bonus chapter 4 the bonus chapter :3c
falling stars fic masterpost
Shadow started to get the nagging feeling that he was forgetting something. And not in the sense that he had amnesia. This was different. It was something that he definitely should remember, something that had happened within the past 24 hours, but he couldn't for the life of him figure out what it was.
“Yo, Stripes,” Sonic said, snapping Shadow out of his reverie. “Are you listening, man?”
Shadow frowned. “No,” he said. “I was thinking.”
“Well,” Sonic said with a frown of his own, “it’s kinda important. So try to keep up, okay?”
Shadow rubbed his eyes. He was sitting across from Sonic on the bed, his legs crossed, and trying very hard not to completely ignore Sonic and just go back to thinking. “I’m following,” was what he said. “Go again.”
“I was saying,” Sonic began, “that it might be good if we raided the kitchen. I’m starving. Aren’t you?”
“No,” was Shadow’s instant reply. But it made him pause. After thinking about it a little more, he said, “I’m not hungry. And I’m not tired either.” It was true, but it didn’t make any sense. Shouldn’t he be both of those things by now?
Sonic tried to laugh it off. “Maybe you just forgot how to be hungry? Once you get some grub, I’m sure you’ll remember what you’re missin’! Same deal with sleep. Once you get some, you’ll–”
“Blue,” Shadow interrupted, “I’m the Ultimate Lifeform.”
Contemplative, Sonic tilted his head. “I don’t know if I trust the words of a guy who shot at us with a dart gun. Besides, it sounds kinda lame. Wouldn’t you rather be the Ultimate Beat-Em-Upform?” When Shadow just frowned, Sonic offered him a shrug. “I’m just saying, even if it is true, we don’t know what it means. At least, I sure don’t. Do you?”
Shadow had to admit that he didn’t.
“So,” Sonic continued, “after we grab a bite to eat, I’ll take watch, and you take a nap. Sound good?”
Shadow suddenly remembered what he was forgetting. “There’s something strange about this place,” he said. At first, Sonic looked a little annoyed that Shadow was dodging the question, but it faded as he went on. “Earlier, when I went to look for your brace, I passed over many rooms, but they were all empty. Just like this one.”
“I can’t say an empty hospital is a bad thing,” Sonic said. “I mean, you saw it too–this place is huge. Maybe everyone here is just spread out?”
Shadow hummed thoughtfully. It was plausible… but then, so was a metal horse statue suddenly coming to life.
“I’m just saying,” Sonic added, “I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.”
But Shadow wasn’t so sure. That nagging feeling kept tugging at his brain, and he couldn’t ignore it. Still, if Sonic was starving, then that matter was a little more pressing than whatever vague instinct Shadow was currently experiencing.
And so, that was how the two of them ended up creeping through the hallways, with Sonic begrudgingly agreeing to let Shadow carry him again since even though he could technically handle the pain of limping around, the noise from the brace hitting the floor was far from sneaky. And they needed to be sneaky.
They needed to be sneaky, because…
“Oh!” Sonic whispered. “I think that’s it. Those doors right there–that’s gotta be the kitchen, right?”
The doors in question were made out of gray steel and had a set of circular windows at the top. Unfortunately, Shadow was too short to see through them even when he stood on his tiptoes. But thankfully he didn’t need to suffer that embarrassment, since the doors were labeled with a plaque on the wall. It read: SECOND FLOOR KITCHEN.
Shadow pressed his ear up against the door, but didn’t hear any noise coming from the inside. And while that was a bit strange in and of itself, he decided to take Sonic’s advice and not worry about it. Or at the very least, not worry about it until after securing some food.
Gingerly, Shadow pushed open the kitchen door with his foot. Still nothing. He slipped inside, and almost dropped Sonic from shock once the door swung closed behind him and he saw what was waiting for them inside the kitchen. Sonic, likewise, gasped, the sight before him making him temporarily forget that he was supposed to be quiet.
It was food. Dishes upon dishes of it. Plates, bowls, pots, and cups covered every table in the kitchen, and all of them were filled with the most delicious looking food Sonic had ever seen. There were meats, salads, soups, and desserts galore. Steam was still rising from the turkey, and the brownies were oozing with chocolate lava. It was almost too much for his empty stomach to take in at once. With all of these options, how was he supposed to choose where to start?
Shadow, however, wasn’t thinking about digging in at all, and it wasn’t just because he wasn’t hungry. The food certainly looked tempting, and even managed to create something of an appetite within him, but that just made Shadow more suspicious. “This isn’t right,” he said. “An empty building, but enough food to feed a village?”
Sonic squirmed in Shadow’s arms. “I’m not complaining,” Sonic said. “With this much food, they won’t notice any missing!”
Shadow held fast to Sonic, despite the hedgehog’s attempts to wriggle out of his grasp and over to the food. “We can’t eat this,” Shadow said.
That made Sonic mad. They’d already come all the way here, and now Stripes was gonna say he couldn’t have any? “You’re not making sense, dude,” Sonic said. “Food is food. And this stuff looks–”
“Too good to be true,” Shadow interrupted. The nagging feeling that had been plaguing him finally culminated into a realization: they weren’t supposed to be here anymore. Shadow had only intended to let Sonic sleep for a little while, and then they were supposed to leave. But somehow, he had forgotten, and all thoughts about leaving the building left him. Not even Sonic seemed interested in leaving anymore.
Almost like the building didn’t want them to leave.
With a strength he didn’t know he had, Shadow tore the handle off of the door behind him and threw it at the nearest banquet table. It lodged itself in a cake, revealing the inside of the dessert to be filled with a sickly green slime.
“If you eat that,” Shadow said, “you’re never getting out of here.”
At last, Sonic stopped struggling. He looked at the ectoplasm dripping from the cake with wide eyes, and finally pieced everything together for himself. “This place just keeps getting weirder and weirder,” he said. Then, he looked up at Shadow. “I should’ve listened to you earlier, Stripes. I didn’t think…”
“Don’t apologize. It was in my head, too.”
All of the sudden, the dishes on the table started to shudder. Shadow backed up, but found the kitchen doors were locked, and didn’t budge when he pressed his back up against them, something that should’ve been impossible considering one of the doors was now missing its handle and therefore, its lock.
However, it was only when the bunches of grapes started floating that Shadow thought to himself that “weird” didn’t begin to cut it. This was straight up supernatural!
In a whiz, the grapes zipped through the air and splattered on the wall. Their green guts spelled out the words: WE MADE THIS FOR YOU. WON’T YOU STAY FOR DINNER?
“I’m not hungry anymore,” Sonic said thinly.
Shadow couldn’t agree more. Whirling around, he sent a kick at the door, but it didn’t budge. His shoe just clanged off the metal uselessly before skidding to a halt on the tile floor.
More grapes joined the fray. This time, they read: IF THIS ISN’T WHAT YOU WANT, THEN WE WILL MAKE YOU SOMETHING NEW.
Shadow gritted his teeth as the walls began to rumble. He thought about the shifting architecture on the outside of the building, and said, “It was a trap from the start.”
Of course it was. The strangeness of the hospital building when compared to the rest of the town was so clear in retrospect, so out of place. And more than that: it was so convenient.
Too convenient.
The walls groaned, the wood transmuting into metal in front of Sonic and Shadow’s eyes. The kitchen was also disappearing, transforming into something else, something that Shadow wasn’t planning on sticking around to see to completion. With fire in his eyes, he turned back around, and found the doors had disappeared. It was just a wall now. That didn’t discourage him, though. If anything, it fuelled his determination, and he took a deep breath.
From Sonic’s perspective, it seemed as though the air had suddenly become electrified.
Shadow slammed a kick into the wall, and the wood-turning-metal exploded outwards in a burst of red sparks. The building screeched in protest, but Shadow was already gone, jumping through the opening and down to the grass below with no hesitation. He briefly wondered how that wall could’ve possibly led to the outside when he was sure it had been deeper inside the building, but chalked it up to being just another trick of the possessed architecture.
Speaking of which…
“Stripes! Duck!”
Shadow ducked, narrowly avoiding having his head bashed in by the hooves of one of the metal horse statues from earlier.
Damn! Those things were moving now too?!
As it was, Shadow stood in the middle of the not-hospital’s courtyard surrounded by giant steel horses, their beady purple eyes staring him down. In the background, the building itself seemed to be leaking smoke from its countless windows, and from the smoke came a ghastly figure. A large white ghost with swirling eyes and a ten gallon hat appeared and sat on the back of one of the horses, its uncannily large mouth stretching into an even bigger shark-toothed grin.
“Y'all make terrible guests,” the cowboy ghost said. “A shame considerin’ your Chaos Energy alone could’ve kept me fed for months!”
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