Anonymous Review Replies!

CuzImCoolBro: Oooh, it definitely has. Please read on to find out how much worse it can get, though. XD

Purplez the Ink: Welcome to Taranea fanfic-land, where we serve cliffhangers for breakfast! :p

Lone Garurumon: Yeeeeah, it's definitely one of my fav tropes, that's for sure. XD I like modelling my Sonic after the Sonic I read in JudasFm's fanfics, who definitely has been through some stuff thanks to Robotnik, but most of the time still manages to keep his optimism and happy-go-lucky attitude intact. :) And no worries, my stories will likely always be funny, humour is what I live off of. ;)

John: Yeah, characters in my fanfics do have it rough, sometimes. XD But hey, as long as it's entertaining...;P

Chapter 4: Brave New World

"AAAAAAAAAAH! HELPHELPHELP! NO! STOP! HELP! SONIC! ANYONE! OH GODS PLEASE HELP-!"

Tails was screaming. He was still upside down and being hoisted bit by bit into the air by a monster bee, the forest beneath him crawling with yellow and green caterpillars and creepily staring cocoons. Upside down, it looked like a lovecraftian nightmare vision of a butterfly house, and Tails was utterly terrified of what would happen to him whenever he had been fully pulled up into the canopy.

"No...please...anybody..." Tears were now falling down his face, running up over his eye ridges, and the fox kit would just have wanted to closed his eyes then, squeeze them shut so he wouldn't have to see what would come next, which one of the big stingers of his captor would draw back to pierce his heart, or whether they would start eating him alive or worse.

"Please..." Tails whispered, and he could feel his voice growing weaker, the poison of the caterpillar stings spreading through his system, numbing him, making him want to go to sleep, and maybe it was better this way...the fox kit let his eyes fall shut.

And then he opened them abruptly when at this exact moment the clearing seemed to erupt into fire.

"Wha...?" Tails whispered the word almost soundlessly, blue eyes wide as all around him, the insects started screeching and scurrying. There had been a blast of fire as bright as the sun tearing through the forest spot, blackening the damp leaves and scorching even the glistening cocoons stuck to the trees. Above him, the bee screamed, sounding furious, and seemed to try and fly away with him, since the thread from which Tails hung in his cocoon at once started to sway wildly.

"Ahhh! Don't drop me!" Tails shouted, the ground beneath him suddenly looking even farther away than before, and despite the strange fondness for head-first crash-landings his hedgehog brother seemed to harbour, Tails was rather convinced that a fall from this height would surely snap his neck. Where had this fire even come from?!

"Beee!" The insect monster holding him had twisted around in mid-air, and seemed to shoot something into the direction of the fire blast, a thin, stinger-like object soaring straight for a gap in between the trees. Tails could follow it with his eyes, straining to see who or what the bee was shooting at – and then gasped as the flying stinger was promptly incinerated by another burst of fire erupting from between the trees like a deadly blossom.

"Sh-Shadow...?" Tails croaked, but then, that didn't really make sense. This was honest-to-gods fire, not the crackling golden energy of a Chaos Spear. And then even that thought was torn away from him as the blast of flames tore through the thread holding him, vaporizing it, and hit the bee holding him straight in its chest.

Tails dropped like a stone.

"AAAAAAH!"

The two-tail was screaming his lungs out for what felt like the hundredth time that day, but he also felt like he had a valid reason for it, because beneath him the ground was rapidly drawing closer at freefall velocity.

"AAAAA-hurf!"

Next, his cry was abruptly cut short as something white soared through the fire and hit him mid-flight, grabbing a hold of his cocoon and landing with him on the other side of the clearing, where he was softly dropped on the floor. Tails, having been dropped onto his belly, hadn't yet seen a glimpse of his saviour, but the insects definitely seemed to have. Out of the corner of his eye he could see them scattering away like cats from the wielder of a water hose, scrambling into the foliage as fast as they could. Before he could twist himself around to see who or what now stood above him, there seemed to be another burst of fire from his saviour, judging by the hot air washing over the back of his neck. It sent the last insects on the branches and hanging from the canopy into hiding, and Tails finally managed to roll onto his back to get a good look at who had come for him.

When he finally did, his eyes grew wide.

"Ninetails," the nine-tailed, red-eyed, smiling golden vixen said.

xxx

"Ahhh! Herrlgl Huhrl! HELP!" Amy was sputtering, coughing water out of her mouth and lungs, while desperately trying to keep her head above the water, completely disoriented. The water surface had hit her like a frying pan to the face when she'd crashed into it and there were stars in front of her eyes as she was flailing now and trying to stay afloat.

Ugh...oh gods...oh chaos... Amy was only just about beginning to get back her bearings, treading water and blinking the last, stinging chlorine drops out of her eyes, finally able to tilt up her head and look around...

It was at this point that she saw that straight in front of her, there reared a giant, near 20 feet tall blue and white water dragon, its impossibly large rectangular mouth opened wide with gleaming teeth.

Seeing the pink hedgehog in front of it, it roared.

Amy reacted in the only way she knew how.

It was safe to say that at the side lines, the leaders of the Azure City Gym were very surprised when today's challenger's Gyarados collapsed with a single strike by a giant hammer from one of the weirdest Pokémon they had ever seen.

"WhatisthatwhatisthatwhereamIohGODS-!" Amy was flailing, babbling and panicking after having fallen back into the pool, not actually looking where she was frantically paddling to any more, but rather still staring back at the monstrosity she had just hit and which now lay near motionlessly in the water, it's eyes little spirals, it's terrifying mouth still open wide. Leaping up at it with a scream and hitting it in the centre of its forehead had been an instinctive reaction, but the panic had returned with a vengeance after she had dropped back into the water, her hammer slipping from her hands and dissolving, and now the only thought she had left was to get away from this thing as quickly as possible.

"Oh gods, oh Chaos, I need to get out of here or else it's going to eat me, where is Sonic, I-!"

Amy's groping hands suddenly brushed against something hard and clamped onto it immediately, the hedgehog feeling overwhelming relief as there was finally something solid beneath her hands; she had to have reached the side of the pool.

She tore her gaze away from the dragon creature, looking downwards to see how she could climb out-

...and then noticed she wasn't hanging onto a ladder or the pool edge at all, but instead onto a giant, staring crab monster that had just extended one of its claws toward her.

"Kingler?" it asked.

Amy screamed again.

Xxx

"Um...where is this, then?" Inside the foreign lab, Sonic was now glancing around uneasily. Everything apart from the freakish creatures he had seen in the forest could have easily been part of one of the more temperate Zones on Mobius, the vegetation, farm fields and farm house, even the lab nothing that would have been out of place on several continents he had already visited. Now the human in the lab coat was looking at him, head tilted.

"Well, officially this is the Kanto region and you're on my ranch near Pallet Town."

Sonic paused. Swallowed.

"Um. And what's the name of the planet...?"

This time, the man favoured him with a very long stare.

"...you're really not a Pokémon, are you?"

"Um...no. I'm a Mobian. Or you humans call us sapients...at least where I come from," Sonic explained with a frown.

"Huh. And where is that?" The human had now pulled a notepad and a pen from his pocket and was looking at Sonic, fascinated.

"Mobius. Or Earth, depending on who you ask," the hedgehog replied, still glancing around the lab somewhat uneasily. The pink blob-thing was now dragging the unconscious boy through the door, his yellow pet following. "And we don't have...pokey-things," Sonic tried to pronounce the unfamiliar word. "Where is this place and who are you?"

"Oh! How rude of me!" the man stuck out a hand at the question. "I'm Professor Oak. Curiously, we also call our planet Earth, but now that you mention it, it's probably not the most original name." He frowned. "I think I like 'Mobius' better." He gave Sonic a smile, at which the blue hedgehog cocked a slightly disbelieving eye ridge. Despite the scary introduction, the scientist – Oak – in actuality seemed to be an okay guy.

"You have to tell me all about how you got here," Oak said, turning and walking over to his assistant creature and the black-haired kid, "If you'll excuse me just a moment, I'll just have to see to Ash-"

"Hey! Doc!"

"Hm?" Oak had turned around at Sonic's call, looking puzzled. "What did you say?"

"You need to get back here next to the machine, I can't understand a word you're saying anymore!" Sonic gestured at the square contraption behind him (that mostly looked like a computer terminal from the moon landing as far as he was concerned). Oak blinked.

"What? Excuse me, I can't understand a word you're saying anymore."

Sonic groaned.

How can someone be a professor and yet be so *dense*...?

xxx

Knuckles the Echidna was currently planning Sonic the Hedgehog's demise.

This wasn't such a terribly new thing – the guardian of angel Island had, in fact, been doing so often enough for it to qualify as an actual hobby at this point – but for the past four hours he had been doing so with a renewed fervour that could have put even Robotnik to shame.

"Sonic..." the Guardian ground his teeth. "This is all your fault for landing me in such a mess again, I swear when I get my hands on you...!"

He had been walking through an unfamiliar forest for what seemed like hours by now, and he still had no idea where he was. The explosion the idiot hedgehog's mission had managed to get them involved in the human Doctor's lab had felt powerful enough to have blasted them all to kingdom come, and if there was anything the echidna knew it was that if Chaos Emeralds had been involved, everyone could have ended up anywhere.

"And now it's getting dark. Absolutely brilliant."

The sunlight was starting to only sparsely poke through the trees now, chillier night air replacing the day's warmth. In the undergrowth, more things seemed to wake up and start stirring, but they also always conveniently vanished when Knuckles snapped his head around. He thought he had seen glimpses of the animals in the bushes, but he hadn't exactly recognized anything he knew. All of this was starting to give him a bad feeling...

"Great. Canned food again. All because that annoying twerp continues to blow our budget on a near weekly basis..."

"Ah, it's not that bad. And just think about it, when we've finally caught his Pikachu we'll be able to live like kings!"

"Well, we're not here to capture Pikachu. Da boss said we're sapposed ta find some of da jigglypuffs living in dis forest for his insomnia."

"Right, yeah..."

Knuckles' eyes snapped up. In the distance, he thought he had just been able to hear voices. True, he had not been able to make out much of what they'd said, but any civilization at all would be helpful for figuring out where he was. Picking up his pace, he started to hurry toward the clearing where the noise had been coming from. Now he also thought that he was able to glimpse the shine of a fire...?

"Hey! Can you tell me where we are?"

Knuckles burst through the foliage toward the little group sitting around the fire on the clearing. Three pairs of eyes were staring at him, looking very surprised, and for a moment, the echidna's face only mirrored their expression.

Knuckles thought that never before in his life had he seen a woman with such an impossible hairstyle, for instance.

"Uh," the cat Mobian with them finally said, "I don't fink dat dat's a jigglypuff, guys..."

To be continued...

Aaaand that's a wrap! Hope you liked! :D (I also hope I got Meowth's 'accent' kinda right. I never watched Pokemon with English dub in my country as a kid, so what you're getting now is cobbled together from some youtube clips and a lot of guessing. XD) But hey, any suggestions will be gladly taken into account, and if you read, please review! :D