Disclaimer: See first chapter.
Paths
Violet stood up from around the car. Dr. Hopps was in the corner, still out cold. "Mr. Sonic told me a lot about him, but I never thought I'd actually see him..." she muttered as she tried to get a better look.
The robot looked remarkably similar to the last time Whisper had seen him. Minus a few dents here or there, and the small scratches of paint that flecked off, and the large white scarf it had wrapped around its neck. It looked towards Surge, who merely shrugged.
"He was not a threat," Metal Sonic said over Whisper's earpiece. Could Surge actually pick it up? The only reason Whisper could understand it was because Cyan was a natural technopath, able to understand computers and everything that went with them, and was able to translate the small signals that it used to talk.
"No idea what you said, and I. Don't. Care," Surge said with a smile as she leaned against one of the badniks. It struggled to try to attack her, even after Dr. Hopps had been disabled. She glanced down with a frown and shocked it into submission.
"Surge. Where is Kit?" Metal Sonic asked. The tenrec made no motion of trying to understand the robot, and it...he...made an obvious sigh of displeasure. "Where is Kit?" he asked again.
"Not here," Whisper spoke up. "He went to another of the villages nearby," she said. Violet and Surge both stared at her. Lavender was making a snow-wisp in a nearby snow drift.
"You...can understand?" Metal Sonic's metallic voice said over the radio earpiece. His face was unblinking, staring straight at her, emotionless. "I am...hesitant to believe that."
"Nope, that's because of me! Hi!" Cyan said, disimbuing herself from the earpiece just long enough to give a wave to Metal Sonic, before doing a raspberry at Surge and diving back in.
"Aww, Wispy doesn't like me. Well that's just too bad," Surge said, doing a raspberry of her own towards the cyan wisp.
"I understand. It is not a native ability, but one granted through the use of technology and wisp," Metal Sonic said, nodding slowly to himself. His red eyes shot down towards Violet, who was suddenly looking over some of the dents on his arms. "What is she doing?"
Whisper relayed the message. "I'm looking over the dents. Mr. Sonic told me a lot, that Eggman always called you one of his greatest creations. It's easy to see why I think-" Violet started.
"Are you seriously excited over some dumb robot? No need to wet yourself kid. Just a robot. These things are the same," Surge said, shocking the other buzz bomber that threatened to come online. The action knocked it out again.
"No need to be crass, Surge the Tenrec."
Whisper didn't want to relay that one, and remained silent. One of the customers, a particularly brave lion, looked outside and sighed with relief as he saw that Dr. Hopps had been taken care of. "Oh thank goodness, we had stopped hearing sounds..." he said, opening up the door and letting the others exit out.
One of the kids, a small cougar islander, ran out and gave a hug onto Metal Sonic's leg, before running back to his mother's car, incidentally the same one that Violet hid behind. Many others walked up and said their thanks to both Surge and Metal Sonic, with a few giving polite nods to Whisper.
"He's not just a robot, he's practically a full AI built into a robotic body. Da...Mr. Sonic said that he was basically a fully built AI clone of him, with the same personality, same likes and dislikes, and even the way he thought. The only thing different was the pre-programmed set of allegiances," Violet retorted.
"She is incorrect. I do not think the same as the Hedgehog. However, my personality core matrix was modeled after his key behavioral pattern," Metal Sonic explained.
Whisper hoped that Cyan would explain the difference to her, but it appeared that even though Cyan knew the words the actual meaning was a bit beyond her. "Is that why you turned?" Whisper asked quietly.
"It is. My master left me and Sage with one wish; to let no one ever rise above him, no matter how we did it. Sage locked herself away in the Starfall Islands, looking through cyberspace for anything to assist with a world-wide intranet. I dedicated myself to the physical world."
So even now, Metal Sonic wasn't truly 'good'. He was, at best, an ally. But to hear that even now Eggman's ego was actually doing the world a favor...that stung a bit, Whisper had to admit. It was fully in character, too, which made it kind of worse.
"I think I can probably repair some of these with Kit's help," Violet murmured. She ran her hand down the robot's arm, feeling the dents and scratches that had gone into his actual carapace.
"Eh, Kit won't. He could, but he's always too busy playing with those damn dolls of his," Surge complained. She threw her hands behind her head again. "We gonna find a place to sleep or what? We found the robot."
Metal Sonic's red eyes went out and turned back on. The equivalent of being taken by surprise, or blinking? "You were searching for me?"
"Kit brought up a prophecy," Whisper suggested, before Violet took over.
"Oh yeah! There's a prophecy about my sister or something?"
Metal Sonic looked down. "Who is she?" he asked Whisper directly.
"Violet Prower. Daughter of Tails-" Whisper started.
The robot cut her off, "Of Miles Prower and Blaze the Cat. The resemblance is quite...uncanny?" he asked, making sure that was the right word. "I had heard of her birth."
"She has a sister. A two-tailed cat."
Metal Sonic blinked. "...I see. How old would she be?"
"Ten."
"That's more than slightly alarming," Metal Sonic admitted. "Please excuse me, I must converse with Sage on this. There is a hotel just down the street, The Snow Day Inn. You will find that a room has been reserved for you, under Surge."
"Metal Sonic says we already have a room under the Snow Day Inn-" Whisper said.
Surge whistled. "That place is nice! Seriously, best amenities money could ask for. How'd you get that much dough just lying around? You ain't made of money Metal."
"Donations go a long way. As do online game tournaments."
And no one else realized that Metal Sonic was playing with them? Whisper wondered how that went; did no one think that his latency would be ultra-low? He was a robot, not just 'essentially' a robot. How did that even work, given that most places would require things like ID?
Unless Metal Sonic faked that too. Whisper had to admit, he could probably do it. Surge led the way to the inn as Metal Sonic stood stock still, Lavender having to forcibly pull Violet away from the robot.
The police had come by and picked up Dr. Hopps, arresting him easily considering he was still out cold. Whisper was glad to have at least one thing work out easily.
The Snow Day Inn looked like it was one of the higher quality inns in the area. The lobby was a mass expanse, almost three stories tall with various railings and elevators to the other floors. It allowed anyone on the third floor to look over the railing and tower over everyone beneath them.
There were a few screens that played various things that people could do at the hotel, and it included things like a water slide, room service, a game show that was taped every night for the kids to watch and or play. There were advertisements for other places around, including a lot of skiing and hiking.
Surge marched straight up to the front, ignoring most of it even as the screens glitched out. The human behind the counter didn't look concerned at the villain in front of her. "Hi. Surge, room for minimum three and a whole lotta wisps," Surge introduced herself, leaning against the counter. Fortunately it was islander sized.
"Surge, Surge...like power surge?" the human asked. When Surge nodded, she glanced back down at the keyboard and computer screen, before pulling back another set of keycards from the back. "Alright, all checked in. Check out is at eleven, if you want room service please call, the numbers on the phone. If you want the front desk, please hit the zero and we'll answer," she said with a smile.
Surge grabbed the keycards, barely returning it with a snarl before she turned around. "Right, room forty six. Wolfy here's your key, don't lose it. I ain't picking up a replacement. Hold on," she said, before she turned around, "Can I get your number!" she called out to the receptionist.
"Just press the zero key!" the receptionist called back.
"Yeah that ain't what I meant," Surge murmured as she turned around dejected. "Whatever. Come on," she said, marching towards the door.
With all the signs around, it was easy to find the right door. It was mostly plain, with a simple number plate spelling out '46' on it. Surge ran the card next to it, letting the door open automatically.
There were three beds all of equal size. Surge bolted in and grabbed the one in front of the TV, immediately turning it on to a channel that Whisper didn't care for, some game show. Violet wandered in, before she went exploring into the various nooks and crannies. Lavender started to bounce up and down on the beds, creating a strange pattern.
Whisper pulled the wispon up and planted it on the bed. Cyan was still in her radio, but there was no energy being used. The wisp was waiting, watching.
Surge bolted out the door a moment later, saying something about being a bit hungry and wanting to get some food. Cyan came out of the radio the second she did, breathing deep as if she'd been holding her breath.
Immediately the other wisps followed suit. "I cannot stand that girl!" Orange complained. "Seriously, how do you do it!? When you know what she did!?"
"What did she do?" Violet asked. "I was only given a quick run-down, but..."
"We're energy. Surge took that energy from us, almost killing us, and used it to almost kill Whisper," Green murmured.
"And don't forget that she tried to kill Sonic and Tails too!" Blue brought up. Whisper ignored them, pulling out some of the tools that had been used to make the variable wispon.
It'd been a long time for the maintenance on it. She'd been using it a lot, and had barely a day to really get into the nitty gritty. The worst part was, she still wasn't feeling tired. The knowing that the Time Eater was after her too...
"Doing maintenance? Can I watch?" Violet asked as she leaned over Whisper's shoulder. The wolf stared at her, before she sighed and shrugged.
"It's nice to be out of the canisters at least. How's Surge been so far, Lavender?" Orange asked, hovering close to the nega-wisp.
"She's been mean, but nowhere near trying to hurt people. I think she's just too hurt herself," Lavender said quietly. "She's definitely in pain, but she's not...bad."
The variable wispon was a hodgepodge of parts that only Smithy had been able to understand well enough to create. Whisper knew enough to take care of it, and she would, but to re-create? Even Tails couldn't do that the one time she'd left it with him for a day or two.
She'd needed it too soon, not because it was a security blanket.
"I think I get it," Violet murmured as Whisper cleaned off a few of the more random pieces. She had no idea what they did, but they were necessary for the wispon to fire. Even the wisps had only the bare functioning idea of how it worked.
"You do?" Whisper asked quietly.
"Yeah. See, this is the polarizing frequency control board, it's what enables it to change based upon the wisp imbuing it. The energy comes from elsewhere, probably the actual wisp," Violet said, staring at one of the parts that Whisper had no idea what it did. It was just a green part, it didn't have the usual signs of being a computer chip or part.
"And that controls the modulator down here. Changing this up allows you to fire different things, rather than just the one. This here is the shifter key, which is entangled with this part here-" Violet started.
"Wow. She figured out more about that by looking at it for ten minutes than you have in your entire life," Cyan murmured. "Not that I blame you. I don't make heads or tails of it either."
"Really? I didn't find it that hard."
"Violet, Tails looked at this and even he couldn't figure half of that out. Let alone in ten minutes."
"He probably could. Just didn't want to make you feel bad. So...sorry about that," Violet said, shrinking back into herself. Whisper almost hesitated for a second, before the wisps helped her and pushed the vixen forwards again.
"Don't be! Can you change it can you change it can you change it!" Blue asked repeatedly. Violet blinked at him before she shook her head.
"Probably not. I could be wrong about it all too. Sorry, didn't mean to get your hopes up," she murmured.
Whisper thought that there was something else going on. But...if Violet didn't think she could do it, Whisper wasn't going to bring it up. The fact she'd even let Violet take a look at it spoke volumes of the wolf's trust towards her. "You can keep looking at least," she murmured towards the vixen.
Violet gleefully took her up on at least that much. The wisps played throughout the room, bouncing on top of the beds and enjoying being out of their canisters for a bit while Whisper did her supposed nightly routine maintenance. Even if she hadn't done it in a few days.
There was a strange whistling sensation to Whisper's ears, before she perked up. The lights had been dimmed a bit, and there was a...girl off in the corner. She was mostly white, with a hint of blue or red in the other areas. "Are you Whisper?" she asked, her voice hollow and harrowed. She was human, but probably not much older than five. It was hard to tell human ages.
"Are you floating?" Blue asked, taking a peek. Cyan slammed her appendages onto her face in some form of a facepalm.
"I am an artificial intelligence, given form through projectors that this hotel uses. I am not actually here," the girl answered.
"So...you're Sage?" Violet asked, sitting on the bed next to the variable wispon. Whisper took another moment to finish putting it back together, letting her mask run a quick diagnostic on it. Thinking that everything was clear, she too stood up and glanced at the artificial lifeform.
"I am," Sage nodded. "You must be Violet," she said. The fox grinned. The door slammed open and immediately the wisps, minus Lavender, gave a heartfelt scream before heading towards their canisters. Surge stomped in, followed by Shadow and Kit, with Metal Sonic bringing up the rear and closing the door softly. It was strange, for a robot that had earned so much of her attention while working for Eggman, he was strangely cautious about hurting too much.
Shadow was covered in snow, as if he rushed here with Kit in tow. The blue fennec fox had snow mostly on his ears, but otherwise seemed fine. Was his hydrokinesis capable of manipulating snow?
"Oh good, everyone's here," Shadow said quietly. "We have...issues to discuss."
That was one way to put it. 'Issues to discuss'. Whisper rolled her eyes in Cyan's honor, as the wisp wasn't there to do it herself. They had fled as soon as Surge came in, not that Whisper blamed them.
Metal Sonic said nothing, but Whisper heard the same crackling sound over the radio. She knocked gently on Cyan's canister, and the wisp leapt out almost as fast as laser to go within her headset. "Alright, ready to go! Sorry, had to make sure Surge didn't see me."
Again, Whisper didn't blame her. "We do?" Violet asked. "I don't see much, unless you're talking about Mata."
Shadow nodded. "That, among other things. There's been some suspicious quakes and holes on the pathway down to Fern Valley. Whisper, can you and Violet take a look at that when you're down there? That's why Metal Sonic was over here."
Whisper raised an eyebrow. "Sure," she answered. She didn't quite know how she was supposed to combat the earth, but on the other hand they've done the impossible before. This was just another version of the same.
"Violet," Sage asked quietly, "Metal Sonic has confirmed to me that your sister is a two tailed cat?" she asked.
Violet nodded. "Yeah. Not sure what it is that you're looking for-"
"Thirteen years ago, I, or rather my father Dr. Eggman, received a prophecy from an islander woman in a brown cloak. The prophecy was vague at best, as they always are. 'The Final Path starts when the living guide the dead, and the future becomes unwritten, the past forgotten, the present unlived."
Whisper glanced up. She noticed a few things. Shadow, Surge, and Kit were staring at Sage, while both Metal Sonic and herself were staring at Violet, who was saying the exact same things, whispering gently underneath her breath.
"The end comes, fire breathes its last, and all will fall under the undying hordes of the once-forgotten."
Violet leaned back. "I was hoping it wasn't that one," she said mirthlessly. Whisper stared at her. She seemed much older now than the twelve year old that Whisper knew she was.
"You are aware of it?"
"Mom and Dad told me the story. Mom was...experienced in pyromancy. They suspected the 'fire' bit was referring to her," Violet murmured. "They got the full thing too, long before I was born."
"Before you were conceived, I feel," Sage said softly. "Your sister practices necromancy, correct?"
"She does. She's the only one that could 'guide the unliving'" Violet said. "I hid it from her pretty well, I don't think she knows."
"It's quite likely that she knows other things then," Sage said quietly. The red lines she had changed to blue, and back to red a moment later.
"She always said they knew more than they were allowed to say," Violet explained. "Still, that doesn't explain anything, even knowing the 'prophecy'. Which as my Mom explained it, is mostly crackpot theories anyways."
Shadow snickered, and Whisper gently hit her radio as Cyan snickered as well. Hearing Blaze refer to anything as 'crackpot theories' though...well, that was kind of funny.
"And yet she chose to believe them."
"Belief is funny like that," Surge answered. "Anyways, this doesn't really matter to us, so Kit and I are just gonna...go."
"No," Sage interrupted. "Please stay, there's more."
"There's more of this nonsense!?" Surge cried out. "Kit, when you told me this was going to be entertaining I expected actual entertainment, not this occult madness!"
"Metal Sonic said we were necessary! For some reason."
"I've done many analyses on the first paragraph, and I think that's the warning. The second is the repercussions of allowing the first to happen," Sage explained.
"That tracks," Shadow spoke up. He turned to Whisper. "Belle ran another translation suite on that clock device that brought you here. It's the same thing, said over and over. 'Healed Time, Hurt Time'.
In a circle, a never ending cycle of healing and hurt. That sounded...familiar, in a way. That was her life in a nutshell, wasn't it? On the other hand, that could be fundamentally extended to all life, a cycle of hurt and heal that belonged to everything.
"I just want to go back," Whisper whispered.
Yet despite the quiet, her voice carried far. Her basic want, at its most basic, was to simply 'go home'. To make sure her friend...lover...whatever Tangle was to her, was safe. She'd move heaven and hell if need be.
There was a chirp in her ear as Cyan agreed.
Unless she wasn't the target. But then something had made that clock point to this time, with prophecies and just...
A hurt Sonic. A pained Surge. Missing Tails, missing Blaze, no Silver, Rouge and Omega gone...A shattered Shadow, a broken time.
A thought came to her. She wasn't supposed to be the one healed by time. She was supposed to be the one doing the healing.
Except what had she done? She hadn't done anything.
"That's not true," Cyan whispered. Whisper wasn't sure how Cyan knew what she was thinking, unless she was whispering so quietly under her breath that she couldn't even hear herself. The wisp came out, ignoring the spike of fear that was from seeing Surge in the corner, and knocked on every one of Whisper's canisters. "You've done a lot here already."
"Shadow's started his healing. Sonic's started his healing. Violet and Mata are learning to live without Blaze and Tails, rather than living in their shadows. You helped Jewel, trapped within her own mind by a power of one of our own," Orange summarized.
"You helped free Green Hills. You helped free Spiral Hill. Even this place. Who are you, Whisper, to say that you don't help?" Pink said.
"We allied with you because you were the last Diamond Cutter. We stayed with you because you were the Guardian Angel," Green kept going.
"Do you remember what the director or admiral of GUN said? That the Restoration was always what he had hoped GUN would be. And then...it came back," Blue.
"Sonic called you a hope-bringer. Your response, if you remember it, was what happened when that hope-bringer had no hope of their own?" Cyan asked.
"You take hope from everyone and everything around," Lavender said. "But you don't keep it. You spread it. You know what's right, and what's wrong."
"Now is our chance to help you," Sage said succinctly. "Shadow...contact Sonic and the others. Everyone you can. Meet at those coordinates that Metal Sonic is about to give you."
"I'm not bringing Faker into this if I can help it," Shadow answered. "He has a family, down in Green Hill." Sage glared at him, the effect given extra by the fact she was completely holographic. Her red turned to blue for another instant before she nodded.
"I get it..." Violet muttered. She turned to Kit, "When you get a chance, alternate the soporific from the knee and up, make sure it's aligned to chaos energy, not just electrical. It should work, if it's for who I think it is."
Kit nodded. "I'm not surprised you figured that out. Alright, I'll do that," he said. "It's only fair, after all."
"Yeah, so with all this nonsense, what exactly is going on?"
"Whisper and Violet are heading to Fern Valley. I'm heading to Angel Island. After that, we have to wait and see. Not much more we can do right now," Shadow answered. Whisper admitted he probably had a strong hunch, although it appeared that Surge didn't as she threw her hands behind her head again.
Shadow nodded towards Kit, and pulled out the green chaos emerald. Whisper could feel its power from where she was, although it disappeared a moment later as he teleported with both Kit and Surge.
Metal Sonic stared at her for a moment, before he started to move towards the door. Sage's lines turned from red to blue again, and she gave a quiet nod before she too, disappeared into midair.
Whisper's mask booted up the night vision instantly. She waited another moment. "You knew this prophecy?" Whisper asked suddenly.
Violet let Lavender out of the hold she'd had her in. "Yeah, but it was...well, Mom thought it was just the Sol Emeralds messing with her. Dad was ambiguous for a while, but I noticed he started preparing early."
Whisper nodded slowly. "Tomorrow morning?" she asked.
Violet nodded. "Yep, we'll go early."
I fell back to my old rigamarole of "if I don't like it, make a prophecy."
I really need to stop doing that. Especially if I don't particularly LIKE said prophecy. In Blooming Tides it was needed to explain the title, where this title won't be explained until...according to my notes, the second to last chapter. If not the last one. Fun fact; this is actually the THIRD version of this chapter. The other two were even worse...Fortunately, as much a nadir as this is, I feel it goes up from here.
Until Next Time!