Whoo! I'm on a roll today! Hey guys! Did you like my first chappie? first of all thank you to: ukslaster,1vampire54 and lauren! You guys rock! also,ukslaster:I didn't know you were gonna do the same thing but I was thinking of the same thing but I thought its not cool to steal ur ideas in case you want to do your fanfic so either way I was good.
I thought the role of fred scrooge(scrooge's nephew)would be sonic is the opposite of shadow in the games so why not could sonic be fred scrooge then? But if you disagree,its okay!
also,I'm doing the christmas carol in school so it gives me a advantage. YES!
Okay,enough talking from me on with the show!
-H.S.H
"A merry Christmas, unc! God save you!" cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Shadow's nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach.
"Hmph!" said Shadow, "Humbug!"
Sonic had so heated himself with rapid running in the fog and frost, this nephew of Shadow's, that he was all in a glow; his face was blue and handsome; his emerald eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.
"Christmas a humbug, unc?" said shadow's nephew. "You don't mean that, I am sure."
"I do," said Shadow. "Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You're poor enough."
"Come, then," returned sonic gaily. "What right have you to be cold hearted? What reason have you to be morose? You're rich enough."
Shadow having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said "hmph" again; and followed it up with "Humbug."
"Don't be cross, unc! " said the nephew.
"What else can I be," returned the uncle, "when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! curses upon merry Christmas! What's Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in 'em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will," said Shadow indignantly, "every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!"
"Uncle!" pleaded the nephew.
"Nephew!" returned the uncle, sternly, "keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine."
"Keep it!" repeated Shadow's nephew. "But you don't keep it."
"Let me leave it alone, then," said Shadow. "Much good may it do you! Much good it has ever done you!"
"There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say," returned the nephew. "Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round - apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that - as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!"
The clerk in the tank involuntarily applauded: becoming immediately sensible of the impropriety, shadow poked the fire, and extinguished the last frail spark forever.
"Let me hear another sound from you," said Shadow, "and you'll keep your Christmas by losing your job. "You're quite a powerful speaker, sir," he added, turning to sonic. "I wonder you don't go into law"
"Don't be angry, unc. Come! Dine with us tomorrow."
Shadow said that he would see him - yes, indeed he did. He went the whole length of the expression, and said that he would see him in that extremity first.
"But why?" cried Shadow's nephew. "Why?"
"Why did you get married?" said Shadow.
"...Because I fell in love."
"Because you fell in love?!" growled Shadow, as if that were the only one thing in the world more ridiculous than a merry Christmas. "Good afternoon!"
"No, uncle, but you never came to see me before that happened. Why give it as a reason for not coming now?"
"Good afternoon," said Shadow.
"I want nothing from you; I ask nothing of you; why can't we be friends?"
"Good afternoon," said Shadow.
"I am sorry, with all my heart, to find you so stubborn. We have never had any arguments, to which I have been a party. But I have made the trial in homage to Christmas, and I'll keep my Christmas humor to the last. So A Merry Christmas, uncle!"
"Good afternoon!," said Shadow.
"And A Happy New Year!"
"Good afternoon!" said Shadow.
His nephew left the room without an angry word . He stopped at the outer door to bestow the greetings of the season on the clerk, who cold as he was, was warmer than Shadow; for he returned them cordially.
"There's another fellow," muttered Shadow; who overheard him: "my clerk, with fifteen rings a week, and a wife and family, talking about a merry Christmas. I'll go ballistic!.
This lunatic, in letting Shadow's nephew out, had let two other people in. They were portly gentlemen, pleasant to behold, and now stood, with their hats off, in Shadow's office. They had books and papers in their hands, and bowed to him.
"Shadow and Eggman's, I believe," said one of the gentlemen, referring to his list. "Have I the pleasure of addressing Mr. Shadow, or Mr. Eggman?"
"Mr. Eggman has been dead these seven years," Shadow replied. "He died seven years ago, this very night."
"We have no doubt his liberality is well represented by his surviving partner," said the gentleman, presenting his paperwork.
It certainly was; for they had been two kindred spirits. At the ominous word "liberality," Shadow frowned, and shook his head, and handed the credentials back.
"At this festive season of the year, Mr. Shadow," said the gentleman, taking up a pen, "it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and Destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir."
"Are there no prisons?" asked Shadow.
"Plenty of prisons," said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.
"And the Union workhouses?" demanded Shadow. "Are they still in operation?"
"They are. Still," returned the gentleman, "I wish I could say they were not."
"The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?" said Shadow.
"Both very busy, sir."
"Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course," said Shadow. "I'm very glad to hear it."
"Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude," returned the gentleman, "a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?"
"Nothing!" Shadow replied.
"You want to be anonymous?"
"I want to be left alone," said Shadow. "Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don't make merry myself at Christmas and I can't afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned - they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there."
"Many can't go there; and many would rather die."
"If they would rather die," said Shadow, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides - excuse me - I don't know that."
"But you might know it," observed the gentleman.
"It's not my business," Shadow returned. "It's enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people's. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!"
Seeing clearly that it would be useless to pursue their point, the gentlemen fled. Shadow returned his labours with an improved opinion of himself, and in a more facetious temper than was usual with him.
Meanwhile the fog and darkness thickened so, that people ran about with flaring links, proffering their services to go before horses in carriages, and conduct them on their way. The ancient tower of a church, whose gruff old bell was always peeping slyly down at Shadow out of a Gothic window in the wall, became invisible, and struck the hours and quarters in the clouds, with tremulous vibrations afterwards as if its teeth were chattering in its frozen head up there. The cold became intense. In the main street at the corner of the court, some labourers were repairing the gas-pipes, and had lighted a great fire in a brazier, round which a party of ragged men and boys were gathered: warming their hands and winking their eyes before the blaze in rapture. The water-plug being left in solitude, its overflowing sullenly congealed, and turned to misanthropic ice. The brightness of the shops where holly sprigs and berries crackled in the lamp heat of the windows, made pale faces ruddy as they passed. Poulterers' and grocers' trades became a splendid joke; a glorious pageant, with which it was next to impossible to believe that such dull principles as bargain and sale had anything to do. The Lord Mayor, in the stronghold of the mighty Mansion House, gave orders to his fifty cooks and butlers to keep Christmas as a Lord Mayor's household should; and even the little tailor, whom he had fined five shillings on the previous Monday for being drunk and bloodthirsty in the streets, stirred up tomorrow's pudding in his garret, while his lean wife and the baby sallied out to buy the beef.
Foggier yet, and colder! Piercing, searching, biting cold. If the good Saint Dunstan had but nipped the Evil Spirit's nose with a touch of such weather as that, instead of using his familiar weapons, then indeed he would have roared to lusty purpose. The owner of one scant young nose, gnawed and mumbled by the hungry cold as bones are gnawed by dogs, stooped down at Shadow's keyhole to regale him with a Christmas carol: but at the first sound of -
"God bless you, merry gentleman!
May nothing you dismay!"
Shadow threw chaos spears with such energy of action, that the singer fled in terror, leaving the keyhole to the fog and even more congenial frost.
At length the hour of shutting up the countinghouse arrived. With an ill-tempered Shadow dismounted from his stool, and tacitly admitted the fact to the expectant clerk in the Tank, who instantly snuffed his candle out, and put on his hat.
"You'll want all day tomorrow, I suppose?" said Shadow.
"If quite convenient, sir."
"It's not convenient," said Shadow, "and it's not fair. If I was to stop half-a-crown for it, you'd think yourself ill-used, I'll be bound?"
Tails smiled faintly.
"And yet," said Shadow "you don't think I'm ill-tempered, when I pay a day's wages for no work."
The clerk observed that it was only once a year.
"A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every christmas!" said Shadow, buttoning his Black an red coat to the chin. "But I suppose you must have the whole day. Be here earlier next morning."
The clerk promised that he would; and Shadow walked out with a growl. The office was closed in a twinkling, and the clerk, with the long ends of his white comforter dangling below his waist (for he boasted no black and red coat), went down a slide on Cornhill, at the end of a lane of boys, twenty times, in honour of its being Christmas Eve, and then ran home to Camden Town as hard as he could pelt, to play at blindman's-buff.
Shadow took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern; and having read all the newspapers, and beguiled the rest of the evening with his banker's-book, went home to bed. He lived in chambers which had once belonged to his deceased partner. They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses, and forgotten the way out again. It was old enough now, and dreary enough, for nobody lived in it but Shadow, the other rooms being all let out as offices. The yard was so dark that even Shadow, who knew its every stone, was fain to grope with his hands. The fog and frost so hung about the black old gateway of the house, that it seemed as if the Genius of the Weather sat in mournful meditation on the threshold.
Now, it is a fact, that there was nothing at all particular about the knocker on the door, except that it was very large. It is also a fact, that Shadow had seen it, night and morning, during his whole residence in that place; also that Shadow had as little of what is called fancy about him as any hedgehog in the city of London, even including - which is a bold word - the corporation, aldermen, and livery. Let it also be borne in mind that Shadow had not bestowed one thought on Eggman, since his last mention of his seven years' dead partner that afternoon. And then let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Shadow, having his key in the lock of the door, saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change - not a knocker, but Eggman's face.