The city was called Vista View.
It was one of those mid-tier Sonic universe municipalities that existed in the strange architectural limbo between "quaint village" and "actual metropolis"—big enough to have proper buildings, infrastructure, and a population that numbered in the thousands, but small enough that everyone still seemed to know each other and the local economy appeared to run on a barter system supplemented by rings. Multi-story structures lined wide boulevards that curved and looped in ways that suggested the city planner had either been a genius or had been playing a lot of Sonic the Hedgehog when they'd designed the road system. Probably both.
It was also, currently, on fire.
Not entirely on fire. Not the catastrophic, civilization-ending conflagration that a serious Eggman assault would have produced. This was a more localized, more annoying kind of fire—the kind caused by a mid-sized Badnik force running rampant through a civilian population center with no particular strategic objective beyond "cause problems." Egg Pawns were smashing storefronts. Buzz Bombers were strafing rooftops. A pair of Egg Hammers—the big ones, the lumbering mechanical brutes with sledgehammers the size of compact cars—were methodically demolishing a parking structure for no discernible reason other than that it was there and they had hammers.
It was, in the grand scheme of Sonic-universe threats, about a four out of ten. Maybe a five if you were feeling generous.
Marcus assessed the situation from the air as he and Sonic approached from the east, Rouge gliding alongside them and Tails keeping pace in the Tornado overhead. The Badnik force was scattered—maybe fifty units total, spread across a six-block area, operating on degraded autonomous programming. No coordination. No strategy. Just robots doing robot things in the absence of anyone telling them to do something smarter.
"Standard sweep pattern," Marcus said into the communicator. "Sonic, you take the southern blocks—the Egg Hammers are your priority, they're doing the most structural damage. Tails, aerial support—keep the Buzz Bombers off the civilian evacuation routes. Rouge, intelligence—I need to know if there's a command signal driving these units or if they're running on residual programming."
"And you?" Sonic asked, already angling toward the southern district with the barely contained glee of a hedgehog who'd been given permission to smash things.
"I'll take the northern blocks. Clear the Egg Pawns, secure the civilians, establish a perimeter."
"Look at you, being all tactical and organized. I love the new you."
"There is no 'new me.' There is only me. Move."
"Moving! Tails, you heard the man!"
"On it, Sonic!" Tails's voice crackled through the communicator, bright and eager and present—so wonderfully, fundamentally present in a way that he hadn't been before Marcus had intervened. The Tornado banked hard and dove toward a cluster of Buzz Bombers with the precise aggression of a pilot who understood his aircraft the way most people understood their own hands.
Sonic vanished southward in a blue streak.
Rouge peeled off toward the city's communication infrastructure with a casual wing-flip.
Marcus descended into the northern blocks.
The Egg Pawns were almost insultingly easy.
Marcus moved through them like a scalpel through tissue paper—precise, efficient, utterly without ceremony. A Chaos Spear through the central processor of the first. A spinning heel kick that bisected the second at the waist. A burst of chaos energy that overloaded the third's power cell and caused it to collapse in a shower of sparks. Four, five, six—each one dispatched in under a second, each destruction a masterclass in economy of motion.
The civilians were more work than the robots.
They were scared—understandably, justifiably scared, huddling in buildings and behind overturned vehicles and in the basements of shops whose windows had been shattered by stray Badnik fire. Marcus moved through the streets systematically, clearing each block, guiding evacuees toward the southern district where Sonic had already established a safe zone, projecting the calm authority that Shadow was capable of when he wasn't being written as an edgy caricature.
He was in the middle of directing a group of evacuees—a family of rabbits, a elderly tortoise who moved with agonizing slowness, a young cat carrying a baby who kept trying to grab Marcus's quills—toward the safe zone when he heard it.
A voice.
Loud.
Very loud.
Enthusiastically loud, in the way that certain people were loud not because the situation demanded volume but because their entire personality operated at a decibel level that suggested their internal monologue came with a built-in amplifier.
"WOOOOO-HOOOOO! DID YOU SEE THAT?! THAT WAS LIKE—WHAM! AND THEN—POW! AND THEN THE TAIL THING—YEAH!"
Marcus's left eye twitched.
He knew that voice.
He had dreaded that voice.
He had, in fact, spent a significant portion of his previous human life writing detailed, extensively sourced, passionately argued critiques of the character that voice belonged to, critiques that had earned him both devoted supporters and death threats in roughly equal measure across multiple social media platforms.
No.
Not yet.
I'm not ready.
He turned his head slowly, with the reluctant inevitability of a man hearing a sound he'd hoped to never hear and knowing—knowing—exactly what he was going to see.
Tangle the Lemur came swinging around the corner of a building on her tail.
Her prehensile tail. Her absurdly, impossibly, narratively conveniently prehensile tail—a appendage that could extend to apparently any length the plot required, that could grip surfaces, wrap around objects, launch her through the air, catch falling civilians, and perform approximately nine hundred other functions that no biological tail should be capable of performing, but which Tangle's tail performed with cheerful disregard for anatomy, physics, and the basic standards of character design.
She was exactly as Marcus had feared.
Gray fur. Purple highlights. Big, bright, enormous eyes that radiated enthusiasm the way a nuclear reactor radiated isotopes—constantly, aggressively, and with potential long-term health consequences for anyone in the vicinity. A grin that was less a facial expression and more a lifestyle choice, permanently affixed to her face as though her mouth had been designed with no other configuration available. An outfit that was somehow simultaneously simple and trying too hard—black bodysuit, sash, the kind of practical-but-cute adventurewear that screamed "I was designed by committee to appeal to the maximum possible demographic."
She was also thick.
Of course she was thick.
Because everyone in this universe was thick. Because the IDW dimension apparently operated under a fundamental physical law that dictated all female characters must possess proportions that would make a cartoon pinup blush. Tangle's hips were wide enough to use as a shelf. Her thighs were—
Marcus forcefully stopped that train of thought, not because he was interested but because he refused to give the universe the satisfaction.
Tangle landed in the street with a dramatic skid, her tail recoiling behind her like a whip returning to rest. She had, from what Marcus could piece together, been fighting Badniks on her own before he'd arrived—a fact evidenced by the scattering of destroyed Egg Pawns in her wake, their chassis bearing the distinctive damage patterns of "hit repeatedly by a very strong tail."
She spotted him.
Her eyes—those enormous, luminous, relentlessly cheerful eyes—went supernova.
"OH MY GOSH!" she shrieked, at a volume that caused several nearby windows to vibrate sympathetically. "YOU'RE SHADOW THE HEDGEHOG! THE ACTUAL SHADOW THE HEDGEHOG! OH MY GOSH OH MY GOSH OH MY GOSH!"
She bounded toward him. Bounded. Like a lemur. Which she was. But also like a golden retriever that had just seen its owner come home after a long day, all uncontainable energy and zero spatial awareness and an enthusiasm so aggressive it bordered on assault.
Marcus did not acknowledge her.
He turned back to the evacuees. "Continue south. Follow the main boulevard. Sonic has established a safe zone in the park district. Move quickly."
The rabbit family nodded and hurried away. The elderly tortoise continued his glacial progress. The young cat with the baby gave Marcus a grateful look and jogged after the rabbits.
"HEY! Hey hey hey!" Tangle skidded to a halt approximately two feet from Marcus's left side, close enough that her tail—which seemed to have a mind of its own and an enthusiasm that matched its owner's—swung forward and nearly brushed his arm. "Did you hear me? I said—"
Marcus walked away.
Not dramatically. Not with a dismissive comment or an edgy one-liner or the kind of theatrical rejection that IDW Shadow would have deployed, all scowls and superiority and I work alone energy. He just... walked. Toward the next block. Toward the next cluster of Badniks. Toward the next group of civilians who needed help.
He walked away from Tangle the Lemur as though she were a stranger on the street who had tried to hand him a flyer for a restaurant he had no interest in visiting.
"Hey—wait! Where are you—WAIT UP!"
The sound of rapid footsteps behind him. And tail-steps. Tangle's tail apparently functioned as an additional locomotion system, propelling her forward with spring-loaded bounces that covered ground with irritating efficiency.
She caught up to him in seconds.
Of course she did.
"I'm Tangle!" she announced, falling into step beside him with the unsolicited familiarity of a person who had never encountered a social boundary and wouldn't recognize one if it introduced itself formally. "Tangle the Lemur! I'm from this town! Well, not from from, but I live here! I've been fighting these robots all morning! Did you see my tail move? The tail thing? Where I grab them and WHAM? It's my whole deal! Pretty cool, right?"
Marcus did not respond.
He spotted a group of three Egg Pawns menacing a convenience store at the end of the block. He altered course toward them. The White Wisp on his shoulder chirped—a sound that, over the past day, Marcus had learned to interpret with surprising accuracy. This particular chirp translated roughly to the loud one is following us.
"I know," Marcus murmured.
"Know what?" Tangle asked, because she was right there, right next to him, matching his pace with the tenacious clinginess of a barnacle that had found a hull it liked.
Marcus did not respond to that either.
He reached the Egg Pawns. Three quick Chaos Spears—one, two, three, gold lances of energy that struck with surgical precision and reduced the robots to sparking debris. The convenience store owner—a portly badger in an apron—peered out from behind his counter with wide, terrified eyes.
"You're safe," Marcus told him. "Evacuate south. Follow the main boulevard."
"Th-thank you," the badger stammered, and fled.
"THAT WAS SO COOL!" Tangle exploded beside him, her tail curling and uncurling with excitement like a furry metronome set to maximum. "The gold energy things! Chaos Spears, right? I've read about those! Well, I haven't read read, I don't really read much, but I've heard about them! Can you teach me? Probably not, right? Because it's a chaos energy thing and I don't have chaos energy, but STILL—"
Marcus walked away again.
Tangle followed again.
This cycle repeated.
Three more times.
Each time, Marcus moved to the next engagement—the next cluster of Badniks, the next group of civilians, the next fire to put out—with focused, professional efficiency. Each time, Tangle materialized beside him like a cheerful recurring glitch in the matrix, her mouth running at a speed that rivaled Sonic's footwork, her tail gesticulating with independent enthusiasm, her entire being radiating the specific energy of a character who had been designed to be liked and was executing that design brief with the relentless competence of a marketing campaign.
And that was the thing.
That was the thing that Marcus couldn't get past, the thing that had driven him to write those twelve-paragraph Reddit posts, the thing that made his teeth clench every time he saw Tangle on a panel or in a discussion thread or on a merchandise display.
Tangle the Lemur was designed to be liked.
Not written to be liked—designed to be liked. There was a difference, and the difference mattered, and the fact that most people couldn't see the difference was what made Marcus want to shake the IDW fanbase by its collective shoulders and shout.
A well-written character earned your affection. They had flaws that functioned as flaws—not quirky, endearing imperfections that made them more relatable, but genuine weaknesses that caused genuine problems. They made mistakes that had consequences. They grew through adversity. They had dimensions that surprised you, contradictions that challenged you, depths that revealed themselves gradually over time.
Tangle had none of that.
Tangle was a checklist. Adventurous? Check. Brave? Check. Funny? Check—or at least, the script said she was funny; the actual humor was debatable. Loyal? Check. Relatable? Check, if your definition of "relatable" was "has traits that focus groups identified as appealing to the target demographic." Skills that were exactly as powerful as any given scene required? Check, check, check—her tail could reach any distance, grip any surface, support any weight, perform any function, as long as the plot needed it to.
She was a Mary Sue.
Marcus knew that term was overused. He knew it had been diluted by years of bad-faith application to any female character who was competent or powerful or important. He knew that calling a character a Mary Sue was often more about the accuser's biases than the character's actual writing.
But Tangle was a Mary Sue.
She was an original character inserted into an established franchise who was immediately accepted by every existing character, who never faced a challenge she couldn't overcome, whose personality was universally appealing and whose flaws were cosmetic rather than structural. She was the kind of character that DeviantArt artists created at age fourteen—the perfect self-insert, the idealized version of the creator projected into their favorite fictional world, welcomed with open arms by all the characters the creator admired.
The only difference was that Tangle had been published by a real comic book company and was therefore canon, which meant that pointing out her Mary Sue qualities got you attacked by people who confused "canon" with "well-written" and "published" with "good."
And now she was here. In person. Next to him. Talking.
God, she was still talking.
"—and then I wrapped my tail around the WHOLE lamppost and swung like WHOOSH and kicked the robot RIGHT in its stupid face and it went CRASH and the pieces went EVERYWHERE and this old lady was like 'oh my' and I was like 'don't worry ma'am I got this' and she gave me a COOKIE and it was CHOCOLATE CHIP and—"
Marcus stopped walking.
He stopped in the middle of the street, surrounded by the distant sounds of combat and evacuation and Tails's biplane making another strafing run on the Buzz Bombers. He stood perfectly still, arms crossed, and stared straight ahead at nothing.
Tangle stopped too. Her tail, which had been gesticulating wildly throughout her monologue, slowly wound down like a mechanical toy running out of spring tension.
"...Are you okay?" she asked. "You've been really quiet. Like, really quiet. Like, I've been talking for ten minutes and you haven't said a single—"
"I'm working," Marcus said.
His voice was flat. Neutral. Not hostile—Shadow being hostile was dramatic and engaging and gave people something to react to. Marcus was being nothing. He was being the conversational equivalent of a blank wall. No engagement. No reaction. No emotional foothold for Tangle to grab onto with her tail or her personality or her relentless, exhausting friendliness.
"Oh! Right! Working! Yeah, me too! I'm working too! We're like—coworkers! Work buddies! Do you want to—"
"No."
"I didn't finish—"
"The answer is no."
"But you don't even know what I was going to—"
"Were you going to suggest we team up?"
"...Maybe."
"No."
"Or we could—"
"No."
"What if—"
"No."
Tangle's enormous eyes blinked. Once. Twice. A third time, slower, as the reality of what was happening began to penetrate the thick, cheerful insulation that surrounded her consciousness like emotional bubble wrap.
She was being ignored.
Not rejected—rejection was active, dramatic, a thing that happened between two characters and created tension and narrative interest. Being ignored was passive. It was the absence of engagement. It was being treated as a non-factor, a background element, a piece of scenery that the protagonist walked past without comment.
For a character designed to be universally liked, being ignored was the worst possible fate.
"Did I... do something wrong?" Tangle asked, and for the first time since she'd appeared, her voice carried something other than manic enthusiasm. It was small. Uncertain. The voice of someone who had never experienced social rejection and was encountering it for the first time like a sailor encountering a sea monster—confused, frightened, and completely without a frame of reference for how to respond.
Marcus paused.
She's not real, one part of his brain reminded him. She's a fictional character. A poorly written fictional character in a comic book you didn't like. You don't owe her anything.
She's real HERE, another part of his brain countered. In this world, she's a person. A living, breathing, feeling person who just asked you if she did something wrong. And the answer is no. She didn't do anything wrong. She exists. She didn't choose how she was written. She didn't ask to be a Mary Sue. She's just... here. Being herself. The only self she knows how to be.
And you're being cruel.
The realization landed like a punch.
Marcus had spent years criticizing Tangle from behind a keyboard. Years of twelve-paragraph essays and heated comment threads and passionate arguments about character design and narrative integrity. And all of that criticism had been valid—he stood by every word, every analysis, every point about self-insert dynamics and consequence-free characterization and the difference between earned affection and manufactured appeal.
But Tangle wasn't a comic panel right now.
She was a person standing next to him in a burning city, asking if she'd done something wrong, and the honest answer was no, you haven't, I just have opinions about the editorial decisions that created you, and none of that is your fault.
Marcus uncrossed his arms.
He didn't look at her—that was a bridge too far, Shadow didn't make sudden emotional pivots, and Marcus was committed to authentic characterization even in moments of personal growth—but he uncrossed his arms, which was, for Shadow, the equivalent of a heartfelt apology and a fruit basket.
"You didn't do anything wrong," he said. Flat. Minimal. But honest.
Tangle's tail perked up. Her ears perked up. Her entire body language shifted from "confused and hurt" to "cautiously hopeful" with the speed of a character whose emotional range had two settings: maximum joy and slightly less maximum joy.
"Really?"
"Really. I'm... not good with people."
"Oh! That's okay! I'm good with people! I'm good with EVERYBODY! I can be good with people FOR you! Like, I'll handle the people parts and you handle the—" She gestured at a nearby Egg Pawn that was attempting to menace a fire hydrant. "—the exploding parts!"
Marcus looked at the Egg Pawn.
He looked at Tangle.
He looked at the Egg Pawn again.
The Egg Pawn, sensing that it was being evaluated by two separate threats simultaneously, seemed to experience a moment of mechanical anxiety. It took a step back from the fire hydrant. Then another step. Then it turned and attempted to waddle away with the dignity of a robot that had decided this particular engagement was no longer strategically viable.
Marcus hit it with a Chaos Spear without looking.
"THAT WAS SO COOL AND YOU DIDN'T EVEN LOOK!" Tangle shrieked.
Marcus resumed walking.
Tangle resumed following.
But this time—and Marcus was not sure how he felt about this—it was slightly less intolerable.
Slightly.
Marginally.
By a percentage so small it required scientific notation to express.
She was still talking. She was still loud. She was still Tangle—all surface, all enthusiasm, all designed appeal with no structural depth. She was still a Mary Sue, and Marcus still had every criticism he'd ever leveled at her, and he still believed that her presence in the IDW continuity was a symptom of the same fundamental problem that plagued the entire series: a prioritization of new over deep, of broad over specific, of appeal over authenticity.
But she was also a person who had been fighting robots alone in her hometown before anyone else had arrived.
She was a person who had chosen to stand and fight when she could have run.
She was a person who—for all her manufactured perfection—genuinely wanted to help.
Maybe, Marcus thought, with the grudging reluctance of a man conceding a point in an argument he'd been winning, maybe the problem isn't that Tangle exists. Maybe the problem is that the writing never challenges her. Never pushes her. Never forces her to grow beyond the design brief.
Maybe if someone actually wrote her like a CHARACTER instead of a CONCEPT, she could be...
He didn't finish the thought.
He wasn't ready for that yet.
"—and THEN the robot's arm went FLYING and it almost hit Mrs. Patterson's flower shop but I CAUGHT it with my tail and—"
"Tangle."
"YES?"
"Stop talking for thirty seconds."
"CAN I talk after thirty seconds?"
"...We'll see."
"OKAY! Starting NOW! Thirty seconds! I can do this! This is—"
"That counts as talking."
"RIGHT! Sorry! Starting NOW now! For real!"
She lasted eleven seconds.
It was, Marcus suspected, a personal record.
They cleared the remaining Badniks in Vista View within the hour.
Sonic had handled the Egg Hammers with his usual combination of speed, precision, and one-liners that were about sixty percent as funny as he thought they were. Tails had neutralized the Buzz Bombers from the Tornado with a targeting efficiency that would have impressed a military pilot twice his age. Rouge had identified and disabled the residual signal relay that had been broadcasting the last of Eggman's automated attack commands, effectively cutting the Badniks off from even their degraded programming and reducing them to inert metal within minutes.
The city was safe.
The fires were being extinguished. The civilians were returning to their homes and businesses, surveying the damage with the weary resilience of people who had lived through the War and understood that this was just... how things were, for now. Sonic was doing his crowd-pleasing thing—high-fives, thumbs-ups, that incandescent grin that made people believe everything was going to be okay even when the evidence was mixed.
Tangle was in the thick of the crowd, helping with cleanup, lifting debris with her tail, comforting children, being aggressively useful in the way that she always was, that she was designed to always be.
Marcus watched from a rooftop.
Arms crossed. Standard position. The White Wisp dozed on his shoulder, exhausted from a day of proximity to combat and apparently content to use the Ultimate Lifeform as a pillow.
Rouge landed beside him.
She was always landing beside him. The rooftop—any rooftop, every rooftop—was apparently their designated space, the place where they existed in parallel, watching the world from above with the detached intimacy of two people who had been partners long enough that silence between them was a language of its own.
She stood close. Of course she stood close. Her hip was a centimeter from his. Her wing occasionally brushed his back. Her warmth was a constant, a physical fact, as reliable as gravity and significantly more distracting.
"You were nice to the lemur," Rouge observed.
"I wasn't nice. I was... not hostile."
"For you, that is nice." She tilted her head, studying him with those teal eyes that missed nothing and forgave everything. "You don't like her."
It wasn't a question.
Marcus considered his answer.
"I don't know her," he said, which was technically true and diplomatically safe and also the most Shadow thing he could have said, because Shadow reserved judgment until he had sufficient data, and Marcus hadn't had a real conversation with Tangle, just a one-sided monologue delivered at him at the speed of sound.
"She's... a lot," Rouge offered.
"She's a lot," Marcus agreed.
"But she fought well today. Held her own against the Egg Pawns before any of us arrived. Kept the civilians safe. Didn't panic." Rouge paused. "That counts for something."
Marcus said nothing.
Because Rouge was right.
That did count for something. Combat performance was objective. You either fought or you didn't, you either protected people or you didn't, and Tangle—for all her surface-level irritation, for all her manufactured appeal, for all the Mary Sue energy that radiated from her like a literary criticism Geiger counter—had fought. She had stood between robots and civilians and used her ridiculous, narratively convenient, biologically impossible tail to protect people.
The writing was still bad.
The character design was still transparent.
But the girl in the street below, using her tail to lift a collapsed awning off a flower shop while chattering happily at the grateful owner, was trying.
Maybe, Marcus thought again, the word returning like a song he couldn't get out of his head, maybe that's somewhere to start.
"We should move on," he said aloud. "There are more cities. More Badnik remnants. More—"
"More people who need the Ultimate Lifeform to show up and remind them what a hero looks like?" Rouge finished, and her smile was warm and teasing and fond in a way that made chaos energy hum in his chest like a purring engine.
"I was going to say 'more work to do.'"
"Same thing, handsome." She bumped her hip against his—a casual, practiced motion that sent a jolt through his entire body disproportionate to the force applied, because physics in this universe made no sense and everything about Rouge was an exercise in sensory overload—and launched herself off the rooftop.
Marcus watched her go.
He looked down at the city one more time. At Sonic, shaking hands. At Tails, examining a downed Egg Pawn with scientific curiosity. At Tangle, still talking, still helping, still being Tangle with the unapologetic totality of a character who didn't know she was a character and was just... living.
The White Wisp stirred on his shoulder, chirped sleepily, and nuzzled against his neck.
"Come on," Marcus told it. "We've got a world to fix."
He activated his hover shoes and followed Rouge into the sky.
Below him, Tangle looked up. Saw his contrail. Gasped.
"HE'S SO COOL!" she announced to no one in particular and everyone in general.
Marcus pretended he didn't hear her.
His ear twitched.
Just once.
END OF CHAPTER 6