To say that the day before-not surprisingly, yesterday-wasn't the best ever could never give what he felt then justice. The day before then promised that both that day and yesterday wouldn't change his life completely. Of course, no story ever promised to not change any character's life, whether it would be a social, physical, or psychological change was only specified within the context of whatever happened to be the medium the story was using. None of the stories he read were exactly his material: after all, there have been no attempts to deconstruct the foundations of his favourite platform series that he was nicknamed after, and he never even bothered to look at other genres because he preferred being simple. The word simple meant that nothing extraordinary was going to jump out and drag you to their world. Simple also meant bare-bones, the basic frame-work that any being-whether their genes originated from non-sapient animals to slightly sapient humans-would end up being built up from.
The day the Soundbreaker War began with anything BUT the word 'simple'.
Many images flowed into his sleepy mind, unable to keep up with each and every one of them. He knew though, that each one held an odd meaning in his heart. Many of the images were people he couldn't recognize, save for his best friend-who-happens-to-be-a-girl Amy Rose, who looked more childish than he ever remembered. He also noticed his young best friend-who-was-also-a-brother Tails, but the twin-tailed fox seemed to look up to him more on a pedestal then as an equally matched friend. He also recognized himself in the images-the calm and collected blue-spiked hedgehog, though without his necklace he had kept all of his life-but he felt the air of loneliness around the other him, even when the other-him was in the presence of company.
The other-him slowly turned toward his own dream body (how could it not be, for he was seeing another version of himself standing right in front of his long snout?), and reached out his identical arm, hoping his other would do the same. The true hedgehog hesitated—what if it was some form of trap? Yet the dreamer saw that the hesitation hurt the other-him, even though he noticed that it was hard to read the other with the large white mask on him—and decided that it was worth it.
As the dreamer's hand touched his others, more images filled his mind, unable to identify each before they faded into the black abyss.
A giant orbital station with a moustache...
A red echidna knocking him out before taking the emeralds he had worked so hard for...
A mosaic featuring him against a god...
A guardian made of water, whose anger made him into a monstrous beast that flooded a city of innocents...
A black and red hedgehog, next to a giant bio-mechanical lizard...
Another orbital space station, though this time over fifty years of age...
A metal version of him, before it turned into a metal dragon...
Again the metallic him, save for this time the other him racing the being for a younger Amy...
A planet no bigger than an asteroid, yet contains its own biosphere...
An orange echidna being knocked aside by her own race...
A flying small dog, next to a burly monster hedgehog-wolf...
An odd tentacle alien with a curl on the head...
A few members of the Herd taking care of some chao...
People the dreamer cannot recognize, save for both the parents of the three kids in their laps...
...Uncle Chuck? With a blue, Flicky-like bird on his shoulder?
A big purple cat, asking the other to allow him to save his frog friend...who was inside a frog-like water beast...
Himself as a fabled star-being, flying in space...
The missing Queen of Mobius holding... himself?
Sonic slowly opened his tired eyes as the remaining fragments of his dream faded from his mind. Light poured into his messy room, illuminating the mess more than it should have. The duvet that was originally on him was now floor-bound, having rolled off when he tossed around. The single bed mattress was scratched from his blue quills, the main reason the hedgehog never bothered to sleep on his back, even while he was suffering from a cold. The window from which the light shone was behind Sonic's head, the heat from the spring rays woke up the tired hedgehog faster, distorting his mind about his dream even more than he liked. What he could remember was stored into long-term, while everything else became mist as his mind started to reboot into a more logical state.
Sonic stretched his arms upwards as he yawned, before getting up to gain some energy for his stomach; navigating through the mess on his bedroom floor as he went onto automatic mode. While he went down the stairs of his Uncle's disguised operating base, Sonic had only one thought on his mind:
"What was that all about?"
He barely remembered what the dream was about, let alone the details, yet his two young school friends and his older, childhood friend had asked about the details of the odd night vision. They were around a small table that would have seated five normal sized humans, two large sapient animals, and ten small sapient animals. Both the table and the five chairs around the table were of white plastic. If hit correctly, the sun's rays would blind the four friends and pet right there and then; but on that afternoon the sun was constantly covered by dark clouds, threatening to rain sometime soon. Sonic sighed as he straightened himself in his seat; ready to crush they're hopeless curiosity.
A small, dark-green coloured dragon pet rested on his bulging belly, a remnant of Sonic's childhood that he could never bother to get rid of. Sonic himself was wearing a white hooded sweater, which had red trimming the ends for his large frame to lift through. His shoes were red with a white elastic stripe running through the middle, and golden buckles that went through the elastic, both of which pointed toward the outside of Sonic's feet. The most prized possession on the Blue, blunt quill hedgehog was-oddly, a guitar-shaped medallion on a red string wrapped around his neck. Sonic's peach muzzle was pulling a small frown, his eyelids threatening to shut out his jade-green eyes from his friends.
He turned his head to the right. On the right side of Sonic's body was the 12-year old twin-tailed genius, Miles Prower. The boy was a sunshine-yellow fox, who wore a simple oil-stained brown dress-shirt over his shaggy white belly fur. His half red, half white shoes were constantly kicked in a child-like fashion by the fox's yellow-furred legs. Miles' white muzzle stuck with a wide, almost dog-like pant-smile, waiting to soak up whatever information would pour out of his brother-bond's own. The twelve-year old sky blue eyes shone with the exact same eagerness that Sonic could feel radiating from the boy's skin.
The hedgehog had quickly darted his head to the left, where he saw the one of two girls around the table (if you counted the pet as a part of the small group). She was a beautiful light pink hedgehog, whose quills hung from the back of her head. She was wearing a light green vest top, which showed off her shoulders neatly. Her hips were adorned with a Red-orange skirt, which had complemented her still-changing figure. The hedgehog girl's red Go-go boots twisted along with her legs when she realized that Sonic was staring at her. The red hair-band that she constantly wore changed its own expression to what the hedgehog herself felt. When Sonic tore his eyes away from the girl's own body to her face, he had realized she had been slightly rosy from being checked out. The female's emerald eyes shone with both embarrassment and amusement, her own peach muzzle shyly smiling at the blue hedgehog next to her.
Sonic tore his gaze away from his pink friend, before sighing and looking toward towards the only member of the group that was not straddling his personal space. In fact, the orange-haired human's face had a look of smug amusement-waiting to see whatever word the blue hedgehog would spit out this time could be turned against the speaker. Unlike Sonic, the older boy was slightly anorexic, making the long dark-grey leather jacket and the bright orange undershirt look far too big for him. The orange-haired male had on a pair of light blue sunglasses, which were held in place by dark-brown frames, tinting the boy's own mud-like eyes to appear more or less dirty brown. The male furthest away changed his expression to a scowl, noticing (quite correctly) that the hedgehog was delaying the inevitable, and was telling Sonic to get on with it.
Sonic sighed for the second time, before saying "Look, I really don't remember much about the stupid dream. All I know was that there was another version of me, except he really looked more like the video game character you guys showed me all those years ago. Every other bit of the dream came and went before I could understand its meaning."
"There's got to be at least some thing you remember about it, Sonic." Miles had asked- wanting to gain a little more information from the hedgehog before his curiosity was crushed completely. "It's not like you to not remember anything specific about your dreams. Remember when you used to create those elaborate tales about the Queen and King of the Union of Mobius?" Sonic had been a master at weaving tales of the Soundbreaker family, particularly since his foster father was related to the lost King Skylocke. The only one who had encouraged the tales was his foster father, Uncle Chuck, who had been trying to recover from the loss of his brother and the family that was given to him.
All of the children around that table had been abandoned in some form or another by their own biological parents: Miles had assumed that his twin tail mutation was what scared his parents away from the young boy. The pink hedgehog had to fend for herself in elementary school because her parents could barely find a decent paying job in the city of Alagar. The orange haired boy had to raise his sister for most of his life because of his mother's death, causing his father to work nearly every day to avoid the grief that she left behind. Sonic was the only one at that table who never had a glimpse, much less a memory, of either one of his birth-parents. He was slightly jealous of this factor, as he only knew the foster parents that had taken him in as a baby, and did not want to remember what had happened to them when his fifth birthday had rolled around. While he was grateful that he had met Uncle Chuck before the incident, Sonic could never tell if the older hedgehog becoming his foster parent was due to likeness to the older man (The differences between the two, Sonic had noted, was that the man's quills were sharp and light blue due to age, while his own were dark blue and blunt due to disuse).
"Well... There was one thing I'd think might be interesting..." Sonic muttered aloud, capturing the attention of all four members at the table. "There was this one moment where I saw Uncle Chuck, with a strange Flicky-like bird over his shoulder. I'm guessing that could be Fluke the Messenger, but..." The Flicky in his dream was a bit larger than Fluke itself, yet it had the exact same colour of feathers as the messenger for the Resistance did in real life. Sonic really wasn't sure why that image had become the thing from the dream he latched onto, but he felt it was important for some-
"Huh, that's the thing you remember most from your dream, Nickolas? You really HAD not much to say about it." The orange-haired boy had said to Sonic, getting up from his seat to walk over to where the other three were sitting. His pants were a lighter shade of orange, held up by a sky blue belt that was tightly wrapped around his waist. His similarly coloured sneakers slid over the ground in rhythm, stressing every second step with a stomp-like thrust. "Never-the-less, I honestly thought that your dream would finally enlighten you to realize that you need to get your head out of the clouds. Guess I was wrong again." He cheerfully added, ruffling the Blue hedgehog's fur in a playful manner, yet Sonic could feel the forcefulness from the hand on his head that the boy was not happy with what he heard.
"Well, Mister Orgville Maurice Kintobor, one can't really get enough information from a dream that constantly blasted image after image of orbital space stations with moustaches, god-like water beings transforming into bigger versions of themselves, people that I have never seen before save for Tails-" he pointed to his fox friend, "And the lovely Amy Rose right beside me, here-" Sonic put his arm around the hedgehog girl, yet did not close the gap between them so that she would be comfortable enough to relax, "and yet could barely recognize them because they were acting so differently in the images of my dream." All four (including the dragon pet, which had fallen to the hard ground when Sonic had moved) stared at the blue hedgehog in disbelief, as if the hedgehog had then grown a second head right in front of him. Sonic looked at all of them before realizing that he was acting not like himself, just barely noticing that he felt more like himself than he ever had been. He had also noticed the details that he could not remember before had slipped out of his mouth perfectly, as if his sub-consciousness was trying to tell him something... Silence nested itself with the small group of friends, not really sure what to say after the bold statement that flew out of Sonic's own peach snout.
"...Well." Kintobor had finally said out of the blue, breaking the silence cast around the small group. "I guess we'll all just go home now, I just remembered that I've left Hope all alone at my place." He quickly left the group at the table, not wanting to stay if there was another bout of insanity from any one of them. Sonic had also got up as well, not bothering with an excuse as he left with the female pet dragon for home, suddenly feeling very exhausted for some odd reason.
Only the dragon noticed his medallion lightly glowing blue, a sign that change may happen to all five of them soon...
