Disclaimer: See last chapter.
Zero
The gates of Zerotime were tall, painted gold and with a heavy metal scent. They weren't actual gold, Whisper could tell that in an instant. "When do the gates usually open?" Sonic asked.
Whisper knew that if this was the younger Sonic, he'd have already gone up and around the walls, trying to open the gates from the inside. This Sonic couldn't quite do that.
"Generally they leave them closed. I usually glide in from the top," Knuckles said. "I can go up top, climbing over the walls," he continued, before he jumped high in the air. Whisper thought she felt a small burst of wind with that one, too.
"Sure, sure," Sonic said lightly. "So, Shadow, as Knuckles is currently attempting to climb Mt. Zerotime, what have you and Whisper been up to?" He asked.
"We've done a lot!" Violet answered for him. Sonic grinned, as if knowing that Violet wouldn't help but answer. "So after we went to Spiral Hill, we found Jewel stuck in some kind of depression spiral thing. Basically it made the entire town like a giant zombie village!"
"Zombies huh? I've always hated those movies," Sonic said, his smile not disappearing.
"You never did let us watch them."
"I'm sorry, whose sister are you again?" Sonic asked teasingly.
"I mean, I get it but still. Anyways, Whisper went onto some of the hills-"
Whisper nodded. She didn't particularly want to re-enact that adventure. She still hated the feeling of firing the gun at Dr. Henderson, the maniac who was so far deep into a hell of his own creation that he was killing Islanders and keeping their heads.
Violet repeated almost the same thing that Whisper had said to Jewel earlier, nearly word-for-word. Shadow was glancing at her with surprise.
Had he forgotten she said she had a good memory? Just more proof of it, really.
"Then we left Spiral Hill, and then...well, Tornado is..."
"It's usually damaged at this point in any adventure," Sonic grinned. "How bad's this one?"
"Half of the main fuselage, an entire wing, half of the fuel tank, landing gear is broken and shattered, main engine capacitors are gone and I don't know how Green managed to keep us in the air long enough to get to the ground," Violet listed off, her face getting more and more worried.
Sonic's face darkened for a moment, before he threw his head back and laughed. "Oh man that's hurtful!" He laughed. "Ouch, that's gonna be another rebuild for the old girl. I've had her since I was twelve, you know? That's the...fourth? Fourth or fifth time we've had to rebuild her," he continued.
"Don't forget the other times Tails rebuilt it using better parts," Shadow snarked.
"Nah, that's the Tornado 2. He built that one long before the second rebuild. Mostly because I think he just likes biplanes," Sonic shrugged. "Well, you obviously got attacked by something. Time Eater?"
"Yeah! How'd you know?"
"Because the one I fought was vicious but it was also controlled by Eggman. It's actually kind of funny, it kept twitching as he commanded it to do things. If he hadn't tried to convert it to a robot, I'm not sure I would have won, even with my younger self," Sonic shrugged.
"Wait that actually happened?"
"Yes?" Sonic asked. "Who's been telling you stories that you don't believe?" He finished with a smile.
Whisper pulled up her wispon, glancing at Knuckles. The red echidna was only halfway up, but he was making good time. The walls were made up of some kind of sand, as his hand holds...or knuckle holds, she supposed, disappeared a few moments after his hands left the wall.
"I mean, it's just hard to believe."
"There's a lot that's hard to believe," Shadow said. "Especially when it comes to the Faker."
"So, the Time Eater attacked you guys, and you managed to defend it off right?"
"Kinda?" Violet's face seemed worried again. "We met Kit and Surge."
Sonic winced. "Oof, them. Yeah that's no fun. How was she this time, just as caustic and brutal as the last few times?" He asked Shadow.
Whisper was almost offended he didn't ask her, but then remembered that Sonic knew exactly what Surge had done to her. There was no way she was keeping a bias out of her vote. Good on him, then?
"Little bit more so, actually," Shadow answered. "But no, she didn't help with the Time Eater either."
"Whisper, then?" Sonic asked. "How'd you beat it up?"
"Frenzy," Whisper said instantly, and quietly.
Sonic stopped grinning. "Oh," he answered simply.
He'd been through Frenzy before, hadn't he? He knew the exact cause of what that meant, the exact mindset needed to have a frenzy. "I know you had the Nega-wisp, but I knew you couldn't imbue normally, so I was hoping..."
"Purples can imbue anything," Whisper answered quietly. "Even others who can't normally imbue."
Sonic winced. "Well, that makes sense then as to why it ran away. Frenzy was never fun. I preferred White or Cyan. Or the one time I went Crimson, Crimson was fun. And the ivory lightning, they were fun too."
"Of course you'd like the ones that make you go fast," Orange said, hovering above Whisper. She blinked; when had she come out of the canister?
"Well, yeah!" Sonic said, grinning wide as he was just as go-lucky as he was before. "Alright, so you met Surge and Kit. What then happened?"
"Kit remembered that Metal Sonic had found a prophecy regarding Mata," Violet said. Sonic nodded.
"I remember the one. I remember Tails was only concerned as far as knowing a chaos emerald had a hand in it."
"It was?" Shadow asked. "Which one?"
"Blue. The time one. The one closest in power to the Time Stones. Course, we never went back to North Island..."
"So it wasn't just pulling some words out of nowhere?" Shadow asked.
"Ha, no, it was. That's what Blaze mentioned about prophecies, especially ones regarding her. They not only came true only when she made them come true, but only if they weren't inherently awful about it. Some of them were bad. I'd have to ask Amy about the worst one, she remembered the actual wording. She wrote down the first few, then realized that we were talking about Blaze here and stopped."
"Wait...what?" Violet asked. She was blinking furiously quickly, her mind taken by surprise.
"Yeah, prophecies are real. They suck, almost universally," Sonic answered. "But their origin is almost entirely the reason they can exist. Knuckles would know more, but at least on the spirit side of things it's never just 'spirits coming down to repeat a message'. If it is that, run. That means there's something big, and it has its eyes on you."
"What do you mean spirit side of things?"
"Two things are needed for almost all prophecies," Sonic said. "One, you need a willing person to host it. Two, you need an energy source that can delve into the fourth dimension. According to Tails. The soul itself holds the prophecy, the energy source being the original connection. That being will do almost anything they can to make sure it comes true, but it's usually so insidious and small that no one really notices until it's too late."
"Why do you know this?" Shadow asked.
"Because I remember Solaris," Sonic grinned.
Shadow gripped his head, blinking off to the side, almost as if a roaring headache was going through his head. "Ha, I love doing that," Sonic grinned to Whisper and Violet.
Whisper had no idea what he was talking about. The wisps though were talking amongst themselves, extremely quietly, and using their native language. It was mostly confusion coming from Pink and Cyan, and a bit of alarm from Green. A sense of calm from Orange, and extreme confusion from Lavender and Yellow.
At least, until Yellow decided to dive into the sand and create a sand sculpture.
"I don't get it, what just happened?" Violet asked.
"Ah, just an old trick. Basically, there was a time when I wiped out time. Forward and backward. Restarted the whole thing. Only two people remember it. Myself and Blaze. And Blaze only remembers it because she somehow left the timeline before it got erased."
"That makes no sense. How can you erase a timeline, and how can you leave a timeline if it was erased as a whole!?"
"Time travel," Sonic grinned. "What do they say here, Zerotime is Local Time?"
Almost as if saying a password, the gates started to open up. Massive gears started to turn on the side, as the door slowly opened to the golden city beyond.
Whisper glanced upwards. Knuckles was at the top, and a moment later he looked down, saw the gates were open, and jumped off the top he'd just spent ten minutes climbing.
She at least would be pissed off for having to climb all that for nothing. But it looked like Knuckles wasn't worried at all. It took him around thirty seconds of freefall before he landed with a loud thud on the sand.
"Huh. That was weird," he said as soon as he landed. Sonic was already hobbling towards the open gates, Violet next to him, her face full of wonder.
"Let me guess, nothing up there?" Shadow asked deadpan. Knuckles nodded. "Probably a password thing that Faker happened to say at the right time."
Whisper nodded. She turned to the wisps hovering around her. "Be careful," she said. "Hop into your canisters if something's wrong," she said.
There was an eerie air about the golden city, and Whisper wasn't quite sure what it was just yet.
Sonic and Violet beat the other three to the main opening, and the only one not surprised at how this city looked was Knuckles.
Each building was as tall as most spires, standing tall and proud above the ground. Right inside the gates, it had gone from astonishingly hot to chilled. Not snowing cold, but definitely temperatures controlled in some way.
Each house, shop, warehouse, or whatever they were stretched up to the skies, a golden color burgeoning from the tops. Even on the bottom floors, where the color was a bit deeper, it had a golden shine that wasn't natural.
What she was also surprised about was how there was no one around. "Where is everyone?" Asked Violet after they passed the second block. The ground was sturdy, allowing Sonic to at least hobble a bit faster than he had been. "I haven't seen anyone yet."
It wasn't like Spiral Hill, where it was quiet but there were still people around. There was still sound as if there were people but there was no one around. As if it was just a record, playing on repeat.
"I don't know. I don't see anyone either," Orange said. "This town feels odd though."
"Yeah, I can sense it too," Cyan offered. "Whisper, I think we should really be on our guard here. There's something."
Whisper nodded. She'd already been on her guard, sure, but if Cyan was telling her to be more careful then who was she to disagree? Especially as Pink, too, was nodding. He was visibly alarmed just as much as the others were.
"I'll scout ahead," Shadow said after a moment, his shoes putting him an inch in the air before he started to skate off. There was a booming sound as he broke the sound barrier rather casually.
"That's one way to announce our arrival. I'll do the rest," Sonic smirked. "Oi, Timeroot or what have you! We're here!" He yelled out.
"Sonic, that's a really bad idea," Knuckles said. He glanced around towards one of the golden doors, before he gently touched it over his gloves. "These aren't metal doors. They're...almost plastic."
"Plastic?" Violet asked, before she ran her hands over the same door. She tried the doorknob, feeling it unable to turn at all. "The doors aren't real. Knuckles, can you climb into one of the windows?" She asked.
"Can do," he answered simply, gliding up to one one of the first or second floor windows. He tried to punch the glass, or where the glass was. "It's not even glass! It won't break!"
"It's fake," Whisper answered after a moment. "The doors are fake. The gates probably weren't real, either," she said. She turned to look as Lavender started to scream in fright.
"The gates are closing!" She shouted.
Before any of them could react, the gates behind them swung shut, and Whisper could see the large gears that held them shut turn, hoisting dozens of metal bars thicker than Whisper was tall into them.
"Huh. That's odd. They have to know we can still get out," Sonic said. "Between Shadow and myself, we have enough skill in Chaos Control that we don't need to worry about it."
"Have you been getting better at it?" Knuckles said as he dived down from the window. "Because last I checked, you can only teleport yourself."
"I mean, yeah, but we have Shadow, and we know he's good with it," Sonic grinned. "Assuming he doesn't go and get himself captured."
"I'm not you, Faker," Shadow answered abruptly from behind him. A few seconds later the sonic boom arrived, making Whisper clamp her hands over her ears. The pain in her stomach and back flared up, and she grit her teeth for a long moment.
"We should stick together," Violet said, the worry easily on her face now. "Who knows what other kinds of tricks they'll have?" She asked.
"Not many. There's no one around, except for the center. I didn't go say hi," Shadow answered. "I think that whatever it is that's going on, we should head there first."
"To the center then!" Sonic called out. The wisps nodded for a moment, before they went in front of Whisper.
"This is gonna be a bit out of the blue but...remember that Geas we put on ourselves?" Orange asked.
Whisper nodded. Yellow looked around for a moment, trying to drill into the ground, before she gave up, unable to pierce the solid ground beneath their feet.
"We want to take it off. Something's giving us all the heebie-jeebies," Green replied. "But for that, we'd need to either complete the mission as set by the Geas, or to have a binder do it. You were the witness for the Geas, so it can only be you that acted as the binder."
"What do I need to do?" Whisper asked instantly. She trusted the wisps more than she trusted herself at times. And if they didn't trust themselves with certain amounts of energy, she understood that. She had, too, taken another life not long ago. She understood well what it means to have too much power.
"Nothing," Blue supplied. "You just need to say 'I accept' when we're finished." The wolf nodded.
"Right. What were the terms, again?" Orange asked. It was obvious that she remembered, at least to Whisper, but was trying to get the conversation going.
It was strange. It had been Blue that had been most insistent on not having the Vow, and it had been Green who explained that the Geas was another way to limit their power. That they didn't want to be able to level entire cities.
And now they wanted that power back, on the off chance that they'll need it. Whisper didn't blame them; something about this city was gnawing at her mind too.
Will.
The word popped up unannounced, and it steeled Whisper's resolve. That's right. She'd already come this far. She was so close to Tangle, so close to Tails.
"I, the Orange wisp known as," Orange started, before Whisper got the sense of high flight, the sense of the ground moving underneath her. Movement, high speed, energy, knowledge, sight, wrath, arrogance...there were so many terms and feelings wrapped up in the small amount of words that was apparently Orange's name.
She had been caught so off-guard that it took a moment for Whisper to realize that Orange was staring at her expectedly. "She can't talk right now," Cyan advised, "Otherwise whole thing's moot. You have to say 'I accept all'," she said.
Whisper nodded. The others had gone on far enough ahead that she could barely see them. "I accept all," she said, putting her whole being into the words. The wisps nodded, and Whisper suddenly felt a feeling of being unburdened, as if something was set free.
"I'll go next!" Cyan said, and Whisper barely caught the start before she caught Cyan's name. Energy, hyperactivity, knowledge, math, flight, light...she'd caught it for only a second.
"I accept all," Whisper muttered. Blue was the same, a sense of weight, reliability, solid, helpful, quake, resonance...she was almost learning more from the wisps' names than she had been for years.
Green was a sense of lightness, reliability, lightheartedness, a sense of groundedness, and understanding. Pink's was, surprise, hyperactivity, invincibility, arrogance and planning, with a small hint of playfulness.
Her head felt like it would pop from the sense of all of them. "I accept all," Whisper muttered, pushing her entire being into the words for hopefully the last time.
All.
All Will Undo.
Whisper's eyes opened. They were making a mistake. And it was one that she had to correct instantly, it wasn't the wisps' mistakes it was all of them.
She understood now. What the words actually meant. They would undo it all, undo all of time, if they kept going. "We have to catch them," Whisper said after a moment.
The wisps nodded. Lavender was looking at each one with a newfound respect. Yellow wasn't sure what to think of all that had happened, but she was quiet about it at least.
The others were nearly a thousand feet away. For someone who was crippled, Sonic could move surprisingly fast. Whisper pushed herself faster than she thought she ever could, the variable wispon on her back.
The group passed into the center just as Whisper got there, and they disappeared out of her view.
Right in front of her. Less than ten feet in front of her, she'd been just a bit late. She could see where they would have gone, but as she ran towards where they were, she felt awash of something.
And suddenly she was somewhere very, very different.
It looked the same on the outside, certainly, but there was very much a different energy to it. For one, there were people around now. Islanders, humans, most of them chatting admirably along. Most were dressed conservatively, as if they were cold, and some were bundled up as if expecting snow or rain.
The wisps hovered behind her. "Where'd they go?" Lavender asked quietly. "I don't see any of them."
"Not here," Cyan answered. "Orange, you felt that shift right?"
"Temporal shift, yeah. Whisper, just keep walking. Try not to get in people's way, maybe we can figure out how to get everyone together," Orange offered.
Whisper nodded. A temporal shift? Was this like that one thing that Eggman tried at the Eggperial City? Tangle had phased through reality, becoming some sort of partial spirit back then. Was this similar to that?
Not entirely, otherwise Shadow would have just Chaos Controlled in front of her. One of the islanders, a lynx in a purple toga-esque dress, accidentally stepped on her shoes. "Oh, sorry!" She said, before hovering back into the crowd. Whisper winced. She'd definitely felt that, so not a partial spirit. Or at least, she wasn't the partial spirit.
A shift in time though. So maybe it was much like that clock thing that had brought her here originally. That was a simple temporal shift as well, wasn't it?
Maybe she was already back in her time.
The lynx's words came back to her. They were in common, so at least they had a shared language. That made things easier. It wasn't like they had an entirely different language or dialect. That would have made things...problematic.
There was a small fountain in the middle of the circle. Small children played around it, occasionally tripping some of them to throw them into the pond. It appeared that it was all in good fun, or at least appeared so. Whisper sat down on it, pulling down on her mask.
Separated from everyone. Again. This was starting to become a large problem, in her mind. It just kept happening.
"Hey, is that?" Whisper heard a voice call out from her side. She blinked, turning. Immediately she saw the wisps facepalm in various ways, as best as they could.
"It is!" Another similar voice called out. Whisper sighed. Of course it would be these two.
Skunk islanders were not looked well upon by most humans. By other islanders, it generally wasn't an issue. But these two...well, they were tall, big, burly, and had their tails removed due to some escapade in their past.
How had Rough and Tumble shown up here? "Think we'll get a big bonus?" One of the brothers asked. Whisper didn't bother trying to figure out which was which.
She did notice that they looked as if they hadn't aged a day since her time. They weren't old, like everyone else was that she'd seen recently. In fact, they looked...exactly the same.
"If we didn't, that'd be just as bogus!"
"Then I guess she should get ready to rumble!"
"With the best of the best, Rough and Tumble!" they called out at the same time.
Bonus. Money. Right, they were mercenaries at the moment it seemed. She couldn't even recall the last time she'd seen these two.
Not because she hadn't, but because she hadn't even realized it. They were kinda easy to beat at the best of times.
She did notice though that most of the civilians around them screamed and ran off to the various corners, afraid of the two charging skunks.
"Pink, wispon. Blue, cubes," Whisper said quietly. The pink wisp looked confused for a second, before his eye lit up and he imbued himself into the variable wispon.
The wispon changed to shoot out the pink spikes, just as Rough...or his brother Tumble, Whisper wasn't sure which one was which, tripped on a long blue cube that Blue had set up.
Pink spikes were shot out towards the one remaining brother, before Orange imbued the cube that Blue had created, shoving the tripped brother high in the air. "You can do that?" Whisper asked after a moment.
"Yeah! There's a lot of stuff we can do!" Cyan said as she shot out to the side, blinding Rough. Or Tumble. One of them. He had pink spikes of energy shoved through his shoes to the ground, fortunately having missed his actual feet.
"Argh, my eyes!" He cried. "We'll get you back for that!" he called out.
"I think you'd have to try much harder," Green advised nearby. He hovered a few of the stones that the brother was trapped to, hovering them slowly into the air.
"Oh no don't drop me I'm afraid of heights!" The brother cried as he held himself in his arms. "We're..we're gonna beat you! You just wait and see, this won't be the last! Next time you'll just fumble-"
The other brother, the one that had been rocketed straight up, crash landed on his brother just as he was about to hit his cue for their name.
Green cut out the hover, and both of them slammed down onto the ground in a small pile. "That was easy. That was like taking out the trash," Orange said as she hovered lower. "So uh...you gonna answer questions?" Orange asked.
"Tumble! You missed your cue, that was a perfect chance!" The lower brother said. "Also, ow my ribs."
"Rough! Hard to hit a cue when you're falling from deep space!"
"I didn't send him that high," Orange commented. "Blue, how high did I send him?"
"I don't know. Few hundred feet? Perfect dramatic timing though."
"Dramatic timing! Drama!" Yellow said before she dove into the water, drilling around in a small circle. Whisper walked up to the two that were beaten on the ground, arguing.
She held up the wispon to Rough. "Alright. Time to talk," she said. Rough, the lower brother and probably the older of the two seeing as how it was his name first, gulped audibly.
"Ah...we surrender?" He tried.
Someone commented, a long time ago, if we'll see Rough and Tumble. The answer was yeah, we will! Here!
Until Next Time!