x
Silver was in art this period. The exercise this week was to draw from random subjects, of their choice, around the school. The first thing to come to many of the students' minds was to head to the science classrooms to draw birds and ferrets, and that was a great idea. However, the birds scared Silver, and frankly the ferrets did, too. So, instead, Silver wanted to draw his most favorite subject in the world-- Shadow the Hedgehog.
Shadow was standing at the library's front desk, drilling holes into the side of his head with his drumming fingers. He was thinking long and hard about something while trying his darndest to focus on the pitter-patter of rain on the roof rather than on Rouge's mind numbing chattering as she checked in books, one after another, whilst standing on the opposite side of the desk.
Silver got a little too excited as he added the big globs of scarlet paint that were the result of Shadow drilling literal holes into his head in his drawing, and the girl sitting at his table, a blue pika, looked at him for a moment with pure concern and terror on her face.
"...And so, I think I should do something about it." Rouge finished one of her thoughts just as the rain on the roof ceased.
"Huh?" Shadow finally quit drumming his fingers on the side of his skull and looked up at her.
"Were you listening at all?!" When the Ultimate Lifeform on the other side of the desk just continued to stare at her with the same blank expression, a vein formed on the government spy's forehead. "The next person to put an open book in the returns slot will get their fingers broken!"
"Don't do that, Rouge. There's gotta be some less bloody way to solve your problems," Shadow told her, sounding disappointed in the ivory white bat.
Rouge put her fists on her hips as she contemplated something. "Alright, then I'll- Hmm..."
Just then, a red recolor of Tails went to put an open book in the slot by Rouge. Jamming it through the nearly three inch diameter gap, he got all the pages creased and crumpled. Out of nowhere, he was hit upside his red noggin with a hardcover novel laying nearby. Well, I guess it wasn't really out of nowhere, then.
"Rouge!!" Shadow sounded horrified. "I said less bloody!"
"He's not bleeding," Rouge said simply. She dropped the book back onto the wooden surface of the desk with a "thump". Well, she wasn't wrong. The recolor she had hit was now lying on the burnt orange carpet of the library, the larger one by the way (read the last chapter), and seemed to have a rather large bruise slowly forming on his forehead. Surprisingly, though, there was no blood to be found.
"Well, yeah, but-"
"So what were you thinking about just now?"
Shadow jumped as he hadn't expected her to bring up his previous actions after all this time. The devious bat had her elbows on the wooden surface of the desk between them and her chin in her palms.
"It must've been pretty important for you to completely block out what I was telling you."
Shadow huffed. "Yeah. I've got detention next week."
When the coal-colored hedgy heard giggling coming from Rouge's direction, his head snapped back towards her. "What?"
"How'd you get detention? I'm surprised you let yourself get caught so easily. I mean, you've infiltrated the doctor's base how many times?"
Yet another huff. "I didn't let myself get caught! I was following Honest around. It was her idea that we skip."
"You were skipping class?!" Rouge asked this as if it was ridiculous what he had done.
"Wait... You think that's uncharacteristic of me?"
The pause was so strong here that Shadow could almost feel the next three dots hanging in the air above them.
...
"Yeah. I'm sorry to say this, but you're a real stickler when it comes to the rules."
Shadow's eyes widened, but he didn't say anything.
Rouge put a finger to her lips in thought. "Though, I guess, in this situation, that would make you a teacher's pet type."
Shadow put his palms to his cheeks, putting pressure on them. It looked like he was trying to cave his head in on both sides. Ouch.
Rouge cocked her head to one side. "You okay?"
"I'm fine," came Shadow's much-too-quick reply. He turned away as if to make some sort of escape, only to be met with the smiling face of his fancanon time-travelling son from the future.
"Do you wanna see my drawing of you?"
Shadow looked kind of confused and startled for a second. He nodded his head. Silver flipped his large sheet of watercolor paper around so that Shadow could see the graphite drawing of himself the fluffy time-traveller had drawn. He gasped.
It was a rather surrealist, pin-up style portrait of the Ultimate Lifeform, complete with heavily contrasting, suspense-forming lighting in the form of heavy pencil strokes running from the subject to the edges of the paper. Alongside the graphite, he had also used some thick, red acrylic paint.
"It's-" Silver's eyes widened to the size of basketballs. Now, wait before you comment something along the lines of "Hey, wait! Basketballs are an unrealistic size for eyes to grow to!". We're talking about Sonic eyes here, remember?
Judging by the way Shadow seemed so taken aback just now, Silver decided that what he would be saying next will be something like "It's beautiful!". So, he braced for just such an explanation to be thrust his way, striking a confident-looking pose.
"... Disgusting!"
Silver's fern deflated atop his head. "Huh? Why?" He looked very disappointed.
"Is that... blood? Coming from my head?"
Silver took another look at his drawing as if he had forgotten what his own artwork looked like. "Yeah. I know it wasn't there in reality, but I thought it needed it." When Shadow didn't look convinced, Silver pouted. "Um, artistic expression and all that." He followed his statement with a nervous chuckle.
Shadow saw how uncomfortable Silver looked, so he tried his best to put on an approving smile as he patted the younger hedgehog's shoulder. "Oh! Don't take that as me dissing your hard work! So what your artwork has some questionable themes? It's still really impressive!"
Silver's fern was seemingly reinflated at that, and the usual flowers began to dance around him once more. "Really? Thank you so much! I just couldn't help myself. You really did look like you were drilling holes into your head earlier, though!" With that, Silver took his drawing up into a neat roll and stuck it under his arm as he skipped off, his boots making a soft thump as they came in contact with the carpeted library floor as he did so.
The growl that had first commenced when Silver brought up the hole-drilling bit now began only just then to make itself loud enough to be noticable in Shadow's throat once he had left. After all, the only one left with him now was Rouge, and it was very important, at least to Shadow, that she was aware of his annoyance as she then jumped at the opportunity presented to her.
"Drilling-- Oh, yeah, the finger tapping! Why were you thinking that hardly about detention?"
"Because," Shadow said rather loudly. "Infinite is in charge of overseeing it, and I was contemplating how I should use that opportunity to bring his life to a sudden end."
Rouge knew instantly that wasn't the answer. She walked to the other side of the librarian's desk and over to Shadow so he didn't have to yell 'cause frankly, Shadow's voice actor couldn't actually be that loud due to how difficult it was to keep that voice up while shouting.
The bat spy crossed her arms, showing him with that action that she wanted him to see her discontentment with his answer. "That's not it. You don't want to be violent when you don't have to. I'm unsure of the exact context of any of those quotes, but I'm pretty sure you've said many times in your game that you have no intentions of fighting, going into boss fights where you're forced to partake in some amount of violence."
Shadow sighed, giving up. "That doesn't mean I'm a pacifist, but alright. I'm worried because the whole process seems very shady." Rouge looked afraid for him. Shadow nodded, acknowledging the unspoken elements of their conversation.
"I mean, Mephiles told Honest and I in person this morning to meet in the school theater sometime before the first bell. I thought that we were going to have detention in a small classroom, or the ISS room, or maybe even one of the libraries. Definitely not the theater. What's he going to do? Put on some morbid play for us?" Shadow shivered. Rouge looked more amused now for some reason. She couldn't have thought his paranoia funny, right?
"This is not funny, Rouge. I'm serious! This is a real concern of mine."
"I think you're way overthinking this. You're just going to sit in there and work on homework or something."
"But-!" Shadow was about to object to her proposal, but he stopped himself short, filling one cheek with air in annoyance. Apparently, Rouge forgot that this was Mephiles they were talking about as their principal. Did Rouge forget who she was for a moment? She was talking as if she expected something normal and boring to happen to them of all people. In a literary work such as this.
It was at this time that the bell chose to ring, signalling the end of fifth period. Next up on Shadow's schedule was sixth period. Honest and him had art together. Well, technically Shadow had Art III and Honest had AP Art, so they didn't have the same class. However, they did have their classes in the same room, so Shadow and Honest liked to walk together.
Rouge and him walked out of the building together and down the sidewalk a ways, but they split up outside, each heading down different paths at an intersection.
Shadow found Honest standing in the shade, out of the rain, under a concrete overhang outside the cafeteria. The art building was behind the cafeteria, so this was where she liked to wait for him. It was sort of a halfway mark.
The cloud cover was very thick, making the whole school yard shaded over and gloomy. Of course, Sonic characters tended to be very colorful, so it wasn't entirely dreary-looking all the time. With Honest's desaturated color palette, however, she blended in fairly well. Shadow didn't have too much trouble spotting her, though, having seen her almost instantly after turning the corner.
Everyone around them looked in a hurry to get wherever they were going. Heads down, raincoats five times larger than they were-- they walked in groups mostly, though, and there was often laughter shared between them. Honest stood there silently, resting her folded arms on a railing. She was peering with interest at the sky as if seeing it for the first time-- smelling the roses.
That was like the only thing Shadow was guaranteed to do in his off-time; his time off definitely wasn't spent infiltrating the doctor's base or impersonating Sonic. Honest was looking so intrigued at something Shadow thought would only intrigue himself. This narrow minded thought came to Shadow: Maybe we are alike.
At this, Honest turned to him, her expression brightening. That "intrigued" expression, as Shadow had been calling it, melted away pretty instantaneously. In its place was left that blindingly bright expression Honest usually had. As if she knew something that the whole world would never completely grasp. Something that made her endlessly happy. Not to go into a "meaning of life" tangent or anything, though. There were things to do.
"Shadow! You're here! Now, let's go to class!" She immediately went for his arm, like an eager dog walker going for a dog's leash. And, like a dog, Shadow let Honest drag him towards the building. Pit bull-like scowl and everything.
Honest took a break from tugging Shadow along to open the front door of the art building. Shadow watched her struggle with getting it over the mat. That was a problem for anyone wanting to get in or out. For a building that contained several design classes, it had very poor design.
"Uh, Honest? What were you thinking about earlier? You were staring at the sky," Shadow asked her, crossing his arms. The door was now stuck somewhere in the middle of the rug. Honest turned around, leaving the door propped open like this.
"Monday and Wednesday's detention. What else? I've never written something like that before," she told him. She grasped the edge of the door and pulled as hard as she could. "Okay, now it's severely stuck." The blond cat girl turned around with a pout. "Let's just go before anyone gets mad at us."
Honest slipped through the gap first and Shadow teleported in. It wasn't too big a waste of chaos energy to teleport a foot or two, don't worry. However, Honest was still unsure that he was even teleporting. It seemed that he teleported in the games, but in reality he was just pausing and unpausing time, right? That was the most confusing thing to her.
"Aren't you afraid of what Mephiles or Infinite might do?" Shadow asked.
Honest laughed. They were walking down the hallway as slow as they could. They were in no real danger of showing up late. The teacher herself usually entered the classroom five or even ten minutes past the bell. And there were no bells in this building anyway. At least, any that worked. People just checked their watches or the clock. Or, well, their phones. It was the 21st century after all... or was it the 3200s like the comics since this is {Comic Edition}? "Remember the end of part 4 of the ghost hunting chapters of {w/Rosy}?"
Shadow looked confused. "Uh, yeah, I guess."
"Mephiles has no power, and he knows it. So, I don't think we should have anything to worry about. If he truly is an intellectual like he claims to be, he wouldn't just keep attacking us and expecting that to yield different results. That would be foolish."
"Yeah," Shadow agreed, attempting to convince himself she was right. "Don't they say that's a sign of insanity?"
"Yup!" Honest exclaimed, smiling and turning back at him, raising her index finger in front of her face. "That is what they say. Of course... who are 'they'?" She looked dumbfounded for a moment, staring at the finger she had raised. When Shadow shrugged, Honest did, too. She smiled and laughed again, turning back around just to be faced with the disapproving frown of Infinite. He was standing there in the doorway of the art room.
"Why are you two laughing and having fun in the hallway?"
Shadow sent an equally disapproving frown back his way.
"Oh, so now there's a law against fun, too?" The two stared each other down. Honest put herself between them.
"Oh! Hey, Infy!" Honest told the masked mongrel before them, swishing her tail side to side excitedly. That was a deliberate thing she did whenever she was trying to appear cheery. It wasn't like that was an unconscious tail-swishing or anything. Only dogs move their tail when they're happy.
"Hey, Honest," Infinite said. He still sounded angry even as he greeted her. Then, he just talked through her. Apparently having something between him and Shadow prevented them from staring at each other, but it didn't prevent them from talking to each other. "There's only a law against it when you're doing it, Shadow the Hedgehog." Honest turned around to look at Shadow. Then Infinite walked around her.
"Well, that's not very impartial," Shadow told him, radiating hatred.
Honest tilted her head to the side. Okay, so Infinite had a grudge against Shadow, and that made Shadow spiteful just because? Or was Shadow angry because Infinite didn't forgive him? Then something else dawned on her. Had Infinite just called her by her name instead of just "Cat"? Honest looked over at Infinite curiously. Him and Shadow were still having an old West stand-off behind her. No words were exchanged; just looks. Honest was pretty sure she could hear a distant flute as well.
This was all getting very tiring. Honest regarded them both extra boredly. Shadow seemed to get the message and gave her an angry yet knowing glare with those seemingly bottomless red eyes of his. "He can't be helped."
As he moved to the now unobstructed art room door, Infinite's much more steely, electric gaze bore into him. Honest swore to get around to helping him eventually, but there were so many comic characters whose needs had to be put before his. Though, according to Shadow, "he can't be helped".
Not noticing any sign of Infinite following them, Honest assumed he was continuing to seethe inches from the door. He was a coward. Definitely.
Honest and Shadow sat at their usual table and got to work creating something of value from rather invaluable things.
---
Sorry for this taking a while. The art is the most time-consuming part. I've been doing so much more planning than actual writing lately, so the chapters after this one are all unfinished but fully planned out.183Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡeNJxLfjIIt
183Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡpXgQKzVDLg
