It was now April 2nd, 2019, and Honest poked her head into the cafe one afternoon, taking extra precautions today. Once she had determined that the coast was indeed clear, Honest wiped non-existent sweat from her brow and entered the establishment.
Now well into her shift, Honest still couldn't bring herself to get comfortable, knowing that as soon as she did, her arch-nemesis, the embodiment of darkness, would show up and cause some frightening ordeal like he had done yesterday.
The fear Honest was experiencing wasn't anything like the fear of being in a confined space, or being late for a meeting, or even the fear of being harmed or dying. It was just an overwhelming sense of dread. I mean, he had actually killed someone in the past, so of course that was something that a person would be afraid of happening again, but then again, the person he killed came back to life. No, this was something else entirely.
Honest stopped next to a table with a tray of coffee and cream. The Babylon Rogues were sitting around it, seeming to be patiently awaiting their drinks.
"Oh! There you are. We've been waiting quite a while for that," Wave said, laughing. She then frowned. "I hope they're not cold."
"Of course they're not cold," Jet said, leaning back in his chair. "Honest is an excellent waitress." Wave just rolled her eyes.
However, Honest wasn't giving them their coffees. Instead she just stood there, the tray jittering wildly. Jet looked up at her. "Uh... you okay?"
Suddenly Honest jumped three feet in the air when a gloved hand tapped her on her shoulder. The three coffee mugs jumped with her, sloshing but not spilling anything astonishingly. "Honest!"
It was Honey. Honest was breathing heavily, but was still able to train her attention on Rouge's assistant manager. "Wh-Wh-What?"
"What has gotten into you? Are you going to give these three their coffees, or am I going to have to call Rouge on you?"
Honest then suddenly realized where she was. Looking in front of her, she could see Jet, Wave, and Storm, each sporting dissatisfied frowns. One of these frowns stood out to Honest the most, and she was deeply troubled by it.
Honest's face erupted into a variegated crimson. She then set the tray down and stepped away from the table, covering her face with her hands. "I'm so sorry!"
Luckily, Shadow was close enough at the time to witness the whole situation, so he arrived to help, pulling Honest across the floor of the restaurant to a wooden bench against the back wall. It was put there to disguise an unsightly scorch mark, the result of a stray one of Blaze's fireballs.
"What's bothering you?" he asked. Honest smiled, relieved that at least someone understood her.
"Oh, you know, the possibility of our usual visitor being, well, usual," Honest told him, acting severely out-of-it.
The dark pineapple looked somewhat confused for a second, but he soon realized who she was talking about. "Oh, yeah. I guess you should be relatively scared, but it shouldn't bother you this much."
Jet probably thought the conflict of this chapter centered on him, but he was wrong. That was just her standard reaction to seeing him. The real conflict centered on probably the last person he would think of that had any relation to Honest.
"Okay, I admit me being this paranoid is a little dramatic, but he's caused trouble two chapters in a row here now (that's three days by the way). What if he strikes again? First, he was just being extraordinarily creepy, then he became... what was it... his primordial form? And then, to top it all off, he straight up assaulted you in your natural environment. Aren't you just as terrified as I am?"
"Yes," he said in the most non-terrified manner possible. His eyes were slate voids.
Honest's face became red again. "Then what thing could you possibly be refraining from telling me?"
The red-striped rodent took a deep breath and his gaze flitted around the room, not lingering on any one point for too long.
"Silver and I got together earlier and decided we would try sealing him away next time he shows up," he told her. "We're hiding the Scepter away in a secret, undisclosed location until then."
Honest listened to all of this while attempting to calm her breathing. However, after thinking deeply about what he had said, her heart made a strange, jerking movement.
"You-You're sealing him away for good?" Honest inquired in a small voice.
The way she had asked that startled Shadow.
"Uh, yeah, that's our plan," he told her equally as quietly, suddenly unsure of himself. "Are you okay with that?"
"Kinda... I mean yes! I mean no... not really... uh..." Honest sat up straight. They were both on their knees on the bench, facing each other. It didn't take a seating specialist to know that they weren't using the bench correctly. She played with her hands nervously. "Even though his game is 13 years old now, Mephiles is a great source of plot, you know, and, uh... Well, I don't want you to get rid of him... just yet." Then she did some more thinking. "Wait... how did you get Silver to agree to that?"
"Well, he didn't necessarily agree to it, but he was more worried about him hurting you than he was with him not being able to see his best friend anymore," Shadow told her. "They're not together are they?"
"That's up to the reader," Honest answered. "I'm not going to force Silver to do anything he's not comfortable with."
"Then what about the two greenies over there?" he asked next, pointing over his shoulder at Sonic's brother and evil twin sharing a raspberry pie between them, laughing whilst they talked to each other.
"They're... comfortable with it..." Honest said quietly, bowing her head. "Besides, Silver, despite only being a few years younger than us, is still a little kid in my eyes. It wouldn't be fair to him for me to place him in a serious relationship before he's ready."
"Why don't you ever ask me how I feel about things? I'm his father, after all."
"Aha!" Honest suddenly stood up, still on the bench. "So you admit it!"
Shadow didn't react very strongly to this. He closed his eyes. "Since there's no way to tell if he's biological or not right now, I'm just going to claim him as my responsibility until then." He opened his eyes. "Since you're only eighteen, however, you're not eligible to adopt him yet. Until then, we can't legally call him ours, but for now I just feel obligated to look out for him."
Honest sat down again, her tail swishing side to side with an unbelievable swiftness.
Apparently the fact that he felt at least the tiniest bit of responsibility for the little, fuzzy time traveler caused her to feel tremendously jubilant. For whatever reason, however, was unknown.
Usually, when scrolling through Zerochan, DeviantArt, Tumblr, Pinterest, and other assorted image sharing sites, you will find many images of the three heroic hedgies- a.k.a. Sonic, Shadow, and Silver- together. Drawing them together is an artistic habit of most people just because of the unity and balance that can be drawn from these three key rodents. Most of these images included something about Sonic or Shadow teasing Silver in some way. So, Shadow saying that he wanted to "look out for" Silver was probably born out of a want for retaliation against Sonic for always picking on him, as most times Shadow is only following along with whatever Sonic was doing.
The reason for Honest wanting to feel responsible for Silver was... the fact that she wanted, no, craved for someone to look after. Don't ask me why this was; I have no clue. Perhaps Honest just wanted to feel needed or important in some way, and being expected to take care of someone was her way of achieving this. Who knows.
The conversation had begun with Shadow being concerned for Honest because she was being overly paranoid, fearing that she or he would once again be attacked by the personification of the absence of light while at work and had ended with Honest and Shadow finally agreeing on how they currently viewed Silver.
Now Honest felt a lot better. She crawled off of the bench and stood up, straightening her apron and tightening her ribbon. "Okay, then. Let's get back to work."
Shadow nodded and went to the kitchen window to pick up the tray waiting for him.
Not only did Mephiles not bother to bother them today, but Sonic didn't show up as well. For some reason, neither of them were here today. Perhaps Mephiles needed to rest before attacking again... No, he doesn't get tired; that's ridiculous. Perhaps Sonic needed to recover from the strange hex Mephiles had put on him yesterday. Then again, Honest was sure she had seen Sonic in class earlier, so that couldn't be it.
However, upon exiting the cafe after a long day of nothing, Honest and her shadowy compadre were met with- guess who- Sonic.
"Hello, Shadow, Honest," Sonic said, nodding to each of them.
Neither of them knew exactly how to react to this, so they both silently decided to nod in a similar fashion to how he had done, resembling, at least somewhat, those plastic desk birds endlessly dipping their beaks into water.
Sonic started walking, so Honest and Shadow supposed that he intended for them to follow him and did.
Shadow tilted his head. "How are you faring?" he asked.
"Very well. You mean after what happened yesterday at the cafe, right?" They couldn't see his face, but if they could they would find him smiling as if having a hex put on him had been a rather pleasant affair.
"Right... Mephiles didn't... alter your brain any, did he?"
"Look, I appreciate you looking out for me, faker, but I really wasn't harmed at all by the spell that creep-o put on me. It just made me... go away for a while. Mentally, that was." The azure speedster then increased his speed and disappeared into the distance.
"I seriously don't think he's okay," Shadow said as soon as he was out of sight.
"He's never 'okay'," Honest told him. "He has been and has always been a tower with a faulty foundation. As soon as even the smallest breeze comes his way, there will be problems."
Honest saw a blur across the street from them. "I wonder where he's heading?"
Shadow didn't see what she had seen, so he took that as Honest wondering where Sonic was heading in life in general.
"Towards trouble most likely."
Uh, so, I didn't originally intend for the conversation between Honest and Shadow to drag on for so long, so the chapter ended up being way longer than I wanted it to. I'm going to have to split it up into a couple of chapters. See you in the next one, I guess.
(So apparently, after all this time, I eventually decided to turn {Cafe Edition} into something serious. Why, you might ask? I seriously do not know.)