There wasn't a cloud in the sky.
Verdant green stretched out to the distant horizon, pristine woodlands bathed in the golden light of the sun. Birds flew from tree to tree, their quiet trill carried along by a warm breeze that bore with it the faint scent of salt and sand.
And Miles "Tails" Prower, twin-tailed genius, villain, and accidental destroyer of worlds, was busy doing nothing.
Currently he kicked his feet on the edge of a rooftop, alone save for the constant presence of Ulnah hovering silently behind him, her radiant glow drowned by daylight. He gazed down below at the endless river of green that burbled below him from a dozen different physics defying fonts, hands and tails moving with steady rhythm, weaving strands of green thread together for no other reason than to unravel them once more when he was done.
Anything to keep his mind occupied.
He'd already built and fixed whatever he could lay his hands on, piecing together scrap from Zeena's destroyed entourage in one configuration after another until sheer trial and error had provided him with his first breakthroughs in the physics of madworld combustion engines. He'd built a whole new town - if seven houses could be described as such - on top of the old one, complete with walkways high above both the slowly rising tide of purifier and any creatures that might wander into the flooded streets below. He'd even furnished them, with beds and everything, however apathetic the newly rehoused inhabitants had appeared to their new living space.
All to keep from spiralling into an endless simulation of what might be happening elsewhere in the multiverse. The greater the possibility that he might manage to return to "normality", or something passably close to it, the more his brain seemed determined to consider the various problems that might come to prevent it.
And he had no way of easing his worries. By the time he'd woken from his comatose state the portal ring had disappeared from its pool. Washed away downstream, upstream, to hell itself for all he knew.
Hopefully it was still working, wherever it was. Right up until it wasn't needed anymore. Right up until his friends were hopefully not dying or turning into undead tentacle monsters made out of blood and rainbows or whatever the local equivalent was, and Earth was as safe as madworld was.
Well, at least at this current moment. The last slime creature to skip through the town had been this morning, and easily despatched by his spores' slow and constant attrition. Funny what you could get used to. He barely even noticed the faint flow of his otherworldly whiskers.
A girlish cry rang out over the warm quiet, shortly followed by a splash. Miles glanced up to see Sept burst through the surface of the stream at the other end of "town", sticky liquid clinging to her fur. Before Miles could even stand, a second splash sounded out, and a currently furless Maria waded into view a moment later, plucking the tiny rabbit out of the goop and into her arms. The fox-human glanced up at Miles and waved, grinning cheerfully before sloshing in the direction of the nearest stairwell.
Alright for some. Miles returned her wave at the expense of his thread, which had already turned into a tangled mess anyway. The stream barely came up to her knee. He had no idea how deep it was in the local cave network, or if it had reached the ocean yet, but the same uncertainty that haunted him also kept him anchored to this spot. What if his friends opened a way home? What if they needed him and he wasn't here? Or would they just leave him here?
"Good morning, Mister Tails."
Miles started, dropping the mess of thread into the liquid below. Green disappeared into green long before he considered the possibility of chasing after it.
"Good morning, Cream." He didn't look up. "If you're looking for-"
Cream dropped down next to him, feet dangling alongside his own as she placed her flower pot between them. Enforced happiness intruded on his thoughts.
"Sorry about your… string."
"It's fine." Miles shrugged. "I can always make more."
Cream snorted, leaning against the flowerpot as she stared up into the unbroken blue sky above. "That's just like you, isn't it? Always working. You never change."
"One of my worst qualities." Miles smiled bitterly through the haze of happiness.
Cream glanced at him from the corner of her eye, then peered back to Sept playing in the distance, now safely atop a nearby roof. The pair sat in silence, beneath that cloudless sky, bombarded by the relentless happiness of the sunflower shining over their heads. Miles settled himself into his tails with a sigh, pulling out a steaming bucket from his hammerspace.
"Coffee?" He slipped a tin cup into his fingers.
"How do you do it, Mister Tails?"
"Huh? Well, when you retain liquid in the bucket at the correct proportions then-"
"Not that." Cream cracked a tiny smile. "How do you just… keep going?"
"What do you mean?" Miles raised an eyebrow, sipping his bitter beverage as he slipped the bucket away once more.
"It… hurts to be outside. I can't look up at the sky without… remembering." Cream drew the flower closer to her, expression haunted. "Nothing feels real anymore."
"Well the refractive index indicates-"
Cream gave him a look.
"Yeah. I know what you mean." Miles rubbed the back of his head. "This place. It's a little unreal itself, isn't it? Like time doesn't even matter."
"...I want to go home." Cream sighed.
"Well, I'm sure they're working on that portal on their end. It just feels like a long time because of the time dilation and-"
"Not that home." She shook her head, swinging her legs over the edge of the roof. "I've never even been there, have I? And it's not like anyone's waiting for me there. Mama… already has her real daughter, doesn't she?"
Miles frowned, fingers tight around a tail. A bright green slime splashed into town, detonating unheeded moments later thanks to his auto spores.
"You know, I don't have much experience about families and stuff. But… I think families can have more than one kid?"
"Mister Tails." Cream puffed her cheeks at him.
He grinned. "What? Your mom will love you, and would you be upset at having a cool big sister who once shot bees up a robot skeleton's nose?"
"I'm not sure if anyone but you would be impressed by that, Mister Tails."
"Then they should be, because that was very cool." Miles sipped his coffee.
It was funny. He'd spent years - lots of years - trying to keep his friends from asking awkward questions he couldn't answer. To preserve the fragile state of normality that was his daily life, so much so that he'd apparently accumulated an entire library's worth of books dedicated to his risking everything to save the world and put things back the way they were. Cream - his Cream - in many ways was the antithesis of everything he stood for, this unknown variable he'd been so recently, at least by Earth chronology, desperately looking for ways to solve before she arrived and changed everything.
But… At this point? There might even be a few extra Creams wandering around over there already, assuming a tentacle monster hadn't eaten them. And Reason had spent days there by now. Even Sonic couldn't miss that. Normal was destroyed, and he had no idea if he could ever go back to the way things were. But with that came an odd sense of freedom. He couldn't even be positive they could get home again with the purifier flood theoretically strengthening the barriers between the worlds once more.
"Lost in your thoughts again, Mister Tails?" Cream was staring at him, a faint smile on her lips.
"Oh, uh… Just looking forward to getting home." Miles rubbed the back of his head with a grin.
"Oh?"
"Of course! And everything's going to work out just great for you. Villain's honour." He mock saluted with a wink.
Cream raised an eyebrow at him but turned away without further comment, watching Sept play with Maria as a solitary cloud drifted into view overhead.
"Coast is clear."
Amy leaned back inside the bars of their cage with a sigh, releasing her hammerspace all at once. Parts scattered across the floor once more.
"Thank you, Amy." Reason smiled at her as she flopped back down in the middle of the pile, already resuming construction.
Amy sighed, turning her attention back to the corridor.
She'd thought they'd be escaping, not putting themselves back into their own cell. Even if it did make sense once Reason pointed out that they actually wanted to be here on Angel Island, and would have had to deal with alarms and search parties rather than the occasional patrol if Eggman had discovered them missing.
So she'd carried the bulk of the materials Reason had pointed out - weird as it was for someone who looked so much like Tails to need any help so far as hammerspace was concerned. They'd even recovered her confiscated hammer and the Miles Electric. And then she dutifully settled here by the door, ready to rush in and scoop up everything whenever a badnik wandered by.
A watchdog and a mule.
Well, at least she was being useful. Eggman was keeping his badniks too busy with whatever evil scheme he was ramping up to for them to bother checking in on them too often, but keeping watch gave her something else to think about than the idea that she was sharing her own head with someone else. That she'd been doing so ever since she met Sonic. The question had been growing increasingly hard to ignore after she woke up to an ongoing conversation with Reason she had no memory of, an unknown electrical doohickey in her hand while the fox girl stared at her expectantly for a reply, only to break off the conversation a moment later when she realised that Amy had no idea what to answer. Who knew what she'd been doing with this chip in her head?
A badnik stomped into view. Amy tensed, but it wandered past the end of the corridor without turning their way.
Well she knew at least part of what she'd been doing.
She'd been killing people.
She felt sick to her stomach to even think of it. If Reason was to be believed she was a murderer, and Amy couldn't bring herself to doubt it. Even though Reason had pretended to be her friend, betrayed everyone and handed the Chaos Emeralds to Eggman - supposedly to save her life - and who had identified herself as an enemy agent.
And was having conversations with Amy's supposedly murderous alter ego.
Amy's frown deepened. There were too many reasons not to trust Reason, though whether she was working for Eggman or had her own agenda she didn't know, but right now did she even have a choice but to work together? She didn't know anyone but Tails or Eggman who could even build a reliable dimensional portal, so a Tails clone with connections to Eggman was... pretty much the best bet she had right now.
Reason leaned back with a sigh, breaking Amy's dark musings.
"Alright, that should do it."
Amy peered around to see a clunky machine the size of her head at her feet, wires sticking out from the uncovered machinery showing none of the polished exterior or colourful designs that Tails applied to everything he built. More evidence that the person in front of him was a stranger rather than a friend.
"It's… smaller than I expected."
"Most things can be a lot smaller when you don't care about it surviving afterwards." Reason tapped the side of the machine, eliciting a spark between two poorly joined wires. "The power supply is the Master Emerald, so all that's here is the emitter itself. This thing should open a portal for about thirty seconds before melting a hole in the floor."
"Is that going to be enough time?" Why did she call him Miles anyway? All his friends called him- Amy glanced at Reason's own surplus appendage. Oh, right.
Reason tapped her lip. "Hm… Should be fine. We'll just need to make sure Miles knows in advance, that's all."
"Well, good work." Amy forced a smile.
"Thanks. You've both been a lot of help."
Her smile vanished.
"So… what now?"
Reason rubbed the back of her head. "Well, there's one thing I still need to do, then we need to get this to the Master Emerald, I suppose."
Amy clenched and unclenched her fists. That sounded more like the action she'd been hoping for. The last she knew Eggman was currently sat on it.
"So... what still needs doing?"
"The most important thing of all." Reason nodded thoughtfully, a frown growing on her lips as she stared at the mess of wires and metal before her. "Please keep a very careful watch, Amy. It's imperative that this isn't seen."
"Alright, alright." Amy waved her hand, turning to stare back down the corridor once more. "I don't see how it could be more-"
A prick in her neck preceded a shock that lanced down Amy's spine, turning her muscles to jelly. She flopped into Reason's arms. A pair of wires sparked between the fox's fingers.
"Good work, Amy." Reason smiled, laying Amy face down on the floor. "And I'm sorry, this may sting just a little bit."
Amy, muscles numbly refusing to listen to her desperate struggles, left out a muffled groan as gentle fingers brushed through her spines. Her last memory before another jolt of energy sent her fully unconscious was the crackle of Reason's beam knife coming to life.