Sorry this took a long time.

...

A train horn greeted Tails as the blackness began lifting from his vision. His head felt like it was about to explode. Was this Station Square? Honestly, it could've been Hell itself and Tails wouldn't have noticed.

No, he was on a train of some sort.

He looked down the tram. There were two other people waiting for the train to stop. One was waiting by the double doors, holding onto a bar beside him and clutching a worn suitcase like it was all he had. Another sat on a bench behind him and further down the tram, staring idly at the floor over the suitcase clutched on his lap.

Tails groaned as he stood, his legs stinging with every movement.

A human being. So this was earth. As Tails approached, he frowned. "I didn't see you get on."

He didn't sound negative. He didn't even sound surprised that the friend of the legendary Sonic the Hedgehog had just appeared. Just a sort of mild curiosity, as though he didn't really care.

Tails didn't mind. He had questions racing through his mind faster than he could register.

As it floated over him, it suddenly seemed to acknowledge his presence and banked down like a fighter plane, hovering just in front of him and blocking his path. Gordon looked into the iris, and was promptly blinded by a flash of white light.

"Gah!"

His voice echoed loudly around the train station, and as he opened his eyes and blinked the spots away, he realized just what a spectacle he was making of himself. His two ex-passengers had stopped to look back at him as though he had a plague. Tails just smiled and gave them a small wave. The doorman rolled his eyes and continued on, while the other passenger stared at Tails with a strange mix of fear and awe.

Tails noticed that the device had floated up over his head and had taken to following along behind him as he walked. Random papers of different colors floated along the ground with the silent wind.

A man in a dark uniform, all dark navy and black, stood behind the. The white, ghoulish gasmask he wore gave Tails flashbacks to the Metarex.

But something told Tails that this one would be nowhere near as helpful. As he stepped out of the darkness and into the light, Tails noticed for the first time the baton held in his shiny, long leather gloves.

"You citizen, stop right there," he commanded, his voice garbled almost beyond recognition.

Tails froze and slowly turned.

"Come with me."

The masked man turned and walked back down a thin, murky corridor, not expecting to have to ask again. Tails glanced to the policemen flanking the train platform and walked inside, his eyes flitting down to the batons held at their sides as he walked inside. Someone closed the door behind him, and he was plunged into almost complete darkness, only the daintiest of light fixtures above giving him a yellowy look to everything.

There were two doors on the left hand wall, and the policeman had gone to the second. From the first, Tails heard a scared, slightly indignant voice echoing out through the eye-level porthole.

"This must be a mistake! Please don't-!"

A ghostly gas masked face appeared in front of him from behind and the door and slid the porthole shut from the other side. That had looked suspiciously like an interrogation room.

His escort wordlessly banged his fist back against the door beside him, and another dressed in the exact same uniform opened the thick metal door. Looking to Tails, his policeman thrust an angry finger into the dark room.

"Get in here."

Tails silently did as he was told, now far too terrified to think about escaping. All he found was a chair akin to one found in a dentist's surgery, dry and fresh blood splattered all around the checked tile floor. A rusting bucket sat beside the chair, and Tails didn't even want to look inside.

No way. He wasn't gonna submit to something like this that easily.

"Sit down."

Tails didn't even think. With a swipe of his tails he sent the masked policeman reeling backward into the wall with a loud bang. He sprinted to the door in the back of the interrogation room. His heart pounded in his chest.

It led to a small storage room with open windows above him. With his flight, he sailed gracefully through the window into the drab back lot below and slipped through the alleys to freedom.

Or at least he would have if he hadn't been forcefully pulled into a tiny storage shed. He fell to the ground in surprise.

Two humans stood over him. A tall one and an older, shorter black man next to him. Both of them were garbed in a mix of rags and denim.

The tall man tried pulling on his tails. "You were seconds away from bringing the whole Forty-Second down on this area, you little shit! Take those damn things off!"

"Ow!" Tails whipped them out of his hands with a yelp. "They're not fake!"

"Impersonating the Tyrant's a capitol offense boy," said the other man, his black skin blending in with his ragged clothes. "You start running around with those two tails on you, you be in a whole heap o' trouble."

"He's here?' A female voice spoke from behind the two humans.

The two of them locked gazes. Something in the back of Tails' mind started to buzz. There was no way it could be her, but the appearance was literally unmistakable. The ears. The eyes.

She was Cream the Rabbit. A tall, curvy, ragged, beautiful teenaged Cream the Rabbit. He had no doubts it was her.

"Cream? Is that you?" He asked.

She simply stared at him, looking over every inch of him.

"A two tailed..." Cream paused, glancing down at the wooden floor temporarily. "Who are you?"

Tails couldn't believe she asked. "Cream, it's me! How cou-"

Obviously these people didn't know him, and now even one as naive as Tails could understand this was a place he knew anything about. Why Cream of all people didn't know him he wasn't sure, but he couldn't think straight at this point. What was this place?

He collected himself to answer. "My name is Miles Prower, but all my friends call me by my nickname Tails."

The men and Cream stared at him cows staring at an oncoming train. It was liked he had just yelled a curse word in a church at the top of his lungs, or called one of the men a racist slur.

"What did you just say?" The two men and the rabbit looked at each other with their mouths agape.

"This isn't a joke kid. You could be dead or worse right now," Tall Man said, "Now who the hell are you?"

"I'm Tails. You know, Sonic the Hedgehog's best friend? Helped him save the world several times?"

She took a single step forward. For a split-second, Tails' heart leapt. Perhaps she did remember him after all! Someone here could finally explain what was going on.

Then she raised the weapon in her hand, aimed it neatly at his chest, and pulled the trigger. Tails felt a sharp sting, and then his legs dropped out underneath him before his brain comprehended what happened.

Before he blacked out once again, Tails managed to hear the rabbit utter three words.

"Bring him in."