It was a gorgeous morning. After staying up just a little late during the fiasco last night, Blaze allowed herself to sleep in—till eight AM, heaven help us all. Now, still a little drowsy, she opened her window and savored the morning breeze and sunshine.
Marine went bouncing off to play with the rest of the Kid Brigade at the first opportunity, and Blaze decided to celebrate the calm with a quick walk. Flickies and other birds frolicked and squabbled through the grass, and a squirrel paused its bouncing trajectory to scold at her peevishly. A very pleasant morning, to be sure.
About five minutes into the walk, she was brought up short by a jaunty wolf whistle. Narrowing her eyes, she turned around sharply—only to find Silver, leaning back against a tree with his arms folded and the faintest hint of a grin tugging at one corner of his mouth.
"If I were you, I would be careful," said Blaze darkly. "Don't forget, back in my dimension I'm royalty. I could have you clapped in irons for flirtatious advances upon my person."
Silver shrugged, a crooked smile now creeping inexorably onto his muzzle. Blaze fought back a smile of her own—dang, he was cute when he tried to be cocky.
"I'll take that risk, I guess. So, where you goin'?" asked Silver, trotting over to join her.
"Just walking."
And for a while they just walked.
"Last night was pretty crazy, huh?" ventured Silver at last.
"It was definitely . . . strange." Blaze shook her head slowly. "It's so odd, to think that Amy has been lying all these years. She certainly kept up a convincing act. It must be hard on Sonic, too."
"He seemed fine with it," said Silver, shrugging. "After all, he's been trying to escape from her for ages—now he finally can."
"Maybe . . . " said Blaze, but somehow she sounded unconvinced. After a little more silence, she smiled thoughtfully. "Really, though. It seems like things just can't settle down to normal for all of us, doesn't it? Always some new upheaval."
"Yeah," murmured Silver. He glanced at her surreptitiously. "But, um . . . y-you and me—we're good, right? I mean, you're not gonna suddenly . . . "
Blaze gave a soft breath of amusement.
"Of course not."
Silver grinned shyly.
"S-sorry, I—"
"You," Blaze scolded gently, "need to become more assertive. For your own sake, Silver! You shouldn't let people walk all over you."
"I don't," mumbled Silver. Blaze stopped walking and turned to look at him earnestly.
"Yes, you do. Shadow pushes you around constantly, Sonic's hardly better, and here you could toss both of them across the continent if you really wanted to."
"Ahh—there are times I do want to," said Silver ruefully.
"And?" prodded Blaze.
Silver sighed.
"Well, look at it this way. You know how you work so hard, keeping your fire powers in check? You know how you keep a tight hold on them, all the time, because you know how much destruction they could cause if they got out of control?"
Blaze nodded silently.
"I can't afford to let my powers go out of control either," said Silver quietly. "You remember, I nearly killed the wrong hedgehog, back when we first met Sonic. After that I got to thinking about how easily things can go wrong, and . . . it scared me. If I start to use my psychokinesis to do petty things like get back at people who annoy me, I might start using it whenever I'm angry. If I start using it when I'm angry, I might start using it to kill anyone who makes me angry. I might get used to killing, start doing it casually, start doing it for power, become . . . " He trailed off.
Blaze said nothing, her eyes following the sway of a daisy-head by her feet. Subconsciously her arms slipped into a folded position.
"Do you have that little faith in yourself?" she said at last, not looking up.
"I'm . . . scared," said Silver miserably, looking away. For a moment neither of them said anything.
"But at least for a good cause," murmured Blaze. Silver shrugged hopefully as she looked up. "I don't know. You do what you feel is best, Silver. I suppose that's all I can offer you."
"It's 'nuff," said Silver ruefully. He hesitated, rubbing his arm. "So, can we . . . um, just keep going now? This is awkward."
Smiling slightly, Blaze resumed walking.
After a few minutes of comfortable silence, Silver and Blaze ran into something new and unusual.
"Was this here before?" asked Blaze, glancing back and forth. They had been skirting the edge of a meadow, but right through the center of this meadow was a strange groove in the dirt. About two feet wide, it cut a shallow path of worn, beaten soil through the grass and flowers. Even stranger, it seemed to extend as far as the eye could see, in either direction.
"Did a spaceship crash here, or something?" marveled Silver, crouching down to place a palm on the groove carefully. "It's not warm, anyway."
Suddenly there was a rapid thrumming sound in the distance. Silver's head jerked up, and he just barely had time to hurl himself out of the way before a roaring streak of blue nearly ran him over. A clap of displaced air buffeted both him and Blaze, and then suddenly everything was silent again.
Silver picked himself up, blinking.
"That . . . wasn't Sonic, was it?"
They waited four minutes. The blue maelstrom roared by again.
"It is Sonic," said Blaze, raising her eyebrows as she looked after the disappearing figure. "He must be running in circles."
"Till he wore a path in the ground?!" spluttered Silver. "How long does that even take?"
"Long enough that we should probably stop him for his health," said Blaze resignedly. "Silver, do you think you could catch him? . . . "
"Sure, I can try!" said Silver cheerfully, charging psychokinesis into both his hands. "One halted hedgehog, coming right up!"
Blaze's eyes flicked upwards slightly in a semi-roll, but only to prevent herself from smiling.
The roar drew closer again. Silver's psychokinesis rose with an electronic whine, and a sheet of pale-blue energy flashed across the beaten track. A whoosh and thunder of passing air, Sonic slowed for the tiniest second, just enough that you could actually pick out his form, and suddenly the blue aura exploded from around him and he was pounding onwards again.
"He's going too fast for my psychokinesis to catch on!" said Silver, awed. "That's got to be several Mach!"
"Let me try," said Blaze grimly, flicking a serpent of flame across the ground and feeding it until it grew into a towering wall of fire. "Hopefully he'll slow down when he sees this, and then you can catch him."
Four minutes. Sonic came shrieking through again; by the time he presumably caught sight of the fire he had already shot straight through it, sending long streamers of flame trailing through the slipstream his speed created.
"He didn't catch on fire, did he?" asked Silver, looking after him.
"At that speed, I doubt it," sighed Blaze. "Now what?"
"Guess I'll have to do this the hard way," sighed Silver. Looking around, he found a large rock and levitated it so it was right by Sonic's track. When Sonic came by again, Silver timed himself carefully and flung the boulder directly in Sonic's path.
Sonic had quick reflexes, necessarily, but this was a little sudden. He skidded, attempted to swerve, failed, caught the rock with his foot, pitched forward, and executed something like an involuntary spindash. Then the imperfect momentum caused him to uncurl and sent him tumbling and skidding violently across the ground, struggling to get back into a proper spindash roll. Silver winced and caught him with his psychokinesis quickly, before he got beaten against the ground any more.
"Woah," said Sonic dizzily as Silver set him down. He lay still for a second, getting his bearings, than sat up, grinning bitterly and nursing a bloodied nose. "Geez, you guys. I'm guessing you thought that was necessary?"
"Our apologies, Sonic," said Blaze. "We were concerned about you. How long have you been running? You've worn a path into the ground!"
"Ahh, that." Sonic flexed his shoulders one by one off-handedly, checking if they were in-joint. "I'm kinda running a pretty small circuit here. Normally I'd just circle the continent a couple of times, but with all the weird things that have been going on lately, I figured I'd better stick close." He got to his feet and surveyed the beaten trail in the meadow morosely. "Man. They don't make ground like they used to!"
"You must have been running since late last night!" accused Blaze, folding her arms and refusing to let the subject drop.
"Only this morning. Lay off me, Mom!" protested Sonic, rolling his eyes. "I can't help it if I started running and forgot to stop. Besides, the summer Olympics are only two years away, and I hear some of Mario's crew are really putting in the extra training hours. I'm not taking any chances! Can you imagine getting outrun by Mario?" He shuddered.
"Sonic," said Blaze warningly.
"Whaaaaat?" protested Sonic, spreading his hands.
"Is that the only reason you've started running like you're possessed?'
"I'm not possessed," sighed Sonic, clearly getting fed up with this conversation. "Just woke up feeling awfully antsy this morning." He chuckled. "Heh, antsy. These ants have started following us around. Like little teeny ant-stalkers!" He made a scurrying motion with his index and middle fingers jokingly. Silver chuckled under his breath, but Blaze sighed wearily.
"Sonic, if something's wrong—"
"Then I'd better be the first to know!" finished Sonic. "Hey, look, it's great talkin' to you guys, but I've gotta get going. It's later than I thought, and Tails and I had plans for the afternoon. Want to race to my place, Blaze?"
"No, I—" Blaze didn't get to finish.
"How 'bout you then, Silver? Wanna race, Silv?" Sonic sang, dashing a quick circle around the other hedgehog. "Hey, hey, I'll race you to that tree over there. See that tree?" Silver turned to look, and Sonic shoved him in the back playfully and took off. "Kidding! See ya!"
"Well, there you go," said Silver, catching his balance. "He's fine."
Blaze's expression clearly showed that she was still not satisfied.
"Aww, come on!" Silver sighed. "What makes you so sure that Sonic would even care?"
Blaze shook her head.
"Something just seems off . . . "
Sonic tore up to his house and circled twice, winding down his speed. Then he burst indoors.
"Hey Tails! Ready to get going?"
"Almost!" called Tails, hurrying down the stairs. "Just let me get my Chaos Emerald tracker!"
Sonic followed as Tails whisked into his newly-tidied workshop.
"Say . . . I was sure I'd left it on the workbench . . . " murmured Tails, looking around. "Maybe I left it in the—yagh!"
"BOO!" squealed a familiar voice, as a small navy-blue form exploded from inside a box of spare parts.
"Bokkun!" snapped Tails, picking himself up from the floor. "What are you doing in here?"
"Cream said I could come and visit whenever I wanted," said Bokkun smugly, leaning his elbows on the edge of the box.
"Visit her, not us," said Sonic. "Get going."
Bokkun tossed a broken wire spool at him and stuck out his tongue.
"Oh, fine. Then I guess you don't want to hear my big news."
"No, we don't. Get out!" scolded Sonic, pointing at the door.
"Well, your loss," sang Bokkun, hopping out of the box and beginning to saunter ever-so-casually out. "But it'll be your fault if you don't find Master Eggman's big secret, when it was rrrrright under your noses!"
Ignoring the hedgehog and fox's sour looks, the little robo pulled a tattered ream of paper out of his bag and waved it in the air nonchalantly.
"Yeah, I guess you just don't want to see any old secret plans . . . "
Even as he realized it was probably a trick, Tails dove to snatch the papers out of Bokkun's hands. The minute he skimmed their contents, his eyes widened.
"L-log?" he stammered. "This is—this is Eggman's journal?"
"Yeah, he keeps an official log of all the important stuff that happens," said Bokkun, leaning back against the doorframe smugly. "When we were at Merkel Peak, he didn't have his usual log-taking computer with him, so he wrote up all his notes by hand. Yesterday he got the papers mixed up with old junk documents and threw them out with the trash!"
"And they wound up here, how?" asked Sonic suspiciously.
"I dug 'em out and brought 'em here, of course!" scoffed Bokkun. "Doncha see? You wanted to ask Master Eggman about the thing that escaped. Now you can pretend you found these papers in the dump, and he won't suspect me of anything! You can ask all you want!"
"First of all, that has got to be the world's most obvious trap," groaned Sonic. "Second of all, who needs the old Egghead? We already found out it was those weird tropical ants!"
"Read the papers," said Bokkun, pointing.
Tails was reading them. His hands were beginning to shake.
"Listen to this, Sonic," he whispered. "'New entry, April 29: Mining robos report sighting strange phenomenon in mines. All report a dark gaslike cloud emanating from a freshly-dug crack in the mine wall. No traces of poisonous or other gases were found upon testing, so I am confident that this was in fact the right track. The cloud allegedly dissipated towards the entrance of the mine. If it has escaped, this may all be for nothing.'"
"'All be for nothing'?" repeated Sonic quietly. His face darkened. "So, he was looking for something in the mines. But seriously . . . a cloud? I know Eggbreath is crazy, but why would he look for cloud in a mine?"
Tails shook his head.
"There's another entry. 'New entry, May 2. It is hopeless. I have set out terms of partnership, and they have been ignored. No sightings. Obviously capture is impossible, so I fear that nothing can be done. It is now loose in the wild, and is presumably as much of a danger to myself and Maria as to anyone else. Blast it! I will take the necessary precautions first thing tomorrow . . . '" Tails trailed off, looking up at Sonic grimly. "That doesn't sound like ants."
There was some silence. Sonic folded his arms, mulling over this new information.
"Still, how do we know this isn't a trap?" he asked darkly. "It could be Egghead trying to throw us off-track or something!" He glanced at Bokkun. "How do we know he didn't just send you here with fake papers, trying to lure us into coming to him or something?"
"You don't," shrugged Bokkun, grinning. "Hey, I did it 'cos I thought it might help keep Cream safe from whatever-that-thing-is he talks about in there. If you don't believe me, your problem! I've gotta go now, though—Master Eggman's launching the Egg Carrier today, I'm s'posed to be there. See ya!"
He stuck out his tongue insolently and whisked out the door.
For a while Sonic and Tails stood silently, Tails' eyes still roving over the papers, studying the other entries. There were no other mentions of the mysterious cloud in the mine that had concerned Eggman so oddly. In fact, there were lots of boring, procedural-type entries, discussing various events and tallying the value of Eggman's share of the diamonds being mined. It didn't look like something that could be easily forged; even the exact date that Team Sonic had intruded on the operation featured an enraged note about their shenanigans.
At last Tails looked at Sonic again.
"It definitely could still be a trap," he said flatly.
"I dunno, did that ever stop us before?" asked Sonic, smirking. Tails pretended to think hard about that.
"Nope! Don't think it ever did!"
Sonic chuckled, flexing his shoulder.
"I think we have some courtesy calls to make."