Counterpart Mine Chapter 1: 'If it Only Weren't for You'
Dimensional travel was something Sonic, amazingly, felt he was getting used to. He'd been dragged along to many adventures across many worlds, and as strange as his life was, a part of him was getting used to it.
But that didn't make it a comfortable sensation. The only way he could visualize it was that Zonic had stretched him across the universe, and let him snap back into place on some other Mobius. It always took a moment for his stomach to catch up, and he crouched, disoriented and nauseous.
This was stupid. Why had he agreed to go? Something about the way Zonic had said that to him made him want to see, but he knew that all he would find was a better place. With no Robotnik around, the world would be at peace. Jessica would be alive, Tails would still be happy, still have some sense of innocence about him. What difference did it make if Sonic the Hedgehog existed in a world that didn't need any would-be heroes? He'd have never amounted to anything without the war, without the freedom fighters.
Maybe that was why he'd made that wish. He'd have gladly traded himself away if Robotnik went, too. The sad truth was that he honestly liked his Mobius: the danger, the fighting, the opportunity to be a hero. It hadn't been until Jessica died that he realized the terrible cost of his selfish dreams of heroism and glory. How many thousands of Mobians were dead in the world that he'd thought of as his personal high-speed adventure? In the day since her death, he'd taken it on himself to shoulder every one of those lost lives for the world he treated as a playground, only to find that the weight was too much to bear.
That was why he needed to see a world without it all. He needed to see Mobius the way it was meant to be. But as his vision cleared, all he saw was... a boot.
“You'll get used to it eventually.”
Sonic looked up at the zone cop, who helped him up to his feet. “I keep thinkin' that, but I never do.”
“It takes a lot of jumps, and my armor protects me from some of the disorienting effects. At this rate, maybe I should get you a set.” Zonic grinned, his bright white teeth glinting in the mottled light just below his visor. They were exactly where they'd started, that same spot in the Great Forest, but this time, the tree had no divots in it from Sonic's broad knuckles.
“So this is Mobius without me?” Sonic rubbed the back of his head, rustling his massive mane of blue quills.
“And without Dr. Ivo Robotnik, too. The Great Forest looks about the same, doesn't it?”
Sonic nodded a little. So far so good. “Okay. Cool. Are we going to Knothole?”
Zonic shook his head and chuckled, “No, nobody here even knows that little grove exists. It's even better hidden than on your world. We're going to Mobotropolis.”
The journey through the Great Forest was the most peaceful that Sonic had ever undertaken. The whole forest felt so strangely serene, so silent, that he didn't want to disturb it by running. He walked with his other self, enjoying the gentle breeze that sometimes made it through the thick woods, the play of dappled light and shadow all around as the light filtered down from the treetops. He climbed the rocks in his path, he hopped down from fallen logs and splashed in the puddles he landed in. A clear one in a rocky depression caught his eye and he looked at himself in the water surface. This world, this slowed-down place without him, it wasn't so bad.
“I guess I'd better tell you before we meet anyone,” Zonic noted quietly as they walked. “This isn't the same time as we left. I skipped us ahead a few years so you could see how everybody turns out. You'd be in your early twenties if you existed here.”
This was a new facet that intrigued the blue hedgehog. He wasn't just in a different place, but another time; at that age, everyone else would be around twenty, too, and Tails would be in his late teens. Though the prospect of seeing all his friends finished growing up was an interesting one, he most wondered how his best friend had turned out. Did he have a girlfriend now? What did he do for a living in Mobotropolis, if he even lived there?
The tranquil woodland of the Great Forest was getting thinner as they walked together. Sonic's head was still awash with thoughts and questions; a welcome respite form the crushing guilt and anger he'd felt before. There was a peace to this place, this silent version of his own Great Forest, and it moved through him just as he moved through it. “If I'm not supposed to exist, then won't it mess everything up if I go to Mobotropolis?”
“No one will be able to see or hear us.” Zonic held up a hand, presumably to draw attention o the blinking light on the back of it. “The armor.” His hand abruptly pointed ahead, drawing Sonic's attention towards the end of the treeline. “There's the end of the forest up ahead. We should see the city in the distance after we get over the first rise.”
Mobotropolis. Sonic hadn't seen it the way it was supposed to be since he was a child. The prospect of seeing it again brought his childhood rushing back and he broke past the treeline in an excited run. Would he get to see the house he would have lived in? The streets he knew? The marketplaces, the elaborate gardens that ran throughout the city, and above it all, Castle Acorn, rising high in the sky, its banners billowing proudly, looking down on the city like a loving parent. That was what he remembered of Mobotropolis.
But that wasn't what he saw as he rose over the grassy hill and looked to the horizon. The sight stopped him in his tracks. “Wha... What is this?
Zonic caught up to him at the hilltop where the blue hedgehog still stood, dumbfounded. “It's Mobotropolis, as it exists in this world.”
Although he was far away, Sonic could see enough to know that this wasn't the Mobotropolis he grew up in. It was like the cosmopolitan metropolis he had known as a child was fused with the industrial nightmare he'd fought against most of his life. The marble gardens and green hills that the city was built in harmony with had been leveled to make way for sprawling expansion and towering monuments of dark stone. The city was now a half ancient, half modern colossus of metal and stone, far larger than he'd ever known it. At the heart it all, where he half expected to see Robotnik's central command tower stood a renovated Castle Acorn, its angry spires and jutting parapets looming out over the city like some angry taskmaster. The red banners that flew from it were alien to him, and he could not see their crest at his distance, but they were not the blue banners of the Acorn Kingdom. “But... how... what's going on?” Sonic stammered over his words, trying to make sense of this drastic departure from his own world. “This is because I don't exist?”
“No,” Zonic corrected, “It's because you and Robotnik both don't exist.” He paused to look at the distant fortress-city, his feelings imperceptible behind the visor he wore. “Come on, Sonic. We have a long walk to make it all the way down there.”
Sonic knew, looking at that city, that something had gone very wrong in the world he'd moments ago assumed was perfect. Where were the Acorns? What had happened? “No. I'm going now!” He took off like a shot, flying across hilltops in a leaping supersonic sprint towards that dark blot on the landscape. He had to know what had happened.
His blindingly-swift dash came to an abrupt end at the city gates, where one of the great city's blowing banners hung, and the sight of it had stopped him cold. The banner bore the mighty oak tree, the symbol for the Acorn family, but the colors were all wrong. Instead of the soft whites and blues, the banner was black and red. Robotnik's colors... but he didn't exist here! This was really Mobotropolis after all, but what had happened to it?
Zonic skid to a stop beside the hedgehog, visibly angry. “What are you doing!? My dampening field only works if you're close to me! You could have been seen if I hadn't been sprinting after you!”
Sonic ignored him, still staring at the banner. “Why is it like this? Why isn't Mobotropolis like it's supposed to be?”
“It is the way it's supposed to be...” Zonic sighed, exasperated. “In this world. Let's go inside. He walked straight through the closed gates, extending an arm back out to beckon his counterpart in. “We can walk right through it, come on.”
Sonic almost didn't want to follow, but a sense of dread and curiosity compelled him inside. He immediately wished he hadn't. The whole city had been converted into a giant industrial complex, like Robotropolis, but cleaner. Everything was in that same red and black motif; the buildings, the banners and posters, even the guards in their imposing, strange armor. Above him, a flying train streaked past on magnetic rails, screeching through the sky. Loudspeakers everywhere droned on and on with some kind of propaganda; something about unity. There were hardly any people on the streets, save for the guards on every corner, and one or two disheveled-looking Mobians pushing carts of rocks or fixing broken down machinery. This wasn't his world, but it didn't make him any less upset about it. “What's with this? Everybody looks awful! This isn't how it's supposed to be, everybody's supposed to be fine now!”
“I've already told you, this is exactly how it's meant to be.” Zonic shook his head slowly. “Arguing it won't show you anything. Do you want to know, or do you want to waste your limited time here arguing?”
He wanted to fight it. Sonic still wanted desperately for his self-loathing to take validation in the idea that it was partly him keeping the world from being peaceful again. He wanted to ask so much, what went wrong with the world without Robotnik and he to endlessly fight on it? Who was in charge? How did it come to this? But seeing his beloved Mobotropolis come to ruin a second time was too much to stand. All he could manage was a defeated little “...Why...”
“Believe it or not, the first part of why the place is so bad is because Robotnik wasn't around.” Zonic's walk with the blue hedgehog came to a stop as he began his long explanation for the deviation from Sonic's normal history. “Robotnik did a lot of things to Mobius. Some of them were good, some of them were bad, no different from you or anyone else. In this world, he never was. He never defected from the Overlanders during the Great War. Mobotropolis never had his knowledge of Overlander tactics and strategy. The Great War was able to drag on to a bitter end. You still won, but not before desperate Overlanders killed King Max's wife and son in a failed assassination attempt on him. The loss of Queen Alicia and Prince Elias changed him for the worse. He became a miserable, unfeeling king in the aftermath of the war.”
The realization that so much had changed, all because his archenemy never lived was sobering for Sonic. He'd never thought about the good Robotnik had done, back when he was Julian Kintobor. Even the dreaded roboticizer that fueled his reign of terror had begun life as device to help disabled war veterans. He'd never thought about why the doctor had to exist. Without his help, the king had come to this.
“After a few years, the Acorn Kingdom was no more. King Max re-organized it into the Acorn Empire, with the new colors you've seen. Robotnik never existed to make the SWATbots to replace the army, so the army remained. And it needed to be paid, and fed, and most of all, used, to justify the expense. So King Max used it. He conquered the Echidnas first. He took Downunda, then another land, and another, until his Empire was global. The paranoia brought on by the loss of almost all his family was finally satisfied. He ran himself out of potential enemies.”
So that was it then. Circumstance had turned Sonic's king into a petty tyrant. Try as he might, though, he couldn't care about it after hearing about the assassination attempt. His mind was on a different victim of the deviant time-line, now. “Sally... is she okay? What happened to her? What happened to all my friends??” His voice was an angry one, tinged with worry; as if the madder he got at Zonic, the faster he'd come out and admit this was some kind of trick or mistake, that this wasn't how it was supposed to be.
“Princess Sally... She was all the king had left. He was so afraid of anything happening to her that he kept her locked away in the castle. She never made public appearances, she was never allowed to leave the grounds or have any friends. She spent her whole childhood almost always alone.”
“That's it!” Sonic stomped his foot, too agitated to continue the tour. “I'm going to the castle! I'm gonna talk to the king and get him to stop this! And then I'm gonna go see Sally and fix all this!” He took a sprinting position, aimed at Castle Acorn in the distance.
Zonic grabbed him by the arm, holding the cool blue hedgehog in place while his legs raced full throttle. The armored zone cop was far stronger than he seemed. “You can't change things! You're not allowed to!”
“You're not allowed to!” Sonic stopped running in place as he tried to wrest his arm back. “I'll do whatever I want!”
“Sonic!” Zonic balled his fist and tightened his grip on his counterpart, his voice raising in anger. “You can't talk to the king!”
“Watch me!” Sonic shouted back, finally freeing his arm from his other self's iron grip.
Zonic seized his other self by the shoulders and shoved him against a wall; he pressed the struggling hedgehog's back into it, pinning him. “You can't talk to the king because he's been dead for two years.”
“Wha-” Sonic was so shocked at the news that he forgot to fight for a brief moment. “Then... who did all this?”
“The Acorn Empire has a new ruler, and I promise, she doesn't want to talk to you.”
As Zonic spun him to face the wall, Sonic finally saw the truth. The wall before him was covered in posters, like many of the walls in the city he'd seen so far. The particular propaganda poster that his attention was directed to, he had not paid any notice to before. It was a very imperious portrait, with a legion of saluting, armored soldiers in the foreground, and the words 'STRENGTH IN UNITY' splayed across the bottom. He recognized the portrait. “No...”
“This Acorn Empire is ruled by Empress Sally Alicia Acorn, and she's the one you can blame for the state of things.” Zonic's voice was twinged with slight sadness. It was clear he didn't like this world any more than Sonic.
“No.” Sonic turned to face him, his expression of defiance and certainty confidently spreading into a smile. “Now I know this is some kind of trick. You had me goin' for a while there, but you messed up when you told me Sally did this! I know her better than anyone, and I know she wouldn't do this, so 'fess up! What's going on here?”
Zonic nodded in tacit agreement. “Your version of Sally would never do this. You're right. But do you remember how you two met?”
“'Course I do! It was before the coup, and we were both really little. I got the idea that I wanted to meet the Princess. So, I snuck up to her tower and we met for the first time. Eh, well, I ran up the wall and hung around outside her window.”
“She was fascinated by you, wasn't she? She'd never met anyone from outside the castle before.”
“Yeah, I remember that...” Sonic chuckled. “She used to be really shy. We were friends after that first time we met.”
“For a very long time, you were her only friend.” Zonic corrected. “She made more friends eventually, but always together with you. If it weren't for you, she would have had no friends at all. She learned so much about caring and being a better person from just being around you and her other friends, that it helped shape her into the person you know. If it weren't for you, she'd still be that lonely little girl in the tower.”
Sonic thought about it, and he had to admit, Zonic had a point. He had so many memories of Sally, because he'd been with her practically every day since they'd met. “You're right...”
“So you see, Sonic, you've done bad and good, like anyone, but you didn't change the world, like you thought. You changed a single person's life, and that shaped your whole world in a different way.”
"But this time, I wasn't around to meet her." Sonic nodded, too overwhelmed by the realization of his value to the timeline to really fight his counterpart on any more issues.
"That's right. And so, she grew up alone, sometimes confused, sometimes angry, sometimes simply distraught. Her tutors of course taught her everything, politics, warfare, strategy. Everything a young lady of her stature should learn in this world." Zonic paced slowly, drawing a carefully constructed picture of her life with his words. "Unfortunately, they never taught her about empathy, or friendship, or caring. She grew up disconnected and alone, a captive. And captivity taught her one more subject; ambition. One day the girl in the tower became a young woman, and she would no longer be a prisoner in her own empire. She proved to be more clever than her father. He never even saw it coming."
"I don't want to know." Sonic had heard all he cared to, and as much as he didn't want to, he believed it. He didn't want to know all the details of what she'd done any more than Zonic seemed to want to go over them. Another of the ever-present propaganda posters caught his eye. 'One Will, One Purpose', it read. A legion of Mobians stood together, marching in formation across the weathered paper, but there was something terribly wrong with them. they stared forward through empty, white eyes. Their posture was stiff and unnatural, in that single frozen frame; much more like a robot walking than a person. towering above them in the background was a device Sonic was very familiar with. "B-but that's not right..." "He took a step back, his face pale with confused horror at the sight of something that couldn't exist int his place, even as bad as it was. "Robotnik doesn't exist here..."
"That's right." Zonic nodded, casually.
"Then why is there a roboticizer here??"
"Because that terrible machine is your uncle's legacy, not Robotnik's."
How Sonic hated his alternate self, his smug, matter-of-fact way of explaining things. So curt and uncaring when he wanted to be. As much as he wanted to punch the know-it-all in the jaw, he was right as usual. It was an unpleasant truth, one Sonic had forgotten with the passing of years. Robotnik had only repurposed, corrupted a machine his Uncle Chuck had invented. "That's right, I forgot..."
"In this world, without Dr. Julian Ivo Robotnik's expertise in robotics, the device never got as far, but it did have applications as a pacification device. In this universe, the roboticizer works very differently, but is equally feared. It reprograms the victim's mind, making them into a living, but unfeeling machine. Robots without the metal. They forget their old life, their old personality, and simply obey any commands that the Empress and her authorized servants give to them. In this world, all crimes are punished by roboticization, and the Empress routinely puts all dissidents through it.
Sonic's stomach turned at the thought, he opened his mouth to speak, but was quickly interrupted once again.
"Oh, she's very fond of it, I promise. It lets her fill her factories and mines without so much as a word from the poor souls she puts to work there. Sir Charles made the mistake of protesting its misuse; he was one of the first dissidents she used it on. Come on, we've got a lot more you have to see before-"
A discreet beep stopped the Zone cop in mid-sentence; he raised a hand to his helmet and began speaking into a mouthpiece that deployed from one side. "Zonic here. ...What? Are you sure it's him? And he's..." He regarded Sonic briefly, obviously trapped in a sudden and difficult decision. "... all right, I'm on my way. Keep him contained but don't move in until I get there, got it? .... Zonic out."
"Look," he said suddenly, pointing an accusatory finger at Sonic, "Something's happened and I have to go; I don't have time to take you home and I can't bring you with me. I'll be right back for you, and I'll keep the non-interference field up as best I can, just stay out of sight and don't do anything!"
"Wha-?"
Zonic raised his visor to narrow his eyes at his guest threateningly. "I'm serious, Sonic. Don't. Do. Anything." He pressed a button on his wrist panel and blinked out of existence, leaving Sonic stranded, however temporarily, in a dark parody of the world he knew.
Boy, this took forever to get done. Thankfully, all the major exposition is out of the way now. I'm curious what people's takes are on this idea of an alternate world.
*Smiles* Next time this updates, I shall have to have the popcorn ready. It appears it is due time for significant portions of Hell to be fractured and unleashed.
Ahhhhh.... *Smiles* Next time this updates, I shall have to have the popcorn ready. It appears it
This looks VERY interesting... So it seems that Sonic was responsible for turning Sally into the kind and gentle person she is today. I'm eager to see what you come up with for the next chapter. ^_^
This looks VERY interesting... So it seems that Sonic was responsible for turning Sally into the ki
