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panda-writes-kpop · 1 year ago

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What does a demon and a function have in common? (You can test both of their limits!) - l. yb.

a/n: happy dami day! i know the timeline of this fic is messy, but just pretend that it's all okay and I will too :) also I wrote this because I was trying to understand my feelings as an aroace person towards love and I'm still really confused... but at least we got a good fic out of it! ❤️

tw: demons, undefined magic, lots of mentions of death, implied aroace! reader, a bit of religious trauma

word count: 2.6k

summary: you're in distress over your math homework and the pretty demon that helps you with it, and you're reluctant to let your heart do the talking since it ended pretty badly for your friend and her demon companion.

related fics: Demon! SuA - Tainted Love

♡ Masterlist ♡

You shouldn't do this.

You glare at the leather-bound book in front of you as you furiously erase another answer from your sheet of scratch paper. The book was a gift from a friend, one that had struggled with a demonic relationship before.

You hadn't heard from them in a year and a half, and from what you heard from mutual friends, they weren't doing too well. Although you weren't positive that the book was bad news, you had never seen your friend so desperate to remove an object from their grasp.

After doing a bit of research, you realized that it was a cursed tome. There were seven different markings on the cover, which meant that seven different demons were tied to the book. Luckily, only one had been released when your friend had opened the book.

Now, you had to be the one to safeguard it. To make sure that no one would ever be hurt by the book again.

But, as you stare at your Calculus homework, you realize that you have no idea what you're fucking doing. And at 10 p.m. the night before an exam, the tutoring center is closed and the professor is probably counting sheep while their students are stressing out.

You're well aware that it's a stupid, very dumb, unintelligent idea to open a cursed book in order to understand Calculus, but what other choice do you have? Do you fail this exam then fail the class, which would put you a year behind?

What would your peers say?

What would your family say?

A shiver down your back, from the looming threat of parental disappointment, causes you to drop your pencil and reach for the book. Your hand gently traces the seven etchings on the cover, and you notice that one isn't filled in with color.

The demon that took my friend away.

You really shouldn't be doing this.

You think about the laundry list of concepts that you have to master by 10 a.m. tomorrow, and your decision has never been easier.

I'd rather stick my hand in an open flame than do another problem with no help.

When you open the book, you realize that you're blissfully unaware of how to summon a demon. Do you say a bunch of random words in Latin? Do you do a little hand motion? Do you need an offering?

You decide that your best option at summoning a demon that won't smite you immediately is to plead with the book.

Because desperate never goes out of style.

“Listen, I don't know who I'm talking to, if I'm even talking to anyone in the first place. I'm having a problem. …Well, it's not a ‘the fate of the world rests in your hands’ type of problem, but I still could use some help.”

An orange trail of smoke leaves the book in your hands and swirls like a tornado in an empty spot in your living room. Objects start flying around because of the tailwind, and you have to duck before you take a pencil to the eyeball.

“Who knew Calculus homework could be deadly?” You joke as you try to not think about the magnitude of the situation that you're in. You haven't even met the demon yet, and the smoke that it creates(?) it is trying to kill you.

Not a good sign.

Once your apartment is messy enough for your demon of choice, the book in your hands shuts itself as the orange smoke starts to dissipate.

You set the book aside as you gawk at the woman- no, demon that stands in your living room.

She's dressed in all black, ready to go to a funeral.

You just have to hope that it's not yours.

“How can I assist you?” She softly asks in a semi-uninterested voice.

“I need help with Calculus.” You blurt out as she clocks her head at you.

“I beg your pardon?”

This demon was exceptionally smart, which was good for your tired, mortal mind. She also didn't kill you on the spot - a good thing, you assume, unless the murder is waiting for you on the other side of the Calculus homework.

She was taken aback by your request, staring at you in utter surprise until she joined your side and helped you with your homework.

Her voice was gentle and smooth, and you would've fallen asleep if you weren't thinking about being killed in your sleep.

“Thanks.” You rub your eyes as you set the pencil down as you check your phone for the time.

You're proud of yourself for putting your phone on dark mode (you've flash-banged yourself in the past, it's a one time mistake) as you realize that it's only one in the morning. With a few hours of sleep and a large container of your favorite caffeinated drink, you'd be fine for your exam.

“Is that all you needed? …A bit of guidance with math?” The woman sitting beside you is in disbelief as you nod your head.

“Is there something wrong with that?” You joke, momentarily forgetting that she's a demon.

“Forgive me, but the people who usually hold the tome are more demanding… and a lot less cute.”

“Okay, back into the book you go.” You toss the book her way before trying to hide her embarrassment.

She chuckles softly before running her fingers over the spine.

“You have no idea how any of this works, right?”

“Uh-huh.” You nod your head before starting to put your school stuff away.

“Right, right.” Her eyes meet yours for a moment. “Dami.”

“Huh?” You tilt your head at her, but she snaps her fingers and disappears with the book in an instance.

Well, that damn book is out of my sight and I now have a chance to pass my Calc exam. I'll take that as a win-win.

You don't remember climbing into bed last night (this morning? The days are blending together at this point).

Before leaving your apartment, you say a small prayer before grabbing your pick-me-up of choice from the fridge. You might have this exam on lock.

As you walk to class, you recite Calculus formulas in your head. Partial derivatives swirl around your mind along with the thought of the mysterious woman.

Dami?

She's not a directional derivative, so you should focus on something else.

You, at least, had the demon situation under control.

This semester, you officially renounced your academic weapon status; instead, you were an academic victim. Although you most definitely messed up the first problem (why do all of the problems have the same wording yet completely different solutions?), you had the rest of it down.

Your confidence evaporated when the two classmates behind you started discussing their answers and got completely different answers to you.

Maybe another semester here wouldn't be so bad?

“You did fine.”

You jump as your eyes lock with the demon from the night before.

“Sorry, sorry.” You apologize to the two people behind you as you step to the side to speak with Dami. “I like your confidence in me, and I wish I had a fraction of it for myself.”

“There's nothing wrong with having a little pride.” She shrugs as the doors to the lecture hall open.

“Well, at least there's another exam a few weeks after spring break.” Ryujin shrugs before closing the door and walking towards you. “How'd the exam go for you?”

“It was okay.” You softly shrug as you glance between Dami and Ryujin.

“You're too humble for how smart you are.” Ryujin scoffs before turning to Dami. “You new here?”

“I'm just visiting someone.” Dami winks at you, and your eyes avert her gaze afterwards.

Ryujin sighs before adjusting her backpack and clearing her throat.

“They're not interested in guys or girls…. or anyone, for that matter.”

You playfully smack Ryujjn's shoulder before she pretends to be in extreme pain from the hit.

“It's not an absolute thing. I'll know if there's someone I'm interested in.” You nonchalantly say as Ryujin checks her smart watch.

“Oh shit, I've got class in fifteen minutes halfway across campus. See ya!” Ryujin waves to you both before offering a nod to Dami. “Nice to meet you.”

She runs off in another direction as your attention turns to Dami.

“Why are you here, if you don't mind me asking?”

“I haven't been out of that book for centuries. I just wanted to see how humans lived.” Dami folds her arms before walking to you. “The world is so much different… better, if you ask me.”

“You're not like any demon I've heard of.” You blurt out before biting your tongue. “Sorry, that's probably really mean to say-”

“It's okay, and to be honest, I'd be surprised if I was like any other demon that you met. Not all demons fall from the sky, you know.”

It's been three hours, and you're still trying to come to terms with the fact that Dami’s a fallen angel. Who says that to someone after only two interactions with them?

Dami, apparently, because she's been watching you like a hawk as you sit across from her in the campus library.

“You think of me differently, don't you?”

You don't look up from your computer as you tap your pencil against the desk three times.

Click. Click. Click.

“I don't.” You calmly say before writing an equation in your notebook. “I should be honest with you, though, since you were honest with me. It's only fair.”

You pause for a moment as Dami folds her arms and leans against the chair. She's trying to remain cool, but a small twitch in her left eye tells you that she's more interested than she appears to be.

It's cute.

“I had a friend who summoned a demon from that book… I don't know her name, and I don't want to. She ruined my friend’s life, Dami.” You explain your friend’s story, going through agonizing detail as told through their family and other friends.

You have to pause once to wipe your tears, and Dami offers a comforting hand as the other drops to her side. You, albeit hesitantly, take it.

She should be cold like ice- undead, unfeeling. But there's some sort of warmth in her touch that can't be explained by the hellfire that she resides in.

Perhaps she's already gotten attached to you. You feel it too, you want to trust her. Can you, though?

She hasn't torn your arm off yet, so you're starting off on the right foot.

Trauma dumping counts as bonding, right?

You bite your lip before shaking your head, feeling the uncertainty of everything crash against you. What are you doing, trusting a demon that hurt someone that you care deeply about?

I can't do this.

“I should go.” You pull your hand out of her grasp as you quickly try to pack your things up. “I'm sorry, I'm probably shit-talking one of your friends that you've known for centuries.”

As you reach for your pencil, Dami grabs your wrist.

“I can't promise that I'm a ‘good’ demon or person,” She softly exhales before looking in your eyes, “but I won't betray you. Not now. Not ever.”

Something pounds, but it's not your head, swimming from the thoughts of your friends and the demon in front of you.

It comes from deep inside you, a feeling that you thought would be forever foreign to you. A magical feeling that “normal” people got to feel. The thing that makes them human, after all.

Your heart pounds.

This isn't you. You need to leave. Now.

Without exchanging another word, you run off into the afternoon light. You know she might follow you, but you hope she'll give you some space.

I hope she doesn't hate me.

You need to get a grip, and fast, before you rock the boat that's been steadily keeping you afloat for years.

Five hours. That's the longest you can last in a little internet cafe before you put your tail between your legs and head home. You know Dami will be there, and you don't want to sleep on a park bench, so home it is.

Will she be mad at me?

Who cares? You're not in love with her, you just like her.

As a friend.

As someone you can hang out with.

Someone to share secrets with.

Friends can kiss, right?

You've known her for less than twenty-four hours. You need to find where your sense of reality has gone and reclaim it before you head into your apartment.

But the key is already in your hand.

Your feet walk up the stairs without your brain telling them to.

You unlock your apartment door to see someone quietly sitting on your couch - the same spot where she helped you with your math homework.

Your stomach and heart fill with dread as you slowly take off your shoes.

She's been kind to you, and you ran off because you were upset about your own feelings.

You felt like a petulant child.

“I'm sorry for running off. I got upset thinking about my friend, and I should have talked through my feelings like a fucking adult. You're not like the other demon, just as I'm not like my friend. Feeling trapped by someone else’s opinions of you is rough,” You toss the keys on the counter before shedding your coat, “trust me, I know.”

Dami looks back to you, and the moonlight casts her in an angelic glow - she was ethereal and you didn't doubt that she was once an angel. You'd be more surprised if she wasn't one of God’s favorites.

Why was she here, instead of in the sky?

You don't want to pry, but Dami’s the first one to walk towards you.

“I was worried about you,” She softly admits, “a demon, a former angel, a creature much older than you could comprehend, was worried about the safety of a mortal.”

When she is close enough for you to reach out for her, she reaches out her hand.

“I'm not an evil demon or a perfect angel. But I can promise you-”

“I think I like you.” The words spill out of your lips before you can truly think about what you're saying. “I mean, of course I like you, but it's not how I've liked anyone before. I like Ryujin as a friend, she's nice to me and we get lunch sometimes. But you… you're different. And being different scares me. It's not just because you're a demon, it's who you are. It wouldn't matter if you were a demon, angel, or human because I'd still feel the same way.”

You pause to take a breath.

“I'm not normal, and I'm probably not like any human you've met. I don't want a traditional romance with a wedding or kids. I don't want physical intimacy with someone who won't appreciate me. Hell, I don't even know if I want a partner half of the time. The only thing I know,” You take her hand before pulling Dami closer, “is that I want you to be by my side. As a friend or as something more. Whatever we will be, I know we'll figure it out together.”

“I want you by my side as well.” She softly mutters as you place your forehead against hers.

You're both quiet as you envelope yourselves in the serene environment that you've created.

“So, do I meet your devilish friends now, or do I have to take you to dinner first?”

Dami laughs warmly before pulling you close to her.

“Whatever you want.”

You're in deep. She has in her talons sunk deep under your skin, in less than a day.

She could betray you.

You had to learn how to trust her.

And in time, you will.

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chubs291 · 5 months ago

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seek — for the single-word drive!

Word Count 591 words, I used this as an opportunity to explore how Alaric would go about creating a new spell, he does a good bit so I thought it would be a good way to explore his process. Not sure if it even fully applies to the prompt but I feel like I did pretty good. The old mage known as Alaric Vance threw himself into his chair in the inn room he was renting. A shock of pain traveled up his left side as his hand moved to his bare hip, covered in bandages. He had been fighting a beast alongside some other adventurers, he had clearly been too slow as he got hit with a blast of acid that still hurt like hell. Something needed to change, the black mage nodded to himself, it was time to craft a new spell, and to do so Alaric would need to do some brainstorming. Alaric pulled a journal out and began to write in it, this was where he detailed his spellcraft and how he did it.

Today I was too slow, much too slow. Thankfully it was not due to my age, I have many adversaries but father time is not one of them yet. It was simply due to a physical incapability, that attack was far too quick for me to react to with my normal speed. By the time I realized what was happening it was already on its way towards me. If only I had that twelves-damned echo but I do not, so for now I must manage with what I do have. And what I do have should be enough, if I’m smart with it.

A new spell is most certainly in order, but what am I looking for out of this. Of course to make myself faster but in what way and how? My first concepts involve either the utilization of lightning aether or wind aether however I have the gut feeling that pouring more lightning aether into my system to increase reaction time may prove fatal if done incorrectly. You always must be careful with lightning based aether as one slip up could be dangerous. So lightning aether is obviously out of the picture but what of wind aspected aether? Perhaps I could use it to form a tailwind of sorts, though one too large and it risks the spreading of harmful liquids, my mind immediately thinks of that very same acid that harmed me. If there were a tailwind then it may result in the acid getting splashed onto bystanders and that would not do. But what if I controlled it? If I were to make it centralized onto my body in a three foot radius then perhaps it could work. Of course it has its limitations, a tailwind such as this could only work in one direction and it would have to be strong, but it could be done.

How much of my aether would it drain? To keep it going for longer than perhaps twenty seconds would probably prove to be rather draining but the whip up a strong wind such as that should not be too taxing if I remain sparing with its utilization. I am amused at the slight possibility of its use for drying oneself though that is a far more novel and niche use, though I would not be a good mage if I did not note every possible use for a spell.

Alaric pulled out a blank piece of parchment from his bag and began to write runes onto it, with a practiced precision to it. “That should work well enough for my purposes, now all I need to do is put it into practice. . . though probably not here, just to be safe.” And so, Alaric Vance stepped outside, to see if this new spell really had all he seeked from it.

#ffxiv writing #ffxiv oc #ffxivwrite

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rogueshadeaux · 2 months ago

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Chapter Forty-Three – Broken Seal

“Do you think she’s dangerous?” Brent asked. “Like, if she’s just a paper conduit, we could take her on, right? We managed to mess up Augustine.” “I don’t think it’s the power that makes her dangerous,” I finally said. “I mean—remember that she was killing people and pinning it on Dr. Sims? On Mom? She’s…really smart,” I said, before adding, “And manipulative.”

10k words | 55 min - 1 hr read-time | TRIGGER WARNINGS: mentions of death, blackmail, kidnapping canon typical violence.

They took her.

God, I still didn’t get it—why would they take Reese? What the hell did they want with some 18 year old who hadn't even graduated high school yet?

Unfortunately, Dr. Sims had a pretty good idea. “Theresa Chenevert?” He repeated. He was bent over one computer in the back of Zeke's minivan, gathering as much information as he could on the attack at Linus Pauling while the car jerked around on the interstate. “Isn’t that the girl who went on air to defend you?”

“And Tommy was the one doing the interview,” Dad realized. “They knew exactly who they were looking for.”

That just made me feel so much worse.

She was gone because she knew Dad. Because she knew me, and wanted to do the thing she always did and take up in fights I was willing to just rugsweep away. Taken by some lady Garrett used my throat to name and her insane lackeys because, what, we were childhood besties? We were each other’s date to homecoming? Because she tried to set the record straight when Tommy was spreading lies?

Speaking of Tommy—Brent didn’t seem at all enthused by the idea that he needed saving. “Guy had it coming,” he eventually grumbled after the adults asked some questions about him while trying to formulate a plan.

“Brent.” Dad snapped tersely. Whatever carefree demeanor he had earlier while we were doing the tag had melted away the moment he saw that message burned into Linus Pauling’s courtyard: Do you have any regrets, Rowe?

Dad turned to face Dr. Sims—not that he had to turn far, as we were all shoved in the back of the van as Zeke sped back towards Oregon. “You know if they found any doves?” he asked.

Dr. Sims shook his head. “No,” he said. “From what I’ve been able to compile from news cameras and steal from body cams, there’s no doves. No sign of paper, either.”

Brent threw me a questioning glance before asking, “Uh…why would there be paper? Or…birds?”

Dad sighed, clearly exasperated at having to put the mental effort into explaining to us what was going on. “Remember a week back, when we were going through all of my stuff I saved from Seattle?”

“Yeah?”

“Remember the crazy lady who made the cartoon and tried to frame us all for the murders she was committing?”

“...yeah?”

“That’s Celia.”

Oh.

Honestly, in the fury of the last few days, I’d forgotten about that break where we did nothing but look through old paperwork and listen to old dead drops—to be fair, we’d been through a lot since then, including being attacked by a monster later that same day. And crashing a wedding. And the road trip to Boston. And Garrett.

But now I was able to recall some of what Dad had told me about Celia; “Augustine faked her death to sneak her out of Curdun Cay. Killed some random guard.” Saisei. The one who called Augustine her mother in the email logs.

Mother’s favorite child.

Garrett’s voice rang softly in the back of my mind, as clear as it did when they had thrown me down the rabbit hole. I guess, in a way, we were chasing a rabbit here, weren’t we? And Celia was there. There at that autopsy, there beside Augustine even when Garrett wasn’t. She was the one that Augustine truly sacrificed for, instead of being sacrificed. The one she trusted.

The one who, at the end of it all, decided Augustine’s mission was weak, and left to create this in the eighteen years she’d been dormant. Attack schools and steal children and stuff.

We headed towards Portland nearly nonstop, following the tailwind of Aunt Sia’s motorbike as we raced the sun. A forty-five hour ride barely punctuated with time to use the restroom and eat—though I wasn’t doing much of that. Eating felt impossible as the nausea that accompanied the thoughts of Reese’s fate took me over. What was happening to her? What did this Celia lady even want with my best friend? She barely knew anything! The last time I had talked to her was the day after this all started, and that was almost a month ago.

The last time we talked, because that was my decision. She’d tried to reach out. Mei had said she was worried sick, and she wanted to talk to me again—but I didn’t meet her halfway. I didn’t want to meet her at all, because I felt like they’d be ashamed of what I did in Seattle, afraid to have to tell them what was happening to me.

Now? Now, I might never get to talk to her again.

I had pulled my phone from Aunt Sia’s laundry basket in our hurried packing before we all sardined into the back of Zeke’s van, but I hadn’t turned it on. I couldn’t, because I was too strong willed to actually reach out to people I loved but too weak not to download every possible app they could’ve used to reach out to me and let the notification of their messages haunt me anyways. What if Reese had tried to message something for my birthday or, God forbid, right before she was stolen by Celia and whatever army of goons she’d managed to build?

No. I couldn’t. So it stayed off.

It wasn’t like I really needed my phone on to know what was happening anyways, between having Brent and Dad. I was, unfortunately, well informed. I got to see when the only casualty announced was the school resource officer when Dad was watching a news clipping; I watched the news articles update with pictures of Tommy and Reese from over Brent’s shoulder; and I heard how roughly Dad cursed as Brent and my school photographs joined the news reels beside images from Dad’s speech at the rally, an FBI tip line under them.

I was no stranger to being plastered places—but the media had kept from throwing my face onto the news until now. Brent, though, looked absolutely bristled when a picture from his football coach’s facebook went viral. “Wait, they—they can’t do that, right?” he asked, turning towards Dad. “We’re minors.”

Dad scowled, pulling down the notification tab of his phone so that the time appeared in the top right corner: 2:13 in the morning. “It’s after midnight,” he declared. “You’re eighteen now.” He looked up at the both of us as we all rocked along with the van’s driving.

“Welcome to being a public person of interest.”

Happy birthday to us, I guess.

Dad insisted we get some rest after that, something that felt nearly impossible between the uncomfortable back of Zeke’s van and the knowledge that Brent and I were now a part of some nationwide manhunt. Sleep was a challenge to come by, and for a while, I could do nothing more than watch the landscape outside of the front windshield slowly become more and more familiar. The plains awoke and stirred into hills before rising to momentous heights with a stretch, the impressively tall mountain sides of the Rockies looming over us before coming back down to a height I was more comfortable with. I had never realized how much I had missed their closeness until the slight megalophobia that came with looking up at their peaks settled into my stomach after missing them for so long.

Eventually, I leaned against Brent’s shoulder as he laid back against the passenger-side seat, the rocking van managing to lull me to sleep as we sped our way towards Portland and whatever was waiting for us there.

“Jean,” a voice said gently, trying to stir me awake. “Jean, c’mon. Time to wake up.”

I, admittedly, grumbled something absolutely incomprehensible under my breath before opening my eyes, blinking back the sleep to look at Aunt Sia…and the scene behind her.

The end of the van was alight with the pinks and blues of neon lights, the van doors open to reveal the alleyway we were tucked into as a breeze shot through it, making me shiver. For a millisecond, as I rose from the drool patch on Brent’s shoulder, I flashed back to that fateful day a full month ago; the russians and guns with names that I’d never be able to commit to memory, the pain in my head from being knocked out, the fear and dread and how everything changed in an instant.

But I blinked, and there was Aunt Sia sitting on the edge of the van’s bed, her motorcycle helmet resting on her knee as she undid the strap of her leather glove. “There you are,” she smiled. “You okay?”

I went to rub my bleary eye, instead accidentally whacking the hard resin of the cast against my brow as I glanced around. The only person in the van besides me was a still-snoring Brent. “Where’s Dad?” I asked.

“Around the van with Zeke,” Aunt Sia said with a bob of her head to the left. ��They’re waiting for Eugene to call back so we can make a plan.”

I blinked. “A plan?”

Aunt Sia nodded. “Since the government is searching for you guys, we can’t just walk up to your old school and look around the crime scene.”

God, right—we came down here to see if we could find something that would point us to Archangel, a way to find Reese and Tommy. Being on Uncle Sam’s extermination list was going to put a damper in that fact. “So then, what do we do?” I asked, beginning to scoot to the edge of the van bed.

“We’ll have to sneak in.”

Turns out, breaking into a building to look at a federal crime scene was complicated. Who would have guessed?

We were parked about two miles away from Linus Pauling, in the alley of a set of strip malls that had this small Indian restaurant Reese and I would go to after school sometimes. The familiarity of it all stung in a way I wasn’t prepared for; the shadows of a life I once had, the hopes and dreams of a future that felt impossible now…

I shook my head, trying to concentrate on the now as Aunt Sia’s phone rang and she looked up, informing Dad and Zeke, “It’s Eugene,” before answering.

“Hey, you’re on speaker,” she greeted, setting the phone on the hood of the van.

Dr. Sims was huffing slightly, like he had run all the way to Linus Pauling. “Hey—have you gotten the pictures yet?”

“Trying to load them now,” Zeke said, clicking impatiently on the cursor of Dr. Sims’ smaller laptop. “The wifi here is slower than a turtle with nubs for legs.”

But finally, the photos came through, everyone crowding around the driver’s side door to look at the laptop that sat in the seat. “There’s a Homeland Security mobile command center,” Dr. Sims began explaining as Zeke scrolled through the images. A huge trailer, all black and sleek, sat in the parking lot just next to the ticket stand of the football field, misted windows alight. “There’s security that walk the outside perimeter of the school, and drones.”

There it was again—that blackened drone that had stalked Brent and I along the shores of the Puget Sound, only a flock of them, circling the school and going up and down every side street that led to it.

I glanced at Brent—if his expression was any hint, he had the same thought I did. “If you try to go to the school from any direction, they’ll know you’re coming,” I said, looking at Dad.

Dad chewed on his cheek to the point where I was sure I was soon going to see teeth. “So we approach from a different way. The rooftops—” he decided, before Dr. Sims cut him off.

“Probably a good time to tell you there’s snipers on the roof,” he said. “And while there’s not exactly people on the crime scene, they’re walking the uh…those outdoor hallways that look over the courtyard. About three on each storey.”

Dad cursed under his breath. “Okay…” he murmured, before raising his voice to a more audible tone to ask, “What’s the—the camera situation look like?”

“Surprisingly, I only saw thermal cameras on every corner of the school,” he informed Dad.

Brent’s head perked up at that. “Wait,” he interjected. “Like, the outside corners of the school?”

Dr. Sims hesitated. “Yes,” he said, curious where Brent was going with this.

Brent looked at Dad. “Those are blind spots to the school’s cameras,” he said. “They don’t cover the corners.”

Linus Pauling was a nice school but it was, admittedly, also built like a prison; three storeys of tall concrete and plaster walls with tinted windows and chamfered corners. It was those beveled corners Brent was talking about—a yard of space that was entirely hidden from Linus Pauling’s watchful eyes.

Dad quirked his brow. “How do you know this?” he asked.

Brent looked at Dad, his expression slightly deadpanned. “How do you think I got away with smoking for so long?” he asked in turn.

Dad, seeming to decide the whole 'smoking at school' issue was very low on the bar of current problems, simply nodding once before turning back to the phone sitting on the hood, asking, “You hear that, Eugene?”

Dr. Sims made some sort of noise of confirmation, taking a moment to respond. “Yeah, okay, I see the school’s cameras now, too. If they’ve only bothered to cover their blind spots, it means the agents are connected to their security footage.”

“Is that good or bad?” Aunt Sia asked.

“Good. Really good,” Dr. Sims confirmed. “The Feds wouldn’t just put a guard at the school’s camera feed and call it a day. If they’re tapped into the school’s security system, it’s being redirected from their original NVR system, which means I should be able to manipulate the footage for whoever is watching.”

Dad breathed a sigh of relief. “Good, that’s one thing we don’t need to worry about.”

Zeke put a hand on his hip. “Yep. Now just for the drones, snipers and guards. Oh my.”

Dad gave Zeke an exasperated look, but didn’t argue. The command center was just one piece of a large puzzle, unfortunately.

“If I can get control of the mobile command center, we can blind them,” Dr. Sims said. “But the drones still chirp if they sense a Conduit. They’ll need to be taken out.”

“If we can blind them, that’ll be easier at least,” Dad relented. “And once they’re blind, it’s just about climbing the wall to the school and taking care of them floor by floor. Snipers, then the ones on the third storey, then the ones on the second.”

Taking care of them.

I hesitated to even speak up, but managed to interject before anyone else spoke with a soft, “Dad?” He looked down at me and I nervously asked, “You’re not….gonna kill them, right?”

Truthfully, that was one thing out of everything that Garrett showed me that stayed burning in my mind; Dad's glare, his snarling face and how the hatred in his eyes burned when he killed that man at the Seattle marina. Hank something. How could he do it so easily and just walk away? He'd already done it for us once.

I really didn't want more people to die, especially if they were just in our way because it was their job.

Dad sighed, rubbing at a temple. “No, no, that’s—” he cut off, like he wanted to say something else but held himself back. “That’s not what we’re doing. We’ll find somewhere to lock them up—a classroom or supply closet or something. Brent, you can help me with that.” He looked at Aunt Sia. “Willing to rock with me again, Gremlin?”

Aunt Sia nodded and—even through the stress of it all—managed to chuckle. “Was wondering how long it would take for us to get back to it,” she said in turn.

Dad nodded before turning his attention to Brent. “I’ll need you to deal with drones,” he told Brent. “You can fly—they won’t see you coming down from above. Once we’ve dealt with the snipers and you’ve gotten all the drones, you can join Alessia and I.” He then looked at Zeke. “Stay with Eugene and be prepared for anything. You’re…our backup.”

Dad didn’t seem exactly excited to say that, but at least he seemed to put a pin in his problems with Zeke for the moment and let him back in the fray.

“What do you want me to do, Dad?” I asked. “I can go invisible, maybe I can help you wi–”

“You’re staying with Eugene until it’s safe.”

I blinked. What? “Dad,” I tried to plea, but he immediately cut me off.

“Jean, you can’t use your powers. You can’t heal,” he stressed. “Between getting more sick and getting hurt—look, it’s just better if you stay safe. You’ll be with Eugene and Zeke, you’ll—”

“Dad—”

“That’s enough, Regina,” Dad said, his voice gaining just enough bass to make my protests immediately die in my throat. God, I hated how quickly his Dad voice could cut me off. “The last thing we need to do right now is add another child to worry about to the list. You stay with Eugene and Zeke, and once we get everything cleared, you can come join us at the school—understood?”

I couldn’t choose between a sarcastic reply or to hold my head in shame, so instead I chose a simple and emotionless, “Okay.”

So when Dr. Sims confirmed that he had taken control of the mobile command center, I tried my best not to pout as I was plopped into a chair like a petulant child before Dad, Brent and Aunt Sia ran off to save the day without me.

Logically, I knew Dad was right. I could feel the ache in my shoulders, and it wasn’t from the way I slept, though I’m sure that didn’t help. The pain was always there, a nice little needle stab of a reminder that I was broken—and apparently useless in helping save my best friend.

The inside of the mobile command center looked…like nearly everything I imagined some large trailer made to spy on people would look like; a wall that was just row upon row of footage, live recording that was either in black and white or thermal. There were a few grainy pictures, those probably from Linus Pauling’s cameras, and others that dipped and zoomed like buzzards. Knobs and buttons and switches that meant nothing to me were on the wall, on either side of the computer that Dr. Sims had easily hacked into. Zeke was on the side; he had brought Dr. Sims’ smaller laptop upon request and plugged it into something in the wall, using it to override systems and reroute and do other things that…I didn’t really understand.

I watched the same camera Dr. Sims was concentrating on, waiting for a guard to make his round down a hallway where Dad was waiting to ambush him. “Hold…” Dr. Sims murmured, waiting for the guard to get to some point in the screen. “Hold…now!”

The screen distorted slightly, a bend in the corner traveling briskly towards the guard until Dad materialized from it, feet connecting to chest and sending him flying back. Dad was gone in pixels again, materializing behind the man before he could fall on his behind and grappling him.

Dr. Sims turned his attention to a display two screens away. “Squeaks, get ready,” he warned.

Aunt Sia didn’t have powers. Honestly, I wasn’t even sure how she got to the roof, but if her tenacity was any hint, maybe the whole building bent for her in respect; She had grabbed this chain from her bike, one skinnier than Dad’s from history before and wrapped in black, something at the end of it that dragged her pants down with weight when she hid it in her pocket. That weight came out the moment she slipped out of the shadows, a flash of silver wrapping around the man’s neck and yanking him off kilter. He went sprawling sideways, her padded knee connected with his rib cage, then elbow with temple.

Zeke was off by the computer, cursor moving around a roadmap on the mini-computer plugged into the system. “Alright, kid, next one,” he told Brent, talking into the earbud I had loaned him. “You’re gonna go up Vista till you hit uh…Park Place, then go down till you get to the weird place with the little pillar at the Lewis and Clark intersection. It’s hanging around the steps there.”

Brent wasn’t being tracked like Dad and Aunt Sia—at least, we didn’t have a GoPro to stick on his back before he went flying—but Zeke knew where he was nonetheless by how the little blips of light on the map went out one by one, Zeke typing away to track the next drone’s flight path to make sure nothing would tell of us while we were here.

And I was sitting here, on the floor, fiddling with the aglet of my boot and being absolutely useless while they worked.

I think it would hurt less if I got to be the man in the chair, at least—that way, I was still helping. I wasn’t leaving the rest of my family to just work while I sat here twiddling my thumbs. But I was never the tech type, minimally savvy—hell, Brent had to help me hook up my drawing tablet to my laptop. This wasn’t my strong suit. And since I had no suits now, my power-conservation being doctor prescribed…

Well, maybe I was being a child about it all, but it left a sour taste in my mouth.

Zeke turned to Dr. Sims after a bit, saying, “Think we got rid of all the gnats. They doing good over there?”

Dr. Sims watched Dad emerge from a classroom of the school with Aunt Sia—they incapacitated the guards on each floor, Dad using his powers somehow to immobilize them as they locked them away in a windowless science lab. “I haven’t seen proof of anyone else on scene,” he informed Zeke, “I think they’re good. We can probably approach the scene now.”

Oh, finally, something I could actually participate in.

We threw on our coats and walked out into the Portland winter, the wind particularly bad that day as I led the way to the school’s courtyard. At least I had some use here—hey guys, follow me and I’ll show you where the school’s side entrance is!

It was kinda sad.

There was a strange grinding sound as we walked, and I looked up in time to see Brent shed his wings, trying to score some sort of superhero landing and instead stringing out a line of curses when his knee hit the ground with force that cracked the pavement a bit. Zeke chortled as he stood. “Y’know, your dad probably wouldn’t be too happy to hear you swearing like a sailor in a dive bar.”

Brent moved to keep his weight off of his knee, limping in time with the rest of us. “Yeah, well, he’s not here,” he grumbled. I rolled my eyes and snorted at his stupidity and he tried his best not to blush while throwing me the middle finger.

The gate was latched shut, key probably long gone with what all had happened to Linus Pauling, and everyone solved it how they could; meaning, Brent and Dr. Sims used their powers to get to the other side while Zeke and I just stood there awkwardly, the two taking a moment to even realize they had left us behind till the absence of our footsteps clued us in.

“Oh, right,” Dr. Sims said, looking around for a moment as Brent just rolled his eyes at me, probably to repay me for how I treated him moments ago.

“Can’t you just come through?” he asked.

I deadpanned looking at him. “I can’t use my powers, asshole,” I reminded him, voice a bit too sharp for the playful banter he was trying to engage me in. He seemed to catch onto my frustration, simply holding his hands up in mock surrender as Dr. Sims called from a ways away.

“It’s an electronic lock!” He told us, “Just give me a second and I can open it.”

Zeke glanced over at me while Dr. Sims worked, not blind to the frown I wasn’t trying my hardest to suppress. “Hey kid, chin up,” he said, waiting till I looked at him to smile. “Just means you get to be my protégé, now. I’ll teach you every trick I’ve learned that’s kept me alive during this mess since I started running it with Cole.”

I offered him a weak smile and a muttered, “Yeah…” in turn. I knew he meant well, but it…wasn’t the same, when I theoretically should have been able to do more.

The gate opened either way, though, Zeke and I walking through it before Dr. Sims closed it as much as he could without letting the latch actually lock once more. Dad and Aunt Sia came bounding down the south wing stairs, Aunt Sia with her helmet tucked under her arm as she pocketed the weight at the end of the chain—a simple padlock, I realized, a smiley face blazed into it with a soldering iron. Dad looked over everyone, somehow missing the still-limping Brent to instead ask me, “You alright, Jean?”

“Yeah,” I responded, “Why wouldn’t I be?” It wasn’t like I’d done anything to actually get hurt. I swear, he was waiting for me to just explode into confetti on the spot at some point. It was kinda patronizing.

None of that mattered right now—because now we were in the center of the school, where Archangel had attacked and stolen Reese and Tommy.

It was so weird being back here, especially in the dead of night and after having been gone for a month—and especially with the chaos left behind after the attack. There were still backpacks there, thrown away in the chaos, loose-leaf papers and textbooks abandoned in the snow. There was a pink knit scarf swaying in the branch of one of the skinny elms in the planters at every corner of the courtyard to give it some life, and a jacket caught on the knob at the end of the westside railing.

The real change lay in the proof that there was someone here, an other that caused this dishevelment; the light pole I had seen cracked in half was still lying in the snow, little markers surrounding the bullet casings near it. The dirt in the planter diagonal from the one with the scarf looked like it had been blown out of it by an explosion, twisting vines clambering up the pillar behind it and lacing through the slats of the railing of the second floor breezeway. It used the railings and their supports like lianas, reaching the third before climbing to the rooftop and embedding their briars in the lining.

“They came in from above,” I said, pointing it out only when Dad looked at me questioningly. He followed my gaze to the vines, the others following suit.

“Probably left the same way too,” Dad hummed distractedly. Now that we were here, there was only one thing he was interested in; he walked to where those words that’ve been plastered on every newsreel and article were written into the ground, leaning down to look at the letters that were half my height. His hand shadowed the marks of the r in Rowe, humming to himself. “It’s carved in,” he said, looking over his shoulder at Dr. Sims and Aunt Sia. “Not just burned,”

We all joined him, Zeke whistling low and Brent and I sharing a look of surprise—because the words that looked like smoldering scribbles on screen on the way here were actually burned so deeply into the ground that the concrete still crackled with the hit, hissing in the cold and melting any of the snow that had tried to settle there before we got here. “Damn,” Zeke said, almost sounding impressed. “What the hell kind of power can do that?”

Even Dr. Sims seemed surprised. “That’s not very….Celia-like,” he pointed out, looking at Dad.

Dad immediately seemed tense. “Yeah, well, neither are the vines and whatever cracked that pole in half,” he pointed out before standing and turning to face us, crossing his arms. “Means she has a lot of people on her side now.”

Aunt Sia stepped over the letters, looking down at them as she turned slowly, taking stock of how they were scratched into the concrete. “This looks a lot like the attack on Curdun, when Augustine was broken out,” she observed. “Same sort of burn marks.”

“Which means….what?” Brent asked, glancing around. “She has a partner in crime?”

“Or a lieutenant she trusts to do what she needs,” Dr. Sims said, glancing at Dad. “She wouldn’t trust many people to have her back like that.”

Dad was still looking down at Rowe in large, scratchy letters before he shook his head. “We aren’t going to find any answers if we don’t find whatever clue she left behind for us to follow,” he pointed out. “She wouldn’t do this without a reason. We need to start looking around.”

The adults dispersed, Brent and I sort of hovering uselessly in the center of the courtyard as we watched the four of them begin scrounging around for…something. “Celia,” I hummed. “What was it she always left behind? Cranes?”

“Doves,” Brent corrected as I fell in step at his side as he walked over to the vines. Steel overtook his lower arms and he grabbed the thicket by its canes, shaking. “Damn, that’s pretty sturdy,” he hummed, impressed.

I looked around at the dirt, the tossed up mulch and rock that had scattered after the vines shot out of the planter. “Do you think she’s dangerous?” Brent asked suddenly as he climbed onto the planter to take a chance at seeing if the vines could hold his weight. “Like, if she’s just a paper conduit, we could take her on, right? We managed to mess up Augustine.”

I sat on the planter’s edge as he tried to find a place to put his feet, looking down at the ground. Did I think we could take on a paper conduit easily? Sure. Dr. Sims’ power was insanely strong, Dad was Dad, and Brent’s power was essentially the trump card in whatever messed up game of rock, paper, scissors fighting her would bring. I…I couldn’t do much anymore, but even if push came to shove—paper dissolves in water.

But that really wasn’t what made her a good villain the last time Dad confronted her either. And Garrett…well, they seemed sure she was a force to be reckoned with. “There’s no time to dawdle,” they had said, with my voice.

“We face the end.”

“I don’t think it’s the power that makes her dangerous,” I finally said. “I mean—remember that she was killing people and pinning it on Dr. Sims? On Mom?” I scuffed my boot in the dirt, thinking about those moments when I was with Garrett in their headspace, with no sense of where I ended and Celia began. “She’s…really smart,” I said, before adding, “And manipulative. I mean, if she’s got all these people helping her…”

Brent shrugged, and I’m pretty sure it was because the guy was more concentrated on finding a foothold in the vines than actually responding to me. “Augustine had the DUP,” he pointed out, slipping the end of his shoe in a gap. “A weird thirty-something year old lady with a bunch of lackeys isn’t something Dad can’t ha—”

He didn’t get to finish the sentence; the moment he put his full weight on the vines, they shattered like glass, splinters spraying as he slammed back into what dirt remained in the planter with a sound similar to a giant balloon deflating.

I burst out laughing as Brent wheezed, trying to suck air back into his lungs after hitting the ground with force like that. God—leave it to the dumbass with metal literally laden into his muscles to see if something so light could hold him up. Brent was always a curious one, but never had self-preservation when trying to prove a hypothesis. It’s gotten him into a lot of shit—the security room of the mall, the nurse’s office, the ER with his arm bone sticking out of his skin.

“Hey!” a voice called to interject on my cackling, Dad standing by the wrought iron of the west side entrance to the school. I hadn’t noticed it before this moment, but the bars were bent, like something had physically pulled them apart to make a gap. Dad’s hands were out, and he looked at the two of us with that face—the one that makes you freeze when you’re trying to do something bad, like take a McDonald’s tray down the slide at their playplace to see just how fast you could go down it. “We’re trying to be discreet here?”

He turned with a sort of scoff, Brent and I throwing each other a look as he sat up and brushed off. Dad wasn’t one to snap, especially at something I knew he’d find hilarious any other time—at least, that’s what I kept repeating to myself so I didn’t feel bad about it. “Must be stressed,” I muttered under my breath as I tried to help Brent up. Tried being the keyword, as I nearly fell when he tugged.

Brent stood and I helped him brush the grit off of his back, shaking it out of his hoodie as he looked up at the vines that still straddled the second and third floor. “Anyways,” he said, brushing off his chest. He shrugged. “Dad’s taken on a lot more than some chick and her flying monkeys. Just means more powers for him.”

I couldn’t shake off the feeling that Brent was being way too blasé about this. But then again—he’d never been inside Celia’s head.

Dad didn’t lose that stress the longer we were there—in fact, it got worse and worse the longer he looked around with no sign of Celia or her origami or anything. “Goddamnit!” he eventually cursed, making a fist and moving like he was going to hit the concrete pillar before deciding otherwise, instead bringing it up to press the balls of both palms against his eyes. “We’re getting nowhere—”

Aunt Sia immediately tried to calm his nerves, tone placating as she said, “We just need to keep looking, it’s—”

“We haven’t found anything yet, Alessia!” Dad responded, hands flying off of his eyes to motion out. He blinked a few times, trying to clear the stars from his vision as he added, “There’s not even a sign she was here in the first place—”

“But we know she’s involved somehow,” Dr. Sims interrupted. “Garrett wouldn’t lie.”

“Not about this, at least,” Aunt Sia muttered under her breath, looking around.

Dad looked at Dr. Sims. “If it was just—” he waved vaguely at the ground, “—here, what’s the likelihood that it would’ve been picked up and categorized as evidence?”

Dr. Sims let his head fall side to side, debating his answers. “I’m not sure,” he finally admitted. “The only reason anyone knows about the doves in the first place was because you used it as evidence when they were trying to pin General Mortimer’s death on you. But—that was the General of the military. If anyone remembered that fact—”

Dad’s outward groan sounded more like a growl, and he looked like he wanted to sing a slew of curse words—at least, before Zeke held up a hand. “Okay, hol’up,” he said, silencing everyone else. “If this Celia lady is so conniving, she’d know they’d look for evidence to where these two kids were taken. I think we’re looking at this wrong.”

Dr. Sims cocked a brow. “How so?”

“Well, if I was some evil mastermind that had a good eighteen years to plan how to mess with you,” he said, motioning to Dad. “Then I’d make it significant but make you sweat about it. Leaving a love letter in the middle of the ground here is a sure way to ruin the game. Either some agent picks it up, or the snow could ruin the paper.”

Dad, who at first looked annoyed, became more and more pensive the longer he spoke. “That’s…not a bad point, actually,” he hummed in agreement, nodding absentmindedly.

Aunt Sia crossed her arms, and I wasn’t sure if it was just to do so or to fight off the sudden breeze that had kicked up—a snow storm was close, I could feel it in the air. “So where would she leave it, if she wanted to make a statement but also keep the dove from being ruined?”

Dad chewed on his cheek. “Could still be somewhere in the school,” he said, before glancing uncomfortably at Brent and I who were watching this all from the sideline. “She knows I have children—she could’ve kept it connected to them.”

“COLE isn’t out of the question either,” Aunt Sia added. “It’s a few miles away, but—leaving the dove in the ruins after the first attempt to get you to come out and fight? It’s not far off from a Celia-like statement.”

Dr. Sims looked really uncomfortable at suggesting the next possible location. “How…how far is your old home from here?” he asked tentatively.

Dad looked at Dr. Sims for a moment before cursing. “Alright,” he decided, looking at Brent and I. “Brent, take Dr. Sims and Zeke—Jean, you’re with me and Alessia. I want you guys to help us look around, show us anything that might be important enough for Celia to use to make a statement.”

And there we were, giving them what was practically a tour of the school to find some serial killer's welcome back letter.

Brent, realistically, probably had a lot more places he could show them; the trophy case was in the main hall of the first floor, the entrance to the gym had even more trophies and a banner with their face from winning state. Me? I had half a mural in the Arts and Culture hall and a clay diorama display of Mesopotamia in the library. Most of my contributions were outside of the school.

But that thinned out the possibilities, at least.

Even more so when I found where the dove actually was.

While the outside of the school just looked like a giant brick of concrete, the inside was actually nice; the courtyard came in from the walls, every corner more spacious to both hold a stairwell and entrances to the wings of classrooms on that level. I had begun to lead them to the Arts and Cultures wing, the hall of band rooms and black box theatres and art galleries, when I froze, stopping so abruptly Dad ran into my back.

I left Dad and Aunt Sia behind as she helped him recover, ignoring the, “Jean, what’s wrong?” to run towards it. I knew that bag; powder purple, small flowers from the fake flower section of the craft store sewn on in random bunches on its front. We always took two miniscule buds from the displays, a little show of thievery, and sewed them onto random things; clothes, blankets. The biggest victim to our attacks was her backpack.

Reese’s backpack.

It looked like it had dropped suddenly, the flap that came over its face open, one of her journal’s sticking out of the backpack’s maw. She must’ve fumbled it while reaching in for something. Or it was ripped from her when she was kidnapped, a terrible voice in the back of my head nagged. But there were no signs of a fight, at least; no blood in the snow, nor on the bag as I picked it up.

The flap fell back as I lifted it, the journal slipping back in and something crumpling under its weight. And I wasn’t sure if it was foolish hope, or something stupid that just drove me inside—but I immediately began rooting inside of it for the source of the noise in the strange, stupid hope that it was something for me. Like she saw Archangel begin to descend on the campus and decided the best thing to do was to write me a note—but rationality means nothing in hope’s wide eyes.

Instead, as I rooted in and grabbed the edge of what was being crumpled by the journal’s edge, what was in my hand making it burn when I realized what it was.

I almost dropped it. The moment I saw the art, I nearly dropped it like it was an IED. Instead, I just called out, “Dad!” despite him already being a step and a half away from joining me, turning and holding the dove like it was acid eating away at my hand. “Dad, it’s—Reese’s backpack, it was in the—“

Dad took the crumpled dove out of my hand, already moving back towards where we came to find Dr. Sims as Aunt Sia moved to comfort me, her hand settling on my lower back as I held Reese’s backpack. There was something about finding what was practically a ransom note in her bag that had me spiraling; everything suddenly felt really really real. Reese was gone. No, worse—Reese was in the hands of some crazy lady that’s had it out for my family since before I was born, and was now taking it out on people who were barely involved. This Celia lady targeted Reese, or at least knew her well enough to leave her goddamn ransom note in her backpack. “Come on,” Aunt Sia murmured gently in my ear as Dad called for Dr. Sims somewhere far away.

The art was, arguably, some of the best I’d ever seen.

Unlike the bits from before I recalled from looking at Celia’s art, this page was a single panel; in the center stood a bird, its shining armor almost as eye-catching as its two heads. The plated armor on it contrasted the bird’s chimera coloring—its white side of its body was adorned in black, tapering grey to white the further the armor was on its black feathers. Some white streaked in the black, black in the white, salt and pepper from age reflecting in its older face.

Dad.

Fukushū.

And if there was any color to the artwork, I was sure the two-headed bird would look way more familiar, the same shade as the Conduit emblem he had painted so long ago.

The bird’s head—both of them—were looking up, eclipsed by a shadow far beyond where the panels could see—but the wings, the horns, were familiar. That had to be Archangel, or whatever its anthromorphic equivalent in this story was. That wasn’t what was interesting.

What was interesting were the two birds sheltering behind Fukushū.

One was large, like him, though different; where Fukushū looked like a raven with a strange case of vitiligo, this one was...sharper? That didn’t feel like the right word, but it was; the feathers of its tail were shaped like cinquedeas, white zipping down the middle of their grey. It had a gauntlet on its wrist much like Fukushū, and the scowl set in its bordered facial markings went all the way up to the ruff on its head, eyes as dark as its face.

The other was smaller, slimmer; it matched in grey with the other, but had none of its sharp edges and rough glare. It looked scared, the gorget of the shoulder armor set looking like a thick collar on the small bird. It had ruffs as well that came down, curling around its lighter, whiter face.

The one thing that connected these two birds were bolts that shot across their eyes; on the larger, black-faced bird, a white streak; on the white-faced bird, black. They were more youthful, spry and fuller, standing behind Fukushū.

Fukushū had his arms out, shielding the young birds from the shadow that loomed above them, protecting them from the attacker. Fukushū and his fledglings.

Dad and us.

The theory was confirmed when Dad turned the page over, beginning to read a haiku on the back: “‘Our paths cross again; New players enter the game; Old habits die hard.’” He glanced up at Dr. Sims and Aunt Sia with a stressed, exhausted look before looking back at the back of the dove to continue reading. “‘Delsin, Delsin—didn’t you learn anything from before? We can’t run from what we are. Who we were. You and I have inherited too many burdens, too many wrongs, to ever truly be free.’”

Inherited. That phrase Garrett told me, they learned from Celia—a life is made of wrongs we inherit. Who said Dad inherited his position? Why did it have to be him? “‘We’ve been apart for far too long. And while I originally believed I would have to dig you out of whatever hole you’d be put in after Mortimer’s death, I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who’s well-versed in slipping out of the noose just before it tightens. And I suppose it’s nice to see that, even through it all, you still tried to help the Conduits from behind your own mask—but it wasn’t enough. It will never be enough, so long as we ask for acceptance. You’re making the same mistakes Augustine did long ago.

“‘Time’s up, Delsin. There’s far too much to catch up on, and even more to learn. And you have quite a lot to learn. This Pandora’s box was opened long ago, and yet far after when we began suffering from its whims. We aren’t the first to walk this road, and we won’t be the last. Perhaps Eugene can help you find the burrows we’ve hidden in before, and those of the First Sons. You found the one in the desert, our hidden location all the way in Australia—even the cave that witch Dubois hid in in Lozère. But you’ve yet to find them all. Put your nose to the ground, Delsin. Sniff out the blood in the water, and come learn everything you’ve missed.’”

Dad looked up, scowling hard. “There’s something here too, a written-out link. Looks like it goes straight to the DoD. I want to go back to the command center, see if—”

He didn’t get to finish his sentence.

Dr. Sims’ phone beeped, and he moved to fish it out of the pocket of his long coat, immediately unlocking it as the alert refused to let up. “Something tripped the alarm system,” he said, looking up and glancing around the frozen group. “We need to go, now.”

That got us all to move.

Dad pushed Brent and I forward, only pausing to drain some concrete from the message left in the courtyard before jogging to catch up, passing as he led the way to the gate. “What the hell tripped the alarm? I thought we were covered?”

Dr. Sims was briskly walking while looking down at his phone, tapping away. “We should be,” he agreed, voice tense. Dad yanked open the gate as Dr. Sims clicked something and said, “Strange…a drone on the perimeter of the investigative barrier was activated by a Conduit’s presence.”

Dad froze, hand on the gate as he processed Dr. Sims’ words, then looked over his shoulder at Brent. “I thought you got rid of all the drones,” he said.

Brent held up his hands in mock surrender. “I did!” he defended. “I took out all the ones Zeke sent me to!”

Dad rounded his stare on Zeke, something a bit more predatory settling into them during the movement—but Zeke didn’t rise to it. “I kept the furthest drones active in case someone comes for us while we’re here,” he said. “There’s no knowing if Archangel put some sort of alarm down for when you eventually came knocking.”

Dad looked between Zeke and Brent and back again before growling out in frustration, opening the gate.

If the drones left to guard the perimeter were still live, and Dr. Sims was informed someone, a Conduit, activated their alarms—then who’s to say it wasn’t Archangel? Dr. Sims seemed unable to access the live footage without his laptop, only able to get notifications from the ping its alarm caused, looking up to say, “300 feet and approaching fast.”

Dad didn’t waste time with running; he squared his shoulders as concrete grew from nowhere, rock shoulder pads settling on his tense form. Everyone else seemed to take the hint; Dr. Sims shoved his phone in his pocket, his strange circular, angelic like gauntlets appearing on his forearms. Aunt Sia took out her chain, Zeke his gun, and Brent slotted himself just in front of me as I sat in the back of the pack like a useless invalid.

For a moment, the air stilled as we all waited for the approaching person that tripped the alarm. Could it have been Celia? Her lieutenant? Another pack of soldiers?

Well, it was none of that; lights illuminated us, brilliantly blinding and forcing us all to wince and look away (save for Dr. Sims, who was somehow still able to look straight ahead). I covered my eyes with my cast-covered hand, tired squealing as the vehicle in front of us swerved and came to a quick stop, engine turning off.

It wasn’t a government car or an armored vehicle; hell, it wasn’t even a nice car.

But it was a very familiar Honda Accord with a small dent in the back fender, all but one door in the car opening as some very familiar faces all bolted out of the car.

“Guys!” Mei exclaimed, slamming the driver’s side car door shut and pushing her way past Zeke to bolt straight for Brent, hands going around his waist to hug him. Brent froze with his hands up in the air like he was at gunpoint for a moment, seemingly shellshocked at the fact that his crush was there hugging him before he cracked, an arm coming down and around her. Dom came around the car from the passenger’s side, Cat fighting her way out of the center of the backseat as Dad’s concrete sleeves disappeared and he turned towards us, scowling just as sharp at the rock that had been rotating around his arms moments before.

Zeke, upon seeing how Cat froze in place, wisely lowered the gun still aimed at the old Accord. “Who, uh…” he glanced at Dad as the illumination from Dr. Sims’ gauntlets went off. “Who’re they?”

Mei pulled back from Brent, glancing between him and I as she began rambling. “Thank God you’re here,” she said as Cat latched her arms around me, hugging tight. “I was—it was terrifying, they just came in and—the walls were shaking when they—”

They took Tommy, Cat signed when she pulled away from me, Tommy’s name sign so frantic it would’ve been misspelled if it was written. No one knows where he is, the cops are saying—

“We’ve all been worried about you guys,” Dom said, the most present I’d ever seen him as he dapped up Brent. Mei, free from his grasp, immediately threw her arms around me.

“I’m so glad you’re okay,” she murmured as she pulled away, that terrible pitying look in her light brown eyes.

I hated when people look at me like that.

There was a very exaggerated throat-clearing behind them and well all paused, turning our attention to Dad—who did not look happy. He was staring at us—specifically Brent and I—with a critical gaze. “What are they doing here?” He asked in that firm lawyer-ly voice, like we were on the bench and he was digging for the truth.

Brent and I glanced at each other, wide eyed—but neither moved to apologize first. I mean, I definitely didn’t tell anyone where we were, my phone wasn’t even on, and Brent looked just as surprised—but before either of us could begin pleading our innocence, Mei spoke.

She broke from me, turning to face Dad. “Mr. Rowla—Rowe—sir,” she decided, holding up her hands placatingly. There went Mei, always the peacekeeper. “It’s my fault. Brent told me you all were going to try to help Theresa and Tommy and I saw you were all back in Portland and—we were really worried. We wanted to see them.”

Dad arched his brow. “You saw them?”

Mei nodded, faltering slightly under Dad’s critical stare. “Yeah, I—when he told me he was going to fix this, I assumed you were heading this way so I kept tracking his bitmoji’s location on—”

“His what?” Dad growled out before his predatory glare landed on Brent. “I thought I told you not to use anything that could track your location!”

“I didn’t realize it was still on—” Brent immediately began to defend.

Off on the side, Dr. Sims moved to stand closer to Aunt Sia. “I don’t understand,” he murmured, looking at his phone as he clicked through the mobile command center’s servos he was still connected to. He showed Aunt Sia the phone screen, continuing, “The drone’s alarm tripped because of a Conduit.”

“See, that’s why I don’t carry around one of them smartphones if I can help it,” Zeke quipped, patting the pocket on the strap of his sling bag as Dad and Brent argued. “Too easy for Big Brother to look over your shoulder.”

“Zeke, I don’t think that’s very helpful right now,” Aunt Sia cautioned, more a warning than anything else—especially when Dad’s hands clenched off on the side as he waited for Brent to respond.

“Holy shit, that’s Eugene Sims,” Dom whispered, looking at me like I should’ve been just as surprised.

Over the chaos of everyone speaking at once, a steady staccato beeping grew closer and louder with every passing second. A blue light appeared at the edge of the parking lot and quickly zipped towards us, the Homeland Security drone materializing in the darkness. Its beeps grew in tone as it hovered close, like a bloodhound yowling for its owner to come take their next kill.

And kill seemed to be the biggest concern for Dr. Sims at the moment, who was poking at his screen in fervor. “The alert triggered something,” he informed everyone.

“What do you mean?” Dad asked, lowering the knife hand he had trained on Brent to move, looking over Dr. Sims’ shoulder.

“I don’t—” Dr. Sims cut off, turning the phone and typing furiously with his two thumbs. He cursed something under his breath that vaguely sounded like a curse word in a Tolkien novel. “There’s a failsafe apparently—the alarm has to be disabled by someone in the command center with a password and credentials within a certain timeframe or it’ll alert the closest Field Office to send backup.”

Dad blinked. “And how long until the feds get alerted?” he asked.

Dr. Sims grimaced. “Two minutes ago?”

“What is that?” Mei asked, looking up at the drone with apprehensive eyes, backing up. Brent hesitated for a moment before his hand came to rest on her shoulder and pull her closer, slotting her into his side.

Dad groaned out a growl, following Mei’s eyes up to the drone before looking at Dr. Sims. “Can’t you—I don’t know, send it away or something?” he asked him. “Make them chase a ghost?”

Dr. Sims stumbled on his words. “I can—I can try, but it needs a constant reading to follow, they might know it’s a ruse.”

“Maybe they’ll think it’s a false alarm?” I suggested. If they saw the drone was following nothing, maybe they’d just think it was broken?

Zeke shook his head. “They follow RFE signatures,” he informed me. “The tracers can sense a Conduit from a hundred feet away. One-seventy-five if someone is actively using their powers. I kept the perimeter drones active in case something started coming towards us, they were too far to pick up you guys even if y’all decided to have a power-pissing context here in the parking lot.”

Dom leaned over—and down, considering he had a foot on my height—to murmur into my ears, “Does the…Elvis impersonator not have powers?”

“That’s Cole MacGrath’s childhood friend,” Brent answered for me.

“That's who?”

“So there could still be something out there?” Aunt Sia demanded, winding the chain around her hand like a tick.

Dr. Sims’ brow furrowed further, lines appearing on his forehead I didn’t even know could exist on a person as he tapped on the screen of his phone. “I—I can’t redirect the drone,” he informed us, glancing up for only a moment before going back to jabbing at his phone. “I think I’m locked out.”

“Locked out?” Dad repeated, looking between Dr. Sims and his phone. He looked like the only reason he didn’t snatch the phone out of his hands was the fear of his reaction. “What do you mean locked out?”

“I mean that the alarm activated a kill switch on all external nodes. Any tech that isn’t in the field office is dead. I can barely see what they’re doing.” Dr. Sims explained, albeit with a slight attitude of his own.

The drone above seemed to beep louder, taunting us at the fact that everything was quickly going to hell. Dad glared up at the device before commanding, “Brent, take care of that.”

“Delsin, we should go,” Zeke warned.

Aunt Sia slotted herself on Dr. Sims’ other side, looking at his phone. “Are you able to see where the drone first sensed RFE?” she asked, still worried about what initially triggered it. “There could be someone out there.”

Brent moved his arm from around Mei’s shoulders, moving to do as Dad said—but she reached out, grabbing him by the wrist. “You can’t do that,” she insisted.

“Mei, it’s tracking us,” he pointed out.

“It’s government property. You could get in trouble!”

“Delsin,” Dr. Sims said, voice a bit higher than usual as he spoke, panicked. “They just dispatched people. We’ve got about five minutes before we have a bunch of Department of Defense agents on us.”

Zeke cursed. “If we were locked out, that means we can’t use the command center’s computers to look into that link Celia left us,” he pointed out.

Aunt Sia and Dr. Sims were talking to each other, trying to involve Dad in the conversation. “It says the sensor was first activated on Southwest Columbia,” Dr. Sims said, zooming in on his phone.

Dom perked up. “Columbia?” he asked. “That’s the road we took to get here, we didn’t see anything off,” he told Dr. Sims.

“Was there a chance you were followed?” She asked Dom, Mei and Cat, before looking at Dad. “If Archangel knew about Brent and Jean’s friends, they could’ve been watching them, too.”

“I don’t know, I—” Dad pressed his hands into his eyes, moving to pace as he muttered some stuff that I was sure involved regret at being alive right now. The drone above kept beeping as Mei tried to talk Brent out of destroying it and it was the straw that broke the camel’s back—he raised his voice, snapping, “Will someone deal with that goddamn drone?”

Mei was still holding onto Brent, who managed to get one hand out of her grip, moving to shoot down the drone—but he was too late. Something hit it with a sticky slap, the drone teetering hard as its beeps became muffled. The strange white substance crawled over the drone’s surface in veins, an albino symbiote that plastered itself close to the plastic, wrapped itself in the drone’s propellers until they stuttered to a stop. The strain of the restraint on the motors caused them to sputter and spark until it collapsed into a heap on the ground, the staccato beeping drawing off like the faltering sound of a heart monitor until it fell silent.

The weird substance around it hardened, going from silky and shiny to something firm and sleek, the color darkening from a crisp ivory to a dark linen. The color of clay.

The color of wax.

Everyone froze, watching the drone sputter and creak to a stop before looking up at Cat, who lowered her hand. She looked around at the group’s dropped jaws and wide eyes before bringing up her other hand.

We should talk, she signed.

#infamous erosion #delsin rowe #no taggin the games this is my sandbox now #Brent Posting #Jean Posting #new OC posting #I'm so fucking hype #Took forever to write this because I wanted to give my baby girl a good entrance #eugene sims #AUNT SIA POSTING #love that girl look at my badass go. I support women's rights but I especially support them reinforcing them with violence. Swang that Than #Zeke Posting #gab if you're reading this go drink water you goddamn heathen #love u <3 #WHAT HAPPENED TO THIS BEING MY SHORT CHAPTER #FUCK #10K FUCKING WORDS?#god christ above and my grandmother below what the shit

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kuai-kuai · 2 months ago

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webdev log uhhhh... 6?

Haven't worked on my site in a bit because I think I fucked up somewhere in during the deployment phase so now it's hard to host it locally.... only the index page works and the css is half broken anyways, presumably because of laravel breeze's tailwind coming preinstalled. I DID have to jump through hoops to get it going during deployment.. just don't know which hoops so it's stuck that way >_>;; so now I can't host it locally for development......... I'll have to make things and just hope it shows up when I deploy them I think

Failed to listen on 127.0.0.1:8000 (reason: ?)

cool, cool. thanks. very helpful debugging message..

anyways, coded up a little php doohicky and updated my site! WANNA PEEK?

I wanted to migrate my fridge page (art others have done of my characters) to my site, but I didn't want to implement another table because YUCK I'm so done with that.

I wanted something more automatic because I'm lazy and I also wanted it to not look like it's from 2003 like my neocities to match with my new site. too much trouble!!!! including the stuff previously mentioned.. so I left it untouched for a while.

then I was talking with someone and wanted to try making this with php.....

it's pretty basic. finished the code for the script in like an hour maybe, and then later it was mostly just tinkering with the html/css itself to make it display all nice and grid-like.

all it does is take all images from a specified folder and spits them out.

it creates a DirectoryIterator object to iterate through the specified folder (at least, I think that's how DirectoryIterator works.... dunno) then for each individual file it checks if it's an image, gets the time the file was modified, then stores the file path and modified time in an array. then that array gets sorted via modified time (newest first), and then iterated through and BAM...

I'd prefer a better time system such as organize when the file was actually created, but if you paste a file into a new folder, "created time" gets changed to when you pasted it.. using file modified time is the only way when you aren't using a database and just want this to be all done automatically I think. unless I'M STUPID and someone has a better idea.. then please enlighten me.

ANYWAYS added The Fridge to my site using my lil code! :>

updated my About to include a link too...

also, I was looking up things and found this funny example code on stack overflow

let's all randomize our racism images.....

#talk #webdev

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the-nox-syndicate · 2 months ago

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SysNotes devlog 2 - retrieving data from the database and NEW profile features!

Welcome back to my SysNotes update! SysNotes is a system management app for people with DID, OSDD, and those who are otherwise plural.

Today I will flesh out the backend of the application (which was completely missing in the first devlog) and add some new profile fields.

First Devlog (1) | Previous Devlog (1.5)

Pulling data from the database and populating the profiles

If you remember, in the first devlog I used hardcoded data to test the interface like so:

Storing data in code is not sustainable or maintainable, so in devlog 1.5 I have identified the most suitable database structure, created some tables, and filled them with test data. To populate the tables I generated dummy data using the Faker library which uses random Latin words to create sentences. This was the result for the Alter Profiles table:

First, let's delete the hardcoded data from the code. Wow, the user interface is looking so empty now!

I already implemented the basic code for processing alter data and displaying it on the page in devlog 1. However, I had to make some tweaks to it due to the nature of database queries.

Firstly, when loading Alter Profiles for the side menu, I'm only selecting their name and ID, without the other fields (description, history, etc). A common mistake beginner developers make in simple cases like this is retrieving the entire DB record. But the side menu does not need the extra information, and loading it in alongside the name would make the page slower!

You may also notice that I'm getting the names in alphabetical order - I thought this would look nicer on the sidebar than if the names were all random, and make it easier to navigate. I'm only getting the profiles that belong to the current user.

When I get the actual profile data, I retrieve it with its status and characteristics, which are stored in separate tables:

And here we go, the profile page now uses the data stored in the database!

New profile features

But this is all just using the the proof of concept profile fields I mocked up in devlog 1. In this devlog, I want to add NEW fields to allow the profile page to do more powerful things, and better integrate with the future features of Inner World and Front Decider (still looking for a better name for it 😩).

(By the way, I assigned the Ulysses profile to a different user for testing, so you won't see that profile in the sidebar from now on)

Alter origins

One new profile field I've been wanting to add is an alter's origins. Some of my alters split from trauma, others from loneliness, and others through being AuDHD. I created a new table called "Alter Origins" with an optional owner ID. This means that some origins are universally available to all users, while others can be created by users themselves to customize their profile. In this example, "stressgenic" is a custom origin my user (Test System) created.

To use this table, I need to connect it to the Alter Profiles table using a foreign key:

Now we can access it on the front end!

(It shows on the top line, highlighted red)

Side note: I had issues with most Tailwind v4 colors not working so I had to manually define the origin badge color classes based on the official Tailwind values 😓 I'm not sure how to fix it, I wanted to leverage Tailwind to allow users to select "custom colors" from the Tailwind palette... I'll look into it at another time.

Relationships

I wanted the ability to set up bidirectional relationships between alters and display them after the character traits area.

I created an Alter Relationships table with some relationships and their badge colors:

And then I created a pivot table where alter 2 is Alice, alter 3 is Amari, and alter 5 is Benji:

Now if we go to Alice's page, we will see:

And Amari's will show:

This feature took a long time to implement because I ran into some issues with the pivot table and model relationships. I'd be lying if I said I have a good grasp of Eloquent 😅

Alter categories

One last thing I want to add in this devlog is to add custom categories that the names in the sidebar could be sorted into, which would be helpful for systems with many alters (or those who want to store their alter data and OC data in one place but want to distinguish between them, like me).

I will add some default categories to the database - however, you will be able to add new custom categories to suit your needs. I also want each profile to have one OR MORE categories for flexible filtering. This means, annoyingly, that I have to tinker with yet another pivot table 😩

Here is my Alter Categories table. Like with origins and relationships, "owner_id" refers to the user who made the category, and NULL categories are available to all users.

The pivot table looks like any standard pivot table so I'll omit it for this feature. I've had enough of pivot tables. Luckily, I got the model relationships correct the first time 😎

And now, Alice's profile shows her categories under her relationships:

(And here are all the category badges so far)

But this isn't all! I want to be able to filter my profiles by category in the sidebar.

Let's create a drop down! I think this looks alright:

Now let's load the categories of our available profiles into the dropdown. For this, I will need to fetch the categories table when getting the profile names.

The dropdown code basically takes the array (list) of all profiles, compares each profile's category to the selected category, and adds them to the array of filtered profiles, then displays them. If the selected value is "-" it just displays the full list of profiles.

And here we go, our fragments are Alice and Colin:

I also wanted to add the ability to group profiles by their categories (e.g. grouping by Age will split the names in the side bar into "syskid" and "adult" boxes). But this devlog has gone on for quite a while, so I'll save that for another time ;)

What next?

I wanted to finish the whole Profile section and move on to the more exciting inner World and Front decider features, however the complexity of the profile section so far requires me to spend a few more devlogs on it, oops 😅 So here is what you can expect in the next few devlogs:

Rethink the User Interface of the Profile page (all these badge colors are getting messy! And is the current layout the best for displaying the data? Find out next on Dragon Ball Z!)

Add a way to create new profiles using the New Profile form

Add ability to edit the profile information and delete profiles

Do you have ideas on other fields and features I could add to SysNotes? Or maybe you have suggestions on how to clean up the UI? I'd love to hear your thoughts! Thanks for reading 🙌

#sysnotes devlog #devlog #plurality #plural system #sysblr #web dev #programming #coding

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solalunar-eclipse · 1 year ago

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Ball & Chain of My Own Making

Written as part of the Sonic the Hedgehog Big Bang 2024, hosted by @sthbigbang!

Summary: Set in the Sonic the Comic (Fleetway Publications) universe. Now that Robotnik's grasp on the planet has finally been removed, the world is beginning to recover. During this process, Sonic goes to meet up with his old friend, Porker Lewis, on the Floating Island. Unfortunately, they're long overdue for a conversation…and it's going to happen whether he wants it to or not.

Wonderful art (may contain spoilers!) by:

@eosomit (GORGEOUS ART BY EOSOMIT HERE) @pikafleetsyolo (FANTASTIC ART BY PIKAFLEETS HERE)

AO3 Link

Wooden scaffolding arched towards the bright blue sky, free of smog for the first time in years. The foundations of future homes spread out across the land of the Emerald Hill Zone, built atop the rubble and ashes of the original village, proving that soon, the people who once lived here would be back and better than ever before.

A sudden gust of wind rattled the scaffolds, making them shake but not crumble under its force—because after all, this was no ordinary wind. This was the controlled tailwind created by the high-octane racing of one Sonic the Hedgehog, Hero of Mobius, reaching speeds even faster than his namesake.

He skidded to a stop in the midst of the construction, admiring the view around him. It was good to finally see the world rebuilding now that Robotnik had fallen…this had been just a dream for far too long, so to have it become tangible reality, something he could reach out and touch, was downright awesome.

After a few moments, he spotted one of his closest friends, Miles “Tails” Prower—to him just Tails—helping to push a high-up beam into a slightly better position with the assistance of his namesake tails, which spun like the blades of a helicopter.

“Hey, pal, you got anything ya need taking care of ‘round here?” Sonic yelled up to him. “Because you know if you do, it’ll be done before you’re finished saying so!” he finished, winking up at the fox.

Tails flew down from his place atop the framework, landing neatly in front of Sonic. “I’m afraid that was actually the last piece of work I had on my list for now! I think I’m going to go help out Johnny with his staff—he says it’s been on the blink lately, and I thought it surely couldn’t be much harder than that time I helped you repair your plane!” He beckoned happily for Sonic to walk alongside him as the two headed back to their current base of operations, and the hedgehog did so without protest.

“Hmh.” Sonic replied eloquently, folding his arms and frowning slightly. “Amy and Tekno are still out too, yeah?”

“They are…” Tails looked up at his friend for a moment, before his eyes widened with an idea. “Hey, there has to be a couple of malfunctioning badniks left to take out somewhere, right?”

Sonic sighed. “Not for a hundred miles—and believe me, I’ve looked.”

The fox’s twin tails flicked nervously. “I mean, the only work we have going on right now is this whole relocation project…the thing is, I don’t think any other baddies are quite ready to crawl out of the shadows so soon after Robotnik vanished.” he explained.

Sonic abruptly snapped his fingers. “Hey, there’s an idea! I’m gonna take the Tornado up to the Floating Island, see how that end of the relocation’s shaking out up there! Seeya, gotta scram!”

And with that, he was gone, Tails’s call of “bye!” (accompanied by an understanding smile he didn’t see) just barely reaching him.

Within moments, Sonic was already in the cockpit of his trusty biplane, flipping switches with the muscle memory of someone who had piloted it a hundred times before. His eyes roamed over the controls, then shifted to the shining red paint that adorned it—

…oh no…what have I done?

The Hero of Mobius abruptly froze, his fingers trembling almost imperceptibly as he remembered an earlier version of this very plane, crumbling and burning before his eyes—the fire had burned all around him, smoke choking the air, but this time not from one of Robotnik’s factories, instead it—

Sonic shook his head, gritting his teeth and forcing his quills to relax. “Everything worked out just fine,” he muttered. “He’s gone now. Amy and Tekno said so.”

With a few sharp movements, the plane’s engine was running smoothly, and Sonic taxied it down the runway and took off with ease. He only needed a moment to remember the controls, and then his memory of flying between islands on his adventures took over at last.

As he climbed in altitude, he banked the plane around so it was pointing straight towards the Floating Island. While Tails had added a map to the Tornado, making it easier than ever to navigate, Sonic didn’t need any of that. He might not have…one particular effect from the Chaos Emeralds any longer, but that didn’t mean their energy would ever stop being intertwined with his being in a way he neither could nor cared to explain.

He glanced briefly over the side of the biplane, enjoying the sight of Emerald Hill’s in-progress town below, now resembling a child’s plaything more than the towering structures he’d seen Tails working on earlier.

As Sonic flew further, he passed over rivers that were running cleaner than before (though their banks still bore remnants of sludge) and the half-destroyed ruins of several of Robotnik’s factories. He smirked with a grim sort of satisfaction as he spotted a particularly torn-up building, stamped with that grinning logo all mangled and broken, unable to churn out even one more ounce of material to support the now-toppled Empire.

Thankfully for his notoriously short patience, it didn’t take Sonic long at all to reach the Floating Island. Avoiding the populated Mushroom Hill Zone for the time being, he instead circled the plane around over a large grassy clearing just outside the Hidden Palace, coming in for an (in his opinion) impressively smooth landing.

Sonic hopped out of the biplane after cutting its motor, grinning broadly. Any second now…

“SONIC!” a voice bellowed from within, accompanied by the sound of heavy footfalls. “What on Mobius are you doing here?”

Knuckles the Echidna stepped out of the shadows of the Hidden Palace, his arms folded over his chest and his ever-present glower meeting Sonic’s expectations perfectly. “You’d better not have shown up just to cause trouble. The Emerald Hill folk are in the middle of packing up their entire lives, and I am already at my limit with all the chaos around here.”

Sonic swiped under his nose, his smirk growing wider. “You’ve gotta be having some real trouble guarding all those Chaos Emeralds then, huh? I can always take care of them if you’re not up to it!”

Knuckles’s jaw tightened. “Sonic, I swear—“

“Relax, knucklehead!” he interrupted, cutting Knuckles off before he could get truly enraged. (Unfortunately, the continued presence of his smug smile may not have particularly helped, but he was more than fine with that.) “You should know I’m not here to mess anything up! Just popped up here to check out how things are going on your end. I don’t expect them to be moving quite as fast as my folks, obviously, but I figured if anyone could help speed the process up a little, it’d be yours truly.”

The echidna appeared momentarily torn between the promise of getting complete peace and quiet on his island sooner, or getting marginally more peace and quiet right now by hurling Sonic bodily off the island. Eventually, he just fixed the hero with his most stern glare, before pointing wordlessly to the door of the Hidden Palace.

Sonic snickered, strolling casually into the building and enjoying the irate grumbling behind him. Knuckles was just too easy to rile up, and his reactions were always fantastic.

“Oh, Knuckles, did you find out who it wa—Sonic!”

The hedgehog in question nearly jumped in surprise, but managed to conceal it beneath a smooth pivot to face the speaker…only to smile broadly once he registered just who it was.

Sitting at one of the consoles around the massive room was none other than Porker Lewis, his old friend and former fellow Freedom Fighter. Porker practically leapt out of his chair, dashing over to greet Sonic more properly. “It’s just wonderful to see you! How’s everything going?”

Sonic flashed his trademark grin, not-so-subtly preening in response to Porker’s unfiltered enthusiasm. “You know me, always chillin’. Howzabout yourself, Lewis? Enjoying that island life?” he added, winking.

Porker smiled wryly, shaking his head. “I’m liking it a lot more now that Robotnik’s gone. Getting to help repair the technology Knuckles’s ancestors left behind is important work, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not nearly as intense as trying to topple a dictatorship.”

The hero’s face didn’t move a millimeter, but somehow, his smile felt so much more strained. “Yeah. It’s…good that’cha can just work on that now instead of having to put up with badniks all day, every day.”

Porker’s own expression faltered briefly, before he brightened up again, albeit more mellow than before. “Well, I’m sure you didn’t just come here to stand around and talk! I’m supposed to be repairing some of the zoom tubes in the Hydrocity Zone today, but I can leave that for later if you want to have a look around Mushroom Hill together.”

“Psh, no way! It’s been ages since I got to give Hydrocity the old run-around, I’ve gotta see if I can beat my fastest time down there! You wouldn’t deprive your old buddy Sonic a chance to do that, wouldja?” The blue hedgehog bounced into a more dynamic stance, one fist held in front of himself and his other hand thrown back as though he were about to spindash right this very second.

“If you tear up this chamber, I will throw you into the ocean.” Knuckles huffed, making Sonic scoff and straighten back up to face the serious guardian. At that very moment, Sonic’s eyes caught on exactly what Knuckles was leaning against—specifically, one of the switchboards in front of the Emeralds’ storage column.

“Forget it, Porker…you’ve already done more than your share.”

“Don’t mention her, buddy. Lately she’s been driving me up the wall!”

“Whaaaa—!”

(The rock Sonic had been leaning against crumbled beneath him without warning, and he was sent pitching backwards into the column of pure Chaos energy. It surged through him, bright and powerful…and…violent…)

“Whoa, hey, Sonic? Sonic? You with me?”

“Agh!” He jumped backwards, immediately dropping into a fighting stance…before seeing that it was just Knuckles in front of him, one gloved hand raised as though he’d just been waving it in Sonic’s field of view. “Geez, Knucklehead, warn a guy next time you decide to stick your hand in his face, huh?”

“…you didn’t even react after I said I was gonna…chuck you off the island and all that. I didn’t actually mean it, you know. You might be annoying, but I’m not just going to let you drown.” the echidna muttered, still watching Sonic warily, as though he were about to space out again at any minute.

And Sonic wasn’t having any of that.

“Tch, I was just daydreaming about new ways to spindash that smug look ‘a yours right off your face.” he retorted, folding his arms defiantly. “I don’t hafta dignify every smart-aleck thing you say with a comeback, do I?”

Knuckles rubbed his brow, letting out a long-suffering sigh. “Whatever. Porker, can you please take him anywhere that isn’t here? Mushroom Hill, Hydrocity, either way, just…ugh.”

Porker laughed sympathetically, walking up to stand next to Sonic, now with some papers in his arms and some tools on a belt. “I certainly can. So, Hydrocity, is it, then?” he asked the blue hero lightly.

“You know it!” Sonic gave him a thumbs up, before following his old friend to one of the doorways leading out of the Emerald Chamber.

The two friends traveled down a short hallway, which led to a shaft so deep Sonic couldn’t even begin to see the bottom. Stairs spiraled around its outside, while a pole speared down the center, attached to the ceiling at one end and presumably the floor at the other.

Porker looked over at Sonic. “How about a race? You on the stairs, and me on the pole?” he asked.

Sonic’s expression split into what had to be the biggest grin he’d worn yet. “You do realize you’re gonna lose embarrassingly, right?”

“Maybe, but that doesn’t mean I can’t at least try, does it?” Porker insisted, his hands in his pockets and the set of his shoulders easy. Internally, Sonic appreciated the sight of his friend relaxed and happy. It had been far too long since he’d last seen Porker like this, after all.

The Hero of Mobius dashed over to the top of the stairs, settling into a sprinter’s starting position. “You sure you’re ready for this, Sonic?” the engineer sked, smiling cheekily as he grabbed onto the pole with both gloved hands.

“Ha! I’ve been ready, Lewis, you oughta know that by now!”

“Alright then!” Porker announced, to the otherwise empty room. “Three! Two! One! Go!”

Immediately, the former Freedom Fighter pushed off the platform and began to slide down the pole—but that could never compare to the power of pure Sonic speed. The instant the sound “go” hit his ears, Sonic tore off down the stairs so fast that anyone watching wouldn’t have been able to make out his features, only seeing the blue blur that had earned him yet another of his many monikers.

Sonic couldn’t help but beam as the wind whistled through his quills and his sneakers pounded on the staircase, loving the thrill of adrenaline that came from riding the line between landing each step as quickly as possible and tumbling into an uncontrolled fall. His agility had to be perfect to pull this off…and of course, it was. He was Sonic the Hedgehog, after all.

Once he hit the bottom, he looked up, waiting for Porker to appear. Thankfully, he’d only just started tapping his foot by the time the engineer came into view.

“Took you long enough!” Sonic smirked up at him, his arms folded and one eyebrow raised.

Porker smiled back. “Well, pardon me for not wanting to free-fall out of control! Not all of us are invincible Heroes of Mobius—that’s your job, after all!”

Sonic hesitated briefly, something about the title resonating oddly in his chest. “Say, speaking of which…it was…a little heroic, kinda, to be the one to clap Robotnik in cuffs like that. How’d you manage it?”

“Oh! Well, it wasn’t much, really. I was just trying to help some of the Emerald Hill folk evacuate out of the Mushroom Hill Zone, when I saw Robotnik trying to escape that massive fight you and Knuckles had with Dr. Zachary! I managed to rally a few of the braver people, and together we got the drop on him and cuffed him before he knew what happened,” Porker explained, beginning to walk into the zone as he spoke. “We were only able to get him because he was so thrown off guard by actually losing his grip on power for once—it was an opportunity we wouldn’t have gotten again! I may have left the Freedom Fighters, but I wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night if I’d let him get away, you know?”

Sonic could feel his confusion showing on his face, but he wasn’t entirely sure how to stop it. “You…I guess, but…”

“Is everything alright?” Porker was frowning in concern, and that was enough to convince Sonic that this conversation wasn’t worth pursuing any longer.

He laced his hands behind his head casually. “Yeah, sure! You know me, since when am I not?”

“…” When Sonic snuck a peek at his friend out of the corner of his eye, he saw that Porker still looked uneasy.

Luckily for him, a Bugernaut suddenly swooped down at Porker, forcing him to duck out of the way. Within seconds, Sonic had curled into a ball, smashing the badnik and landing with ease. He quickly scanned the area for any more, spotting a few patrolling in a line farther ahead. While Robotnik was gone, his influence clearly still lingered, even up here on the Floating Island.

Briefly, he glanced back at his friend, who shot him a quick smile and a thumbs-up—which was all he needed to tear off in pursuit. It was a matter of a single jump to reach the nearest platform, and then only one more leap to bounce from badnik to badnik in a line, freeing the various little critters inside.

Sonic landed on an even higher platform, crouching by the edge to scan the ground below for Porker. He could jump down easily…but that would mean more awkward conversation. And when his alternative was scouting ahead and taking out any leftover badniks so Porker wouldn’t have to deal with them? It was hardly a choice at all.

He waved to get Porker’s attention, before jerking a thumb over his shoulder and holding up his fists like he was about to get into a cartoonish fight. The former Freedom Fighter gave him a friendly salute back, before turning back to his path towards the busted zoom tube. Sonic let out a breath that, had anyone else heard, he would have denied having been a sigh. Then, in a blink, he wasn’t there at all, only a blue streak of light marking the path he’d taken.

Thankfully, he did turn out to have a genuine excuse to rush on ahead, as he found several more clusters of badniks after that initial line of Bugernauts. While Porker followed the lower paths, Sonic took every shortcut he could find in an effort to cover as much ground as possible. However, being thorough did mean he had to make some…unfortunate choices, as well. Hanging from a slow rope pulley above water wasn’t exactly his idea of fun, and neither was the promise of dropping into the water to clear out some aquatic badniks, but let nobody ever say that the Hero of Mobius and leader of the Freedom Fighters wasn’t committed to what he did.

With a gulp of air, Sonic opened his hands and let himself drop, curling into a ball and crashing directly into the water. Thankfully, this particular area seemed to have a fast current to it, meaning that he merely had to keep himself curled up and let the water turn him into a badnik-busting buzzsaw.

Not really loving the lack of air down here, Sonic thought to himself impatiently, finally uncurling in search of an air bubble once he was reasonably sure the room was clear. Now where would…

There!

A small imperfection in the floor of the area had allowed a tiny crack to form in the material. At that exact point, the liquid could freely drip out—but more importantly, air could flow in. Happily, it didn’t take long at all for an air bubble to appear that was big enough for Sonic to use, and he inhaled the oxygen inside eagerly.

His energy restored, the hedgehog made his way over to a slightly narrower section of pipe, letting the current sweep him along once more. Annoyingly, the water turbines were still active, but it was a small price to pay for his otherwise quick progress, and he could easily avoid them with the help of the support struts used to help the pipe hold its shape. Besides, before long, he was spindashing up a ramp and out of the water, soaring high into the air before landing with perfect ease.

After a bit of casual platform-hopping, Sonic spied Porker a little ways away, kneeling by a strange mechanism and seemingly inspecting it. This must’ve been the fix-it job he had to do, Sonic mused, before leaping down to join his friend alongside the ancient travel system.

“So, how’s it going?” he asked, making poor Porker yelp and drop his screwdriver with a clatter, startled.

“Sonic!” he scolded, but his smile severely diminished any attempt at properly convincing the hedgehog to regret his actions. “You startled me!”

“I have eyes, I noticed,” Sonic quipped, shifting to lean casually against the wall. “You didn’t answer my question though, you really gonna leave a guy hanging like that? And here I thought we were friends.” he complained, wearing a faux-devastated expression.

Porker stared at him blankly for a moment, before recognition lit up his eyes. “Oh, yes, of course! It really is on you for making me forget, though.” Sonic scoffed lightly, but otherwise didn’t speak, leaving room for Porker to continue.

“It’s frankly quite a simple fix,” the engineer began. “While the tubes themselves are largely made of stone, the mechanical parts that create the vacuum necessary to enable this kind of rapid travel are much more delicate and therefore prone to failure. That’s why the tubes here aren’t working anymore—there must have been a malfunction in this area. Now all I need to do is open it up—” and just as he said this, he heaved a panel off the side of the structure in front of him, revealing an incomprehensible mess of pistons, cogs, and other unidentifiable bits and bobs. “—and figure out what's going on in here.”

“Huh. Why’d the echidnas decide to stick this thing all the way down here instead of up with everything else in the Emerald chamber? Somehow I don’t get the sense they were particularly in it for the sightseeing opportunity.” Sonic remarked, moving to lean against a different piece of the machine’s casing.

Porker’s laugh rang out from the metal walls of the structure, having already slid mostly inside to take a closer look. “Beats me! Knuckles and I are still having quite a time working on translating the ancient language used on most of the schematics for this place. We just got the blueprints for this all sorted out yesterday—it only became a major priority when the tubes stopped functioning. I haven’t even had a chance to dig through more of what we think are records, since most of our focus has been on the way the Floating Island works anyhow.”

Sonic smirked at the sound of Porker’s evident good mood. “Ol’ Knucklehead better have those blueprints all translated correctly, or else he’s gonna wind up going backwards instead of forwards next time he hops in one a’ these!”

“Oh goodness, I certainly hope it doesn’t come to that!” Porker still sounded amused, but also a little concerned. Not ideal. “At least they’d be working again, I suppose!”

“Well, pal, tell ya what. ‘Cause I’m such a kind and generous soul, I’ll give the tubes a spin once you’ve got them all set up! Just make sure to double-check your screws first—I’m not about to have Knuckles laughing at me if I get closely acquainted with the nearest rock, alright?”

“I’ll certainly do my best!” the engineer replied brightly. “Wait—oh, Sonic, I think I’ve found the problem!” he added, shifting around some more inside the machine.

“Forreal? Huh, I guess all that studying must’ve been worth it if you can find the problem that fast!” Sonic remarked, pushing off from the metal plating and strolling around to where Porker was.

“It’s a relatively simple issue too, thank goodness,” his friend continued, “there’s a hole in the main conduit for the pressurized air. In the long term, this pipe should really be replaced, but for now, I think a simple patch job will suffice.”

“What, and you just happen to have ‘pipe patcher’ on ya at all times?” Sonic asked, snickering slightly. “You go to dinner at someone’s house and think ‘oh no, better not leave my pipe patches at home’?”

Porker’s sigh echoed in the machine’s chamber. “It’s really not all that special, all I’m using is duct tape. So long as it makes a proper seal—which I’m being careful to do now—it should hold well enough for us to go back and get a proper replacement. And duct tape is an essential part of any engineer’s toolkit, especially when they’re going to do some engineering work. Which is exactly what we came down here to do.”

“We?” the hedgehog asked. “S’far as I can see, you’re the one doing all the fix-it jobs around here, I’m just tagging along to clear out badniks and have a good time. Wouldn’t wanna be inside that thingamajig anyway, you can barely even move in there!”

Porker made a movement that seemed to suggest a shrug. “It’s really not that bad,” he said, beginning to extricate himself from the mess of machinery. “I honestly find it quite comfortable—though I must admit there have been a couple of times when the sentries didn’t think to warn me politely before tapping me…I earned myself quite a few bruises before they learned not to do that.” Now fully outside, he shook his head with a slightly tired smile. “At least they apologized afterwards, I suppose.”

“Aw, man, I wish I’d been there! I would’ve paid good money to see that!” Sonic clapped a hand on his friend’s shoulder, grinning good-naturedly. “So, we gotta head back and grab that piece, yeah?”

Porker nodded in agreement. “Yes, we do, but first—”

But by the time the word “yes” had left his mouth, Sonic was already in the tube.

“Aw yeah!” he whooped to himself, rocketing upwards at a breathtaking speed. “This is the good stuff!”

Suddenly, however, he noticed that his speed was…beginning to slow down. He frowned. The zoom tubes normally didn’t do that at all, instead letting him blast out at full speed. This wasn’t a new problem Porker would have to fix, was it?

Sonic felt his quills begin to raise as he continued to decelerate, scraping uselessly against the near-frictionless surfaces of the inside of the tubes. The air grew weaker and weaker, struggling to push him up a vertical passage, and the Hero of Mobius felt a cold chill settle in his stomach.

He curled up just a little tighter, trying to use the movement to regain even a fraction of forward momentum, and that was enough to get him through the bend onto a horizontal plane, but then—

—he stopped moving.

Entirely.

Sonic the Hedgehog, the fastest thing on Mobius, could no longer move.

~~~

Porker Lewis, on the other hand, was running as quickly as he possibly could.

He’d wanted to warn Sonic that he needed to check the air pressure first, make sure everything was at least moderately in working order before he let his friend give the zoom tubes a test run, but while Sonic’s thoughts moved much faster than his own, that didn’t necessarily mean he had a greater amount of caution. Now, Porker had no idea where Sonic was, nor whether he’d even made it out of the tubes at all.

Still, the engineer pushed himself to follow the path upwards, in spite of the increasing difficulty he met with as he climbed. More precarious platforms, more obstacles, and wider gaps had to be dealt with, slowing Porker down as he struggled to navigate, but he refused to let the tube out of his sight. He had to be coming to a bend or junction soon at this rate…

And then, he saw it. The tube made a right angle, running along the ceiling of the Hydrocity Zone, and within it, just visible through the glass paneling, was a ball of blue.

Quickly, Porker scanned the area. The panel was held in place by a frame, which could be easily removed with his screwdriver, but getting to the tube in the first place would be rather more difficult. Further examination revealed that there were small crevices and ledges on the wall adjacent to it that he could use to climb up, but staying in position without falling and injuring himself would be complicated, especially since he would essentially need to turn around while on the wall to properly remove the paneling.

Still, it was the best he could do, given the situation. Removing the screwdriver from his tool belt and holding it in his mouth, Porker began to clamber up the side of the rock wall, moving as quickly as he could without putting himself in danger. He would be no use at all to Sonic with a broken leg, of course.

Speaking of him—“Sonic! I’m going to unscrew the paneling! You’ll be out shortly!” Porker shouted, forcing his voice as loud as it could possibly go.

If his friend replied, the engineer couldn't hear it. Nerves gripped his heart as he forced himself to climb faster, reaching the top soon after. Now came the difficult part; he braced himself with a hand against the pipe, before carefully shuffling his feet in a manner that would allow him to turn around and press his back against the rock wall.

The only thing keeping him from falling now was the strength of his arm as he pushed against the tube.

Carefully, Porker began to unscrew the frame bit by bit, wiggling the screws out of their housing one by one and letting them drop to the floor. After the third screw, his supporting arm began to tremble, but he refused to let it falter. Not when Sonic was counting on him.

The fourth screw dropped. At first, the frame refused to move, but a good whack with the screwdriver fixed that—followed by a sudden flinch from Porker as the glass panel dropped and shattered on the ground below.

“Good heavens, that’ll be quite the repair job…” he muttered to himself, before recalling exactly what the situation was at the moment.

“Sonic? Sonic, can you hear me?” he called, craning his neck in an effort to get a better look at the insides of the tube. He could see the ball of blue spines pretty well, actually, but something wasn’t quite right.

“…oh.” Porker murmured quietly.

Sonic was shaking.

He would have to get the hedgehog out all by himself, but how? He certainly couldn’t reach into the tube, not from this angle, and Sonic was clearly unable to move. The only thing he did seem capable of, as a matter of fact, was bristling his spines.

Wait. If Sonic had his spines raised, then that meant they could catch on something, yes? Porker began to hurriedly shrug off his jacket, only pausing to swap hands on the pipe once his screwdriver was back in his belt. Frowning in an effort to better gauge the distance, he swung the jacket back and forth once, twice, and then up into the tube—and thank goodness, at least one thing had gone right in this whole mess, when the cloth caught securely on Sonic’s spines.

Porker pulled as hard as he could, and for once the near-frictionless surface of the zoom tubes proved useful when his friend moved along with little resistance. Uncomfortably slowly, given the awkward angle, Sonic’s curled-up form slid further and further forward until finally, he slipped out of the opening.

What Porker had forgotten, however, was that Sonic had weight, and weight affected both balance and gravity.

What this meant, in practice, was that Porker very nearly wrenched his arm out of its socket fighting to keep them both from falling.

Even then, he didn’t succeed for very long, pitching forward and off the face of the wall soon afterwards. At the very least, his fall was more controlled, so that when he landed, he merely sprained his ankle instead of breaking it. (Happily, he was also able to avoid the shattered glass on the ground. Things would have gotten much more complicated if he hadn’t, and he was already about at his limit for complications.)

He ought to be thankful for small mercies, he supposed, because that at least meant the pain wasn’t so excruciating that he couldn’t check on his friend.

“Sonic? Sonic, are you al—are you hurt?” he asked quickly, pulling himself along the ground towards the hero, who had uncurled and was now on his hands and knees, with his head hanging between his arms.

For a moment, Sonic didn’t respond at all, and Porker felt a pang shoot through him. Just a second later, though, the hedgehog sat up, raising an eyebrow at him cockily. “Am I hurt? You’re the one who can’t curl up into a ball here, I’m not the one you should be checking on.”

“I wasn’t just talking about the fall. I meant before that, too.” Porker insisted, unwilling to let it go quite so easily.

“Tch, what, me getting stuck in the tube? Just don’t tell Knucklehead, he’ll never let me hear the end of it.”

Porker felt his stomach turn uncomfortably. He really, really didn’t want to push this, but the thought of Sonic pretending that nothing had happened sat even worse with him. Shakily, he inhaled once, then sighed, and felt his shoulders tense up as he prepared to speak again.

“Sonic.” Porker insisted. “I saw you shaking with my own two eyes. I can’t just let that go.”

“What, me? Shaking?” Sonic scoffed. “You of all people should know that the Hero of Mobius doesn’t shake, pal.”

The engineer frowned…and then abruptly his expression softened, as something that Sonic had just said caught his attention. “No, I get it. The Hero of Mobius doesn’t shake, you’re right. But, well, my old friend Sonic, from way back in Green Hill…he’s allowed to get scared in front of me, I think. Whether or not he thinks he should.”

“Uh, you sure you didn’t hit your head in that fall, Lewis?” Sonic asked, now the one to squint over at his friend in confusion. “In case you forgot, this speedy blue hedgehog—y’know, the one called Sonic—is the Hero of Mobius.” He jabbed a thumb at his chest for emphasis.

Porker took another deep breath subtly, trying his best to keep from getting exasperated. “That’s true. But being the Hero of Mobius is a job, and being Sonic just…is. You’re Sonic all the time, but you’re only the Hero of Mobius when you want to be. And you don’t have to be in front of me.”

“You sure about that one? ‘Cause last I checked, only one of us was up to being a hero.” Sonic shot back.

As soon as the words left his mouth, he froze, his eyes widening slightly and his teeth snapping together so hard they clicked in the suddenly heavy silence.

“Porker—we can—just forget that happened, ‘kay? Apparently my mouth moves as fast as the rest of me sometimes, heh.”

Porker gave Sonic a surprisingly flat look, making the hedgehog’s poor attempt at humor fizzle out into nothingness. His grin twisted into a grimace, and his hands balled into fists on the floor as he avoided Porker’s eyes.

Well, at least now he’s hiding his emotions less, the former Freedom Fighter thought to himself, internally sighing.

“Sonic.” he said softly, and while his friend didn’t flinch, his fingers did tighten noticeably.

“I’m not upset. Or—well—I am, but not at you. I just don’t like that you feel you have to be a hero around me all the time. I know we were fighting Robotnik for so long, it’s kind of hard to be anything else…but before that, we were just friends, stumbling our way through life together.”

Porker sighed, allowing himself a bittersweet smile. “I’d like to go back to being that way, at least to some extent, now that the war is over.” He hesitated briefly, before continuing, “If you don’t want to though, for whatever reason, I’ll understand.”

Sonic laughed, but his eyes were too wide for it to seem genuine. “Hey, what? Of course we’re friends, there’s no way I’d wanna change that! Why on Mobius would you ever think I would?”

“It’s…difficult to explain.” Porker began, picking up a chunk of debris and worrying circles into it with his thumb. “Sometimes it feels like when you look at me, you’re seeing just another civilian to protect, instead of, well, me.”

“Well, that’s not it at all!” Sonic straightened up boldly. “It’s totally different—I’m just making sure you don’t have to deal with the difficult stuff anymore after we—after you, y’know, got stuck on, uh, Little Planet.”

“Sonic, just because I was too stressed out to continue fighting in a war doesn’t mean I’m too distraught to live my life, or to help my friends when they could use a hand!” the engineer explained. “Besides, living here on the Floating Island has done wonders for me, I’d say.”

Sonic had sported a strangely skeptical expression for the first part, but when he finally spoke up, it wasn’t in response to that at all. “Was it really good enough for you that you were able to handle Robotnik?” he asked, frowning genuinely.

Porker stared blankly at his friend for a few moments as several things suddenly slotted into place. “Is that what you meant when you asked me how I was able to cuff him earlier?”

Sonic’s sudden eagerness to look away and shift positions, combined with a short “Eh, it’s whatever. Never mind.” told him all he needed to know.

He bit back his first instinct, which was to get upset that Sonic essentially seemed to view him as an invalid, no longer capable of functioning in the face of difficult situations. Getting upset wouldn’t help here—he’d known Sonic long enough to be certain that if he got angry, Sonic’s temper would flare up to match. Instead, he struggled to work out how best to explain his current situation to his friend.

Porker knew that Sonic had gone through a difficult process when he’d decided to leave the Freedom Fighters, and had taken some time to come around to the fact that not everybody had his level of fortitude and resilience when it came to coping with difficult situations. However, it seemed like Sonic had understood Porker’s choice to leave as a permanent “off” switch on his abilities, instead of the truth, which was that the scales of “desire for freedom” and “fear of lasting damage” had simply tipped in the other direction, without any weight being removed from the former.

Suddenly, he was jolted from his musings by the voice of the hedgehog in question. “Listen, how about we head back to Hidden Palace and grab whatever parts you need? That way you can show me around some more, yeah?”

Slowly but surely, Porker got to his feet, sighing tiredly and trying not to wince at a twinge from his ankle. “Hang on, I just wanted to explain one thing first. You mind if I talk your ear off for just a moment?” He shot Sonic a half-smile, and that seemed to do the trick.

“Sure thing, pal. Hit me.” he replied carefully, moving to lean against the wall.

“I may have assumed this was more obvious than it actually was, but…I was always scared. Even when you first asked me to join the Freedom Fighters, I was frightened as anything.” Porker began, cringing internally as Sonic tensed up once again. “But the thing was,” he hurried to add, “I believed in the better future you talked about more than I felt afraid. So I pushed myself to join because I wanted to help make a world where people like me didn’t have to be so scared all the time, and that was enough to keep me going.

“But then…when I was held on Little Planet for so long…” Porker trailed off, memories of wire biting into his arms and endless examinations flashing before his eyes briefly. He blinked rapidly and squeezed the rock in his hand tighter in an effort to dispel the images—only to look up into an expression on Sonic that was emptier than any he’d ever seen before.

The engineer sighed and shook his head, smiling ruefully. “After that, I was so worried about it happening again that I couldn’t contribute to the team like I wanted, and, well, you know the rest.” He paused for a moment, composing his next sentence in his head. “I think there was one thing I should’ve said to you back then, but didn’t, because I thought it was obvious.”

“Yeah?” Sonic’s voice was perfectly measured, perfectly even.

“I don’t blame you for what happened. I don’t even see how I could—I knew the risks, I knew Mobius had to be kept safe, and I made my choice. I mean, in the end, it all worked out too. If that was really what had to happen to start the chain of events that led to the Empire of Metallix being defeated, then I can’t even say I regret it.”

“Porker.” Sonic marched over, staring at him with narrowed eyes. “Now I know for a fact you hit your head in that fall. Either that or I need to get my ears checked, because I know I didn’t just hear you say you’re okay with the fact that we all left you there.”

“What else am I supposed to say?” he asked, genuinely. “We were in a difficult situation, not to mention a dangerous profession. Awkward choices and bad experiences were bound to happen eventually. All things considered, I escaped without any serious physical damage and got the space I needed to work on healing mentally. Things could have gone a whole lot worse—”

“But they also could’ve gone better!” Sonic barked. “We left you there! We all could’ve gone back with you, fought off the Metallix together!”

“And left the planet defenseless against Robotnik? That would’ve been terribly dangerous.” Porker forced himself to keep his posture open, hoping that having something else to focus on would help him feel less stunned that his friend was on the verge of yelling at him. “Besides, it’s equally possible that the Metallix would have overpowered us all, seeing as we’d be stuck there for a month, and then who would have saved us from them?”

“What, so are you telling me you’re fine with the way things turned out?” the hedgehog snapped.

“Yes and no,” Porker replied, hating how stiff his voice had become, but unable to search for any better words, “I certainly would have preferred to not be trapped on Little Planet for a month, but since I was, and we were able to destroy the empire that I was stuck with, I don’t really have anything left to be angry about. I may be upset that it happened to me, but I’ve decided that I don’t resent anyone for the way it happened.”

“Yeah? Well, good for you, but not all of us feel that way, y’know.” Sonic spat.

Porker hesitated for a moment. He had a feeling that he knew exactly what his friend meant, but he wanted to check something first.

“Are you upset with me for going back?”

“Wh—f—why would I be mad at you?” Sonic looked like he was about to explode, face twisted into a snarl. “It’s the Metallix’s fault, for being scummy enough to treat you like they did! It’s Robotnik’s fault, for making those machines in the first place, and for making a Mobius where there needed to be Freedom Fighters at all! And—and it’s on me for asking you to join the Freedom Fighters, because then this’d never have happened!”

The walls of Hydrocity Zone rang with the echo of Sonic’s outburst.

“…we’re done here.” the hedgehog muttered, turning away.

“N-n-no, we’re not.” Porker insisted, still gripping the rock, now so tightly that his hands shook. Sonic whipped around, his eyes hard, but Porker pushed onwards as quickly as he could. “S-Sonic, you couldn’t have possibly known this would happen. You may be a hero, but you’re not the Omni-Viewer—you can’t kn-know or do everything. And that’s fine!” he added, quickly, seeing Sonic’s quills begin to rise. “I don’t, I don’t expect you to, and anyone who does is being absurd, frankly. All you knew when you asked me to join was that Robotnik needed to be s-stopped, and that I was smart enough to help. And all you could—could do when I went back to Little Planet was make an impossible choice, and if you’re sorry that I got hurt, then I’m sorry I put you in a position to choose between me and everyone else.

“I don’t know if you really do r-regret asking me to join the Freedom Fighters—and if you do, I can try to understand why, but I have to inform you that I disagree whole-heartedly. You would n-not have survived fighting Robotnik on your own, you needed others by your side, and you were a big enough person to a-admit that in spite of the fact that I’m sure you would have preferred otherwise. If you regret asking me, then do you regret asking Johnny, or Tails? Do you regret bringing all of us into this? Because let me tell you, if I have to choose between a future where I am traumatized but alive, or a future where I never met the Metallix and you are gone, I would choose the former every time!”

Porker’s legs wobbled beneath him, and he lowered himself to the ground quickly, breathing hard and fast. “S-sorry, sorry for my harsh tone at the end there.” he apologized. “I didn’t m-mean to get so worked up.”

“…Porker.” Sonic said, no longer facing him, his voice strangely quiet in a way the engineer had never heard before. “You’re—right. About all of it. I’m glad you said yes when I asked you to join. Without you, we’d never have saved Kintobor, or gotten all the gadgets we needed to fight. It just, you know. Like you said. We were friends, but I was also the leader. That made your safety my responsibility. And you know me, I don’t like to, well. Lose. Heh.” He laughed humorlessly, even as his hands twitched and shifted with surprising intensity. “When you’re the Hero of Mobius, and you don’t save someone. Anyone. But especially a friend. It makes a guy wonder if he still gets to call himself a hero. If he still…has that friend. After he couldn’t keep him from getting permanently hurt. You know.”

“I think I do know.” Porker replied, almost instantly, needing to make sure Sonic knew that this opening up, no matter how stilted, was the right thing to do. “And I know that his friend has been with him for a while. His friend has seen him save people so many times, over and over again, even without a reward. So, quite frankly, if there was ever a time when he didn’t save someone, that friend would not doubt for a second that he didn’t wish things had gone differently. But,” he added, “this friend would also care about him a lot. And his friend would feel terrible if it seemed, for even a second, that a choice that the friend made was something he was using to make himself feel worse, whether he thought he deserved it or not. Because his friend is, well, his friend, right? So of course that friend wouldn’t want him to torture himself using the thought of what happened.

“After all, he may be a hero—an incredible hero, even—but he can’t do everything, and like I said earlier, that's okay. That’s why the rest of us were there, to help him be able to do everything with our help. And sometimes that meant we were in danger, just like him. But that was okay, because there was no place we’d rather be than by his side, helping to make the world a better place.”

A single drop of water wet the stone by Sonic’s feet.

“There’s—” he croaked, before cutting himself off and abruptly clearing his throat. “There’s nobody I would rather have had with me.”

“I’m glad.” Porker smiled gently, and hoped it carried through in his voice.

“Ugh, first Super, now this—what is it with me and coming to visit you that makes bad things happen?” Sonic groaned, finally turning around once again (and the engineer elected not to notice how he was still working to compose himself).

“Well, in the very, very long run, that was a good thing too, considering that Super’s EMP blast was what enabled us to defeat Robotnik.” Porker said.

“Oh, so you’re not upset about that either?” Sonic asked, voice caught halfway between sarcastic and hesitant.

“Sonic!” the engineer huffed. “Super’s transformation process is completely involuntary! It may be frightening in the moment, but I would never, ever blame you for his actions!”

“…good to know.” Sonic said simply. “Speakin’ of which, I saw you two put up some better walls around the Emerald chamber, good to see we won’t have any more falling accidents.” He finally turned around, his arms folded and smirk back in place. “Don’t wanna find out what Super Porker is like or anything.”

“I hope seeing the Emerald chamber again wasn’t what bothered you earlier.” Porker’s brow furrowed in concern. “I didn’t even consider how it might be an unpleasant place to be…”

Sonic’s smirk lessened just a fraction.

“You know, you’re always free to talk about it if you’d like.” Porker said, but when Sonic scoffed, he already knew it was a lost cause.

“Listen, I’ve had more than enough ‘talking about it’ for one visit.” Sonic rolled his eyes and did exaggerated air quotes, but…

…‘for one visit’ wasn’t ’for a lifetime’. Maybe it wasn’t such a lost cause after all.

Porker decided to take pity on his friend at last. “Would you like to head back to Hidden Palace now? You can bother Knuckles some more while I find the part I need to repair the zoom tubes.”

“Finally!” Sonic exclaimed. “As much as I appreciate a good cave adventure every now and then, I’d rather be somewhere I can actually see the sun. Come on, let’s get moving.” He began to walk back towards the entrance, making Porker hesitate and frown over at him.

“…you’re not going to scout on ahead again?”

Sonic looked over at him, surprise registering for the briefest of seconds before he relaxed, his usual smirk returning—albeit somewhat crookedly. “Nah. If any badniks haven’t learned their lesson by now, we can handle ‘em.”

Porker could feel himself smiling wider than he had all day, enough so that Sonic seemed to notice. “Shut your trap, pixel-brain.” he grumbled, folding his arms. “Haven’t we had enough sappy nonsense already?”

“Fair enough,” Porker admitted. “So, how’s the rebuilding process going back in Emerald Hill?”

“The new town’s looking better every day!” Sonic’s grin returned in full force. “It’s gonna be much more defensible, but it’s also just way better quality and more sturdy than before.”

“That’s fantastic.” Porker said, suddenly feeling as though a weight he hadn’t even noticed had been lifted off his chest. “As much as the hillfolk have appreciated Knuckles’s hospitality, they seem eager to get home.”

“It’ll be good to have them back.” Sonic sighed. “Seeing the world start to live a post-Robotnik life sure is something, huh?”

“It really is. Sometimes I wondered if we’d be fighting for the rest of our lives,” Porker smiled ruefully. “But I’m so happy that isn’t the case.”

They walked together in silence for about half a minute, giving them both time to admire the water flowing through the caverns and the massive pillars helping to keep it all stable. The fact that the colors on the pillars hadn’t faded after all this time was fascinating to Porker, and he was beginning to think back on the papers Knuckles had gotten from that pirate fellow—

Sonic abruptly dragged his hands down his face and groaned. “Now you’ve gone and done it! Why’d you have to bring up Super in the first place, now I can’t stop thinking about him!”

“Technically, you brought him up.” Porker corrected him, before smiling sheepishly when Sonic shot him a glower (without any heat behind it, of course).

“Listen, it’s just—something about falling into the Emerald chamber made him way worse than usual. I don’t know all of it, but lemme tell ya…” He trailed off, staring into the middle distance.

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to.” Porker said softly, wishing he could give his friend a hand on his shoulder or a hug, but that wouldn’t help someone like Sonic. Instead, he jammed his hands in his pockets, kept walking, and waited.

“Ugh…waking up in the wreckage of our plane with the others nowhere in sight…fire everywhere…feeling myself laughing without knowing why…it’s good he’s gone, ‘cause I’m never about to see something like that again.” Sonic spat, forcing the tremor from his voice.

Porker felt his stomach turn. “Nobody told me about that! I can’t imagine how that must have felt, being amongst all that devastation without knowing what had happened!”

“They didn’t even tell me they were alive for days.” Sonic muttered, his shoulders hunched. “Super was still an issue, I know why they didn’t, but they left me thinkin’ I’d—! For days!” Suddenly, he kicked a rock with such speed and violence it shattered on impact.

Sonic clenched his fists, stopping in his tracks in an attempt to catch his breath. Porker shifted a little closer to him, worrying the fabric of his gloves with his fingers. “I’m sorry that happened. I’m guessing you haven’t mentioned this to any of them?”

“Why would I?” Sonic scoffed. “It worked, didn’t it? They fixed the problem.”

Porker opened his mouth—then hesitated—then sighed gently. “Well. I can see why they might have done that, but I don’t necessarily think it was the perfect solution. And if you ever want to talk about it more…I’m here. As your friend.”

“…you meant what you said earlier, right?”

“Hmm?” Porker blinked. “I said a lot of things earlier, I’m afraid you’ll have to remind me.”

“About…not blamin’ me for the stuff he does.” Sonic muttered, clearly embarrassed.

“Of course I did!” he insisted. “And I’ll say it as many times as you need! I don’t blame you. I don’t blame you. I don’t blame you. I don’t—”

“Alright, alright, I get it!” Sonic snickered, shoving Porker lightly. “Save your breath for all these stairs, we gotta climb them to get back up to that knucklehead.”

“Oh, good heavens.” Porker sighed, eyeing up the spiral staircase warily.

Sonic rolled his eyes, his trademark smirk softening just a fraction. “Forget it, Porker, just grab on tight.”

Seconds later, they were back in the main room of the Hidden Palace.

The engineer pulled his wrist from Sonic’s grip, stumbling over to the nearest control panel and slumping into a seat. “I will never be used to that,” he wheezed, chuckling lightly.

“Sonic, you’d better not have broken my best engineer!” Knuckles barked, stomping over to the two of them.

“Isn’t he also your only engineer?” Sonic shot back.

“All the more reason not to drag him along when you decide to have a run around!” the echidna insisted.

“Knuckles?” Porker called, interrupting the two’s bickering. He had removed one of his shoes—but not his sock, obviously—and was bandaging up his sore ankle. Both of the others seemed concerned, but when he smiled reassuringly, they both trusted him enough to back off. “Oh yeah, just turned my ankle, nothing major. Anyhow, do you know where the replacement air conduits are? We found the break, but my temporary fix wasn’t much of a fix at all.”

“Drawer 14B.” he replied, already heading off in that direction. “I’ll get it for you if you keep this prickly tank of hot air out of my face some more. Take him to Mushroom Hill or something, have him play with the toddlers a bit to burn off that energy.”

Sonic huffed, tapping his foot rapidly. “Hot air?! You come back here and say that to my face! C’mon, Porker, let’s leave the guardian to his sulking.”

The engineer laughed under his breath as he joined his friend once again. “You two could have a whole comedy show with that kind of banter.” he said warmly.

“Yeah, yeah, whatever.” Sonic rolled his eyes. “Now who needs help packing up?”

Porker did indeed proceed to show Sonic all around the Mushroom Hill Zone, and the two helped out where their skills were needed as the citizens of Emerald Hill prepared to return to their long-evacuated home. (As a matter of fact, Sonic sped up the process by at least half a day, which went greatly appreciated amongst everyone present.)

Once they had finished with that, Sonic admitted that he should probably head back soon, to make sure that the rebuilding process was still going well and that his other friends didn’t need him for anything urgent. Porker walked him back to the plane, the two chatting about memories new and old along the way. And just before Sonic hopped into the cockpit, he placed a hand on Porker’s shoulder—the only differences from last time being that Sonic was the one to leave via plane instead…and that Porker put his hand over Sonic’s for just the briefest of moments.

As the Hero of Mobius took off, he looked back for a second to see his old friend waving him off with a smile on his face, and he couldn’t help but feel pleased to know that he was welcome back whenever he felt like it. To his surprise, however, there was one other thing he noticed—or rather, the absence of something.

This time, when he had settled into his plane and prepared for takeoff, the memories of Super hadn’t been there. Even now that he noticed it, even though he could still remember the fire, now, there was also…

“I don’t blame you.”

And wasn’t that just something else?

#sonic the hedgehog #sonic big bang 2024 #sonic the comic #porker lewis #fleetway sonic #fleetway comics #knuckles the echidna #sol's fanfiction #(for organizing purposes on my blog)#thank you so much to the artists for taking the time to create something based on my writing!!#and thank you also to the mods of this event for all the effort they put into making this happen!#i'm delighted to have had a chance to participate in a fandom event #and getting an excuse to finally write for this universe has been an absolute delight

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