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stumps
“Ooh, I wanna know!”
“It’s nothing.” Tails looked down at the ground, side-eyeing Eggman.
“It is a fun story, though,” Amy interjected.
“Fun for you, maybe.”
Amy noticed Tails’ discomfort and moved closer toward her. “Hey. We can drop it if you want. Though I still don’t know why that whole thing makes you so upset…”
“I— I don’t know… It was so long ago that I should be over it, right?”
“Maybe it’s still a sore spot for you.”
“It is, and yet it shouldn’t be, you know what I mean? Like I should be able to treat it as just a goofy idea that some people used to be obsessed with, years ago, and that they’ve all forgotten about since.”
“But I get the impression that you were at the epicenter of it too,” Eggman remarked.
“I was! And yet I wasn’t, either… they took their own thoughts about me and ran with them.”
“Were they accurate?”
“Not in the slightest.”
“Then it sounds like it wasn’t about you; it was about someone who isn’t you and never was you.”
“I hate to say it, but Eggman has a point,” said Amy.
“You don’t even know what this is about!” exclaimed Tails to Eggman.
“I may not know the details, but my preternatural gift for inference leads me to believe that this is about something – or someone – that was attributed to you through no act of your own… am I right?”
“Hate to say it, Sky, but he nailed it,” Amy whispered to Tails.
“I know… I hate it,” Tails whispered back.
“Why do you both hate saying that I’m right?” Eggman loudly whispered toward the two.
“Sorry, force of habit,” Amy replied normally.
“And, I hate to say it too, but I guess you’re right… this never had anything to do with me, so it’s OK if…” She looked up at Amy beaming eagerly, and she bit down on her lip.
“Fine,” Tails relented. “Go ahead and tell him.”
“Oh, goody!” Eggman cheered, clapping his hands together.
“So, around the time when my sweetie started getting popular,” Amy put an arm around Tails, “people started to wonder how she got her tails: if it was a mutation, or an implant, or some gadget, or whatever. And some of them really got into it, and they came up with a bunch of bizarre theories for how it happened.”
“Some of them tried to prove them too,” Tails replied, eyes wide in distress.
“Yeah, they just couldn’t let it go.”
“They were really invasive…”
“But anyway, one theory floated around that she had a twin who she absorbed in the womb, including the tail which was meant for that other twin.”
“But that makes no sense, since wouldn’t I also have two of everything else?” Tails chimed in.
Amy continued, paying no mind: “Eventually, it mutated into the idea that she absorbed just the tail, meaning that somewhere out there was a fox who was born without a tail,” Amy shrugged, “and that’s her brother.”
“Kyle ‘Stumps’ Prower,” Tails flatly responded. Eggman cackled.
“Wait. This can’t be real, can it?” Eggman excitedly replied.
“Nope. I’m an only child. Always was.”
“As far as you know…” Amy lilted, causing Tails to groan. “It could be that you two were separated at birth, and Stumps is somewhere out there!”
“Please don’t act like you’re buying into this too.”
“I’m not, don’t worry, but I understand the mindset. Heaven knows I’ve written my share of fanfiction back in the day… though not about this.”
“Still, ‘Stumps!?’ People genuinely believed this?” Eggman asked.
“Yeah, and they really went to town on that theory,” Amy responded. “They created this whole characterization of Stumps, based on who the opposite of Tails would be. There were Stumps fan clubs and stuff. It was out of control.”
“Especially once the, uh…” Tails froze.
“The shippers?” Amy asked.
“Shippers?” Eggman was eating this up.
“Yeah, there were people shipping me with Stumps.”
“I guess that would be pretty weird to go through…” Amy said.
“It’s always strange to hear people talking about who they want you to hook up with at the best of times, but then to have them pair you up with a figment of their imaginations…”
“But they were dead-set on Stumps being real by now, right?” Eggman commented, with Amy sadly nodding in response.
“Still,” he continued, “you have to admit that there’s something charming about the idea. Twins separated at birth… Brains and brawn, reunited at last—”
“Stumps doesn’t even exist!”
“So what happened after that?” Eggman asked. “Did it all come to a head somehow?”
“Not really, no: it fizzled out pretty soon after,” Tails replied.
“I expect that you tried to shut it down, then.”
“Oh no, that’s the worst way to try to kill a meme. I could tell that they wanted me to acknowledge it, whether to confirm or deny it. So I just said nothing, and waited for it all to blow over.”
“And eventually it did –” Amy added, “you know, I don’t think I’ve heard anyone mention Stumps in years.”
“And good riddance to him, I should say.”
“Aww, that’s no fun. Maybe we can bring Stumps back!” Eggman joked, only to see both Tails and Amy staring daggers at him. “I jest, of course.”
“Eggman please! She told you this in confidence!” Amy shouted, placing her arm in front of Tails protectively. “The least you could do is keep this between us and not spread it around.”
“Or if you’re desperate to incite drama, then make up a rumor that’s original;” Tails dryly added, “surely with your genius you could at least do that.”
“I’m quite sure I could, if I put my mind to it,” Eggman eagerly responded. “Should I consider this to be a challenge?”
“No.” they both answered.
“Hmph, fine. But while we’re on the subject, Amy, you said earlier that you used to write fanfiction?”
Amy laughed nervously. “Oh, right, a little, back when I was a teenager. Doesn’t everyone, at that age?”
“So, what was it about?” he asked.
“I don’t remember,” she said, blushing, eyes averted, “probably nothing important. It doesn’t matter.”
“I dunno, I wouldn’t say that. I’m sure it was important to you back in the day,” Tails joined in, “and knowing you, you must’ve put your heart into it.”
“…maybe so,” Amy admitted, “but teenage Amy was kind of a mess. I’d rather leave her in the past.”
“OK…” Tails conceded, before a thought crossed her mind, “but wait. When you brought up the Stumps thing and I was uncomfortable with it, you told me that I shouldn’t need to worry about it because it was so long ago, right?”
“Yes, but…” Her tongue got caught in her mouth.
“Then’s what’s the harm of talking about this now?”
“You make a good point, my fellow,” Eggman mused, with Amy’s face becoming increasingly crimson.
“So c’mon, tell us! What were you into back then?”
“It was, uh,” Amy stammered.
“Oh I know!” Tails exclaimed. “Let’s see, when you were a teenager… that was around the time that werewolves were really popular, right?”
Her eyes froze wide-open with horror.
“And since you were always the romantic type, you probably wrote a lot of romance.”
“T-This is really embarrassing… Let’s move on,” Amy nervously suggested.
“I’m sure it wasn’t that embarrassing,” Tails remarked, “it’s not like you were writing like smut, you know?” Amy gulped.
“Or maybe slash?” Eggman added.
“School AU?”
“Self-insert slow b—”
“Like I said,” Amy growled, teeth gritted, “let’s move on.”
the final digit of pi.
“Before I landed in your time,” Blaze reminisced, “I traveled back to metropolitan Soleanna at a point just years before its ruin. I needed to know if there was still any hope of salvaging it, or if the forces which destroyed it were too far gone.
“In some ways, survival in that world felt just as harsh. To make ends meet I ended up living in a shared house with ten or so others – it was the only way any of us could afford to live where we did.
“They were a strange group; some of them had known each other for years, while others were like me and just needed a place to live. But the strangest thing about them is that they all were part of this cult based around predicting the final digit of Pi.”
“But that makes no sense,” Tails replied, confused. “Pi is an irrational number. It doesn’t resolve to anything.”
“I brought that up too, but they replied that we only know that through induction.”
“Mmm, I’m pretty sure that it was proven mathematically – multiple times, even.”
“That’s beside the point. Anyway,” Amy and Tails nervously looked at each other. “Their idea wasn’t so much to coalesce around a single particular digit as to spread the belief across the possibility space. As long as they had at least nine members in the group, each believing in a different digit, one of them was bound to be correct.”
“Assuming the premise isn’t flawed from the start,” Tails muttered under her breath.
“When I arrived, I was told that I had the choice between eight and two, and I went with eight because I know for a fact that it isnʼt two.”
“And how do you know that?”
“Because the last digit is eight!” Blaze instantly responded, cracking a smile. Amy shot her a glance.
“What?” Blaze asked, noticing Amy.
“It’s just…” said Amy, “this is a lot to take in, that you were part of a cult and all.”
“Especially one as ridiculous as this,” Tails chimed in.
“It wasn’t as serious as you’re imagining,” Blaze said. “In fact, it hardly came up in our day-to-day lives – we all had bigger issues to worry about. If anything, this was just a way for us to theme the household. To give it an identity.”
“That’s I guess a bit more understandable,” Amy replied.
“Some bought into it more than others, though. One of the founding members – named 0xE, pronounced ‘Oxey’ – e wrote a program to simultaneously calculate Pi across multiple different bases. E also built a home server to run it, which we kept in one of the closets.”
“Were they a serious believer, then?” Amy asked.
“No, ‘e…’ 0xE went by e/em/eir. But that’s the thing: I could never tell if e truly believed in it or if it was ironic to em too, since we joked about its absurdity quite a lot. E built that server like a tank, though… and that’s what makes me wonder.”
“To get back to what I said, about why I was there in the first place…”
“Right, right,” said Tails.
“I learned quite early on that it was too late, and that the time for stopping Iblis’ advancement had long since passed. We all knew that we were doomed, and all the firepower in the world could only contain it from spreading… yet even that could only hold out for so long.
“We were truly at the mercy of forces well beyond our control. If Iblis gathered enough energy to breach containment, it was over. If the military decided to cut their losses and pull out, it was over. Either way, it would come at the cost of the city and whichever inhabitants remained; we were living on borrowed time.”
“I can only imagine how gut-wrenching it would be to be trapped there…” Amy said quietly.
“It was eerie, really… it wasn’t like there was fighting in the streets or anything. Life continued as it always had, but we knew that could change at a moment’s notice.
“And yet, for as bad as it was, we all wished that it wouldn’t have to change. We all wished that we could escape this fate someway, somehow. We tried to believe that we could!… someway, somehow…
“Now that I think about it, their belief that Pi would resolve could’ve been them choosing to harbor a silly, small, pointless morsel of faith: that we would find some way out of this impasse, and reach closure on something that is just as irrational.”
“That’s really… poetic, when you think about it that way,” Tails responded.
“But the group could’ve also just been an excuse for them all to date each other,” Blaze shot back.
“Oh,” Amy and Tails replied in unison.
Blaze stood up and started pacing the room. “Yeah. The whole household was caught up in a series of romantic entanglements, most of them volatile. After a while I lost track of who was dating who, which made things dangerous because I’d also lost track of who had stopped dating who.
“The atmosphere in that place was tense, for everyone. There was bad blood between half of them, but none of them could afford to move out, and also anybody leaving jeopardized the ability for everyone else to live there. And so we coped with the tension by pairing up with whoever we hadn’t yet burned bridges with. The whole house turned into a Petri dish for interpersonal drama.”
“That sounds really stressful to live in,” Amy commented.
“You’re not wrong. There was no escape, neither outside nor inside. I began to feel that the house was a microcosm of the city itself, with each of us holding out until the next inevitable disaster.”
“But the random pairing up? That doesn’t sound like a very healthy way to cope,” Amy replied. “What about compatibility, or getting to know each other more before jumping right into a relationship?”
“Those are all luxuries, really, if you think about it.”
“But are they really? You could just not date; there’s nothing wrong with being single as you sort out your priorities.”
“For how long? When your house might go up in flames the next day, it’s hard to make plans for the long-term.”
“I hadn’t thought about that…” Amy meekly replied.
“I know it’s strange to think like this, but that’s just what life there was like. Nobody was thinking straight in those conditions: we all were turning toward each other just as often as we turned on each other, and clinging to whatever pleasure we could find in the moment before it all came crashing down around us.”
Tails piped up: “But I’m curious now. You obviously made it out alright, but what about everyone else?”
“I’m ashamed to say it, Tails, but I don’t know. I silently made my exit one night, once I had found the answer that I sought from living in that time, and once it became clear that I was no longer welcome in that house,” Blaze mentioned in a darkened tone. “I doubt that I was missed – if anything they were likely glad that I finally took the hint and left, if they even thought of me at all.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Amy said, “there’s always someone who cares, whether they can say it or not.”
Blaze stopped in her tracks. “…0xE. Even while the others were gossiping about me through the whisper network, or ignoring me to my face, e never treated me like that. E wasn’t particularly warm to me – since e was at the center of the whole polycule, it would’ve been risky to associate that closely with me. E just treated me like any other normal acquaintance, and in that environment, that alone was a breath of fresh air.
“I worry that I betrayed em by leaving, though I suspect that e thought e betrayed me by not standing up for me.”
“Once I returned to my present, I decided to visit the ruins of where I once lived. The people who were living there must’ve fled long ago, leaving only a few scorched boxes and utensils behind, but the server which had been calculating Pi for all those years was somehow, miraculously, still running. The program itself, however, had stopped… terminating at a final number.”
Both Tails and Amy leaned forward, on the edge of their seats.
“I couldn’t believe it. I investigated its logs, but I could find no obvious sign of it having crashed. Everything else about the server seemed normal too; 0xE truly knew how to build something that would last. I still wonder what happened to em… what happened to everyone, really.
“I never saw the code e used to write the program; even if I had, I doubt I would’ve understood it. So to this day, I still don’t know whether the process was prematurely killed, whether the calculation formula it used was bugged, or whether it had truly found the answer.
“Yet even with the number in front of me, glowing on the screen, I still had to believe that it was truly the final digit of Pi. But I would’ve had to believe either way, right? It would’ve required just as much unjustifiable faith to either still believe that it was eight, as I had before, or believe that it was the number I now saw.”
“And that number was?” Tails asked.
Blaze chuckled lightly and shook her head. She silently gathered her belongings, stood up, and started walking toward the door. Then, looking back at them through the corner of her eye, she lifted a single finger: “…haha, hah…”