Kj: Thanks, I'll try :)
Trash: Heh, thanks :D
Matri90: Glad you liked it :) And as requested, there shall be some Sonic'n'Bait :P
Pyro Hedgehog4Ever: You want it? You got it :D
Awdures: (happy smile) Thanks. I love comments like that; they make it all worthwhile :D Daimeri...ooh, you'll find out about her in good time (weg)
Matt Lans: Okay, Sonic and Bait it shall be. Learning Bait's original name...I don't know. At the minute I've no idea what it is...to be honest, I can't imagine him being called anything else now :S And thanks; I love Raker too (in a hating-his-guts kind of way ;))
The Kuzbucket: (Knuckles: Oh thankyou. That makes me feel SO much better.) Thanks :D I'm glad you're enjoying it. And thanks for the warning; to be honest, I do know that reviewer responses aren't allowed in chapters but a) everyone else seems to and b) if people take time out to leave a message just saying they liked the story (or not as the case may be) I believe in thanking them publicly...I'm just weird that way :P I think it's more entire chapters devoted to replies that FF hate as opposed to slotting them in here...I do have my stuff backed up though, just in case (working on building a Sonic site at some point to put it up there :P)
Toboe16: Heh, maybe he should :P Anyway, you want Sonic and Bait, you got it ;)
FriedBrickWall: (Knuckles: Hmph. At least someone understands why I did it.) Yeah, Knux, sure. Lactoberries...depends on what they're crossed with, but usually they're about the same size as a human hand held out with the fingers and thumb pressed together, if that makes sense :P Every other chapter...I'll try, but at the moment I'm not sure I have enough material for Sonic and Bait. Still, there's time ;) EDIT: Okay, yes I do ;) I moved a chunk of the storyline up and Sonic and Bait shall be in :P
SaffraEchidna: (Tails: Glad someone else thinks so!) Thanks :D And by popular demand, Sonic and Bait shall feature in this fic :P
Guardian's Log no. 11486
Tails is out and about somewhere. I don't know where he slept for the second half of last night, but it wasn't in my hut...as the ornament on the floor can bear witness. Why'd that kid have to go out the damn window, anyway?
Tails also overdosed on lactoberries. Badly. Poor kid was suffering chronic stomach cramps and...well, given that the diarrhea's likely to kick in any time, if it hasn't already, to be honest I'm in no hurry to find him. Yet when I tried to warn him of the likely consequences of an overdose, he almost bit me, thinking I was trying to steal his food. Ha. Like I haven't got enough of my own...and I've not been so fond of lactoberries ever since my own overindulgence as a puggle.
--Knuckles the Echidna
Dear Diary
cant write much. stomach too queasy. uh oh gotta run.
Hate lactoberries.
--Tails
Knuckles lay full length in front of the Master Emerald, eyes closed, smiling slightly at something inside his eyelids. This was what life was all about; peace, quiet, solitude and dreaming.
There was a scrambling sound from off to his left and the echidna grimaced inwardly and counted to ten. All good things had their down side.
Tails clambered up next to Knuckles and sat down on the steps of the shrine, kicking his legs morosely. After catching the fox trailing after him for what seemed like the hundredth time, Knuckles had finally relented and allowed Tails to come with him to the Master Emerald. Even after what had happened down in the mines Knuckles knew the kid was determined not to become clingy and dependent, but at the same time Tails didn't like letting Knuckles out of his sight either.
"How're you feeling?" the echidna asked.
"Okay. My gut still hurts but I think I'm not gonna...I think I've finished, uh..."
"Evacuating?"
"Uh huh." Tails glanced up at the lactoberries growing close by the Master Emerald, then looked away with a shudder. "Knux...is it okay if I go 'sploring?"
"You do what you want, kid. Just be careful; the last thing I want is to find your remains on Hydrocity wall."
Tails shivered. He vividly remembered the one and only time he'd been down into Hydrocity; he still had nightmares about that wall, how it had ground towards him...most of all about the dark, rust coloured stains he'd seen on the opposite walls.
"No way. I'm not going down there again ever."
Knuckles shrugged. "You can go down if you want. Just don't get squashed; I didn't get you out of those tunnels to lose you to the defences on my own damn island."
Tails shook his head. "Uh uh. I'll go to Marble Garden or something; that's a safe Zone, right Knux?"
"Safer than Hydrocity, that's for sure." The echidna lay back down, chin pillowed on his arms, vaguely hearing Tails pad away.
Some six hours had passed before Knuckles finally went to look for the fox, and it took him another four before he actually found him; Tails was sitting at the top of a snow covered hill in the Ice Cap Zone, staring up at the sky and shivering.
"So this is where you've been hiding!" Knuckles said, relief making him sharp. "Dammit, are you on some kind of death wish? It's freezing out here, kid. Below freezing."
"I like it," Tails said, although he was shivering so badly he could hardly get the words out.
"Oh, you do, do you? You could at least stay in one of the caves."
Tails shook his head. "No. Not after...that place. I can't."
"You can't, huh?"
Another shake of the head. "No. And besides, I..." Tails broke off and looked away, embarrassed.
"You what?" Knuckles said idly.
Tails scuffed the ground, tracing patterns in the snow with his finger. "I like seeing the sky. After that place, I don't wanna be trapped again."
Knuckles could well believe it. Tails had stayed in the echidna's hut for the rest of that first day after waking up, but when it had started to get dark he'd panicked and bolted out of the window. Knuckles had been a little put out by this – if the kid wanted to leave, then fine, but there had been no need for him to go out the window and knock the ornament there over, not when there was a perfectly good door just sitting in the wall doing nothing – but hadn't said anything.
Knuckles reached out and rested a hand on Tails' shoulder.
"Tails?" he said softly. "Tails, come back with me."
The fox's shivering increased momentarily, then he slumped dejectedly and didn't offer any resistance when Knuckles lifted him into his arms. The echidna winced as the fox's cold body touched his own, then told himself not to be so damn weak. Besides, Tails would most likely warm up well enough when he got back.
The fox mumbled something. Trying to hear, Knuckles leaned in.
"Say what?"
"Walin." Tails' voice was almost inaudible; he was more asleep than awake. "Walin yapai."
The shock of this was so great that Knuckles actually staggered. The kid's accent was atrocious, thick enough to slice with a knife, but he understood.
"The Chaos Caves! That's what they're digging for in those tunnels! That's what they want!" Knuckles felt his blood congeal as he remembered Tails' cryptic message back in Scrap Brain Zone: Knuckles, the caves! We can't let them get to the caves! He'd dismissed it at the time, chalked it up to the kid having a nightmare – and hell, who had a better right than Tails? – but now it made a terrible kind of sense. All that raw chaos matter, just waiting to be picked up...it chilled him just thinking about it.
"Caves, Knux," Tails mumbled. "Gotta stop 'em...can't let 'em get..."
"We won't. We'll stop them, but only after you're rested and fully healed. You're not going back like this."
Tails forced open bleary eyes and fixed them suspiciously on the echidna. "You're sending me back? To that place?"
"No! But we're going back one day, to get all the other slaves out." Knuckles relented. "Or at least, you can tell me how to find my way and I'll get them out. But we can't leave those slaves."
A small smile appeared on Tails' face. "'Specially not the echidna shaped variety, huh?"
"Quiet," Knuckles ordered, a little more sharply than he'd intended. "Save your strength for healing." He hoped his voice didn't betray the whirling thunderstorm of emotions he felt whenever Tails mentioned that little fact, that there was another echidna down in the tunnels and not only that, an echidna about Tails' age, if not younger. Where was his parents? How had he got there? Was there another echidna settlement somewhere? He supposed it was possible – after all, he didn't know much about the Mobian surface – but not all that probable. No Mobian knew what he was, not even Sonic at first, and if there was a Zone which that hedgehog hadn't blazed through at some point, Knuckles didn't know what it was.
Looking down, he saw Tails was sound asleep. Poor kid, to get free and then celebrate that freedom with a chronic attack of diarrhea. Knuckles snorted silently. Well, he'd tried to warn Tails and look what thanks he'd got. Serve the kid right if he couldn't take a friendly warning.
Knuckles sighed. He didn't really mean that; worry over Tails and how the hell he was supposed to fix him up with no medical centre on Angel Island was making him snippier than usual.
By the time Knuckles arrived back at his hut, it was almost midnight and he was drained. Placing Tails on the sofa and dragging blankets over him, he crawled into his own bed and was asleep almost before he was under the covers.
The rest of the night passed in relative peace and quiet. That is, Knuckles slept peacefully and Tails didn't, at least, not until he woke up from a horrific nightmare for the third time in a row and snuck into Knuckles' bed, snuggling up to the warmth and security of the echidna's bulk.
Knuckles let him. He didn't much fancy being mauled and headbutted to within an inch of his sanity a second time, which was the usual outcome if Tails was unable to get into just the right position.
He sighed inwardly. He'd have to do something about the kid, and soon. Not that he minded sharing his hut, but it really wasn't large enough for two of them.
Next to him, Tails was feeling a growing sense of uneasiness that was only slightly checked by Knuckles' presence. He found he hated being indoors; if he couldn't see the sky, it was too much like the tunnels. Tails wished he hadn't given in, wished he'd stayed in Ice Cap Zone, but the warmth of the echidna's hand had been too pleasant to resist.
When he woke up again, it was bright sunshine outside and Tails scrambled to his feet, waking Knuckles at the same time.
"Knux! Knux, can I go outside?"
"Wha'th'ell y'askin' me for?" the echidna mumbled drowsily. "Y'don't need my perrission, kid. Y'wanna go, go." Memories of yesterday's events tapped him on the shoulder at this point and he woke up enough to add, "But not through the—"
There was a clatter as the small sculpture on Knuckles' sill fell to the floor.
"—window," the echidna finished, somewhat redundantly. With a sigh he got to his feet. It was probably time to get up anyway. Yeah. Time for breakfast, then another day spent lazing and dreaming in front of the Master Emerald. Paradise.
A couple of miles away, Tails sat down by a stream and dangled a stick in the water. Boy, was he gonna have bad dreams every night? For the rest of his life? That hardly seemed fair!
Almost immediately, he seemed to hear Sonic's voice again, saying the same words the hedgehog had spoken when Tails had been a four year old cub.
"The world isn't fair, Tails. You'll learn that one day."
"'Sright it's not fair," Tails mumbled, then shot to his feet and yelled at the forest, "It's not fair that you blew me off either an' left me to wander around on my own! It's your fault I wound up in that place, Sonic, all your fault!"
A twig snapped behind him and he jerked, spinning around. "Who's that? Knux?"
No answer. Tails shifted his weight nervously and tried again. "C'mon Knux, this isn't funny. If you're there, c'mon out. Please."
For a moment, there was utter silence. Even the birds seemed to have stopped.
Then there was the unmistakable sound of someone moving very fast towards him, and Tails spun and bolted in Knuckles' direction; if it was someone from the tunnels coming for him, he wanted the echidna's support.
"Where's the fire?" Knuckles said idly. He was in a rare good mood, having found enough grapes to last him all the way through breakfast.
"Knux, someone's coming! Someone's coming, you gotta do something!"
The echidna straightened. "Here? Towards the Master Emerald?"
It was comments like that, Tails thought resignedly, which let you know exactly where you stood in life.
"Yes, towards the Master Emerald! And towards me," the fox couldn't resist adding.
"Kid, if someone steals you, it doesn't have the potential to bring about the end of the world, literally." Knuckles glanced at Tails and smirked slightly, letting him know he wasn't too serious. "Except their own personal one, of course."
There was a crashing sound from the undergrowth and a figure emerged...or perhaps emerged was too kind a word; she stumbled, tripped, attempted to right herself and failed, then fell to her side with a crash, burned and streaked with blood and sweat.
Tails looked at Knuckles. "She doesn't seem dangerous, does she, Knux?"
Knuckles didn't answer. He was too busy staring. Puzzled, Tails followed his gaze and stared, seeing the person for the first time.
"She's...is that an echidna?"
"Tails...this..."
Tails shifted the stunned stare to Knuckles. He'd never seen the echidna like this before.
"Knux, is it 'cause it's another echidna? Is that why you're so stammery and stuff?"
"That's not just any echidna, kid." Knuckles licked his lips, feeling unaccountably afraid for no reason he could fathom. Reaching down, he caught hold of the battered female and eased her to her feet, then turned to the fox. "Tails, I'd like you to meet Lara-Le...my mother."
Okay, so there you have it :P Sonic and Bait shall turn up (sooner or later) and for the meantime...well, I know it's short but it seemed as good a place as any to leave it :P Hope you enjoyed it and if you read, please review:D