While the two walked for a few more miles in silence, Paint's guilt over dragging Arrowhead within an airborne chunk of rock of his life began to gnaw at her ability to stay mum. She didn't deserve a friend she could whisk away on frivolous journeys all the time that weren't even his choice of escapades. She was adventurous and that was fine, but she could keep that to herself, or at least to a narrower radius of influence, right? The more sensible Arrowhead didn't need that. She was, for the most part, happy to have a friend like him, but beneath this, as was surfacing now, she felt that she didn't deserve him. He was surely smarter than her, both in book-learning and in prudent decision-making.
There was a question she had had buried inside the smothering soil of her head for a long time, and that he perhaps asked himself as well, but she felt it was time to unearth it whether he was ready or not. It would be for the best.
"Arrow?" she ventured with an unsettling meekness in her voice.
He seemed surprised at the difference in tone from her normally confident self. "What is it?"
"Why have you stuck with me all these years?" she asked.
He hadn't been prepared for that. Toad eyes aren't good at hiding their gaze, but he tried his best to divert it from meeting hers. It was a sensitive question indeed; it deserved a careful response with no betrayals of emotion.
"You... you don't get enough respect," he calmly replied.
Respect? What did she ever do to earn it? For her whole life, she'd been nothing but a weed and a bothersome pest, annoying everyone who was generous enough to let her into their life. Earned respect could come from the likes of saving the village from one of Dr. Eggman's robots or, over several decades, contributing more than one's share to the community, as other villagers had done - not from being so disorganized and unrealistically idealistic that hardly anyone sticks around to offer disrespect.
"But... but I don't-" she stammered.
"And you're pretty."
The silence grew, at once, deader than ever.
Arrow was sorry then that he was an amphibian and not a turtle or shelled mollusk or crustacean, as he wanted more to escape into a shell after blurting something like that out than he could ever remember being. Had he even meant it? He didn't... fancy her in that way, or at least he couldn't clearly say that he did. But she definitely had a certain allure. It was a strange one, to be sure - her leaflike tufts of green, yellow, and orange were like nothing else he'd ever seen, to say nothing of her short twin tails and oddly red-orange ears. But that was part of the charm, indeed. If he grew to like anyone anytime soon, she would be... high up his list. He felt comfortable with himself leaving it at that.
Her face was bright red; it was nice that she too was turned away from him as they kept their pace back home. That... was nice of him, definitely. But she wouldn't fall for his kindness - in fact, it was that kind of naivete that made it so painful whenever she was mocked for looking like a demon, a scarecrow, a work of terrible art that no one would pay for. She was almost angry at him for trying to get her hopes up, but she knew that he had just reasoned it out that that was what she needed at the moment. And maybe that much could be enough.
It was time to spit out a reply and never look back from it.
"I appreciate it and you're cute too."
Well, that had happened. What had she meant by it? The wonder caused her revulsion - coming up with that might involve more looking back than she was ready for. If he pressed the issue, she would do her best to be as a good a friend as she could, but otherwise she was more than happy to leave it alone.
Thankfully, the issue's momentary significance was about to vanish.
"Hey, what's that?" Arrowhead wondered aloud. "It looks metallic."
The two ran up to the object Arrowhead had spotted lying in the uneven grass. It looked like a shell from a large capsule, which Paint gathered must have been fired from a barrel six inches in diameter. Who - what - could wield such a thing?
She didn't have to wait for an answer. "Hey, look!" he exclaimed. "FOR MODEL E-1030 / PRODUCT OF EGGMAN ENTERPRISES." She then noticed the tiny lettering on the shell, too - that had been quite perceptive of the toad.
Clearly quaking internally but trying to stay calm, Arrowhead stated matter-of-factly, "Well, this seems to have been shot by one of Dr. Eggman's robots. It's not warm, so it can't have been here within the last couple of hours, but it also isn't the slightest bit aged. In other words, Eggman's on the prowl."
That wasn't good. It'd been a while since Paint had thought of Eggman in any real way; he was almost thought of as a legendary figure rather than a psychotic, very real dictator by both the two of them and the rest of their village. Yet here was all the evidence they could ask for that he was making a comeback - or simply continuing an existing, long-lasting trek across the planet to their neck of the woods.
"Well, Arrow, that's all the evidence we need to get back home right now, eh?" She laughed nervously while speaking the words, which seemed to be directed almost toward herself rather than him, despite the presence of his name in them.
"Yeah, let's keep going; we're not too far anyway," he said. "I should know; I drew up the map for this trip." She was again stricken with a bit of gratefulness as she remembered another way he filled in behind the scenes for her, although this time came with less sadness as she knew it was something he enjoyed doing and was proud of - organization and planning in general, really.
And with that, their journey through the forest back home continued, more purposefully than before, though neither one knew yet how right they were.