"You know how people say 'Man, do I wish I could do that' when talking about things like superpowers that allow them to clone things or fly or turn themselves invisible or something totally impossible that would make their lives incredibly easier?" Honest was saying, rubbing her sleepy eyes and leaning heavily on the desk between her and the creature of total darkness sitting as still as night on the other side. "Those things would sound great to anyone. My ability, though? There are hardly any upsides, and the drawbacks to my ability can be kind of scary. For instance, what if I disappeared into this world and couldn't return?" Although her overall mannerisms would lead one to believe she was tired out of her mind, probably missing out on her daily morning cat nap, the mountains of garbage mumbling she was able to deliver in what could only be described as a speech-esque format was proof she wasn't nearly as brain-dead at this early time in the morning as she would have Mephiles believe.
However, no matter how spiritedly she delivered this barrage of thoughts, Mephiles didn't respond at all. He simply stared a hollow, corpse-like stare.
"Hey, Meph?" He just shifted his eyes upward, which made Honest realize that he hadn't been looking her in the face this whole time. "Is there something you're able to do without much thought that others write off as impossible?"
"What kind of question is that?" Mephiles asked, sounding annoyed. "How am I supposed to answer that? Can't I ask you some questions? Questions that actually make sense."
"Oh, I didn't realize what I've been doing. I'm sorry," Honest apologized, blinking. She laughed and stepped back from the desk, her fingers gripping the edge. "Here I am, attempting to be Honest with you about everything when all you want is to be Honest with me."
"Our time is limited, you know," he told her, staring at Honest fiercely. "Not so much this before-school period which can be extended as long as you want with your Author powers, but more so the readers' attention spans. Not to diss your audience or anything. They are the lengths of average human attention spans, that is to say very short."
"You don't really need to consider the readers, there aren't enough of them for it to really matter," Honest sighed. "But go on."
"My goal is to end Sonic's life. If I were to... theoretically... come close to achieving that goal, would you stop me?" the demon asked, clutching his fist dramatically.
Honest's eyes grew immediately. "Hey! How does that question make any more sense than mine?!"
"It makes perfect sense. Are you perhaps saying it's an unfair question to ask?" The personification of the absence of light seemed to lose his annoyed tone and relax some in his seat again, as if making Honest feel less comfortable caused him to feel more comfortable.
"It's not... totally unfair. Maybe unfair to you. Sonic can't die. I may not care for him most of the time, but that doesn't mean he's not important. Like... the manga." Honest tilted her head and stared at the ceiling as she thought of a way to explain this to him. "The story started out as being all about this one character and the main character's relationship, but as more characters began being added in, she got pushed away and became less important. I have no reason to hate her, but I'm just not interested in her feelings. However, the manga won't get rid of her because the majority of readers were forced into liking her early on when she was the only character. You can pretty cleanly swap this character out for Sonic." Honest watched Mephiles get up from his chair. The tentacles parted around a picture hanging on the wall of Sonic, and Mephiles ran his hand along it as if he could somehow feel Sonic's fur that way. Kind of creepy, actually. Like he was thinking about how he was going to attempt to end Sonic's life next time they met.
"When people ask me who my favorite Sonic character is, I tell them 'Sonic'. You'd think, if asked that question, you'd want to be more creative with your response and choose any character other than the main character. Choosing the main character as your favorite makes you seem either less knowledgeable of things Sonic or boring. If your favorite character is Sonic, then you'd better come up with a reason fast lest you want to be accused of being one of those things. Any one will do, because think: If you have a history of preferring 'default' characters, people would probably also accuse you of choosing only the default playermodel in games, a.k.a., something only a boring person would do." Honest rolled her eyes before straightening up and walking even further backwards, falling down in one of the chairs with her hands raised in front of her. "'What your favorite Sonic character says about you!'" Honest exclaimed in an impression of some sort of game show host. "'Sonic: You're not an actual fan! Joke's on you, you failure of a content creator. You're not an actual fan despite dedicating your life to this fandom!'"
"You're talking to somebody who can't have a favorite Sonic character. If I were asked that question, of course I would say myself, or... Shadow..." Mephiles said with half-lidded eyes, resembling Honest's chao "Zop" in SA2. His eyes opened, though, when he continued. "I thought for sure that you would say the same."
"Say what, that I like Shadow?" Honest asked it in a way that made it seem like accusing her of liking the one Sonic character she spent the majority of her time with was ridiculous and a total stretch of one's imagination. "Not as a character, no. He's my friend, so I like him in that way. I've always liked Sonic more than Shadow, no matter how two-dimensional he feels in some games which, I know, seems ironic since I'm currently betraying him and committing some incredibly treasonous acts behind his back."
"You're betraying Sonic?" Mephiles echoed with intrigue. This caused Honest to blank for a moment.
"Oh! I haven't told you about that yet, have I?" she exclaimed once she had broken out of her stupor. "I'm going to need some help explaining it to you, though. May I step out and use the intercom?"
–-
The sun hadn't yet begun to shine when Scourge and Fiona crested the hill across the street from the school. Fiona patted Scourge on the back as if to mock him and said, "Alright, then! Go see your boyfriend," before shoving him rather harshly towards the nearest building by whose brick face he usually met Manic.
Scourge wondered if she were jealous of their relationship. She and Scourge had a relationship as well which Manic was aware of and okay with them continuing. Scourge was of course okay with it as well, but he had never thought about asking Fiona what she thought. He had always assumed she would be because- Oh. It was the same bias people had towards him. Assuming that of her was directly contradictory to his unwritten code of conduct, but here he was disobeying his own rules without even realizing. Perhaps he should make plans to speak with Fiona and sort this all out at lunch, when they next meet again.
"'Sup." Despite the informal greeting, Manic was smiling rather cheerily as Scourge approached with his hands in his pockets.
However, Scourge's expression was contrasting with Manic's quite a bit, as per usual it seemed. "Hey."
The upbeat drummer (haha, get it) noticed and asked. "What's up?"
Scourge sighed and leaned against the brick wall beside him. "A lot of things, more than I'd like, and that's the problem."
"So you'd like a break?" Manic asked as if he could just take "a break" whenever he felt like it.
"A break from this love trapezoid? Is that doable?" he asked, deciding to play with the idea in the case that he might actually think of some way to relieve himself from said burden, if only temporarily.
"Love trapezoid... So like Rosy, me, Fiona, and you? I don't know, maybe you could go on a trip somewhere just by yourself. Like to the beach for the weekend or something. Everyone deserves some amount of alone time, right?"
"I... deserve that? Me?" Scourge asked as if this were new information. Then, his mind began to work. Usually when Scourge found himself alone, it was in Casino Night Zone collecting light bulbs out of the tail ends of Batbots so he could turn them in for cash or committing some petty crime so he could get the old adrenaline pumping escaping the nonexistent HBP law or picking things up from the store for Fiona so that he could escape her wrath if only for an hour or two. Sometimes Fiona would stay at their assigned house in Station Square while Scourge snuck off to go check on the castle, either spending the afternoon dusting and cleaning the old pigsty or attempting to secure it with traps made of a... certain energy source. The thought that he could just lounge on the beach crossed his mind not even once.
A student walked over and down the hill Scourge and Fiona had just come over. He seemed to be a recolor of Shadow, being a complete clone of him despite his white fur and the fact he was wearing what looked to be a red jacket and matching beanie. Scourge wouldn't have thought much of the character if he hadn't seen the pink hedgehog following them, talking at length with them about who knows what in an extremely spirited manner. This pink hedgehog was none other than Amy Rose, the prime equivalent to Moebius's Rosy the Rascal.
"But you want to live there? Don't you think that might be a bad idea? I don't know how long you've been out and about, but it's no secret that place is a hotbed for criminal activity!"
"What do you mean?" the recolor asked. As the duo passed, Scourge picked up on a tidbit of their conversation. The mysterious student's voice... if Scourge had to describe it, he would probably say it was- no perhaps there was no good way to describe it that didn't sound absolutely stupid. "I have been staying in an old home décor store called 'the Flying Crate' for... two days now? And I haven't seen a soul besides my neighbor, but she's actually pretty quiet. She keeps to herself and doesn't even respond when I talk to her, which I'm totally okay with."
"Um, Scourge? You're spacing out a bit," Manic informed the royal pineapple who now found himself drawn towards the two hedgehogs.
"I know," Scourge breathed, starting to follow them. Manic just rolled his eyes and looked around for someone else with whom to converse.
The two continued talking while they walked and didn't notice the green king shadowing them at all. However, once they were just about to round a corner that would take them on a long path that paralleled the side of the old gym, the sound of the intercom's starting beep made everyone currently outside freeze in their tracks.
"May his Highness the King please report to the principal's office? Thank you!"
Once the click of the phone being put back down echoed off the brick outer walls of the school, every student within seeing distance turned to stare right at Scourge. Even Amy who, once she had, caused the recolor of Shadow to turn to look at him as well.
His Highness blushed like mad in front of everybody. After a few silent seconds of standing there, Scourge bowed his head and quickly bolted towards the main building, barreling through waves of people headfirst in his desperate sprint towards the principal's office.
—
"Is my Honesty my one-of-a-kind ability, or is it my writing? Both are equally supernatural!" Honest exclaimed, raising her hands and face to the sky as if begging the ceiling tiles for help. However, she couldn't really see said tiles on account of all the black tentacles obscuring them from view.
"I mean, I started writing when I was six, but I only started noticing the way I wrote was so different in the ninth grade when I saw how my teacher reacted to all the monologuing in my creative writing."
Honest put on a deadly scowl, one so deep that it looked like her mouth might drip off her face like running water on each side. She then plopped back down in the chair which she had risen from and crashed back down twenty times so far. Her hands still raised to the ceiling, Honest said in her best impression of said high school teacher, "Your writing has such an excellent tone. I can practically hear your voice while I'm reading it." Then, in her normal voice with her boots now joining her hands in their praise of the ceiling, "Do you know what 'tone' is in regards to writing?" Honest stood back up again, just sort of allowing her feet to fall back to the ground and bring the rest of her body up with them like a seesaw. "It's the attitude of the author towards the subject, implied through the words and phrases and overall sentence structure in one's works."
"So... the writing style?" Mephiles asked, his hands folded on his desk in front of him. He took one of his hands and adjusted the jar of pencils to his right.
"No, not the style," Honest corrected him, exaggerating her annoyance at his lack of knowledge in all things relating to writing. "Tone is a nexus of feelings spanning, in this case, an entire portfolio of works. I feel like-" Honest suddenly appeared unsure of herself as she gripped both arms tightly to her chest and assumed a pained expression. "Normal people- er, proper people going about life the proper way can just change tone from work to work whenever they feel like it. As for me, however..." Honest fell back down into the chair, its soft coral cushion reaching out to grab her and pull her into its pleasantly comfy embrace. She sighed, a seemingly delighted smile developing soundlessly beneath her black nose. "I'm forced to be the same in every chapter, in every conversation, in every situation I find myself in. So. Brutally. Honest." Her smile fell away like a structurally impaired load-bearing wall, revealing a bitter frown underneath. She closed her eyes in defeat and laid her head back. "The curse rears its ugly head once again."
Mephiles raised a brow of confusion in response to her mentioning a "curse" just as a knock resounded from the door across the room from them. "Come in," the principal of darkness called out to the presence at the door, all the while not breaking eye contact with Honest.
"Who is in there?" the presence at the door asked in a voice which sounded entirely different depending on which person you asked, his black nose and one of his gloved hands the only things poking out.
"Just Mephiles and I," Honest assured him. Seconds later, the mossy green hedgehog fully entered the room.
To Honest, Scourge sounded like Ryan Drummond attempting to create an "evil Sonic" voice, which just came out as a more raspy form of his Sonic voice. Sometimes it was easy to forget that Scourge didn't have a voice due to him never having appeared in a game or TV show or movie in his lifetime (Though, that doesn't mean he's dead. The last time we saw him, he was alive. He's not Blaze. .) before he inevitably was wiped from history after his prison story arc concluded in issue... eighty something... of Sonic Universe.
Most Sonic fans, in Honest's experience, discovered Scourge through fan fictions and fan art rather than in the actual Sonic comics, herself included. Maybe they assumed Scourge was in some game, one they had never heard of due to not being the biggest fan of the games. However, Honest knew about every game, so she knew he wasn't in any of them. Once she had read the Comics, the fact that Scourge was from them seemed to be long forgotten knowledge that she had told everyone else on Wattpad and other sites as a "did ya know?" whenever they happened to bring up said kingly pineapple in conversation. She was always surprised by just how many people she had enlightened through doing that. Maybe they didn't care as much as she did, but it was always wrong to assume that you cared more than other people about a certain subject, right? So, she told them all just the same. Scourge walked over to stand beside Honest as she sat in the leftmost of the two chairs.
"Take a seat," Mephiles told their guest, nodding towards the empty chair beside Honest. The chairs were medium-sized armchairs with high backs, pink polyester cushions, and solid, wooden legs with antique brass caps at the bottoms.
Scourge sat down and looked at Honest with a scowl.
"Next time you need to call me, please don't refer to me as 'His Highness the King' ever again," he scolded her.
Honest rolled her eyes and looked away. "I only did it to make you blush, and you did, didn't you?"
"How did you know I blushed?" Scourge asked. He already knew how, though, didn't he? Mephiles cleared his perhaps-nonexistent throat with a fist over his definitely-nonexistent mouth and then started using said nonexistent mouth to speak.
"Now, so what is all this talk about betraying Sonic?" he asked. Scourge looked to Honest as if he were wondering the same thing.
"About that... I couldn't help but notice Mephiles called you a green Sonic during the Session, so I thought it would be nice if you two met properly. Plus, you are both in my care now. It is important that we all know each other. Scourge, this is Mephiles the Dark. Embodiment of darkness, personification of the absence of light, and the only villain who has ever been able to actually, successfully kill Sonic," Honest told him with a smile before next turning to Mephiles. "And Mephiles, this is Scourge the Hedgehog. The equivalent to Sonic in his home Zone, Moebius, where he is ruler over the entire planet. He is the only villain Sonic 'defeated' that continued to haunt him so long afterwards as if he somehow regretted defeating him." This whole scene gave her an overwhelming sense of deja vu what with this being basically identical to her introduction of Scourge and Infinite back in {Forces Edition}. Yet again, they could bond over the same one mutual goal. "You share a common goal. You both want to defeat Sonic. He's the final boss of both of your existences." The two just seemed to blink at each other.
"So, if I can get your support, I would like to propose an idea that will work out in everyone's favor," Honest told them, her eyes upward facing carets (which I just recently found was the correct spelling. I've been spelling it "carrots" like the vegetable ^_^). She turned to only address Mephiles next. "But first, I think I should explain this to you. I am betraying Sonic by... showing Scourge a simple scrap of kindness by treating him as just a step above absolute garbage."
"You sound awfully biased," Mephiles observed.
"Can you not judge me any further than I've already judged myself?" Honest asked, a vein protruding from her forehead. When no one said anything in response, Honest blew out a long sigh and leaned back in her chair. "I feel incredibly cruddy and noble at the same time. Still, the noble feeling is what I would rather focus on. This is a noble quest I am embarking on." She looked at Scourge solemnly and noted his expression's resemblance to her own. Then, looking at Mephiles, Honest was thrown slightly off when she noticed how bored he seemed to look. However, she always had to take his lack of a mouth into account as well. Maybe he was fiercely angry? Maybe he was gravely sad? Who could know for sure?
"What about the blue one's experience dealing with... Scourge... still haunts him?" Mephiles asked. Honest kind of wondered why he hesitated so much with saying his name. Maybe he was still coming up with a way to address him like he had done earlier when calling Honest 'the Author'.
"I don't entirely know for sure. You see, the Comics never really explained that bit to the fullest. However, I believe it's because Sonic didn't exactly realize who he was fighting until he had defeated him. And then, perhaps, he realized that what he did was unfair to Scourge and that there were infinitely better ways he could've gone about it that didn't result in Scourge going to prison and being misled into believing that he was the one person in the multiverse not believed by Sonic to be worth saving. In this story, Scourge is on a sort of trans-dimensional parole that seemed to have been initiated by a combination of Sonic and the Zone police, but in reality, I did it." Honest smiled and pointed to herself like she was proud of that despite it not really requiring much skill for her to do so. When she realized Scourge didn't look shocked at all, she asked, "Did you already know that?"
"I guess I should have assumed that to begin with, but no, I didn't. Still, I can't think about that too much or else I'll only cause myself another headache," the royal pineapple answered, his arms crossed.
"Another headache?" Honest echoed, blinking her wide eyes in bewilderment. She shook her head as if to shake that thought out of her head, the thought that Scourge had been thinking about the extent of her influence for a while now. "A-Anyway, I was thinking that we could maybe meet up again second period, during mine and Scourge's study hall, to continue our discussion." When Mephiles tilted his head in a questioning manner, Honest sighed. "Scourge and I need to start on our way towards Vanilla's classroom before the bell in order to get there on time."
"You share both first and second periods?" Mephiles asked. "Why is that?"
Well, there goes the mystery as to who planned the schedules.
"Oh, it's related to the canon ages of characters. Since grades are redundant due to time not passing, the way I decide which students get which schedules is through looking at their ages. I consider Scourge and I to be in the same age category."
"And here I was thinking you structured the schedules around whatever characters you wanted to write about together," the demonic hedgy told her. His tone of voice seemed to suggest he was amused, so Honest just focused on that rather than his complete lack of expression. She stood up from her chair.
"Alright Scourge, let's be on our way," Honest said, turning around and departing for the door while carefully stepping through the maze of overlapping tentacles.
"Okay," Scourge told her, standing up as well and picking his way after her. Mephiles watched them go with his arms folded on the broad, wooden desk in front of him.
As the green hedgehog and blond cat left the room, Honest heard the tail end of one of Mephiles's thoughts echo in her head:
"...that green one is special. He gives off a peculiar aura..."
Surprisingly, Honest found herself agreeing with him. She just wished she knew why that was.