Miles opened his eyes to a thin beam of daylight shining down through the open door above.

His pain was completely gone, as was his nausea. A quick probe into the thick fur of his torso revealed not even bruising remained.

Odd.

He twisted and prodded a few moments later, frowning. Not nerve damage. He'd recovered completely, without having to gather rings. Was that the potion? It hadn't been anything like this last night.

Hold on.

Miles squinted in the dark, burrowing his fingers across his waist once again.

Yep. His fur had grown back. Not even rings restored lost tissue… Was it chaos related? If the high chaos readings from his world had been bleeding through, it could be having an impact on surrounding reality. But this was the other way around. His body wasn't being infused with chaos, entropy was being reversed. The world itself was becoming more orderly, even while being flooded with so much chaos energy that dimensional barriers were collapsing.

And if something was taking the chaos out of the world… What was it, where was it, and what was it doing with it?

Miles hopped to his feet with a shrug. Sitting here literally contemplating his navel wasn't going to get him home, or save the world. Or doom any worlds, admittedly. Sort of a counterargument there.

He climbed the stairs anyway. At least he could be out of the dark, and maybe the robot left its head.

That and the scrabbling sounds in the dark below. That was creepy enough all by itself to want to run away and feel the sunshine.

You could tell a lot about a society by its stairs. He hadn't really been paying much attention last night, too busy staying upright, but he did notice that Cosmo was approximately the same height as Sonic - four inches taller than his own diminutive size. The stairs, on the other hand, were approximately six inches high each. Too tall to be comfortable for someone their size. He had to lift his knees up to his stomach with every step.

Human sized stairs. And a human sized door, too, with a handle right at eyeball height. Topped off by a human sized robot.

Civilisation. Somewhere.

The twin flowers still bloomed brightly, unmolested by the night's hostilities - Miles looked away before they could make him fondly remember a genocide or something. The door showed no signs of damage either as he passed it by, peering around for any sign of his benefactor, or of people who hated him less.

Bingo. An avenue of trees, flanking a grassy highway interspersed with rocks. A few squirrels scattered the area, playing among the flowers. Far beyond, though only a short jog from his perspective, Miles could see the telltale grey of stone buildings.

"Guess I'm not going to get ahead in life, though." Miles scratched his chin, peering around for the missing bodypart.

No, it just felt awkward. He should leave the quips to heroes. It just felt super corny when he did it. Was his timing wrong?

Movement caught Miles' eye, a flash of red - and green. Harder to pick up on green, his brain tended to ignore it. Hard to miss her though, now he saw her, walking down the avenue of trees, brushing each with her fingers as she passed.

Cosmo.

Lithe and ethereal, looking at once alien among her surroundings and as though she fundamentally belonged tox the forest.

The dryad gasped, wide eyed as she saw him before her expression soured.

"Thanks for letting me stay. I'll get out of your fur now. Uh, hair... leaves." Miles rubbed the back of his head, looking down at his feet.

"If you go near the ruins, they will kill you."

Cosmo swept past him, her perfume hitting his nose once more. Was that her natural scent? It wasn't some kind of neural defence like the flowers was it? Miles frowned.

"Thanks for the-"

"If you truly don't know what you've done, find the caretaker. For all the good it will do."

"Where's the caretaker?"

Miles turned around, but the dryad was already gone, the door of her tree shut tight.

And growing from the floor, in flowers of the same crimson hues as her own, was an arrow, pointing out into the distance.

Miles nodded, standing directly on top of the arrow and stretching his legs and tails, orienting himself with the distant mountains to help him keep his bearings.

Time to find some answers.

He burst into a sprint, feet pounding the grass below him, the grass stretching up into a steep hillside dotted by shallow cave entrances. Miles glanced into each as he passed them by, but the only sign of life was a snow white rabbit.

With a stick of dynamite strapped to its back.

What?

Miles skidded to a halt, rescuing the poor creature with a few tugs.

Seemed fairly traditional, blasting fuse, the sweet smell of nitroglycerine. There was even a deadman's switch, set to trigger with the bunny's death. What kind of sick weirdo wasted perfectly good explosives on torturing fuzzy animals? Even Robotnik didn't do that. Miles shook his head, turning his attention back to the bundle of dynamite. Within a few moments he'd liberated it and slipped it into his hammerspace. One could never have too many explosives, after all.

"Steer clear of any more crazy people, okay little bunny?" Miles rubbed a gloved finger across the back of the rabbit's head before lowering it gently to the floor to hop away into the grass.

Nice. His murder:rescue ratio for rabbits needed all the help it could get.

Anyway, civilisation. Human - or similarly sized and shaped, even the dynamite was designed for larger hands than his own - and sociopathic? Did the humans here hate fuzzy things? Was that why Cosmo warned him?

Miles shook his head, rubbing his chin thoughtfully as he walked back to his original heading. He was so lost in thought musing about the signs of civilisation he'd seen so far he almost missed the next one until he nearly ran face first into it - an old wooden storage chest. Tall as him and trimmed with metal.

Some kind of supply cache? It was inside the indentation in the hill, so unlikely to be from an airdrop. Unless someone had been sheltering in here?

Seemed unlikely. The cave was shallow enough for grass to be growing inside. It wouldn't offer much, or any, protection from the weather. Let alone giant eye monsters and killer robots.

… Well, it was empty now.

Miles shook the morbid thought from his head, clicking the chest open and peering within. His eyes lit up at the sight of processed metal bars, a handful of the crimson drinks Cosmo had given him, a pile of processed lumber…

And a stick.

With a leaf on it.

Miles raised his eyebrows as he appropriated the rest of the supplies - spoils of war. Even if the original owner was still around, he was clearly a lunatic that liked to detonate fuzzy animals and therefore an enemy combatant. But why explicitly include a stick of all things? Miles held it aloft, squinting at it against the sun now peeking over the mountains - East? He'd need to bear that in mind.

Why a stick? They clearly had the means to work wood. Was it a walking stick? A... weapon? How desperate would you have to be to use this?

Miles gave the stick an experimental swing. He felt a chill in his chest, and a blazing cloud of sparks tumbled from the tip of the stick he was holding in his hand with a low whooshing sound.

The bunny, enjoying its newfound freedom, looked up at the noise just in time to be engulfed in flame.

"Ah! Bunny!" Miles reached out helplessly towards it, but it was already far too late. The lagomorph sizzled to the floor.

Miles sighed, carefully patting out the singed fur of his arm before carefully flipping the stick over. The smell of burning fur hit him straight in the pit of his stomach, dredging up memories of countless faces before he could press them deep down inside.

That was almost a metaphor for his life right there.

Good thing he'd taken off the dynamite.

Walking over to his latest victim, Miles brushed a gloved hand against its smouldering body, watching as stray flames crackled only briefly against the grass before dousing themselves. Blackened grass became green once more in moments, though the longer blades didn't regrow.

Negative entropy. Order from disorder. The discharge from the stick had been enough to kill a rabbit, turning it from Living Rabbit to Cooked Rabbit, but not enough to fundamentally change the nature of the grass below, so it reverted.

How would this even work? More importantly, how could he use this phenomenon to help him get home?

Miles felt his body warm again, a strange, uncomfortable sensation in either direction.

Some kind of survival tool? An advanced firestarter? A simple flamethrower? He wasn't sure what powered it - body heat? - but it would be handy, especially for further experiments. Fire was the first bootstrap of civilisation, after all.

He swung the stick again, slower this time. Flame sprayed from its tip once more, this time in a more coherent direction. He felt the same strange feeling of absence once more. Fire tore apart flowers, destroying all of them without a trace.

Miles nodded, swinging again. The emptiness worsened. Again and again until...

Nothing. The final charge of flame sparked harmlessly against the wooden chest as the dull emptiness reached its peak. Miles panted with not quite physical exhaustion.

Minutes passed. The sensation faded, replaced once more by that odd sensation of fullness once more.

Well, about ten shots, swinging it too frequently did nothing, needed to recharge? And whatever it consumed regenerated, possibly because of the reverse entropy - Dentropy? Antitropy? He had a new toy, and a new world of physics to experiment with using it.

"... Sorry about killing you. And thanks." Miles said to the rabbit, picking up a body still sizzling hot from the fire that had cooked it, its temperature kept constant by dentropy. "Probably should have followed my warning though."

He turned and went on his way, carrying the rabbit with him as he went.

All this science had made him hungry, after all.