Author's Note:
Hi there, thanks for checking this story.
Just to let you know this story is a sequel. You should never need to read earlier Eternal Tails stories to understand what's going on, but you might enjoy the stories more if you read them in order:
Eternal Tails: Chaos Break
Eternal Tails: Happy Days
Eternal Tails: Bad Seed
Eternal Tails: Chronos Divide 4- You are here.
That's all! Hope you enjoy Eternal Tails CD.
~ Pan.
A broken fox walked the broken land.
One foot in front of the other, slow, methodical. Twin tails coiling around one another as he plodded from place to place, swimming through polluted waters and climbing through mechanised forests.
Once in awhile, the fox pulled out a metal flask from the folds of a tattered green backpack, drinking its sickly sweet contents without comment. Once in a greater while he pulled out a clunky metal box from the pocket of a threadbare blue hoodie, jabbing his finger at buttons on its surface with a frown before continuing his silent, solitary pilgrimage.
Grease stained desert gave way to a maze of corroded steel structures, vile ash grey rain pattering down over the bones of broken machines from a sky of metal. But the fox kept walking at that slow, sedate pace.
What would be the point in hurrying?
The world had already ended after all.
And he was the only one left.
Miles Prower, child genius, for a given value of child, mechanic, and unwilling hero. Or possibly villain. He wasn't quite sure which at this point, and he refused to think too hard about it for fear he wouldn't like his answer.
So instead day after sunless day, night after moonless night, he walked on, sleeping only when exhaustion took him. When he was too tired to dream.
Until at last atop a mountain crisscrossed by long dried rivers a beep came from the fox's backpack. He paused, lungs burning from the tainted air as he pulled the metal box free, fingers dancing across its buttons.
"Finally."
The whisper echoed in the absolute stillness, the first voice in centuries in that desolate ruin.
Miles turned this way and that for a moment, beeping box held aloft, before plodding forward, down into a hollow basin carved out by a long gone waterfall.
There.
A corner of metal peeked out from beneath a dry crust of silt. Miles reached down, pulling it easily from the dirt with a strength that belied his tiny body. A signpost teetered upright with a groan, ancient letters carved in gold on its surface.
PAST.
Miles traced gloved fingers over its surface, eye shifting from blue to a glittering pink, crystalline fractals tracing across his iris. Energy crackled from the sign's surface, spreading up the fox's arm and beyond until his orange yellow fur stood on end, white sparks tumbling from his body to the barren earth below.
"Let's get it right this time."
Dropping into a four point crouch, the fox raised his tails, spinning them faster and faster until the air flow was scouring the dusty basin behind him, until his fingers were being pushed into the dirt from holding himself back.
And he released, feet spinning momentarily to build up momentum before the force of the tails behind him lifted him from the ground, only the tips of his toes trailing below to steer him as he soared up the river bed, glow increasing along with his speed.
He ran out of river, exploding out into empty space, the mountainside stretching into the distance below, endless dry plains as far as the eye could see, but the fox didn't stop moving, even when gravity tilted him forward and all that forward thrust now propelled him down towards the barren earth below eight times faster than terminal velocity.
The world turned a blinding white, fading in an instant like the flash of a camera to reveal green rolling hills and lush forest as far as the eye could see, glorious sunshine shining down from the blue sky above, and a waterfall, which the fox now slammed into a relative velocity high enough that the impact was like hitting a sheet of concrete. The fox bounced off the water in an uncontrolled spin, fur no longer glowing, eyes once again blue - and vacant - as he tumbled down to the river below.
Impact.
The cold shock of submersion jerked the fox back to his senses in more ways than one as he sank to the bottom of the pool like a rock. His brain, long slowed by isolation and boredom, surged back to life in a torrent of thoughts that made computers look dull in comparison as his brain prioritised, calculated and schemed.
He needed to find out how far back he'd travelled in the timeline, then change a future that he'd already lived through, potentially by waiting centuries to reach the correct time period if he couldn't find the time stones to do it.
He sighed, bubbles sparkling in the sunlight filtering down from above.
Time travel was the worst.
At least this wasn't his first temporal rodeo, which gave him vital knowledge on how things worked. Miles had actually met and interacted with his own time displaced self. The event that gave him acute headaches trying to remember it, but the universe hadn't imploded. Likewise, he knew Silver, a hedgehog born in around the future time period he'd just left, had still been born unchanged after several massive changes in the timeline, which meant that time was loosely convergent, so he didn't need to worry about sneezing and accidentally preventing one of his friends from being born from the butterfly effect.
So, all he needed to do to succeed was to avoid any major changes and avoid messing with the timeline as much as possible so as not to make things worse in new and exciting ways before the evil Doctor Robotnik built the Death Egg around the planet. Then he could end the Happy Days project in its infancy. Before it wiped all life from both planets and locked his past self up with Cream for hundreds of years.
Save the world to save the girl.
Save the world to save his friends.
Save the world to stop existing.
Simple.
The sound of something large plunging into the water broke through his thoughts. A pink furred hedgehog in a green and orange dress, dropping to the floor of the pool like he had as she struggled along the bottom towards him. A hedgehog he recognised at first glance, one he wouldn't meet until she left Little Planet. One of the two people on Little Planet that he had wanted to avoid at all costs, and a walking temporal disaster waiting to happen.
Amy Rose.
The word Miles uttered floated away as bubbles, thankfully to remain unheard by anyone over the sound of the waterfall.
Ugh. Whatever. He sat up. Like most mobians, Amy couldn't swim, and at this age she hadn't developed her speed over years of stalking her hero, Sonic, so if Miles went in the opposite direction he could easy get away before she saw more than a glimpse of him. Timeline intact, no prob-
The girl slipped on the bottom of the pool in a spray of bubbles, still crawling to try and reach him as the violent currents of the plunge pool mercilessly pulled her too and fro. She hadn't developed her strength yet either. A perfectly average mobian girl.
And the average mobian could only hold their breath for around thirty seconds.
Shaking his head with another bubbly sigh, Miles launched towards her, arms outstretched.