezes against the ice and as she tries to walk away, she's thrown back against the ice, her pinetree necklace becoming embedded into the ice block. She tries desperately to pull herself free and soon manages to free her head and body from the block, leaving a large layer of her fur and skin stuck to the ice. But as she starts walk off, she feels something on her neck stopping her. Looking back, she sees the necklace is stuck into the block. Screaming like only someone who's truly lost their mind can, she takes a few steps backwards and charges forward, hoping to free her necklace... Instead we hear a sick slicing sound and see Petunia's eyes go wide as the string of the stuck necklace goes right through her neck, cutting off her head, and watch as her head falls forward, along with her decapitated body, leaving the necklace still in the block

A few minutes later...

After getting Shifty cleaned off, the 5 of them head to the next challenge location, a HUGE rock climbing wall just outside the arcade. They tell Disco Bear that the goal of this challenge is to be the first team to have one of it's members climb up to the very top and hit the buzzer, signifying the completion of the climb. Disco Bear asks how he'll be able to tell which one of them got up first and Shifty, still wringing vomit out of his fedora, mentions that the buzzers are each set with a different number of rings, corresponding to which number buzzer it is.

As Disco Bear nods in understanding and heads out of the climbing area to observe from a safe distance, the rock climbing supervisor, Lumpy (oh... no...), starts hooking the climbing apparatuses to the 4 Happy Tree Friends. Soon, they're set up in this order; Mime, Lifty, Rhyme, and Shifty (again, the order will come into play very soon). But as they start the climb up, we see that Lumpy forgot to fully hook up Rhyme's harness, leaving one of the roped hooks looped around his leg, and as Rhyme starts climbing up, the loop tightens and yanks Lumpy upside-down, causing him to be banged against the footholds as the deer continues to climb. Good thing for Rhyme, all his years of doing acrobatics and holding up partners has helped him build up the strength needed to climb even with Lumpy attached to his harness.

As Lumpy starts to be brought up the wall, we see Cuddles, the next one in line for the wall and noticing there's no supervisor, duck under the turnstile to the ride and go to put on a harness to climb up, only to see there's none left. With a disappointed groan, he starts to walk back... But as he walks under Mime's path, we see one of the footholds start to come loose as Mime grabs onto it. As he pushes downwards, the foothold comes out of the wall and falls onto Cuddles. At first, nothing happens, but then we see him fall backwards dead, the foothold having gone right through the middle of his head and down through his body making a hole from head to toe.

We pan to Lifty, who's about halfway up, and, switching momentarily to his P.O.V., see he's still a little dizzy from the gravitron. Unable to focus, he misses one of the footholds and starts to fall... Now you're thinking the harness will prevent him from falling to his death, right? Well, it turns out Lumpy forgot to hook up Lifty's top harnesses, the ones attaching him to the wall, and with nothing to keep him suspended he starts to freefall, screaming, down towards his death... but luck is finally on the side of the raccoon and as he braces himself for his demise, he feels himself land on something soft and furry, breaking his fall... At first, he breathes a sigh of relief at still being alive, but as he gets up and starts to dust himself off, he feels his hand brush against something wet. Thinking it's a little bit of vomit still stuck in his fur, he brings his hand up, only to notice it dripping with red blood. Yet, as he looks closer, as best he can anyway, he sees a small piece of brain tissue stuck in the palm. With a scared gulp, he looks down and sees what he landed in... Cuddles corpse. The impact of the landing caused Cuddles body to, in essence, explode and shower Lifty in blood and guts...

As we go back to Rhyme, we see he's about 3/4's the way up the wall and Lumpy's banged up very badly from being pummeled against the footholds... Now remember how Lumpy forgot to fully hook up Rhyme's harness? Well, without the other straps to help distribute the weight, the rope starts to break under the pressure of Lumpy's body. Lumpy sees the rope start to come undone and desperately tries to hold the rope together, but to no avail as the rope snaps and sends him falling, still upside down, to the ground. Lumpy starts to scream, but notices a foothold down aways and tries to shift his body to where it lands on the foothold and arrests his plunge. The shift is successful... TOO successful. Lumpy's going so fast down the climbing wall that when he lands on the foothold, the momentum pushes the foothold right through the middle of his body, cutting him in half and sending both halves plunging to the ground where, like Cuddles body, they splatter on impact, showering Lifty with more gore and causing him to scream "Oh come on!!".

We look up near the very top and see Rhyme and Shifty both neck and neck trying to reach the red buzzer, Rhyme noticing the climb up has suddenly gotten a little lighter. As they both reach for the red button, they misstep the last foothold to get up to the peak and both start to fall! But as they begin to fall, they both grab for dear life onto the nearest foothold they can see and, unlike Lumpy's attempt, succeed in stopping their descent. Suddenly, they hear a strident ring fill the air and look over to see Mime's succeeded in hitting the buzzer!

Rhyme, while keeping one hand one the foothold, uses the other to pump his arm in victory and starts to very carefully, manuever his way down the wall. Shifty, on the other hand, looks up and sees his harness somehow still attached and starts, sadly, rappelling down to the ground. As all 3 of them succeed in getting to the bottom, they all look at Lifty, who's splattered with blood from the two bodies hitting the ground at such high velocity. Shifty starts to laugh, but is silenced with a single glare from Lifty and the words "Now... we're even...".

A few more minutes later...

After going back to the shower area to clean Lifty off, and scaring the pants out of a few Happy Tree Friends who thought Lifty'd just killed someone from the amount of gore on him, the 5 HTFs head to the last challenge location... one that makes Disco Bear very excited... the DDR machines! They explain to Disco Bear how the challenge will work; each of them will get on one of the machine platforms and all 4 of them will do the same dance song, the last person to remain on their feet will win the whole thing for their team. Disco Bear asks what he's supposed to do and is told by Rhyme that he just has to watch for when 3 of them collapse onto the platforms. As the 4 of them climb onto the platforms, Mime's monitor asks for him to choose a song and, using the song roulette, chooses a heavy rock song. Little do they know that, when the song starts, it will lead to a chain reaction that leads to the deaths of more than 10 HTFs!

With 3 rings, the song starts and all 4 begin moving and grooving, hitting the colored arrows as they appear on the monitors. However, it's been a very long time since the platforms were first installed and as the 4 htfs dance, we see the ground beneath them start to crack slightly, the beams underneath starting to give way. Disco Bear, figuring it'll be a while before 3 of them fail, heads to the other side of the DDR machine and, getting on the solo platform, starts rocking to a discotechque groove. But as he rocks and rolls to the beat, we hear the cracking on the other side grow a bit louder and... as all 4 them plunge their feet down in a hard dance move, we see the beams collapse and all 4 of them break through the platforms, causing the glass on the arrows to shatter!

As Lifty tries to pull his foot up, we hear a sick splurting sound and see his leg's being gashed up by the edges of the broken metal and glass, the pain preventing him from fully raising his foot. Rhyme, seeing Liftys groaning face, looks down and sees his leg's stuck as well! Panicking, he starts to scream for someone, anyone, to help them!! Sure enough, his loud screams reach the ears of everyone's favorite heroic squirrel, Splendid! As he plunges down through the roof of the arcade, he sees the 4 HTFs in trouble and goes to help remove their stuck legs... but suddenly, we see him hold his head in pain, as if he's gotten a sudden migraine! As he looks behind him... he sees Pop and Cub holding their just-gotten prize from the ticket counter; a Kryptonut necklace! As the heroic squirrel holds his aching head, he starts feeling a bubbling in the back of his skull. As he presses his hands to the back of his head, he feels to his horror his skin bubbling and sloughing off! Starting to scream, he tries to press his hands against the bubbling to stop it, but his tries are in vain and he soon feels the power of the Kryptonut eat away the back of the skull and start eating the brain! Stumbling backwards with a final cry, the squirrel falls dead onto the floor's power grid.

Now here's a quick science lesson for ya; a small component in blood is water and what happens when water and electricity mix... you guessed it, a very bad shock! Rhyme, seeing Splendid fall onto the power grid and knowing he doesn't have much time before the amount of blood oozing from Splendid's slowly dissolving cranium causes a massive shock reaction, bites the insides of his cheeks and starts cringefully and forcefully lifting his foot up still stuck against the broken glass! As his foot slowly comes up, we see the sharp edges tearing the back of his foot and most of his achilles tendon off, causing him to emit blood-curdling screams! Finally, his foot comes free, albeit missing the back of the heel, and he falls backward, crying and panting onto the ground. As he lifts his head up, he sees Mime, Lifty, and Shifty still trapped in the broken platforms and painfully crawls over to Mimes. Once there he, with tears in his eyes, plunges his hands through the broken glass, breaking the shards holding Mimes leg. Soon, Mime's foot is free of the platform, although gashed and bloody, and Mime starts to limp off... but Rhyme holds him back.

Despite the teasing and antagonizing Lifty and Shifty put them through, the deer doesn't want to see them get electrocuted to death, not when he can save them... (now HE'S a true hero). So, with Mime's help, he makes it to Lifty's platform and starts trying to use his bloody, cut-up hands to free Lifty's leg by shattering the wood and glass holding it in place. Soon, the shards trapping Lifty are broken and the raccoon is able to get off the shattered platform, much to his relief, as Rhyme crawls over to Shifty. It's there that he makes a horrifying discovery, one of the shards of glass is stuck halfway through his leg, buried in the skin, the muscles, and the cartilege. With a mournful wail, he pushes against the glass in Shifty's foot, slicing his own hand nearly in half, shoving the shard all the way through the bone of the leg as Shifty yells in agony. Finally, he sees the shard come out the other side and uses his other hand to yank the piece of glass out, finally freeing Shifty. As the raccoon falls off the platform, screaming bloody murder, we see the blood from Splendid's melted skull finally drip onto the power grid, starting off the deadly wave of electricity through every single game and light in the arcade!

Mime, seeing the shock of the surged up grid, quickly pulls Rhyme down as Lifty does the same for Shifty... getting out of the way just as the monitor on their machine explodes, sending sharp shards of glass shooting only inches above their heads, but poor Disco Bear, being the closest to the grid on the other side of the DDR machine, doesn't even have time to scream before a massive shock causes his monitor to explode and send a huge piece of glass right through his neck, beheading him. As the glass shard continues to fly, we see Nutty nearby, buying a candy bar from a vending machine, trying to forget about what happened earlier. Suddenly, we see something shoot right through Nutty's head and shattering against the machine. Blood starts to drip for a few seconds from Nutty's frozen face before we see his head split apart and fall to the ground in 2 pieces. Pop, seeing the DDR monitor explode, starts to run off... but trips over Cub, who's sitting on the ground playing with his new necklace. As he starts to get up, we see one of the large fans hanging overhead start spinning wildly and coming loose off it's bolts. Pop picks up Cub and tries to get out of harm's way, but in the split-second it takes for him to pick up his son, the fan comes off it's supports and plunges, still spinning, onto the two bears, carving them up like they were slabs of meat!

Nearby, we see Flippy and Buddhist Monkey, who's visiting from China, playing at one of the arcade's shooting galleries. Suddenly, Flippy hears the arcade cabinet monitors nearby start popping and is instantly reminded of the sound of bombs going off in the night sky and flips out into his dark alter-ego. Wrenching the rifle off the holder on the gallery, he shoves the barrel of it into Buddhist Monkey's skull and pulls the trigger. The force of the cartridge exiting the barrel is enough to cause the monkey's head to explode in a shower of blood and brains. But as Flippy looks around for someone else to kill, we see his face suddenly take on a shocked look and dark blood start to drip from his mouth before his eyes roll back into his head and he falls to the ground, dead. It's then that we see a large shard of sharp glass and his impaled heart stuck to the wood of the shooting gallery's counter, the shard sent flying off one of the arcade cabinet monitors.

As the two deers and two raccoons look at the carnage going on, they realize they have to get out of there NOW! Rhyme tries to take a step forward, but the pain in his heelless foot is so severe, he falls to the ground and spits up a bit of blood. Giggles, who's at one of the skeeball machines, sees Rhyme fall and heads over to try and help him. But as she runs over, we see her trip and land on one of the power cords, surging with deadly volts of loose electricity. Giggles is only able to emit a small scream before the current of power causes her body to explode and sending the skeeball in her hand shooting through the air. Cro-Marmot, meanwhile, is just leaving his control station at the gravitron when, as he "moves" outside the station, we see the skeeball fly through the air and go all the way through his ice block and through the back of his head! The momentum causes the block to wobble a bit before falling backwards and shattering, sending a dead Cro-Marmot onto the ground.

Getting back to the 4 main stars of this episode, we see Mime and Lifty helping support Rhyme and Shifty as they head through the mayhem towards the exit. Suddenly, as they pass by a crane machine, we see the crane moving down and narrowly missing reaching a teddy bear. As we pan to the controls of the crane game, we see Handy giving his trademark frustrated groan and start to walk off... only to slip on one of Giggle's dismembered limbs and fall backwards through the glass! Fortunately, his hard hat shields hiim from being cut up by the glass. UNfortunately, as he tries to get up, the crane, running on it's own thanks to the surges of power, reaches down and attaches itself to Handy's head! Handy starts to yell, but is cut off by the sharp claws piercing through his neck and allowing the crane to rip off his head and carry it to the prize chute, dropping it in like a won toy.

We pan over to Flaky, who's on the way to the restrooms, stuck at the corridor seperating the mens and womens bathrooms. As Flaky starts moving towards a corridor, Flaky notices something pink and red splattered against the wall next to the corridor. Taking a closer look, Flaky sees that the pink splatter is the remains of Giggles brain and the red is the mess of blood surrounding it! Overcome by the gruesome discovery, Flaky starts to pass out (AWWWW we were SO close to finding out Flaky's gender)... but makes the mistake of falling backwards into the path of a teetering arcade cabinet, one that had just blown up just moments earlier... Flaky, seeing the machine start to fall from the momentum of Flaky falling against it, starts to scream, but soon is silenced by the machine falling over onto poor Flaky and crushing the porcupine like a bug!

By now, the 4 stars of the story are almost at the exit of the arcade when Lifty notices Russell and the Mole at one of the interactive fighting games (the kind where you do the moves and the game mimics the movement). Lifty screams for the 2 of them to get off the machine, but he's so far away they can't hear him properly and think he's just saying hi. As Russell waves back, he hears a popping sound behind him and seeing the monitor of the machine's exploded from a massive surge... Russell starts to take Mole's hand to lead him to safety... but soon realizing he has just THAT, the hand! As he looks back, he sees Mole's body starting to bleed massively before collapsing into a pile of cubed flesh, sliced up by being in the path of all the shards of glass from the broken monitor. With a scream, he drops the hand and starts to run off... but slips on the hand and falls towards another power line... Closing his eye tightly, he falls just INCHES of the surging line... At first it seems like Russell's ok... but as he gets up and starts to walk off, he looks down and sees his peg leg is stuck in a hole in the carpet and starts to try and pull it out. Unfortunately he pulls a bit too hard and, while he manages to pull his leg out, the momentum carries him back, falling into the surging power line and a few seconds after his head hits the line, the head explodes in a mess of sparks and blood.

Lifty screams in terror at seeing Russell shocked to death and realizes if the 4 of them don't get out soon, they may never get out! But as he looks away from Russell's corpse, he sees to his delight that the exit door's straight ahead! As they approach the door, Rhyme sees, out of the corner of his eye, Sniffles approach one of the photo machines (the ones where you can get photos taken of yourself doing goofy poses) and weakly yells for him not to go in. But his voice, drained by the massive pain coarsing through him, fails to reach Sniffles's ears and we see him enter the photo booth. There, we pan to inside the photo booth and see Sniffles putting a coin into the machine before giving a big smile for the camera! But right when the automatic camera's about to snap his picture, the cords powering up the camera inside are hit with a major surge of electricity, causing the power of the camera to multiply! The minute the camera goes off, the force of the flash envelops Sniffles's head and as it fades, we see the heat from the flash has disentegrated the anteater's head!

As Mime pushes open the door leading outside, we see the building, by now nothing more than a ruin of broken glass and power lines, start to go aflame as the countless sparks from the surges light up the broken wooden cabinets. Panicking, Mime pushes Shifty out the door as Lifty does the same to Rhyme and then quickly dash out themselves, helping carry the two wounded HTF's across the parking lot of the arcade... Right as they reach the end of the parking lot, Shifty looks over and sees a bright flash as the whole building goes up in flames! As he watches in horror, the whole building slowly burns to the ground, taking with it the bodies of all the HTFs inside and leaving just the rock wall standing for a few moments before it too, with it's supports destroyed by the fire, collapses into the heap of rubble. It's then that he realizes the shocking truth... he's still alive... he, his brother, and the two deer cousins are still alive... The shock of it hits him like a ton of bricks and he starts to cry as Mime holds him comfortingly... if you listen real closely you can even hear a soft kind of music start to play, as if signifying the end of the nightmare. As Lifty sets a moaning and drained Rhyme down onto the pavement and looks back at the burning wreckage, he can only think of one question which he quickly asks..."Who won??" We hear the sound of a record scratch suddenly and if looks could kill, the looks Rhyme, Mime, and Shifty give him could end his life right there as we finally iris in on Lifty's face giving an embarrassed grin...

Moral: It's not wether you win or lose, it's how you play the game!