Disclaimer: See last chapter.

Gray

Whisper found herself into a rhythm. Aim for a spot, combine Orange and Pink's powers to make a line that connected with that direct spot, and use that line to swing herself as far as she could. At the end, disconnect from that spot, and find another one.

As it was using her own mass and gravity's edge, she found herself soaring at a quick and rapid pace. The green tunic clad enforcers down on the ground sometimes looked up, a few of the civilians pointing up at the hopefully mysterious wolf-spider.

That was what Blue had called it, the second time she started her rhythm. She was a fast learner, but being a fast learner didn't mean much when the situation was almost certainly do or die. She kept a few moments at the lowest point on each swing to make sure she knew where she was in relation to the palace.

Fifth floor, left side. She had to keep repeating it to herself. That's where her friends were. Violet, Shadow, Sonic, Knuckles...hopefully even Tails and Tangle. Amy, Metal Sonic, Kit...and she supposed Surge too was there. That was a thing. To keep her there though...? She'd burn that bridge when she crossed it, she supposed.

She hadn't quite forgiven Surge for what she did, and Whisper highly doubted that anyone would think of her badly for that.

"Stop! I don't know what you're doing but you shouldn't be doing it!" one of the enforcers was yelling at the bottom of the road. Whisper barely gave him a glance before she twisted her next disconnect point and connect point to swing around a few of the structures. "Someone stop her!" they yelled.

She flung herself around one of the buildings, some kind of residential or office tower from what she could see, before she looked down again. Most of the civilians had left, only a few of the kids were left, pointing up at her and shouting.

Whisper gave a sigh. Of course she'd be highly visible. It was the middle of the day, she guessed, and she was wearing a black cloak that was standard for her. There were at least two, maybe three enforcers trying to keep up with her as she swung and swung.

"I think we might be in trouble," Green said as he looked down. "They aren't going to stop chasing us."

"Only one thing left to try!" Cyan grinned, as much as the cyan wisp could grin, and Whisper suddenly realized that maybe taking the wisps' geas was, in fact, a bad thing. Green and Cyan high fived each other, or at least as close to it as they could, before they too, imbued the wispon at the same time.

Orange, Pink, Green, Cyan. They'd at most done a three combination wispon earlier. Whisper worried about it for as long as she could before it would take effect. The line disconnected from her chosen point far earlier than intended, and she was sent hurtling towards the ground at a rapid pace, and getting faster the more she fell.

The wispon was changing itself. "Whatever you're doing, do it fast!" Whisper said, spreading out her arms and legs and trying to slow her fall as fast as she could. She didn't know what it'd do, but this was definitely a Cyan plan. She'd have to improvise.

Which, to be fair, she was doing most of the time anyways. If anything, that thought just made it more obvious.

She felt Orange's power first, directing her skyward from his rocket. She felt Green's next, in that she wasn't feeling gravity anymore, the wispon essentially gliding through the air with Green and Orange combined. Then she felt Pink's, which was attaching her clothes to the wispon so she didn't need to hold on pretty much at all.

Cyan's was next. And she felt herself get lighter as the hyper-energetic wisp took over the entire array, both her and the wispon, as they started to swirl and stretch, thin and elongate. Like a beam of light through a small slit, Whisper felt herself change.

Was this what imbuement felt like? She knew she couldn't be imbued, it was a rare skill in the first place, except for Lavender who apparently could do it as part of her transformation to a nega-wisp. She had meant to ask Sonic, although for him it had probably been years since he'd last been imbued. Maybe he wouldn't remember the feeling.

It was easy to think like this, she realized. She couldn't move or turn her head, and it seemed like her entire body had been turned into a tube, turning inside out constantly, and yet guided by the power of the four wisps that imbued the wispon at the same time. Is that why Smithy had made it even possible?

Or had he not known? A singular wispon with a known wisp was...well, it wasn't exactly easy to make but it certainly wasn't the hardest thing in the world either. She herself had made a flamethrower wispon in the early parts of the war, with the help of one of the Burst wisps. Red, it had been. But it was also far more aggressive than she liked, and she gave it, with the wisp's permission, to the local Resistance chapter.

Then she'd been picked up by the Diamond Cutters. And the rest...was history.

The Variable Wispon was unique in that any amount of different wisps could imbue it, one at a time, to get it to change its own configuration. Smithy had told her that it wasn't possible to have more than one imbue it at once, he'd tried.

But what if he hadn't, and only said he had? Or if he had, had Violet changed much more than she said she had? Then the wisps said she had? She allowed the wisps to have secrets, because that was just how she worked. She had secrets too, and wouldn't want anyone to pry into those.

But if the wisps had lied to her, that wasn't a secret. That was something far, far more destructive. And if the wispon had changed this much...she had told Violet to look at it. And she had, and figured out more than Whisper had ever in only ten minutes. When Tails had looked at it, he gave it a good look through, before saying that wispons weren't his particular cup of tea.

It wasn't that he didn't know, but rather that wispons ran on different physics entirely. And at the same age as Violet had, she had figured it out. Maybe she was better with weapons? But her workshop in Green Hills hadn't been filled to the brim with them, but she knew that Tails' workshop had inventions of every kind and caliber. And had been for years.

Maybe the wisps had changed something, without telling her. That was something they could do, and would do if it was proven entertaining enough. But they had seemed shocked themselves that the wispon could now take two, three, or even as it was now, four of them. Pink to include her as part of the wispon array, Green for the lightening of gravity, Orange for the thrust, and Cyan for the directions. One wisp, on their own, could not do this.

But four wisps, working in harmony, could. This way, that way, Whisper felt herself being pulled apart and put back together again. They were slowing down, as Orange's endurance was not the best of the main wisps. She hadn't seen many other orange wisps though, so she wouldn't know if Orange was comparable to other ones. Maybe she was.

Even with Cyan doing mostly just the directional changes, the hyperactive wisp was still moving her forward, even if it wasn't to the same speed or ability as what Orange could do. She felt herself turn left, followed by a right, then another right, then a left, she saw only a white focused void around her.

Was she supposed to be doing anything? Whisper hoped not, because the wisps had done a good job of making sure that she couldn't, even if she wanted to.

Then suddenly a green building appeared in her vision, and just as quickly she snapped back to normal three dimensional spacetime. She had barely an instant to blink as what that meant as the wisps all hid in their canisters, her body still moving forward.

She slammed into it hard. Cold, hard stone. That's what these things would be made out of, weren't they? Whisper could feel her arm bend in a way that it wasn't supposed to, and her shoulder wasn't much better.

She fell off the wall, which was surprisingly based on how far into the stone her imprint was, before she landed hard on the ground with a stonelike thud. The variable wispon landed next to her, crashing into the ground. "Ow," she said simply, the pain in her back and stomach flaring up again, now tied with the pain in her arm.

"That looked like quite a fall. And a crash," another girl said from nearby. Whisper gave her the barest glance, before she tensed up. Emerald tunic, this time a wolf much like herself, except much more gray in color. She must have noticed Whisper tensing. "Woah, hey, nothing's bad gonna happen. Just need to check up on you, alright?" she asked, pulling out a different strange device than the square like one that the dog pulled out earlier.

A purple light shot out, scanning everything over her. "Let's see..." she muttered, before she just stared at it for a second. She turned to Whisper, "How are you walking?" she asked simply. She looked towards the emerald building. "Someone get out here, we need medical!" she called out.

That was bad. That was bad, very bad. Whisper struggled to push herself up, only to realize that her limbs weren't really responding. They were as if her brain was getting an error message, saying, 'error limb not found'. She could still see it though.

She hoped she hadn't been paralyzed. Not this close, Tangle was literally right there. That's all she wanted, that's all she'd ever wanted, and the lemur was just now out of reach.

Another skunk, this time with a tail, appeared in her vision. "Is this the one that Diego's been after?" he asked congenially. "Before you panic and hurt yourself more," he said, looking down at Whisper. "You're going to be alright. We just need to ask a few questions, that's all."

That was bad. That was bad, very bad.

Whisper felt her legs get pulled up first, and she almost sighed with relief. She could still feel, which meant that she was just so injured she couldn't move. That was all. Still a massive pain in the tail, but not nearly as bad as it could have been. Then her arms were picked up by the skunk, and she could see the wolfess dragging her inside the emerald building, the variable wispon slung over her shoulder.

The inside was surprisingly enough, not green. But rather a mix of blues, browns, and various other colors that made her think of general authority. There were still plenty of greens thrown in, but they were mostly just that; thrown in. As if someone had realized what a dull place it was without any other colors.

She was put down softly on a nearby couch. The same wolfess that saw her fall grabbed a chair, sitting down next to her. "Alright, this may sting. Hopefully it stings," the wolfess said, pulling out a small shot of some kind of red liquid. It wasn't blood, Whisper knew, but whatever it was she didn't know.

She felt the effects near instantly. Her breathing was suddenly much easier. Her shoulder almost popped back into place, and she could feel the injuries on her legs, which she'd mostly just ignored, start to vanish in front of her eyes. Her back pain that had been bugging her for weeks at this point, it seemed, slowly went away as if it was never there.

"There, you feel better?" The wolf enforcer asked, sitting back on the chair. "If you want your wispon, it's right there," she said, pointing to the opposite side of the couch. "Now, before Diego realizes you're here and timesets now, may I ask you a few things?"

Whisper pushed herself up, rolling her shoulders gently. "Who's Diego?" she asked simply.

"Ah, starting off with this. Alright, fair's fair. Twenty questions. I'll answer one, then you answer one, we'll start off easy. Diego is Rough and Tumble's boss. He found them as a mercenary force in AR1545. They weren't the most competent, but they were at least silly enough that it softened the enforcer's hand with the locals quite nicely," she explained. "He's the one who told us to be on the lookout for a brown wolf with a black cloak, several wisps of various abilities, and that thing," she said, pointing to the wispon. "Now my question. Who are you?" she asked.

"Whisper."

"Whisper the wolf. The Restoration?" she asked, tilting her head. "Odd. I don't think we picked any fights with your team."

"Don't you want to kill Sonic?"

The other wolf tilted her head before shaking her head. "Not...exactly. I don't know what upper management wants. I can give ideas. Most of us in Timeroot are just here because we were either born into it, like myself, or because we had nowhere else to go."

She looked towards Whisper. "Is that why you're here? To make sure we can't...I mean that's a valid reason, more so than many others," she started to say. "I'm Gray," she smiled, as Whisper's eyebrow rose. "Yes, named after the fur," she smiled, in the way that suggests she wasn't happy at all.

Gray looked down at the device in her hands, before her eyes went to the wispon. "If you ask me, if anyone was going to try to kill a hero like Sonic...and yes, we've heard of his exploits even here, then only the Timeroot could do it. It would change timelines, but we've navigated worse scenarios before."

"How?"

"How do we navigate?" Gray asked, as Whisper nodded. "It's complicated. About fifteen years ago local time, or about three hundred years ago your time, there was a pack of echidnas that, to be honest, messed up. They pissed off an old god, or...I'm not sure what they were. Either way, the end result is that the echidnas died off, the exception of one line. Timeroot's wanted the Master Emerald, if you know what that is, for ages."

"I'm aware of what it is. I'm friends with the guardian," Whisper admitted. That wasn't technically true. They were at least colleagues, and knowledgeable of each other. Whisper often praised Knuckles' self-control, and ability to determine the right path from the start.

He was, however, quite naive and gullible to thinking the best of people, which was something that she'd seen through dozens of times. Perhaps that was the problem of dealing with Mimic, the scars left on her psyche.

"Oh wow," Gray said, blinking in surprise. "I wasn't expecting that."

"He got caught by your time trap. As did many other friends of mine."

"...Does that include Sonic the Hedgehog?"

"Among others."

Gray sighed. "That's not a good sign. It means the Master Emerald is alone right now."

"It's not."

"It's...not? Then who's up there?"

"Other guardians," Whisper said, deliberately being vague. She didn't trust Gray, and she doubted that Gray trusted her, but at least she was getting information. And Gray did help heal her up.

"Huh. Nothing in the reports say anything about that," Gray said, looking down at her device again. "Alright, last question from me. If I were to let you out, right now, what would you do?" she asked.

Whisper didn't immediately answer. She doubted that Gray would want the answer to be, 'to break my friends out', which was the absolute truth. She was so close to it.

The device pinged, and Gray glanced down at it. "Huh. Diego put an update on your report, saying that you came here through the Root Clock, but by using a separate energy source than a usual clockwatcher. Wait a second..." she murmured, as she quickly started moving through menus and files on the device. Whisper didn't know how it worked, but she supposed it had to be some kind of advanced computer system.

"Clockwatcher?"

"It's a device built by the older Timeroot. It's how they timeset to various ways, but you have to do it with temporal energy. I'm not sure how it works, I just know that it does. Most Timeroot citizens don't have one, only we Enforcers use them a lot."

"It's uncommon, then?"

"It's rare. Unless you found a jailbroken one, and those ones are illegal to use, for obvious reasons. Root clock's been missing for eons. Even with our ability to timeset."

"They record where people go. Root clock?"

"When people go, but yes. The Root clock is supposedly the one out there that anyone can use. The first one ever made. But that also opens us up to Time Eaters."

"You know of Time Eaters?"

"When you start time traveling as we do, yes," Gray said, flipping through the records. "They're...well, I'd say monsters, but they really aren't. They're more just forces of nature. People aren't meant for time traveling."

Gray glanced down, before putting the device down and staring straight into Whisper's eyes. "You're being followed by a Time Eater, aren't you?" she asked flatly.

Whisper said nothing, instead matching Gray's eyes stare for stare. Forces of nature? That was basically what Sonic had said, too. There was no way to kill them. They were to hunt, and hunt, and end, and end.

All she could do was end the ends before the end ended her.

"We're going to die, you know?" Gray said simply after a minute. "The Time Eater is going to hunt us just as it does you. The shield around Zerotime is enough to keep them from hunting us if we timeset inside the city, or if the city itself does a timeset. But you...it's following you. It's following you, into the city."

"I don't want to get others hurt."

"It's nothing you could have known," Gray shrugged. "And honestly, most of us will be just fine. Zerotime is localtime to most of us. We stay in the localtime. The only ones that don't is the Enforcers, and really now that we know we can just timeset to our zero time's. The Time Eater won't try to hunt us then."

"To get it to go away, I have to go back to my normal time?"

"Yes? You didn't know that, did you?"

"No," Whisper said. "No one knew. And no one knows how to get me back."

Gray blinked. "Well shit, that should have been Diego's first thought. But you have friends in Zerotime's time trap..."

"What would happen to them?"

"If you went back now? Then however long it was, they'd reappear here, and that's only if things went exactly as planned. In my story, we tried to get Echidnaopolis to evacuate from the water demon. They didn't listen."

"As planned?"

A loud klaxon burst through the room, and Gray immediately grabbed for another device on her belt. A blaring purple alarm burst out from the sides. "Time Eater alert. Our sensors have located it," Gray explained. "Most people won't have an issue."

"How do we kill it?"

"We don't," Gray answered. "We just have to run. Did anyone else in your party ever time travel?"

"No," Whisper answered, before she shook her head. "No, Sonic did. And they've also been to a 'White Space'."

Gray's eyes widened. "Time's End. No one's ever gotten out of it as far as we know."

"Sonic did. As did Amy, and Tails, and Shadow...Knuckles-"

"Shoot. Alright, new plan," Gray said softly, before she spoke into a device. "This is override Gray. Override Diego. Whisper the Wolf needs Zerotime."

"What will that do?" she asked. She stood up from the couch, and her legs protested the quiet motion before they solidified under her.

"That will get you a Clockwatcher, and to go back to your normal time. The Time Eater should follow you, and then lose interest."

"My friends will stay?"

"They'll have to. You'll be watched to make sure the timeline continues as we've seen it."

She couldn't have that. But she'd have twenty three years to prepare...that seemed like forever. And yet...there was a niggling thought in the back of her mind. "You'd said they'd just reappear here?" Whisper asked.

Gray nodded. "What has been done will stay done. Time isn't an immutable river, but it follows the same flow no matter what. It would take a large change to move the flow."

"And that's what Timeroot does?"

"No, we, the Enforcers, make sure that it stays the same. Why...?" Gray said, suddenly narrowing her eyes. Whisper almost felt sorry for her. This would've been easier on her if she hadn't realized what Whisper was about to do.

Gray went down a moment later as Whisper swung the variable wispon at her side. The wolf slammed into the side of the wall. "Why...?"

"Because my friends are there, and they're in trouble. I'm going to get them out, and undo all."

Gray's eyes widened just as Whisper took off through the Enforcer building. Dozens of people in green uniforms of all sizes and shapes were running around, some were screaming around orders, and some were shouting out others.

Whisper sought none of it. Her friends were in danger. And she had to be close, if this was the Enforcer building. Enforcer...more like enforced time.

Maybe that's why their name was the Enforcers. They enforced their own version of time, making sure that things went their way.

No one seemed to be taking care to look for her. She would use that.

She knocked on the wisp canisters just as she glanced out one of the windows. The sky had turned purple and vibrant, as if sucking in all the light around.

Orange popped out, and took only a moment to gauge what was going on. "This is it, then?" she asked.

The other wisps, minus Yellow, flew out of their own canisters as well. The hallway was suddenly quiet, as people went into rooms and didn't come out. The hallways were starting to empty out, but even the ones still around weren't paying any attention to Whisper or the wisps.

"We break out our friends. And then..." Whisper started.

Cyan nodded. "We undo all things. We're gonna break it."

Blue gave a chirp. "Aw yeah, it's time to break stuff!"

"We know the goal. It's four blocks from here. The Time Eater is hunting us."

"We just have to shatter it, don't we?" Green nodded. "Defend Whisper, and get her to the goal."

"Use everything we can!" Pink smirked. "I like this plan! This plan's gonna be great!"

Orange rolled her eyes. "There is no plan, Pink. It's literally just 'break stuff and get the Time Eater's attention!'"

"And that's why it's awesome!"

Whisper shook her head, before she gave a soft clap and started to run down the stairs. She was on the second or third floor.

There was a series of shouts above her as she heard the Enforcer's shots start to eat away at something, not related to her. The purple skyline started to infect the building that she was in just as she landed on the second floor.

There were signs posting various things, but none of them were in a language that she knew. Pink flew up in her sight. "You should put on your mask, you know? The Diamond Cutters would love for you to rescue your friends completing the look. It's this way!" Pink said, pointing down another side hallway. It was long past, and went down a bit towards what Whisper hoped was the end.

Whisper nodded. Once more the thought of the old Diamond Cutters ate away at her, but she pushed down the mask as Pink had suggested either way. Violet was waiting for her. Tails was waiting for her. Sonic was waiting for her.

Tangle was waiting for her.

New character! Can't wait to see how she joins the par...oh.

Whisper why.

Until Next Time!