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Sleeping Owl: Aw, thank you! You hit on a lot of my insecurities as a writer here; a lot of those adjectives were not words I would have used, haha! You'll get a pretty big clue as to the big picture in this chapter. ;) Also, on a completely unrelated note, I really like your username—it's so cute! :) Thanks for reviewing!
A/N: So... much... dialogue... Oh, and if there's any misleading medical information in this, then my apologies; I don't know any more about the human body than the average Joe, and I'm having to make up a lot of stuff between Sonic being a made-up creature and all this Chaos theory changing the game. Some things are completely made up; others are just semi-educated guesses. They are all important to the plot.
Also, after you read this chapter and decide whether or not to leave your thoughts in the reviews, there's a poll on my profile that needs a little attention, so if you're bored, mosey on over and check it out. It'll help me figure out what my readers want to read—which also includes you! :)
One thing led to another, and eventually Amy, Cream, and Vanilla all followed Knuckles to the workshop. They all convened in the living room; Knuckles and Tails settled on the hardwood floor in front of the couch to make up for the spots Sonic took up stretched out above them, Amy and Cream settled into the love seat, and Vanilla, ever the proper lady, perched on a chair she'd pulled in from the kitchen. On request, the elder rabbit was filled in on every strange thing that had happened recently concerning the comatose Sonic, notably his mood swings and his sleepless nights.
"I can't help but connect them in my mind," she explained thoughtfully, consciously keeping her voice low. "I want every piece of the puzzle before I try to put it together."
"Why don't we just take him to the hospital and let the doctors figure it out?" Amy demanded, her worry for her crush lessening her patience. Cream only reached over and covered the hedgehog's hands with her own to stop her from aggressively wringing her hands together.
It was Knuckles who rather calmly answered her; "I told Tails already, I have an idea as to why this is happening, but it's not something they can handle. That's why I brought you and the Rabbits here in the first place; I want to hear what you guys think first. He looks fine for now, so don't go telling me we're wasting time."
For obvious reasons, no one understood the echidna's reasoning, especially the "he looks fine" part. Nevertheless, Vanilla sighed and folded her hands, surveying the group of worried teenagers. "All right, then. Does anyone have a suggestion?"
"Flu?" Amy guessed weakly, cocking her head.
She only earned a facepalm from Knuckles. "Any weak medicine would do the trick if it was that simple."
"Food poisoning?" Tails suggested more readily, sitting up straight. "We were at the fair all day, after all. I mean, who knows where all that stuff's been?"
Amy folded her arms and pointed out, "We would all be sick, then. We all ate the same things yesterday; I didn't even see him sneak in an extra chili dog anywhere."
"But his system works a little faster than most people's. We just might not feel sick yet, although if it was really this fast-acting, overnight really should have been enough time for any of us..." Tails trailed off as he realized the flaws in his own circular reasoning.
"Keep it in mind, anyway," Knuckles advised gruffly. Amy muttered something along the lines of "pointless."
"Perhaps he's somehow attracted some kind of incommunicable disease," mused Vanilla.
Cream, who had situated herself on the sofa's armrest, looked up from where she was gently stroking Sonic's quills to comb his damp, sweaty fur; "What's that mean, Mama?"
The elder rabbit smiled patiently at her daughter. "One that can't be passed around, dear. A cold is called a communicable disease because you can give the germs to someone else and make them sick. It's another word for 'contagious.'"
"Oh, okay." Satisfied, the eight-year-old returned to her grooming, humming softly.
Tails nodded stiffly. "I guess that could be it; it's a pretty broad category, though. If that's our only guess, we might have to take him in."
A heavy silence ensued, mental images of such a course of action causing each to cringe internally, for none of them wanted to be the one to drag an unwell Sonic the Hedgehog to the hospital.
Eventually, convinced no one else had any better ideas, Knuckles broke the quiet by clearing his throat; "Okay, get down to the basics, here, Tails. Assume Vanilla is right when she says the not sleeping and all is connected to this. Tell me exactly what's been wrong with Sonic lately—not just today, but ever since all this started. I wasn't around for much of this, either."
"Well, okay..." Tails counted off on his fingers each item as he thoughtfully spoke them. "He hasn't been sleeping well, he's having a hard time controlling his emotions which may or may not be connected to not sleeping, he's always tired, he's running a really high fever that won't go down, and he's nauseated but hasn't actually thrown up yet. That's pretty much it, that I know of."
Knuckles nodded in satisfaction. "All right. Now let's see if we can break those down. Why isn't—wasn't—he sleeping? I mean, obviously he's not having much trouble now, but..."
The fox bit his lip, wracking his rather frenzied brain for the details of the right conversation—had it really only been the day before yesterday? It felt like so much longer than that, now. "Uh... He said he was just too full of energy. He couldn't shut down long enough to conk out."
"Why is that?"
"... Because he just couldn't? I dunno, how am I supposed to know?" Tails demanded, glaring in frustration at his lack of answers to the echidna's seemingly unimportant questions. Something in him did not like the fact that Knuckles was obviously dancing around something instead of being his usual direct self, and for once the fox wished he would forget tact and logic and just spill his thoughts like he ordinarily did.
Knuckles shook his head and tried not to let the kitsune's reaction annoy him. "Okay, okay. We'll say he couldn't sleep because whatever it is that controls adrenaline—I said that right, right?—is working overtime for no reason." He hadn't meant to stutter, but he really didn't know much about anatomy; he was currently hinging his theories on the hope that the information he garnered would back up his rather tentative theory. "Now, what causes a fever?"
"A lot of things can," Vanilla jumped in knowingly, "but generally it's the body's way of killing bacteria and sending more blood to fight an infection; it's a response to something being wrong." She blushed at the sudden, surprised attention afforded her by the younger Mobians around her; "I took a year of nursing in college before deciding to be a teacher instead."
But Tails, mind gears moving at near top capacity, had already moved on. "Wait a second, there's a connection there. Even though they're usually only connected when there's a danger, they're connected here. They're both a result of a stress of some kind."
A glint of excitement lit up Amy's jade eyes. "Miss Vanilla," she addressed hopefully, "do you know what causes feelings and emotions to change?"
"No, dear," Vanilla sighed, "I'm sorry. You'd have to talk to an endocrinologist, most likely."
"What's that, Mom?" Cream piped up out of the blue once again. Now she was carefully smoothing out the little mound of blankets that had been provided for Sonic over the course of the morning, with Cheese helping her with corners she couldn't reach. The solemn group had to smile a little at how hard she was working to make him comfortable, completely oblivious to the conversation filled with big, serious words that spelled trouble for the hero in front of her.
"I'll explain later, dear," Vanilla told her. Turning back to Knuckles, she said, "I think I understand what you're saying, Knuckles. You're saying that everything is connected to some kind of stress on his body, right?"
"You know..."
All heads whipped around at the sound of the familiar voice; somehow, the breathless words injected light into the dim topic, and every muscle relaxed, if just a little bit. "Sonic!" Amy exclaimed happily.
Sonic half-smiled at them, emerald eyes partly veiled. "I like... how you're talking about me... like I'm not here," he joked between breaths, causing a little laugh to circulate the group.
"Well, we might be onto something," Tails told him, relief flooding his voice. He twisted around to face his best friend, still sitting on his knees. "Are you feeling any better?"
Sonic closed his eyes again and snuggled yet deeper into his blankets, but his ears were still perked up ever so little in alertness. "Bleh... No, not really..."
"All right, so nothing's changed with rest," Knuckles concluded. Subconsciously, the group shifted to include Sonic in the circle of conversation as the guardian continued. "Now the only thing left is the big one—that his fever won't go down. Anybody have any ideas?"
Less tense than before, Tails raised his hand like a school child. "Well, I'm not a hundred percent sure of this, but I think most of the time medicine kind of takes over the body's functions. If there was a germ, it would move in to kill it more quickly, and it's supposed to bring fevers down. I'm not sure how... But if that's not happening, then there's gotta be something else..."
"Okay, we'll go with that. So if the fever won't go away, then either there's nothing for the medicine to do, or something's preventing it from doing anything at all," deduced Knuckles when his younger friend broke off. "Obviously something's wrong, so what could be strong enough to prohibit medicine, cause such a stress in the first place, and cause weird mood swings?"
Amy threw her hands in the air with an annoyed huff and a glare tossed at the eighteen-year-old. "Knuckles, how on Mobius are we supposed to know—!"
"The Chaos Emeralds," Sonic interrupted suddenly, stunning everyone into a momentary silence.
Understanding dawned on Tails's face almost immediately as Knuckles nodded his consent. "The Chaos Emeralds... Of course! But..." His expression fell again as another thought hit him; "No one's seen them for months—going on two years now. They couldn't have done anything."
Knuckles shook his head. "That's where my theory comes in."
"This'll be good," Sonic teased with a devious smirk.
"Pipe down, Blue." Knuckles's fists clenched slightly. "It's you I'm trying to help, here."
Sonic said no more, leaning back and allowing Cream to continue her soothing fur grooming. Amy watched the pair with a hint of jealousy hidden just out of sight.
"Anyway..." Knuckles forcibly cleared his throat and returned to his point; "What I'm saying here is that because Sonic hasn't interacted with the emeralds in a long time... That's the reason he's down like this."
"... Elaborate?" Amy requested flatly, mirroring the blank looks of everyone in the room.
Knuckles leaned back in his seat with reasonable confidence in his once-shaky theory. "I read about this on Angel Island a long time ago; I didn't pay it any attention at the time because Eggman was coming up with killer schemes every other week and it seemed like he'd be going forever, or at least until we were all dead and it wouldn't matter anymore. But here we are—Eggman's gone, Sonic's barely seventeen, and lo and behold..."
"Focus," warned Amy impatiently.
"All right, fine," the guardian eyerolled. "Here's what I'm thinking. You used the Chaos Emeralds to transform into Super Sonic a lot, right, Sonic?"
Without opening his eyes, Sonic murmured, "Yeah. Every other week, like you said."
"Right. We all know the Chaos Emeralds do a lot when they transform a person. That's why they scatter after being used; their energy is depleted from all that use and they need time to recharge. When you use them, they heal you, strengthen you, and protect you, sometimes all at once, like with Super forms. In essence, they mask the effects of whatever normally goes on—that'd be pain or discomfort or whatever—and allow you to do things, take things you normally couldn't do. They also channel your emotions as fuel; in essence, they offer a form of control over them."
"Wait..." Tails held up one hand, blue eyes wide with fearful recognition as the pieces fell together in his mind. "Are you saying what I think you're saying?"
"Depends on what you think I'm saying," the echidna shrugged.
Tails took this as a signal to speak, which he almost didn't. The words, to him, sounded worse than they were; they were subjective, demeaning words he would have never used to describe Sonic on any plane before.
"You're saying..." He tried to swallow a lump in his throat with some difficulty. "You're saying the Chaos Emeralds acted like a really strong stimulant—they stimulated him and enhanced his body's activities. And since he used them so much, he got a little too used to the effects they had on him."
Knuckles nodded silently, confirming the fox's fears—which were no longer just his, if the looks on the girls' faces were anything to go by. "Is there a word for that that's more pronounceable than the ancient echidna word?"
"A dependency, or an addiction," Tails rattled off automatically. "Sonic literally became addicted to Chaos energy without knowing it."
"Right. So now, he's quit cold turkey with the emeralds, since Eggman hasn't been around to give him a reason to use them, and his body can't get the same effects without them. What we might be seeing here is him trying to get the same energy rush and high-power feeling using just his own energy."
"Withdrawal," Tails and Sonic muttered simultaneously. Amy's face drained itself of all color, and Vanilla bit her lip, deep in thought. Cream frowned slightly in confusion once again, but this time she refrained from asking questions. The longest ten seconds any of them had ever experienced ensued as the facts tumbled around in their heads and they each tried to come up with another explanation.
Finally, Tails spoke up; "Wait. It's never happened before, and it's been a year and a half since we even saw the emeralds last. I mean, Eggman was never dormant for that long, but why did this take so long to kick in?"
"He went for months without it sometimes, remember?" Knuckles reminded. "When Eggman would go dormant and cook up something really big. He can take shorter longer periods of time, if you know what I mean. This has probably been building slowly for the last several months, and it just started to become noticeable this last month or so." He gave Sonic a pointed look. "You're lucky. Apparently, back in the ancient days, if the guardian of the Master Emerald left Angel Island, he came down with something really similar to this in just a couple of days. At first, they thought it was something in the air down below, but eventually they figured out that it was overexposure to Chaos energy."
"Is that why you never leave Angel Island for longer than a couple of days?" Amy questioned quietly, her expression softer than it had been.
Knuckles stiffened slightly. "The Master Emerald is my duty. I could make it as long as I needed to, but my duty is there, and I can't leave it for that long."
Tails, meanwhile, shook his head in wonder. "I never would have thought of that in a million years if I wasn't seeing it right now. But it makes sense. Maybe when you slept all the way through last night, Sonic, the suppressed energy from you not running or anything just built up until you couldn't take it anymore, and this happened."
"Well, how do I make it stop?" Sonic's voice was even quieter than before, and his cheeks had lost their previous bright red color when everyone turned to face him again. He was stiff and still, barely moving enough to breathe and speak. "Cuz I'm kinda... kinda miserable over here..."
"Oh, honey..." Suppressed motherly instincts overcame Vanilla at last, and she stepped over to the couch to rest her hand on his forehead as tenderly as if he were her own son. He didn't resist her cool touch. "I'll get you a wet washcloth or something," she told him before slipping out of the room.
"What should we do, then?" Tails reiterated worriedly. "Sonic can't just lie there and moan for a couple weeks until his body decides he can live without the emeralds; all kinds of things could happen!"
"I know, I know," Knuckles growled, trying not to appear too irritated. Unfortunately, he had reached the end of his scope of knowledge, and he didn't like that he had not a single clue what to do now that they had some idea what was wrong. "What do people down here usually do for this kind of thing?"
A hesitation-filled moment passed before Amy explained, "Well, most of the time, whatever the person is addicted to is something bad and they really need to stop anyway—things like alcohol and drugs. They'll usually just quit; there's therapy involved, sometimes time in the hospital, all that stuff. But I don't think that'll work this time. I mean, look!" She turned back to Sonic, who appeared to be trying to go back to sleep in order to avoid an oncoming nausea attack. "Dealing with a fever like this for days on end might do some permanent damage! Not to mention if he can't eat or drink anything without bringing it back up, he might get dehydrated, or worse! And—"
"Amy, dear," Vanilla quickly admonished as she reentered the room with the promised wet washcloth, "don't get too worked up in the 'what ifs.'"
"That's right," Cream chirped, eyes bright with innocent faith, "I just know that you'll find a way to make sure Sonic's okay. That's what friends are for, right?"
Tight smiles found their way onto the faces of the rabbit's friends. "What would we do without you, Cream?" Amy complimented before she wrapped the child in a comforting hug.
Vanilla knelt next to the sick hedgehog and encouraged him to lift his head a little to let her maneuver the cloth around the back of his neck. Sonic wasn't wild about moving, yet he stubbornly placed every ounce of effort he had into obeying without vomiting; thankfully, Vanilla was quick and deft, and such an incident never came to pass.
"Now you rest, dear," she told him. "We'll move so we don't bother you."
"M'kay..." Already, Sonic was halfway unconscious, basking in the relief the cloth brought him, and Vanilla shepherded the rest of the gang into the kitchen as he easily gave in to sleep's invitation.
"The most obvious thing to do," Knuckles decided lowly as he fell heavily into a chair at the table, "is to go find the emeralds and let him use them like always."
"But then the same thing will happen again in a few months!" Amy argued. She flopped down into a chair opposite the echidna, passing a halfhearted glare over toward him. "We can't just keep finding the emeralds every couple of years for the rest of his life, and besides, who wants to be sick like this all the time?"
"What about using only a few emeralds?" Tails suggested suddenly. All eyes were drawn to him, but he hardly noticed for being deep in thought. "Since he just quit cold turkey, like you said, then maybe we can kinda... wean him off, for lack of a better term. We start with six this time, and he can use fewer emeralds each time until he doesn't need them anymore. It'll have to happen a few more times, but he won't be completely dependent on them for the rest of his life. And, since we know what to look for now, we can catch it and treat it earlier next time."
Knuckles crossed his arms loosely, mouth in a firm line and eyes downcast toward the square of sunlight from the kitchen window on the floor tiles. "At any rate, I want to test this thing, first. We're working off a lot of assumptions here; if we spend several days on a wild goose chase, I want to make sure the emeralds will actually do something. I'm not wasting time playing a game of hide-and-seek with a bunch of rocks if they're not going to help."
Skeptical, Amy folded her arms. "So we just get one emerald and see what happens?"
"Pretty much. After that, I'll know if I'm right, and if I am, then we find the rest." The guardian's violet eyes drifted toward the living room doorway. "But there's risk in that, too. Using too few emeralds might make him worse. I don't know."
"That's a chance we'll have to take," decided Tails with as much resolve as he could have with his brother in such a spot. He was still taking all this in, trying to understand it all. Was this really Sonic's reward for all the lives he'd saved using the Chaos Emeralds? What had the hedgehog done to deserve having one of his greatest assets thrown back in his face? Knuckles's rather vague warnings only amplified his worries; what if they were wrong and things spiraled completely out of control? Would that, after every other ridiculously powerful thing he'd survived in the past, be more than the hedgehog could take? And had Knuckles said something about making him worse?
Amy's voice broke into his train of thought before it could jump any further off its track; "You better be right about this, Knuckles. What's first?"
Knuckles nudged Tails's shoulder with the heel of his hand, saying, "Tails? Can you track any emeralds from here?"
"Wha—oh! Y-yeah, sure I can." The kitsune forcefully pulled himself away from his morbid imagination and gestured them all to follow. Everyone, sans Vanilla, silently filed one by one through the back door and into the connected workshop. Tails flicked on the overhead lights to reveal a messy collection of just about anything a budding mechanic could dream of, including, in the middle of it all, the famous Tornado, its scarlet-red paint shiny and telling of the generous maintenance it had received throughout its retirement from battle. On the opposite end of the room sat two computer monitors above a floating mass of junk; Tails pulled up a sturdy shipping box to sit on and shoved the piles of stuff away to expose a hidden tabletop and keyboard. His curious friends crowded around to watch.
"I haven't worked a lot on projects like this since Eggman was arrested and the emeralds disappeared, so we're kinda left with the same technology we had before," he informed, consciously avoiding going into too much confusing detail as he woke up the machine and began deftly inputting commands. "I didn't get the chance to refine the signal or anything, but I've still got everything we used to have. I can tell you the continent it's on and give you a basic idea of where it might be, and once we get there, I can give you the general area within a few miles." He leaned back with his hands folded nervously in waiting; "After that, Sonic or Shadow used to just kind of... sense it. Knuckles, that'll have to be your job; there's no way Sonic's up for this, and who knows where Shadow is right now." Knuckles nodded slightly, setting his jaw determinedly.
A bright welcome menu splashed onto the screen, and Tails's fingers once again flew over the keys. "This first one will be the hardest since we're working without an emerald to start, and it'll probably take longer to find them than it used to without Sonic around to speed things up." Without ceasing his rapid typing, he craned his neck to look at Amy and Cream; "I'm counting on you girls to keep an eye on him and keep us updated."
Cream nodded agreeably; Amy, on the other hand, creased her brows in displeasure. "Why can't I go?" she demanded. "Vanilla and Cream can handle Sonic between the two of them."
"There's only two spots on the plane," Knuckles firmly replied for the fox. "Any extra weight will just slow us down, and without Sonic that's the last thing we need."
Amy's expression turned into an all-out enraged scowl. "Are you saying I'm just extra weight?!"
"Got it," Tails broke in, having been oblivious to the argument. The two teens forgot their bickering and turned their attention to the red blob on the screen surrounded by the different colored lines of a road map. The little splotch of color was faded around the edges, indicating less chance of an emerald's presence.
"That's the northeast corner of the continent," Amy realized, pointing at a far corner of the map. "See, there's Empire City over there."
Knuckles's voice was dangerously close to a whine as he questioned, "Is that really the closest one?"
Tails nodded and sighed in reluctant submission. "Yep. Looks like we've got our work cut out for us this time."
Steeling his expression, Knuckles only took a second to think before he turned on his heel in the direction of the Tornado. "Well, no use standing around and feeling sorry for ourselves. We've got an emerald to catch."
Tails hesitated for a moment before standing. "Can you wait just a second? I'm gonna grab a cereal bar or something to eat while we're gone. I kinda forgot about lunch."
"In that case, bring me one, too," Knuckles nodded. He hoisted himself up onto the Tornado's wing with a mighty thrust and sighed as he sent his dreadlocks flying into his face, while Tails found himself trailed by Amy and Cream back into the house. They found Vanilla still in the kitchen with her hands submerged in a sink full of soapy water, a stack of clean, white dishes already piling up on the counter next to her.
"I hope you don't mind, Tails, but if we're going to be helping, I need to be organized," she explained.
She couldn't have possibly overheard our conversation, could she? Tails was a bit taken aback, yet he couldn't refuse the rabbit's rather forward offer of services at such a time as this. "No, no, it's fine. It needed to be done anyway. I just came in to grab the cereal bars out of the pantry to take with us, and then we'll be gone and you guys can do anything you need to."
"Can we help, Mama?" Cream wanted to know, bouncing up to her mother and eagerly gesturing to herself and Amy. Cheese, Tails noticed with mild surprise, was nowhere in sight.
Vanilla smiled and nodded approvingly. "Sure, sweetie; why don't you two start clearing the table?"
Many hands began to make light work as Tails snatched the desired cardboard box and ducked his way toward the quieter living room. There was Cheese, who was amusing herself with snoozing Sonic's ear by gently lifting it, then giving a confused coo as she watched it flop back down.
"He's not going to do much that's interesting, Cheese," Tails told the Chao wryly. He watched in amusement for a minute as the innocent little blue creature persisted in the game. He sighed, "Listen, when he wakes up, can you tell him that we left and we'll be back soon?"
Cheese chirped happily and proceeded to dance in place, presumably communicating Tails's message. The kit smiled in spite of himself; "Or maybe I'll just tell him myself."
He knelt down and leaned forward so he was just inches from the hedgehog's ear and whispered as quietly as he could, "I don't know if you can hear me, but Knuckles and I are going to find a Chaos Emerald. Hopefully everything'll be okay soon..." He faltered as he studied his best friend closely; despite his muzzle, red with fever yet pale with illness at the same time, he looked peaceful and at ease; of course, he was asleep and couldn't feel any discomfort. Dreamland was a safe world, where anything undesirable could be rid of by simply waking up.
But when Sonic woke up, he would likely find no change and no comfort, and Tails wouldn't be here to help him through it like the hedgehog had done for him so many times throughout his life.
I'm sorry...
"... but we gotta get this done before we get there." He grasped his brother's hand tightly for a second. "Hang in there, bro."
Then he was gone, before he could change his mind, rushing out the door to meet Knuckles and embark upon the most important mission he'd ever taken.
