Authors Note: Chapter 3 time baby. I've been hard at work on this one as my hands were crippled in a car accident shortly following the last upload. I have had to learn to type with my feet and it's been a slow transition. I have worked nearly 650 hours on this one chapter once accidentally electrocuting my feet keyboard to the overflow of my own tears. Enough about me though, it's Sonic time!

It would seem impossible that a light could both be insatiably bright and stingingly cold but that was exactly what the light overhead felt like to the small boy. Upon waking his mind slowly began to spin to life starting with an overwhelming amount of senses. Smells unfamiliar crept into the boy's tiny pathetic nostrils and as previously mentioned his eyes were met immediately with an almost heavenly light. His ears slowly began to ring as he tried to make out the noises around him. Soft mechanical beeping and distant chatter bounced off the walls like the acoustics of a theater. The room was frightening. Every wall was white with unfamiliar scraps and heaps of metal strewn about in sharp and jagged shapes. As the boy's eyes adjusted to take in the light he could make out that these shapes were tools but their frightening nature did not cease. The boy to use the most appropriate of words was shitting his pants with fear. He tried to speak but nothing came out so he laid back down and attempted to make sense of what had brought him to this place as his memory slowly began to resurface.

He remembered his mother waking him up for school. He remembered slumbering onto the bus feeling hot in every area of his body and barely struggling to inch his body along and then he remembered nothing. The bus and then nothing. If the boy had been in a better shape he might have smiled knowing that he would not have to go back to school tomorrow but, with the current conditions factored in the boy would rather have been deep into an advanced calculus lesson than where he was now.

As his pained and exhausted body slowly started to work he heard a loud crash which caused his ears to ring as the doors leading outside the room were thrown open with vigor. The new shapes bothered the boys adjusting eyes and so he shut them attempting to pretend in the chaos that he was somewhere else...anywhere else.

Sonic stared down at the child with mute horror. The child was red from head to toe as if the entire body was the result of a rash. Welts and growths sprung up from various sections of the legs, arms, chest, hands, feet, and face. It looked as if the boy had been bitten thousands upon thousands of times by insects. It was unlike anything the blue hedgehog in all his years of doctoring had ever seen.

"I see what you mean, Grooms. This is bad."

Grooms shook his head at the response and pulled up an X-ray of the boy

"It's worse than it looks like, Sonic. This is cataclysmic. Typically these types of growths by nature are the result of the body attempting to push out something harmful."

Sonic shook his head in agreement wondering where this could be going as he studied the X-rays.

"Well, if you'll look at bone 247 and bone 246 right here on the clavicle they're fractured as if something's been pushing in on them."

Sonic's eyes widened as the gravity of the situation donned upon him.

"These growths arent just mounds pushed out from the body. They're tumor like bubbles that are forming in various areas and pushing out and in. The internal push is keeping the external push from popping and so as they spread it's only a matter of time until there's an external push on vital organs."

Sonic's eyes grew even wider, this time with a different glint.

"You mean to say that there hasn't been a single strike on a vital organ?"

Grooms shook his head seeming to understand the extreme level of luck the two had been granted.

"The legs have multiple which have caused fractures in necessary joints and we see them lining up the entirety of the spine but somehow his body has been able to keep them from forming around the heart, lungs, stomach, and intestines.

Sonic shook his head once again in disbelief. He asked bluntly,

"Grooms, how the hell did this happen?"

Grooms sighed. He had no answer. There was no explanation. The easiest possible one was a genetic mutation but none of their tests had yielded proper results. The entire team was stumped and Sonic took the man's silence as proof to that.

"Has the kid came to yet?"

Sonic asked preparing to examine. Grooms began to reply as he caught sight of the heart rate monitor spiking. The other two doctors had been rushed out once Sonic and Grooms arrived.

"It looks like he just did."

Sonic followed Grooms's eyes and stared down at the boy who had clamped his eyes shut. He felt bad. The poor kid must have been terrified out of his mind.

"Ok, give me a second. I want to talk with the kid."

Grooms began to speak up but decided against it. He nodded and left the room leaving Sonic and the boy with an undetermined terminal illness alone in the quarantined space.