Tails of Brave Adventure Chapter 1: Retrospect, a sonic the hedgehog fanfic

TAILS OF BRAVE ADVENTURE
S Peter Davis

All characters (C) SEGA, Archie and SP Davis 2006.
Used without permission
Apologies about the screw-up with the beginning of this chapter. Fixed now.

---

This was not the way it was supposed to end.
He was on a gurney, but he couldn't see who was pushing him. His head was a drugged-down lump of lead on a rubber neck, he couldn't move an inch. Fluorescent lights on the ceiling marched past his vision as he floated along the hallway in a white bed. The people around him had no faces. No... they were wearing masks. Blank, white masks. Dozens of eyes stared down at him and he tried to speak but he couldn't. He wasn't even sure he was making a sound, because his ears didn't work. The world was a reel of film without a soundtrack.
This was not the way it was supposed to end.
To understand how he had arrived in this situation was a futile effort. He couldn't remember. His past was a blur to him as a dream becomes vague and incorporeal upon waking. The mountains... ah, but even they were slipping away into that dark abyss, now. Besides, what relevance did the past hold when his present was what it was? His quest was surely lost. He had failed his family and himself. His failure was utter and total. It didn't matter what became of him, now.
This was not the way it was supposed to end.
Now he was in a room... a white, sterile room without windows. He watched the masked people above him as they handed various silvery instruments back and forth to one another. They were all wearing rubber gloves and blue plastic coats. He was completely paralysed, unable to do anything but watch, but nevertheless he could feel his flesh creep underneath his skin as he was lifted onto a white table, a soft pillow slipped under his head. A bright light was switched on above him.
This was not the way it was supposed to end.
One of the faceless strangers stood over him and held up something that glinted in the light. He knew his father had died in vain. There was no justifying his life, which had been so fleeting and pointless that he couldn't even remember it by the end. He tried to say this; he tried to announce that it didn't matter what they did with him now that his purpose had been terminated, because without his destiny he was just a sack of rotting meat in a freak's shell. But he couldn't speak. The drugs had numbed him. He could only lie in wait.
Tails was awake and watching when the scalpel came down.
This was not the way it was supposed to end; but this was how it began.

---

RETROSPECT

---

10:00 am

Tails Prower stood alone in the pine forest. A breeze blew back his fur and rustled the pine needles, and this was the only sound. The forest was empty, and so too was his mind.
How did I get here?
He frowned and shook his head. How very strange. He seemed to have lost his train of thought.
(you've lost a little more than that, buckaroo)
Through the trees up ahead, he could see buildings. Just a glimpse. Two white towers stretched overhead. It must have been Joe's airport... finally, he had arrived. He couldn't wait to greet his old friend, sit down for a meal and talk about current events and planes. He could see the goal ahead of him... so why did he feel so lost?
"Overdraw," he said aloud. The word was lodged in his brain like a splinter. He looked down and realised he was holding something. A little gold-painted toy, made of iron or something stronger. There was a key in its back. Why did this look so familiar to him? Where had he picked it up?
"Okay, get yourself together, Tails. Keep your eyes on the finish line. Keep your mind on the quest."
It had been four months since Tails had parted company with his uncle Tyler. They had travelled together for a few weeks through the Westerican plains north of the Great Forest, but Tails hadn't followed his uncle all the way to Catilina. Speaking with Tyler at length about his father and his legacy, he had come upon an insight as to his own purpose in life.
Tails had left the Freedom Fighters because he did not belong with their cause. With Sonic gone, he felt about as useful as a shovel after the handle has fallen off. There was no meaning in what he did in the Great Forest. Tails had learned of a place where his actions would have meaning, where he could truly make a difference for good; This place existed over the ocean. It was his birthplace. The Kitsune Atole.
Over a decade ago, Trevor Prower had made a vow to the people of the Atole, his people, that they would return to free them some day from the tyranny they endured. This was his promise, one that he would never get to honour. Instead, he laid down his life for his son, far away from home.
Tails, in turn, became the inheritor of this promise. He swore to take on his father's burden, to honour the vow he had made, and to return to his people, to set them free. This was his responsibility as his father's son. This was his destiny. This was truly to be his quest, not Sonic's, not the Freedom Fighters'. He couldn't allow his father's death to be in vain, as it surely was for every moment that Tails spent fighting for a cause that was not his own.
Tails had spent the past quarter of a year preparing himself for what he was about to undertake. He settled in a town called Point Adrien on the north side of the Great Forest, and there he lived, performing odd jobs here and there, building up some savings with which he could purchase the things he needed for his journey. It seemed he had forgotten what it was like to live in the public eye - he had forgotten the disgusted looks and snide laughter that he attracted from strangers. In New Knothole, everyone had known him, everyone had been comfortable. Here, he became a novelty again. The weird mutant kid. When he spoke to people, often they would conspicuously avert their eyes, or worse, reply very slowly and smile a lot as though an extra tail meant that he suffered some kind of mental deficiancy. People were such idiots. Tails didn't much enjoy his short sojourn into the outside world, but he did begin to feel already as though he were truly making a difference. When the time came to leave Point Adrien, he packed his supplies for a long hike into the Kirandul Range.
That was where he stood now.
The Kitsune Atole lay over the ocean and his only method of reaching it was stored in a hangar deep within the mountains. Flightless Joe, the eccentric hermit and aerial enthusiast, with far too much money to know what to do with it all, lived in seclusion in a mountaintop airport along with his vast collection of flying machines. Tails' journey would take him there, and then straight on to his destiny.
But something had gone awry somewhere along the way. Tails stood without his pack, he couldn't remember where he'd left it. All he had was this strange gold statue. Joe's airport was up ahead of him, and yet he didn't dare approach. It felt wrong, somehow.
Tails had images in his head. He didn't know what that meant. Something about hiking through these mountains had apparently thrown him into a temporary state of insanity. He hoped it was temporary. He didn't want to see these images forever. He didn't want to see the black squid flying over the trees. He didn't want to see the ugly talon clutching at his shoulder. These things were madness to him. He didn't want to see the wolves spreading their wings for him to see. It was not an image for a sane mind to hold.
Now he stood in silence without any insight into his own recent past. He'd lost some time, he didn't know how much, but it was enough for him to have lost his belongings and acquired this strange statue. He looked at it, dumbfounded. He rattled it with absent ignorance, like a simpleton trying to rediscover fire.
It was now that he became aware of a presence around him. He wasn't alone in this forest anymore. He felt watched from every angle, surrounded. Ambushed.
There was nowhere he could run. Even if he tried to make it to the buildings up ahead, he knew they would catch him before he got anywhere. Trapped by his own confusion, he did nothing, merely awaited the inevitable. He dropped the metal toy in the grass, where it lay upside-down and motionless.
People were walking out from behind the trees. Each of them a dark silhouette against the long shadows of early morning. They were all dressed the same, in dark uniforms with large helmets and powerful guns strapped to their chests. Dozens of them, all heavily armed, as though it would require an entire army to take him down. Every one of the soldiers had a beak. They each aimed their weapon at Tails from a distance and waited.
Somebody else was stepping out from the foliage and approaching him with crisp, slow footsteps. Pine cones crunched loud under the stranger's feet. Another bird, though he didn't wear any helmet and instead bore a crest of dark plumage upon his scalp like a ceremonial headdress.
"It's over, yes?" the stranger said, and held out one winged hand as though a peace offering. Tails knew it was anything but.
"This isn't the way it was supposed to end," he replied, forlorn.
"This is the way it always ends. There is no escape from us, do you understand? You are so far below us that we tread you beneath our feet, yes?"
The strangers from the forest led Tails away in chains, and he wept for the entire journey. His cause was lost before it even began. This was not the way it was supposed to end.

---

9:43 am

He sat on a log and rested his head in his hands. He thought about the journey that lay ahead of him and smiled. Would his father be proud of him, to know what Tails was doing in his honour? Would Sonic be proud to know that the young boy he had loved and protected for so long had grown into an adult, and was walking in his footsteps? He sighed, and wished they were all still around to see him take up his destiny.
There was movement ahead of him, and Tails figured it was a wild animal. When he looked up, he was shocked to see another mobian standing nearby, looking down at him.
"Oh, hey!" he exclaimed, "Who are you?"
The stranger appeared mildly frustrated about this inquiry. He just grunted, put his head down and murmured "Dalziel." He pronounced the word Dee-ell.
Tails cleared his throat and was about to say more, but he hesitated. Was this guy familiar to him? He was a fox, the same race as Tails except that he was older, and there was an aura of familiarity about him. A very strong aura. "Let's not wait much longer," he said, "I don't know how much time we have. We're almost there."
"Huh." Tails was distracted by a sheet of paper in his hand, folded over twice. He couldn't remember picking this up.
In fact, he couldn't remember much of anything that had happened recently. The wilderness of the Kirandul mountains had all blended together into a kind of blur after a while, and he felt as though he'd blacked out for part of the journey. Was it possible he'd met this stranger before, and somehow it had completely slipped his mind? The guy seemed to know him.
Tails opened the folded paper to find that it was a dirty note, smudged with mud and addressed to him. Where had this come from? What was going on? His lips moved as he read the scrawled words written in unfamiliar cursive:

Hello, Tails!

I'm afraid you've been in an unfortunate accident, and have received an injury to the head. A symptom of this injury is a temporary loss of short-term memory function. Do not panic! You are in safe hands. With plenty of bed-rest, you will recover full recognitive functionality. I will return to check on you later. You might like to make use of your time by

- writing down anything you remember about yourself, e.g. where you came from!
- feel free to look at any of the books in the room but please take good care of them
- get some sleep! (there was a scribbled smiley-face here)

Take care,
Marx Templeton, esq. (NOT a doctor! ha ha)

Underneath, he saw a further collection of scribbles, and even more amazingly, this batch he recognised as his own handwriting. He hadn't even the vaguest recollection of any of this, and not a single word of what he read made any sense.

Ask wolf brothers RE: escape town. Secret hole - ?

OVERDRAW (?)

"Remote robot" is IMPORTANT. Ask STANLEY.

Finally, in a third and almost illegible script, another note was scrawled:

TRUST DALZIEL (dee-ell)

Tails looked up at the famliar stranger standing nearby. "Is your name spelled with a 'Z'?" he asked.
"Yes," the other replied, "D, A, L-"
"This is you!" Tails exclaimed, "On this note!"
"Yeah."
"Well what the heck is going on, here? I don't remember writing this! Some of it is in my own handwriting!"
"What does the note say?"
"I don't understand any of this crap! It says I have a... what, a memory problem? I remember everything just fine!"
"Do you?"
(-wound down again, buckaroo-)
"Yes! I-"
(-you can't stay here, exile-)
Tails put his head in his hands, his mind reeling and spinning. As soon as his fingers touched his brow, he detected something strange. Something was wrapped around his head. Bandages. He cried out and began to tear them off.
(-you won't be harmed, yes?-)
What were these voices in his head? What was going on?
"Calm down," said Dalziel, "You have to listen to me, okay? You have to trust me. I'm your friend."
"I don't know you!" Tails yelled.
"Yes you do. Trust me, okay? Listen. Your memory has been taken from you. There are some very powerful people who want to get to you, and they're nearby. You have to let me help you. I'm going to get you to safety."
Tails looked down at the sheet of paper again. He felt as though the line between dream and life had broken down and the residue of his wildest dreams of adventure were seeping out to infect his reality. Being persued by powerful enemies who existed only in theory, speaking to an imaginary ally who bore an uncanny resemblance to himself. What could this be if not a dream?
But he could smell the scent of wildflowers, could feel the rough, dry texture of the paper between his fingers. A dream could not so imitate the sharp clarity of the senses. If he pierced himself he would feel the pain and bleed. This was reality. Somehow, this was happening.
"Who is Marx Templeton?" he demanded, "Who is Stanley?"
"I don't have a clue," Dalziel replied, "Except that what they've told you is absolutely right. You have a problem with your mind, Tails, and without my help you're going to stumble right back into their trap."
"I'm not going anywhere with you! I need to get to Flightless Joe's airport!"
"That's exactly where we're going. Look, I'll show you." He pointed through the canopy, and Tails squinted, trying to see past the foliage to what he was supposed to be looking at. He saw something white, towering above the trees. Two points of white, two buildings. Towers.
(we'll have to wind each other up, buckaroo)(exile)
"I've seen those before," he said.
"Joe's airport," Dalziel replied, "We're almost there, now. Just a couple more miles. If we leave now then we can make it before they get here. But only if we leave now."
"Flightless Joe..."
Joe's face flashed before his eyes, laughing. The laugh quickly became a scowl and Joe's face turned black. His beak sharpened, a sharp crest grew out of his scalp like feathered darts.
The two towers... the remote robot... the wolf brothers... overdraw...
"Are we going?" Dalziel demanded.
"Yeah... yeah, if you're going to take me, then take me."
He followed the older fox through the scrubland until it thinned out into a wood of pine trees. The ground was flatter, here, less rocky, covered in fallen cones. Tails could see the two white towers some distance ahead, among other buildings.
"They're familiar," he said, "But I don't know they're familiar for the right reasons. Something's strange, here."
"Hurry up!" Dalziel hissed, "They're coming!"
Fear began to well up in Tails' heart and gut. He couldn't see or hear the invisible, nameless enemy. The pine trees rose up around him like sentinels, and in the strangeness of the situation he wouldn't have been too surprised if they moved to attack him. Anything could be possible. Reality had taken a holiday.
"Run!" Dalziel shouted all at once, and Tails found himself running. He imagined a darkness behind him, a sea of ink, rushing through the trees, consuming the grass and the bushes and the rocks and everything behind him. And could he trust anything that he imagined to be false or fictional anymore? Dalziel was shouting that he had to make it, that he had to keep running and never look back, just keep running toward the towers. He said that he was going to fall back and try to hold them off, but that Tails was going to have to keep going forward without him. Tails was nearly in tears, but he didn't dare stop, he couldn't, or else...
Or else...
He slowed his pace. Why was he running? Why was he crying? It almost felt as though somebody had been shouting at him, chasing him, but when he turned around, nobody was there. Nobody at all. He stopped entirely and looked around while he struggled to get his breath back.
A silent pine forest spread out around him. The fallen cones crunched beneath his shoes. There was a wind rushing through the branches and a sudden gust took him by surprise, ripping something from his hand that he didn't even know he'd been holding.
Just a scrap of paper. It blew upward into the treetops as though the trees were its home and family; danced among the branches and the pine needles and vanished.
Something else was moving through the canopy. Tails wouldn't even have spotted it if he hadn't been watching the paper blow away. He thought at first that it was a bird; it moved with clear, though drunken, deliberation. But it didn't have any wings. Tails saw that this creature flew in much the same way that he himself did, using a circular rotor above its head. He was so taken by this oddity that he almost failed to notice over the rushing wind that the thing was calling out his name.
It descended quickly toward him, and Tails feared it would collide with his head. Instead it stopped inches from his face so that he could see at last what it really was. A robot - almost like a toy, a little thing coloured all in tarnished gold with a cute mockery of a face and two pointed ears that gave it a distinct pig-like appearance. Its eyes glowed, nothing but bulbs in their sockets.
"Tails!" the thing exclaimed with a tinny, digital impersonation of a voice. "I found you! Thank heavens I found you!"
"Tock," Tails whispered, and held out his hands for the thing to land. He didn't know how he recognised the little robot, the memory was like something from a dream. "You're back."
"Stanley Templeton," the robot told him, "In Quarantine. You helped me. I have to help you! You're in danger! An ambush... oh, no..."
"I don't know who you are," Tails said, "I can't... I can't quite remember... It's fading out of my head..."
"I'm winding down!" the thing exclaimed, and its voice started to slow and deepen, like a stretched-out audio tape. Tails saw that it had a key turning in its back, as though filled with clockwork, and it was slowing as well. "We're both winding down! Quickly! Crank me up! I have... to... warn... you... I... ... have ... ... to ... ... ... help ..."
Tails reached for the key but stayed his hand. The wind rustled the pine needles like a hundred brooms sweeping the sky. It was the only sound.
What am I doing?
He was alone. Alone in the wood but for the statue lying in the palm of his hand. And what was it? Though he'd seen it before, the specific memories eluded him, retreated from him into the abyss, the darkness.
What am I doing here?
Tails Prower stood alone in the pine forest. A breeze blew back his fur and rustled the pine needles, and this was the only sound. The forest was empty, and so too was his mind.

---

8:40 am

He slept through the night, and woke up to somebody tapping him with a foot.
Tails groaned and batted limply at whoever was disturbing him. Then he frowned and slowly opened his eyes. There was somebody standing above him, a fox, the same as himself except older. Tails dragged himself to a sitting position, and found that he'd been sleeping in a puddle of mud. It was dried and caked in his fur.
"Wasn't sure I was gonna find you again, kiddo," the stranger said, "Real glad that I did. Thought you might've gone and got yourself caught."
"I know you," Tails said, and he was sure that he did, although from where he couldn't say. He was still tired and confused.
"Yeah, you do," the other replied, and offered him a hand. "Do you remember me?"
Tails took the hand and let the familiar stranger help him to his feet. "I don't- I can't really remember who you are. Just that I know you. Is that weird?"
"You've got a problem with your head," the fox said, and tapped Tails' head for emphasis. "Had some memories taken out. My name's Dalziel, does that ring a bell?"
"I'm not sure," Tails replied. He cupped his head where the fox had touched him, and found that his entire cranium was tightly bandaged up. He felt a throbbing pain somewhere underneath. "Did you say I had... memories taken out?"
"You're wanted by some pretty powerful people," Dalziel said, "They're everywhere around here. Searching for you. That means we have to get going."
"No, no-" Tails stammered. "Wait... I was hiking, and-"
An image flashed through his mind. A black squid, flying over trees.
"You don't remember them," Dalziel insisted, "They made sure of that. Are you feeling okay? Do you know what happened to you yesterday?"
"...Kirandul Range. I was hiking through the mountains, and-"
Another image. Someone shining a torch into his eyes, he couldn't see past the light. They were just silhouettes, standing around him like doctors. He grabbed his throbbing head and groaned. "I don't... I don't know what's happening..."
"Listen to me." Dalziel held him by the shoulders and looked into his eyes. "We're going to get to safety, okay? I'm going to get you to Flightless Joe, to the airport. You can be looked after, there. You'll be out of their reach." Tails noticed that something was wrong with his right arm, but when Dalziel noticed he was staring, he turned modest and covered the arm up, obviously sensitive about it.
"You know Flightless Joe?" Tails asked.
"Yes. Let's go."
They started walking hurriedly toward a patch of thick scrub. Tails was limping due to a sharp pain at his ankle, and all at once realised that it was from something sharp lodged in his sock. "Wait," he said, and reached down to extract it.
Strangely, the offending object was a ballpoint pen. There was something else, as well - a folded piece of paper. He opened it up to find that it was a note.
Dalziel stood at his shoulder while Tails read through it. This was bizarre, the note was addressed to him and detailed a number of things in both his and someone else's handwriting.
"Temporary loss of short-term memory function," he whispered. "This is so weird, is this... is this a prank? I don't remember any accident, I was- I-"
"You've been writing yourself notes," Dalziel said, "Good. That'll help you to keep track of things. They want you to be confused."
The other fox took the note and the pen from him, and scrawled a message of his own at the bottom. When Tails took it back, he read over the new amendment.

TRUST DALZIEL (dee-ell)

"You spell your name with a 'Z'?" Tails asked.
"Yeah. Blame my father, he had the affinity for stupid names. Who is Marx Templeton, do you remember?"
"I don't have a clue. I've never heard of him."
"Could be one of them. Be careful what you read, they'll send messages to try and mislead you, try and bring you back to them."
"Who are they? What are you talking about?"
They started to hurry through the scrub again. Dalziel sighed. "You keep asking and I keep telling. Let's just say they have a vested interest in recapturing you, and they have the resources to make it happen. As long as you stick with me, we have a chance of beating them."
"But that's ridiculous!" Tails protested, "Nobody even knows I'm here! And why would anybody want to capture me? I haven't done anything to harm anyone!"
"You're thinking in terms of your old memories, the things you knew when you came here. There's a whole block of time that you have no memory of, it's all been erased."
"Erased! How much time?"
"I don't know. Might be days, might be weeks. Hurry up! I don't know how much time we have."
Tails wasn't used to trusting strangers without any reason for doing so, but this situation was just too bizarre to be able to figure out any other plan of action. It seemed just a few minuates ago he'd been hiking through a patch of mountainous terrain with his pack on his back, and now a stranger was leading him through the scrub, telling him that his memory had been erased and that he was in grave danger from some powerful unknown threat. If not for the fact that he felt as though he knew this guy so well, he would be inclined to write it all off as garbage. But his mind was very confused with itself. There were images in his head that didn't make sense, memories of things he'd never seen. It was almost as though he'd blinked and now his life didn't belong to him anymore. It was too bizarre for him to handle.
After walking for an hour, neither of them saying very much to each other, Tails announced that he was tired and they simply had to rest a moment. Begrudgingly, Dalziel conceded, but only if they only stayed a moment. Tails wasn't even sure why he needed to ask. What authority did this stranger assume over his journey, anyway? Who was the stranger? By now, Tails couldn't even recall his name.
He sat on a log and rested his head in his hands. He thought about the journey that lay ahead of him and smiled. Would his father be proud of him, to know what Tails was doing in his honour? Would Sonic be proud to know that the young boy he had loved and protected for so long had grown into an adult, and was walking in his footsteps? He sighed, and wished they were all still around to see him take up his destiny.
There was movement ahead of him, and Tails figured it was a wild animal. When he looked up, he was shocked to see another mobian standing nearby, looking down at him.

---

11:23 pm

Tails awoke when somebody grabbed him. At first he thought it was a part of his nightmare, but it was immediately evident that two dark figures, very real ones, were attacking him in the night.
He tried to cry out, but something was stuffed in his mouth. It tasted like a dirty sock. He fought tooth and nail, and actually seemed to give the attackers more of a fight than they had expected. He seemed to hurt one of them, who cried out, and the other reprimanded him for making too much noise.
They overpowered him, however, and dragged him out of bed. He only had a few seconds to question why he was in a bed in the first place, before one of the attackers (probably the one he'd hurt) whacked him in the head. The blow hurt a lot more than it should have. Tails was completely stunned, he saw an explosion of light and a galaxy of stars, and fell limp in his assailants' arms.
The two figures didn't seem to be very strong, the two of them combined still found it awkward to carry him, and Tails wasn't very heavy to begin with. They dragged him down a flight of stairs (stairs?) and out an open door into the biting cold of the night. He started to fight again, but one of the attackers asked him if he wanted another whack in the noggin, and he ceased resisting.
Tails was dragged some distance before he heard a sound like somebody messing with a chain wire fence, and then he was dragged some more before he was left in a puddle of mud.
As soon as his attackers moved away from him, he spat out the sock and started coughing.
"We're sorry," someone said. Tails lifted his head and squinted to try and see who had attacked him. The silhouettes of two young wolves stood on the other side of a chain wire fence. Their voices betrayed them to be possibly even younger than Tails.
"You just can't stay here. They'll punish us if they find you. You have to stay out there, with the rest of the exiles. Don't come back."
Tails just lay there in shock, resting off the pain in his head. Already it seemed as though what had happened to him had been a dream. The memory seemed vague and insubstantial, fading from his mind as memories of dreams tend to do. Had he dreamed of a house? Nonsense. He was in the outdoors, now, where he always had been. He closed his eyes again and curled up against the cold. He slept through the night, and woke up to somebody tapping him with a foot.

---

12:53 pm

Tails swore to remember. That was his only way out. He had to remember... what? He lost his train of thought and frowned. It was this darn throbbing pain in his head, he couldn't think straight. He figured he would take a walk to clear his head, and when he opened his eyes he expected to be inside a tent... but his heart skipped a beat when he discovered he had no idea where he was.
A wood ceiling lay above him. He was lying on a bed, in a strange house. He didn't recognise the place at all.
Tails knew that the mind occasionally played tricks immediately after waking, he had often forgotten where he was when sleeping in a strange place. Had he reached Joe's home and stayed the night? He didn't recall. Minutes passed, and he still did not recall. The room he was in was still unfamiliar. He didn't even think he'd really been asleep.
You must have been asleep, Tails, people don't just close their eyes and forget where they are.
It'd come back to him. It had to. Tails sat up in bed and had a look around.
He was in a small room, somebody's bedroom, lined with bookcases. Most of the books were on subjects related to medicine. Textbooks and journals. There were also novels, encyclopedias and other things. Whoever lived here was an avid reader, and clearly not much else. Besides the bookshelves and the bed, there was only a desk and a window.
Totally unfamiliar.
This is ridiculous, Tails thought, and put his head in his hands. It was then that he noticed something wrapped around his head. A bandage. It covered everything above his eyes except for his ears, and there was a dull, throbbing ache underneath. He couldn't remember injuring himself. Another discrepancy. It was as though he was channeling a life that wasn't his own.
He stood up and walked to the closed door, but when he wiggled the handle he found that it was locked. No latch, either - it was a deadlock, a keyhole on both sides, and he couldn't see a key anywhere in the room with him. Great, so he was a captive, as well. Why couldn't he remember how he got here? Had he been drugged and kidnapped?
He went to the window. What he saw outside boggled him even further - a town, like a little village, stretched out before him. People wandered back and forth along a cobblestone street, chatting and walking together as they went about their normal daily routine. The unusual thing about these particular people was that they were wearing clothes so ridiculously out of fashion that they seemed better suited to a time about which some of the more elderly Freedom Fighters often reminisced. Tails tried to get their attention, but nobody could hear him through the glass. Eventually he gave up and sat on the floor, groaning. Still no closer to figuring this out.
Something odd was sitting on a side-table by the bed. He edged closer to see what it was. A toy of some kind, a little metal statue that vaguely resembled a pig. It attracted his attention because it was the only thing in this room that he found familiar. It was a strange object, out of place, and it held some vague kind of significance for him. Why could he imagine it flying around and speaking to him? Maybe he'd dreamed about it. If he'd been drugged, he probably hallucinated all sorts of bizarre stories about the objects in this room.
The statue was being used as a paperweight. Tails lifted it and held the sheet of paper up so he could read it. A note, addressed to him.

Hello, Tails!

Take care,
Marx Templeton, esq. (NOT a doctor! ha ha)

The note was aggrivatingly unspecific. Who was this Marx Templeton and under what authority did he presume to hold Tails against his will? What, exactly, did a temporary loss of short-term memory function imply? What kind of accident had he been in? Just where the heck was he, and how long was he going to have to stay here?
Was that why he couldn't remember where he was? He got a knock on the head and lost his memory? Memory loss was a terrifying concept to him, because a person's entire reality was constructed from his memories. Without memory, his reality was constructed from the testimonies of the people around him. By this Templeton character. It was times like these when Tails wished he had stayed with the Freedom Fighters, with his friends. If something like this happened while he was surrounded by people he trusted, then he would at least know that what he was being fed was the truth. As it stood, these people could tell him literally anything.
Short-term memory. He supposed that was something of the cognitive equivalent of being far-sighted rather than near-sighted. He could remember things that happened a long time ago, but not things that happened recently. This made sense because he remembered the entirity of his life with perfect clarity right up to his journey into the Kirandul Mountains, but anything that happened recently, including this supposed accident, was a mystery to him. It was as though an editor had taken a pair of scissors to the film-reel in his head, cut out a chunk of indeterminate time and stuck the two ends back together. His hike in the mountains felt like it had been yesterday; heck, ten minutes ago. But how long ago had it really been? He certainly wasn't in the mountains now, there weren't any towns like this in the Kirandul Range, at least not to his knowledge.
Tails looked again at the paperweight. It was actually some kind of robot, it seemed. The key sticking out of its back indicated that it might do something. Why was this thing significant to him?
(we need to wind each other up, buckaroo)
He picked it up and turned the key a few times, but the toy didn't do anything. It made a few sick grinding noises and then ceased. Not the revelation he was hoping for.
There was a sound at the door - a key being turned in the latch. Tails propped his head up, defensive and wary. The door opened very slowly, and three heads poked around it from the other side. Three boys - two wolves and a raccoon. They were all around his age, he thought, though the wolves might have been older. They just stood there in the doorway, staring at him like he was a bizarre kind of insect, or a surrealist piece in a museum.
"Who are you?" Tails barked after a moment. He knew those stares only too well, they were the stares of people who had already labelled him a freak in their minds.
"I'm Richie," one of the wolves said after a moment. He introduced the other wolf as his brother Thomas and the Raccoon as Stanley. Then they went back to staring.
"Do we know each other?" Tails prompted. They shook their heads 'no'.
"You're the outsider," Stanley the raccoon said, "My Dad says you're sick. He says you might be an exile."
"You can't stay here if you're an exile," Richie added, with obvious venom, "They'll punish us if you are. They'll take our stuff away. They might even hurt our parents."
"What are you talking about?" Tails demanded.
"Not allowed to keep exiles in town, that's what they say," the wolf insisted.
"What do you mean by 'exile'?"
"The people who live outside the fence. They're really bad people 'cause they're ugly and they got all these like germs and stuff."
"My Dad says you might be an exile," Stanley said again, "Because you're different from us, and you've got defects. And nobody's ever seen you before."
Tails' body temperature rose slightly at the accusation of defects, but he bit his tongue. "Outside the fence," he said, "What fence?"
"The fence around the town," Richie replied. "It's all locked up so the exiles can't get in."
"And you're not allowed outside of it?" Tails asked. This was bad news - a fence meant that he was imprisoned in this town, even if he escaped the house.
"We're not supposed to," Thomas said, "But we found this hole in the fence nobody knows about, and we-"
Richie nudged his brother hard with an elbow. "Shut up!"
The two wolves began to argue in whispers, and Tails took the opportunity to scribble a note to himself, in the event that his memory should fail him again. A pen had been left on the side-table, and underneath Marx Templeton's note, Tails jotted:

Ask wolf brothers RE: escape town. Secret hole - ?

"If you're an exile then you can't stay here," Richie told him again, and this time he sounded more threatening. "They might exile my Dad if they find you."
"Who are you afraid of?" Tails asked. "Who's in charge of you?"
"They- they make us better-" Thomas stammered. Richie nudged him again, more softly, and Thomas put his head down and looked glum.
"Overdraw," Richie said. "Overdraw's in charge. He's not a nice person, he likes to take stuff away from us and hurt us. He's much meaner than the others and that's why we have to follow the rules. That means no exiles."
The word 'overdraw' triggered a distinct twinge of familiarity deep within Tails' mind. He couldn't pinpoint where he had heard it before, but it was important. He jotted it down on his note and underlined it. If Overdraw was in charge, then who was Templeton?
"And who is Marx Templeton?" he asked.
"He's my Dad," Stanley replied, "This is his room, but he said you could have it for now."
"Does he run things here? Is he an authority in this town?"
Stanley seemed to find this a very strange question. "No, uh... only the Armada do all that."
"My Dad says he knows you're an exile," Richie said, and this time he pointed an accusing finger at Tails.
"I'm not an exile!" Tails barked, "I haven't been exiled from anywhere!"
"My Dad says he knows," the wolf insisted, "You're an exile, 'cause you don't have Alteration Seventy-Six. If you were from Quarantine then you would. All the kids in town have Alteration Seventy-Six."
"What the heck are you talking about? I don't-"
Richie lifted his arms over his head, and Tails' breath caught in his throat. He nearly choked on air. He began to question his own sanity, because he quite literally could not believe what he was seeing.
Richie had wings.
They weren't proper wings, like those that you'd see on a bird. They weren't even quite like a bat's wings. They were something like flaps of flesh and skin that ran from his wrists down to his waist. Tails hadn't noticed them before because they were covered in fur like the rest of him, and they seemed to drape close to his body when his arms were by his side. Lifting them like that seemed to stimulate muscles inside the flaps that spread them out like sails. For a moment, Tails thought he'd misidentified Richie's race, that he really was some kind of bat, but then his brother showed his own set of wings - and, reluctantly, so did Stanley the raccoon.
"They- They make us better," Thomas stammered.
"Good God!" Tails exclaimed, and instantly felt bad about it. He knew better than anyone the pain of growing up with a mutation and having people scream out profanity at the sight of him. But this was no random mutation, this was something much more. Three kids, one of them not only unrelated but a completely different species to the others, sharing the exact same defect? Richie hadn't called it a mutation, he'd called it an alteration. What on Mobius had happened to these people? Where had he been brought?
"Dad said all the kids who didn't get it were exiled," Richie continued, "And you don't have it, that makes you an exile. So you better not stick around here, got it?" With that, he put an arm around his brother, and the two wolves left the room. Stanley was about to follow them, but Tails called out to him.
"Wait! Wait a second!"
The raccoon stopped, and reluctantly turned to him.
"Where am I?" Tails asked, "What do you call this place?"
Stanley shrugged. "This is Quarantine. This is our home."
"And this Overdraw, he's somehow responsible for you having these... these alterations?"
"Oh, no," the raccoon replied, "Not Overdraw. He just upholds the law."
Tails glanced at the little robot on the side-table, and felt the same sense of familiarity he experienced earlier. "Do you know what this is?" he asked Stanley, and lifted the toy to show it.
"Yeah," Stanley replied, and shrugged again. "It's a remote robot. And old one. They don't use this kind anymore."
"What do you mean?"
Stanley took the robot and passed it slowly from one hand to the other. "They use them to watch us and stuff, make sure we're following all the rules. See, this kind is clockwork. You wind it up with this key. They don't use the clockwork ones anymore because they got something better, but the new ones, they don't have any personality. These ones are like people, but some of them are mean." He gave the key a few good cranks, and when nothing happened, he frowned. "It's busted."
"Where did it come from?" Tails asked.
Stanley shrugged again. He did that a lot. "You had it with you when you came here. Dad said he thought it might have had a message on it, like the Armada sent you here or something, but it doesn't work and Dad says you've forgotten anyway 'cause when he asks you about it you say you don't know."
"This thing is important, for some reason. I think it's a key to finding out what's happened to me, these memories I've lost."
"Well, I could fix it for you."
This caught Tails by surprise. "Really?"
"Sure... I mean, maybe. I guess so. Depends on what's wrong with it. I know all about this kind of thing, it's what I'm interested in. They teach us anything we want to know, because they want us to learn stuff. I've taken these things apart before, they're real easy to fix. Real easy to break, too, which is why they stopped using them."
The wolf brothers Richie and Thomas appeared in the doorway again. "Stan!" Richie shouted, "Come on!"
"I gotta go," Stan said.
"You don't have to," Tails replied, "Don't let them boss you around."
"It's better if I do." Almost as an afterthought, he took the remote robot out of Tails' hands. "I'll try to fix it, okay?"
After the kids left, Tails wrote some more notes to himself.

"Remote robot" is IMPORTANT. Ask STANLEY.

He almost placed the sheet of paper back on the side-table, but then he thought twice. What if somebody decided to take it from him in the night? If he was to dig his way out of this hole, he was going to have to make sure that he had access to the truth. He folded it up into a small finger of paper and slipped it into his sock. He hid the pen the same way.
Tails reclined on the bed (Templeton's bed, someone he may as well never have met) and tried to relax his mind enough that he might remember something. He stared at the ceiling for a while and then closed his eyes. The attempt backfired on him, for it was only a few minutes before he couldn't quite remember who he'd recently been speaking to, or if he'd actually been speaking at all. He forgot the room, forgot the note, forgot the horrid alterations of the children in the town, forgot the town. His thoughts wandered bit by bit until he found himself wondering how much longer it would be before this hike was over and he arrived at Flightless Joe's airport. Then he fell asleep.
Tails' slumber was plagued with nightmares. In his dream he was running through a field, desperate to escape something that was much faster than he was. To his left he could see two white towers stretching to the heavens, but he knew they held no sanctuary for him. He stole a backward glance to try and see what was behind him, but all he saw was a sea of black. Whispering voices emanated from it like miasma.
(-stupid retard-)
(-an exile, yes?-)
(-overdraw-)
And all at once, Tails realised what the black ocean was really doing. It was eating his past.
Someone was running beside him, now. He didn't recognise this person, and yet he did. He was a fox, older than himself, and dressed in tattered rags.
"Things aren't as they seem, Buckaroo," the fox told him, and he grabbed Tails' shoulder with a hand that looked like a bird's talon. It was a bird's talon. The familiar stranger transformed into a bird right before his eyes, and took off flying. He wasn't wearing rags at all, he was in a neat military uniform, and he hovered a few feet away, looking down at Tails from above.
"You won't be harmed, yes?" he screeched, and then darted down with his clawed talons out in front of him, a bird of prey going in for the kill.
Tails awoke when somebody grabbed him. At first he thought it was a part of his nightmare, but it was immediately evident that two dark figures, very real ones, were attacking him in the night.

---

12:17 pm

The world was a chaos of lights and echoes, faces both familiar and unknown to him. As he drifted in and out of the darkness, whispered voices told him that everything was going to be all right.
An explosion of intense light woke him, and as he squinted to adjust his eyes, the world slowly came into focus around him.
Tails was lying in a soft bed with his upper body propped up by many pillows so that he was almost sitting. There were several people around him, none of whom he recognised. The source of the light was a tiny torch inches from his face, being shone into his eyes by a raccoon. He batted the torch away, very weakly, and sat up straighter, rubbing his eyes with the other hand.
"Who are you?" he asked.
The raccoon chuckled as though he'd said something witty.
"Yes, indeed."
"What?"
The stranger clicked off the torch and reclined. He was modestly dressed in an old-fashioned suit with a thick, black moustache that trailed across his jawline, and a small pair of spectacles that he adjusted on his snout. "You must have asked me the same question a dozen times, now. At least now, we finally know why."
"What are you talking about?" Tails asked, "I've never seen you before! Any of you! Where have you brought me? What am I doing here?"
"Calm down, young lad. I'm afraid you've been in an accident."
The situation finally became clear in Tails' mind. He'd been hiking through dangerous territory, and through some foolish escapade he'd managed to injure himself, had been lucky enough to be found by a passer-by and had woken up in hospital. Quickly he tested all of his limbs and appendages to make sure they were all still there and he could still feel them. He was relieved to find that he seemed to be relatively intact, although his whole body ached and there was a bandage around his head.
"If I may introduce myself once again," the raccoon said, "My name is Marx Templeton, I'm somewhat of a medical professional here in Quarantine, although we don't usually have much need for doctors as I suppose you can imagine. Though I don't want to make light of your condition, I have to say it's exciting to have a patient of my own, for once."
Tails looked around the room at the dozen-or-so strangers who had gathered around. They were all dressed in fairly elaborate clothing that seemed fifty years out of fashion. The room itself was cosy and personal, more like somebody's home than a hospital ward.
"What kind of accident?" he asked, putting a hand to the rough dome of bandage that was the top of his head. Two holes had been cut for his ears.
"We may never know, I'm afraid," Templeton said, which puzzled Tails somewhat. "You've been wandering around for quite a while out there, compounding your problems. Multiple blows to the head, from numerous causes. You've got a pretty harsh case of concussion, that's why you fainted. You need some bed-rest, stop running into things for long enough to heal up."
"I don't remember fainting," Tails said, "I don't- I don't remember any accident."
"You have a condition known as anterograde amnesia. I've read about the condition, but of course, I've never met a sufferer personally."
"Amnesia? No... No, I know who I am." He remembered that Sonic had been under the spell of some kind of amnesia when they had first met. The hedgehog hadn't known how old he was, or even his own name. Tails' memories were as lucid as they always had been. His passion for this quest was as strong as ever.
"There is more than one form of amnesia," Templeton replied, "Your condition affects your short term memory. You see, the memories that you already have stored away, things you remember from right up until roughly the time of your accident, these are memories that you keep. What's happened is that an acute head trauma has inhibited your brain's ability to save your short-term memories, and as such, everything that's happened between the onset of the trauma and now is lost to you. Every time your attention shifts from one thing to another, your memory is erased. In a few minutes, you won't remember this conversation. You won't remember who I am or where you are, and you'll ask all these questions again."
Tails frowned. It all sounded crazy, but of course it explained the haze that shrouded his recent memory and the mystery surrounding his presence here.
"If this is true," he said, "Then I could have been wandering around mindlessly for days, or even weeks, and I wouldn't even know it. Everything I've done, it's all gone."
"The bump on your head is relatively fresh," Templeton replied, "I'd say it's a few days old, a week at the latest."
"And are you telling me that I'm going to be like this for the rest of my life? That I'm going to... forget the rest of my life?"
"Oh, mercy no!" Templeton laughed, and Tails was slightly offended by his mirth. "No, most of these cases are very temporary. I can already tell that you're starting to carry some of your memory forward."
"But you're not a doctor," Tails said firmly. He was beginning to grow flustered, overcome by the seriousness of this situation and the flippant way with which he was being treated for it. It was almost as though this Templeton character was more interested in the academic value of Tails' condition than in helping him treat it. He felt as though he was being observed like a rat
(hamster)
in a cage.
"Well, I- No, I-" Templeton spluttered, "I've read about all this. I've studied very hard, this is what interests me, you see. The Armada give us books, anything we want, anything at all. They like us to study, they want us to learn. To elevate ourselves."
"That's just great, but do you have any real doctors I can speak to? Qualified professionals?"
The blank looks that his inquiry attracted, from Templeton and from everyone else, dampened his spirits.
"No," the raccoon replied at last, "Not here, not in Quarantine. The Armada provide us with all our medical needs." He laughed again. "It'd be pretty stupid to make one of us a doctor, when they're looking after us! That'd be like giving a zoic chimp a Ph.D!"
The others chuckled at this, too.
"Okay, fine, then can I talk to the Armada?" Tails asked, "Who are they?"
Templeton's smile drooped. He looked at Tails as though he'd just said something in another language, then leaned in close, adjusting his spectacles again.
"My boy," he said, "Where are you from? I only ask this, because... well, to be honest, nobody I've spoken to seems to recognise you. Very distinctive, too, a child with two tails. Even if you were an exile... but oh, we would have a bit of a problem, in that case, wouldn't we!" He chuckled uneasily, his voice wavered.
"I don't know what you're talking about. I don't come from around here, I came here looking for the airport."
"The... airport?"
"I'm looking for Flightless Joe."
That blank look again for a moment, and then another uneasy chuckle. "Oh, we're all flightless here," Templeton said, "They say that's just the problem with us. You go ahead and have a rest here for a while. You've gotten yourself quite knocked about, doing whatever it is that you've been doing."
"And am I going to forget all of this?" Tails asked, "How long before I completely forget everything you just told me? How am I going to get over this thing if I don't even know what's wrong with me?"
"I shall write you a note, and leave it beside your bed. I'll keep this door locked, for your own safety. Just so you don't go wandering about in a daze, and go get yourself in trouble again."
Tails was very adverse to the idea of being locked in a room by these people, who seemed only a few steps shy of crazy. What if they never let him out? It was easy for Tails to frighten himself with the possibilities. For all he knew, he'd already been trapped in here for a year, trapped perpetually in this torturous memory cycle, unable to even recognise his own imprisonment. The fake doctor might drop in once in a while and have this conversation with him, just to get a kick out of his reactions.
"Okay," he said. What else could he do? "But can you leave the pen with me?"
"Sure."
While Templeton scribbled on a piece of paper, Tails probed his mind. Maybe this thing was psychological, mind over matter. If he could just force himself to remember this, maybe he would. Could he remember anything of the past few days?
"Here you are," Templeton said, and he placed the sheet of paper on a bedside table, using a very strange metal toy as a paperweight. "Now we'll clear out of here and let you have some rest, okay? I'll be back a little later to find out how you're doing."
All of the strangers began to file out the door. Templeton was last, and before he exited, he turned to Tails one last time.
"I'd really like to talk some more," he said, "I'd like to find out where you're from."
He closed the door behind him. Tails sighed and closed his eyes, wondering if he would ever get to Kitsune Atole. Somewhere nearby, his plane was sitting in a hangar waiting to be used. Flightless Joe didn't even know to expect him, so there was little chance of a rescue. Nobody knew he was here. Nobody at all. If he was going to get out of this, he was going to have to do it himself.
"I have to remember," he said. "I have to stop-"
(winding down, buckaroo)
Tails swore to remember. That was his only way out. He had to remember... what? He lost his train of thought and frowned. It was this darn throbbing pain in his head, he couldn't think straight. He figured he would take a walk to clear his head, and when he opened his eyes he expected to be inside a tent... but his heart skipped a beat when he discovered he had no idea where he was.

---

10:02 am

When he looked up and saw the village, it was new to him, and so pristine that it took his breath away. The charming little cottages were spaced out in rows along cobblestone streets and impossibly green, lush parkland. In the center was a large fountain spouting crystal-clear water in a beautiful symmetry. People were milling about in slightly old-fashioned clothing, chatting and laughing. Children were playing skip-rope in the park. The smells of bacon and pancakes wafted in a delightful cloud over the whole setting, carried though the chimney-smoke. Tails wondered if he'd died in his sleep and woken up in the suburbs of heaven.
Where did this come from? Had his mind gone blank? He'd only been hiking in the mountains a moment ago, or so he thought, and then his memory went hazy, then went completely, and then he woke up here. As though aliens had sucked him through a wormhole and deposited him in the village at the end of the universe.
But such a pristine little utopia it was, such a temptation, that he found himself wandering toward it anyway. At the very least he could find out where he was and what was going on.
The people of the village did not appear pleased to see him. Faces drooped, confusion reigned as he walked down the street. Someone dropped a ball and didn't try to pick it up, and it rolled to his feet and stopped there. Did these people ever see outsiders? Why did they look so wary of him? He couldn't possibly be less intimidating. He smiled and waved at the people, but only the youngest children gave a favourable response. The rest just stared.
"This is too weird," he muttered through a hopeful smile.
As he walked, Tails was aware of a queer sensation of lightheadedness. He put a hand to his temple and found that it was quite badly bruised, though he couldn't remember how he had injured himself. The world began to swirl around him, the faces all melded into each other. He fell to his knees as everything drifted out of focus.
Tails was aware of the presence of people, they gathered around him but didn't lend a hand. They simply watched him wilt like a shrub in the heat. As he dissolved into the abyss of his own mind, those who meant the most to Tails paraded themselves before him. Sonic, his father, Tyler, Joe, and the Freedom Fighters gathered with a sympathetic smile. They laid their hands down to catch him as he fell.
The world was a chaos of lights and echoes, faces both familiar and unknown to him. As he drifted in and out of the darkness, whispered voices told him that everything was going to be all right.

---

9:18 am

When Tails opened his eyes again, he couldn't seem to recall exactly what he was doing.
Just a slip of the mind, he decided. A momentary lapse in reason. He had been travelling for days, after all.
He was holding something in his hand, he realised. It was about the size and shape of a large rock. He held it out and looked at it - strange. A little metal toy, something that looked like a robotic piglet, tarnished with age and caked with clods of dirt. Something he had picked up? When? Where was his mind?
No matter. The expanse of the Kirandul Range spread out before him, untamed bushland and rocky wilderness. Somewhere ahead was his destination; it wouldn't be long, now. He hadn't too far to go.
Something was amiss, however. Something didn't seem right. He had the distinct sensation that he was being watched.
Tails turned around to allay his fears, but what he found lurching over him only made his blood run cold.
It was a wolf. The beast was almost the size of a bear, with inch-long spurs digging into the ground from each of its paws. It stared down at him with hungry eyes, ropes of saliva dripping from its foaming mouth. Its hide was unkempt and mange-ridden, its breaths rasping. Easily the biggest animal Tails had ever seen, and it was clearly insane and hungry for blood.
Tails held his hands up, trembling despite his best intentions (they can smell fear! his mind insisted) and backed away as slowly and carefully as he could, trying not to break eye contact.
After a few moments of this, the monster frowned, and barked "What?"
Tails could have screamed. Was this a mobian? It was almost inconceivable. He'd never seen an anthric mobian whose features and mannerism so resembled that of a zoic animal that it could be mistaken for one. Yet it seemed possible, with a little consideration. And of course, animals couldn't talk.
Mobian or not, the wolf put a fear in Tails that chilled him to the bone.
"Don't hurt me," he said, "Please."
"I ain't gonna hurt you," the wolf snarled, and then he grinned devilishly. "I could."
"He's forgotten again," said another voice, and Tails saw that there was yet another stranger here. A fox, the same as him, but older and dressed in rags. "Calm down, Tails."
"You know my name? How do you-" Tails was officially freaked out. He started to back away again. "Just keep away from me, okay?"
"Come here," the fox said, "I need to tell you something."
"Tell it to him," Tails replied, motioning toward the huge wolf. "I'm outta here, okay? I'm leaving."
With that, he turned and ran. He wasn't about to get mugged and left for dead by a couple of mountain winos, that was certainly not how he envisioned his demise. He fled down the side of a rocky embankment, through the heavy bushland, dry branches digging into him and trying to hold him back. Were the strangers following? He couldn't tell, but he wasn't about to stop.
When Tails reached flat land, he slowed his pace. This wasn't what he expected to see at all.
He'd arrived in a large valley, outside some kind of village complex. The facility was bordered by a wire-mesh fence that looked to be about forty feet high, and studded with barbs. Loops of razor-wire were threaded along the top of it for good measure. Tails could have believed that it was some kind of prison, if not for the fact that the complex inside appeared pristine, almost heavenly. The buildings were some distance from the fence, and he could see people milling about inside. They didn't appear to be imprisoned or unhappy. The fence was a total enigma.
But there shouldn't be any buildings in the Kirandul Range! he thought, There shouldn't even be a valley like this!
Perhaps his information was out of date. It had to be. Someone had managed to find enough space in this harsh wasteland to build a settlement, and it looked as though they'd made a very good job of it. But what was with the fence?
Tails forgot his concerns with the strangers in the mountains as he tried to figure out the mystery of the caged settlement. As he stood at the fence, holding onto the mesh and staring through it, somebody came up behind him and startled him with a grizzled voice.
"Forget it, kid, you're never gettin' back in there."
Tails turned around to find an elderly rabbit dressed in rags, held up by a makeshift crutch. He was in terrible shape.
"I was never inside," Tails told him, but the rabbit screwed up his face and looked at him as though he was a creature from outer space.
"It's you again!" he barked. Then, more loudly, "Pedro! It's the recall! It's the recall!"
Someone put a meaty arm around Tails' neck and another around his waist, and he cried out in alarm. Whoever had him was very smelly and very strong. The old rabbit also made a feeble grasp for him, but Tails managed to wriggle out of his captors' grip. Backing away, he saw that the one who grabbed him from behind was a very, very ugly hog. His arms were disproportionately large, and he had no discernable neck whatsoever, his facial features seeming to sprout right out of his chest. He roared something incomprehensible and charged, using his huge muscular arms for extra propulsion. Tails did the only thing he could think to do - he jumped before his attacker reached him, planted a foot in the hog's face and jumped again, clearing the brute entirely. On the second jump he curled his tails together and spun them, launching himself so high that he flew straight over the wire fence.
Angry, shocked voices roared after him when he landed on the other side, and he turned to see several people raving, clawing and beating at the fence. The rabbit and the hog had been joined by others.
"Good grief," he muttered, staring into the bloodshot eyes and contorted, infuriated faces of the people outside. What had he done to offend them so badly? They were positively livid, some of them close to tears in their anger. They were clearly insane, all of them. Completely out of their minds with rage and madness, they might have torn him limb from limb if he'd allowed them to capture him.
Somebody tried to climb the fence to get to him. The would-be attacker climbed about halfway up before he grabbed a barb and fell backward into the gathering crowd.
Tails turned his head toward the peaceful town in the valley, then looked back at the braying, snarling crowd and suddenly realised exactly why the fence was in place. It wasn't to keep anybody in.
It was to keep them out.
Tails flipped the frenzied crowd an offensive hand signal, and then turned his back to them to make his way into the town. On his way he realised he was still carrying the little toy robot, whatever it was, and once again inspected it as though he'd never seen it before. As far as he was aware, he hadn't. But why had he held onto it?
Because it's important to me, he realised. It was inexplicable, but he couldn't bear to lose it. The robot held a value to him that he couldn't explain.
When he looked up and saw the village, it was new to him, and so pristine that it took his breath away.

---

8:06 am

Tails' dreams were filled with nonsensical images. He dreamed of a dark, monsterous squid that drifted through the sky, and black trucks driving across a field. He dreamed of his father, and of Uncle Tyler and Nightmare, of Sonic... and a tall, dark stranger in a decorated military uniform and a neat crest of plumage upon his head.
When he awoke, he was surprised to find he wasn't inside a tent. Had he decided to sleep out under the stars the previous night? He couldn't even remember. Why was there such a haze over his memory? He found he couldn't quite recollect his most recent movements, he'd lost track of how many days he'd been hiking. It was dangerous for him to be so careless. If he truly wanted to make himself into an adventurer, he would have to do better than this.
There was a bitter, rancid taste in his mouth, as though he'd eaten cat crap for dinner, and he spat in the dirt. His head hurt a lot, and when he touched his brow he found he had one mother of a lump, and probably a black eye too.
Geez, Tails. What have you been doing?
He felt poorly rested, and his whole body was worn and bruised. He felt around under his fur and found scabs and fresh wounds carved into his flesh like war tattoos. He was much more thoroughly beat up than he last recalled. There was a smoldering campfire site nearby and the coals were still warm.
"Good, you're awake."
Tails turned around and found a stranger standing over him. An older fox, the same race and colour as himself. No, not a stranger entirely - he vaguely recognised this person, though from where he couldn't quite tell. It was as though they'd spent a lot of time together but he'd forgotten the details. He felt mildly embarrassed amidst his confusion. Had he been drunk? Drugged? He felt no after-affects.
"Time to go," the fox said, "Today's the day. Hurry up, we've got to go."
"Go where?" Tails grunted.
"Go to meet Flightless Joe. Get to the airport, get you safe. That is where you want to go, isn't it?"
"Yeah, but... hey, this is kind of embarrassing, but..."
"You can't remember who I am. Yeah, I know. You say that every time."
"Every time?"
"I'll explain everything on the way. Again. But we have to get going, time is short."
For lack of a better idea, Tails began to pack his things, only to find that he didn't seem to have any things to pack. There was no tent, no camp, nothing. When he asked the stranger about it, the fox just replied that it was all taken care of, and asked him again to hurry. While searching for anything he'd left behind, Tails spotted something strange lying in the dirt - it looked like an old wind-up toy, a little metal robot with a key in its back. Another bizarre clue. He picked it up and carried it with him.
"My name's Dalziel," the fox told him as they walked, "My friend Dale is up ahead. We picked you up while you were wandering in circles, it's a good thing, too. People like you can't be alone."
"People like me?"
"Lost souls. Fugitives. They do it on purpose, they screw with your head. Make sure that you don't get far if you manage to get away from them."
"Who are you talking about?" Tails was growing distressed. "What did they do to me?"
"The Armada. Look, this is Dale."
He lumbered out of the scrubland. The stranger who'd been introduced as Dale was an enormous mobian wolf, who Tails found to be fairly intimidating. He wished that he knew these people as well as they told him he did. Dale grinned and showed too many teeth. "Hello," he said.
"You've been a slave to them," Dalziel explained, "Your memory's been extracted. You're on a loop, every few minutes you forget everything you know."
"Why would somebody do that?" Tails asked.
"Because this way, if you do manage to escape from them, it's only a few minutes before you forget what you were doing, who you were running from, and where you were going to go. You can't organise, you can't plan, you can't think. Prison of the mind, little buddy."
"Wait, wait, this doesn't make any sense. I do remember things, I remember how I got here, and why. Everything's perfectly clear until this morning."
Dalziel stopped walking and looked him in the eye. "One thing you have to learn, kid," he said, "Don't trust your memories. They can do anything they want to you. Edit, delete or insert. You could be the crown prince of an empire, for all you know. They could make you think you're a chicken, if they really wanted to."
Tails felt smothered, helpless. It would be impossible to rebut such accusations with facts about his life; if these people truly believed that memories could be controlled, then how could he argue? It was a frightening concept, and although he didn't quite believe it, he couldn't help exploring the implications, if it were all true. He wouldn't have been able to trust anything about himself, sort fact from fiction. The Freedom Fighters, Robotnik, the Aracks and Nails the Bat might have been digital lies manufactured in some laboratory. No, he couldn't believe his life was a fiction, that would be impossible to bear. This led to a bigger question, and one that was disturbingly difficult to answer:
Were these people the crazy ones? Or was he?
And if he was sane, then how would that explain his inability to recall the events leading up to this morning?
"Why would you guys want to help me?" he asked.
"Because it's the right thing to do. You're lucky that we're the ones who ran into you, a lot of people would just turn you in right away. There's a good sized reward on your head, you know. Take a look over that way, those people are the ones you have to look out for. The exiles."
Tails looked in the direction Dalziel was pointing, down below them in a wide and green valley, and he saw a cluster of buildings that seemed to be surrounded by tall wire fences, the kind they put around prisons. Outside the fences, dozens of people shambled about, like zombies, in torn and filthy clothing. Most of them were rooting through a pile of garbage.
"Keep out of sight," Dalziel said in a low voice, "Don't go near them, they'll betray you just as sure as the sun rises in the east. They're monsters, every one of them."
"Monsters," Dale reiterated, and growled low in his throat.
"Who are they?" Tails asked, "I thought that the Kirandul mountains were uninhabited."
"Yeah, well, things change, kid. There's a new management in town, and they're none too friendly."
A terrible thought occurred to Tails. If this area of the world had been somehow violently overthrown, then... "Flightless Joe! Is he..."
"He's fine. We're gonna get to him, Tails. Then we can try to fix up what's wrong with your head so you can get to thinking clearly again."
"What if it can't be fixed?"
Dalziel smiled. "Oh, don't you worry about that. It can be fixed."
Tails observed the people down below and found it harder to doubt Dalziel's story. Something had clearly been done to them, something horrible. They lurched about like there was no hope in their lives, they were clothed in the same manner of garbage they pawed through for sustenance. It was heartbreaking, and he had to close his eyes. It seemed he wouldn't have to travel as far as Kitsune Atole in order to find massive injustice. What was happening to the world?
When Tails opened his eyes again, he couldn't seem to recall exactly what he was doing. Just a slip of the mind, he decided. A momentary lapse in reason. He had been travelling for days, after all.

---

9:42 pm

"No!" he shrieked, "No! Remember this! Remember it, you stupid moron!"
"Tails!"
"I have to remember!"
"Tails, wake up!"
He opened his tear-filled eyes and looked up at the fox kneeling above him. He didn't recognise the face he saw, illuminated in the light of the crackling fire.
"Hunnh?"
"Just a bad dream, kid. You were having a bad dream."
"Who... who are you?"
"You don't remember us," the fox replied, and smiled. "You never do."
Tails thought he did, though. Somewhere deep down within his mind he harboured a recollection, like an adult might recognise a face from his childhood. Just a fragment, brief and insubstantial. He may have dreamed it.
"Here, you must be hungry."
Tails was handed a bowl of some horrid gruel that looked like it was dug out of the garbage. He screwed up his face just from the smell of it.
"Sorry it's probably not what you're used to," the stranger said, "It's what we live on, outside of the hamster cage. Their garbage becomes our dinner. Don't worry, it's perfectly safe, we've been living on it for most of our lives. It grows on you."
"Thanks," Tails replied. "Uhh... where... where are we..." His hand stole to his forehead, above his eye, where he felt a throbbing ache. It came away a little bloody.
"We're safe," the fox told him, "We're friends. I'm Dalziel, this is Dale. We're going to help you get where you want to go."
The one he called Dale was a massive wolf who sat back in the darkness, slurping up the slop that Dalziel had offered for dinner. Tails was glad he introduced him as a friend; he would hate to be that guy's enemy.
"You're going to help me?"
"Yeah, you need all the help you can get, in your condition. Or else you'd just be walking around in circles all the time until you got caught, which is pretty much exactly what they want."
"They?"
"Eat up. You need food."
Tails was extremely hungry, which was probably best, because he would have to be very hungry to be able to come at this meal. He choked it down. It tasted like tomato and mud. Mostly mud.
"We're going to set off in the morning," Dalziel told him, "This whole ordeal is going to be over for you soon."
Tails touched the wound on his head again, tenderly. Perhaps all of this would be clearer tomorrow. With his belly full and his mind unhinged, all he wanted was to sleep it all off. There was no hurry, and he could trust these people. At least he hoped he could.
Finding a comfortable spot to curl up, he closed his eyes and listened to the whispers and laughter of the strangers who had taken him in. He couldn't understand what they said, but wished that he could. Anything he could learn about how he came to be here and why, about who they were and why they wanted to help him, would be a good thing. Soon enough, he drifted off to sleep.
Tails' dreams were filled with nonsensical images. He dreamed of a dark, monsterous squid that drifted through the sky, and black trucks driving across a field. He dreamed of his father, and of Uncle Tyler and Nightmare, of Sonic... and a tall, dark stranger in a decorated military uniform and a neat crest of plumage upon his head.

---

1:00 pm

Tails drew his arms and legs in and lay in the dirt, his eyes welling up with tears under his cupped hands, waiting for the pain to pass. When at last the burning knives subsided to a dull throb, he pulled himself to a sitting position and looked up at the two strangers sitting in front of him.
"Hey there, kid," one of them said, "Gave yourself a pretty solid whack, there, didn't you."
"I- I did?"
"Yeah. Walked right into the wall, looked like you nearly knocked yourself out. You gotta watch out for things like that, in your condition. You okay?"
"I think so. My... my condition?"
The strangers, a fox and a wolf, helped him to his feet. The fox handed him a rag, and he put it against the wound above his eye. There was a small amount of blood.
"Yeah," the fox said, "The memory thing. You don't remember us, you never do. It's how they keep you under control."
"Huh... what?"
"Never mind." The fox smiled. "We're friends. You stay with us, youll be fine."
Tails did stay with them, unable to comprehend his situation enough to come up with any better course of action. The three of them camped in the crevice where he had awoken, and there they stayed, cycling through the same conversations again and again as Tails' memory continued to fail him. Every time his attention shifted, he looked back to find two complete strangers watching over him. Their presence, his situation, was a puzzle that he had to decode again and again.
After night fell, they built a small bonfire, and the fox and the wolf set up crude cooking equipment with which to prepare some rations. They didn't look very appetising to Tails, scraps mostly, garbage, the kind of swill that you feed to farm animals. He was desperately hungry, though.
Tails sat down near the fire to warm himself, and his hand touched something cold and hard in the dirt. It wasn't a rock, it was something metallic. He observed it under the glow of the fire and saw that it was some kind of robot or toy, a little metal pig with a face and lightbulb-eyes. Lying near it was a tiny key.
"What's this?" he asked.
"I dunno," replied the fox, who had repeatedly introduced himself as Dalziel. "You've been carrying it around with you."
Tails noticed a hole on the back of the thing that was just the right size and shape for the key to fit inside. A wind-up toy? He inserted the key and began to turn it. After a few good cranks, he put it down in the dirt. The robot sprang to life, shook its little head and looked up at him. The two lightbulb eyes flickered on, and the toy, miraculously, began to speak.
"Hey there, Buckaroo! Glad you finally decided to crank me up."
"Uh, hello," Tails replied, "Where'd you come from?"
"Well, you know, I really wish I could write the answer on a note and pin it to your forehead, but I don't have any hands."
Dalziel wandered over and kneeled beside Tails. "What have you got here?" he asked, "This... this is one of their machines. How did you get this?"
"I don't know," Tails replied, "I've never seen it before."
"You think you've never seen it before."
The robot looked up at the other fox. "Who are you?"
Dalziel ignored it. "It's an old model," he said, "Really old. Didn't think they were still around. This thing looks broken."
"Do you know these guys?" the robot asked Tails.
He looked back and forth between the fox and the wolf, who were laughing about something while they cooked over the fire. Already his familiarity with them was beginning to fade into the mists of his confused mind. "I... I think so..."
"Listen, Buckaroo, I think these guys are bad news."
"I think you should shut your trap," Dalziel called from the other side of the bonfire.
The robot opened a compartment on its back and something poked out of it - a set of rotor blades. They spun rapidly around, and to Tails' shock the little machine took off and began to circle around his head.
Something stirred in the depths of his mind, a flash of recollection, a flurry of images that he couldn't quite place. He had seen this little machine before. He wasn't sure when or where, but a fragment of memory was ingrained in there like a scrap of food caught between the teeth.
"Is your name Tock?" he asked.
"Yes! Yes!" the robot replied, "You're doing it, Buckaroo, you're remembering! You're getting it back!"
"I don't... I don't quite... I can't..."
"Listen. Listen to me for a minute, focus, can you do that? It's important."
"Yeah..."
"These guys are bad news," the robot seemed almost frantic, now, "They're going to lead you into a trap, Buckaroo, they're after the bounty, they're tricking you, you have to get away from them before it's too late! You have to-"
Something struck the robot out of the air. It let out an awful crunch and an electronic squeal, fell to the ground and didn't get back up again. Tails looked up to see Dalziel standing over him with a large rock in his hand.
"Hey-"
The older fox slapped him hard across the face. He cried out and tried to scramble away, but Dalziel grabbed him by the jaw with crushing strength, so hard that the fingers dug into his flesh. Tails looked down in his pain and saw that the hand that was grasping him was a hideous three-fingered talon. The wolf was standing by him too, now, and growling deep in his throat, thick ribbons of foaming spit dribbling down his face.
"You made a friend, did you?" Dalziel roared in Tails' face, and pulled so close to him that Tails could smell his rancid breath. "You've got no friends, retard, nobody likes you. Understand me?" He threw Tails onto his back. The younger fox tried to scramble to his feet but the wolf put a foot on his chest and pushed him down again.
"You're our lucky ticket, kid," Dalziel said, "They're gonna let us back into the hamster cage. No more scavenging, no more starvation. It's luxury all the way for the two of us, while you're getting cut up in a little room without windows. All we gotta do is turn you in. No worries, who cares about one stupid little retard?"
"Stupid... little... retard!" the wolf added between wet snarls.
"We're gonna lead you right into the slaughtering pen," the fox continued, "It's gonna be easy as pie, know why? Because you're as dumb as wet cement. I could cut both your ears off right now and feed them to you, I could beat you until my fists hurt, and five minutes later you wouldn't remember a freakin' thing!"
"I'll remember..." Tails choked, "I'll remember you! I have to!"
"Go ahead! Just go ahead and try. We're gonna be best buddies again before I can click my fingers."
Tails closed his eyes and mustered all his energy, but he could already feel it slipping away. "No!" he shrieked, "No! Remember this! Remember it, you stupid moron!"
"Tails!"
"I have to remember!"
"Tails, wake up!"
He opened his tear-filled eyes and looked up at the fox kneeling above him. He didn't recognise the face he saw, illuminated in the light of the crackling fire.
"Hunnh?"
"Just a bad dream, kid. You were having a bad dream."

---

12:11

Tails looked around. He seemed to be standing on the edge of some kind of field, and far ahead of him he could see a group of buildings.
There were some people milling about here, too. This shocked him, because as far as he had known, the Kirandul mountains were uninhabited except for Flightless Joe and his airport. Since when had there been a settlement here? For that matter, since when had there been enough space to build a settlement here?
It dawned on him that he was a little bit lost. He was going to have to ask one of these people where he was. He lifted his hand to attempt to get somebody's attention when he realised he was holding something. A small toy of some kind, a little robot that somewhat resembled a golden pig. It felt hollow. A piggy-bank? Tails checked the back of it for a coin-slot, but he only found a small circular hole. He held up his other hand and found that he was holding a key.
"Hey! Hey you!"
Tails spun around and saw somebody running up to him. At least he was running as well as he seemed able, which was really little more than an enthusiastic hobble. It was a rabbit, an elderly mobian with a jacket so badly worn that it was almost a cloak of tattered rags. He moved with the assistance of a large stick as a crutch, and it wasn't difficult to see why. His left leg was malformed, only about a quarter of the mass of the other, shrivelled and folded up as a useless and bothersome attachment. Tails instantly felt sorry for him, knowing as he did all too well the pain of deformity.
"Hello, there," he said to the stranger.
"What you got?" the rabbit asked with an almost demanding tone, "What you got there? Can you share? I'm so hungry, mister, I'm so hungry... Them hoodlums back there, they took my..."
Tails held up the dead robot, and the stranger was instantly downhearted. His ears fell over his face. "Not food," he whimpered, "Nothing to eat."
"Sorry," Tails replied, "Hey look, I'll share some of my supplies with you, all right?" He reached behind his shoulder but frowned when he grasped only air. Where had his pack gone? When had he put it down?
There was a gathering of people around him, now. About a dozen of the wanderers had congregated nearby, and Tails saw immediately that something was very wrong. Every one of them looked homeless and ragged, and many of them had some kind of deformity or mutation. Some worse than others. Some much worse.
"I think that's the kid," somebody said.
"The recalled one," someone else added, "The one they want back..."
Tails was about to say something when one of the strangers thrust forward and made a grab for him. He shrieked and backed away, and immediately a fight broke out among the people, a violent brawl that seemed to focus on which of them should be able to grab him first. Deformed hands reached out for him, clawed at the air near his face, as the strangers wrestled with each other to get to him. Tails stumbled backward away from the pack and fell over, terrified. These people were crazy! All of them, completely out of their minds, and for some reason they had focused their deranged desperation on harming him in particular. Perhaps they wanted to make him like them, cut him up until he was so deformed he barely looked mobian anymore, make him into a slobbering, wailing maniac.
Somebody grabbed his arm and he yelled and shook them off, but more hands clutched at his arms and shoulders, held tight, dragged him to his feet as he kicked and fought.
"Tails! Tails!"
The use of his name calmed him down, and when his captors relinquished his hold he turned to them expecting friends. Alas they were just two more strangers - a fox and a wolf - and although they knew his name they appeared just as filthy and mange-ridden as any of the other maniacs, though they were free of visible deformity.
"Come with us," the fox insisted, "Quickly, while they're too busy killing each other to notice you're gone."
"Who are you?" Tails demanded.
"A couple of guys. Look, you can go back to them if you prefer. Or, you can come with us." The fox held his hand out, and Tails saw that he was indeed the victim of a physical deformity. Instead of a normal hand, the fox had a thin, three-fingered talon. Tails didn't touch it, but he did take the invitation. He fled with the two strangers as they ran from the chaos in the field, and eventually they came to rest in a rocky ditch.
"What was with those people?" Tails asked, "Why did they want to hurt me?"
The fox and the wolf just looked at each other and started to laugh, and Tails found himself once again a little concerned for his safety. He wasn't sure the intentions of these two were any better than those of the others.
"They don't wanna harm ya'," the fox said after a while, "They just want the reward, same as we do. Heck of an opportunity. Doesn't come around too often."
"What... reward?"
"You got quite a price on your head, kid," the wolf snarled, and they both laughed again.
"Reincorporation!" the fox exclaimed, "It's like winning the lottery, and you're the winning ticket, retard. Who could have imagined? Glad I didn't kill you after all."
Tails gulped. Both of these strangers were significantly larger than he was, especially that wolf. He looked as though he could snap Tails' neck between his jaws like a popsicle stick. And he would have to run past both of them to escape.
"Who has a price on my head?" he asked. Who even knows I'm here?
"Oh, shut up," the fox replied, and kicked dirt at him. "They want you alive, but we can still rough you up if you get annoying. No point telling you anything anyway, you're just gonna forget it in five minutes."
"I think I have a right to know who-" Tails was cut off when the older fox darted forward and sucker-punched him in the side of his head. He fell over, clutching his eye. The blow had hurt more than it should have, due to a large bruise around his eye that he didn't even realise was there.
"See if you remember that one," the attacker barked (and the wolf howled in laughter), "When I'm punching you, it means 'shut up'."
Tails drew his arms and legs in and lay in the dirt, his eyes welling up with tears under his cupped hands, waiting for the pain to pass. When at last the burning knives subsided to a dull throb, he pulled himself to a sitting position and looked up at the two strangers sitting in front of him.
"Hey there, kid," one of them said, "Gave yourself a pretty solid whack, there, didn't you."

---

8:33 am

Tails watched his reflection in the clear stream. The water was so pristine and lovely that he could have gazed into it for hours. Perhaps he had. He blinked hard, twice, shook his head and looked up at the mountains ahead of him. Well, enough of this; time to push on.
He hiked through the wilderness for some time, making good ground. It would be good to finally arrive at Joe's place; it seemed he'd been travelling forever.
Eventually he arrived at a vantage point where he had a good view of the area below, but what he saw didn't make a lot of sense to him. In fact, it was downright puzzling.
There were buildings down there. A lot of them, and all constructed on land that was flat enough to fit a whole settlement. This didn't conform to his understanding of the local geography; the Kirandul Range was supposed to be all rocky mountains, cliffs and untamed wilderness, no green sprawling valleys and certainly no room for habitation. At least, such was his understanding. Obviously he'd been wrong, for someone had cleared enough land to find a comfortable use for it here. That was the thing about people, they could find a way to live pretty much anywhere.
Tails figured this was a pretty serendipitous discovery and a good opportunity for a decent meal and a rest, assuming the people were friendly. At least it didn't look like it was an Arack settlement. He began to make his way down the mountain in the direction of the buildings.
It was about noon when he set foot on level ground again. The day was just beginning to grow hot and the effort of the journey was making him sweaty and itchy. About time for a break, he thought, not a moment too soon.
"Hey, Buckaroo!"
Someone was shouting out, presumably to him, and he turned around to answer whoever was greeting him. He didn't see anyone though. It was like a ghost had been yelling out from a veil of invisibility. Then he heard a second shout, coming from above him.
"Up here!"
Tails looked up and found something small and strange hovering over his head. It was almost like a tiny helicopter with a face and two bright headlight-eyes. It was this thing, some kind of robot, that had been calling out to him, and provided his first impression of what kind of folk he was dealing with. Although clearly sophisticated, this robot was old and showing its age with its tarnished hull and chipping paint. Stranger still was its apparent method of conveyance. In front of the rapid-spinning rotor blades that kept this thing afloat was a small slowly turning key. Was it possible that this thing was clockwork?
"Glad to see you're all right!" it exclaimed, "Thought you'd been caught for sure! Thought I'd have to find some way to rescue you, you dolt."
"Hello?" Tails waved at the peculiar thing. He couldn't help but think it was familiar, where had he seen something like this before? "Maybe you can help me," he offered, "I'm not entirely sure where I am."
"Of course you're lost, you haven't had me around to keep you wound up!" the flying robot barked back at him, "You can't go running off on your own like that. We've got to stick together! I've got to keep you around to wind me back up as well."
"I don't understand what you're talking about."
"Look, guy, you've got a problem with your noggin. Turn around, count to three, and your hard drive formats itself. The data just won't take, Buckaroo. You need a RAM upgrade, you're low on memory."
Tails touched his forehead and found that his right eye was pretty badly bruised. He tendered it, wondering idly what happened. "Did you say there's something wrong with my head?"
"It's what's inside your head, I'm afraid. To be quite blunt, you have the memory of a brain-damaged goldfish, and it's been causing you a bit of strife."
Tails laughed. "Sorry, but if I had a problem with my memory, I'd definitely know about it."
"You did know, but you've clearly forgotten."
"I don't know what kind of game this is, but-"
"Look." The little machine sounded like it was becoming flustered, if that were at all possible. "You've been wandering around lost all day because you can't remember where you've been and where you haven't. Walking in circles, going nowhere."
"I've been hiking all day, I've travelled miles."
"You've come about five kilometres! In six hours! Last time I saw you we were right around that bend!"
Tails looked over his shoulder but didn't see anything familiar.
"But we've never met."
"We've met heaps! You just-"
"Right, I don't remember."
"Exactly."
"Look, if what you were saying was true, I'd have missing places in my memory, right? Empty spaces I can't account for. But I don't. I remember everything as clear as day, I can tell you everything right up to how I came to be in the mountains and why. There's nothing missing. Take a look, I'll show you where I've been. I'll-"
He reached for his pack to find the map he'd brought, but it was only now that he realised how unusually light his load was. His pack was missing.
"Lost something?" the robot asked.
Tails frowned at the little machine. "Who are you?" he demanded.
"Just a concerned fellow exile looking out for your interests. After all, who else is going to look out for mine?"
"And we know each other." Tails still had trouble figuring out which one of them was crazy. He still placed his bets on the robot, but perhaps this was just a symptom of a crazy person's inability to recognise their own craziness? If he couldn't trust his own memories, his own brain, then what could he trust? A dirty old worn-down clockwork robot?
"Well, not very well," the robot replied, "But we make do. Now, we really should shake a leg and get somewhere safe before... uh-oh..."
The robot seemed to be having trouble flying all of a sudden. It was shaking and faltering mid-air. "What's wrong?" Tails asked.
"Winding down... mayday... need a... crank..."
With that, the thing's eyes flickered and went dead, and it fell out of the sky like a rock, landing dully at Tails' feet and not moving again. The key in its back fell out in the grass.
Tails looked down at it for a moment, trying to process what he'd just heard. He reached down and picked up the robot, jiggling it in his hand, listening to it rattle. He picked up the key and inspected it too. If this was some kind of joke, he didn't get it.
Where was he, anyway?
Tails looked around. He seemed to be standing on the edge of some kind of field, and far ahead of him he could see a group of buildings.

---

7:14 am

Tails tore through the thick scrub for almost an hour, his breath heaving in his chest. When he burst out on the other side, he saw the mountains ahead of him and slowed to a stop. He turned his head, panting, to make sure that his persuer had been lost, though he couldn't remember who or what had been chasing him.
He'd been scratched and cut up by stiff branches, and his muscles ached. How long had he been running? It was stupid to be so afraid of something that he couldn't remember having seen. Maybe the mountain air was getting to him. Maybe it was time to sit down and have something to eat.
Tails reached for his pack and froze. His back was bare. The pack he'd been hauling, his tent and his supplies, were all gone. The only things he was carrying with him were the shoes on his feet.
Had he dropped his pack when he'd been spooked by whatever it was that he'd seen back there? He looked back, into the scrub, and realised that nothing looked familiar to him. It was like he'd been running with his eyes closed. He couldn't remember anything that had happened to him.
"Great, Tails," he muttered bitterly, "That's great. Good job."
So, now what? He had no food, no shelter, no map, and no idea how much further he had to travel. There was nothing to do but sit here, in the leaves and the dirt, and think. Hopefully his memory would return and he might have some chance of locating his belongings.
Unfortunately, the memories did not come back. In fact, they seemed to be fading. He sat for a long time, listening to the birds and just thinking, but only fragments came back to him, meaningless words and images caught in a contextual void.
He had the word overdraw floating around inside his mouth like bitter scraps, and he said it aloud in case it offered some kind of insight. It didn't. Nor did the image of black trucks cruising across a savannah make any sense, or the surreal image of what appeared to be a giant squid flying above the forest, the nightmarish juxtaposition of a certified lunatic. Had he dreamed that? What would a psychiatrist make of it?
He'd lost some amount of time, that was for certain. How much, he didn't know, and it was about this that he began to fret. How could time just dissolve? Just melt through the cracks and vanish?
(you're winding down again, buckaroo)
Whose was the shrill, coppery voice that whispered in his ear and called him buckaroo? What were the two tall, white towers that he saw in his mind?
Tails heard running water nearby and crawled a few metres to find a clear stream. The water was pristine, and he cupped both hands and drank deep. Before he looked up he saw his own reflection in the water and gasped. He looked horrid. He had a black eye that he couldn't remember receiving, like somebody had clocked him with a rock. There was dried blood in his hair and his fur. He was a warzone.
But I've only been hiking, he told himself, That's all, just a hike through the mountains!
(no, you've done so much more. you just can't remember because you're winding down like an old clockwork robot. and now it's happening again.)
"I don't want to wind down," he said aloud, "Please. I just want to remember."
But fate was merciless. As he sat before the stream and looked into the slowly trickling water, his memory recycled itself, he wound down and lost himself again.
Tails watched his reflection in the clear stream. The water was so pristine and lovely that he could have gazed into it for hours. Perhaps he had. He blinked hard, twice, shook his head and looked up at the mountains ahead of him. Well, enough of this; time to push on.

---

6:30 am

"I'm not in the right place," Tails suddenly realised, though he had trouble grasping the full implications of this revelation. "This isn't where I'm supposed to be."
The feeling was somewhat akin to if he'd opened the door of his home one morning and found another country outside. His brain did not corroborate with his eyes; they disagreed quite completely, and he felt his whole body waver and weaken from the shock of it.
This was not the Kirandul Range. This was an entirely different landscape. As though he'd unknowingly stepped into some rift in space that had transported him halfway across the world. The land was too flat for this terrain, too tropical and green for this climate. He was more than just lost, he was completely displaced.
There were people down there, too. The Kirandul mountains were uninhabited, but the fields ahead were swarming with dark-clothed mobians, some of whom seemed, distressingly, to be carrying weapons.
"This is too weird," Tails said to himself, and shook his head. "There's some explanation for this. I'm not crazy. There's an obvious answer, something I'm missing."
(you won't figure it out, buckaroo, 'cause tock says you're winding down too fast)
Something flew overhead. Tails looked up and saw what he thought at first to be jet planes flying in formation, far above him. It was an illusion of perspective - the things weren't large and far away, they were tiny and close. A triangular pattern of seven small blue and white machines flew over him and then peeled off in different directions. He couldn't see how they were propelled.
This place was alien to him. Its inhabitants were alien to him. He wanted desperately to go down there and speak to them, gain some insight into his exact location, but their weapons frightened him. Their motives were a mystery - what were they doing? Searching, it seemed, for something... or someone.
There were vehicles, too. Strange dark-coloured trucks, a few dozen of them and all identical, slowly driving in a linear procession behind the people who looked like they composed some kind of military.
Something else was flying around up there, something that didn't look like it rightfully belonged in the sky. It looked like it was more suited to the depths of the ocean, a big black jellyfish or a squid, flying gracefully over it all in somewhat of a figure eight formation, long organic-looking tentacles trailing behind it. Tails could have believed, given the already bizarre circumstances, that this was some kind of living creature, if not for the radar dish and two bullhorns that stuck out the front of it like antennae. A message was booming from the squid-machine that could probably be heard for miles in every direction.
"This is Overdraw. All exiles are to report for inspection immediately. A recall order has been placed on one of your number. The location of this subject is to be revealed to us immediately. Information leading to the retrieval of this subject may be rewarded with reincorporation with the quarantine sector." From here, the message repeated.
Overdraw, Tails thought, I know that word. I know that name. He couldn't think how, but it registered danger with him. Something about this entire situation set off warning bells deep within him as though he'd been granted some kind of extrasensory instinct to warn him away from these people. Somehow he felt that the subject they sought, this exile, was him. He didn't feel particularly interested in giving himself up to find out what they wanted.
So he ran. Though it seemed likely that the strangers possessed more than enough resources to flush him out from wherever he may hide, it was certainly preferable to try and evade them than to give up. After all, he already had a lot of things to worry about without this on his plate.
He just hoped that none of those strange flying machines had detected him. The technology of these people was obviously fairly sophisticated.
If only I knew where I was, he thought, If only I knew which way to run.
It crossed his mind that, at some stage, he had been drugged and kidnapped. How would he escape from a foreign, alien land? Who had brought him here in the first place? He ran without direction or goal, seeking only to shelter from dangers that were already fading from his memory. He just ran, and found cover in a patch of vegetation at the far end of the field.
Tails tore through the thick scrub for almost an hour, his breath heaving in his chest. When he burst out on the other side, he saw the mountains ahead of him and slowed to a stop. He turned his head, panting, to make sure that his persuer had been lost, though he couldn't remember who or what had been chasing him.

---

6:00 am

What am I looking for? The images ran before his eyes too quickly for Tails to grab a hold of any one of them. His quest, his mission, his destiny lay before him. But what was it? What was it? He ran a hand over his eyes as though this was some bizarre dream he had to awake from. What am I looking for?
It was not an easy answer. Did he intend to fill the shoes that Sonic had left empty? Or did his loyalty lie entirely with his father, someone who he barely even remembered? Perhaps a fair degree of both. Tails felt the weight of responsibility for the plight of those who had protected him throughout his life. Many had fought against his ingratitude and stubbourn abrasiveness in order to provide him some semblance of a safe and decent life. Many had died through the course of doing so. Maybe, if he turned out to be something great, he could convince himself that it had all been worth it. If he completed his father's work, then the great Trevor Prower wouldn't have died in vain. Maybe if he did something great he could turn out not to just be a useless burden of a two-tailed freak. Maybe.
What am I looking for?
Meaning. Tails was looking for meaning in an unjust world.
"Have I gotta wind you up again, Buckaroo?"
Tails heard a voice speak to him from the left and he turned to find its source, but nobody was there. Just an empty patch of grass and clover. He frowned.
"Up here! I'm up here!"
Something was hovering just above his head. Tails looked up and saw it, an odd little robot with a spinning set of rotor blades for flight. It ogled down at him with flashing eyes.
"Who are you?" He felt no need to brace himself for hostility, it was just shy of inconceivable that this little contraption with the pleasant, almost smiling face could find any way to hurt him. It let out a series of clicks and whirrs that might have constituted laughter.
"Who am I! Just an insignificant part of a greater whole, my friend! Officially I'm known as Forty-Seven-K, but a good friend of mine always called me Tock. You can too!"
"That doesn't really tell me anything," Tails replied, "Who are you?"
"Nobody any more," said Tock cryptically, "Neither are you! Just Exile One and Exile Two. You've gotta stop thinking in terms of being somebody. Why bother? There's no jumping back into the gene pool once you've been ousted."
"What are you talking about? I am somebody! I'm Miles Prower, son of Trevor!"
"Nope, nope," the robot insisted, "Exile, son of Nobody, that's you, Buckaroo." Tock swooped around to look Tails directly in the eyes. "What are you looking for?"
"My father's people have been imprisoned," Tails replied, "My people. I'm going to set them free."
"You're going to set them free? How are you going to achieve that?"
Tails considered for a moment. "I don't know."
"You don't know! You don't know! Then why even try?"
"Because it's my responsibility."
The little robot laughed again. This made Tails a little angry.
"Look," he said sharply, "You don't know anything about honour and resposibility, you're just a dumb little machine. I don't even know why I'm bothering to tell you any of this, I don't know who you are."
"I already told you, Buckaroo, I'm nobody."
"If you're nobody, then buzz off. Leave me alone."
"You need me."
"Why would I possibly need you?"
"Because I can hear them."
"Hear who?"
The robot's voice changed to loud radio static, and then another voice emerged. It was a tinny, dirty sound like a poorly received radio broadcast. It sounded like a police or military report.
"This is Unit B, commencing search of Quadrant Seventeen. No sightings of target at present."
Tails had no idea who had sent out the signal, or indeed why anybody's military would be out here in the Kirandul ranges.
"What's the 'target'?" he asked the little robot.
"You are." Tock laughed and spun around. "And they're close, they're very close. That's why you need me, unless you like being cut up for science."
Tails didn't even know where to begin trying to comprehend this. "That's crazy," he said, "That's a load of garbage, there's nobody hunting me. Nobody even knows I'm here. Why would they want to cut me up?"
"Beats me. Unfortunately you did something to catch their attention, and that's strange in itself because they never care about exiles. We'll probably never know, 'cause you keep winding down, same as me. In any event, stick by me and you'll do fine, Buckaroo, just peachy."
"I'm not going to stick by you," Tails replied, "I don't trust you. I'll make my own way, thanks very much." He turned away and deliberately left in the opposite direction to that towards which the robot was trying to lead him.
"No!" Tock shouted after him, and zipped around in front of him to cut him off. "That's the wrong way! That's where they are!"
Tails batted it away and continued onward, defiant. He didn't know what kind of game he was being sucked into, but he certainly wasn't going to be led into an ambush by something that looked like it might have been designed and put together by Robotnik during his infant years. The robot followed him for a little while as he climbed a hill, and shouted at him incessantly, until finally it reached a point where it seemed unwilling to follow any further.
"You'll see!" it called, "You'll find them! And you won't even know I was right because you'll just wind right down again! I'll find you later, Buckaroo, and talk some sense into you! You'll see!"
"Yeah, yeah," Tails muttered, "You're a few sprockets short of an internal combustion engine, pal."
He rounded the crest of the hill and slowed his pace when he finally saw what was ahead of him. The landscape was quite vastly different from what he had expected. There were no mountains ahead of him, only plains and forests, modest hills and scrubland. Even stranger, there were people down there. Quite a few people. He squinted to make them out but the rising sun was in his eyes.
"I'm not in the right place," Tails suddenly realised, though he had trouble grasping the full implications of this revelation. "This isn't where I'm supposed to be."

---

5:50 am

"They're coming! Quick! Follow me! No time! No time!"
Tails looked around and saw some kind of robot buzzing around his head; a small, dirty, gold-painted thing with a rotor blade that kept it airborne. At first he was too startled to move or respond, but the flying thing was so insistant that he found himself following it anyway. The strange robot zipped into a ditch, and Tails leaped after it, rolling a little and staining his knees on the grass.
"What's going on?"
"Shoosh!"
Looking up, he saw more of the little robot things; different ones, a whole flock of them. They didn't use rotors to fly, and they didn't have the likeness of faces, but they looked otherwise like upgraded versions of the thing sitting in the ditch with him, like big blue and white electric shavers cutting through the breeze. In a few moments they were gone, their whirring faded away, and Tails was left alone with whatever had brought him here.
"That was close!" the little robot said, "Stick with me, bucko, and you'll do fine."
"Great," Tails replied, "So, who or what are you? And what were those other things?"
The robot clicked and beeped, its little jaw, nothing but an arc of metal on a hinge, flapped under its flashing eyes. "It happened again, didn't it! Golly gee, you wind down faster than I do!"
"What happened?"
"Your memory! Your brain, your central processing unit. You're caught on a loop, little buddy, you're thinking around in circles. Think about it... you've forgotten, haven't you. Everything that's happened before."
Tails was about to protest, but his breath caught in his throat. There was a certain something missing. It was like he'd walked into a movie theatre after the film had already started.
"It's okay," the robot said, apparently having read the confusion on his face, "Just a faulty spring, that's all. Happens to the best of us. Mine's supposed to last for days, but there's really no telling how long I'm gonna keep ticking. A day, an hour, a minute, it's always a surprise. That's why we've gotta stick together, buckaroo. We've gotta be around to wind each other back up."
"Wind each other up," Tails repeated with some humour. "Right. And what's going to happen to us otherwise?"
"We'll get caught, of course. They'll melt me down and cut you to pieces, that's the way the Armada work. They'll take us there."
The robot turned and faced to the left, and Tails followed its gaze.
There was some kind of building in the hills in the distance. Two white towers stretched to the sky, gleaming through the foliage, and it was obvious that they were based among a much larger complex. Tails was quite taken aback that he hadn't noticed this before, it was quite stunningly obvious.
"We're exiles, now," the robot said, "The two of us. We'll need each other if we're going to survive. That's how most of the exiles live, you see, they pair off, or chances are they don't make it."
"Exiles..." Tails whispered, staring at that brilliant white building. "Wait a second... where am I? I'm not-"
"Survival of the fittest, my friend. That's all."
"-I'm not in the mountains, I'm-"
"Better follow me, Buckaroo. What are you looking for?"
What am I looking for? The images ran before his eyes too quickly for Tails to grab a hold of any one of them. His quest, his mission, his destiny lay before him. But what was it? What was it? He ran a hand over his eyes as though this was some bizarre dream he had to awake from. What am I looking for?

---

5:30 am

Tails looked up to try to pin down the source of the bizarre sound, and that was when he saw the towers.
Two white towers standing out above the trees a long way off, on the side of a hill. It looked like there was some kind of castle over there, a great white castle. But that didn't make any sense; there was no such building in these mountains, not as far as Tails knew.
Then again, how was he to know? He didn't know every inch of this area. Perhaps someone did live here - Joe did, after all.
But in a castle?
It definitely wasn't a ruin. It was too well-kept. He decided he would ask Joe about it, when they met. He still had quite a way to travel.
But which way?
Tails was downhearted to realise that he wasn't sure which direction he'd been travelling. The towers had distracted him and he'd lost his head. No matter, he reached for his compass... and discovered he didn't have it.
Stop. He stood in place and stared out over the hills and trees with his brain turning somersaults inside his head. There was something very strange happening here, he knew that much. It was as though a part of his memory had been taken and all he had left were these strange white towers... He was drowsy, his muscles bruised.
A sound, distant at first, caught his attention. It was a flat metallic grinding and whooping, something he couldn't identify at all, a noise so alien that he couldn't help but search the horizon for its origin. But the sky was blue and flawless. The sound reached a screeching climax as something moving at a great velocity changed direction very suddenly in mid-air - and collided with Tails' head.
The fox yelled and fell over backward, shielding his face too late as whatever had hit him had already bounced off and fallen to the ground. It hit hard, like a thrown rock, and a blinding pain ripped through his skull momentarily. He sat down and cupped his right eye with both hands. Luckily it didn't appear that he was bleeding or that his eye was damaged, but it would bruise.
Tails looked around for the weapon that had been used against him. What he saw was the last thing he expected to find - a dirty little metal toy, a mechanical doll about the size of a large hamster, upside-down in the grass. Beside it was a novelty key, like the kind that was used to wind up old clocks. He picked up the toy in one hand, the key in the other, and held them both up at eye level. The toy stared blankly at him with unseeing eye-lenses, and the hinge that served as a parody of a mouth hung open.
Already, Tails had forgotten the towers. He sat with his back to them, observing with extreme interest the little mechanical oddity he held. His fascination with such things commanded his attention, and curiously he inserted the key into the little hole in the thing's back and gave it a generous wind-up.
As soon as he let go and the key began to tick backward on the tension of the spring inside, the little robot came alive. It kicked its legs about with such vigour that Tails dropped it again, and it rolled about in the grass, spluttering and whirring.
"Got you!" it declared, "Clocked you a good one right over the head, didn't I! Serves you right, it does! Serves you just right!"
Tails was more than a little shocked that the robot could speak. This surprised him so much that he wasn't even enraged by the 'bot's hostility. He just gazed on while the thing ranted and reasserted itself.
"What do you think about that, huh?" the robot asked.
"Think about what?" Tails replied after a moment, half-wondering whether he was halluscinating after his blow to the head.
"I gotcha back, didn't I!" the robot retorted.
"Got me back? I didn't do anything to you..." Tails, with a grunt, picked himself up from the grass. "I don't know who - what - you are. I've never seen you before."
"You took a swipe at me! You did!"
"You've got me confused with someone else."
To his further surprise, the robot reared up and sprouted what appeared to be a tiny set of rotor blades out of its back. With an electronic whir, it lifted up off the ground and began to circle Tails' head like a giant beetle.
"No mistake!" it insisted, "You've got a problem in your head if you can't remember yesterday!"
Tails looked around at the unfamiliar landscape before him, and ran his hand over his face. Could he remember yesterday? His memories seemed loosely assorted in unlabeled folders inside his mind. Some of his recent recollections could have happened an hour ago or a week prior, for all he could tell.
"I don't-" he stammered, "I don't know where I am. I can't seem to... I can't remember..."
"You've got a problem, buckaroo," the robot said, "Seems you've been rattled in the head. Wasn't because I hit you, neither."
"You hit me?" Tails mumbled. He had a phantom pain around his right eye, but couldn't quite recall how it had happened.
"Guess this makes us kind of kindred," the robot suggested, "In so far as that could be said for an exile and a remote robot. We've both got a problem with winding down too fast, huh?"
Tails sat down again, all at once feeling very dizzy and very homesick. He was lost in an alien place, and for all he knew he might never escape. An alien world with alien intelligences speaking incomprehensible fictions. Lost, drowning in the abyss of his own confusion.
"What's wrong with me?" he demanded, "I don't know where I am!"
"Exiled," the robot said. "That's all you are, now. Me, too. Both of us. I've become obsolete too, you see. Found out when I tried to return... they've got these new models, brand spanking shiny new upgrades, no room for old Tock anymore. It's a pity, they have no personality, these new ones. All the same, all bland and dumb. See, I was always unique. Now they wanna melt me down! Turn me into scrap! Evolution, they say. I can't return, no no."
"I don't know what you're talking about..." Tails groaned behind his hands.
"Talking about the Armada, buckaroo, which reminds me. I've heard word about you. They're after you. You've been tagged, little buddy, you've found your way onto their list. Dunno what you did, exactly, but you've caught their eye. If I were you, and I'm not, but if I was, I'd keep out of sight. And if you were me, you'd keep out of sight too. In fact, the two of us, being who we are, and not being each other, but ourselves, would be much advised to keep invisible."
"The Armada..." Tails whispered. "Wait a second. I'm here..."
The image of the Tornado, his beloved plane, flashed through his mind. Flightless Joe beside it, laughing. Just a flash, just an instant, a broken memory. An image not from his future but from his past... he had already been there, done that. Moved on.
"I'm on the Kitsune Atole," he stammered, "I'm here already. I don't know how it happened, but-"
"They're coming! Quick! Follow me! No time! No time!"

---

5:18 am

Tails slept well, and dreamed of adventures that he couldn't later recall.
When he awoke to the caress of the warm sun, it took him a while to figure out where he was and what he had been doing.
The mountains. My quest. I have to find the airport. Overdraw...
He couldn't figure out what significance the word overdraw held for him. Perhaps it was something he dreamed during the night, a fragment of a thought that had stayed with him through to his awakening. A bit of nonsense.
And where was he, specifically? He was in a field of some sort, or a meadow. It didn't seem like the mountains at all, but that was where he knew he was.
(Or are you? Something doesn't seem right, Tails. You know it's not right, and the word overdraw has something to do with it.)
Never mind. He would figure it out in time, but for now, he needed to press forward. He needed to get to Joe's place. He needed to get to the Tornado 2. He reached down to pick up his bag so he could journey on and reassert himself.
His bag wasn't there.
(Had it ever been there? Did you ever have it with you? Why does it seem like it was never there at all?)
He distinctly remembered his supplies. He remembered packing them, carrying them, making meals and snacks on his way. And yet...
A buzzing sound caught his attention, like a swarm of loud insects coming his way, and he instinctively sought shelter behind a tree. They did, after all, sound like very big insects. The sound passed overhead, and he looked up through the foliage to see if he could catch a glance.
The source was about seven or eight large shapes hovering close to the ground. What confused Tails was that they were too large to be insects of any kind, and too few to be a swarm. They moved with too much purpose, in a straight line and in formation like tiny jet airplanes.
He watched them with equal parts awe and apprehension. He'd never seen such bizarre creatures, blue and white beetle-like things whose wings didn't move, who cut smoothly through the sky with only a buzzing to indicate their presence. There was only one dreadful possibility. These were robots. Robotnik's tyrannical rule over Westerica had ended long enough ago to assure that these were not remnants of his empire; in fact, he had attached such a stigma to the entire concept of robotics that such technology was now only used by those who cared not an iota about their reputation. Robots were so thoroughly feared that they were only used as a tool to that end.
Tails knew what they were doing, too. They were scouting. He kept a low profile in case it was for him.
Who did they belong to? He was close to the Arack homelands, but they did not look like the machines of the Empire. They were white with pastel blue streaks, almost like children's toys. They were unfamiliar to Tails, though he knew a lot about such things. This was a very disturbing discovery indeed.
Maybe Joe knew what was going on. Maybe he'd seen something in his regular flights over this area. Or maybe he was in danger... or in trouble.
A vision of his friend flashed through his mind. Joe's face, smiling, laughing... a recent vision.
(already seen him)
That was strange. It was strange for him to think that. Like as though he'd already been to see Joe. But if that were true, why wouldn't he remember it? Why wouldn't he have taken the Tornado, as he had planned?
He shook his head to clear it. No, no, he had to stay focused. He had to- What was that buzzing noise?
Tails looked up to try to pin down the source of the bizarre sound, and that was when he saw the towers.

---

7:30 pm

"Hey kid! You want something to eat?"
Huh? Tails turned around to see who had spoken. Two strangers were sitting by a bonfire, and one of them was motioning for his approach.
Tails realised first that, yes, he did indeed want something to eat. He was starving. But who were these people? Where was he, and how long had it been since nightfall?
For lack of a better explanation, he decided that he must have been asleep, had dozed while resting from the long hike, and had slept through sundown. These two travellers had set up camp here, had spotted him but decided not to wake him. It made perfect sense... except for the fact that he didn't feel the least bit rested. He was, in fact, utterly exhausted. But he was willing to ignore this fact in light of greater evidence.
The strangers were smiling at him, so he smiled back and walked over to join them.
"Hey guys," he said, "Didn't see you there. I'd love something to eat, if you're offering."
One of the strangers, a fox, laughed at this, for some reason. He laughed long and hard. Tails, figuring he missed the joke, smiled and chuckled politely. The fox ribbed the other stranger, a wolf, with his elbow. The wolf was smiling too, but Tails wondered whether it was really a friendly smile.
"Sure!" the fox exclaimed, "Plenty to go around. Plenty!"
So Tails sat, and ate what was offered to him. He ate greedily, felt as though it was the first food he'd had in a week. But he'd been eating, hadn't he? He'd brought supplies.
The two strangers stared at him intently through all of this. Tails didn't think he liked the way they stared. Especially the wolf, huge as he was, and rugged from hard living. It was almost a hungry gaze. It told him that, although they had fed him and provided him sanctuary, their true concern for his welfare was minimal. What was their motive? Were they drugging him for some depraved purpose? Though unbelievably presumptuous, and inconsiderate, as it was to think such morbid thoughts, it was impossible to rule out cannibalism when they were staring at him like this.
He spoke in the hope of striking up some conversation and learning that they weren't bad guys at all. "So... where are you guys from?"
The older fox laughed again, and turned instead to his associate, the rugged wolf. "See, Dale? I told you. He's totally buggered in the head."
Tails frowned at this. "Huh?"
"Nothing. Listen, kid, what brings you to the, uh... the Krandal mountains? What are you lookin' for?"
"Kirandul," Tails corrected, "I'm looking for an airport. You might be able to tell me where to find it, actually."
Another bark of laughter. He began to feel concerned that there was an inside joke at his expense that he wasn't privy to. He wondered if there was something green on his face.
"An airport!" the stranger exclaimed, "Which one, kid? A lot of airports around here!"
"Dozens," the wolf added.
"What?" That didn't make any sense. "I'm looking for Flightless Joe, he owns an airstrip here somewhere."
"Oh yeah, my good buddy Joe," the fox replied.
Tails cocked an eyebrow. "You know him?"
"Sure! We go way back."
"Well great! Then you can tell me how to get there!"
"Ohh... I don't think he wants to see you."
The snide glance that the strangers shared at this point gave Tails the strong suspicion that he was being lied to quite thoroughly, and it made him furious. These jerks seemed to have thought they'd found a sucker, and they were toying with him for some unknown reason. He didn't have time for this garbage.
"What do you mean he doesn't want to see me? You don't even know who I am."
"Sure I do! Sure! Joe says to me, he says: 'I don't want that ugly Tails kid coming around here anymore. He's a retard.' Hey, his words, not mine."
"Look, I don't know who you are," Tails snapped, "But if you think I'm just going to sit here and take this, you've got another thing coming. You can take your hospitality and shove it."
He stood up and began to walk away. He heard the braying laughter of the strangers behind him and found himself growing angrier by the second. He was instantly ashamed of himself. How was he going to set his people free if he couldn't even handle a couple of regular bullies?
"Hey! Hey, I didn't mean anything by it!" the fox shouted after him, still laughing. Already, Tails was starting to forget who was behind him, and from where his anger stemmed. He ran away from the strangers, who had faded into silhouettes in his mind, ghosts he may have imagined, and then they vanished entirely. Surrounded by the dark, he forgot everything but himself and his mission. His anger remained, emotional residue without context, and he fumed for a while before he settled down to sleep in a soft patch of ground. His hunger satified, his exhaustion was the most pressing of issues.
Tails slept well, and dreamed of adventures that he couldn't later recall.

---

7:09 pm

Tails found a tree trunk in the darkness and hid behind it, panting and close to tears. He didn't have the energy for this. He was starving, he hurt all over, and he was exhausted. When he gathered the courage, he peered back.
To his surprise, there was a campfire flickering nearby. He saw two mobians sitting by it. Perhaps they could offer him something to eat?
Slowly he crept toward the camp, conscious that there was something dangerous nearby, though he couldn't seem to bring to mind what it was. Something was out there, in the dark. He had just been running from it. He would have to warn these two, as well.
A fox and a wolf sat across from each other, on either side of the fire. The fox was cooking something in a pot. The smell of it made Tails' mouth water and his stomach growl like a wild animal.
"Excuse me," he whimpered. Not loudly enough. He tried again. "Excuse me?"
Both heads snapped around to look at him.
"Can I- Can I have something to eat? Please?"
There was no reply for a moment. Then the fox shrieked, picked up a knife, and launched himself at Tails.
Not the welcome he was hoping for.
"That's it!" the stranger yelled, "That's the last straw! I'm going to take your head off, you little rodent!"
"Please!" Tails whimpered, and the other fox grabbed the fur around the scruff of his neck so hard that it felt like he was trying to tear it out.
"I'll teach you to be a smart-aleck. I gave you two chances, that's two more than usual, and still you push it, you keep pushing it, and now you're going to lose blood."
Tails felt the blade of the knife on his midsection. "Please!" he pleaded, "I don't know what you're talking about! I've never seen you before! I've never met you!"
The fox was breathing hard, growling deep in his throat, but he stayed his hand. He looked confused, a little bewildered, and mercifully weakened his grip a little.
"There something wrong with you, kid?" he asked.
Tails didn't reply, just shook his head. The stranger narrowed his eyes, and after a moment he let the younger fox go, though he still held the knife out in front of him.
The other stranger, the wolf, approached from behind.
"You gonna bleed 'im, Dalziel?"
"There's something funny about this kid," the fox said, "I think he's a retard or something. Says he doesn't recognise us, though he was right here all of five minutes ago."
Though the immediate danger seemed to have passed, Tails wasn't too much more relieved, seeing as these strangers were clearly maniacs, or lunatics, or both. Why were they acting as though they knew him? He had never seen either of them before, so far as he could remember.
"He's just messin' with you," the wolf growled, "Crikey. Are you gonna mess him up or am I?"
"Just wait a second," 'Dalziel' snapped, and turned back to Tails. "You messin' with me, kid?"
"I'm not messing with you," Tails assured, "I've never seen you before, either of you, I swear to God. Please, I'm just... I'm really hungry. And I think I'm lost, and... I just need something to eat."
"You weren't here, just a few minutes ago," the fox pressed. "You weren't right here, standing where you are now, saying the same stupid things that you are now."
"No! I wasn't!" They really had gone mad. Tails was about to produce an alibi, but his breath caught in his throat when he realised he couldn't really picture where it was that he had been five minutes ago. Or one minute. It must have been the fear clouding his mind.
The fox laughed. "Well kid, I tell you what. Either you have an identical twin brother roaming around these parts, or there's something gone wrong with your noggin."
Tails wasn't sure he should further antagonise these people by insinuating that they were the crazy ones, but he couldn't quite figure out what they were implying.
"There's nothing wrong with my head," he said. "What are you saying, that I've got amnesia? I remember who I am. I remember where I am."
"Oh yeah? And where are you?"
"At the border of Kirandul, in the mountains." He was sure that the mountains themselves must be around here somewhere, though he couldn't make them out at night.
"The mountains?" Dalziel barked, "Kiran-what? Kid, I don't know where you think you are, but you're not in any mountains... unless you call the old Peaks of Eastern Border mountains."
Tails was becoming more confused by the moment. Talking with crazy people was a complicated business. Why couldn't he remember where he really was?
"I don't understand, Dalziel," the wolf complained, "The kid's screwing with us. We should just cut 'im and leave 'im."
"No, no, this is too precious," the other one replied, "This is too interesting. Don't you see? The kid's head is spinning around in a loop. No wonder they let him outta the hamster cage, he's a total retard!"
"So what?"
"So, we can use this. Think about it. We can tell him any story we wanted, he'd have to believe it. Wouldn't matter what we told him, he'd just forget it afterward, right?"
"I guess."
"So this could be entertaining! Look, when it gets too old, you can cut him up, all right?"
"Well, what are we gonna tell 'im?"
Tails let the two of them argue it out while he considered the situation. He was quite sure that he didn't have a memory problem, but that would be easier to believe if he could actually remember what it was that he had been doing before he got here. In fact, he wasn't even sure he could remember getting here, didn't know if he could even recall the beginning of this conversation. Suppose it was true? Suppose he did have parts of his memory missing. What would that imply? He might not have been where he thought he was. He might be even more lost than he knew. What could he do about it? He would have to concentrate. He would have to make sure he remembered. He would have to-
"Hey kid! You want something to eat?"
Huh? Tails turned around to see who had spoken. Two strangers were sitting by a bonfire, and one of them was motioning for his approach.

---

6:15 pm

Tails had no compass apart from the sun, and with that as his guide, he hiked deep into the mountains in search of his destiny. It took him most of the day.
He headed east, away from the sun, and just as it began to disappear behind him, he reached something inexplicable. Something that made his confused mind reel, revolt and retract right back into the depths of utter bewilderment.
A clearing. A field. It led to a forest, which seemed to go on as far as he could see from this vantage point. No more mountains. But that was simply not possible.
He looked behind him to see if he could find the sun, but it had gone behind the rocky cliffs. Still, even if he had only been going vaguely east... the Kirandul range extended for miles. It was the deepest mountain range on the planet, and he had entered from the western side. Nobody had ever hiked through it on foot. It was simply not possible. It would take weeks. How could he be looking into a clearing?
Tails fell to his haunches and buried his face in his hands, peeking out from the gaps between his fingers. He was utterly, irredeemably lost. He knew his map was gone, his whole pack was gone. He had reached for it hundreds of times. Where had he left it? He couldn't remember. There was something wrong with his head. He couldn't remember anything.
There must have been more mountains beyond the forest, he decided. This was just a valley, a large clearing he hadn't known about, or couldn't remember being here. He picked himself up again and started onward. He would find himself again, he had to. Without his supplies, time was running out.
The thought of dying here seriously crossed his mind as he wandered down into the valley. He couldn't help it. What a stupid, idiotic way to end his life. He'd only just begun to act on his true destiny. He had only just realised what he had been born to do. How could he allow himself to die before his quest had even started? He had vowed that the banal futility of the Freedom Fighters, puppies chasing their tails under the illusion of an eventual just cause that neither involved nor interested him, would not wind up being his life's legacy. If he died here, then it would be. He would never have the chance to prove that he had learned anything from his time with Sonic whatsoever. He would never have the chance to prove he even tried. All because he had been too stupid to even prepare without killing himself.
When Tails reached the clearing, the sun was down and the valley was in darkness. There was a flicker of light ahead of him, near a copse of trees, that he realised was a campfire. Relief flooded over him. People! They would have a map, they would be able to tell him where he was. He ran, almost sprinted, toward the light.
The small, crackling fire had something sitting over it - a cooking pot. Tails forgot all about being lost when he realised he was starving. He couldn't remember having eaten all day... or having done anything else, for that matter.
He couldn't see any people around the camp, but his priorities had changed and he didn't really care. There was food lying around - a lot of food! Two significant piles of it. Shrink-packaged stuff, the kind that would last for a long time without refrigeration. Perfect for a long journey. He could eat now, and then ration the rest out for the journey ahead. He fell to his knees beside the bounty, mouth watering uncontrollably, and it didn't even dawn on him to consider that it all belonged to somebody else... until the shadow crept up behind him, and somebody spoke in an angry, growling voice.
"I told you I'd slice you in half if I caught you stealing from me. Now you're going to learn a thing or two about what it is to be an exile, you rat."
Tails leaped to the side just in time to avoid being skewered on a knife blade. It sliced open a box of biscuits instead, and the contents spilled out into the grass.
His attacker cursed loudly and knelt to salvage the biscuits. Tails backed away slowly, but ran into something warm and furry. He had backed into a large, feral looking mobian wolf, encrusted with mange and showing all of his teeth in a fierce, drooling growl.
"He's come back for our loot, Dale," the first attacker said, and Tails could see his face. It was a fox, the same as him. "The kid's got some gall. Fresh from the hamster cage, I'll reckon. Doesn't quite know what he's dealing with."
"I'll teach him what he's dealing with," the wolf growled, and at the word 'teach' he spat so much foaming drool that Tails was near saturated with it. This guy was absolutely terrifying. It was rare for a mobian to share the beastly traits exhibited by the animals who shared their names, but enough time stranded in the wilderness, away from civilisation and forced to hunt and kill, forced to endure disease and famine, would often have this effect. When a mobian went feral, he or she was little more than an animal with a larger brain. The difference between a mobian (or anthric) species and an animal (or zoic) species could be blurred by extreme conditions. This guy looked like he could tear Tails limb from limb as easily as any zoic wolf, and more frightening, looked as though he wanted to.
"I'm sorry," Tails stammered, "I didn't know- I'm- I'm hungry-"
"You didn't know!" the other fox roared, "I warned you this morning, you little maggot. This is our haul. It's law of the jungle out here, and I don't care if you're just a dumb kid, I'll slit you open just as fast as if you were one of the Armada."
Tails couldn't understand anything that the fox was saying, and feared that the two of them were completely insane, which would make it much more difficult to escape from them. Crazy people couldn't be reasoned with.
"You're m-mistaken," he stammered, "I've never met you before. I don't know what the Armada is. Please- please, just- I need to eat-"
Both of the strangers laughed, for some reason.
"Hey Dalziel," the wolf said, "He doesn't know who the Armada is."
"You must take me for some kind of idiot," the fox said, "Is that what you think? That I'm a gibbering retard?"
"No! I-"
"You really want some of this? You want a warm jab in the guts, smart-aleck?" The fox, Dalziel, held up his knife, and Tails was shocked to see that he only had three fingers on his hand. There was no space where another one had been lopped off; the whole hand was shrivelled, emaciated, the fingers too long and clawlike. It looked much more like a bird's talon than a fox's hand.
Tails just gulped, and he knew to his dismay that he was allowing the other two to see that he was terrified. They laughed again.
"You find your own food," the fox said, "You'll learn, soon enough. You don't get fed out here like you do in there. You'll learn, or you'll die, either way it's none of ours. Poke through our stuff again, and Dale here will make a three course meal out of you. He's been out here longer than I have. He don't care, if it's animal or mobian, all tastes the same to him."
Tails eyed the wolf, who eyed him back. He wondered whether 'Dale' was imagining how he would taste.
"Now, scat," snapped Dalziel, and poked Tails with the end of the knife, hard enough to hurt but not to draw blood. It was all the persuasion he needed, and he ran from the two ferals, who shrieked near-insane laughter until he disappeared from their sight.
Tails found a tree trunk in the darkness and hid behind it, panting and close to tears. He didn't have the energy for this. He was starving, he hurt all over, and he was exhausted. When he gathered the courage, he peered back.
To his surprise, there was a campfire flickering nearby. He saw two mobians sitting by it. Perhaps they could offer him something to eat?

---

12:35 pm

A sound outside the mouth of the cave captured his attention.
It could have been an animal, but Tails was almost sure it was mobian. Other hikers? Possibly. He briefly considered going out there and saying hello, when it dawned on him that he didn't realise why he was inside a cave in the first place. He couldn't exactly remember coming in.
"I must be delirious," he muttered, "Too exhausted. I'm not even paying attention to what I'm doing."
Something buzzed near his ear, like an enormous bug, and he let out a startled shriek and batted at the air. To his shock, there was something flying around in here with him. If it was a beetle, it was the biggest freaking beetle he'd ever seen. What was more, it didn't fly using wings, but with rotor blades, like a helicopter. If such a thing existed in nature, he'd never heard of it. The bug was huge and gold, and zipped around his head in a circle.
The most shocking thing by far was when it spoke.
"One last thing before I go!" it said, "Some helpful advice. The Armada don't really like exiles hanging around up here. They like you where they can keep tabs on you. I suggest you don't let them find you up here, or you might just be singled out as a troublemaker. From me to you, buckeroo, from me to you!"
Tails just barked incoherently and swiped at the horrid thing. It avoided his blows while emitting beeping and clicking noises. Was this some kind of robot?
"What are you?" he demanded, "What do you want?"
"Hey, hey!" the thing cried out, "You're a crazy-guy! You're more busted than I am! I'm outta here! Good-bye!"
It spun about on its rotors and flew out through the mouth of the cave and into the sky. Tails looked around the cave to make sure there weren't any more of the things about the place, but it seemed secure. Now he could focus on figuring out where he was.
He left the cave to have a look about outside. The position of the sun and the heat told him that it was around noon, but he didn't recognise his surroundings. It was true that all the mountains looked very much the same, but why couldn't he remember what he had been doing this morning? Which direction he was headed?
I just need to look at the map, he thought to himself, and looked about for his belongings. That was something else amiss. He wasn't so naive as to start out on this journey without packing supplies. He had a hiking bag with enough food to last him weeks, a tent, a map and other things. It was a huge bag, so where was it now? He began to panic a little. If he'd left it somewhere, set off without it and lost it, he was thoroughly screwed.
Movement to his left. Tails turned and looked through the trees warily, in case it was a bear or something. He thought earlier that he'd heard a mobian out here, and he was right. But rather than approach the strangers, he kept himself hidden. These weren't hikers. These were military.
The mystery of his missing bag was already fading from his memory as Tails watched three uniformed soldiers, all of them birds, move through the heavy foliage with a large degree of purpose. They were searching for something.
A few things Tails thought were particularly odd about this. Firstly, he couldn't figure out to which nation these soldiers were allied. They weren't GUN, they most certainly weren't Arack, and no other people along the southern rim of Westerica had an organised state, at least not organised enough to have a military. Had he stumbled upon an invading force from some foreign nation looking to establish power on the region? If so, it made no sense that they would be here in the mountains, the border between Arack-occupied Kirandul and a hundred kilometres of Westerican desert. These people were a total anomoly. And Tails had no way of knowing if they were hostile or not. He decided to grab his backpack and move along.
Looking around, he searched for it. But it wasn't there.
Why do I feel as though I've done this before?
A vague sense of de'ja'vu swept over him, as though partially remembering a dream. There were bizarre images, or fragments of images, in the back of his mind. A little yellow robot. A crested stranger with a fire in his eyes. The word overdraw on the tip of his lips. He mouthed it in a whisper, but it revealed nothing.
Already he had forgotten about the soldiers in persuit. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath to clear his head. Joe's airport could not be far away. If he had lost his supplies, then he would have to reach his destination as soon as possible. He was already hungry. How long had it been since he had last eaten? He couldn't remember. He couldn't seem to remember much of anything about his immediate past. All he knew was that he had to press on. So he steeled himself for the long haul, and started onward.
Tails had no compass apart from the sun, and with that as his guide, he hiked deep into the mountains in search of his destiny. It took him most of the day.

---

12:15 pm

A few metres into the cave, he tripped on something and forgot why he was running.
Easy does it, Tails. Slow and steady, now. Don't knock yourself out. Why am I in a cave?
He stopped to reassert himself, and sat down on the cold stone. He must have been thinking too hard and lost his sense of direction. There was no time for spelunking, he had to find Joe's airport and the Tornado. This wasn't a holiday. He didn't even really like caves.
He picked up the thing that he had tripped on. It looked like a rock but it was too light and seemed to be made out of metal. Inspecting it, he found to his amusement that it was a little toy of some kind. It had a face and two legs, and looked somewhat like a little mechanical pig. The toy was encrusted with dirt, like it had been here a long time. He brushed it off and looked at its dulled gold face. The thing was a little like one of Robotnik's badniks, except that it was too small to be of any harm, and there was no reason for a badnik to be all the way out here. He smirked at it. Cute.
Tails sat back and put his hand on the ground, and touched something else. A small scrap of metal that revealed itself to be a key, like something he might use to crank up an old fashioned clock. It was painted with the same dulled shade of gold as the little robot was. Curious, he looked for a hole in the thing, found one in its back, and inserted the key. It fit. What a strange little artifact. He tried to turn it, but the gears inside were clogged with dirt and made a strained crunching noise. He shook the robot and beat it against his hand to empty it out, but realised that the thing was probably too rusted to do much of anything. After a good shake, he turned the key again, and this time it cranked the spring inside, crunching only a little. He gave it a few good cranks and put it down on its feet.
At first it looked like it was completely dead, but then the key began to turn on its own, very slowly, and the clockwork inside the robot began ticking over with a sick irregularity. The robot wobbled on its feet, and then one of its eyes flickered with light. Its jaw moved up and down, and its legs began to march on the spot. Such a queer contraption, a child wouldn't know what to make of it. The thing spun in a little circle, then shook erratically. It made a beeping sound, then a grinding sound, and chomped its jaws together. To Tails' shock, it spoke.
"Remote Robot serial forty-seven-k reporting. Fatal error in unit seventy- seventy- seventy- seventy- sev-" The thing backfired suddenly, blowing a cloud of dirt out of its little mechanical backside, and fell on its face. The key stopped turning and it stopped dead.
Tails nudged it with his foot, but it may as well have been a hunk of scrap. How unfathomably bizarre. It seemed that this was more than a toy, it was a fully-fledged robot of some kind. Tails had seen plenty of robots in his time, powered by plenty of different methods, but he had never seen a clockwork robot, or ever even conceived of one. The whole idea was very amusing, and he found himself, in the face of his better judgement, cranking the key again. Much more, this time. The spring inside had plenty of give and he cranked for several minutes before it tightened up. It seemed the robot's insides had been cleaned out a little, for the gears churned more smoothly and with less noise.
The robot's eyes flickered on again and this time it had a little look around, turning one way and then the other, its gears tick-tick-ticking within its tiny chassis. It turned and looked right at Tails, eyes flashing twice. "Remote Robot serial forty-seven-k reporting," it said, "Idle time... one year, seven months? Crikey! I have been out of it. Listen, buckaroo, thanks for the wind-up but where the heck am I?"
"Uh, hello," Tails replied, "I, uh. Actually, I'm not sure. Somewhere in the Kirandul mountains, but beyond that-"
"Oh snap, son, you're even more confused than I am," the robot buzzed. "Kirandul mountains indeed. I'm not that busted. You really turn my crank."
Tails was flabbergasted. The darned thing had an attitude.
"Never mind," the robot said, "I remember, I remember. You try sleeping for a year and a half and you'll wonder where you are in the morning, too. Now if you'll excuse me..."
The robot (and Tails was already starting to think of it as a 'he') seemed to go through a struggle with itself, shaking and beeping and making harsh grinding noises deep inside.
"What's wrong?" Tails asked.
"Nothing! Nothing! Nothing at all!"
"Can I help?"
"No!" The robot clambered away from him. "I will thank you to keep your nasty hands away from me. Truth be told, I shouldn't even be associating with you exiles, let alone letting you touch me."
Exiles?
"I'm very good with machines," Tails explained, "I repair aeroplanes as a hobby, so a simple little clockwork robot should be a piece of cake."
"I am not just a simple little clockwork robot!" it protested, "I am a very complex nucleo-silicon nanocomputer powered by a delicate internal kinetic engine. You could not possibly understand the intricacies of my advanced technology."
"You're running on cogs and springs," Tails said, "Look. You have a cute little key and everything."
The robot appeared embarrassed about its little key and turned around to hide it. "I don't have to listen to these wild allegations! I'm not letting you- get- anywhere-- near--"
Its voice began to wind down like a cassette tape losing power, and the two little eyes faded into darkness. The robot's key cranked to a stop and it fell dead where it stood. Tails snickered and picked it up like a broken toy.
There was a clasping mechanism on the contraption's rear end, and Tails was able to open it up and see inside. What he found were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tiny cogs and springs. This machine was very complicated indeed, but it was basically clockwork. He couldn't fathom how such primitive mechanics were able to power a computer. The machine had been right to that extent. Tails shook as much dirt as he could out of the intricate system and blew hard into it a few times. He then closed it all back up again and wound the key.
"-me," the robot concluded, and nodded. "Now, away I go."
To Tails' awe, a tiny little set of rotor blades poked up out of the robot's midsection, and its feet retracted into its body. The blades spun and the robot lifted off the ground. This just kept getting weirder and weirder.
A sound outside the mouth of the cave captured his attention.

---

11:50 am

Tails scrambled for purchase on an outcrop, struggling to drag himself into a small cave in the cliff wall. When he pulled his body to safety, he lay on his back on the rocks, panting and flexing his sore muscles. As he rested, it dawned on him that he didn't seem to recall what, exactly, he had been doing.
He felt as though he had run a marathon through rough countryside. He was scratched and bruised all over, his muscles were tired and overexerted. It dawned on him that his young teenage brain, infected with illusions of immortality, had vastly underestimated the difficulty of passing through the Kirandul mountan range on his own. He remembered the first time he came here, with Sonic, many years ago. He had been young and rowdy, had harboured a severe distrust for the hedgehog, and had given him a hard time throughout the entire ordeal. Now he wished that Sonic was here with him, to guide and help him, as he always had in the past.
(But he's not here, you dumb kid. He's gone, he's gone for good, and if you ever want to be even half the mobian he was, you'll get up and fight on.)
There was still a part of him that couldn't accept Sonic's demise, and it certainly wasn't logic that led him to this belief. The logic was against the idea. His uncle Tyler, or rather the monster Nightmare who lived within him, had ended Sonic just as he had ended Trevor Prower. The only true father figures who he had ever known, and the same beast had taken them both. Despite this, Tails did not harbour resentment toward his uncle Tyler. It was Nightmare who he blamed, and whoever it had been who had created the beast. Tyler thought the creature inside him was a god. Tails, however, had other theories.
The evidence supporting Sonic's death was overwhelming. Why, then, did a nagging part of him insist that the hedgehog was still alive? Tails was not one for blind faith. Faith had never put food on his table or cash in his pocket. Faith didn't keep him alive, knowledge did. And Sonic was not an immortal, he was young, reckless, and as impermanant as any other life. There was no evidence that he was alive, and Tails struggled to suppress the thought that he was. Not because he didn't want Sonic to be alive, but because blind faith was never far from blind hope. And while blind faith could at times be admirable, blind hope was almost always pathetic.
(So get up, Tails. His legacy is your burden, now. Both of their legacies - Sonic's and your father's - are survived only by you.)
Tails had three selves who coinhabited his mind, three tiny entities who often bickered for control, moreso during difficult times. One was born in the streets and knew only survival, at any cost whatsoever. Another was born in Knothole, and knew about honour, responsibility and respect. Tails had spent much of his life trying to supress one or the other, but now he found that he fared best with a healthy combination of both. The first told him how to live, and the second told him why. But there was a third entity, and it had never been born, as far as Tails could tell he had always possessed it. It was the third voice that whispered to him about faith, belief against the odds, and he frequently ignored it because it never helped him do anything at all. Wishing that Sonic was alive would never make it so, and would only hinder him from accepting it.
It brought to mind one of Nails the Bat's sayings. Whenever Tails had wished for something aloud, Nails would tell him to hold out his hands. When Tails did so, Nails would always snort laughter.
"Now, wish in one hand, and crap in the other. Go ahead and see which one fills up first."
It made sense. The only reality was the one that he could see with his own eyes, and if he added one and one together, no matter how much he hated it, he would always be left with two. Every darn time.
Tails picked himself up against the complaints of his aching muscles, and dusted the chalky white dirt out of his fur. All this deep thinking and he seemed to have forgotten what he had been doing before he lay down to rest. Which direction was he headed? Which had he come from? He reached for his pack and only clawed at dirt. Frowning, he looked about for it, and was hit with a sinking feeling when he realised it wasn't in sight.
My supplies! My rations!
A sound to the right of him caught his attention. It was like someone had thrown a pebble very hard at the rock face near his head, and small stones rained down on him. It had been preceeded with a resonating crack from below.
Tails hit the deck before the sound had even finished echoing. He knew the sound of a gunshot as well as he knew the sound of birdsong.
Lying as close to the ground as he could, he panted and waited. Somebody opened up with an automatic weapon, peppering the rocks above him with bulletholes, but his assailant had no clear shot.
Who in holy heck is shooting at me? Up here?
Perhaps there were pirates, or drug runners in these mountains. Tails hadn't heard of it, Joe had never mentioned anything of the sort and he lived here. So what was going on?
Somebody down below was yelling cease fire! with a voice of authority, and the shooting stopped. That was even more bizarre. Pirates don't say 'cease fire'.
Tails wanted very much to poke his head out, just for a moment, to see who was down there. But he was smarter than that. Anyone who used the term 'cease fire' was probably a very good shot. He kept all of his vital parts out of the range of their bullets, but he didn't know how long he would be safe here. If they wanted him dead then they'd come for him.
"You up there!" The voice from below shouted up at him. "You are safe to come down! I have instructed my troops that you are not to be harmed! I just want to talk to you, yes?"
Tails snorted. Won't be harmed. Yeah, right. The only talking this guy wanted to do was behind the barrel of a very large gun, and it was a discussion Tails decided he could live without. He looked around for a means of escape, and saw a large cave behind him. Caves were risky because often there was no way out of them but the way you went in. But it seemed like there was no other way, at least not without putting himself in the crosshair. He took the option and ran with it.
A few metres into the cave, he tripped on something and forgot why he was running.

---

11:30 am

A clicking sound near his ear forced Tails to turn away from the gruesome image. He came face to face with two complete strangers.
"Huh?"
Two black, dark uniformed birds were kneeling in front of him. One was wearing a helmet that obscured most of his (or her) face, and the other, a stony-faced bird with a spiky crest of black feathers, was clicking his fingers next to Tails' ear.
"Hello?" he was saying, "Hello? Hello? Who are you?"
"Hunnh?"
Tails shook his head, frowned, looked around in confusion. Where was he? He felt as though he had just woken up from a nap, but he was standing beside a road somewhere. A bunch of dark-coloured trucks were driving along it. Who were these strangers standing before him? They were actually rather terrifying. The one with the crest had a cruel edge to his expression and a somewhat frightening glint in his eye. Tails, blinking and swaying in disorientation, looked down and saw that the bird was wearing his name on his uniform.
Lt. OVERDRAW. Were these guys military?
"What's going on?" he asked.
"Identify yourself immediately," commanded Overdraw, and his voice was gathering a distinct air of irritation about it. Tails could tell that this guy had a very short temper. "Are you lost? Did you get out of quarantine, yes? Do you have a signature?"
Tails didn't have a clue what he was talking about. All he picked up was that Overdraw had a very queer accent that he couldn't place, and that was a little disconcerting. If these guys were military, he didn't recognise the uniforms.
Man, why couldn't he remember where he was?
"I- I don't-" he stammered, pinching the bridge of his snout between two fingers.
The two birds looked at each other with hard expressions, then turned back to Tails.
"I think that you should come with me, yes?"
They began to advance on him. Tails backed away, extremely fearful of the glint in that crested stranger's eyes.
Several dark vehicles had stopped nearby and more birds were stepping out and walking toward him. Was he infringing on somebody's territory? He was drawing blanks in his mind, unable to even guess at his whereabouts. He assumed that he must have fallen asleep in the mountains somewhere, but if so, why couldn't he remember why he was standing here?
In such bizarre and surreal circumstances, the only possibility that he could come up with was that the crested Lieutenant had something to do with his alarming state of mind. His memory had been robbed from him by this stranger, and he was darned if he was going to go along with him. While Overdraw reached behind his back for something he had holstered and reached for Tails with the other hand, the fox followed his instincts to turn and run away.
This didn't seem to impress Overdraw. In fact, it made him hopping mad. The Lieutenant and half of his army bolted after him, and after a moment he began to hear gunshots.
Tails was absolutely terrified, but it failed to register with him that he had absolutely no idea why. Somebody was after him, this he knew, and he couldn't let them catch him, this he knew as well. He recognised the sound of gunfire, even if he didn't know who was shooting at him, and this was enough to keep his instincts geared toward escape. Nothing else, for the time being, mattered.
He ran for what seemed like a long time, but panic made the perception of time difficult. Tails was running through bush, then a field, then across rocks. Ahead he saw a cliff face, and knew that it was a dead end. For a moment he glanced back to see what or who was chasing him, and saw three black all-terrain vehicles advancing on him from behind. Each one had a huge gun mounted on top, and each had a mobian in military uniform leaning out the window with another gun. That was a lot of guns, a few too many for Tails' comfort, and they were all aiming at him. They were going to pick him off like a clay pigeon. He looked back toward the cliff face that he was approaching, saw the caves higher in the rock structure, and made a rash instinctual decision. He ran atop a large rocky outcrop, leaped as hard as he could at its peak, and spun his tails like rotor blades. The thrust launched him high, high into the air, and for a moment he thought that it may have been the highest he had ever flown on his own. His mind drifted, he forgot his danger and thought only of the euphoria of free flight. Oh how he'd missed it! There was no gravity. There was no Mobius. There was only air, wind, the sky, and Tails. He closed his eyes and spread his arms wide. He was the sky. This was bliss.
He opened his eyes just in time to see that he was about to crash into the cliff face, and bracing himself for impact, he managed to grab onto a rock and steady himself.
Tails scrambled for purchase on an outcrop, struggling to drag himself into a small cave in the cliff wall. When he pulled his body to safety, he lay on his back on the rocks, panting and flexing his sore muscles. As he rested, it dawned on him that he didn't seem to recall what, exactly, he had been doing.

---

11:20 am

An unfamiliar sound behind him made him turn around, and all at once he lost his train of thought.
He turned back again. He was in a field... had he been talking to somebody? There was nobody there now, though there was a hole in the ground that looked like something had been half-buried there until very recently.
He turned to look behind him. What was that sound? It was like heavy traffic on a highway. The only problem was that there were no highways through the Kirandul Ranges. Was that where he was? It certainly didn't look much like the mountains, but then, he didn't know where else he could possibly be. The mountains were his most recent memory.
This was very strange.
Running through a patch of scrub, he followed the sound of traffic. When he burst through the wilderness to the other side, he began to panic. He didn't know where he was. He didn't recognise any of this.
There was a road, and there were dark-coloured vehicles driving along it, dozens of them, all in the same direction, all identical. Tails shielded his eyes from the bright sunlight and looked up and down the road.
Why was he in such pain? His muscles ached, and he felt scratched and bruised all over, like he'd been doing heavy construction work in a hailstorm. He looked down at his body and saw that his fur was caked with mud and sand. He was a wreck. He looked and felt like he'd been lost in the wilderness for days. At this point, he couldn't be sure he hadn't been.
"Hey," he said. He'd meant it as a shout, but his voice was weak. He had to get some help. Someone had to help him.
"Hey!" He began to jog, then run, along the side of the road in the direction the trucks were going. "Hey! Help me! Somebody help me! Someone help!"
He didn't want to cry, he wanted to be stronger than that, but the more he realised how much time was missing from his mind, the more of a panic he drifted into. His heart thudded, his stomach churned. Something terrible had happened, and he didn't know what it was. He didn't know where he was.
After running for some time, one of the vehicles, smaller than most of the others, slowed down and pulled over into the embankment ahead of him. Both doors opened, and two people got out. Strangely, they were both birds of some kind, and they both wore similar dark uniforms. The driver of the vehicle was wearing a helmet that obscured his eyes. The passenger's uniform was much more decorated, and his head was plumed with a tall crest of jet black feathers. Both of them approached him with expressions of faint concern. They appeared to be military of some kind, which Tails found both alarming and comforting. Alarming because this much military almost always meant very deep trouble was brewing, but comforting because he knew they would help him. That was part of a military's job... unless they were the enemy.
"Please help me," he begged.
The birds stopped about a meter ahead of him, and the tall one who appeared to be a superior officer kneeled to Tails' height. Tails noticed a patch on his uniform that read Lt. OVERDRAW.
"You are an exile, yes?" he asked.
The bird spoke with an accent that Tails didn't recognise at all. That worried him even more, and his lip trembled when he replied.
"Help me, I don't know- I don't know where I am-"
The kneeling bird looked up at the standing one, then back at Tails.
"You are an exile, yes?" Overdraw asked again, "What is your name? Who are you?"
Tails didn't know what he meant by exile, but he supposed that, in a way, he was one. He had been exiled from the world that was familiar to him, thrust into madness, a refugee from sanity.
"My name is Tails," he said, "I think- I think I've lost my memory. Just parts of it, I-"
He happened to glance toward the road, where the dark vehicles were still passing, and saw a much larger truck moving slowly behind the convoy. The truck was carrying something on a huge open trailer, tied down with ropes and harnesses. To his shock, he recognised the cargo. It was his plane! The Tornado! It was extremely damaged, as though it had crashed. The cockpit was all smashed in and scorched, and a wing was missing. His poor, poor Tornado!
A clicking sound near his ear forced Tails to turn away from the gruesome image. He came face to face with two complete strangers.

---

11:12 am

Tails picked himself up with a frustrated grunt, blinked and wiped the mud out of his eyes. Now... What the heck was he doing?
He was in some kind of scrub, sitting in a puddle of sandy, slimy mud. He'd been running and had fallen over. Okay, why? He looked around in idle confusion. This wasn't the Kirandul mountains... was it?
To find himself in a situation where he had absolutely no clue where he was or what he'd been doing was very strange and somewhat frightening for Tails, as though God Himself had picked him up from whatever he'd been doing, shaken him around a bit, and dumped him in some random location on Mobius. What had been his last memory? He focused to find the answer... he was looking for the airport. Of course... he was going to see Flightless Joe.
This wasn't an airport, and it wasn't the mountains. It didn't even seem to be the right climate, although that was quite ridiculous. He was in pain, he ached quite badly from head to toe, but it wasn't from the fall he had just taken. It was much worse than that, as though he'd been in a boxing match with three grown bodybuilders.
Holy crap. What had he been doing?
He laughed and shook his head. A brain glitch, that was all it was, a temporary case of mild insanity. Any moment now he would remember what he had been doing and get back to it. The first step to that end was probably figuring out where he was. Because it sure wasn't the mountains.
Tails stood up and looked around for anything that seemed familiar. He listened to the sounds on the breeze and thought he heard ocean waves and gulls. Was he near a beach? That would certainly be strange. There was also the sound of two people arguing, about what he had no idea, but it seemed quite heated.
He decided to investigate. It probably couldn't hurt. At least he would be able to ask someone what was going on.
There was a clearing in the scrub, and the source of the commotion was a wolf and another fox. Tails could see immediately that neither were in very good shape. They were filthy, unkempt creatures, too thin by far, and the wolf had traces of mange on his pelt. They were arguing bitterly and standing over something that was half-buried in the dirt.
Tails recognised it instantly. It was the supply canister from the Tornado. On long flights, it was stocked up with food and other necessities. It was also very much attached to the plane, which meant that someone had ripped it out. These two derelicts were probably responsible.
"Hey!" he shouted, "Hey, you!"
The feuding mobians fell silent and turned to look at him, and Tails could now see that they were actually quite intimidating characters, especially the wolf, and he was sorry he approached them. His nerve was a little weakened, but now he had to continue.
"That's mine," he said, "Where did you get that?"
The wolf and the fox looked at one another for a moment, then back down at him.
"Excuse me?" the fox asked.
"That's mine," Tails replied, and began to approach the canister, reaching for it. "It's-"
"Get back!" the fox shrieked. The wolf was snarling, ropes of saliva dripping from his bared teeth. Tails gasped and backed away. Approaching these two had obviously been a very bad idea.
"It's okay," he said softly, "Everything's all right."
"Who are you?" the fox demanded, "You seen him before, Dale?"
"Never seen 'im," the wolf replied.
"My name's Tails, I just-"
"You an exile? Are you an exile or are you a hamster?" The fox spat in the grass.
A hamster? "I don't understand," Tails said.
"You don't understand? Well understand this, shortstop. It's finders keepers out here. You want to eat, you get your own chow. This one's ours, and we ain't sharing. Try to steal from us and we'll cut you up bad, okay? Real bad."
"No problem. Listen, no problem, okay?"
"No problem. Come on, Dale."
The wolf and the fox picked up the canister and carried it away, looking back constantly at Tails to make sure he wasn't following. He didn't dare.
An unfamiliar sound behind him made him turn around, and all at once he lost his train of thought.

---

10:43 am

We can predict the future of our lives; the nature of our doom eludes us all.
He awoke because breathing was difficult. He was breathing sand. When he lifted his head, the coughing reflex kicked in immediately, and his diaphragm spasmed uncontrollably, emptying his lungs and breathing apparatus of the foreign matter that choked it. After that was done, he gasped deeply and rolled onto his back, breathing as though breathing was coming back into fashion.
His entire body hurt very badly. He was bruised and sprained from head to toe. When he ran a hand across his face, he found that his forehead was bleeding. At least he didn't think any bones had been broken. He didn't think.
The sun overhead bore down on him and he shielded his eyes from it while he rested his wounded body in the soft sand. Soon he would begin to focus on the problem of his not knowing where he was or how he had gotten into this state, but for now he only wanted to rest and think.
He could hear the sound of waves crashing against the beach, and that was strange to him, because the last memories he could piece together were of the mountains. The Kirandul mountains, inland to the east of the Great Forest. Why had he been there? Think, Tails, think.
He tried to stand, but it was more difficult than he expected. Something seemed wrong with his sense of balance, almost like he had been drugged somehow, and it took him three attempts to get on his feet and stay there. His head ached very badly, and he saw spots before his eyes.
Darn it... where the heck was he?
There were tropical palm trees all around him, vegetation that in no way fit the south Westerican climate. He was on a large beach, he could smell the salt and hear the water and the gulls, but he had no memory of beaches. He could remember wanting to go somewhere.
Tails tendered his sore head and stumbled through the dunes like a drunkard. He fell over once, and struggled to his feet again. Whatever had happened to him, it had beat him up pretty bad, and the most severe injury seemed to be the knock on his head. He wondered if that was what was wrong with his balance... and his memory.
But he remembered who he was. He was even starting to remember what he had come to think of as his quest. It had been his father's quest first, he had merely taken up the reins as his father's son. Trevor Prower had once made a promise, one that he hadn't been able to keep. Keeping that promise was the quest that Tails had undertaken, in his father's honour. That quest was to set his people free.
Tails climbed atop a tall dune and looked around, trying to see anything that he might find familiar and jog his lost memory. The beach was very clean, even pristine, almost untouched by mobian hands. A natural paradise. He sat and looked out at the ocean for a little while. Strangely, there seemed to be a bad storm brewing on the horizon. The weather on the beach was perfect, but not too far out he could see a restless black sky, boiling with angry cloud. Lightning flashed every few seconds. He was glad that he wouldn't have to fly or sail through that.
Tails looked up and down the beach, searching for any sign of life. He couldn't see too far in either direction because of the tropical wilderness, but surely he wasn't far south of the mountains.
A memory fragment flashed into his mind, and he focused on it to try and establish a context, but it was like grabbing at a wet bar of soap. He saw Flightless Joe, his friend the eccentric pilot who lived deep in the Kirandul Range in his private mountaintop airport. The memory was confusing because he had wanted to see Joe, had been travelling through the mountains for that very purpose.
Had he already met with Joe, and now couldn't remember doing so? How did that lead him here?
The first thing he knew he would have to do was find his way back to the mountains. Joe would surely be able to shed some light on this mystery, and even if he couldn't, he could certainly help with his quest - he needed to find an island, and for that, he needed a plane.
He began walking, along the shoreline, because he was afraid he might get lost if he wandered inland and found himself in some unmapped wilderness. Wherever he was, it would come to him soon. He was just a little out of it at the moment, a little confused and disoriented. All he would have to do was find some familiar surroundings and everything would be all right again.
A beach. This was so weird. No part of his plans involved travelling to a beach. When he and Tyler had parted ways, his route was inland. He had been in the mountains. The mountains. At what point had he arrived on a beach?
Now he was walking along the coastline but he couldn't even really remember getting here, and that was frightening. He had woken up in the sand... hadn't he? The details seemed to be fading out of his head. All he could tell was that he was on a beach, now. There were footprints behind him. Where was he walking to? Why?
Focus, Tails. You have to find Flightless Joe, you have to get to the mountains, get off this beach. You have a job to do, your father died for this, and now you must... you must... good God, where the heck am I?
He looked around, almost insane with confusion. Beach. Waves. Footprints behind him. He didn't know where he was walking or why, but perhaps if he continued he would find out. Why was he in pain? Why was he on a beach? Shouldn't he be in the mountains? Darn it, he was supposed to be in the mountains.
His memory of having awakened in the sand now eluded him. As far as he knew, his walk along this beach (and the pain he was experiencing) was completely without context, and that was a very queer sensation indeed.
Tails made his way through a patch of wilderness, and then scaled a dune, all the while searching for some rhyme or reason, some key to his immediate past. When he reached the top and looked over, he froze in his tracks. There were people up ahead, and something was buried in the sand.
He crouched behind a rock and squinted to make out the details, hoping that this would clear everything up.
Instead, it only made things more confusing.
The machine that he saw half-buried in the beach was familiar to him. He could have sworn that it was his plane, the Tornado. But the Tornado should have been with Flightless Joe at his mountain airport. What it was doing here (wherever here was) was a total mystery. It appeared to have crashed. One wing was further down the beach from the rest of the wreckage, which was itself half buried nose-first in the sand. It pained Tails very much to see his beloved plane in such a condition. It had been so long since he had seen it, and this was the state it was in. One thing was for sure, it wouldn't be flying him to any island any time soon.
There were about a dozen people around the crashed Tornado, none of whom Tails recognised. They all wore strange, identical uniforms, and he didn't recognise these either. They looked quasi-military, but they weren't GUN or anything of the sort. Their uniforms were dark khaki, and they wore bulky jackets and large helmets. What was more, they all seemed to be bird mobians, every last one of them, which was strange in such a multiracial world as modern day Mobius. Perhaps it had some significance.
It dawned on Tails that he really had no idea why he was sitting on a sand dune watching a bunch of birds in army uniforms inspect his Tornado. What was more, why had it crashed? His poor plane! He seemed to be in a lot of pain, too. Had he been in a crash? A brief moment of panic flooded over him as he realised he had no memory of arriving here.
Why was he... on a beach?
Shouldn't he be in the mountains?
Why had his plane crashed? Why couldn't he remember it? And who were those freaky looking birds?
He looked up and saw that two of the birds were walking in his direction. It dawned on him that he really didn't want them to see him. Whatever mystery lay in his immediate situation, he would work it out without any help from them.
Tails backed away, sliding down the side of the dune, and then started running inland, toward the thick scrub that lined the far side of the beach. This wasn't the kind of complication he needed, not when he had a quest to undertake.
He ran through the thick scrub for several metres before he tripped on something and went sprawling face-first into the wet, sandy mud.
For Tails Prower, his adventure began here. His words to Uncle Tyler still sat firm in his mind. "I swear, whatever it takes, I will find our people and set them free. Or I will die trying, as my father did. I'll do it, Ty, I'll take an oath. I'll free them, or die trying."
Surely, his future carried one of these fates on the wind. It just might not have been the fate that he preferred.
Tails picked himself up with a frustrated grunt, blinked and wiped the mud out of his eyes. Now... What the heck was he doing?

---

10:00 am

This was not the way it was supposed to end; but this was how it began.
The patch of ocean that connected the Sea of Torion to far off western lands was known as the Forbidden Zone for a reason. Two storm belts converged in this region, giving birth to hurricanes that raged with terrifying fervor. Planes and ships had an unfortunate history of going missing here. Flying or sailing through the Forbidden Zone was a task reserved for the suicidal, the deranged and the stupid. Tails may have been neither, but then he had no choice. This was his destiny. If he died, then it would be in accordance with that destiny.
Though he hoped and prayed that he wouldn't.
The sky was rarely visible through these thick, nerve-consuming stormclouds. Somewhere over the horizon a buzzing sound could be heard over the boiling thunder, and a dark spot moved against the water like a low flying bird. The lights on the wings discounted any further avian similarity. This was a mobian-made bird, a machine created to give the flightless a chance at flight; a corruption of nature on one level, perhaps, or a defiance of God, but the argument could also be made that it was an example of mobiankind simply winning the game. As though God had created bird, then created mobian and said to him "There. Now, do better. Make me proud."
Tails Prower was certainly an example of one of nature's blurred lines, more a bird in spirit than a fox, in the air more often than on the ground. For Tails, the air smelled sweeter above the trees and the buildings, above the heads of the quarreling, warring mobians down below him. Heaven really was a place above the clouds. After being grounded for so long in the embattled territory of the Great Forest of Westerica, Tails took to the sky again as a beached whale took to the ocean. Seated in the cockpit of his little plane, he thought he might never leave it again. He was truly at home. This was where he belonged, not in the war-embroiled cities and villages of the mainland, but in the azure skies above it all.
For Tails, the adventure was still ahead. He wished this flight, the best that he had ever had, would never end. The wind rushing through his hair, tickling his fur, filling his spirit with glee. But it did have to end. There was adventure in his future, destiny awaited him. New friends were to be made, and lost. Enemies lay ahead; love, tyranny, violence, hope... and a sterile room, a white table, a sharpened scalpel.
Of course, he knew none of this. Not yet.
The weather was rough. Tails had expected this, and was prepared, but there was only so much that his little plane could take. The heavy winds pummeled the Tornado 2, tried to rip Tails from the sky and cast him into the sea for his insolence - the sky was for birds and storms, not for mutant foxes and their blasphemous flying contraptions. Tails struggled to keep his wings steady, stayed low to the water while being wary of large waves. Lightning flashes were becoming more frequent around him, and there was always the danger that one might strike him. The sky was growing darker and darker. The wind was increasing in ferocity. A seed of panic settled in his gut when he realised he was going to need to land soon, and there wasn't anywhere to go. There was supposed to be an island here. At the very least, he had expected it to be here.
Cautiously, he fixed the Tornado on autopilot and unfolded his map. He couldn't hold it - the wind crunched it into a ball around his hands, blew it back into his face, and he couldn't make out anything. He had memorised the co-ordinates, anyway. He checked his instruments, which were playing up in the fierce weather, but they seemed to indicate that he was in the right place. Annoyed, he looked around below him. Nothing but angry ocean, as far as he could see. This was quickly becoming a crisis situation. Ear-shattering thunder cracked overhead, and for a fraction of a moment he thought it was the sound of his plane crashing. The wind tore the map out of his hands and blew it away.
Time to call for help. He preferred to fly in secret, but he was not a foolish pilot.
"Mayday," he said firmly over the radio, "Mayday. Mayday. This is the aircraft Tornado, requesting emergency landing. Can anyone read me? Weather conditions are perilous. This is a licenced Westerican aircraft requesting immediate assistance, do you read? My call name is Tornado, registration code 667-84Q. Is anyone out there? This is an emergency mayday broadcast, over."
The radio hissed with empty static. Tails closed his eyes and prayed. No response was forthcoming. He tried again.
"Mayday, mayday. This is the licenced aircraft the Tornado requesting immediate emergency assistance, is anyone out there?" He repeated his identity and his request, and hoped beyond hope. Only static replied, and his spirit faded. Perhaps something had happened to his homeland in the time he had been away. Perhaps Tyler didn't even know that all that was out here was churning water and raging storms.
Tails drew breath to make a third report, when his radio crackled to life. The voice was shrouded in feedback and static, and he could only make out every other word.
"We...Armada...we are...our airspace...you must...immediately...permission...is not...we do not...guests...presence...not requested...are the...Armada we..."
Tails tried frustratedly to make sense of the broadcast. "This is the Tornado... can you repeat the previous statement?"
Static. No discernable response.
"This is the Tornado, I am requesting-"
"We are the Armada," the radio cut in quite clearly, "The Armada we are. You...our airspace...you must...(long static)...do not...receive guests...not...requested...(long static)...turn...immediately...we are...the Armada...we are..."
They seemed to be telling him to turn back. Right now, that didn't look like it was going to be an option.
"I can not turn back, Armada! This is a mayday, this is an emergency, I am going to crash and burn if I do not find somewhere to land right now! Flying conditions are impossible, I'm going to break apart! Over!"
There was no response but static. Rain began to pummel him in the face, it felt like the clouds were shooting needles at him, and suddenly he couldn't see. He tried to shield his eyes to keep watch on his instruments, but they seemed to be going haywire, and were probably about as useful to him now as the map had been. He was flying blind.
Lightning flashed. Thunder boomed directly ahead, and the sound itself seemed powerful enough to thrash his plane to bits. He tried to turn, but the Tornado wasn't listening to him anymore. The rain and wind pounded his face, the plane jerked back and forth, like a scrap of paper caught in a gale. He was at the mercy of the storm, and the storm was not merciful. He was going down... oh mercy, he was going down.
Of course, Tails did not meet his end here. Destiny lay ahead of him, after all, and fate would not take his life in this storm.
It would, perhaps in bad-tempered compromise, take his memory. A fierce updraft battered the cockpit from below, and his forehead connected hard with the dashboard. Everything went black here.
Tails' future lay ahead of him, but he knew none of it. The future as a concept exists only in our minds, for although we may glimpse it, our glimpse is only conjecture, the product of probabilities, statistics, combinations of variables, all mixed in with hope, prayer, and wishes. What we see in our minds is nought but a simplified vision, a generalised projection of one possible, ideal path. Our true future is unknown, and our mortality is the deepest mystery of all. We can predict the future of our lives; the nature of our doom eludes us all.

To be continued.