Where the Wild Things Are

by Taranea

Chapter 1: Attenborough's Got Nothing On This

In the living room and house of Miles "Tails" Prower, mechanical genius and aged all of nine years and a half, Sonic the Hedgehog, Mobius' mightiest hero, was snoring blissfully on the worn burgundy couch, utterly at peace.

But he wouldn't be for much longer.

"Slumbering and sleepily slouching, dormant and defenceless on his back, the hibernating hedgehog is entirely unaware of its dawning deadly demise."

If Sonic at this point would have opened his eyes and turned his head to his side, what he would have seen were two twitching fox ears poking up and moving along swiftly behind the coffee table. The fox they were attached to was currently also mischieviously grinning from ear to ear, blue eyes peering around the leg of the table as he continued his whispered narration.

"As the mild-mannered mammal continues to snore and drool on couches that don't belong to it, its natural perfidious predator - that's me, by the way," - Tails briefly sat up on his knees to look at his invisible audience and jabbed a thumb proudly at his own chest, before dropping down onto all fours again with a hunter's grin, continuing his prowling - "the fearsome fiend that is the Mobian red fox, vulpes vulpes sapiens, is approaching his midday snack swiftly and soundlessly through the tall grass of the endless plains of...er..." Tails, still on his hands and knees, now almost up close to the couch Sonic was napping on, paused for a moment, glancing at his surroundings and frowning a bit. "...his living room. Um."

He briefly looked slightly embarrassed at this failing of imagination, but then shook his head and abruptly dropped back into character. Gloved fingers and toes in sneakers dug into the carpet as he bent his head down low toward the floor, back arched high with namesakes excitedly swishing about in the air. Blue eyes narrowed, trained on the azure-furred body lying on the couch above.

"The coiled strength of the prowling predator is visible in the manly muscles underneath his cuprous coat as he crouches, prepared to leap upon his mangy meal and end its ectomorphic existence. Its life is – forfeit!" Tails finally yelled the last word as he leaped into the air with a roar, sharp vulpine teeth bared and gloved hands formed into claws to be sunk into his unaware victim.

That was, until one of the eyes of said 'victim' quirked open while Tails was still in mid-flight, the formerly sleeping visage of his brother transforming into a suddenly wicked grin and then the hedgehog had already catapulted out of his reclining position on the couch, catching a (very surprised) Tails in mid-air and threw them both onto the carpet, where a short-lived wrestling match ensued.

"Agh-no fair! You were supposed to be the unsuspecting prey!" Tails whined as soon as he had been overwhelmed and was now lying underneath his brother. Sonic raised a rather smug eye ridge.

"Oh, was I?"

"Yes!"

"Dunno whether that's just me, li'l bro, but if that was what you were going for, I don't think a...perfidious predator, was it? - is supposed to narrate his actions," Sonic pointed out, sitting back on his knees, while Tails, still on his back now crossed his arms and pouted, looking up at Sonic with a stubborn expression.

"He can if he wants to."

The hedgehog laughed and promptly was cut short by another mock attack of the fox kit when Tails successfully had wriggled out and tried to tackle him again, the pair rolling across the living carpet for another round. Sonic did let Tails win that one after some struggling – although, even if the little fox had already gotten quite good at wrestling and other hand-to-hand combat, it was still obvious that he couldn't yet hold a candle to his older brother. It was likely because of this that, even after he had 'won', the younger of the two Mobians still flopped down on the blue hedgehog's chest with a slightly put-out expression.

"'s not fair if you only pretend to be asleep, Sonic. How else am I supposed to ever win?"

The hedgehog snorted. "You'll hafta wait a couple years for that, squirt. Maybe one day you'll be bigger than me, then you can try again."

Tails pouted. "But I don't wanna wait that long."

"Now that's a sentiment I can get behind," Sonic chuckled (even if he kind of actually hoped that moment wouldn't come for a while yet; he knew Tails as a fox would likely some day grow to be taller than him – as long as I continue to get him to eat some decent food instead of friggin pop tarts at any rate, the hedgehog thought dryly– but, even if Sonic had long since made peace with the fact that he as a hedgehog did belong to one of the smaller Mobian sub-species, he knew he enjoyed being able to lift Tails off his feet for as long as it would last.)

"So, anyway," he said as he picked up both of them from the floor. "Anything you wanted to tell me? Is your thingamajiggy done?"

"My universal translating module," Tails corrected his brother patiently, "and yes, it is. Now we can try teleporting us somewhere to see how it works!" Annoyance at still being the shorter of the two completely forgotten, Tails was already excitedly bouncing again and had started to pull Sonic from his living room into the corridor and down the staircase toward the underground lab of his workshop-cum-house amid the Mystic Ruins.

Sonic didn't live here – he had a small apartment in Station Square – but visited and/or stayed overnight often enough that it could have qualified as a second dwelling place for him regardless. Today, he had actually come by because Tails had claimed he had almost finished his newest invention and needed Sonic to give it a test run. (Which usually always meant a very sudden feeling of dread for the hedgehog. But this time Tails had assured him it wasn't something that could explode, but rather only a babelfish-like telepathic translator chip that would enable anyone who wore it to understand everyone else, regardless of language. However, for them to check if it worked, Tails had also said they'd need to teleport somewhere very far away, where the language the natives spoke would have no common linguistic roots with New Mobian at all.)

"See here?" Tails now held two small, black, spider-like chips with a clipping mechanism out on his palm. "We just clip it into our ears, I made two prototypes so we can both try them."

"Like this? Ow!" Sonic yelped a little, hand automatically flying to the ear he had stuck the translator chip onto. The appendage had folded itself flat against his head automatically at his wince. " Tails, it bit me!"

"Yeah, I designed yours to be extra-hard to dislodge, knowing the speeds you go at," Tails informed him cheerfully, earning himself a flat stare from his older brother. "No worries, the needle is microscopic and should only have pierced the really far out edges of your ear. When I remove it, the wound should close up near instantly again."

"Gee, thanks, bro. I always did want to have my ears pierced for jewellery." Sonic threw Tails a slightly peeved look, but the two-tail only gave a marginally guilty grin in return.

"Heh, okay, I am sorry about that. I promise I'll cook breakfast for all of next week?"

"...fine," Sonic sighed, who knew he wasn't able to stay mad at the kit for longer periods than that anyway. "So what next?"

"Well, all you have to do is place your hand on the Emerald," - Tails gestured at the one green Chaos Emerald he had asked Sonic to procure last week, which was now encased in a strange metal ring holding it above a mechanical pillar attached to various power cables and a computer terminal- "keep a hold of me like when you do a normal teleport and then try and Chaos Control us to the other side of the planet," Tails explained. "As soon as you shout the command, I'll add the auxilliary power which should super-charge the Emerald so we can actually travel that distance."

"Huh. Alright. And this contraption is gonna come with us?" Sonic asked, indicating the metal pedestal and the machinery attached.

"No." Tails shook his head. "Just the super-charged Emerald, but that should be enough to get us home once I've been able to conduct my experiment."

"If you say so, li'l bro," Sonic shrugged easily, placing his right hand on the stone and his other on the shoulder of the fox kit. He wasn't actually too sure where he should teleport to (although there were in fact places he hadn't yet visited; either due to Robotnik or other disasters keeping him busy or because he didn't fancy having to fly in a plane for hours across an ocean to get to one of the two continents of the other side of the planet when there was perfectly fine landmass for running on just outside of his front door) but he vaguely knew what they looked like from TV documentaries, so that should be enough for a Chaos Control, surely?

Besides, the Emeralds sometimes did seem to have a bit of a helpful mind of their own, Sonic had often thought, and so far, his Chaos Controls (even his first, disastrous one when he had thought he was about to die in Robotnik's capsule) had always led him to where he had wanted to go. And so, the blue hedgehog closed his eyes, for a moment visualizing the images of the far-away places in front of his mind's eye, untouched ancient forests and endless plains filled with weaving grass, concentrating on his brother's wish – a place so removed, that no one there spoke their language at all...

Sonic drew a breath and opened his eyes. "CHAOS CONTROL!"

And when his world then seemed to turn inside out and it felt like his insides were compressed, ripped apart and then drawn down a drain before everything exploded, Sonic got his first clue that something about that teleport probably had not gone quite like he had expected.

To be continued...

Happy New Year everybody! :D Have a new fanfic to go with it :3 Anyone who still remembers the (literal) plot bunnies in Burning Arrow might find the next chapter a teensy bit familiar, but of well. This one has been in the works for a while, hope you're all in the mood for a Sonic-and-Tails brotherly-fluff-filled adventure romp! :)