(Original publish date: Aug 05, 2022)
"I tried to talk to him, but he wouldn't tell me anything. I was going to have Zouge work on him, but then these two came along," Zonest replied calmly and cheerily. Zonic glared behind him at Honest and Shadow. "They got him to spill all the beans!"
"You know who was behind the prison break?" Zonic asked. His seriousness contrasted with Sonic's behavior quite a bit. So much so that when he spoke, it was always in the same flat manner that made him sound like an entirely different person. Shadow wondered if this version of Sonic was obsessed with his universe's Shadow or if something completely different was going on between them because frankly, Shadow couldn't imagine this version of Sonic displaying any sort of extreme emotion like that.
"Mm-hm," Honest affirmed, nodding fervently. "If you'll take us to your office, I'll be glad to tell you all I know."
Zonic blinked and his eyes widened at that. "Okay," he said, taken off-guard by Honest's sudden change of character. "Follow me." He pushed back through the door and left. Honest and Shadow followed, but Zonest stayed behind. Honest made a silent prayer to the Powers that Be that Zonest would stay there and continue to work on the Wiki the whole time they were gone. On the way, they passed by a locked door. Glancing inside through the glass window, Honest could see what the room was. Ah, yes. They would need to remember where this is.
Compared to the chairs in Zonest's office, Zonic's chairs were way less impressive. They weren't uncomfortable, though. Not in any meaning of the word, actually. However, they were falling apart. They were missing chunks of foam and scraps of fabric all over. Why were they?
"Hey, Z. Not to be rude or anything, but why are your chairs falling apart?" Honest kind of felt like he wouldn't know, but he answered anyway.
"I apologize, Honest Prime. There have been dozens of things I have requested be updated to the Warden in the past. These chairs are only one of them. Please try to stick it out for a little while longer." He placed his helmet, which he had been holding under his arm this whole time, on the large oak desk and sat behind it.
"I think the chairs are the least of our problems, Honest," Shadow told her. Of course, they were. For some reason, Honest was having trouble finding any urgency now that they were here. Also, everything Zonic was saying, even what he said about the chairs, was giving Honest a serious sense of déjà vu that made it hard to concentrate.
"Oh, yeah. So, we spoke to Scourge, and he said that Fiona has the Phantom Ruby." ...prototype. She has the prototype. However, Honest decided to hold onto that detail for later. She didn't know if she could entirely trust him yet... or if she wanted to trust him.
Zonic stared hard at the floor as he paced the empty carpet on the left side of his desk. "The Phantom Ruby... yes, I guess that would explain the portals. What, did she send them to Null Space?"
Null Space? No, that didn't sound right. They had forgotten to ask Scourge where they were being sent, but they could always just do that later. Something else was bothering Honest for the moment. The Zone cops believed that they had the Phantom Ruby safely secured somewhere here in the HQ, right? So why wasn't Zonic saying... I don't know... "What? But we have the Ruby already- Huh?!" Did he not know? Why wouldn't Zonic know? It's not like it happened so recently that it's still news to most of the people here. It happened immediately after the Confrontation and before the Play. He did know about Scourge being in a cage upstairs, right?
And then, suddenly, everything clicked. The chairs, the Ruby, they were connected. Zonest's chairs were pristine, but Zonic's chairs were falling apart. Zonest knew about the Phantom Ruby, but Zonic did not. What was the connection? Zonest said that the Warden ordered them to put the Ruby away in their vaults. Zonic said that the Warden denied Zonic better chairs. The Warden was the sole commonality there.
...Does the Warden show favoritism towards Zonest?
Zonic, in the Comics, always despised Warden Zobotnik like Sonic despised Eggman, and the other way around. Honest thought about her relationship with her Eggman. Out of her and Sonic, which of them would he listen to first? I think the answer is obvious.
"Um, Officer Zonic? Could Shadow and I step out into the hallway for a second?" Honest asked, trying to be as polite and subtle as possible.
"Sure," the Sonic lookalike replied, tilting his head.
Shadow looked just as confused as Honest tugged him out into the hall.
"What's up?" he asked once they were outside and had shut the door behind them.
"I've figured something out," Honest told him. "I know how we can get Scourge out of prison."
"Huh," Shadow said as if that were an absurd thing to do, much less attempt. "Why would you want to save him?"
Honest looked incredibly annoyed. How many times would she have to explain this to the Ultimate Nitwit before he would understand? "Because he's our ally, what do you mean? And because he's special. He's one of us." When Shadow just continued to make the same sour face, Honest put a hand to her forehead and sighed. "We're getting him out of prison, and I don't mean breaking him out. We're simply going to ask the Warden to let him go."
"And how exactly do you plan on convincing him?" Shadow asked. "This isn't the Doctor Eggman back home, Honest. You can't just go 'nya' and swish your tail and have him eager to please like you do back home."
"No, I can't," Honest said, smiling a cat's smile. "But I know who can!" Shadow stared seriously at her. Honest laughed quietly and assumed a thoughtful pose. "You'll just have to wait and see."
When they were back in Zonic's room, Honest got right to it. "Can we use the teleporter to go to Moebius and stop Fiona?"
"Absolutely not," Zonic told her, acting as if he were offended that she even asked that. "It was the No Zone prison's prisoners that were stolen, so it's up to the Zone cops to solve this."
"Alright then, let's make a deal," Honest told him. She crossed her legs and put her hands in her lap. "We go to Moebius to stop Fiona, and then in a week, you can send your guys in after us. That way we can make the necessary arrangements for your guys' arrival beforehand."
"We'll need a week?" Shadow asked, turning to her.
Honest thought for a second. "Yeah, that sounds good. We can't just walk up to the front door of the Castle. We'll need time to prepare." And to do everything else we need to do.
"Okay, that sounds reasonable," Zonic answered finally. Shadow was taken off guard by how quickly he agreed to that. "You can ask Zonest to show you to the teleporters. Oh, and tell her I apologize for getting onto her earlier." He seemed to want to shoo them off as he started straightening up a random stack of papers on his desk that was already perfectly aligned. However, Honest wasn't done with him yet.
"You do? What is your and Zonest's relationship exactly?" Honest asked. Shadow elbowed her hard in the side. "What?"
"That's impolite, Honest. That kind of stuff is personal," Shadow told her, his eyes narrowed in anger.
"I need to know these things, Shadow. It's for the sake of the story," Honest argued, giving him the same angry face back.
Zonic looked between the two. "She's right, Shadow Prime. Things like common courtesy must be overlooked whenever the story's involved. That's something Zonest has taught me." Honest stuck her tongue out at Shadow as if to say "I told you so!"
The Zone cop sighed and drug his fingers down the side of his face. He reached and took the first sheet off the top and laid it in the middle of the desk. Honest looked down at it. It was completely covered in type that she couldn't read due to it being upside down. However, Zonic could read it just fine. "She typed this ahead of time for me." He looked up at Honest with a smile, the first they had seen from him since meeting him for the first time back on the Egg Wrecker. "Your abilities are one-of-a-kind and extremely remarkable."
Honest didn't really know what to say. She settled on saying "G-Go on and read it," before smiling, opening her mouth, and fanning her face with a hand.
"Okay." The blue hedgehog straightened up and looked down at the paper once more. "'Honest Prime, if you are reading this, Zonic has tracked you down, and you've asked him something a little too personal and have been scolded by Shadow Prime.'" Zonic was smiling as he read from the sheet of paper, resembling Honest every time she opened up and started to read the latest issue of the Sonic Comics every month.
He looked up and regarded the hedgehog and cat duo in front of him with a proud expression for just a second before shooting his eyes back down to the paper. "'At the start of {w/Sonic}, I was just a No Zone equivalent of a B grade OC. However, as the world of Honesty is the Best Policy rose in intricacy, so too did my rank among the Zone Police increase. I guess you could say that I owe everything to you, Honest Prime, but I digress. I am now part of an elite group of officers we call the Council of Realities. Besides our universal Zone officer duties of protecting all our equivalents in the zones, we are each tasked with a specific function. I am, as you probably already know, the Bookkeeper of All Realities. I keep detailed records of every major and minor event in all the universes. Zonic here is in charge of overseeing every major occurrence across the multiverse. He's tasked with making sure the zones stay separate and do not interfere with any other zones' operation.'"
"Isn't that what all Zone officers do?" Shadow asked. Zonic looked completely caught off-guard, either by Shadow's question or what he had just read. Still, he answered.
"There are a lot of people in your world who could be considered heroes. Still, your Sonic has taken the title of 'hero'," Zonic told him. Made sense. "Plus, I get to travel freely between zones in order to keep them in line. It's a great undertaking."
"Are there other Zone officers in the Council?" Honest asked. She didn't know it, but that was also a personal matter.
"I-It's not necessary for us to hand that information out to just anyone," Zonic explained, stuttering. He attempted to cover it up by coughing, passing it off on something having tickled his throat. "Zonest really shouldn't have shared my secondary designation like she did. That's something I'll have to get on to her about later. Think of the Council as your own Honesty Club."
"Why do you keep talking about scolding her for everything?" Shadow asked, genuinely curious. "I thought you and Zonest were equal in rank."
"It's a matter of seniority," Zonic answered, offering a smile and although the smile seemed very forced, perhaps it was still genuine. "In tenure here in No Zone HQ as well as in mental maturity." He rolled his eyes. "Anyway, we should continue."
Yeah, Honest guessed that made a lot of sense. Sonic, although they were canonically close in age, usually treated Honest as a younger sister. It was because Honest always looked up to him and because he as a character was 31, ten years older than Honest, at the time of her writing this.
Zonic resumed reading the paper, but Honest was still busy thinking about the information they had already been given. How highly ranked was Zonest? Why exactly was Zonic's job so intensive? Was it due to Warden Zobonik's and his relationship that he had been given such a difficult, all-encompassing job? The whole 'the identities of the other members of the Council are a secret' thing didn't bother her, however. At least, not by that much. I mean, it was none of her business after all. Of course, a lot of things weren't her business in this world, and that had never stopped her before, but for now, Honest just really couldn't see a use for this information. Why did that sound like foreshadowing? It wasn't... Right? Oh, my.
Anyway, back to listening to Zonic read Honest and Shadow something Honest's No Zone equivalent wrote about a universe that Honest had no plans to stay in very long and therefore didn't really care to be listening to... Next chapter.
