Got this idea yesterday and just had to write this


"And… and with one more drop of the somatotropin sample," Tails whispered to himself, staring deeply into the microscope at the culture of cells as he added said drop with an eyedropper. The cells began to shift, and then, surprisingly, move and swim around in the culture. Tails gasped and pulled back, whooping and threw his hands into the air "Finally! It's alive!"

The lab was cold, but he was wiping the sweat from his forehead as he lifted the dish up to his face, way too close. He couldn't see the individual cells, but just the thought that they were there and alive was exciting enough.

"You sure this is a good idea, fox?" Shadow grunted from not so far behind, and the kit turned and beamed at him. He had been standing with him for a while, commenting about where should and shouldn't be done to his samples. He told the fox a lot of specifics, but truth be told, he didn't pay attention to half of them.

"Of course it is! Dr. Gerald left his notes on what he wanted you to be and do, Shadow. Can't you see that this is it?" He held the petri dish up to Shadow's face, uncomfortably close. The bio-hog flinched backward but did look at it. It just looked like thick blood in a puddle, and he internally shivered when he realized he once looked like that himself.

"I understand, but he also had forty years of practice before creating me." Shadow continued, pushing the dish a comfortable distance away "I do not want this to backfire."

The kit didn't seem to hear him at first, simply staring at the dish with poofed namesakes in excitement. He was whipping them back and forth so fast now Shadow was almost sure he was going to take off. Reluctantly, Shadow repeated himself, and the fox flicked his ears once he realized what the other said.

Tails frowned and set the dish back into place under its gentle heat lamp. "I know, Shadow. But, you're supposed to cure everyone of every disease! There's some not in your system, remember? New things have come up, and I know it's your personal goal to make everyone happy. She would have wanted that." He didn't look up, continuing to stare at the culture. Shadow, expectedly, did not like that he brought up Maria, but he had been dealing with that for a while now and was more mature about it.

"True." was all the hedgehog said, and then he turned and began to leave. "Don't stay up late; else I'll get a hearing from that blue brother of yours."

Shadow had never gotten yelled at for not telling Tails to get to bed before, but he needed a way to say it without sounding too 'not Shadow.' Tails waved him goodbye but only proceeded to mess with the culture again.

While they were talking, he noticed that it was growing at an alarming rate, much faster than any cells should have. It was growing fast enough to be seen with the naked eye. Working quickly yet carefully, Tails set up the dish under the microscope again and put his eye to the lens.

"Shadow heals fast, but not this fast..." he murmured to himself, going over to his cabinet to pull out more petri dishes and a few test tubes. He split the sample cells, accurately named 'UC 3/12', multiple times and put them into the new dishes and tubes with more culture, hoping the bloody mix would cut down on the amount of somatotropin he added.

Slowly, his eyes turned to the side, where his mini-fridge sat. Tails hummed and kneeled to open it, going through the various snacks to pull out the blood bag hanging in the back.

"That's probably unsanitary," He told himself but shrugged and stood up anyway. Those snacks had been there for weeks, but Shadow had just given him his blood the day before. The kit looked at the green liquid sloshing around and almost changed his mind.

Almost.

He drained nearly a fourth of the bag and used a syringe to inject Shadow's blood directly into the cultures. His idea was simple; Shadow's blood was what started the healing process when exposed to air, and when it wasn't, it kept everything from healing when it didn't need to. So, once he was done adding the blood, he sealed everything and stepped back.

He wasn't a chemist, more of an inventor, but Shadow admitted that he did not trust anyone to be working with his body or powers yet. Tails was the only exception, as Tails said he would come to Shadow right away should anything bad begin to happen. However, the fox figured he had everything down pat and gathered the samples under the light to work their magic.

Once everything was put away, he turned off the light to his lab and made his way upstairs to a pretty miffed Shadow.

"Did anything happen? You were down there for another hour after I left." He growled, but Tails held up his hands and shook his head.

"Nope, nothing happened. Your cells are growing, a bit faster than I wanted, but other than that nothing of interest happened." He neglected to tell Shadow that he did add the hedgehog's blood afterward, but shrugged it off. It was merely added to stop them from growing too fast, nothing bad could come of it, right?

Shadow seemed to accept that answer and turned his back to the kit.

"Where are you off to?" Tails asked, not too concerned, but in a more caring way.

"It's 2 AM, the hour where sad saps and lonely idiots to crowd to Club Rouge. It's also the time where twelve-year-old foxes go to bed and stop messing with cells and cultures." Shadow half-heartedly glared over his shoulder, then shook his head and left for Club Rouge.

Tails whined at how Shadow addressed him, but smiled softly and did head to bed. He was exhausted and had been working for hours nonstop just for this one sample actually to live. He had made three series by now of the 'ultimate cure,' and that was his twelfth attempt of that series. It was back breaking work, but he was proud of himself.

The kit yawned and made his way up the second set of stairs to the bedrooms, but going to the bathroom first to wash himself off before going straight to his room and collapsing on the bed. He drifted into a deep sleep quickly.

Xx

"There he is! Look! It's Super Tails!" A woman squealed, pointing to the fox gently descending from the sky with a bright light shining behind him.

Tails touched the white beach sand and stood tall, before being crowded by men and women mobians and humans alike, all chanting and calling his name. They bent sharply and kissed his shoes, smiling up at him, some even crying.

"Look at his long, luscious fur!"

"Look at his beautiful baby blue eyes!"

"Look at his double tails! I want double tails!"

The kit chuckled under his breath and waved his hand, making them part so he could begin to walk the length of the beach. Sonic hounded up to him and grinned ear to ear. "Big bro! I haven't seen you in so long! Eggbutt is at it again in Station Square, and we can't beat him without you!" Sonic cried, and Tails gasped.

"He is!? Where is everyone else-? No matter, this is a job for Super Tails!" He pounded a fist on his chest and struck a pose, where magically a cape formed over his shoulders and began to blow in the non-existent wind. Tails rose his fist into the air and flew upwards, hovering mid-air while the crowd below him took up chanting again.

"Super Tails! Super Tails! Super Tails!" they shouted in unison.

Oddly enough, their chanting started to not sound like words, and more of gentle clinking and clanking sounds coming from their wide open mouths. Tails looked down with concern and shook his head a bit, opening his mouth to try to correct them, but they just continued

He looked at Sonic, and he was making the noise too. Utterly freaked out, he dove straight towards the ocean.

xx

The kit sat up straight and huffed a few times to catch his breath, looking around his room. Nothing was wrong, but it was now around four thirty. "My dream was not that long," he told himself, even though he knew most dreams only lasted a few seconds.

Tails got out of bed groggily and opened his door just to be met with the sound of a small piece of glass shattering coming from the lab. Something was definitely happening down there. He shook his head clear and smoothed back the fur between his ears, making his way down the hallway to the stairs. He heard Sonic groan and then shift in his bed, so Tails stilled, waiting for his brother to do the same. Once he calmed down, he rushed the rest of way down, not bothering to put on his shoes before rushing down the hardwood stairs and with the grace of jellyfish on stilts, crashed and tumbled down them immediately.

"Why," he groaned, rolling onto his side "Do I have an IQ of three hundred but fall down the stairs every week?" the kit laid there for a while, slowly recovering from the rough few landings he did on the stairs and then finally the carpet. Then, he heard a squelching sound and remembered the reason he was rushing in the first place.

Tails got to his feet and jogged to the stairs leading to the lab, this time being careful to amble on this set, then opened the door and blindly reached for the light switch. He groped the wall for a few seconds, and when he found it and flicked it on, nearly screamed and fainted right then and there.

There were these blobs of green slime, small, about the palm of a hand, crawling along the table and some on the floor. There were eight of them. The exact number Tails had split the primary sample into…

He carefully stepped around the glass, twisting his tails to get him into the air and away from the sharp shards. The slimes didn't seem bothered by them anyway, and one promptly slid and fell off the table, falling right onto a large shard from a test tube but not reacting.

"What are you!?" Tails hissed, picking up and sliding on his hazmat gloves to huddle each slime creature into the containment bay area. They gurgled and wriggled in protest at him touching them, but oddly enough had a definite shape to them. Each had a small black orb in the middle of it.

"You look like gross, melting eyes..." The kit flew up and closed the container, tossing his gloves into a decontamination solution to watch the blobs move around. "Why did you grow so fast?" He mostly asked himself.

Tails hummed in thought, considering something slightly dumb. Shadow would know, right? The fox left for his bedroom to get his phone then returned to the lab, pulling out his chair and facing it to the blobs. Eight of them. All were moving mindlessly.

He shook his head and frizzed his tails, calling the dark agent and staring straight ahead in a panic.

"Why are you awake, Tails?" It came as a growl. No 'hello.'

"I-I had a weird dream. Say, what did you tell me about your blood again?" He swallowed a lump in his throat. Tails flinched when he heard Shadow breathe slowly through his nose, mumbling something he couldn't quite make out. Then.

"It reacts when in contact with direct light and oxygen. Why?"

"No-reason-gotta-go-bye!" Tails squealed and hung up, just for Shadow to call again. He didn't answer.

He had left the samples under light for them to cure, not grow.

"This is fine," He said gawkily, going up to the tank and looking in. The black orbs looked slightly bigger. "That's fine. I can work with this, and Shadow doesn't have to know! Isn't that right, balls of possible flesh that look like they want to kill me if I pick them up?" Tails grinned in absolute fear.

Tired, he stepped back and grabbed his broom, sweeping up the glass and tossing it out. Oddly enough, the blobs didn't leave a slimy trail. The ground seemed slightly cleaner where they traveled, along with the metal table, too.

Not having any idea what to do with them for the time being, Tails made more culture on a much larger scale and flew up with a bucket of it, dumping it in over the green and black blobs and watching them get buried under it. It was disconcerting to see them moving and squelching around through the bloody mess but figured it was a bad idea to add any more of Shadow's actual blood. Plasma and type-o worked best.

"Just don't break out of this, okay? I think Shadow would probably kill me, and...you all if he found out you existed. Deal? Deal." He held up a thumbs up then turned off all the lights before going up to his bed.

What he didn't notice was how erratic the blobs became once they heard Shadow's name.