Aquarius
On the home front especially, change is in the air. At one level you may be trying to work out what a younger person is holding back. At a quite different level you might wish to move items in a kitchen or bathroom. You might also be aware of taking part in displacement activity rather than getting to grips with information you know you ought to study. With friends doing all they can to lure you from your lair, study-time could be limited.
Even on his wilder days, hanging by his tails from a street lamp with a pair of binoculars clamped to his eyes was not his idea of a fun pastime. Of course, previous 'fun' pastimes he'd indulged in were leaping off cliffs in order to save Sonic from certain death whenever the hedgehog forgot about that weird little thing called 'physics', and trying to stay away from Amy when she was on a hammer rampage.
But, as needs must. There was something he needed to know, desperately, and obviously the only way he could find out was to peer inside Cream's bedroom with night-vision goggles. Obviously.
It had all started earlier in the month, when he tried to bake a cake.
Cooking, as he had been informed by the faintly maniacal TV chef-of-the-week, was essentially chemistry. You plop in a little bit of salt, a little bit of pepper, maybe a dash of polyphosphate if the devil was in you. Easy as one, two, three right?
No. Not right. Not right at all. The danger with cooking being like chemistry is that, well, Tails had rather a lot of chemicals. And he had curiosity. So, what about substituting salt with a pinch of something a little more...exotic? The result was a cake which, whilst looking fine, made him hallucinate. For five hours, he had thought his door was a puffer fish. Never again.
So, in a desperate bid to end his cup-ramen and raw spaghetti devouring ways, he had sought cookery classes from the only person he knew who could cook even in the vaguest sense of the word.
Cream.
She was a good teacher. This was not surprising, given that she was named after an ingredient, but even so, he learned quickly. She organised his cupboards, removing anything that was glowy or radioactive or that, most importantly, would not taste good if dumped in gumbo. When he presented her with his first dish and tentatively asked her to try it, she only had one fit afterwards. Things were looking up.
But after three weeks of daily tuition and three trips to hospital, she'd said she couldn't teach him anymore. No one had seen her since that day, and she'd spent a lot of time in her house, refusing to see anyone ('anyone' being a synonym for Tails, or so Sonic gloated).
So, there he was, trying to find out what tragedy had befallen her and caused her seclusion. With high-powered binoculars. At ten o' clock at night. If nothing else, it would make for an interesting anecdote. But what he had failed to remember was that Cream's house was one of the most secure in the entire world, and that was because he'd done the security. Of course, he'd bypassed a lot of the external measures like the portcullis trigger and the DNA scanner, but a genius could hardly be expected to remember all his great ideas in one sitting.
Of course, this meant that the cheerful pigeon which had just perched upon his street lamp was, in fact, a highly sophisticated robot defence mechanism. One that exploded.
After Cream and Vanilla had scraped him off the pavement and reassembled him in their kitchen chair, he felt a sensation of dread building in what remained of his lower intestine. Cream looked at him shiftily (or as close an approximation of shiftily as her cute features would allow) and said nothing. Deciding to revert to Knuckle's style of negotiations ("This is my head! I will hit you with it until you break or it does!") he came right out and asked her: "Why have you been so secretive lately?"
Cream blushed modestly, and, with a few moments delay, opened the fridge. Inside was a cake that make his teeth ache just looking at it. White frosting, sculpted icing-sugar roses, three tiers high and with a smell that could cause road accidents, it loomed above all other foodstuffs in the fridge like a towering, diabetes-inducing giant.
"You were doing so well at cooking, Tails, so I decided to make you a cake. I've been trying three weeks to get it just right. This is attempt number 28!" Cream said shyly.
He didn't say anything. He just drooled. Deep down inside, he marvelled at it. 28 attempts? He only ever bothered to repeat his experiments three times! Meanwhile, Vanilla bustled about, trying not to look overly proud of her daughter's amazing baking skills.
"One question, Cream. Why is it...uh...a wedding cake?" he said, pointing to the plastic bride and groom at the top. The groom was wearing a tux uncomfortably similar to the one he'd worn for one of Cream's birthday parties.
Vanilla started to interrupt, but Cream was, sadly, too quick.
"Mother says the only cake worth baking for a guy like you is a wedding cake," Cream replied innocently.
He looked at Cream, then he looked at her mother. Then back at Cream again. Then wondered how quickly he could sprint from the room. And if the price was a lifetime of chilli-dogs and soup in a mug, then that was a price he was willing to pay.