Book 0b, Sonic's Redemption, ALPHA VER 0.2.b

Sonic's Redemption page 1 of 89
Sonic's Redemption
The second prequel of two
to “Seize the Deity”
by Charles A. Rockafellor
WARNING:
Foul language. Reader discretion recommended.
LEGAL DISCLAIMER:
Most of the characters (some liberties having been taken with their personalities and physical features)
and all of the artwork (except for the map [TBD] in the beginning and illustrations in the appendices)
are not mine, and there are a number of pop-culture references and quotes that certainly aren't mine
either, nor are the songs.
NB: See https://archiveofourown.org/works/24230851 for most recent completed version (and

minor edits sometimes).
Book 0b, Sonic's Redemption, ALPHA VER 0.2.b.1 + AO3.odt

© 2018, 2019, 2020 Charles A. Rockafellor
~~~ ~~~ ~~~
The world was over. What do you do when that happens, and you find yourself on a
deserted tropical island? Your prospects are bleak – no matter how pleasant the
surroundings – when it all boils down to a universal variant of thermodynamics and
poker: you can't go home, you can't start again, and you're functionally immortal.
~~~ ~~~ ~~~
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dramatis Personæ......................................................................................................................................5
Chapter 1: The Island................................................................................................................................7
Chapter 2: Friday....................................................................................................................................15
Chapter 3: Fox populi.............................................................................................................................33
Act 2: The sleeper awakes.......................................................................................................................36
Act 3: Resonant Evil...............................................................................................................................45
Epilogue: Limbō, et in Purgatorium........................................................................................................54
AFTERWORD.........................................................................................................................................55
APPENDIX A: The Soundtrack..............................................................................................................62
APPENDIX B: the Octorillas' language [Paku]......................................................................................63
APPENDIX C: Deleted and Alternative scenes......................................................................................64
APPENDIX D: GEN 0 particles, or “too OCD”.....................................................................................65
SCRIBBLED NOTES TO GET BACK TO.............................................................................................82
EDITORIAL NOTE:
This is an ALPHA version. The file name indicates my estimation of its

completeness so far (e.g.: 0.3 would indicate a guess of ~30% of the final version).
Some portions are fairly complete and polished, others are scripted outlines, and
some bits are just inserted short notes. Text in RED font indicates material that I
expect to edit (usually) or delete (probably struck-through).
I will keep this note throughout the alpha and beta versions (eventually updating it
slightly when the story finally reaches beta phase).
If you wish to share this, then share the folder's URL (rather than the .pdf's URL) – I
replace the documents when I upload new versions:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1BG7P_sVezz8Dn5b8js_34yeAjSBhfN0v
The URL above also holds a sub-folder (at the URL below) that contains several spin-
off stories related to “Seize the Deity” in particular, and at least one right now (“Meat
pies”) that's set in Jötunheimr (of the greater cosmography of the “Icewall” meta-
setting):
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1MPusb6PkF-P7O28RAuzF55mdQfrb_Xgo
Simplest of all, just go to

https://archiveofourown.org/users/Charles_Rockafellor/collections
Also: please note that while the hyperlinks to websites seem unaffected, the internal
hyperlinks to other areas within this .pdf seem to function only before uploading and
after downloading – for some reason, they seem to be nonfunctional when the .pdf is
viewed while it's still on my Google Drive.
A similar issue applies to the comments and bookmarks not being visible at all while
the .pdf is still on my Google Drive (I think that I've fixed that, but no guarantees).
RULE: Any world (no matter how improbable) in a spatiotemporally infinite rule-based random
universe is virtually certain to exist (merely occupying a smaller portion of phase space).
Corollary: Any world that someone thinks is “cool,” given sufficiently advanced means of production,
is virtually certain to be produced.
Zelda series:
Book 0a, Zelda Invictus

Book 0b, Sonic's Redemption
Book 1, Seize the Deity -- Zelda x Peach
08a Deathclaw, the tale of Mister Fluffykins (Zelda x Peach)
08 Alexander's horned cabinet (Zelda x Peach)
10 Sock hop (Zelda x Peach)
28 Nightmare at 20,000 RPM (Zelda x Peach)
Book 1a, What evil lurks -- Link
Book 2, I am Legion
Light World sidequels:
07 To be (Zelda x Peach world)
Icewall shared universe:
Icewall
05 Meat pies (Icewall setting, Jötunheimr)
Book 1b, Nyjötnar Saga
Book 1c, The Colony
Book 1d, Tales from The Ice
...and many more at

https://archiveofourown.org/users/Charles_Rockafellor/collections
/// --- ///

Dramatis Personæ
► Return to contents ◄
Sonic the Hedgehog, our protagonist
Ruru, a Kaijin
Wila “Friday” Mesquite, a Deku Scrub

Miles “Tails” Prower
Imperial Princess Zelda Hylia of Hyrule, a Hylian
Warbotdorf, the Big Bad
O ~~~ O
Chapter 1: The Island

Spinning.
Land, roll, scan.
Nothin'.
Up and moving, scanning, down.
Nothin' – nada!
Creep to better cover, away from the insertion point.
Wait.
He was in an open courtyard ringed with tropical plants. Eerie silence.
The ground was covered by a comfortably springy low growth, seemingly untended but not growing
in disarray.
Warm; air's thicker, less oxygen than Möbius. Gravity's higher. Fuckin' hell, is it ever higher. Sky's
distinctly paler; well, that fits with the oxygen, anyway. Sun's a lot richer yellow, bit more orange to it.
Nothing moved within his view from the foliage.
Sonic waited an hour before he was satisfied that there were no immediate threats, then waited a
second hour.
The courtyard was run down. The whole place was a ruin, in fact.
Best guess, empty fer five or six hunnert years.
It was spacious, and there were some underground storage areas that could be useful. There was a
graveyard in the bailey, the stones bearing unusual epitaphs: “He's dead, Jim”, “Here lies Louise, a
thief shouldn't sneeze”, “Here lies poor Mel, he cast the wrong spell”, and a dozen more of the same.
There was a well near the gate to the north, still functional – though it had the unnerving quality of
watching him, its face reacting to his actions, giving him the distinct impression that it didn't trust him
one bit and would gladly welcome several more centuries of solitude; he took this as an obvious
indicator of his mind having been rattled in transit. From the towers he could make out a golden
ziggurat far to the northeast and a valley spread out all across the northern and western area. The castle
itself was located atop a mesa adjacent to a bluff, overlooking a cove to the southwest that spread partly
to the east.
The cove was what gave the most disturbing view.
He couldn't be certain of the distance, but all the way to the horizon, stretching in either direction,
there was nothing but lava. Long shallow waves undulated slowly, the distant crackling resolving itself
from the undifferentiated subliminal background hiss that he'd been hearing. Huge crocodiles basked
on the cove's beach, along with several visible in the lava nearby. No; files and memories spun in his
mind: phobosuchus, maybe.
'least now I know why I been sweatin' my balls off.
'the fuck is this place? If I'm dead, this sure ain't like any afterlife I ever heard o'...
=====
“[…] Möbius – the world me 'n' Tails are from – was once a happy little place, just chock full o' cute
li'l duckies an' bunnies...”
“I was once Warbotdorf's second in command, one of an elite group o' clones designed by
Warbotdorf himself from a genetic soup. Me and Tails ended up turning against him, things went
sideways, an' got rough. At first, he'd been all about cybernetics, but then his hunger grew ta new
magnitudes, an' he set his sights on life itself, with an eye toward other worlds. He had some sort o'
alien artifact that he was tryna make work with the help o' some small orb. The orb was some kinda
huge information center, which is why I kicked Zelda when Kitana offered that encyclopædia – these
things're ancient, an' got some next level shit in 'em.
“Warbotdorf had gotten this object o' his to respond haphazardly. It was a big ring o' metal with
symbols on it. He called it a world-gate.
“When me and Tails moved in on Warbotdorf's fortress at the end, he'd hit the switch just when we
almost had 'im. Everything went all screwy. Gravity fell away and I floated forever through nothin', just
watchin' while Möbius went red 'n' black, sucked into a hole.
“Next thing I knew, I exploded inta the middle of a castle on a bluff of a deserted island. I didn't
know where I was, but I knew for damned sure where I wasn't. Gravity, oxygen content, sunlight, air
pressure 'n' viscosity. Möbius was gone, and this...
“That island sat in the middle of a lake o' giant-crocodile infested lava. Whoever used ta live there
had a sense o' humor, judgin' by the tombstones in the graveyard near the castle. There was a mountain
nearby with a deserted Dodongo cavern system at the base, an' an abandoned Goron city in the main
body.
“I spent the first four weeks there alone before Ruru showed up. Friday, a Deku Scrub, found an'
adopted me a little after that. For the first few months wit' Friday, neither me or Ruru understood a
single word Friday said, but we helped her drink her wine – an' she always had some mighty fine wine.
It was her kindness, her reaching out that finally broke through my barriers, dragged me out inta
civilized behavior 'n' social interaction. Made me care. Made me give a shit again.
It didn't take long for Sonic to explore the ruins. No sign of Robotnik showed itself at any point, nor
yet had Tails made an appearance. It seemed as if neither had ever arrived here, leaving Sonic with
only his frustrated regrets.
The walls stood perhaps three hundred feet east to west by four hundred feet north to south. There
was enough of the old castle remaining that it was eminently defensible as it stood, and the catacombs
beneath would afford more than sufficient space for living and storage, but there was no doubt that
there had been so much more to the immediate lands at one time.
The frontispiece read Barrik Keep.
Don't mean I can't rename it Aberwyvern, he thought to himself, an' bonus – it's been pre-
disastered.
Whatever had befallen the place, one thing was clear: no one now remained.
To the south of the castle were the remains of an apparently once-thriving village and farmlands.
There was some damage from time and weather, but the disturbing part was the eerie quiet. From the
main body of the island came an incessant background of bird calls and insect trills. Here, it was
silence, aside from the wuthering lava waves below. Some of the background sound resembled an
ocean shore, though quieter and more bass, but with other sounds alien to a shoreline, faint impressions
of ripping fabric and tinkling glass. The demesne extended fairly far to the west and somewhat west-
northwest, but less than a mile south-southwest from the wall, the village and fields were cut sharply by
the cliff face. It wasn't quite perfectly clean, but so close as to make no difference. He could only
assume that the land there had fallen away into the lava – or been cut clean away by some huge force.
What remained formed a cove, the cliff curving around gently at first, then turning sharply south. From
atop the southernmost tower of the castle, he could see the land stretching away and spreading
westward for a way, while the beachhead below showed signs of movement.
What appeared in the distance to be objects or creatures crept across the sand and floated in the lava,
presumably more phobosuchoi. Whatever they were, they were easily the size of large logs, perhaps
forty feet or more in length, based upon the trees around them.
As he watched, one of them drew too close to a dark blemish in the sand. In a frenzy of motion, the
phobosuchus began twisting and whipping about, seeming to have sprouted tentacles or vines. He was
too far away to hear the struggle, but it was over almost as soon as it had begun. It looked as if the
phobosuchus had been snapped in half before being dragged beneath the surface, the blemish then
lightening and disappearing.
Well, if all else fails, there's always the Nestea plunge...
He snorted to himself, knowing full well the complete futility of such a gesture on his part. Even
that could offer no escape for him.
Just keep swimmin'.
The castle's cistern worked fine, after a little pond scum was raked off of the top – he noted the green
algal scum and duckweed on his mental checklist of food reserves, along with the barely discernible
snails throughout. Someone had stocked it with various fish at some point, since there was a surprising
ecosystem flourishing within, complete with a number of water fowl and seagrapes; at a glance, there
appeared to be several other species of edible freshwater seaweeds present. The cistern water would
still need boiling even after filtering 1 through its sand layers to reach the cache basin, that went without
saying, but it worked as a source to start from.
Beneath the keep lay tunnels and rooms, within one of which was a sizable overflow that bled down
one of the dungeon's interior walls into a cool pool. Might be nice to soak in later, but not really
potable – prob'ly seat half a dozen, though, he grinned. What caught his eye most was that it was
neither part of the keep's original design nor a natural recess, but a later addition, as if someone had
found it necessary to add an open-access chimney between the basin and... wherever it let out farther
below. Whatever the cause, it resulted in a cool breeze flowing through the dungeon at all times, the
whole maintaining at perhaps a few degrees above sixty.
He'd spotted some bulette shells and shell-plates earlier. How he knew what the beasts were, he had
no clue, but he knew them, somewhere in the back of his head. Huge things, nine feet tall and twelve
1 Water filtration and distilling: filtering through layers of materials helps remove particulate matter, boiling will help remove other
impurities. Distilling permits the capture of water vapor into a second vessel, rather than merely cooking the water alone in the first
vessel.
Water from tree taps:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiqomPCf0-g&t=7s&index=2&list=PLzdQ9vN7FdPZjyGGlpnZzCvvsOH0-tlgA
Filtering water:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0DlnAq5UAqY&list=PLzdQ9vN7FdPZjyGGlpnZzCvvsOH0-tlgA&index=4
Four ways to make fire by hand:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzIysPChca4&index=5&list=PLzdQ9vN7FdPZjyGGlpnZzCvvsOH0-tlgA
Potable water from sea water (requires fire):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zf4JrsqlIkU&list=PLzdQ9vN7FdPZjyGGlpnZzCvvsOH0-tlgA&index=6
feet long with toothy parrot-like beaks and thick claws for rapid burrowing and rending, built like
bulldogs on steroids and armored all around. He'd have to hunt some of them down eventually. Clear
the territory as his own. Plus, with adults weighing upward of twelve thousand pounds, even a young
one might stock a larder well.
As it stood, he set up some bamboo pipes to keep a continuous flow running from the basin upstairs
to a bulette shell outside, with easy access to firewood that he stored beneath a broad outcrop of stone,
sheltering it all from sun and weather; first a medium-high heat under it to drive off any volatiles, then
an overflow to another shell for boiling the remaining water with a larger shell doming over it as a
condensing surface that kept a constant drip from the tilted edge to collect the condensate in a fourth
shell. This was a functional but temporary design for immediate use; hellaciously wasteful and in place
only because there was such a large reservoir to start from. He'd arrange a more-sealed system of clay
or metal once he'd ensured a minimum of daily living needs. There was a fair amount of metal
products stored below, but he wanted to use them sparingly.
Distilling water meant a clean source at all times, with plenty to spare.
Spare water could be put to other uses.
So could the still2.
Beneath the keep lay tunnels and rooms, many dedicated to storage as if against an expected siege.
The stores hadn't all survived the centuries, mostly those perishables that one would simply hold no
such hope for, but many were perfectly intact – salt, pemmican, honey, sugars, extracts, beans,
vinegars, corn starch, syrups, powdered milk. The presence of some of these surprised him, but he
couldn't argue with it. Enough remained to see a hundred people through several years of siege without
external support.3
Those same storage areas led to some other interesting finds – some rooms held simple machinery,
tools, and spare parts, others contained textiles and all manner of raw materials. Amongst them was an
area beneath the smithy. It seemed that the smith had had some rather advanced ideas on rapid fire
repeating flintlocks. Seeing this, he nodded at the design, his eyes tightening as he shook his head
sadly at the same and closed the door. An' here they were, right on the beach the whole time...
Surveying the once-tended fields gone fallow, he found an abundance of now-wild grains and
tubers, not to mention a profusion of fruit and berries in the village and along the main wall. The
village even offered a fair variety of herbs and vegetables gone wild, should he so choose to infuse
them. Everything that he'd need was immediately to hand, but it was the sweet corn and sugar cane
that really drew a smile – he'd search for beets, maples, and honeybees soon enough, but the date and
coconut palms4 would do just fine to start with.
Everything in its time.
For the moment, he set to work with a will.
“Well my name's John Lee Pettimore,

same as my daddy an' his daddy before.
2 Distilling and mead: see
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPAKBxCIHAA&index=19&list=PLzdQ9vN7FdPZjyGGlpnZzCvvsOH0-tlgA
and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YwAvLru2ec&index=20&list=PLzdQ9vN7FdPZjyGGlpnZzCvvsOH0-tlgA
3 Siege: cribbing from the note in chapter 5 of “Seize the Deity”, let's assume that 140 people * ~2,000 kcal * 4 months ≈6.6+ short tons
±35% (6 metric tonnes ±35%). Assuming exactly one hundred people, taking “several” years to mean “3+” (distinctly longer than
almost any likely siege), and bumping kcal to a more medieval 3,000 per day, there would be at least 63.6 short tons ±35% (57.5
metric tonnes ±35%). Taking the average density as being on the order of water's (give or take a factor or two), it's both quite a lot and
not as much as you might think – approx. 57.7 m 3: say... a little more than three rooms of 3m * 3m * 2m each (perhaps thrice this for
arranging by category and with aisles & shelves).
4 Palm wine: Tap an appropriate palm for its sap and you'll have 4% alc within a few hours. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palm_wine
Ya hardly ever saw Grandaddy down here,

he only come ta town 'bout twice a year.
He'd buy a hunnert pounds o' yeast an' some copper line,
everybody knew that he made moonshine...”
=====
His memories didn't make a lot of sense. They weren't particularly hazy by any means, or even
jumbled, he just remembered things that couldn't have happened the way that he remembered them if
other things that he remembered were true; too many lines of events that were mutually irreconcilable.
He knew that he'd been an unwavering, dedicated troop. He knew that he'd always questioned
Robotnik's plans, and eventually his very ethos.
He knew that he'd been decanted as a fully functioning clone in the masses, proving himself superior
in the death mazes in every instance. He knew that he'd spent a lot of time with his grandfather, hiking
through the cool green hills of Möbius and exploring the marble ruins and crystal caverns.
He knew that he was merely one of many experimental designs, all working unquestioningly toward
a common goal. He knew that for every time that he'd sought a connection, friendship, he'd met only
confusion or disgust. He knew that he'd joined a resistance group, seeking to overthrow Robotnik.
He knew that his programming had led inexorably to... something; he could feel it just beyond reach
of his memory, something that had been in line with Robotnik's plans all along. He knew that he'd
spent large amounts of time studying other worlds' cultural records, uploading them voraciously into
side-channels within his genetic makeup, viewing them externally, analyzing their worldviews and
mores, drawn increasingly further away from his peers over time, eventually embodying the alien
concepts of agency and self-actualization, the innate right to self-determination – at once so basic that
there weren't even words to describe these things, like a fish describing water, and again so at odds as
to be insensible, as much so as describing a particular shade of nearly-invisible violet to a blind man.
Sometimes his research was just an excuse to distance himself, or create a protective barrier; other
times it gave him leverage that the others couldn't even comprehend being there, much less its uses;
most of the time it was simply refuge.
Beneath all of this was a generalized feeling of having known a better life in some other way, a
world without this dichotomy, a “normal” place.
He knew who he was, while at the same time having not a single clue.
O.K. campers, rise and shine, and don't forget your booties 'cause it's cold out there... it's cold out
there every day.
“Ave atque vale, mi amice,” he pronounced as he settled the last soft stream-smoothed stone onto
the pile, “et requiescet in pace...”
He returned his attention to the bottle that he'd retrieved from the dungeon's endless stores, pouring
first a measure over the stones, and then another for himself. For now, this would do until he could
find a better escape, or at least until his own brews came to fruition.
=====
“Oh, I got a lo-ve-ly bunch o' coconuts...

here they are all standin' in a row...”
He bowled an empty coconut down a poorly improvised lane, pulling a long draught of fermented
coconut water5 in his other hand and trying not to taste it. He'd lucked out here – so much that he was
tempted to call it suspiciously lucky – aside from the whole place being full of food, the coconut crop
almost always yielded good white meat, with so low a percentage of bad pinkish-light-brownish stuff
that he almost didn't bother checking them anymore. Almost. Shit needs some salty lime 'n' tequila, or
at least some banana. Got all of 'em around. Gotta remember that fer the next round. Or at least prep
some nice girly frou-frou drinks.
“Hey, an' we got us an Earth-shatterin' kaboom,” he remarked to the empty air as the bamboo pins
fell and he lurched drunkenly.
The sun at its zenith beat down mercilessly, but it was cool enough where he stood. There was a
conveniently wide overhang along the northern wall, and he took advantage of it for this very reason.
Lunch time. He glanced over at the spider-pig on the spit. The stones had been a pain to haul and set
right, but it was paying off. Takin' forever. Fuck it. Prob'ly just slice some off an' fry the shit f'now.
Testing the foodstuffs held within the storage rooms and growing throughout the local area had been
tortuous. Avoiding bright shiny berries or waxen surfaces, looking for clear watery saps, sniffing
versus telltale acrid chemicals and almond-like scents, dabbing each against his skin and waiting, doing
it again against his tongue and waiting some more, tasting versus bitterness or soapy flavors, finally
taking in tiny amounts and waiting, repeating this in larger amounts until he was finally sure that each
held no nasty surprises. In the end, the items that looked like food that he recognized had all turned out
to be safe, and although some of the wild plants and animals had given him the shits or had him
vomiting almost immediately, and one had seen him fevered for two days, he'd worked out which ones
were which. He had yet to dare the fungi.
Now he was bored. The mesa was safe, the immediate surrounds reasonably well provisioned, but
there was no zest to life. Nothing presented a challenge, nothing of interest captured his attention, there
weren't any interesting cultures – or any culture at all – no new life, no new civilizations, no place to go
that he hadn't gone before.
And everyone whom he'd known was dead.
“They're all dead. Everybody's dead, Dave.”
Everything that he'd sought to save was gone forever.
No more orders; no more fighting. It was freeing at first. Then relaxing and empty. Now... it was
just empty.
No more orders; no more fighting.
Just empty.
Mostly empty. Every so often there was a creepy feeling of being watched, but he could never pin it
down.
Ruru was no help at all. It didn't help any that he'd imagined the annoying self-centered Pixie-thing
into existence long weeks gone, for all that she protested otherwise, but the least that she could do
5 Coconut alcohol: https://www.leaf.tv/articles/how-to-make-alcohol-from-coconut-water/

– Pour the coconut water into the large container.
– Sprinkle the yeast evenly over the hot water. Allow it to proof for five minutes.
– Pour the yeast mix evenly over the top of the water. Repeat with the sugar.
– Shake both thoroughly together by placing the cap on the top of the container. Continue mixing until they are all combined.
– Remove the lid. Cut a small hole about the size of a quarter in the top of it.
– Place the lid on the container and fit the balloon firmly over the top of it so that any escaping air from the bottle will fill up the
inside of the rubber.
– Allow the container to sit undisturbed for a week or two. The balloon will fill completely during this time. The alcohol is
finished when the balloon has deflated.
– Taste the alcohol to see if it is at the strength you desire after its period of sitting.
– Pour the liquid into a glass jar. Top with a lid. Place the jar in the fridge. Use within several weeks.
would be to offer insight or decent conversation. Instead, she'd just shown up one evening, half-naked
and demanding food, and since then had simply spent her time making his pineapple liqueur disappear.
Hell, even a lap dance – or I guess that'd be a pole dance, or maybe an “arm job”... slip 'n' slide?
Nah: sit 'n' spin! He chuckled to himself at the images conjured by his ruminations. Meh, prob'ly fer
the best, since she might drown if she tried it. Freakin' tamagotchi.
These thoughts were on his mind as usual as he neared the fire pit, only to stand thunder-struck by
what he beheld there. With neither sign nor sound of another's presence, there sat a footprint in the
sand. Even in his intoxicated state, he searched up and down the wall, finding no other impression but
this one. Returning with care, he examined it once more, sure that he'd imagined it, having seen no
evidence of such before, and there lay the very print still.
I'm losin' it. More. I'm losin' it even more. This I don't need...
...and you see a girl's brown body

dancing through the turquoise,
and her footprints make you follow
where the sky loves the sea...
O ~~~ O
Chapter 2: Friday
Poking around on the main body of the island, Sonic found more of the same as he'd seen so far. Some
minerals, useful food sources, and the odd decayed indication of ancient habitation.
Bamboo, sulfur, batshit, stones... great. Wit' some willow or balsa fer charcoal, I can kill any Gorns
that wander by.
No signs of other occupants beyond that footprint for a day's travel in any direction.
No sign, that is, until he found the Octorilla nest-village in the baobabs two days to the west-
northwest, across the valley. It wasn't so much the distance (weighing in at only a few miles) as the
undergrowth that ate up the travel time; gilboa and ginkgo trees were rampant, along with banyan and
baobab, wisteria everywhere, kudzu clogging every swale that wasn't nailed down, and a field of
enormous sunflowers got in the way at one point. Wolf lichen the size of large shrubbery abounded.
Every few days, there had been a simple, dolorous one-two on the upbeat with what sounded like
taiko drums. Not terribly imaginative, but definitely artificial.
Most of the Octorillas were zebra-striped, some leopard-spotted, but all spent their time foraging in
the canopy with some short forays to the ground for young bamboo and other items too tempting to
pass up.
Heh, maybe I should yodel to 'em an' swing in on a vine? I can go all ape-man, long as they don't
worship some fifty foot gorilla or nuttin'. Or an underground city fulla dinosaurs. Or some ancient
daikaijū sleepin' off the coast. 'least there ain't no statues stickin' outta the beach.
As it turned out, the Octorillas that he observed lived a tranquil life. Atop the massive branches
there grew a variety of plants. They gathered nuts and berries and fruit, some grasses and seeds and
tubers, dug into smaller limbs for insects and grubs and the occasional small lizard, and sometimes
their eggs, and stayed far above the ground most of the time. No fire or wheels – or even travois – but
they had drum and nest technologies, and they applied sticks for digging leverage and even used gourds
as bowls and for storage.
When finally he approached them, they displayed no hostility, but also neither trust nor interest.
Introducing them to the concept of a satchel in hand or over the shoulder went well, causing a stir
among all who saw this and the immediate implementation thereof.
I could ask 'em about the neighborhood... if only I spoke Hovitos...
It was on his third day with the Octorillas that the drums began again. He'd already determined that
they were neither threat nor resource, and had decided to head back after the midday meal.
They'd been beginning lunch when the sound reached them.
As one, the Octorillas had slumped resignedly, turning away to face the beat, gathering flowers as
they moved.
He'd learned some of their words, but not enough to gather what was transpiring until they stood
near the drummer.

One by one, they approached the fork of the limb, cast out their flowers gently, and returned whence
they'd come.
Reaching the fork, he looked down to see a thin cloud of flowers still falling. They were beautiful, a
pageant of color, and a silent paean of loss.
Below lay the ravaged corpse of a young one near a bush covered with ripe berries. The scene was
grisly, and all around lay bulette tracks.
His face froze at this, his eyes closing slowly as his breath left him. Dropping her flowers in shock,
Ruru turned away immediately, her lunch coming back up before she'd flitted more than a yard.
The scene below now blurred, washed away in tears, he passed his hand over the fork, releasing his
flowers, and returned slowly to the dining area.
Some few picked through bits of food, disheartened, most just sitting there doing not even that.
Not a threat...
He looked back in the direction that he'd just come from, eyes tight.
“Onryō no shinrin,” Ruru whispered, her face hardening, still wet.
Over the next three days, he tracked and killed two dozen bulettes of every age, mounting and
befouling their carcasses all around the nest-village, high enough from the ground to keep them clear of
predators. In the process, he did the same with any velociraptor nests that he encountered, though he
didn't expect that to do any good.
The drums remained silent.
=====
Upon their return to Barrik Keep, he and Ruru discovered a new occupant who seemed to have made
itself at home. Near the entrance sat a large flower, seeming to be the whole of the plant, and low to
the ground. The kitchen refuse had been removed to a mulch pile, the dungeon within had been swept,
his gourds and clay bowls washed and dried, all of their crap neatened... and a large meal awaited them
all, wood plates and turtle shell bowls set out for each, along with a sweet and heady wine not of his
stock.
It was the scent of fresh baked bread that hit them first. A dense buttertop honey wheat.
Well, then. Hello, Snow White... et dōna fers...
A figure stood still by the table. A tiny thing, maybe two and a half feet tall, barely more than half
of his height. She – at least he guessed that it might be a “she,” from “her” bearing – seemed to be
wearing nothing but reddish leaves, though the spring green leaves on her head might be her version of
hair, so he wasn't entirely certain that those on her body were actually clothes. The longer that he
gazed, the less sure he became of this, as it seemed evident that her skin was a smooth bark with veins
that looked closer to those of a leaf than of an animal. She had a short, trumpet-like mouth in place of
lips and nose, and her eyes were olive green with a dull blood-orange glow to the sclera, but there was
no feeling of threat from her. As an offhand and almost inconsequential observation, he couldn't help
noticing that her feet looked to be a good match for the footprint in the sand.
Ruru's eyes shot wide as she gave no thought to any of this other than to pause and cry out
“Itadakimasu!” before diving straight to the table and beginning to eat ravenously. Sonic watched this,
then moved casually toward it, sniffing for telltale traces of poisons.
As he did, he watched their benefactress watching Ruru with what appeared to be pleased
amusement.
Shifting his eyes to Ruru and back again, he asked carefully “You can see 'er too?”
Her head shifting back toward him, she said nothing, only curling her neck uncertainly in response.
“Hai – sō desu! Baka,” Ruru supplied for her unnecessarily, between bites.
Then again, some of the Octorillas had seemed to be aware of Ruru, too, though he'd put it down to
coincidental appearance.
Leaving that for the moment, he returned his attention to the meal laid out before them.
Hot and cold tea, fruit juice, shelled nuts with salted edamame, sliced jicama; an odd hot and sour
minestrone with wonton; smoked fish with chives, roasted duck with drippings in rice vermicelli with
kale and mushrooms, a vegetable fricassee with bamboo shoots over rice with molluscs and garnished
with slices of olive and grape, stewed beans with a hint of molasses, ears of boiled corn, lightly
steamed greens with vinegar and spice, boiled cabbage with a little butter and salt, creamy looking
mashed potatoes and cassava of mixed textures with turnips and chopped eggs and what might have
been cauliflower; chilled fruit; braised smoked spider-pork chops and fried hypnotoad; a basic salad of
arugula and sliced beefsteak tomatoes with bits of salted fish and a simple vinaigrette as well as a
sprinkling of chia and flax with bean sprouts and cherry tomatoes; water chestnut cakes, some sort of
fruit and berry compote dim sum, and... cheese.
Tea. Wonder if they got coffee here, too...
It was tempting – and God, did it smell good. His stomach growled at the thought.
His eyes rose toward their guest inquiringly, his expression wooden throughout.
Shifting sideways in his mind, sliding backward a little bit, alpha state; he looked deep.
She scanned clean, a pure and silvery bell-tone feeling against a cool gray background.
He was tired. They were both tired. It had been a long schlep.
Fuck it; not like it can kill me, right? 'least not fer long...
Visions of Circe crossed his mind at that thought, and he grinned lopsidedly. The Illiad and
theodicy.
Good luck to 'er.
Cracking his neck to either side, he eased himself into the chair beside him. It seemed likely to be
as old as the keep itself, but was still sturdy.
She did the same, then offered him the bowl of nuts, making a strange warbling, a humming-whistle,
and finishing with “Pi.”
“Yeah... bah-weep-graaaaagnah wheep nini bong ta you too, Jinpei...”
She merely tilted her head slightly.
Gesturing to the table, he tried Octorilla, “Shi onam – ye amura? Sa opari onam?”
“Pi.”
“Right. 'Pi.' Got it.”
There was coffee, in the end, and it was strong, but it was the wine that finally did him in. So full a
stomach after a long travel home was a welcomed blessing, and twice over for not having had to make
it himself – not that that mattered, since he drank most of his meals these days. The wine though... ahh,
that wine. It hit the spot, lulling him gently to sleep.
The Cybers6 were closing in. He had to get to Robotnik before it was too late.
He had to get Robotnik to send out the killbit flip.
6 Cybers: composite beings of nanomachinery rather than organic cells. Something like Dr. Who's Cybermen with the powers of
Daleks and ST:TNG Borg, the shapes of the various small furry creatures of the Sonic the Hedgehog games are formal templates (they
are designed to be what they appear to be, and so are not T-3000 series Terminators; they're more like metallorganic cousins to their
originals, genetically – though not quite as Dr. Robotnik had envisioned them), and psychologically akin to Stargate: SG1's nanites.
Several steps evolved from the basic cybernetic augmentation of either Cybermen or standard Dr. Robotnik creations.
The ground shook violently from another gravity oscillation. Reality itself shook in four different
directions. His vision was shot through with tiny actinic sparks of titanium white and eerie blue arcs
from Cherenkov radiation cascading across his optical nerves. Sheets of plasmons arose at all angles
along his path, pale mustard, dull magenta, and vivid violet disturbed into laminar vortices by his
passage.
They were destroying Möbius in their bid for supremacy – why wouldn't they simply leave? This
was madness, a rabid pursuit of mutually assured destruction! Most of the surface was already a
cauldron of metastable particles held at bay by vying physical laws; they'd burned the sky and now
they were dropping cosmic string deformers.
Some symmetry had been broken, space now beginning to crystallize around him, a raging fire of
condensate clouds frozen into place, spreading outward like frost across a supercooled pond. An
inflating phase transition as the decoupling had its way.
A subnova flash of zeroeth-generation leptoquarks washed over everything as he reached the
gravity-chute... he could see his own bones, the circuitry within the walls, a cloud of bird-shapes
flocking through inchoate fluctuations of dark matter distributions against a brown hypergiant looming
in the distance...
This has all happened before; it will all happen again...
He awoke suddenly in the middle of the night to find Ruru collapsed across most of his pillow and
the plant girl curled up beside him. He didn't remember the dream, but felt as if he'd been running or
chasing something; a feeling of unnameable dread and panic, existential terror, the world collapsing all
around him no matter his efforts, and... someone else, maybe several someones. The tension was
spread throughout his body, every fiber of his being singing with it as if that were his true essence and
this waking-self a mere shadow overlain.
Easing out from beneath the furs, the thin velvety mushroom-suede sheet barely making a sound, he
wandered off to piss, his mind still muddled with wine, wondering whether to accept her apparent offer
of domesticity. She could sure as hell cook well, and seemed to seek only company in return.
Chugging some sangria with a quick snack of cold duck from one of the zeer pots 7 in the breezeway
near the pool room to top him off before seeking his bed again, he decided to let her stay for the time
being.
...an' the company really would be nice, fer a change; an' she's nice 'n' warm.
Then it hit him. Shit! Gotta find a new spank-tank.
=====
Morning.
Something repeatedly and insistently poking your mulch-cloaca tends to waken you – a stick or a
rock, maybe.
Reaching back to remove the object, it was neither, nor was it so easily dislodged. Too fleshy.
There was an animal scent in the air, not strong, but clearly present, and slightly sharp.
Chlorine?
Looking back carefully, so as not to wake anyone else, the others were still sleeping deeply, the
larger one's arm draped tight about with a contented smile, constraining movement.
7 Zeer pot: a simple refrigerator built of one large UNGLAZED clay pot within another, with wet sand between them and a damp cloth
covering the two. Evaporative cooling takes care of the rest of the job, with a typical (though somewhat variable) extension on the
order of 9x the original shelf life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNLPeb3qIhc&index=12&list=PLzdQ9vN7FdPZjyGGlpnZzCvvsOH0-tlgA&t=6s
The green and orange eyes narrowed in further puzzled fumbling.

Wet?
No...
Sticky?
They widened shortly thereafter in surprised realization.
Sonic stumbled out a few hours later to discover food once more laid out. Wheat and barley with
cane sugar and blueberries in coconut milk and a little cream, scrambled eggs with diced vegetables
and small chunks of meat, fried bacon strips, slices of ham, seared strips of sand squid, sliced
honeydew and cantaloupe, and more fruit juice.
The plant girl smelled different, too. The air now carried a light, slightly sweet floral scent that was
itself faintly like cantaloupe, whereas last night had been more like fresh laundry or a spring rain, cool
and sparkling.
Must be nice ta choose yer smell at will.
“You got a name?” he asked, rubbing his hand across his head, not expecting anything useful.
He wasn't disappointed. More warbling.
“Howsabout I call ya Friday? You good wit' that? I ain't really all that sure yesterday really was
Friday, but... anyway, I'm Sonic,” he held his hand to his own chest, “an' that's Ruru,” pointing toward
her as she painted something onto the corner wall, a palette of berry juices and ground powders in hand
and a small array of texture materials nearby.
“Sonic – Ruru – Friday,” he repeated with gestures.
“SSahngk. Rūu. Fhrá'de?”
“Ehh, close enough,” he replied, rummaging for something with more kick than the fruit juice could
offer.
Seeing him reach for one of the gourds of liquor, Friday's eyes lowered. Letting out a short sigh, the
plant scuttled off for a moment, returning with the wine from the night before and offering it solemnly
but insistently to him in exchange for his spirit of choice.
“Pi.”
He considered it.
“Ya really like that stuff, huh? A'ight, let's see how good it works against mornin's. Pi.”
Friday returned the gourd to the shelf as Sonic took a long swig.
He continued to make his way through the wine, but accepted the helpings of breakfast that Friday
insisted politely that he eat.
As he did, memories swirled their way into his thoughts.
He didn't think about them, they simply appeared piecemeal.
Möbius. The other clones. The beatings.
They didn't “get” emotions, they were just... dead inside; didn't get all warm 'n' fuzzy over small
furry creatures.
Ya gotta hide yer feelin's, blend in. Bury 'em all, or else. Can't get found out for 'em.
If they never felt shit though... how-the-fuck come I do?
Spurned for seeking friendship. 'cept by Tails. He got it. Fuck...
Bits and pieces mixed together disjointly, images out of order or without context.
Her wine didn't do shit to ward off the memories, but at least it leeched away the pain and loss,
mellowed the frustration and anger, the pointlessness and desolation. Weird wine, man.
Oatmeal appeared at one point, grits at another. Friday must have made them.
Eventually he noticed something in the air. Friday had lit some incense. Something sweet.
He batted playfully at a small cloud of it passing by.

He remained like this through the day, with Friday sometimes bringing him a carrot or coleslaw or
pink grapefruit to snack on, or twice a wineskin, or lighting some new kind of incense. The coleslaw
was a little unusual. Raisins. Who puts raisins inta coleslaw? He really enjoyed whatever she'd burned
while he ate the cinnamon-and-strawberry-jelly covered waffles, though.
He really liked her. She was nice. Ruru was nice too, in her own bizarre way. He loved them both,
and the whole world, really.
If only he could fix the past...
He spent a while just staring at the pastırma dangling above the counter, then at the shimmying fish
net hanging from its ceiling pegs, almost dry now.
Need drawers. Knife block. Obsidian's too sharp ta leave lyin' around. Chert, even. Maybe a box o'
sand?
As dusk fell, the light brought in through the quartz veins waned and Friday lit some of his candles.
They were simple tallow, and cast a warm glow. Somehow, her having lit them felt all warm and cozy
in way that had never been there when he or Ruru did so.
Udon. Goat. Cream sauce? Mmm, chopped chilis 'n' bacon...
He vaguely remembered watching Friday making noodles. He didn't remember having seen her
with any of the goats, but they were around. Goat milk? Butter! Funny green flavor...
He smiled a huge smile and made happy noises while gesturing with his food. Friday's head bobbed
for a moment, seeming to understand.
He hadn't had any success with those damned goats, but apparently Friday was better at animal
husbandry. Of course, by this time he'd forgotten the cheese at the end of last night's meal, and last
night he'd been so caught up in events that he hadn't wondered at it at the time.
Then he realized that his plate was empty. He didn't remember eating it all – but there it was, gone.
Someone had eaten it, certainly. Such a sad thing, to see an empty plate. Friday handed him his
wineskin, and to his utmost delight, he found his plate magically full again as he finished his drink.
Looking up and around the table, he felt an overwhelming gratitude at this simple miracle.
Ruru watched all of this, laughing. Looking at his food and drink, he saw that she was right though,
it truly was funny, and he joined her in laughing. After a moment, Friday began making a strange,
chirping noise that felt like laughter, which made him laugh even more, in turn causing Ruru to break
into tears of laughter.
It was the first time that Friday had seen his eyes uncreased of continuous background pain, his
mind unburdened of guilt and loss, and solely in the moment. Free of his fear.
At turns, his mind wandered.

He could almost see and hear the imagined crowd of friends and loved ones, well-wishers.
A retirement party that had never happened. Not like that. Yeah, even if he hadn't gone outside the
wire, he would have ended up in a shallow grave of carbonite, one way or another.
Except that maybe he had gotten that party. Maybe it was happening right here, right now.
Still though, ain't gotta debate about re-uppin', an' I sure got one helluva fini-flight...
=====
Time passes, F integrates quickly, things find new balance.

The fronds of Friday's “hair” were a mess. Without thinking about it, Sonic reached out to adjust
them for her. Her eyes widened as she made a small squeak, her body seeming to shiver and melt at
this. Glancing around in embarrassment, he apologized and hurried out of the room. Friday just stood
there, gazing after him speculatively, considering. They touched this one's pistils and stamens, and did
so from care, without revulsion or mechanical disinterest, nor ulterior intent.
Outside, seeking something to do to make himself useful, Sonic fretted and paced in distraction.
Shit an' two makes eight – what the hell was I thinkin'? I invaded her space wit'out invitation, an'
maybe broke some giant fuckin' taboo. She a'ready thinks I'm repulsive, an' now I go 'n' pull this shit?
S builds lathe to work some materials for F: simple millstone, screw press, molds to press husks into
material, a loom for husk/etc. fibers, etc.. Thinks about wind power, given the constant breeze driving
out to the lava, though hide tanning didn't really grab him (no oaks, and the alternatives were more
involved); easy to run a few saws or pounding mallets that way, maybe rig some block and tackle or A-
frames, and haul a few logs and stones, build a nice sheltered square foot garden 8 with some
hydroponics for the roots and tubers, maybe a little water feature or something – husk hairs, a bit of
loam, some egg shells an' coffee grounds, maybe rust some nails inta the water, an' build it all on the
stone ta' keep moles away from the worms... F might like that, and it would make life a little easier;
wonder if I can find some vermiculite. He began picturing a greenhouse first of thin mushroom suede,
discarding it as impractical, then of spider-pig silk, and discarding that too since the weaving alone
would be far too involved even if he put together a loom, and finally settling on cannibalizing pieces of
glass from the village. He supposed that the dungeon really could use some fixing up, too, if he were
honest. Maybe some beds, before things got too weird.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnv0DAR_gWA&t=40s&index=44&list=PLzdQ9vN7FdPZjyGGlpnZzCvvsOH0-tlgA
S finds a fair amount of materials, tools, etc. lying around in keep and village
Great, it's the freakin' Mary Celeste – 'cause y'know, that ain't creepy or nothin'.
=====
Wila looked around, deciding on breakfast. Something light maybe...

SSahngk walked in, their face not specifically troubled, but bearing the same weight as ever, as if
ready for the world to cave in around them.
“Shrub-leaf-broth or tree-seed-broth? Hot animal-seeds or cold grass-seeds?” Wila asked.
8 Garden: You can learn a lot from TV shows. Probably the best that I found on this (I watched them a lot in my early 'teens) were
PBS material, unsurprisingly.
Square foot gardening: http://www.melbartholomew.com/category/beginners-guide/
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=square+foot+gardening
Victory Garden: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/victorygarden/watch/index.html
This Old House... a brief Google revealed only the past season or so (the show goes back to '79). If you can find it anywhere, it's
well worth watching for in-depth (often step-by-step) work – relevant to both new construction and refurbishing of old.
“Várvar ak kawví?”
Their language was strange, and still sounded like water-birds to Wila, but some of the noises were
beginning to make sense. “Kawví” and “káwvi.” Those were definitely their words for tree-seed-broth;
differing only in the lilt, one was used when asking about it, the other when stating something about it.
This was the former: a request.
Rūu wobbled in right behind them, still unsteady from last night's libations.
“Ohayō, Furá Dë,” they said quietly, laying their head across the table, “Bāru baru á-ku gobu'lu.”
Gobu'lu. That sounded like Rūu's word for animal-seeds with solid woolly-idiot-juice and bits of
meat and vegetable. Better to make some and see than to guess that they'd declined.
Wila poured some vegetable juice for each of them as the kawví began to drip. SSahngk had already
drunk theirs before Wila had even finished pouring Rūu's; they cradled the second one more
judiciously, lifting a fist with a thumb and smiling.
It looked like a slow day. Maybe a nice big pot of creamy tomato soup and basil with a few
vegetables, rounds of cold sandwiches, and lots of chilled woolly-idiot-juice.
The psi-web bore down once more, the periods of overpressure bringing it incrementally closer to
encompassing all life on Möbius.
He'd cautioned Robotnik against this, briefed him in camber on the inherent dangers of their forces
going in and exposing the Gaian9 to any information at all. This thing had no vital organs, existing
solely in the zooic aether. A single comprehensive life form that spanned countless worlds, its
movements blind to external reasoning but still directed by a will to expand, it sought Hamiltonian
paths not of least distance, but of maximal long term gain, each advance affecting all others in some
intangible tensor.
The Augments10 were already falling to its sway here and there.
But that had never happened.

Sonic shook his head, trying to remember what he'd been doing before... before whatever that was.
Looking down, there were hand tools and some materials, but he couldn't focus.
Friday laid her hand gently across his. Coming back to the moment, he found that she'd brought him
some sandwiches and a Long Island iced tea. The drink would do him good, since something that she
did to them caused a focusing effect, rather than muddying his mind.
Her hand still lay across his. Looking down at it, his mind wandered as he felt the pull of honestly
offered companionship in that simple gesture.
9 Gaian: like a lichen or volvox colony (or any large life form with others living within it) in that multiple species work together for
their mutual benefit, the Gaian is composed of millions of species together. Unlike these examples, they don't come together in a
cluster, single body, or hive-like location; their shared being is purely a life-force pattern, insubstantial, hive-mind-like but stemming
from the collective synergy of all.
It lacks actual self-awareness in the usual sense, but operates much as if it possessed this in the same manner as a truly expert system
AI. The collective awareness-pattern of its member life-forms permits uncoordinated action to run as smoothly as any autonomic
system.
10 Augments: the cybernized small furry creatures [typically of Möbius] are “Augments” (minuscule “augments” when non-sophont).
Not quite as advanced as Cybers – more like The Six Million Dollar Man or The Bionic Woman – their abilities are certainly enhanced
by various implants and modifications, but these things are only bigger-better-faster-stronger versions of a wood leg, rather than truly
integrated into their whole being on a base level and offering exponential leverage of resources.
Basically the difference between taking some rope and tripling its length vs. cubing the volume of that length (presumably with the
same cross section, of course) and cubing its strength and flexibility and so forth, or the difference between addition and calculus, or
some braided straw versus UHDPE, or even a hand replaced with a hook vs. polymorphic liquid metal, much less that of walking
versus MHD propulsion.
It's not simply a question of degree or approach, but of logistical infrastructure and implicit synergy and side developments.
A friend.
No more than that.
Never more.
Right. Beds.
Changing the topic before it could start, he asked “Ya got any Klondike bars?”
He couldn't be sure, but she seemed to pull inward a little at this, as if hurt by the brush-off, possibly
almost as if not wishing to press him for more than he could give as yet. Hell, she don't even know
what I'm sayin'. Dismissing the ridiculous fantasy, he thanked her for the food as he considered the
work laid out before him.
As dinnertime approached, he finished the beds. Once he'd gotten underway, it hadn't taken nearly as
much effort as he'd half-expected. He'd put together a sort of nest-like large cushion within an oval
upholstered framework for Friday, a sleeping closet with sliding doors and a bed of springy moss for
Ruru, and a tent-like hammock for himself.
As they ate, Wila watched.

Their eyes are pinched; always so much pain. Something that's gone and should never have been as
it was.
Sonic found the evening's wine different, but no less pleasant. Earthy toned, like mushrooms, and a
little sweet. It went surprisingly well with the chicken 11 fillets wrapped in spinach, ham, and cheese,
the crisped edges of which teased his tongue with a salty sharpness against the sweetness of the butter
and juices pooled all around. The curried rice didn't overpower it, either, even with the small pieces of
broiled pumpkin; if anything, they complemented each other, bringing out subtle flavors that he'd likely
have otherwise missed.
His thoughts returned to Möbius, or different versions of it. Each was its own tragedy.
Slowly, the images receded, replaced with the food and the company.
Ruru holding out eggs to Friday and smiling happily, her eyes large and expressive, clearly hoping
for an omelette.
“Eto... soshite kōhī, o kudasai?” she asked, glancing longingly at the mason jar of coffee.
An omelette an' some coffee... maybe that's all anyone really needs, anyway: just ta be happy an'
relax.
Soon there were lightly curried omelettes over rice for all, bits of vegetables and fungi bringing the
flavors to life. Coffee, too.
Sonic smiled bitterly at the irony.
If only it really was 'at simple.
That night, he awoke to find Friday pressed back against him in his hammock.
She was soft and a warm, and that pressure was returned most urgently by his own lower regions
stirring and making their interests known quite clearly.
Fuck. She musta lost track o' things 'n' come back to the usual spot half-asleep at some point.
He crept out of the hammock and slipped quietly under the covers of her unoccupied mattress. It
was cramped, and the sheets were cold, but he'd manage.
Morning came, only to find her curled up against him beneath the furs once more, her arm across his
11 Chicken: These were cucco fillets, actually – a different species. Both are present on the island, but neither Sonic nor Ruru are aware
of the difference, and even if Friday were aware of it, there's still the language barrier. For now, just assume that each case of
“chicken” refers to cucco specifically.
Cuccos can fly and swim, go well when roasted, and pair with apple, plum, pear, fish, and hypnotoad.
hip, this time in her cushion-nest.

Confused now, he made his way to the kitchen by way of the pool room, stopping to piss down the
glory hole.
Reaching for a drink, he hesitated and looked around thoughtfully.
Grabbing some juice instead, he went to work.
By the time that Ruru and Friday made their way to the dining area, he'd mostly made breakfast.
Sort of.
Milk and malted cereal were set out, along with some fruit and blueberries. That much had gone
well.
There was a cold plate of now-cooled eggs that he'd fried or scrambled to varying degrees, toast
with a similar range of toasting, and several kinds of fried meats in congealing grease. He'd forgotten
the butter – rushing to the zeer pots, he corrected this hastily. After a moment, he rushed back to the
shelf for the sugar that he'd remembered at some point and forgotten again. Then the salt and jam.
The kitchen was a disaster area.
Ruru pulled back, a look of mixed confusion and uncertainty – and not a little disgust – on her face.
Friday simply sat down and awaited the others as she doled out servings of everything for each of
them.
“Yeah... y'know, that might not be so hot an idea – right?”
She gazed at him calmly, gesticulating as she warbled. Not a word of it made sense to either him or
Ruru, but they both got the impression that he'd gone to the effort of making breakfast for everyone and
they were all going to appreciate it.
They sat.
They ate.
=====
“We're mostly physically compatible, though ya gotta be a bit adaptable. We manage. Sex, from
either of our perspectives, just takes a little... creativity – 'sides, y'ever see the schnoz on 'em? So I got
dangly bits, 'n' she's got a flower fer hair; it kinda takes some figurin', butcha get there even'chly. Plus...
she's one of a set of bud-triplets. I didn't meet her sisters for a while, since they were in, like, some sort
o' hibernation or some'n, I dunno – it was all rose quartz bells 'n' amethyst rods 'n' cryotube-lookin'
bismuth 'n' shit, an' the whole place was done up in obsidian an' hematite – I also didn't know it at the
time, but it turns out that marryin' one of 'em is a marriage ta all three. Turns out that this wasn't a bad
thing at all, either. They're individuals, but share some o' their thoughts 'n' senses. It gets umm... real
interestin' in bed...” Sonic grinned through the side of his mouth as he said this last, “I think you'll like
'em when ya get ta meet 'em. An' fer the record, they're both male an' female, florally, but since they
sorta look female, an' definitely act all feminine an' shit, an' I got no better pronouns to work with, I
just call 'em female. I keep thinkin' o' they/them/their, but that'd just get confusin' since there're three of
'em. 'sides, they don't really distinguish sexes at all, an' kinda look at you 'n' me as 'a little odd that way'
– their words, not mine.”
Friday had gone off on her own for a few days last month and the month before. She hadn't done so
secretively, but with no ability to communicate, the first time had been a surprise and the second
worrisome.
The lights had finally died, and with them any hope of survival.
Robotnik had escaped just as they'd been closing in on him. Without him, the system had locked
down in fail-safe mode. Even Tails couldn't get it to respond.
The interior hatches weren't locked, but the base was hermetically sealed.
Trapped like rats with no hair and one leg.
Now it was just a snail-race between starvation and asphyxiation, if they didn't go insane first from
the continuously replaying song.
...I'm the fly in your soup,

I'm the pebble in your shoe,
I'm the pea beneath your bed,
I'm the bump on every head,
I'm the peel on which you slip,

I'm a pin in every hip,
I'm the thorn in your side
– makes you wriggle and writhe
– and it's so easy when you're evil!

This is the life, you see;
the Devil tips his hat to me.
I do it all because I'm evil,
and I do it all for free...
– your tears are all the pay I'll ever need!
Sonic tensed, bringing himself back to the present, reminding himself that this was Friday; she wasn't
leaving, just going somewhere. She'd be back.
If.
If she wanted to.
If she didn't get rolled up.
In a rush, he crammed some extra jerky, dry cheese, hard bread, and trail mix bars into his go-bag
and caught up to her before she'd even gotten past the courtyard.
She turned and waited for him as she heard his footsteps approaching rapidly.
Reaching out and taking his hand, she continued onward as if it were simply another afternoon's
stroll, Ruru bobbing along happily and carefree, sniffing flowers and finding shiny stones that she'd
promptly add to his pack.
Once they'd crossed the rope bridge, Sonic cranked the slats to their retracted position, leaving only
the guiding wires in place before throwing the bolt on the tower door at this end – they'd secured the
other end before crossing. It didn't smell very good there, since he'd taken every opportunity to mark
the boundaries by pissing and shitting all around each end wherever the afternoon rains wouldn't wash
it away, but at least the scraps of meat rotting in the bulette shells and sand squid claws scattered to
either side didn't make it much worse. The phobosuchus skeleton and partial hide didn't really help
though. The stench wasn't pretty, but local predators shied far from the area, aside from the damned
carrion 'raptors; they were simply too stupid and bullheaded to take the hint. There was a small pile of
their bones near the portcullis, just for good measure.
Their path wound generally northeast, toward the golden ziggurat in the distance. The path that
she'd taken before was overgrown, but easily enough traced out, presenting no threats or particular
obstacles en route.
With the afternoon rains threatening to release their usual steady patter, Friday dug into her bag,
withdrawing a pair of flowers; they seemed to be the same sort as she'd planted beside the dungeon
door, squash yellow petals with a few of hot pink. Handing one to Sonic, she unfurled the other and
held it upward like an umbrella, its petals translucent and offering a beautiful pastel lighting like a
parasol.
When they stopped for dinner, Friday passed out onigiri; some were fish and vegetable, some were
meat and mushroom. In seeming prescience, she had packed enough for everyone. There were also
sealed bamboo tubes of matcha and saké – the matcha was the larger of the two, the reason for which
became apparent as she poured some over rice with both fresh and pickled vegetables, wasabi, and
hamo to make ochazuke, while reserving the remainder to mix with the saké.
These were soon followed by bentō filled with shrimp tempura, bream sashimi, grilled trout, unagi
yawata maki, partially dried tomatoes and sweet potatoes, mixed-meat sausages with tortellini, ōtoro
omelettes with bonito flakes and kombu, stuffed squid, shimeji-and-chestnut-rice with teriyaki chicken
and umeboshi, asparagus shoots and soy marinated hijiki, and tofu with a lightly caramelized brown
sugar syrup.
There weren't many chestnut trees on the island, nor did the poor things fare terribly well. It was
generally too hot for them, and those few were in shaded areas with a strong breeze. A small grove of
them grew along the southern wall by the cistern atop the castle, which was likely the source that
Friday had tapped for these.
They ate while watching the sun creep slowly down through the open spaces between the branches
and trunks.
As bedtime rounded the corner, Sonic started gathering branches and large leaves, only to find
Friday watching him curiously. As he began constructing the raised floor of a lean-to, she warbled
something that he couldn't understand. She didn't sound upset, just head-shakingly amused.
Digging into her bag again, she pulled out one of her flowers once more. Opening it and setting it to
the ground, she waited for a moment as its stem wriggled into the ground and the whole settled flush,
then stepped onto its center and disappeared.
He and Ruru were stunned.
A moment later, Friday's head popped back out from the center of the flower, looking at them
expectantly, then disappearing again after another warble.
They looked at each other, and Sonic shrugged. Looking it over briefly, the petals appeared to link
to one another, like moths' wings – fren-... frenulo-... the thought teased at the edge of his mind.
Not knowing what to expect, he stepped forward and experienced the oddest sensation of being
swallowed.
The flower deposited him on a soft, cushiony surface, Ruru showing up right behind him – landing
on top of his head, in fact, then sliding down across his face.
Too bad that wasn't a little more interestin'. Coulda been fun.
The room that they found themselves in was surprisingly large, perhaps twelve feet across and
roughly circular, with a few niches in the wall. A mossy growth along the ceiling provided enough
light to see by, though not very bright.
Friday warbled cheerfully, then held out two large nutshells filled with a lightly honeyed nectar-
water that held a bouquet of saffron with undertones of cloves to it.
Ruru drank hers with avidity and reached forth in hope of more.
“Mō ippai o onegai shimasu, Furá Dë-san?” she requested as Friday smiled and took her shell,
“Arigatō gozaimasu!
“Nani kore...?”
Unsurprisingly, Friday's reply as she refilled the shell was unintelligible, though she gestured around
the room in such a way as to suggest that the plant itself might have something to do with making their
drinks. Indeed, this was borne out as she pinched closed the vine-tip that had extruded from the wall.
Sonic accepted his own refill with a nod, smiling at the unexpected comfort for the night. His smile
broadened when Friday opened a small pantry and brought out tortillas, butter, cheese, and a small
griddle with a tea candle.
“Take me to your liter,” he toasted, holding up his drink.
As they walked, there were times when the path narrowed and Friday took the lead. They took rest
breaks every hour or so, and after one such rest stop, Sonic found his eyes wandering to a peacock-like
bullseye pattern in Friday's leaves. An area of mostly darkening rings not much different from the rest
of the colors, but enough so that it caught the eye. He hadn't noticed it before this. Somewhat below
waist-level, it lay midway between her hips... Realizing the direction of his attention, he swallowed
and looked away suddenly, watching the birds and insects around them instead, or Ruru savaging the
onslaught of branches and leaves in her path, concentrating on anything but where he'd been looking.
As he adjusted his pack's straps for the third time, his gaze found its way to her pattern again, and
the sway of her hips, lingering there for a few seconds, and as he looked up, he found her watching him
over her shoulder. Panicked and ashamed, he glanced away immediately. When he looked back again,
she had returned her attention to the trail ahead without comment.
The ziggurat stood unblemished and shining in the late morning light of the third day. The foundation
stood a full ten feet thick of some unidentifiable stone. At each corner stood an enormous black bell –
they resembled stūpa, but were true bells of twenty foot radius from clapper to dome – a script of
whorls adorning their faces. Thin rivulets of mercury streamed from one spot to another at random in
some areas of the ziggurat's surfaces, with no hint of their sources or destinations; other areas were
dotted haphazardly with mica slabs, thick plates set so as to project slightly outward from the walls.
Far atop the peak stood a curious assembly resembling an antenna with several cross pieces, the
bottom-most of which lay aslant just above an upward-turned crescent.
It was beautiful, though somewhat unnerving. The aesthetic was undeniable, but that it hovered
above the ground by some ten feet with no apparent means to do so – this was no small feat nor trick of
the eye.
Gaining the pavilion at what seemed the front face was done easily by way of Friday's flowers.
Standing there, gazing upward, Sonic found her moving directly before him.
As he backed up to afford her space, her head cocked and she reached for his hands.
Turning away from him, she placed his arms over her shoulders and laced his hands firmly around
his elbows, giving them a final tugging to ensure that they were firmly in place.
As he stood there, awkwardly aware of the physical intimacy of their position, she brought the
flowers up above her head to either side with a stem in each hand and they began to whirl around
rapidly, lifting them swiftly from the ground. A moment later, they were level with a broad area onto
which she settled them gently.
This admitted them to a broad walkway with winding side paths into topiary and flowered gardens
surrounding the base.
They followed the main path and were soon at the ziggurat proper. There were no doors at the
entrance to the main structure, only an enormous archway.
Once within, the atmosphere took on an unearthly mein. Gems adorned various interior surfaces,
highly stylized wall glyphs luminescing slightly with a ghostly pale blue-green light, mist swirling
gently. Here the mica slabs held a surprise, somehow permitting light to pass inward even given their
thickness.
None of it looked familiar, but he recognized tech when he saw it, and he got a bad vibe from the
six-armed Corinthian-bronze statue in the main antechamber; its features held an all too smooth and
molded organic quality to them, as if it were a living thing, waiting there. The armored demon-horned
dragon-person skeletons lining the hall to it didn't help, either; they weren't tech, but he could just feel
that they were something.
F lays out some fruit and flowers before a pair of crystals, then sits meditating quietly.
S can see forms within them, a little blurred, but visibly much like her. Walking up to one slowly, he
pressed his hand to the surface, but went through it with only the slightest sensation of substance, as if
passing his hand through a candle flame or a magnet approaching a field at a close tangent.
Looking around at a pedestal of crystal, a doorway with a curtain of mist, the chiaroscuro ambiance,
the feeling of unreality came home to him in full force once more. Gemstones hung in the air at
various heights and inclinations above the nearly horizontal face of the pedestal. Neither déjà vu nor
jamais vu, but instead a sense of what cannot be, almost an inversion of presque vu.
I knew it. I really am freakin' dead and dreamin' alla this shit. 'less I'm a quantum cat. Descartes
would have an aneurysm in this place.
=====
They lay there limp. The room smelled of a clean sweat and elm in the evening, a sweet pollen-scent
filling the air.
Upon returning from their excursion, Sonic hadn't expected anything unusual beyond Friday
possibly needing some time alone, and so prepared a fairly large dinner to occupy his time and give her
whatever space she needed. She'd puttered around the kitchen with him distractedly, helping with
dinner yet so uncharacteristically not present that he'd been worried, but he hadn't pushed.
It hadn't been anything fancy, but she'd seemed to appreciate it. Leek and potato soup, a few roasted
fish, rice with nuts and mixed ground meats and allspice, a simple glazed ham that she had set to
marinate before they'd left, a vegetable salad with too much carrot and too little tomato, and a fruit
salad for dessert. These were accompanied by a simple dry white wine. He'd been careful with the
seasonings – all too aware that he still didn't really know what he was doing, even though he could
almost remember recipes that he'd never learned – he'd had to be, with Friday being as she had been
just then.
Ruru had certainly been enthusiastic about it, but she generally had a good appetite. After dinner
though, she'd made herself scarce, leaving him and Friday to their own devise, as if the sheep and
beetles were better company. Ōmagatoki had passed, so she'd have no issue with the between time, just
a bunch of darkness; she already swore that the keep itself was tsukumogami – though why she'd feel
any concern over either of these in the first place was beyond him.
They'd sat there by the fire, and after a few abortive attempts at conversation, their limited abilities
conspired too much against them and each had fallen silent.
When Friday had moved to sit next to him, he'd automatically held her, hoping that it might help
some with whatever she was going through.
When she'd looked up into his face, he'd given her a reassuring nod and smile.
When she'd kissed him...
He glanced fondly now to Friday, her breathing beginning to fall into a deeper rhythm, his own lids
grown heavy. She looked like soggy celery, her hair as bedraggled as steamed spinach.
He'd had no idea that plants could sweat, or whatever that sheen was. It wasn't salty; more like the
fresh flavor of cucumber, with a hint of apple or jicama and just a little sweetness of grated carrot.
He slid closer to her, one arm around her waist and the other up past her head as they recovered
from their exertions, each bathing in a deep, blissful satisfaction.
He almost failed to notice as Ruru made her way across the room, tip-toeing exaggeratedly through
the air to her box-bed.
The next morning was spent in an hours-long breakfast. Pancakes, waffles, French toast, cinnamon
toast, several types of bacon, turtle soup, five kinds of eggs – 'raptor eggs weren't usually on the menu,
but their odd, spicy-tangy and slightly fishy flavor went well with the mussels and sausages and oyster
mushrooms – and cheese and other toppings abounded.
Ruru loved the pancakes, and that prompted Sonic to explain passionately and at length that the
secret lay in warm buttermilk and lard, with a bit of cinnamon and nutmeg, along with a little lemon
juice or vinegar to nudge the baking soda along a bit, and in adding the egg yolks into the wet
ingredients separately from gently folding the whipped egg whites and cream of tartar into the mix...
and in mixing the ingredients only until combined and lumpy – no further – and then letting the batter
rest for ten or twenty minutes before pouring so that the flour could soak up the liquids better and the
gas pockets had more time to form, and of course keeping the heat at a low-medium so that the insides
had time to cook along with the outsides, and using less butter on the griddle than you'd expect so that
you didn't get an overly fried-hard skin, and how swirling just a little batter around the edge just before
flipping worked wonders at keeping the puffiness nice and level and adding a thin air pocket beneath
the pancakes' cooking surface.
She nodded seriously as he prattled on, but eventually kept smirking, and when she finally made
kissy-noises at them in response to yet another display of hugging and murmured nothings, he just
looked her dead in the eye and replied “Yup, you got it Ratbert.”
She smiled without saying anything when they disappeared for a suspiciously long inventory before
lunch.
Wila found SSahngk's interests rather odd, but had seen animals' mating habits before and knew that
they certainly performed quite a few bizarre acts, mostly involving one or the other's cloaca (they
seemed almost obsessed with those), and often both – for that matter, most of their body parts were
typically involved. There were awkward moments and odd angles, and any amount of giggling and
sudden squawks on each of their parts, but it wasn't without some unexpectedly pleasant sensations; the
open and gentle closeness and SSahngk's caution and attentiveness eased matters, going a long way
toward encouraging Wila's own needs and explorations.
The first obvious difference was flavor. SSahngk's transpiration was meat-like, rich in umami, rather
than a clean and fresh plant-likeness, but so unexpected in that it was nothing like food-meat flavors.
This held true for all of SSahngk's varied flavors – and so many interesting smells. It was so strange to
discover, and exploring all of these hesitantly at first, Wila's curiosity found SSahngk an enthusiastic
subject.
In turn, while it was abundantly clear that SSahngk had no clue about pleasuring a Deku, they proved
to be a willing and apt study, and some of their natural inclinations were embarrassingly on point – as
Wila discovered when SSahngk's entire face lit up with a happy drifting smile at the pollen release, then
burrowed deep into Wila's anthers and stigmae and inhaled, caressing the sepals in the most personal
manner, sending quivers coursing through Wila's body and causing another burst of pollen. SS ahngk
certainly hadn't objected when Wila responded to this with a loud and prolonged trill, clutching their
fur and pulling their face into the petals.
Rūu seemed to understand the evolving relationship on some intuitive level – and more important
seemed not to feel displaced, seeming instead to approve of matters. This was a great relief. Wila had
awoken to that concern looming in mind, but breakfast had gone smoothly, and the others' mostly
incomprehensible banter felt light and warm. Over the past few months, their speech had grown more
easily understood, though they used only some few of the same or similar words; most of their words
seemed to be entirely different for the same things – they'd also begun to understand a handful of Deku
words, though their accents were difficult to decipher through.
When Rūu caught Wila watching with a cautious look, Rūu had simply glanced to SS ahngk and back
with a carefree and warmly open smile.
As they prepared lunch, Wila cringed when Rūu pointed out some nectar on SSahngk's lips and their
response was to lick it clean, but neither seemed to think anything of it, and Wila had no idea what to
say. Still though, SSahngk's uninhibited behavior certainly gave Wila's thoughts some impetus and more
than a few ideas for the coming evening...
=====
S explores mountain to north-northwest. F and R accompany, no surprise. Find burned-down Hylian

settlement. The broad avenues to and from the settlement and all around it were stepped with grains
and an irrigation system. S really begins to wonder about what the hell happened here to have caused
everyone to run off or die.
Wandering along the settlement's perimeter, they discover chickens toward the southeastern corner.
While considering them for lunch, Sonic stopped short and called Friday and Ruru over to announce
that they couldn't eat them, then brought them around the side of a large mound to show them why.
Between the complex of beehive-looking corrals at the center, housing a wide variety of grubs and
insects – some with clipped wings or hind legs – and the whole being surrounded by what he could
only describe as a system of moats with simple huts on small islands, he opted to name the place
Chicken Itza and the region Angkor Wattle.
Surrounding the complex – and off to one side on each island – were firestones, glowing faintly in
the daylight, emitting just enough heat to make an effective barrier where spaced properly. These were
spaced properly.
The construction methods were crude, but the design was hardly primitive and clearly some sophont
cooperation was occurring here at some level. As well, several cats were visible, seemingly guarding
the perimeter, with more no doubt lurking unseen.
Farther uphill, they came to an abandoned Dodongo village, and shortly thereafter an abandoned
megalithic Goron town within. Looking slowly around the Goron town, he thought back to the various
ruins dotting the island.
Great. If this is the way the world is, I guess I'm the flesh. Just waitin' on the Devil, huh?
F did most of the cooking, but S tried helping where he could. Gathering, prep work. He was
beginning to remember snatches of cooking with his grandfather, bits of cooking documentaries from a
lifetime ago. Gradually, he found himself working more fluidly, acting more from understanding than
by rote. F was a good teacher, but an even better guide.
S has an idea for some of the quinoa that they'd brought down from the village's fields. F
supervises. S lays out 2 parts quinoa, 1 part corn, squeezed a small lime, some cilantro, diced mango
and peppers, olive oil; tossed in some chili, paprika, cumin, red pepper, coriander, and garlic; finished
with kielbasa slices; lightly fruity white wine to bring it all together. Looking over the prep table, F
says “Warble-warble, hai. Good.”
http://www.gettystewart.com/lime-and-cilantro-quinoa/
F balanced it with a contribution of slightly charred Swedish meatballs Stroganov, deviled potatoes,
and a rich tapioca pudding, making R happy as a clam. S wasn't terribly sure about the charring, but
was amazed by how well it brought out the underlying flavors to complement the quinoa dish.
http://woodlandsdairy.co.uk/meatballs-in-white-sauce/
https://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/swedish_meatballs/
https://www.recipetineats.com/beef-stroganoff/
https://www.google.com/search?&q=deviled+potatoes
Entrée of oyster-mushroom-bacon meunière?
Friday watched him as they ate. Ruru seemed perfectly happy with it all, but even though each dish
tasted fine, he couldn't shake the feeling that the whole didn't quite go together.
Friday smiled quietly to herself, Sonic's ill ease and its cause communicating itself well.
The resistance was broken. Everyone had either fled or died under Robotnik's last assault.
He was trudging through the charred remnants of a swamp, the water tainted with oil and chemical
sludges, but there was no other option.
Fuckin' hell, where'd we go wrong?!?
He couldn't go any farther, not that it mattered. First it was the bloody vomit and diarrhea just a
few hours later, then the headaches – and those had been getting worse. Now he was losing hair,
several of his teeth had fallen out, his nails were loose, and half of his arm throbbed with burned skin
while the other half was beginning to putrefy. Even his bones were beginning to ache...
He must've picked up a few hundred rads, maybe even upward of a thousand or more.
His cough kicked off a series of dry heaves, retching with nothing to show for it. As the cough
subsided, he caught a glimpse of the product of his efforts. Thick sticky phlegm, some blood... spongy-
looking gray stuff.
That ain't good.
Fuckin' particle guns.
Fuckin' brehmsstrahlung carrier waves.
They'd all carried Prussian blue and combined atropine-2-PAM autoinjectors – an' a pocketful o'
salts – but what the hell good would those do any of them now?
Dead man walkin'.
He was burning up. Sometimes he thought that he could see a light shimmering around him. It was
a pale blue, almost cornflower or periwinkle, but so warm. It seemed to feel as if it loved him, cared
about him, wished him well and sought to guide him to some better place.
It was nice to give in to those febrile dreams.

He had no idea where anyone else was now. They might all be dead. Robotnik had succeeded at
last in putting down their final pitiful holdout.
God help the rest of the worlds.
He'd drifted again.

He was doing that less often these days, but it always worried Friday, he could tell. His nerves
never quite lost that frayed edge, he tossed in his sleep, and whenever Friday managed to surprise him
by accident, his reflexes kicked in and he had to catch himself in the middle of a counterattack.
There'd been one instance that had been a little too close. They'd eaten a little while before, and he'd
been leaned back, hands behind his head, dozing comfortably. Ruru had tossed something to Friday,
who'd caught it just as it grazed his nose. An instant later, he'd come to consciousness with her wrist
and elbow already pulled down to his lap in a joint lock, poised for further need. Not good.
She helped him with her medicines, her plants and fungi, her smokes and wines. He just wished that
he could free himself of it so that she wouldn't have call to deal with it at all anymore.
In his worse periods, he thought that maybe he should simply leave. If he weren't around, then she
wouldn't have to help him, wouldn't have to deal with his shit.
As the weeks passed, Sonic found that cooking with Friday brought him some measure of peace. He
learned from watching what she did and began to get a feel for which ingredients paired best, how to
bring out the more subtle flavors, when to go sparingly with seasoning – which turned out to be most of
the time, to his surprise.
He also began to remember things.
As his mind calmed, he found that it didn't empty, it simply became... simpler. Simpler to remember
tasks, to focus on the details, to be in the moment, to feel the flow and timing of the food. There was a
grace to it, a beauty that he'd never before been aware of. It wasn't just putting things together and
making them hot, it was a dance with its own rhythm ebbing and jumping at moments, but with an
undercurrent that you could almost touch but never quite see.
He wasn't constantly bothered with memories of Robotnik's depredations, yet even so, he
remembered things that he'd learned from cultural studies. Files that he'd uploaded into himself, to get
a better understanding of target worlds, or to shield himself from the other clones' abuses with an
insight alien to them. The reasons varied, and he couldn't tell which were real, but that was no matter.
Many of those files had been about cooking.
He began to branch out with experiments from the files, introducing Friday to some of the
combinations that he was beginning to recall. They were spotty piecemeal records now, but as his
memory began to uncloud, so too did his grasp of the intricacies. Where before there had been so
much noise within that he couldn't hear even the noise itself, now a vast untapped vista of promise
presented itself. It was funny, but Ruru pestered him less now, almost as if she knew that he didn't need
the distractions quite so much anymore, and of course she was always ready to help taste test every step
of the way.
And sometimes it was nice to simply stand there and hold Friday as they waited peacefully for a
dish to be ready.
O ~~~ O
Chapter 3: Fox populi

“Wastin' away in Margaritaville,

searchin' for my lost shaker o' salt...
Some people claim
that there's a
woman ta blame,
but I know
it's my own damn' fault...”
Sonic eyed the grill as he sang, a wry note in his voice. His thoughts were safe enough to let ride on
their own with minimum supervision these days; he could observe from the backseat as they wandered
into the more morose regions without needing to pull them up fast. Mostly.
The 'raptor cuts were almost done, and he'd just thrown on a rack of shrimp from the basin. The
'raptors were a pain in the ass, packs of them always scrounging around and making a mess of the
mulch pen, but luckily had no interest in the trumpet mushroom crop that lay next to the mulch, and
they made for surprisingly decent eating – not quite turkey, not quite cod; the irony there lay in how
well they went with those same mushrooms. Now it was only a matter of minutes before tossing on the
bulette steaks; funny things, halfway between shark and beef, but pretty good all the same – easy to bite
through, but with a rich flavor. And Ruru's eight ounce bacon-wrapped, butter-soaked lavasuchus tail
steaks, extremely rare of course; she'd already set aside a selection of cheeses to go with it. The
asparagus and lemon-butter would be the final touch, with just the tiniest dash of salt and garlic. He
had no idea how the girl could pack it away the way that she did. Eats like she's got two assholes an' a
hollow leg. She'd been hovering over his shoulder all morning, waiting for the 'burger-burn to start.
He'd finally banished her to the herb shelves near the still to find just the right seasonings so that she'd
stay out of his hair.
His third margarita was running low as he turned to the lawn chair, but he was in no rush to refill it.
The first two had done their jobs pretty well, and this one was only being sent in to make sure that they
were O.K. and report back to him. If he ran out, the gazebo had a zeer pot of its own – complete with a
wide-mouthed duct connected to the grill's chimney in order to ensure that a decently cool breeze
flowed all around it – stocked with lemonade and iced tea. Besides, Friday would doubtless know
better than he just how much he would need or not. She had a cannier sense than a veteran bartender,
and he had no idea how she did it.
He smiled in anticipation, practically hugging himself, thinking of Friday and singing of sponge
cake. He didn't know for sure, but he suspected that she had a nice fat rum-soaked fruit cake in store
for tonight; she'd been acting secretive and happy in that funny way that said that she knew something
he was gonna love but wasn't saying shit about it, and her funny way this time happened to have that
twist of yumminess to it. He could taste it now – a ton of cinnamon, bits of icing and powdered sugar,
raisins, almond slices, candied fruit, marzipan, poppy seed paste, crushed nuts, chopped figs – and all
of it set off just right with her crema di mascarpone... he was in Heaven already at the thought...
A deep whump sounded, felt more than heard, like a parachute catching or a sheet filled suddenly
with air. He hadn't heard that sound for two years.
A two-tailed fox sparkled into existence within the world-gate, taking moments that passed glacially
and were gone in the instant that it took for Sonic to turn his head in that direction, the fox then barely
missing the cairn and flowers.
The fox hit the ground running, then slowed as he registered what his eyes were telling him.
“Where'd-he-go?!?” his voiceless snarl exploding from the back of his throat, the whole sentence a
single word thrust forth without conscious issue, a percussive cough possessed of its own volition, his
lips peeled back from his teeth as he scanned for their target.
Sonic's mouth snapped shut as he formulated a reply.
“Yo, T – dude, izzat'chu? Fuckin' A, man!”
Tails pivoted full circle on one heel and then stood still, only now fully processing the lesser details,
but grasping the implications instantly and already extrapolating corollaries, racing to update
contingency plans.
“How long?”
Sonic set down his drink and approached him gently.
“How. Long?” Tails repeated, still completely calm, his body taut and head zeroed on Sonic.
Squaring with him, Sonic replied simply “Two years, man.”
“Gate's one way, he landed elsewhere under an exponential time differential, we're trapped.
Understood. Resources? Disregard; minimal, but adequate,” Tails's every sense soaked in all that they
could at once, “Low tech, decent agriculture... you're not alone, but your group is small, no more than
three or four in toto... threats negligible – astronomically unlikely find, but at least local large scale
disaster, extensive though, given the lack of relief... you... like one of them... quite a bit...” his eyebrow
raised a fraction at this, some surprise, some approval, “but there's a complication – no, two of them,
sort of...” he continued, his voice lowering as he tried to ferret out what Sonic's eyes were hiding.
“T, chill,” Sonic pulled him in for a tight hug, “Y'not on the clock; not anymore. I'm just glad to see
you alive again, if this ain't all a fuckin' dream – 'less yer pullin' some kinda Inception shit.”
Tails lifted his head a shade, his eyes twitching slightly to the side just over Sonic's shoulder, and
Sonic turned to see Friday coming, watching their exchange as she brought out a bowl of chutney-
sweetened soy sauce with ground chili and a little mayonnaise mixed into it – he was rather pleased
with this batch, having finally found just the right dribbles and dashes of bourbon (nasty shit in his
opinion, but the stuff worked wonders in smoky sauces), molasses, ground mustard seeds, and brown
sugar; he was still trying to fine tune the ground sun dried tomato though. There was also a tiny
amount of diced red chili: just enough to make the flavor pop, but no more. Sometimes there was
crushed pineapple in his mix, which was often the case with spider-pig, sometimes not; in this case
there wasn't, as it would be the final touch to the low temperature marinade that had built up in layers
on the bulette steaks and would now be quick-seared for flavor before serving. It would be a quick sear
in order to maintain the steaks' overall rareness, rather than ruining them by cooking them all the way
through.
Her eyes swiveled to Sonic expectantly.
“Friday, Tails; Tails, Friday,” gesturing to each in turn, “Welcome ta the twenty fourth and a half
century.”
Pulling his chin, he glanced over to the grill and back to Tails, “When was the last time y'ate, man?”
“It's good ta see you again, brother,” Sonic closed.

They had sat as he summarized his time on the island while Tails drank something that Friday had
made; a strong alcoholic coffee with a potent admixture of multiple alkaloids and amines. Sonic was
clearly aware of this, giving him the nod to the unexpressed verification request implicit to his look.
Recognizing the rather debilitating effects, he continued to drink on the assumption that his system
would soon require some cushioning. That need arose all too soon.
Just as Sonic wound up his tale, Tails turned to talk to his left arm only to find nothing there. Where
he'd worn a data-bracer for as long as he could recall, there was now only bare fur.
“Amy...?” Tails's eyes were unmoving, locked infinitely far away.
Sonic tensed, ready for any reaction.
The Fridays had been one of the aforementioned “complications”; this was the other, and he had no
idea of how Tails would respond to the loss.
After a momentary review of the data and obvious conclusions, he lurched as if his heart had seized,
then fainted.
=====
Tails had been staring intently off into space for a while, blinking only rarely. Sonic had seen him do
this sometimes back on Möbius, but there was something different now, as if some vital part of him
were on vacation far away.
“Hey, 'chup to? Y'wanna grab some chow, man?”
Tails's eyes focused back in at a slower rate than expected, as if holding his place in a book, or
pausing a movie.
“Comparing loxodromes in general with transforms of slopes in Cartesian coordinates to polar
coordinates,” he replied distractedly. His voice was different, slightly more high pitched and
completely devoid of its old grit.
Sonic glanced in the direction that Tails had been staring.
“On the wall?”
Tails frowned, “No, just here,” he explained, gesturing to the air in front of himself, laying out a
small inclined plane and indicating a few abstract spots before it.
“You wanna talk about it?”
“Well, if you sort of squish the base of a plane to a point so that one of the walls is now a diagonal,
keeping the previously perpendicular distances a constant from the combined vertex, then stretch the
now-pie-wedge rotationally to form a circle, and describe a curve with radius equal to the fraction of
the turn – and allowing for a dipole at zero and one – then a straight line running between diametrically
opposed corners of the original square graph describes–”
“Not what I meant, man.”
Tails blinked owlishly, a little lost.
Sonic sighed.
“Come on. I been messin' wit' this sardine-chili combo that'cha might like, an' I need a taste tester.
We'll grab a bite an' you can tell me all about squarin' yer circles.”
=====
T figures out crystals' basic functions – betavoltaic RTG gems and piezophotonics – and releases
Friday's sisters. S comments on T having cleared up their floral malady.
They make chawanmushi that evening.
T glad, but a little withdrawn. R approaches. T explains an empty space, as if something were
missing. R So ne... T something important that he'd forgotten someplace... R leans into him and
throws an arm over his shoulder. Yare! Hai, wakata.
Notes days are ~21 minutes (20 m 58.2 s) longer than those of Möbius. Not sure of year yet (precisely
same as Earth year, though local days are slightly longer, giving a year of exactly 360 diurnal cycles).
O ~~~ O
Act 2: The sleeper awakes

“ 'nother two years later, Zelda drifted inta the cove. There wasn't much left of 'er. On her own,
she'd'a been dead by dawn.”
Her ship was cast adrift.

When she awoke the next morning, she had no supplies, no knowledge of the ship's workings. It
had drifted for a week before she'd caught sight of the island. By then she was out of what little water
had been aboard in puddles, and hadn't eaten for almost two weeks.
Lashing herself to the tiller, she'd sat at it and passed out, drifting in and out of consciousness for
several days more as her ship drifted ever closer to the cove.
Sonic had dragged her off of the ship and back to the ruined castle, where Tails and the Fridays had
then taken care of her for weeks.
Standing on the deck, Sonic wasn't sure of what he was looking at anymore.
He'd watched the ship drift in for days, seen the figure lying listless.
He'd brought water and salt, but she was too far gone for that.
The captain does not answer, her lips are pale and still.
He squinted back at the board that he'd laid from the sand. It wouldn't last long against the heat.
The phobosuchoi knew to avoid him, but would they remain at a distance if they sensed his
exposure while carrying her?
No options? No choice.
He leaned down on one knee, unlashing her elbows and torso, then lifted her gently across his
shoulders.
Scrawny li'l shit weighs less'n freakin' Tails, Sonic thought as he carried her into the main room.
Her eyes tracked listlessly and unfocused through the space, across Tails and the Fridays and Ruru,
before coming to rest upon him once more.
Three words escaped her lips before she passed out again.
“My blue angel...”
Sonic glanced to Tails and the Fridays.
Whoever she is, we ain't gonna find out any time soon.
=====
Tails had assisted the Fridays in examining the girl, mostly watching and sometimes asking questions.
“Beyond the obvious severe dehydration, she shows signs of severe chronic stress, her fingernails
are ridged in a manner indicative of a recent and prolonged period of hunger and malnutrition, multiple
untended minor wounds are festering with several low-grade infections...”
Sonic listened as Tails's litany rolled on, watching the Fridays minister to the castaway's needs, laid
out across a makeshift bedding of furs and suedes, her body too tall for any of the beds. At the
moment, they were simply monitoring her and keeping her covered with thin, damp towels, changing a
compress on her forehead, moistening her lips and tongue. They'd also laid her out on damp towels, to
increase what moisture she might absorb. The door was kept open in order to permit a gentle current
through the air, the noren gentling what came through, but they'd decided against any more-cooling
efforts lest they incur system shock.
“Her feet and ankles are blistered and calloused, we had to cut away the lower half of her leggings –
they were stuck to her skin, so I don't think that she'd been out of them for months – her lesions aren't
festering at least, but we bathed her anyway–”
“I'm surprised she ain't dead, from the sound of it.”
Tails just stood there, a peculiar silence in the air.
Turning his head in question, Sonic looked at him, waiting.
“From what I can tell, and from the Fridays' poking around, she should be. We have no idea how
she's made it this long. Physiologically, there's so much wrong that... Look, the only way that any of us
can see this is by something driving her. We can't know what that is until she comes to, but I don't think
that we'll like what we hear.”
An' wit' alla that, she still ain't all the way tits-up. Fuck me runnin'.
He looked over to the girl's wasted form. I feel like I brought home a bird wit' a broken wing.
He imagined himself having dragged the girl to the dungeon – It puts the lotion on its skin? – then
having looked to Friday with big, sad, soulful eyes, and begged Friday, can I keep 'er? I'll feed 'er an'
change her litter an' everything, I promise!
=====
She awoke after several days' unconsciousness. Her dreams had been troubled and her sleep restless,
though she remembered none of that now, beyond a bone-deep weariness.
E pur si muove, he thought to himself as he got up to alert Friday.
Her eyes opened and came to focus slowly as Sonic stood near her, but safely distant, presenting no
immediate threat.
“Thou hast summat of the wolf about thee, yet thine eyes betray compassion.”
Her voice was that of a husk steeped in the dust of summers gone.
He wanted to ask how it was that she spoke his language, but now wasn't the time. Then again, he
noted, how the fuck's the castle's sign written so I can read it? Gotta be some pretty freakin' low odds o'
that.
“Yeah, you can say that,” he replied, looking around uncomfortably, “Now rest a bit while I go get
Friday; ya found'jer island, Snitter. My name ain't Roarke, but I guess I'll be yer host, so... welcome ta
Caprona – or maybe more like The Island o' Misfit Toys, at this point.”
“Hold a moment, I prithee.”
Biting his lip, he waited.
“I recall thee as from a dream. Thou'rt he who drew me from pale Hecate's grasp?”
“Say what?”
He waited until she'd finished her next sip of coconut water before explaining further.
“Yeah, so, Friday's kinda the doc here. She'll look y'over an' keep yer shit together.”
The girl's entire being tensed in that moment, a galvanizing atmosphere distilled in the air.
“She...?”
Holding tight to the covers, her eyes locked on some imagined untoward action...
Oh boy, stepped right on a UXO wit' that one.
They had gone over some of what had happened, from finding her ship through her past few days of
bed rest. Now she clutched the furs tight to her body, shrinking into herself and looked fit to dig her
way through the wall at the drop of a hat. Her eyes though, they told him everything.
“However, comma, Tails might be a better option. He's kinda an understudy, but really on the ball.”
The moment that he'd said 'he,' she'd relaxed visibly, draining, the tension almost pouring out of her.
Now she was clearly only concerned in general, whereas before she'd been on the verge of total panic,
terrified by the very thought of 'she.'
“Yer clothes are on the nightstand next ta ya. Don't worry, I didn't look or nothin', I swear,” he said
as he turned to leave, “Not fer nut'n', but ya shouldn't really try ta get up fer now. Just lettin' ya know.”
It was irrelevant though. She'd already fallen asleep.
=====
“Eat,” Tails coaxed, “Krebs cycle is unforgiving.”

He'd been with her for an hour now, fussing over her and checking things as she continued to ignore
her food. He'd explained that Friday was a hermaphroditic being, and although that had turned out well
enough once she'd caught sight of her and recognized her species as Deku Scrub, she'd still shown
herself to be far more at ease with him.
At first it was simple chicken broth with egg drops, rice starch, and tiny shreds of ground
vegetables. Then he'd tried mashed banana in a thin oatmeal with brown sugar. Now crackers and
watered down fruit juice.
She simply sat there, listless, the servings of food still on hand, but seeming to hold no more interest
for her than would news of a mild storm in a faraway land.
She had taken a nibble of each thing as he brought them in, only to stare at her lap. At moments her
shoulders slumped as if she were about to collapse into a coma or break down crying.
Her skin now slathered with aloe beneath damp bandaging, she wasn't in as much constant pain as
she'd been before, and he'd managed to get her to swallow some willow bark tea and a little salt, but
she still responded poorly to stimuli.
The only thing that had gotten much response from her was when he'd said that she was now safe.
She'd turned to him, her eyes torn between hope and disbelief, fear that the hope was but a cruel
trick, the ragged edge of despair courting her. Eye contact. That was progress, of a sort.
As he watched her, worried, a tendril of bacon scent wafted into the room and her eyes slid slightly
toward the door, accompanied by the merest twitch of her head.

He seized on this, dashing to the kitchen and returning immediately with a large bowl of bacon. He
hadn't even taken the time to explain, but nobody had questioned his rush.
She stared at the bowl as if fearing that it might disappear like a dream upon waking, a morning mist
burned away with the first rays of sunlight.
He nodded his head encouragingly, and finally she lifted a piece to her lips.
Flavor!
Flooding her mouth was a richness that she hadn't even remembered existing, her tongue gone
dormant these many months.
Before she'd finished, he'd retrieved some fish soup that she now eyed avidly while ploughing more
rapidly through her bacon. At least it was only lamb bacon, and more sumac and a little coriander than
salt, hence probably easier on her stomach, and she was eating and showing some minimal interest in
her environment. He wasn't terribly concerned about the soup, since Sonic's cooking was pretty decent,
and it would probably do more good than harm – the scallions and snow peas and powdered bone meal
would replace some much-needed minerals, the mushrooms might help too, the daylily tubers and
flowers and water lily shoots would almost certainly do her some good, and her spirit might rise from
the shredded spider-pork; mostly he was thinking of the protein helping her think more clearly, and the
little lumps of spider-pork fat giving her some calories to work with, as long as the garlic didn't upset
her stomach too much.
Even so, the soup proved too calorie-rich, especially after the bacon, and she soon found her head
spinning. Taking the bowl from her slowly and gently, and placing it clearly within her reach, Tails
assured her that all of her food would remain here until she sought it again, or wanted something new,
and that if she slept and the food needed to be put away, then he'd be sure to leave some fruit and water
for her in its stead.
As she settled back into the pillow, a grateful look crossed her face. He settled a gossamer-thin
sheet of satiny mushroom suede over the food as her eyes closed and her breathing already slowed to
sleep once more.
=====
Zelda, huh? Y'ain't from Ruritania, are ya? <baffled look> never mind; close, but that only counts fer
horseshoes 'n' hand grenades.
=====
Z rests, recuperates.
Makes her way timidly out of her room after a few days, clutching the sheet as if it were a shawl, her
clothes still on her nightstand. S sets fresh brown bread and butter before her, F brings a light garlic
and onion cream cheese. Z eyes it hungrily, doesn't touch; S cuts bread and spreads both butter and
cheese thick, placing it into her hands. Her eyes tear up as she eats hesitantly, holding it as if it were a
precious thing.
S grits teeth, a cold fury settling upon him at whatever had brought her to this state, glaring toward
T, who nods with him.
Gets used to the coolth of the dungeon for a week further.
Ventures out into the sun after a second week. Says nothing, but lingers by the honeysuckle around
the door, across from Friday's Deku flower; finds it comforting. Tails brings out a few souvlaki-pita
and knishes with a side of sliced apple, pear, and cheese and says that the honeysuckle had just popped
up there, on the same day as she'd arrived.

Doesn't move much. Sits quietly staring into space, sometimes showing a small sign of animation in
watching the others furtively, nervous.
S knew that look too well. Haunted. Empty.
=====
She stood in awe at the alcohols arrayed before her. While she could see numerous gourds and capped
bamboo and lidded coconuts, there were no easily read labels to the glass bottles – but the lingering
fumes around the diverse containers left little doubt as to their contents.
“Nah-nah-nah, ya don't want that shit – yer lookin' at the cleanin' closet. Well, shelves, but whatever.
The good shit's all over here in easy reach.”
A quiet part of her, watching from the back of her head, processed this, unthinking. Her conscious
self merely experienced it with no response. A third and detached part observed both the information
file itself away like a machine and the experience occur unregistered, and felt vaguely as if she should
either be more engaged or not at all.
Moving through the dungeon halls and rooms in a dreamlike state, each thing registering as if from
within a drunken state and bearing as little relevance as might the presence of a distant stranger across a
crowded room, she stopped now by the corner of the dining area near the kitchen, an impressionistic
picture suggesting itself in the charcoal reliefs of a strangely surfaced portion of the wall.
“Yeah, that's Ruru's work yer lookin' at there. Some'n she painted a ways back.”
She reached out to touch the image, but held back. A fallen Caryatid, one knee up, her arms folded
self-protectively across it, sitting upon a flower within thin beams of light and surrounded by utmost
and fathomless darkness, looking upward toward a speck of blue sky, the only color aside from a hint
of pale tulip to the petals and some rouge to the Caryatid.
“I... sketched this once... long ago...”
Indeed, it had been two years before, when they'd been in a bad spot financially, and her girlfriend
had gone to live with friends for a couple of months. Nayrufest had been coming up, and she'd felt the
isolation sharply. Samhain had just passed, and she'd been utterly alone and was facing the cold
months with little to eat, and though only temporary, the time until their reunion loomed as if it were an
impassable gulf. Seeing it again, impossibly here...
“You made one like that?”
“Nay, this very image, though against canvas board.”
He watched her, not knowing what to say to this. As she stood there still, he warmed some cream
and added brandy and chocolate and sugar to it. So lost in the image, she accepted the drink without
noticing, her nerves soothing some from it as Sonic went about preparing a lunch of mutton, lettuce,
and tomato sandwiches with slices of gravy-soaked bread in the middle.
When Ruru heard of this, she was convinced that she was possessed of psychic powers, spending the
next several days exploring and exercising them to predict food arriving at meal times, water springing
forth from the spring-wall of the pool room, darkness arriving at night, and so forth, and each with an
associated exclamation of “Yatta!”
She slept fitfully, and then only when exhausted beyond capacity to resist further, sometimes sitting or
standing, sometimes eyes open or half-lidded; cold sweats, mumbling, calling out, tremors, twitches,
kicks, sudden startled wake-ups, panic, nightmares that she couldn't remember. Her body language was
always guarded closely against showing her defensive readiness. Friday had given her a narrow-bored
corn cob pipe with a deep bowl and several needle-thin aeration holes along the stem, along with a
large pouch of mixed herbs, and this relaxed her; her mood was less fragile, she focused a little bit on
good memories, could interact somewhat, found some small appetite, and slept more at ease.
She'd retreated some, not saying much after the first awakening or two, and always barely above a
whisper, as if hoping not to draw anyone's attention. She almost never asked for anything, and then
only in halting sentences, stuttering when nearing the point of actually saying what she wanted.
It was months before she ate much. She tried – her hunger and stomach had both shrunken so much
from disuse that a small snack was as much as she could manage even with gentle encouragement and
the Fridays' seemingly continuous turnover of food for everyone.
In truth, it was the community spirit that finally succeeded in breaking through one evening.
She'd been sitting in the large chamber that they'd turned into a living room. She'd grown used to
this after an evening or two of polite offers and Sonic's song inviting her to “Be our guest.” One or
another of the Fridays was constantly adding to the smörgåsbord while everyone told stories or jokes
(Sonic had a lot of each of these), sometimes just enjoying little side conversations. Tails explained
something mathematical about her lava ship's workings, though she didn't really follow it all, and
suspected that nobody else had either. Ruru showed off an interpretive dance that she'd been working
on, somehow involving flowers and body paint, pungi and sitar music were accompanied by a
mridangam all playing faintly, sourceless and conjured from nowhere to insinuate itself through the
audience. The Fridays played a beautiful ocarina piece that turned and returned on itself. There were
only seven of them, and the room was spacious, but between the fire and the furs and the company, it
felt warm and comfortable.
She was accepted.
She was safe.
Without realizing it, she'd been smiling a little, and finished a whole bowl of gyūdon – rice cooked
in dashi and served with thin bulette strips, sliced mushrooms, bamboo shoots, shredded cabbage, and
green onion, and topped with a raw egg and a drizzle of soy sauce – and begun working her way into
some greasy chunks of fried potato and roasted cygnet in an oyster and giblet gravy of saffron, celeriac,
fennel, pears, raisins, and cranberries, with a relish of carrots, raisins, lime, and orange. This latter had
a gaminess rife throughout that made her tongue sing. She'd already had three mugs of hot plum wine
and felt relaxed as she relit her pipe for a few more hits when she realized that everyone had gone quiet
and was looking at her.
She stopped moving, her eyes wide with a rush of panic.
The Fridays came over to her, smiling, and huddled around in a group hug.
This was oddly both terrifying and comforting, as she had no clue as to their reason.
“ ʻOhana,” Sonic said, “it means family, an' family means nobody gets left behind – or forgotten.”
For a long-forgotten reason that she could no longer fathom, this made her throat tighten as her eyes
grew hot and damp.
Tails came over bearing a tray that held a couple of bowls of onion soup with sour cream and a pile
of sardine and cheddar sandwiches with watercress and a tangy mayonnaise, a huge and happy grin on
his face.
As she accepted her share of these, he looked down happily at her previous bowl and back to her.
Then she realized how much she'd actually eaten. Not much to speak of, altogether, barely more
than a couple of snacks, but for her this represented an expansive meal indeed, and here she was about
to eat a little more.
Starting with a short dip, he nodded his head sharply, like a cat butting its head toward her in an
uncertain gesture of coming forward, then joined her to help eat the snacks as conversation resumed
and the evening whiled itself away.
Sonic announces gumbo almost ready as he comes out with veggie plate and ranch and nacho dips.
To her surprise, she found herself looking forward to the gumbo – and the blueberry pies, the scent
of which was already filling the dungeon as they cooled in the kitchen.
“She isn't hoarding food,” Tails told Sonic later, out of Zelda's earshot.
“Uh-huh...”
“I'm a little worried.”
“Right, so... yer sayin' that she ain't got a food hoardin' problem, an' that's a problem?”
Tails nodded.
“Ya wanna walk me through this wit' maybe a little more detail?”
He considered how to simplify this.
“She has food anxiety–”
“Yeah.”
“This comes from an extended period of not having enough food at all, and little hope of changing
that.”
“A'ight...”
“Normally, people will hoard food against such a situation recurring. The fact that she isn't means
either she's comfortable, or...”
“Or?”
“...or she doesn't hold out even that much hope that such precautions would be worthwhile, or not
taken away, or not bring trouble on her far in excess of its potential value,” he finished miserably.
Sonic nodded, finally understanding.
“Fuck.”
She awoke late the next morning, her head still spinning and slow of thought from the calories of the
previous evening's debauchery. Food was most assuredly not high on her list of priorities. She had
slept well though; Friday's herbs let her mind drift calmly; Ruru had prompted Tails to give her a large,
lumpy, misshapen thing that was intended to be a Teddy Bear... and much though she hated to admit it,
it had actually helped a lot; the food in her belly had finally felt as if it weren't her one and only chance
to eat, and so had set well, filling and filling, and when she'd gone to sleep, it had been with a belly
stuffed to its limited capacity.
Following the sounds of life, she wandered into the kitchen, finding Sonic putting a plate onto a tray.
“Oh, hey, I was just about ta bring ya breakfast. All four food groups, y'know?”
She glanced down, confused.
“Coffee; bacon; more coffee 'n' bacon,” he elaborated.
“But – that stands at only three, with the third simply a combination of the first two... and those two
aren't even food groups.”
“Shh!” he whispered, his hands moving rapidly in a calming-down motion, a worried look on his
face, “Don't let 'em know that!”
She looked around the room, finding that they were still the only ones there.
“Whom?”
He glanced around as if to ensure that nobody were listening, then tilted his head meaningfully
toward the coffee and bacon, and pointed with his eyes.
“An' I don't really trust the cantaloupe or honeydew,” he added through the corner of his mouth, “but
I might have ta throw 'em in on the side, just ta be sure.”
The poor dear! He isn't entirely possessed of his faculties!
Her heart went out to him, understanding at last.
She nodded to him reassuringly, “I shall break my fast with some of those as well, then.”
“Ya want I should maybe sneak ya a bowl o' malted wheat 'n' cream, too?”
“Sneak?”
Sonic rolled his eyes, “Friday 'n' Tails don't think yer up to it, but I think ya need a treat.”
She shrugged, a slight and nervous little nothing that he took as agreement.
In the end, he'd sat there eating with her, recounting some of the morning's goings on. Without
realizing it, she found herself accepting a plate of broiled spider-pork au jus, the skin all crisped with a
thick, wobbly layer of fat and just the right amounts of garlic and salt to set her belly rumbling and
mouth to watering even after having worked her way through more breakfast than she'd expected – he
didn't complain when she ate with her fingers, either. Then there was a little buttered toast, with which
Sonic insisted that she try the cream cheese and lox with just a wafer or two of tomato, during which he
brought her around to the idea of a slice or two of pastrami with mustard and sauerkraut, maybe a little
butter and jam, and it all went so well with the tea that he'd brewed just for that. It was an odd one, a
mix of jasmine and a bit of orange pekoe, but the flavors mixed so well with the tiny amount of sugar
and a thin sliver of lemon that she found herself sipping a second cup without realizing it.
As she'd eaten breakfast and Sonic had chatted away, he'd mixed a quart of cream and another quart
of sugar with a little vanilla into a half gallon of milk over the fire, bringing it to a low simmer, then
setting it to cool in a zeer pot.
As she had worked her way through the spider-pork, he'd brought the mix back and whipped it
some, and then set it into another pot, this outer one filled with salt and ice. He'd winked at her as he'd
set the pot in the breezeway with a wet cloth over the top, stepping out to churn it periodically.
Now as she nibbled the lox and cheese, he brought the pot back in to reveal the results.
Ice cream.
Her eyes widened, her breathing growing difficult and coming in jerks as tears formed and she held
her jaw tight against a growing panic.
“Whoa, hey now, it's O.K.” Sonic said, trying to reassure her as soon as he saw her reaction, “I
guess alla this might be a bit overwhelmin', huh. Y'a'ight?”
She nodded slightly, staring down at the tabletop, unsure that she could trust herself to more.
“Hey, 'scool, I swear. Lemme scoop some o' this out, an' we can try it together. You won't have ta be
the guinea pig, a'ight? Eh, ya want maybe some mint with it, an' a cup o' coffee? We can even toss in
some spiced apricots an' chartreuse jelly ta sorta water it all down, huh?”
She thought that he was trying to make her feel at ease, to reduce the strain of feeling special over
the ice cream, and she appreciated that, though it didn't detract from her tentative anticipation or the
experience itself that she'd been so long without.
“So... can I break out some sarsaparilla and sassafras, or d'ya think that'd mean again wit' the water-
works?”
=====
S brings kills to cook, drags in hauls of fruit and veggies.

Eventually tries to talk her out of her funk. Doesn't work, but he keeps talking anyway, telling her
about Möbius and some of the places that he'd been to, the trials that he'd run through.
He gets a tiny reaction when he tells her about the cultural records that he'd uploaded, their
entertainment files.
Soon he's recounting all of the stories that he can think of, from every genre across the worlds. She
responded most animatedly to musicals and comedies, and seemed drawn most deeply to simple slice-
of-life pieces – but romances and violence threw her into shock, or she'd fall apart completely. He got
the first laugh out of her after a month of his best material – he hadn't even been trying to do that when
he'd grabbed some sticks to roast some potatoes; they were rather large potatoes, so he'd simply walked
them over with the sticks poking out of them, lifting first the one, then the other, overbalancing a bit
and stepping backward with the sticks still in hand and ghosting his motions, stuck into the potatoes
and walking along as if they were his legs as well. The whole scene was so comical, so utterly
ridiculous, that her laugh had simply burst out of her, startling her. She hadn't expected it, and didn't
even recognize this sound that could as well have been a barking horse.
But it was a laugh.
It was her laugh.
He got the others involved, playing multiple parts each. It went well, helping heal a part of them all
that none had realized was so splayed and raw within them.
<S & T, tap dancing across the sandstone with improvised canes>
“...If yer blue,
an' you don't know
where ta go ta,
why don't ya go
where fashion sits?”
<T plays the part of Young Frankenstein's monster, snapping fingers twice>
“Muh'in' onna Rihshh...”
<S & T tap in place, some tension from S>

“Diff'rent types
who wear a day coat,
pants wit' stripes
an' cutaway coat,
– perfect fits.”
<T repeats performance>

“Muh'in' onna Rihshh...”
<S does a little soft shoe across the sandstone>

“Dressed up like a million dolla' trooper,
tryin' mighty hard to look like Gary Cooper.”
<T mums uncertainty>

“Rupeh lupah!”
<S mouths “I love him”, seemingly negating same with a slow shake of his head.>
O ~~~ O
Act 3: Resonant Evil

Falling. Always falling, the universe shrinking to a dark and narrow tunnel, crying out, nobody ever
hearing her screams, her pleas for help. Losing herself, outside looking in. Now Pérdida is screaming
at her about being useless, belittling her, insulting her, manipulating her, laughing. The explosion, her
family gone, Warbotdorf stepping in. She's running. Then there's Sonic.
The Fridays brought her herbs, berries, leaves, vines, cacti, and mushrooms that soothed her nerves,
dulled her fears, helped with her nightmares and night terrors. Some of their concoctions brought deep
insightful visions, the smokes carrying her far away, the pastes and foods healing her heart to the extent
that they could, letting her mind sort itself out. The spirits that the Fridays called forth offered the
sagest of counsel, probing with questions without prying. Eventually she found the one combination in
particular that worked best – what she now smoked in her cigars. It lightened her mood, made her
sociable, returned some of her appetite, let her sleep without needing to be exhausted in order to avoid
nightmares. As an irrelevant bonus, it even smelled nice.
Tails spent most of his time asking her questions about the world, drawing her out as he learned
from her, tinkering and experimenting with the ship and various chemicals that he extracted over time.
He took some notes at times, but modeled most of it in his head.
Sonic had planted crops and hunted lava-suchuses, a few species of bulette, sand squid, giant ants,
hypnotoads, and velociraptors for her to eat, and to make the area safer for her; he'd mounted the
remains around the castle to ward the predators away, drawn her out so that she no longer hunched into
herself, and spoke above a hoarse whisper again, had preferences and opinions even, could finish a
sentence and follow someone else's sentence all the way through; had taught her to fight.
“Yer askin' me what's best in life?” Sonic squinted off into the middle distance for a moment, “ 'Ta
crush yer enemies, see 'em driven before ya an' ta hear the lamentations o' their women. That's good.' ”
He thought back to the start of this, a whole new direction for all of them...
Z: An' thou know'st their demesne?
S smiled coldly.
Z: Hie thee yonder then, that we might set matters aright!
S: Hey, whoa-now. You see any freakin' white gold rings on these fingers? <holds out hands
unnecessarily for her to examine> I ain't all that sure this place is even real, but I sure as hell ain't about
to throw out my little slice o' Paradise over that rat byastid!
Z: Wouldst thou then stand by, as all is swept aside? Canst thou not see the ills crying out?
S stays quiet, remembering.
Then there was the triumphant parade.

Subjugated creatures of all shapes prostrated themselves before Sonic as he and his troops marched
through their city.

For every one of his troops dead, ten of theirs had been publicly tortured to death at random and
left to rot.
Coronal mass ejecta and relativistic ortillery12 had laid waste most of their world.
Robotnik's C3I ship hovered over all, casting it in darkness.
Sonic closed his eyes and turned away from the memory.
He wasn't going back.
Not to that.
They'd been training for some time now, and it had actually helped him ground and focus, to see her
learn, to watch her skills and understanding grow, to know that she was becoming somewhat capable of
handling things.
S: I popped smoke four years ago, so fine as 'ose sentiments sound, how much'd change fer the
peasants down here on the ground?
Z is given pause.
S: Ya want revenge? Good. Ya wanna remove a festerin' sore from the face o' the world? Fuckin' A!
Just don't tell me yer doin' it ta save the world, 'cause yer fulla shit.
Z: But –
S waits
Z: Then what...?
S: Ya said you been through some shit, right?
Z nods.
S: Nobody gave a fuck, or damn' near no one?
Z bobs her head sideways.
S: How many o' yer people go ta bed hungry every night?
Z's head drops, trembling some, but S presses his point.
S: How many got no place ta live?
Z starts shifting around, agitated, twitching.
S: You want him gone, I'll help – but, you gotta do some'n f'me.
And there it was.
The price.
She should have seen it coming. Of course he wanted something; everyone always did.
She braced herself.
S: Open yer eyes. Take what'cha learned an' do some'n about it. Unfuck it all.
Z: <this glimpse of hope at war with her disbelief of his altruism, distrusting this façade> And that
is the whole of thy request?
S frowns, confused, then nods. “Yeah...?”
Z: <thinks> I've seen thine hunts, and many is the time that thou hast responded to threats as were
beyond ken.
S: “Yeah,” he said quietly, thinking of Möbius, his face draining of all animation, “a real Billy
Fuckin' Bad-ass.”
Z: Teach me. <asked quietly>
12 Ortillery: a portmanteau of “orbital artillery”, called down when ground attacks and pulsed masers and air-to-surface fusion nukes
just won't get the message across. Strictly, CMEs might not exactly qualify as ortillery, and relativistic masses are generally overkill –
but this is Robotnik. Conventional speeds would likely also have been used, since they would tend to pack an impacting and explosive
punch, whereas the higher speeds would tend to result in HALO EMPs and deep penetration (say: crust and mantle); picture the
difference between a hammer fist to a firm surface and a single fore-knuckle strike to a soft area.
S hadn't expected that. This from the girl who fell apart at mere stories containing tangential
violence. She'd asked no simple thing, but hadn't meant it lightly. “Ya think that's yer Golden Ticket?”
Z: It matters not what I think, only that what must be is done.
S: Y'know it involves hittin' 'n' gettin' hit, right?
The conversation continued, but without resolution.
Over the following days, Zelda returned to the topic several times. In each instance, Sonic didn't rebuff
her, but nor yet did he address the question.
At last, Zelda confronted him directly, asking him for a definitive answer.
“I got no clue how ta teach shit. I know what I know 'cause it's programmed in there.”
“Then let me learn from what thou dost. Whither thou goest, natheles shall I shadow thee, and not
burden thy travels.”
He stared.
“Ya know, someone once said 'If ya can keep yer head when all about'chu 're losin' theirs 'n' blamin'
it on you–' ”
“ '–If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, yours is the Earth
and everything that’s in it–' ” she finished for him, her eyes alight.
“...you... know this poem?”
“Yes! My mother once read it to me. It's beautiful and tragic and moving. I've treasured it close to
my heart ever since.”
“Huh...” he nodded, puzzled and thinking on what it might mean that she should be familiar with
this.
=====
S starts with situational awareness. The dungeon's escape routes, the ruin's defensible positions and
structural weak points, Z's daily routine and favored habits and places. Goes on to blending into
background – animals or people.
After some time, Z asks the relevance to fighting.
S explains that it is fighting, just not with the body. You know what's around you, what to expect,
what to prepare for or avoid, how to extricate yourself before it comes up. What signals you put out
aren't all under your control, but if in the right frame of mind, then you can at least signal some clear
indications for others to pick up on; lethal threat, innocuous passerby, etc..
“Y'ever go huntin'?”
“Of course.”
“Waddya got – ray guns or slug throwers, or what?”
“Pardon?”
His brow knitting for a moment, he tried again, “What kinda weapons you use?”
“Bows and arrows?” she replied, uncertain of the direction that he was taking.
“Wait, what? Why?” he asked, her answer at odds with the technology of her ship.
“ 'tis only the way of things.”
Her answer didn't tell him anything, but he set that aside for the moment, focusing on the task at
hand.
“O.K.… so ya know yer arrowheads. Y'any good?”
She nodded, “Many beasts and birds have been brought low at my hand.”
“So then ya know when ta move or stay still, how ta blend in an' why. Now picture yerself hunt'n'
people.”
Her posture shifted uncomfortably at this, becoming rigid and closed, her face contorting slightly,
but she remained attentive.
“Glad ta see the idea don't taste good t'ya,” he observed, “Think they'd just hang out while ya walk
up an' shoot 'em?”
She shook her head.
“Same shit. Ya watch an' ya wait. Ya choose the moment – an' it ain't simply when they show up.”
As their conversation wended its way through terrain, time of day, and surrounding events, she
found herself detaching from the details and focusing upon her one target in mind: Warbotdorf.
Sonic snapped his fingers before her face several times, “Yo, anybody home there? You trackin'?”
“Forgive me, I...” she started, trailing off at a loss for words.
“An' that's some'n ya can't afford. Ya got one shot, then ya gotta book ass. You fuck that up, an' it'll
be months 'til yer next chance.”
And so began her training. There were moments of miscommunication, exhausting days and short
nerves, and time spent on day-to-day activities, but Zelda remained adamant that she learn all that she
could from him. In time, it became apparent that she'd begun recovering well, but also that she had
begun down a path that none wished for her. While not yet consumed with a thirst for vengeance, her
ire was clear and worrisome.
As her skills progressed, Sonic drew Friday into the program in order to balance Zelda's growing
restlessness. The Fridays worked with her to focus her thoughts and spirit, to calm her mind and empty
herself to a degree, separating thought from action.
Snag w/ topic of cooking.

Her eyes turned inward briefly, her voice returning as if she'd no knowledge of the delayed reply.
S: sore point, bad business.
Notices same in Z's analyses: her gut's good, her mind had once been well trained, but now fogs
over when considering even simple probabilities and others' likely behavior and motivations. Same
twice over when recounting painful past events.
For all of that though, she learned quickly. She hunted and trapped well. She worked the fields and
trees for all that they bore. She netted fish and shot down birds far in excess of their immediate needs.
She pursued all of this so diligently, in fact, that their larder was soon full to bursting with foods
preserved in all manners, the keep's original stores now replenished beyond capacity, and disused cells
were pressed into service to keep up with her overflow. The seed store grew; the furs, skins, sinews,
and other material components expanded beyond measure.
She was driven.
She was providing value.
She was paying back all that they had given her tenfold and more.
She was proving to them that she could help rather than be a burden soon to be cast out.
=====
S → Z: Yeah? Don't stick yer dick in crazy – or yer tongue. Whatever.

Z: While colorful, thy metaphor does bear some sagacity.
S: Yeah, well... it ain't exactly rocket surgery. First rule o' war: don't lose. Someday yer princess'll
come, an' she'll click t'yer clack just fine; ya won't be all alone in this world ferever.
Z returned to her smoke, setting the thin rod of glowing metal to the bowl. She had finally settled
on one particular mix of Friday's herbs and gummy-oils, and preferred a foot long pipe that Sonic had
fashioned for her from a rifle that he'd found in the machinist's storage room. It acted as a carburetor as
well as giving the smoke a chance to cool down. What she liked most was its internal design – Tails
had worked out a way of it permitting her to draw the chamber full of smoke mechanically without
having to puff empty air until reaching an acceptable density, and likewise to compress the same as she
drew such that the chamber didn't become airy as she depleted it of its contents; there was even a
strange little crank that compacted the materials within the bowl to just the right density for a smooth,
thick-smoked burn.
“...little Jackie Paper

loved that rascal Puff...”
Z turned to him quizically.

“Oh, just a song. So, ya like that Roman Red, huh?”
It took her a moment to follow his eyes, but she'd been growing accustomed to his odd speech and
mannerisms.
“It helps,” she said with a sad smile, “it doesn't hurt like this – though in truth, life would be better
without the need if I had my druthers. Still, I'm like tae eat ye out of house and home at this rate,” she
smiled dreamily, her voice softer as Friday's herbs worked their magic, “And once matters shall have
been settled, I think that I'll find me a nice girl... who likes tae cook...”
He couldn't refute her argument. 'least it ain't Prozium.
He began singing again.
“Who is the lolo

who stole my pakalolo,
I had it in the yard only yesterday...”
=====
S → T: Landin' strips might be a problem. Can ya knock out a helium balloon?

T had been making observations, now that he'd rigged a functional, if primitive, telescope. He'd
made out land in every direction, once he'd climbed high enough to get past the heat distortions. The
distances varied, and he didn't entirely trust his numbers, but most of the lake's coastline seemed to lie
about one hundred miles away.
T: Extracting it atmospherically would be a no-starter. There isn't much of a chance at helium unless
this island has a natural gas reservoir buried beneath it, and even that's not really an option for us.
T <frowns at a thought>: You haven't run into any ancient buried über-tech fission or fusion plants
here that you haven't mentioned yet, have you?
S shook his head.
S: Guess 'at means it's coconut radios or nuttin'.
T blinked.
S: How 'bout a hot air balloon?
T thinks about this, estimating material weights and buoyancy, occupancy, wind streams.
T: We could, but it would be risky. <eyes defocus as he runs the numbers> We don't know anything
about the local norms beyond the observed weather data. In principle, we could loft everyone for a day
or two, given enough fuel13, and probably cross the lake with a good margin to spare, but with no
13 Balloon: assuming typical weights and rig (e.g.: ~800 pounds of people plus 500-600 pounds of gear), it should require 20-30 gallons
of propane per hour. Let's say 30 gallons for safety, and plan for a 48 hour trip (taking a mean average wind speed of 5 mph, we have
240 miles; Zelda's drift indicates something on the order of ~168 miles [not necessarily inline] to the shore of Brigadùn). That's
guarantee of landfall, much less a safe one.

S: Huh. So we gotta stick wit' the lava ship thing. 'least we ain't gotta worry about makin' it hover, if
ya can get 'er ta work.
<S eyeballed the ship down in the cove for a moment>
S: An' I'm guessin' percussive maintenance ain't gonna do it?
T, taking the question seriously, shook his head vigorously.
S: Fuck it: best bad idea I heard all day.
Even unpowered, the ship had remained well above the surface of the lake since its arrival, and kept
to a tolerable temperature within an operating bubble around its deck. Tails still had no explanation for
this, nor for the island's relatively low temperature, and Zelda's shrugged answer of “magic” served
only to whet his interest in it.
T: Propulsion might not be the same system as its means of levitation, but that might not be a
problem. The lava lake is inexplicably cool, only a thousand degrees or so – well, maybe not
inexplicably cool, but the fact that it's remained fluid for so long and retained a steady temperature is
really weird – but we could scavenge metal from the town and villages and I could work out something
that wouldn't melt, so maybe we could arrange a paddle wheel system, and we could always work with
lavasuchus bones and hide if nothing else, though in either case we might have a heat conduction
problem, so we might be better off if we simply set sails and tack into the wind. Maybe not; Zelda
averaged something like one mile per hour or less – though that might be off by an order of magnitude
– so even with sails, it would be pretty slow, though we could easily store enough food for that, maybe
ninety pounds before safety margins, though the water would be an issue – I mean, it'd only need to be
a couple of cubic feet in toto, even without recycling and condensation, but... Oh wait, I could just rig
a ducted fan, maybe a few on outriggers...
S smiled in amusement, watching T follow one idea after another. It was good to see him
reasonably fully-engaged again and on the hunt.
=====
“Over time, piecin' together the history o' Hyrule, I event'chully figured Warbotdorf landed here too,
just a really, really long time ago.
“Moloch,” Sonic spat in disgust.

Zelda gave no sign of recognition.
=====
~1,500 gallons of propane (at ~92,000 BTUs per gallon), or ~200 cubic feet (5' 10”(+) feet per side, or a slightly wider sphere).
Propane isn't on the table here, but they can produce ethanol (~76,000 BTUs per gallon) in abundance, requiring a tank of ~1,815(+)
gallons (6' 3”(-) feet per side) for the same flight.
The air above the lake is hot though, hence the balloon would be much less buoyant than in more typical conditions. They'd need to
reach a high enough altitude to survive the air temperature, much less float well. Tails would likely want to maintain a flight ceiling of
~7,000' for expected oxygen content, with a flight deck of ~1,500' vs. heat (toxic fumes being an uncertain variable, since Zelda
survived the trip by use of the lava ship).
At this point, he will also have already reviewed, prioritized, and discarded dozens of related strategies – gliders, gyrocopters,
rocketry (less crazy than it sounds, given ethanol's specific impulse of ~338s, or biodiesel's [lye + vegetable oil] <353s of kerosene
[and B100's higher density might compensate for the est. 4% loss]), tunneling beneath the lake, evacuated dirigibles with pressurized
cabins, floating reefs and hamster wheels of lavasuchus bodies (live or dead). Which ones and their weighted pros and cons? Let your
imagination run wild.
A just machine to make big decisions,

programmed by fellows with compassion and vision;
we'll be clean when their work is done,
we'll be eternally free, yes, and eternally young.
What a beautiful world this will be;

what a glorious time to be free...
The Droogs: Johnny Kickback, li'l Mikey the Spider, Ferger-Burger, Marisol, and everyone... she had
been new to their group; a Human with a nice personality, interesting conversation, cute tits and ass
from what he could see, gorgeous lips, long dark brown hair – she'd been excited over something
earlier, jumping up and down and bouncing nicely; he'd asked her to do that again and she had, and
he'd thanked her for that. They'd been hanging out in the park earlier, warming up at a garbage can
fire, drunk and stoned, blasting music. Marisol had kept playing with his mohawk and earrings, and
said that she liked his claws. He'd had them anodized the week before; just a cheap twenty dollar
quick-job at a stall on the street, but good for another couple of weeks before they'd need a touch-up.
They were matte black at any distance, but up close they showed as a shifting iridescent pattern against
a deep almost-teal turquoise underlayer, appearing to have an inch or two of depth to their surface.
The park had been right on the shore, by the sewage treatment plant. The water reeked and almost
everything in it was dead; the slimy things that crawled out from the oily ocean were dangerous
enough that the sewage workers didn't always bother showing up to work, mostly because of the
incidence of workers who never got home. Nobody else was dumb enough to hang out down there, so
they always had the place to themselves.
They'd moved the night's activities to the abandoned house up the block to get out of the freezing
wind, and he'd talked about jacking in and surfing the 'net, and she'd talked about death metal and
photography techniques. He had been hoping like hell to show her his latest augmentation – one that
would be good for hours of fun together – and it had been beginning to look as if he just might get that
chance after a dance that she'd done for him and the way that her dress hugged the flare of her hips;
when she'd dangled from the monkey bars in the park earlier, it had given him a tantalizing view of her
sheer black panties, and the image still burned in his mind; and she'd certainly been overly
appreciative of his standing guard for her while she used the bushes. The second floor had a weird
bedroom-like room with a dais... that held some potential, as long as they let everyone know to give
them some private time. Funny how clean the place always was. They never left any trash or tagged
up while they were there.
And then strange lights had played in through the windows and down from the belfry.
The cityscape itself was normal; vast columns of smoke and steam rising to the cloud deck a quarter
mile up just above the apartments' rooftops, zaibatsu installations dotting the scenery, huge Tesla
towers bouncing energy streams through the darkness, a few dirigibles plying their way above the
pneumatic transit system.
The Air Quality Index forecast had been miserably optimistic, as usual. They'd said something like
four hundred or so, and here it was somewhere in the upper six hundreds tonight, maybe lower seven
hundreds. Still pretty good, even for the clean season, just not remotely as good as they'd said it would
be (it never was).
That wasn't what had drawn their attention.
The sky looked like molten pizza, angry red blobs roiling down from an orange cast, and all shot
through with sharp streaks of brilliant green. Then the horizon had come alight brighter than dawn,
illuminating some kind of floating city just before the superheated blast wave had rolled in on them.
Sonic dug his nails into the heels of his palms, forcing away the memory.
Ghosts... they're everywhere...
“Y'got an E-TiC on that thing?” he asked as he watched Tails poking around within Zelda's ship.
Tails paused to give this thought.
Nodding with a bit of a sideways back-and-forth movement, he replied “Ye-es-s... it will be either a
while – like seriously a while, maybe a year or two – or a really long time. I'm still trying to work out
the operating principles behind it, but once I get those down, the functions should flow from design.”
Sonic nodded, “So, yeah-but-no-but. Got it.”
He didn't push the issue. If it took Tails a while to figure it out, then that would just give each of
them all the longer to get their heads together better.
“Any guess as ta what'cha might need fer materials – cradle ta grave?”
Tails frowned, his eyes skittering along and across various lists and tentative blueprints in his mind.
“ 'cept fer a decent technological infrastructure, I mean?”
Tails paused, nodded once, and reassessed.
“With the materials that I know of here, and some that are likely, I'd guess maybe some lead,
beeswax, any ziggurat gems that aren't in apparent use, some copper wire and papier-mâché, a turbine,
lodestones, maybe glass rods but I'll get back to you on that, some primitive batteries...”
Sonic listened, mentally ticking off possible sources as Tails went on.
Ruru, listening in as she hovered over the shiny interior parts, looked to Sonic, gave a sharp nod,
and intoned “Osu!” before departing into the greenery. He had no idea as to what she thought she
might find, but at least she was pitching in. I'd piss on a spark plug, if I thought it'd do any good.
=====
S: Hey. You hit drop-dead hours ago. C'mon. Chow now, then goof off, grab some rack time, an'
goof off some more. Forty-eight hours; minimum. Reconstitution leave: 'san order. You can chase
sparks 'n' bubbles another day, but fer now yer officially on light duty as of yesterday.
Dinner that evening involved shakshuka with smoked salmon and baked clams, kunafah for dessert,
and shwarma for after-dinner snacking.
S talks w/ Z over dinner, carefully probing. Afterward, while everyone else was busy with their
respective entertainments, he got to the point. Asks her how one “civilians”, as a verb.
=====
Two years later, Tails had finally fixed what was wrong with the ship, and she was finally warm again.
The continuous feeling of cold and tremors had left her.
She was ready to kill Warbotdorf.
One of the last stones – a vital one, in fact – came from Ruru. T described in detail what it should look
like, she tears off to her secret treasure trove and returns with it.
Shakedown runs, Q&A tours, training.
Everyone had to learn at least the basics of the ship's controls and instruments, just in case.
Ruru was standing by the helm as this was announced, and as Tails looked to her, she backed away,
shaking her hands and insisting “Sonic ichiban!” as she glanced sideways to nod her head vigorously at
the Fridays, seeking to encourage their support in this.
Zero defects. Nice.

“How long we got 'til we hit bingo?”
Tails looked up from the motor compartment, “I hate to say this, but I'm pretty sure that it's a unity
reactionless drive.”
Sonic puffed his cheeks thoughtfully, nodding as he squinted out across the lava.
“So,” he began.
Tails nodded, filling in for Sonic's gap, “So, we should be able to cruise for as long as we want
without running out of fuel.”
By this time, Tails had put it through engine back-runs for weeks, then another month and a half of
functional check flights within the cove and a few times around the island.
“Seven more wake-ups 'n' we pull chocks – exit stage left, even” Sonic said as he looked around the
island from the highest remaining spire of the castle, “should be fun ta see what's out there. Take out
the bad guy, an' we can live the life o' Riley.”
Are we not drawn onward, we few...
He looked over the deck, thinking about the floor space and cargo hold, the supplies that they were
taking, and the expected travel time.
“We gonna need a bigger boat?”
That evening, with all preparations already taken care of, and only a week on hold against potential
surprise considerations, they brought out a barrel of an ancient tawny Madeira from the warmest corner
of wine cellar. In a clean font, a seeming date of AC 1010 was burned onto the lid, but this was
meaningless to all.
Dinner had been a sumptuous indulgence, but casual, just an abundance of favorites without any
conscious thread. Beginning with pickled green olives and quite a few different caviars with brown
bread and Butterkäse, they went on to potato and leek soup and then rabbit stew, followed by baked
oysters covered in scallions and capers with feta and a thin layer of cheddar, smoked sardines on garlic
bread with hummus and roasted vegetables, tacos and fajitas with pico de gallo, cucco marsala and
risotto alla milanese with sausage and sides of cottage-pie-stuffed-mushrooms, succulent portions of
lamb with habanero-mint jelly over a creamy potatoes gratiné, eventually settled down to buttered
honey muffins and thin chocolates with a rich Stilton, and in the end were finally treated to a lemon-
berry trifle with toasted almonds. A young mulberry wine made the rounds severally throughout.
Tapping the Madeira cask after dinner, they found that there remained the ghost of a fruitiness in the
bouquet, along with hints of sandalwood and toffee, black tea, tar, leather and tobacco, turned earth and
minerals, potpourri and spices, cherry, vanilla, honey and molasses, violets, prunes, figs, even meat and
curry.
After the initial tasting, Friday added careful splashes of lemon tonic to each glass before pouring,
balancing the tartness against the wine in order to bring out its life and undertones. Its profile was
astounding even given its full body – burnt sugar, treacle, butterscotch, marzipan, preserved lemon,
burnt lemon peel, orange bitters, maple syrup, hazelnuts, caramel and peanut brittle, apricot, plum,
raisin and roasted walnut, cocoa, raspberry and blackberry, and a hundred other things that they
couldn't identify, and a surprisingly crisp smoky finish that developed a complexity all of its own.
They whiled away the hours discussing their dreams for the future, places to visit, things to do.
Their plans must await the removal of Warbotdorf, but this did nothing to damp their spirits, though the
Fridays weren't keen to see Sonic's absence once secreted away to their clan's ancestral home deep
within Kokiri Forest far to the south – particularly as this meant that everyone else would soon place
themselves in harm's way in order to see them safe.
The moonlight crossed the room as everyone sipped and chatted by the fire with coffee and
croquettes making their rounds, hope and happiness resolving within them this first night of Nayrufest.
Their journey was set to begin on the morning of the winter solstice, new year's day by the local
calendar; a rebirth for all.
O ~~~ O
Epilogue: Limbō, et in Purgatorium

That night, Zelda slept soundly and deeply. In her dreams, she flew out from the ring of fire, above the
clouds and beyond the ocean, across the known world. Everywhere below her the land shone, people
rejoiced in their lives and their loves, and the richest bounties of food overflowed the lands.
Her heart swelled to see it.
And deep within, a quiet voice turned its eye outward in every direction, and couldn't help noticing
that she flew alone.
/// ~~~ ///
For the continuing adventures of Zelda et alios, please see “Book 1, Seize the Deity”.
AFTERWORD
I've mentioned the issue with character agency somewhere before. It comes up sometimes when I
know exactly how I want some scene to go, and I get to writing, and find the characters outright
balking at the words that I try to put into their mouths, or the actions that I envisioned them taking. I've
had that happen before in RPGs (as a DM/GM with NPCs and as a player with PCs), but not so much
in my writing (probably because I've never really spent much time in writing). I was surprised to see it
crop up so prominently in John Scalzi's “Redshirts” – maybe I've seen it mentioned before, in regard to
writing, but I'd swear that I hadn't.
Something that I know that I've seen and heard other people refer to is how ideas sometimes come to
you fully formed (I've had a whole lot of gaming worlds and character classes come to me that way
over the years), or in a torrent of bits that you have to write down (not in case you forget them, though
that's also true, but because of their “insistence” that you write them down). I was reminded of this just
now while watching a video on surreal numbers (“Surreal numbers (writing the first book) –
Numberphile”; Numberphile; Jun 27, 2016). Donald Knuth apparently had this exact issue: he'd go to
sleep, and the characters' lines would pop into his head unbidden; he'd have to get up and jot it all down
fast because of the rate at which they flowed; he'd go back to sleep, and there the next lines were,
waiting to pounce.
That's exactly what's been going on with this whole series and the Icewall meta-setting. I had no
intention of writing anything like these, and found the Icewall idea suddenly present itself in a couple
of large chunks, and I had to backtrack a lot of stuff that I'd read and watched in order to give the right
feel to things and references for anyone who might be interested (a lot of the time I could only jot it
down and hope to make references later). Then I found myself picturing “Seize the Deity” while at
work, one scene or another playing itself out in variations; lines and paragraphs of narration occurring
unbidden. I was stuck with it and figured that I could just jot it down and be done with it, but it
wouldn't let things lie so easily, and I found myself writing a romance novel. Then the Plot Bunnies
attacked, and I soon surrendered to working on prequel, sequel, sidequel, and expanded universe
material.
Is this a common issue, or am I nuts? I vacillate on that, sometimes concluding that we're all nuts,
but it seems to be a recurrent “thing” with other people too.
“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.”
– Fyódor Dostoyévskiy, “The Brothers Karamazov”
To my great embarrassment, I've never read any Dostoyévskiy. This one quotation seems to pretty
much summarize the higher levels of the Maslow hierarchy, and is central to a lot of my thinking and
writing.
It's what “Seize the Deity” revolves around, and what underlies both “Zelda Invictus” and “Sonic's
Redemption”. It's not about being alive or staying alive, but having a reason to do so and sharing life's
experiences with others whom you love (though without these, there's still an altruistic need to leave
the world better than you found it, but that's a slippery slope).
Another major theme for me is being together with people who share a goal, a life. Family. It's not
about being related by blood or marriage. It's about community. I grew up in Brooklyn, and there isn't
that same feeling of togetherness there that you seem to see in smaller places (at least not back in the
'80s or so; I still have some really good friends from back then, but a lot of would-be friendships of the
time felt more like loose not-entirely-trusted alliances against whatever might come, rather than actual
mutual friendship and respect). I joined the Air Force to support my wife and daughter and found that
spirit strongly ingrained while overseas (I also found that “debrief” = /brief/, “IPCOT” = /COT/, and
maintenance troops are [generally, not universally] jock-assholes who think that office positions are
unnecessary jobs filled with useless skating “nonners” [rhymes with “POG” & “Fobbit”] who don't
qualify as part of the team, but all of that's another story). I retired stateside and found that while it's
present in the civilian world, it's not as strong, prevalent, deep-rooted, or widespread. That's a shame.
If you know that spirit, then hold it dear, and don't let it go; if you've never seen it and think that it's just
some jingoistic Pollyanna bullshit, then I understand (believe me), but it's out there, it's real, you just
have to find it, and if you do, then protect it.
Then there's the last major theme: loss and finding your way. It takes effort to climb out from
beneath a certain threshold; I sometimes think that it takes ten times that effort to climb back out once
you've done so before.
Sonic's parallel memories aren't a take on “Terminator: Genisys” (though coincidentally, I watched that
maybe a week after having written about his mutually exclusive memories, and a few days after having
written the first occurrence of his dream-memories [the one with the Cybers and the phase transition]),
but they do probably come subconsciously from some book or movie (and it's not Moorcock's Erekosë,
either, now that I think of it – beside which, the mechanic is different: Sonic is accessing many other
quantum-equivalent selves' memories, not those of other incarnations of himself).
One thing that I discussed in “Seize the Deity” is the question of my version of Sonic and Tails.
They're both Warbotdorf's [then-Robotnik] creations. They're more naturally capable of survival than
you or I, and have more skills packed into them than your average S.A.S. or PhD, but they're [mostly]
not on a level with Legionnaires from WH40K or anything (think of them as something like Ian
Fleming's 007, or L. Ron Hubbard's Jettero Heller, with a lot of fighting potential – a little less so for
Tails, whose design was more oriented on active Intel and local-conditions analysis, but he's still
incredibly lethal). As long as they have digestible material the contents of which contain the necessary
elements, their systems can synthesize whatever their bodies need (e.g.: dirt might be unpalatable, but
would likely sustain them reasonably well; concrete not so much). They can withstand greater ranges
of conditions and more-rapid changes over time than most biological creatures (evolved or designed),
and will eventually recover from anything short of a nova (a non-naked entanglement substrate that
drives a tech equivalent of eternal youth [it's a good thing that LotR Sauron {or the CoDominium
Saurons, come to think of it} never got his hands on this stuff]), but that doesn't make such experiences
particularly easy or fun (you or I can get by just fine in 150° F or -20° F [65° C or -29° C] for a while
with very little support [a lot of water and very little activity, or a few layers of clothing, respectively],
but we wouldn't find it terribly pleasant for long).
In “Seize the Deity”, Sonic had mentioned having uploaded a bunch of data into his memory while
on Möbius. This is true in at least two of his memory-lives. Most of it was cultural materials, research
on different worlds' entertainments, philosophies, social interactions, etc.. These had some impact on
his thinking (leading to his eventual rebellion against Dr. Robotnik, in fact, though that was more from
personal freedom than out of altruism).
After that... well, how does one forgive oneself for having survived when everyone else is now dead
and gone?
The common thread between Sonic's memories and his survival on the island is the question of
quality of life and a sense of greater purpose and self-actualization. You can live in a paleolithic cave
and eat bugs, or in a 25c starship holosuite with replicators, and each alone could fulfill and lack
different aspects of life simultaneously.
This informs the evolution of his personality. Surprisingly to me, my story-verse background of
Sonic being Robotnik's creation (literally) and suffering PTSD seem to be reflected in the game series'
bible. I began writing this NLT Feb 2019 (with the background forming for it through at least the latter
half of 2018), and had never heard of Sega of America's bible for Sonic until watching “Every Sonic
game is blasphemous” in Sep 2019. Apparently Sonic's supposed to have helped Robotnik (as
Kintobor, his father figure?!?) to create the very machines that Robotnik uses in his evil plans (which
would probably fuck with his head pretty badly), and even hibernate below delta (kinda like scanning
people from an alpha state?) – sound familiar? I swear that I had no clue of all of that. So much for
<*ahem*> the Darth Vader <*cough!*> MY idea being original. :-(
Getting back to his personality's general evolution though, here we see him ready (as well as willing
and able) to take on any threat (bulettes single-handed, for example) without considering it much more
than a nuisance, and slowly come around to extending himself and his trust to others, but not naturally
inclined to deal with the world as a whole (his “...slice o' Paradise...” rant, for example). By the time
of “Seize the Deity”, he's matured some when it comes to the greater good, is shifting from NG(CG)
toward NG(LG) in Big Picture terms – though still living day-to-day life in a CG(CN) manner – and
has apparently acquired some sense of caution (as shown when >>> SPOILER ALERT >>> the party
encounters the zombies in the forest, while en route to Tor Diablo <<< END OF SPOILER <<<). He's
still himself throughout, but by the point of “I am Legion”, he's much more concerned with the welfare
and self-determination of the world as a whole, in addition to his family's and his own.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design
a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders,
give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a
computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.”
– Robert A. Heinlein, “Time enough for love”
The quote above comes from Heinlein, whose writing I've always enjoyed. His opinions (as far as I
can tell) generally mirror my own, and this quote summarizes [at length] how I feel. It's not a
philosophical choice or a reasoned opinion on my part, just a fact that I feel this way (philosophically I
simply think that we should all ensure that we can [if able to] perform at least the necessary minimum
for survival and such [to include emotional fulfillment], but that this minimum set is context-
dependent).
That feeling oozes its way into my characters – they're none of them (including Sonic) experts at
everything, or even at the things specified in the quote, but they're flexible, they adapt to changing
conditions, they learn what seems handy (or even merely interesting) to learn.
All of that aside, what I haven't gone into detail about is the actual question of his parallel memories.
To set things straight:
1. his life started in service to Dr. Robotnik, and he remained loyal throughout (though the
memories of the death mazes and the other clones' rejection of him from his studying various
world-ponds' cultures are real);
2. when they invaded Light World, “something happened” that rewound events on Möbius (Peach
explains a little about this toward the very end of “Seize the Deity”), resulting in his now having
joined the resistance (which was indeed prompted by the uploaded cultural records, but those of
both rounds on Möbius, so that this time around his eyes were open);
3. his chasing Dr. Robotnik into the world-gate with Tails unlocked the other parallel memories
(and those of the first round) of many other versions of his life across many other world-ponds
– these memories are real, just not his-his in quite the same sense as those that he actually lived
through personally (the first time around or on the rewind).
How completely formed was Sonic's prefrontal cortex upon clone-decanting? I don't know. Perhaps
Dr. Robotnik chose to exclude one, though I imagine not; Sonic's behavior really doesn't allow for that,
and excluding one wouldn't have been a good idea from Robotnik's point of view. Perhaps Dr.
Robotnik included one that had been carefully tailored; that's plausible, given Robotnik's nature and the
vast amount of information then at his fingertips. I don't think that he'd have intentionally left Sonic
with whatever he'd have “naturally” had. Whatever the truth of the matter, I think that [this version of]
Sonic's changes over time are in keeping with the natural development of one's prefrontal cortex.
One final thought that I'm extremely uncomfortable with, now that I've just realized it, is Sonic's
age. When I put together most of the material in “Seize the Deity” I didn't have a bible of facts set in
concrete – some things were definite, yes, but others simply developed over time. I had a fuzzy feeling
of Sonic's world-view being someplace between an already-world-weary 20s and a not-quite-grouchy-
old 40s. I also felt as if he'd spent no more than ~10 years on Möbius, prior to landing in Light World.
Due to events in “I am Legion”, I tried to work out a more detailed picture of how old Tails probably
was – those events' occurrence being ~7.5 years after the end of “Sonic's Redemption” puts Sonic at age
~23.5 at that time, and I worked from there – I'll have to bump the dates carefully, in order to be sure of
not missing details there (which I likely have, since all of this just hit me and I'm re-checking things on
the fly), but what hit me after all of that is that Sonic arrived in Light World at around physical-
experience age 10. Sure, he's loaded with what amounts to 20-odd years of schooling, plus the
memories of so many other lifetimes, and was clone-decanted as a physically complete adult
(effectively ~22 at that point, for a human), but... his actual active experience in being alive after that
was only 10 calendar years (which might qualify as 20, if you count both the original period on Möbius
and the rewound-repeat time). That's one hell of a long life if you consider that hedgehogs live 2-5
years in the wild, or 4-6 (some even 8) in captivity, and nothing compared to his overall expected
lifespan of... however long an immortal can live. On the other hand, another way to look at it is simply
that he landed on the island at age ~10. I'm really not thrilled with that in light of his relationship with
Friday. THAT WASN'T MY INTENTION. I'm not about to rewrite all kinds of details over this, so I'll
just hope to get over it by focusing on normal hedgehog lifespans (making him the hedgehog-
equivalent of a human ~150 years old [or ~300] upon arrival, as if that's any better?) and his de facto
adult state upon decanting, plus the time-rewind and memory stuff. Then again: maybe it doesn't
actually matter, given the Ocampa of ST:VOY, though that feels like a cop-out (much as is often
leveled toward characters in anime).
In a like fashion, Ruru's personality is something of the complement of Sonic's, yet her knowledge and
skills base are a mix of things that he has access to (such as his fighting skills, though I'm not sure of
what level she has) and things that he doesn't (e.g.: Japanese language, low-level magics as spell-like
abilities), while not having access to other things that you might expect her to have beyond what he has
(e.g.: she possesses no useful knowledge of the layout of Caprona, displays no clear understanding of
him beyond what anyone might of another) nor necessarily any given component of Sonic's psyche
(e.g.: she doesn't remember any of his memories – there are some bits in “Seize the Deity” wherein she
displays some knowledge of stuff that he'd know, but only in the way that one might from hanging
around him for a decade or so).
This all comes from the fact that she is a Kaijin of “Musaigen no Phantom World” (only in the
anime, not in the manga), completely real – or at least as completely real as the “phantoms” are there.
The phantoms there are already present, and a change in human biochemistry brought about our ability
to perceive them; here, Sonic's presence conjured Ruru's existence, so it's not quite the same.
Regardless of her origin story, she leads an objective existence outside of Sonic's awareness,
possesses wants and needs of her own, and is fully sophont.
Friday... Friday wasn't an intended element when I began writing “Seize the Deity”, having been
inspired by noticing someone's attire and body movements. They reminded me a little bit of a Jawa,
then I realized that it was more reminiscent of a Deku Scrub – then wham, I got hit with the whole
Friday idea within Sonic's backstory. I hadn't intended to write any prequels at that time, but I did take
note of it as story-canon background.
As I write this, I have yet to detail my notes on a few of the adventures on Caprona, much less really
fill out most of them within this document, but the one thing that I'm still on the fence about badly is
the question of precisely what drew Friday to Sonic in the first place. I could say that she sought help
with her sisters (and that's true), or that she had some interest in companionship (also true), or just
general curiosity and some Florence Nightingale vibe (and these too are true) – but none of these things
feels right in a compelling underlying sense; then again, maybe there wasn't a particular reason, simply
an overall set of little things.
Tails didn't suffer/gain the parallel memories thing. Due to the nature of how Sonic acquired them,
Tails lacking them is almost certainly not an accident.
Losing Amy screwed him up, obviously. Without writing a side-prequel on that specifically, I can't
say with authority (due to issues with character agency, and possibly the metaphysics of Icewall in
general) that what happened was intentional or accidental or what, but my guess is that it was an
unfortunate side-effect that was only as significant (from a certain point of view [per Peach's
explanation to Sonic]) as losing a glove, and might conceivably have been a necessary step. If you get
as far as “I am Legion” (the sequel to “Seize the Deity”), then this particularly callous-seeming
reasoning begins to make an unpleasant sense – I still dislike it, but I can understand it.
You might have noticed the fish on the menu. While many, perhaps all, of the plants and mushrooms
might have been sourced locally (the castle mesa), this isn't the case for all of the animals – bulettes,
notably. That same applies to the fish in particular. Some of them – a good percentage of them, in fact
– come straight from the castle's cistern; I picture a pond somewhere on their mesa, as well. That isn't
all of the fish.
Many of the fish species are generally stream/river or lake species, and others are typically salt
water (i.e.: brackish or full sea/ocean). Those particular freshwater species would pretty well have to
have come from the main island. That still leaves the saltwater species – and there's the fun part: each
of those named herein have species that live (or can live) in fresh water, and it's those species that I
have in mind here.
One thing that I don't really discuss or focus upon much in the Zelda series (or even much in the
Icewall stories in general) is the technology. It's present in one degree or another, and I present it as it
comes up and with whatever quirks one would encounter under the circumstances, but I don't really
expand upon it. As a reader, I always love it when the author goes into great detail about how some
development functions, what insights it opens up, the resulting materials technologies and spinoffs that
derive from it, and yet... here I am showing a floating lavaship with a unity drive and not explaining a
thing about it because Tails doesn't fully grasp its underlying principles (for the record: it's the
technological application of arcane energies and zooic repulsion fields – mage-tech rather than sci-
tech).
I go into a little detail with more mundane things, such as how to distill water for survival needs, but
not the “cooler” stuff (e.g.: not how to distill alcohol >4%, not which color a magic mushroom should
be, not what the laws of magic are in Light World). Those I just present as being as normally
undescribed a facet in this setting as a newspaper would be in the real world (and if you don't think that
publicly available newspapers are a miracle, then you haven't really considered paper [and papyrus, and
vellum, etc.], abstract representation of concepts by words and words by orthography, the printing press
[and loom, and binary logic...], widespread literacy, human rights, freedom of information and press,
and a score of tangents that all pay into – and descend from – these things). That might be sensible
from the perspective of characters who aren't themselves focused on these things, or don't know those
details themselves, but I still feel the need to apologize – I know the mind-soaring and heart-singing joy
of flipping between the narrative and the juicy technical appendices (Forward, or Crichton), or
finishing reading a book only to go on to the expanded background glossary and richly detailed
gazetteer (Tolkien, or Herbert), so I've included things like these as they come up in each book, but
only for a select few things here and there (e.g.: 0 GEN quark physics, a constructed language or recipe
section, a game, categorical logic and hadronic quark combinations, Jötnar biological considerations); a
great many other things lack such expansions (what are the actual details of Zelda's life with Pérdida
and Sonic's & Tails's experiences on Möbius [both before and after the rewind], how did Barrik Keep
arrive here and what the hell actually happened to everyone on Caprona, how did Light World come to
have such a jigsaw puzzle of places and species [somewhat explained in “Seize the Deity” Afterword]
and what's its political structure in detail, what's the deal with the various Powers and Principalities,
where are all of the different world-ponds w.r.t. one another), and that might be a let-down to some.
There's a reason there. Two of them, really.
The story features these things, yes, but they're not the crux of the matter. They're just features that
tell you how this world has evolved, the fact that there is magic there, just not highly-advanced stuff
everywhere – much as the real world had radioactive elements long before Marie Curie or Ernest
Rutherford came along, and somewhat like the modern world has space technology not-exactly-side-
by-side with stone age technology.
That's the tech side of the house.
The other side is all of the other questions that make up the world itself – the history, the cultural
interactions, the social norms and issues. Each one of these answers opens a slew of other questions.
As I develop one aspect or another, it sometimes implies things about the background, and a
comprehensive coverage of the places and societies would take focus away from what it's all about in
the first place. Maybe it's a good idea to put it all together as a separate fourth wall reference, but for
the moment I'm still focusing on telling the tales and letting the whole develop naturally from there.
That still leaves at least one thing that I probably should address or risk catching hell about: how'd
Sonic land on the island? Sure, there's a Stargate-thing involved, but SG1/etc. uses point-to-point
connections – this used something like a Star Trek transporter approach, or just maybe a Thoan weak-
point and one of Shambarimen's quirky designs. So what gives? Simple: I never said that Robotnik
had an actual SG1 stargate. Is it basically? Yeah, sorta mostly, sure. Is it for no-shit-sure an SG1
model? Nope; that should be kinda obvious, so don't nitpick; clearly it's not precisely either of the
other two examples, but I picture it as being slightly akin to a transporter (arguably relating also to
Qhal gates [of C. J. Cherryh's Morgaine cycle] and Sliders portals). And no, I'm not writing a tech
manual on it.
Maybe I should include a recipes appendix, as I did with “Seize the Deity”?
As a treat for those who've stayed with me so far, here's the complete list of epitaphs in the keep's
graveyard:
• He boasted of his might; but, death was his plight.
• His wandering eyes soon caused his demise.
• Many ladies he cherished and now he has perished.
• He quenched his thirst; but, the water was cursed.
• This dwarf was much feared, ‘til he tripped on his beard.
• Here lies Dwight, a knight he did smite.
• Eric was given to roam; all that's left is this stone.
• They came, they saw, they died.
• Here lies Louise, a thief should not sneeze.
• Here lies poor Mel, he cast the wrong spell.
• A thief who did fink, has become quite extinct.
• He’s dead, Jim.
• Here lies Todd, he angered a god.
• This spot is reserved for:
O ~~~ O
APPENDIX A: The Soundtrack

► Play all ◄
1 Copperhead Road (Steve Earle, 1988) Lyrics

2 I've got a lovely bunch of coconuts (Danny Kaye cover, 1951) Lyrics
3 Tales of brave Ulysses (Cream, 1967) Lyrics
4 Apeman (Kinks, 1970) Lyrics
5 When you're evil (Voltaire, 1998) Lyrics
6 Margaritaville (Jimmy Buffet, 1977) Lyrics
7 Be our guest (Beauty and The Beast, 1991) Lyrics
8 Puttin' on the Ritz (Young Frankenstein, 1974) Lyrics
9 Puff the magic Dragon (Peter, Paul and Mary, 1963) Lyrics
10 Who is the lolo who stole my pakalolo? (Don Ho, 1978) Lyrics
11 I. G. Y. (What a beautiful world) (Donald Fagen, 1982) Lyrics
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
O ~~~ O
APPENDIX B: the Octorillas' language [Paku]

Octorillas across valley speak Paku (Land of the Lost, 1974-1976)

inflecting, SVO
“Parts of speech are similar to English and have distinctly marked morphologically. This
is of course not to say that Pakuni mimics English or that it is a relex. It has some
features more similar to Swahili than English (the prefixed semantic classes of nouns, for
example). Nouns feature the bare root, to which is added -sa for the Adjective, the
various noun class markers, and then -chi for the Adverb. Prepositions and Particles are
unmarked, like verbs. Roots are also used to form verbs, adjectives, adverbs and so forth.
It has regular ante-penultimate stress, homorganic nasals, nasalization of vowels
before nasals, and deletion of final vowels before vowel initial suffixes." Pakuni simply
means "people" in this language (paku being the singular form).
The phonemic inventory was as follows : a e i o u , b c d f g j k m n p r s sh t w y ng Ɂ.
Syllables can begin with glottal stops and can end in nasals. There are prepositions but
no postpositions. There is one example of emphatic VSO word order. Emphatic particles
come first in a sentence while the interrogative particle comes at the end. Nouns in
sequence have an implied conjunction. The possessive is formed by placing the possessor
after the possessed : X i-ban means "X of owner".
The gestures and quasi-language noises (like English Ah!) are the same as in English.
The words for yes, no, I, & you are the rather similar yo, no, me, & ye.”
So: “c” is present, but which unique phoneme does it represent (or is it still a pointless symbol)?
No naturally present {h, l, [q], v, [x]}, nor apparently a dozen other non-Latin-alphabet sounds (e.g.:
gh, kh, th [voiced or voiceless], wh, zh), though some phonemes are present and not listed (i.e.: ch, sh,
z) [“oganza” or “ganza-ni” = magic].
Vowels take the standard Latin sounds, lacking other variations.
Pakuni pronunciation and grammar: http://lotl.popapostle.com/html/nels/grammar.html

Pakuni lexicon: http://lotl.popapostle.com/html/nels/pakudict.html
1995 study http://fiatlingua.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/fl-000021-00.pdf
Fanfics http://lotl.popapostle.com/html/portal.html
Large analysis https://app.box.com/s/gh5my7i3ztlet8wmjs2t
O ~~~ O
APPENDIX C: Deleted and Alternative scenes

Deleted scenes presented here are canon to the story-verse, just cut because they simply didn't fit the
feel of the storytelling (treat them as a Director's Cut behind-the-scenes thing, happening off-camera).
Alternative scenes aren't canon – they're ideas that I toyed with, and could see happening in some
near-tangent story-verse, but didn't happen here.
ALT: UPON ZELDA'S AWAKENING
Z: ¿Entiendes...?
Z had first tried High Imperial Common while groggy, then Low Imperial. She hadn't even thought
of Standard.
S: Sí, pero... no mui bueno. ¿Quien eres tu?
Z <silent, pensive> “Bien – 'No bien,' y 'Quien eres' sin 'tú.' No necessito.”
Z relieved to have found a common language, and one that she had a fair facility with. She had a
few others to work with, but was weaker in those.
S: ¿Y tu llama?
Z: <sighs> “Nombre. 'Y tu nombre' – o 'Como te llamas'.”
Sonic ran his hand across his face and glanced over to Friday as she entered the room, his pleading
look of frustration begging her to intercede.
F → Z: He's still learning Standard Common, and knows neither High nor Low. How are you
feeling?
Z looked relieved at the communication bridge, then troubled over what to say and how much to
reveal.
F: Rest for now while I fetch you some food. You're safe here, and Sonic will protect you against
anything. We can talk later, once you've adjusted.
F → S: <pulls aside; low, gentle voice, her language shifting to almost baby-talk> She's weak.
Watch over her, but leave her be.
S: Yer the boss.
F: No, she is. <leaves for food, S perplexed and guarding the doorway unnecessarily against
would-be predators>
O ~~~ O
APPENDIX D: GEN 0 particles, or “too OCD”

Zeroeth generation quarks: a flight of fancy
I don't know if anyone's looked into a further spontaneous symmetry breaking of forces (e.g.: X ~10 28
eV [≈1032 K] → G+ES ~1025 eV [≈1029 K] → G+S+EW ~1011 eV [≈1015 K] → G+S+W+EM →
{G+S+W+E+M or G+S+W+EM+W'}), and if so then they probably found it to be completely
meaningless garbage, unless you count the possibility of false vacuum decay. The same goes for
further particle decoupling or particle generations in extremely low energy regimes (current record:
5*10-8 K ≈ 4.309(-)*10-12 eV [far below even quantum computer temperatures], which we can reach
without suddenly seeing strange new ultralight-weight particles condense out of the vacuum – but hey,
maybe such a transition would hinge upon a combination of energy density and minimum n-volume
[though I'm not aware of such having obtained in previous cases]); something similar with false
vacuum decay seems to have been considered by Coleman and De Luccia (“Gravitational effects on
and of vacuum decay”, Phys. Rev. D, vol. 21, no. 12, 15 Jun 1980), with the result being an anti-de
Sitter space decaying within microseconds.
Maybe we'd need to “freeze” space in the middle of a Big Rip (at some point prior to a phantom-
driven quark-antiquark pair production overdrive [assuming that the jerk or snap rates don't cause
comoving space's expansion rate to exceed force-carrying causality speed – though if so, then what
would a Rip do to point-particles?], much less singularity). (Why not? We can now freeze light in a
B.E.C. – an utterly preposterous proposition on the surface, not many years ago.) Alternatively, if one
had a compactified dimension that expanded accordion-like to some extent without affecting the
macroscale dimensions, then the overall energy density would drop without having “gone” anywhere
(assuming that the vacuum energy didn't scale with the n-volume). Mind you, this paragraph goes off
rather farther into Cloud Cuckoo Land than I really wish to entertain, and my purpose for this appendix
isn't the “how might” so much as the “and consequently”.
So: what if...? (For that matter, what might the universe be like if GEN 2 became the end of the
line, with no GEN 1, or if any of the masses [and/or other properties] were adjusted to someplace along
the scale other than where they are? If one were to induce such a state of affairs for the universe as a
whole, and stand back and watch the fireworks from some god-like perspective, then I suppose that the
then-impossible GEN 1 particles would have to either spontaneously merge into then-stable GEN 2s or
perhaps dissipate in a puff of uncertainty into photons and neutrinos [sort of as if they were virtual
particle pairs].)
What I sought to describe with Sonic's memory of Cherenkov radiation and plasmons and a
supercooled pond was a single, protracted instant of phase transition happening at random points just
before something like a chaotic inflation of the Z.P.E. being dropped to a new low at all points, like
nucleating bubbles of steam that haven't quite yet coalesced to an explosion of combined surface area
(it makes me think of Q-switching, but I can't quite put my finger on just why). That doesn't convey
the picture accurately at all, but hopefully it mixes the imagery in a way that carries the feeling aptly.
Picture something like a plane-fronted gravitational wave bursting outward; imagine applying that to a
special case wherein our universe were DIM 2 and the front were a manifold impinging from without,
giving an expanding circular domain wall around the disc of intersection – now make that wave front
sponge-like in its topology (or at least in its topographic contours relative to the universal plane), and
the result isn't a single point that expands from some origin, but rather more like the DIM 2 cross
section of five fingers expanding as they intersect with the plane even though they're all part of a single
hand (and not necessarily all at the same rates, since the contour tangents might be variable): basically
a non-local Rayleigh-Taylor instability of a sort, more like collision with a cylindrical hairbrush fiber
bundle than with a p-brane (I keep picturing it as sort of a quiver diagram of possible pilot waves
condensing to reified fracture lines – that's not a very scientific picture, so I'll have to see if I can edit
this later to something more accurate; the other metaphor in mind is even less realistic: a compass flip-
flopping between two entirely different “north” poles). Sonic's incomplete memory of that event left
open the question of whether the inflating regions eventually merged continuously vs. leaving
irregularities (such as monopolar, cosmic string, and domain wall equivalents).
If you've read and enjoyed Abbott's “Flatland” or Dewdney's “Planiverse”, then you might have
had the let's-have-some-fun bug grab you at some point – so let's see what we can do with the idea of
GEN 0 particles. It'll be a toy model, but it could still be fun.
To be clear, though: I'm not a physicist. I've had some calculus, done some self-study, etc., but am
not particularly qualified in wave functions or equations of state.
GEN 0 masses
Assuming that such a further phase transition were possible, then perhaps we'd see quarks (and/or
other particles) decohere into lighter modes. I've no idea what they could be like by any current
research, so let's just have some fun with spitballing it (I'll work with PDG's data as of 18 Mar 2019
[data date-cutoff = 15 Jan 2018 {the 2018 PDG sheets mention the CODATA 2010 value, but their
comments seem to indicate that the CODATA 2014 value was used; the e - and µ- masses in MeV match
the CODATA 2014 value through 9 decimal places}], to include their GEN 4 highest-value mass-
minima shown for reference):
GEN: 0 1 2 3 4
q± MeV/c2 9.62(+)e-4 2.2 (+0.5,-0.4) 1275 (+25,-35) 1.73e5 (±400) > 1.16e6
0.492(-) 4.7 (+0.5,-0.3) 95 (+9,-3) 4180 (+40,-30) > 1.53e6
lep± (AMU → MeV) 2.01(+)e-4 0.5109989(+) 105.65837(+) 1776.86(±0.12) > 1.008e5
v° MeV/c2 < 2.1(+)e-14 < 2e-6 < 0.19 < 18.2 –
Note that the u0 remains less massive than the d0 and is presumably more stable, much as with their
GEN 1 original counterparts. N.B.: these GEN 0 numbers were extrapolated without the evidential
lower limits of [GEN 4] b' and t'. Also: yes, neutrinos used to be thought to be massless, but have
since the late '90s seemed to be of non-zero mass, so I've included their 2018 PDG experimental upper
limits for reference; these estimates aren't exactly the same as the old KamLAND mass-eigenstate
oscillation squared-mass estimates, or masses deduced from galactic lensing extrapolations, but at least
they're all from the same source as the quarks' data, so I'll call it good enough for now.
Now, these look O.K.-enough here, and the spreadsheet (next figure down) shows how I arrived at
these values for GEN 0 (though I still look at the flip-flop in charge-mass distribution [u<d, c>s, t>b] as
being “funny”, but weird little quirks make things interesting).
MeV q ↑ diff Diff 2

173000
1270 136.22047244
2.25 564.44444444 0.2413354827
0.000962 2338.8373653
MeV q ↓ diff Diff 2

4185
98 42.704081633
4.8 20.416666667 2.0916284881
0.4917461 9.7611343422
MeV L ± diff Diff 2

1776.86
105.65837 16.817029492
0.5109989 206.76828261 0.0813327329
0.000201 2542.2517523
MeV v° diff Diff 2

18.2
0.19 95.789473684
0.000002 95000 0.0010083102
2.12E-014 94217032.967
Why these values for GEN 0? I don't have a good, solid, scientific reason for them: I simply looked
at the rate of change between each known generation's masses, and those changes' rates of change, and
applied that to the GEN 1 particles for a shits-and-giggles regression. A sound enough starting point,
but I'd be astounded if these results were even remotely like those of a rigorous analysis (particularly
since the masses are well above the lowest temperatures that we've so far delved to in practice – then
again, liquid water solidifies to ice at low temperatures, rather than breaking down into component ions
or hadrons and leptons, and can supercool without necessarily freezing, so maybe not having seen GEN
0 particles as yet doesn't mean much, and we'll encounter a [real or hypothetical] GEN 1→0 explosive
decompression at some point [I can see it now: something like a neutron star evaporating enough mass
to begin boiling off its neutrons as protons, electrons, and antineutrinos]). For the purpose of
extrapolating GEN 0 particles' populations and properties in a fanfic's tangent's irrelevant-appendix,
even this is probably more than good enough (I'm already counting how many pins are dancing on the
head of an angel, or something like that).
I tried some other quick extrapolations; most were much worse (I don't mean simply that they gave
GEN 0 and 4 numbers that I didn't like, I mean that they just didn't fit even the known GEN 1-3 data
very well). Below are examples for the up-type and down-type quarks (I'll skip most of it for the
leptons [neutrinos being electrically neutral leptons, but I'll name them separately from here on for
brevity], since they're not really the point here):
Polynomial regression
y = 85231.125 x2 – 254425.625 x + 169196.75
GEN 0 = 169196.75 [ridiculously heavy]; GEN 4 = 515192.25 [a little light]
y = 1996.9 x2 – 5897.5 x + 3905.4
GEN 0 = 3905.4 [rather heavy]; GEN 4 = 12265.8 [somewhat light]
y = 783.077125 x2 – 2244.083999 x + 1461.517873
GEN 0 = 1461.517873 [rather heavy]; GEN 4 = 5014.415877 [somewhat light]
y = 8.910001 x2 – 26.540005 x + 17.630006
GEN 0 = 17.630006 [ridiculously heavy]; GEN 4 = 160.190022 [unk.]
Linear trend
f(x) = 86498.875 x – 114907
2090.1 x – 2750.93
GIGO
Logarithmic trend
f(x) = 140709.667145553 ln(x) – 25948.5428399908;
3409.7326426177 ln(x) – 607.2069166487
GIGO
Exponential trend
f(x) = 0.0102836478 exp(5.6250583286 x)
0.1437474117 exp(3.3853230325 x)
GIGO
Power trend
f(x) = 1.8730836914 x^10.1218892736
3.5488336011 x^5.9678704669
GIGO
If a nonzero portion of GEN 1 quarks' mass in that scenario came from stabilizing them against
decaying to GEN 0 states, then the total population of GEN 0 would be less than the simple division of
GEN 1 – that is, presumably GEN 1 up-quark decay channels would display the largest branches via
some virtual-W path into far fewer than the maximum possible of ~2,339 GEN 0 up-type-quarks in this
model (probably just one of them, actually, with the remaining mass-energy mostly being bound up as a
GEN 0 lepton and a GEN 0 antineutrino [or vice versa], or as a GEN 0 meson).
When GEN 2 quarks decay, they generally don't turn into cascades of GEN 1 quarks; they usually
(branching ratio / branching fraction) turn into just the one (a weak-induced electrical-charge-swap and
typically becoming the next-most-massive quark [aside from the usual weirdness of d-vs.-u]) with a
little something extra here and there sometimes, and the rest of their GEN 2 mass-energy presents now
as momentum and such. The same holds for GEN 3 quarks. I'm going to assume here that the same
again would hold for GEN 1→0 decay paths: instead of the common image that's something like an
atomic nucleus shattering into a zillion component pieces like a lego toy that's been dropped onto the
floor, picture spinning your arm fast so that the single stem of a dandelion (like some lower GEN n-1
quark) left a few puffy bits behind it (the decay's results' released energy being represented as the
stem's velocity).
GEN 1→0 hadron decay would presumably exhibit some sort of conservation constraint(s), as seen
in EM charge conjugation of π° (e.g.: π° → γ charge and momentum violation, or π° → γ + γ + γ
charge violation only), or the GEN 2→1 strangeness conservation of Λ° (giving us a GEN 1→0 weak
decay something like p+ →W- p+0 + π°0 = udd →W- u0ud + u0d0).
Note that such a transition on its own shouldn't directly affect anything else; e.g.: while it might
mean a higher background radiation level (e.g.: Earth, if it somehow survived, would be bathed in
~99.94(+)% of its mass [simply assuming a mean average of quarks' and leptons' GEN 1:0 mass ratios]
in the form of GEN 0 leptons, neutrinos, and mesons [presumably triggering secondary cascades] until
it radiated away, and ignoring all of the other resultant radiation in the universe and the resultant long-
term issue of its orbit being too large for the leftover sun's ~0.06(-)% mass to retain the leftover planet
[though this might take a little while before being a problem, since only the surface of the sun would
lose mass immediately, as the non-neutrino results wound their way around in an attempt to escape], if
the sun somehow also survived such a transition) and a lower mass-density of interstellar medium
(~0.06(-)% of current mass [or ~0.05(+)% if we assume all-hydrogen], hence less drag for a spaceship,
for example), it shouldn't also increase [for example] the speed of light in vacuo (unless such a
transition [consequently or coincidentally] also reduced electric permittivity [ε o] and/or magnetic
permeability [µo] of free space appropriately [and/or introduced some third-or-more fractional term(s)],
which would necessarily increase the speed of light in vacuo).
What would all of that amount to in simple terms? I can't guarantee this, but I'm pretty sure that
we'd be dead. By definition here, GEN 1 quarks are assumed to be fairly unstable in contrast to GEN 0
(though GEN 1 hadrons might be longer-lived there than GEN 2 hadrons are here – maybe you could
even have GEN 1 stars showing up in a specific mass range [just as glasma / QGP stars might here,
though I suspect that the equivalent there would likely be a mixed state GEN 0+1 star], with “weird”
GEN 1 chemistry). My first thought was that (since quark masses dropped a mean average of ~2
magnitudes and lepton mass dropped ~4) GEN 0 atoms [e.g.: H°0] would have very tight e–0 orbitals
(possibly remaining within the nucleus [though we'll see in a few paragraphs that my guess gives a
velocity uncertainty >c]), given their minuscule mass in ratio to p+0 (and I'm not so sure that n°0 would
be terribly stable). There might be some chemistry that life could evolve from, maybe even far more
easily and interestingly than with GEN 1 baryons (much as we imagine wholly- and partly-strange
nuclei today, a GEN 0 world might very well have some situations with nucleo-stabilized GEN 1
particles in the chemistry [consider neutrons within nuclei vs. free]), but I seriously doubt that we'd
survive such a transition. Consider: in the real world, GEN 2 “molecules” (e.g.: Λ(1405)) live for
picoseconds, if at all (mesonic “molecules” have yet to be observed with certainty); given this, how
long do you suppose a typically stable modern GEN 1 baryonic “molecule” (e.g.: p +, n°) might survive
in a GEN 0 scenario before cooling down to the lower rest mass ground state?
If the above paragraph held true, then you'd need quite a few more GEN 0 atoms to build an object
of the same mass as we'd expect in a mostly GEN 1 universe, but if the orbitals were indeed far closer,
then you might not see a huge change in volume (I'd love to pursue that idea, but refuse to go that far,
even assuming that I have the math at my disposal [which is unlikely]). I'm not even going to guess at
what planets and stars might be like there (if such things could exist in this situation), nor what sorts of
new objects might show up.
But could they form nuclear structures? Right now, in a GEN 1 world, we know that our nucleons
obviously can. There's sufficient binding energy available to them, and sufficient Pauli degeneracy
pressure preventing a condensate. We also don't see nucleonic resonances [Δ] or any of the other
hadrons (notably those {11s, 1ss, sss} with mean lifetimes of ~10-10-10-11 s and approximately nucleonic
masses) forming stable nuclei (hypothetical systems aside). Maybe it's simply a watershed maximum
that GEN 1 falls beneath (and that GEN 0 presumably would as well [anyone care to model some GEN
1.5 masses right on the border of stability/instability?]); maybe it's simply a question of whatever the
lowest generation is (in which case, maybe no more GEN 1, but no problem for GEN 0). I really have
no idea. For a story or game idea, I'd say sure, let's assume so, it sounds like fun; for an actual answer,
I'd need a lot more math and data to even conjecture on it.
If we were to try to stick a few together, then they'd be much lighter, and their masses would almost
certainly have much higher ratios of binding energy to constituent valence quarks' rest mass (run the
numbers for hadrons: they show exactly that pattern already, so this is a seemingly reasonable
extrapolation for GEN 0 composites [were they to exist]; I don't have the chart that I made c2000-
c2005, so I ran a new one just now with the 2018 PDG quark masses and a quick reference to
Wikipedia's baryon masses [since the data needn't be particularly accurate], and it's a fairly steady trend
(especially if you ignore Λ in favor of Σ) for J P = 1/2 [3/2 too, though that's beside the point here]: qud
~99% EB , 80s-90s for uus/uds/dds [and sss, where JP = 3/2], mid to upper 40s for qqc [sharp drop to
~30 at qcc], etc. – though t quarks' decay precludes hadronization, so I can't say that those would have
low percentages of binding energy out their total masses). If we extrapolated that backward, then the
trend would indicate p+0 = u0u0d0 and n°0 = u0d0d0 as having binding energies distinctly above 99% of
the total masses (consider GEN 2 equivalents: Ω+CC [scc :: p+] at ~29% and Ω°C [ssc :: n°] at ~46%).
GEN 0 nuclei and chemistry
I'm guessing that N0 would move around within such GEN 0 atomic nuclei more rapidly than our
nucleons do (lower masses and possibly less-dense mass:volume [rather than simply center-oriented]
packing between nucleons [e.g.: gold nuclei display ~20% slower quarks (in a sense) than those of
helium]), and those are already somewhere around 0.25c. If so, then presumably they'd hit Dirac
supercriticality far sooner than our GEN 1 theoretical Z ≈ 173 (i.e.: no bare nuclei permissible, due to
spontaneous e± creation) – though if they were the other way around, then we'd presumably have a
similarly larger periodic table to work with. Positing smaller nuclear and lepton shells would also
imply greater uncertainty to N0 and e–0 momenta, and given their smaller masses this translates to a
larger velocity (e.g.: simply taking GEN 0 e–0 shells to be of the same size as those of GEN 1 ~10e-10
m, shrinking only the mass of e – to that of e–0 ~3.34(-)e-34 kg, we get a velocity uncertainty of
~1.58(-)e9 m/s, hence a kinetic energy of ~4.6(+)e9 ergs ~2.598(-) KeV [ignoring relativistic
corrections]...14 which sounds great 'til you notice that this means that our little e –0 “could” be cruising
along at ~5.27(-) c [mathematically, not realistically: it's just meant to indicate a complete uncertainty,
not an actual speed], which means that the e–0 shells would have to be larger than our GEN 1 e – shells
[to the corrected tune of ~10e-8 m] if we choose to assume similar speeds to those of e – [hence
14 Heisenberg uncertainty:
σxσp ≥ h/4π
σp = mσv = ~6.62e-34 J*s / 4 π ~1e-10 m = ~5.27(+)e-25 kg*m/s
σv = σp/m = ~5.27(+)e25 kg*m/s / ~3.34(-)e-34 kg = ~1.58(-)e9 m/s … i.e.: ~5.26(-) c (stems from small σx)
KEC = 0.5 mv2 = 0.5 * ~3.34(-)e-34 kg * (~4.98(+)e19 kg*m/s)2 = 4.16(+)e-16 J = ~4.16(+)e-9 ergs = ~2.6(-)e3 eV
σx = ~2.73(-)e-8 m would give σp = ~1.93(+) kg*m/s ⸫ σv = ~5782785(-) m/s ⸫ KEC = ~5.58(+)e-21 J = ~0.03 eV
maintaining fine structure constant α], though anything larger than ~5.27(-)e-10 m brings this example
mass's velocity uncertainty to sublight). The derivation is shown in the table below, though I'm leery
of the Lorentzian transforms (E seems to be OK at relativistic speeds, but the others I'm not so sure of;
the spreadsheet is embedded into the original .odt for editing, but it's not editable within the .pdf
[sorry]):
Given Derived Check

σxσp = 5.27285900134014E-035
σx = 2.73E-008 m σp = 1.93145E-027 kg*m/s
m0 = 3.34E-034 kg σv = 5782784.981 m/s = σp/m0
c= 299792458 m/s c/σv = 0.0192892944
KE = 5.58458E-021 J
5.58458E-014 erg
0.0348562134 eV
v= 5782784.981 m/s = √ (KEJ / 0.5 m0)
Lorentzian
p= 1.93181E-027 γ*k g*m/s = γ*m0*σv
1.7307E+040 γ*m/s = σp / (m0 + [σp /c ])
2 2 2
v=
c/v = 5.7731E+031
3.00240E-017 J = m0c / √ (1 - [v /c ])
2 2 2
E=
That brings us to the question of atomic stability. With the Fermi energy in this example, I'd expect
a stronger tendency for n°0 → p+0, shifting the center point of stability to something lower than iron and
making the heavier elements still more unstable than they already are (assuming that iron and actinides
and such are meaningful here – it's possible that actinides and maybe lanthanides would be above the
GEN 0 island of stability, with yttrides and maybe scandides [or lighter still] taking their place as GEN
0's [rather light] “superheavy” elements). Conversely, it should take much less energy to excite an e –0
to a higher orbital, which might indicate a more chemically active system – if things aren't typically
bare nuclei (though molecular plasma is possible). Easier excitation means easier ionization.
This in turn begs the question of molecular chemistry. Honestly, given their seemingly-probable
respective Fermi levels in this example, I'd expect a decent chance of some cases of GEN 0+1 to exist
in less-than-stellar conditions (no pun intended). If GEN 0 chemistry were approximately as diverse as
our GEN 1 chemistry... consider this: for as many molecules (and isomers and allotropes and
interactions and...) as we have with 80-90 reasonably stable elements (isotopes aside), you'd expect a
0+1 chemistry to almost scale with these (naïve paired-ion molecule example: 80 2 = 6,400 → 1602 =
25,600), hence any such 0+1 combined chemistry would [if scaling similarly] be far richer than our
own.
Assuming that GEN 0 molecules were possible, with or without a GEN 1 admixture, I'd expect that
they'd dissociate more easily than ours do. Just a hunch that I haven't really thought through at all
(which I really should do, since I'm commenting on the thought), and it stems from the Fermi energy: if
GEN 0 atoms were to ionize more easily than ours do, then perhaps GEN 0 molecules would as well.
That might not matter if the background radiation were sufficiently low, but in this scenario I suppose
that it's probably too high to permit molecular bonds (except maybe if the atoms were of sufficiently
high Z and one were sufficiently stripped to bond to another's outermost e –0 shell?). If they could, then
I imagine that the binding energies available should be rather weak (note to self: how weak, exactly –
or would they instead be fairly strong?), hence lower material strengths and melting/etc. points.
GEN 0 terrestrial conditions
Given Earth's size remaining a constant, but assuming ~1/9 of the mass (for reasoning, see next
subsection on stellar fusion), our surface gravity would be ~0.11(+) g; this translates to ~1.08(+)m/s 2 of
acceleration.
I'm not even going to take a stab at the atmosphere. A lower surface gravity on its own means less
air retention; lighter air molecules means that they'd be more easily boiled off, but we're also looking at
much less energetic daylight. How much air a GEN 0 Earth might be able to retain (whether after
miraculously surviving a phase transition or as a result of natural planetary evolution in a GEN 0
universe) is too “iffy” for me. This means that I can't really look at heat retention or air pressure at all,
much less weather, ocean currents, plate tectonics, etc..
If we consider solely the question of life forms... I'm still stuck with not knowing how to work out
anything like a decent guess for molecular bond strengths (driving the strength of materials for bones,
for example). As a first-order approximation, I'll say that a given life form would require less work to
support itself against this gravity, hence (ignoring all other considerations) could afford to be much
heavier for the same metabolic cost.
GEN 0 stellar fusion
I'm not about to do this in depth, but it might be fun to look at the fusion of GEN 0 nuclei here, to
see what we might expect from a large gravitational mass. To do that, even if we're just playing with
foo-numbers, we'd need to know just how much the nuclei weigh (assuming that we're not doing a solid
workup from wave functions [that's beyond my math, sorry]). I'll take a stab at it, based upon q 0
masses and extrapolating their approximate binding energies from the percentages of the higher
generation hadrons' percentages (in order to find the expected p +0 and n°0 masses, and guess at possible
H0 / He0 / etc. masses), but nuclear physics isn't my forte (insofar as I can claim anything to be), so this
will be on even shakier ground than the rest has been so far. For the moment, I'll set aside the question
of whether it could proceed through a series of resonance peaks (e.g.: 1H + 1H → 2H, + 1H → 3He, +
3
He → 4He [each interaction plus side products]) and unlikely events (e.g.: triple alpha), and simply
assume that it's possible for large masses to at least gravitate together. Maybe nuclear fusion (or some
other mechanism with equivalent results, as long as we're changing physics in the first place) would or
could be possible with GEN 0 nuclei, and I'd love to see that, but even if not, the gravitating masses (if
large enough) presumably would radiate blackbody at the least. If these “stars” couldn't fusion-ignite,
then the infrared outpouring might still drive ecological cycles, but I don't know if mass contraction
alone could spit out enough energy to shed visible light at all. (It might be a simple and obvious
answer either way, or difficult, or the whole question is utterly inane, but I'm not feeling the draw to
investigate it right at this moment.)
Given that the rest of this appendix is all fluff for a toy-model, let's just go to the hilt here. We have
approximate percentages for binding energy, so we can find the quark-mass complement: {1 - 0.3611...
= 0.6388...} * {1 - 0.9888... = 0.0111...} = 0.0071..., giving us N 0 that are ~99.29(-)% binding energy
and ~0.71(+)% valence quark mass. We already know the GEN 0 quark-masses for this example, so
p+0 = u0u0d0 ~0.49(+) MeV (plus binding energy) and n° 0 = u0d0d0 ~0.98(+) MeV (plus binding energy).
From these we find the total masses to be p+0 = u0u0d0 ~69.1071(-) MeV and n°0 = u0d0d0 ~137.8102(-)
MeV. For simplicity, we'll consider only one typical example: 2 11p+0 + 2 11n°0 = 4.53346 * 10-12 J of
nuclear binding energy, following Khan Academy's lead. I'd like to run the GEN 0 equivalent of 63Li +
1 4 3 2 3 4 1
0n° = 2He + 1H + 4.7 MeV, or 1H (~1 MeV/N) + 1H = 2He (~7 MeV/N) + 0n° + 17.6 MeV, and
maybe another one or two, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader (you can find a few common
examples at Wikipedia's article on nuclear fusion).
4
2 He0 = 2 11p+0 + 2 10n°0
1 +
p = 0.0741895(+) AMU each
1 0
* 2 = 0.148379(+) AMU of 42He0's total mass
1
0n°0 = 0.147945(+) AMU each
* 2 = 0.295891(-) AMU of 42He0's total mass
4
2He0 = 0.148379(+) + 0.295891(-)
= 0.44427(-) AMU
4
2 He0 nucleus = 0.44427(-) AMU predicted mass
mass defect in GEN 1 42He is ~1/132.729517(+) of the total mass
if ~same%, then 42He0 mass defect ~0.003347(+) AMU
& total ~0.440922(+) AMU actual mass
E0 = m0c2 (J = kg * m2/s2); 1 AMU = 1.66054e-27 kg

m0 = 0.003347(+) AMU mass defect
* 1.66054 * 10-27 kg/AMU
= 5.558127(-) * 10-30 kg mass defect
c = 8.987552(-) * 1016
2
⸫ E0 = 4.995395(+) * 10-13 J of nuclear binding energy

where E0 indicates energy of rest mass, not some kind of magically different GEN 0 energy
The bottom line is that, unsurprisingly, with the n° 0 & p+0 weighing 1/13.58(-) & 1/6.82(-) of the
GEN 1s, 4He0's binding energy comes out in this mock up as 1/9.08(-) of normal 4He. In other words,
about 11% of normal energy production, if GEN 0 stars could exist (I presume that this wouldn't
necessarily be the same exact percentage for other fusion equations, but it shows the basic process to
derive other equations' equivalents for GEN 0). This is just the barest treatment of fusion. It doesn't
even address the equation of state for GEN 0 degeneracy pressures.
If we were to assume some universe that worked as described so far (i.e.: GEN 0 quarks and leptons
of some mass distinctly less than GEN 1's, and consequent results, but no other changes [such as other
GENs' masses, any force's strength, universe's physical dimensions, etc.] that aren't causally required
[unless we model them as unchanged by fiat]), then a gravitating body of a given volume would
contain much less mass there than a body of the same size would be here (rewording that, since
sometimes the choice of wording can muddle or clarify things: a body of a given mass would be larger
in volume there than a body of the same mass would be here).
GEN 0 quark stars
Everybody loves white dwarfs and neutron stars, right? These days, it's a popular enough topic that
you've likely run into articles on strange stars and nuggets of strange matter. There doesn't seem to be
much hope for quark stars of c, b, or t, but s is at least still a possibility.

This is an extrapolation drawn from material in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, John D.
Barrow & Frank J. Tipler, Oxford UP; New York, 1986. I had looked at it originally as a general
question of quark stars in the late '80s or early '90s, only to find in the mid- to late-'90s that I had been
scooped (Ed Witten had done a really in-depth paper on it in '84 for Phys. Rev. D [I'd swear that it's not
the “Cosmic separation of phases” paper, but I must be wrong – I have that and a good Zel'dovich, if
you're interested in them] – and it later turned out that he too had been scooped at least once in the '70s
by a Chinese group, though I can't remember their names just now). The funny thing is that I have
some old URLs on my later quark star research, and they all come up unreachable these days (or
excluded in the LANL case on Wayback).
That aside though, I can at least use it as a jumping-off point for the question of quark stars in a
hypothetical GEN 0 situation.
Below, I've copy-and-pasted some of my [incomplete] notes from a 2005 .doc version – but have
only quickly skimmed them for format; I have yet to update them to a GEN 0 context.
Note:
r0 = distance of closest approach, classically; dq same, for quarks
 = fine structure constant (2002 CODATA value ≈ 7.297 352 568 (24) x 10-3)
(2018 CODATA value ≈ 7.297 352 569 3(11) x 10-3)
G = binding energy, gravitational.(2002 CODATA value ≈ 6.6742±0.001 x 10-11 m3 s-2 kg-1)
(2018 CODATA value ≈ 6.674 30(15) x 10-11 m3 s-2 kg-1)
S = binding energy, strong force
Relativistic To for particlesx (Tmx): 1 / d2me-
Non-relativistic: given e- degeneracy pressure ≈ p2me-–1 ≈ dn2me--1

given no degeneracy pressure ≈ r0-2mn-1
 q degeneracy pressure ≈ dq2mq-1 ?
Relativistic stellar e- degeneracy pressure ≈ d(e-)-1
White dwarf: MWD ≈ G-3/2MN

RWD ≈ G-1/2me--1 :: 1/(G1/2me-)
PWD ≈ mNme-3 ≈ 109gm cm-3
Neutron star: MNS =

RNS ≈ r0N1/2 ≈ 10 (M/M0)1/3gm :: 1/(G1/2mN)
 RQS ≈ 1/(Sq1/2mq) ?
PNS ≈ mN (M/M0) gm cm [for P≱mN4]
4 2 -3
Equilibrium requirements
Neutron star
N ≈ _GM2_
r02mN R where N = M[ m ( N ) ] - 1 = number of nucleons
r0 = N - 1 / 3 R radius for neutron degeneracy
≈ mN-1
If the same holds true for white dwarfs, then:
#e- ≈ _GM2_
d2me- R
which would imply:
#q ≈ _GM2_
dq2mq R in which Mmq-1 = #q
If mean internucleon separation [p. 363, note 61]
r0 = d ≈ 2SmN-1
then presumably
r0(q) = dq ≈ 2Smq-1 ?
(Strong) binding energy of quark
Sqm ≈ [mN-(mu+2md)]/3 ≈ [0.940-(0.004+0.16)]/3 ≈ 0.258(6) GeV/c2 ?
mn° = 940 Gev/c2, dia n° ≈ (from 10-15 to 10-13 m) ⸫ d2-2 ≈ 1030
Mean interquark separation within neutron ≈ 0.520 mq-1 GeV/c2 ≈ 9.45 GeV/c2
Mean mass of (2d + 1u) ≈ 0.054(6) GeV/c2
⸫
(degeneracy pressure ≈ d2-2mq-1) 
(degeneracy pressure ≈ 9.45-2 * 0.055-1 GeV/c2) ≈ 0.205… GeV/c2
If
#q ≈ _GM2_
dq2mq R in which Mmq-1 = #q
Then (assuming up and down quarks only, for now)
(M★ ≈ 1031N)  (M★ ≈ 3*1031q) ⸫ (#q/dq2mq) ≈ ([3*1031]/[89.3*0.055])
6108113610913162984831517866232.3
NOT EQUAL TO PAPER VERSION ≈ 0.611 ≈ GM2/R ; r0 ≈ 9.45, mq ≈ 0.55 GeV/c2 UNITS OF MEAS.?
(R ≈ f(km)?))
GM2/R ≈ ([6.6726*10-8] * M[in gm]2) / R(in km?) 108 to 1014 (gm?) / (≱ 10 km)
Here M is M★, but in what unit of measurement?
Ratio of sizes:
q★ : N★ = RNS ≈ mN ≈ 17.1
Rqs mq
*** Run comparison of degen. pres. on e-, n°, & q:
e- ≈ 1/(d2me-); d ≈ 2EMme--1
n° ≈ 1/(d2mn°); d ≈ 2Smn°-1
q ≈ 1/(d2mq); d ≈ 2Smq-1 ?
GEN 0 solar evolution
Assuming that Sol's mass were dropped to ~0.11(+) M ⊙ (i.e.: within the red dwarf range, toward the
lower end; a little less massive than Proxima Centauri), and that the size and pressure remained the
same (here we're assuming a balance of forces) – and that it weren't to simply explode outright (though
maybe asking this of a universe that began with GEN 0 particles and stars is more reasonable than
picturing anything remaining physically intact after such a phase transition) – then it might look there
much like our stars of that same mass (~0.16 radius, ~3*10 -3 luminosity) here: ~2,900 K (vs. Sol's
~6,000 K), mostly infrared (visually appearing to be something in a light pumpkin color).
Since we're assuming that the only change here is the energy output, not the size, it would
presumably have a luminosity of L = R ⊙2 * T⊙4 = 12 * (~2,900/6,000)4 = ~0.05(+) L⊙ (hence appearing
to be as bright there at 1 AU as Sol would be here at ~4.28(+) AU [hence <5.46% as bright]: we receive
~120,000 lux under direct noonday sunlight here; if our atmosphere there had the same effects as it has
here, then we would instead receive ~6,549(-) lux there [i.e.: more than 3x that of an overcast day, less
than 1/3 that of shade under a clear sky]).
If our red dwarfs' fully convective model held for the same mass range there, then it should maintain
its luminosity and main sequence status for several trillion years (i.e.: it would then have ~1,000x its
current life expectancy).
GEN 0 element distribution
Assuming that no great differences were to obtain, then we might expect nucleosynthesis to follow a
pattern similar to what seems to have been the case for us. Starting with hadronization and moving
along to fusion (p-process), we see helium, lithium, beryllium, etc. and various isotopes thereof (r-
process and s-process). Wait around for a few stellar generations of novae/supernovae to populate the
heavier elements such as iron, uranium, etc.. Maybe throw in natural decay products, or other possible
cosmogenic processes (cosmic rays, neutron stars).
The results should end up with a distribution curve of how much of each element you have on hand.
Initially: pretty identical to nothing. Let things cool down a little and you have a lot of hydrogen
and some percentage of helium. Given more time, you start seeing the numbers creep up in favor of
heavier materials, at least until you start looking at deep time and iron stars (without going quite so far
as proton decay or black hole decay products).
Image found at http://www.astronoo.com/en/articles/abundance-of-the-elements.html
If a universe began with a GEN 0 situation (inasmuch as one might say that ours “began” with a
GEN 1 situation), and there were some inherent issue such that any resulting periodic table just weren't
the same (lighter cutoff of stability as conjectured, though a heavier cutoff would presumably show
some quirks too), then some GEN 0 astrophysicist might look to the skies and calculate percentages
and find a happy agreement between prediction and observation.
On the other hand, if a GEN 0 universe arose from the transformation of an extant GEN 1 universe,
then that GEN 0 astrophysicist might be in for a real head-scratcher: their universe looks to be a certain
age (though their stars' apparent lifespans might be calculated as a little shorter than our own, if there's
any issue from the question of just where the elements' stability ends), but their elements' relative
abundances would presumably be skewed far more in favor of heavy elements than they'd expect (that
is: their heavier elements' distribution would imply a far older universe than they could reasonably
account for, since any elements that used to be GEN 1 that are too heavy to be stable in GEN 0 would
decay down toward still-fairly-heavy resulting nuclides [setting aside the question of the release of
binding energy during the 1→0 process in the first place] – in fact, this might even lead to something
like a bimodal distribution, since they presumably wouldn't simply decay in a nicely behaved spread
with products favoring light elements: plenty of light elements since neither GEN 0 nor GEN 1 has any
issue with those, plenty of heavy elements [or at least in far greater abundance than they'd predict]
having decayed from heavier GEN 1 starting points, and not so many in the middle since neither
process would yet have had much time to reach that point). Consider this: some element “n 0” is the
heaviest stable possible GEN 0 nucleus, and you convert GEN 1 element (n+20) 1 to GEN 0; whether it
splits into a two (n+20)0/2 = ([n/2]+10)0 nuclei, or one n0 + one n=200, or more than two nuclei of
whatever masses, the most likely is simply something relatively heavy but stable plus some tiny extra
bit(s)... and this means that you'd suddenly the right side of your graph to be more heavily populated
than it would be by natural occurrence.
What would this mean for their particle physicists' study of hypernuclei, and maybe eventually
hyperchemistry? Assuming that they could do so, then they'd soon be where we are now: finding
“weird” GEN 1+ particles, studying their force interactions, deducing their properties, injecting them
into “normal” GEN 0 nuclei, and wondering if they could stabilize these results for long term scientific
study and technological application – and perhaps a public outcry over possible 1-star nuggets
converting the planet to 1-matter. If you're curious, you can get a feel for them at
https://slideplayer.com/slide/12510415/ or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypernucleus, but note that
these both refer to hypernuclei in the usual sense of GEN 1 nuclei that contain baryons of 1-3 strange
quarks and nothing heavier; here I'm referring to any heavier than GEN 1 quark content (it's a misuse
of the term, but the alternative is to say “heavy”, which similarly refers only to charmed quarks or
heavier). You can also find an outline of hadrons in general in Appendix E of “I am Legion”.
Conclusion
The punchline to all of this is that simple rules can lead to utterly unexpected results (I wouldn't think
that Conway's 23/3 rule would yield results that were at all interesting – clearly I'd be wrong), so you
can't necessarily easily guess an outcome.
From that being wrong, I'd think that there would be all sorts of cool results from any variation of
23/3. Again, I'd be wrong. (I.e.: sometimes you can double-guess badly when your first thought was
right.)
Between these two lies the Goldilocks zone, twisted around like the Mandelbrot set: sometimes the
hunt itself is the most fun of all (and that's what this GEN 0 appendix is about: assigning some value
for fun, not necessarily a correct one, and seeing what it might lead to), and you might find a tiny tweak
yielding surprisingly interesting or boring results. Whatever the values of GEN 0 particles might be if
calculated by someone who knew what they were doing, the values here at least let us peek into what
the results might look like if these numbers were correct for any given step.
Addendum
For those who are really curious, the same [rather pointlessly unscientific] calculation method
applied upward would have GEN 4 masses come out as follows (this b' would show up an order of
magnitude sooner than our current lower limit research suggests [so... not terribly realistic], and the
same issue shows up for leptons [at least two whole magnitudes too light], but at least the associated t'
is safely above the current real world minimum mass limit), which leads me to wonder just how
accurately I've run the numbers for our imagined GEN 0 particles.
MeV q↑ diff Diff 2

5687346.1897 0.030418405
173000 0.0073410405 0.2413354827
1270 0.0017716535
2.25
MeV q↓ diff Diff 2

373808.69344 0.0111955663
4185 0.0234169654 2.0916284881
98 0.0489795918
4.8
MeV L± diff Diff 2

2430.3446279 0.7311144188
1776.86 0.0594635337 0.0813327329
105.6583745 0.0048363317
0.5109989461
MeV v° diff Diff 2

1.7578562473 10.353520106
18.2 0.0104395604 0.0010083102
0.19 1.05263E-005
0.000002
GEN: 0 1 2 3 4
q± MeV/c2 9.62(+)e-4 2.2 (+0.5,-0.4) 1275 (+25,-35) 1.73e5 (±400) 5.69(-)e7
0.492(-) 4.7 (+0.5,-0.3) 95 (+9,-3) 4180 (+40,-30) 3.74(-)e5
lep± (AMU → MeV) 2.01(+)e-4 0.5109989(+) 105.65837(+) 1776.86(±0.12) 2430.34(+)
v° MeV/c2 < 2.1(+)e-14 < 2e-6 < 0.19 < 18.2 1.75(+)
Hmm... I wonder how things might look if [in the real world] instead of a symmetry break of weak
and electromagnetism, we had experienced a break of electrical charge and magnetoweak, or magnetic
charge and electroweak [a literal electroweak, sans magnetism, not the SU(2) x U(1) of the standard
model]. For that matter, what if electromagnetism were particularly self-interacting at low orders
(maybe photoballs would be hypothesized in such a world, much like glueballs today), or photons
exhibited generational differences?
For more questions like these, see: “The eighteen arbitrary parameters of the Standard Model in
your everyday life” (Robert N. Cahn, 1996).
If you enjoy this stuff, but it's a bit too heavy, then I recommend “Black Holes and Time Warps”
(Kip S. Thorne, 1994) and “The Anthropic Cosmological Principle” (Barrow & Tipler, 1986); the latter
is primarily philosophical for the first third (or 2/3?), but gets to the physics in good time. There are
also some really interesting (old) pieces from Scientific American, “Particles and Forces: At the Heart
of Matter” (1990) and “Particle Physics in the Cosmos” (1989), which go for about $25 each on
Amazon – though I imagine that there's more-up-to-date material out there by now. For more-
immediately accessible reading, poke around at http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/index.html.
On a more whimsical note, you might like the magmatter write-up at Orion's Arm, or their
fascinating article on neutron star vortex biology:
https://orionsarm.com/eg-article/53961a52bb97a
https://orionsarm.com/eg-article/46709d53449d2
If this material is too light and fluffy for your level, then I recommend https://arxiv.org/. Really
good material there, some of it being fairly standard and some rather bleeding edge. You won't be
disappointed (though sometimes you'll need your Google Fu in order to find the more rare items
elsewhere).
You might also consider http://vixra.org/; it has a bit of disrepute to it, but that doesn't necessarily
make a given paper wrong – and regardless of veracity or lack thereof, that doesn't necessarily mean
that something isn't an interesting read, or might not spark a perfectly valid line of reasoning (or game /
fiction ideas).
O ~~~ O
SCRIBBLED NOTES TO GET BACK TO

Wow... oh goody, StackExchange's Arqade section might be as warm-and-welcoming for Sonic's

gravity as WorldBuilding was for Icewall...: https://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/344948/what-
value-of-surface-gravity-does-m%C3%B6bius-have-in-the-sonic-games-esp-w-r-t-v has 6 views in 33
minutes yielding 2 downvotes in the 1st 5 views.
What value of surface gravity does Möbius have in the Sonic games (esp. w.r.t. Ver. 1991)?
I'm trying to compare/contrast the surface gravity of Sonic's Möbius with that of
Marioworld. There's an excellent article [1] that analyzed Marioworld's surface gravity
across several games, wherein the mean average turned out to be 7.51(-) g. In trying
to find similar material on Möbius, I've so far found only some material for generic
differences between the games [2] and Source engine gravity [3] (after which I
broadened my search to Sega Genesis's gravity in general, but no luck so far);
Googling quite a few terms has been singularly unforthcoming.
I'm not asking in order to write code for game development. I'm curious about it for a
much more mundane reason: I'm writing a fanfic in which Sonic noticed the difference
immediately upon arrival. This means that I don't require 5 SD of accuracy (my OCD
would love that, of course), but would like more than my own ballpark guesswork.
Sources cited:
[1] https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2007/mariogravity.shtml
[2] What are the different versions of Sonic the Hedgehog (1991) and what differs
between them?
[3] What is the gravity model in Source engine games?
ADDED COMMENT: I've gone over the title and question and compared them with the
question-asking standards, but I can't figure out what the 2 down-votes (out of 6 views) are for. 2/6
means that there's clearly something wrong with my question. Could someone clarify how I could
improve whatever is wrong with my question?
Hi @charles. A lot of users here just don't like what they deem as 'trivia' questions. That would be
my guess.– Buns Glazing
Worrisome, and a bit of a shame, but understandable I suppose. If that's it, then I hope that I don't
run into too many more drive-by-trivia-haters. Given your profile, I'm guessing that you'd likely have
spotted and mentioned any errata or formal faux pas in the question. Thanks! :-)
S → Z: Whereunto? Jeez, ya make my head hurt wit' some o' the shit you say...
Peach palm fruit and hearts, pond apples
Might be some useful historical material: http://sonic.wikia.com/wiki/Sonic's_World
“Pennies from Heaven”
Octorillas: looking for bits of Barsoom here
Robinson Crusoe / Swiss family Robinson
25 days alone, 28 months on island w/ Friday til T 'ported in, 20 more months til Z
if I claim to be a wise man, it surely means that I don't know...
Cove: Z had already been catabolizing for weeks
severe chronic malnourishment, recent moderate physical trauma, list goes on.
Not much left of her, physically or mentally.
Z felt like zombie, might as well have been one for all of her responsiveness
wall of carcasses around ruins kept predators warned off
Belittling remarks behind death's back
MacGuyver
Sleestak tech holds Friday's sisters in stasis
starve for a few days, forget about food or hunger
it isn't the narcissists; we steal our own years.
S square foot gardening for Z
castle ruins lie atop a butte next to bluff
bearcats
<at shore of lake village> cold inside, skinny, hungry, not sure when last ate
Queen snakes? Why'd it hafta be queen snakes?
Vermicious knids
S: Yeah, well, meanwhile, back at The Fortress of Doom...
Hey, ya wanna dye a buck? If yer short on 'em, I could be a loaner of an only hart.
Waddya wanna do tonight, Z? Plan ta take over the world?
Zuzu's petals
S is convinced that he's playing Thomas Covenant
S Follows Friday to crystal cave, sees others, whistles softly: Show us yer mother, Riff...
S scouts dungeon, finds decent spank tank
T trying to find magic fairy smoke to fill the circuits
S → T: coconut radios? Starlite? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqR4_UoBIzY
S thinks of Deku Scrubs as somewhat like Mégamicres
S: in the jungle, we're all just another animal
Rand, Calvin, Hobbes? (latter two might be more appropriate to “I am Legion”)
S (z): long, dark night...
s salted herring from lake across village, sour cream, relish, onion
z maybe fennel? F horesradish
(note: had idea, Google showed a bunch like it)
dandelions, marigolds, goldenrod, ragweed (snow doesn't look likely, though), sumpweed -- even
milkweed if it comes to that. chicken gruyere; shredded cauliflauer, oysters, green apple jelly, liver,
caviar, sliced scallops, salad dressing, chives;
garlic, sour cream, saffron, lemon juoce, gelatin, fennel, sage
-- cream of cabbage with topping of coquilles san jac + caviar
(Helene Darroze)
bulette marengo, when plan vs WBD settled upon (insp by Antoine Careme's Napoleonic conquer
dinner):
fried/sauteed in olive oil; add eggs, tomatoes, garlic, mushrooms, olives, tomato sauce, glazed
onions
escoffier-like: salmon venetian sauce white wine, truffle-chicken w feta sauce vol au vent, cuisses de
nav au roux
roasted saddle of lamb, dress w herbs n surround w apples, cover w apple puree
roast more
pour over it: 1 decltr porteaux blend w nutmeg, cinnamon, pepper; reduce by 1/3
add 4 dl bread currant jelly, 2 spoons fine grate horse radish
horse radish sauce accompany, topped with vanilla sorbee and kirsch
she showed up naked, with food.
zoom out on lava ship's map, scale vs ship, get distance confirmation
Best bad idea I've had all day. Swear I smell cinnamon, too.
Omelas :: Cabin in the woods
S: He-man, technicolor dreamcoat. I _knew_ I knew there was some'n buggin' me. They tunes're the
same shit!
When nothing we do matters... the only thing that matters is what we do.
s -> t think ya can ya hotwire this thing?
Wonder if it's got got IFF...
salmon, cucumber, dill, sparkling light lettuce
Thunderheads death mtn rainshdw
Fridays release stiff stumbling
Play piano joke
Every move just part bigger set mvs
Wendigo
Mercy compassion hesitation
Forgiveness WBD regret/nonregret
Ambivalence
Some sulphur in air
Life stinks
Fingerprint friday
Big red button? Seriously?
S z need opposing opinion
Ill be your pain in ass on shoulder
Sometimes life gets in the way?
Zelda hyrule thou shallt be avenged
You survived. You walked away from
everything and lived. Bakemono!
Yeah well, maybe i can become a
real boy after all...
Wanna dye a buck?
Deja vu, spidey sense, hooves fate
Warped dist infntl close n far bth incr
Police "don't stand so close to me"
Weakness n blindspot n agendas
Oingo boingo good yeah

Z splain not lord foul or sing dtctiv
more re:zero
S z maid's day off but hey, light
works, gravity works
Bitey baby suchus
Box o' rocks
It'll all end in tears
Thou hast summat of the wolf about thee
Cloacal mulch hole
Z face no need read: screams clear
F fronds tousle arousal
S sips lng isl tea as t pops out gate
Cryo holo-flame density
Octorilla nonthreat iq 2d4+1
All the time in the world...
Plenty metal in castle n town
No hydropon schema but basics
S stole through ruins as if occupied
but all quiet west front
Pyrmd no mummies or egg sacs
yet another deserted place...
F -> Fhrade
Direct or sneak atks minimal
Finally intent caught so wbd gloat
S back real. Hvy slow breaths.
Still feel all. Saw f wipe brow.
Knew safe still looked for wbd
Tense n ready nrvs scream
Puff the magic dragon...
Fronds. He repulsed her.
Broke taboo
Land in world w same lang unlikely
Cmd vs autonomy
S ccmd ~O6, auton ~E7
F: s dth n vlnc as mantle placed, but
cast shdw of atmptd harmony
Bedrm sheep skin warm thick door
Vent shaft cool breeze later constrctn
Add macauley ref to afterword
Some tools left preserved, ancient
food stores
Wonton soup dinner
Fried fish
Pernil
Malta
T speech uber clipped
Culture tv some no word good bad

Z moves quiet fear noise attn
Ocsionl tremble twitch no reason
Yeah he-llo [blank] makes so mch sns
How cross mesa to main island?
Ginger snaps (chewy)
Sonic o6 but also e7
Wbd real bad guy but adhd basically
Lil deb dutch apple treats
S z someday yer princess'll come
Ref scott adams god cloud pdf
Btm line is what is so try get by
Border trauma bond vs aversion
Fruit salad lightly sweetened cream
cheese oatmeal next awoke
two candles low oil lamp
F avatar-like hair-sex fetidh-like
Simpsons alien hand hold
Light so bright he could hear it
F ass match midriff pattern
No surprise common to match
F knows animal mating habits
Morng after pancakes fr toast waffles
Cin toast ton bacn 5 kind eggs
Memo rbnk dead world between
Racelon hell world watched
Snt
Lava ship sys like all logic flows
Barbarella duran duran
Woody allen sleeper
Morn aft ruru kissy noises
S smile you got it ratbert
S t CTOs decompress
Caution: adult situations n material
Teach fight
Here was the catch quid pro quo
Send PSH to flip killbits
"Handle" T convrstn then Z same
R: slip n slide?
S → eclair-like bun w/ spinach dip and chopped jalapeños filling & sausage pizza-like topping? He
does this with a garlic bulette and broccoli stir fry. Goes over well enough, though not rave reviews.
“It's... good, it's just that... the flavors don't really come together. They sit there in your mouth,
ignoring one another. Loudly.”
S → Z “So, motherfucker nearly rolled you up, an' ya got nobody you can drop a dime to an' get this
shit-sack taken care of?”
<Z tries to work her way through this sentence>

“Nobody'll hook you up an' off this fuck-wad. Nobody's gotcher back. Friends 'n' allies?”
<Oh, then nod, then shake vigorously>
S finds a fair amount of materials, tools, etc. lying around in keep and village
Great, it's the freakin' Mary Celeste.
S re. lava ship: broke dick, suggests BFM

also asks about box nasties
Memories. A lot of dead hedgehogs. Trial runs, mazes, cybernized animals pitted against one another.
Beatings. So many beatings. And then Tails.

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Sonic's Redemption page 1 of 89

NB: See https://archiveofourown.org/works/24230851 for most recent completed version (and

Book 0b, Sonic's Redemption, ALPHA VER 0.2.b.1 + AO3.odt

~~~ ~~~ ~~~

~~~ ~~~ ~~~

This is an ALPHA version. The file name indicates my estimation of its

Simplest of all, just go to

Book 0a, Zelda Invictus

Light World sidequels:

07 To be (Zelda x Peach world)

Icewall shared universe:

...and many more at

/// --- ///

Sonic the Hedgehog, our protagonist

Wila “Friday” Mesquite, a Deku Scrub

Miles “Tails” Prower

Imperial Princess Zelda Hylia of Hyrule, a Hylian

Warbotdorf, the Big Bad

Chapter 1: The Island

“Well my name's John Lee Pettimore,

Ya hardly ever saw Grandaddy down here,

“Oh, I got a lo-ve-ly bunch o' coconuts...

5 Coconut alcohol: https://www.leaf.tv/articles/how-to-make-alcohol-from-coconut-water/

...and you see a girl's brown body

near the drummer.

The green and orange eyes narrowed in further puzzled fumbling.

He batted playfully at a small cloud of it passing by.

At turns, his mind wandered.

Time passes, F integrates quickly, things find new balance.

Wila looked around, deciding on breakfast. Something light maybe...

But that had never happened.

As they ate, Wila watched.

hip, this time in her cushion-nest.

...I'm the fly in your soup,

I'm the peel on which you slip,

– and it's so easy when you're evil!

S explores mountain to north-northwest. F and R accompany, no surprise. Find burned-down Hylian

It was nice to give in to those febrile dreams.

He'd drifted again.

Chapter 3: Fox populi

“Wastin' away in Margaritaville,

“It's good ta see you again, brother,” Sonic closed.

Act 2: The sleeper awakes

Her ship was cast adrift.

“Eat,” Tails coaxed, “Krebs cycle is unforgiving.”

toward the door, accompanied by the merest twitch of her head.

up there, on the same day as she'd arrived.

S brings kills to cook, drags in hauls of fruit and veggies.

<S & T tap in place, some tension from S>

<T repeats performance>

<S does a little soft shoe across the sandstone>

<T mums uncertainty>

Act 3: Resonant Evil

Then there was the triumphant parade.

through their city.

Snag w/ topic of cooking.

S → Z: Yeah? Don't stick yer dick in crazy – or yer tongue. Whatever.

“...little Jackie Paper

Z turned to him quizically.

“Who is the lolo

S → T: Landin' strips might be a problem. Can ya knock out a helium balloon?

guarantee of landfall, much less a safe one.

“Moloch,” Sonic spat in disgust.

A just machine to make big decisions,

Book 0b, Sonic's Redemption, ALPHA VER 0.2.b

Book 0b, Sonic's Redemption, ALPHA VER 0.2.b

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(M★ ≈ 1031N)  (M★ ≈ 31031q) ⸫ (#q/dq2mq) ≈ ([31031]/[89.3*0.055])