Chapter 3

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…Of course, I always knew it was only a matter of time before somebody found me out. Given my history it is strangely fitting that it was the hedgehog, and perhaps that was why I revealed myself so easily. I always was too sentimental for my own good…

- From a torn scrap of notepaper found in Emerald Hill

‘Star claims your body, Emerald claims your soul.’

- Mobian proverb

…………………………………………………………..

Sonic tossed aside the game pad with an accomplished sigh, then checked his watch.

“Clocked. Not bad, eh Johnny?”

The battle had raged for two hours and fourteen minutes exactly. It had been long and bloody, but now, finally, the Emeralds had been gathered and the zombies dispatched to the Frozen Hell From Whence They Came.

He had even got the girl. Okay, that girl had turned out to be none other than the Evil Zombie Queen herself, but that was not the point.

Sonic grinned expectantly across at his friend Johnny Lightfoot. The grey rabbit managed to hold out for a few moments, but Sonic’s stare and smug expression eventually won, as usual.

“Okay, okay. You’re good.”

Ego satisfied, the hedgehog stood, stretched skinny arms towards the ceiling, and then turned off the game console with a flourish.

“What, no applause? I’m hurt.” He tutted, ignoring Johnny’s eye-roll and waving a hand at the now-dark TV screen. “Nice twist at the end, huh?”

“If you say so,” Johnny replied with much less enthusiasm. Killer Zombie Penguins were not his idea of quality entertainment, and they had taken up most of the day in one form or another- starting with the movie and its string of increasingly low-budget sequels, and finishing with a marathon session of the spin-off video game.

Sonic seemed to find the over-the-top, unconvincing horror highly amusing. Johnny just thought it was laughable.

“C’mon, Johnny, where’s your sense of fun?” Sonic said to the rabbit, who was trying unsuccessfully to suppress a yawn. He’d had more than his fill of undead birds for one evening, although he had to admit he was mildly impressed by anything that could make Sonic sit still for a few hours. That was no mean feat at the best of times.

Johnny glanced at the window and saw that it was almost dark outside. It was late. Or early, depending on your point of view. As if to emphasise this fact, there was a soft snore from the sofa’s other occupant.

“He actually fell asleep?” wondered a smirking Sonic.

“No thanks to you and your Zombie Penguins. No, don’t poke him…”

“I’m not,” the hedgehog fibbed as he hastily withdrew his poking finger. “I’m just surprised,” he added with a snigger, “he nearly went through the ceiling during that last film.”

Porker Lewis was asleep sitting up, his head lolling back against the sofa. The pig liked horror films even less than Johnny did and the wobbly special effects had not stopped him from being scared silly; he had spent most of the evening jumping out of his seat every two minutes, even in the parts where you could see the strings (which Sonic unfailingly pointed out with a laugh and some sarcastic comment about movie awards).

Apparently, though, the 8-bit pixellated violence of the Mega System game had been easier for Porker to handle, and his tiredness had eventually had its way. The pig was evidently not at all used to late-night film and video game marathons.

Well, that would have to change if he planned on staying at Sonic’s house much longer, Johnny thought wryly. It had been almost a week since Porker had repaired Sonic’s television and somehow boosted the signal in the process -Porker had tried to explain how, but neither Johnny or Sonic knew what any of those technical terms meant- so that the TV now received all four channels in perfect clarity, much to Sonic’s delight and the envy of everyone who had heard his subsequent bragging. Since then Porker’s skills with machinery and electronics had been in high demand. By the time a piece of technology reached Emerald Hill it had passed through many hands and was usually both outdated and in need of repairs. Johnny suspected Porker would not be short of paid work, even if fixing defunct televisions and washing machines was not quite what he had expected to be doing. He seemed happy enough with the niche he had found for himself, though.

Sonic, on the other hand, showed more and more signs of boredom and frustration as the days since he had left school mounted up. He quite literally did not know what to do with himself. At least, Johnny mused, Porker had distracted him from that stone loop of his. For now at least.

The rabbit yawned again and ran a hand back over his long grey ears, which were starting to droop noticeably.

“Well, Porker’s got the right idea. I’d better get home before I fall asleep myself…” He stood and began picking his way towards the door through the wreckage of today’s fast food binge. Yesterday’s mess was absent; Porker had proved to be an obsessively tidy pig and had insisted on getting rid of the worst of it ‘before it evolved sentience’. This, Johnny thought, could only be a good thing as Sonic lacked any concept of clean and tidy. Especially since Porker had paid particular attention to removing the moulted hedgehog quills embedded in the sofa. Sonic barely seemed aware of them, but they could give anyone else a nasty surprise.

The spiny mammal in question was shaking his head and tutting as he followed him to the door.

“You wimp, Johnny! No stamina, that’s your problem.” He pointed at the leaning stack of video cassettes next to the sofa. “We haven’t watched Part 7 yet. It has aliens.”

Johnny guessed that the younger Mobian wasn’t being serious- not entirely anyway. With Sonic it was never easy to tell.

“No way, Sonic. Some of us have to get up in the morning.”

“It is the morning, almost,” the hedgehog pointed out reasonably. Johnny sighed again.

“You know what I mean.” He nodded at Porker, “I don’t think he’d appreciate it much, anyway.”

Sonic dismissively waved a gloved hand at the sleeping pig.

“He’s comatose, he doesn’t care.” He shrugged, but didn’t offer any serious argument. “I’ll see ya tomorrow, then. Remember, aliens.”

“Night, Sonic,” the rabbit replied, hiding his amusement behind another yawn. Sonic was always the first to scoff at the idea of aliens, or ghosts, or anything supernatural whatsoever. But if there were rumours of a haunted cave, he was also the one who insisted on spending the night there, and if a legend warned not to do something, he simply had to do it. And then of course there were the horror films. There was no point wondering whether Sonic was more open-minded than he liked to let on, or if his thrill-seeking was the result of sheer boredom- sometimes, he knew from experience, the hedgehog defied understanding.

Sonic hesitated in the doorway as Johnny began to make his way down the street towards home. It was not out of concern- the village had never given anyone cause to worry about their safety after dark, even though it was lit only by the occasional lamp and the windows of a few houses whose occupants were still awake- but because of restlessness. Sonic shifted from one foot to the other. All that sitting around, not to mention the sugary junkfood he’d been stuffing himself with all night had made him twitchy; he didn’t want to sleep, he wanted to do something.

The mild evening breeze pushed his ears backwards and rustled his quills against one another. For some reason his eyes were drawn to the road leading out of the village and into the countryside beyond, and then upwards to where the black silhouettes of hills met the sky. There were no clouds tonight, and two pale crescents of moon hovered just above the hills like half-lidded eyes. Because the days were long at this time of year it was not completely dark yet; overhead the sky was indigo, nearly black, but on the horizon it was still a deep, glowing blue.

The young hedgehog grinned to himself. This was too perfect a night to waste on sleeping; he’d go for a run instead to burn off some of that excess energy. Sunshine may be better for running, he thought, but there was something special about this time of night. The dark yet luminous colour of the sky would not last more than an hour or so and only offered a few hints of the brilliant display of stars that would come later. But as far as Sonic was concerned the rapidly changing twilight was even better because it didn’t reveal everything. There were things to be discovered out there, it said.

A tingle of excitement passed through him, the same sense of impending change that he had felt at the stone loop on the last day of school.

That was when he saw the flash of light in the distance.

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“Johnny! Hey! Come look at this!”

Fortunately the rabbit was not yet out of earshot. Unfortunately neither was half the village; one particularly grumpy individual threw open an upstairs window and demanded sleepily that ‘the damn kid’ be quiet, before slamming it loudly enough to wake up as many people as Sonic’s insistent shouting had in the first place. Everyone else either ignored the commotion or, like Porker, remained obliviously snoring.

Johnny hurried back, more to shut the hedgehog up than anything else.

“What?” the rabbit hissed under his breath.

Sonic was gazing towards a distant hill that was visible between two buildings on the outskirts of the village.

“That,” he pointed. “What is that…?”

Johnny looked, then frowned. At the very top of the hill a small point of golden light flickered on and off irregularly. It was nothing spectacular- in fact he was surprised Sonic had noticed it at all.

“Someone with a torch?” he ventured. “People do go out at night-“

Sonic shook his head impatiently.

“It’s not a torch, it’s the wrong colour. That’s something else.”

“A campfire then. There’s nothing up there but grass and trees and-“

“Grass and trees and the Star Post,” Sonic finished, glancing up at him. The hedgehog’s eyes looked black in the darkness but still appeared to gleam in a way Johnny had learned to dread- it usually meant his excitable friend had an Idea and was about to get himself in trouble again.

Johnny was also mildly surprised. He’d thought Sonic had lost interest in the Star Post a long time ago, after spending a night in its shadow had not resulted in him being cursed with bad luck, struck by lightning or vanishing altogether as the legends said he was supposed to.

“Sonic…”

“Don’t Sonic me,” he grinned. “I’m gonna check it out, whatever it is. C’mon!”

“No way, it’s late enough as it is-“

Sonic tapped his foot impatiently. He was not superstitious, but he somehow knew that flashing light was nothing as mundane as a campfire, in the same way he often seemed to know when there were gold rings nearby. He was a hedgehog who trusted his instincts.

Sonic darted behind the tall rabbit and shoved.

“Come on.”

Johnny sighed. There was no understanding Sonic. And sometimes no arguing with him, either.

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Sonic knew as much about Star Posts as most people, which was hardly anything.

Star Posts were another of Mobius’ mysteries, as ancient as the stone loops and just as unexplained. Many zones had at least one; Posts located some distance from towns and villages were simply accepted as part of the landscape despite the stories of strange disappearances that surrounded them. They were generally left alone because of those same legends and had often survived intact to the present day. Those too close to Mobian habitation had not been so lucky.

Emerald Hill’s Star Post was just far enough away from the village to have been left standing, although the metallic base bore a few bright nicks and scratches where daring children had tried to carve their initials into it. It stood among a scatter of coconut trees on top of an otherwise unremarkable hill, and at twelve feet tall was average in size. Otherwise it was near-identical to every other Star Post. The strange, silvery metal it was made of refused to rust and only a slight coating of tarnish hinted at the centuries it had stood there. It resembled a common lamp post, except for being topped by a fat metal disc instead of a lamp.

Of course, all that Sonic could see as he climbed the Star Post’s hill was the silhouette of its top half and the vague outline of one of the two yellow stars that adorned the disc. He wasn’t worried about the Post making him vanish. Once he had been fascinated by the Star Post because he had been warned not to go near it- it was the lure of the unknown that had appealed to him more than any particular legend, the excitement of breaking the rules and the possibility that something amazing would happen if he did. Nothing had, of course, so he had dismissed the legends as nonsense.

Now he felt a trace of that old excitement again. It wasn’t quite fear- even if the flashing light had been something to do with the Star Post, there was no way he’d let it make him disappear. No stationary metal pole was going to outrun Sonic the hedgehog.

He smirked at the thought, his eyes fixed on the tall beacon on top of the hill.

Sonic had seen the Star Post a hundred times before, but at first he couldn’t quite put his finger on what was wrong with the scene in front of him. The brown hedgehog paused, panting slightly from his run. With a confused frown, he turned to ask Johnny what he thought- but the rabbit wasn’t there.

Sonic looked back over his shoulder. The Emerald Hill Zone took on a whole different character at night, the shifting blue twilight rendering familiar objects mysterious and alien without obscuring them completely. The disused path he had been following was a thin black thread; trees and log bridges sat in pools of shadow, and dark smudges marked the position of bushes, rocks and other smaller objects.

Any one of those shadows could have been Johnny. It was too dark to run flat-out without the risk of breaking an ankle but Sonic had still managed to leave him behind somewhere.

He expelled a sigh of irritation, and then shrugged. Johnny would catch up eventually. With that thought he continued up the hill- he was not going to miss out on whatever was going on up there because his friend insisted on being too slow.

The Star Post was a black cutout shape, distinguishable only from the surrounding trees by its crisp edges and the softly glowing yellow star-

With a start, he suddenly realised what had been nagging at him. In this light the star-shaped panel should not have been visible at all.

Sonic’s eyes widened.

Is that what the light was?

The glow was faint, like static clinging to a television screen after it had been turned off. It was fading as he watched.

But it was definitely there.

Did Star Posts usually glow in the dark?

He didn’t think so- they didn’t usually do anything, let alone glow- but he didn’t get the chance to wonder about it any further. He was far enough up the hill now to see the Star Post’s base.

There was something between him and the Post. Something that shouldn’t have been there at all.

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At first Sonic thought the dark shape was a large boulder. But then he remembered there were no rocks on this particular hill. And rocks did not tend to float. This one did, rising gently out of the grass to hover, impossibly, a few feet above the ground.

Startled, he froze in his tracks. With his attention focused on the floating thing, Sonic was only vaguely aware of the breeze shifting and his ears swivelling forwards to catch an odd humming sound: it was constant, low pitched and unnatural, like nothing he had heard before. The gust of wind smelled strange and unpleasant.

Sonic grimaced unconsciously at the smell, wrinkling his nose. In years to come he would get to know the scent of hot metal and machine oil very well indeed, but for now it was just as foreign to him as the eerie sound.

For a few moments the teenager was merely puzzled; then what he was seeing registered and he realised that standing in full view might not be a good idea. Sonic quickly ducked behind the nearest coconut tree and peered around the trunk.

He was not hiding, he assured himself. He was merely assessing the situation.

The object, aircraft, thing- Sonic could not find a word to describe it that fit, his experience of vehicles being mostly limited to carts and bicycles and the Hill Zone bus service- was hemispherical, like a flying bowl. Although it flew, it could not be a plane; there were a few small protrusions on the surface but Sonic could see nothing that resembled wings. If they were there they were impossibly stubby. A light on its rounded underside painted a small circle of grass orange, and going by the gleam reflecting from the base of the Star Post there had to be a second, white light on the side of the craft facing away from him.

Sonic knew that anti-gravity vehicles existed, but what on Mobius was something this high-tech doing in a middle of nowhere Zone like Emerald Hill?

But as exotic as the floating thing was, it was nowhere near as strange as the figure sitting in it.

Sonic blinked and strained his eyes, trying to make out more details of the creature against the rapidly darkening sky. Perhaps it was the light, but the silhouette seemed… wrong. Its head was a strange shape- like an upside-down apteryx egg and almost as smooth. There was something that could have been ears or hair, but no sign of a snout, even when the head turned. Long, thin, spindly arms were withdrawing some object- a large square thing, a box or container of some kind- from inside the bowl. The slender limbs cradled it protectively.

The creature didn’t look like any species of Mobian Sonic had ever seen, or even heard of.

He remembered his words from earlier: We haven’t watched Part 7 yet. It has aliens.

No way, Sonic thought, shaking his head in wonder. Aliens don’t exist.

But if not, then what was floating in front of him?

He hesitated, wondering whether or not to step out of concealment and confront the… the whatever it was. That would be the most direct way to find out what was going on, and Sonic liked to be direct- it wasn’t like him to be so unsure of what to do. But this strange scene beneath a glowing Star Post was like nothing he had experienced before. He had a sense that whatever was going on, it was not something he was meant to see. How would this person or thing respond to discovering they had an eavesdropper?

Sonic didn’t have to wrestle with the problem for long. The decision to stay hidden behind the tree or reveal himself was suddenly taken out of his hands.

The figure opened the box.

Curls of vapour spilled over the sides of the container, filled with brilliant blue light. It was not a cold blue; this was the fierce colour of a gas flame or electric spark, like the sky near the horizon but somehow- more.

Sonic inhaled sharply. In an instant the mystery of the glowing Star Post and the possible alien didn’t matter nearly as much as finding out what was in that box. The air was suddenly as charged and heavy as if a storm was coming. All his spines stood up of their own accord, and he felt an answering buzz of energy somewhere deep in his chest like the echo of what he felt when he absorbed a gold ring.

The light called to him, drawing him forward.

Maybe it was Sonic’s gasp or a piece of coconut shell cracking beneath his foot that gave him away. It wasn’t until the box snapped shut, cutting off the magnetic power of whatever was inside that he became aware of what he was doing, that his legs seemed to have walked him out into the open and up to the vehicle all by themselves.

The figure had frozen like a statue. The indistinct oval of its face was staring straight at him.

“-What?” The hedgehog blinked in total confusion as the craft spun around to face him. He stumbled backwards and quickly threw up a hand to shield his eyes, but was not fast enough to avoid being half-blinded by the intense beam of its single circular headlight.

Hedgehog and creature stared helplessly at each other. Sonic squinted into the glare through splayed fingers, every quill standing to attention. He felt the first stab of real fear- what was the creature going to do? Should he stand his ground or run?

Indecision rooted his feet to the ground and his thoughts came to a shuddering halt.

“…Oh dear,” said the creature.

The floating thing’s humming abruptly increased in pitch. An instant later Sonic was knocked off his feet by a rush of warm air, thick with that unidentifiable metallic smell.

Stunned, Sonic raised himself on his elbows. There were huge green splotches dancing before his eyes; he blinked hard in an attempt to clear his vision and get his eyes to re-adapt to the darkness.

The blinding light was simply gone, along with the vehicle and its occupant.

Sonic cast his eyes around for any sign of the car or aircraft or whatever that thing had been.

Was that the glow of a headlight disappearing into the distance…?

He scrambled to his feet and started towards the far-off glimmer, but it was already gone by the time he had taken three strides; he couldn’t be sure it had even been the same headlight.

The thing was so fast! Sonic lurched to a stop with an awestruck look on his face, eyes scanning the horizon.

Nothing.

The hedgehog turned a full circle and took in as much of the hilltop as the failing light would allow.

Nothing.

For a while Sonic stood in expectant silence. What if the thing came back…?

He felt an odd mixture of relief and disappointment after a few minutes passed without any sign of the craft. A glance upwards told him that even the Star Post had stopped glowing, and although his heart was pounding as if he had been sprinting there was otherwise no sign that anything out of the ordinary had happened at all.

But that didn’t stop the young hedgehog’s face from splitting into a wide, adrenaline-fuelled grin. His sudden, uncontrolled bark of laughter surprised even him.

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When Johnny came panting over the crest of the hill a short time later, Sonic berated him - albeit teasingly- for taking so long, then rattled off his story at machine-gun speed, punctuating it with quick, agitated gestures. Johnny had to make him repeat himself twice before he could make sense of what the hedgehog was saying.

When he finished, Johnny was no less mystified than he had been before.

“You’re telling me you didn’t see anything?” Sonic exclaimed.

Johnny’s reply was guarded as he eyed his friend worriedly. “I think I saw some more lights…”

Sonic’s grin flashed white in the darkness, the same kind of crazy grin Johnny had seen far too many times for comfort. Last time Sonic had had that look on his face it had ended badly- the hedgehog ended up lost in the caves that riddled the Zone for a day and a half, all because he had wanted to test out the theory that Emerald Hill was not named for the river that meandered through it, but because the mythical Chaos Emeralds were buried somewhere beneath the Zone.

What Johnny had not been prepared for this time was that wild story about the UFO. Sonic had been known to listen to those rumours that were passed around sometimes, the sightings of monsters and chao and islands in the sky. He would laugh, and then go and check it out for himself. He’d find nothing and laugh some more. But to actually make up one of those stories himself… That wasn’t like Sonic at all.

“Are you okay?” Johnny frowned.

Sonic narrowed his eyes at the implication in the older teen’s voice.

“I am not imagining things, Johnny!” he circled the Star Post, scuffing at the ground with his foot in search of some shred of evidence. “I know it’s hard to believe, but I saw it. You saw the light too! It was the Star Post. It was glowing.” Sonic tapped it with a gloved fist. The metal made a muted ding, a soft bell-like chime, but otherwise stood still and unresponsive. He described the flying ship again, and its occupant who was almost too strange to be Mobian. He trailed off with an involuntary shiver as he got to the part about the object in the box. Whatever that thing had been, it had felt… powerful. Even if he never learned what had really happened here tonight, he had to find out what had created that mesmerising blue light.

Sonic’s emotions were a confused whirlwind. It was disturbing, the way the azure brightness had tugged at him. And when that creature had spotted him… anything could have happened. Yet for some reason he couldn’t stop grinning at the memory. Was it because something incredible had finally happened, something he couldn’t begin to explain, after years of futile daydreaming? Or because he had faced the fear of an unknown danger and emerged unharmed?

Whatever the reason, every inch of him buzzed with a feeling like the electric thrill he got from running, or the sense of triumph when he achieved something everybody else thought was impossible. But this was stronger, as if he was somehow more alive than he had been before.

“I’m just saying that it’s really late, and maybe…” Johnny began. Sonic took no notice. Normally he would have been angry that his closest friend apparently didn’t believe a word he was saying, but he was too caught up in this new feeling to be more than mildly annoyed.

The hedgehog continued to toe the debris of leaves and bits of coconut that had ended up against the base of the Star Post. Maybe the alien, or whatever it was, had dropped something that would prove his story.

Sonic’s worn shoe shifted a few pieces of dead leaf, and the last of the light gleamed dully off something that was definitely not another piece of coconut.

“Ha!” his hand darted in to grab the object, which was about the size of his palm. He held it up for Johnny to see. “If I’m imagining things, then what’s this?”

Johnny squinted into the gloom. The object was glossy and disc-shaped, a flattened spiral with a pattern of fine ridges over the surface.

“It’s a seashell…”

Sonic glanced at it.

“Well, okay. But the sea is three miles away, so how’d it get here?” he countered, with a little less enthusiasm than before. Looking at it properly for the first time, he saw that what he found was indeed an ordinary seashell. The inside was packed with earth or sand, and a crack had worked its way around the spiral from the lip inwards. He’d found fragments of similar shells himself on Emerald Hill’s rocky beaches.

Sonic had even kept some of the better ones. They were still gathering dust on a shelf in his house somewhere. This one was cracked but whole, which was unusual, and appeared to be a little darker in colour than the ones he had seen before- but other than that the shell was not particularly interesting. Definitely not the space ship part or alien artefact he had been hoping for.

“Sonic, anyone could have dropped that. It might not have anything to do with what you saw…”

“But I did see something,” the hedgehog insisted stubbornly.

“So did I, and it looked like a headlight. It’s dark- I think you might have seen someone in a hovercar, like the ones they have in the city. It was probably just a tourist…”

Sonic sceptically quirked an eyebrow. “Here? At this time of night? Yeah, right.”

“…Seeing if the myths about Star Posts are true, like somebody else I know,” Johnny concluded with a smile. “Actually you probably scared the fur off them, sneaking up like that.”

Now that his adrenaline rush was starting to wear off, Sonic had to consider it. He had been watching horror films all night; could he have mistaken a hovercar for something else? Having never seen a hovercar in real life, he supposed he might have, especially if the driver had been wearing a crash helmet that changed the shape of their head. Maybe the Star Post’s ‘glow’ was nothing more than the reflection from a torch or headlight…

Sonic was becoming more and more dissatisfied with the pace of village life. He knew he had been losing his temper more often lately, and worse, although he hated to admit it his speed was beginning to plateau. He was starting to feel like a fizzing ball of pent-up energy without an outlet.

From the concerned look on Johnny’s face they were both wondering the same thing- was he so desperate for something to break the tedium of Emerald Hill that his mind had twisted a chance encounter with a passing tourist into some kind of adventure?

“Maybe…” he said, replying to the unspoken question in both their minds.

But he couldn’t get the image of blue-tinted steam spilling from a sturdy metal box out of his head. Nor did he drop the spiral shell. He ran his thumb over it thoughtfully as they headed back to the village, feeling the ridges on the surface through his glove.

Maybe…