Supersonic Spectacular!

Ch.1 - Wintry Warfare

11/30/2018

Sonic the Hedgehog was asleep on the roof as he waited for lunch to end. He had been doing this consistently for the past few weeks. He'd finish his lunch (typically a chili dog) in a supersonic second and then escape to the school's rooftop for a quick nap until the bell would ring. And so today it did, and he awoke to join a swarm of FCs on their way to class.

Sonic's class sat shivering in Doctor Eggman's room (he was their science and robotics teacher). He was going on about their latest project: a robotic snowman that could hurl snowballs at passers-by. It wasn't that the students found the concept of building a robot boring, but only that Eggman would criticize their every mistake, sculpting each anthropomorphic creature to manufacture in his image, demanding that they incorporate a wavy mustache or evil secondary purpose.

As always, Shadow was above it all. He sat in the back of the room, arms crossed and neck surrounded in a green scarf. He had a thousand-yard stare pointed directly at the Doctor. No one else even bothered to look in any particular direction, but Dr. E felt like the whole world -- edgelords and emos alike -- was betting on his next move.

He felt pressured into making a rather un-Eggman-like decision. He urged everyone to go outside and "play in the snow." Shadow was the last to leave his classroom.

In a frozen huddle, Sonic and his friends were coming to a conclusion. "That classroom was our last line of defence from this weather!" said Amy. "Not to mention the best place to get warm," said Knuckles. The others gave him an appropriate look. Sonic shifted the focus, "Guys, I think Shadow made him feel like he had to do something." Tails was curious. "Do you think that's Shadow's idea of fun?"

"I know I didn't hear those two words in the same sentence," said some random background character.

"Would everybody just forget I said that!?" Sonic whined. It was hard not to hear everything coming from the blue blur as a complaint for the last eight years. The sound of miniature jet engines hovering overhead caused all heads to turn.

"What?" Shadow was floating about five feet off the ground with a trail of melted snow behind him. The jet streams caused the snow directly beneath him to dissipate and make a clearing at his feet, where he landed by clicking a small red button on one of his skates.

"Woah," Sonic marveled, "I haven't seen you use those things since SA2! Why don't you hover like that all the time?"

"Well, I mean it cuts down on travel costs... they're not allowed inside, and I don't have many classes outside the main building."

"In that case," the blue hedgie asked, "can I have your shoes?"

"What? No, that's gay."

"How is that the slightest bit gay?"

"Aw chaos, do I have to tell you that story again? The first two hedgehogs partook of the chili dog tree --"

"Those are real?"

"Uh... moving on. Anyway, they took a chili dog from the forbidden tree, and it gave them unholy knowledge. Thus, they realized that their ungloved hands that touched the tree were indecent, and so were their feet when they dropped the chili dog."

"Oh, so that explains why we always wear gloves and shoes!" Knuckles exclaimed.

"It does?" asked Mephiles, creeping up on them, "I thought it explained how Shadow is better than you foolish, arrogant--"

Sonic hurled a snowball at the embodiment of darkness, who boiled into an oily mass and seeped into the snow underfoot without another word.

"Mephy! What happened?" shouted Silver as he ran, arms flailing, to the scene. He knelt by the puddle of sinister sludge and scooped it up in his hands. "Wait, I'm confused," said Sonic, "Are they friends?"

No one answered as Silver constructed a lopsided snowman and dotted its eyes and mouth with Mephiles' slime. Tails finally joined in, exclaiming, "It needs a hat to come to life!"

They combined their efforts into lifting a dripping mass of semi-solid goo and placing it on the snowman's head. Its eyes turned red as it twisted its head around. "Season's greetings, mortals," it said in a voice that sounded like it was coming from the end of a long steel tunnel.

Silver and Tails ran off screaming.

Shadow looked around and decided what was best done in such a predicament. "Chaos spear!" The snowman dissipated as Mephiles formed outwardly beside it. "Ouch," he said, lacking emotion.

Silver and Tails huddled by the fire from Blaze's constant and tiring accelerator tornado. "Is it gone yet?" asked Tails. A dark liquid stained the snow from behind an adjacent tree. "I think that's him," Silver whispered.

"Where?" asked a timid Cubot, hiding behind the tree with oil leaking everywhere. Everyone let out a sigh of relief except for Cubot, utterly confused.

"But seriously," said Tails, "That's gross."

The ominous threat of Mephiles the Snowman was still too great for anyone to laugh. They remembered its every unnatural movement, its snake-like eyes and void in the place of a mouth.

Meanwhile, Shadow hovered toward Rouge, lying on a tree's branch and playing something on her 3DS. "Rouge! Thank Chaos I found you!" He desperately dodged snowballs as she glanced at him disapprovingly. "What's the matter? Is the Ultimate Lifeform scared of a little snow?"

Shadow struggled to talk as he swerved side to side, trying as well not to burn the tree down with blasts of jet fuel. "Yes," he responded, "No. Uh, maybe." Before Rouge could assess the situation, a single terrible event befell them all.

The Ultimate stopped to catch his breath, and he turned around to see Sonic's last tired attempt to strike him. A hastily misshapen orb of snow, compounded by gloved hands in a rush, soared through the air, visible only as a blur. It impacted the side of Shadow's head with a low and compressed sound that can only accurately be described with such brevity:

Thump.

Shadow was filled with such seething rage, blind ire, that he made seen his fangs when he rotated to face his rival head-on. To any soul of you familiar with his game in 2005, he had become what is essentially "Dark Shadow."

He froze reality with Chaos Control. In this pause, he scooped up snowballs and hurled them toward Sonic so that when the flow of time was restored, Sonic was hit repeatedly with a chain of snowballs in rapid succession.

His neck nearly broke with every hit. As soon as his head would snap back into place with his posture lowered each time exponentially, another snowball would pound it back into place. Eventually, he fell to the ground without a grunt. All was silent but the distant roaring of an accelerator tornado.

Shadow was breathing heavily. All eyes were on Sonic, however. Suddenly, their gaze shifted to a flying contraption overhead. "Aha!" exclaimed Doctor Eggman from his hovering vehicle, "It's just as I planned it all along! Now Sonic is rendered incapable of defeating me as I take over the world!"

"Oh, come on!" shouted Tails, "You didn't plan anything!"

"That point will be invalid when today goes down in history! You snooze, you lose!" Eggman began his usual assault on the school (typical of every fortnight) by dropping in hundreds of push-over robots that were easily destroyed by any of Sonic's friends. Somewhere between the events of laser cannons and a buzz-bombing, our spiky hero woke up and looked around. He pushed his way through the crowd of robots and FCs and made it to the same tree Rouge was in earlier. He climbed up to the farthest branch and took a nap.