(Ah, my writing at this time was so nice. I mean, right now this is my "modern" writing style, but since people will be reading this at any time, I feel the need to treat this like the past.)

Honest had no idea what had happened after the regal, viridian pineapple left the design room earlier in Chapter 19 of {w/Rosy}. She hadn't followed in fear that causing some sort of scene here would result in her being caught out of class by a teacher, but maybe she should have.

Much like what it seemed to the world's best journalists and reporters, the act of going out in search of the truth was a crucial action that Honest was, in all situations, expected to take. Such a measure should be taken to make sure that all characters, in one's works, were always appropriately represented.

As soon as those last few lines of thoughts crossed Honest's mind, she immediately stretched her arms across the table in front of her. She had failed as a writer!

"Is she... okay?"

Honest was sitting at the far back table in the café, a cloud of dark energy swirling around her head.

As soon as Honest and her shadowy companion had gotten dressed in their uniforms after entering the café that afternoon, the blond cat had thrown herself on the table that Mephiles usually sat at because it was always shaded from the sun and began to expel potentially nausea-inducing gas from who knows where. It was some sort of natural defensive technique she had developed after years and years of dealing with the stresses of helping business run per usual in this strange, messed up world she had created- evolution at its finest.

"I don't care if the cat is well or not. That seat belongs to me."

The original speaker, who had said "Is she... okay?", had been Shadow who had spoken to Rouge, but then Mephiles also said something once he had stepped into the café and became a witness to a live theft, saying "I don't care if the cat is well or not. That seat belongs to me" (Just to clear things up).

He pushed past the bat and the hedgehog whose form he had taken so that he didn't always appear as a puddle of goo (which greatly improved his chances of being hired after a job interview if he ever sought to go to one). Once his path was clear of any obstacles, the personification of darkness floated in a straight line towards his table.

"That's my seat. Go find someplace much brighter to sit," he told her.

"No," she said, her voice muffled by the table.

"Why not?" he asked.

Honest raised her head and she looked as if she were nauseous, rooting around in one of the pockets on her apron until she found her cellphone. Her fingers moved as if she were typing something, and then things started happening.

First, Mephiles turned his head to look out the window as an echidna man walked by, carrying what looked like a stack of two-by-fours under one arm. He had a hammer in one hand and was throwing it up into the air and catching it, whistling as he did so.

"Ah!" came Rouge's sudden interjection. "They're making renovations to the Hedgehog Hut Pizza today. I totally forgot to tell you guys."

"What does that mean for us?" Shadow asked. Her and him were still standing in the middle of the empty-for-the-most-part restaurant.

"Oh, nothing really," she explained. "Except that there might be a bit of noise as you're working today."

Next, the ground started to rumble and Rouge rushed outside.

"Look!" she shouted. Shadow followed her out, but Mephiles just stayed where he was, floating beside his table which Honest had stolen and was still sitting there.

"Is that a... tank?" came Shadow's confused question.

Suddenly the echidna outside saw what it was they were staring at and threw his hammer at the armored shell of the tank with Eggman's logo on the front. When the echidna ran away, the hammer hit the tank and ricocheted off, flying through the window above the table. When the window became shattered, the wind outside blew the curtains open and let light into the café. It was shining upon Mephiles.

He hissed and melted, hiding under a chair.

The tank passed and the rumbling died away.

Shadow and Rouge ran after the tank, but suddenly stopped as they rounded the corner."Wh-Where did it go?"

Honest smiled silently, obviously satisfied by the way that she ended up handling her problem, which was that Mephiles was trying to make her get up.

Suddenly, however, the black ooze that was he began to travel upwards, climbing into the seat and reforming once again. Mephiles was now sitting across from her, with practically all of his weight resting on top of the table. Honest opened her eyes to see his mouth-less face inches away from her trembling face. Somehow, despite having a mouth, his expression was surprisingly clear to Honest. She knew exactly what kind of mood he was in... even if he didn't expressly understand himself what exact emotion he was portraying. I say that because he really didn't feel anything. In that way, it could be said that he was simply moving his face in a way in order for it to look like the formation one would expect a mortal being's face to assume when they were feeling that specific emotion.

Honest sweat-dropped.

"It surprises me what kind of lengths you're willing to go through to get us alone."

Suddenly it felt like it was a hundred degrees Fahrenheit in the café that day, and yet she was shivering so fast it was more like she was blurring.

"C- C- You're- c-creeping me out!" Honest fought out, feeling as Honest as she'd ever felt before. That was exactly how she felt right now- creeped out.

She eventually recovered herself enough in order to feel angry. "That wasn't what I meant to do at all! I was trying to get you away from me, not nearer!"

The foul, unholy creature across from her had kept the same expression throughout her entire freak-out session. "Oops, you messed up."

"What does that mean?!" Honest asked, still very perturbed. She knew what that meant... she guessed, but- why the heck was this horrendous demon the one to say this sort of thing to her?

"G-Get away..." she said in the same dark, whispery manner in which an evil spirit would, slowly ducking underneath the edge of the table.

Eventually reinforcements arrived at the scene in the form of a pink hedgehog.

"Uh, Honest? What's going on?"

Honest felt stuck. She couldn't move. "H-Help!" She clutched the fabric of the back of the seat behind her in her hands as if her chair were one, giant stress ball.

Her savior wasn't Rosy. It was Amy. She pulled Honest from her place fairly easily. All it took was one tug and Honest released her fierce grip on the back of her seat.

Even though he could have totally followed them with very little effort, Mephiles remained where he was, propped up on his elbows, and simply turned his head 270 degrees to watch them.

"He's so creepy!" was all Honest could bring herself to say once Amy had wrestled her into a sitting position on the ground.

"Yeah, tell me about it," Amy said, rolling her eyes. "He is the only being in the history of the planet to successfully kill Sonic. You should be creeped out. And that's not taking into consideration the fact that he's also a walking corpse comprised of pure darkness."

She suddenly turned her head. "About time you guys showed up. Here, Shadow. Come take care of your scared kitten."

Honest couldn't see anything but the icy stare of the demon sitting at a table ten feet away as Shadow came to her aid now. As he pulled Honest into the kitchen, she saw Mephiles melting slowly where he sat.

The next day, when Mephiles came to the café right at its opening that afternoon, he was met with a set of guardsmen. Well, guard cat and guard hedgehog.

"Oh? What is this?" he asked, sounding more amused than upset.

Honey was holding what looked like one of those stakes frequently pictured in all those dorky Netflix vampire-hunting shows. "You're not allowed in the café anymore!"

He looked at the wooden stick and blinked. "Why do you have that thing?"

"Because," Honey said. "On TV I heard that the undead, once stabbed through the heart with something wooden, are sent back to the demon realm!"

"'The demon realm'? Where's that?" he asked, his eyes narrowing in annoyance.

"You would know! That's where you came from, demon spawn!" she insisted.

The embodiment of darkness rolled his eyes. "I'm not a demon. I am a simple element found in nature."

The other person standing guard outside of the café was Silver. This whole time, he had been standing there with some gigantic spear like those pictured in history books detailing the sorts of ancient weapons used by native peoples in the far past. He was grasping it tightly in front of him, but he didn't look all too formidable as he was literally shaking in his boots. His glowing, blue future boots.

"Y-You have to... st-stay away from the café so that you don't... disrupt business!"

The walking mushroom garden turned his head to focus his attention on the other guard.

"Business? What business? You're keeping me out so that I can't see Honest," he said. He didn't seem too angry. It was more like he was trying to get on their nerves. Was that all he wanted to do? Wasn't that all he had wanted in '06, too? To mess with people?

Honest was watching all this go on from the window. Eventually Mephiles noticed her, however, and attempted to push past Honey and Silver. However, as he nearly was about to pull the handle on one of the doors, Honey and Silver came together in front of him, preventing him doing so.

"Let me in," he said darkly, well, darker than usual. They both shook their heads "no". Honest could see the purple mist swirling and gathering around him and knew then to run, so she did, jumping over the front counter and hiding behind it, peeking around the side so she could call the others over.

"Cosmo! Manic! Blaze! Over here!" she whisper-yelled. They all stopped what they were doing and ran to duck behind the front counter. Blaze dropped her broom and it fell to the floor with a soft clank.

Foom! was the sort of sound that came when the chaos all began to go down. It wasn't a "boom" because it wasn't really an explosion. It was more like a cloud of dust being released.

"Honey? Si-" Suddenly the front doors flew open and Honey and Silver ran in screaming, throwing the door to the kitchen open and diving inside.

"Manic, Cosmo, you guys go to the kitchen, too," Honest told them. They didn't reply as they scrambled for the kitchen door. Blaze looked over at Honest in a confused manner.

"You're not joining them?" she asked her. Honest shook her head.

"No. We're going to need more than fire-power to deal with him," Honest said.

Blaze wasn't sure what she meant by that, but she nodded anyway.

Just then the front doors to the café were blown clean off their hinges as the storm cloud of living darkness outside made its entrance. Peering into its center, there was no sign at all that any solid matter existed inside the cloud anymore.

The sound of fire igniting beside Honest signaled that the fight was on as Blaze stood up and began to fire a steady stream of flames at the darkness cloud's center. It seemed that wherever fire met with dark, a shining light was produced.

"No, Blaze!" Honest yelled over the loud noise that was made by the darkness. "Light is formed by darkness and flame! You're only making him stronger."

The fires started in the purple cat's palms slowly died. "Oh.."

She looked worriedly at Honest. "What do we do, then?"

Honest smiled a cat smile. "You remember what I said, right?"

"'More than fire-power'?" Blaze repeated her earlier statement. She had directed it towards the raging storm of darkness as if she were asking it. When she looked back to Honest, she was typing something frantically into her phone.

Honey and Silver were peeking out from the pass-through at the front of the kitchen at the café as it was being destroyed before their very eyes. "Rouge is not going to like what she sees when she comes back from the staff meeting at the club."

Silver is sniffing pitifully beside her. "If Shadow were here, we could use the Scepter of Darkness to catch him." The silver hedgehog opened his eyes and looked around the kitchen for anything that might be helpful in this situation. Immediately his eyes lit up when he spotted something sitting atop one of the ovens. He left to get it.

Honey turned around. "Where are you go-?"

A vase with a couple of violet flowers had been sitting at the very back of an oven on a thin, wooden shelf. When Silver jumped to snag it, he hit it with just the very end of one of his fingers. It fell and rolled across the burners then off the edge.

The sound of shattered glass reverberated through the café until it had essentially made it to everyone's ears... and equivalent audio sensory organs.

The cloud of living (and coincidentally also extremely destructive) darkness, once it had heard this, redirected itself towards the source. As it moved, tables and chairs were blown around the room, breaking windows and spilling lots and lots of salt.

"Well, luck sure isn't on his side," Blaze said. Suddenly a whole wall of the kitchen was torn off by the gusting wind produced by Mephiles.

"Silver is in there!" the cat exclaimed, running straight into the storm cloud and popping out the other side. Honest attempted to follow, but there was an unseen force holding her back. Obviously Mephiles didn't want her to interfere. But, what was going on in there? There was no way that Honest would let what had happened yesterday in 5th period to happen again.

"Where are you go-" I suddenly stopped when I felt something weird happening. It was like I suddenly became more aware of what was going on. I was forced to disregard this, though, because soon after, I saw something glass fall and hit the ground, shattering.

It was pretty loud despite the roaring wind around us. I immediately tensed. That demon outside hadn't heard that, right?

My answer came when I saw the wall in front of me ripped away as if it were one of the walls of a gigantic box around us. The kitchen was square... in that way, it might've been the fourth wall he ripped away...

I was forced out of my uncharacteristic off-topic thinking when suddenly I was tugged backwards by Cosmo.

"Sorry," she apologized as if saving my life were some sort of injustice.

"Guys, I have an idea," came Silver's self-assured statement as he stepped in front of the group, hiding something in his hand.

"What are you doing?" I ask. "Flowers can't possibly do anything to stop a demon darkness storm thing!" I was trying my hardest to make him see just how ridiculous he was being. However, it didn't seem to be working.

He was still standing there looking just like he had when he had been determined to protect his future thirteen years ago. He then uncovered the small, purple plants in his hand.

The wind flying around them and the chairs and tables spinning around them in the air didn't slow a bit, much less cease entirely like he had planned. Instead, the clouds moved away to reveal Honest who was trying desperately to push through to get to them.

Finally. I can see what's going on.

With the point of view now shifted back to her, Honest still could do nothing else but kick the invisible wall in front of her.

"Hey! What gives? Let me in!" Honest yelled.

Suddenly a voice erupted from within the dark cloud. "I know what you're trying to do, Silver, but it's not going to work. You'll never distract me from what I'm going to do."

"What? Why are you suddenly choosing Honest over me? She's like my mother, you can't do that!" Silver yelled, crying.

The wind stopped.

"You don't get it, do you?"

The clouds began to go away as well, fading slowly as if they were going out of the rendering visibility.

Resembling a splattered bug, liquid darkness appeared as a blob on the ground and then formed Mephiles again. "You're so naive." He walked out of the still slowly dissipating fog and crouched in front of the silver hedgehog.

"That's not my purpose for Honest," he said. "It never was."

Silver suddenly felt unbelievably stupid. "H-Here then." He stuck the flower behind the demon's left ear. "Take it and get out of here."

Silver wasn't mad at him, was he? As soon as Mephiles stood up and turned around, Silver ran out of the building.

The personification of the absence of light attempted to walk out of the kitchen silently, but Honest was still standing there. The invisible wall had since then disappeared, but she still wasn't moving.

"Hey! Where do you think you're going?" she asked angrily. He stopped and looked at her. For some reason he looked very real or at least somewhat less demon-like as he stood there. Perhaps it was because of the vast amount of energy he had used just now. No. That couldn't be it. He never ran out of energy. He wasn't mortal. Maybe it was just the flower behind his ear. "Can I get some sort of explanation for everything that happened?"

He blinked. "What do you mean? I destroyed the cafe to get to you."

"But what for?" Honest was seething mad.

... He didn't say anything.

Honest only thought to do what she tried to do with all her adversaries.

"What's it you want from me...?"

... After even more silence, he just said, "I can't tell you right now."

Suddenly the sound of footsteps on concrete forced Honest to look towards the entrance. A bell sounded and the front doors to the cafe opened.

"What in Chaos happened here?!"

Everyone pointed at Mephiles when they saw that Shadow and Rouge had entered the cafe after returning from the meeting at the club.

"He did it!"