Harsh? Maybe. A little like coercion? Absolutely.

But I needed Knuckles to help me. I needed my family to know. I'd received a vision from the Vortex that was still burned in my brain, of… let's just say things that would be pretty catastrophic if we didn't act - and much worse if we kept it from our families. And as much as I hated my parents, I would not have wished half of that on them.

Knuckles turned the key in the ignition. "Are you crazy?" he asked me as the engine roared to life.

"Yep," I said. At least I should acknowledge it.

I could feel the motion of the vehicle as he pulled out of the lot. He was driving jerkier than usual. Perhaps my sudden announcement of the change in plans had thrown him off.

"Are you sure about this?" he asked. "I can hardly come in to accompany you. They don't even know me –"

"That's the whole point of this," I cut in. "So they do know you."

"– and you know how Muslims are about a girl dragging in a strange guy."

"Don't remind me." I didn't need Knuckles nitpicking. I was going to tell them about my echidna buddy anyhow. At the very least, they deserved to know what I was going through. Besides, the trouble I was going to be in for hanging out with a strange guy was nothing compared to getting attacked by an avadark or a mountain giant (again, don't ask).

As we passed through the city, I saw a variety of people out there – regular pedestrian tourists sightseeing in the park, gaping at various landmarks; people in expensive suits strutting like they owned the city landmass; a homeless fellow panhandling here; a gangster teen mugging a woman there.

Yep, good old Philly life in a nutshell.

My family's restaurant was one of those jobs where the family living quarters was right over the business. The place hosted some of the finest Arabian cuisine, courtesy of Mom. It was an innocent-enough looking place, with a sign saying Fadjir's Fancies, and a cheery storefront. But inside, my stepmom had decked out the place with plenty of touches of modernity – such as a front desk and a kitchen in the back. The place was now somewhere commercial, a bit too much like fast food for my liking.

When we pulled into the drive, Knuckles pulled into the parking lot, like we'd agreed. I got the feeling he really did want to meet my family, just to see if they were as awful as I'd told him. He just wasn't sure what they'd think of him with me. Most people wouldn't have looked twice at a boy and a girl traveling together – alone, no less – but Muslims, as Knuckles had noted, can be a little more straitlaced than that.

I also got a little worried they wouldn't make sense of my avatar buddy, period. Knuckles had had a lot of experience with weirdness, but his encounters weren't exactly something you could talk about with a normal family. (Well, normal was pretty relative in this instance.) He'd also have to keep his powers under wraps. I hadn't looked into how fireproof our house was, and I didn't want to learn the hard way. Besides, spontaneous combustion was not something easily explained anyway.

"Keep it together," I said to Knuckles as we got out of the Blazer.

"I am keeping it together."

I studied Knuckles' posture. "The smoking hands beg to differ."

"I just… I would wonder if you thought this through, but of course you never do."

I smiled at him. "You know me too well."

We headed into the building.

Interestingly, the first person to meet me wasn't my parents. It was Achmed.

"Hey, Imira," he said.

He was a fine little squirt – took more after our father in appearance, with his olive complexion, dark hair, pointed nose and lively dark eyes. He was presently in a black WWE t-shirt (he was way too into wrestling for my liking) and green shorts that clashed excellently with his dark orange sneakers. He wasn't too judgmental of me – in fact, he and I had often messed around in the past, and I regarded him as my favorite half-sibling.

"Where were you?" he asked now. "Dad was looking for –" Then he saw Knuckles, and his jaw dropped. "Whoa. Is that –?"

"Yes, Knuckles the Echidna," I said in response.

"Cool!" Achmed ran up and shook his hand, running his mouth in a flurry of excitement I hadn't been expecting. "Do you really guard the Master Emerald? Is Angel Island floating over our heads right now? I never had a floating island in our world!"

"Be glad you don't," Knuckles muttered, looking slightly confused. I suppose I couldn't blame him. For one, Achmed was going a mile a minute – although, we'd both endured Vinny Lee in an excited fit, and this was not even close. For another, avatar memories are notoriously funky. Blame it on whatever you like, but in most cases avatars don't really remember any sort of life before they were spawned. Any memories that do make it in aren't always consistent with the game's lore, either. It was a miracle Knuckles even knew what Achmed was referring to.

"Achmed," I said, laughing. That kid sure could amuse me without even trying. "How're things going at home?"

"Fine," he said. His expression shifted suddenly from excited to something strangely guarded. I'd seen that look enough times on my friends on a bad day to know what that meant.

"You can tell me what happened –" I began, but cut off when I saw my father.

Pop was a striking man – kind of a larger, adult version of Achmed, but with more of a paunch and graying hair from middle age. He wore a button-down shirt and work pants, rather than the garb of our regular employees. I wasn't sure how to face him, though. He hadn't taken well to the excuse for showing up late with the beef.

"Imira!" he said – not sharply, as I'd expected. More like he'd been quite worried about me. One plus from hanging with Amos – I can tell sincerity and a fake-out (or joking) apart, and his worry sounded quite sincere. Had he heard –?

"And who is this?" he asked, eyeing Knuckles.

"Oh, that's Knuckles," I said casually. "He's…" Ugh. There was simply no way to explain what I was doing, hanging out with a strange guy. "He's a friend."

"Friend, eh?" Pop extended his hand to Knuckles.

The echidna didn't shake it. Instead, he gave Pop a sideways glance. "I was expecting something else," he said firmly. "If you didn't pay attention to your wife's treatment of that kid –"

I facepalmed. That was not the way to start off.

Pop glanced at him firmly. "How do you know about this?"

That was my cue to change the subject. "What happened to Achmed?"

I assumed Achmed had told his father about whatever had happened while I was out. He'd been going to the library this afternoon to return a book – Omer Khayyam, I think? (Pop was getting on him about his summer studies.) If he had come across something on his way there or even (Allah forbid!) at the library…

"Dinner!" My stepmom. My inner defenses kicked in.

"Coming!" I said, possibly in a sharper voice than the situation warranted.

As we headed upstairs to the dining room, I glared at Knuckles. "You have got to have more tact than that," I chided him quietly.

"This from the girl who calls people fat and ugly," Knuckles retorted.

"Shut. Up."

Mom was busy setting the table. For her age, she was still pretty – tanned skin, brown-black hair, and light brown eyes. She adjusted the position of her green hijab after she finished setting out the food.

"Where have you been, Imira?" she said.

"Me?" I snorted. "Exploring. You know."

My voice must've been tense, because Knuckles raised an eyebrow at me.

"Exploring. And you met someone?" Her eye was dead on Knuckles. I knew what was going through her head. I must've reinforced that I wasn't worth her by dragging Knuckles in.

Well, she wasn't worth me. And I was already a disgrace by my birth, so why did she care?

"Yeah, who is that?" Fatima asked, next to her mother. Her tone, however, was a curious one. She was only six, but she already looked like her mom in miniature – without the hijab, as she had not reached the age to decide to wear it yet.

Pop frowned at me. "Is there more to this?"

I wasn't sure how to explain, but I wasn't about to keep things from my father. It came spilling out – my meeting with Knuckles; his sessions with me, training me to control my strength. As I explained it, the memories came back in visual form.

I'd been running in the streets for a few days. I'd been dodging cops when I could. Sure, they were there to protect me, but if they saw me, they would have sent me right back. And no way was I heading back there with what I'd been through.

It was raining like crazy. I had stumbled in an alley and was completely lost. A Muslim girl, on her own – surely there was no way I could survive out here. I was contemplating my options for survival, which weren't looking so great, when I saw it.

I don't have to tell you a run down building generally isn't a good idea. Something that ready to collapse really is a hazard in itself. But I was desperate for shelter, so I jumped inside the old shop.

It had definitely seen better days. The place was a mess, with destroyed furniture and smashed cases. I recalled a story in the news - Hartzman Jewelry had been destroyed in a smash-and-grab robbery, and then the place caught fire. The word on the street was that it had been placed on cursed ground. I don't acknowledge such superstitions, but it certainly looked like the building was suffering from the aftermath of that robbery – and then some. I noticed some fresh burn marks on the walls.

I was walking over to observe the burn marks when I heard, "That's my fault, in case you were wondering."

I whipped around in surprise, as I hadn't been expecting to see anyone there. Most people avoided the place after the arson and robbery incident. But there he was.

My first thought on seeing his silhouette – mugger. When you've been in Philly for as long as I have, you start to associate big buff guys in hoodies and jeans with people looking to rough you up. So naturally, I seized my nearest weapon – a burned up wooden chair that might've belonged to the cashier's desk – and threw it at him.

The guy didn't even react. I watched as the chair hit him – and promptly splintered.

Okay, that was not normal. An average mugger would have been downed by that. It just made me more scared.

"Oh," the guy muttered in a low deep voice, "you've got spunk."

"Get away!" I launched a swing at him. If I could knock him out cold, I could dominate the place.

Alas, no such grace was awarded me. I heard a sharp crack as my fist hit his jaw.

Pain shot through my right hand. With my luck, I'd broken it – and possibly even sprained my wrist. Lovely.

"Stop!" the guy barked out.

He came in a little closer to the center of the room and lit up his hand. At first I was, yes, freaked out, but then I thought he was going to lob a fireball at me. That would be a way to go out.

Instead, he flicked the flame upward, illuminating the room we were in.

"I don't want to fight you," he said in a softer tone of voice.

"What the heck?" I muttered. "Perhaps you shouldn't dress like a carjacker, then."

He leaned in toward the light, and this time I could see his face.

This was definitely no human that was squatting here. I could catch his slightly tapering snout and coal gray eyes. He yanked off his hood, exposing a set of red spines which looked enough like dreadlocks, but were much more pointy.

"No way," I muttered. Here I was, in the presence of the fourth most popular Sonic character, after outright attacking him.

"What's your name?" Knuckles asked.

"Imira."

"Well, Imira, what were you doing out in the rain?"

I decided I'd best be honest with him. "Running. From my parents. My stepmom, mostly."

Knuckles must've sensed the tension in my tone, because he didn't press. Instead, he shifted toward a different point of conversation.

"How did you do that?"

"Do what?"

"Chuck that chair."

Normally most people wouldn't have looked at that as a good thing, but Knuckles sounded downright impressed. I suppose it really isn't every day a guy meets a girl who can throw heavy objects at him.

I shrugged. "I guess I thought you were here to –"

"I said how, not why," Knuckles said with a light laugh. "I get that reaction more often than you'd think. But you – you're obviously stronger than I anticipated out of a human. And I'm an expert on strength."

The last remark wasn't what surprised me. He was a pretty physically strong character in the games. What surprised me was how he'd said obviously – as if he'd figured that out for himself faster than anybody else would have. Than I would have.

"I don't know," I said at last.

Knuckles glanced sideways at me. Then he came a tad closer – just enough to survey me. "How long have you been doing stuff like that?" he asked me.

"Forever, I suppose?" I then told him about my mishaps with it.

Knuckles frowned as if this dissatisfied him. "Wow. Sounds like you really don't know how strong you are." He glanced at me like, Listen up, kid. "Storm's passed. Why don't you head home?"

"What? My family hasn't been so nice to me, and you're telling me to –"

"Head home," Knuckles repeated. "At least you have a family you can call blood."

I didn't know what to say to that, so I just did what he told me.

After that, I stopped running. My parents, it turned out, had been worried. Pop hugged me, glad I was safe and sound. "I'd hate for you to lose control out there," he'd said. Furthermore, Mom made fewer demands of me, which I thought was strange. I didn't think she was capable of learning a lesson – but that shows what I know about her.

And I did see more of Knuckles – often out of the blue while I was out on errands. He'd help me locate the items I needed, because I could never find them myself. After the first such errand, he taught me a special whistle signal for when I really needed him – a variant of the classic taxicab whistle, with the end clipped off and followed by a Morse code pattern – long-short-long, then short. KE – for Knuckles the Echidna.

On occasions when I was by myself, he would show up and let me work out with him. At various points, he'd called me out on what I was doing, and I amended it. By the time I'd run into DJ and the other VLADJIs, I'd had my strength under control.

"So," I finished. "Yes, I should have told you about this. But I wasn't sure you'd believe me. I mean, running into Knuckles in real life –"

"Don't apologize," Pop said. His tone was sincerely forgiving. I could tell he never saw this coming when he had that fling in college – even when my real mom dropped me off at his place. But I could tell I'd made things quite interesting for him.

Mom, however, regarded him with a sharp eye. "Very well," she said, her tone dangerously neutral. "He can have dinner with us – as long as he behaves himself."

She left to pick up the rest of the food and set it out.

Knuckles' right eye twitched. "Nice woman. I actually see why you don't like her."

"Everything else aside," I added. I didn't like the way she'd tacked on the condition that Knuckles behave himself. As if Knuckles wasn't having enough stress keeping his powers from triggering in my parents' presence.

Once dinner started, I could tell the mood wasn't so good. We made small chat about the weather, but I could tell everyone's mind was elsewhere. Achmed kept picking at his food. Mom kept giving Knuckles looks every time he acknowledged me, as if warning him – I've got my eye on you, so don't do anything suspicious. Yeah, right. As if she ever cared.

Pop frowned and set down his plate. "Okay, enough small talk, just what happened at the library, Achmed? Did you return your book?"

Achmed set down his fork. "Yes, Pop. But I had to drop it in the box. There was a drag story hour –"

Knuckles nearly spewed water. "Excuse me?"

I was quite shocked by what Achmed had said as well. "You didn't actually go in there, did you?" I asked, in concern. As far as I was concerned, the drag queens did not belong with kids. VLADJI had enough trouble making sure people didn't get into racist (or any other ist, for that matter) scuffles without kids getting corrupted by those dividing forces. The last thing I needed was my half-brother getting caught in the crossfire.

"I didn't know what it meant, but this strange boy stopped me before I could go in. Told me to drop it in the box and go. Said I didn't have any business being in there with that going on."

"And rightfully so," Pop said sternly. "See anything else with 'drag queen,' you stay away."

"Gotcha," Achmed said.

"What's a drag queen?" Fatima asked.

"That's for when you're older, Fatima," Mom scolded her. "Honestly, Ali, why must we discuss this at the table?"

"Don't look at Pop," I said. I got the suspicion that my pop was sorry he'd asked. "Did you go away from there?" I asked Achmed.

"What do you think?" he said.

I decided to take that as a yes and went back to my dinner. Achmed was nothing if not a rule follower. I was more that rules were made to be broken type – something that made my position as the eldest more absurd.

"And who was this boy?" Mom asked. "If he shooed you off on account of – that –" it was clear that she was not broaching the drag queen thing directly with Fatima in the room – "he must have some sense."

"I didn't catch his name," Achmed said. "But I don't think I'd miss him the next time I saw him. Looked like Justin Bieber – with a sharper nose and dressed in pink."

I nearly dropped my fork. The shot of steam from Knuckles' chair told me he knew as well.

"Are you two alright?" Mom asked.

"Fine," I lied.

So Achmed knew about Amos now. Worse – he was caught in our problems. He'd nearly been a victim of the forces that we were trying to stop. And now that he'd survived it, he'd have to have a discussion much, much more discomforting than the Talk.

He had to know about my other life.