"Hey, Scourge! Slow down!" Honest was literally running at full speed after this guy and he didn't seem to notice her at all. He turned around just as the blond cat had reached him. She grabbed a handful of the leather fabric of his jacket and gulped in air. "I thought you said you were walking me to class, not running!" He just looked at her absentmindedly.
"Oh, sorry. I'm not used to... well... not running for my life all the time." Honest looked at him confusedly. He noticed and looked to the wall. "Anyway, I didn't say anything like that at all. I just wanted to talk with you out in the hallway, not walk anywhere."
"But if we don't at least start walking in that direction, we're gonna be late," Honest pointed out. Scourge sighed and started walking.
It was April 17th, 2019, and Honest and the rotten, regal pineapple shared their next class together. It was fifth period, and they both had art. It was in another building, so they didn't really have much time to hang around and talk.
"So what's up?" Honest truthfully didn't have any clue as to what sort of thing the king of air and empty space wanted to talk to her about. If that wasn't prime evidence to support the 'Honest isn't in complete control of everything and thus cannot, in any sense, predict the future' theory, then I have no idea what is.
"Rosy has been uncharacteristically quiet the past few days. Has something been going on?"
Oh. Right. The subject matter of this conversation was so obvious that it had completely slipped out of Honest's mind in order to avoid being considered at all. The namesake of this story, Rosy the Rascal, had been MIA for six chapters, and yet Honest hadn't even noticed until now. "Not only has she been extra quiet, but she's also been completely missing."
"Like, she hasn't been coming to school?" he asked, now deeply concerned.
Honest shrugged. "I don't know. How should I know? I'm almost completely blind unless I'm forming eloquent descriptions of stuff, you know. All I'm saying is that she hasn't been in the story for at least six chapters. The last time I saw her was when I spaced out while at a table in the lunchroom with her in chapter 19."
Scourge took the small bit of silence that followed to look somewhere far off in the distance and think, while also looking somewhat like a brain-dead zombie or something. Eventually he broke out of it with a strong puff of air. "Fine. This afternoon I'm going shoe-shopping with Manic at the mall. I've put it off this long while waiting for Rosy to settle down enough for me to go out in public. Afterwards, though, we're going to look for her," he said.
"And I can search around town for her in the meantime," Honest said somewhat flatly. She was obviously confused about something.
"What?" Scourge asked, looking and sounding as if he were severely thrown off by her odd expression.
"You just developed the plot for a chapter," Honest said, pointing at him.
He jumped out of the way as if she had just attempted to jab him with something sharp. "No I didn't! I just... you know... developed a plan for what we're going to do."
"Which is exactly what I do in order to plan out a chapter," Honest pointed out, this time not so literally.
"Are you so selfish now that you won't allow anyone else to help you out with your story's plot development?" he asked, taking Honest's reaction to mean something she hadn't intended.
"No, of course not!" Honest exclaimed quickly, attempting to correct him before he made any further ill-informed assumptions like that. "I was just blown away by the idea that you could even do it." The viridian king did what she had intended for him to do and fixed himself before he could judge her falsely any more than he had already previously done.
"Well, you've been impressed or overwhelmed by your total lack of control many times before, right? You didn't establish any sort of rules upon creating {w/Sonic}, did you?"
"No," Honest answered. That was an easy question. Honest always intended to answer as many easy questions as she could. The hard questions popped up more frequently, but Honest wanted to avoid confusing the readers as much as she could.
"Then expect the unexpected," he said so casually it made Honest's cheeks burn... or maybe it was her brain that was burning. She wasn't sure.
Honest started walking faster. Now Scourge felt he was the one having trouble catching up, but of course he wasn't really; he was the fastest thing alive (tied with Sonic of course).
"You do know our entire mission is completely optional, right? I could have just as easily not bothered with yours and Rosy's relationship to begin with and just left you alone. Nothing different would've happened, and you could be satisfied with your relationship with Manic."
Scourge suddenly looked nauseous. "Are you feeling alright?" Honest asked.
"No, no, I'm fine," he told her. "But what you're saying is correct. You didn't have to help us."
"'Help' you? Well, I'm not sure that defying norms is helping anyone, but I do feel like it was in our best interest. I never want to submit to any one 'way' that things are supposed to happen. I want to always fight and to go out fighting. Call it immature of me or whatever." When Honest had finished saying this, she huffed and intended to cross her arms. However, Scourge reached out and grabbed one of her arms before she did this.
"That's not immature, that's honorable," he told her. "And Honest."
Honest gave him that odd look again. And don't think for a minute that he didn't notice it this time, too. He did, and just like last time, he moved away as if to dodge some sort of unseen physical attack she made towards him. This time, though, he attempted to add to his previous point before she could respond.
"I guess that's why that's your name," he said quickly and attempted to laugh it off. However, this did little to diffuse the awkwardness still hanging in a heavy cloud around them.
"R-Ray said it was because I don't hesitate in telling others what's going on with me," Honest told him, stuttering. "How did you make that connection?"
"Honor, uprightness... that's what Honesty is, right?"
"No," Honest exclaimed, shutting her violet eyes tight as if she were trying not to reveal how she was feeling with the appearance of her eyes by preventing him from seeing them. And, by the way, that was exactly what she was doing.
"I mean it could be, but-" When Honest opened her eyes and tried to correct her ill-informed absolute statement, the bell rang. They were late to class and they hadn't even made it out of the building they were in yet.
Although the tardy bell had just rung and any other student would've been running at this point, Scourge was just standing there calmly, unflinching as he said, "We should go hang out somewhere so we can sort this out."
Honest nodded and let him pull her into the room beside them.
But then again, Scourge wasn't any other student.
Also, they didn't go "into" anywhere at all, much less a room. These were the doors to the outside. At first she wasn't sure where she was, but eventually Honest started recognizing things and everything started coming back to her.
The old gym, the wall, the garden- they passed everything... and then back into a building again.
Chapter 16. I believe it was January 30th.
Honest felt the urge to be friendly to Rosy, so she offered for her to join Honest and her friends near this very entrance. Of course, Honest hadn't known Scourge was with them. As soon as his fuchsia worshiper had seen him standing there in a cloud of dust, she turned and ran without saying a word.
She was supposed to say something psychotic and try to bash his teeth in. Instead, she just ran- ran into the gym, and the rest is history.
"I doubt anyone's in the library this period," the king muttered to himself, throwing the door open while looking straight through it as if he had x-ray vision. If he did, that was scary, but Honest was sure by now (after reading every single issue of the comics he had appeared in) she knew every ability he had, and that wasn't one of them.
No one was there. Well, at a glance anyway. As long as they were quiet, though, and hid somewhere deep within the shelves of the fiction section, the chances of running into anyone was slim. The only person they cared about overhearing anyway was Rosy. Out of hundreds of characters, the chance of running into just her was even slimmer.
"Can I start by asking you a question?" the spiky hedge-rat said as he sunk down into the floor beside her. Honest pulled her phone from a pocket on her backpack and nodded. "What is your goal? Like, I'm talking end goal. Not just with Rosy and me."
Honest blinked. "Well... I want to solve everyone's problems."
Scourge narrowed his eyes. "What are you, a psychiatrist?" he asked.
Honest laughed. "Kind of. But psychiatrists usually aren't in control of a whole universe." When his stormy countenance didn't clear up, Honest continued. "I'm not saying I am, but you know..." With him still frowning, Honest was forced to assume that he didn't know. "We can accept people's weaknesses and personal issues as 'canon' whenever we want to, but I don't want people to indefinitely suffer... you know?" Maybe he did know that. "I don't care if the rest of the world doesn't consider them real. I don't care if they're not real. No one deserves to suffer."
"Some people do, though," the king of air and empty space said, huffing. "Me for example. Look what I've done over my lifetime. Taken over whole worlds, hurt every ally and friend I've ever known, ruined Rosy's life, did... hideous things to Sonic's friends..." He trailed off as his mind became cluttered with all the less-than-desirable details of his track record. Honest knew that there was some guilt in there with it all... mostly due to how guilty his facial expressions made him out to be.
"I don't want anyone to suffer. Isn't that what I just said? You don't need to feel guilty for the rest of eternity. What a boring way to spend your life," Honest said, turning up her nose. She scrolled past, on her phone's screen, all of the chapters she had backed up online. "Chapter 13. You saved mine and Shadow's life. We had been tricked by Honey and turned over to the Carnival Night zone mafia, and you saved us. Chapter 15. I was starving to death, and you gave me your last gram cracker. In Chapter 16, you covered for me while I worked things out with Rosy despite being mad at me for calling you out moments before."
"Wait, how'd you know about that?" Scourge asked. Honest ignored him, though she did make a mental note: Oh, so he did want to keep that bit of good he did a secret.
"You have done so much good in this story. Heck, you even somehow managed to teach Infinite the true meaning of friendship. You can deny it all you like, but not everyone has completely turned their back on you. You aren't that far gone. I, at least, am still willing to try to help you."
When the viridescent, four-eyed porcupine didn't do anything but stare at her, Honest was too tired from that 14-15 sentence miniature speech to do anything to break the awkwardness this time. It had won. So, Honest just sat there and stared back. What Scourge did next was his choice.
Then, the last person Honest thought would come to her rescue appeared at the end of the aisle they were sitting in.
Cliffhanger. I'm sorry, I just really wanted to put one in here. It was also sort of due to the fact that this chapter would be too long if I didn't split it up. Anyway, expect a new character to be introduced in the next part. One that I probably should've tried to add a long time ago to occupy Scourge's time.