Chapter 3: Under the Weather
The trip to the ski lodge had so far been uneventful, but in the best possible way. Unable to catch Sonic and force him to go with her, Amy had instead abducted Chris as her partner to take figure skating lessons. Despite the rocky start, they actually seemed to enjoy themselves as they both improved. Cream and Cheese spent all their time out playing in the snow under Vanilla's supervision. Chuck was out skiing a time or two, but he mostly stuck to the luxurious spa and grand picturesque views from the resort's highest balcony. Mr. Tanaka was busier than ever, constantly keeping everyone's schedules and gear in order so their little vacation went perfectly, but even he got a brief moment on the slopes. As it turned out, Mr. Tanaka used to ski competitively when he was younger, or at least so he claimed. Ella had stayed behind, naturally, to mind the house and get in some extra deep cleaning while it was vacant. And of course Sonic, being the daredevil he always was, spent every waking moment carving up the slopes on his snowboard.
And boy is he hard to keep up with! Tails thought as he struggled to chase the speeding hedgehog downhill. Tails learned how to snowboard from Sonic a long time ago and had decided to join Sonic for this last run of the day. And, of course, Sonic chose to blaze his own trail down one of the steepest and most treacherous faces of the mountain. Tails felt up to the challenge at first, but he started lagging further and further behind as he chose to take safer, rather than faster routes downhill. It's sad that today is our last day to have fun here, thought Tails. I really have enjoyed this weekend with no annoying press or Eggman or...
"Hey, Tails!" Sonic shouted as he unexpectedly slid to a stop just in front of the fox.
Tails cried out as he looked up in his distraction and saw Sonic suddenly stopped in his path. The fox slammed his board sideways and leaned back to try and dig into the snow to stop himself before they collided. He did manage to succeed, falling over on his back just inches from the stationary hedgehog.
"Whoops, sorry bud!" Sonic apologized. "Good thing you were wearing that coat for extra padding!" The blue hedgehog reached down to offer his little brother a hand.
"Yeah, maybe," Tails didn't sound so sure as he took the offered hand and stood back up. He normally wouldn't have worn anything special, even on this freezing cold mountainside. He had pretty thick fur to keep him warm, even better than Sonic's, honestly. But Tails had remembered his promise to Chuck to take better care of himself, so he'd donned the heavy coat as an extra precaution before leaving with Sonic. The only problem was Tails wasn't used to the extra bulk of the coat, and it was doing murder to his coordination.
"There's a big jump ahead, Tails. Watch this!" Sonic quickly kicked off again and sped toward a cliff face. He vaulted off of the lip of the small cliff and immediately kicked free of his snowboard. Sonic did a double somersault midair and still had plenty of hang time to strike his classic "thumbs up" pose, in a reclining posture no less, before miraculously landing on his discarded snowboard with a huge grin.
"Pfft, showoff!" Tails shouted down at Sonic after observing the impressive stunt. Why is it that everything he does always makes it look so easy? I don't think there's a competition in the world that Sonic couldn't take first place if he entered, except maybe a quiz show. Regardless, the only way down was to follow Sonic's example, so Tails took a couple deep breaths and rushed over the cliff after him.
As he cleared the edge, Tails started to do a simple 360 degree spin while holding the front of his board. In the middle of his stunt, though, Tails was blinded by a sudden flash of yellow from his coat pocket. Just this tiny moment of distraction caused Tails to lose his grip on the snowboard, so he tried to use his other senses to straighten himself back out for a blind landing. That's when he felt his snowboard slip out from under him as he fell. Tails silently cursed himself for not trying to modify the human-intended straps and instead following Sonic's example of a bare board.
There was only one way out of this free-fall now. Tails immediately tried to spin up his twin namesakes to bring himself to a safe hover. As Tails was horrified to discover, however, the heavy coat that he was wearing, which was also designed for non-tailed humans, severely limited the range of motion of his two furry appendages. The way they were simply tucked under and trailing out the bottom of the coat, Tails couldn't get them free enough to spin. Just then the blinding light faded as quickly as it had started, and Tails opened his eyes to see where he was about to land. He let out a panicked yip when all he could see for the last half-second was endless white.
Sonic heard the quick cry of alarm and heard the muffled thud immediately after. The blue hedgehog turned around to search the cliff behind him for any sign of Tails, and was alarmed not to spot the bright yellow fox against the drab mountainside. "Tails? Hey, Tails!" Sonic ditched his snowboard and hurried back the short distance to find his missing partner. It only took a second or two for him to find the fox-shaped hole in the snowbank nearby. "Yo, Tails, are you all right, buddy?"
"I'm fine, Sonic," came the stunned Tails' reply as he sat up from his cold landing site, imagining a flock of Flickies orbiting his head. As he recovered, Tails did a quick survey of himself. Nothing seemed broken or injured, just a few sore spots from the impact. He guessed he must have gotten lucky, landing in a fresh snow bank like he did. It might have well as been a pile of soft mattresses.
"Looks like you bombed that jump, buddy. What's the matter? Did you forget you could fly?" Sonic gave a teasing grin once he knew Tails was unharmed.
"Ha ha, very funny, Sonic," Tails laughed sarcastically as he stood and began brushing off all the snow covering him. "It's this coat Chuck wanted me to wear. I can't fly in it... or so I just discovered," the fox passed the blame to try and save a bit of his pride.
"Or do stunts either," Sonic added, still teasing with a smug grin. "Take it off then, if it bugs you so much."
Tails thought about Sonic's suggestion for a moment. The idea had occurred to him several times before, but now it felt like Tails was being given permission to remove the impeding clothing. So he quickly did so, making sure to grab any contents out of the coat's pockets in the process. That's when he pulled out the yellow Chaos Emerald he'd brought with him to power the X-Tornado, and Tails suddenly stared at it in shock.
"Sonic, look, the Emerald!" Tails quickly shared his discovery, holding up the glowing gem for Sonic to see as well. "It's reacting to something around here! Maybe that was the flash that made me lose my balance a second ago."
"Yeah, but Tails, don't the Chaos Emeralds only react when they're near other Emeralds?" Sonic reminded the excited fox. "Unless that means..."
"Come on!" Tails hadn't even waited for Sonic to come to his conclusion. The fox was already running back up the slope, using the intensity of the Emerald's glowing like a tracking device. As he passed over a spot in his previous flight path over the cliff, the yellow Emerald let out a bright pillar of light again, forcing Tails to turn his head away and step back until the Chaos Emerald in his hand wasn't blinding anymore. "Right over here, Sonic! It has to be under all this snow."
"One super-Sonic snow shovel, coming right up!" the blue hedgehog grinned as he noted the spot Tails was pointing at. He jumped up and charged a spindash in the air, shooting himself back down into the snow like a blue drill bit. Tails waited for a minute at the surface as he heard Sonic using his spin dash to dig around under the snow drift to search for the buried Chaos Emerald.
"Find anything yet, Sonic?" Tails finally shouted down the hole in the snow where Sonic had first entered. Seconds later, instead of giving Tails a reply, Sonic re-emerged a few feet away. He burst out of the new hole he'd made and uncurled in midair, landing on his feet with a smile. "So, did you get it? Seems like it took you a while," Tails asked again.
"Yeah, it was like trying to find a needle in a stack of needles," Sonic remarked as he held out the clear Chaos Emerald he'd just dug out.
"...Wouldn't that be incredibly easy, Sonic?" Tails scratched his head at the unusual twist of the popular idiom.
"Not if you were looking for just one needle in particular," Sonic explained as he walked over to Tails to give him the new Emerald. Luckily, the two emeralds didn't react so severely to each other a third time, but Tails put the yellow one away just in case.
Tails nodded his head to show he understood while he inspected the crystal clear Chaos Emerald. "This brings us up to six of the seven Emeralds, Sonic. Only one more to go before we can use them to go back home."
"Yeah, and I don't think we'd ever have found this one if it wasn't for you being so lucky, Tails," Sonic chuckled.
"Lucky? I fell off a cliff, Sonic! How is that luck?" Tails shot the hedgehog a cynical glare.
"It's all in how you look at it, buddy," Sonic laughed.
"Yes, and I, for one, feel incredibly lucky today!" a familiar but unwelcome voice boomed from behind the two talking Mobians.
Tails felt his fur stand on end as he turned around with an annoyed growl. "Eggman! Go away! We're on a vacation!" the fox shouted to the uninvited guest hovering in his unmistakable pod a short distance away.
"Oh really? And you just so happened to stumble across a Chaos Emerald buried on a mountainside completely by random while enjoying yourselves? Why, maybe the next time I go to the beach, one will just wash ashore at my feet!" Eggman voiced his obvious skepticism.
"Can it, Egghead! Tails is right. Can't you give us one weekend without having to destroy another dumb robot of yours?" Sonic replied back with a clenched first.
"Sonic, you wound me! And here I thought you valued our little rivalry as much as I did," Eggman pretended to be hurt by the hedgehog's dismissal. "I guess my new robot and I will have to teach you how to give someone the cold shoulder properly!" At the press of a button on his wrap-around console, Eggman summoned his newest creation from the woods nearby. The snow-covered pines shook and fell as a giant treaded vehicle plowed out from the tree line. It's design was rather simplistic for one of Eggman's robots, simply a huge parabolic dish mounted to a treaded chassis.
"What does this hunk of junk do, Egghead? Mess with our satellite reception?" Sonic goaded Eggman at the sight of the unusual device.
"Why you impudent...!" Eggman fumed at Sonic's refusal to act intimidated by the huge robot.
"Heya, Tails? What do you think he calls this one? Dish-tank?" Sonic guessed, ribbing his buddy to play along to aggravate Eggman further.
Tails was more than happy to play along. At least making fun of Eggman helped him feel less annoyed by his interrupting their vacation. "Nah, Eggman's got a pattern with his names a lot of the time. First, it's what the robot does. Hmm... He's ambushing us on a snowy mountain and he made a cold-related pun, so it's probably a freeze ray of some sort. Then add a suffix that sounds robotic, like -bot or -tron. And last, put some arbitrary big number that sounds impressive."
"So, like, Icebot 1,000?" Sonic tried Tails' formula.
"Ha! Wrong, hedgehog! This is my new Freeze-a-tron 5,000 Mark 3!" Eggman proudly proclaimed.
Sonic nearly slapped his forehead at Eggman's answer. "Same difference, Eggman. Admit it, your names are getting lame and totally predictable."
"Not exactly, Sonic," Tails broke in. "The Mark 3 part is different. What happened to Marks 1 and 2?" he asked Eggman out of curiosity.
"Flawed prototypes," Eggman twiddled his fingers for a moment in shame. "Let's just say I managed to save myself the need to buy a new walk-in freezer and leave it at that."
Now it was Tails' turn to look embarrassed for Eggman. "So, what makes you sure that this one will work, then?" he asked.
"Simple! Because, by using the power of a Chaos Emerald, I can guarantee more than enough power to charge the main weapon!" Eggman shared.
"You have the last Emerald?" Tails' eyes widened in surprise.
"No, my foxy little friend. I have your last Emerald!" Eggman sneered. Before Tails could be tipped off by Eggman's words, a mechanical grappling arm shot out from the Freeze-a-tron 5,000 and yanked the clear Chaos Emerald from Tails' hand. It retracted just as quickly back into the base of Eggman's robot, accompanied by sounds of the machine powering up and its large dish glowing a pale blue.
"Ah! Sonic, I'm sor..." Tails started to apologize for losing the Emerald, only for Sonic to suddenly rush towards him. In the blink of an eye, Sonic picked Tails up and got them both to safety as a shimmering beam of energy hit where they had both been standing, creating a pillar of ice.
"Talk about your cold reception!" Sonic just couldn't resist the lame, spur-of-the-moment joke. He quickly dropped Tails back on his feet and revved into a spin dash, speeding straight towards his frigid opponent.
"Whooo ho ho hoo! We're just getting warmed up, Sonic! Blast him!" commanded Eggman as he saw Sonic closing in on his newest creation. At least 20 missiles streamed out of the back of the robotic tank and started chasing after Sonic. The blue hedgehog was forced to change course, looping in a large circle around the Freeze-a-tron 5,000 as he used trees and rocky outcroppings to dupe the homing rockets. He thought he'd tricked them all into hitting objects other than him when Sonic noticed the last one coming straight down at him from above. The blue hedgehog quickly sidestepped the blast, but was thrown into the air by the proximity of the explosion, landing behind a large snow bank where Tails was taking shelter.
"Hate to say it, Tails, but Egghead is getting a lot smarter with programming his missiles. I'm gonna need a distraction to get close to that thing," Sonic tried to come up with a quick battle plan.
"Right, I'll go back to the lodge and get the X-Tornado fired up!" replied the worried fox as he grabbed his snowboard. He shared a quick thumbs up with Sonic before the fox raced downhill, using his now unhindered tails like a propeller to zoom back to the lodge, leaving a long rooster tail of fresh powder in his wake.
"Now to find out how I'm going to put this bot on ice," Sonic said to himself as he watched Tails quickly disappear down the mountain. He heard a strange noise and launched himself away from the snowdrift he had been hiding behind. Looking behind him, Sonic noticed that the spot he'd just been standing was again encased in solid ice. Can't stay still for long or I'll be a hedgehog-cicle. At least it can't get a lock on me while I'm running around. Just then, a near miss from a freeze ray blast directly in front of him almost proved Sonic wrong. ...Or not. Maybe I should try another frontal assault, Sonic thought on his feet. He turned and headed straight for the robot again at full speed.
"Ah ah ah, Sonic! I wouldn't do that if I were you!" Eggman shouted out while grinning widely. "Freeze-a-tron 5,000, execute maneuver Alpha-Two-Beta!" In response to Eggman's codenamed instructions, the satellite dish atop the tank-bot blasted a wide semicircle of ice on the ground in front of Sonic.
Uh, oh! Sonic realized too late that he couldn't stop in time to avoid slipping on the icy speed bump. As he attempted to screech to a stop, he lost his balance on the ice and unceremoniously fell on his posterior in the middle of the new ice rink. "OK, Egghead, I'm through playing around!" the now enraged hedgehog yelled back at the laughing Doctor.
"Whoo ho ho ho ho! I think you need to chill, Sonic! Did you realize that this resort gives ice skating lessons? Maybe you should have attended a few," Eggman taunted with a toothy grin.
Sonic was really glad that Amy wasn't here right now, or he'd never have heard the end of it. He jumped back to his feet with an annoyed snarl... and promptly ended up on his rear once again. Sonic growled as he heard Eggman laughing even harder. He got back up on his feet, slowly this time, and prepared to simply jump off the icy patch to the snow nearby.
That's when Eggman's robot decided to play dirty. Another freeze-ray blast caught Sonic off guard, and the next thing he knew his feet were both frozen to the mountainside, encased in solid ice up to his chest. Sonic tried to move to break free, but it was just too tight. He couldn't even curl up enough to spindash his way free. So this is how it ends, huh? Egghead actually wins after all these years? Who would have thought?
"It worked? I mean, yes, it worked! Whooo ho ho hoo! Now to finish you off, you pesky hedgehog!" Eggman said with another evil, annoying laugh as his robot shot five more missiles at the immobilized Sonic. They each took their time, arcing high into the air before streaking down menacingly towards the trapped hero.
Sonic closed his eyes and grit his teeth in preparation of the pain that was coming. He could hear the missiles screaming through the air as they got closer and closer... Then, to his astonishment, Sonic heard a loud buzzsaw noise and all the warheads detonate prematurely directly above him, just a mere second or two before reaching their target. He looked up immediately and cried out for joy as the X-Tornado swooped by on a high speed, low altitude pass.
"No, No, NO!" Eggman pounded his control panel in frustration as he witnessed the familiar plane shoot down his missiles just barely in the nick of time. "Grrrrr! Well, don't just sit there! Bring that plane down!" Eggman screamed at his latest invention.
A new salvo of missiles streaked into the sky to chase the X-Tornado as it looped around the mountain for another attack run. Tails had expected that he'd become the new target. In fact, he'd been counting on it in order to take the robot's attention away from attacking the defenseless Sonic. He pulled an inverted loop to bring the X-Tornado on a direct path towards the incoming missiles and let rip with his machine guns again. He blasted most of them out of the sky in small, fiery explosions, then did a barrel roll as the two that survived streaked by within inches of the agile jet. Both missiles tried to U-turn to come back at the X-Tornado again, but they ended up colliding with each other in the process, making a slightly larger, combined explosion.
Meanwhile, Tails pressed the attack, firing on the Freeze-a-tron 5,000 itself. Unfortunately, his shots bounced off the armor of the robot harmlessly, barely managing to put several small holes in the large dish of its main weapon but not much else. Tails realized that this wasn't going to work as he pulled up again and prepared to dodge more missiles.
"That's it! Fire!" Eggman commanded as he saw the annoying fighter jet break off again and recognized the moment of opportunity. A dazzling beam of energy lanced out into the sky from the oversized dish, tracking the retreating plane. The beam crossed paths with the X-Tornado for only a split second as Tails tried to dodge, but that was already long enough. "Ha ha! Bullseye!" Eggman gloated as he saw the X-Tornado glistening with a layer of ice from the nose back down one side to its all-important wings.
Inside the half-frozen jet, Tails had alarms screeching at him from nearly every instrument in his cockpit. The controls weren't responding on one side of the plane, and he was fighting with all his might against the yoke as the plane kept wanting to roll on its side. Tails was losing airspeed fast and knew that a stall was only moments away. Try as he might, Tails quickly realized that the X-Tornado had become unflyable. Even so, he managed to force the stricken jet to finish its turn for one last pass, knowing it meant he would end up going down on the mountain.
"Mayday! Mayday! This is the X-Tornado! I'm going to crash into the mountain! I have to eject!" Tails shouted into his cockpit headset, hoping someone would be listening to his distress signal. He manually unlatched the cockpit glass from its hinges and tried to push against it to pop it loose. To his horror, though, the canopy which should have been ripped away by just the wind alone refused to budge at all. Tails pounded on it a couple times, but it was no use. The ice from the freeze ray blast had frozen the canopy shut.
"Looks like I'm out of options," Tails talked to himself to try and stay calm and focused. He still had a couple moments of control left before he knew he would stall. Just time enough for one last shot. Instead of reaching for the gun's controls, however, Tails flipped a switch to arm a different device. Aiming at a certain spot next to the robot, Tails fired a single golden projectile. Immediately after its launch, the X-Tornado began to shake and lurch violently towards its frozen side. It couldn't stay in the air any longer with the added weight and altered aerodynamics of all that ice built up on its body. Tails was powerless to do anything but strap in and hold on as the plane rolled over and dove into the mountain.
Sonic watched in horror as the half-frozen X-Tornado plummeted toward the mountainside. "No! TAILS!" he screamed as he heard but couldn't see the plane collide with the slope below. He didn't see Tails eject before it hit, but the hedgehog held on to hope that maybe he'd gotten out moments before impact. That's when Sonic noticed out the corner of his eye a twinkling golden ring flying straight towards him from the sky.
Sonic reached up and snatched the gold ring, wasting no time tapping into its power. Thanks, bro, Sonic thought as he channeled the energy into quickly melting the ice around him. "I'm gonna get you for that, Eggman!" Sonic growled so vehemently that Eggman's joyful smile suddenly faded in fear. Using the remaining power of the ring, Sonic spun in place as he charged a super spindash.
"No! How did you...?" Eggman wondered out loud as he realized too late that suddenly the game had changed. "Well don't just stand there! Fire! FIRE!" He frantically ordered his robot.
The monstrous robot never had a chance to comply. In the blink of an eye, Sonic took off like a cannonball, punching straight through the armored chassis of the machine and out the other side like it was made of tissue paper.
"Oh no! Not my beautiful Freeze-a-tron 5,000!" Eggman lamented as the robo-tank glowed brightly and exploded, sending Eggman's pod hurling into the stratosphere.
"Better luck next time on the Mark 4," Sonic taunted as he watched Eggman get blown away. Then he simply held out his hand and caught the clear Chaos Emerald as it fell from the blast as well. Seconds later, he heard the sound of several snowmobiles rushing up to meet him.
"Sonic! Tails told us you were in trouble, but he was in too much of a hurry to say why. What happened?" greeted Chris, seated behind Mr. Tanaka on the lead vehicle.
"Just chillin' with Egghead for a moment, Chris," Sonic confidently responded.
"Well, it looks like things have already been handled. And is that another Chaos Emerald?" Chuck looked very surprised to see the gem in Sonic's hand.
"But, wait, where is Tails?" asked Cream who rode behind her mother Vanilla, who obviously didn't have much skill in driving a snowmobile because Chuck was squeezed into the front seat to drive the thing.
"Chao?" Cheese chimed in with an inquisitive tone as it hugged Cream's fuzzy coat.
"He crashed down on the mountain. C'mon!" Sonic instantly remembered. He took off in a blue blur towards the direction he'd seen the X-Tornado go down. He reached the crash site first and immediately began surveying the wreckage, or at least what was visible of the snow-buried plane. The impact must have triggered a localized avalanche that buried most of the jet, although it was encouraging to see that the X-Tornado stayed mostly in one piece. Say what you'd like about Eggman's talent with machines, but Tails really knew how to build something that could last.
"Tails! Hey, Tails!" Sonic called out, still hoping the fox had managed to eject at the last moment. When he got no answer, Sonic started to worry. He began digging out the forward cockpit using his spindash as the others finally arrived again on their snowmobiles.
They all stared in astonishment at what Sonic had uncovered. Tails' body was still in the cockpit slumped over the controls. It was impossible to tell if he was breathing, though, because of the thick sheet of ice that distorted their view and kept them from getting to the clearly unconscious fox.
"How do we get through that to get Tails out?" Chris again spoke first.
"Luckily, I came prepared for such an emergency," calmly replied Mr. Tanaka. He took out a large ice pick and a small hammer from some climbing supplies strapped to his snowmobile and began to chip away at the ice. The process was agonizingly slow, however, knocking off only small chunks of ice at a time.
"This is taking too long!" argued Sonic after a couple minutes of seemingly no progress.
"Let me try, Mr. Tanaka!" said Amy. He acquiesced and watched her as she jammed the ice pick as far as she could into the small hole Mr. Tanaka had so far chiseled out. Then she took out her trusty giant Piko Piko Hammer and smashed the ice pick in as hard as she could.
"Ow!" Amy dropped her hammer as she held her wrist in pain. She hadn't expected the ice to be so solid, like trying to smash through concrete. But from the ice pick, cracks began to spiderweb their way across the ice. The cracking noises grew louder, too, until thankfully the wall of ice disintegrated into countless shards of all sizes.
"Nice work, Ames!" Sonic said while flashing a 'thumbs up' towards her.
"Oh, it was nothing Sonic," responded the flustered pink hedgehog, who now blushed as she clasped her hands behind her back. She absolutely loved it when he gave her a honest compliment like that.
With the icy barrier now removed, Chuck and Sonic were able to pull away the detached canopy and get to Tails. On his first attempt to extricate the fox, Chuck forgot to undo the safety straps Tails had cinched up tightly around himself. But, once they were removed, Tails was lifted carefully out and laid back gently on the snow.
Mr. Tanaka conducted a hasty inspection of the downed pilot while everyone watched in concerned silence. "Master Tails appears to be in good condition. There are no obvious signs of massive trauma," the butler, who was apparently also once a medic as well, reported to the nervous crowd.
"Then why isn't he moving?" inquired the still terrified Cream as she clutched at her mother's long skirt.
"He was probably knocked out in the crash. I noticed quite a bruise on his forehead from the dashboard," answered Chuck, trying to sound more calm than he actually felt. "The real danger Tails is in right now would be hypothermia. We need to get him back to the lodge immediately and warm him up. If only he'd been wearing that coat like I asked him to," Chuck lamented.
"Leave it to me!" volunteered Sonic, who grabbed his little brother's shivering body and raced down the mountain as fast as he could. He didn't want to face the fact that his encouragement for Tails to ditch the coat might have put Tails in more jeopardy, nor was he going to tell Chuck. Sonic was just determined to make sure Tails pulled through.
Ooooh... Something doesn't feel right, was his first thought as he came to. Slowly Tails began to feel the nerves in his body coming back online along with his brain. He almost wished that they hadn't. His whole body ached, his head felt like a smashed pumpkin, and he was still rather cold although he could tell that he was wrapped in a blanket and next to something hot like a fireplace. He wanted to open his eyes and see where he was, but they felt so heavy that he couldn't. Instead, he let out a weak moan.
In response, he heard footsteps approaching from someone close by. Survival instincts kicked in as the wounded fox wondered if they belonged to a friend or a foe, so he forced his eyes open despite their resistance. He was greeted with the view of the inside of a room in the Thorndike's private ski lodge. As Tails had guessed, he was lying next to a roaring fire in the single fireplace, and he was wrapped up like a mummy in multiple blankets. But the owner of the footsteps wasn't visible until Tails managed to slowly and painfully turn his head.
"So you finally decided to wake up, huh?" Amy remarked as Tails made eye contact with her.
"Amy?" Tails spoke confusedly, "Ugh... What happened?"
"You and Sonic were attacked by Eggman, remember? You got shot down, but Sonic used the ring you gave him to beat the robot," Amy reminded the befuddled fox.
"Oh, that's right! Wait! Did you say Sonic made it out okay? And what about the Chaos Emerald I found? And what happened to the X-Tornado?" Tails sputtered out as he forgot about his pain and sat bolt upright, now fully recalling the day's events and needing to know how it was all resolved.
"They're all fine and perfectly safe, Tails." It was Chuck's voice from across the room. "Sonic managed to defeat Eggman thanks to your help, and he recovered the Chaos Emerald, too. As for the X-Tornado, well, it is still being unburied and hauled down the mountain from the crash site, but it will probably be shipped back to the mansion by the morning."
"Chuck!" Tails turned to see his friend in the doorway.
"You gave us quite a scare today, Tails. You really had me worried again," Chuck responded somberly, reminding the fox of his promise.
"Sorry, Chuck. I know that I promised never to put myself in danger like that again, but I… well..." muttered Tails apologetically.
"It's OK, Tails. You had to help Sonic, and you ended up saving his life. Even if you were a little bit reckless. Sometimes you just have to be. I get it." The last thing Chuck had wanted to do was to make Tails feel guilty.
Tails just smiled at the reassuring words and felt glad to know that he'd ended up rescuing Sonic after all. Amy, who didn't know about Tails' promise to Chuck a few days before, looked quizzically at the two males, but decided not to ask any questions. For that, Tails was glad. He didn't really feel like talking anymore. Now that his curiosity and concerns were satisfied, Tails felt the stiffness and pain returning.
He laid back down to get comfortable, feeling his eyelids drooping again already. Tails thought it was ridiculous to go back to sleep already when he'd only just woken up, but his tired body overrode his mind's refusal. As he drifted back to sleep, he instinctively curled his twin tails around his body for extra warmth. Normally he'd only do that around Sonic, but somehow he didn't care if anyone saw him curled up like a baby kit today. Amy and Chuck had already left the room quietly to tell the others, who were busy packing, that Tails was fine. So no one was around to see him curl up anyway, or to hear his muffled sneezes.
