While Sticks found herself talking to a fanfic author (who obviously had no life or hope of becoming a real author), there was another hedgehog confusing his friends to the point of concern...

Amy certainly had a thing for a certain blue hedgehog but said blue hedgehog was... well... He hinted at liking the pink member of his species but denied feeling anything if asked and whenever his actual thoughts and feelings about her started to slip. If he thought about it too hard he'd just get confused so he tried not to think about her as anything other than an ally in battle and a somewhat close friend...

But then things started getting weird and more confusing than usual.

Sonic started thinking about Amy all the time. If Eggman decided to attack today Sonic would've lost because he couldn't get Amy off of his mind. Though as much of a nuisance it was to think about her all the time... it wasn't that bad... it was kind of nice in a way...

But of course as the hero he knew he shouldn't think about girls all the time – not with Eggman around all the time! Then again Eggman hadn't shown up in a while and Amy's fur and quills were a pretty color... It was this soft pink color like a flower... Heh... like a rose...

But when he found himself thinking like that he smacked himself back to his senses. He didn't want to think about her that way but he couldn't stop himself. As much as he wanted to stop himself he knew he couldn't ask Tails for help... that'd be too awkward.

Tails was still a kid. He wouldn't know anything about talking to girls He was smart but really smart when it came to machines – not girls.

He certainly couldn't talk to Amy and all of her floofiness...

And then he found himself thinking about her again – wanting to rub his fingers through her quills, wanting to bite them even. And he started to panic... Tails was too smart to help and Knuckles was too dumb to...

Wait... KNUCKLES WAS DUMB!

So poor Sonic dashed around the Unnamed Village to find Knuckles. Though the poor blue hedgehog got easily lost in thought – thinking about Amy of course. Whenever they were battling or if she was trying to "express herself" by dragging him textile shopping or to a chick flick... She was pretty cute either way... And she probably meant well... He just wasn't into that stuff normally...

Then he realized he was thinking about Amy again and he was starting to creep himself out. He felt disgusting for thinking about wanting to bite her quills almost constantly and how these thoughts would come out of no where with even the most mundane thoughts mutating into such a weird need to bite her. What's worse is that poor Sonic didn't even realize he was still running while arguing with himself internally and he crashed face-first into a tree with such force and speed that he got full-frontal splinters and gave the tree a Sonic-shaped hole...

He realized now how off his game he was... He needed a break... He was way too out of character...

Then he finally remembered he'd been trying to find Knuckles...

Knuckles – the echidna – sat on a rock looking out at the ocean and contemplating his purpose. From time to time he considered taking up a hobby like gemology – whenever the team had a mission that involved sacred stones or gems in general, he found he had an affinity – no – a basic instinct to take care of those gems. Though he didn't know why...

He thought about taking a trip on his own without the rest of the team to do some more deep thinking on the subject of who he was, where he came from or even figuring out why he was the last of his kind...

And then Sonic trapped him on the shoulder while caused Knuckles to abandon the thought of finding a floating island in the sea.

"Hey Sonic... Wait, why do you have even more spikes than before?" asked Knuckles, noticing the fact that Sonic got new 'spikes'.

"Knuckles, I don't have time for the writer's clever but TOTALLY obvious way of complaining about your character. I have a problem." said the very anxiety-laden hedgehog.

Knuckles thought to himself 'wait, I have a character?' but refrained from saying it out loud. Instead he asked and he jumped down from the rock: "well, what's the problem?"

Sonic looked to his left, then his right and then back at Knuckles, grabbing him by one of his dreads and saying "I need you to punch me in the face..."

"Wut?"

"I need you to punch me in the face!" shouted Sonic. "It's urgent!"

"And why would I do that?" Asked Knuckles. "I know I'm not the deepest thinker but I know for a fact I have no reason to punch you... Although those new spikes do look suspicious..."

"Well I got a little too up close and personal and ended up doing more than just hugging a tree... Though I don't know if self-anointing* is gonna fix this..." Sonic sighed, dreading the thought of how he'd get all of the splinters out of his fur.

"OH! Is that why you wanted me to punch you so bad?"

Not the actual reason Sonic wanted to get a punch to the face but it did make him forget about Amy for a minute. "Y-Yeah! Maybe you can punch me hard enough to knock all the splinters out! That's totally what I was thinking!"

"I can try... You can solve a lot of problems just by hitting things." Knuckles started doing warm up stretches. "Although, I don't know if it'll fix your face completely... And I guess you can't solve internal conflicts by hitting them all the time... Some internal conflict maybe but not ALL internal conflict... Anything on your mind?"

"Oh, no, I totally wasn't thinking about Amy or anything. I was just-!"

"Oh? What about Amy?" Knuckles asked, cracking his joints.

"Um... I don't know..." Sonic blushed a bit. "What do you think about Amy?"

"She hammers pretty well. She's pretty strong. Maybe the second strongest on the team?" Knuckles said. "Like when you think about it, you're all about speed, Tails is smart and I'm the tough guy. Amy's pretty balanced in comparison."

But Sonic stopped listening past "she hammers pretty well" and Knuckle's clever analysis of Amy's character flew over his head entirely because the more he thought about the phrase "she hammers pretty well" the more it sounded like an innuendo.

"Hey um... So what do you mean when you say Amy 'hammers' well?" Sonic asked, goofy and slightly lovestruck expression having changed into a jealous one with blood thirsty undertones.

"Well... She fights with a hammer and uses it... well..." Knuckles said it slowly to see if there was anything wrong with what he said which to his knowledge – there wasn't.

"That's what I thought..." Sonic tried to get back on track. He needed to get rid of his splinters and hopefully his thoughts about Amy. Hopefully Knuckles wasn't planning an attempt to get her alone to bite her quills. Just the thought of it made the hedgehog's blood boil (especially since Knuckles as an echidna and not a hedgehog).

Noticing the change in his friend and teammate's demeanor Knuckles asked "wait, so you're getting all worked up over Amy? I dun get it. And didn't you come to me to get punched in the face?"

"FINE! Punch me in the face if that's how you feel about it!" Sonic shouted, Knuckles appearing as more of a threat than a friend and finally getting that punch to the face he so desperately sought which caused every splinter in his fur to come out and fall into the sand...

On the other hand he also got flung back to the same tree he put a hole in before and got a back full of splinters in exchange for having given it yet another hole in his image... And with a crooked nose to boot...

Knuckles didn't even bother going back for him, instead just getting on top of his rock again and thinking about how he could get his hands on an emerald of some kind...

Chapter 2 end

Animal trivia for chapter 2:

The reason Sonic is acting out of character is because male hedgehogs tend to be more aggressive about mating to the point of getting into fights with other hedgehogs in an attempt to impress a female. So to my surprise: the way SonAmy is presented in the Sonic franchise is inaccurate to how actual hedgehogs mate. If you wanted a more accurate version it would actually be SONIC being clingy and stalker-y over Amy... But of course that's only if you base their behaviors off of actual hedgehogs. That's not a requirement for me to get a kick out of the pairing, I just thought it was funny.

Since Sonic and Amy appear to be the only 2 consistent hedgehogs in the Boom TV show and since I have no idea what they're going to do with Shadow or with Silver (if they ever do anything interesting with his character again the poor baby), I had Sonic get fighty with Knuckles instead just because Knuckles is a familiar character and also because there's more opportunity for slapstick.

Another painful fact about hedgehog mating is that the actual mating process involves the male biting the female's quills... So the pure OUCH factor aside, Sonic isn't just pulling kinky stuff out of his ass, that's based on what actual hedgehogs do.

Now to the specific terms/term:

*self anointing - self anointing refers to a specific behavior hedgehogs do in which they'll feel the need to compulsively lick themselves and cover themselves in their own saliva. They might do this out of anxiety, especially after encountering a new smell they've never smelled before. As such, younger hedgehogs do this more often than older ones.

Special thanks:

To my boyfriend for being so analytical of this series as well as analytical of gameplay mechanics as I sort of borrowed "Knuckles's clever analysis" regarding the main 4 characters from him. Across the many, many Sonic games as well as the TV shows (namely Sonic X and Boom), Amy has proven to be a well-balanced character. She's strong like Knuckles, smart like Tails and almost as fast as Sonic. She's the most well rounded of the group, which occasionally makes me wonder why Sticks is even a character in Boom at times if not only to fill out the five man band trope. I'm told Amy's presented in a similar way in the comics but I haven't read those...

Next chapter: more trivia, pairing shenanigens and poking fun at the sexualization of anthropromorphised animals