A lot of this chapter is a recap of Sonic X's third season, partly for the benefit of people who never watched the series. Readers may want to go back and read my previous story, The Möbius Cycle, if you haven't already; it will become relevant later.
25Mar2012: Uploaded a revised version; no major plot changes. 14Apr2012: Minor formatting change.
Chapter 1 – Living With Pain
Residence of Miles Prower, Angel Island – Green Hill zone, Möbius
Time unavailable
Grief is a curious thing. The pain of losing a close friend cannot be compared or described, for it never takes the same form twice. It can drain the will, leaving little more than tired souls scattered like fallen leaves on the surface of a stream. It may be the most powerful force beyond the visible universe, a deeper well of strength than ambition or generosity could ever hope to be. In some cases, it manifests as nothing more than silent and desolate emptiness.
Tails sat before a desk in his Angel Island workshop, a row of monitors lighting his face with a pale glow. It was sometime past two in the morning; his eyes were heavy from tiredness, but nothing else felt like sleeping. He rubbed his face without thinking, then groaned as he realized he had just missed the critical moment again. He was studying a series of videos taken at the center of the galaxy – the only surviving record of events that had decided countless fates. Just thinking about the battle had once been unbearable, but time marches on. Tails could recall the events that leading up to that day of ultimate destruction with surprising clarity.
The story had begun many months ago, when a young alien girl appeared within a meteor shower and crashed on the surface of Möbius. Introducing herself as Cosmo of Spring Dawn, she warned them of a threat rapidly approaching their planet. A mysterious faction of warriors known as the Metarex had begun a campaign to conquer every planet in the galaxy.
First contact had come only hours later. A self-piloted craft descended from orbit, performed a brief survey, and set fire to the dense jungle surrounding Mystic Ruin. Despite its small size, the lone machine had easily repelled their attacks and departed after the completion of its task, leaving nearly a square mile of forest to burn down to ashes. According to Cosmo, the Metarex had extracted Möbius's life force and converted it into a crystalline form to use as an energy supply. With its "Planet Egg" stolen, she explained, their world would gradually decay into little more than a lifeless desert.
Tails, Sonic, and their closest friends and companions had immediately decided to give chase. Serving as the first crew of the newly-christened Blue Typhoon (a prototype aerial battleship refitted for space flight and interstellar travel), Möbius's time-tested "Sonic Team" had set off in pursuit of their home's life force with Cosmo serving as their guide. Commanded by Doctor Ivo "Eggman" Robotnik, the Crimson Egg and its crew of robots and mercenaries had dogged the Typhoon's footsteps in secret, following a complex strategy that ignored any concept of "ally" or "enemy."
Over the course of their journey, they encountered other victims of Metarex operations. Breezee – the atmosphere drained of heat, locking its ecosystems in a permanent winter. Hydoo – fertile lowlands covered in a lifeless sea, pushing a primitive agricultural society to the brink of starvation. Marmolim – the site of an extraction gone wrong, grown completely through its core by a strange infection. Chystar, Cascade, Green Gate, and countless thousands whose names they would never know – long since harvested, their deaths complete. They gradually learned of Cosmo's history with the Metarex – how one of their warships had attacked Spring Dawn, the space colony where she was born, and left her as the only survivor. They learned that the Metarex were actually descendants of Cosmo's people, a race of plant-animal symbionts known as Seedrians, divided and ultimately destroyed by a centuries-old war.
After weeks of sabotage and undercover warfare, the two Möbian crews joined forces to uncover the true nature of the Metarex campaign. The stolen Planet Eggs were being moved into Sector 0-0-0, the space surrounding the galaxy's core, in preparation for a large-scale collective discharge orchestrated via Chaos Control. The intent was simple and unforgiving: bring about the extinction of every consumer species in the galaxy, leaving plants and plant symbionts to take their place. Worse yet, the Metarex had collected enough Planet Eggs to initiate this process of "Forestation," and the project's final stage would soon begin.
The allied Typhoon and Crimson Egg arrived in Sector 0-0-0 to find the assembled Metarex Navy and its three surviving commanders: the last Seedrians of Green Gate, known only by their callsigns of Black Narcissus, Pale Bay Leaf, and Dark Oak. The two ships began a full frontal assault on the fleet guarding the center – a hopelessly outmatched charge that, by all logic or tactical wisdom, should have been annihilated without a second thought. No more than a dozen Metarex vessels ever seemed to notice their presence, and the lack of resistance had baffled Tails ever since.
Despite the Möbians' best efforts, the mechanism for Forestation had taken shape. Before their eyes, the three Metarex commanders transformed into a gargantuan tree that housed their combined consciousness. Powered by the seven Chaos Emeralds, thousands of Planet Eggs, and a massive spatial distortion that emitted light drawn from who-knew-where, the plant grew with impossible speed, enclosing the entire anomaly in a planet-sized shell of roots. This was the conclusion of the Seedrian life cycle, twisted and weaponized through Metarex technology. The spent Emeralds were ejected into space, and under the commanders' control, Forestation's final stage began.
Tails caught himself. He needed to keep his emotions in check, to think rationally about what had happened next. Tails remembered that event all too clearly. He had shouted at Sonic, broken down in tears, demanded to know how he could possibly have failed, how they could have won the battle and yet lost so much...
He needed to focus. The seed, he instructed his unruly thoughts. Sonic gave you a seed.
Upon their return home, Tails had done the only thing that seemed to make sense: he had planted the seed. It had since grown into a tiny sprig of a plant, vibrantly green and bearing several pairs of new leaves. It showed every sign of becoming a sun-loving, earth-feeding, perfectly normal Möbian hardwood; few would ever suspect it was the last of its kind. Tails had resolved to keep it alive. It might be an ordinary tree, but he would make it the tallest, strongest, and most beautiful tree in the world if that was what it wanted to be.
Seedrians had a special connection with trees in his mind. Cosmo's affinity for plant life had run deeper than anything he could think of for comparison; it was a powerful and complex sixth sense that transcended every barrier Tails expected to find between organisms. He remembered his first glimpse of the connection during the landing on Breezee. Cosmo had rested her head against an alien tree she had never seen before – not even a real "plant" in the eyes of a Möbian biologist – and seemed to become the tree. She might have been frozen like the hard-packed snow she stood on, so profound was her empathy for the suffering winter world in that moment.
The computer display froze, switching to a "Playback Complete" message in dark red text. Tails shook his head, annoyed at his own lack of focus, and rewound the video again. It occurred to him that only one five-second stretch could contain what he was looking for; he located the critical point and played the file at reduced speed, examining each shot in order.
A golden bulge of light swelled from somewhere below the camera and stretched out in a cone, the two sides intersecting with a dark mass in the distance. A single frame consisted of a solid white screen and maximum readings across several blocks of the light spectrum. Glowing cracks spread over the surface of the mass, spilling out more light even as the trail from the Sonic Driver started to fade. The flood of radiation grew until it masked everything else onscreen. The various recorded measurements followed, blacking out into error messages or hovering uselessly at the tops of their scales.
Tails sat back with a frustration that had become dry and automatic. That was the problem: at the very point where anything of interest might have occurred, every instrument on the ship became woefully inadequate. Many of the ship's computers had actually crashed, rounding one digit too far and literally attempting to divide by zero, unable to make sense of the astronomical energy readings. There was simply no way to tell what the anomaly had done after the Sonic Driver was fired.
Tails caught a glimpse of his clock; it was after three. He decided he had better sleep on this, since he wasn't going to get much farther tonight. Already yawning from the thought, the fox turned off the monitors. Before he even thought to get up from his seat, he was soundly asleep.
