I knew edits on this chapter were going to be tough, but wow, they put me at an absolute standstill! Fixing this chapter took far longer than I would have hoped. Thank you all for waiting, and hopefully this is much better than it would have been if I hadn't taken the time. Enjoy and don't forget to review if you can!
Jan. 10, 2012
Dear Diary,
Sonic won't talk to me or anyone anymore. Part of it's the fact his brain's still moving slowly, since the Chaos Emerald's only doing so much to fix him, but he's also making himself scarce. It shouldn't surprise me. Sonic's never been much of a "talker." Not even when it's good news. So now that what's going on has to do with him and what the Metarex did to him, there was no chance he'd go into more detail than necessary. But I thought he'd changed. I thought he wanted to be more honest since he'd realized how short and at risk his life is. That's what he said. And now it's like those were just words and he hasn't changed at all. For once, I'm angry that this is him going back to normal.
He's spent his entire life protecting me. Throwing himself off cliffs, jumping in front of bullets, every type of danger. And now, I can't protect him. The damage is already done. The Metarex already destroyed him.
Love,
Amy Rose
Amy crushed her notebook closed in her lap before shoving it to the floor. Anger warred against sadness and desperation in her chest so that it tightened her throat and made her bones ache. "I don't even know what to do anymore!" she groaned finally, letting her head fall back on the couch.
Tails lifted his eyes from his computer where he was analyzing data that he'd recorded on the headsets during their Metarex base infiltration. "About Sonic?" he asked.
Amy rolled her eyes, not honoring his question with a verbal response, and Tails lowered his gaze again. "'Metarex' might have been another acceptable answer," he muttered to his computer screen.
She pressed her hand against her forehead. "I don't know how to help him," she said. "He's not saying anything. Should I talk to him? Should I make him talk to me?"
"You're asking the wrong guy," Tails said slowly. "But it doesn't seem to me like he wants to talk."
Tails's slowness grated on Amy's nerves. He was too patient, too calm. Wasn't his world shattering to pieces? Wasn't Sonic his best friend? So she snapped, "He lied to us, Tails! Why doesn't that bother you?"
Tails snapped his laptop shut. The click made Amy jump as if Tails had slammed a door in her face. "He didn't lie; he just didn't tell us everything that happened to him. Which we all decided we were fine with," he said
Amy shoved herself forward so she sat on the edge of her seat. Her nerves jumped, but she forced herself to lower her volume as she asked, "But then how are we supposed to help him?"
Tails sighed, squeezing his eyes shut as he shook his head at his closed laptop. "We wait for him to run again," he said.
Amy opened her mouth to shout again but her words caught in her throat. She clamped her mouth shut as the truth of Tails's words wound through her thoughts. No, Sonic didn't ask for help. Not ever. He just eventually returned to normality.
Amy hated it, hated the standstill, hated the waiting. It seemed counterintuitive where Sonic was involved. Her hands balled into fists in her lap. They ached to fix. Fix him, fix the world. Five years of waiting hadn't taught her patience. Not after she'd basically been formed by Sonic's impatience.
But before Amy could come up with the proper reaction to offer Tails, he pushed the mic from his headset in front of his mouth. "This is Tails," he muttered. "Go ahead, Knuckles."
His eyes widened, then narrowed, and Amy stopped breathing. The tips of her fingers tingled, but she forgot how to move them as long as her eyes remained on Tails. "What's going on?" she hissed.
He didn't look at her. He looked beyond her at the wall. Whatever was going on, he was already there, not here, in his head. "We have to get up to the Master Emerald," Tails muttered. "Now."
-(-)-
Tails brought the X-Tornado down at the foot of the shrine of the Master Emerald. Before the engine quieted, before the craft had really even settled its wheels into the grass, Amy forced open the blast shield and jumped down to the ground. Only at the foot of the stairs, she could already see the pulsing light of the Master Emerald.
Not usually a good sign.
Amy took the stairs two at a time. Tails chased after her, calling, "I got a hold of Chris. He's grabbing Sonic and then they should be on their way."
The tip of Amy's sneaker caught on the next stair and she stumbled, just barely righting herself without crashing face-first into the stone. Of course Sonic should come. The Master Emerald was often a mystery to them all, but besides Knuckles, Sonic was their next best chance of understanding. At least he knew how their servers—the Chaos Emeralds—worked. To whatever extent that anyone could understand how they worked.
Knuckles waited for them at the top of the stairs. He barely glanced their way before returning his eyes to the Master Emerald before them. And while he kept his distance as much as the rest of them, his body leaned forward, like the Emerald called to him, drew him in. Still, self-preservation won out, if just barely.
"All right, brainiac," Knuckles said, "any bright ideas?"
Tails frowned at the Emerald. "It looks like it did when Chris made that warp tunnel, using the Master Emerald as a conduit, right? But I don't think this can be that."
"Why not?" Amy shot back. She felt panic rising in her. It squeezed her insides tight inside an unseeable fist and all she wanted was to explode. "If Chris used it, can't anyone else?"
But Tails shook his head. "Chris told me that he built his device so that he'd be the only person who could use it. The only other option would be for someone to create an identical device that used the Master Emerald the same way. Which is unlikely. Or impossible, I guess."
But when Amy returned her gaze to the Master Emerald, she could see a whisper of shadow in the brightness. "Well it looks to me like science has other ideas," she said, pointing at the darkness. And after a few more seconds, the shadow resolved itself into a clearly human-looking figure.
"But who do we know from Earth that'd want to come here?" Knuckles exclaimed.
"Better question," Amy corrected, "would be who'd be smart enough to get here?"
"Best question," Tails whispered, "when a month here is a year on Earth, that means that anyone we knew would probably be…dead and gone by now. So why is a child coming through the Master Emerald?"
Amy narrowed her eyes. A dagger of pain dug through her heart for an instant at the thought that everyone they knew on Earth had probably long since passed on and was momentarily grateful that Chris hadn't been nearby for that comment. But once past that, she looked closer at the quickly growing shadow. The figure was clearly small, clearly young, clearly female.
The sound of a descending aircraft behind tore Amy's eyes away from the Master Emerald. Chris landed the Hyper Tornado not far from the X-Tornado, but Sonic waited until the craft was at nearly a complete stop before sliding down the side to the ground. It sent a new shiver through Amy. She was tired of seeing his caution. It felt more like the end of the world than anything could.
But then, he dashed and was at Amy's side before she even had a chance to blink. "I heard this is where the party's at," he said, with a wink her direction. It struck Amy silent. The sound of new footsteps before her yanked her back and dragged her eyes to the Master Emerald.
And the girl standing in front of it.
She couldn't have been more than ten. Her long, pale red hair was pulled over her shoulder in a low ponytail. She swayed on her feet, eyes half shut. Then those eyes locked on Amy's. She opened her mouth to speak, but before she could say a word, she stumbled. Sonic bolted forward and narrowly caught her before she hit the ground. "Careful now," he whispered.
He sounded so much like himself that it physically hurt Amy. It shouldn't; she knew it shouldn't. All she wanted was for him to get back to normal. But now it just felt like a lie.
The girl already struggled to push herself from Sonic's arms. "There's…not time!" she muttered. She started to fall again. Sonic snapped out to grab her wrist, just stopping her before she hit the stone face first.
"It's okay, don't panic," Sonic said.
She still didn't listen. Instead, she used Sonic's arm to pull herself upright. She shook her head and found Amy's eyes again. "We don't have time for this," she growled. "I need your help."
"Help with what?" Sonic asked.
The girl opened and closed her mouth. She squeezed her eyes shut, pressing the heel of her hand into her forehead. "I need to get off-planet," she said eventually.
Sonic tilted his head up and met Amy's eyes. Amy could see the confusion in his. "Why…who…?" he started but couldn't finish.
"Are you from Earth?" Amy said suddenly.
The girl groaned, sounding less like a child despite how she appeared. "That's…a complicated situation we don't have the time for."
"Is that a threat?" Knuckles exclaimed.
The girl winced and pressed her face into her hands. "This isn't working," she said. But then she threw her hands down. "Fine! If I explain who I am, will you listen to me?"
She scanned the faces of those surrounding, though Amy wasn't sure what she was looking for. She wasn't even sure what expression she shared. All she did was glance sideways at Sonic to see he already looked at her, both searching out the reaction of the other.
The girl released a slow breath from between her teeth. "Okay, then I'll explain this quick. My name is Cosmo."
Knuckles jumped forward, and Sonic took a quick step between him and the girl before he could close the distance. But it didn't stop Knuckles from shouting, "You're trying to play these games with us? What, are you some new type of Metarex weapon?"
She stumbled back, holding her hands up in a gesture of surrender. "What are you talking about? I'm not a weapon! I'm not a Metarex!"
"Knux, chill; let her explain," Sonic said.
Anxiety sent Amy's heart rate skyrocketing. But it was less this girl's presence and more that Amy couldn't reach out and take Sonic's hand.
She winced. I'm better than this, she thought and forced herself to stand up straighter. "Where are you from?" she repeated slowly. Her gut told her that this was the important question to ask, and for once, she was going with it, whether or not her gut was right. She had long given up on crafting the perfect situation before Sonic's return. No reason his return should make her demanding once again.
"That's a complicated answer," the girl—Cosmo—said.
"Then explain it."
She pressed her lips together, an expression that looked odd on her young face. "I'm…well, I personally am from Earth. But my mother is Seedrian."
Amy's breath caught in her throat. "How is that possible?" she asked. None of the boys surrounding her dared to interrupt, as if they all felt like Amy: standing on a pane of thin glass with an abyss below.
The girl glanced beyond them to the sky before returning her eyes to Amy again. "It sounds unbelievable," she said, "it sounds bizarre, but just believe me, because there's no time to waste on confusion. My mother ended up trapped in a warp in space and time through bad luck or something, and it messed with her DNA and sent her to Earth where she had me and named me after a child that had been born in her colony."
"Cosmo's colony," Tails breathed.
That jerked the girl's eyes to him in an instant. Tails cleared his throat. "The child in the colony you're talking about is our friend."
Her eyes widened. Before she could say a word, Knuckles interrupted again. "Doesn't all of this seem a little unbelievable to anyone else?"
"So is the fact that Sonic's alive at all," Amy said in a dead-even voice without glancing Knuckles's—or Sonic's—way.
The girl watched Amy as she started again, "I'm sorry if this seems unbelievable, but I don't have time to make it believable enough."
"Start with why you're here," Tails said as carefully patient as Amy had ever heard him be.
The girl narrowed her eyes so her forehead creased. Again, she looked too old to be so young. "My mother spoke of the Metarex, and I knew I couldn't live on Earth without someday coming to her home and fighting them. You've clearly heard of them and know how dangerous they are. Which is why we need to get off-planet. That's where the Metarex are."
"We don't have to do anything!" Knuckles shouted. "The Metarex are here, they're everywhere. We can't even take out the ones here on Mobius; we're not about to go into space where they can slaughter us. At least here we're hidden."
And at Knuckles's words, Amy's blood ran cold. She looked beyond the girl, beyond Sonic standing beside her, ready to catch her if she fell again. She forgot about Chris and Knuckles and Tails all standing around her. All she could do was stare at the Master Emerald as the last of its bright, pulsing light faded away into its steady glow. "Except we're not hidden anymore," she breathed.
"What are you talking about?" Knuckles snapped.
But Amy could feel Sonic's eyes on her. At the edge of her vision, she watched Sonic follow her eyes to the Master Emerald as well. Amy forced her eyes more fully to him so she could see him stiffen and pull his gaze back to Amy's face. He crafted an expression that revealed nothing, which instead meant he revealed himself and the fear coursing through him. "The Master Emerald," he said.
Amy swallowed hard. She couldn't move, though she needed to. She needed to run. They all needed to run. "The Metarex must have seen it glowing. That would have been a huge Energy spike."
"Which the Metarex would have followed," Tails said, his voice cracking and breaking as his quicker mind processed the details before Amy could force her lips to form them into words. "And then the Metarex would have seen us coming. Which means they know where we are. And where we've been."
"So we don't have a choice?!" Knuckles shouted.
It no longer mattered who this girl was, that her story was anything but believable, that all this may be a trap because if it was, they'd already fallen into it. But all Amy could manage to say was, "Cosmo, Cream, and Cheese are still at home."
Which meant they might already be dead.