Honesty is the Best Policy {Comic Edition}

Chapter 49: Sonic Holmes

"Glad to see you've finally come to your senses, Shadow," Mephiles exclaimed, his eyes widening. "Are you ready to start your sinister reign over the humans?"
He had Shadow suspended in the air upside-down beside the broad, dark, wooden desk that sat at one end of the small and rectangular room. The Ultimate Living Pendulum struggled, which just caused him to sway a bit from side to side.
When the profane principal saw Honest and Hearts enter the room, all of the wind seemed to be knocked out of his sails as he observed the other two visitors with confusion evident in his soulless eyes. "You are here to finally join me, aren't you?"
"Hearts just needs a schedule," Honest informed him, pushing said tricolor cat softly from behind up to the front of the desk. The tentacles quickly retracted and dropped Shadow unceremoniously into the strangely cushioning bed of writhing tentacles beneath. Mephiles stepped up to the other side of the desk and levitated a bit in order to stretch across the breadth of it to get a better look of the rather, despite the circumstances, lax-looking cat standing before him. "So, you're going to be attending classes here, hm? What a surprise." Then, to contradict himself, Mephiles pulled a sheet of paper out from the cloud of darkness behind him and passed it to Hearts.
So… it wasn’t a surprise to him because he already had one printed. How could he have possibly known about Hearts starting school here? Honest had only just recently discovered this herself.
Mephiles saw Honest's brief look of confusion and chuckled ominously. "Did you catch the contradiction there, Miss Author?"
"Y-Yeah," Honest responded, crossing her arms and tapping on her chin with a finger as she thought about what to say. "Hearts coming to school today couldn't have been a surprise to you because you already have her schedule made."
"Correct," the demonic hedgy said, sliding off of the desk. When he stood back up, his arms stayed stiffly held out in front of him and his head stayed facing slightly downwards towards the floor. He looked like a zombie. "After you guys left me stranded in Moebius, I had to find my own way back, and I had to pass through No Zone to do that." He lifted his head back up and let his arms hang loosely. "I… Overheard some things on my way through. My full apologies, Hearts."
Hearts shrugged. "Meh, it's nothing."
“Oh yeah, last I heard, Scourge was working on getting the teleporter back online to get Rosy. She’ll need a late slip when she gets here,” Honest told the shady principal, trying to ignore Hearts’ much too laid-back reply.
“‘Last you heard’? When was that?” Shadow asked.
“I texted him before we left this morning,” Honest answered him rather pointedly. “This isn’t the 50s, Shadow. People have these newfangled devices called phones that can receive a signal even through your thick skull.”
“Okay, okay, I get it!” Shadow exclaimed, his eyes inward facing angle brackets.
“Oh yeah, and something else I heard-” Mephiles began, putting his hand to the place where his mouth would be if he had one and acting as if he were relaying some sort of juicy gossip. Shadow narrowed his eyes at his demonic duplicate’s disingenuous display. "Apparently, the unwanted sibling of the Sonic villains, Infinite, has returned to this realm as well. How problematic."
"He's less of a problem now that he's no longer a student council member," Shadow pointed out.
Honest crossed her arms and grunted out of annoyance. "Well, he's not any more of a problem."
"How so?"
"He's not gonna put us in detention and create any more play drama, but now…" Honest trailed off as she started to think about all the hairy situations having Infinite as an adversary might bring now that he had something against Scourge. He now had a reason to want to make Scourge's life miserable, not to mention Honest's as well.
He turned to Honest with sweat flying out from beneath his mask, a sign he was worried. "You're... going to get me out of here, too, right?"
"Let's see," she said, tapping her cheek with her index finger. "Without that red gem, you're pretty harmless. We could ask that you be released, but-" Honest smiled and shrugged. "I dunno, I rather like the sight of you behind bars. Maybe some other time."
The sight of that one yellow eye peeking out of Infinite's precious mask and contracting to the size of a pinprick told Honest everything she wanted to know. Despite their differences and, well, the fact that Honest was best friends with the one person he hated most in the whole universe, Infinite considered Honest an ally. He considered her his friend.
Really, Honest had known this since the very beginning. Of course she knew. She was the writer afterall. At the time, Honest was afraid that she was making it too obvious, but now she was hoping that it had been obvious enough. However, so much time had passed, so had it even been worth it? May of 2019. That's… almost four years ago at this point! Even before then, it had been a thing. That was just when Chapter 22 of {w/Rosy} had been published, a chapter in which this plot was mentioned aloud.
"Hey, Inf. If your goal is to convince me to carry your revenge on Shadow out for you, why are you claiming me as your arch nemesis as well?" Infinite looked as confused as Honest was. "I mean, don't you want to do what Mephiles would do and befriend me so that you can get me to join your cause?"
Infinite blinked. "Uh, I..." He looked at Shadow.
Just two chapters before, Honest and Infinite's rivalry had been highlighted by Scourge to draw attention away from him and Rosy's problems. However, this plot point had existed in Honesty is the Best Policy since Infinite had been originally brought into the story way back in Chapter 1 of {Forces Edition}.
The point Honest is trying to make here is that Infinite, despite seeing Honest as his biggest obstacle, thought, up to this point, that she was his friend or, at least, that she wouldn't betray him because she was a good person at heart.
However, Honest leaving Infinite in No Zone was proof that she wasn’t a good person.
…No, no, she was still a "good person." Infinite was a bad person, so it was only natural that Honest reacted in the way that she did.
"...Now, Infinite's a problem in a different way." Honest explained, turning away from Shadow as she continued to think deeply.
"You're not still talking about what you found out in the hallway just now, are you?" Shadow asked. He knew she couldn't be because the expression on her face was far too grave.
Mephiles was way too quiet right now. He was still expelling gaseous darkness in a cloud around himself as he peered over his desk at the group, resembling a noble watching peasants milling about in the streets outside his window. If Mephiles had a mouth, Honest guessed that it would be twisted into a smugly content smile right about now. Why was he so pleased by the way?
Honest soon got her answer. “‘How problematic’ for Honest,” Mephiles corrected ominously. This correction, however, went completely over Shadow’s head.
“Yeah, that’s what she said. Infinite is now a problem for Honest and Scourge since they’ve become enemies,” Shadow summarized, tilting his head. Mephiles gave him a deadpanned look, communicating his annoyance, which also went over Shadow’s head. “What?”
Meanwhile, Hearts was looking over the schedule she had been handed. Honest started looking over her shoulder at it as well. Hearts noticed and drew the sheet of paper to her chest, hiding it from sight. "What are you doing?"
"I was about to lend you my help," Honest told her. "You want help finding your first class?"
Hearts looked down at the sheet of paper and then back up at her twin. "Okay. It's…" She looked down at the sheet of paper again. "...Business Management."
"Hey, that's my first class!" Honest exclaimed excitedly. "We're running business simulators for the first semester. I can give you a small loan of a million rings to get you started."
"You've made a million rings?" Hearts asked, acting blown away by that fact.
"Well-" Honest tapped on her chin thoughtfully as she walked out of the room. "We grossed a hundred million last year alone. I'm on the fast track to beating that by at least twenty million this year."
"Woah," Hearts breathed, absolutely mesmerized.
"But it's all a simulation, you know. The only reason I've been able to make so much virtual currency is because I've exploited the system. You see, I run my business like a sweatshop-- the stations are packed so close together that fires break out every day, but when workers are injured and go on strike, I just pay their doctor bills and up their pay until they're satisfied and go back to work. Because I work them so hard, I make enough profit that I can spend a huge chunk of it on payroll and still turn out a profit. That sort of thing would never work in real life because there are laws that prevent that sort of inhumane treatment from occurring. If those laws were also part of the simulation's system, my winning business structure would, of course, have to be tweaked." Hearts' eyes were still sparkling. Honest shrugged. "The reason I'm doing so well isn't that I'm a great business manager, it's that I'm great at finding and abusing exploits in video games." They turned and started heading down the hallway. “What’s your second period class?”
“Study hall.”
“Hey, that’s what I have! I usually work on writing the next chapter instead of studying anything. Our teacher is pretty lax. He’s a crocodile…”
The two cats’ voices faded away as they left. Shadow turned to Mephiles. “I… need to start heading to class. I have homework I need to turn in for Reading.”
“You don’t yet know how to read?” Mephiles asked, his eyes half-lidded despite his voice sounding somewhat enthusiastic about his false assumption. “That’s embarrassing.”
“What, no! I know how to read. There’s way more to learn about reading, though. Like reading strategies and reading comprehension,” Shadow explained. He then put a palm to his forehead and sighed. “I don’t know why I’m trying to explain it to you.” He turned and marched towards the open door.
“Because you care what I think of you perhaps,” Mephiles suggested, leaning forward on his elbows.
“Haha, very funny.”