Hey, look at this! Another update! Aren't we special?

This lovely chapter was written by Blue Mage Quartet. Now, Blue is awesome not just for writing this, but he's graduating High School too!

So, in the words of azngirlchibi…

PLEASE GIVE US LOTS OF LOVE BY SENDING REVIEWS! ESPECIALLY BLUE,
SINCE HE'S GRADUATING!

…That is all. Now read.

-=-=-=-=-=-

He opened his eyes.

Well, he THOUGHT he did. It was kind of hard to tell with it being so… dark. He vaguely considered waving his hand in front of face but dismissed that idea, as when he tried to move his arm it felt… held back, restrained.

Both arms were constricted tightly to his side, and he had just the tiniest trouble breathing.

Sonic groaned aloud as he felt the rough, fiber texture of rope embed itself in his sore arms. The only sound in the room was the scraping of the chair legs against the floor as he desperately struggled back and forth against the rope tightly wound around his torso.

"Great. Here I never thought I would ever be put in handcuffs or tied up with rope, and they both happen on the very same day," Sonic lamented, once again wondering what exactly he had done to piss these people off.

"Well, Amy might try out the whole '12 Practical Applications of Bondage Material ' shtick if she ever gets her hands on me…" Sonic shuddered at the thought of S&M! Amy and the experiments she would--- possibly---maybe--- almost definitely--- conduct with a gleeful smile on her face with a gagged and bound Sonic.

"At least, I still think it's the same day…" A song the police officers had listened to on the way to the courthouse flashed in his head. It had featured a rather gruff voiced woman who could sail from the high notes down to the low ones… what was her name? Jeannie Hicks? Lily Micks?

"Stevie Nicks!" Sonic's lips curved into a smile, snapping his fingers proudly, "'All around, black ink darkness'… I'd say that line sums up my situation right about now."

The hero tilted his head to where he assumed the ceiling to be. He had never realized until then that he relied so much on his sense of sight; avoiding attacks and obstacles, finding rings… it was something he valued, but took for granted.

"It must be awful, not being able to see your surroundings, being able to touch something you see, never knowing where you were and never recognizing places and friends," Sonic contemplated aloud, wondering if maybe he had taken one too many knocks on the back of the head and was suffering for it now by going blind.

In complete and total darkness, Sonic's sense of direction, his sense of being was turned upside down.

"Amy barging to my rescue would be really convenient right now."

Right as those words left his lips, a creaking sound invaded his ears.

"Amy, if it's you, I promise I take back the S&M comment! Really, I mean, I'm open to new and exciting things… it's just, you know, you can be really scary… Tell you what, if you get me out of here I'll go on a date with you!"

His frantic murmuring and hoping was interrupted by bright yellow light assaulting his eyes.

Squinting against the offensive brightness, Sonic's vision eventually adjusted to a broad shouldered individual dressed in an impeccably clean lab technician's outfit.

"You are so obviously not Amy. Gee, thanks for getting a hedgehog's hopes up!" The hero said scathingly towards this gruff looking, dark haired individual. "By the way, mind telling me how I ended up tied to this chair in this little laboratory of yours?"

The expansive room was impossibly… clean. And white. Glass beakers and vials filled with bubbling chemicals, security cameras showing black and white images, microscopes and scanners, literal mountains of paperwork, medical supplies…. it looked like a place for the types who were more interested in testing and experimenting on human beings than being one.

Sonic's attention was diverted at the sharp prick in his finger. The tech hadn't even bothered removing his gloves; just shoved the needle for drawing blood right through the material.

The hedgehog briefly eyed the red pattern welling and spreading on his right index finger before staring icily at the technician. "Is this your strange, mentally inhibited way of showing hospitality? I mean, yes, Robotnik tried to blow up everything dear to me several times a week. But his was a respectful 'I'll kill you with love!' kind of thing, not out and out rude and sneaky."

"So, you can bleed."

Sonic was surprised at the light, almost musical tone of voice coming from the imposing man. He replied angrily, "And I can talk and run and jump too! Isn't it amazing?'

An imposing gleam shone in the man's dark eyes before her continued, "Sonic the Hedgehog, test subject SEA001B; do you know exactly what you are?"

"Why, last time I checked, I happened to be a hedgehog."

"Programs are locked into place, working only on the designated machine they were built for…they cannot interact with the world," the man seemed to be announcing things rather than speaking, his offertory loud and booming.

" A video game is merely overlapping bits of code. Data, motion, voice, expression, created and imposed onto the frame of a computerized image made to look like an anthropomorphic hedgehog. You are a program with nothing but artificiality built into you."

"An AI like you, a program created by humans, cannot breathe, or walk, or bleed. You can't exist here," the man leaned in inches away from Sonic's smaller frame, his face contorted into a sneer.

That was when Sonic spit in his face.

-=-=-=-=-=-

He opened his eyes.

This technically should not have been possible, as he had hurtled towards the ground at impossibly fast speeds (ones that easily rivaled Sonic's) and scattered into several fox bits once his body had forcefully reacquainted itself with Mother Nature.

Not to mention he had somehow managed to plummet through a lake and spiraled down into an endless abyss of technicolor sky and wispy clouds.

For one of very few times in his (admittedly short) life, Miles "Tails" Prower had no clue what to think.

Gingerly the little fox leaned rose to a sitting position on his knees.

Which, in and of itself, was weird. Tails' breath hitched in his throat, surprised at how much lighter he felt.

Yet at the same time, he felt…sturdier, somehow. His arms and legs were slightly both thicker and stronger, as if he spent a few weeks training rigorously (i.e. getting pummeled) by Knuckles. His body, overall, felt lean and compact, his stomach less of a slight potbelly and more wiry.

Tails carefully poked and prodded his head (noting that it felt smaller), entertaining the idea that this possibly a strange dream and he was truthfully snoring away on the couch in his workshop.

"After all, it wouldn't be the first time such a thing happened," Tails mused as he felt a defined neck that hadn't been prominent at all before, "Sonic told me all that mint chocolate chip ice cream before bed has a strange effect on my brain while I sleep."

At a loss, the twin tail closed his eyes, inhaling and then exhaling quickly. Thoroughly calmed down, the kit opened his eyes in an attempt to ascertain where he was.

Intelligent blue eyes took in their surroundings. Pristine greenery all around him was accompanied by the sound of rushing water, the large creek cascading down a natural rock wall like a miniature waterfall. Majestic mountains rose far off in the horizon, and a little closer to Tails were towering constructions of steel and glass that sharply contrasted the beauty of nature.

Skyscrapers that he hadn't seen the like of since Central City or Station Square--- which, by the way, was both in ruins and underwater.

"If I'm still on Mobius, then this is definitely a place where Sonic and I haven't been before. I wasn't aware that humans had expanded past their central sphere of influence near the Mystic Ruins…" Tails surmised, hand on chin thoughtfully. He had tagged along with his surrogate older brother for many an adventure and was certain they had covered everywhere that wasn't on the bottom of the ocean floor, in secluded dark caves or boiling in molten lava.

"Maybe Sonic was playing a practical joke, hiding from the world and Chaos Controlling away whoever happened to pass him by. And I ended up here, maybe in a different time or even dimension. But, that wouldn't explain why the blinding white light was...white instead of green. Or these weird changes that happened to me."

"And I fell through a LAKE," Tails flatly stated, as if repeating the fact over and over again would make it any more tangible and easy to grasp.

Or logical.

Or possible.

With an absentminded huff that was usually used to blow the bangs out of his eyes (which were slightly shorter and scruffier than normal) the engineering prodigy decided that he should find out where, or when, as the case may be, he was.

"There's no point in just sitting around hoping for an answer to come to me." Tails told himself resolvedly as he set forward through the leafy wilderness.

It was nice, at first. The trees were impossibly tall and reached for the heavens. Flowers of all shapes and colors were sprouting high and low, swaying in the light breeze. Tails could even swear the clouds floating in the sky resembled faces of his friends.

After an hour or two of plodding tiredly through what a nature tour and travel guide might call 'A mighty, boundless testament to the natural beauty and power of the wild!' while flashing a dazzlingly white smile, Tails felt that if he ever met said nature guide, he would kick them in the teeth.

"Gee, this is like fun, only boring," The fox muttered angrily as he stumbled over a fallen, rotting, weathered tree corpse for what must have been the fourth time that day.

Feeling like he had seen enough green anything for the rest of his life, Tails was busy concocting a plan to burn the palm trees on his landing strip that wouldn't set everything else on fire as well as hide the Master Emerald so he wouldn't ever have to see it again (despite the incurred wrath of his hot-headed echidna friend) when he ran into something.

Or rather, his face ran into something.

Cursing the fact that he was so short, Tails massaged his cheeks and jaw as the blurry words on the wooden sign came into focus.

As his mind ran over the letters printed before him, the expression in his sinking, forlorn blue eyes began to match the droop of his ears.

"Santiago Park Nature Reserve?" Tails read incredously, feeling just a little bit of panic as his surroundings became more and more unfamiliar. A nature reserve was something you did not see when the population of the planet you lived on was chock full of anthropomorphic animals. Were the others on this planet like him endangered? Persecuted to the point of near wipeout?

The words were pushed into the back of his mind as his eyes took in a scene that changed his interpretation of the words 'humanity'. Sure, he had seen Station Square at its busiest but it didn't even compare on the scale of 'congested cities filled with humans who build impossibly tall expensive buildings for no reason' to what he saw now.

The city a few miles in the distance was a clogged, winding maze of concrete, asphalt and metal. The sections not covered by speeding cars and flashing lights were populated with bustling humanity of both foot and bike. Stores and ethnic restaurants lined every corner, signs spelling out unknown words and phrases Tails couldn't comprehend.

Feeling slightly overwhelmed by such an overflow of artifice and life, the youngster retreated behind the bulky sign and took cover behind the multitude of trees. Humans weren't the most trustworthy people to the fox, the old man Tails was most associated with being the person whose mug-shot you would find next to the definition 'psychotic scientist' in a dictionary.

Who knows how these people would react to a two-tailed fox just happening upon their streets in the middle of the evening?

"Sonic, I hope you're okay, wherever you are right now," Tails said with a frown, concern showing for his adopted older brother---his only family--- in both expression and voice.

With his best wishes and hopes for Sonic at the forefront of his thoughts, Miles "Tails" Prower vanished into the foliage.

-=-=-=-=-=-

There we go! Now, hopefully we'll update quicker next time (unless I'm the one writing it, of course…I take forever, thank you much.)

So now, our graduating author, Blue, has something to tell you…

IF YOU LOVED US YOU WOULD GIVE US REVIEWS AND FEEDBACK. AT LEAST TELL US HOW WE DID.

…I WAS supposed to keep it in all caps, right?

Oh well. 'Til next time!