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Art credit (with PERMISSION): Timothy Mindek
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Don't let the days go by —
could have been easier on you.
I couldn't change,
though I wanted to.
Should have been easier by three...
our old friend fear,
and you and me.
Sonic awoke with a start.
He remembered the whole thing vividly, but only the isolated scene, cut off from context before and after, with only a feeling that he hadn't been there alone.
A friend, a lover, a comrade; all three.
Something.
Extricating himself gently from the cluster-cuddle of Fridays in the sleeping-nest, the three Deku Scrubs adjusting a little in his absence but not waking from it, he wandered into the kitchen.
It was oh-dark-hundred, or maybe another hour or two before even that, but he wasn't alone. Zelda was there, nursing a hot toddy, and she looked like complete shit.
“Couldn't sleep either, huh?” he asked, setting up some coffee.
“Get faecked, arsehole,” she replied.
A six foot tall pointy-eared Hylian with a rich and indefinable mid-brownish skin tone and a blue Hedgehog a little over four feet tall, they made a fine pair.
“Yeah, love you too, Z.”
Sitting to join her, he caught a flash of his dream.
There had been a cave. Something about catalyzed phlogiston. Preliminary intel had suggested it to be a variant of oxygen, chemically almost an opposite of oxygen, some technobabble report saying something about a Madelung-exception ground state of [He] 2s2 2p3 3s1, and the phlogiston conversion shifting affected oxygen to some peculiar valence state sort of akin to that of sodium, though it seemed to be somewhat more electronegative1 (closer to magnesium — almost a percent past even that, in fact — on the Pauling; somewhere between negative 6% and positive 10-13% more electronegative than magnesium on other scales). T-section said that phlogiston — when in its -1 and -2 anionic states — should behave like oxygen, but instead phlogiston remained sodium-like in its chemical bonding through those and -3, though at least it did behave like oxygen when in its possibly-less-common +1, etc. cationic states (until regaining its full complement of electrons and returning to being a neutral phlogiston atom). So it wasn't all a loss, he thought dryly: Doctor Evil was up ta no good as usual, but at least T was excited over his latest toys an' puzzles.
That hadn't been a dream. He was sure of it.
What the hell it meant, he didn't know. The dream felt like a memory, one those memories that weren't exactly his, one that had come from another him — some parallel version of him, or a past life of his own or one of his parallels' past lives, hell maybe even a future life. Whatever it was, he'd remembered it for a reason, and he'd have to go over the science crap with Tails in the morning.
“Hey there — furball — what-'re ye mulling over?”
He remembered that, too.
She'd asked it once before.
She'd asked him that in the cave.
The cave in the dream — Z was there, too.
He could feel the shape of the memory now. He couldn't quite see the image therein, but he knew what it looked like as if remembering a description.
They were standing at a cave entrance, water lapping up at the beach, boulders here and there, sand beneath their feet. She was stripping out of a wetsuit, almost entirely naked now, her sweet little ass shining in the sun, her tits jiggling so deliciously, and so he...
Fuck!
He controlled his reaction to an extent, but reeled within.
He remembered what he'd been thinking at the cave.
It had been just before he'd gotten distracted by a whiff of something in the air, almost like ozone, his lungs beginning to burn a little as if having breathed an acidic cloud.2
He'd been thinking about that morning's breakfast, and the morning sex that had preceded it, and the further morning sex that had followed it.
With her.
With Z. He'd fucked Zelda that very morning — twice.
He'd been thinking that under any other circumstance, this beach would have been a really nice place to hang out, get some sun, relax on the beach, and fuck their hearts out.
That thought of sex on the beach hadn't been some idle fantasy, either. He could still feel it referring to other times and places like that, when they had proceeded to do just that.
Me an' Z? We were... together?
“Sonic?”
Zelda was now hovering over him, concerned. She never called him by name without good reason, and one was etched across her face right now, peering at him, holding his shoulder.
Her fingers. Delicate, soft, lethal... so beautiful.
He stiffened at this, shaking himself.
She crouched by his side, her breath warm and close to him...
“I'm getting Tails — wait right faecking here. I'll be right back.”
She walked off in a hurry, her hot toddy forgotten on the table.
Doctor Evil.
They'd been sent in to stop him, called off of a top-priority engagement, right in the middle of a masquerade ball and feast, just before lead was set to fly.
First the bastard had released toxic gas. That was the phlogiston. His troops had been genetically altered to function with it, but it was neurodisruptive in trace amounts, biochemically lethal if ingested, and a choking agent at any significant presence in the air.
That hadn't been enough though.
He'd been developing a way to project a phase transition beam that caused oxygen in its path to become phlogiston, an element nearly identical to oxygen, but not quite a nuclear isomer thereof — being instead a monatomic electromeric ground state that couldn't exist under the same physics, something that should simply be an excited state.
This was unprecedented.
With his beam, phlogiston not only came into existence here, but apparently now could remain stable against the laws of physics, as if it were instead operating in a universe where amenable conditions obtained.
If that rat-bastard were to broadcast it, perhaps from a suitably configured EMP, or satellites, or distributed trojan malware in appropriate RF transmitters...
It was heavier than air (though vanishingly so3), and so collected in depressions and displaced oxygen.
It bonded with oxygen, forming diphlogiston oxide, a 116° molecule with a strong ionic bond, a tannish crumbly antiflourite cubic crystalline substance that reacted violently with water to form two phlogiston hydroxides; every ion of it sought to bind more oxygen, and so even alone it was a further threat in reducing the available unaltered oxygen that remained. Worse, it formed a similar heteromer of water, dihydrogen phlogide, not easily distinguished from water until too late.
That wasn't all though.
It also liked to bond to hydrogen, resulting in phlogiston hydride — a soft, translucent pale-greyish salt-like hydride, forming face centered cubic crystal structures, a superbase, reactive to acids, and tending toward spontaneous combustion.
Its chloride was hygroscopic, of course.
It formed soapy molecular isomers, at least when in its sodium-like — yet anionic — phlogistic state. This was unexpected, given actual sodium's cationic nature, but phlogiston tended to be electron-hungry, much like oxygen, trying to fill its 2s orbital.
Then there was more about phlogides and hydroxides and peroxides and nitrites and nitrates and silicates...
Melting points, boiling points, crystalline structures. All of the things that he and Zelda had skimmed over in the briefing.
So far, phlogiston could mimic oxygen when missing electrons, hiding in plain sight. That was bad.
Worse was that Doctor Evil seemed on the verge of giving it a sympathetic property: the ability to autocatalyze oxygen into more phlogiston.
Tails also hinted at the possibility that phlogiston's nature implied the capability to cause chalcogens in general to follow suit categorically with an altered quantum electrodynamic post-pnictogen jump. Such a not-so-hypothetical period-increased “chalcoli” group even begged the question of Doctor Evil pulling a fast one and dropping alkali electron bands in a reverse fashion to become more noble-like — an “alkable” group with an appropriate period reduction of one, as Tails put it before wandering off on a tangent about hydrogen and a nullium-exciton electride.
The data were crowding his head, pushing everything else away, forcing themselves into his awareness, more real than the room around him.
He could see the others. They weren't there yet, but he could see them already, as phantasmal as a silent movie, a cigarette hole burning through reality.
Music played in the background, a thin sound from a scratchy record etched into his skull by the uncaring sky, the singer's voice hollow and empty, distant.
Tinny.
Memories are just where you laid them.
Drag the waters,
'til the depths give up their dead:
What did you expect to find?
Was there something you left behind?
Don't you remember
anything I said,
when I said
“Don't fall away...”
The room spun around him as the floor rushed up ever so slowly for a kiss.
Death.
This was what phlogiston brought. Tails had likened it to “the Great Oxygen Catastrophe,” and pointed to a number of bizarre lifeforms that had cropped up increasingly over the past decade, and whose metabolisms they hadn't been able to explain, but which now showed themselves to be eminently suited to the new conditions prevalent in major chunks of the world, almost as if the ecosystem had designed them with all of this in mind — but it was still death to everyone and everything else.
Decay and ruin to all, as they choked on the very air that they breathed, their blood coagulating, their bronchioli blistering, green vomitus expelling itself with force.
The city had been hit, not entirely everywhere, but everywhere-enough.
They'd lost contact with Command Post, back at the SOA — Some Other Agency.
This shouldn't matter, but it had rattled them.
They'd argued.
Now Zelda was scanning the horizon as they waited.
They had no leads, the world was crumbling everywhere at once, and Doctor Evil hadn't issued any ultimata, only clouds of blue-ish yellow death.
They had iodine pills.
They had meta-quantum4 transduction dephlogisticators.
They didn't have enough.
Doctor Evil wasn't going to invade the world, just wait for it to die.
The day passed in silence, accompanied only by the wind whistling through silent structures.
They lay together silently that evening, making love with abandon long into the night, the world forgotten in a desperate need to drown themselves in each other.
Even spent and sore, they couldn't sleep, holding each other close, breathing together.
Sonic awoke to find Tails waving his sonic tricorder at him, a small ring of organic steel circuits embedded in the palm of his hand.
The Fridays stood nearby, looking miserable.
Even after the years that they'd spent healing him when he'd arrived in this crazy world, and the joyous family time together since the party's triumph and Warbotdorf's banishment...
“There was this UFO, 'cept it looked like a flyin' bell,” he said, trying to make sense of something that he'd seen, something that he'd been living through right before coming out of it, “an' there were these chlorine-breathin' little Grey men, an' an airplane that crashed wit' the door open but nobody hurt or sucked out, an' you were studyin' it, or Warbot— I mean Robotn— no: Doctor Evil was studyin' it maybe. Point is, somehow or other, he got his hands on some bad juju an' poisoned the world by changin' physics an' shit...”
“UFO?” Tails asked cautiously, “Doctor Evil?”
“Yeah,” Sonic nodded, now avoiding Zelda's eyes, “an' you were there, too, Z...”
“When? And where was everyone else?” Zelda asked.
“It... that wasn't here. Not this life, I don't think,” he hedged.
“What were we doing?” she pressed.
He glanced at Peach, who was also hovering over him, consulting Tails's ephemeral sensorium pop-up with Amy.
“Ah, y'know. The usual. Fightin' the bad guy, dealin' wit' shit — an' uhh...” he said, trailing off into a mumble.
“You trailed off there. Could ye repeat the last bit?”
“I said... we were... kinda a thing, OK?” he replied, trying to get up and away, prevented in this by Tails pressing him back into the sofa, “Look, we fooled aroun' a bit. A lot.”
The room went still.
Even Tails grasped this, now looking to Peach.
Zelda stood there with her mouth open, but Peach just smiled.
“I swear te ye, I ne'er touched the faeckin' fehrball!”
“I think that it's really sweet,” Peach said, reaching out to reassure them both, “and it's not as if you cheated on me — it wasn't even in this lifetime!”
“Aye, but still — 'twould be as if I were to faeck my own braether!”
Sonic just stared at the Fridays, waiting for them to hate him. Instead, they all waddled over, one hugging him, another hugging Zelda, and the third beginning to rummage in the herb garden.
“You should be in the doghouse! It is the shame on you!” Ruru announced, but no one paid this any heed. She was just blowing off steam.
In minutes, Friday handed him a large, hot stein. The contents looked like soup, but tasted like concentrated jasmine tea with berries and sweetened condensed milk and a hint of coconut. Whatever she'd put into it packed a kick, already lulling his senses and fraught nerves after the first few sips. This was some of the good stuff, like back on the Octorilla island, Monte Mortis, when he'd first gotten here and the world was gone.5
That was probably a good thing, since Mister Fluffykins had decided to comfort him by lying on his legs. He wouldn't be going anywhere soon.
“So...” Tails began, “I'm pretty sure that this is just more past-life or side-life or future-life stuff emerging, and it might be his own or that of another him, but can we afford to risk ignoring it?”
Amy looked uncomfortable at this.
Zelda hesitated, then glared at the ceiling, thinking of Nayru, “Was there any blue thereabouts in yer dream?”
“Just me,” Sonic replied after a moment, his head beginning to nod as he emptied the stein.
Friday laid one of the comforters over him as the other two piled in around him, their Deku Nut nestled safely in the center.
Sonic, a beta build in his line — Robotnik never got past beta testing anything that he ever devised — had been decanted from the clone vat for five months when Robotnik began R&D on the Tails design, meant to be superscientists, walking computer-logistical support to the shock troops and main infantry. One year later, Tails had been decanted, the first of his line, an alpha model that Robotnik, as egotistical as ever, had sworn was his most perfect creation yet and would need no further testing or tweaking. The other clones, even those of Sonic's own model, were sociopathic mass murderers under Robotnik's sway. His only real family for a decade (or two, counting a temporal rewind) had been Tails.
How long nano-genetic soup such as his (or Tails's, in principle) might take to gestate or germinate or whatever as a divinely hybridized Deku Scrub was anyone's guess, and nobody was taking the slightest chance with his and the Fridays' first born.
The rest of the gang stayed up late discussing matters, no wiser for it come morning, only far wearier.
O ~~~ O