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I know how much I like long chapters in fanfiction, so I worked hard to make this chapter and upcoming chapters the length I would want to read. I hope you like long chapters as well. I just have to assume these things because I get ZERO feedback/comments. Anyway, onto the chapter!172Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡLeEOnS5ium
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The sounds of frogs and assorted bugs echoed from outside the sleeping house. Well, it would have been sleeping, if only one of its occupants weren’t burning all their precious midnight oil in one of the second-floor bedrooms.
The room was completely black besides the illuminated figure of a hedgehog lying on his stomach on his comforter. The light was coming from the powered-on smartphone in his left hand. His thumb was moving at the speed of sound.
“Are you really okay with having the whole school witness their hero be killed on stage?”
Send.
“Are you really okay with Mephiles killing you a second time? Don’t you want your archenemy, you know, the Doctor to be the one to end you?”
Send.
“How will your final expenses be paid?”
Send.
…
“I’m not actually gonna die, Shadster. How many times do I have to say it? I die hard.”
Shadow didn’t seem convinced. He was so serious that he didn’t even bother to scold him for using that nickname he hated.
“I know you don’t want to accept it, but I have. Honest talks tough, but I can tell she knows you are going to die, too.”
"Man, you never text me with more than just a few words when I bug you with a text or two during school hours. What’s up with you?"
“I’m serious, Faker. This is a serious matter. Will your family be prepared for the decisions they will have to make in your stead?”
“They won’t have to be. I. Die. Hard.”
He shook in anger and squeezed the phone in his hand before letting it drop to the bed. He groaned as the confusion was what was making him mad. How come he was the only one who could be serious in this situation?
"Fine. Where is Mephiles right now?"
"Still there. You know, he hasn't said a word to me this whole time. Isn't this usually the time when the villain reveals his plan to his prisoner? He's still just reading that dang book about, I dunno, ten feet away from me."
The fact that Mephiles let Sonic keep and even use his phone still bothered Shadow. He wasn't Eggman. He wasn't just blatantly bad at what he did. Yeah, he could make oversights he guessed, but to Shadow this felt like a purposeful move on the mushroom-sprouting demon's part.
"Look, I know you don't care, but aren't you afraid you'll cause others grief?"
"It looks like I already have, and nothing has even happened yet."
Shadow chose to ignore that comment and instead pressed further.
"Don't you have anything you'd like to wrap up? Things you want to do before you kick the bucket?"
"If you just want to ask me fifty questions, can you make them fun ones? I'm bored out of my mind rn"
When Shadow didn't reply right away, another text came through from Sonic.
"What, do you have something to wrap up? Like something you want to tell me? Spit it out or I'll come back and haunt you."
Shadow could imagine the sarcasm behind those words. He fought down the urge to just throw down the phone and refuse to reply. That's what he would do in any other situation. In fact, that felt like something he had done in the past. But this was different, right? They had to address Sonic’s uncertain future.
"I don't have anything to say to you, Faker. I was talking about you."
"That proves it then. You don't really think I'm going to die or else you would be honest with me."
“Shut up.”
“Okay, I guess I’ll ask Mephiles to go ahead and kill me, then.”
“No, wait, don’t make those your final words!”
Shadow nearly pressed the button to call him when his door suddenly flew open and the light that flooded into the room blinded him. There, standing where the door used to be when it was closed and not letting painful light into Shadow’s room, was the figure of a cat, er, cat girl. It was just a featureless silhouette, but there was only one person it could be.
“I have a plan,” the figure in the doorway stated sternly. She took a few more steps into the room and her curious violet eyes became visible to him. “Are you developing your own plan?”
Shadow looked down at his phone then back up at Honest. “No… I was just talking to Sonic so that he wasn’t so bored at school in the cage by himself.” He set his phone down on the bed in front of him.
“Okay, good, because I need you to be completely on-board with this,” Honest said as she ran and jumped onto the bed to his left. The headboard hit the wall and made a loud noise when her bare knees made contact with the mattress, startling her. “Shouldn’t have done that.”
Finally Shadow’s brain registered what she had just said. “Wait, you have a plan? Now? The night before the play? Where was this ‘I have a plan’ stuff when I was feeling hopeless?”
Honest just assumed the most blank expression in the world. One so blank that Shadow had to make sure she was even hearing him by snapping in front of her face. She didn’t even react to that until, suddenly, she pounced on Shadow out of nowhere.
“You were feeling hopeless?? Aww, Shadow, that was your own fault! I kept telling you ‘I got this, I got this’; you should’ve believed me! Whelp, you’ve learned your lesson,” she said, patting his head and moving away. His mouth just hung open as if he had been betrayed. Honest closed her eyes and crossed her arms.
“The plan requires… a stealth mission. And a rescue mission. First we need to get Rouge.” Shadow broke out of his own stupor, but wasn’t exactly quick enough in doing so to realize Honest was reaching for his phone, which was still resting on the bed, until it was too late.
“Are you really sure you should be disturbing her so late? It’s eight-”
“Hey, Rouge!” Honest greeted cheerfully with the phone up to her ear, closing her eyes shut as if said bat girl could see her through the phone.
“No, Shadow is here, though. We have a plan to save Sonic that we can try now when Mephiles least expects it!”
Shadow could make out faint whispers of Rouge’s voice due to how quiet the house was at this hour, but he couldn’t tell exactly what she was saying.
“Well, it would be easier to pull off if we could know what’s going on inside without actually being able to see ourselves. It’d be like having another set of eyes and ears, am I right?” Honest replied. Shadow wondered just what kind of plan she had. I mean, she could come up with plans for chapters, but was her plan guaranteed to work in practice? Then again, wasn’t this plan a plan for a chapter?
While Shadow just sat in the background and churned out dozens of purple question marks in a cloud around his head, Honest continued her conversation with Rouge. “Are you sure you can find your way? You’ve only been here a couple of times,” she was saying. Honest blew out a sigh of exaggerated sadness. “Yeah, I wish we had more shade trees.” She then brightened up again. “Okay, then! See you in a bit.”
Shadow quit looking so befuddled and instead resorted to glaring disapprovingly at Honest as she handed back his smartphone in order to hopefully communicate to her that he was unhappy.
“Rouge will be here in ten minutes to take us to the school in her car. Apparently she says the all-knowing weatherman on SNN tonight was saying something about it raining soon, so she offered to drive us,” Honest explained.
"Alright. I don't want to take the Dark Rider out in a rainstorm anyway if I can help it," Shadow commented absent-mindedly. However, his face remained twisted into an angry frown.
Honest saw how irate Shadow looked and tilted her head. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, it’s just that I don’t like how you haven’t said anything about a plan until just now,” Shadow said, crossing his arms.
“Well, I only just came up with the plan a second ago. IRL, it’s actually been three days since I came up with it, but it’s been Tuesday in this story for six months.” When Shadow looked to be about to start producing question marks again, Honest jumped off of the bed and started tugging on one of Shadow’s arms. “Come on! We need to go stand on the porch so we’ll be there when Rouge shows up!”
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When just walking, er, running in his case, back-and-forth, it was hard for people to really feel what it was like backstage. Like, really like. After spending one night and the better of two days here, Sonic had grown used to the heavy, old dust and the creaky, wooden flooring. Well, not exactly “used”. The heaviness of the dust still caused his nose to run steadily, and the creakiness of the floor still caused his sleep to be interrupted… steadily.
The text conversation with Shadow hadn’t helped in any way. Sonic had no idea why it would. After all, any activity other than sleeping is preventing you from sleeping. However, it was only eight according to his phone’s clock, so he had to pass the time somehow. Even if the conversation were just Shadow asking him fifty questions and worrying unrealistically for a whole hour, it still accomplished that goal.
Sonic looked up from his phone to check on Mephiles. He was still sitting on a tall stool about ten feet away from the round cage where Sonic was sitting. He was flipping through a small book, about the size of the one hand that held it, with his usual relaxed expression… or maybe it was the lack of expression.
Mephiles must never feel the need to sleep, Sonic thought. I wonder what he thinks of the people who do? Sonic, realising that this was his kidnapper he was thinking of, immediately retracted that question. Who cares what he thinks? He’s darkness incarnate. He attempted to move his thinking to other places that mattered.
Was he actually making Shadow sick worrying about him? No. Of course not. If he were actually worried, when Sonic asked him if he had any final words to say to him, he would have told him something. Since he hadn’t, he must have doubted that Sonic would meet his death tomorrow. I think he just doubted Honest when she told him everything would be fine, and he shouldn’t.
Though, maybe, Sonic blindly believing Honest wasn’t the smartest thing to do, either. Yeah, it eliminated worrying, but if there were something he could do to protect his own life in the meantime, maybe it was worth worrying about just a little.
…
“I’m so bored!”
“Learn some patience, hedgehog. Is this how you are every night?” Mephiles asked, not looking away from his book for even a second.
“No way. I run until the sun goes down. And by then, I’ve worked up some fatigue.”
“You work up… fatigue? Don’t you mortals usually wind down before bed?”
Sonic thought for a second. “No- um, yes? Anyway, I probably could run even after the sunset, but that’s kind of dangerous... running around in the dark, you know.”
"No," Mephiles responded simply. "I don't just 'run around' pointlessly like you do."
"Right…" Sonic assumed the pose of a well-known statue of a human man in deep thought and resumed his pointless thinking.
If he died… No. It wasn't worth thinking about. He was in the middle of so many important things. Honest couldn't just stop writing about him now. Not in a million chapters, and definitely not now.
In fact, why couldn't he sleep? Why did he have to pass time? Was something in store for him tonight? Or maybe all this thinking was what was in store.
---
With a black and red bag hanging from her shoulder and resting on her hip, Honest was staring out into the darkness of night as rain fell all around them. Just like that, she had been put in a hot seat of her own creation. The writer. A light began to shine at the end of the driveway. A white hand rested on her shoulder.
It was Shadow's.
"That's Rouge," he told her. The silver car turned and stopped as close to the shielded platform where they stood as possible. A white leg arched and kicked the passenger door open. Rouge waved from within the vehicle.
"And you wonder why the 'passenger door ajar' light won't go out," Shadow huffed, looking down his nose at her. "You abuse that poor door."
"It's my car, Sunshine, and I bought it used anyway," Rouge argued. She then jerked her head towards the vacant seat beside her. "Come on, we need to save Sonic before morning."
They departed from Snow's large house at a moderate speed. It was never safe to go too fast when the road was as slick with water as it was. The house was now just a silhouette in the rearview mirror. Their next stop would be the high school where Sonic was being held against his will.
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"Hand it over," Mephiles told him, standing up and laying the book he had been totally engrossed in just minutes before on the stool.
"Huh?" Sonic exclaimed, sounding as confused as he felt.
"You heard me." The embodiment of all things ominous and foreboding linked his hands behind his back and wandered over to Sonic's enclosure. Sonic scrambled backwards when a slitted, unholy-looking eye stared back at him through the solid iron bars. "Hand over the cellphone."
Sonic glanced one more time at the screen and flipped the phone closed. Mephiles stuck his left hand through the bars, and Sonic hovered his hand over the other's waiting palm, not letting go just yet.
"Please be careful with it. It was given to me by an old friend." Sonic let it go and Mephiles withdrew his hand now holding the small cellphone.
"You weren't… Talking to anybody, were you?" he asked, looking over his shoulder at his captive.
If you were more cautious, you wouldn't have to worry about that.
"I was," Sonic answered, deciding to be earnest. "Not anybody you need to worry about saving me, though…" he told the demon in a dejected tone of voice.
Mephiles blinked in what Sonic had to guess was a confused manner. He quickly retracted that guess when said mouth-less monster of murkiness turned away and immediately left Sonic's limited range of sight instead of asking a question.
The blue-spined captive rested his back against the bars at the back of his cage. "Yup, I'm stuck here until morning."172Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡCSfGuNw8cd
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Things are looking pretty grim for Sonic right now. Are Honest and Shadow going to be able to rescue him? Even with Rouge's help, it's gonna be tough. Please leave a vote and comment if you enjoyed this chapter and are as interested in what will happen in part three as I am.
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