Amy crossed her arms so tight her gloves squeaked. "Silver, we literally *just* got here," she huffed, nudging a floating plate out of her personal space with all the grace of someone who'd spent years dodging Badnik shrapnel. "Give us five minutes before you start interrogating like this is one of your weird future tribunals."
Silver rubbed his nose—a nervous tic that sent him drifting sideways like a poorly anchored blimp—before sighing hard enough to ruffle the papers orbiting his head. "Fine. But if this ends with Dorctor Eggman or Egan Nega or whoever laughing at us from a hologram again, I'm billing you for our group therapy again." He gestured vaguely at Sonic, who was now attempting to balance a floating fork on his nose with suspiciously practiced ease.
The fork clattered to the floor—or would have, if Silver hadn't reflexively caught it mid-air, only to immediately drop it again when Tails cleared his throat pointedly. Somewhere behind us, a floating potted plant emitted a sound suspiciously like a sigh. I shifted uncomfortably, acutely aware that my stupidly dramatic stance made me look like a rejected final boss from a mid-tier JRPG.
Amy, mercifully, cut through the awkwardness by snatching a drifting notepad from the air and whacking Silver lightly on the shoulder with it. "Focus," she said, in the tone of someone who'd perfected the art of herding male hedgehogs. "Nox needs help figuring out how he got here—and more importantly, how to *not* break time while fixing whatever led to the bad future he hails from."
Silver than paused for a moment, "Wait, if your future of 50 years got screwed up, does that mean my original time is again as well?" He asked as he looked at me intensely, his psychic energy making the stray papers orbiting him tremble slightly.
Somewhere behind us, Sonic casually leaned against a floating bookshelf that shouldn't have been able to support his weight—physics here being more of a loose suggestion—and shrugged. "Eh, time's weird. Maybe it's like one of those buffet lines where you can just grab the good stuff and ignore the rest." Tails facepalmed so hard his goggles skewed sideways, while Amy pinched the bridge of her nose like she was physically restraining herself from committing male hedgehog-cide.
I scratched behind my ear—immediately regretting it as my stupidly sharp claws snagged on fur that was way too thick—and sighed. "Look, while I don't know if the effects of my time were drastic enough to drastically alter yours, I do know this—the future I came from was bad enough to warrant me being sent back." Silver's eyes widened slightly, his psychic aura flickering like a dying lightbulb as a floating teacup drifted between us like a punctuation mark.
"Then I need to check my time, since the future is ever changing, while it won't take into account any actions you make in say, a month, it should reveal something at the very least." Silver replied, flipping upside down midair—because apparently gravity was optional—as he flew out of the room and into the sky, fading away after saying, "lock my door for me won't you?"
Amy blinked—slowly, deliberately—before turning to Sonic with the expression of someone who'd just realized their cat had learned how to operate the blender. "Did he just," she began, gesturing at the now-empty doorway, "leave us to *babysit* his *hovering apartment*?" Sonic shrugged, plucking a floating pen from the air and twirling it between his fingers with suspicious ease. "Eh, could be worse. At least it's not yet another time paradox on top of this one." Tails groaned, rubbing his temples as a drifting coffee mug bumped against his forehead like a particularly persistent mosquito.
I exhaled through my nose—a sound that came out half-growl thanks to my stupidly edgy vocal cords—and watched Silver's floating apartment items wobble in place like drunk fireflies. The silence stretched just long enough to be painful before Sonic casually kicked a drifting cushion, sending it spinning into a stack of floating dishes that somehow didn't topple. "So," he said, grin sharper than my claws, "while Silver's off doing his future boy shtick—wanna see if we can find Shadow before he finds us?"
Tails groaned—the sound of a man who'd seen this exact scenario play out approximately twelve thousand times—as Amy snatched a floating spatula out of midair and pointed it at Sonic like a prosecutor with damning evidence. "Last time you said that, we had to explain to the GUN commander why his helicopter was suddenly painted lime green." Sonic shrugged, plucking a floating meatball from the ether and popping it into his mouth with suspicious ease.
"Details," he said around the mouthful, sauce dangerously close to dribbling down his glove.
I rubbed my temples—immediately regretting it as my claws snagged on fur that was somehow both too thick and too edgy—and exhaled through my nose.
I just knew that I didn't want to know what happened that day.
///////Pov Change: Silver the Hedgehog///////
Silver reappeared midair in his time of origin of 200 years from the once he just was in—or rather, what *should* have been his time—only to immediately see how different everything was.
But... it didn't look different as in bad.
For fucking once.
The Resistance HQ—usually a crumbling husk of a building patched together with duct tape and desperation—stood gleaming under the harsh sunlight, its metal reinforcements polished to a shine that made Silver squint. Even the air smelled different—less like ozone and despair, more like... freshly cut grass and whatever the hell Sonic's chili dog breath had evolved into over 200 years. Silver pinched himself.
Ow.
Okay then, not a dream.
Silver floated closer, nose twitching at the unfamiliar scent of *not-apocalypse*, and immediately collided with a holographic welcome sign that materialized out of nowhere. The glowing letters—"RESISTANCE HQ: NOW WITH 20% MORE RESISTANCE!"—flickered around him as he rubbed his snout. "Ow. Okay. Definitely not my regular future, or my apocalyptic one," he muttered, watching a perfectly intact park bench float past on what appeared to be anti-gravity treads.
He drifted toward the HQ entrance—now suspiciously clean and lacking the usual bullet holes—and paused as the automatic doors slid open with a *swoosh* too smooth for any post-apocalyptic tech he'd ever seen. Inside, the command center hummed with activity, but instead of grim-faced soldiers hunched over cracked monitors, the room was full of… well, *laughing*. A trio of Chao bobbled around a holographic strategy map, giggling as they pushed tiny Badnik figurines into a digital volcano. A fox in a lab coat that covered their entire back—who Silver *swore* had Tails' smirk—was elbow-deep in a floating engine, humming a tune that sounded suspiciously familiar.
Silver pinched his nose. "Okay," he muttered to himself, "so either Nox fixed the future by existing, or I've finally cracked under the strain of too many time paradoxes before I even turned 15." He floated closer, dodging a floating snack machine that drifted by with a cheerful *ding*—still fully stocked, which was frankly the most unrealistic detail so far. The scent of freshly brewed coffee—actual *coffee*, not the burnt tar substitute the Resistance usually rationed—hit him like a nostalgia grenade.
Silver hovered cautiously toward the fox scientist, who was now attempting to weld something with a laser pointer and what appeared to be sheer optimism. "Uh," he began, scratching behind his ear in a gesture that was definitely not nervous, "so… bad future's gone?" The fox glanced up—revealing goggles that suspiciously resembled Tails' old pair—and blinked before grinning with far too many teeth. "Oh hey, you must be Silver the Hedgehog! Nox fortold that you'd show up eventually—time travel's *weird*, right?" Silver froze mid-air, marker slipping from his grasp as it hovered there awkwardly.
Somewhere behind the fox scientist, a blur of golden fur streaked past—too fast to track, leaving behind a trail of faint psychic static that made Silver's nose twitch. The blur resolved into a teenage tenrec hovering mid-air with effortless grace, her ivory chest fur catching the fluorescent lights as she flipped upside down—because apparently gravitational defiance ran in the maybe family.
"Whoops, sorry, you're Silver right?!" she chirped, righting herself with a spin that sent her scarf billowing dramatically despite the lack of wind. Silver blinked—slowly, deliberately—as the tenrec's forehead marking pulsed in time with his own gloves' glow.
Gold, as her introduction made abundantly clear, was the living embodiment of everything Silver wasn't—sunshine incarnate wrapped in golden fur and boundless enthusiasm. She gasped dramatically when she saw him, clapping her paws together with enough force to send a floating clipboard spinning wildly off-course.
"OH MY CHAOS IT'S REALLY YOU!" she squealed, voice ricocheting off the walls as she zoomed around Silver in dizzying circles, her psychic energy leaving faint golden streaks in the air like sparkler trails.