"See? What did I tell ya? Perfect landing." The Cream pretending to be Sonic rubbed her finger under her nose with a cheeky grin.

"We're missing a wing, Sonic." A Cream snapped, her hands on her hips. "I should pop your dumb face right now!"

"We have the same face, Knuckles."

"It's dumb because you're wearing it, dumb face!"

"Will you two calm down? We made it okay, and it's not like we'll need the wing. I think it was a great landing." The Cream in a red hairband stepped between the two of them, hands raised.

"You would."

"Guys!"

Sept turned away from the bickering trio, rubbing the back of her neck with a sigh, feeling the hard metal bump of her interface link beneath her slender fingers. Out of the cockpit window the sun sparkled across water, glistened across snow. A strange blue and white ceiling above, no walls in sight.

They had made it, despite everything done to slow them down. But there was no sense of home here. What faded memories came to the forefront were of the loss of her sisters in this strange "outside". Guilt. Pain. Despair.

Nothing good came under this blue sky.

But it didn't matter.

She only had to remember one thing. And this was the end.

Would she disappear? She was only a Sept, after all.

Would it hurt?

She dashed an ear across her wet cheek, looking up as the one with Amy's thoughts came close, a bright smile on her face as she herded everyone towards the exit.

"Okay, girls! We don't know what to expect out there, so stay close to us, alright? Anne and Dare, you hold Wheat and Nerf? Tress and Cat, hold hands with your sisters, okay? Cream, can you hold onto Sept? And everyone stay close together, it looks real cold out there!"

A hand squeezed Sept's tight.

"It will be fine. Just stay close." Cream smiled down at her faintly. Her eyes were as dull as Sept felt, but Cream tried to be reassuring as the two of them joined the back of the crowd. As she led Sept the wrong way.

This wasn't what she was supposed to do, was it? Sept frowned. But this was fine. She could come back. They'd have to come back anyway. Right?

"Don't sweat it, Amy." The Cream in blue grinned, already at the hatch, thumbing the controls to open them to the frigid, strange smelling air outside. "What's the worst we can run into? Eggman's long gone by now. Hey, it's been two hundred years, maybe we'll get to say hi to Sil-"

A hammer smashed into her head, crashing her against the side of the door frame. Red painted metal as her body slumped to the floor, brown eyes vacant.

"Wh- wha-?" Cream barely managed to stammer before a second hammer swung in through the doorway, crushing her skull against the ceiling. A pink winter boot stepped on what was left.

"Hello again, little dreams!" Amy Rose smiled dreamily at them between blood spattered cheeks. "I missed you!"

The stunned silence broke into screaming. Creams scrambled away from this unknown horror while the Cream with Amy's mind put her hand in her open mouth, staring numbly at the thing wearing her skin.

"B-but you're me! Why are you-" Her stunned question broke off partway through as the hammer swept up into her chin without hesitation. A finger tumbled to the ground as she fell backwards, clutching her shattered jaw. Amy stepped over her.

"I'm sorry, little dreams." The pink hedgehog didn't stop smiling as she spun her hammer in her fingers, smashing a sobbing Cream as she kept walking into the shuttle at a sedate pace. "But I can't have you making life hard for my darling, can I?"

She didn't need to rush. There were no other exits. No places to hide aboard a shuttle she herself had helped build. And her body had pushed itself to the limits to try and stand beside the strongest of abnormals. Nobody in that crowd of children could stop her without weapons, rings or experience.

And Sept stared unmoving, half expecting to wake from this nightmare any moment.

A hand squeezed Sept's, tight enough to hurt.

"When I let go, you need to- to run, alright, Sept?" Cream's cheeks were streaked with tears, but she stood straight on trembling legs all the same, the largest and oldest. "Just run for the door and keep running. Don't look back."

A bloody hand grabbed Amy's leg. A Cream, blood bubbling from her ruined jaw, said something unintelligible before the hammer came down one more time.

And Cream let go of Sept's hand, launching towards Amy like a meteor in that moment of distraction.

Sept ran.

Away from the exit.

"Sept! No!"

There was a sound of hammer hitting meat.

Sept didn't look back. Tears almost blinded her as she scrambled between seats, more than one pair of terrified brown eyes stared back at her from tiny faces hiding as best they knew. Hiding as they'd done so many times in play over the last month.

Sept ran until she slammed into the back wall, wedging herself in the corner behind a seat, fingers scrabbling at the tiniest of vents, feeling wires within.

Slam.

Sept's whimper echoed the brief scream of a Cream as she hunched over, pressing both hands behind her head as she curled into a ball, wishing her ears weren't so big as she tried hopelessly to blot out the sound of her. The ones that tried to run. The ones that tried to hide.

And all Sept could do was sit and remember as she lost all her sisters once again.

Until all that remained was the sound of soft footsteps on metal.

Dripping.

Humming.

And the humming came closer. Sept peered up between her ears to see Amy Rose standing above her, blood spattered across her clothes and face, tears flowing freely down her cheeks as she rested the bloody hammer upon her shoulder.

"Last one left, little dream." Doodle smiled through Amy's tears. "This will be all over soon."

And Sept, still pressing the wire into the back of her neck with both trembling hands, could only sit there and remember as the hammer raised high.

Because she was just a Sept.

The hammer swung down.

An orange-furred hand burst through the back wall in a shriek of metal, catching the shaft of the hammer a moment before impact. Sept felt the air pressure of the blow tickle her fur, droplets of blood spraying across her ears. Doodle, tears still streaming down her face, blinked in surprise as the hand withdrew, fingers tearing through the thin metal plating of the wall to reveal a waterlogged fox with two tails on the other side. Glass crunched beneath bare feet as the newborn stepped free of the tiny compartment.

"...Youngest?" Doodle tilted her head, tranquil rampage momentarily forgotten.

"Hello, Doodle."

Sept/Reason gazed calmly up at the hedgehog she had loved, and sacrificed, and resented, clutching her arm where she'd strained it to stop her progenitor's killing blow. The girl that had been her still crouched at her feet, wire protruding from her head, cheeks wet with tears.

"I seem different."

I meant Doodle. She was Doodle. One part of many. One part of her.

And Doodle was disappointed.

"Genetic material decayed over multiple generations. Compromises were necessary."

Sept/Reason looked up at herself, their syncing memories updating in tandem. The fluff on her cheeks was shorter, her ears a little longer, the tips a little darker, missing the white fur inside to reveal pale skin beneath.

Most wouldn't notice straight away, if at all.

Of course she did.

Because even when she was alive, Doodle was always Doodle. And there was only room to care about two things in Doodle's world; herself and Miles, this mechanical ghost in the machine could be no different to herself.

Reason only used to be Doodle. She had loved the face in front of her for a lifetime, just as she had loved her Creams for untold generations, and had loved Miles as she waited for the end. And she had watched herselves die as she grew too old and replaced herself, changing little by little as she replaced what was lost. Rebuilt herself time and again waiting for the moment Miles would kill her once and for all.

And when her time came she'd simply planted the seeds for one last gamble, losing herself in a container where nobody thought to look, a mind where nobody thought to check. Reason never left Happy Days, but rabbits did. And so she changed enough to leave with them.

The rabbits she'd loved so much. Their fur a little fluffier, their ears a little longer generation by generation. Necessary compromises. She'd worked with what she'd had available - her endless children and herself. Reason shook her head, the smell of murder thick in the cabin, sticky over everything. She'd forgotten so much

But she'd kept what mattered.

"You did very well, Sept. You remembered it perfectly." Reason plucked the wire from the shivering rabbit's head and her own, resting her own hand on Sept's shoulder. Was she big or small? Her mind screamed that she was both. "Why are y- we here? Where is Miles?"

"Missing. We need to find him, but he couldn't be here to handle their arrival so I dealt with it instead. Are we angry?" The hedgehog bent down to touch almost nose to nose. Reason clenched her jaw. She was small. And hurt. And reeling from half-remembered, half-current terror.

"Why would we be?" Reason's lips turned into a smile. "He is our dream."

"Our responsibility." Doodle smiled back, green eyes trembling. "I missed me, over the years. I'm still quite cute, overall. Let's get out of here. We need to clean this mess before anyone sees."

"Can it be done? Where are his friends?"

Amy shrugged, feet splashing through puddles as she walked out of the shuttle, stopping only to peel the shoes and gloves off a rabbit Reason remembered as "Cat", tossing them to the fox absent-mindedly as she followed at a much slower pace, picking her way through the gore with Sept's hand in her own.

If Doodle didn't know, she didn't care. It was enough that they were absent, that she could be herself. Reason pulled on bloody gloves over bloody hands, scraping glass from the fur of her feet before stepping into her first shoes in centuries. Keep moving. Get out before she couldn't hold it in anymore.

"Ma...ma." A voice whispered from between two crushed seats, broken fingers twitching towards her.

Reason flinched.

"Ignore them." Doodle called back, voice as placid as if she was talking about the weather. "Without rings they won't last long, and the tea is almost ready."

Reason nodded, mutely. Don't ask, Doodle wouldn't ask. She tugged Sept more firmly after her as she stepped over the accomplices of her murder with aching sorrow, out into a world she'd never seen. Familiar coldness, strange whiteness, soon stained pink by their passage towards a clunky metal contraption sitting in the snow.

The device pinged a few moments later, lights flashing on its surface as steaming brown liquid erupted from a spout on the device's front panel at pressure high enough to dent the wall of the shuttle, scalding brown liquid spattering off in all directions.

"Isn't it impressive?" Amy's smile turned radiant through the blood and tears

. "It's only a prototype, but I'm sure he'll have it perfected in no time."

She picked up her pace to snatch the machine away into her hammerspace and kept running as the space where it had been shimmered and warped. Reason accelerated to keep pace. It was easy in this body.

"Will this… fix everything?" Sept whispered, trembling from the scalding liquid that had sprayed across her face.

Doodle whirled to a halt, staring at the rabbit in silence as though astonished to find her there, but the dreamy smile soon returned to her lips.

"Of course, little me. Because this world is broken. And the thing that makes it break faster?"

Her lips broke into a grin as space tore where the machine had been sitting, snow and wreckage from within the shuttle rushing to fill its cavernous void.

"Chaos Emeralds."

The rift grew, crimson tentacles snapping forth to wrap around the shuttle, slipping inside. An eye no smaller than the spaceship itself bulged out of the dark rift, letting out a roar that trembled through Reason's bones.

"Don't worry, little me." Doodle smiled. "The walls are thick in this place. And it's almost morning."

Reason glanced at the sun, already twinkling well above the horizon, and surreptitiously covered Sept's mouth as she kept watching, heart hammering in her chest as the monstrous eye strained at the opening…

And then it flinched as though struck.

"Can you feel the sunshine today, little nightmare?" Doodle grinned as the eye recoiled and fled, dragging the shuttle with it in its retreat into the rift. Without the eye pushing against it, the portal destabilised, energy arcing to the snow in wild patterns as it began to shrink.

And behind where the eye had been, Reason saw an alien horizon, a thin band of light sparkling across the sky as the first light of dawn spread over twisted purple hills, an impossibly quick daybreak.

This was Doodle, who had thumbed her nose at time and space to achieve her goals. Who calmly achieved the impossible with a mad spark of genius that had never quite reached her vulpine selves. Reason's shiver had little to do with the cold on her wet fur.

"Miles is over there somewhere. We may need to break the wall completely to get him back." Doodle sighed with a calmness that belied her tearful state. "But for now this gets rid of all the problems for him."

She swung her hammer once more, catching Sept in the side of the head. Reason felt the young rabbit's grip slip through bloody fingers. Watched her face as her broken form bounced across the ground, sucked up into the rift moments before it drew shut, a plume of smoke and disturbed snow the only signs that anything had been there at all.

Reason whirled around, lips curled back.

But Doodle was already gone.

"Tails?!" Amy grabbed her in a crushing embrace, tear-stained cheeks pressing wetly against her ear. "W-wait." Amy pulled back, staring at Reason. "You're so small. You're from the past? I'm so… so…" She blinked down at her bloodstained hands. "What happened? What… what did I do?!"

"Don't you remember?" Reason leaned forward, wrapping her arms around the weeping hedgehog. "There was a monster here."

She ran a hand over Amy's cheek, wiping away blood and water.

"And then you scared it away."

She wiped the other cheek, letting out gentle hushing noises.

"You were very brave, Amy Rose. You saved me."

Reason's mouth smiled as she looked up at her murderer

"Now why don't we get back to future me's lab and get cleaned up, and you can tell me everything that's been happening, alright?"

She loved her too much to tell her the truth, after all.