Miles sighed, sat atop the grassy roof with a golden ribbon in his hands, surrounded by the tools and materials he'd accumulated scattered among the weeds in organised clutter, and bathed in the candyfloss pink glow of the full moon.
He wasn't going to spend time sleeping if he didn't have to, after all, and this was as close to a literal truth as one could imagine in madworld. The dull ache of sleeplessness never left, and never worsened. And, most importantly, never stopped him from thinking.
Don't sleep.
He shivered, nothing to do with the temperature. That didn't change much without convection.
The howling wasn't helping. Furry giants aligning themselves with flying laser snails and loogie hawking eye monsters alike, achieving little more than throwing themselves to their deaths now his gift had grown in. Flecks of green sprouted from his fluffy cheeks, swaying with a lazy movement all their own as they conducted floating spore clouds to rise from every surface.
Even the sunflowers hadn't shifted them. Miles frowned. Was Cosmo always a dryad? Or did she become the way she was over centuries of exposure to Shipnikkurat's "generosity"? She certainly smelled nice, but he wasn't sure he wanted to have a new and personal interest in beekeeping himself.
A massive wolf-human raced across the pink-tinged fields of the hallow with a snarl, unerringly heading straight for where Miles settled quietly among the greenery. He ignored it, attention on his ribbon, lips moving as he translated the binary crackle it emitted into letters he scribbled onto the empty page of a book that had long since exported its mind bending contents to the dark corners of his brain.
His whiskers, on the other hand, took on a frenzied dance. Spores that had been quietly drifting in gentle clouds now moved unerringly towards the intruder in his domain, phasing through solid stone and earth alike as testimony to their otherworldly nature. The wolf barely made it three sunflowers in before the first spore caught them, exploding into a caustic green mist that ate away at flesh and fur without even touching the flowers adjacent. The wolf let out a pained whine as seeker cloud after seeker cloud burst into it before finally tumbling to the dirt. Fresh spores rose from its devastated remains to await a fresh victim.
"Yorick." He swept his bone encrusted hand, the skelehelper floated off to comply, returning with a crescent shaped stone to drop onto a pile of similar trinkets Miles had acquired while hiding out here from the various people that hated him. He reached out to grab a cookie from the same pile with a tail without breaking his concentration, or even really noticing until he absent-mindedly took a bite.
Leaves rustled behind him. Miles tilted an ear. His "whiskers" hadn't reacted, so it presumably wasn't hostile, and he suspected was the same visitor he'd had multiple times at this point.
Brown, frightened eyes peered from beneath a frond, pale fur tinted pink in the moonlight as she crept closer through the mud.
Sept. Most likely the only person on the planet who didn't hate him right now, while simultaneously being absolutely terrified of him all the same.
Miles couldn't really blame her. He raised his rifle to shoot an eye monster's snot loogie out of the sky with a spray of flaming paint pellets. A refinement of his original bowgun's "torch bayonet" system that took advantage of his newly refined understanding of madworld physics to pass the pellets through two candles of different "types" of flame. This drastically reduced their range but gave him yet another method to set things on fire. And that wasn't including the lava bullets he'd- wait, he'd gone off on a tangent again.
He glanced with surprise at the girl still trembling before him. Normally she'd have already bolted back into the… house? Hut? It had been just a single room with table and chair like all the others before he'd built up a few creature comforts for it.
"Uh… Hey?" He put on a smile. "Everything-"
Sept plonked down on his lap without a word, grabbing one of his tails between her arms as the surprised fox stammered into silence.
"Uh... Hi?" He raised an eyebrow, suppressing several well-honed reflexes concerning unexpected physical contact.
"'M s'ry," the girl muttered into his tail.
"It's fine." Miles grinned. "Your sister used to grab 'em the same way. Total tail envy."
The smile faded swiftly to a sigh. No sunflowers up here to support it, after all.
"It must be weird for you, huh? Stuck in the middle of all this, just Cream and a grumpy plant lady for company?"
The rabbit flinched. She didn't much like Cosmo either it seemed.
"Well, that Doctor guy's pretty spooky too. Kind of reminds me of Vector." Miles tapped his lips. "You probably don't know Vector. Big crocodile, looks scary, but really a pretty goofy guy. Good people."
Well, the Doctor seemed less goofy more spooky, with a big wooden mask covering his face, but he'd been as helpfully unhelpful as the other contracted had been, perhaps more so with how specific he was about what he was being unhelpful about.
"Everything's kinda weird for me too." He turned the page in his book, teasing the ribbon between his fingers. "I guess it's fitting. I just showed up out of nowhere with a note telling me I was going to save the world. Never said from what or who. Just spent my whole life trying to live up to it no matter what."
A laser singed past his ear. He fired another blazing salvo in its general direction. The world never quite gave up trying to get rid of him. He couldn't really blame it either.
"At least you've still got Cream, right? I never really had a family. Or anyone like me. Even when I started hanging out with Sonic, he's always running away. From everyone. He flits in and out of peoples' lives like a shooting star, and I've always been the kid running after him as hard as I can, trying to be worthy of him because I..."
He sighed, leaning back against a defensive barricade already overgrown with grass and lava flowers.
"I'm just greedy, I guess. I never wanted to stop having him around, so I was always trying to earn his attention."
And then Sonic told him to stay home, to stop following him. Just like he did to Amy.
"Heh. I guess I made myself a family in the end though. Figures right? You may actually have the worst father in the multiverse. Even worse than mine." Miles laid a careful hand on the tiny mobian's head. She was so small he wasn't sure if he might break her by mistake. "But don't you worry, Sept. When I get you out of here I'll set you up with a nice wolf family. Huge tails, no laser snails. You'll love it."
Sept didn't reply, her breathing soft and even as she snuggled into the fur of his tail.
Miles sighed, gently running slender fingers across the fur of her head like he'd done uncountable times to Cream before her in the timeless warmth of Happy Days.
He missed the days when his biggest problem was dealing with Amy's weirdness. Before Happy Days, before this. Barely over a month ago by real world time at this point. He'd have said things escalated quickly except for all the time dilation involved... And his problems just got a whole lot more complicated with Reason's message.
He'd been hoping he could use the Master Emerald to flatline the Chaos Emeralds for a bit. One of the main constants in the worlds he... "harbinged" was the overabundance of fake emeralds leaving a constant source of chaos for the "outsiders" to smell, and ultimately break through to consume. With this world so close to fading entirely, even the natural manipulation of hammerspace was enough disruption to cause the hole Zeena and he fell through, and Shadow's chaos spear caused the currently stable rift hidden beneath a nearby leaf as per Reason's urgent, and unexplained, instruction.
But what if there was no chaos? Would they lose the scent? Go elsewhere? Could the ancients have been aware of the outsiders already and designed this feature to avoid them? Without Knuckles around, it was going to be hard to find out.
Miles had set up a few machines with the Master Emerald as a power source in the past, like the device to travel to the Twilight Cage, but actually using it to suppress chaos emeralds directly involved some very unscientific communing and fiddling that he wasn't very good at. Short of breaking the thing and hoping Tikal showed up to stick it back together again, which seemed fairly unlikely, their best hope of getting it working without Knuckles was Shade the Echidna. But after they left the Twilight Cage she'd wandered out into the world at large, probably hanging out somewhere trying to come to terms with becoming in a species of "two".
Heh. He knew that feeling.
Well, hopefully this was all unnecessary worry. Sonic was facing off against Knuckles - soon or currently, Miles' relationship with time rendered it largely irrelevant given he probably wouldn't receive any updates for days either way. All he needed to think about was how to fix them. Would sunflowers work in an "alien" environment? Potions? The Doctor had talked about "imbuing" liquids, or more specifically, his unchosen self not being able to imbue liquids, which meant that the concept was possible, if he somehow worked around madworld physics to make it happen. If he could synthesise a liquid that purified the corruption in Rouge then he could "produce" as much as he needed, the solution to stabilise this world and stave off his own's collapse until a more permanent fix became apparent.
Miles reached the end of the ribbon with a sinking feeling. Reason hadn't answered the most important question of all.
Why wasn't she here?
It might be looking a gift horse in the mouth, given that her presence at his lab was easily the best possible thing for his friends and to help Miles do things he couldn't possibly hope to achieve in madworld physics. But she presumably travelled to Earth with Cream and her sisters… His friends, or at least an iteration of them.
But she hadn't mentioned the rabbits at all. Did the rest survive? Somewhere here? Or there at home? Or did the crash that had left Cream and Sept trapped between life and death kill them? Even though that same crash had left Reason completely unharmed? Did she find some rings? Or somehow escape injury by whatever trickery she used to escape Happy Days in the first place?
Or... did she have some hand in their demise?
Miles gently ruffled Sept's orange streak as his spores claimed another victim,
… Not knowing left him feeling sick to his stomach. Reason was always on his side. A lighthouse in a sea of infinite time, a willing accomplice and treasured confidant who'd helped him carry out the grisly, thankless task of saving the world, before sacrificing herself to become Mama, enduring centuries alone in the dark waiting for him to kill her with words of praise and affection on her lips to her very last breath.
Even if her lo… her feelings for him had cooled in her latest incarnation, he could only believe she was acting to help him, and if she wasn't he could only accept her betrayal with a smile. But if she did it because she thought that was what he wanted… what kind of monster would he have to be in her eyes for her to think anything of the sort?
And could he bear to ask the question and find out?
Miles sighed and raised his hand, sending Yorick down to the garden below to return a moment later with a sunflower in its grasp.
He wished she was here.
