(Authoress frantically works her way through site to get to this page)
Ugh! Now everything's so complicated...oh well.
0-
Bad news, guys. This is truly and completely the LAST CHAPTER OF THE FIC!
(thunder crashes, church bells ring, and a woman screams)
0-
Hope you all enjoyed this little sojourn into the depths of my crazed imagination...and I doubly hope you all managed to find your way back out. It's pretty wild in there.
0-
0-
Disclaimer: Haven't you gotten it by NOW? Sonic isn't mine!
Claimer: Raven mine, Eclipse mine, mystery hedgehog mine, Fount of Light mine...it ain't rocket science, folks.
0-
0-
0-
0-
The weird hedgehog was someone none of them recognized: walnut brown in color, save for a wide patch of silky gray fur like a natural collar on its chest, with many overly-long quills draped down their back and sporting unusual-looking back sneakers.
0-
Speaking of strange hedgehogs…Shadow looked around for his brother as the others approached the stranger.
0-
But Raven was missing.
0-
Hadn't him come back with them? Their return had left them all totally drained, so he should still be around somewhere…yet he wasn't.
0-
0-
A flash of memory - Eclipse striking out, Raven vanishing in an instant -
0-
"Has anyone seen my brother?" Shadow asked as he walked towards the group, trying not to sound at all completely terrified of the idea that his only remaining blood relative might have just been erased from existence -
0-
"He's coming around!" Tails announced, not hearing Shadow's question, "Are you - oh."
0-
The stranger's eyes were the same current tired gray of the Master Emerald, with the same hint of returning green glow that the Master currently had…and were looking around far too intelligently for a regular person of any sort.
0-
"Oh…" Tails gasped, "He saved himself!"
0-
"Mmm…" groaned the brown hedgehog, gesturing towards Shadow - having apparently heard his question, "…Was supposed…to tell you…sorry…we dropped him…"
0-
"You dropped my brother?" Shadow repeated woodenly.
0-
"…S'okay," the brown hedgehog added, as quickly as he could, "Parent saw…he's on this planet…someplace bright…full of stone, we thought…so tired…"
0-
0-
The relief that Shadow felt was powerful enough to knock him straight up to the ARK and back again. Raven was still alive! That meant he could be found again!
0-
Meanwhile, the stranger gained energy with the Master Emerald, until he could at last sit up on his on and look at the others eye-to-eye.
0-
0-
"I was supposed to tell you," he said to Tails presently, "That the Parent liked you a lot and will miss you very much."
0-
"I'll miss him too," Tails said, "But if you're not the consciousness of the Fount of Light, who are you?"
0-
"The Parent made me, because it couldn't come here itself," explained the strange hedgehog, "Removing the one you called Eclipse cost the majority of the power-life matrix, and sending me with the memories was the only way to insure survival and eventual revival for the Parent."
0-
"Wait, explain with smaller words so I can understand!" Sonic pleaded.
0-
"I think he said that he's the child created from the consciousness of the living dimension we were just stuck in," Knuckles said.
0-
"Smaller than THAT!"
0-
"You're just being difficult now," Shadow told him.
"So," he continued, talking to the newcomer, "Do you have a name?"
0-
The brown hedgehog hesitated, glanced at Sonic, and with a slight smile replied, "We believed 'Alphonse' might be a suitable appellation."
0-
"That's a huge word too," Sonic sighed.
0-
But he grinned, knowing he was being baited, and calmly ruffled Alphonse's quills and called him 'Squirt', explaining afterwards that his logic had figured on the fact that Alphonse had literally been squirted out of a fountain.
0-
…
0-
Alphonse wasn't exactly accurate hedgehog material, but the Fount of Light hadn't had a true consciousness for very long and so the mistakes with his quills and his tail - it was very long and semi-prehensile - were easy enough to overlook.
0-
But as far as anyone asked about his having the powers of the Fount of Light itself, Alphonse would only say that he wasn't certain, since some of those powers probably wouldn't work if you lacked the power to shape reality to your whims.
0-
As soon as Alphonse finished recharging from the Master Emerald - this seemingly minor detail had a particularly confusing explanation - everyone except Knuckles departed Angel Island for Sonic and Tails' house, taking most of the Chaos Emeralds with them.
0-
Shadow, however, didn't plan to stay with the others very long, and as soon as the Chaos Emeralds were fully back to normal, took one and left to go find his brother.
0-
Wherever he was.
0-
…
0-
This, like many other incredibly remote locations, was hardly ever traveled to.
0-
Even to get here, you'd need to hike all the way up the longest, hardest trail, and then jump off a couple of cliffs to make it to this particular crevice.
0-
And at that point, unless you checked very, very carefully, it was almost impossible to make out the impression in the loose rock and dirt.
0-
The impression, if one checked very, very carefully, was strangely similar to one that would be made by a hedgehog.
0-
If it was a hedgehog, that hedgehog might have been wearing weird metal shoes, and could quite possibly have possessed flared-out quills…
0-
Further checking would only reveal a few more markings, heading out of the crevice and going on downhill, where such an unusually located hedgehog could have crawled out of the crevice and thereupon walked away…