002 – This Was How I Discovered My New Self
Knothole was never very big. It was a very small city that grew out of the survivors of when Mobotropolis was first attacked by Doctor Robotnik. Even that small city had been shrunk further by raids and ill-planned ventures into enemy territory. Although it had grown substantially after the liberation I discussed earlier, it was still fairly small when compared to Megaopolis, Mobotropolis, or any other city that had risen and fallen in recent history. That said, it would be hard for me to miss it as I walked back. Yet, somehow I managed to do just that.
The car ride out to the quarry had only taken the better part of a day. On foot, that meant that the return trip would take a few days if I were moving swiftly. Considering that I only knew the general direction I needed to travel, it was surprising that I found anything at all. But I was fortuitous to stumble on some campers out in the woods.
They were gathered around a campfire with a tent propped up between two trees as I ambled up out of the forest. They were kind enough to share food with me and inform me of a few things. First of all, Knothole simply didn't exist anymore. The ruins existed, they told me, but no one lived there. Apparently Robotnik, now "Doctor Eggman", had made a final move against Sonic and the rest of the Freedom Fighters. Eggman had won a victory and destroyed our home, but Sonic and a majority of the inhabitants survived and made a new city, New Mobotropolis. The campers told me all of this while eyeing me suspiciously. All of this had happened a couple of years ago; just how long had I been lost in the woods? I lied and told them that I was traveling from far away and must have been using an out of date guidebook (that I'd also lost along the way). In the end, they pointed me in the right direction and I went off in search for New Mobotropolis.
The woods were a glorious emerald green as I walked through the trees. The air was rich with the smell of pine and the sounds of small birds and animals filled the air. I enjoyed the walk, finding it pleasant and wondering why I didn't do more walks like this out in nature. It wasn't until sundown the day after I'd left the campers that it started dawning on me: I hadn't eaten or drank all day and I didn't feel fatigued at all. My feet didn't ache, my legs weren't sore, and I didn't feel at all hungry or thirsty. This was the first moment that I realized that something had happened to me. (Up to this point I had just discounted the story of Knothole as a curiosity and nothing more.) When I woke up the next morning, I found myself well rested, albeit dew-covered, and still not hungering for anything. At some point that morning, I ambled past a serene lake, so I decided I'd take a brake and skip some stones.
As I approached the water, I noticed that my reflection had changed. Before, I was a very non-descript kind of fox. The kind that would appear in the background and garner no attention. Now, though, my coat shone more brightly in the sun, healthier than ever before. My figure was more defined than I'd ever seen it in my life, showing off more of my badger heritage than I thought possible. Most striking was my eyes. Before, my eyes had been a common shade of brown. Now, they were a brilliant shade of aquamarine. They almost seemed to glow in my reflection. I stared at myself for the better part of an hour before I realized I needed to be going. Tearing myself away from my self-examination, I started heading on my path again.
My mind was racing as I kept looking down at my arms, noticing for the first time how much more thickly muscled they were. I felt them, noticing how firm the felt under my hand. I forced myself to stop touching my arms by shoving my hands into the pockets of my, now dirty, blue jeans.
Throughout that entire day, I felt something building inside of me. Something was adding up in my subconscious and it was coming to a head soon. I'd read stories of super heroes; the fictitious epics of the average joe suddenly waking up to discover that he could fly or had the powers of a spider or some such nonsense. And, sure, like every adult, I secretly waited for the day when those powers would suddenly be made known to me. The day when I was revealed to have some mysterious alien origin, or to be part of some long-secret order of beings whose power rivaled those of the gods. But I'd never seriously believe that anything like that would ever actually happen to me. But maybe that subconscious expectation was what prompted me to do what I did next.
After mulling around my physical change in appearance, the fact that I hadn't needed to eat for the better part of a week now, and this buzzing feeling my entire body seemed to be generating, I decided I'd try to test out my latent abilities. So I stopped walking and found a tree that seemed like a good target. After listening hard for a few moments and looking around to ensure that I was alone, I spread my legs apart and lifted my arms in a dynamic pose. If someone does something embarrassing alone in the forest, did it ever really happen? I asked myself.
What I did next, I'll try my best to explain, though it's hard to capture in words. I saw the tree, and then, in an impulse of feeling rather than actual thought, I forced the tree to explode from the innermost parts of the trunk outwards. I mean, I could feel the wood expanding rapidly; where there was no space, suddenly there was lots of space. I expanded my hand and suddenly, I was flat on my ass, peppered in wood shards. Millions of pieces of shrapnel stung my body. I had done that. I was sure of it.
A dozen other explanations raced through my mind as I picked myself up. Maybe there was someone out here with a new kind of explosive and they blew up a tree? What if someone else was the superhero and blew it up and didn't notice I was standing so close? Maybe trees can just blow up from time to time?
All of these didn't sit well with me, so I tried it again, only on a pinecone instead of an entire tree. The pinecone vaporized itself in the palm of my hand and I started grinning ear to ear. I was elated. I was terrified. I was proud. I was confused. It had been so easy to blow up the tree (and the pinecone). I continued walking, experimenting as I walked along. I discovered that I could crush things. I could manipulate matter. I found that night that if I really focused and tried to feel them, I could manipulate individual molecules to bind with one another. I could lift things bigger than me; with both my hands and my mind. I couldn't find any limit to my new powers. I was the king, and all of reality was my domain. If I willed it, if I could conceive it, I could make it happen.
Almost. I discovered that I had my limits as well. I couldn't create matter from nothing. I had spent the better part of an hour before abandoning that train of thought. I reasoned that I could probably rearrange the elements around me if I had a better idea of what I was doing, but that was far too much for me. It was exhausting to even try, which meant I must've been doing something right.
The most exhilarating moment of that day, I have to admit, was when I learned how to fly. I really cannot overstate how exhilarating that was. I had reasoned that if I could pick up other things, rocks, trees, etcetera, then why not pick up myself? So I did. It felt like I was laying in one of those space-age future beds. The kind that form fit to your body. Only I was being lifted up by that bed. I think there's enough literature, theory, and fantasy out there for you to draw your own conclusions what the ability to fly is like. All I feel I can add is that it feels oddly similar to how it feels when you dream that you can fly; as though your mind has been expecting it and has been ready for the moment that you leave the surly bonds of gravity and take to the sky for your entire life. Also, it's very cold the higher up you go.
That's something that fantasy and your dreams rarely prepare you for. Now, I had assumed that my body no longer needed heat to survive, since it didn't need anything else to survive either. (I had held my breath for an hour before deciding that air was no longer needed.) And while it was technically true that my body would keep functioning at freezing temperatures, it didn't stop my body from feeling those freezing temperatures. So when I shot myself high into the air, the euphoria I felt was quickly tempered by the realization that my simple navy blue hoodie wasn't going to handle the thin air a few miles up. I wasn't shivering in that cold, but it still felt more frigid than anything I'd ever felt before, and it wasn't something I was eager to experience any time soon.
But from that high up, I could see the world. I ignored the cold for as long as I could as I took in the beauty of the landscapes below. The mountains and the plateaus to the north. The wide oceans to the south and the forests to the east. Floating along the southern coast was a small land mass, hovering slowly in the sky as Angel Island made its lethargic circuit around the globe. And not too far to the west, I could see a sprawling landscape with a large, sandy wall built around the perimeter. There were trees and houses, so I knew it wasn't whatever Robotnik (sorry, I mean Eggman) was using as a fortress these days. I decided that if this wasn't New Mobotropolis, then surely they knew where it was.
So I fell from the sky, feeling that invisible mattress disappear and enjoying the ride down. It occurred to me that it took longer to fall back to the ground than it did to fly up. My stomach dropped as I plummeted from the sky. Tears streaked my face. Only once or twice did I slow my descent, out of some misplaced fear that now would be when my powers would suddenly vanish. Eventually, the landscapes that seemed so distant at first clarified and grew bigger almost exponentially. When I hit the top of the canopy line of the forest, I slowed my descent. I realized with about sixty feet left to go that I needed to hit the brakes a lot harder than I already was. So I grabbed myself quickly and brought myself to an immediate stop some ten feet from the ground. It shook my body hard. My vision suddenly blurred and I saw gray creeping in from the sides of my vision. I felt a sick warmth crawl up my back: I was going to throw up.
And I did. Or, rather, I tried to. I hadn't eaten anything for days so the nausea took longer than it should've to fully leave my body. I tried to will it away, apply my power to it and make it disappear, but it seemed like my body was trying to teach me a lesson about flying it didn't want me to forget. After a half-hour of dry heaving, I continued my journey westward on foot. While flying was exhilarating, and a little nausea was a small price to pay for the ability to fall from low orbit and not die, it wouldn't do to come flying in at top speed like a missile. I'd reveal my abilities when I was ready to, and not a moment sooner.
