Anonymous Review Replies!
Clockwork: You bet it's her, I'm sure writing her will be a lot of fun. ;p And yup, totally Chris. Not sure yet what his fate's gonna be, but we'll see. XD Glad you like it!
XxShadowxX: Preeeeetty sure Shadow's only here because otherwise Maria would be upset XD And oh gods, yes. He's going to need a *lot* of luck for this fic. As does Chris. Maybe one of them will have it :p
SonicDragon1302: Glad to hear it! More coming already! :D
DEV: Hahah, ja, und das ist erst der Anfang^^° High School verlangt natürlich nach einer *Menge* an Statisten...:p (und Shadow freut sich sicherlich über jeden Exzentriker, dem man ihm in den Klassenraum steckt, right? Right? XD) Was Sonics Hintergrund in dieser Story und seinen Grund für die Anwesenheit in der Klasse angeht - hah, das soll er später selber erzählen, aber ich denke, dass der Grund schon eins der wichtigsten Motive überhaupt für Sonic ist ;) Etwas mehr zu seiner Rolle gibt's auch prompt dieses Kapitel :D Nach, äh, jeder Menge Shadow-whump. XD Freut mich sehr, dich an Bord zu haben! :3
Chapter Two: Lunch Break
"It's so cool to meet another hedgehog with a human name!"
That was what Amy had said. Shadow knew this wasn't quite correct.
Shadow's name was a strange mixture – he had a first and last name like a human, yes, but he was also named, like it was a cultural tradition among sapients, for an object – a shadow. Maria had given him the name when he had only been a few weeks old, and like a lot of things his sister had gifted him with, he treasured it - even if it, like everything else about him, made him a strange hybrid that was neither quite human nor entirely Mobian.
Still, better as a name than my other designation UL 2/23, Shadow thought dryly. That was the label he had received when he had still been nothing but a lump of cells in a petri dish, short for 'Ultimate Lifeform, Series 2, Version 23' – a morbid reminder that there had been 22 artificial hedgehogs before him that had never survived the experiments performed on them. And a whole host of previous experimental lifeforms in Series 1, when Gerald had still tried to use lizards. But his creator never seemed too fond to talk about that, so Shadow had never pushed, caring little for any creature that wasn't part of his immediate family anyway.
Next, the lesson began with a roll call, but to Shadow, who had never been used to having direct contact with more than four people on a first name basis, the wild mixture of human and sapient names soon blurred into one, anyway. He managed to remember a few of the more normal, non-Mobian ones – Chris, Helen, Danny, Elise, Julian, and even a girl called Shahra – but most of the rest of his classmates' identities was soon lost on him. (Even though Amy for some reason warned him not to get too close to this Chris character).
Afterwards, the lesson dragged on. Shadow stared at the clock. He knew most of the content anyway – Gerald's education had been thorough – and so resigned himself to studying the students once more instead. There were approximately twenty of them in the class, maybe a dozen of them sapients, the rest human kids. It really seemed to be a wild mixture; not only did the humans have all sorts of skin- and haircolours, the furry (and feathery, and scaly) population of the class room consisted of all sorts of shapes, colours and sizes as well. He, his neighbour Amy and the strange blue guy (Sony? Something like that...) at the window were the only three hedgehogs in the room, the other seats being taken up by a pair of green and purple birds, then a strange, orange-brown, presumably female thing that for some reason had a boomerang lying on her desk, then a rather large purple cat, something that looked like a mixture between a coyote and a wig store, a girl rabbit, a red-furred vixen, and finally the strange pair of the also incongruously large crocodile and a magenta chameleon sitting next to him.
All in all, Shadow had trouble to feel like he was at a school and not at the zoo.
No. Focus. You can't think like that. They are normal people. You are even one of them, Shadow reminded himself unwillingly. Having grown up amongst humans, most of whom had thought sapients like him little more than animals, it was a bit hard not to somehow hold these attitudes themselves, nonsensical though it was. (Maria had actually called it 'internalized speciesism' once, but her brother hadn't really been listening). Shadow let his gaze travel back to the black cat Ms Ebony who was still writing on the blackboard and he could already feel his mind drifting off again, when suddenly-
"Rolling around at the speed of sound-! Got places to go, gotta follow my-"
"Hello?"
Shadow turned. The blue hedgehog at the window had apparently just answered his phone and was now speaking into it as if this was the most normal thing in the world in the middle of a class.
"Hmm. Oh. Yeah. Okay, on it." He pressed the call on the mobile away, then looked up at the teacher. "Uh, teach, I gotta go, it's -"
Ms Ebony's only response was a weary sigh as she waved the blue hedgehog off. " It's fine. You may go."
"Cool! See you next week!"
And then he jumped out the window.
Shadow stared after him.
Was this normal?
He gave a brief, inconspicuous glance around. Absolutely no one seemed to mind, (and for a moment the black hedgehog had a brief paranoia attack if he had even imagined the entire thing, if it weren't for the still deserted window desk)
Well. The only other one who was showing a reaction of sorts was Amy, who was staring after the blue lunatic with a dreamy-eyed expression that suggested she probably wouldn't be paying attention to the rest of the lesson.
Well. That makes two of us, Shadow thought, resigning himself to staring straight ahead and trying not to think up excuses already for why he would need stay home tomorrow.
xxx
After what had seemed like an eternity, finally the bell rang, signaling the lunch break.
"Excuse me." Shadow stood up and walked out past Amy before she could say anything, or any of the other students could approach him. This was all a bit too much. He needed a place to calm down, there were entirely too many people in this class, in this building, in this school. He wasn't used to this. Maybe a bathroom break would help. Bathrooms were supposed to be private places, weren't they?
He pushed open the door of the men's room, which fortunately was only occupied by one other boy at the urinals and made to head for one of the stalls. What he hadn't expected to happen was the teenager glancing over his shoulder, and then, seeing Shadow, go boggle-eyed and whirl around.
"What the hell? What are you doing in here?!"
Shadow, much like any introvert unused to the sacred silence of the bathroom interrupted, for a moment felt slightly at a loss. Then, annoyance fortunately took over.
"It's a bathroom. What do you think I would be doing in here, tapdancing?"
That seemed to throw the boy a little, who stared at him for a moment absolutely mystified, but then recovered remarkably quickly.
"What? No, dude, I mean what are you doing in here? This is the human bathroom. The one for you guys is one door over." He jabbed a thumb toward the side as he yanked his jeans back up.
"The human...oh. Oh," Shadow began, at the same time again feeling embarrassment rising inside himself like a shameful balloon.
"But if you're going in there, you can actually clear something up for me," the other teenager said, at the same time giving Shadow an enthusiastic grin, "See, me and my mates have been wondering, is it actually true that lizard guys have two-?"
A very wide-eyed Shadow was rather glad the bang! of the door on his way out had cut the boy's last word off.
Freaks. Freaks, the lot of them.
He glanced at the other doors next to the human men's bathroom, of which there were another two. Both of them had symbols, one of them showing something that looked like a silhouette of two elongated triangles curved toward one another, and the other a sign that more resembled a spiral.
For a moment, Shadow considered simply going into the door with a wheelchair symbol on it on the simple basis that there was only one of them.
Luckily, at that moment the female rabbit from his class walked past him and entered into the spiral room, and Shadow therefore selected the other one, probably for the first time in his life hoping nothing more that the room he was about to enter would contain urinals.
When it did, he was actually pleasantly surprised – apparently, the fact that this was a room for sapients meant that everything in here was just a tad smaller and easier to use for people only three feet tall.
(He was less pleasantly surprised at the smell, of course, which was likely to be the same no matter where the High School and which species its students).
The Ultimate Lifeform sighed and stepped over to the sink, glad that no one was in here at least, pulled off his gloves and splashed some water into his face. He needed to calm down. He couldn't lose his cool already just because there were so many...people here. The Chaos Energy inside him was still curling and fizzing underneath his skin, stirred into uneasy, wary movement by the nervousness of its master. Shadow was gripping the sides of the sink, staring into the mirror before him and tried to make a conscious effort to suppress it. The last thing he needed were sparks and flames of it escaping, burning along his fingers or hissing from his shoes – that would make people suspicious of him for sure.
Rest. There is no enemy here for you to fight, he told it, and could feel it settling down again, curling up in his chest, close to his heart, like a protective dog called back and returning to slumber. When Shadow was fairly sure he probably wouldn't accidentally unleash a Chaos Spear upon any unsuspecting students, he stepped out of the bathroom again into the corridor. Now it was lunch time, wasn't it? That meant he should probably follow the masses of teenagers who were presumably all heading for the canteen. He had just turned around to make himself part of the procession, when a voice made him halt.
"Hey! Newbie!"
Shadow stopped in his tracks and turned around. Behind him stood the green bird from his home room class and the purple female that had sat next to him. Their expressions seemed anything but friendly.
Shadow's eyes narrowed.
"My name is-"
"Yeah, yeah, don't care for your name, hairball." The hawk waved him off, his tone a self-satisfied sneer. "Just wanted to tell you, we don't need another dirt-crawling mammal like you here, so you better know your place, alright? And don't you forget it!"
The avian snapped the last word, his beak shutting with a sharp clack only inches from Shadow's face as he and his partner walked past him, giving him a light shove with the shoulder as they did so. Shadow snarled instinctively, but caught himself just in time before he would have reached out to yank the hawk back by his head feathers and wring his bony neck until he would talk like Tweety the canary for a week. Gerald had told him this school had a low violence tolerance. He couldn't disappoint his family by giving a negative impression this early on. The black hedgehog shot a brief glance around, just to check if anybody around had noticed the brief confrontation, but the general hubbub seemed to have been entirely unaffected, the birds already swallowed up by the lunch-hungry crowd. Breathing a last, irritated huff through his nose, Shadow rejoined them; he had no idea why the two had even picked on him, but he would still make it his mission not to stand out regardless.
xxx
The canteen. This was something he knew from his life aboard the ARK, at least. You got in line, grabbed a tray, and received whatever culinary abomination the kitchen crew had committed today. Shadow hadn't eaten often in the dining room aboard the space station, Maria only taking him there a couple of times when he had still been very young and not yet known to most of the station personal as a dangerous experiment, but he was still familiar with the basic logistics.
After he had received his lunch – ("Hedgehog, right? Charlie, one insecti-carnivore, lactose-intolerant!" the human woman behind the counter had hollered after only a cursory glance at him and then shoved a lasagna onto his tray before he could say anything) – he now found himself with a different problem altogether.
Where to sit?
The canteen's furniture consisted exclusively of large tables, seating at least ten each, and all of them already seemed to be occupied by various groups. Aboard the ARK, he had always eaten with Maria. Here, he knew no one.
His gaze briefly roamed over the dining hall – despite the school's inclusive policy, there weren't many tables that had both sapients and humans sharing it, only a few here and there. The other groups were fairly homogenous – the girl in the wheelchair from his class sat with five of the other humans at a table close to the counter, the green bird who had insulted him earlier had been joined by a purple swallow, grey albatross, blue hawk and a sunglass-wearing chicken at another one, and there also seemed to be a table populated entirely by shrimp and fish.
I think Maria once mentioned something about how humans at some point in their history managed to separate themselves by skin colour. Seems like they have progressed to species now, a dry voice in Shadow's head commented.
Not feeling like wandering around until he had found a table of hedgehogs (where he felt like he wouldn't belong anyway) Shadow had almost made up his mind to try his luck with one of the human/sapient mixed groups, when an already familiar voice called out to him.
"Hey! Hey, Shadow! Come sit with us!"
He turned around. Behind him, Amy and a few more people were waving at him from a table that still had a couple of empty seats.
Well. At least that'd spare me the process of introducing myself.
Shadow took a breath, and, forcing a marginally friendly expression on his face, made his way to one of the chairs.
"How're you holding up?" Amy asked, smiling at him as he sat. "School can be kinda overwhelming on the first day, huh? Sticks still doesn't like the canteen on some days, so when it's too crowded for her inside, she usually goes outside to hunt for her lunch."
"What?" Shadow managed, before his hypnotized gaze followed Amy's outstretched finger. The pink hedgehog was pointing outside the window, where, below some of the trees of the school's courtyard, the orange jungle badger girl from this morning appeared to be screaming and chasing after terrified feral squirrels with a boomerang.
Shadow gave Amy a look.
"Just so you know you have alternatives," the girl said with a bright smile.
Shadow at this point considered it perhaps hadn't been the best idea to sit down at this table.
"Hey, don't look so freaked out, she's a nice enough girl," Amy said, apparently interpreting his expression correctly. "She just grew up in the jungle, s'all."
"In the jungle," Shadow repeated.
"It happens," Amy shrugged. "This is what this school is for, anyway. A place for all of us who don't fit in anywhere else." She gave Shadow a smile that just for a moment reminded him too much of Maria and he quickly looked away, a bit spooked by the uncanny resemblance. Amy perhaps noticed, or else she simply remembered the others were there, for she next turned to the group. "But yeah, sorry, completely forgot! Marine, Mighty, this is the new student I told you about, Shadow! Shadow, I think you remember Espio and Vector?"
"Hello," Shadow managed, nodding at the two new faces – the first one, the raccoon, appeared to be somewhat younger than the rest, and the armadillo a bit older, more in line with the crocodile and chameleon. The armadillo called Mighty returned the greeting with an acknowledging nod and the racoon girl with a bright, enthusiastic grin and wave.
"No worries, we're all here because of a somewhat...spotty past, or because this is the only school that actually bothers to try and accommodate anybody not quite what they'd call normal," the crocodile said, giving Shadow a (somewhat disconcertingly) wide smile. "I run my own agency and them here's the only folks who give a croc a loose enough schedule that he can work with." He thumbed his chest. "Vector the Crocodile at your service - and these here are my business associates, Espio and Mighty. Our other member is thankfully in the supervised preschool lunchtime programme."
"Right," Shadow replied, not sure what kind of 'agency' a teenaged croc imagined himself to be running, but he didn't say as much. Instead, it was Marine who now also piped up, smiling.
"Yeah, mate, this place is ripper! None a' the blokes in those other bodgy schools believed me when I said I wos a Captain in me home dimension, but them 'ere sure do!"
Maria, you have enrolled me in a school of lunatics. I swear I will never forgive you for this.
"Hey. Marine. Give the guy some space to breathe," the armadillo remarked calmly, glancing at Shadow with a somewhat understanding look.
"It's cool. Some of us are also here because we don't have folks to pay our school fees for us and here they treat you decently even if you're poor."
"Or if you're a warden of the state," Amy remarked with a slightly rueful smile, before she immediately brightened up again. "But you still have family, don't you, Shadow?"
"I – yeah. As I said, my sister Maria and her grandfather, Professor Gerald."
"Human names, huh? And they gave you a Mobian one?" Vector asked, curiously.
"They are humans," Shadow pointed out with some irritation, and was rewarded with five pairs of eyes (sans Amy) immediately growing wide.
"Crikey! Really?!"
"Wait, since when-?"
"Does that mean your biological parents-?"
"I was adopted," Shadow cut them off. "I don't have any biological parents."
Marine frowned. "But everyone has-"
"I don't. Trust me," Shadow said, repressing the impulse to give a snort none of them would be able to understand.
"Well, nobody is perfect," Mighty said, thereby ending the topic effectively. "And compared to a lot of people here, having any family at all is pretty lucky."
"True," Amy nodded. "Eggman's attacks have left a lot of people without their folks..."
"Speaking of which, Sonic's not here. Is it-?"
"No idea. He ran off during first period," Amy replied with a pout. "I wish he could leave for once not during school hours, so I could come, but noooo..."
"He wouldn't take you anyway," Mighty pointed out. "You know that."
"He so would! I'm his girlfriend!"
"Amy..." the armadillo was affecting the tone of an exasperated older brother, and Shadow felt his attention slipping away as the others were jumping from topic to topic in a seemingly random pattern. Truth be told, he was slightly curious about what on Earth had been going on this morning (although the way this school was run, he supposed he shouldn't be surprised if the answer was that the hedgehog simply had some sort of mental condition that required him to jump out of windows at regular intervals) but he also didn't want to look like he in anyway cared about the antics of what was obviously the class clown.
"- too dangerous."
"He takes Tails!"
"Only sometimes. And the kit can hold his own."
"And so can I! If I hadn't stopped Gamma from -!"
"I would recommend for you to ignore them. This 'discussion' can go on for quite some time."
Shadow blinked. The purple chameleon had just spoken for the first time, his voice pleasantly low and smooth in comparison to the hedgehog and armadillo now caught in their increasingly exasperated, cryptic argument that was also taking up all the attention of Vector and Marine.
Shadow nodded. "Right. And you were...?"
"Espio the Chameleon." The reptile extended a gloved hand across the table. "And you're Shadow Robotnik. No relation to Dr. Ivo Robotnik, I presume?"
"...I don't know," Shadow frowned, aware that this was the third time in a row people had reacted strangely to his surname. There was something that twitched in his memory, but he couldn't quite recall what. "I'd have to ask Maria or the professor. Why?"
Espio gave him a strange look. "Well, the reason should probably obvious," he replied. "But don't concern yourself in either case. If there's anything I know it's that you can't choose family." His tone became somewhat cynical at the last phrase, even if his expression didn't change. Then he cocked his head, as if declaring the topic closed, before Shadow could even ask what any of that was supposed to have meant. "But no matter. You're a hedgehog. Do you have any special abilities?"
That seemed to catch the attention of the rest of the group again, and Marine immediately piped up.
"Strewth! Oh yeah! Tell us! You probably have real ace powers, mate, roight? Roight?"
"...powers?" Shadow asked, once again feeling a bit uncomfortable as the entire group's attention was focused solely on him.
"Yeah, powers, dude!" Vector confirmed enthusiastically. "Mighty here's freakishly strong, Amy can do that hammer thing, and Espio's our agency's resident ninja meister!" The crocodile beamed with pride, while Espio's twitching eye probably told the world what he thought of the denomination 'ninja meister'.
"And I can build tinnies and proper boats!" Marine proclaimed. "I'm so smart ya wouldn't believe it!"
"And with hedgehogs it's really common, too," Amy said with a smile. "I mean, everybody knows about Sonic, of course, but the rest of us often have powers as well. Do you?"
Shadow blinked.
Somehow the answer 'I can manipulate spacetime to suit my whims' seemed a bit grand.
"Uh...I can..."
Kill a man in less than two seconds.
Operate near any gun, rifle and other form of ranged weaponry you care to name.
Survive electrocution, suffocation and radiation that would wipe out any other form of existence on Earth.
"...make...risotto?" Shadow tried, increasingly aware that not many of his skills would likely help him out when trying to appear 'normal' in the dining hall of a high school.
He wasn't quite sure whether he should be offended or not when Vector and Mighty immediately burst out into laughter, Marine yelled out 'awesome!' and Amy seemed to give him nothing but a sympathetic smile and a pat on his shoulder. Only Espio looked at him somewhat doubtfully, but didn't say anything.
"Hey, that's cool, Shadow, I like cooking, too. Maybe you can teach me sometime," Amy said, and Shadow for some reason briefly had to fight the feeling of just having received a consolation prize at the lottery of life. This entire day had been giving him nothing but one headache after another, and more questions than ever.
"Well, even without powers, there's lots of other stuff you can apply yourself to," Vector said with a generous gesture. "I mean, look at me, surviving just on my wits, taste, and good looks."
"What our deluded boss means is that he is five feet tall and can bite most people in half," Mighty clarified smoothly, ignoring Vectors sputtering in the background. "Listen, being completely without powers as a smaller species can be tough. We know. And especially because this school takes in everyone who might have...behaved less than stellar elsewhere..." he briefly looked to the side "...it's not always the cushiest place in the world. Especially as fresh meat, try not to go looking for trouble, alright?"
"...I'll do my best," Shadow ventured, even if he privately knew that so far, trouble had never had any problem with finding him.
"Yeah. Like, you should definitely stay clear of the Babylon Rogues," Amy said, her voice low as she gave a small nod and a surreptitious glance toward the table where the group of birds was seated. "They often try to pick on newcomers especially. Sonic used to be able to put a stop to it, before, but ever since the school cracked down on him...not so much."
"I'll be sure to keep that in mind," Shadow replied conversationally, at the same time trying not to pay any attention to the twinge of increasing annoyance he felt at his own rising curiosity about how this absent blue hedgehog kept popping up in the conversation in the most random ways and everyone seemed to be absolutely awed by him. Who was this guy, some local village celebrity?
But before curiosity could perhaps finally have gotten the better of him, the bell rang again, ending their lunch period and their conversation. After the others had showed him where he could dispose of his tray and leftovers, Shadow politely excused himself, mostly because instead of afternoon classes today, he had a scheduled evaluation exam for new students to determine whether he needed extra tutoring in subjects, or could perhaps be moved to Advanced Placement in others.
The Ultimate Lifeform hoped it wasn't too obvious that the result that he really desired was that he would never have to return to this asylum at all.
To be continued...
...I'm sorry, Australians. I'm so, so sorry. I love your country, I loved living there, but I love hopelessly mangling accents even more. That said...
There you go! Slightly longer than the first chapter, so I hope you like! Already some fav characters of yours in the suporting cast? Lemme know! For anyone who's interested in Espio's family history, btw, I mostly like taking my cues from JudasFm's stories, which have quite a bit of fun with Mobian world building and feature some fascinating animal cultures :) Also, if anyone wants to read more Sonic/Shadow interaction than we got in this chapter, Advent of Equinox is going to update next! Yay! ;p That said, please tell me what you liked, and if you read, review? :D