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“Drippy, spritz me.” Surge stuck her shovel into the ground and leaned against the handle while fanning herself in dramatic fashion. The noon sun hung nearly directly above her, pelting her with its most scorching rays. What she wouldn’t give right now to feel the breeze going through her quills or reclining under an umbrella while sipping a drink that had its own, tinier umbrella. Anything other than standing in the stagnant heat.
“Yes, ma’am.” Kit dropped the nursery bag he had been tying and focused all his attention on the tenrec. A barely visible cloud of mist emerged from his Hydro-Pack and he wafted it towards her.
“Thanks.” She rubbed the water vapor all across her face and shook away the excess, cooling herself down slightly and sighing. “It just had to be the day with absolutely no clouds. This sucks…”
“I don’t mind if you take a break, you know.” Silver called from a few yards away, kneeling in the freshly overturned soil with trowel in hand.
Surge glanced towards him and clicked her tongue. “Why’re you saying that like I need your permission?”
“I wasn’t— Mm…” He pointed towards the lone building stationed between both of them. “The shed has plenty of shade and there’s some water bottles underneath the shelves to your left. They’re there if you need to rehydrate.”
“Swanky.” Surge let the shovel fall with a paff into the grass and took the invitation inside. The draft in the doorway was like an arctic blast in comparison to the sweltering outdoors. A part of her wanted to close her eyes, pass out, and soak it all in, but she settled on one, deep breath and crouched low to find the water she was offered. She pulled out three bottles before heading back outside, immediately regretting her decision to continue working, but firmly shutting the door behind her anyways. “Drippy, catch.”
“Yes!” Kit fumbled it for a moment but managed to get it under control.
“You too, Shiny.”
“Huh— Ow!” The bottle hit Silver squarely in the side of his head and buried itself cap side into the dirt after falling. “I didn’t ask for any water though!”
“Whoops. Too late, I guess.”
“Mm…” He didn’t bother arguing any further and took this opportunity to cool himself down as well. He dabbed away the sweat that beaded on his forehead, wiped away as much crud as he could from the bottle, and took a large swig. The lukewarm water was still cool enough to be refreshing as he gulped it down; half of it disappeared in an instant. Maybe he needed it more than he initially thought. All the while, though, he could feel the unmistakable prickle of being watched and looked up at Surge giving him a puzzling look. “Is something the matter?”
“What’s your deal?”
He blinked. “I’m… sorry?”
“Don’t play dumb. I saw how you lifted that shipping crate with your mind or whatever.” Surge gulped down her entire bottle and picked up the shovel just to lean on it again. “What are you doing in a place like this?”
Silver screwed the cap back on and returned his attention to churning the dirt with his trowel. “I’m still not following.”
“What? Do I gotta explain it like you’re five?” She groaned loudly and blew a raspberry while gesturing to the dilapidated scenery around them. “A garden? Here of all places?”
“Oh, that’s what you meant,” he chuckled. “Well, the original idea was to have it far enough away to not bother anybody back at the Restoration, but I guess that didn’t work out in the end.”
“Hmph. It’s not like anyone’s supposed to be out here anyways…” She averted her gaze from the patch of sunflowers behind her, half of which were either upturned or had been snapped in half. The smaller sites of carnage were unavoidable: dents in the asphalt, divots in the dirt, and skidmarks in the seedbeds. Whatever every unnecessary maneuver she made was perfectly preserved.
“Right, and because no one’s ‘supposed’ to be out here, that gives you license to peel out and tear everything up in my garden, huh?”
“Shove off! I already said I was sorry!” Surge bared her teeth and snapped her head away from him. “Getting all worked up over a little accident… Feh.”
“Relax. I’m not that upset about it.” Silver winced instinctively as he felt Kit’s lethal gaze baring down on him and continued. “Besides, I’m glad you showed to help out, even though Lanolin was the one that put you up to this.”
“Yeah, and I’ll make sure to get Dinnerbell back for this too…” The empty water bottle crunched in her fist as she stared menacingly in the direction of the Restoration HQ.
“Hey, if you really hate being here, you can head back any time.” He flexed his bicep and patted where the muscle just barely bulged out. “I’ve handled worse than this on my own before.”
Surge gave him that same odd look. It wasn’t pitiable or judgmental — merely observational. There was dirt staining the hedgehog’s gloves and scuffed into his legs where he knelt down. Some debris stuck to his face where he had wiped away sweat while more perspired to wash it away. All of this while he wore an unwavering, determined, dolt-ish grin on his face. A barely audible sigh left her mouth before she pointed at him and looked at Kit. “Drippy, hose him down. Don’t stop until I say when.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Blrblbblrbl!” The first jet of water hit him squarely in the face before he managed to put out his hands enough to block the majority of it. At least until the stone-faced fennec bent the stream around his flimsy defenses, pelting him in the side of his face. It was a losing battle now; no matter where Silver held his hands, Kit would always move to the other side and continue the drench-ening.
“Aight, that’s enough.” Surge issued the order with a barely concealed chuckle in her throat as she gazed upon her handiwork.
The hedgehog’s quills drooped like willow branches, each one letting out their own stream from the water trapped between the individual spines. His eyes were covered by a sodden clump of them hanging over his forehead like poorly trimmed bangs. His gloves were saturated in much the same way, and as he held them out in front of himself, they sagged like patches of swampy moss. Silver brushed away the stuff obscuring his vision and glared at Surge.
She was all smiles. “How we feelin’, Shiny?”
“…Wet.”
“Cooled off too, huh?”
“No. Just… wet.”
The chuckle upgraded itself into an infectious cackle, one that wrestled a smile out of Kit in the process. “Don’t worry. You’ll air-dry in no time in this heat.”
“Why wait?” Silver slicked back his quills before his body became enveloped in a soft blue glow, the sigils in his gloves shining the brightest. All at once, his spines stood up as if being pulled into sky and the water within flowed in the same direction. The streams being drawn out of each clump condensed and suspended itself a few feet above his head into a shimmering bubble of water. It was barely a minute before droplets stopped flying out from his body and the glow subsided. It remained around the baseball-sized mass of water he had created — his body was left completely dry.
“Huh. Didn’t know you could do that.” Surge’s voice was low, but her eyes had widened in amazement.
Both she and Kit followed the orb with their eyes as it gently flew through the air and disappeared into the dirt near by Silver. The hedgehog let out a sigh at seeing how little the soil darkened from the water he added, but he laughed as he turned back to the duo. “If you don’t mind, could I have more of that? Just… not aimed at my face, please?”
Surge glanced at Kit briefly before responding. “Wouldn’t it be easier to get Drippy to water that stuff for you?” She could see the fennec grimacing in the corner of her vision and opted to ignore it.
“I would prefer not to bother you too much. All I need is roughly two gallons, I think.”
The fennec’s expression deepened to a scowl, but softened the moment Surge laid her hand on his head. “It’s not that much water and it’s his garden. I’ll take you someplace to refill after, alright?”
Kit opened his mouth as if to protest, but it snapped shut just as fast. His brow furrowed as his gaze went from Surge’s face to focusing at the ground next to his feet, a click of his tongue barely audible to those present. “…Okay.” His notably-less-polite reply was forgotten as his eyes glowed amethyst in preparation.
“Thanks. I appreciate it.” Silver smiled as his body became enveloped in his telekinetic glow. It formed in front of the fennec in no time at all: a several-gallon-large sphere of water all being fed from the tendrils of water that shot from his pack. They receded soon after and the hedgehog’s pale blue energy rimlit the shimmering orb; he had taken it over. “Pretty sure this is a bit more than two, though.”
“What’s wrong? Afraid you’re gonna drown your plants?” Surge called out over the sloshing sounds the water was making. “Something like this should be a cinch for you. Or maybe you’ve run out of gas already?”
“Heh. Watch this.” Silver clapped his hands together and the liquid spread itself out into a wide, warbling sheet of itself about two inches thick. The perfectly rectangular shadow it cast covered the long bed of crop seed he had prepped earlier. His hands separated and that motion was mirrored onto the manipulated water. It all divided vertically into a scatter plot of smaller balls, then inch-wide globs, and finally into raindrop-sized pellets. Despite being so densely packed, they were separate enough for both Surge and Kit to see a rainbow being refracted through the arrangement. Both of them gawked with mouths agape, and Silver was proud that his show was being so well received.
He closed both of his fists at once and the flashy display came to an end. Over the next twenty seconds, the droplets fell onto the soil, watering it completely and evenly. Part of him felt silly holding that pose for so long, though he was thankful that the duo seemed too enamored to rib him for it. Once the ground had become saturated and the job was finished, Silver dusted his hands together and puffed out his chest. “And that’s how it’s done.”
Surge stomped the ground and roared, “See? This is exactly what I’m talking about!”
“Huh?” His bravado dissipated into confusion. “About what?”
“You’re psychic and can do all this cool shit, but you spend most of your time out here… gardening?”
“Is it that weird?” Silver scratched underneath his nose. “Everyone has their hobbies, right?”
Surge’s eye twitched. “Shiny, if I had your powers, my hobbies would be crushing Egg-bots into pancakes and turning the mustache-twirler into an omelette. You can lift shipping containers like they’re dollhouses, dude! This is—” She let out an exasperated sigh. “This is just… sad.”
“Well, I…” The words caught themselves in his throat; several explanations all collided with each other on the way out. “I don’t find that kind of thing as fun as you do. It’s more of a means to an end for me, if that makes sense.”
“Yeah. No shit. That’s why I’ve been asking why you’re doing this.” A short burst of electricity sparked through her eyes and into the ground beside her. “I’m not gonna ask again.”
The hedgehog let out a resigned groan. “I don’t know… It was a sort of spur of the moment thing.” He pushed himself off the ground, leaving behind his trowel, and entered the shed. “Plants like these don’t really grow back home half the time.”
“Not much of a green thumb?”
“Not much of anything green, honestly.” The rattle of various metal tools emanated from inside, looking for something buried deep within no doubt. “Just fire, soot, and maybe some radiation if I’m unlucky.”
Something clicked in Surge’s mind at those final few words. “Oh right. You’re the weirdo from the future people keep mumbling about.” The people in question were conversations she halfheartedly eavesdropped on between some of Sonic’s other friends.
The noises stopped. “Yeah, I guess so.”
She could tell whatever conversation was coming up would be a long one, so she unstuck her shovel from the ground and sat down with it laid over her crisscrossed lap. Kit sidled up next to her out of reflex, and she ruffled his head a bit. “So the future is hell, huh?”
“Mm… Not always. That’s the thing.” Silver reemerged with a half-full sack of fertilizer tossed up over his shoulder, and he closed the door behind him with his foot. “The future is always in flux. One minute, it’s peaceful. The other, it’s on fire. Or worse. Usually worse.”
“No shit?” Surge glanced up from wiping away dirt flecks from the pitted iron spade and watched as the telekinetic hedgehog used the trowel to sprinkle the fertilizer over his crop plants.
“Mm-hmm.”
“What’s it right now?”
“Peaceful, thankfully. Eggman’s still alive in your present, but because nothing major is taking place, my future is also okay.”
Now she was extra intrigued. “So if the doc started getting up to his usual shtick again…”
“Then there’s a good chance that everything’s been reduced to rubble, yeah.” Silver’s eyes caught on a budding weed beside one of his potato plants. He wasted no time in excavating it and throwing it onto the asphalt in front of the shed.
“That’s stupid. There’s no way it would ever get that bad.”
“Hah! It probably won’t, but the possibility’s always there. And sometimes that’s enough.”
Surge pounded her fists together, sparks flaring out past her elbows like gauntlets. “All the more reason to scramble him before he even gets the chance.”
He shrugged. “Maybe.”
The passivity of his answer annoyed her. “Hell, you could probably go further back in time and flip over his crib or something, couldn’t you? Problem solved. No more dumb future stuff.”
“If it worked like that, probably.” Silver clapped his hand together and the residual soil and fertilizer from his gloves fell in with the rest. “You ever hear about branching timelines?”
Surge raised an eyebrow. “What, like in ‘Now To The Later’?”
“Sorta, but it’s more… restrictive than that.” Silver took his water bottle, unscrewed the cap, and used his powers to pull what was left inside of it out into the air. It formed into a shimmering, transparent twig with every end tapering into a fine point. “This ‘stick’ is time, the places where the offshoots meet are choices, and the paths they take are the consequences of those choices. With me so far?”
“Uh-huh.” Surge could see Kit nodding along in the corner of her eye.
“Let’s pretend the present is in the middle of this.” A small knot formed in the center. “The way you said time travel might work is I could go further back in time — the fat end of the stick — and do something different that puts the present on a different path, right?” A new shoot sprouted from nearer towards the base and pointed downwards.
“S’about right.”
“The problem with that is…” In one smooth motion, the bubble of water he created slid down to the butt end of the stick. The branch-like paths in the figurative twig all disappeared, turning it into a straight, thin rod with the opposite end resembling the water droplet trick he had performed earlier. “I can’t.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Huh?”
“I know the ‘present’ is kind of a fuzzy word, but the world and time you’re experiencing right now? I can’t go back any further than this with my own power. It’s as if this moment in time is an anchor point where all future possibilities stem from. Small changes in the here and now can have massive impact on my time, but I’m not allowed to go back any further than your time to undo or fix anything.”
“…So if something goes bad with us now, no do-overs?”
“Yeah. No do-overs.” Silver directed the water back into his bottle and took the remaining swig.
“Wild…”
Partway through the explanation, Kit’s ears had perked up. He had been twiddling his thumbs and gazing at the ground with a sullen expression, but all the while, he had been listening attentively. His bottom lip quivered for a moment before a mutter tumbled out, “…No way to stop Starline from doing…”
Surge barely heard his mumbling and dug her fingers deeper into his scalp until part of his fur covered his eyes like bangs. “Yeah. Guess not. We still turned out alright, though.”
“Hm?” Silver’s eyes swapped between the two cyborgs briefly. “Did you say something?”
“Nope. Classified info.”
He shrugged. “Okay.”
“What about—” Kit spoke up this time, directing his speech towards the hedgehog for the first time during this assignment. “What about you? If time is a functionally a straight line with such a highly variable destination as you say, then why are you present regardless of the state of the future? Wouldn’t there be futures where you weren’t born?”
More circuits closed in Surge’s mind. “Yeah. It’s that… that horsefly effect or something.”
“Butterfly effect, ma’am.”
“What he said.”
Silver twisted closed the cap on the empty bottle and let it fall next to him. “Logically, yeah. That would make more sense, but it doesn’t matter if its a good or bad future; my memories stay in intact and I always exist. I don’t know how or why. That’s just how it happens to work out.”
“But that—” Kit wanted to argue, but he had nothing to counter with. It’s not like he ever traveled through time. Someone being exempt from natural cause and effect made little sense, but how could he refute the embodiment of that strange contradiction? He gnawed at his knuckles while in deep thought to the point that a small bead of blood soaked through his glove.
Surge yanked his hand away before the fennec went any further and looked back at Silver. The hedgehog had already returned his attention to the crops, idly and unnecessarily leveling out the soil with the trowel like spreading icing on a cake. Her eyes narrowed and wandered around the rest of the crater. Of the sunflowers that remained, every one was planted in a staggered grid where each stalk was six inches apart from the other. The saplings she had been working with were already neatly yet sloppily bundled in their nursery bags, waiting to be tamped into the ground.
Remembering the shed, it had scant few tools in it — the shovel and trowel were already half of Silver’s arsenal. Grass stains were beginning to show up on the hedgehog’s knees again despite being blasted by Kit earlier. All of that immense psychic potential, and he still made himself get up close and personal with every seed he planted. How long had it taken to get to this point? How many sweat filled hours? Weeds uprooted? Buckets of water spilled? Bags of fertilizer poured? All for this random little hovel in the pavement—
SMACK!
“Alright! That’s enough moping!” Surge stood up in the blink of an eye and her gloves squeaked as it took firm hold of the shovel. She nudged Kit with her toes and bucked her head upwards. “Double time, Drippy. Let’s get this done.”
Silver’s shoulders were still hiked up from flinching at the tenrec suddenly slapping both of her cheeks simultaneously. Any confusion brought on by that became more pronounced as he watched Surge fling dirt everywhere before shoving a sapling into the crudely made divot. “What— What’re you doing?”
“What’s it look like, McFly? I’m making your garden look kickass.” She was already onto the next tree with Kit watering the one before it.
“Yeah, but… where’d all this energy come from?”
“It’s ’cause you were talking all that depressing crap earlier about the future. I’m fixing this place up so you shut the hell up and I can go home.”
“I’m sorry for… upsetting you?”
Surge growled and balled her fist like she wanted to punch him. “Forget about that. Just tell me where you want these stupid trees to go, or I’m gonna mess it up again. I might be even more clumsy this time. Who knows?”
“Snrk!” Silver coughed out the rest of his choked up laugh and grinned wide at the duo. “Alright. But I’m pretty sure I could stop you before you even get the chance.”
Surge couldn’t stop the corners of her mouth from turning up into a wry smirk as a few sparks ran loose from her eyes. “Bring it on, Shiny.”