A/N Hats off to a Sub-Zero fanfic on a site that is long since dead.
Too hot. Alice fidgeted in her snug seat, it just too hot! The jeep bumped and tossed itself on the road at its relatively high speed, but the wind was hot in the desert heat! She just hoped that once she was in the air, that -that- wind showed her some mercy: if she didn't cook on the way there of course.
Her instructor took little or no notice of the heat, weather that was from his less bulky frame or just he was more experienced at this weather was anyone's guess. Alice was glade she wasn't the one driving; she doubted she could focus on driving in this weather. Maybe she should have chosen to do this at night; at least then her girth would have been an asset. But all the hang gliding sessions at night were booked up for a month. She wanted to do this before she lost her nerve.
Most people in life buried their dragons, other ran from them, some chose to just live with them, Alice wanted to be one of the few who actually faced up to her dragon.
Alice's dragon wasn't her weight, she was happy with who she was, it was genetic rather than any bad habits on her part. And she knew by kind words from her parents that those who looked down on her because of this were the ones who had problems to deal with.
Alice's problem was something a tad more abstract but no less regular (to everyone else), she hated, no, she was scared of ever being air born. Planes, balloons, heck, rockets if those ever came into public use, all acted like a magnet of the same polarity with her. She couldn't get near them, and when made to be near one, she retreated a distance once under her own power. Of course the attacks of 2001 had done little to calm her about this.
However, her family had recently won tickets to Hawaii if all places, and of course the tickets were by air.
She had tried talking her way out of it, even giving her ticket away, but her family wouldn't have it: she couldn't spend her life with her dragon owning her to the point of absurdity. Yes people died in airplane crashes, but she couldn't go and make that a norm.
Thus here she was in the hot hot desert, far far away from civilization, getting higher and higher, and it becoming a bigger, and bigger drop if she fell while on the wings made of metal rods and plastic canvas. However her instructor promised her that they'd only go as high as they needed to catch the winds. Heights were normally not Alice's problem, but when she was going to be at this height with nothing beneath her, that was where the magnet started and the dragon bore its claws.
Of course she was here to face that dragon head on, if she was able to go through with hang gliding, she would be able to hold herself together long enough for the plane flight to run it's course. Or at least that was the theory.
Weather or not it was going to work was anyone's guess, but her mother was addicted to self help books and insisted that her daughter try it, just like such and such from such and such who was scared of such and such and did such and such and wasn't scared of such and such anymore. Alice wished she could pay as much attention to her surroundings right now as she could her mother's speech.
The jeep stopped: time to slay the dragon. Some would wonder where Alice picked up all the 'dragon' references. Truth be told they fascinated her, she knew dragon true to the myth were selfish, vain, and violent in the extreme. But like genies and the like, dragons had been tamed by modern culture turned into the cute colorful lizards your kids saw on Dragon Tales. About the only dragon she knew from kid's cartoons that wasn't for preschoolers or ate maidens as part of a square meal was from a video game based TV series from the early 1990's. Sonic The Hedgehog wasn't it? She wasn't exactly into video games, and had only learned enough about the premise to figure where the dragon, Dulcy by name, fit into things. The dragon in the second season of the doomed show hadn't even been given a proper introduction scene. She was simple part of the show one day.
Alice realized this might not have been the best time to be thinking about that character since that dragon's flights always ended with crash landings, the dragon always walked away from them unharmed, so did her passengers, but in cartoons, everyone walked away with just some crisscross lines on them that vanished when they changed scenes.
If she crashed here, she wouldn't be doing much of anything. The view from where they were was beautiful, or it would have been if Alice were just there sight seeing. She wasn't. She was there to hang glide.
Her instructor, she hadn't been listening when he had politely introduced himself to her for their outing that day, asked her help in getting the objects of their purpose here out of the jeep's storage compartment.
Getting out and downing half of the water bottle in the cup holder, she pulled out the infernal contraption, not really all -that- complex, but given what it was for, it looked and felt rather intimidating to her.
The glider had the watermelon pattern of being pink on the bottom and green on top.
The instructor told her how he used the widest one in the club's collection to balance out her weight. Okay, so he didn't tell her, but she could easily guess. His was half the size of hers in comparison, orange on top, yellow on the bottom. She said something about wanting a blue one but that wasn't very smart with a blue sky and flying planes: that did NOT help her.
Following his instruction to the letter, Alice connected the metal tubes and hooked on the watermelon colored plastic cloth, thinking it was nonsensical but her instructor told her she'd get the -hang- of it. Oh what a bad pun. However, when she was finished, she did indeed stand before a fully complete glider.
Her instructor had assembled his along with her as an example. He had asked repeated that she let him hang along with her. But she quoted what her mother had said each time. The instructor had just shaken his head, and muttered about her funeral and stupid counter parts to over protective mothers. Alice said nothing to these comments, she pretty much agreed with them, but what mother wanted, went. It was as simple as that. And there were enough complex things in life as it was.
The wind blew on their backs, perfect for gliding her instructor told her. Launching was as simple as falling off a log he told her. After helping her into her harness, and putting himself into his own, but not before giving a fool proof walkie talkie head set, they two were facing a steep slop that spread out to a flat sand bed at the base.
"Now just follow my lead and you'll do fine." He assured.
Alice wasn't so sure, she had her eyes shut, and her hands gripped the bars like a soldier would their weapon. This was it, she could back out now, it wasn't too late, who cared if her parents called her weak for not facing her dragon? . . . "The wind's picking up . . . " She heard her instructor say. "Get ready." She somehow managed to open her eyes.
"Now!" Who cared? She did. She went into the best sprint she could manage down the slop, letting gravity help her, but that didn't last for long as the wind pushed up on the wings of the glider she was strapped to, and the ground was suddenly getting further away. She made several load and unintelligible sounds as she got higher and higher, her instructor right behind besides her.
"That was a great take off!" He told her, she took his word for it, the memory itself was blur. "Okay, now remember the first step here is to remain calm."
"It's not easy!" She yelped, her hang glider shaking left to right.
"Nothing worthwhile in life is." He returned. He almost sounded like her mother but a tad more down to Earth. "First things first, stop being so nervous, it's causing you to rock, just know if you aren't nervous you won't crash and stop being nervous."
"Easy for you to say."
"Because I've gone through it too, and I started out as cocky as they come and got a slap in the face by reality and was almost too scared to step into the real world."
"Sounds interesting." She gasped doing her best not to look at the ground or above her, and just straight ahead thinking she could avoid panicking if she just didn't see the sky or the ground solo.
"Naw, boring as heck, hey, tell me about yourself."
"Is this a lesson or an interview?"
"Whatever keeps your mind off of crashing into the ground lass. What's going through your head right now?"
"How I'm going to wind up a pizza if I hit the ground."
"Well don't! Wait, forget that. That never works. Okay, focus on something else, like, what your favorite hobby?"
Alice hesitated for a moment, but if it got her mind off this trial and got it to go along faster than all the better. "Dragons. They've always interested me. My friends thought I was strange since I didn't like Little Pony as much as they did."
"Heh . . . well, then this should a dream come true for you."
"What?" This was something she dreamed about after a scary movie!
"Come on, everyone knows dragons fly, and here you are flying right now. What more could you ask for?"
"Being on the ground."
"If you didn't come here to fly like a dragon why did you come?"
"I'm just trying to face my fear of flying!"
"Is that so? . . . Well, would a dragon be afraid of flying?"
"I'm not a dragon!"
"Maybe not, but you know what they say about the mind's eye right? All those ninjas in the bad movies who keep saying 'I am the Spider, I can climb' to themselves a million times to keep themselves from being scared of falling to the ground? How about you try that here?"
"I am the spider I can fly?" Alice was not having fun.
"No, I mean, I just, how about, what I meant was, picture yourself AS a dragon, sounds crazy I know, but hey, if it works it works right? Why not try it?"
Alice mumbled to herself a few times, sounding a bit more like 'this is crazy, I am going to die' than 'I am the dragon I can fly.'
"I can't hear you." Her instructor said at last, they had been gliding for a while now. She just hoped they didn't run out of desert and smash into a building. Okay, now THAT she knew was just plane irrational. "Okay. I see this calls for a slightly different approach." He breathed in deep. "Repeat after me. I am the dragon."
"I am the dragon." Alice spoke half-heartedly.
"Loader with -feeling-!" He said with a slight accent.
That made Alice laugh, and she did indeed forget about the ground in that moment. "I am the dragon."
"Again."
"I am the dragon."
"Who is the dragon?"
"I am the dragon!" This was fun.
"What does the dragon do? Squeak?"
"No, she roars!" She proclaimed.
"Good for you dragon!" Her instructor encouraged. "Now let's test those wings! Shift your weight to the right and your wings should do the same."
Alice obeyed the instructions and indeed, she flew right the right, the cool wind flowing over her. She just pictured herself as the dragon, as her instructor told her, and her fears did indeed retreat . . . but that isn't what this was about. She needed to pursue those fears, take them at where they lived, and slay them! Like a true dragon!
Her instructor began a game of follow the leader that she was determined to win. After going in circles and performing two loop de loops out of thin air her instructor spoke over the mike for the first time in a while.
"You know girl, many wouldn't say this, but I can say you were born for flying."
"Thank you." She breathed. She was totally relaxed. The lighter air flew over her wings, she kept her legs together steady, she didn't rock at all. Perhaps this was what a dragon felt like in flight after all.
"Girl . . . there's something in need to ask ya, it's kinda important, I didn't want to ask you at first because I knew you'd think I was crazy, but I think at this point it best to ask ya. Heh, 'Julan' must be rubbing off on me. Well, dudet what I had to ask was if you'd like ta-" A sudden down draft twisted their flight paths apart. "Dammit! Not now!"
A hot and cold spot had clashed with each other, and Alice was paying the price, the random wind, could it be a twister? A twister? Here? Was that even possible?! Wouldn't people have warned her about that?
Alice felt one of her wings break, it happened so fast she could actually visualize the pain. She saw she was headed straight for the ground.
"No!" Her instructor cursed, she knew he had to be trying to get to her, but what he could do? She knew she was about to die. So she knew how she was going to die after all. Guess that made her no fortuneteller. Shouldn't she have been scared out of her life? Maybe that was why she was screaming with her eyes closed tighter than drums.
"Alice." She heard a female voice say to her as clear as day she fell. Was this the voice that told her to go towards the light? "You were supposed to ascend to great things today, or at least great in their own right. I had convinced him to let -one- person chose to be go or stay. You were supposed to be that one. Now you have a different choice, you die here and know peace. Or leave who you are behind, and help save the lives of several innocent people."
Alice couldn't have been confused. What was this voice talking about? And shouldn't she have hit the ground by now?
"It's your choice to make. Either way, everything you accomplished up until now, ends here. But you have stalwartness against bigots, irrational fears of others, and a kindness that refuses to go out. These inner parts of yourself are needed. Your packaging and background story might change, but in your own way, you'll be playing the same character. We need you. But for this time, it will be your choice."
Alice wasn't sure what was going on, but she knew what her other option was. "Any port in the storm!"
"No! You can't just jump in! I won't let you! Either give up the identify Alice, and prevent other families moaning the abrupt ends of those they love. Or it ends here, and you go on to the next world.
Alice did indeed think about it. What choice did she have? What the voice was offering sure sounded better than just dying. "I'm in!"
The world behind her eyelids turned into giant splashes of color, but everything went white as she felt the impact. She tumbled head over heals, smashing branches and rock alike as her massive form spun from the force of the crash. Finally coming into something with enough density and mass to stop her (a solid rock cliff) she opened her eyes to see the world spinning and tinny birdies spin around her head. Shaking her head, she looked over the few bruises on her scales. She was just happy she didn't have a passenger in her pouch. They would have been turned to paste!
Raising her neck over her body she saw her wings weren't broken like she first thought and the surprise twister had just knocked her off balance. First time that happened. But her friends always did joke she kept coming up more and more creative ways of crashing.
Bringing herself up right, the dragon checked to see if anything was broken (unlike as that was), and surveyed her damage, checking to see, and glade to find she hadn't destroyed anyone's home or flattened anyone into the ground from her surprise landing. These practice flight were going to be the death of someone, and not very likely her. Still, practice made perfect and she had a long way to go. Glade she was a long way from Knotehole so Rosie couldn't see this latest disaster, the dragon took flight once again. Dust yourself off and get back in the saddle as they said. After a stronger front had been built against Robotnik's machines and robotified slaves, Knotehole had lost most of it's purpose as a hiding place and the various heroes had mostly found their own homesteads. Their Nanny and caretaker, Rosie, had been left lonly in the secluded forest city, the kids she had come to love as her own finding their own places in the world. The old chipmunk's frind Julia had died before the FFs had even formed. And with Sally 'still away' there were few to fill in the void. Dulcy herself had spent more time among Mobians than her own kind, so Knotehole was good a home as any.
That was saw it's shadow steak across the ground, so fast she almost didn't see it. But she did notice it. And she did look with her acute senses to identify the air born object. While she had never seen one personally, she knew the shape from hear say well enough. A missile! It was a missile! With a very familiar grinning mug pasted on it's side. And Dulcy have had the world record for most crashes, but her sense of direction was second to none. And she knew EXACTY where that missile was headed. Knotehole Kingdom! While most of her friends were out and about all over currently, there were so many other non-combatants who had no chance of getting away in time.
Dulcy took flight in the blink of an eye, leaving a shock wave of dust on her wake. Not wasting a moment she 'cracked the whip' as she called it, straightening out her body and increasing her speed to where she was little more than after image, almost catching with the weapon, almost, not quite. But Dulcy was a Freedom Fighter and not prone to giving up at the first roadblock. Forcing the breath out of her element lung with amazing impact behind it, a stream of sub zero air shot out of the green scale's mouth, hitting the burners on the tail end of the machine, they stopped working. The missile began to fall, Dulcy caught it.
Rather unsure of what to do with the deadly thing now that she had it helpless and not wanting to set off the pay load at the tip of the nozzle, Dulcy just knew she had to move the thing as far away from Knotehole as possible and did so, turning it around with it's own momentum and it began a sailing downwards course over the forest straight into the Great Beyond.
Dulcy making note that Lupe and her pack weren't in the imitate area thankfully and cover her ear holes and opened her mouth, remembering to shut her eyes only at the last moment.
The entire forest and desert shook, breaking several teacups and good china, thankfully nothing electronic belonging to the heroes was in range of the electromagnetic pulse.
"DAMMIT!" The Eggman cursed looking at the feed back from the observing Cyber Tails' cameras. The hiding machine's programming concluding it could not serve its functions turned into scrape metal. Plus EMPs tended to be bad for robots. "It took me forever to steal that war head from Station Square's arsenal!" He shot a finger at the only other self-aware figure in the room. "THEY keep bring back more and more pests to make my ghastly dreams of a world of evil life less machines hard and harder to reach. And you just stand around doing nothing! All this time and you give me ONE?"
The figure said cheerfully. "Would you like me bring Ixis Nagus and Mammoth Mogul back from the other side? It would be fairly easy for me to . . . no? . . . Then you do your job and leave me to do mine. Trust me dear Robotnik, you'll get your little minions back . . . in due time . . . you'll survive for now; you're good at that. Let them become lax, and when they think there's on top . . . " The figure spoke in a sing song voice. "Ashes, ashes, all fall down!"
Dulcy flew back to Knotehole under moderate speed. Dulcy's ordeal may have only lasted a few seconds, but it seemed a lifetime to hurt. When she landed (yes, landed, as in not crashed, maybe she was just thinking about it too hard normally) Rosie was waiting for her, franticly wanting to know if she was okay and if she knew anything about what had happened. After Dulcy explained things she quickly found herself being looked over by Doc. Quack who looked her over repeated, perform tests on her she couldn't even guess. But eventually he said she'd live, she must have been far enough away from the blast that the radiation must have been minimum. Dulcy was struck by lighting after hearing this (stupid Knuckles practicing his chaos powers high above on Angel Island); afterwards she was shocked to learn about this deadly after effect of the weapon. She had to tell Lupe and her pack to avoid that area from now on. Even when Eggman was beaten, it seemed the mad scientist would still have left his mark.
But she was a dragon, from a bloodline of Protectors; she wasn't about to let -that- frighten her. It was just one more reason to fight to clean up the horrible mess the evil man had made on the world, and to keep him from making an even larger one. She was a dragon, and with a roar, she would show Eggman why they were to be feared.
She was surprised to see Sonic back in Knotehole a few minutes later. He seemed surprised to see Dulcy there as well. He awkwardly asked her how she was and strangely if she had picked up any nicknames while he was gone. When she told him no, he looked disappointed, but not surprised. She asked why he was visiting his old homestead and he explained he just -felt- he needed to be there. That sounded more like Knuckles, but Sonic was stubbornly quite about it.
He asked if Sally had 'come back' yet, to which Dulcy replied no.
"Terra." He said so low even Dulcy didn't hear him. Was he happy or scared at the idea of seeing her? Would it be Terra? Or Sally? Or someone else? Which idea scared him more?
However, he was no coward, never had been, never would be, and he was an icon to everyone around him, he wasn't about to be scared by what ifs. And if Dulcy was showing him anything after learning what happened, he didn't need to be everywhere, just where he was needed . . .. Ben started. 'This world, this self, is this where I'M needed?'
~Fin