Ruby Haze [Archie Sonic SI]

[Abandoned Account]

Here, it just means that she should kick Monkey Khan's ass on sight. Keep him on his toes.

Click to shrink...

Which, considering what he was like before #201, he probably has coming.

 

[weredrago2]

NOTE - Rather than a new chapter, the following is an extensive rewrite of the first chapter of the fic. My reasonings for this rewrite (and why I made it as a new threadmark instead of just replacing the first one already) are included at the end of this post.

The chapter notes also contain an update on a new Friend Insert I've been working on with over 10,000 words in the bank, so please take a look for that as well.

---

Ruby Haze
Chapter 1: In Mercia Res

♦ 100

For the first time in my life, it seemed as though I'd finally achieved some measure of greater perspective of my place in the universe. Not by deeply diving through my issues, reaching a significant breakthrough needed to better myself as a person. That would've been a long-term project. No, this was accomplished by gazing down at an alien planet, and being unable to reconcile how small I felt in comparison to it. That was before factoring in the dozens upon dozens of little moons that rotated around the sphere, each one a different size or shape moving along at its own pace. They may have been only dwarf moons, but I was left speechless at how they dwarfed me.

They called this sense of wonder the overview effect, and I had to admit: This was the most beautiful, terrifying photograph of the Earth from space that I had ever seen. Even if it got the finer points wrong. Europe was scrunched-up. Africa was set askew until it poked South America and India. Australia was a rough, circular patch of terra firma set in the Pacific. Most bafflingly, it seemed as though somebody missed the memo about Southeast Asia having many islands and haphazardly glued them to the Eurasian landmass.

It was an unusual circumstance, dreaming of an oxygen-starved void far beyond any atmosphere. Taking in all of the little, tiny details of a world that resembled my own in the same way that a chicken resembled a turkey. I hadn't been facing the right way to see what the New World looked like, but I imagined it would've been as screwy as the old one.

Regardless of whether air was abundant out here or not, I felt my chest rising and falling. The heart beating in my chest as fast as ever. Not really things associated with dreaming.

Am I dreaming?

I didn't dream often. Well, I figured I dreamt as much as your average person, and only sometimes remembered them. I didn't lucid dream very often, so much as I had the infrequent dream where I was aware enough to be helpless as the action unfolded in front of me. It was a good night when I was too exhausted to have any dreams, and a decent night when any nightmares wouldn't bother me any further than the rest of the morning.

The more I thought about the little things, the clouds and what few pinpricks of light I could make out on the night side of this Not-Quite-Earth, the more I couldn't ignore that what I was seeing was too consistent. There weren't any sudden fits or starts, no flights of fancy that would shift it into something new that would mark it as a dream. There was no way this could be real, but I was a bit too awake for this to be my imagination.

It couldn't be a dream, but it had to be.

Right?

♦ 99

I felt a sudden rush of heat and a heavy sense of dread, the weight of both focused on my left hand. Turning in that direction, I saw that my left had been pierced with a glass or crystal stud. It almost looked like an accessory attached to a black glove, but it felt like a piece of silicon wedged between sensitive nerves and tissues. Belatedly acknowledging the presence of the black glove, I then saw that the clothes I'd fallen asleep in the night before had been replaced by a black bodysuit with magenta highlights.

"What?"

It was the first thing I'd ever said in space. Hardly the most eloquent thing I could've said, but it got the idea across. My mind flooded with questions. Besides the obvious answer of being in orbit, where was I? How did I get here? Who took my glasses?

What was that crystal, and who put it there?

♦ 98

Deep in my bones, I felt it. Like a grain of sand falling down in an hourglass, or a timer ticking down. The crystal on my hand became almost imperceptibly cooler than it was seconds ago, and it was cooling off while I was floating around in space without a helmet.

Oh.

…

That isn't good.

I was working on very little information, but I could put two and two together. People weren't supposed to survive in space, so, assuming I wasn't having my first lucid dream, this crystal was the only thing keeping me alive.

My heart rate quickened, trying to figure out how I'd get out of this situation. If the gemstone was a battery, then what was it powered by? What was actively draining the charge? My life support, for one. It was also anchoring me in place. Radiation shielding?

I thought I felt the sun on my back. Without an atmosphere to filter out the sun's rays, I reckon I'm taking it full-blast.

Another mystery solved. What else?

♦ 97

This is too much.

I brought my hands to my head to massage my temples, inadvertently bringing the foreign object closer to my face than I strictly wanted it to be. My thoughts were, for reasons that should've been rather evident, in complete disarray.

"Is there somewhere I can land?" I said aloud, not caring how far my words carried. Or if they ever reached past my lips and ears at all. I just talked aloud sometimes to get my head back on straight. "Europe, I guess?"

It was a bit silly to quibble over landing zones, when anywhere with oxygen beat my current predicament. For some reason, my mind rationalized that I should prioritize an English-speaking nation, or one that was on decent terms with the United States. The human brain liked its routines, but those didn't always react well to stress.

In this case, the delay caused me to waste time I didn't have to lose. During my deliberations, a large shadow passed over my body.

"Huh?"

Shadows getting between me and the sun during the day were never a good sign. I thrust my arm around, to force my body to flip, when I realized that shouldn't work. Nevertheless, I had the thought of turning around, and my whole body swiveled to face the ceaseless expanse of the stars dancing across the blue planet's horizon.

It was breathtaking..

Then I kept turning, to face a massive hunk of rock threatening to bowl me over!

It couldn't be a meteor, because it looked way too big to burn up in the atmosphere. The khaki-colored, craggy sphere was too small to be Luna, and what were the odds that I'd be stranded out here at the same time as a solar eclipse?

Why not? Nothing makes sense anyways.

I hissed out a swear of alarm, and tried to 'swim' away from the oncoming planetoid, but it merely drifted away, making me realize that it was in a stable orbit. Not a threat to me at all, save that it was a reminder that I was completely out of my depth.

I was about to breathe a sigh of relief when the reflective fragment of a solar panel whizzed past my nose like a bullet.

♦ 96

Taking a hurried glance to the left, I could see the rest of a broken satellite the size of a bus making its way towards me.

My mind jumped to a particular phrase that described what that satellite would do to me.

Kessler syndrome.

Ah, yes. It was about to Kessler me.

"No, no!"

Oh, come on! This isn't fair!

My mind awash with indignation, I extended my arms outwards to block the oncoming projectile. The gem on my left hand glowed with an intense magenta radiance, a colorful bolt of pink rocketing out of the extremity and shattering it on impact. In its wake, a harmless haze of glittering dust was all that remained.

I took a moment to examine my handiwork.

That was a laser. A genuine laser!

"Wow."

What else was I supposed to say?

♦ 91

That sense of wonder was brief, as I felt how much that attack took out of me. The running number in my head was an abstraction of some kind. An abstraction that was at a little over 90%. It sank in that, unless I found a way to recharge this thing, I didn't have a lot of power to burn. I didn't want to find out what happened when it went dry.

Once that thought had sunk it, it occurred to me that it wasn't the only thing sinking. Firing off that energy blast disrupted the careful balance of my own orbit, causing me to tumble downwards into the atmosphere.

♦ 90

"Ah! AH! Slow down, SLOW DOWN!"

I felt bile rise in my throat as I maintained a downward spiral towards the planet below. The sky was green, the grass was blue, and the malformed globe spun faster and faster; it was more accurate to say that I was the one that was spinning, but I was more concerned with the fact that I was on fire.

♦ 88

Friction. It was a killer. The only surprising part was that it hadn't killed me yet. My entire body was burning, surrounded by a bright corona of flame.

♦ 86

…Which, now that I had time to think about it, should have ended things then and there. Instead, I was still falling.

…

I had, years back, watched a video of a skydiver launching themselves off the stratosphere in a pressure suit. Some kind of promo for Red Bull. They got there in a helium balloon, and the jumper took a good ten minutes to land back to Earth. About five or six minutes of freefall, and the rest was done with the parachute.

♦ 84

At a guess? I was falling from a lot higher than that. As someone who wasn't a fan of heights, and neglected to bring a parachute with them into lower orbit, I was really hoping that this was a dream again. In spite of all evidence to the contrary.

Mostly because it felt like I was falling way faster than I should've been.

♦ 82

"Come on, come on! Fly! It isn't that hard!"

I was flailing around midair, trying to come up with something that would stop me from going splat. If this thing on my hand was supposed to let me fly, then I hadn't figured out how to do it yet. There wasn't a built-in instruction manual, either. Falling through the clouds and quickly reaching a terminal end point, the land below appeared to be rural woodland… when I had the chance to look down. I still hadn't stopped spinning, giving me the verdant view of an evergreen forest every other second.

♦ 80

"How about happy thoughts, eh?! Happy thoughts! Just think happy--!"

My head tilted down towards the ground again. Before I ever found the magic words to give myself wings, one side of my face made an earsplitting impact with a lake. The water might as well have been concrete, for all that the surface tension did to break my fall.

♦ 70

I felt my entire body reverberate. Bones snapping from the force of impact, and then unsnapping. The right side of my body was wracked with pain, and it felt like a jet of water sprayed up my nose to jab straight through my brainstem. I was somehow alive, but I wasn't going to go out on a limb and call it a miracle yet.

As if my morning couldn't possibly get any worse, I was starting to drown. Water was rapidly filling my lungs, and bright motes of light were flooding my vision.

♦ 80

I was far too deep in the water to grasp for the surface. My power might've let me breathe underwater if I was more composed, especially since I could breathe in a vacuum, but I was hardly in a state to do that.

Not… like… this!

Unable to reach for air or latch on to anything solid, the gemstone on my hand started glowing again, drawing in the light that had pooled at the bottom of the lake bed.

♦ 85

The stone illuminated the dark depths in a sea of red light, and I was launched straight through the top of the lake to freedom.

My flight plan was erratic. Less floating, and more flopping. There were multiple times where I risked hitting a tree or sheer cliff and breaking my neck. Focusing my jittery jumps into concentrated movement took effort, driven by desperation and adrenaline. Coming to a complete stop was even harder, but in that moment, I would have taken stable ground under my feet over bouncing around like a pinball.

♦ 84

Once I reoriented myself, regaining a sense of up and down, I dropped to the ground and vomited. I was utterly tapped out. Physically, mentally, and, for the record, existentially. Launched out of space, and nearly splattered. I needed time to unwind, decompress, and, ideally, wake up from this nightmare that I clearly wasn't going to wake up from.

At some point, I did lose consciousness before being dragged back to wakefulness. It could have been a rest for a few minutes. It could have been more. I wasn't keeping track, but I did know it was darker out when my eyes fluttered open a second time.

More than that, I could barely feel the texture of the dirt as my fingers dug into the soil, but that was because of the dark gloves that I'd been wearing since I'd awoken. What were they? Leather? Latex? I couldn't place the material.

"Stupid gloves," I muttered, between sputtering out copious amounts of fluid from my body.

When I spared the idle thought to wish them away, the gloves disappeared. I crawled back to the water's edge in an exhausted stupor, stumbling over gnarled greenery that nicked my exposed hands. It hurt a bit, but not enough to bleed. Besides, I didn't think I would be ready to stand for a while.

I was at the shore of a lake, in the clearing of a forest. A lake in a forest, in what might've been Europe, assuming that this might've been Earth. That was a tenuous leap in logic at best, but it was all I had to cling on to.

I carefully examined my reflection in the water. My eyes were dark, sunken pits, with red rings around black pinpricks for pupils. The light brown curls of my hair were a wet mop that crowned a gristly, disheveled expression. My nose was about the same as when I last checked it, but it was swollen with a bold streak of blood running down both nostrils.

Was that from using the gem, or the crash?

Does it matter?

Either way, I looked terrible. My body and the immediate area around it were bathed in an eerie, ethereal light. I washed my face in the clear lake, something to keep my hands busy while I thought over what the hell I was going to do next.

♦ 86

The awfully conspicuous icosahedron had cooled off somewhat from the dunking, though it still glowed faintly. I couldn't see all sides of the thing with it plugged into my hand, but I recognized a D20 anywhere. I tried to caress my left palm with my index finger, to feel the other end of the stone poking out; it felt like nothing was there. It was surreal, without the fabric covering where one end connected to the other.

"What the hell happened to me?"

"Stand and deliver, varlet!" a voice from behind me declared in the most jarringly Shakespearean English accent I could possibly imagine.

The sudden noise had me spooked, then strongly bewildered. Who was that? What were they saying? Was I going crazy? Crazier? Fingers through my hair, hands trembling as I addressed what might've been one part of a greater stress-induced episode.

"Hey. Hey. Shut up. I need a minute here."

My voice was hollow and shaky. I didn't even have the strength to turn around.

The hallucination, which spoke like a British teen LARPer, sounded flabbergasted at my irreverent response. He faltered slightly as he pressed onward.

"I shall grant ye no moment of respite, sirrah! As the guardian of Deerwood Forest and rightful steward of yon sacred waters, I command ye to make thine intentions known or face the consequences!"

Exasperated, I turned with a long swing of my arm.

"Alright, alright! What're you…?"

I turned around, and felt my heart plunge in shock.

Straight ahead of me, perched on a stump atop a short hill, was a rodent of unusual size. Standing at about a meter tall, I almost thought he was a child, but his head was way too big. Made up too much of his build and mass. The humanoid's Lincoln green head and body were concealed in a brown cowl and tunic, leaving big green eyes and a stern scowl peering back at me from the shadows.

"What are you?" I asked, dumbfounded by the odd being in front of me.

The creature--

I struck the line of thought, because he was very clearly talking to me. Calling the guy a creature was rude at best. If he was civilized enough to wear hiking boots, he was civilized enough for me not to call him a 'creature'.

The, erm, fellow was pointing a wooden bow at me, an arrow nocked in the direction of my heart. A recurve bow, by the shape of it? The bow stood as tall as he was, giving it a strong pull if he chose to fire. However, as someone who wasn't in a rush to be shot, even after all of that up in space, I was sobering up to the fact that I hadn't made the best first--

--The fact that his mouth started moving a few seconds ago.

Wait wait, what's he saying?

"…trespasser. For what being of Walkers' make could stand there and question mine own nature, whilst acting unperturbed by the sting of a broadhead's point?"

"A broadhead?"

Wasn't that an arrow shape?

I looked down, trying to focus on the narrow spike of an arrow nocked on his bow. Unexpectedly, looking down also caused me to notice the long shaft ending in colorful feather fletching that was already sticking out of my chest.

♦ 85

Then came the pain of being shot in the chest.

"You shot me!" I seethed in accusation. That was somehow the least extreme thing to happen to me thus far, but still. It hurt! "Why did you shoot me with an arrow?!"

The short mammal took a step back, looking only slightly less confused about the whole affair than I was. He took a step off the stump, nearly falling on his rear in the process, but his hardy bow was able to hold his weight and spring him back to his feet.

"Lackaday, spellbinder!" he exclaimed defensively. "That was merely meant to be a warning shot!"

"What was the warning? Wear armor?!"

My first instinct was to yank it out, but it hurt to pull at, and my attempt to jostle it loose only made it hurt more!

"I merely meant to query thee in order to determine thine alignment! Whether thou were friend or foe, when ye turned swiftly without nary a warning of intent!"

I pointed to the offending projectile with a gloved index finger. The wound didn't seem to be bleeding, but that might've just been my black suit covering it up.

"You know, I don't think friends do this to each other! I've had a real long day, and I don't see a great friendship foundation going on here!"

My eyes were, last I checked, awfully red. I hoped my anger got across loud and clear. If that didn't, then the renewed glow the gemstone on my left hand was making certainly did.

He put his bow back up, for whatever amount of good that'd do for him. I still had the gem, and I felt I could defend with it. Modulate the output and go for a non-lethal blow, if I could.

I… didn't appreciate being shot, but maybe I was the one in the wrong here?

"You descended from the sky as a fiery, baleful phantasm unto the bed of Never Lake! Am I not to assume you sought to violate and despoil its serene beauty to fuel your dark magicks, Overland warlock most foul and unseeming?"

He called me what now?

At that moment, my logical brain stopped proofreading the words coming out of my mouth.

"I don't even know what that means, but I'm not going to be talked down to by a funny animal that doesn't wear pants!"

The rodent drew closer, standing atop his bow so he could get up in my face. He could only get so close to me without poking the arrow he put there.

"Sheathe thine sharp tongue, you plague-marked mage of ill repute!"

If that was the game we were going to play, I knew just the way to escalate.

I bit my thumb at him.

His furious scowl widened.

"Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?" he asked angrily.

"I do bite my thumb, sir."

They called Shakespeare's works the classics for a reason, and the reason was applicability. I appreciated my psychotic episode for going along with the bit.

"Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?" he repeated, angrier still.

Gregory wasn't here, so we had to skip his lines.

"No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I bite my thumb, sir--!"

"HALT!"

Neither of us were able to get another word in. The prior atmosphere was utterly disrupted by the arrival of three steel goliaths from out of the woodwork. They were all nearly twice my height and fairly uniform in construction, seeming right at home on the budget of a shoestring sci-fi production. Built with a minimum of moving parts, the giants were covered in heavy plates of armor that bowled over pine, stone, and shrub. Each was armed with thick bars of metal that functioned as crude clubs in their weighty hands.

A trio of blood red, cyclopean visors glared down at us, followed by a litany of the local equivalents of the Miranda Rights projected through cheap voice synthesizers. If they had accents like the shrew, then they were mangled by the modulator.

"ROB O' THE HEDGE AND UNIDENTIFIED COLLABORATOR. YOU ARE UNDER ARREST. DO NOT RESIST THE WILL OF THE HIGH SHERIFF. I REPEAT. DO NOT RESIST."

"Are those robots?" I squealed out in incredulous, barely-restrained indignation.

Not at all drones. Robots.

This whole day that had been panic, terror, screaming, and agony. One crisis after the other. Now? Even more confusion. All questions, no answers. I was so fed up with all of this, so lacking in context that I couldn't even begin to compartmentalize all of these mental stress fractures in my head. It was a dam about to burst, and I didn't know where the water was going next.

The teal humanoid -- Rob was what they called him -- lept away from me and stood in a combat position atop a tall stone. I couldn't tell which part of those things would be vulnerable to a humble arrow, at a glance. The eye, perhaps?

"Verily!" he replied, switching out the broadhead for one with a round, threaded head from his quiver. "These mechanical miscreants are the shock-troopers of the Sheriff! I know not your intentions, pilgrim, but surely you can recognize the need for--"

I growled, and the gemstone projected a conical ray of light. The ray coalesced into a large, translucent left hand, which wrapped itself around the body of the robot nearest to me. With a thought, I clenched the giant fist, crushing everything encased beneath it into scrap metal and glitter dust. The robot's head spun straight up into the air before landing on the refuse pile.

"…Cooperation."

♦ 82

The two that remained started blankly at their very destroyed comrade, before raising their metal clubs and slowly ambling towards me.

"UNIDENTIFIED MISCREANT IS ARMED AND DANGEROUS. ENGAGING WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE."

What did that guy call me? A warlock?

I didn't know if what I was doing was some kind of magic, or sufficiently advanced technology, but whatever it was, it was working. For my next trick, I focused on a rough circle around the two robots, and set it ablaze with iridescent flame. Pillars of fire rose above the robots, freezing in place and solidifying as a jagged crystal cage that surrounded them on all sides.

♦ 80

"Now that's what I'm talking about!"

The rest of this trouble, I could do without, but the power? No complaints thus far. Since he recognized them, I looked around for where Rob went, to see if he might be able to explain more about where these things came from. For better or worse, they may have been able to point me in the direction of civilization.

My celebration was short-lived. There was a loud clatter like shattering glass, and the two robots used their iron clubs to smash free from their sparkling prison. I'd clearly underestimated their speed, because they closed the gap into melee range in under two strides. Their sudden blitz threw me on the backfoot, but I had enough time to raise a barrier of pink light between me and the wrecking force of their blows.

♦ 78

Fragments of that interposing wall scattered over the ground, as I was tossed reeling into a sheer stone wall. It felt like they'd knocked something loose with that heavy blow, and it wasn't a stronger tolerance for pain.

"Would you cut that out?!" I called out to them, nearly breathless, but with enough air left to loudly complain.

There was a pause in their combat routine. A stall, as the two robots neared closer. If one blast worth five 'points' was enough to take out a satellite, then I should be able to beat them, but what if I wasted too much power doing it? On the other hand, could I afford to wait until they called for reinforcements from that Sheriff guy? Could I afford to risk being tagged by someone who might like enforcing high taxes with killer robots?

Eventually, the robots formulated a response.

"REQUEST DENIED."

They readied their blunt instruments, to pick up where they left off, when the path of the farthest one was intercepted by an arrow striking its foot from the trees. It was the round arrow from before. Instead of piercing armor, it exploded into a bundle of twine that got caught between the giant's lumbering limbs and caused it to tumble to the ground with a heavy clunk. Another arrow with a red tip flew out from the forest and detonated on impact, scattering the robot's head and shoulders across the clearing.

Well. I took back what I said about the arrows being ineffective.

With that robot down, I was forced into close combat with the last one. It swung its rebar beatstick left, then right, causing me to flinch and propel myself away with long, unbalanced jumps. Being yanked around on invisible wires was the closest thing I could do to flying while under duress.

I hadn't been in a fight in well over a decade. Not a real one. For that, I was grateful. Nevertheless, there were moments where you were glad that the human body was always ready to make cortisol. For moments where keeping your blood pumping was the priority, and common decency went out the window.

For what it was worth, I lost that fight. This time, I wouldn't.

Kicking off against a rocky spire, I rocketed off towards my next victim with a left hook that exploded into a shotgun blast of pressurized pink mist. The wave of vibrant energy bowled the machine over, a spiky layer of magenta crystal forming over the head and trunk in the shape of a frozen splash.

"Ha! Try breaking out of that, you tin-plated git!"

♦ 76

The robot's thick fingers dragged coarsely across the surface of the crystal shell, too stiff to hold on as it futilly attempted to scrape free. Not wanting to risk whether it could actually accomplish the deed, I conjured a broad cylinder of solid light and drove it straight down on the robot's head. The result was a total flattening and a satisfying crush where a mechanical brain might've been. Brain or not, the body stopped functioning when its head was squashed into a solid disk.

♦ 75

"Aha! I got 'em all!" I pumped a first out in the air, but once the deed was done, all that remained in the forest was an eerie silence. "Hello? Anyone still out there?"

With nothing else to fight, and everything seeming to calm down, the adrenaline started to bleed out of my body. The gemstone still had most of its power left to burn, but I sure as hell had run dry. I fell to my knees, exhaustion returning to wreck its vengeance once I'd run out of targets. Worried about falling on top of it, I yanked the broadhead out of my chest with all of the force I still had to muster.

It was a drastic act of delirium, which caused me to pass out from shock. The last thing I saw was the ruby-red glaze of the arrow, smeared across my hazy vision. After I collapsed, the last thing I heard was a distant voice murmuring poetic in my ear.

"At ease, overlander. Any foe of the Sheriff is a friend of mine."

---

Spoiler: Author Notes / Lore

I've been at this for a while, huh?

The first chapter of Ruby Haze was put online in 2020. Which, geez, was years back! I was much less seasoned as a writer, and it showed. It's kinda difficult for me to go back and read my old stuff… which is why I kept putting off the inevitable rewrites for later.

You see, due to me often being split between other obligations over the past couple years (mostly work, but also other writing projects that demanded my attention more than Ruby Haze did), my writing skill has greatly outpaced my ability to actually, well, write this. As such, the quality of the earlier chapters and those that came later can get pretty jarring. Talking to my friends about how rough the beginning was compared to my later output was enough to convince me that I'd put off doing rewrites for the earlier chapters for long enough. It was an uphill battle to read my old work and get this new Chapter 1 out, but I can easily say I'm proud of it as a refurbishment of Ruby Haze's opening.

I put this up as a new threadmark so people could judge the quality for themselves before I did a full-on replacement of the original first chapter. If there's approval, then I can do the switch-up and leave a link to the old one in the author notes.

My game plan is to do one rewrite for every new chapter of Ruby Haze, until the quality of the older chapters reaches parity with the rest. Which might take a couple for me to be satisfied, but the good news is that you get touched-up versions of the start.

Additionally, my friend and I started work on a collaborative Friend Insert in which he is inserted into Archie Sonic as a Metal Sonic. Please keep an eye out for Dead Metal in the future, because we'll start posting when the backlog is further along.

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This chapter has been brought to you by the following patrons and beta readers: CaptNameless, C-Moon, Dredloki, and N'Oni!

Thank you all for the continuing support!

 

[FKorus]

I like it, so go for the rewrites if you want

 

[weredrago2]

Ruby Haze
Chapter 33: Chaolaxing

After spending less than a week on Angel Island, it actually felt good to return to Mercia. For all of the terrors I and everyone else had to endure there, the occupied land had become something of a known variable. I knew the snow-covered expanses of Deerwood Forest, and had been in Hideaway and Sylvania Castle long enough to call them my second set of homes. Places I could feel safe to let my guard down. The situation in Eurish wasn't perfect, by any stretch, but it was steadily changing for the better.

I tried to keep that slightly outdated thought in mind as Fiona landed the biplane down in the charred expanse of blackened stumps where Deerwood Forest once stood.

"Fiona, stay with the plane," I ordered, and she didn't argue. "Figment, with me."

My familiar flew out from an aperture in Null Space, scouting around what was left of the landscape. The air was sharp, hazy, and acrid, stinging my nose and his beak with faint embers. Wood smoke. Toxic runoff.

"No, no, no…!"

Roasted meat.

"This isn't happening."

I tried to open my awareness, searching outwards for signs of life, but all I could sense was the opposite. Searching for the cause of this devastation, even though it should've been fairly obvious, led to similarly dead ends.

"It was only a few days," I hissed out. "How did this happen?"

It didn't.

I whirred around to Fiona, who was mumbling something under her breath.

"What did you say?"

"I said I don't know!" she yelled, fear clear on her face. "The High Sheriff wasn't supposed to be able to mount this kind of assault for weeks! Maybe he called in extra help from Robotnik, or he had a secret weapon saved up, or--!"

This doesn't add up.

"It doesn't add up," I said, feeling the color drain from my face.

My voice was cold. My tone, rational. Almost clinical. I was trying to come to terms with everything, or stow it all away so that I could turn the knot of thoughts in my head into action. There was no use in denying what I was seeing, was there?

Everyone was dead. Or most of them were dead, following a raid that was initiated between my last contact with Hideaway and when we arrived to check on everyone. The celebrations from our victory against the High Sheriff were cut short with extreme prejudice, as anyone that hadn't fallen in the initial slash and burn was rounded up for the roboticizer. Plain and simple.

The Crazy Kritters were gone. The Maquis were gone. Clan Argyle were gone.

The Mercian Freedom Fighters were over, and I was left behind.

This, right here, John. This was why you didn't want to get attached to people.

It all felt too real. The distant, fading fires were even more distant, increasingly faded. How long had they burned for?

Fire is my element.

Fire was one of the four elements I'd been experimenting with. The one that came the most naturally, followed by water. Air and earth were the only fields I'd stalled in, to the extent that I'd considered dropping them entirely to focus on the other two.

Where was I, again? Oh, right.

Everyone was dead.

I extinguished the lingering flames with a wave of my hand. Less distractions in my visions as I picked through the ashes for anything that could tell me what I'd missed.

Honestly, there wasn't much left. Tattered huts. Shattered weapons, scattered across what remained of the battlefield.

I picked up a round, white shape that caught my eye. A stainless skull, and one that felt instinctively like it belonged to a friend. Like it belonged to Rob.

Is that my new power? Identifying skulls by touch?

Well, he's the only guy I know with the hedgehog head shape, it's a bit too small for--

I dropped the skull, letting it tumble to the ground.

"This isn't happening," I repeated. "The Sheriff wouldn't let a high-value target like the former king be burnt up with the rest of them."

I heard the loud cracking of glass, and saw that it was followed by a spider web of branching fractures over the smoggy sky above.

"This. Isn't. Happening."

My memories were becoming clearer. Fiona was parking the plane near Sylvania Castle when we returned from Angel Island, wasn't she? Why were we so close to Deerwood now?

Looking around, I really was alone. Where had Fiona and Figment gone? Were they ever here at all? Someone mentioned this not adding up before, and I had to agree.

This had to be a trick. An illusion. How? I should be able to see through those with the Phantom Ruby.

Was there something I was overlooking?

What if it was a--?

♦ !!

"--in there, sleepyhead?"

My magenta eyes flashed open, causing Amy to stumble back in surprise.

"Ah! There you are!"

I blinked.

"Hmm?"

I looked around, trying to reestablish my bearings. I was still in the power ring grotto beneath Sylvania Castle, where I'd taken Amy to meet Merna the Merhog. The day trip was to make up for the fact that I didn't take her along the first time I came here, back when it was a lot more dangerous. The merhog made a habit of passing through the underground rivers connecting the Sylvania Castle to the Central Sea when she could, and the two of them really hit it off without me. I saw no issues with closing my eyes to meditate for a few minutes while they chatted about old myths and stories.

When my vision was more clear, I saw that the pink hedgehog girl and the half-hedgehog, half-fish woman were looking at me. They were relaxing by the large pool of the grotto, watching for my response.

"Something wrong?" I asked.

"We were getting worried about you, Mister Wizard," Amy explained. "You kinda dozed off, but Merna didn't wanna wake you up."

The merhog merely nodded. While Amy sat next to the pool, Merna lounged in it. She could survive outside the water for brief periods of time, but doing so too long would cause her to dry out. Standard merperson fare, with the added feature that she could hop on her tail like it was a particularly stiff pogo stick.

"When Amy mentioned how busy you'd been with your arcane studies, I thought it better to let you rest."

"I was just meditating," I said, waving off her concern.

"Meditating for nearly an hour?" Merna teased, a knowing smile crossing her turquoise face.

That long?

"It was a deep meditation."

I didn't mean to fall asleep. The Phantom Ruby meant I could replace some of my body's typical needs with magic. It'd only been a couple weeks since I got back from Angel Island. After a well-earned rest, I made the executive decision to cut sleep back to a couple of hours per night. Mercia had been relatively quiet, like Fiona said it would, but time I spent sleeping was time being wasted. The High Sheriff would be using this time to prepare for another plot, or a renewed offensive, and I needed to use that time to continue unravelling the mysteries of the Ars Ixia. There were far more opportunities for me to experiment with my powers, now that I finally had an emerald shard to fuel them.

The more lore I absorb from this musty tome, the easier the Phantom Ruby will be to handle. Cut through the Old English, and that's more or less what the book says about 'crystalline magic'.

Did I need to read a specific passage on the subject to find out if mixing low sleep and chaos energy was a good idea? No, obviously not, but my time budget was running on margins that were razor-thin. Maybe the lack of sleep and my recent doubling-down on occult research were why I was dreaming about fire?

Fire, chemical fumes, and… a skull?

The details eluded me, and I didn't care to remember the rest. It wasn't like my dreams were ever pleasant.

"I hope your meditation was fruitful all the same," Merna acquiesced. "Are you ready to visit the chao garden?"

I got up and stretched, giving the horse-sized sea turtle I was leaning against a friendly pat on the shell. The snoozing aquatic reptile was one of Merna's friends that came along with her, after I made the flooded tunnels more stable. Now that we were in a better position to properly restore Sylvania Castle, the last thing we needed was a structural collapse beneath it.

"I'm good to go. Amy, do you have everything?"

Amy turned around so I could see her big rucksack. Gray. Military surplus. Waterproof. A bright splash of magenta sprayed over the Overland emblem on the back gave her Christmas present a personal touch.

"Yep!" Amy shouted. "Let's go see the chao!"

"See you soon!" Merna said, splashing into the water.

Amy held my hand, and I formed a hollow bubble of water around us. It held steady as I kicked the stone floor and bounced the bubble into the depths.

♦ 70

A water shield. It didn't just keep out excess water as Amy and I walked through the flooded catacombs. This sphere of water magic worked as an arcane set of gills, drawing in oxygen from the estuary and filtering out carbon dioxide. After I pulled off the fire shield against that super badnik, my frequent visits down here made the water shield a logical follow-up.

"It's so pretty down here," Amy beamed, using her flashlight to illuminate the castle ruins and the flourishing river life that claimed it.

A variety of colorful fish swam past us. Striped trout, yellow eels, salmon salmon, and even a green largemouth bass. I didn't think the last one was supposed to be swimming in a Europe-esque body of water, but the Central Sea was much smaller and closer-knit to the adjacent continents than the Atlantic Ocean. An argument could be made for draining these tunnels so they'd be put to more 'practical' use, but I wasn't going to make it.

"Yeah, it's nice. I wish I could explore places like these more often. Could solve another mystery or two from those books of yours."

"You think we can do that?"

"We met a merhog, so I don't see why we can't try for another."

Maybe, if my life went another way, I could've been an archaeologist. Or a historian. I liked learning about history and going to museums. Not so much when I was younger, but definitely later in life. After the child and student discounts expired, of course.

Needless to say, fate didn't seem to have much of either in my cards anymore. It was a shame that I wouldn't be seeing the Ringling again any time soon. Only went there a couple of times, even though I spent my whole life near the damn thing, and now…

Amy disrupted my darker ruminations with a non-sequitur.

"You know, when I have a bad dream, Cousin Rob says it's okay to talk about it," the hedgehog girl commented.

"That's solid advice, Amy. He knows what he's talking about."

"When I talk about my bad dreams, I feel better about them," she continued.

"Are you having any bad dreams you want to talk about?" I offered.

"Never mind," Amy said, sighing in apparent resignation.

I shrugged, stopping our bubble when I saw our exit. A lifting gesture with my hand took us upwards and back towards the surface, where I popped the elemental barrier with a thought. Diverting the path of the trickling waterfall, I revealed the path to the chao garden.

"Alright, we're here."

Amy gasped at the sight.

"Wow!"

The place hasn't changed much since my return from that perilous 'vacation' to Angel Island. It was enclosed in a broad, shallow cenote, surrounded by tall trees and patches of moss that clung to the cavern walls. Baby blue chao with green or yellow highlights frolicked around the garden, hovering around trees and swimming in the basin.

By the time we arrived, Merna was tending to a shrine she put together to bless the garden and protect it from danger: A short, boxy structure of blue and beige stones that the chao gathered around to sing cheery songs with her.

It was saccharine, but I wasn't gonna complain. I could use more saccharine right now.

"What do you think, Amy?" I asked.

"They look just like the fairies in my book! Which ones are yours, Mister Wizard?"

I searched around. Some of the chao got skittish when I approached, while others were more friendly, but otherwise paid me little heed. They were too busy enjoying their simple lives, without need or worry. The only ones that had gotten really attached to me were those two eggs I saw when Merna showed me this place. They hatched during one of my visits to spruce up the place, while I was in the process of adjusting their placement to reduce the risk that they might fall over. Both chao came out of their eggshells in my color and imprinted on sight, so that made them my responsibility.

I wasn't aggressively fishing for an excuse to keep them. Really.

…

I only spent, what? Hundreds of hours in the Chao Garden in SA2 over multiple save files? Not counting the one in SADX and the Tiny Chao Garden, of course.

"They have to be around--" I spotted a pair of crimson, two-tone chao getting into a wrestling match over the same orange fruit. In a garden that regularly produced more of them by magic. "Errol, Vivi!"

I flew over and broke up the feuding water babies, scooping them up into my hands. In my left hand was Errol, with his usual half-lidded eyes and dopey squiggle of a smile. To my right waited Vivi, whose eyes were wide, and her shark-like rictus grin was wider.

"Really, guys? There's enough to share!"

Errol cooed and wriggled in my hand because he wanted to cuddle, while Vivi went straight to biting, because her version of cuddles involved teeth.

Naturally, the two troublemakers were mine. Or in this case, my problem.

"Want me to hold them for you?" Amy suggested. I turned, and she got a better look at how Vivi had latched herself onto me like a lamprey. "How about just the left one?"

I handed her Errol, who proceeded to crawl out of Amy's hands and explore around her arms. She giggled.

"Errol's got a lot of energy, huh?"

I was very relieved that Vivi was disinterested in expressing her affection towards her fellow chao in the same way that she did towards me. Holding her steady in one hand, far away from my other one, I popped out a sharp, black talon from my index finger.

"You kids don't even know what scarcity is," I muttered, as I sliced the orange fruit in half for them. After hovering one chunk within range of Vivi, she became content with chewing on that instead. "You're welcome."

I passed the other half to Amy, who passed it along to Errol. With that, the yellow emotion balls bobbing atop their heads turned into hearts, and both my chao became much easier to manage. We set them back on the ground, and I was able to watch them eat in the grass with minimal intervention.

"Are they always like this?" Amy asked, sitting down on a cool stone next to me.

"Only when they're awake," I clarified.

With the unique way that chao absorbed traits from the creatures they were in contact with, I knew there were signs to watch for. Unlike the other chao in the garden, Errol and Vivi developed darker complexions and more prominent crescents on their soft bellies each time I visited. Merna insisted that the twins would be heartbroken if I never returned, but when I first saw them changing, I was worried that the negative energies of the Phantom Ruby made me a potential bad influence.

…No, wait, Figment was left unattended with them a couple times until I found a replacement chao sitter. I could pin some of my current predicament on them observing and hugging my avian familiar to absorb his bad habits. That'd explain the feathery tuft on Vivi's head, too, but not Errol's horns or whiskers--

I paused, noting the lack of said whiskered sitter.

"Vivi, Errol? Where's Brie?"

My chao knowingly laughed. They were both done with the fruit, so while I took out a cloth and cleaned off their messy faces, Amy opened her bag and handed out toys to any chao that wanted them. They were her old things that she hadn't played with in years. Stuffed plushies. A rattle. Crayons. Stuff like that.

She already donated most of them to the younger children in Mercia, but there was still a lot left over. Only so many kids her age or younger survived for us to distribute them to.

"Who's Brie?" Amy asked, as she rolled Errol and Vivi a striped ball they could chase around the garden.

"One of my new familiars."

Amy tilted her head.

"What happened to Figment?" she questioned, concerned about the safety of a feral bird that could rip the power cell out of a SWATbot by the beak.

"Figment's fine. He's been helping me scout the skies and pick off badnik patrols. Brie helps me out with other stuff."

Her expression brightened.

"Oh, okay!"

Namely, Brie helped me out by having an even temper and positive attitude. I wasn't exactly fluent in animal speech, but I didn't need fluency to tell me that Brie was much better with kids and at keeping a lower profile than Figment ever was. After I saved the poor girl from being caught by the neck in a Robotnik-branded mousetrap, she'd been eager to help me with stuff that Figment turned his beak at. Mostly reminding me of my daily errands via our telepathic link, but her paws meant she could hold things, too.

Inspecting the other side of the palm tree my chao liked to congregate around, I saw a footlong mobini rodent with dark magenta fur and glassy black eyes like a doll. Her head bore a pair of ruby spikes, which ran down her back and along her tail.

"Brie, you alright?"

The micky let out a squeak of defeat. My first Phantom Ruby-mutated familiar of the Rodentia order was tied to the base of the tree with colorful string. The skill behind the knotwork meant that Brie had only mostly chewed herself free, in spite of the fact he could now gnaw through metal. One claw swipe against the bark cut Brie the rest of the way loose.

"Take five, girl."

Brie promptly collapsed onto the soft grass for a nap.

I felt bad, because watching Errol and Vivi for me was supposed to be her light duty. Lighter than spying on troop movements or sabotaging the High Sheriff's foresters, which was what Figment was doing. The less mobini he could round up for Robotnik, the fewer badniks powered by animal batteries he'd receive from Robotropolis. After a few incidents, I imagined he might've gotten suspicious about the sudden attacks from mixed flocks of flying critters led by a demonic flicky cast in shades of red.

That was to say, he would've gotten suspicious if I couldn't turn them all invisible at a moment's notice. The only thing funnier than seeing badniks armed with nets get mobbed by a horde of animals was when they couldn't see them back.

Heh. Gotta get my kicks where I can.

It'd be an exaggeration to say I was eager to make more 'ruby mutants', but thanks to that emerald shard, I also had the juice I needed to perform more consistent animal testing. Find out if what I did to Figment wasn't a one-time thing.

A few dead mobini later, I got my answer. There were intangible factors at play besides how much mental focus or chaos energy I put behind the process that determined if the animals survived the mutation… or didn't. It almost felt crazy to ask for the consent of an animal or try to prioritize doing the spell on animals that were on death's door anyways, but some mobini were smart. If I could communicate, then why not try?

Besides, they had a closer tie to nature than mobians. Or me. Not one of them turned down the opportunity to survive after being given it, even when warned of the risks. To those scant few that made it, the deal was simple: In exchange for their power up and exemption from their usual obligations to the food chain, they worked for me while I wrote down any side effects that cropped up. Sloppier than how an actual scientist might do it, but until a legion of lab rats fell off the back of a truck, this was the best I could do.

Figment and Brie were two of the success stories.

I only wished more of them were.

The jumbo raccoon and the Cluckatrice, I'm still on the fence about.

Remaining stumped on where those knots came from, I checked my chaos' stumpy arms for fingers. As well as hidden weapons, while I was at it.

"Merna?" I called out.

The merhog turned her head away from the singing and dancing chao.

"Hm?"

"Are chao supposed to be able to tie knots on their own?"

She shook her head.

"The arts and crafts supplies you dropped off have made for great enrichment, so I taught them how to do basic knots. Why do you ask?"

Oh boy. I started to gesture with my hands.

"So, uh, how do they--?"

"Patience," Merna answered simply.

"Just checking."

I settled down on a blocky stone next to Amy, pulling out my spellbook to continue where I left off. Making sure that Errol and Vivi never strayed further than the corner of my eye. Having already acquired a stronger grasp of fire during my brief time as a dragon and the further practice afterwards, I cracked open the aged pages, removed my crystal bookmark, and returned to the ancient grimoire's section on the element of water.

If fire was sharp and subtle, then water was blunt and dense. I wasn't able to make much sense of those terms at first, when I let the Phantom Ruby do the heavy lifting for me. The gemstone was still on my left hand, holding the book secure, but I deliberately avoided calling upon its power for these exercises. My right arm was extended forward, a crystal chalice in hand as a focusing tool, to draw a sputtering stream from the central pool into a continuous fountain.

Like a waterfall flowing in reverse, the liquid cascaded upwards, and then collapsed gracelessly back into the pools. I struggled to keep the pressure consistent, because the molecules of water felt much more cumbersome than the embers of fire. Fire was far more reactive to my thoughts; it always hungered for something to burn, and being fed made it behave exactly how it was supposed to. Burning oxygen to make fireballs, a fire shield, heat beams, and so on. Forcing water to move where I wanted it to go, instead of where the tides and gravity pulled it, felt like trying to swim against the current. Both elements were described as being mobile, a commonality that kept me anchored.

Then there were the other two. Air had subtle aspects to it like fire, blunt aspects like water, and was a third mobile element, but air felt so intangible that I could barely grasp it. It was so ephemeral as to feel incomplete. The opposite held true for the element of earth, which was a solid wall I couldn't breach. It stubbornly held fast until I'd all but beaten my head against the stones to make them budge. I knew that I could get better with those elements if I kept using the Phantom Ruby as a crutch, but I'd already been spreading myself dangerously thin. Worst of all, I couldn't figure out how to make shields for them! With my time in high demand as it was, I'd seriously considered cutting my losses and focusing only on what the Ars Ixia prescribed for the elements I favored.

Huh. Deja vu.

Amy tore her eyes away from the fountain to stare back at me.

"I almost forgot! Congratulations, Mister Wizard!"

"Congratulations on what?" I asked in confusion.

"John, look out!" Merna cried, pointing back at my fountain.

Amy picked a less than ideal time to pull me away from my spellwork, because that was when Errol and Vivi's ball went floating into the fountain. Which had somehow reached a much higher pressure as my chao went zipping through it!

"No, stop!"

I dropped the book and expanded the fountain outwards, extending the scant gallons of water under my control into a frozen menagerie of icy chutes and slides!

♦ 66

They rode along the slides, until the final one sent the chao gently tumbling back into my arms, none the wiser to the danger.

"Please, let's not do that again?" I pleaded.

"Baa!" Errol answered gleefully.

"Woo," was Vivi's simple reply.

The chao yawned, and promptly crashed. My concentration wore out, causing the water construct to fizzle away into bubbles. All of the commotion caused Brie's ears to perk up. She awoke from her own nap and scurried to attention. Taking the chao out of my hands, one at a time, Brie found patches of grass for them to lay in and put them to bed.

"What were you congratulating me on again?" I whispered tiredly.

"Whatever that banquet Rob and I got invited to is about," Amy said quietly, so as not to wake them up again.

"Banquet?"

"The one being held in your name next week. They said you'd be the guest of honor?"

Brie shook her head, projecting sensory data into my via our psionic link. She was getting better at this. Magenta stripes, geometric patterns, odors of burnt hair gel, coffee beans, incense…

"You mean the Cult of the Ruby Flame?" I hazarded.

Amy nodded enthusiastically. She went rummaging through her bag and took out a gray, bezeled talisman carved in a hexagonal shape. Two striped feathers stuck out of one side.

"They're big fans of you, and Miss Benzina gave me this neat charm. I think I'll put it on my headband, but what do you think?"

Crap, did I forget about that again?

Brie brought a hand to her face.

What? I met with them and had a couple drinks with the hyenas when I got back, but I forgot to do the follow-up! I have a lot going on right now!

Brie threw in a rather creative image of me being tossed into a boiling pot with carrots. As if I needed the reminder as to why I was the 'guest of honor'.

Alright, alright! I'll talk to my cannibal cult now and get it over with.

"I think I need to go over there and sort out the finer details of my role at the banquet. Can you hold this for me?"

I passed Amy my spellbook and made a portal to my cult's compound, which grew out of the motorpool they made from stacked containers and welded scrap metal in the vicinity of Sylvania Castle.

♦ 63

"Huh?"

"I'll uh, be back in a few? Brie, you're with me."

Brie scampered up the tree and hopped onto my shoulder. We stepped through the portal to resolve what I hoped would be a simple theological difference.

Those things that have, historically speaking, always been simple and never caused horrific amounts of bloodshed.

Fingers crossed?

- - -

Spoiler: Author Notes

Chao time!

This is a chapter I've been looking forward to writing ever since I decided Sylvania Castle would have a chao garden. Then came the names and descriptions of Errol and Vivi, which took some time to finalize. I wanted to use the chao garden as a way to ease into how things would be going in Mercia after the major arc with Enerjak.

In short? Things are gonna be changing.

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This chapter has been brought to you by the following patrons and beta readers: Argidoll, CaptNameless, C-Moon, and Dredloki!

Thank you all for the continuing support!

 

[weredrago2]

Howdy! Based on some reader feedback I've received, I went back and made some significant revisions to Chapter 33!

CHAPTER 33 CHANGELOG:

• +450 words total.
• Flipped the italics on the opening sequence, providing a better clue on what's going on.
  • I started doing this for other stories years back, and will go back to do this to prior chapters with similar dream/flashback sequences to denote when they are occurring.
• The amount of time that had passed since the SI's return to Mercia has been made more clear, and more elaboration has been given to how that time had been spent.
• Added descriptions of fish to the Sylvania Castle depths, because I felt that more description would help there.
• Expanded on how the SI adopted his chao and why, with the "why" being "I love chao!"
• Added additional context on Brie and the other ruby mutants John Scarlet has made since we last saw him. Which is to say, while there are more than two, there aren't a whole army of 'em.

As an additional update, I will be working on Chapter 34 next. The Ruby Haze Origins update for Chapter 2 can be after that, but I already have some good ideas for how I'm doing 34. So why not strike while the iron's hot?

 

[weredrago2]

Here's a new picture of John Scarlet done by Adam Bryce Thomas!

Yes, THAT Adam Bryce Thomas! I saw him at Magfest and got a comm! Real cool guy!

 

[Delta/Soul]

Here's a new picture of John Scarlet done by Adam Bryce Thomas!

Yes, THAT Adam Bryce Thomas! I saw him at Magfest and got a comm! Real cool guy!

Click to shrink...

Does Adam have any other comics that he did or is working on right now?

 

[Billbo baggins]

Only one question since I don't see a SFW nor an NSFW. Smut or no. I feel like this is something that I would like to know before going further into this story

 

[weredrago2]

Does Adam have any other comics that he did or is working on right now?

Click to shrink...

Mostly Sonic, but he's doing the art on an indie science fantasy comic called Drogune and is slated to be the penciler on the upcoming DC/Sonic crossover.

Only one question since I don't see a SFW nor an NSFW. Smut or no. I feel like this is something that I would like to know before going further into this story

Click to shrink...

This fic remains SFW for the time being. The thread was made in the Creative Writing section and not the Creative Writing NSFW section, so I'd need to make a new thread there for that. Correct me if I'm wrong on how the process works.

 

[Billbo baggins]

Mostly Sonic, but he's doing the art on an indie science fantasy comic called Drogune and is slated to be the penciler on the upcoming DC/Sonic crossover.


This fic remains SFW for the time being. The thread was made in the Creative Writing section and not the Creative Writing NSFW section, so I'd need to make a new thread there for that. Correct me if I'm wrong on how the process works.

Click to shrink...

I can't really correct you on that since I don't know myself. The only thing I know is that NSFW is meant for serious violence or explicit smut. So unless you have plans on showing the MC mutilating someone or going into detail on him getting Fellatio you won't need to worry about making it NSFW.

As for changing or moving a story to NSFW I believe your best option is to ask a administrator to move it for you.

 

[weredrago2]

Ruby Haze
Chapter 34: Powers for Algernon

A micky needed to be clever to survive in the deep woods of Mercia, and even more clever to find food in the places where they weren't supposed to be found. They were rodents -- vermin -- small and weak, in a forest that was full of danger for mobini that were small and weak. Being smart had been, by some metrics, their claim to fame.

Then there was Dull Eyes. The runt of her litter, if only in the wits department. She wasn't good at noticing things as they were happening, or figuring details out on her own. Or telling what food was safe to eat until some time after she ate it. The nest wasn't able to store enough food in the autumn, so Dull Eyes was one of the mickies cast from the safety of their burrow to forage. They didn't expect her to find much on her own, but Dull Eyes was determined to prove them all wrong.

Going alone was a mistake, which Dull Eyes made a lot of. The first issue that the rodent ran into was that it was the dead of winter. Her choices were limited to dull pine needles, dreary roots, and icky weeds. While she gathered whatever she could carry, Dull Eyes wondered what happened to the mobians that would leave out tasty scraps for her to feast on in moons past. Crumbs of bread, bits of meat and cheese that would vanish if they were left out overnight… so long as there weren't any cats around.

Dull Eyes let out a shiver, as her fur only did so much to keep out the chill. The big nests and colonies of the nearby mobians had become silent some time ago, and she didn't know why.

Where did they run off to? Didn't they know that the mickies needed to eat, too?

With hands that were full of plants that probably weren't poisonous, Dull Eyes was prepared to return to the home when a strong odor crossed her nose. A scent that was familiar, and mesmerizing. She dropped everything and pursued the scent with all of the effort her little body could muster.

Dull Eyes strayed further from where she was supposed to be foraging, but she had to follow the scent. A quick scurry across the snowy forest floor took her to an abandoned mobian burrow -- house, another micky once called it -- so she crept across a pine branch and jumped inside to follow her quarry. Dull Eyes clambered and crept around the interior, until she found what she was looking for: A big block of cheese, fresh for the taking!

The micky salivated at the chance to gobble up the cheese, then and there, but she knew that if she could show it to the other mickies, then they'd have to stop chittering about how dim she was behind her back. If Dull Eyes walked up to the wooden platform that the cheese was standing on and took it, she'd prove that she could be clever, too!

Her stomach rumbled, and Dull Eyes remembered that she hadn't eaten in a while. She didn't need to share all of it, did she? She told herself that she was going to take one bite piece for herself, and share the rest later. As Dull Eyes took the cheese into her arms, she thought that she was lucky to find the pristine slice of cheddar before any one else could.

That was when a big jaw flipped out of the platform and swung towards her head!

The mouse let out an alarmed squeak, as the iron vice bit down on her neck with a snap. Following the sudden spike of fear, came the pain, as the pinching metal forced her mousy head down against the wood. Dull Eyes couldn't understand what was going on, but the evil jaw refused to let her go free. She flailed wildly to escape, to no avail.

It took until she calmed down to remember the word for what she fell into: Mousetrap.

How was Dull Eyes supposed to know that the cheese would be a trap? It was cheese! Cheese was good! Dull Eyes continued to struggle against the horrible device that made it hard for her to breathe, trying to force the wicked thing off her neck. Then Dull Eyes squeaked for hours, in the hopes that another micky would help her. The rodent would weather any mean things they'd have to say about her foolishness, so long as she could be there to hear them.

After a day, Dull Eyes lost hope that anyone would find her. The metal bar dug deeply into her neck, and the hunger gnawed at her so much that Dull Eyes didn't think she had much energy left to push against it. She let out a final, forlorn squeak, from a tiny throat that was squeaked too hoarse to keep fighting.

This was just how things went, she knew. A micky needed to be clever to survive, and Dull Eyes wasn't a very clever micky at all.

The very sad death of Dull Eyes, fated to be forgotten and unmourned, was interrupted by a pink flash of light appearing in the corner of her eye. She could twist her head just enough to see the intense light coalesce into a flicky with magenta, white, and black feathers, perched at one of the openings in the mobian nest.

Flickies were supposed to be joyous birds, but the dour flicky in front of Dull Eyes had the steely-eyed gaze of a raptor hawk, with a white, zig-zag of a scar that ran along the left side of his face. Dull Eyes froze up out of instinct as the flicky approached the micky's body, tilting his head down to appraise her sorry state.

"Look what we have here," the strange flicky crowed. "Still alive, rat?"

Dull Eyes let out a terrified whimper, which sabotaged her attempt at playing dead.

"N-No?" the micky squeaked out.

She wasn't the best actress in her nest, either.

"Shame," he answered dryly. "I'll just tell Wishbone he was too late to save you."

"Who's Wishbone?" she asked weakly.

The flicky turned around, trotting across the cool stones towards the window.

"Nothing to worry about. He only works with live ones. Mostly."

"Someone was going to save Dull Eyes?"

"Oh well. He can't save everyone."

Desperate to survive, the micky used her last reserve of willpower to shout to the bird before he flew away.

"Wait!" she cried out.

He whirled back towards her.

"What is it?" the flicky barked testily.

"Help Dull Eyes!" she coughed. "Please!"

The flicky stared her down with eyes that had seen things, but Dull Eyes couldn't say what. He came to a decision, and then spoke.

"Fine," he cawed tiredly, before letting out a harsh call. "Wishbone! I found another one!"

The main entrance to the burrow opened with a loud creak, and Dull Eyes heard a strange voice, followed by a flush of magenta light.

"☞︎︎︎❍︎︎■︎⧫︎?"

Dull Eyes was already regretting her decision, but it was too late for that.

"Over here!" the bird tweeted, his voice ringing around her ears as he circled overhead.

Eventually, the beast that the flicky called the Wishbone came into view, and it was different from anything Dull Eyes had seen. A huge, lanky thing, with a loose hide of magenta and black. Its head was crowned with broad, rosy petals that curled around a gnarled horn. The monster's face was almost naked, with bundles that were brown like her fur. Then there were its glowing eyes, which, combined with its flesh-covered beak, reminded her of a--

"OWL!" Dull Eyes squealed in a blind panic, wriggling around with what little mobility she had left and screwing her eyes shut. "BIG OWL DON'T EAT ME!"

She could feel a tremor rumble across the floor, as the giant crouched to approach her.

"Don't be afraid," the Wishbone said softly, and the words were soothing to her. Dull Eyes could actually understand some of what he was saying, having overheard mobians repeat specific things while sneaking into homes like this. "My ■︎︎❍︎︎ is ☺︎□︎︎■︎. I'm ︎□︎■︎■︎︎ try to ︎︎●︎◻︎ you, okay?"

Dull Eyes remained still, in spite of her fear. It wasn't like she could go anywhere. The micky expected the worst when she opened her eyes again, but she wasn't expecting the being to extend his paw to free her from the trap. Dull Eyes was free, but when she tried to run, scurry, or simply rise up from the ground, she discovered that she couldn't move her legs outside of sporadic twitches and spasms.

"︎︎︎⧫︎," the Wishbone uttered in his strange, mobian tongue. "The bar got her ⬧︎◻︎︎■︎︎."

The micky didn't understand. She couldn't understand.

Wishbone brought his left paw forward. On the back side of it was a glowing red rock covered in a pitch black spiral, which drew the eyes like blue cheese did to her nose as its glow intensified.

"I'll do my best to fix the damage. Just, ah, think happy thoughts?"

"Happy thoughts?" Dull Eyes repeated, but Wishbone didn't explain.

"It's his catchphrase or something," the figment said boredly. "Might even help this time."

"Help with what?"

The suggestion had an effect on her, if not the one that was intended. Regardless of whether the thoughts were happy, Dull Eyes did a lot of thinking as she was bathed in ruby light.

- - -

"Hey, Brie?" Sir Scarlet slowly waved his fingers in front of his newest familiar's face. "How you holding up in there?"

Brie the Phantom Micky blinked, as though clearing her black eyes would dissipate the lingering phantasms of her past. Which was easier said than done, because the most important event of her life happened mere weeks ago. The magenta micky was still coming to terms with her new status quo, but the red coat and ruby spikes were accompanied by an intellectual blossoming beyond anything Dull Eyes could've ever imagined.

"I'm quite alright, milord," Brie answered effortlessly. "Merely a temporary lapse in my concentration. It shan't be repeated."

Alas, for all of the improved dictation and etiquette Brie 'procured' from Villa Stellan finishing school textbooks, her master only heard something to the effect of "Squeak squeak squeak".

Brie was again focusing on the present, but her thoughts effortlessly drifted back to the moment she became irrevocably tethered to the overlander that Figment referred to with his derisive nickname of Wishbone. She thought Master was a more professional term of address. A title befitting of the wizard's superior status over them, but her fellow familiar didn't think John Scarlet would approve of her suggestion. The flicky also resented the implication that he was anyone's inferior, a complex she was ill-equipped to safely disentangle. Better to drop it, then.

Very well. I'll just have to keep searching for a better one.

"I'm gonna take that as a yes," the overlander said, lowering his hand. "Ready to roll?"

"As you command, my liege."

She was now a very clever micky indeed.

With a faint gesture from the sorcerer who walked a left-handed path, a magenta vortex opened before them, and he stepped through to the other side. Sir Scarlet had brought his new rodent familiar with him to a variety of locales, from the secluded village of Hideaway to the far-flung Outlands, but this eclectic realm defied any conventional explanation. An alien dimension composed of giant rubies floating in a void, above and below an eternally-pink twilight. In the absence of a sun, the sky was lit by luminous thunderclouds scattered across an endless horizon.

"There are more things in Heaven and Mobius, Horseratio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy," quoted Brie. "William Shakesdeer."

"This is Null Space," Sir Scarlet explained vaguely, alluding to the ceaseless abyss that surrounded them. "It's the pocket zone where I keep my stuff. Try not to wander off?"

She looked around at the lack of a floor in Null Space, and determined that staying with Sir Scarlet was a fairly sensible choice. A segmented path of translucent rectangles appeared below the warlock's feet, and he walked down the crystalline stairway towards a rough ruby block the size of a castle. Scrutinizing the fortress more closely as they approached, Brie could identify that there was a structure hewn from harsh, umbral metal beneath the crystallized surface.

Once he pushed his way past the large, steel doors at the entrance, they were greeted by narrow walkways of steel, glowing pools of molten metal, and hissing vents of steam. The vast interior of the floating building was lit by dim electric lamps that flickered on and off at irregular intervals. In the long shadows, Brie could make out tin heads and limbs dangling on ghoulish racks along the high ceilings.

Everything was covered in scant traces of ruby dust.

"Prithee, what manner of vexing place is this?" she asked.

Unexpectedly, the main thrust of her statement actually reached her master's ears this time. That, or he was already planning to elaborate on the situation when they entered, regardless of what Brie was actually saying.

"This was a factory created by a crazy echidna god guy named Enerjak." The latter was starting to seem more likely as he pressed onwards. "His real name was Dimitri, but it's complicated. Anyways, when this place was at full functionality, it'd produce these 'mechanauts' robots. They were different from the badniks made by Egg-- er, by Robotnik. The factory's the biggest freestanding thing I have in here, so I've been using it as a jumbo storage locker."

The doors to a co-opted side room were left open, revealing a room that contained an assortment of random objects in her master's possession. Assortments of weapons and armor stored in locked cabinets. The Ars Ixia, set on a wooden shelf across from a pink crystal ball. A red board decorated with the iconography of a winged beast. Sir Scarlet's new scepter of gnarled, petrified oak, the head of which housed a brilliantly green emerald. The long stave was left leaning on a thick, silvery disc, the shape and depth of which reminded Brie of a giant wheel of cheese.

As much as she was still delighted in the taste of cheese, Brie wasn't going to get distracted by an object that only resembled it in the loosest of senses. Rather, the fidgeting micky hopped off Sir Scarlet's shoulder because she was drawn to a loose stack of golden halos that gleamed like sunlight.

"Uh, Brie?" her master called. "The tour's going this way… unless you wanted to do a detour?"

Brie nodded enthusiastically, excitedly pointing to the rings in the room.

"Oh, those are my backup rings," the wizard said, not providing quite as much information as she would have preferred. "They're all-natural charges of magic I can expend to all sorts of stuff."

"But what manner of things?" she begged to know, before recalling that Figment and Sir Scarlet had once described a way she could more directly ask for herself.

Bringing her dexterous hands to her temples, Brie tried to project her questions towards her master in a way that he would be better equipped to comprehend than squeaks alone: Through the power of her thoughts!

"Brie, what're you--?"

Q̷̴ͬU̴̵ͥE̴̷ⷫᵍ̸R̷̶̾R̸Y̷̴̾:̴̷ͪ ̸̵ͥW̵̴ⷫH̸̴ⷱA̸T̶̴ͬ ̶̶ͥA̶̴ⷫᵍ̷R̵̴̾E̵ ̵̵̾T̵̴ͪH̵̵ͥE̶̸ⷫS̵̶ⷱE̵ ̶̷ͬC̵̶ͥU̵̴ⷫᵍ̴R̷̸̾I̸O̷̴̾U̴̵ͪS̴̷ͥ,̶̸ⷫ ̷̵ⷱB̷R̷̶ͬI̵̸ͥL̴̷ⷫᵍ̷L̷̷̾I̶A̷̶̾N̶̵ͪT̵̴ͥL̴̵ⷫY̵̵ⷱ-̷G̶̵ͬL̶̴ͥO̷̶ⷫᵍ̷W̷̷̾I̶N̷̷̾G̷̷ͪ ̸̸ͥR̸̷ⷫI̶̴ⷱN̸G̶̸ͬS̴̶ͥ?̸̶ⷫᵍ̷ˢ̷

Sir Scarlet stumbled, spontaneously losing his footing as his eyes forcibly screwed themselves shut in pain. The scepter that was resting on the ground suddenly bucked forwards, flying towards his grasping hand. A flash of green from the staff's head, followed by a flash of magenta from the ruby on his glove, and the wizard was able to use the former as a crutch to keep himself standing.

Brie scurried around him in worry.

"My word! Sir Scarlet, art thou well?"

The overlander massaged the bridge of his nose with his free hand.

"Okay, let's try not to get ahead of ourselves with telepathy. Couldn't get any of that. Baby steps, alright?"

"Of course, milord!" she affirmed.

Brie tried again, with a much smaller mental probe.

⌾?

"Definitely got a migraine," her master groaned.

Sir Scarlet stood up and walked towards the shelf storing his grimoire, swallowing two green pills from an amber-tinted bottle. When he set the container down, Brie saw that it was labelled Wes Weasley's Terrifically-Holistic Catnip. He made a beckoning gesture to the ring pile, and a pair of glowing rings flew towards his hand. Their glowing intensified as they shifted size and shape, sliding onto his index and pinky fingers in a more literal interpretation of their namesake.

"Remind me to show you what I can do with these later?" the sorcerer bargained. "I've got a tight schedule today, and frankly, you never know when I'll need them."

Brie nodded, returning to Sir Scarlet's side.

"Atta girl."

He kept walking, until they stopped at an open area where a group of fully-assembled automatons busied themselves with a variety of tasks. Assembling weapons. Smelting scrap metal. Putting together more of themselves, one piece at a time. Brie even spotted one performing clerical duties, taking stock of everything that was being made. The ceaseless sentinels stood even taller than her master, with gleaming red mono-eyes that bore no souls behind them. Like the factory and various surfaces inside it, every work of artifice had heads and shoulders that were anointed with ruby crystal.

"I managed to swipe this whole setup, and got the mechanauts busy on the grunt work to help the resistance. Problem is, I'm not as all-powerful as I was when I pulled off the--"

He was interrupted by one of the machines breaking ranks from its peers, lashing out at random workers and infrastructure in a wild frenzy. Pointedly, this mechanaut didn't have any crystals on it at all.

"Praise to Lord Enerjak!" the rogue mechanaut declared.

"It's always something," her master muttered darkly.

His grip on the arcane staff tightening, the wizard bombarded the robot with magenta rays, sealing it in a ruby finish.

"Let's try that again," Sir Scarlet said, in a tone more firm than she'd ever heard him use against a living thing. "I am John Scarlet. Who do you obey?"

The machine spasmed, its defiance beaten down with each word until it was brought to one knee.

"Lord -BZZT- Scarlet. This mechanaut -BZZT- obeys you."

"Cool. Groovy, even. Join the rest and get to work."

He watched the mechanaut rise to its feet wander off towards the other working units, before letting out an exhausted sigh.

"Another trick I picked up on Angel Island. Or maybe something I could do the whole time. It's a real game-changer, and one that I can't be reckless with. Can't afford to let the High Sheriff know I have this ace up my sleeve."

"Turning the tools of our foes against them is a most cunning stratagem, milord!" Brie praised.

The micky pondered to herself how the mystical conversion was undertaken. Was it because the machinery was inorganic, as the Ars Ixia determined her master's crystalline magic would grant him dominion over all things not of the flesh, or were there other underlying processes at play? Her master did not specifically forbid Brie from reading his grimoire, and as such, she happened to peek at the words over his shoulder. Occasionally giving a subtle, telepathic nudge when he took too long to turn the next page.

A thin thread of light snaked out of Sir Scarlet's ruby, ensnaring itself around a crystalline chair construct for him to sit on. Brie resettled on a nearby stack of pallets, where she could face him at near eye level.

"Sorry if this is a lot to take in, but I wanted you to have the full picture of what you were getting into as my new helper. We're arming up for whatever the High Sheriff's dragging out next, because it's the only way we're making up for the… unexpected shortage of manpower. Know what I mean?"

Brie hadn't the foggiest clue what he was referring to, so she remained silent. A flash of light formed in Sir Scarlet's palm, and he passed her a small block of cheese.

"Right, this was before I found you. I was coming back from Angel Island, and was relying on a few mercenaries who had my back during that to stick around afterwards."

"I see," Brie mumbled between nibbles.

The wizard didn't sit still for long. He went from sitting to standing, and from standing to pacing.

"I knew it'd be a hard sell, sure, but I thought I ironed out a good contract for them to stay on retainer. A regular salary, extra hazard pay. Funds set aside for retirement. Who else is offering them that kind of sweetheart deal, huh?"

Mickies were rarely content to sit still, so Brie began pacing around the pallet to match the overlander.

"Bean and Bark were useful, sure, but I knew from the second that Fiona identified the Phantom Ruby as the source of my powers that she was someone to watch. She was clever. Creative. Resourceful, too. Not always a straight shooter, and I had a decent idea that she was only hanging around to steal the Phantom Ruby from me--" As Scarlet revealed this, Brie let out a scandalized squeak of shock. "--but I could use the help making sense of the Ars Ixia, and… the Phantom Ruby is always recording."

He gazed into the red gemstone in his hand, examining its striped surface. The micky felt that she was still missing context, but, by attempting to focus on what her master was thinking of, the image became more clear. She closed her eyes and saw Sir Scarlet speaking with a cherry-red red fox with blue eyes and a yellow bow on her head. They were standing on the grounds of Sylvania Castle, exposed to the moonlight.

"This offer's way too generous," the girl in Brie's mind's eye said flatly. "What's the catch?"

Sir Scarlet accepted the contract that had been thrown back in his face with an annoyed frown.

"I wouldn't call it a catch, but fine. I'll go ahead and spoil the surprise."

"The Hooligans don't run on surprises, we work for mobiums. Out with it, Scarlet."

"Whenever you're ready, you can start learning magic from me as my new apprentice."

The girl was taken aback, the hot wind taken out of her angry sails.

"What?"

"I have a book on magic. My skills would be improved if I had somebody to teach, and you're the only person I know who has the right mindset for it."

Fiona's tail flicked anxiously, then angrily.

"I don't--?! UGH! Are you bent in the head?! You know I tried to betray you, and now you want to offer me this?"

As Brie experienced the memory, her master continued to speak in the present.

"It doesn't go as far back as I'd like, but I was able to see what Fiona saw when she touched the Phantom Ruby."

His memories were intermixed with a recording from further back in time, the Fiona of the past overlaid with an impression of the Fiona she wanted to be. One of false bravado, and the other of hard-earned confidence.

The power of the ruby made her completely untouchable. With but a wave of her hand, anything she wanted was within her grasp.

"Feel what she felt when it showed her what she wanted, and why she wanted it."

Then there was a third Fiona. The little girl who spent her childhood behind bars. Stolen away by a grotesque, rotten egg of a man, the fox was subjected to tortures that even now the enlightened micky had yet to conceive of.

Perhaps some knowledge was better left unknown. She hadn't meant to pry.

Never again to want. Never again to need. Never again to feel pain, or fear, or spend her nights being afraid of getting hurt again.

The Phantom Ruby showed Sir Scarlet how alone Fiona felt, and how something in her broke when she was abandoned to her fate.

Never again to be powerless. Forgotten. Left behind.

"Giving her the benefit of the doubt was a risk, but instead of cutting and running when the chips were down, she…"

"You saved my life, Fiona. That matters to me. You don't have to say yes, but promise me you'll think it over?"

"Fine. Give me a day to think it over."

Fiona snatched the contract out of his hands and walked away in a trance.

"She said she needed a day to think about it. Come the next morning, I found out that Fiona and her 'Hooligans' ditched Mercia long before sunrise!"

Sir Scarlet punched a crystallized pillar, his knuckles rapping the surface with a hard clack that severed Brie's mental perusal of his memories. If the warlock noticed her unwitting intrusion, he made no external indication of it.

"Fiona made her choice," he stated, shaking off the pain in his hand. "I wish I could've steered her away from making that stupid choice, and one that was very inconvenient for me, but she and her friends aren't my responsibility."

The communicator on his belt started beeping.

"She wasn't my responsibility," he repeated quietly, before checking his alarm. "Crap, I gotta go see those hyenas again. They said something about an offer I have to check out."

Brie's whiskers flicked up and down.

"Milord… As a being of great reverence to the Cult of the Ruby Flame, didst thou finally discuss in length the nature of your relationship with your followers? Establishing proper boundaries and reasonable expectations?"

Sir Scarlet made another portal, this one leading to his chao garden. He then twirled his emerald scepter and sent it back to his storage locker in the deeper confines of Null Space.

"How about you hang out with Figment and Bandit for a couple minutes? This shouldn't take long."

The micky sighed.

"Ave, imperator. Thy will be done."

Brie scampered through the portal, taking her to the cool, grassy cenote that radiated peace and tranquility. In addition to the fruit trees and water fairies that belonged here natively, Brie saw a fuschia flicky and enormous red raccoon.

"Hail and well met, my fellow familiars!" Brie exclaimed.

The big raccoon rose onto his hind legs, making him stand taller than Sir Scarlet and his mechanauts. A standard mobian could stand comfortably in this behemoth's paw prints, leaving him too big to exit the chao garden without occult assistance. He was so incredibly fat that Brie was convinced that no mobini like him could ever exist in nature.

"Hey, Brie!" the raccoon called out, blissfully ignorant to Vivi gnawing on the flesh of his back. "Did you bring Bandit any food?"

Brie supposed that there was too much padding there for him to notice, though it wasn't like Vivi could break skin. If not from a lack of trying.

"Only a mere morsel of cheddar," she confessed.

Bandit turned his whole body towards the much more miniscule micky.

"Give to Bandit?" he pleaded in a small tone. "Pwease?"

"If you insist," she acquiesced, tossing what was left of her block into Bandit's awaiting maw.

Between all the portal transit, Brie had lost her appetite.

Bandit descended to the ground, sending a faint tremor throughout the garden. An orange fruit tumbled out of the nearest tree, and Vivi started teething on that when the fruit landed on the resting raccoon's back. The mutant flicky, for his part, had been using one wing to keep overly-touchy Errol at bay.

"Wishbone still hasn't done it yet, has he?" Figment remarked, a thin piece of straw balanced precariously in his beak.

The familiars had been discussing the Ruby Flame on and off, having had more encounters with the Sir Scarlet's acolytes than Sir Scarlet himself. Well, Brie and Figment talked about them; Bandit wandered towards their compound when he was hungry. Which was fairly often.

"Not yet," Brie answered. "Our sorcerer appears to be uncomfortable with the subject."

Figment scoffed.

"He's digging in his heels. You're his new minder, so go bite him if he puts that off again."

Brie blanched at the notion. Acknowledging that Figment was the last mobini that anyone should go to for affection, she extended her arms and let Errol bowl over her for a hug.

She tried not to get distracted by the fact that Errol was growing whiskers.

"Bite the master? Surely, you jest!"

Figment's beak clipped the straw, and the flicky flicked it away.

"You wanted a role in this flock that Wishbone was putting together, and I wanted a break from the guy's whining. If you can't keep him on task, then he's gonna pull me out of the sky to do stuff like this when I could be securing our territory!"

Brie gave Errol a gentle tap and pointed, sending the chao crawling in the direction of the monolithic raccoon.

"Are you still harping on about territory?" Brie chided. "We have a royal decree over this land, and the High Sheriff can't even detect us here!"

Figment glared, causing Brie to take a step back.

"Don't get comfortable. They haven't found us yet, and that can change if I-- If we let our guard down. If you ever think you're safe, then you're already another beast's meal."

"Meals are nice," Bandit articulated.

"Even Bandit gets it," Figment said. "Wishbone made you smarter, but he pared back the wild parts that had to hunt to survive."

Brie was never a good hunter, so she was pretty sure that Figment was projecting. The micky pointedly didn't bring up all of the times Ms. Rose fed the flicky by hand, because she preferred her naturally black eyes without any additional blackening.

"Why do you insist on calling the master 'Wishbone'?" she interjected.

"You pick through a lot of bones, rat?"

She shook her head.

"I can't say that I have."

Figment let out a self-amused huff.

"When it's doing what it's supposed to do, the wishbone holds up the chest and shoulders. Keeps everything from falling apart in flight. I'm just not sure which way this one'll go when he snaps."

Figment kept his distance after that, allowing Brie to take over in regards to handling Errol and Vivi. Bandit had fallen asleep, same as the chao eventually did. He wasn't going to be of any help, but unlike Figment, Brie knew not to expect any ego-driven issues out of him. Bandit was merely content to be fed, and that was all it took to convince him to become a ruby mutant in the first place.

Minutes passed, and another vortex opened before them. Sir Scarlet's silhouette appeared in the lit gateway, carrying a clucky in his hands.

"Hey guys! I uh, brought that offering back home."

He set the clucky down on the ground, where Brie and the others could see that it wasn't quite a clucky anymore. The rooster was a normal specimen from the neck up, magenta comb and waddle notwithstanding, a sharp dividing line marking where the more extreme mutations began. After that, the more feeble features of domesticated poultry were overtaken with a pair of billowing bat wings and the sinisterly sinuous tail of a serpent. The only feathers to be seen were on its head, the rest giving way to reptilian scales and mineral flakes that were more akin to crystals than anything that belonged on fish or fowl.

"There was a miscommunication on what I was looking for when I said I needed mobini, so this guy was a bit of a rush job, but I think he's gonna pull through!"

Figment's beak fell open, speechless.

"By Scarlet," Brie swore.

"Food?" Bandit asked, only staying awake long enough to confirm that it wasn't the case.

"Cluck," the clucky clucked.

Sir Scarlet patted the mutant clucky on the head, his hand perceptibly shaking.

"I-I'm thinking of calling him Mort. What do you guys think?"

Mort blinked. The rooster's eyes were transmuted into red orbs with yellow rings, which Figment took as his cue to leave entirely. Before Sir Scarlet started introducing them to any more 'friends' he reanimated on the way to his next appointment.

Brie took a mental tally of everything her 'master' still had yet to do, using his own short-term memory as a starting-off point, and realized that this side diversion was going to put him further behind schedule.

"I'll think I'll have to start taking Figment's suggestions under advisement."

- - -

Spoiler: Author Notes

With this chapter, we can now say a proper hello to Brie! Her brief introduction in Chapter 33 was meant to be sudden, to springboard into this one. 34 also serves as a recap in regards to all of the pies the SI has been sticking his fingers into, which is part of the reason he needs Brie around now. His familiar count is rising to meet his familiar workload!

As for Fiona, Bean, and Bark? Them up and quitting with no notice has been in the works since before the Enerjak arc. Hence why Bean was saying goodbye to the audience when he last "saw" you all at the end of 23. I was saving it here because I was waiting for that to be revealed from a fresh pair of eyes, and Brie was the perfect match.

If you don't remember Bandit, he's the same raccoon from Chapter 17 that was guilting the SI into giving him food! He has since bargained himself into a permanent position with the Phantom Friends in exchange for all of the food.

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This chapter has been brought to you by the following patrons and beta readers: C-Moon, Dredloki, N'Oni, ShatteredSky, and Teron!

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[weredrago2]

The Phantom Friends (and How to Make One!)
The "Phantom Friends" are a friendly euphemism referring to the various mobini altered by John Scarlet into ruby mutants. Not wanting to be careless with who is selected for the process, the ruby wizard has Figment and others search out critters willing to accept the consequences of a fatal reaction to black magic. For those animals already on death's door, the alternatives to a chaotic life in his service are rather grim.

Any mobini that survive the process are irrevocably changed, with flesh and souls reforged into new forms possessing supernatural abilities. The mutations and powers derived from them are determined not only to the fickle whims of the Phantom Ruby, but the dreams and desires of the subjects involved. It's more an art than a science, and an art that John Scarlet has yet to work all of the kinks out of. As familiars remade by the warlock's hands, Phantom Friends are subject to a two-way telepathic bond, though some mobini have been more effective at using it to communicate concepts and share senses than others.

John Scarlet doesn't know what would happen if he tried to "befriend" a mobian, and hopes that he never has to find out.


The Successful Ones

Figment the Phantom Flicky
A foul-tempered flicky whose cardinal red feathers have molted away, leaving magenta stripes and a white scar that won't heal. Once a daring bird that flew too close to the sun and saw his whole flock burn for it, Figment alone rose from the ashes as a brutal phoenix.
Super Flicky: Figment is much faster and stronger than a flicky should be. By performing a Drill Dash, Figment can strike with enough force to pierce armor.
Paraloop: When he flies, Figment leaves sparkling trails of energy. Figment can complete a loop to damage targets, trigger an updraft, create a portal, or trigger other effects.

Brie the Phantom Micky
This micky wasn't born with a good head on her shoulders, and a bad experience with a mouse trap almost took it! Ashamed at her past ignorance, Brie redeveloped her brain into the picture of intellect, and is continuing to stretch her new mind's untested limits.
Cranium Rat: Brie is super bright! Her mental powers are still being explored.
Jaws of Life: This micky's bite has been strengthened, and she can chew through metal.

Bandit the Phantom Raccoon
For such a tiny critter, this racoon's bottomless gluttony made him willing to accept the tiny risk of death in exchange for being fed forever. Having grown to a scale that matched his appetite, it remains to be seen who got the worse deal out of this arrangement.
The Big One: Ruby mutation caused this mobini to balloon in size, until he was nearly seven feet tall and weighed over half a ton! While ponderously slow, Bandit is strong enough to pull a cart and tough enough to take a hit. As a raccoon, Bandit's more clever than he looks.

Mort the Phantom Cluckatrice
This clucky has seen things that clucky was not meant to know, and returned to tell the tale. Not that he would, as Mort only seems to say "cluck", "caw", or "cock-a-doodle-doo" to his peers. Unlike the fabled Chanticleer, who greeted the sun at dawn, Mort's crows herald the maddening moon and the bright light at the end of the tunnel.
Snake Eyes: Mort can paralyze any singular individual that enters eye contact with him at his time of choosing. He can maintain this effect as long as he doesn't blink.
Thousand-Yardbird Stare: Mort doesn't need to blink.


How to Make Your Own
Want to make an abomination in the eyes of the Ancient Walkers, too? Here's how!

The Rules

1. The submitted animals must be of a species that could be reasonably encountered by the SI during their regular duties.
   1. A succinct list of animals that'd count as mobini in this story can be found HERE or HERE. There are other non-anthro animals that might still count, but if you want that list, you're searching for it on your own.
   2. "Could be reasonably encountered" means it's an animal that passes the sniff test for something that you could imagine wandering around Mercia & Eurish. Mercia's based on England, France, and Europe in general, though the close proximity of the continents on Mobius gives you a bit of wiggle room. Soleanna is based on Italy, but it has giant lockies (eagles) that we'd normally associate with North America. Dogs and cats yes, unicorns no.
2. Most Phantom Friends get one "major" power or two "minor" powers as a consequence of their mutation.
   1. The powers/mutations a Phantom Friend can have are rather open-ended. Look at what John Scarlet is capable of, or an extant character trait that's been showcased in the franchise. Break one of those off, and you have a viable trait for a Phantom Friend. Getting really big, shooting eye beams, or growing bulletproof wool would be considered "major". Anything less than that (like having longer claws or a third eye) is "minor".
   2. Figment and Brie have two major powers because they're special, and are not the baseline. Bandit has one major power. Mort has two powers because I wanted to break them up into a joke with a setup and a payoff.
3. The name of the Phantom Friend should be something the SI would come up with on their own. Nothing too mean, but it may contain wordplay or a reference.
   1. If you aren't sure if John Scarlet would pick a given name, just ask me since this is an SI fic.
4. I am not under any obligation to use your suggestions, use them right away, or use a suggested Phantom Friend exactly as you present them. I'm trying to pace myself with how many characters trickle into the fic at a time.
5. Due to recent events, John Scarlet officially only attempts the ruby mutation process on live mobini. The five-second rule does not apply here.

With that out of the way: Have fun! No deadlines on submissions for Phantom Friends, so just kinda do it whenever you want.

Please ping me if you decide to make one, so I don't lose track of them.

 

[SirKel]

The Successful Ones

Click to shrink...

I like how this implies that there have been unsuccessful ones. Or maybe I just haven't been paying enough attention to them

 

[weredrago2]

I like how this implies that there have been unsuccessful ones. Or maybe I just haven't been paying enough attention to them

Click to shrink...

It came up briefly in the second draft of Chapter 33. There have been failures, but I don't want the story to dwell upon them too much. It's enough to make it clear that the process isn't easy or without risk.

 

[zecorezecron]

I feel some trepidation at adding so many new characters. Archie sonic already has a pretty bloated cast, especially pre SGW, so adding more might not be the best narrative choice.

 

[weredrago2]

I feel some trepidation at adding so many new characters. Archie sonic already has a pretty bloated cast, especially pre SGW, so adding more might not be the best narrative choice.

Click to shrink...

A completely understandable concern. The comic's cast could get unwieldy, to the extent that they had to thin out the echidnas like three times. I've tried to be rather sparing with OCs for that reason, but sometimes you really do need to make a new character. Especially as I explore the parts of Mobius that the series didn't.

In regards to the Build-A-Phantom-Friend-Workshop, I don't plan on implenting every suggestion I recieve, and I imagine the ones that I do use will end up in bit roles. Actual additions to the Phantom Friend count are going to be gradual. Speaking lines are gonna be practically nil unless I do another mobini POV chapter.

In other words, this mostly serves as a fun thread exercise to get folks participating in discussion and getting creative. This fic is crossposted in other places, so occasionally I see something new I hadn't thought of as an idea for a Phantom Friend, or I have a chuckle when I see someone had the exact same idea I did.

Magical familiars and animal companions are characters, though in fiction, they're normally characters with smaller parts to play than the main cast. 34 was me casting the spotlight on the familiars as I revealed the SI was gathering more of them.

 

[weredrago2]

John Scarlet's Powers & Assets [As of Chapter 34]

Our Self Insert has a lot of powers at his disposal, and picked up a lot of things on his journey, so I figured I'd make a thread-sharable version of the document I'd been using to keep track of it all in my notes. Enjoy!

NOTE: This writeup contains light spoilers for Chapter 35, primarily in regards to the SI's new scepter. Anything divulged for that here will be reiterated there when 35 is posted.


[] The Phantom Ruby
By John Scarlet's reckoning, the Phantom Ruby functions as a reactor for negative chaos energy. Any power goes in, and black magic comes out. Instead of producing chaos energy, the Phantom Ruby must ravenously consume power to work. In a matter of months, the Phantom Ruby had transformed John Scarlet from a complete novice in the long-lost "Ixian Magicks" to a capable adept. (Among other things it turned him into.) As a tradeoff for the great magical strength it offers, long-term exposure to the Phantom Ruby is hazardous to the body, mind, and soul. Permanent side effects may vary.

• [] Ruby Illusions: The Phantom Ruby can project realistic and fantastical illusions that fool the mind and trick the senses. The effectiveness of the illusions are dependent on the scope of these projections and the amount of power poured into making them "real". Minor illusions that affect one or two senses are much cheaper than grand spectacles that influence them all.
• [] Ruby Delusions: Foregoing illusions entirely, the John Scarlet can mesmerize others to obeying his commands. Unwilling victims can resist the mind hex, though most "non-heroic" characters will crumble under the weight of the Ruby's power.
• [] Elemental Magic: A system of codified "elements" John Scarlet can influence when they're near, or alter the local conditions for them to manifest. He can form defensive shields and barriers out of elements he has a Medium affinity or higher.
  • [] Fire: HIGH Affinity. Heat control, igniting fires, forming mirages, and hurling fireballs. Fire Shield with a Red Hot Kick attack.
  • [] Water: MEDIUM Affinity. Shifting tides, making bubbles, and freezing water into solid constructs. Water Shield with a Bounce attack.
  • [⌾] ???: MEDIUM Affinity. Establishing rapports with power rings, ring divination, and binding ring tethers. Magenta-toned Barrier.
  • [] ???: MEDIUM Affinity. Absorbing electricity, short-circuiting tech, and communicating with robots via extrasensory uplink. ??? Shield.
  • [] Earth: LOW Affinity. Softening earth, digging, and raising stones.
  • [] Wind: LOW Affinity. Gusts of compressed air, levitation, and holding breath for extended periods of time.
• [] Crystalline Magicks: The "fifth element" (ignore the other ones) that grants dominion over crystals. Requires a magic stone to access.
  • [] Crystal Ray: Laser beam that coats targets in crystals on impact.
  • [] Ruby Constructs: Crystalline constructs that can be shaped into myriad forms. Weapons, spikes, hands, domes, force fields, etc etc.
  • [] Crystallization: Inorganic materials covered in crystals become susceptible to direct magical influence, with vulnerability proportionate to the surface area covered. Applies especially to robots.
• [] Flight: In defiance of gravity, John Scarlet can fly at subsonic speeds.
• [] Null Space: An arcane pocket zone linked to the Phantom Ruby. Access to Null Space (or escape from it) without John Scarlet's consent is nearly impossible.
• [] Ruby Warp: John Scarlet can warp spacetime, allowing travel over long distances. Thus far, he can only go to places he's already been to.
  • [] Ruby Portals: Magenta vortexes that go from Point A to Point B, determined at the time of activation. The surface area, the amount of mass passing through, and the duration the portals are kept open determines how much energy these portals cost.
  • [] Ruby Snap: A teleport that is faster than a Ruby Portal, if less flexible. Can carry passengers.
• [] Healing & Mutation: After much trial, error, and deliberation, John Scarlet discovered that he can heal injuries, whether moderate or severe. However, without anything to flip the Phantom Ruby's negative energy into positive energy, the target runs the risk of becoming a ruby mutant.
  • Or dying.
• [] Conjuration & Enchantment: A lesser-explored field of his magic, John Scarlet can shape Phantom Ruby-generated matter to enchant items or create them wholecloth. This is where his outfits come from, new gloves whenever he rips them, and fresh hats whenever he loses them.
• [] Cantrips: Lastly, John Scarlet can perform minor "magic tricks" and mend broken objects at a minimal expenditure of power. Anything fixed this way has a red, pink, or magenta finish to indicate it has been touched by the Ruby.

NOTE: Powers marked with [] require the Phantom Ruby. Powers marked with [] can (theoretically) be performed with any kind of magic stone, but would be much more difficult because the Phantom Ruby is what John Scarlet is used to.

…

• [𓃥] Ø: Prestidigitation and card tricks aren't really the last thing that has to be said about the Phantom Ruby, is it? For a long time, John Scarlet knew that the damn gem had a mind of its own. Something that would take over and make decisions for him when he was pushed to the brink unless he wore a power ring to suppress its influence. A being that only spoke in "I", and only scarcely acknowledged that he wasn't alone in this body he was seizing. The voice was stirred to near-coherency by Enerjak, and worked with John Scarlet to defeat him, but afterwards? Silence.
  • Who is he?
  • Why can't he remember his face?

[] Phantom Friends
See the Phantom Friends post for details.


[] Permanent Mutations
The power of the Phantom Ruby has as many rewards as it has costs, depending on how you run the numbers. One man's debilitating, trauma-adjacent reminder of the humanity he has lost is another man's neat side perk.

• [] Power Type: John Scarlet is far stronger than your average human. While not exceptionally muscular in appearance, his raw physical strength and endurance are in the range of Olympic athletes.
• [] Elastic Ring Barrier: As much a consequence of his exposure to rings as it was the Phantom Ruby, John Scarlet's body became much more flexible, durable, and elastic than the human baseline. He can stretch his limbs to extend his reach.
• [] Elemental Resonance: Even when not using the Phantom Ruby, John Scarlet can influence the elements he has an affinity for at a much weaker scale.
• [] Ruby Eyes: John Scarlet was cured of his former vision issues, and can see in low-light settings as though they were illuminated in shades of red.
• [] Claws & Fangs: Unnatural natural weapons extend from his hands and mouth, durable enough to rip concrete. He can use the retractable claws to climb walls, and the fangs to bite his tongue whenever he forgets they're present.
• [] Emerald Radar: Over time, John Scarlet developed a sixth sense for chaos energy, akin to the mental radar possessed by Knuckles and Rouge. The range extends no further than line-of-sight.

[] Assets
Mobiums can't buy you happiness, and they can't buy you love, but they can buy you stuff like this. Then, where mobiums can't take you, there's always the Phantom Ruby!

• [] Morglay: An enchanted sword with a wicked edge. Also known as the Death Brand, Morglay cut a crimson swathe through Mercia during the reign of King Arfur. The sword and the red knight who wielded it were eventually slain, cast into the murky depths beneath Sylvania Castle by Sir Peredur, but not before taking several members of the Hound Table with them. [Obtained in Chapter 8.]
• [] The Door: Dense door of silvery oricalcum, which protected a wellspring of power rings beneath Sylvania Castle. John Scarlet has been lugging it around as a blunt instrument because it was the strongest thing he knew of, and has been trying to smelt it into something more useful ever since. [Obtained in Chapter 8.]
• [⌾⌾⌾] Ring Stock: A stockpile of power rings from the vault beneath Sylvania Castle, which John Scarlet has been using to charge the Phantom Ruby or expend for other purposes. Unlike the Lake of Rings used by Knothole, or the one on Angel Island, these rings are of a limited supply. [Obtained in Chapter 8.]
• [] Crystallized Robians: Mercian victims of the roboticizer that have, until such a day comes that they can be restored, been entombed in Null Space. Storing them in crystalline caskets is hardly an ideal situation, but this indefinite fate is far kinder than leaving them in the High Sheriff's clutches. [Obtained in Chapter 10.]
• [] Red Chimera: Lengthy, cruising extreme gear that doubles as a robust shield. Heavy weight and high top speed, but poor handling. [Obtained in Chapter 12.]
• [] Weapons Arsenal: A surplus of Overland-made small arms and light weapons (SALW) allegedly left over from the Great War. From the humble 1911 to far less humble Javelin. One might wonder where Wes Weasley keeps finding these things, but if John Scarlet did that, then they might stop appearing for cheap. Best not to look a gift pasha in the mandibles, eh? [Obtained in Chapter 14.]
• [] Crystal Ball: John Scarlet's scrying aid. When he loses one, he can remake it with the Phantom Ruby and use the orb to search around. [Obtained in Chapter 16.]
• [] Ars Ixia: An occult grimoire containing many spells and secrets from the long-dead "Ixian Order", of which only fragments of memories remain. How Amy of all people had this is in her home library was a mystery that had, with everything else going on, slipped beneath John Scarlet's notice. [Obtained in Chapter 17.]
• [] Cult of the Ruby Flame: We'll uh… get back to this one. [Obtained in Chapter 16, but John Scarlet didn't know about them until Chapter 21.]
• [] Mechanaut Factory: An occult installation that conjured into existence by Enerjak III, which he used to produce combat and labor drones called mechanauts. The entire structure was stolen by John Scarlet while he was still in his Phantom State (see below), but as the creation of a super echidna and super genius, there's only so many things a mortal warlock can tamper with before he runs the risk of breaking it. [Obtained in Super Scarlet Special 1.]
• [] Emerald Scepter: Powered by a cast-off shard of the Master Emerald, this petrified oaken staff is a safe way for John Scarlet to recharge the Phantom Ruby. While its power is as limitless as a complete Chaos Emerald, it is not inexhaustible. The Emerald Scepter becomes colorless after being drained, and must remain stored in Null Space until it recovers. [Obtained in Chapter 31.]

NOTE: Not included on this list are miscellaneous minor tools and items John Scarlet has accumulated that are too minute to warrant their own category.


[] Modes & Transformations
When nothing else will cut it, there's special modes and transformations to kick things up a notch. Each of these has their own requirements for activation.

• [] Disguises: Need to skulk through enemy territory? How about avoiding an awkward conversation, or sidestepping centuries of awkward racial strife? John Scarlet's glamours are an easy way to blend into a crowd, and he's able to improvise a cover story to go with his new face as needed. [Introduced in Chapter 12.]
• [] Mania Mode: John Scarlet can push the Phantom Ruby into overdrive, pulling the safeties off the gemstone and allowing for a burst of "infinite" power. When Mania Mode ends, the Phantom Ruby is left with minimal energy, and John Scarlet may suffer additional permanent consequences. [Introduced in Chapter 15.]
• [] Weredragon Scarlet: When the Phantom Ruby's careful balance of negative energy was thrown into disarray by Enerjak, this monstrous metamorphosis erupted to the surface. Driven by fear, anger, and other suppressed emotions, Weredragon Scarlet exchanges fine spellwork for the sheer, primal force of an elemental beast. The "Curse of the Weredragon", while currently dormant, was able to emerge in the presence of intense geothermal activity (such as a volcano) and the absence of natural sunlight. [Introduced in Chapter 24.]
• [𓃥] Phantom Scarlet: When supercharged by seven Chaos Emeralds and fifty rings (or the Master Emerald), John Scarlet can achieve a state of unity with the second entity inside the Phantom Ruby to become Phantom Scarlet. As Phantom Scarlet, the boundaries of the gemstone's powers over illusions are crowbarred off, giving them broad authority over what is "real" and what isn't. Reality, physics, and gravity are what they make of them, until the transformation threatens to tear the two conflicting personalities apart at the seams. [Introduced in Chapter 30.]

I'll try to keep this updated as the story continues.

Please let me know if I missed anything! Thanks in advance.

 

[weredrago2]

NOTICE - Rather than a new chapter, the following is an extensive rewrite of the extensive rewrite of the first chapter of the fic. My reasonings for this rewrite of the rewrite (and why I made it as a new new threadmark instead of just replacing the first rewrite already) are included at the end of this post. Please give it a rereread!

CONTENT WARNING [THIS PART IS NOT AN APRIL FOOLS JOKE] - This chapter has more foul language and graphic violence than the usual Ruby Haze threadmark. You have been notified!

---

Ruby Haze
Chapter 1: Mega Man at Home


My eyes were flooded with a haze of electronic static.

>WILYCORP ENGINEER WORK SYSTEM

>Copyright © 20XX
>WilyCorp
>All Rights Reserved

>user: Prof. V
>pass: ★★★★★★

>Activate "Q.S."? [Y] OR [N]
>>[Y]

A dazzling scattershot of black and white pixels danced across my vision, the visual noise accompanied by deafening, chaotic roars that incessantly poured into my ears. Chaotic tides that crashed against my skull without end.

>real mem = 8192 TB

Am I dead?

>avail. mem = 32768 TB

It was a stereotypical thought, but one I wasn't quick to dismiss. Not that I looked forward to it. Some people called the static on the TV snow, and, trying to make sense of the shifting images before me, it almost felt more like being trapped in a blizzard. Shapes and images. Nearly coherent enough to make sense of, but they kept shifting before I could.

>primary data cache : 512 KB
>primary inst. cache : 768 KB
>secondary cache : 32768 KB

My body felt distant and numb. Almost petrified, disconnected from the whole. I could only feel the slightest sensations of my hands and fingers, but if I could still feel them, then I was still alive. That meant there was a chance I could get out of this situation, if I could just--

"Welcome to the City, my creation."

A voice. I heard a voice cut through the discordant decibels like two halves of the sea.

>HEAD: Ultra-sensitive Voice Recognition System.

"I won't be around to see what happens next. But it doesn't matter now, does it?"

Before I could reply back, a bright flash of light wiped the artifacts and dead pixels off my vision. Faster than I could let out a word, the visual noise of the snowstorm was blown away by the loud bang of a gunshot.

>HEAD: Broad-range Eye Camera.

I was out of the static, which transitioned to the dark red blur of emergency lights as the waves hitting my ears settled to the muted whine of an emergency siren. Clouds of black smoke billowed in the air, emanating from sparking machinery that surrounded me on all sides. Heavy mainframes and other exotic devices that I couldn't recognize were burning in my immediate vicinity, but I couldn't feel the heat. I could only see the fire.

My body wobbled from slack to standing alert with a startle when I heard the bang. Not a steady transition to wakefulness, but a sudden jolt to full control of my faculties. It wouldn't be right to say that I was tired, or groggy, or even awake. It was like flipping a switch; from a state of full dormancy to firing on all cylinders.

Whether or not I was dead before, I was alive and kicking again. Two limbs reached forward to steady myself. What extended out weren't my arms as I last saw them, but a pair of gauntlets in dark green armor. A set of riveted, copper bracers wrapped around both gloves, which stopped when they reached the edge of a concave, glass cylinder.

>LEGS: Gyroscopic Stabilization System

I was trapped inside a capsule made of thick, heavy glass, while the rest of the place outside me was on fire. As bad a place to be claustrophobic as any, really. Looking down, I could see that my whole body was encased in green, segmented armor.

"Where am I?" a coarse voice asked at the same time I was going to speak, his voice echoing in the enclosed walls of the room. "Who said--!?"

>HEAD: Voice Generation System by HAYATOM Inc.

I stopped. The voice was too harsh, too gruff to be my own, but only after hearing the echo again, did I realize that the question couldn't have come from anyone else.

This has to be some kind of nightmare.

"Let me out of here!" I growled, banging on the glass.

I couldn't afford to wait for someone to find me. Desperate to get loose, regardless of how dense the material looked, I kept striking the glass until I heard a crack. Surprised that it actually worked, I reeled back a fist and delivered a haymaker against where the crack stood. My punch shattered the surface, scattering thick chunks of glass across the floor.

Clambering out of the broken tank, I searched for an exit, but all around me were machines. Large computers. Flying drones with broken helicopter blades and creepy smiles painted on them. The remains of an almost humanoid robot with a firearm sticking out of one arm. They were left in pieces, or various states of disrepair along the ground.

No, not disrepair, damage. Soot marks from a firefight stained the place, and that caused the fire that was spreading. Then there was some kind of jackhammer mounted to the wall, along with other weird devices I couldn't even name.

"Some kind of lab…" I muttered to myself, before locking eyes on a steel door marked with an 'EXIT' sign. Barricaded by cobbled-together obstacles and furniture. "There!"

I took eager steps towards it, my foot catching on a weight that caused me to stumble. Turning around, I saw that I'd nearly trampled over a collapsed man in a bright orange lab coat, his crumpled body left prone at the base of the capsule.

I froze, running back towards the fallen man. My first fear was that he'd gotten struck by the glass, but he looked unharmed by the fragments. There was the selfish part of me that wanted answers, but so long as he had a pulse, I'd do my damndest to keep him alive for his own sake.

Before this, I had one of those jobs where you didn't need to do much life-risking action most of the year, but on the rare occasion when you were activated, you were expected to act. So I acted, turning him over to check if he was still breathing.

"Look, I don't know who you are, and I don't know how I got in there, but…"

The man's face had been flash cooked. Pasty skin. Two eyes. A nose, presumably. Most people had them. Strands of a red mustache and eyebrows. Everything past the skull had been superheated into a grotesque mass of flesh by the grey and orange pistol in his stiffened hand.

"Fuck," I swore.

Too late to perform CPR. Far too late. The sight made me want to reel back and retch in disgust, but instead, I kept staring at the body. Taking in the little details of the grisly scene. A suicide. Judging by the broken machines and scorch marks he was surrounded by, it was an act of desperation. His weapon almost looked like a toy gun, but the smoking barrel told me that it was anything but for playing with.

Good god, the smell had to be--

It occurred to me, then and there, that I couldn't smell the burnt flesh that had to be wafting in the air. Overwhelming past the smoke that I couldn't smell, either, now that I thought of it. I could still hear and see, while touch felt numb, but I couldn't smell at all. Four white lines cropped up in my sight, framing the rectangular tag that hung loosely on the dead man's burnt coat.

>user: Professor Vector Stackman
>status: [DECEASED]

As an archived photo of the dead man appeared in my left eye. Middle-aged. Bald on the top. Huge nose. Awfully blue eyes.

Once a very human being, now a corpse. I instinctively reached out to the image in alarm, fingers stopping at the darkened visor of the helmet attached to my head.

A head's up display? I thought I was just imagining the words before, but--

Every second counted in an emergency. What was this, if not an emergency?

"I-I'm sorry. I need to go."

Gently, I set the man back down. No time for a funeral. He didn't even have eyes I could shut, to show some respect for the dead. It was something they did in the movies, almost making it a trite gesture at this point, but it was the best I could offer without knowing the man personally.

Whoever Stackman was, he probably didn't deserve how his life ended. If only because I found it difficult to imagine someone that did. All I could do was leave him where he lay as I made my escape. I was in the process of yanking the chairs and desks out of the way with shocking ease when I saw that the lock to the metal door had been welded shut.

"Are you kidding me?!"

Short of other options, and finally feeling the heat, I yanked the neon red jackhammer off the wall. The machine bucked to life after my fingers glided over the power button, the device unsteady in my hands in spite of feeling much stronger than I'd ever been before. Trudging back to the barricaded exit, I rammed the jackhammer in the direction of the door moments before it was forcibly blown open on the other side.

The first responders were hardly what I was expecting. For one, they weren't human. I knew that much on sight. They were bipedal robots, identical to the broken one I saw on the ground. Their right hands were semi-automatic guns, and their left hands bore riot shields. More blatant a tell than that: Human heads weren't skull-like biker helmets with cyclopean, crimson dots for pupils.

Those eyes.

Time slowed to a crawl. I had moments with which I could've decided to pull back and relent.

Those eyes.

I didn't hold back.

My grip wavered, but I followed through on my swing, the jackhammer wrecking every machine that stood in its path. Straight past the paramilitary uniforms and leather accoutrements. Directly through the inadequate armor plating of the ones who didn't react quickly enough to raise their shields. Those that did got launched into the next hall over.

"One hell of a kick," I commented, glancing down at the weapon.

Definitely not a power tool. A weapon.

To my surprise, the weapon was staring back at me. A pair of white eyes with two black pupils looked up at me in expectation. From the bottom of the jackhammer, two cylinders that I thought were guards to protect the operator from the pointed end flipped outwards into footrests.

This wasn't just a jackhammer. It was the most lethal pogo stick in the business.

>SPECIAL WEAPON: Sakugarne.

A colored meter representing Sakugarne's weapon energy filled the corner of my HUD, causing the remaining pieces to fall into place faster than I could deny what had happened to me. As it turned out, this new processor I'd been saddled with was a bit too sharp for my own good.

Came online wearing green armor with a visored helmet.

Can see and hear better than ever, but my sensors aren't equipped for smell.

His signature weapon.

Surrounded by Sniper Joes straight out of The Protomen--!

A laser beam grazed my shoulder.

"Shit!" I hissed in pain, leaping forward and taking cover behind one of the gaudy pillars in the nearby hall before I was melted by burst-fire.

>ARMOR: Reactive Ceratanium Skeleton

The hallway was as much a step into the future as it was a step into the past. Neoclassical in the stylings of its austere pillars and arches, while colorful holograms highlighted the marble architecture. Several busts of the illustrious founder decorated the scene, the mad doctor's hair flying off in two directions from his bald pate like swooping bat wings.

"Albert Fucking Wily?!" I yelled. "Of course it is!"

Another energy projectile whizzed past my helmet. The corridor was currently being redecorated as an active warzone, complete with riot bots taking potshots at me.

The loudspeakers on the wall crackled.

"Attention! Additional combat bioroids are required in WilyCorp R&D1!"

Things were moving far too quickly for me to properly panic. Thus, I was acting, my actions guided by a steady flow of combat routines from some deep data cache in my positronic brain.

Oh, and I'm a robot. One from Mega Man, no less.

Wait. Wait. Am I Mega Man?!

That would be really bad if I was, but I could have an existential crisis later. Already, I could hear the tinny voice boxes of the Joes preparing to box me in for the kill.

"We have control!" one of them buzzed out.

"We keep you safe!" trilled another, from the opposite side of the room.

"We are your hope!" I heard from above, at the same time my new audio receptors picked up the faint whirr of helicopter blades.

Tilting my head up, I saw the ghoulish Blader drones clocking my position. They were chanting the WilyCorp motto, in sequence with the Sniper Joes.

"We have control! We keep you safe! We are your hope!"

"Time to get a move on," I said, stepping onto the pogo.

I expected Sakugarne to be as difficult to handle as a vehicle as he was an improvised weapon, but when my internal gyroscope kicked in, balancing became second nature. My left hand and feet remained firmly on the transport as my right hand curled into a fist. That fist shunted itself into my forearm, making space for the footlong cannon that thrummed to life.

>ARM: Quint Buster

"We!"

I glared, until the five robots were tagged by a quintet of targeting reticles.

"Are!"

Ready.

"In!"

Aim.

"Control--!"

In a staccato of laser blasts and a single bound of the pogo stick, I shot down four Bladers and stomped a Sniper Joe to scrap. I kept bounding and shooting past squads of bioroids, until there was a straight path to the window on the other end of the hall.

"--Fire! I repeat, a fire has broken out in R&D1…"

The fact that I didn't suck at fighting was a relief. For what was supposed to be an evil version of Mega Man, Quint was one of the easiest bosses in the franchise.

Then again, we weren't exactly in Mega Man canon.

No, this was a homespun hell called 8-Bit Dystopia. After crashing through the glass, twenty stories high, I was gonna have to play it by ear when I touched down in the City.

"…and a Robot Master-grade maverick is loose in Wily Towers!"

---

Spoiler: Author Notes / Lore

April Fools! ​

For those unaware, 8-Bit Dystopia is one of the many projects I work on besides this fic... and other fics... and my many campaigns I'm in. 8BD initially began as a /tg/ project, inspired by the works of The Protomen and cyberpunk/sci-fi media in general. I always had a fondness for the setting, so a couple folks (such as Argidoll, my co-writer on Dead Metal) and I took 8BD out of hibernation and gave it some touch-ups. As the primary steward of the 8BD: Deluxe doc, I've done most of these new writeups or their final drafts. Making the pieces come together on this whacky patchwork.

It's very much a work-in-progress. Writing a chapter of an SI fic in which I'm Quint of all characters was one of the ways I got the creative juices flowing.

...

With that out of the way, the next actual threadmark is 90% done! I worked on it all of today! Expect it in the near future!

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​

This chapter has been brought to you by the following patrons and beta readers: Argidoll, C-Moon, Dredloki, and N'Oni!

Thank you all for the continuing support!



...For any of you that skipped the Author Notes: The next real update is 90% done!

 

[weredrago2]

NOTICE: No, this isn't another April Fools threadmark!

The following is an extensive rewrite of Chapter 2, and the original is staying where it is for now. Please give this a reread until I replace the original Chapter 2, and put all the old ones in a side document tagged with an Apocrypha threadmark.

---

Ruby Haze
Chapter 2: Unhappy Tree Friends

I rarely had dreams. A lot of aspirations, things I wanted to get done in my life before I locked the door and put being alive behind me, but only on occasion did I have a dream that stuck with me. I wasn't one of those people who could so seamlessly slip into a lucid dream, act like I owned the place, and take everything I saw back into the waking world. It'd be nice if I was, though. A nice outlet for my creative side.

No, I was one of those people who didn't know that they were dreaming until they were already in too deep.

In my dream, I was entangled in the shifting ebb and flow of a labyrinthine maze. A chthonic entanglement of tunnels leading to more tunnels, lit by torches along the walls that were cool to the touch. They were the only source of light here, without the fire of the real thing. Going backwards was as good as going left, right, or forwards when the tunnels kept shifting, so I simply marched along the myriad roads and hoped that I was picking the right ones.

♦ !!

What other choice did I have? Between staying in place and going around in circles, the latter meant I might get out. By that logic, staying still was not an option. I had to keep going. Pushing harder, forcing my way through these winding paths faster than whoever put them there could wind them up.

Sometimes, it felt like there was at least a little rhyme or reason as to why the paths kept shifting, but for the most part? Random chaos, which didn't abate until I put all of my strength behind a charge and burst through the walls of my prison. All of a sudden, what was once an endless maze opened up to a broad basin of red stone. With the sky exposed, I could finally see an emerald-green sky and gold, ringed stars above.

Ascending to the air, I could feel the heavy shackles placed on my body, mind, and soul falling to the wayside. They'd been holding me back for so long, that I'd forgotten they were ever there in the first place.

How long had I been like this? Days? Weeks? Years?

How many years had passed me by? Did it matter anymore?

Finally, I was free--!

♦ 72

I was woken up by a violent sneeze. My body trembled from the force of it, and the sneeze was the starting gun for a sudden panic attack. Tenseness clutched across my chest, as memories of what last happened to me flashed back much faster than I would've asked for.

Space.

Falling from orbit.

The crystal on my hand.

A broadhead arrow through the chest.

The robots. The magic.

It felt like I was drowning all over again, and the shock was enough for me to want to tear off the burgundy blankets and covers enveloping me in a startled flailing of limbs. I wasn't drowning, of course. Instead, I was able to see that I was set atop two child-sized mattresses lined together, in a round room that was equally not quite to scale. Coarse strands of copper-toned straw stuck out the sides of the bed, grazing my gloves with enough tactile resistance to snap me out of the initial reaction.

Forcibly getting my breathing back to more reasonable levels, I sat up in bed and tried to think about what the hell I was going to do next. Careful not to touch the alien gemstone on my left hand, which was still there, I massaged my hands, fingers, and joints. Cataloging all of the colorful nick-nacks I could see helped centering myself. Helped me stay grounded in the present.

Where was I? I was in a foreign, but admittedly-cozy room. One entrance, with no door, instead being covered by a cloth for privacy. Two windows, no glass, just two holes in the hut. Staying inside the building, the first thing I could see was a redwood shelf. This room also had a big, pink pincushion in one corner. Beside the odd pincushion and a maroon doll was a dried-out carnation in a glass jar. A weird assortment of junk, alright. Besides those was a broken clock with a… grenadine finish… and a wooden cardinal sticking out of… it…?

I was starting to see a pattern that gave me pause.

Why's everything in here the same color?

In the process of figuring out what I'd do next, I couldn't help but notice that while it was mostly dark inside this cramped, stuffy room, everything here was illuminated in shades of red. Like I was staring down the screen of a Virtual Boy. The observation (or simply the dust) made me blink, and that reminded me of what my eyes were like now. A glowing magenta, and perfectly functional without glasses.

The accommodations were a bit too rustic for electric lighting, and a glance towards the windows confirmed that it was night. No light sources were coming into the room from outside, and the weird stone wasn't lighting the room, either. Whatever that thing was, I could feel when it was doing things, and it was currently on standby. Until I got the covers off, it was covered up, to boot.

Did I get darkvision?

If I could see in the dark like it was dimly-lit, then my new set of peepers were even more functional than I thought. Then another thought lashed out, unbidden.

When do I get my old eye color back? Are they gonna stay like that?

Resolved to get out of here sooner, rather than later, I groggily rose to my feet. My limbs felt heavy and cumbersome, as though I hadn't used them in a while. How long had I been out of it? Exploratory stretches along my arms, legs, and neck weren't doing me any more favors in the pain department, either. I almost regretted getting up in the first place, but it wasn't like going back to sleep was an option.

Whatever I'm going through right now, it's real. Very real. I'd better start acting like it.

Knowing that I'd benefit from some more light being shed on the situation -- 'serious mode' or not, I was getting my puns in where I could, the dire situation be damned -- I nudged the crystal on my hand and imagined the room being a little brighter than it was. No levitation, energy constructs, roiling explosions, giant boots to kick down the walls, or any other errant ideas for expressions of my new power that tickled the back of my mind. I was trying not to get ahead of myself, when all I needed was a light.

A conical spectrum of pale light poured from the crystal. With some mental tweaks, I could alter the beam's intensity and scope at will. Change it to be broader or narrower. Waving the cantrip back and forth across the room, seeing the hut in full color, it wasn't long until the flashlight passed over the pincushion a second time.

I wasn't alone in here after all. She was a tiny thing, with a huge head that bore matching big eyes and eyelashes like a cartoon character. Long spines or quills poured out the back of her head like hair. The alien critter was outfitted with a blouse, a pleated skirt, sneakers, and gloves. Adorable, sure, but I startled easily.

"Woah!" I yelped.

"Eek!" the girl cried out in turn.

If the choice in attire hadn't given it away, her voice did. She was a young girl, and a skittish one at that. The adage about them being more scared of me than me of them felt as awfully appropriate as I felt awful about it. We were both spooked, but she scampered out of the room in a startled rush when I caught her in the headlights.

Maybe I could go back to sleep, and pretend that didn't happen?

I sighed. No such luck. I had to go out there and apologize.

Watching my head for the low ceiling, I stepped out onto a wide, wooden bridge suspended high above the ground. Connected to that were more bridges and huts. The building I was placed in was a treehouse, built into a network of treehouses in a forest of tall evergreens. Swinging the beacon downwards, I couldn't quite see the ground from my vantage point. How high up were we, and would it kill them to make taller guard rails?

"I didn't mean to scare you," I said hoarsely, searching around for the girl.

I wasn't as dead as I could've been, but I was feeling dehydrated. A glass of water first, then a drink on the rocks. Turning off the magic lamp, I was submerged in the fluorescent reds of my night vision and the pale moonlight raining down from above. Faint silhouettes of animals peered at me from doors and windows, candlesticks in hand. Eyes leering with hushed words exchanged between them, in ways I didn't particularly care for.

Eventually, I spotted the animal girl at an intersection of bridges, where a platform was raised to form a common area. She was crouched behind a hooded figure holding a lantern. Taller than her, but not by much.

"Pardon the indiscretion of mine younger cousin, fair wizard. She had ne'er seen an overlander in person before."

A what?

I was pretty sure he was the one who shot me earlier. I wasn't sure what to say to his 'explanation', so I opted to take it on the nose.

"Uh. No problem."

He turned to the girl, who whispered something in his ear, before replying back at a matching volume. She ran off into one of the larger huts in their treetop village. More faces poked out of the surrounding windows. Humanoid squirrels, birds, mice, and other woodland creatures, the fear and suspicion in their looks not escaping my sight.

What the hell did I do?

"Thou hadst been resting for quite a while. I hadn't known for certain when to expect your rousing, but thine sense of timing is certainly uncanny." The hooded mammal tilted the lantern back towards the hut he came from, where I could smell something cooking. "Care for a bowl of stew?"

I'd say he was being too casual about the whole thing, and that I was being too casual about everything, but I worked up an appetite fighting for my life and sleeping for who knew however long. Assuming I only lost half a day would be optimistic at best.

"You know what? Sure. I can do stew."

I followed the teal-furred fellow into his cabin, where a wrought iron pot was suspended over a fire pit. The dining table was cramped, but not so cramped that I couldn't wedge myself into place across from him. All I needed to do was avoid flipping the whole thing over if I twitched. He poured the orange, vegetable-laden stew into a wooden bowl, the meal complemented with a loaf of bread.

There was no way that I was experiencing the normal response to all of this impossible stimulus. I was pretty sure I got sent into another dimension, or another world, or something like that. My initial bout of irrational fear and denial felt more natural than this. I was hardly tranquil, of course, a general unease settling over my chest as I settled down into the squat, wooden chair across from the English-accented alien. Not calm, by any stretch, but stable enough to handle a bowl of stew.

"Thank you," I said belatedly, having only thought to say it after the bowl was emptied out. "Sorry. I should've opened with that."

He laughed.

"Think nothing of it, pilgrim. Far be it from me to impose myself between a starving man and his meal."

A silence gradually settled over the table, leaving me as the one to break it.

"I guess all of that happened, then?" I initiated, sliding the bowl aside. "I landed in the lake, we er, talked, then that fight broke out…?"

I trailed off, uncertain of my words. He looked at me inquisitively, then nodded.

"Aye. It transpired as ye recall."

"Just checking."

I took another sip from the tall, wooden mug provided. The opaque liquid tasted hot and bitter. Tea, at a guess, strong enough to keep my eyes open. The stranger continued, as I tried to power through the tea.

"Hearing a disturbance at the sacred grounds I hath been charged with protecting, I misjudged thee as an occult threat to my royal charge and… acted accordingly." He looked away awkwardly. "When you swiftly came to my aid, I realized the enormity of my error. For your gallant action, I was placed within your debt."

An occult threat?

Was that what he thought I was? I recalled that he described me as a wizard, a spellbinder, and a warlock. A real thesaurus after my own heart.

Am I a wizard? Was what I did some kind of magic--?

I slipped into a coughing fit, a stream of that strong tea having meandered its way into the wrong pipe while my mind wandered. I was supposed to be staying away from caffeine for health reasons, but this was as good a reason to deviate from the doctor's orders as any. I could deal with any future migraines from this after I dealt with the current one.

"If you're the one who dragged me out of there, then I'd say we're even."

The animal man's expressive face softened, put at ease by my words. The fur framing his muzzle appeared more teal than green by the lamplight, but I didn't exactly bring a color swatch. It was hard to judge.

"Your grace is appreciated, wizard, but I fear a debt remains to be repaid for my impropriety. These are troubling times in which we find ourselves, but that is no cause to forget our better natures."

I nodded along like I knew what he was talking about, allowing him to finish his thought. His big eyes opened, as he snapped his fingers in alarm.

"Gadzooks! A horrid host I'd been, to not even properly introduce myself!" He stood atop his chair and performed a theatrical bow. "I am King Robert O'Hedge, rightful ruler of the Grand Kingdom of Mercia. Known to friend and foe alike as Rob o' the Hedge, leader of the Crazy Kritters who protect Deerwood Forest from the perfidious High Sheriff and his malicious, mechanical miscreants!"

I blinked, most of Robert's spiel sailing clear over my head like water off a duck's back.

"Well, ah, I'm John," I replied. "Wizard."

The second part, which couldn't be further from the truth, slipped off the tongue with a casual indifference. I was stating it as a fact, but not making a big deal of it, even though it was very obviously a lie. This entire time, Robert had been insistent that I was some kind of sorcerer, and I went with his assumption instead of correcting it.

My grip around the cup tightened ever-so-slightly.

Am I nuts?! Why the hell did I just--?

"Friar Buck told me that courts of Eurish hadn't been graced with a magician since the time of Old Sylvan," Robert explained, having bought my fib hook, line, and sinker.

Wait, he bought it?

I wasn't exactly surprised to hear that Furry Robin Hood was friends with an animal of the cloth, but I couldn't afford to focus on that.

"How's about you give me the lay of the land, Rob, and we call that debt thing square?" I interjected.

His face crinkled.

"If ye insist," Rob said, raising the kettle. "Wouldst thou care for more tea?"

"Sure."

Rob refilled my cup, and once again stood from his chair, clearing the rest of the dishware from the table. He gestured to a drawing table on the other side of the room, where I saw a detailed map that was done in ink on parchment. It resembled what I gazed from my short jaunt across the planet's horizon: A coastal nation with the geographic trappings of the British Isles and France mashed together, in the same ballpark of Bretonnia.

"As a visitor to our once-fair lands, I must advise thee to make thine passage through Mercia brief. The High Sheriff's crackdowns had only increased with intensity over time, leaving the Crazy Kritters at a fraction of our manpower. Our couriers sent to warn the Highlands warrens and the Maquis of the south of the Sheriff's plots against them have yet to return from their quests. Should the blackguard become aware of the formidable powers ye possess, as I and the others of my fellowship have, then the Sheriff would stop at nothing to bring ye under his heel."

If I tell people I'm not a wizard, they'll know I'm a defenseless fraud.

If I get caught by the Sheriff for pulling whatever it is I can do, I'll get imprisoned, enslaved, or executed. Possibly in that order.

"Oh. Thanks for the heads up."

Full context or not, that sounded bad. Very bad.

A large castle was illustrated in the west, surrounded by great plains in the north, and untamed wilderness in every other direction. Scattered villages dotted the map, sprawling roads connecting several of them to the heart of the kingdom.

The map had some odd additions to it that I couldn't explain. A megalithic structure that resembled Stonehenge, but it was drawn where Scotland should've been. Was the dragon in the right corner for flavor, or would I have to watch for one of those as well?

"Above all, have a care to avoid the capital," Rob growled, pointing towards the fortress. "The royal castle fell to our most hated foe, years hence, casting the survivors of his initial purge into Deerwood Forest for protection against the Sheriff's war machines."

He didn't call it by name. Glancing down, I saw that the previous title had been crossed out. One of many settlements that had their names struck from the map, presumably after the Sheriff's forces visited them.

I didn't feel like I was looking at Robin Hood or Sherwood Forest anymore. This didn't feel like it had anything to do with taxes.

This is an extermination campaign.

Then I finally read what the High Sheriff had replaced the old name of the capital with.

"S-Snottingham?" I coughed, covering the lower half of my face with my fist.

I coughed a few more times, just to be sure. Rob's voice took on a somber, frustrated tone as he rolled up the map and put it away.

"Renaming my family's ancestral castle to 'Snottingham' was the High Sheriff's first official act, after executing my father by the blade, and putting Rosy's parents to the guillotine."

My sense of levity evaporated.

"I'm sorry, Robert. I didn't mean to--"

He held out a hand to stop me.

"Ye didst not know, overlander, but know this." There was a spark in his eyes as he spoke, and it didn't come from the firepit. We were slumming it out in a treehouse village, so a part of me was initially skeptical about his claim of being nobility, but he spoke with a conviction that was all too genuine. "My cousin and I are all that remain of the royal family, and I will not stop fighting until our kingdom is free. Even if all other Crazy Kritters are captured, to a man, and I am consigned to carry on my mission alone."

Rob exhaled, some of that indignant fire from earlier leaving his voice.

"But this is not a battle for Rosy. I pray that our war is won before she is of fighting age. The Friar was to smuggle her across the Continental Land Bridge to distant Northamer, but the High Sheriff has redoubled his forces at the edges of Deerwood Forest. Our destruction of his sentries set the Sheriff on high alert."

Now that Rob was speaking more -- not speaking calmly, just more -- I had gotten the impression that he was… young? Late teens, early twenties? It wasn't only how he held himself when he was excited that gave him away, but his voice, and how his composure broke when I got under his skin earlier. It made me realize that, if he really was a king, then he was king by the virtue of his father's death.

"You said you and your friends are the resistance?" I asked, somewhat bluntly.

"Freedom fighters," he affirmed, nodding resolutely.

Assuming he was telling the truth, and I wanted to believe he was telling the truth, then I lucked out by running into this guy first. Rob couldn't answer all the questions I had, but he was able to put some of my concerns at ease.

I stood up, stretching.

"I don't suppose you'd know anything about those old magicians I could take a look at?"

Rob shook his head.

"Alas, no such luck. Tomes and grimoires of such an age were rare before the Great War, and have become scarcer still with the current strife engulfing the lands. I could impose upon Friar Buck to search through the scrolls he was able to abscond with, but much was left behind in our haste to escape the Sheriff's clutches."

I couldn't even crack a smile when the pun of the Friar's name belatedly clicked.

"I'll have to ask your friend about it before I go," I replied.

"We don't have much to offer, but we can furnish thee with enough provisions to reach the southern border. I did have one last query, if ye shall grant me the indulgence?"

"Shoot." He winced. "Poor choice of words?"

"Verily," Rob agreed.

"Sorry. What was your question?"

"Prithee, what brought an overlander so far across the world to Mercia?"

A great question. Got an answer to that, John?

The fact that there was still time to walk things back did cross my mind. More than a few times, since I started on this stupid course. I could have admitted to Rob I wasn't a 'real' wizard, for whatever that would've meant to him. That I wasn't anyone with arcane knowledge, or magic spells, or talents. Then he, and anyone else he told, would know for certain that I was nobody important, outside of being a terrified man with a mysterious gemstone strapped to his hand. I wasn't anyone to be wary of. A fish in a barrel.

Lying about being a wizard, of all things, is insane… or self-preservation.

Guess I'll find out.

I was scared out of my mind, and paranoia was grabbing at the wheel, but I'd read enough of these types of stories to know the score. I was stuck in a new world. No idea when, or if, I'd be getting back home. Having already spent my old life being 'nobody important', and deciding had gotten rather stale, I took another sip of tea, preparing my poker face.

The easiest way to do that would be to play a character. A slight switch to a firmer tone and a sharper posture. Changing into someone a bit more confident about their place in this world that was supposedly chock full of colorful animal folk, magic rocks, and gonzo robots.

Heh. Reminds me of Sonic the Hedgehog, when I put it like that.

My high school drama teacher said I'd never cut it as an actor, but one thing I could do? Improvise. Spin a yarn from a loose string. Catapult a tabletop session that was stalling into a bold, new direction because inspiration struck in the moment.

Or, less charitably, lying.

"To be honest, I didn't really have a direction in mind when I took off," I attested, deciding that a white lie would be harmless if I was leaving anyways. "Just needed a new place to crash, and with my bad sense of direction, your neck of the woods happened to be where I landed."

The gem on my left hand gleamed in the firelight.

"In that case, thou picked a rather poor time to visit our 'neck of the woods'," Rob said dryly. "The High Sheriff's advance has been relentless."

"How… bad are we talking?" I inquired, then internally kicked myself for asking.

Why would you ask that? You know what the answer will be.

"Seizing the capital hadn't sufficed to sate his gluttony for conquest. He continues to sack the villages surrounding the castle and press the citizens to his legions."

Bloodshed. Barbarism. Bloodshed.

"Would having a wizard around change that?" I impulsively asked.

Why am I signing up for this?!

"Art thou offering to pledge thine services to my kingdom's cause?" Rob asked, eyes opened in surprise. "I am in nary a position to examine a gift pasha in the mouth, but we hath little wealth to spare for a mercenary, and I wouldn't dare to impose my duty upon a stranger without a just reward."

"You said so yourself that the Friar might have records from the old days that could help me with my… arcane studies. I'd be willing to stick around and see what he can dig up. Help where I can in exchange for room and board. See where things go from there?"

I wasn't delusional enough to think I was going out there to be a superhero, but I could do minor things here and there. I'd need to do something to get in practice with this power I had, and going out into the wilds again without someone covering my back was stupid.

If it could shape lasers beams and constructs, then it could maybe, just maybe, make a difference.

Maybe save a life.

What else am I gonna do with this gem? $%&ing sightseeing?

"A most generous offer to give to a people in dire need of good news, fair spellbinder. Perhaps you were a blessing sent by the Walkers after all."

I held out my right hand.

"So how about it?"

Rob o' the Hedge went silent as he considered the proposed arrangement, staring at me, his rolled-up map, and the shiny charm on my left.

"Is your word your vow?" Rob asked, as he examined the outstretched palm.

"…Yes," I replied after a stilted pause. "I try not to give any promises I can't keep."

We shook hands then and there, making us officially in this together.


---

Spoiler: Author Notes / Lore

Welcome to Chapter 2 of my Ruby Haze Origins rewrites! This one's a lot more comprehensive than the last one, and for good reason.

The most obvious one to start with would be the opening dream sequence, which is a significant departure from the original. I wasn't satisfied with that one, as it felt extremely disconnected with where things ended up going. Thus, it was replaced with something that felt more appropriate for the story.

After that, I moved on to the awakening. I spruced up the descriptions leading to the SI's first proper introduction to Rob o' the Hedge, giving the scene some more buildup before they got to talking. Then came the additional setup for why he went with Rob's suggestion that he was a wizard, and a proper explanation for why he stuck around at all.

Overall, I'm far more satisfied with this iteration of Chapter 2 than the old one, though I'm still taking feedback on changes. The next update, though, should be Chapter 35.

♦ Want to support my work? ♦
PATREON | KO-FI
♦ Join the W2 Workshop Zone for previews and updates! ♦
W2 Workshop Zone Discord​

This chapter has been brought to you by the following patrons and beta readers: C-Moon, Dredloki!

Thank you all for the continuing support!

 

[weredrago2]

ENTRY #5: AN EXAMINATION INTO RECREATIONAL DERIVATIVES OF MYRISTICIN

AUTHOR NOTE: This datafile is derived from a commission from my friend C-Moon. He's really good with writing and chemistry, so you can check out his Ko-fi here.

Snively sighed deeply as he flipped through the stack of papers in his inbox.

He could admit that despite everything else, his uncle could come up with some brilliant schemes. If he really put his mind to it, he could invent just about anything, and the military coup that had got them this far was executed brilliantly.

'Robotnik's Rats' was not one of those schemes.

It had started out almost as a joke, a way to convince the populations that were still allowed to remain non-roboticized that collaboration was a worthy goal. He promised rewards for information on anything that could threaten the Robotnik regime, especially for information on the Freedom Fighters.

"Yes, we know Sonic is fast! We know you've probably seen him!" Snively muttered to himself as he delivered one 'report' to the shredder. "We know his base is in the Great Forest! We just don't know where and neither do you!" Most of these 'reports' were barely worth the paper they were printed on, pointing out things they already knew or information so obvious a child could have provided it.

Come to think of it, maybe a few of these reports were from literal, actual children.

After delivering another document into the shredder (this one helpfully informed him that the Freedom Fighters had a tech expert on their side) he finally picked up one that looked a little different than the rest. Several pages of neatly typed information, without so much as a cover letter to put it all together.

Hmm… maybe this was actually worth a read.

===

Abstract
What follows is a report on the recently developed designer drugs, their mechanisms of action, and potential synergistic or off-target effects that may arise from sustained use and/or interactions with other commonly available materials. Spectrographic and pharmacological analysis of illicitly distributed street drugs has revealed derivatives of myristicin, coumarin, and smaller quantities of novel isomers of the MDxx class. The intent of this report is to catalog information with citations so as to provide easier access to a field that has little to no regulatory oversight.

Background
In recent months synthesis of a novel designer drug, deemed 'lemon sundrop dandelion' in the local parlance (hereafter represented as LeSD for brevity), has been seen distributed through illicit channels in significantly higher quantities. Contrary to the parlance there is no relation to LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide, in anything other than the name- while uncorroborated it is possible that the name was selected to appeal to a wider market. Myristicin is a naturally occurring chemical present in several spices that has a pharmacological role as a weak monoamine oxidase inhibitor. Its mechanism of action is similar to the MAOI drug class, though its lack of an amine group is thought to contribute to its weaker affinity. Monoamine oxidase is an enzyme responsible for the metabolization of neurotransmitters. Interaction between myristicin and the SSRI and MAOI drug class is theorized to lead to severe interactions such as serotonin storm, though the case studies reporting such interactions as of yet are not substantial.
Myristicin consists of a benzene ring with a dioxyl ring on carbons 1,3, a methoxyl group on carbon 4, and an allyl group on carbon 6. This structure is similar in many regards to drugs in the substituted methylenedioxyphenethylamines (deemed MDxx henceforth) and conversion to MMDMA has been proven in laboratory conditions. This drug is also highly cytotoxic and a potent inhibitor of the cytochrome p450 class, a family of enzymes responsible for the metabolization of xenobiotic substances within the body. Of particular note is the CYP1A2 enzyme, highly involved in the catalyzation of substances such as caffeine and paracetamol (note- synergy between myristicin and fluvoxamine/caffeine presents potential avenue forward- if given funding.) This is responsible for its sustained half-life and delayed reaction time, as well as interactions with further factors as seen in patients.
As seen in the attached spectrographs, analysis of the compounds suggests several things of note. Observe the following figures- [Fig. A] represents analysis of a MDMA sample of assured purity, displaying peaks in line with expected carboxyl group and very little contamination outside. [Fig. B] represents an analysis of the drug itself- note the vast discrepancies between the peaks. [Fig. B] displays several contaminants that are highlighted, indicating the presence of contaminants derived from the manufacturing process, likely leftovers from synthesis or processing. It can be determined with a high degree of confidence that LeSD is not one compound, but a name for a synergistic cocktail of myristicin, coumarin, MDMA, MMDMA, and lesser quantities of the class. For greater detail, look to [Fig. C].
Intelligence suggests that rather than a completely novel synthesis from precursors, as one might expect when performing an operation on this scale, at least one portion of the LeSD compound is extracted from naturally occurring materials. At present it is unknown why this occurs- while myristicin synthesis is extremely difficult under laboratory conditions, this paper has theorized that its presence in the cocktail is a limitation of the process rather than an intentional part of the design. If myristicin is used as a precursor for synthesizing drugs of the MDxx class, then it suggests a lack of material as one might expect of an illicit operation- or a lack of skill or oversight. MDxx drugs may be far easier synthesized by using safrole as a precursor, which is far easier to produce in quantity without being reliant on extraction.
When taking into consideration the low yield of myristicin from a single gram- estimated to be approximately 13 mg per g of the seed (Nowak et al), and the obvious lack of skill demonstrated in extraction efficiency, it is feasible to conclude that the original intent was not to produce illicit drugs but rather to capitalize on a side effect of an already existing industry. Further spectral analysis of the compound revealed contamination by coumarin.
Coumarin consists of a benzene ring attached to an unsaturated lactone ring and is present in many plants, but in this application its presence in tonka beans is of particular note. Tonka beans are widely used for flavoring enhancement, owing to their complex flavor, though some criticism has been levied due to the potential for coumarin toxicity. Widely used in the pharmaceutical industry as a precursor to anticoagulant drugs, it has demonstrated the potential for conversion via biosynthesis even though the compound itself does not exhibit any anticoagulant properties. Production of 4-hydroxycoumarin occurs naturally due to fungal activity, however, and this has historically been enough to induce bleeding disease. Contamination of the primary product seems likely given the evident lack of oversight placed into other areas of this illicit operation.
In a recent [case study] patients suffering from what was later determined to be a myristicin overdose presented with symptoms of delirium, tachycardia, and fever- when discounting the primary symptom of intense disassociation from reality, these represent classic anticholinergic symptoms. These symptoms are exacerbated as demonstrated in practical instances of Mobian morphology, given their deviance from the established baseline norm. Studies of divergence between Mobian and Overlander physiology with particular respect to pharmacological concerns is not well documented and present an avenue for further investigation. It can be noted however that there are two likely explanations for the outcome of this case study- one, that myristicin acts as an insecticide that demonstrates synergy with other insecticides (Lichtenstein & Casida, 1963), and when administered in conjunction with coumarin, another insecticide, may have contributed to the outcome of the case study. 4-hydroxycoumarin's anticoagulant properties likely contributed to massive surgical complications. The precise nature of the relationship between Mobians and their counterparts is poorly documented as well, but conjectural evidence is enough to suggest at least a degree of similarity in terms of biology- and another avenue for further study.

Conclusion
Structural analysis and examination of relevant case studies allow some insight into the nature of LeSD's origin and distribution. It is likely that LeSD first emerged as a flavor enhancer derived from extracts of nutmeg and tonka, and upon being noted for its potential hallucinogenic effects, was examined further for its recreational properties. Given its nature as an illicit operation, sourcing precursors for the wholesale synthesis of MDxx drugs was likely not reasonable- and the presence of undesirable side products (i.e. elemicin, a deliriant) suggests a lack of knowledge of chemical synthesis and efficient laboratory technique. Extraction yield of myristicin and its subsequent MDxx derivatives is poor even under optimal conditions, and the likelihood that the operation is extracting and concentrating the relevant compounds directly from the flavor enhancer is extremely high. It is unknown if the operation is aware of the relevant compounds desirable in its product. The nature of the operation's distribution requires further study to understand. The resulting product, while providing the desirable effect of disassociation, hallucination, and euphoria also manifests potent anticholinergic symptoms and has proven toxic, especially in insectoid Mobian phenotypes. Further investigation into the matter is suggested in order to obtain a full understanding of the operation's nature.

https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/4276
Ageno W, Gallus AS, Wittkowsky A, Crowther M, Hylek EM, Palareti G. "Oral anticoagulant therapy: Antithrombotic Therapy and Prevention of Thrombosis, 9th ed: American College of Chest Physicians Evidence-Based Clinical Practice Guidelines", 2012.

Ai-Hong Yang, Xin He, Jun-Xiu Chen, Li-Na He, Chun-Huan Jin, Li-Li Wang, Fang-Liang Zhang, Li-Jun An, Identification and characterization of reactive metabolites in myristicin-mediated mechanism-based inhibition of CYP1A2. Chemico-Biological Interactions, Volume 237. 2015

Bailey K, By A, Legault D, Verner D. "Identification of the N-Methylated Analogs of the Hallucinogenic Amphetamines and Some Isomers". Journal of the Association of Official Analytical Chemists, 1976.
Stein U, Greyer H, Hentschel H (April 2001).

Kelly BD, Gavin BE, Clarke M, Lane A, Larkin C (March 2003). "Nutmeg and psychosis". Schizophrenia Research.

Lichtenstein EP, Casida JE (1963). "Naturally Occurring Insecticides, Myristicin, an Insecticide and Synergist Occurring Naturally in the Edible Parts of Parsnips". Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

McKenna, A.; Nordt, S. P.; Ryan, J. (2004). "Acute Nutmeg Poisoning". European Journal of Emergency Medicine.

National Center for Biotechnology Information (2024). PubChem Compound Summary for CID 4276, Myristicin.

Nowak J, Woźniakiewicz M, Gładysz M, Sowa A, Kościelniak P (2015). "Development of Advance Extraction Methods for the Extraction of Myristicin from Myristica fragrans". Food Analytical Methods, 2015.

"Nutmeg (myristicin) poisoning--report on a fatal case and a series of cases recorded by a poison information centre". Forensic Science International.

Truitt EB, Duritz G, Ebersberger EM. "Evidence of monoamine oxidase inhibition by myristicin and nutmeg". Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine, 1963.

Venugopala, K. N.; Rashmi, V; Odhav, B. "Review on Natural Coumarin Lead Compounds for Their Pharmacological Activity". BioMed Research International, 2013.

===

Snively blinked.

He could barely remember the last time he read anything resembling an official publication- how many years ago had it been now? Julian never bothered to write anything down, declaring he wouldn't want others to steal his brilliance, and it wasn't like he kept in touch with any of the Overlander settlements to exchange research.

The writing was dry and technical, but well researched (and bizarrely cited too). There wasn't so much as a single note asking for anything in return. He wasn't sure exactly how useful the information would be, but this might be the first piece of information Robotnik's Rats produced that was worth their time.

===

"Mmmm…" Robotnik mused. He looked the paper over with narrowed eyes. "Acceptable. We should encourage this kind of work from collaborators, Snively. Track them down and give them a platinum Get-Out-of-Execution-Free Card. Non-transferrable."

 

[weredrago2]

Ruby Haze
Chapter 35: Tending to Flames

Okay.

I took a deep breath, held it for a couple seconds, and exhaled.

Time to talk to the Cult of the Ruby Flame.

As much as I tried not to think about how I had a cult, that was how I got into my current predicament in the first place. Best not to retrace my steps.

Admittedly, not everyone could say that they had a cult, or the problem of forgetting they had one. The Ruby Flame has been around for a while now, but the revelation that my hyena hirelings turned themselves into much more than that was more recent. I should've recognized the 'Nasty Hyenas' I picked up in Leonus as being related to the ones from SATAM and watched for the warning signs that they might get overly-attached to me, same as they did to Antoine in the cartoon. Instead, because they weren't ringing immediate alarm bells, and my mind was focused on other concerns at the time, they flew completely under my radar. Slipped into the background, even.

I couldn't say they were deceiving me in the same way those other Nasty Hyenas did to Antoine. Wes Weasley's communicator mistakenly filed their emails about the cult they were making under spam. However, that communication breakdown put me in an awkward bind. I was warping over to the Ruby Flame compound under what they likely imagined was me showing up to offer a live RSVP for the banquet being held in my honor next week. The banquet that'll be kicked off with my sacrifice under the pale moonlight.

Ignoring the parts of the situation that were self-inflicted, then this wasn't my fault in the slightest.

♦ 63

I touched down at the edge of what was initially a garage complex to store our burgeoning motorpool, where high walls of scrap metal were erected to keep trespassers out. The exterior was freshly-decorated with magenta glyphs and sigils that played off my own imagery. Spiraling geometric shapes and dazzling stripes, broken up by ornaments of metal and resembling monstrous mobini skulls.

"Really made themselves at home, huh?" I asked the rodent on my shoulder. "Makes you wonder where they got all of the magenta paint."

Brie withheld comment. She seemed a bit miffed that I'd managed to kick the can this far down the road, but I was more than a little worried that trying to talk the Ruby Flame out of going through with the ceremony was going to go over poorly. The Nasty Hyenas in the show didn't take it well when the Knothole Freedom Fighters prevented them from 'serving' Antoine, and the Ruby Flame getting violent was easily what I'd call a worse-case scenario.

I could beat them all in a fight if it came to it, or use my powers to force them to back down without raising a fist, but…

Was that not how I got into this mess? After unlocking the Phantom Ruby's ability to mesmerize people into submission, one of the earliest mobians to be exposed to it were the Nasty Hyenas that would become the Ruby Flame. For all I knew, my so-called cult got like this because I made them this way.

Just like--

--No. No. Bad train of thought. I can't have done that. I'm not like him.

I'm not that far gone yet to start mind-controlling people by mistake.

I cast the thought aside for now. One way or the other, I'd confirm it when I met Benzina and the other hyenas that were at the epicenter of my initial burst of power in person. If I could detect Enerjak's tampering with other peoples' minds, then I could just as easily see the markings of my own handiwork.

The Ruby Flame's shamaness of ceremonies, Benzina, was kind enough to forward me additional information on her sect in the lead-up to the next full moon, but for a cult that was allegedly about me, there remained an awful large number of holes in my knowledge. I attempted to ask for specifics on what the Nasty Hyenas thought about me by speaking to their members, but they tended to clam up in my presence, pointing back to the high priestess for specifics on 'doctrinal questions'. Couldn't avoid it any longer.

It wasn't like I could keep playing along, pretend that I was fine with the sacrificial ceremony, and fake being dead with the Phantom Ruby until they wandered off. The Ruby Flame were convinced I was some kind of divine figure, but they weren't dumb. Benzina the Hyena got this far because I assigned her to manage several construction projects around Sylvania Castle for me, which she got done in record time. The fact that she did all of that and started a cult while I wasn't looking meant I should expect her to remember that illusions are my bread and butter.

And give her a raise, too, depending on how this shakes out.

Even if the Ruby Flame bought that obvious lie, pretending that I'd returned from the dead early would only exacerbate the core issue: I was already uncomfortable with the concept of being worshiped before the Angel Island trip, and my experience there left an even worse taste in my mouth over the prospect.

I'm not Enerjak. I don't want to be Enerjak.

Hell, Dimitri didn't want to be Enerjak. He got that way because of an accident, and it ruined his life. All because the absolute power he never asked for hollowed out his soul.

"Hooooold on a tic."

Poor as the timing was, I realized then that I was down to nearly half strength. Stopping near the gate, I summoned my new staff from Null Space for a quick recharge.

◊ ♦ 75

Upon securing a shard of the Master Emerald, I looked up what I should do with it. The Ars Ixia advised that I construct an external implement to focus and channel the crystal's energy from, physically and mentally distinguishable from myself or the Phantom Ruby. A critical degree of separation, if I was to avoid my body undergoing what the grimoire called an 'alchemical breakdown', and what I called 'short-circuiting like a human battery'.

In regards to what I needed to make my staff out of, the book was less specific. I experimented with multiple materials until, inspired by my affinity for the element of fire, I went across the spectrum of card suits. Fire was one of the four suits in tarot, and fire's neighbor in the German deck was the humble acorn. Returning to the logging camp where I went on my first outing with Rob and the Crazy Kritters, I picked an acorn off the ground, charged it with Ruby energy, and buried it into the soil, where it grew into a scepter of petrified oak. Perfect size, shape, and weight for my requirements.

Not a bad way to get a scepter, if I did say so myself--

I felt a nibble on my ear, which served as a reminder from my familiar to stop dithering.

"Okay, okay! I'm going, I'm going."

Brie was right. I could only put off having a talk with the Ruby Flame for so long. Especially since, due to the whole Enerjak debacle, they had to delay the banquet where they were supposed to put me under the ritual knife from the last full moon to this upcoming one.

I was holding out hope that this could be resolved peacefully, but if not…?

◊ ♦ 100

The shard dimmed from a brilliant emerald to a dull gray. When it was exhausted, I shunted my scepter back into Null Space and hovered towards the compound entrance--

"--Shih Tzu said that, and I'd say he knows a little more about fighting than you do, pal, because he invented it!" a stern voice barked.

I turned towards the shouting across the field, where I overheard Sgt. Doberman partaking in the drill sergeants' universal pastime: Putting fresh recruits through their paces. At the moment, a dozen or so new recruits were performing drills with rifles. The sergeant knew how to fight, but he served best behind front lines as an instructor.

I flew closer to see how they were doing, over the micky's squeaking protests.

"This'll just be a minute, Brie," I reassured her.

"…so that no living mobian could best him in the ring of honor!" Doberman flipped up his helmet as I approached, making it easier for him to see me. "Sir Scarlet, sir!"

The trainees stopped what they were doing and saluted, though some of them were quicker on the uptake and better at handling their rifles than others. One rifle went airborne, and I caught it midair with an elongated arm.

"How's the training coming along?" I asked, trying the weight of the rifle for myself.

It was one of the battle rifles acquired from Wes Weasley. He said it was Former Overland kit, but the Great War was over a decade ago, and that was an increasingly-questionable artifice for where all this lightly used military hardware came from. The gun resembled a Belgian FAL that came straight out of the Cold War, complete with a wooden-stock. A bayonet was affixed to the barrel on the opposite end of the solid projectile weapon, serving as a sharpened bridge between the modern and the medieval.

"Few more weeks of basic and these soft, wannabe doughboys will be beaten, kneeded, and moulded into fighting shape!" Doberman declared, hand smashed into his fist for emphasis.

I handed the rifle back to the would-be infantryman who dropped it, who scrambled to get a grip on the weapon.

"I'll leave you to it, then."

Leaving them with a two-fingered salute, I took off back towards the gate.

"See?" I said, eying my shoulder minder. "I made it short."

Brie gave me a satisfied nod as I landed. By this point, the striped hyena in spots and the spotted hyena and stripes guarding the entrance were becoming a familiar sight.

"Yo Spots, Stripes!" I greeted the two hyenas I recognized. "Mind letting me in?"

"Of course, Scarlet Pasha!" Stripes answered.

The two guards scrambled to open the gate for me. As they did so, I tilted my head to the familiar on my shoulder.

"Hey, Brie?" I whispered. "What's with the 'Scarlet Pasha' thing?"

I heard some of the other Ruby Flame-types call me that too, but I was so bewildered with why they bequeathed me an Ottoman Empire rank that I didn't know where to start.

Brie paced back and forth around my neck, until the blurry outline of a red square with six lines sticking out of it took shape in my head. Four lines pointing down, one pointing upwards, one pointing back. I wasn't sure what she was trying to show me until the bottom four lines of the abstract form took off into a gallop.

"A horse?" I offered, comparing it to a memory of one I saw at a county fair years ago. "Why are they calling me a horse?"

The micky's projection became more complex, filling in additional details. Apparently, Mobius had mobini equivalents to horses after all. Or something close? They might be predators, actually, with the way these pony-sized quadrupeds were armed with fleshy beaks and big, slitted eyes reminiscent of cats or crocodiles. Kinda creepy-looking. Was that why? They had to be rather rare, if I hadn't seen any during my time here.

Tilting my head back up, I saw that the gate was open.

"Thanks," I said, walking, not floating, past the two of them.

I spared a brief glance to Spots and Stripes with my extrasensory vision, recalling that these two were the closest to me when I initially used the mesmerism power. If there was any lingering tampering, any long-term twisting of their minds akin to what Enerjak did to the Chaotix before I fixed it, then it'd show on a cursory examination.

My mind's eye blinked open. A surface read for supernatural influence, odd strains, serpentine scars, or diamond patterns, and finding nothing of the sort confirmed that they were clean. I let out a sigh of relief when it became evident that, whatever the Ruby Flame was about, they weren't doing it out of a mystical compulsion.

It was about midday, and the facility was bustling with activity. The original Nasty Hyena expats I'd acquired were constructing weapons and vehicles for the war effort alongside an assemblage of Mercians of various other species wearing their colors. My colors. A spectrum of pinks, reds, purples, and magentas, worn as patches, belts, scarves, or other accessories alongside leather jackets that kept out the cold. Some of their decorations integrated flakes of ruby crystal that fell loose from my constructs but remained coherent enough to be turned into jewelry.

Looks like they'd been recruiting?

Stepping past the threshold, it wasn't long until my arrival was taken note of. Blacksmiths, mechanics, and artisanal gunsmiths paused their work. The bikers taking their extreme gear for a spin slowed down to rubberneck. Most of the Ruby Flame members played it cool, acknowledging my presence with a smile. I awkwardly waved back in turn.

Others didn't play it as cool.

"It's the Scarlet Pasha!" a field mouse cried out, her voice full of elation.

"Praise be to the Badnik Breaker!" a duck hailed.

Hey, Badnik Breaker didn't have an awful ring to it--

"WE LOVE YOU, O GREAT AVENGER!" a rabid sheep bleated in my face.

I had to take a step back, almost stumbling away from the parishioner that jumped me. She was wearing, of all things, a shirt with a stylized emblem of my face on it that said RUBYCON 3235.

How did she get that? Is someone selling those?

Would it be better or worse if she made it herself?

"Ah, thanks?"

Her eyes opened wide.

"THE LIVING SAINT BLESSED MEEEEEEE~!"

The lamb fell backwards into the snow on the spot, twitching. I rushed over to help her, but I was warded away by a gruff badger with a pouch full of basic medical supplies.

"Does this happen often?"

"She's a fainter," the badger grumbled.

"Okay?"

I carefully sidestepped past my first confirmed 'Scarlet Stan', suppressing a shiver at the term as it was coined.

Moving on, I saw that the Ruby Flame not only built new fortifications and watchtowers, but they refurbished an old Walkerist church. The exterior of the building, like the outside walls, was decorated with magenta stripes and hexagons. Rather than replace the Ancient Walkers trine that went atop the temple, they polished it to a shine.

"Am I getting syncretized already?" I mused under my breath.

"Look, luv!" a woman proclaimed. "Sir Scarlet's come ta visit our rehearsal!"

I focused on the cybernetic butterfly and grasshopper that were playing a jaunty tune on an improvised sound stage, walking up the wooden steps to meet them.

"Presto? Cadence? What're you two doing here?"

"Practicing fer our set!" Presto explained, without offering much in the way of explanation.

Cadence paused her practice to tune her fiddle. The old instrument glowed with the bright red finish it received from the Phantom Ruby's repair spell months back.

"We heard there was going ta be a party, and what's a party without music?" the butterfly wondered.

"A dull celebration fer our fair wizard, that's what!" the grasshopper rejoined.

In other words, the Mercian bards were here for emotional support. That did put a smile on my face, if a strained one due to the circumstances.

"I appreciate the gesture, but are you guys in the Ruby Flame?"

They shook their heads.

"It's not our cuppa, fair wizard. Me n' Presto were raised Walkerist, n' with the Walkers we stay. No offense."

"Really, none taken."

"We believe in ya, sure, but not like…" Presto thumbed over to the sheep being roused with smelling salts. "That lass o'er there, ya know? After the cold shoulder ya got the last time we tried to hold three cheers for ya, we figured adding our musical expertise to an event in yer honor was the best way we could repay all the good ye've done fer Mercia."

"It really burned Presto up something fierce, the way some o' those villagers still treat ya like an outsider!" Cadence said.

He nodded fiercely.

"Ya bet it did!" Presto agreed angrily. "It's not like ya can help being an overlander!"

"Or a wizard!" Cadence added.

"Or being really tall 'n skinny like a scarecrow!" Presto supplied.

"Or talking ta yer funny critters more than ya do regular folk!" Cadence overshared.

Brie chittered irritably, giving the two bards pause. They looked at one another, and swiftly covered each others' mouths before one of them had any more insights to add to their lengthy list.

"You're too kind."

Figuring that she might have more tact than him this time, Presto removed his hand from Cadence's mouth first.

"What we're tryin' ta say is that, with my metal wings n' Presto's tin legs, we get bein' outsiders!"

They wouldn't be like this if it wasn't for me being too late to stop the roboticizer.

"Unn uf et wzn't f'r--!" Cadence removed her hand from Presto's mouth. "And if it wasn't fer ya saving us in the nick o' time, we'd be roboticized all over!"

Huh.

Almost… forgot about that.

Cadence took to the air on her VTOL jet wings, and Presto jumped after the butterfly on his spring-loaded legs.

"So if ya ever need a merry song to lighten yer heart!" Cadence started.

Cadence grabbed onto Presto, carrying him into a twirl.

"Or a jig to take a load off yer soul!" Presto continued.

"Look no further than Presto 'n Cadence!" they declared together.

I chuckled at how extra they were, even when not performing. Or maybe they considered themselves as performing any time they were in front of people.

"You practice that?"

"It's a new routine!" Cadence admitted. "Me old wings were too dainty to carry me 'n a feather, but the new pair might be able to lug around two of ya!"

Presto hopped from Cadence's arm.

"Took some adjustin' to the new legs, but these parts ain't so bad once we--!"

I heard a distinct pop as the grasshopper touched down onto the wooden floor, followed by the clattering of a small, metal object tumbling to one corner of the concert stage. Brie retrieved the thing before I had the chance to ask, depositing it into my hand.

Holding the item to the sunlight, I was able to identify it as the end gap on one of Presto's bionic knees.

"Presto, is this yours?" I guessed.

"Oh, that?" Presto replied nonchalantly. "Just one o' those pesky odds 'n ends that keeps fallin' loose! Mind helpin' me get it back into place?"

"…Yeah, sure."

I crouched down, trying to keep my expression neutral as I looked over Presto's cybernetics. They'd both been partially-roboticized for months now, and the wear and tear was becoming more prominent. Accumulated bangs and scratches were becoming harder to ignore. I could've sworn that the springs that gave his legs their leap clung tighter to his limbs the last time I saw them.

If I could repair Sir Bruin's steel jaw after breaking it, and charge that Big Arms mech with enough Phantom Ruby power that Metal Sonic could merge with it, then undoing the damage accumulated by Presto's legs should be well within my means. Once I had the cap in position, I screwed it into place with a mote of Ruby power behind the thrust.

♦ 90

The cap was enveloped in a red hue, sealing it tight. A pink bolt ran across the cap, tightening other loose screws, adjusting his coils, and performing a complete realignment along the joints connecting his metal parts to the organic ones.

Presto stood ramrod.

"Blimey!" he exclaimed, jogging in place. "I feel a fresh pep in my step!"

I rose to my feet.

"Cadence, could I give your wings a look-over next?"

The butterfly hovered close, a look of concern flashing across her face before she turned around to present her hoverjets.

"Something amiss, Sir Scarlet?"

I didn't go to school for this -- not that I expected it'd be of much use here -- but I could tell right away that Cadence was also suffering from a severe lack of maintenance. As a partial aircraft, her decay was in some ways worse than Presto's, miniscule sections having likely flecked off her wings from exposure or battle damage mid-flight.

How many sorties were they both away from a bad accident? Worse than that?

How did no one--?!

--No, how did I not think to deal with this sooner?

Thankfully, there wasn't a speck of rust in sight. The alloy was resistant to corrosion, so there wasn't a risk of tetanus for me to panic over, but unlike Knothole, the Mercian rebels didn't have a couple of robotics geniuses on hand to keep our cyborgs from falling apart.

"Nothing that can't be fixed," I reassured, preparing the same mending spell I did on her…

Uh…

Boyfriend? Spouse? No ring on either, but there's no way they're brother and sister. They couldn't be more of a lovey-dovey matching pair without being stapled together.

Hell, how old are they? 18? 19? Am I overthinking--?

I received a sudden nip on the ear.

"Ow!"

Brie squeaked for me to get on with it.

Fine, I reckon the word I could use here was… er… sweetheart?

Sure. That worked.

"Did ya do whatever ya wanted to do yet?" Cadence inquired. "Not trying ta sound ingracious, but I'm gettin' stiff floatin' in idle."

I placed my hand on the back of Cadence's cybernetic flight harness and poured a flush of crystalline magic through it.

♦ 80

A cascade of purple sparks ran across Cadence's steel wings, spots of ruby crystal growing into the gaps. For an enlightening moment, I could not just see her nerve endings connect to where the exotic machinery began, but feel the bond. There were parts of her that were insistent upon the metal wings still being a part of the whole, refusing to identify them as a foreign element to be rejected. Her body continued to support her wings and supply them with enough energy to generate thrust, as if nothing had changed before and after her aborted trip through the roboticizer.

How was that possible?

"G-Gracious!" Cadence sputtered out, shaking me out of the trance as I lifted my hand away. "I see what Presto was talking about! I feel like a million mobiums!"

"ME NEXT ME NEXT!" the sheep from earlier aggressively volunteered.

I turned around, intending to patiently explain to my very enthusiastic fangirl (who was waving her arms in order to be seen) that I wasn't obligated to take requests, only to be met with a large crowd that'd congregated around the stage while I focused on my magic.

Oh, $@&# me. I just did a miracle live on stage like a televangelist, didn't I?

"Whoops?" I offered meekly.

I could've said anything to them, because my gaffe was overtaken by awestruck applause.

"Gadzooks! Didja see that?"

"He healed them!"

"Praise be to the pasha of the Gaian spirit!"

"No, look! They're still half robot!"

Presto and Cadence cringed at the merciless comment from the peanut gallery. I imagined that they'd received their fair share of rough crowds during their previous time as bards, but this was a different flavor of hostility.

"So what? Maybe he can't!"

"He's got the power, don't he?"

"It's not that--" I started, before I was drowned out.

"Maybe they ain't worthy of being turned back!"

I felt my left hand clench. Brie was about to mentally project something to me, but--

Brie? I have this covered, thanks.

She held her tongue. Or mind, in this case. I cleared my throat, and used the Phantom Ruby to make myself somewhat easier to hear over the noisy audience.

"People? People. Some room, please?" The crowd parted in two directions, and I stepped off the stage, gesturing for the two bards to follow. "Thank you. I'll return to convene with the high priestess of the Ruby Flame shortly."

"Where'd you learn a trick like that?" Presto inquired, once we had some distance.

I'd like to say it was something I did as far back as my first encounter with Chat and Fifi, when I pretended to be a ghostly ball of the flame to scare the living daylights out of them, but the truth of the matter was speaking with a more recent source of inspiration.

"Something I picked up a while back," I said vaguely. "Makes people listen when I speak."

"Ya've got that right," Cadence contributed. "Real spooky voice."

We stopped at the entrance to a prefabricated repair depot.

"Try to take it easy from here on out," I warned. "I don't think the Crazy Kritters' Tinker is equipped to handle the kind of hardware you're equipped with. If you feel anything else coming loose, or just want to get something about your roboticized parts checked, don't hesitate to ask the people working here for help or come to me, okay?"

"If you think it's important, then sure!" Presto acquiesced.

Cadence nodded.

"Ya haven't steered us wrong yet, sirrah!"

"I need to head out to talk to Benzina. Presto, Cadence? Take care of yourselves, alright?"

"Will do!" they said in turn. "See you at the banquet!"

"See you there!" I lied.

I walked towards that renovated church, where Benzina was most likely to be, but I halted my advance when I saw an improvised sauna and massage parlor built out of one of the solar greenhouses. That was unexpected, but the more shocking part was one of the hyenas feeding Figment dried fruit while another one gave him a massage.

"Figment, aren't you supposed to be on patrol?" I asked, having stopped by to investigate.

"Lord Scarlet!"

"Scarlet Pasha!"

The mutant flicky removed one cucumber from his eye and lazily craned his head in my direction. He growled, and telepathically flashed me an image of him fighting Enerjak while my body was unraveling like a ball of crystal twine in the Sandopolis Desert.

"Sorry I said anything," I replied flatly. "You know you can ask for time off, right?"

He waved me off with a wing, delivering a few articulate squawks to Brie that she chittered replies to in turn.

"Fine, We'll check in later. Bandit here too?"

The rounded, purple hemisphere next to the bench Figment was laying on shifted his head in my direction, revealing where my enormous raccoon wandered off. One of the massage parlor attendants was feeding the gluttonous mammal the camp's excess food waste by the shovel full, which Bandit accepted with glee.

"Don't overfeed him," I advised.

"How do I know when the beast has had enough?" he asked pleadingly.

"Bandit, are you still hungry?" I asked him. He nodded enthusiastically. "Wrong answer. Take a walk and head back to Deerwood Forest for your patrol. Trust me, it'll be waiting for you when you're done."

Bandit frowned and marched away, inhaling a token morsel of trash for the road.

"What about Mort?" I asked my first, finest, and most frustrating familiar. "I left him in Hideaway in case anything happened while I was at the garden, but considering you wandered off from your patrol, and Bandit wandered off from his…?"

Figment made a caw that sounded a lot like an ehh.

"Brie, can you check for where Mort went?"

Brie made a squeak that sounded a lot like an ehh.

"Let me try."

Bringing my index and middle fingers to the side of my temple for a quick telepathic range-finding estimation, I could determine that the chicken was near.

It took a while for my other familiars to get the hang of the telepathic bond. I didn't know what was wrong with Mort that he never picked up my 'calls', but if I had to guess? Oxygen deprivation from temporarily losing his head didn't help.

This has been a stressful day already, and I've only been here for a few minutes, tops. All without actually seeing the woman I was supposed to be seeing in the first place.

"Brie," I ordered, extending my palm. My micky familiar read my intentions halfway, scurrying down my arm into my hand. "Take it easy for a bit, will you?"

She tilted her head in confusion, as I set her down on the stand next to Figment's.

"They're both hard workers, so watch them for a few, alright?" I asked the attendants.

"O-Of course, Pasha!" the attendant said, taking Brie off my hands and working out the stress she'd accumulated since she started working as a chao sitter.

I looked back in the direction of the church, which was crested with a weathervane that bore a striking resemblance to my missing Cluckatrice. The way its head turned had little to do with the physical weather, and was irrelevant to which way his body was facing, which told me all I needed to know about where Mort decided to roost.

"Cool, cool," I replied wearily. "If anyone needs me, I gotta go see a woman about a god."

- - -

Spoiler: Author Notes

The initial draft of 35 had so many ideas I wanted to get to, that I had a strong suspicion that it'd end up being broken in half. Lo and behold, here we are! This fic has several story arcs you can recognize. If the last one was the Enerjak Arc, then the current one is what I've been calling the Mandatory Cooldown Arc. It's necessary for the SI to unwind and not get into as much physical action as he did during the events of the Angel Island escapades, but that doesn't mean it'll be sunshine and roses! Especially because talking to the Ruby Flame has been something on his 'to-do' for quite a while.

I'm glad to bring back Presto & Cadence after so long. Not much to say about them here that isn't already in the chapter, but they're funny OCs I made that will continue to play a continued role in the fic. Their appearance here is a reminder that they matter.

My initial concept for 35 had my intended portrayal of the Ruby Flame go in a different direction from what you're seeing here. The full picture of what they're about will become more clear as we enter 36, so I might go more into that in the Chapter 36 Author Notes. While I usually have issues coming up with chapter titles, due to the next chapter so thoroughly spinning out of ideas I couldn't fit into this one, I can confirm that Chapter 36 will be called With Gasoline.

See you soon!

Don't forget to update the TV Tropes page!

Ruby Haze - TV Tropes

Waking up in orbit above a planet wasnât on Johnâs list of things to do. Nor was crash landing in Mercia and joining the Freedom Fighters. Fortunately heâs far from powerless, even if he is …

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Ruby Haze
Chapter 36: With Gasoline

Mort had seen better days.

It was, perhaps, the understatement of the century that my briefly-decapitated familiar had seen better days.

One only had to look at him to get the impression. Feet that swapped between unsteady and eerily balanced at odd intervals. Leathery wings that he fidgeted with when he didn't know what else to do with them, now that he had he didn't have feathers to clean. Slithering tail that dragged along the ground. Circular scar that ringed around where a local thought he was doing me a favor. His body from the severing line down was covered in red and yellow scales.

Red touches yellow, kills a fellow.

In this case, the adage didn't hold true. The clucky resembled a mythological basilisk after undergoing his ruby mutation, but Mort wasn't nearly as venomous as Figment. He was easy enough to coax off the roof of the Ruby Flame church with some gentle encouragement.

"C'mon, Mort," I said faintly, gesturing to get my familiar's attention.

The rooster turned his head away from the sun and towards me. Mort's head always bobbed or dangled to one side, but never stood straight. His two eyes were deep pools of crimson, in which floated two shiny coins for the ferryman.

Mort clucked in response to my call, trotting towards me. I took it as a good sign that he relaxed as he nestled into my arms. Big, harrowed eyes pierced mine, and I felt my body momentarily freeze up until Mort remembered to shut off his new power by breaking eye contact. He was still getting the hang of fine control on that, which was why I'd been considering a minder for him if I was ever indisposed of.

Unless he'd been resting with his eyes closed, there had to be a secondary mutation in the process that made him not need to sleep. While he certainly had seen better days, I'd never seen Mort get some shut eye.

Or blink. Mort wasn't much of a blinker, either.

"Were you looking for something up here?" I asked.

The chicken tilted his head back towards the sun.

"Staring contest?" Mort nodded. "You winning?" He nodded again. "Good job, Mort."

I levitated down from the roof and stepped towards the stone steps at the front of the old church. Hanging above the aged, wooden door was a metal charm of an outstretched hand, clawed fingers pointing downwards. A cloudy emerald sat in the center of the amulet as the pupil to a monstrous eye. The sign outside said that they were in the middle of the daytime service. Presumably, they rotated in cycles to account for work shifts. It also said the building was open to visitors, so I carefully opened the door and helped myself in.

This church was smaller than the cathedral that stood in Villa Stella, but it wasn't too cramped. In addition to the usual pews were other chairs and furniture lined up to a basic pulpit. The windows that the Ruby Flame couldn't repair or replace were boarded up, and in their place were rugs that hung along the walls. Angular, woven tapestries that were illuminated by candlelight, depicting the exotic beasts intermeshed in the motifs.

A furious serpent in faded blue dyes that splashed across the ancient fabric, a singular, green eye peering outward towards the world with unvarnished hatred. Another portrayed an alabaster eagle, yellowed with age. Nearly half of the carpet was lost to a long-forgotten fire, leaving the great bird incomplete. A third rendered a vast, black crocodile whose full mass lurked beneath the fragile strands holding the rug together, a vast jaw and dozens of arms reaching towards the sun in the center.

The symbolism of these tapestries wasn't exactly lost on me. Did Benzina think I was one of theirs? A god? A monster? A… pasha for one of those entities to ride as they saw fit?

Huh. That's almost what Princess Elise's situation was like. The living seal that kept the Flames of Disaster from spiraling… out of…

I didn't want to finish the thought.

Frustratingly, I came here to see if I could talk Benzina down from the sacrificial ritual and debunk any lingering belief that I was some kind of 'living saint' or nascent god, but the evidence to debunk either theory wasn't as spotless as I'd hoped for. I knew for certain that the spirit in the Phantom Ruby had a bone to pick with Enerjak; a being that I didn't recognize, but the spirit knew well enough to despise on a personal level. There was a history there, and one I wasn't privy to.

My own inquiries into where both Enerjak and the Phantom Ruby came from fell short, but when we entered the Phantom state, I started experiencing the snippets of another life through his eyes. A jackal with a life full of pain and violence, under the harsh sun. Whoever he was, before he became a possessing spirit cut from the same cloth as Enerjak, he was a person. Not a mindless animal, or a devil advancing a Machiavellian scheme, but a living mobian who had his own story to tell.

It was almost funny that, now that I was finally willing to listen to his side of things, the ghost had stopped talking to me for nearly a month.

I can't believe the silence in my head is starting to get to me.

"Close the door back there!" a woman called out. "Do you want poor Ethel to catch a cold?!"

I turned my head back to the bona fide congregation of dozens. Benzina the Hyena was standing at the pulpit. She was about four feet tall, with bright green eyes and a magenta mohawk that'd make a shadowrunner blush, which made it hard not to notice her presence. If that wasn't enough, a long, sinuous snake with a black mouth and eyelashes was coiled around her arms and neck. It looked like an extremely-lethal black mamba, but the snake was covered in too many scarves for me to be certain.

"Sorry!" I replied, hastily going back and closing the door behind me.

Benzina muttered minor curses loud enough for me to receive the impression that leaving the door open was a pet peeve of hers. Doubly so when her pet was involved.

"Mother Gaia and the Ruby Flame as my witness, if my baby has so much as a sniffle--!"

I withheld a wince as the crowd looked back and realized who the high priestess was shouting at. There were gasps all around. Benzina included, who looked especially aghast.

"I meant no disrespect!" Benzina started, head hung low in supplication. "One thousand pardons, Gaian spirit!"

I held up a hand.

"It's cool, Benzina."

She raised her head slightly up to look at me and the clucky I was holding.

"Am I, your high priestess, speaking to the divine spirit, or their pasha on this plane?" Benzina enunciated.

"Just me," I clarified with a wave. "Er, that'd be John Scarlet."

Her posture became measurably more relaxed. She smiled wide, her sharp-toothed smile only somewhat strained.

"Greetings, Mister Scarlet! What brings you with us on this fine day?"

"Just stopping by. Mind if Mort and I sit in?"

"By all means! Take a seat wherever one is available."

Trying not to cause any more disruptions, I sat near the front, next to a black sheep with a set of four dark horns. Two pointing up, and two curling down. I was initially surprised to find two of those wandering around here, only to discover that this ewe was the same one as before. Same shirt, and the same look of elation on her face from being in my very presence. The sheep was quietly vibrating with excitement, and she didn't even look perturbed at the creepy chicken in my hands.

"Settle down, everyone," Benzina soothed the crowd. "Should John Scarlet not be welcomed as a guest here, same as us all?"

The group was calmed by her words, though I could feel a sense of mixed emotions permeate the atmosphere. I was only trying to do a mental scan of the sheep to make extra certain she didn't get the backwash of a mesmerism spell, but my enhanced senses picked up the conflicting tides of positive and negative feelings swirling around the atmosphere. Initially, the shock of my arrival. Then came the awe. Some of that awe tinged with fear, while in others, it was respect or… adoration? I was feeling a lot of the latter in the next seat over, to the extent that it was almost blinding.

There was no sense of fear, anger, and disgust in sight. I could see from their eyes, faces, or a skim along their minds that their opinion of me was more positive than negative. There was a lingering sense of unease that faded as Benzina returned to her sermon.

"Now, where was I? Ah, yes. Persevering in times of doubt."

As Benzina spoke, I glanced out at the humble wooden table laid out in front of her podium. On it stood a dark red candle lit with a ruby flame, of a color I hadn't produced since I entered my Phantom state on Angel Island… or that charged-up mode I triggered against the Fearsome Foursome. I'd yet to come up with a name for that one, and I was hesitant to activate again due how drained I was left afterwards.

"There have been many times where I questioned my purpose in life. For those of you who are new to the Ruby Flame, my old pack and I were a former member of the Nasty Hyenas. Our ancestors were exiled from Leonus many generations ago, for crimes both real and imagined in the eyes of the lion king."

Any additional comments about having my own 'eternal flame' like Solaris set aside, that other transformation functioned differently from a super mode and the weredragon. It reminded me of Chaos Mode that Shadow entered whenever he removed his Inhibitor Rings. A lot of power in the short term, and a killer cooldown where I was vulnerable.

With how close to the edge I felt while overclocking the Phantom Ruby, Mania Mode felt far more appropriate.

The stone in question was pure magenta when I first got it, and the black streaks along the surface came later. Had the spirit in this not said I'd broken the limiters on the thing with that stunt?

"--feared as portents of danger and practitioners of foul witchcraft, opportunities outside of what we stole for ourselves became scarce. The hyenas became scavengers and bandits to survive, a reputation that only became worse when our own began forsaking their ancient vows. Taking more than we needed to sustain ourselves. Hunting mobians for sport, and twisting our ancient funerary rites into a game to be played on their prey."

I refocused back on the speech. Benzina paused to take a breath.

"For all that had changed for the Nasty Hyenas from our beginnings, I always kept the traditions that kept us in the good graces of the spirits," Benzina continued, a fire rising in her voice. "I warned Queen Petra that allowing those defilers to go unpunished, free to continue their reign of terror in our name, would spell disaster! And the actions I took to enforce order, Petra accused me of weakening the gang when we needed to be at full strength! For my faithful service, my pack was exiled from the whole!"

Benzina spoke with conviction. Briefly looking back, I could see that other hyenas in the room were affirming her statement. Nods of approval at her words, frustrated scowls at their past treatment. A resigned weariness over what happened to them. Her voice became softer as she proceeded to detail what happened next.

"It is a terrible thing, to feel the foundations of what was once stable and kept you grounded crumble beneath your feet. Like a hoverbike without handlebars, my pack became unmoored. Hopelessness clung to my heart like a heavy shroud, and I begged Mother Gaia for a sign. Any sign she hadn't so cruelly forsaken us as the Nasty Hyenas had!"

Oh.

Ohhh.

"Then, I saw it: A streak of magenta light over the midnight sky!" This was new. "I thought it was my imagination, but the others saw it as well! My pack raced towards the light, chasing it across the desert until it flew beyond sight!"

The audience was captivated by the tale, and to her credit, Benzina was a good orator. However, my mind was elsewhere.

How did they see the Phantom Ruby before I awakened in orbit?

Care to chime in now?

…

It was worth a shot.

"This is my favorite part," the sheep whispered giddily.

"The spirit led us where we would find temporary employment, but I held hope that there would be another message in due time. Indeed, our days of toil came to an end with the arrival of a mighty warrior with that same ruby flame lighting his soul! He broke us from our past, and inspired us to take on a higher calling beyond the life that was meted out to us! To fight back against the wickedness plaguing Mobius!"

"YOU'RE THE BEST, JOHN SCARLET!" the sheep praised. Into my ear.

I gave my well-meaning follower a smile, black talons scratching new grooves into the bench as I did so. Benzina cleared her throat, and the ewe let out a sheepish chuckle.

"Thank you, Faith. I could not have put it better myself."

The sermon wrapped up on a call for everyone not to be disheartened in spite of how dire the situation was. Holding faith that the things would some day get better, wrongs would eventually be righted, and justice would be inevitably served, as they kept to the rituals of the Gaian spirits was how the Ruby Flame would 'keep the flame alight'.

If it wasn't for the fact that I was the guest star in the sermon, I would've called it a fairly pedestrian service. Not at all what I was expecting from an alleged, self-proclaimed cannibal cult. There was definitely something I'd missed or overlooked, and I stood up to talk to Benzina when the service concluded to get that sorted out.

"Wait!"

Turning around, and looking down, I saw a rabbit. I didn't know his name, but based on his flannel, he looked like one of the survivors from Clan Argyle. Rather than purple or green diamonds, the pattern on his tunic was red like rubies.

"Can I help you?"

"Help me?" he said incredulously, taking my hand. "If it wasn't for you and those Crazy Kritters, my whole clan would've been roboticized!"

"Just doing the best I can," I replied, thrown off balance by the sudden praise.

I was able to detach myself from the handshake after several seconds, but another mobian got near before I could disentangle myself from the whole situation. A white weasel or mink in a faded purple surcoat and an Efrikan shawl, the two small children in her arms wrapped in a mud cloth blanket to keep warm.

"We almost caught our death of cold," the woman stated bluntly. "Few could farm during the growing season, and I had to sell my old furs to afford food when the famine came. These clothes, your food, this haven from the Sheriff… These are the reasons we withstood the winter. I don't think I could ever repay what you've given us freely."

"I don't want anyone to think that they owe me," I disputed.

Or, on that note, wanted anyone to think they needed to pray to me for help.

"You've done what our king couldn't," she remarked, more than a hint of bitterness creeping in her hushed tone. "If praying for your success and safety is the best I can do to repay the debt, then by the Walkers, I shall pray for thee."

"He freed me from the labor camp in the Outlands!" the sheep added, giving me some much-appreciated context on why she was like this.

"Me too!"

"Ripped off our chains and told us to rise up!"

"He said 'RISE UP' and showed us the way!" the sheep exulted.

"RISE UP!" the crowd chorused, parroting my words back at me.

This was surreal. The fact that I had to hold a mutant chicken in one hand while grateful mobians profusely shook the other was icing on the cake.

Was this one of those 'zero self-esteem' things? The whole 'shying away from positive reinforcement' thing, not the chicken. I was expecting more heads on stakes or -- not to be too mean to Faith -- more people like her when I was told that I had a cult.

I wasn't seeing either of those things. This was looking a lot more like my fan club. A fan club with some cult undertones, rather than one with cult overtones.

"Awright, give 'em some breathin' room, will ya?" a more familiar voice cut in.

They'd been standing near the back, but I recognized him and the mobian he was standing next to right away. One, the porcine man-at-arms in a dark, hooded cloak who spoke up. The other, a ram with curling horns and a tattered cape hanging loosely over his jacket.

"Arthur? Gilbert?"

I couldn't help but notice that, unlike Presto and Cadence, they'd taken to wearing hexagonal pendants on their necks. The group parted to give them space, though much of the congregation was already leaving after having their chance to talk to me anyway.

"Hail and well met, Sir Scarlet," Gilbert Whitehand greeted amicably.

"Hail and well met," I returned, the old greeting putting me at ease.

"Been a while since we've seen ye 'round these parts," Arthur Boar chided. "What took ye so long to come over?"

"Working on my studies," I deflected. "How have you… been?"

Healing Arthur and Gilbert was one of the first things I did when I got back to Mercia. Same with many others that had what'd otherwise been crippling injuries.

"We're in better health," Gilbert answered. He slipped off his glove to demonstrate the bright pink, branching scars from where the ring and the Ruby healed his laser wound. "The injury left its mark, but thanks to thine ministrations, I can use my hand again."

"And I can walk without those damned crutches!" Arthur affirmed.

There were successes and failures in the process, but with the rings working as a buffer, the worst that happened was that the most severe wounds remained as they were. Nothing got worse, and patients received a temporary reprieve from their suffering.

"Any lingering side effects?" I questioned. "Chronic pain? Unusual growths?"

"You're acting like a mother clucky, you know that?" he scoffed.

Mort clucked.

"They've been mentioned as side effects before. I have to ask."

"Nothing of the sort."

"Yer magic healed us good as new!"

I felt a weight shift away from my chest.

"That's… great. I'd love to stick around and chat, but I needed to talk to Benzina."

"Do check in with Rob when you can," Gilbert advised.

"I can stop by tomorrow, but did he need something specific?" I asked.

"Robert didst allude to the matter of a vault door?" he perplexed.

Did he finally decide what he wanted me to do with the orichalcum?

"We wouldn't have much of a kingdom left to be fighting for if it wasn't for you, 'holy man', so don't be a stranger!" Arthur warned.

"I'll… try."

They walked off, leaving me even more confused than before.

"Cluck," Mort clucked.

"Teach me your wisdom," the sheep beseeched the clucky.

Then there was the matter of Mort and the sheep that'd been shadowing me.

"Your name's Faith, right?" I asked, seeking to confirm if her name really was that.

"H-He said my name!" the sheep exclaimed, her balance wobbling. "I'm gonna--!"

"Please don't faint," I commanded in exasperation.

♦ 79

Faith's eyes rolled back to where they should be, and she found her balance again.

"Thank you, milord!" she resounded, eyes open wide.

"Faith, is Benzina still around?" I queried.

"Of course! She's in the back."

"Thank you. If you're not busy, would you mind holding Mort while I speak with her?"

"I'd be honored!"

"I appreciate it." I handed the sheep the docile cluckatrice, and she handled him with great care. "Try to keep his neck up?"

Faith sat down with Mort.

"Yes, Saint Scarlet!"

I was gonna have to talk to Friar Buck about that 'Saint Scarlet' thing, wasn't I? Make sure I wasn't giving the Crazy Kritters' chaplain a heresy-induced heart attack.

"Mort, don't give Faith trouble, alright?"

"Bucawk."

"Good chicken." Faith looked at me with expectant eyes. "Good, uh, bye?"

I headed for the back of the church, where I found Benzina sitting at a short table in an adjacent room, pouring two cups of hot tea.

"Mister Scarlet! I was worried that we would not be able to speak again until the ceremony."

Ethel, her black mamba, had slithered off the high priestess and coiled close to the space heater for warmth.

"It's regrettable that I haven't made more time for the Ruby Flame," I admitted, and it was very much the truth. "We should catch up."

"Mint tea?"

"You know what? Sure."

I took the offered mug. After how my nerves have been, the tea was appreciated.

"The people of Mercia hold the Great Mokele-Mbembe in great regard," Benzina commented off the cuff.

I recognized the mythical creatures she named from my old life. Giant cryptids said to live along the Congo Basin, which were conflated with sightings of sauropods in Africa. Or something like that. It took me a moment to process what she meant when she mentioned them, only being able to decipher the reference with my reading of Friar Buck's scriptures.

"You mean the Ancient Walkers?"

The hyena nodded. All three Tomes of the Ancient Walkers described them as being giant lizards, reptiles, or dragons wearing masks. I'd done some speed reading when the books got repetitive, but that part got drilled into my head enough times to notice--

That I have that Infinite-looking mask I got in the desert, and can turn into a dragon too!

#$%&! ^&*@!

I was feeling nauseous. I put down the tea before I threw up.

"The Three Who Stop the Flow of Rivers are known in Efrika, for they are the ones whose footfalls shaped the lands, but their worship is far more prevalent here," Benzina explained, glancing out towards the window as she spoke. "Many of them believe you were sent by their Walkers to save them from the conquering High Sheriff."

"I don't know about that," I said warily.

"I am inclined to agree."

I stopped.

"You are?"

"Of course! The Mokele-Mbembe are divine spirits of the sun, and you are a vessel for a spirit of the moon. It would be a trespass of the natural order, but for what it is worth, these are strange times. I would not say it is out of the question."

The sun and the moon. Yin and yang. Positive and negative forces, in a struggle for balance.

Light Gaia and Dark Gaia, intertwined.

"How did you figure out the, er, spirit is connected to the moon?"

Hell, when did she figure out I had a spirit in me in the first place?

She tilted her head in confusion.

"Is this some manner of test?"

"Let's go with that. How's about you lay out the clues for me, so we're on the same page?"

Benzina's face scrunched into an uncertain expression, but she proceeded to do just that.

"We hyenas have always been favored by the spirits of night," the priestess initiated warily. "They have sheltered us from those who would seek us harm for many years. I almost mistook you for a vessel for the Ziz of Disaster, with those great displays of fire, but the way you wielded the Ruby Flame to protect instead of destroy made me question that notion. I needed different confirmation of the spirit's affinity."

"How did you confirm that?" I questioned, pressing her for information.

I needed to know how she managed to so quickly figure out something I'd stumbled into after months: That the Phantom Ruby had an inherent affinity for the negative spectrum of chaos energy. I didn't think I was staring at her too intensely, but she shrank away from my gaze. I made an effort to try and soften my expression.

"The Gaians of the sun accept offerings of food and devotional dance for their attention, but are hesitant to interfere in the affairs of mortals. The Gaians of the moon are more willing to intercede, offering boons and secrets to those who are chosen to serve as their temporary vessels on Mobius, but they demand more in exchange for their services."

"How much more?"

Benzina poked her index fingers together awkwardly.

"You are the pasha for the Ruby Flame. Did He have any… insights to share into why our offering was rejected?"

"Offering?" I tried to think back to what she was talking about, snapping my fingers a few times to jog my memory. "Oh! You mean Mort?"

She looked away again, seeming very uncomfortable with the subject.

"The… clucky, yes. We usually do not have our mobini sacrifices returned to the realm of the living. Particularly not in such a state. Did we make a mistake with the ritual?"

"The ritual?"

"It was how I received my confirmation that the Gaian was one of the moon. A divine spirit of the sun's nation might merely ignore a mobini sacrifice they did not care for, unless it caused them great offense, but the Ruby Flame transfigured it into a new shape. The same as the other beasts changed by His power. I do not understand it, and it makes me… wary… of what may happen when we attempt the next sacrifice to earn his favor."

I tugged the collar of my poncho awkwardly.

"Actually, that one was my doing. Spur-of-the-moment thing?"

Her eyes opened wide.

"Have you-- Have you been keeping your distance because of a mistake we made in the Gaian's veneration!?"

"No, that's--!"

Benzina's facade of calmness around me crumpled, and she became frantically apologetic.

"Have I been leading the Ruby Flame astray in some way? Allow me to know what mistakes have been made so I can make amends with the displeased spirit!"

"Benzina, please." That got her to stop. Even the snake stood ramrod straight. "I'm going to ask you a question, and I need you to be honest with me."

"As a speaker of the Gaian's will, I would always be honest with you."

I felt bad about putting her in the spotlight like this, when Benzina didn't even seem that bad, but I had to bite the bullet before Brie started sending her bites telepathically.

"Benzina, has this cult ever engaged in mobian sacrifices?" I asked plainly.

"No, never!" she denied, looking horrified at the prospect. "It goes against everything in the old laws that the Nasty Hyenas were violating! But… if you are saying that is what the Ruby Flame requires of us for protection--!"

My eyes flashed magenta, ceasing that topic of discussion.

"No. I would've acted sooner if there was any indication of that happening, but I needed to hear it from the… pasha's mouth. Especially after you sent me the information about the upcoming ceremony."

"What of the ceremony?"

I furrowed my brow.

"Benzina, I'm happy to hear that you're against sacrificing mobians to curry favor, but you might have to explain why you also want to host a ceremony in which you'll be eating me!"

The hyena woman stood up and crossed her arms furiously.

"Mister Scarlet, that is a harmful stereotype!"

"But I--!"

She shook her head disapprovingly. Ethel hissed in agreement at the scale of my faux pas.

"Only a small number of Nasty Hyena exiles -- more than I'd prefer but let's not get caught on the details -- participate in mobian cannibalism!"

"But you're the one who--!"

"For shame, sir! I expected better from you!"

At a loss for words, I slid over my clamshell communicator and let my high priestess read over her own damn messages she sent me.

"'Cannibal', 'cannibalism', 'departed', 'ritual consumption of flesh'?" Benzina repeated, combing over the sections I highlighted.

"Got anything to say about that?" I asked.

The hyena steadily paled as she read on.

"Gaia Below, these emails are full of typos!"

What.

"What?"

"This instance of 'cannibal' was supposed to say 'cannable'," Benzina clarified, pointing to the relevant section on the device. "As in, 'we are a tribe of that prefers cannable food for eating on the go'?"

"I was shocked about how open you were on that one," I said.

"The next instance after that was meant to be cannabis."

Can't exactly throw stones there.

"What about the 'departed' in that paragraph?"

"The sentence should've read as 'we will fight for your honor after the wisdom you have imparted'! This draft makes it look like we are planning to kill you!"

I nodded.

"Uh, yeah! It kinda did look like you were planning to kill me!"

She slumped down in her seat.

"I see why you were so hesitant to meet with me after I sent you the RSVP, then."

"One hell of a spellcheck, huh?"

Benzina cackled. It was an unexpectedly friendly cackle.

"I blame Wes Weasley."

"Good idea. I really should've done this sooner, though."

"Perhaps! But I was too afraid to approach you as well, because of what I feared would provoke the Gaian spirit to wrath."

"Sounds like there's been a lot of miscommunication going around," I confessed. "Look, maybe we can just start this whole thing all over again?"

"How so?"

I stood up from my chair, one hand extended. The right one, and not the one with the Phantom Ruby.

"Howdy. I'm John Scarlet. I've got a ghost inside of my head that doesn't talk much, but you seem to think it's some kind of divine spirit. As much as I've tried to refute that, and provide evidence to the contrary I don't think I can anymore. That scares the hell out of me, and I think I need a high priestess to help sort this out."

Benzina looked at me, bewildered by my sudden rush of earnestness that flew in the face of whatever she thought the Ruby Flame and I were about. Nevertheless, she accepted my hand and gave an introduction of her own.

"Greetings. I am Benzina the Hyena, high priestess of the Cult of the Ruby Flame. We revere a powerful Gaian spirit of the moon and the element of fire. Not only do we revere the spirit, but we follow the leadership of the hero whose body is his pasha." She paused. "Also, we only practice funerary cannibalism on consenting parties."

I was glad she mentioned it now instead of later.

"So, what now?" I asked. "Since we're taking it from the top and being more honest with each other."

"You could tell me more about the Ruby Flame?" Benzina asked eagerly. Not quite as eager as Faith, but she was obviously curious about the entity.

"He's been giving me the silent treatment for a couple weeks now, but I can take it from the top with what I last remember?"

My high priestess let out an inquisitive hum.

"If the spirit has been dormant, then perhaps we could use the ceremony next week to draw him out? Music and dance may be a more preferable means to draw his favor?"

This was the best I could hope for out of the whole thing. Instead of having a cannibal cult, I just had a bunch of people who loved me for saving their lives, instead of just associating my face with the people who caused the last and current wars. Some of them literally worshiped me, but now I was going to be around to get them to knock it off.

In spite of this being the best-case scenario, I still predicted this whole Ruby Flame business would be a pain to sort out.

After all, they didn't make magic crystals I could drain to recharge my social batteries.

"I'll sleep on it, okay?"

Might even get some better sleep tonight than I did last night.

- - -

Spoiler: Author Notes

This chapter was a long one coming, in terms of setup and payoff for the Ruby Flame.

Surprise! The Ruby Flame isn't evil! They're mostly composed of somewhat normal people with flexible belief systems who like John Scarlet, as it's revealed that Scarlet has bad self esteem that caused him to initially misattribute people liking him to them being under malicious influence, and Wes Weasley's instant messenger has a terrible autocorrect!

The charm on the church door was inspired by the hamsa. It's a protective amulet used to ward off the 'evil eye' and other curses. The hamsa has variations based on what part of the world they're found in, but it often takes the form of a stylized hand with an eye in the center. The not-quite-a-hamsa in this chapter is meant to invoke Dark Gaia, but its purpose remains analogous to the real thing. It was Dark Gaia or Doom's Eye, and I was already saving Doom's Eye for when I had someone make a God's eye.

For those who missed them: The creatures in the tapestries were stylized interpretations of Perfect Chaos, Solaris, and Dark + Light Gaia. In that order. After showcasing some odds and ends of the Walkerist religion of most of the fic thus far, I'm glad I have the chance to show a faith with much stronger Gaianist leanings.

Stay tuned for the next chapter!

Sweet dreams!

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Ruby Haze - TV Tropes

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