It was May 1st, 2019, and everyone was getting their tests back, which they had taken the previous day, and finding out what they had made. Some people were angry and were taking it up with the teacher while others were brimming with happiness after finding out that their overall grades were improving due to their scores here.
However, Honest was doing neither of these things.
Instead of being simply angry about what her grade was, she seemed to be in utter despair.
"Oh, no! The Egg method is a failure!"
Her particularly shadowy compadre lifted his eyes from his paper and stared at her with a confused expression. Honest flailed her arms in a rather overly-dramatic manner.
"It didn't work this time! I got one point taken off!"
"One point?" he said in a questioning way. "Just one? Also... what's the Egg method?"
"The Egg method is a method to test-taking that I came up with. It was supposed to ensure that I complete my tests in a timely manner while not messing up a single bubble. Basically, I give all of my answers' bubbles a mustache the first time through so that I can stop at the end of the test and finish filling them in with more precision than if I had done them on the fly." Shadow nodded the whole time, showing that he understood. "But, this time, it failed! I left pieces of the mustache sticking out, and it was counted wrong for not being perfectly filled in! My experiment failed!"
Honest acted like she was about to fall over as she pulled on her ears. "I'm going to have to revise my hypothesis!"
"'Hypothesis'? 'Experiment'? Are you finally losing it?" he asked, actually concerned.
"Nope!" Honest said, stopping her psychotic ramblings. "I've just been really interested in the work of a particular psychaotologist I admire."
"What's a psychaotologist?" the dark pineapple asked, making sure to say that word carefully.
"A psychaotologist is a scientist that studies Chaos and its effect on the psyche," she informed, raising a finger. "I've always kind of zoned out whenever some Knuckles recolor would start to go on a tangent about Chaos and such, but recently I've become very interested in not really Chaos as a religion but how Chaos affects behavior and thinking."
"Mm-hm," Shadow voiced his lack of trust in her level of sanity.
"He's kind of a mad scientist. His ethics are questionable, but his thinking is sound."
"Uh-huh," Shadow said. His response was calm. At least it was, since he then realized the full extent of her meaning a moment later. "Wait, huh? That's a little unnerving."
"No, it isn't," Honest corrected him flatly.
"Yes, it is," he countered. "If you can't trust a scientist's ethics, how can you trust his morals? If his practices are inhumane, the ideas he pushes are probably just as inhuman."
Honest put a finger to her cheek and ignored his question by going off topic. "Is 'inhumane' even correct in this situation if we're not talking about humans?"
Shadow didn't notice this deviation and answered in an even tone. "Yes. Remember? Mephiles said humanity in '06."
Honest disproved this immediately. "He was referring to humankind and GUN and how they were destined to cause their own downfall, so no, I don't think that's right to say."
The bell then rang and they both sighed loudly, Shadow picking up his books. Honest slung her backpack around her shoulder, and they left the classroom in relative silence.
Honest immediately found Scourge in the graphic design room and sat beside him at her computer. "You wanna play a game?" she asked him.
He turned and looked at her with interest. "Sure."
"Just go to this site and wait for me."
He did so as Honest waited patiently for her ancient Mac to start up.
The game consisted of shooting your bubbles out of a canon at other bubbles to make matches. The aim was to decimate as many bubbles as you could before they could drive each other towards an apocalyptic collapse of their very way of life, which was sitting in a twisting channel while slowly heading towards a black hole. They would all be sucked in eventually, but the player's level of skill determined just how fast this fate would come.
"So, after this do you want to go to the library?" Honest asked after a while of playing this extremely nerve racking game.
Scourge jumped. Apparently he had been so invested in this game that this sudden bit of dialogue occuring startled him. "To read?"
"Yeah," Honest confirmed, her face going sour. "What else is there to do in a library?" This resembled the same question Infinite had asked her the other chapter (Chapter 20).
"Oh, yeah, sorry," the king of air and empty space laughed. "Durr."
"Mostly. I just want to discuss with you some more things."
Scourge's heart had only been beating moderately faster than normal, but now it came to a complete halt- only figuratively thankfully.
I wanted to give Scourge's thoughts here seeing as though they're painfully loud at this point, but I won't for the sake of keeping something he probably wants kept confidential confidential. Yeah, I'm a good friend like that.
They slipped away with no one spotting them thankfully. When they reached the outdoors, the hedgehog and the cat found that it was raining outside. Honest and Scourge had both left their backpacks, and effectively also their umbrellas, in the design lab, so they just put their jackets over their heads and ran. By the time they had reached the school library, Honest's orange cloth jacket was soaked through while Scourge's leather jacket was left relatively unscathed, though still a tad bit wet on the outside. He must've had it sprayed with leather sealant or something. u.u Honest wrung hers out the best she could and dragged it behind her by one of its sleeves.
They both looked out for Fiona, but they didn't spot her. Hopefully she was in class this period so they could talk in the library in peace.
"I discovered something that I had previous overlooked," Honest told him, pulling out a wooden chair from one of the tables. "You're aware of it, I'm sure."
The regal renegade tilted his head to the side. "What is it?"
"A difference-" Honest relaxed in her chair as he got situated in his. "Between your world and mine."
The green hedge rat was only slightly interested. If anyone could call themself an expert on the differences between here and the anti-here, it was him.
"Here, people are born good at heart. Then, through hardships and unfortunate events, their natures change. In your zone, however, people are born rotten at heart. Then, through hardships and unfortunate events, they learn humility and such and their natures change."Scourge was nodding. Peculiarly though, he wasn't looking at Honest and instead was inspecting a particular speck on the raw, wooden surface of the table beside where he had rested his left arm.
"You were abused and neglected by Anti-Jules, weren't you?" Honest asked, her voice borderline apathetic.
"My father," he said solemnly. He shook his head. "My late father." He looked up at Honest finally, meeting her gaze with a pleading expression. "You know I had no choice, right?"
Judging him based on something that happened long ago? Honest had no intention of being that foolish... that disHonest. "Of course you didn't," Honest said, strangely cheerful despite the subject matter. "It's hard for anyone to count something like that against you- especially considering what kind of world you came from. Heck, parricide might be smiled upon in Moebius."
"Well, twenty years ago I might've," the king of air and empty space said.
Honest nodded fervently. "But after all the misery and misfortune, you changed," she said. Honest was stating it firmly. It was almost as if she didn't feel sorry for him, but of course she did. That was the reason she was trying to help him in the first place. She was just being Honest about it. "That's why you never fit in with the Suppression Squad."
"My Suppression Squad," he pointed out. "I organized them to back me up, back when I was a wimp. I eventually outgrew them, though." He smiled to himself. Wasn't he torn up about that at all? Of course he was. He was just hiding it.
"Be Honest," she told him. "You've done it before. Be Honest to yourself."
He pointed a finger at her angrily. "Hey, I didn't agree for you to bring me in here just to judge me and blame me for things. I get that enough from Sonic."
Honest rolled her eyes. "Didn't I already tell you I'm not judging you?"
"Yeah," he said. He was still sitting there, but every ounce of his being was pulling away from her. "And I totally trust you're telling me the truth, but I-"
Honest smiled a cat smile. "You don't like the truth, do you?"
His entire face was glowing like hot coals. He blew literal steam from his nose and turned around. "I get it, okay? I'm a horrible person."
Honest sighed. Maybe she was being too forceful- too direct.
"I'm sorry," Honest said. "I don't want to be so Honest. It just happens. Uh, let's see..." Scourge turned around with a confused expression as Honest took deep breaths and began to speak.
"You were dealt an unfair hand, but instead of it negatively affecting you, you benefited from it. However, it didn't seem to you as if you had been affected positively. When you found yourself different from your peers, you developed an inferiority complex- No! Wait! You felt "out-of-place" so you tried way too hard to be your old self. Eventually you came to terms with it and strived to become your own character. You succeeded, so everything is cool now." Honest finished and beamed.
The green pineapple resumed his previous frown. "...I prefer Honest Honest better. You can judge me... I mean tell the truth... and if I have a problem with it, I'll get over myself."
"That's the spirit!" Honest exclaimed, flowers seeming to rotate in the space around her head. "As a result of events in your past, you've become a better person! You thought that was bad, and it might've been in your zone, but here it's cool! So be yourself and everything will be fine!"
"Didn't I say to start being Honest again?" he asked, confused.
Honest tilted her head to the side. "But I was being Honest."
...
"Oh." He drummed his fingers uselessly on the table. "But I'm still not sure what 'myself' is, yet. Can you tell me?"
Honest's eyes were slate voids. "Of course not. Duh. It's called 'personal' discovery for a reason."
Scourge's eyes were slate voids, too, until he let out a puff of air and stood up from the table.
"Well this was fun," he said, pushing in his chair. "See you tomorrow."
A few moments after he had left the room, the bell rang but Honest just continued to sit there.
I did it. Honest rested her face in her hands and smiled. I saved him from self destruction. He might still continue to be depressed, but at least he wasn't going to continue to be so spiteful.
All of the things Honest had told him just now, he had already known, at least partially, himself. For him to purposely ignore the obvious answers to his problems was dumb, yes, but also severely silly. Honest hoped that he felt silly about it as well now. Only time would tell.
Honest raised her head when a black blur appeared at the doors that Scourge had just exited from and raced towards her.
"Here you are! It's time to head home," the blur, Shadow, said. Honest sighed and stood up. It wasn't a 'I'm fed up with this world' kind of sigh. It was more pleasant than that, and Shadow noticed.
"What's up?" he asked her. Honest shook her head as if she were clearing her head of bad thoughts.
"Nothing," Honest said, smiling. "I don't want to sound like I'm showing off or something, but... I think I'm getting better at this whole 'when I figure something out, spill it' thing with Scourge and Rosy." Shadow made a confused expression, so Honest continued, grasping the hem of her dress and smiling a cat smile. "I mean, I'm already past the point in the comics where all the stuff with Scourge and Rosy goes down, so I shouldn't feel like I need to keep anything I learn at this point to myself in fear that I'll just prove myself wrong at a later date. I mean, there's 30 and 31, the prison issues, but that's all about how Scourge's self-image is knocked down a peg. I just talked with Scourge about the distant past and its effect on him in the present today."
"Wait, you talked to Scourge?" Shadow asked, making a complex but inherently livid face. "Can you be a little more careful or something?"
Honest looked confused. "What do you mean?"
"I mean..." Shadow crossed his arms and glowered at her from beyond them. "You won't let me be alone with Infinite, so why should I let you be alone with that weirdo?"
Steam puffed from Honest's cranium. "Because," she answered, crossing her own arms as if to challenge him. "Infinite wants to kill you. Scourge is my friend. Big difference there."
Shadow scoffed. "The only reason you two get along so well is because you're both mental. Now come on already. I want to get home so I can take a nap and recharge."
"Okay," Honest replied solemnly, walking in the direction of the door. Tomorrow her club was going to be having their first official meeting at lunch. Maybe then her and Scourge could talk again.
Honest hadn't had a feeling like this in a long time. Her heart felt like it was beating a million miles an hour whenever she just thought about talking to the speedy king again. It was like an addiction. Why was she feeling like this, though? He was just another character that needed her help. Maybe she would lose interest in him after a while. If not, Honest would need to force herself to if she ever hoped to someday get serious about his and Rosy's situation... and hopefully sometime soon so this story won't drag on forever.
Thanks for reading! Scourge's personality and backstory are so complex. Maybe after this I can have a story called {Comic Edition} so I can focus on all the characters from the comics, not just Rosy. I think that would be best seeing as though I just introduced Fiona, and I currently am working on adding some more characters like that psychaotologist with questionable ethics Honest admires. Anyway, see you in the next chapter! :D